The Point

by Marion Halligan

  It’s so not worth it, she said, turning on her back, staring up at the sky. Trash like me. Stinking stinking trash. Cessy.

  No. You smell nice. And you aren’t trash. Nobody’s trash. He paused. Well, not somebody as good as you are.

  I am so so stinking trash, she said again.

  He waited, drawing her into his arms, laying her head on his shoulder, making himself a father. She was still stiff, but not in that rigid way of earlier. She heaved a deep sigh. Then she started talking.

  She’d needed to get some more methadone, so she’d gone to those boys she’d seen before, they could get anything they said, but this time they hadn’t got any, so she went to some others that they told her about, they said they’d fix her up, these others. Then they said she didn’t have enough money, these others did, the stuff’s hard to get, it costs, but they’d give it to her cheap if she’d let them fuck her. Two of them, there were. So she said yes, what else could she do? No big deal. Not when she needed the methadone. She wasn’t a slag but she needed the methadone.

  They made a time for a meeting, at a house, in Red Hill it was, they told her where to go but it was quite a long walk and steep too and she was tired by the time she got there. That was last night. But when they let her in the door it turned out there were six of them. She told them it was supposed to be only two but they said six or no stuff, so she let them. What else could she do? They’d have done it anyway.

  Gwyneth, said Clovis, that’s rape, we can go to the police, you know the house, their names, they mustn’t get away with it.

  She was silent for a minute. I so can’t go to the police, she said, you know I can’t. And I agreed. I can’t say it’s rape. They didn’t really hurt me.

  It is rape, though. You were coerced.

  Leave it, Clovis. I got the stuff.

  Who were they?

  You’d tell.

  No. Only you can do that.

  Well, the one that did the deal was called Steve. I suppose it was his house. Some house. A palace, I reckon. Massive. Carpets in this real pale pink and lots of gold furniture. I don’t know who the others were, they had those woollen beanies on that come right down over your face, with holes for eyes … of course I know it was the baseball-bat guys, but I couldn’t see them. I just wanted it to stop. Get the stuff and get out. Six is too many.

  One’s too many, when it’s coercion. Oh Gwyneth, all of this has to stop. It can’t go on, you know. What about your little boy? You must be missing him, and I’m sure he’s missing you. What’s his name? Brad?

  This time the silence lasted for several minutes. Where she had been stiff before, Gwyneth was jumpy. Clovis was wondering what he was doing. His words felt lumpy in his mouth, like large awkward clumsy clichés, he had trouble getting them out; he thought he should utter them out of duty to this child, the child the daughter the fool that the father has to try to save, but they didn’t seem to be working. They clunked like rocks into the silence, the air quivered, there was no healing in them. Gwyneth twitched in the moonlight.

  Thing is, she said, there isn’t a little boy. I was pregnant, all right, that was my stepfather, he’d been doing it for years, but I didn’t tell Mum that because of what he said he’d do to me if I told, I’d seen what he could do, you had to believe him when he said. I was fifteen. Mum, she goes, You better have it done, and I did, but afterwards I thought, there would have been a little kid, maybe a little boy, I’d have liked a little boy, you wouldn’t want a child to be a girl, and I could have called him Brad, and he’d have belonged to me, there could’ve been just the two of us, it would have been lovely, no drink or hitting or hurting, just him and me, and sometimes it did really seem there was my baby boy called Brad, and I’d talk to him and dress him in nice clothes, I did get some from that shop, lovely ones he’d look beautiful in, and I’d take him in his pusher for walks and people would say isn’t he such a lovely baby. But he might have been a monster my mum said or a cripple with me being a slut and not knowing who his father was, and then I said my boyfriend was that guy who cleans windscreens at the lights in Barry Drive, he looks like Mick Jagger, just to get her off my back, and she was all for getting him to pay but I go, Leave it, and she did, get her to have another drink and she doesn’t worry about much my mum. My stepfather told her I was a disgusting little slag and not fit to live with decent people but he did front up the money, don’t let your mother know, he says.

  Oh Gwynnie ...

  I did hang about with that guy at the lights but he wasn’t ever my boyfriend. He was cool. It looked dangerous, ducking in and out through the cars but you knew he’d be okay, he was so cool, even off his face the cars could never touch him. And there was Saul, but he didn’t last. They never last. They fuck you for a while and then fuck off.

  And what about gaol?

  Well, I did do the shoplifting, a few times, the baby clothes, and it was true about the underwear, all lace it was, I put them on and walked out, I got away with that, but not the jeans, they have these plastic bits that make the sirens go, and then they discovered the perfume, and there was some lipstick, it’s all right at first but then you get caught a few times and they shut you up. I didn’t ever take any Rohypnol but, they keep that stuff well and truly locked up. People who get hold of that, they do it stealing prescriptions, and anyway I don’t like it, I don’t feel good on it. But I did break my parole, I thought, I’m sick of this, and just walked away. So here I am.

  God. That’s some tale, you’re a real story teller. What about the rest of it – what about your stepfather dying?

  Oh yeah, he’s dead all right. And I did say about him doing those things to me. Not when they made me lose the baby, but later, when I was getting put away and Mum was shouting at me about being a slut and a slag and a dopehead, so I said, Well who’s fault’s that, and told her about Daryl, cause then he couldn’t get me, and she goes, You’re a lying little brat as well, and then he gets sick and kicks the bucket, serve him right, I say, the way he used to put it away, and then she goes, You killed him, when I never did, it was the drink did that. You should have seen her bawling her eyes out at the funeral. And the bruises he give her on her legs and stomach still blue. He used to hit her where he thought it wouldn’t show but I knew, I had a peephole in the laundry where the shower was, there was this little hole in the fibro and I poked it with a nail and made it bigger, I used to watch him and his big purple thing wagging about in the hot water and think, I’d love to cut you off, you worm.

  My god, said Clovis again. He could hear Gwyneth warming to her tale, telling it with dreadful gusto.

  She stretched out her hands to the sky, holding her palms flat as though it was a weight, just there, that she was supporting, or maybe holding off. She seemed to be examining them, their pallor in the bleaching moonlight, as though they were made out of lead, and her pushing up was partly their own weight that they were supporting, but when Clovis looked her eyes were vacant.

  Clovis said, You don’t need locking up, you need help.

  Help is locking you up, they reckon. I’ve been there, I know.

  You should be being looked after. You could be somewhere you don’t have to sell yourself for methadone.

  You always have to sell yourself for something. How would you get on in life if you didn’t? What do you reckon that Flora does, or Jerome? Or you used to?

  Well, he said, maybe then it’s a matter of the price you’re getting. I think you’re selling yourself too cheap.

  Yeah, I reckon. Should get a job in Fyshwick and earn real money.

  That’s not what I meant.

  She seemed calm now. He recalled people talking about postcoital calm. This was, what, post-narratorial? She turned her back to him, into him, and went to sleep. He marvelled, that a creature the world had so damaged could be so trusting.

  Now he couldn’t sleep, he had too much to think about. There was horror for Gwyneth and her grotesque stories, which who knew were any more true now than b
efore, and admiration too, and wonder that she could turn over and go to sleep so easily. Postnarratorial catharsis. She had handed the burden of her stories over to him; he could bear them now, and she could sleep. She was like the Ancient Mariner, and there was something ancient about her, as well as innocent. And now she’d slung her albatross round his neck, what a relief for her.

  He thought about the little boy Brad, who’d never existed. He did believe in him, the aborted and now imagined child that she invoked to comfort her. Stole clothes for. You probably had to think he was better off being a figment than being real. He was glad that Brad wasn’t off in Cowra being looked after by a drunken grandmother and a momentary de facto who wasn’t his father. And glad to see that Gwyneth wasn’t the careless uncaring mother he’d supposed she must be, seeing her pay so little attention to the child or her missing of him. He liked her better for it. No, not that, he felt more comfortable with his fondness for her. Though he didn’t know if she was better off. Maybe if Brad had been born he would be making her happy. Her making good money in the massage parlour – had there ever been a massage parlour? – and bringing him up carefully. Or maybe there would be some passing temporary lover shaking him till his brain died and ending up in gaol for murder.

  He liked lying with Gwyneth like this. It was a comfort. A good moment in the present. There was his rule to think of his life only in its present moment, and no reason to break that rule for a passing stranger which was after all what Gwyneth was. The comfort of bodies, lying together, that was the thing for now.

  He woke up with the daylight. A sense of urgency. Gwynnie, he said, what about getting pregnant? You’re not on the pill, are you? We better get you to a doctor.

  It’s okay, she said. I don’t have periods any more.

  Why?

  Might be being thin. Or people say it’s the methadone. She gave a little gleam of a laugh. Lucky, eh?

  Gwynnie was better at living in the moment than he was. He wasn’t even going to mention AIDS. You could hope the kids were too young for that. The pale sun shone out of a pale sky. It was cosy on the warm vent. They would get up soon, into another day; just that, another day.

  31

  Jerome

  I’ve never got into the habit of going to plays. I wonder if it’s because my idea of the theatrical was nourished by the mass, its hierarchies and repetitions, its utter dependability. The absence of surprise is the great comfort of the mass. The same yesterday, today and forever, world without end, amen. I can enjoy music, once I know it, and of course I do like plays, I just don’t go. But Elinor was flogging tickets for a production of Doctor Faustus, her daughter Blanche who’s a public servant by day but longs for a career on the stage was in it. Elinor was drumming up an audience. I bought tickets for myself and Flora, and then on a whim for my lads. Since I was always worrying about their lack of general culture, this seemed a chance to do something about it.

  Blanche is a tall fair slender girl with a short shapely haircut. I imagined her playing Helen, and Flora said as she recalled it wasn’t a very large role, that Marlowe doesn’t make much of women’s roles in that play, or ever, really, it seemed hardly worth going just to see Blanche. In fact, said Flora, I don’t think Helen has a single word to say. She’s just an object, a phantom maybe. Though some of the best lines in the play are said to her. Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss, she murmured.

  That’s love, I said. Any mortal believes that, at the moment of desiring to kiss his beloved.

  It was on at the ANU Arts Centre, and I have to confess I wasn’t expecting a lot, amateur productions and all that. I was surprised. They did it in modern dress, Faustus in shapeless tweeds with leather elbow patches and half glasses on his nose that made him peer, for all the world like one of those old codgers that would have inhabited this campus before the universities got privatised. The students were a scruffy lot in jeans and besloganed tee-shirts. And the thing was, Blanche wasn’t Helen, she was Mephistophilis. Dressed in a black jacket with satin lapels and straight black trousers, a man’s dinner suit – Elinor reckoned it was what the French call le smoking, made popular for women by Yves Saint Laurent – and as I have said she is tall and blonde, definitely a young woman, but in that outfit there was something quite sinisterly androgynous about her. The suit was tailored in a soft fine wool and when she moved it shaped her body, yet it was such a masculine garment. She wore shoes with heels, her mouth was painted in a large red bow, her hair smoothed flat to her skull. Such a confusion of messages. She was a woman, but a consciously ambiguous one. Sexuality had lost its safety, here. There was a sense of anything going. She made the audience distinctly uneasy.

  When she first appeared, Faustus sent her off and told her to come back again dressed as a Franciscan friar because That holy shape becomes a devil best; I had to smile at that. But she soon cast off the woollen robe, and tap-danced round the stage with the ethereal elegance of a Fred Astaire. But then she pouted, and flirted, and would not do as Faustus asked. Alternately flouncing away and smoodging up to him. He, she, was a flirt and a tease, and never once did Faustus have his way. Mephistophilis’ response to Faustus’s request for a wife was little short of obscene. His hands fluttered and suggested unspeakable gestures that straightaway you supposed you’d imagined, but hadn’t; I checked with Flora later. And at the same time he was oddly honest with Faustus, trying to talk him out of selling his soul. Saying of his present circumstances: Why this is hell nor am I out of it – chilling stuff.

  His attendant devils were all young women, dressed as their own sex, rather like Bluebell girls in skimpy costumes with frilly half skirts frothing behind them and long gloves and feather headdresses, dancing with all the highly patterned synchronicity of a Busby Berkley chorus. I noticed that two of them were twins, and then realised they were the Prelec girls, Cressida and Candida, acting quite different parts from demure waitresses or nice little birthday girls.

  I didn’t take this to mean that the devil and her minions are all female. It was rather that the natural order of things was subverted, so they were quite dangerously not what they seemed. And of course we know that the devil has all the best tunes. And the best dances, it appeared. And then the play is full of shows and set pieces, the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, the Dirge of the Friars who are roundly trounced, the vision of Helen, all choreographed with the élan of a musical. Not to mention a great deal of knockabout farce, and setting off of firecrackers. Squibs, but not damp ones.

  Helen of Troy, for her part, was a boy, another slender pretty youth, but gangling, and entirely out of his depth, his face too brightly painted like an amateur drag queen’s, his expression terrified, his knees in their high-heeled sandals knocking together. A figure of fun, who made you laugh but was so endearingly pathetic you were ashamed you had done so. Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, asked Faustus, and the audience roared. To see the pair of them trotting off stage, the crusty old don pulling at Helen to be his paramour, was to observe the epitome of sex-as-farce.

  Poor old Faustus. His tragedy wasn’t that he had sold his soul, it was that he got so little for it. His Helen a joke, his knowledge nothing he did not already know, his magic power the clumsiest of conjuring tricks, and his servant Mephistophilis the puppet master controlling every one of his moves. His wisdom, ah, that was nonexistent.

  Well, after all this time, I can still rave on. The play delighted me, and the delight is with me still. However much tempered.

  All sorts of people were there. It was one of those occasions on which you realise Canberra is a small place. The foyer was a performance all of its own. I recognised a number of people I had seen in the restaurant – the lawyer, the member of parliament, the surgeon, the builder, like players in a game. The lawyer’s pretty daughter. Godblot, whose son apparently was playing Helen. Laurel and Oscar, the beautiful boy, taking his mother on his arm with such charm that she glowed. I saw Anabel in the distance, with her chap Nigel; I hadn’t
imagined them liking theatre. And George, Clement’s brother, turned out he’d gone to university with Blanche, they were old chums. George grinned at me: The all-singing all-dancing Doctor Faustus, he said. What a triumph. I’ve never seen comedy segue so wickedly into tragedy.

  It was a twilight performance and afterwards a group of us went to Dickson and had a meal at one of the Vietnamese. Blanche’s sister Isabel who works at the ABC in Sydney took on the job of ordering for us. Some fine things. The mermaids’ tresses I rather liked, and some fresh spring rolls, cold, with prawns and raw vegetables. A dish called silver fish, which was a kind of whitebait, quite hot with chili. Superb scallops in the shell, dressed with coriander and ginger and rice wine. I thought that really sometimes I should venture into the suburbs for a meal. Knowing I probably wouldn’t, of my own accord.

  We filled a number of tables. George sat next to Flora (I said he was a clever lad), I heard him quizzing her about the Slow Food Movement. I sat next to Elinor, who was quite feverish with excitement over the performance. Not just because Blanche had been so dazzling, but because the whole experience had that exhilarating effect you can get from a good production. Of course it wasn’t perfect, but the ideas were so terrific, especially the games with transexuality, the dancing girl chorus of devils, the fairly female Mephistophilis, and then it’s a great play, great words, and the production didn’t lose those, they came across with a wonderful clarity. Elinor couldn’t stop talking about it. The ending, she said, it’s dreadful, he could save himself, God stretches out his arm, but he can’t take it, he could, but he thinks he can’t, he believes himself damned, he knows there is always the possibility of grace, but the real damnation is he can’t reach out for it, not that the grace isn’t there. Oh, it’s so terrible.