by Helen Garner
‘Sad?’ I said. ‘They’re not so sad.’
‘Oho!’ said Patrick. ‘Now she wants to hear lies about herself!’
Natalie laughed and made an exclamation of reproach, but since I had recently been led to believe that my life as a lovable creature was over, I said nothing. Solitude, I thought. Forgiveness. On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenues their patient chime, the chattering of their wheels; but although I did not speak, Patrick knew the words I would have used and so even the thought of home at that moment was not a refuge.
There must have been thousands of facts unknown to Patrick, ones I thought of as mine, but sweepingly he would correct me. He had mapped out the story of my life, and of the lives of everyone we knew, into a grid-like framework and nailed it down; and everything done, witnessed, dreamed, heard of or read he had lined up under cast-iron headings, those terrifyingly simple categories of his. Only Dissatisfied Women become feminists. Lesbians are Heavy Drinkers. Derelicts suffer from Human Degradation. Some women Lack the Quality to make a man A Good Wife. Ursula, for example, Became an Alcoholic and a Prostitute.
Hostile, I objected: ‘She was drinking, for God’s sake. She got a job in a massage parlour.’
‘I think you’d be hard put,’ said Patrick, squaring himself and whitening his nostrils, ‘to draw a distinction between “drinking and getting a job in a massage parlour” and what I just said.’
When I stood next to you, Ursula, at your daughter’s funeral, you were still wearing the gold ankle chain, the Indian ring on the forefinger. You said to me brightly, from behind your sunglasses, ‘What a lot of people have turned up! You don’t often see so many people at a . . . gathering.’
‘You told me about her,’ said Patrick. ‘You were laughing and pulling faces. You told me that summer, remember? When you brought your new bike up here on the train and rode around in those silk shorts. It was an Italian bike with an unnecessary number of gears. You said you’d seen her at the swimming pool. Her face was red and coarse from the grog, you said, and she told you that the blokes she, uhm, serviced, that they all reckoned it was their wives’ fault, that they couldn’t get what they needed from their wives.’
Did I say those things, did I grimace? Forgive me, Ursula, as you stumble into the traffic on St Kilda Road. I thought of you yesterday when I stood too close to the tracks and a tram, keeling fast, clipped the tip of my shoulder. Unlike you, I stepped back in time but I was shaking, because now I knew what you had already found out: the colossal weight of the thing, its dense rigidity, its utter lack of give.
Patrick was by nature not a guest but a host, the kind of person who had his own chair and always sat in it. My houses and my life upset him because they were not fixed, as the past is: I was always crashing, picking up the pieces and moving on, and he could not afford to be curious, because curiosity and its results might cause a shift in his taxonomy. He came into my room on one of his rare visits, stepping gingerly to where I was reading at the table with my back to the door, and peered over my shoulder at some lines on a card that was pinned to the window frame: ‘What are you waiting for? What are you saving for? Now is all there is.’ He turned away with a tongue click, relieved and vindicated.
‘Oh, how shallow,’ he said. ‘I’m disappointed in you.’
I hung my head. I did! I was choking with indignation, but I hung my head and fiddled with my fingers. The words on the card, no matter who said them first, were what Balanchine used to shout to his dancers—a dare, a challenge, not a philosophical position to be argued; and yet Patrick went home again happy, furnished no doubt with a fresh subheading: hippy? grasshopper? clapped-out party girl? What do they say about me, when they lie alongside each other in their upstairs room, talking after midnight in their quiet, civilised voices? He is my oldest, my most loyal friend, who loves me and seems to want the best for me; but loyalty is not as simple as it looks, and the truth is that for the comfort of the contrast he needs to go on believing that my life is lonely, chaotic, wrecked, loose, without meaning: ‘a blasted heath’.
On that same last visit to Melbourne I took him to a coffee shop and we sat up at the bar. Patrick looked round him with cheerful pleasure.
‘It’s years,’ he said, ‘since I’ve sat on a high stool like this. It must be, oh, eighteen years ago, when Natalie and I lived over in Darlinghurst.’
‘I never knew you lived in Darlinghurst,’ I said.
‘Yes you did!’ said Patrick. ‘Because you saw me there once, way back in the early seventies. You told me about it years afterwards.’
‘I don’t think that can be right.’
‘It is!’ he said. ‘How can you forget these things? You’d come to Sydney with some bloke or other, in a band, remember? I suppose you’d been taking drugs with him and so on—anyway you saw me walking along the other side of Victoria Street with my shopping basket. You were about to yell out to me, but something made you change your mind. You didn’t call out, and I walked on round the corner without knowing you were watching me.’
‘Funny,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember that at all.’
‘It’s rather like a Poe story, isn’t it,’ said Patrick luxuriously, unfocusing his eyes. ‘A person sees the chance of a better life passing by, and he makes as if to call out’—he flung forth one arm in the imploring gesture of a soul in torment—‘but something in his nature makes him hesitate. He pauses . . . he closes his lips . . . he steps back . . . and then he slides down, and down, and down.’
I stared at Patrick, breathless.
‘Who did?’ I whispered. ‘Who slid down, and down, and down?’
He turned his full front to me and sang out, laughing, with both arms spread wide, ‘You did, my dear! You!’
There was a lunch for those who rallied round, the day Patrick was to go into hospital. Rain was falling, birds flew low, air was damp and hair turned wavy. Another university relic of Patrick’s spotted me in the kitchen, nodded coldly, then said to Natalie with a sentimental smile, ‘Patrick’s still looking after people, I see!’ The phone kept ringing, people were drinking and laughing and taking terrible liberties with the unspeakable.
‘I’ve got a really good brain tumour story,’ said Max from where Patrick worked, ‘an absolutely true and recent one. A woman I know, our age, lovely girl but never had much success with blokes—well, she gets a tumour, a bad-looking scan. Goes to a top surgeon, he operates. Every kind of treatment available, she gets it. He does a brilliant job on her. Off she goes. A year passes, they do another scan. She comes in to get the results, the surgeon sits her down and gives her the news: perfect. Clean as a whistle. They’re both excited, laughing and congratulating each other. Then the surgeon says, “Would you mind waiting here for a moment?” He gets up and goes out of the room, closing the door behind him. Then he opens it again and comes straight back in, without his white coat. “I’m no longer your doctor,” he says. “Will you come out to dinner with me?” And they’ve been together ever since.’
Later in the afternoon, when the other guests had wished Patrick well and departed, Natalie unplugged the phone and Patrick put to me a formal request.
‘I want you,’ he said, ‘to take two photos. One of me, Natalie, and our children, and the other of me and Natalie.’
Cheerful from the afternoon’s society I replied, ‘Okay. Of course—with pleasure. And then Natalie can take one of you and me.’
I sprang up from the table to reach for my camera, but with a slow movement of the kind permitted to those behind whom death already stands, Patrick put out his hand and restrained me, saying, ‘No. With a camera I’ve got upstairs. I borrowed one with a flash.’
‘You don’t need a flash,’ I said. ‘There’s still plenty of natural light left.’
‘No,�
�� said Patrick more firmly. ‘Natalie’s sister lent it to us. I want you to use that.’
They were going to drill open his head in the morning so I held my tongue, but inside me, oh! that shameful, grinding mutiny. I loved my own camera, its scratched black body, a certain inky tremor that winked on the sunken pool of its viewfinder as I raised it to my eye—my eye, this unofficial, peripheral eye of mine; but I disciplined myself, I applied the discipline that is missing from Patrick’s version, and I submitted. There was no point in explaining to him that the flash would bleach their faces and give them red dots for pupils. Natalie fetched the camera and the children, and Patrick arranged the pose with gestures and quiet orders: himself and Natalie side by side on straight-backed chairs, and the two kids bracketing them, leaning on their parents’ shoulders. It was an easy shot to take. Their mood stilled them, and they looked into the camera with identical expressions of formal apprehension. The children moved out of frame, and I took the second one: Natalie and Patrick, side by side, hand in hand, thigh along thigh. Then I stood still and waited; but nobody seemed to remember my suggestion for a third shot, so after a moment I put the lens cap on, and handed the camera back to Natalie.
‘Patrick,’ said Natalie, as she zipped up the case and the children wandered away, ‘tell your dream. He dreamt last night about an angel. The angel of death.’
I looked sharply at him, and he laughed. Patrick had that rare thing, a mirthful laugh. He always liked to recite my old dreams, as comic turns, but I had never heard him relate one of his own. I never thought of him as that kind of person: I never thought of him as a dreamer.
The shabby walls, whose plaster was so thickly encrusted with the worm-casts of damp that it might have been French brocade, struck me then as beautiful, as original, because of Patrick’s illness and the danger he was in.
‘My dream,’ he began mildly, taking his time, ‘this dream which my wife has so histrionically interpreted, was that I was in a pit. Not a wet pit, but a dry one, with sides of bare earth tamped hard and packed. Really it was a lion’s den.
‘The lion was nowhere to be seen, but I could feel it somewhere nearby, and I was crouching there, waiting. Waiting for the person to come who would save me from it.
‘And then a figure appeared on the rim of the pit, looking down at me: a black man, tall, with shining skin, and eyes that were slanted and Asiatic. He was dressed in splendid robes, very magnificent, and on his head was a kind of turban, a great feathered head-dress. He was even more terrifying than the lion. He was mighty. He was . . . in majesty.’
The breaths we took were not sudden, but quiet, and thorough. This was not the kind of dream-telling after which one asked, ‘And then what happened?’ Patrick kept his eyes on the weave of the tablecloth. His eyes seemed further apart, and he held his mouth slightly pursed, as if restrained by modesty from saying more.
He leaned over and turned up the volume of the radio which had been too low, all afternoon, for anything to be audible except the occasional hushed wave of applause; and the music we now began to hear was hardly more emphatic.
‘A string quartet,’ I said. ‘That’s comforting.’
It was still light. Sparrows were hopping about in the branches of a tree outside the window, and rain, earlier, had collected in the up-turned leaves with their frilled edges. In different spots, now here, now there, a load of rain would become too heavy for its leaf, and the stalk would suddenly sag and let the water pour straight down in a quick stream.
‘I like a quartet,’ said Natalie. ‘It’s like a family. Or a conversation. One speaks, then another; then the other two join in.’
‘No—listen,’ said Patrick. ‘It’s a quintet. It’s the one with the two cellos.’
‘Two? Are you sure?’ I said; but before Patrick could argue, the music did it for him. It gathered itself in a powerful intake of breath: it paused in a quivering silence: and it exploded.
Now I could hear the extra cello, the point of it, what it was there for.
It dropped through a rent in the net and plunged away into the darkness, crying out. It groaned a warning: it prowled, it ranged, it lay in wait. It was the bad dream of the quartet, brooding, ravening outside the fold, and its argument was doubt and panic, a desolation as yet unlived.
‘Yesterday, for the first time in twenty years,’ said Patrick with his foot on the bottom stair, ‘I tidied my desk. I found dozens, scores of postcards from you. They’re in bundles, next to the dictionaries, if you want to read them.’
‘Oh, please don’t keep them,’ I said. ‘I bet they’re awful.’
‘Awful?’ he said. ‘I may never have answered them, but you went to the trouble of writing them to me; they mean something. Surely you don’t think I’d chuck ’em out?’
‘You won’t like them,’ said Natalie as he disappeared round the stair landing. ‘I had a look. They’re like out-of-date magazines that you read at the dentist. Full of false and inappropriate enthusiasms.’
‘I’ll burn ’em,’ I said recklessly, ‘while he’s away. Do you think I should?’
I looked at Natalie’s face, in the liverish light that came through the glass panel of the front door.
‘It won’t make any difference,’ she said. ‘That’s the idea of yourself you’ve given him, and nothing you do now can shift it.’
She was leaning against the wall with her hands behind her and her head on an angle, so that no single footstep of Patrick’s, as he shuffled across the floor of the upstairs room, would escape her attention, or go unheard.
I was already rolling mincemeat into balls and shaking them up in a paper bag of flour when I heard the front gate screech and slam. Living so close to the hospital, they could walk there in ten minutes, carrying in Patrick’s old satchel only a toothbrush and a copy of King Lear. The children were allowed to accompany them as far as the corner, and by the time they slouched back in I was making a salad, the meatballs were sizzling in oil, and three potatoes were toiling in the pot. The boy went straight to Patrick’s chair and sat in it. The girl squirmed in under my arm at the stove; with my left arm round her I could feel her hasty heartbeat, and smell the sourness of her thick, damp hair. We kept our eyes on the contents of the pan and said nothing, but as the hot fat shrank the meatballs, as they wallowed and hissed there in a cluster, small and grey, shrivelling in the heat, fissures opened in their floury surfaces, and oozed a thin, bloody fluid.
Patrick’s books were coated with creamy dust, and wedged so tightly into the shelves that I broke a fingernail working the bundles free. The postcards. So many! I squatted on the matting with my shoulders between my knees and fanned the pictures out like a pack. They came from everywhere—Exmouth, Port Vila, Munich, Santa Margherita, Fort William, Ipoh, Ocean Grove—from the paper shops and museums and railway stations of every city or township I had ever passed through. Miramont-de-Quercy, Zahedan, Wilcannia. Augsburg, Campagnatico, Rangoon, Bendigo. Paris, yes—a copper sunset behind the Eiffel Tower, Brassaïs’s Couple fâché with lowered eyes and backs to the café mirror. And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring itself with pole akimbo round the tight corner where Bourke Street enters Spring.
My will was iron. I did not turn one card over, I did not read one word. I told the cards by instinct. My regrets were organised in advance. No verbal evidence was needed to show the difference between my life, this career of blind staggering, and the way that Natalie, even while speaking to me, had kept her head cocked for the sound of her husband’s foot shifting on the floor of the upper room.
It was night in the yard, and the sky was high now, and cloudless. That special smell of cities—warmed bitumen, and the plants that stubbornly grow in spite of it—sweetened the air as I crouched over four bricks I had set up to shield my little fire from breezes. I offe
red the cards to it one by one, holding them by their corners with the words facing away from me. While the Australian ones burned with reluctance, being coated in a transparent layer which peeled back at leisure, the foreign ones took to the flames as obediently as if made to be incinerated. The neighbour’s dog, jingling its chain and uttering grunts of anxiety, paced up and down the length of the fence, but the neighbour himself was heedless of my drama. He tuned up his bouzouki out there and began to play and sing to himself, thoughtfully, his voice moving in unison with the single notes as he plucked them: a melody, slow and deeply rhythmic, from somewhere I had never been.
‘What are you doing?’ called the boy from the kitchen door.
‘Getting rid of some rubbish,’ I answered.
He approached the fire in his enormous, unlaced running shoes, with his sister behind him. He liked me, we had shared a room and conversations before sleep on my visits since he was small and our mutual modesty was exquisite, but he was his father’s representative tonight and he was demanding an explanation.
‘They’re only postcards,’ I said, ‘that I sent to Patrick when I was young and foolish.’
‘Did he say you could burn them?’ he asked sternly, standing over me.
‘Not exactly,’ I said, ‘but it’s my right, you know, to take them back.’
‘Not without his permission. You sent them to him with his name on them. Therefore they belong to him.’
‘Legally, perhaps,’ I said, turning a tram so the flame could seize its sparking pole, ‘but morally I believe I’m in the clear. He may own the cards themselves, as objects, but I own what’s written on them; and anyway he knows the words by heart.’
‘Ah,’ said the boy, his father’s son. ‘Copyright. I suppose it’s all right, then.’