Cosmo Cosmolino

by Helen Garner

  Her house, bought with a windfall as deposit twenty years ago in a suburb not yet fashionable, was a two-storey corner terrace, one of those narrow and yet imposing Victorian arrangements of rooms which have been likened, by the disobliging, to railway carriages.

  ‘Every room has a room off it,’ chattered a visiting child to its mother, ‘and every room with a room off it has a room off it.’ It was littered, at the time when this story begins, with the detritus of many a failed household. Janet knew that one day she would have to hire somebody to put it in order, or else sell it and buy herself a hard, bright little apartment on the other side of the river: but in the meantime she retreated before chaos, closing doors as she went, leaving timber half-stripped and plaster unpainted, until only in the kitchen and her bedroom was any kind of order maintained.

  In fact the house had always been her liability. In the seventies, when collective households regularly formed and crashed, when teaspoons had holes drilled in their bowls to frustrate the passing junkie, when cooking was rostered and bands practised in the bedrooms and toothbrushes like icicles hung by the wall, it was demonstrated to Janet many a time that property is theft. Households exploded or collapsed, friends quarrelled and parted forever, the police thundered on the door at five a.m. and hauled the junkies away, and the one left behind in the echoing house, picking up mess off floors scarred by the repeated dragging of heavy club chairs, was always the hapless owner.

  Take the wrong tone at breakfast, said Janet, and you were laying a heavy trip. Mention the mortgage payments on pension day and you were a slum landlord, the last worm on earth. People stopped talking when you entered your own kitchen; the word my could cause sharp intakes of breath round the teapot. What were we thinking of, in those days, said Janet. For all our righteous egalitarianism we were wild and cruel. We had no patience: our hearts were stony: our house meetings were courts of no appeal: people who displeased us we purged and sent packing. We hated our families and tried to hurt them: we despised our mothers for their sacrifice.

  Some of us, said Janet, fell into the gap between theory and practice, though we called it overdose, or suicide, or falling asleep at the wheel. We had not learnt the words with which to speak of death. ‘Poor Chips,’ whispered the last of the household children, a little girl whose head bristled with a hundred tightly yanked plaitlets, holding Janet’s hand in a bleak crematorium chapel: ‘he died by loneliness.’ They sat in a pew, dry-eyed and desolate, listening to the ideological ramblings of a contemporary with scum on his lips who knew of no comfort to offer, no blessing to call down, nothing useful or true to say. The gods had long ago been mocked and forgotten. Nobody prayed.

  And the house, Sweetpea Mansions, with its foolishly fanciful name worked in bossets and bulges on an old brass plate beside the door: it jinxed her. Perhaps the communards, departing at the end of the seventies with armloads of collectively purchased kitchen-ware, had had a point after all; or perhaps it was not Janet’s ownership of property per se, so much as the breezy, impatient confidence it gave her, her irritating refusal to adapt her bourgeois individualism, that made her so unclubbable, and later, so unwifely.

  Unwifely women, even independent ones with property, do marry, as Janet did at forty; and her husband, a kind and comical man for whom, though she was too distracted to express it, she felt real tenderness, real liking, Janet’s husband did his best. He tried. But at last he became sad, and lost heart. Janet had no talent for intimacy. She did not know how it was done. Privately she thought of it as knuckling under. She had thrived, before, on drama, on being treated badly: it enlivened her. Her husband, who wanted to be good to her, could never seem to get her full attention. The chess set he gave her was flung into an upper room. The ukelele he brought home from Vanuatu lay forgotten and dust-choked under their bed; and in the end, after five years of wandering in the complicated moral landscape of such a marriage, when he tripped the landmine which buckled the horizon and hurled them cartwheeling across it, he picked himself up, half-stunned with sorrow and relief, and limped away to a girl whose hair and teeth gleamed behind the rolled up window of a waiting car, leaving Janet sprawled there on the sofa, holding her breath while the back gate slammed and the motor roared and the beetroot soup dribbled down the wall. She lay and stared up at the familiar cracks and mouldings of the ceiling, its chubby plaster garlands and upside-down cornucopias of ambrosial fruits and flowers. It was all still there, enclosing her. She had the house, and the house was all she had.

  Is it any wonder, then, that at such a juncture a woman like Janet should put on some lipstick and a clean pair of white socks, take the tram downtown, and outlay a small fortune for a haircut so savage that, walking home, she saw herself reflected in shop windows as a skull?

  Now consider Maxine, who lived in a shed and called herself a carpenter. Although she had little training and no worldly ambition, she was in the grip of such a powerful urge to make that she barely slept. Ideas came swarming through her, and like many people who labour in the obsession of solitude she lacked the detachment to challenge them; yet when pressed in company she never lost her temper but argued round and round with a serene unshakable courtesy. She expected good of everything, she thought the best of the world and against all evidence was full of trust. Auras, star charts, chakras, the directing of energy and rays, the power of crystals, the moral values of colours: these phenomena were her delight: they guided her.

  No one would buy her furniture. It was too outlandish for ordinary houses, being devised out of scavenged objects or pieces of native timber that she spotted deep in the scrub and crawled in after, with her little bowsaw, to cut and drag home. She carved uncouth figures on the heads of sticks; she wandered by lakes, and out of fallen branches would fashion, to celebrate the spirit of the place, a strange and delicate bench which she would plant up to its knees in the shallow ripples; then she would tramp away in her boots, leaving it to contemplate quiet water.

  Open one of Maxine’s cupboards and its interior would be decorated with threatening runes, or motifs and insignias you could under no circumstances incorporate into your practical life. Her tables were carved with hollows which prescribed the exact spots where your plate and glass must stand, and her chairs, while stable, tore at your stockings with their seats, or had flyaway backs which gestured towards the ceiling with all the authority of a diva’s final note: so rhetorical that while the air was still vibrating you hesitated to resume your conversation.

  For money she took jobs where she could find them, scrubbing, mowing, ironing for women who went to work in shoulder pads. Alone in their cavernous kitchens Maxine ate standing up at the stove, out of a greed that was almost spiritual: she ravened in a saucepan with butter running down her chin. Her terrible bush of frizzy hair she attacked with combs, clamps and clips, all of them helpless against the vehemency of what sprang from her head.

  Vehemently, too, each night in her crowded shed with its line of tomatoes ripening on the sill, she dreamed of digging and discovering, of vegetables loose in the soil, of a bush covered in red flowers that bloomed on the very edge of a whistling chasm; and over and over she dreamed of a baby, a male child which, giddy with gladness, she took upon her knee and dandled, stroking his limbs, his plumpness, rubbing her face against his delicious temples; he permitted it; but nothing she did could lift him out of his mood of discontent. He sat on her lap by the high window, this tiny, anxious monarch with his crown and sceptre, and looked out over a landscape of hazy fields, of orchards, towns and forests; a mighty, polluted river wound across his prospect, and up and down its breast long barge-like vessels toiled in silence, laden down with cargo and trailing wakes of oil.

  For dream sadness there is only art; and so the next thing that Maxine constructed, using the curliest and strongest twigs stripped under cover of night from the trunk of a neighbour’s tortured willow, was a trembling cradle, smaller than a shoebox, lighter by far
than any human babe could be; so light that the lightest puff of wind could set it in motion, lilting it on its dainty rockers. She placed it in her doorway and stood gazing at it. The same movement of air that shifted it lifted one corner of a curtain; as fleeting as the skirt of a running child it caught the edge of her eye in the darkening shed, and her heart was suddenly growing too high in her ribcage for her to catch a breath. Was it already too late?

  But suddenly, in autumn, that season when the angle of the light changes and without warning one thinks of the past, when at mid-afternoon even the most carefully groomed garden is chilled by the meditative scraping of a cricket, Maxine lost her shed.

  A fortnight’s notice was all she got, but though news of the property sale chagrined her she held no grudge against her landlord, for she believed that everything was meant, that she was responsible for and had in fact initiated all the events and conditions of her life; and she had no idea that her landlord, with whom she was on nodding terms as she passed his windows on her way home to the bottom of his yard, was in the habit of taking his friends on visits to her shed while she was out working for the rent. They stood at the door, the last group he would usher, with their hands over their mouths or in their pockets, watching him pick his way nimbly to the bedside. He beckoned them to follow. ‘And look, look—these are her little slippers,’ said the landlord, but his mockery held a note of fondness, even of respect, though he scarcely knew it; and when he held up for their amusement the fantastically titled tracts she kept beside her bed they hung back, reluctant to disturb the demeanour of the furniture, its silent, dignified postures, the shivering of the tiny cradle. Like a shrine in honour of a god whose name they had forgotten, the dim shed quietened them: it made their own city seem foreign.

  Maxine, thinking of leases, bonds, and the hiring of a truck, increased her hours of labour by taking on a new employer, and waited for her next lodging, or the path towards it, to take shape.

  Late one morning of her shed’s last week, while she was down on her hands and knees in the house of this as yet unseen stranger, scrubbing at a stain on the hall carpet, a wind sprang up and unsettled the street. She heard the boom of air in chimneys, the venetians’ brisk tattoo; plastic bottles whispered on the rim of the bath. Maxine lengthened her back to glance towards the narrow panes of the front door.

  The sky looked dry, bright and empty. She was intent, passively alert, but the sounds confused her. Had the council workers opened the fire hydrants? Were dead leaves beginning their seasonal journey down the gutters? Or was it the letter sliding under the door, the step on the verandah? Had somebody called for her? Had her moment come?

  Upright on her knees like a pilgrim she crawled to the front door and opened it. There was no letter on the step, and nobody on the verandah, but down at the gate, half obscured by the fronds of the unclipped hedge, stood a man in dark glasses.

  His arms were flung out wide. His right hand lightly touched the gatepost. His knees were in the act of straightening, and the outline of his tightened thigh muscles showed as powerfully through the cloth of his trousers as if he were a gymnast who had just that second landed after a manoeuvre on the bar. Even the sinews of his feet, bare but for a brand-new pair of thongs, were bright with tension. Could he be the one? The one for what?

  Maxine scrambled up in such haste that her blood did not keep pace, and the street outside shuffled its cards before her eyes. She grabbed the door frame to steady herself, and in the few beats it took for the black edges on things to disperse she saw a kind of tremor behind the man’s shoulders, the large relaxed furling of a flag from which the wind has withdrawn itself.

  Her head cleared. She craned her neck to see what was on his back, but he brushed a path through the waving hedge strands, and stepped on to the property; there was nothing behind him.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. He stopped halfway up the path, holding a cardigan folded over his forearm and tilting his dark-lensed face up to her.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Maxine. ‘Are you looking for somebody?’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said in a meek but confidential voice, ‘I’ve been sent.’

  Maxine clasped her hands under her chin and rolled up her eyes. The sky was peachy with autumn: in her relief it seemed to swirl. ‘Sent,’ she said. ‘Thank heavens.’

  ‘Halleluia,’ he said casually, looking round him. ‘This is a very lovely house. I expected it would be. But these leaves. Shouldn’t somebody take a rake to them?’

  The timbre of his voice sent shots of energy coursing through her.

  ‘I will,’ she said eagerly. ‘I’ll do them as soon as I’ve finished inside. Would you like to come in?’

  She made a sweeping gesture of welcome, but he did not respond. He stood on the brown and yellow tiles of the path, waiting.

  ‘Don’t you want to ask me some questions first?’ he said. ‘I mean who I am, who sent me, and so forth?’

  What? Interrogate? Demand credentials? She made an impatient movement. ‘You can tell me that later. Come into the house.’

  Still he stood without moving. Some formality had not been observed: what could it be? Perhaps she was rushing him. This must be what men meant when they said to her You are rushing me, Maxine. She took three proper breaths, and began again.

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Ah—that would be telling.’ He smiled. ‘You’ll have to work harder than that.’

  ‘Is this a game?’ said Maxine, taken aback. She had no sense of humour, she was not playful, but if that was what he wanted, she would make the effort. ‘All right. Who sent you?’

  ‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘Have a good look. Don’t I seem familiar?’

  The sunglasses bothered her. Would it be cheating to ask him to take them off? What were the rules? The trouble was that nothing about him so far rang a bell, nothing at all. Again she felt that her heart was fixed too high in her chest. This was not a game. It was much more crucial: a test, like the exams we face in dreams and have forgotten to prepare for. She let out a nervous laugh.

  ‘Don’t you recognise me?’ he said. ‘Don’t I remind you of someone?’

  Perplexed, Maxine rubbed the crystals of her necklace. She wished she had bought the pocket stone after all, the four-dollar one that unified every aspect of life. A false move now might ruin everything.

  He was young. He was tall. In the power of his teasing his thin shoulders seemed to widen. His hands were invisible, clasped under his neat cardigan. How fresh he looked, almost beautiful, smiling there on the checkered path and waiting for her to take the plunge! A grand confusion of possibilities blossomed in her head. Was he a son, from another incarnation? Was he her father, come back on second thoughts to bless her? Was he her imaginary brother, her male self, soul’s husband, cosmic twin? Was he an angelic being of the kind that comes in paintings offering a single lily, the flower whose contemplation furnishes all that is required? Or was he simply the bearer of the key to a shed?

  ‘I’m sure this is terribly important,’ she said, ‘but just for the moment I don’t seem to know quite what to say.’

  He looked down and laughed: a pleasant sound: a voice with a crack in it, like music. Oh! she trusted him.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’ll come to you. I hope this won’t seem forward—would there be anything here to eat?’

  ‘Of course. Come in!’

  ‘Thank you. I’ve been on the road a while.’

  Maxine imagined a peppering of galaxies, a tremendous trajectory along the star lanes. She saw a stony track among palm trees, a low horizon fading under a sky of pure green; and at night a woollen cloak wrapped round, the deep chill of a body sleeping on sand. She glanced at his thongs. They were pristine, utterly unmarked by travel. But he was already past her and through the front door, stepping carefully over her cooling bucket, and forging
on into the body of the house.

  Now if a house can be bruised, this one was. Its height and depth were still imposing, but its windows, propped open with lumps of wood, had to gasp for breath, and plastic bags nested in the branches of the trees outside them. The garden behind was derelict, wild with shrubbery and composed of moribund clods. The bicycle in its shed had grey pancakes for tyres. Indoors, the planet lamps bowed their heads in corners and over the table, and dusty runners lay discouraged in the hallways, drained of the energy to slither, as rugs should, along the floors. Had its enfilade of hollow rooms ever been counted, ever been tamed and put to use? The heart of the house was broken. It ought to have been blown up and scraped off the surface of the earth.

  But houses as well as their owners must soldier on: and what would this pair of lost souls, already off on the wrong footing with one another, charging down the hall towards the kitchen where perhaps a heel of dry bread awaited them, a scrap of cheap Camembert lying shamefully on its face—what would they care about the building’s history? All they saw was roof, walls, floor. This was what they needed. Why ask questions? Why search for more?

  ‘This house,’ said the young man in the darkest part of the hallway, ‘is rather large.’

  ‘I know,’ said Maxine with a blithe laugh, skirting round him where he had paused to stare up at the framed pictures askew on the walls of the stairwell. ‘I haven’t even seen all the rooms yet, let alone cleaned them.’