by Helen Garner
‘What?’ said Janet. ‘Surely you’re not going to offer to pay me, for God’s sake. I’d be pretty pathetic if I couldn’t offer people a roof. For a couple of weeks. Or so.’ Again she laughed, ha, a chopped-off sound.
‘I don’t want any favours,’ said Ray stiffly. ‘I can pay my way. And it’s only till Alby gets here. Alby and I have got plans. Major plans.’
‘Alby,’ said Janet, ‘was always big on plans. Don’t hold your breath, if you’re waiting for Alby.’
Ray looked offended. He went to speak, but Maxine butted in. ‘Did you say a shed? Is there a shed out there?’
‘Do you want it?’ said Janet. She made a gesture of indifference. ‘What would you do out there?’
‘Make things,’ said Maxine. ‘I make things out of wood. And if it was all right with you, I could even sleep in it.’
‘Take it,’ said Janet. ‘Be my guest. But there’s no power. It hasn’t got a proper floor, or anything. And I’d have to find myself another cleaner.’
‘Oh,’ said Maxine, rolling up her eyes and placing her hands over her cheeks. ‘Oh. I knew today would be special. I can hardly believe this.’
‘What’s so special about a shed?’ said Janet. ‘It gets cold out there. No one’s ever lived in it.’
‘Sheds are what I like best,’ said Maxine. ‘I had a good one, but I’ve lost it. The cold doesn’t bother me. I’m always happiest in a shed.’
‘Is it because of the noise?’ said Janet. ‘Do you have music on while you work?’
‘Music?’ Maxine’s face clouded. ‘No. Not music. Not me.’
‘Music’s all right,’ said Ray. ‘Some of it. But you have to be careful with the words. Most modern music’s just . . . well, it can be dangerous.’
Maxine looked at him anxiously. But the music of the spheres? Or is it all silence, out there?
‘Toss for the bloody shed, then,’ said Janet, turning away. ‘It’s all the same to me.’ It was not. She wanted other people to be breathing all night under the same roof, but she was too proud and sore to ask.
‘It’s against my beliefs to gamble,’ said Ray. ‘Let Maxine take the shed. I’m grateful for any shelter. I’ll take whatever I’m given.’
Oh, come off it, thought Janet. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said sourly. ‘You won’t have to sleep anywhere near me.’
He reddened. Maxine gazed at him, entranced.
‘Listen,’ said Janet. ‘There’s a couple of rooms upstairs. Take your pick. I haven’t even been into them for years. I’ll show you. See what you think.’
They followed her up, this time averting their eyes from her open bedroom at the top of the stairs. They paused in the upper hall and swung right, obeying the instinct that guides people to the best part of a house; but Janet put out her arms like a guide.
‘No,’ she said, and herded them in the opposite direction. Not those. They’re stacked with junk that people never came back for. The big front one’s where the kids used to sleep. It’s a mess. The roof leaks. Houses sort of crumble. I used to try to keep up, but it’s not much fun on your own. One of these days I’ll get round to it.’ She heard herself apologising, and closed her mouth.
Towards the back of the house, beyond the bathroom, things became less impressive. The floorboards of the narrow passageway were dried right out, long grey splinters had been torn from them, and the architraves had lost their grip on the walls and slouched this way and that, showing electrical wiring through the broken plaster. The visitors paused.
‘Dark up here, isn’t it,’ said Ray.
‘Were these the maids’ quarters,’ said Maxine, ‘in the olden days?’
Janet pushed them on into the hall. ‘I haven’t been past the bathroom for ages,’ she said. ‘It’s a part of the house I prefer to pretend doesn’t exist.’
The first door was locked. ‘Some dill took off with the key,’ said Janet.
‘Maybe it’s haunted,’ said Maxine. ‘Maybe someone had bad dreams in there. Or a spirit came and made them toss and turn all night. So they cornered it, and locked it in.’ She rounded her eyes and bit her bottom lip.
Ray placed his hand over his breast pocket. ‘You can’t lock spirits in,’ he said. ‘Or out. Believe me. There are incubi, and succubi. It’s no joke. I know what I’m talking about. They come and go as they wish. There’s only one thing that can control them.’
In a minute they would start reminding each other of The Exorcist. Janet cut across them. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘if you must know, it was Alby who slept in there. When I didn’t feel like company.’
She hustled them past it.
The second of the three rooms was little more than a cupboard, filled to the roof with a tower of old cardboard cartons; a rope of cobweb connected the light-flex to the corner of the window frame. Quickly they withdrew.
Janet threw open the last door and they looked in, elbows touching. An empty socket hung from the ceiling, a bedspread was hooked over the window, and on the bare lino lay a stained single mattress, headless, with one shoulder stiffly twisted.
‘Pooh,’ said Maxine, turning aside.
‘The last person to crash here,’ said Janet to Ray, ‘was your brother’s horrible friend Chips. Remember him? That’s probably why it pongs.’
Ray blinked. ‘Chips died,’ he said.
‘I know,’ said Janet. ‘He OD’d. We all turned out for the funeral. Alby took it hard.’
‘That was a couple of years before Alby was saved,’ said Ray. ‘He’s got a resource, now. In these matters.’
‘Was your brother sick too?’ said Maxine. Did angels have brothers?
‘No sicker than any of us,’ said Ray. ‘More of a slave than a sick man, actually. But Chips,’ he added solemnly, ‘was a poet.’
‘Crap,’ said Janet. ‘He was a whinger and he wrote it down. That’s not poetry.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Ray. ‘About what’s poetry and what’s not. Alby liked what he wrote, that’s all.’
‘Well I didn’t,’ said Janet. ‘And I didn’t like Chips. He was a sleaze-bag.’
‘Gosh, that’s tough,’ said Ray, mildly.
‘Tough! Listen—that bastard used me. He treated the place like a flophouse and then went round putting shit on me behind my back. We only let him in the door because he was with Alby. Alby had style. But Chips was a log and a manipulator.’
Ray shrugged. He pursed his lips. ‘Alby may have had “style”,’ he said, ‘but it didn’t save him from making a mess of his life.’
‘Anyway,’ said Janet, ‘I should have known Chips would be trouble. His head was the wrong shape.’
She laughed to herself, a sound that made hairs stand up on Ray’s neck. At his elbow Maxine too let out a laugh. Janet picked it up smoothly and ran with it.
‘From the side,’ she said, catching Maxine’s eye, ‘his head resembled the pickled onion from the very bottom of the jar.’
She advanced into the room with her face screwed up, and without looking at the mattress sank her elegant shoe into its ribcage, its raised shoulder; she shoved and kicked at it until it peeled back off the lino and flopped its sagging spine against the skirting board. A wave travelled off the mattress’s under-side and reached Maxine and Ray at the door, a staleness that must have once been stench but now was faded, dry and weak; barely able to offend.
‘Even in life,’ said Janet, hands on hips, panting, ‘he had no backbone.’
While the air settled in the room nobody spoke, but Janet felt the play of their eye-beams between her shoulder blades, and was ashamed. As always, shame made her angry. She looked at her hands, although she had not used them on the mattress; she wiped them on the sides of her skirt, examined them again, then turned and pressed between the two watchers, out into the hallway and back
along it to the bathroom. She went in and closed the door with a sharp click.
‘Boy,’ said Ray. ‘Is she snaky.’
‘Is your name really Ray?’ said Maxine. How long was it since she had stood so close to a man? She had forgotten how small she was. Her shoulder would have fitted neatly into his armpit. ‘I mean—have you got other names as well? Or do you always call yourself the same thing?’
He looked down at her, not listening.
‘I think I’ll accept,’ he said. ‘Just while I get my bearings—till my brother comes for me. He’ll be here soon. Wait till you meet Alby. He’s pretty talented. He’s had his problems, of course—but he’s a really special bloke. We’ve taught each other a lot. Yes, I think I’ll stay a bit. How about you?’
Was this the invitation? ‘I’m not like Chips,’ said Maxine, thrilled and bashful. ‘I don’t drink or write poetry. And I own a lot of stuff.’
‘Take the shed, then,’ said Ray with a magnanimous gesture. ‘I’ll choose myself a room. That’s what she said.’
Softly on his thongs he turned back to the first door in the shabby back passageway. Maxine followed him. He rattled the brass handle, using it to lift the door in its frame and shift it to left and right, but it would not give. They stood still. Then Maxine rose on tiptoe and ran her fingers along the top rim of the doorframe. Dust tumbled off and sprinkled Ray’s hair and shoulders: but when she held out her flat palm, there was a key on it.
‘How did you know that was there?’ said Ray.
‘It was peeping,’ said Maxine.
He stared.
‘I mean I saw it,’ she said hastily. ‘Peeping over the edge.’
He looked up at the frame, and down at her. Then he took the key out of her hand, and examined the lock.
‘Don’t you think we should wait for Janet to come back?’ said Maxine. ‘Ask first?’
‘I want to see my brother’s room,’ said Ray.
He rubbed the key against the material of his hip, and slid it into the lock. Maxine bent her knees, to watch. Pressure, withdrawal; press again with lightness; a flutter, a wrist-flick and a tug; a daintier push. While his other hand rolled the brass knob in unison, the key turned, and the door swung open.
Inside, behind it, there was nothing at first, only darkness and dead air, but gradually, as if waxing into Maxine’s field of hearing, there came from low down near the floor a fast, rhythmic sound, something metal, something going like mad. Before she knew she had moved, she found herself behind Ray like a pillion passenger, hanging on to his waist. She felt his back go rigid, then relax. Was that her heart, or his?
‘It’s all right,’ said Ray. He reached round the door jamb, flicked the dud switch on and off, and slipped out of her clutches into the dark brown room. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s empty.’
How on earth could he not see it? It stood on the wooden floor behind him, in the corner just inside the door, where the light from the hallway poorly fell: an old-fashioned alarm clock with three blunt stumps for legs and a bell like a Prussian helmet. Its face, a faithful little moon, was turned up to her, its hands were spread to plead innocence, and its inner mechanism emitted without ceasing the rapid ribbon of blows called the passing of time.
But as she opened her mouth to call out the wonder of it, the silver ticking spread along the walls of the room, became a drumming, and was drowned in an ample and agreeable rush, as if water somewhere were gushing in sudden release.
Ray swung round with his arms wide, floating in the darts of daylight that pierced the blind.
‘How could he have got a wink of sleep in here?’ he said. ‘Those pipes are prehistoric. I think I’d better take the end one. The one that was Chips’s.’
Before she could point or warn, he had stepped past the clock and shepherded her back into the hall, pulling the door to behind him.
In the bathroom, Janet turned off the taps and opened the window. She knew she should come out and face whatever needed to be dealt with next, but instead she shot a look at her haircut in the mirror, and turned away from it, appalled, to sit down on the wooden lid of the still groaning lavatory. She was hiding. These weirdos. Why do I always collect them? It must be my fate, to be depended on by lost souls. Just for the time being, though, she could put up with them. For a little while. Until they took what they needed, got fed up with her bossiness, rounded on her, and shot through.
From the sloping street under the window rose the cries of home-going schoolchildren, their passionate, breaking voices. She squeezed her eyes shut and doubled herself up over her knotted arms. It was a good sound, she believed with the part of her that still believed anything; but it hurt her. She knew why, and there was nothing she could do about it. It was much, much too late.
The dark column shifted into position, near her left shoulder. It did not touch her. It formed and fluttered there, further behind her than her glance could have reached; and it waited.
Apart from Maxine’s tools and furniture, there was not much to be transported; it was all done in a morning, with the absorbed and practical cheerfulness which at the establishment of any household sweeps away misgivings. The furniture, when it came, filled Ray’s panel van like an excursion of handicapped children, some supine and passive, some eagerly upright but exhibiting at the windows bizarre body language which snagged the attention of pedestrians and left them puzzled and staring.
‘What do you make of her stuff?’ said Janet to Ray on the back verandah, while Maxine, fifty feet deeper in the unreconstructed garden, trotted backwards and forwards outside the shed’s gaping double doors, hands clasped under her chin, engrossed in the fresh arrangement of her creations.
‘Her stuff?’ said Ray.
‘Her work. The chairs and cupboards, and so on.’
‘I haven’t formed an opinion,’ said Ray. ‘Yet.’
‘Just at first glance, though,’ said Janet. ‘How does it strike you?’
‘Oh, I don’t know whether I can really say, at the moment.’
She glanced at him, surprised, impatient. ‘Not even off the top of your head?’
Sweat broke through the skin of his armpits. ‘I’ll have to examine it much more carefully,’ he mumbled. ‘I’ll have to become accustomed to it, and get acquainted with her . . . theories, before I can offer an opinion.’
‘I’m not asking for a final judgment,’ said Janet. ‘Just an impression—you know, a gut reaction.’
Dumb, he stared at her.
‘What I mean is,’ said Janet, more gently, ‘do you like it?’
‘Like it?’ he repeated.
‘Is there any of it that you—that you sort of feel good about, when you look at it?’ She was speaking in words of one syllable, as if to a child.
He closed his mouth and turned away towards the garden, his thoughts struggling behind a cloud. Again she looked at his feet and saw the pathos of them, how unguarded they were, how feebly shod.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he said in a rush, ‘if you really want to know. Her stuff gives me the creeps.’
Relieved, Janet laughed, then lowered her voice. ‘Why?’
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’m not very sophisticated, right? Anyone can see that. I haven’t had much education. I’m not a talker. But I do know one thing. I know the difference between right and wrong.’
Janet fixed her eyes on Maxine’s little figure down there at the shed doors, beyond the mossy lattice and the old tomato stakes: rapt, unconscious of scrutiny, she came and went keenly in her faded flannel shirt and running pants, clasping and unclasping her hands under her chin, hesitating for long moments with her explosive head of hair tilted to one side, pressing a forefinger across her pointed lips, then, with both arms outstretched, dashing into the shed again and out of sight. Janet felt the back of her neck prickle.
; ‘How the hell,’ she said, carefully keeping her tone steady, ‘how can furniture be right or wrong?’
Ray stepped closer. ‘What she’s got out there,’ he said, ‘is not just ordinary furniture. It’s got things carved in it. Signs, and special holes and pictures.’
‘You mean slogans?’ said Janet. ‘Or decorations?’
‘No,’ said Ray. His hand crossed his chest and felt for the book buttoned into his shirt pocket. ‘Kind of magic. Superstitious beliefs. And I saw the books she reads. Scary stuff. Cosmic. Don’t you know what I mean?’
‘Oh, it’s probably just New Age,’ said Janet. ‘A lot of people are into that, these days. They seem to believe in everything all at once. It’s not very discriminating. But it’s pretty harmless, isn’t it?’
‘Harmless?’ said Ray. ‘You think that stuff’s harmless?’ He wrestled with the button of his shirt pocket and pulled out a small black book. ‘It’s all in here,’ he said, riffling the cigarette-paper pages with his thumb. ‘I can show you. It’s crystal clear, in here.’
‘Put it away,’ said Janet. ‘Here she comes.’
He obeyed. They turned. Maxine was ploughing up the garden towards them, smiling enormously, carrying something tiny on her two extended hands.
‘It’s a cage,’ hissed Ray. ‘Look, she’s built a cage for a rat, or something.’
‘Shut up,’ said Janet. ‘Just calm down.’
‘Look,’ said Maxine, stopping below them at the foot of the verandah. ‘Look what I made. It’s my favourite.’
She held it up to them so that a rocker balanced delicately on each palm.
‘See?’ she said, beaming. ‘Can you tell what it is?’
‘Oh,’ said Janet. ‘Oh, look.’
She stretched out her hand and brushed the cradle lightly with one finger. A tremor ran through it and on into the air. Janet sighed.
‘Oh, Maxine,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely. Look,’ she said, turning to Ray. ‘See—how beautiful!’
He tried, he really tried to see it with them, to see it as they wanted him to. He urged himself to respond, he stared at it with fierce willpower, but before their avid, demanding smiles his whole intelligence went numb. In vain he applied himself. His store of remarks was empty. Into the space between him and the object, this arrangement of twigs, this box-like contraption on skis, there rolled, in the form of a dense fog, the idea of himself looking at art. The women waited, with their eyes on his stiffening face, then, embarrassed for him and disappointed, they looked away. With his whole body he felt Janet’s allegiance shift. The river swung away from him and he was high and dry, bereft again and foolish, on his own.