by Helen Garner
One evening he drifted in and came upon Janet rummaging through the cupboards.
‘We should be congratulated,’ she said. ‘We have achieved a totally snack-free kitchen.’
‘We could take it in turns to go to the market,’ said Ray, ‘instead of living like this—bringing things home at random.’
‘A roster,’ said Janet. ‘How passé. You can’t be serious.’
‘I could go,’ he said.
‘When men do the market,’ said Janet suavely, ‘there is blood on the inner walls of the fridge.’
Ray opened it and stood staring in at the old vegetables that drooped through the wire shelves or lay sadly in mounds below.
‘But I’m always hungry,’ he said. ‘Look at this wastage. Couldn’t we make soup? Isn’t there something called stock?’
‘There is such a thing, yes,’ said Janet, keying open a tin of sardines and beginning to squash them on to a stale biscuit.
‘I read in the paper,’ said Ray, ‘about these pots that stand on the back burner and never get turned off. People chuck all the scraps in there and it keeps on cooking for generations.’
‘That’s in France,’ said Janet. She leaned back against the bench and took a large bite. ‘You won’t be here long enough. Anyway for that you need a servant. A mother, or a wife.’
‘I don’t see why,’ said Ray.
‘Because, my dear,’ said Janet, muffled by fish, ‘someone has to be there. To keep an eye on it.’
‘What about Maxine?’ said Ray. ‘Isn’t she out in that shed most of the day?’
‘I wouldn’t dream of asking her,’ said Janet. ‘A classic stockpot is a major domestic commitment. I’m amazed- you can’t see that.’
Ray dug in. ‘Alby’s got a stockpot,’ he said, sliding his eyes her way.
‘Alby?’ said Janet. She stopped chewing and her mouth dropped open. ‘Is Alby married?’
‘No,’ said Ray. He squatted down in front of the fridge and with two hands parted the hopeless vegetables. ‘But he’s got a stockpot.’
‘Well. Now I’m really struck dumb,’ said Janet. She sounded almost good-humoured. ‘So Alby’s got a stockpot, as well as life everlasting.’
Ray pulled out a plastic jar with a red cap and held it up to her. ‘Do you mind if I eat this?’ he said. ‘This yogurt?’
‘Go ahead,’ said Janet. ‘I haven’t had the nerve to open it. It’s been there quite a while.’
He thumbed off the lid. The contents were green and strandy, pullulating with mould. On an impulse he thrust it up under her nose. She reared back.
‘Look, Janet,’ he said, on his haunches at her feet. ‘Here it is. Eternal life. The un-dead.’
Janet had forgotten how it felt to let go: the seizure of the skin across the nose, the dissolve of the abdomen, the warm collapse of an inner barricade. They stared at each other, once their first paroxysms had subsided, with tears in their eyes, shocked and loose-mouthed in the sudden intimacy of laughter.
Ray struggled to his feet. ‘That wasn’t exactly the truth,’ he said, running a cuff across his face. ‘About Alby having a stockpot. I was piling it on. For argument’s sake.’
Janet started again. She had to turn away, in a kind of modesty; she balanced her forearm along the bench and bowed over it while he waited, grinning, snapping the sides of the yogurt pot in and out with his fingertips.
Presently Janet pulled herself together and straightened her spine into its customary correct posture.
‘Surely,’ she said with enfeebled lips, ‘surely you didn’t think I believed you.’
‘Well he was going to get one,’ said Ray. ‘Him and some people he was staying with, last time I saw him. Fellow-Christians. They were. Or at least they said they were.’
Janet began to laugh again, then stopped. In the glow from the half-open fridge door he saw that the grey film had lifted off her. Her skin was flushed, and her eyes glistened under a brow which had lost its shadowy stiffness and was broadening, as he watched, into harmony with a private, tender mouth.
He dropped the plastic jar into the bin and kicked the fridge door to with his socked foot. It shut, snapping off the only light in the room, and the two of them stood side by side against the bench in the dark, breathing in and out.
* * *
Janet had once read in an account of the Irish potato famine that it takes only two generations for a people to lose its practical skills. In the life of one person, she thought, this process telescopes: it can happen in a season. When she was young she taught herself to cook from books. Although she never cared for it she found it easy enough, even in the big households when her turn came round, to prepare and serve something worth eating, and what the collective children turned up their noses at she got into them by dint of will or trickery. But now, since the night her beetroot soup hit the wall, she had not so much as chopped up an onion. In delicatessens she stood helpless, lacking a single idea to bless herself with, and when approached she would buy in haste the first thing her eye fell on, and go home carrying nothing but a jar of pickled capsicums or a packet of custard powder. She was no more civilised than Maxine or Ray. She too scrounged and scavenged, but in her own house; she ate on her feet and only to stay alive. Pleasure had left her life. What pleasure? There was a sort of gratification in the quick hit of a pasty in a bag, a coffee, a bunch of grapes. What she had lost was the pleasure of serving.
In the bowels of the corner cupboard she found an old-fashioned oval oven-proof dish, still with a lid, but chipped, stained and encrusted along its edges with nameless scum. She pulled it out and stared at it, tickled by a strange and distant sensation, an almost childish pleasure in its chunky shape and unusual depth. It radiated meaning, like an object from a forgotten dream. She set it on the bench, and with painful slowness, biting on the pen which upstairs in her room flew so readily across the pages, she began to make a list.
But it was only when she reached the market and stood indecisively between the counters in the meat section that she remembered what she had used to cook in the dish. Years ago Chips and Alby, forced one day by communal pressure to take the smallest household child along when they went to busk at the market, had let the little girl wander off alone among the delicatessen shops while they strummed and yodelled under the broad verandahs. They brought her home white-faced and dumb, her plaits standing on end, and from that day on she refused to let rabbit in any form whatsoever pass her lips. The older children picked up on this and turned it into an ideological position, one which Janet felt an irritable urge to foil, and many a battle had been fought over the marinated, filleted, minced and poached contents of the oval dish, fought and lost, for not even the greatest chef in the world can hoodwink the instincts of a child.
Today, though, in the bright cleanliness of the refurbished shop, the rabbits lay behind glass on glossy enamel trays, stretched out skinned and headless in positions of full flight. The rabbit seller in a crisp pale-blue overall approached with his eyebrows up, and when Janet pointed, he hooked two of the little carcases with a finger under each ribcage and held them out to her, arranged with a merchant’s flourish along his inner forearms. ‘Yes,’ said Janet. Scrupulously he weighed and wrapped them, and she watched him, so soothed by the intent angle of his head, the seriousness of his attentions, that when she noticed on the wall behind his shoulder a hand-lettered sign that read rabbit’s and hare’s, the apostrophes loosened in her a gush of foolish love for every creature in sight, alive or dead. She could hardly catch her breath for the desire to laugh out loud or break into song.
The rabbit man offering the white parcel grinned at her as if he knew that bliss; but how could he, for she scarcely knew it herself—it must be low blood sugar, some sort of chemical imbalance—and blushing, she swallowed it, holding out the money and feigning sudden interest in a half-open
door at the back of the shop, an entry to a darker annexe where something all along had been swaying and swinging in a mechanical rhythm. She stood on her toes and leaned sideways, to see.
It was an old woman, standing between two heaps of corpses and up to her elbows in blood.
Working at speed and with a bitter efficiency, she seized each furry body from the stack on her right and skinned it in a single savage movement, turning the pelt inside out as fast as a dishwasher strips off a rubber glove, then slung the flayed cadaver on to the pile at her left. She sensed the shock of Janet’s focus and raised her speechless face to the light. Without slackening her pace she cast Janet a look that was less a greeting than a challenge, a dark flash from under her heavy, blood-flecked brow.
To Janet this was a class thing, and out of her guilt she nodded and tried to smile. The skinner’s mouth writhed in irony. Janet took her parcel and hurried away. As she came out of the market carrying the meat, the bread, the salad and the wine, the sky closed over and rain began to fall in fat, deliberate drops.
Not only had Janet lost ideas, she found that she had become stupid in the kitchen, and clumsy. The garlic in its papery envelope had softened and turned yellow, the peeled onion spun on the board and would not stand still to be sliced, and when she cursed the knife for skidding on the glistening flesh it repaid her with a stern slash across the fingerpad out of which blood welled and swelled: nothing she did could stanch it. She stood snivelling at the sink, letting the reddened water run down the drain, and listening to the failure bird outside in the garden as it tried with a special, dreary gusto to prop its stepladder of notes among the dripping boughs.
But the blood stopped at last, the dish was slid into the oven; and at seven o’clock, when the rain had settled in for the long haul and Janet had run out the front to empty the wet letterbox of junk mail and then upstairs to position saucepans under all the best-known leaks, she wiped down the white table with an Ajaxed rag and set about making it beautiful: an ironed cloth, proper cutlery and crockery for three, glasses with stems, two candle stubs in silver holders, and even the serviettes that the household children, echoing their parents, had called ‘serve-you-rights’, pink linen ones with drawn-thread borders, dragged like the tablecloth from the utter bottom of the ironing basket.
She uncorked the bottle of wine, laid the baguette at an attractive angle across the middle of the cloth, and stood back satisfied.
It was seven-twenty. Any minute now the others would walk in. But the room was cold. The fireplace was clogged with ash from days ago. Hastily she brushed it clean, then ran out the back door for wood. There were logs in a pile by the door, but no small stuff and no kindling, and when she put out her hand to the spot where the axe usually leaned, it met blank wall. Maxine. Water was welling in rills over the rim of the choked guttering, dropping a curtain between the dry verandah and the rain-darkened garden. Janet draped a teatowel over her head and burst through.
She had to fight the bolt of the shed, lifting and tugging and favouring her cut finger, before the big door swung open. There was no light at all, but a strange, pleasant perfume, woody, peppery, drifted out of the darkness to where Janet stood, and waiting to be able to see, she breathed it in.
She groped along the wall and found a box of matches on the windowsill. How anyone could live in here was beyond her—a dirt floor, no electric light, a dismal window with bathroom panes—but the peppery scent was seductive and the roof did not leak, and though she saw the axe at once, leaning tidily against a crate, she did not stoop to pick it up. She shuffled forward till her shins were barked by a low table on which stood a hurricane lamp. She put the match to its wick, and holding it high in front of her, stepped into the gesturing forest of the furniture.
A chairback plucked the teatowel from her collar; a table edge jostled her hip. She leaned forward with the lamp and peered between the petrified limbs into the depths of the shed. Along one wall she made out the workbench; on its far end, near a severe-looking narrow bed, the twig cradle, uncharacteristically motionless; and above the pillow, too high and too far in for the lamp to illuminate anything but its general shape, there hovered a little figure, a kind of doll.
Was this snooping? She was, after all, the landlady. She glanced over her shoulder to the dripping doorway, and hesitated. Back in the kitchen the rabbit flesh would have softened by now in hot juices, and loosened itself from the bones. But she took three steps further in, raising the lamp. The doll was spread-armed, like a crucifix, but the tips of its feet were blurred, somehow, and it was partly wrapped in cloth. A trickle of cold ran down Janet’s scalp under her hair and into the neck of her jumper. She could not find an angle for the lamp that would show her what the thing was. She pushed forward again, with her elbows out, turning her hips sideways to get past a curved desk, but a footstool snagged the hem of her skirt. She heard the stitches rip and swore out loud, hopping and staggering against the side wall to get her balance: the whole frame of the building shivered from the impact, and with a rustle the doll tumbled off its hook and plunged out of sight into the darkness of the bed.
If anyone came, Janet would be deafened by the rain. She backed out, extinguishing the lamp and replacing the matches, and struggled, with the axe gripped between her knees, to shoot the bolt home. Her head and shoulders were sodden. The rain fell and fell. The garden was bowed under it. As she turned to run towards the back door, she saw the house suddenly as if it were a stranger’s and she the traveller: hollow, bleak, forbidding, although it was lit up from door to top: the only shelter between her and the coming night.
Her axe blows shook the concrete of the yard, and in ten minutes a fire was wriggling and popping in the grate, but still the others did not come.
She ran up to her room and changed into a dry jumper. Any minute now the back gate would scrape: it probably had already, while her head was muffled in the woollen folds. In the bathroom, taking her time, she rinsed and dressed the seeping cut on her finger. She brushed the brief feathers of her hair, dashed on a couple of stabs of lipstick which she wiped off immediately on the back of her hand, and sauntered down the stairs, humming an aria.
The room was empty.
But the kitchen was warm with the smell of cooked meat. She turned the oven down while she made a slow and dignified salad, then with gloved hands she carried the brown dish into the living room and placed it on a board right in the middle of the arrangement. She lit the candles, first one, then the other; she blew out the match; she sat down at the head of the table.
Everything was ready. The oven dish shimmered gently, the salad sprouted its oiled green leaves between the dark bottle and the loaf’s cubist crust; and Janet, with her hands clasped on the cloth, her lips discreetly coloured, and her brutal haircut beginning to soften, was not only the creator of this tableau but also its central element. What she was offering was herself.
Nobody came.
Still sitting with upright spine, Janet rolled her wrist towards her and looked at her watch. Half-past eight.
The rain kept falling, the closed windows streamed. Its white noise should have kept at bay all other sounds from the world beyond the house; but a tiny burr of anxiety prickled far inside her chest. She began to twist about on her chair. By its intensity she knew that her discomfort had nothing to do with Maxine. It was an attack of night-time waiting for a man, that most demoralising state, which starts at the incredulous, deflating, forgotten dinner hour and can continue without mercy till first light.
Ugh, the shame of it! Every sound that could possibly herald an approach sprang direct into her head. If tyres sponged or hissed, the car must pull in to the kerb and become his. A voice laughing or calling out goodbye at the corner must belong to him. A tram screeching down the metal to the stop must disgorge his running figure. Nothing had changed. She was still the same old sucker. All a man had to do, to put her at his mercy, was to ma
ke her laugh. All dignity, all stoicism was lost. Full of self-disgust, Janet lowered her head on to the tablecloth between her knife and fork, and held it there.
And that was how Maxine found her when she came in on her soft shoes and stood panting in the kitchen doorway under a bush of hair studded with trembling droplets.
‘Janet,’ she whispered urgently. ‘Janet. Are you asleep? Wake up! What are you doing? What can I smell? It’s so dark in here.’
Janet sat up with a jerk and whirled around on her chair. Her face in the candle-light was creased and red. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ she cried. ‘And where’s Ray? Was he with you? Where is that bastard?’
Maxine paid no attention. She forged into the room, smiling; her eyes were extra bright. ‘Listen, Janet,’ she said. ‘Nothing can stop me now. I’ve found the answer to all my money problems.’
‘Your money problems? Right now I couldn’t give a shit about your money problems! Where have you been? The meal’s cold. It’s spoilt.’
‘Have you got a thousand dollars?’ said Maxine, looming over the table in her yellow slicker. ‘A thousand. That’s all you need. It’s for a game. Well, they call it a game, but really it’s a kind of revolution.’
She had left the back door open and the rain’s hiss and splatter drowned all other sounds from outside. The candles guttered in the rush of air. Silent, clenching her teeth, Janet steadied them. She reached for the wine and slopped the first big slug of it into her glass. Maxine pulled out a chair and plumped on to it, elbowing aside the table arrangement.