by Helen Garner
Late one afternoon, in a milk bar far from home, the serving girl greeted her like an old customer. When Maxine hesitated, puzzled, the girl said, ‘Aren’t you the one who carries the little—the little—on your back?’
‘Oh, my little back-pack,’ said Maxine. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘No,’ said the girl. ‘I meant the baby.’
A shiver ran through the cradle.
‘On my back?’ said Maxine. She moved up to the counter.
Seeing her mistake, the girl tittered and flapped one hand across her mouth.
‘Sorry!’ she said. ‘You were standing against the light. I was sure I saw a head pop up behind your shoulder.’
Maxine raced home rejoicing. She found Janet upstairs in her room, facing a blank wall and banging away on the typewriter in her lamplit snug of dictionaries and reference books, with an old crocheted blanket wrapped round her to hold a hot-water bottle against her kidneys.
‘She saw it, Janet!’ cried Maxine, stampeding in. ‘She saw the baby!’
Janet looked up in alarm. Maxine’s hair stood on end round her face, and while she jabbered out her tale in the doorway, the cradle on her palms was buffeted by a heavy surf of agitation.
‘Hey. Hey,’ said Janet. She pushed away the machine and struggled to her feet in the tangle of paraphernalia. ‘Put that thing down and come in here.’
Maxine placed the cradle on top of a filing cabinet and, full of trouble and exultation in her looks, came to attention beside the table like a schoolgirl.
Janet laid her hands on Maxine’s shoulders. ‘Now listen to me,’ she said. ‘Are you quite, quite sure that this is the right thing for you to be doing? Don’t you think you might have let it go far enough?’
Maxine dropped her head to one shoulder and gave a slippery smile. ‘Tell me, Janet,’ she said in a conversational voice. ‘Why don’t you move your desk so you can look out the window? Then you would be inspired by what you see outside.’
Janet shook her gently. ‘Maxine. Please do not change the subject. I am only a shit-kicking journalist. I am what is commonly known as a hack. For what I write, inspiration is not required.’
Maxine’s eyes focused and filled with tears. ‘Oh, don’t speak about yourself like that,’ she said passionately. ‘It’s so cruel.’
‘Maxine,’ said Janet, with a hard throat, ‘I’m worried about you. I’m afraid you’re going to get hurt. Can’t you accept that Ray just isn’t interested?’
‘I know—he won’t join in the game,’ cried Maxine. ‘I can’t blame him—he works so terribly hard and he’s afraid to risk his money. If only I could make him understand that there is no risk.’
‘Not that. I don’t mean the game. I mean your other plan.’
‘But I can’t do that without the money,’ wailed Maxine. ‘He can’t stick around afterwards to look after me. I’ve got to make everything ready myself.’
‘But even if you do,’ said Janet, ‘you can’t just hijack a bloke! For God’s sake, Maxine. Be reasonable.’
Suddenly Maxine’s cheeks bulged, her nose went red, and she exploded into great, racking sobs. She made no attempt to smother them, but stood with her hands stiffly by her sides, and howled with a square mouth, staring straight into Janet’s horrified face.
It was the despondent time of day, when the failure bird dragged its gauche stepladder of notes into the garden and propped it against the nearest tree, making everything within earshot forlorn; but now Janet pulled Maxine clumsily into her arms, and found herself rocking the scrawny, sweating little figure to and fro; a few tears of her own slid into the bush of Maxine’s hair; and while she murmured foolish endearments that came percolating up out of some half-remembered reservoir of comfort, her mood of dread dissolved, and she was filled instead with a calm, maternal daring.
Presently Maxine’s gusty sobs spaced themselves further apart, and lost their rhythm, and stopped. Janet slid her hands down Maxine’s arms to the wrists, and let go.
Maxine wiped her nose and slug-lidded eyes on the sleeve of her jumper.
They looked at each other in silence.
Then Maxine heaved a bottomless sigh, and said with a gasp and a hiccup, ‘Help me, Janet. You’ve been around. Can’t you tell me what I’m doing wrong?’
‘You’re asking me for advice?’ said Janet. Her laugh cracked in two. ‘About a man?’
‘Is it my looks?’ said Maxine humbly. ‘Can anything be done about them or is it too late?’ She closed her eyes and tilted up her face.
Silenced by a helpless sympathy, the kind for which there is no remedy, Janet swung the planet lamp away from the typewriter and aimed its beam on to Maxine’s face. Maxine squinched her eyes more tightly but continued to hold up her head, presenting her face like a lake waiting for a wind; and Janet, in this moment of strange privacy, examined her from forehead to chin, from ear to ear and back again. Perhaps she would soon need glasses, perhaps it was a trick of the light, but she had to focus all her will into this act of looking; she was obliged to lug the grid of her concentration with force over the resisting planes and excrescences of Maxine’s tear-puffed face; and her gaze, as she hauled it along from right to left, from bottom to top, trailed behind it a gleaming furrow of meaning, of intense significance which she could neither read nor interpret.
Maxine gave a husky giggle. ‘That feels funny,’ she said, squeezing her eyes shut. ‘It tickles. What are you doing?’
‘Looking,’ said Janet, and sighed. ‘Just looking.’
She bent the lamp’s heavy head away, and patted Maxine on the cheek. Maxine opened her eyes.
‘Well?’ she said eagerly. ‘Is there a special cream or something? Or should I cut off my hair?’
Janet rested her bottom against the table and folded her arms. This undefended innocence. It was almost Martian. She spoke with difficulty.
‘Don’t you read the magazines? That’s where you find out what men are supposed to like.’
‘But Ray’s not an ordinary man,’ said Maxine. She stared at Janet, bewildered.
Outside, closer than the hum of home-rushing traffic, the failure bird carefully stacked its tower of notes; losing heart before it reached the top, it climbed back to the ground and prepared to start again. Maxine was beyond reason. All that was left was kindness— or bluntness, even if you had to pick up the pieces afterwards. Janet filled her lungs and jumped.
‘You haven’t looked after your hands,’ she said.
Maxine glanced down at them, and shrugged. ‘It’s the work I do,’ she said. ‘Does it matter?’
‘And your face. Is your skin that rough all over?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Maxine. ‘Probably.’
Janet got to her feet. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I think we should start with a massage.’
‘But it’s nearly night,’ cried Maxine. ‘Everywhere’s closed now. I was counting on doing something straight away. I can’t wait, Janet. My time’s running out.’ Her red eyes swelled with tears, and she began to wring her hands.
‘Don’t start again,’ said Janet, hearing in her own voice the strident note of haste. ‘I can do it. I’ll do it myself.’
‘You?’ said Maxine. ‘How?’ She scrubbed at her eyes with her cuffs.
‘How do you think we used to pass the time when we were hippies? I’ve still got the book. It’s on the shelf next to the dunny. Nick in and get it for me while I warm up the room.’
She pushed away the typewriter, and began to heave the unmade bed about. Maxine, unwinding her scarf, hurried out the door and along the hallway towards the back of the house.
It was quite dark now, though judging by the frequency of passing cars it could not have been later than five-thirty, and no other lights in the house were on. Maxine slithered her hands along the wall, and reached the bat
hroom by feel and smell: but its light showed her that Ray’s door, further down the hall, was open, just a crack. Many a time she had loitered outside it, not daring even to knock. Now, in the boldness of relief that follows tears, she simply strode up to it, pushed it open, and stepped inside.
She flicked on the dull overhead light. The window, its panes thickly clogged with creeper, was jammed shut, but one tendril had forced a way between the ill-fitting sashes, and hung out into the room. Maxine’s hands clasped and butted under her chin. So this was where her angel lodged and slumbered: this was his place of dreams. How spartan his needs were. A sleeping bag, a narrow pallet, a pillow with a book beside it; and under the window, a cardboard carton of possessions. She tiptoed closer, and bent over to admire.
Clothes. Oh, his darling garments. She knelt by the box with her hands on the floor, and pushing her face right into the jumble of sweat-rank laundry, breathed her fill; then she sat back and plunged in both arms, to the elbow. Her fingers struck a firmer object at the bottom. She fished it up like a prize from a lucky dip, and drew it out towards the light. Something small was tightly rolled in layers of cloth. The wrapping was soft and flowery, and trimmed with torn, discoloured lace. She raised it to her nose.
It was her nightdress.
The floor foundered under her knees.
Ray had visited her shed. He must have pushed his hands right down to the foot of her bed.
Dumb with jubilation, Maxine laid the bundle on the floor and unrolled it with steady hands. The flannelette peeled away, and from a nest between the stained folds sprang up the core of it: money. A wad of money. A thick, rubber-banded, perfumed clump of brand-new notes.
She knelt quite still.
It was not necessary, but she licked her fingertips and daintily counted the cash. A thousand dollars. A thousand dollars exactly.
Out in deep space the planets swept, inexorable, along their splendid orbits. Maxine bowed her head. From now on she would take the gods’ dictation.
She thrust the roll into the pocket of her tracksuit, paused for a second with her head strained up to listen, then bounced to her feet, leaving the nightdress spread-eagled under the window, and darted along the hall to Janet’s room.
Janet’s back was towards the door. She had turned on the radio, very softly, and was bent over the bed, singing to herself, while she stretched the sheet tightly over the mattress and spread out a towel. A plastic bottle of oil stood beside her on the night-table. While Maxine watched, with one hand round the door jamb and her fingers almost touching the nearest strut of the twig cradle, Janet stooped again and pulled out from under the bed a small brown instrument, with strings. She positioned her fingers, turned her back more fully to the door, and struck a chord so timid, so uncertain, that even the tiny cradle failed to register it.
Maxine whisked the cradle silently off the filing cabinet and sped away down the passage.
Her heart was absolutely tramping, inside her ribs. Kneeling again under Ray’s window, she laid the cradle on its side, rolled it up with rapid strokes in the flannelette nightdress, and worked the new bundle, her side of the bargain, deep into the box of dirty clothes. Then she let her head swoon again among the shirts and underpants, drinking in his smell.
Downstairs, the back door crashed shut.
Maxine frisked the top layer back into a casual arrangement, snapped off the light, and shot out of the room like a rabbit.
In the bathroom she pulled the lavatory chain at once, and while the water roared and gushed, she scanned the shelf for the massage book. There it was, smelling of patchouli, its covers and page-corners splodged with oil-stains.
Janet was waiting for her, not with her customary irritable finger-tapping but sitting quietly on the tight-sheeted bed with her hands resting in her lap; she was almost smiling. The guitar—the banjo, whatever it was—was gone.
‘Hop up,’ she said, as Maxine came skirring round the corner with her arms flying wide and slung the greasy book on to the pillow. ‘Get your clothes off and hop up here.’
‘I think I just heard Ray come into the kitchen,’ panted Maxine. ‘Shouldn’t we shut the door?’
She pulled off her soft boots and her old, rainbow-striped, woollen sweater, and while she folded the tracksuit pants with meticulous care and laid them on top of the pile, Janet walked to the door and closed it.
‘Back in the seventies, you know,’ she said, ‘we used to massage each other blatantly on the dining-room table. We had no fear. Nothing was sacred.’
She laughed, and turned from tuning the radio just in time to see Maxine, lit by the blush of the one-bar radiator, scrambling out of elephantine cotton knickers and a sagging singlet. Janet did not miss a beat. She snatched at the grey rags before they hit the floor and corrected their trajectory so that they flopped into the waste-paper basket under the desk.
‘It might be an idea,’ she said, squirting oil on to her palms from the plastic nozzle, ‘to pay some attention to your underwear, later. Lie on your stomach.’
Gloriously, Maxine dived face down on to the towel, and closed her eyes. She was too porous to stay bed-bound: any minute now the mattress would drop away from under her, and she would rise to the ceiling and bob among its garlanded cornucopias. Thoughts of bluestone ballast weighted her. She heard Janet’s feet shift round to the top of the bed, heard her draw a first, formal breath, and felt the shadow as Janet leaned forward, blocking the light. The oiled hands swooped, skimmed, and pounced. With a grunt, Maxine let go.
But the surprise of touch! Where Janet had expected a coarseness, desiccated, even flaking, her palms surged down a back whose skin was as cool and as dense as yogurt, and across whose shoulders was tossed a starry shawl of the palest, finest freckles. Maxine’s ribcage sank under the rolling pressure like a little bellows, and rose again as the hands glided, one on each side of her spine, all the way to the waist, drawing behind them on the skin a quickly fading double stripe of flush.
All Ray could find to eat, down in the cold kitchen, was a rind of cheese. He attacked it, and while he chewed, his eyes roved along the bench, looking for fruit, for something with juice in it, something that had grown on a tree.
But instead, poking out of a bundle of old catalogues and supermarket specials behind the toaster, he saw a letter.
Upstairs, water groaned and beat in the pipes.
He put out his hand, but he did not need to touch the letter, or even to see the writing on it, to know that it was for him. He spat the rest of the cheese into the bin and ripped open the envelope. It was from Alby.
Alby was coming. Alby was on his way. Alby would be here, with a rented truck of household things, in a fortnight. At last, at last he could get out of here. Ray clenched both fists in the air, threw back his head like a boxer, and jogged on the spot in his socks.
But when? Which fortnight?
In vain he read and reread the short letter. There was no date on it anywhere, only the scrawled word Thursday at the top, and the postmark was a grey blur, completely indecipherable, as if the corner of the envelope had been lying in a pool of water. How long had it been stuck there with the junk mail? It could have been days—a week. Those bloody—it was Maxine. She had no morals. She was mad keen on him. She would stop at nothing to keep him hanging round. Pushing his feet into his boots, he leapt off the back verandah and galloped across the garden to her shed.
He thundered his fists against the double doors. The failure bird broke out of the branches and flapped away.
No answer.
He gave the bolt an irritable twist, and turned to stamp back to the house; but behind his back the latch came loose, and one of the big doors swung open and whacked him across the square of the shoulder. He seized the heavy door to heave it shut; but then he glanced up the length of the yard to the gate and the high windows of the house-back. He had a
minute or two. He slid between the doors and stepped down on to the beaten earth floor.
Phew. It was like a forest in there, half dark and full of gestures. He almost expected bats, or those flights of twittering birds that explode in old cartoons, making the explorer flinch. How did she get to the bed, over there in the corner, without having to twirl and stoop? Tingling with the intruder’s thrill, he advanced into the dimness, holding one arm bent to protect his face, and groping for matches or a torch. Maybe the pieces of furniture had not been carpentered at all, but had reproduced themselves: maybe they had mounted and mated clumsily in the dark while Maxine slept, like reptiles, or prehistoric monsters. The thought made him shiver; but the shed smelt of sawdust and wood, clean smells, and over there against the window’s square he saw a tapering limb, the back or arm of something otherwise invisible: the grace of its curve brought him up short. He leaned towards it. Something dry and crackly fondled his cheek, and he let out a snort of fright. He jerked upright. A hat-rack crowned him, and the air round his head blossomed with stars; but snatching about his ears he got hold of the thing that had touched his face, and backed to the door with it, out into the cold evening garden.
Janet did not open the book at all. She did not need to. The strokes returned to her hands, efficiently and in perfect sequence, as if the seventies were only yesterday, or as if Maxine’s body by its very contours had called them back to life; and now Janet herself was stripped down to a singlet, flushed and sweating, all her muscles warmed by exertion and a growing sense of usefulness and power. Perhaps, if somebody really sensible took over this business and did the talking, something along the lines of Maxine’s fantasy might possibly be arranged. Stranger things happened every day, and were reported in the news. She hummed along to the music, under her breath.