by Peter Carey
Frederic smiled excessively and annoyed the boys with mullets who thought he was a poofter cunt. He was blatantly some unknown quantity who would get her father bashed. They escaped into the dead end of a suburban street, unscathed, and she understood that the liver-brick shitheap right in front of them would be, forever, That Coburg Place.
Broken pickets. Weird old flowers. Red-hot pokers. Cactus with shark’s teeth growing along the edges of its flesh. The house was one hundred years old, at least, dying in deep shadow, with a wide low slate roof and verandah tiles like a mansion you pay to visit on a boring Sunday, blues and terracotta which turned out, in this case, to be smeared with illegal skid marks. The garden smelled of gas and cat’s piss and there was a tall palm tree with a dead frond. Complete and utter lossitude. She could have cried.
Wow, said Frederic. Oh wow. Mr. Quinn, do you have a key?
Sando kicked the front door and it swung into the gloom. The previous inhabitants had lit a fire in the middle of the living room and burned a hole to the centre of the earth. The injured floorboards were wide and waxy and marked with motorcycle skid marks.
This was their clubhouse, right? Frederic asked. The White Knights? This can be so good.
Sando took Gaby’s hand in both of his and led her, in this ungainly way, from one room to the next, through violent debris of a type you might not expect to see unless you were, for some unexpected reason, on the run, frightened for your life.
There’s a lot of room, she said.
So cool, said Frederic and she did not know what to think of him.
Plaster hung in shards held by ancient horsehair, moving gently in the breeze.
Sando held his hands out: Will it be OK? he asked his daughter.
She saw it in his eyes: someone had been murdered here but he had bought it because it was so cheap. Celine would have a shit fit. It would be Gaby’s job to make it all OK. And it would be Frederic’s talent to know all this without being told. He understood the role. He was Matty Matovic’s son and therefore knew the cost of lead and copper. He had attended auctions all over Melbourne. He knew the value of these internal stone walls. He knew the squiddy underbelly inner-city pubs and midnight runs, and he would, for his reward, have her beside him in the tunnels of the world of Zork.
He perched fearlessly on the corner post of the front fence and saw what no-one else could see, that the leak in the bedroom corresponded with one broken slate, that “this must be Gaby’s room.”
“Gaby’s room” had a narrow window with a view of an empty laneway. It’s quiet, he said and his voice made her tailbone hum and he was being the power, the generator.
We can get kids from school to help, he said.
No, she said sharply.
Why not?
It’s not your house.
But I’m helping you.
Gaby, honey, said her father.
He’s not helping me, she said. He’s creeping me out. I don’t even know him.
And she saw Frederic’s hurt face through the hot blur of tears. Her father was restraining her, holding her, squeezing all her breath out. She wished to be back in her own home which was being taken from her, mother gone, father crumpling like paper in a bin.
FREDERIC REFUSED to be offended, no matter what she said to him. He already knew what she was like. He said that. He may have even been correct. But then he told her he would teach her to code, and assumed that was just so attractive. How totally up himself. She was a girl so she must want him.
On Monday, after everything she had said to him in Coburg, he tried to catch her eye. Even while she ignored him she wrote “Frederic” in her notebook and scribbled over it, obliterating him forever. She went into the loo and ripped him out and tore him up so small no-one would ever know what she had done.
She got back home and a telegram arrived—the first telegram she had seen that was not in a movie. She signed for it and left it on the table for her father who threw it in the trash when he was finished with it. Soon it was covered with spaghetti bolognaise, so obviously it was from Celine.
Is it Frederic? her father asked. Is that why you’re so sad?
That was him? Saying she was sad? What had been in the telegram?
I’m studying Cicero if you want to know.
Gaby, I’m not sure Frederic likes girls.
Oh aren’t you? she shouted, without warning, even to herself. Really? she yelled at him. She threw her book on the floor. Who was he to talk? What a mope. Letting Celine get away with all that shit.
He patted his big hands before his chest. He said, it was just my feeling.
And what are you, a homophobe?
It was as if she had slapped his face. Oh God, she thought, please Daddy, don’t be drunk.
Why don’t you just go and get her back? she said. Just get her and bring her home.
Then he was offended and shook his head at her, like some awful TV actor trying to convey disappointment. Then he stormed out of the house. Up to the Albion, of course.
And this was just one of many incidents that occurred in the two weeks when Celine was sending telegrams from Moggs Creek. On another night: Gaby had been looking through the cardboard box of Dylan Neil Young Jefferson Airplane Beatles. There was Rickie Lee Jones doing “Chuck E’s in Love.” She had danced to this track with her mother when she was a little girl, Celine crooning. He learn all of the lines, and every time he/don’t stutter when he talk.
On this night, Gaby thought, Frederic! (And it’s true! It’s true!) And then, the needle scraped across the vinyl and her father was home and the vinyl was flying through the open doorway out onto the dirty street, and all her insides were cold spaghetti. Her father was insane. Why would anyone do a thing like that?
Because—duh—it was a song about an actor. Celine was with an actor. Shagging. It made her sick. He was not even a Christian so was he putting up with Celine’s bullshit to make a happy family? Was he turning the other cheek? If so, don’t do it on her account. She stood on a kitchen chair and pulled the hems of Celine’s dresses, tugging, dragging until clothes pegs popped and clattered against the wall. She twisted clothes hangers beyond their useful shapes and the room got lighter and brighter until finally the ceiling was all bare and she didn’t know who she was cross with but she fetched the black rubbish bags from the kitchen and stuffed them full of Celine, five full bags of them and tied them up with yellow ties. She was a cat running screeching over lily pads, nothing to support her, each pad sinking as it took her weight. She waited and waited but her father stayed upstairs. Finally she locked the front and back doors and the window to the lane.
At her father’s door she called to him. Are you OK?
The streetlight illuminated his blue shoes protruding from the murky blankets. She found a place beside him in the musty tangle.
Will Mummy come back?
Yes my love. He tucked a quilt around her and she did not wake until the middle of the night when he carried her back to her bed. In the morning she found him in the kitchen drinking instant coffee. The black rubbish bags were now lined neatly against the wall and Gaby saw that the attack on Celine’s clothes would not be undone now. Those body bags would still be there, lined up in evidence against her, when her mother finally came home.
After school the four girls, the Keppel Street Quartet, as they called themselves, were walking north along Rathdowne Street. They were not really a quartet at all. They were Gaby and Katie and Nina, but they always had to include Katie’s little sister. Her name was Jenna and she needed a good whacking.
Crossing Elgin Street they all saw Frederic carrying another cardboard box entirely on his lovely head. It was a shock, Gaby said, to see his beauty displayed in public and to recall how she had bled onto his sheets and listened to his feathering clicking nails, black as beetles.
Jenna said, Hello Frederic. In a cheeky tone of voice.
Frederic lowered his burden to the footpath. As anyone could see, the box contained a brand new K
noll office chair, but Jenna asked: What’s in the box, Frederic? The lurker loser, it was not her place to speak at all.
Frederic said it was a chair. He was being funny. They did not get it. He was a hundred times brighter than the lot of them.
That’s nice, Jenna said. Did it fall off the back of a truck?
Gaby said, Shut up Jenna. She gave Frederic a quick nod.
Hubba-dubba, said Jenna and the other girls stayed silent. Katie lifted her finger at Jenna who stuck her tongue out. Frederic picked up his heavy box and continued up Elgin Street without any sign of strain, walking with that beautiful bounce, presumably towards his home.
He’s strong, said Nina, as he walked away. He has endurance.
At which Katie and Jenna both burst into laughter.
You’re really rude. Gaby spoke to Jenna but she included Katie, obviously.
I’m what?
Your little sister told him his father was a thief.
Get real, Gaby, said Katie. His father is a thief. Everyone knows that.
His father is an anarchist, said Gaby. Did you know that?
Gaby, darling, Katie said, selling left-wing newspapers doesn’t stop him being a thief.
Have you ever heard of Proudhon, Katie? No, you haven’t. Don’t smirk at me, Jenna. You couldn’t even spell it. Just look it up, Katie. See what Proudhon said. And leave Frederic alone.
Hubba-dubba.
Babe, you’ll only get your heart broken, Nina said. I had a friend who fell for one of those. It destroyed her life.
Well, I don’t have that sort of problem, said Gaby who was amazed with herself for making up the story about Proudhon.
Well, you have some sort of problem.
No, you do.
What sort of problem do I have?
This, cried Gaby, swinging her bag by its straps so it whizzed past Katie’s freckled button nose. And that was how they temporarily resolved their problem shrieking all the way to Keppel Street. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da in vinyl talk.
CELINE DROVE HOME through a hurricane, along the Great Ocean Road with her eardrum broken, buzzing, throbbing. The driver-side windscreen wiper stopped working as she passed the little church at Mount Duneed. She was one-eyed through Geelong in a hailstorm, and up the endless, awful Melbourne road.
It was and would remain, she told the tape recorder, the stupidest thing she had done in all her life—no, not running away to Moggs Creek with Fergus, no, she meant letting Sandy put her in the wrong.
So she committed adultery. OK. But Sandy bought the house without her, and left her name off the deed. So who was the biggest liar and cheat? She did not even like Fergus, but he was there, waiting, ready, able, unemployed. Also he was intellectual and working-class and would beat the shit out of Sandy soon as look at him.
Sandy was like some Labor Party saint. He would turn the other cheek. He would not cry out when tortured. Fergus was the un-Sandy, with unapologetic calculating eyes, a million miles from all those smooth-faced creatures who made up the Footlights Collective, actors who were still having to relearn the Australian accents they had lost while auditioning in London, artists who could only impersonate what Fergus really was. He argued as he acted as he fought, dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee, from Nietzsche to Solon and back to the dangerous edges of Douglas Credit. By the time you had assembled your rebuttal he had moved on elsewhere. Žižek before we even heard of Žižek, Celine said on the tape playing on the floor a thousand kilometres away, twenty-five years later. It was perfect casting: the fucked-up energy, the rawness of his speech. He was mad in bed, wide and barrel-chested and covered with fine curling hair like a beast and his penis had a distinct upward curve to it as you might imagine on a satyr or a pig.
Celine had always been inflammable, easily intoxicated by her burning bridges. She wasn’t nice, she knew, but how do you compare that to leaving your wife’s name off the title deed?
Based on all available evidence, Sandy had cheated her. Fergus had wanted her, had flattered her, had listened to every single word she said. She knew what he was doing, as she always knew when men did that nodding thing. She was not at all surprised that when he finally had her in Moggs Creek he never agreed with her again. She had not come for conversation anyway. Once he had fucked her she could not get away with anything, and she was in the mood for that as well. It was dangerous. You could not bluff him. There was no dare he would refuse. Celine would have to go out further, beyond the Moggs Creek surf, if she was to be with Fergus, which was what she had done for all those weeks.
Then they drank whisky and he told her she was a yuppie bitch.
She was high as a kite, reckless, off the map. She told him he was feral. She said some other things, quite personal.
And the bastard nearly killed her for it.
The rain stopped at Werribee and she drove back into Melbourne along Dynon Road where her mother had learned to dodge the Yankee trucks, up past the hospital where she was born, and into Carlton. She blew her nose and heard the air whistling out her broken ear. She came home incorrectly labelled with disgrace. She parked, badly, at Macarthur Place. She was no more in the wrong than he was.
It’s her, Gaby cried, but stayed where she was, halfway down the stairs.
Celine heard the stairs creak and then saw her husband’s legs and then his face peering down from the upper floor. He did not speak.
She noticed all her clothes were gone. She did not connect this absence with the bright black bags.
She closed the door quietly and sat on the sofa as if it were the middle of a set. The audience knew exactly who she was.
OK, she said, and put her hands up in surrender.
How stupid.
Gaby retreated up the stairs as Sando descended and Celine knew, as they passed each other, that an upsetting intimacy had developed in her absence. As he emerged from the shadow Sando was older, with two stark new creases from his nose to the corners of his beautiful mouth. So he had suffered too. She thought it was fifty-fifty and he would join her on the sofa, but he stood over her, towered above her, with an expression she took to be a sneer. Then, as he shook his head, the light caught an actual teardrop. She was appalled then pleased. She moved to one side and he surrendered. She gave him a tissue and held his hand. It was not yet clear to her what she had done.
COCKATOOS WERE RIPPING the bark off the angophora while the oily-haired fugitive inserted four new Duracell batteries and played a cassette he had labelled “Celine 4.” His eyes were dark and hollowed and he stared at the machine with his head cocked.
Is this what got you boys so hot? she said.
Pause. Rewind. Sip. Play.
Is this what got you boys so hot? That I would blow myself up? That I would do anything? You knew I had fired my mother. That must have looked like something but when Doris did not come chasing after me, when I ended up sleeping in Sando’s car, I cried myself to sleep each night.
Fast forward.
You saw me in my mother’s house, back in Springvale, ripping photographs from frames.
The fugitive had never personally witnessed such a thing.
Fast forward.
It was the same in the stupid business with Fergus, she told the tape recorder. Sando must have heard my ruptured ear whistling but no-one saw my hurt. No-one knew how I wanted to be forgiven.
A spy would never see the beauty speaking to the journalist, but he might hear grief, a certain flatness of affect, or even wonder why so many of us talk like that.
So I came back from Moggs Creek, she said, and guess what? I did not exist. Gaby vanished me. Sando wrote his bloody letters or read about saintly Samoans exiled in vile materialistic Australia. He was steely. It is not how people talk about him but he could be totally unbending. And of course, she said, he would not make love to me. He could be very cruel.
Pause.
Play.
I had thought we shared the blame fifty-fifty but now I just wanted him to love me like before. He had lied
and cheated with real estate and I was the only one who said sorry. I was weak. I traipsed after him to Coburg and waited to be forgiven. I did penance. I ripped up the lino and killed the slaters and the cockroaches and kalsomined everything as was required. Of course the whitewash only served to emphasise the jagged shadow where the floorboards failed to meet the walls. As everyone said, the house had good bones: large square rooms and massive sash windows and once the filth was scrubbed off or covered up, it should have felt wonderful. Yet even when the morning sun washed across the hallway floor, it was clear that something awful had happened there. This was not “the electorate.” It was a site of trauma, a place with unsafe floors, where the fabric of society had been ripped and torn. This was where the saintly Sando brought his wife and child, to get away from “your Carlton tribe.” And although he and Gaby had got their way, I know they felt what I did. My dialectical materialist was made angry by talk of ghosts, and he turned sarcastic when I suggested that rooms might contain echoes of their past. Just the same: the hair rose on his arms. He had me buy him curtains and kept them drawn at dark. The junkies parked their car in the lane, so close to the kitchen window that you could see the flare of the match against the silver foil.
I should have abandoned them. I stayed.
Sando was shitty with me because I made so little money, but I was exactly the creature he had wished me to be. I had been going to teach school just like he did, but he wanted me to be an actress. It made him amorous to sit in the theatre and see me on the stage. Naturally I made no money—what did he expect? But after Moggs Creek I agreed to do those soup commercials and that got me kicked out of the Collective.
Gaby was so triumphant I had lost Macarthur Place. She became an instant Coburg girl with made-up vowels. She set off each day up the narrow footpath, lumping her backpack to Bell Street High School, up past the stripped car, the broken syringe, the clinker-brick St. Bernard’s with its depressing ’50s bronze statue of the saint. Whatever happened to her each day I was not allowed to know. She refused to see anything was less than perfect. She insisted Bell Street High was “really, actually, academically the best school I could be in” i.e. she was siding with her father.