Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  Jack and his mother still don’t have a black American Express card. They don’t have a private plane. They don’t own an island.

  And so, Jack goes up to the beanstalk again. He knocks for a second time at the towering cloud-door.

  The giantess answers again. She seems not to recognize Jack, and it’s true that he’s no longer dressed in the cheap lounge lizard outfit – the tight pants and synthetic shirt he boosted at the mall. He’s all Marc Jacobs now. He has a shockingly expensive haircut.

  But still. Does the giantess really believe a different, better-dressed boy has appeared at her door, one with the same sly grin and the same dark-gold hair, however improved the cut?

  There is, after all, the well-known inclination to continue to sabotage our marriages, without ever leaving them. And there’s this, too. There’s the appeal of the young thief who robs you, and climbs back down off your cloud. It’s possible to love that boy, in a wistful and hopeless way. It’s possible to love his greed and narcissism, to grant him that which is beyond your own capacities: heedlessness, cockiness, a self-devotion so pure it borders on the divine.

  The scenario plays itself out again. This time, when the fifty-foot-tall dim-witted thug Fi fi fo fums, early and unexpected, from the hallway, the giantess hides Jack in the oven.

  We don’t need advanced degrees to understand something about her habit of flirtation with eating Jack.

  The second exchange between giant and giantess – the one about how he smells the blood of an Englishman, and she assures him it’s just the bullock she’s fixed for lunch – is too absurd even for farce.

  Let’s imagine an unconscious collusion between husband and wife, then. He knows something’s up. He knows she’s hiding something, or someone. Let’s imagine he prefers a wife who’s capable of deceit. A wife who can manage something more interesting than drudgery and peevish, drowsy fidelity.

  This time, after polishing off the bullock, the giant demands to be shown the hen that lays the golden eggs. And, a moment later, there she is: a prizewinning pullet, as regal and self-important as it’s possible for a chicken to be. She stands before the giant, her claw-tipped, bluish feet firmly planted on the tabletop, and, with a low cackle of triumph, lays another golden egg.

  Which the giant picks up and examines. It’s the daily egg. They never vary. The giant, however, maintains his attachment to the revisiting of his own bounty, as he does to his postprandial snooze, face down on the tabletop, wheezing out blasts of bullock-reeking breath, emitting a lake of drool.

  Again, Jack emerges (this time from the oven), and makes off with the hen. Again, the giantess watches him steal her husband’s joy and fortune. Again, she adores the meanness of Jack, a small-time crook dressed now in two-hundred-dollar jeans. She envies him his rapaciousness, his insatiability. She who has let herself go, who prepares the meals and does the dishes and wanders, with no particular purpose, from room to room. She who finds herself strangely glad to be in the presence of someone avaricious and heartless and uncaring.

  Are we surprised to learn that, a year or so later, Jack goes up the beanstalk one more time?

  By now, there’s nothing left for him and his mother to buy. They’ve got the car and driver, they’ve got the private plane, they own that small, otherwise-uninhabited island in the Lesser Antilles, where they’ve built a house that’s staffed year-round, in anticipation of their single annual visit.

  We always want more, though. Some of us want more than others, it’s true, but we always want more of . . . something. More love, more youth, more . . .

  On his third visit, Jack decides not to press his luck with the giantess. This time, he sneaks in through the back.

  He finds the giant and giantess unaltered, though it would seem they’ve had to cut back, having lost their gold and their magic hen. The castle has dissolved a bit – sky knifes in through gaps in the cloud-walls. The daily lunch of an entire animal runs more along the lines of an antelope or an ibex, sinewy and dark-tasting, no longer the fattened, farm-tender ox or bullock of their salad days.

  Still, habits resist change. The giant devours his creature, spits out horns and hooves, and demands his last remaining treasure: a magic harp.

  The harp is a prize of a different order entirely. Who knows about its market value? It’s nothing so simple as gold coins or golden eggs. It too is made of gold but it’s not prosaic in the way of actual currency.

  It’s a harp like any harp – strings, knee, neck, tuning pins – but its head is the head of a woman, slightly smaller than an apple, more stern than beautiful; more Athena than Botticelli Venus. And it can play itself.

  The giant commands the harp to play. The harp obliges. It plays a tune unknown on the earth below; a melody that emanates from clouds and stars, a song of celestial movements, the music of the spheres, that which composers like Bach and Chopin came close to approximating but which, being ethereal, cannot be produced by instruments made of brass or wood, cannot be summoned by human breath or fingering.

  The harp plays the giant into his nap. That gargantuan head makes its thudding daily contact with the tabletop.

  What must the giantess think, when Jack creeps in and grabs the harp? Again? You’re kidding? You actually want the very last of our treasures?

  Is she appalled, or relieved, or both? Does she experience some ecstasy of total loss? Or has she had enough? Is she going to put an end, at last, to Jack’s voracity?

  We’ll never know. Because it’s the harp, not the giantess, who finally protests. As Jack makes for the door, the harp calls out, ‘Master, help me, I’m being stolen.’

  The giant wakes, looks around uncertainly. He’s been dreaming. Can this be his life, his kitchen, his haggard and grudging wife?

  By the time he’s up and after Jack, Jack has already traversed the cloud-field and reached the top of the beanstalk, holding firm to the harp as the harp cries out for rescue.

  It’s a race down the beanstalk. Jack is hampered by his grip on the harp – he can only climb one-handed – but the giant has far more trouble than Jack in negotiating the stalk itself, which, for the giant, is thin and unsteady, like the rope he was forced to climb in gym class when he was a weepy, lonely boy.

  As Jack nears the ground, he calls to his mother to bring him an axe. He’s lucky – she’s semi-sober today. She rushes out with an axe. Jack chops the beanstalk down, while the giant is still as high as a hawk circling for rabbits.

  The beanstalk falls like a redwood. The giant hits the earth so hard his body crashes through the topsoil, imbeds itself ten feet deep, leaves a giant-shaped chasm in the middle of a cornfield.

  It’s a mercy, of sorts. What, after all, did the giant have left, with his gold and his hen and his harp all gone?

  Jack has had the giant-hole filled in, right over the giant’s body, and in a rare act of piety he’s ordered a grove of lilac bushes planted over the giant’s resting-place. If you were to look down at the lilac grove from above, you’d see that it’s shaped like an enormous man, arms and legs akimbo; a man frozen in an attitude of oddly voluptuous surrender.

  Jack and his mother prosper. Jack, in his rare moments of self-questioning, remembers what the mist-girl told him, years earlier. The giant committed a crime. Jack has, since infancy, been entitled to everything the giant owned. This salves the stripling conscience that’s been growing feebly within Jack as he’s gotten older.

  Jack’s mother has started collecting handbags (she especially prizes her limited-edition Murakami Cherry Blossom by Louis Vuitton), and meeting her girlfriends for lunches that can go on until four or five p.m. Jack sometimes acquires girls and boys in neighbouring towns, sometimes rents them, but always arranges for them to arrive late at night, in secret. Jack is not, as we know, the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but he’s canny enough to understand that only his mother will uncritically adore him forever; that if one of the girls or boys were suffered to stay, the fits of mysterious frustration, the critiques
, would set in soon enough.

  The hen, who cares only for the eggs she produces, lays a gold one every day, and lives contentedly in her concrete coop with her twenty-four-hour guard, Jack’s attempt at exterminating all the local foxes having proven futile.

  Only the harp is restive and sorrowful. Only the harp looks yearningly out through the window of the room in which it resides, a room that affords it a view of the lilac grove planted over the giant’s imbedded body. The harp, long mute, dreams of the time when it lived on a cloud and played music too beautiful for anyone but the giant to hear.

  (2015)

  ★

  Les Murray, often called the ‘Bush Bard’, is widely recognized as Australia’s greatest living poet. Murray’s poetry is dexterous, down-to-earth and laconic: in these ways, his ballads sing a quintessentially Australian ‘dirt music’.

  Murray has framed his poem ‘The Sleepout’ in particularly personal terms, by explaining his own origins: ‘I come from a verandah on a dairy farm between Foster and Gloucester on the north coast of New South Wales – forest and farming country. People up there still, to some extent, sleep in verandah rooms, known as sleepouts.’

  However homespun Murray’s introduction, ‘The Sleepout’ is far from simple. It conjures the timelessness of childhood dreams, with all its tactile minutiae and sensual specificity (‘splinters picked lint off warm linen’), before spinning out into the encroaching outback night (‘the never-fenced country’), crescendoing into a transcendent rhapsody, immutable and irresistible.

  The Sleepout

  by Les Murray

  Childhood sleeps in a verandah room

  in an iron bed close to the wall

  where the winter over the railing

  swelled the blind on its timber boom

  and splinters picked lint off warm linen

  and the stars were out over the hill;

  then one wall of the room was forest

  and all things in there were to come.

  Breathings climbed up on the verandah

  when dark cattle rubbed at the corner

  and sometimes dim towering rain stood

  for forest, and the dry cave hunched woollen.

  Inside the forest was lamplit

  along tracks to a starry creek bed

  and beyond lay the never-fenced country,

  its full billabongs all surrounded

  by animals and birds, in loud crustings,

  and something kept leaping up amongst them.

  And out there, to kindle whenever

  dark found it, hung the daylight moon.

  (1987)

  ★

  This next story, which was at one point entitled ‘I Dropped Off’, depicts a coming of age amid an English pastoral.

  A middle-aged woman drifts off (adult energies do trough markedly in the mid-afternoon and so short cat naps (of 10–30 minutes) are advisable, as the brain’s alertness can thereby be renewed for between two and three hours afterwards).

  Our nearby narrator – then a child – is, in contrast, abuzz with stories, and all the formative hopes and fears that they conjure. Soon her musings take flight, like butterflies. The girl’s imaginings give way to vivid daydream. Images cascade through her mind, and our own as reader, charting a dreamscape of internalized wanderings . . .

  The pair’s semi-conscious states eventually comingle and commune somehow, despite the age gap. When the grown-up awakes, she tells the child – who has been neither seen nor heard – that ‘only young people should be seen asleep’.

  True enough. Although, some might say, we are all children when we sleep.

  The Idea of Age

  by Elizabeth Taylor

  When I was a child, people’s ages did not matter; but age mattered. Against the serious idea of age I did not match the grown-ups I knew – who had all an ageless quality – though time unspun itself from year to year. Christmases lay far apart from one another, birthdays even farther; but that time was running on was shown in many ways. I ‘shot out’ of my frocks, as my mother put it. By the time that I was ten, I had begun to discard things from my heart and to fasten my attention on certain people whose personalities affected me in a heady and delicious way.

  Though the years drew me upwards at a great pace, as if they were full of a hurried, growing warmth, the seasons still held. Summers netted me in bliss, endlessly. Winter did not promise spring. But when the spring came, I felt that it was there for ever. I had no dread that a few days would filch it from me, and in fact a few days were much when every day was endless.

  In the summer holidays, when we went to the country, the spell of the long August days were coloured, intensified, by the fascinations of Mrs Vivaldi. My first thought when we arrived at the guest-house in Buckinghamshire was to look for some sign of her arrival – a garden hat hanging in the porch, or books from Mudie’s. She came there, she made it clear, to rusticate (a word she herself used, which put a little flushed constraint upon the ladies who kept the guest-house, who felt it to be derogatory); she came to rest from the demands of London; and she did seem to be always very tired.

  I remember so many of the clothes she wore, for they seemed to me unusual and beautiful. A large hat of coarse hessian sacking was surprisingly lined under the brim with gold lamé, which threw a light over her pale face. In the evenings, panels heavy with steel-bead embroidery swung away from her as she walked. She was not content to appeal only to one’s sight, with her floating scarves, her fringes and tassels, but made claims upon the other senses, with scents of carnations and jasmine, with the rustling of moiré petticoats and the more solid sound of heavy amber and ivory bracelets sliding together on her wrists. Once, when we were sitting in the garden on a still afternoon, she narrowed her hand and wriggled it out of the bracelets and tried them on me. They were warm and heavy, alive like flesh. I felt this to be one of the situations I would enjoy in retrospect but find unendurable at the time. Embarrassed, inadequate, I turned the bracelets on my arm; but she had closed her eyes in the sun.

  I realize now that she was not very young. Her pretty ash-blond hair had begun to have less blond, more ash; her powdered-over face was lined. Then I did not think of her as being any age. I drifted after her about house and garden, beset by her magic, endeavouring to make my mark on her.

  One evening in the drawing-room she recited, for the guests, the Balcony Scene from Romeo and Juliet – all three parts – sitting on the end of the sofa, with her pearls laced through her fingers, her bronze shoes with pointed toes neatly together. Another evening, in that same room, she turned on the wireless and fixed the headphones over my ears (pieces of sponge lessened the pressure), and very far off, through a tinkling, scuffling, crackling atmosphere, I heard Edith Sitwell reciting through a megaphone. Mrs Vivaldi impressed me with the historical nature of the occasion. She made historical occasions seem very rare and to be fastened on to. Since then, life has been one historical occasion after another, but I remember that scene clearly and the lamplight in the room with all the beautiful china. The two ladies who kept the guest-house had come down in the world and brought cupboards full of Crown Derby with them. The wireless-set, with its coils and wires, was on a mosaic-topped table that, one day, my brother stumbled against and broke. It disintegrated almost into powder, and my mother wept. Mrs Vivaldi walked with her in the garden. I saw them going under the rose-arches – the fair head and the dark – both very tall. I thought they looked like ladies in a book by Miss Braddon.

  One afternoon I was alone in the drawing-room when Mrs Vivaldi came in from the garden with a basketful of sweet-peas. As if the heat were suddenly too much for her, she sat down quite upright, in a chair, with the basket beside her, and closed her eyes.

  The room was cool and shadowy, with blinds half-drawn to spare the threadbare carpet. The house seemed like a hollow shell; its subfusc life had flowed out into the garden, to the croquet lawn, to the shade of the mulberry tree, where elderly shapes sagged in deck c
hairs, half-covered with newspapers.

  I knew that Mrs Vivaldi had not seen me. I was reading, sitting in my ungainly way on the floor, with my body slewed round so that my elbows and my book rested on the seat of a chair. Down there among the legs of furniture, I seemed only part of the overcrowded room. As I read, I ate sweets out of a rather grubby paper bag. Nothing could, I felt, have been more peaceful than that afternoon. The clock ticked, sweets dissolved in my cheek. The scent of the flowers Mrs Vivaldi had brought in began to mix with the clove smell of pinks outside. From the lawn came only an occasional grim word or two – the word ‘partner’ most of all, in tones of exhortation or apology – and the solid sound of the mallet on the ball. The last smells of luncheon had faded, and the last distant clatter of washing-up. Alone in the room with Mrs Vivaldi, I enjoyed the drowsy afternoon with every sense and also with peaceful feelings of devotion. I liked to be there while she slept. I had her presence without needing to make her love me, which was tiring.

  Her presence must have been enough, for I remember that I sat with my back to her and only once or twice turned to glance in her direction. My book was about a large family of motherless children. I did not grudge children in books their mothers, but I did not want them to run the risk, which haunted me, of losing them. It was safer if their mother had already gone before the book began, and the wound healed, and I always tried to choose stories in which this had happened.

  From time to time I glanced a little beyond the book and fell into reverie. I tried to imagine my own mother, who had gone out walking that afternoon, alone in the cherry orchard that ran down from hilltop to valley. Her restlessness often sent her off on long walks, too long for me to enjoy. I always lagged behind, thinking of my book, of the large, motherless family. In the cherry orchard it would be hot and scented, with bees scrambling into flowers, and faded-blue butterflies all over the chicory and heliotrope. But I found that I could not imagine her walking there alone; it seemed an incomplete picture that did not contain me. The reality was in this room, with its half-drawn blinds, its large gros-point picture of a cavalier saying good-bye to his lady. (Behind him, a soldier said good-bye in a less affecting way to a servant.) The plush-covered chairs, the Sèvres urns were so familiar to me, so present, as never to fade. It was one of those stamped scenes, heeled down onto my experience, which cannot link up with others, or move forward, or change. Like a dream, it was separate, inviolable, and could be preserved. Then I suddenly thought that I should not have let my mother go out alone. It was a revolutionary thought, suggesting that children have some protection to offer to grown-ups. I did not know from what I should have protected her; perhaps just from her lonely walk that hot afternoon. I felt an unwelcome stir of pity. Until now I had thought that being adult put one beyond the slur of being pitiable.