Elsewhere in Success

by Iris Lavell

  ‘Thanks Harry,’ she says. ‘It was thoughtful of you.’

  When he was in one of his final years of high school, Tom had to do a still life. He procrastinated, saying that everything involving fruit, flowers and fabric had already been done, but Louisa insisted he make a start, telling him that even the mundane could be made interesting. Wasn’t that the whole point of the exercise? To escape her insistence, he rode his bike away to see what he could find, and stopped at a roadside memorial where a boy had crashed into a tree. Someone had been there recently, so Tom picked up the flowers they’d left. It was a bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums and purple statice.

  ‘Happy Mother’s Day,’ he joked when he got home with them hanging, windswept and wilting, on his handlebars.

  ‘Why thank you, dear, they’re lovely,’ she said, joining him in the joke. When he told her what the joke was, she went cold.

  ‘Take them back.’ Her voice came out in a whisper, and he drew back. She modified her tone, pleading with him. ‘Those flowers are for someone’s loved one. You can’t do things to add to their pain like that. You can’t, Tom.’

  He began to giggle, struggling for control, but he’d already lost it. She caught his laughter at her own stupidity and her self-righteous front dissolved before him. She was naive. She didn’t know how teenage boys thought or felt. They were deep and mysterious. They were incredibly superficial. Who was this child of hers? She half laughed with him, even as she scolded. He stopped laughing then. He didn’t want connection. He wanted separation.

  ‘They’re for my still life,’ he said. ‘I have to do a still life, so I’m going to do something kind of dead, get it?’

  ‘You can’t keep them. Come on, we’re taking them back.’

  She made him get into the car and drove him to the memorial where she replaced the flowers, smoothing them down as best she could. She made him bow his head and apologise to the spirit of the boy before they went to the nearby roadside flower-seller from whom the flowers had probably been bought. She chose a similar bunch for her son.

  ‘It’s not the same,’ he said. ‘I preferred the look of the others. They were falling apart. That’s the whole point, Mother.’ His voice was querulous with frustration and defeat. ‘It’s not as if he’d care. He’s dead.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not all about him,’ she’d said harshly.

  ‘It’s his life. No, it’s his death.’

  ‘Not really, it isn’t. Wait a couple of days, Tom. Leave the flowers outside. You’ll get the effect you want.’ He said he couldn’t wait, the assignment was due.

  Later he took the bunch outside and smashed it against a steel down-post on the carport until he got the effect he wanted. Each time he hit it against the post he expelled a small sound, a little cry.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said when he came in. ‘Now I have something more interesting. If I had the dude to put with them, it would be perfect.’

  She was preparing dinner when he came to her side and hugged her. He was already a head taller than she was, growing into a man.

  ‘I love you, Mum.’ That was the last time she can remember him saying it.

  ‘I love you too. Go and wash your hands.’

  Harry’s not sure about Louisa’s response to his gift of flowers. Some things he just doesn’t get. He still misses things. They seem trivial, but they turn out to be important. Like all the little things that must have led up to the incident with Yasamine.

  One day he found her sobbing in the bathroom.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked impatiently.

  ‘Nothing.’ Still crying.

  ‘Shit, Yasamine!’ he said. ‘It’s obviously not nothing. You complain that I never talk to you and now when I show a bit of concern you shut me out. What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing!’ She tried to push him hard out of the bathroom and he reacted automatically. He pushed back and she fell and hit her head on the ceramic basin as she went down. Blood everywhere.

  It’s what happens with head wounds. They always look a lot worse than they are. At least her sobbing had stopped, out of surprise, he supposed, or disbelief. He’d never done anything like that before. As history showed, he never would again. He grabbed a towel to stop the bleeding but as he came towards her she held up her arms to protect herself.

  ‘Please don’t hurt me, Harry,’ she whimpered.

  He was shocked by those words, but more by the way she held up her arms, covering her head in some sort of instinctual protective action. Her action had set off a flash of his father’s face, red, shouting obscenities, the back of his thick hand sweeping down. The picture in his mind was from one of the many times he’d tried to stop the old man from getting to his mother, offering himself up in her place. He must have been a skinny little kid when he started doing that, and then went on doing it all through primary school.

  Now with Yasamine he just stands there, a towel dangling from his hand and his mind stopped in its tracks. He is frozen to the spot, with a sickeningly familiar weakness spreading through his body.

  ‘What?’ he says to her. He can hardly get the word out. It comes out as a sort of whisper. ‘What did you say?’ It’s a question, not a threat.

  ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Please, Harry. I can’t help it.’ She speaks with difficulty, her words tumbling out, one or two at a time, between gulps of air. ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t. Yas, I wouldn’t hurt you. I didn’t mean to – I’m sorry.’ He stretches out his arm and hands her the towel. He notices his hand shaking. He feels like crap. ‘Here, your head is bleeding.’ She takes the towel.

  Looking back now, that was a turning point. Or the turning point might have been when he left her crouched there on the bathroom floor, walking out, closing the door behind him, closing all the doors behind him. He took the car, squealed the tyres, drove around the block twice, three times, came back. As he walked in, she had just hung up the phone. The towel was wrapped around her head like a turban and some of the blood had seeped through, exaggerated by the whiteness of the towel.

  ‘Who was that?’ he asked, but she ignored him, twisted away and busied herself in the kitchen. Then Bella started crying from her bedroom.

  ‘The baby’s woken up,’ she said sharply. ‘Can you get her?’ It was the old Yasamine, strong, confident and slightly sarcastic. ‘And when you’ve done that,’ she continued, ‘you can clean up that bloody mess you left in the bathroom.’

  It’s been years since she could bring herself to watch the video. The quality of the film is grainy and the colours aren’t quite right. It’s strange, Louisa thinks, to see herself as another person. Nothing of this young woman remains. It is as if she has been taken over by another soul, another body, and yet there are sense memories being stirred as she watches this person who is nominally herself.

  This Louisa, in her crocheted wedding dress, is actually beautiful, no more than fifty kilograms, young, smiling and uncertain. She wears a circle of flowers on her head, and her hair is long and shining. Victor is disturbingly young too, younger than she ever thought he had been, handsome, and strangely nervous. There is vulnerability about him as he awkwardly guides her around the room in the bridal waltz. The strains of music are barely audible, but she remembers his unremarkable choice: ‘The Last Waltz’. She had nodded agreement, as she continued to do throughout their marriage. And yet there was hope present on that day, or if there wasn’t, a lie had been captured on film.

  Louisa rewinds to the speeches. Victor is the first to stand.

  ‘On behalf of my wife and myself,’ he says. Everyone applauds and there are some wolf-whistles from a group of his university friends. ‘I would like to thank everyone for witnessing this auspicious occasion. Ain’t she a beauty?’ he says, raising his glass in Louisa’s direction. ‘But seriously, ladies and gentlemen, a marriage is no small undertaking. A marriage is forever, an unbreakable commitment buried in an institution that has stood the test of time. But then, who wants to l
ive in an institution?’ There is general laughter. The camera pans to Louisa. Her smile is present, if a little tight. ‘I jest,’ says Victor. ‘You’re stuck with me, girlie,’ he says, and people laugh. ‘I’d also like to thank the folks, Terry and Margaret, for taking me into their family so warmly.’ His voice falters on the last word. It seems to Louisa that he’s not so certain. ‘Especially as my own couldn’t be here today. As expected.’ He raises his glass. ‘Margaret and Terry,’ he says.

  It’s like watching people who have already passed away. Some of them have. She switches over to the television. The announcer forecasts unsettled weather. There’s a heatwave on the way.

  Instead of avoiding the heat, Louisa enters into it, walking through the house to the backyard as if she is pushing her body through silt. She sinks into the synthetic cushions on the garden swing and her eyes fall on the rosemary bush, her mind as close to blank as it can get. There is no sun. The day is softly lit and the colours seem to be glowing with some sort of radioactive light. It would be easy to paint on a day like this because the light and the heat make everything seem strange, creating clearer vision, resisting interpretation. Today the rosemary bush is beautiful with muted grey and blue blocks of colour that could be mixed on a palate, placed on paper in rough form, and hung on a wall.

  The leaves on the big yellow rosebush hang limply. As her eyes focus, Louisa discovers that there is a flower there. One deep yellow blossom appears before her eyes. At first the rest of the bush seems devoid of new life, but the longer Louisa looks the more she sees. Buds appear on the bush; little yellow light bulbs switch on in her brain. Her body is so heavy that it is hard to move. She doesn’t want to move. Her mind doesn’t seem able to take control.

  Yesterday Harry said he saw a wasp taking a drink from the birdbath. It stretched its slender body down to the surface of the water and took a long drink. But today absence becomes the focus of attention. Everything is under shelter, hiding. Only mad dogs and Louisa go out in the mid-morning heat. The dog stays briefly and then goes back inside. Louisa still can’t bring herself to move. Her eyes fall on Buddha. His eyes are half closed. Everything happens around him in imperceptibly slow motion. His thoughts travel at the speed of light. He sees the future. He sees right through.

  Later that day Louisa will drive past a roadside memorial that has been neglected for some time. A small group will be placing flowers, one bent over, one standing. Two will be kneeling. An old white sedan will be parked further up the road. An anniversary.

  She walks in and tells Harry about what she saw, and how she thought about it all the way home. She says that from now on she’s decided to stop over-thinking everything and take it at face value. She’s simply going to let herself see something but try not to build a story around it. The stories are too sad, and anyway she could be right off the mark. It’s like everything, she tells Harry. It’s not to be taken to heart. She wipes her eyes.

  Harry concedes that Louisa makes a valid point. If people didn’t think so much they wouldn’t spend all their time worrying about what was going to happen, and they’d enjoy life more.

  Harry prefers not to listen to the news just before bed because it keeps him awake. He switches channels but instead of news he gets a documentary. He lies awake thinking of everything, and of how he couldn’t protect his daughter even if she wanted him to. He feels so weak in the face of it all. Louisa is lying awake next to him, staring into the darkness. He can feel her thinking. He can hear her breathing monotonously, in and out. What if he were to put a pillow over her face? What then? He feels uneasy, disturbed by the strange thoughts that emerge and subside in his overactive brain. It’s a terrible thought. Sickening. He thinks of lying in bed alone, the sheet cold beside him, the terrible feeling of being utterly alone. He has been watching too much television, too much violence, too much that’s way over the top.

  Everything is exaggerated these days, super-sized they call it, as if everything isn’t already big enough. He’s just watched a documentary about a super-volcano under Yellowstone Park, which would cause global chaos if it went off. A regular-sized volcano is bad enough. Also he read somewhere that Greenland is becoming green again and that if its glaciers all fall into the sea, sea levels will rise dramatically, killing millions and displacing millions more. What else?

  Now he remembers reading somewhere that men are becoming infertile and could be redundant someday. He could have seen it in a movie.

  He thinks about the polar icecap that is melting, endangering polar bears, and all the currents that regulate the world’s temperature that will cease flowing if too much ice melts into the sea, plunging the earth into another ice age, and the fact that, apparently, it’s just a matter of time before another asteroid hits.

  As if that’s not enough, someone has noticed that once sharks are wiped out, plankton eaters will proliferate and eat all the plankton, which will put even more carbon into the atmosphere. Not that it will matter, because of nuclear proliferation.

  Plus he’s just been given another bloody speeding ticket. How many points is that? Sometimes he wishes he was an animal without all the complications of living as a human. Sometimes he wishes he didn’t know so much.

  Louisa says she wouldn’t mind being an orang-utan. Or a parrot. He’d like to be a pelican, but too many of them get caught up in fishing lines these days. Not that orang-utans are any better off.

  He thinks of food shortages, people dying in cyclones, tsunamis and earthquakes, acts of heroism, corruption, cowardice and procrastination, the way governments prevaricate, the way people in high places keep behaving as if the laws of nature can be negotiated, the way good people try to help, while scammers scam, and fundamentalists see everything in black and white. There are songs on the radio that encourage every man to act for himself, as if he is more important than the rest of the species, as if reason never existed, as if mateship, the diggers and, yes, even chivalry towards women and plain good manners never existed. Old men are bashed in their homes by young men and even girls these days, wanting money that they haven’t earned, for drugs they don’t need. War medals are stolen. Grandmothers are raped.

  Meanwhile he and Louisa keep getting older, less certain, shakier, weaker, like all the other old codgers. Their friends refuse to grow up. Carole puts the whole future of her friendship with Louisa – not to mention his with his old mate Gordon – on the line by having a fling to see if she can still get a man. And what about him, what he’s done to Louisa? What if she finds out, what then? No, nothing happened. Not really. He feels sick, feverish. He tosses and turns.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  On Australia Day Louisa is driving towards the freeway, heading out on her weekly visit to her mother’s. Ahead, a red and white jet hangs motionless, suspended in blue sky. A jeep speeds past her, flying an Australian flag from its antenna, window down, radio blaring some sort of heavy metal music. It is still hot. A section of road in front of her glistens, a haze rising above it and distorting the traffic that has gone before.

  Louisa wonders if she exists. She wonders if she is asleep. She doesn’t know whether she wants to wake up or not. She has created the boundaries to her own world. She knows every nook and cranny. What would be waiting for her if she awoke?

  She winds the window up to allow the air conditioner to work, to block out the outside and to lock herself in. She turns up the opera that she has recently placed in her multi-disc CD player. Madame Butterfly is singing ‘One Fine Day’. She feels her heart fill. Tears prickle her eyes but discipline themselves before they are substantial enough to fall, dry up, draw back. She examines her thoughts. There is nothing there but Madame Butterfly and the knowledge of things to come. There will be disappointment, the disillusion of love diminished to human proportions, rendered fragile; a clinging to the transcendent; loss; finally harakiri. The opera seduces with music and sad stories. Suicide seduces because it seems romantic, feels like a final solution, provides instant gratification, prom
ises an end to suffering. The promised ending hangs in eternity.

  At the beach, Louisa lies on her back on a towel and pretends to sleep beneath her sunglasses as Harry bodysurfs the relentless waves. Louisa is running a commentary inside her head, talking to Lucy. She places the two of them at a kitchen table, as if they are two old friends chatting over coffee. Lucy has just been telling her something about her life – some indiscreet love affair. Then Lucy asks Louisa about the day it happened.

  The trouble, Lucy, is this. When something terrible happens you don’t believe it. Not because you haven’t been warned, and not because you haven’t seen it coming, but when you hear something as terrible as that, you don’t believe it. You immediately decide to think that there must be some kind of mistake. So you hear the news but you dismiss it, as if someone is playing some sort of tasteless joke on you, but never mind: people are ignorant so you’ll forgive them. They can’t hurt you. Life will go on as usual. There is this sort of period where you float along as if nothing has changed and you feel a bit of anxiety as you’re waiting for confirmation of that good news, and you’ll all have a good laugh about it, or obviously not if someone else has suffered misfortune, of course not, but the odds are against it being you. Most people survive to maturity, to old age, don’t they? It’s what you expect. And you’re kind of middle-class, and bad things happen to people who have been unfortunate, people who have had bad starts. They did, my kids: they had a difficult start in life, but I’d made it all right and somehow you don’t think of yourself in that way. So it’s always someone else who has the bad luck. You don’t think this consciously, don’t believe it when you use your reason, but it’s down there somewhere in your view of the world. In my view of the world. So I dismissed it of course. People get mixed up. They fail in their communications all the time. Things get mixed up. Messages and so on, people should be friends but they say the wrong thing and the next you know you are at odds with them. But when I heard the news I said, no, they’ve obviously made a mistake, but it’s okay. People are only human. People make mistakes. They aren’t saying it to hurt you deliberately, so there you go. It’s all very silly really, isn’t it?