by Zoe Morrison
I pumped out the oom-pah-pah bass, the cheery tune; sometimes the accompaniment had little off-beat rejoinders that made everyone smile. When I finished they clapped loudly, I looked up at my mother, climbed onto my father’s knee; he kissed me on the cheek, wetly. Four big faces smiling down on me, they were suns, stars, moons; I orbited around them.
The visitors left and I began working on a piece called ‘Andante’. My mother was sitting beside me. Again, she said, again, and I played it until I got it right. Wrists up, she said, touching them with a flat fingertip. Fingers bent. Then I played it all the way through and my mother stayed silent, there was nothing more to correct. I realised she wasn’t sitting beside me anymore, she had got up and was looking out the window at the rows of orange trees. I kept my hands on the keys until only the tiniest sound was left, then nothing. I lifted my hands, she turned her head. That was very good, she said.
It was a sad piece, and I’m not sure how I knew such sadness then. Was I sad about practising so much instead of playing with other children? Or was it sadness by proxy? Sadness for Mother, preparing to send her only child to the place she herself longed for? Or for Father, who was out on the block, going mad again?
He was up in a tree, feet and hands on branches, counting oranges. Then he was down on the ground, stalking fruit that had already fallen. He was muttering the number of the oranges he had counted in the tree, he was counting the fruit in the pile on the ground; when he added both numbers together he got ninety-three. It was a number so low in relation to what he had hoped for, and expected, that he refused to believe it.
He leapt back into the tree, poked his head in and out of the spiky branches to find more oranges; he scrabbled around in the dirt at its base. He added the two numbers again; ninety-two. He was staggered. He was enraged. A bastard, sneaky orange had disappeared right in front of him. He started to shake, his legs, his arms, he pulled out his shirt, ripped off his hat.
I was lying on the scratchy couch lawn watching all this, covering my mouth with my hands to hide the giggles. In this mood, Father was scary close up but funny from far away.
I saw him eye the fruit on the next tree, consider adding some of those, but then his body countered – that just wouldn’t do. He was Walter Murray, most bountiful orange producer in the district, he was a magician, and he bent over suddenly and stared at the ground. I put my hands over my ears, expecting him to shout, but he just walked further into the block, stumbling a little on the crusty edges of the furrows he and Mother had dug that morning for the irrigation.
He came back later in the truck with sacks of fertiliser. He hauled one out, fast, and ripped into it. With huge shakes he sprayed the stuff all over himself, the trees and the ground beneath them.
My mother was furious. The fertiliser was expensive, the money was from her family, and the money had nearly run out. She scolded him when he came inside, hands on her hips, her voice rising then falling dangerously low.
I was under the table in the playroom and I saw my father rush at her as if he were about to do something terrible. My mother flinched, her shoulders tensed, she turned away. He spun around and banged out the back door.
My mother put her hands in the kitchen sink and stood there without moving for a long time. When the light dropped I went into the kitchen, put a hand to her skirt, pulled at the waist-band, squirmed between her and the edge of the sink, and she took her hands out of the water with the wet still on them and held my back, and we didn’t say a word.
My father became interested in manure. He told me its effectiveness had been scientifically proven, and that chicken manure was best of all. Every day he shovelled the shit out of the chook house into a bucket and sprinkled it around some trees. There were only a few chooks and not nearly enough shit for acres of recalcitrant, under-performing sneaky bastard orange trees. He watched the chooks pecking about, threw them weeds he had pulled, even crusts of bread spread with lard. Once, a cake my mother had baked.
He decided he would accept any sort of shit. Shit from cows, dogs, horses, pigs. He went around the district, sloping up people’s drives, asking for shit, which might have become a running joke except that I think people were a bit scared of my father and the madness that streaked his yellow-white eyes. He didn’t tell them why he needed the shit, but they usually bagged some up and delivered it, because everyone remembered, or said they remembered, what he was like before the war.
He shovelled the shit around the trees and stood watching them like a dog watches a ball someone threw for it weeks ago.
Urine, he decided. It was very fertile-making; there was a chemical in it that made it liquid gold. Every time he needed to pee he strode onto the block, undid his pants and aimed at the base of a tree. When he asked my mother and me to do this she just looked at him. As he peed further down a row his purposeful walk turned into a hurried wiggle. He stood in front of trees trying to squeeze out more; there might have been a dribble. So many trees, so little urine. He went quiet for a while.
Then he started to look sly and walk with a swagger. He kissed my mother on the cheek with great smacks of his lips. He had a secret in his chest that he was proud of. One night I heard the rumble of an unfamiliar truck in the drive. Kneeling at the window I watched my father help a man guide a hose from its side to the irrigation furrows. Something dark chugged out and slopped onto the soil. The trees were still and silent as if reflecting philosophically on what they had been given to drink.
In the morning he didn’t tell my mother that the truck was from the abattoir, carrying blood from the animals they killed and cut up. He only told me. But when she saw the blood on his boots her lips zipped up and she turned away when he tried the smacky-lip kisses again. I went near the trees tentatively, but nothing seemed to change about them, nothing at all.
Not long after this, when he thought no one was looking, my father got the axe out of the shed, walked purposefully past the woodpile and stood at the top of a row of oranges. He considered the tree in front of him. With the blade of the axe he chipped off some of the small twigs and thin branches near the bottom, exposing the trunk. Then he gripped the axe with both hands, made his legs into two sides of a triangle, his mouth into one flat line, drew the axe back and threw the blade hard into the trunk. He wrenched it out, swung it back, plunged it in again. With even, lethal blows he chopped the tree to the ground.
2.
Oxford, October 4th, 2005
After hearing the concert A, I heard scales. I was upstairs in bed. I thought I was dreaming and I rolled over, looked at the window, and the scales pealed on. They were played in every key, up the keyboard chromatically, and they were played perfectly; they were like water poured from a spout.
I shoved back the covers, staggered down the stairs feeling furious for some reason, and stood in front of the piano, staring at it. The keys were still, the strings unstruck; no, this instrument was not playing itself. And the scales were even louder.
I started searching the room, marching around picking up cushions, pushing back the couch, jerking my head up to inspect the cornices of the ceiling; all the while the scales ran on and on, up and up. What was I looking for anyway?
When the scales finished I sat on the couch panting, dizzy, nauseated. The silence extended.
I went to the phone. ‘Hello?’ he said, in a normal voice, then, ‘Hello!’ cross. ‘You again! You, the silent —’ but before he finished I hung up.
3.
Currabin, 1936
My mother planned to send me to boarding school in England. Her great-aunt had offered to pay the fees. My father disagreed; he thought Australia was best, that England was the enemy (among many) and that his daughter should remain at home. They fought about it when they thought I was asleep. They fought about other things, too. Living at Currabin, for example, growing oranges (my mother had never wanted this, she wanted to be in the city; my father detested city work). When my father drank, the fighting was louder. Sometimes I heard crashes and I shut my
eyes tight.
In the days afterwards I would watch them stay as far as they could from one another: my mother in the house, my father in the far reaches of the block fixing a fence. Then my mother was out on the block and my father in the truck. It was as if there were a string pulled tight between them, making a straight line, as if they were at either end of the same axis. When she moved left, he moved right, and so on.
My mother thought education was important and that I wouldn’t get it in the back blocks of New South Wales. The local primary school was bad, the options afterwards worse. The people who lived here were ignorant, uncultured ruffians. I could go to the city, of course, but why board there, she reasoned, when England was far superior? I had answers to this question but said none of them.
Like all the women in the district Mother worked non-stop; it was rare to see her sitting down. She was tired, her hands were cracked. She should have been a musician, but instead her life was this, and she was angry as well as lonely; she wanted better for her only child, her daughter, and she believed better was as far as possible from the citrus block.
She always made time for my piano lessons and was a fierce but excellent teacher. This was the thing she was able to give me to take to England, it was my ticket. Sometimes she taught me from the kitchen when she was cooking the tea. Wrong, she would shout, her hands wet in the colander, rinsing beans. Start again.
My father had not yet worked out the link between piano playing and going to England.
He was sensitive to noise. If I walked down the hall with too much of a thud he shouted; when my mother sneezed he yelled; a door slammed had him airborne; certain foods were banned – those that made too much noise in the mouth, like apples, celery. But he always loved music. Even if my mother had Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, ‘The Pastoral’, playing as loudly as it would go when he came in from the block, he didn’t complain at all.
He cried when he heard decent singing; a good rhythm had him twitching, moving limbs as if it was involuntary. If my mother was about, he would catch her at her waist, put her arm up; they’d face each other and then they were off, circling round the room. Once they did this to Ravel’s ‘Boléro’ and they circled out the door, across the lawn, tango-charged down a row of orange trees, disappeared and came back later brushing dirt from their clothes and leaves and twigs from their hair.
When I turned six my mother got out the big trunk and took it onto the veranda to dust and wash it. Now, Alice, she said, it won’t take a year to pack, but I’m getting it out so one can get used to the idea. I wasn’t sure who she was talking about, but it made me nervous. I started kicking the edge of the veranda, hard. She told me to stop that kicking and brush my hair, which she’d just washed. I did it out by the strawberry patch, watching carefully in case a snake slithered out; they liked it in there. Once, a red-bellied black snake had got into the house and lay motionless under the dining table. My mother fetched the broom and stared at it for a moment, wiping her hands on her skirt. Then she made some strange puffing noises out of her nose, charged at the snake, and it reared and started to slither towards her, and with huge movements up, down, curving motions with her arms, she swept it out the back door. I remember that snake flipping and writhing and swelling, flashing its bright underside, mouth opening, its tongue on fire, as if it were roaring at us, although it made hardly a sound.
By this point I was advanced at the piano. I was learning Bach’s ‘Preludes and Fugues’ and parts of Beethoven’s sonatas.
When the trunk came out my father started listening to my practice. I heard him casting about outside the parlour door, saw his shape flick across it and smelt him – alcohol, sweat, cigarettes, petrol – and that scent of the block: tree, soil, wind, water, sky.
One day I was playing a waltz by Strauss and he erupted into the room and tried to pull me off the stool. My body went rigid; I pulled away, he pulled me back, the stool fell with a bang, I dropped, urine leaked out warm around me on the floor. My mother rushed in. What are you doing? she said loudly, what are you doing? And he looked at her for a second, looked back at me and skulked out.
4.
Oxford, October 5th, 2005
Arpeggios the next day, arpeggios supreme; two hands arched effortlessly over phantom keys, hands like gymnasts, like Olympians. The B flat minor played as easily as the E major, the F sharp major as smoothly as the C; nothing fazed that music, it seemed.
I crept down the stairs hoping to catch them, it, unawares, but when I got down the notes continued even louder, untrammelled.
When the music finished I stood at the window, staring at the place next door. I heard the creak and bang of the pipes of the old house, the tap dripping in the sink. I went down the hall to the kitchen, palming the walls, put my finger beneath the drip, felt the cold water tap my skin.
I filed Clementi. I burnt an enormous volume, extremely heavy (Economics Explained, Volumes 1–11), which smouldered for several hours. Then I went to the phone again. ‘Hello?’ Pause. ‘All right, now you’re starting to piss me off. You’re actually going to have to say —’
I hung up.
5.
Currabin, 1938
I was seven, my leaving day was close. My father had started to drink more, and openly, shamelessly, as if showing us how. No longer were bottles hidden in the crook of the lilly pilly tree, or that place in the chook shed, or that hole in the lawn. He held them himself, slouched against the side door, moaning.
My mother ignored this at first, ignored the fact of him. She just started to get very thin. She still cooked the same meals but she didn’t finish what was on her plate; she fed it to the chooks instead.
I refused to believe I was going anywhere. I could see Father drinking and moaning and plotting. I could see Mother turning to sinew and bone. I could watch them dig the furrows beside the orange trees in the mornings so that the water from the channel from the river could flow in. I could feel the heat and contraction of the land. But I didn’t think I was going anywhere. I didn’t know anywhere else. I just kept playing the piano.
A fortnight or so before I was due to leave, I was sitting at the piano and for the first time in my seven years I did not want to play. Come on, my mother said, hurry up. She had been digging for the irrigation since dawn. I put my hands on the keys but did not press them down. What’s the matter? she said sharply. Stop wasting time. I started a slow scale but I did not finish. Instead, I swivelled around on the stool, looked out of the window beyond the curtains and mesh to the garden, the scratchy lawn, the lone palm tree bent in the corner, the rows of orange trees, the saltbush scrub, the white blue sky, and everything so still, so still, and I saw my mother looking at these things too.
Play, Alice, she said, drawing her eyes from the vista, it’s time to do your practice now, and I turned and faced the instrument, but I didn’t know what to play; it was as if I couldn’t remember any music. Play the ‘Andante’, she said, reading my thoughts. Skip the scales today. Remember that ‘andante’ means at an easy walking pace and that it is graceful and accepting. Remember that when you play one note there will be one after that, and then another, and that you needn’t rush any of them, they will be there, they will come.
I started the ‘Andante’, and for a while I found it difficult to breathe, my stomach was tight, I felt cold and shaky. But I continued to play, and she was right that day; after one note there was indeed another, until the music was done.
That night my father went to the hotel and came back very drunk. I could hear him outside, shouting. He slammed the door, locked it behind him and yelled, Where’s my girls?
I froze in bed. I could hear him blundering around in the dark, trying to work out how to get down the hall to the bedrooms. Then I saw a figure of white: my mother had flown from her bedroom without using her feet, she had me in her arms, her hand close to my mouth. Now, just be silent, she whispered. It seems your father has had a bit too much to drink. Her breath smelt of bad milk or somethi
ng worse. She took my hand, gestured under the bed. Get under there, she said; I looked at her, we’d never done this before. Get under the bed, she hissed, staccato.
Where are you? he shouted, and in her flimsy nightdress, I could see my mother’s breasts, the hardness of the nipples against the white cotton, the hesitation in her step; one hand was scrunching her nightdress, she was thinking about what to do. I quickly obeyed, sliding on my stomach across the floor. I hid my face, I couldn’t bear it; I started playing a fugue in my head. In the end she got under the bed with me, scrabbling across so that I was between her and the wall. She didn’t look at me when we were lying under there together.
By now he had found his way down the hall. Come here at once, he was shouting. He reached my bedroom door, paused, swayed. Alice, he said, won’t you play me a tune? He came towards the bed, stood above it breathing fire, then staggered at the sight of the empty sheets. He ripped at the linen, threw the pillow to the floor, the blanket, got tangled up in it and fell, bang! He was level with us now, my mother was pressing me hard into the wall. He groaned, rubbing his head. Then he got up and raged out of the room, up the hall, and Mother and I uncoiled our bodies.
He broke most of the good furniture in the parlour that night. I could hear the strings of the piano humming in fright. Mother, I said, amid the noise of the cracking, splintering wood, I do hope he won’t touch the piano. Mmm, she said, as if her mind were somewhere else entirely, wondering why a couple of the chooks had stopped laying eggs or pondering what to do about the rampant wisteria escaping the trellis. We ended up falling asleep under there.
At dawn we woke, stiff. My mother listened for a moment, got out from under the bed, straightened her nightdress. She went out the back door, returned holding the axe and walked up the hall into the parlour.