by Sue Woolfe
My skin, I say and I blush again in case the girl suspects that the lipstick needs to go with what Nan would call my birthday suit.
Find your anger, they said.
They’d be pleased to know that as I go in the office doors, I get angry. I’ll tell him off, I won’t raise my voice, I’ll speak as if I have practised manners from an expensive boarding school.
Who do you think you are? I’ll say.
What a bastard, I’ll say.
You are a shit, I’ll say.
I see his chair the moment I enter the office. His chair stands out, as it never has before. His chair is empty.
By mid-morning, I know that he’s not going to come in today. By mid-afternoon, I plead to go home early, claiming I’ve got a chill. It’s true, my heart is chilled.
I hope you’re not going down with this flu, Maria says when we meet in the tea room. We won’t get these programs to air. I’m afraid you’ll have to stay till the work’s done.
It’s only then that I notice what’s-his-name is also absent.
Must be the rain, I say.
We’ll warm you up, she says. Someone’s sure to have something warm. She rummages in everyone’s drawers. If she went to my drawer, she’d discover the inks for the poet I used to love.
She holds aloft someone’s big thick cardigan. She brings it over, and bundles me into its warmth.
No excuses now, she says.
For a moment I feel like telling her, but what is there to tell? I steal a look at her face, laughter around her eyes, grief around her mouth.
I work a double shift, and Maria allows me a work taxi home.
Thanks for helping out, she says. She leans towards me and my heart thumps. But all she does is confide:
Why don’t you grab some woollies from the shops before your shift begins tomorrow? Thick woolly underwear. I depend on it myself. You can still look glamorous on top.
I laugh, almost in tears.
I get out of the taxi at the shops. At the front of the vegetable shop, there’s a big display of mushrooms, large, palely topped but dark and secret underneath. And I’m dizzy with memory, the cold morning I’d disobeyed Nan and walked to school, the bumps that had landed overnight in the neighbour’s paddock and surely were mushrooms, and I scrambled through Snakey’s barbed wire fence with spikes that could scrape out my brains. If you’d been there, you would’ve held out the barbed wire in a diamond until I was safely through and running.
I’m through and I’m running towards them and I smell them before I get to them, the sweet armpit smell of mushrooms, I’m plucking them out between the wet blades of green grass, that one’s poisonous, that one’s all right, not that one, yes that one.
And then, the bang on my skull and I’m on my face in the spiky grass and they’re holding me down and the pain and the pain and the pain and then, The Ceasing.8
Today’s list
Ways to love myself
Leftovers in the fridge promising there’ll be tomorrow.
Feeling the towels on the washing line, still damp in parts, but in a few hours, if the sun stays, they’ll be dry.
An empty washing basket thrown on my carpet.
The fat bulge of my teapot around the spout.
Folded hen-coloured jumpers plain purl plain purl folded in a drawer – the fat neat piles like little homes.
Making lists.
I’m proud so proud of my list.
Day six of the rains:
Full house today, Maria says cheerily as I enter the office.
Get yourself a nice warm cuppa first.
I spot Simon immediately above everyone’s bent heads as I come out of the tea room: I’m ready to shout at him you bastard you shit. I haven’t Ceased, I’m a list-maker and I’m alive – but he’s standing at Sarah’s cubicle.
I don’t know how to think – what will I say?
Nothing of course.
I always say nothing.
I Cease.
I cast my eyes down, pretend absorption with walking carefully holding a cup of tea, with not spilling my tea. I’m a person who does not spill tea. I walk past him. He’s still at Sarah’s cubicle.
I’ve nearly passed him.
I glance into Sarah’s cubicle, I don’t know why – the streaming green blaze of thoughts, his thoughts, her thoughts, mine? She’s sitting at her desk, he’s standing close. There’s something unexpected glimmering in the light and shadow of the video that flashes on her monitor. It’s the top roundness of a pale breast. Her breast. She’s unbuttoned her top, she’s exposing herself. She’s exposing her breast to him.
Or he’s unbuttoned it.
Her gaze is on him, enthralled, exhilarated, questioning. His back is to me but I know, oh how well I know that his eyes would’ve climbed like an explorer’s over that glimmering hill, memorising its curvature, telling himself about that breast being proffered to him, about its promises offered him, telling himself it will balloon onto his cupped hands, the same hands that only a matter of hours ago imprinted a crescent moon of fire on my breast and on the lips between my legs. I will know till I die those crescents of heat.
I almost stumble. I don’t stumble.
I should say: Oh, what is there I should say?
I say nothing.
I trudge, I don’t know how long I take to get past them, how long does it take to pass her breast and his body, how many years to cross that huge continent and in all that time, during all that trudging, the breast keeps glimmering and he keeps gazing.
My legs moving one after the other, as if nothing has happened and indeed nothing has. Eventually the corridor of cubicles ends and I’m out into the open space of the editors’ section, then my pretence falls away and I stumble, catching hold of a desk.
A deep voice says:
Are you okay?
Is the voice inside me, or in the room?
I look up. A pale wave of milky tea is flowing towards a pile of papers. It’s what’s-his-name’s desk, Liam – I suddenly remember his name, he’s lifting papers up in a comical way as if a spill of tea is of no concern, and he’s fishing out from his pocket a dirty but large handkerchief, and stemming the tide.
I’m okay, I say.
For the first time ever I look at him. His eyes.
I’m not, actually. Not okay.
I think I say that.
Want me to go and refill your tea? he asks.
It seems the kindest question anyone has ever asked. All I can do is nod.
He gets up, takes my cup. I go around the desk and sink into the warm hollow of his chair. I don’t normally like sitting where someone else’s bottom has warmed, but now I’m in the barn, do you remember the barn, the flanks of the cows, their warmth that enters you on chilly mornings, their dear warmth?9
Liam is heading to the tea room, passing those two, not knowing to look into the cubicle, not knowing to look away. If anything, he seems preoccupied by the grey rain lashing the windows. And suddenly I’m bereft, like a puppy, wanting people to pat me, wanting him to pat me, wanting to be in his warmth.
This is the way to care for yourself. Not karate not kickboxing not yelling. Maybe not even making lists, but finding kindness.
I stand up, I don’t look in the cubicle, I don’t look their way, I head towards kindness.
In the tea room, with the jug already humming, he nods at my arrival, doesn’t probe, looks only at the jug as if its humming is talk enough.
And it is.
The humming stops. He fishes a teabag out of his pocket, two teabags.
My favourite tea, he says glancing at me. Special occasion.
He pours the hot water and we wait for the tea to steep. I lean on the counter, he glances at me, and I know that his glance, despite its rapidity, takes me in, takes in my distress. He’s sophisticated. He comes from a quiet, unassuming people who read weather, birds, animals, people. He wipes his mouth as if to silence himself, he turns his attention to the windows, streaked with rain.
He asks have I noticed the rain has different sounds? I say no.
Apparently you can tell by the sound if it’s falling on gutters, on roofs, on footpaths, on plants, on dirt paths, on the sea. It patters on cement footpaths, it sloshes on guttering, it makes an echoing sound on canvas canopies over doorways and shops, it plops lightly on the gardens on suburban verges, it drops sweetly on the petals of pansies, and thoughtfully as it weighs down the spikes of grass.
Rain’s not just a wall of sound! I say.
I had to stay in bed a lot when I was a kid, he says. It makes you notice things.
He goes over to the cups, takes out the teabags and throws them in two neat arcs into the bin. They don’t even drip.
I dreamed of you last night, he says suddenly. You were in trouble and came to me. But I want to know, he continues – if you’re psychic, and sometimes I am – why don’t you sense when something important is going to happen? Why do we know only the trivial? Or is it trivial? Don’t we know what’s what?
I watch him get the milk from the fridge. He doesn’t ask how much, of course he matches the milky spill on his desk. He’s a peasant like me but there’s a natural grace about him. It’s like an aching absence, that I’m too awkward to have this grace, it’s like a tooth that my tongue has just noticed is missing and must probe again and again. I wonder if it’s too late to learn this grace, and to learn it from him.
We stand watching the rain and sipping our tea. I’m thinking of Nan on her hillside, and how she’d always told me that she’d chosen the hillside. Grandpa had wanted a farm in the valley, but that was in the time of the droughts, and she guessed that one day there’d be floods. Suddenly I realised that she hadn’t been doomed to her life, that she’d chosen it, and she’d been, in her own way, remarkable.
My cup’s empty. I turn to Liam, to thank him. He says:
What are your plans?10
*
1. This is an extract from the personal papers of the highly-honoured author; these papers have been held by the National Library under a caveat that made them unavailable until her recent death and the death of her husband, for reasons that will become apparent in the text. However, less apparent is the identity of P.; to date it has been, as I argue, inadequately, even salaciously considered, without due reference to her juvenilia, published here for the first time.
2. Some scholars have read this, and other such utterances, as a plea to a lover, the supposed P. – but I suggest this is a whimsical reading.
3. Further to my argument on the identity of P.; our subject seems to have known P. even as a child on a remote farm.
4. Not pertaining to the identity of P., but the reader may forgive me for mentioning small matters, for details in research may count for a great deal. Our juvenile author was actually in a café when she wrote this, evidenced by a coffee stain with some flecks of powdered chocolate and a circle of a cup on the right-hand corner. Her writing about her home life only refers to the drinking of tea. This adds veracity to the detail when in a state of shock she makes herself a cup of tea. Whether the state of shock is warranted is another matter.
5. The reference will probably be unfamiliar to most readers but our author flirted with the work of the neuroscientist Colin Martindale.
As an artist she was often asked where her inspiration for her stories came from. Rather than answer with an ecstatic ‘I’m channelling the universe’, and rather than tell the truth – but more of that soon – she liked to put on an imaginary scientist’s white coat and flirted with the work of the neuroscientist Colin Martindale; let me assure those readers that his early papers were plausible but his later work became problematic. In The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change, Martindale argued that the time artistic genius appears in the world is predictable in the same way as one can predict the outcome of a toss of a coin; and he argued, somewhat self-indulgently in my opinion, that this timing could be formulated in the equation (where PC is Primordial content) PC = 2.73 – .37t + .01t 2 – .32PCt – 1 –.36PCt – 2.
No doubt our author saw herself as one of his geniuses who’d been born just at the moment required by the equation. But, ironically and pertinently, in the above book Martindale revealed himself as a believer in the degenerate theory of the artist, along with the great though now sadly overlooked Hans Eysenck; the theory posits that the artist shares with psychotics and felons a weakening of higher, inhibitory brain centres, and therefore a ‘shared proclivity to disinhibition’. Such disinhibition is exhibited in a number of tell-tale traits listed by Eysenck, and it is relevant that the reader have some familiarity with the list, to see its startling relevance to our author:
‘morbid vanity’ – so greedily ambitious was our author that she constantly published ‘her creations’ despite my excellent advice as an editor that she work further on them.
‘a loss of a moral sense’ – the reader will see evidence of this in the extract!
‘isolation’ – to say the author is isolated is speaking the obvious.
‘inability to focus and to differentiate the relevant and irrelevant’ – the extract evidences this.
‘exaggerated verbosity’ – no doubt the reader will heartily agree.
Most in evidence is Eysenck’s listed trait of ‘over-emotionality’, with the author’s absurd over-reaction to what is merely an ill-advised gesture, a hopeful touch in circumstances that were ambiguous. I have often pointed out that female fiction authors should never be tempted to use the first-person narrator; the writing inevitably descends to the hysterical.
This constellation of traits are known to be part of the personality of the felon. More of that in the following pages.
6. I have argued that ‘P.’ was a childhood companion. Our author was by the time of writing this in her twenties but P. is still ‘her better self’ – this would indeed argue for a very long-term admiration.
7. Please note that when she writes to or about ‘Nan’, it’s never ‘my Nan’. So in my considerations about the identity of P., I began to suspect a shared ‘Nan’.
8. It is of interest that if ‘P.’ had been present at the intended mushroom gathering, our author assumes that he or she would’ve helped her through the fence. It seems that ‘P.’ was already absent in her eleventh year.
9. Another reference to an early childhood shared by P.
10. There is one last irony I wish to bring to my reader’s attention, given the ‘degenerative theory’ underpinning Martindale’s work, as explained in the earlier pages in which, as you may remember, the creative disposition is linked to that of the felon. You may remember that our author often speculated aloud about the origin of artistic inspiration. But this, dear reader, was a ruse. While artistic theft is not commonly considered felonious, such was the ambition of our vaunted author that she committed many thefts, often beguiling such as me in apparently innocent conversations but furtively recording them either by a machine concealed in a pocket or in her shrewd memory and afterwards rendering them as if they were her creations. Her ‘work’ is littered with my life: I will try your patience with just one such telling instance. Witness the oft-quoted funeral scene in which the grieving daughter is required to kiss her father’s dead cheek, but instead snatches up his small, shrivelled corpse and runs away with it and has to be pursued by the law across the land. I recounted this and many other experiences from my extraordinary life to her and would have in time penned them myself or at least told them to my admirers – but once she’d written them, I was met with calls that I was the plagiarist. I confess I was lost. What is one, without one’s history? To her works, I have donated my identity. I grieve for it.
But I am a generous scholar. To return to the caveat: amongst the personal papers and the bottles of ink (crimson, turquoise, emerald and purple, I’m sure you remember) was a small, apparently unremarkable paper, worn to tufts along its folds. It proved itself to be an invoice from the North Shore Crematorium for the cremation
of her brother Paul in his infancy and in hers. I contend that Paul was ‘P.’
So my contention is that our author communed to her dead brother Paul all her childhood, and through her youth, but gradually, as she found her voice, she reached out to real, live readers.
To return to the degeneration theory – Eysenck pointed out that withdrawal and isolation are traits of this particular personality type, and in her juvenilia this is clearly apparent, for who but the truly isolated would talk continually to the dead?
And here, I must allow my finer feelings free rein.
Some have unkindly suggested that this, my brief article, is an attempt to bring my name and grievance before her vast public. Far from it; it is this, her juvenile addressing of the dead that makes even those as mightily wronged as I have been to remember one’s softer feelings of humanity. We realise that even the mighty are puny, the unassailable are vulnerable, even the felons are needy.
My discovery of the identity of ‘P.’ has led me towards forgiveness of her, and it insisted that I reveal to you my investigations.
Professor Amelia Broughton,
Central and Southern University
2016.
Acknowledgements
WILLY: How can he find himself on a farm? Is that a life? A farmhand? In the beginning, when he was young, I thought, well, a young man, it’s good for him to tramp around, take a lot of different jobs. But it’s more than ten years now and he has yet to make thirty-five dollars a week!
LINDA: He’s finding himself, Willy.
WILLY: Not finding yourself at the age of thirty-four is a disgrace!
From Death of a Salesman, Act 1: Arthur Miller
I’d written these stories before I realised that, like Biff in Death of a Salesman, and though much older, I am still trying to ‘come of age’. How do other people arrive so fast? All the women in the stories – and one man – are trying to find themselves at what Willy would say was a disgraceful age.
Stories too sometimes take a long while to find themselves; some here have been published before, but in other forms. ‘Small talk’ was published in Southerly Magazine in 2007 in more or less the same words but ‘The Last Taxi Away From Here’ was published in Text Journal in 2013 and before that, as ‘The Last Taxi Ride’ in Acts of Dog (ed Debra Adelaide, Vintage Press 2003). It’s taken years for me to find the story’s heart. ‘Her Laughter Like a Song of Freedom’ was published in Wild Minds: Stories of Outsiders and Dreamers (Random House 1999) but I’ve tinkered with it because after publication, Gerard kept arguing against his own ending; Gerard in fact went on to live a second life as Owen in my novel The Secret Cure. ‘Passport’ was published as a short memoir ‘The True Story of My Father’ in A Country Too Far (ed Thomas Keneally and Rosie Scott, Penguin 2013) but is now almost completely re-written after a previously unknown distant cousin in the UK found me and solved a family mystery; why my Scottish grandmother lost her family and her life to alcohol.