by Carmel Bird
One night I dreamt I was a woman in a long blue gown, and I was calling out ‘Peter Pan, Peter Pan! Doesn’t anyone want to grow up?’ I woke up thinking of Sasha, almost feeling the presence of Sasha in the room, and I found myself weeping tears of sadness and frustration, my only thought that Sasha is on the brink of growing up, on the threshold of womanhood, and is now suffering so much from this strange turn of events about which I can speak to nobody but yourself.
Let me know what you make of it all. I am writing this at 4 a.m.—a time, I recall you once told me, you believed to be one of particular clarity in matters to do with the conjunction of this world and the spirit world.
Perhaps the most difficult and most ironic aspect of all this is that I have always been so sceptical of paranormal phenomena, as you well know. But when it lands on your own front doorstep, so to speak, that’s another matter, pause for very serious thought indeed.
You may wonder whether Sasha ever read Alice’s file. I can practically swear that she did not. Impossible. The file was in a locked cabinet in my room at the Tavistock. (Although Sasha does have a certain annoying talent for poking her nose into every possible nook and cranny. Harriet regrets not having had another child for her to develop with, but that was really out of the question, given Harriet’s health.) Someone else read the file and told Sasha the story? No, again. Well, let me say I can’t imagine how this would be possible.
All I can think is that adolescents are susceptible and sensitive to activity that generally passes the rest of us by, and that there is some kind of impression of Alice Rosenbloom on the couch at the Freud Museum, but then my head spins and I can almost feel myself rolling down a steep slope into some terrible waiting abyss. Then I try to imagine Sasha getting hold of the files and reading up on the story and being inspired to create the drama at the museum. She’s quite an actress, if you recall. But why so mischievous and disruptive? What if she has somehow read the files? No, there has to be some other explanation. So, I turn to you.
If the matter interests you, and if you would like me to send you the whole file, just let me know.
Maybe I will have to go back to the Freud Museum and confront whatever it is that is troubling our lives. Is that a reasonable idea? Perhaps I should take Sasha back there? Sometimes I even imagine returning to St Fintan’s to revisit the site of Alice Rosenbloom’s tragic decline and death. Then I ask myself, what good would that do, stirring up old demons, opening cupboard doors to rattle old skeletons. If you remember, I left there under a bit of a cloud after the silly complicated business with Wendy Whatshername, the deluded teenage daughter of the pharmacist in Downpatrick. About which Sasha knows absolutely nothing.
All that being something Harriet and I have put behind us long ago.
Where to turn?
I tell you, Frisbee, the weird event at the Freud Museum has really put the wind up me.
What to do?
Yours etc
Rex
P.S. Another dream I had has just come back to me. I think it somehow relates to St Fintan himself (you know he had leprosy) because I was in a strange and silent house in the middle of a desert and everybody around me was suffering from leprosy, their fingers and noses etc. falling off silently and lying in great heaps on the floor. A lion kept coming in to inspect the piles of diseased bits. Then a dust storm was on the way, and I knew I was going to be buried alive. Then, as they say, I woke up.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: For some of the details in this story, I am indebted to Gillian Bouras who kindly visited the Freud Museum at my request and supplied me with pictures and detailed descriptions.
Buff Orpington and the Disasters of Middle Life
Carrillo Mean, Californian guru, did not write his definitive work, Buff Orpington and the Disasters of Middle Life, until well after Stanford Fox, Melbourne barrister, had suffered some of those disasters.
The People
Stan Fox—a barrister
Maureen—his wife
Melanie—his girlfriend
Tony—his partner
Margaret—Tony’s second wife
Barbara—Tony’s first wife
The Story
At one time it was fashionable, in Melbourne, to have spent the years of childhood in a working-class inner suburb where everyone had a chookhouse down the yard.
Chookhouse nostalgia gripped the hearts of all the barristers and all the wives of all the barristers in Carlton. Long and narrow channels of their brains were furnished with rusting sheets of corrugated iron, lacy panels of chicken wire, pollard and bran, and shell grit. White Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds tarktark-tarked through their dreams. They began to collect large paintings by artists about to be famous. Poultry appeared in these paintings. Men who could be seen by day wearing jolly little wigs and crossing William Street, their black gowns flapping, sometimes catching at the knee, by night lay beneath Danish quilts on Japanese beds beside Indian rugs, gazing up at a few hints of stars through new curved skylights, thinking, every now and again, about the straw in the nests. There was the colour and shine and smell of the straw, and the gleaming hint of the china egg which they had hidden there to encourage the hens to lay.
The wives of these dreamers also gazed up through the skylights in the renovated terrace houses, as proud visions of the White Leghorn rooster, his long tail feathers curving, his comb standing up like play-dough, strutted across the skylights of their minds. Mistresses, generally speaking, were spared these farmyard scenes, for they were, as a rule, too young for chookhouse nostalgia. In fact, they were inclined to have been born in wealthy suburbs in times when Rhode Island Reds no longer tark-tarked at the bottoms of gardens, but lived, still and quiet, with hundreds of their sisters, their beaks and legs useless, laying eggs for rich farmers. Those who had studied biology at the most expensive schools had, of course, been given an egg to hatch and a chicken to carry round under their pullovers, but there was no connection whatsoever with the farmyard.
So by now you are beginning to imagine the kind of life led by Maureen (known, by the way, as Buffy) and Stanford Fox.
They were about forty, and were building up a collection (amongst all their other collections of wines and paintings and Limoges china) of books about the crisis of the middle years of mankind. No book in their collection made any reference to the important part that the chookhouse of childhood plays in the crises of the middle lives of Carlton barristers and their wives.
Stan lay on his futon, underneath his doona, next to his dhurrie, thinking of money, and of Melanie, and of what it was like when he was four. All he had wanted for his birthday when he was four was a little black hen. He had got that hen, and her feathers glittered in the sun that shone all day every day when he was four. There he was in his tartan shirt and his khaki overalls.
In the books—You and the Mid-life Adventure; Professional Man at the Crossroads; Births, Deaths, and The Ageing Process—eminent psychologists explained that at any time after the age of thirty-five, Stan would probably grow ‘disenchanted’ with the Law. Had he ever been enchanted, he wondered. The books went on to tell him that he would be seduced by any one of about four fantasies.
There would be the sailing-around-the-world fantasy, or the becoming-a-creative-artist fantasy, or the running-away-with-the-girl-from-the-milk-bar fantasy. Or the back-to-the-earth fantasy. The title of this last one worried Stan. He was about to be forty-one, and he was staring at the skylight and working on the back-to-the-chookhouse fantasy, which was not described in the books. It escaped Stan’s notice that back-to-the-chookhouse was but a variation of back-to-the-earth. And that being in love with Melanie was the running-away-with-the-girl.
Carrillo Mean wrote of the function of nostalgia for childhood and the obsession with nursery foods. He dealt briefly with the phenomenon of back-to-the-schoolroom as a misdirection sometimes taken by men in middle life when they seek, as Mean put it, ‘the authority of the dominant school-mistress figure’. As noted earlier, it was goin
g to be years before Mean would write Buff Orpington and the Disasters of Middle Life—a name adopted, incidentally, by a group of feathered singers. In fact, Mean would cite the case of Stanford Fox Q.C. in a detailed footnote to the third chapter.
Stan lay in bed planning to find a little place in the hills. There was a tall pine tree at the front, rather like an illustration in The House at Pooh Corner. Water babbled over nearby rocks.
Look, look, there are clumps of bluebells, and carpets of wild freesias in the spring. Rabbits peer from behind the stumps of trees. On green wicker chairs beneath an apple tree sit Stan and Melanie. Oh, Melanie is wearing a sort of transparent nightgown which might have appeared in a film in the forties. Her hair, a mixture of corn silk and soft ripples of amber with flashes of topaz, is long and ruffled. Her feet are bare in the dewy grass. They are drinking Russian Caravan tea from dainty cups with violets painted on them. The cups belonged to Stan’s grandmother. The teapot is blue and fat. It has a little chip in the spout, just where Stan’s mother’s teapot, also blue, had a chip. As Melanie gestures to emphasise a point, the Milk Arrowroot biscuit between her fingers is snatched away by one of the hens that fidget around her feet.
Buffy lay in bed and thought about the fountain that she planned to put in the courtyard in the middle of the house. She stared up through the skylight and thought about the Italian fountain, and about money, and the children, Bib and Bub, and about Tony.
Every Monday, in reality, Buffy met Tony at the beach house. She had been doing this for five years and had seen Tony through his divorce from Barbara and his marriage to Margaret. If, as sometimes happened, Tony was unable to get to the beach house, she went there by herself. She would make avocado dip and lie on the old sofa reading Doris Lessing and listening to the sea. And still, after all this time, she had visions of Tony. She lay in bed in Carlton and Tony would float across the fashionable skylight. His outline would, it is true, occasionally recede as sharper apparitions of the two Italian boys from the bike shop pedalled into view. Buffy would imagine herself feeding imported chocolates into their open red mouths. She would buy the chocolates in little gold mesh bags from the coffee shop just down the street, and, dangling the bags from her fingers, she would stroll into the bike shop to buy a tail-light for Bub’s bike. And there would be the boys, wiping the grease from their fingers with a grubby cloth.
As she lay in bed, Buffy decided that she would ring the plumber tomorrow. She would have the fountain in the central courtyard, the babble of its water echoing the sound of the stream on the country property blooming in Stan’s head.
For Stan’s birthday, they had a dinner party. Tony and Margaret were there. And so was Barbara, Tony’s ex-wife, who was married to the orthopaedic surgeon who had put her bones together again after Tony had pushed her down the stairs.
‘When I was four, I got a little black hen for my birthday. It was all I wanted. And I really loved it. I called it Natalie. I was madly in love with a girl called Natalie.’
‘We had about a dozen Buff Orpingtons at one time. When we lived in Northcote next door to the Italians who were supposed to have shot the man in the TAB. God, they were pretty little things. The chooks I mean. Like corn silk with ripples of amber and flashes of topaz. In the sun.’
‘I was famous for my chook imitations. Tark-tarktark-tark.’
‘But that’s wrong. It’s puck-puck-puck-puck.’
‘It is not. They go cluck. I know it sounds like something out of a school reader, but they really do go cluck. I know. We had about twenty fowls, and ducks as well, and the hens definitely said cluck and the ducks, believe it or not, said quack.’
‘French ducks say coin-coin. I’ve heard them. When we were in Brittany last year, Madame Thing kept the most fabulous ducks in the sort of basement part of the house. And they all said coin-coin. All the time. You could smell them in our bedroom, what’s more. It was just above them you see.’
‘But really, don’t chooks say a sort of mixture of tark and quick?
‘What sort of chooks did you have, that said that?’
‘Well, Australorps. You know, little black hens. Tark-quick, they said. Always.’
‘Oh, Australorps.’
‘My sister took a photo of me with the little black hen, and she won a fountain pen in a photographic competition.’
‘Have you got the photo?’
‘No. When I was about sixteen, I think I tore it up.’
‘Oh, what a pity. We could get a little Australorp though, and we could take some more pictures of you. And it. We might all win fountain pens.’
‘Buffy does a really good imitation of a rooster. Go on, Buff.’
‘Cock-a-doodle-doo.’
It was then that the discussion moved on to talk of the bouquets of the wines and the effect on the middle palate. We may record that the Mouton Rothschild was really quite delicious, and everybody became rather drunk.
It was on a sunny day in spring that Buffy took Bib and Bub onto the bike path by the river. The children had yellow helmets with scarlet straps. Flags on tall stalks fluttered behind them as they rode. They looked rather like little soldiers in some modern and yet mediaeval war. The boys from the bike shop whizzed past on a bright red tandem, almost knocking Buffy from her bike. They waved and kept going, shouting something cheerful in Italian.
On this same sunny day in spring, Stan and his sweet Melanie were inspecting a small property in the hills behind the city. A dusty pine tree grew by the front gate. There were bluebells in clumps by the tap at the back door. Water trickled over the pebbles of the stream that marked the northern boundary. And an asthmatic sheepdog dozed in the dust.
That night, at Melanie’s house, Stan had a heart attack. The books had warned of this.
They had been sipping Chateau Neuf du Pape, and leafing through a poultry catalogue.
‘Let’s have one of everything,’ said Melanie, her hair a ripple of corn silk, flash of amber, dash of topaz.
Buff Orpingtons, Rhode Island Reds, Australorps, White Leghorns pecked cheerfully at grain in the pictures in the catalogues.
‘The birds must be induced to take sufficient exercise in the house. That would be their own house, wouldn’t it?’
Stan drained his glass, smiled at Melanie, embraced her, caught his breath, and fell onto the peach velvet settee.
It was while Stan was in Intensive Care that Italian workmen came to install the fountain in Buffy’s courtyard. Water gushed from it in a shiny cone that overflowed like a melting ice-cream. In the sunlight, droplets of water winked like stars.
‘Stan will find it soothing, won’t he, watching the water and listening to it. When he comes home.’
Buffy was talking to Tony on the telephone.
‘You’ve done a great job, Buff. Hold the phone up to the water again for a minute. It sounds great. Just great.’
‘Come round later,’ said Buffy. ‘I’ve just put the Veuve Clicquot on ice. And you must see what I’ve bought for Stan. It’s the sweetest little statue, just like Natalie, the hen he loved so much when he was four.’
The Man in the Red Car
Brian and Amanda were in the middle of a happy marriage when Amanda fell in love with Rex.
‘It might be just a passing thing,’ Brian said to Philip, who was his psychiatrist.
‘Yes,’ Philip said, ‘yes, it might.’
‘We were so happy, you know,’ Brian said, looking hopefully at Philip.
‘That’s not exactly what I know,’ Philip said. ‘Tell me about the happiness.’
‘We love each other, don’t we.’
‘Do you?’
‘And we love Melody.’
‘How old is Melody?’
‘She’s four. Just turned four. Goes to kindergarten.’
Melody goes to kindergarten wearing a scarlet tutu.
‘You’re naughty,’ a boy says.
‘No, I’m not; I’m nice,’ Melody says.
The kindergarten is in a
tall house of red bricks where a large and affluent family must have lived a hundred years ago. The path is lined with old trees. A magnolia, a pomegranate. Oaks overshadow the house. Children run around the garden, run under the hose, hurl themselves into the sandpit, quarrel over the swings. Their paintings hang on a string to dry.
Melody has a long blonde fringe that dangles in her eyes. She paints faces. She stands on a chair at her easel, a small, serious blonde girl in a scarlet satin tutu.
Big thick brushes and pots of sloppy paint.
A teacher is reading a story. The Elephant and the Bad Baby. Girls are jumping onto a pile of tartan cushions.
Melody and the boy who spoke to her go into the miniature kitchen. The boy collects a bucket and turns to leave.
‘I have to go to work, Alice,’ he says to Melody.
‘Is it that time already, Tom?’ Melody says.
‘You know what the traffic is like.’
Melody sighs and picks up a saucepan.
‘I could drive you,’ she says.
‘No, Alice. You stay here. You stay here and tidy the place.’