by Carmel Bird
Dear little old Sister Apollonia was dragged in to give an account of the chapter in the French textbook dealing with the manufacture of cider in Normandy, and thereafter that section of the book was banned. Never mind that this was the chapter where the use of the demonstrative adjective is consolidated; never mind that students would no longer have the opportunity to write a composition on the subject of the contrast between the character of the Provencal shepherd and that of the Norman peasant. Gone, the chance to translate into French: ‘Let’s go to the farm and see how they make the cider. Look at the ancient stone vat where the millstone turns, pulled round by Biquette, the old donkey. The great heap of apples rolls about in the vat as the millstone begins to turn slowly, crushing the beautiful apples under its weight, crushing them and reducing them to a thick brown paste.’ (Let the paste ferment for twelve hours. Then into the oak press in the cellar where it gets squeezed, and squeezed and squeezed until the juice flows ‘sweet and thick’, pure juice. The flavour of apples ripened in the summer sun is stored in the juice that is left to mature.)
All this information became, because of our misdemeanour, our Evil Mischief, unavailable to the future students of Sister Apollonia.
Maris and I were marched to the locker room where the cupboard was opened and we had to pull out all our paraphernalia and put it on the table. Sister stood silently while we did this, while we sobbed and shook with fear and shame. What if Breezy died? What if the baby died? The baby? Breezy was going to have a baby. This was perhaps the most terrifying part of all, for me anyhow. I felt I had somehow participated in Breezy’s sin and shame and ultimate disgrace. Supervised by Sister, Maris and I took everything out to the great incinerator at the bottom of the garden.
It took three trips to carry it all, and the hellish symbolism of the incinerator was not lost on us. Afterwards Sister said she was going to speak to our parents, and she reminded us, with no apparent irony, that it takes only one rotten apple to ruin the crop. And we were that apple.
It was a while before I worked out what all this was about: Breezy McCarthy figured that if she drank our powerful poisonous cider she would either lose the baby or else die. When I realised this, I wondered which she would have preferred. Really. Did Breezy want to die? Or just get rid of the baby? In any case, she gave up alcohol altogether after baby Colette was born. Took the pledge. People said that along with her teetotalism she went frigid. The marriage didn’t last. And all the zing went out of Breezy until she took up serious drinking in her thirties and from then on it was downhill all the way.
Breezy McCarthy, good-time girl and slut, fizzed and sparkled for a moment some time between being a child and being an adult. And then, with one thing and another, life being what it is, she went flat. The episode with the cider was somehow a turning point. The rest was life in a small town in Australia in the fifties. Routine. And then some.
The memory of the little brown bag of flour and brewer’s yeast and honey lingers. Tied up with string, dripping, slimy, grotesque, it lay on the table in the locker room as its juice seeped out of it.
The great heap of apples rolls about in the vat as the millstone begins to turn slowly, crushing the beautiful apples under its weight, crushing them and reducing them to a thick brown paste.
The Horse Might Talk
There’s an old story about a man who was condemned to death for a crime he had committed. He begged the king for a year’s reprieve during which time he said he would teach the king’s horse to talk. He explained to his friends that at least he would have another year of life, and that in a year the king might die, or the man might die, or the horse might die. Or the horse might talk.
Well, I used to think like that. Mum would say, Skye, you can’t go on hoping for the impossible. And I’d say I reckoned Jason would come good in the end. Once we’re married, I’d say, you’ll see. He’ll be able to get right away from his family’s influence. Mum said pigs might fly.
We got engaged. We were all set to come here to Queensland for a holiday. I am here alone in the hotel, in the room we had booked for both of us. Mum was dead set against me coming here by myself after all that happened, but I was determined. Mum knew a girl that actually died from grief, killed herself because her fiancé broke it off. I know one or two that tried. At least take Lisa or someone with you if you’re going to Brisbane, Mum said. But no, I’m going to get over it by myself if it kills me. There I go. I didn’t mean that to come out the way it did. I’m not the suicidal type, I’m really not.
This is the exact room we were going to have, me and Jay. I’ve got a photo of him in a gold frame on the cabinet beside the bed. I have the ring, and the photo and my memories, and I’m going to get over it. I lie on the bed and stare around me. It’s a pretty funny room, really.
Called the Tropical.
The rest of the hotel has been modernised—luxurious but bland. But they decided to keep the Tropical the way it was twenty years ago. You come up in the lift to the second-top floor—the pool’s on the top, and it seems to me that the weight of the water causes cracks in the walls up here. The Tropical might disappear one night in a great big tidal wave coming down from above. You get to the end of the corridor and you come to a little trellis with a gate, and over the gate in letters made from bamboo it says ‘Tropical’. You go through the gate and come to the door of the room. The walls are yellow and the carpet’s green. One window that looks out onto a thing that must be the lift or the air-conditioning. That’s the view. Then the curtains are yellow and orange with patterns of brown bamboo. The bedspread’s the same. Two sketches of monkeys, framed, on the wall, and a clock beside one of them.
The clock’s a sort of thick plate on which is carved a tropical scene, a beach at sunset, with hibiscus flowers around the edge and a bunch of bananas too. The hands are thin, like long red needles, and I lie on the bed and I watch the second hand as it moves—it goes in funny little jumps, and it doesn’t exactly tick, it sort of clacks. Clack-rest-hiss. Clack-rest-hiss. But it’s not exactly regular.
When I got here (they were expecting me and Jay) there was a huge basket of fruit on the glass table underneath the mirror. ‘Welcome to the Tropical Room—Skye and Jason’ it said on a white card pushed into a bunch of grapes. I haven’t touched the fruit, and now they have begun to rot. They smell, that sickly sour smell you get with rotting fruit, and tiny insects, almost invisible, hover over them. There’s a woman comes to clean the room, but she must have instructions not to touch the fruit.
Welcome to the Tropical Room—Skye and Jason.
I lied. I told them he was coming later. He won’t be coming. He’s dead. I stayed for the funeral and then I came here.
A week later than we had booked, but the room was still available.
The day before we were due to come, the day after our engagement party, Jason and his brother, Alex, went bushwalking. This was nothing unusual, except you wouldn’t expect them to do it the day before we went away. The day after the party. But anyhow, they were always going off somewhere, just the two of them, or else a group of people from the uni. I went with them a couple of times, but it was too cold and wet for my liking. The scenery was beautiful, I will say that. You can’t beat the Tasmanian highlands for scenery. Let’s go to Queensland for a holiday, I said to Jay, and he laughed and said okay. He was very easy-going.
Not like his brother. Alex was more the nervy type. And I reckon he was gay. I liked him, don’t get me wrong, but I always got the feeling he wished I wasn’t around. I first got this feeling one afternoon last summer. And it got to be more than a feeling—I knew—and he knew I knew.
We were sitting on the back veranda at their place—they lived with their mum and dad at Sandy Bay—and you could see the yachts on the water and there were seagulls standing on the steps leading down to the beach. I see all this so vividly, like it was etched into my memory. And Alex went down the steps and he scooped up some seeds from a flower with his hands. They were little black
seeds mixed up with a cloud of silvery gossamer. Beautiful. He brought them up to where me and Jay were sitting on the veranda, and I thought for a minute he was going to give them to me, but he stood over Jay and he let the seeds fall down on his brother’s head in a soft shower, a drift. And he said with a crooked smile on his lips: There you are, these are dreams, Jason.
That was all. It sounds like a silly little thing now that I say it, but at the time I knew that Alex was—well, claiming Jason, was marking him, was telling me I couldn’t have him. Not ever, not if he had anything to do with it.
I kind of understood, but I refused to believe it, to face it. I loved Jay with all my heart. We were going to have a great life, kids. He was going to be a geologist, and I was hoping to have my own beauty salons.
I have never said this before, and I’m not ever going to say it again, but Alex was in love with Jason, really, truly in love, and he did everything he could to put me off. He was studying literature, and reading books by Patrick White, and the only thing he ever said to me about any of it was, ‘Listen to this—he says women are one of the messier kinds of fruit.’ I just walked away when he said that. He thought it was true and funny. And he told me some jokes once that proved he thought men having sex with women was really disgusting. That women were disgusting anyhow. (One of the things he said was: Q: How do you find the girls hiding in the garden? A: Follow the snail trails.)
Alex hated me. But Jason was only half gay, if that’s possible, and I believe he wanted to get away from Alex. It’s incest, after all. If their father knew any of this he would have taken one or both of them up the bush and shot them. Maybe that sounds incredible, but you don’t know their father. I can’t understand how Phyllis, that’s their mother, can bear to live with him. She’s really very sweet. And of course she’s completely shocked and devastated by what happened. They were the only children, and now they’re gone, both of them, just like that. She says she doesn’t understand how two men who were such good bushwalkers could fall to their deaths from a safe platform on a clear day. They simply went walking and never returned to the hut. It was freezing, but clear. They died in a place called Olympus, a mountain. Well, they looked like Greek gods, anyway.
I’ve never been to a funeral before and, actually, I can hardly remember theirs. But I’ve never, ever felt so sad, so terribly, terribly sad. Lisa said she expected me to throw the ring into the grave. I didn’t. People rang up from the TV and tried to make me talk about things, but I was truly speechless with grief and shock. Jason’s father went on TV—I simply don’t know how he could do that. They sent cameras to the funeral, it was in the cathedral, and Mum says it was very dignified and beautiful, but I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t look at the television afterwards, but people have told me they saw me—stricken, my grandmother said I looked stricken.
Well, I was.
But I’m determined to get over it. I lie on the bed in the Tropical room, with the noisy air-conditioning that doesn’t seem to make any difference, and I drink rum and coke and fill the room with blue and yellow smoke from my cigarettes. I just lie here in my underwear, staring at the TV, staring at the cracks in the walls, wondering about the swimming pool overhead, staring at the clock—clack-rest-hiss—and time passes. I eat packets of peanuts, and I can smell the basket of rotting fruit. I am crying most of the time.
When I come to my senses in a day or two, I’m going to forget Jason forever, and I’m going to go down to the lobby, and I’ll sit there in one of the great big armchairs and I’ll let somebody pick me up. It nearly happened the night I arrived, but then I wasn’t ready for it. This bloke came up to me when I was booking in, and he said he wanted to take me to a Greek island. I thought I must be dreaming, and I looked straight through him. But in a day or two I’ll get up and have a bath and throw out the fruit and put on my black dress and stilettos—Jason loved them, in fact—and I’ll go down to the lobby and just see what happens. Mum keeps ringing up to see if I’m all right. I’m all right.
A funny thing happened last night on the TV. They interviewed a woman in America who talks to horses. She said they often talk back to her. Sometimes they talk in Dutch. She said she doesn’t understand Dutch. I’m not sure whether to believe her or not. You just never know, especially with television.
Now Ida Haunts the Car Park
In certain lights you can see the impression of a vanished building hanging in the air. The towers and turrets and chimneys of what appears to be a fairy castle may come into view in the mad blue flash of lightning or at the turning point of dusk or dawn. You look up, uncertain of what you have seen, and it is gone, a fanciful silver image fading on the square reality of day, the strange obscurity of night. You imagine you might have glimpsed movement behind the tower window—a hand, the turn of a head, the gentle swaying of a velvet curtain. In the very dead of night it is sometimes possible to catch on the ear the sound of vanished laughter or the faintest tinkle of a bell.
A paving stone under your foot tells you in bold gold type that on this site there stood a college for young ladies, founded, it says on the stone, in 1875, demolished in 1966. In place of the absent castle is a vast white assembly hall where gatherings of men meet to perform occult rituals. Nearby, the Day Procedure Centre of a hospital in which human babies can be brought into being by astonishing modern technology and thought.
Deep in the earth underneath these visible buildings is a place for parking cars, a kind of layer cake joined through the middle by an elevator. The elevator has a voice all of its own, a disconcerting hollow voice, announcing in its strange blank way the names of all the elevator’s destinations, such as ‘basement three’ or ‘ground level’. Underneath the very bottom of the car park is a little stream of running water that connects this world with the next.
Young ladies who vanished long ago, taking their easels and their violins and their tennis racquets, sometimes come back to this place of happy memory, of former life. Girls such as Ida or Nellie or Henry—an odd name for a girl, but she is a writer, and the times being what they are or were, she felt the need for a man’s name in a man’s world. In one of Henry’s books she told the story of her school days—the title of the book was The Getting of Wisdom. These days Henry haunts the State Library, where she is doing the research for a trilogy to be published at the turn of the present century. It will be a great Australian saga (inspired by events that have taken place since 1950) produced on CD-Rom. The title of this one is, you will have guessed, The Forgetting of Wisdom.
Nellie is an opera singer who was celebrated throughout the world. On odd occasions she has spent an evening in the car-park elevator singing the ‘basement one-two-three’ and ‘ground level’ lyrics to the astonishment of the public. Many of the people who heard her were returning from the bars nearby, and so they were inclined to treat her as a hallucination, a large woman in a beaded gown singing in the elevator. In 1907, Nellie was the President of the Old Collegians’ Association, and when she materialised on the other side she was re-elected to this position for eternity. The Association is one of the most active organisations on the other side of the water. It is, in fact, as a member of the Old Collegians that Ida haunts the car park. It is her job to see that the presence of the old school is maintained on the spot.
Ida is a painter. She does delicate pictures of fairies with the fabulous wings of butterflies and other insects. She has illustrated books for children, and once was asked to paint her joyful pictures on the walls of schools and hospitals. Dressed as a fairy in a dark-blue tea-gown, she haunts the hospital and the car park. There is a bright hint of mischief in her eyes which sparkle. She carries a large handbag that is shaped like a butterfly’s wing, embroidered with silks the colour of the sunset and studded with sapphires from the heavens and pearls from the depths of the sea. In her handbag she keeps a wand made from a long stalk of evening primrose, and a telephone of morning glory. The technology of these things is primitive in the extreme—the telephone must be con
nected to the bright-blue fire extinguishers in the car park before it will work. The evening primrose has the power, when waved, to stop the elevator between floors. Before doing a tour of the hospital, Ida always gives Nellie a call to let her know she has arrived safely.
Ida’s outline behaves like that of the old school building—now you see her, now you don’t. However, one day she discovered that people who are suffering from the pain of a lost love are gifted with the sight to see her in all her radiance and beauty.
She was standing in the elevator, wincing at the hollow sound of ‘basement three’, when a distinguished-looking fellow with silver hair and sad pale eyes got in. The white silk scarf around his neck slipped and slithered to the floor. He seemed distracted, didn’t appear to notice that the scarf had fallen. Without thinking, Ida stooped down and picked it up. She then realised he could see her, and she knew therefore he must be suffering. She handed him the scarf, he smiled sadly, the corners of his lovely eyes crinkling as he did so. Ida’s heart missed a beat and she felt she had to act at once. She whisked out her evening primrose and there, between the ground and basement one, the elevator settled gently to a halt.
‘I do believe we’re stuck,’ he said. And he began to press the buttons on the wall. Nothing happened. They introduced themselves—his name was Lawrence, Lawrence Honey—and he explained he was on his way to Lodge. Which Lodge is that? she asked in innocence, and he told her he belonged to a society called the Invisible Lodge. She said she liked the name of that, and then she explained she was a volunteer, a visitor to the hospital. He said he hoped she didn’t suffer from claustrophobia, stuck there in the elevator, hanging by a thread between the floors. She said she wasn’t frightened. My ex-wife, he said, and tears came to his eyes, my ex-wife, Georgina, was terrified of things like this. She was very young—always insisted that we use the stairs. As you can see, I miss her. You must excuse me, he added, and took out his handkerchief and wiped away his tears, and then he opened up his attaché case and took out a silver flask from which he drank. A nip? he said, and handed it to Ida. She took a swig of brandy and felt it go straight to her head. They both began to laugh, and then he offered her a bite of his peanut-butter sandwich. My secretary, he said, always insists that I bring a sandwich with me on Lodge night. She’s a most practical woman—makes the sandwich for me. I think you’ll find it satisfactory. And it was.