by Carmel Bird
Jack’s one and only dream has haunted me; and the children in the silo have haunted me. When I was a child I had a book in which there was a story about the little princes in the tower. To illustrate the story there was a black-and-white photograph of a painting of the princes in their velvet suits and lace collars and with their long curly hair. I think of the princes in old sad black and white and they are like a memory; they are not like history or a story in a book; they seem to me to be a part of my own memory, of something that I know. The book said that hundreds of years after the princes had been murdered in the tower, two little skeletons were found underneath a flagstone.
Nobody ever said how they got the children out of the wheat in the silo, but I imagine someone could open a chute somewhere and the children and the wheat would come pouring out. The awful thing was that the silo was unchanged by the event. It stayed there tall and still and grey, and grey and stern, and went about its business, storing wheat.
I don’t know where Jack is now, or what he does, but if he dreams I imagine he could still dream about a silo, and it could easily be the silo at the end of the South Eastern Freeway. But the part that really interests me is that Jack told the story to another man I know.
They were sitting in the back bar of the Cricketers’ Arms, watching the Test on TV when the other man said, ‘I dreamt that Julia and I split up. It was a great relief, in actual fact. One minute she was there, reading the paper at the table on the patio and drinking orange juice, and the next minute she was gone. Just like that. There was still half a glass of orange juice on the table. She came back a bit later and said, “I’ve bought a house in Collingwood.” And then she went for good. She took the children.’ Jack ordered another round of drinks and got a packet of Dunhill from the machine and borrowed a light and sat down and said, ‘I never dream.’
Then the other man said, ‘I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet you anything you do. Think for a minute. Didn’t you ever have a dream?’
And Jack said, ‘Once I had this dream about the silo at the end of the South Eastern Freeway.’
The other man laughed and said, ‘There you are. I told you. But I must say it’s a pretty boring dream. Is that all?’
Jack said, ‘Yes, that’s all. You have to remember I’m a very boring man.’
They both smiled and laughed a bit. Then the other man put down his glass and looked at Jack and said, ‘Boring? That’s not what Julia said.’
And Jack said, ‘How do you mean?’
‘Julia said you’re anything but boring.’
Then they both stopped smiling and went on drinking. They looked up at the cricket on the TV and they realised that Australia had just taken another wicket.
Flick
The Heartbreak Hotel is up for sale. I pass the Heartbreak every day on my way to work. On the front of the building above the door there’s a big shiny red plastic heart bisected vertically by a jagged space. A line of neon tube circles the heart like the rings of Saturn. I look up at the broken heart and the words of the song start running in my head, as they are meant to.
As I drive towards the city I pass three things that stand out on the highway. I come through a cutting where layers of rock are visible, like in diagrams in a geology textbook, and then the road slopes down and crosses the river. The first thing I see on the other side of the river is the Skipping Girl. She is a large flat image of a girl in a red-and-white dress. She has a skipping rope that loops above her. At night a series of flickering neon lights creates the illusion that the rope is moving, that the girl is skipping. When I first see her, as I cross the river, she is flattened against a brick building, but as I get closer the building disappears and the girl rises until she is outlined against the sky. The girl is there to advertise a brand of vinegar. She is enormous. One day I saw a workman in overalls mending the toe of the girl’s shoe. The man crawled like a dusty insect across the black patent leather.
The second thing I come to is the scarlet heart on the Heartbreak Hotel, down at the end of Lonely Street. Then I come to the rat. The rat is on the corner of a wide and very busy intersection. I always have to wait at the traffic lights. High above me I see the rat. He is a lifelike model with wild eyes and nasty teeth, and his head bursts through the clean white surface of a wall. He is the master of the intersection, the overseer of the cars and trucks and trams. The traffic is made up of small toys that move in endless patterns down the roads. Rat advertises Flick. Flick is a pest exterminator. In certain lights if you read the red-and-white letters of the word ‘Flick’ on the billboard it can look like ‘Fuck’. Round the edges of the billboard there are decorative little black-and-white pictures of ants and spiders.
The rat is so sudden and shocking and ugly. I look at him every morning and wonder that the city fathers don’t insist he be removed in the interest of the beauty of the city. He leaps and looms at the beginning of a graceful avenue of trees that leads from the busy intersection up to the old Gothic cathedral.
When I am going home in the afternoon the rat is on my left. Once, when I was inching across the intersection in the evening, the traffic in all directions stopped and I was stuck in the middle. I later learnt that in the distance up ahead the police were redirecting all the traffic. A man with a gun was up there somewhere shooting at the cars. As I sat in the middle of the intersection listening to a cassette with the rat high up on my left above it all, I didn’t know about the bloodshed down the road. My car was stuck behind a bus, and in the back seat of the bus were a man and a woman. I could see parts of each body. The man and the woman believed they were invisible, believed the back of the bus in the middle of the intersection was a private place, and they were embracing passionately, framed in the window of the bus.
There were police and television helicopters in the sky.
Slowly the traffic untangled and I drove home behind the parts of people kissing in the bus, past the Heartbreak Hotel and past the Skipping Girl. I lost the bus. It was night. The broken heart was ringed with neon fire; the skipping rope was brightly turning in the dark. The rat is never lit.
I was living with Jack again. The lights were on; the fire was burning; I could smell pumpkin soup and hear soft music. Jack had seen some of the massacre on television and when I got home he held me for a long time in his arms and we were very solemn with relief that I was safe. Framed in the lighted doorway we must have been nearly as good to watch as the man and woman I saw in the back window of the bus. We listened to the radio and watched the television and got the news about the gunman and the people he had killed. The next day and all the next week we read about it in the paper.
One of the dead people was a young woman called Yadi who had been engaged to be married. Her father, it said in the paper, went shopping for the wedding dress for his daughter to wear to her funeral. The funeral was shown on television and I kept expecting the camera to hover over an open coffin with a bride in blood-spattered snowy finery. Everything else was there—the father, the mother, the brothers, the sisters, the fiancé, the neighbours, the massacre, the road, the traffic, the church, the cemetery, photos of the dead girl at her eighteenth birthday party, and an occasional glimpse of the rat on the billboard.
I read in the paper the things the mother said as she stood at the door of the church before the funeral. The mother cried out: ‘Yadi, Yadi, where are you? Why are you late, Yadi? Why are you keeping everybody waiting?’
Red Letters
The man from the house next door died. He was old and he lived alone. He walked about the garden in his slippers and dressing-gown. One day I heard a thud and I went out to find that the man had misguided his rubbish bin and it had fallen on its back on the path. The bin was a large black one and when it was lying down it resembled a coffin with wheels on the end. I righted the bin and wheeled it out to the street. I saw a small detail of the man’s dressing-gown—the breast pocket was darned with pale-brown wool in tiny even stitches. I imagined his wife had done this. She is long sinc
e dead and I never saw her but I think of her as wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and sensible shoes. She and her husband worshipped at the nearby church. She did the flowers on the altar every third Sunday and she was on the roster of the Women’s Auxiliary to do the brasses once every six weeks. She mended the vicar’s vestments with her invisible stitches, tidying the fraying outline of a passionflower, plumping out the grains of an ear of wheat. Time passed and this woman passed away and in time I saw the darning she had done on the pocket of her husband’s dressing-gown.
We stood beside the upright rubbish bin and I thought about how this man could collect such heavy garbage. The bin contained old books and crockery and flotsam, jetsam, bits, pieces, odds, ends. Sensing the approach of death the man was packing his bags and sending off his things to be buried somewhere in advance of his body.
I wheeled the bin into the street and stood it on the grass beside the road. Early the next morning I heard the garbage truck. Men called to each other as they emptied the bins. I heard the sound of things falling into the truck and it was a sound like pain. The truck drove on. I heard it stop again, heard the men calling to each other.
A long time ago, when I was living with Jack, we went to the tip with a trailer full of branches we had cut from the trees along the fence. In the car on the way to the tip we heard a woman talking on the radio. She was talking about letters and about life and death. As we drove down the gravel road that winds into the tip we entered a world of broken things, of seagulls and ibises and people scavenging for furniture. We heard the woman on the radio saying she hoped she would know when she was going to die. She wanted to make sure all the letters in her possession were destroyed beforehand. Jack said if he felt like that he’d burn the letters now.
The man next door sensed the approach of death and filled the rubbish bin with letters—hundreds of love letters from his sweetheart who later became his wife. Her handwriting was as tiny and neat as her stitches. He filled the bin and it became too heavy for him to steer in his old age and strange state of emotion. A lifetime of sweet love fell down thud onto the pavement. Fearing the worst, I came rushing out looking for tragedy in the middle of the sunny afternoon.
The man disappeared from view. He died noiselessly, secretly. I did not see an ambulance. A board was nailed to the front fence next door, advertising the house for sale. The notice drew attention to the large size of the land on which the house was standing, and suggested it would be a good idea to buy the house and knock it down and build a better house or an apartment block. At the top of the notice in red letters were the words DECEASED ESTATE. There must have been a funeral at the little church up the street, arranged by the vicar who ordered the casket and the flowers and gave the oration.
The laundry window of the house next door faces into the backyard of my apartment building. When I walk down the path I look across at the window of the laundry. The man always used to keep two packets on the windowsill. One was a packet of detergent called Softly, and the other was a packet of fabric softener called Cuddly. Both packets were decorated with pictures of toy bears—Cuddly was pink and Softly was white. Cuddly and Softly stayed on the windowsill, fading in the sunlight, part of the Deceased Estate. For months after the man died I watched as the images of the bears gradually became fainter and another sign went up on the front fence of the house. This time the sign was rough, made from plywood. The lettering was uneven, done in red paint with a paintbrush. The letters said WRECK HOUSE. People came and took the tiles from the roof of the house, leaving the bare bones of the beams. They took the doors and windows and they prised up the floorboards. Tiles from around the fireplace went, and most of the bricks. The bath. It happened quickly. Cuddly and Softly disappeared. I looked up one afternoon at the space where the window of the laundry used to be. I saw that the space was empty.
P. D. Hepworth, Architect
I wished, long ago, to be P. D. Hepworth, Architect.
My father cleaned out the roof gutters once a year. He went up the ladder at the end of autumn so that the gutters and spoutings could flow freely in the winter. He wore gloves and he scooped out handfuls of dirt and decaying leaves and threw them down onto the ground. The people next door didn’t clean out their gutters at all and so the gutters were choked up with leaves and soil. In some places weeds sprouted round the edges of the roof. With heavy rain the gutters quickly overflowed; water cascaded onto the garden where it washed the soil away.
The people next door were the Bonneys. They rented the house. My mother managed to convey to us that the Bonneys were inferior to us—unruly, rowdy, careless, transient and inferior. One day they would go away, go back where they belonged. Mrs Bonney, my mother said, had been married before. Divorce was not something you got in our street. Mrs Bonney wore high-heeled slippers when she went into the back garden to hang out the washing. Generally people in our street were decent and they mowed the lawns and clipped the hedges and minded their own business. Part of that business was keeping the gutters free of leaves. The Bonneys couldn’t care less; they had holes in the wire door and the house was full of flies. I expected bad things would happen to the Bonneys—Mr Bonney would die in an accident at the newspaper where he worked; the children would come bottom of the class; Mrs Bonney would have varicose veins and too many babies. Some of these things came true, and one of the girls got TB, but mostly the Bonneys prospered. The eldest boy got a Rhodes scholarship and went to Oxford, and once Mr Bonney won a new car in a raffle.
I was friends with Patricia Bonney, who was my age. We both had swap cards and we also collected love comics. My love comics were a secret at home, but Patricia shared hers with her sisters—and her mother read them too. I felt uncomfortable about Mrs Bonney reading the same stories as me. Patricia and I spent many afternoons on Patricia’s bed reading comics. We also read Reader’s Digest and National Geographic. Patricia said the National Geographics were full of stories invented by people with vivid imaginations, and these stories were illustrated with trick photography. Her father, she said, was a trick photographer who sold pictures to National Geographic. It was in one of the National Geographics I saw pictures of houses with flowers growing on the roofs.
People in Nebraska build houses from bricks they cut from the sod. The grasses on the surface of the earth create a solid pelt with an intricate web of roots. It is possible to cut chunks from the earth and build houses with the chunks which contain the seeds of flowering plants. The wide flat slabs, used for making the roof, bloom in the spring with flowers. Patricia said it was obvious the photographs were fakes. I hoped they were real; I liked the idea of flowers blooming on the roof. Whole streets of houses with gardens like bouquets and hats. Patricia said what about earthworms dropping through the ceiling. And do you want snails and centipedes crawling all over the roof all the time?
The houses in the photographs were very simple, and, apart from the flowers on the roof in springtime, they were ugly and uninviting. My own dream houses were the ones in coloured diagrams in a book about how to build houses. The best one of these was labelled ‘Bungalow at Esher, Surrey’. It had a thatched roof and dozens of small windowpanes, like a house in a fairy story. Roses grew around the door. I had never seen such a house in Australia, and I was very interested in the fact that the picture was accompanied by the architect’s working plans. This meant the house was not a fantasy. In small print along the bottom of the page it said: ‘From plans and drawings specially prepared by P. D. Hepworth, Architect’.
I wanted to go further than P. D. Hepworth; I wanted to have flowers growing wild on the thatch. I got an exercise book with blank pages. I got coloured pencils and a ruler, a pen and Indian ink. On the cover of the book I wrote: ‘P. D. Hepworth, College of Architecture, Nebraska. Plans and drawings specially prepared.’ I worked in private, alone in my bedroom. Like my love comics, the book was a secret. I didn’t tell Patricia. In the book I drew architectural pictures of houses with flowers blooming on the roof. All kinds of houses
as time went on. I signed each drawing ‘P. D. Hepworth, Architect’.
When I left home to go to college I left behind such childish treasures as P. D. Hepworth’s book of houses. I never lived at home again. Years later when I searched for the book I couldn’t find it. I wish I had it now because the woman in the apartment next to mine spends a lot of her time imagining the designs of houses. I’d like to show her the book, but really I would like to be able to look at it and let it take me back to Patricia and the love comics and the trick photography.
The woman next door is Jean. She suffers from depression, claustrophobia, agoraphobia and ringing in the ears. She is also mildly anaemic and lives, it seems to me, on tea and cigarettes. She seldom leaves her apartment, and she spends her time watching television and reading newspapers and dreaming. One of her dreams is the dream of living in a beautiful house of her own. To nourish this dream Jean studies the housing section of the newspapers and imagines the houses she could buy and live in and how she would feel. When I told her about my phase as P. D. Hepworth, Architect, it made her smile. Jean doesn’t often smile. Sometimes she asks me if I have found the book yet. I never will.
Jean tells me she has been almost cured of ringing in the ears.
‘If you are low in manganese—or that might be magnesium—you can easily get noises in the head. I had this. I used to call it ringing in the spheres because the sounds you get could be coming from somewhere in outer space. I was so tired all the time. So exhausted I couldn’t lift a duster, let alone peel a potato. Too weak and distracted with the noises in my head to light a cigarette or start an argument. Things needed doing round the house. I was married to Doug and things needed doing. Never mind growing flowers all over the roof.’ She smiled again when she said that. ‘The walls wanted painting; buy a new lounge suite; mend the door in the laundry; get the wiring done. But the less manganese I got, the louder the noises, and I just couldn’t think, couldn’t manage to do a thing. Then I went to the Chinese doctor—herbalist if you like—and now I always have the drops and the tablets and my head’s as clear as crystal. Not a sound. I’m almost cured of it. But if I let myself get low in manganese I can hear the noises coming back like some great big invisible mosquito zooming and circling and drifting in my head. Doug couldn’t stand the drama of it. We split up.’