Rose pushed her shoulders back in response and stomped her foot down because she could and he couldn’t. ‘Clean it off,’ she said. And then, ‘Clean it off now.’
It was, perhaps, the first thing she had ever demanded of him, and she got stuck on repeat, saying it more than a few times just because she couldn’t believe that she had said it at all.
‘No.’ He said it calmly, like he had been waiting all this time for her to object and had already decided that anything she might say was absolutely wrong anyway.
‘But why? Why cause so much trouble? So much nonsense. Why? What’s the point?’
‘Because it is important.’
‘Why?’
‘To stand up for yourself. It is important. To stand…it is important.’ And as if to emphasise the point he just stood there. Arms folded, staring at her.
‘But why? This isn’t the way to stand up for yourself. This is nothing. It’s juvenile.’
It made Rose feel dizzy to be talking to Antonio like this – like being at a great height without a rail to hold you back. She had always been the quieter one, the first to back off and give his voice space. She adored him too much, and he spent too much time protecting her. Now, rather late in the game, when they had things to discuss, they didn’t possess the kind of language that would allow them to sit down and talk to each other with the ease of two human beings on the same level.
‘You know what I mean,’ Rose said.
He looked away angry, distracted. His focus was on the cracked paint in the corner of their ceiling. There, right there before her, angrily avoiding her eyes, was the man she’d met at eighteen and thought she knew better than she knew herself. Here he was in the guise of someone who was angry and afraid and confused; she looked at him now and thought he had a kind of ravaged quality she had never seen in him before.
‘You don’t know anything about it,’ he said at length. ‘You don’t know anything.’
That’s when the silence set in, a silence so deep that it took over what had always been a house full of noise. The absence of sound became something so heavy in the air that you could almost touch it, feel it. The silence was everywhere creeping into the curtains, weighing down the couch cushions, withering the leaves of the zucchini plants in the backyard.
Under the weight of all that silence Rose turned and left.
More and more her present was becoming similar to her past, and not like the future she had imagined. Here she was living with Lucy again in a strange, older version of her younger self. Her adult life, her relationship with her husband, a picture of a boat in the front yard, had threatened to immobilise her.
So, at the end of a week in which the entire Martone family was left feeling wounded and silent, Rose was at Lucy’s house. And here, on the news, on the television that sat in the corner of Lucy’s living room, Rose recognised something else from the past – the old kitchen block Lucy and she used to work in. She remembered the uniform she used to wear, the gloves, the apron, the pinafore that held her body tightly in place, the stray hairs falling from the boundaries of her hairnet, and the thought of all that made her smile.
There used to be a garden, right behind where that razor wire was now. The New Australians used to help grow herbs and tomatoes and pumpkins there for the kitchen staff to use in their cooking. She still remembered the Spanish and Polish and Greek words for things. Pepino, ziemniak, vasilikós. She would trade a word in English for a word in another tongue when she picked things with the residents. Cucumber for pepino, basil for vasilikós. That’s where she’d met Antonio.
‘How do you say this?’ he would ask her, holding up a potato or a sprig of mint.
‘Potato.’
She would watch him think about it, the word, watch him rolling it over on his tongue before he released it from his mouth fully formed, ‘potato’.
Now, the camera cut to a shot of three men on the roof of that building she remembered so fondly. It went closer, closer, until it showed their dark hair and large begging eyes. They sat cross-legged in faded T-shits and jeans, their fat lips sewn together with dark thread. Now, the camera moved out again to a long shot of the buildings that had been burned down in the riots of previous months. Now, it focused on a child standing there, looking up expressionless at the men on the roof. Now, the camera took a close-up of the razor wire bent like a corkscrewed silver earring. Now, it was focusing on the pink-glossed lips of the reporter outside. She flicked her blond hair and raised her eyebrows from the television screen as if to say, ‘what are we supposed to do with all of this?’
‘Sometimes I can’t believe that place is the same place we worked in.’ Rose had said it as a thought but somehow it had come out of her mouth. Lucy was purse-lipped. Her butter hair fell around her face as she lifted her teacup up to take a sip.
‘It’s almost not the same place. The Nissen huts are gone. There’s only a few of those old brick buildings that used to be around in our time.’
Rose watched Lucy sip her tea and thought of her back then, cigarette in hand, stirring a pot of something in the kitchen of the hostel, wearing her sex on the outside for all to see.
‘Do you remember that family, the Spanish one that was in all the photos? That woman, what was her name? She looked like Audrey Hepburn with pinned-back dark glossy curls and all her children in starched white pinafores?’
‘Those ones? Of course. They were in everything. Everything. All the brochures they put out, whenever they needed something in the newspaper. They were the most beautiful-looking lot. They were right up there with those cowboys on the “Australia: Land of Tomorrow!” posters. I guess that’s how they got everyone here, with promises of good-looking strangers. Like a nightclub.’
Villawood was the start of Rose’s new life. To her it was the opposite of a nightclub – more like a village somewhere in a European town far away. Compared to Surry Hills, the place seemed endless and green, rural almost, a calm blue-green whirl. It wasn’t people on top of people, crammed up in terraces and apartment blocks. Even with all the people that were there, there was more of a sense of order. The Nissen huts sat in neat rows, the migrants stood in straight lines, there was no noise after nine.
And then what? Rose watched as Lucy yawned and turned the volume up on the television. ‘It was different then,’ she said.
‘Not so different.’ Lucy replied. ‘Remember? There were protests back then too. Remember the residents went on hunger strikes, same as they do now. They had the same strategy as the government does today, you tell people where they can and can’t go, you don’t let them cook their own food, you take away their choices, you make it difficult for them to find their own home somewhere, you don’t allow them any responsibility, you just tell them to wait for something that you won’t explain or define and you don’t tell them how long that waiting will be. And then you make them wait and wait some more until they start to break down and go mad and they sew their lips together because there’s nothing else they have left and then we put them on the TV knowing they look a bit like Frankenstein and that lets everyone turn away because they don’t look quite human and we allow ourselves to forget that people from other places are human too.’
Outside they heard the screeching of tires again. This time neither of them got up to look out the window and see what had happened. Rose looked at Lucy in a sideways kind of way that said, ‘I am looking at you but I don’t want you to notice.’ This was one of those moments when she was reminded that Lucy always seemed more worldly than her, like she had spent so much longer thinking about the ways that the universe worked, and had reached all her conclusions a long time ago.
And to confirm what Rose was thinking Lucy added, ‘That’s what pushes people over the limit, when they are pushed back from adulthood and squeezed into some kind of juvenile form.’
But Rose looked at the people behind the razor wire and knew that everything had been different back then. She knew this for sure. She had been there in that k
itchen, in that garden.
‘But we wanted them back then,’ she said.
‘Wanted them and in another way we didn’t want them.’
‘But we didn’t lock them up. They came and went.’
Briefly, Lucy turned her head from the television and faced Rose, a look of quizzical irritation on her face. ‘But you weren’t there. Not really. Not in there. Ask Antonio, he knows what I’m talking about.’
Rose felt jealous – not because of any shared devotion between Antonio and Lucy, but because they shared this piece of history of which she wasn’t a part. There were people who had been in there and those who had not. She recognised something, a kind of knowing between Lucy and her husband, that she had never recognised before. Sometimes she forgot the place was also the start of Lucy’s new life when her family had arrived from Poland, just like it was for Rose, but in a way that was not at all the same.
On the television a man behind the razor wire turned and faced Rose, looked at her directly in the eyes and said, ‘If you Australians think that I am an animal, then tell me that I am an animal so that I come to think of myself as an animal and don’t expect to be treated like a human.’
Rose had to get out for some air.
Outside her house looked unfamiliar again. On the pavement there was the refuse left by people who had come to watch the show that was her current life: a Pauline Hanson poster ripped in two, a beer can, a white plastic chair.
Something she is sure was true: when she was about twenty, nineteen maybe, she had sneaked into Antonio’s section of one of the Nissen huts and got caught there in a storm. Everything in those huts was bigger, louder, hotter than it was on the outside, so that when it rained it was like being trapped in the eye of a tornado. She had sat on his bed while Antonio sat on the chair beside it. Behind him, the curtain that separated his space from the man next door shook in rhythm to the rain landing on the uninsulated tin roof above it. They had sat in silence. The awkwardness of a young woman sitting alone on a foreigner’s bed hanging in the air until a flash of lightning through the doorway turned the outside into a brief, vivid white. Then they both started to laugh. It was Rose first, mostly because of the look of terror in Antonio’s eyes. It startled her. The nervous laughter came straight from the awkwardness sitting deep down in her guts. The lightning might have been the punchline for some kind of long and complicated joke no one understood. When they were through laughing, they talked about the future, about the possibility of having a future together in some place that was not here, and for the first time the storybook idea of it became something that was almost real. After the storm had passed Rose had sneaked back to the kitchen. Later, they would learn that the lightning had struck one of the other Nissen huts, sending electric currents across the inside of its roof and causing a spooked young woman to run, scandalously half-dressed, out into the rain.
Now she walked over to her house slowly, alone. The lights from the apartment building next door lit up the empty rooms that hovered in the skyline above. They were like spotlights from a movie set, lighting up the darkness on the main stage that was her home. For a moment she could imagine what it would be like to watch this whole story unfolding from her television set, in some other space somewhere that felt more like home.
24.
The Martone women, they were slightly unreal. There was something about them that was never grounded in the actual world as everyone else experienced it. Of late, Francis had been wondering if there was something more wrong with them than whatever was wrong with his father.
Today, he had escaped from his mum standing on a milk crate at the side of their house so that she could peer through the window of her own home from the outside, from his father sitting at the kitchen table nodding attentively to a guy who looked like a skinhead, from a giant boat painted on the concrete of his front yard, and from people hanging out on the pavement in front of his house who wouldn’t move to let him back his car out so that he could get to work on time. And then, as if things couldn’t get any shittier, as if the universe had arrived to tell him in no uncertain terms that he was definitely its biggest loser, he’d arrived at his sister’s house only to be greeted with the shocking fact that his sister, of all people, got laid much more often than he did.
Francis was in the living room downstairs, waiting for her to finish her business upstairs with someone Clare’s flatmate referred to as ‘the guy who comes to hang out in Clare’s bedroom from time to time’ – wink wink – but he was not really interested in explaining it all to Francis; he was busy staring at the television where the face of the umpire who was apparently ripping off his team kept flashing up to a lot of angry booing.
Francis sank himself into the couch and read the posters on the wall. The place was a strange cross of bachelor pad with female uni student share house. There was a Man U poster, signed and framed, and a set of matching orange posters from something called The Best Books series. The boring-looking heads of people no one cared about stared down at him as he read the quotes that summed them up: ‘What a woman needs is a room of her own’. Yep, what a man needed was a home of his own.
With the difference in their ages, he’d never really gotten to know his sister that well. He’d been eleven when she’d left home at eighteen to live in what his father had called ‘The Commune’ someplace near to where she studied. He still remembered the fights back then about her leaving, and then the fights when she did come home to visit with dirty hair and no bra and all that talk of politics and things his father didn’t agree with and he didn’t understand. It was like all of a sudden she’d become cool and adult-like and she had all these friends. Not like before, when she was in high school and he understood her a little bit better as being like one of the girls in his class who hung out with the other kids who were only stuck together by the fact that they were all losers. He remembered her as hanging out back then with other girls whose hair was too frizzy. They had sat in her bedroom on a Saturday night, eating peanut-butter crackers till the gunk got stuck in their braces, and they’d read each other love poems and sing love songs like they were written especially for them. Clare had been geeky, nerdy. She’d lived in books and she quoted things at the family all the time, as if all those writers could stand in for her own lack of personality. He’d always felt a certain superiority over her, even when he was eleven, purely because he wasn’t totally socially inept.
But now she was a different kind of beast. She had style, she went to nice bars. She’d developed the ability to hold an actual conversation with people. She possibly wasn’t even a teacher anymore. She had sex. Who knew when that had all started? He hadn’t been paying attention and something had happened while he’d been looking away.
He heard footsteps coming down the stairs and looked up to see his sister, but instead there was a tall thin guy with messed up red hair. He looked like he belonged in some kind of 80s rock band. He wore a faded shirt with a picture of the earth and the words, ‘It’s getting hot in here!’ written underneath. He paused to tie up the laces of his Converse at the bottom of the stairs and nodded at Francis and the flatmate sitting there on the couch.
‘What’s the score?’
‘Two-nil.’
‘Better luck next time,’ he said and walked himself straight out the door.
Without breaking his eyes from the television, Clare’s flatmate said, ‘Give it a few minutes. She’ll come down for toast and a bottle of wine and you can catch her before she disappears upstairs again. Best kind of flatmate. Goes to work. Comes home. Disappears into her room. I call her the phantom in stilettos.’
And sure enough, ten minutes later Clare emerged down the stairs. Not a hair out of place. She was looking straight forward at the wall like she was thinking of something else until she caught Francis’ eyes and stopped.
‘Oh shit,’ she said, and nothing else, before pausing for a long time there, holding the railing. ‘What are you doing here?’
Francis wasn�
�t sure by the tone of her voice if that meant ‘what are you doing here?’ as in he wasn’t wanted, or ‘what are you doing here?’ as in she was surprised to see him, or ‘what are you doing here?’ as in she was glad that he had finally come.
‘I was just around. Had to get out of the house. You know. All sorts of crazy there. Thought things would be less crazy here.’ He couldn’t help smiling and he knew it was that smile that made her turn red underneath her high cheekbones.
‘How about we get out of here?’ she said. ‘Go get a drink or something. My shout.’
‘Sure. Whatever. Sounds good.’
Outside, Cleveland Street was starting to get busy, even on a Wednesday night. People were dressed up and ready to go. Clare took him to that kind of bar in the city where you pay too much to sit on mismatching chairs and drink cocktails from old jam jars and tomato soup cans.
‘Nice,’ he said when she sat down at their table with a bunch of tacos in a plastic basket and two Bloody Marys in old soup cans.
‘Nice,’ he said again because he didn’t really know where to start just being out, being casual like this with a stranger he was related to. He lit a cigarette, stirred his drink with the celery stick that came with it.
‘You think it’s wanky.’
‘Yeah.’ But he quickly added, ‘It’s nice too, you know, to be here with you.’
She nodded. He was always better at being nice than she was. He watched her look away at the couple sitting next to them, and thought for the first time that she was actually quite beautiful. She had their mother’s strong jaw and smooth peachy skin.
She looked back at him, tapped her nails against the table, looked a bit like she had something real important she was going to say.
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