by Glenda Adams
“Well, I wouldn’t destroy anything, people, objects.” Lark was aware she sounded like a goody-goody.
“Wouldn’t you kill Hitler?” Tom asked.
“I suppose so. Then I would be doomed, too. But that would be the price, I suppose, for saving the world. The death of an individual is nothing really, is it?”
“Then with the world as my stage, my canvas, my text, you would consciously choose to break the law, and you would destroy property. Afraid to take action, you would be suddenly bold.”
“What would I find myself doing?” Tom asked.
Donna put her chin on her hand and contemplated Tom. “You’re a hard case. You perhaps would settle down and get married and have children?”
“Me?” Tom laughed.
Lark said, a little lamely, to reassure Tom that it had not crossed her mind that he should be thinking of settling down, “I’d rather hope to find myself doing something about changing the world, contributing in some way.”
Donna looked scornful. “Very noble sentiments.”
“You can begin to contribute tomorrow, I’m speaking at the rally,” Tom announced. “You should come and hear me. I’ll teach you to take photos, and you can be the official photographer.”
“Rally?” Lark regretted, once again, her ignorance.
“Yes, really,” Tom said, and let out a few bars of his laugh.
Donna Bird raised her eyebrows. “You don’t know?” She looked at Tom from under her visor, as if to say “callow.”
“You should come,” said Tom.
“Where is it?” Lark asked.
In answer to the next questions that she was forced to ask, Tom told her, “At seven. You should be there. We need bodies. And at some stage you have to stand up for things you believe in.”
Again, after the right questions, Tom told her that there would be a party afterwards at his flat in Glebe.
While Donna and Tom discussed the speech Tom was to make at the rally, giving an American perspective on White Australia, Lark ate her meal, morsel by morsel, slowly. She felt miserable, and yet she also felt she had begun to live, and she had not even run away yet.
Even at the front gate Lark could hear the hammering. Henry Watter was at work. Again, two letters waited in the letter box, one from Champaign-Urbana for Lark, the other from the Daily Mirror for her father. From the size and thickness of the envelope Lark knew that his story had been rejected. He had never mentioned the radio contest again, and she felt she could not ask. As for Solomon Blank, she tore open his letter and read it as she walked slowly down the path to the front door.
Solomon Blank was facing a long, hot, lonely summer and could no longer do without the steady companionship of a female. He had succeeded in meeting a fairly attractive, fairly blond American, as tall as he was. They had been to New York together. “It’s the most dazzling and energetic place I’ve been to,” he wrote. “The center of the universe. You should see the real Park Avenue.” And in the postscript, he said, “Aristotle? Episode? Sometimes I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You’re home, then,” said Mrs. Watter. She was in the kitchen in her hat and coat, peeling potatoes. “I never know these days. Luckily it’s stew, rabbit, so there’s enough.”
From outside the kitchen came a squawking sound. “I had them delivered today,” said Mrs. Watter, inclining her head toward the noise. “Your father wasn’t happy about it, as you can hear, but he did build them an enclosure.” As she finished peeling each potato she threw it into a pot of water boiling on the stove. As the potato plopped into the pot, drops of water leapt out and hissed in the flame. “But he’ll love the eggs when they begin to lay. He loves a rich cake. He’s been so depressed.”
“I didn’t know,” said Lark, going to the back door.
“He hammers all the time. And he’s stopped the books altogether, all of a sudden. I don’t like it.”
At the bottom of the back steps clustered a dozen ducks, honking and squawking, trying to clamber to where Lark stood. “They’ve escaped,” said Lark.
The chicken wire strung across the backyard had come loose.
“He can’t do anything right,” said Mrs. Watter. “Go down and tell him to fix it. And then tell him to wash his hands and come to dinner.” She threw the final potato in the pot, then sighed and said, “Now I can take off my coat and hat and maybe have a quick cup of tea. I just wanted to get dinner started and over and done with. Here.” She handed Lark a basin filled with stale bread soaked in water. “That’ll make them follow you.”
Lark led the ducks, stumbling behind her, back through the chicken wire and down to the gum tree, near the rooster, which was sitting on its crate looking surprised, making a deep sound in its throat, like a growling cat. Lark tipped the bread onto the grass and the ducks fell upon it, tearing it apart with the vigor of carnivores attacking flesh.
In the basement Henry Watter was fixing hinges on the lid of his box.
“They got out of the wire,” Lark said. “It has to be fixed again.” One side of the box had now been sanded smooth and she put her hand out to stroke it.
“My ark,” whispered Henry Watter. “Le ark, as you’d say in fronsay. And that’s what it’s going to be. A lark. But it’s our secret, all right? Don’t tell your mother.”
Lark nodded, not sure what the secret was, but it did not matter, since she had never conveyed any information from one parent to the other.
Henry Watter took a wooden stake and a mallet and went out to fix the wire. “I don’t know what gets into your mother. Forte dux,” he said to Lark. “That’s Latin for forty ducks. Caesar ad-sum iam forte, Pompey ad erat.”
Lark waited for the inevitable translation and the ensuing reproach from her mother.
“Caesar had some jam for tea, Pompey had a rat,” Henry Watter shouted as he hammered the stake into the ground.
Mrs. Watter considered reference to the eating of rodents to be in the category of “language.” “Please, Henry, no language,” she said out the kitchen window.
The ducks, having finished their bread, saw Henry Watter at the wire, and with much honking they flew up the slope at him, skimming two feet above the ground. They landed on top of one another at Henry Watter’s feet, on his feet, and milled around his ankles as he worked. “Someone’ll have to clip their wings.” He kicked them away from him. “Far, far too much fauna.” He came back into the basement. “One day it’ll be kangaroos, you’ll see.”
Lark did not know what to do with the rejection from the Mirror. She could not bear to let him have it. Instead, she told him about her letter. “Solomon Blank has found a steady girlfriend,” she said. “Fairly attractive, fairly blond, tallish, and she’s American. They went to New York together.”
“You’re better off without him, Larkie, if you ask me. People from big families aren’t a safe bet. They’re too self-centered, wrapped up in their own doings, smug. They’ll let you down in the end. Those Blanks, going off all the time, with those four boys. Look.” He lifted the lid from his box and opened the paper bag that now rested beside the bolt of cloth. “Cadbury’s Caramello, Hoadley’s Violet Crumble, and Minties. Lots of sugar, for quick energy.”
Mrs. Watter was stamping at them on the kitchen floor overhead.
“Dinner,” said Lark, then, “There’s news from the Mirror.”
Henry Watter looked at her, questioning, and she shook her head. “Never mind,” he said.
“‘The mirror would do well to reflect further,’” said Lark, who had seen Cocteau’s Orphée with Tom at the university film group. She thought her father might be about to cry and hoped that a pun might cheer him up. She nevertheless went ahead up to the kitchen so that he could cry if he wanted to. But he burst into the kitchen behind her and said to Mrs. Watter, “So when do we have roast duck?”
Lark leant against the railing at the Quay, looking down into the opaque, oil-covered water. Tom was almost an hour late, and she began to worry that she wou
ld not have time for her photography lesson before her interview at the Herald. She was dressed in her air hostess outfit, with a fountain pen and pencil in the pocket of the floral blouse.
“Got tied up,” Tom said, and gave her shoulder a pat.
“It’s all right,” she said.
He looked around. “There’s a good spot for us.” He stationed Lark at the bus stop directly in front of one of the wharfs. “There’ll be all kinds of people here.” He opened up his camera and began explaining aperture, focus, shutter speed. “Take one of that old woman,” he said.
“She’s not that old,” said Lark, putting the camera to her eye and focusing. “In her forties, I’d say. Maybe fifty.”
“That’s old,” said Tom. “For a woman. As far as men are concerned, that is.”
The woman, dressed in a straight woolen skirt with a cardigan over her neat white blouse, was carrying a heavy string bag. She was talking to a young man, smiling up at him and twisting a strand of her brown hair in her finger.
Lark took the photo.
“And take the man, too,” said Tom. He showed her how to wind the film to the next frame.
Lark focused on the young man. He seemed hardly able to move his mouth to speak, and when he did, he answered the woman in monosyllables, gazing out across the harbor over her head. Lark took the picture.
“Now take one of them both. They’ll be good for a May–December scandal,” said Tom. “Isn’t it silly, a woman her age flirting. She should see how she looks.”
“Maybe it’s her son,” said Lark, and felt a terrible sorrow at the distance between that particular woman and man. “She looks very sad. And he is treating her badly.”
“Quick, get that drunk,” cried Tom.
A man had lurched out of the pub opposite and was weaving across the road to the bus stop. He had drawn out a crumpled handkerchief and was wiping his face.
Lark snapped him.
“Just take everyone waiting for a bus. Make sure you get one of everything—old, young, fat, thin, happy, sad, male, female, elegant, shabby. Get twins, if you can. Twins always come in handy. And we always need babies, and little children, groups of little children.”
Lark snapped away, using up one roll of film, learning how to change the roll, and using up two more.
“Sixty should do us,” said Tom. “I’ll develop them while you’re at your interview and I’ll show you what we’re going to do with them tonight, at the party.”
“Can I take the camera with me?” Lark asked. “It’ll make me look the part. You know, foreign correspondent.”
The editor interviewing her wore a visor like Donna Bird’s. His bald head poked up behind it, making him look as if he were wearing a shiny helmet with a white and green peak. He wore metal garters around his shirt sleeves. Lark sat down in the chair beside his desk. A young reporter brought him several sheets of copy, which he read while the young man stood rigidly beside Lark, waiting, possibly terrified. The editor finished reading, and without changing his expression he ripped the copy in two and dropped the pieces in his wastebasket. The young reporter stood for a moment longer and seemed about to speak, perhaps to ask what was wrong with the story.
“What makes you think you can be a reporter?” the editor asked. He picked up another batch of copy from his desk and looked as if he would start reading it. Lark was not sure if he was addressing her or the young reporter, but since the reporter retreated without uttering a word, she answered, “I shall have my B.A. in December,” she said. “I’m looking for a full-time job, a career.”
“Our reporters don’t need degrees.”
“I have studied French.”
“Our reporters don’t need French.”
Lark touched her camera. “I am a photographer and I have published a couple of things”—she was thinking of her letter in the student newspaper—“and I am interested in the world as a whole and I...”
“Our reporters don’t need to be interested in the world as a whole or as anything, they just have to report. And we have photographers who take the pictures.” He passed his hand over his face, brushing away the sweat without moving his visor. “Listen, girlie, you’re too educated, you’re too big for your boots. You might look like a schoolgirl, but actually you’re already too old,” he held up his hand in case Lark was about to protest, “and you’re a girl.”
Lark opened her mouth to form some retort, some reply. The man continued to hold up his hand at her.
“Our reporters start with us at sixteen and by the time they’re twenty-one, they’re old hands. And girls only get into trouble. Or they get married. Same thing. You can’t count on them. And none of my men want to work with girls.” He went back to his editing. “You’re wasting my time.”
Lark stumbled onto the street and, after walking for some time, onto the bus that took her out to the university. But when it swung around onto Glebe Point Road, she stayed on, deciding suddenly to go to Tom and cry on his shoulder. Although she had never been to his flat, she had long ago ascertained his address.
Tom was at the greengrocer’s stand squeezing tomatoes when Lark got off the bus. “I’m famous for choosing ripe tomatoes,” he said to her, apparently unsurprised by her appearance on his doorstep. “I can get them at just the right hour for a salad, and at just the right hour for a sauce. You name it. The Tomato Kid, they call me. What can you do?”
“This horrible man spent two minutes with me and insulted me and...” To her own horror and surprise, Lark started crying.
“Hey,” said Tom. He put down the tomatoes and opened his arms, and Lark let herself be folded against his shoulder. With one hand he picked out half a dozen tomatoes and motioned for the greengrocer to put them in a paper bag. “This is a stroke of luck that you came by at this moment. I need to photograph the wooden crate these tomatoes came in.” He eased Lark away from him, lifting his camera from around her neck. He gave her a pat to tell her he would be with her again in a moment, placed the tomato box on the footpath, and took several pictures of the box from various angles. He put Lark against his shoulder again, fished in his pocket with one hand and paid for the tomatoes, thanking the greengrocer for his cooperation, then led Lark across the road and up the stairs to his flat. “I’ll make you a tomato salad to knock your socks off,” said Tom.
Lark smiled a bit, then found herself laughing.
They had to step over the mail, which had been pushed under the door of the one-room flat.
Tom sat Lark on the bed. “Okay, so some asshole insulted you.” He lay down and patted the space beside him. “You didn’t learn lesson number two thoroughly.” Lark lay down. He patted her shoulder, saying “There, there,” in a soothing way.
Lark gasped out her story against his shirt.
“Jackass,” said Tom. He kissed the top of her head. “It’s a reactionary paper, anyway, the Herald.”
“I was so upset. I had to tell someone. Nobody wants me.” Lark placed her hand on Tom’s chest and turned her face up to his.
He kissed her forehead, then pushed her away. “Listen, I do have to go over my speech for tonight.” He sat up. Lark’s hand fell back to the bed. “I already developed some of the photos you took—they’re drying in the bathroom—and still have the others to do.” He sprang from the bed. “Why don’t you just wait here for a few hours and then go to the rally with us later.”
Lark went to the bathroom to wash her face. The drying prints were pegged to string that laced back and forth across the bathtub. In the tub were beer bottles, which were covered in cold water, ready for the party.
“I feel much better,” Lark said, happy to be in Tom’s presence, alone with him, in his home.
Tom was in the kitchen alcove slicing tomatoes. “First, food for thought,” he said.
Lark picked up the mail from the floor and looked for somewhere to put it. The table was awash with newspaper clippings. There was no free surface.
“Just put the letters on top of the fridge
,” said Tom. “You think this is bad, you should see Manfred Bird’s apartment.”
“What are these?” Lark was reading one of the clippings. “‘A woman who intended to ride her motorbike from Sydney to Perth put her three-month-old baby in a tomato box and tied it to the pillion seat. The baby was sunburnt and charged with being a neglected child when the mother was apprehended in Canberra.’” She waved the clipping at him.
“Ah, that’s ‘Three-month-old baby arrested and charged.’” Tom went into the bathroom and returned with a photograph Lark had taken that morning at the bus stop. “This is the baby.” He rooted around on the table until he found a picture of a motorcycle. “Motorcycle.” He pointed at the camera. “And in there is the tomato box.” He held up a brochure on Australian marsupials. “Mother confines baby in leather pouch.” And he went through the photos kept in a shoe box until he found a picture of a leather bag carried by a woman in a floral dress. “Mother, leather bag, baby. You got more than one baby this morning, didn’t you?”
Lark picked up a clipping about a snake that got out of its cage in a pet shop and ate an Angora rabbit. “Snake eats rabbit?”
Tom shook his head and pulled a face, giving her the thumbs down.
“Man eats rabbit?”
Tom turned his thumbs up. “You got it. Father eats daughter’s Easter pet.”
Lark ran to the bathroom and brought back a picture of the lurching drunken man she had photographed. The handkerchief made him look as if he was dabbing at his mouth, having eaten a hearty meal. “Father?”
Tom held up a picture of a rabbit. “Rabbit.”
“But why?” Lark moved close to him to view the rabbit. She touched his elbow lightly.
Tom shrugged. “Strange but True will never know. Donna and I get all the small-town newspapers and odd brochures that we can and just lift suitable stories. I change them of course. It’s quite creative really. The pay is good enough for vagabonds like Donna and me.” He stepped away from Lark into the kitchen alcove and took the letters that Lark had put on the fridge and held one up. “Our latest check, from Strange but True. It’s beating the capitalists at their own game. It could also be called new approaches to conceptual art. We can do much more if you join us. You can have the photo credits for the lot you did today. The Herald will be sorry they let you slip through their fingers.”