Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  ‘I smoked with a baby on board.’

  ‘But you were only a baby yourself. And how is Eli?’

  ‘I’m not sure I know, but he’s bound to be fixing the world wherever he is right now. Mothers are the last to hear.’

  ‘Oh, I fixed the world once,’ Vance laughs, ‘only it broke again.’ He pats down his fine, dark baby hair onto the balding head underneath.

  ‘Yes, I remember your turn at fixing,’ I say. ‘You had a lot of fun at it, but I suppose the world can only be fixed so many times before it’s so stuffed it has to be chucked out.’

  ‘Well, we had a jolly good go at chucking it out, Bel, but it was too big to fit in the bin!’

  ‘So you reckon it’s going to chuck us out instead?’

  ‘Seriously,’ he picks up the pin tray from his desk and turns it round and round slowly in the very wide span of his fingertips – I used to draw Vance’s hands when he wasn’t looking, their hugeness makes their fluid and able articulation stand out, ‘I think we’ve got a while yet. We make progress. We learn a lot. We might be much more powerful wreckers than ever before, but we’re also much more powerful thinkers. I’m sanguine about the future. The young are adaptable. The ones I’ve met have good ideas. I don’t like all this doom and gloom crap.’

  He puts down the pin tray and sits down, tenting his fingertips under his chin.

  I’d forgotten how pro-science Vance is. It’s his religion and he’s trying to cheer me up with it. ‘Some of the young are very good communicators,’ he says.

  ‘And some of them not so good. My lot never answer their phones. I’m trying to find out if Nin knows about David without upsetting the apple cart. Sometimes she makes it bloody impossible not to.’

  ‘Oh yes, Nin. Gee, have we been talking about her father here – that louse who vandalised your show…and your poor sister, I seem to remember?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’ve been too good to him. Did he ever get round to helping you bring up Nin?’

  ‘What do you reckon? He was a great nuisance. He’s never been capable of bringing up a kid. I was never able to get proper custody of Nin because he’d make it so difficult, threatening to counter-sue then withdrawing the threat then tormenting us with phone calls at every fluctuation of his mood. When we moved away after Allegra died I had my phone number privately listed and he didn’t have the nous to find out how to contact us. Apparently – after having resisted learning to drive for years – he went out and got his licence, drove up to the area where we were, drove around like a maniac for a while, couldn’t find us, ran out of money and drove back to Melbourne. By the time he got back, the car was undrivable. Anyway, he only ever had an intermittent income, we were better off not being tormented by him and he didn’t have the living skills to persevere with a custody case.’

  ‘Does it matter that he’s going to die?’

  ‘Well, no doubt it does to him!’

  ‘But to you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I really don’t know how I feel about David – all I can think of is the word “dreadful”, and that refers to my state of mind. We tried to have a relationship with him when we came back to live in Melbourne again, but it was pretty soul-destroying. By the most rotten of coincidences, my mother and David have birthdays within a week of each other: we tried, with disastrous consequences, having a joint celebration, but the tensions would start the moment the arrangements were made – David would be coming, then he wouldn’t be coming, then he’d swear off coming, but the moment we were all seated in the restaurant, he’d turn up with a bottle of plonk and sit down beside “my daughter” and Mum would primp up her lips and start to snipe. They’d squabble – a couple of times we were thrown out of restaurants and then taxi drivers would see a fight in progress and wouldn’t pick us up.’

  ‘What? Real physical fighting?’

  ‘Yeah. She’d slam into him with her handbag and he’d start kicking her in the shins. It was dreadful. Poor Nin would spend the month of May in tears and I’d spend it trying to comfort her while David either behaved like a pint-sized Rottweiler or, to make things up to her, bought books or carefully chosen artwork. By the time Nin’s birthday rolled around in October, there’d be competing invitations, disjointed noses and more weeping. Nin and I would do mutual strengthening exercises and sometimes we’d plan to leave them to it. “Let them tear each other apart,” we’d say, “then we won’t have to put up with them anymore.” And we’d fantasise a restaurant scene in which Stella and David created mayhem and were carted off by the police and flung into jail for a long time while we went to Paris. “Would we visit them?” we’d ask each other and say, “Nah!” and curl our lips and shake our heads.

  ‘A couple of Christmases ago, Nin’s partner’s mother, who’s a climate-change activist, bought David a barometer and he said, “What do I want one of those for? I don’t care about the bloody weather.” The partner’s mother yelled out, “Well, you ought to!” And he yelled back, “Don’t tell me what to think, you stupid twerp!” And the Christmas lunch that Nin had prepared was wrecked. He’s just a walking antagonism.’

  ‘You’ve been much too tolerant, Bel. It’s ridiculous.’

  He’s right, so I change the subject and we talk for a while about his family. Suzanne and Vance couldn’t have children, so they adopted two of them. I don’t really know the younger one, but the elder is a daughter called Lexie. She’s now over forty and runs a vineyard in the hills above the Yarra Valley with her husband. After the drought had been going for five years, Lexie and her husband thought about a second income stream and built a storage facility into the hillside under their crop and I store with them. I was up there recently putting away the remnant of pictures from my show and I had lunch with Lexie at her cellar-door restaurant.

  ‘It’s not common knowledge that I store with Lexie,’ I say to Vance. ‘I’m under attack again for the ownership of my father’s paintings and they’d pounce on me if they knew I stored them in a fire-prone area.’

  ‘But they’re bloody good storage facilities, Bel. I’m not just saying that because of Lexie. You know, they’ve been very thorough: they’ve got climate control, security cameras and you couldn’t beat their rack system, it’s terrific. It’s state of the art.’

  ‘Oh yes, I know that, Vance, but just for now, it would be better not to reveal that my father’s pictures are up there.’

  ‘Well, you’d go a long way to find storage as good as Lexie’s. It’s full of safety features. The family are planning to sit out a fire there if they get caught. Truly, it’s that safe.’

  ‘Do you still have your bush patch up there, Vance?’

  ‘Sure. Although it’s pretty weedy these days. I haven’t seen the profusion of orchids we used to get for a long while.’

  ‘No rain.’

  ‘No fire. That’s what makes them germinate.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, there’s bound to be a fire. You can’t go this long without water and not have a major fire.’

  ‘Twenty-four years since the last one.’

  ‘Gosh yes. Remember that dust storm? I was here that day, the sun was just a little red patch in a dirt-coloured sky and it was raining flaming gum trees all over the city.’

  ‘We can expect more like that.’

  ‘Climate change?’

  ‘Yes. They’re predicting much fiercer weather events. The statistics have changed.’

  ‘It’s not because we’re better at measuring than we used to be?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘The core samples and the data coincide. The weather’s changed.’

  ‘Everything’s changing. The world at the top of the Faraway Tree keeps moving on. It used to be really free here in our day, didn’t it? I mean in this building. You didn’t have to pussyfoot about with secret numbers to punch into doors. We shared. We were optimistic, open. Now science has become a business. How do you feel about that?’

  He pulls meditatively on his earlobe and says, ‘Inevitable.�
��

  ‘I don’t think that’s how you used to feel. I thought you were pretty passionately for an open environment in science.’ He was, I know, because he used to lead debates about it.

  ‘We lost that argument. And anyway, people who’ve got talent in making science pay made it pay. We were so strapped for funds before that happened we couldn’t have done anything like what we’ve managed after setting up the new system. It’s not as if discoveries are kept secret indefinitely; there’s a time limit on withholding information.’ His calm voice has developed a crack in it. ‘Look, Isobel,’ he continues, tapping the tented fingertips together again – so stiffly, he never had stiff fingers in the past – and leaning towards me earnestly, ‘Selling stuff is one thing; science is another…’

  I leap in…why do I always leap in? But my mouth is saying before I can stop it, ‘I know they’re different species, Vance, but one has compromised the other. Marketing is the orchid and science the delving fungus on which it feeds. The fungus doesn’t need the orchid.’

  The new crack in Vance’s voice is a hard, sad, crack, like a neat, smacked, one-run cricket ball. He used to hit sixes and make hundreds at every innings. ‘I’m sorry Vance, but I feel we’ve been robbed of something.’

  ‘But Bel, research takes investment, and investment needs money, heaps of money. We can’t just doodle along and say, “Oh, look, this is a good doodle”…’

  ‘Like I do.’

  ‘No Bel, you’re an artist.’

  ‘It’s not a job you get paid for. And I often wonder what it is I do, Vance. In terms of world enterprise and contribution to the great “going forward” of humankind?’

  ‘Paint pictures. I can’t paint pictures for nuts. And you’re a clever person, Bel, the world needs clever people.’

  ‘Not clever artists.’

  ‘Your work has more meaning than you think. Remember all those ideas we had way back when? They’ve borne fruit. Who’d have thought you could go from looking at the interaction between a plant seed and a fungus to mapping cell-surface markers on breast cancers? We learned a lot about nature’s tricks with our little model.’

  ‘But you could have done all that without me.’

  ‘That’s just what I couldn’t have done. The point is that I did it with you. We did it together. And now you’re doing what you alone can do. Look at it this way – ideas are parasites on people. You can be a person without having any ideas but you’re a person with them. Think of orchids as marvellous experiments in life forms. They are, you know. They’re authentic beings.’

  I used to enjoy spending my life in the company of clever people like Vance. Clever pursuits take your mind off grief. Making discoveries is joyful. The sap rises and splashes through your brain when experiments reveal good thinking and Ariadne’s thread leads you on to do it again. It doesn’t work like that in art. The will to create comes in spurts and unless you can live with your art obsessively and all the time, it comes out in spurts and not as a considered, long-term pursuit. To be a good artist you have to work at it constantly; the best art grows continually and smoothly and not in spurts. You come to a point where the dialogue has to be continuous or it is damaged. My life’s not right for the continuous dialogue. Living around Stella is like flying a plane with felt propellers. I have to pretend a different reality to find my concentration.

  There were no places vacant with the Protestants except the one that refused us.

  I’ve tried the Anglicans twice. After all, she’s an Anglican. I still can’t get out of my mind the place that looked like a converted garage; it makes you wonder about the accreditation laws that Narrowlea is closing down rather than this place. I’d hesitate to put a human being in there for any reason. I realise this about the Anglicans: they care for the very poor and the very rich – people like my mother they leave to the Protestants. The second Anglican hostel I saw was far too expensive.

  So that left us with the Baptists, the Jews and the Catholics. The Baptists weren’t taking and if they were, they’d want an arm and a leg by way of deposit. The Jewish home was frenetic: an old business woman with dementia was joy-riding the lift and circulating through the lounge rooms, checking ‘the staff’. ‘The staff’ were, by and large, holocaust survivors. There’s a place at the Jewish home but I have to admit that this is not my mother’s cultural milieu.

  There are a hundred people to rehouse from Narrowlea. I’ve scouted the entire neighbourhood within a twenty kilometre radius of home for vacant places and found four. There are two places with the Catholics. First, I rushed to the Catholic home near Narrowlea and practically collided with another woman doing the same thing. This was a nice home and I would willingly have taken the place, but I felt I ought to defer to the other seeker because she has a father to place and her mother is in the nursing home over the road from this hostel, so I ended up ringing the second Catholic home, Holy Redeemer.

  Holy Redeemer is further away but has ‘full facilities for ageing in place’ and has a vacancy. So here we are at their activities day.

  I’ve developed a need for a view, or a taste, anyway, since the need can’t be met. When we lived at Reg Sorby’s retreat, we could see the Great Dividing Range spreading in all directions, north-westerly to distant plains and south-easterly, plunging and rising, a vast dolphin pod, to the invisible coast. Eagles and swifts would soar above the dark clustered canopy and in my heart I would soar with them, so sure was I that flying creatures love to fly.

  Yet sometimes it was too grand for me, that view, the cumulus rising up and up until it seemed crowned by an empurpled sun-shaft-hurling Queen Victoria whose chariot wheels seemed apt to grind the mountains down under her dominion.

  It’s easy to feel like that when you’re Australian, especially an Australian of polyglot origins – half of them British – as most Australians are. God alone knows how the Aboriginals feel and have felt through two hundred years of it. Imagine Queen Victoria living the life of an Aboriginal…well, you can’t, she didn’t and that’s the point.

  Funny that Queen Victoria was only five feet tall and yet threw such a shadow across the empire on which the sun never set. Ridiculous really, one of the ludicrous facts of history. A fact that warped the grand vista – painters like David and Gros are to blame in their apotheosis of that other short person who threw a long shadow, Napoleon, back in the days when it could be said that what painters did spoke for the way people carried the great world in their heads.

  For me, a simple view from a window into a garden can be enough, like looking out from Mick’s sitting room in the country to catch sight of a ginger-brown butterfly in liquid sunlight delighting in moving air over new-mown lawn. Looking out makes me forget myself and want to enter the view, have it in my pores, be it – perhaps that’s why I think this aged care place is such a good one. It’s on a high knoll above a green park down in the dell beneath. Here and there are stands of white-trunked eucalypts, the sort that lose their bark in spring, exposing a delicate green tracery, like the lees of broken bubbles. You can see remnants of a Federation garden; old palm trees up the drive to the house are yanked up like schoolgirls’ ponytails in intricate braids with teased-out tips.

  But I stand alone at windowsills; Stella isn’t interested in views. She’d rather look at the appointments and the furniture. We are in the manager’s office. ‘Nice old desk,’ she says, blowing her ever-dribbling nose and raising the drape rosettes that used to be her eyebrows.

  ‘Did you like da room, Stella?’ booms the manager, an explosive Dutchman called Kees.

  ‘Oh it was right enough. But I’m not a Catholic,’ and she fidgets with a Kleenex in as Anglican a fashion as she can.

  ‘Nor am I,’ he booms again, a man with no control on his volume knob. ‘I’m an atheist. Da sisters say prayers for me but it makes no difference. You don’t have to be Catholic to be in here. Da point is, did you like da room?’

  ‘Oh it’s nice, yes. But there’s a man’s clothes in it.�
�

  ‘Oh, well we’ll have to rustle him up to come and keep you company,’ he cackles.

  Not to be outshouted, Stella erupts angrily, ‘THERE WAS A MAN’S SUIT IN IT, you oaf.’

  ‘All right, all right. We just hadn’t removed dat suit. We ought to have, but people don’t always get around to what dey ought to do.’

  ‘I ought to pull your nose!’ She would, too, if she were steadier on her feet: she pulled the nose of her GP-before-last when he said she was passive-aggressive.

  ‘Mumma,’ I say, ‘it’s a nice room. It has a little garden you can look out onto. And, really Mumma, it’s the nicest room I’ve seen.’

  ‘BUT IT WAS A MAN’S ROOM.’

  I bend closer to her, bringing her eyes in line with mine, ‘Well, how about we just try it for a start, eh? There was a dear little sitting room nearby where we can make tea and there’s a television, a radio and a piano in there. I think the people here know how to live in groups, not like Narrowlea…’

  ‘But they’re all nuns and priests!’

  ‘Only some of them. There are lots of folk in here like you too.’

  She has mutilated the Kleenex and her eyes are glistening.

  ‘But what about the petrol?’ The bottom lip quivers, like the lip of a child who is going to wet its pants with fear.

  ‘Never mind the petrol.’

  ‘What about the poor car?’

  ‘You needn’t feel sorry for the car, Mumma. The point is if you don’t like the room, we’ll have trouble finding another one as nice. Look, you’ll have your own little bathroom and they can supply you with a very comfy chair and you’ll be able to watch whatever telly programs you like, or look at some of your books or look out onto the garden…’