I will live, I will live, I think I will live.
‘Hurry up, lovey,’ goes Mick in an unfriendly way that hurts my feelings and when I catch up with him, he shoves a wire arrangement for saucepan lids intended for the back of a kitchen cupboard into my arms when what I need is a reassuring full body hug and it’s too much, I just start crying. He pretends he hasn’t noticed and plunges on to the home office section, so I just drop this saucepan lid rack noisily and sob on the spot.
‘Where am I going to paint?’ I moan, when he comes back to hassle me onward.
‘Lov-ey!’ He picks up the wire arrangement and shoves it back into my arms. I want to drop it again.
‘I’m sick of the sight of your back!’ I sob. ‘At least have the decency to walk beside me.’
‘Why don’t you just keep up?’
‘You think I’m putting it on, don’t you? You think I really can stand being in here, don’t you? I’m not Greta Garbo, you know. I haven’t got a great big coat up to my cheekbones and dark glasses.’
‘What are you on about?’
‘Fuck! What am I going to do with that corner bookshelf of hers, with the bridge chair and the hall table from Narrowlea? Where will they go? There’s nowhere for them to go!’
‘Forget them! We’re buying a workstation. We’ll worry about the other stuff later.’
‘This is later! Oh, it’s all later. All these people trying to make homes inside jam jars! Where am I going to paint?’
He doesn’t answer. He’s found the workstation set up and he’s looking for someone to write out the docket for him. But they’re all turning the other way, going on tea break, answering phones or not there at all.
I slump to the floor.
‘Lov-ey, lov-ey???’
I haven’t really fainted. Do you know how it is when you haven’t really fainted? You just can’t quite stand up because your legs won’t do it and your head won’t let you.
‘Sorry,’ I mutter and sit up while people walk around me, staring.
The floor of Hell will be hard as this and covered in arrows that only show the way to more of the same. I slobber over the bottom chromium rail of the information station, reminding myself of similar slobbers as a child on the chromium rails on the backs of bus seats. I’m the sort of child who spoils everything for the others. I’m too much, even for myself. Some school headmistress inside me hauls me upwards to stare myself in the face and tell me what a naughty girl I’ve been and that I’ll never get on. But where will I paint? And what? Jumble? Junk? The Jamsjö table lamp?
I pat Mick’s upper arm. ‘Don’t worry,’ I mumble, ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’ And now there’s someone at the desk, writing and ignoring my tantrum. What would be cheaper – rent storage space or rent a studio? I can’t afford to do either. I’m utterly sick of having no room to stand back and survey what I’m doing, of having no means of transporting a large canvas from A to B without having to dismantle a room and set it up again.
I’m utterly sick.
‘Sorry,’ I say as Mick whoomps off crankily through the Circles of Sloth, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger and Heresy, the outer, middle and inner rings of Violence, through the eight Evil Pockets of Fraud, the four rounds of Treachery to the basement to where Satan’s minions are checking the sinners out onto the dock from which the large items come sliding out on unslobbered-on chromium trolleys preparatory to loading them onto roof racks of cars that then roll down the concrete ramps and out into the starry, starry night. Well, less than starry, starry night, glowering and granular as it is with pollution and summer drought.
I’ve behaved very badly.
I visit a shrink occasionally to cope with feelings like these. I promised him that I’d up the dose of antidepressant when I felt like spitting the dummy, so, apologising to Mick for my break-out of rottenness, I crack another half tablet, forge my way into my studio, burrow for a sketchbook and spend the evening recording Hell from memory. But Mick doesn’t get it and it doesn’t put Hell out of my system and I’ve been instructed, again by my shrink, to avoid going to Hell. My obsession with Hell is ruining my life. ‘There is no Hell,’ says the shrink as I sit in his Hellish consulting rooms in a Hellish chair, gazing upon a Hellish sofa and wondering if anyone of his patients is gauche enough to lie in that cold, dark, leather-studded place and put aside the ignominy of using a fellow creature’s flesh to make it – indeed countless fellow creatures’ flesh to mass-produce it – and imagine instead that they are in the exalted presence of Freud. (Whose presence was just a bearded old shortsighted bloke with an Eastern rug over his lumpy-looking sofa, anyway.)
Oh, Lasciata ogni speranza voi ch’entrate. Oh, Abandon all hope ye who enter ‘Here’!
‘Here’ is where the past gets put in its place. Here, the past was yesterday. Here, today is the beginning of the rest of your life. Here, nothing was made before today.
There is no history anymore.
‘Here’ used to be ‘now’ and ‘with me’, but now nothing is more immediate than ‘Here’, because ‘Here’ is today. It throbs with news, is pregnant with tomorrow, but never quite gives birth to it. Today exists in contradistinction to everything that is past. Even shop windows are past. Ikea doesn’t have them; it just puts you straight in with the muck.
No, Isobel, no, it doesn’t matter. Smile. It wasn’t meant to be like that. It’s never meant to be like that. Every action has unintended consequences. Life is full of ironies that nobody anticipates. And that’s the point of an irony, isn’t it? There’s Ariadne’s thread to take you through Ikea and you’re an idiot for letting go of it.
But I’ve made Mick cross and now he has driven off to the country in a temper and I don’t blame him. He isn’t usually temperamental. He’s generally patient and stands by me in all the tedious things I have to do. I don’t know where I’d be without Mick.
It is Saturday today. I’m wishing for Mick to return. I’m nervous about it because on Thursday something very unnerving happened. A man came knocking at my door; at first I didn’t know what he wanted but he was clearly furious. I thought maybe, in my absent-mindedness, I’d parked him in or a branch had fallen off the over-large tree in my front yard and dented his car, or his kid, or his wife, or, or…
He was waving a paper around in my face. ‘What is it?’ I asked. He was Chinese-looking and his English wasn’t very good.
‘Look! Look!’ Banging the paper with the back of his stiff open hand. I’m always wary when lone men come knocking, thinking they can see that there isn’t a man around to defend me bodily. I’ve always had to defend myself from predators, and there’ve been plenty of them right from the time I was a very young mother with a little child. Whatever neighbourhood I’ve lived in, posh or poor, there have always been predators and I’ve always been their object – small, female, defenceless, even though in my heart I’m brave and fearless and perfectly able to defend myself.
On the other hand, if that’s how I’ve seemed to men, to women I must have seemed strong and protective because I’ve sheltered frightened girls from fathers and frightened wives from husbands while abuse lurked on the far side of my door – remembering this, I took hold of the paper, the man still grasping one side of it as if he feared I’d rush off and destroy it.
‘Bastard not pay,’ he said. ‘I find this address.’
‘Oh.’ I could see Eli’s name written on the page. ‘A residential agreement?’ I asked.
‘Rent. Rent. Two months. Bastard not pay.’
‘Oh dear, you’d better come in.’ So I changed my defensive face for my sympathetic one and ushered him into the house. I followed his sweating body and nervous stench down my narrow hallway and into my slightly less narrow living room. He perched on a chair at my table, shuddering with tension.
‘It’s okay,’ I said, laying a hand on his arm. ‘That’s the name of my son.’ And I pointed to Eli’s name. ‘I take it that you were the person who rented him his unit?’
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�You got it, lady.’
‘Well, don’t worry. I’ll put on the jug and make some tea. How do you like your tea?’
‘Not like tea. Water, just water.’
So I filled a glass of water for him and one for me, carried them in from the kitchen and sat down next to him.
‘Now, could you please give me a close look at the paper and we’ll see what we can do?’ said I, imagining it was just a matter of money and Eli’s forgetfulness.
So he handed me the paper. It was a rental agreement for $300 a week with a $5000 bond, signed by Eli (who, as a schoolboy, made a very good fist of my signature, but never mastered his own).
‘He not pay last two month rent. Meant to pay every two week. Unit in bad condition, very bad condition.’
‘Oh.’
‘I go to see it. Terrible, terrible.’
‘I don’t quite understand, you know. Eli went overseas weeks ago now. His lease ought to have finished in late September or early October. I don’t think he was even living at the unit before he left.’
‘He there all right!’
‘Gosh. Well. I can see you’re upset. But I promise you he did go. He flew out the morning after he came to an art exhibition. He was there with me. The date was…’
‘Bastard here, he not pay! Lot of damage!’
‘Oh dear. Maybe I should see the unit…although I never saw it in the first place to gauge what damage has been done.’
‘A disgrace! Smashed mirror in bathroom, stain all over floor! Terrible! Terrible!’
‘Oh!’
‘In bathroom, on floor. Big stain – bleach from blood. Someone fighting.’
‘Oh dear, Mr…?’
‘Liu, my name Liu.’
‘Have you called the police?’
‘No. You muss come. Come!’
He was parked out the front and I hoisted myself into the passenger seat of his Toyota van. It was one of those vans that has plenty of room in the back for toting things around, clothes or furniture. It wasn’t new and the dashboard was sun-crackled, but, unlike the jalopy Eli had been driving around during his stay, it was tidy.
‘What do you do for a living?’ I asked him, trying to be sociable – I, who seem to do nothing much for my living, except breathe.
‘I own two house,’ he said.
‘How long have you been in Australia?’
‘Lady, bleach on my floor to get rid of blood!’
‘To get rid of blood you think?’
‘That why people use bleach. Believe me, I know this.’
‘Blood? It might have been something else, surely – my son can be very untidy. He could have dropped a bottle when he was cleaning…?’
‘All over wall and floor. Terrible.’
‘And you think it was a fight?’
‘Muss be a fight. Bleach everywhere.’
‘But my son’s not a violent man.’
‘Violent, violent!’
‘But I’ve never known Eli to be violent and I’ve known him all my life.’
‘Sometime mother not know son.’
The place was in Collingwood, only ten or twelve minutes from me. Mr Liu owns two of four townhouses built where a couple of cottages once stood on the edge of a laneway. They are nondescript, the dirtied cream of 1980s or ’90s fling-em-up and plaster-em-over boxes with undercover parking. Eli was supposedly living in a back one with a shiny black front door and a straggle of ivy sprouting weakly from where the downpipe made an imperfect connection with the ground.
Mr Liu put the key into the door with a shabby rattle of the other keys on his ring and we stepped straight into the front room, a depressing cream box, smelling of Glen 20 underwritten by staleness and grimy around the edges but not startlingly awful. It was empty of furniture. I noticed the venetians on the long front windows at about foot height, carelessly let down as only Eli can let down a blind. There was a door on the right-hand side behind where the stairs went up to the next floor directly inside the front door. We went through to the kitchen. ‘See, see! Tiles, tiles! They wrecked with the bleach!’ And it was true that some terracotta tiles on the floor had taken on a cloudy look, but I wouldn’t have called them wrecked. I began to tot up the cost and wonder why you’d put down real terracotta in a rented unit until I realised the tiles were seconds, with chips out of them well before the grout was laid.
On the second floor, there was a bedroom and there things took a turn for the worse. Bleach had been scrubbed across the wall beside the en suite and there was a large colour-drained stain in the doorway, half on the floor tiles – once again terracotta – and half on the beige carpet. It looked as though it had been there for some time, it was dry and the carpet was shrunken and powdery-looking and it did look rather as if there was a blood stain underneath. ‘Terrible, terrible,’ said Mr Liu.
I had to agree. The mirror in the en suite had been violently smashed and the sink in the vanity was cracked through. I thought I could detect old meat hidden somewhere.
It’s very scary in civilised Melbourne to walk in on a scene like that in a dwelling place that has bottom-of-the-heap written all over it. Little swarms of panic started running all over me, tightening my guts and clenching my gorge.
‘We’d better ring the police,’ I said, swallowing, and I took out my phone and dialled. For once the person who answered did so straight away and wasn’t in Mumbai. In a panicky voice I asked for the police to come. ‘There might have been a crime committed here,’ I said when I was put through. ‘I can’t tell, but I think you’d better come.’
Then we stood about in the crummy place where neither of us wanted to be – me, because it baffled me to sickness and Mr Liu because he hadn’t wanted anything like this to happen, his dreams to be smirched.
And to think that I’d thought that Mr Liu had wanted to molest me!
The police were there fairly soon and I found myself explaining that my son had left two months ago for Afghanistan…
‘Is he a soldier, then?’
‘NNNNo. No. No.’ I was already being turned upside down by an avalanche of wrong directions that could be taken here. It was a constable in a tight blue jumper who interviewed me. He stood with his legs apart and his arms crossed over his chest. His shoes were old but shiny and he flexed one knee continually and watched the toe of the shoe on that leg as he did so. Now and then he looked up into my face, his bottom lip stuck out and one eye slightly off centre as if he were trying to nut something out. ‘Just a minute.’ I fought for my story, for what I knew of my story – aghast at the same time that I knew so little. ‘He’s a freelance journalist. He goes over there to report on what’s happening with the reconstruction of Afghanistan. He started going over there years ago not long before the Taliban took control…’
‘Taliban!’ His mouth came open.
‘NNNNo, not like that. No, he never went anywhere with the Taliban. Eli was largely in Pakistan where he was trying to help the Afghans establish an open press by setting up radio and TV links. He’s not a terrorist, definitely not a terrorist. Whatever’s happened here…Well, I don’t know what’s happened here.’
‘Bit of a hero, then, is he?’
‘I suppose he is. Yes. He is.’
‘What, does he come home to visit his family sometimes, does he?’ His voice sounded as if he might just be able to piece things together if there was a wife and kids involved…marital trouble, that kind of thing…
‘No, there’s no wife and kids here. He was married, but…All I can tell you is he came home for a rest after one of the women journalists he was working with was killed in February in Afghanistan. He took time out.’
‘He’s not still married, then?’
‘No.’
‘What, strong silent type is he?’
‘I wouldn’t say that. Just that his life’s very complicated and he doesn’t tell me very much. He has to be secretive because of what he does.’
‘Or he keeps things from his mother. Wouldn’t be the first
time…’
How I hated the all-knowing look on that man’s face! ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s it. Not at all. He’s a bona fide journalist.’
‘Not still in contact with the wife?’
‘No. It’s well in the past now.’
‘So no point in trying to contact her?’
‘No.’
Then he started talking about soldiers and the Australian commitment.
‘Well, it wasn’t the war,’ I interrupted. ‘There have been three prominent women journalists killed in the past two years. Not by firepower in war. They’ve been murdered by people, their own people, who don’t want women to be reporting on the news. The murderers are very conservative. They don’t like seeing women in Western dress, let alone delivering news bulletins.’
‘Muslims, eh?’
‘Well, yes, of course, I’m talking about Afghanistan. It’s very much a Muslim country. There are conservative and radical Muslims the same way there are conservative and radical Christians.’
‘And your son’s over there writing about it, is he?’
‘Yes. That’s what I’ve been saying.’
‘Does he get depressed?’
‘Yes, probably.’
‘Is he on medication?’
‘More than likely.’
‘What, he suffers uppers and downers, does he?’
‘Yes. Yes, he does,’ said I to a cop in a suit too small for him.
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