The Women's Pages

by Debra Adelaide

She went over to the shed where the garden tools were propped against the far wall. There was her father’s thick wooden workbench, so aged and scored with marks it was black with time, its provenance impossible to guess. Perhaps an old chopping block. Or something he might have fashioned himself out of old railway sleepers or discarded fencing posts. He always kept it clear except for the massive vice, and although the shed was cluttered it displayed a pleasing order. Above the bench was a masonite board painted a dull cream, on which hung his collection of hand tools, their shapes outlined in indelible pencil. Some of them were missing now: the hacksaw, its bread-loaf shape clearly visible, and two of the set of five files which she remembered he had loaned to a mate a few years ago, though he had stopped complaining about their failure to be returned. Her father rarely used his tools now and only entered the shed to fetch the larger gardening implements and the rotary mower. He kept his secateurs and trowel and garden twine in an old wicker basket under the table on the back verandah. When she was younger Ellis remembered him spending hours down here, even during her school holidays, only emerging when the daylight through the tiny windowpanes, always festooned with cobwebs inside and out, faded to make work impossible. There was no electricity, and he had never installed a light.

  The shed was dark now, in the late afternoon, as the windows were all but covered in ivy and the plane trees loomed even closer and denser than when she was a child. It seemed like a long time ago, but when she thought about it, it was really only four or five years since her father had stopped making toys and small pieces of furniture for the house and odd things for Mrs Wood. He had made a set of wooden alphabet blocks for Ellis when she was baby, and an infant-sized table and chair which sat in the corner of the kitchen until she was big enough to sit at the kitchen table. Later he had made a bookcase for her bedroom, three tiers, that stepped down from a small top shelf where she kept the cow and moon night-light. The bottom shelf still held her collection of Little Golden Books. The Pokey Little Puppy. The Little Red Hen. The Saggy Baggy Elephant. The Three Little Kittens. She had wanted the entire set but her father stopped buying them after she turned seven and could read chapter books. You don’t need those baby books any more, he had told her.

  He had also made a set of chopping boards and a spice rack for Mrs Wood. She had always complained that there was never enough storage or bench space, that the kitchen with its preposterous Early Kooka stove and chipped enamel sink was impossible to cook in. She had got Edgar to agree to replace the old pine table and red-painted chairs with a modern laminex one, with four vinyl and chrome chairs that could be properly wiped clean. Wearing an apron over her plain neat clothes and with her hair always smoothed in its French roll, she would clear this table off every afternoon, putting the bowl of waxed fruit and the cut-glass condiments holder on the dining room dresser. Ellis could then sit at one end and do her homework while at the other Mrs Wood would roll diced meat in seasoned flour or peel vegetables or cut out rounds of puff pastry with a tin cutter, talking through the various steps of the dishes she was cooking. She taught Ellis how to add a few pinches of curry powder – she favoured Clive of India – to the batter for fried flathead, which took care of the fishy smell in the house. She showed her how to slice cold butter through chilled flour very quickly for a good short pasty, adding lemon juice as well as iced water for a better flavour. She introduced Ellis to her secret for easy scones: full cream instead of the tedious rubbing through with butter then adding milk, which is what the recipes always insisted. Most of this knowledge, she told Ellis, she had gleaned from the women’s pages of the Sunday newspapers over the years. She often allowed Ellis to sit at the kitchen table on a Monday afternoon and cut out special recipes or household advice, which she placed in an old shoebox in the pantry.

  Now Ellis used the spice rack her father had made, replenishing the curry powder and dried herbs and adding some of her own choosing: cinnamon sticks, bay leaves and whole peppercorns. She had saved Vegemite jars to form something like a matching set, though she had seen a proper set of herb and spice jars, with rounded glass lids and gold labels, in the kitchen shop up the road, which she thought she would get one day.

  In those few years the shed had shrunk, or seemed to, and become more cobwebby. The wooden door scraped against piles of dirt and leaves that had accumulated, and the bolt now jammed unless you gave it a good shake before sliding it to the right. She took the hoe from its place against the wall next to the rake and the mower, and returned to scrape the dirt over the ashes this way and that, then a thin layer of leaves. When she flattened them back with the sole of her shoe, there was nothing to be seen. Nothing at all.

  *

  After the operation, Ron had not telephoned her as she had forbade him, telling him they were not to meet or talk ever again, outside of church. To maintain appearances, she still went to the youth group, but decided to go less often. By the start of the new year she would stop going at all and no one would think anything of it. The others in the group already understood that she and Ron were not so close and if their relationship had always been an unspoken one, then their break-up – if that’s what it was – was similarly a non-topic. Already she sensed that Ron was turning his attentions to another girl in the fellowship group, Ruth, who was still at school and even younger than she.

  Today was the first time she felt normal again, in herself. Not her abdomen, not even her body, but the whole of herself, her spirit and her mind. She had slept badly for weeks, had not been able to concentrate at tech in the evenings. She did not neglect her father or the house, though she did a lot less housework. She caught herself sitting at the kitchen table or on the back step after getting in the washing, doing nothing for long stretches of time. Her father noticed her fatigue, her tendency to eat and talk less at the dinner table. One evening, he put his knife and fork down and said, ‘Are you all right, love? Is something wrong?’

  ‘No, nothing. I’m fine. It’s just that tech is hard work at the moment.’ She cut off a sliver of her meat and pushed it around the gravy.

  He looked around the room. ‘This old place is hard work too, I suppose.’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t mind.’ Though she did, a bit. It would be better if the place weren’t so old-fashioned, if they could have new wall-to-wall carpet and a modern bathroom.

  ‘Maybe it’s not such a good idea that you get a job after all. It’s not like you need the money.’

  ‘But I want to work.’ She put her cutlery down and pushed her plate away. It would perk her up, staying independent, not that she could explain that to him. She was already looking seriously for something full time, and if there was nothing on the horizon right now, she was sure that as soon as businesses reopened after the January break she would find something suitable.

  This morning she had risen and gone about her morning tasks feeling as if a heavy cloud had lifted from around her. After her father had read the paper she had opened the Positions Vacant section and circled three ads with a red pencil from the kitchen drawer. Two of the positions were in neighbouring suburbs and one would be perfect to fill in time after college finished. It was in a pharmacy up on the main road, which was expanding to include a large cosmetics counter. She placed the paper to one side of the kitchen table and set about preparing her father’s lunch for him to take to work. Two corned beef sandwiches with mustard pickles, an apple and a slice of fruitcake. She had tried salad sandwiches, which he refused to eat. Then substituted the pickles with French mustard from the delicatessen, which he also disliked. She had given him cold roast chicken with a mayonnaise dressing, which she made herself. Tried grated cheese, corn, gherkin relish and shredded lettuce. Every time he thanked her politely enough but asked for corned beef, so she had given up. He even preferred it if she bought it already sliced from the delicatessen, rather than preparing her own cut, which she boiled with peppercorns and herbs, a half-cup of malt vinegar in the water.

 
She was sorting the laundry when she heard the postman’s whistle. Next door’s dog darted out from its snoozing place under the hydrangeas and yapped, as it did every weekday the post arrived. In the letterbox was a bill in a window envelope, a copy of National Geographic and a bulky envelope, addressed to her, no return address. Intrigued, she opened it up on her way back through the front door and before she got halfway down the hall put her hand to her mouth.

  When she saw the photographic paper she was, for one weird split-second, expecting they would be photos of that night. That Ron had perhaps rigged up a secret camera that somehow operated in the dark. Or even worse, pictures of her dead aborted baby. As if either were remotely possible, she realised in the next second when the images, after she turned the six-by-fours around, took shape and she saw exactly what they were. Ron was completely naked, lying on a bed. He was not looking at the camera, but down at himself, and indeed he looked sad, to be contemplating his own body. She pushed them back into the envelope, her heart beating as though she had performed a criminal act, then took them out again, disbelieving her own eyes. As she did, a piece of folded exercise book paper fell to the floor. Feeling sick, she picked it up. Thought you would like, was handwritten, with no preamble, these photos of your ‘boyfriend’. See what he gets up to when you’re not around. Notice how he can get an erection for the camera? It was signed Philip, the name underscored with a thick Z-shaped line that she recognised as distinctly his. In four of the images Ron’s penis was in various stages of erection, in the others he was not yet aroused. She had never so much as seen the word erection before, never used it. The word seemed as much an affront as the pictures themselves, and even more offensive was their purpose. And she had never seen Ron’s penis before, nor any other. The few nights she and Ron had fumbled their way towards her unexpected pregnancy she had not looked.

  By now she knew enough about Philip and his relationship with Ron to understand that it was possible that he was simply trying to intimidate her or bully her. Or just disgust her. Or perhaps, despite the fact that she and Ron had broken up, Philip was still trying to prove he exerted some strange control over Ron. The reason she told Ron months before that she would have nothing more to do with him was not the terrible secret of being pregnant and the trauma of having to terminate it, but because of what Ron had explained to her about himself and Philip.

  ‘Why did you want to be with me then?’ she had asked that final night when they had sat in Ron’s car, and he had replied that he was trying to prove he was normal. And he thought that he was now ready to get away from Philip’s control.

  Still, looking at the images one last sickening time before pushing them back into the envelope forever, she wondered why they had been sent to her, now, and when they had been taken. If Philip had taken them while she and Ron were together she did not want to know. She had asked Ron, the last night they spoke, why they had left their previous church and come to St John’s.

  ‘The minister there found us out,’ Ron had confessed, looking down at the floor of the car. ‘And he insisted we stop being friends and go separately to him every week for counselling. Otherwise we had to leave the parish. We tried it for a few months but failed.’

  ‘Who failed?’ Ellis had said. ‘Was it you or Philip who gave up on trying to be normal?’

  He had looked up at her and pushed his hair off his forehead in the gesture she no longer found endearing, then looked away and sighed.

  ‘He did. I felt sorry for him. I couldn’t abandon him. He lost his father when he was just a kid and he needed a friend.’

  Ellis was too shocked to respond to this. Did he not even remember that her mother had never figured in her life? She looked out the window while Ron prattled on about her not needing to worry, as Philip would be going away soon for his country service, and it would be a long way away, perhaps Griffith or even Broken Hill, and they could get on with their life. By that stage Ellis had made up her mind. She was already reaching for the door handle.

  *

  At first she shoved the photographs under her mattress and sat on top of the bed. Then she got off and stuck them at the bottom of her wardrobe under a shoebox. Then after sitting back on the bed and contemplating everything, her chest heaving, she went to the bathroom and washed and dried her face. Her father would not be back from work until after five. She took the envelope with the photographs and letter – she was not sure now which offended her more – straight out the back and down under the plane trees, taking a box of matches from the top of the stove.

  The worst thing, she realised, the greatest betrayal of all, was that Ron would have developed and printed them in the laboratory where he worked. As she set light to them and watched them curl into grey flakes and as she stamped and raked to remove all traces, she had the strange sensation that she was suffocating, perhaps in the earth below the place where she stood right now, and would have to fight very hard to stay alive. She gulped in heaving breaths before she steadied herself and began to feel like she was breathing normally again.

  When she was satisfied there was no hint that there had been a fire she returned to the house, went to the kitchen and hauled the potato and onion bin out from under the bench. Grabbing three potatoes and one onion, she tossed them into the sink for peeling then noticed how grubby the bin was. She emptied all the vegetables out, took it outside and hosed it and left it to dry on the lawn while she returned to sweep under the bench with the dustpan and broom. She filled the kettle to boil and while she was waiting pulled everything out, the pedestal garbage bin, the five-tiered saucepan stand, the box where she kept old newspapers and empty jars. Upturning the chairs onto the table she swept the kitchen twice, not brushing the dirt out the back door onto the verandah like she usually did but carefully collecting it in the dustpan. When she went to put it in the bin she realised how grubby that had become too, so she emptied it into the big rubbish bin at the side of the house, took it back to the laundry where she scrubbed it with pine disinfectant then left it on the lawn to dry next to the vegetable bin.

  She was exhausted, yet curiously energised. She worked with a steely focus that she did not remember experiencing before, as if her life from now on depended on how well she polished the lino floor or how smooth her cream sauce would be later that evening. She fetched the mop and poured boiling water from the kettle into the bucket, adding a capful of eucalyptus oil to the floor cleaner like Mrs Wood had always done, and mopped the floor so vigorously she felt the sweat blooming in her armpits. Taking down the methylated spirits and a small scrubbing brush she cleaned around the kitchen taps and the top of the stove, then wiped the stove dry before putting the kettle on again. After she put the chairs back she took a clean cloth and wiped the kitchen table with metho, then again with fresh boiling water until the steam rose from the laminex in little clouds. The moisture evaporated by time she smoothed a fresh seersucker cloth over the top and replaced the condiments in the centre. She went through the house and took every cloth and towel, every placemat and runner she could find and went to the laundry to put them on to wash, then returned to the front room with a yellow duster and bottle of polish, and commenced cleaning the window frames, the sideboard, the dining table, every wooden surface she could. In the bathroom she tackled the green stain under the bath taps that usually eluded her most vigorous scrubbing, and took to the taps at the basin with the metho and the nail brush until her eyes watered with the fumes. Back in the kitchen, she was just lining the clean, dry bin with newspaper when her father appeared at the screen door, loosening his tie.

  ‘Sorry, Dad.’ Ellis wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. ‘I’ve got carried away with the cleaning. Dinner will be a bit late tonight.’

  14

  When the flat was cleared of Jane’s clothes and all the items Dove was sending to charity, when it was clean and waiting, with minimal furniture to retain some effect of a home, a sturdy pot plant on the coffee
table and the fridge door propped open almost expectantly, she still delayed contacting an agent. She had inherited it without any complications, and she had prepared it to sell and had no use for it, but she could not pass it on.

  She still considered moving in. Her own place in Camperdown was beginning to feel oppressive. She had little aptitude for household improvements and none for home making. Her place was utilitarian, serving a need to be close to the city and work and, until recently, her mother. She had lived there for the past three years. It was a half-house, the smaller, poorer section of a Federation bungalow whose lawns had once sprawled into dense gardens that hugged the walls. The block next to it was originally an orchard for the main house. Her own little front garden bore traces of sandstone borders which her neighbours in the larger part of the house told her was originally a rose garden. Sunlight on the whole building was mostly stolen by the huge native fig trees in the street: heritage orders prevented them from being trimmed. When she had moved in she had felt like a temporary tenant, a feeling that remained. The fruit bats seemed to have more claim to the place than she. They colonised the figs in the street, dropping fruits and excrement, shrieking and flapping at inconvenient times, such as when she was trying to watch the evening news.

  Most of the backyard was carpeted with wandering jew, and morning glory covered the fences and twisted around the trees. In the moist summers the place hummed with mosquito life. In the damp winters it was a sodden zone where the climbing weeds lay dormant for a few months, exposing flat rocks that represented a long-distant effort at landscaping. Even if it hadn’t rained for weeks the garden was always humid. The smell of wet earth, a rotting potato-in-the-cellar smell, was inescapable.

  It seemed to Dove that for the entire time she had lived in Camperdown it had never stopped being wet. Mould appeared on everything – shoes and bags in her wardrobe, the bathroom ceiling, overcoats in the hall cupboard – and she learned to keep a spray bottle of bleach handy in the shower. Outside, the house was just as bad. The front porch flooded in heavy rain, seeping quickly under the front door. She kept a mop there permanently. She had heard of mould spores infiltrating people’s lungs and making them ill with chronic coughs and congestion. She had never suffered from chest complaints, but she knew that diseases like asthma could be exacerbated by spores. What impeded her breathing, especially in bed at night, was not the damp.