The Women's Pages

by Debra Adelaide

  Again she reached into consciousness and pulled herself as hard as she could into waking, sitting up in bed for a few seconds, momentarily blind and terrified, until her eyes adjusted to the dark and she heard the familiar wails coming from the next room. Charlie only needed picking up and rocking for a few minutes to calm him but she sat down in the wicker chair anyway and settled him on her shoulder where he made contented animal noises as he sucked his fist and drifted back to sleep. She wrapped him firmly into his bunny rug and placed him back in the cot, patting his back while his breathing slowed and deepened.

  It took her a few more months before she found the courage to tell Vince. She waited until Charlie was asleep one evening and they sat on the back step overlooking the shared garden where next door’s washing was still on the line.

  ‘You are the best of men, and I can’t explain it. I’m so sorry. All I know is I can’t stay married.’

  It was beyond horrible. Vince cried, and she did not. She hugged him around his shaking shoulders, and went into their bedroom to start sorting her things.

  But it was another month before she told her father. That was when Charlie was one, the day she was visiting Edgar on the bus, the very first time Dove had encountered her in her own imagination. The day she set Charlie down on the garden path and he took his first steps, and Edgar opened the door to say his familiar ‘Hi de hi’, only for his face to fall as she scooped Charlie up and said, ‘I’m leaving Vince. I might have to come home for a while. If that’s all right.’

  The nightmare stopped altogether and she began to sleep again. She found a nursery school position for Charlie and then a three-days-a-week job back at the pharmacy in Liverpool Road where she’d worked before.

  Edgar and Vince met occasionally, and after these meetings her father would come home and try to talk to her, but she would not be coaxed, would not listen.

  ‘You’ve left him to work in a chemist?’ He shook his head.

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ she said. ‘I’m working there so I don’t bludge off you.’

  And she was marking time at the chemist, that was all. She would find her way and who she was meant to be – she knew that somehow, even though in her head it didn’t make any sense either.

  *

  One night she woke, having in her sleep heard Charlie crying, who now slept in a cot at the foot of her bed in her old bedroom, though he was nearly three and needed a room of his own. He was not crying, he rarely woke at night now, but she had heard him in the dream, crying so loudly and piteously it was as if he was protesting on her behalf the fate she was about to undergo on that operating table. Or it was as if he was protesting the suffering that he was about to feel himself. Drawing up her knees to her chin she sat there for the remainder of the night, just as she used to when she was a girl, looking at the cow and moon night-light that her father had retrieved from the cupboard after Charlie had come along.

  Dove watched her begin to pack. Charlie’s clothes and night nappies, his toys. His Bunnykins bowl and mug, the silver spoon and fork set that Mrs Wood had given him when he was christened and without which he refused to eat. His little gumboots, bright blue, and his Peter Pan bag that he took on outings. It would all fit into two suitcases. In a box she would pack the night-light too, and the various toys and books that Charlie was beginning to accumulate. As soon as she could that morning she would ring Vince. He had always said he would look after Charlie, whatever happened. It was far better to do all this now rather than in a year or two when there would be too many other complications, such as kindergarten. And the older Charlie became the worse it would get for him. For all of them.

  18

  She didn’t know the exact location of the place so she left the bus and walked up to King Street from City Road. On her right the park sloped down to the duck pond before ascending to meet the iron rail fence of the university. The weather was unseasonably hot and only a few ducks could be seen on the water, which was thick and green as pea soup. A few students were lying on the grass under the trees, others walking along the paths, heads down, knitted jackets tied by the arms around their waist. A couple of students wore academic gowns. They were from the colleges, she assumed, who were expected to dress formally for lectures. Farther up, she passed the gates of the university itself, then the college of St Paul’s, overshadowed by Moreton Bay fig trees. Only then she realised she could have walked through the university itself, something that occurred to her as a bold, novel idea. But then she was embarking on something new today, and walking through a place where she had never set foot would seem an appropriate thing to be doing. Next time she could just walk through the grounds. She could follow the map in a street directory, and no one, she expected, would take any notice of her, let alone challenge her presence.

  The typesetting shop was not far along King Street, she discovered, and just off the main road in a side street that was barely more than a laneway. It had a bland concrete front with three steps leading into a recessed door. There were weeds growing through the cracks in the footpath beside the steps, and shards of brown bottle glass that had been kicked to one side.

  As soon as Ellis entered she registered a thrill inside her that she could not quite understand. She took off her sunglasses. The place seemed vast and filthy, dark in the corners, yet illuminated by great skylights which on a second glance were only transparent panels of fibreglass set into the corrugated iron roof. A regular thuck-thuck noise was coming from one of the machines. Before her was a long desk, just above waist height, behind that smaller desks with a few people seated. The man nearest to her was wearing a green visor and holding up a long roll of printed material which he was scrutinising through gold-rimmed glasses. When he saw her enter he rose and came over to the larger desk, which she could now see was covered in a variety of printed matter, some individual documents, others in small neat stacks. Pamphlets, magazines, newsletters and posters.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I’ve come about a job.’

  He took off his glasses, revealing a younger face. He had deep-set grey eyes, and curly hair longer than most young men’s.

  ‘A job? That’s Clive you want, probably.’ He turned around and scanned the room. ‘Clive,’ he called out. A man in dark blue overalls appeared from behind a stack of cardboard boxes. ‘There’s a lady here wants a job.’

  ‘What job?’ Clive pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face, smoothing his moustache on either side as he walked over to Ellis. Underneath his overalls he wore a business shirt and a brown and fawn striped tie, the knot tied very tightly.

  Ellis realised she had not planned this far. She tucked her sunglasses into her handbag and pulled her jacket a little tighter over her shoulders.

  ‘Well, it’s about a job I would like to have. To do. Making type.’

  The men exchanged a brief glance before the first man raised his eyebrows – not unkindly – and returned to his desk.

  ‘We don’t do that,’ Clive said.

  ‘But I thought you made type.’

  ‘Well yes, we do. But it’s dirty work.’ He nodded towards the rear of the premises where Ellis could see several more men in overalls standing or sitting at large machines. She had already done some research in the library and determined that a business such as this would almost certainly be using designs made by Monotype. But typesetters and printers also made their own designs. Perhaps she had made a mistake. Perhaps she had misjudged this sort of business. She had hoped that its proximity to the university would mean it was something one might call creative. Progressive. She had read an article about the flourishing of the type design business. She had consulted all the books on the subject she could find, and then pored over a book on calligraphy, just for the heck of it.

  She swallowed her disappointment. ‘I was hoping to get some work designing types,’ she said. She pulled a manila folder out of her hand
bag and placed it on the counter between them.

  Clive shook his head. ‘We don’t do that here, love. One of the boys might do something artistic now and then, like Tom over there.’

  At the sound of his name the man she first spoke to raised his head and stared at her, then dropped his gaze to his desk again. Unlike the other men he wore brown corduroy trousers, a loose shirt and a vest, unbuttoned. Perhaps he was an art student.

  ‘But it takes time,’ Clive said. ‘A lot of work involved. We can’t afford that. Besides . . .’ He paused, appraising Ellis.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Women don’t make type.’

  A few yards away a woman was seated at a desk in front of a typewriter. Behind her silver cat’s-eye glasses it was not clear if she was listening in to the conversation or not. On the desk beside her typewriter was a green cut-glass vase containing pink carnations, on the other side a three-tiered wooden out-tray. She watched the woman wind up the sheet in the machine, a nervous attenuated clicking as she did so, then apply a flat round eraser, which was attached by string to the typewriter, to a spot in the middle of the page. She blew on the page then wound the sheet down and continued typing. It was something that she herself had done hundreds of times over.

  ‘They use it though,’ she said softly.

  Clive chewed at his bottom lip under his moustache. ‘Never heard of a woman in the business before,’ he finally said.

  Ellis looked at the floor. It was time she left this place. Why did she want to make type anyway? It wasn’t like there weren’t enough of them around. Helvetica. Courier. German Gothic. Baskerville. Century. Copperplate. Some of these she was familiar with from her reading, others she had learned when taking her stenographer and secretarial courses at evening college. But she had always loved the shapes of letters. The calligraphy book she had borrowed from the library contained blank lined pages covered with tracing paper, intended for the owner to practise various styles. She had sat at the kitchen table at night and traced over the letters with a soft lead pencil, considering how she might contrive to keep the book and fill those pages using a nib pen and ink, as was intended. But Miss Neville, the librarian, now knew her far too well for her to get away with such a crime. Ellis had been in the habit of browsing there for an hour or so a few mornings each week. It was located in the basement of the Town Hall in Ashfield and was a dim, quiet place frequented by few people. She had started going when she had realised she needed to get herself and Charlie out of the house on her days off, to let them both breathe – to let herself breathe, the house oppressed her so. Before inspecting the shelves, she read the Positions Vacant in the Sydney Morning Herald and made notes of businesses she might contact. Typesetting came after Secretarial and Stenographers, which was how she had got the idea.

  As a child she had had a set of alphabet building blocks. Her father had produced them from a cupboard storage box for Charlie. They had raised serif capital letters, like large stamps, painted in different colours. A was red, G was green, B was yellow – she remembered that from when she was a small girl. Touching them for the first time again, she could see an adult hand helping her build a tower, G, H, B, C, K, and she wanting the block for E, the letter for her name, and becoming fretful when she could not find it. Then her own wilful hand swiping the blocks down. There were tears. The adult had no face, was just arms and legs, a tall body bent over. Perhaps it was her father, though somehow she instinctively knew it was not. Possibly a carer. Not her mother. It could not have been her mother.

  ‘I love letters,’ she now found herself saying, though why she could not tell. It was not the sort of information she imagined Clive or anyone in the typesetting factory would care to know. The man in the green visor glanced up from his desk again. She should leave before she embarrassed herself further, but then her mouth, working as if it were a completely autonomous thing, uttered more. ‘I just love the shapes,’ she said, ‘the endless possibilities.’

  ‘You a reader?’ Clive said.

  ‘Oh yes. I love reading. I love words.’

  Under her jacket and ribbed turtleneck top, Ellis began to feel warm with the nonsensical shame of it. She would have liked to take the jacket off, but that would have signified something else – familiarity, or an intention to settle in at this place. She remained hot, hoping her face was not becoming flushed. Reading was something you were meant to like, to respect, not be passionate about. Not admit love for it.

  If Clive noticed she was becoming uncomfortable he did not say.

  ‘My wife’s a great reader,’ he offered. ‘She’s reading Love Story at the moment. Me, I can’t finish a book. Prefer my magazines.’

  She could have embraced him for his kindness. She cleared her throat. ‘I enjoyed that novel,’ she said, forcing a restraint into her voice that normally came naturally to her. Besides, she had enjoyed it, not loved it. ‘But language is . . .’ she said. ‘Words are . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Words. You can’t create a new word. But you can change the way they look. With letters. Typefaces, I mean.’

  Ellis was beginning to feel quite troubled with herself. She had come expecting to be able to apply for a job, and here she was indulging in an aesthetic discussion. Clive ran his finger between his collar and neck, easing the tie looser. She noticed now that his shirt was rather grubby, with a bloom of sweat along the collar line. Mr Rose at Vince’s garage was like that, wearing a business shirt under his overalls. Vince had always changed into a dark blue T-shirt under his overalls, no matter the weather, dressing in day clothes again before leaving for home each afternoon. She had always soaked Vince’s work clothes in the laundry tub after rubbing the greasy stains with hot water and a bar of Sard Wonder Soap. Each evening after he returned home and showered he would scrub his hands with a nail brush then scrape under each fingernail with the blade of his penknife. She wondered if Vince was as fastidious about his work clothes now that she was no longer washing them, or if someone else was taking care of that for him.

  ‘Sorry, love,’ Clive was saying. ‘But if anything comes up we’ll give you call. When Marjorie here goes on holidays’ – he jerked his head to the woman at the typewriter – ‘maybe you could step in.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to type. I already do that.’

  The look on Clive’s face now turned. It spoke a thousand words, a story of disapproval. How women really shouldn’t work at all, and how she should be grateful she’d got an offer like this, and such a sympathetic hearing in the first place. Behind his frown Ellis imagined she could see him thinking how presumptuous it was of her to walk in here to ask for work, to expect an opportunity, and how audacious it was for a woman to refuse even the promise of some clerical work. She imagined he knew everything about her, the husband she had left – for no good reason, as everyone believed – how she should return to him, to the home she had abandoned, and right now perhaps be preparing the evening meal or doing the laundry. And what of him, the husband who had suffered this humiliation?

  Ellis never intended to carry the guilty burden of Vince with her, especially not this day when she was looking for a new position, and before she lost all control she picked up the unopened folder at which Clive had not even glanced. It contained some sketches and tracing work she’d compiled over a few months. He disappeared back behind the pile of boxes and she walked to the front door, pausing to get her sunglasses out again. She had only just acquired these sunglasses. They were round, outsized, with dark brown frames. She had tried them on one day when waiting for her father to finish an appointment at the optician in Liverpool Road. When she looked into the mirror above the sunglasses display she saw a woman who looked different. With her thick tousled hair and her pearlescent lipstick, there was a hint of glamour. Her father had come out and almost whistled, saying she looked like Jackie Kennedy, and insisted on buying them for her.

  It was the first time sh
e had approached a place like this for work, out of the blue. She may as well continue being adventurous. She could return home crushed or she could go farther along King Street. It was early afternoon, the sun was bright.

  As she stepped out the door the man in the visor appeared behind her.

  ‘You could, you know.’

  ‘Could what?’ she said.

  ‘Create a new word.’

  19

  What of Charlie? Dove had not forgotten him, but every time she tried to turn her mind to the story of Charlie, after Ellis left the child with Vince and commenced what amounted to another life, she could not work it out.

  Being a novelist was so hard. She wondered if she really had chosen to do what she was doing, or if some unseen force had sneaked up on her and possessed her and forced her into it. One thing it involved was something that, had Dove foreseen it, meant she would have tried with all her might to turn her back on it. She would have remained a graphic designer, albeit a reluctant one in an unhappy work situation. This was sharing the emotional agony of her characters. Surely it was not meant to be like this, surely they should not have the power to distress her the way they did.

  And what had happened to Charlie could only be distressing. Though for him the consequences were not nearly so bad, in fact it seemed to Dove that she had suffered far more for knowing and now writing about Charlie’s story than he did himself.

  She had not meant to write the story of women but that was how it had appeared, that was the only story in her head. The more she delved into the lives of her characters the more it was about missing or silent women and the more it seemed it was her job to find them and open their mouths and pull their words out and lay them across the pages. Ellis had stepped out of a longer story, one in which women were always grasping for some sense of authenticity, and in which mothers in particular were absent. Wuthering Heights had almost no mothers and certainly none whom you could say were good to any degree. They were all dead or dying, or simply blank spaces, unnamed and unacknowledged, as if their progeny – Heathcliff, Catherine, Hindley, Edgar, Nelly – had been produced by magic, or had just sprung up out of the earth like the primaeval rocks or heather that spread across the windy moors.