The Women's Pages

by Debra Adelaide

  Dove remembered that Charlie was born in the late 1960s and would by now, at the time she was writing, have been a man in his late forties, eight or ten years older than she. She began to fantasise about Charlie, imagining him as an older friend, or perhaps a brother, which of course she had never had.

  All her childhood, and well past it, Dove had fantasised about having siblings in the way that only children often do. When she was younger she had vacillated between resentment at being an only child and smugness at the privilege of it. One of her friends was the eldest of five children and shared a bedroom with her two sisters, a tiny room where books and clothes were fought over and private space stoutly defended. When she and Dove were in their first year of high school, they barricaded the door one afternoon to examine their Personal Development handouts featuring diagrams of the female internal organs. Only a month or so later Dove waited outside the toilet door while Jenny took her time, groaning and flushing repeatedly. When she emerged she looked pale and pulled at her crotch. ‘I don’t think it’s in properly,’ she whispered, although Dove had handed over the leaflet that came with the packet of Meds from which she had furnished Jenny with a tampon, all the while fending off incursions from the giggling younger sisters who demanded to know why they were taking so long in the toilet. Fortunately the little brothers were parked in front of the television watching the afternoon cartoons. Jenny’s mother, who was a Catholic and had odd views, had given her daughter a packet of bulky pads with sticky backs that were meant to stay in place, but somehow worked themselves free. All Jenny’s mother had said to her daughter on the topic of menstruation was about keeping the packets out of sight and disposing of the used ones discreetly in the bin. When Dove had told her mother, Jane had snorted. ‘Is it still 1950?’ she’d said. ‘The poor girl. Tell her to come to me if she wants any help, although god knows with all these ads on the telly a girl needn’t be ignorant these days.’

  At times like this Dove was not only glad she had no siblings, but also that she had a mother who was so sensible, so straightforward, who seemed unfazed by menstruation or teenage boys or late-night phone calls or all the erratic adolescent habits that gave Jenny’s mother so much anxiety. Now and then she would phone Jane to elicit sympathy, about Jenny’s failure to return from a party by the approved hour, or the fact that she seemed to be meeting a boy after school in secret, or that she had smelled cigarettes on her, when it was about to become illegal for children under sixteen to purchase them! After these conversations, in which Jane spoke in monosyllables and raised her eyebrows at Dove, she would just sigh and shake her head and return to her book, or music. For Jane childhood was never the catastrophe that others made out, but then – and this took many years for Dove to work out – perhaps that was because Dove never needed to compete for attention and never felt the constraint of rules that demanded to be challenged.

  At other times she desperately yearned for a soul mate, a sister or brother who knew you well enough to be almost part of you, in spite of the fact that you might fight like crazy with them.

  It was not only her reading of Wuthering Heights – for soul mates were clearly also prone to being toxic – but many others that taught her as a child that only children were somehow doomed. Dove knew that the reason she found it hard to make friends was because she and her mother had formed such a tight unit when she was young, and that she instinctively shied from close bonds with anyone because in the back of her mind was always the thought that her mother was there for her. She doubted this would have been so if she had been obliged to share her mother with anyone.

  She and Jenny remained friendly enough after they both left school, but after Dove returned from a long overseas trip to find Jenny moved, then married, then a mother of two, there didn’t seem to be any point. Someone at Jane’s funeral had said to her, ‘Don’t be a loner now that she’s gone. Don’t be alone because you’re an only child, and adopted.’

  No, thought Dove, I’m a loner and alone because I live in my head. Was she, she often asked herself, writing about a woman who had not known her mother because in one way it paralleled her own experience? Only after Jane died did Dove properly confront the absence of a father in her life. She astonished herself, at the age of thirty-eight, when she realised she had barely been bothered by it all her life. She astonished herself even further when on reflection she realised she was not especially curious, even then, to learn what had happened to him. She had supposed that when she went through her mother’s things after her death there would be some information, but she found nothing. Well before the stroke that was the beginning of the end, Jane had cleared out all the superfluous paperwork in her spare room and reduced her files to one box that contained copies of their birth certificates – her own simply containing Jane’s name, and no father – the deeds to her flat, the registration and insurance papers for her car, which Dove now drove. She had thrown out cards and letters and other tributes, even her teaching certificate and several awards she had received as the music mistress at the private girls’ school near Bathurst, a career that had ended after Dove arrived. This life had left no clues, as if there were secrets. The most interesting item was the copy of Wuthering Heights that she had first read, with annotations in her mother’s and then in her own hand, from when she was a teenager.

  If that was the only clue then Dove had to make the most of it, though even after all this time she could not begin to comprehend the reasons this novel set in the bleak Yorkshire landscape had any bearing on her life as an urban woman in the mid-2010s. But one thing was very clear: in Wuthering Heights children were as much a necessity as they were a burden. Without them there was no story. Heathcliff and Cathy formed a bond as children, one that could not withstand the advent of adulthood. Cathy, barely out of her teens, died in childbirth, and her daughter Catherine became a loose piece rattling around in the generational box puzzle that formed the story of the novel. None of the children’s mothers survived to guide them, and the fathers that did proved to be neglectful, tyrannical or weak.

  Was it the story of miserable childhood? Or the story of inept and failed parents? Right at the very start of the novel Dove could see how Mr Earnshaw had erred in his duties by bringing back from his trip to Liverpool a wild nameless boy, instead of the whip and the violin he’d promised his children. And he compounded his failures by setting his son and his adopted son against each other, then dying to leave the bad blood between them like poison brewing in a cauldron. The romantic view promoted a reading about unfettered childhood, roaming free and wild amid nature, thumbing its nose at everything that adulthood supposedly represented, but every time Dove re-read the book she could find none of this: nothing that Cathy and Heathcliff ever did was untainted. There was no such thing as their childhood innocence. And as for the cosy sight towards the end of the novel, where the younger Catherine was teaching the rough-hewn Hareton his letters, this disturbed her greatly, though she could not quite put her finger on what it was. It was not exactly the smug benevolence of Nelly, who somehow survived everyone in the story, nor the foolishness of Lockwood for whom at the very end the sight of two lovers returning from an evening ramble on the moors was unbearable. It was a growing sense that every single character was trapped in the narrative and that it did not matter that three generations were ushered in and out of the story, no one seemed able to escape the tyranny of being alive. And yet, perversely, almost everyone was doomed to die young.

  20

  King Street was a strange but exciting place. Cheap diners were next door to second-hand clothing shops and there were endless places selling junk or bric-a-brac. Ellis stopped and peered into the window of one. Green, amber and pink glassware was piled up haphazardly along with Bakelite ashtrays and floral teacups and embroidered linen napkins. It was all the familiar stuff that had surrounded her at home, the stuff that stifled her as a teenager and which she had packed away into the dining room sideboard. Useless, depressing
and dust-gathering. There was a tin Negro figure with its hand out, a money box: if one paced a coin in the hand and pressed the lever the hand would lift and the coin would slip into the mouth. There was a tarnished silver coffee and tea service, a set of cut-glass and silver condiment bottles in a silver holder, also tarnished grey. There were vases bearing peacock feathers and stems of dry pampas grass flowers. She hated all that ornamental clutter. Further inside were small items of furniture, chrome and black glass smokers’ friends, veneer writing desks, nests of side tables with barley-stick legs, an oak planter with a pot plant that looked like an aspidistra on top. She shuddered. How could people want to buy this stuff, how could they want to surround themselves with this dark dreary furniture, with such clichéd plants?

  Perhaps she just found it more depressing than usual. She turned and walked past a chemist shop and a dusty newsagency, an even dustier art store with faded prints and rolls of cardboard in the window display. Past a second-hand bookshop she came to a corner wine bar, a tiny place. If she entered the bookshop she would be trapped for ages. She checked her wristwatch. She didn’t need to be heading home for another hour at least.

  She had never entered a wine bar before. Now she pushed her way through the swinging louvre doors and sat down at the first table. The place was almost empty. Each table held an empty chianti bottle in a raffia base bearing a stub of red candle, already lit as the place was dark and virtually windowless. The bottle at her table was palaeolithic with layers of wax that had dribbled down the sides. Above her was a dropped ceiling made of lattice, from which dangled more empty bottles tied by their necks with string, and bunches of plastic grapes with leaves trailing along the lattice. She should have a wine, but was not interested in ordering a sherry, which was the only wine she’d ever really drunk. Her father drank spirits, whisky and brandy with soda, and Vince had only drunk beer, and aside from that no one around her much had drunk. The fellowship group had frowned on all liquor, although she knew that some of them enjoyed a quiet drink and cigarette when separated from the pack. And the women she’d known, at parties or barbecues, drank things like Pimm’s with lemonade or shandies or punch, and all those drinks were far too sweet. In her final year of school a girl had somehow acquired a bottle of Barossa Pearl which was passed around along with a packet of Craven As one Saturday night behind the library block. In the dark she had nearly missed the mouth of the bottle when it came her way and then wanted to spit the wine out, it was that warm and sweet. Two of the girls proceeded to giggle and sway as they made their way back to the dormitory. Ellis was convinced they could not be drunk but one of them claimed to be ill the next morning. ‘Hangover,’ she had whispered proudly, pulling the sheets up to her chin to avoid the mistress rostered on to chase them out of bed and off to morning service.

  She picked up a narrow menu in a plastic folder. Nothing on the list was familiar. Most of the wines were French or Italian and she was having trouble working out which were red and which were white and then realised she could probably only order a whole bottle, which she would never drink. She felt stupid and faintly panicky. And she had no idea what she liked. No idea at all. Fortunately, a couple had entered and headed straight to the bar at the end of the room. That would give her time to escape.

  ‘Yippie.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Yippie,’ he repeated, leaning over her table. It was the man from the printer’s shop. He had removed the visor. ‘May I sit here?’

  She barely nodded but he pulled out a chair anyway.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  He was smiling as he picked up the menu and ran his eyes up and down the list, flipped it over, then tossed it down.

  ‘You were saying you couldn’t invent a new word. There’s one for you, just a year or two old. A baby of a word. No, a toddler.’ He laughed.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Ellis stiffened. He was laughing at her. And now she was revealing her ignorance. She picked up the menu he had dropped. She could order a bottle of anything and pretend to like it or not, then walk off and leave it, if she wanted.

  Possibly he sensed her discomfort. He held out his hand. ‘Thomas Sanders,’ he said. ‘But call me Tom.’

  She took it and he grasped hers firmly. Another first: she didn’t recall ever being shaken by the hand. That was the sort of thing men always did. She told him her name.

  ‘You don’t mind me dropping in? I finished work early. I hope you didn’t think I was following you. But you were fantastic, back in the factory. Old Clive didn’t know what hit him. No woman has ever fronted up and asked for a job like that. Especially not someone smart and glamorous.’

  Ellis glowed and squirmed at the same time. She knew she was meant to be pleased but she wished she wasn’t being complimented.

  ‘This word, yippie. Is it in the dictionary?’

  He caught her eye. ‘Probably not. It means a member of the Youth International Party. Big in America, not so well known here. We did some posters for them last year. I don’t think there was much of a turnout for their rally.’

  He talked about the counterculture, about writers and artists. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner and Alan Ginsberg. He moved on to demonstrations against governments and the need to liberate youth, about the oppression caused by capitalism and religions, and the importance of peace. He stopped to ask if she was having a drink, and she made a gesture signifying anything, too preoccupied with all he had told her. He went to the bar and returned with a carafe of red wine and two glasses.

  ‘Claret,’ he said succinctly. ‘Only the house stuff, but it’s okay.’

  He was acting to impress. She suspected he was nervous under an exterior that implied intimate knowledge of wines and even more intimate acquaintance with this bar in particular. She would not reveal any more of her ignorance but simply took a sip. Immediately she liked the dry taste, the richness of it. Meanwhile her head was abuzz. He had mentioned people and the sort of ideas that barely filtered through to her little suburban world. She knew it was a conservative existence, and there was nothing she could do about it. Her father didn’t even much like reading the newspapers these days. But this man, well, doubtless he had something to do with the university, and went on demonstrations, and read radical magazines. He probably printed them. Maybe that was why he was so knowledgeable. She had never heard of a yippie. Presumably it was a variation of a hippie.

  ‘You know,’ he said, comfortably picking up the topic of conversation, ‘people are being persecuted here for smoking pot, while over in Vietnam they’re being burned to death or blown up. Does that make sense?’

  Of course it did not make sense. No sane person could agree that it did, put like that. But Ellis would not mention that her ex-husband’s brother had served there. Tom seemed to be waiting for an answer. She looked closer at him. Despite the dim light she could see grey strands in his curls. He would be several years older than she.

  ‘You haven’t fought?’

  ‘Conscientious objector,’ he said. ‘Got picked in one of the birthday ballots six years ago.’

  That made him about twenty-six. He looked older.

  ‘Hardly anyone objected then, not like now. Or if they did it wasn’t reported much,’ he said.

  She never recalled hearing anyone protesting about the war in the first few years.

  ‘Were you jailed?’

  ‘Cops picked me up a few times but I kept moving around. Laid low until they finally left me alone. And I had a good lawyer.’

  Maybe Ellis was not against the war – that was a complex issue, best left to the country in question, and she would not pretend to understand that – but she didn’t see why Australia belonged there.

  ‘The sooner we get out of there the better,’ she said, the heat in her voice surprising even her. It was the first time she had spoken such a thought aloud. In t
he past few years she had hardly dared to have an opinion on anything, let alone voice it. But she believed it.

  He held her gaze for a second. She picked up her glass and drank another mouthful. He took out his cigarettes and reached over to grab an ashtray from the next table.

  ‘What words would you invent?’ he said after lighting up.

  Ellis thought for a moment. Imagine inventing language, wasn’t that what other people did? Old men in wood-panelled rooms somewhere, Oxford or Cambridge, sitting over their pipes and glasses of port and shuffling around piles of books and notes. But of course, now that Tom had posed the question, it made sense: language was mobile, shifting. And democratic. It was not as if there was some law that said an ordinary person couldn’t have a hand in it.

  ‘When I was a kid,’ he continued, ‘my little brother couldn’t pronounce cutlery: he called it cluttery. We started calling the kitchen drawer that gets full of all the bits and pieces the cluttery drawer. It kind of stuck.’

  She didn’t know if it was the benign image of the drawer that she knew straightaway, indeed could see in her mind, for they had one at home – cluttered with odd rubber bands and skewers and corkscrews and unpaired knives and forks, along with cookie cutters and napkin rings and the knife steel – or if it was just a perfect term, but she warmed to the idea, and to him.