by Black Inc.
Over the years he’d probably spent more waking hours with Ulla than with Grace or Kristina, but there were many things he did not know about her. Ulla did not give reasons. Why she’d migrated to Australia, for instance – he suspected a love affair. Why, with her energy and acumen, she continued to work for him.
For a moment he felt nostalgic for their friendship too as it used to be. When he had been raw and lost, the shop a desperate gamble, only Ulla had believed in him. When the sight of Ulla, in her neat black and white, had been pleasing to him every morning. The customers had commented on the good vibe in the shop. On George’s first anniversary there was champagne for everyone at closing time. Afterwards he and Ulla allowed themselves a little sentimental self-congratulation and finished off the bottles. For some reason, Ulla pulled out from her bag a photograph of herself at seventeen and showed it to him, and he remembered being touched to see how soft her eyes were then, in the round face of a mid-sixties European schoolgirl. It was very late and somehow they ended up on the floor of the office. There had been laughter, an upturned waste-paper basket, carpet burn. George had blotted out most of the details. A last-minute intimation of danger on his part. Ulla’s patience. A subdued brushing down. They must never drink again at work! They said the next day. He was relieved they both felt the same. After all, he told himself, he and Ulla came from the same generation. Those were rough-and-ready, more forgiving days.
*
When did he understand the grip that some people’s love could have on you? Its weight, even its peril. In the hospital, Ulla’s bunch of wattle had a scent of such virulent sweetness that it seemed to penetrate his brain. He couldn’t have peace until, dragging his post-operative drip with him on its trolley, he carried the vase out of his room down the corridor and left it on the reception desk. But back in bed the scent found its way to him. Off he trundled again, this time to dump the flowers in a bin marked ‘Hospital Waste’. It took a night for the scent to drift away.
‘Of course you’ll have to live differently,’ Ulla said when she sat by his bed. ‘Diet, exercise. No drinking or smoking. A more natural life.’ You caused this. You did this to yourself. He didn’t look at her. ‘Does Kristina understand this?’ she said.
*
‘I’m re-thinking everything at the moment,’ he said suddenly to Ulla when they were a few blocks from her place. ‘About my involvement in the shop. The sort of hours I want to put in, the sort of commitment. Even whether to close the shop and turn the whole business into mail order, work alone from home, have a catalogue on the Web, that sort of thing.’
‘What aren’t you happy with?’
‘Nothing. I just want to simplify my life.’
‘You’re good with customers, George. Much better than with computers. You need people.’
‘Maybe,’ he said as he pulled up. ‘Anyway, I’m giving it some thought.’
As usual, Ulla offered him a crumpled five dollar bill to pay for the lift, though she knew this annoyed him. He shook his head at her and pushed her hand away. She walked slowly up the pathway to her dark-brick home unit through its drab bush garden.
He knew as he drove off how cruel he’d been. She didn’t deserve this. For years her first thoughts had been for the shop. She really deserved to be made a partner. Or perhaps she’d known all along how it would end. On the freeway he opened his window to a rush of weedy river breeze. He felt cool and hard and savagely light-hearted.
It was clear at last that it must happen. Ulla would have to go.
*
Kristina was sitting on the front steps of the verandah, her bare feet on the footpath. The road was awash with the yellow light of the streetlamps. Behind her the black zigzag roof line of the row of houses ran like a spine up the hill.
Kristina said she felt stifled in the house. She couldn’t sleep. He sat down next to her. How unhappy she was, hugging her knees, not able to look at him, her mouth too set to speak. He wished she would tell him what was wrong. They were often at their closest when Kristina had a problem. An insult at work. What a colleague had said. She seemed to attract jealousy. He was very good at helping her.
‘Did Jerzy say goodbye?’
‘Yes. By the way, he wants to invite you to a game of squash.’
‘Good God. I didn’t know Jerzy played squash.’
‘He doesn’t. But he thought it might be good for you. Build you up a bit.’
In spite of herself Kristina laughed. George laughed too, warmed by Jerzy’s loyalty.
They heard a trickle of water on the verandah next door and looked at each other: Connie, giving her rubber plant its late-night drink.
Connie had lived in her house all her life. She had seen many occupants come and go in the row. George would be one of the oldest residents now. When he first moved in, Des, in the furthest house, used to organise street Christmas parties, but nine years ago he died of AIDS. In the next house down, a couple of academics, Clare and James, had moved out to a serviced apartment when Clare became crippled with arthritis. Ted, of Ted and Mavis, had a stroke and died in a nursing home. Sweet Mary Van Beem died three years ago of breast cancer. After she died, Kristina had seen a white heron circling over the roofs of the terrace. Then Connie’s Sam. Then George.
Every two years. You had to wonder if it was higher than the national average. Or if there was a reason why this row of houses had attracted the attention of a particularly vengeful angel. Death Row, George privately called it. One night last winter he asked Kristina if she ever thought of this. ‘It’s coming our way,’ he said.
‘No it’s not,’ Kristina said instantly. ‘It jumps around. Ted and Mavis lived further down than the Van Beems, remember?’
So she had thought of it. She was surprisingly superstitious for a scientist.
When he opened his eyes from the anaesthetic, the first thing he saw was Kristina picking out the corned beef from a hospital sandwich, looking haggard and exasperated. She was wearing the little gold cross from her long-repudiated Catholic childhood, which she’d always worn to interviews and exams.
His mood had turned sombre. He felt his limbs grow heavier by the moment. He touched her shoulder. ‘I’m off to bed.’
*
Before he left, Jerzy had stood at the bedroom door and called into the darkness: ‘Is he going to be all right?’
Kristina said that no one knew. If he made it through five years, his chances were good. He was in remission for the time being.
‘Don’t do anything to upset him,’ Jerzy said suddenly.
In one bound Kristina rose up from the bed and stood blinking in the hall. She didn’t dare ask Jerzy what he meant. They talked about George.
She’d been sitting on the steps since Jerzy drove off. From down the hill came the distant static of Fremantle on Friday night, shouts and crashes, feral drumbeats, the pulse of car radios. Her stomach hurt.
This afternoon, the man who used to be her lover had phoned her at work. He was a doctor at the same hospital. They’d had a long infrequent affair that she ended when George was diagnosed with cancer. No contact at all, she had said. She didn’t tell him about the pact she’d made, giving him up for George’s survival.
The doctor said today that he’d heard George had recovered. He wanted to see her again. Just for a walk or a drink, to see how she was. He said he missed her. In fact – his voice broke and he whispered – he was beginning to think he couldn’t live without her. And Kristina croaked back that she never stopped thinking about him either. A hoarse craving voice seemed to be speaking through her. At the same time she was filled with foreboding.
Later she rang him from the car at the Monument to tell him she wouldn’t meet him. They agreed to try not to meet.
The more they denied themselves, the more they desired. Kristina knew this. She also knew that the doctor wasn’t as nice as he was charming. When she first met him she thought he would be funny, with his long upper lip and ironic hangdog look. But he wasn’t funny
, in fact he turned out not to have much of a sense of humour. He didn’t like her to cry, or even to dress carelessly. He could have a whining tone when he talked about his colleagues. He had a capacity to sneer. For all his height and authority, it sometimes crossed her mind he was a sleaze.
The one person whose advice she’d trust she could not tell. Her lover was not half the man George was, she knew. And yet her thoughts returned to him, over and over, like a mantra.
One seagull circled silently over the street, lit up white in the darkness.
The angel had got it wrong. It should have been her, not George.
She had kept her pact and the angel had flown off again. But it was watching. It had left its mark on the door.
Her lover said on the phone at the Monument that he was leaving it up to her. How had it got to this point, so quickly? She didn’t know if she could find the conviction not to see him. She didn’t know how much longer she could bear it.
*
God how tired he was. He had just enough energy to slide a disc into the player by his bedside, pull his clothes off and fall naked onto the bed. But still his eyes remained open.
He’d put on Kancheli’s Abii Me Viderem. He’d been longing for it all evening. He was listening these days to composers from small, almost forgotten countries on the outskirts of the old Soviet Union. Countries which had known great suffering.
Kancheli was Georgian. There was something pure and unsparing about this music, like walking over a strange harsh landscape. I turned away so as not to see, that was what Abii Me Viderem meant.
He saw suddenly the garden around the hospital, pretend bushland that had probably once been landscaped, stunted banksias and eucalypts, forlorn paths of grey sand, a picnic table and benches that nobody ever sat on. Still, it had a certain delicate, unassuming serenity. After rain you could smell the eucalypts. Freesias appeared in early spring and magpies chortled around the car park.
Inside was its own world, a lonely place, and yet there was no face which did not smile at him. You sometimes glimpsed children in pajamas running down the corridors, bald-headed sprites surrounded by a sort of hush as all the adults held their breath for them. Once he walked into a waiting room full of women, old and young, in pastel floral gowns, and it seemed to him as they looked up that their faces were like flowers. Strangers told each other their stories, sitting together in gowns. They went very deep, very fast. Cancer had humbled them. Nothing had protected them, not virtue or intelligence or good looks. There was nothing left to separate them, nothing left to protect. A young Chinese woman called Mrs Cheng, sitting next to George, told him she had the Lord and that was all she needed. When she received her diagnosis, she’d reached into her handbag for a tissue to wipe her eyes and pulled out a little handcard, nicely printed, which said The Lord Will Save You. She had no idea how it got there. It was like a blinding flash, she said.
Sometimes he felt he had died and woken up.
How could he tell Ulla that to the end of his days (an end on which he now reflected daily), he would never pass a bus stop without looking for her, waiting in her dusty sandals?
He was growing sleepy. He reached out one arm and switched Kancheli off. Out of music comes silence. Once he fell asleep (after listening to one of the Russians) and dreamt that he was walking down a snowy street at night, lit by glowing, old-fashioned lanterns. How could he tell them that what he remembered most was the pull he felt, strong as love or nostalgia, to give up, lie down in the snow, and close his eyes.
FORGING FRIENDSHIP
KAREN HITCHCOCK
Hannah replied to my Facebook request for friendship by email.
Hey Keira, she said in the email. What’s it been, one year, two?
She was no longer with Thomas, had moved interstate, was making a short film and she’d prefer – she wrote – not to use Facebook. She would close her account any day now, it was a nightmare, she knew way too many people, and they all wanted to friend her. Nothing personal; she hoped I didn’t mind. She hoped she’d bump into me one day. We should catch up sometime, when she was in town and wasn’t so crazy busy.
Which to my mind was a fancy way of saying: Please fuck off.
So I wrote back: I totally understand, Hannah, thanks so much for finding the time to respond to me, because I do appreciate how extra precious your time is. I know that you really should have a PA to handle all this Facebook rejecting for you; how horrible it must be to tear yourself away from your city-slicking, vegan-shoe-and-blood-red-lipstick-buying, la-de-dah filmic machinations just to compose little Facebook rejections designed to make everyone else feel like a piece of crap. I mean, HOW TAXING for you, Hannah.
*
Switching pages, I see that Xanadu658 is selling a silver crochet evening purse lined in pale-blue silk. It is ‘no longer suitable, due to a change in lifestyle.’
What kind of lifestyle precludes evening purses? I check the other items Xanadu has for sale: three diamante belts (all size XS), red kitten heels (a bit scuffed), a six-pack of baby booties (NWOT).
I’m watching a couple of dresses, their prices creeping, I don’t need them, I probably won’t wear them, and yet … Maybe I should invest; maybe I need an evening purse. Who knows what the future may hold. Maybe this evening purse holds my future of evenings out clutching purses against perfect frocks over flawless skin, all clutched tight by a companion.
*
Hannah has dark brown eyes. We were once friends. Now we are not even ‘friends.’
I have a lot of ‘friends.’
I mean, we all know, or knew, or knew of, or wished we knew (like the-guy-from-the-bookshop), way too many people, don’t we? I’d even found my dad listed on Facebook: the first time I’d seen him since I was eight. Late one night, call it the bottom of the barrel. He looked fatter, smaller and dumber than I remembered. Barrel bottom or not, I didn’t ask him to be my friend.
What I really wrote to Hannah was this: Cool, Hann. Give me a call sometime if you’re passing through town and we’ll have a coffee and catch-up. Ciao xx
I don’t need to tell you; she’d never call, kiss kiss, how are ya babe.
*
Hannah moved from South Africa to my school in year eleven. Something about the end of apartheid and its impact on cattle farming? Her dad – despised, pined after – went to New Zealand. Hannah and her mum came here.
Her first week at school she caught me smoking by myself, behind the woodwork shed. She asked for a light and said my tobacco was grown in Zimbabwe. I looked at my burning cigarette, then back at Hannah, unsure if she was taking the piss.
She lit up, blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth. ‘I’m Hannah,’ she said, as if I didn’t know.
I made no assumptions, but from that moment on she’d find me each lunchtime and peel me away from my book. We’d nibble our crappy sandwiches, make fun of the other students and smoke our guts out. We never hung out on the weekends; she was seeing some older guy named Frank who took up all her time. But in year twelve they broke up and Hannah and I made the transition from smoking buddies to out-of-school buddies and she started sleeping over at my place.
Weekday, weekend, it made no difference to us, we’d stay awake half the night, gulping hot chocolate and leaning out the bedroom window to smoke. Hannah’s appetite for hot chocolate was insatiable; we’d go through a litre of milk each night, at least. Hannah’s mum would only allow cocoa made with water and a splash of skim milk, so when she got to my place – where my mum slept heavily and didn’t give a damn what we drank – she’d cut loose, heat the full-cream milk in a saucepan till it boiled, add half the box of cocoa and an avalanche of brown sugar. Each week I’d scrawl cocoa and milk on the shopping-list notepad on the fridge.
‘The amount of cocoa you girls go through,’ my mum would sigh in her distracted way as she tore the list from the pad and rushed off to the supermarket on Friday night.
Hannah’s hot chocolates. Her mother was one of those petite, po
inty-nosed women for whom eating nothing was a sign of refinement. The world was a great and mysterious place where nothing was certain except the superiority of looking like an old bag of bones. Hannah inherited her father’s large frame and appetite and made her mother look like an icy-pole stick. As far as I could tell, Hannah’s mum had spent Hannah’s entire life trying to whittle her into a twig.
One morning towards the end of the school year we were walking to the bus stop when Hannah told me that I held her in my sleep. I would – she said – wrap my arms around her waist, press my head into her chest or her back and hold on tight. She said she didn’t mind, but wondered if I was aware that I did it.
No, I told her, I was not aware.
Then I said: Jesus Christ, how embarrassing, I’m so sorry, I’ll try to stop.
She said not to worry about it, she didn’t much mind.
She sort of liked it, she said.
She found it sweet.
*
I once read that the reason we are able to walk down a crowded street without continually colliding into others is because we detect subtle movements in the eyes of the people coming towards us – movements that somewhere deep inside our brains we understand as an intended direction and make the necessary adjustment in our trajectory. We make way for each other through a mutual understanding. Perhaps this is why we can feel comforted by a crowd.
Our eyes send signals so we avoid the barest touch. Perhaps this is why we can feel so lonely in a crowd.
Hannah? It had not been what, one year or two. It had been twenty-eight months plus three weeks. And Hannah? Never mind.
*
Facebook makes me sick. Hannah and I used to meet up in the flesh and walk along a real street and enter real live shops, staffed by fragrant, embodied individuals who – if you reached out and touched them – would feel warm and smooth, as human beings do. In such establishments we would try on clothes that were new and available in most sizes, including ours. And we would choose a frock from a rack and slip it on and spin for each other, our backs to the cool, hard mirrors. Then Hannah and I would sit face to face, look across the table into each other’s eyes, and lips, and down into our coffees, slowly stirring the froth in, as we spoke words with pitch and waves that hit each other’s tympanic membranes and sent physical signals of chemico-electric form zinging through each other’s brains.