by Helen Garner
The moment for crying was long gone. She would have had to fake it, though she knew she had the right. ‘It hurts,’ said Little Helen. ‘I can feel blood still coming out. It hurts quite a lot, actually. It might be serious.’
‘You want to know about blood?’ said Noah. His small, high, dog’s eyes began to glow, as if a weak torch battery had flicked on inside his head. ‘I’ll show you what can happen to people.’
‘I think I’d better speak to my mother,’ said Little Helen. ‘I need to ask her about something very important.’
‘First I’ll show you something,’ said Noah.
‘I can’t walk,’ said Little Helen. She folded her arms and stood square, with her knees apart to accommodate the bucket, but he scooped her off the ground in one round movement and ran out of the shed and across the garden.
From her sideways and horizontal position Little Helen saw the grassy world bounce and swing. She kept her left leg stuck out straight so the bucket would not be interfered with. His big hip and thigh worked under her waist like a horse’s. He took the back steps in a couple of bounds. At the top he swung her across his front while he fumbled with the glass door, and in its broad pane she saw reflected her own white underpants, twisted half off her bottom, and down in its lower corner, half-obscured by the image of her faithful bucket, the bunch of skyscrapers flaming with light. She writhed to cover her pants and his hard fingers gripped her tighter. He forged through the kitchen, along the passage and into a small dim room that smelt of leather and Finepoint pens with their caps off.
Dumped, she staggered for the door, but he got past her and kicked it shut.
‘Mum!’ said Little Helen, without conviction.
‘Look,’ said Noah. He kept one foot against the door and reached behind her to a large, low, wooden cupboard that stood on legs against one wall. He slid open its front panel and switched on a light inside it.
It was not a cupboard. It was a box. It was deep, and it was full of pictures, tiny square ones, suspended in space, arranged in neat horizontal rows and lit gently from behind so that they glowed in many colours, jewel-like, but mostly yellow, brown and red. The magical idea, the bright orderliness of it, took Little Helen’s breath away. She limped forward, smiling, favouring her bucketed leg. Noah left the door and crouched beside her. He must have forgiven her: he was panting from his run, from his haste to bring her to this wonder.
The pictures were slides. They seemed to be of children’s faces. But there was something unusual about them. Were they children in face paint? Were they dressed in Costumes of Other Lands, or at a Hat Competition? Were they disguised as angels, or fairies? Little Helen tried to kneel, but her bucket bothered her. She spread her legs wide and bent them, and opened her arms to keep her balance. In this Balinese posture she lowered herself to contemplate the mystery.
The children were horrible. Their heads were bloodied. Their hair had been torn out by the roots, their scalps were raw and crisscrossed with black railway lines. Their lips were blue and swollen and bulged outwards, barely contained by stitches. Their eyes had burst like pickled onions, their foreheads were stove in, their chins were crushed to pink pulp. One baby, too new to sit up, had a huge purple furry thing growing from its temple to its chin. Another had two dark holes instead of a nose and its top lip was not there at all.
But the worst thing was that not a single one of them was crying. The ones whose eyes still worked looked straight at Little Helen with a patient, sober gaze. They were not surprised that these terrible things had happened to them, that their mothers had turned away at the wrong moment, that the war had come, that men with guns and knives had got into the house and found them. Little Helen’s hackles went lumpy and her stomach rose into her throat. She shut her eyes and tried to straighten up, but Noah put his hand down hard on her shoulder and croaked, ‘See that kid there? A power line fell on him. His brain woulda blown right out of his skull.’
Little Helen squirmed out from under his hand and crawled away. He did not follow her, but watched her drag her bucket to the door and stand up and reach the high handle. She got her good foot out into the hall and looked back. He was crouching before the picture box. The soft white light from inside it polished his furry hair. Little Helen saw that he could not stop looking at the pictures. He turned to her.
‘See?’ he said. ‘See what can happen to little kids?’
She nodded.
‘Don’t you like it?’ The dim torch battery went on behind his eyes. He was smiling. ‘You don’t, do you. Piss weak. Look at this equipment. Best that money can buy.’
‘What—’ She cleared her throat. ‘Did they all die?’
‘Die? Course they didn’t die. My dad sewed ’em up. But they were very sick. And afterwards they were always ugly. For the rest of their lives.’
Little Helen let go the door handle and slid out into the hallway. Her palms were sticky and the backs of her hands had shrunk and gone hard, but she was not going to be sick. She stumped away down the passage towards the front of the house. The bucket made a soft clunk with every second step.
Her mother and Noah’s were sitting quietly on the edge of the big double bed. They were dressed in their ordinary clothes and sat with their hands folded in their laps as if waiting for something. Little Helen clumped into the doorway and stopped. They looked up. She saw their two white faces, round and flat as dinner plates, shining above their dark dresses in what remained of the light.
LA CHANCE EXISTE
I AM THE kind of person who always gets stopped at Customs. Julie says it’s because I can’t keep my eyes still. ‘You look as if you’re constantly checking the whereabouts of the exits,’ she said. She’ll never really trust me again, I suppose. It shits me but I can’t blame her. I love her, that’s all, and I feel like serving her.
When we got to Boulogne we had to hang around for three hours waiting for the ferry because of a strike on the other side. I would have sat in a café and read Le Monde, but Julie wanted to walk round and look at things, seeing she’d only been in France a couple of days. Her French was hopeless and she was too proud to try. When I met her plane at Orly she was already agitated about not being able to understand. We went straight to a bar in the airport and she insisted on ordering. The waiter, tricked by her good accent, made a friendly remark which seemed to require an answer: her face went rigid with panic and she turned away. The waiter shrugged and went back behind the counter. She hit the table with her fist and groaned between clenched teeth. ‘It’s pathetic! I should be able to! I’m not stupid!’
‘For Christ’s sake, woman,’ I said. ‘You’ve only been in the country fifteen minutes. What do you want from yourself?’
Boulogne was dismal, as I had predicted. I kept telling her we should go south, down to Italy where she’d never been, but she had to go to London, she said, to meet this bloke she’d fallen in love with just before she left Australia. He was coming after her, she was dying to see him again. She fell in love with this guy, who was a musician, because at a gig she found him between sets sitting by himself in a sort of booth thing reading a book called The Meaning of Meaning. She told me he was extremely thin. It sounded like a disaster to me. Love will not survive a channel crossing, I pointed out, let alone the thirty-six hours from Melbourne to London. But I was so glad to be with her again, and she wasn’t listening.
We walked, in our Paris boulevard shoes, over the lumpy cobbles of Boulogne. We found a huge archway which led on to a beaten dirt track that curved round the outside of the old city, at the foot of its high walls. Julie was excited. ‘It’s old! It must have been trying to be impregnable!’ The track was narrow. ‘Single file, Indian style,’ she chanted, charging ahead of me.
It was eleven o’clock on a weekday morning in July, and there was no one about. A nippy breeze came up off the channel. The water was grey and disturbed, a sea of shivers.
We tramped along merrily for twenty minutes, round the shoulder of the hill the old ci
ty stood on, turning back now and then to look at the view. The track became narrower.
‘Let’s go back,’ I said. ‘You can’t see the sea round this side. It stinks.’
‘Not yet. Look. What are those caravans down there?’
‘I dunno. Gipsies or something. Come on, Julie.’
She pressed on. The track was hardly a track at all: it was brambly, and was obviously about to run out against a wing of a castle about a hundred yards ahead. I was ten steps behind her when she gave a sharp cry of disgust and stopped dead. I caught up with her. There was a terrible smell, of shit and things rotting. At her feet was the mangled corpse of a large bird: it looked as if it had been torn to bits. Its head was a yard away from its neck, half its beak had been wrenched off, and there were dirty feathers everywhere, stuck in the spiky bushes, fluttering in the seawind. The shit was human. Its shapes were man-made; it was meat-eater’s shit, foul.
We looked at each other. The murder was fresh. In the crisp breeze the feathers on the creature’s breast riffled and subsided like an expensive haircut. It was very quiet up there.
‘Someone’s looking at us from one of those caravans,’ said Julie without moving her lips. ‘This is their shitting place. It’s their fucking dunny. They must be laughing at us.’ She gave a high-pitched giggle, pushed past me, and ploughed away through the prickly bushes, back the way we’d come.
Back amongst houses, we stood at the top of an alley in the depths of which two little boys were engaged in a complicated, urgent game with a ball and a piece of rope. One dropped his end in annoyance and walked away. The other, who had glasses and a fringe and a white face, sang out after him, in a voice clear enough for even Julie to understand.
‘La chance exis—te!’
‘What a sophisticated remark,’ said Julie.
On the boat, when it finally turned up, we didn’t even have the money for a drink. The sky and the sea were grey. The line between them tilted this way and that.
‘Will it be rough?’ said Julie. ‘What if I spew?’
‘You won’t spew. We’ll walk around and talk to each other. I’ll keep your mind off your stomach.’
My glasses are the kind that are supposed to adapt automatically to the intensity of the light, but they failed to go clear again when we went down into the inside part of the ship. Cheap rubbish. The downstairs part was badly lit. I hate going back to England. I hate being able to understand everything that’s going on around me. I miss that feeling of your senses having to strain an inch beyond your skin that you get in places where people aren’t speaking your language.
Julie darted down the stairs and grabbed a couple of seats. We got out books and kicked our bags under the little table. On the wall near us was the multilingual sign warning passengers about the danger of rabies and the fines you get. Julie knelt up on her seat and read it with interest.
‘Rabies. What’s that in French. La rage. Ha. You don’t have to be a dog to die of that.’
Julie is suspicious, and full of disgust. When she laughs you see that one of her back teeth is missing on the left side. If she chooses you she loves you fiercely, lashes you if you fail yourself. A faint air of contempt hangs about her even when she’s in good spirits. She says she’s never going home. Everyone always says that when they first get here.
She flung herself round into the seat. ‘I saw Lou just before I left Melbourne,’ she said. ‘I told him I’d be seeing you. He laughed. He said, “That fuckin’ little poofter!”’ She glanced sideways.
‘News travels fast.’ I knew that’s what Lou would have said. It made me tired. He could do the dope and the bum cheques on his own now. I took a breath and went in at the deep end.
‘When I first got here,’ I said, ‘I knew I was going to have to do something. That’s what I came for. I used to walk around Paris all night, looking for men and running away from them. For example. One night I was in the metro. It was packed and I was standing up holding on to one of those vertical chrome poles. A boy got on at Clignancourt. He squeezed through the crowd to the pole.
‘He wasn’t looking at me, but I could feel him—I might’ve been imagining it, but warmth passed between us. I was burning all down one side. My heart was thumping. His hand on the pole was so close to my mouth I could have kissed it. The train was swaying, all the people were swaying, and I edged my hand up the pole till it was almost touching his. I felt sick, I wanted to touch him so much. I could smell his skin. I thought I was going to pass out. Then at the next stop he calmly let go of the pole and pushed through the crowd and got off.’
Julie put her feet up on the low table between us and folded her arms round her legs and laid her head sideways on her knees. She was having trouble controlling her mouth. ‘What’s your favourite name of a metro station?’ she said.
‘What? I don’t know. Trocadéro.’
‘Mine’s Château d’Eau.’
‘Ever been up on top of that station? You’d hate it. It’s not safe for women.’
‘Remember that time you shat on my green Lois Lane jacket?’
‘It was an accident! I had diarrhoea!’
‘You were so busy looking at yourself in the mirror you didn’t know you were standing on my clothes.’
‘The dry cleaner got it off! Why do you have to remind me?’
‘“It’s dog mess,” you said to the lady at the dry cleaner. Dog mess.’ She gave a snort of laughter.
‘It came off, anyway.’ I opened the newspaper and rattled it.
‘Being homosexual must mean something,’ she said. ‘What happens? Is everything possible?’
‘How do you mean?’ Was she going to ask me what we did? I’d tell her. I’d tell her anything.
‘I mean, if both of you have the same equipment does that mean it’s more equal? Do people fall into habits of fucking or being fucked? Or does everyone do everything?’
‘It’s not really all that different,’ I said, feeling shy but trying to be helpful. ‘Not when you’re in a relationship, anyway.’
‘Oh.’ She looked disappointed, and stared out the porthole at the grey sky and the grey water. Her cardigan sleeves were pushed up to her elbows and I could see the mist of blond hairs that fogged her skin. Her legs were downy like that, too. We can wear each other’s clothes. She’s the same height as me, with slightly more cowboy-like hips: light passes between the tops of her thighs.
‘I never want to fuck with anyone unless it puts me in danger,’ she said suddenly. ‘I don’t mean physical. I mean unless there’s a chance they’ll make me sad.’
‘Break your heart.’
‘I’ll never get married. Or even live with anyone again, probably.’
‘What about shithead? The bass player? Isn’t that why we’re making this fucking trip?’
‘Are you afraid of getting old?’ she said in a peculiar voice.
‘My hair’s starting to recede.’ I pulled it back off my forehead to show her.
‘Oh, bullshit. What are you, twenty-five? Look at your little round forehead. A pretty little globe.’
‘And I’m getting hairs on my back,’ I said, ‘like my father.’ I didn’t mention that I twist round in front of the bathroom mirror with the tweezers in my hand.
‘Can’t we afford one drink and share it?’ she said.
‘No. We have to get the bus to Rowena’s.’
‘Last week,’ she said, her head still on her knees, ‘I was in the Louvre. I was upstairs, heading along one of the main galleries. I saw this young bloke sitting on a bench with a little pack on his back. He was about your age, English I’d say. He looked tired, and lonely, and he gave me a look. I wanted to go and sit next to him and say, “Will we go and have a cup of coffee? Or talk to each other?” But I was too…I kept walking and went down the steps to the room where all those Rubens paintings are, of Louis Whichever-it-was and Marie de Medici. I stayed in there for ten minutes walking round, and I hated the paintings, they made me feel like spewing—all thos
e pursed-up little mouths smirking. I went back up the steps and the boy was gone.’
The boat heaved on towards Folkestone.
‘Why is it so hard to talk about sex?’ she said, almost in tears. ‘Every time you think you’re close to saying what you mean, your mind just veers away from it, and you say something that’s not quite the point.’
What would they know here about summer? The wind was sharp. People in the queue had blue lips. I was stopped before we got anywhere near Customs, this time by a smart bastard in plain clothes who was cruising up and down the bedraggled line of tourists with passports in their hands.
‘His jacket,’ muttered Julie. It was orange and black hounds-tooth. ‘My God. What’s happened to this country?’
‘Don’t get me started on that subject.’ I stood still and proffered my bag. Some look must appear on my face in their presence, or maybe it’s the smell of fear they say dogs can pick up. He was nasty in that bored way; idle malice. No point getting hot under the collar. While he rooted through our bags, and Julie stood with her arms folded and her chin up and her eyes far away over his garish shoulder, he asked her an impertinent question.
‘How long’ve you known this feller?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said, how long’ve you known this feller you’re travelling with?’
You can’t take that tone to a woman these days. ‘What’s that got to do with you?’ said Julie.
He stopped rummaging and looked up at her, with one of her shirts in his hand. God, she still had that old pink thing with the mended collar. He narrowed his eyes and let his slot of a mouth drop open half an inch. Here’s a go, he was thinking. I kicked her ankle. She reached out, took the pink shirt and said, folding it as skilfully as a salesgirl in Georges, ‘Six years or so. Nice jacket. Is that Harris?’
He wasn’t quite stupid enough to answer. He shoved the pink shirt back in among the other garments and walked away. Our bags stood unzipped, sprouting private objects.
On the train to London I read and she stared at people. At Leicester Square we ran down the stairs into the tube. I caught the eye of a good-looking boy who was coming up. I turned to look back at him as he passed and she slashed me across the face with her raincoat. The zip got me near the eye.