Stories

by Helen Garner

  The telephone began to ring: long, single, European blasts. She dithered. She picked it up. It was not him. It was a young woman. They found a common language and spoke to each other.

  ‘He has my poems,’ said the young woman. She was shy, and light-voiced. ‘He said that I could call him this weekend. He said we could have a drink together to discuss my poems.’

  ‘I’ll take a message.’

  ‘My name is Jeanne. You know? In the French way of writing?’

  ‘I’ll tell him, I promise.’

  The young woman laughed in her light, nervous voice. ‘Thank you. You are very kind.’

  Capri, c’est pas fini.

  She picked up her bag and went out the door.

  At the Hauptbahnhof a ragged dark-haired gipsy woman ran out of a door marked POLIZEI. Her shoes were broken, her teeth were broken. She ran with bent knees and bared teeth. She ran in a curving path across the station and out on to the street. Men looked at each other and laughed.

  The train went south. South, and south. It stopped at every station. People got in and people got out. It ran along between mountains whose tops were crisp. People carried parcels and string bags, and sometimes children. They greeted each other in blurred dialects. The train crossed borders, it ran across a whole country. A grandmother ate yogurt out of a plastic jar. She raised and dipped the spoon with a mechanical gesture. She licked the white rim off her lips and swallowed humbly. The train slid through a pass beside a jade river. Tremors rose from the river’s depths and shuddered on its swollen surface. After the second border she opened the window. The train passed close to buildings the colour of old flowerpots, buildings set at random angles among dense foliage, buildings whose corners were softened with age. The shutters were green; they were fixed back against the walls to make room for washing and for red geraniums. The air had colour and texture. You could touch the air. It was yellow. It was almost pink. She turned back to the compartment and it was full of the scent of sleeping children.

  DID HE PAY?

  HE PLAYED GUITAR. You could see him if you went to dance after midnight at Hides or Bananas, horrible mandrax dives where no one could steer a straight course, where a line of supplicants for the no-cost miracle, accorded to some, waited outside the door, gazing through the slats of the trellis at his shining head. Closer in, they saw him veiled in an ethereal mist of silvery-blue light and cigarette smoke, dressed in a cast-off woman’s shirt and walked-on jeans, his glasses flashing round panes of blankness as they caught the light, his blond hair matted into curls: an angel stretched tight, grimacing with white teeth and anguished smiles. In the magic lights, that’s how he looked.

  He was a low-lifer who read political papers, and who sometimes went home, or to what had once been home, to his fierce wife who ran their child with the dull cries of her rage and who played bass herself, thumping the heart rhythm, learning her own music to set herself free of his. They said she was rocking steady.

  ‘To papa from child’ wrote the little girl on his birthday card. She was a nuggety kid with cowlicks of blond hair, a stubborn lower lip and a foghorn voice. Her parents were engaged in their respective and mutual struggles, and imperiously she demanded the bodies and arms of other grown-ups, some of whom recoiled in fear before the urgency of her need. A performers’ child, she knew she existed. She knew the words of every song that both her parents’ bands played. You’d hear her crooning them in the huge rough backyard where the dope plants grew, chuckling in her husky voice at the variations she invented:

  ‘Don’t you know what love is? Don’t you love your nose?’

  ‘Call me papa!’ he shouted in the kitchen.

  ‘Papa! Papa!’ she cried, thumping joyfully round him on her stumpy legs. Having aroused this delight he turned away, forgot her, picked up his guitar and went to work. The child wept loudly with her nose snotting down her face: like her mother, she was accustomed to the rage of rejection and knew no restraint in its expression. In her room she made a dressing-table out of an upturned cardboard carton covered with a cloth. She lined up a brush, a comb and an old tube of lipstick upon it.

  The parents had met in a car-park in a satellite town, where kids used to hang out. Everyone wondered how they’d managed to stay together that long, given his lackadaisical ways and her by now chronic anger. The women knew her rage was just, but she frightened even the feminists with her handsome, sad monkey’s face and furious straight brows. It was said that once she harangued him from the audience when he was on stage at one of the bigger hotels. Somehow it was clear that they were tied to each other. Both had come from another country, as children. ‘When he’s not around I just…miss him,’ she said to her friend. It cost her plenty to say this.

  ‘Old horse-face,’ he called himself once, when they ran an unflattering photo of him in the daily paper, bent like licorice to the microphone, weighed down by the heavy white Gibson, spectacles hiding from the viewer all but his watchful corner-smile. He was sickeningly thin; his legs and hips were thin past the point of permission. In spite of guitar muscles, his finger and thumb could meet round his upper arm. One of the women asked him why he was doing this, in bed one morning. ‘Finger-lengthening exercises,’ he said, and she didn’t even laugh.

  He was irresistible. His hair was silvery blond, short, not silky but thick, and he had a habit of rubbing the back of his head and grinning like a hick farmer, as if at his own fecklessness. He would hold your gaze a second longer than was socially necessary, as if promising an alliance, an unusual intimacy. When he smiled, he turned his mouth down at the corners, and when he sang, his mouth stretched as if in agony; or was it a smile? It did for women, whatever it was. Some people, if they had got around to talking about it, might have said that there was something in his voice that would explain everything, if you could only listen hard enough: maybe he had a cold; or maybe he did what everyone wants a musician to do—cry for you, because you have lost the knack.

  Winter was a bad time in that town. Streets got longer and greyer, and it was simply not possible to manage without some sort of warmth. He was pathetic with money, and unable to organise a house for himself when his wife wouldn’t have him any longer. Yes, she broke it. Not only did she give him the push: she installed another man, and told her husband that if he wasn’t prepared to be there when he said he would, he could leave the child alone. He ground his teeth that day. He hadn’t known he would run out of track, but he knew enough to realise he had no right to be angry. He walked around all afternoon, in and out of kitchens, unable to say what the matter was. He couldn’t sit still.

  After that he drifted from house to house between gigs, living on his charm: probably out of shame rather than deviousness, he never actually asked for anything. Cynics may say his technique was more refined: pride sometimes begets tenderness, against people’s will. He just hung around, anyway, till someone offered, or until it eventuated with the passing of time: a meal, a place to sleep, a person to sleep with. If someone he was not interested in asked him to spend the night with her, he was too embarrassed to say no. Thus, many a woman spent a puzzled night beside him, untouched, unable to touch.

  In the households he was never in the way. In fact, he was a treat to have around, with his idle wit and ironic smile, and his bony limbs and sockless ankles, and his way of laughing incredulously, as if surprised that anything could still amuse him. He was dead lazy, he did nothing but accept with grace, a quality rare enough to pave his way for a while at least. If any of the men resented his undisputed sway, his exemption from the domestic criticism to which they themselves were subjected, their carpings were heard impatiently by the women, or dismissed with contempt as if they were motivated only by envy. Certain women, feeling their generosity wearing thin, or reluctantly suspecting that they were being used, suppressed this heresy for fear of losing the odd gift of his company, the illusion of his friendship. Also, it was considered a privilege to have other people see him in your kitchen. He had a big r
eputation. He was probably the best in town.

  After his late gigs he was perfect company for people who watched television all night, warmed by the blue glow and the hours of acquiescence. The machine removed from him the necessity of finding a bed. The other person would keep the fire alight all through the night, going out every few hours to the cold shed where the briquettes were kept, lugging the carton in and piling the dusty black blocks on to the flames. He would flick the channel over.

  ‘That’ll do,’ she’d say, whoever she was.

  ‘No. That’s War and Peace. No. Let’s watch Cop Shop. That’s all right, actually. That’s funny.’

  It wasn’t really his fault that people fell in love with him. He was so passive that anyone could project a fantasy on to him, and so constitutionally pleasant that she could well imagine it reciprocated. His passivity engulfed women. They floundered in it helplessly. Surely that downward smile meant something? It wasn’t that he didn’t like them, he merely floated, apparently without will in the matter.

  It was around this time that he began to notice an unpleasant phenomenon. When he brought his face close to a woman’s, to kiss, he experienced a slow run of giddiness, and her face would dwindle inexorably to the size of a head viewed down the wrong end of a telescope, or from the bottom of a well. It was disagreeable to the point of nausea.

  All the while he kept turning out the songs. His bands, which always burnt out quickly on the eve of success, played music that was both violent and reasonable. His guitar flew sometimes, worked by those bony fingers. He did work, then? It could be said that he worked to give something in exchange for what he took, were this not such a hackneyed rationalisation of the vanity and selfishness of musicians; let us divest him of such honourable intent, and say rather that what he played could be accepted in payment by those who felt that something was due. He could play so that the blood moved in your veins. You could accept and move; or jack up on him. It was all the same to him, in the end.

  He worked at clearing the knotty channels, at re-aligning his hands and his imagination so harmoniously that no petty surge of wilfulness could obstruct the strong, logical stream. It was hard, and most often he failed, but once in a while he touched something in himself that was pure. He believed that most people neither noticed nor cared, that the music was noise that shook them up and covered them while they did what they had come for. Afterwards he would feel emptied, dizzy with unconsumed excitement, and very lonely.

  Sometimes guitar playing became just a job with long blank spaces which he plugged with dope and what he called romance, a combination which blurred his clarity and turned him soggy. In Adelaide he met a girl who came to hear the band and took him home, not before he had kept her waiting an hour and a half in the band room while he exchanged professional wise-cracks with the other musicians. In the light that came in stripes through her Venetian blinds she revealed that she loved to kiss. He didn’t want to, he couldn’t. ‘Don’t maul me,’ he said. She was too young and too nice to be offended. She even thought he liked her. Any woman was better than three-to-a-room motel nights with the band. He was always longing for something.

  A woman came to the motel with some sticks for the band. She had red henna’d hair, a silver tooth earring, a leopard skin sash, black vinyl pants. She only stayed a minute, to deliver. When she left, he was filled with loss. He smoked and read all night.

  When the winter tour was over, he came south again. He called the girl he thought had been in love with him before he went away.

  ‘I don’t want to see you,’ she said. ‘Have a nice band, or something.’

  She hung up. At his next gig he saw this girl in the company of his wife. They stood well back, just in front of the silent, motionless row of men with glasses in their hands. They did not dance, or talk to each other, or make a move to approach him between sets, but it was obvious that they were at ease in each other’s company. He couldn’t help seeking out their two heads as he played. Late in the night, he turned aside for a second to flick his lead clear of an obstruction, and when he looked back, the women were gone.

  When he got to the house the front was dark, but he could see light coming from the kitchen at the back. He knocked. Someone walked quickly up the corridor to the door and opened it. It was not his wife, but the girl. He made as if to enter, but she fronted her body into the doorway and said in a friendly voice, ‘Look—why don’t you just piss off? You only make people miserable. It’s easier if you stay away.’

  The kitchen door at the other end of the hall became a yellow oblong standing on end with a cut-out of his wife’s head, sideways, pasted on to it halfway down.

  ‘Who is it?’ she called out. He heard the faint clip of the old accent.

  ‘No one,’ shouted the girl over her shoulder, and shut the door quietly in his face. He heard her run back down the corridor on her spiky heels. He thought she was laughing. Moll.

  That night he dreamed: as the train moved off from the siding, he seized the handrail and swung himself up on to the step. Maliciously it gathered speed: the metal thing hated him and was working to shake him off. He hung on to the greasy rail and tried to force the van door open, but the train had plunged into a mine, and was turning on sickening angles so that he could not get his balance. There was roaring and screeching all around, and a dank smell. Desperately he clung, half off the step, his passport pressed between his palm and the handrail.

  The train heeled recklessly on to the opposite track and as he fought for balance the passport whisked away and was gone, somewhere out in the darkness. Beneath the step he saw the metal slats of a bridge flash by, and oily water a long way down. He threw back his head and stretched open his mouth, but his lungs cracked before he could utter a sound.

  The band folded. He might get used to it, but he would never learn to like the loosened chest and stomach muscles, the vague desolation, the absence where there ought to have been the nightly chance to match himself against his own disorder and the apathy of white faces. He got a job, on the strength of his name and what he knew about music, doing a breakfast show on FM radio. You could hear him every morning, supposed to start at seven thirty on the knocker, but often you’d roll over at twenty to and flick on the transistor and hear nothing but the low buzz of no one there. Lie back long enough and you’d hear the click, the hum and at last his voice, breathless but not flustered.

  ‘Morning, listeners. Bit late starting. Sorry. Here’s the Flaming Groovies.’

  He had nowhere much to sleep, now, so different women knew the stories behind these late starts. Shooting smack, which he had once enjoyed, only made him spew. One night when nothing turned up he slept on the orange vinyl couch at the studio. The traffic noise woke him, and at seven thirty he put on a record, and chewed up a dried-out chocolate eclair and some Throaties. He thought he was going to vomit on air.

  With the radio money, dearly earned by someone with his ingrained habit of daylight sleeping, he took a room in a house beside a suburban railway station. There was nothing in the room. He bought a mattress at the Brotherhood, and borrowed a blanket. He shed his few clothes and lay there with his face over the edge of the mattress, almost touching the lino. In the corner stood his Gibson in its rigid case. He dozed, and dreamed that the drummer from his old band took him aside and played him a record of something he called ‘revolutionary music’, music the likes of which he had never heard in his life, before the sweetness and ferocity of which his own voice died, his instrument went dumb, his fingers turned stiff and gummy. He woke up weeping, and could not remember why.

  The girl who kissed arrived from Adelaide one Saturday morning, unheralded. She invaded the room with her niceness and her cleanliness and the expectation that they would share things. That night he stayed away, lounged in kitchens, drifted till dawn, and finally lent himself to a woman with dyed blond hair and a turn of phrase that made him laugh. When he went back the next night, the kisser had gone.

  There were no curtains
in the room, and the window was huge. He watched the street and the station platform for hours at a time, leaning lightly against the glass. People never looked up, which was just as well, for he was only perving. At five thirty every morning a thunderous diesel express went by and woke him. It was already light: summer was coming. He supposed that there were questions which might be considered, and answered. He didn’t try to find out. He just hung on.

  CIVILISATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  PHILIP CAME. I went to his hotel: I couldn’t get there fast enough. He stepped up to me when I came through the door, and took hold of me.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘my dear.’

  People here don’t talk like that. My hair was still damp.

  ‘Did you drive?’ he said.

  ‘No. I came on the bus.’

  ‘The bus?’

  ‘There’s never anywhere to park in the city.’

  ‘You’ve had your hair cut. You look like a boy.’

  ‘I know. I do it on purpose. I dress like a boy and I have my hair cut like a boy. I want to be a boy. So I can have a homosexual affair with you.’

  He laughed. ‘Good girl!’ he said. At these words I was so flooded with well-being that I could hardly get my breath. ‘If you were a boy some of the time and a girl the rest,’ he said, ‘I’d be luckier. Because I could have both.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d be luckier. Because I could be both.’

  I scrambled out of my clothes.

  ‘You’re so thin,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t eat. I’m sick.’