by Gary Crew
‘Sorry?’ I said.
Seeing as I had invited a comeback, he said, ‘Well, before Alice…’
‘I call her Lootie,’ I said.
‘Before Alice,’ he said, ‘there was…?’
‘Nobody,’ I admitted.
‘Nobody?’ He looked at me over the brim of his cup. ‘Nobody, ever?’
‘Before that I was in school.’
‘How about your mother?’ He sipped, then put the cup down, satisfied that he had upset me.
‘My mother?’
‘Well,’ he said, making out that he was watching some girl wander past. ‘She did have you over a barrel. She did control your life, if you know what I mean. Tough lady, that one.’
‘Didn’t stop you from eating her biscuits,’ I said. ‘And cake.’
‘Take it where you can get it, Monkey Boy,’ he said, giving me a wink. ‘So, what about this latest mess?’
‘I wouldn’t call it a mess. It’s just one of those things.’ ‘One of those things that puts you on the lounge. In your own house, like?’
This was true. But it was hard to admit. Harder still to live with. ‘It’s only temporary,’ I said. ‘I already told you I was back in the bedroom last night.’
He sighed, shaking his head. ‘So why are you looking so miserable?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Whereabouts in the bedroom, Charlie? Whereabouts in the bed?’
‘That’s a bit close to the bone,’ I warned him. ‘First my mum, and now Lootie. Hey?’
Rory finished his coffee in a gulp. ‘Hey yourself, Monkey Boy,’ he said, leaning across the table towards me, ‘you’re one of the reasons I live alone. Think about it.’
I was home before Lootie so I grabbed a beer and sat beneath my elm.
A low stone wall spanned the front of the property. The stone was basalt, and aged. Olive green moss, thick and rich, grew on the house side of this wall, where the sun never reached. The moss grew in tufts, and sometimes (if I sat very still), I saw ants, black as jet, come to feed there, or drink from the edge of it, tiny tongues sipping. Sleek silver lizards came too, silent and flat. If I was very quiet, and slipped from the bench to my knees (like praying), I might imagine a lizard’s eye to be a pool of gold, so deep, so real, that I could dive in, but dare not.
Our garden was very small, being no more than the width of the house, which was narrow. About seven metres wide, I guess, and four or five metres deep. Or, if measured by the shrubs, two azaleas and three hydrangeas wide, and one magnolia stellata deep, with the golden elm in the corner, to the right of the front door, reaching up to our bedroom window. The elm’s lime green shade was the best part of summer, its golden splendour the best of autumn. The garden bench beneath made this my favourite place in any season.
That afternoon, as the sun set, I stared over the wall into the gardens of the houses across the street. I guess the people who lived in these houses knew that I was staring—if they were at home, that is, and in their front gardens themselves—but no one ever had a go at me. I say I guess that they could see me, but maybe they couldn’t. If I was sitting down (which I most often was), the fact that the stone wall ran the width of our garden might have been barrier enough to prevent them knowing I was even there. Like the secret ants. Or the flat lizard, invisible. Whether the wall prevented their seeing me, or whether it didn’t, I will never know (I never went over to find out), but at least it provided a psychological barrier. As did their own walls. My point is, our wall made it easier for me to watch without being seen (or so I imagined) and I liked that.
What I liked most was watching the family that lived in the terrace directly over the road.
I never saw much activity in their front garden until late afternoon, dusk mostly, usually after five. A family of four lived there: a father, a mother and two little boys. I didn’t see much during the day because I was mostly at uni, or riding for XPress, and even if I was home, and did happen to sit out the front, maybe the boys were at school. Or maybe they played in their back garden. They were only young, about five and seven. Little fair-haired boys. But at dusk, about five-thirty, their father would come home. He wore a white shirt and tie. I guess he worked in an office. Maybe a post office, I liked to imagine. He didn’t carry a briefcase, so he couldn’t have been that important.
The boys would wait for him, sitting on their front wall. When they saw him coming from the direction of Ho’s Chinese, they’d whoop and run to meet him, leaping into his arms, all hugs and kisses.
I hardly ever saw the wife, the mother. Once or twice I saw a woman go in the front gate, between the stone plinths, and I guessed by her age and clothes and the groceries she carried in plastic shopping bags that she was the mother, but this was only a guess. Only in my imagination.
What was real were the games the boys played with their father. After he went inside, I suppose for a cuppa (or a beer?), he’d reappear with a soccer ball and his sleeves rolled up. The boys and the father would kick this ball in the street (too involved to notice me), up and down and back again, laughing and yelling for a good hour or so then, still laughing, they’d go inside, because it was dark, and shut the door.
I would see nothing for a while (dinner time in the kitchen at the back? Bath time?), then a light would go on in the front of the house, behind a lace curtain there, and I’d imagine the father reading stories to the boys.
This is all made up.
Probably completely untrue.
At best imagined (like that episode when I stabbed Chanteleer with the pen), but it would be good to be loved like that.
5
Sunday morning, just a week after we heard Chanteleer at the Redmond Barry theatre, it was time to get ready for the garden party at his house in Kew.
(I really don’t want to write about this. I really don’t want to invite him back into my memory, my life, where once again he might hurt me, as he did, but if I’m going to tell this, and be rid of him I know that I must.)
So that morning I got up, made coffee and toast, and took it in to Lootie.
She sat up in bed (yes, Rory, we were sleeping together) and said, ‘Did you check on your coat? For the garden party?’
I sat beside her, one hand on her leg, my coffee in the other. ‘It’s there,’ I said.
‘I’m sure that it’s there,’ she said, ‘but is it pressed? Is it nice?’
‘You’re nice,’ I said, rubbing her leg.
‘Charlie,’ she said, pulling away. ‘I asked you to check that it was okay. Did you?’
‘Why shouldn’t it be okay?’ I asked. ‘It just hangs in the cupboard. I never wear it.’
‘Get it out,’ she said. ‘Show me.’
This was the second Sunday morning that Chanteleer had occupied our minds. So I said, ‘Why? Do you think Chanteleer might be keen on me?’
(Being ignorant, it was nothing to make jokes in those days. Lard arse though I was, my assurance in my love for Lootie made me invulnerable. I believed that the might of my love for her, the all-encompassing certainty of it, guaranteed her love for me. I was, of course, a fool.)
Lootie snorted. ‘You’re revolting sometimes.’
‘He might like revolting. Being so twee himself.’
‘I’m going for a run,’ she said. ‘We have to leave at quarter to eleven.’
‘How are we getting there?’ I said.
‘Cab.’
‘Cab? That costs. Can’t we ride our bikes?’
She was rooting around in a drawer, looking for her running shorts, I guess. ‘I’m wearing a dress,’ she said. ‘My white linen shift. So bikes are out. And I’ll take that blue linen bolero, in case it gets chilly.’
‘This is a garden party, you say?’ I said to her back as she headed for the door.
‘That’s what he said.’
‘So, is that like a bar-b-que?’
‘No,’ she said, all snooty like. ‘It’s a garden party. So we present ourselves at our best.’
&n
bsp; ‘Meaning?’
‘No shorts and no T-shirts. Smart casual is the go.’ She yelled this from the front door. ‘Hence my linen and your coat. Get it?’
‘So there won’t be snags and tomato sauce?’
Either she didn’t hear me or she couldn’t be bothered answering.
I opened my wardrobe (Lootie was too neat to share) and took out my coat.
We arrived a little after eleven. We had asked the cabbie to pull in at a bottle shop. Lootie chose the champagne. It cost $42.50, which was top shelf. For us, at least, on our income. I said nothing.
I guess the episode with the coat, and the white cricket flannels that she made me wear, had prepared me. And the white tennis shoes, seeing as I didn’t own any white leather shoes. (Not being a real estate salesman, as I pointed out.)
But it was not the cricket flannels, nor the white tennis shoes, nor the $42.50 champagne that set me back that morning. It was the gilt dragon that Lootie stuck in my lapel.
Before we had even left our place, as we were waiting for the cab in the patchy shade of the elm, she said, ‘Here, Charlie, turn around.’
Did I have dandruff on my shoulders?
‘Other way, silly,’ she said when I had my back to her.
I turned to face her, wondering. Had I dribbled on my clean white shirt?
She dug in her change purse and pulled something out. ‘Stand still,’ she said, and put the something in my lapel.
I looked down. As best as I could see, it was a kind of brooch. A little gold brooch, or stick pin, in the shape of a dragon. A dragon with its mouth open breathing gold fire, its pointed tail arched over its back. Maybe two centimetres long. On big fat me.
‘What is it?’ I wanted to know, twisting it around so I could see it better.
Lootie slapped my hand. ‘A gold dragon,’ she said. ‘I bought it especially. For when you meet Sebastian.’
‘What?’ I said, but the cab pulled up.
‘Why?’ I asked when we were in the back seat. She didn’t answer. No matter how many times I asked. She patted my hand and looked out her window, as if to say, mother knows (as my mother did) and I had to be satisfied with that.
The cab pulled up before a massive pair of wrought-iron gates set in a cast-iron fence with spikes on top. (They were probably fleur-de-lis, but being Chanteleer’s place, I imagine them as spikes, jousting lances at least.) The garden beyond was thick with glossy-leaved shrubs, camellias mostly, some protruding through the bars as if attempting an escape.
Lootie pushed the gates open and I followed her through. The curved drive was paved in red brick with a circular bed of pansies, all scarlet and purple and gold—a cushion of velvet—squatting in the centre.
I followed until we came to three stone steps leading to a portico. Lootie went on up; I stood back.
The house reminded me of the whited sepulchres that Father Steven taught us about in chapel on Sunday mornings while my mother waited in the vestry. ‘Father Steven means you should watch out for frauds,’ she told me as we trudged home in the summer heat.
‘What?’ I said, not understanding.
‘Frauds. People who look like one thing and they’re another,’ she declared. ‘When they’re something else. They’re what you call “whited sepulchres”.’ For all of her explanations (and since I was so naïve, so ignorant, you might say), none of this meant anything to me.
But standing in Chanteleer’s garden, and looking up at his house, was something of an epiphany. For all its apparent magnificence, the place was built of brick not stone. The notion of strength was borrowed from the iron in the surrounding fence, the illusion of wealth from the jewelled tapestry of the pansies. The bricks were old and ill-fired, the sepulchral white paint peeling off. A Greek pediment (empty of sculpture, streaked with bird shit), evidently provided a home for starlings; and while I stood on tiptoe to look inside, the faded corrugations of the threadbare curtains (once royal purple?) meant that I could see nothing.
Lootie was at the front door, waiting for someone to answer. I stepped up beside her. The knocker was of some bright yellow metal in the shape of a dragon’s head. When I looked more closely, I could see a bar-coded price sticker still attached. I figured that Chanteleer must have added this bit of whimsy to suit his taste. If Eve (aka Red Lips) was to be believed, he had not been in this country all that long.
Obviously no one was home.
‘Let’s go,’ I whispered, ever hopeful.
(Would that I had grabbed her arm and run!)
‘They must be somewhere,’ Lootie hissed.
She pulled me down from the portico and took a cinder path leading to the right, through more camellias, very dense, towards the back of the house.
I followed.
Ahead I heard music and laughter, then Lootie broke through the shrubbery and was gone. Left alone, I plunged on, but stopped, seeing on the lawn before me a crowd in pink and blue, their faces turned towards me, gaping.
I side-stepped into a clump of camellias, the foliage thick enough to screen me, and hid, watching. The heavy smell of rotting blooms was all about me, their fallen, fleshy petals crushed beneath my nervous feet.
I eased my collar, suffocating.
‘So you’re a fr- fr- freak too?’ someone stuttered in my ear.
Behind me stood a bloke in his thirties, his hair red and wavy. I recognised him as the gormless money taker at the Redmond Barry theatre. The dill with the cake tin full of coins. ‘What?’ I said, intimidated.
‘You’re hiding t- t- too,’ he said.
This was true, but I wasn’t about to admit it. Not to any old Tom, Dick or Harry, especially one dressed in a blue-and-white striped seersucker blazer. (My mother was very particular about the naming of fabrics: in haberdashery, she would say, ‘That is a nice poplin,’ and hold the bolt up at one end to smooth the cloth through her fingers. So I came to know.) The red-headed man held a straw-yellow boater in his right hand. By the look in his eyes, which were weak, the colour of water, he might have something wrong with him, mental like.
‘At least you look as if you belong here,’ I said, making a vertical sweep of his get-up. ‘You’ve got the coat and hat.’
‘You’re w- w- welcome to ‘em,’ he said. ‘They go with the h- h- house.’
‘Sorry?’ I said.
‘I h- hate the house too.’ He hawked up the word hate, rather than said it, wanting to get it out without the stutter, I suppose. The result was horrible, all the same. ‘I hate the whole place, h- hey!’ and he tore at a camellia leaf for good measure.
‘So how come you’re here?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t c- c- come,’ he said, shredding the stiff leaf.
‘Well you’re here, aren’t you?’ I said, the rotten blooms claustrophobic, the proximity of the stutterer making them more so.
He shrugged off my question, chucking the remains of the leaf away. ‘I live here,’ he said.
‘You live here?’ I backed deeper into my camellia.
‘I’m Adrian,’ he said.
‘Adrian?’
‘The gardener, h- hey. The jack of all trades. The Man F- Friday. The Master’s s- s- shadow…’
‘Ah!’ I said. ‘That explains it. I saw you at the Redmond Barry theatre, taking the money.’
He looked at me vacantly, as if not comprehending and I would have escaped, if I could, I would have cut and run, if the stiff green leaves had not engulfed me, if the giggling pink and blue of the crowd had not confronted.
‘And hoo- hoo- who are you?’ he asked, as well he might. ‘And how c- c- come you’re hiding t- too?’
Finding the balls to step out, I declared, as my mother had taught me, ‘I’m Charles Franklin Bloome. Charlie, if you like. And I’m not sure why I’m here…’
‘Not s- sure?’ he said, looking at me queer.
‘I came with my partner, Alice,’ I said, remembering. ‘She’s a fan. Of Chanteleer’s.’
‘And you’re n- n- not?’
‘It’s j- j- just that you’re wearing one of his dragon pins,’ he said. ‘A fan pin.’ He touched a gilt pin in his own lapel, then reached out to touch the one that Lootie had given me.
‘Ah, that,’ I said, enlightened. ‘Alice put that there. Not me.’
‘Who is…?’ he began.
I looked into the crowd, saying nothing, not wanting this interrogation to continue.
‘Your g- girlfriend?’ he said. ‘H- hey?’
‘Something like that,’ I said, brushing myself.
‘You’re l- lucky,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’ I said.
‘S- S- Sebastian gets all the g- g- girls. Always has.’
I had no idea what he was getting at, and didn’t want to, so I said, ‘It’s a nice garden. The camellias…’
He pushed past me. ‘I have to g- go,’ he said. ‘The mother said that I have to c- carry the sandwiches. There’s c- cucumber, you know.’
‘The mother?’ I asked, but he didn’t reply. Rather, he stepped into the sunlight, stopped a moment, his hat in one hand, his free hand to his chin, then he turned and, checking his watch (white-rabbit-like), hurried away, muttering.
When he had gone, I also abandoned the hide-out. Whether this was motivated by a desire to behave like an adult, or simply to find Lootie, I really don’t know. All the same, I straightened my coat, and joined the crowd.
There were about fifty people, maybe more. Considering how close they stood, even allowing for that well-established party-buffer, the glass of wine held at chest height, and the intimate manner of their speech (they spoke directly into each other’s face) to me they constituted a crowd.
And Lootie was somewhere among them.
‘Pardon,’ I said, blundering. ‘Oops.’
I spotted her, surrounded, since she was the loveliest there. ‘Lootie,’ I called. ‘Lootie.’
Seeing me (my sorry face), she put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, Charlie!’ she said, as if she had forgotten. As if she had mislaid her hankie.