by Ashley Hay
She put her arms around her husband, humming the chorus and singing a phrase here and there as they danced around the kitchen.
‘Anyway, who cares about words?’ she said, pulling him along, until the song stopped and they paused.
‘Who cares about words?’ Ben dipped her in mock outrage, leaning in further to give her a kiss. ‘I don’t know about that.’ Later, when he was in the shower, Lucy clipped on a set of headphones and piped the songs into her head. Lying on the living room floor with the lights off, she scanned along the spines of their CDs and picked out the shapes of their possessions: the sofa from London, the rug from Tashkent, the photos she’d bought by the Seine. There was a story for every thing they owned. Elsie’s bleached and starched white doily glowed on a chair’s arm like a burst of starlight. How sad that something made so carefully ends up thrown away. Now it was just another story Lucy would tell.
All the things they’d brought into this house; all of Elsie’s things, packed up and taken away. A world delineated by this ebb and flow of items. The stuff of people’s lives.
Her mind drifted as the song went round and round. And now there were so many people. Maybe we’re out of originals. Maybe these days most of us are vardøger, living versions of a finite set of lives.
I wonder what the other Lucy Kisses are doing tonight?
Did you have just one vardøger, scurrying ahead, or did new iterations of yourself peel off whenever you made a decision? All the other incarnations of Lucy Kiss who’d travelled to different places, met different people, taken different jobs, different lovers, different paths.
She pushed her fingers against her eyes and watched the darkness sparkle. Perhaps all the Lucy Kisses were lying on their living room floors right now, listening to this song, tapping along to its bassline, remembering when they’d heard it, years ago, one summer, on their own. Surely one of them was standing in a pub right now, singing and dancing. Surely one of them was still living that life.
She hoped so.
She pulled off the headphones and sat up. No time for nostalgia. She had five hours, six at the most, before Tom would wake up for another day.
At the other end of the house, he coughed as if he’d heard her. And she crept into his room, where she kissed him and rested her hand against his head for a while. This person who remade, recast every single piece of her life: no wonder that she sometimes tripped up.
In her own bed, she waited for Ben. And when he climbed in and reached out his hand, she grabbed it and held on, holding fast to this here and this now.
6
The sitting
It was a quiet Sunday morning. Clem was busy with some project in the garage downstairs, and the bells from the church on the ridge had just stopped ringing. If Elsie thought of religion—of churches, of believing—she thought of bells: a pretty sound that drifted in from somewhere else but which didn’t have much to do with her world.
After nine, she thought as the chimes faded. Rising ten. She’d give Elaine one last quick call—bless Gerald for these telephones—and then she’d get ready for her strange morning meeting.
Three days earlier, Elsie had been standing on an empty kerbside watching a big, dark car speed by. It was a shiny black Mercedes with huge oval headlights and two neat little fins pinched onto its tail, just like the cars they’d hired for Elaine’s wedding ten months before. A man was driving, with a woman sitting in the back. Elsie caught a flash of something like the deep green colour she’d worn to her daughter’s wedding and almost raised her hand to wave at herself in her frock, heading off to the church last July.
And now she’s having a baby, she wanted to call to her passing double. Here she was, on the brink of becoming a grandma. The thought made her beam.
‘Mrs Gormley? It is Mrs Gormley?’
The voice by Elsie’s elbow had made her start. She’d seen no one on the street a moment before, but here was someone standing by her on the kerb.
‘I’m Ida Lewis,’ said the woman. ‘Up the hill from you. You’re the blue house on the corner, aren’t you? I always love it in the springtime when your amaryllis bloom, the red ones above the white.’
Elsie nodded. Everyone knew Mrs Lewis. Up on the hill. In a house full of windows. With a husband who’d left his first wife for her. Ida Lewis was the most famous person in their little nest of streets. She was a painter, and someone had told Elsie that she even had pictures hanging in galleries down south in Sydney and Melbourne.
‘Of course I know who you are, Mrs Lewis.’ Elsie was grateful for the bags that stopped her having to hold out her hand, since she wasn’t quite sure if she should.
‘Well, good. I have a business proposition for you. I see your parcels there, and you’re on your way home. But if you have a moment next weekend—maybe Sunday morning—I wonder if you’d like to come up to my place and we could have a chat.’
‘Mrs Lewis.’ She took care to clear her throat first to sound more businesslike; as if she, Elsie Gormley, were in the habit of making new acquaintances on the roadside. ‘Of course, Sunday morning. Around ten? I do a bit for some of the other ladies around here—cleaning and mending and so forth—’ There wasn’t much of it, just helping where she could, but that must be what the artist had in mind. ‘Whatever it is that you need doing, I’m sure we can work something out.’
‘I’d appreciate it,’ the other woman said, raising her hand to shade her eyes from the glare and staring at Elsie so hard she felt the force of the gaze like a magnet. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant. ‘It’s often awkward to ask,’ Ida Lewis went on, ‘but there you are. Come and have a cup of tea, and we’ll see how you feel.’
And she was gone, darting into the butcher’s before Elsie could take her leave. She’d walked home with a sensation that swung between a giggle and a frown. What a thing, she thought, what a funny thing. She hadn’t had another house to clean for a while—not really since the children had left home, if you could call two twenty-one-year-olds children. But there was a bolt of some beautiful silver fabric she’d seen in town. A little extra in her purse, and she could buy a length to sew into a dress. Something elegant, she thought; a sheath. Maybe Clem would take her out for a meal in that nice beer garden by the river, and she would wear it then.
You don’t have to be a grandmother all the time, she thought. Even so, she was giddy with the idea of Elaine becoming someone’s mum.
A beautiful baby. That would be the making of her girl.
Perhaps she and Elaine might even become friends when this baby came; the two of them mothers together. Of course, her daughter had her own set of friends, some from school, a couple from the secretarial college she’d attended for those few months, and now her husband’s sister, of whom she made a great show as her dearest sister-in-law; her friend.
‘The sister I never had,’ Elaine said.
Which had broken Elsie’s heart in a whole new way.
Now, on this quiet Sunday, before she walked around to see Ida Lewis, Elsie listened as Elaine’s unanswered telephone rang out, and her stomach jagged. She remembered the sensation from the first days of knowing Clem. Excitement and fear all at once. The baby. It was the baby. Coming soon.
In the bathroom, Elsie checked her hair, her dress, her stockings. It always helped to look your best. There’d been nothing strange or unusual about the way the artist looked, or what she wore—no paint spots on her fingers or in her hair—which had been a bit disappointing. Clem carried his work as a janitor at the university under his fingernails and in the grain of his skin. And as she looked in the mirror, she wondered how her own work sat on her—the children, the house, her odd jobs. Did they mark her in some way?
The painter’s husband was a professor; he did something with flies, the lady in the bakery had told her once, and had been in New Guinea in the war. Working with flies: Elsie sniffed. Give her a swat and she’d work the blighters out. The dark buzz of them that used to hover around the swamp in summer—let him turn his atte
ntion to that instead of punting over to the university to do who knew what. She slapped at an imagined incursion on her arm, to make her point.
Beyond the back fence, children were playing in the swamp, their calls echoing around its culverts. The incandescent blue of hyacinths spotted the water’s dark shadows. From under her feet, then, came an almighty crash and a curse—‘damn it!’—as blue as Clem’s language ever got.
‘You right, love?’ she called down through the floorboards. She’d make him a cuppa and take it down to the garage. She liked to see him at work there: it let her imagine the decades of old age they might have—being together, busy in their different ways.
It was one of the things she liked most about him, the way he could potter. Looking for him, she’d call, ‘Where are you, Clem?’ and he’d say, ‘In here, love, just pottering.’ While he dismantled the rusted parts of something, or reglued something else, or rebuilt the entirety of some machine he’d hauled out of the dump’s morass, bringing it home flecked with mud.
Coming into the garage, she balanced the two cups of tea on the edge of his vast green-baize billiards table and admired her husband’s industry. The look on Clem’s face when he was sunk into busyness: it was the kind of trance she felt when she was kneading dough, satisfactory and rhythmic. He rummaged through a toolbox for a screw, weighed one in the palm of his hand, held up another to check its thread. After a moment, he drew another from a different compartment and set it into place. And it was perfect.
‘There,’ he whispered, a look of pure contentment on his face. ‘Have this working good as new,’ he said, brushing imagined dust off a mangle’s smooth wooden rollers. ‘I promised it to that lady up the hill, that artist. Guess even artists have to get the water out of their wash, don’t they?’
She passed him his tea, steadying her own. ‘I didn’t know you’d been talking to Mrs Lewis,’ she said. Something about it irked her, as if the artist was her secret. ‘And what a curious thing, to talk about a mangle.’
‘Met her on the train back from town,’ he said. He took half the cup of hot liquid into his mouth at once, puffing his cheeks out like a toad before he swallowed. ‘Can’t think how it came up, but I knew I’d seen one in the dump, and I promised her I’d fix it. Should have it done by the end of the day.’ He was all dust and grease and sweat from the exertion. His ginger hair was speckled with oil spots and fluff.
Elsie took up a broom that was propped against the wall, and swept wide arcs across the floor. ‘Our mangle’s a bit rickety, if it comes to it,’ she said. ‘I don’t miss it so much now the children have gone, but I could do with something a bit more useful when it comes to doing the sheets.’
And there’d be Elaine’s new baby, too. She’d be needing to help out with that.
‘Be nice to have a little one around again,’ said Clem. Sometimes he said things that made Elsie wonder if he could read her thoughts. Was that how a marriage might go? ‘I miss fixing up Donny’s carts and Lainey’s dolls.’
‘They weren’t children long,’ said Elsie, setting the broom back and brushing the detritus into a pan. There were days when she still felt almost young herself. And then there were moments when she felt impossibly old—like when her son started enthusing about men being fired into space and about bombs, bigger and bigger, being detonated somewhere out there, east of Brisbane, over the ocean.
Not in front of the baby, she wanted to say if his sister was there, her belly stretched like a ball stuck onto her wiry frame. Let’s keep the world safe still for its sake. Reaching for her husband’s teacup now, she saw that her hand was shaking. Surely she was never so superstitious about her own children, even though they were born in the middle of the last big war. But perhaps that had something to do with there being two of them. Two little ones, and then they were gone. Elaine looked like a child in her wedding photograph, so slight in that white dress—Elsie was sure she hadn’t eaten for a month.
‘I’m off to Mrs Lewis’s now,’ she said. ‘She wants some help with cleaning.’
‘Well, you go on,’ said Clem, ‘and I’ll get on with this mangle. You know I can’t think if you’re fussing about.’ It was his place, under the house, as exclusive and singular as he thought of the kitchen as being hers. ‘Tell her I’ll bring it round when it’s done.’
•
It was a strange room, so busy. Elsie had never seen anything like it. The house itself was not dissimilar to hers, except that each room was slightly larger and set with wider windows. And then tacked on at the back there was a cube, three sides half-glass from the roofline down, and with deep eaves to the north and the east. Beneath each windowsill were stands of shelves, thick with jars and vases, with bottles and boxes and enough shells, Elsie thought, to furnish a beach.
‘I don’t get round to doing much cleaning—’ she heard Mrs Lewis say.
‘Well, it would be very easy to pop up for a morning once a week,’ Elsie said, wanting to save her the embarrassment of asking.
‘Hmm?’ Ida Lewis was holding two lengths of fabric, one a dark and bloody crimson, and the other a deep, rich blue. ‘The cerulean, I’d say—would you call it cerulean? Or is it more towards ultramarine?’
Cerulean. Ultramarine. It was a foreign language to Elsie, and she felt it sink into some deep and hidden section of herself. Poetry, it was like poetry. Those words that could make you feel.
I always knew there had to be more to it than blue, she thought, and was surprised to hear herself saying this aloud.
‘More to it than blue—you are right, Mrs Gormley.’ Ida Lewis looked up at her and smiled. ‘But what are you saying about cleaning? I wanted to ask if you would sit for me—if I could paint your portrait.’
Elsie had never known that so much of her could flush: she could feel the heat around her ankles, her knees, stretched right across her stomach and fingering its way up her neck and onto her face. ‘Mrs Lewis,’ she said, brushing at the air in front of her face. ‘Mrs Lewis, I thought you were going to ask for some cleaning. But painting, a painting, I don’t—’ ‘I only require that you can take a pose and sit with it.’ Ida Lewis arranged the blue fabric around an empty chair—pulling it this way and that. ‘There. And I can pay you, of course. Probably more than you’d get for some cleaning. But this would be of far more use.’
Elsie looked around the cluttered room. She saw the cobwebs in the corners of the ceilings, the patina of dust on the few flat surfaces that remained clear, the way the front covers of the books, and some of their pages, had yellowed in the light and were curling, too: that’s how it was in these tropics with their humidity. A dead fly lay under the lowest rib of the slatted blind; another clung to the lip of the skirting board. Elsie wondered if they belonged to the professor.
Ida Lewis stood behind a wicker chair, her hands set firmly on its back. She was looking hard at Elsie; she was waiting for a reply.
That gaze: it was like a hot knife sliced through butter—so smooth, so easy. It was like basking in some unknown sun.
And I could sit with this.
Elsie coughed: what a notion. Who was she to sit still when there was work to be done?
‘Mrs Lewis,’ she said quickly, ‘I’ve never done such a thing—’ And as she waited for her own voice to demur, she heard it rattling on. ‘I’d be curious to do it for you.’ And then another blush. ‘But I would like to clean your room first. It does need it, you see, and otherwise I’d be sitting here all morning marking out what I’d be better employed to do.’
The words so unexpected, she thought another speaker must have come into the room.
Ida laughed, a full, round sound. ‘Good for you, Mrs Gormley: well, all right. Come tomorrow morning and do your wretched dusting—I won’t be here; I’ll leave a key in the box. Then come again the next day, at nine, and we’ll see how this painting gets on. I should have a couple of weeks before the dust starts to mount up and your cleaning hands get twitchy again. I’ll pay you as we go—a pound per sitting
. Agreed? Now, a cup of tea?’ And she was gone into the kitchen before Elsie could reply, calling, ‘My sister-in-law brought cake the other day, so it’s a good day to have morning tea in this house, and a rare one.’
Elsie smiled, brushing the two dead flies into her handkerchief and shaking them out through the window, hoping the professor wouldn’t mind.
She looked around the jumble of the studio. A pound a week: it felt too generous. And in this extraordinary room—she noted the way it pushed out into the garden, its glass letting in the greenery and the light.
‘It must be lovely to work in here when it’s raining,’ she called in reply. ‘To have the garden so rich and so close.’ Clem hated a busy garden: their own block was bare save for a poinciana in the back corner, an umbrella tree at the front, and a rockery he’d built around the porch. But this garden was so thick and lush, with oleanders, crepe myrtles, lilly pillies and acacias, a huge poinciana, a jacaranda and a mango, and the pretty trunk of a leopard tree pushing up above the rest.
‘There’s a story that some minor member of the royal family planted that leopard tree, you know,’ said Ida, ‘a prince or something, when he visited the colonies late last century. All this way, to dig a hole in the ground. But isn’t the foliage magnificent?’ She stood at Elsie’s elbow, holding the tea tray for want of anywhere to set it down. ‘Could you—’ Ida nodded to the bookshelf running along the eastern window. ‘Just push those out of the way a bit, and try not to mind the dust. Now, milk? Sugar? And a piece of this cake?’
•
Walking back to her own house, Elsie felt the blush creep up her body again. She’d never had such a morning. ‘Ida, please call me Ida,’ Mrs Lewis had said, and Elsie had found herself giggling.
‘Just come as you are on Tuesday,’ Ida had said at last. ‘Don’t worry about your dress or anything like that—just come as you are, and we’ll see how we go.’