by Peggy Frew
When I left Randal and went with Bert it took Silver a while but she settled in she started to make friends with other kids I think she liked it that I was happy again I started putting her to bed the old way, lay with her and whispered. I was open to her again because I was open to everything I was set on a new course and full of hope. But then when things went bad the same old gap opened up the weight came down on me the slowness I had nothing left over to give her I stopped touching her and kissing her I just couldnt do it. Then when we left Bert, packed up and ran off in the night and hitchhiked to the city I swung back the other way the heaviness lifted and the love came easily again but this time it was her that turned away. In the womens group house, even with the piano playing man when I was the happiest Ive ever been, she wasnt there with me she was holding some thing back she reminded me of a dog I saw once on a jetty with its ears tipped to the water showing through the gaps body all flat not trusting. She had learned to look after herself pretty well, I saw that when I compared her with other children some of them couldnt do any thing for themselves. She knew not to ask for much from me. Shes a good kid people would say and she was but I didnt feel proud, I never felt proud again like I had when she was just born. I hadnt made her good she just was because she had to be. Now it seemed impossible that she had ever been in side me ever fed from my body ever slept in my arms.
I’m not sure what made me willingly submit to another visit with Dawn. Boredom, maybe, or the car-crash fascination that had gripped me the first time. After only that first encounter I couldn’t know, I suppose, what another might hold; perhaps she might show me something else from one of those beautiful upholstered cases, things from the past life that, beyond the confronting reality of her present one — grey, withered, piteous — held such a calm, understated, and intriguingly foreign glow of wealth and privilege. I thought of pearls and gold, of evening dresses. It’s possible I also thought of the Cherry Ripes.
Whatever the reason, only a couple of days afterwards — again, in the late afternoon, Miller having driven off somewhere in the brown station wagon and Ishtar still at work — I found myself lurking near the mud-brick building and watching for her. Eventually she did appear, tottering out with surprising speed to take my arm. We enacted the same routine as the first time, me checking the toilet for spiders and then waiting uncertainly before being guided by her insubstantial yet strangely compelling touch down the tunnel of the mud-brick hallway and into the foetid room. I stood at my post by the bedside while she settled against the pillows and took up the zippered album. The chocolate bars, I noted sadly, had disappeared. Dawn made no reference to our previous encounter but simply began talking, starting, to my astonishment, at exactly the same place — the photograph of herself. As if the first time hadn’t happened at all, we went through the whole thing again: the studio portrait, the wedding shot, the madness and breakdowns. Even the way in which she told it was almost exactly the same — some phrases were repeated, I was sure, word-for-word — and I recognised this time the tone of a storyteller settling into the worn grooves of repetition.
The rustling voice rose and fell, and again she went from the reclining, dreamy reminiscence to clutching at my hand and pulling me down so she could hiss right into my face. I endured this, tuning in and out while nervously keeping an ear open to the hallway, until she got up to where we’d left off last time.
She was lying back, her fingers curled round mine, and I was half kneeling. ‘They didn’t want me to go with him again,’ she said, ‘to come here. Well, we go through this every time. Mum asks why he never visits me when I’m unwell, and when I say it’s because he just can’t stand to see me in those places and to feel so helpless, she says, “Yes, well, I feel that way, too, but I keep coming, don’t I, because I know it’s the right thing to do.” They’re so concerned, Mum and Dad, with what’s the right thing to do. They simply could never understand someone like Miller, who allows himself to be led by his instinct, rather than by rules.’
She glanced at me and I gave an obedient nod.
‘Dad says he’s just after money, that’s the only reason he keeps coming back. Dad really has a very poor opinion of Miller now — he won’t even speak to him. He says he’s a degenerate who thinks the world owes him a living. But what upsets me most is when he says that Miller never really intended to be a lawyer, it was just a ruse to make them think he was respectable. He had wanted to be a lawyer. He was passionate about the law. Or at least what he thought the law was. He thought he was going to be able to effect change.’ An echo of Miller’s speech-making voice entered hers, and she gave a weak chop at the air with her free hand. ‘But then he became very disillusioned with the legal system. He had thought it was all about justice, about truth — but, really, more often than not it’s about trickery, about pulling the wool over people’s eyes. And that, you know, I think that broke his heart. Made him lose his way.’
My mind grated at this impossible image of Miller as some kind of vulnerable being, deserving of tenderness.
‘Do you know,’ said Dawn, ‘I’d rather see him destitute and full of happiness than trudging in the door of that flat — which was pretty dismal, I have to say, even if it was in South Yarra — trudging in after a day in court, looking so … so beaten down. That morning, when he sold the flat, I sat outside in the car and I’d been feeling very worried, thinking, oh god what is Dad going to say about all this, but then Miller came back — and he’d signed the papers and he was just beaming, he was so full of excitement about moving up north, buying the land.’
She lay in silence for a while, and I eased my hand out of hers, hoping perhaps she’d finished. But she sighed and went on.
‘I wish Dad hadn’t been so mean, about the loan. It’s not as if he needed the money. He just can’t stand someone not doing exactly as he says — someone having ideas of their own. Even if the macadamias had been a tremendous success and Miller had paid him back ten times over, Dad still would have disapproved.’
Abruptly, she turned on the mattress and began clinking through the medicine case. Selecting a bottle, she tipped some tablets out into her palm and picked up a glass of water. I took the opportunity to have another look round for the Cherry Ripes, but there was no sign of them.
‘But they can’t stop me from being here with him,’ Dawn went on, sipping and throwing back her head as she swallowed. ‘I’m his wife. Dad threatened to cut me off, but I know he won’t, Mum won’t let him.’ She returned to the album, the pages making plasticky sounds as she leafed through them. ‘See?’ she said. ‘See how happy we were?’
In the photo, they stand against a backdrop of small, round-topped trees. Gone are the suit and the dress — they both wear jeans and t-shirts, although with the same stagey, unsullied look that set Miller apart from the farmers at the supply shed now — a crispness in the denim, a richness to the colours. Miller’s hair has already begun to rise like one of the blobs of dough Ishtar sometimes set in tins on top of the hot-water boiler to perform their gradual, yeasty expansions. Dawn is still sleek and alive-looking — her mouth opened in laughter, her teeth showing, the sunlight turning her hair a bright platinum. Miller reaches across to hold one hand over her stomach.
‘Don’t we look happy?’ said Dawn, her voice quieter than ever, the words coming more slowly.
‘Yes, you do.’ I allowed my eyes to lose focus on the photo album, and the pages became blobs of green and pink. I no longer felt afraid of Miller coming in and finding me there in his room. Nor was I resistant to hearing these things spoken in Dawn’s dried-up voice. I had entered a kind of dream state. None of this could be real. The Miller I knew, who was so full of hidden menace, who changed all the time for no reason, speaking in different voices and descending unexpectedly to lift people into the air — and who had drawn those pictures of Ishtar’s body being invaded so brutally by his rainbow explosions — this could not be the same man Dawn was
speaking of. A man who had lost his way. How could anyone so huge, so loud, so terrifying, be lost?
Dawn slipped lower on the mattress and her head lolled.
I blinked and tried to gather myself. I felt incredibly weary, as if her weakness had been somehow leaching into me, transferred, perhaps, by that bitter breath. ‘I’d better go,’ I whispered.
The wind bit as I ran up the hill, joined the whoosh of my breaths to fill my ears. I welcomed it, desperate to shake off the dreamy feeling, to wake up. Ian wasn’t at the log. He wasn’t at the creek either, but I didn’t mind. I crouched with my hands in the water until they lost sensation, and gulped air that made my lungs hurt. I jumped up and down on the spot and ran recklessly, dodging branches, until the blood stung in my face and my thawed fingers throbbed. After that I sat tucked into the base of a tree until a wallaby came, the nap of its fur dark and solid-looking, its ears swinging as it lengthened its neck.
Back at Hope I took an apple and a book and read in the front room until it filled up with people and it was dinnertime. And later, when I went to bed, I was able to fall asleep without much trouble.
I kept well away from Dawn after that, sneaking carefully any time I went near the mud-brick building. When I did see her again, getting into the car with Miller, it was from a distance; she had her dark glasses on and seemed once again a mysterious figure, unknown to me.
One dinnertime, in the usual chaos of everyone moving in and out of the kitchen, loading up their plates and carrying them off to the front room, Miller reached past me and I saw his ear. It was deep and shadowed within the sandy frizz of his hair, but small and neat nonetheless, and that young, eager, exposed-looking face from the photo popped into my mind. I saw him standing on the church steps with one hand part-way raised, and I heard Dawn’s words — lost his way — and a strange pang of pity ran through me with the suddenness of an electric shock. But it only lasted a moment — he straightened and went round to the other side of the table and, before helping himself to the dahl, shoved closer to where Ishtar stood by the stove in order to run his fingers up the back of her thigh and between her legs, and it was a relief to feel the regular current of my hatred take up again.
I wanted to get my licence so I could drive legally. I knew how to drive, Randal taught me so I could help on the long trips in the van. In the back of my mind I had the idea that if I saved up enough money I could buy a car maybe I could start a business on my own selling things at markets like Randal had, I knew how to make the soap and candles. I went to the place where they did the tests but they said I needed proper identification like a birth certificate or a passport. I just went back to the ashram and kept working, I didnt think about it for a long time. Then one Saturday morning I said I had an appointment, I left Silver with the house mother and I caught the bus to Toowoomba then another bus to my parents house. I didnt even know if they lived there any more but then I saw the car in the drive, the same car still. I stood across the road for a long time. The vacant block wasnt vacant any more, there was a whole house there it looked newer than the other houses on the street but it didnt look that new. That was when I realised how long it had been, seven years. My father had taken care of the car, it looked almost the same just a bit faded. There was a kids bike lying in the drive way of number fourteen, I wondered if he still lived there if that bike belonged to his kid but it didnt make me feel any thing much. I had never thought about him even when I saw things in Silver that didnt come from me I never thought of them as having come from him, like the parts of her that were different belonged to her only. It was winter and I had a coat on, I tugged it straight and did up the belt I smoothed my hair and crossed the road I went up the path without stopping and rang the bell. My father opened the door. He looked so old. He stared at me for a while then I said Its me, and he said Bloody hell and then he said my old name, it was strange to hear it after so long. Well what do you know? he said. Come in, Lindas on her way actually. I stayed where I was. What about Mum? I said. Oh he said and looked around like he thought she might be hiding some where. Well … But then I heard a car, the slam of its door and heels clicking up the path and it was Linda. Sorry Im late she called, I had to catch up on a Biology prac and my lab partner didnt … Then she saw me. She froze and stared like my father had. Then Oh my goodness she said, Oh my goodness and she came forward and grabbed me and squeezed me close. She was taller than me she was so tall she smelled like shampoo and perfume she was like a grown woman in her long boots and a miniskirt, I would not have known her if Id seen her in the street. Look at you! she said. Come in, you girls said my father, Get out of the cold Linda, you havent got enough clothes on. I looked past him down the hall, I wondered where my mother was. Its all right Linda whispered, Shes not here. She took my arm and made me go in.
The house smelled the way it always had except sort of stale, the carpets looked like they needed a clean and the furniture was much shabbier than I remembered. We went in to the kitchen. My father tried to say some thing but he couldnt he got his hanky out and kept blowing his nose then he left the room. Mums sick said Linda. Shes in a hospice now, its cancer, she doesnt have long to go. In the light I saw the dark circles under her eyes, she was thin and I could see her collar bones under her shirt. Still it didnt seem real to me, I kept expecting my mother to come in to take off her hat to look at the floor and say What a mess what a state this place is in, to go to the cupboard and get out the carpet sweeper. It didnt seem possible that this house could exist without her. I will make some tea said Linda, So did Dads message finally get through? I said What message? He went looking for you said Linda, He went to Brisbane and waited in the city for those, for your … people and he asked if they knew you, he took a photo to show and everything. He asked them to get you to contact us. I didnt hear I said. Ive been away. Oh said Linda, Have you left the, the … are you no longer a member? She smiled, she looked so happy. I knew it! she said, I read this book on cults and it said that even highly intelligent people could be brainwashed but still I always thought — Its not a cult I said, they didnt brainwash me. Oh. She looked confused she turned to the bench. Its just she said, You were always so smart I could never understand why you just suddenly decided to go off and … My father came back in then just as I realised. At first I didnt even feel angry I just couldnt believe it. I stared at him. My voice came out very quiet. You never told Linda? I said. Told me what? said Linda. My father put his hands in his pockets and then took them out again. Well he said, Your mother — Dont blame it on her I said quickly and the anger was there then it sprang up and hissed in my voice and they both went quiet. The kettle gurgled and switched itself off. I breathed slowly trying to calm my voice. I said, I came to get my birth certificate, can I have it please. My father stood there for a while then he said Oh. Then he said Yes, yes of course. He went out again to his study. What didnt he tell me? said Linda. I looked at her with her nice clothes and her shampooed hair her university classes her car, I thought about the damp room in the ashram where there werent enough blankets on the bed and it was always a bit too cold where I would get up in the morning to dress Silver in her second hand clothes and rush her down to school before a day of pamphlets or workshop, rushing back to pick her up then help prepare dinner and sit through satsang then put her to bed before rushing off to the other job. Linda said my old name. I looked at her. I could feel how hard my face was. Ishtar I said. What? My name is Ishtar. I thought of the goddess with her bow and arrow her strength her cruel beauty. Linda just stared. Then my father came back with an envelope. What didnt you tell me? Linda said to him. I took the envelope, I went towards the hallway then I stopped. Answer me one thing I said. Is she sorry for what she did to me? Has she ever said that? He just stood there. I didnt think so, I said. He started to cry then, he got his hanky out again. Maybe if she saw you he said. I went to the door. Wait called Linda, Let me drive you. I will catch the bus I said. Wait she called again, she ran after me, she sto
pped at the door. Its called Hillcrest, she called as I went down the path. The hospice, its in Rockville.