The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt

by Tracy Farr

  The Strong Arm Boys played the songs of the moment, jazz and swing, anything the dancers wanted. They were good enough, rough enough, fast enough for dancing. Two guitars, drums at the back, Don on piano with a microphone to sing into; a horn section of trumpet and saxophone; and Danny, a farm boy from Dandaragan, on bass. They dressed in matching black suits. All of them but Danny were over fifty; Danny was younger, and no one quite knew what kept him out of the forces – and of course they called him Dannyboy. They played with gusto, the Strong Arm Boys.

  The dance floor was next to our flat in the Pav. A door led through to the hallway that led in one direction to the kitchen and Cath and Eric’s room, in the other to the north tower. When you walked through from the dance floor to our flat and closed the door behind you, the music would hum through the wood of the door, vibrate your spine and arse if you leaned against it. Up the stairs, in our room, Grace would rock herself to sleep, to the sound thumping and thrumming through the walls and the floor and the limestone of the building, up through the still night air and in through the open windows of the room in the north tower of the Pav. I’d come to check her in the night and find her asleep, legs splayed, on her belly in the warm night, one hand down her pants and the other in her mouth, jammed in to the knuckles, fingers wet with spit.

  Eric, of course, with his gammy leg, hated to go to the dances, and he hated Cath to go. But she went. We’d go together. After I’d put Grace to bed, tucked her in tight, rocked her to sleep, sung her a song, I’d dress for the dance, put my make-up on, curl my hair. My old clothes came out, the old clothes from Sydney, formal clothes that had lain long unused in the bottom of the trunk. They were years out of fashion, but because the fabrics were so fine, so rich, the cut so beautiful, I didn’t change them. I looked out of time; but that was how I felt anyway, so I didn’t mind. Silk and satin skimmed my body, hugging it tight – I could fit into the dresses again, since my body had lost the softness from Grace’s first year. It felt delicious to dress this way again. I enjoyed the outline of my body in the mirror, under the cloth. I liked myself hard, after the Grace-softness.

  Some nights saw just a score of us at the dance. We learned to dance the man, or the woman, as required; to play the part, take the position. Other nights there were hundreds, especially when our boys were in town, and anything female was in high demand.

  Our boys, that’s what they called them, and most of them were just boys: farm boys, city boys, skinny and uninteresting, either hardened from war, or yet to go and scared. And they were scared of a woman like me; I terrified them with my old-fashioned clothes and my haughty way of speaking.

  God, I loved to dance! It took my mind and my body back to the days in Sydney, took me away from the war. At the Pav, we couldn’t have stayed away if we’d tried, the music would have come to us. I loved to walk through that door – both ways. Men would say to me, to Cath, ‘Can I walk you home?’ and we’d say yes, link arms with them, and get them to walk us to the unmarked door at the edge of the dance floor. Then we’d turn around, wave at them and close the door tight behind us. We’d lean against it, on the safe side, breathing hard, laughing hard, hearing the music distorted and muffled on the other side, hear them knocking, confused.

  And on the nights when the dances weren’t on, Cath and Eric and Gracie and I’d troop across the road to the Lido, to the pictures. Even Eric loved the pictures. From the beginning of summer, the deck chairs and screen were set up, and the projector started its clickety whirring once it became dark enough to see the pictures moving on the screen. Gracie – like all the children – ran wild between the deck chairs, or she’d sleep on a rug by my feet, curled into herself, her fingers in her mouth. The air smelled of hot chips in newspaper, cigarette smoke, and beer from sly bottles stashed under the deck chairs.

  To tell the truth, our lives didn’t change much because of the war, not in those first years. The boys, the men, went away – but they came back in uniform, and ready to dance with the girls with a new urgency. That was what changed – there was an urgency to people’s lives in wartime. People were reluctant to waste time. They grabbed at things they might previously have held back from. Grabbed not without thinking, but with a different way of thinking, a different way of seeing the world. This only increased when, instead of the men coming home, their names started to appear in lists within a sombre, black-bordered box on the front page of the newspaper, in rank order, alphabetical, all lined up in columns, uniform.

  DINKY-DI

  Our beach streets had always had their share of hostels and boarding houses. With the war, more families took in boarders; everyone crammed in together. Those who could afford it kept their households as they always had. Uncle Valentine remained in solitary splendour in his big old house up the road from the Pav, with the Andersons in attendance. One of the big houses was rumoured to be a brothel, and the doctor’s house, conveniently next door, was said to be where the young women went when their precautions failed or the clap caught them out.

  The hotel on the corner was commandeered by the US Navy, used as a billet for submariners. They’d parade down the beach in their uniforms or their civvies. You could tell them, even when out of uniform, even before they spoke. There was something about the way they held themselves, a kind of poise; not the arrogance of youth, of soldiers, but somehow a sense of righteousness, an old-fashioned courtesy holding in place the instincts that war teased men to display.

  There were black men among them, an exotic chocolate-black, bringing me memories of musicians I’d met in Sydney, in the partying musical days and nights in the Cross and at the docks. They’d strip down to white, short-sleeved, tight cotton undershirts through which you could see the hair or smoothness of their chests. It was the first time we saw what we learnt to call t-shirts. They’d sit on the verandah, arms bulging from those undershirts, all limbs and shoulders, arranged like warriors in the classical paintings I saw in books in Uncle Valentine’s library, like The Rape of the Sabine Women. No, they were more like The Raft of the Medusa, as if they were survivors, safe for a brief moment in time from the ocean, the war; but it was just that, a brief moment in time. Snapped. Adrift. Homeless. Stateless. A bit lawless too – there was a sense of danger, of not being sure what was going to happen next.

  When I walked Grace in her pram along in front of the hostel, their eyes would overlook me instead of looking me over; they’d turn to look for the next unencumbered woman. But when I walked without Grace – sometimes detouring especially to pass in front of the men as they lounged and lazed and sprawled and threw balls and kicked and stretched on the lawn and the verandahs, top and bottom, of the hostel – then they’d look at me, then they’d call out, and whistle. It was Ma’am when I had Grace with me. Single, alone – sans enfant – I became darlin’, or doll, or baby; would be called with a whistle, a shout.

  I was lucky enough not to have to work to keep myself and my daughter fed and sheltered and clothed. Our rent was cheap at the Pav, and often I put in a little extra for Cath. We still went each Sunday to Uncle Valentine for tea and as we left, each week, he would press a crisp note into my palm, clasping the money into my hand and wrapping it between his big, soft hands. I had my inheritance, my small nest egg in the bank, left by my parents. We were comfortable, Grace and I, better off than most. And our days and nights were our own, not chained to the need to work. I could wallow in Grace’s babyhood, her childhood, watch her learn and grow and discover. I enjoyed being a child with her in a way I had never quite been allowed to be a child myself.

  We spent days on the beach, Gracie and I. Grace’s third summer, the second of the war, was busy for the two of us, busy with playing. We made peg dollies play in the sand, built sand cities for them, sand houses, sand castles. We looked for shells and seaweed, mermaid’s-purses and cuttlefish washed up from the ocean, and we brought them back to the tower above the sea where Grace would sit and arrange them and rearrange them for hours at a time, building houses and sto
ries and muttering them under her breath as she went.

  I taught her how to make a comb buzz and hum, to make the sound of bees. She laughed at that, even though I’m not sure she’d ever seen a bee. Flies she knew, but not bees. I think she thought that bees was the word for the sound.

  It’s not entirely true that the trooper boys would ignore me when I was with Grace. Sometimes, as we played on the beach, the older ones, the bolder ones, the ones with children of their own would come up to us on pretence of my Grace. What a cute little doll she is, just like my little sister/ daughter/cousin, they’d say. Does she look like her daddy? Do you look like your daddy, honey? they’d ask her, and Grace would beam her smile at them, beam back at them and introduce me, her mummy-and-daddy, all rolled into one. Is your daddy a Yankee or a dinky-di Aussie, honey? they’d ask her, and she’d echo them back in a singsong, dinky-di, dinky-di, not for the meaning but for the sound of it.

  They’d want to give Grace pennies. And I let them. Why not? I taught her to curtsey – almost before she could walk – and she’d curtsey, her head down, eyes cast up to catch the response. She had a good sense of audience, my little one. She’d take the proffered penny with another quick bob from the knees, and tuck it into her fist. Then she’d hand it to me, sticky and hot and specked with sand. And then they’d sit down next to Grace and me in the sand, stretching their brown arms back behind them, spidering them out to splay across the sand but they’d sink into the fineness of it; their hands would work themselves up to the wrist in the sand, silvery, hot, making its way into cracks and crevices.

  The Yanks were bolder than the Australian boys. And the Australian boys mostly went home for their leave. It was the Americans who colonised the beach during the years of the war, transformed it. The beach, the streets, the air, the dances were filled with their twanging voices, their t-shirts, their strangeness, the smell of their cigarettes.

  CUSP

  There was a night on the cusp of autumn when humidity added to unseasonal heat, and the crowd at the dance was huge, bigger than I’d ever seen. The press of bodies, the sweat, the smell of cigarettes and perfume and rum and beer and powder were overwhelming. Even Eric was keen to go to the dance that night – it had the feel of a last hurrah before winter, the weather perilous, edgy, full. I’d put on one of my favourite old Sydney dresses for the dance. As I’d dressed, looking at myself in the mirror in the north tower had felt like looking back into time. I’d even set my hair in a style from then – the dress seemed to require it.

  The Strong Arm Boys were already playing when I stepped through the door from the flat, swinging it, the dance floor full and teeming, swarming with bodies. Limbs were bare, brown from summer. Arms and legs moved loosely, flung out and all about with abandon. The band sounded tight, different, the bass up-front. Dannyboy was gone – maybe he’d finally been called up. The lights were low on the crowd; we could see the boys in the band, but they wouldn’t have been able to recognise faces in the crowd, not easily.

  But I recognised the face replacing Danny’s behind the bass. I knew Gus immediately, placed him, felt a jolt in my gut, a rush. Gus was from long before, from Sydney. Trix and I knew him in the Buzz Room days – well, the nights really, long smoky dreaming nights, dancing and music and minds escaping bodies. Gus had been quiet in the Buzz Room days, not much of a player, in the background. But even so I’d noticed him; and he was good-looking still. Long, feminine fingers, a slightly effete way of holding his hands with a droop of the wrist, a relaxedness that likely came from playing bass, but that was balanced by the breadth of his shoulders, and his rich, low voice. His curling dark hair, almost black over olive skin, made him look Italian, or Greek, even Aboriginal.

  I turned away, breathed in deeply, settled my shoulders, and didn’t have to wait long to be grabbed to dance. An airman pressed himself against me, then swung me away. I felt him pull me in to him, and our fronts pressed and brushed, the buttons of his uniform hard against me. I smelled his sweat, felt it slick on his hand. It had a chemical effect on me, lightning to my brain, to my body. I observed it, then lost myself in it, in the dance, in the darkness, in the music.

  I danced two more dances with the airman, then begged off. He swung me over to the chairs lined up around the edges of the dance floor, winked as he let me loose and sashayed to the next girl. I found Cath in the crowd as the band announced a break between sets. Cath linked her arm through mine, winked at me.

  ‘Nice dance, Princess?’

  As we walked to the supper table, laughing, I felt a hand on my shoulder, a voice say my name.

  ‘Lena? It’s you, isn’t it?’

  I turned to face him. I could read the years that had passed since the Buzz Room in the depth and shadows of the lines by his eyes, and from his nose to his mouth.

  ‘Hello, Gus.’ I leaned in to kiss first one cheek, then the next, as we all always used to back in Sydney. He smelled smoky, and of sweat. I closed my eyes and breathed in hard.

  ‘I’m Cath, pleased to meet you.’ Cath nudged me with her shoulder, held her hand out towards Gus.

  ‘Gus.’

  They shook hands, but Gus kept his eyes on me.

  ‘Haven’t seen you with the Boys before, have we? You new in town?’ Cath asked.

  ‘Just over from Sydney. Been travelling.’

  Cath dug her elbow into my side. ‘You two old friends?’

  ‘Ages ago. I’ve told you I used to live in Sydney, haven’t I, Cath?’ She shrugged at me. ‘Gus was in bands there, too.’

  ‘Well.’ Cath looked at me, looked at Gus, screwed her mouth into a shape designating reluctant acceptance. ‘I’m going to go and find a drink, and then I’m going to find someone to dance with. Nice to meet you.’ She turned away from Gus, and winked at me as she left us.

  Gus and I hung off to the side of the dance floor and talked, tentatively. He told me he’d not been in Perth long, was sniffing around in the hope of continued work with the Boys. He didn’t say why he wasn’t fighting, and I didn’t ask.

  ‘Where are you playing these days?’ he asked me. ‘Still playing that crazy machine? You haven’t got yourself a real instrument yet?’ He smiled as he said it.

  ‘Not playing anything much lately.’

  ‘Where’d you and Trix get to? You were there one minute, then – not.’

  ‘New Zealand.’

  ‘Ha! End of the earth after all! That’s what I heard, that you’d dropped off the end of the earth.’ He laughed. ‘You been here long?’ he asked, lighting a cigarette. He offered the pack to me. I took one. He flicked his lighter and I leaned in to it, steadying his hand with mine as I did so. Such little routine actions, so familiar, so clichéd. I exhaled.

  ‘Since ’thirty-seven.’

  ‘Why here? It’s a fair way from New Zealand. Fair way from anywhere.’

  ‘I have family here,’ I told him, figuring that could cover Uncle Valentine and Grace. ‘You?’

  He screwed his mouth up, looked away. ‘Not sure. Just ended up here. Travelled with one mob, then another. Found myself here before I knew it.’

  Then he asked me. It had to come.

  ‘And Trix?’ He blew smoke out of the corner of his mouth, but towards me, so that his breath mingled with mine.

  I sighed, put my hand to my mouth, a little as if the fingers could stop the words coming out. ‘Trix died. In New Zealand. We were there for – a while. We were happy. I came here, I didn’t want to stay.’

  He fumbled, then managed to put his hands around mine, held our hands in between us in a pose of prayer. Cigarettes stuck out, mine on one side, his on the other, like flags, like little incense sticks, the smoke wringing up from them and joining, entwining, in the air above them.

  ‘Oh, Lena. I’m so sorry.’

  And that was it. I fell into him, and he wrapped himself around me, and I felt enclosed and warm and lost and found all at once. I missed Trix. But somehow, somehow, there was something of Trix in this man, even if it was
nothing more than a shared memory. Something to hold onto, for a time, at least.

  When the music and dancing had finished, when the Boys had packed their instruments and made their noisy exits, when Eric had locked up after all the punters had gone, and we’d declined Cath’s offer of a cuppa, Gus and I tiptoed to the door of my room in the north tower. I turned to him at the top of the stairs, my finger to my lips.

  ‘Shh.’

  ‘Cath won’t care. She’s got smiling eyes, that one.’ He leaned in, kissed me lightly, then harder, pressing me back into the door.

  ‘Not Cath. Shhh.’

  I pushed him gently away, turned to open the door, my hand on his chest, holding him back. The room was lit by the bedside lamp I always left on for her when I was out. Grace was asleep on her low bed under the window, fingers in her mouth, the pillow wet with spit.

  ‘Grace. She’s Grace. My girl.’

  He brushed one hand back over his hair, put the other hand on his hip. He looked at me, looked at Grace.

  ‘She looks like you. Little Lena.’

  I crossed the room, turned off the light. Grace moved in her sleep, pulled her hand away from her mouth, murmured, rolled over to face the wall. I looked over at Gus, backlit in the doorway. I couldn’t see his features, just his shape. I walked towards him.

  I leaned back against the doorframe. Gus, opposite me, leaned against its other side, our legs angled towards each other, our feet touching at the toes. He reached both his hands towards me, and I reached out to him.

  Gus was living close, a room in one of the boarding houses clustered near the beach. He travelled often with the band, but when he was around, he’d come and spend time with us in the kitchen, on the beach, in the room in the north tower. Cath liked him; Grace loved him; Eric tolerated him.