by Alex Miller
Mrs Allen left a while ago. The afternoon has moved on. Marie is tired now. She needs a drink. It seems to have been an extra big day. About this time of the afternoon this is the usual feeling every day. Another big day. Are there ever going to be small days? Oh, what a small day I’ve had! She is staring emptily at the Black Cowboy, a tight band of pain around her head, her bowels making complaining noises.
He is sitting across the desk from her talking his talk, posturing his postures, being the man he knows he is not, the broken giant, the helpless little boy. Her attention wanders from him again and she finds herself remembering Ms Alworth looking at her over her glasses with that so-hard-to-read expression in her eyes; I really think you should consider taking the first half of next year off on half-pay.
In her final year of social work at the university, reading the history of the idea of juvenile delinquency, Marie came across the work of the nineteenth-century French social philosopher Henri Gaillac. It was in his Les maisons de correction that she first encountered the idea of people addicted to running away for its own sake; people for whom to run away is not an act of necessity, people who are not escaping material or emotional neglect or deprivation or cruelty, but who do it from what Gaillac called ‘a need for freedom, for carefree hours, for new emotions, which is never satisfied’. He spoke of this need to run away as ‘a violent, irresistible passion: in order to abandon themselves to this pleasure they flee the pleasures they enjoy in the breast of the family’. Had her mother, she wondered, been a freedom junkie of the kind described by Gaillac? Was there a medical diagnosis, Gaillac’s Syndrome?
Her mother the freedom addict was a phrase with a nice ring to it, and she didn’t feel like dealing it out of the range of possibilities. In fact it remained her favourite. There are duty addicts and there are work addicts, after all, so why not freedom addicts? The rush of ridding oneself of the accumulated responsibilities and encumbrances of family life in one grand leap! My God, imagine it! There one day, gone the next. Out the door one sunny morning and never seen again by the husband or the kids. To experience this rush, however, the freedom addict must first establish the situation of responsibilities and encumbrances from which the temptation to free herself eventually becomes a compulsion too strong to resist. She has to create the conditions for it herself. And surely getting married and having a child is just about the most encumbering condition a young freedom-loving woman can create for herself. And abandoning it the most liberating.
How often did her patients stare at her and tell her, ‘I just felt I had to do it,’ bewildered by the mysterious source of this irresistible compulsion to do the wrong thing?
She focuses once more on the Black Cowboy. Suppose she were to stop the flow of his talk with a counter-flow of her own? Let him have the lot. The whole great dammed-up tide of her own elaborated interior life breaking over him. Let the Black Cowboy have it between the eyes! She hasn’t dealt with any of it. There is no interior order to it. How can she ever expect anyone to know her story as she knows it herself?
Impatient suddenly, she stands up.
The Black Cowboy falls silent, his mouth open. He stares at her.
‘Sorry, John, time to go.’
She manages to get a seat on the South Melbourne tram. She has bought the Age but can’t remember a thing about what she has read the minute she folds the paper and closes her eyes. No idea. There will be plenty of time during her six months off for some of the other things she is always promising herself she will do. For one thing, she will reread Middlemarch. A smile touches her lips at the thought of the pleasure this will give her. She imagines herself sitting by the window in the yellow armchair downstairs in the middle of a weekday morning, slowly turning the pages of that vast and wonderful book. The joy of being a real reader again, returning to a familiar ample landscape of the imagination, returning home to the voice of Miss Wendell of the long tresses reading to them from the books she loved and taught them to love. Bringing together at last the promise of those wonderful school days. She will get back to the piano. Every day for two hours. Chopin’s Études and Beethoven’s Variations in E Flat and in C Major. And, of course, she will add to her bunch of Bach preludes and fugues. As many as she can manage. And she will travel. Somewhere different. Bulgaria or Turkey.
The tram crashes its way over the points at the junction of Park and Clarendon and she opens her eyes. She gets up and makes her way to the door and waits with the other passengers to get off. She steps down onto the road and walks along Park Street past the dentist’s and turns into her own street. The late afternoon is hot, the sound of children playing in the Housing Commission block, the tram going on along Park Street, the cars accelerating to overtake it before it gets to the next set of lights and holds them up again.
So after the Christmas–New Year break Marie doesn’t report for work at the unit but stays home. She lies in bed listening to the uncanny silence long after she would normally have left the house. Everyone but the very old, the infirm and herself have gone to work or to school. After her shower she finds she is tending to creep around the house, as if she is an intruder. All day she can’t shake off the feeling of being a person who should not be there. She doesn’t feel the liberty of her situation and she supposes it will take a day or two for the routine of her normal life to let go its hold. This sensation is obvious, but she hasn’t expected it. In the kitchen she turns on the radio for a bit of company but the constant blather of it jangles her mood and she turns it off again.
After lunch she can’t make up her mind whether her first priority is to begin reading Middlemarch, which she’s taken down from the bookshelf in the front room and laid ready on the low table beside the yellow armchair. She stands in the front room looking at the book lying there on the low table. She steps over to the window. It is another hot day. The grass in the park is parched to the colour of dead skin.
She flexes her fingers but doesn’t open the lid of the piano.
Not yet. There will be time for that. And anyway it needs dusting, and probably tuning. It will take an enormous amount of practice before she is able to play anything near well enough to give herself pleasure.
She stands looking out the front window. She decides she needs to get out of the house. She puts on a headscarf to keep off the sun and writes a shopping list, flowers to brighten up the place essential, underlined. She walks to the South Melbourne market. She is making her escape, she knows it. She can smell the summer heat coming up from the tar and the eucalypts lining the footpath. She feels better walking. There are very few people about, but there are cars and the shops are open. A few old women in black and the men sitting outside the Greek cafe. There is no reason at all not to be happy. She has forgotten that the market isn’t open on Mondays. That is why everything is so quiet.
There is no other florist, so she walks on along Market Street and looks in the windows of three new shops. Not really new new but refurbished Victorian shopfronts scraped back and redone. They are all to do with furnishing the home. Tasteful and expensive things looking more or less as if they have come from France or Italy. Who will buy them? She stands outside the last shop before the corner of Clarendon Street looking at an old square-sided wooden bucket, from a peasant’s yard somewhere in France no doubt. The bucket stands on an iron table and is filled with an enormous bunch of white daisies with rich yellow centres the colour of egg yolks. Sensing a possible sale, the woman inside the shop steps towards the door and smiles. Marie smiles back and walks on around the corner into Clarendon Street. As she passes the newsagents she sees it is 14 January. She is suddenly aware of time passing, her six months of freedom already being measured out and eaten up, her little allotment being doled out a spoonful at a time.
Astonishingly two weeks slip by and she has still done nothing.
She doesn’t call up any of her friends. Most, though not quite all, are at work during the day or busy with their children, but it isn’t just that. It is that she belie
ves she has to deal with this business on her own, whatever it is. So although she is rather intimidated by her solitariness, especially around the house, she does nothing to soften her situation and make things easier for herself. Something is going on and she has to see it through alone. She wonders if she is being seriously unbalanced about it all.
Even for Melbourne the summer of 1982/3 is hot. According to the weather forecasters it is going to get hotter. Marie reads the travel section in Saturday’s Age while she is having breakfast at a cafe in Clarendon Street. She wonders if she should buy a ticket to the cool of the northern hemisphere. They are advertising winter specials to almost every European capital. Singapore Airlines has some enticing offers to Paris. But she doesn’t consider Paris. She doesn’t even read the ads with the Eiffel Tower on them but lets her eyes skip over them. Paris is too troubled by family ghosts. Paris will confront her directly with questions. Why have you never gone in search of your mother? Why has your mother never come to Australia to look for you? If she were alive, this year her mother would be sixty. Not at all old these days. In Paris the painful questions would arise to condemn her and nothing would stop them.
No, she will not even consider Paris. Not for a second. She orders another cappuccino and reads about the Grand Canyon.
She is still lying in bed after ten in the morning, cocooned in the cling wrap of unbroken stillness, when she realises with a little shock that it is the first day of February. The shortest month.
She gets up at once and has a shower and dresses.
Without waiting to have breakfast she hurries around to the newsagents in Clarendon Street and puts a notice in the window: FREE PIANO LESSONS FOR GENUINE BEGINNERS, STUDENTS MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY A PARENT. She leaves her phone number and returns home. She feels quite breathless. She dusts the piano and calls the tuner. She sits at the piano and plays scales for an hour. By the time she stops playing, her wrists and the muscles of her forearms are on fire. She listens to the fabric of the house resonating, like a tall Italian belltower after the thunder of the bells. She is elated by what she has done. She has taken herself by surprise.
Then the phone rings.
Within the space of three days Marie has four students and a fifth promised. People are obviously price sensitive. The tuner comes on Tuesday; not the man she has used in the past but a new and younger man. Her first impression was that he was a not unattractive man and it pleased her to think she would see him every so often. When he is removing the front panel from the piano she says to him, ‘Someone once told me it was figured walnut. Is it?’ She is not just making conversation, though she is doing that as well, but really wants to know. He says bluntly, ‘I don’t know anything about the wood. I just tune them.’ She finds his response disappointing and begins at once to think him an unintelligent man and not at all interesting. She says, ‘When you’ve finished, come to the bottom of the stairs and give me a call.’ People are disappointing. She wishes she hadn’t spoken to him about the figured walnut.
He calls, ‘You there, Miss?’ She comes out of her bedroom onto the landing. He stands at the foot of the stairs looking up at her, his black bag of tools hanging weightily from his hand, the ropey muscles of his forearm tensed. A vast growth with a life of its own slowly ingesting him, that black bag. That’s how she sees him, standing there looking up at her as she comes down, something in his eyes she doesn’t like.
The tuner, she decides, is the victim of his own meagre labours, the entrails of his allotted time eaten up slowly year by year, lost to the mouth of that sagging black bag. For an instant she fears him, his brutal presence. She reaches the bottom of the stairs and counts the notes into his hand, not meeting his eyes, wherein lurks his sardonic knowing. She follows him to the front door and closes it after him.
She goes into the front room and stands at the piano and plays a few chords. She has to stoop only a little to see in the mirrored wood her fingers undo the top button of her dress. She examines the effect of her open dress in the blurry reflection; the tone of her naked skin is favoured by the lambent glow of the precious timber. She straightens and does the button up again. Was she once beautiful?
After the second lesson she decides she isn’t a natural teacher. But they are getting it for nothing, so the parents can hardly complain. None of them do. Indeed she is surprised to find they are in awe of her abilities. Her students are all young children who attend primary school until three-thirty in the afternoon, except the fifth student, whom she has not yet met. For some reason his mother says she can bring the boy at two o’clock. Marie doesn’t ask the woman why this is possible. She doesn’t care why. She buys a notebook for each student and puts their names on the covers, otherwise she knows she is sure to forget where they have got up to in the previous lesson.
The parents (all mothers so far) perch themselves on the edge of the sofa in a state of listening during the lesson, leaning forward and jiggling a leg, gazing anxiously from her to their child. She decides parents should not be in the room during the lesson and makes this a rule. She is surprised to find the mothers all accept the rule as if they believe in her authority to make rules. Each mother seems to think her child is a genius and will be playing like Mozart within months, if not days. One asks her at the end of the first lesson, ‘Has he got it do you think?’ Marie is bemused by the question. ‘Got what?’ But the woman is talking about It, genius, a gift. ‘It’s not a gift,’ Marie tells the woman severely. ‘It’s the result of years of hard work. You have to live your art.’ The woman gives her a funny look and Marie feels sure she isn’t going to last. She wants to say, Why the piano? Why not basketball or footy? But she doesn’t. Marie doesn’t mind the children—they believe in her and in themselves—but five minutes with one of the mothers drains her tolerance to zero and is exhausting. So she begins claiming the children from their mothers at the door and not letting the mothers in at the pickup either.
Marie is standing at the window, leaning to see along her street to where it joins the main road. The fifth student is due. The drift of air from the fan caresses at intervals the back of Marie’s dress and might be the light touch of an intimate companion. But Marie is alone and waiting. It is a few minutes after two on the afternoon of Tuesday, 8 February 1983, and at 109.8 degrees in the old measure (43.2 in the new) it is to be the hottest February day ever recorded in Melbourne.
The boy and his mother (she assumes it will be his mother who brings him) are only a few minutes late, but they are late all the same. It makes her nervous when people are late. A car turns into Marie’s street at that moment and she pulls back from the window so as not to be seen, but the car sweeps past without stopping. There is only a driver. Then another car does the same thing. After that the street is empty and quiet again, as it invariably is at this time of a Tuesday afternoon.
Marie looks out at the terrible day. It seems to her the sun has not moved for hours but has hung there, stationary, at the highest point of the sky, refusing to relent, refusing to begin its descent towards the horizon. The sun god in revolt against humankind and their earthly endurance. Enough is enough! The laws of nature refuted. The eternal web of reality unfashioned. From Marie’s downstairs front room window the horizon is in fact the flat roof of the Housing Commission tower block that rises behind the row of Victorian terrace houses on the other side of the park. The day is still and the city unnaturally quiet. Mesmerised by the stillness and the heat, Marie stares out at the day as if she expects the foretold hour when the first crack will appear and creation will begin to disassemble: trees without leaves, earth turned to dust, the sovereign sky a molten furnace in which no bird can live. Her memory presents her at this moment with an image of falling birds. Small black things falling against a malevolent yellow sky. A newsreel image she saw as a girl of the British atomic tests at Maralinga in the desert. The wind that passed over the watchers there, snatching at their military caps, and they not knowing themselves changed by its touch.
Sh
e feels sorry for the poor European poplars out there in the park, unshielded from the nuclear blast of the sun’s rays, their leaves grey and withered, curled in upon themselves like beaten men. Those sad trees are not made to withstand this sort of exile but are made for the cool tonalities of Corot’s landscapes. Oddly, right at this minute, staring out at the blistering day, she feels happy. She goes on with her Corot image. A grey drift of misty rain on a deliciously chilly northern autumn day, the deep greens of shade beneath the overhanging branches where they form a bower by the bank of a river. She insists on the image, and manages to steady it before her mind for a few more precious seconds before it too withers and withdraws, leaving the comfortless street and the dusty park and the blasted trees in the awful heat of this never-ending February day.
Despite the regular sweep of the fan, sweat is beaded on her skin. Droplets course down her neck from under her hair into the top of her stylish blue and white linen dress. She fingers the wetness on her skin where the sweat tickles and she closes her eyes. Perhaps the boy and his mother aren’t coming after all. She can hardly blame them if they don’t turn up on a day like this. But all the same she doesn’t like it. His heat limit, or his mother’s, she supposes, has been reached. She opens her eyes.
Across the road a man is sitting on the only bench in the small triangle of park reading his newspaper, the tabloid square of grey-white opening and closing as he turns the pages and folds them back, as if he is semaphoring a message to her. Is it an SOS? He is without a hat and is wearing only a singlet and shorts, his bald head glowing like a molten ingot. His dog (she supposes it is his dog), a low thickset white animal with a naked pink face and a swinging pizzle sac, is doing the rounds of the trees, snuffling at the base of each trunk then turning aside and lifting its leg, a look of dumb obscene bliss on its flat ugly face. She hates looking at the dog but can’t take her eyes from it. When the dog squats to unload its bowels, its goggle eyes bugging with rapture, its jowls trembling, Marie makes a small dismayed sound and switches her attention abruptly to the burning man. She has never seen the man before. Or perhaps she has seen him but does not remember ever having seen him. She would remember if she had seen his dog. The pair of them are evidently members of a species that come into the open only when it is too hot for ordinary humans to endure. It occurs to her then that it is the likes of these two who will be not the burnt ones but the survivors when the last bird falls from the sky. A heartbreaking event they will not notice.