by Thea Astley
‘Couldn’t get a park. There were two buses and half a dozen cars pulled in. I slowed right down, though. It’s a gas!’
‘My!’ Brain laid down the paper and reached for the coffee pot, savouring the scent as he refilled his cup, savouring the prospect of a relaxed afternoon by the pool. ‘Causing a stir, is it? Maybe some civic-minded grateful member of Len’s electorate decided it was time for public thanks.’
Chaps rubbed his freckles thoughtfully. ‘It’s certainly causing a stir. Everyone up in Port was talking about it. Maybe some hippy whacko freaked out.’
Bosie and Brain had been playing happy families: Mother, Bimbo and Chaps, all up for Mother’s yearly visit. Bimbo had looked in only for a couple of nights on his way to Darwin. Chaps, who was leaving the next morning, could think only of that long run down the coast in a beat-up Holden that badly needed an overhaul. He judged, nicely gauging his father’s pleased smirk about something or other, that it was time to put in the nips.
‘What the hell do you do with your allowance? What about those casual jobs you’re always telling us you’ve got?’ Brain asked.
Bimbo and Chaps had only the blazer pockets of their Brisbane boarding school as mementoes of five years’ expensive education. Bimbo had failed university political economy and was thereby assured of administrative work in a political party. ‘Better if you hadn’t done any of that crap,’ the party secretary told him. ‘Spoils your judgement. Still, we’ll give you ago. Temporary.’ The wily lad had only recently decided to throw in his genius with the national coalition. Uncle Len had applied some pressure but not, Bimbo thought resentfully, nearly enough. ‘Why them?’ his father asked. ‘More perks,’ Bimbo explained briefly as he gazed critically around his parents’ outdoor living room where, my God, those old sixties carbuncular speakers were still playing forties big band muck! Still, he’d be gone soon. His olds bored him rigid. Bosie was a complete turbo mouth once she got going. He wondered how the old man stood it and for the shortest of moments (to be calculated in microseconds) he patted his father’s sad, greying thatch and regarded the poor wrinkled neck with compassion. That vulnerable nape! Instinctively he rubbed his own, dreading. Chaps wasn’t nearly as critical—yet. He was still into eating and muscle-building and lapped the pool endlessly, his shoulders darkened by sun, glistening with oil, stroking away in brilliant chlorinated waters.
Woooosh!
But you were the oddball, Daisy said, weren’t you?
Kathleen found her thoughts inevitably meshed with those of her son and his crackpot stratagems. Both of us, she answered.
The hypnotic quality of sun burning slant-wise through the mall and the whoop of traffic in side streets kept trying to extinguish that last Christmas with its sour hostess and the guttering candles of a failed marriage. You don’t want to hear all this stuff, she said to Daisy, who refused to stay in that seat opposite, who kept getting up and moving away. The more I remember the more I’m loaded with this sense of responsibility, the conviction that somewhere along the line I went horribly wrong.
But you kept moving, didn’t you? Daisy asked. Spiritually, I mean. You don’t even have to leave your chair for that.
I know that, Kathleen said impatiently. God, I know that! How would I ever have managed, for goodness’ sake! How would you? Listen. How about this for zany? You want zany, I’ll give you zany!
A pilgrimage.
‘But this is your land!’ Bosie had accused shrilly as the three of them panted up the scrubby slope in the late afternoon to what Brain insisted on calling his coup de vie. ‘Oh Brain, how could you do this to Len?’
She had insisted on being shown. His mother had come for laughs.
‘Easy.’
‘No wonder the council …’
‘Trespass. Trespass if they touch one plastic hair of his head.’
‘Bullshit!’ his wife screamed, forgetting her refinement. ‘Bullshit, Brain! I don’t know how you could do this.’
Then he told her how he could with such detail she started screeching about family disloyalty, thoughtlessness, producing a litany of damage that might affect the boys quite apart from the offensiveness to someone as pleasant, as clever, as obliging …
‘You’ve forgotten rich,’ he said. ‘And slimy bastard.’
His mother was overcome with unsuitable mirth. ‘I love it,’ she kept croaking. ‘Absolutely love it. The ultimate garden gnome.’
‘Of Zürich,’ her son added. ‘There were rumours and rumours, probably all with foundation.’
Bosie was staring at her gaga mother-in-law with loathing. She was outraged by Kathleen’s response, even if the old girl wasn’t all there. God! Shrillings of ‘laughing-stock’, ‘libel actions’, ‘public fools’ leapt easily from her lips. And in truth when they tottered down to the road there was a knot of photographers and reporters to meet them. Mother, Brain observed, could not subdue the joyous tug of her mouth.
Yes, Brain admitted to the cub reporter from the Reeftown Herald, oh yes, it was most certainly his land. Would she care for the title deed number? And certainly he was aware that the … er … statue was there. Had he built it? he was asked. Cameras buzzed like cicadas. He was not prepared to answer that question at this stage. Did he know who had built it? they persisted. He reminded them of the respected journalist tradition of never revealing one’s source. There were unbelieving smiles.
‘He did!’ his Judas wife shrieked at the end of her loyal tether. ‘He built the bloody thing!’
‘Is that so?’ one of the reporters asked. He winked at Brain.
The cameraman took a lot of snaps of Bosie with mouth agape and teeth flashing. She would hate herself the next day.
‘No.’ Brain lied with the assurance of a politician, with that same meretricious ease. Momentarily he wondered if his talents perhaps lay in government. ‘It certainly is not so. I simply made my land available. It’s a statement.’
‘Of what?’
‘I’m afraid I will have to leave you to make your own assumptions.’
‘Are you going to pull it down, Mr Hackendorf?’
‘I’m not going to.’
‘Do you think the council will?’
‘They might try. They might trespass. I’m taking legal advice.’
For the moment the only advice he had taken was that of Nina Waterman, whom he had driven there for a viewing before the head was mounted. An afficionada of galleries and the dubiousness of gallery-speak, she had brought the trimmings for al fresco lunching—champagne and ice-bucket, flamboyant qualifiers to the outing where they had clinked champagne flutes over the grass-snuggling features of Brain’s brother-in-law. Mrs Waterman, who rarely yielded to emotional admission, rocked with laughter as she christened the head, then seated herself firmly on a nearby log artistically lugged beneath a recently planted grove of fan palms. From below on the highway came the screech of cars braking and excited chatter in a variety of languages.
‘So what do you think?’
‘Marvellous!’ Champagne slopped onto the grass. ‘Absolutely marvellous! Who did you say the gentleman is?’ She leant forward and poured a little more wine over Len’s snuggling features.
‘My brother-in-law,’ Brain said with appropriate modesty. ‘The minister for transports.’
‘Whose? Whose transports?’
‘Originally my sister’s, one hopes. Now, who knows?’
Mrs Waterman rolled these shreds of fact around and hogged more champagne. ‘Delicious, my dear. Oh delicious.’
Yet after the newspaper assaults, Brain proceeded with a legal ban on council intrusion and somehow his lawyer managed to slap an injunction on proceedings. For another fortnight buses continued to pull up. From the seaward side of the highway visual access to the upper torso was rendered easier by a mound of granite boulders flung up by some geological spasm on which camera-wielding tourists perched like excited gulls. In Brisbane the minister for transports contemplated suing but decided, pushed by Shamrock, o
n a public and dignified silence and a private donation to Reeftown’s council funds. He gave one television interview only, on which the bastards kept moving between his features and those of his fibreglass twin, and sat back and waited.
During that period, in a last satiric lunge, Brain erected a large sign, THE BIG DEVELOPER, near the gates and cleared scrub all round for twenty yards each way so that the belly and legs were visible from the road.
The shire engineer retreated behind a maze of legal paperwork.
Dispensing with thoughts of foxhole, redoubt, stockade, barbette, circumvallation or even a primitive abatis for protection, Brain took to sleeping on the block after he had left work at the bar, huddled in a pup tent pitched beneath the statue’s straddling legs. Why, old Len, he thought sourly, sweating in his sleeping bag, two vast and trunkless legs of stone.
Four nights later, when Brain drove up after midnight had belched into silence at the Jungle Bar, he found that during the day the council, someone, had settled the matter. The chainwire fence had been flattened for ingress and the Big Developer exploded into fragments that lay all over the grove. His pup tent hung raggedly from the lower branches of a wattle.
Fury. Despair. Then laughter. Rational about it, he knew he had had his moment and was sated, more or less, when next morning’s Reeftown Herald ran the following report:
A mysterious explosion last night was heard clearly by residents of Casuarina Beach and as far away as the Port.
It appears to have been located at the site of what has come to be known as The Big Developer, a 10-metre statue erected on the freehold property of a well-known local identity, Mr Brian Hackendorf.
Local feelings are mixed about the destruction of what some called a monstrosity and others a witty and authentic tourist attraction.
Whatever the outcome, we can be sure that a certain southern politician is relieved.
When asked for comment the Reeftown Shire Council, who had strongly opposed the project, refused to make a statement.
Brain smiled and sighed. Bosie’s smirk scorched.
Another failure?
Success?
Hey, Daisy, Daise! Kathleen had said over the chocolate cake that day, there’s more to it. Much more. I’ve skipped the grandma years. Think I’ll write a book about those. Funny Doctor Spock never thought of it. Could have made another million. The guide to grandmothering. The four ages of women: Bimbo, breeder, baby-sitter, burden. Daisy had slopped tea all over her cake plate. Need someone to baby-sit me, she said. I’m at the burden stage myself. She had crooked a mock-elegant finger and asked about the four ages of man. Which one of them had said Hunk, hunk, hunk, hunk? She couldn’t remember anything except the splatterings of mirth.
There’s a limit, Kathleen decided, angry too late, to the amount of work families can squeeze from the withering muscles of grandmothers.
Over the years she had become accustomed to her daughter’s voice, hardened by distance. Mother—the wires refused to dimple—can you take Bridgie for me next weekend? Len has to attend a conference in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Hobart … Her job spared her week-day trials and her son’s removal to the far north much more. But the baby years of Bimbo and Chaps had eaten into her own free time week after week. When Shamrock gave birth to Bridgie she had just taken early retirement. Am I unnatural, she wondered, lying vigorously to avoid a long weekend at her daughter’s home, a weekend of yowls and laundry while Shamrock and Len lived it up at a ritzy hotel in Melbourne. They think, she thought sourly, I can’t wait to get my hands on this grandchild, that I’m bereft of hugs, kisses, cuddle-time. They’ve got to be crazy!
Beyond all that now, she plucked up the nagging phone and held it away from her ear, pulling a face at the hot Brisbane street outside. Cars were terrorising an old man trying to cross the pedestrian walkway. They kept speeding through while he fluttered his frail bones on the lip of the footpath.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she lied, ‘but I’m going to Tamborine for that week. It’s all booked.’
‘Couldn’t you take Bridgie with you?’
‘Couldn’t you? It’s not as if she’s at the toddler stage. In fact Bridgie and I have more in common than you think. We’ve both reached the burden period of our lives.’
‘Oh God, Mother. She’d be bored witless. Come on, I don’t ask that much of you.’
‘Not these days, no. But still no.’
‘What do you mean, no? Heavens, you’re unnatural. You are her grandmother after all. Most grandmothers are panting to do a little something.’
‘Not this grandmother,’ Kathleen said. ‘I am no longer panting. I’ve done my fair share of that.’ She watched two cars play chicken with each other around the old man, who had now ventured ten paces out onto the roadway. The cars vanished in screaming exhaust fumes towards the river. ‘In fact, more than my fair share.’
‘But look, it’s not as if Bridgie is a baby any more. She’s thirteen, for God’s sake, and perfectly capable of entertaining herself. It’s ages since I asked you. All of five weeks.’
‘No, dear. Sorry. I’m five weeks weaker. Can’t she stay over with one of her school friends? Why can’t she go with you if she’s perfectly capable of entertaining herself?’
Kathleen envisaged Sham’s stubborn bottom lip thrust out with resentment. Already Bridgie was smoking, boy-mad, and given to sneaked swigs of alcohol. She was expensive to run. She had been expelled from two private schools and was having disciplinary problems in her third.
The line hummed with incommunication.
‘Look, Mother, this is really the last time I’ll ask you, I promise. Len wants me to go with him as a kind of personal trip.’
Kathleen remembered unremembered birthdays, her often lonely Christmases, the presents unthanked, casually treated.
‘Does he, darling?’
‘Yes, he does.’
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but it’s still no.’
Sham slammed the phone into its cradle at the precise moment the old man reached the far side of the road and collapsed. Kathleen saw two pensioners tottering to assist, picked up the morning paper and read:
An elderly woman found wandering in a late night supermarket at Chermside was unable to tell police what she was doing or even where she lived. Police investigating discovered that she had an interstate bus ticket from Newcastle but no means of identification. The woman was unable to tell them her name or address, although she was under the impression that her daughter had purchased the ticket.
Inquiries are proceeding.
To proceed: Sham instantly found a compliant doctor who booked her into a private clinic for observation. She had developed mysterious and strangling cramps in her lower abdomen. The hospital rang Kathleen as next of kin. Within an hour of the phone call Bridgie arrived on her grandmother’s doorstep, lightly swinging a beach bag, a pack, jean-stuffed, drooping over her shoulder. She wore too much eye makeup and her jaws worked busily at gum.
‘Hi,’ she greeted the open door. Then she pushed rudely past her grandmother and dumped both bags in the hallway.
‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’
‘Pupil-free day,’ Bridgie said without interest. ‘We get loads of them.’
‘Now wait a minute, Bridgie,’ Kathleen protested. ‘What is this? What’s going on?’
Bridgie ignored the question. ‘Gotta sit.’ She sprawled immodestly on the living-room sofa.
‘Answer me,’ Kathleen demanded. ‘I said what’s going on?’
Bridgie looked up and grinned around gum. She explained languidly with limp finger movements. Mother had been rushed to a clinic right on lunchtime. Bridgie was undisturbed by the news she delivered. She dragged herself up from the sofa, ambled out of the living room and began raiding the refrigerator for juice. Kathleen could hear the crashes of shoved-aside dishes coming from the kitchen. Tracking the noise spoor!
She went out to the kitchen herself. ‘I’m beginning to understand,’ she sai
d testily, ‘why they killed the messenger. Bridgie, tell me immediately what is going on. I don’t understand.’
‘God, Grandma, don’t you?’
Bridgie was an aggressively pretty child who used insolence as a cosmetic aid. She did raised eyebrows and wrinkled nose. She gulped the last of Kathleen’s orange juice.
‘It’s a ploy. She isn’t really sick, not sick sick. She’ll be right by the weekend, just in time for Daddy’s Perth junket. She suspects he’s on with one of the secretaries, actually.’ Bridgie looked down at the dregs of flavoured mineral water in her glass. ‘Pure puke, Grans.’
‘You didn’t have to drink it,’ Kathleen rejoined vigorously. She removed the emptied bottle and rammed it in the waste bin, a task that seemed not to engage her grandchild’s consciousness, while she repressed cosseting memories of a tear-stained four-year-old Bridgie displaying grazed knees and wet pants. What possible relationship did that mucus-streaked baby face sodden with tears bear to this teenage pouter brilliant with gold glitter and lip gloss?
Bridgie rolled her eyes in a world-weary fashion.
‘Mother told me to come here.’
‘Well, mother was wrong. I’m going away this afternoon for a little holiday. It’s paid for and I’m not cancelling now simply to please your mother’s suspicious whims. You can go back at once. I’ll ring for a cab.’
‘But there’s no one at home.’ Bridgie allowed a badly-done-by whine to creep into her voice.
‘Now Bridgie, that won’t really worry you one little bit, will it? In fact, knowing your record, darling, you’d prefer it.’
A sly smile flickered on Bridgie’s lips.
‘And I’ve no money.’
‘My shout,’ Kathleen said. She watched Bridgie’s eyelids blink, concealing a brazen blaze.
‘Okay, Grans.’ Kathleen could tell she was doing mental arithmetic at computer rates as she calculated blackmail. The child stifled a yawn.
‘That’s a good girl. I’ll get the cab to take you to your mother’s clinic first. She can sort it out from there. Do you know the address?’