by Thea Astley
‘Sure. She’s often used it. She flogs Daddy with it. It’s her panic hole. It’s very expensive.’
Quite suddenly the two of them were smiling at each other.
‘You’re not really going away, are you, Grans?’ Bridgie asked complacently.
Kathleen said, ‘I decline to answer that question on the grounds that it might incriminate me. You know, Bridgie, sometimes you make me feel quite young.’
‘Hey,’ the kid said, ‘that’s great! That’s really great! You know, Grans, I really like you. This should stuff it up for both of them.’
Could it have been that barely recalled firming of the spirits three years ago that now found her Lear-like between the homes of son and daughter, who had dutifully but reluctantly offered haven and then made living in that haven impossible? The patterned landscape of her past had altered with the scumbling effects of time, presenting this day, this week, this year, as the blurred and entrancingly beautiful protoplast of an unskilled impressionist—as if she herself had cunningly but deliberately smudged the still-wet shapes and outlines.
Programmed, of course, to accept the blame.
Were you a scapegoat, too? she had asked Daisy, Daisy’s mouth smudged with cream and her own fogged past.
Whatever had Daisy replied? Her memory going while she lived in a world of names that more and more frequently refused to attach themselves immediately to the right object, any old word tumbling off the tongue, come trippingly, oh she could recall the Elizabethans, but only fragments of this hot present continuous in Brisbane town where even the town’s silhouette was so changed from that of youthful recall it was as if she were living somewhere else. And the impatience that greeted that loss! The irritability and the mouth-munching as she fought for a place, a person! Yet across that stretched canvas, when she tried not to remember, names and incidents stuck with the particularity of rocks in a reef. There was no searching, no fumbling. The days laid themselves out, laid themselves out, in the sequential design of a cunningly constructed game of chess.
End game?
Hers?
But where for the restart, the new beginning?
Reeftown, Brain realised, was replete with the memory of failures. There were the unshed spouses as well. Not of course that Reeftown society raised its eyebrows at marital peccadilloes. From the town’s beginnings, from the pitching of tents on the banks of a river that snaked its way across the tablelands to drop a thousand feet before wandering through what had once been swamp and mangrove to the sea, a tolerance to irregularities in wedlock prevailed. The mosquitoes had always made concentration difficult.
Yet Reeftown was the world in a way. A paraphrase of the microcosm. A précis. On the eyelid rim of sleep they had mumbled about where, the inevitable ubi of lifetimes that ultimately ten thousand years from now—or even fifty—would mean nothing.
Not there, Nina had yawned sleepily, wiping from her mind the possibilities of that palm- and tourist-infested town that had fed her mind-blood for so long. But of there. She could never escape the northern tug, never erase. He had shaken her into wakefulness to demand exactly what she meant by those throwaway words and she answered that they were certainly not that. She fell asleep at last but in the morning, with grey snow light between the long grubby drapes, she described the next town south, with its ugly gobbet of rock staring across five miles of aquamarine to an island that tugged.
‘But not on the island.’
She watched Brain’s eyes, red-veined from insomnia. ‘Not on. Somewhere along the coast on the escarpment. Just north or south.’
They left the hotel, searching for a breakfast bar. He drew a mud map for her in the slush of Copenhagen as they stood near a pølse vendor’s stall. They planned their restaurant with tomato sauce from the hot sausage running down their fingers. Everything seemed fine then. It was easier not to think.
As now, Brain thought, momentarily imagining Bosie in a nimbus of humiliated rage, cleaning out his belongings back in Reeftown. He envisaged her shredding the sheet music, raping the tape deck, hauling down the speakers by the pool. All she would be left with, he reflected bitterly, was the house she stood up in, a million-dollar ocean-front and an annuity from her developer daddy.
Nina and he had returned in almost inelegant haste from Europe for a fortnight of spouse acrimony. Well, his, in fact. Mr Waterman, Nina told him, was totally absorbed in his collection of postcards, grabbed between bouts of diarrhoea at tourist spots throughout Europe and the United Kingdom, and had become obsessed with one particular brown reproduction of the classroom at Hawkshead Grammar. He kept wondering, though he put it more delicately, if Wordsworth had really bonked his sister.
‘I’m moving out,’ Nina announced.
‘Are you dear?’
‘Charles, you’re not listening. You never listen.’
‘Yes I am. I do. But look, Nina, I have his collected letters. I have infinite comments made by his contemporaries. And after all he did have that little fling in France which must, don’t you agree, have acted as some kind of ultimate moral slackening—if indeed, it weren’t a warner!—wouldn’t you think? Such a philosophic-stroke-pantheist Christian, if I can put it that way. One boggles.’
‘You can put it any damn way you like, the emphasis being stroke. Do you mind if I take the clock radio?’
‘Not at all. Take whatever you want, my dear. Yet there is something suspect. Oh I don’t know. It’s the disease of post-Freudians, isn’t it, to attribute sexual appetence to almost everything.’
‘And what about the tapes? Fifty fifty? Half and half?’
‘My dear, whatever. Look at the whole thing this way: here’s William; here’s Dorothy. Now …’
But Nina had already left the room and was ramming clothes into cardboard boxes. When she emerged to ring for a taxi, her husband was still brooding over a blow-up of Wordsworth’s cottage.
‘On second thoughts,’ she said, ‘I won’t take the radio.’
‘Won’t you, dear?’
‘No.’
‘Or the tape deck?’
There was a rude hooting from outside under the tulip trees.
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Goodbye, Charles. Look after yourself.’ He looked up as she lugged cases and boxes towards the door.
‘You too, dear. Where are you off to now?’
She became furious. The honking outside repeated its primitive motif. Charles had easily won that round. Or was he even trying? That was the rub, that probably he was not even aware.
‘I’m not sure,’ she replied, allowing the cold and the heat to bite through her words. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
‘Of course,’ he said.
Of course, of course, of course.
So there they were at last, the two adulterers, perched, re-plumaged parrots, on a ridge-roost of the Great Divide, too far (couldn’t you guess?) from tourist traffic to make a financial killing, yet so awkwardly angled to tourism that the low-priced leasehold, the almost negligible rates, were constants in their conversations on profit and loss. But those, Brain realised in his growing disillusion, suspecting she did also, were nothing to do with the dwindling spiritual gains, the unrelenting mathematics of their own relationship.
The restaurant was a kind of shed-like structure, all veranda and air, tarted with bamboo artifacts and tapa cloth. It had failed two previous owners. A short distance uphill was a small dwelling with small hot bedrooms and kitchen for the cafe management.
‘But the pluses!’ Nina was in the first flush of proprietorship. The restaurant verandas gaped at a coastal plain that paused with astonishment before prairies of swinging blue. Bluer than blue. The staggering brilliance of still unsullied waters. ‘Just look at that … that dayspring!’ Islands sailed untroubled along the marge, as indifferent as ships. Her partner, however, was gazing peevishly at the road in, a rutted memory of bitumen sustaining it, and a gradient that would attract only the most dedicated gastronome.
‘The cooking,’
he commented, ‘will have to be bloody good to get customers tackling that track.’
‘We’ll need a staff of at least four,’ Nina said dreamily. ‘A superb chef, for a start.’
‘But I thought—’
‘I see myself rather as hostess of the cash register. Gracious troubleshooter. You, my dear, will be excellent in the bar.’
Will I indeed! Oh the souring of fact.
The longer they spent on primitive addition and the frightening aspect of overdrafts, the more their enthusiasm was buffeted. It was difficult, despite widespread unemployment, to find staff. The pair of them were forced back on their own efforts and Nina, in the early evening as they waited hopefully for the trickle of diners who had begun to face the distance and the horror of the road up the ridge, would put on a tape of Italian lusciousness and sing along with tenors about Napoli and Sorrento, snapping her fingers and thumbs during the fast bits and swinging her hips to the insidious rhythms. She was still a woman of voluptuous dimensions, her face moulded on harmonious bones protected by the lushest of camellia flesh. Despite the languor of weather, her hips swung vigorously between checking things in the kitchen, whipping up a sauce or altering a table setting. She cha-cha’d vocally with tenors of renown.
Business was slow.
It seemed never to stop, this mediterranean mode. Ai yi! carolled sumptuous Nina, jittering along with the Gipsy Kings, who sounded as if they had missed the last train to Madrid and were determined everyone would suffer. Ai yi! she cried as diners straggled in. Ai yi yi! With small heel stampings, arms curved above heavenly head, fingers clicking. Brain wondered if she were having a breakdown and patted her with lingering hand on his way to mix highballs and uncork wine with spurious flourish. Yet later, the diners vanished in puff-balls of dust on the hill road, he would yield to her taste for the saccharine and sing once more M’han detto che domani, Nina vi fate sposa, even though his eyes caught a tiring light on the edge of hers.
‘Does it matter?’ she would ask in the sensual mornings, moisture still dripping from gutter and leaf, sunlight carving through green. She would roll, lazily naked under the sheets that were still too hot and heavy to bear.
‘What? Does what matter?’
Sometimes he thought disloyally that since leaving Bosie he had merely changed guards.
‘The money, my dear, the money.’
‘What money? We’re not making any. My overdraft is strangling me. This is game-playing, isn’t it? It really is.’ He was afraid to gouge out the truth of the matter: that each of them had used the other as an excuse for shedding a worn-out relationship. He cursed those fallaciously greener distant hills!
Nina flung her portion of sheet pettishly across his and stalked naked to the bathroom. Water would restore.
But it restored nothing beyond a temporary freshness of skin that lasted minutes only and the days, weeks, months, developed their own patterns of boredom and predictability as each secretly began wondering about their former partners and the flattened curves of their life-styles. Nina began gallery hopping again. Brain resumed golf. Their flight from responsibility rewarded them inversely for the gallery crowd took up their restaurant as an out-of-town dining quirk and golf club acquaintance spicked up in the club bar began eating there on Saturday nights. A bit of a buzz, really, they told each other, to drive fifty miles for nosh up one of the worst back roads on the coast. Still, that dame of his was definitely something else and by the second bottle of Dom Perignon it all seemed worth it. The food wasn’t too bad at all, they convinced themselves, if you liked pictures of food on plates. That nouvelle cuisine!
Once or twice Nina’s extrovert welcomes made strangers wonder if she went with the coffee. Scatty Brain refused to be amused.
Could their renaissance in this gimcrack Eden last?
They feared asking each other in the perfection of those dud, those imperfect days.
Mother had rung.
Mother had rung from Brisbane.
Bad news comes in half-heard spurts on faulty lines, in blotched faxes, in hysteric mouthings impotent to control the outpourings of disaster.
Her house, she had told him, was being resumed for an expressway. Yes, of course she had known. For years, actually, but knowing government departments, had believed it would never happen. How long? The last five years. Well? Well, she had a month to move.
How could he explain without the corollaries of pain-giving, of rejection, that they had only just begun their business, that things were dicey? Over eight hundred miles of rustling and trembling wire he recognised her recognising rejection. What about Sham? he had asked brightly, hoping for respite. The silence became one of those cartoon balloons designated to be filled in with suitable captions. He couldn’t think of any. Well, yes, okay, he agreed to the unspoken exegesis. She’s a pretty busy lady, I guess. (Lady! Sham! … Jesus! Married to that slack-mouth whose limpness of feature measured his limpness of political purpose yet who managed, despite obvious defects like a low intelligence quotient, a dependence on liquor and a fluid expense account, to con his electorate every few years into returning him to the perks of office! Len had even escaped from the Heart of Darkness with minimal losses in his bank account. Wherever that was! No resting place for an outspoken woman like mother, who was now forgetting what she wanted to be outspoken about. Who forgot to pay bills or paid twice. Who missed bus, train, plane connections and stopped mid-sentence and asked, her tired eyes baffled and pained by the memory lapse, ‘Now what was I saying, Brain? I’ve totally forgotten.’)
‘The Croziers,’ he would prompt. ‘You were telling me about the Croziers.’
‘Who are they?’
‘The people you went to visit … oh never mind.’
‘Oh.’ He could feel distant mother tense as she struggled with the name. ‘No dear. I think you’ve got it wrong. I can’t remember anyone of that name.’ Half an hour later, he knew, it would all rush in, drowning, a deluge of memories but twenty years earlier. She would probably ring back. ‘Oh Brain, those Croziers. The ones who …’ And off she would rattle on a nostalgia binge the edges of which he could barely recall himself.
Now, oh now, he yielded.
‘Do you want to come up, Mum? For a visit? Just till you get things sorted?’
‘Could I, dear? Not for long, I promise. Remember old Sam whosit, after three days guests and fish stink. I think that’s what he said.’
‘Johnson. Sam Johnson. He said that.’
‘Did he? Well, he was so right. Probably something to do with his skin problem. Hard being a host with skin problems. Sham always makes me feel I have scrofula before I even arrive, to say nothing of that dreadful husband of hers.’
‘The minister for transports!’ Brain chuckled.
‘Who else?’ He could hear his mother’s answering laugh.
They fixed dates, times. Nina said of course. She had liked Brain’s zany old wool-gatherer of a mother the moment they met. When was it—two, three years ago at one of those Christmas bashes Bosie insisted on having. Why, she might even help out, in the least tiring way, of course, on the busy nights, if ever there were busy nights. Did Brain think she would mind?
Brain had shaken his head. Of course she wouldn’t mind. He was beginning to understand at last the healing quality of being needed, just at that point, though he didn’t realise that, when his mother was tiring of being used.
He sighed now and looked at his watch.
His mother’s plane was due in an hour and shortly he would drive down the zigzag track to the coast plains and head south for the airport, dumped between the constant sea and the constant hills.
The police had run Kathleen to earth in a small motel in Buderim. She was tackling her second breakfast egg. They were very kind to her, rang her daughter and checked to see the old girl had been picked up later that morning.
Shamrock was ferocious at having to drive all that way to collect (she made it sound like a parcel in her recriminations), having book
ed her mother on the tour out of kindness. Len received concessions on most of those things.
‘Why did you do it?’
When the tour bus had stopped for a morning-tea break, mother had wandered off and hidden in a shopping mall, emerging only when she thought the rest of the party might have moved on. The bus captain, bedevilled by timetables, had reported one missing passenger to the local police and driven the other pensioners off along the coast.
‘They were boring old farts,’ Kathleen said.
She seemed unaware that she had done anything amiss.
Now Brain, hanging around the airport terminal, sweating charity, dread and love, recalled another phone call barely a month ago, coming mid-evening as he and Nina had been wrestling with a pudding course for three picky diners. His mother’s voice was barely audible. He had asked her where she was calling from. She told him she didn’t know. What city? he had inquired with heavy irony. She was testy when she said it was somewhere in Brisbane, New Farm way she thought, having strolled into the park, dozed on a seat by the river and absent-mindedly wandered out the wrong end. ‘I’m not sure how to get home,’ she said. ‘There don’t seem to be any buses and I don’t want to walk back through the park in the dark. All the shops round here are closed.’ ‘For Chrissake!’ Brain had screamed. ‘Why me? Why don’t you ring Sham?’ She complained that her daughter got too angry. He suggested she ring a cab. There was no phone book, she told him. She was lucky there was a handset. Stay in the call-box, he instructed her. Don’t move. He would fix something. He seemed to be on the phone for hours. The pudding was ruined.
The police were pleasant that time, too, and drove Kathleen right home, seeing her to the very door.
Was she more difficult than vague? Was that it? Sometimes, he had to concede, she was sharp as a tack. As far as he knew she coped with being alone, still managed with reading, the garden, getting to the shops. He didn’t want to admit she needed companionship, fought that admission when that was the one thing, he was beginning to realise, he could possibly do without.