by Thea Astley
‘I like that.’
‘Do you? Well, we can work on it. I must say that if the letter of demand brings no response, you can sue, but it’s such a lengthy business. I strongly suggest you get in touch with your friendly neighbourhood press.’ He smirked. ‘By the way, where are you staying?’
She hesitated. He appeared sympathetic. She hoped he was that in a world she now saw as full of deceit. But the oily glister to his bald pate might be even more synthetic than the easy surface of his words. ‘Oh,’ she replied. ‘Oh my daughter took me out to this terrible retirement village. Ghastly. I simply can’t stay.’
‘What’s the name of the place?’
Caution rode her smile. ‘Spent Forces. Twigdroppers. I really can’t remember. I’ve no intention of going back.’
‘But Mrs Hackendorf—Kathleen—probably that is where the money went. On buying you a place there. A villa, I think they call them. Remember, I handled only the actual sale of your house in the most minimal way. Your son-in-law told me nothing. It was the barest formality—sighting signatures and so on. Of course that’s what happened! A unit, villa, whatever. If that’s the case it would be even harder to get your money back. Most of those places have very tight fine print. It’s all their way. Frankly, I think that taking your son-in-law to court as well as the retirement village, to say nothing, my dear, of a government authority, would be expensive and useless. You’d lose and you would be worse off than you are now. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry!’
She walked slowly back to the Queen Street walking-place, a madhouse of tent-topped eateries and truant schoolkids rampaging past shop fronts. She was buffeted by racing hoons on roller blades and shoving teenagers, rendered invisible to them by her very age. Someone snatched at her overnight bag, dragging her off her feet while she clung and clung, the paving stripping skin from knuckles and elbows. A cluster of other ancients had gathered then and she was being helped up, her bag with its broken strap still at her feet. A woman—Daisy?—shoved it into her shaking hand.
‘Bloody louts,’ the old geezer with the paunch commented. His anxious sun-battered face looked hard at her. ‘You’ve hurt your arm, lady. It’s these damn pupil-free days they’re all having. And no bloody police when you want them. You all right, then?’
Her noddle see-sawed, but not with agreement—in a kind of frenzied waggle she couldn’t control. On the grubby shirt-front close to her eyes there were friendly food stains, the stigmata of decline and its ultimate indifference; a sheen of sweat greased the wrinkled neck above. Babble words about her seemed to clatter with concern.
‘A cab,’ she mumbled. ‘I need a cab.’
‘Come on, then, love, I’ll get you there. Just a bit of a way down here on your left.’ The little knot of curious watchers loosened, untied and drifted away. ‘Hang on to me, missus, and I’ll take you all right. Bloody louts. There ought to be a law.’
This is nice, Kathleen thought, this warmth of strangers. Support from that beefy slab of arm helped her forget the needle-sting of her torn elbow while he reined in his strides to equate with her own stumbling feet.
‘There you go.’
Calvary over. The cab door opened and she felt arms lever her onto a seat where, dazed, she sat mindless of destinations.
Where?
Stranger comfort had vanished and the driver was impatiently repeating his question, head half-turned, eyes rolling in mock despair at this stupid biddy. ‘I said where to, lady.’
‘Airport,’ she said. The impulse that had lain there all day awaiting her recognition was grabbed with a tired delight, a sense of solution.
‘Domestic or international?’
Was there irony? This crumpled old bat was spattered with blood, her bag strap dangled torn, her hat sat cock-eyed.
‘Domestic,’ she whispered.
He turned the cab radio up full onto some talentless screamer and Brisbane laid out its steaming spaces for them, flattened under its own muggy effusions as they drove too fast through the headache that was threatening to split her skull open.
Limbo.
This is the magic hall of mirrors. Just stand in front of the glass displaying your number and boy, are you ever in for a surprise!
There goes Ronald on a windjammer, beating before the Trades, looking for landfalls that ultimately he does not want. Or if he glides into an unencumbered harbour, he soon tires, sets sail (gifts of breadfruit, papayas heaped on the deck, chanting and weeping natives watching his departure from the shoreline growing smaller and smaller as his ship swings with the tides) and, cursed (a blast of trumpets!) like Vanderdecken, is doomed to never-ending arrivals and embarkations.
Watching that wind-tousled young man at the tiller, he can only smile. He’s never thought far beyond weighing anchor.
Like me, Brain supposes, seeing a distorted self screeching out numbers on the floor of Wall Street stock exchange, waving at the guys on the rostrum, begging to buy, sell, make it this time. He has always dreamed of millions, the exquisiteness of zeros. But hey, wait a minute! Wait a minute, bud! He’s not dabbling in shares. He’s singing, for Chrissake! The guy’s letting them have it, full voice. He can see his mouth making the sound hit the front of his palate, even the strainings of his diaphragm. But what are the words? What are the goddam words? Not Tosti, not shanty, not Lied. He’s urging these bulls and bears of the pit to take a pair of sparkling eyes.
Sister Shamrock is delighted to observe herself hosting a dinner party for fifty (who has a table that large!) power-brokers, heads of state, paper millionaires. It’s a setting of crystal, starched napery, and deliciously presented food. But my God, what’s this? The lobster stinks! The chilled wine’s like vinegar and she’s sure that at the other end of the table Len has his hand up that woman’s skirt.
My turn, Kathleen says impatiently to the guide. My turn. He leads her over to the glass and that’s her number all right, but when she looks in the mirror it is milky, purblind, the surface a pallid emulsion that washes sluggishly within the frame. What’s this then? she asks the guide, who is shuffling his feet. Don’t I get a look?
That’s it, lady, the guide says.
She must have dozed, for something jerked her back to the present in the high tide of summer scalding the paving and the gloss-painted bench where she sat. She groped for her overnight bag. It was still there, packed with a change of clothing, her pills, some basic toilet items and tissues. To mop up—what? What was it? Tears? She couldn’t recall what it was she should be upset about. Lear, forget it, you selfish mug! Only a male would have mewled about the front doors of castles that didn’t want him, desperate for the four-minute egg, the lightly buttered toast.
She began walking slowly along the mall a little way to the sea end and plumped herself down in the shade of the overhead gallery restaurant. Water bubbled, palms flapped despairing signals over the shoppers and the grubby glitz of shop fronts. She remembered her suitcase taken south three days ago, forgotten as she left the airport, which could still be circling endlessly on the Brisbane carousel. Someone might snatch it, she speculated uninterestedly. She didn’t really care. She hoped it would be a disappointed transvestite confronted by four sets of practical underwear, a cotton twin set and assorted cheap slacks and shirts that bore her indelible post-middle-aged shape. Me bum! she thought. He’ll hate me bum.
Now she could see Daisy coming slowly up the mall, trudging in the terrible heat, her hat dragged low so the brim sheltered her face. Daisy was slowing up too, poor old girl, she couldn’t help noticing. Soon, she told herself, she would take the ferry and cross over to the island unlike those other islands that were locked, seed floaters, into her past, across which the shadows growing shadowier of old island hands moved: Ronald, the assistant secretary who had once …, the manager of the Joy Biscuit Company. Perhaps Daisy would come with her. She would miss their weekly meetings. And then she realised it wasn’t Daisy at all, Daisy in Brisbane, herself here, and she drowsed fo
r a moment but was snapped awake by words cut-ting the air about her, swooping bird-like as she she blinked into the afternoon glare. She forced herself up and began walking diagonally to another tea room in one of the arcades.
A short dumpy woman with a moustache was sitting humbly at one of the tables, edged so close to the brink of her chair it appeared she wanted to make no more impression, occupy no more space, than was humanly necessary. Kathleen’s eyes met those of the waiting woman and she smiled, receiving in return the most timorous, the most tentative, of responses under that emphatic moustache. Oh God! Kathleen thought. Oh God! The eyes of the stranger had that wondering pained look of innocent blue that for a life-time had been fearful of catching the appraising stare, the smirk, the noisy glee of kids. She had been sniggered at too long. Even her clothes were steeped with despair.
Kathleen smiled again, despising her self-conscious charity; but loneliness created a mist around this discard. ‘Lovely day,’ Kathleen said. ‘Lovely day.’ She moved past and away, ah, the shame of it, but the woman with the moustache was suddenly walking beside her, timid, frightened to intrude.
‘Hallo, Daisy,’ Kathleen said.
‘I’m not Daisy.’
Kathleen blinked. Heat dazzle overcame her. ‘Aren’t you?’ she said vaguely. ‘I’m sorry. I thought … I get muddled these days. Brisbane. An old friend I used to meet. I was just going for a cup of tea.’
The hopefulness on the face under the hat brim defied her indifference, compounded error. They walked back to the tea room together.
This was pleasant. Sitting. Free. Sipping. Sitting. She could pretend it was Daisy. Free now to pretend anything at all.
Tourists ambled by in their crease-proof, stinkingly hot tropic gear. The air-conditioning in the little cafe hummed like the sea and she forgot entirely the ugly retirement home, the bulldozers flattening a highway through the living room of the house at Ascot, smashing the bric-à-brac memories of decades there and the ghost relics of those months in the islands.
‘We could be friends,’ the old girl with the mo was suggesting, another moustache of cappuccino stuck to the one already there.
Kathleen had to laugh. ‘Why not?’ she agreed. ‘I’m off to the island soon.’ She had only the vaguest notions of what she would do next. It was safe to think in cliches. They protected, gave succour. There was some money, she remembered, straining for practicality, that she didn’t really care about. Not a lot. A public service pension that drizzled brief fortnightly puddles of support into her bank account like a rusty tap. She had a few hundred in savings. Who cared? Who damn well cared?
‘Who cares?’ she said to the moustache, which quivered away from her sharp demand. She didn’t. She had spent—well—half a life-time worrying about the fortunes of her children, who now proved myopic and deaf about hers. And who cared about that? Not gutsy Kathleen who heard herself say to this shaken old bod in the chair opposite, ‘It’s time to go feral. Tribes of feral grandmothers holed up in the hills, just imagine it, refusing to take on those time-honoured mindings and moppings up after the little ones while the big ones jaunt into the distance.’ The moustache quivered along an amused but frightened lip. ‘Always grandmothers,’ she was shouting now. ‘They never put the hard word to mind on grandpops. Old men. Because they’re afraid they’ll shove their fingers up the kids’ bums or worse. Isn’t that so?’ she demanded, leaning forward to the grinning but alarmed face across the cups. ‘Still,’ she ranted, ignoring the waitress’s tap on the shoulder, ‘still …’ She stopped, bemused, forgetting what it was she had intended to say.
‘You’re getting loud,’ the moustache whispered.
‘Oh Daisy,’ Kathleen asked, ‘why in heaven are you wearing that moustache?’
She couldn’t understand when the old girl burst into tears.
She met the moustache head on, decided to delight in it and those blameless, baffled eyes that gazed out above trumped-up questions to strangers about bus times or whereabouts, driven by isolation and the need to speak to someone, anyone, to prove she was human, capable of communion, of receiving the ultimate wafer host of words.
The sadness of it.
Kathleen offered her best, her sweetest smile, touched by the other woman’s dilemma in the essential ugliness of a Hollywood world and said, ‘My daughter, my son and the minister for transports have no idea at all how to smile,’ and wondered as the puzzlement on her listener’s face rose and bubbled and drained away as if even those words held some further jibe inexplicable for the moment.
She paid for the tea and wandered out again along the mall, heading east with the curve of the river, pausing now and then to stare in a shop window or look at family groups clustered about the fast-food stalls. She turned around, waiting for Daisy, expecting her to catch up. ‘Daisy?’ she called. ‘Hey, Daisy!’ But there was no one behind her now. No one. Had she imagined that other?
Farther on she thought she spied the moustache once more and she smiled widely and warmly and waved a hand. But the moustache retreated behind the bodies of other strollers and Kathleen forgot almost at once. ‘Trust Daisy to be late!’ she muttered, irritable. ‘Trust her!’ The island, she decided giving her bag a little shake. She must reach the island. Magnetic. It had meant, or started, something years and years ago. She was heading for the source. Magnetic. Though smiles weren’t, that very word determined the direction of her hot and aching feet towards the ferry terminals.
Despite the searing lick of the sun when she left the shelter of the awnings, her world appeared as nothing more than a celestial blue blister inside which lumbered a rocking ultramarine water, across which she would soon be bobbing.
Scraps of poetry took possession, something scribbled decades back in the primacy of arrival there: thoughts pointed to the pole-star of the mind, move into light—it was light, wasn’t it?—from outer dark like ships unhurried. ‘Oh yes,’ she said aloud. ‘Oh yes oh yes oh yes.’ There was more if it would come, if those creeping words could reach and grope upwards to this fuzzy brain. ‘Tacking towards that centre, foam-defined,’ she declaimed to the mid-afternoon street.
Her feet, limping along iambics and trochees, had reached the entrance to the ferry building before she knew it. Nothing like a bit of verse to take the mind off! Fragments of phrase, shreds of metaphor took her through to the ticket office and the narrow catwalk to the landing, along which passengers were already moving, pressing down the gangway and taking their seats on the ferry.
‘Ah, the Fort Caribee!’ Kathleen said to the deckhand, who hadn’t a clue.
She swung her bag lightly, forgetting everything, stepping renewed into the boat and sitting up front behind the glittering window snow streaked with spray as the ferry took the tides of the crossing. Not a cloud anywhere. Only this preserving, baking, astringent blue.
There was more poetry if she could simply catch hold of it. More. Upon my brow, she struggled to remember, winds patterned—was it patterned?—with palmetto find the calms beyond great longing. Ah, there! The calms! She was scrabbling and rooting about for words in that old handbag of her years. Young, I magnify—that was it, magnify!—the island moving in across the prow!
Young!
‘God!’ she said aloud to the world at large, to anyone who would listen. ‘What a marvellous day!’