‘Friday night.’
‘Albert.’
‘Yes Florence?’ he smiled.
‘I’ve just remembered what Cat Morrison’s last book was called,’ she said.
‘What was it?’
‘It was called,’ Florence said, slowly getting to her feet and brushing off some small pieces of curling ironbark from her lap, ‘Stupid Men, Stupid Women.’ If he really wanted to see an Albert’s lyrebird, there was one right in front of him.
Albert frowned. ‘I haven’t heard of that one,’ he said.
‘I’m heading back,’ she said, and stamped her way out of the clearing.
*
Entering the Savage Reader bookstore, Albert ducked his head beneath a trail of looping ivy above its door, one errant tendril hanging down.
Copies of Nourish and The Burnt Chop and Other Syndromes, but not, he noted, Stupid Men, Stupid Women, were stacked on a table alongside small hills of Cat Morrison’s new book, Candy.
A young guy sitting behind the books looked up at Albert through a heavy fringe parted like curtains above his eyes.
‘You here for the event?’ he asked.
Albert nodded. ‘I’m a little early.’
‘Me too,’ the young man shrugged. ‘No customers at all yet. I don’t mind, it’s nice here.’
Albert looked around. It was nice, he thought, particularly as the store had closed trading for the day and the lights from the cafés outside flickered through its windows.
It was like being caught in a Christmas carol.
Albert had always felt at home in bookstores, and libraries, and gardens. Adelaide said he was really a middle-aged woman called Enid.
Albert headed for the drinks table as a tiny bird of a woman with wire-brush hair and a complicated coat gathered around her waist by several buckles walked in, carrying a fedora in one hand.
Cat Morrison, Albert thought, and her hat, as the bookstore’s owner Fiona Wilson appeared through a doorway behind the cash register.
Albert had met Fiona several times at Savage and liked her. Sometimes she put gardening books aside for him, and once he had been to her house to sort out some invading onion weed.
Fiona nodded at Albert as she walked past him and held out her hand to the author. ‘Hello Cat, I’m Fiona Wilson. Welcome to Savage Reader. It’s an absolute delight to host your evening.’
The author held Fiona’s hand, Albert thought, as if it had one of those electric buzzers in it and did not return Fiona’s smile.
Cat Morrison, he thought, was going to be hard work – she reminded him a little bit of Florence.
Albert flinched, thinking of Florence in the forest yesterday morning. It sounded like the title of one of those girls own adventure stories from the forties. Milly of the Mountains. Primmie in the Pyrenees. Florence in the Forest. She had been rattled by his silence, stomping off along a wallaby track in her work boots, and he didn’t blame her. He had wanted to call after her and explain that sometimes his words travelled all the way to behind his teeth and stayed there.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ he heard Fiona ask Cat Morrison, and then she nodded again to Albert, which he understood to mean that he should be the one to get it.
He brought both women a wine, Fiona taking hers and then excusing herself to speak to a woman who was hovering around like a dragonfly above water, holding a copy of Candy. ‘We’re doing the signings after the event,’ Fiona told her firmly.
As Fiona spoke with the customer, who was telling her a long story about catching a train here and other reasons why she should be allowed to jump the queue, Cat Morison leant towards Albert and said very quietly but very clearly, as if instructing a small child: ‘I need to get out of here.’
She jerked her head towards the glass front doors and the people sorting themselves into some sort of line through it.
‘Not that way,’ she said. ‘That’s where they are.’
‘Who?’ Albert said, peering at the gathering crowd, who looked completely harmless, hardly a band of angry villagers brandishing pitchforks.
‘The readers.’
Albert looked again.
‘Isn’t that rather the point?’ he said, deciding that he, too, would like to get out, away from Cat Morrison’s darting eyes.
But Fiona, having directed the hovering woman to the back of the line, asked Albert to take Cat Morrison into her office, and when he looked surprised by the request, Fiona pretended she didn’t notice, instead saying, ‘Albert will look after you, Cat, just for a few minutes, I have to go and sort out the seating.’
The three of them walked behind the register, and Fiona said quickly to Albert, ‘Just watch her, we thought this might happen. She does this all the time, her nickname’s The Bolter.’
‘Why?’ he asked.
Fiona shrugged her shoulders. ‘She’s a writer – who knows why any of them do anything.’
Then she turned back into the bookshop before Albert had the chance to explain to Fiona that he wasn’t asking why Cat Morrison was called The Bolter, he was asking why he was the one charged with stopping her from doing it.
Inside the office, Cat Morrison was inhaling her breath noisily through her nose, then exhaling it in a rush out of her mouth.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked. ‘Are you having some sort of . . . medical episode?’
Cat Morrison said no, she wasn’t, but she wasn’t budging from the couch either. ‘I’ll just stay right here until everybody leaves,’ she said calmly, as if this was a perfectly reasonable course of action.
But Albert saw, in the spaces between her breath, in the way her feet were jiggling against the floorboards, that Cat Morrison, author of Nourish, The Burnt Chop and Other Syndromes, and now Candy, but not, as it turned out, Stupid Men, Stupid Women (Fiona had looked at him strangely when he’d mentioned it earlier, then said, ‘I think someone’s been having you on, Albert’), was frightened.
And then, because Albert Flowers knew what that was like, he sat down beside her and said, ‘All right, well I’ll stay with you for a bit, shall I?’
They sat on Fiona’s couch, Fiona’s very old and very sleepy cocker spaniel between them, both stroking his deep, silky hair, Albert scratching the dog lightly behind his ears. It felt, Albert thought, strangely companionable, the three of them tucked behind the door. He had never minded silences. In his experience, it was talking that generally got people into trouble.
But Cat Morrison was talking, mostly about hats.
In the beginning, she said, she could write her books and essays and people were happy just to read them. But now people wanted to get beneath the words, they wanted to meet the person who wrote them, they wanted to know how she wrote them, when she wrote them, and it was not, she said, her natural inclination to tell them. She understood that her sort of books invited discussion, it was just that she wanted people to talk about them amongst themselves.
Albert laughed.
The thing was, Cat said, she understood what they wanted – ‘I’m not ungrateful’ – but with every book, every tour and every signing, each person who waited in line clutching their book with the little yellow post-it note stuck to it with the correct spelling of their name, each person wanted to take a picture with her. In the hat.
Sometimes, she shuddered, they even wore their own hats.
Albert looked at the fedora on the author’s lap.
‘What’s the big deal?’ he said. ‘It’s just a hat.’
But apparently it wasn’t.
Because people expected it.
Cat Morrison had never planned the hat thing. She had never sat down and thought, I shall make my mark by what I wear on my head, and yet somehow that was what had happened. When interviews were published, when reviews were written, when speeches were given, mention was always made of the hat. ‘Wearing her signature hat’; ‘Arriving in the restaurant beneath one of her well-known hats’; ‘The Cat in the Hat’. It had happened, she said, by accident, and now, Cat told
him, ‘It’s gotten out of hand.’
Albert thought of Florence describing Cat as a ‘wearer of colourful hats’ and believed her.
He stood up, picked up the fedora and put it on his head.
‘I’ll wear it for you then,’ he said, and held out his hand. ‘Shall we?’
Cat laughed. ‘You look ridiculous.’
Albert shrugged. ‘No one will be looking at me,’ he told her. ‘They’ve come to see you, with or without a hat.’
Cat nodded. ‘I appreciate you sitting with me,’ she said, then stood up and took the fedora off his head.
‘I’ve never needed a man to rescue me, Albert,’ she said, ‘and I’m not going to start now. So thank you, but I decide who wears the hat.’
Then she put on the fedora and walked past the office supplies, into the rows of her waiting readers wearing a cavalcade of headwear.
6
Florence had spent the evening with Isolde and Puck, the three of them drinking tea, gossiping about other musicians and talking about their father.
It was easier to do this when their mother wasn’t around, Amanda taking over each recollection with one of her own, lassoing each memory with hers, always more vivid, never allowing them, Isolde said, to have Lucas Saint Claire to themselves.
‘She hated sharing him, even with us,’ she said.
‘The problem with Dad,’ Puck said, ‘was there was never enough of him to go around.’
Florence looked at Puck and wondered what it had been like for him, being Lucas’s son. With Puck, Lucas had been more physical than he had been with his daughters.
Florence could still see the two of them play-fighting on the lawn, their bodies meshed, fists and hands and legs and elbows rolling down the grass, until Amanda called, ‘That’s enough, Lucas,’ and Puck called back that no, he was all right, and that he loved it, because for Puck, and Isolde and Florence, it was never enough.
When Puck drummed and Lucas played the clarinet or saxophone, that had been physical too, Puck’s wrists flying, Lucas’s fingers dancing, matching each other, their eyes locked. Florence thought that perhaps the longest shadow cast by their father’s death was the one attached to Puck.
‘No,’ she agreed with her brother, ‘there wasn’t ever quite enough.’
Looking at Puck and Isolde, Florence wondered, as she had many times, what they would say if she told them what had really happened on the day of their father’s death.
She had never told anyone about it.
There had never been, in its aftermath, in the confusion of the days that followed, when the house was awash with tears and lasagnas, space for her to do it.
Kinsey had been in disarray, her family passing one another in the hallway like ghosts in the bardo. Amanda was vague and dreamy from whatever tablets someone was giving her; Isolde was more kinetic than ever, and Puck’s hands were shockingly still.
Florence spent most of her time in the music room sitting on the window seat, knees drawn to her chest and arms clasped around them, looking out the window and waiting for the sharp intake of Lucas’s breath just before he put his lips to his clarinet.
She would watch from the window as he twirled around on the piano stool and pretended to fall off from giddiness to make her laugh, or scribbled notes on sheets of music and sipped coffee with his headphones on, looking up at Florence and giving her a thumbs-up. Sometimes she spent the night there, lengthening her body along the window seat, breathing in and out slowly, willing sleep to come and, in a house awash with tears, not crying. Florence found she couldn’t; she squeezed her eyes together and willed them to fill, but they remained stubbornly dry and empty.
How long had they lived like that? A month? Two? Florence couldn’t recall, but she remembered the pushing down of her memory, the act of erasing the day of her father’s death, reversing her steps from her street with its spill of red and blue lights, to the café, and the bus, and the school, and the morning and the one sock up, one sock down, until there was nothing there to tell at all.
It was, she knew, an act of self-preservation, one that they had all pulled off, one way or another, as the weeks and months and years rolled on and they had all returned to the business of living.
Amanda, her words no longer blurred at the edges, had summoned her children into the kitchen one morning and announced that it was time to start flying the Saint Claire flag again. She had stridden around Kinsey, raising blinds and parting curtains, lifting up sash windows and opening doors until the whole house was too bright.
Then she had called them up to the music room, where she had opened all the windows, and said, ‘I have released your father,’ which was so ridiculously dramatic that they had all laughed hysterically, but that night when Florence entered the music room, Lucas Saint Claire was no longer in it.
He was everywhere else, though.
Florence could never tell when he was going to shimmy up beside her. Sometimes she could feel the bounce of his shoulders against hers as she walked to work, or hear his low chuckle at something Isolde said, and once she was certain she saw his grey felt hat bobbing up and down ahead of her at a market.
She remembered sitting beside Albert in Mount Bell forest, the silver triangle of saltbushes brushing against their skin, and hearing her father’s voice somewhere beneath the hum of the cicadas. ‘Go on, Florence,’ Lucas Saint Claire had said, ‘ask him. What’s the worst that could happen?’
Florence had closed her eyes to feel the heat of the sun behind them.
‘You Dad,’ she silently answered him, ‘you could happen.’
She could lose Albert in a crowd as easily and frequently as she had lost Lucas. There one minute, off with his usual suspects the next, Albert raising his hand towards Florence from a room she couldn’t cross. Or worse, stepping off a footpath into oblivion.
Florence returned her attention to Puck, who was asking Isolde if she had felt robbed of their father’s attention too.
Isolde shook her head. ‘Not really, but I was his favourite, of course – What? I was, it’s no big deal. Mum likes the two of you way better than me,’ and Florence wondered again what the world must look like through Issy’s lens.
‘So I do miss him, but I guess I’ll always have that.’
Issy leant back on the sofa and smiled, satisfied.
‘I really don’t think Dad had favourites,’ Florence said. ‘Unless you count mum.’
Lucas and Amanda. Amanda and Lucas. The Saint Claires, ‘like two sexy twins,’ Isolde said, then added, ‘but not in an incestuous way.’
Florence laughed.
It was true, Florence thought, her parents’ marriage seemed unusually close compared to the few others she had seen. She remembered going to Amy’s house as a child and thinking it was funny how Amy’s parents never seemed to touch each other, the way they spoke to each other from different parts of the same room and sat on different chairs watching television. Lucas and Amanda never stopped touching, one part of one’s body seemingly always in contact with one part of the other’s. Arms around waists, ankles entwined, hands in hair, shoulders brushing, as if they couldn’t bear to let each other go.
And yet, Florence thought, her mother had.
For all her wailing about Lucas, all her long sighs and monologues of memories, the looping of the words ‘When your father was here’, ‘Your father would say’, ‘How I wish your father could see’, there was something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, Florence thought, something amiss in Amanda Saint Claire’s mourning.
She had never voiced it out loud, but there were times, in all the days and weeks and years that had passed since Lucas Saint Claire was run down by a milk truck, that Florence felt there was a small but discernible spring in her mother’s step.
‘How do you think Mum is going?’ she asked her siblings.
‘Good, she’s all pumped up about that television appearance she’s got on Good Mornings,’ Isolde answered.
‘Do you think she�
�s okay in the house still?’
‘I think she’s fine. Besides, she’s never alone there.’
It was true, the Saint Claire house hummed as it always had. Music still filled its corners, musicians still came and went, taking the stairs to the music room, laying down tracks and flirting with Amanda, her throaty voice filled with promise.
Florence sometimes wondered if her mother took a lover from the assorted players who played beneath her roof, but she had never asked her. Amanda’s love life was none of her business, and if she needed someone else’s arms around her to fill the space left by her father’s, then so be it.
Florence noticed both Isolde and Puck looking at her, something a little off-key in their gaze, and she knew, just as she’d known when they were smaller and they had put pepper in her food or sticks in her bed, that something was up.
‘What?’ she said, and Isolde, being Isolde, jumped right in.
‘So we’ve had an offer, a really good offer, Florence, to perform at Hello 2000!’ Isolde said. ‘They’ve asked the Saint Claire Swingers to close the show with Jazz Cat . . .’
Isolde looked at Puck who said quietly, ‘It’s a really big deal, Florence.’
Florence knew it was.
Everyone in the industry knew. The Hello 2000! concert at the Domain was going to feature an embarrassment of talent to sing in the new millennium.
Florence also knew exactly how it would play out.
Families on rugs waving neon bracelets, the kids overexcited to be in the night air, a male and a female host, both with snow-white teeth, a big name to kick things off, then a smattering of the old and the new, and at least one cool band for the teenagers who had been dragged along by their parents. Then just before the fireworks all the artists would be invited on stage to welcome tonight’s very special guests, the Saint Claire Swingers, together again for the first time in many years (‘Lucas Saint Claire would be so proud’ one of the hosts would say and the other one would say they wouldn’t be surprised at all if he was looking down on them all right now) performing – what else? – ‘Santa Was A Jazz Cat’.
Florence saw Puck tap his sticks together three times and Amanda step forward.
The Best Kind of Beautiful Page 11