He left the chocolate almonds in the letterbox with another note and headed for Miss Bowman. He must make an appointment for next time, bring the tape recorder. He was on the trail, a scout padding.
He walked up the cracked concrete path thinking of the house guest, saw her eyes, her heavy hair. He had never seen hair like it since, so heavy, dark, coiled so low on the back of her neck.
The garden was overgrown, the taps dull. Years ago Miss Bowman had transformed the gravel drive which led to the shed at the back into a flowering field. In the summer miniature blue and white harebells flourished beside creeping thyme and tangled with mats of green. Diminutive white trumpets flowered around miniature irises and resisted overlay by a thug with frilled leaves and powdery green flowers.
The exuberant fight for survival of such small things had pleased him, lack of restraint had added to its charm. Now it was a wreck.
He rang the bell. A quick thudding of bare feet was followed by Calvin’s shadow against the stained-glass panel of the door surround. Robin could see the triumphant stretch as the key turned. Calvin was a trier. He flung the door open and held out his arms. ‘Hi!’
It must have been the poncy suit at the wedding which had put him off. Robin swung him up, buried his nose in the warm neck. ‘Hi, mate.’
Calvin wriggled free, skidded up the bare hall which ran to the back of the old house and returned to give him the news. ‘I’m in the big kids’ room at day-care now.’
‘Good on you.’
Emmeline came down the hall, friendly, cheerful, her arms imitating her son’s. Calvin, she explained, was finally dry. She gave a quick chop with one hand, bony fingers carved the air. ‘Phht. Straight into the big kids’ room. Neat eh. One of the reliefs is we’re no longer lousing up the environment with disposables.’ She scratched her behind thoughtfully through a trim little op-shop number covered in yellow and green sunflowers. She looked like Doris Day gone wrong. ‘Come in.’
Calvin was now chewing his way around the equator of a Granny Smith. His head, caught in the crimson shafts from the door surround, had caught fire, exploded to burn-off. He handed the ring-barked thing to his mother who held it in both hands and munched, elegant and meticulous as a chipmunk on Wild Life.
Calvin, his hair now faded to its usual orange, disappeared down the hall.
‘How’s Miss Bowman?’
Emmeline shrugged, her uplifted palms told him. ‘No longer with the big kids sadly. Aunt,’ she yelled, ‘do you want to see Robin now?’
The voice was surprisingly strong. ‘Yes, please. Very much.’
He walked in. He had never seen Miss Bowman’s bedroom before. It was both satisfactory and unexpected. He had not known Miss Bowman was a believer, let alone a devout one as her choice of pictures seemed to indicate. He had never seen Miss Bowman striding off to either church or good works. Yet here she lay, surrounded by a collection of holy pictures. Praying Hands hung in the front room but you didn’t have to be devout to appreciate that. These were different. A Holy Family featured an ill-favoured Christ Child. A Sacred Heart on the opposite wall appeared to pulsate at the viewer’s gaze directed to it by one long pink index finger. Strangest of all was a lithograph of a dreaming sensuous Christ; an intense visionary who gazed through the long floating hair of an early rock star; a Messiah who loved his flock but especially, oh especially, the believer who gazed back.
There were swaying shadows and muted submarine colours in this room as well, purple-blue chairs, a dull ruby bedcover, faded silks draped and hanging in swatches over a screen, and a sharp smell of ammonia.
Robin held the back of a wicker chair. ‘How are you, Miss Bowman?’
‘Rotting away boy, just rotting away. Sit down, sit down.’
She heaved herself up. He and Emmie both sprang to help, narrowly avoiding collision in the process. She flapped them away. ‘Tell me what’s going on in the world. They’ve got to do something about Bosnia.’ Fingers insubstantial as x-rays insisted. ‘But then again what? And how? Tell me. Fitzroy Maclean said it would be hopeless and he knows the place. Built for guerrillas apparently. All very well thundering on like that wretched Thatcher woman. Tragic. Tragic. We must go in, but then we’ll go out, and then what? People go on as though there’s one answer. A or B. Not like that, is it? Never has been. Never simple. Some things, some things, what is the answer? But, yes,’ she panted. ‘Can’t not. Can’t not.’
They talked politics, economics, market forces, funding sources and user pays; agreed then disagreed, got cross, slogged it out like the thugs and ground-covers outside. Anger could not be good, not for that face, that dragging breath. He tried to calm her, to humour her which enraged her further.
You cannot storm in on the dying and start grilling them immediately, but he could feel his breathing, his anxious heart. She had been in hospital for months. Major surgery. No visitors. Home for two weeks and he was the first visitor, Emmie had told him. Now. Spit it out. Now. Tell me Miss Bowman.
‘Miss Bowman, I’m doing my PhD thesis on Alice O’Leary.’
Eyes, black hooded eyes too bright for the yellow pleated face beneath, snapped shut and reopened. ‘Why?’
‘She was a good writer.’
Miss Bowman scratched a fingernail at a yellow mark on her winceyette nightgown. ‘Egg,’ she said.
‘You were a friend of hers,’ he insisted.
She had shrunk, grown smaller, turned inwards. Her hands were claws. She was not old enough to look like this. Neither as fiercely ancient nor as collapsed.
‘At one time,’ she murmured.
‘Why did she stop writing?’
She was silent. His heart squeezed to a stop. She was not going to tell him. He was pleading now. ‘She was a good writer and I must find out all I can and the fact that you know her … It would be the most enormous help if you could talk to me about her.’
She thought of something. ‘Emmeline could show you her books. We have her books.’
‘But you must remember her. Tell me. Tell me anything you can remember. Did you know her as a child? Her parents, anything. What was she like? Why did she stop!’
She closed her eyes. He could feel the lump in his throat. ‘Miss Bowman, please.’
Shock tactics. There was nothing else. Robin got it out. ‘I heard her weeping. Alice. I heard her when I was a child.’
Her eyes flicked open, closed quickly. ‘Miss O’Leary to you.’
‘Why was she crying!’
‘You’ll have to go now. No puff.’
He could hear Emmie dispensing juice in the kitchen, her voice calling. He stood up in silence. ‘Miss Bowman?’
Her eyes opened. ‘Nnnh.’
Filled with the impotent despair of frustration he bent over the gutted body. ‘I just want to thank you.’ Why was he attempting anything as impossible? She didn’t deserve it anyway. He saw the woman weeping by the lilac. Why? And this old boot could tell him the answer and would not and he needed to know. He swallowed, tried again. ‘Just to thank you for all the fun I had as a kid. The popcorn and …’
Her eyes glinted, an old witch savouring her brew. She took his hand. ‘You’ve got to make the most of dying while you can, Robin. Remember that.’
‘But I can come again? Please.’
She shook her head. ‘Goodbye, boy.’
‘I’m sorry about the whiff,’ said Emmie as they stood gazing at the harebell seedheads. ‘But like your mother I think no-pongos are worse. And even if they weren’t, how could you go round spraying above someone flat on her back below you? You might as well carry a sign. “This room is being sanitised for your convenience.”’
She hid her head for a second in her hands, sniffed loudly. ‘The trouble with heroes is they make the rest of us look so feeble.’
He looked up from his blasted hopes, dead as the fucking harebells.
‘Don’t be dumb,’ he snapped. ‘You’re not feeble.’
‘Good,’ she said fiercely. ‘That’s nice.�
� She sniffed again. ‘I get mad you know. Fed up. So does she. It’s not a barrel of laughs this dying stuff. Ministering. Being ministered at. She hates it. I lost my cool the other day. I roared and screamed and …’
‘You’re meant to.’
She was furious with him, fists clenched, face too thin. ‘What the hell do you mean?’
‘I read it somewhere. You have to let go occasionally otherwise you explode.’
‘Huh. You mean the “Don’t shoot the pianist, he’s doing his best” stuff?’
‘That’s the one.’
She bent down, tugged a frilly leafed clump from a nest of thyme. She was too quick, too angry. The plant came away in her upraised hand, showering his shirt with the deep rich friable loam of garden writers.
She brushed his chest, her quick fingers streaking black across white.
‘Hey, that reminds me. Wait here.’ She ran up the steps and reappeared waving a batik cotton shirt. ‘I put my hand straight on it. I never put my hand straight on anything. Amazing.’ She held it out. ‘This any use to you?’
No birds, just a kid whistling. He fingered the soft cotton, the melded pinks, blues, mauves; glanced at the collar. Malaysian. ‘It’s great. Why don’t you want it?’
‘I bought it in a day-care bring-and-buy. It’s ten times, fifty times too big. I like things big but jeeze. Come here. Turn round.’ She held the back of the shirt against his shoulders, her fingers busy on his back, a child borrowed for a quick check at a street market. He stood still as you are meant to. ‘Any good?’ she asked his shoulders.
He must remember. It was not her fault. Miss Bowman’s silence. Her dying. Any of it.
‘Yeah, I mean it. Thanks a lot. Great.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘And let me know if I can do anything to help.’
She shut her eyes briefly. ‘I hate that phrase, that “let me know”. Think about it. “Robin would you care to slip round with a litre of chicken soup easy on the onion and no rice, and make that two while you’re at it and I’ll freeze some.” Why don’t people just do it?’
‘But I will now you’ve asked. I meant it.’
‘I have not asked.’
Hopeless, hopeless as ever. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want you to bugger off.’
They stood side by side in silence. He put out his hand, touched her shoulder. ‘Thanks for the shirt,’ he said.
She kicked the dislodged clump of roots. Shrugged. Her hair really was the most extraordinary colour. Henna and dried blood tinged with Chinese Wild Man red.
‘Why do you dye your hair when it’s red already?’
‘I just give it a little tickle-along. Doesn’t everyone?’
‘Not Lisa.’
‘Huh. How is she by the way?’
‘Good.’
‘I don’t doubt that for a moment.’ She paused, stood on one leg, replaced it.
‘See you,’ she said and ran.
Four
He tried the shirt on as soon as he arrived home, inspected himself in the long mirror Maureen had handed on to them because it was broken and some of her ladies were superstitious, although if anyone copped it it would be her not them as it was her fault; the scissors had hidden themselves beneath a pile of scraps by the overlocker and slipped when she tidied up, to splinter the bottom-right-hand corner into shards, darn it.
The shirt was light, cool, you wouldn’t know you had it on. Imagine ditching a shirt like that. Deceased estate perhaps. Dead man’s batik. Bung Daddy off to day-care.
Lisa ran to meet him at the Mein Street exit of the hospital, a snatched frond of wild fennel in one hand for tonight’s fish as requested, her Saturday over, her Urgent done. It was always Saturday or Urgent. Sandy had had a really shitty Saturday last week. They were one short and it was hell in haemotology as well. Complete chaos, know what I mean? Blood on the floor haha.
She stopped, one hand on the car door. ‘Robbie! Where’d you get it?’ Her face was ecstatic; for him, for his shirt, for how beautiful he looked, for how it brought out the blue of his eyes. He should always wear blue—and pink of course but it was the blue in this one that did it. She was stroking, patting him, frisky as a kitten released from Urgent.
‘Where’d you get it?’
‘Emmie.’
A mere flick of silence. The smile remained. ‘Why?’
‘She bought it in a bring-and-buy at day-care. It was too big for her.’
She shook her head at his amazing luck, clucked her tongue in approval. ‘Choice eh.’
He was never quite sure about her slang. It sounded dated to him, something left over from primary but how would he know.
‘Let’s have coffee at Deluxe. I’m starving.’
He changed when they got home. He wanted to wear it on Monday. It might cheer him up after the debacle of Miss Bowman’s silence, which he would tell Lisa about but not now.
Lisa’s Mondays also pleased her. They had none of the sealed-off completion of Saturday, fewer prospects of drama, less chance of independent discovery of some esoteric bug no one else had noticed in the direct slide but which she had picked up on the blood plate and Padma had been pleased. But Mondays, like all her days, were welcome. She enjoyed the loving seemliness of their work-day routines as much as he did. The fact that they never wanted the toilet at the same time was lucky wasn’t it, when you came to think about it. Rob was tidy as well, a happy coincidence which added to her ever-rolling stream of pleasure in her marital state. Breakfast for example; she quite enjoyed making the toast, the satisfactory clop as the thing disgorged mixed grain or sometimes kibbled wheat. Whereas Rob preferred the grind and hissing slurp of coffee-making so it all worked out quite well. And they both liked marmalade which was good too. Some people didn’t like marmalade at all but they both did. Some people didn’t even like breakfast. Imagine.
And it didn’t take them a minute to clear up before they were on their way and she was wondering aloud what the weekend cultures had grown. Sometimes she couldn’t wait to get to the incubator but fortunately they always read the blood plates first thing. Always.
Her zest for life was infectious. Rob drove across the city after her brief garlic-scented kiss, trying to work out his fascination at the way her mind worked.
It was like any other energy equation. Input equals output. Well, not equals. Friction, entropy, wear and tear will catch more than the internal combustion engine: things will fall apart, drop off. But by and large. In this day and age. He grinned, surprising a lean blonde sniffing her armpit in a Mini beside him.
And Lisa knew this. Lisa whose legs often dangled from normal chairs, who wore little boys’ shorts, whom he could have held over his head with one hand like some goddamn ice skater flinging his partner about.
The blonde swept past him.
And it was not only Lisa. Teaching had helped and his excitement about Alice O’Leary. The more he tried to overcome the inert indifference of most of his tutorial the more determined he became that they should not miss out, should get excited about something or someone who could get inside your head to delight, terrify, tighten privates or appal, and why not start with Eng Lit? His previous mark-grubbing exam-passing techniques had been senseless. Passion is the thing. What did fooling the sods matter. You land up gutless, unkindled as a damp sack, a time-server. He must get on with his abstract, dive into his research, slap in for copies of the letters from the Newbery, attempt Miss Bowman once more. Though he had blown that and the thought was sour in his mouth. But he could talk, glean, catch nuances. See her.
See the books. They would be signed. He could touch them. Touch the book that came from the hand that broke the heart of Miss Bowman. If it had. God what a fool. Why had he rushed the old woman—bounced her, clammed her tight as a tube worm around her treasure.
He parked the car and headed up the hill. Everything about the new building pleased him, the cavernous clanging coffee space, the glass and the light, the soaring height. Some of the students were less che
erful. Ripped jeans and layered grunge sat in corners, weeds of despairing hair draped a couple of tables. Cuts were tough and getting tougher. The Minister had been mobbed last week.
Rob strode across the wide overbridge to the arts building, wondering as always who had chosen the carpet. Its diagonal stripes were reflected as looped green garlands in the slick chrome bellies of the garbage bins. Below them drifted discarded paper, greasy bags, a misfired can or two. He glanced at the languid intertwinings on one or two of the padded benches. One couple were male. He hadn’t noticed that before. Not on the overbridge. The usual group of Asian students sat beside a drooping rubber plant; two Muslim women glided by with draped heads and deep-laden arms.
There had been another PhD student sharing his room originally—Aspects of Religious Imagery in James K. Baxter: an Interpretation—but she had disappeared for reasons unknown which was a help. Space was at a premium.
He sat at his desk reading, making notes, dissecting Alice’s mind, puzzling at the occasional naiveties of her sexual images; the naked arrows poised to strike, the fastened doors, the stolen keys seemed too well-worn to express such bitter grief, such loss.
The titles also puzzled him. The Mystic Scroll, The Hand of Time, We All Fall Down, The Load. Surely she could have chosen better than these dim uninformative Wide, Wide Worlders. She had been born in the nineteen-twenties, not eighteen.
Another misfiled quotation surfaced on the computer screen. ‘The three hundred and fifty or so images drawn from the realm of music are never technical and usually not elaborate or even very interesting,’ wrote the critic. So why mention them huh, why spend your life digging for irrelevancies; for ‘something of Schubert’s’, for ‘Wagner, four times’, ‘Mozart, three times’, ‘Beethoven, twice’ and ‘Paganini, once’?
The House Guest Page 8