by Kate Ryan
They were making tacos, a mess of kidney beans, lettuce, and avocado spread everywhere. ‘So, Tam,’ Ali was saying, ‘you can stay up until eight and then read in bed. But make sure you turn off your light early. I haven’t heard from her mum yet, but I guess Bettany’s coming tomorrow, and you’ve got the concert in a few days. You don’t want to be too tired.’
Tam frowned.
‘We’ll have fun, won’t we, T?’ Patti said. Tam had moved over to her, and Patti pulled her close. She smiled. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get her to bed by midnight.’
‘Yeah!’ Tam’s eyes glittered.
‘Hilarious,’ Ali said drily. ‘Thanks, Patti.’
She didn’t know why she decided to workshop that night. Mila smiled encouragingly as Ali passed the piece around. She tried not to shake as she read.
Quest 4: a test of love
Jessie put the paper crown on Ali’s head, a scarf around her eyes. She laughed in an over-the-top, sinister fashion. Accent like Morticia from The Addams Family: ‘Come with me, my dearest. You are safe with me.’ Ali giggled as she let herself be led out the gate. ‘Watch for the cracks, my darling. Watch for the cracks.’ The sun was hot on Ali’s head and she felt Jessie’s warm hand on her arm. It was strange to feel her touch — they didn’t do that. She whispered, ‘Ali-son, Lady Fry approaches. Be prepared.’
Ali giggled again. She felt her senses heighten, the gauzy texture of the scarf, the smell of her mother’s perfume.
Old Mrs Fry’s voice was breathy, ‘Hello, girls, what mischief are you up to?’
‘Just a game,’ Jessie said.
Ali smiled under the blindfold and felt an odd mix of anxiety and surrender; no decisions, no words.
‘Well, be careful, girls.’
Ali felt the shock of a clawy hand on her arm, and then the sound of the old lady shuffling away.
‘Slight change of plan, my dear,’ Jessie crooned. Ali thought of blindness, of never knowing the meaning of sight. She felt Jessie guide her in the opposite direction. ‘Tree root,’ Jessie said. She held her by the shoulders. ‘We are at the corner now, my dear. Watch out for cars.’ Ali waited, hearing the swish, feeling the vibration of cars. She stood very still, but even so she felt the slightest sway in her body, the breeze on her arms like feathers, Jessie’s musky smell.
She could push me if she wanted to.
That was what she thought.
Back at Ali’s house, it was Jessie’s turn. Ali tied on the blindfold, made her wait. She clattered around getting jars out of cupboards, opening the fridge. No one was around; the light was pinky, peaceful.
She used a doctor-y voice. ‘Okay Jessie, it is time for your medicine now. It will make you feel much better.’
Jessie stretched her big mouth wide and poked out her tongue, ‘AAAAH.’
‘Young lady, I must insist you cooperate. You must take your medicine.’
‘Okay, okay. I am. Can you just get on with it.’ Jessie opened her mouth again, waiting for something to land, then bit down and chewed slowly. A small piece of Saltine cracker spread, for confusion, with a blob of both peanut butter and Vegemite. ‘Urghh.’ She disliked Vegemite with a passion. ‘Thanks a bloody lot,’ she said, swallowing with a small gulp.
‘It is my pleasure,’ Ali said smoothly. ‘Wait, there’s another part to the medicine. Open up now. Here it is …’
Jessie was laughing now, seated on a kitchen chair, jiggling her legs like Samson waiting for his hair to be cut. ‘Nooo!’
‘Simmer down, young lady.’
Jessie spluttered and got herself together, then waited, open-mouthed.
Slowly, slowly, Ali put a tiny piece of chilli on her tongue.
Jessie shook her head like a marionette. ‘Aaargh! Thanks a lot.’ She was getting restless, but pulling the blindfold off wasn’t allowed. It was a rule. Still, Ali relented a little, decided to be kinder. First, a bit of golden syrup. Then an ice block.
Jessie sucked away and swallowed, and Ali watched her closely, imagining a cold stone straight to the chest.
‘This is the last thing,’ she said. ‘You have been a very good patient and now you may have a jellybean.’
Jessie grinned and waited. ‘Well, thank god for that!’ She opened her mouth wider, and Ali placed a tiny segment of orange on her tongue.
They called it the Test of Love.
Ali would write it all down.
Ali blinked and looked up.
‘Thanks, Ali,’ Clara said. ‘Great. Kids’ voices can be challenging — to make them sound authentic — so this is quite ambitious. Does anyone have any comments for Ali?’ There was a deathly pause.
‘I liked it,’ Murray said inanely, but Ali loved him anyway. He smiled at her. ‘Reminded me of the kind of things my brother and I used to get up to.’
Mila nodded. ‘Yes, I thought the language was very immediate. It seemed authentic.’
Ruth frowned and stared at the page. She always forgot the directive to say something positive first. ‘You’ve placed yourself in the story. Why did you do that?’
Ali had a second to decide. Everyone looked at her expectantly.
‘Well, it was supposed to be a couple. And I’m basing it on me and a childhood friend. I … we were quite competitive, I guess.’
Clara had an unnerving tolerance for silence. A teaching technique, Ali supposed, but now it was a bit like being flayed alive. Finally, she said, ‘What do people think about the power relationship depicted here?’
‘Well,’ Ruth said, frowning again as if she were examining something unpleasant under a microscope. ‘The part about pushing seems … a little toxic.’
Ali felt a roaring in her ears; a hot/cold feeling. She looked down at her page. ‘Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe it was, in a way,’ she mumbled.
Silence.
Clara gave her a quick sympathetic look. She didn’t know what, but she knew it was something. ‘I think this is an interesting piece. The language is quite visceral in parts, and the pacing is good too. And I like the orange segment! Thanks, Ali. Who else has got something to read? Mila?’
18
After the film, she and Ed sat drinking tea. ‘I did it,’ she said at last.
‘What?’
‘I read a piece.’
‘Hey,’ Ed said, raising his hand to high-five her. ‘I knew you could. What did you read?’
‘I’m writing about me and Jessie. That’s the plan, anyway.’ Ali allowed it to be good — maybe it was. Nothing bad had happened, really. The horror had receded, and a strange elation hovered.
‘What did they say? Did they like it?’
‘No one said much, but Clara was nice. Oh, and Mila.’
Ed squeezed her hand. ‘Maybe that’s what you need to do. Keep going.’
Ali nodded, but as quickly as it had come the elation went. What she was doing? Why she was doing it?
Soon they were talking about music and travelling somewhere, maybe to Prague and then one of those cold Nordic countries where Ali had always wanted to go. ‘Graeme could take Tam for three or four weeks, couldn’t he?’
More discord worked its way into Ali. ‘I don’t know. It seems too long to be away from her.’
‘She’ll be fine.’
‘Yeah, I know. She’s young, though. It’s quite a long time.’
‘We can FaceTime every day if you want. And Marina will love it.’ Marina was meticulously organised and seemingly devoted to Tam, despite a high-powered admin job. Her care was a comfort to Ali, and it allowed Graeme to do less. ‘She’ll start making casseroles before we even tell her we’re going.’
Ali smiled briefly. It seemed easy for Ed to say this, with his grown-up daughter, who could come into her house at will, mess it up and leave again. She remembered a few weeks back, Patti sweeping in and making a big show of the pista
chio and honey ice cream she’d brought from the restaurant. Ali had left to get Tam from a friend’s house. When she came home the back doors were open — no sign of Patti. The milk was going off on the outside table in the afternoon sun, the butter melting, the Vegemite, its lid off, speckled with butter and flies. Later Ali got out the ice cream to find Patti had eaten three-quarters of it.
Ali changed the subject. The conflicted doctor in the film they’d just watched had made her think of Jean-Martin Charcot, she said, the nineteenth-century French neurologist who worked with so-called hysterics — women whose treatment included hypnosis. ‘They had fits, throwing themselves around the stage, screaming, crying, writhing. It was weirdly sexual. People came to watch them as if it were a performance. A few of them became almost famous, like celebrities.’
‘What was the point of putting them on stage?’
Despite her feminist core, Ali felt oddly protective of Charcot, this stranger from long ago. ‘I don’t know. Everyone talks about the hysterics as exploited, of course, but I think he really wanted to help them. Freud called him an artist, a visuel.’ She liked the sound of the word on her tongue. ‘They were in his hands, these women, like puppets, but they had power too. And if it weren’t for him, some of them would have been destitute.’
‘Trained monkeys?’
‘Yes and no. Who was in charge? He was nothing without them. They were his life’s work.’
Ed knew the conversation wasn’t about Charcot and the hysterics. He waited. She reached out for his forearm, warm, soft, dark hairs. She liked to pretend he was always sure. ‘I’m saying that things aren’t always simple. Power shifts around. People who look like they have all the power sometimes don’t.’
Ed nodded, and she turned away. She thought of another time with Patti, coming home to find her smoking weed and drinking coffee in the backyard with some boy, no thought of Tam, no apology. Ali hadn’t even known she had a key.
She had just said hi and moved inside, starting to chop garlic and onion for pasta. But she had seen in seconds that the boy could not keep his eyes off Patti. It wasn’t bitterness she felt about this, the envy of an ageing woman, but fascination. Some people are like this.
Ed was back on the trip again. ‘Think about Norway. There’s meant to be a great music scene in Oslo. We could get a place in the woods, forage, eat gravlax.’ He smiled. She loved him, but the idea of being away from Tam for so long was impossible. If Tam died, she would have to die too.
‘I’ll think about it. Talk to Graeme.’
There was nothing more to say and soon they stood up to leave.
19
At 11 pm every light in the house was blazing. They walked down the hall past Tam’s room, the blind raised to the dark night. Ali pulled it down.
In the living room, the TV was on, an episode of Seinfeld blaring. There were the remains of a bowl of melted chocolate ice cream, a couple of tumblers with traces of red wine and a half-empty bottle on the coffee table. They walked into the kitchen and found Tam standing at the bench, a sheen of burning butter in a frying pan just beginning to smoke. Ali took it off the element, turned off the stove. The doors were open, and Nirvana pumped out of Ed’s stereo. ‘Shit,’ Ali said. ‘Tam, what are you doing? Where’s Patti?’
Tam grinned. ‘Pancakes. She said I could.’ Eggshells littered the bench, a scattering of flour; the butter was half melted in its packet, a serrated knife speared into it.
‘Tam, it’s 11! And you know you need someone with you when you use the stove.’
Tam kept her head down mixing the batter.
‘Where’s Patti?’
‘She said she was going to meet someone.’
Ali looked at Ed. ‘Great.’ She walked out to the living room, picked up the remote, turned off the TV and came back into the kitchen. ‘Tam, you need to get to bed.’ To Ed, she said, ‘Are you going to do something?’
Ed nodded. He fished his phone out of his pocket to call Patti as he walked down the hall. In half a minute he was back. ‘She’s not picking up.’
‘Great,’ Ali said. ‘She’s nine years old, and Patti’s gone out. Tam, you need to get to bed. You can have the pancakes in the morning.’
‘Mummm, it’s not fair! I haven’t even had one yet.’ Tam’s voice rose like an instrument. She looked from Ali to Ed and back again.
Ali waited, standing very still. ‘Tam, go. That’s it. Get to bed.’
Tam picked up the bowl so that the pancake mixture slopped across the bench. She stomped across to the sink, dumped the bowl on top of some other dishes. It clattered, bumping a dishcloth into the mixture. Marching to her room, Tam shouted, ‘I hate you. You’re so mean! And you’re always mean to Patti. She didn’t do anything.’ She slammed her bedroom door.
Ali was in the bathroom when Patti came in, and she heard low voices in the kitchen. She finished brushing her teeth and was walking into the bedroom when she heard Ed say, ‘Patti, you shouldn’t have done that.’ She remembered with a jolt of understanding the wine-stained tumblers. She walked quickly into the kitchen, her heart beating hard. Ed was leaning against a cupboard. Patti was sitting on a bench, her long legs swinging and her brown boots tapping.
Ali stood arms crossed. They looked so calm she would have liked to scream. ‘Patti, you gave her wine as well as leaving her completely alone, didn’t you? And do you realise she was cooking when we got home? What if there’d been a fire?’
Patti’s face arranged itself into lines of contrition. Ali thought of a kid in one of her classes, all of them, Sorry miss, sorry miss. ‘Sorry, Ali, it was a little celebration, cos I got a call about a new gig. That pub in Melville Road. It’s so hard to get in there. That was why I ducked out — I was so excited — I had to tell Max. He’s only around the corner, and he’s lost his phone.’
Ali glanced at Ed. Are you going to say something? She felt a tightness in her throat. ‘She is nine years old, and you thought it was okay to leave her and give her wine?’ She saw Ed glance towards Patti and her raised eyebrows.
‘A small glass.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s not a big deal.’
‘Oh, really. You know a lot about kids, do you?’
Patti pressed her lips together in a sour little moue and raised her hands in mock apology. ‘Okay, okay, guilty as charged.’
Ed glanced towards Ali, said quietly, ‘Patti.’
‘Look, Patti … how can you not know this?’ Ali felt like a teacher who had had enough, a teacher all the kids disliked. ‘She’s a child. You cannot give her wine and you cannot leave her alone when you’re meant to be babysitting.’
Patti turned her big eyes on Ali and then on Ed, who was saying nothing. She got off the bench, a bit theatrical, flouncy in her movements. She picked up her leather backpack and fumbled around in it, took out her cigarettes, put the bag over her shoulder. ‘Okay look, I’ve gotta go … I’m sorry.’ She paused and looked straight ahead towards the front door. ‘But kids in Italy drink wine all the time, you know.’
‘Jesus, thanks, Patti.’ Ali turned away.
Just as she was opening the front door, Patti threw a comment over her shoulder, both muffled and precise. ‘Probably not good to have a control freak for a mother.’ She walked out, the neat slam of the door closing and her steps on the wooden verandah.
Ali swung around furiously to Ed. ‘That’s it. I don’t want her here.’
‘I’ll speak to her. She’s acting like that because she feels bad.’
Ali snorted. ‘Right.’
‘She rang me at the restaurant, but I didn’t hear my phone. She was only around the corner.’
Ali’s teeth felt rigid in her jaw. ‘What!’ she hissed. ‘What if there’d been a fire? She gives Tam alcohol and leaves her at home alone. She’s nine! I don’t want her here.’
Ed was irritatingly calm. ‘Of course, she shouldn’t have done that
or said what she said, but she’s my daughter, remember. We need to give her a chance before we turf her out.’
‘But this is my house. Tam is my daughter.’
‘I thought it was meant to be our house.’
Ali ignored this, starting to sling dirty dishes into the sink. ‘You’re just avoiding what I’m saying, making excuses for her.’
‘No, I’m not. I just think you could cut her a bit of slack. You’ve forgotten what it’s like to be that age. It wasn’t exactly responsibility town back then.’
Ali almost smiled at this, but she didn’t turn around, pushing at crusty food on a dish with a scourer. ‘She gave her alcohol. She’s nine.’
‘I know. It’s not on. I’ll talk to her.’
Ali finished the dishes and went to bed before Ed, lying awake after too much late caffeine, her anger fading to a jagged exhaustion. She must have slept eventually because near dawn she woke to find him beside her. She moved towards him, wanting to take in his warmth. Her heart beat erratically. She thought of cancelling the flight, making up an excuse to Eli. Then Ed turned, drew her to him, held her.
She looked at him in the light just starting, his scratchy, stubbled cheeks, his eyes liquidy and crumpled with tiredness. ‘I’m sorry about the PM,’ he said. It used to be their joke, code for Patti, whose initials they were, for when they didn’t want Tam to know they were talking about her. Tam was too cluey for that now.
‘Yeah.’
She kissed him and they were making love, and she felt the strange apartness from life of it, the way she sometimes felt when she thought of Jessie, as if the time with her was real, and the darkness, the dreaminess, and all that came after was not.
It was six o’clock, and everything was still and quiet. Ali lay holding Ed, feeling a sudden compassion for Patti, her self-absorption, her ego. If circumstances were different, she would have been much the same.
‘I could still come,’ Ed said.
‘It’s okay. I want you here with Tam.’
