by Peter Carey
Yes, yes, lovey. She smelt of fish, like a cat. Just look.
She saw a tiny snapshot framed in silver. The glass was splintered and the old dame’s finger had been cut and was smearing blood across the tissue.
You’re bleeding.
Look.
The photo showed a woman and a little girl, taken long ago. There was a black van in the background although to call it a van was to make it sound far larger than it was. Although the subject in the photograph was much younger than the woman at the door, she shared the strong lipstick and penchant for black. She was eccentric, Gaby understood, but quite artistic and very beautiful. Somehow she assumed the little girl had died.
Macarthur Place was a very “come in” sort of house and she led the injured visitor to the kitchen where she found the bandaids and sat her at the table and took some pleasure in cleaning the wound with Dettol and securing the bandaid.
Would you like a cup of tea? she asked.
Her guest set the memorial on the table. Gaby thought, oh dear she really wants to sell it to me. Tea?
That would be nice dear.
A bickie?
You don’t happen to have sardines I suppose? She had removed her fur and coat and revealed another layer of black, a smartly tailored suit cut quite snugly. So much better for your memory.
On toast?
A fork would be lovely.
Gaby found the sardines and put the kettle on.
I’m Doris, her guest said.
I’m Gaby. Gabrielle.
It’s a very pretty name. Were you practising your music?
I’m reading.
Do you like to read?
Yes, but this book is a little hard.
The old lady had deep-set eyes, and a very straight mouth that occasionally revealed the smallest most beguiling movement in the direction of a smile. Your mother was a terrific reader.
Well, everybody knew her mother, or claimed to, even if it wasn’t true.
The visitor ate her sardines from a cereal bowl. She slid the photograph across the table. You know who it is?
You look very pretty.
No, the girl.
That’s your daughter?
That’s right. And who is she?
What do you mean?
I am your nanna, the old lady said, using a tiny handkerchief to remove sardine oil so delicately that the lipstick almost survived intact.
How do you mean?
I’m your nanna. I’m your lovely old granny, dear.
Gaby sat down suddenly. She looked through the cracked glass, at the image of her mother. It was not like her at all. Her clothes were awful, like a refugee, like things from a lost and found. She had long socks up to her knees and a tummy showing through her poor tight sweater.
I am Doris, the woman said.
She reached an oily hand to touch her granddaughter’s hair. Gaby drew away.
And you are the most beautiful, she said, of all of us.
Then she permitted the fishy hand to stroke her hair. She entered a disturbing variation of that hypnotic state she sometimes experienced when her hair was cut. Who can say how long the trance might have continued if the front door had not opened.
Here, the old woman said hurriedly. (It was a business card, a little oil-stained, SPRINGVALE TAXIS.) This is me, darling. I am at your service for anything you wish. The zoo, the Dandenongs, I’ll take you where you like. She was gathering her coat when Celine entered.
Hello, said Doris.
Did Celine know who it was?
Visiting my family, the old woman said. I brought you a present.
Gaby watched as her mother examined the framed photograph with its crazed glass.
Keep it, Doris said.
Thank you, Celine said, quickly placing it behind her.
Goodbye, Doris said to Gaby who was startled to see her poke her tongue out at Celine. And then she left, without explanation, soft as a cat, out the front door and out of sight.
I thought she died, Gaby said.
No, Celine said. Of course not. How could she be dead?
It was not her mother’s lie that shocked Gaby but her grandmother’s fur, the sardine smell, the poked tongue. She ran upstairs to wash her hair, knowing that she had been saved to live a happy life.
The unhappy part arrived soon enough.
She came home from soccer practice to see her father arranging polaroids along the mantelpiece. She closed the front door and the draft blew the photographs across the floor. He yelled at her.
She was a beloved child and this was unacceptable. She rushed to her room and locked her door. She waited for the apology. It did not come.
She heard the front gate squeak and knew it could only be her mother returning from her run. She unlocked her door and spied from her tent of darkness at the top of the stair: she saw that the photos had been restored to the mantelpiece. What did her father expect would happen now? Once more the door opened. Once more the photographs swooshed across the room. This time he did not yell. He watched as his wife knelt to pick them up and all was quiet a moment.
Then she throws them in his face and the child is electrified with fright. This never happened before. Sandy falls to his knees. He stacks the fallen pictures as tenderly as a boy with swap cards. When he speaks, his voice is very slow and very reasonable and it is clearly understood, by everyone, that he is in a towering rage. His face is unshaved and savage like something washed up on the beach.
The mother demands, We are not going through this again.
In a cardboard box, years later, there will be a faded polaroid of a weatherboard cottage, a dying lawn, a high lifeless brick fence like a blindfold on its eyes. Who would keep such a photograph and why?
He says, We won’t ever have a chance to own a house again.
Did this all really happen? Of course. She, the beautiful young woman, steps forward with her hands backwards on her hips. What did you say to me, Jack? (Saying Jack to make a stranger of him.)
He says they now have a chance to own a house.
She removes her headband and flicks her fair hair back over her shoulders. She says, You said it was obscene. “It” was the Saturday real estate circus, the yuppie home buyers who travelled from auction to auction in Carlton, double-parking along Canning Street, coveting the old working-class cottages.
Anyway, she says, we can’t be “home owners” even if we want to, not even in Coburg.
The man moves to a kitchen chair. The woman resists the implication that she should join him, but clearly he has something new to say. Go on, she says, from the doorway. What is it?
We have been offered the deposit, he announces.
Christ, the woman shouts. (Christ, the girl hears.) Can’t they just leave us alone? Can you win the election or not? Are you the best thing Coburg ever had? Does the idiot branch understand they’ve got themselves a cabinet minister in the making? Tell them to fuck off. We don’t want to borrow their dirty money.
Then he smiles. It is such a relief for the girl to see her daddy smile.
Not borrow, he says. Some blokes.
Blokes what?
They will make us a gift of the deposit.
Some Greek bloke?
No, not him.
She would have been outraged to know the money would come from Woody Townes. That particular revelation will be delayed until the divorce, at which time their so-called “marital property” will not be theirs at all, but an asset of one of Woody’s secret shell companies.
You be bloody careful Jack, she says. Honest people don’t have that sort of money.
There are great places with big backyards.
I can pay next month’s rent. All of it. I’ll get a second job.
He shrugs and stares into the fridge.
They want me to go to Coburg? Why? You got elected living here. Don’t turn your back. You think you can force me? Do you not understand anything about me?
There is nothing the girl can do to affect
this conflict, which she will relate years later. Anyone listening to her adult recollection will hear how little distance she has from the event. She may be a “habitual law-breaker” but she still knows what it is like to flee to her cold bedroom and switch on the blower heater. She can tell you how she locks the door and waits. All her room is vile and empty. She wishes she had a kitten. If she was dead they wouldn’t know.
It is an eternity before her parents understand what they’ve done to her, and then they come creeping up the creaking stairs. Then they love her. Then she curls up in her mother’s lap. Publicly, she is her mother’s replicant. Privately, she feels herself to be a plain square little thing. She traces her mother’s beautiful face with her finger and calls on all her will, the great engine of her terror, to make them laugh and love each other. She can do that. She does it constantly. She performs a handstand and reads a poem. She clears the table without being asked and, when she finds the stack of photographs, she hides them in the drawer reserved for string and rubber bands. She knows she has the power to make her parents love each other. She is the force swinging between them. She is the heat and electricity and she will turn it off, forever, if they frighten her by shouting.
Sando and Celine apologise for their “dreadful character.” They show their consideration by only fighting late at night (as if the girl can possibly sleep when she knows her whole life is at stake). She notices how her mother now refers to the “Labor Party machine” and “machine politics.” Likewise her father refers to her mother’s “radical friends.” “Your Carlton tribe,” he says, sarcastically. He says the Labor Party will die when it becomes the party of “your tribe” rather than the party of Coburg.
She begins to “sleep over” at friends’ and stay late at soccer practice and lock herself in her room and listen to Midnight Oil. There was no sleep. The beds were burning. She would recall the lyrics all her life. She turned up the music so loud the bass shook her windows and they did not even try to stop her. Ditto: there was nothing she could do to stop them, not even bite their legs.
She gets caught shoplifting from HMV but they do not even blame her. She smokes cigarettes that they do not seem to smell. They forget her thirteenth birthday until it is a day too late. So she gets into her mother’s closet and tears two sleeves off two different dresses. Nothing happens as a consequence.
There is a warm windy night when Celine and Sando fight until the early morning, stamping up and down the stairs, to the bathroom, to the fridge, out the door and in again. By dawn, they are all worn out and drunk and snoring. Then the child takes her backpack and her homework folder and her soccer ball and leaves the house by the kitchen door which opens onto a narrow bluestone alley.
Later she will hear that you could fix this feeling by cutting yourself. But she has no-one to advise her, so on this particular morning she does not know what to do about the pain. She dribbles the ball up the centre of Macarthur Square, and sprints across empty Rathdowne Street, the way to soccer practice. She has the power to make them seriously sorry, more than they can ever know. She catches the green light up at Swanston Street and dribbles across the silent tram tracks. The sun is behind her as she enters the empty streets of the University of Melbourne, into Queen’s College. She keeps the ball between the double lines without a mess-up, pushing with her laces, not slowing but anticipating College Crescent where she is stopped by two-way traffic. She waits, all lit up by yellow sodium, doing switch keep-ups on the curb, seeing the white startled faces in the cars. Where is that girl’s mother? Why is she abandoned? Then she is off, through the traffic, a clean calm line through a hysteria of brakes.
For the first time, by herself, she enters that long spooky path through the middle of the Melbourne General Cemetery. She sees herself from way on high: straw hair glowing, a dead girl risen from her grave, dribbling, cutting left onto the green field, completely, totally alone. She lies on the hard thirsty ground pretending to be dead. What else is there to do?
She can hear the lions and hyenas roaring in the nearby zoo. Now and then she opens her eyes to see if anyone is creeping up. There is dust in the wind. The yellow streetlights look like murder. She stays and stays until sun bathes the faces of the terraces on Royal Parade. No mention of 1975 at all.
IT MATTERS THAT she did not mean to slap the fox terrier or hurt its head but she got woken by its tongue dragging on her skin. She hit its face in fright. In return it bit her leg. There were four other dogs, maybe five. Maybe they just wished to play, she thought, years later on a microcassette. She had freaked. A spotted bitzer jumped and scratched her and she screamed and got her soccer ball and ran with her book sack thumping like panic on her back.
The dogs blocked the way to Carlton so she ran west towards Royal Parade. It was the little patch-eyed fox terrier who was the scariest, maliciously nipping at her heels as she ran straight across Royal Parade, behind the tram, before the truck. She heard the squeal, the awful howling, but she was already fleeing into The Avenue which runs around the back of the big old terrace houses on Royal Parade. There she recognised Frederic Matovic’s rusty corrugated back fence.
She did not know him well enough.
Blood was streaming down her leg as she let herself into the yard. Her sock had turned pink. She had never been invited into Frederic’s, but she knew that was it, ahead, a shocking tacked-on sort of shed with rusty corrugated walls like the back fence. His dodgy mother lived inside the house at the front, upstairs in a large single room which was apparently lined with the second-hand dresses which were her business. She sold stuff from her van and little shop.
This was Parkville and therefore fancy but the social structure here, from Royal Parade across to Nicholson Street, was always smudgy, layer to layer, Italians, Jews, skippy working-class, lawyers, academics, Housing Commission kids, playwrights, junkies, boarding house proprietors and fences of stolen goods. It wasn’t often that you saw a family slide from one group to another, but in Frederic’s case there had been a lurch. His father had once been famous, on the cover of TV Week.
Frederic, Gaby called his name. When she heard him breathing on the other side of the door, the hair rose on her neck.
Who’s that?
Gaby. From school.
What do you want?
Let me in, she demanded, waiting.
She knocked again. I’m sorry.
Just bloody wait.
I’m hurt.
Wait.
The chain shook and rattled and was withdrawn through its jagged hole. The door opened a little and there he was, blinking, the beautiful boy with long black hair and black fingernails, his face quite red as if from violent scuffing. He looked down his nose at her.
What?
I need someplace to crash, the child said.
The door opened and she saw that he had covered himself in a strange blue raincoat. You should come to the front door of the house, he said.
But I’m all messy.
He stepped back and she followed him. To her surprise he took a box of Kleenex from a desk. Obviously his mother had been removing makeup here. Gaby saw her stuff was everywhere in the sleepout, not just crumpled tissues but her trash and treasure, racks of clothes she could wheel into her van, from there to Footscray or her musty little shop on Faraday Street where everyone went to find fur coats, loopy wedding dresses, cups with triangular handles.
The sleepout smelled of old lives, dead people, the cats that had once lived with them. Take your shoes off, he said. Sit here.
Gaby rested the box of tissues on her lap and Frederic took them one by one and dipped them in his glass and washed her bleeding ankles.
I’ll get rabies.
No you won’t, he said, and she did not ask him how he knew.
I’m sorry I woke you.
What happened to you?
Dogs I said.
You want to sleep?
What if I foam at the mouth and bite you?
He pulled back the bed cover and
she climbed in and he tucked her in so nicely her neck felt strange. Don’t tell anyone you’ve been here, he said.
There was a computer on his desk. She had seen one previously on television, and also in a comic strip, but she had never seen one in real life, not this tiny screen joined to a keyboard the colour of old bones.
What do you do on that?
You wouldn’t understand.
It’s your mum’s?
He shook his head irritably.
I’m a girl so I must be stupid? It’s in Hamburg, she said, reading off the screen.
It’s not.
Welcome to the Altos Hamburg Chat System.
Mind your own business.
The bed smells nice.
It’s lavender.
Your mum will go nuts when she gets the phone bill.
Go to sleep. You’re so completely wrong.
Won’t she though?
Go to sleep.
You’re very clever, aren’t you?
If you can’t stop annoying me you’ll have to leave.
She lay on her back and closed her eyes. He was in Germany somehow. She was leaking blood. Everything smelled funny, borrowed, stolen, used, former weirdnesses and misery, old men drinking port from flagons, country girls, nurses, matrons, cats comforting their chilblain toes. On the wall it was handwritten: IT IS AGAINST THE LAW IN MELBOURNE #1 TO WEAR PINK PANTS AFTER LUNCH ON SUNDAYS.
It was too hot for him to wear that coat. He had scrubbed his face so hard there were scratch marks on his burning cheeks. There was a big chart pinned onto the wall above the desk, a web of tunnels and caves with tiny spider writing dense as lace. She did not guess that this was where she was going to live. She read: “East Temple Room.” Later, he stood and added to the writing then returned to the keyboard, his fluttery butterfly fingers dancing, his cuticles like the wing cases of black Christmas beetles that lived inside the walls.
The sun got higher and the hot corrugated iron made loud explosions as it pulled on its nails like Jesus Christ and it was too hot to lie in bed fully dressed and she could not leave and could not sleep. She would never have thought of Frederic like this before. He never spoke in class except when the homework meant he had no choice but read aloud. He stood apart, always, alone, tall, straight, too big to be teased or threatened. He would have been bored to be a goth but his skin stayed very white and his hair fell on his shoulders like a raven’s wing, and he walked rather carefully with his head tilted to one side, so the hair, she guessed, did not obscure his view. He was already over six foot and he had to shave once a week, but he had a very soft sibilant way of speaking which, now she knew his place, exactly matched the room.
