by Garry Disher
Naked
Bodies were hidden from view and so Anna imagined them. From a sketchy beginning—Hugo’s description of a pale, loose, globish bottom briefly glimpsed when Grandfather Ison undressed in the light leaking through the bedroom door from the hallway, pom pom pomming as though he hoped he were not being observed by the little boy in the corner bed—Anna constructed the old man’s thick legs, padded grey back, drum-tight, hanging, hairy stomach, thin white arms abruptly sun-browned from wrist to fingertip, and a generalised dark accumulation at the mid-point of his body. She saw her mother once, full length from the rear, towelling herself dry in the ladies’ bathroom along the corridor from their rooms at the Delmonte Hotel. She registered these things before her mother shyly dragged a satiny flowered robe over her dampness: streaked, mottled pink skin, a wet shoulder blade missed by the towel, knobbly bones revealed along the bent-over spine, a referred jelly shake of thigh and buttock as one dried foot and then the other landed solidly upon the squelchy floor tiles. She only ever saw her father’s torso. It was broad, vulnerably stippled with freckles and moles, moving minutely as he scraped a cut-throat razor over his whiskers in the mornings. Hugo’s body was about as relevant to Anna as her own. The children enticed their cousins to the old school at a bend in the sunken road and ordered them to strip, squat open-legged for inspection, urinate, defecate, Anna cool and curious, Hugo bow-shouldered and shivering, the bobbing eye of his finger-thin stem like an extra, eager spy at the proceedings in the cobwebby ruin. Anna found little privacy in the boarding house of her mother’s old grammar school. Bodies, morning, noon and night—in the showers, in the changing rooms, in the narrow shared territory between each pair of iron cots. Convinced that her breasts were too small, the thatch at her groin too sparse, her cleft as featureless as a little girl’s, she shut herself in a lavatory cubicle and perched upon the closed lid with a mirror. Suddenly there were footsteps inside the bathroom and the sounds of shouted laughter, flushing water, doors and singing, then silence, then another burst. Anna breathed shallowly, encouraged into a sense of hidden sin and power, and watched her fingers. Wonderfully, she saw herself grow and open. She was reminded of unfolding flowerheads and rock-pool anemones, the dewiness on their bracketing lips. She decided: Not different, just a variation. She ran away home, and within three or four years they were calling her experienced, loose with her body. Exaggerated, unfair, but Anna learned to live with it. One thing that she wanted, apart from love, was to see a boy stand unselfconsciously naked in the sunlight. The boy who could do that would be one she could love, and who would love her. But all Anna got was the darkness of the back roads and the impatient clankle, slap and zip of unbelting jeans. Nothing to see and nothing worth looking at—not until Lockie made love to her in long grass on the Razorback. Anna’s English tutor took her to his house in Unley. The people there smiled in a sleepy dope haze, elbow-propped on cushions on the floor, and waved her in. The tutor rested the back of his head on Anna’s thigh and stared glitteringly up at her. He was putting it on, trying to look demoniacal. Anna watched closely when a new joint went around: handle gingerly, draw back in hyperventilating huffs, snatch away from the mouth, hold in for several seconds, then release. She applied the yellow body paint to the tutor’s chest and stomach. Another woman there decorated his cheeks and forehead with broad strokes of red and blue. A third striped him green and gold from his hips to the blades of his feet and threaded gold glitter foil in the tangled hair between his legs. That left his genitals unpainted, a sad bunch of cold-shrunken lumps. The three women seemed to sober simultaneously, to draw back from him. He said plaintively: Anna, won’t you finish me? Anna thought guiltily of Lockie, of his beauty. She didn’t know that Lockie had followed her to the house. In the morning he confronted her: Two-timer. He said: You’re drifting away from me. Then he was gone to the war and she had no word from him for months, only a card describing the sun-shot South China Sea. She evoked his body in her mind’s eye. In her worst moments, parts of him were torn away under the impact of landmines and sniping bullets. The son Anna gave birth to five years later was part of her cure. First the crown of his head, playing hide and seek with her in an angled mirror, and to get to that point she cried out, moaned and huffed, for almost twelve hours, sometimes directing unregretted snarls upon the nurses whose ministering hands had become a torment. Finally she pushed, and at last she saw all of him, gliding out of her in a heaven-sent rush. Sam leaned close to her and articulated carefully, as if she were deaf or feeble-minded: He’s perfect! A perfect little body. Well done! They called him Michael, an old Ison name. Anna often caught herself beaming at him entranced—his arms and legs stirring the air, his edible fatness. Sometimes it seemed a pity to clothe him, although he did look fine in clothes, in baby clothes, toddler clothes, the shorts, shirt and sandals he wore on his first day at school. She kept these things for some time after the accident, until Sam told her not to be morbid. When he said: Pass them on to Maxine’s kid, Anna wondered: Does he ever think before he says anything? And so her body abhorred his. Sam rarely wanted her anyway, but, whenever he closed in, she grew agitated, her trunk and limbs hunting for a way out before freezing finally, waiting for his touch. She wondered: Does my body bear the mark of my loss? People stare at me on the street—do they know from gossip or does my body betray me? Rebecca and Meg like to shower together, soak in a hot bath together, the door open so that they can draw Anna into their conversations. Anna is accustomed to it. Meg, she’s noticed, is big-boned, swaggering and strong-looking, her body apt to wrap itself around little Rebecca and never let go. It seems to Anna that, for Meg, lesbianism is a sexual expression; for Rebecca, political. When Anna sees Sam naked now it’s when he’s tossing his workclothes on the laundry floor and stepping into the back-porch shower stall. He’s getting paunchy, more and more like his father every day. She wonders what else stirs him now, apart from his dream for the 150th Jubilee. She supposes that he will grow old and begin to shrink, as will they all. Anna will visit her mother in the retirement home behind the Pandowie Hospital and one day happen to see the old woman dart with a giggle from the bathroom to the gown behind the bedroom door, and be struck by how youthful the naked body may seem, even after eighty-four years of gravity.
City
They all felt the push and pull of the city on the coast. Grandfather Ison retired to Burnside when his daughter married the Tolley boy from Pandowie; Grandfather Tolley depended upon a distributor in Hindley Street for his weekly film canisters; books from the sandstone library on North Terrace were parcelled up for the children once a month; Stock & Station obliged the children’s father to attend head office from time to time; and the family holidayed at the Delmonte in Glenelg every January. When the children were small they were taken to see the lights of Rundle Street, where the big department stores sat like bishops and sniffed as you passed through their doors. The city had embraced neon, the merchants scribbling and stamping their businesses with it. Names stuttered and glowed in red and white behind plate glass, climbed external walls, or popped hoarsely above the heads of the country women who had come down for the sales, one arm herding their cowed children, the other locked on their shopping bags against purse-snatchers and undesirables. At night, Rundle Street swam in neon. Rubbernecks crawled along in their cars. Anna discovered that if she were to blink her eyes rapidly and sway her head, the neon stretched and yawed like molten elastic. One night she felt cut down and tossed aside as if she were nothing. A car crammed with wild children pulled up alongside the Stock & Station Holden at a traffic light, and Anna made the mistake of looking at them. Dreaming, floating, cocooned in metal and glass, she believed that she was joined to all the children in the world. But, in the crowded window opposite her, three long, livid tongues rolled out and membraned the glass, three pairs of cross-eyes looked into her brain, three mouths were prised wide and wetly open. Anna gasped and looked away, shocked, hurt, defenceless for the first time. Normally she had plenty of nerve—after all,
she had roamed the back roads seeking her father and seen dead and dying lambs and the flickering tongues of tiger snakes—but no one had been unthinkingly cruel to her before. The blood rushed to her face and she was deeply ashamed. Sometimes her father drove them to a cracked brick house in Mile End. The back yard faced a railway line and the house and yard seemed to crouch and slink away from the constant iron thunder. It was never spring or autumn in that place, only scorching midsummer, and Anna sensed that the man who lived there, her father’s offsider in Borneo in 1944, had slipped in the world and had farther to slip. He had a twangy voice riddled with sullenness, a face tucked and pillowed from the beer. She played quietly in the dead grass with Hugo, while the wives struggled to find a common ground in the shade of the verandah and the men drank themselves into risky moods. A kind of raucous irony and scorn came over her father when he was drunk. He liked to drive back through leafy suburbs in search of victims, shouting insults at pedestrians who seemed too buttoned-down or too good to be true. It aroused the children. They saw surprise and offence in the receding faces as the car accelerated away, and crammed their fists in their mouths to smother their snorting laughter. Even their mother was aroused. She slapped him affectionately: Peter, you’ll get us arrested. But somehow their delight in him always spoilt the mood. He’d scowl and shut down abruptly, as though displeased that they could be so easily diverted. When she finished at the primary school, Anna was sent to her mother’s old grammar school in the city. You’ll be able to say, My mother was an old girl. The school hummed with the untroubled assumptions of caste and privilege, where wealth came second and intellect third. Black cars whispered along the bordered drives and shoe leather snapped on the polished floors. There must have been streets and houses beyond the ivied perimeter wall but Anna couldn’t see them. She was served pâté on a sliver of toast in her housemistress’s room and didn’t know what it was. Even sprawling on the grass was beyond her. She didn’t have the style for it. She was in a well-watered, green, ascendant world and seven days later she ran away from it. As the taxi downshifted for the descent through the Pandowie Hills, Anna leaned forward to peer at the wheat stubble, someone’s dust-scribbling farm ute, a sparrowhawk floating in the air currents, the meandering stonewall fences, and finally the blue-grey bends and curves of the sunken road far in the distance. There, she said, pointing her finger. When she turned eighteen she didn’t want to leave Lockie, but she couldn’t wait to leave the bush. The city, the idea of the city, excited her now. Besides, Lockie was only three hours north by road. On the day on which paint was splashed over her face and clothes and the placard wrenched from her hands outside the Raintree Corporation, Anna saw the hate-filled faces along the footpath and remembered the children who had spoilt the city lights for her, twelve years ago. She remembered the howling pack in the Pandowie train, pursuing the shearer’s son. Anna’s parents insisted on a slap-up wedding in Adelaide, in the well-bred Burnside church where Grandfather Ison was still remembered by all the old sextons and vigorous powdered widows. Anna glowed in her wedding dress. Sam looked crisp and vivid, his white shirt, his black suit and tie. But afterwards, as the big hired saloon crept away along an elm tree corridor, Sam’s hand landed on Anna’s knee and she saw how scoured and raw it was, a raw-boned bushman’s hand that was nothing like Lockie’s. She thought: Lockie and I would have had a romantic, irregular, disastrous marriage, full of lies and vows, and it would have been all I ever wanted. She wondered: What sort of children will Sam and I have? They made many trips to the city to seek a cure for Rebecca’s asthma. Their daughter had inherited, from the Isons, allergies to everything around her: animal hair, house dust, yeast, dairy foods, pollen. The specialist swung in his swivel chair high above North Terrace: Also, don’t let her get excited. Ideally you should move to the city to live. Anna gazed past his shoulder to the spires of the Cathedral, which obscured the redbrick wing of Women’s College where she’d had a room and read arguments for and against the existence of God and made love to Lockie twice a month. She didn’t speak. She went home and said to Becky: You’re getting an education. Well, Rebecca knew that anyway. Rebecca studied at the Conservatorium and bought a house of her own and suffers now only when seasonal winds blow dust and pollen from the inland across the city. Many of Anna’s contemporaries have sold out and moved to Brisbane and Perth, seeking sunshine and burgeoning economies. According to the latest census, over two thousand young people have left rural areas for the city. Anna’s twin cousins have married a pair of Adelaide suits and so the Ison name will die out when Kitch and Lorna die. When it’s time for Anna to leave she will settle for a place close to the wind-whipped sands of Henley Beach. She will find herself thinking more and more of that city woman, her grandmother, taken by a shark long before she was born.
Dress
Whenever Anna’s mother and her dressmaking friends settled down to sew and gossip, the supple nouns and verbs of a coexistent language floated there in the room with them: fittings, patterns, sizes, measuring tape, buttons, cotton reels, balls of wool, leftover material, sewing-machine burr, pins-in-the-mouth murmurs, the clack of needles, and the eyes-narrowed, calculated final assessment of a dress, a pullover, a blouse. Anna stood on a kitchen chair and they turned her around and around, tucking and pinning. Everything has to be red with Anna at the moment, her mother said. When the dress was ready, Anna raced to the other end of the house. Mrs Mac leaned her rump on the sink and said: Aren’t you the pretty one? With a huge, hammering heart, Anna glanced down and slowly, slowly, smoothed the cloth over her thighs. My party frock, she said, and in the mirror the skirt frothed about her knees, concealing, revealing, concealing. Auntie Beulah? she said, swishing inches from her great aunt’s tartan rug. She said it again: Auntie Beulah? Like my new dress? But the old woman’s watery eyes were watching her lost love and she was singing to him, so low that Anna could scarcely hear her. Mrs Mac wheeled Beulah into the sun. You mustn’t mind, dear. She’s wandering a bit these days. Anna stood and thought about that, the tips of her fingers seeking reassurance from the red cherries on the white collar. She had imagined saying to Great Aunt Beulah: See, the belt goes through here. See the buttons? See the cherries? Mum embroidered them. Then for a couple of years Anna wanted to dress only as a boy. She had a rough and tumble life and felt too skinny, too gawky, too false, to wear a dress or a skirt and blouse. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Suddenly Anna had legs and a drowsy, catch-breath appreciation of them. Her legs drew the gaze; she drew the gaze. She wore tights to school, a tanning shade of brown, with one dazzling white knee truss to reinforce the effect. She sat where Lockie could watch her during the grinding hours on the Bitter Wash school bus, perched opposite him on the sideways-facing seat above a rear-wheel arch, tormenting him by bunching the slippery purple and gold folds of her uniform about her thighs. The netball changing room was the science lab. Boys might catch Anna and Maxine there, framed in the window, slow-handed, grinning a wide-eyed O of mock dismay. Anna’s mother said: For the ninetieth time, there simply isn’t the money. It’s been a bad year and Dad wants us to make economies where we can. And so Anna blamed him, too, for letting her appear in a home-made gown at the high school ball. She could not see the quality of the cut or the fabric, or the skilled hand, only that the gown was not shop-bought. Nothing would make her beautiful, so what would make her uglier? Lashing eyes and a tongue that could cut to the bone, that’s what. When her father asked her to dance the Pride of Erin, she folded her arms and stared fiercely at the floor. Then for the next two hours she flung herself into half a dozen self-abasing back seats in the chilly car park while the band played softly inside the hall and warm shapes revolved behind the yellow windows. Anna greatly loved a black cotton jumper but it betrayed her in the end. She wore it next to her skin at lectures and whenever she went home to Pandowie. One twilight Saturday she returned to the house with chattering teeth, her arms wrapped across her chest, and met her mother’s long, unblinking, expressionless gaze as Lo
ckie tooted goodbye outside: Anna, it might interest you to know that your jumper is inside out. For exercise, for a distraction, Anna attended dance classes in an upstairs studio along a forgotten alley behind Victoria Square. Here she flexed as though she were naked, her bare feet slapping down upon the varnished floorboards. A woman called Connie remarked, admiring her: They must have had you in mind when they invented the leotard. The dress Anna wore to the Showalter Park field day was for Chester Flood, not the field day women. At two o’clock she poured a final cup of tea, draped the apron over a fold-up chair and slipped away from the catering tent to hunt for the children. By half-past two she was soothing them to sleep on Chester’s bed: Sssh, darling, a little nap, and then we’ll go home to Daddy. She joined Chester in his sitting room. She removed her shoes. She curled her toes in the thick pile of his carpet, turned her back, lifted the hair away from the nape of her neck. They didn’t speak. Chester’s hands flicked down her back, freeing buttons one by one along her spine. The dress sighed to the floor. Suddenly Rebecca appeared in the doorway, knuckling her eyes: Mummy. Anna took her to the bathroom, then back across Chester’s long carpet to the bedroom, and when she returned to Chester’s warm arms the world had tilted a little. Did she...? I don’t think she saw anything, Anna replied. But I’ll make it into a game in the car going home, so she won’t know who she’s seen today or where she’s been. For a long time after the accident, grief and mottled legs eroded Anna’s confidence. Sam said: You’re incredible, you know that? If I mention that I like you in dresses, you assume I’m saying you look bad in pants. And all those dark colours all the time. Snap out of it. They were days of struggle. Anna’s mother came by with the old sewing machine: At least let me show you how to run up a dress. Anna made skirts, workclothes for Sam, little dresses for Rebecca. She saved hundreds of dollars that way. When Rebecca grew touchy and particular, she taught her to sew. But it was more than simply teaching Rebecca how to sew. Theirs was a relationship weighed down by complications. Anna wanted her daughter to stop settling that fatalistic gaze upon her, and she wanted her daughter to know how to fend for herself, take responsibility, pay her own way. Rebecca made dresses if she had to, but mostly she made shirts and trousers. She grew into a quick, slight, moody woman, suited to pants and jeans. If she can get away with it she wears loose black pants rather than a dress when the orchestra is playing. Rebecca and Meg don’t hide anything from Anna. For example, Meg is interested in inversions. She stages parties at which everyone must wear a dress. She likes to experiment in low-key S&M with Rebecca. It’s the marginality I like, she tells Anna, the tinge of danger, the eroticisation, the giving over of the self when I play-act and dress in chains and leather. But we don’t hurt each other, nothing like that. Anna will dress to flatter as she grows old. She will argue that she doesn’t see why she shouldn’t display some flair and style in her declining years. Old women in humdrum situations like to watch the young ones parade in their new clothes, but Anna’s attitude is: Not me, sister, not me.
