Fabulous Lives

by Bindy Pritchard

  ‘Glad you came,’ he answered, nodding his head, and Katherine immediately felt bad. After all, it was her husband’s fault they were here, and this calm, good-natured man had to stand there and be civil to them. She sensed her husband standing just behind her, and was angry that he compelled her to speak, just as he made her deal with the hawkers at the front door and send his family their birthday cards every year. It was this reluctance, this holding just a little further back from where she was in life, that annoyed her.

  Katherine spoke. ‘We slept in, so we couldn’t make it in time to get to the city. My husband forgot to set the alarm,’ and then immediately wished she hadn’t said a word, because she might as well have been saying, I blame my husband for everything in my life.

  She wondered what on earth the minister would be thinking of her now, but his biblical blue eyes maintained a steady, unblinking gaze and she knew he was the sort of person to think the best of everyone.

  ‘Let me introduce my wife, Shirley,’ he answered, calling over a stout woman dressed in a red suit. Shirley gave Katherine a grim, cursory once-over and nodded.

  ‘Welcome. Here are the chorus books and the programs. Sit anywhere you like, but keep the first two rows free.’ She seemed to speak beyond Katherine, keeping her eyes focused on the swinging glass entry doors, in case there was someone else she should be talking to.

  ‘Thank you,’ replied Katherine, smiling at the minister, her voice invested with more than just gratitude. She sensed his trials were many with Shirley by his side.

  Katherine and her husband walked over to the white plastic chairs, which were laid out like rows of teeth. Some families, already scattered around the hall, had pulled the chairs out of alignment; were leaning back, scraping, rocking and dragging the chairs away from the others in the row. Children with dampened hair and new shoes, not quite sitting or standing, strained to see their friends in the next aisle. It had the same sense of impermanence as a picnic.

  Katherine chose to sit in the back row, and her husband followed her. Usually she liked walking down to the front of her church, past the aisles of gleaming pews and the straight-backed men in dark suits. The harpsichord would be sounding out a triumphant hymn and Katherine would almost march along like a homebound soldier down the aisle to the second row from the front. She liked this kind of ritual, she would always tell her husband, the music—the melodic line soaring with the spirit—the people all laid out like the alphabet, and the solidity of the wood beneath her legs as she slid her soft dress across the pew.

  However, this Sunday she wanted to keep her distance and become more of a spectator in this sorry affair. The room was now three-quarters filled, she saw, and hummed with snatches of conversation. And the congregation looked surprisingly multicultural for this suburb. There were Asian families, Indian families and even African families. It’s beginning to look like a UNICEF greeting card, she decided, half-wishing to tell her husband. But she could detect the faint sour smell of breakfast on his breath, and instead turned her head away. Just then, a reedy sound filled the room, and Katherine noticed a woman with a pince-nez perched on her thin nose playing the Lowrey organ set up in the corner. Katherine caught her breath as Shirley fired up the overhead projector and straightened the song lyric transparency, which was written in the kind of writing found on the nameplates in family bibles.

  Oh, Lord! Choruses, not hymns, she thought, while the whole bedraggled congregation rose to their feet and sang in meek, half-formed voices. The minister, flowing in glorious robes, glided down the centre, followed by another robed minister, who was black-skinned and looked like he came from a distant continent. That must be his family over there, two rows in front of her—the wife, and the three small children. Yes, a missionary family visiting Australia for training, and it all was beginning to come together for her while she studied the backs of their heads and the napes of their necks. The woman’s hair was plaited across her scalp, little perfect bumps and knobs that Katherine wished to read as if Braille. Her own mother wore her long, dark hair in thick plaits, and had gone to the hairdresser’s the day she turned thirty to have them cut off in two consecutive snips, so that they fell, thump thump, to the ground like useless limbs. They were kept for years in white tissue paper, and colourless rubber bands clinched the fat braids together. They disgusted Katherine so much, these remnants of her mother’s glossy girlhood, and yet she needed to hold the firm, woven strands in her fists as if they were unwieldy ropes of existence. Oh, the texture; the silk and tenacity of such things, and the colour as rich and tart as burnt raisins. But nothing compared to these African heads. The beautiful shape of the skull, really an elongated crown—why, she could almost think of a proud queen, or a ripening insect sac—whereas the others in the room, the thin perms, the bouffant bobs, had heads as round and as ordinary as a doodle on a notepad.

  So Katherine studied scalps, overly laundered collars, moles, profiles, the way she could see through the piercings in earlobes, the lint on jackets, her own dry, small hands, and then homed in on the voice of the minister, as he spoke the words of the Apostle Paul: ‘Wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.’ Katherine glanced around at the women’s faces expecting reaction, yet no-one seemed to be concerned; if anything, the mothers looked rather bored and worn out.

  The heat rose in Katherine’s face. She watched the bearded man continue, saw how his African counterpart mimicked his posture and expression (so vacant and full of male piety), and how the minister’s lips were thin and cruel through the beard, and the eyes that cool ice floe of people who watch but never see. And Shirley, poor fat Shirley, wearing the hot, itchy red suit for him, and having to make small chit-chat when she would rather be safe in a corner somewhere. What a dreadful church, she decided. Full of such awful people, the men (clearly misogynists), and such a low, flat roof that could never possibly house the presence of God.

  Katherine wanted to leave but the only door had been shut, and the room somehow felt hermetically sealed. There were no windows (she had never noticed this before), and she longed for the jewelled panes of glass that seemed to break the darkness in her own church like glowing embers. Or even like panels of a vision. A vision fired up by the sun in a great expanse of darkness. Yes, yes, this is what she longed for more than anything.

  Then Katherine noticed the spider. From a single, almost invisible thread, it descended from the ceiling as if it was a tiny abseiler. The movement was slow and deliberate, its fat, black body dropping like a lure into silent water. Katherine watched, fascinated. The spider’s squat legs were crouched in a warrior stance while the two front legs moved furiously to weave the next strand of web. And it continued this descent, slowly, the front legs whirring and spinning, until there was no doubt in Katherine’s mind that it would come to rest on the head of the woman sitting in the chair in front of her.

  Katherine turned to tell her husband, but he was already watching. ‘Shall we say something?’ she whispered. He didn’t answer, but squeezed her hand instead.

  Together, they watched transfixed as the spider hovered above the shiny henna-coloured bob, and then disappeared into the hair in one final sickening lurch.

  ‘We need to tell her,’ she commanded her husband, but he gripped Katherine’s hand even tighter.

  Katherine felt ill. She looked around at the congregation, but all their heads were bowed in silent prayer. Rows and rows of obedient heads. And the spider’s image wouldn’t leave her alone. There was that fat, satisfied body; the fast and furious weaving; the steady drop, and then gone, as if it had drowned forever in the beautiful hair. Would there be others, she wondered, looking up and half expecting a regiment of spiders to be falling from the ceiling. She felt her husband’s hand squeeze hers again and turned to look at him. He nodded towards the woman in front. The spider was retreating slowly from the hair, ascending on the same long, silvery thread.

  Then her husband announced in a low, calm voice, ‘It has attach
ed a web to her scalp.’

  And sure enough, she saw he was right. The woman moved her head slightly, and the thread swayed at the same moment, still intact, like a celestial cord. A single thread, and suddenly everything was made so clear. Yes, Katherine understood now. The underslung bungalow, the bearded minister, the African novice, those rows and rows of bending, prayerful, obedient heads, and she knew she would go home and discuss the meaning of it all, until the words became like paper on her tongue, and her husband would say, ‘Enough, Katherine. Enough.’

  LAST DAYS IN DARWIN

  Joy Luck Club

  My mother isn’t Chinese. Nor are her friends—‘the girls’, they call themselves, at fifty-three years of age. But every Tuesday afternoon they play mah-jong. They unfold the cidercoloured card table and set up the plastic tiles. Dainty crustless sandwiches are passed around on the lacquered Chinese bamboo tray. Sweet sherry is poured by the thimbleful.

  There is quiet Mavis, dressed in the pattern of yesteryear. Her simple outline has been sheared from generic floral cottons and stitched at home with the whirring black Singer. A little lady, the others often remark to their daughters on those mother–daughter occasions.

  Mavis bakes banana cakes. Moist, golden slabs that are generously sliced and smell of sweet bread straight from the oven. The cake falls apart on the fork, rippling with the treacled banana and the fine black lace. When she laughs, it is done neatly, through small, childish teeth. Her hands, burdened with old family rings, fall into claps on her lap. Concern fixes itself on her brow in lines of varying length, like children’s counting rods. Before she goes home, she always leaves a little something in the freezer for Don, my dad.

  Quite different from Kay, who is bossy but kind. Kay thrives on housework and charity drives. She swaps cleaning stories as people swap tales of love, but her war against dirt is always the most passionate. The others are in awe, and always make sure they wipe the top of the fridge before she calls in; she is very tall and could easily get to those out-of-reach places without the aid of a kitchen stool. At school she played hockey, and she still keeps that same fearless stride through life, pushing through shops and doctors’ surgeries as if she was three steps behind a little white ball. By the end of the day her large bones ache, and the knots on her calves swell to purple and blue. But she never complains, just avoids Bermuda shorts and going dancing late at night. Kay applies lipstick by memory. Smears the bright coral across her lips in a brusque, mannish swipe. She always supplies Mavis with a Coles bag warm with the deliquescence of banana.

  Dianne is the groomed one of the group. She plays tennis in girlish pleats. Her hair is a frosted bouffant which over the years has diminished in height. One day she will resort to wearing a wig. Her head is generous. Large and bony, it is a canvas for all of her emotions, while her body, frail from the years of dieting, maintains an elegant reserve. She speaks of other people’s husbands in order to bring up her own, who is successful and very wealthy. Dianne has a joie de vivre that is infectious. She uses the word ‘fun’ as people once used the word ‘gay’.

  My mother. Surrounded by her girlfriends, laughing and playing mah-jong. She isn’t Chinese. Though today she looks tired and her skin is stretched like Chinese nankeen, tightly, from cheekbone to cheekbone. There is something Asiatic or maybe Indian in her look. An ancient glimpse of bone and wisdom pressing through the buff-toned skin.

  Fortunes

  My sister is complaining again about the vegetables. ‘These are more expensive than in London. They call this a lettuce?’

  We are both in a bad mood. The Parap shop is a convenient minimart, only a five-minute walk from our parents’ house. We took the car. As Yvonne discovered, linen suits, like salad vegetables, lose their life-force in the Darwin humidity. To sweat and breathe in stifling air, a filmy perfumed strangeness—all this is okay in another country. However, when everyone is wearing KingGee shorts and thongs, and buying white sliced bread, it is simply all too much.

  ‘I’m sick of hicksville,’ Yvonne hisses.

  We’ve left Mum with the mah-jong group. For a woman who is supposed to be dying, she still arranges those tiles with the precision of a winner. She is dying. Yvonne left her life behind because she is dying and now here Mum is, gossiping and scuttling tiles across a table.

  ‘Shall we get some scratchies?’ I ask.

  For some reason this abbreviation doesn’t irritate my sister as much as ‘undies’ or ‘boosies’.

  ‘Yes. Let’s get four more.’

  All month we have been buying these instant lottery tickets and taking them home to Mum. A tradition has been established. I laughingly blow kisses on them and sing out, Come on Lady Luck. Sometimes Mum is too tired to sit up, so she lets us scratch out the games on her behalf. No-one really cares about the money. It’s merely an attempt to revise a future that doesn’t exist. Perhaps to tempt fate with possibility.

  Driving around Darwin streets, running errands for Mum, opposing traffic—both of us scream out the car window, We beat Darwin! If only Mum would do the same.

  Fractions

  My mother is a quarter Greek. It’s not very fashionable to be Greek in Darwin. People still talk about the cyclone, and how the Greek men dressed in drag so they could be airlifted out with the women and children. I wasn’t born until a year later and it’s difficult to imagine Uncle Vic in a seersucker frock. Mum only admits to her origins whenever people mention Paspaley pearls.

  My sister and I are an eighth Greek. In this light, with the sun filtering through the green fibreglass shading, Yvonne looks almost tubercular, and her pale hair, pulled back tight in a bun and straining against the roots, absorbs the colour like a thirsty plant. I notice for the first time how my sister has aged. The face powder crumbles a little on her skin, gathers in the crease around the nose and in the sad, fine lines near her mouth. A poor mask, loosening its hold on her face. And around her ears where the hair strains hardest, the tender pink places of childhood.

  I have a nose that would look good profiled on a silver coin. My grandfather had a censorious mouth. Nana still lives in the same old house by the beach. A Queenslander— all stilts and weatherboard timber. She is famous for her wishbones. Across a line of grocer’s string attached to her kitchen curtain rod, she has hung the crooked bones to dry. They divine the ceiling. Mangy and yellow, the ones with meat still attached glisten like glue.

  ‘Make a wish,’ she says, and before I can prise the magic bone apart, it snaps like a twig in the crook of my little finger.

  ‘That chicken has osteoporosis,’ she laughs, but her eyes always betray the sadness.

  Petulance

  My mother has a refractory jaw. She has been chewing on that bean patty for ages. She chews everything into one stubborn fibrous wad, like a giant hairball to be coughed out later.

  ‘Everything is tasteless,’ she says like a naughty child. Her jawbone, large and defiant, is an unhinged relic.

  Today, Mum insists on going to the Mindil Beach Markets. We arrange her body in the wheelchair in a way that will reduce the weight on her bones. Any pressure can cause untold grief. So there she is, a rag-doll mother folded into a respectable mother shape, and we set off for the outing.

  When we arrive at the markets, we wheel Mum across some sand and stop behind the fruit salad stall. But the smell of Asian cookery is startling. Hot drifts of oil-saturated noodles, char kway teow, pork dumplings, spicy laksa, beaded sticks of dry satay—all assault the sea air. Now we realise why she has insisted on coming.

  Initially I refuse to buy the kway teow. ‘It will ruin your cancer diet,’ I protest.

  But both Dad and Yvonne turn on me angrily. ‘Lighten up, Sylvia.’

  Tears prick the underside of my eyelids. I can feel my red-gilled lids burn. I walk through the crowds of tourists and locals blanketed in these red-hot lids. I don’t expect to see anyone I know. Most kids don’t stick around once they’ve left school. Because I don’t expect to see anyone, I assum
e no-one can see me. My eyelids are a blood-lined hood.

  The man serving the food has a broad, flat nose and full lips. His black eyes are shallow in the orbits. Blackheads scatter his nose like apple seeds within a pale core.

  He transfers a tongful of slippery noodles into a plastic container and squeezes a lid on tight. It squelches. Through the plastic, I can feel the grease slide.

  I return to Mum and give her the food. She eats it, crying out with every mouthful: ‘I can taste it. At long last I can taste food.’

  We wheel her around the stalls. There are the usual racks of faded tie-dyed clothing and batik skirts and trousers. Trestle tables are covered in wooden carvings that seem pointless once taken from the holiday country. An artist sketches a woman. His approach is close to that of a political caricaturist. He dramatically alters the proportions of her face. She is given silly eyebrows and an Afghan nose. A man in the small crowd—possibly her husband—shrinks back uncomfortably, and flicks through second-hand books at a nearby stall. Maybe he has seen a version of his wife he doesn’t know.

  I walk away and stand by a white elephant stall. A belt buckle catches my eye. It is a round, glassy mound in which a little sea horse has been preserved. The sea horse is orange and dragon-like. Its body is covered in a delicate scaled armoury. The body and tail curve back in a sweet embryonic curl. The effect is so ethereal that I feel like shaking the sphere to see if a light blanket of snow falls.

  ‘Dr Grey! Dr Grey!’

  My mother is making a scene. It’s her doctor she’s calling to, and he can’t seem to hide his embarrassment. One of his patients—close to death—sits in a wheelchair at a popular family market and calls out his name. He wavers for a moment, then leaves his family and comes over.