‘Really!’ said Agnes.
Vexation doesn’t travel well over telephone lines though, it seems. And neither, it appears, does irony. So both must have leaked out by the time her voice got to her brother. ‘Get her a job. Get her out doing a decent day’s work,’ he said. ‘That’ll usually fix things. The girl needs to start looking at what’s in front of her. There isn’t anybody that can do anything about what’s in the past,’ said Pa.
Pa was blundering. But he was right, so Aunty Agnes did. She did for Marjorie what she had done for Bill all those years ago. ‘You can’t be lying about the house all day, you know. You will never be able to pull yourself together that way,’ was her softly delivered advice to Marjorie the next morning as she placed the newspaper gently, firmly, on Marjorie’s pillow. ‘We need to take your mind off brooding about things that can’t be changed. Decent, hard work is the best medicine for most things in life. That, and a good couple of decades of the rosary,’ she added as a seeming afterthought.
Marjorie’s eyes followed Aunty Agnes. What about in death, Aunty Agnes? Is decent hard work the best medicine for most things in death, too? Marjorie said silently to her bedroom walls.
But Aunty Agnes had made up her mind now, and she had Pa on her side, so no amount of silence and dry dull eyes was going to change her mind. ‘Come on, Marjorie. You need a respectable outfit to wear to job interviews,’ she said. ‘We will go to the department stores in the city. We need a decent pair of shoes and stockings. And we are going to the haberdasher’s. And you are going to start looking in the Situations Vacant and start applying for jobs.’ Aunty Agnes stopped and turned to examine Marjorie’s hair messing itself all over her pillow. ‘Did Elise ever attempt millinery?’
Marjorie spoke then. She said the first decent words to Aunty Agnes that she had said to anyone in a very long time. ‘Millinery?’ she whispered.
‘Hats. Doesn’t matter. I know how,’ said Aunty Agnes, blinking and blinking at the whispered word.
*
‘You look very smart,’ he said from behind the carved oak desk. His head tilted at her. The gold-plated Schaeffer fountain pen reclining in its silver-plated desk set glinted at them. He reached for it and his right thumb rubbed it as he stared at Marjorie.
‘You do indeed,’ said the woman at his side. She smiled. ‘Marjorie, isn’t it?’ she asked, glancing at the pile of job applications in front of her.
Marjorie nodded. She sat up straight. Hooked one ankle discreetly behind the other. Clasped her hands over the lines of the box pleats in the skirt. She imagined her father standing in that long line of hatless men out under the sun in that factory yard.
‘It looks like a Chanel,’ the woman had said when she directed Marjorie into the office. Her raised right eyebrow questioning the decency of a young girl wasting money on a store-bought Chanel suit. And if she could afford a store-bought Chanel suit, then why did she need this job?
Marjorie thought of Aunty Agnes’s Singer sewing machine. It would be luminous by now, she knew. And redolent of metal and wood and Singer sewing machine oil. She could see the gentle afternoon sun creeping through the lemon tree in the front yard before it melted through the lace curtains in Aunty Agnes’s front room. Before it laid itself softly all over the surface of that Singer sewing machine. It was not her mother’s sewing machine. It was Aunty Agnes’s. Marjorie smiled a bland smile – it was the only smile she had these days, but it seemed to suit everyone – and tried to tell herself that the palms of her hands were not sweating away underneath their protective finger clasp.
He had stopped playing with his pen now. ‘So why should we give you this job, Marjorie?’ he asked.
I really have no idea why. Because Ruby isn’t here anymore? Or perhaps because my mother is here still. She is apparently busy fulfilling a long-term commitment at a mental hospital here somewhere. Is that a good reason for wanting this job? ‘Because I have always loved books,’ Marjorie said. She smiled. Her hand went to her throat and she clasped, as a comfort, the pearls that Aunty Agnes had given her. (‘You have them, love,’ Aunty Agnes had said. ‘I want you to have them.’)
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘That is very commendable in a young lady. A love of good literature will carry you safely through life. But,’ he said, ‘there is much more to working here than liking books. We need someone with an enthusiasm for the enormous importance of all that this institution – its processes and procedures – stands for.’ He leant forward, peering at Marjorie to see if she was fully appreciating the responsibility of the position. ‘That is what I need,’ he finished.
The woman nodded.
I need a sister. I need a mother. I need a job, apparently. That is what Aunty Agnes thinks will do the trick. That is what I need. ‘I think books are important for a progressive society,’ Marjorie said. But books, it turns out, are not always as safe as you might think. So I will watch them very carefully for you in here from now on, she could have added.
He looked at her legs. And at her high heels. ‘There will be quite a lot of running around,’ he said.
Marjorie smiled again. I am good at running, she thought. She nodded.
‘Can you start immediately?’
‘Yes,’ she said and nodded again.
‘How old are you, Marjorie? Do you have a driver’s licence?’
‘I can drive,’ Marjorie said.
‘Wait outside, thank you,’ he said.
So Marjorie bent to pick up her handbag and gloves, then stood and walked from the room. Her high heels clicked across the tessellated tiles.
The chief librarian resumed rubbing his fountain pen as his eyes watched her legs – no doubt checking, as any boss had the right to do, that the seams of her stockings were straight.
Marjorie got that job. Aunty Agnes’s job-getting magic had worked once more. And both Marjorie and Aunty Agnes always thought it was on account of the neat little hat perched on the top of her shiny dark hair. Because Marjorie didn’t wear a tie, like her father had done so many years before when he got his job. But she did wear a hat. Just like her father had done.
*
The woman’s name was Patricia (not Patsy!). ‘Follow me,’ she had said as she clipped off down the corridor. ‘You are to start at the bottom. You will be trained on ephemera. Do you know what that means?’
‘No.’
‘Ah!’ said Patricia. And she stopped momentarily to look at Marjorie with a slight, superior shake of the head. ‘It is to do with all that does not last: newspapers, magazines, journals and the like. But I imagine you are too young to fully consider the enormity of all in this world that does not last.’ Patricia glanced at Marjorie.
Marjorie smiled back. You are so very wrong about that, Marjorie thought, smiling pleasantly.
‘You will begin with newspaper clippings. You will assist our patrons with their ephemera requests. You will then progress to magazines and journals, if you prove yourself. After that . . .’ Patricia shrugged. ‘We’ll see,’ she said.
She handed Marjorie a pile of newspaper clippings. It was a collection of articles about last year’s Melbourne Olympic games. Ruby loved the Melbourne Olympics, she thought. On the top of the pile was a photograph of a young woman, her legs and her heart pounding their way to the fulfilment of glory. It was Elizabeth Alyse ‘Betty’ Cuthbert. Australia’s golden girl running into Olympic and Australian history. It was a big year for running that year, thought Marjorie. ‘Do you think she is running to or running from?’ she asked as they both gazed at the photo.
‘She’s running to the finish line. For a gold medal,’ Patricia said. ‘She’s just running.’
‘No one just runs,’ said Marjorie.
*
Marjorie surprised herself. She really liked her job. She wasn’t making books on a printing press like she always imagined but she was surrounded by them. And that was something. She
found too that she could hide away from everybody for hours within all that paper. For days and days and weeks and weeks. And she didn’t have to talk hardly at all. And when she did it had to be hushed, slow, weighty talk. Which suited her just fine. Because paper is heavy. Even newspaper and magazine paper, if it is piled high enough, can be very heavy. And ephemera is so much more substantial than anybody ever realised. Except Marjorie. She soon realised. She fitted right in with this job because she appreciated the dead weight of impermanent things. So, Marjorie worked away – caring for fleeting, fragile, dead weight ephemera. There in the city.
And the city whispered into the air all around Marjorie as she watched it out of her tram window; out of her library window; out of Aunty Agnes’s lounge room window. It brushed against this girl as she walked all alone through the midday lunchtime crowded pavements, or through the after dinner, early night, silent suburban streets. It sighed as Marjorie sighed. It spoke so kindly to her about such things as burnt, dead sisters, or mothers who preferred the sweet treasures of madness to her daughters, or a boy who would now be stranded and bereaved, slowly dying of thirst as he wrote yet another letter that would be crushed unread into a handbag before being taken out and smoothed down and laid against a cheek and breathed slowly in – then jammed neatly, unread, with all the rest of them in the bottom of an old brown suitcase at the bottom of Aunty Agnes’s old brown wardrobe, as the boy clung by himself in the star-littered dark to a relic of an old blue bench. But even though it talked so softly, this city could see how hard it was for Marjorie to listen, this city could see that such things as it had to whisper were hard to hear. And even though that was not what this city had in mind, this is what Marjorie did. She grafted bits of this place on. She mortared and stacked. Carefully plastering layers of it all over the place. Until she was encrusted. Until she was a slight, delicate, pretty, distraught thing – a piece of battered reef – a coral skeleton that had caked and iced its ethereal beauty all over those wheat bags. Until Marjorie’s burden of wheat bags was practically invisible, non-existent to anybody who didn’t know what was going on. Until the average Joe Blow could have been mistaken for thinking Marjorie had forgotten all about the Mallee and what could go on there.
A proper graft needs careful attention, though. It needs to be done precisely. It needs to be watched for a long time. There is no place for sloppy, slapdash grafters on a farm. Grafts will turn on those sorts of grafters. They will protest and wither and die and drop off – just to prove a point. And encrusting and encasing someone is no different. So it took Marjorie more than a year to do all that grafting.
But time taken doesn’t bother a city. What are years to a city? And what Marjorie didn’t realise was this city knew more about grafting than she did. It knew that grafting is a charity. It knew that a grafted thing is a healing thing – a graft lets things grow again. So the city helped Marjorie. For months and months. Streets and laneways, patient and gentle, whispered to her.
‘I found another art gallery hidden down a back street in the city today,’ Marjorie might say as she flung patent leather shoes and handbags at her bedroom door.
‘Did you, dear? You mother always loved the art,’ Aunty Agnes might reply – dauntless in the face of Marjorie’s anticipated hostility.
‘More books?’ Aunty Agnes might ask, indicating the ever-increasing pile wobbling away in Marjorie’s bedroom.
‘Don’t say anything about anybody!’ Marjorie might warn.
‘Look at all that rain – look at all that grass,’ Marjorie might comment as she watched the men in Aunty Agnes’s street cossetting their particular bit of nature strip with its perfect push-mower surface.
And Aunty Agnes watched as Marjorie’s patent leather high-heeled shoes transported her anywhere she wanted to go in this city. As the city paraded its footy grand finals and its spring racing carnivals and headed for the magic of Myer Christmas window displays. As all those soft summer days courteously gave way to cool summer nights. Not like the Mallee, where the summer night leered and jeered at you from outside your totally ineffective bedroom window and blasted you with its dark, eighty-degree midnight heat. Yes, this city knew what Marjorie needed. And Aunty Agnes did her best to see that this job and this city were as mild and as kind to Marjorie over the next few years as they could be, given what she had done.
But it wasn’t all like that. There was that particular bit of the city that dragged at Marjorie at the mental hospital. Try as she might, Aunty Agnes couldn’t do anything about that. That bit of the city was like the Mallee. It showed no mercy. It was gristly and soggy, that bit of the city. It was sullen all around that mental hospital and it sucked at Marjorie and tried its level best to pull her into it. Because it knew that there were many times when Marjorie would have been quite happy to be pulled in. To be pulled under. To stay there. It was the still, silent sea of her waiting salt lake – shallow and stinking and biding its time until you stepped onto it. When its devious crystalline beauty would break under your feet and turn into a sucking black stinking morass. Grasping at you with its dank air, its lack of dust, its beautiful cast-iron bars, its beautiful lush gardens, its beautiful wrought-iron fence.
Marjorie went every month to the mental hospital. (So she said.) Month after month. Like going to confession. She should have gone with Bill when he came down to visit Elise – like Aunty Agnes did. She should have gone to the hospital once a week – when Bill wasn’t there – like Aunty Agnes did. Like she had gone once a week, sandwiched between Ruby and Pa in the back seat of the car, to mass at the dusty little Catholic church in the Mallee. But once a month was better than nothing. And before once a month it had been nothing.
Aunty Agnes, though, went every week without fail. ‘Perhaps it would help if you came along, dear,’ Aunty Agnes had suggested early on. ‘You might be able to settle a bit if you saw her.’
Settle a bit? I’m not a bloody bucket of milk that you want to get the cream off, Aunty Agnes, she thought. But Marjorie was not sharp in her reply to her aunty. She was mild and contemplative. And why wouldn’t Marjorie be? Sheltered as she was now within her encrustations. She felt she could view the world with the serene detachment of an under-the-salt-water organism from where she was now – without having to actually touch any of it. ‘No, thank you very much, Aunty Agnes. It is not convenient for me right now,’ she said. ‘Dad can go with you when he comes down again.’
‘Your father keeps asking if you have been to see your mother yet. What should I tell him?’ asked Aunty Agnes after a number of her lonesome faithful weeks of visits.
And Aunty Agnes must have caught Marjorie at low tide. Those encrustations must have been exposed to the air and dangerous. ‘Tell him to bloody come down here and see her for himself! Tell him to do it! Tell him it’s his job! Bloody hell, Aunty Agnes! Bloody hell!’ Marjorie roared.
The face of her thoughtful and gentle Aunty Agnes turned red at that and crumpled in on itself. It was a sagging pavlova with leaking, syrupy sugar as tears sprang from her gentle old eyes to wind their way down the furrows in her cheeks.
That is a bloody awful job of ploughing they have done there on your face, Aunty Agnes, thought Marjorie as she watched the slow syrupy travel of an old lady’s pain. Those furrows are all over the place like a dog’s breakfast. Marjorie turned away from the wet, crumpled face. She stared out the kitchen door instead, at the Sacred Heart of Jesus with its perpetual bleeding heart. It was giving nothing away – as usual. But Marjorie could see it was sorely tempted today. She could see its index finger itching to break away from catching those drops of blood. Itching to point itself at her and break the seal of confession. You are responsible, Marjorie, those sorrowful eyes were saying. Why do you bother me with your ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned’? The fact is your mother has fallen into temptation and succumbed to the evil of insanity; and your sister threw herself on the pyre. And you failed to stop either of these th
ings happening. What can I do? It is a sin. A mortal sin of omission. And now sins of torment as well, Marjorie?
‘Do you know anyone who has committed a mortal sin, Aunty Agnes?’ asked Marjorie.
‘Of course not, dear,’ said Aunty Agnes.
Oh yes you do! thought Marjorie. And the Sacred Heart of Jesus won again. Because it showed Marjorie that pain and suffering needed to be looked at square in the face when you were a mortal. And Marjorie had to admit that her best opportunity to look pain and suffering squarely in the face was at that mental hospital with her mother.
Or maybe it was because she had already stared someone else’s pain and suffering squarely in the face with those tears she caused to spill themselves from the kindly eyes of her Aunty Agnes. Maybe that was what made her do it? Anyway, Marjorie and her encrustations explained things thus: What’s the point of dwelling on your personal blameworthiness and letting it wear you out so that you end up dying early if you are only going to end up in hell for eternity, you and your pile of mortal sins? So, Marjorie started going – once a month only, mind – to the mental institution. On Fridays – the day set aside by any Catholic worth their salt for eating fish, and for the perpetual remembrance of death. She went after work.
‘Are you coming out for drinks after work, Marjorie?’ workmates would ask.
‘No thank you. I am sorry but I have charity commitments I must attend to now,’ Marjorie would say. Except that many times she was lying. Sometimes she just stayed in the city and wandered the comfort of the streets. And she never felt the need to explain to anybody why she lied about this. Neither the boys at work who wanted her to go for drinks nor poor old Aunty Agnes who refused to let up on the belief in a mother’s love to overcome everything bad in the world.
But every now and again, imprecisely, Marjorie would actually visit. Where, at this gristly and soggy place, Marjorie would watch. Marjorie’s dry hard eyes would watch all its crying women with their feeble bunched hankies, their twisted and forlorn hospital dresses, their frightened eyes and their whisperings. Her face would screw up at its stark men with their lifted dribbling chins and their clenched jaws. Their jangling legs and arms. Their useless mutterings. Marjorie wasn’t a shirker, though. She took it upon herself to be responsible for things at these visits. At each of these fitful, sporadic visits Marjorie counted the half-filled, saucerless, teaspoonless cups of lukewarm tea scattered randomly, crouching anxiously on bare wooden tables everywhere in that room where the residents were marshalled to receive their guests. She counted the sensible tin plates with their scrubby supply of stale Arnott’s Milk Arrowroot biscuits. She counted the tables and the sensible chairs. And Marjorie would sort these things out.
Wearing Paper Dresses Page 24
