by Laura Elvery
A voice came over the PA system. ‘Would the following Year 12 students please come to the office to see Mr Young …’
As each of their names was read out by nice, asthmatic Jackie in the office, Sarah, Monique, Henrietta and Tess set down their tools. Not unusual for one or two students to be summoned. But four – and best friends, at the same time – was deeply curious. Scraps of gossip from their classmates rose around the classroom until Ms Farrell said, ‘All right, that’s enough. Sarah, Monique, Henrietta and Tess? We will clean up your things while you’re gone.’
Ah, Sarah thought. Their teacher, then, knew that they wouldn’t be back.
The principal’s office was down the steps and one building over with gazebos and gardenias around it. Beyond that the groundsman on the ride-on mower droned over scrolls of the green grass, and beyond that was the train station and the occupied freeway. Beyond that: South Bank. Beyond that: Spain.
‘Bye, miss,’ Sarah said to Ms Farrell. She wondered when news of their crime would reach her mother in their apartment, and Henrietta’s father in his glass-walled office overlooking the river, his phone within reach. ‘Miss? We’ll see you at the formal.’
Out the door and down the steps into the courtyard, the girls walked two by two, arms resting on each other’s jacket sleeves or fingers meeting to touch in the swish of their skirts. Sarah recalled the scratch of the balaclava against her cheeks and the hammer in her hand and the wolfish yelp she gave as it swung. Nearing the principal’s office, Tess dug around in her pocket, pulled out a cigarette and dropped it into a bin. Past the canteen, Henrietta took off her glasses and held them up to the light. Here, some years ago, at this corner, she’d bitten into a pie and her final baby tooth had fallen out. Sarah looked at Monique’s red hair that quivered as she strode the final steps to the principal’s office, tendrils of it curling like perfumed Venus, newly born.
Love, Listen
Dad calls, says he wants to take me to the cricket. He’s already bought the tickets, or someone at the nursing home helped him buy them. I take a cool shower, slick my arms and neck with sunscreen, and wait for him outside the ground. Police officers direct traffic as fans spill out of buses and cross the road. Small children wearing team caps bounce on top of their fathers’ shoulders.
At the gate, security isn’t interested in my reasons for smuggling in a litre of Mount Franklin. But I’m pregnant, I say. She is, Dad says. Look. The woman makes a face like she’s never heard of human reproduction and points to the red bins.
Dad leads me through the turnstile. Wally Lewis got pelted with cans at Lang Park twenty years ago, he tells me. He nods towards the other side of the river. Bunch of animals. And now cans and bottles are banned. He raises his voice. Even for pregnant women.
We find our seats and Dad realises his mistake. Row H in the eastern stand. We’ll have shade for three-quarters of an hour and then full sun for the rest of the day. He looks in horror at my belly. He’ll roast in there, he says. I tell him we’ll be fine. If the place doesn’t fill up we can sneak into someone else’s seats. We’ve done it before, I remind him.
We step down the cool concrete that is strewn with rubbish even though the game hasn’t started. Dad helps me past the lift-up seats and holds mine down for me, takes my Woolies bag of provisions minus the Mount Franklin. Love, listen, he says. I’ll get you a drink. I reach for my purse. Nah nah nah, he says. He comes back with bottled water and a tall cool beer, half gone. We cheers our drinks together. Do you know why cans are banned? he asks. Footy fans – that’s why. Back in the eighties, they pelted the refs after they sent Wally Lewis to the sin bin.
I think, let him say what he likes.
We win the toss. Dad isn’t a fan of our new opening partnership. He reckons one of them is perfectly bloody boring, can’t talk to the media, a total nobody, no one knows who his wife is. And the other fella has a spot on one of the morning shows, will spruik anything on television. Cars, deodorant, Aussie beef, bathroom sealant. A real windbag. But with a pull shot like Ponting’s.
Above us the shade slides away and the sun swings over our shins, but I don’t acknowledge it. The baby gives three good kicks and his foot ripples beneath my palm. Dad knocks off the foam of a second beer and taps our Row H tickets on the seat in front. How’s our little tiddler doing in there, he asks. I rub my belly. Oh, he’s loving it, I say. Listening to the crowd. Snug as a bug.
Love, listen. Dad points. See up there?
Dad leans in close, takes a sip. Fixes me with his stare. Yours truly, he says, darting his thumb to his chest, hit three sixes in a row all the way up there.
I play along. I say, Way up there? I shield my eyes. I let air out through my lips. That’s pretty high, I say.
He grins and adds, Three balls to go, last over of the day. Won the match. Straight drives – bam, bam, bam. Clean as a whistle. Right over Markson’s head, the tiddler. Almost felt sorry for him. God, you should have heard the crowd. I took the middle stump as a trophy, as you know. They used to let you do that. Built that box frame for it in the lounge room.
Dad gulps the rest of his beer. In the seats beside us, a father and son have been paying attention. The father’s smile is fixed, polite, unchallenging. Dad cocks his head to one side. It’s true, he tells the small boy. Me.
Dad makes them stand when I need to ease past to go to the toilet. Out of the sun, beneath the concrete structure, the shade is heavy. My belly resting on a bathroom sink, I fill my hands with water and submerge my face. I am cool again and wonder how on earth I’ll want to return to my seat. Dad will have gotten in with the father and son. Stuck out his hand. I’m Lawrie, he’d say. Used to play here myself. Tonight at the nursing home Dad will start to tell the other blokes about the boy’s favourite player, and have to make up a name because he’ll have forgotten.
Lining the walls of the stadium’s underbelly are tall tables where beer-drinkers step from foot to foot and talk about this game, another game, the next game they’ll come to. Behind them, plaques are fixed to the walls. When I was little, Dad would take my photo beside his plaque every time we visited. He nailed the photos to our lounge room wall next to the middle stump from the Markson match. Me hugging a stuffed rabbit. Me in my togs come straight from swimming. Me, just gone thirteen, my face dotted with acne that I couldn’t hide, my face lowered. Don’t put them up, I begged him. Love, listen, he said. You’ve got to be proud.
I go for a wander and locate the plaque beside the steel pole painted with 33A. I consider taking a selfie, or asking one of the drunks to take one for me. Instead I touch a finger to his name: Lawrence ‘Ripple’ Rivers. I touch a hand to the baby. I hope to feel another kick through warm water, through membrane, through heat and tight skin.
Back to our row of seats and Dad is telling the father and son a story about me, at primary school, being tiny, leading the band. A nice enough memory, anyway, and the other father is smiling. Nothing embarrassing. Dad had wanted to come, I remember. He’d wanted to fold him himself into a front-row chair in our hall and lead the applause that day, all those years after he’d retired from cricket. But he’d been invited to share his story at an awards ceremony. Mum only told me afterwards. He wasn’t there at all.
Dad tells me, Like a fly in a pickle jar you were. He zig-zags a hand through the air.
A cheer flares beneath the yellow sun. A straight drive, perhaps.
I remember, he says.
Dots and Spaces
The announcement came from the Honourable Stuart Ryder MP to a press room that was mostly empty on account of the AFL grand final. As Minister for Aged Care and Human Services, he explained that Australia faced an ageing population on an unprecedented scale. Never before had there been such a large population of elderly people, and with so much to offer the young. An untapped resource of wisdom.
Those in need of the pension could apply to be ‘Sages’ as part of the
newly legislated Old-Age Pension (Wages for Sages) Amendment Act. Amid soaring unemployment, amid the revocation of veterans’ benefits and bulging hospital waiting lists, Ryder had little time for questions.
‘No, it isn’t at all like Work for the Dole,’ he told one reporter. ‘At the moment we’re pretty sold on Vigour and Rigour. Or Grey Therapy.’ He chuckled. ‘Next.’
‘Minister, might some people see this initiative as exploitative?’
Ryder glared at the reporter with the flimsy hair and steely eyes. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘this country is great enough to recognise the contributions of its elderly, their wealth of knowledge, their advice to be passed down to younger generations, who are eager to understand the world. Many elderly Australians want to stay working. Retirement and leisure just aren’t for them. Would the bleeding hearts of this country deny them their right to work?’
*
In the happiest week of her life Iris had been with Marnie, who had finally decided to pack up the things in the house where her late parents had lived for forty-five years. Iris had laid Marnie’s mother’s knick-knacks out on the lounge room floor, zipping them into plastic sandwich bags to donate to the church fete. The little dioramas made no sense to Iris: a frog asleep on a picnic bench clinked next to a thumb-sized china cup and saucer. Marnie’s father had kept a yellow teddy bear whose ears were rubbed free of fur. He’d left behind a green-black emu egg high up on a shelf. Iris put her eye to the hole in the egg where the insides had been sucked away, and Marnie touched Iris’s hair on her way to the garage, where the scent of sawdust was in the air. They wrapped goblets in thin pillowcases and taped boxes shut. They toasted Marnie’s parents on the back lawn. They ate vanilla slice for dessert. Later, Iris watched the ceiling fan above their bed. She slept well, and in the morning they slid wedding photos and honeymoon photos and christening photos out of their brass frames and arranged them across the carpet in a golden, faded timeline.
Marnie said, ‘No one gets a life like that anymore,’ and Iris laughed because Marnie was always so serious and could never see, the way Iris could, all the wonderful things the pair of them would do together.
But now, all these unspent lives ricochet around inside Iris’s body, separate from Marnie, who is still, in Iris’s mind, fifty-two years old with a slick of custard on her thumb, bumping the microwave shut with her elbow.
*
Iris pours milk into her teacup, then boiling water, stirring, letting the tea bag steep. She slices potatoes and rests them in water. She uncovers the lamb left over from last night, keeping the alfoil smooth and in one piece so she can fold it up to use again later. She walks to the train alone.
Now assigned to Firm Data Firm, Iris gets the same amount of money in her pension as she received when she was part of Wages for Sages. Back then, her thoughts and advice for young people were available on the wagesforsages.gov.au website. Identified only as Sage 76938, Iris was one of more than ninety thousand Sages across the country saving the government millions of dollars in trained mental-health professionals. Although her colleagues complained about the work, Iris got a thrill every time she sat face to face with a nice young man named Oliver or a nice young woman named Ava. She liked to listen, and she found that her few favourite bits of wisdom (follow your dreams, hang on to your loved ones) seemed to fit most occasions.
Her pension now is the same amount, too, as it had been six months after Wages for Sages, when she was moved to the OzGrandParent scheme, where she was responsible for toddlers while their parents worked, getting around on kitchen tiles on her hands and knees: a table! a horse! a silly puppy-dog! Later, she was a white-aproned, in-home Brush Strokes Cleaner, for one of Minister Ryder’s more short-lived pilot trials. But as she aged, Iris couldn’t keep up with the demands of being a Sage or a toddler’s playmate, or lifting heavy rugs to air over clotheslines. So she was assigned to Firm Data Firm, where she has been for six weeks.
At Firm Data Firm, Iris feels like the universe – her sliver of the universe called Marnie – communicates with her through objects in the office. Iris sits at her standard-issue chair, turns on her computer and clicks on the form 68F. A blank page springs open.
She begins to type.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Iris enters the data, in the exact way their manager, Vic Kloss, taught her. Three dots. One space. Three dots. One space. Ad infinitum. Occasionally Iris gets bogged down by the repetition of it all, but she takes pride in her work ethic, as though it is a pretty object she has carved. She thinks of her mother and her father long gone, who would be proud of this ethic, of this object, too. Each day at Firm Data Firm stunts Iris a bit, but she feels compelled to keep typing.
... ... ... ...
Sometimes the dots look like confetti. Other times like very patient insects, in single file with hungry gaps between them.
‘All right, listen up, you pack of deviants,’ Vic Kloss says, expecting attention as he raps his knuckles on an upturned cardboard box.
Iris glances at docile, beatified Swell Brigham who sits hunch-backed to her left, war-widowed Liccy Emmerich on her right. Vic has a way with words. Vic encourages the old women to bake pies, biscuits and those buttery lemon slices with the coconut icing and leave them in the kitchen for him to paw over at morning tea.
‘I don’t want anyone taking it upon themselves to slack off,’ Vic continues, ‘as they say, to rejoice in this lolly-fingered, giggling-gertie, salad-days operation. Mind that you all keep typing. Mind that you meet your targets. Those dots won’t dot themselves. Those spaces won’t space themselves.’
... ... ... ... ... ...
Iris has always believed in signs. One time at Firm Data Firm it was coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup she was about to wash up. The message from Marnie: I am here for you. Another time it was a ceramic panther the size of a fat baby, perched on top of the fridge. It took Iris the whole day to figure out the wildcat’s message: This won’t last forever. She jotted her messages down in a small notebook as though journalling these words could keep Marnie within her reach.
Marnie is everywhere.
Recognising these talismanic objects at Firm Data Firm crystallises for Iris a sense of purpose. In coming this long distance on the train. On receiving the pension that she manages to stretch twenty-four, sometimes twenty-six, days into the month.
They had both worked at Finegan Textiles: Marnie till her accident and Iris till she lost her job with everyone else when they were told it was closing down. After the accident, Marnie could still mostly walk and talk, and mostly get around okay, but her head injury grew worse. One day, out walking in the poverty of the sunshine and the poverty of their days left together, Iris and Marnie noticed the Finegan smoke stacks puffing and billowing, at work once again.
‘Oompa-Loompas,’ Marnie said, and that was the end of it.
*
Three hours later, Iris spies a trio of ants on the bench in the coffee room. One of the ants stops. The other two keep moving, pulled towards a white plate with lemon slice crumbs beside the sink. Marnie loved animals, even insects, and here is a new sign. Iris’s amazement that Marnie has been able to marionette the movements of actual living creatures is short-lived. Of course she’s managed to do that. Of course Marnie will do whatever she can to get her message through, and now she’s conjured a wisp of air so thin that an ant falls behind its pair of friends and steps out of line.
As Iris returns to her desk, thoughts like flotsam rise to the surface and gather together. All those residuals are suddenly clarified. What would happen, she thinks, if I were to type something different?
Deep in the mid-afternoon slump – dot dot dot space dot dot dot space – Swell and Liccy are slipping tiny pink uppers between their lips to stay awake. Iris sits in her chair, feeling puppeted, feeling herself quake. She can’t afford to lose the money she earns here.
; Still.
Her fingers stroke the keyboard and the usual script comes alive in her mind.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
But she is starving to keep Marnie’s messages alive. She begins to type.
.. . .. .
From Vic’s office, Iris hears a barrage of telephone conversation. Vic’s boss is Mick and Mick’s boss is Dick, all the way up to Minister Stuart Ryder, whose handshake on the day he visited Firm Data Firm was like wet upholstery.
.. .
dot dot space dot
The ground beneath Iris’s feet starts to heave and the employees at Firm Data Firm fade. Iris stands, stumbling, one hand on the keyboard with its worn-down full-stop key, its worn-down space bar.
Marnie.
Swell and Liccy and all the others, and Vic, too, are gone. Of course they’re gone, because they have no role in the history that belongs to Iris and Marnie.
Iris, seventy-one and frail, stills herself while the thin office partitions solidify into brick, and the dark red scattershot carpet desiccates then re-forms as hardwood planks. Enormous looms break through the floor, shedding their cobwebs and shuddering, suddenly polished and alive. The smell of woollen thread and the stannic scent of combing machines and carding machines that used to shunt and roll and terrify. In the centre of the office where a potted fern once stood is Marnie, occupying the body she was in before the accident. Iris fights her way through the warp and weft of this new place.
She drifts towards Marnie with chaotic, desperate ideas to thank her, to love her, to caress the top of her scalp and her once-more perfect left arm. ‘I saw the ants,’ is all Iris can say.
*
A deep breath in and Iris wakes to pink and golden light that appears in squares. She pieces those squares together until she thinks she knows where she is. Iris appreciates the order and safety of hospitals. She liked them when Marnie was treated after her accident. She even liked the hospice where Marnie was finally delivered to wait, thin and wool-soft on a bed, for nine days until she died.
