by Laura Elvery
She sucks at the spit forming around her mouth and utters her question. ‘Is there a nurse?’
The voice of a young man speaks up. ‘I’m Toby. I’m not a nurse. But, Iris, how are you?’
She tries to sit up. The movement reminds her of the office, where she’d seen Marnie. Of the motion that tossed everyone out like rags to leave only the pair of them standing.
‘Marnie?’
‘Is Marnie someone I could call for you?’
‘Oh,’ Iris says, not understanding.
The young man brings his chair nearer to the bed. ‘A good room you’ve got here,’ he says. ‘Some of the other ones feel a bit dingy. They told me you’d wake up soon, so I came right in.’
She tries. ‘Are you …?’
‘I’m here with the My Twentennial Coalition to offer assistance during your recovery.’
Finally, all the queries and secrets are undone. Iris’s understanding is now wide and clear.
It is Oliver.
She reaches a hand out to him. What a strange code of events has led her here: from that textile factory to that office and those crumbs and ants, to these squares of light on the wall. Such tumbling inside and outside today. The alfoil from the lamb, she thinks, might not even be flat on the kitchen bench at home.
‘Oliver! What a turn-up for the books.’
His throat makes a noise and his face turns into a sign Iris doesn’t recognise. She flexes her neck on the pillow then turns back to face him. His red hair is cut fine and neat. She can’t remember what haircut he had when they met during Wages for Sages, but he is beautifully handsome now.
‘You look like you just stepped off a boat. Or out of a painting.’ It’s taking longer to say what she wants but, there, she’s said it.
‘My name is Toby.’ He’s speaking slowly too.
‘Hmmm.’ Iris takes a sip of water. ‘Yes. I remember you.’
He looks towards the door. ‘Iris? Is it okay to call you that? The neurologist will be in soon. You had a fall.’
Marnie had a fall once, Iris recalls, recognising a new sign in this rich and shining place. She saw Marnie fall at the factory.
Iris touches the fabric of a nightgown she’s never seen. She makes a fold at the wrist. ‘Do I pay you?’
The young man beams and his hair is like a golden pelt in the late afternoon. ‘No, ma’am. Fully funded, courtesy of the Minister for Aged Care and Human Services. We’ll help you get back to work as soon as possible.’
‘Oh, I do hope you followed your dreams, Oliver. Are you a poet now?’
‘Sorry, Iris. My name is Toby. But you’ve just woken up, so perhaps you’re a little …’
Absolutely not, Iris thinks. She is no longer dot dot dot.
She glances around for other objects in the hospital room that might have come from Marnie, but none of them means anything to her except Oliver being here, the boy she’d helped with advice as Sage 76938, perhaps having followed his dreams, now reminding her once again of Marnie, of their pair of falls. They are almost together again, at the edge of the world where politicians who are paid to say important things are out of the picture. She and Marnie are panthers, long gone.
Fledermaus
Marlee met Emmett S Ulrich in line at the bakery. She recognised him from the photograph printed on her high school textbook. She stood, frozen, listening to him order a thick-sliced loaf, and she tried to figure out what a man like that was doing in tiny, boring Milford, in the middle of summer.
Marlee studied his face while he counted his money. He had a snowy moustache and goatee and bushy eyebrows. She watched him return the coins to his pocket, frustrated, and pull out a ten-dollar note folded lengthwise. He jabbed it at the air in front of the cash register. He took his change.
On the way to the bakery, Marlee had seen herself reflected in the window of Milford compounding pharmacy. It was the summer after the end of school, and she felt herself peeling away from the cluster of friends who had been so important, but were now dispersing to foreign universities, to P&O Cruises, to the Australian armed forces. In school, Marlee had gone along with everything her friends had done. She’d welcomed it all. When Cassie and Lou had beckoned her into the bathroom stalls at the Bridges Boys’ College social and giggled like it was nothing to drop your knickers and hold a conversation and wee in front of someone else, Marlee had tolerated it. When Alexis and Elleni wanted to know what ecstasy would do to them the night before their Year 11 exams, Marlee, who hadn’t the faintest clue, had been like, Sure, I’ll be your support person, and she’d sat across from them at the picnic table in the park with her finger poised over her phone, having pre-dialled triple zero.
‘Mr Ulrich?’
‘What? Yes?’
‘You’re on my Drama textbook. At school. I know you.’
She told him that she wanted to be an actor. Emmett’s face brightened. ‘Ah, wonderful.’ He pointed to a neenish tart in the glass cabinet and signalled to the bakery girl for two of those.
‘I’m Marlee.’
She mentioned that she’d done well in Drama at Milford State High, and she’d certainly liked it, even if she’d never come top of her class. She had studied his textbook, The Powerful Player, since Year 9, and thought it was brilliant. Emmett asked what she was doing now. Marlee told him about her first failed acting audition down in Melbourne, and that she’d been offered a second one, hoping to get a spot at a university in Brisbane.
‘And what are your chances, do you think?’
No one had ever asked her that question so simply. Chances were handed out, worn through, used up. ‘I hate auditions. I hate how I sound.’
Marlee felt a hand at her elbow. A burly man was pushing through towards the bakery counter, even though there was space on Marlee’s other side. She stepped back. ‘Sorry,’ she said to the man.
Emmett didn’t seem to notice. ‘You know what?’ He held up a finger like he was testing the direction of the wind. ‘I think I could help you.’
Excitement grew in her. Of course you could, she thought but did not say.
‘What if I offered to show you a cracker of an audition piece guaranteed to knock their socks off up in Brisbane? Unusual and frightening in its scope and vigour – and if you like it, well, it’s yours.’ He tossed his hand up towards the sky. A man used to getting lots and giving lots away. ‘Come round one evening. Would that be okay with your folks?’ He was in Milford for the week, at his beach house.
‘It’d be fine,’ she said, knowing she would never tell them. Alexis and Elleni would be proud.
‘It’s about,’ Emmett said, fanning out his fingers, ‘bats.’
Before Marlee could answer, the girl at the bakery said, ‘Here you go,’ and handed over Marlee’s salad sandwich.
Emmett said, ‘My wife, Geraldine, is here on holidays as well. I’ll make sure she’s there, too, so you won’t feel strange.’
‘I won’t feel strange,’ Marlee said, recalling the famed Ulrich triad of exercises in Chapter 1 designed to help an actor seek out and inhabit the soul of a character.
‘Well, then,’ Emmett said, hugging his Vienna loaf close like a newborn. He passed Marlee one of the neenish tarts and wrote his address on the white paper bag. ‘Neither will I. Tuesday?’
She watched him walk up the street. She caught a glimpse of herself in the bakery window and she was astonished.
*
Marlee dashed through the house to the back deck and found her brother asleep on the daybed. The sweat from Damien’s head blotted a circle on the cushion. Marlee heard the neighbour’s chickens shuffling around the yard.
‘Oi. Wake up.’
She told Damien who she’d met, knowing he wouldn’t understand the significance, or her excitement, or her relief that finally she could stop with all the Lady Macbeth and Blanche DuBois and Meryl Streep
in The Iron Lady typed up on paper in her bedroom, none of which had been successful in Melbourne. Perhaps this new piece would be perfect for her.
‘Sit up. It’s about bats.’
‘Bats? No one cares about bats.’
‘You don’t know anything about them,’ Marlee said.
‘Indeed I do.’ Her brother rubbed his hand across the back of his neck and wiped the sweat down his shorts.
‘Fine. What?’
‘During mating season, the males shine up their testicles so the females can see them from ages away.’
She kicked Damien’s feet under the daybed. ‘Stop being a sexual predator.’
Her brother screwed up his face, like, Sis, as if that’s something I can control.
*
On Tuesday, Geraldine met Marlee at the front gate of a timber house on the edge of Milford. There were palm trees in the front yard and yellow lights strung across the verandah.
Geraldine pressed a hand to her chest. ‘Geraldine. Lovely to meet you, Marlee. Did you find the place okay?’
Marlee listened for signs of Damien’s car in the distance, hooning back home. She nodded. ‘I had a friend in primary school who lived out here, by the beach.’
Geraldine led her around the side of the house, where light from the windows in the second floor illuminated the grass. She put a glass of red wine into Marlee’s hand. ‘I’m assuming you’re eighteen. Emmett said you must be.’
‘Almost. Yeah, just about.’
Geraldine grinned, turning away to poke at things on the barbecue.
When Emmett appeared at the top of the stairs, he was dressed in a white shirt and black pants with a scrap of red fabric tied at the waist, like a pirate. He was studying a piece of paper.
‘Hello, Marlee,’ he called.
He eased himself off the bottom step, as though one leg was troubling him, then took the wine bottle and filled a glass.
‘We bought these in Florence,’ Geraldine said. ‘The glasses – years ago, before we got this house. Before we realised we couldn’t have children because we were barren.’
So little happened in Milford. So few adults talked to Marlee in a way that placed her at the centre of their confidence, of their stories. She leant against the table, taking in the potted plants that jotted the edge of a white gazebo. There was lawn the whole way round the house, which sat islanded in the centre. Low fences marked all four sides. Bright towels were draped on the clothesline. A dish of birdseed sat on an upturned bucket. The trees shifted cooler air across her face and neck. She took it all in, happily.
‘So,’ Emmett said, ‘this script came about years ago when we were living in a town in Western Australia that had been overrun by bats. Beautiful but grotesque creatures; no one could sleep. Not during the day, when they make a lot of noise. Not at night, when they make the most noise. Crying and yelling and howling, practically twenty-four hours. An enormous amount of food, too – gorging themselves then shitting on everything. And during mating season, it’s even worse.’
Geraldine faced Marlee and snipped the tongs together. ‘Orgies, and whatnot.’
‘Oh.’ Marlee sipped on the wine and decided that she didn’t like it, but thought it was important to keep drinking while she listened to Emmett.
‘I determined to write a piece about it. I intended it to be part of something longer, a three-act play, about the inhabitants of a town – coincidentally, not unlike Milford in character and landscape – descending into madness over the course of a year. But, Marlee, the play never let me in, and at first I couldn’t start and then I could. But I couldn’t finish …’ Emmett plunged his hands left and right through the air as though he was shifting items between baskets. ‘But “Nothing will come of nothing”, and all that, and it remains inachevé. Here. A monologue from the perspective of the mayor’s daughter, who is the only person left in town—’
Geraldine interrupted to hand out plates of chicken and blackened sausages. Marlee took the paper.
‘Because Marguerite decides to stay and fight the bats, and in doing so …’ They sat. Marlee laid her serviette across her lap. ‘She experiences a sort of … metamorphosis,’ Emmett finished.
‘I’d love to try it,’ she said. ‘I’d love to perform something they’ve never seen before.’ Marlee waited for her hosts to start eating.
‘So who beat you in Drama?’ Emmett asked. ‘Who took out the top award?’
Marlee gnawed on a chicken wing. ‘Kelsey Bridgeman-Ferguson.’
Emmett thumped the table. ‘I don’t like the sound of her one bit.’ He laughed at his own theatrics. ‘Every year?’
Marlee nodded.
Geraldine made a sympathetic sound and straightened the shawl around her shoulders.
‘Kelsey wrote a really great essay,’ Marlee said, licking marinade off her fingers, ‘about the use of the proscenium in Antigone, and we had a replacement teacher in third term, and he lapped it up. It’s a small school …’ She trailed off.
Geraldine patted Marlee’s hand. ‘The same thing happened to me when I was your age.’
Emmett rubbed mosquito repellent into his forearms. Marlee saw scars on his skin like something had been cut out. He saw her looking and scissored two pale fingers together in the dark. ‘Just cancer. And why do you want to be an actor?’
The truth was Marlee felt good about it. About the confidence she got that first time she was on stage at school, and Lou and Elleni and whoever else from class had come up afterwards, like, We Had Absolutely No Idea You Were Good, like that was soooooo good. They didn’t expect it, see, and neither did Marlee.
‘I like becoming someone else. Another person’s skin.’ She speared a sausage. Yep. That was the truth.
‘Marlee, I am certain I can help you. Did you ever read, in my textbook, the chapter about physicalisation and personification of animal forms?’
She nodded, recalling one example Emmett had given – the William Blake poem that had prompted her Year 8 teacher to drape herself in orange and black striped fake fur and prowl the walkway alongside the classroom, responding to her students’ shrieks with ever louder roars until one of the ladies from the office hurried down to tell them that the principal was on his way.
Geraldine topped up her glass. ‘What a lark.’
Marlee watched for bats in the trees above them, but could see none.
Dinner was over. Emmett stopped drinking. Geraldine brought out three bowls and three spoons and a tub of ice-cream that she never served up. She ran a spoon around the inside rim, licked the ice-cream off the spoon upside-down, and replaced the lid after each bite. Geraldine swatted at mozzies. They dragged chairs onto the grass, away from the table. They would be Marlee’s audience.
‘Just a run-through,’ Emmett said. He straightened himself, tugging at the collar of his white shirt.
Recently there’d been bushfires west of Milford, and further south and east, but there in the Ulrichs’ holiday house, Marlee felt only the dampness of the air, its warm touch. As a child, Marlee thought the fires really were a whole other season, part of the order of things. School holidays, Christmas, New Year’s, sweaty afternoons slung across the couch watching cricket on the TV – and bushfires. A few years ago, Marlee and her father had driven west to visit her cousins. Marlee had watched smoke on the horizon. The fires had unsettled her, made her afraid.
‘Those nerves, there, Miss Marlee?’ Emmett asked, his voice gentle.
‘I’m fine. Just reading it.’ Marlee waved the script in their direction.
Emmett gestured widely to the empty space on the grass. ‘Some nerves – not too many – but a measure of nerves can be just it, though, can’t they? The thing you need.’
In that case, yes, Marlee thought. She had a measure of nerves.
‘Let’s see you, then,’ Geraldine said.
Marlee
would need to coax Damien back out here soon to collect her. In the morning, her mother would offer up a similar story to this one, from her own childhood, and would remind Marlee how careful she needed to be about time slipping away. About the impermanence of youth and the great, dull, unrelenting stain of longevity. Marlee felt invigorated in this secluded yard near the ocean with these people who would surely become her benefactors, her people to worship. Like those teenagers from Lichfield, but less like a cult. All this work in the muggy summer evening. She looked up, and imagined bats in the branches.
*
The audition was five days away. Marlee shut the door to her room and untacked the monologue from her corkboard. She paced back and forth between her desk and the window. In her guise as Marguerite, she rewarded herself with a swig from a carton of chocolate milk every four turns of the room.
The night is engraved with howls and cries as sharp as teeth.
Foul cackling comes shiny black through window cracks.
On her bed lay the in-progress costume. She’d looked online, but the made-in-China ones were the type her friends would wear on Halloween, all pleather dark as coal and stitched-up corsets and knee-high boots, but no judgement, Alexis and Lou. Instead, Marlee cut up her mother’s umbrella and sewed the pieces onto the long sleeves of a black top. In Emmett’s monologue, Marguerite herself became ‘wet-nosed’ and developed ‘starry-pointed ears’. On her pillow was the feathery hood Marlee was constructing. It had furry ears and a ribbon to tie beneath her chin.
Marlee’s mother was posing one of her hypotheticals. In the kitchen, both their faces were a mess of shadow and glare from the pendant light above the breakfast bar. Marlee had her mother’s dead-straight brown hair, as coarse as a horse’s tail. Her mother squeezed out a dishcloth and set it like a rosette beside the sink while she formulated her question:
Suppose you gave birth to a son and then you had a daughter and they gave you nothing but joy and made you nothing but proud. And they won prizes and were nice to their grandparents and taught themselves how to poach eggs just the way their mother liked. But then they grew up, which you knew was coming, but still it took you by surprise one day, as though someone rang the doorbell and yelled Delivery! and the delivery wasn’t a bouquet of tulips from your depressed ex-husband but two teenagers who pretended to barely know you but wanted to live in your house. Suppose those teenagers gave you grief for not knowing the difference between Google and Facebook, or for accidentally sending a donation cheque to a politician who was actually anti-gay rights, neither of which made you a bad person. And hypothetically you had read somewhere that it’s important to give your children wings so they learn how to fly. And one way of giving your children wings might be to stop driving them everywhere and start encouraging them to pick a career that might make them some actual, human money.
