The Children's Bach

by Helen Garner

  ‘Have you been to America, Philip?’ said Vicki.

  ‘The sort of singer who lounges across a glass piano,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘I like to have tortellini of a Friday,’ said Philip.

  ‘She was wearing these daggy flares,’ said Elizabeth, ‘with embroidered insets.’

  ‘I got my hand jammed between two speaker boxes,’ said Philip. ‘My finger burst like a sausage.’

  ‘You know?’ said Vicki. ‘One of those horror movies where she drives up to this house and gets dismembered?’

  ‘I got to Reno on the bus at eight o’clock in the morning,’ said Philip. ‘People were stumbling about the streets in full evening dress.’

  ‘She had all the colour and dynamism of a parsnip,’ said Elizabeth. ‘You could not by any stretch of the imagination drum up feelings of sisterhood for her.’

  ‘We’ve got a rabbit in a cage,’ said Arthur.

  ‘I walked in to our first gig,’ said Philip, ‘and they were sticking red cellophane over the lights. I thought, Oh no.’

  ‘I went through centuries of torture,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I’d emerge exhausted from the Crusades and the Black Death only to realise that I still had to drag myself through the entire Spanish Inquisition. I never touched it again.’

  ‘They only cost twenty-five dollars,’ said Vicki, ‘so I bought two pairs.’

  ‘Does anyone want more spaghetti?’ said Athena.

  Dexter got up and cranked open a tin of pears.

  ‘Sing something,’ said Poppy to Elizabeth. ‘Sing ‘‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’’.’

  ‘Oh, not that,’ said Philip.

  ‘You do the come-ah come-ah,’ said Elizabeth to Philip.

  They sang. Billy flung himself about in Dexter’s arms, loopy, with rolling eyes. Their rhythm was solid, they slid their eyes sideways to meet, and smiled as if to mock each other for their unerring harmonies. Athena saw they were professionals. The piano is such a lonely instrument, she thought: always by yourself with your back to the world. The music, thought Dexter irritably, is American music. He remembered Dr A.E. Floyd’s quavering voice on the radio: ‘Some people pronounce it Purcell: that’s an Ameddicanism.’ The song ended. ‘Now we’ll sing,’ said Dexter. He put down Billy, who wandered away; he made Arthur come and stand beside his chair, and they sang ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. Arthur had the long song word-perfect. He stood to attention and threw back his head on the high notes. Vicki watched with a cold eye. ‘I suppose,’ thought Elizabeth, ‘that he is trying to keep something alive.’ It embarrassed her to see the righteous set of Dexter’s mouth between verses: she looked away.

  Drunk on performance, Dexter hardly let a pause fall before he cried, ‘And now I’ll sing ‘‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’’ . . . And pour contempt on awhaw-hawl my pride,’ he bawled. He drew breath and looked around him, smiling, with tear-filled eyes, his right arm still extended in its melodramatic curve. No-one spoke. Poppy turned a page.

  ‘Mind if I sing another stanza?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Vicki. ‘I do. Hymns are boring.’

  Had anyone ever crossed Dexter before? Had anyone? He jerked back as if he had been struck. His chair splintered under him and he saved himself only by flexing his legs and grabbing the corner of the table with one hand.

  The gin bottle was empty.

  ‘Why was that teenager so rude to that man when he was singing?’ said Poppy on the way home.

  ‘Who knows,’ said Philip.

  ‘But I like the mother,’ said Poppy. ‘Athena’s perfect, isn’t she.’

  ‘Perfect – you reckon?’ said Philip.

  Elizabeth looked at him. ‘She’d have to be, to live up to the name.’

  ‘The goddess of war,’ said Philip.

  ‘I didn’t mean that perfect,’ said Poppy.

  ‘Of war and needlecraft,’ said Elizabeth.

  *

  It was a grey rabbit. It had no name and its life was not a happy one. When Athena’s parents came to visit and saw it crouched in the old chook pen half buried in Virginia creeper, her father said, ‘What the hell are you keeping that for?’

  ‘Dexter thought it would be nice for the boys,’ said Athena.

  ‘What would he know about rabbits. Knock it on the head. Wring its neck. Flaming pests.’

  ‘At least in the cage by itself it can’t breed,’ said Athena’s mother.

  One morning Athena and Vicki lowered it into a deep cardboard carton with grass in the bottom and a teatowel over the top, and put the box on the back seat of the car and drove it out through Footscray and down the highway.

  ‘We’ll have to get far enough away from civilisation so there won’t be any feral cats,’ said Vicki.

  ‘I have to be back for the boys,’ said Athena. ‘I didn’t mean to come this far out.’

  ‘There’s heaps of time,’ said Vicki. ‘We can get fish and chips. Did you bring any money? Aren’t we near the sea? Go down the side road.’

  There was thick grass at the verge, and a brown dam fifty feet inside the fence. Vicki knelt up on the seat and lifted the teatowel off the box. ‘We should have got someone to kill it. Can Dexter kill things?’

  ‘He killed a chook once. A dog bit the back of it right off and it was full of maggots. He held it down on a log and chopped its head off. He went white.’

  They dragged the box out of the car and laid it on its side in the grass, but the rabbit would not come out. They stood waiting. The wind combed the surface of the dam into fine ridges and raised the hair on their arms.

  ‘Is he still in there?’ said Vicki. She gave the box a tap with her toe. ‘Come out, come out.’

  They began to giggle.

  ‘I feel sick,’ said Athena.

  ‘Tip the box up.’

  ‘I can’t. You.’

  They were convulsed with laughter. Vicki stamped her foot. Together they seized the carton and tilted its mouth to the ground. The rabbit, its ears laid back and its head withdrawn into its torso, slid towards the air. It dropped out, they whisked the box away, and it crouched shuddering between tussocks, under the huge blank sky.

  *

  He should have rung up first, but he didn’t have the number or the last name, and anyway that wasn’t the way he did things. The back of the house was shabby, and the jasmine, whose smell he remembered from the night visit, seemed the only thing holding it together, but someone had already been working in the garden and had left neat piles of weeds all along the path to the lavatory. A row of children’s tracksuit pants, frayed and dripping, hung on the line, and the bins stood with bricks on their lids at the foot of the concrete steps. All the doors and windows were open.

  He made a lot of noise going in, to warn her, but the music – an orchestra, a cello – was on so loudly that she wouldn’t have known if an army had marched in the back door. The passage was cool; a telephone sat on the lino. He stopped at the door through which the music poured. She was lying on her back on the floor with her eyes shut, her knees bent and her arms spread out. One foot kept the beat and her torso and her head rolled from side to side. Her face flickered and blurred like that of someone making love: a laugh relaxed into a smile, then into a vagueness as her head turned; she took a gasp of air and let it out, and all the while she rolled in time to the music, small rolls this way and that, as if she were floating on water and being lightly bobbed by a current.

  He turned and walked quickly back to the kitchen, and sat on a chair and waited. The piano was open but he did not touch it straight away. He was holding his breath with embarrassment and curiosity.

  She heard him out in the kitchen when the music stopped. She heard him go to the piano and plink with two fingers a tune whose name she did not know but which she had surely heard from the radio in Vicki’s room. ‘Tsk,’ she said. ‘He would play that kind of stuff.’ She stepped into the passage, thinking herself safe and superior; but he struck one quiet chord, a wide blue one, a chord from the kind
of music she knew nothing about and was too tight to play; she stood still, listening, and he left a silence, and then he resolved it.

  How fresh and pretty he looked, sitting at her piano in his clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the top button fastened! She said, ‘You look gorgeous!’

  He laughed and looked down. ‘What was that you were listening to?’

  ‘Haydn. It’s in C major. Isn’t that supposed to be the optimistic key? I could never understand why I always felt so cheerful after I’d heard that concerto, till I thought what key it was in.’ She blushed: what an idiotic generalisation. Surely musicians were beyond such crassness. Nerves cause chatter. Least said soonest mended.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere?’ he said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just out. Look at things.’

  ‘Wait till I get my bag.’

  She stood in the middle of the bedroom and looked at the rows of books. She read novels fast, lying for hours on her side holding the book open on the other pillow; they blurred into one another and were gone. Great passions are ridiculous, she thought, although it is terribly cathartic to have felt. She imagined that Philip had indulged in sexual perversions with strangers. Every man she met was inferior to Dexter, but only, perhaps, because she had chosen that this should be the case.

  He would have liked to move around her house and examine all its icons, or to hang over the front windowsill with her and make remarks about the dress and gait of passing pedestrians; but he wanted also to get her outside and on to his own turf, into public places where no-one was host and no-one guest, where everything had a price, where he could get what he wanted, pay for it, and keep moving in long, effortless, curving afternoons unsnagged by obligation or haste: the idea of destination meant almost as little to him as it did to Billy.

  ‘I’m supposed to be on my way to work,’ he said.

  ‘I thought you only worked at night.’

  ‘Something came up.’

  ‘Are you worried about getting there on time?’

  ‘No. I’m just worried about being comfortable.’

  ‘Did you say “comfortable”?’ said Athena.

  ‘Yes, I did. But I didn’t mean it.’

  That was his way of talking. When she pressed him he was not there. Like most women she possessed, for good or ill, a limitless faculty for adjustment. She felt him give; she let herself melt, drift, take the measure of his new position, and harden again into an appropriate configuration. There was something to be got here, if only she could . . .

  In the street there was a dusty summer wind, a morning not quite hot enough. If they walked shoulder to shoulder, if they sat side by side, it was in order to become the world’s audience instead of being obliged to perform their personalities for each other. They bought tickets, they travelled. Their mutual curiosity was intense, but oblique. They watched one another witnessing the world: how two fat businessmen examined as merchandise the girl who pouted and pretended to read the paper in the cafe window with her skirt up round her thighs; how the waitress in Myer’s mural hall crossed the vast room with both arms high above her head and a dirty tablecloth hanging from each hand; the hippy boy on the tram who bought a ticket to St Kilda and announced to the other passengers, ‘I must go to the sea. To the ocean’; the girl whose lips moved as she read a book called Tortured for Christ. The world divided itself for them, presented itself in a series of small theatrical events. ‘Now,’ said a woman to a man at the bus-stop, ‘I’ll tell you the whole story. See the thing was that . . .’

  What was the thing? They pointed out these eventlets to each other. They did not discuss or pass judgment, but defined themselves against the attitudes revealed by the unwitting characters in these dramas. They wanted to know each other less than they wanted to agree. Harmony! To be each other. They examined clothes in shop windows.

  ‘You could wear that jacket,’ said Philip.

  ‘I’m afraid of looking like a small man,’ said Athena.

  ‘I’m afraid of looking like an ugly woman.’

  The waiter had a face like an unchipped statue. He served them in a way Philip provoked in many waiters: with delicate sideways movements he swooped the cups on to the table, and shone into Philip’s eyes a smile of tender regard.

  ‘Where does the other boy go all day?’ said Philip.

  Athena had to make an effort. People seemed to feel a duty to question her about this. ‘To a centre. They come for him every morning in a taxi. But only during the term. He’s with us all summer. Dexter and Vicki have taken him to the pool today.’ Was that enough?

  ‘Do you work, or anything? Not that I –’

  ‘I used to. I used to –’

  Two girls pushed aside the fly curtain and clacked into the cafe. They wore ear-rings like tombstones and blackish lipstick that made them look as if they had been sucking blood. Their legs were fleshless.

  ‘Look,’ said Athena. ‘Look at those two. I bet they are the kind of girls you like.’

  One of them stopped and leaned over the table.

  ‘Hi, Philip!’ she said, with her shoulder across Athena’s face. ‘Remember me?’

  Her spiky hair gleamed with gel; her eyes were dots. Philip ducked his head and turned up his wrinkling smile to her, and she passed on, satisfied. She and her friend arranged themselves at the next table, well within Philip’s eye-line. To Athena they looked very young, and rapacious.

  ‘Sorry I couldn’t introduce you,’ said Philip. ‘I’ve forgotten . . .’

  ‘Are you famous?’ said Athena. She laughed.

  Philip’s afternoon lurched in its tracks, and righted itself. ‘Better ask Elizabeth that,’ he said.

  *

  Poppy vacuumed the living room carpet and stacked the newspapers under the sink. When Elizabeth came they would go into Campion and buy her school textbooks secondhand. Poppy could not understand the mentality of kids who underlined their books and wrote stupid comments in biro: she longed for brandnew books, their glossy modern pages and luscious smell, but there was no point in going on about it. Even her uniform was secondhand. At the end of last term, Philip took her to the new school, Clever Girls’ High as he insisted on calling it, even out loud on the tram, and they were guided to a great big barn with no windows and a concrete floor where other girls’ mothers, in aprons and tight perms, helped them sort through mounds of grey pleated skirts, gingham dresses and red jumpers, looking for the right size, which in Poppy’s case was so extremely small that she was ashamed, and her shame mingled with the admiration and vanity she always felt at being in public places with her father, who was different from everyone else’s, younger-looking and not a dag, and he talked slowly and quietly to people, looking them right in the eye and not doing false laughter with workers like other fathers she had seen. There was, on the trestle table, one last pleated skirt small enough, and Philip got his hand on it a split second before the mother of the only other very short girl, who cast at Poppy a glance of complicated camaraderie and relief: now she, not Poppy, would have to buy a new one in a proper shop with mirrors and fitting rooms, and the pleats would still be tacked together round the hem and it would smell clean, not op-shoppy and doggy and wet-jumpery like all the uniforms in this gloomy building with the swinging light bulbs and the canteen price lists still on the wall from the year that had just finished.

  Poppy went into her bedroom and put on the uniform. She did this at least once a day, to practise getting used to it, and because she could not quite believe, from one day to the next, in its extreme ugliness. Worst were the shoes, great black lace-up clod-hoppers with square toes. Would they ever get soft? She stood in front of the mirror in the hall and stared at her brown, stick-like legs and long feet. Elizabeth came in behind her. Her eyes too were drawn to these boat-like extremities. They reminded her of the ankleboots worn by Ant and Bee in a book her mother had read to her. She thought of her mother and the sight of Poppy’s anxiety made her voice tremble.

 
; ‘Head prefect of Mosquito Girls’ High,’ she said.

  Poppy turned round with a crooked smile. She took the bait. ‘I know what!’ she said. ‘Let’s write a story. Let’s start like this: “Things were buzzing at Mosquito Girls’ High”.’

  ‘The headmistress’s name is Miss Queenie Bee,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘And she says to all the girls at assembly, ‘‘If there’s one thing that really bugs me . . .”’

  ‘And no-one wants to be the school swot. Swat, get it?’

  They pranced and frolicked in the hall. Elizabeth got bored with it long before Poppy did.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get this show on the road. Did Shithead leave you any money for the stuff?’

  ‘No,’ said Poppy. ‘He said for you to pay and tell him how much.’

  They sat in the high seats at the back of the bus, and Poppy sank into her book. Up at the front sat a European woman in her forties, dressed in a satin suit and high-heeled shoes as if for an outing. Elizabeth could not work out her relationship to the two men she appeared to be with, who were conversing in the seat opposite. As the bus swung round into Russell Street, one of the men tossed a piece of screwed-up paper on to the high shelf of the woman’s breasts. She looked down very slowly, and very slowly she picked the rubbish off her bosom; she was smiling with humiliation. Elizabeth stood up to walk down the bus to the door, with Poppy stumbling after her, still reading. The woman looked up at Elizabeth as she passed. They held eyes. The woman made the grimace, and Elizabeth returned it: corners of the mouth go down, head tilts to one side, shoulders come up in a shrug: are they worth it? It was a secret showing of badges, of scars. Had Poppy seen? It would contaminate her. But Poppy was finishing a chapter. She kept a grip on Elizabeth’s sleeve and forged down the page with her eyes. Her feet were braced well apart on the jolting floor.

  They found the textbooks and paid for them, but Poppy lingered to admire the blocky reams of paper and the silver bulldog clips clamped into a chain. Elizabeth picked up a handsome bound diary.