The Children's Bach

by Helen Garner

  *

  ‘You’re pretty crazy, aren’t you,’ said Philip. ‘I have to go to Sydney. Better come with me. I’ll pay.’

  Perhaps there was a world where people could act on whims, where deeds could detach themselves cleanly from all notion of consequences. Perhaps this never-quite-present Philip might be that mythical creature, a man who was utterly scrupulous and who was yet prepared to do anything. Perhaps she too might never apologise, never explain.

  The taxi came. She looked back as it drove away, and saw Dexter standing on the front verandah in his old tartan dressing gown, bare-shinned, holding the paper in his hand. Arthur was beside him. Their faces, shocked, floated after her like two balloons on a string. One could behave like this only by numbing something, and the skin of the body, as if to compensate, peeled back and laid bare the nerves.

  Even the route he took to the airport was new to her. They went by Melville Road and Bell Street, they came over the rise and rolled down the hill and there it was! the freeway flying away in all directions! Her own city was cracked open for her, as neatly as a nut opens at one tap of a hammer. From the plane window she thought she saw a rabbit tearing madly along beside the runway, but perhaps it was only the shadow of the wing.

  ‘This hotel is a dump,’ said Philip. ‘I love it.’ He turned on the television and lay on the bed. She was ashamed of her motherly body, of the homely uses to which it had been put, of the marks of its unromantic experience. But then, in curiosity, she forgot to think, and when she rolled over, the sky behind her back had turned orange. They slept, they woke. ‘Fucking you,’ he said, ‘is like having a long and interesting conversation.’ His expressions changed, and changed. He laughed, he swore, he became distracted, he closed his eyes: tears fell from his eyes, he wiped them away impatiently. He seized her attention with his eyes, sucked her into his eyes. But late in the morning he drew himself together, neatly took his cock out of her, and got off the bed.

  ‘Now I have to make some phone calls,’ he said.

  Everything was his idea: things he proposed they did, and he paid. He knew where places were and how to get there. He showed her: taxis, a rented Commodore to the ocean in the early evening. He wore a creased suit over a T-shirt, he spent money as fast as he got it, he slid the plastic card across counters with his wrinkling smile, tellers ate from his hand. They walked to the water where in sunny air metal clinked above moored yachts. They passed a beautiful house of Italian squareness and ochreness, and flatness of gravel and barredness of window and thickness of foliage by the gate.

  ‘Will you ever have a house like that, Philip?’

  ‘Nnnn . . . Yes. I will.’

  They walked along the watery edge of the Botanic Gardens; they looked at the nuns, the sails, the eggshells of the Opera House. ‘Patriotic, isn’t it,’ he said.

  She slept, he did not seem to need to. He went to work. She could not imagine what his work entailed, what he did, and tried to piece it together from his random remarks, without showing her ignorance.

  ‘You put everything you can think of in at the beginning,’ he said, ‘and then you start taking bits out.’

  ‘But how can you take bits of music off a tape, once you’ve . . .’

  ‘There are . . .’ Philip was patient. ‘Well – you’ve got twenty-four tracks, right?’

  ‘Oh! You mean they’re all separate! And you can put in and take out!’

  ‘Now you’ve got it. They’re all separate till you put them together on another tape. And that’s called the mix.’

  ‘Dear Arthur. We went’ – she crossed out we and put I – ‘to a famous beach called Bondi. I liked the way the women drivers brought the big buses swooping down the hill to the ocean.’ The tops of old buildings, the upper window frames that I see from the bus are all rotten and peeling. Things rot up here. It must be the sea air. Even the hotel we are staying in is rotting away. I looked down from our window and saw a big rat browsing on a rubbish heap. It is the kind of hotel where people leave their doors open and when you pass a room you see a pair of bare feet sticking out off the end of the bed. In the street the thin girls call to the passing men: ‘Wanna girl?’ In the afternoon a damp wind springs up and tears through the alleys that separate the buildings. Sometimes there is a storm. Clouds hang down in lurid loops, like a sagging ceiling. I have washed my white shirt and hung it in the open window. The wind makes it flap like a ghost: in the damp air things take longer to dry. On the bus I saw a tiny baby. Its mother lifted it to her shoulder without properly supporting its head: up it came, blind, its chin quivering violently. I walk round the city. I look at pictures, I look at the water. I went to a photo exhibition and saw a picture of a black man in New York who had just killed someone: he was lying on a bench at the police station with his head in a woman’s lap, and his face was quite peaceful. I was walking through Martin Place and I said good morning to an old woman who was selling flowers. She looked at me coldly and when I got past her she laughed. She went her her her. She was laughing at me. ‘Don’t forget to rinse the chlorine out of your bathers every time you get back from the baths. When I come home I will bring you a present. Lots of love, Mum.’

  *

  They took the cocaine off the flat part of her nail clippers, in a dogleg lane outside a cinema. They strode out of the lane in step.

  It was late, in the bar, later than the middle of the night. The girl had frizzy hair and black-rimmed eyes. She smiled at him from further round the bar. She got off her stool, left her friends sitting there, and forced her way through the pack. She inserted herself between Athena and Philip, and began to hug his head and kiss his forehead.

  ‘What’s your name?’ said Philip.

  ‘Don’t you remember? Angie. Down at the –’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I remember now.’ He kept smiling at her.

  ‘I’m going to the toilet,’ said the girl. She staggered away.

  He turned straight back to the bar and said, as if to himself, ‘I should’ve followed her out there.’

  ‘What?’ said Athena.

  ‘I said, she probably wanted me to follow her out there. But I’ve, I don’t know how to do that stuff any more.’

  Athena watched the barmaid. She wore a little peaked yachting cap on the back of her head, and flared canvas pants cut very low and laced back and front to show her pubic hair and the cleft between her buttocks. From the hips up she was naked. She had small firm high pale-nippled teenage breasts. Her face was mild and expressionless. She worked efficiently, filling glasses, taking money, not meeting the eyes of those she served. Her breasts were pretty, they swelled on her ribcage, they were a mild swelling under the skin. Athena gazed at them, and at her unemotional face.

  The girl who liked Philip came back from the lavatory. She shoved in next to him again and said in a ringing tone, ‘We were discussing whether that was Kate Fitzpatrick or not, over there.’

  ‘It is her,’ said Athena.

  The girl was not listening. She was turned towards Philip. His eyes flashed, he smiled at her, Athena felt his hard left hand pass round the girl’s back and brush against her own waist.

  ‘Is it her?’ said the girl.

  ‘Must be,’ said Philip.

  ‘Yucky guy she’s with,’ said the girl. ‘Yucky, yucky guy.’

  ‘It might be her father,’ said Athena.

  The girl was kissing Philip again. He did not kiss back. He sat there and let her kiss his forehead and the top of his hair. She had her right arm round his neck.

  ‘Is that your boyfriend over there you were with?’ he said.

  ‘Him? No. Lovely guy. I’ve just been in love with someone for a year. Not him. It’s over.’

  ‘Did he leave you?’ said Philip.

  ‘He was a beautiful guy. I really loved him. But hard. Hard as hard as hard.’

  ‘Who’s the girl you were with?’

  ‘That’s Rowena. My flat-mate.’

  ‘Your flat-mate?’

  ‘Yeah.
Gorgeous, isn’t she.’

  ‘Very pretty.’

  ‘And not only is she very pretty. She is the nicest, loveliest person you could ever hope to meet.’

  She slung her other arm round Athena’s shoulders and bent her knees, so that their three heads were on a level at the bar like friends about to have their photo taken. Her arm was heavy, a dead weight.

  Philip did not send her away. Athena waited for her to go. In a little while she did. Philip stood up and put his arms round Athena from behind. She turned her head and he kissed her on the lips, a dry kiss.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he said. His glance passed her shoulder. His voice was light and toneless. ‘I’m glad you said you weren’t in love with me. The minute you said that, I fell in love with you.’

  They both felt it, as a passenger in a jet senses the precise moment at which the zenith of its trajectory is reached and passed. It was not the fact of it, but the suddenness that surprised her. She said nothing. She looked at him. A single word occurred in her mind, in Dexter’s voice, flat and definite: bullshit. The light in the bar wiped everyone’s faces free of lines, of expression, of experience. It was a pink light, an apricot light.

  ‘I think I’ll go back to the hotel,’ she said.

  He looked at her sharply. Which of them had dismissed the other? I will grow old and die, he thought, without moral consolation.

  ‘I’ll see you there, then,’ he said.

  She nodded and walked away.

  ‘If –’ he called after her, but she did not hear, and kept walking.

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’

  ‘Morty told me.’

  He was thinner. He stood without baggage in the ugly lobby.

  ‘Come home.’

  ‘No. I haven’t finished yet.’

  ‘Come home.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Let’s go home.’

  ‘I’ll never forgive you if you make me.’

  ‘Make you? How could I make you? I love you.’

  She shrugged. ‘At home I was half dead.’

  He began to cry. His face twisted, his mouth was lumpy. He gritted his teeth. He would not use the children against her, he would not.

  She saw him sob. She did not step closer. If he mentioned them, if he spoke their names, she would splinter. He was afraid of her. She had the stance and the expression of an idiot struck dumb, but an idiot who was holding an axe. He turned and shoved out the door and on to the street.

  The night was warm, the air was creamy, the beauty of the city was barbarous. Clumps of light, sprinkles of light moved along dark washes. There were nets of stars; and where there were none, a dense blackness reigned. Dexter walked and wept. Near dawn he found himself in the gardens of an institution. Its upper windows were barred. A smaller, newer building stood apart from the bulk. He went to the open door and looked in. A man in a white cap was shouting under a hanging bulb. Trucks were making deliveries. It was a vast kitchen, lined with metal tanks and vats, comfortless. Here food would be crudely cooked, without love, slung about and loaded on to trolleys for those less fortunate than ourselves. People who had to eat it were surely lost souls.

  Athena waited for Philip until she fell asleep. Philip, between the bar and the hotel, encountered a keyboard player of his acquaintance and went with him in his black BMW to a place where music industry people drank and girls prowled. He finished the coke, and a girl, perhaps even the one who had kissed his head in the first bar, went down on her knees to him in a lavatory whose walls jumped and chattered with the secret words of the night.

  *

  The back door did not lock: the wood was wormy, the metal loop had lost its grip. Vicki went to the boys’ room and fortified herself, as women do, with the sight of sleeping children, the abandonment of limbs, the oblivious breathing, the throats offered to the blade. ‘If anyone came to harm them,’ thought Vicki, ‘I would kill. Without even thinking twice.’ Thus, having imbued their limp bodies with her own vulnerability, she felt iron; but took the hammer out of the toolbox and carried it with her to the front room and laid it on the second pillow. She spent a comfortable, contented night alone in the Foxes’ double bed. She woke several times and redisposed her limbs and thought, ‘How comfortable I am! How contented!’ At dawn someone in the house next door slid open a window. Vicki sat up and tugged back the curtain. The moon was hidden behind thin, pinkish clouds, and there was a sharp smell of gums. She lay down and turned on the radio, and slipped back into riotous two-dimensional sleep pricked by the elegant needles of a harpsichord. When she woke again in full light the brown hammer looked silly beside her head, like a symbol left behind by a dream. Billy began to shuffle and to wail. She hid the hammer under the sheet and got out of bed.

  The piano was shut. The kitchen table was piled with newspapers, the bin was overflowing, the sink was full of greasy saucepans. Slugs had silvered the matting and the chopping board, and had toiled back to their lairs before this hot morning: their whole night had been spent in slow travelling. Vicki opened the cupboard and a rubber glove fell out in a gesture of appeal. She picked it up and pulled it on.

  ‘I am running this house,’ said Vicki. ‘Who is in charge here? I am, officer. It is going to be a very hot day. I will wash them, I will feed them, I will take them to the pool. I am holding the fort. I am necessary here. For breakfast I will cook tomatoes under the griller.’

  She peeled a banana and shoved it into Billy’s hand. While he chewed it she picked the crusts of sleep from his eyes. He champed vilely, with open jaws.

  ‘There’s piss in his bed,’ said Arthur. ‘You shouldn’t give him anything to drink at night. Three drinks – piss.’ He isolated three fingers and held them up. ‘Hey Vicki.’ He followed her into his bedroom. She smelt it before she reached the bunks. ‘Once I saw this movie called Excalibur.’

  If Dexter had been there he would have said, ‘Film, Arthur, not movie. Movie’s an Americanism.’ She seized the top sheet and whipped it free of the mattress. ‘Don’t tell me the plot,’ she said, ‘for God’s sake.’

  ‘And there was this mighty sword which had become stuck in a mighty rock, and whoever could manage to pull it out, well he could be the king.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear a story, Arthur. I’ve just woken up.’

  ‘And there was this boy – well, he was a young man really, or a teenager –’

  ‘Shutup, Arthur. I’m busy.’

  ‘– who was befriended by Merlin, the greatest magician the world had ever known, and he –’

  ‘Will you shut up?’

  She turned round with her arms full of stinking sheets. He had not heard a word. His eyes had gone out of focus, his pitch was up, his pace was accelerating, his smile was the one-sided, manic grimace of the born raver: he was away on the high seas of narrative. In the wide planting of his feet, his blithe assumption of an audience, she saw Dexter, oh poor Dexter, gone away on a plane to try and pull the sword out of the stone. Her insides quivered with what she thought was laughter. She pushed the chattering boy aside: he turned to follow her, pointed his rapt, jabbering face in her direction, but she stepped out into the passage and closed the door on him. He took no notice: as she walked away his chipmunk voice rattled on without interruption.

  She stood among the rank stalks of the tomato plants. Her legs itched and the sun struck through the back of her cotton nightdress. A bird sat on the fence and trilled madly. It spotted her and flipped away across the vegetable patch to a tree, where it threw back its head, opened its beak like a pair of scissors, and sang tune after tune.

  *

  ‘See that boy?’ roared Arthur into Vicki’s ear. ‘Well his name is Dennis Dwyer. He gets the strap all the time. He’s a really horrible type of person. Not very bright either.’

  The boy strolled up and cast himself on the concrete step above them. His shoulders were blistered and flaking. He looked straight into Vicki’s face. ‘Hullo miss,’ he said.

/>   Vicki smiled at him. Arthur withdrew ten feet and squatted frog-like in his green bathers, dripping and spearing bitter looks at the boy, who got up and darted away into the water.