The Children's Bach

by Helen Garner

  All afternoon he kept coming back. Each time he lay closer to Vicki, his thin chest heaving, his eyes red with chlorine. He was patiently waiting his turn. When Arthur took Billy to the kiosk, the boy made his move. He lifted his head from his arms and spoke to her.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘I haven’t got a mum any more.’

  ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘No. I’ve just got a dad and a nanna.’

  ‘What happened to your mum? Did she d – get sick, and die?’

  ‘She went away.’ He sat up and folded his arms round his blue knees. ‘And I don’t think she’s coming back.’ He was taking his time.

  ‘Gee. How did your dad feel? Did he get mad? Or upset?’

  ‘Hoo yeah. He says he’s gonna shoot her.’

  He nudged himself across so that his upper arm was touching hers. They sat parallel; they stared out over the glaring water with its moving threads of light and shadow. Over the boy’s head she saw the empty scaffolding of the gasometer: clouds sailed in and out of its framework in great masses, stately and unhurried.

  ‘How do you feel about it? Your mum going away.’

  He gave a small turn of the shoulder and shone his face at her for a second. ‘Oh – all right. How many kids have you got?’

  ‘Two,’ said Vicki.

  ‘I seen the big one at school. Is the other kid yours too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s got something wrong with him. Spazzo.’

  ‘Not spastic,’ said Vicki. ‘Just a bit vague.’

  ‘He’s spazzo,’ said the boy.

  ‘I haven’t got a mother either,’ said Vicki.

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘Died. Got cancer.’

  They went on sitting there. Their arms touched, their knees were drawn up to their chins, their faces

  grinned into the sun.

  ‘What’s the time?’ said the boy.

  The big clock was exactly opposite them, on the wall of the dressing sheds. ‘Just after four,’ said Vicki. ‘Can’t you tell the time?’

  ‘Not on them old kind of clocks.’

  Vicki took a bottle of lotion out of her basket, squirted some into her palm, and ran her hand across the boy’s shoulders. He did not draw away, but presented his whole back to be coated. The cream disappeared into his skin: his back was the colour of a burnt stick, his shoulders crackled with broken blisters. The job done, she took her hand away. Immediately he twisted round and turned up his face like a plate being offered.

  ‘Look at me scabs.’

  ‘One of them’s loose,’ said Vicki. She pulled it off his top lip. He winced with his eyes closed, giving her his face without defence. His blond hair was sopping, thickened into greenish matted clumps. Vicki saw the tender stalks of his eyebrows. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I come off me bike. Over the handlebars.’ He was almost in her arms, his eyes squeezed shut, his face turned up. Her basket had been overturned. The pages of her magazine riffled in a gust of dry wind: her hat brim whirred.

  The PA squealed and a man’s voice bellowed, ‘that boy in the red bathers. stop your pushing. report to the manager’s office.’

  The boy’s eyes popped open. He glanced down at himself to check the colour of his bathers. They were blue. He sprang up without a backward look and galloped down the high steps to the water.

  The afternoon changed its colour. The wind dropped, people raised hands to their eyes, the screaming children paused for breath, the water flattened and turned brassy. Dexter paid at the turnstile and ploughed through the herd of dripping midgets.

  ‘Here’s Dad!’ shrilled Arthur.

  There was no-one with him. She must be at home, getting the tea ready or taking the clothes off the line before it started to rain. Vicki saw Dexter scoop up Arthur in his arms, saw Arthur struggle to be put down, panicking lest his friends see his father treat him like a baby. She kept her hand round Billy’s wrist and waited for news. Dexter seemed to be coming very slowly towards her, with the twisting boy in his arms. People were scrambling out of the water and running away to their towels. The remaining heads, breaking the slate meniscus, looked like the victims of a massacre.

  ‘Look at that inky sky!’ chattered a voice among the group on the step below her. ‘Remember the dust cloud last year? Wasn’t it awesome when it came over the flats!’

  ‘You could tell this wasn’t New York!’ said another. ‘If that had happened on Manhattan everybody would have been saying Oh my gahd! Did you notice? Not one single person said Oh my gahd!’

  He came up the steep concrete levels to the wall against which she sat, and put Arthur neatly back on to his feet. The boy was red: he hitched up his bathers and turned his back. The dry wind gasped and began again. The girl and the man stared at each other. Dexter’s eyes seemed to have darkened and fallen back into his head. Something important is happening in this family, thought Vicki, and I am part of it now, whether I like it or not.

  *

  Elizabeth reflustered her wind-flattened hair and examined the cut of her jacket in the reflecting front of the beer fridge. She was pleased. The barman went out the back to look for the Campari, and she picked up off the counter one of those little four-page bulletins on duplicator paper which announce the results of inter-pub darts and pool competitions. There was a joke at the bottom of the page. She read it.

  ‘Gynaecologist to dentist: ‘‘I don’t know how you can stand your job, smelling people’s bad breath all day.”’

  Her legs surprised her: that old, almost forgotten sensation, as if all the blood were draining rapidly out of them, leaving them fragile and chalky, unable to support her. They do hate us, she thought. The weight of disgust that loaded the simple joke made her bones weak. She thought, I can’t bear it, I can’t. She thought, I should be able to bear it by now. It has just caught me off guard. She thought, Dexter would think it was funny. She screwed up the bulletin and dropped it into the ashtray at her feet.

  ‘Campari,’ said the barman, returning. ‘Never drunk that. Nice, is it? Italian drink, is it?’ He twisted the top of the paper bag into a hard twirl.

  She paid him the money and did not speak. When she turned her back to leave he pulled the corners of his mouth down, niddled and noddled his head, and twitched his hips in imitation of a stuck-up walk.

  There was no way he could have known that her heart, for the thousandth time, felt as if it had turned into a sharp splinter.

  There was weirdness in the turbulent air. They all felt it, as they passed the flailing fig tree and came up the hot concrete steps to the kitchen; but Billy was berserk. He struggled, he shrieked, he bit his lips until they bled. When Dexter put him down he flung away and galloped among the chairs, overturning them and cannoning off the fronts of cupboards.

  ‘Can’t you do something?’ cried Vicki. ‘I wish Athena was here!’

  ‘Well she’s not,’ said Dexter. ‘Anyway she can’t do anything with him either when he’s like this. It’s electromagnetic.’

  ‘Sing to him.’

  ‘I don’t feel like singing,’ said Dexter. His face was grim. ‘You sing.’

  ‘Me? I can’t sing.’

  The little boy, wailing like a fire engine, was trying to cram himself into the greasy space between the bench and the stove. His shoulder was smeared with dirty fat, his bathers were twisted round his loins and his erect penis showed white and pointed as a fish. The noise in the room was deafening: the chairs crashing and rolling, the thin voice screeching, the hot wind whining through the half-open window. Dexter was stupefied, he was ugly with sadness.

  ‘Do something,’ said Vicki.

  ‘There’s somebody at the door,’ shouted Arthur.

  In came Elizabeth, all cool and high-heeled and clean, carrying the bottle in its paper bag and a net sack full of oranges.

  ‘What is this?’ she called in her piercing, silvery voice. ‘This place is a madhouse!’


  She put her load on the table, righted the lolling chairs and dragged the roaring boy out of his oily hiding place.

  ‘Here, you take him,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to do with kids.’

  Dexter snapped out of it. He seized Billy’s hands and spun him round, crouched, enfolded him like a foetus in a cage of limbs and torso. The boy was defeated, but he raged and clamoured: he could scream even with his mouth shut, the very bones of his skull were in commotion.

  ‘He’s chucking a mental!’ cried Vicki.

  ‘Fill up the bath and stick him in it,’ said Arthur, calmly colouring in at the table. ‘That’s what Mum does.’

  Vicki ran to turn on the taps.

  The boy stopped to draw breath, and the rain started. A mass, a block, a volume of water crashed on to the roof. The temper of the air changed: in some meteorological bureau the dials flicked back to zero. Elizabeth opened the back door and they stood in a row, Dexter with the limp boy over his shoulder, and stared out at the wall of rain.

  Elizabeth lined up the knife, the board, the squeezer, the glasses, and began to work with easy efficiency. As she sliced she spoke to Dexter over her elegant shoulder.

  ‘So. She wouldn’t come back, eh?’

  He twisted his head away.

  ‘Come on, Dex. Don’t be a drama queen.’

  ‘Think it’s funny, do you.’

  ‘She’ll be back. Listen to me! I know him. He has the attention span of a stick insect. I’ll lay odds she’ll be back in a couple of days.’

  ‘And then what happens?’

  ‘That’s up to you.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have stopped it?’ he said.

  ‘What for? It’s none of my business.’

  ‘But you must have known what was going on.’

  ‘What if I did? You didn’t expect me to dob her, did you? I have got some shreds of feminist loyalty left. Anyway if it hadn’t been Philip it would’ve been someone else.’

  ‘No! It’s his fault. She was naive. He saw that. He took advantage of her.’

  Elizabeth gave a snort of laughter. ‘You don’t think much of her, do you.’

  ‘She’s a saint! Someone like you couldn’t even see that!’

  ‘Someone like me,’ said Elizabeth. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I hate the way you talk,’ he said, ‘and I hate the way you live. Smashing everything. Smash, smash, smash, smash – then what? Fuck, you say. Fuck this and fuck that. I even hate the way you pronounce the word.’

  ‘It’s a simple word,’ she said. ‘I’d never even heard it used till I met you. There’s not much range available. Fuck. Fewck. Furk.’

  ‘It’s the shape of your mouth when you say it. It’s blunt. You spit it out.’

  They had never fought before. They looked ugly to each other, swollen with the desire to do harm. He was afraid of the way he imagined she lived; and she wanted, in some obscure sadism, to induct him into it, into the rough sexual world that lies outside families.

  Vicki heard their voices turn low and nasty. She sang in a whisper to the placid boy in the bath: ‘A band of angels comin’ after me, Comin’ for to carry me home.’ It was one of the few songs he would tolerate. She swilled the water up his back in a rhythm, scrubbed at the horny skin of his heels. There was a stoned voluptuousness in his acceptance of her caresses which, if she let herself think about it, made her gorge rise, but still she sang and sloshed the water up and down his unblemished back.

  There were heavy steps outside and the bathroom door flew open.

  ‘I’ll finish him off,’ shouted Dexter.

  He cast himself on his knees beside Vicki, took the face washer from her hand and raised his big round voice: ‘I’ll sing you a song of the fish of the sea – o-oh, Ri-o!’

  Vicki, upstaged, scurried away into the kitchen.

  A glass jug stood on the table, full of a thick reddish-orange liquid. ‘Flash drinks,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘Why do you have to fight with everyone?’ said Vicki.

  ‘Me? He started it!’

  ‘You both started it,’ said Arthur. ‘I don’t care if people fight. I think it’s rather interesting, actually.’

  ‘Mister Cool,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Tiny Tim in the kitchen corner.’

  Arthur shot her a flirtatious smile.

  ‘I must say, Arthur,’ said Elizabeth, ‘you have very spunky legs for a boy of your age.’

  ‘I’ve got a girlfriend at school,’ said Arthur.

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Want to see some photos of me when I was a baby?’ said the boy. ‘I’ll go and get them.’ He darted out of the room.

  ‘You always con people,’ said Vicki.

  ‘I have no shame,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Let’s drink these.’

  They began. It was still raining steadily. The room was almost dark.

  ‘Don’t you care about Philip and Athena?’ said Vicki.

  ‘Course I care. I always care. But there’s no point in making a song and dance about it, like that night he stayed here. Know something? There’s only one thing that’ll bring ’em back, and that’s indifference. The one thing you can’t fake.’

  ‘But you are faking it.’

  ‘At the moment I might be. But as soon as it stops being faked and starts being real, he’ll turn up. Rule number one of modern life.’

  Vicki shuddered. ‘You’re cold. You’re too detached. You’re scary.’

  Arthur romped in with a packet. He spread the colour photos out on the scratched table top. Elizabeth bent over them. ‘They’re rude!’ she cried. Arthur skipped about, squint-eyed with laughter. The photos were of a naked baby boy lying on his back like a frog, flashing the enormous, raw genitals of the new-born.

  ‘That’s what I get for coming on to yobbos,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Put them away, you hoon.’

  ‘I bet you’re not really shocked,’ said Arthur. ‘I bet you’re only pretending.’ He sniggered to himself and gathered up the photos.

  ‘Come on, Vicki,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Let’s get smashed.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Vicki. She separated one of the photos from the slippery pile. ‘Who’s this?’

  It was a picture of two men standing in a garden so green that it could not have been in Australia, the kind of green that to Vicki’s untravelled eye looked like a trick of the camera: a deep, lolling, effortless green without even a tinge of yellow.

  ‘Is that Dexter?’ said Vicki.

  Elizabeth tilted her chair to look. ‘It is. It’s Dexter and his father. In London. That must’ve been taken nearly twenty years ago. My Gahd. Will you look at that suit he’s got on. The seams are all lumpy. It could do with a good press. That boy always did look a sight.’

  The older man, Vicki saw, stood side-on, as if about to slip out of frame: his smile was crooked, almost sly. But Dexter! Dexter faced the camera with a frank, cheerful look. His hands were plunged deep in his trouser pockets. His hair was shockingly blond: it sprang back off his high, narrow, unlined forehead. He was young. A teenager. An HSC student. Hardly older than herself. He was not afraid of the camera, of the world. He liked the world, and he expected the world to like him. What was the word for the quality that shone in his plain, open face? It was goodness.

  ‘You know, Vicki,’ said Elizabeth, ‘you’ve got to go back to school in February. You’ve got to study.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ said Vicki. She slipped the photo under a newspaper.

  ‘I did so! I went to university.’

  ‘You never got your diploma.’

  ‘Degree is the word.’

  ‘Degree, graduated, whatever it’s called.’

  ‘No, but I studied.’

  ‘I bet you didn’t study any more than you had to.’ Vicki guzzled her drink. ‘I bet I know what you did at uni. You fucked.’

  Arthur let out a high-pitched giggle.

  ‘You should talk,’ said Elizabeth. ‘And don’t call it uni. Only people who’ve never been there c
all it that.’

  ‘What’s for tea?’ said Arthur.

  ‘We’re drinking,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We’re getting drunk. Why don’t you cook something?’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ he said, with more force.

  ‘Eat some cheese.’

  Vicki laughed, and drank. Arthur thought for a moment. His eyes slid to the closed bathroom door. ‘Billy will be hungry too when he comes out of there,’ he said. ‘He’ll be absolutely starving. And he can’t cook.’

  ‘But you could,’ said Elizabeth. She turned her full attention on him, and he rose to it.

  ‘But I don’t know how to.’

  ‘But you could if you tried.’

  ‘But my mother never taught me.’

  ‘But I can teach you.’

  ‘But you’re not my mother.’

  ‘But I can still teach you.’

  ‘But I’m not allowed to turn on the gas.’

  ‘But I can turn it on for you.’

  ‘But I might burn myself.’

  ‘But I’ll rub Savlon on your wounds.’

  ‘But fat might splash in my eye and make me go blind.’

  ‘But I’ll get you a guide dog.’

  ‘But we haven’t got a kennel for a blind dog.’

  ‘But he can sleep beside your bed.’

  ‘But he might piss on the floor.’

  ‘But you can clean it up in the morning.’

  ‘But Mum won’t like it.’

  ‘But she’s not here, so she won’t find out.’

  They stopped on a rising note. Dexter was standing in the bathroom doorway, holding Billy by the hand, lit from behind through a cloud of metallic steam.

  ‘Some things, Morty,’ he said, ‘strain a person’s sense of humour.’

  He swept through the room. The three of them sat foolishly, with fading smiles. It was dark, and the rain had stopped. Vicki stood up and switched on the lamp in the corner: the disorder of the room, its stuffiness and neglect, would have made her feel guilty had she not been already half drunk: as it was, she witnessed minor twinges of the appropriate emotions occurring distantly, as if to some other girl in a similar circumstance. She pushed her glass across the table to her sister, who filled it again without meeting her eye.