Turn Left at Venus

by Inez Baranay

  All the times they were there are present, and you might be able to see them all at once, the time you came back and buildings had been torn down and new clubs opened and what The Squares called Vice became the theatre of the street.

  Ada said aloud, ‘Was every place prettier in everyone’s past?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Leyla. Who was there, it seemed very suddenly, but Ada didn’t know if she’d forgotten that Leyla too was there for very long or for just a split second thinking about those days.

  ‘There was the newsagent and the milk bar and later the bookshop and we danced in the street one New Year’s Eve.’

  ‘I bet you can still dance,’ said Leyla in a gush of warmth, ‘even on those two sticks.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Ada but she might have said it feebly.

  Here they were, so very old on the outside.

  The same or not the same people who had danced together.

  In these streets, saying, this is where it began, and we’ll dance again one day.

  They did dance again. They were fifty-five years old, zestful and fluid, dancing in a little bar club place behind the Iron Curtain. Ada with her sticks – no, no, this was long before the sticks.

  This actually great little bar club place, dark and loud, the fun there was intense like surviving a calamity or being sheltered from a nearby calamity outside. The drinks waiter said, ‘What are we celebrating?’

  What are we celebrating?

  ‘Menopause!’ declared Leyla, and they fell about and drank and got up again onto the dance floor. People let themselves rock right out and the musicians were a crazy combo of instruments, playing a dancey kind of a bit gypsy a bit new wave.

  What was it here? It was something like but not exactly like the countries of their own ancestors, forebears. Four big brown bears. Four six eight parents multiply by four grandparents

  ‘Like you danced on a tabletop, where was that again?’

  Leyla dancing that time. Her unique movements a bit jazz, a bit legong. Ada would have to dance also. They laugh and drink and dance. We’re still doing this, we’ll always do this.

  Ada was heading for an empty couch, this is in an airport lounge, a members lounge.

  And it’s Leyla. Lying back in a huge yellow armchair, her feet in soft short boots on the extended footrest. Big dark glasses. A large glossy magazine laid aside.

  What if it isn’t really her.

  A staff member brings her a coffee from the self-service coffee stand.

  Ada slowly walks past her again, leaving her bag on another seat, turns, returns, stands in front of her.

  With the coffee cup in one hand, her head tilted back on the armchair headrest, Leyla looks at her through the glasses, which change their tint at new angles.

  Ignoring Ada, pretending not to know her.

  She says, ‘You have mistaken me’, in a strange accent.

  If Ada is dreaming she can decide what happens now. But the room tilts, she didn’t choose this. Am I dreaming? Ada tries to dig her fingernails into her palm but she is wearing gloves. Shouldn’t she feel it even with the gloves on?

  Someone Ada knows from a couple or more times/places in her life shows up knowing Leyla. Ada is going to meet this someone and then can’t connect with them, she hasn’t got their number, that someone has taken away something, she needs to know what happens next. That feeling of not having your device, like what happened to The Stranger on Lueshira when his device stopped working that time.

  32

  ‘I’M READY’

  What do you decide about those other worlds … do people live on and on, being old for a lot longer than they had ever been young and then, so, when does one start being old?

  If our old are wise?

  Or what if a world where people thought well of old people – being old was the perfect condition, and being young was only a way to get there. Imagine the glorification of age, where ‘you seem to have aged’ is a compliment, and ‘you’re still looking a bit young’ an expression of concern or hostility.

  They called what Ada used to write ‘gender bending’. ‘But,’ Noemi asks her, ‘do we have age – what? Age bending?’ Ada shakes her head, that doesn’t sound right. What would you call messing with the usual way age is expressed and perceived?

  It’s not the same.

  Ada had thought about gender, not calling it that, from the time she could think. But for so much of her life she had not thought much about being old. And then suddenly and gradually she got old and that’s what she was. And you could be old for a very long time. When you are young you think to be young is the most natural human condition. You are young for such a short time which is quite apparent to you in the long middle years but when did the point arrive at which you could no longer see all your life in one go, in one swift panoramic sweep through your memory?

  ‘How,’ Noemi asks her and herself, ‘is an old person meant to be?’

  Old people are meant to be grumpy and to dislike everything about the world the way it is now. ‘But we are Old Persons!’ says Ada. ‘And look at us.’ Most of the other old people Ada knows also rejoice in discovery and advance, that astronomers find new stars, that inventors invent inventions to clean up the mess, that science supports their intuitions, or shatters them. They do courses and study things. They delight in new words that become essential, videos of inter-species love.

  ‘Again,’ says Noemi, ‘they’re calling me an older woman. Older than what? Please, call me old. They started calling me an older woman when I was forty-five. Now I’m only waiting for evolved senescence to kick in. Are you going to write a story about that? Make it one of those prescient ones, my love.’

  Who can know how this thing will end. It must be better to have some sense of being loved. Than to never have known it. To be known, known, your darkness, known, you, known to doubt your ability to write the next book and even to doubt it was really you who wrote your last one, known to love at times with no feeling of love, doubt your ability to love well enough, doubt you can be loved, doubt your memories, doubt your existence.

  Noemi has gone. Ada remains the same person she always was, with an essential self that survives all the changes life can bring. Or, that sense of self is an illusion. Ada wonders again whether her illusion is quite shared by real people in a consensual reality that was some part of their own reality. Noemi knows what she means and is never quite gone, still talking to her, still listening.

  ‘What’s it like being old?’ a child asks Ada at the airport departure lounge: only a child will ask, not yet aware that to be old is something never to admit to, that to acknowledge the oldness of someone is to commit an offence, even while their oldness might be the most obvious thing about them. When Ada was a child you should never acknowledge a disability like a deformed leg or blindness, you never referred to it, you should avoid anyone in any way disabled, in case their disability could not be ignored, in case the occasion arose when you had to admit it was evident, you might even have to offer assistance, and if you did so you were admitting you perceived that this person could not walk or see or speak and this meant shame, shame, your shame.

  It starts early. ‘You’re not old!’ said with a vehement upbeat falsity, no falsity in the desire for denial. ‘You’re only as old as you feel. You don’t look your age!’

  ‘This is what my age looks like.’

  ‘I know,’ says Noemi, ‘it’s crazy stupid.’ Your age is an incontrovertible fact, you were born a precise number of years ago, that is your age, what you feel does not alter that. What are they actually saying when they say you’re only as old as you feel? They mean something like, Even if you’re old you might yet cavort and boogie, you might yet be captivated by gossip and sunsets, you might yet feel erotic desire and the call of new places, and if so, why then, what, you are just like someone who is not old – what rot. And they say, ‘Age is only a number.’ Same kind of half-baked idea, trying to say something but making nonsense. It
was told to Ada at various ages, once back when she was seventy-six and someone said, as if in consolation, Age is just a number. My age is seventy-six, Ada said, whatever I do or do not feel does not alter my age. How humourless. She’s eighty-six, she’s ninety-six, she’s three hundred and six, she feels feelings but there is no feeling of a certain numbered age. You get old and so will you unless you die first. You get old and you are made to wonder when you crossed that line from being a regular human to being one of the old, who are another species.

  Noemi would know and now she is gone.

  ‘We’re old women,’ Ada says to Noemi, Noemi says to Ada.

  ‘Old age is a time of clarity and strength.’

  ‘Remind me when I forget my keys and can’t lift my suitcase.’

  ‘We must not deplore and complain.’

  ‘We must not.’

  ‘You’re in early old age and I’m in middle old age,’ says Noemi, ‘according to the definition given by I have to look it up.’

  They were already old when they met, with crinkled skin, drooping breasts, reduced acceleration. But also they are vigorous, healthy, curious, active. At this age you don’t take it for granted, you take care. You take heart at what might try to dishearten you. Where you have a scar you are not destroyed, where you have wrinkles you have expressed yourself.

  Still, now, strange aches break like waves over your thoughts, drenching thoughts in achingness, sweeping them to dry shores.

  Aches that threatened to cripple you one day have passed away.

  Ada is now older than Noemi ever was.

  Their city, the city they had spent the most time in together, the city became the setting for a period of their old age.

  They were in San Francisco and Noemi was dying here. ‘Happily,’ said Noemi, ‘it won’t take long.’

  They held their hands and they looked into their eyes, and stopped talking about the mysteries of existence.

  ‘My affairs are in order,’ said Noemi. A previous partner had made her make a will, make her wishes known. ‘Make sure yours are, that’s all I ask.’

  Sophie had gone, Ada would have to ask Saul.

  ‘I will come and haunt you,’ Noemi promised, ‘if I find out that I can do so.’

  ‘I’ll look out for you.’

  Weeks and months and more since Noemi had died. At that point Noemi became a felt presence and soon after a felt absence. And Ada was haunted, you could put it like that, though never saw a sign of a ghost, of any reaching from the beyond. Ada despised all the accounts of grief she could find, for their struggle to use words, for their knowing they can and can not succeed.

  For a while she felt too numb to feel.

  For a while she felt too much to do anything but feel. There were times of a choking, tears, and the day finally of a storm of wailing sobs, a flood; her face swollen for days

  afterwards.

  Ada was now an ugly old woman.

  After some more time she knew she had used up her entire store plus any reserve of any possibility of that feeling, of feeling that again.

  She had another book to write, she had longer to live, more to do. One more story to write.

  ‘I’m ready,’ Noemi murmurs as if they are her last words.

  ‘Is that it then,’ Ada asks Noemi, ‘that was the meaning of life, it was all about getting ready?’

  An immense grief lurks nearby, it might smother her.

  Come back! Wait, there’s so much I never knew about you. There are things I should have known.

  We knew what we needed to know. We will always be partly a mystery to each other. There is no other way.

  ‘That girl had the most influence on your life.’

  Was that something like an accusation? As if Ada had been somewhat dishonest, or insufficiently self-aware, or insufficiently self-examining in not having made this declaration herself. Though she had in a way. Those conversations that through duration deepened in intensity and the level of intimacy. The things you eventually tell in this relationthing. Where you want to think you could tell anything even though you never can.

  But really, can there be an example of a single person who had the most influence on anyone’s life? It doesn’t make sense, it’s like thinking about infinity.

  Of course not counting parents, whoever brought you up, the first people you lived with, the things that being a child taught you. Most influence. Or – is the most influence from that turning point later, the one you have a choice in, because of one person?

  They talk about these things eventually, Ada and Noemi, about a refugee camp and the suburbs of Sydney and the city’s margin; about a Mexican village and Mexico City and the journey north. Stories of who they used to be.

  ‘We’ve been several people each since then.’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘Some things you want in life change; some things you want never change.’

  ‘I’ve never wanted to be anything but a writer.’

  ‘I’ve never wanted to do anything but force my opinions onto people for my living.’

  Does anything explain anything? Ada’s traumatised mother, her violent mood swings, the way they were never to speak of the past. Life was a matter of settling in, eventually finding themselves in a house they could stay in, Ada’s third school. She and her mother seemed to be connected by an occult accident. Mother provided a home, food and board, allowing Ada the independence she would have seized anyway. ‘I suppose she was affectionate sometimes,’ Ada told Noemi uncertainly, a bit unnerved by the intense questioning. Ada hadn’t gone in for close analysis of mothers since, well, since up the tree with Leyla, over thirty, forty, oh dear over fifty years ago, more. Really. Because people don’t usually talk about these things. No, they don’t. Well, people you know might. ‘If I were afraid of intimacy,’ Ada retorted, ‘why am I here with you?’ For the intimacy, until now seen in a glass darkly, until now felt through layers of insulation, now was face to face.

  ‘I was too strong for you.’

  ‘You were.’

  Noemi made Ada say things that seemed too dully, embarrassingly obvious to be said – my mother was a traumatised refugee and this must have had some effect on me – into truths made truer by being deeply felt.

  Noemi had never not told her story, quite contrary to Ada; Noemi had had years of therapy, years of being in intimate monogamous relationcars, years of believing you should tell whatever you can about yourself and why should you: it made you the most authentic, true self you could be.

  Noemi spoke of her own long-ago, and Ada could not know if the images her own mind conjured were hers or only her own.

  Noemi grabbed hold of Ada’s hand with her feeble strength. Ada was rising from lying next to her on top of the bedclothes a while, now to leave Noemi to rest. Noemi pulled Ada’s hand towards her, pulled the hand to her breast, looked up at Ada with a steady look, her breast swelling in that way.

  She wants this. Ada returned to the bed, and bent to her with a gentle caress. Noemi had no time for much more of this, pulling Ada’s hand downwards, managing to lift her pelvis. There was a jar of skin lotion on the bedside table, unscented, organic. Ada smothered her hand with it and bit by bit Ada’s whole hand made its way into her, Noemi flowing the throbbing of noontide over Ada’s shimmying fingers. Noemi moaning as if in terror, groaning, growling, the pulsations increasing, stronger, a sudden river of gelatinous liquid flowing from her, and when Ada eventually slowly withdrew her hand from inside Noemi and left her palm cupping the soft hair at the mound, the two of them floated upon the stream flowing from her as on a raft carried away to their dream dominion.

  Noemi died soon after.

  Close as can be, skin to skin, Noemi’s olive-hued skin, Ada’s paler skin, that time they lay entwined all day, murmuring, falling silent, at times adrift on the same cloud, levitating on the border of sleep, at times burrowing into each other, that smell of a forest, that was what Ada always ended up with when seeking a word for it. Noem
i smelled like a forest, from her skin you inhaled trees and flowers and air that made you breathe deep as you could. Woodsmoke from a distance, earth turned over by burrowing creatures. Her odours changing as the moon swelled then faded, of newly dug earth, ripened to scents of the bush after rain. Even long after menopause the lunar tides had their effects on the body though far more subtle. That one day Ada, it was that one day in that apartment in Noe with its back windows looking onto the garden tended by the people on the ground floor, a magnolia flowering at the time. Sometimes the neighbour’s little dog barked. Ada remembered they remained touching all day as if they had already agreed to it. Not lose skin contact at all the whole day, a pact, a ritual. But someone must have got up to change the music, they listened to all the Joni Mitchell albums.

  That was during the time Ada and Noemi were the very closest, that cold foggy summer in San Francisco, been together long enough that they knew they were going to stay together, new enough that they knew there were years ahead of times like this, Ada’s writing and Noemi’s gigs giving them pauses in work at compatible times.

  At that time Ada and Noemi were actually living together, full-time for a while, one of the few periods neither of them had another home at the time.

  33

  WHAT IS HAPPY ANYWAY

  ‘You are someone that Sophie and my mom would talk about,’ Saul told Ada.

  When was this? Where was Noemi?

  Ada and Saul had been in each other’s lives a long time.

  Saul said, ‘I always did grok what you were about.’

  This was when Saul had just taken over and the first time he and Ada had scheduled ‘a talk’, with an agenda.

  ‘I know I can’t replace Sophie,’ Saul said. ‘But as much as I’m able. But things don’t stay still.’

  Things fall apart. Things become their opposites. Things cannot be created or destroyed, only change their form.

  ‘It’s still small,’ Saul said about the agency. ‘Sophie didn’t make the mistake of trying to expand and then getting taken over. I had to apologise for once trying to promote a merger bid, which happily she refused. It sidelined her in a way for a while,’ said Saul, ‘and some of the names went where they thought they could do better for themselves, but Sophie kept her solid loyal clients, like you, and enough interesting inquiries always coming in that she more than survived, she had the life she wanted.