by Joan London
This was the reason why she had gone along with Jacob’s offer of her services. Because she could see Cecile was in pain. This too was why she had offered to massage Miriam Kershaw when she was dying. By the time she’d brought her up the stairs to her room on top of the community centre, she knew that Miriam was beyond any skills she had to offer. It was a shock to see how frail she was. How the poor woman had winced and cried out as Toni touched her pitifully withered body. Tears of pain gushed from Miriam’s eyes.
After Toni had helped her dress and sat her on the couch to rest a little before they tackled the stairs back down, Miriam said: ‘There are healers and non-healers.’
‘What makes a healer?’ Toni asked.
‘Lack of ego.’
Toni drove her home to Isolation in silence. At the door, Miriam turned to her and looked her in the eye. ‘Our Lady of Warton.’ She gave a broad, deliberate grin. That was the last time Toni saw her.
Toni drove off filled with a crawling shame. For the room above the community centre, with its quasi-medical, quasi-New Age aura. For her TAFE therapy certificate with its one weekend of practical accreditation, and her belief that intuition and compassion could do the rest. Above all for the clients whom she had hoodwinked into feeling better just through her attention, her aromatic oils, her rainforest music.
Miriam’s massage was a humiliation she never spoke of to Jacob or any other member of the family. Perhaps it was the same for all of them. Their deepest humiliations they did not share.
Her hands kept working on the mute, tightly wound little body laid out before her, but she no longer believed they could heal.
‘I’ve been wondering,’ Jacob said to Dieter across the bar. Dieter hadn’t spoken at all during dinner, just listened, his pale eyes indifferent to the point of disdain. ‘Is there any way we could track Maya’s phone from the message she left?’ In his experience, these Teutonic types often had a technical turn of mind.
‘I think no. There is no call-back on this system.’ After a pause Dieter added: ‘She used a mobile phone, I think.’
‘You took the message?’
‘Yes. You have listened to it?’
‘Never thought of it. We don’t have one of these …’
Dieter reached across to the phone. ‘I will retrieve it for you.’
The voice seemed tiny, childish, far away, a historic recording. Hi Cecile … a few days … in touch … send my rent … gotta go. It was echoing, as if in a high wind, then something like a truck roared past. Jacob replayed it. Just as it cut out he thought he heard the first note of a chime, the sort you hear in airports before a flight announcement.
‘Did Maya buy herself a mobile phone?’
Dieter shrugged. ‘I didn’t see her with it the last time.’
‘When was that?’
‘That day.’ He nodded at the phone. ‘At breakfast.’
‘How was she?’ Jacob spoke slowly so as not to show his stab of resentment that it was Dieter who had seen her last.
Again Dieter shrugged. ‘OK. She slept late. I told her she should go to verk.’
Jacob wished there was another bottle of wine. So this self-righteous prick thought he could give his daughter advice. ‘It’s been exactly two weeks,’ he said quietly, getting down from the stool and making his way back to the couch.
Dieter was sitting at Cecile’s desk, rifling through her CDs. He’d put on jazz and turned up the volume, just beyond what Jacob considered to be respectful in someone else’s house. The Hawks and the Cats were slogging it out and Jacob would have liked to hear the commentary. He pondered whether or not to ask Dieter to turn it down. Was Dieter, as Cecile’s guest and business partner and whatever else he might be, further up the pecking order than he was, the father of an absentee housemate? After all, he and Toni were only here out of Cecile’s kindness. He had no rights.
How could a girl like Cecile hang out with this guy? He was a poseur, all Jacob’s instincts rushed to tell him that. Look at him, his air of detachment, his pale blue nylon shirt that he must have found in an op shop after some old guy had died. Was he a cheapskate, or very fashionable? The way he listened when you spoke with an air of containing himself, no doubt ready to pounce on any sign of the mindless, the conservative. Well, he used to be a bit like that himself in his revolutionary phase. A pain in the neck. But this guy had no sense of humour. Jacob knew the type from his travelling days. The sense of entitlement. The reluctance to part with his money.
Dieter sat down on the other side of the conversation pit. He placed a film canister and tobacco on the coffee table. ‘You like a smoke, I think?’
‘What? Oh, well, why not?’ My God, there was nothing he’d like more.
They stood in the sharp night air out by the fishpond and shared Dieter’s immaculate joint. Smoking has become an outdoor activity, Jacob thought. At home he smoked an after-dinner rollie in the doorway of his shed. He loved to watch the house beneath its peaceful curl of smoke, while the family members passed by its windows and the brilliant stars swirled overhead.
He looked up to the sky above the courtyard. ‘You can hardly see the stars in Melbourne.’
Dieter made a barking noise. ‘You guys are so cosmic with your drugs.’
‘What do you mean “you guys”?’
‘Your generation. The Doors of Perception. Did you read that? Did you read Timothy Leary?’ Dieter’s shoulders shook up and down. This stuff made him more forthcoming. But no more likeable.
‘Why do you smoke then?’ In the spotlight over the fishpond he could see that Dieter was well into his thirties, a Generation X-er, a natural enemy.
Dieter shrugged. ‘To relax. Watch porn on the internet. Get into music. It’s too cold out here I think.’ He threw the butt into the fishpond and went inside. Through the window Jacob watched him glide back to the CD player.
Did any generation ever get a worse press than his? Why sneer? Why give that grating laugh? Maybe it was jealousy. Because who wouldn’t have liked to believe that they were revolutionaries when they were young? To forget the problem of who you were and throw yourself into the collective? For better or worse it was his true education.
He hadn’t thought of it for years. God knows he groaned as much as anyone now if he happened to get stuck on Albany Highway behind a slow-moving ‘hey what’s the hurry, man?’ hand-painted Kombi. A revolution always leaves its relics. No doubt that was how Dieter saw him. Fresh from the deeps of the country.
The air felt soft and fresh out here. The bamboo gives off more oxygen than any other plant on the planet. Who told him that? Minty Brown, Beech’s aunt in Sri Lanka. That was why he liked passing through this courtyard. The inside-outside feel of it, the little Buddha, the air of having seen better days, reminded him of the time he stayed on Minty Brown’s tea plantation at the end of 1980.
He was heading home, travelling overland. He made his way from India to Ceylon, as it was still called then, and sat in a planter’s chair on Minty’s verandah, reading. With the last of his money he’d bought a passage on a boat from Colombo to Fremantle, due to depart in three weeks. He still felt the shadow of the great sub-continent, still trod lightly, as he had through the teeming vibrant streets, the eternal Indian villages. For a little while he had lived in a world without time, without anxiety. It seemed to him that those he passed amongst, peasants with hardly a rupee to their name, were in harmony with their surroundings. He felt an ever-growing imperative: to live differently, simply and in peace.
He’d been away for seven years. It was, as he told Minty, a turning point. She was a person you said those sort of things to as you drank gin and tonic and chain-smoked cigarettes with her. From her perspective, in her sixties, nothing interested her more than what she called ‘the long view’. Nothing, she said in her lilting, upper-class voice, seemed quite so serious anymore. She was like someone out of A Dance to the Music of Time.
He was mortally tired of travelling, he wanted to find a place where
he belonged. In his years away there’d been wars, coups, the three-day week, the five-day war, the IRA. Even now bombs were going off in London. There was an apocalyptic feel to the old world. And Kitty was coming to London, as if his past was catching up with him, his feelings of responsibility and guilt.
But he dreaded the thought of Perth with its sprawl of suburbs, its white midday glare.
He slept a lot in Minty’s house. Eight hours at night lulled by the rhythmic thud of the fan. He woke to the smell of Minty’s cigarette smoke as she wrote letters in bed and the croaky sound of her voice giving the day’s orders to the sixty-year-old houseboy when he brought her tea. Once the servants had opened the giant wooden shutters it was a house without doors or glass in the windows, floating on its promontory above the valley.
In the mornings he sat in a deckchair on the verandah and read, the Russians again, Chekhov, Tolstoy with his ‘problem of the self’, The Brothers Karamazov. He felt like a nineteenth-century gentleman himself, surveying his country estate.
Minty was a painter, trained in the thirties at the Slade. She spent the mornings in her studio, a thatched-roofed, open-sided pavilion with a view down to the valley, where tiny figures in sarongs rode bicycles along the banks of a winding river. She was working on a series of paintings of the coconut palm. The life cycle of a coconut palm was similar to that of a woman, she told Jacob. It didn’t produce fruit for twelve or fifteen years, stopped production at forty-five and died at seventy.
In the afternoons everybody slept again, he and Minty in their net coffins, the servants slumped on benches in the outhouse kitchen, the dogs under the trees. Servants were a fact of life here, Minty said briskly, an essential source of employment, but Jacob believed all men should be as brothers, and felt guilty at allowing himself to be waited on.
At dusk Minty liked to have a drink or two on the verandah and play a hand of patience on a little rattan table before she dressed for dinner. Egrets and crows rose in great white or black flocks from an island far up the river. The Tamil tea-pickers filed their way home through the thick green bushes down the hill. A light breeze stirred the tips of the coconut palms and the frangipani blossom fell. In spite of the colonialism, he played with the idea of staying here forever.
Minty laughed. ‘You’re too serious a young man,’ she told Jacob at dinner. ‘My nephew now, he could live here. Mind you, there’d be havoc with the local gels. He’s like me, not serious, it’s in the blood, a strain in the family. Some of us are decadents, and some, like my brother, go into the Church.’ They ate by candlelight on the verandah, curries served by the houseboy in a white sarong. ‘Experience taught me not to get involved with serious men,’ Minty said. ‘They think they’ll reform you. They want you to be good.’
‘Then what happens?’
‘Then I can’t paint anymore.’
She’d had three husbands and many more lovers. She came to Ceylon with her second husband, a colonial administrator. He lived in the mountains now with a horde of children. Fell in love with a local gel, Minty said. After the death of her third husband, Mr Brown the tea-planter, she decided it was time to live alone and give herself to painting. To grow old as naturally as a palm tree. The only thing that saddened her was the thought that she would never fall in love again. One of life’s loveliest experiences, she said, like an unexpected guest arriving on a summer night.
‘Have you ever been in love?’ she asked Jacob.
‘All the time.’
‘Then you haven’t, really. It only happens once or twice in a life.’
He was haunted by traces of her beauty, like a half-obscured painting, by the gestures of faded glamour, the elegant stained fingers, the way she uncurled her long thin leathery brown legs from a chair, her ability to study him through half-closed eyes and stay silent. In her bedroom was a self-portrait she had painted when she was twenty, wide-spaced brown eyes, pale hair flowing back from a broad, tanned forehead, the same earthy, intense gaze. He could have fallen in love with that girl.
One morning Jacob sat on the verandah trying to finish a letter to Beech in London. The world-weary tone he and Beech adopted with each other bored him. He was sick of cynicism, of trying to impress. Sunlight had just dissolved the mist and now the hillside of tea bushes, the village in the valley, the river winding to the sea, were shining like a dream revealed. Eden, Minty called it, the world before the Fall.
Behind him he could hear the steady raking of leaves across the gravel in the courtyard, the beating of a rug, laughter in the cook-house. Squirrels flicked like shadows in the corner of his eye.
Suddenly the two came together, the long view and the domestic, the grandeur of nature and the fellowship of simple toil, and he had a vision of how he wanted to live. A communal life on the land. Houses with a verandah and open windows and doors. In his own egalitarian country. Eden in the bush.
A lot of people were doing this now, he knew, dropping out, but he hadn’t paid it much attention. He thought he was a city boy. They even had their own bible in America, The Whole Earth Catalogue, and suddenly he understood what they were about. He had a sense of blinding truth. He sat quietly without reading, watching everything, and all the time he was planning, planning, how he was going to live. As he dressed for lunch, his eyes looked different to him in the mirror. He felt the call came from deep inside him. The moment was, he thought, Tolstoyan.
He thought of the bowl of frangipani blossom left each morning in front of a little stone Buddha in the courtyard. A life of devotion to the spirit.
The two women were sitting on the end of the futon. Cecile was wearing a red silk dressing gown. Like strangers after an intimate but soulless assignation in a motel room, there seemed to be nothing to say.
‘You’re very strong,’ Cecile said, as Toni squeezed her rings back onto her fingers. But why does she wait hand and foot on her man? she thought.
I’m glad she doesn’t fake her reactions, Toni thought. There’d been no release, no rhythm between them. Deep down, she is resisting me. Because of Maya? Because she knows more than she’s letting on? Because she doesn’t trust middle-aged Australian mothers?
‘Cecile, did Maya know anybody else in Melbourne?’
‘There was the guy she used to board with. Tod.’
‘Tod Carpenter. We know about him. Nobody else?’
‘She worked pretty closely with her boss. Maynard. I don’t know his surname.’
‘How did they get along?’
Cecile shrugged. ‘Half her life was spent with him.’
‘Do you think she might be with him now?’
Cecile shrugged again. Maya must have reasons for her silence.
The air was warm and smelt of almond and lavender oil mingled with the scents released from their bodies. Toni couldn’t quite bring herself to leave.
‘Do your parents miss you?’ she asked Cecile.
‘How can you miss a child who always held herself apart? I never let them near me. I think they were relieved when I left.’ Cecile lay back on the bed and spoke to the ceiling. ‘Don’t get me wrong, they’re not bad people. Though not as good as they think. They bought me with their money because they wanted to do something. They had three kids of their own and they thought it would be good for their education. They had a name all ready for the cute little Asian girl – Kiki – but I wouldn’t answer to it. The nuns at the orphanage had told me I was named after Saint Cecile. The family didn’t understand that I was already a fully conscious person, with memories and affections. I didn’t want to be carried around by their kids like a doll, I was used to being independent. I don’t hate them, not at all. I just couldn’t go on pretending that everything was OK. People have to be what they are meant to be.’
Just as the cold in the courtyard defeated him and he was entering the house, Jacob remembered another homecoming. He smacked his forehead, looked at his watch and hobbled fast to the phone.
9
Kitty
The first thin
g Kitty saw when she stepped off the bus into Cannon Street was the window display in Take Five Fashion, two life-sized models, male and female, outfitted in pyjamas and dressing gowns, bent into sitting positions on a couch, in front of an ancient TV. On the coffee table at their knees were two mugs and a plate of varnished Anzac biscuits which resembled a pile of turds. New winter sleepware! Don’t be late! was handwritten on a yellowed sign over the window. Kitty stood with her suitcase in front of this cosy still-life for some minutes. It could have been an installation in a gallery. She couldn’t believe it was for real.
The street seemed deserted. There was a row of turn-of-the-century pubs and shops, run-down but picturesque. Everything modern was banal and ugly. Warton Homeware, Billabong Crafts, Ezi Plus, Warton Meats, Melissa Hair. She bought herself a bottle of water from The Lucky Tearooms, a great dark barn-like place smelling of hot fat.
Kitty was not in a good mood. The bus trip had been spoiled by piped talk-back radio, and then just as the landscape became interesting, a video started up, an American high-school comedy which, as there were no headphones, you had no choice but to hear. Since she’d been gone, this country had become colonised. In Arlene and Joe’s home-unit the TV blared non-stop, mostly American shows. That was a blast, to come home to Lakeside, pre-grown palms, an artificial lake, retirees buzzing around in shopping buggies. She shared the spare room with Arlene’s sewing-machine, which seemed somehow symbolic.
Up Cannon, left into Trench, she read, her own scrawl on Arlene’s telephone pad. A twelve-minute walk, Jacob said. Her suitcase rumbled over the gravel footpaths. A small black pull-along. Over the years she’d become an expert packer. She’d learnt by now how little you really need.
Where was everyone? The emptiness after years in crowded streets was almost frightening.
