by Joan London
‘What does he do out there?’ she asked Magnus.
‘Stares out the window. Plays music. Falls asleep. Has a smoke when he thinks we’re not looking.’
‘Sounds like when he was a boy.’
‘No kidding! He’s always telling me to get my act together.’
‘Nobody ever told Jacob to do anything. Maybe you’re lucky.’
Chickie Fitzgerald. So this was the person she’d been trying to prove herself to all these years. The big brother who was always her superior. When she was teaching she made herself go to bed early, no matter what the hours of her current lover, to have enough energy for all she tried to do in the classroom the next day. She counted each lesson a failure if she did not see some light of interest or ease on every student’s face. She had to take care she slept enough or she became exhausted.
Slowly she’d climbed the ladder from teacher to policy-maker. By this time, nobody even knew she was Australian. She couldn’t have carried on teaching the way she did, but she came to look back on her teaching years sadly, like an artist appreciating the vitality of early work. By the end of her time in London, she was just another bureaucrat slowly burning out.
Meanwhile Jacob had disappointments of his own. Chickie Fitzgerald.
But he did have beautiful children.
Best of all she liked Maya’s room. She fell into the habit of taking an afternoon nap on Maya’s bed. At that hour the sun lay in a streak of warmth across the quilt, and the walls were patterned with palm tree shadows. No posters, no trinket boxes, no childhood teddy bears. A packed-away emptiness that declared life in this room was over. All that she’d left were the photos on a pinup board above the desk. Every day Kitty studied them. An enlarged, arty shot of the Garcias’ horses in mist, probably for a school assignment. Maya and Magnus as little snaggle-haired kids, arms wrapped around an ecstatic bulldog pup. A frail teenage boy in a wheelchair with a drooping head. A snap of Jacob and Toni slumped asleep in sarongs on their bed, slightly turned away from each other, yet somehow fitting together. Even asleep Toni was photogenic. Arlene and Joe getting married in those terrible matching white Thai silk suits. And the famous photo, The Sailor on Leave, Anton de Jong reading the paper on the verandah, ignoring his family. How had Maya got hold of that? There was even a faded Polaroid of Aunt Kitty in the snow, sent one Christmas years ago.
Kitty was touched. Why had Maya left them this shrine? Didn’t it show, at the very least, strong affections? It was a sort of farewell to childhood and its cast of characters. To one’s sleeping parents. In the top right-hand corner was a tiny mug-shot cut out of a school magazine, of a self-conscious, delicate face that at first sight Kitty took to be a girl.
‘Was Maya happy here?’
Magnus shook his head.
‘Why not?’
Magnus considered. ‘It’s like, there’s some kids in Warton who can’t wait to get away. And there’s some who never wanna leave.’
‘Was she hard to live with?’
He shrugged. ‘She just wanted to do things her way.’
They were talking after dinner, when Magnus was at his most communicative. Kitty had excelled herself again. Like an old-fashioned French housewife, each day she relied on inspiration, seeing what vegetables were fresh, what cuts in the butcher’s took her fancy. She bought wine from the pub, trying out different Australian reds. She fed Magnus huge meals, food she remembered from London dinner parties in the eighties, coq-au-vin and pot-au-feu, recipes from Elizabeth David. Keep good food on the table was one of her life rules, she told Magnus. She never forgot how hungry she was in adolescence, how she and Jacob had prowled around the kitchen, how the empty cupboards affected them like the hollowness of fate. She shuddered at the thought of those comfortless plates of chops and peas and mash.
Parenthood fascinated Kitty. What would she have been like if she hadn’t always had to be on the alert for herself? If as a little child she hadn’t been put to bed with the door shut and the light firmly out? She had cried, even screamed, but nobody came to her. She’d had to teach herself how to be alone, how to console herself with plans for what she would do tomorrow, or when she grew up. How to live for the light in the morning and have hope.
Arlene had work to do. No point in complaining to Arlene.
At first Magnus stayed in his room, padding out for meals or snacks and going back again. Kitty left him alone. She didn’t even ask him how school was that day: her students used to tell her how much they hated that question. Now after dinner, full of rich consoling flavours and a small glass of wine, Magnus stayed at the table and talked. She could see that he lived in a dream of his future. How did she rank London as a place to live, he asked, compared to New York, Tokyo or Berlin? Had she been to any good concerts? Had she seen Sting? Did she go to clubs? Why had she left London?
You don’t have to shield kids from your truth, she believed. Let him know she was a woman who’d been through things, with men. She topped up her glass and told Magnus the story that was still white-hot inside her. One night at a party she overheard Tim – Tim Lees-Walshe, the poet she’d lived with for seven years – asking a lawyer friend whether he could put in a claim on her flat if they parted. ‘After all,’ Tim said, ‘it is my place of work.’
‘Do you pay rent?’ the lawyer asked. ‘Do you share expenses for its upkeep?’
‘How would anybody know if I didn’t?’ Tim said.
She left the party at once and rang an estate agent first thing in the morning. Tim, she knew, without her, always missed the last train, and would still be asleep on the living room floor of the party. She took a taxi to a shipping agent and brought home a dozen boxes. Then she rang in sick at work and packed up her London life. Useful household things, kettles, doonas, she took to Oxfam, the rest she dumped in a skip at a nearby building site. She packed up Tim’s stuff too and left it in the corridor. It was all she could do not to dump his manuscripts and notebooks in the skip. But that would give Tim an excuse for his lack of productivity for years to come, how he’d lost his best work, his essential material, because of her jealousy. There is nothing, Tim often used to say, like the ambition of a small-town colonial girl. It would be a gift to him.
At last she could admit to herself that his poems, so rare, so erudite, so minutely dissected with his friends at the kitchen table, these poems that had required her to support him body and soul for seven years, had never given her one moment’s joy or insight and never seemed to be about anything of the slightest importance.
By midday, the flat, with furniture, had been sold unseen to a wealthy, desperate immigrant family. She booked her ticket home, moved out to a cheap hotel, and stayed there for two weeks until she’d finished up at work. She never saw or spoke to Tim again.
After years of therapy – and thousands of pounds – she knew that everything we are, why we do what we do, is formed in childhood. ‘It was instinctual,’ she told Magnus, ‘I couldn’t talk myself out of it. I needed to come home.’
She felt it was the end of one part of her life, the part with men. This she didn’t say to Magnus.
Magnus told Kitty about one of his ideas, to set up a business called Living Sounds, different music for different places and occasions. Not muzak but real music, custom made, for restaurants and shops, buses, trains, hospitals, schools. If they played different music all through the day at school, for example, they’d really change the feeling of the place. It would be like music for movies, the movies of ordinary lives. People would order music for their houses and cars, or for things they were going through, like studying for exams or a love affair or feeling sad. For each client he’d make a special compilation. It was the sequencing that was important. In music it was mood that really interested him.
Pretty soon it would all happen on computer, he said. Meanwhile he offered to make her a tape.
‘How will you know what to choose for me?’
‘It’s intuitive. I can’t start till I sort of hear the music,
or see a scene when I say your name.’
It was Magnus’s room off the kitchen, with its artery of wires and stacks of tapes and decks, that was the real creative centre of this house.
On the handle of his door was glued a tiny piece of newsprint that said hello.
Kitty felt a prickle of professional excitement. She recognised talent when she saw it. A Gifted Child. Her mind raced in the old way, with challenges, strategies, possibilities.
He was one of the ones who were dying to leave, like his sister. Where would be the best place for him to go? He had to consider the options. She took care to leave The Guardian Weekly on the kitchen table where Magnus could read it. The shyness, the slovenliness of speech, would drop away by itself, as hers had. It was important to give him the right sort of support now. So that he didn’t make some self-destructive decision like Maya probably had. Above all, he had to learn self-discipline. She’d known a lot of disappointed men who’d once been gifted boys. Starting with Beech.
The quintessential golden schoolboy. Who can transgress more gloriously than the son of a minister of the Church? For years she’d brush her hair after school and do her homework in the kitchen, in case Beech visited. Sometimes he’d wink at her, call her Miz Kitty. Sometimes he didn’t notice her, too busy announcing himself to Jacob. She listened to their non-stop voices in the sleepout, the shouts of laughter in bass tones. If Jacob was out, she sneaked into his room, picked up the books they lent each other, took them to her room and read them, turning the pages that Beech had touched.
She was sixteen when Beech, for lack of any other amusement, turned his attention on her and whisked her off to a bedroom at a party. It was better that she lost her virginity now, got it over and done with, he said, with an old family friend. It was a real handicap these days. ‘For a girl like you, Kit, it could be years and then you’ll get a complex.’ He was sharply intuitive, it got him what he wanted. It got her every time. In those days he half meant well. People hammered on the door, she lay wincing amongst other people’s coats, while he hissed commands. It hurt. There couldn’t have been a less romantic deflowering.
Then came the early London years when Beech, peripatetic journalist, would arrive begging floor space for a night. One thing always led to another, especially as you couldn’t spend time with Beech without drinking or getting stoned. She could never resist the violence of her physical reaction to him, a sixteen-year-old again. His eyes like a bright shrewd kid’s, show me a good time. His tiny, thin-lipped smile: Rien ne me surprise. He was the only person in London who knew where she came from and, as if he were some wild, childish part of her, she was unable to give him up. Eventually he got a job in Bangkok and never came back. By then she’d begun her long career of sleeping recklessly, hopefully, with men she knew didn’t love her. Beech had taught her how to throw caution to the winds, broken down some basic instinct for self-protection. Like a good disciple she adopted her master’s bravado. There was anger too. Why couldn’t she act as men did? Anger but also, always, shy hope.
One year she had three abortions. After that she didn’t get pregnant anymore.
She’d never had so little to do. Time at last for the Great Books. She started reading Jacob’s old copy of War and Peace. There were no distractions at all, except for a restless need to walk, as if she’d grown addicted to the air. Her shins ached from walking over the gravel roads.
At night under Magnus’s direction she embarked on a season of his favourite videos. Magnus considered Hitchcock was a good way to start.
She slept long and deep, as if she was learning to breathe again. Looking after Magnus was a sort of cure.
On Saturday morning Magnus wandered out in his pyjamas to the backyard where Kitty stood looking up at a cloud of black cockatoos dive-bombing for pine nuts. The air was full of their screeching.
Kitty pointed to the pine trees. ‘I can’t help seeing them as a couple.’ One was larger, bushier, the other smaller, better shaped. ‘Jacob and Toni, keeping an eye on us.’
‘Really?’ Magnus stared at her. She continually surprised him. ‘I’ve always thought of them as Jacob and Carlos.’ The giants of his childhood. Now they made him feel a bit sad.
‘Have you seen Carlos?’
‘No. But his ute’s there all the time. I don’t think he goes to work.’
‘Magnus, let’s ask them to dinner tonight.’
‘The boys’ll be going out.’
‘Then just ask Carlos.’
I hope I don’t have to spend the whole night listening to his problems, she thought.
12
Music for Carlos
It was interesting, Magnus thought, to live in a house with another woman. Everything about her was different, not just her clothes and the smell of her products in the bathroom, but her amazing white skin and her sad, shining eyes and her long jaw, a female version of Jacob’s. There was an aloneness about her wherever she went. It made her dramatic. Everybody noticed her.
He made her scream by walking soundlessly right up behind her, just like he did with his mother and Maya. What was it with women? They were always thinking about something else.
As soon as he’d returned from inviting Carlos, Magnus went straight to his room to finish working on the tape for him. Carlos had shocked him by his appearance, puffy and red-eyed, stinking of cigarettes.
‘Oh mate …’ Carlos stumbled round for an excuse. But he wouldn’t refuse him, Magnus knew. When they were all kids and he was the littlest, Carlos used to carry him around on his shoulders. They’d always been close.
Carlos arrived with a bottle of wine, his hair wet, in a clean shirt. One that Chris would have washed. It had the Garcia smell, the smell of childhood, when Magnus used to inherit the Garcia boys’ clothes. There was a red nick on his chin where he’d mown into his fierce black stubble. He’d made an effort, Magnus could tell. While Kitty poured them all a glass of wine, Magnus started the tape. A little friendly spat of jazz filled the room, as if they’d walked into a bar. By the time she put the big pot on the table Patsy Cline was singing, Carlos’s favourite, and everything felt more natural.
‘If this is music for ordinary lives,’ Kitty said, ‘I want to put in an order for each day of the week.’ She lifted up the lid of the pot with a flourish and steam rushed out. Lamb with white beans. She’d told Magnus she was going to make a dish to warm the heart.
After they were onto the second bottle of wine, and Tom Waits – Kitty told them a funny story about seeing him perform in London – Magnus knew it was going to be OK. The food had made them all feel better. He could see that Kitty would be a good teacher – she made people join in. Carlos was sitting the way he’d seen him sit a thousand times at this table, with his legs and arms crossed and his whole body shaking as he laughed. The Four Tops started up and they reminisced about rock festivals. Kitty did a Wild Thing demonstration, a bit pissed, showing off.
Magnus took his plate to the sink and told them he was going to jam at his friend Ben’s house now and would probably stay the night.
‘But you haven’t had any chocolate cake!’ Kitty looked upset.
‘I’ll have it for breakfast.’ He started putting on his backpack. Kitty had a right to a good time but he hated watching old people dance. He edged to the door. ‘Thanks a lot, Kitty.’ They both stared at him, but he didn’t relent. Everybody knew that on Saturday night you had to be with your friends or you got depressed. ‘There’s still some really good stuff to come,’ he said. Some Spanish guitar, mellow after-dinner music. It was an eighty-minute tape.
‘Look,’ Kitty said to Carlos a little desperately, ‘don’t feel you have to stay.’ She started to clear away the dishes. ‘It can be hard being with other people. I know what you’re going through.’
‘You do?’ Carlos looked shocked.
‘Bye,’ Magnus called as he shut the door behind him. There was Leonard Cohen to finish up. Leonard always sent that generation wild.
Rain started beati
ng on the tin roof, so loud they could hardly hear the courtly Andalusian ripples as they drank their coffee. Carlos laid his head back on the couch, closed his eyes and stretched out his legs. All over Spain she’d seen profiles like this, fine aquiline nose, receding curling hair, small pointed chin with a sad little bristling fold beneath it. His hands were neat and square, hairy-backed, with a wedding ring.
In a little while I’ll stoke the fire and start reading my book if I want to, Kitty thought. She felt sleepy and at ease. Why? There was no need to talk. How long since she’d sat with someone in a room without speaking? She was getting used to silence here. What were these familiar doleful chords? Bird on the wire … Oh Magnus. The melancholy was almost orgasmic. She and Carlos turned and laughed at one another.
‘D’you think Magnus knows what he’s doing?’
‘You bet he does.’
They were equally proud of him. They put their cups down on the floor at the same time.
Suddenly Carlos looked at her. ‘You’ve got really beautiful skin,’ he said, as if he could no longer keep it to himself. She felt the purity of his good nature rising like an evanescence beside her.
‘All those years without sun.’ Her eyes fell on the cover of the tape lying beside the stereo. Music for Carlos was written in Texta on the spine. Why did Magnus love this funny little guy? Why did he trust him? Their eyes met.
Eighty minutes. That was all that it took.
He stood in the bedroom doorway, water dripping off his parka, Winnie butting against his legs.
Kitty hardly moved when she slept, a kid-sized parcel deep in his parents’ bed. Winnie pattered over to her and licked her face.
A little yelp from the pillow. ‘Magnus! What’s the time?’
