Jean Harley Was Here

by Heather Taylor Johnson

  Leaving Donald hadn’t been as hard as her friends said it would be. When she’d told him over cigarettes and cask wine at the kitchen table, he’d said, ‘Fair enough,’ and when she’d asked him for some money to get them started, he’d said, ‘How much?’ He’d told her he never did think he’d be a good husband and he was surprised they’d lasted this long.

  ‘You weren’t so bad all the time, just most of it.’

  They were both looking at their glasses or the table or the rings on their fingers.

  ‘My heart wasn’t in it for long, I guess.’

  ‘Nor was mine.’

  ‘So what’ll you do?’

  ‘Get a job, I suppose.’

  ‘You can’t get a job. You can’t even clean the house properly.’

  Her parents took her and Stan in. ‘Come and stay with us for a spell. It’s quiet here. You’ll love the birds.’ And she did. She spent hours bird watching while her son fished on the little island south of Adelaide named for kangaroos, where her parents had retired. Her father was a former school teacher who’d taken to making cheese. Her mother cared for injured roos and painted lovely landscapes. Marion felt guilty about the free accommodation, she being in her forties with a child of her own. Felt she should’ve been able to take care of herself and Stan without anyone’s help, yet what could she do? ‘I’ll keep your house clean in return for room and board.’ They’d said it wasn’t necessary, but with all of the baby joeys in and out of the place, it was.

  Eventually she got a job at the regional school, desperate as it was for teachers. She struggled with teaching maths and science, but loved teaching history and literature. Every year she taught Julius Caesar; Shakespeare made her weep.

  It was hard when her father died. He’d taken a piece of Marion to the grave and she knew this because she no longer felt whole. Her mother stopped talking, clung tighter to the roos, and Stan left to travel the world. Marion discovered the plays of Chekhov that year and cleaned like mad, because cleanliness wasn’t so much about appearances or sanitisation, but more about telling Donald, telling her parents, telling the world, ‘See, I can work, parent and keep a clean home, and I can handle anything else you damn well throw at me.’ She’d been guilty of being passive aggressive with Jean in the past, saying things like, ‘Yes, it’s wonderful you had the ceiling fans put in, but the problem is now someone has to dust them.’

  So on that first morning of her indefinite stay at her son’s house, Marion had rinsed her mouth and spat, stared hard at the drain, then took her toothbrush and scrubbed at the mildew, swearing silently because now she’d have to buy a new toothbrush to replace the one she’d just thrown across the bathroom, the plastic bouncing hard off the glass of the shower wall. Of course the flying toothbrush had nothing to do with the state of the drain. Marion had been thinking about Jean’s coma.

  It was on day two that she got the cheque for a play she’d written fifteen years earlier. London had revived it, garnering reviews of ‘it’s a classic’ and ‘another Australian icon’, so there she sat, holding the gutsy sum, not knowing what to make of it. Mortality and existentialism, she thought; it could be the title of a stellar tragedy if it hadn’t been so close to the goddamn truth.

  Already she’d fed Orion, gotten him dressed for bed, read to him and kissed him goodnight and then rung Stan at the hospital to tell him all was fine – at least in his house, considering – and already she’d rung Jean’s brother in America to give him an update on the sad state of his sister’s condition. Nothing had changed and, in this case, no news was bad news. John Harley had asked if he should come. She hadn’t known how to answer. He’d said things were difficult with him moving out of his home, a marriage break-up, a fragile daughter – what more could life throw at him now? Marion hadn’t known how to handle the delayed response of the telephone line, let alone this stranger’s tears, because he was, indeed, ‘losing it’. So when everything she’d taken on had been ticked off and filed away under More Awful Jobs for Another Awful Day, including wiping down the kitchen cupboards, she took the cheque out of her purse and held it in the silence of her son’s lounge room, Digger the dog an apostrophe next to her, giving her the kind of comfort money could never buy. She petted him lovingly, which woke him up and then he fell back to sleep, leaving Marion staring beyond the cheque. She was seventy-seven. She had enough money to see her through until the end, and she could still provide for Stan and Jean’s future (if Jean lived through the night) and that of her grandson too. Whatever could the money mean?

  It was Jean and her two friends who had introduced Marion to the Fringe Festival when they’d staged a performance about menstruation. Given the subject matter, Marion hadn’t had high hopes for the girls’ theatrical piece – clearly it wouldn’t be the Shakespeare that made her weep – but she was going with Stan, who was introducing her to Jean, his new American girlfriend. Well, it can’t last, she’d thought. She’ll have to go home eventually. How was Marion to know that this Jean would one day give birth to her only grandchild, her brightest star Orion? How was she to know that this American girlfriend would break her son’s heart by landing herself in a coma after a horrible accident with a van, for godsake? All she’d known then was that Jean had danced across the stage and spoken in verse both witty and reflective, and that she had been mesmerising.

  Marion had been fifty-eight when she’d written her first play, thinking, If they can do it, so can I. She was sixty when it had debuted at the Adelaide Fringe Festival. Sixty-one at the Fringe in Edinburgh. She’d thought herself too old to get carried away with grand dreams of success and fame, yet there they were, coming at her as fast as the ideas for each of her plays. She was sixty-two when one of her plays showed at the Festival Centre. Sixty-four when it made it to the Opera House. Year after year she steamrolled along, wondering what had taken her so long to start writing in the first place. Her office at home housed framed playbills; a photograph of her seated next to David Williamson, both dressed in black at a long white table littered with wine glasses; a poster with ‘starring Goldie Hawn’ in black and red chunky letters; a scrapbook of review clippings, the good and the bad, though they were mostly good. With eight plays under her belt, she was doing all right, better than all right, but what did it mean to her when now it came in the form of an obtuse cheque and her daughter-in-law possibly never waking up, rendering her grandson motherless and her own son lost?

  Their relationship had always been complicated from Marion’s side. True, they shared a love of the arts and they supported one another’s passions in a way Stan could not, he being a mere admirer and nothing like a practitioner, but Marion had resented Jean for reasons she’d never been able to pinpoint. It wasn’t overt resentment – they were friends and she loved Jean – but it niggled.

  A strong memory, tasting bitter now, had Marion feeling guilty. Stan and Jean announcing their engagement. The riesling in her hand becoming heavy. There was no fear of the glass falling, only fear of Marion bringing it down to the table before she’d clinked it with Stan’s and her soon-to-be daughter-in-law’s. ‘Oh! That’s …’ Rather than finish her sentence, she clinked glasses.

  But she’d known it was going to happen. Stan and Jean had a remarkable story to tell if anyone asked how they’d met, and they’d been together for years. He’d taken her to Kangaroo Island, where they picnicked at his grandparents’ graves. He’d flown her to Bali, and though Marion had gracefully nipped at him for buying Jean’s ticket, he’d said they were a buy-one-get-one-free deal and why would he want to go alone? Who else would he want to take?

  ‘Well, I’d like to go to Bali.’

  That hadn’t gone too far. In fact, it had bounced off Stan’s smile and landed right smack in Marion’s eye, so even she winced as soon as the words had left her mouth. What kind of mother am I? she’d wondered, badly wanting Stan’s loyalty. He’d always been her number one man.

  Of
course they were going to get married and one day move in with Marion, having spent all of ‘their’ money travelling, travelling, always travelling every school holiday Stan got off work (Jean, the perennial student, could always leave at the drop of a hat), but what could Marion say? Hadn’t her parents taken her in when she’d had no money?

  Marion feared too much that one day they’d want to move closer to Jean’s family, leaving Marion behind, ageing and alone. America was just so far away and, now that she was examining this, maybe that’s why Jean’s American-ness had always bothered her. Her confidence, her naivety, her optimism. Marion closed her eyes and lay down the cheque, realising it was exactly those qualities Jean needed – they all needed – right now.

  Of course there was respect and admiration, and there was real love too. Who but Jean cared most for her when the cancer beat her down? Who but Jean? There had been midday check-ins, when Jean would bring Orion, who was only three, and both bore presents: crayon drawings and plastic containers of homemade soup. Jean drove her to hospital for chemo and radiation and follow-ups and check-ups. Jean helped her buy bras after the operation. Jean rang at night just to say goodnight. No doubt it was time to give back.

  Being there for Stan and Orion was the least she could do. Cleaning up the place was just that little something more. But as she held the cheque on day two of this mess – thinking if it hadn’t been for Jean and her dance of the fallen egg, she mightn’t have the money at all, so in fact the cheque should do something to honour Jean – she came up with an idea for a new project.

  Day five at the house: now she was truly over-extended. A woman her age wasn’t meant to care for a little boy not yet in school, all day, all night, with only a few hours’ reprieve from her own son, who in these hours needed special care too. It was an emotional time and Marion couldn’t find her own space where she could properly feel. It was all go, go, go in the day and do, do, do at night, because when the house was quiet and Digger sat with her on the couch – the familiarity of the new nightly ritual a welcomed warmth in a dire situation – Marion was putting that cheque to use, answering emails from the Australian Society of Authors. She’d told them she wanted to set up a grant for an unpublished female playwright over the age of fifty because surely there were budding greying playwrights, possibly nub-knuckled from arthritis, who deserved a break in a later stage of their lives, and shouldn’t she help them out? The ASA asked her for the details and so she wrote that the Jean Harley Fellowship for $40,000 would support the work of an as-of-yet unproduced playwright for one year. She prayed that by the time the successful applicant got her own big cheque, Marion would be back at home in her office writing another winning play, and Jean would be back to caring for her family and ignoring the hassle of cleaning.

  It was pure exhaustion, though. Today’s checklist had included getting breakfast for herself and Orion, helping him choose his clothes and brush his teeth, cleaning the dishes and dusting the blinds, walking the dog to the park where she pushed Orion on a swing until her arms gave out and her knees did too, lunch, dinner, and all the in-betweens like going to the hospital and wiping her eyes, blowing her nose, hugging able bodies and looking over the unable one, then carrying a napping Orion from car to house, getting the boy ready for bed and into bed and somehow finding time to send the email. Jean’s body wasn’t responding the way anyone had hoped and the doctors were less than optimistic, you could see it in their hesitant eyes. Marion’s own eyes were tired, the words on the screen blurring and shifting.

  She crawled into the guest bed and her aching body sunk so far into the mattress she didn’t think she could possibly turn and was sure she’d wake in this exact position when the sun came up in the morning. But there was Orion, moving in his sleep. The sound encouraged Marion to give turning her own body a go. Just thinking it somehow proved to be enough, because this was OK, lying in the guest bed, staring at the ceiling, letting the day lift from her old bones. Unlike Stan, at least she was lying in a bed. Unlike Jean, at least she could make the choice to lie still.

  Not Dead, Just Sleeping

  The red plane rose into the sky, heading for America, maybe even further than the moon. He’d built it from the little Lego he’d been given on his fourth birthday because before four he’d only had big ones. Before four he might have stuck little Lego in his mouth for no other reason than a mouth is a hole and holes carry all kinds of possibilities. He was clever at building with the tiny Lego and so the plane flew far. It flew far from the city street rug he sat upon, where some days Matchbox cars drove in circles but today were packed away in an old tin because today he needed to fly. He was the pilot and he wanted to go higher, so he pointed the plane up to the ceiling and he rose to his feet so the plane could go higher, so he could go higher, and he stood on his bed and in his mind he flew his plane up above the strong rod holding his curtains and beyond the glass in the window panes and over the trees, into the sky, where he flew and he flew and he flew.

  Sunlight splashed Orion’s walls, brightening the green and pink racing stripes his Very Viv had painted for him. Very Viv was very nice very funny very pretty very tall and she was very good with a paintbrush. He loved the racing stripes and he loved his room, where things happened that didn’t happen in other places. Like just now, he’d flown higher than the blue in the sky, then pointed the plane down, because he was the pilot and he wanted to go down. He flew along the bottom racing stripe because if he didn’t follow it around the room three times, the world would blow up. It was hard work.

  He looked at the map of the city street rug when he tired, deciding the world would not explode. He thought about going to Very Viv’s house by the beach, where he could play a bowling game or a dancing game on her big TV that hung on the wall. Very Viv’s was the very funnest house.

  He could go to Juni’s house, but then he’d have to fly over the city, and he didn’t like to ‘feel crowded’. It’s what his mum always said after a day of running errands in the city. ‘Let’s get out of the city now so we’re not so crowded.’ He loved playing with Juni, but he’d never been to her house without his mum and he wasn’t so sure she’d let him go by himself. She wouldn’t even let him cross the street by himself. Luckily she wasn’t here to see him in his aeroplane by himself.

  He could turn around and fly to his nan’s, where they would bake and read a lot of books, but Nan wasn’t there because she was at his house, and if he decided to come back home, she’d be there waiting for him with a hug that would turn into hair-petting, which is how Orion told his dog Digger that he loved him. But even with Nan and Digger and his room, Orion didn’t want to fly back home. He looked on the map again and decided the hospital was in the corner. He went there because it was where his mum was.

  ‘Should we get ready to go, love?’

  Orion felt himself falling. The engine stopped working. ‘Help! Help! I’m crashing!’ The red plane tumbled in circles until it hit the hospital where his mum was sleeping (how can people sleep so much?). The plane and the hospital both burst into flames. Those who could use their legs were running out of the building, but most of them, like his mum, were burning in their beds. There seemed to be nothing he could do.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said his nan. ‘I hope the pilot survived that crash!’

  ‘No,’ said Orion. ‘He fell from too high. He’s dead.’

  Orion’s mum was sleeping too much and it was a little bit scary. She had tubes in her and it looked like they hurt, but not enough to wake her up. The tubes gave her ‘food and water and helped her breathe’. Orion thought it odd that a person could sleep while eating and drinking. Sometimes doctors opened her eyes and shone tiny lights in them and she still wouldn’t wake up. His dad told him that someone washed her. Why didn’t she wake up when the water splashed her skin?

  The doctors said to be ‘optimistic’. Orion didn’t know what ‘optimistic’ meant. He noticed there was a change in the people around
him, so he thought maybe they were being optimistic. His dad sure looked different. His face seemed longer. Either his hair was darker or his skin was lighter. And his eyes were different, too. Orion wondered if his mum’s eyes might look different when she woke up. Her face sure looked different. And her skin. And his dad’s body was longer, too. Or skinnier. His mum’s body looked smaller because he couldn’t see it under the covers. It was like she had no body, just lots of covers. Orion wanted to get in bed with her. He wanted his dad to get in bed with them both, but his dad looked so different and so did his mum. Orion thought they were being optimistic.

  He heard his nan talking quietly to people about ‘dying’ and ‘cancer’ and the ‘coma’. His nan had cancer not so long ago, but she was OK now because she had ‘fought it’. His nan didn’t seem like the fighting type because she was old and wore skirts and dresses, but she was strong in lots of ways, this he knew, even at four (almost five). When his mum and dad first told him about his nan’s cancer, they’d told him that she would have to get sick before she got better, but that she could definitely get better. And she did get better, but boy did she get sick. Maybe when her hair fell out she was being optimistic and that’s what made her get better.

  At hospital, where his mum was sleeping, his nan asked a lot of questions about dying to the other grown-ups. She seemed to be like Orion: not so sure what it really meant. Usually she knew things that Orion didn’t and she told him how bees grew flowers and what the colour red might say if it had a voice, but she didn’t know about dying and she looked sad when she talked quietly about it.

  His Very Viv wasn’t very fun at the moment. She was still the most fun of all the grown-ups because she still picked him up and tickled him when she asked what was in his belly and she ran with him down the corridors when they went to the cafeteria and she always shared a cup of jelly or a piece of cake, and she held his hand when they walked back to his mum’s room, but now Very Viv seemed very serious, so Orion thought she was being optimistic too.