In the yard at the rear of the house, the last of the summer fruit (which, to Michael’s surprise, his mother has not raked up) is rotting on the ground, the plums, apricots and passionfruit lying where they have fallen. The lawn is autumn brown. The house has a bright new coat of white paint, and sparkles in the sun. Fancy drapes have transformed the porch, a modern clothesline has replaced the old, and a garden light that was never there before overlooks the scene. But on the back fence three white stumps are just visible, the paint having just survived the years of rain and sun, as faint as old pain. Inside the shed, a red plastic cricket ball lies on the workbench where it was casually dropped one day and never picked up again. The remains of the old life mingle with the new.
During the day he listens to music, reads, and explores the living museum he grew up in. That evening, before rousing Madeleine, he smokes in the kitchen and lounges at the table, much, it occurs to him as he blows smoke into the air, in the manner that his father once did. Likewise, he sips the beer he brought with him from the prized Pilsner glass that his father once drank from. And, for a moment, he is his father. And, for the course of the cigarette and for the remains of the beer, he registers the sensations that come with this, as if he is being given a foretaste of what he will become. Eventually, he extinguishes the cigarette and places the ash and butt in the wastepaper bin, drops the beer can on top of it, and turns in the direction of his old room.
He slowly opens the door and pauses, watching the sleeping Madeleine. As deep as her sleep is, he will have to disturb her soon, not only because it is time to leave, but because the house itself, as the day has waned, has begun to unnerve him. Its ghosts are out and about. It is the very time of day, it has always seemed to Michael, when the hoo-ha’s come to get you. The hoo-ha’s, that’s his father talking. Like many of his father’s phrases, the phrases that come from his father’s age, they have stood the test of time and he is content to use it. The heebie-jeebies is another. And perhaps it’s appropriate that when he reaches for the words and phrases to describe the house at this hour he should find only those from another time, just as the life he lived here is now another life. Hoo-ha’s. Heebie-jeebies. These, indeed, are the words that the house would use. And with the hour and the vocabulary that is written into its rooms reasserting itself with such ease, the whole house and the darkening street itself have now taken on a conspiratorial air, as though they would drag Madeleine, too, into its past and claim her. And with her, claim his new life. So he strokes her shoulder, and her eyes open to an unfamiliar room, adjusting to the light and staring at the figure of Michael standing by the bed.
‘Did I call you?’ Her eyes are wide.
‘No.’
‘I thought I called you.’
‘I didn’t hear.’
‘I dreamt I called you, then.’
He shrugs as if to say only she can know that.
‘But you’re here,’ she says, now sitting up in bed and grinning. ‘I did call you. I called you from my dream and you heard. Explain that. No,’ she adds, her arms now open, ‘come here.’
The light in the room thickens, there is a chill in the air, and they stay close to each other. Then Michael hears the voice of Mrs Barlow next door, her voice with that high-pitched edge that has remained as consistent down through the decades as the things she says: the house is all wrong, the suburb ghastly and it’s all Desmond’s fault for dragging her out here in the first place. But Desmond is gone, and Michael imagines her addressing the empty room. A compulsion she barely understands herself any more, driving her to it, on and on. She has been here so long she can now no longer leave. But she can never admit this to herself, for to admit this would be to concede that she is, in fact, home. Over the years, this place and she have meshed, grown into each other, to such an extent that she would now be lost without it. Sometime, during all the years she fought so hard against the place, it became her centre. Desmond Barlow is gone (having coughed the last of his lungs into the last of his buckets) and Michael can only speculate about the scene being currently enacted in the Barlow lounge room and what (a photograph, a chair, a coat on a hook) she must be addressing.
He grins at Madeleine. She grins back.
‘Who is she talking to?’
‘Nobody.’
Her eyes pop, and she pauses.
‘Does she talk to no one often?’
‘Every night.’
‘Every night?’
‘Apparently.’
Then Mrs Barlow’s voice rises on one last wave of hopeless rage and the grin falls from Michael’s face. Madeleine turns her ear to the house next door. They are in her thrall and it is almost with a sense of panic in his voice that he coaxes her from the bed, switches the light on and brings her shoes to her. He throws the quilt over the bed and when Madeleine suggests they make the bed properly, that his mother will notice, he tells her not to bother. They must leave, he says, as the voice next door finally collapses into silence, and Madeleine, glancing from the window looking onto the Barlow house and then back to Michael, nods, as much annoyed by Michael’s high-handed manner as she is amused by the scene next door.
The autumn evening settles in. The children are out in the street, the way Michael once would have been, while Madeleine and he walk to the station, to the train that will take them back into the city and the Saturday night that awaits them. It’s dark, the hoo-ha’s have gone, and they are now safely beyond the reach of the street and the house and all its twilight phantoms. It can’t claim them now. But she has seen it, the suburb, the world that he comes from and which he will take with him wherever he goes.
Outside the train window, the suburbs of his past rattle by; the lighted platforms of familiar stations come and go, and as they recede into the distance, they also recede into that comfortably sentimental part of the memory that sees the past under eternally honeyed street lights.
Inside the carriage, Madeleine talks about the town she left to come here. The place that she talks about often enough but doesn’t miss. And, in the years ahead, when Michael will actually go there and see this town, he will know why. For it will have the look of a place, that, if you were Madeleine, you’d want to leave. He will pause by the park opposite the station one dank November night waiting for the Liverpool bus, not knowing what to make of the place until he recognises something of his old street in it, a touch of a closed-in world, and a town that always has one eye on the flat horizon because trouble is bound to be on the way and that’s where it comes from.
The suburbs have given way to the city now. The eyes of the old street will have turned inward and will now be focused on their televisions. The protesting voice of Mrs Barlow will have been silenced for the day. The khaki grass of the vacant paddock will be silver under the moonlight. Inside the carriage, the city beckons and Saturday night awaits them. But as much as the prospect of the evening excites Michael, Madeleine is subdued, even sullen now, and still more than a little annoyed at having been bundled out of the house. She has said all she wants to say about this town she came from, and now she wants to just sit. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is witnessing, for the first time, the unreachable Madeleine. The Madeleine who goes somewhere in her mind and doesn’t take him, because she doesn’t want him there. And, already, he is wishing he’d never taken her back to his old street. Everything goes rotten on the old street, and as much as he might just have viewed it through a sentimental lens, he is now cursing it, for it has given him this new, this unreachable, Madeleine, and he is convinced that he is cursed to carry the street wherever he goes.
20.
Perfume (1)
From the moment she enters the house on the Sunday evening, she knows someone else has been there. Michael had told her on the phone that he might drop in, and he has — but someone other than Michael has entered the house too. Her house. And the instant she asks herself why she knows this, she puts her nose to the air and smells it. Perfume. And not her own.
She’s b
een visiting her sister on the other side of the city. And as much as she is happy to visit her sister, she is always happier to be home because Rita is not one of those people who settle easily — or at all — into other people’s houses. Even if only for the weekend. And so she has been looking forward to this homecoming. When she would once more be surrounded by familiar walls, prints, chairs and all the carefully chosen decorative objects that give the place her touch — as well as the distinctive sounds and smells that make a house a home.
But the smell is all wrong. And she picked it as soon as she opened the front door and stepped inside. Michael had said he might be coming out to the old place (might ‘drop in’ he’d said, with the same casual air, it seemed to Rita, that these friends of his ‘drop out’), but he didn’t mention that anybody else would. And she knows it must be this young woman he’s been seeing. The one Rita hasn’t met yet, because she hasn’t been introduced. And her nose is out of joint about that. But even if Michael were to explain to his mother that their house was never that kind of house, it wouldn’t matter. That their house was never the kind of house to which he could bring a girl back and introduce to everyone, that throughout the whole of his adolescence he knew it was not written into the laws of the house that a girl could be brought back to it, because it would always be the wrong girl. The wrong sort. For the girl — apart from surely bringing with her the wrong laugh, voice and clothes — would always bring with her the possibility of Michael’s closed bedroom door and Rita would always be bursting that door open. Because some closed bedroom doors are unnatural. Not that Vic would care. Let him, Vic would say. Let him. If Rita were to just pause and think, she would recognise that it was always this way, and her nose shouldn’t be out of joint because this girl of his hasn’t been introduced. They never were. And she knows this even now, standing in the hallway of her house with all the wrong smells around her. At least, part of her does. The part that she doesn’t talk to. And behind it all, there all the time (and once again Rita knew it then and knows it now without need of Michael telling her), there was always this business of the weight. The weight that she took from Vic and placed upon Michael, the weight that they could have called love but never did. The weight that eventually landed on Michael. Who else? For when love turns to weight, somebody has to carry it. So, the girl would always be wrong. And, throughout Michael’s adolescence, no girls ever entered the house. If Rita were to just pause, she would see that it was always this way. But she doesn’t. She’s got the cheap reek of some tart’s perfume up her nose.
And so Rita, dragging this ancient weight about with her and wishing she wasn’t, now walks about the house smelling only the scent of intrusion. Of a stranger. Of deception. And, as she walks about the house, she is now aware of other smells, of cigarettes, yes cigarettes — and beer? She’s sure she’s got the whiff of old beer in her nostrils. She knows that smell, stale beer, from the night before — any night before. The smell of previous-night’s-beer is unmistakable. And with the whiff of old beer she is simultaneously seeing Vic falling through the front door, stumbling through the house, and that old familiar feeling of wretchedness is upon her once again, and the memory of that wretched madness that swelled her heart to the point of exploding all those years ago is now more than a memory. It’s a smell. And smells make things happen all over again. And she knows she doesn’t want these memories again, but knows they won’t go till the smell does. Then she sees further signs of disruption, even as she’s dwelling on this business of smell and weight and love and why it had to be like that. For she has entered Michael’s old bedroom, which has changed little since he left, and noticed immediately that the bed has been disturbed. Slept in. And with the observation comes an involuntary shiver. A half-hearted attempt has been made to make it, a quilt thrown over the bed almost contemptuously. Brazenly. And as this stranger’s perfume — which she knows to be a common, cheap scent that young girls these days go for — as this stranger’s perfume mingles with the sight of the shabbily remade bed, the word ‘tart’ comes to her again. And she is convinced that Michael has not only sneaked back into the house when she was not there like some creature with guilt written all over its face, he has dragged a tart back into their house, her house, with him. And she knows straight away that this is not the act of her Michael, upon whom she rested the weight of the love she was left with (when Vic wouldn’t carry it any more), her Michael who had always told her that her dresses were just right when the street sneered. No, it wasn’t him, but some other Michael with a tart in his ear.
She has been at her sister’s all weekend, looking forward to being back in her own house. With its own sounds and smells, but now all that has been ruined. And, although it is chilly, she is opening the windows of Michael’s old bedroom and pulling the quilt, blankets and sheets from the bed. And as she lifts the sheets she notices that the perfume — this common drop that, no doubt, common girls go for — rises, stronger than ever from the pillow slip. And soon, the whole intrusion, the whole violation, is bundled up and dropped into the washing machine in the laundry where the scent can be washed from it. The thought of some girl that she’s never met sleeping in the house — if ‘sleeping’ is the word — without Rita even being consulted is not only an intrusion but a betrayal. And, if he can treat this place like some kind of doss-house, she is also asking herself just how well she knows this other Michael who mixes with all his university types and the sorts of girls — that she can well imagine — who hang around them.
For an hour — or is it more? — she’s wretched. Ridiculous. As angry with herself as she is about the bed and everything else. She’s spent all her life either waiting for the men in her life, or watching them move on, just wishing they’d stand still long enough for her to get a grip on them. And noting, more sad than angry, the happiness with which they move on, when they finally do. And maybe all the staying when everybody told her to go, all the care she poured into the house, was just another way of telling herself, and telling the street, that the world hadn’t expired the day Vic moved on. A way of telling herself and everybody else that the house was still here, she was still here, things would go on, and the damage wasn’t so bad really. But, perhaps, in the end, the only one she convinced was herself.
Later, when the bed has been changed and the evening breeze has done its work, when the kettle is boiling and kitchen smells fill the house and the television is creating its own distinctive sounds (for each television is different), she tells herself that the house is hers again.
For a moment it slipped from her, its ghosts rose up from where they were resting and she felt the weight of old love doing its work all over again. And with that moment, possibly acknowledged for the first time with any sense of inevitability, or even urgency, was the feeling that Michael might be right after all, that her sister might be right, they all might be right — that the ghosts of the house would be forever in residence. And so, after all the care she’s showered on the house and the sense of home the house gave her when a sense of home was needed, after all that, the time for parting company might be upon them.
She looks around her, wondering what the feeling might be like — to finally say goodbye to the place — and if (for the memory of old love and old wretchedness has exhausted her) she would ever have the strength to do it.
21.
Vic’s Detour
This is the part of Vic’s wanderings through the town that he doesn’t have to take. But for reasons he is not quite sure of, he does. And perhaps ‘reasons’ isn’t the right word, for he is driven by the kind of impulse that an animal might be driven by, uncomprehending, but utterly accepting. Therefore, once a week (usually a Monday, as it is today), even on those midsummer mornings when nobody should be about, Vic goes out of his way and strolls past the funeral director’s in a small street behind the post office.
He has, in fact, just come from the post office and on this day there is no letter from Rita (currently noting that the whiff of in
trusion has been expunged from the house overnight). He enters the side street that takes him round the back of the funeral parlour. The roller doors are up, a long, gleaming hearse sits waiting for its hour, and near it a beautifully polished and lacquered coffin has been placed on a metal stand. Three men in white shirts and dark suit trousers, and a woman in gumboots, all stand about in a circle, chatting, laughing and smoking, the way anybody would before work. They could just as easily be a road gang taking a break, or drivers in between shifts.
As he passes he nods and they all return the greeting, but it is the tall, grey-haired, senior member of the group who makes eye contact with Vic. An amiable face, a grin that is happy enough. But at the still centre of his smiling face are the eyes that know a few things about Death. We greet Death in the mornings, this man’s eyes say. We mix with Death’s family and friends, we drive Death to a lonely plot and we bury it. Or we burn it, and put it in a jar. But before we do all that, we like to hang about out the back here and have a bit of a smoke and a laugh.
On this morning though, Vic recognises something more than all that in his eyes. The coolness on the dark side of the affable undertaker. A professional interest, and Vic the object of his interest. It is a passing moment of scrutiny, of calculation. Up and down the length of Vic’s frame. Of measurement. In short, a fitting. Unspoken, but there. They all come to us in the end, the look says. Whether you like it or not, we will, you and I, do business one day. And Death does a steady trade in this town.
Has he got a smell about him? A smell that Vic himself can’t pick up, or anybody else for that matter, except for those who deal with bodies every day. Vic could swear, as this affable undertaker narrowed his eyes, he also lifted his nose as if detecting the unmistakable scent of business.
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