‘I think I am a tolerably broad-minded specimen,’ I said.
‘Yeah, right.’ He nodded with a sage expression. It reminded me of his niece, although they do not look at all alike on the face of it. ‘I guess you’ve seen it all, Thea. Maybe more than once.’
‘What goes around comes around,’ I said. And we continued to sip our coffee in a decorous manner.
‘I’ll take her to the pound next weekend, if you like,’ I said. ‘We don’t want to disappoint her yet again, do we?’
He seemed delighted. Would I? Really? Hey, that’d be great, if it wasn’t too much trouble.
If you think she’ll come with me, I said.
‘Oh, she’ll come all right. Know what? I reckon she’d rather go with you anyway.’
‘And if we come back with a new puppy, you and Ellice are content to accept whatever we find?’
‘We’ll be fine with any furry critter that takes your fancy, I reckon, Thea.’
‘It’s going to be Kim’s,’ I told him, ‘so it will be her choice of critter.’
Had he been angling for it? That did cross my mind. But my suspicious mind has a habit of seeing ulterior motives when they don’t always exist. This is a habit of later life, a cynical habit. The result, I imagine, of having once been on the receiving end of a grievous lesson in moral dereliction and duplicity. And in the necessity of keeping one’s eye on the ball.
Anyway, as they say, whatever.
Frank is very easy to get on with. I think he’s one of those fortunate individuals who has no problems with social interactions in general. What they call these days a ‘high people skills’ person, which with my notoriously low tolerance of other people ought to mean that his personality is the antithesis to mine. We may be like chalk and cheese in this respect, but we seem to have made our own connection.
It is a common assumption that age differences create insuperable barriers between people, but I have not found this to be true, necessarily. There was a big age difference between Matthew and me, but we got on famously. My deputy head once observed that he and I got on better than she did with her own son. This was a disconcerting remark because I didn’t see it in any way as a ‘filial’ relationship. I knew there was some bad feeling about our friendship in the staff room, but in my obtuseness I put it down to jealousy. Solely to that.
You’d think that Frank might have gravitated towards a more social type of occupation, instead of working in an isolated creative bubble. He says he enjoys bushwalking so he must have a reflective, solitary side. Perhaps this is the part of him that I instinctively respond to. It must be a point of contact with his niece too, I suppose. He is certainly fond of Kim, but I have a feeling he welcomes the chance to have her entertained off the premises for a few hours. It must be quite a responsibility for a young man who was hitherto unencumbered with any such thing.
If he is right and she would prefer to go to the pound with me, this may be because I am not part of the family she is majorly wary of becoming attached to, as Frank says.
Frank showed me where he writes and plays music, the end room he calls his studio. I had to steel myself. I tried to imagine I was visiting this house for the first time and being shown around by the owner. Tried to see it dispassionately. In this I was reasonably successful, I think.
On the way we passed Kim’s bedroom. The den of the Wombat, he said. It would have been my guestroom. I’m not sure I needed a guestroom, or who I imagined was going to visit. The door was closed. He went to open it, but I put my hand on his arm to restrain him.
‘We should wait until Kim is here to show me herself,’ I said. ‘A girl is very particular about her own room, it’s her private domain.’ I remembered that from the school boarding houses, which don’t afford very much privacy at any time. And also from my own childhood. I never wanted anyone invading my sanctum.
Frank said, ‘Oh, she’s used to it. She doesn’t care who barges in.’
I doubted that, and said so rather forcefully. It was all the more important as she’d almost certainly never had a room of her own before. He gave me a throwaway grin as if to say, have it your own way.
His workroom down at the far end would have been my study. This was the room in which I was going to do my writing, surrounded by bush on three sides. My inspirational room was unrecognisable to me now, full of baffling electronic gadgetry and switches, big speakers and a keyboard. There was a couch or day bed along one side, and a console of whizzbang controls, just like the dashboard of a Boeing 747. I could see the need for extra power points in here. He was like a jet pilot in his cockpit, I told him.
He liked that. ‘My cockpit? Cool.’
I nearly walked into a half-empty bottle of red wine and a half-full (to be even-handed) wine glass on the floor. Nearly knocked them both flying. I never drink a thing when I’m trying to write. Perhaps I should give it a whirl, it might improve my poems. Couldn’t make them any worse, could it?
Frank played me one of his compositions on the synthesiser. It sounded like one of those discordant pieces I always find utterly pointless and alienating. I interrupted, with my hands over my ears, before he got to the end. It was too highbrow for me and far too avant-garde, I declared. I’m not afraid to say I like a nice tune. He looked comically crestfallen.
I added, ‘But you never know. If I was locked in here and force-fed your music on pain of dismemberment, I might discover a liking for it.’
He laughed loudly and clapped me on the back. ‘Good on you, Thea.’ He took a disc from a shelf. ‘Here’s my new show reel to practice on. You’ve got a CD player, haven’t you? Go on, force yourself.’
I might force myself, or then again I might not. He may even be absurdly talented. How would I know?
It’s been pouring with rain almost non-stop for three days. Unusual for this time of year, but the whole climate’s out of whack as a result of the depredations of the species. Still, rain is to be welcomed for reducing the bushfire risk. I’ve hardly set eyes on them. Frank’s been taking the other two off in the morning, dropping Kim at school presumably and Ellice at the café. I’ve also seen him walking at a brisk clip in the rain. Then I’ve seen him go out later in the car to pick up Kim.
Two leaks in the kitchen from a blocked gutter. Water seeping under the windows. I got on the ladder and cleared most of the leaves, but still had to get Giorgio in. The TV conked out and I had to get Paul in as well. Not that there’s ever anything on the box that any sensible person would want to watch.
At one point I even put on Frank’s show reel. I lasted five minutes, maximum. Teddy couldn’t stand it either and left the room.
Went to the library. I asked if a girl of Kim’s description had joined recently. The dim little woman didn’t know. This is a small community, not a teeming metropolis like Sydney or Saigon. She must be singularly unobservant as well as a halfwit.
You could say my piece about Ted was a washout too. Oscar said it was on the anodyne side. A little lacking in my usual astringency and bite. I’d thought it was quite clever, but of course he wasn’t to know why I’d thought that.
‘I dunno, Thea,’ he said. ‘The way you paint this saintly guy, he sounds almost too perfect by half. A goody-two-shoes. Almost too goody to be truey.’
‘When can we meet this paragon of virtue?’ Gilda-lily, of course. ‘Can we come round for tea, seeing as how he doesn’t drink? Will you introduce him at once so I can get my sticky paws on him?’ Her paws? How creepily appropriate, had she only known.
Greg said he hated him already without needing to meet him.
Really, rather an extreme response. No one asked me if we lived together, so my preparatory work was not required. I was left with the impression they all thought Ted was a figment of my imagination, and stopped short of saying so outright to spare my feelings. Galling is the least of it.
The others didn’t fare much better. Mostly they had chosen influential people in their lives rather than love objects. Gilda had chosen
Cary Grant. Enough said. I was sitting next to Greg again. The idea of Cary Grant pushing her buttons leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, I murmured in his ear. Or where I thought his ear was; he was having a particularly bad hair day. I don’t do anything to mine, but at least it’s short and straight. The longer Greg’s gets the less he appears to wash it.
Oscar said it was his fault. ‘I made like I wanted nice, when it was nice and nasty I was really after. Sweet and sour, the two sides of everybody’s coin. Not to worry, we’ll go there another time. And now,’ he appeared to consider, ‘for something completely different. Intercourse.’
There was an audible group intake of breath.
‘Social discourse, you disreputable lot. Speech. Lofty diatribes, idle chatter. Write me an arresting page of dialogue between two people, about something. Doesn’t have to be about something important, not even necessarily anything overt or spelt out. Think three things, troops. The three things are: subtext, subtext and subtext.’
He expanded on this theme, people talking about one thing and meaning another. I suppose people do this. I’m not sure that I do it. He says it happens all the time. If you doubt me, he said, go forth and eavesdrop. Shamelessly listen in to snatches of speak in buses and cafés. Especially snatches between life partners. You’ll soon see what I mean.
I wondered how Oscar’s amour was progressing. He seemed a little subdued and fretful today. His personality is very fin de siècle, Gilda said to Greg as we were leaving. Un peu Proustian, she added with a laborious moue.
Proustian? Good grief. She wouldn’t have the faintest idea what that means. She probably thinks madeleine is the name of one of his characters.
Sandy tells me Frank and Kim came in again after school. They bought three books, all for her. She was gobbling up his young adult stuff now, Sandy said. ‘We went Gone With the Wind, How Green Was My Valley and Jamaica Inn.’ Next stop, Jane Austen. And how had she gone with the two I’d given her?
I had to say I didn’t know as I hadn’t seen her, it had been so grim and wet lately. But I’d had coffee with Frank. We had a regular date on Mondays. And I was taking Kim to the dog pound on the weekend.
‘An overflowing social calendar. You’ve struck up a friendship,’ he said. ‘That’s good, I had a feeling you two would hit it off, even if she is only twelve years of age. Didn’t I tell you she’s your kind of person?’
And what would that be when it’s at home, I inquired. A little on the unorthodox side, was all I could extract from him.
‘Which covers a multitude of sins, and describes you too, what’s more,’ I said. How about Frank? Was he my kind of person as well?
Sandy gave me one of his playful looks. ‘I’m sure he is. But I hardly know the man.’
I think he was just bantering about in the way we do together, but it did occur to me to wonder if there was a subtext in there. If so, what could he mean? I couldn’t pursue this intriguing line of inquiry because the woman Monica came in and distracted him with a raft of dopey queries.
I’m sure he is. But I hardly know the man.
I juxtaposed the two sentences in my mind to see if they sounded any different.
I hardly know the man. But I’m sure he is.
Oscar, this is your doing. You have made me obsess over ten innocent words. Ten innocuous words, moreover, delivered by someone so constitutionally good-natured he is incapable of innuendo, even of ambiguity of any description. Or so I have always thought.
I was left wondering whether Sandy was implying something about me. I found myself asking quite what it was that he, of all people, was actually saying. And wondering if I was endowing it with an unwarranted significance?
If it means what I think it may mean, it is dismaying, not least in its inaccuracy. To suggest that I have an indiscriminate predilection for anything of the male gender is preposterous.
Of course, subtext is not the same as implication. Hum drum words and phrases can express different things depending on how you use them. This is a fundamental linguistic truth, yet it is something I feel am only just beginning to come to grips with. Is that curious fact enough, in itself, to explain why I became a teacher and not a writer in the first place?
I suspect Oscar may turn out to be correct, and writing conversational speech will have much, perhaps everything, to do with subtext. Is this because people incline by their nature to say one thing and mean another? What does this say about their nature? The idea that we are all devious, to a greater or lesser extent, should not surprise me, should it? And yet I feel an odd resistance to it.
And what about children? Is deviousness a learned behaviour, or is it instinctive? To be consistent with the belief that it is intrinsic to the species, one must incline to the latter position. And yet again, I seem obscurely disinclined.
I felt I ought to consult Ellice before going to the pound. Establish that she has no eccentric dislike of any particular kind of dog. She doesn’t appear to be a full-blown hysteric, but of that you can never be too sure. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen a relentlessly mirthful exterior on an inner loony. And it’s strange, with her brain, that she seems content with waitressing.
I went to the café, only to find she wasn’t there. ‘She’s off sick today,’ the other girl said. I realised I still didn’t have their phone number. The girl, who was a standard-issue simpleton, refused to give it to me. On what grounds? I demanded. On the grounds that I don’t know who you are, do I? she responded with a bovine stare. You might be anyone, she added. Fools have never been known to shun the redundant observation, in my experience. I looked around the café, but on the one occasion I’d have been pleased to see somebody I knew, there wasn’t such a one in sight. Always the way.
I considered throwing my weight around, heavying her, as Frank would say, but thought the better of it. The girl was too obtuse to respond to rational argument. Next thing I knew she’d be calling the police and accusing me of being a stalker. Of Ellice, of all people. The mind boggles. There’s a stalker in the news; I saw some lurid headlines in a tabloid on one of the tables. Down in Sydney, of course. Luckily there are no celebrities (sic) worth hounding in this neck of the mountains.
I scheduled my visit for mid-afternoon, circa half an hour before Kim gets back from school. It was steamy and warm, the ground still muddy and churned up. I left Teddy behind in consideration for their floor. Ellice opened the door herself. As I suspected, she hadn’t been in bed sick, she was fully dressed in ripped jeans (designer holes, a particularly asinine fashion) and a red-and-yellow check shirt, with her hair in rollers. Looking in the pink of condition, too. She’s well-covered, not scrawny like so many young women.
She greeted me with a beaming smile. A good-looking girl, certainly, in what people presumably mean when they say a high-impact way. She has a wide mouth and smiles with unnerving frequency. I would guess she is fairly highly strung. In contrast to me, I suppose, whose temperament is not outgoing and whose mouth is small and thin-lipped.
‘I don’t approve of dropping in on you like this,’ I began, ‘but I didn’t have your number and that stupid girl in the café wouldn’t give –’
‘Oh, please come on in, Thea. I’m being a slack-arse and taking a sickie today. Got to work all weekend is my defence. Just washed my hair.’ She pulled a clownish face. ‘Have you come to see our Franko?’
‘No, I didn’t come to see our Franko, I came to see you,’ I said. He didn’t materialise, he must have been ensconced in his studio. I hadn’t designed it with a cacophonous composer in mind, but was pleasantly surprised how soundproof the house seems to be.
Ellice does turn out to have some definite likes and dislikes where dogs are concerned. Lucky I checked them out. A relief too that they were mainly sensible: no yapping or snuffling, no miniature anything and nothing too small or too big.
‘No mincing, no squashed-up faces, fancy poodles, chihuahuas or Great Danes, thank you very much,’ she laughed. She’s a vivacious young wom
an and laughs as much as she smiles. A live wire. Fizzing extroverts tend to provoke in me the opposite reaction, as with Newton’s Laws of Motion. I become sour and surly, or more that way than usual.
No Mexican hairless dog? I inquired.
‘Not on your nelly. It’ll go straight back to Tijuana or Popocatepetl or wherever it came from.’ A trill of laughter.
Age and sex? She agreed with me that these should be left open. Kim’s pet, let her decide. See what was available. It was going to be the girl’s responsibility, in the fullness of its canine being. I drank some tea and asked how she thought Kim was getting on at the new school.
To be honest, Ellice said, she wouldn’t have a clue. When people use phrases like ‘to be honest’, I always think it means the reverse. She tossed her head.
‘She doesn’t confide in me much. Not at all, really – it’s so depressing, I can’t tell you. Keeps herself to herself. Talk about trying to get blood from a stone.’ A curler had come loose on the side of her head. She rolled it up again expertly. ‘Maybe it’s too much to expect, you know, with all the upheavals in her life, being hauled around from pillar to post from a young age. Poor thing probably doesn’t even know how to make friends.’
‘Perhaps she doesn’t want to,’ I said.
This went over Ellice’s head. I sensed she was hitting her stride. ‘She’s deeply psychologically detached as a result of her background, don’t you think so, Thea? It’s obvious – she’s such a loner.’ To be such a loner was inexplicable, the incredulous tone suggested. I refrained from pointing out that she and Frank had come up here to get away from the social whirl of Sydney. Or so they had told me.
The Precipice Page 12
