She knew him, of course. Penny had been to several parties with Jonathan and Sarah, an intelligent woman with an engaging smile whom she remembered mostly for a truthful conversation they had once had about recalcitrant daughters. She knew Sarah had run off with a woman, a fact she found intensely interesting, but despite this she intended to give Jonathan only a friendly nod and keep walking.
‘Penny!’ he said, and she stopped and turned. ‘I was going to drop in. I’m having a barbecue tonight, nothing fancy. Do you and PP want to join me? Gordie’s coming, and the Pattersons and Rosanna.’
She laughed. ‘You’re forgetting Pete and I aren’t married any more.’
He laughed too, a deep, sexy laugh. ‘Oh, I thought you had one of those civilised divorces where you all go away on holiday together like in an Alan Alda movie.’
‘Yeah, right,’ she said.
Something of her feelings must have shown on her face, because Jonathan averted his eyes. ‘Look, a kite,’ he said.
She followed the line of his finger and saw a hawk, freewheeling in the air. ‘Oh, you mean a bird kite, not a kite kite.’
He laughed again. ‘It’s too early for those kites,’ he said.
They both noticed, at the same time, the dog, eating a bright orange patch of vomit. ‘She loves vomit,’ said Penny.
‘Doesn’t everyone?’ he said. Penny smiled.
‘What time do you want me?’ she said.
‘Any time after seven,’ he said.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Oh, and what can I bring?’ The polite response to this was ‘nothing’, and she was surprised when Jonathan suggested she could bring something sweet if she liked. What a tight-arse, she thought as they parted, asking people to dinner and then asking them to bring the dinner. According to gossip he was mean with his money, even though he had piles of it. He never gave mates rates on his house either: Phil’s sixtieth birthday relatives had come from New Zealand and when Sylv asked Jonathan about the possibility of them staying at his house—assuming he would invite them to stay for free, or at the very least at a modest rental since it was empty—he let her know via Cheryl—via Cheryl, not even personally!—that, yes, it was available, but at the full price of comparable high-season rentals. Cheryl ran The Landing’s only letting agency, and everyone knew that she had once had a one-night stand with Jonathan, but no-one knew the details. Everyone wanted to know, naturally.
FIVE
Marie Arene
In 1955, Penny’s father, Syd, proposed to her mother, Marie, on Brisbane’s Victoria Bridge. The sun was at last giving up its hold on another insufferably humid summer day and in the wet subtropical air Marie’s new blue crepe de chine dress was sticking to her back. When she refused him, Syd turned around, climbed to the very top of the elaborately curved iron guard rails, and jumped into the Brisbane River.
Penny’s mother watched the whole thing, her comprehension a beat behind what her eyes were telling her. She saw him climbing but, as in many other moments in life, she failed to predict one of the many infinite and impossible responses from another living being’s veiled heart. Only when she heard the terrible sound of Syd’s body hitting the water did she run for help.
Soon, boats were scouring the river and Marie was wringing her hands. How could she have known that the skinny youth with a crooked eye tooth held in his heart such outsized passions? Marie kept her own heart under lock and key, only rarely looking up to see the wash of marbled clouds over fathomless skies, causing her to puzzle afresh about why she stood on the earth at this particular spot at this particular time. Marie knew nothing good ever came of clouds momentarily parting or of trying to predict an outcome.
‘What’s his address, love?’ said the policeman standing by her side with a notebook.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. Marie did not like this turn of events and she knew her face was gathering itself in, even more so than usual. Marie did not like anyone knowing anything about her.
‘There, there,’ said the policeman, misreading her. ‘It’s not your fault, dear.’ He made a move as if to comfort her and Marie pulled away.
As if it were her fault! What an idiotic man. Marie hated Australians for their stupidity and their smug complacency, and standing on the bridge on a ridiculously hot February evening she hated them all over again. She hated Brisbane with its small-town manners and its small-town bigwigs, and she hated the humid days and humid nights and the night cart and the nightman, the tin can resting on one shoulder, a man who spent his life emptying toilets of excrement, reeking and foul, crawling with maggots, abuzz with flies. It was like Africa! It was unimaginably awful, an uncivilised shanty town in which she was stranded without hope of return. She hated the wooden houses squatting on poles, the tin roofs, the chicken coops at the back of houses, the rows of outboxes in the awful treeless clipped backyards and the slimy frog who lived in the tin toilet. She hated the cheery signs by the side of the road reading Stay Alive in ’55 because every time she saw one a voice in her head instinctively replied, I’d rather be dead. She hated the witless policeman standing in front of her in an excited swoon of self-importance (how people who slept safe in their own beds loved catastrophe: death! suicide! drama!). She hated everything about the particular spot of the world she stood in, this land where nothing happened. Now something had happened but Marie still hated everything: everything, that was, except for poor, drowned Syd McAlister and his last violent, non-complacent act of defiant life.
But Syd wasn’t drowned, obviously, since he went on to become Penny’s father. When he hit the water he sank fast, but he must have chanced upon a deep part of the river. He felt the shock of the impact, but no worse than a bad belly flop, a painful stinging up through his legs and, strangely, all around his chin. His jaw must have slammed up against the top of his skull and for a moment he wondered if he had broken his teeth. He was thinking this as he rose, alive, to the surface, his tongue sliding fast around his mouth, numbering the molars and incisors still miraculously fixed in his head, thinking of being alive and breathing and still in love. He was thinking about Marie’s dark, lovely face, as fine-boned as his mother’s best teacups. He was thinking of those teacups, fine china, Royal Doulton, stacked in the mirrored china cabinet, the best china and the best china cabinet from his father’s illustrious shop, McAlisters Department Store, the best shop in Fortitude Valley. The bones of Marie’s French face were like those fine china teacups, her skin burnished, darkly golden, unlike any other girl’s, her eyes such a deep shade of brown they might be black. Teacups and bones, dark eyes, Marie and breath, swimming, swimming, the Churchie under-seventeen freestyle and breaststroke champion. Syd McAlister, exhilarated, with a full set of teeth, happier and more powerful than any other death-defying twenty-three-year-old in Brisbane. Marie Arene, Marie Arene, Marie Arene, the strange lovely notes of her name falling like a song upon his tongue.
He kept swimming. It seemed to him that his entire life had been aimed at this one moment, and that everything inside him had risen to this one exquisite point. He knew himself to be unlike timid men, destined to live their lives within the boundaries of propriety. His was to be a life ablaze, a life risked, gambled on the outcome of love. The tide was coming in, sweeping in from Moreton Bay, but Syd pushed against it. He swam hard, past a barge, past the cliffs at Kangaroo Point, and up and under the giant span of the Story Bridge. He was invincible, powering past the docks with its ships, past safe men just coming on nightshift, their lunchboxes packed for smoko. He swam on and on, marvelling at how love had not killed him and how impending death had not killed love. He swam around the bend in the river, Marie Arene, Marie Arene, till at last he came upon the baths at Mowbray Park. It was growing dark and the water was murky because there had been a lot of rain. He battled his way past logs and branches, over the pebbled rim of the baths, and it was only as he was climbing up the stone steps to the river bank that he realised he was buggered. He looked down at his body in the twilight and saw that
dark bruises were forming on his chest. His shirt! He had lost his best shirt, without knowing it, and saw for the first time that he was wearing only trousers, socks and one shoe.
He shook himself down, and headed up the hill across the park. The Moreton Bay figs formed an archway, dim and shivering, as he crossed the footpath. A sort of porous membrane between life and death had opened, between the natural and the supernatural, between the material world and the unseen world, which he had experienced only once before. He was unclear what this new unseen world revealed; only that its perceptive reach had been uncovered, and that he was imbued with the same reverential ringing feeling that had filled him when his father died, long after the nurses had given him up for dead, long after Dr Gregg said that his father could no longer hear them. ‘Hearing is the last of the senses to go,’ Dr Gregg said. ‘I fear Alan is no longer with us.’ Not long after this, Syd’s father had squeezed his hand. At the point of death—after struggling for some hours, the rattle in his throat sounding exactly like something Syd had heard before in dreams, a rattle that really was a death rattle—his father squeezed his hand. The colour drained from him at the moment of his extinction, his flesh no longer animated by moving blood but turned to wax. Syd walked from the room, the permeable membrane rent, to find the world as he had never known it: tender, perishing, awash with souls.
Syd felt the same way as he climbed from the river. He was alive, walking, in love with Marie Arene, a resurrected man. When he got to his front door, a policeman opened it. His mother, Min, stood behind the policeman who had just finished telling her that Syd had drowned.
‘Hello, Mum,’ Syd said.
His mother fainted.
SIX
The art of life
Around three the phone rang. Penny was asleep, book on happiness—another volume to add to the enormous library she had accrued in her ceaseless quest for instruction in the art of life—squashed under her thigh. She was momentarily discombobulated, unsure where the ringing was coming from. By the time she got to the phone, whoever it was had hung up, but they had left a message. ‘It’s Gloria from Evergreen Gardens. Can you please call me urgently?’ Penny’s heart gave a little flip: here was the moment, arrived. Her mouth went dry and her legs felt weak; with one hand she pulled across the nearest chair. The nursing home number was stored in the phone, thank God, and she pressed the button. It went straight through to Gloria’s answer phone, so she rang the general line. ‘Gloria’s looking for me,’ she said. ‘Is my mother all right?’ The dopey girl immediately went into the I’m-sorry-I’m-not-authorised spiel, which Penny assumed to mean her mother was dead. Oh, God, she thought, no, no, please. All the wrecked moments between them crowded in, all the missed chances, the right words unsaid. The hammering in her head and heart was so loud she almost failed to hear a voice on the other end of the phone. ‘Mrs Collins? Mrs Collins?’ The voice cut through the noise that had engulfed her. ‘Mrs Collins? Are you there?’ When she finally heard it, the voice was saying that her mother was alive and well (apart from an eye infection), but could no longer live at Evergreen Gardens.
Penny knew, of course, how difficult Marie was. She knew about the ordering around, the rudeness, the nurses who refused to help her following her recent fall, who did not wish to shuffle her into the shower cubicle to sit her on a white plastic seat to be handwashed like a prestige car. She knew about the indiscriminate flirting, her mother’s vain insistence that she was the most attractive woman her age in any room she was in; how she thoughtlessly insulted every other woman by implying that, because she was French, she genetically had a better fashion sense than they did. She knew about Marie’s complaints regarding the food, the disappointing company, the service in general. The service was nothing like what she was used to, nothing like the five-star hospital she had once stayed in when she twisted her ankle in Paris on that last wonderful trip with Syd, when every evening she was offered a carte du jour featuring crustaceans or the meats of hand-reared beasts, a Kir Royale to drink while she decided. Australians did not know how to do anything properly! She was indestructible; a vigorous eighty-eight years old with all her wits, and she had outwitted everyone.
Penny had a younger sister, Rosemary, who lived a charmed life on the other side of Australia. ‘One can never live too far away from one’s mother,’ Rosemary said with boring frequency. Rosemary had a devoted husband and a son who did all the right things, who ate his greens and went to university and—unlike Scarlett—never ran off with anyone inappropriate. Penny had flown to Perth with Marie for his wedding, at great expense, and everything was in its rightful place: the church, the groom, the bride, the guests. No-one got drunk, the speeches were on the right side of bawdy, and Penny hated every minute of it. She couldn’t work out why some people’s lives went in exactly the right direction, all their lives long; they married the right person at the right age, had the right children at the right age, and their children did everything expected of them. The right children did not run off with men old enough to be their fathers, birth two babies in quick succession and fail to qualify as anything other than an unskilled worker. Other people had handsome, successful husbands who flew them to Italy to eat expensive sardines by the sea at Portofino. Other people made great paintings, like Lucian Freud, instead of living with the ghost of the person they might have been. Penny lived with a smothered self, someone shinier, braver and altogether more glorious.
‘I’m really sorry but I’m in the middle of a conference,’ Rosemary said now. ‘I’ve been planning it all year. I can’t possibly have her.’ Rosemary was in marketing, whatever that was.
‘But I had her last time,’ Penny said, conscious that they were somehow playing out their childhood roles, with Penny always coveting something Rosemary had, and Rosemary refusing to relinquish the coveted object. Neither of them coveted Marie. She was conscious of a note of pleading in her voice. The last time Marie was dismissed from a nursing home had been right in the midst of the scandal of Scarlett and Paul Raymond, with Marie in the spare room shouting at Penny that her mother, Penny’s unknown, tragic grandmother, was married and pregnant at eighteen, so what was the problem? ‘Their bodies are made for it,’ Marie said in her maddeningly distinctive accent, the French language still curling around her English words, three-quarters of a century—more—after she’d left her native country.
‘People died at thirty in the Middle Ages, too, Marie. How does that have anything to do with anything in the twenty-first century?’ Penny shouted back down the hall.
‘Girls and boys still have the same bodies, Middle Ages, twenty-first century,’ said Marie.
‘Christ, will you shut up!’ Penny said, too loudly, and her mother would not speak to her for the rest of the time it took to get her settled in a new nursing home.
‘I’ve got to pick her up,’ she said to Rosie. ‘Pronto.’
‘Can’t you put her in a cab and send her to a hotel? Russ and I will pay.’
Penny had thought of this herself, but could not bear to do that to her mother. There was nothing for it: she would have to bring Marie home.
Who knew that residents could even be rejected from nursing homes? And this time Penny had been so careful about reading the fine print! Her late father, Syd, had inherited a small fortune in McAlisters Department Store, a once-grand shop modelled on Liberty of London, situated in what was then one of the smartest shopping areas of Brisbane, Fortitude Valley. For many years McAlisters was the store to go to in provincial Brisbane, to be fitted for bespoke dresses and suits, to purchase wedding trousseaux, ladies’ stockings, gifts, the best-quality household linen; it was where young couples went to lay-by furniture for their newly built houses. During the store’s heyday in the fifties and sixties, Marie and Syd went on six-week tours of the Continent every northern summer, and every Australian summer they rented apartments in Surfers Paradise opposite the beach, at Kinkabool or The Chevron, where they hosted lavish cocktail parties in the Corroboree Room, att
ended by all the big shots: the lord mayors of Brisbane and the Gold Coast, venal police commissioners, consecutive newspaper editors, High Court judges, various premiers and high-ranking public servants who with giddy abandon appointed sons, daughters, nephews, friends or anyone they liked the look of, because nepotism—not to mention institutionalised corruption—was the order of the day. Anyone who was anyone came to the McAlisters’ specially catered parties to make small talk and hear all the gossip, while eating devils-on-horseback, smoked oysters and gherkins smothered in cream cheese and swaddled in a processed meat product called devon, served by tanned young women in gold lamé bikinis.
Even today Marie was rich—she owned several buildings in Brisbane’s CBD—and had enough money to go into any nursing home she liked. Marie did not yet appreciate that the question was no longer which nursing home she liked, but which nursing home liked her.
During the long drive back to The Landing, Marie issued a constant stream of directions.
‘It is shorter turning off the next exit,’ she said. ‘Your father always drove up past Cooroy.’
Yeah, and this highway wasn’t even built when he died, Penny replied in her head. She was getting a sharp pain in the left side of her skull.
If Penny ever wondered why she could not bring herself to hug her mother or tell her that she loved her, she remembered her decision at eighteen to stop calling her ‘Mum’ and to address her forever after as ‘Marie’. It seemed to Penny the only way she could distinguish her mother from herself, to know that her body was not her mother’s body. She could not breathe properly around Marie; their relationship had a claustrophobic intensity, in that Marie had powerfully and mysteriously conveyed to Penny her obligation to fulfil her dreams and assuage her fears. Her mother’s life was built on the ruins of loss: the suicide of her mother, her only brother killed in the war, her father’s premature death. She had once been a girl living in an elegant apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement, in Passy, with a maid and an English tutor. Now Marie was alone, a permanent citizen of some invisible city under siege, and Penny, helpless, tried to signal she was outside its gates. She conceded that her strategy of refusing to name her mother had not altered her mother’s perception of Penny as an extension of herself. Penny knew all this and could not understand how her vast self-knowledge had failed to change for the better a single thing in her life.
The Landing Page 3
