The Vintage and the Gleaning

by Jeremy Chambers

  Charlotte paces the room. She looks at Florrie’s crystal cakestand, picks it up, turns it over, puts it back, looks at the family photo. She walks over to the glass cabinet with the wireless at one end, the framed print of the sea over it and crouches down, her arms folded. She looks at the Franklin Mint plates on stands and the silverware, the old photos in frames inlaid with pieces of mirror and mother-of-pearl, things of coloured glass and Florrie’s collection of porcelain cats set out in a row.

  I honestly don’t know what I do with myself, she says. During the days. I sleep in. I watch TV. I have long baths. I do my nails, my hair, I put on make-up. I mean, not for any reason. There’s no reason. I don’t even leave the house. It’s all just passing the time, just something to do. I mean, there’s no actual reason. I’ve got no reason to do anything.

  Charlotte stands up and stretches. She looks at the picture of the sea.

  But I’ll tell you this. When the day’s over, somehow it makes me, not happy, something else. I mean, when I go to bed, it’s like I’ve achieved something, even though all I’ve achieved is getting through it. That’s all. Getting through the day. And it goes on and on, like that, every day. Days, weeks, months. Years. All these years. All this time.

  Charlotte comes over and sits on the couch. She smooths down the bathrobe. Her eyes are dark.

  It’s like all this time I’ve been waiting for something to happen. And it’s like I still am. Like things are going to get better and I’m just sitting it out. Counting down the days. But nothing’s going to happen, is it. I mean, really. Not for me, anyway. I know that. Of course I know. But it’s like somehow I can’t help acting like it will, like something’s going to happen and I don’t even know what. It’s just that I feel like something has to get better. Something has to change. And if I don’t believe that. How else can I live with myself?

  Outside the sound of insects. Things crackle in the heat.

  I don’t know, says Charlotte. I should probably just leave town. I should have done it while Brett was inside. Just left. Disappeared. It’s just that I don’t have the energy. I mean, I think about it all the time, and not only now, with Brett getting out and everything, but before then. All the time. But I don’t. I don’t leave. I couldn’t face it. I just can’t seem to face anything these days. And it’s like that more and more. Sometimes I just can’t be bothered. I go for days without having a shower, don’t get dressed, don’t do anything. I just sit there. All day. I mean, there doesn’t seem to be any point.

  She looks at me, her painted face, her high arched eyebrows.

  You wouldn’t understand, she says.

  We sit there. The morning keeps on. The sun seems to pulse audibly, a distant scream. Charlotte puts her feet up on the couch and leans against the armrest, arranging the bathrobe again.

  How do you do that? I ask Charlotte.

  What? she asks.

  I point to her hair and face.

  Charlotte gives me a funny look.

  What do you mean? she says.

  I point again.

  I don’t know, she says. Pins. Make-up.

  Women have to learn those things, I suppose.

  Charlotte shrugs.

  I suppose they do, she says.

  And I do understand, Charlotte, I say. It’s what made me used to start the day with a glass of brandy, waiting for the pubs to open.

  So what did you do about it? she asks.

  Me, I say. Work. Without work it would be an early grave for me. Would’ve been anyway.

  Well, I’ve missed the boat there, she says.

  Rubbish, I say. You’re young. Healthy. No reason you can’t work.

  I’ve got no qualifications, no experience, she says. How am I going to find work.

  There’s always something, I say. Look at me. At my age.

  It’s different, she says. I can’t just go and get a job at some checkout.

  Why not, I say. There’s no shame in that.

  But there is, she murmurs. For me there is. I know there shouldn’t be, but there is.

  She is patting down her hair. She sees me watching and she stops.

  Besides, she says. Think what people would say.

  What does that matter? I say.

  It matters, she says. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t face them. I know what they’d be thinking. I just couldn’t.

  The outside is like a faded photograph. Sunlight comes off guttering and tin roofs, slicing from gashes of peeled paint, piercing my vision, leaving burning spots long after I look away. There is no noise, no bickering of birds today, just the occasionally cawing of a crow. The day is still.

  So every day I ask Brett what he wants for his tea, says Charlotte. Because that’s the one thing I do, at least, make tea for Brett. And he always says, Whatever, you know. Whatever. I mean, he doesn’t care and the thing is, I don’t care either. It’s not like that’s my purpose in life, cooking Brett’s tea, looking after Brett. That’s not how my life should be. I mean, there’s better things I could be doing, so many other things I could be doing.

  But I cook for Brett every night anyway, and whatever Brett might say, he does expect me to. And then I sit and wait for him to come home, and whenever he comes home late or drunk or whatever, I start yelling at him and he acts like I’m this nagging housewife. You know, he hears me out, he apologises, but like it’s nothing important to him, like he’s just putting up with me, his nagging wife. And he never thinks that maybe it’s not important to me either, maybe I don’t want to be yelling at him and nagging him, maybe I don’t care either, maybe I don’t care any more than he does. But what I hate is that I actually do end up caring, because I make the effort. And I don’t want to, but I do. And so this is what my life has been reduced to. Cooking for Brett, waiting for Brett to come home. I mean, does he think that’s what I want? That this is all I want out of life?

  And that’s the thing. It’s not what I want and it’s not what he wants, so what are we doing? But that’s how it is and, I don’t know, it’s like I can’t get out of it. It’s like neither of us can get out of it.

  I remember there was this one time, years ago, I was cooking dinner for Brett, as usual. It was early, but I often cook early, I mean, what else do I have to do? I cook early and I heat it up whenever Brett comes home. So I was cooking. Chops, I remember. Chops in the grill. And for some reason I just turned off the stove and I went outside and sat on the kerb. It was like I was sleepwalking or something. And I couldn’t get up, couldn’t move. I just sat there. And I was sitting there thinking, I’ve got to go and cook those chops. But it all seemed too much. So I just stayed there.

  Anyway, these kids were playing on the street, riding their bikes around me, watching me. And after a while they started throwing stones at me, yelling stuff, making fun of me. Like I was some mad person. And I didn’t do anything, I just put up with it. Like a mad person would. But eventually this woman came along, I didn’t know who she was. I still don’t know who she was. I’d never seen her before and I haven’t seen her since, thank God.

  But she was nice. She was really nice. She came over and asked if I was all right, if there was anything wrong. I can’t even remember whether I answered her. And she asked me if I knew where I was and I said no. But of course I knew where I was. I was sitting outside my own house, but for some reason I said no, that I didn’t know where I was. And so she went off. She said she was coming back, I suppose she was probably going to get help of some sort, I don’t know, the neighbours or the police. So I went back inside, because I didn’t want someone I knew seeing me. I didn’t want people hearing that I was sitting outside my own house saying I didn’t know where I was, because they’d have known I was lying. But for a moment, just for that moment, it felt like a relief to say it, that I didn’t know where I was, like I’d forgotten, like I had amnesia or something. I can’t explain it properly, but I sort of wished it was true.

  Charlotte keeps going over to the cabinet and looking at the po
rcelain cats.

  Whose are these? she asks.

  Florrie’s, I say. I used to give them to her birthdays.

  Charlotte crouches down to look into the cabinet, her hands on her knees.

  You’re a good man, Smithy, she says.

  I didn’t always remember, I say.

  Charlotte opens the cabinet and starts taking the cats out, laying them across the green felt on the top. They are white with gold paws and gold around the eyes, sitting and stretching and lying and standing with their tails in the air. And I notice that their painted eyes are like Charlotte’s painted eyes and today her face is somehow like a cat’s face, something about it like a cat, her face perfect and proud and a cat’s face never shows nothing and it has a pride and a strength because of it, because you can never tell what a cat is thinking.

  Charlotte arranges and rearranges the cats. It is like a child playing. She puts them away again.

  I wish you could have known Brett when he was younger, she says and stops.

  God, listen to me, I’m like a one-track record.

  Well you got to think these things through, don’t you, I say. Better now than never.

  You don’t mind? she asks.

  I’m here, aren’t I? I say.

  Charlotte is standing looking out the window, shielding her eyes.

  Some days I find myself sitting at home trying to make myself remember, reminding myself what he used to be like. I just don’t know whether it’s there anymore. I honestly don’t know.

  A breeze stirs the leaves and twigs rap gently on the guttering. Charlotte looks up, listening to the scrape of metal. The breeze dies and crows call.

  It’s so strange, she says. It seems like it was such a short time ago, but really it was half a lifetime. Half of my life. Even so, it feels more real than things do now. It’s like I’ve been asleep all these years, like nothing’s changed, like I’m still back then and still the same, me and Brett and everything. And it’s like I want to wake up but I can’t. Now, I mean.

  She listens for the breeze again but there is only the high sound of insects and sun.

  Brett’s always telling me I’m living in the past, she says. And I say, well at least it’s better than living in the present. Better than living in the present with you.

  But it’s all over now, isn’t it? I say.

  Charlotte looks out the window, blinking. She rubs her eyes, a silhouette lost in the streaming sun.

  Charlotte walks up and down the room.

  Everything’s so serious, isn’t it, she says. So serious and miserable and boring. I mean, God forbid I actually ever have any fun, ever enjoy myself once in a while.

  I look down at my jeans, sitting heavy on my legs. I can feel the bones through them and what’s left of my muscles, shrunk and loose and smaller than what they once were, and I think of the skin gone white and powdery, pinched and folded, the thick purple lines like welts across my legs, and my arms too, where the muscles have wasted and the skin hangs. I try to remember when all that started to happen but I can’t remember.

  Well, you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas, Charlotte says.

  Charlotte keeps pacing the room. She is restless and says so herself. I ask her if she wants to get some fresh air.

  I wait while she gets dressed. It is nearly noon before we leave. We walk into town.

  The sun is strong and hot and the streets are empty. We don’t go in by the railway track and I realise that yesterday I didn’t go in by the railway track either. Flies swarm in shady places. We pass houses.

  Charlotte is wearing mustard-coloured slacks, tight like riding pants, a white singlet. She has made herself up again, even more made up than before, her lips red and her hair the colour of syrup in the midday light. Walking beside her I realise how tall she is. She is taller than me.

  Starting down the hill to the curve in the street and the railway bridge, we pass the high concrete wall of the old convent and girls’ primary school. The buildings are overgrown with English ivy and wisteria, coiled tightly around green copper pipes to the high terracotta roofs and reaching out over the eaves and the walls and the footpath. Where the wall has cracked and fallen I look through the dark mass of ivy to hopscotch squares on the asphalt playground, the paint faded and peeling, rusted netball hoops.

  The church is just across the road, built of orange brick with a concrete saint out front on the concrete paving, small cypress trees and recently laid buffalo grass around it, well watered, thick, green and mowed. Behind the church the land falls to sparse sloping paddocks, a few sheep, lone trees, and dried out dams piled with swollen carcasses, the hides festering in dark and riddled patches, the sweet awful smell of death faint in the still hot air. And flat land and vines to the horizon.

  We cut through the Rotary Club park, past the war memorial and start up Main Street, Prescott’s caryard, the hardware shop, crumbling gold rush terraces, the whitewashed front of The Imperial with its iron lacework balcony and Parker’s Workwear with rows of elastic-sided boots in the window, hanging wool jackets and jumpers, khaki pants, oilskins, rabbitfelt hats. Outside the post office, a eucalypt in bloom, sprays of pink on the new foliage, masses of hard, bare gumnuts behind. We go past the barber’s shop and museum with its single chair of chrome and blond vinyl, the glass cases of rusted mining tools and pans, old photos and newspapers, spearheads and digging sticks, bayonets, clay pipes, mortar shells, a nugget. Joe McLaren is asleep behind the counter, his black cigaretteholder still stuck between his teeth, the cigarette dead and brown.

  At the petrol station, two roan guard dogs lie chained on the concrete among crates of soft-drink bottles, their tongues out, brows twitching. They open their eyes and lift their heads to watch us pass. We are alone on the street. The buildings cast no shadows.

  I stop outside the newsagent’s to look at the headlines in their caged metal stands. Dot Slater is watching us from inside, eating Lions Club mints. I wave to her but she looks away. We stop outside Poachers.

  You feel like a drink? I ask Charlotte.

  God no, she says.

  How about an ice-cream or something, I say. Hot day. Ice-cream, fizzy drink, something like that?

  Charlotte is looking at the footpath.

  I don’t want to go into any of those places, she says.

  Well, I’ll go in, I don’t mind, I say. You can wait outside.

  We go over to the milk bar and takeaway.

  You mind waiting outside? I ask.

  Charlotte shrugs.

  Where have you been hiding yourself then Smithy? asks Chris Johnson.

  The ceiling fan is going inside the shop but it does nothing except move the air. Heat comes from the griddle and the vat of oil, the charcoal rotisserie under lights. Glen Johnson is wearing a singlet. He is a hairy man with long sideburns. Behind him there is a chalkboard with a list of things and prices. Old Big M and Chiko Roll posters are along the walls, girls in tiny bright bikinis. A video game.

  I go over to the freezer and pick out an ice-cream for Charlotte.

  Not a superstitious man then, ay Smithy, says Glen Johnson when I take the ice-cream to the counter.

  What’s that? I say.

  Well, George Alister, he says. You must have heard about George Alister.

  Yeah, that’s right, isn’t it, I say. I forgot about that. You here when it happened? I ask him.

  I certainly was, he says. Happened right out there.

  He nods towards the footpath where Charlotte is standing. She is standing with her arms folded and hunched over, staring at the ground, occasionally glancing up and down the street. She looks different seeing her through the window.

  Like a begonia in an onion patch, says Chris Johnson. He is grinning at me.

  What’s that? I say.

  Like a begonia in an onion patch, he says. You not know that saying?

  Yeah, I know it, I say. I pay him and leave.

  You all right? I ask Charlotte, handing her the ice-cream.
>
  Can we just get off this street, she says.

  I look back into the shop. Chris Johnson is watching us, still grinning. He winks at me.

  Me and Charlotte go to the municipal gardens and I start walking along the path.

  No, it’s too hot, says Charlotte.

  We sit on the grass under one of the big gums by the footpath.

  I mean you’d think they’d at least plant some trees along it, says Charlotte, pointing at the path. It circles the thin grass. There are electric barbecues and children’s swings and scrub and ironbarks at the far end.

  I mean, who wants to go for a walk in this sun? says Charlotte. I mean, honestly.

  She hasn’t opened the ice-cream.

  But that’s typical of this town, isn’t it, she says. They can’t do anything properly. Everything’s crap. And God forbid you have anything nice, nice clothes, anything. Because that’s flash, isn’t it. You wear anything nice and they call it flash and it’s like an insult. You know, they have this nasty way of saying it. Flash. Isn’t that flash? Aren’t you looking flash? God forbid you have anything that’s not utter crap, anything nice, anything flash. It’s all so bloody petty, everyone around here. I’m sick of it.

  She looks across the gardens drenched in full light, the grass gone pale and russet, studded with crab grass, piebald with worn patches of earth, clay and dust. The ironbarks are thickcrusted and furrowed, black as though scorched, burnt by the summer, the scrub brittle and spindly. The sky is an endless, unchanging blue.

  God I hate this town, says Charlotte. I hate it so much.

  You going to eat that? I ask.

  I can’t, says Charlotte. It’s too hot. It’s too hot for anything. I’m sorry Smithy. Do you want it?

  She holds out the unopened ice-cream. I shake my head. Charlotte stands up.

  Well, let’s get back before it melts, she says. This was a bad idea. I’m sorry Smithy. It’s my fault.

  We walk back to the house and I put the ice-cream in the freezer.

  Charlotte is sitting silent on the couch.