Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  Leone, our father’s friend, is on the other side of the camera. She is backing into the garden, blushing pink beneath her ash blonde hair. She is plump and curvaceous. Her dress gapes a little bit around the waist and we can see where the top of her slip is dimpling the white flesh of her belly. She is lining us up, the box Brownie sitting between her long plump thumbs with painted nails that curve down right over the tops of them. Allegra grunts, ‘There’s a slater running round inside this dress.’

  ‘Stand still and be serious,’ I tell her. ‘This is a serious occasion. You’re my wife now and you have to do what I tell you.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘It’s true. It says so. You have to.’

  ‘Bull!’

  ‘You do,’ I say sedately and quietly add, ‘and your name’s Leone, for your information.’

  A haze of spit sprays out from Allegra’s face. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Jimmy Coote.’ Jimmy Coote is Allegra’s boyfriend. She is beside herself with glee.

  ‘Have you opened the wedding presents yet?’ I ask, as the real Leone clicks away, the hem of her dress grazing the dandelions and the daisies. Dadda hasn’t mown the grass for weeks because he’s using the lawnmower for something else. In our garage he has made what is called an installation. The installation is to be painted for an exhibition entitled ‘All Mod Cons’. So our lawnmower is hanging from a scaffold with its grass catcher gaping open. At one and the same time it is a lawnmower and a hanged man screaming. People get hanged for murder in this part of Australia, but, asks our mother, do they get hanged for murdering the grass?

  The answer is no. And nor do they get hanged for murdering lawnmowers. We were once a two-lawnmower family, but now one of our lawnmowers has been capitally punished in the garage and the other is in pieces in the washing machine.

  Allegra says, ‘Stop it!’ and this is because she can’t stop giggling. She has opened the presents, I know, because it is the thought of one of them that is making her laugh.

  ‘You’ll have to put it back in the fridge,’ she says and she means the sausage. But the sausage is rude and sly and as exciting as the chops Jimmy Coote gave Allegra. I have wrapped the sausage in cellophane so it goes thwock in the palm of your hand and I know that we will not put it back in the fridge.

  ‘Mum let me,’ I say. And this is true. Mum doesn’t like pork sausages, she says they’re inferior meat. It’s Dadda who buys them. We only eat rump or fillet or lamb, but he likes pork sausages.

  Leone has stopped photographing and comes over to the verandah, picking her way through the shin-deep grass. She sits at our feet on the bottom step, winding the camera on and smiling up at us. ‘You’re both adorable,’ she says. Leone loves us but we don’t love her and so we don’t tell her she is sitting right over the bull ants’ nest.

  There are bull ants everywhere in this neighbourhood. If you put a stick into one of their nests and dig it up, you find an underground tunnel, not like other ant nests with galleries and branches. There are only a few bull ants in one nest. They are nearly an inch long and have sickle jaws. Their bites hurt almost as much as a bee sting. A bull ant will be crawling up the inside of Leone’s floral skirt right now, making for the juicy inside of her thigh.

  Why don’t we love Leone? She brings us presents and draws us in her children’s books and praises our mother’s cooking. And praises our mother’s clothes and says all the time that our mother is beautiful. But sometimes she goes to Dadda’s studio with him and the buttons on her dress don’t do up properly, so we don’t like her. Sometimes you can see the tips of her bosoms when she sits down. We wonder if she knows. We think she does.

  Dadda’s studio is in the backyard, right next to our bedroom. The door is opposite Allegra’s window. When it is shut we don’t know what’s happening behind it because Dadda has put a blind on his window. It’s like that song, Green door, what’s that secret you’re keeping? Both the door and the blind are green.

  We don’t like the studio door to be shut. Leone is always touching her buttons when she comes out, and it’s a habit that annoys our mother. Once our mother banged very loudly on the door before Leone’s visit to Dadda had finished. When it was opened right away, Mum stopped being in a bad temper. We could see Leone sitting on a stool inside, fingering her buttons, her sketch pad on her lap. She was nervously moving her legs around so we could see Dadda’s shoes in a jumble on the floor under the bench behind her. She had her shoes on. He had his shoes on. It was all right. But we still don’t like Leone. She loves my paintings, but it makes no difference.

  When I was smaller, Dadda gave me one of his shoes to make a doll’s house in. It was smooth where the balls of his feet had rested and ridged where it had shaped itself around his toes: like the lino in our kitchen, tracked with our comings and goings. Leone had better leave my father’s shoes alone.

  When we know she’s coming, we groan, but we don’t go out. We try to stick with her, but sometimes she gets away. Our mother tells us not to badger her, that she’s only come here to do her drawings and she has to get Dadda’s opinion because Dadda is the expert. But our mother also has a saying and she says it sometimes when she isn’t sure that her young friend Leone, whom she brought home to meet her beautiful, drawable daughters and to meet a real artist, hasn’t come just to see the artist. The saying is, ‘Beware of experts; an ex- is a has-been and a spurt is a drip under pressure.’

  Allegra says she has bite lumps on her belly from the dump wedding dress. I look at Uncle Garth’s broken watch and am about to tell Leone it’s high time the guests went home, when she rises from the bottom step, uttering little shrieks. Just as I said, the bull ant went for the soft and fleshy inner part of her thigh. There are ants that milk caterpillars for the juices they exude. Her thigh may have seemed a magic caterpillar, capable of supplying juice for aeons.

  Leone would be aging now, getting on for sixty, her firm flesh would have fallen away. Where once it was plump and smooth, now it would be a swaying bag of sinew and vein and no one would seek to bite her there. Not even a reprehensible man like Dadda.

  Undoubtedly it was he who had given us lice; undoubtedly he was to blame for the sheep dip and curry comb summer of Uncle Garth’s stroke. When, after a week, Uncle Garth came to and opened the single eye his mind now had access to, our grandfather, as has been said, had already moved up to Clare in order to be of comfort to Aunt Nina in her time of travail. Stark raving humanity and a sense of territorial integrity led Aunt Nina to have Uncle Garth brought home and ensconced distally in the second bedroom, which imposed a frontier on Granpa, his pipe and the various rubs he had for his rheumatism. Having heiresses with headlice in residence meant that the third bedroom, theirs, had to remain theirs. Rather than sleep like a guest in the fourth or fifth bedroom, Granpa and his appurtenances were housed, in the manner of a gentleman flung on hard times, in what had been the butler’s quarters.

  To stem the tide of her ill luck, Aunt Nina went to church each Sunday and belted out ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past’ in a stern, reproving contralto. Allegra stayed in bed while I spread lice to the congregation, and afterwards, as Aunt Nina crashed through the gears on the way home, I would prompt her to tell me why God, who had not been particularly helpful in her past, would suddenly offer his assistance now.

  ‘He chasteneth those he loves,’ she opined dolefully.

  ‘Do you think you will go to Heaven, Neeny?’

  ‘Good Heavens, child, it’s not for me to say.’

  ‘If you don’t go to Heaven, no one will.’

  She thought I was being truly kind. She couldn’t have fathomed that I went along to church, not in a spirit of piety, but in one of amazed curiosity. The stone arches and stained glass at the Scunthorpe Anglicans bewitched me with their useless opulence. The church was nobody’s home; God was not there. It was just a piece of Australian air parcelled up, albeit prettily, by the people who had built it. The pews, though they smelt nice, weren’t even com
fortable. There were no beds, and as far as I could tell, there wasn’t any kitchen. Fervent prayer did nothing, I proved that time and time again.

  Dear God,

  I would pray,

  If you’re there, please send a ray of light through the memorial window to Mrs Jas Williams 1854–1900, even though there is a mirror bush on the other side of it and the light normally doesn’t come through. You do not have to send the ray through any particular bit, you may choose any piece of the window you desire. You have ten seconds. If you do this I will believe in you forever and ever, Amen.

  But it seemed God didn’t fall for cheap tricks.

  ‘I should get christened,’ I announced one day on the journey home, thinking Aunt Nina would be delighted. But she was scandalised. I had already been christened. Uncle Garth was my godfather. Didn’t I go to Sunday school and scripture?

  The truth was that on scripture days at school I did drama with the non-sectarians and Sunday for me was dump day. I realised I couldn’t tell Aunt Nina this and lied passionately to cover my tracks. To prove my religious bent, I took to reading the Bible as I deloused myself beside my prostrate uncle, who was pretty soon lousy too.

  And, alas, he knew the Book of Job by heart. ‘There was a man in the Land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God and eschewed evil,’ he would say in a melancholy slur. ‘… My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust: my skin is broken and become loathsome.’ I had done Aunt Nina a terrible disservice. ‘… My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle and are spent without hope … O remember that my life is wind: mine eye shall no more see good … My breath is corrupt, my days are extinct, the graves are ready for me.’

  In the kitchen Nina grizzled to God under her breath, ‘Hast Thou given the corpse strength? Hast Thou clothed his neck with thunder?’

  We had to feed him sherry to shut him up. Granpa beat his stick up and down like a metronome. He could not openly castigate Uncle Garth because it was the Bible he lay quoting, and Granpa respected the word of God no matter whose mouth it issued from, even if that person should come from a family full of calculators.

  THREE

  Perpetual Succour

  SOMETHING IS BEING worried by a heron across the courtyard outside, a frog maybe. The glistening tree litter from the stringybarks is humping up and throwing out javelins at the bird as it stalks, jabs, stalks, jabs: its sharp-beaked head making scissors with its neck. This house was built around the trees, following the land flow. In fine weather, forest robes the mountain range as far as the eye can see in one direction. Looking the other way, the view is of cleared hills, furred by blond grasses and cruised above by eagles and swifts; but now this heron, stitching the world in close.

  The past is pressing forward, bringing its clatter of old fears. I catch my eye in the window glass again. Behind me Mad Meg has armed herself with dishes, pans and carving knives and leads her band of hags against the Devil. Across the field of Hell she goes, sword on the rise, roars and exclamations mounting in her throat. What will she slay? Everything exists demonically and absurdly around her. The moment of her action tumbles onward and outward forever.

  What is writ, is writ: our faces darting, hers, mine, through the landscapes of childhood, creeping up on the studio shed in the backyard.

  Once there were chinks for our eyes all over it, but one by one they’ve been covered up. Once we played under the bench among his shoes, but then we were banished.

  From the rear, the wobbling line where the wall meets the floor is marked by tufts of handleless bread-and-butter knives, a dangle of rusty toilet chain with a handsome wooden knob, a spray of eggbeater, bent bottle brush and scissor tip.

  But we aren’t allowed in. We aren’t to worry him, our mother says. Our eyes pry past the door perpetually. We are very good at leaning, excellent at reading the insides of rooms from the undersides of tilted windows, fine at summing up from a doorway-full.

  Babies can go in, little children with their mothers aren’t unwelcome. Is it when you reach a certain age, is it ten, that entry is taboo?

  In the garage, his arrangements: the wedding dress dancing a flamenco round a mop, a doorless refrigerator done out as a shrine: a plaster heart of Jesus mounted in the icebox. Transfixed, we stand there and wonder what he thinks of.

  Dadda’s arms: they are tanned and well formed. When he is among people he holds them just slightly bent at the elbows, and his fingers fidget against his thumbs, making his palms growl. The arm muscles twinge. He wants to get back to things. He closes one eye and laughs abstractedly, sending a double message. Lots of people choose not to understand and to think his laughter signifies their wit.

  ‘Where will the money come from?’ they ask. ‘Who will buy a doorless refrigerator decorated with Roman Catholic icons?’

  They were shrines, of course, shrines to the Mod Con, though we didn’t know that then. Our mother would try to explain them away and get stuck on the Catholic aspect of things. Mottes looked upon Catholicism as a misfortune. ‘The poor thing’s a Catholic,’ our mother would sometimes say, as if that explained away someone’s need for spectacles or eye drops at the eye doctors’ surgery where she worked. We didn’t know what religion our father was, though our mother assumed he was Catholic because he was Italian, and once in a while she and Allegra and I traipsed up the only hill in our district to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour to stand at the back of a mass, just in case Dadda’s soul should be salvaged by our doing so.

  We fiddled with the holy water and went weak at the knees in an embarrassed kind of way. Once, when our mother went to the extreme of kissing her thumbnail, just to set herself apart as a religious curio, Allegra went right off the air and stalked out. Afterwards, she chucked herself downhill ahead of us in a burst of empassioned walking.

  Our Lady of Perpetual Succour was a bluestone brontosaur of a building. There was a corpse behind the altar. Christ’s knees, grazed, stuck out of a fireplace in the Lady Chapel. I was sure it was God’s true home, because he had all his paintings there, money boxes to keep him going through hard times, Mary to do the cooking and cleaning, plenty of visitors, the bed with the corpse on it behind the altar, little brass doors and candles everywhere that looked promising in the kitchen line, and there was a toilet in the quadrangle. Pictures of Christ were freely available, with his name inscribed in the halo for those who couldn’t afford aspirin to stare at during periods of nervous exhaustion, overwork and physical pain. I often picked one up for our mother on the way home from school.

  The bluestone brontosaur was the only imposing building in the neighbourhood and it afforded the Catholics their only grandeur. Downhill from it, Catholic and Protestant alike lived in a state of mild decay. Heiresses we might have been, but we could hardly have been said to live the high life. When our mother was tired and allowed the fat from the chops to congeal on the griller, setting the blowflies in capsized attitudes, you could almost have called it genuine low. Except that the chops were lamb.

  There were backyards in the vicinity of ours where kangaroos were gutted and their hides tanned. Dogs squabbled over the discarded tails in the street. In a certain bath there were sacks of pippies waiting to be scrubbed and bottled in brine for the fish shops. Most people kept chooks, so their backyards stank, were grassless and had rats. We just had the rats.

  From the street, our house didn’t appear perpendicular to the block. A 1920s house, the general trend was perpendicular, but there was a slight lean inwards, which made it look as if our garden were a witches’ huddle over an unseen cauldron. Three old elms, ill planted round the front verandah, reached over their shoulders to pluck birds from the blue and stuff them in their pot. The rest of the front was tame enough, a sagging picket fence, a straggle of suburban flowers, the odd nest of sprouting bulbs, some of them lost in the grass, which was generally long and hid the path. It was a path up which you might have doubted many people would come, but you’d have been wr
ong, for our mother attracted people willy-nilly.

  To visit our mother in the afternoons after school, in the surgery where she worked, was to have our blue eyes playfully examined by the partners, Rumpton and Rudge. Rumpton sometimes held Allegra by the chin and gazed at her, shaking his long-beaked head in admiration. Allegra curled her lip and knitted her brow when he did this, but ‘Rumpty’s’ attentions made our mother fill with pride and deliver the fable of our coming inheritance. Clare, she would say, followed by a fictitious acreage, and you could tell she thought Rumpton and Rudge would rustle up a Medical Man for each of us one fine day.

  We would climb the stairs to Rumpton and Rudge’s and enter another age, and an ambience altogether different from the one at home, though home was not far away. Unlike our local GP’s surgery, which you could identify from the smell created by stale cigarettes and linoleum, hot from the stream of sun through the smoke-hazed windows, Rumpton and Rudge’s smelt opulent. Rumpton, the senior partner, believed that a decent, hard-wearing seat was made of leather – thick, brown leather – hide polished with hide, Rudge was inclined to call it. The leather chairs and couch were deep and hid children very satisfactorily. Behind our mother’s desk of inlaid morocco, aspidistras flew in brass pots on the shady, colonnaded verandah, where there were rattan chairs from Singapore. From there you could see the pavilion of a British Colonial tennis club with its row of short, stout palm trees. Through French doors leading from the verandah and the waiting room, to the sound of tennis balls pock-pocking at leisurely intervals, the examination room was a marvel of beautifully made little wooden drawers in handsome cabinets, comfy seats, ophthalmoscopes and eye charts.

  Rumpton, tall and thin, wore three-piece suits and a pince-nez. Rudge, a late ape, wore clips on his shirtsleeves and called Rumpton ‘Gloom Bottom’. Rumpton had a saturnine temperament while Rudge was jovial; the former called our mother Motto, the latter, O’Rourke. They loved her, and she was pretty satisfied with them, though their wives kept cropping up with little requests – would Motto mind minding the Pekinese while Mrs Rumpton went shopping? Would O’Rourkey be a dear and pick up some shirts from the cleaners in her lunch hour? Every now and then Stella Coretti née Motte wielded the family escutcheon – who did Marjorie Rudge think she was? Nothing in her family tree except phloem and xylem. And who did Marjorie Rumpton think she was addressing? And why were all eye doctors’ wives called Marjorie, a name redolent of cold weather and cardigans?