Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  ‘Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la diritta via era smaritta,’ quoted Dadda, ‘That’s Dante, Stella. “In the middle of my life, I found myself in a dark forest where the straight way was lost”.’

  We didn’t understand, but enjoyed the evening all the same. It was a recital by a Chinese girl who sang, among other things, ‘Oh Waily, Waily, up the Bank’.

  FOUR

  More about Mottoes

  A DOOR CREAKS. Through the lugubrious entrance hall, shuffling over the Mudgee slate and past the fireplace with its skirted copper hood, comes a little old lady, her white head bent, to visit me, the Midnight Knitter. Her hazel eyes are pin-pricky and sorrowful. Someone has broken into Fort Knox and stolen her bankbooks. Her hands are blue, her circulation’s gone with her fortune. ‘There, there,’ I say, ‘it isn’t half as bad as you think it is.’

  She has had an intruder, she tells me. Oh, for an intruder! Out here where no one comes. We go and look, down the passage and across the covered courtyard to the place where her bedroom is.

  It is evening now. A mysterious light has come on outside her bedroom window, what could it be? ‘I believe,’ I say to her, ‘it is the one the electricians came and put in so we could see our way across the courtyard at night.’ They came in their overalls, doesn’t she remember? One was called Chins and the other Jack Keogh. Chins is called Chins because he’s part Chinese and grew three chins to keep up with his nickname. Jack Keogh is a left-side Keogh, left as you drive towards Canberra through the town, and not to be mistaken with the right-sided Keoghs, though one of them is also called Jack. The Keogh war goes back to the gold rush of 1860. So do the Chinese forebears of Chins. Irish and Chinese riddled the high, cold creeks for gold together in those days, just as now their descendants do the electrical work. Must be something about currents.

  But who put the light on? Well, someone put it on. It didn’t put itself on, did it? Where’s the switch then? There isn’t a switch. If I can find a switch she’ll give me all the money she has in her purse. Except that her purse and bankbooks have gone, clean disappeared. Someone has broken in and taken them. But I can come into her place and choose a china ornament if I can find a switch.

  I tell her I have to go into her place to find the switch, anyway. ‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘this isn’t my place. I live at Boris Pasternak and Jane Austen. You wouldn’t find me living in a place like this.’ She clambers up onto the railway sleeper that makes the doorstep to her bedroom and shuffles inside onto the higgledy-piggledy red brick floor. ‘This is a rabbit warren.’ She flings out a handful of arthritically noded fingers to the right of her. ‘The walls are made of mud.’ She flings out a handful of arthritically noded fingers to the left. ‘It could be overrun with Italians any minute.’

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ I ask. ‘You moved from Boris Pasternak and Jane Austen years ago to marry my father.’

  ‘Was he the Italian?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Why would I want to marry your father?’

  ‘To have Allegra and me, I suppose.’

  ‘You? I don’t even know you.’

  ‘I’m your daughter, Isobel.’

  ‘Geoffrey was Isobel’s father. Geoffrey Latimer. The Germans bayoneted him. He died in Syria with my brother, Shaver. The Red Cross sent us letters in French, and photos of the graves.’

  ‘My father was called Henry,’ I say.

  ‘Well, I suppose he would be.’

  I find the light switch. ‘See, this is the switch, this one here that looks different from the others. Remember, we asked the electrician to make it look different so you would know which one it was.’

  She has never heard of such a thing. Next I’ll be telling her the washing machine works.

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ I say.

  Outside the rain is still falling. On and on and on. Little carts rolling down the iron roof, dragging the night along behind them.

  I sit on the end of her bed, warming her poor old feet. She’d like to give me a china ornament but she hasn’t any. Probably the intruder took them. I ask what he looked like. ‘Ooh,’ she says, ‘he was that Italian. You know, they don’t wear proper clothes and they never have clean fingernails. Or polished shoes, not like proper men.’

  A proper man has suits for all occasions. A proper man washes his hands before he sits down to a meal and he endeavours to keep his fingernails clean even if he has been doing man’s work. A proper man sends his daughters to grammar schools. His socks match. He takes pride in polished shoes. More than that, a proper man knows how to polish his own shoes.

  The improper man wasn’t keen on polish – I crack her old white toes above her bunion – high gloss on long boots was an especial phobia. When I played Captain Midnight at school wearing an old pair of Granpa’s riding boots stuffed with newspaper, he said, ‘Don’t shine them. A bushranger wouldn’t have.’ But I was already out on the back steps with the polish. Granpa and Uncle Garth were proper men, gentlemen. They spat, rubbed, oiled and spoke of elbow grease. I, too, would be a gentleman. I thrust my arm down the cool length of the boot.

  Granpa and Uncle Garth were still alive as I sat there polishing. The only person to die in January 1956 was Dadda’s uncle, Nicola Coretti. Oddly enough, he was proper in his way and polished his shoes. The only relative of Dadda’s we ever knew, Uncle Nicola, had a gold-tipped walking stick and wore a flower in the buttonhole of his frock coat. In spite of living in a single room in a boarding house in South Melbourne, he affected a large diamond ring which Dadda inherited when he died. His English wasn’t good, but his voice in its heyday was supposed to have been impressive. We were told he had been given to public speaking, though quite where and what, it was difficult to ascertain. We understood he had lived in Melbourne for thirty years, but he was so different from anyone we’d met, we found that hard to believe. He took little notice of us or our mother, nor did we want him to take notice, as he was old and touchy with rheumatism.

  When Uncle Nicola came to visit he sat in the studio with Dadda and quaffed vermouth. He died on an outing to Coleraine in the company of several university professors and lecturers, among whom must have been a botanist as it was said our great-uncle choked on a kex. We were a long time finding out that a kex was a dried-out stick of chervil, and having found out we were none the wiser as chervil was a plant unknown to us. We knew of fennel; it grew everywhere in the cracks and crannies of a neighbourhood rich in them. We knew of thistles, which abounded in the local parks, and of the blackberries choking Yarra bank and making it difficult for those who practised murder to dispose of the murderees. Allegra and I agreed that blackberries were probably the reason why murder was out of fashion in our region in the fifties, though a mere twenty years beforehand it had been quite a popular pastime. Imagining Uncle Nicola choking on a kex posed almost insurmountable difficulties. We thought of his sallow face turning a brilliant red above the white of his neat, clipped beard, then turning purple, and the cracking of his skeleton as academics slapped him on the back, then black and Uncle Nicola withdrawing entirely from ownership of such a face.

  It was astonishing to think that his memorial service at the Unitarian Church in East Melbourne was packed out. Our mother told us some of the guests were very distinguished people.

  Granpa and Uncle Garth, though probably made of no sterner stuff than Uncle Nicola, battled on through his choking and through the whole of the next year, by which time my days of bushranging were over. For three more years, during which the practice of polishing shoes among Corettis in Melbourne sank into oblivion as the tins of Nugget and Kiwi rusted round their slowly desiccating contents, Granpa and Uncle Garth wheezed and tapped, quoted and tapped their way into the future: the blind and the blind.

  Aunt Nina ran from one to the other with draughts of sherry and pinches of salt. Then one day, unable to forestall the inevitable any longer, Granpa stopped tapping and bit off the air with his blunt old te
eth – as if death were a matter of castrating life as he’d castrated lambs in his boyhood.

  A fortnight later, victorious but weary, Uncle Garth stopped wheezing and the trap was sprung on his remaining eye.

  Allegra was inconsolable when Granpa went, but I had to dredge tears up from the reservoir I kept for propriety’s sake. She was appalled with me. By contrast, when our uncle died, it was I who found myself with a face wet out of pity. On both occasions Nina sang in a wobbling but strong contralto, her soft jowls quaking over her firm chin: ‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me/Let me hide myself in Thee.’ The stones of the Scunthorpe Anglicans would never forget her.

  Our mother began to talk in the past tense of the fortune that was coming our way. Once or twice she toyed with the notion we’d been ruined. Allegra and I savoured this romantic state for quite a while, but among the people we knew, most had been born into ruin and hadn’t had to wait to have it thrust upon them.

  Aunt Nina continued on at Clare, though it was clear she would be lucky to salvage the house after the death duties. The Furlongers were supposed to be helping out by using the home paddocks to agist their sheep. In that way Aunt Nina could hold on to the land between the house and Mountshannon, but our mother was certain foul play was afoot. You couldn’t tell her the lever wasn’t being applied and Aunt Nina wouldn’t end up out on her ear in an old people’s home.

  From the business at Clare our father stayed as aloof as he could. He was kind to Nina, however, wore a borrowed suit and helped with the funerals, only causing one bout of huffiness when his unmatching shoes were noticed as Granpa slid over the edge.

  When Uncle Garth died, Dadda actually bought himself a pair of shoes to spare Aunt Nina hurt. They were polished black leather, but on the night of our arrival at Clare they mysteriously disappeared from the fourth bedroom where, in deference to the recently deceased, our parents had been installed.

  Those of us in the know scoured the house, hoping to keep evidence of a thief to ourselves. Meanwhile, Dadda had to resort to some old slippers he found in Uncle Garth’s den. On the morning of the funeral, seeing Dadda in her late husband’s slippers, Aunt Nina marched off to her bedroom and produced a shoe box, saying, ‘Well, I dare say Garth would prefer you wore his shoes to his funeral rather than his slippers.’ Inside the box were Dadda’s shoes. He lifted them out with a frown. Still with a frown, he put them on his feet. With half a frown, he drove us to the funeral, by the end of which the corners of his mouth were flickering up satanically, so that by the interment, the focus of attention was not on the flesh being clothed with its worms and clods of dust, but on the nitid toes of Dadda’s shoes, which wriggled up and down, up and down, to the flickering of his smile. New they might have been, but they did not match.

  ‘She really did believe they were Garth’s,’ whispered our mother. But if you thought about it that way, it made matters worse.

  A series of paintings evolved from Uncle Garth’s funeral. One was called A Very Disreputable Man Wearing Highly Polished Shoes. As for the shoes themselves, along with Granpa’s riding boots and several pairs of Uncle Garth’s shoes bequeathed to her shoeless brother-in-law by an Aunt Nina who said since one pair of Garth’s shoes had fitted, there was no reason why the rest wouldn’t also, they became part of a mobile that strutted and paraded arrogantly over our garage ceiling around a humble cluster of footwear Allegra and I had grown out of.

  Some months later, Dadda and I drove to Clare, ostensibly so Dadda could help make an inventory and sort out what needed to be done. It was August. Scare-guns were going off at random all over Clare, where seed had been valiantly spread in the pastures. The white cockatoos who’d come to gobble it up rose in a motion like a sheet flapping on a clothesline, only to land again a little further off to peck between salvos.

  Aunt Nina was thinking of roots and shoots, of soil binding and rainfall. The appearance on her premises of that fly in the ointment, my father, caused her spine to straighten and her lips to purse, even though she herself had invited him, as my mother should on no account feel left out of negotiations concerning the precarious family inheritance.

  No doubt Dadda placed little importance on such things, but Clare had been the prime concern of three generations of Mottes, as he could see from all the paperwork she spread out for him daily on the walnut table in the vestibule. There were account books going back for years. The gorgeous copperplate of great-grandfather Augustus Motte gave way to the affable script of his son. In turn the affable script gave way to the gorgeous copperplate of Uncle Haydn and this yielded to Aunt Nina, whose hand got away from her so that words lounged across columns, squashing conclusions into tiny spaces that made the vowels pop out into thin air.

  Dadda allowed himself to be shown Euphrosyne’s family crest, a shattered oak, and to be read the motto nec deficit alter, which Nina supposed meant ‘Never fail another’ but which some uncouth lout who thought he knew Latin had told her meant ‘Never fail again’. Nina hadn’t had the opportunity of learning Latin, but she was sure if she had learnt it alter would have meant ‘another’, not ‘again’. Dadda couldn’t reassure her on that point. It all had to do with the case of alter and whether another time was implied. She mustn’t be so concerned; greater tragedies had occurred than misconstruing a family motto, and regarding Clare, all was not lost, not yet.

  At this something was lost – Aunt Nina’s temper. There was a standing up at the walnut table and a banging down of the account books. Mottes worth their salt bounded and plunged at the utterance of cold comforts. Had Dadda no pride? He struck Aunt Nina as a man without pride altogether. What had he been doing, for instance, when Mottes were being sunk off Crete, shot in Palestine and captured at the fall of Singapore? Why had he not been in his own country sinking, bombing and capturing?

  It was an impasse. The antipathy between Dadda and Aunt Nina was insoluble. Dadda stood, his own lips pursed and his thumbs fidgeting wildly till his palms growled. For Aunt Nina’s information, the sinking, bombing and capturing capacities of the Italian people had been in safe hands when he left them. And if she wanted a motto, why not Me ne frego (Who cares) because that was the slogan with which his country had gone to war. And if she thought she could tell a man’s worth by the boots he wore, why did she not lend her mind to the feet of Him in whom she had so much faith: that Anglican, Christ?

  The light outside my mother’s bedroom is making the spider webs in the courtyard shine. Here – for the benefit of you who are not here, I shall take this beautiful word as my motto. Here means now and with me and it has come to Australia, to this mountainous, isolated place, via the English and, before them, the Frisians and, before them, the Saxons and the old High Germans. When the Romans were saying adsum, the Germanic tribes described by Caesar in De Bello Gallico were probably saying Here! Why waste your time with adsum when you could be here? Here, it is the season of spiders, lace and grace, the culmination of all heres.

  And it is where Mad Meg on the kitchen wall is gathering the future into her basket, her sack, the Dutch oven slung over her gauntleted arm. There have been several heres. One was a room with a honey-coloured maple veneer suite in it. There was a steam train running down the grain of the wardrobe door. The door could only be shut by jamming it with a wedge of paper. Inside the clothes were packed so tight you could hardly get anything in or out. There were clothes and accoutrements everywhere; we even ran to a scotty-dog-shaped lump of coal, given to Allegra by the boyfriend after Jimmy Coote, whose chop bones she still kept in a satin-lined box. She could throw nothing out. I was a little less reverential, but hesitated guiltily at garbage tins and grieved just a bit when the lid clanged down.

  From this chock-a-block room one day, when girls were changing into winter garb and boys were still vaulting the fences round the baths or being let down onto the concrete pool surrounds from roofs to avoid the turnstiles, we exited in furtive fashion via a window that deposited us in common suburban shrubbery to the side of our house. T
hrough this tangle we scuttled and crouched the short distance to the street, snagging our black stockings and getting dust all over our black suede courtshoes. We were wearing straight skirts to the knee and floppy jumpers – hers powder blue, mine red. Beehive hairdos, French rolls. Not so conventional that everyone else was wearing them but, then, not so blatant that the daughters of public servants and kindergarten teachers were being summoned inside for fear they might set eyes on us and be transformed into rebels without a cause. Our suburb was being invaded. There was hardly a chook pen within crowing distance now, though there were still rats. The people who used to bottle the pippies had opened a fish and chip shop in the main street, and another shop sold kangaroo skin coats. The days when you’d find pippies in the bath and roo tails in the street were gone. Gone too was the phase of smoothing over ‘ugly old Victorian facades’ with rough-cast, as had happened in Melbourne for the ’56 Olympics. The wrought-iron Mexicans siesta-ing over the house numbers were being clucked at and decried. Restorers had moved in. Quite a lot of iron lace was going up, a fair amount of it by mistake, on Art Deco.

  We were on an important mission. It was a Saturday. We had left our house by the bedroom window so as not to be seen by the afternoon tea guests. These were The Brolga Laurington and her abominated daughter.

  The Brolga had offered Allegra a job she didn’t want to take. She’d been asked to the drive-in that night by her boyfriend, Macka, but there was no choice. To be offered a job by The Brolga was tantamount to a summons.

  Terry McReady, known as Macka, long-faced, acned, with a footballer’s waddle, had shot my sister a glance, all dark brown iris without white to it, since Terry McReady’s sparsely lashed lids were worn closed along the greater part of their margins. Suddenly the blue and luxuriantly lashed eyes of my sister saw a boy transformed. His cap of ginger crinkle became beautifully sculpted old gold curls, his thick, punched lips, the broken mouth of Mars. Those bandy legs that jet-propelled the backward-leaning Macka through school cheers and a field of enemies towards the goal posts – Macka was a Rules man – and had Macka following after them, lurching stiffly now left, now right, had become for Allegra freckle-smattered God-limbs. A bond had formed across the playground, a bond as long as the distance between Allegra and Macka. The whole school disposed and disported itself like elves and fairies, dukes and amazons, around this pole of love: Macka was its ugliest, most decorated schoolboy and Allegra its most beautiful girl.