Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  ‘Oh, come along, Milesss,’ Bart managed. ‘The point isss, we’ve made a point.’

  ‘You don’t live in Melbourne,’ Miles grunted. ‘Make a point in Melbourne and they’ll put a hat over it to stop it showing.’

  There was a new show on the walls of Figments, a hard-edged and expressionless show. Bart and Allegra didn’t like to say so, but managed to say at length that its Marxist content wasn’t very high. Miles accused them of being ignorant, this kind of deadpan art was international and what was Marx about if he wasn’t about internationalism? The old insistence on figuration and immediate accessibility smacked of ‘bourgeois sentimentalism’. That was what Australia was suffering from, they had only to go next door and see Reg Sorby’s show at Siècle for proof positive.

  Siècle was one place in Melbourne where Allegra would not set foot. She was nevertheless curious to know what was happening there and somehow worked out that I would not be compromising my principles by going. Perhaps she thought I was thoroughly unprincipled, but I had an uneasy feeling that my principles, unattended by textbooks, were being overlooked.

  Next door at Siècle Reg Sorby, according to one of his critics, was being ‘led astray from an individual expressiveness into the desert of dullness’. I mounted the stairs a step or two behind Bart. ‘Oh, Bart!’ sang Checkie Laurington from the front desk, and then ‘Oh, Isobel!’ and she turned her back. Harry’s eye glinted through a door at the far end of the gallery, then disappeared.

  My footsteps made a very loud noise on Siècle’s floor. Bart kept giving me sideways glances, pointing at the pictures and making a tragedy mask of his face. Reg had swatted wildflowers and bird wings to his canvases. It didn’t improve them. The best-looking thing in Siècle, alas, was Checkie Laurington. She was tall and someone had cut her hair into a marvellous golden bob, shaping it into the nape of her long neck. Her mother, I hated to think it, had a neck like that.

  Our inheritance was a long time coming down to us. It took eight months to clear the probate on Aunt Nina’s will and auction off the house as a deceased estate. Tony Furlonger’s cousin Jim ran the auction; there were only two bidders. Tony Furlonger bought the house. He bought everything except the two Kombi vanfuls Allegra and I had scuttled off with. The only large piece of furniture we were able to take had been a bed. We needed one for Eli.

  Tony complained that Clare homestead was too big to be useful to him. Coolang had its own homestead, after all. Nevertheless, he moved his daughter Jocelyn and her husband Ralph in there. Ultimately they took it on a separate title from Coolang and renamed it ‘Welaragang’, which is what the Aborigines knew it as before great-grandfather Motte took it from them. That was perhaps the only decent fact to emerge from the whole tacky transaction.

  After debts and duties, the combined inheritance of Allegra, our mother and me was $27 000. The walnut table alone is now worth five times that.

  It was Bart Turner who put it to Allegra that in a world biased against women, it was time a woman owned an art gallery and exercised a female bias in the selection of the art to be shown. Why should Henry Coretti, he asked, be given all the advantages and have all the doors opened for him, when Isobel Coretti, who could probably paint just as well, had no such advantages lying in wait for her?

  There was a house opposite the Pantechnicon which was reputed to be the oldest standing in the main street. Its demolition had been mooted several times, but was opposed by those with an interest in local history. It was a little wooden box; its metre-wide verandah ran the length of its front and was abutted at the street by an old picket fence. The door was in the middle of the front, just as in a picture book, and there was a chimney at either end of the pitched roof. It came up for auction just as probate was being cleared on Aunt Nina’s will.

  The door opened into a corridor on either side of which was a bedroom. Behind the left bedroom was a third bedroom. The corridor wall stopped behind the right bedroom, where there was a little sitting room. On a closed-in back verandah was a delapidated kitchen and a token bathroom. The taps didn’t turn on. The toilet was up the backyard near the hen house, where there was a cage for a prize rooster who had been called Charlie. His vital statistics were painted on a slab of wood proudly mounted over his door.

  Also up the back, which was really pretty small, was a shed that had obviously served as a sleepout in times of overcrowding. It was chock-a-block with junk: hand-made toys; several of Charlie’s cups; a great many empties, which, if set up in chronological order would have told a history of beer-making in the city of Melbourne; and a handwritten copy of an advertisement placed in the Argus at the turn of the century which read: ‘Range of whips available for discerning gentleman customer. Most requests handled, apply P.O. Box …’

  Allegra called the gallery Mad Meg, after the Bruegel we’d found under Uncle Garth’s bed. It was with enthusiasm and a rebellious heart that I copied Meg onto a wooden sign which we eventually hung outside our door, like a sign outside an English pub.

  We ripped up the aged floral carpet and gave it to Bridget Kelly, who reckoned she could make some waistcoats out of it. The boards under the carpet were eight inches wide and made of Baltic pine. We tried to lime the varnish off and made a mess of it. Bridget Kelly came and said, ‘Nah. What you need on that’s a floor sander. I got a floor sander down at my place, or half a floor sander, I should say.’

  ‘It doesn’t necessarily follow that a half-varnished floor has need of half a floor sander, Bridget,’ our mother opined from behind her bucket in a slimy corner. She had stood by at the auction when Allegra bid for Mad Meg, fiercely ruing a transaction which was about to change an eight-bedroom mansion with servant’s quarters into a three-bedroom timber cottage in inner Melbourne which had probably been owned by a servant. In spite of Allegra’s having outbid several men for the place, we were barely on speaking terms with our mother. Bridget Kelly reckoned she knew a bloke who could come up with the other half of the floor sander. The bloke was Big Ernie, her husband.

  With the aid of extension cords and an overloaded fuse box, Big Ernie attempted to drown us in chivalrous, varnish-removing sound. It was some time coming and during its imminence Big Ernie consumed what can only be called a volume of beer larger than his external dimensions would have seemed to allow. For Big Ernie was not so much big as large in presence.

  Big Ernie was given to song rather than to speech, and of song, it seemed, he knew but one, this being ‘The Ball at Kirrimuir’. ‘Oh the mother superior, she was there,’ he warbled between blasts, ‘Sittin’ by the fire/Knittin’ contraceptives from/A worn-out rubber tyre …’

  At the utterance of the word ‘contraceptive’ our own mother became extremely superior. Belonging, as she did, to the late medieval age, she took a dim view of condoms and diaphragms. Given the dim view, it was probably not too surprising that Dadda left her. As for the pill, it was another hideous trick worked on womankind. Furthermore, it was an incitement to adultery. Allegra and I had to go to extreme lengths to disguise any evidence of indulgence in the ordinary activities of our generation. There had been The Great Shoulder-Bag Emptying scene, which took place in our family kitchen and was not unlike the cigarette blitzes they used to carry out at school. Bridget Kelly used to reckon the only reason kids had to wear school uniform in Australia was so that everyone had the same set of pockets to empty out on fag blitz days.

  During The Great Shoulder-Bag Emptying, it was revealed that Allegra Coretti (23), the parthenogenetically descended daughter of Henry, had in her possession a plastic and aluminium pill dispenser in which twenty-eight pills were arranged in a telltale ring. Our mother said, grimly, ‘I thought you said it was only a word.’

  ‘Who’ll do me this time?/Who’ll do me now?’ sang Big Ernie as Bridget helped us whitewash the walls in another room. ‘Change the record, for Chrissake, Ernie. It’s killin’ the cockroaches,’ Bridget yelled.

  The knickers protecting our mother’s head from the ravages of paint and
dust waggled at the leg holes. She spoke of enunciation and breeding. Allegra threatened to give her a face full of paint. Our mother’s scraper paused on the wall. ‘Madam,’ she said to her elder child, ‘I am fed up to the gills with paint. You can take your scraper and slice your tongue off with it.’

  Ludicrous in her headgear, she stood her ground like a Maori warrior, her hand clenched on the paint scraper. Allegra set to attack. Her eyes flashing, her thumbs grinding with rage.

  ‘Fuck off!’ Allegra screamed and our mother flung the scraper in a wild arc. It stuck in the door by its corner.

  ‘Shit!’ said Bridget, flushing pink.

  ‘My family home!’ our mother yelled. ‘This dump!’

  ‘Don’t, Mum, don’t.’ I tried to put my arms around her, but she clouted me. ‘Vulgar tramps,’ she said darkly as she left the room.

  Then Allegra said, without compassion, ‘Don’t cry, Bel, just don’t cry.’

  That was the day the Russians rolled their tanks into Czechoslovakia, the day the National Gallery of Victoria opened, the day Reg Sorby’s old dictum about figurative art being the only valid way an artist could express himself went out the window.

  It was also the day we were told we were our father’s daughters and our mother resolved never to have anything to do with us again, the day we had to find new living quarters for Allegra, me and my son.

  On the evening of that day, I slept on the floor at Bridget Kelly’s. Allegra didn’t sleep at all.

  Allegra and Kelly Kelly sat among the junk cartons and stacks of salvaged books smoking pot. The smell of marijuana mingled with what was wafting off the dump and vied for dominance. It was an awful fight. Maggie Kelly strummed her guitar and sang political songs in an extraordinarily gravelly voice. Chantal slept on the sheep dog under a table. Eli, having crawled into the sheep dog’s kennel and erected a barbecue griddle over the doorway, sat up half the night growling, ‘Wild ammimal. Wild ammimal.’ Bridget Kelly snored in a hammock in the kitchen and her son, Little Ernie, sat in the backyard cleaning his rifle. Big Ernie spent the night plastered on the back steps of Mad Meg.

  PART TWO

  MAD MEG

  ELEVEN

  The Art of Bamboozlement

  BETWEEN REMEMBRANCES, the old woman with the white hair is knitting. She knits with a morose doggedness and grinds her teeth. Every night she takes an extraordinary multicoloured article out of a bag she leaves in the armchair when she goes to bed. That can be at any time, as the whim takes her. I sit up with her, because if I don’t, she wanders and loses her way.

  ‘What’s that you’re knitting?’ I ask her.

  ‘Oh, you should know,’ she mumbles. ‘You’re the one with all the bright ideas.’

  The drawers of her mind fly open by default; a thief has been there and removed selected pieces – maybe he’s the man in the shortie pyjamas.

  Her profile is lit up by the fire: head forward, neat little nose and stubborn chin. She feels for her daughters love, hate, jealousy, pride, spite. Sometimes she says her genes have been diluted.

  Her fight with Allegra over Mad Meg was spirited. Battle lines were soon firmly drawn. There were certain roads Allegra would not cross. She would not cross the quadrant of streets that surrounded Stella’s house. Rudge and Plant’s was out of bounds. Since Dadda and The Brolga shared premises close to the city but well south of Rudge and Plant’s, any shop or gallery south of the Yarra was unvisitable. It took Allegra an inordinate amount of time to get from either Mad Meg or our house to the university where she worked, such were the boundaries, ethical, moral and ideological, that impeded the progress of the psychedelic Kombi.

  Allegra and I rented an Edwardian house on the brontosaurian heights of our neighbourhood. It faced west, so its ambience was dominated by the setting sun. It exhaled terracotta, red, purple and blue, and threw velvet shadows behind it as the night came up.

  Over the hump of the brontosaurian heights, facing north, was Harcourt Lane. On the high side, the warehouse containing Figments and Siècle was like the plain member of a pair, as the Harcourt-Wilson seemed to have been turned in the manner of a fig, so that its insides were on its outside. It was hung with generous balconies, on several of which were to be seen little weatherboard boxes with louvre windows, which presumably housed the overflow of derros and winos under Methodist care. On the corner of the main road on the high side, the pre-unification Methodist Church faced east, a squat building with a grey front. A couple of steps up from the footpath, and the once-monthly Uniting congregation was face to face with a pair of shut doors that were almost never in sunlight. The church, being only one storey tall and without a steeple, was robbed of its shadow by the Harcourt-Wilson behind it in the lane. In the passage of a day, its existence went unrecorded, shadow-wise, in the main street.

  On the downhill corner of Harcourt Lane, the Pantechnicon faced east into the main street, watching the morning shadow-play on the road. Pedimented, spiked and cupola’d, this shadow-play was scored across by tram lines, or lost in the unevenness of the road, or it vied there in the rain with reflections. In the mornings, yellow arrived first, then pale grey. Mad Meg was white: its little bullnosed front verandah would frown across at the Pantechnicon opposite, like a person in bed who doesn’t want to get up yet. Its mood correlated strongly with that of the Mad Meg collective, and it was generally unoccupied in the early hours.

  I was the only painter in the collective, which was seven strong. Maggie Kelly joined when she discovered a talent for photography. Bridget had assembled a Pentax for her from collected bits, quite a feat when one considers the intricacy of Pentax cameras in 1970. In addition to Maggie, there were three critics, an art historian and Allegra, who was by this time a fully fledged social scientist. Everything we did was put to the vote, and often the outcome was six to one, the out-of-step party being me. I was into Caution in a big way.

  Many women wanted to show with us. Apart from painters, there were potters, sculptors, printmakers and performance artists. We were pretty soon booked up, but as ever with this kind of enterprise, the cash flow was hardly commensurate with the enthusiasm. Though we could operate on Fridays and Saturdays, on other days of the week we were often all working, and if the artist couldn’t caretake the gallery would be shut. This led Allegra and me to squabble because she thought I was the ideal person to caretake. I could live off the inheritance, hers as well as mine, if I wanted to. I didn’t want to. I wanted to earn more money, not fritter away what we had already. Allegra tried to assure me that by the time the inheritance money ran out, private property would have been taken over by the state anyway, the political left being in the offing. But I was cautious: there was Eli to think of and I wasn’t about to go begging Dadda for his upkeep; furthermore, although the words ‘Property is Theft’ were often bandied around, nobody except Allegra was of the opinion that the ALP was going to disinherit them in the name of a fair go.

  Our openings, for which Maggie, Kelly and I had a roster for childminding, were held on Friday nights. It was good of Kelly Kelly to take on something that wasn’t her responsibility, but she was a loving aunt. Quiet and mysterious, she hid behind her hair, which was very long, very fair and very straight – that she should have come into the world through a rubbish tip was unbelievable.

  On opening nights, perhaps because we were at the base of the brontosaurian hill and not at the apex, a certain group of dishevelled men would congregate on the footpath outside, trying by various nonchalant manoeuvres to look like guests and merit a glass of plonk. If things were especially crowded they would get their glass of plonk by accident and regale the company with philosophy and song. These were the gentlemen who rotated through the detox, changing places with each other down to the last cubic centimetre of liver. Periodically among them was Big Ernie Kelly.

  One night when Kelly was babysitting and Mad Meg was bursting at the seams, Big Ernie did us the honour and rolled round with the district’s most famous drunk, Courtly Tom
. Six feet four inches tall, Courtly Tom had slicked back his hair with Californian Poppy all his life. He wore his beer belly high, which meant he had a creased crutch. Surrounding him was an ether; he said it was his aura and that it was so strong, other people could smell it – they probably could have lit it with a blue flame, too.

  Courtly Tom had once played rugby for Wales and had appeared on Melbourne television in the 1950s, dressed as a sultan in a children’s show. Whether in or out of detox he could be seen on Wednesday afternoons dressed in a tux, refulgent with use, getting onto a tram, bound, it was said, for Pentridge Gaol where he taught the inmates the intricacies of trombone playing.

  On the evening of his appearance at Mad Meg he favoured the company with the toreador song from Carmen. Maggie fled, embarrassed, to the back room. We followed her and found her furiously smoking. She turned her back on us, tensely shredding a match between her thumbnails.

  ‘Come on, Maggie, it’s all right,’ Allegra coaxed. ‘It’s nothing to get upset over. They’re just two men wanting to have a good time, but they haven’t got enough money to go to the pub. Let’s face it, most people’s problems would be solved if you gave ’em a fistful of dollars.’

  ‘Every time someone gives my old man a fistful of dollars,’ said Maggie, still with her back turned, ‘he spends it on the TAB or winds up in the detox.’

  ‘It’s because he never had a chance, Mag, that’s all. He was born into poverty. It’s not his fault. But things are going to change, Mag, they’re going to change. Poverty is going to be eliminated, believe me.’

  Maggie flushed and tossed her head. ‘God, you know what you look like when you say that, Allegra? You look like an imported Italian doll. You might have lived here all your life, but what do you know about it, except what it looks like?’ She burst into tears and flung herself down at our desk, burying her head in her hands. The cigarette she was holding burnt a hole in her long fair hair.