Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  ‘There are causes, Mag, economic causes. Money isn’t properly distributed.’

  Maggie sat up wet-faced and laughed. ‘You want to know what causes poverty, Allegra? I’ll tell you. The more you hunt, the more causes you’ll find. There’s a cause for every example, there are individual and collective causes, minor and major causes, accidental and deliberate causes, external and internal causes. University faculties get built in the name of causes, but poverty goes on forever.’

  ‘You ought to go to uni, Maggie. You’d be a natural.’

  But, as things stood, Maggie couldn’t go to uni. She’d been busy having Chantal when girls her age at better schools were matriculating.

  If Maggie often felt patronised by Allegra, so did I. Yet, except when I felt it imperative to have my way, we didn’t fight. Allegra was as protective as she had always been and turned a blind eye to my falling a long way short of the Marxist feminist ideal. I was always the exception to the rule, and, when the pack closed in on me, baying for blood, Allegra would stand between them and me until I could safely get myself out of the road.

  But, while Allegra was protective, neither she nor my mother was forgiving. I carried the war dispatches to and fro with gusto, over the brontosaurian hill, through the grounds of the brontosaur itself, and down the primrose path to the hobs of hell, where I would shake the bell and drum collection at the door and it would whoosh open and there she’d be, Stella Motte in the attitude of a valkyrie.

  Allegra (owner of the vacuum cleaner) to Stella (borrower of the vacuum cleaner): Where’s the vacuum cleaner?

  Stella (who needs the iron) to Allegra (who has the iron): Cleaning the vacuum. Who said you could take the iron?

  Allegra (who gutsed the entire cream cake over three days) to Stella (who baked the cream cake): The iron is Isobel’s. The cream on that cake you sent was off!

  They were turning the humble huff into a high art form. I was sure there was a knack for getting them back together, but I couldn’t think what it was. I was to and fro like Balashev from the Czar to Napoleon in War and Peace.

  The problem, of course, was the dwindling down of Clare and all its delusions of grandeur to Mad Meg and its left-wing social conscience. Stella had ideas of lineage and breeding which had not leapt the generation gap. They lay in the intergenerational ditch stunned, but still adept at attaining the moral high ground.

  While her daughters spent the family fortune on alien ideas, Stella filled our erstwhile home with the dispossessed. Members of a certain faith played strange stringed instruments on her sitting-room floor. A girl with a baby and a musk ox bladder was living in Dadda’s studio. Her dog fouled the Genoa cut velvet couch. A woman poet and some kind of Tibetan holy man slept together in our former bedroom. Stella ordered me home to identify a substance the holy man had wrapped up in a handkerchief. ‘Heroin,’ I said, and she asked how it was I knew. Had I been injecting myself? Perhaps I was injecting her grandson, Eli? For all I knew, the ‘heroin’ could have been talcum powder, but I was so annoyed with her predilection for bizarre strangers, I was determined to bash back some of the guilt she was peddling my way.

  When illness broke out in her commune, she consulted Aunt Nina’s first aid book from 1910. She diagnosed the musk ox girl as having corpora lutea. I was summoned to the showdown. No doubt the musk ox girl had come by her corpora lutea from drugs or sex. ‘Probably sex,’ I told my mother. ‘I’ve had them, too.’

  She looked at me with a hung face. And just what, she would like to know, did I take to get rid of them? ‘Nothing,’ I told her. ‘I get them every time I ovulate.’ She flew to the first aid book. Did ‘ovulate’ mean what she thought it did? She looked at me, horrified, with a crimped top lip. ‘I dare say you get them, too,’ I said. ‘They’re hereditary. Mothers pass them on to their daughters.’

  ‘But you children never had anything wrong with you when you were little!’

  I was about to feel sorry for her, but she added, ‘Except for you,’ as if I was defective. ‘You had asthma.’

  ‘Yellow bodies, Mum,’ I said, checking my rising spleen. ‘That’s what corpora lutea are, little deposits of fat left in your ovaries after you’ve shed an egg. Every functioning female has them. And most of us have neurones, too. Presumably you do. Presumably they’re in working order!’

  That being the case, why could I not use my father’s studio to paint in? Why was some hippie allowed to stink the place out with shitty nappies and a musk ox bladder? I was told that I had been allowed to stink the place out with shitty nappies and paint. Now it was someone else’s turn. Somehow or other, the hippie and her baby were being blamed on me.

  The poet who shared our bedroom with a saffron-robed monk earned herself some money occasionally by playing a guitar and singing in a folk attic. As I fought with my mother in her kitchen, squalid with her boarders’ messes, this person in the back room sang wanly:

  Then by and come the king himself Looked up with pitiful eye, ‘Come down, come down, Mary Hamilton, Tonight ye’ll dine with me.’

  My mother sat on one of the two unencumbered kitchen chairs and played Mary Hamilton for all she was worth.

  The light in the kitchen in those days was lugubrious. One of her boarders, unaware of the intricacies involved in turning on the sink heater, had allowed too much gas to accumulate before lighting the jet and there had been an explosion. The bottom of the blind had been singed off on the diagonal, and one of the window panes had broken, necessitating a brown paper square to be cut and placed over the broken glass. A less lenient landlady would have required the gas igniter to pay for the damage, but the standard of tenant led an outsider to suspect that the landlady would be lucky even to be collecting the rent.

  There were no kings to come and cast their eyes on her. Boo-boos other people would have been thankful to relinquish years ago had begun to dance to her tune like mindless clowns. See that I am good, she seemed to be saying, and rescue me from this hellish pit.

  But I doubt, if you’d dangled a rope of any kind into that pit, that she would have seen it in the chaos of her despair. Or, if she saw it, she would say the mindless clowns needed her and she couldn’t come today.

  Off she would trudge to Rudge and Plant each morning; back she would trudge each night. With resignation and more good nature than was warranted, she extended her bounty to all who were in need. She’d had her instructions in goodness from rural Anglicans. The philanthropy of country vicars had taken root and grown into an earth-hugging, wide-spreading tree whose fruit was plentiful, but whose shade prevented small things under it from growing into more than stunted suggestions of what they might have been. Lurking by habit in the shade of her embrace, they were sun-shy and behaved very badly in winter when they were reached by the day’s cold light. The silhouette of Stella’s tree in winter was formed of hybrid heads, lop-eared, crook-snouted, cock-jawed. They bayed and mewed and lamented at discovery, but seldom scuttled out to fend for themselves in the world; for the tree, in its way, was strong and all-providing. However, it had come to occupy too much lateral territory at the expense of height, and the weight of its branches was bringing Stella down.

  She saw her task as the fostering of intrinsic goodness in her foundlings. Sometimes she succeeded. She hid adolescents from violent or drunken parents and battered wives from brutal husbands. These days people would find a degree of self-abuse in her actions, but then, when the only havens available were for alcoholic men, Stella became a nucleus for the weak and the unlucky and, in time, many people owed her for her kindness.

  But if Stella could shore up people’s hopes, she could also approve or disapprove of the nature of hope. For her and for Allegra, I was somewhere between an ally and a cause. In this position, naturally, I could always be an enemy or a failure if things went wrong. I had never been welcome to talk about Arnie, even though I needed to. I was to put Arnie by into the drawer of things for which history, at a later date, would be expected to atone.

&n
bsp; Stella’s belief in goodness was a belief that she was good and therefore worthy of the family motto, ‘Never fail another’ (if indeed that was the family motto). Allegra’s escutcheon was not borne with anything like the same assurance. Allegra was alive to our mother’s unintentional tyranny. Somehow, Dadda’s leaving had come to be my fault. Perhaps I had conspired with him on those traipses through the dump. Or I hadn’t kept my eye on him properly. Whatever I’d done, I had proved myself useless as a saviour. Allegra vacillated: there were times when it seemed Stella’s reasoning was right and I was a lousy saviour, and times when she was most definitely and categorically wrong and Dadda’s leaving was not my fault.

  I tried to imagine myself as my mother and Allegra would have had me: I ought to have been a comical, charismatic giant, a Mad Meg who, whenever danger threatened, would have made everybody laugh instead of being afraid. Somehow or other, I would have fetched in money and bestowed it, while Allegra and my mother would have spent it, giving me a reason to go out and fetch in more.

  Allegra lived in the dormer-windowed ceiling of our house, guarded at the roof ridge by a terracotta dragon with wings. Eli and I had all the ground floor to ourselves. We had hardly any furniture and the place was large, so Eli was able to invent himself a jungle.

  The house had a high, tiled verandah that gave it the feeling of a ship breasting the waves of roofs and trees that fell away to the city below. In sunsets the interior walls were rosy pink, and sometimes cloud shadows sarabanded through them. Our old cat, Silk, had a favourite resting place at the top of the front steps, where she sat with her eyes just shut, purring the last of the colours from the day. I set up my easel in the front room and every evening I tried to follow the colours into night, but they would stay on my eye even after Allegra had turned on the lights upstairs and Eli was hugging my legs, wanting to be fed and put to bed.

  In accordance with feminist principles, Eli was given dolls for his birthdays. While Chantal Kelly reshaped the back garden with her graders and bulldozers, Eli put his dollies in a wagon, made himself a gun out of a piece of wood, wore a crash helmet given him by Bridget Kelly and sang out, ‘Come on, men!’ as he staged charges and raids up and down the hall and in and out of bedrooms. Sometimes the place would be thick with trees, and sometimes it would be a sandy desert. One day I heard him mumble, ‘Biggles lit another cigarette,’ and I knew he was under outside influence.

  Four days a week in their last year before school, Eli and Chantal attended a red brick kindergarten with a fenced-in, tanbark yard. The weekly cost of this privilege would have kept a child in South East Asia for several months. My inheritance being largely spoken for by Mad Meg, the rent on our house, and my future plans for Eli, meant I had to take a job. I potted orchids in a public garden. This left me little time to examine the content of stories read to innocents in the kindergarten. If Allegra had heard Biggles alluded to in play, she would have been all for fronting Mr Goodfellow, who owned the kindergarten, and demanding that only ideologically sound stories be read. As it was, because Mr Goodfellow called Eli Mr Blue-eyes, Allegra said he was teaching him how to use his good looks as a weapon. But Eli was just as likely to go round with a bag over his head as he was to go round wearing a crown, a fact Allegra happily overlooked.

  According to feminist principles, the absence of Eli’s father from our lives ought to have been looked upon as a blessing rather than a curse, but, from the time Eli knew there were fathers in the world, he had set out on a father hunt. Ask Eli what he wanted to be when he grew up and he’d say, ‘Normal.’

  Along the road to normality, he passed a bride in full regalia coming out of a Greek Orthodox church. He asked Allegra, whose hand he was holding, what the lady was doing. ‘She’s getting married,’ Allegra said. ‘That man she’s with now is going to be nice to her for the rest of her life.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Eli.

  ‘Because he has to. Those are the rules. He’s made a promise.’

  Eli watched the bride over his shoulder, and plucked his rosy cheek in thought.

  ‘Do kids get married?’ he asked as the couple drove off.

  ‘No. You have to wait till you’re grown up,’ said Allegra. ‘Why doesn’t the chap wear something fancy?’

  When Eli and Chantal Kelly were married, Eli wore the dress. He wore a latterday hat of Aunt Nina’s and carried a bouquet of nasturtiums. All the other kids on the block came to look him over and offer their suggestions. Someone brought net for a train. Chantal wore a pair of shorts, a plastic moustache and the crash helmet. Maggie took photos and Allegra performed the ceremony.

  First Eli stood by the garbage tin with his belly poking out, trying to tie a sash around his middle. Then Chantal had to do it for him. Then he put his nasturtiums on top of the garbage tin and bent over to fix his hem. Then he posed with his legs wide apart, his thumbs in his ears and a wild look on his face. Chantal stood back, poked her belly forward and blew her cheeks out. Eli rolled on the lawn, Chantal wafted the bouquet overhead. Eli had his pyjamas on under the dress and was wearing gumboots. The marriage celebrant failed to have the wedding taken seriously, due to an overflow of spirits. Later, attempts were made to impress the gravity of the situation on the ‘bride’. Allegra thought it was important for Eli to understand the nature of marriage.

  ‘Where’s Mum’s husband, then?’ Eli was heard to ask.

  ‘Well, that’s just it. If he loved you, he’d be here.’

  ‘My dad?’

  I snaffled him up and took him to his room. ‘It doesn’t matter your Dadda isn’t here,’ I said. ‘You can have mine.’

  But Arnie’s absence did matter. Time passed, but there was no forgetting him. There’d been a few attempts at boyfriends since, but nothing worked. I tried to dismantle him, but I harboured an objection deep inside myself. Certainly he had been a bad choice as a lover, but I wouldn’t have exchanged Eli for any other child, even given a wide choice of father, and that meant to me there had been something right about Arnie.

  In spite of herself, Allegra seemed to understand my quandary. We never talked about Arnie. If he loved you, he’d be here, was the closest I had heard to an opinion. I had constructed a story for Arnie that was the opposite: he stayed away because he loved us. His presence would have interfered in our lives. He was nothing like me. He had loved me across a boundary that isn’t normally crossed. I was some sort of tragic exotic and he, an Edward Rochester, chained in marriage.

  I imagined Arnie must have yearned for me as I yearned for him, but I’m sure now that he didn’t. I’m sure if he thought of me, he was in a hurry to put me out of his mind. In his imagination, my forbidden child was probably no more than a poignant embellishment of himself.

  At my job, I learnt about orchids. The nursery where I worked was in a public park. It had a herbarium and a chief botanist, a Dr Beryl Blake, who, although not a mother in fact, had an Earth Mother dimension in her character, and was a mother by proxy. No man had clattered by to claim her on his steed of fire and it wasn’t hard to guess why, for Beryl was as wide as she was tall, her largest dimension being that around which a tape measure might have been at pains to meet itself, that part known in other women as the waist. Her bulk here made it impossible for her to see where she was putting her feet, so that rougher pieces of ground and stairs were known to seriously thwart her progress. This progress, to avoid the embarrassment of frequent prostration, was conducted by and large over a single course which covered the distance from her office to the compactus in the herbarium where a bottle of whisky was kept, no doubt to bamboozle the cockroaches. Checking the bamboozling involved frequent visits from this gruff but kindly woman under whose auspices unmarried mothers, illegal immigrants and homosexuals were paid to play poker in the potting shed and pot the occasional plant.

  At my interview she sat with difficulty on her chair, its plankiness not being particularly friendly to her sphericity. ‘We’re putting you on orchids,’ she said. ‘And I understand you
draw. Ultimately I might be able to persuade the powers that be to let you team up with Loyola in the herbarium, though whether she’ll let you do orchids or not’s another question. She likes to do the orchids herself.’

  Loyola? Someone less devout than the little grey-haired draughtsperson who was queen of the herbarium might have dropped the o’s and called herself Lyla when she discovered the world of Colleens, Pats, Carmels and Marys into which she had been born, but Loyola O’Flynn took her name very seriously. A crucifix was the dominant item of her clothing.

  In the younger days of Beryl Blake, those before her eyelids had everted, showing a sorrowful pink interior to the world, there had been, I was told, ‘a man’, so I didn’t have to tell her what they were like, or what I must have gone through. She knew. She knew. Further, it was a sorry world that judged a salary by the gender of its recipient, but there was nothing much she could do about that.

  The delivery of this opinion was accompanied by some rather dangerous lurching, corrected by feet that had seemed to be having difficulty with the angle of the floor. To the eye of a civilian the floor seemed horizontal enough, but then, the civilian’s eye was a little less bloodshot than that of the chief botanist.

  I was directed to take the path from the herbarium to the potting shed and to introduce myself to the conservatory ganger, whose name was Abdul bin Hadji.

  I noticed, on my way to the potting shed, a dark fold in the garden into which a green painted hut seemed to have been slid, like something stolen, into a giant’s pocket.

  For all the public knew, this was the place where rakes and barrows were kept. The more curious among the public, however, might have wondered at the staccato sounds coming out of it, an ack ack ack of human voices, as opposed to a yack yack yack. They might also have wondered at the smell of garlic, ginger and soy sauce. If those curious members of the public had worked for the Department of Immigration, they might have done more than pause and observe. Because the contents of the Green Hut, or Crin Hu, as it was known to the cognoscenti, was a somewhat fluid population of Malaysian Chinese and Singaporean Malays who, for fear of the race riots going on, did not wish to return to their home countries.