Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  For the most part, they were students or trainees in botany, agriculture or forestry. They tended to spend the daylight hours indoors, due to visa expiry and the aftermath of the White Australia Policy, which made them conspicuous on the street. I understood that, apart from unintentionally providing a roof over their heads, the government of Victoria was not underwriting their stay. A certain bishop was known to drop into the ‘Herb’ and consult with the cockroach-bamboozling oracle of the compactus in the company of the chief botanist. Money would change hands.

  Orchids, I discovered, like a tight pot. They like a soupçon of compost and aren’t above lounging around up to their petals in filth. Some even smell like dung heaps and attract stercoraceous insects to them to perform cross-pollination. Perhaps the original orchid was a coprophile, though some smell sweet and bring the honey-eaters. Others are blue, and therefore, highly attractive to bees. And others yet mimic a female wasp in shape so males will try to mate with them and thereby perform the proxy ceremony on which all, or certainly, most, orchids rely to set their seeds.

  Orchids are hermaphrodites, but outward-looking. If they were narcissists, they’d never have been able to form such an array. Some of them even bloom below the ground. It may seem unlikely, but orchid mutations could be hastened by delaying tactics. Just as a knitter turns a heel on a sock by stalling on a round needle and interrupting the even flow of stitches, so may orchid petals fuse to make hoods. And just as a cabler translocates within a row, orchids may translocate to turn their heads. Mother Nature is a knitter, prone to err.

  My mother drives her needle into a row of purl, lolls her old white head to one side, sighing, and says of the garment, ‘It’s the ravelled sleeve of care.’

  Stitches are added in or dropped or knitted back-to-front. Every now and then I have to untangle the dozen balls of different wool. For a long time, her knitting was precise and very correct, but she only knitted one thing, over and over. It was a Fair Isle pattern jumper front. She lost it in stages. First, she would switch to plain in the middle of a purl row, and that would put her Fair Isle out of sync. Half the neck would appear too soon and she’d be bamboozled by the asymmetry of the other half. She’d ask me had I tampered with it, or had I seen anyone tamper with it? Nowadays she’ll be going along splendidly, knitting at random, and then she’ll suddenly disown what she’s done. ‘I didn’t do that,’ she’ll say. ‘That looks like nothing on earth.’ Other times, she’ll be sad and say, ‘I think they’ve taken away my pattern.’

  TWELVE

  Encroachment

  I AM PAINTING, but doing it all wrong. I don’t obey the rules of the collective. I am riven. At night in my dreams I practise Arnie. I make good his deficiencies and perfect him, making myself whole again. By day, my thinking self does him to death, dissolves him in wells of light. Removes and replaces him with something bigger than he is.

  Whatever I say to the collective is greeted by scorn. We sit on the polished floor of Mad Meg in a circle, where the cigarette smoke curls itself into itself, like lovers tumbling. We bicker over feminist semantics: an art historian, three critics, a photographer, a political scientist and me. Six Marxists and a woman who paints, or a painter who’s a woman. I am dragged from my shelf, laid out, dissected and improved upon. When I paint a cup on a table, I’m painting a female symbol – womb and nourishment – when I thought I was painting loneliness.

  I am told I shouldn’t want heroes, but I want them. I want life to be bigger than it is. Obey the rules, the Marxist sisters seem to say, and life will be bigger for everyone. But artists, like lovers, are mad people, and painting, like love, is inextricable from madness. Remove painting from a painter and you have someone who renders the world in imagined strokes of paint; remove loving from a lover and you have someone who endows every threshold with the expectation of a beloved step, a longed-for shadow cast into the room.

  But when love fails, there is yet more life. I have to agree with the collective: it is my condition. I am weighed down. I paint an open wardrobe, stuffed with female clutter on one side, on the other, a wire coat hanger and a man’s dropped shoe. The collective loves it. I call it Equal Hanging Space.

  I try not to practise Arnie by molesting my bedclothes every night. A man is not an assemblage of pillows. I try to think of something or someone else, but my love, alas, is steadfast. It is with me every day, tormenting me. I have learnt him, he is on me like my skin and in me, an unremitting pain. When I look for new love, I find my old love: a machine swings round to measure whoever I am looking at. Blue eyes, it says, and straight fair hair; tall, it says, with plump, sensual lips. Unreasonably good-looking, it says, and I try to get it to say something else. I move its calipers to fit some short, dark, brown-eyed man with an interest in art, but I find his speech pattern is identical to Arnie’s. Every time I choose, the machine finds a parameter; it surfaces after a little acquaintance, it says, ‘See, you fooled yourself. You’re always fooling yourself, Isobel. You think you’ve hooked onto something special that sets a man apart and all you’ve done is gather in another aspect of Prince Charming. He is going to crop up like a paper chase all your life.’

  Then I have to ask myself was Arnie all that bad? If he’d had a different component in the faith compartment, would he have betrayed his wife and stayed with me? And it seems to me that men are just machines. You can fool a machine it’s in love and it will behave as if it’s in love until some displacing factor gets fed into its network, and then it will behave as if it isn’t in love anymore. Or not with you, anyway.

  While I am having these thoughts, the calipers start measuring a middle-sized, hazel-eyed actor with a beard. There is nothing, on scrutiny, that seems familiar there …

  I marched with Roscoe in the May Moratorium of 1970. He was a moral veteran from 1968 and proudly pinned his Moratorium badges all over Eli’s dark blue top coat. At four and a half, Eli came on the march, even though certain eminent religious gentlemen had prophesied the imperilment of life and limb. He had to come, I couldn’t find a sitter. Everyone I knew was marching and I was too proud to ask my mother.

  Stella took no interest in the war, but when someone wrote PEACE in big red letters on the pillars of the cenotaph, and was accused of desecration by the premier, she declared herself all the way with the desecrater.

  I decided if Chantal Kelly could march, then so could Eli.

  The worst happened, and we lost him in the crush and, worse still, we found him. He was discovered, badgeless, with thirty-five dollars in his pocket, handing over, in exchange for a further $3.60, a sixty-eight badge to terrible Reg Sorby. Reg, ignoring the family kafuffle, made his way, pinning on the badge, to the front of the now-seated crowd and grabbed a microphone. ‘And they thought we were a mob of ratbags,’ he proclaimed.

  People carpeted the Treasury Gardens, where Dadda and Mum once, in another month of May, plighted their troth among the elms and claret ash. More people carpeted the roads as far as the eye could see. There was laughter and cheering for Reg, because the Federal Police had just been to his rural retreat to arrest a cocky he’d entered in the draft.

  ‘I can’t stand that man,’ said Roscoe, and stepped out of our lives in his buffalo-hide sandals, over the seated throng. Then we spotted Dadda. He was wearing pale blue denims and a waistcoat. His hair was shoulder length and he had pink laces in his blue suede shoes. As if drawn to a magnet, Eli plastered himself to Dadda’s front. They loved each other with all the zeal that was lacking in my life.

  Dilly dilly, dilly dilly, come and be killed, Dilly dilly, dilly dilly, come and be killed.

  I am singing to Eli. Outside the moon is riding in her chariot of clouds: moon, the reflected glory of the sun.

  Down the hall, in the low, white kitchen, Allegra is eating eggs. She clouts the spoon on her teeth at every bite, evoking the wraith of Nina, tut-tutting our appalling manners. I hear her peanut-buttering her toast, then her chair teeters back on the ill-laid lino and I hear the foot
of her boot clunk onto the table among the plates. Usually it takes more than one foot swing to perform this action.

  She is taking on her feminist self for the sake of the collective tonight, but her boots are turquoise mock-croc plastic. They lace up the side. We saw them on a revolving mirrored disc in a window in town and knew that one of us had to have them. They’re hand-made French, a demonstration pair for the opening of a boutique. She bought one boot and I the other.

  She is telling the assembled Marxists, with her mouth full, that she thinks my work is ideologically sound after all. It is an incidental statement made during a collective meeting held at our house as a dispensation to my maternity. My presence is being awaited and I am pretending that Eli is not yet asleep.

  Tonight, the Mad Meg collective debates the desirability of sending three hundred dollars to the communists in Cambodia. I hoped I would be excused on account of maternal duties and no sitter, but the collective decided to do me the great honour of coming to me so I would not have to go to them.

  I keep wanting to pinch Eli to wake him up, but his little red mouth is fluttering in sleep. ‘Dilly dilly, dilly dilly,’ I sing, but Allegra’s footstep sounds in the hall and she says, sotto voce but impatiently, ‘Come on Bel, we haven’t got all noight.’

  She has developed a very proletarian way of saying ‘nate’. Not ‘nace’ at all. It is just as well Aunt Nina is not in the ‘hice’ to hear her. Furthermore, her deportment could do with some attention: she drags her heels. ‘Well, you would, too, if your heels were as high as these,’ she says, and I remind her that one of the heels is mine. She says, ‘Oh yeah. Sorry. I’ll get ’em mended.’

  The collective crunches up its egg shells and shoves them into the brickette hot water heater. It chucks the knives and the teaspoons into the sink and paws the tabletop to remove the crumbs. Teeth are noisily sucked. The fridge, on its last legs, shudders to a standstill. Out come the fags.

  As I take my seat Allegra stands behind me, her hands lightly on the back of my chair. ‘I think we’ll save the Cambodian vote till the end,’ she says, drumming her fingers. And then, guiltily, ‘God, Bel, don’t look so abject. You’re sitting there all scrunched up in your caftan like a lump of hair at a Hare Krishna convention.’

  ‘It’s the Cambodian vote,’ I say. ‘I don’t think we ought to send the money.’

  ‘We’re saving that till last,’ she says in my ear.

  ‘Well, you might be, but I’ve been reading about it in the paper.’

  ‘Oh?’ Imperturbably. ‘Well, it probably ain’t true, Bel, what you read.’

  ‘I think it is.’ And in this kitchen in suburban Melbourne, a tacked-on room with a low, white, smoke-stained ceiling, I get emotional about Cambodian rivers choked with butchered bodies. I think I can see them, I think I can smell them.

  ‘Listen,’ she says, sitting down beside me and looking up into my face, ‘how do you know the communists did it?’

  ‘Because the report I read said so. The bodies were South Vietnamese. They were rubber workers. They worked for the French. I suppose you think that’s a double sin – wrong nationality, wrong sponsors? The people who saw them were on a ferry. They counted four hundred bodies. Some of them were bound together with wire. The stink was so bad the people who saw them couldn’t stop vomiting.’

  ‘American propaganda,’ says one of the art critics. There is a collective stabbing out of butts.

  ‘So are we to assume,’ I cry with venom, ‘that everything coming out of Vietnam and Cambodia that doesn’t come from the communists or doesn’t support Marx is treacherous lies?’

  Allegra slowly swivels round to me with her face lowered. ‘You didn’t say this was how you felt when the issue was first raised.’

  I stare at the passive, mottled hands in my lap. They look like newborn rats. ‘I didn’t fully understand. It’s one thing to be sending money to the National Liberation Front because we don’t believe in American puppet governments, but quite another to be sending money to butchers.’

  ‘Everyone makes mistakes in war,’ she says.

  ‘Oh, feeble, Allegra, feeble!’ I feel the words hurdling my lips to make their mark. She swivels slowly away, her head still down.

  ‘Shit!’ goes the collective, and someone mutters, ‘We’re not even up to the first item on the agenda yet and you two are at each other’s throats.’

  Allegra and I crouch back into our chairs.

  ‘We’ll cross that one off, then,’ says Allegra, quietly. ‘We’ll deal with it another time.’ One of the critics then flies in from the left. ‘No! I think it’s important. I mean, where does Isobel stand? We’re talking about a national struggle here.’

  ‘No, we’re not,’ croaks Maggie Kelly. ‘We’re talking about the first item on the agenda.’ After all those years of standing on school benches in disgrace, Maggie Kelly has a better idea of what constitutes injustice than any of us. The Nouveau Proletarian wing of the collective can talk till it’s black in the face about being a gallery with a social conscience and adopting positions on Vietnam and Cambodia, but for Maggie local justice takes precedence.

  There is a short war between Maggie and the Nouveau Proletarians but Maggie, who shoots from the hip and has a voice like a lawnmower, wins, and the Troika lapses into sulks. Maggie puts on her glasses, which replace her eyes with a pair of Op Art kitchen interiors, and takes from her leather-fringed Pantechnicon bag a wad of complaints.

  For years our local tip has neighboured a swamp, a swamp that is slowly claiming a one-time billabong of the Yarra. In its puddles and marshy recesses mosquitoes buzz, and not only mosquitoes but also gnats and dragonflies, among the marginal, emergent weeds.

  A cat with six kittens lives in a box at its drying edge. Eels writhe through its mud and lizards sun themselves in its mottles of light. Mynah birds drive ducks away by stuffing rubbish into their nests.

  Among the swamp’s visitors, the crane and the kookaburra, mating pairs of green parrots, wrens and wagtails, silvereyes and wattle birds, magpies, ravens and ibis.

  Bacteria ooze in the ooze. Phyto- and zoo-plankton plank on the bacteria. Browsers browse on the plankton. Everything with a mouth goes for everything without a mouth, and those without mouths multiply and give off the odour characteristic of swamps, an odour which has drawn to it two waves of vigilant men.

  The first wave consisted of men in Bermuda socks with clipboards and theodolites. Their arrival aroused in Bridget Kelly, Caretaker Grade 2 (female), preparations for war. The men were surveyors, their object, landfill, the demolition of Bridget’s house, the end of her livelihood and the beginning of a large, expensive freeway.

  The Mad Meg collective is to design the protest banners. FREEWAY NO WAY they’ll say, and SAVE OUR HOMES. SAVE OUR TIP, two smaller banners will declare, to be picked out in psychedelic rubbish colours by Eli and Chantal.

  There are two projected routes for the freeway. Both annihilate Bridget Kelly and one would take Mad Meg and the Pantechnicon with her. There are barricades to be womaned and parliament to be marched upon.

  Child-minding contingencies and surety in the event of jail are to be left to the neurotic quarter of the Mad Meg collective. The minute-taker notes down my name and Maggie Kelly’s.

  Maggie Kelly tells of graders and bulldozers that are creeping from the east with caution and many tea breaks, and of parliamentarians scheming.

  These creep and scheme while Bridget Kelly feeds bread to the displaced ducks and throws stones at the mynahs. If the ducks are too slow to take the bread, it’s taken by a flock of seagulls to whom the solidified sea of the dump is Mecca.

  These seagulls have caused the arrival of the second wave of men. They do not come from the Department of Main Roads as did the surveyors. They come under the auspices of the Federal Department of Aviation. They are scientists from Canberra. Among them the large-bottomed, pinheaded variety, who stands head and shoulders above his team and keeps the sun from his beak with a towelling ha
t. Bridget Kelly clobbers him amidships with dirt clods when he isn’t looking. Another, who is tall from the small of the back to the top of the head, but short from the small of the back to the bottoms of his feet, can’t find a hat large enough to accommodate both his head and his hair, and so goes without. Bridget Kelly likes him because he thinks what he’s doing is a heap of governmental bullshit. She has sold him a filing cabinet and a shade to protect his nose from sunburn. Also in this wave of men is a woman, a Direct Descendant of the Man who Engineered the Sewer Outlet at Bondi Beach, Sydney. The photo of her forebear, proudly straddling the outlet on its inaugural flush, has made its way into the Melbourne papers in her stead. Bridget Kelly keeps her in tadpole nets.

  Water has been sampled. Mud. The gut contents of eels. The kittens have been stroked and put back in their box. The general conclusion of the large-bottomed pinhead is that a cyclone fence should be erected around the swamp and notices prominently displayed to warn the public, under threat of hefty fines, not to feed the gulls. A further problem lies in the plethora of gnats and dragonflies, mosquitoes and other insects upon which the gulls are known to dine. It can only be solved by insecticides of known efficacy, deposited in efficacious amounts. This opinion has been ventured in the wake of the downing (without casualty) of an American DC7 by a flock of seagulls last December at Mascot Airport, Sydney.