The column sank under the brigade hoses, but then it rose again with another whoompf, this time grey.
The television crews hardly knew what to report. It looked as though one of the portals to hell had been opened; when the flames had conquered the smoke, the muck mounds behind the house grew tipsy in the light. Then they, too, caught fire, the flames tiptoeing rapidly over them, hither and thither, little devils dancing.
We stood away from the heat, our monster shadow giving way to leaping witches. People began to say, ‘Methane, methane,’ to account for the spot fires.
Soon the smoke had dispersed and the entire neighbourhood was out of doors, gaping. ‘That’s not your land!’ screamed Bridget at the policeman who was busy arresting her. ‘It belongs to the Abos. And the stuff in the house belongs to me! All my stuff! It’s me livin’, understand?’
But hardly anyone understood Bridget. The police impounded the rifle and locked her up for twenty-four hours while we found the money to bail her out. She was a bit of a hero to the local blacks, who’d seen her screaming on television, but being a people who keep to themselves, they didn’t contribute to her release and soon let her heroism pass. They didn’t want a white woman taking action on their behalf.
We rang Wednesday Monday and he took his second trip to Melbourne by air, this time without a pocket full of fake boils. The magistrate was instructed to remember that, although Bridget had been armed, she hadn’t actually fired the rifle, nor was she intending to fire it.
Bridget’s crime, if indeed it was a crime, was to resist having her home of more than twenty years flattened to make way for a freeway.
Were the cars of outer suburbia more important than the people of inner suburbia? Was it not true that Bridget and many people like her in inner suburbia were being dispossessed, their wishes overruled by those whom money made powerful? One need only document the Aboriginal history of the area to see that it was not possession, but dispossession, that was nine-tenths of the law.
This time the magistrate was sympathetic. One had the feeling the case was being wrapped up as quickly as possible, probably to keep the land rights issue and the freeway controversy out of the papers. Since Bridget had no money to pay a fine, he gave her three months with a parole period, contingent on a bond, of two weeks. We took picnics in to her and decent books to read. She found jail restful and was a bit sorry to leave when her two weeks were up.
Kellys were billeted out at various places until they were found a two-bedroom Housing Commission flat into which they moved, all six and two dogs without a blanket or a stick of furniture to their name. Inside a month, however, it was all one could do to open the front door and squeeze down the passage, to find Bridget pottering about among her cartons of this and her cartons of that, looking for a lens here, a doorknob there. ‘Want a jumper? Got a jumper’d fit you. People throw out anythin’, anythin’ at all.’
Maggie and Kelly decided they’d be better off living above the Pantechnicon, although they had no permit to use the shop as living quarters. As for the land rights, they would be investigated by the appropriate department in Canberra. Which meant, to put it in lay terms, they disappeared into a rigmarole of words as sugar dissolves in a cup of tea.
The burning of the dump was a stroke of luck for the freeway lobby and made the favoured route a certainty. If nothing else, we at Mad Meg and the Pantechnicon could breathe easy.
Since there are more of us than will fit on the Turners’ settees, we are sitting on the floor on Persian prayer cushions. Among us for the first time since Aldo’s Italian lessons, Checkie. We are playing cards.
Checkie has gallery-going down to a fine art. The feminists and the art school mafia came to this one. After Checkie clopped through Mad Meg and staged an irreproducible laugh, like the repeated stabbings of a stiletto through someone else’s open parachute, over Little Red Robinhood on our roof, she clopped up to Figments and latched on to Miles. Obviously her father has warned her to steer clear of the seventies avant garde because its object isn’t money. Nevertheless, she was discovered asking Miles intelligent questions loudly. Particularly within earshot of David Silver. It’s Love, and the chips are down.
Every so often, cigarette in a holder and hand on hip, Checkie swivels round to address David as if some vital question has just occurred to her. She’s tall, she holds her head high, a daring posture, because if anyone should fail to answer her, she would be stuck conspicuously with her chin up and her eyelids at half mast. But her questions are almost always answered. We have to say, though it causes pain, Checkie is considered highly intelligent, even by Miles and Bart. In Motte circles, they would have considered her ‘a calculator’.
I know David from Sydney. He used to live in Bart’s flat above the gallery. I didn’t see very much of him. Apparently he slept all day and spent his nights working and smoking non-stop.
I didn’t warm to him right away, because the only time he spoke to me he said he liked that woman my father was with. Perhaps he was teasing, nevertheless, it was a reminder that I’m not the only person entitled to have an opinion about The Brolga. He redeemed himself a bit later when he laughed at Bart’s observation that sleeping with her must be like going to bed with a cheese grater.
I knew that he painted, but I didn’t know what. He wasn’t in ‘Turner at Figments’, but when he rang up the day Miles and Bart were arrested and I answered the phone, he sounded quite affable and pleasant, as if we were old friends.
His Uncle Bart has been taking care of him since he was sixteen. Apparently he did very well at school, but Bart wasn’t able to persuade him to go to university. Instead, he did odd jobs around the gallery. Bart said he was a ‘dizzarsster’. ‘Honestly, only David could drive a single nail into a wall and bring the wall down. It’s really amazing that someone so lacking in manual dexterity should want to become a painter.’
Painter, nevertheless, he has become, and now it’s Miles’s turn, apparently, to look after him, even though one supposes he could look after himself at twenty-eight or twenty-nine or whatever age he is.
Miles is dealing the cards for pontoon. The stakes are matches. Allegra lies on her belly opposite David, looking ravishing in a mini-dress made out of pale pink and pale green evening gloves. Checkie is seated like the Lorelei beside him. One has to say that Checkie is also looking ravishing, but whereas Allegra is Essence of Ravish, Checkie is Ravishable Chic, her costume a light brown minifrock, the back of which is much longer than the front and makes a train which the wearer can pass between her legs and toss over her shoulder. In addition to being a simple, very good idea, lest the back of the costume look too plain it bears the stencil of a blue Matisse dancer. The rest of us – Maggie, me and two of the Troika – are out of contention.
I look for the lack of manual dexterity that Bart said was David’s hallmark, but it isn’t in evidence. His hands are very well formed, the graceful brown fingers pink at the tips. Like Miles, he is a chain smoker, but it doesn’t show on his hands.
He has been drinking and is just a bit drunker than the rest of us. As the cards are dealt out and he loses yet again, Allegra wins yet again and Checkie resorts to breaking her matches in two so she can stay in the game, he tells us, between bouts of laughter that shake his diminutive body from head to foot, that he’s had crabs.
‘I didn’t get them from having a good time, either,’ he laughs. ‘I think they must have been on this terrible old mattress I used to sleep on once.’
Checkie descends from her Olympian heights to say, ‘I hope you’re rid of them now.’
David picks his ear wax with one of her broken matchsticks, ‘Oh, it was years ago in Sydney. I didn’t have any money. I used to live in an abandoned house that had no electricity or water. I had an old coat and a mattress and a pile of newspapers to keep me warm. I used to eat sugar cubes and people’s leftover biscuits in cafes. I got so malnourished I fainted on the way to the doctor’s and one of my teeth fell out. I think I must’ve had
scurvy. My skin was so bad you wouldn’t believe. You know how your skin goes when you don’t eat properly.’
‘No, actually,’ answers Checkie. ‘You mean to say you practically starved to death in the middle of Sydney at the age of … of … how old were you?’
‘Fifteen. Sixteen. I ran away from home.’
‘Good heavens! But you’re Miles’s nephew, I thought. Which means you’re Bart’s nephew. Why didn’t you go and get a feed from Bart?’
‘I didn’t know Bart then.’
‘But what about … what about … nous?’
Miles cackles, removing a strand of tobacco from the tip of his tongue. ‘Nous isn’t a universal quality.’
‘I wanted to be a painter,’ says David. ‘When I told them in the unemployment office, they started calling me van Gogh and got me a job selling magazines from a trolley in a hospital. It was a women’s hospital. They used to call me the Book Man. Books! I sold Post and People and at night-time I went home to a condemned house, my crabby mattress and my pile of paper.’
‘Ew,’ says Checkie. ‘Ghastly. How did you end up with Bart, then, if you didn’t know him?’
‘I knew of him. My mother used to talk about him all the time.’
‘The pink sheep of the family,’ quips Miles, sending David into another paroxysm of laughter. He borrows half Checkie’s halved match collection and bets the lot to Allegra’s bank.
She wins. What Allegra hasn’t won tonight isn’t worth talking about.
David Silver. Though his legs are the same length, he walks stiffly, like a man who wears a built-up boot. Perhaps his feet don’t match. Yet when he takes his socks off, he has beautiful feet, just as he has beautiful hands. His socks don’t even smell.
His hair is thick and strong and dark, but it grows as if it has been yanked back by someone in a terrible temper. His widow’s peak is so deep, his temples seem about to sprout a pair of devil horns. His face is triangular, the sensual mouth taking up most of the width of the chin. He has a beauty spot on his left cheek that gives him a decadent appearance.
One great eyebrow spans his face so his eyes are like soft furry animals sheltering under it. They are green eyes, prettily shaped and dark, the only really dark green eyes I’ve seen. He is a child-man with a childish speech impediment: he says ‘wiv’ instead of ‘with’. He is done up in soft brown skin that has no freckles. He devours cigarette smoke as if it were mother’s milk. Because he keeps crossing his eyes to look at his nose, Miles says he has a Pinocchio complex. He seems to have trouble breathing up his nose because when he crosses his eyes, he also tries to breathe in, but he can’t seem to get enough breath through. He seems like a thwarted thing to me, curiously beautiful, but kept back from a larger plan of himself.
The kitchen shadows are enlivened by the television. Anita is listening to the late, late news. There’s a deadlock in federal parliament, and things are tending drastically towards anarchy.
SEVENTEEN
History and Moving into It
WHITLAM’S SACKING WAS one of those occasions you remember. Work stopped in the potting shed and everyone converged on the compactus in the herbarium where Beryl Blake was shamelessly pouring tots for us, even one for Loyola O’Flynn. ‘It’s a travesty of justice,’ Beryl kept saying, a pink-mouthed groper in a hot aquarium. ‘A travesty of justice,’ her gills blood-mottled with her fourth or fifth tot. She relished the bite and hiss of this word, justice, the rhythm of which kept her from falling backwards off her stool. The radio was turned right up. The herbarium smelt of whisky and feet. Thongs plapped and squealed on the lino. Wattle birds jabbered in the red grevillea just outside.
Afterwards, the Mad Meg collective joined thirty thousand other people on the streets of Melbourne. We thought we were in the majority but we weren’t. Barely a month later, the vote went so far the other way, we were stunned into silence.
There were a couple of half-baked, day-long general strikes in which participation was optional. That was all. The shakers and movers were gathered in impartially by History.
Eggs are cracking all around Mad Meg. The housewives, who have followed her to Hell, flay the monsters around her with sticks and swats, but the monsters are our imperfections and failures made flesh and they are perpetual; they swarm up walls and out of water neverendingly. They occupy the sky and burn our horizons. The eggs crack: the newborn could be with us or against us, but ideal people are never born. We come without memory, and the consequences of our coming are immediate, ongoing and always unexpected.
Dadda died in 1976. It still seems strange to me to say that Dadda died. I still think there must be some mistake. How could he die? How could he hurt us to begin with and then die?
Eli and I were weeding the garden when the phone went. It was a Sunday. Allegra was still in bed with David Silver: David was meant to be living with Miles but, little by little, it seemed he was moving in with us. I walked from the sun-bright garden into the blue-blackness of the house. Eli and I both loved sun-blindness and would feel our way along the cool hall of the house as if we were underground and searching for treasure. I picked up the receiver. There was silence for a moment and then The Brolga Laurington said, ‘Oh, hullo, Isobel. Thank God it’s you. I wouldn’t have been able to say this to your sister. Henry’s dead.’ Allegra said later it would have been more civil of her to have kicked me in the heart.
She said there was no point going to the hospital where Dadda had been taken with a heart attack, but Eli and I went immediately, leaving Allegra and David to tell our mother.
‘I’m not good at grief,’ said The Brolga when I entered the room where Dadda was lying dead. I was horrified to see Checkie Laurington remove Uncle Nicola’s diamond ring from his finger and give it to her mother. ‘Leave my father alone,’ I hissed. ‘Leave my father alone.’
‘Oh dear,’ said The Brolga with dry-eyed chagrin. ‘I told you not to come, Isobel. Really, what is there for you to do here?’
I hissed at her, ‘Get out.’ I hissed at Checkie Laurington, ‘Get out.’ Viva interposed a hand over her daughter’s shoulder and murmured in her ear. At the door of the room she said to me, ‘I’ll give you five minutes, Isobel, and then I don’t want you here.’
Just then Allegra arrived, running. We locked ourselves in. Not only did we lock the door in which, because it was a special room, there was a key, but we barricaded ourselves and Eli in there with the metal chest that had been by Dadda’s bed.
There was no doubt that Dadda was dead: though we pulled the tubes out of him and tried to revive him by sitting him up, he was dead. His skin was blotched, his hands were yellow, his forehead was like polished stone. When we opened his eyes, his eyeballs were turned upwards. We tried to move the blue bit down so it would see us, but it wouldn’t come. Eli climbed up on him and tried to make his mouth talk, but his mouth would only hang open a bit. We stared at his flesh, all its pores, the down on his cheeks, the uselessness of it with no life in the body. How shabby it was! The blotched chest with man’s hair on it, the growl gone out of his thumbs and palms, the incapacity of his legs now to weigh shapes into his shoes. Eli stared at me and I at him and Allegra. We howled and howled. The Brolga outside the door said, ‘Oh dear, really.’
Then she got angry and started to call us pagans. After all, she was his wife. We didn’t really hear her. We didn’t hear her till weeks afterwards. Our siege lasted a couple of hours; sometimes we sat under the bed, sometimes on it, sometimes on top of Dadda, sometimes at his sides. Then, because they couldn’t get the door open as they couldn’t locate another key, a locksmith arrived. It was the first case of its type. We were banned from the funeral. She spread his ashes, but wouldn’t tell us where.
PART THREE
GOOD INTENTIONS
EIGHTEEN
Christmas and an Explanation
THE PAGES OF history are heavy and hard to turn. Beyond entertainment and fashion, history resists what is new. We pretend that politics will correct our f
aults and eliminate evil from our midst, but to think we can eradicate undesirable aspects of ourselves is nonsense. Yesterday’s evil is today’s expedience and today’s good is tomorrow’s calumny.
Reality goes on and on whether we are here or not. People in our midst try to tell us there is no reality, all is a figment of thought. Lucky, then, the starving child with fly-infested eyes, because its pain, its tears, its whimpering are illusory. But the children in the deserts who look like worn-out shoes off a rubbish tip are real. The laws of nature bind them as they bind ourselves, their pain is human pain. They have always been there, their crouching mothers so emaciated their veins and arteries throw shadows, their fathers, maybe, legless in some makeshift hospital in a war zone.
According to Reg Sorby, the human race, rich or poor, is despicable: it runs on avarice and greed and it’s destroying the planet. Women, Reg maintains, would be much better at running things than men are. To ‘prove’ this is so, he has constructed a phantasmagoria of past societies where women were in power and godhead was female. When his phantasms turn up in paint, however, women don’t so much have heads as winking vaginas and vigilant breasts. His paintings of nudes seem relics of the sixties, when intelligence was running a poor second to sexuality.
But in the nineties, the West has bourgeoisified, the working class has aspirations not recognisably different from the middle. All around us are palaces of conspicuous consumption, household glut, women’s wardrobes bursting, scent bottles lying forgotten everywhere, fake faces in bottles, fake shoulders hanging around in coats: this cult of appearances, this female cult which now is dominant and extends itself to men. This is where we’ve come. Lenin and Marx lie smashed in public squares. The centrepiece of this life is an eighty-dollar haircut with a Rolex watch, a pant, a Tee and coloured glasses in which we see/ don’t see ourselves in our own coloured glasses, for which, in turn, the have-nots clamour and hanker.
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