Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  ‘Interesting man, your grandfather,’ said Reg, peering at it. ‘Didn’t like his work, though,’ he pursed his lips and made as if to rub something out with his hand.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Eli said, unabashed. ‘He didn’t like yours much, either.’ Reg’s shoulders bounced with laughter. He patted Eli on the back. ‘You’ll do me, boy. You’ll do me.’

  Allegra kept craning pregnantly round doors. When I came home from my evening out, she and David were waiting up for me in the kitchen, a committee of two.

  ‘Home early?’ Allegra teased. ‘It isn’t even midnight.’

  ‘Oh, get off my back, what I do’s my business.’

  ‘Oh, oh, listen to the lady,’ said David adenoidally. ‘What do you want wiv that messy old sentimentalist, Isobel?’

  ‘I’m working with him.’

  ‘Working wiv him? I mean to say, do you call what he does work?’ He gave a derisory, face-wetting laugh.

  ‘He lives from it, which is more than the minimalists can claim.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Allegra said. ‘Barrie Bull lives from his work, so do some others. It isn’t impossible.’

  ‘So am I a traitor for doing botanical drawings for a book on orchids?’

  ‘We are what we do, Isobel,’ said David.

  ‘Well, I’m not a botanical drawing.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s not what you meant. You mean I’m debasing my skills for the sake of a mortgage. Well, you can think what you bloody like! I’m going to bed.’

  In my bed I found Eli, yawning, ‘How did it go then, Mum?’ he asked. It was clear he rated Reg about eight and a half out of ten.

  Reg’s presence in my life brought David into sharper focus. If Reg was prone to dispossessing me of the things I was about to say, then David was prone to talking disparagingly over them, putting what was otherwise a soft and charming voice to ill use.

  As for Allegra, I’d thought Reg was being unobservant when he said her expression had changed since the Moratorium; after all, pregnancy had brought out her marvellous complexion. From that night onwards, however, I began to see what he meant. Allegra had become a co-inquisitor; David was describing the arena in which he would allow her intellect to wander. It wasn’t so much that Reg was manipulating me as that David was manipulating Allegra. It was obvious she was under strain; they weren’t the quietest couple to live beneath, there were lots of quarrels, squabbles and tantrums, no explanations offered, though they would have known they were being overheard. When they decided to get married, I couldn’t see how they were going to be happy. Perhaps things would alter after the baby.

  The baby was pretty close as we sat lamenting the Siècle Trust in Figments. David and Allegra were in concord for once; perhaps because Allegra was tired and relying on him to do the daily chores, though, less cynically, it could have been that they were truly in love. You would have said so to see the tableau of David leaning on the back of her chair, biting his bottom lip in a shy smile, and Allegra rolling her head across his chest.

  Since there was virtually nothing we could do to combat The Brolga at this stage, we had turned our attention to the freeway. It was well on its way to completion and the Board of Works was maintaining that no one whose property did not abut the construction reserve was entitled to lodge a complaint. Furthermore, would-be complainants ought to have complained earlier. It had been pointed out to the Board of Works that people had been complaining for a decade, but the Board said it had nothing on file. We could only conclude that was because it didn’t keep a file.

  To pay for the privileges of two daily peak-hour traffic jams (buses, trucks and semi-trailers not excluded), and many weekendly traffic jams so that people who lived in Melbourne’s well-heeled east could drive to work in and around the city or go to the races in their ridiculous hats and white Rolls Royces stuffed with chicken and champagne lunches, the town councils of inner suburbia were supposed to levy a charge on their rate payers.

  The rate payers were not only reluctant, they were downright furious. If there were to be no compensation for traffic snarls, noise, air pollution and the corresponding diminution in the quality of life, then there could be no payment of costs by residents.

  We took Wednesday down to look at the construction, a couple of blocks away. There was a three-quarter cyclone-wire stockade into which the freeway nosed like a whale beached in a diminutive inlet. Buildings to either side of the central road plantation, up which the freeway was slowly nudging, were freshly daubed with slanders against the state premier and the Board of Works. Peripheral issues, such as the freeing of jailed union men and the liberation of their sisters, bristled with rage in the interstices, and under that which was topical and urgent lay the complaints of yesteryear, the peace signs: VICTORY TO THE NLF, NIXON OUT OF CAMBODIA, WE WANT GOUGH and NO NUKES.

  Wednesday crouched and leapt around the encroachment, seemingly in a tangle of competing desires. Laws and the breach thereof flew about him, an invisible flock over which, by arching himself forward and flinging his arms high, he cast his net. The fence around the road-widening was incomplete, he exclaimed. Victorian law said a construction zone couldn’t be declared until it was fully fenced.

  Though it was a Saturday, we rang and arranged to meet the mayor at the Town Hall. When we arrived there, having picked up all the extra people we could on the way, we found the mayor spying through a hole in the door on a taxidermy class in one of the ground-floor rooms. The Town Hall was remarkably grand for a neighbourhood that had, until recently, been poor; the corridors were wide, the door lintels massive and the doors positively baronial in their sweep. It had been built by the rate-paying but absentee landlords of last century, so they could hold balls in their electorate without actually having to resurface any roads other than those coming from the eastern suburbs where they chose to live. Those were the days when subtenants paid rent to tenants and Labor members of council weren’t above being bought off in little matters such as which tender would be successful for enlarging the Town Hall and furnishing its Mayoral Library.

  In the Mayoral Library the first impression one had was not of the mahogany-shelved room with a high, elaborate ceiling rose off which hung a thirty-globed candelabrum, a room whose windows, boasting more than generous sills, were draped in claret velvet and on whose walls were honour rolls, inscribed in gold leaf with the names of those who had been councillors in the year of the Town Hall’s construction. The first impression, on the contrary, was of files of ancient manila folders tied in brown tape rather than red, of teetering piles of well-thumbed, food-stained books of regulations, abandoned coffee cups, and a quantity of ash and dust, lying in such a way as to suggest the presence of desks beneath it. As our mayor consulted a vellum-backed volume of building regulations snatched from one of the lower piles, Allegra directed my eye to the frieze of wallpaper just visible above the picture rails of the one wall not covered in shelves: it was the same lyrebird pattern as had been on the walls of our bedroom at Clare.

  As we repaired streetwards down handsome granite stairs, it appeared that Wednesday was right; we could legally delay the freeway construction by preventing the fence from being completed.

  On the following evening the mayor donned his regalia and we rustled up a posse of squatters who would seal themselves into the building site behind a barricade of old car bodies. Though David, the Kellys and I squatted, Allegra couldn’t very well do so. Instead, she gave her psychedelic Kombi to be overturned onto the barricade. Reg Sorby supplied us with champagne and two beautiful picnic hampers, saying he couldn’t join us as he was off to Sydney to paint a portrait. ‘Well,’ he said as he was leaving, ‘I hope no one gets diarrhoea.’

  Diarrhoea did not turn out to be a problem but although it took the police some time to dismantle the barricade, it only took them as long as it had taken us to erect it, and we were soon being thrown or carried out, our picnic uneaten. A wall of police was po
sted round the compound to protect the road workers. We were pretty shat off with the workers. They weren’t with us. We tried to persuade them: this had been a working-class suburb, we said, but they didn’t care. It was ‘Yuppieland’ now, best thing for it was to slam a freeway through.

  Trendy though many of them may have been, the indigenes of inner suburbia did not give in lightly and came together as never before. The genuine poor, the nouveau poor, the green, Opposition MPs state and federal, boutique and gallery owners, botanists, detoxificants, secondary, primary and preschool children gathered in the evenings in the Mayoral Library of the Town Hall to receive instructions.

  Courtly Tom, in his shiny tux, was seen one evening with numerous wick-like extensions hanging from his pockets. Some time later, he was seen again, inebriated, with the news that the freeway was so solidly constructed it would take a team of jack hammerers considerable time to make a hole large and deep enough to bury a bomb so the freeway could be blown up.

  The threatened median strip at the debouchment, the only piece of green within walking distance for most of us, was turned one night into a forest. At three o’clock in the morning there was a clash between protesters and police, who had concealed their numbers and therefore couldn’t be reported for any violence they might commit. By then, however, most of the forest had been planted and it was going to be considerably more difficult to remove than the car-body barricade had been.

  Pine trees, palm trees, wattle trees and young red river gums throve in abundance around picnickers to whom wandering minstrels sang, no longer of war, but of displacement and despoliation. Two of the singers had very long, very straight flaxen hair and played recycled guitars; the voice of one was gravelly and deep, of the other, silvery and high. Listeners were clad in all colours of the rainbow, some in the red, black and yellow of the Aboriginal land rights flag, others in tie-dyed cheesecloth and hooded caftans from the Pantechnicon. Many wore jeans. The short- and long-sighted, by and large, corrected their focal lengths through John Lennon glasses.

  Banners of all types, the canvas, the calico, the paper and the plastic proclaimed WRONG WAY, GO BACK!, WHAT’S FREE ABOUT THE FREEWAY? and PUT IT THROUGH TOORAK! When the co-operative kindergarten had to be shifted because of high projected levels of air pollution, there were several banners saying KIDS, NOT CARS.

  One way of stopping a freeway is to replace the dirt that the workmen remove in the process of widening the road at the freeway exit. Professors, clergypersons, members of the Ananda Marga, bartenders, mechanics, fitters, turners, breadbakers, sock producers, Orange People, clerical assistants, tram drivers, connies, podiatrists, in short, the polyglot, shovelled it, shunted it, biked it, triked it, spaded, prammed and strollered it back into the holes it came out of. The anti-uranium lobby set up a stall selling yellow cake.

  As we were unable to bomb it out of existence, creating a permanent block at the exit seemed the way to go. A Tower of Babel built of tip-up trays, old cars and extraordinary scrap metal (some of it courtesy of Bridget Kelly) was set in concrete across the freeway mouth to instructions given in a plethora of tongues, some of them Heaven sent, we noticed, for God had bidden his minions, ‘Go to the Barricade.’

  The Church of the Freeway was founded amid many halleluiahs. The Brolga, naturally enough, did not number among these parishioners, but a fervent black-eyed lady in her fifties, strong in the ankles and teeth, was heard every now and then to call out loudly, ‘I’m saved! I’m saved! Halleluiah!’ From another, secular, direction came The Freeway Survival Kit, featuring the gas mask and the ear plug. The Community Rape Board erected a trestle table and handed out printed matter. Bridget Kelly had a stall called The Toxic Tadpole. She was available for psychic consultation.

  Poets circulated, one with a peacock feather hanging from his ear. A semi-permanent camp was established and a cracker night held. The camp kitchen doled out vegetarian curry in pita bread which children of the campers refused to eat, causing not a little tension.

  A motorised rally drove to the home of the Victorian state premier and opened a freeway across his drive.

  From the Stella Coretti-née-Motte quarter came a petition with numerous pages of signatures from people who lived as far afield as Mudgee, New South Wales, who had put their eyesight in the care of Rudge and Plant and had probably signed while their pupils were still dilated by drops.

  One evening, at the instruction hour, Stella arrived with a contingent of Chinese. This caused a temporary thawing in diplomatic relations between her and Allegra, as we had a show of revolutionary Chinese posters currently on the walls of Mad Meg. The Chinese contingent smiled and nodded frantically when taken on an inspection tour. ‘Ah, ah, Rittre Red Book,’ they said every now and again.

  I was ordered to find out surreptitiously how our mother had come by her new boarders. Had it entailed a noble act?

  I was able to report back that Stella had struck up a friendship with a Chinese child on the back of a bicycle. The child had a mother who was walking the bicycle. Not too surprisingly, she was Chinese, and a member of the China–Australia Friendship Association. The baby’s father, however, was Mexican, a professor of mathematics. The baby’s name was Angel.

  Angel and his mother were touring Melbourne by bike, looking for accommodation for three Chinese chaps who were staying with them. The poet, the Tibetan monk and the musk ox girl having moved on to higher, if not greener, pastures, Stella was in a position to oblige. Luckily for Stella, since ‘breeding’ prevented her from bargaining, the Chinese woman examined the prospective accommodation and named a reasonable sum. And so it was that Liu, Yip and Wang came to inhabit our former bedroom, our former dining room and our father’s one-time studio.

  Allegra invited them to come one evening and talk Marx to the collective. The talk consisted of Allegra firing questions while Liu answered either, ‘In China it is very much like this’, or ‘In China it is not very much like this’. Yip and Wang responded with polite giggles, which they screened with their hands.

  Then, in spite of ideologically sound boarders, Stella and Allegra fell out all over again. This time over tablecloths.

  She has cut a hole in a tablecloth. Doesn’t she realise those cloths took years to tat? Why couldn’t she, as happens no doubt in plenty of other shotgun marriages, have bought herself a dress? There are cheap dresses aplenty to be had at that place, the Whatsamaycallit, the Thingummyjig where those girls from the dump work, and they’d fit anybody, even a hippopotamus.

  Allegra sticks her head through the hole and tells Stella to piss off. ‘Only things with pizzles piss,’ says Stella, and then, announcing that Nina would be churning in her urn, she sweeps out of the Edwardian house where the bride is being outfitted.

  ‘She was buried!’ shrieks Allegra after her, as Maggie and I fix the cloth into a wedding drape. Kelly has run a strip of gathering along the edge of another antique cloth and attached it to a crown of gardenias to make the veil. Allegra, in spite of her fuming, is the most beautiful lace-clad thing in the world: she and her attendants start out for her nuptials on a tram.

  We are all dressed up in swathes of this and that. Chantal Kelly is wearing a crocheted bedspread. Maggie and Kelly are in cheesecloth saris. Kelly and Cathy, the art historian, are playing improvised flute music and one of the Troika is twanging a zither as we accompany Allegra down the median strip. We are wafting through gardenia scent and neck-to-knee trees. Even the grass is excited at the procession and leans towards Allegra, trembling glossily where it can and waving little daisies. The fifteen-year-old Eli, in a caftan and peacock-feathered turban, is holding a stunning parasol from the Pantechnicon over Allegra’s head. It is red silk, hung round with a golden fringe and tassles. Life on the barricade comes to a hushed, admiring stop.

  The poet with the peacock feather, a porcine gent, is wearing a white wedding toga, one plump shoulder completely revealed. He is reciting and, as he recites, a bruised and laddered dancing troupe is performing a pas d
e deux that could do with quite a deal more practice.

  As our parents did before her, Allegra has hired a marriage celebrant. She is a very large person in a colossal garment of purple and red. Eli calls her the Marriage Elephant. In her exceedingly long and bedraggled hair she wears two tufts of wilting bougainvillea either side of her central part. She is barefooted, and it is interesting to speculate how close together she could get those feet to stand, given what appear to be massive thighs inside the very large garment.

  David is waiting at the freeway barricade, clad, one might think, for a funeral in a dark suit, hand-made for his father, apparently, in the dark ages. He is also sporting a yarmulka and prayer shawl. We have all commented that it didn’t occur to us to think he was Jewish.

  Well, they plight their troth as so many have, with mixed success, before them. And then, as they are exchanging rings, the contractions start and the bride has to lie down with her head in Eli’s lap, crumpled up in the makeshift forest, while the groom looks round for a public phone in a pharmacy.

  When Nin was born, it was October. The grasses were splitting open and nature’s cunning array of seeds was sticking, burrowing, pirouetting, putting down roots and raising its flags. A blackbird on the front verandah of my soon-to-be-acquired house kept trying to make her nest, but wasn’t able to complete it. Every day we would find her tapping at the eaves, nest-building materials draped and spread around, but no nest.

  Buzzing in the house’s hall was a European wasp, the first one Reg had seen in Australia. He made me a nectar trap; the wasp count would keep increasing year to year.

  When Nin was born, her father was amazed by her and stood for hours looking into her cot, tugging and tugging his lower lip.

  ‘I hope she doesn’t turn out like your mother, dear,’ he’d say.

  TWENTY-ONE