Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  Therese with a heap of account books or tax returns, at the kitchen table after the evening meal, became a familiar sight. She made quite a tidy sum from it, would never tell Cec how much, but made sure it was put by for David, to be used in the long run for uniforms and books and a supplement to his school fees.

  When David was nine, his mother and stepfamily moved to Queensland, exacerbating his isolation. His school holidays were problematic. During term breaks he mostly stayed at school. Therese then learnt to drive, bought a car, and would take him on little holiday expeditions. One time, she told him to ask a friend to come too, but David said he hadn’t any friends. He was a peculiar child, of course. How could he be anything else?

  One Christmas, when David was thirteen, his grandmother decided to have him for the holidays. There’d be plenty of room for him since Miles, who was studying at university, was the only one of her children still at home. It wasn’t fair on David to leave him at school or make him go home to a teasing and violent stepfather when there was a bed and food and a grandmother who loved him in Sydney. Cec could do what he liked, but she was going to have the boy for Christmas.

  As she was leaving the house to go and pick him up from school, she asked Cec to back his car out of the drive so she could get hers out. Cec, who could do nothing with a good grace, roared backwards down the drive and ran over a beer bottle he himself had left there, puncturing his tyre. Later, with circuitous logic, this was found to be David’s fault.

  At the dinner table in the evening, the child was made to wear that look on the face that plays havoc with the search for an appropriate expression. He bent his head, his eyes slid from side to side, his top lip wanted a legitimate reaction to give it shape. He was told to ‘get that expression off his face’. He was asked ‘What are you looking like that for, anyway?’ And as he was ‘looking like that’ because the accident wasn’t his fault but his grandfather’s, he was hit. Had Therese been sitting at the table and not standing at the kitchen counter serving up the sweets, she could have undone the chain of events. But Therese could not be everywhere at once.

  Miles loomed from his seat and let fly.

  Therese shepherded David out of the room and tried to distract his attention from the thudding and yelling in the kitchen, where the china was being broken and the sweets she’d prepared ground into a couple of angry faces. But the symptoms of family illness were running riot and the child, who was no fool, knew they were. He was, however, accustomed to accepting his fate, not as a child for whom the best arrangements possible were being made but as a child who was to be punished for accidents that could have been avoided had he not existed. He valued himself less highly than a beer bottle and a car tyre.

  Worse still, as a result of David’s existence his Uncle Miles left home and went to live with his Uncle Bart, whom his grandfather called ‘that poofter’. This had made his grandmother sad because Miles had been her solace. The message David got was that if you wanted a man’s approval, you’d better not be a poofter, nor identify with the problems of a woman.

  Miles had guarded Therese against the tyrannies of Cec and now she was without protection. It was a maternal crime to have brought three exceptional children into a world that paid homage to mediocrity and looked down its nose at instability and homosexuality. It was a crime only partially expiated by the two sons between Bart and Miles, one of whom ran a fishing tackle shop on the north coast and the other of whom was a mechanic. These sons were Brendan and Damon. It was Therese, who’d been brought up a Catholic, who’d given them their names. After David came for Christmas, Cec began to say that Catholic was one thing, but Jewish was another.

  David’s youth was lived hardly realising any part of him was Jewish. He was brought up Anglican with a dash or two of Catholic during his holidays. Though he scorned his grandmother, she was his only source of love, and fondness for her meant fondness for the myth of Christ’s divinity. He believed in resurrection, in sinning and atonement. An overlooked fact of his childhood was the Jewishness of an unremembered father.

  The year after the fight between Cec and Miles, Miles drove David home to Queensland at the end of term.

  In spite of having had jewellers for parents, David had no prowess with his hands. He was clumsy; he couldn’t hold a ball without dropping it down the only culvert for miles, and once he kicked a football so off skew it bounced up the school roof and lodged in a chimney. It was almost as if he had a psychological set against success so strong that his failures were spectacular. There was a subject at his school called Mechanical Ability; every year his report showed him to be below average in Mechanical Ability. He might come top of several subjects, but every year he was at the bottom of the class in Mechanical Ability and every year, it became apparent to Miles, his stepfather would take him to the field opposite the family house and torture him with tackles and drop kicks. When Miles tried to intervene in this process of degradation, he found that David himself was stubborn and the charade would go on until the boy was thoroughly disgraced and the stepfather’s cruelty was triumphant.

  In time, David had become obsessed with physical activities and sport. Almost every moment of his waking day was spent vicariously standing on a podium, a medal round his neck. Bart, who had been a hero, was filled with pity when he learnt this. It seemed that David longed for nothing more than a man to take pride in him.

  It was after Miles had moved to Melbourne that David ran away from school and went to squat in a derelict house in Woolloomooloo.

  At first he was too shy to go and introduce himself to Bart, whom he didn’t really know, but when he did introduce himself, Bart was protective, just as he was later towards me, and immediately took David into his care. He wrote to Dorothy to say David was with him and he would do his best to make sure he finished school.

  When David was eighteen he was a lightly built boy with a big head. He had just matriculated well enough to go to any university in the country and do whatever course he liked, but, Bart discovered, he didn’t even know the role of universities in the world and was contemptuous of them, probably to cover fear and ignorance, and Bart couldn’t penetrate the defence. Therese would come to visit every now and then and would try to interest him in one course or another, saying how lucky he was to have all these options, but David was even more defensive with Therese. Therese would say it was probably a good sign, as he wasn’t going to be pushed into anything easily.

  Ultimately he decided on art, the one thing matriculation hadn’t prepared him for. ‘He wasn’t going to go to tech and do it, though. He was going to sit at home and be a painter, which meant sitting at home with me. He was ruining my sex life, but whenever I felt like reading him the riot act, I would look at him and feel what he suffered inside myself. And Isobel,’ Bart said, wearily, ‘he couldn’t draw. I mean, literally. He had no sense of a picture plane at all. He just liked to sit there contemplating the pristine condition of the drawing pad, with his pencils sharpened and in a nice neat row. When he did draw eventually, the drawings were absolutely minute and fenced in with little frames. They were so weird, really, that even though the tech knocked him back, I began to think there might be something in him. And he was obsessive about it, too. Once he started, you couldn’t stop him. He would draw and smoke all day, all night. Then he started to go out and buy little hard-covered books with marbled endpapers and he literally filled them with this amazing stuff. Private little self-contained worlds. Beautiful. He mightn’t have been able to draw on an ordinary scale, but his tiny drawings were compact and laden with out-thrusting energy.

  ‘At first I thought they were copies of other people’s work, but then he clearly got his own imagery going. Stiff little men, strange little dogs, straight roads, round suns and moons, everything geometric. It made me decide to do a show on artist’s books. I wasn’t wrong, he really took off from there.’

  Bart untwined himself from the cobra and lay for five minutes, ‘toe-tally relaxed’ on my sitting-room
floor.

  I hadn’t known he and Miles came from such a traumatised family. Their mother was still alive and immensely proud of them both. I’d met her once and would never have guessed at a husband like Cec. She was calm, well spoken and obviously intelligent. Her body was neat, strong and snug. A vertical gold filling in one of her front teeth added character to her smile. Though she had no background in art, she had instinct, and it wasn’t an instinct for ballerinas or swans. Bart, Miles and David had it, too: a sophisticated appreciation of what it is that artists do and why they do it.

  As for Dorothy, once in a while there would be a fleeting contact, a wish to hear news of David, but as far as Bart understood, she now lived imprisoned in an outer suburban dream home with a huge bunch of keys for the many locks on sliding doors that opened and closed with the precision of guillotines.

  While Bart relaxed, I sat there thinking about David’s radical appearance, his very broad forehead and ferocious widow’s peak, his very narrow chin, spanned by a thick, purplish mouth. Physically he seemed the illustration of his mother, starved of sustenance by his intelligence. It was a sad story.

  I remembered the first night he spent at our house. He was very drunk. ‘He-h!’ he said to me. ‘You gotta paint all the time, no matter what, if you’re going to be a great painter.’ So saying, he fell asleep and subsided down the wall. We started laughing, Allegra and I. We were willing to forgive anything in a relative of Bart and Miles. Asleep, he was as innocent as a baby. The inside of his arms was soft and young. His hands were very beautiful, the fingers straight, pink on the tips, the nails white-mooned and, ironically for a maladroit man, beautifully clipped. We brought him a pillow and put a rug over him.

  Bart opened one eye and, ten seconds later, the other. ‘I can’t help loving David,’ he said. ‘All that aggression in him is fear and self-defence. It’s as if he’s harbouring a soft little creature inside him, done up in that wonderful satiny skin. Maybe that’s his obsession with the kitten. I’m sorry for Allegra. You never know what’s going to cause a catastrophe with David; he’s been so hurt, so messed about by life. I have to confess I’m afraid for the baby, part of David himself is still as small as she is, he probably feels she’s a usurper.’

  Then he sat up and said, brightly, ‘Tea time!’ and tossed me a packet of lapsang souchong out of his bag.

  ‘What’s Allegra to do?’ I asked, in my kitchen now, submerged in the back garden where a challis lily grew, its as yet unopened flowers python heads on a propeller-leafed tree.

  ‘Well, not what she’s doing now,’ Bart answered. ‘Oh, I don’t really know there’s much she can do. She could leave him, but he’s very persistent, very tenacious, and he does believe in his life with her. That it’s gone this far has given him something to hold. I have to confess what surprises me is not so much his behaviour – he’s as mad as a hatter – but Allegra’s. I mean, David’s weird, it’s obvious he’s weird. He can be very well intentioned towards the people round him, but then he mucks it up completely, does his block and says it’s the fault of the people round him, so that whatever it is in him that needs care and attention escapes the notice of most people. He’s hard going. Allegra’s given herself a heavy load.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  A Table in the Presence of Enemies

  THE MAD MEG collective met in the back two rooms of Mad Meg. It was pretty cramped, for despite our preference for art of the ‘event’ kind, which was meant to disappear like the dust behind the door once it was over, or travel somewhere else as a ‘total environment’, we accumulated many an extraordinary article: a revolving desert sunset with accompanying birdsong, bird beak helmet and feathered breast, an ‘event’ sculpture, collectively constructed, of a witch on a broomstick, whose vapour trail was made by children tying anything taking their fancy onto long strings attached to the witch’s rear. There were boulders wrapped in orange plastic, a flagon full of Murray River water, boxes of sticks, a heap of bricks, a stuffed carp.

  A sack of sand doubled as seating for the coordinator, a functionary role supposed to rotate on a yearly basis; squabbling, however, led to its being either Allegra or Maggie, they being better at keeping the peace than the rest of us.

  The domination of Maggie and Allegra naturally led to accusations of factionalism, but whenever the orb and sceptre looked like going the way of the Troika, there would be an in-depth examination of principles, culminating in the Troika being unable to accept because of its anarchist conscience.

  Cathy the historian did not think of herself as coordinator, but she was an archivist by habit, and by habit kept our records.

  I was deemed politically to the right of Genghis Khan, and therefore ineligible for the post. Putting aside the slur on my character, this suited me fine, as I had plenty else to do.

  In the late 1970s the Mad Meg Broad Sheet had become a widely read item on the art scene and had latterly distinguished itself by going into a shiny cover, through the spine of which largish staples were required to contain the collective outpouring. While the collective had voiced no objection to the publication of letters from those of the Other Gender on the letters page, indeed, they welcomed the opportunity of reply, recent strongly felt opposition had been raised to the inclusion of articles and reviews by the said gender on the hallowed territory of The Art Debate. The Kelly–Coretti faction of the Mad Meg collective believed we should invite men to criticise us with the same rigour and respect they accorded male practitioners. The Troika was adamantly against us: it had to be a female critique (all three, of course, were critics) in which a female world view was brought to the discussion of the work.

  ‘But,’ said Maggie, who wanted to include a review we’d received from a man, ‘this review’s interesting because he says “the work is informed by a female sensibility”.’

  A collective, wet and lip-vibrating laugh leapt out of the Troika.

  ‘Well, he goes on to what he thinks a female sensibility is,’ said Maggie defensively.

  ‘How would he know?’ the Troika snapped.

  Maggie replied that she thought the chap had put it very sensitively and well.

  ‘Well, we don’t,’ came the Troika’s reply. ‘We think it’s unethical.’

  ‘How, for God’s sake?’

  ‘It’s politically suspect.’

  Behind the conglomerate, co-operative-approved personality, the Troika managed to be about as supportive as a perished rubber band. Nin’s presence at the meeting was being tolerated with dense clouds of cigarette smoke and ill-concealed chagrin. Earlier, she’d had a bellow and was given to me to soothe and entertain in another room. ‘I’m a dreadful mother,’ Allegra had said, but motherhood was not yet an ‘issue’ for the Troika.

  The Kelly–Coretti faction began arguing that the result of a wholly female critique could be, and often unfortunately was, mushy self-congratulation which lowered the tone and made us look ridiculous.

  Well, then, was the Troika’s riposte, didn’t men look pretty ridiculous, profoundly more ridiculous for their pompous, elitist, perpetual possession? Should we not fight elitist tactics with elitism, give the men a taste of their own stuff?

  Maggie and Cathy bridled at this; elitism was a crime in itself. Mad Meg didn’t exist to commit crimes; it existed to bolster the image of women in art. This was a good piece of writing; someone had taken the time and had the insight, and insight was an individual gift, not an ideology. Getting men interested in the women’s art movement was important if women were going to be considered in the mainstream. Teaching men to consider women as practitioners rather than objects in art was very important.

  Here Allegra wiped a herring over our trail: men were unaware, too, of how women saw them, she said sadly, and for the most part, they didn’t think it was important to find out. But it was important; men were arrogantly overriding the requirements of women in the world and using marriage as a form of tyranny. Just let them try to see life through female eyes! Let them admit female cr
itics to their realm and let them reciprocate by coming to look at women’s work with impartiality and honesty.

  I had no doubt it was her own marriage she was calling a tyranny, but the generality lit a spark in me. I saw a whole set of pictures in my mind: ironies of the female nude, crisply painted all-too-peachlyflesh-bound little women crouched in corners, overburdened by Janus-faced men, whose upper faces would be kissing a Blakean God or male angel leaning down from a cloud and whose lower faces would be seeking out the woman. Everything but the woman in each picture would be painted in stone-like Blakean fashion: all would be massive weight, bearing downwards. In one canvas, the woman would be pressed up to the front of the picture as if against the glass. The very window existed in my house; I could hardly wait to ask Maggie to pose.

  But the meeting was getting on. I was being cursed and asked questions. They were taking a vote. They were going to run an issue of the Broad Sheet on a series of women’s shows, each one reviewed by both a woman and a man. Seemed fair enough to me. Would I be one of the shows? Of course; this thing I was thinking of now had me in its tow, I had only to take charge of it, and I’d be away.

  The Troika wasn’t sure it approved of the twin review idea and felt it could only go ahead if one of their number were allowed to do a deconstruction to sum up at the end. Would we? Wouldn’t we? We would, but not with burning enthusiasm, and Allegra, I could see, was biting her tongue.