Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  ‘In my opinion Allegra and Isobel ought to have the Corettis you still have, Rose, the ones that were earmarked.

  ‘You should get that lawyer friend of yours and Bart’s from Sydney onto it, Isobel, he knows what he’s doing. He’s got a sense of honour as well as a sense of humour. I’d be prepared to will the Corettis to you and Allegra as if I owned them. And it could be said that I do. It might be all I have the time to do. Then, Isobel, leave your father’s paintings to the Trust if you want to, if it comes to mean anything to you. Viva and Checkie already have more than enough.

  ‘I suppose you can’t forestall the sale of your gallery, can you, Isobel?’ he asked. He did not realise that Mad Meg was already sold. It had gone at auction just a few days previously.

  It was a Saturday morning, Allegra in such a state she developed a migraine and had to run out and spew in the mint patch halfway through the bidding. When I went to help her she was reeling, her top lip beaded with sweat.

  The men who came to auction the place were not the people she had spoken to, they were some other seedy crew who’d just taken over the agent’s where she’d gone to arrange things. The first one, a man of about twenty-eight, dressed like an undertaker, had bowled up in a Daimler just like The Brolga’s. Allegra had been there when he’d come and paced around the rooms, criticising.

  ‘Ha! Outside toilet,’ he’d say. ‘You know, you wonder why people don’t fix these places up – or knock ’em down. You could build a nice shop here.’

  When the actual auctioneer arrived, taking the sign from the back of his powder-blue Mercedes, the younger man asked how he was. ‘Oh, been at another one earlier on this morning.’ ‘How’d you go?’ ‘Oh, you know; you sell the shit to the shit.’ Allegra had had to bite her hand to stop herself from having a fit of fury.

  Mad Meg was bought by a silk-cravatted man and a bauble-choked wife who were so tanned that Maggie Kelly said they looked like a couple of duty-free handbags you’d pick up on your way back from Acapulco. The wife’s mouth, gaudily lipped, twisted to one side of her face. When Mad Meg was knocked down to her husband, she squealed, ‘Oh! That’s the second one we’ve bought this week!’

  Beaten in the bidding were a young Greek family wanting to start up an electrical goods business, and some Vietnamese looking for a shop from which to sell material.

  We had to attend the document signing, where we were given twenty-eight days to vacate. After the exchanging of the copies, the red-lipped wife said to me, ‘You wouldn’t like to rent it back from us, would you? We probably won’t be knocking it down for a while yet.’

  I nearly spat on her, but instead said, ‘Why don’t you try to rent it to one of the other bidders?’

  ‘Oh, we like the look of you.’

  ‘The others probably need it more than we do.’

  ‘Yes, but they’re … you know.’

  ‘We’re you know too. We’re half-Italian.’

  ‘Yes, I could see that from the names. You don’t look it, though.’

  Allegra listened to all this with her back turned. When the appalling woman had gone, she said we ought to burn the place down and pour ten tons of concrete on the site.

  The demise of Mad Meg was very painful for Allegra. She wept for days and couldn’t eat anything. I made little bowls of food for her and bought piles of fruit, but she didn’t touch any of it. She was sinking into herself and David wasn’t making matters any easier. I found him in the house twice when I came home after work. The first time he must have taken our altered telephone number, because the calls began again the following day. We would let him rave while the receiver dangled down the wall. The second time I found him he was rifling through Allegra’s letters and papers. When I told him to leave, he kept at what he was doing with surly determination. It took Eli to dislodge him, but he wouldn’t go unless Eli went with him.

  About this time, I had a call at the gardens from the people Allegra worked with at the university. ‘She’s practically catatonic,’ the woman said. ‘She needs help.’ I explained to Beryl Blake and she let me go early to collect Allegra and Nin, who was in the university crèche. I brought them back to the ‘Herb’, and Beryl told us of a psychiatrist she knew. He was available for emergencies, took drink cases, among other things. By that she was saying it was her psychiatrist, the person who kept her able enough for work. I left Nin drawing on Beryl’s whiteboard with a felt pen and took Allegra to the shrink.

  The waiting room was taken up and we had to wait in a pink corridor, confronted by a hideous Japanese print of zebras on the facing wall. The place looked like a converted massage parlour, with a deadlock on the back of the front door.

  Every so often a secretary flounced by us in the hall. ‘Just checking my cherubs,’ she’d say. There seemed to be people in drugged or comatose states shut up all over the place. Down the hall we could hear the psychiatrist’s every word as he interviewed someone in a far room with the door open.

  Allegra was silent, weeping the whole time. She sat on the only chair, rolling her head from side to side across the wall behind.

  ‘Shitty joint,’ I said. But Allegra was beyond noticing her surroundings.

  A policewoman came through the front door, her shadow thrown down on the floor as the door opened. ‘Yoo-hoo,’ she called, blinking at the sudden change of light. The secretary stomped out of her room, saying, ‘Up here,’ in a whisper while the floorboards cracked beneath her tread. Perhaps there were sleeping babes with rosy faces tucked up in cots behind the doors, or the puppies of some rare breed, dopey, in skins too big for them. But directly afterwards a dazed old lady, smartly dressed, was hefted down the hall on the policewoman’s arm. Behind her toddled an old man, carrying his hat. Perhaps the old lady had run away from home like that, in her Sunday best.

  At last the secretary opened the waiting-room door and a dishevelled youth appeared in the interior, his cardigan filthy and full of holes. The interviewee from up the corridor could have been his mum; she sighed at the waiting-room door, stringy and downcast. He jogged a bit in his runners, adjusted his penis, hands in pockets, and flicked a foot so his balls hung comfortably.

  The waiting room was small and Edwardian, painted pink like the corridor, Seurat’s Grande Jatte on a wall by the casement that gave onto the street, the roof of my battered car, a busy corner and a toylike railway station. It was like the room we all used to know about above Woolworths in Darlinghurst Road, King’s Cross, something wrong somehow. The kind of place where panicking women go, a dread room, a room where you paid, not just for your sins, but for the sins inflicted on you.

  Allegra still sat in the corridor, head bent now, face hidden in hair.

  The psychiatrist was a man in his mid-fifties, looking terribly tired, hung-over and dandruffy. His suit was crumpled, his eyes red-rimmed. He took Allegra by the elbow and she got up mechanically and went with him into the consulting room.

  No, I hadn’t made a mistake, I thought in the hallway, at a point where the wallpaper was mismatched, the renovations hasty, feeble light at the leadlight panes around the door, pink and green with random cracks, a brown stain threatening at the roofline. It is an illness, I thought, she does need help.

  Minutes passed. As if the house were tilting at sea, the door to the consulting room clacked open and shut.

  The secretaries began a tea-break conversation down the hall. The phone went. ‘Doctor is very busy, I’m afraid.’ ‘Doctor won’t be fitting in any new patients until …’

  The doctor called me in. ‘I’d like to put her in hospital,’ he said. Later Allegra said she couldn’t even hear him, she’d had a head full of muffled machinery.

  She was having a breakdown. I took charge of Nin, which meant having her at work with me every day. She had turned four and was a handful, loving to climb and draw and make little rooms in empty shelves in the compactus. I explained to Beryl that leaving her with my mother or at the crèche would mean leaving her open to being taken by David, who had
even begun to badger me at work, so that Loyola started taking all the calls and saying I wasn’t available.

  Allegra didn’t improve at first, because being in a hospital bed meant having David or our mother at close quarters. I told the doctor to ban David until she had recovered. ‘He’s the mad one,’ I said. ‘He’s the one you should be seeing.’ But the doctor answered he wasn’t out to punish anyone, just to help Allegra. Nevertheless, he acceded to my request and had the ward sister prevent both David and our mother from visiting.

  Our mother fought with me over it, as if Allegra’s illness were deliberate and we were blaming her for it. ‘Conspirators!’ she called us. ‘You’re just like that man was. Sly.’ It was no use saying Allegra needed time and space, our mother, who had never had time and space granted her, wanted to find out whose fault the madness was and perform a correction. ‘There was no madness in my family,’ she said, and I thought of Granpa, the horse-whipping of Weightly Lisle, the constant inebriation of Uncle Garth and Aunt Nina’s pathological goodness. ‘No, there was no madness in your family,’ I said.

  When he thought Allegra was not acutely ill anymore the doctor had her moved to a public psychiatric hospital. He couldn’t stop David from coming there and eventually it was I who had to confront him and tell him to desist. He quizzed and hectored Allegra the whole time. ‘What did the psychiatrist say about me?’ he’d ask. ‘What did you tell him about me? You see, dear, it isn’t me who’s mad, it’s you.’

  ‘I’ve got money for her,’ he said when I confronted him, brandishing the same bank cheque he’d been carrying around for weeks. ‘She could go and stay in a private hospital, I’d pay for it. I’ll go and see the psychiatrist myself. I will, I will. You can come, you can come with me and be my witness.’

  The hospital was such a drear place that our mother, who only visited once because Allegra wouldn’t respond to her, commented if you weren’t depressed when you went in there, you would be by the time you came out. It was wet on the grass between the wards. They were shacks, a sick pale green inside. Steam rose from an underground drain by the black, shining road to the main building where the administration was.

  Up a wooden ramp, be merry, I would tell myself, be bright. A giant man would be creeping back and forth, back and forth, over and over the same worn track of corridor. I would see his profile through a high panel, left side, right side, left side, right side. Be bright, be cheerful, bringing clean socks in my bag and new nightclothes. The woman who sold me the nightgowns said, ‘Sorry to hear she’s in hospital. I’ll pray for her. That’s what I’ll do, pray.’ They all knew Allegra there, it was Cathy’s father’s shop.

  Smile, I would say to myself, be gentle. There was a woman in a floral dress and cardigan who leapt at me, the synapses bulging under skin that was choking her; a nurse’s arm came down on her shoulder. ‘Everyone loves you, Agnes. See, the lady loves you, all of us, all …’

  I love you, Agnes, yes, I love you. Looking into her eyes was like looking down railway tunnels.

  Once there was a squabble in the occupational therapy room, between a large, high-pitched Dutch girl with enormous fists and an ex-Jesuit who was hunched up on himself, jacked upright by the stake of his backbone. And there was a woman in there who knew me once, and turned away.

  ‘Allegra?’ She would seem much more well than all the other people, but it was because she wouldn’t take her medication. She had decided not to believe in psychotropic drugs. She was a focus of anger and destructiveness in a world of zombies.

  The doctor said he could take no more responsibility for her if she wouldn’t take her medication. And so she was discharged.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Allegra

  The weatherman says clear today, He doesn’t know you’ve gone away, And it’s raining, raining in my heart …

  Slowly she circles my living room, her arms wrapped round herself. Allegra in Aunt Nina’s dress, sad and creased from a long night’s dancing, flowers drooping in her waist-length hair. A kitten plays with her shadow on the floor, leaping empty champagne bottles and ashtrays spilling over.

  Oh misery, misery-ee, What’s gonna become of me-ee?

  The black lace of her skirt sends patterns swirling through the room.

  Up the hall, Cathy and her boyfriend wave to me and open the front door. Pale light slips briefly down the hall, then folds on itself and is gone. Car doors slam, an engine comes grumpily to life and the gears crash twice as they drive away.

  Allegra has given me a New Year present, a pink stone in the shape of an embryo. It’s 1984, George Orwell’s year, the sun now rolling blocks of light across the floor.

  She has been weeping off and on for days. She tries to come out of it, only to start weeping all over again. Her cheeks and her lips sting and the folds of her nose are sore.

  She and Nin still live here, but we are besieged by David. When he isn’t trying to heave windows up from the outside or kicking at doors, he’s on the phone. He wants to talk forever, so we leave the phone dangling down the wall and every fifteen minutes or so, Allegra says yes or no into the mouthpiece.

  He’s off his rocker. Sometimes I find him huddled on my front doorstep when I leave to go to work in the mornings. He threatens to kick the door down if I don’t let him in. The door is covered in kick marks. Then it’s red roses all over again, one a day, first with a card saying he’ll leave her alone, then with a plea, then with a farewell, then with the announcement that someone else wants to marry him.

  No real attempts have been made to kidnap Nin, though once he took her from our mother and sat with her on my front verandah until Allegra came home from work. There, she was only just holding on to her job after having been away so long and coming back before she was well enough. He began, ‘I don’t want my child anywhere near that woman, do you hear me? I said, DO YOU HEAR ME?’

  ‘I heard you.’

  ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Perhaps you could mind her?’

  ‘What do you mean, I could mind her? You know fucking well I can’t mind her.’

  ‘You could if you tried.’

  ‘I can’t. I’m not living anywhere.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not, she asks!’

  ‘Well, she’ll have to stay here with me then, won’t she? If she’s not worth finding a home for.’

  ‘I’ll contest Allegra. I warn you.’

  Maggie, Kelly and I have decided to take Allegra on a holiday. Maggie is brewing coffee behind me in the kitchen and Kelly is shunting the remains of last night’s party into garbage bags. There’s a young chap cleaning up in the yard outside. I don’t know who he is – a gate-crasher, maybe, or someone Eli knows, except that Eli’s away with his friends. Anyway, he seems to be polishing the shrubs. He’s taken the fallen python lilies and made stacks of them like party hats in my rockery. He seems to have wrapped up the outside rubbish in Christmas paper and tied it with bows. It’s poking gaily out of the tin.

  I suppose if I were a proper modern woman, I’d stride firmly out into the yard in search of an ulterior motive in the cleaning, stuff the fact he’s actually found room for the rubbish.

  ‘What are you?’ I decide to demand from where I am, jacked up on the wall beside the open back door. ‘Some kind of …’ I can’t think of the word, ‘… altruist,’ I say at last. He is carefully extracting a green pea from a lily trumpet: now he holds it in the palm of his large hand and stands before me, a castigated child flexing his knees. What knees! They are round as newborn baby heads under his twitching thighs. From the back (I tell him to turn round so I can have a look), his knees have that bland sleepy expression knee backs tend to have on people who are disinclined to strut. His back is very straight and his shoulders broad – he is the stamp of boy a Motte would be proud to own. I can’t think why I didn’t notice him earlier. I tell him he can turn back round again now. He is hiding his eyes away under a big forehead, and when I fish them out, they a
re light green. ‘Sorry,’ he says, and lowers his head.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Sorry I’m an altruist.’ When he smiles, his teeth are big, white and gappy, but he moves his head to keep me away from those green fish under their ledge.

  This isn’t meant to happen at all. Ideologically most unsound. You’re meant to have them quaking at the knees by now, and confessing drug habit. Then you’re meant to say the habit is no concern of yours in a voice that sounds as if you were chewing a fistful of rubber bands. But I say instead, ‘It’s 1984. Matching thongs are in. You people without them are meant to go and sleep under bridges and content yourselves with cheap drink. Would you like to have some coffee?’

  ‘Okay,’ he says and I ask him his name.

  He says he is called Link, because his name is Philip Chaney. Not related to either Lon or the senator. His dad is called Newsome, a fly-by-night, present whereabouts unknown. Sitting on the back step while Maggie tries to tempt Allegra from her trance with coffee, Kelly and Link and I talk of fathers and whether it’s worth chasing them up if they abandon you, until it occurs to me to ask him if he often goes round vomiting in strangers’ rockeries uninvited.

  ‘Well, um, actually, I was invited. Allegra asked me to come, but I think she forgot. I mean I think she forgot she asked me, and she forgot who I was, and as I didn’t have anyone much to talk to, I got drunk. It was a good party, though.’

  He used to drive a delivery van, he tells me. A while ago it seems he dropped off some paintings to their owners after we cleaned out the storeroom at Mad Meg. ‘Usually I just pick up the pictures from the galleries and shoot through,’ he says, ‘but I wanted to ask Allegra something, so I hung around. I didn’t quite know how to look casual. First of all I just sort of stood around with my arms crossed. Then I leant against the upright of a door. Allegra was busy packing the paintings into cardboard. I kept thinking she must’ve thought I’d gone already, so in the end, I kind of coughed. Then she looked up and she sort of said something like did she have to sign a docket. And I said, uh, no, she didn’t have to do that, but would she mind telling me – because I’d noticed her name was Coretti and the signwriter who’d written it on the gallery window did a really bad job – the letters were all the wrong size. Anyway, I wanted to know if she was a relative of that man whose pictures I’d seen in the National Gallery?’ He rubs the back of his head, screwing up his eyes at the complications.