Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  Maggie and I, mothers both and quite unmoved by vomit, got busy cleaning the place up. Maggie, ever the sensible one, had brought a spade, so we were able to bury the rubbish. The sick was another matter. To wash it off under the shower would have clogged the drains, so we took bedclothes and mats out and beat the solid bits against a post and rail fence, then chucked on buckets of water.

  Allegra, meanwhile, did meaningless tasks in slow motion in the kitchen. ‘God,’ said Maggie, ‘we’ll have to watch her, Bel. She’s completely out of her tree, poor thing. We’d better make sure someone’s with her all the time.’

  And so we did make sure. She didn’t put on her swimming costume to go to the beach but, still in Aunt Nina’s wedding dress, sat cross-legged in the sand, sifting handful after handful of it. Every so often, Nin would peer up at her face through her hair and say, ‘Mummy.’ She would crouch in front of Allegra, grinning enticingly. Sometimes Allegra would be lost somewhere; sometimes, though, she would stroke Nin’s hair, but when she tried to speak the tears would splash and contract into tiny craters on the sand. If Nin put her arms around her, Allegra would cry even more, though she didn’t ward her off.

  We had taken the place for five days but Maggie said, ‘We mightn’t be able to stay that long, not if Allegra doesn’t get any better.’

  Maggie and Kelly had planned to go bushwalking the next day. I said I’d stay with Allegra and Nin as it was obvious Allegra wouldn’t be up to it. That night we slept in our own sheets and burnt mosquito coils, which lessened the stale smell in the house. Allegra had seemed to go to sleep long before the rest of us, who sat up playing cards. She still hadn’t changed from Aunt Nina’s dress, but we thought it best to let her be. In the morning, I would run a bath for her; she could have a good soak and I’d make her breakfast. We had brought grapefruit, which we now passed round to one another, pressing the cool yellow globes against our cheeks and enjoying the fresh, light smell.

  Maggie was off to Sydney in February, having graduated in photography and scored a good job in a Sydney tech. The Pantechnicon had folded before Mad Meg and the Kellys had run a market stall for a while, but then they sold up and Kelly and Chantal had taken up apprenticeships; Kelly in cabinet making and Chantal in electricity. Chantal was one of only two girls in the state to qualify.

  As we had feared, the building housing the Pantechnicon had been demolished and now, freeway-free, the inevitable marble-coated shopping mall was on its way to becoming … what? What, after all, is a shopping mall, particularly one with more marble in it than Milano Centrale?

  Though, on the whole, the new architecture was excessive, I had to confess a sneaking admiration for some of it; some of it really was new and surpassed the ugly and often gerry-built sixties boxes. I liked the clothes, too – they had regard for shape and finish, as seventies clothes never had, and certain designers had their tongues firmly in their cheeks. But often enough, the new stuff was extraordinarily expensive, and that which was made for poor tarts like us was generally thrown together in as hideous a fashion as ever before; only the price tags had risen. There were so many mirrors now in shops, you ran the risk of banging right into yourself, but one thing they demonstrated was that although the shops dripped opulence, the populace looked just as daggy as ever.

  We yacked as we played, all of us nicotine abstainers now, breaking off the ends of our matchstick stakes and chewing on them. We sipped a bit of cask white while Kelly told us about her new bloke. ‘His name’s Guitar,’ she said, pronouncing it Geet-ar. ‘He’s a Hell’s Angel.’

  We laughed at the thought of Kelly, slender, blonde and pretty, as a bikie’s moll. ‘Oh, it’s not like that,’ she said, ‘not quite. Only rides at weekends. He’s doing the apprenticeship. We’ve started up a little business and we’re going to call it Shadow Cabinets. We’re going to be really careful where we get the wood from. It’ll be Australian, as far as that’s possible, and crafted by Australians, too. None of this wood-chip shit. We’re going to have a workshop up in the hills and train kids how to make stuff and design it. There’s a bit of a market for handcrafted stuff up in the hills, what with the mudbrick houses and the mudbrick hippies.’

  ‘When are you going to start?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, we’ve started. Mum’s got us a dance floor and a heap of other recycled stuff, and guess who’s renting us the workshop? Your mate, Reg Sorby. Christ, that guy’s got a finger in every bloody pie, I can tell you. This workshop’s next to a factory he owns that makes snail bait. I tell you, he’s the snail bait king of Victoria.’

  Talk of Reg made me wary. Before he came round to my house with Where the Nice Girls Live No. 2, he called in with his easel and paint box to paint my python lily. We hadn’t sold Mad Meg back then and were still trying to work out ways to save it. ‘H’mm,’ he hummed, his back to me as he dabbled the python heads onto the canvas. ‘You two are in a fix, aren’t you?’

  ‘We have to sell,’ I’d said.

  ‘So it would seem,’ he answered, standing back and smiling coyly at a nymphette he’d slipped in behind the bush.

  ‘She’s pretty fat in the thighs, Reg,’ I said. He pursed his lips, but then sniffed and smilingly added nipples.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’m going to do you a favour. Since you were kind enough to let me paint these lilies, I’ll buy the others out of your collective so you and your sister can hang on to your gallery.’

  ‘Christ!’ I said. ‘We’d be the laughing stock of the universe if we sold out to you! Imagine! You in charge of Mad Meg!’

  ‘Mussolini paid thirty-three thousand lire for a Modigliani nude once,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Reg. But Modigliani was dead.’

  ‘How about if I made you a gift of some of your father’s paintings, then? I’ve got a potential buyer. You could sell some of them and get yourselves out of trouble.’

  ‘Well, that’s an idea! So you’ve got some of Dadda’s paintings, have you?’

  ‘Well, no-o. But I can get some. You see, I own some of the paintings that are in dispute, but I own them jointly with Harry and Viva. Viva’s forgotten that I bought from Rose, and then, because I’m not stupid with money and never have been, not like you and your sister, I deeded them back to Siècle – a gift, you see, that I could write off my tax. But it was partly a gift to myself, because I’m part of the Siècle Trust. Your father wasn’t, because he went off and married your mother before the Trust had been properly thought out.

  ‘I thought you said you didn’t like Dadda’s work, Reg?’

  ‘I don’t like it much.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, I just don’t. But I’m a rich man now, Isobel. I don’t need Henry Coretti. I have a feeling that if I opt out of that Trust I’m going to be worth at least a quarter, if not a third of its assets. You ought to have your father’s paintings. I look upon them as yours. And, as I said, I might have a buyer. How much do you need to save your bacon?’

  ‘Fifteen, twenty thousand dollars. Preferably twenty.’

  ‘Ah. Well, two of your father’s paintings would probably fetch thirty.’

  But though Where the Nice Girls Live materialised, Reg’s buyer didn’t, and our troubles, instead of diminishing, seemed to multiply. I didn’t know whether we had come by the painting legally or not. Harry Laurington thought it was probably legal that we had the painting, but Reg was not above getting hold of it by illegal means. I sighed to think of the mess our lives would be in if Reg had stolen it.

  ‘Pontoon,’ said Maggie. We were all pretty tired by this and lacking the coherence of mind to play further rounds, so I went to bed in the same room as Allegra and the slumbering Nin, and Maggie and Kelly bunked down in the sitting room.

  We woke about half past eight or nine the next day. Nin had been sitting beside my head for an hour or more, pretending to read from a pile of books we’d brought along for her. Kelly was already in the kitchen, cutting the juicy, golden fruit into halves and brewing
up tea. We’d decided the night before to cut down on coffee and go for health- and strength-giving tea. There was a mint patch in the so-called garden at the back of the house, so the smell of mint was in the air, and the house was in better odour than it had been. Allegra was asleep, so I decided to let her be until after Kelly and Maggie had gone and I could take care of her and Nin without distractions.

  We ate brown toast dripping with honey while Nin sloshed around in a plate of muesli. Kelly had put on shorts and kept her clodhoppered feet on the rung under her chair seat. Maggie came out of the bathroom in a hat with corks hanging round the brim and we laughed. They were about to go when Maggie put her head around the bedroom door where Allegra lay sleeping. ‘Do you think she’s all right?’ she said. ‘She’s awfully still.’ She went into the room with a jacket on her arm and stooped over the bed. I saw her take Allegra’s wrist and shake it, and I buried my head in my arms as if I were about to be in a crash. ‘No pulse,’ Maggie said. The worst of it was I’d known it subliminally for hours.

  An ambulance came and took her to the local hospital. There, they said there’d have to be an autopsy, but I was freaked out, I couldn’t bear them to touch her. The blood sample already showed an overdose and there was an empty pill bottle in her bag.

  Kelly had taken Nin swimming to distract her. Whenever my mind turned to Nin I felt the uncomprehending ache of a little child and knew this terrible new reality would break on her and do her great harm. Surely Allegra had thought of that; but as I pictured her weeping on the beach, I realised that she had gone beyond coping even with her child’s love. She had gone to the point of thinking her life would ruin her child’s. And she had gone to needing only to die.

  There would have to be an autopsy in Melbourne. ‘It’s the law,’ they said. ‘How would we know if it wasn’t the barbiturates that killed her? We know it’s the most likely thing, but we don’t know if it’s the actual thing. We have to rule out any suggestion that she didn’t die by her own hand.’ So I had to sign the wretched paper giving them permission, though I felt my hand being clawed back and I felt her nails wounding me deep between the bones that run to my fingers.

  I went back to Melbourne with her in the ambulance. I would have to tell my mother. I knew I would break down in front of my mother, so to help me tell it, I would ask Beryl to be with me. Beryl would be the best person to ask. A kind person, someone with authority. How would I even open my mouth to tell my mother over the phone I was coming to see her? I would ask Beryl; Beryl might have been a drunk, but she was kind and calm. She understood the need for grace in life.

  In the ambulance, I wept, held Allegra’s hand and bit her wrist as if I were a baby trying to rouse her. Tears and saliva bound us. There was a nurse in the cabin with me. She kept talking gently and patting my head, but I couldn’t hear a word she said and the pats felt as though I were being lightly pelted with little bags of sand. I fell into a kind of doze with my head on Allegra’s belly, and dreamt a little bit that when I woke the world would be transformed, Allegra would wake up and I would stop crying. But too soon the ambulance was in the parking bay of the morgue, the doors were being opened, the temperature and light in the cabin were changing and I had to let her go. Instead of a sweet, peaceful awakening, the most horrible duty of my life to perform, when I myself was stricken almost to dumbness.

  They were good and rang Beryl for me; and so I wept and waited, waited and wept until she arrived – good Beryl, ugly, real, compassionate.

  ‘I think we won’t ring first,’ she said, squatting in front of me and patting my knee, so I caught a little whiff of her, female and motherly. ‘We’ll just call around. It’ll be hard, but I’ll be there.’

  My face a cascade of tears, I rang the bell and drum collection. She opened the door and I took her in my arms: my mother, my dear mother, for whom we had had such years of anger. ‘Allegra,’ I said in her ear and her embrace grew firmer. Then we came apart and she stepped back, tears popping from her eyes, wiping her arthritic index finger upwards under her nose. ‘I can’t cry,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been able to cry.’ She blew her nose, not on a Kleenex, never on a Kleenex, but on a proper hanky. ‘One of Neen’s,’ she said, dangling it and making a little laugh.

  ‘This is going to be hard for you to believe,’ she said, ‘but I heard your grandfather singing his round-up song last night and I knew it was Allegra. I’ve even been expecting you, my poor darling, poor little darling. I suppose she did it …?’

  ‘To herself! Yes! To herself!’ I cried, suddenly feeling that she ought to have stabbed herself or jumped from a high place. ‘Fucking sleeping tablets! What a coward! What a coward!’

  ‘Oh, darling, people like Allegra don’t grow old. They bloom brilliantly and drop.’

  ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ I writhed around what she had said. ‘No! She was sad. She was unhappy. It didn’t mean she had to kill herself.’

  ‘Darling, there are some people …’

  ‘Not Allegra!’

  ‘Oh well, not Allegra then,’ she said with a kind of resignation, nodding her head. I’d touched her in a place that hurt, but I was suddenly furious with her for assigning Allegra so easily to death. It didn’t occur to me till much later that my mother had had to assign a lot of people to death while being expected to soldier on herself. I didn’t stop to think that she’d done her best with what had been available. I became passionate and accusing. ‘You never believed in her!’ I cried.

  ‘I did. I admired her courage and the way she took up causes.’ And then she broke out, ‘Hell! Didn’t I get down on my hands and knees trying to fix up the floor of that bloody gallery? And where did that get you both? I wanted you girls to have good lives. I didn’t want you carrying the can for everybody else, as I’ve had to.’

  ‘You haven’t had to,’ I roared. ‘You chose to. You tried to reform Dadda when it would have been better if he’d reformed us!’ Suddenly, here I was in the middle of a pitched battle, not knowing why I was there and why my mother and I were instantly at each other’s throats at a time when we ought to have been supporting each other. I was sure the fault lay with her, but, of course, I’d gone to give terrible news to my mother and had expected her to react impeccably, to suddenly have words and wisdom she’d never had before, to be dignified in her sorrow, when where is the dignity in the suicide of your child? Instead of catching her emotional intentions, which were to bring comfort and express sadness, I fell into an old habit of my own: I took her at her word. Behind the statement that meant she believed Allegra was the type of person who’d kill herself was something evil, a kind of maternal curse.

  Afterwards Beryl said she hadn’t known what to do, both my mother and I had closed ourselves off to reason. And then she said, ‘There’s such a thing as forgiveness, Isobel. It’s not just a Catholic precept, it’s an actual gesture, but you can’t make it unless you leave yourself open to feeling it. I’m sure your mother loves you and I’m sure she loved Allegra. I wouldn’t be surprised if her grief went very, very deep.’

  ‘You don’t know her,’ I said.

  In the next few days, my mother and I hung around each other, hugging then hurting, hugging then hurting, until she said she couldn’t bring herself to look at Allegra dead, and didn’t have the strength to go to the funeral. Beryl and Eli were both with us then, and when I went to attack her, Beryl said, ‘No, Isobel, no.’

  ‘But Allegra’s her daughter!’

  ‘Be merciful,’ said Beryl, ‘this is Allegra’s mother.’

  Eli said, ‘Go, Mum. I’ll take care of Grandma. Otherwise, she’s all alone, and even if she went she’d be all alone.’

  What about me being all alone? I thought. The scene of Arnie and me on the beach came back to me, surrounded by oyster shells. Once again, I was the one to be sacrificed. I would have to be my father and mother. I would have to reconcile this war of opposites both in myself and by myself.

  Bouquets in cellophane wilted along the hall of my ho
use, while outside, the streets never seemed so ordinary: shut grey weekday terraces, waiting dogs by rubbish bins. No wind. Onion weed flowered in the bluestone lanes.

  You were a trap for the light, Allegra. Beautiful as a spider’s web, your hair arranged to hide the coroner’s work. A shadow fought itself in the stillness under your thumb.

  David came with Miles and stood around, surly and speechless. He stroked the back of his hand down your cheek, but that was his only moment. Nin clung to my hand.

  Following the hearse in my battered car, we could talk, and did, as if there were no funeral, hoping it wouldn’t rain, hoping we could keep up with the fast-moving cortege. I put my foot down flat on hills, I shot through intersections. An empty yoghurt cup rolled around the floor.

  At the cemetery we couldn’t find the gate, and walked with the other mourners in our best high heels or polished boots in a quagmire beyond the fence, helping each other over puddles. Nin ducked in ahead of everyone through a broken bit of fencewire, grinning, but she soon came back to me, a grimy little posy of grave weeds in her hand.

  We threw in after you flowers, clods of earth, a stone – a river stone, smooth, pink, shaped like an embryo. I heard it thump on the coffin lid. There are only hard things to cling to in this life: facts have edges and cut into your palm, mysteries are slippery.

  We filed back to the cars. The paths were narrow, runnelled and pot-holed. It seemed ridiculous, a hole in the ground, the knocking of clay clods on the lid of a box. A ritual without solace.

  A prayer worth saying would be made of stone. Disbelief is the first reaction. You wake in the dark, expecting something to happen. It doesn’t. There is no knock on the door, ‘Sor-ry!’ and the arms around your neck, the voice rocking in your ear, real.