Last Days of Ava Langdon

by Mark O'Flynn

  Ava resists temptation. With the new ream in her bag her weight, if not her equilibrium, is restored. Held to the chest, two kilograms over her heart, it would stop a bullet, she reckons, if someone were to take a pot-shot at her. It would probably stop a bazooka.

  Next stop, the paint shop. She wanders down the hill again accompanied by her wading reflection. Again she gleans an impression from the periphery of her eye of how striking she must appear to the other folk on the street. Yet how few of them realise what a champion they have in their midst, simply strolling about, taking the air. A flâneur. A raconteur, a storyteller recording her time and place in history. Another part of her doesn’t give a fig what people think. Although, she wonders, perhaps fame has abandoned her; her moment in the light, gone – that twinge of doubt like a cloud passing over the sun. She looks up. There is a cloud passing over the sun, but it is only a cloud, not a symbol. Not a psychic eclipse. Clouds do that all the time. Her manuscript is in the mail. Winging its way. She is free. Life is, you’d have to say, almost unbearably good.

  In the art shop – Framing, Easels, Palettes, Brushes, Maulsticks – she buys a tube of Armanth Red and another of Dark Byzantium. Her tubes at home are getting a bit wizened, like old potatoes in the bottom of a cupboard, or the husks of dried blowflies. The artistic side of her nature is something she has tried to encourage in recent years. The art shop proprietor, Mr Guido Guilfoyle, himself a weekend portrait painter specialising in profiles, pops the paints in a paper bag. His trouble is he talks too much about technique, which annoys the bejillikers out of her. She would like to tell him about inspiration and flashes of luminous brilliance that prevent her from sleeping, but he doesn’t seem interested. He thinks real art stopped at Whistler’s Mother. Look at that nose, now there’s a nose. He gives her the change and she counts it. It’s been an expensive day and it’s not over yet. Some days are like that. You have to grin and bear it.

  She wishes there was a gun shop in Katoomba whose window she might ruminate and daydream before, in a fashion she approves of, to while away some time. Why? Because she does so love guns, they make her feel almost weak at the knees, but there is no gun shop. The grog shop will have to do. She doesn’t know what time it is, exactly, only that it’s about time for a snifter, a celebratory toast, a hair of the werewolf.

  The sky is slowly filling with cloud, yet the light is clear, clear as chicken soup. Ava strolls, taking the air. She finds herself outside the early opener, Blackburn’s Family Hotel on Bathurst Road. What led thou thus to mine door? It’s like her feet have minds of their own. She debates with herself whether the front bar, with its smoky, acrid, mindless smell of men, will treat her with the regard the day deserves. Or not. She does not like it when, on occasion, they have howled her down and called her names. Bugger them. Will her accomplishment be truly comprehended? Or will they merely humour her, try to persuade her out to the snake-pit with all the other sorry wives of pisspots. But then, it’s early, so she goes in. Begone all mine enemies. And they are. The front bar is empty. There’s not even a barman. The dark timber of the beams and walls absorbs all light from the door so she has to let her eyes adjust. This carpet has seen its fair share of fisticuffs over the years. She hums a tune to herself. Hello-o. She looks at the photos on the wall of the victorious Katoomba cricket team from last year and the year before that. There are other photos of the racing cars carving up the peace around the swamp in Catalina Park. The Gully, they call it, another sacred place usurped. She coughs and jingles the coins in her pockets. Yoo-hoo, anybody ho-ome? No one comes. She spills her jingling coins on the counter, then sweeps them up and spills them again with the sound of Hell’s doorbell.

  ‘Ahoy,’ she calls.

  Eventually she attracts the attention of the barman, a hirsute lad called Jimi, who appears from somewhere bearing a pair of multi-grips. It’s still maintenance hour.

  ‘Sorry, mate. Just changing the keg. What can I get you?’

  Ava turns her face to him.

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, I thought you were a fellah.’

  ‘An honest mistake,’ she says. ‘And perhaps one to profit by.’

  ‘Eh? How can I help you?’

  ‘A schooner of your finest, Jimi.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘This is an ’otel, is it not? Of course really.’

  ‘It’s still pretty early. I’ve gotta hose out the gents.’

  ‘Ah, the barman as moral arbiter, there’s a nice little paradox. It’s not early to me; I’ve been working the night shift. Autonomy of the will, Immanuel Kant would say, a time and a place for everything, and I say no time like the present, no place like here, so are you going to do the job for which you are handsomely remunerated or do you want me to keep chawing your ear off, as they say.’

  ‘Manuel who? I don’t know him.’

  ‘Never mind. To revert: a schooner. Please.’

  ‘Would that be a Resch’s?’

  ‘A Doctor Toohey’s,’ she corrects him.

  ‘Sure.’

  He pulls her drink. What a windbag he thinks, she thinks. Anything to shut her up. Moi? He takes the proffered money. Commerce reduced to its fundamental elements. Ava can see it all. Haggle, barter, beg. Didn’t need all that palaver, just a little patience while Jimi worked it out. Humanity survives, as do the gastropods.

  She finds a quiet spot in a shadowy corner. Actually the whole place is filled with quiet spots, it’s one big quiet spot, but she likes the subterfuge of a darkened corner. The third man. A smuggler’s cove. Umbratilous, there’s a handy word. She sips. A sonnet comes to her, fully formed, but she has nothing to write it on. Well, she has the new ream but she cannot bring herself to break the seal. That act requires more considered ritual. Besides, she has no pen. Hopefully she’ll be able to remember it.

  While she is drinking, trying to memorise her opening couplet, the door opens to reveal a strange apparition. Already? So soon? At first she thinks it’s an astronaut. He’s wearing a silver space suit, the light from beyond shining all about him in a morning penumbra. He has a large, round, hairless, alien sort of head. The light bounces off it. Ava does not move. She’s hidden in shadow. She eases the brim of her helmet down low over her eyes. The figure (which for some reason reminds her of Engels) steps into the gloom of the bar and stands there. Slowly he, for it seems to be a he, there being no breasts or Golden Fleece to speak of, rotates on the spot, not seeing her, not seeing the barman, quite the automaton, a full half-circle and leaves the way he came in. The door pulls itself shut. Ava can see the head is actually a motorcycle helmet, not an alien skull. The strangely familiar form disappears. Nevertheless it is a weird moment and she wonders how she might weave the image of it into her next narrative, the one lying dormant in the new ream of paper in her bag. She can’t wait to get home and unleash it. However, that is an anticipated pleasure and she has learned how to delay gratification. She must exercise restraint, let the steam build up. All the precious moments of the day before that happens.

  Jimi the barman catches her eye across the room and shrugs. He’s no more in the know than she is. Strange figures every hour of the day and night in his world. Ava shrugs back. Bugger it, the sonnet has gone. Something about the shade. In a gulp she finishes her drink, wipes the froth off her lip with the back of her hand, and rises. She waves farewell to Jimi, who gives her a salute. She leaves the front bar and goes round the side of the building to the bottle shop. A little bell tinkles above her head as she enters. In a moment there is Jimi from within, now playing a different role. People are so versatile, she thinks.

  ‘You again,’ he says, unsurprised.

  ‘Me forever and for always.’

  ‘Look, love, I’m just trying to do my job.’

  ‘Something for which I would offer you eternal encouragement.’

  ‘What would you like?’

  She buys two bottles
of Penfolds Sweet Sherry. Nectar of the proverbials.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ says Jimi.

  ‘There, see, it’s easy, isn’t it.’

  She wanders back along the street, the railway station on her left, past the Niagara café to the corner and, hard-a-starboard, down the hill again, past the various heathen churches, the school, the PO, the banks, the garage on the corner. The second journey along the same path always seems shorter than the first. Who said that? Was it Kant or was it Noddy?

  At the bottom of the hill, beyond the commercial precinct of the shopping strip she makes her way to Hinkler Park, lovely and green, with its skeletal monkey bars in the shapes of aeroplanes. Why this municipal fixation with aeroplanes? she wonders. She finds a park bench by a laurel hedge and takes the weight off her legs. It’s the sort of hedge the boys have secret hidey-holes inside where they hide their cigarettes and girly magazines. The palpitations in her chest are trying to tell her something; that lost sonnet perhaps. She rolls up her trousers and looks at her legs, their scars and bumps and varicose veins. She thinks: immortality.

  Time to twist the cap off the sherry, which makes a pretty cellophane crinkling-at-Christmas sort of noise. She raises the bottle to her lips. Lovely. The luv-erly lava boiling in her belly. She sips again and closes her eyes. The gas of satisfaction rising in her gullet. The watery sun illuminates the canals and tributaries in her eyelids thin as parchment, thin as Bible paper, lovely and pink, like maps of unknown cities. The Nile river delta perhaps, from eight thousand feet. She opens her eyes. Hinkler Park, this is where she is. It could be anywhere, she anyone, and yet it is not.

  A young mother wearing a calf-length Laura Ashley dress is pushing a child on one of the swings. Presumably it’s her child, although that’s not guaranteed. She might be a governess. Or a kidnapper. Higher and higher, the child squeals in delight. High as an elephant’s retina. Ava can see there is some sort of resemblance. The floral patterns of their clothes are not dissimilar, though that might be chance. An empty stroller stands to one side like a burnt-out tank in the desert.

  Ava thinks back to her own children, long ago. Where are they now? What part of the world? She has no idea. Whom do they resemble? She has not seen the boy since he was eight years old. Would she recognise him? She remembers looking at him through a window impregnated with chicken wire. She remembers rowing on a lake together, laughing at the ducks. It is as if her children happened in another womb, in another person. Not the shrivelled-up walnut she has in her. Like those Chinese women she has heard tell of who carry around granite foetuses inside them till they die. Children dead and ossified. Never born. A loss too great to bear. The body clinging to its grief. She has read about that. The body clinging to its grief.

  She drinks. She may as well drink. See Ava drinking. She thinks, instead, about her manuscript. The glowing journey of it. Her knees start to jiggle. She cannot sit still with the anticipation. How could they not like this one? Yet, how dare they not like the others? Half in fury and half in triumph she jumps to her feet, whips out her machete and waves it in the air.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ she shouts to the sky. Ava swishes her machete at the nearby laurel hedge and lops off a thin branch. Across the park the paisley woman with the child stares at her, the oscillating swing the only movement. Quickly she drags on the chain and brings the swing to an ungainly halt. The child whines at this rough treatment.

  ‘I will not be a captive to biography,’ Ava cries.

  The woman hauls her child off the swing seat and marches smartly off, dragging the stroller, hauling the poor little tyke by the arm, crying now, there’s injustice for you.

  Ava sheathes her machete, sitting back on her bench. It’s a beautiful day, even if it is starting to cloud over. Don’t ruin it with imponderables, old girl. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Once the mother and child have gone, Ava has the park to herself. Breathing room. She has the idea to sit on one of the swings. There’s no one about; she may as well kick up her heels. It’s a public park. The seat, or rather the chains at its sides, are a little tight, but she manages to squeeze into it. Made for smaller bottoms than hers. She gives herself a push backwards with her toes. Soon she has some momentum and it’s like her muscles remember the routine, like riding a bicycle again after fifty years. The body remembers. She kicks her legs out and leans back on the forward swing, tucks her feet under her and tilts forward on the backswing. Back and forth like a pendulum. She goes higher and higher. Her helmet falls off and rolls on the grass. No matter. She’s flying. Admittedly she’s not flying very high. Even so she sees herself poised at the apex, a frozen frame from Zeno’s paradox. Light flickering through the leaves. Slowing at last, every fractured moment contains the animated essence of a new person, multiple Avas, each one living a slightly different, parallel life, until at last the zoetrope approaches an impossible stillness.

  And suddenly she’s nauseated and seasick and has to drag her heels in the wood chips to come to a complete stop. The seasick blood rushes around in her ears. No wonder people grow out of this, she thinks, like climbing trees. Two feet planted on the ground, that’s where common sense lives. Otherwise you’re at the fickle whim of gravity. Ava extricates herself from the chains, gives her hips a bit of a rub. But Ava, she tells herself, wasn’t it such fun. Wouldn’t her sister, Red, have loved that? Leaning back, her feet touching the sky. Shouldn’t all life be this state of dizzy adventure? Wonderful, fluid delirium. Isn’t that what the romance of her past has taught her? She picks up her helmet and clamps it on her wind-swept hair, squashing down those contradictory thoughts, squash them down to a manageable frenzy more appropriate for a quiet suburban stroll or a picnic in the park. She strolls. See Ava strolling. Or perhaps ambling. One step at a time. There is still, at day’s eventual wane, the long walk back to her hut, and the idea of that is exhausting. She has to garner her reserves. These old immortal legs don’t feel quite up to it just yet.

  Her hut. Home of the gods and all the wondrous figments of her past. Where her dolls line the windowsills and the cats stand guard, awaiting her return. And her books, her books. To the unknowing eye it might be construed as the yawning maw of Hell. Only she knows better. She must remember to buy more cat food. Was that on her list? Where is her list? Plenty of time for that, anyway, she thinks. As always she hopes the rats can fend for themselves in her absence. Plutus and Bacchus. So far they have lived together most harmoniously, a lesson to all, although she cannot know what they get up to while she is away. Rats, when their conversation dries up, are, naturally enough, rat-like.

  Wary of the look the young mother threw her way (young mothers can be so judgemental and treacherous), Ava leaves the park and walks on. She’s usually very good at walking. Picaresque, is that her style? Meandering? It’s Oscar’s certainly, and what she herself aspires to, but Ava is probably more agitated and driven, so the combination of the two is sometimes exhausting. She heads south down Lurline Street past the RSL club towards the escarpment. Past manicured gardens and houses the insides of which she can only imagine with a vague trepidation. What sorts of lives are being lived in there? What sorts of carpet and cutlery? It’s like trying to imagine the insides of the Kremlin or the Taj Mahal. She passes a municipal council vehicle by the side of the road. A yellow backhoe and its operator are digging a hole. Or else it is a trench. What did Conrad say? Every turn of the path has its seduction. Now there’s work to admire. They are surrounded by a makeshift fence of orange witch’s hats. The backhoe man is leaning against his black-knobbed levers, looking down into the hole. Ava follows his eye. At the bottom another man is labouring away at the dirt with a spade. It’s an impressive hole and Ava has nothing but pleasant envy for it, although God knows what the heck they’re trying to do. Perhaps it’s the sort of thing men do all the time: dig a hole, fill it in again. Entropy. That would explain the state of a lot of things.

>   Eventually the men realise she is watching them and a degree of self-consciousness seems to enter their work. The man in the hole stops digging. The other man on the backhoe points into the hole, but this rudimentary gesture seems to have no meaning, apart from looking authoritative. Hole, it declares. Spade. The colour of the dirt is called sinopia. She might paint this scene. The Work of Kings. The workmen look at her.

  ‘Carry on, chaps,’ she calls, waving regally, and, turning away, carries on herself.

  She wanders, all right – saunters – down to the cliff top which constitutes, in a literal, topographical sense, the edge of town. She thinks of all the radiant ways she has described her wandering. New ones come to her. A dandy, a whirling dervish. Thoughts for later. The footpath spreads to a broader concourse like a stain across a kitchen floor. The edge of town at Echo Point is fenced in to stop people accidentally falling to their doom, or else swallow-diving off the lip of the precipice. Ava stands at the fence and swigs from her bottle. The clouds like drowned sheep in the valley. Other clouds like saintly sheep ascending to the heavens. Up there a little Cessna farts across the sky.

  The view is renowned. There are a handful of tourists with their cameras at the ready, beguiled by the fleeting moment. The cold. The fact that it’s a weekday. A few cars pull up and park. A buzzing motor scooter slowly circumnavigates the turning circle then buzzes away.

  Along the fence another old woman leans against the wire, staring into the distance. Her hair is glaucous blue. She has a plastic rain hat on even though it is not raining. Staring, not so much into the distance, but into some purer vacancy. Ava knows that stare, where there is no horizon. Her eye sees nothing. The corneas drying in the air. It’s a stare of common anguish. How would you ever know what goes on in the heart of another woman? thinks Ava. Even she who has had the writerly benefit of that conjuring is still not sure. How another person thinks? What they might see? But she can try. Is that not her charge?