by Mark O'Flynn
‘I think I fancy an absinthe,’ she declares. ‘That’s what Oscar would have in a place like this.’
‘I don’t know if you’ll get that here, Mum.’
‘What about a cigar?’
‘I didn’t know you smoked cigars.’
‘I don’t. But I have a sudden urge, and one thing I have learned is to give in to your sudden urges.’
‘Even if they’re illegal?’
‘Cigars aren’t illegal.’
‘Fair enough. What do you think of the view?’
Ava glances at the scene: ‘As Oscar said: A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.’
‘Yes, well,’ says Vladimir, irritated, ‘I suppose to you that makes sense.’
‘To me and Oscar … I tried to procure some morphine today, but was prevented only through lack of supply.’
‘What do you want morphine for?’
‘A sudden urge.’
‘But why?’
‘To dream. To yield to my dreams.’
He stares at her. They find a table by the window. Vladimir gazes out at the spectacle, perhaps finding he cannot look at his mother. A waitress brings them a menu.
Seeing it he gulps. Such prices. And, counting, there are nine courses. Not dishes, courses!
‘Just drinks, thanks,’ says Vlad, playing the part.
Studying her menu, Ava asks: ‘What’s in a Screaming Lizard?’
‘The ingredients are listed on the back, madam.’
Ava says, ‘I just want to hear you say them.’
‘Oh. Crème de menthe, green chartreuse and soda water.’
‘Ah, chartreuse. Lovely. Yes. Bring me two.’
The girl glances at Vlad.
‘I’ll have water, thanks,’ he says.
The waitress looks confused.
‘Is that two for you, madam?’
‘Of course. And would you have a cigar?’
‘I’m afraid there is no smoking in the dining area.’
‘It’s all right, I don’t smoke. Tell me, is Conan Doyle here? Did a little bird tell me that?’
Vladimir comes to the waitress’s aid. In another incarnation she could have been the sort of girl he’d have liked to ask out, and might have – the cliché strikes – taken home to meet his mother.
‘Mum, Conan Doyle is long dead.’
‘But he ate here, didn’t he? I seem to recall. Or did I make that up?’
‘I think he did,’ says the waitress, who may as well be called Verity. ‘It’s in the pamphlet.’
‘Did he order a Screaming Lizard?’
‘I don’t know … I’ll see if I can find out,’ says the poor girl now called Verity.
‘Mum,’ sighs Vlad, ‘she’s just trying to do her job.’
‘What? It’s a legitimate question.’
There is a pained silence between them while they wait for the drinks. Other people are eating their entrees, talking amongst themselves. Whispering in her ear Oscar has another point to make about the view: ‘When I look at a map and see what an ugly country Australia is, I feel I want to go there and see if it cannot be changed into a more beautiful form. That has been the ultimate purpose behind all my work too.’
‘I see,’ says Vlad.
They proceed to debate the merits of the view and views in general. Good points and bad. This one’s too Turneresque for Ava’s liking, as if Zeus’s beard had caught fire in a field of opalescent, corrugated wavelets. Whew! Sometimes she exhausts even herself. Vlad doesn’t ask her to repeat it. Stylistic excess, that’s a phrase she doesn’t want to hear again. When the drinks arrive, green as algae in an unlilied pond, they clink glasses.
‘To you, Mum.’
Ava says, ‘Alcoholidays.’
Vlad does not smile. It’s galling. They sip.
‘So cruel, so royal a drink,’ she says, her hand assisting with a regal wave.
Sometimes she makes no sense. Sometimes she’s sharp as a tack.
Not much more can be said about the view, as the windows continue their darkening. Ava skates her gaze about the opulent features of the room, the curlicues in the cornices, the brass door handles, the ornate rococo frames about the mirrors.
‘Nice carpet,’ she says.
Vlad looks at the carpet and has nothing further to add. The ice tinkles in his water glass. Their conversation seems to come out of thin air.
‘I’ve been wondering,’ she says, ‘how you’ve coped with a name like Vladimir Ilyich.’
‘I’ve had a long time to get used to it.’
‘You haven’t found it to be a burden?’
‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.’
‘I suppose so. Who said that?’
‘I forget. Anyway, at least I didn’t run off and get another one when it didn’t suit me.’
There is still a little spark between them. You will eat your porridge. I will not.
Is this why’s he’s come? Revenge for his name? The soap in his eyes.
‘Well, since you bring it up, I’ve never had the chance to ask you as an adult, but why did you give me that name?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. A rush of blood to the head.’
‘Great. Named after a rush of blood.’
‘I must have been come over with a fit of patriotism.’
‘But you’re not Russian.’
‘No, but I have the blood of the Cossacks coursing through my veins.’
‘Really?’ Vladimir drinks. He must wish it was vodka.
‘So I thought at the time. Change it if you don’t like it. My name,’ says Ava, ‘has been a great – counterpoise – to me.’
They drink. Ava swirls the green pond water around in her mouth. She puts down one empty glass and begins on the next.
‘I worked for a while as a book repairer in the Auckland library,’ she reminisces. ‘I don’t think I knew you then.’
He doesn’t know what to say to this because he clearly remembers when he was fifteen going into the library to catch a glimpse of her in some dimly lit back room, head down in meticulous work over a damaged book. It was soon after her release from the mental institution. His mother, from whom he crept away. And did she look up and see him? And is this not her memory?
After a while Vladimir speaks: ‘Okay, Mum, now it’s my turn. Seeing how you live, I’ve been wanting to ask you about your health. The hospital said you absconded.’
‘Which hospital? Auckland?’
‘No. Here.’
‘Oh … My health? Dear boy, thank you for your concern but I’m as fit as an oyster.’
She pounds her chest, straight away wishing she hadn’t. When she stops coughing she says:
‘How long have you wanted to ask me that?’
‘Oh, that’s … that doesn’t … Is your leg okay?’
‘Nothing another Screaming Lizard won’t fix.’
‘Mum, I’m being serious. I was wondering about your – the state of your—’
‘You mean my mind?’
‘Well. Yes. Your mental health.’
‘You’re very presumptuous, my son. I told you before. Nothing was proved. I did not pull that boy’s hair.’
‘What? No, not that. Mum, I’m talking generally, Auntie Red told me, it’s common knowledge.’
‘What is? Rubbish. Anyway it’s a bit late in the day to worry about that, isn’t it? You never cared last time. You didn’t even visit when I was in that awful place.’
‘Dad wouldn’t let us,’ the son protests, and she can hear the buried whine in his voice. ‘Dad said you abandoned us. He said you were – dangerous … There was that time we were in that rowboat and it began to sink and you jumped overboard—’
‘I didn’t jump overboard. He jumped overb
oard. I hugged you to me.’
‘My memory isn’t very clear. It was so long ago. And we were only kids. We were scared.’
‘And that’s supposed to be a source of comfort to me, is it?’
‘Mum. I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to fight with you.’
Ava looks as though she wouldn’t mind a fight with someone. Seven years she waited for someone to visit, tell her what was going on. Seven years. Vlad drinks his water. As the waitress approaches he gives her a surreptitious shake of the head and she diverts her course to calmer waters. Ava sneers. All this pussy-footing around the fairy floss of her nerves.
Gradually Ava’s resolve fades. The muscles in her jaw let go and her cheeks hang limply off their bones. There’s no one worth fighting. It’s an old battle she’s lost many times before. Night after night, why must she revisit the infinitely varied scenes of her failure? Why has he brought her to this point of dejection, perfectly formed in the pit of her gut? She feels suddenly tired. She feels her age. Her leg is giving her gyp. The painkillers wearing off.
‘I think I’d like to go home.’
‘Are you sure? I thought I’d bring you up here for a treat. Get you out of that house. My shout!’
‘Two Screaming Lizards is more of a treat than I’ve had in many a moon.’
‘Okay, if that’s what you want.’
‘It’s all been a bit of a shock. The accident, and seeing you again.’
‘I’m sure. A shock for me too.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing.’
Ava upends her second cocktail.
‘Bottoms up,’ she says, but her heart isn’t in it. For a moment her lips are green. Drinks like a man.
Vlad picks up his helmet and goes to the bar to pay the bill while Ava pulls on her smelly coat. The golden cravat limp at her collar. Unbelievable how much those two drinks have cost. He pockets the change, Ava pockets the coasters, while the waitress called Verity watches them go: a funny couple she has forgotten as soon as the door swings shut. Who on earth was Conan Doyle?
* * *
It is dark at last outside. Severed foliage litters the path beside the scooter. The ride back is weirdly a sober affair. She’s frightened of falling off. Ava hangs on tight and buries her face once more against Vladimir Ilyich’s back. This stranger. This amoeba. What if she pulled out her machete and sliced his throat like Medea? No, that probably wouldn’t help, and she’d definitely fall off. Her leg is throbbing rhythmically. She remembers to lean into the corners. The passing cars seem fast and dangerous, dreamy, their headlights like asteroids, all on their mysterious orbit. Or collision course. Her zoetrope flickering past. Her arms hug her grown son, and while there is some ill-defined memory, a spark of warmth in this human contact, the wind whips around her, inside her coat and out, and she is cold.
NIGHT
They return to the hut, and even at night Ava, something breaking in her, sees how bleak and forlorn it is, how it must look to the eyes of another. Stupid old bus in the headlight, perched up on brick pylons like a fish caught in a net. The colour of the shack indistinguishable from the surrounding dun-coloured scrub. Grey grey grey. The jagged sheets of asbestos lying about the place in the grass. It looks to her newly opened eye somehow diminished. Her teeth chatter and the damp pocket of her coat is cold against her thigh.
Wattle saplings brush against them as Vlad weaves between the trees and switches off the ignition. The Vespa’s engine ticks in the newborn stillness. He remembers to give her the machete. It’s such a shame about the topi, she thinks, but maybe someone handed it in to the police. Maybe, lost and bedraggled, it might wend its own way home. The breeze hisses softly in the tree tops. She sees, through his eyes, the fact that the hut has only one door. There’s hardly room for two. If there had been two there might not have been enough room for the inside. The hut would simply have been a brief passageway, an interruption, no more than an interlude between one part of the outside and another. And they, phantoms, passing through.
Inside, Ava remembers that to stoke the fire is the first thing which needs her attention. She turns her face to the ash. Vlad, making himself home in the kitchen, unwraps his chops and slaps them into a fry pan battered as an old hubcap. He shifts the strange parcel wrapped in brown paper off the bread board. It’s surprisingly heavy. He places it next to another on the sideboard.
‘What is all this crap, Mum?’
‘Posterity.’
Parcels of stones and feathers and chicken wire. In one of them, she can’t remember which one, there is an orange tuft of Eddie Tebbit’s hair. Vlad shrugs. Ava sees that her son doesn’t understand. Why should he?
She pours the beer.
‘Do you have a sharp knife?’
She has only one sharp knife.
Using the machete he dices up some potatoes. Once the fire’s blazing, things are much more cheery. What was she worried about? It’s just her old dolour doing its rounds. The smells, the sizzling fat and its fabulous smoke. There is a man, a living man in her house, at the stove, cooking up a storm just for her. When did that last happen? Did it ever happen? Her son. Look at his broad back. A man. Out of the ether.
She sets the table, first moving the typewriter aside. Where shall she put it? Here on the draining board next to the sink? No, it might get wet. There’s no room, so cluttered is the place with posterity. She picks up the machine holus-bolus and takes it into the cold bedroom. She thinks about a few homey touches, a tablecloth might be nice, but remembers there isn’t one. She used it as a curtain to keep the light out a couple of summers ago, and now it’s nothing but a faded dishrag. Instead she snaps open the packaging and takes two pink foolscap pages from the new ream and lays them on the table as place mats. It’s a special occasion after all.
The spuds bubble away in their pot, steam fogging up the kitchen window. Vladimir has found candles in a drawer full of miscellaneous gubbins, that’s the only word for it, and has placed them strategically about the room. Hang the expense. More candles, she reminds herself to put it on the list for tomorrow. While the potatoes boil, Ava takes off her boots and a sock to examine her foot. She scratches at a rash between her toes. Vladimir sees how pale and tiny it is. The long, yellow nails. The thin bones within. His mother’s foot, fragile and almost translucent. Hard to credit the work it’s done over the years. She puts the sock back on. He sees that her socks are different colours.
Remember, thinks Ava, their evening, this refined pleasure is finite. Oscar will need to direct the conversation before she is overcome. In a while Vladimir drains the spuds, splashes in some milk, some salt and butter, and mashes them up with a fork. He serves up the chops onto two china plates of different size. There aren’t any others. He places them on the table.
‘Have you got any sauce?’ he asks.
‘Sauce? Do you know I forgot to go to the shops.’
‘You went to the shops today.’
‘Yes, but I forgot my list.’ Then, as if remembering, ‘And I got knocked down by a lunatic driver.’
‘You were lucky.’
She studies him seriously, the wrinkles beginning in his cheeks, the eyebrows about to go wild with age. They’re real, aren’t they?
‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘I think I was run over today by a figment of my own imagination.’
‘Maybe you were.’
‘Though it felt real enough.’
They sit in candlelight opposite each other. There’s plenty more mashed potatoes in the pot. Silence while they eat. The clinking of cutlery. The sipping of their beer.
‘I wish you’d get rid of those rats.’
‘Well, that’s not logical,’ Ava snorts, offering no further elaboration.
Vladimir places his knife and fork together and eases back, stretches his spine against the backrest of the chair. After licking her fingers Ava
leans towards him and says:
‘Can I have your bone?’
‘Sure,’ he says lightly, but cannot bring himself to look at her sucking it.
After their meal Vlad boils the kettle and makes a pot of tea. Ah, the endless cups of tea, Ava rhapsodises. He doesn’t twirl the pot six times and so it won’t taste as nice, but it’s nice enough. She stirs in some sugar, watching the tiny maelstrom. Whirlpool, that’s the word she was thinking of before. Even her words are leaving her. Vladimir drinks his tea quickly then rises to wash the dishes at the sink.
‘Let me help you.’
‘No, Mum. You rest.’
However, Ava does not know how to rest. Rest eludes her. In the corner of his eye she’s hobbling about, getting under his feet. Making sure he’s doing it correctly. It’s her house. Her spirit seems to pace relentlessly. What would she be doing if he wasn’t here? What does she do every night?
She watches his back as he passes the clean dishes from the sink to the rusty dish rack. He does not want her to help him, to lay claim to him. It’s not an act of union, of bondage, it’s just a chore. It doesn’t take long.
‘What about these spuds, Mum?’
‘Leave them. I might have them for supper.’
While he works his mother hums to herself in her pacing. It takes a little while to recognise the tune. Then – she’s humming: All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, and this somehow fills the air with melancholy horror. When he’s finished he turns to her and says:
‘I read that book you wrote, Mum.’
She’s astonished. ‘Which one?’
‘The one about the apple pickers. Dave and Red. What was it called?’
‘The Apple Pickers.’
‘Yeah. That’s it. Dave, that was really you, wasn’t it, disguised as a bloke.’
‘Oh, all that happened before you were born. Red and I had the time of our lives.’
‘It was good, Mum. I enjoyed it.’
The fire spits and chuckles to itself. There is a crack in the mortar between two bricks of the chimney where a little dribble of smoke seeps out, gathering at the highest corner of the roof.
