Last Days of Ava Langdon

by Mark O'Flynn

  ‘Thank you, Vladimir. That’s nice to hear.’

  ‘Call me Itchy.’

  ‘Itchy.’

  ‘Bit late coming, I know, but, yeah, I got a laugh out of it.’

  ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’

  ‘So if you were Dave, and Red was Auntie Red, who was Engels?’

  ‘Engels was your father. Engels was’ – she almost sings – ‘every man who done treated me wrong.’

  ‘Well, you certainly taught him a lesson.’

  ‘Who, your father?’

  ‘No, Engels.’

  ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I … Have you seen her, your aunt?’

  ‘I see her occasionally. Christmas, and so on. She lives in Wellington now. She’s worried about you too.’

  ‘I’m so busy I rarely have time to think of her.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe. There’s a photo of her just there on the wall.’

  They consider the photo of Ava’s sister, Red, her heart-shaped face, and the absence with which it fills the room.

  ‘Does she still play tennis?’

  ‘Not for a long time.’

  He finds a tea towel, pretty threadbare, and turns back to the dishes. Keeping busy.

  ‘Leave them,’ she says.

  So now there is nothing but the awkward adieus, painful, mixed with ambiguous relief. They are at the door, moving outside into the night. The air is icy. The drizzle has stopped, on again, off again, but is mounting its forces, getting its wind like a boxer between rounds. Vladimir stuffs the spare helmet into the side pannier as if he is trying to drown a brown dog. He kicks the Vespa out of gear and wheels it to the road. All dark everywhere. The stars extinguished. Ava trails along behind. Vladimir pops the bike on the stand then turns back to his mother. This small old woman who knows so little and yet who knows so much more than him. It’s not a knowledge he cares to own.

  ‘Good night, Mum.’

  ‘Goodbye, son,’ she says. ‘Itchy, I like that.’

  ‘It’s because I had nits at school.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Much more prosaic. Perhaps you might drop by for some breakfast in the morning? I know where to get some eggs.’

  ‘Sure, Mum. That sounds like a good plan.’

  However, she knows he won’t come. She knows that if she got up early and went to Gearins to intercept him he’d be gone. He’s doing what sons do.

  She sees it all, parading before her in some lost vision. There is no resolution. He leans down and gives his mother a kiss. She is his mother; he can’t deny that. People kiss their mothers. She feels almost coy. He kisses her, and for a moment she clings to him, kisses him on the mouth. Then he breaks away and pulls on his silver helmet so she can’t get at him anymore. He slips on his jacket. Swings his leg through the scooter and stamps on the kick-starter. It belches into life. The headlight illuminates the nearby trees, the overbearing foliage. He gives it a rev, and then pulls slowly into the road, bumping over the ditch. These final moments sear themselves into her eyes. Then the tail light slowly dissolves up the road past the orchard, getting smaller until it turns the corner and is gone.

  Ava is on her own with the silence, the moon failing to break through the shreds of the canvas sky.

  She stares after the vanished motor scooter. It’s not coming back. She realises she’s alone, outside, like a rabbit out of its burrow with all the night’s eyes alert to her. There is not even the light from a single window to interrupt the darkness. Apart from her own. It’s freezing. She limps back. The fire roars for a moment in the draught as she opens the door. In the ensuing silence it’s like the great human bulk of him is still present in the room. The echo of his presence. The shadow of his energy dancing with her. She does a private little jig. But her elation does not last long. Already she feels it, the spirit of his presence, dispersing like mist.

  She slams the door shut behind her. Then opens it and slams it shut again with more power, just so as to have the satisfaction of slamming it properly. It doesn’t quite make the noise she’s after. The candle flames flutter wildly. She cannot think of the best words to accompany this gesture. Perhaps fuck might be one. A raw scream another. They will come to her later, no doubt. After the event.

  So she stokes up the fire and soon the house is cooking. Little claws scratching up in the ceiling where it is warmest. It’s almost too hot, but she’s reluctant to open the door again to let any of the heat escape. The windows she can’t open. They’ve been stuck for years. A sheet of cardboard is taped over one broken six-inch pane. The eye she has painted on it stares at her. The rats are sitting on the table, waiting. Her house. Better than anything she had in New Zealand. Ava, here, alone as she ever was. Why didn’t she just hammer him with the gurlet? She is so glad he did not remind her of his father, although the timbre of his voice had a ghost in it. Perhaps that was the point of his visit, to make her confront her ghosts. Perhaps in it there was a message from Red. Well, to confront things, there is only one way that she knows.

  She goes into the bedroom and is momentarily surprised by the incongruous image of the typewriter resting askew on her pillow. No rest for the wicked. She picks it up and its heavy indentation lies square on the pillow. She lugs it out to the table and places it down. She has an idea for the next chapter of The Saunteress. Hang on, that one’s already gone, posted this morning. A living, breathing, haunted thing. Soon to be in a bookshop near you. What now? All right then, she has an idea for something, and part of the poem she lost in the pub this morning returns to her. She plucks two sheets from the new rose ream and inserts them with a skilled hand.

  My one and only heart-shaped leaf

  I would never find another

  that would bring me similar relief

  from who I am and who I am not.

  She shrinks into the maimed sunset

  beyond the shadowed seas

  a halo of pure light encir.ling her,

  the s.n hanging its tired o.d head at l.st

  in th. w.st, th. fu.l m..n ca.ght in th. tr..s

  tr.pp.d like a .ish in a ne.

  She’ll attend to the corrigenda later. Doesn’t quite sound like the beginning of something, she thinks, the setting sun and that, but something she can build towards. A fish in a net, where did that come from? She peers closely at the last few lines. She can still make them out, even though the keys have punctured the paper like Braille. She can feel the dots under her fingers. One of these days she’s going to have to buy a new ribbon.

  Ava pushes the typewriter away. She doesn’t feel like writing tonight, which is not like her. Normally the muse would have her up half the night, and then struggling for sleep. It must be the shock. The accident has petrified her blood. There’s still a bottle of Resch’s left, so that’ll put the icing on the cake. And the sherry. Her kidneys are aching gently. Perhaps in her dreams her son, or her sister, will tuck her in so she might sleep at last. The night is pressing in. Two books. Do two books stand up against the weight of the night? The weight of the silence bearing down on her? Are two books enough? Is that all the noise she has in her soul? Of course not, but it seems they will have to do. The impermeable darkness punctured and punctuated by those two fading stars, the light by which her life shone brightest. They will have to whisper for her. Almost extinguished now. Outside the night is blind, hissing with the susurrant ebb and flow of the tree tops. Her little inner spark tossed on the waters.

  She scrunches up the pink foolscap placemats and throws them in the fire. The chop fat makes them catch and blaze quickly. Then, from the pile atop the cupboard she picks the next sheet of King Willy Weeties cardboard, cut from the box she flattened this morning. There are no more Weeties, she remembers, she’ll have to get some tomorrow. And a ribbon. Maybe she should make a list. The throbbing in her leg is starting to get worse. Those stupid nurses, they should have fixed it properly. Sh
e labours to her feet and finds the painkillers the hospital gave her. There are four left. She takes two and swigs them down with a mouthful of beer. Then she takes the other two.

  She spreads the cardboard out on the table. She fetches her paints and brushes from the old turpentine jar on top of the bookshelf. The books all in place, leaning like soldiers at ease. The dolls sitting like sentries or gargoyles between them. Where did she put her paints? The new ones she bought today. Ah, yes, she remembers, on the bed. She finds the parcel and tips it up. She has quite a collection now, quite a palette. There is the Armanth Red, the Artichoke, the Bangladesh Green, the Cadmium Yellow, Orange and Red, the Dark Byzantium, Electric Lime, Worn Leather Shoes, Tweed Coat. It’s as much about the names as the colours. She could move through the alphabet – no, the spectrum of colours, hovering like a rainbow over an apple green field, naming each one until she gets to … potato grey, congealing in the pot on the bench like a sort of cement, a sort of melted brain. A portrait of her coagulant, midnight soul. Maybe tomorrow she’ll wrap that up in wire and brown paper.

  But she’s not there yet. She changes out of her good trousers. Wouldn’t do to get paint on them. Changes into her pyjama pants. She unscrews a few lids and squeezes paint onto a saucer (a clean one). She takes a deep breath. All these things in a life to take account of. All the raw materials: a fingernail, a cramp, a woman at a fence. The fence itself. A hole in the side of the road. A grave. A Screaming Lizard. Her headstone on the bread board. A tuft of ginger hair. And is it her life, or someone else’s? She takes a brush and dips it into a fanciful colour called Flattery. She starts at twelve o’clock and, moving anti-clockwise, her wrist traces a circle to the left. Of course the paint runs out so she dips again and, starting at midday, or is it midnight? traces to the right until her two arcs have joined to form a perfect line. Not a circle. The line is perfect, just what she was hoping to achieve, not the circle, but the line, which might be a river stone inside a cage, or it might be a silver space helmet, a face uplifted to the sun, or the sun itself gazing down. It might be anything. A heart-shaped leaf swollen to its extremities. She does not know what she has begun, only that it feels like the most important thing she has ever attempted. And it’s not finished. That’s the beauty of it. It never ends. She stands up and stares at it. Her line. Coming back to itself. Complete and hollow both. She looks at the black windows. She can see her own reflection looking back from the glass, an old woman, hair awry, all her fervour gone. If only she had another life, would she want it? Is that Ava or someone else? By some other name. It’s getting late. She’ll finish it tomorrow. What now? What now? Once more it’s starting to rain. The mildew on the ceiling will like that. And who’s that lying prone on the floor? See Ava lying prone. See, she’s only got on one slipper.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Ava Langdon is a thinly disguised fictional version of the Australian writer Eve Langley, sadly neglected these days. I first became interested in her when researching a play about a fabricated meeting between Langley and Eleanor Dark, in their time two relatively well-known writers who never, as far as I can establish, met. Yet this is not a historical novel. It couldn’t be. Little is known, or documented, about Langley’s last days or months or even years, as her mental health deteriorated in her hut in the Blue Mountains. When I first saw it the hut was still standing, surrounded by the strange wire parcels that she made. Now it is a sad, dilapidated ruin. Over time she became increasingly reclusive. It is not even certain exactly when she died. If anything she was probably more addled than I have portrayed here. Anything I have presumed could therefore only be fiction; there is no evidence that she did any of the things I have suggested. As such, this is not a biographical novel. I have used a few biographical ‘facts’ and aspects of Langley’s personality, recordings of her speaking and, of course, her writing, to inform an approximation of her voice, a voice which still has resonance for me. Any words or actions I have given to Ava can only exist in the realm of the imaginary.

  Quotations from Oscar Wilde come from:

  Redman, A (ed.), The Wit and Humour of Oscar Wilde, Dover Publications, New York, 1959.

  Other books I have found useful include:

  Frost, L (ed.), Wilde Eve, Random House, Sydney, 1999.

  Thwaite, JL, The Importance of Being Eve Langley, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1989.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A number of people have read various drafts of the manuscript and given generously of their time and expertise. I would like to thank Deb Westbury, Carol Major, Alice Major and Philip Dodd for reading earlier versions of Ava at different stages of her evolution and making very helpful comments. Also Annie Byron and Maureen Green, who helped me to hear the formative cadences of Ava’s voice. I would also like to thank my agent, Gaby Naher, for her faith in the character and in me. At UQP I would like to thank Madonna Duffy and Ian See for their brilliance and enthusiasm, as well as the marvellous eye and ear of my editor, Judith Lukin-Amundsen. Last, but not least, my family Barb, Liv and Eamon. Thank you.

  First published 2016 by University of Queensland Press

  PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

  www.uqp.com.au

  uqp@uqp.uq.edu.au

  © Mark O’Flynn 2016

  This book is copyright. Except for private study, research,

  criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act,

  no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

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  Cover design by Christabella Designs

  Cover image by Anna Pogossova/Getty Images

  Typeset in 12.5/17.5 pt Adobe Caslon Pro by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

  Author photograph by Barbara Fitzgerald

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available at http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  ISBN

  978 0 7022 5415 4 (pbk)

  978 0 7022 5778 0 (ePDF)

  978 0 7022 5779 7 (ePub)

  978 0 7022 5780 3 (Kindle)

  University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.