by Rod Jones
She had left school at seventeen with typing and Pitman’s Shorthand and taken a job in an office to save money and go travelling. She couldn’t wait to get away from Arcadia, with its stifling narrowness. Arcadia. The little town near the South Australian border where she had spent her childhood. Dad had only agreed to let her go to London because her cousin Justine was already there. Cathy had stayed with her for the first few months, before she made friends of her own. They went travelling together in Spain, Portugal, Morocco. When it was time for Justine to go home to Australia, Cathy had stayed on, found herself jobs through temp agencies, and it was only then—so it had felt to Cathy—that her life had really begun.
London had given Cathy her independence. She travelled in the Soviet Union by herself, and spent an entire summer driving through Yugoslavia, with her friend Connie, in a beat-up car. She’d fallen for a boy and followed him across America, before they’d parted ways in LA. And through all that, she’d never once had to ask her father to send money.
When she got home, she was appalled by the way nothing seemed to have changed. Dad still spoke to her as he always had. She was still the little girl who needed protection from the pain of losing her mother so young. He assumed that Cathy would continue to do officework and find someone solid to marry.
And now? She couldn’t bear to think about what Dad was going to say.
‘Do you know when I was happiest?’ she exclaimed abruptly, when David still hadn’t responded to what she had said about telling her father. ‘When I was all by myself, hitchhiking in Scotland. Never knowing from one day to the next where I was going to sleep.’
David looked up from his pile of papers. ‘I bet you didn’t tell your father about that.’
‘Even when I was little, I wanted to leave Arcadia and see the world. My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs Hampson, had been to England. She encouraged us to broaden our horizons. She used to have a map on the classroom wall, and all the children had to choose a country to do a project on.’
‘Which country did you choose?’
‘Cuba.’
‘Why Cuba?’
‘It was in the news that year. The missile crisis and all that.’
‘US imperialism! The Bay of Pigs invasion! That was a CIA operation, you know. Castro sent the invaders back to America. I would have had them all put against a wall and shot.’
Cathy hated it when David talked like that. These violent thoughts he came out with frightened her, especially when he talked with his friends in George Street, Murray and Vanessa.
She’d had the time of her life in the house in Swiss Cottage with her friends. In the evenings, someone taking their turn at cooking in the kitchen, the stereo blaring, Cathy and the others would perform for each other, miming and dancing along to their tapes.
One Monday evening in the July of 1973, they’d all gone to a Bowie concert at the Hammersmith Odeon. One of her housemates had scored free tickets.
Crack, baby, crack, show me you’re real.
She’d been amazed by the way David Bowie became Ziggy Stardust. People can do that too, she thought. We don’t have to stay the same all our lives. We can become whoever we want. That week, one of her friends happened to call her Ziggy, and it had stuck.
And now this other David. Could he see the Cathy who wanted to transform her life, to become a photographer perhaps, or even to go to university?
Every Friday night, they went to meetings at Murray and Vanessa’s house in George Street. David belonged to the same revolutionary group. They had a committee for everything and David was always writing articles for their newsletters and pamphlets. They all got up at six in the morning to sell their radical newspaper, Liberation, at factory gates—the meatworks, the Newport railway workshops, the Williamstown naval dockyards. Cathy woke when the alarm went off and felt him leave the bed.
She had never managed to unravel their particular political pedigree. David told her there were dozens of such groups on campus, all of them arguing about shades of interpretation. He had tried to explain it to her, but it was all so complicated that she decided it was not entirely her fault she had failed to follow. Marxists were like feuding families, their differences hardened into implacable hatred.
Still, she was accepted by the little clan in George Street. Vanessa with her flaming hair, her faded army shirts, and her boyfriend, Murray, with his Afghani sheepskin coat, along with a changing guard of hangers-on. Vanessa and Murray weren’t married either. Marriage is slavery! Marriage makes women property! Marriage is an outmoded bourgeois institution! Yes, marriage was becoming unfashionable, although Cathy knew from old friends that the couples in country towns and the suburbs who were still getting married could not understand why the inhabitants of Carlton and Fitzroy looked down their noses at them.
According to David, if anyone had a sound class analysis, it was Murray. But when he pronounced his views, it seemed to Cathy that she was hearing ready-made phrases that had been repeated by others, and that, while undoubtedly conscientious in his reading, Murray was just the tiniest bit inauthentic. When he used words like ‘hegemony’, she noticed that his voice wavered, almost imperceptibly, as though he had not entirely overcome what had once been his fear. It would be impossible ever to have a real conversation with Murray; she was sure he brought out those big words to hide how small he felt.
At those Friday night meetings, Cathy sat listening to them argue for hours. Even though she was exhausted after work, and had morning sickness, she was determined to stick by David, to take an interest in his friends, and perhaps even to somehow pick up the education she had missed out on. She sat with a glass from the flagon of rough red wine they drank, taking a careful sip from time to time. Booze only fuelled their eagerness to point out the faults in one another’s ‘method’. There was a self-righteousness in the tone of voice they used, all of them; it seemed like a virus. Even though she usually tried not to judge, she knew in her heart that they were narrow-minded people, in spite of their clothes and long hair, their grand pronouncements about how a future socialist society might be. They talked about liberation, but she couldn’t see anything free about them. They were just learning to be dictators. New students came to meetings; others left the group just as suddenly. And all the time Cathy felt dishonest not telling David what she really thought of these self-proclaimed radicals.
Cathy was reminded of a family who had moved to Arcadia when she was a child. Cathy and her father had always attended the small, rural Methodist church stuck by itself near the crossroads, where local families met on Sundays to pray and socialise. But this particular family went about trying to impose their ideas; they were strict, intolerant. She remembered one Sunday when the husband, Mr Eltham, had given an explanation of a reading from the Book of Isaiah—the sacrifice on receipt of good news. Why did they want to make a sacrifice when they heard good news, Cathy had wondered, and she wondered still. And within a month or two, without any reason, everyone had begun to talk like the Elthams, that same hectoring tone of doctrinal purity. Even Dad had caught the evangelical illness. Instead of her sunny Sunday mornings, there was this punishing seriousness. Families who had been friends fell out and abandoned their little wooden church to the newcomers, and started going instead to the big brick one in town. That had been Cathy’s first experience of how new people can turn up and cast a shadow over something that had been hers.
Even in t
he merry-go-round of new faces in Swiss Cottage, there had been shadows. A bossy couple, Tom and Maureen, had stayed for a while, know-it-alls who were always trying to outdo the others with their self-aggrandising travellers’ tales. They’d been on the road longer than everyone else, been to countries no one else had. Secretly, Cathy had laughed at them.
David told her that by getting married, they would be giving in to the class enemy. Cathy thought the enemy probably wouldn’t mind much whether they were married or not. But she didn’t want him to go against his principles. After all, she’d decided they were her principles, too.
She had earned her stripes in London and wasn’t going to swallow the country town’s conformist expectations. In Arcadia, girls got married and looked after the house while their husbands farmed. Cathy didn’t care any longer about husbands and wives and weddings in white, but she did want to be by David’s side so that together they could achieve their dreams: she with her photography, and David with the novel he was now talking about.
At one of those Friday nights in George Street, Vanessa came up to Cathy and casually asked, ‘Why David?’
Cathy froze. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you two are such a mismatch.’
‘A mismatch?’ Cathy smiled. Vanessa hadn’t meant to be hurtful. But she made Cathy feel that her life with David was provisional: it might end at any moment. What hurt her most was that Vanessa had given voice to Cathy’s own deepest fears. Were they a mismatch? Why had David chosen her? Were she and David together only because she was pregnant?
Cathy let Vanessa’s provocation go unanswered. She’d never liked confrontation. At university, as far as she could tell, the mind was a weapon of war, and words its arrows. And why should she want weapons? Vanessa and Murray were only happy when there was some kind of argument going on; they changed, their eyes were brighter when there was intellectual dispute in the air. Cathy, too, was drawn to these mysterious, dangerous energies and understood the importance of contesting ideas, but when David yelled at her, she felt it go right down into the fibre of her being.
She wondered if David might have been better off with a headstrong girl like Vanessa. And whether she should have chosen someone more stable and mature than David. Anything could set him off. And when his mood did turn abrasive—this wasn’t easy for her to admit to herself—was that, too, in some way her fault? They were incompatible. She was pretending, and so was he. That wasn’t easy for Cathy to admit to herself, either.
David often talked about ‘the emptiness of here’. He told her one day that it was a quote from his favourite book, My Brother Jack, and that he admired the way George Johnston and Charmian Clift had left the stifling boredom of Australia in the 1950s to live on Hydra. David gave her his well-worn copy and, as she read it, Cathy imagined herself and David living on a Greek island too, shutters on the windows, a grapevine growing over the courtyard. She told David that she could see them there already—and there was their child, standing in the doorway! But somehow she couldn’t bring herself to point out to David that George and Charmian were husband and wife.
Her cousin, Justine, phoned. She and Ian wanted to come around and meet the new boyfriend. Justine, now married, lived in South Yarra and worked in her husband’s travel agency in Toorak Road. They drove a Mercedes. Justine’s accent had altered to match that of the rich people she now mixed with.
Cathy was nervous all day. David’s desk in the front room would have to serve as a dining table. She moved his typewriter, threw a cloth over the desk and laid out knives and forks and glasses. Four unmatched, wobbly chairs. Over the meal, David lectured them on politics. Whitlam, he said, had achieved admirable things. He had delivered Australia from the stupidity of its own history. He had abolished conscription and got us out of Vietnam; he had given us free hospitals and universities. He had recognised Aboriginals’ and women’s rights. But Whitlam’s limitations were the limitations of social democracy. ‘What we need now,’ he declaimed, ‘is the nationalisation of the means of production, transport and exchange.’
Justine gave Cathy a strange look across the table. When she helped her carry the plates out to the kitchen, Justine asked, with a kind of terrified smile, ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’
Cathy didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t begun to show yet. How had Justine guessed? As soon as they got home, Justine would ring her parents, who would, no doubt, in turn ring Cathy’s father. He would then sit up late, anxious, in that farmhouse kitchen she knew so well.
Next morning, Dad was on the phone. ‘Your aunt tells me you’ve got some news.’ He said he was going to drive to Melbourne that afternoon to have a talk with her. He was keen to meet David, too.
Cathy showed him around. She was ashamed of how cheap everything looked—the wobbly camping table in the kitchen, the torn Leon Russell poster covering a crack in the wall, the fact that they couldn’t afford a fridge. She led him up the steep staircase to their bedroom, no wardrobe, clothes strewn around. The sliding window above the bed was made of opaque glass like a shower screen.
‘I wish you had a bit more comfort,’ Dad said when they were back in the front room, standing together awkwardly.
‘Lots of people have to put up with worse,’ David replied.
Cathy would have liked to have a few more chairs, a dresser, some framed prints, a little table with a lamp in the hallway. It was only David who was proud of their frugality. One night, walking home from work, when she had plucked up the courage to point out their neighbours’ lamp-lit room, the walls of books, the open fire, the wine, David had said, ‘I didn’t realise you were so petit-bourgeois.’ Cathy didn’t talk about furniture again.
‘When are you getting married?’ Dad asked when they were sitting down. His voice sounded reasonable, friendly, hopeful.
‘Marriage is outdated,’ David told him. ‘It makes the woman a possession—it’s hardly better than prostitution.’
Cathy was afraid she was going to vomit. The last thing she wanted was David picking a fight with her dad.
Dad had a fixed smile on his face. A gentle man, he was not used to harsh words. ‘Do you really believe that? Prostitution?’
Cathy looked helplessly at her father. Her own feelings were so mixed up by now, embarrassed by David, feeling sorry for Dad, angry at herself, defiant in the face of other people’s expectations, that she felt a choking sensation, the words refusing to come out.
She knew Dad did not understand David’s intentions, or how to make his own position clear in all this. ‘When you live in the country,’ he finally said, ‘the good opinion of your neighbours is important.’
Later, in the street as he was leaving, her father took David aside. She could hear them talking beside Dad’s old Ford Falcon. ‘What’s this business about not getting married? You won’t find a better girl than Cathy,’ he told David. ‘You’re entitled to your opinions about the institution of marriage and all that. But when the baby arrives, it deserves to have a family. As far as I’m concerned, if you don’t get married, then you’ll always be just some bloke that Cathy’s shacked up with.’
David dismissed him with a wave and went inside, leaving Cathy to cross the street to the car and kiss her father goodbye.
Dad must have been cursing his misfortune. Cathy knew how David must have seemed to him: a wild young hothead, a disturbing influence.
The next Su
nday night at seven o’clock, the phone rang. Cathy knew it would be her father. The long-distance rates were cheaper on Sundays. Dad asked if she would come up to the farm by herself one weekend. She could catch the train from Spencer Street after work and Dad would pick her up at the station in Arcadia. Cathy agreed to go. She would call him back and tell him which weekend.
She loved her father; she did not want to disappoint him. But she knew, of course, what her father was going to say. And what, really, was she going to say in reply? Although Cathy had grown out of the bridal swindle—the wedding-in-white lies she heard other girls carry on with—actually, she did not object at all to the idea of being married. Still, she knew she would repeat the same lines: ‘we don’t believe in marriage’ and ‘times have changed, you know’—and her dad would go on thinking she was allowing herself to be duped by this boy in the city who was refusing to face up to his responsibilities.
It wasn’t just David’s politics, his abrasive manner, his need to shock people. Cathy understood—without being able to discuss it with him—that David was angry about politics because he was unhappy with himself. More and more, she felt there was something unstable about David, something unhinged, and sometimes she was terrified of him.
The question about getting married still filled her with anxiety. It was settled; then it reared its head again. David told her they had to stick to their guns. The one thing she felt certain of was that she had to persevere, to get through this confusing year. Whatever the limitations of her life now, Cathy was determined that she would become great in giving birth.
