by Rod Jones
She walked from room to room. The house was miles from the nearest neighbour, dreamy in its quietness—a house where a novel might be written.
When Cathy got back to Fitzroy on Monday afternoon, she told David that she definitely wanted to get married. David went quiet. There was something going on in his head. His eyes were dull, as if a measure of their light had been drained off.
He was moody all that week. Was it her fault? Had the talk of marriage frightened him? Was he thinking of walking out? As the time approached, was there something in David that resisted fatherhood? Once more, she was filled with terror.
David must have felt he belonged in George Street, not with her. He was at home in the chaos of Vanessa’s kitchen, with the burnt toast, the flagons of cheap wine, the sink full of dirty dishes, spaghetti sauce splashed around the tiles like excrement. It wasn’t just the meetings. Their household seemed to contain some thrill for him, which their own lacked.
One evening, after a meal of scrambled eggs, David sat smoking at their wobbly kitchen table. Cathy reached across. ‘Can I have a drag?’
She inhaled, blew out the smoke with a sigh of satisfaction, and handed back the cigarette. ‘I know I shouldn’t.’ Then she asked, ‘Do you think I’ll make a good mum?’
‘You’re going to be a great mother.’
‘But I don’t know the first thing about babies. Neither do you.’
‘Maybe it’s one of those things you can only learn by doing it?’
‘Maybe.’ Cathy smiled.
‘We’ll work together, like a good socialist couple.’
‘Like a good socialist couple.’
He looked hard at her. She had been surprised by the bitterness that had crept into her voice. She liked to get on with people, to feel that other people liked her, and she was confused by the way David saw everyone as a potential enemy—he was always waiting for people to make some remark that would ‘show the error in their method’, some slip that would reveal their underlying bourgeois thinking.
‘What’s wrong with being a socialist?’ he asked.
‘Oh, nothing!’ She heard the disgust in her voice.
‘What, then?’
‘Not everything is about politics. There are other things that are important. Ordinary things. Family life.’ In a whisper, Cathy added, ‘I only wish I knew how to make you happy.’ And a secret thought to herself: I wish you knew how to make me happy.
One Saturday afternoon, she found herself alone again. David had left in his VW without a word. She was sure she knew where he was. The sullenness in David lately, his baffling silences—he must have been saving up his thoughts for his friends in George Street. At this very moment, he would be talking to Vanessa in their kitchen that no one bothered to clean, the table stained and clotted with old food, the piles of newspapers, the old potatoes sprouting little limbs. Who knew if they ever swept the floor—or perhaps that was bourgeois, too.
It was after four o’clock when Cathy finally went around to George Street. Vanessa was just out of the bath. She answered the door wearing a towelling robe, combing out that great spill of red hair. ‘This is a nice surprise,’ she said. Her eyes were untroubled. David was not there.
Vanessa invited her into the kitchen. As they sat at the table, her eyes lingered on Cathy’s belly.
‘When’s it due?’
‘January.’
‘Not long.’
‘No.’
‘Are you ready?’ Still Vanessa was watching her carefully.
‘It’s hard to know if I’m ready. I think so.’
‘Good,’ Vanessa nodded, but she didn’t seem convinced.
Vanessa wore the same army shirts day in, day out. They made her look like a fearless guerrilla commander—perhaps it was her confidence that attracted David to her. Cathy knew he would not have been able to admit that it was sex. She now recognised how cleverly he tricked himself, so that his mind would put things to him in some other way.
In other parts of the double-fronted terrace, people were going about their afternoon. She heard a window shriek open upstairs, then a gust of wind rushed in and slammed the door and a faint shower of plaster fell in the corner of the kitchen. It was a bare, neglected house with forgotten food in the fridge. Cathy looked at the grubby place mats, the chipped teapot.
‘I don’t want to have kids,’ Vanessa told her, after a while. ‘I don’t believe in biological destiny.’
‘I see.’ Cathy smiled. Right now she wanted to be seen as an equal.
‘There are more important things for women to do in life than just being mothers. Women have fought long and hard for the right to work, to education.’
‘I once thought of becoming a professional photographer.’
‘But not any more?’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘Well, I suppose some women photographers have babies.’ And both women laughed, though it was clear to Cathy that Vanessa hadn’t intended to make a joke.
Vanessa and Murray shared a bed in the room at the top of the stairs, more storeroom than bedroom, with piles of pamphlets and old editions of Liberation. Was there enough fire and passion left over for bed? Or did they think of it as just some necessary bodily function in the time remaining before the next meeting?
Cathy went back to King William Street. The place was cold and empty. She put on the porch light for David. She expected the phone to ring at any moment, but it remained malevolently silent. Finally, when she was in bed, he returned. He had been studying at the university library, then he’d driven over to his mum’s place. There were some jobs she’d wanted him to do. It wasn’t much—moving the buffet and the dining table so the carpet layers could put down the new carpet on Monday. David said he was sorry—moving the furniture had taken him longer than he’d thought. Too humiliated to ask why he hadn’t bothered to phone her, she swallowed her anger, but her mouth tasted like ashes.
The following week, things took a turn for the worse.
‘They’re having a rage around at George Street,’ David told her. Rage. That was the word they all used. They’re going to have a rage tonight. The party’s going to be a real rage.
Everyone was drunk. Everything was loud. They were playing Lou Reed’s Transformer.
There was something wrong with David tonight. He was mouthing the lyrics to her, a nasty expression on his face, as though he was trying to hurt her. You’re so vicious, he sang.
In another moment, he erupted. On and on he went, belittling her, telling her off. She was a liability, a dead weight, a burden.
Stunned, Cathy was unprepared for the force of his attack. She had angled herself into a corner and was staring at him, tears trickling down her face.
Later, in the kitchen, Vanessa asked her, ‘What’s wrong, Cathy?’
Before she could open her mouth. David snapped, ‘She’s just upset, that’s all.’
Vanessa spun around to him. ‘Why do you treat Cathy like that?’
‘Like what?’ he asked.
‘Like shit.’
David went quiet.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Vanessa said. ‘She’s a fucking saint to put up with you. You’re a dangerous cunt.’
‘I’m not dangerous.’
The question of marriage remained in the dark. Cathy woke sobbing in the mornings. She pretended she was just breathing deeply: she was too scared to let David see how upset she was. Now—she couldn’t avoid it—she began to ask herself about the rightness of their connection. When she looked into the future, she saw them still locked painfully together. David took care of her, he paid the rent, he said he was going to stay with her. But surely, this perverse arrangement wasn’t what love in a political age had come to mean? It didn’t feel like love at all to her.
She sat in the house in King William Street, miserable, her smock covering her swollen belly, the little person growing inside her. It was the kind of destiny she’d read about in Thomas Hardy—from this locking together of lives, however cruel, from this ferocity, the feeling of family would somehow grow, at least Cathy hoped it would.
One afternoon, David used Cathy’s camera while she posed naked on the bed. Her shape was changing, and they wanted to record it. When the photos came back from the chemist, she hardly recognised herself. The engorged, pear-like breasts, the dark pigment in her nipples, the hard belly that wouldn’t let her get comfortable in bed at night, all seemed to belong to someone else. She looked frightened and alone.
THE NEXT SATURDAY, Cathy drove to Essendon to see David’s mum, Molly. David said he wanted to stay home and write. He sent his stories to magazines, but he already had a collection of rejection slips. Although she had wanted to support the idea of his becoming a writer, it was only now she understood he was one of those people never satisfied with the reality of their own lives.
Molly was pleased to see her. She took Cathy from room to room, showing her the new carpet. Then they sat together in the kitchen while Molly made tea.
‘I just want us to have some security about the future,’ Cathy said. ‘But when I talk about getting married, he starts yelling at me.’
‘My mother and father were never married, so I understand all too well. But David is just highly strung, that’s all,’ his mother said. ‘He was always like that, even when he was a boy.’
‘I’ve tried everything,’ Cathy said. ‘I can’t see what more I can do!’
‘It’s not your fault, love.’
‘But he always makes me feel it’s my fault. I don’t want him to be angry any more. I don’t want him to be agitated and shouting.’
‘Tell him to bloody well pull his horns in! That’s what I used to do, when he got on his high horse. Has David told you he’s adopted?’
‘Yes, but he doesn’t talk about it much.’ In fact, he had mentioned it just that once.
‘I’ll have a talk with him, if that will do any good. He used to listen to me. We were very close, when he was little.’
After a while, Molly went into the dining room. Cathy could hear the buffet drawers being opened. When she came back, she was holding two photograph albums. She turned the pages, explaining to Cathy who was in each photo, where it was taken. Molly and Percy on motorbike rides, their house being built, the backyard bare, the rockeries not yet in place, no flower beds. There was David as an infant, standing on fat little legs, holding a stool for support, reaching for a tin of Johnson’s Baby Powder. Cathy studied the pictures of David at all the stages of his childhood and youth.
‘I can’t tell you how happy I was when I heard your news,’ Molly told her.
‘Really?’ Cathy said, relieved. This was the first time anyone had told her she was doing the right thing. It was so different from how her dad had reacted to the news.
‘Yes, really. You’re going to make a wonderful mum. And becoming a dad might turn out to be just the thing David needs!’
For a moment Cathy entertained the hope that Molly might be right about David changing. No, it seemed impossible. She put it out of her mind.
‘I want to go to night school. They have courses for adults. I want to go to Swinburne and study photography.’
‘I didn’t go on at school, myself. None of us did, in those days.’
Cathy thought, ‘No, it’s no use me going back to school—what if I flunk? That will just make matters worse. Then he won’t want to be with me at all.’ Tears came. How was it that he had taken all her confidence from her?
Molly went over to the bench and picked up a box of Kleenex. ‘Things will work out all right in the end.’ She sat down again and put her arm around Cathy’s shoulders and drew her in. ‘I tried to talk David out of giving up his Law course, but he always gets his own way. I suppose it’s my fault. I was overprotective.’
‘If he always gets his own way, that’s the end of me,’ Cathy thought.
‘Has he ever been curious about who his real parents are?’ Cathy hesitated. Real parents. She wished she hadn’t said that.
‘He said he’s not interested. He told me I’m his mum and that’s all there is to it. Anyway, there’s no way for him to find out who they were. When we brought him home, they gave him a new birth certificate with our names on it. The original birth certificates for all the adopted children are locked away in the government vaults somewhere. We chose the name David, and that’s the only name we’ve ever known him by.’
They sat on in silence. Molly reached across the table and held Cathy’s hand. ‘I’m happy you and David are going to have a baby. I’ll help you learn to look after it. I had to learn everything myself, when he first came home. We’ll love it and spoil it together! Just imagine—my first grandchild! It’s going to be such a special baby!’
Molly told her about the morning they had driven to North Fitzroy and brought him home from the Haven.
‘Then when David told me earlier this year that he was moving out and going to live in Fitzroy, you can imagine I wasn’t exactly happy about it. Why Fitzroy, I wondered.’
Cathy realised that, for Molly, it must have felt like he was going back in time to find his birth mother.
‘When he was little, we had to give him a sedative.’
‘The doctors weren’t able to tell you what was wrong with him?’
‘It’s just his temperament.’
Time disappeared miraculously that afternoon. Cathy sat at the table with her cheek resting in her palm, elbow on the table, tea gone cold in her cup.
Molly gave Cathy a hug as she went across to switch on the kettle again. ‘You know something? You’re lucky. Both of you are. Children give you real happiness. Of course, the buggers can also give you a lot of heartache.’
She sat down again and reached across to the plate of biscuits, then changed her mind. ‘I’ll take you to Footscray with me one day soon, and we’ll start buying clothes for the little one. I had a cupboard full of clothes for David months before they told us we were going to get him. I made a lot of clothes for him myself, too. I always had some kind of knitting or sewing or fancy work in my hands.’
‘I haven’t bought any clothes yet.’
‘Don’t worry, love. Remember, you can come and visit me anytime. I want you to know that you can always come and talk to me, about anything.’
Molly accepted her. Molly did not want her to be someone else. Cathy now sensed that there was a great power to be found in believing in herself. Why had no one told her this before? Why had she never re
ally believed in herself?
With Molly, more than with her friends, more than with her own father, she no longer felt that familiar constriction in her throat. It was something entirely new to her, this feeling of relaxed confidence.
It was getting dark outside. Molly hadn’t yet switched on the lights. The kitchen was at the back of the house, the window darkened by an overgrown fuchsia. There was another window, of frosted glass, next to the sliding door into David’s old bedroom. Cathy liked to go in there and see the traces of his childhood in that room, to feel the innocence that still reposed there.
Driving home to King William Street, Cathy felt light and free. Things were going to turn out well for her and David, after all. She imagined the house where they would live in Greece one day, the dark Mediterranean lapping softly against the rocks in the night.
She had come away from Molly’s feeling safe, but when she got home, David was in dangerous high spirits. ‘Come on,’ he told her, ‘we’re going to Johnno’s party.’ There were a dozen bottles of Carlton Draught waiting on the kitchen table.
She put her coat back on, then changed her mind. ‘I’m not going.’
‘What else are you going to do?’
She went into the bathroom and stared at the mirror.
‘There’s a part of me that’s still pretending,’ she thought. ‘Same for everyone, I suppose. Putting on an act.’ Even with Dad, in a way, even though he was always understanding and tender. Cathy knew he loved her. Dad would always love her, even if everything did go wrong.
She wrenched herself away from the mirror and went into the bedroom to lie down. ‘Maybe I should just go to the party, after all?’ she thought. ‘Why am I making such a fuss about it?’
Cathy had played the likeable clown for the gang in Swiss Cottage. She had then, too, briefly felt the unspoken fear leave her. It was the fear that had entered her when her mother died, and the light of the world suddenly changed. That’s what she wanted to capture in her photographs: that change in the light. She wondered if something like that had happened to David, too, when his father died. Was this shared past what somehow bound them together?
