by Helen Garner
‘But what about the pictures on them?’ said the girl hoarsely, pushing past him. ‘He doesn’t know those by heart. How can a person learn a picture by heart?’
‘Your father’s head,’ I said, ‘like everybody else’s, is a vast gallery of pictures. Nobody will ever know what pictures your father has inside his head.’
They laughed, but their brows were in knots, and they glanced behind them to the yellow rectangle of the kitchen door.
‘Not even Mum?’ said the girl.
‘Not even Natalie,’ I said.
The membrane of light bulged and burst to disgorge their mother, walking, taking steps, coming out to the bonfire where the last of the postcards was turning brown at the corners and curling into a writhing tube. She saw what I had done. She smiled; she squatted down beside me without speaking, and with a stout twig began to rake out the ashes.
Next morning everything I saw, in the streets that passed and pierced the hospital, was sharply shimmering. Capped and aproned girls flung open rows of shutters. An ambulance, silent, slid into a discreet bay and yawned there. Two pretty junkies rattled a stroller down the path to detox, while their baby, bounced and flopping, grizzled feebly with no hope of ever being noticed or comforted. What was that singing? Was there a choir? Palmtrees were clacking their hard fans above the roof tiles, boomgates floated and sank, a dog stood open-mouthed in awe before a lawn sprinkler, and every wrist that passed was manacled in plastic.
I kept moving. Something in soft soles was keeping pace with me wherever I walked, padding along silently behind my left shoulder. I walked and walked, with the thing moving smoothly behind me, and as I walked I rehearsed Patrick’s version of me, the rubrics under which he had long ago marshalled into a cast-iron curriculum vitae the evidence I had so conscientiously provided: sad girl; problem with her father; full of anger; nympho; self-destructive; unstable; hyper-sensitive; a failure at marriage; unfeminine; man-hater; lost soul.
Was there a way to wipe it out? What if it happened today? I thought of Patrick, shorn and mapped with dotted lines, lying face down on a table. I imagined a foot, clad in a soft slipper shaped like a shower cap, approaching the switch of a drill. What if the surgeon should lose his way, and broach the box of bone where Patrick’s official grids were stored? What if, with his savage light-tip, he should isolate, clip out and finally excise my file from the bee-chambers of Patrick’s memory? Then, at last, could I spring away free into newness of life?
I went round through the garden of Occupational Therapy, along the front of a red brick wing where tranquillised people sat sombrely in a row on a dark verandah, and up a flight of stone steps towards the windowless side of a building whose exterior was studded all over with cement hand- and foot-holds. Halfway up to the eaves a young man still wearing a canvas back-pack was flattened like a spider, legs parted wide and belly to the wall, gripping and treading, clawing, gathering balance in stillness, then swarming again across the surface of the sun-warmed bricks. I heard his slow, controlled breathing as I passed below him, and took in my own stomach muscles the strain of his spreadeagled position.
I found Natalie in the waiting room of the intensive ward. She was sitting with upright spine in an ugly dark armchair, knees together and hands folded in her lap.
People were smoking and walking back and forth, whispering in pairs, keeping their voices down in front of straining children. There were no windows and the air was blue. Every now and then the lift door would open with a soft dragging sound and display its lighted interior like a scene on a little proscenium stage: a family hand in hand, a bald girl in a cotton gown, three medical students white with fatigue.
I pulled a chair round to face hers, and sat on it. Natalie was not the kind of person you touched. She recognised my shoes and raised her head.
‘He’s in there,’ she said. ‘In a few minutes we can go in.’
‘Oh, not me,’ I shrank back. ‘You go. He’ll want you.’
‘Come in with me,’ she said. ‘You’re his oldest friend. It’ll mean a lot to him.’
We sat face to face, staring anywhere but at each other. Natalie was breathing hard.
‘They let me in while he was coming out of the anaesthetic,’ she said. ‘He was deathly cold. Green, like a corpse. His whole body was in shock. They were wrapping him up in silver paper. He looked mad. His eyes were crazed. He was waving his arms, and raving.’
People in the room drew away from us, except for one girl, a fat teenager in stretch jeans and moccasins, who took hold of a chair and dragged it across the carpet to where we were sitting. She placed it three feet from us, at an angle but well within our field of vision, and lowered her large bottom on to it; then, with her forearms along the rests of the chair, she fixed us like a judge or a witness and, flicking her eyes from face to face as we spoke, absorbed our words with unabashed greed.
‘Have you ever,’ I blurted, ‘wished that someone you loved would die? So that the record of all your crimes and failures would be obliterated?’
Natalie gave a gasp of laughter. The fat girl caught her breath and sat forward, letting her mouth fall open.
‘Look,’ said Natalie. ‘The only person in the world with a full inventory of your crimes is you. You can burn things, wish death—but the past is still the past and you’re still the same person.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know you must be right. But—’
‘But what?’ said Natalie.
We were both shivering. The fat girl’s eyes were on my face, waiting for my lips to move.
‘But what if he forgets everything?’ I said. ‘What if it’s all up to me? He was my first real friend. Everything I ever knew about friendship I learnt from Patrick.’
‘Oh, don’t start that,’ said Natalie, closing her eyes. ‘You’re worse than he is. Can you imagine how many times I’ve heard all these tales? You can’t know how desolating I find that kind of sentimentalism.’
‘But listen,’ I said. ‘He did things for me. He was faithful to me. He was there. He bailed me out of the lockup. I was in a cage in the back yard of the police station and I saw him coming through the gate. And once a doctor put drops in my eyes to dilate my pupils, and Patrick took me by the hand and led me home.’
‘All right,’ said Natalie. ‘That’s enough.’
‘He sent me the money for an abortion,’ I ground on.
‘Stop now,’ said Natalie. ‘Shut up.’
‘I didn’t even know which bloke it was. I wrote to Patrick in Sydney—I hadn’t even seen him for two years—and he sent me fifty quid the next day. In pound notes. In an envelope. No questions asked.’
‘Yes,’ said Natalie. ‘Yes.’ She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees: I could see her teeth. ‘But what I want to know is—what did you ever do for him?’
‘I can drag it back,’ I babbled. ‘He thinks I’ve forgotten it all—but I can dredge it up. All of it, if I have to—if he can’t remember any more.’ I began to bawl. ‘I’d lie at the foot of his bed like a dog,’ I said, ‘if it would do any good. Tell him that, Natalie.’
Natalie stood up.
‘You tell him,’ she said. ‘Tell him yourself.’
The intercom on the wall next to the ward door spoke a name and Natalie ran to answer, putting her mouth right up against the metal; then she beckoned to me. I followed her in. She had a way of walking which suddenly seemed to find its purpose: she put her feet down firmly, but with a light spring, as if her knees were never completely straightened. She was ready for anything, with this walk. Anything at all would find her ready for it.
The air in the ward was dense with anxiety. Entering it was like wading against a surf of rhythmic moaning, whether human or mechanical I could not tell. Down the aisle between the two rows of beds trod Natalie, lightly and quickly. I saw the first body. That’s not him. The h
ead, shaved and with a bloody modess pad clapped to the back of it, was turned away from us in a hard, unnatural position: dead, an Auschwitz victim, someone who had perished in agony. I kept moving but Natalie stopped. She stopped. Wildly I tried to read the name on the clipboard. It was Patrick.
He was suffering. He was crying out. A nurse rushed to him with an oxygen mask: he rolled to grab at it and the force of his in-breath seemed to suck it on to his terrible face; then, seeing us over its rim, he tore it away and reached out his left hand to where we stood, two of the women in his life, gaping with shock and fear at the foot of the bed. We were tripping over each other to defer. Frantic, Natalie pushed me: ‘Go on!’ I blundered to the side of the bed and seized his hand. It was warm and very meaty, but it was not my place to go closer, to approach his face, his wounded head. I kissed his hand, squeezed it, and laid it down for Natalie, who took hold of it as I scrambled out of range. He fought to speak to her, her ear was against his face, but his grunts were swallowed in the weird soughing that filled the ward, the sound of the room itself labouring for breath.
Natalie backed away and I fell into step behind her. She was almost running. The big door flopped shut after us, and the waiting faces lifted and swung in our direction like a shoal of satellite dishes. I looked at the clock. We had been inside for barely a minute.
‘What was that noise?’ I jabbered. ‘I heard a noise.’
‘I didn’t hear it,’ said Natalie. ‘I block out everything.’
She kept walking fast, barging towards the elevator. She certainly did not need me, but I hurried in her wake, and down in the lobby she paused long enough to turn her blank face towards me, and nod.
‘I’m going home,’ she said. ‘Don’t come. I’m going home.’
I stood still, to let her get away from me. When she had become a member of the crowd, I walked slowly, on chalky legs, through the lobby of the hospital.
It was cool there. The hallway was wide and clean, and the floor was made of green marble tiles that shone. I looked up at the stained-glass windows. All I could make out was a figure standing with its arms spread wide and its bare feet balanced, low down in the frame, on what looked like a stack of sandbags. No: they were clouds.
I thought I would have something to eat, somewhere. And after that I had better find myself a hotel.
I tried to walk briskly towards the door; but somebody was standing in the shadow of the huge sandstone pillars which supported the entrance porch. It was a child in a cape, a little boy.
He was hunched over from the waist, working with ferocious concentration on a black metal object he was holding in both hands. His head was bent over his task, but as I walked towards him I could clearly see his face in profile, and trembling with shock and distress though I was, my steps shortened of their own accord, for I felt that I knew him, that in some book or gallery I had seen his picture, or a picture of somebody like him. Out of respect I placed my feet more lightly on the marble floor; and just as I drew level with him he straightened his spine, raised his head, and extended his gun arm towards me in a slow, vertical arc. I saw then what he was: I recognised him. I stood still in front of him. I presented myself: for he was no longer playing. He was here on business, acting on orders. He was a small, serious, stone-eyed angel of mercy.
Kim’s father was supposed to come down from Queensland or wherever he lived to straighten her life out for her, give her some good advice, pay her uni fees and so on, or even take her back up there to live with him. He promised he’d be there in June, for her birthday, but for some reason he couldn’t make it by the date. Then it was going to be August, then September. She was hanging out for this. She stopped going anywhere, in case he turned up while she was out and the others in the house let him get away without giving him her message, to make himself at home and wait ten minutes. First she used to sew, till the machine broke down, and anyway the whine of the motor was starting to make her nervous. Then she drew, or wrote for hours in her diary. Then she read, lying on her bed in a worn-out old nightie, nibbling at the ends of her hair, but she said the books she was supposed to be studying were so boring that she kept dozing off.
Then things got to the point with her where all she could do was sleep. Awake, whatever she heard threw her into a state of nerves: the wind when it bumped, a bird in a tree outside the window, the water rustling down the gutters when the council workers opened the hydrants. Her fearfulness filled Raymond with impatient scorn, and relief that he was not after all the most hopeless person he knew. The morning a truck poured a ton of blue metal chips down in the lane outside, he came back from the kitchen and found her on her knees in the corner with her head in the dirty clothes bag. He thought of laughing, till he saw that her eyes were bulging. There was a primary school behind where she lived. She couldn’t stand the noise the kids made in the yard at playtime, their screaming. It made her grind her teeth and blow her nose till it went red. ‘Somebody must be hurting them,’ she whispered. ‘They’re hurting each other.’
‘You’re stupid,’ said Raymond irritably. ‘That’s a good sound. Aren’t kids supposed to be a good thing? You shouldn’t freak out over something that’s good. What’s the matter with you?’
By October, though she lied about it, she was swallowing day by day in threes and fours the pills she got from her mother and sleeping the time away buried so flat in the quilt and pillows that when he came in he had to feel around to make sure she was still there.
‘Get in,’ she mumbled, too doped to open her eyes. ‘Less go to sleep.’
The nightdress was twisted up round her waist and her skin was loose, like old sacking. She had about as much life in her as a half-deflated dummy, but without complaint she opened her legs, and he kept his face turned away, to avoid her breath. She grunted, that was all, and when he rolled away she made a limp effort to attach herself to his back; but she was a dead weight that could not hang on. Her arms’ grip weakened and her torso fell away. The cool air of the room shrank his bare spine. She snuffled, and a light rhythmic click began in the open membranes of her throat. He would have got up straight away except that the tick of her breathing matched itself briefly to his heartbeat, and at the moment of focusing on the leaves outside the glass his mind lost its grip on the edges of the furniture and slithered away into a comforting nest, a sty of warm webs and straw. Then the parrot screeched, in somebody’s back yard, and he woke.
He raised himself on one elbow and looked back over his shoulder at her. She was only a small girl, with small bones, and her head too he had always thought of as small. Wandering round the city, the day after she had first dragged him home from a party where he was lurking sourly in a doorway, always too old or too awkward, always wearing the wrong clothes, he had found himself fitting words together in the part of his mind that no one knew about: he practised remarking casually, ‘She’s buttery’, or ‘She’s well-toothed’; but he never fell into conversation with anyone who looked interested in that way of talking—Alby certainly wasn’t—and now her face, like any drugged sleeper’s, was as thick, stupid and meaningless as a hunk of rock. He saw that there was nothing special about her; that he was superior to her after all. She was damaged goods. The pills were not to blame. The pills were doing him a favour by reminding him of something he had always known was in her, in any girl that age who would do what she did with him, and you could tell by the moron face they made when they were doing it, all vague and grinning. He imagined, propped there in his twisted pose while his insides congealed again into blankness, how he would describe her in the café if any of them stopped talking long enough. ‘She was more out of it than I’ve ever seen her. Mate, she was’—he would stick out his flat hands, palms down, and jerk them sharply apart—‘out of it. This gig’s over. People who can’t get their shit together should just go and die.’
It was late in the day. If he got up now he could make it to the Hare Krishnas
for a feed. The girl downstairs was getting ready for work. As she called to her cat, her clogs on the cobbles of the lane made a sound like a tennis ball bouncing. While he pulled on his clothes, blocking out the irritating click of Kim’s open mouth, he ran his eyes over the floor, checking for dropped coins, a screwed-up five dollar note, the price of a coffee, anything he could use.
On the boards between the bed and the door stood a pair of heavy black rubber-soled shoes. Their laces were still in bows. She must have yanked them off in her rush back to the big dipper of sleep, and yet they were placed tidily side by side, and although they were months old they still looked new, since the only wear they got was when she walked over to her mother’s every couple of days for pills and maybe a leftover from the fridge. All the girls wore these shoes. He felt nothing about the style. He only noticed the shoes because the neat bows jigged a memory which was gone before his mind could lumber round to it: something about laces, something about tying a shoe. He hesitated, then he stepped over the shoes and went out of the room. The door clicked shut behind him. The air of the stairs was thick with the smell of cooking broccoli.
Four days passed before he came back.
He too spent them horizontal, in his brother’s boarding house room with his pants unzipped, holding across his chest Alby’s big acoustic guitar and picking at it tunelessly, or rereading the collection of seventies comics from under the bed: epic acid landscapes, hulking heroes in fur leggings, pinheads, VW buses full of frizzy hair, a stoned cat, girls with huge legs in boots and mini skirts, and a special way of walking called ‘truckin’’. That world, drawn in square boxes and balloons of words, he knew. The real one he was lost in, but so lost that he didn’t know he was lost. His father was dead, his mother was stupid, his sister had run away; and as soon as Alby got back he would be on the street again. He lived untouched inside a grey casing through which he watched, dully, how other people behaved, and sometimes tried to mimic them. He saw that they remarked on the weather, and he tried to remember to look at the sky, to see if there were clouds in it. He saw what people ate, and he bought some. He saw that they talked to make each other laugh, and he dropped his mouth open to make the sound ‘Ha. Ha.’ He saw that when a band played, they heard something; he saw that they danced, and he tried to lift his feet. His whole life was faking. He thought that was what people did.
