by Helen Garner
A breeze swooped over the shed roof and shook the grasses at the bottom of the yard where she crouched. Half-hypnotised, left behind like a surfer by a wave, Maxine let her eyes follow the air-gust’s progress up the length of land towards the house. It crossed grass whose pale and flattened fibres were parted by the edges of smashed bricks; it passed a vegetable patch where stakes staggered and seedheads died blighted by their own stiffness; it threaded itself through the holes of a crumbling lattice fence that sliced the yard in two; it pressed on over a mattress of wavering nasturtiums, and eddied on the tree-shaded grey concrete by the gate—
—but how dark and shrunken it suddenly looked, the house end of the garden. Was it an eclipse? Dropping to her knees, Maxine tried to focus. She could hardly make out the verandah, the rubbish bins, the torn shirt on the wire—and what was that sound, that huge booming and rumbling coming, that deep and mumbling roar?
Her forehead weighed too much. It was dense, as cold as a dish. It longed to press itself into the dirt before the wiry stalk clumps of the bride. Down she went, like a vomiting child urged forward over the porcelain by its mother’s callous hand—but even as this large force pushed her shoulders down, she strained her head up and kept her eyes fixed on the wimple of blue cloth through whose slit the bride’s tanned, implacable face narrowly showed.
Maxine breathed out, out, out. Her lungs were almost empty. The sky was bellowing. Her chin touched ground, the dirt parted for her, the stiff twigs feathered her nostrils—and the plane’s shadow skimmed over and was gone.
The weight lifted from Maxine’s shoulders. Breath with its welcome sweetness swelled her chest. Her head cleared, and she raised it to the bride, still hoping for a sign—but somebody laughed outside the fence, and a bunch of schoolgirls went scampering past, clapping in rhythm and vigorously chanting a song.
The bride toppled to the left and keeled over. Slowly, slow, it executed a quarter cartwheel, hesitated, and came to rest, balancing on one chopped wrist.
Maxine sprang up. The distant bins stood in perspective, respectably daylit. But the sun was covered. The sky was gaberdine. The colours were colder, and on the tip of a branch, a leaf wagged.
Again she propped the bride, jiggling and settling it into the grass tuft. Again, while the girls’ chant faded, the bride listed sideways and made as if to fall.
Maxine caught it. Her eyes glazed and she clawed at her hair. The feet were wrong. How could she expect it to stand, if she hadn’t made it a proper pair of feet? But realistic feet would destroy the look of it. The burst of stalks was its beauty, what made it different from the one in the book, what made it hers. No, she would not clip its feet. She would fix it to a wall. An inside wall, in case of weather. The inside wall of the shed.
In she ran. Above the low bed in the corner she whacked into the timber wall two nails, a thumb’s width apart, and hooked the bride up by its armpits. She twitched at it till its spread arms and the flaps of its garment settled, hiding its means of support. It poised above the pillow. Maxine, with her feet among the blankets, saw that the bride’s grass-bursts were what kept it in position. They were rocket-blasts of energy. When the stars swung into auspicious configuration, that energy would gush into her. She would be fertilised, she would flourish, she would crop.
It was three o’clock.
Cheerfully she hopped off the bed, collected her keys and a rubber band for her hair, and set out on foot to clean a small but fiddly house on the other side of the freeway.
The afternoon, left in the garden with the remains of the shirt, swung quietly down towards evening.
At four-thirty the temperature dropped, then dropped again. Presently the sky cleared, leaving a few bobtail clouds to float upon its purity. The failure bird, that autodidact, arrived in the tree in a fluster and would have struck up its earnest, unmelodious scale: but there was no one home to hear it, so it perched glumly on a twig, whirring its feathers, and peered about it with a dull and desperate eye.
Just at dark, Janet came trudging through the gate. On her way across the verandah she unpegged the dry washing, out of habit, and gathered it in. She slung it into the ironing basket in the corner of the living room, then swept the newspapers into a pile, switched on the lamp, and went upstairs to her room.
Anyone with half a heart can learn to sleep alone and like it. Mornings have their own metabolisms, and the working day will take care of itself. No—the hard thing about living alone is having no one to report to at the end of the day, no witness for a re-enactment of one’s mortifications and snappy rejoinders, one’s heroic endurance of the intolerable. For that there must be a household, and this was only a house.
Besides, there was really only one subject that Ray felt driven to talk about, and in the company of people who showed no interest in it, he was restless, sombre, at a loss.
The women, however, squandered language. If Ray did not take his turn at speech when it was offered, they exchanged expressionless looks and went galloping past him, scattering words from their gaping purses. ‘Today,’ Janet would say, ‘I passed the biggest, grandest, most magnificently, beautifully and generously tremendous oak tree I’ve ever seen in my whole life. I felt like prostrating myself before it.’ Goose-flesh coated him, as it did when Maxine got going, veering out into her phantasmagorical theories about toxins and purifications, luxuriating for hours in her own indecisiveness about which cure to apply to her many-fold, elusive and delicious ailments. ‘Naturopaths,’ she would say, ‘treat everything as the whole digestive system and the this and the that and the other thing, so it’s all slightly this or that.’ Cramps seized his stomach and wrung it like a rag. He sat in silence, fingering his little black book.
‘Why are you so forlorn, Ray?’ said Janet. ‘Hey! Forlorn! That must have something to do with verloren, German for lost. Do you feel lost?’
Know-all. Skite. She was clever all right. She knew plenty of words, where to find out more, and how to fix them together correctly: she made a living out of them: but she was empty. She had nothing to say. Whenever he brought out his book and laid it on the white table she would stand up abruptly and prance out of the room, or put on a record and turn up the volume, flashing him a mean, sidelong smile. The music was noise to him, fat ladies warbling, orchestras on the rampage, some idiots twanging bits of string and tapping on a tin; the cradle, dumped on top of a speaker, would vibrate as madly as a leaf in the wind; but he liked to watch Janet listening, because she looked so silly.
She would adopt special, sensitive expressions during the slow bits, stretching her neck, pointing her lips like a beak, breathing in sharply through her nostrils, and making her eyebrows into an inverted V of anguish, while in the fast bits she would nod in a stern rhythm, frowning, as if the music belonged to her and she had personally sent down instructions about how it was to be played. Sometimes when the record ended she would put on a little act of breaking out of a spell, pretending to have been so swept away that she had forgotten the existence of the real world (including him); she would suddenly shake her head to clear it, widen her eyes in a pantomime of confusion as to her whereabouts, then, with an affected smile, feign recognition of her own living room. These performances caused strange tingles to occur in various parts of his person: runs of dislike, pity, a strangled desire to laugh that made his mouth feel unnatural.
‘Wasn’t that won—derful,’ she would breathe, pressing the back of one hand against her forehead. ‘Enough to restore your faith in the human race.’
‘No point having faith in the human race,’ he said doggedly. ‘There’s only one thing to have faith in. One man.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she said, and dropped it cold.
He had seen the shadows on her face. He knew that emptiness. He too had been scoured. But the moment had not come, and while he waited for it, he contented himself, as weeks passed and the weather chilled and he stil
l had not found a job, with copying out scriptural quotations for her and leaving them propped against the sauce bottle or the empty fruit dish on the bench. She began to use her education against him then, to shield herself from what he obstinately believed he had been sent to tell her. My soul shall boast in the Lord she batted back with Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven. He persisted with warnings and threats: Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves; and Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire; but because of the hours he kept, dawdling, waiting for word from his brother, and using the delay as an excuse, she got the upper hand. Back through the Old Testament she ranged, busily hunting up mocking rebukes: Go to the ant, thou sluggard: consider her ways, and be wise. As the door turneth upon its hinges, so doth the slothful upon his bed. Often he was still in his sleeping bag when the sheet of paper slid under his door. At first he would roll over and seize it eagerly, always hoping for a letter from Alby, for news of when he would come, for reassurance that he had not dropped his bundle and gone off the rails again; but it was always only her reply to his sally of the day before, dashed on to the paper in her merciless, legible hand, nothing crossed out or corrected, peremptory as a memo from an irritable superior.
He let his side of the duel lapse, but still the messages came, spiky, malicious, their meaning perverted by lack of context, and presently he read fewer and fewer of them, then only one in five, and by the time her tone began to shift he had stopped reading them altogether, and merely gathered them up and dropped them, still folded, into the council bin near the corner shop, to withhold from her the satisfaction of finding them in the kitchen rubbish: and thus he missed It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house, and Let me set a morsel of bread before thee, and Let us reason together, saith the Lord. Janet copied these things and pushed them under his door, but when he would not bite she became bored and scornful, and despised him for a wimp; the game was over.
Given this domestic stand-off, then, how, and to whom, was Ray to announce, when the day came, the stunning news that he had at last been hired? That, standing in slime in front of a foreman who was holding an orange mug of tea in one hand and a Boston bun in the other, he had wanted to burst into a whining protest, to show his palms with their innocence of calluses, to make the bloke see his mistake and send him packing back to his natural habitat, the dole office? Already, spongeing back to the street in his thongs, Ray felt the leash of his shortened freedom get a grip on his neck and start to choke him.
* * *
Winter fell on them overnight. They hardly knew which was worse, the wind or the rain, and while they sat on their hands in front of the grate or poked kindling sticks between its bars to enliven the sullen logs, the splendidly mantelled fireplace sucked heat straight out of the wood they had chopped and sent it whirling up the chimney to disperse under the low sky.
There was no heat in the shed, but Maxine dragged out extra jumpers and thicker socks, and while she worked on, uncomplaining, she would glance up, from time to time, at the bride, implacable on the wall. She respected it. She greeted it formally on waking and retiring; she turned her face up to it while she meditated; she hummed tuneless, wordless little ditties in its honour, and invented special sequences of gestures with meanings she could not have explained; and before too long these rituals, like most observances, lost their freshness and became automatic; but still she performed them, absentmindedly, out of habit.
Ray’s new steel-toed boots came home so caked with mud that he stepped out of them on the back verandah, leaving them disposed in a more casual V than they ever adopted when his feet were inside them, and slid about the house in socks. Secretly Janet thought better of him when she could no longer see his weak-looking, broken-arched feet, but Maxine missed the sight of them, their vulnerability, for to her they were beautiful, and familiar from the paintings she had seen in books or at the occasional travelling exhibition from Italy, wonderful old pictures in which angels, cool or warm, calmly took their places in human dramas, wearing sandals whose complicated fastenings and slender soles, designed only for ether, were never meant to be distorted by walking, or sullied by contact with the earth.
‘Are your poor feet sore?’ said Maxine from the table, as Ray hobbled in across the ugly carpet. Usually, when he came home at this hour and found her waiting for him, doing nothing, just sitting up brightly with her hands folded and the cradle rocking in front of her, he walked straight through and upstairs to the bathroom, to avoid her; but today he could hear water brushing in the pipes. Janet must be having a shower. He was stuck.
‘Not sore,’ he said. ‘Just tired. I’m not used to it yet.’ He sat down opposite her, with his face averted, and pulled a newspaper towards him.
‘Used to what?’ said Maxine fondly. ‘What do you do out there, exactly?’
‘I do what I’m told,’ said Ray, blindly turning the pages. ‘It’s a factory. A warehouse. In a paddock full of thistles. I don’t know what they’re doing to it, and nobody else seems to know either.’
‘Couldn’t you ask someone?’ said Maxine.
‘Oh, nobody asks questions,’ said Ray. ‘They hire you from the neck down.’
Maxine melted with sympathy and respect. ‘How do you mean?’ she murmured.
‘It’s like this,’ said Ray wearily. He pushed the paper away. ‘On my first day they gave me a crowbar and told me to chip the cement off this floor. I started doing it the way they showed me, but it was slow. Sometimes I’d get the corner of the crowbar under it and be able to sort of lift it, but usually I could only get about an inch up at a time. My hands got all torn—see? Anyway, after lunch the foreman came to check up on me, so I said, “Look—do you mind if I only do about this much every day? Because it’s kind of laborious.” And he yelled at me. He said “Laborious? You’re a bloody labourer, aren’t you? It’s meant to be laborious!” ’
‘Laborious,’ whispered Maxine. ‘Mmmmm. I bet they’re really glad they hired you.’
She did not get it. Ray sat still, slumped in his fatigue. But Maxine was gazing at him, tilting her bushy head to one side, and with a pleasant surprise he noticed that she was still waiting, that he was actually being listened to, or would be, should he care to speak. Her face had become rounder and younger while he told his tale, and her lips were gently closed, as if not needing to restrain a single interruption. He felt his own face go soft with shyness.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I went on chipping away, all by myself in there, and after a week a different foreman came to me and said, “You can stop doing that now. They’ve decided to knock the whole building down.” ’
Maxine neither laughed nor spoke. She merely went on looking at him, with moist and shining eyes.
‘And now,’ he trailed off, ‘I don’t know whether they’re pulling it down or not.’
She listened.
‘At lunchtime,’ he said, struggling on, ‘I sit by myself and read my book.’
Still she listened.
‘It’s cold out there,’ he said. ‘The wind comes tearing across the paddocks.’
He felt the suction of her silence.
‘The other blokes sit in a shed,’ he said, ‘scrapping and gambling and throwing food around. They don’t take much notice of me.’
Her eyes were giving out a brown fog of devotion: her face was swarming. He felt giddy. He was conking out; he was losing shape; he was sinking into the swamp of her attention. Maxine drew a long, romantic sigh, and suddenly Ray was stabbed with complete desperation. I’ll have to grow a moustache, he thought. I’ll have to start drinking beer. I’m lonely. My loneliness is unbearable.
‘Are all jobs like this?’ he burst out in a cracking voice. ‘I don’t know how long I can stand it. Is
this what jobs are like?’
Brilliantly, Maxine centred herself. She reached out and took his hand, cross-wise, as if they had just been introduced. ‘Tell me, Ray,’ she said. ‘What’s your sign?’
He jumped, and went rigid, but she had a firm grip on him, palm against palm, a man’s grip. ‘My what?’ he said.
‘You know,’ she said. ‘Your sun sign. What the magazines call your star.’
‘Oh no,’ he said with a groan. ‘No, not that stuff. I don’t—’
He tried to withdraw the meat of his hand and leave her with only the fingertips, but she hung on.
‘Why not?’ she said, glowing at him from under her corona of hair.
‘That’s astrology,’ he said. ‘That’s satanism. The devil comes through that kind of thing.’
Maxine laughed. ‘Oh, Ray,’ she said, massaging his hand with both of hers. ‘Ray—you may not believe in it. You may doubt its power. But you can’t make it not exist.’
He jerked his hand away, and she let it go without a struggle. He clenched it into a fist in the air, then forced it to relax, and laid it flat on the table. All the tiny hairs of his forearm were standing on end.
‘It’s all right, Ray,’ said Maxine, leaning back in her chair. ‘You don’t have to pretend, with me. I know why you’re here. There’s no hurry. At least now we’ve shaken hands. I think that goes quite far, don’t you? Psychically? A handshake?’
Even with his secret palm pressed against wood he could remember the hands that had kneaded him. They were tough, seamed and warm. They would not take no for an answer.
Hunger struck the house-dwellers at different times and with different desires. If there was more than one of them eating at the same time, it was purely by chance. The women did not care. They were content with little where food was concerned, and could dine, standing up at the fridge door, on a raw carrot and a lump of cheese every night for months and never notice the sameliness. But Ray, out of a sober longing for what he had only been told about, wanted things to be done more formally. At nightfall, while Maxine swept up the day’s sawdust in her shed and Janet sat in front of the television smartly taking notes for her next article, he would be drawn to the bleak kitchen like a spirit haunting a place where it had once been nourished, and would loiter there in the gathering dark, dissatisfied and morose.
