by Helen Garner
‘Let me finish, listen to me, fuck ya!’
Obviously they were used to this mode, for she didn’t take the slightest offence. She shared Javo’s liking for rhetorical language. When she lapsed into generalisations, I saw on her face that a cog had slipped: her eyes, like his, took on a certain opaqueness, the mouth turned up a little, the head cocked slightly, and the words flowed out too easily to be the product of real, gritty thought. It was the repetition of a catechism.
I put the iron away and went out into the garden. I sat looking over the estuary for half an hour, then ventured back into the house, thinking they would have quietened down and gone back to the cricket. But no. Worse was to come. As I opened the kitchen door I heard Javo roar,
‘You just contradicted yourself! You’re intellectually neurotic! You contradict yourself! Be rational! How can I talk to you, if you’re not rational!’
To her eternal credit, Hazel simply let out a cackle of laughter. I glanced round the door to see how Javo was taking it. He was sprawled in an armchair, looking at his knees, elbow on the arm of the chair, one hand over his face.
I went outside again.
One day Gracie may scream at me like that.
I HEARD THE CURTAIN GOING UP
I got home a few days before my scene in the junk movie was to be shot. There was one night’s work in the strange house in Prahran. I had enough speed left to rev me through the night, and it let me down easy because by morning I had extended myself way beyond my limits. We finished work just before dawn, when the fingernail moon was fading in a hot, dry sky. I came out of the house and lay on the small front lawn, staring at the sky as it lightened. Jessie wandered out and lay down beside me. Attenuated, dried out, made gentle, we lay together in the companionship of fatigue.
Francis drove me back to Fitzroy and dropped me at the corner of the Edinburgh Gardens. As I scrambled down from the high seat of the VW van, I looked back at him to say goodbye: our eyes fixed together, in our fatigue and the serenity and fearlessness of that state, and I stopped in my tracks. We smiled, and smiled. I broke it, and walked to the kerb, and turned back, to see him still sitting there, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the gearstick, looking at me. Easy contact: hearts perhaps. I hardly even knew his name. He had the gloss on him of clever parents, enough money, calm enough to smile like that at a stranger.
I walked home very, very slowly across the drying park. The whiteness of my clothes burned in the dry sun, my runners padded silently. I sang to myself, loud and unabashed,
‘And the song that he sang her
to soothe her to sleep
runs all through her circuits
like a heartbeat . . .’
In the back door, across the worn matting, three steps on the lino of the hall, turn to my bedroom door – and Javo was in my bed with a thick white mask of calamine lotion on his torn skin.
‘It’s all right, Nor!’ he burst out eagerly at the sight of my shocked face. ‘It’s only some pimples.’
I stood staring at him. I saw that he had been in my bed all night. I felt panicky, and tired of it, wanting to escape now, quick, before the water got any deeper.
I turned back to the kitchen, and found Clive and Georgie sitting at the table drinking coffee. I slid wearily on to a chair. They pushed a cup towards me and looked at me in silence, half-grinning about the white-masked apparition in my room. I grinned too, and shrugged, and felt again the moving of that reluctant love for him, in spite of all reason.
‘Imagine,’ said Clive, catching his breath and leaning forward to me, ‘imagine how it must feel to be someone like Javo, thinking, “Is there anything about me that prevents her from trusting her life to me?” And knowing that YES, there’s this –’ pumping into the crook of his arm – ‘imagine the anguish of knowing that!’
He became my sick child. Helplessly he slid further into dope. His skin was covered in infected pimples which he doctored savagely with a razor blade in front of the kitchen mirror. His face was hollow and alarmingly white. His fingertips were infected from his ceaseless gnawing at himself. We never went out together; I saw him only at night when he would creep into my bed for comfort, but his restlessness and horrifying dreams would drive me, night after night, out of my own bed into other parts of the house. Often I slept with Clive, for comfort of my own. He would move over without a word, and sometimes stroke me till I fell asleep again.
People I met in the street would take on a certain look, when they asked ‘How’s Javo?’ as if they were speaking of a dying person.
By mid-February it was autumn already, before we had had a summer. Leaves rattled dryly outside my window on the pavement. The air had a waning feeling, and moved with a touch of melancholy.
Gracie, having hung longingly over the state school fence for three days, at last became a schoolgirl. She carried a small cardboard case down the street every morning, and returned dragging her steps every afternoon. She was not interested in answering questions about school. In the second week she ran away three times, strolled into the house at lunchtime with a plausible lie to explain her early arrival:
‘It was hot and we got out straight after lunch. All the grade bubs kids came home early today.’
She’d drop her case and lie on the bed with me to read or draw; then there would be a thunderous knock at the front door and a frowning man teacher in walk shorts and long white socks would be standing there, hands on hips.
‘Mrs Lewis? Where is Grace?’
She squeezed out a few tears each time, but consented to return. I walked her back to her prison, feeling my treacherous heart sinking with every step. Then her teacher discovered Gracie’s problem: boredom, caused by the fact that she was the only child in her grade who could read. I spent hours with her after school, drawing endless faces in profile, cartoons about the people in our household, rising suns, earthquakes, cyclones. If I had to deliver her up to her jailers every day, I would make up for it somehow. She survived. But one day when I rode past her school at playtime I saw her, very small in her brown gingham schooldress, lingering alone against a wall, watching the children moving about purposefully. I saw her heave herself away from her leaning place, and without a smile start to run with the mob.
I went to a party full of communists. I looked over my shoulder from a conversation and saw Javo come in: stoned, all right, I saw his wild eye and something in the turn of his head. This time, even after five days of watching him withdraw, I didn’t even involuntarily think,
‘But you said!’
I just saw that it had happened. He came over to me and hugged me with his gangly arms, bending down to me. To placate? No. Because he was glad to see me. It was noisy. We walked back to my house. He talked and I listened, padding along beside him with my bare feet.
‘I worked like a dog today,’ he said. ‘I dug up our whole back yard. And I planted a syringe tree.’
‘A what?’
‘I broke my fit and threw it in a hole and buried it.’ We both burst out laughing. A plant with evil fruit.
Back in my room I lay on my bed and listened more. He sat at my table, mending the sleeve of his Lee jacket and sewing a strip of Nepalese braid on to the cuff.
I said, in a tone of curiosity, ‘Did you and Martin get stoned today?’
‘Nn . . . yes.’
‘Did you nearly say “no”?’
‘Yes, I did.’
A small flowering of confidence and trust.
I was sweeping the matting after breakfast, digging in with the corner of the straw broom, when the back gate scraped against the concrete and round the corner of the house came the hasty, fluttering figure of my friend Rita: always in a hurry, on the verge of laughter or tears, hung about with a great leather bag containing her camera, a crushed packet of cigarettes, screwed-up tissues, a blunt pencil, an apple, a bicycle pump – a bag in which she rummaged helplessly while she talked to you, shaking back bangles and cursing absent-mindedly.
‘Oo hoo!’ I called as she came flying up the path on her high heels. She was smiling, of course, but by the time she reached the door I could see she was only just holding on. I stood the broom against the wall, to have my hands free, but she darted past me and sat down on the red chair.
‘What’s up, Rita?’
‘I can’t – I can’t –’ and she dropped her shining face on to her hands and began to sob.
Her daughter Juliet, carried along invisible on the tide of Rita’s entrance, appeared at the door and insinuated herself into the room: she looked at Rita, rolled her eyes round to my dismayed face, giggled nervously, and ran between the chair and the table to Gracie who was standing at the other door, round-eyed, thumb in mouth.
‘Come on, Grace!’ piped Juliet. ‘Let’s go in your room.’
Grace tore herself away from the interesting tableau; we heard them murmuring and rustling over the dress-up box in the next room.
I sat on the arm of Rita’s chair and stroked her thick hair. ‘So. What’s been happening?’
‘I’m going nuts at home,’ she said, fishing a dirty kleenex out of her bag and wiping her cheeks. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me. And this morning I thought, if I don’t get away from Juliet today I’ll fuckin’ kill her. I came straight round here. Can I leave her with you today? I’ve just got to get some work done.’
‘She can stay the night if she likes,’ I said. ‘You know, you really ought to live with more people, Rita.’
‘I know. But it’s not that easy to arrange. People who haven’t got kids are so hard to get on with. I know Juliet drives them nuts, but I keep thinking that’s their problem. What am I going to do?’ The question was already rhetorical: she was on her feet, gathering up her bag, pulling herself together.
‘I dunno. Battle on, I guess. It’s like what Eve says: “Life’s a struggle”.’ We both began to giggle at the mental picture of Eve the trooper, head forward in work-horse position, ready for the harness.
Rita struck a heroic pose, one hand flung out. ‘“Dare to struggle, dare to win”,’ she intoned.
‘Or –“Dare to giggle, dare to grin”, as the anarchists used to say.’
‘When will I come back for Juliet?’
‘Tomorrow – whenever you like.’
‘I’ll just nick in and say goodbye.’ She emerged again so quickly that I raised my eyebrows. ‘At home she wouldn’t leave me alone – now she’s too busy to even give me a kiss. Oh, well. Thanks, Nora.’ She put her hot cheek, still damp, against mine, and went off out the back door, crepe jacket flapping. I picked up the broom, but before I could start sweeping I overheard the girls in the bedroom:
‘Pretend you are a bad witch and you’re going away.’
‘And pretend you’re dead.’
‘And when you come home you find me dead on the bedroom floor.’
‘And only a kiss from my mother can make me alive again.’
‘Help!’ I thought vaguely. ‘I’m too young to be a mother. I don’t know enough. I can’t bring up a kid. I’m not a real grown-up. One day the real mother will come back, and I’ll only have been babysitting, and then I can go home.’
I spun the broom and pointed its good side down and began to beat at the matting with sharp rhythmical strokes.
At six in the morning, as the early autumn progressed, the sky was scarcely lighter than its night-time colour. I could hear the city start to shift, and roar deeper, and the surface sounds of its life begin: doors banged, a radio gabbled, cars started up, a rooster somewhere crowed. I could tell the season was changing, because in daylight the air moved, moved ceaselessly, not what you would call a wind, but restlessness and unease which were delicious to the bones and skin.
I dreamed of a bust in a house full of people: a political bust, where nasty clever police efficiently checked and filed, and escape from their knowledge was impossible.
I went to the film co-op to see the rushes of the junk movie. The lights went out and the rushes began and the door opened and in the light from the screen I saw Francis come in. He was wearing small hippy spectacles. I took my courage and crept over to him in the dark, against the wall where the latecomers were crouching. He touched my arm, looked me full in the face, without fear.
He drove me home on his way to the night’s shooting. There was something very sweet and whimsical in his thin face.
‘If I get any thinner than this,’ he said, ‘I’ll just disappear. It is this bloody movie. It is driving me insane. But it will be over by the end of this week, and then I’ll be able to relate to you properly.’ He was talking out of a tired face, almost waxen, the fine veins showing under his eyes. He had a way of trapping my eyes, holding my gaze for longer than my speedy head was used to, or could bear.
‘I’m not complaining,’ I replied, sitting placidly at the kitchen table. ‘I think there’s enough happening now to make it worthwhile, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said, with a smile in his eyes that narrowed them kindly. ‘But – I don’t know what happens in your life.’
I began to talk about Gracie and Javo, and the night in the Swansea hotel, not knowing why I chose that as the first story about myself.
He suddenly laughed and said,
‘You’ve got amazing eyebrows!’
I laughed too. My hand went involuntarily to my face.
‘Don’t cover them up!’ he cried.
I had lost the thread of thought.
‘I’m sorry!’ he said. ‘Go on.’
When he went off to the shooting, I walked out with him to the VW van full of equipment.
‘I’m going to give you a hug,’ he said, and we were standing in the road holding each other, faces in necks and shoulders, breathing each other in. He was thin. Like Javo, he was twenty-three.
That night I slept alone, and badly, dreaming bad dreams and feeling the night to be endless.
When I got home the next afternoon, Francis was in our kitchen. He was so tired. He sat on my bed and I mended my jeans and he talked, as twenty-three-year-olds will, about what love means and where sex fits in and so on. It was years since I’d heard someone going through the basics so painstakingly and seriously.
‘Why did you ask me my age, the other day?’ he wanted to know.
‘I was just interested.’
‘But – this is something I‘ve learnt so I don’t know if I ought to try and force it on some-one else – I don’t think people can get to know each other by asking things. I think they should do it through – holding each other, and being together.’
Oh, you little hippy! I caught the feeling on my face of a mocking look – heaven forbid.
‘Yes, I’m sure that’s true,’ I said. ‘But a bit of factual information never went astray.’
He looked at me. There was a pause.
‘It’s rather relaxing, being with you,’ he remarked, as I stitched away, cross-legged on my bed.
‘Funny you should say that. Usually people find me too speedy. I seem to spend half my time trying to slow myself down.’
‘So do I! Maybe we could slow ourselves down together.’
Outside at the van, he sat in the driver’s seat and I stood between him and the door, holding it open with my bum. He was wearing faded old Yakka overalls; through the side slit I could see his thin, thin flank naked under the worn cotton. We talked comfortably.
‘I’m sorry you have to go,’ I said, ‘but come round and see me again soon, will you? Because I can’t really come to you, can I?’
‘No, not really. Anne just couldn’t . . . understand it.’
He took me by the shoulders, and we hugged, and kissed.
‘Oh, it’s strange!’ he exclaimed, with his hands on my upper arms. ‘I haven’t really kissed or hugged anyone but one person for four years!’
‘Have you been married?’ I asked, half joking.
‘No! Well, sort of.’ He grinned. ‘But she is going to India in a week.’
I shut the door
and he drove off. Waved.
He must think I’m sharp, or hard, I thought. I might be. When I talked, sometimes he let a silence fall after I’d spoken, and looked at me quizzically for a long time, his face smiling kindly with crinkled eyes and a speculative expression.
On the last day of the junk movie shooting, I rode down to the location at the National Gallery, with Georgie. There I ran into Francis, agitated beyond endurance, stammering. He looked like an angry mouse: a frown seemed out of place on his gentle, pale face. Sweat was shining across the bridge of his nose. He smiled at me distractedly and hurried past along the empty passageway.
There was plenty of good dope around. Gracie was at school. The sun shone every day. I rode my bike everywhere. I went to the library. I was reading two novels a day. When Gracie came home from school we would doze off on my bed in the hot afternoon. For days at a time there was no sign of Javo. One night Georgie and Gracie and I went to the Pram Factory to see a play, and didn’t come home till two in the morning. We rode home, speeding along, Gracie on the back of my bike like a quiet monkey. The moon hung in the deep, deep blue sky; the air was dotty with stars. We sailed serenely through floods of warm autumn air. Gracie sang a song:
‘I useda be a parrot
but then I met a bad witch, a bad witch,
and she turned me into
a dang’rous frog . . .’
Oh, that Gracie, who feigned deafness, and stole dress-ups from school, and smeared her face with makeup stolen by some junkie in a chemist bust, and wore a gold lame cape with a glittering G on the back, and who said to me when we met unexpectedly in the street,
‘Oh, you look beautiful! I wish I wuz as beautiful as you.’ Whenever I worried about her irregular life, I remembered Noel Coward’s poem about his childhood:
‘I never learned to bat or bowl,
but I heard the curtain going up.’
ONLY HIS NEXT OF KIN
