by Helen Garner
I walked quickly past. Soon she put the doll down and drifted away up the stairs.
I don’t remember what happened to the doll. Within three years I’d had two abortions, and within eight years, a child. The abortions I went into briskly, without conscious regret. But now I’m in my fifties, they’ve come back to haunt me. I’ve had to grieve for them, and mourn them. I never expected this to happen. It was awful, and it took a long time. When it first surged up in me, I remembered the woman in the toy department, and the look she gave me. For the first time I understood it, and I grieved for her as well.
2000
Big Brass Bed
EVERYONE was upset when the café changed hands. For years it had stood reticently on our main street. In winter a wood stove warmed it. Herbs grew in tubs along the path to the toilet. The quiet souls who ran it supplied toys and colouring books, and fresh copies of the Guardian Weekly and the Financial Review as well as the essential celebrity trash. They knew our names and were patient, pad in hand, with children’s struggles to read the menu for themselves. They baked and served the most sensational savoury muffins. And their coffee was always perfect. On the last day nobody wanted to leave. Some of us cried.
The day the sheets of newspaper came down off the windows, I went in. The new young guy behind the counter had a shaved head and a Pearl Jam T-shirt. Not only did he give me one of those blank looks that are reserved for invisible women of my age, but he addressed me as ‘sweetie’.
They were going for a ’70s look: a lot of nauseous burnt orange; wood-framed paintings of sailing ships. The waiter brought me my latte in a glass shaped like a teacup. The head on it was thick and the right colour, but I looked at it resentfully.
Somebody else had got the Age first so I had to pay attention to the music. It was some band I’d never heard before, loud and boring. Making a mental note never to come here again, I took the first sip of coffee.
It was good. It was really quite excellent. I felt it go zinging smoothly along my veins, opening out my thoughts into a series of promising gateways. I would have to admit it was a perfect coffee. There was nothing I needed to write, but I was in the mood, so I got out my notebook and pencil, and looked around for something to describe.
The customer who’d bagged the Age was an oldish woman, a stranger, sitting opposite my table with her back to the wall. She looked ordinary and dull, like somebody’s wife, or widow, or mother, or auntie, or nanna. Her hair was short and dyed, and she was wearing a loose linen shirt over pants cropped above the ankle. She was carrying some weight, and her feet were veiny, in their sensible, thick-soled sandals. She had a pencil in her hand and was doing the crossword. Her face was closed and crabby-looking.
Just as I was making a note of this, the music stopped, and a new CD began. A harmonica, thin and tentative. A young-sounding band, warm and modest and not yet famous, loped out of a faraway country. A nasal voice, quivering with melancholy, singing about a pick-up, about driving it down to LA. I sat up. Along with the caffeine, a stream of happy memory flowed through me, from thirty-five years ago.
The oldish woman at the other table kept her head down over the puzzle, but her lips were moving. I thought she was spelling out the clues, but then I saw the pattern: she was singing along. I stared at her, thunderstruck. We must be the same age.
And she kept going. She knew all the verses. Pictures on the wall. A big brass bed.
The waiter who had called me ‘sweetie’ dashed past my table. I called out: ‘Hey. Who’s the Neil Young buff?’ He gave me a big, open grin as he hurried by: ‘Oh, round here we’ve got a thing about him.’
I laughed. The woman doing the crossword raised her head and shot me a private smile. Her face was warm and open and pretty. She looked ten years younger. Before I could respond, she dropped her eyes again and went on working away with her pencil.
So I too was an oldish woman, somebody’s ex-wife and mother and aunt and grandmother, ordinary and dull. I too was close-faced and crabby-looking, with veiny feet and thick-soled sandals and dyed hair and pants of an unfashionable length. I wanted to go and sit beside her. I would have liked to say something, like ‘Hey—sister’. But we both stayed where we were, with our heads down over our pencils, mouthing the words, full of sudden gratitude for the things in our lives that we don’t need to talk about, except maybe one day to a stranger.
2007
Dawn Service
WE had never been in the city so early. At Flinders Street a crowd rushed to board the St Kilda Road tram. A big guy in gold rings and bracelets dropped into the seat beside me. ‘I’ve been meaning to go to this for years!’ he said in a low, thrilled voice. ‘And last night I decided I just would!’ Most people weren’t talking. Strangers exchanged meaningful glances, like conspirators.
The tram stopped outside the National Gallery and everyone poured out into the soft darkness. We surged straight across the road and set out, fast and purposeful, in a southerly direction. Some people pushed their kids in prams, others carried them on their shoulders. We strode across lawns, we streamed along pavements. No one was laughing, no one was shouting or cracking jokes. It was before dawn, and we were going to pay our respects to the dead.
We fetched up against the back of a dense and stationary crowd. We stood on tiptoe and strained our eyes. Faint light barely pierced the clouds. The huge building, with its ridged pillars and vast stone staircase and Egyptian-looking top, bulked weirdly sepia. A man’s voice, amplified, floated over our massed heads. He was assuring children that something called ‘the Anzac spirit’ would get them through the difficulties of their lives.
Who was this speaker? Why did he sound so deeply wrong? Was it the hollow, hackneyed nature of the sentiment, or the glossy timbre of his voice, so mellow and patronising?
Next, the invisible speaker turned his attention to the thousands of grown-ups standing in the dark. He addressed us as ‘ladies and gentlemen’. He intoned the lines we were expecting: ‘They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old. / Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.’ Two cadets who had distinguished themselves in their studies read worthy thoughts aloud to us in stilted tones, self-conscious, terribly sincere. Their youthful voices came and went on the still-dark air.
The crowd stood in stoic silence. The generators of the fast-food vans, over there in the park beyond the crowd’s edges, hummed steadily. We could smell the heating fat.
A bugler played ‘The Last Post’. A Welsh choir sang with a brass band. Their voices swelled grandly. After each verse of the song an officer’s tiny voice, far away, yelled an order. Gunfire roared. Two little girls in front of me turned to each other in awe. Still we stood with closed mouths. The silence of the crowd was as thick as felt. We stood patiently, respectfully, hopefully. We were waiting for something, the mysterious, nameless thing we had come for.
But the MC’s voice, with its fruity intonation, betrayed the pure, pained cry of the bugle. He spoke to us as if we were no more than his audience. The third time he addressed us as ‘ladies and gentlemen’ a peculiar rage rose up in me. We weren’t here to be entertained, to be passive consumers of a professionally produced show. We were not just spectators. We were here to take part in something. We had come as Australians, as each other’s countrymen and -women—as citizens.
Now the man urged us to sing the national anthem. The band struck up. As usual it was pitched either too high or low for a mature woman’s voice. We sang, or tried to; and then the thing was over. The day had dawned.
If only we had been able to sing a real song, while the light struggled through the cloud cover and Anzac Day began. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ would not do, in its awkward key, with its clumsy poeticisms and embarrassing claims.
We needed to sing songs we had known since we were children, songs we shouted in our playgrounds or at assembly, standing in lines on the asphalt with our hands on our hearts. What happened to all our hymns? How did we lose ‘Jerusalem’? ‘I Vow to T
hee My Country’? ‘O Valiant Hearts’?
Why couldn’t we raise our voices and sing out together in solemnity, thousands of us, men and woman and children, unabashed? It was too late in history. Nobody knows the parts. The words have been forgotten. We turned and set out homewards along St Kilda Road, under a grey sky, with our emotions still aching in our throats.
2006
A Party
IN 1966, when I had just started my first high-school teaching job, I ran into some domestic problems and had to find a place to live, in a hurry. I heard someone was vacating a room in a high terrace at the north end of Swanston Street, opposite Melbourne University.
I climbed the stairs to inspect the room. The floor was covered in worn seagrass matting. The fireplace was beyond use. Half the floor space was taken up by a clumsy sink and kitchen bench. It was ugly and mean. But as I stood at the open door, there stirred in me a faint, complex and not entirely disagreeable sensation: I had been here before. Ridiculous.
I had nowhere to sleep. I said, ‘I’ll take it.’
I moved in my stuff, such as it was, and got on with messing up my life. The not-quite-strangeness of the room might have haunted me, except that the kids in my classes had my number and knew how to make me cry. Each evening I would stagger home, lie on the bed for half an hour, then walk round the corner to Jimmy Watson’s and start drinking.
One Saturday a friend from my university college tracked me down. She strode in, looked around the room and started to laugh. ‘How the hell did you end up here? This is where we came to that party!’
‘What party?’
‘You know! In second year! The one where you sat on the floor all night with—’
‘Shut up!’
The first night I ever got really, really drunk. I don’t remember how I got to the house, or who with. Unflattering light beamed from one bare bulb. There was no music because in those days at parties in someone’s room there wasn’t music, there was just yelling, and flagons of violent claret. I was a private-school head prefect from Geelong in a twin-set and pleated skirt, and I had never drunk wine in my life; but I wanted to be like the people I was with, whoever the hell they were, so I swigged claret. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I took my turn at the glass flagon as it passed. Between slugs I sat in a daze of pleasure and gazed up at the underside of the mantelpiece. The room was packed with impressive strangers my age, laughing and bellowing and arguing. They looked like the sort of people I wanted to know, and I seemed at last to have found them.
A student wearing a battered brown leather coat came and sat down on the floor in front of me. He couldn’t have known my name, but I knew his without having to ask, because he was really famous. We didn’t say ‘on campus’ back then, only Americans used the word ‘campus’. We said ‘at uni’. His name was John Wishart and he was really famous at uni, I had no idea what for, because I only knew people like me who were doing Arts. He was tall and dark and extremely good-looking, with narrow eyes and high cheekbones, below one of which was a perfect, tiny black mole. I don’t remember if either of us said anything. But we started to kiss, and we sat there on the matting, leaning towards each other and resting our palms on the floor, and kissed and kissed for hours and hours and hours.
I think.
I don’t know where he went, or how I got back to college. The next thing I was leaning over the toilet vomiting, and at the same time I was singing a Joan Baez song, very loudly, and shouting, ‘I’M SOOOO HAPPY!’ The studious girl who lived down the hall came along softly in her dressing-gown and slippers to see if I was all right. I suppose she must have held my head out of the toilet and wiped up the mess. I couldn’t remember anything about the party but it was the best one in the world and I wanted everyone to know that I had been at it.
By lunchtime the next day I had stopped being sick but I understood the squalor of life. The sunlight kept hitting me with a hammer. I put on sunglasses and limped across Trinity and past the swimming pool to the caf. I sat down carefully at a table with some friends who were not party girls. They looked at me with distaste, and were about to start reproaching me when one of them broke off and whispered reverently, ‘Look. There goes John Wishart.’
I composed my features, and swung round to look. Would he say hello? Shuffling past the end of our table, his bespectacled gaze fixed on his feet, was a short, puny, wretched swot in sagging cords and a jumper with matching beanie obviously knitted by his mother.
My blush faded. ‘I thought you said John Wishart.’
‘I did! There he goes!’
‘Pfff. That’s not John Wishart.’
‘It is! Everyone knows who John Wishart is! He’s the president of the Rationalists’ Society!’
My gorge rose. Could he have been the man I had kissed? But what about the old leather coat? The dark hair and narrow eyes? The perfect mole? Was this the derangement of the senses they talked about in French poetry tutes? Had the wonderful party even existed? It was my first existential crisis.
When I recovered I made discreet inquiries. Yes; there were two John Wisharts, one plain and clever, the other beautiful and probably rather dumb. Neither of them ever crossed my path again. But every Wednesday morning, when I drive my granddaughter along Swanston Street to her crèche, she points to the big house opposite Newman College and says, in her ritualistic voice, ‘Nanna, that’s where you went to a party and had too much to drink, when you were young, in the olden days.’
2004
The Insults of Age
THE insults of age had been piling up for so long that I was almost numb to them. The husband (when I still had one): ‘You’re not going out in that sleeveless top?’ The grandchild: ‘Nanna, why are your teeth grey?’ The pretty young publisher tottering along in her stilettos: ‘Are you right on these stairs, Helen?’ The flight attendant at the boarding gate: ‘And when you do reach your seat, madam, remember to stow that little backpack riiiight under the seat in front of you!’ The grinning red-faced bloke who mutters to the young man taking the seat beside me: ‘Bad luck, mate.’ The armed child behind the police-station counter unable to conceal her boredom as I describe the man in a balaclava, brandishing a baton, who leapt roaring out of the dark near the station underpass and chased me and my friend all the way home: ‘And what were you scared of? Did you think he might hit you with his umbrella?’
Really, it is astonishing how much shit a woman will cop in the interests of civic and domestic order.
But last spring I got a fright. I was speaking about my new book to a university lecture theatre full of journalism students. I had their attention. Everything was rolling along nicely. Somebody asked me a question and I looked down to collect my thoughts. Cut to the young lecturer’s face surprisingly close to mine. ‘Helen,’ he murmured, ‘we’re going to take you to the medical clinic.’ What? Me? Apparently, in those few absent moments, of which I still have no memory, I had become confused and distressed; I didn’t know where I was or why I was there. He thought I might be having a stroke.
The rest of that afternoon I lay at my ease in an Emergency cubicle at the Royal Melbourne, feeling strangely lighthearted. I kept thinking in wonder, I’ve dropped my bundle. All scans and tests came up clear. Somebody asked me if I’d ever heard of transient global amnesia. I was home in time for dinner.
Next morning I took the hospital report to my GP. ‘I’ve been worried about you,’ she said. ‘It’s stress. You are severely depleted. Cancel the rest of your publicity tour, and don’t go on any planes. You need a serious rest.’ I must have looked sceptical. She leaned across the desk, narrowed her eyes, and laid it on the line: ‘Helen. You. Are. Seventy-one.’
I went home and sulked on the couch for a week, surveying my lengthening past and shortening future.
I had known for years, of course, that beyond a certain age women become invisible in public spaces. The famous erotic gaze is withdrawn. You are no longer, in the eyes of the world, a sexual being. In my experience,
though, this forlornness is a passing phase. The sadness of the loss fades and fades. You pass through loneliness and out into a balmy freedom from the heavy labour of self-presentation. Oh, the relief! You have nothing to prove. You can saunter about the world in overalls. Because a lifetime as a woman has taught you to listen, you know how to strike up long, meaty conversations with strangers on trams and trains.
But there is a down side, which, from my convalescent sofa, I dwelt upon with growing irritation. Hard chargers in a hurry begin to patronise you. Your face is lined and your hair is grey, so they think you are weak, deaf, helpless, ignorant and stupid. When they address you they tilt their heads and bare their teeth and adopt a tuneful intonation. It is assumed that you have no opinions and no standards of behaviour, that nothing that happens in your vicinity is any of your business. By the time I had got bored with resting and returned to ordinary life, I found that the shield of feminine passivity I had been holding up against this routine peppering of affronts had splintered into shards.
One warm December evening, a friend and I were strolling along Swanston Street on our way out to dinner. The pavement was packed and our progress was slow. Ahead of us in the crowd we observed with nostalgic pleasure a trio of teenagers striding along, lanky white Australian schoolgirls in gingham dresses and blazers, their ponytails tied high with white ribbons.
One of the girls kept dropping behind her companions to dash about in the moving crowd, causing mysterious jolts and flurries. Parallel with my friend and me, an Asian woman of our age was walking by herself, composed and thoughtful. The revved-up schoolgirl came romping back against the flow of pedestrians and with a manic grimace thrust her face right into the older woman’s. The woman reared back. The girl skipped nimbly across the stream of people and bounded towards her next mark, a woman sitting on a bench—also Asian, also alone and minding her own business. The schoolgirl stopped in front of her and did a little dance of derision, flapping both hands in mocking parody of greeting. I saw the Asian woman look up in fear, and something in me went berserk.
