Queen Kat, Carmel and St Jude Get a Life

by Maureen McCarthy

  ‘I’m going to tell them tomorrow on the phone. Jude, I can’t go back there!’ I nodded, sensing that she didn’t want any glee from me at this stage.

  ‘But it will cut me off from them,’ she wailed. ‘I know it will. I’ll be so alone after . . . after I’ve defied them . . .’

  ‘I know,’ I murmured. ‘But it is your life . . .’

  ‘They might even tell me never to come back,’ she went on, as though to herself. ‘And then there’s the twins and everyone . . . I love my brothers! I don’t want to be cut off from them! I was going to go home next week to see them all. Now they’ll tell me I can’t.’

  There was nothing I could say. Perhaps she was right. I didn’t think so, but then I didn’t know them that well.

  The next week went by in a subdued haze. Carmel rang her parents to tell them of her decision and they were, as she had expected, outraged. After the first phone call, they began to ring her at odd times of the day and night cajoling and threatening her with all kinds of things. I had to go to uni every day, of course, so I missed a lot of it.

  At one stage her mother told her that she was never to come home again and that she would be cut out of the family will. We had a laugh about that one, joking that the money was really what she had been interested in, of course! But it was devastating nevertheless. Her mother was shameless, a blatant dictator. Stalin had nothing on this woman. Once, when I’d made the mistake of picking up the phone before Carmel could get to it, she’d shrieked at me, ‘It’s all your fault.’ She went on to say that they had decided to pretend that Carmel had never existed.

  ‘Never existed, Mrs McCaffrey?’ I’d repeated.

  ‘That’s right! Don’t you feel proud?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Carmel was distraught for two days after that one. Then her father rang and seemed to know nothing of her mother’s threats, because he ended the conversation on a sad, we-are-longing-to-see-you note. Letters arrived, too. A couple from aunts, one from a family friend, and two really heavy ones from her parents.

  ‘We have done everything for you.’

  ‘We are so ashamed to have raised such a selfish girl.’

  ‘How could you have lied to us for all these months?’

  ‘After all our years of hard work!’

  Every time I saw Carmel during that first week she seemed to be either bawling or writing letters back to her family. She gave me one to read, anxiously asking if it was ‘all right’. It was very short and to the point. She simply told them that she wanted to make her own life and that she loved them all dearly. By this stage I’d had enough. I told her to send the bloody thing, it was more than they deserved.

  Carmel seemed to see the whole thing as a battle she had to fight on her own. She continued to work in the cafe and rehearse in the afternoon with the band. But after that first gig, when she had knocked the audience’s socks off with her talent, the band’s cohesion seemed to slide. Carmel came back each afternoon from the rehearsals with tales of intrigue and petty bickering. The lead singer seemed to think it was his role to boss everyone around and impose his ideas about what they should be playing. He’d begun to belittle the old blues/rock songs that suited Carmel’s voice so well, and insisted on a harder, more aggressive style. Not the sort of thing she wanted to sing at all.

  Alan seemed more or less oblivious of what was going on. When Carmel tried to talk to him he acted as if he was completely unaware of the lead singer’s repressive edge. Carmel eventually realised that this was because he always had a few joints before rehearsal. Although Carmel liked Alan, she bemoaned the fact that he didn’t stick up for her. The three men in the band only seemed to be close when they were rub-bishing Carmel’s ideas. Underneath they resented her superior knowledge of music: both Carmel and the other backup singer could read music and knew, and could explain in theoretical terms, why something sounded wrong when it did. It had taken Carmel time to develop the confidence to speak up. When she did she had to contend with aspersions about her ability to ‘move right’ and ‘look right’. Why didn’t she lose weight? they wanted to know. The band could really go places if it had a couple of ‘spunks’ out the front. It was all said half-jokingly, but it undermined Carmel’s confidence.

  One afternoon during this time I came home early and found Carmel stuffing a hunk of iced bun into her mouth. She looked up guiltily. There was a big brown paper bag beside her with only one bun left in it. There had obviously been more.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’ve just finished four of these,’ she said miserably, ‘and I feel sick.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Since the night of the protest, when Juan had told me about Orlando, I’d lost interest in food. A few bites of toast in the morning was enough, then maybe an apple or orange during the day. I didn’t know why, I’d never gone off my food before. The idea of sitting down and eating four of these great big sticky buns made me feel like chucking up.

  ‘I thought you were trying to lose weight,’ I said. Carmel went on stubbornly munching on the bun.

  ‘I haven’t eaten anything for two days,’ she mumbled defensively. ‘Then I was walking home past the bakery and the smell . . . I gave way and bought all these!’

  ‘Oh God, Carmel!’ I tried to laugh as I whipped the last bun away, wrapped it back up in the paper bag, and put it in the fridge. ‘Don’t eat any more or you will be sick. Have you been rehearsing?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did dickhead bring you the dress he was talking about?’ The lead singer was always showing off about his mother, who’d been a blues singer in Europe in her young days. He’d been promising for weeks to bring Carmel a spangle-encrusted blue silk dress she had worn when she sang in a German nightclub.

  ‘It was too small,’ she cried forlornly. ‘It just looked revolting. I tried it on and they all laughed at me.’ I sat down and stared across the table at her. I could tell she was really cut by all this. The week before she had said she was going on a diet to try and fit into the dress.

  ‘So what,’ I said, trying to cheer her up. ‘You don’t want to wear his dumb old mother’s dress!’

  ‘But I did,’ she said. ‘It was beautiful. A real torch-singer’s dress. I would have been perfect, except for . . .’

  ‘What size was it?’

  ‘That’s the thing. It was big . . . loose by reasonable standards. Size sixteen, at least. And I still couldn’t fit into it!’

  ‘So you thought you’d better come home and have a big guts-up?’ I said.

  She covered her face with her hands and started to laugh and groan at the same time. I joined in. I’m sure we sounded like a couple of sick cats.

  ‘Oh, Jude, what am I going to do?’ she spluttered. ‘I’m starting to hate being in this band. The guys are awful. They don’t work together . . . I mean what am I doing? What future do I have . . . ? Maybe I should go home!’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Carmel!’ I said, still laughing weakly. ‘Or I’ll . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll . . . put you out of your misery,’ I said, picking up a heavy saucepan and pretending to hit her over the head with it.

  I sat down and put my own head onto the coolness of the laminex table, aware of the lightness in my stomach that had been making me feel slightly dizzy all day. Now, on top of the dizziness I felt quite drunk with the laughter. I knew I really should get myself something to eat right then, but even thinking of food made me even more queasy.

  ‘I’ll never be a singer,’ Carmel blurted out, her eyes peering out from behind her long pale fingers.

  ‘You already are a singer!’ I said impatiently.

  ‘Yeah, but you’ve got to look right,’ she went on. ‘That’s part of it, and I’m too fat.’

  ‘Cut the crap, Carmel!’ I snapped. I could usually buoy her up into feeling all right again. But this time my heart wasn’t in it. We sat there silently for a while, thinking our own thoughts.

 
; Anyone with half a brain could see that those guys were belittling out of jealousy. She would outgrow that band soon anyway. I suppose I didn’t really try to understand her problem with her weight. The truth was I thought she was beautiful and I couldn’t understand that she didn’t.

  I suddenly felt profoundly uninterested. Who was I to try and fix up anyone else’s life when I had my own . . . my own obsessions to worry about?

  A few weeks went by. Weeks during which I tried to avoid looking at myself in the mirror. I didn’t want to watch my own face grow pale and pinched, nor see my arms and legs slowly become scrawny. I was becoming lighter all over. Bones were beginning to protrude in all different places: elbows, hips, knees. My collar-bone stuck out sharply like a strange bird’s. I started wearing a scarf around my neck. People began to comment.

  ‘Jude! You been sick?’

  ‘You’re getting too thin!’

  ‘Got a tapeworm?’

  My jeans were now baggy. When I first noticed this I thought there was something wrong with the jeans. I was worried, but I had no idea what to do. I had an odd feeling of moving backwards. When I caught sight of myself in shop windows and street mirrors I had the oddest sensation, as though I was turning back into a child of twelve.

  I SAT ON A SEAT AS NEAR AS I COULD TO THE water, hunching down into my coat against the wind and looking out across the Yarra. It was that wonderful halfway time, neither day nor night, clear and cold; the pale blue sky was already beginning to slide away into the drama of night; the subtle landscape of watery gold and pink light washed across the sky above me. The river and me. Like music.

  Like the dream I’d had the night before. We were on our way down from the mountains again, my father and I. Cutting our way through thick undergrowth, trying to get down to the river. We both knew what we were going to find when we got there, but still we were in a hurry. It was important to get there before the light faded. My feet hurt; stones were pushing through my light canvas shoes and my father’s face and hands were cut and bruised. When, at last, we got there, we looked around and could see nothing except the beautiful setting sun dropping slowly behind the trees on the opposite bank, spreading its light like molten gold across the water, catching the trees and low bushes, making the tips and edges of them shine like stones.

  I knew I was in Chile. In the high country behind the city, a long time ago. And I could feel danger all about me.

  A tremendous dread built up in my chest as we began to search among the clumps of rushes in the banks of the river. I desperately wanted to run but because my father was there I couldn’t. At last we found what we were looking for. The bodies were hidden between the clumps of tall reeds upstream. There were perhaps six men piled on top of each other, and three older women with grey hair and wrinkled faces. Although we looked closely into each face neither my father nor I recognised any of them. Each body was riddled with bullets. Strands of congealed blood waved like tiny flags in the water around some of the wounds. My father waded into the water and began carefully and very gently to push the bodies out into the current. I stood and watched them sliding off downstream. Then I turned away and found two young children near where the others had been. One boy of about eight and a little girl of around three. In spite of the bullet holes in their chests they looked peaceful, as if they were only asleep. My father stepped in front of me, as though he didn’t want me to see the children and pushed them out into the current as well.

  I was waiting beside the Yarra on the Southbank Promenade for a restaurant to open, thinking about my dream. I’d come down after my lectures were over and had been there for a couple of hours. There were lots of people about. Smiling, arm in arm. An occasional shout and burst of raucous laughter gave the place a warm, easygoing air, in spite of the cold. Streaky ribbons of yellow and red light fluttered below me in the water.

  I stared over at the crowd waiting in lines to board the restaurant boat. It would be launched soon, gliding out into the bay, full of people who wanted only to eat, drink and be merry. I despised them at the same time as wishing I could be part of their easy, carefree fun. Some of them wore fur coats, with shiny high-heeled boots. Champagne corks were popping, and I could see the sparkle of glasses being raised in the distance under the dipping line of coloured lights. I got up and tap-danced a little, trying to warm my toes. Surely it would be open by now.

  Orlando’s. The name was spread proudly across both windows in elegant script. I shuddered before pushing open the door and walking in. There were about three other groups of patrons already seated. A woman of about fifty stood behind the small counter, by the partially concealed cash register. She was blonde and immaculately dressed in black silk. She smiled at me in a tight professional way.

  ‘Good evening.’ Her accent was thick and hard to place. ‘A table for one?’ I nodded numbly, followed her to a small table and sat down.

  The place was large and nicely furnished. The slate floor contained various subtle shades of grey, the walls were white with bits of dark wood-panelling around the cornices and window edges. The tablecloths were crisp and white. Lovely round glasses sparkled on every table. Apart from the three small groups of people already eating and drinking, the only other person was a young girl of around eighteen who was waiting on the tables. She was moving quickly, serving bottles of wine and plates of food, and smiling secretly to herself. She came over to me, smiled, and stood waiting for my order. I realised I was hungry, that I hadn’t eaten anything at all that day. Six weeks had gone by since the night Juan had told me. Six weeks of trying to forget, trying to keep away. My heart was hammering as I ordered a plate of pasta, some bread, and a glass of wine. Then I sat back and tried to calm myself. There were only the two women. And they might just be hired staff. How could I find out what I wanted to know? I stared around and tried to think of a way.

  That morning I had risen knowing that I had to see him. That was all, I told myself. That would be enough. I needed to see this man, to look into his face if that were possible, to try to understand something about him.

  It had been easy to find the restaurant. It was listed in the phone book. When I rang the number a girl had answered and she had told me that the restaurant had been relocated to the Southbank area.

  The waitress brought my wine, a steaming bowl of pasta, and a plate of warm bread. I thanked her and ate a couple of mouthfuls very quickly, without tasting it. Then it happened, the way it had been happening for weeks, every time I came in contact with food. I lost all appetite.

  The place began to fill up. Most of the surrounding tables were now occupied and the noise level was high; at times it seemed to be verging on hysterical. A table of giggling office girls sat on my right and three serious young men in suits sat immediately in front of me. I listened alternately to their conversations as I played with my food. I made myself take a bite of bread, but it tasted like cardboard and was hard to swallow. I put some pasta on my fork, but couldn’t distinguish the separate tastes. The bread was like the pasta, and the sauce was like the bread. The girls were talking about men and the men were talking about their work. As I eavesdropped I wondered if I would ask the waitress something when she next passed. Perhaps I could say I’d visited the restaurant when it had been in South Yarra, to try and get her talking about her boss. I tried to catch her attention, but the table of men beat me to it.

  ‘May we order some more bread?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘Where’s Orlando tonight?’ My head jerked up from my meal. I chewed and strained to hear her answer over the noise. ‘Is something wrong?’ The girl’s face had dropped. The men laughed.

  ‘Not at all, it’s just that we’re used to him being about.’

  The girl began to smile again.

  ‘There’s a big party coming in later,’ she said. ‘He’s in the kitchen preparing food.’

  ‘So we’ll just have to make do with Mrs Orlando?’ one of the men joked loudly, glancing over at the lady in black b
ehind the cash register. They caught her eye and she smiled over at them and waved. Mrs Orlando. I got up, feeling giddy. I picked up my coat and bag and walked quickly over to the where she stood. She looked at me querulously because I hadn’t been given a bill.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’ve just realised the time. I couldn’t wait. I had a small carbonara, bread, and a glass of wine.’ But she wasn’t listening. Her mouth had gone tight with displeasure. She moved out from behind the alcove and motioned briskly to the waitress to come over. I’d offended her sense of correctness. I should have waited for the waitress to bring my account. The girl rushed over, still smiling gamely, her hands full of plates and glasses. She was very busy, the only waitress attending to the whole room.

  ‘Table three? Have you got the bill?’ the woman said darkly. The girl indicated her pocket. Her hands were full so she was unable to get the order book out herself. Mrs Orlando reached down and took the book, sniffed, and began to flick through it. ‘Just a carbonara, bread, and a glass of red wine, Mrs O.’ The waitress repeated my words lightly before diving off towards the kitchen. They had both treated me as if I wasn’t quite present. I felt humiliated, which I guess is what they wanted. More importantly, I felt I needed to have some fresh air soon. Her face a mask of displeasure, the woman began to ring through the items. Six dollars fifty, four dollars.

  A man suddenly appeared in the small alcove with her. He was also dressed in black, but he had a white square linen apron tied around his middle. He was tall, grey and heavily built, with black hair all over his arms, and he seemed edgy, anxious to be off.

  ‘My dear,’ he said in Spanish. ‘Did we order any more cream this morning?’

  ‘Of course,’ she anwered. Then to me, ‘That will be fourteen dollars and sixty cents . . .’ But although I heard her words they didn’t register. I was staring at the man’s face, side-on to me as he stood behind the woman waiting for her to tell him where the cream was. His features were strong and even. I think I was trying to see him in relation to Juan. He looked younger. Heavier but much healthier. Juan was ancient by comparison. This man was ageing, of course. There were wrinkles, and grey hairs, and a slight sagginess around his chin, but his chest and arms were muscular and he looked strong.