Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  ‘You don’t need that place,’ he’d say to me.

  ‘But it’s my mother’s home.’

  ‘She doesn’t know where she’s living.’

  ‘She’ll probably want to go back to her home, Reg.’

  ‘Look, you’ll need to stay up in the retreat for quite a while until I can get the lawyers to see things my way and have the paintings legally restored to you and your family. How about I go and live in your mother’s house and rent it from you…tell you what, I’ll buy it from you. You haven’t got any money, you need money. I’ll buy that house.’

  ‘It’s not mine to sell. It’s my mother’s.’

  ‘Well, it’s no use to you sitting empty like that plum in the middle of Melbourne where plenty of people are wanting to live.’

  ‘Including you.’

  ‘Look, I could live anywhere I chose. I just happen to like that house…and, if I bought it, it would still, sort of, be in the family.’

  He was a manipulative old bugger but it was true we’d have been better off selling Stella’s house. In fact, it seemed the only way we were going to get by was by selling her house. Or my house, which Eli had been sharing with friends while he was a student. There was still a mortgage on my house and students lived on there when Eli took off on his trip. They’d be late with their rent and the garden was a wreck and I tried not to think about it, but it represented such a lot of work and effort with the bank and it was my one security. ‘Come on, Isobel, realise your capital and sell up,’ Reg would say. And I would have bad dreams that my beaut little house was falling to bits catastrophically and it would happen while dependable friends were visiting me. It was a two-storey, timber house, renovated on the cheap. In my dreams Eli would be living in it with me. I’d be sitting in the flat in the roof apologising to my dependable friends for the sudden collapse of walls around us, while acquaintances of Eli’s, who were far from dependable, moved in en masse, making the whole building shake and begin to topple. My dependable friends and I would become a little insignificant enclave of oldies; the more dependable among them, to whom such things would never happen, would say, in firm voices, ‘Isobel, you can’t allow Eli and his friends to do this to you.’ And then they’d consult with each other and shake their heads until they had to run for their cars that were parked nearby and save them from being destroyed in the total collapse. One of them would give me a lift, saying, ‘This used to be such a promising part of town. We were all so happy when you bought here.’ And she would drop me off under a big railway bridge where tramps were living in sleeping bags and where the only way out was up an escalator onto a station from which you needed a ticket to exit. Not only would I not have a ticket, I hadn’t even the money to buy one. I was doomed to ride trains all my life, avoiding inspectors, trying not to be raped by other tramps and feeding myself through theft or beggary.

  I was really fretting for my house and Stella was slowly coming to herself, so I put it to her that to save her place, we really ought to let Reg rent it from us so it would be generating some income. As things stood, we couldn’t afford to be buying furniture and papering over the mudbricks so that Stella could have a salon in retirement…Senile she might have been, but at the mention of someone whose penis she’d seen depicted swinging in the breeze on the wall of a gallery putting himself up as a prospective tenant, she broke into a string of invective so fierce I had to crouch behind her new couch in case she hit me. She was roaring. What was I doing with her life? I was a tyrant, just like His Craziness, who had killed her daughter! (His Craziness? I don’t know whether she meant David or Dadda and I don’t think she knew, either.) If she, Stella Motte, wanted to live in salubrious surroundings, then she, Stella Motte, would live in salubrious surroundings and I could go drown myself ‘in a vat of piddle!’ Stella Motte wasn’t going to agree to renting anything to anyone. It was beneath her. When I put it to her in top G from behind the couch that we couldn’t afford her spending sprees unless we either rented out her house or sold it, she did one of her emotional swan dives, laid waste to the new furniture and ripped into the wallpaper, yelling, ‘Sell it then!’ Her father was supposed to have slaughtered all the pigs in his sty when the bank foreclosed on the mortgage on his property and she wasn’t his daughter for nothing. She broke the side off a brand new armchair and buckled the fittings on her new lamp stands so they couldn’t be used. These days, she’d be called ‘bipolar’, but back then, it was par for the course, only occasional and witheringly exhausting.

  I was so angry I sold her house for cash to Reg. He put the money in a bank account in my mother’s name, to which I had access. Stella saw the sum and believed she’d suddenly become rich. There were more trips to Canberra for hairstyles and clothes, replacement furniture, good crystal and an eighteen carat gold watch. She, who had been sitting around for a couple of years humbly and quietly knitting things at random and only requiring more wool, now began to resurrect her glory days. Except there weren’t really any glory days and she made it all up as she went along.

  Reg’s retreat began to feel overpopulated with crazy people who could still drive but couldn’t afford their own grog, and especially not the sort of grog Stella was buying and drinking out of Stuart crystal. Minor royalty emerged from an isolated farm – Lady Stephanie Plum was actually an old maid who’d been dumped by her family in a cottage they owned in an apple orchard. There was a religious Bulgarian of about seventy with a white crew cut who belonged to a doomsday cult and would come on Wednesdays to help Stella prepare for the Day of Reckoning. The Day came and went and he died and was replaced by a man who lived in the local town in a renovated Victorian cottage he rented from a local estate agent. He couldn’t open any windows in the cottage because the windows had been renovated and the keys lost. He had to keep his front and back doors open all the time to let fresh air in. He owned the fattest bulldog I’ve ever seen. I’d promised Reg that we wouldn’t have any pets at the retreat because of the wildlife, but the immense animal would come in spite of the injunction and poo in Reg’s wildflower reserve. ‘No!’ I said. ‘No, it can’t go on. We should think about moving back to Melbourne.’

  The wildflower reserve was Reg’s idea of a sacred place. In there, there were rare orchids that he painstakingly pollinated by hand the moment they appeared. I’d met Reg through orchids and orchids had been the mainstay of Eli’s upbringing because I could never earn enough money through art alone. I afforded my house because of orchids. When Eli was little I got a job in a public garden, potting orchids. The woman who hired me was a marvellous old dame called Beryl Blake. Well, I say old, but I’m more ancient now than she was then; she just seemed ancient. People who didn’t know her feared her. She was short, squat, fat and red-faced: her hair was thin and grey and fell its short length in greasy straps. She had a mouth like a trout’s and her eyelids everted around washed-out irises. She always had a bib of sweat on her copious bosom that made her dresses cling to her, emphasising her bulges and falling into pitiful flaps around her thighs. In summer she wore rubber thongs and in winter, lace-up black school shoes and ankle socks. And she had a deep, frog-croaking voice that came burping up from a heart of gold. She employed students in the holidays to do whatever job she could rake up the money for them to do. ‘You never run out of chores in a garden,’ she’d say. A public servant called ‘Stewy’ would find sundry funds for her and she was often in his office begging balefully for a bit more so she could take on another person with problems.

  One year, when she ran out of money, she introduced me to Reg, whom I already knew, anyway, because he was a friend of Dadda’s. Reg was illustrating a book on orchids and she recommended me as a person who could help him. So I helped Reg do the book and tried to prevent Reg from helping himself to me, and when the book was finished, Beryl found me more work. She was collaborating with a scientist at the University of Melbourne on the propagation of rare Australian orchids.

  When Eli wrote home from Peshawar declaring himself a
fake, I was doing battle with dog poo in the wildflower reserve and thinking to myself that I’d sooner be back in Melbourne working at a distance from Stella on those great fakes of the plant world, orchids, in a smelly university laboratory where Stella wouldn’t deign to set a foot.

  Oh Eli, I wrote to him in Peshawar, I know a lot about fakes; not only have I met a great number of them, I’ve even studied their genetics. Artist I may be, but how do you think I came by our house and sent you off to school? And not only you, but Nin as well?

  Science is a refuge for me: it can be both intellectually challenging and aesthetically pleasing. I have a number of friends who are scientists and their mindsets are quite distinct from those of my artist friends.

  Science is a bridge built in the present to link the facts of the past to concepts it anticipates in the future. Just now, instead of picking Stella up to go in search of a new hostel room – something I will have to do in the next hour or so – I’m considering Charles Darwin. What a bridge he built! He was fascinated by orchids, those great imposters. Through some mind-blowing coincidence, be it convergent evolution, exchange of genetic material between animal and plant or the constraints of natural laws on DNA, they grow to look like the mates of the insects that pollinate them – quite a lot of them even produce the mating pheromone of the female insect to attract males. The fooled male attempts to mate with a gaggle of pseudo females lolling about on their stalks like blow-up sex dolls and pretending to be the real thing without even providing the poor chap with a blob of nectar in exchange for his efforts. What’s happening here?

  It’s an object lesson in chicanery.

  It doesn’t seem to matter that the pollinators bumble off course to do free work for orchids, useless species that they are, but you’d think the path of least resistance would be for nature not to have come up with the orchid at all. Orchids are freeloaders and occupy a realm well beyond artistic Surrealism – a realm that is entire, hooked up, workable and ongoing. Just like us.

  What a delectable artwork I could make of Darwin’s engravings on the pollination of orchids – it would be every bit as fascinating as the visible poems of Max Ernst. A graphic work that attracted my interest early is Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté. It is a set of turn-of-the-century (nineteenth) collages, lizards’ heads on women’s torsos, that kind of thing, done very intricately and great to look at, but Ernst’s fusions are those of the mind. Nature’s fusions result in fabulous forms such as you find in the orchid’s reproductive system – you could create a glamorous, incredibly sexy pastiche from them.

  It would be all about allure.

  That word ‘allure’ trots off the tongue with such a promising sound.

  If you chop allure out of the equation, you can’t expect sex to be exciting and fulfilling at all. I can’t imagine good sex without allure.

  In these early days of women taking on full participation in the running of world affairs it’s hard to dissociate good straightforward sex-with-foreplay from the exploitative proclivities of misogynistic men: however, looking at a woman’s body and making the assumption that she’s out of her natural context because she’s applying for work or doing work where attractive women are a rarity is not the same thing as looking at a woman in a ripe context and wanting to fuck her – or if you’re a woman, knowing what you look like and wanting to be fucked. Gauging the situation is all-important and at this time in history we’re only just working out what situations are acceptable.

  Once upon a time, the tribe probably had to conceal the sexual emanations given off by women, or they would have been killed in scrum rape – sometimes they were killed, it seems; sometimes they still are, by men who can’t discriminate between situations. In the normal run of life, nonetheless, forfeiting sexual highs for wet blanket public approval would be paying a price too high for wellbeing.

  I know a lot about sex. I’ve had a terrific sex life – sporadically terrific, I have to say, because there’s routine sex and sex, on the other hand, that explodes every cell in your body. You couldn’t live with crescendo all the time, but it’s there for special occasions. Especially for hoodwinking yourself. I have to admit that some of the best sex I’ve had has been deluded. I think it’s the thrill of transgression that fires up orgasm – just as the feeling you’d like to eat a baby is assuaged by a sloppy smooch.

  Even among the pious and politically correct you can’t get past that element of secret liberty-taking. I’ve seen plenty of feminists absolve themselves from the rules when on fire with lust – they just sort of disappear and come back, glowing with the guilt of original sin. Nobody cares to remember that actually, underneath it all, we’re animals and animals are lured into sex: think of the upside down waggling about of the bird of paradise or the head-thwacking of giraffes – they don’t do it to get giddy or break their necks.

  When I was younger all my sexual highs were achieved subversively; they had to be because Stella had been taught that sex was dirty. My loves were furtive and illicit. I had to hide my sexuality from Stella, who used to do me up to look like a hibiscus in a bed of weeds and then panic in case I lost my virginity. I lost it right under her nose with a man whose image was constructed for me by her – a medical man, jocular, smooth, sensual, flirty. Fifty feet tall and ten feet broad, blond, blue-eyed, a Chesty Bond in a white lab coat or laundered hospital gown, the coat of whichever one of his fabulous suits he happened to be wearing hung cavalierly on the hatstand of his consulting rooms where Stella was the practice nurse. He was Eli’s father, Arnie Russell, ophthalmologist, a man of straw with feet of clay. Everyone wanted to lay Arnie – women primped their hair and wiggled their hips at a hundred paces. Feminine dew pearled in the trumpet of every orchid for miles. He hummed snatches of Cole Porter and fell into these mating niches evolved for the trapping thereof with the alacrity of a male insect who knew what he was up to. Young Isobel Coretti was too green even to put on palpitations when he fell into hers. The sex was entire, every cell in the ‘armoury’ discharged.

  Too bad he was a prestidigitator who passed for an expensive version of the cheap Charlie he really was. In my imagination, he was a dramatic saver of sight who would take his skills to distant lands and cure ailing tribes of their blindness the world over while I brought up the rear with the mosquito swatter – in truth, he ditched me, took his legal tribe off to California and became even richer than he already was by opening a chain of laser clinics and entering into a string of laser-swift marriage turnovers. They say he’s been married four times.

  Since Arnie, I’ve loved men too young for me and men too old for me, daredevils and egoists with no parenting potential whatsoever. My imagination has set each one of them up with splendid qualities that would see Eli and Nin brought up sane and secure and see me into an admirable, rich old age.

  They were gods and heroes all to me but no doubt they imagined they were living lives altogether different from the ones I invented for them: lives in which I was a peccadillo, significant only insofar as their other women were curious to find out who I was.

  Or are women orchids in our way, trying to divert the pollinators from their predestined course? Such a huge amount of energetic signalling, competition and jealousy is involved you’d have to wonder why nature came up with sexual reproduction at all. I blame snails: they shoot each other at close quarters with mating shafts and remained locked together for ages – like jealousy and possessiveness all in one (and all along, they’re hermaphrodites).

  I’ve caused jealousy and felt it in equal measure. Because it’s so overwhelming, I’ve had to give away transgressive sex as too extravagant and increasingly impossible with age, compensating myself with function, affection and reliability. And, of course, need.

  All this makes you wonder why living things didn’t just remain single-celled and go on eating each other and dividing for eternity. Why, given the choice of such simplicity, would living things modify the multifarious and coincidental worlds around them to keep themse
lves anticipating sex? Single-celled organisms didn’t produce offspring except as a means of getting rid of their avoirdupois. The trouble is the subunits of DNA: it’s every multiplicand for itself! Think of the thrust of DNA, that self-serving substance against the entire inanimate universe – that inherent will to transgress against the current order and subsume it into complicated life! Think of the imaginative leaps involved in a chemical deciding that complex makes for a better life than simple. How? Why? Is it just an experiment in compost?

  Allure. I have to say that Phoebe Häken-Green was gorgeous. There’s no two ways about it. She was a class apart, like Allegra. Pale blonde hair in drifts of silk around a sweet, naughty face that men fell for immediately. Just the sort of woman you wouldn’t come across in Peshawar, Pakistan, not even as a visiting film star. Which made her all the more alluring. The UN owed her presence there to her antecedents. She was the love child of an Australian diplomat, George Green, and a simultaneous translator, a Swedish American, Fridlinda Häken, who became his second wife. All was cast aside for Phoebe Häken-Green, it seems – a first wife and a tribe of sons forsaken for the blonde nymph of the north.

  The tribe of sons was Canberra Grammar’d, Sydney and Melbourne University’d, Public Servant’d and spread around the globe on missions to everywhere. They were spoken of highly and idolised by their sister of the combination name, who was a catch phrase in Canberra whenever the Greens were home there for a spell. Phoebe Häken-Green had her brothers’ hostage negotiations to match, arms and drug caches, negotiations on trade deals and quellings of riots among wild Pacific Islanders. She had lots to prove and four abandoned boys to justify for her existence. Hard, when you’re one little blonde girl. Becoming a film star or a model was too easy. She followed her glamorous blonde mother, studied in the US, became a linguist, and, to get her into the kinds of places her brothers had gone before her, she had degrees from American universities in sociology and psychology. And now here she was, equipped to work among Pashto- and Dari-speaking refugees, to find out where they came from and whether they could go back there.