Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  When I heard of Phoebe Häken-Green of the green eyes, I knew this was it – number one, unlikely to be easily unseated by a rival. And what were Phoebe’s hopes for Eli? She was obviously highly intelligent. She had lived a life of glamour and danger and she might have paired up with any major diplomat or politician, probably had paired up with one such or two or three such already; she was five years older than Eli. No doubt whatever that she’d flirted and had affairs in several places. She’d been recommended to the UN as a brilliant translator of a highly desirable language set. How much of it was the blind recommendation of the awestruck and how much the recommendation of solid promise?

  Eli’s credentials: he had the world’s bluest eyes. So has anyone else who is the product of a blue/blue cross. Apart from that – he was a charmer, he was cock-a-hoop and daring. He had a good turn of phrase. Nor had he been used up and discarded on any of the social circuits through which Phoebe might have been whirling.

  He found bunches of flowers for her in a desert.

  There’s a place called Flower Street where a bloke there puts by a nice bunch for me every day…mind you, it’s sometimes Dried Flower Street because the market gardens around here are being affected by the influx of people and it’s terribly dry right now. Yes, he was in love. Maybe she was out of his league, but nothing like putting my credentials in her vases in hope.

  What was this I was feeling when I picked up her photograph and stared at it? Not jealously, surely? Not at my age? Jealous of my son’s beloved? I couldn’t help hoping she’d do something wrong, but if she broke my Eli’s heart, I’d be over there in a shot…would I? To shoot her? Probably not. She was hugging a dog in the photograph, a St Bernard, obviously not in Pakistan. She must’ve wrinkled up a little bit by this? Surely? Laughing. Perfect teeth. Erk.

  I have to say I felt relief when his visa ran out and he had to continue his journey. He did, after all, go down into Africa, to Uganda and Botswana and Kenya and I was there at Heathrow to meet him when he got off the plane from Nairobi. I couldn’t see him in the crowd around the carousel, but then a dark, dirty arm reached down to take up a filthy backpack and the arm was attached to someone with knockout blues. My baby.

  They nearly refused him entrance at my hotel. He looked much better when he’d showered but we obviously had to buy him new clothes as a priority.

  I was on my way to Milan. I had a couple of weeks in England while Eli hunted up work. At least in London there were papers eager to take his articles and want more of them. So I went on to Italy and Eli stayed in London with enough work to keep him there for some months. I was back in Australia – and living in Melbourne – by the time he caught up with Phoebe once again. She’d been head-hunted by the American Department of Defence and, before she started work in Washington, went to London to see if Eli still wanted to marry her.

  Yes, he wanted to marry her. It would mean going to Washington to live.

  I didn’t quite know how to feel.

  The unknown quantity. The possibility that it’s just a huge crush.

  To be allured is to be in a state of want. I made him promise that if he was going to get married, he’d marry here, in Australia, with me looking on. Thank God he interpreted it as my pride in him and not as my need for reassurance.

  Without allure, we’d be bored to death and yet it can take us in so completely we forget who we are and where we live and what we are striving for. The allure of the mythical good life makes dupes of us all. The orchid blooms and we’re seduced.

  Which brings me to Stella. Not that I want to go to Stella, but I must. Stella has been frightened of allure all her life. If she’s had unfettered sex she’s buried it deep in the bottomless pit of misdeeds. A strict mother told her that if ever she became pregnant out of marriage, she would take her to a high place and, together, they would jump into the sea. Stella told me about it when I arrived home with Eli after an inadequately explained absence, but we didn’t do any tramping off to cliff tops. She rather liked Eli. Indeed, she could have devoured Eli. Here at last was a male heir and his eyes were the exact right colour. Having been warned off men by her mother, she fell under the spell of a baby boy.

  Euphrosyne – as her mother was called – also put her under an injunction never to say no. She had to agree to every request in the name of being demure. Women were to be beautiful martyrs and their compensation was to be in the hereafter at the side of the man with the halo and the holes in his hands and feet. Stella was bidden to make sense of this mishmash at all costs. Beauty was stained glass and Anglicanism. She had to subvert the natural beauty of things into the worship of a mangled god in a well-mannered way. No wonder she has resisted sanity. Sanity would disabuse her of the reasons she’s concocted for being alive. But alive she is and these fripperies have nested in her framework, an infestation of battiness, for nearly a hundred years.

  Earlier in the week, I investigated the Anglicans on her behalf, in case something good turned up in her old ethnic niche but I wouldn’t put my dog in the Anglican home I saw. Cold, dark rooms and a converted garage of a dining room: it was a home for hoboes and unlucky ones at that.

  This morning there’s the Protestant home to go and look at. I put Stella’s name on top of the list for consideration by the other Protestant home that has vacancies at hostel level and we are going out today to see if we can’t clinch it.

  I’ve tried to tell Stella as gently as I can that she should wear nice clothes and try to relax. I warned them beforehand at Broadlea that today was the day, but when I arrived, it was ‘Oh today!’ and I found her in her ordinary, somewhat dribbled-on clothes, booked in for lunch here. I had to get the manager to ring up and check that I had the date right – yes, I had the date right – then I had to take Stella back to her room: not something accomplished in a flash, particularly when the ‘stroke lady’ is hovering backwards and forwards without making any progress on the threshold of the lift. I had to find help to move her on into the lift, then get Stella and her frame in, then get both folk (the stroke lady is tragically young, perhaps in her fifties) out at the other end, walk the slow and rather long distance to Stella’s room and find reasonable clothes that were clean. I had to take the shoes off – always a massive operation because the feet are clawed and crippled and no longer fit easily into a shoe – I’ve had to put new trousers on… ‘I don’t like those ones.’ ‘Well, I’m sorry Mum, but you’re going to have to wear them today.’ ‘But I want the ones with the stripes down the side.’ ‘I’m sorry Mum, they’re dirty.’ ‘No they’re not, look in the cupboard.’ ‘Mum, I’m sorry, but we’re running late and it’s important that you look good and behave yourself so we can get you into the other hostel. It’s much newer than this one – I believe it’s very nice.’

  Clothes on, then down to my jalopy, minute after long, slow fucking minute, ticking away.

  The drive is the easiest part, through pleasant, leafy streets, but ‘It’s quite a long way away, isn’t it?’ observes Stella.

  ‘Not too far.’

  ‘But all that petrol money.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  She fusses for change to give me and drops the contents of her bag all over the car floor.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry.’ And I think of Baudelaire and how he got away with hateful comments about his mother in poetry that people rave about. Voices at my ear tell me constantly to be like that myself and leave the silly old cow to her fate. The new, strong Isobel would, if she…if she…what? Was a shit like Baudelaire, probably.

  We park, we progress slowly to the doorway. Its red eye blinks alarmingly at me as I punch in the security code. Silently the doors open. We crawl inside. Silently the doors close us in, guillotining off the day.

  There’s no one to greet us. There ought to be someone to greet us.

  The sitting room to our right is like a demonstration room in a suburban developer’s brochure. There are some smartly dressed old people sitt
ing in easy chairs around one of those silent, fake fires. It looks fake comfortable. Somebody must actually handwash woollen cardigans around here – either that, or the oldies are kept in a constant supply of new ones – the pink, the red, the blue – and none of them shrunken from being flung in a machine, like Stella’s.

  Stella is tottering dangerously on her Wheelathon, as she calls it. ‘I need to go to the toilet. Oh, I need to go quickly.’

  So I hassle her forwards…um…where?

  Oh, yes, there we are, a loo off the dining room.

  We just make it. She sits on the seat and squirts for all she’s worth. And it stinks. And it’s a shame, but never mind, we’ve got here, now all we have to do is take it easy, calm down, wash the bits that need washing. Wash everything carefully, use the hand soap, lots of it… ‘Oooh, it’s cold.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry it’s cold, Mum, but we just have to get you comfy again and then we’ll go into the dining room and I’ll see if I can find the lady who was supposed to meet us.’

  If there was a lady who was supposed to meet us…

  I think there was.

  I change her emergency pants and tuck her in, find the bin for the debris. Make sure every visible trace of poo is removed.

  And eventually we negotiate the Wheelathon to make enough room at the sink, fix the toilet, get all four of our hands properly washed and dried on the paper towels – thank God for paper towels. The old don’t seem to manage the air drier.

  And we’re set…but she starts to breathe funnily. And I recognise this breathing from one of the times Cousin Audra came to stay. ‘She’s having a fit!’ said Cousin Audra. I said, ‘She’s having a panic attack.’ ‘What’ll we do?’ ‘Dial an ambulance, please, while I try to calm her down.’

  I sit her on the seat of the Wheelathon.

  ‘There, there, Stella, quietly now, in through your nose, one, two, three…and out gently through your mouth, one, two, three, four. Just a little more out than in, Mumma, there we are.’

  Five minutes of breathing normally and we are set to go into the dining room. Most of the guests have finished lunch and have left, but I take Stella up and sit her at a table. She is incapable of choosing what she wants to eat, so I choose it for her. I tell the lady on the food race that we’ll both have chicken and I explain that we’ve come over from Broadlea at the invitation of the manager here to see if Mum likes the room that’s available. The food lady intercoms the manager and, at last, we sit down.

  Dutifully and obediently, like a little child, Mum munches her lunch, but nerves are making it hard for her to swallow, so I have to stroke her wounded old hand and tell her gently to relax. ‘How can I,’ she cries, ‘when you’re doing that to me all the time?’

  So I snatch away my hand…and then try to cover up for having snatched it.

  Stella munches for a while, ever so carefully. And then, just as the manager heaves unsmilingly into view, Stella shrieks and brings everything up on the tablecloth.

  Well, all I can do is cry, really. But you don’t cry, do you, Isobel – you keep a straight face when the manager burls up close and tells the whole building in a firm voice, ‘Oh, she needs high care. She definitely needs high care!’

  Sadly we trail our way out. Back into the car, back to Narrowlea. ‘I’m sorry Bel.’ ‘No need to be sorry. The question is, did you like that place?’

  ‘Oh it seemed all right. It was quite bright.’

  ‘Yes it was, wasn’t it? Very clean. The sitting room looked comfortable. Shame we didn’t see the room, but perhaps if I explain what happened to the Broadlea people they’ll explain to the manager here and we’ll have another look when you’re feeling better.’

  So I explain to the manager at Narrowlea, who looks aghast at my tale and says, ‘But Stella’s much too bright for nursing-home care. I’ll ring them up and explain.’

  She rang up, she explained. They said my mother was too old.

  When I’m dying I want to be as incidental as a cushion and as easy as an old pet cat. I don’t want to be wasted time for someone else, but as things stand, I may have no control over my fate.

  Whatever happens, I do want to die having achieved something: I don’t really want to die under a bridge with the tramps and no railway ticket out to a better place.

  Sometimes you can feel as though you’ve achieved something, even if it’s through the efforts of someone else. History is always in a rush to remember things, but in her charging forward, like Mad Meg through Hell, she will trample much and misinterpret plenty. She will run innocence through with her sword and drop truth from her bundle without stopping to look for it and gather it up again. Lately, History has been turning her gaze on the seventies art world in Melbourne and I have just been book buying at a launch in a friend’s bookshop. The book has a feature chapter on the feminist art movement and on Mad Meg’s namesake, our gallery. The author interviewed me at length about our methods and lack of them and our aims and superfluity of them.

  I was given the section to read before the book went to press. The author used the information I gave her to chart Mad Meg’s all-too-famous demise, David’s wrecking of my show when he picked a fight with another painter, our going broke and Allegra’s suicide. I was dubious about telling the story to someone who was going to publish it, but then I thought David epitomised the reason for Mad Meg’s existence and telling the story added to what Allegra was trying to say about women and their art by running the gallery.

  Another contributor to the chapter, a painter called Jan Laird, has had great success in life, going on from Mad Meg to big commissions and a name that competes alongside the men’s. Recently she was commissioned by a public gallery in Paris to create the Australian Aboriginal component of a new building. It’s a building that might have been created here – the concept being that Aboriginal art, being the oldest continuous art practice in the world, would form the outside and base of a building housing the art of the Pacific. I suppose there’s more money for such a project in Paris and Paris is much more visited than, say, Brisbane or Darwin, but such a gallery would really have been at home in either of those places. Anyway, Jan says that without Mad Meg women artists in Melbourne would have been passed over no matter how good they were because that was the culture of the time: Mad Meg offered a place to go where there was support and exhibition space and enough noise made to attract attention. Jan admired Allegra for throwing down the gauntlet politically and taking it up to the men as far as she possibly could. Allegra exhibited Jan often in her early career when she began making statements as an urban Aboriginal with prints memorialising the fate of her mother’s people, whose sacred sites lie buried under Melbourne. She joined the excavation of urban Aboriginal sites and went on to do some terrific prints of the unearthed past. Now she does glass and mosaic constructions as well as her prints.

  Jan Laird is sixty-two. Without the Paris commission and the publication of this book, her name wouldn’t be on everyone’s lips. She’s had to work under time constraints that are easily as tough as mine. She has three children and her output, like mine, has been delayed by commitments.

  While the book-launching speeches were being delivered, I found myself standing behind an old Mad Meggian, one I never liked. She has a thin neck and a small head and, in profile, a nose that twitches at the end that, when stuck in a shelf of seriously new literature, looked as though it was going to reach right in and grasp something off the shelves without help from the hands. Elspeth, appropriately surnamed Roach, was once a politically correct Marxist Feminist who belonged to the group within our collective that Allegra and I used call ‘the Troika’ because they couldn’t come to a decision independent of each other. Every opinion was prefaced with ‘We think…’ Elspeth is an art critic who likes the words ‘banal and trivial’, the clichés almost always used by art critics in lieu of that reverse cliché, ‘stunning’.

  Ah, stunning! A word that reels around the streets of Melbourne, whacking itself over the h
ead with a dead mullet whenever the critics can’t think of anything better to say. So popular is ‘stunning’ that it’s been taken up by estate agents – ‘stunning views’ means you can see out two windows; ‘stunning kitchen’ means silver fridge, a silver wall oven and a hot plate that looks like a photograph.

  The twenty or so stacker chairs near the stage were being occupied by ancient folk of the kind who give out opinions and university degrees. Very important gent at the microphone, too distracted with himself to do more than drop the names of his luncheon companions and those who send him emails from Cambridge; Jeremy, the old friend who owns the shop, beside the counter, smiling with arms crossed and…David Silver, standing next to him also with arms crossed and his mouth written across his chin, terse as a line of minimalist poetry. I nearly didn’t recognise him – he’s had one of those ridiculous number one haircuts. I hate them. David’s emphasises his huge head. Now why would he swap a decent head of wavy black hair – no bald patches – for a Tim Burton skull? He mustered a filthy look to give me – although he scowls a lot, his face doesn’t really suit it; he has a sharp jaw and the corners of his mouth came down so close to the bottom of his chin I imagined it detaching and falling off on the floor. He can be pretty good-looking when he smiles but he rarely does. Who invited him, I wonder? I expect he’s on the bookshop’s list but he wouldn’t be on the author’s, surely?

  Surely?

  Though maybe…

  Other people smiled at me vaguely, as if they might have known me at some time. I put their non-remembrance down to failing vision and the decrepitude that is assailing us all at our age, however, I began to feel intensely nervy and guilty about having brought an old wound back into the public eye. I hope David isn’t coming to the dinner. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so free with the information.