Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  But he’s just another person – I always tell myself that, just another person – and plenty of people are as two-faced as he is. Every day people do nastier things than destroy an exhibition. They rape, murder, pillage and silence. Eli sees it all the time.

  Jeremy has told Elspeth that a rich bloke bought a painting of mine (actually, he bought the triptych, which is a cause for joy) and she’s saying how she hates rich people and how the world is full of suffering children ‘and they’ll all be dead before tea time’.

  I can’t help myself from interjecting, ‘Well, that’s the trouble, isn’t it, Elspeth? They won’t be and you’ll have to deal with them all over again at breakfast.’ She looks me up and down, surprised. Yes, people do worse things than destroy exhibitions. They destroy souls; they rip up reputations…or worse again, children.

  David was a ripped-up, abused child who turned into a vandal, but Nin doesn’t need me to hate him – she’s the only family he has left. There’s already enough enmity between David and my mother – and because of that, I shall control myself. And I shall not say that if David has lung cancer, it’s because he’s been setting himself up for it for years…

  ‘What’s the matter with your dinner, Isobel?’ goes Elspeth. ‘Eat up, it’ll get cold.’

  I was just raising my fork to my lips to bite off a clump of spaghetti, but when she says that, I slop in some wine instead. My mouth is very dry. God I make myself laugh sometimes, I’m just like a dear old mate of mine who, not knowing what it was, took a chunk out of a red hot chilli in front of Checkie at an opening and when Checkie threw up her hands in horror, proceeded to quaff down the lot, saying, ‘Delicious, eat ’em all the time. You should try one, Checkie.’ Her mouth and oesophagus were numb for days and everything went numb for days at the other end too once the chilli worked its way through.

  ‘What’s funny?’ asks Elspeth.

  ‘Private joke,’ I say, wishing that my dear old pal were with me now; she modelled for the show David wrecked. It was called The Crushing. I had her with her flaxen hair and pink, vulnerable skin push up against panes of glass as if she were being crushed to death in a stampede. My fingers still remember the drawings. They were almost the best I ever did.

  ‘I hate it when people won’t share jokes.’

  ‘Well, you’ll just have to hate it, then.’ But Elspeth has started jabbing her fork at someone else while I ferret in my bag for a saliva-inducing tablet – fancy being reliant on pills for your saliva! Can’t even work up a good spit!

  Pathetically, David bought me a new easel and a box of paints by way of reparation, came knocking at my door to deliver them but I told him straight and plain to go away. I didn’t even yell ‘Fuck off!’ although Allegra did and threw a pot plant at him.

  In a tight corner, I could forgive Allegra for suspending her ideology to come and live with me in my bourgeois setting, but I was angry about the pot plant; it was an orchid I was trying to propagate as part of Beryl Blake’s project. Allegra wouldn’t have known what the orchid was – she was in a rage and it was a missile. I picked up the bits and started to cry and she said she was sorry and would buy me another; she’d thought it was dying anyway. She had no clue. I’d been working with that plant for weeks, coaxing it along and finding out how it worked. To her, it looked just like the clump of spaghetti that sits in my oesophagus now, straining to make it down into my stomach. My chest is tight.

  Well, it was all a long time ago, I tell myself. And even if the episode did contribute to Allegra’s death, there were plenty of other things that made her want to die – like she wanted the world to change. She wanted women to be as free and powerful as men. Bitches like Elspeth hijacked her thoughts and turned them back on her, used her ladders to install themselves in power coteries and set themselves up for the money vamp when it rode into town with its blankets, beads and knives, while in the background, only just audible, Allegra’s ghost was saying that you couldn’t be bought if you weren’t for sale.

  I’ll have to wait for the bolus of spaghetti to move on.

  She died not long after she pitched my pot plant and that’s when I learned something I hadn’t anticipated. I don’t anticipate much, but I should have known that David would badmouth us carelessly enough to have Viva and Checkie making us out to have been a pair of fools with our doings at Mad Meg, a drag on our father’s career.

  David took up their chant, adopted their self-righteous posture.

  But I’m pretty certain Dadda loved us no matter that we were no good at arithmetic. I’m pretty certain he was quite proud of us, even if we weren’t going to make any money. We were emotional. We made him cry, he made us cry – the tears were a measure of the love. When he died, Allegra and Eli and I – there was no Nin back then – barricaded ourselves into his hospital room and wouldn’t let Viva in. She thought our behaviour was ‘Risible! Risible!’ Allegra went round for weeks then, calling me Isible.

  Viva could have put us out of our ignorant misery about her role in Dadda’s life when that happened but she didn’t. She waited until Allegra was dead before telling me. It was hard not to feel despised during that long night – all night long, the bay water at the Laurington beach house where Viva told her story sloshed in and out of the history I’d been excluded from. Harry Laurington sent me down there. I wasn’t expecting Viva – I just wanted to be in the place where she’d scattered Dadda’s ashes. I wasn’t allowed to know where she’d done it for a long time. All night long I had that low, bruised voice of hers telling me the story of my Coretti grandparents –how the name Allegra came from my grandmother and she couldn’t describe the devastation she felt that my mother had been allowed to use it, while she, out of deference, had restrained herself and only bestowed the second name, Cecilia, on Checkie. She made it sound as if Checkie were Dadda’s only genuine child.

  It was so humiliating that she knew so much more about my father than I did and so very much more about him than poor Stella did.

  I need some cold water.

  Viva used to say that Allegra and I were directionless but we had direction all right. We were passionate; we used our passion to fight for women’s stake in the world. First and foremost we fought for recognition of women’s work. Mad Meg might have gone broke and been superseded by the reassertion of capitalist values but there were achievements. Feminism isn’t dead – perceptions, expectations and conditions were changed in women’s favour, the momentum goes on. A number of our painters are still working away, even if we’ve been subsumed by a world that doesn’t continue the fight for our status.

  ‘Please, may I have some cold water?’ I ask the waiter’s retreating back. He catches my request, turns and asks, ‘Perrier or Mountain Springs? Sparkling or flat?’

  ‘Tap,’ I say, making a stand. God, I’m pathetic – but I will keep on fighting, bugger it, I will, I will!

  The waiter nips into the nearby gents’ with some ice in a glass, returns and clunks the water down in front of me, hard, not even looking. My chest’s been splashed, but at least it’s cold. I clink the cubes in the glass and sip. I can feel my chest opening up a bit. ‘To Isobel,’ I think. ‘Honest water and cool ice to Isobel.’

  And to Allegra: young, beautiful, famous and dead, people have been dropping her name for decades. To Allegra, the glorious harpy!

  But if I was Allegra’s daughter rather than her sister, I’d want to hate her for leaving me behind. Allegra used to say she was a lousy mother and she probably was, but that’s no excuse. There are lots of lousy mothers who stick around – I know one intimately. Or is that unfair? Other people love her. She’s helped a lot of people, been hospitable, kind…

  Now Elspeth’s talking about Jan Laird’s Paris project and decrying it. ‘Have you seen it yet?’ she snaps at me – as if I go to Paris as a matter of course every year or so. ‘It’s ludicrous,’ she continues – oh, I forgot about that word ‘ludicrous’: another of the critics’ favourites – it’s got nothing to do with Ludo,
but a lot to do with game playing. ‘Oh, but you like her work, don’t you? You like pretty things.’

  ‘Pretty things!’

  ‘Glass and mosaics and crafts like that…’

  I pick up the glass and hurl what remains of the water at her.

  Time to go.

  Coming home in this condition – having to drink to stay sane — makes you think twice about being sociable. Does Nin know about David? I haven’t had time to see her, although I left a message on her phone to contact me when she can.

  I’ve decided that I hate artists and artists’ coteries. They are all so full of themselves they can’t talk straight about anything. It’s always got to be one-upmanship: I’m smarter than you, I’m better than you, you’re a talentless bore. Scientists aren’t quite as bad as that. You can’t get past the fact that a good scientist talks sense. A good scientist is logical and logic is Ariadne’s thread – it brings us from the dark into the light of day.

  I’ve made an appointment at the university with my good friend and former colleague in the orchid work, Vance. He’s a retired professor these days. He’ll be able to set me straight about the gravity of David’s cancer. I really don’t think there’s any chance he’ll pull through and I want to be standing on firm ground when Nin finally contacts me.

  The first foxgloves of the year are out in the university gardens. There’s a honey bee buzzing up a trumpet of one outside the library. How busy it is. If it was a European bumblebee, it wouldn’t have to buzz to dislodge the pollen from where it is neatly stowed in batons above its wings, because it would fit exactly, but the Australian bee, being littler, has to work hard for its reward. There it goes now, its proboscis full of nectar to dehydrate into food for the hive and its leg baskets full of pollen for the next flower.

  Vance made sure I have access to a library card for having been a research collaborator here and I’ve just been to the library to stock up. If I’m ever down a mine, may it be lined with books and I will bring to the surface every kind of wealth you can imagine. This place feeds me and makes me want to live. It is full of untouched plunder. I love coming here and it’s thanks to my freaky employment history that I can.

  I’m thinking of Beryl in Vance’s anteroom and how we used to work together in the labs in this building in the height of the summer heat when the students were on holidays. It was on this side of the building, taking the full force of the sun. A puddle used to develop around Beryl’s feet. It’s all air-conditioned now. Vance’s secretary buzzes him. She’s shaped like a very large bee and happens to be wearing a striped yellow blazer. Vance has become important; he speaks here, there and everywhere about modern methods in cancer detection and so you have to make appointments to see him. His door whooshes open in milliseconds after the buzz; there he stands, chocolate-eyed and smiling. ‘Isobel!’ Deep velvety voice. I love old Vance. Enormous hands conduct me into his professorial lair.

  Comrades.

  His lair commands quite a sweep of campus. It’s in the ginkgo and lemon-scented gum precinct, presently barricaded off with striped plastic no-go zones and wire grid compounds as the buildings grow bigger and better, higher and newer. To walk here makes me realise that the irreplaceable me of yesteryear has been replaced. These days we are told it is healthy to live in the present, but the older you get the more there is in the present to resent the loss of.

  From inside Vance’s room – which smells of medical handwash and warm vinyl – you’d think this building was really rather swish, when in actual fact it’s a timeworn, concrete bunker with a slow lift and so many chips out of its fire escapes they’re practically ramps. It used to be two floors shorter and, on the occasions when I worked here, the crush inside meant that we had to breathe in to get past each other and we’d bump elbows working at the same bench. In those days, when people had just learned to cut and splice genes, work went on in any space. There was equipment in corridors. The esprit de corps was high. Information was freely exchanged, shouted between labs – it isn’t these days; now that gene sequences and sequencing methods are top secret, everyone’s specialising and all the labs have security doors. It could be so hot over summer here that the molten agar we used to pour plates to grow our specimens on would fail to set in the Petri dishes.

  It was before people knew about genetic markers and how to isolate them. Beryl and Vance were collaborating on methods for propagating the rarely seen and vulnerable Australian orchids that only flourish after bushfires. Vance was interested in the genetic aspects and Beryl was the propagation expert. The orchids are parasitic on certain types of fungus which they exploit for their value as delving, ramifying, moisture-supplying root systems and you have to inoculate sterile media with the appropriate fungus first up and then seed that with orchid seeds that are so tiny they don’t carry enough nutrients to mature without input from somewhere else – hence their parasitism. It was my job to isolate the appropriate fungus from the soil of orchids found in the wild and to get it going in purified form so Vance and Beryl could seed it. Later, they employed me to help them find out how the orchid got itself penetrated by the fungus so it could sprout – another bit of ingenious allure – God, orchids are lazy. (Or maybe fungi aren’t choosy.)

  My mother and sister thought that working with genes was shady. They deplored the conditions in both the gardens and the labs. The garden shacks were primitive and it was beneath my mother’s dignity to have a daughter who ‘worked in a shed’. My sister said it was exploitation to make people work in such conditions.

  Whatever my relatives thought, I’ve never been grand or ideological in my tastes. At the time, nutting out obscure problems was an ideal escape from having been dumped by Arnie. Beryl, who, having personal problems of her own, took mine for granted, used to say that even if everyone in the country worked hell for leather on Australian botanical species, they’d never get the job of classification done before extinction caught up with them. In those days we imagined we were saving Australian flora for posterity.

  One discovery Vance and I made in the 1980s, after extinction leapt up out of the bottle and claimed Beryl, was that rare Australian orchids don’t pay their way. Brilliant tricksters they might be, but in the scheme of things, they’re useless: they’re too small, you can’t sell them in flower shops, they have no export value, nobody needs to be cured of them and there were more profitable ways for Vance to spend his time. Nowadays the orchids occupy land that has the potential to be developed and thus to keep people in much-needed jobs and to create wealth. It’s no longer a question of saving Australian flora for posterity but of exterminating them for posterity – for who will thank us for tiny orchids if they have no McMansions to test their mortgage-paying propensities in and no takeaway food to feed their children when they’re at work all day, saving their splendid kitchens from being cooked in and their dishwashers from giving up the ghost in case they have to sell up in a hurry?

  Vance is lanky and very tall, his pants are always an inch or two too short, so he has a nice selection of socks – navy blue with a small red paisley design today I see as he puts his feet up on his smart new desk. Long, thin, soft-soled shoes of the sort my mother deplores; shoes that gape at the top and whose laces pull the leather into scallops over the arch. He bids me sit down in one of the low fron-trow-of-the-auditorium padded chairs scientists prefer, particularly the long-legged ones like Vance who can flex their quads and glutes and give their ankles a work-out while sitting back, relaxed and ominous, and terrifying to novice seminar-givers. Never having been a front-row girl, sinking into the chair makes me feel like a mere pleat in the vinyl; I used to like to sit up tall on something hard, unthreatening and further back, among the ignorati.

  ‘Hot spots in the bone,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t sound good, Isobel. Lost half a lung, you say?’ Soft glance over the top of the specs. ‘Under most circumstances that would mean he was healthy enough to undergo the surgery and his oncologist thought it could cure him. But “hot spots in th
e bone”…’ Sorrowful head shaking. ‘The removal of the lung is probably palliative because the lung’s rotten.’ He swings his legs down to the carpet, stands, hands in pockets, stretches his back and strolls to the window. ‘I agree with you, it doesn’t look good.’ Turns to face me, one elbow on the window ledge, the other weighing up a ball of air. ‘Mean survival rate about eighteen months?’ He flicks his thick brows at me.

  ‘I thought as much.’ Maybe Vance is expecting me to burst into expressions of grief, but it isn’t grief I want, I want facts. I must look ungrieving, because he continues, matter-of-factly now sauntering back to his desk, scientist to scientist, ‘Metastases in the bone means advanced disease, as you no doubt know. Maybe one person in fifty might last five years…You say he smoked?’

  ‘Yes. But he gave up some years ago.’

  He stands pondering the ceiling’s soundproofing, hands back in pockets, ‘Yes, well, cancer can take years to become a tumour – even as long as forty years. People are stupid about it.’

  ‘I was stupid. I smoked.’

  He laughs, and says over his shoulder, ‘I know. I used to smoke yours, don’t you remember?’

  That’s true. It was at that time that scientists started giving up cigarettes and Vance was half-hearted about it, being a bit too young to be absolutely serious. He’s only six years older than I am – but heaps more qualified. Lots of the middle-aged senior staff here had pipes and made out that pipes did less harm to the lungs – but the puritans, who were also top-of-the-heap experimenters, weren’t fooled: all sorts of people were dying early deaths from lung cancer and academic distinction didn’t save them.