In spite of his packed bags, Daniel isn’t here. He and Wendy are at a shopping mall somewhere awaiting the RACV with a flat battery. I resist the urge to think that Nin is taking after Stella in the chaos department – because, of course, I also take after Stella. Our family is not Ikean – clutter we have, but categorise it we do not. ‘Let sleeping dust mites lie,’ I say to myself, as I have always said, being a person who sneezes when dust is aroused, but maybe there aren’t any dust mites here because Nin and Wendy hire someone to come in and dust, vacuum and mop around the heaps.
Nin, under a brisk little haircut that flies out in tassels when she shakes her head, is not finding the conversation on gardens any easier than I am.
Our hovering problems are not limited to David. There is also Wendy. I hardly see Wendy. It must be six months since she came one evening to pick up Daniel at my place. Dan was dawdling in his bath and Wendy just took a magazine, sat down and read it, never meeting my eye. No formative news was forthcoming about anything. No friendly greeting. Sometimes it seems to me that news transmission from this household is left almost entirely to Daniel.
‘Any news of “Rampa”?’ I ask Nin at last. ‘Rampa’ is what Dan calls David.
Nin is quick to answer, ‘Nup.’
Daniel has told me that Rampa comes calling on him. ‘Chickie’ also figures in conversation. ‘Chickie not likes me in office,’ Daniel will say from time to time. ‘Chickie not play wiv me.’ Apparently ‘Chickie’ has one very upmarket toy, a kind of waterfall or ball rolling device – I can’t work out which – kept on the large back balcony of her apartment where Daniel is allowed to play. The apartment adjoins the gallery. If it is raining – which it almost never is – Daniel is allowed to play inside alone in a room with Checkie’s other toy. He has to knock on the door to be allowed out.
So I ask Nin now about this second toy.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘it’s an inflatable thing with a weighted led light in the bottom. When you knock it over, it shoots a pair of feelers in the air and kind of…shitters.’
‘Shitters?’
‘Well, shimmers and glitters at the same time. You know… shitters!’
And I try to think of a thing shittering, ‘What? A kind of Shitter Bug?’
‘Yeah, that’s it, a Shitter Bug!’
‘The only shitter bug I know of is the dung beetle.’
‘This one shitters in the dark. Checkie brought it back from Paris. I don’t think she bought it for Daniel specifically. All kids who visit Siècle get the same treatment. She sticks them out on the balcony or shuts them up in the room with the Shitter Bug. If you eat there, the poor kid still has to go on the balcony or get shut up in the room.’
‘Eat there?’
‘Well, me and Dad. Me and Dan. Me and Dan and Wendy. You know. Sometimes you get asked.’
I fail to refer to our being sued by Checkie – for it seems to me strange that you would dine with a person who is suing you. Perhaps I’m paranoid, but in almost the same breath as the discussion about Checkie’s winning ways with children, Nin has let it slip that she might not need to place Daniel in child care. She thinks she can work and look after him at the same time. Has she had an offer, I ask. Well, she’s considering something. A friend who owns a gallery says she could organise some events there. She could do that from home. Ideal, I say. Yes, she says, but avoids my eye. Do I know the person who offered her the work?
‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘probably not.’ But she is biting her lip and she isn’t a good liar. What does she mean? That I’ve got Checkie’s character wrong? That she’s afraid I’ll burst a boiler when I find out she’s thinking of working at Siècle? I must not burst a boiler if she is thinking of working at Siècle. She grabs hold of one knee in both hands, one of her fingers capped by a hollow Bob the Builder that she’s deftly hooked up from the floor. Flippetty-flip goes Bob the Builder.
Poor Nin, she’ll learn one of these days that to tell a good lie you need to disentangle it from the context of your guilt. She ought to know by now: she has my example, I’ve been lying to Stella for years, making out that her clothes are 100% cotton because she’s ‘allergic to synthetics’. All I have to do is put black felt pen stripes over the rest of the information on the clothes labels and make it look like the kind of thing a manufacturer put there. But when Nin buys Stella clothes, she doesn’t bother to doctor the labels and then she wonders why Stella doesn’t wear anything she’s spent time and money on selecting. Bloody Nin, she’s so stubborn. Sometimes it seems she’d rather end up weeping over lost time and effort than confess to herself that the allergic Stella spends her life wearing synthetics to which her skin shows no adverse reaction at all, but the moment you mention the presence of synthetics in something, she gets itchy and forlorn. Either Nin’s plain bloody lazy or she wants to think that what Stella says is credible. Or then again, she could be forgetful or cross herself because Stella doesn’t have enough reality on board to accept gifts without reciting her list of preordained tastes and allergies.
Or maybe she’s just assertive, in the modern way, but about the wrong things.
The phone goes. ‘That’ll be Wendy,’ she says to me and shoots a hand out, thumb poised to chop off our conversation.
‘Yep,’ she says, gets up, strolls nonchalantly across the chaotic room, knees hyperextending, ‘Yep,’ again. Gleeful laughter, back turned to me, Bob-holding hand ruffling the cute haircut, toes of the bare feet flexing. ‘Yep, yep! You betcha. Yep, she’s here. Okay, how long? Twenty minutes,’ she says to me. ‘Can you wait that long?’
‘Sure.’
She says, ‘Yep, bye,’ into the phone and then, ‘I thought you might be painting or something. We could bring him round to you.’
‘I’ll wait.’
‘Bloody battery’s always going flat – we don’t use the car enough. Price you pay for being green.’
‘Mine’s got a hole in the radiator. I have to fill it before I start the car up every time. I haven’t managed to improve yet on the Maserati.’ The Maserati was the first car I owned, a Datsun Thousand wagon with dicky front suspension. I drove it for more than a decade.
‘Yeah, the classy Maserati, eh?’ says Nin. Having relaxed a little bit on the furry pelt of Wendy’s words, she has a fit of the giggles. ‘Remember when the Chinese kid from over the road got hold of his dad’s pile of porn magazines and you let us have a look at them “with adult supervision”, and then stuck us all in the car and drove us out to that great big dam to put them in a garbage bin in the picnic ground.’
‘You were supposed to forget that. I was meant to have scrubbed all the filth and exploitation from your naughty little minds. Particularly as we went for a picnic afterwards.’
‘Enough to make a kid want to go and grab another pile of porn!’
‘Shut up! We’ve always been innovative with rubbish, our family. It’s in the blood. We furnished our house from the council chuck-outs. Eli got our kitchen table and chairs off a skip when he was about eight. He always had an eye for useful rubbish. It’s a skill handed down from Henry Coretti, who used to paint rubbish assemblies and have a special relationship with the person who ran the dump.’
‘I remember her! She had a big box of plastic nose guards and gave us all one so our noses wouldn’t get burnt,’ says Nin, remembering the marvellous Bridget Kelly, dump caretaker and supplier of hubcaps and objets d’art to Henry Coretti.
‘Yes, she had several gross of those. Very practical woman, Bridget Kelly.’
‘I don’t think they have people who superintend dumps anymore,’ says Nin.
‘More’s the pity. Bridget was a good old stick, just that it wasn’t the acme of suburban life to be seen associating with her. But they rose, the Kellys – we used to call them “the upwardly mobile misbehaving poor” because some stuck-up sociology bitch used to talk on the TV about “the downwardly mobile genteel poor” back in the eighties when Bridget was had up for vandalising plastic bird nett
ing to rescue fruit bats.’ I’ve made her laugh at long last. Generally we get along pretty well, Nin and I. We’re similar in temperament…innovative, but a bit lackadaisical.
She says, ‘Dan likes a rubbish heap. He’s made you a windmill out of paper cups, you’ll be pleased to know. It’s for your garden to scare off the birds.’ She plunks down a bowl of pecans in front of me. ‘You can have a vodka if you want…’
‘P’raps not, babe. If I’m driving. Can I ask you something?’
‘What?’ she says, quickly.
‘About David? I know he’s ill.’
She perches on the couch, Bob-flicking, head down. Then she hoists her head up to look me in the face.
‘You know he’s going to die?’ I ask.
‘Well, he doesn’t think so,’ pouting, ‘I don’t reckon he will.’
‘What makes you think he’ll survive?’
‘Oh…’ she beats the toy up and down on her palm, ‘I don’t know, really. It’s what he says.’
‘What does he say?’
‘That he’ll lick it.’
‘Do you love him?’
She shrugs, beating the toy on her fingers now and looking away from me, then, freshly, ‘Daniel kind of loves him.’
‘In what way?’
‘They play footy. Outside, of course, you wouldn’t catch them playing footy in Checkie’s precious premises.’
‘He’s living there then?’
‘Yeah, since he had the op.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about that?’
‘Dunno,’ she says, looking down, a dollop of light sliding back and forth across her pout. ‘Sorry.’ Tears shoot out of her eyes sideways and she squashes them off with hyper-flexed fingers. ‘He didn’t want me to,’ big sniff, ‘just the way he is, I s’pose.’
‘Do you think he thought I’d cheer, or something?’
‘Maybe,’ she turns round to face me, nodding her head earnestly as she says, ‘but I know you wouldn’t. I know you wouldn’t Bel.’ And I wouldn’t; she’s right about that – you can sneer too long and too hard. ‘Guess there’s no point in telling Gran?’
‘No love, you must realise by now that there’s no room in Gran’s repertoire to be reasonable in any way about David.’
‘He might even die before she does. I did think, Bel, that maybe he didn’t tell you because he really believes he’s going to get better and there’d be no point in burdening you.’
‘Oh darling, you do have such a good opinion of people. David’s an eternal little boy, in need of good opinion and gentle love, like yours, but he’s determined that I’m his enemy.’
‘Well, aren’t you?’ Very tunefully aggressive and leaning forward now, bottom lip far out.
‘Look, however you feel about your father, he will never ever stand in a woman’s place and sympathise with women’s views. He really does think women are lesser beings, there to be toyed with and enjoyed on some levels, but not to be taken seriously. His own mother abandoned him, don’t forget.’
‘Yeah. Well, my mother abandoned me,’ tapping Bob the Builder frantically on her fingertips.
‘Allegra ditched us all, darling. No one could have foreseen that.’
‘She didn’t love him.’
‘She didn’t really know him. She was very attracted to him. When we met him he was really happy and funny. I think it was the excitement of being in Melbourne. He’d been living in Sydney up until then, sort of shacking up with his Uncle Bart.’ Bart Turner ran a wonderful art gallery, called Turner, in Sydney: I met him when I ran away from home, pregnant with Eli. ‘He used to sleep in the picture store of the gallery whenever he ran out of money for a place of his own – which was practically all the time. When he wasn’t with Bart, he used to live in flophouses. Things had gone stale for him up there.’ Here, in Melbourne, Bart’s brother, Miles, had a gallery called Figments. ‘They were hopping down here. And then, he was bowled over by Allegra. He loved the way she looked – she was both classically and unconventionally beautiful, just so herself. He loved how she looked and he loved the fact that Bart and Miles thought highly of her. They loved Mad Meg and they helped us to set it up. Bart and Miles were a great pair of blokes and up until he met us, they were David’s only port of call. Those two, Allegra, David and I were all in love with each other in the beginning and it suited us all around. David had somewhere to be among his own contemporaries at last. It looked as though it was going to go really well. We were art world adventurers – all of us – out to upset the status quo, and by God, it needed upsetting!’
‘Uncle Bart was gay, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe that’s where it comes from.’
‘Your lesbianism? I don’t think gay comes from anywhere in particular, baby. It just is.’
‘I remember that gallery in Sydney. It was all concrete. I used to hate going there.’
‘Brutalist architecture. All the rage. It wasn’t meant to be kid friendly; it was dreamt up by big kids – a thousand and ten things to do with concrete.’
‘But Bart was nice even if his floor was bloody cold and hard. Eli used to say he had asterisk eyes.’
‘He was lovely. He was our main inspiration when we set up Mad Meg. He was right behind feminism.’
‘But Dad wasn’t?’
‘Your father was a great fan of Pop art. The women’s movement had only just taken off when he came to Melbourne. I think he resented it because it was Bart’s new enthusiasm.’
‘And he wanted to be Bart’s enthusiasm?’
‘Something like that. But David has never trusted women.’
‘He seems to trust Checkie well enough.’
‘I don’t think that’s because she’s a woman. I think it’s because she’s a lever. But I’m not going to go there; it’s something you’ll have to work out for yourself. No, I think David can’t trust women because he loved his own mother and she ditched him. After that and his upbringing in a household with misogynistic man at its head, he just couldn’t believe that women had as much right to full lives as men.’
‘His mum had other kids down the track, didn’t she?’
‘Yes. As you know, David grew up with his grandparents and she married someone who didn’t want him tagging along.’
‘What happened to Dad’s father? Why wasn’t he around?’
‘I thought you knew that, too. God knows I’ve tried to keep you in the picture.’
‘Yeah, but it’s hard to build up pictures from little bits and pieces.’
‘You can say that again. My whole life is bits and pieces.’
‘I keep trying to put it all together, but it’s hard. I don’t even know what Dad’s father looked like.’
‘I don’t think David does, either, but he was Dorothy’s lover. He was married to someone else and had a family. She worked for him. He set her up in a flat in Bondi, she got pregnant, David was born while she was living there and he was about one or two when his father dropped dead suddenly and Dorothy had to go back to her family. Her father, old Cec Turner, was a real bastard by all accounts and he gave Dorothy a very hard time. She was the only girl in a family of five kids. There was a suggestion that Cec interfered with her when she was a kid…’
‘Erk!’
‘Yes. It was pretty erk. It was her mother who looked after David, but when Dorothy got married and her bloke didn’t want him, Cec insisted that he was sent off to boarding school – he was only seven. Sometimes he was in there for his whole school holidays because his grandfather wouldn’t let him come home. He had a hell of a life.’
‘Why did Dad’s gran put up with Cec?’
‘Life’s not neat, Nin, billions of mistakes happen and people just go on, trying to make the best of their circumstances. Therese Turner was very young when she married Cec – only in her teens and she pretty soon had five kids – Dorothy was in the middle of a whole swag of sons. It’s quite possible Therese didn’t realise what was happening. Imagine what it mu
st be like to find out something like that. It’d just about kill you, I reckon. And your instinct would be to protect your kids. You’d have to be there to stand between your kids and the other parent. If you left, then you couldn’t prevent what happened between them. You might be so poor you had to leave your kids behind. On the other hand, the court might order shared custody and you had no power over what happened when you weren’t there.
‘Just think, Nin, it’d be an awful thing to have to tell a kid that their father was despicable…In the nineteen-fifties, you had to sue for a divorce. You had to prove irretrievable breakdown of marriage – a lot of people just cleared out and hid for at least two years until the other party could sue for divorce on the grounds of desertion…And supposing they didn’t sue? Supposing they were angry and vindictive? There was a lot of vindictiveness under that system. There’s still a lot of vindictiveness, but at least the problems related to protecting yourself from a violent or hideously transgressive partner are out in the open now. At least people admit that it happens and admit that it’s a big problem – we’re just a pack of monkeys, really, but at least there are places to go. Domestic violence is a frightful situation.’
‘Crikey. What did the old fucker do for a living?’
‘He was a night watchman…used to pinch stuff from the places he was supposed to be minding and flog them off. He stole dozens of dressed chickens from the Trocadero Ballroom when his kids were small and sent the whole five out taking orders to get rid of them. He also stole the family cutlery from there – all monogrammed with T, for Turner, of course.’
‘It must have been horrible to grow up gay in that family.’
‘Bart was a pretty good boxer. He decked his father and pissed off in the end.’
‘Was Miles gay?’
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