Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  Baritones! Thank God for baritones! But that didn’t mean that Mick would be there to protect me during the week and it didn’t mean that Nin would be safe from David’s maniacal behaviour either.

  If only Eli had been around, we could have asked him to look after Stella while we hid for a while. But Eli wasn’t around. There’d been no developments over Christmas: the police hadn’t managed to pick up a trace of him and the forensics came up with nothing either. It seemed the best thing to do was to warn Lexie that there might be a confrontation and hide out at Mick’s till the drama died down. I rang Redeemer and explained the situation as best I could to Kees. ‘Nin and I might have to take a bit of a break away,’ I said. ‘It might mean a fortnight or so without seeing her while we work out the best way to tackle the situation.’ Then I had to front Nin and Wendy at their house, because – with the excuse of David this time – they were incommunicado and it was impossible to get through to them by phone (or even email for that matter). After a battle royal with Wendy over whether or not it was gutless to flee, it was Nin, surprisingly, who turned the tables on her. ‘You’re right, Bel! Checkie shouldn’t have those pictures. And as for bloody David…He’s a bastard! A total megalomaniacal bastard! He’s gone too far. All he wants are those bloody pictures and he’s not going to have them. I am. I know the ones I want. They’re pictures of my mother painted by my grandfather and I want them. And I’ve got news for the lot of you…’ Nin fished in the fruit bowl, pulled out a test kit and held it on high. ‘Pink!’ she cried. ‘I was going to tell you but that bastard started ringing up. And then I thought maybe I shouldn’t have it because it could turn out like him. I was going to have an abortion and go back to work. How dare he terrorise a pregnant woman! I’m going to have this kid. I’ve decided!’

  ‘What!’ shrieked Wendy. ‘Are you pregnant, Nin?’

  There are no Jane Austens quietly scribbling long observant sentences on doilies in this household.

  ‘How dare he terrorise you, my darling!’ Wendy threw her arms up and flung herself on Nin, full of joy. ‘Another ba-by! Another ba-by!’ she sang, dancing around like a cowboy with Nin in her arms. Two minutes’ worth of passionate kissing later, she cried, ‘Well, you can piss off now and have your morning sickness down there with them, then and I’ll guard the house.’

  ‘Like a chihuahua.’

  ‘Like a piranha.’

  There’s no logic to life. A fertile egg had attached itself to Nin’s insides and caused her to make a decision, just like the flying pensioner who broke a blood vessel behind her eye on the tram.

  And something changed in me, too. I could see their complete joy in each other, their love of their kid and their kid-to-come and their topsy-turvy home and I felt love for them both. I even hugged Wendy hard and long, and kissed her.

  Mick’s house is a family home, so there is plenty of space for us not to trip over each other. It’s a two-hour drive from Melbourne. On the way, the usually lush countryside looked scant and skewered by the sun as if for the most meagre of picnics, but we were high on Nin’s news and the drought was a distant reality outside the car. Daniel was enjoying himself in the back in his kid seat, ‘I’n having two babies,’ he announced. ‘They in my legs. This one’s a girl,’ and he patted one thigh, ‘and this one’s a boy.’ And he patted the other.

  ‘What are their names, Dan?’ we asked him.

  ‘Lightning and Princess.’

  ‘That’ll be good. The new baby will have two friends to play with.’

  ‘Lightning’s the boy and Princess is the girl.’

  Here, at this time of year on the stubbly back lawn at Mick’s, the spotted pardalote among the ripening nectarines says, like a primary-school teacher in a playground, ‘In you go. In you go. In you go.’ A pretty little bird, but I wish it would shut up. Sometimes I say, ‘In you go,’ right back to it and that does shut it up for a minute or two. Then it’ll say, ‘In you go,’ again, with less certainty than before and it won’t repeat itself. So I’ll say, ‘In you go,’ and it’ll fly away – possibly to seek instructions from a Higher Bird, or because suddenly the playground is empty and it’s time to go in itself.

  I can paint down here when I’m by myself but not with Mick in the house. I feel the presence of the past when Mick is here and I can’t quite get on top of it. In the best space, the sitting room, the colour of the walls gets me down. The house was professionally painted and Mick’s wife thought she had chosen the kind of mauve that roses sometimes provide, on the blue side of pink – that’s not how the walls turned out. They turned out on the pink side of blue. Not restful, just insipid. The room ought to celebrate green because the garden comes right up to the windows. What is needed here is a Matissean palette to lift the spaces, to fill the length of the house with delight for the eye and the width with light. I can feel the colour scheme but there’s no opportunity to put it down. Maybe I should make an opportunity while we’re here. Perhaps we should go into one of the larger towns where you can buy decent house paint and nut out a scheme. I tried to ask Mick whether we could do it this morning but he wasn’t interested. After all, Mick has history, too; maybe he isn’t ready for a change. He and Nin are having a cookathon and, not being a cook, I’m twiddling my thumbs and playing with Dan. Yesterday we made a feeding loft for dinosaurs with clippings from the lawnmower. There are mini hay bales strung up and stuck to the side of the toolshed with sticky tape and we thunder up for a feed after a good dinosaur fight with the snapping plastic heads we bought at the museum. In another box in the garden we’ve made a dinosaur nest that’s hatching out some Funny Putty eggs stuffed with dinosaur jelly babies.

  Wendy rings up a few times a day. David still hasn’t stopped pestering her.

  ‘Call the cops,’ said Nin last night, suddenly full of responsible direction as if she’s been rammed by maturity amidships.

  Dan and I have been for lots of walks. People grow good roses down here. We’ll get some nectarines and there are a few plums on the Satsuma I put in last year. The passionfruit vine is absolutely covered in ripening fruit. But the pear blossoms had brown stuff oozing out of them in the spring and no fruit has set on them. I hope they’re not blighted; blight means you have to cut pear trees out in this part of the world. Maybe they’re barren, but then, I only put them in last year. Things will get better. They should. They will. I have a little system going on where I make soil in Mick’s back garden. There’s a worm farm for apple, pear, quince and plum waste and a snail bin for lily leaves. I have a little cellulose digester on the go, away from the rest on a piece of concrete – rotting wood will bring down the structure of leaves eventually. A good garden needs to feed on what it grows. I’ve told Dan that to stay alive, every single thing has to eat something else. ‘And I mean everything, Dan. Big things eat little things and tinchy things eat up big things. Not all dinosaurs ate grass; some of them ate other dinosaurs. It happens all the time. It never stops.’ I think that’s a good way of thinking about the world rather than setting up the goodies and baddies model. In the world of the shops, however, goodies and baddies rule and Dan’s life is studded with superheroes. He’s brought down a boxful of them. Accommodating the universal eating paradigm is difficult when superheroes are imperishable, so I’ve taught Dan to say that his superheroes are not biodegradable. ‘Can you say non-biodegradable, Dan?’ ‘Not yet. Maybe soon.’ Now, he thinks that non-biodegradable is a good way to be. ‘But how will the biodegradable things keep going if superheroes can’t die? What if everything turns into a superhero? Then they won’t be able to eat each other and the rubbish dumps will be full up with broken superheroes.’

  ‘Is that good, Sibella?’

  ‘Well, the worms eat the dead things and make good earth from them.’

  ‘Poo erf?’

  ‘Well, yes, poo earth. Good poo earth. The trees and flowers and veggies and animals eat that poo.’

  ‘Trees and flowers not got mouvs.’

  ‘Well, no.
Trees and flowers sip up the worm poo with their roots. The worms can’t eat plastic and superheroes are made of plastic. And if the worms can’t eat plastic and there are only plastic things, they can’t poo and the trees and the flowers and the veggies and the animals can’t grow. How will Princess and Lightning manage if nothing can grow?’

  ‘Turn into superheroes.’

  ‘But if you’re their dad, they’ll be humans, like you. They’ll have to eat something.’

  ‘Will they do poo, too?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Has poo got germs?’

  ‘Not the worm poo, no – but our poo does. Our poo’s got bad germs. That’s why we don’t touch it.’

  So he turns his toy camera into a gun for shooting germs dead and I find myself lying behind a patch of arums having my germs shot off.

  This morning I had my chest X-rayed with a plastic cash register while I was dozing on the couch and he wrapped me up in Mick’s crepe bandages – there’s a whole boxful left over from the football-playing youth of his sons. Once I was mummified, Dan sat on the couch arm and drove me off to hospital at top speed. ‘A dinosaur bited you,’ I was told.

  I’m a bit sick of lying under the arums so I’ve suggested yet another walk. As we amble down to the nearby farm paddocks, the place is not exactly abuzz. Even the bees take it slowly down here and the starlings sit along the wires, observing rather than chatting. Ants in single file on tree trunks, dry garden tangle, scent of cow dung. A teenage dude on a skateboard, nonchalantly trundling across the T-junction, and behind him, coming up the footpath, a gaggle of long-haired girls in a conspiratorial, fastmoving, stiff-legged huddle which splits suddenly in two to pass us and continues on, scheming on how to pass the dude without seeming to notice he’s there. Down into the dip we go and there, in the paddock, are Patrick and Manoly, the two steers who are agisting beside the town’s creek. We stand at the wire fence until

  they come over for a nose rub. Patrick is large, fat, black and white and a bully and poor Manoly has a soulful brown look. This time last year, we had the Two Ronnies – Ronnie Barker was fat and had an over-the-counter moo, whereas Ronnie Corbett was a dark little squib who snuffled. While we’re watching, Patrick casually mounts Manoly and pees on him. Dan stands there, holding out handfuls of long grass, amazed.

  ‘He weeing on he.’

  ‘Yes darling.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is that good, Sibella?’

  ‘I don’t think it is, particularly. I think Patrick’s a bit naughty.’

  Patrick dismounts in favour of food and Manoly sets to, whacking his tail around to hit himself on the flanks like the masochist he is. ‘They got sun-ting in they’s ears,’ says Daniel.

  ‘Yes, number tags, can you tell me what colour they are, Dan?’

  ‘Lellow. Why they got lellow in they’s ears, Sibella?’

  ‘It’s their earrings, I suppose.’

  ‘Aminals not wear earrings.’

  ‘These ones do.’

  ‘Why?’

  What do you say? So they can send the tags back to the farmers when they’re killed? ‘They might be going out, Dan. What do you think?’

  ‘To the shops?’

  ‘They might be going to buy new dresses, or hats?’

  He laughs. ‘That would be funny.’

  ‘They might be going to a party?’

  ‘Can we have a party?’

  And I think of having a party to take our minds off the boredom. ‘We could put up a tent in the backyard,’ I say.

  There are some beautiful bulrushes in the creek, standing very, very still. Ibis pluck the ground in the trodden-up wake of the dairy herd. There’s still quite a lot of moisture in the soil and it’s green around the watercourses. If all else fails, could I live here?

  There’s a store (for sale), a pub and a milk bar in the shopping strip.

  Two mechanics, one at either end.

  There’s a country butchery (for sale) and a tractor store.

  There’s a primary school. It’s a pretty little school with a friendly playground.

  There’s an RSL, a bowls club, and Scouts.

  And that’s about it.

  A post office that doesn’t deliver.

  Every now and then, you can hear the overhead creaking of a cockie.

  I’ve done every walk I could take in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree radius from the house. Most of the area is fenced paddocks for feeding cows. There’s a gully. It’s an hour’s drive to the sea.

  You know you’re in an exciting place when one of the activities listed on the noticeboard of the store is ‘read the noticeboard’.

  Daniel says his legs are tired and he wants to go back to the house where Mick’s sons have left behind toys that belonged to the seventies when they were growing up. Clip together knights and cowpersons, police and soldiers, horses and motorbikes. These toys were from the height of feminism when girls could do everything – perhaps they’re meant to be unisex. There are plenty of baddies to round up with handcuffs, bows and arrows, guns and crossbows but nobody to do the housework.

  The teenage girls are now flicking their fingernails on a far corner and laughing very loudly while the dude describes slow circles on the bitumen on his board. The ants are still filing up and down the tree. Occasionally, a starling will shift a wing and shuffle and somewhere, a block or so away, someone is starting up a muffler-less quad bike. Quad bike riding starts pretty young around here; you even see little girls roaring round the streets in pink helmets. Daniel tells me he’d like to slam me in jail again behind the kiddie fence we bought to stop him wandering when he was little. This game involves releasing me so he can catch me doing bad things again. Once in a rare while, he opts to be the baddie, but I’m not allowed to find him until I’ve looked everywhere else but where he is. I’d rather lie down and be bandaged up again. Maybe holding a newspaper, except that Dan can’t resist thwacking open newspapers with pretending swords. I wonder if combat is as necessary to human beings as eating is? I suppose it is, really – after all, you’ve got to fight your way to the food in the wild.

  We dawdle into the drive and I am just thinking that I should spray the roses with anti-aphid stuff, when Nin bursts out the front door, ashen. God! I hope Mick’s okay!

  ‘Gran’s had an accident! She fell out of her bed last night and broke her elbow.’

  ‘Oh fuck!’

  I should have known she’d have an accident. What do you do when your daughter has a pressing need to be away? Break a bone. My immediate return is required. Mick and Nin have already packed the sandwiches and the thermos.

  I get into the car, as so many desperadoes do in thrillers – only not this type of car, which is built like a sensible boot – and looks like one, on wheels. Dan comes tearing after me, calling out, ‘No!’ while Nin races to the front fence and says, ‘Come on Dan, jump up here and wave goodbye to Sibella.’

  ‘I’n not Jumpabere!’ he wails. ‘I’n Dan! No, Sibella!’

  ‘Sorry, darling, but I have to go, you show Mum the germ camera.’ Mick embraces me through the window and I bounce out of the drive, backwards. Bounce because, although Mick is doing his best to ride his marital breakdown with panache, that panache doesn’t extend to his driveway, which has suffered concrete dislodgement over the years and has a crater with lifting edges just inside the gate.

  I feel overly gallant going it alone to my mother’s bedside yet again, but realistically, I have to. A break at this time of her life could signal the end.

  It could. Apparently, it’s quite bad.

  So it’s back through the paddocks, through the shreds of forest and the pine plantations that line the roads, past the three or four memorials to kids who’ve written themselves off joyriding for want of entertainment. Back through the petrol station towns, the spruced-up village with the craft shops and then the freeway. And the freeway. And the freeway. And the sculptural fences on the freewa
y edges. And whizzing by the suburbs, spreading like a plague of McMansion boils – and in and in and in like the zoom on a satellite map. To the hospital at last. And the skirmish for a car park.

  It’s a pretty bad break, they tell me at the hospital. She is in dreadful pain, crying out, ‘Lord, Lord, take me, PLEASE.’ They waited until I came to sign the ‘Do Not Revive’ form in case she succumbs under the anaesthetic, so I feel wretched that it took two hours to drive here. She is probably in as much pain as ever her fiancé was, lying on the battlefield outside Beirut. I can only reassure myself that she has had more life than he did; she is leaving descendants. They wheel her away to operate.

  I try to comfort myself with the thought that there haven’t been any extended bouts of agony in her life, or not that I remember. Just lots of short incidents. She broke a leg but she was younger then and physically more able to take it. The recuperation was long and needed the rehab hospital. There was boredom, ennui, aches, pains and trouble, but she was going home to her own house that time. There was her garden, the neighbours, the cat, the dogs. I was there to care for her, to take her back and forth once she was able to walk again. I was there for the animals. Then she dislocated her hip and had to have a replacement – it was the same story, but the hip kept on dislocating – there was minor agony, but once the paramedics had given her the morphine shot, ‘Take me to the Waldorf Astoria’, she’d cry – she liked the hip hospital; it was worth the private health insurance. This time, it’s a compound fracture and there are nerves involved, so it is agony. I can’t hope that her Lord takes her in pain. I want her to die in peace. There’s the cat at the home to go back to and a soft toy replica of her favourite dog, although she’s forgotten she ever had a dog.

  I’m walking up and down, up and down in a waiting area, arms clamped across my chest beside the stuck-together plasticky chairs in their heartless rows on long-wearing, don’t-show-the-dirt blue carpet. The place is shady, a bunker of concrete with a dirty plate-glass window high up, screening out what ought to be contact with the relentless sky. So much dust in the air and much of it landed on the bits you most want to see through. The only bright spot is a woman in a long purple shirt with a red hijab, leaning forward on one of the chairs. She has her hands open, prayer-book style and her eyes closed. I guess she is praying.