Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  ‘Well, I need to be satisfied that she is a true Anglican.’

  Jesus Christ, he is as autistic as my dentist! ‘I see. Well, I have a postcard in my possession that was given to her by the Bishop of Scunthorpe when she was confirmed.’

  ‘Oh. Does it affirm that she was confirmed?’

  ‘It says, “To Bunny with love from The Bish”. I’ll go and get her cousin. Wait here.’

  ‘I have every intention of doing so. I’ll be here until six p.m.’

  It’s about midday, I suppose, sun at its hottest as I trundle past the Mercedes Benz showroom around the corner from Audra’s. I turn left, then left again and park outside Audra’s house at the back of the Mercedes dealer. Audra’s house has a high wall around it, not like something out of Afghanistan, but high because the house has been made much of. She has broken it into her own home and a flat at the back that brings in rent. Her garden is cut off from the flat’s. ‘It’s for privacy,’ she’s always said, with a short ‘i’ in privacy – upon which, Stella has always retorted ‘pr-eye-vacy, my mother always said pr-eye-vacy.’ For a while there, there were lavatorytoilet wars, Audra declaring that she must be right because they said ‘lavatory’ in England – and she’d been; but Stella stuck with We have a mulberry tree, We have a persimmon tree, but we do not have a laver tree, no matter what the English said – the English, after all, had outlawed the use of Scottish surnames and she was a descendent of Rob Roy’s, as were all true relations of hers. Then there’d follow the tale of ‘Dig ’er wide and dig ’er deep’ and the making of the toilets at the family property with a six-foot drop, a toad at the bottom and three different sizes of seat: gentlemen, ladies and children.

  Why am I doing this?

  So an old heathen, who never so much as trod on a treadmill at a gym, let alone visited a single psychiatrist, can live out her fantasy of high birth and God having his eye on her to her very last day? Here I am, knocking on blasted Audra’s door in need of help!

  And I’ll swear she’s been watching and waiting for me behind that front door for weeks. Whoosh! goes the door. ‘Come in, come in!’ Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly. And here I am, sitting up on her genuine Octaloctapus sofa, 1836, drinking lapsang souchong out of Impelimpetus china, stirred by a Frippatippenny solid silver spoon from Sklutch and Brothers, asking for a favour and thinking, Fuck! Daniel has left his ‘let’s-recycle-this’ innards of a Ben 10 Omnitronix-cum excavation of Pharaoh’s tomb with budgie grit for sand on the front seat of my car and it has leaked and I’ve got to get Audra in there and up to the demon vicar and then get both of them over to the ancient heathen before God…but God will wait. Fuck it! God will wait.

  ‘So, may I ask you to take over this bit Audra?’

  ‘You certainly may.’ And she has clapped her rhinoceros-hide handbag to her forearm and, like the chatelaine that she is, is going briskly from door to door, locking up with keys that dangle from a ring that would do justice to a bull’s nostrils. Even the tantalus she locks – that is to say, she locks the little antique decanter holder where masters and mistresses of the great house of Motte would lock away the liquor from the servants and she says, ‘You can’t be too careful, can you?’ while I race out ahead of her to put Daniel’s construction in the boot, saying, ‘No,’ a word I ought to have learned to use a great deal earlier than this and in answer to some very different questions.

  As Audra rides beside me in the car, there’s something I notice – like Stella, Audra has no neck. But unlike Stella, she has obedient hair. She Is-she-very-ill-dears all the way and I refrain from saying Isn’t that obvious and decline to mumble.

  ‘Yes.’

  I talk to her as if she were human.

  Audra and the vicar are one. I might have known. Away we bowl now in the vicar’s spick-and-span black Holden Commodore to the unrenovated but comfortable pink room at Redeemer. Once there, I park them with Stella, pretend to have a deep turn of grief and to be unable to look on and I take to prowling the corridors, again. Under Blessed Mary MacKillop’s gaze I go, past the chapel where Mother F. Oldmeadow is on her knees breaking her own appeal for group entreaty by dropping a private one at the feet of the Saviour. So you lost out to sanity over the air-conditioning, and are you now asking what you did wrong, Mother F.? I walk into the common room with its Matissean window gods.

  I know those gods quite well, having strayed as a schoolgirl deeper into Catullus than was permitted, trying to find out what his lascivious allusions meant and finding, to my excitement, Cybele, the Earth Mother. She preceded Zeus in the pantheon. Cybele had history years before the Romans got hold of her. In some cultures, she was androgynous until the other gods castrated her – I can’t remember why, perhaps they were envious that here was a woman who could inseminate herself; perhaps they discovered early on that such practice leads to inbreeding and monstrous offspring. Anyway, with her male parts, these envious, super-rational or just plain cruel gods grew an almond tree. A ripe almond fell off and struck the river nymph, Nana, in the breast and she fell pregnant with a boy, Attis. Strange way to fall pregnant but there you are: technically, Attis was the child of Cybele mothered by Nana, but when he grew up, he returned to Cybele as her lover. He was a flirt; he got about a bit, notwithstanding that Cybele was a bitter, vengeful woman after having had her bloke’s bits cut off. She drove poor Attis out of his mind with guilt-inducing hectoring – I’ve been guilty of such behaviour myself a number of times but my victims did not then castrate themselves in a frenzy as Attis did and die from their wounds. Nor did I resurrect them, as Cybele did Attis, in the form of a woman, with all a woman’s ferocious longings. (Although I wanted to – I wanted them all to suffer as I had suffered: I thought it would be instructive. I thought they would learn from it. I didn’t know that bitterness and vengefulness, when paired, have bitter and vengeful offspring because they can’t have anything else.)

  Some say Cybele morphed into the Mother of Christ, whose name, Mary, means ‘the bitter sea’ – there’s vengeance in waves and salt spoils water for slaking your thirst. Of course, some say that’s nonsense: Mary is so named because she came from the Dead Sea, whereas Cybele was from the mountains, but I say Mary is Cybele brought down to sea level and civilised by Navigation and Trade and all their heirs. It’s my guess that civilisation couldn’t have arrived at the great middle class we know today without a Mary straitjacketing libidinous behaviour.

  Mary will find you a lot less troublesome if you shop for a decent house in a respectable neighbourhood and stock the house with name-brand white goods than if you let your mind wander. If you just think of the buy-and-display cycle (behind which sits Womanhood holding the stakes), you’ll have a single-minded, coherent world and everything else will take care of itself. Right down to the pictures on your walls. Which almost certainly won’t be mine.

  I wish that David had broken Redeemer’s window in the beautiful way he broke mine. Then I could throw myself out – right through a charming, bird-shaped hole, fly up high in the blue and be a tour de force with a brush that went for miles.

  When Audra asked if she could join our vigil over Stella, I did not say no. And I asked the vicar to oversee the proceedings at the funeral home when the day came, even though he had difficulty accepting that Nin and Wendy were the parents of Daniel and Georgia. ‘Two women cannot parent a child,’ he said.

  ‘I know that.’

  I didn’t say ‘Your Grace’, although I was tempted to.

  ‘Not in the biological sense. Nevertheless, they both parent the children. They live together in the same house with the children and sleep in the same bed. If that is distasteful to you, please don’t undertake to conduct the funeral. If you can accept that Nin and Wendy co-parent Daniel and Georgia and that Daniel and Georgia are Stella’s great-grandchildren, then please conduct the funeral as the person who delivered Extreme Unction. It will be a simple funeral and I ask you, please, to say the words with which my mother has been familiar
all her life as an act of respect to her.’

  Thank God I’d organised the occasion long ago as part of the business of moving Stella into Narrowlea. Audra began to nag me to have it at what she called ‘our church’. I was, at last, able to say the word, ‘No’. I was able to say, ‘It’s all arranged.’ And when I got the hangdog look and the whine, Meetra’s visage leapt into my mind and I said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  We took it in turns to sleep beside the bed. During the days we listened to the tennis in the roasting sunroom of the nursing home to which the blessing of air-conditioning was not extended. A mad old former priest called Father Michael kept whizzing into the dying room in his wheelchair to see what was going on and we had to hunt him out. Relatives traipsed in and relatives traipsed out. Stella did not stir. We moistened her mouth with water and administered teaspoonsful of cold ginger ale. A week passed and fires broke out near Mick’s country house. He and I sat watching the telly, horrified in the sunroom. ‘Go,’ I said to him. ‘You have to go and bring back what you need to.’

  So he went. The spotted pardalotes, the cockies and blue wrens were burning. The country was cracking open. Trees split open of their own accord before the tempest reached them.

  Stella passed quietly in the night. She was still warm to the touch when I found her, her little nose high and beautiful, rose in her cheeks, a smile on her face. ‘Numpa One!’ wept the little Asian nurse. ‘Oh, goodbye Numpa One.’

  Mick came back. The fires had stopped just short of the town.

  On the seventh of February, 2009, the relatives began to assemble at the funeral parlour. As Mick and I were driving up the street, we saw a phalanx of them, streaming sweat as they made their way up the road from the train station. People’s clothes clung to them the way that old Beryl Blake’s used to cling to her. I was glad for having chosen the parlour over a church. We had air-conditioning.

  ‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ we said. ‘I shall not want.’

  But everything changes. The vicar said the international version.

  ‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ he said. ‘I lack nothing.’ Obviously, if Stella had truly been a regular attender, they were the words she would have known.

  A relative brought a portable organ and didn’t know the tunes. ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah!’ we sang, all off-key. Sweat dripped from every pore. Babes mourned loudly. The Nations assembled: the Vietnamese, the Indians, the Islanders, the Somalis, the Russians, the Czechs, the British, at least one with Aboriginal forebears and another with Chinese. Australians all and all, at some stage, sheltered under the eaves of the Hawthorn cottage, drinking tea or something stronger with the Queen Mother’s cousin, twice removed. The sandwiches were good. Audra and the vicar were one, solid and irreproachable in the sight of so much sin.

  Afterwards, we went to the pub where we used to take her for seniors’ lunches. The rowdier elements came with us and those relatives who couldn’t take the train home because the rails had buckled in the heat during the service. On TV screens where usually they had the races on a Saturday afternoon, there were walls of fire. The countryside was going up. A return of the summer horrors was upon us. We were downing beers – ‘Gosh,’ someone said at my elbow, ‘nearly didn’t make it!’ I looked up.

  ‘Eli.’

  ‘Mumma.’ His was the last plane in before the airport closed. ‘It’s horrific,’ he said. ‘It goes for miles.’ And he shook his head in slow, sad disbelief.

  We were going to bury her at Scunthorpe among her relatives on the Sunday but the roads were closed. Along the route we were to take fires were still burning until late Monday, and so it was on the Tuesday that Mick and Eli, Wendy, Nin, Daniel, baby Georgia and I sat up in a small cavalcade of two black cars behind a hearse and made the slow, sad journey.

  We hardly spoke. We played no music. Where the fires had been, creatures lay, legs-up beside the road, bowled over by the flames. The air was thick and grey. The land, black. Where, in Afghanistan, it was a shelled-out landscape, here in Australia were the jang and sang of nature – the war and the stone – shattered trees, split scenery, all black or ashen. No birds. No green.

  We carried our little sparrow of a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother to the place where her people lay waiting for her in the family grave. I farewelled her at the graveside with Fear no more the heat of the sun, from Cymbeline. I love the line that goes Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust. We brought with us the oddest flowers we could find, a box of chocolates and a bottle of sherry for luck. So she went down with truffles, oloroso, pineapple lilies and waratahs, there being no monkey orchids at the time of year.

  Then back we drove to our mourning city through the ruined scenery under a sorry sky.

  There has been rain in the weeks since.

  There were long shining puddles across the floor of the Yarra Valley when we drove out to Lexie’s this morning. We have driven through the blackened acres and the thorny profiles of burnt-out mountains, past the black and jagged memories of its forest trees around whose bases the green is already sprouting but not with the promise of survival. These shoots are the last hurrah of the eucalyptus. It’s only when you see the green high up that it signals continuing life. Grand European requiems on the tape deck were wrong for this journey; what it needed was a dirge of didgeridoos and clap sticks. We didn’t have any, so we drove in silence. Where there is no thread to pull, you must make one for yourself.

  We have followed Vance and Suzanne down graded tracks to their patch and felt, under our feet, the depth of cinders. Lichen, gold and green, has begun to lace the top of the powdery ground. There are trunks burnt through, like giant keyholes. The trees on the ridges seem to have writhed and cursed in their death throes like the people of Pompeii. Here is Garibaldi’s statue in the piazza in Milan, its outline impossible with pigeon shapes; there, two trees have fallen together to make a Chinese dragon whose remains rear up, powerless before the greater dragon whose annihilating breath so recently passed this way. Yet it’s our land, whatever our cultural memories. ‘I’ve found one!’ calls Suzanne from where she is crouching in a nest of skittled logs. ‘It’s a purple wax lip!’ We’ve already found white spider orchids and blue Caladenia and greenhoods. They are small and easily overlooked but our eyes are becoming better at searching them out and they are beginning to be everywhere. It makes us feel as if we are bringing them to life and, in their life, they are transforming the way we see.

  Under the ground the mycelia are delving, finding the seeds, and the seeds are sprouting, their alluring ladies waiting to come out and loll around to fool the native wasps. This is what happens in our midst – here, now and with me no longer waiting.

  Lexie is a kilometre away up the hill doing small salvage jobs around her house. The double glass in the windows stayed intact but the guttering melted, as did most metal things, leaving holes and planks and flaps of masonry behind. Lexie and her family were safe under the hill and were able to go back twenty-four hours afterwards. They lost the solar panels off their roof but their generator helped them in the meantime. The water in their dam is covered in fire debris but it was effective when they needed it, filtering water down to the bunker through underground pipes. It won’t be very long before their systems are back in place.

  Yesterday I was at Raven and Barratt’s, signing papers. More than once the lawyer has said to me, ‘Keep your powder dry.’ It seemed stupid to say that during the drought when you would have had a hard time getting your powder wet. It seems to me that the law exists only to feed lawyers: having spent hours bending my mind around ridiculous, entrapping questions put by Checkie’s lawyers, and even more hours bending it around the changes of mind and the shifting of the arguments, my insurers thought the best way out of the mess was to offer Checkie compensation. I objected strenuously but there was no point. If I didn’t accept the insurer’s terms, they would go ahead without my agreement. They did just that, offering twenty thousand. Apparently, it
wasn’t enough. Checkie wanted three times that sum to drop the case. It was between her and the insurers then. There has been an out-of-court settlement. Thus do those who fish with a long line between the cracks of fortune reach the bottom to land the flounder.

  Dadda’s paintings are still down in the store but they won’t be there for long. Some day soon, Nin and Lexie and I will bring them up the hill along with all the other art and craft in the store and hang them in the house for an exhibition to celebrate their survival and ours.

  On the day, we shall reopen Lexie’s restaurant in the large, airy house. The restaurant has a very long wall, and on it, in train, is a very large triptych. On the first panel is a crouching, naked woman, pressing up against the glass pane of the frame, her palms white with effort, her cheek and hair also pushed hard into it. Reflected in the glass that will go in front of her will be the flames of the centre panel which leap through the devastation we can see stretching forever through the restaurant windows – but there will be people in the painted version. The centre panel will remain unglazed. Through mayhem and conflagration, the world will go tumbling in a revisitation of Breughel. The Shi’ites, the Sunnis, the Protestants, the Catholics, the Liberal and the Orthodox Jews are taking shape. Crosses admonish, Stars of David hang around people’s necks and bear them down, Crescent Moons are wielded like cutlasses. Ayatollahs race to-and-fro, women in burqas beg, nuns advise their acolytes with their backs turned, bishops preen before mirrors while choirboys adjust their raiment and kiss their shoes. Death meanwhile is not some striding black-draped figure with a sickle over its shoulder, nor Mad Meg with her reforming zeal, but a tiny woman, lying in a tiny bed on an island in the very centre: her tiny expression is amazed, because it isn’t God or a band of angels she sees hurtling over her deathbed, but a stone, a sang, headed out of the picture plane for the third panel, which overlaps the second and is in the act of breaking open in the shape of a bird.