by Peter Carey
"We will invent ourselves," she said.
Geelong did not exist for us. We were oblivious to discomfort in our inconvenient nest. We lay, sat, squatted together in the valley of the roof while Molly lay, half crazy, on her bed below and Jack was entertained by his backers in gardens of Western District sheep.
"Will you teach me to fly?"
"My word, yes."
"Could we fly to Europe?"
"Yes."
"Have you ever made love to a man?"
"Good grief, no."
"I have made love to a woman," she said.
I was shocked, jealous, lustful and my voice was hoarse, half strangled with it all. "What woman?"
"You must teach her to fly too."
It is no wonder I did not take to Annette. I was jealous of her before I met her.
The hair around my penis was already damp and matted but when Phoebe extended her white hand the organ seemed to reach out towards the hand.
"Just like a flower", she wrote complacently in her notebook, "towards the sun."
32
Molly had not seen Phoebe climb on to the roof or me follow her. Yet she had a strong sense that something was wrong. This sense overpowered her and gave her what she called "her symptoms": a feeling of vertigo, like the panic she felt on high bridges, ledges, winding mountain roads. And once this feeling had appeared, like an old crow from a childhood nightmare, it stayed there and brought its own fear with it and she bitterly regretted the day she had so rashly thrown away the electric belt.
The electric belt had been purchased in 1890 from the Electro-Medical and Surgical Institute, a three-storey building in Sturt Street, Ballarat. Molly had been fourteen. She sat in the office of Dr Grigson with her two young brothers and her aunt, Mrs Ester. Mrs Ester's real name was Mrs Ester McGuinness but she was known as Mrs Ester to everyone in Ballarat and she was the licensee of the Crystal Palace Hotel.
Mrs Ester was in her late thirties. She had a slim figure, thrown slightly out of kilter by the unusual length of her body in relationship to her legs. She had a high head, a longish chin and quite extraordinary cherubic lips of which (together with her small, arched feet) she was secretly proud. Her eyes had a tendency to bulge and Dr Grigson, on first sighting her, had privately diagnosed a tendency towards an overactive thyroid gland.
Mrs Ester did not much like children but she had a strong sense of responsibility and these three children beside her were her brother's and it was her duty to safeguard them properly. The minute she knew of Molly's mother's madness she knew what had to be done and she used her newly installed telephone to call Grigson for an appointment, although she could, almost as easily, have walked across the street.
There were plenty of people in Ballarat who made fun of Grigson, men Mrs Ester thought should have known better. But Grigson occasionally took a small brandy in her establishment and she had felt honoured to listen to his talk of Pasteur and Lister and the Power of Electricity, the latter being a proven method for dealing not only with such things as constipation but also general debilitation and hereditary madness.
She was impressed by Dr Grigson's offices. They were a hymn to modernism and enlightenment. Models of the human body displayed the electric invigorators. Smartly dressed secretaries used telephones, Remington typewriters, and what she later discovered to be Graphaphone dictating machines. Mrs Ester, having seen the doctor (small, neat, precise, with a slightly Prussian appearance) driving his Daimler Benz down Lydiard Street, had expected modernism, but she had not been prepared for the scale of it.
Molly McGrath was Molly Rourke and she was fourteen. She sat wedged in between Mrs Ester and her brother Walter and saw none of what was around her. One of the secretaries offered her a sweet in a coloured wrapper. Molly shook her head and triggered off an echo of shaken heads in the two small boys. She had long copper hair that fell across her shoulders. Her young body reflected her diet of bread and potatoes. Her dimpled knees were properly hidden beneath her threadbare dress.
Walter had pooed his pants again. She had her nostrils full of the smell as she gazed down at the patterned carpet (roses and delphiniums entwined) and was unusually quiet: she thought everyone was looking at her because she was mad.
It was not like Molly to be so quiet. Her mother had called her "my song bird", not because she sang, but because she laughed. She was cheerful, inquisitive, energetic. She did not have to be told to get up in the mornings. She dressed her brothers, lit the fires, and often as not cooked breakfast. She did not complain, as Walter did, about her chilblains or pick at her warts. She could multiply 765 by 823 in her head, or any other number you liked to give her. No one had ever thought she was mad.
It had not even occurred to her that her mother was mad. Mrs Rourke was pale and wiry with dark sunken eyes and if she spent a lot of time being angry she also laughed, and Molly loved those rare sweet moments between storms when her mother was suddenly pink and warm and the troubles of the world were a long way away and then she would sing the soft Irish songs she had learned from her own mother who had carried them to Australia on a perilous voyage and arrived to find half Victoria afire and their ship had its sails set alight by the flying ashes from the bushfires.
It was Molly who had discovered her mother, early in the morning while her father was still at the bakery. She had hanged herself in the wash-house. There was one black shoe on her foot, not properly laced, and the other dropped on the broken stool she had climbed on. The smell of her opened bowels and the bulging, black eyes fused, in that dreadful moment, into one single thing, not a shape, not a colour, not a picture, but a feeling that burned itself into her. It was, at once, as hard as steel and as ghostly as a smell and it was this feeling that enveloped her still in Geelong nearly thirty years later while Phoebe and I were possums on the roof.
When Molly discovered her mother she did not scream. She dressed her brothers and took them next door to Mrs Henderson. She then walked two miles to the bakery where her father worked. She was made to wait for half an hour before she was permitted to see her father and then she watched while the big flour-dusted man roared and wept and rolled in the icy street while the cold winds blew through her thin dress. She listened to the loud cracks as he hit his head and thought that he must die too. She did not cry.
Mrs Ester was called in. She took the necessary steps. A funeral was organized and there was a wake at the Crystal Palace Hotel, in the private rooms, where Mrs Ester surprised everybody by singing "The Shan Van Vogt" and everybody became very Irish and very stirred and chose to remember that the dead woman's father had had his leg broken by policemen at the Eureka Stockade. They embraced Molly and made her eat slices of bread and butter.
After the wake Mrs Ester took the business of madness in hand. She had a small talk with Molly in the Ladies' Parlour of the Crystal Palace Hotel.
"I'm telling you cause you're the eldest – it wasn't just your mother."
Molly played with her dress which had been dyed black for mourning. The dye was not holding. It left black marks on her fingers. She knew that this conversation was not easy for Mrs Ester who had closed the hatch to the bar and shut the door to the passage. It was dark in the parlour and it smelt of floor polish and Brasso and stale stout and smoke.
Mrs Ester was not at ease with children. "Do you see what I'm getting at?"
"No, Mrs Ester."
"What I am saying is that it wasn't just your mother. Do you see what I'm getting at?"
But Molly did not.
Mrs Ester sighed. She fiddled with the big ring of keys she always wore hanging from her waist. "Your Granny Keogh was the same."
Same as what? Molly looked miserably at the painting of the green-eyed cat that hung crookedly beneath the shelf of china ornaments that were intended to make the parlour cosy.
"Do you see my point? For heaven's sake, girl, she drowned herself in Lake Wendouree."
This news was horrible but made no sense. It got mixed up with the smel
l of whisky on her aunt's breath, the darkness of the room, the green eyes of the cat and the reverence with which Patchy the barman, having blundered into the room, retreated from it, his larrikin's head oddly bowed.
Mrs Ester was at her best dealing with the brewery or asking a drinker to leave without offence. She was, by habit, a blunt woman, and this beating around the bush did not suit her at all. She did not intend to be unkind. She was now merely intent on not prolonging the agony.
"I am not having you hanging yourself," she said, "here or elsewhere, now or later."
And having, at last, delivered herself of her burden, she sat with her hands folded on her lap and her head on one side.
"Oh," Molly said, "I promise you. I promise, Mrs Ester, I never would."
"It is not a thing you can promise, poor child," said Mrs Ester, suddenly hugging her fiercely, and crushing the child's nose into a brooch. "It will come up on you. One minute you will be singing and happy and the next… I will take you to Grigson," she said.
Molly had wailed. She had howled, sentenced in the Ladies' Parlour, and felt the black dye of her dress insinuate itself into the pores of her skin.
Dr Grigson, as it turned out, was strange, but not unpleasant. The nicest thing about him was his hands which were soft and dry like talcum powder. When he touched her face or held her hand it had a lovely ministering quality which the girl found comforting. Everything about Dr Grigson was very neat and very clean. Molly had never smelt such a clean smell, on a man or a woman. He had small, stiff movements and when he turned his head he turned his shoulders as well, as if his head and body were all of a piece and had no independence at all.
"I see no reason", he said, "why you should end the same way as your mother and grandmother. Modern Science", said the promoter of Lister and Pasteur, "can do much for your condition."
"She doesn't understand," said Mrs Ester, who was accompanying each of the children on their interviews.
"Do you understand?" Dr Grigson asked her.
She nodded her head.
"Tell me, my child."
She did not want to say it. She did not have to repeat, with words, the fallen chair, the shoe still on the foot, the smell.
"I will go mad," she said in a very small voice, "and get up on a chair, and jump off."
"You will do no such thing," said Dr Grigson, "if I can help it."
She was relieved when he took her hand back. He asked her many questions. Did she see things falling? Did she hear voices? Was she prone to laughter in an excessive degree? ("Yes," said Mrs Ester.) Did she touch herself between the legs? Did she wake with palpitations?
He was like a nice nun, not the sort that hit your knuckles with a ruler and talked of sin and hellfire, but the other sort. He had gentle Jesus eyes.
"Amazing," Dr Grigson said turning in his chair to look through the window at the big white statue in the middle of Sturt Street. "The child", he swung back to face Mrs Ester, "must have an electric invigorator. With it she will have a long and happy life."
Molly multiplied 899 by 32 in her head. A small, light, happy calculation. It meant nothing. She multiplied in relief. A flood of numerals marched across her mind and swept away her misery.7,676 by 296, she thought, marching down the stairs behind her brothers. The answer seemed almost as long as life itself.
The day that Molly strapped on the apparatus around her waist, hid the battery in the folds of her dress, and stood before the doctor smiling, was the happiest day she could remember of her childhood, better, by far, than her first communion or the birthday picnic out at Creswick. She walked the wintry streets of Ballarat as one invincible. She went into St Mary's on the hill and prayed for an hour to the Blessed Virgin. She did some multiplications for God as well, presenting him, finally, with 5,895,323.
33
Ballarat stretched low and wide, from Battery Hill to the edges of the west. It was made from wood. Weatherboards and wide verandas lined wide streets that baked into claypans in summer, churned into mud in winter. They had planted oaks and bluegums in Sturt Street. They stocked Lake Wendouree with fish. They began to talk of Ballarat with civic pride, but it was Mrs Ester who showed real confidence in the future. She built the Crystal Palace Hotel from brick.
It stood high and solid, three storeys facing a Sturt Street that looked faint-hearted and pessimistic in comparison, as if the gold that had made the city rich might suddenly go away.
Mrs Ester did not worry about gold. The quartz crushers were already more important. The foundries were there. H. V. McKay was manufacturing harvesters which were sold all round the country. She had no need of the custom of miners who drank themselves into oblivion down in the shanties of the east and frittered away their fortunes on chilblained prostitutes. It is true she had a public bar that spilled its dubious contents on to Sturt Street on summer evenings: and there were miners amongst the shearers, fettlers, foundry men, farm labourers, clerks and tricksters and passing thieves, but she had not built her business on anything so flimsy.
The Duke of Kent stayed at the Crystal Palace Hotel in 1873 -that was the sort of hotel it was.
Molly had visited the Crystal Palace Hotel before her mother's death made it her permanent residence. They had come once for Christmas dinner and once for a funeral, but they had come with tingling skin scrubbed hard by a mother who felt out of place amongst such finery. They had come with new shoelaces, their eyes downcast, told not to stare at the lady with the cherub's lips and bulging eyes.
But now she could enter the Crystal Palace Hotel through the grand front entrance. She did not quite skip up the steps. She certainly did not laugh or giggle. But she could, whilst walking briskly, carrying the morning's newspapers, smiling sweetly at the guests, feel that she was a part of the complicated mechanism of this important place.
Her father had taken a room in a boarding house close to the bakery. Sean had been sent up to Creswick to the Rourkes' and Walter went to Ballarat South with the Kellys who wrote complaints about his bed-wetting. He had also been sent home from school with his underpants wrapped up in newspaper after soiling his pants in arithmetic class. And Molly had begun work as a housemaid for Mrs Ester. She was paid no money, but she was fed, given shelter, and she had her electric invigorator.
She worked hard and lost her fat. She rose at five and lit the fires. She toiled along the carpeted passages upstairs and the highly polished wooden ones downstairs. She could clean a room and leave it so that one would imagine it never slept in. She could clean a mirror so a guest might feel that no face had ever been reflected in it before. She collected squeezed lemons from the kitchen every Tuesday and went from brass doorknob to brass doorknob, rubbing them hard until the lemons fell to pieces in her hands and the brass gave up its grime to the sour sticky juice. She liked the hotel. She liked the quiet clink and rustle of breakfast in the dining room, the rumble of kegs being rolled down to the cellar, the smell of brewery horses, the songs in the saloon bar late at night, and the sound of Mrs Ester's high-heeled shoes and rattling key as she passed in the corridor on her way to bed.
She ate her meals with Mrs Ester in the dining room where there was always food in plenty – meat every day, even Fridays -and almost nobody, it seemed, could eat what they were given and the black-uniformed waitresses were always carrying back plates that had not been scraped clean. The hens in the hotel yard ate better food than Molly had been used to.
She had her friends: an old yardman who told her stories and showed her his odd socks sticking up above his boots and Patchy the barman who gave her pennies when he was drunk, and even Mrs Ester, on three occasions, read her stories from a book about India which, although she did not quite understand them, were appreciated all the same. However, it was not until Jennifer Grillet arrived that she had someone of her own age to talk to. Jennifer was a distant relation of Mrs Ester's. She had red hair that sat on either side of her head like a spaniel's ears and she was very thin. Jennifer arrived with a proper suitcase just after
Molly's sixteenth birthday and when the door was shut in their small room above the stables, Molly began to talk.
"My," said Jennifer Grillet, "you are a chatterbox," but she listened just the same and showed Molly the birthmark on her shoulder.
Their friendship was not to last long. Before a month was out Jennifer had begged Mrs Ester for a room of her own because Molly kept her awake all night talking, but by then the real damage had been done and Molly had told her everything, how Walter pooed his pants, her father banged his head, her mother hanged herself. She had made no secret of her electric belt. She explained its purpose. She let Jennifer try it on and thought she was secretly envious, not only of the exotic apparatus but of Molly's figure which had become, by that sixteenth birthday, decidedly womanly.
"A real hourglass," she told herself proudly, standing before the mirror in petticoats and electric belt.
There were others who thought so too, and Mrs Ester was not slow in realizing the girl's potential behind the bar.
The bar Mrs Ester had in mind was not the public bar where Patchy ruled, sometimes ruthlessly. The bar she had in mind was called the "Commercial Room". It was not downstairs, it was upstairs. There were no tiled walls in the Commercial Room. You did not clean it as Patchy cleaned the public bar, with a hose and water. It had a woollen carpet on the floor and several leather chairs and low tables.
The Commercial Room was a meeting place for mutton-chopped merchants and frock-coated doctors, chalky-skinned solicitors and the moustached graduates of the School of Mines. Visiting gentlemen and their crinolined ladies could sit in comfort, drink champagne if they wished, and only occasionally be reminded of the realities of Ballarat when a fight erupted on the footpath below or fire swept through the wooden cottages on Battery Hill, and even these events could be comfortably observed from a balcony above the street.
