by Lisa Gorton
‘It’s what we’ve done,’ she cried out. ‘We’ve lied so much we can’t see what anything is.’
Peter took his phone from his pocket. He held it out at arm’s length, its screen turned towards her. ‘It’s afternoon there.’ She bent her head to look at the phone in his hand: a little neat thing; and she was suddenly conscious of satellites advancing through the overhead dark. She pictured, as if from that distance, the two of them side by side on sand as leached and pockmarked as moon images. What had they ever talked about? All their unmeaning talk…
She said, ‘We’re never anywhere. One is a dream or the other. This is real and then I go home and you’re nowhere. You’re saying it’s simple but that’s what we haven’t been.’
He stood up, brushed some sand off his phone and slid it into his pocket. She kept sitting. Something, she thought, was final. Colourlessly he said, ‘I have to work tomorrow.’
Chapter Eight
Treen at last discovered her shopping list, folded in her shirt pocket all along. The two of them just popped into the supermarket. Kit heard her aunt’s phrase with a flicker of mockery: her mother was vicious about people who spoke in what she called the diminutive tense. But the next moment, watching Treen step into the supermarket with her shopping list out in front of her like a map, Kit disliked herself. There was something unassailable about Treen—perhaps just that she didn’t try to be impressive.
The supermarket’s door was propped open, the entrance hung with see-through plastic strips. From a folding table by the entrance a radio blasted out the local radio station: classic hits and memories. ‘Supermarket’—for Kit the word meant something different from this windowless long room with its single dividing shelf, its unpainted walls overrun with grey electric cords.
Even in France, supermarkets had been more familiar. In this place everything, by being unfinished, showed itself as the result of human effort. A half-empty box of tomato sauce bottles blocked one aisle; a hand-held device for attaching prices stickers lay on the floor beside it. In a shopping basket on the ground loaves of sliced white bread sweated in plastic bags under a sign handwritten on the torn-off lid of a cardboard box: ‘Yesterdays’ bread 99 c’. Flies crawled tormentedly over the plastic: food they could smell and not reach.
The place looked not so much like a supermarket as the bunker of some doomsdayer stockpiling food for after the apocalypse. Most of the food was the kind that would last years: tinned soup, baked beans, beetroot, sweetcorn, tomatoes, packets of dry pasta. In the half-lit closeness of the windowless room a smell of mice, noticeable the first moment, faded into a general stale indoorness: sweat and the chemical sweetness of out-of-season refrigerated apples.
Treen looked at her list again—squarish, tidy handwriting—and chose two lemons from the fridge at the back. ‘I thought we’d have lemon chicken,’ she said. ‘Your mother and I used to love that.’ Her eyes travelled doubtfully over Kit. Fifteen-year-olds were older now, that look said. By the freezer Treen stopped. Peering down with her through its sliding glass top, Kit saw pizza boxes, varieties of chips, fish fingers, frozen peas, and huge polystyrene trays of barbeque meat.
‘Should we get some ice-cream?’
‘Won’t it melt when we’re at life drawing?’
Treen put the ice-cream back.
‘Cash only,’ said the boy behind the counter. ‘Phones are down.’
‘Not again?’ said Treen.
He was one of those skinny, loose-jointed boys with protuberant Adam’s apples, apparently hard to shave, and a jawline edged with itchy-looking pimples. Kit was surprised: she had expected that someone with his looks would be more apologetic. Treen went up the street to the cash machine. Faking interest in the handwritten notices pinned to a board by the door, Kit soon found herself interested: kittens for sale, and horse manure, a second-hand ute, a cot and pram. None of these people who had put up notices, nobody knew her here. The idea that she could become somebody else came into her mind. Somebody who went to yoga on the beach at 7am. Somebody who took up piano (‘It’s never too late!’). A volunteer for the dune restoration project, meeting every Sunday at the lighthouse rain, hail or shine…One notice in pink texta advertised a wedding dress for sale, ‘never used, with veil’—there were love hearts drawn in the same texta in the corners of the torn-off page.
A phone rang behind the counter. Kit heard the boy answer it, giggle, hang up surreptitiously. He had lied, was probably filching some of the take. She could sense him glancing across at her. Kit, with rigid back, knew already that she would not tell Treen. Church on Sunday, helping out with Sunday School in the afternoon: these were fixtures Treen had marked out apologetically on the drive into town. For all her vagueness she was stubborn; she had what Kit’s social studies teacher would have called ‘moral seriousness’. Kit could picture Treen trooping off to the police station.
Through the music on the stereo Kit heard her own phone. The withheld number was usually her father. Kit stepped out, away from the boy, into the glare of the street.
He started accusingly, often his way: ‘I called you yesterday.’
‘There’s not much reception here.’
‘Where? You didn’t tell me you were going away.’
‘I’m at my grandparents’.’
‘Audrey and Patrick’s? Your mother’s taken you?’
‘She’s still working. She’s got the show—’
‘You’re there on your own?’
‘I wanted to come. I asked her about them.’
‘Did you.’ The way he said it, it was not a question. Kit listened to the phone line. A sound like radio static was often in the background of these calls. Other times, his voice sounded startlingly close. When he spoke again his voice was formal: the voice of a parent choosing not to say what he thought. ‘How are they?’
‘Patrick says the house is haunted.’
‘Yes, he said that to me once. He’s a bit mad. Likes to scare people.
He used to be a priest, did you know that?’
‘No.’
‘What about Audrey?’
‘She stays in bed mostly. She’s writing a book.’
‘She’s been doing that for years. Treen’s alright, I think. We used to see her in town occasionally. Do you remember? She used to come down for the ballet.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘It was a while ago.’
‘Why is she still here?’
‘You’d have to ask your mother. She did leave for a while, lived with a doctor for years, all through his training. They were still in Toronto when your mother and I married, I remember. Everyone was very impressed that he was a doctor; kept asking me what I did. Then I think—well, there was some trouble. She went home for a holiday and he took up with someone else.’
Kit pictured Treen walking into the supermarket with the list held out in front of her, and could not assimilate what her father had told her. They waited.
‘What have you been doing?’ she said.
‘Not much. Working. Listen, it’s the middle of the night here. I just wanted to hear you were okay.’
‘I’m alright.’
‘I might get back for Christmas, tell your mother.’
‘Alright.’
They hung up. Kit headed back to her noticeboard. The notices, if they had seemed funny before—those hopeful scattered apostrophes— filled her now with useless pity. Minx the floppy-eared bunny, gazing out from its photo with inbred hauteur, a nose uncannily like the noses of soft toy rabbits done in cross-stitch: some primary school kid had written out that notice. Missing three weeks—had nobody told the child that Minx was dead? Kit heard again her father’s question: you’re on your own? His surprise brought home the unease she had been feeling all along. How strange was it, her being here, with them? It should not have been strange. Everybody had nodded when she’d said it: a week at her grandparents’ house by the sea. Everybody had nodded, and she had come to believe in that version of how it
would be. Now the very idea that it should have been normal brought home how isolating it was. If the atmosphere of the house was thick with feeling it was not their feeling for her—not for each other, either. In the house none of them could look at her without seeing the mother who was not there. A shadow was thrown out from every thing she did, even how she looked. Daylight hours she thought she could get through. Treen’s week—not only art class but exercise class, work at the doctor’s and the helpline, and ‘of course’ church—would let her off. She’d have Anna’s old bike; Treen had promised to get it from the shed. At night, though, she would have to go back—to dinner, questions, that hovering presence in the hall.
Before the phone call, she’d have said that being here made her miss her father less: she was not forever walking into rooms where he should have been. That it was night where he was seemed in one way obvious, in another fantastical. Putting the phone back in her pocket, she felt at a distance even from herself. She would have liked to stay here with this small wind rattling the plastic strips beside her. The sound made her remember the backyards that she had passed in the train on the way here: car tires and rusting parts; a mattress, stripped of its covers, tilted against a wooden fence warping under its weight of jasmine. Why had she nagged Treen to take her to life drawing? Kit remembered lace over the teashop window, Treen chewing slowly with the crumb stuck to her chin. She could not now recreate in herself that keyed-up feeling—what had it been? That she should have said something to Scott, shamed him somehow for staring at her? Whatever that feeling had been, its residue was this self-dismay, an aimlessness that satisfied itself with out-of-date notices, with imagining what had gone wrong to make that unworn wedding dress (‘genuine tulle’) for sale.
Treen pushed through the plastic strips.
Having run out of time to fetch the car they stood a little after the hour outside the hall, shopping bags in their hands. Opening the door, Scott stepped back with a theatrical flourish, a fixed ironical smile. The room was, against expectation, almost deserted. Weatherboard, high like a church, it had narrow windows that showed only sky. At the far end, through angled falls of dust-blurred light, women sat waiting on a row of fold-down chairs.
‘We’re not too early?’ said Treen.
‘Actually, late.’ Scott clapped his hands. ‘We’ll get started, ladies.’
‘Someone your own age,’ Treen said triumphantly. ‘I’d hoped Miranda might be here.’
The girl stood up. A clatter as the chair shut, and Kit was instantly conscious of plastic bags, sweat under her arms. Here was one of those long-haired shining girls whose first effect is total, who have no individual features but are shut off, fatalistic in the expectation they will be looked at. Whatever idea she’d had of facing Scott— of being defiant, clear-cut—Kit knew now to be impossible. She was ludicrous even to herself: freckled, pale, indistinct, standing there in her old T-shirt.
‘My niece is staying with us this week,’ announced Treen.
A woman with hair of blonde lacquer sat forwards in her chair. ‘Not Anna’s girl?’
Setting her bags down, Treen touched Kit’s shoulder proprietorially. ‘Kit, our neighbours: Carol Bishop. And Miranda.’
‘Well! You can tell you’re family,’ said Carol. She challenged Miranda. ‘Like two peas!’ Miranda looked obediently from Treen to Kit but made no comment. ‘Your mum’s here too?’
Treen said, ‘Anna can’t leave the gallery now. Not right before Christmas. And Kit’s father’s off in London so we’ve got Kit for the week.’
‘Isn’t that lovely. A week with your auntie!’ There was a pause, in which Carol kept watching Kit. Alert, upright in her chair—behind that fixed smile she was noticing things she would think about later, when she was alone.
She said, ‘We’ve been remembering that poor boy.’
Treen glanced at Scott, his fixed professional expression. ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘That brute of a father,’ said Carol.
‘Poor Rosemary,’ Treen said. ‘I must drop off a casserole.’
Kit felt how strange it was that they were ignoring the woman who sat, turned away from them, on a seat at the end of the row. As if to demonstrate her boredom, the woman was flicking over the pages of a magazine. Her hair was startlingly black: a solid block of colour, probably home-dyed, pulled back at each side with plastic combs. She was dressed in a paisley satin dressing-gown; her feet were bare. Sensing Kit’s eyes on her, the woman turned. She pulled the edges of her lips downwards in a smile surprising in its warmth. Her eyes were a dazzled blue composed of yellow and green-grey flecks. As abruptly, she dropped her smile; she tossed her magazine on the floor and stood up.
‘You’re not going to cancel?’ She spoke to Scott as though there were just the two of them in the room.
He shrugged. ‘I never cancel.’ He turned his back. ‘Money, ladies!’ he cried. With a frightened expression, Treen peered into her wallet and extracted two twenty-dollar notes.
‘Now none of that jabbing at the paper today, Carol,’ he said. ‘You’re getting an even flow to your lines.’ Arm outstretched, he drew a pattern in air. ‘Keeping that shoulder loose.’
The model with a scornful flamboyant gesture stripped off her dressing-gown and stepped to the middle of the sheet that Scott had spread across the floor. Facing Kit, with the expression of someone trying to make out something far off, the model arched her back and raised both arms in the air.
Kit’s first response was helpless: she blushed. Embarrassed most of all by the fear that one of them—Scott, or Miranda—would notice, she screwed up her eyes and frowned at the blank paper on her easel. Beside her, Treen was running a pencil over the paper with a polite half-smile. Scott, having seated himself on one of the chairs, was frowning at his fingernails.
The woman’s skin was bluish-pale; the undersides of her arms were mottled mauve. If she was cold—the hall held a dusty, underground smell—the consciousness of it did not reach her face. Her breasts were small, the nipples the colour of too-strong milk tea. Under her belly button, the skin sagged. From the belly, her hips splayed wide. The thighs, unmuscled, looked oddly soft; loose skin puckered over her knees. The hair on her legs, the frizzed hair under her arms and between her legs, was unshaven, dark. From the neckline up, the model’s skin was different: not so much tanned as everywhere marked with minute wrinkles, a sort of crazing that would not have shown except against the underwater-pale smooth skin beneath. The woman’s neck, her made-up face, belonged to a different body, not this one underneath. It was seeing them together that was humiliating, that made Kit feel as though she herself were exposed, stripped of any possible response. Whatever she could find to say to the model’s face, that naked under-flesh made false; but she could not look at the model’s body without feeling the model’s eyes on her, watching what it was she saw.
Scott had stood up. He was behind Miranda, looking impassively at her easel. Kit scratched the shape of a mouth onto the middle of her paper, and two backwards brackets that marked where indents ran from the sides of the mouth upwards. She went over the mouth: that strange shape, its upper lip pinched together while the lower lip drooped loose. With a single line, she marked the nose and one eyebrow.
Scott caught her wrist in one hand. ‘You’re thinking too much.’ Turning her hand over, he prised the pencil from her grasp. ‘Here, look. This is you.’ Bunching his shoulder up, wrinkling up his face, he jabbed his wrist back and forth over the paper. ‘You’re drawing with your knuckles. Now look…’ He took a step back. Standing at an angle to the canvas, with the pencil balanced between his thumb and his first two fingers, his arm looped up and down marking a loose figure on the paper. ‘From the shoulder. See? I’m relaxed, I’m feeling the line.’ With his arm still working, he called: ‘Do you see, Carol? You see the difference?’
He stepped back. ‘Treen’s got it. No, keep going, Treen. Everybody watching Treen for a minute. See? We’re not hunching our shoulde
r; we’re not worrying; our elbow’s loose.’
Kit had a frozen sense of them all: Carol watching with a set, tolerant smile, Miranda, with head tilted, wrinkling her forehead slightly—Kit guessed she was noticing Treen’s clothes. Only the model did not move her eyes but stood isolated, remote in her indifference.
Scott stepped into the middle of the circle, clapped his hands once. ‘Next pose.’
‘Oh!’ Treen stood with one hand across her mouth. ‘I’ve just…I forgot Mum’s medicine.’
‘For her heart?’ Carol stepped forward. ‘Call your father.’
Treen was already over by the chairs digging through her bag. She held the phone at arm’s length while she stabbed out the number. They stood watching in silence while the phone rang.
‘Dad! Yes, we’ve been held up…I know, I forgot to put it out. You have? Which one? Which? No, it’s alright. She’ll be fine. I’ll come. I’m on my way.’ She hung up and looked starkly at them. ‘He’s given her the wrong one.’
Carol hurried over to get her own phone out of her bag and stood holding it in her two hands.
‘Just a sleeping pill,’ said Treen. ‘She’ll need propping up, is all…’ She clutched her bag with two hands to her stomach.
‘Scott, I am sorry.’ She smiled ruefully at the model as she said this, and at Kit. Then, with a mechanical jerk she started for the door.
‘Your shopping!’ called Carol. ‘Miranda, take it to her!’
But it was Scott who picked up the shopping. Together, he and Kit pushed out after Treen into daylight. She was already shouldering up the road.
‘My God! Where’s she parked?’
‘It’s at the service place.’
They waited on the concrete while Treen sorted out payment. The wind, catching in the shopping bags, made a tearing sound. The men were still there. This time they had a red ute cranked over their heads. Throwing out a few words from time to time, they worked away at it: unhurried, at ease. At a shout from the receptionist one of them came across, took the keys from Treen, brought the car round and left it with the door open and the engine running, all without noticing them, without changing expression at all.
