Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 6, Issue 5

by Alex Miller

  She whispers to the silence:

  I am not here

  When she turns to leave her apartment Anna’s stomach churns in shallow horror. She marches to the kitchen and swings open the door, her breath quickening, her head loose on its fragile neck. The kitchen is spotless, the furniture without breath, the chicken a silent and covered corpse. The scene is set—arranged just as her husband, that absurd director, wants it. Like so.

  ( like so )

  She paces back to the living room, hoping to find a way out but her labour has been so thorough that any attempt to snatch at the outside is lost to her immaculate, polished reflection. This perfect conception. She could slink silently away, under the radar, and they will find this place years later, just as it is—this banal museum, this perfectly arranged Bell Jar. Her words still rebounding off the windows and walls:

  I am not here

  I am not here

  I am not here

  If H were to walk in right now she would murder him. She would brand his forehead, pull out his teeth, one by one, and use shearers on his hair before severing his limbs and dissolving them in the anxious acid of her guts. Her desire is as complete as his had been twenty-odd years ago.

  All the while, unknown to Anna, the outside presses its face against the double-glazed windows. A snarling silent beast, baring its teeth. She sits on the floor in the middle of the hot and clean room. The movement, the fleeting impurities of the outside are lost to this sterile and slippery surface she has meticulously crafted for her family. With her capable hands she has created and continues to maintain this prison, this space of pure goodness, a goodness that is clean and impenetrable—a surface so smooth that it is without grip, crack or fissure.

  She steps up to the window, pressing her forehead against it. She runs her finger around one of the brass locks. The weathered texture of her forefinger explores the sharp side of the lock’s underbelly before swiping quickly over it, slitting open the membrane of her skin. She spoils the perfectly polished window with a smear of blood before walking out the front door.

  The next day will present the same tumultuous routine as her body, obedient and disciplined, will perform the daily tasks without noticeable fanfare or pause. Suspended in the tumult... This brilliant, tight, generous act of motherhood:

  Wake. Tidy. Look out to the world. Pang! Pine! Get over it. Boil kettle. Close shutters. Make lunches. Prepare breakfast. Walk down steps carrying same ridiculous load. Avoid a lecture. Kiss H goodbye and tell him not to be late. Don’t look back after he walks his own particular way. Actually, it’s best if you don’t look back at all. Wait for tram. Make small talk. Board tram. Keep focused and wait for the nausea to come. Ride it through. Hold onto the rail if you have to. If you have to, rest your head on your son’s shoulder. It’ll be mistaken for an act of affection. Hug children and walk away. Steady now, steady. Walk through the busy street. Release yourself. Meander. Have your second coffee and get the shopping done. Quickly. Quickly. Quickly. Go home and prepare dinner. Feed Stray whether she still exists or not. Shower. Clean. Clean. Clean. Step out again because if you don’t you might suffocate in that place. Run afternoon errands. Literally. Run. Run. Run. Feel your pulse beat? Your blood pelt? Is that your lip quivering? And your voice cracking? Don’t-you-dare. don’t.you.dare. don’tyoudare. Do you hear me? Push through this moment, another will come. Now, get home in time to greet the children. Prepare some fruit on a platter, come on, hurry, any one will do. Slice it nicely and clean up the juice. It’s delicious but makes for a sticky mess.

  Be Calm. Remember to be gracious. Touch the fishmonger’s wife’s hand as she hands over the parcel of fresh fish. Because she saves the best for you. Help the young mother get the pram up the steps. Touch her sleeping baby’s face and comment on the fairness of her complexion. Pull a compliment out of the bag. Smile widely. Tilt your head to show sincerity. Tilt / Tilt / Tilt. All the while, tuck yourself in. Tuck in your legs, tuck in your arms. Tuck in your toes and keep those legs firmly closed. Look people in the eye but don’t stare. You are the thread that holds your family together. You are the thread. Keep it steady. Hold steady. Hold it, hold it. hold it. You are the thread that holds it all together. Now! Time to really get cracking and make the night lovely. Keep the ritual on its toes. Two of your kids are doing their homework (well done) and the little one is playing with his matchbox cars, on the carpet. No Anna, he won’t spill his milk, he’s beyond that now, No! You don’t have to remind him to be careful. He spends his whole little life trying his guts out to be careful—for you! They all spend their lives trying to be careful for you—but that’s what you don’t get. Do you? Do you? Well, go on, don’t sit there watching . watching . watching . empty . empty . empty . Get the table set! There are things to do. And this is just the beginning, isn’t it? By the end of the night you’re going to feel like a wrung out old piece of washcloth. But that’s just the way it is. This is your job. It’s not that hard a job really, is it? You have moments to yourself now, you have time to wander the street and fuck yourself. You sip coffee on the sidewalk and poke faces at little kids because all yours are at school. You can hardly complain, can you? Can you?

  But

  Somewhere, hidden in the layers of time and distance

  that slice through the days / A letter to Mother is written.

  It sits

  in the back of a dresser

  (among the most private things)

  of a woman, tucked between

  Mother, I need you so badly. There is this restlessness that reverberates through me and I want you to understand it. H is useless to me now. I don’t know what happens, but it does. Now I know why you stood like a brick wall in front of father. By the end you rebounded it all, didn’t you? You could absorb no more of him. That’s why they grow impotent. To pretend they still have the final word. To disguise the fact that we can take them in no more. That is why, one day we return. We long for the sea and to hear the crashing waves. We always did prefer the lapping. The certainty of the cycle. I need you here to feel me and see me and whisper to me so I know I exist. Isn’t that what we ultimately are to each other, the certainty of our existence?

  Mother I have a cunt and it bleeds and when it is not bleeding, it weeps. My whole body weeps from my cunt. You have a cunt too mother. I know you do. I heard you that time when you thought no one was home. I was not outside in your garden playing, that gorgeous cultivated garden of sun and shade and texture, I was inside in the room opposite yours and I heard you. I heard your cunt. The bedroom door was snibbed shut and you let out the short sharp bursts. They tore through me and they reverberate still. No one would have thought you had it in you. It was energy. I know. I know. Mother, we are polluted and it’s a delicious cocktail.

  You smoked too. From your cunt. I used to see you at the window sometimes when I was outside playing. You smoked men’s cigarettes and that’s why, over the years, your voice dropped. The inside pushed out. I remember the blue grey smoke, billowing from your mouth. You would not force it through your lips but let it meander in safe passage, cancering your mouth and tongue, oesophagus and lungs. From the inside out we die—spent bloom, beautiful rot.

  You know, sometimes I visit your grave and kiss the rough concrete of your headstone. I kiss it hard and scrape my full lips across its unpredictable surface, hoping to cut my flesh open and bleed. Why did we do this to each other? Why did you not let me in? Why did you make me a copy of your other self that was mute and silent and still? That side of you that was pure goodness. That impenetrable surface. Without cunt.

  At three o’clock Anna is ready for another coffee. She stops in her usual place where the boulevard opens up to a square that always reminds her of the piazzas of a northern Italian hilltop city. There are bougainvilleas, creeping up the walls in their magenta splendour. The canopy of plane trees that frame the square reach only so far and one cannot walk from one side of the square to the other without feeling the scorch of the sun. She
sits down at a table and orders her macchiato. A man’s coffee, her father would have said.

  In the days of her youth, Anna had always carried around her notebook. Supple notebooks, without lines. In the flighty days of adolescence, she refused to submit her thoughts to sensible, straight lines. She nurtured her passion privately, writing the inside out and the outside in. But all that changed when she met H and found a new focus. Claiming an identity of diversions. She is not sure when she finally stopped carrying around a notebook, nor could she remember where they had all gone. There were heaps of them. Perhaps they had been thrown out by one of her siblings when they gutted the family home of its memories. Or it was possible that they still remained in one of the unopened boxes she has yet to go through. A lonely box, quiet, silent, still, collapsing into its lean, bursting full of teenage angst and innocent reckonings with the world.

  Feeling the bitter thickness of the coffee on the back of her throat, she thinks of the story she had written for her mother. Upon her death she found the story as she emptied the top drawer of her mother’s bedside table. When her eyes met the first page all she could see was the careless typo in the first line: ‘The last highway is dead strait’. Straight! Like a straight line, Anna! Ugh. The abject horror of the error! It made her want to wretch. Straight! Surely that was a Grade Two word… she thought as she burnt the story that night and scattered the ashes on the top of the compost pile so they may be finally put to some use.

  Of course, she had forgotten that it was not a typo at all. Forgotten the night terrors and day dreaming that had propelled the word ‘strait’ to spill from thought to pen to page.

  But anyway, here she is now, sipping macchiato while trying to distract a cheeky toddler so his young mother can enjoy a moment’s peace. She’ll tuck that abject typo away, be kind to herself and try to forget what she had forgotten to remember, please—place that thought in the cupboard with her carefully ironed linen, whip it into the cupcake mixture. She’ll blend it so well into the folds of her existence that it will be part of some chemical reaction unable to be recognised again as its own.

  Soon the toddler loses interest in what he suddenly considers a strange woman who is not his mother. She folds back into herself, looking around at the colour, the movement. Watching, watching, watching. A body of a woman, taking it all in and then losing it a moment later. Her bandaged forefinger, gently throbbing in its melancholy rhythm against the solid surface of the glass.

  She looks up, following the bougainvillea splendour, the way it creeps, higher and higher, broader and broader, year after year. As everything creeps. The path of least resistance to the sun. It is a simple equation. Beauty. More than just a climax of brilliance. The magenta brackets coming and then going, loosening and falling in their graceful decay that litters the red-bricked square, always in gradual return. The respect of the cycle. Science is so much more than science and science is rich and rounded. Anna takes the last of her coffee in one hit, leaving one side of the glass covered in froth skimmed with a rich brown. She pours herself a tall glass of water. She is calmer than before and glad that the wind is up just enough to bring some relief.

  From one of the city’s laneways, a woman emerges from the churning crowd with her double length trolley snaking behind her, full of a dozen pink and grey sanitary bins, neatly stacked and secured by a thick strap. It rattles and shakes as it crosses the curb that separates the smooth sidewalk from the bumpy red-brick square. The wheels of the trolley are small and hard and inappropriate for such a surface. Anna wonders why the woman is attempting to cart the trolley across the square and can see that she is going to get stuck halfway across. A double trolley load of sanitary bins on a sea of awkward red bricks. A nightmare. Nonetheless, the woman, dressed in her neatly pressed lady rose uniform of pink polo shirt and khaki slacks, continues her journey. She stops continually to refasten the strap around her load, the uneven bricks only loosening it again as soon as she resumes her journey.

  Anna takes a sip of the cool water. This is a time when she would have liked to write the humour of this in her notebook. With a name like lady rose—its lower case lending itself to a whisper—it has to belong to a funeral parlour or a tampon factory.

  Despite the woman’s attention to her uniform, she has frizzy hair and a fat face that is hot pink. Her embarrassment has grown into frustration and she looks messy. She stops her trolley and fastens the load once more. To turn back now would give her the same grief as carrying on. Anna turns around and faces the other way. She takes another sip of her water. As she raises the glass to her mouth she submerges her top lip in the shallow pool of water, this cool pleasure afforded by the angle in which she holds the glass. She tilts it a little more and allows a generous splash of water to fall down her chin, onto her chest, encouraging it to drip between her breasts. The coolness is lovely. Behind her, about where the lady rose woman must be, there is a dreadful commotion. It’s the precise sound of two dozen sanitary bins losing order and balance. Without looking back around, Anna sees the images. The cotton mice, pink and brown and pads of white, stained by the violent sash of red, decomposing in their bed of chemical acid. A delta of blood and chemical begins to trickle across the square. All around, people focus in and respond to the disturbance. Some laugh but most have no idea how to react. The decomposing—putrid abject in plain view. A fat man with a long beard stands there in awe and lets out a loud ‘Good God’ for all to hear. A mother, wrestling with dignity, pulls her child away as it makes a game of jumping between the pink streams. The waitress freezes in horror, the coffee she is carrying falls and smashes against the ground, a pond of glistening shards decorating the bricks. Anna does not need to turn around to see the full horror of the scene. She imagines the blood and chemicals spoiling the fat-faced woman’s meticulously maintained lady rose uniform. She will be considered a disgrace to the company with her lack of discretion and poise. Her failure to control what must be controlled. Her ability to turn up on time and do the job without complaint will mean nothing against a scene of such violence. The lady rose gangsters will simply find someone else to wheel the trolley and replace the bins. Anna leaves enough change on the table for her coffee and a small tip and walks away without looking back. Her greatest fear during each of her pregnancies had been that she would endure a miscarriage on the street.

  After dropping off her husband’s shoes at the cobbler, she turns to walk the long way home through the Botanical Gardens. She wants fruit. The mangoes are plump and in their peak of ripeness and stacked in a splendid geometry at the fruit stall. Their blush is deep and Anna holds one to her nose, the way her mother had always done, to take in its perfume. She chooses some mangoes for the children and one for herself. But the loveliness of the moment is lost to the exchange with the stallholder. It is nothing more or less than awkward. He grips her hand loosely, thinking that she is going to drop the money. As he does this she notices the clamminess of his hand, cool and sweaty, and it makes her instantly retract, and the money falls to the ground. She scuttles around awkwardly, picking up the coins, apologising uncomfortably. He offers no assistance, standing firmly behind his stall. When she looks up she is locked into the wetness of his gaze. Arrested in the stare, she notices that his eyes are identical to her own. Crisp and blue, with a ring of ice circling the pupil. Snatching the sack from his hand, she hurries down the crowded laneway in the directions of the gardens.

  The gardens are spread over several acres, framed by the original stonewall, erected over 150 years ago. Cracked in places, some of its edges are giving way to crumble. It is in such decay that it’s precious. The gardens have an instantly cooling and peaceful effect. It is more than just the proximity of water, the spongy thickness of the grass and the dense shade of a thousand plants, engaged in constant battle for the sun. Stepping from the gravel track, Anna takes off her sandals, shifting her balance from one foot to the other, looping the straps through her right index finger. In the other hand she holds the bag of
fruit and her handbag is neatly positioned over her shoulder, its bulk tucked under her arm. The grass stretches for several meters on either side of the gravel path that snakes its crooked journey through the crafted wonderland. Trees are spaced here and there—old trees and new trees, exotic, rare, and native. Their canopy arching over the herbaceous borders—rich in a collage of foliage and flower and seed.

  In this moment she is just a woman in the park. She sits on the grass, fanning her dress around her so she can feel the cool richness of the grass against her skin. A woman with arms and legs, mouth and cunt. The bed of soft blades leaves its forgettable impression of pink streaks on her moon skin. The park seems still and peaceful but when she lies back and closes her eyes the undercurrent of life and movement invades her senses. She loses her pivot, gravity loosens, stability falters. Birds, in their song—a symphony of sweetness and mania, some of it delightful and some of it frantic. The soft grass begins to niggle and then itch, the individual cells of her skin are at work, alive and squirming, reacting to each blade. The perfume of the flowers, at first gentle, creeps into nausea. Settling potent and putrid in her stomach. The thick canopy and the luscious foliage is nothing but oppressive in its summer fullness. It is so rich in its intensity and sweetness that her body, overrun with emotion, grips it with anxiety.