‘I want Mummy to see my hurt.’
DB pressed his lips into his child’s hair. He smelt of sweat and sand and the chocolate they’d used to bribe away his tears.
‘And my nappy,’ Rudy added. ‘I want Mummy to change it.’
DB held the kiss a little longer, savouring the jumble of scents, then pulled away.
‘Fair call. Let’s go in and see Mummy.’
9
Evangelia
Evangelia hadn’t been nervous until the moment she shifted the car into park in the TAFE parking lot. Then, as the engine cooled, a barrage of previously unconsidered worries came bursting to the surface: what if they had to read each other’s work? What if everyone else was better? What if the general consensus was that she was wasting her time trying to tell this unremarkable story? And, above all, what if Lydia somehow found out? It wasn’t that Lydia would disagree, but more that she might laugh, and this was far worse. It was a habit she’d picked up from their father, a deep dismissive laugh at things that seemed pointless or petty. The laugh that had echoed about the rafters as their mother wrung her hands in worry at Lydia’s refusal to stay inside for the forty days before the sarantismos following the birth of her babies, when she’d taken them out into the world, vulnerable to the ever-lurking mati. When she’d clamoured to stop Lydia pouring down the sink the blessed water saved from their christenings. When Evangelia had announced her intention to marry Peter. It was a laugh that said so clearly – what you are doing is foolish. It had been there in the previous weeks, thundering down the line when Evangelia had expressed her reservations about celebrating Easter while still in mourning. For god’s sake, Eva, it’s not like we’re even going to church. We’ll have a barbecue and load the kids with chocolate and no one will burn for their sins.
The worry worsened when Evangelia found her way to the classroom and sat at the table farthest from the front. They were set up in a U-shape and she hated this because she couldn’t hide. She pulled the brand-new pencil case from her bag and the leather-bound journal too, and felt instantly embarrassed at her choice. Everyone else was pulling out laptops or setting up their iPads with little detachable keyboards. In comparison, her journal, which had looked so writerly in the shop, now seemed closer to a dream journal or something equally juvenile. Evangelia slipped the journal off the table, discreetly ripped a chunk of pages from its binding then shoved the rest of it back in her bag. She took a biro from the pencil case and hid this away too. She might look like she’d shoplifted her stationary but at least she didn’t look like a loser. She understood now Nick and Xanthe’s obsession with having the right pencils and book contact and shoes and all the other bits and pieces they hefted to school each day. They – like she – were terrified of being judged by their peers. In this instance, her peers seemed to consist of a couple of older women in cardigans and an intense-looking young man, but still. Judgement was judgement, no matter who it came from.
An older man dressed in knee-high socks and sandals drifted in, and then a woman with a neat grey bob with a striking dark fringe entered, taking the focal position up front. She pulled some papers from her satchel, slipped the glasses that had been resting in the bob down onto her nose, scanned the papers, then repositioned the glasses in her hair. She stood back, placing her hands on the black tunic hiding her hips, then surveyed the room.
‘Is this everyone?’
Evangelia glanced about the room. How were they to know? The woman counted the participants, checked her list again (glasses down, glasses up) then counted once more. Five each time.
‘Righto.’
The woman looked disappointed.
‘Let’s get started then. My name is Carole Swansea and I’ll be your tutor for the course. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, the people of the Kulin nation, and pay my respects to any elders past, present or emerging. A bit about me. My books include Bush of the Bush and my recent release, Out of Focus, and in my other life I lecture in feminist literature and critique, with a particular focus on biography and historical non-fiction that helps rewrite the dominant gendered narrative. This is my first time teaching a technical writing course but I’m sure we’ll all muddle along together just brilliantly.’
Muddle along? Evangelia pursed her lips. She hadn’t paid all that money to muddle along. Also, she’d never heard of this woman so clearly her books mustn’t be that flash. This was a terrible mistake. She could already hear Lydia laughing at her, holding her hands to her chest as if to stop her heart from tumbling out. Carole was now perched on the end of her table like the teacher in one of those movies where they send a hip young grad to a tough inner-city school ruled by feisty urban kids brimming with hidden talent, except she was not, and neither were they.
‘So why don’t we go around the room and you can all tell me a bit about yourself. Who you are, why you’re here?’
They were Gwen and Sita, both from Zonta and presently retired, who were working on a biography of the first woman elected to their local council, and they were incredibly pleased to meet Carole because they loved her work and found it utterly inspiring even though it was a pity she kept getting cut from the telly and perhaps one day she might like to speak at one of their morning teas? They were Damien who had recently finished high school and was taking some time to work out what he wanted from life, but he thought it might be being a biographer because he had read a really good Dylan biography and his mum had got him this class as a present but he didn’t have anything much he was working on at the moment because he mostly wrote free verse poetry like Dylan and he could share that if they wanted? And they were Terry, who had amassed a considerable bottom drawer of World War II biography since his early retirement but hadn’t had much luck getting it published, so perhaps this was something Carole could help him with? Carole had steepled her fingers at this, then asked him if any of the people he wrote about were women, what with this being a women’s biography class and all? Terry had nodded his head at this as if he were only hearing eighty per cent of it, then applied considerable thought as he stroked his goatee.
‘There’ll definitely be one,’ he said brightly, problem seemingly resolved.
Finally it was Evangelia’s turn to introduce herself, and she did so with both her fight and flight responses jostling for supremacy.
‘My name is Evangelia and I’m here to test the waters, I guess. I’m working on my mum’s story but I’m not sure if I’ll keep writing it or not. So we’ll see, you know. Anyway, that’s me.’
‘Righto,’ Carole said, eventually, and she looked about the room with something very close to disappointment.
She reached for her piece of paper again (glasses down, glasses up) and consulted it. She seemed at a loss for a moment before she steepled her hands together once more and brought them to her lips.
‘Let’s start with the beginning.’
The beginning, it seemed, was very literally the beginning of time as Carole began a potted history of the purposeful exclusion of women from the narrative arc of antiquity. Evangelia scribbled notes on her paper scraps, trying to catch the jumble of new phrases Carole expounded.
Binary norms – Cartesian dualism – gendered division of labour – public/private spheres – personal as political – the exclusion of the academe – control of the narrative – Oedipal paradigms (Was that what she’d said? Disgusting . . . )
Nearby, Gwen and Sita were nodding vigorously, typing each thought bubble into their iPads in the same determined index-finger jabbing motions that Peter adopted when typing. Eventually Carole paused for breath and rested back on the edge of the desk.
‘So I guess that’s why we’re here. Questions?’
Terry raised a finger to attract her attention.
‘So you’re saying there’s not much history written about women because no one thought to write it?’
Carole gave a more-or-less gesture.
‘Remarkable!’ Terry slapped the tabletop. ‘Well, I’m definitely the man to fix that. So you’re telling me that if I go out and find a woman who hasn’t had her dues and write it all up into a nice little story my chances of getting published are higher?’
Carole’s nostrils flared but she maintained her composure.
‘That may very well be the case.’
Terry slapped the table once more and Evangelia decided she would avoid sitting near Terry in future.
‘This course is already paying for itself,’ he crowed, scribbling into his notebook.
The next thing they did was an exercise where Carole asked them to define what ‘biography’ was.
‘Let’s start by saying what it isn’t,’ she suggested.
Gwen immediately stuck up her hand. ‘Biography is not fiction.’
Sita jumped in with, ‘Biography is not irrefutable.’
Terry slapped the table.
‘Biography is not memory.’
Carole nodded, surprised. Terry was on a roll.
‘Biography is not lies. Biography is not apolitical. Biography is not propaganda.’
‘Biography is not confined by space and time,’ Damien offered. ‘Biography is not a swimming pool.’
‘Okay, we’re getting a little esoteric,’ Carole held up her hands. ‘Let’s bring it back to reality a bit. Evangelia?’
‘Biography is not autobiography?’
Evangelia surprised herself with this answer, the stuttered result of intense panicking. But the more she thought about it, the more she saw it made sense.
‘Tell me more,’ Carole prompted.
‘Like, even though I might be the one telling the story and I might even be a part of it, it isn’t about me.’
‘Fabulous point and one that many biographers forget,’ Carole said. ‘So often the work says more about the biographer than it does about the subject.’
She reached for her sheet of paper. Evangelia thought about this for a moment then raised her hand again.
‘Only, sometimes it is about you. It’s about how you interpret things. Like, even if you’re writing something that isn’t based on your own memories, you still have to decide how you want to write it. So maybe it’s the opposite?’
‘That’s a really interesting point,’ Carole said. ‘And something I want each of you to think about before next week. Where do you stop and truth begins – and does this place even exist?’
Carole checked her watch. ‘So for the rest of the course we’re going to divide up our time like this: for the first half of the class we will be looking over examples of women’s biography and discussing the themes, successes and failures, and then the other half we’ll be workshopping your own material. It can be something you’ve already written or something you work on across the course. No more than a thousand words at this point. You’ve got my email address so please send something through to me by the start of each week so I can circulate it to the group before we next meet. Questions?’
Terry’s hand shot up.
‘Not related to getting published?’
Terry’s hand shot down.
‘Great. I’ll see you all next week then.’
Evangelia took her time packing up. She wanted to ask Carole about what she’d said – if you ever could remove yourself from what you were writing, and if this wasn’t possible, what did that mean for how stories were told? But Carole slid her papers into her satchel and was out of the door before Evangelia got a chance.
*
Peter had needed to stay late at the shop that night, so Lydia’s son Andreas had caught the bus with Nick and Xanthe up Spring Street to drop them there before he headed home. It wasn’t an arrangement Evangelia was entirely happy with – Lydia never forgot a favour owing – but she felt more comfortable knowing they had someone with them as they passed the local high schools and mosque. They were sitting at one of the lacquered tables doing their homework when Evangelia arrived, a huge half-eaten plate of chips between them.
‘Please tell me there was salad on that plate and that you ate it all,’ she sighed.
‘We could tell you that if you want,’ Xanthe said.
Evangelia pushed through the plastic curtain into the little office at the back. Peter was hunched over the desk, moving papers about and flicking coins first into his palm and then into sealable bags. He looked exhausted.
‘That class of yours better be worth it,’ he grunted, then started recounting a pile.
He was always snappy after a long day at work, something he had previously blamed on his blood sugar and more recently on his mystery affliction.
‘Nice to see you too,’ Evangelia replied shortly.
He was the only one allowed to be tired and this irritated her. As if it wasn’t work getting the children to school and double-checking the orders to the suppliers and reviewing the invoices and taking the aprons to be laundered and all the other things she did so that they didn’t have to pay someone else to do it. She thought of her mother and the decades she’d put into managing the never-ending parade of domestic need, and Evangelia was instantly annoyed. If she’d not had to do all those things, then maybe Evangelia would have something to write about. Maybe she’d have been the first female councillor or have done something heroic in war. But instead she’d been stuck at home mending their clothing and making the food stretch between pay cheques and hiding from the Waltons man whenever he came knocking for payments.
Evangelia watched her husband, oblivious and distracted. They’d forgotten Mothers’ Day – Peter and the kids – and Lydia had been busy speaking at a rally for the boat people or whatever it was, so the day had passed unnoticed. Lydia had invited them all to the rally to see her speak, but Evangelia had declined. The last time, Lydia had gone off on a rant about how their father had arrived in the country with nothing and had worked hard for everything he had, and people had clapped and cheered and told Lydia how articulate she was. So while Lydia had spent the afternoon standing in the tray of a ute with a megaphone in her hand, Evangelia had sat crying in the bath, trapping a bath bomb underwater and watching it dissolve in her fist.
‘Have the kids eaten?’ she asked.
‘They had chips.’
‘Chips?’
‘Yes, chips. You know what chips are. They had chips because they were hungry. There wasn’t anything else.’
‘Nothing else? This is a food store. You couldn’t make them some salad? Even a bloody gyros or something? Just chips? Like we’re one of those families on Today Tonight with the malnourished children?’
Peter thumped the handful of coins he was counting back on the table. Evangelia thought of Terry and her irritation ratcheted up a few notches.
‘Yes, just chips. I need to get this stuff finished before the weekend. What do you want me to do? Send them out on the street by themselves to find something? It’s dark out there.’
‘I know it’s dark out there,’ Evangelia snapped. ‘You know when it wasn’t dark? Before. Before it wasn’t dark. Before there was lots of light and they could have gone to the hot chicken store and got some chicken and salad. Heaven forbid those children should actually eat salad every once in a while.’
The hot chicken store was Peter’s closest rival and she knew this would rile him.
‘You think I would let my children eat chicken from that malaka? You know how much steroids are in his meat? You think I want them looking like some kind of East German swimmer? Don’t even mention that name to me. Hot chicken store! My god!’
He let out an outraged cry and threw his arms in the air, receipts fluttering from the desk in a graceful arc. Sometimes – often – when they were fighting, Evangelia had the ability to drift away from her body and look down on the profound inanity of the things they were saying. They fought a
bout stupid things – this did not escape her at all. The problem was, they had been arguing for so long that it seemed natural, and they were both so enthusiastic about it. She drifted back into herself.
‘Anyway, fine. I’m gonna take the kids home. You need anything?’ Like chicken? she thought, but she didn’t say this because they were done fighting for the time being. Peter drew his arms open in a sign of conciliation and for a moment he looked like a hefty Christ seated before the money lenders.
‘Nah, I’m fine thanks, babe. This work, eh? It’ll be the end of me. I reckon we’re gonna have to take on a new staff member. They’re killing us at the lunch rush.’
She bit her tongue. She had been saying this for months now, every time Peter complained about how busy things were. But he always had some reason why this wasn’t feasible, often connected to money and usually connected to his not wanting to part with it. But she couldn’t complain, because it was his inability to part with his earnings that had put them in the position to send the kids to the fancy private school and keep them in a way of life vaguely proportional to Lydia’s. And it could be worse – Peter’s sister had insisted on sending her son to a public school and he now worked in an art gallery, so god knew they were doing the right thing by their children. Besides, his relatives in Greece had been struggling for years now, what with the pension cuts and high unemployment, and despite this still managed to give to the steady stream of refugees washing up on their shores. They sent them money, Peter and Evangelia, every month for the last few years, and she knew that some of this went straight into helping those poor people, so she couldn’t complain about the state of their finances or Peter’s reluctance to part with it.
‘That sounds like a great idea, Petro.’
‘Thanks, babe.’
‘We’ll see you later tonight, okay? Don’t stay too late.’
*
Once the children were in bed Evangelia sat down to write. She was tired but her brain was awake, stirred by the evening’s class. But when she brought her hands to the keyboard she watched them hover uncertainly above it. She thought of her mother, the familiar stabbing in her chest like someone had thrust a knife into it. Her mother had never wanted much, not that Evangelia was aware of anyway. She’d never wanted a big life and all her wants seemed to be reserved for her family. For them to be healthy, successful, educated. For herself, the wants seemed so minimal. The shops and church were within walking distance from her home, as was Evangelia’s house. And Lydia was a short bus trip away. Nothing else seemed necessary. Evangelia had always just assumed – what? Her happiness? That she hadn’t expected more of her life? Of course she probably had – everyone did. But she’d never made any representation of this to the living, not to anyone Evangelia knew. Her mother was an open book with remarkably few pages. There had been no surprises when selling the house. No grand discoveries hidden in the bottom of drawers. Not a single item in the entire place that wasn’t familiar and homely and unbearable to pack into new boxes destined for op shop shelves. She knew other people who had dug a little deeper and found things: a father who had been part of the guerrilla resistance during independence and planted bombs in British buildings; a grandmother who had hidden Allied soldiers in the woodshed while the Germans bombed the Dodecanese; an uncle who had jumped ship on Mussolini and fled across the Alps to a new life. But the only things in her mother’s closet were the same battered black coat she had been wearing for decades and the same orthopaedic sandals she’d buckled up rain, hail and shine. These were now stored in Evangelia’s own wardrobe like faded ghosts, waiting to fill her eyes with shocked tears each time she went searching for a blouse or jacket because it really was true that her mother was gone and these were the last things she had that smelt of her. It had been like this in church too, each time they’d gone. Not so much the funeral when everyone’s perfume drowned everyone else’s out, but at the viewing, the nine days, the three months – each time she would breathe in the smell of the church’s elderly, their soapy stale milk scent as they whispered the cross to themselves, and this would hurt too. But what was remarkable in that?
The Book of Ordinary People Page 12
