by Gary Crew
‘Something like that.’
He gave me a funny look. ‘Like you did with your mum?’
‘My mum?’ I said. ‘What’s my mum got to do with this?’
Rory laughed. ‘You waited on her hand and foot. She should have been in hospital.’
I said nothing. Rory took the hint.
‘So Lootie’s had a bad experience, hey?’ He fiddled with the sugar cubes.
‘You might say that. She says she’s had it with kids.’
‘Yeah, I couldn’t do it,’ he said. ‘What school was she at?’
‘St Xavier’s. Teaching boys.’
‘No kidding? My mum’s a cleaner at St Xavier’s. Good school, she reckons.’
‘Lootie thought so too, for a while. Then she kind of lost the plot.’
‘Yeah?’
‘She invited a writer to her class. She says the boys were rude to him. It went downhill from there.’
‘Get out!’ Rory said, very loud. People turned to look. ‘My mother told me. Chandelier his name was, hey?’
‘Chanteleer,’ I said. ‘And keep your voice down.’
Rory glanced around. He leaned across the table, calling me towards him with his finger. ‘So that was your girlfriend’s class?’ he whispered.
‘I guess.’
He threw his head back. ‘Shit!’ he yelled at the ceiling.
People were staring. I reached out and pulled him towards me by his collar. ‘Shut up, okay? This is between me and Lootie.’ I let him go with a push. He was getting on my goat: first my mother, then my girlfriend.
‘Sorry, Monkey Boy,’ he said, wriggling. ‘Sorry. Honest.’ He started to fiddle with the sugar again, checking to see if people were still watching. ‘But you’re wrong.’
‘Why?’ I wanted to know.
Rory fiddled with the sugar. ‘It’s not what you said.’
‘What?’
‘It’s not between you and Lootie.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I reached over and took the sugar away. He started spinning a plastic spoon. ‘It’s between you, Lootie and Chandelier,’ he said.
I picked up my books. ‘You’re crazy,’ I said.
Rory grabbed my arm. ‘No, Monkey Boy,’ he said. ‘Listen to me.’
I sat.
‘Lootie might have told you that she was shitty with the boys,’ he said ‘but I don’t reckon she told you what really happened, eh?’
I shrugged.
‘Right,’ he said, leaning over. ‘I need to make sure that I’ve got the facts. I wouldn’t want to hurt anybody, okay?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘So your Lootie—her real name’s Alice, right?’
I nodded.
‘She’s the cute little blonde. Right?’
I nodded again.
‘Then I have got the right one. Okay…’
He folded his hands on the table, maybe to stop them straying, fiddling with things. He lowered his eyes. ‘This was last week. Monday afternoon, I reckon. My mother came home and told me this story.’
‘I thought you lived alone,’ I said.
He didn’t bite. ‘About 2 p.m.,’ he said, ‘my mother was in the staff room cleaning up after lunch. This girl comes in and says she’s looking for somewhere to wait while the author she’s brought to the school gives a talk. So Mum says “Take a load off,” and they talk. Mum says this girl was nice.
‘The shit really falls just after 3.00. There’s a few teachers come into the staff room when this Chandelier comes barging in. He’s abusing your Lootie and telling her that her class is rude and kids are shits and she should have more discipline and Lootie is crying and saying she’s sorry. Then this prick turns to my mum who’s just standing there and he says, “Make me a coffee.” Mum gave him the finger—you know what I mean—but the girl that she’d been talking to gets up and puts the urn on and tries to calm things down. So they get their coffee and the writer says it’s instant, it’s rubbish, and the three of them get up and go to the pub.
‘Mum said it was pretty bad, him abusing your Lootie—and her class—what with teachers there too. And him a visitor. And her a student teacher.’
In all of the years that I had known him, I had never been convinced that Rory was sincere. That he was actually on my side. He was the one who reckoned my mother was a man. He was the one who told me that my cricket bat was a fake. And he still called me Monkey Boy. So I said, ‘Thanks Rory. I’ll see you later,’ and I left.
That night when I got home Lootie was lying on the sofa. Prac teaching was finished. Maybe she had been to uni, maybe she hadn’t. I didn’t feel like engaging so I said, ‘There’s a TV dinner in the fridge.’ I found a bottle of red and went to sit under my elm.
I couldn’t get the fact that Rory still called me Monkey Boy out of my head. I was thinking about this and what a loser I was when the ladder came back, lighting up the allotment over the road. This time (though I admit I was probably pissed) I was pretty sure that it was free-standing, a ladder with two uprights and nine rungs. It did not rise out of the ground, but stood upon the ground, free of any supports. The uprights were alive with flame. Not all-enveloping tongues of flame, but smaller flames of red and yellow, each lapping the one above. So the ladder was alive. The rungs were also burning, but more like rods of heat than flames. More like filaments of heat. Solid fiery red, as if heated from inside.
Though this ladder was unsupported, it stood firm. This was because the longest rungs were at the bottom, near the glowing earth, the smaller at the top, where the uprights tapered in. On the top rung there perched a dark object. The shape and size of a black bird, perhaps the crow seen in the elm in our garden. But it wasn’t a bird exactly, although it perched like a bird. As if it was waiting. As if it was looking down, searching for prey.
Far below, Charlie Bloome attempted to scale this ladder, trying to climb those fiery rungs, but he could not.
He was dressed as a monkey, the sort seen dancing and doing tricks for an organ grinder, the sort dressed in silk pantaloons of red and white stripes with a yellow smock and a red neck tie and a blue beret.
Try as he might to get on that first rung, the lowest, Monkey Boy Charlie could not. He could not get one soft-soled foot on the rung because of the heat, let alone get a handhold, three or four rungs up.
Each time he put a timid foot on the bottom rung, he was burnt, and he leapt back, whimpering and trying to put that foot in his mouth to suck it and cool it which meant that he was dancing around on one foot with the other in his mouth. He looked ridiculous, which made the black object at the top cackle (the crow, the predator) because Monkey Boy was making a fool of himself.
So eventually, Charlie Bloome learnt not to be so silly. He sat on the ground and, wrapping his arms around his knees, he looked up at the crow and yelled, ‘Who are you?’
Apparently the bird found this question impertinent. It wrapped its black wings about its head, like a cloak, and turned away, averting its beak, showing that it was ignoring this fool who was so eager to get its attention, or worse, climb up.
Pissed out of my brain, I staggered inside to find the living room empty.
10
I thought about Lootie as I pedalled for XPress. The more she worried about school and the closer she came to Chanteleer, the more I worried, which took me back to how we met, Lootie and me, and my mum, and her part in our meeting, and what I learnt from those days.
My mother was very low at that time and (as Rory said) I waited on her hand and foot. I sat with her for months. This began in my second semester at university. I caught the tram to lectures but because of Mum’s trouble, I never lingered. I found what I wanted in the library and caught the tram home.
‘I’m all right,’ Mum would say. ‘You needn’t hurry home on my account.’
True or false, her cough ruined her client base, cost us her income (except the pension, which was nothing) and drove me to work. To lycra shorts, pushbike pedalling and the
whole mind-numbing, ball-busting business of XPress courier delivery. I worked Mondays and Fridays and have kept at it ever since. Being a big man, and prone to carrying extra weight, it’s good that I exercise, even though I hate it. Pedalling a pushbike is not the work of an intellectual.
At home, sitting by Mum’s bed, my uni books on the floor beside me, I tried to read. I tried to study. ‘I hate to cause you trouble,’ she would say. ‘I hate to be a burden.’ My real work (my assignments) was reserved for when Mum slept. If she slept.
She would sometimes ask me to fetch her something, as I have said. Something that she would never wear herself, which she had ordered for a client, a ‘society lady’. Something for her to hold up to the light. To wonder at.
Other than uni, I rarely went out except to buy food, which is how I met Lootie.
With Mum in bed, or sitting in the sun in a wicker chair on our little closed-in patio at the front of the house, as she sometimes did, I taught myself to cook. I was never much good, having had no real role model, but I had a go, out of necessity. Basic things like sausages and mashed potato, rissoles and mashed potato, steak and mashed potato. And beans. ‘You need your greens,’ I would tell her.
As I gained confidence (and out of sheer boredom), I graduated to using a Domestic Science recipe book that I found in the cupboard under our kitchen sink, learning the miracle of converting offal into something half-way edible.
When she had bad days, I fed Mum by hand. First I cut her food up, then I fluffed her pillows and put a tea towel under her chin. I fed her with a spoon, or my fingers, wiping the juice (or sauce, or soup) off her dribbly lips. Occasionally she would say, ‘That’s nice,’ but I never knew whether she meant my feeding her or the food itself. So I never came to expect compliments, not where my cooking was concerned.
(I hesitate to admit, since it is probably painfully clear, even glaringly obvious, that Lootie never complimented me either. On anything. And try as I might, I can’t lay responsibility for that at Chanteleer’s feet. Which is a source of wonder, or a statement about love, depending.)
Nevertheless, feeling duty bound, I had taken to going to the Victoria Markets on Saturday mornings to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, sometimes meat, even fish. When I could, I bought enough for a week, carting everything home on the tram.
But after all these years, now that I can, I am also duty bound to tell the truth (which I am trying to do), admitting I looked forward to going to the markets as an escape from sitting by Mum’s bedside. I was not proud of abandoning her, though I came to rationalise my going by claiming that I was buying food (‘It’s Saturday, Mum. I have to get the groceries’), which was true (in a manner of speaking). But there was another reason. Reasons, actually. In no particular order, these were my need for people (kept at a distance, I admit) and space to wander, to dream.
I don’t know when the Victoria Markets were built (maybe they simply evolved) but they were old. They sprawled over a number of city blocks—encompassing several minor streets that crisscrossed within the complex—a thing they would not have been able to do had they been built today. Not with the price of real estate. The markets were huge, pavilion after pavilion of airy sheds made of no more than a post at each corner and a basic raked roof, its metal beams exposed. The floor was concrete. There were no walls. The elements entered freely. In winter the place was freezing, in summer boiling.
I caught the tram first thing, had a coffee and a doughnut (an extravagance), then entered the markets. Each week I chose a different entrance, either Peel Street or Victoria Street or Queen Street. This stimulated my adventure by ensuring that every visit was different. Having gone in, I followed a different path, passed by different stalls selling different things, albeit with the reassurance of being safe under the same roof, and in the same place. Different, but the same.
The markets appealed to the senses. I was excited by food from every nation. I didn’t buy anything rash or exotic, because Mum was so conservative and my own palate had been trained that way, but I enjoyed the adventure of looking, of smelling, of touching, of tasting—just a sample. But I did buy fruit: oranges, apples, bananas and stone fruits in season and I took some risks, branching into mangoes, custard apples and once or twice the golden persimmon. Mum didn’t like strawberries, saying they were too expensive and no matter how red, they could still be tart.
I investigated imported teas and exotic coffees. I would bend and smell them, loving how they caught my nostrils, but I didn’t buy them. I also enjoyed looking at the biscuits. Mum had always made Anzacs and peanut biscuits (much to Rory’s delight) but since she fell sick, she had stopped. I spent ages cruising the fancy-lidded tins (Joshua Reynolds girls, collie dogs and tumbling cornucopia of fruit), wondering what was inside, or if the contents were stale. Once or twice I bought some (quite often, in fact, because I liked them too) and Mum’s face lit up when I opened them: Monte Carlos, cinnamon slice and ginger bites. Then she would have tea with two sugars, a biscuit in one hand, a shaky cup in the other.
I liked choosing between these bright things. I was happy to buy them and take them home. Like those artificial cherries, they made Mum happy.
I also went to the markets for the people. Sitting at home minding my mother, leaving university on cue, and working the solitary shifts for XPress, meant that I couldn’t afford to be gregarious. This is not to say that I was naturally antisocial. The pressure and pace of my life—as dictated by the needs of my mother—meant that I was denied company. I couldn’t afford the time to talk to people, nor could I take the risk that they would ask me out, or worse, ask to come home with me. Not with my mother hacking away in her bedroom, and her demands.
So Victoria Markets, being crowded, allowed me to meet people—to look but not touch. I could stand as close as I wanted to a pretty girl and she would be none the wiser. I could smell her perfume, hear her voice, watch her wrists and elegant fingers as she handed over change right there beside me. I could stand directly behind her and see the down on the back of her neck. She need never know, nor guess. I would take these memories with me and recall them in private. That is how I created company. My companions were the intimates of my imagination. This was neither perverted nor disgusting. It was necessary. Those who have not lived in servile isolation could never understand.
The morning I met Lootie I was wandering through the markets in my usual drifty state—looking for something, I imagine, though I can’t remember what—when I was suddenly conscious of a slight blonde person beside me.
I need to explain certain things at this point. The first is that I don’t like using the word suddenly. The reason is simple: very little actually happens suddenly. If I say, ‘I suddenly found myself all alone,’ does that mean that my companion was instantaneously called away to God? Nor have I ever found myself ‘Suddenly hungry’. I have found myself hungry, but this wasn’t a sudden experience. The sensation of hunger was the result of my not eating breakfast some hours before and the feeling of emptiness that I experienced had no doubt been growing for some time.
On this occasion, the first time that I met Lootie, having been surrounded by people, all jostling and shoving, they inexplicably thinned out (as can happen with crowds) and, as I have said, I was suddenly conscious of this blonde person and myself walking between the stalls, side by side. I say ‘person’ because it was not immediately obvious to me that Lootie was a female. The person beside me (to my left) was much shorter than me and slight, with cropped, uncombed blonde hair, and wearing a white T-shirt and shorts.
‘Where did they all go?’ this person said, looking up at me.
I saw this was a girl. She had an unusual face. Cute, you might say. With big eyes. Blue eyes. Mine were brown, nearly black. My unshaven face stubbly. My skin dark. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and made the goofy face.
She shrugged and strode ahead. But in a second, she jerked to a stop. She looked back. My watch had caught in the mesh of her shoulder bag. Oranges spilled ou
t all golden and bouncy against the grey concrete floor.
‘Shit!’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘My fault.’
Must it be my Alpha and Omega to say, I’m sorry? Must my entire life begin and end with the catechism, I’m Charlie Broome; I’m guilty? Must it? I admit, after years of practice, after mile upon mile of following those steely tracks of misery, of self-loathing, of doubt, the answer is: yes.
Probably.
So then and there, in the crowded walkway of the Victoria Markets, I dropped to my knees and grabbed at the bright rolling oranges muttering, ‘Sorry! My fault. Sorry!’
I realise now that it could have been Lootie’s fault the oranges spilled out. That in walking so close to me she might have caught her bag on my watch. Not vice versa. Not the My fault, sorry, blame Charlie Bloome way.
Whatever.
The truth is, those words—my personal mantra—brought Lootie into my life.
The oranges rolled and we chased them. We ran, stooping, we dropped to our knees, we crawled under tables. When we finally had them all, and they were put back into the bag, and the bag knotted to prevent any future disasters, we sat on the concrete, our feet out in front of us, like kids, laughing. At which Lootie said, ‘I’m Alice. Do you want a coffee?’
We gathered our stuff and found a café. I said, ‘I’m Charlie. My shout.’
She said she would have a skinny latte and I said I would have a flat white and a doughnut.
‘A doughnut?’ She frowned.
‘Sorry,’ I said, and changed my order.
We sat, talking. We found that we were both at uni. The same uni. We talked about that and then we went our own ways. When we bumped into each other at uni a few weeks later, we had coffee again. Then came Georgio’s and panini…
11
The week after Chanteleer visited Lootie’s school I came home to find her asleep on the sofa. The cushions were askew and while one arm was across her chest, the other trailed on the floor. I went to the fridge to get a beer. When I came back, she was in the same position. A chill came over me. The possibility that she was dead.
