Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  – Well after all, Vivien protested, I am an outsider. And this I accept. I’m well aware it means exercising a bit of tact.

  – Heavens, what will the woman say next? Miss Brinsmead asked the iron awning above them. Whatever will she say? Very soon we shall have to begin at the beginning if you go on giving me shocks. If you’re an outsider then so are we all, Miss Lang, you have quite the wrong way of looking at it. The point is that we are historic. Let me tell you I was the first in this town to come out in a picture-hat when they were all the rage in Paris. Such a fine hat too, a fluffy concoction of silks and feathers with a brim as wide as the average verandah. I manoeuvred myself out into the street on a Saturday afternoon when everybody promenaded, taking turns, arm in arm with somebody, hundreds were out, families you’ve never heard of since, and myself proud as you like in my picture-hat which had set the Bond Street galleries aflutter. And the whole town laughed. They fell about laughing so that I saw into their black bloody mouths and the hell inside them choking out ha ha ha ha, aimed at me, everywhere bloodthirsty ha ha ha’s. I could see immediately there was no point in standing on ceremony, so I threw the hat on the ground where it belonged now I hated myself in it. They were correct, it was a ridiculous hat. Had I been living historically at the time I’d have realized that for myself. The boys used it for a football. What a game they had till it fell to pieces and one of the Buddall babies got tangled in the silk band and strangled to death. The trouble was, I thought at the time, that everybody had cousins except me. I felt deprived, I freely admit it. I was ignorant then and disgracefully vain. Had I had the least inkling that history is not a chain of things done, but a continuance of things been, a morass of heart-searching and despair might never have come my way. You should have seen us in those days, she sighed dreamily. Dancing for charity, dancing for fun and for our sporting teams, trying everything out. Nothing daunted us. The girls played cricket against the clergy, the men played the Yalgoona Aborigines who are coming back to invade this place; if it was just forest without our mountain they’d be back here today. We had Massey-Harris bicycle rallies, an orchestra of ukuleles, our teams competed at working the irrigation mill, the fastest treadmill in the civilized world, we had working-bees for sharpening gramophone needles, the birdwatchers’ club was in correspondence with Saskatchewan. And everything we did, we photographed ourselves doing. Axemen would take a break risking death as the tree toppled so a friendly fanatic could record some action for posterity, girls smiled while they milked cows in case any moment a lens appeared beneath the beast and that’s how Olive McAloon got her facial paralysis. Ladies would sit posing in a group while the men stood up and folded their arms in the annual society portrait. 320-bellows cameras were all the rage. We were quite the most au courant backwater in New South Wales, I shouldn’t be surprised.

  They sat, side by side, utterly at cross-purposes, confronting the stage-set of the School of Arts with its faint heart A.S./A.L. and the welder’s workshop, the background of green pegged up on the studs of cows. Across everything a dusty wind constantly blew the lines of an engraving.

  – You’re disappointed, said Miss Brinsmead enjoying herself all the more, smoothing her thighs, thinking of her once-beautiful flesh now rotten with its secrets. But there was no response.

  – Remembering really began with my grandfather, Miss Brinsmead explained feeling little flurries of love re-kindling. It’s an idea so simple you don’t have to think of it. You let go and permit yourself to live again, or still live, what happened at some other time and place.

  – How far back can you go?

  – As far back as you do go.

  – Did your grandfather practise the idea, or did he just have it?

  – What intelligent questions you ask. My family and yours are unusual, Vivien. But most unusual was Tom Whitey himself. Every other family intermarried as fast as they could strangle each other. But he never married, he was the sole and only Mr Whitey. One has to respect that. Next came my grandfather who had three sons, Albert, Michael and Edgar. Two of them died in infancy as was the habit in those days. He was stuck with Michael, who was my father and a miserable disoriented man. He and my mother set themselves the task of being the aristocrats of the district! Felicia Brinsmead shrieked with laughter, the shocking noise of a magpie in an eagle’s claws, sending clusters of goosepimples crawling across Vivien’s skin. The decayed buildings gave back wooden and iron shrieks. The old lady ducked her head with effort, her bundle of dead hair bouncing in distress.

  – They were the vulgarest people, she commented eventually while arranging the dress across her lap. As was proved by my father’s suicide and my mother’s rushing off into oblivion with her single contemptible morsel of gold. My brother and I have never married.

  They sat on their ricketty chairs, Vivien with her arms folded, Miss Brinsmead still hands on knees and watching her bare toes at their independent work among the ants. Above them the mountain put on an ostentatious display of large comforting shapes.

  – I am told, Vivien said into the silence. There was a plague of boy children. She noted her companion flinch, yes perhaps it was a malicious thing to say to a spinster, also recollecting that boy’s face peering out from the shop window.

  – In those days, Felicia responded with composure (though given the lie by her thick voice). We used to pray for boys, needing to breed men for the work. Well it came home to roost. She stiffened her arms and her toes worked more ants into the concrete.

  – Sebastian and I had no cousins, she announced after a pause.

  The town had died. Only the washing hung out along a verandah up the road flapped restlessly, shirts and singlets strung across the front doorway tugging their rope line, wind puffing them full as ghostly fluttering petitioners.

  – Miss Brinsmead, why do you keep coming back here?

  – Because this is the only place where I can be in touch. I go away and feel free, but I lose control, I may as well be anyone from anywhere. Out there you have to adjust to what other people expect… She let her answer lapse, musing on the incompleteness of what she’d said. In any case the question wasn’t of a kind to inspire respect for this person’s subtlety. But to educate is an obligation, ho hum.

  – The world’s great cities are mostly shells, Miss Brinsmead added. Filled with people who scarcely exist. I’ve listened to what they’re thinking. It’s a terrible shock in a Geneva bus to suffer the magnetism of a real person getting in, or a San Francisco tramcar for that matter. Like having Savonarola for your corner chemist. But now you see you’re thinking of yourself again. Too bad.

  – I was thinking of my family, of family characteristics.

  – Your family the Langs. Well the Langs could never abide other Whitey’s Fallers. Norm Lang was of an age with my father and a drinking companion of his, he brought nurse Margaret Opie from the city to marry him. That’s your great-aunt Annie’s parents and your grandfather’s too. As for Annie’s nephew Geoff, now he was a typical Lang, took himself off down the valley to Yalgoona and didn’t come back till Sadie Saunders agreed to hold his hand. He was always full of ideas, poor man, oh yes, you couldn’t say a thing without his flying off at a tangent. Him and Sadie, a bright pair of miseries, and no mistake. Theirs is that green place up the back of you on the south track. And as soon as their son Lance could read and write they were planning to bundle him out of Whitey’s and put him to boarding school. Long history of malcontents in the Langs.

  – Me too.

  – Yes, you too. But always had cousins because at one stage the family had girls who married all over the place with the Collinses and McTaggarts and who else. The girls were local alright. It’s the men imported their wives: and a suffering mob of sheep they turned out to be, Miss Brinsmead sniffed at the thought of the wives.

  – Annie went away.

  – But she sent you back to fill her place.

  The idea was so astonishing that all feeling drained from Vivien leaving her brit
tle and ricketty as the chair she sat on. Could she have been used? Could she have been sent back by Great-aunt Annie as a substitute, a proxy, a surrogate, a sacrifice? Without warning the world came rushing up to meet her, she sat tight, as if drunk. Was she such a dupe? Miss Brinsmead began talking again while her listener, her disciple apparently, hung on for dear life against a prolonged falling sensation, the old lady was talking savagely, sagely about how worthless it was to struggle with the deadening stupidity and goodwill of this bumpkin community, how she wished it were possible to leave though she knew leaving meant nothing, in common with so many beautiful human truths, how she doubted a sane person could stay sane long in such a backwater, how Miss Lang herself was joining the mad stampede to insignificance.

  – Miss Lang! she cried joyously, her mood swinging round a hundred and eighty degrees. Are you falling, my dear? Is it true then?

  Bending to peer right into Vivien’s face, she examined the fear-locked eyes and saw the truth through deep water, moving steadily gracefully uncontrollably killingly down.

  – Are you in love with young Bill Swan? the sibyl clucked so her voice alone might supply some security some sense of direction. Hold on to him, he’s all you have. I know the feeling. After fifty-eight years, I should think I do. My poor mother never succeeded, her anger at her own life was such that she found it hard to bring herself even to say thank you for a courtesy. Now hold on Miss Lang dear.

  Vivien’s world filled with that hideous bland face, its lips two flaps sucking and blowing. Evil, evil.

  – One must get used to it gradually. How right I was after all Vivien. I remember the day you arrived. I remember what I felt. Ah yes indeed. Would you like to stay a little longer before we try walking? You might be unsteady. Perhaps I could tell you a story? Miss Brinsmead smiled as she patted Mercy Ping’s notebook.

  Vivien tried not to hear, not to be corrupted, tried instead to think her way out, to save herself from this sensation. Yet she was powerless.

  – Mrs Ping tells how she was captured and hung, back there at the old town. Poor Mercy, how hateful people are, Miss Brinsmead commented complacently, aware of the ambiguity.

  They sat, it might be thought intimately, the listener with her arms prim, the speaker with head well back, shoulders propped on the buttress of straight elbows, knees comfortably wide and her toes grasping at the concrete. A warm wind swirled round them and off among the dying relics. The washing gesticulated and ballooned against the house up the street, a hectic repetition of empty gestures and rebuffs. Miss Brinsmead turned to the dead woman’s notebook with its spot of Mr Ping’s blood dried into the cover. She recited in a dreamy singsong.

  – Hung without warning, pain jolting and stinging her through the length of her body. Even to the ten fingertips, she says. Did she have the presence of mind to count, one wonders? As if pain could be a light around her … how she must have suppressed her taste for melodrama all those years. Admittedly she did always indulge her desire to see herself as innocent. That’s true. As the injured party, few could touch her. Yet you know she never took trouble with herself in the way of vanity; and she’d go to no end of bother for other people. Not just because she was Chinese.

  Vivien hugged herself protectively. She saw something awful: her darling great-aunt plotting. With herself as pawn. Aunt Annie giving her the violin for a reason, buying her an icecream and holding her hand for a reason, telling stories about a fairytale Australia for a reason, charming her, possessing her. And all this to use her life as a means of vicarious repayment. In Miss Brinsmead’s words, she sent you back to fill her place: to face exile for the satisfaction of some fantasy, the women’s role in keeping Whitey’s Fall alive?

  – Do you think we know what we are doing? Felicia enquired gently as she watched these ideas formulate.

  – Auntie was too strong for me.

  – In my opinion she would never guess her destiny, Miss Brinsmead replied, jumping up so suddenly she seemed a younger woman altogether. We are going, she announced. We are already late. This is an occasion; you and I will settle ourselves at the Mountain for our first Remembering together. Try standing, dear, that’s the spirit. It’s a question of balance and I shall be here to help, I do know what this feels like. Young Bill Swan will do well enough. When I was born this time my mother shouted go away, not a nice thought to live with. But she was afraid, she guessed I knew more than she did even then. Correct though she was, it ought to be nothing to fear. I’ve been in hell fifty-two years this time, becoming quite comfortable with it. You have to drift along, fighting won’t help. You’re starting a bit late at, what is it, thirty-four? but a lot better off than I was. Being without a brother.

  – I feel quite well thank you, said Vivien disengaging her arm with some distaste.

  – Good heavens now you don’t even like me! she screamed a little laugh. Oh I’m used to that, you needn’t trouble to hide it, thank you very much indeed. You can’t be expected to look on things as I do.

  – Do I seem ungrateful?

  – Gratitude gratitude, chanted Miss Brinsmead. The sly Roman flatitude maxima debetur puella reverentia. All the same, she added, giving her colleague a tiny slap to show she was still hurt and offended, all the same the Mountain is the place for you at this stage. No need to tidy up, that’s one thing the beautiful and the ugly have in common: nothing wasted on appearances.

  The two women walked independently and without further conversation until they reached the hotel, the dust swirling under their feet.

  – Now I should mention this, Miss Brinsmead broached the silence expunging all trace of wistful cajoling from her voice. At the Mountain one doesn’t speak unless one’s sure the person wishes to be spoken to. There’s the television if you need an escape. A drink is helpful. Then you’re on your own.

  – You don’t have to mollycoddle, Vivien retorted irritably because she was nervous. I wouldn’t volunteer to come if I felt afraid.

  – Hey ho, how tiresome, independence, the new woman, lady Godiva in modern dress, in we go.

  Inside, some of the ladies from the morning tea club were there, the two Collins matriarchs and the spinster Dolly Swan. There were men as well, some a generation older than Felicia Brinsmead, while behind the bar Jasper sidled without raising his eyes from what his hands were doing so the top of his head confronted the newcomers.

  – One shandy, Miss Brinsmead ordered.

  The top of the head considered the order.

  – A beer for me please, Vivien said distinctly, nettled and ostentatiously more polite than her mentor. She was feeling conspicuous. They must all guess what she was here for, her initiation, her debut, her corruption. She took refuge in an interested examination of the room, the long bar, dark wood scratched stained and dull, the wall lined with shelves where a few sparse exhibits stood; bottles of extinct liqueurs crusted inside to a scum of crystals; a family of black tankards growing mould as if once edible; hideous mementos of forgotten occasions adorned the place, such as a boot now dry as a leaf which had once made violent contact with the buttocks of the last policeman of Whitey’s Fall, some mirrors lied about the world of appearances, and a poster over the till, pasted to the bare timbers of the wall, proclaimed the benefit to the complexion of Pear’s Soap, the ever-smiling model unaware the grain of the wood had grown out through her cheeks. A television, as promised, babbled cosily about the chocolate space-age and a shipping strike. Mum Collins’s arm reached out of its own accord from the inert form of Mum, drawing Vivien to her side, taking her round the waist in that motherly way. You could not resist, nor wish to. Her jutting jaw thrust forward, her mouth also smiled at the bar, it was a gesture and all Mum could manage, the force pulling at her and no going back, she closed her eyes to save her young friend seeing what might be there.

  – Starve the lizards, Mum Collins gasped after a highly charged muteness. That’s shocking.

  Fear laid siege to Vivien, the mountain folk around her in uncanny attitudes,
their pursed faces and faraway eyes; one wizened figure carved in patchy granite already host to lichens and animal parasites, a yellow discharge seeping out from under his knuckled eyelids. Was he perhaps asleep? Her fear told her he was not. Nor was Mary Buddall, the cheery aunt, hunched over a tiny glass of sherry, blowing into her cupped hands, concentrating on something not there. You couldn’t breathe for other people’s breath.

  The publican turned his back to pour himself a tot, which he tossed down at a gulp. Vivien realized only now that he had been muttering all the time and seemed to do so even while he drank. The syllables slurred together sounding familiar but incomprehensible. Now and again he flung out an arm with the emotion of the scene. In contrast with the deadly quiet of hallucination, his condition was pitiable and not at all threatening. If her father had lived he might have become an alcoholic.

  As she looked from one face to the next she learnt something. They have all watched the mystery of each other’s flowering, they’ve been here on this little mountain every day and watched the signs of childish meanness develop into the dangerous urges of the spy, the thief, the gossip; they’ve watched shyness develop into modesty; they’ve watched cleverness become opportunism and possessiveness become nymphomania. And then they’ve watched the flowering shrivel, the spy withering to spitefulness, the voyeur reverting to a moralist, the opportunist becoming wise and the nymphomaniac tolerant. Till seedtime slurs these distinctions. The husk wrinkles hard. Family resemblances obliterate personal identity so that eventually there remain principal types: the McAloon, the Collins, the McTaggart, the Lang, developing towards one another with each generation. One day they would be indistinguishable, perhaps. A sad occasion. She shuddered, thinking of her own name.

  Vivien, turning to Miss Brinsmead for reassurance, saw herself in that lady’s eyes, her screaming plummeting fall through a void. It was absurd that she’d thought of Felicia as dirty. What could be more irrelevant to anything that mattered? Heroic to care for herself so little. Mum Collins still clung to her waist but more like a child overawed by the fairground than a rescuer; the support came from Felicia. Vivien herself whirling round screeching, yes she danced, mad with hatred, and no she wasn’t alone nor was she vulnerable, she was winning, it was the other woman, the one they were holding down who uttered orange sounds, moonlit trees reflected in her eyes, her mouth a ragged injury.