by Thea Astley
Against which his wife waged increasingly refined battle, chiding them in vowels so ovate the boys paused physically within a smidgin of being flattened another way.
Cor!
1992.
His marriage had endured two decades.
They had moved north on the promise of nirvana. More hotel management in booming Reeftown, the man with the fake sincere glance had persuaded. Needs people like you. People of your calibre with get up and go. You can’t miss. Not these days. Not in this economic climate. Simply can’t miss.
Could he not?
PR for Reef Tours. That lasted longer. Bosie had chosen their house after cutting a swathe through soon-disaffected real estate agents—another year, another mortgage—at one of Reeftown’s northern beaches, a low-slung, rambling affair turned in on itself (Like us, Brain had hissed) and away from the street, the living room a spacious, roofed, unwalled affair surrounding a pool of extravagant blue. Bosie was ecstatic. There were parties parties parties, back-grounded by hi-fi joy from carbuncular speakers depending like enormous ripe plums from the pergola roof. ‘Or haemorrhoids,’ coarse Brain suggested, inspecting the completed work. ‘Brain!’ his wife had cried. ‘For God’s sake! Must you reduce …’
The only thing Bosie failed at was words.
More plans sprouted and withered. There were months of riches on paper followed by financial drought. Backers for improbable business projects came and went. They went bad-tempered. There were more parties and more dinners, more luncheons by the pool and in it. God! What a rage! There was political involvement followed by political accusation followed by withdrawal of funds.
Twenty years’ endurance.
Fair enough, was his summation. Fair enough. The boys were more or less self-sufficient except for those lean times when they reappeared with dollar signs in their eyes.
‘You’re not the only one who wants freedom,’ Bosie had said bitterly. ‘Why do men think they are the only ones trapped? And the only ones entitled not to miss the great world out there, eh?’
‘We’re both trapped, love.’ He was conscious of vast sadness for them both. ‘Both. I know exactly how you feel because it’s how I feel. It’s simply a question, isn’t it, of who’s going to be the first to make a break for the wall.’
Bosie glanced up with suddenly fearful eyes. She was unequipped for any sort of career now, her pert good looks vanishing along with those outdated office skills she had once sported. She was fit only for counter-jumping. She mentioned these facts, ground them out reluctantly, acidly, the data of those decades.
‘But why not?’ Brain was unfeeling. ‘Why not get a job?’
‘There are no jobs, haven’t you noticed? It’s impossible to get a job even slinging hash. You damn well know that. I’ve spent years organising dinners and parties to foster your hare-brained projects and now I’m on the heap.’
She hated admitting that, hated the pencillings of age that scrawled the indifferent interest of time.
‘But you enjoyed them.’
‘Enjoyed what?’
‘The parties, those Goddamn endless dinners. You played at the sweet life. Why didn’t you get off your bum when the kids were at school and do a course? Retrain. Something. You had the bloody time.’
There was no answering that.
Bosie heaved a lilo into the pool and stalked off. Brain heard her car (the second car!) start up and then the engine’s rage fading along the bay front. He expelled his held breath contentedly.
Ultimately he wanted to be alone. Alone alone alone.
Yet he failed to achieve even that.
Bosie, sobbing her grievances into the eager ears of pals weak in wisdom but brimming with advice and hoping, perhaps, to cobble up her frayed marriage, was persuaded to book Brain and herself onto a group discovery tour of Europe.
What an innocent!
Part Two
Police report being called to the aid of an elderly man found collapsed in a Reeftown park late yesterday afternoon.
The man, who is in his eighties, insists that he comes from Melbourne and has no recollection of how he got to Reeftown. Locals say he had been observed sitting on the same bench on the Esplanade for two days.
Disoriented and suffering from exposure, he had his first name pinned to his shirt but appeared not to recognise it. ‘Albert’ is 160 centimetres tall, of slight build. He is crippled in one leg and is partly deaf.
Anyone able to help in identifying him is asked to contact the Elder Care Group, Reeftown, where he is being looked after.
Reeftown Herald, 10 July 1990
WHOOPSADAISY! DAISY had said, stumbling on the kerb edge in Adelaide Street.
The two old girls had linked arms for support as they crossed to the big store.
God, how she missed Daisy these days. It had been good for those years when she had come down from the north hutched in some hot-box in Shorncliffe. Good for that surprise of hearing Daisy’s voice crackling over the telephone wires in unexpected announcement. ‘There could only be one Hackendorf,’ she had cackled. ‘Knew I’d find you.’
All those years. Great groping palm hands of alocasia had fumbled gloomily towards their meeting place on the footpath, just above the stairs to the conveniences. ‘Where are all your kids, now, Daisy?’ she had asked. ‘Buggered off!’ Daisy told her. ‘Perth. Melbourne. You name it. On me own now.’ Daisy with her streaks of carrot still showing through the untended grey mop, her cheap floral cottons displaying those creped arms and age-spotted skin, her most precious belongings shoved into a plastic shopping bag she never let go. Not a proper bag lady, she would say. Not proper. Just another desperate from the lonely house she lived in on the shores of Moreton Bay. She’d become obsessive about burglars. ‘But I have to get out,’ she almost whimpered. ‘I can’t stay in that poke of a place endlessly.’ Of course you can’t, Kathleen had assured. ‘See,’ the other had said, scrabbling down to the bottom of the bag. ‘It’s just these few things I’m frightened to leave.’ Snapshots. All the kids. Her mum. A pensioner bank book. Her health card. A book she’d won for the best composition in primary school. Show me, Kathleen had urged. Do show. Presented to Daisy O’Brien, Biloela Primary School, 1930. ‘That and the kids,’ Daisy said. ‘My only achievement. And now I never get to see them, they’re too busy. I’ve got to hang on to something, haven’t I?’
All those years meeting at that bus stop and going off to do the cafeterias in the big stores, treating themselves to cream cake and tea, complaining about the thoughtlessness of kids and laughing a lot between complaints and then Daisy didn’t show. After their last outing, Kathleen discovered, she had walked behind a backing truck and that was that. Like that! Oh God, Kathleen thought, having a small nightmare: the photos and the prize copy of We of the Never Never and the pensioner cards and the savings account with fifty-five dollars put by for emergencies, scattered in Adelaide Street and rammed back into the bag and then thrown away because the ambulance had come and Daisy was silent for keeps.
Hey, Daisy, wherever you are! Listen! Listen to me. It gets better! It’s not all grief.
Take five!
Take longer if you feel like it.
Here’s this crazy, this wacker, this … this … whatever you feel like calling the poor coot, obsessed, no, riddled with this maggot to sing, golden-throated, golden-tongued, Tosti’s last song, the ultimate lament, from a bridge in Venice, a bridge spanning one of the smaller canals leading into the bassino.
Ah well.
For a once-off?
To frighten the gondoliers? The tourists? Send sonic but useless messages to a lost love?
Well, maybe.
Nothing but water and bells, he imagined, and his voice, rapturous with resonance, rocking the bassino into wavelets.
He lifted his head into dawn air, inhaled deeply, opened his mouth wide, wider, and launched into the opening bars of L’ultima canzone: M’han detto che domani, Nina vi fate sposa, he sang. Full. Loud. Louder. Resonan
ce.
Rez-o-nance!
Workmen going by hesitated, grinned widely, leaned against the bridge railing and eyed him from under their caps with pleasure. One joined in. They sang duetto, allowing their voices to melt into curves that floated up and over the water, dominating the liquidity of bells, curling into the wisps of cirrus teasing church spires across that glinting world. His song was a gondola of grief on which he poled away from the watchers, even his singing partner, oblivious to their surprise or delight, sensing only the rotundity of sound as it left his throat, curvilinear.
When he reached the last throbbing note—and he allowed it to throb in the finest Italianate style—there was a burst of applause, ragged, fragmented, from the loiterers. ‘Grazie,’ he said with a self-mocking bow. ‘Grazie. Molte grazie.’
Without looking into their smiles, their curiosity, he turned and began walking away quickly, losing himself in a network of alleys and lanes, crossing market squares, moving ever further and further from the hotel where his wife was now unpacking in the too expensive room their travel agent had booked. Leaving now before the old routine set in, the museum trudging, gallery goggling, piazza dining turning each day into its organised monetary orgasm. Bells reached a climax of slashed air all about him, cutting small winds to streamers from a tower across the square; and he chased after their summons and entered a world filled with the cobwebs of ancient prayers.
He was, is, interested in the processes of goodness, the abstractions of duty, self-sacrifice, the sheer purity of the unladen soul. On this morning of early March, striding across the endless skies, as it were, of Venice’s floating floor, the sole-heel-toe of him felt no paving, no grit and agonised clutch to earth. As if involved in chicanery, in subterfuge, he had whizzed from that hotel room, scooting across arpeggios of bellringers, silently exhorting steeples, workmen, cringing cats, sly before-times moneychangers, insomniac tourists, in order to utter the briefest aspiration of God-directed gratitude.
So long, Bosie!
So long, Bimbo and Chaps!
Bimbo and Chaps now not quite completing academic courses, not quite dropping out.
Bosie unpacking the drip-dry and hanging it carefully on racks in the monstrous wardrobe that threatened the bed.
So long! Arrivederci!
A Mass was half-completed, the sanctuary bell ringing at the elevation of the Host, the saddened weathered cunning simple duplicate human discs raised, lowered, raised, the prayers pressed like everlastings between hands draped with rosaries, rings and the tiredest of tired skins.
Kneeling with chin on knuckled hands, he thought of Bosie. Why didn’t she laugh? Ever? Once, listening to a political leader gabbling idiotically away on television, he had commented, ‘They’ve left the scrambler on.’ Not a smile. Not a glimmer of a smile. She was unmoved by most things of the spirit. And another once when he played her Te Kanawa singing Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder with that effortless floating, effortless buoyancy of the heart out of sight, a bird—out—of—sight, ah, she had switched on the Hoover and worked around his scuffed running shoes. There was nothing like the Romantics, he had informed her, talking to air. The hell, he had told her, with Victorian schmaltz and tenors, me dear, one hand lightly placed on the grand, moustache always blond down-drooping, thrumming to the tentative occasionally wrong notes struck by an hour-glass garbed woman-fashion, swaying on the piano-stool. She had kept on Hoovering. But Tosti! Brain had begun to shout above the racket. Who could resist him? He couldn’t. Partly for the thought of that ingratiating Latin giving music lessons to the royal toad and the toad’s children in the soot and gas lamps of London.
His own eyes were stained with the sea as he explained.
Jesus God! L’ultima canzone! He would try not to remember that it was written at Folkestone.
He flicked off the player and began singing to his Hoovering wife.
The last song.
Over
and
over.
‘For Chrissake!’ Bosie had screamed, going out to the pool and an aureole stench of guinea flower. ‘Will you give up on that Goddamn song! That bloody song!’
‘Mother,’ he had reprimanded, following his wife and breaking from lyric mode to speech mid-note, ‘played it for Father.’
‘I don’t,’ Bosie shouted, her small acquisitive face screwed up into what Brain recognised as the first honest resentment in twenty years of marriage, ‘give a stuff if she played it for the president of the Yew Ess of Ay or Yasser Arafat.’ A leaf dropped its exclamation point, tested her hair briefly and fluttered away to the terrace.
That vignette he offers now to his raw and guilty soul. Or had he screamed slut? He couldn’t remember.
He was hugging his personal alto rhapsody to himself like a comforter, a warmer, a cuddle-bunny of escape into unachieved but dreamt-of contacts, say: girl crossing landscape—serious, gawky—on a lonely beach on Magnetic; girl swinging into bus-stumble, his quickly gallant hand supporting a succulence of flesh, wanting, oh God, wanting what? He could accept the lust in either vignette with the figure erased from landscape.
Was he a queer?
Years ago—three? four?—Nina Waterman had knelt literally at his feet on a pool scootway flooded by the splashings of yoicks, polluted by arcadian flat-chested nymphs and lugger shepherd boozers, and bowed her magnificent head as his party song climaxed: honey, did yo’ hear dat mockin’ bird sing las’ night? To lager and stubby wash of the good ship Hackendorf, Brain Hackendorf sang.
When he left the church the gondolas on the canal swung by with barely a glance from boatered polesters under the thin wash of early sun damped down by mist, pollution and the rags of sea-dragging cloud.
So long, Bosie, now rinsing out her underwear to hang on a neat packaway traveller’s clothesline hooked across bathtub or shower screen.
In a room whose ceiling was cluttered with putti.
You brought a new kind of love to me, blooted Harold ‘Shorty’ Baker on trumpet, mute blocking like a heavy head cold the driving rhythms of Billy Strayhorn and Cue Porter. The ghetto-blaster vibrated with its own racket from a barley-sugar balcony above him and there he goes, there goes Brain, who could not refrain from snapping fingers along with the sound, chuck-chucking as he almost pranced along cobbled streets to meet Nina Waterman, cool and agelessly middle-aging but still yummy, adjusting hat and scarf in the colonnade of a broken-down, still gorgeous palazzo.
Twinned! Snap!
There. Standing half-shaded by portico, by hat, one finger probing a timetable, her timeless profile trapped in connections. Nina. He felt that wild rush of excitement he used to get forty years before when he played hookey.
She had no sense of culpability.
‘This,’ she would later insist to her divorce lawyer, when she decided long after that divorce might be neater, was entirely unplanned. ‘We had been trapped,’ she would explain, ‘on the same tour. As it were. Ironically …’ and she had smiled her ancient Attic smile … ‘a discovery tour. Fifteen days, twelve cities. I ask you!’
They had not lasted with their partners more than two.
‘Cities or days?’ the lawyer had asked.
‘Why, days.’
In Rome Bosie had become sniping, whining in the Pantheon, the Colosseum (he, Brain, was the one spreadeagled on sand under lion’s breath!) and in the rain-drizzled square of St Peter’s. She craved big spending along the Via Veneto. Mr Waterman developed Roman belly on the first day, a distressing condition that was to affect him for the rest of the tour, whose conductor was relentless in his insistence on culture. He barely noticed his wife had gone, and when Bosie bitterly pointed out to him on the third morning that some conclusion could be drawn by both absences, he cheered up immediately despite his illness.
‘This,’ Brain said to Mrs Waterman, touching her hand as it rested on a stone balustrade of their fourth crumbling church on day one, ‘is not what I really came for.’
‘The decay?’
&n
bsp; Joke, she had explained to his hurt, blunt features. Blunted as when he had pleaded with Bosie for God’s sake just to hear Schreier singing his guts/heart out for a minute, half a minute, in the Schwanengesang and had said Hist! Actually, he had said, ‘Hey! Lissen a that!’ as once, three years before he had held a rapt finger to the tip of Johnny Hodges’ fluid lace of notes and caught a barely known Nina Waterman watching with poised amusement. Bosie had poked out her tongue and walked away, slamming a muffling door between them. Dampered! Twice!
‘That’s for all of us, the decay,’ he said. And her time-endangered hand twitched on eroded stone.
The leaving had been easier than he could have imagined, having imagined so often these last years in the humid nights of Reeftown with his wife snoring persistently beside him. Take five. Take this: an abandoned heap of outer garments (holding memories of his vanished dad) on the dazzle strip of some deserted beach, any beach, and a two-hundred-yard swim round a point to predeposited dry clothing, cash and a motor-bike panting to whip him away, never, not ever, to be found as Brain Hackendorf again.
The reality was the briefest note tucked under a bedside lamp, his pockets stuffed with air ticket, travellers’ cheques and passport with numerous visas already stamped in and throbbing to be used in rhythm with his overexcited middle-aged heart.
Mere escape, he argued.
Or was it the sight of Nina Waterman, more a metaphor of escape than a fornicatory goal, under the ambiguous shelter of her dipping hat?
It was, he insisted inwardly, giving her cool fingers a belated squeeze, the escape itself.
Bimbo and Chaps would be outraged, but not for long.
Kathleen would be amused.
He must send a card to that sweltering Brisbane home. That’s if the poor old girl could take it all in, she was so damn vague these days. Vague and forgetful. He must ask Shamrock if she ever wet the bed. He’d heard that was an early sign. Incontinence of brain and bladder. But would Shamrock, entangled with the entertainment schedules of her ambitious backbencher husband, even have bothered to visit the old Mum in months unless she needed something? Shamrock had never been a daughterly daughter or for that matter a sisterly sister, any more, he had to admit, than he had been a son.
