Careful, He Might Hear You

by Sumner Locke Elliott

  Lila said, ‘PS, there isn’t going to be any row. And even if there is, no one is going to say anything to you about it. It is Lila who will take the blame.’ She flung dishes into the sink and turned on the tap. She said to George with her back arched, ‘I know you think I’m wrong but that can’t be helped. I know what is right to do. I know what his mother would have wanted and that’s enough for me.’

  Tin letters slipping sideways over the jetty said: FAIRYLAND.

  Beyond the jetty lay a discouraging picnic area, worn bald of grass in patches of grey dirt. Trellised summer houses leaned and sagged under the ancient gum trees. A kiosk, unpainted for many years, bore a sign: HOT WATER. SAVELOYS SARGENT’S MEAT PIES. Tables and benches were scattered throughout the area between the trees. There were seesaws and a row of weary swings dropping into pools of dust. A wooden stage had been erected near the kiosk, and strings of flags and coloured electric lights had been looped between the trees in an amateurish attempt to lend an air of festivity to the weedy, drab tobacco-coloured landscape. A pall of sadness hung over the place. It was a playground of dead picnics, stale as old sandwiches, wallowing in its own litter of rusted tin cans, schnapper and whiting bones, brown beer bottles, IXL jam jars and old rubber bathing caps. Staler than the news on the yellow newspapers that blew in the breeze and wrapped themselves around legs of tables. But sadder than the rain of dead gum leaves and dried berries was the sense of mortified fun, the smell of old joy. Where now were the lovers, the dancers, the mandolin players, the children skipping rope, the ring-aring-a-roses, the beery, elated, aroused moonlight-seekers in the row boats? The dancers were gone, the lovers had choked to death in the spiky lantana vines and blackberry bushes; the skipping children were skeletons flung away into the shrubbery; the secret whispers in row boats had sunk into the green sludge at the bottom of the river.

  What has happened to Fairyland? thought Lila as the ferry blundered towards the rotting jetty. And then, Something happened here. What? Murder? Food poisoning? The razor gang?

  She saw a dead dog floating in the water and quickly directed the attention of PS to the tattered flags.

  ‘Quick, quick—see how pretty they are?’

  (What had happened here?)

  They went up the narrow wooden gangplank with a handful of dispirited-looking people as the sun went behind clouds, casting a bilious tarnished light on the rotting summer houses and heightening the illusion that this fairground was a once lavish stage setting left out on a city dump to be burned.

  (We shouldn’t have come! … Too late now!)

  Lila smiled at an emaciated woman wearing a bright dirndl who was handing out tickets behind a table from which hung a banner declaring: WELCOME SCRIBES AND DAUBERS 1934.

  ‘Five bob. Children half price,’ said the woman.

  Lila said in her best-manners voice, ‘I’m Mrs Baines—I’m Sinden Scott’s sister.’

  The woman stared at her, unmoved as a fish, and Lila flushed slightly, added, ‘This is her little boy. We’re guests.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ said the woman.

  Lila, flattened, expecting a fanfare, said, ‘Well, we were invited—I’m Sinden Scott’s sister. Pony Wardrop—’

  ‘Oh, just a minute then.’ The woman went on selling tickets and giving chits for billy cans, hot water and tea.

  Lila found Pony’s letter in her bag and thrust it towards the woman. ‘This letter will explain who we are—Sinden Scott’s relatives—Sinden Scott, the late novelist.’

  ‘They’re all writers here,’ said the woman.

  Really! This was dreadfully insulting. How like them to have some fool of a woman at the gate who was so common and ignorant and terrible-looking into the bargain. And not to know who they were! Poor little Sin. Could they have forgotten her so soon?

  ‘Stand over to the side,’ said the woman. ‘You’re blocking the line.’

  They stood to the side. Like poor relatives, Lila thought. Five shillings! Her heart sank. And another two and sixpence for PS! She felt in her purse. Seven and sixpence could have been George’s new hat. And they had defied Vanessa just to be stood aside at the gate like this.

  ‘Now,’ said the woman, ‘I wasn’t told anything about free passes. This affair is for charity. For writers.’

  ‘My late sister—’ Lila began, in a voice suitable for laying a foundation stone, but the woman had turned away and was yelling, ‘Digger! Digger, come here a minute.’

  A young man in dirty white trousers and a sweater disentangled himself from a group of boys and beer bottles and came towards them at a run. He had thinning sandy hair and every few seconds his left eye twitched.

  ‘Digger, see if you can find Pony for me.’

  Lila said. ‘Digger Ewers!’

  The young man turned, twitched and stared.

  ‘Mrs Baines,’ said Lila. ‘I’m Lila Baines, dear. I’m Sinden Scott’s sister.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. How are you?’

  He took Lila’s patched-glove hand and shook it limply.

  ‘My goodness me, Digger. You were just a little boy when I saw you last. Is your mother here, dear?’

  ‘Yes, she’s over under that pine tree.’

  ‘Really? Fancy her being able to come with her bad leg—’

  The woman at the table interrupted. ‘Digger, find Pony and tell her I don’t know anything about free passes.’

  Digger twitched and said, ‘It’s all right, Daisy. Mrs Baines was invited.’

  The woman said sourly, ‘Listen, lovey, this is for destitute writers and we won’t make a bloody brass razoo if every Tom, Dick and Harry’s going to be let in free.’

  Lila said quickly, ‘But we’re not any Tom, Dick or Harry, thank you very much.’

  She took hold of Digger’s thin arm and they went up the dusty incline to the fairground. Digger said, ‘I’ll take you over to Mum and then I’ll see if I can find Pony. She was telling fortunes over in the tent.’

  Lila peered around, hoping to see elated faces, outstretched hands, to hear glad cries of welcome, but saw only listless knots of shabby people around a chocolate wheel, some men playing two-up and an apathetic audience clustered beneath the wooden stage where a woman was singing ‘On the Road to Gundagai’ too close to the mike.

  Digger led the way to a group seated under a pine tree. As they came up, several men made halfhearted attempts to rise, holding enamel mugs of hot tea.

  Conchita Ewers sat on, or rather overlapped, a deck chair to one side. Spilling in all directions, she was a great ox in grey silk, her hoofs bulging out of grey suède shoes, her horns pushed up under a mammoth grey felt hat on to which a grey and venomous falcon had alighted, her massive flanks bursting through the seams of her dress at both sides, and she clutched in one puffy hand a thick alpenstock and in the other an obscene cream puff. (Who was it who had said that Conchita was really William Randolph Hearst in drag? Sinden had laughed for days but Lila had never quite got the point.)

  Digger said, ‘Mum, here’s Lila Baines.’

  Conchita uttered a groan, dropped her cream puff into the dust and extended behemoth arms. Lila bent, tipped forward, nosed into the quivering jelly, righted herself and her hat, said:

  ‘Conchita, dear, well my goodness, fancy you here!’

  ‘Lila.’ Conchita spoke in a deep tragedy-queen voice. ‘Dear Lila Baines. Little Sin’s sister—’

  ‘Digger rescued us from that woman at the gate—we came in on the boat just now—’

  ‘Little little Sin!’ It seemed Conchita was about to call for two minutes’ silence. ‘Sinden Scott,’ she added to the others, and a white-haired man wearing shorts said, ‘Ah, yes, Marmon, a good book. Met her once at Packy’s Club.’ The others nodded perfunctorily.

  ‘Get Lila some tea,’ said Conchita to Digger, and turned towards PS, half hidden behind Lila. ‘And is this—’

  Lila brought him out proudly. ‘This is PS,’ she said.

  Conchita studied him through
a broken lorgnette.

  ‘There is no PS,’ she said.

  Lila made a quick movement.

  ‘I know that’s what she called him,’ growled Conchita, brushing pastry crumbs into the fissure between her giant breasts. ‘But there is no postscript to her. When she went, everything died with her.’

  The obedient group nodded and Lila gave a nervous laugh, sat on the edge of a bench and pulled up PS’s drooping pants.

  ‘There can be no appendix to a work of art such as she,’ continued Conchita, and she beckoned PS forward.

  ‘I shall call you “Boy”,’ she announced, and the group murmured approval. Conchita nodded graciously. ‘Boy’s little mother was the greatest of us all.’

  ‘Not greater than you, Conchita,’ said the old man in shorts, rubbing cold, white knees.

  Conchita said, ‘I have not been recognised in my lifetime. I have been overlooked and bypassed for those others who write commercial rubbish, but I shall be recognised posthumously.’ Conchita’s massive works included a trilogy on the Coptic wars; Bonaparte, an Inside Study; and Joan Heard Voices, a verse drama in four acts with forty-eight characters and twenty-three sets.

  ‘Since my accident,’ she said, ‘I have written no more.’

  Conchita had fallen between a ferry and a wharf and after being fished out by a grappling hook, had announced her retirement to the one and only news reporter she had ever met.

  Since then, she had lived on in the crumbling large house by the river, musing on her failures, accepting compliments on her out-of-print books by anyone who remembered them and gathering around her a carefully selected group who sat at her feet while she handed out the sour grapes.

  ‘In this country,’ said Conchita, accepting one of Lila’s squashed sausage rolls, ‘a cricketer is a national hero but an artist is nothing!’

  Her group sucked this in like oxygen; began reviving.

  ‘Did Sin leave any money?’ asked Conchita.

  Lila said, ‘Oh, goodness, no,’ and began an inventory of hospital and funeral expenses, but Conchita cut her short.

  ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘The greatest one of all of us died without a farthing.’ She made a dramatic gesture and the group brightened perceptibly.

  ‘Queers!’ yelled an excitable younger man with bitten fingernails. ‘If you’re an artist, they think you’re queer. Too right. They think you’re a poofter!’

  Conchita turned an oblique gaze on him. ‘Oscar Wilde was branded as a poofter, Harry,’ she said, as though this were fresh news. ‘You must learn to live with that. They pilloried poor Oscar; they did the same thing to our own Gus Trencherman, who took a gun and blew out his brilliant brain. Boy’s mother used the episode in Marmon, probably the most beautiful chapter ever written about ambivalent love; the affair between the two cane cutters, Dave and John—so aptly named—Biblical in its application, don’t you agree, Lila?’

  Lila glanced quickly at PS, but he was absorbed with a grasshopper.

  ‘It’s a lovely book.’ Lila gasped and wheezed. (What is Conchita babbling about? I’ve read Marmon. I never saw anything like that between the two cane cutters. Surely Sinden didn’t mean to imply—I must read it again.)

  ‘Was that a rainbird?’ she asked, searching the sky for help.

  ‘Boy’s mother,’ said Conchita, ‘had more spunk and talent than all of us put together. She lived among us, drank us all up and then hammered us into characters on her little anvil, sending sparks up into the night. She had her little room in my house, and on and on into the dawn, the typewriter spat, spat, spat—’

  ‘Oh, she never worked at night,’ said Lila, and Conchita turned a withering look on her and someone said, ‘Shhhh!’ ‘On and on into the dawn,’ continued Conchita relentlessly, ‘knowing that she had only a little time to get her brilliant timely message down on paper. Well, that message fell on the deaf ears of atheletes! Yes, cricketers are immortal—she is dust.’

  ‘Wasn’t there another book?’ asked the old man with the marble knees.

  ‘Unfinished,’ said Conchita.

  Unfinished! This pleased the group enormously. They chuffed with pleasurable sighs, feigned sadness.

  ‘Her best.’ Conchita handed them the cherry and turned her great white face towards PS.

  ‘Boy,’ she said, ‘would you like to come here and sit on my knee?’

  She reached out and grabbed him, lifted him, squirming, on to her paddock of a lap.

  ‘Boy,’ she said, ‘someday you will finish your mother’s book for her. Will you do that?’

  He drew back, alarmed, pushed at her breast with both hands.

  ‘S-h-y,’ said Lila to the group.

  ‘Will you do that for your little mother?’

  He struck out with one fist, dislodging himself, as the deck chair teetered sideways and Conchita sagged towards the dusty ground. Two members of the group rushed to rescue their dethroned queen. ‘That wasn’t very nice,’ said someone. Lila said, angrily, ‘He’s too young to understand,’ pushed a sausage roll into his protesting mouth, jumped around as a shot rang out.

  ‘What was that? Oh, the ladies’ sack race. Look, pet, see the funny ladies?’

  Conchita said, not without pride, ‘Boy’s mother once threw an ashtray at me, but I forgave her. I forgave her everything. Even what she did to Ernest Huxley.’

  (Oh, goodness, will she never stop? Are we going to be marooned with her all the afternoon? Where is Pony? Here comes Digger with our tea. That twitch! No wonder. He’ll never get away from her and she’ll never die. PS, I’ll never hang on to you when you’re grown and want to go.)

  ‘Oh, tea. How nice of you, Digger. And a lemonade for PS. Aren’t we having a lovely time, pet?’

  ‘Pony’s over in the tent telling fortunes. She won’t be long.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Where are you going, Digger-boy?’

  ‘I thought I’d go for a swim, Mum.’

  ‘It’s not warm enough.’

  ‘Oh, the water won’t be cold, Mum.’

  ‘Not warm enough for you! Digger-boy has a heart murmur.’

  ‘Ahhhh.’

  ‘Alf and Rexie are going in.’

  ‘Alf and Rexie are big strong men. Now come and sit down; you’ve been racing around all over the place. And pick up my stick for me, dear. I was telling them about Boy’s mother …’

  It began all over again. The sky darkened, brightened, darkened again. They sipped bitter tea. The loudspeaker hummed and said, ‘Attention, please! Elsie Chaffey will now recite “My Heritage”.’

  Then a nasal child’s voice:

  ‘My land is girt with ocean,

  My land is wide and free.

  No other land more golden,

  A precious Eden, she …’

  ‘That’s Sid Chaffey’s little girl.’

  ‘Kids reciting! Bloody boring picnic, if you ask me.’

  ‘Rotten turnout.’

  ‘Where’s all the old gang?’

  ‘All dead. Or got the sense not to come.’

  ‘Wish I’d had. Want to see if we can get a beer?’

  ‘I’ll give it a go.’

  A scream of ‘Coo-ee’ broke through the monotonous talk and Lila, turning, saw a little girl in a red print dress running towards them, but growing middle-aged as she rushed up and threw her small arms around Lila’s neck.

  ‘Lila,’ said Pony Wardrop. ‘Hooray! I’ve been looking all over the bloody joint for you.’

  ‘Pony—well, my goodness, you haven’t changed a bit.’

  Pig’s arse I haven’t!’ Pony’s puckish, withered little face gathered itself into a smirk. ‘Excuse my French, love.’

  She kissed Lila again, turned to look at PS.

  ‘My God, is this him?’

  She squinted at him a moment, then drew him towards her.

  ‘Oh, my God. He’s the spitting image of her.’

  Easy tears ran down her small lined face. She kissed him tenderly, then drew ba
ck, laughing suddenly.

  ‘PS,’ she said. ‘The blue-sky gentleman.’

  Lila felt a sudden pang. She had forgotten—almost forgotten Sinden’s joke: ‘What are you working on now, Sin?’ ‘My blue-sky gentleman.’

  ‘Guess what, pet. Pony knew Dear One.’

  His face said, Another one!

  Pony said, ‘You’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be with my party.’

  ‘Yes, well, there was a mix-up at the gate and then we found Digger Ewers and Conchita—’

  ‘Come on,’ said Pony. She took both their hands and skipped along between them in her little-girl sandals. ‘We got some beer going over in a summerhouse and some of the old mad peasants are there. Charlie Seay and the Howard girls—you remember them, don’t you?’ She sped them away across the dusty picnic ground, waving to people as she went. ‘I didn’t know you’d got stuck with Conchita. What kills me is Sin gone and that old fake Conchita’s still poisoning the air. What a fraud. Her and her lousy books and her gab gab gab about “my beloved Sinden” when all the time she was piss green with jealousy. Oh, it was all right when Sin was just battling along without recognition, but once Marmon won that prize, whacko the diddle-o, old lady hemlock couldn’t stand it. Had to go and fall off a ferryboat to get some attention.’

  Lila said, ‘Oh, but poor thing—she might have drowned.’

  ‘Not her.’ Pony went into gusts of laughter. ‘Di’n’t you ever hear the lovely story? Someone said to Walter Hatfield, “Conchita fell off a ferry,” and Walter said, “Some boy we know?” ’

  ‘Ah,’ said Lila.

  ‘Ferry—fairy. See?’

  ‘Oh, yes, very funny.’

  (Really! All this in front of PS. What had Sinden seen in Pony? She really was rather common and raffish and why did she have to dress as a little girl of ten?)

  ‘You remember Walter Hatfield, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Pony, oh, yes. He did a picture of Sinden once. Vanessa has it in her house.’

  Pony said, ‘He’s the father of my love child.’

  Lila said, ‘Is your little boy here?’

  ‘Oh, no, love. My new boy friend doesn’t like kids around, so he’s living up in the country with my cousin. He’s mad as a cut snake, my kid. Going to be something, I think. Here we are.’