by Kim Kelly
Addy winced, and not only for him. It seemed the more hedonistically and flamboyantly herself Roz had become across the almost twelve months they’d shared this tumbledown terrace house, the more Addy had shrunk. Roz was a fine arts femme fantabulous, painting herself in large, loud splashes across any and all canvases she chose to inhabit; while Addy … Addy seemed barely here at all. She hadn’t even shown her face at a Young Labor meeting all year; couldn’t imagine public speaking anywhere these days; it was hard enough to have to make the required contributions to tutorial discussions. What had happened to that girl, Adrianna Loest, who could stand on a stage and fill five minutes to brimming with all manner of guff, from the meaning of wealth beyond money to whether or not women could be heroes too, and make it fascinating, entertaining, words falling so easily from her tongue. She remembered the crowd laughing with her; she would float upon those drifts of laughter; she would thrill inside the spotlight stillness of their listening silences. That girl her father was sure would change the world. Where had she gone? A mouse-brown ghost in the misted mirror. Was she dead already?
‘Yes! Yes! Give it to me!’ Roz was off the planet.
Addy slunk back to her room, threw on yesterday’s black jeans and flannelette shirt of blue-and-green checks, her usual student uniform these days, and she sat on the end of her bed. The digital alarm clock on her bedside chest said it was only a quarter to eight, but she didn’t want to sit there waiting for hamburger-time, empty and too full, waiting on the end of a terrible play, staring at the blunt-edged numbers glowing emergency-red at her, like the Doomsday Clock set at three minutes to midnight, three minutes to terminal, global disaster. This was a long three minutes. She glanced around her room, not that there was much to glance at, the room being all of three metres by three-point-two; and she’d tidied the barely contained chaos of her wardrobe yesterday afternoon, her nocturnal-frock collection, her trove of most marvellous material things; she’d tidied her already tidy bookshelf as well. She tidied her bed now, straightening her quilt and folding her granny blanket neatly over it, lining up the colourful crocheted squares, so that she wouldn’t look like a slob, in case —
Oh for God’s sake – get a life. Seriously.
She grabbed her bag, her grunge-smudged canvas satchel, checked that her notebooks and her copy of Pope’s Selected Poetry and Prose were there, as well as her unread library book, The Poetical Career of Alexander Pope, and Tacitus’ The Annals for Ancient History, still faintly smelling of squashed banana, and Gatsby for American Lit, too, and then she crept down the stairs.
The lounge room at the end of the bannister was dim, windowless, but Addy could see well enough the remains of last night on the coffee table: the ashtray overflowing, sticky glasses ranged around the board game they’d played – Trivial Pointlessness, or something like that, it was called, a new game that their other housemate, Harriet, had brought back from somewhere expensive.
Harriet Rawley-Hogue, or HRH as she preferred to be known, was in fine arts with Roz, but that was about all they had in common. Harriet was the daughter of a judge, had gone to one of the country’s most prestigious private schools, looked like something Modigliani might have framed, had a boyfriend who was in his final year of medicine, as well as being ridiculously handsome, permanently tanned, about to pop the question any moment, and no doubt this minute cradling her between sculpted arms as they slept in the front room up the hall – HRH’s private parlour, complete with four-poster and silk drapery. Harriet was slumming it here with them, ‘Learning a little worldliness,’ she’d sigh condescendingly; Addy imagined that even Harriet’s parents found her insufferable and had turfed her out. Still, the cast-off furniture, kitchen appliances and state-of-the-art stereo Harriet had also brought with her made the pain worthwhile – and made their place pretty cool, by comparison to most student digs. There might have been a hole in the floorboards under the chaise longue, but they had a chaise longue – plush powdery-lavender velvet, with scrolly repro Queen Anne legs. Eye-poppingly horrible, really, but cool.
They also had a piano, thanks to HRH, an elegant old upright, and Harriet’s most redeeming feature – not just the piano itself, though. Sometimes, Harriet would play it, and she was very good. She’d play mostly Chopin etudes and Addy could listen to her all day. There was no piano at home, at Port, only the radiogram and her father’s massive classical record collection. Very uncool out there in the Illawarra wilderness of steel and coal, where the only crescendos likely to be heard emerged from the rugby league commentary at a sneaky burst for the try line with three minutes to the full-time whistle, and any music that wasn’t AC/DC was for poofters. Music, as in real music music, the kinds of music that gave Addy glimpses of who she really was and where she was really from, was something special she shared with her dad; Sunday afternoons listening to Beethoven paint seas of emotions into her she couldn’t yet know; listening to the shushing of the surf, to the ripples of generations leading her back to a small town in central Germany she’d never seen. And at this moment, it all made her think of him again – her father.
His fist slamming down on the tablecloth, making the salt and pepper jump.
The instant ache of longing to know the truth of him – to understand – and never being able to ask. Because the truth hurts. The truth hurt him. Sometimes, if she stayed over on the Sunday night, after a glass of Riesling too many, he’d ask her to dance, and he’d look at her, there in his arms, and he’d let her see the tears in his eyes – not for her, but for her mother. They’d met in the dining-room hut of the Balgownie Migrant Workers Hostel in 1955 – he’d been nineteen, almost twenty, the same age Addy was now. Her mother, Elke, had been seventeen, a trainee machinist at the Friedelle Children’s Wear factory. They were both orphans, washed up on these shores; they’d done everything properly: scrimped and saved for their marriage, for seven years they put away every spare penny until they had enough to put down the deposit on a patch of land on Gallipoli Street, living in a caravan there until they could afford to build their humble fibro home, made grand to them with its ocean-facing views, but none of their carefulness could stop fate from robbing Peter Loest of his Elke. She had just told him she was pregnant again, with what they’d hoped would be their third child; she died of an ectopic rupture the next day. Addy was only two and a half, and knew nothing more of any of it, except for her father’s silent, stoic grief – a grief she supposed was only ever made worse because she looked so much like her mother, with her fine long nose and large eyes, which, she could only guess from the three black-and-white photographs she possessed, were the same crystalline blue, hair the same pale brown, too. Addy often imagined that if her mother had lived, they’d sit around complaining about their boring hair, and maybe talking about Germany.
‘Germany?’ her father would snort at any attempt at a question. ‘No one wants to know anything about Germany – and neither should you.’
The war and every loss it had brought were still too close for him, forty years on.
I should get to my Contracts tute. How can I not finish law? How can I disappoint him?
Hamburger.
The resident cat – a stray called No Name – blinked at her from the top of the piano. He was a pretty thing, with an almost perfectly symmetrical marmalade splash across his otherwise grey face, making it seem as though his green eyes were peering through translucent butterfly wings. He yawned and curled back into himself.
She said aloud, ‘You’re no help,’ reaching into her bag for the smaller of her notebooks, to leave a note, ostensibly for Roz, but really – what for? Just in case? She’d always been a note-leaver, just in case, and yet like the unfunny turns, her notes had subtly, although surely, increased in intensity and frequency lately. It seemed she couldn’t leave a space without some explanation, some mark that she’d been there, some clue as to where she’d gone. She wrote now:
Am never drinking again, et cetera. Have left in search of early hamburger. Should
I fail to return within a day or so, assume I have fallen into a vat of salted lard. Died doing what she loved – Addy X
She tore out the page and placed it under the paperweight between No Name and her telephone book. Then, just before she turned to leave, just as she was giving the cat a fleeting rub under his pretty little chin, something moved behind her: on the brown couch, the decrepit leather relic of indeterminate age that sat across from the lavender chaise, opposite in every way, with its lame disguise of pink paisley bedspread and assorted scatter cushions. And there was a body inside it this morning. She could see a mess of dark, shaggy hair at one end; black suede boots at the other. A foggy recollection that this was the singer in the band – musical relation of Drummer Boy upstairs. The band was called Elbow – Who calls a band Elbow? – and they were a post-punk, alternative folk-rock, jingle-jangle quartet, duelling guitars around an earnest baritone, like Elvis, but after too many cones, delivering dinky earworms like, ‘She’s a spoonful of blueness, so sweet and so dark, she’s a moonbeam, she’s a daydream, she is barefoot in the park’ – that sort of wet nonsense. She couldn’t remember his name, though, any more than she could Drummer Boy’s. What had they talked about last night? Snatches of chat came back to her, voices raised over the current conversational standards: the looming threat of university fees and other evils of neo-conservatism; and then she’d won a piece of Trivial Pointlessness plastic whatever on the question: Which race car driver won his third Bathurst 1000 in 1978? She answered: Peter Brock. The singer boy had jumped up off the floor and shouted: ‘How did you know that?’ Slapping his thighs, he’d loomed over her, all tall denim stovepipes, fashionably threadbare, faintly accusatory. She’d shrugged and poured herself another drink; she didn’t know how to say, ‘My dad loves motor racing, and boxing, and rugby league, and Beethoven, so suck on that.’ She didn’t know how to ask: ‘Why are you so shocked at a girl winning a piece of plastic whatever on a sports question?’
And she didn’t want to talk to him now. She didn’t want to talk to anyone.
He turned again under the pink paisley, squinting up at her, and she couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
‘With a little bit of extra beetroot, please,’ she asked the man at the Olympia Café, the early-opener up on King Street, almost a kilometre away, in Newtown, a long strip of shops on the chipped pastel-plaster edge of western Sydney.
‘More beetroot?’ He looked over his shoulder at her from the grill and smiled. ‘I like the beetroot, too,’ he said, kindness in his gruff, rough voice; a nice man, presumably Greek and about the same age as her father, face lined with some similar boatload of cares.
Addy only nodded in reply. She was almost tearfully hungry now and a dull headache sat above her eyes.
‘You don’t get the beetroot in Maccadonalds,’ he said, turning back to the grill.
Addy nodded again, out the window. She’d never set foot in one of those hamburger joints, franchises of which seemed to be springing up everywhere now. Their prices might have been a little cheaper than a greasy Joe’s, but it wasn’t real food, so her father would say; when he was drunk, he’d also say the whole operation was a front for the CIA in a way that left her wondering if it might be true. She watched the first spots of rain dot the footpath outside, cars whizzing by, a bus thundering past, rattling the glass in its tired old frame, and she wondered what this shop might have been, originally. One of the buildings across the road had the year ‘1895’ inscribed on its facade like a block-type date stamp, but the ornate masonry around the arched windows of its upper floor looked somehow medieval and the decorative pediment above them seemed to have escaped from a Roman temple; the whole thing had been painted the colour of a lime milkshake, and at street level a new Thai restaurant had just moved in. All of the buildings up King Street were individually eccentric in this way – pub, butcher, fruit shop, pawn broker, record store, book emporium, second-hand furniture, bakery, pizza place, Chinese takeaway. All of them had been something grander once, or maybe people had simply cared more then, about the things they looked at – why not put a domed turret or a Juliet balcony on a charcoal chicken shop?
No such thing as a charcoal chicken shop in 1895 – idiot.
I just meant —
‘Here you go, love.’ The Greek café man brought her hamburger over on a plate, and oh God it was perfect: oozing barbeque sauce and fuchsia beetroot juice, burnt onions and sausage mince spilling from the sesame-seed sprinkled bun, this hamburger glimmered before her as something not quite real. Something magical. This could have had something to do with the blaring glare of the fluorescent lighting inside the shop reflecting at double strength off the mad yellow laminate tabletop on which the hamburger had been placed, but oh it was beautiful.
Addy looked up at the man and beamed: ‘Thank you.’
‘Is okay.’ He smiled again, and reached behind him to the high, tiled counter, for another plate. For one horrific second she thought he was going to join her at the table. No, no, no! Hamburgers were best eaten alone, and this one – this one was special. She didn’t want to share it in any sense. But he wasn’t going to join her; he placed this other plate beside the one in front of her: it was piled high with hot chips. He said: ‘On the house, for you, young lady. Eat up.’
‘Oh!’ The surprise caught in her throat. He was too kind; he probably thought she was starving, miserably scrawny and broke. She wasn’t broke, though: she worked two long shifts a week in the toy department at the Town Hall Variety Store in the city – Thursdays from two until nine, and Saturdays from eight until five – all per the Shopworkers Union regulations and all above the hourly award rates. They were good to her there as well, the managers, always letting her juggle shifts if she needed to with a change of timetable at uni. She paid no tuition fees, not yet at least, her rent was low and she got a fifteen percent discount on stationery and basic comestibles at work. She had it damn easy, really. But this nice, kind man had given her an extra plate of pity. She must have looked like just another poor King Street dero, she supposed.
She hung her head over her food, pushed aside all guilt and self-loathing for the pleasure and privilege of hamburger, and ate every last mouthful as a moral obligation; she ate every chip, too; washed it all down with an orange fizzy drink.
That’s better. She almost belched out aloud. She glanced at her wristwatch: it was a couple of minutes after nine now – less than two hours until English Lit. She supposed she might head for the library, read some more Pope before the lecture, but she wrote a note for lovely café man first:
Dear Mr Olympia Café,
That hamburger was superb, and your kindness will never be forgotten. I needed both this morning, very much. I hope you have a wonderful day. X
She never signed her name on notes to strangers, just the smiley face and one kiss. As the man was now busy taking an order from a group of construction types wanting an industrial quantity of egg-and-bacon rolls, she tucked the note under the neat little stack she’d made of her plates and left without a word or wave, or a second glance at the half-a-dozen pairs of hairy legs crowding the counter, football socks pushed down above dusty steel-capped boots; didn’t turn around when one of them gave her a leery, ‘Why don’t ya smile, sweetheart,’ out the door. She knew that type a bit too well.
The rain was falling a little more heavily, giving her an excuse to pick up her pace, to get away from him, and to cross the road. Under the tin awning here, the rain crashed heavier still; she didn’t fancy running through this downpour, all the way to the library – her books would get soaked, and so would she. It was mid-autumn cool turning cold and she was coatless; she hadn’t brought an umbrella, either. Supposing she might pick one up for a dollar at the nearest el cheapo discount store, she backtracked to do precisely that, but before she got there, she passed an elderly woman letting herself into one of the shops along the way, muttering something under her breath, seeming to have trouble with her keys, grappling with them aw
kwardly, as she carried four sizeable shopping bags, those sort of roll-up nylon bags that fit half a cow in them once unfurled, two slung on each arm.
Addy instinctively slowed, and asked: ‘Can I give you a hand?’
The woman frowned over her shoulder, but there was a smile in her bright blue eyes. ‘It is all right, thank you, dear,’ she said. ‘I have fought with worse.’
An accent thickly, unmistakeably Germanic.
Addy laughed, with some warm reflex: ‘All the same – let me help with your bags. Please.’
‘That’s very thoughtful, dear.’ The woman smiled entirely now, a big, broad smile that seemed to comprise most of her face. She was quite elderly, perhaps seventy or more, and her hair, pulled back in a timelessly stylish chignon, was white, but there was something jaunty about her; spry. She wore a simple yet smartly tailored suit of plum-coloured wool, expensive-looking, European, and black shoes that appeared equally so. Addy immediately wanted to know her – know what a woman like this was doing letting herself into a shop in shabby old Newtown. What kind of shop it was Addy couldn’t recall. A haberdashery? Although she found herself in Newtown once or twice a week, she didn’t remember this shop at all; or perhaps it was only that the lights hadn’t been switched on yet, making the window seem unfamiliar. Was that a zebra’s head she could see within the sweep of a red velvet curtain?
She said to the old woman, taking two of her bags: ‘It’s no trouble. I just enjoyed a plate of free hot chips. One good deed deserves another, et cetera.’
‘Good, good,’ the woman replied distractedly, finally popping the lock, and giving the door a little kick with her fine patent-leather toe.
Addy was met with a draught of some sort of floral scent, as though the old shop exhaled. She took a couple of paces back, to check her bearings, asking herself again: What shop is this? In looking up between the awning of this one and the next, to try to see the facade above, she copped a face full of rain; her vision blurred, but she saw clearly enough: this was a building of bare brick, small colonial bricks, dark pink, almost the colour of the woman’s suit, and unadorned in any way; it was perhaps the oldest building in the row. A bus honked – she was standing there with one foot on the road – and as she stepped back across the footpath, she saw the shop window now glowed, and so did the name of the place, in swirling cursive, quite unmissable gold lettering: The Curiosity Shop. There was the zebra, looking out from behind that red curtain, and the harlequin splash of a large tiffany lamp, a cave of wonders beyond: shelves of books and bric-a-brac, chandeliers and long-fringed shawls, and shoes, lots of shoes …
