Stories Page 5
‘What did you—’ I yelled.
She was laughing furiously. ‘You should have seen the look on your face.’
‘What look?’
‘Like this.’ She pulled a face: mouth half-open, eyes rolling up and to one side, like a dim-witted whore.
In the basement room we were supposed to keep the wooden shutters closed because Rowena said there was a prowler who stood up on the windowsill. But the room was dim and stuffy. I took off my clothes, then slid the window up and shoved open the top half of the slatted shutter. Julie whipped off her dress and stared at me.
‘You still look like a little goat,’ she said. ‘Pan, up on his hind legs.’
I got under the sheet. ‘Come on. Let’s go to sleep.’
‘I’m all speeded up. I’m looking for something to read.’
‘Well, don’t rustle the pages all night.’ I turned on my side and closed my eyes. When she got into the bed she hardly weighed it down at all.
‘Talk to me,’ she said behind me.
I flipped over on to my back and saw she was lying there with her hands under her head. ‘What’ll I say?’
‘Do you get just as miserable as you used to when you were straight?’
‘Are you kidding?’
She shifted so that the sides of our legs touched lightly, all the way down. ‘Come on. Talk.’
‘Maybe more miserable,’ I said. ‘It’s all real now. Before, I was in a dream for years, even when I was with you. Everything was blurred and messy. Now I know exactly what I want, and I also know I’ll never get it.’
‘Oh hell.’
‘What?’
‘What do you want?’
‘Everything. I want to love some man forever and at the same time I want to fuck everyone I see. Some days I could fuck trees. Lamp posts! Dogs! The air!’
She whistled a little tune, and laughed.
‘In the Tuileries,’ I said, ‘there is a powdery white dust.’
‘What else?’
‘It’s a cruising place at night. Not that part with the rows of trees: they lock that. The part between the gates and the Maillol statues. I love it.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s like a dance. It’s mysterious. People move together and apart, no one speaks, everyone’s faceless. It’s terrifically exciting, and graceful. The point of it is nothing to do with who.’
Her face was quite calm, her eyes raised to the ceiling. Turning my head I could see pale freckles, a gold sleeper, a series of tiny parallel cracks in her lower lip. The skin of her leg felt very much alive to me, almost humming with life.
‘Once,’ she said, ‘I was coming down that narrow winding staircase in one of the towers of Notre Dame. Two American blokes were coming down behind me, and I heard one of them say, “Hey! This is steep! My depth perception is shot already!”’
We rolled towards each other and into each other’s arms. I pushed myself against her belly, pushed my face into her neck and she took me in her arms, in her legs. I cooled myself on her. Her limbs were as strong as mine. Her face hung over me and blurred in the dim room. I could smell her open flesh, she smelled like metal, salty. I swam into her and we fucked, so slow I could have fainted. She turned over and lay on her back on me; I was in her from behind and had my hand on her cunt from above as if it were my own, my arm holding her.
And then under the hum and murmur of breathing I heard the soft thump of the man’s foot against the closed lower half of the shutter. Fingers gripped the edge and a head floated in silhouette, fuzzy against the glimmer of the garden. My skin opened to welcome him.
THE LIFE OF ART
MY FRIEND AND I went walking the dog in the cemetery. It was a Melbourne autumn: mild breezes, soft air, gentle sun. The dog trotted in front of us between the graves. I had a pair of scissors in my pocket in case we came across a rose bush on a forgotten tomb.
‘I don’t like roses,’ said my friend. ‘I despise them for having thorns.’
The dog entered a patch of ivy and posed there. We pranced past the Elvis Presley memorial.
‘What would you like to have written on your grave,’ said my friend, ‘as a tribute?’
I thought for a long time. Then I said, ‘Owner of two hundred pairs of boots.’
When we had recovered, my friend pointed out a headstone which said, She lived only for others. ‘Poor thing,’ said my friend. ‘On my grave I want you to write, She lived only for herself.’
We went stumbling along the overgrown paths.
~
My friend and I had known each other for twenty years, but we had never lived in the same house. She came back from Europe at the perfect moment to take over a room in the house I rented. It became empty because the man—but that’s another story.
~
My friend has certain beliefs which I have always secretly categorised as batty. Sometimes I have thought, ‘My friend is what used to be called “a dizzy dame”.’ My friend believes in reincarnation: not that this in itself is unacceptable to me. Sometimes she would write me long letters from wherever she was in the world, letters in her lovely, graceful, sweeping hand, full of tales from one or other of her previous lives, tales to explain her psychological make-up and behaviour in her present incarnation. My eye would fly along the lines, sped by embarrassment.
~
My friend is a painter.
~
When I first met my friend she was engaged. She was wearing an antique sapphire ring and Italian boots. Next time I saw her, in Myers, her hand was bare. I never asked. We were students then. We went dancing in a club in South Yarra. The boys in the band were students too. We fancied them, but at twenty-two we felt ourselves to be older women, already fading, almost predatory. We read The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone. This was in 1965; before feminism.
~
My friend came off the plane with her suitcase. ‘Have you ever noticed,’ she said, ‘how Australian men, even in their forties, dress like small boys? They wear shorts and thongs and little stripy T-shirts.’
~
A cat was asleep under a bush in our backyard each morning when we opened the door. We took him in. My friend and I fought over whose lap he would lie in while we watched TV.
~
My friend is tone deaf. But she once sang Blue Moon, verses and chorus, in a talking, tuneless voice in the back of the car going up the Punt Road hill and down again and over the river, travelling north; and she did not care. ~ My friend lived as a student in a house near the university. Her bed was right under the window in the front room downstairs. One afternoon her father came to visit. He tapped on the door. When no one answered he looked through the window. What he saw caused him to stagger back into the fence. It was a kind of heart attack, my friend said.
~
My friend went walking in the afternoons near our house. She came out of lanes behind armfuls of greenery. She found vases in my dusty cupboards. The arrangements she made with the leaves were stylish and generous-handed.
~
Before either of us married, I went to my friend’s house to help her paint the bathroom. The paint was orange, and so was the cotton dress I was wearing. She laughed because all she could see of me when I stood in the bathroom were my limbs and my head. Later, when it got dark, we sat at her kitchen table and she rolled a joint. It was the first dope I had ever seen or smoked. I was afraid that a detective might look through the kitchen window. I could not understand why my friend did not pull the curtain across. We walked up to Genevieve in the warm night and ate two bowls of spaghetti. It seemed to me that I could feel every strand.
~
My friend’s father died when she was in a distant country.
‘So now,’ she said to me, ‘I know what grief is.’
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘Sometimes,’ said my friend, ‘it is what you expect. And sometimes it is nothing more than bad temper.’
When my friend’s father died, his affairs were not in
order and he had no money.
~
My friend was the first person I ever saw break the taboo against wearing striped and floral patterns together. She stood on the steps of the Shrine of Remembrance and held a black umbrella over her head. This was in the 1960s.
~
My friend came back from Europe and found a job. On the days when she was not painting theatre sets for money she went to her cold and dirty studio in the city and painted for the other thing, whatever that is. She wore cheap shoes and pinned her hair into a roll on her neck.
~
My friend babysat, as a student, for a well-known woman in her forties who worked at night.
‘What is she like?’ I said.
‘She took me upstairs,’ said my friend, ‘and showed me her bedroom. It was full of flowers. We stood at the door looking in. She said, “Sex is not a problem for me.”’ ~ When the person…the man whose room my friend had taken came to dinner, my friend and he would talk for hours after everyone else had left the table about different modes of perception and understanding. My friend spoke slowly, in long, convoluted sentences and mixed metaphors, and often laughed. The man, a scientist, spoke in a light, rapid voice, but he sat still. They seemed to listen to each other.
‘I don’t mean a god in the Christian sense,’ said my friend.
‘It is egotism,’ said the man, ‘that makes people want their lives to have meaning beyond themselves.’
~
My friend and I worked one summer in the men’s underwear department of a big store in Footscray. We wore our little cotton dresses, our blue sandals. We were happy there, selling, wrapping, running up and down the ladder, dinging the register, going to the park for lunch with the boys from the shop. I was happy. The youngest boy looked at us and sighed and said, ‘I don’t know which one of youse I love the most.’ One day my friend was serving a thin-faced woman at the specials box. There was a cry. I looked up. My friend was dashing for the door. She was sobbing. We all stood still, in attitudes of drama. The woman spread her hands. She spoke to the frozen shop at large.
‘I never said a thing,’ she said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me.’
I left my customer and ran after my friend. She was halfway down the street, looking in a shop window. She had stopped crying. She began to tell me about… but it doesn’t matter now. This was in the 1960s; before feminism.
~
My friend came home from her studio some nights in a calm bliss. ‘What we need in work,’ she said, ‘are those moments of abandon, when the real stuff runs down our arm without obstruction.’
~
My friend cut lemons into chunks and dropped them into the water jug when there was no money for wine.
~
My friend came out of the surgery. I ran to take her arm but she pushed past me and bent over the gutter. I gave her my hanky. Through the open sides of the tram the summer wind blew freely. We stood up and held on to the leather straps. ‘I can’t sit down,’ said my friend. ‘He put a great bolt of gauze up me.’ This was in the 1960s; before feminism. The tram rolled past the deep gardens. My friend was smiling.
~
My friend and her husband came to visit me and my husband. We heard their car and looked out the upstairs window. We could hear his voice haranguing her, and hers raised in sobs and wails. I ran down to open the door. They were standing on the mat, looking ordinary. We went to Royal Park and flew a kite that her husband had made. The nickname he had for her was one he had picked up from her father. They both loved her, of course. This was in the 1960s.
~
My friend was lonely.
~
My friend sold some of her paintings. I went to look at them in her studio before they were taken away. The smell of the oil paint was a shock to me: a smell I would have thought of as masculine. This was in the 1980s; after feminism. The paintings were big. I did not ‘understand’ them; but then again perhaps I did, for they made me feel like fainting, her weird plants and creatures streaming back towards a source of irresistible yellow light.
~
‘When happiness comes,’ said my friend, ‘it’s so thick and smooth and uneventful, it’s like nothing at all.’
~
My friend picked up a fresh chicken at the market. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Feel this.’ I took it from her. Its flesh was pimpled and tender, and moved on its bones like the flesh of a very young baby.
~
I went into my friend’s room while she was out. On the wall was stuck a sheet of paper on which she had written: ‘Henry James to a friend in trouble: “throw yourself on the alternative life…which is what I mean by the life of art, and which religiously invoked and handsomely understood, je vous le garantis, never fails the sincere invoker—sees him through everything, and reveals to him the secrets of and for doing so.”’
~
I was sick. My friend served me pretty snacks at sensitive intervals. I sat up on my pillows and strummed softly the five chords I had learnt on my ukulele. My friend sat on the edge of a chair, with her bony hands folded round a cup, and talked. She uttered great streams of words. Her gaze skimmed my shoulder and vanished into the clouds outside the window. She was like a machine made to talk on and on forever. She talked about how much money she would have to spend on paint and stretchers, about the lightness, the optimism, the femaleness of her work, about what she was going to paint next, about how much tougher and more violent her pictures would have to be in order to attract proper attention from critics, about what the men in her field were doing now, about how she must find this out before she began her next lot of pictures.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to think about any of that. Your work is terrific.’
‘My work is terrific,’ said my friend on a high note, ‘but I’m not.’ Her mouth fell down her chin and opened. She began to sob. ‘I’m forty,’ said my friend, ‘and I’ve got no money.’
I played the chords G, A and C.
‘I’m lonely,’ said my friend. Tears were running down her cheeks. Her mouth was too low in her face. ‘I want a man.’
‘You could have one,’ I said.
‘I don’t want just any man,’ said my friend. ‘And I don’t want a boy. I want a man who’s not going to think my ideas are crazy. I want a man who’ll see the part of me that no one ever sees. I want a man who’ll look after me and love me. I want a grown-up.’
I thought, if I could play better, I could turn what she has just said into a song.
‘Women like us,’ I said to my friend, ‘don’t have men like that. Why should you expect to find a man like that?’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ said my friend.
‘Because men won’t do those things for women like us. We’ve done something to ourselves so that men won’t do it. Well—there are men who will. But we despise them.’
My friend stopped crying.
I played the ukulele. My friend drank from the cup.
ALL THOSE BLOODY YOUNG CATHOLICS
WATTO! ME OLD darling. Where have you been. Haven’t seen you since…Let me buy you a drink. Who’s your mate? Jan. Goodday Jan. What’ll it be, girls? Gin and tonic, yeah. Lemon squash. Fuckin’—well, if that’s what you. Hey mate. Mate. Reluctant barmen round here. Mate. Over here. A gin and bloody nonsense, a scotch and water for myself, and a—Jesus Mary and Joseph—lemon squash. I know. I asked her but that’s what she wanted. Well and how’s the world been treating you Watto me old mate. No, not a blue. I was down the Yarra last week in the heat, dived in and hit a snag. Gerry? Still in Perth. I saw him not so long ago, still a young pup, still a young man, a young Apollo, a mere slip of a lad. I went over to Perth. I always wanted to go over. I’ve been everywhere of course in Australia, hate to hear those young shits telling me about overseas, what’s wrong with here? anyway what? yeah well I’ve got this mate who’s the secretary of the bloody Waterside Workers, right? I says to him, think I’ll slip over to Perth. He says, Why don’t you
go on a boat? I says, What? How much? Don’t shit me, he says. For you—nothin’. Was I seasick? On the Bight? No fear. Can’t be seasick when you’re as drunk as. Can’t be the two at the same time. All those seamen drunk, playin’ cards, tellin’ lies—great trip, I tell you, great trip. Course I got off at the other end had a bit of trouble, once you’re back on dry land the booze makes itself felt, but anyway there I was. Yeah yeah, I’m gettin’ to Gerry. Blokes on the boat asked me where I was goin’, I says, Don’t worry, I’ve got this mate, he works at the university—I didn’t tell ’em he was a bloody senior—what is it? senior lecturer? Reader. Anyway first bloke I run into was this other mate, Jimmy Clancy, you’d remember him I suppose, wouldn’t like him, bi-i-ig strong bloke, black beard, the lot, always after the women, well he hasn’t changed, still running after ’em, I told him off, I lectured him for an hour. Anyway it was great to see him again. He used to hang round with Laurie Driscoll, Barney O’Brien, Vincent Carroll, Paddy Sheehan, you know. Paddy Sheehan? Pad hasn’t had a drink in—ooh, must be eight years. He was hittin’ it before, though. Tell you about Pad. I was in Sydney not so long ago, went up for the fight, well, on the way home I went through Canberra and I tell you it was shockin’. Yeah I said shockin’. Ended up in a sort of home for derelicts—the Home for Homeless Men! Well, I come to out there, I had plenty of money see, it was the fight, the time Fammo beat Whatsisname up Sydney, I had tons of money, tons of it, I says to this Christian bloke out there—he wasn’t one of those rotten Christians, he was one of the ones with heart—I says to him, Listen mate, I don’t want to stay here, I’ve got plenty of money, just get me out of here—I’ve got this mate Paddy Sheehan who’s a government secretary or something, so the bloke comes out to pick me up in a bloody chauffeur-driven car, bloke in front with a peaked cap and that, Paddy with his little white freckly face sitting up in the back in his glory—he really laid it on for me. So I says goodbye to the Christian bloke, I says Here, have some of this and I give him some money. How much? Oh I dunno, I had handfuls of it, it was stickin’ out of me pockets, I just passed him a handful of notes and away I went in the big black car. All right all right, I’m gettin’ to Gerry. Perth wasn’t I. Yeah well we sat and we talked of the times that are gone, with all the good people of Perth looking on. Ha ha! Course we did. He’s still a boy, full of charm, like a son to me. He was a young tough buck then, love, all handsome and soft, wet behind the ears, and Watto here done the dirty on him, didn’t you Watto! Yes you did, you broke his heart, and he was only a boy, yes sweetheart—what was your name again? Watto here she hates me to tell this story, yes she does! He was only a child, straight out of a priestery—no, must have been a monkery because he said he had to wear sandals—course he’d never fucked in his life! Didn’t know what to do with his prick! And Watto here goes through him like a packet of salts! Makes mincemeat out of him! Poor bloke never knew what hit him. Drove us all crazy with his bloody guitar playing. She told him didn’t you Watto that she didn’t want no bloody husband but he wouldn’t listen, he was besotted, drawin’ her pictures, readin’ her the poems of W. B. Yeats, playin’ his flamin’ guitar—they used to fuck all day and all night, I swear to you love—no shutup Watto! it’s true isn’t it! I dunno what the other young Catholics in the house thought was goin’ on in there—but one day I gets this lettuce and I opens their door a crack and I shoves the lettuce through and I yells out, If you fuck like rabbits you better eat like ’em too! He he! Look at her blush! Ah Watto weren’t they great times. Drinkin’ and singin’ and fightin’ over politics. I remember a party at Mary Maloney’s place when Laurie Driscoll spewed in the backyard and passed out—next morning at home he wakes up without his false teeth—he had to call poor Mary and get her to go out in the garden and poke around and see if he hadn’t left his teeth behind as well as the contents of his guts. Oh, all those bloody young Catholics—’cept for Gerry, who was corrupted by Watto here—don’t get me wrong Wats! you done him a favour—they were all as pure as the driven snow—dyin’ of lust but hangin’ on like grim death for marriage, ha ha! They thought they were a fire-eatin’ mob in those days but they’re all good family men now. Course, I was never allowed to bring no women home, bloody Barney he tells me, Don’t you dare bring those hooers of yours back here, you old dero—I had to sneak them round the lane and into me loft out the back. And finally Watto here gives young Gerald the khyber, he moons tragically for weeks till we’re all half crazy—and then he met Christine. Byoodiful. Wasn’t she Watto. Byoodiful…ah…she’s still me best mate. Gerry was that keen to impress her the first time he got her to come back to our place, he says to me, Now you stay away, I don’t want no foul language, she’s a lovely girl. So I stays away and that night I come back real late from the Waiters’ Club with this sheila and we’re up in the loft and in the morning I didn’t know how I was goin’ to get her out of there! They were all down in the yard doin’ their bloody exercises, Barney and Dell and Derum—so in despair I pushes her out the door of the loft and she misses the ladder and falls down into the yard and breaks both her flamin’ legs. Lucky Barney was a final year medical student. Oh Christine was beautiful though—I’ll never forget the night you and her brought Gerry back here, Watto, he was that drunk, he’d been found wallowing with his guitar in the flowerbeds outside that girls’ dormitory joint you two lived in—youse were draggin’ him along between you and he was singin’ and laughin’ and bein’ sick—and then you went off, Watto, and left the poor young girl stranded with this disgusting drunk on her hands! Laugh! Aaahhhhh. Course much later she goes off with Chappo. I remember the night she disappeared. And years after that she took off with that show pony McWatsisname, McLaughlin. Didn’t you know that? Yeah, she went off with him—course, she’s livin’ with someone else now. Oh, a beautiful girl. Gorgeous. They fought over her, you know. They fought in the pub, and bloody McLaughlin had a fuckin’ aristotle behind his back while poor Chappo had his fists up honourable like this—I got the bottle off McLaughlin. At least if you blue you should do it proper. Cut it out, I says, look you don’t have to fight over cunt! If I was to fight over every sheila I’d ever fucked there’d be fights from here to bloody Darwin! Why do they have to fight over them? Those bloody young Catholics. Gerry. All right all right. And fighting over women! You don’t have to fight for it! Look if I can’t get a fuck there’s a thousand bloody massage parlors between here and Sydney, I can go into any one of them and get myself a fuck, without having to fight for it. I never put the hard word on you, did I Watto, in all those years? Well, Gerry. Yeah, he was in great form, lovely boy, always felt like a father to him, I taught him everything he knew, I brought him up you might say. Oh, he’s been over London and all over the place but he’s back over the west now, just the same as ever. Aaaah Watto I’ve been in love with you for twenty years. Go on. It must be that long. Look at her—turns away and giggles. Well, fifteen then. You’re looking in great shape. Gerry. Yeah, yeah…he was a lovely boy. Don’t I remember some story about you and him in Perth once? Something about a phone box in the middle of the night? Oh. Right. I’ll stop there. Not a word more. You’re lookin’ in great shape Watto. Your tits are still little though aren’t they. How’s the baby, my girlfriend? How old is she now? Nine. Jeesus Christ. She still goin’ to marry me? I seen her come in here lookin’ for your old man one time, he was drinkin’ in here with some of the old crowd, she comes in the door there and looks round and spots him. Comes straight up to him and says, Come home! And bugger me if he doesn’t down his drink and get up and follow her out the door as meek as a lamb. Pleeez sell no more drink to my father / It makes him so strange an’ so wild…da da dummm…/ Oh pity the poor drunkard’s child. A real little queen. Imagine the kid you and I would have had together eh Watto—one minute swingin’ its little fists smashin’ everything, next minute mai poetry, mai music, mai drawing! Schizo. Aaah Jesus. Have another drink. You’re not going? Ah stay! I only ever see you once every five years. Give us a kiss then. I
always did love ya. Ha ha! Don’t thank me. Happy New Year and all the best. Ta ta.