Alone

A cat shrieks. Behind the high rope of leaves at the open window my room is dark and cool. The hot grapes in the bowl have seeds in their deep green globes. I am alone. It is the Sunday of my eighteenth birthday. I have slept in.

I lift the warm sheet and shadows begin to move over me and lie in bony hollows of my hips and between my breasts. Brown hairs curl in my armpits and about and above the long closed lips between my thighs.

License my roaving hands, and let them go, Before, behind, between, above, below.

At the funeral home they must wash you there, wash you all over. They stop up the orifices. There was a phenol stench where Granpa’s body lay mounted in the coffin to be viewed. A casket is dearer, madam. The knotted throat was sewn into a calico shroud, the yellow mouth glued shut. They had plucked the fierce white hairs out of its ears and nose, and powdered its domed old pate. I kissed the cold mask over the skull bone. Death, I said. Death, this is me.

My watch has stopped. They were all expecting me home today to celebrate my birthday in the bosom of the family. Dad sunk brooding in his armchair. Mum drooling smoke, a cold eye cocked at the mantel clock. Val flouncing.

On the dull mahogany of the dressing table among books and pots and pans the sheep’s skull from the brown hill stares back with jewelled sockets in its splintered, yellow-toothed muzzle. The ribbed leaves of the cabbage, a give-away at sixpence, come on, lucky to get it, the lucky last at this price, yours for sixpence, miss, curl and cling in a pallid ball. In a dish of vinegar water lie two gutted, sequinned fish with torn gold-leaf eyes. The tilted oval of the mirrored sky is laced with leaves. Every mirror is a fragment of the one. A cat squalls.

Just tell me what you get out of living in this squalid old dump, she said once. Tell me, why should we live here? Is it another one of your penances or something? Like drudging round in that filthy café?

Where are you? Where were you last night? When the Library closed everyone, but not you, came shuffling and coughing away from its musty, high, echoing circles of books and its green-coned lamps down the marble staircases and the stone stairs in the lawns on to the thronged streets gaudy with warm rain. But not you. Where are you? Down on the Yarra Bank? With your freaks and cranks and fanatics. Afterwards we walked to watch the black ships on the sliding sunset river.

The river glints

Slime and oil

Gulls prance

In the sludge tread

A rat’s corpse

Bled

The red sun sinks in eddy and coil.

Pastiche, intones Miss Jones, is something of a misapplication of your undoubted intelligence.

At the market, in the crowds jostling over the cobbles – blood glinted in the noon glare – I was sure I would find you. I bought my sodden mullets. From a yelling Chinaman I bought furry peaches, the very last cabbage and a ripe pineapple. I munched a sugared doughnut, walking in the sun, amber drops burning on my ears.

Yesterday evening on the north bank of the tumid river black-robed hags were clambering to pick great bunches of those feathery tall stems that smell of aniseed. You remember. Their houses were black blocks patched with the yellow glowing out of window-frames and doorways, under the red sky. Outside one with a vine over the lintel people sat among fallen golden leaves and the shadows of other leaves above them. The bridge lamps were lit, swaying in the red water. The hill was leafy and dark. There were no lights on in your house.

On my last birthday we were sitting together with the family in our hot shiny cyclamen kitchen over the good tablecloth and the good dinner set, gorged on roast lamb and gravy and mint sauce, roast potato, sweet potato, three potato, four, pumpkin and parsnip and grated carrot raw. You’ll come again soon won’t you dear, we’d love to have you. I’m always at Shirl to bring her school friends home, aren’t I Dad?

I rubbed and sloshed with the rank grey dishmop gravy-clogged plates and knives and forks and the slimy black baking tin. You wiped up. In my own room behind the golden falling fingers of the fig you lay reading The Cocktail Party. In the hot bar of sun on the lino I squatted to brush my drying hair over my face, the sun a small glitter in my iridescent fell of hair, the lit brush flashing amethyst, emerald, opal on to my lap. Sunlit, my eyes are green-speckled. In the old brown radio, crackle and boom, the Pastoral Symphony.

Now it would be time – ‘Shir-irl, the iron’s hot, Shirl’ – to go and iron the same old striped, stained hankies and tea-towels and pillow-cases on the cleared kitchen table, dark by now under the lace curtain limp over grey palings.

I push a shiny wrinkled hand under the cool pillow. My silent watch shows ten. I never listen to music now. I pull out and unfold rustling the copy of my last letter with your lock of bright hair inside and a pencil sketch over the thick carbon words of my hand cupping a candle flame.

Darling,

It’s six months today since I came home to find you gone. You shun me. You treated me as a stranger when we met in the street. I still love you and nothing else means a thing to me. What can I do now? While you loved me too I could brave any humiliation. Since I have known that you really don’t love me any more I just stay shut in here all day and skulk around the city, night after night. It’s not true that I’ll find a man and get over it, as you said. I can’t bear a man to touch me. I think I might be mad. I’ll never go to the University now, nor go to Asia, to Europe, nor ever be a writer, nor have a child. I never listen to music now. I am an object of scorn. Next Sunday week, on my eighteenth birthday, I am going to kill myself. You did love me once, didn’t you? I would like to see you once more before I die.

There was, of course, no need for any signature. I thrust the letter back. I posted the original days ago. She might still come. Day after day I have crossed off. Oh, darling, come here, she said. Sullen, I hung back. Now she has gone forever. If she doesn’t come, or if she does, soon I’ll know if all bonds are broken and I am at a loose end.

A tram trundles past. In the yard a cat howls. Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed. On bare arched feet I stalk to the window, plucking the dusty green curtain across to cover me. On the landlady’s bony black puss, ringed by bristling toms, one tabby leaps snarling and claws her down and rapes her, squalling, inside the intent still circle.

Oh, Mrs O’Toole,

It’s bloody croole.

There’s poor Puss Cat

Impaled, squashed flat

By a brute like that

While a dozen more droole,

Mrs O’Toole.

Catherine was raped. She told me all about it, or all that could be told. As we lay coiled, golden by candlelight, in each other’s arms she would ask, Is your body happy? Now and then, half asleep, I would feel her suddenly kick and jerk against me.

It’s as if you were repulsing me somehow. Don’t you want me with you? Don’t you love me?

She would kiss me, smiling, gentle, golden all over, and hot and damp: I watched her fall asleep in my cool arms. I know now why she kicked and jerked. Much good it does me. I’ve never felt like that. I realised at last what it was when I went with the boy who used to sit staring at me in the café, and he did it too, and cried out. Before that all I knew was that it’s what you have in mind when you dream of climbing stairs, according to Freud. I didn’t think women could do it.

We climbed up dark stairs to his dark, dusty room. Too shy to speak, we kept glancing at each other and looking hastily away. He turned on a lamp on the dressing table, pulled down the blind behind the torn lace curtain, gave me his towel and took me down to the bathroom. If only it had been her with me instead.

I stood in a grimed tub, water glittering, mantling me, a gilded moth fluttering on the pane. I sat naked by lamplight in front of the mirror and peeled an orange for him, an orange for me, peeling glowing segments of veined cold oranges. My fingers burned scarlet against the lamp. His room was on the top floor of another old, dank slum, but the one window looked to seaward, its lace curtain breathing salt air.

We coiled and fed each other spoonfuls of the thick honey. He squatted, kindling a coal fire in a cracked grate. He turned his back to undress and stumbled to me, darker still by lamplight, his pale-palmed hands cupping his groin. Loose, my hair lay flickering over my breasts. I was golden, insolent, superb on his rumpled bed. I had smeared between my thighs with cold cream. By then we had drunk between us half a bottle of burning rum. He clambered clinging on top of me, clamped his hard mouth over mine.

He flung away. A warm trickle ran down my rigid thigh, and he sagged, sobbing, against me. I held his rough head.

When I came back from the bathroom he lay turned to the wall, firelight wrinkling and sliding on his bare back. I lay down behind him and pulled the sheet up over us. I lay awake for hours listening to the fire, to the sea. The curtain woke me, breathing loudly in the dawn wind. On the morning sea the sun flashed and tracked, looped. Golden light filled the room, tarnishing the lit lamp: the fire lay in ashes in the dim grate. The silent street below was still deep in shadow.

As I crept past I saw him in the dark bathroom. He was sitting on the rim of the lion-pawed, grimy tub, rubbing his black hair with a towel. I vanished, leaving no addresses.

I never went back to the café again, not even for my pay. Perhaps he tried to find me there, perhaps not. It was a night to put in a poem, not deep and real, not love.

A slow tawny-furred bee propped on the sill bobs and strokes with dainty legs its goggling head and twitching glossy belly, and lumbers away over the yard where bright hens among the leaves strut and peck, ruby-combed, fenced in with shadows.

Blades of yellow sun strike the bare spare bedstead, the tangled, fluffy shadows under its wire mesh and the wardrobe against the cracked wall. Howls shudder in the air. The mirror flames. Four o’clock. Padding with fastidious feet on the warm boards, I sink back into my cool bed and rub one against the other over the edge the soles of both soiled feet.

We crept out of our windows once for a long walk in the winter streets, rain-lashed at first then still under the light of stars and moons, streetlamps and puddles and lit, shut windows; under trees budding leaves and water, green drops and white. We decided to hitchhike across India and Persia and Greece and Italy and live in Paris by such another spangled river, maybe in Saint Germain des Prés, shuffle through chestnut leaves, breakfast at dawn at the Halles on onion soup, in lamplit rain wander cobbled streets of jet-scaled snakeskin. Fourmillante cité pleine de rêves. That is all cities, this city too. Fourmillantes cités, cités pleines de rêves. Toutes les cités du monde.

My set of poems Night I was going to call City, then City Night. I must burn Night. Night and city have become one to me. The city by day is a grey void of dust and sun and jagged concrete. By night every glowing window is a lit stage. We outside are masked by darkness. Others like me creep about at night. You dumping your suitcase in the ruined hut, I saw you. I am furtive and secret: I cover my tracks, burn my boats. I will not betray you. Do not threaten me.

I swooped down street after golden empty street that night, cowering, looking behind.

My scrapheap bicycle was stolen one day from beside the gully trap in the yard. In its place, a pile of faeces heaped under the lamp. I am a snooper on foot now, much given to peering in at inhabited windows and doorways. I have always been outside, an onlooker. She was the only person to ever love me.

I pull the heavy curtain across and set a match to the burnt wick of the candle in an oilgreen gloom flickering gold, to rummage under tangles of clothes in the wardrobe for Night and her letters. I slip the few creased sheets out of their envelope, spread them out and squat down in brimming candlelight.

‘I told you I was asked today if we are lesbians. You were outraged. But if you will openly display your feelings, how can you object to their being discussed?’

After the youth concert I walked out of the crowded doughnut bar on to the gold street. On the long bridge as I leaned watching swivelling coils of water she came up behind me, her mouth sandy with sugar. ETERNITY, said the bridge.

‘Jealous scenes like last night’s little performance will do nothing but heap humiliation on us both.’

I trudged home from the café. She was in the kitchen with her friends, tossing and gobbling pancakes. A mouth-organ wailed, wavered. She called to me. Old Jerry was gorping, gobbling too. I stalked upstairs. I locked the door.

‘I’m going away for the weekend. Don’t come or ring my place. You expect me to be totally obsessed too. You’ve given up your studies to be a waitress, well that’s a sacrifice I don’t see any point in and it doesn’t give you any claim on me. I haven’t a moment to myself. The only time I can study now is at six in the morning and then you lie awake watching me. You’ve driven all my friends away. Soon my parents are bound to hear about it. People ask me why I put up with your scenes and sulks and frenzies, your insane jibes.’

I had stood up and walked out alone in the middle of the English Literature examination. I had waited for her by a pond. Raindrops split in rings and rings black branches and one black bird. I didn’t see you, she said. What made you do it? I no longer knew. It was a good paper. She got a first. We sat until late in the all-night coffee and pie shop and read The Waste Land to each other. I laughed, cried, numb with triumph at my awful daring.

A good poem is hard and clean like a bone, all that is left of so many days and nights.

On the morning of the next examination I sat in the sun on St Kilda pier. I remember hot wood and the green coils of the weaving, woven water. After tea that night I broke the news to Mum and Dad, who were not pleased.

‘Whatever happens, never forget that it was not something imaginary between us, but deep and real.’

At that I screw her pages into tight balls; the scrawled sheets of Night as well, my Night which I know by heart; the little calendar too, with each day until yesterday crossed out with a thick black stroke, signifying? Nothing. I take the saucepan from beside the hollow skull, set it on the floor and cram in the blossoming paper balls. The candle flares, dripping. The papers, red-fringed, flare bright one by one high up to my crouching breasts and fall and sink back into black roses that I stir and poke to flakes. I push the hot saucepan under my bed and pull the curtain off the sky. My eyes are oval mirrors, leaf-laced.

I’ll never go to the University now. That’s where she is. I love it for its age and mellow studiousness. Fretty Gothic arches and iron windows, slender bars and panes over walls of gilded dusty books, snug inside the moulting branches of cold trees. The cold cloisters echo. Newman and Queen’s and Ormond and Trinity fold it round. In the grounds of Ormond I found the blind kitten. Did it die? Abandoned. Stone towers and golden windows. Towery city and branchy between towers. I read, much of the night, and go mad in the morning.

I have done forever, I proclaimed, with prescribed texts and essay topics and examination questions. I threw all that off once and for all walking, stalking, out of the booming Exhibition Building. Analyse, dissect, account for, compare, appreciate, estimate, discriminate, calculate, explicate, elucidate, expatiate: repudiate. All for a lifetime of battling to teach more and more bored and sullen schoolchildren. Expiate. I will not be taught or teach, Shirley Nunn informed her stunned parents.

If she comes, I’ll hear her footsteps hesitate outside the door, then stride in without knocking. Oh, darling, come here. No, it’s locked, She’ll stop and turn the handle and I’ll leap to unlock the door and she’ll stride in and lean against it without a word. And I? Abject. Abject of scorn.

I throw the sheet over me from my feet to my tangled hair. Through its thin weave the golden room is filmed with a mesh of bubbles. I close my eyes against the pillow.

I love you. Where are you? Aren’t you coming? You have to come. You do still love me. Still love me. Perhaps it is not too late.