Alone

A hen wakes me, throbbing and squawking in the yard. I roll over in the sheets to eat a dripping peach, its brain-wrinkled stone lined with red velvet, and suck my fingers and lie back in the deep leaves’ slap and ripple.

Pebbles swell white and green under the cold sea. I squat, sink under the loud water, soaking my hot hair. Between hairy piles of the fallen pier I dive down to the shadow of a gull rolling in the green sky, and leaping up burst the wallowing sun with mirrored scarlet hands. I climb the water stair. A trailing blue jellyfish pulses and flares its milky brim in a mesh of ravelled light. A peacock’s eye of oil, now gold, now blue, bobs past. The gull swoops over its fragmented black-and-white image.

On the sodden sand water ruffles up my legs as I lie. The red sun swirls in my eyelids. In the woven shallows she sat wringing out her hair. Sheep blared on a high brown hill. And the squall and squabble of gulls. She lay in the late sun in a deep weedy pool dipping freckled apricots underwater on her wrinkled palms. She was coated with fine white hairs. So are you, she said. I slid into the surging water and the apricots rolled off, bobbing and nudging our tipped white breasts. She bent and took an apricot in her mouth, her hair afloat on the water, and pressed it cold and salty into my mouth. The low sun, green in the hollows of waves, lay on us lolling, shivering, eating wet apricots.

We crawled out over the hot rocks. The pool of spiralling copper shrank to a deep ball. Squatting in slippers of sand we wrung out our hair. A gull paddled with red webs the yellow sea.

A breeze breathes over my hot body laced with shadows. Dust swirls at the pane over green bubbles of grapes. The wall stares back with two slant eyes. Hairs glint in my armpits and groin, downed all over my arms ripened like apricots, half brown and speckled, half pale. The tree shakes shadows over me as I dress and ring with black my sun-speckled, mirrored eyes, brush my flickering hair and slowly plait it down my nape. A tangle of hairs fills the brush. A clock tolls six. I sit and wind my watch. Six more hours. I still have her books, among mine marching round the skirting board: her Eliot, and Dubliners, and Sons and Lovers, and Blake and Jude the Obscure. I daresay she’ll claim them when it’s all over.

I pull a sheet of thick paper from between the pages of my tattered Shelley, rub out its pencil scribbles and write in thick black mirror writing:

SUMMER

For Catherine

Dust

at the gold pane swirls

over grapes like green lamps. Hairs in my armpits

between my thighs,

all over me glistening

web me, waking sun-downed,

alone.

Palimpsests of purple poetry. The sun’s eyes on the wall are golden slits. That will be the first verse. I pencil a figure 1 in the margin and reread the rest of the black scrawl complete at last.

I don’t know if it’s any good. ‘Veins laced you/Dark with blood.’ The metaphor is no doubt an amputated football boot, Miss Jones would say. Is Mr Eliot lurking here with Sappho and Hopkins? And ‘valved’? moans Miss Jones.

Well anyway I rewrite it all in a curly black hand and pencil over it the same cupped hand and candle flame. The sun’s eyes close in my room. The skull glares on with amber eyes: I pluck out one of the earrings, wrap it in the poem and drop it into my black bag with my money and my key.

On my woollen shoulder, not a dead leaf, with one staring striped brown eye cringes a huge grey speckled insect. In a frenzy, jerking and flapping my futile hand, I batter at its torpid body until at last it stumbles off on to the window sill, props dark on the lucent grapes and lurches froglike out on to a bare twig close to the pane. I grab the sash.

I crane down with a placating smirk. In the dust under the prunus, tousled old Mrs O’Toole, her breasts rolling in a spotty apron, squats mixing layers’ mash with red pumping hands for her avid hens.

Hens crowd and claw and jab. The groping grasshopper grabs, if it is a grasshopper and not a locust or something: I jerk down the sash.

It squats, rocking on its red-streaked serrated hind legs. The blade of its folded wing, a skeleton leaf, glistens.

Rigid, I slowly, smoothly inch the sash up again and lean out, wincing sidelong.

Bent, she prods a hen lying ruffled in the sawdust of the henhouse. Its pale comb flops. She drags it out by a spread white wing and from the draggled frilly feather-down under the tail a long striped pink cord trails in the dust.

‘Look what they’ve gone and done!’ Her indignant mouth loose in her floured face. ‘Pulled ’er guts out! Saw a spot a blood on ’er tail yesterday but I never dreamed!’

The hens flounce, flaunting under the prunus. A spade grates and Mrs O’Toole, panting, shoves the corpse into the shallow hole and presses it flat with the spade. The dead hen breathes a hoarse sigh. I blanch with horror.

‘It’s on’y air,’ Mrs O’Toole sings out, making a face. She pats the grave flat, and wipes her forehead with a fat wrist. ‘I know what I wanted to ask yer. Did yer ring up yer mum?’

‘She was on the phone last night again. Said ter ring ’er back soon as yer got in. I pushed a note under yer door, yer can’t of seen it.’

‘No, it’s all right, thanks, she’ll be out just now. I’ll ring later. Thanks very much.’

It stares, still on its limp twig, as I haul the window down. There is a scrap of dusty paper by the door.

Dear Shirley,

Your Mum rung up nine p.m, tonight. She says please ring her back when you get in. You can use my phone if you like.

Yours sincerly,

May O’Toole.

What time did I get in? About two. That would never do. I fill a paper serviette with flour out of a brown paper bag with a hole in it. At night I have heard scuffling, squeaking, but there have never been any droppings. Clean, hungry little mouse, you’re welcome to share my flour. I take the thin bottle of green-gold olive oil, the camping knife and fork and the cracked willow-pattern plate and drop them in my basket with the last peach and old Jerry’s pineapple. That doesn’t fit. I shove it prickling under one arm and sidle with the basket and the brimming dish of sour, tarnished mullets down the dank stairs.

Beyond the grimed pane of the landing birds loop squealing, black flaring in the sun, huddling in crevices to launch themselves up and down on the gold air.

I see the sullen crippled boy heave himself over the tiles, through the kitchen doorway, down the passage into the cobbled yard. Out of work, he gets up with the sun six days a week to get the paper from the bleary old man sprawled with his bundles on the step of the milk bar. Grace Riley, deaf and bald in her rank weeds, is hunched drooling over the gas stove, clutching her dented black saucepan and slopping with a spoon bubbling brick-red spaghetti out of a tin. With age and envy grown into a hoop. But for the grace, I alwus say, Mrs O’Toole always says. With a sidelong grin or glare she hobbles past me. To the stair. And old Jerry and I have the great kitchen to ourselves.

By the hot pane I flour and frizzle the sodden fish, sucking the peach. A blow-fly buzzes. Jerry hacks and gobbles up black pudding, his nose hooked over his pan. The sun wobbles, oily, in the sink water. Dazzled, I hear a sunset cock hoot.

‘Yair. Right as rain. I could eat a horse. Probably am if it comes ter that. That O’Toole female’s been blabbun ter you, looks like. I shouldna et that bloody pet mince yesterday that’s a fack. Musta swallered a bone or somethun. It’s got the vittamins, yer know. Cookun it up fer an hour or so oughta kill the wogs, I dunno. Errp. Beg yours. Talkun wiv me mouf full, where’s me bloody manners, eh?’

I grin back, picking clean the white ribs of my fish. He thumbs off the cap of the bottle of milk in front of him. Mrs O’Toole, bouncing in with eggs in her muddy hands, stops and stares.

‘Sorright, Missus, ’smine, no’ yours. Knocked it orf meself first thing this mornun down Elgin Street, see.’

‘Man my age’s gotta keep ’is strength up. Bit a meat an’ milk ev’ry day, the odd egg now an’ again. Us elderly citizens get a pretty rough deal if you ask me.’ He peers at the pineapple and picks it up by its stiff crest, sniffing. ‘That me pine, love? Beaudy. Two bob? Well, I gotta shell out sooner or later, eh? ’Ere yar.’ He spins the coin across the table to me and tips the milk down his corded throat, gasping and scraping his free hand over the greasy bristles of his chin. I slosh hot glittery water over his dishes and mine, loosing rimmed globules of fat. The wall is laced with light. I shake soap frothing in the water.

Mrs O’Toole, striking a match, stoops to admire her tawny copper kettle, mottled deep magenta, iridescent as oil on mud, splashed with sea blue and gold.

Puss Cat, her owl eyes glazed green, comes padding shadowy over the uneven terracotta tiles.

‘It’s antique. I can’t bear to polish it up some’ow, it looks that pretty all stained. Pusspusspuss? ’Ere, Puss. Come ter mum. Poor Puss.’

She tips a clogged grey lump on to the gritty saucer under her chair. Squatting on lean and hungry haunches, draggled Puss Cat gnaws and slavers.

‘Where’ve you been all day, you naughty girl? Up ter no good, I’ll be bound. Oo, I’m a wake up ter you! Yes, I am so too.’

‘Yair. What I carn see next door’s not worth worryun about. Peepshows arn in it. What the butler saw!’

A red-frilled hen leaps on the sill and jabs, cocking a peeved eye, at the blowfly blundering inside the pane.

‘Got eyes like a hawk. It’s all them vittamins. Them two sheilas lars night! Big yeller busbies a hair an’ little tiny skirts up round their bums. Jeeze, were they ’ard at it! The blokes were bloody well queuein’ up out there by the gully trap. The light was on till sunup.’

‘Carn think ’ow yer never noticed it, Mrs O. With that row goin’ on I never got a wink a sleep all night.’

‘Well, if yer that fit yer can wipe up yer own sick off the table next time. Whadder yer think I am?’

‘Wasn’ mine, I tole yer this mornun. Yer know, Mrs O, yer’ll ’ave the perlice in ’ere after yer one a these days if yer don’ watch out.’

‘Yair. Tell that ter the Sergeant. Well, ladies, I’ll love yers an’ leave yers. Oh, an’ where’s Popeye the sailor man got to terday, that reminds me? Thought ’e was in port terday.’

‘Jeeze. Oh, thanks a lot, girlie. Nice ’n’ clean, eh? See yer bloomun face in um.’

‘That’s it. Shirley. That’s easy. This is no place fer a nice girl like you, Shirley. Bet your mum’d ’ave a pink fit if she knew the arf of what goes on in this place!’

‘Mindun everybody else’s business but yer own. If I ’aven’ just about ’ad enough a you!’

‘Orright. I can take a hint. I’ll love yers an’ leave yers then. Tooroo, ladies. G’night.’

He shambles out to the dark yard with his empty bottle, his frying pan and his bristling pineapple, and through the gold doorway of his room. His skeletal bicycle leans over the bare fireplace. His cockatoo, jerked out of sleep, scrambles up, biting a bar of her cage, witch-eyed. ‘’Ullo there, sweet’eart,’ they croak in unison.

‘Dirty old bludger,’ snorts Mrs O’Toole. ‘Know what the bottle’s for, doncher?’

‘’Is idea of a chamber pot! Doesun even wash it out first, what’s more. Put yer off milk fer life, wouldun it? Caught ’im emptyun it down the bath the other day. Red ’anded. Fair dinkum, ’senough ter make yer throw up, the things some of them get up ter. Yer know Mrs Riley, senile ole bag, never talks ter nobody?’

‘Yair. That’s ’er. But fer the Grace, like I alwus say. Yer wouldun believe what she was up ter. She’s got a room next ter one of them Greek girls, see. You know. There’s two of ’em an’ I carn remember which one’s Cooler an’ which one’s Tooler, any’ow it’s the single one with the long ’air.’

‘Is it? Funny names, aren’ they? I can never remember which one’s which. Any’ow, the ole girl’s got the room next ter this Cooler’s, see, an’ I was in there meself one night ’avun a look at some presents ’er fam’ly sent over when all of a sudden I started ’earun this filthy mutterun comun outa the wall! Oo’s that? I sez, an’ Tooler jus’ grins an’ sez, Zat ole lidy, she tok too much. Yer should of ’eard the things she was sayun. All about ’ow Australia’s beun turned into a bloody brothel, that’s bloody foreigners for yer, an’ so forth an’ fifth. Ev’ry single word clear as a bell. Never woulda thought she ’ad it in ’er. An’ the voice! Bloodcurdlun. Course I tole ’er orf about it next day. Well, yer carn ’ave that sort of thing goun on, even if the girl carn ’ardly unnerstan’ one word in ten. I mean it’s not decent. Now, look ’ere, Mrs Riley, I sez. It’s got ter stop. She never said a word. Jus’ glared at me like a snake an’ tottered upstairs. Far as I know she ’as stopped. I ’ope she ’as. Turn a blind eye, what else can yer do? Poor ole buggers, the lot of ’em, one foot in the grave. Yer carn jus’ turf ’em out, can yer? I dunno.’

‘That was a lovely cuppa tea.’ She heaves a deep wheeze. ‘Ah ha. Might go up an’ ’ave a bath later on. Nice an’ ’ot in that copper bath. Feel like a queen.’ Mirrored, glimmering, in golden water. ‘Doll meself up a bit. Put me face on. Feel like somethun the cat dragged in,’ moans Mrs O’Toole.