Alone

The sky deepens over the row of little yellow shops. Inside the cascading pane of the fish shop ‘H KRHTH’ the pewter fish gape with leaking, tarnished eyes, morwong, salmon trout, garfish. One red crayfish huddles, the rubbery petals under her belly spread open in a fan and showing her cluster of eggs. A tufted hand grabs her. I turn and drag open the door of the telephone box hot and rank with stale smoke and sweat. Beetles batter on yellow glass walls.

I prop my pennies in the slot and dial Mum. Engaged. Time passes. How time flies. A heavy moth slithering and flapping has black eyes painted on her wide wings. I could ring. I must have spent hours in this hot, bright box mouthing into the mouthpiece words that can never be said again, the dialling tone burring in my ear, a hail of moths and beetles battering. Will I ring? I flick the tattered directory open.

If, rather than die tonight, I let slow time carry me past all this, years and years on? I might never see her again, anywhere, ever. I might meet her again one day ten or twenty years from now, in some café or other, blood shaking my heart. A dim lamp to tangle that harsh hair.

That’s not worth living for. I’ve spoilt my life. There are no new starts, no new leaves. Palimpsests. I am a palimpsest of purple prose. I dial again.

Jangle clank. Home, with the hall light burning in the leaded green glass on the front door. Squat behind the hedge, a sagging weatherboard villa with daisies in the couch grass, a stained giant clam shell under the dripping garden tap, a black spider under the cover of the water meter, and lantana under the brown-blinded bow window.

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of stunted brains,

Of endless vapid villas

And clotted, leaking drains.

Did I drag you away from the TV? Or was it the latest Digest? Or were you getting Dad his tea? Bubble and squeak and a lean rasher of a Sunday night, or baked beans on toast, all slack and cosy in your dressing gown, your brinded hair slipping out of your French roll.

‘Is that you, is it, Shirl? Happy birthday, darl! Well, and about time too! You caught me in the bath!’

You laid your furrowed rump in surging swirls of water, raising bony knees. On your curled pubic hair bubbles glowed bronze, and at the base of your sounding white belly, a white island gold-rippled, and about the pursy bivalve between your thighs.

I soaped your back. You were moaning in pain. The suds rippled down into your shaven armpits and down your loose thighs, scumming and shadowing the water, weaving laces of light shaking over aged flesh embalmed in honey. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

‘Never mind. I’m in my dressing gown. You’re late, dear. On your way out, now, are you?’

‘But it’s your birthday! I’ve been looking forward. You know you said you’d be coming Home!’

‘Oh, Shirl. How thoughtless can you get. Here’s me going to all the trouble of doing a roast dinner, a whole leg and four vegies, we’ll take a week to get through it all, and I didn’t dish out till three, I was that sure you’d be here. Why didn’t you ring?’

I don’t think of Home as it is now that you’ve had it done up. When I was little there was an alcove with a gas stove on legs, a kookaburra painted on the door, Early Kooka. There was an ice-chest in the darkest corner, a copper and a long pole and troughs for washday, a yellow jug of boiling water for hands and faces before breakfast. Porridge with the names scribbled in golden syrup. Milk with its blue-beaded net.

‘There are some cards for you. Mrs Mac popped over a while ago with a plate of her shortbreads she baked for the occasion, Auntie Eth just rang to wish you many happies…’

I’m never coming Home again. We’ll never see each other again. You’ve never seen my room with its glowing grapes and cabbages and sodden, gilded fish. A skull stares at the sun-slit wall. I have a mirror, and a candle, and deep port wine. Don’t come tomorrow when they notify you. What would be the point?

I quite liked being a waitress. It paid the rent. Men kept trying to pick me up. Are you all woman? one snarled. I went home with the black boy. Rum, honey, sour oranges. He cried, and slept.

‘Oh well, I suppose that settles it, then. If you can’t, you can’t. I did try to get on to you last night, did the lady tell you? What was her name again?’

‘She sounds such a nice person over the phone. We had quite a chat. You’re not having too many late nights, are you, dear?’

At the hot, blinded window on summer afternoons we children lay in wait for the ice-cart. The horse stamped and twitched, fly-bitten: masses of brown shit bulged from its brown rump plop on the soft asphalt of our road. Sullen, the ice-man jabbed with his pick. Fragments of ice fell glittering. We stood around and sucked the stinging ice, watching the cart lurch clip clop away and blowflies swarm.

Birthday, deathday. The University is next to the great graveyard’s jagged marbles and dry grass.

‘Your dad and myself wouldn’t want you to think of us as spoilsports or anything like that, you know, dear, but we do worry. When’ll you be down to see us now?’

‘I can’t say for sure. You see, I’m flat out all day at the café. By the time I knock off I’ve simply had it…’

I cry, much of the day, and go out in the evening. I flick the tattered directory open at Catherine’s number. It is there. I am embalmed in amber glass.

‘You’re quite a stranger. All summer we hardly set eyes on you from one week to the next, what with exams and then you taking it into your head to go hitchhiking all over the place goodness only knows where and then leaving Home. How time flies! It must be well over six months now since you moved into your flat and in all that time you haven’t been to see us once.

‘If it wasn’t so awkward for me to get out and about since Dad’s op I could have popped up to see you. I miss you, you know, Shirl…’

For years of safe Sunday nights I knelt on the faded floral carpet by the hoarse gas fire, baggy in Aunt Eth’s old chenille dressing gown, daubing water-colours for school with the radio on full, the Hit Parade, Daddy and Paddy, Crosbie Morrison. I rode your ancient bike, the huge shadow of its basket lurching all around me, up our gold-patched street to the Greek’s for four pieces of flake and two bob of chips, please, for you to pop wrapped in the newspaper, into the hot oven, reeking of dripping and vinegar and printer’s ink, the times you didn’t feel like beans or bubble and squeak. Pop up to the fish shop for us will you, Shirl, I just don’t feel up to cooking tea tonight, there’s a good girl.

‘All right then, dear. I just thought I’d ask, I know it isn’t like you to bear a grudge.’

‘Oh. You know how it is. He has his good and his bad days. Mustn’t grumble, you know.’

‘He took it pretty hard, of course. He had his heart set on you going to University and all that. And when you broke it to him that you weren’t going on, well it was quite a blow, you have to admit.’

‘And you didn’t so much as send a get well card when he was in the hospital, Shirl.’

‘It’s hard to say. He might have. For show, he might. It’s hard to tell with Dad. Deep down in his heart of hearts…’

Plump, pompous, ponderous, prosy, parsimonious, pious, patronising Podsnap. His red nape abristle over his stiff collar, his bald pate glooming over the financial pages. Picture of a stockbroker with a heart of hearts.

‘Remember us to her, won’t you. It’s lovely to know you’ve got a nice friend like that. We all took quite a liking to her. You need someone to bring you out of your shell. Or your ivory tower, which is it? You always were a mite antisocial from a little girl.’

A dusty, red-eyed moth flutters, thumping the hot panes. She stayed that night in my room. She came to my bed by candlelight. Naked to naked. I remember our yellow flickering bodies, her nipple in my mouth, and her unbelievable wet secret lips bared for the first time.

‘Oh. Better make it snappy then. Well, remember, don’t work too hard, dear. I still can’t see why you have to work in a café when you’ve got your Leaving. You could just as soon find an easier job. What do you get out of being a waitress, anyway? You could get a nice job in a bank.’

‘Oh, I know we’ve been through all this before. I can’t help hoping you’ll see reason one day. Val’s fine, by the way. She’s gone to some Church do. She came top of the class in the last test, isn’t that marvellous, a hundred out of a hundred for Science. She was that disappointed you didn’t turn up today.’

Sudden headlights jerking over the empty road flash on the panes. Shadows slide on the footpath. A black-thatched head squat on shoulder pads stares in at the door, blandly smiling.

‘Yes, all right, then, dear. Oh, yes, by the way, before I forget, it’s Auntie Eth’s birthday next Friday, did you remember? Your birthday’s five days before hers. Poor soul, she’s been that lonely since your Uncle Bill passed on.’

Her footsteps tap away in my ear. The two golden children saunter out of the fish shop, probing avid fingers into their torn newspaper parcel, yelping, licking them. They goggle at me in the thick glass, then scamper off, singing:

‘Oh ma darlun, oh ma darlun,

Oh ma darlun Clementine,

Makes yer realise kids are lucky

To live in nineteen fifty-nine.’

Ten years ago I sang that. To live in nineteen forty-nine. Time passes. The faint moth spreads her painted eyes on the glass. Once Catherine stood in a telephone box and dialled Mum’s number. I picked up the phone.

The long river lay at our feet, wrinkled, gold-ruffled under the lamps of its arched bridges. A train flashed mirrored across. Gulls squalled. A rat on the muddy bank below leapt into the long grass. The black image of a man padding along the cycle path stopped, fumbled, and sent his bright arch of piss hissing over the coiling water.

‘There, Shirl? Only the Salvos taking up a collection. What was I saying? Oh, Auntie Eth’s birthday.’

‘Will you, dear? I knew you’d want to. A nice card’s just the very thing to cheer her up a bit.’ The slow shadow slides off the pane. ‘You always were her favourite niece, you know.’

‘Yes, well, Mum, I really have to go, they’re tapping on the door, so give Dad and Val my love, won’t you –’

I hang up. And that’s that, as you’d say. Pull your cosy gown tighter around you and go and have a bit of a warm by the fire. Sit trickling smoke between your lips to furl the frilly golden lamps and fray the warm shadows in corners.

I shove the door open and step into the cool street. He is still there, dark against the ripples of the fish shop window, lit smoke trailing from his lips and nostrils. A tram is clanking up the street, its long rod hopping and flashing along the netted wires. Two rows of streetlamps shake gold rings on the asphalt. His hand falls, yellow-furred, on my shoulder. I clutch my bag. I feel his thigh against my buttock, and gasp.

I jerk his hand off me, and step on to the road, under the high lamp. Darling. The green and gold tram lurches up and stops.