Alone

And lo and behold at my very door at last, blood pounding my heart, I am alive, alive and she is here! She will hold me in her arms, gold-furled by candlelight. She will hold me. You’re so smug you’re not human. I love you. Oh, darling!

‘Oo-oo! Shirley!’ trill the ripe tones of Mrs O’Toole through the keyhole. ‘Can I come in fer a sec?’

The door thumps and shakes. The handle turns. I leap up, hurl the empty port bottle trundling far under the wrong bed, drag my sleeves down over my stinging wrists embossed with dry blood.

And the door swings open on Mrs O’Toole, you deluded foole, of all people. The candle splutters. Vast shadows of her caper and flounce on all four walls as Mrs O’Toole, steamy and swathed in cerise chenille, caulked and rouged comes prancing in and perches cross-kneed on the end of my draggled bed. Scratching one shaven shank.

The whole still room has port wine on its breath, port wine and rank cabbage. The candle flaps, mirrored in the pane and in the oval glass, in its own pool of wet wax, in her eyes and mine. She is wrinkling her broad nose.

‘Yairs. Not that like smoke, though, I s’pose, more like ashes or somepun.’

‘Oh, yairs.’ She snuffles, scratches her knobbled knee. ‘Yer don’ mind me switchun the light on, do yer, dear, jus’ while I’m ’ere?’ And thick light suffuses the room. ‘There!’ she sighs. ‘That’s more like it! Not that I didun go through the candlelight stage meself when I was a girl. Moonlight an’ roses an’ so forth an’ fifth. Gives me the willies now, though. Like some sorta wake. Me nerves are that bad ternight.’ She flares her nostrils, shrugging. ‘Smells more like someone’s incinerator, I would a thought.’

‘You ’aven’ gone an’ ’ad it cut! Oh, Shirl, what a shame! What made yer do it?’

‘Aoh, such lovely ’air, too. Yer one – yer best feature. Yer shouldun ’ave. Let’s see the back. Mmm. Bit uneven. Come up ter me suite in the mornun, I’ll straighten it up a bit for yer.’

‘Oh, no, it’s all right, thanks all the same, Mrs O’Toole, it’ll do, really.’

‘I’lI make a good job of it. If I ’ad a quid fer ev’ry ’aircut I’ve done in my lifetime! You’ll be sorry, though, I bet. You mark my words!’

‘Fer all our married life my first ’ubby wouldun ’ear of me cuttun me ’air. Over my dead body was what ’e alwus said. First thing I did when I left the bugger was cut it all orf. Left it on the piller for ’im! But the time came when I was sorry… Not ter worry, any’ow, it’ll grow again in no time.’

I have heard of such things happening, beards and hairs sprouting on corpses in the coffin.

‘Well, hon, the bathroom’s all yours.’ She sags back sighing, nursing her wet towel and soapsaver. ‘Yer got a good eyeful a me in all me glory! Ole Jerry Baker ’ad ter miss out!’

‘Nah, well, nothun that’d come as a surprise, any ’ow. I’ve got a shower of me own up in me suite, of course, but ev’ry now an’ then I fancy a nice bath, with bath salts an’ all the doin’s. It’s that gorgeous ole copper tub, makes yer feel like a bloomun queen.’

‘Aren’t yer gunna pull yer curtain over a bit? Priddy bright in ’ere.’ ‘Oh, no, it’s high up.’

‘Wouldun put it pas’ this mob ’ere ter put a ladder up!’ she chortled. ‘Or a telescope or periscope or what ’ave yer! Yer never know. There might be a beady eye on us right now!’

Clutching my bathrobe round me, dangling my sleeves over my scored wrists, I manage to pinch out the faded candle flame and fold myself up again on the bed.

She is leaning forward, hoarse, sepulchral. We went into the empty room with its dying ikon.

‘They dunno yet. They’re gunna do a post mortem on ’er. The fun’ral ’as ter be postponed an’ everythun. I jus’ carn seem ter take it in, some’ow, it’s that awful.’

‘Cooler tole me. Or Tooler, whichever’s which, I can never remember. I got such a shock when I ’eard.’

‘I know. It shoulda been so simple. Nothun to it nowadays. Oo knows what went wrong? Somepun musta went wrong. Yer jus’ carn tell, yer see.’

‘I know! I nearly fergot what I came for! There was a phone call fer you but yer wern’ in.’

‘No, not yer mum, love, I’d know ’er voice, it was a foreign lady. I could tell by the accent.’

‘Wanted ter speak ter Miss Shirley Nunn. I said yer’d gone out. I seen yer goin’ out a bit before that, yer see.’

‘Nao. She made a bit of a song an’ dance about gettun me ter come up an’ see if yer’d got back so I traipsed up an’ ’ad a peep in yer door but yer weren’t in like I tole ’er the first time so she jus’ said oh thanks verrry much, an’ ’ung up on me before I could get a word in edgeways. I was a bit peeved, I can tell yer.’

‘Oh, yairs. More’n my fair share, I’d say. Not that it’s somepun you ever get used ter, all the same, seeun a corp. I viewed me own mum an’ dad, an’ me first ’usband’s mum an’ dad, an’ me second one’s mum. There was one in this ’ouse las’ Christmas.’

‘A Greek fam’ly. They’ve gone back ’ome now. The womenfolk knocked me up at the crack a dawn all wrapped in black from ’ead ter toe an’ gabblun an’ wailun their ’eads orf. Gave me quite a turn. They’d dressed the ole man up in a nice suit an’ shoes, tie, the lot, an’ laid ’im out in the dark with hyderanges all round ’im, an’ candles. Talk about weird! No wonder candles give me the creeps! ’Is jaw kep’ droppun open an’ they kep’ leanun over an’ shovun this black scarf under ’is liddle yeller chin. Jeeze! Dracula wasn’t in it! Never seen anythun that gowlish in all me born days.’

‘Yer not lookun too well, yer know, love. Course it’s none a my business, but I sort a promised yer mum over the phone I’d take you under me wing. ’Ow about a nice cuppa tea, wouldun that be jus’ the thing?’

‘Oh, no thanks, Mrs O’Toole, I couldn’t. Thanks, but really I feel fine. I’m just a bit tired, that’s all.’

‘Well, if yer sure. Be no trouble, if yer fancied it. Look, what about callun me May, eh? After all, I don’ call you Miss Nunn, now do I? ’Ow about it?’

‘Hey, there I go, fergettun again!’ May blushes and beams. ‘Bought yer some termaters from the garden and a couple a new-laid eggs. I know yer like ’em.’ She fumbles in her chenille pocket and balances the little red and brown balls beside the skull on

the dressing table. ‘Lucky fer me they didun break, that would a reminded me all right, wouldun it!’

‘I’ll say this much fer ’em, vicious they may be, but they’re good layers.’

And that’s more than you could say for me. Thumping, bumping, he crammed his ramrod in me. Black water slapped. I sidle to the window and proffer in return my bowl of green, lit grapes.

May crams and munches grapes, her peevish eyes pecking, jabbing the dust in corners and under beds. The trundled port bottle will remind her of Jerry’s, propped in his bare grate aglow with cloudy piss. Jerry, yer blood’s worth bottlun, someone could say, and Jerry: My word it is, sport. So’s all me vital fluids. Oo, naudy, naudy!

‘Jus’ ’ave a gig at the books she’s got, will yer!’ May squeals. ‘Bet yer it’d take a dill like me ’alf a lifetime ter get through all that readun. ’Ow old are yer, Shirl? I know it’s none a my business, but you don’ mine me askun.’

‘Eighteen, eh?’ Twisting magenta lips. ‘What wouldun I give ter be eighteen all over again! The best a life all still ter come. But knowun what I know now.’

Well, yer welcome to the butt end of my days and ways. I twist in my hand my hacked gold hair, intoning:

‘Aoh, I see. Yairs. Never ’ad much time fer Art, meself, Like the Mona Lisa, is it? Art’s orright, a course. Carn ’old a candle ter Nacher, though, not ter my way a thinkun.’

Her lips pouched, slowly she twists by their stalks against the light bulb the veined green globes of grapes. A copper fur pelts her freckled arm. Wistful, she wheezes.

‘Me sister was a great reader. Alwus ’ad ’er nose stuck in some book or other right from a liddle girl. She teaches ’igh school now up the Mallee somewhere, Mildura way, loves it too. Yer know, you could do a lot bedder fer yerself than jus’ waitressun. When yer got a bit of ejication I think it’s a shame ter let it go ter waste. If I ’ad my time all over again, believe you me… Isun there somepun else you’d like ter be?’

‘I know it’s orright. I done it meself fer years. Started orf as ’ousemaid-waitress in a mansion in St Kilda Road after I walked out on me firs’. Worked up ter this. It’s a dead end, see? Not what yer’d wanter see a daughter of yer own doin’. None a my business, love, I know.’

‘Hey!’ A laugh gushes out of that bulging face. ‘I’ve gone an’ et up all yer bloomun grapes! ’Ow’s that fer a cheek, eh? Sorry, love.’

‘Got carried away, they were that nice. Carn be ’elped. Well. I bedder let yer go an’ ’ave yer bath, time’s gettun on. I wouldun be surprised if my gen’leman fren’s arrived by now. ’E’ll be wonnerun where I’ve got to.’ She waddles leering to the door, hugging her paraphernalia.

‘Now get a good night’s sleep. Night night, dear, I’ll see you in the mornun. See yer some more, Morry.’

I turn off the light and strike a match. The skull glowers. In the small twin glow of match light my face is bossed and caverned above my fleece. I watch flames bud and fatten on the candle wick, flare over the dark walls.

Poor Mrs O’Toole. It’s bloomun croole. You and your tomatoes and new-laid eggs. A futility symbol.

I hurry along the dark passage. Sudden whistles shrill out: chrrr, chrrr. In a corner on the lavatory floor a couple of little black crickets, one sprawled twitching, the other clutching it, trill in blurred spasms of frenzy. Beside them lies another cricket, legs awry: the hair-fine shadow straddling it is a frail spider, intent, sinking its pin-head into the squashed black belly. Chrrr.

I sit on paper on the seat and let my warm rank urine gush, spill into the water.

When I was little I sat on newspaper on the long wooden seat over the hole stinking of shit and phenol. Rain was battering the tin roof. Writing in black sprawling crayon on the weatherboards mum and dad, I let hair-footed flies crawl tickling all over my botty; I picked the peeling green paint off the back of the door sliver by sliver; I stared up in terror at fat black spiders straddling woolly webs on every dark rafter of the roof.

Chrrr. I pull the chain clanking. Chrrr. Locked in the yellow bathroom I undress and step on to the rippling copper and turn the hot tap full on.

I stand now, the door shut,

burn on the water, spreading foam

on my spindle shanks and cloven dugs and buttocks.

Water, glittering, mantles me.

I find white soap in the copper dish and soap my hands. In the ring of my joined forefinger and thumb a bubble, a membrane of swirling opal water shimmers until a splash bursts it. I should have brought the candle. One night, years away, at some holiday camp, I stood in a round tin bath, my shadow lurching over mud bricks, and spread soap froth on my new round breasts, round belly and thighs alight with runnels of poured water. I crouched, flapping the candle flame. Shadows and bubbles brimmed my dim feet.

Once in some dream or other I flew heavily off a mountain ledge. A polar bear far below on the pack ice. I swam lumbering in the air over the fragments of my own undulating shadow. I slid down a long snow road, through crystalled webs spun from tree to tree, and sat by a log fire eating a tomato. The Tomato. I half woke to scrawl an illumination: ‘Each tomato is the one tomato while we are eating it. Mirrors are fragments of the one mirror.’ Tomatoes have gold seeds in a star of red flesh and water.

The gushing water is cooler. I turn it off and step out of the burnished bath, rub myself dry with my rough bathrobe inside out, and then pull it on, warm in the yellow box of walls and ceiling and window pane all furred with steam. My sandals slip, clammy, under the soles of both wet feet. I paddle off through the darkness. Floorboards creak at every shut door. I slam my door shut. Cupping my long hand I blow my candle out and crawl into my moonlit bed. It is ice cold. A sudden bulge of wind blurts out between my buttocks. A cock hoots. A dog far away howls, howls. A far cock hoots.

May is in bed by now with her sailor man, burping portergaff and pickled onions, grunting and writhing, clutching each other’s ample flesh. A whore with a heart of gold. She knows she has a heart of gold. I alone know I am debased, deranged, repulsive. It’s not as if I could ever have written that out. A novel is a mirror taken walking down a road; I read that somewhere. Any puddle of mud and piss glowing in the gutter mirrors the sun.

In fifth form I made a start on my secret novel. Slice of felt life. Under the shower every night I held long conversations with avid movie moguls, charming, disarming me. No, not even for a million dollars. No. There is such a thing as artistic integrity. The purely literary quality of my style could never be translated to the silver screen. I stood dripping, smiling but adamant, holding back the shower curtain to see in the wiped wet mirror: if I can stay under the cold water full on while I count to twenty it will come true. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Rubbing my chilled long body dry I shook with fears that I too would cease to be. Shall this flesh live?

Then the reviews. ‘A poetic novel of passionate intensity, an extraordinary achievement for one so young…’ ‘A masterpiece, as exquisitely corrupt as the Fleurs du Mal, as Australian as the waratah…’ ‘If not The, then at least A Great Australian Novel.’ Dreams of passing airily through the cloisters, sitting aloof in lecture theatres, envied by all as a genius in full flower. She was to have been proud that I loved her. A novel, a little tarnished mirror of what? The day she left I burnt every page in the saucepan.

Two scenes were nearly finished, though. A girl alone in the dark, revealing with a torch one by one the hills and hollows and hairy clefts of her body. My fingers flared red, closing over the torch bulb. I lay in bed with pen and paper and sketched for the flyleaf the long line of my tufted armpit and my breast, dented belly, and groin, and thigh.

In the other scene, in a grey bed on a winter afternoon, well into flabby middle age, she leaned smoothing back with gnarled hands the yellowing furrows of her face. See how young I look when I do this: Mrs O’Toole at the lamplit mirror, cyclamen lips pouted in a face round and pored like an orange, hair shading her eyes and her upper lip. He was refusing to be aroused. She tugged and rubbed at his wilted phallus. He pushed her away, turned over and started snoring. Sobbing with rage, she slammed out of the house and roamed the greasy streets by lamplight, to lie down in the gutter for the first comer.

I didn’t get it finished. I still had never seen a man’s phallus. Abandoned due to technical difficulties. A work of art is never finished, only abandoned, or so I read somewhere, and in that it is like a life.

His I didn’t see either. Only a glimpse of that other, stiff as a candle stick, sprinkling spawn on the golden river.

In the last chapter she was going to kill him as he slept in that bed, and hack off his limbs and head and lug the meaty remains of him in a suitcase to the ruined hut by the docks. She was to make two trips in mounting horror, never to be found out, but afraid for ever.

I saw a woman creep out fastening a suitcase. What have you done? I said. Terror and hatred convulsed her face. I leapt on to my bicycle and thrust away, pedalling madly, madly to the city. Her rat face glaring from dark corners day and night haunted me for weeks. Did mine haunt her?

Perhaps I should have gone in with a torch to find what she had brought there for the rats and the sodden darkness. The corpse of a lover, man or woman? A baby murdered at birth? A black shack on the glinting, tufty bog, the wind rattling its jagged window. Lights swivelled. Gulls squalled in golden flakes of light. Beyond, lit spars of ships on the wide river probe the sky. Did she go back? I will not betray you. What is it to me? You will be afraid for ever, never knowing that I am dead.

Sleepless, I wrote Night. I was the whore myself in Night, sure and skilful, disdainful, curtained with bright hair. The black ashes of Night still lie in my saucepan. I know it by heart. I’ll never be a poet. Nor ever be a writer, nor have a child. Did she ever love me?

I reminded her a little of her sister, whom she missed so much. And I was going to be a writer. For her benefit I lashed myself into sterile frenzies of ambition; I wrote brutal, enigmatic poems; I brooded over my novel. We were both convinced that I had genius. I was brusque and awkward, intense, scornful, unkempt, farouche. A female Rimbaud.

From the day I told her I loved her I found I could not write another word. Everything had ceased to exist for me except our Love. I studied and elaborated every sentence, every gesture, and rehearsed every day of our life together scene by scene. I insisted on being alone with her all the time. I was no more than an adoring schoolgirl, openly and embarrassingly obsessed, a burden that very soon she could not bear any longer.

I had learnt what little I knew about love and passion from novels. Like Madame Bovary herself, n’est-ce pas? My own body was a secret I kept even from myself. She knew much more. Miss Jones had been in love with her, brilliant, arrogant Miss Jones. I had seen them months before at a play rehearsal kissing in the wings. Never at any stage did I dare to ask her about Miss Jones.

The day she taught me to use make-up I lay back, letting her stroke blue shadow on my eyelids, my hair spread loose and glowing over the pillow. Carefully she ringed my eyes with black.

I could feel her breath on my face and hair. Smiling, she leaned forward to kiss me lightly on my blue eyelids. We both laughed uneasily. She got up then and brought me a mirror to see for myself. Every day I ring my eyes with black.

When we quarrelled for the first time, she walked out. I stayed sullenly shut in my dusky room. Under the door seeped smells of baked beans and sodden toast. The boom and blare of the radio. I sat slitting shallow red stripes across both my wrists with a razor blood, a razor blade, licking the salt blood as it oozed.

The street beyond my window pane was silent, empty, lamplit. In the pool of lamplight floated the shadows of moving leaves. Eventually I pulled the curtain over. I was sure she was never coming back. She did come, though, that time.

Hours later there was a tap on the pane and I pulled the curtain aside and saw her. Her hair against the far streetlamp was a mass of shadows like brown leaves.

Shaking. I pushed the window open and watched her crawl in on to the bed. We sat in utter silence in the dark.

I burst into great sobs. She came and lay down beside me then, holding me fast, and I felt her start as she touched the stickiness of blood.

Poor Mrs O’Toole, surging in here tomorrow morning, will find my carrion body in a bath of blood, as if the glossy pile of brown shit she found in a corner of the lavatory the other Sundy mornun wasn’t quite enough, now another frightful shock. Not to mention that gruesome little Greek corp slowly turning yellow among the flowers and candle flames.

The mutilated body of a blonde teenage girl was discovered early this morning in a Carlton rooming house. The victim’s name has not yet been released pending notification of relatives. Police are investigating.

I must make no mistake. Having failed at life, at least I can make sure I get my death right.

In this still house other inhabitants lie mouldering, sleepless, gnawed by despair. Goodbye, old Mr Coleman, crippled Jack and Mrs Riley. Goodbye, Maria. No, Maria is dead. Her little boy will grow up remembering nothing of her. Goodbye Jerry. Goodbye, May O’Toole.

Mirrored, the blown light of the candle ripples on me. My silver skin laced with my golden blood. Yellow skin, laced with my russet blood. My face is a bubble of golden blood in the fluted blade of the knife.

I baulked on the brink of the black river. They dragged Harriet Shelley green and bloating from the Serpentine sludge. Virginia Woolf in the Ouse. Ooze afraid? I baulked on the high bridge rather than be scraped, burst like a grape, off the railway lines. Anna Karenina. Raped, I was left to live. I drank all the port without lacing it with the spirits of salts. One deep slash under my ear is all and my blood will roll pumping out on to the floor. Bloodbath in rented room. The candle will splash and flare, gutter out.

How many like me are dying in the dark tonight? Four-millante cité. Cité pleine de spectres. A nous deux maintenant!

I crawl off my bed to lie down in my robe on the cold floor, the candle at my side. A cock crows. Morry’s long muzzle stares agape at me. Flurries and towers of golden light daze me. I kiss the bulged gold face mirroring in the blade.