15

Perth, 2000

Celia, not far away, had her own recollections of Mickey that took place after that time. The night of the opera in Perth when they were in such high spirits at the catastrophic production. How good the audience was about the whole ruined farce. The head-wagging resignation of the sweating conductor and the courageous cast who had pressed on regardless!

It couldn’t have been many nights after the opera shambles, and the episode should have been foreseen, she thought later, since whenever one is going along fairly happily with things working well, the world tends to turn upside down. But she was unprepared for it, that winter’s night in Daglish, sitting on the sofa with the cat who had recently adopted them, Celia, with her legs tucked under her and Pepper taking advantage of her lap, purring as loud as a lawnmower. Marcia was doing a season at a suburban theatre. The knock on the door’s glass was uncompromising, so that the cat jumped off in fright. Through the glass she could see a hulking dark figure.

Unflinchingly she threw open the door: to be truthful she’d recognised the shape of the duffel coat seconds before.

‘Mick! What’s up, where’s your key?’

He pushed past her, mumbling that he’d lost it. He was dishevelled, smelling strongly of whisky. They were used to his steady drinking but Mickey was the kind of charming drunk, laughingly seen as in his cups, or three sheets to the wind, quaintly tolerant sayings that suited his condition. You wouldn’t ever call him rotten drunk or totally pissed. But he was in a bad way tonight; sullen and with a morose glint in his eye, a bruise on his cheek and blood on his knuckles. It was so unlike him to be in such a state that there was something shocking about it, like coming across Sister Mary Ignatius down the road in the local sex shop.

Celia waited, going back to the sofa, as he shuffled into the kitchen and opened the fridge before taking his coat off. She heard him go into the bathroom and have a bit of a wash. Finally he returned with a drink in his hand.

‘Care for one?’ he asked her, more like himself. She shook her head, looking at him.

‘You haven’t been in a fight, have you?’

For answer he impatiently nodded his head. ‘With a brick wall.’ Then said without preamble:

‘I was in the Leederville pub today and guess who I met?’

She shrugged.

‘Albie Duxton,’ he said, sitting opposite her, sniffing at his whisky, the parody of a connoisseur, like someone who doesn’t throw it down his neck in one go, she was thinking, but taken aback by the name.

‘Albie Duxton? From London?’

‘The very same.’ He stood up, walked around the room, then sat down again and twirled his glass. ‘It seems that when we were out of London on holiday years ago, he met you by chance and asked about me because he had a biggish job. But you couldn’t think of my whereabouts.’

‘I didn’t know your exact whereabouts – you were both in Scotland, remember?’

‘I certainly do remember, Celia. Remember telling you the name of the place in the Highlands where we’d probably be staying.’

‘Probably be staying.’

‘We did stay there.’

‘Some little hut in the wilderness. How would I have been able to contact you?’

‘Because you knew the name of the guy who loaned me his cabin. He would have been contactable through his agent. Albie would have known how to get hold of him. And there were such things as telegrams, remember them? We weren’t in the Antarctic after all.’

And on he raged, Mickey the ever-sanguine, now accusing, belabouring her over her sin of omission. How his life had been misdirected because of something she might have, could have, added to that conversation. She defended herself, saying that she didn’t withhold anything intentionally; how was she to know; he never followed an itinerary to the letter and she was half-drunk at the party anyway. But it was at this point she realised there was self-justification spread all over her explanations. Why hadn’t she passed on to Albie exactly what she did know? Mickey was waiting.

‘I needed the work and you knew it. What was it?’

She looked away, knowing she’d just have to sit still and hear what he had to say.

He threw taunts at her: how she would find and then lose a job, always leaving before she was dismissed. He reminded her that she said that there was nobody in her life but Marcia and him, but she was so snobbish she thought herself a cut above most people – that’s why she was friendless.

‘Oh for God’s sake, take a look at yourself,’ she interrupted.

If she wanted to be exclusive, he continued, if nobody’s conversation was good enough, if their sensibility wasn’t honed enough, if their bloody table manners weren’t refined enough – then she was doomed to be on her own, which must be after all what she wanted. Didn’t she know by the way, was she too obtuse to realise, that he was pulling her leg with his table manners?

Caught in this tirade she was nevertheless mightily impressed by the lucidity of his arguments and the feebleness of her own thoughts, as they sat quietly and saw their friendship turning rancid in front of their very faces.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, finally. ‘You’re right. I suppose I was jealous.’ Even more was required. ‘I beg your pardon.’

He stood up wearily and looked at himself in the mirror over the fireplace.

‘I’d not have thought you had a mean streak in you.’ He heaved a sigh. ‘I’m sorry too, I didn’t just mean all that.’

‘Yes you did.’

‘That’s more like it.’

He swallowed more whisky slowly, thinking hard, as if the force had been taken out of him and the momentum at a standstill.

‘I thought life for me would be healthier here,’ he said, unexpectedly, straightening himself in the mirror.

‘You can’t surely blame the way of life in this country for the look of you.’

‘I’m not talking of the way I look, my dear, but the way I feel.’

‘Or that.’ She eased up a little. ‘I thought you liked it here; it was you who wanted to come to Australia. You get along well with people here.’

‘Oh yes,’ he seemed fully sober now, ‘and it’s friendly and the parks are beautiful and the girls are divine.’

He came to a halt for a while. ‘I think it’s the grinding bloody smugness of it. The conviction that there’s nowhere else on earth.’ He flicked at an imaginary and persistent flying insect at the corner of his eye, a new twitch he’d developed.

There was also, she thought, the fact that he wasn’t getting work of any description because, look at the sight of him. In the British Isles people would look beyond crumpled trousers and bloodshot eyes and see some worth or recognise a past success.

‘What about Albie, then? What’s he doing here? Maybe he’s got something he can help you with.’

He waved away the thought. ‘He was scouting for young actors at the academy, I think. He’ll be on a plane by now. I’m going to bed.’

She sat for a time, feeling tired herself, not wanting to get up. The parks he spoke of she could see, where large young people pushed past you, well-fleshed and white-toothed, somewhat vacant Australian girls and boys scantily dressed, in a wide, spacious country, claiming all of it as their personal space, only at the last minute moving an arm or a shoulder backward or forward to avoid collision. These same people of course, in another setting, say a café, will serve you with a smiling good nature that wouldn’t have registered any harm done. Which just goes to prove, she thought, the old premise that one can only take offence if there is an intention to offend. Still, if someone felt offended by something, then the perpetrator had to accept this responsibility.

But again, these were inner ramblings, her own, unrelated to Mickey, who had put down his empty glass and bade her goodnight in his usual softly-spoken way, brushing vaguely again at his eye.

It was likely that what he said was true. There was not enough to bounce off here. The city of her childhood had devoured itself in greed and a show of progress. No history remained to draw upon, and a lack of history impedes your memory of the way life used to be, with other people and earlier preoccupations, real obstacles. Life was almost too easy here yet the population complained that they didn’t have enough money, enough time, enough consideration from the government. What, as an example, had the army barracks looked like – the place where she had worked, a young school-leaver, as a minor functionary? Or the elegant pink, spiffy little art deco office building that used to be an insurance office near the Victorian pub, in those halcyon days, when they went and drank beer on a Friday after work. What of all the other good-looking 1920s office buildings, the beautiful city hotel with its white, first-floor verandahs, the chequered arcade, the fabled movie theatre (marble staircases, chandeliers, a domed ceiling of gold stars on blue that actually slid open – could they do that in 1947? – to reveal the genuine article)? Where were the coffee bars, the dance studios that gave the city its life all those years ago? All buried in memory, though she still tried zealously to guard it. In creating and constantly recreating new buildings – angular grey steel and glass – the city had become antiseptic, ugly and gleaming, like any other new city, with none of the soft edges of lived-in dirt; it had no soul. It was a city that belonged to commerce, to the present only, one that thrived during the day and died from lack of human interchange at night.

Without warning she felt drained, as though she had been running for miles. She tidied her cup and saucer away and went to bed.