Marjorie took great pains with Aunty Agnes’s city. She didn’t at the beginning. Not when she first turned up there – all by herself and saddled with everything. Marjorie already had too much of her own pain then, lumped on her shoulders like a whole mountain of wheat bags. She couldn’t take on any more of anyone else’s – even a city’s. Marjorie’s wheat bags were so heavy then that she had no chance of lifting her head high enough to get a good look at anything else that might be going on around her. She certainly didn’t have any chance of really looking this city in the eye, to see it for what it really was.
And even if she had, she might have back then only seen it as so many others chose to see it. To see it as a taut place, a frantic selfish place crammed full of to-and-fro and noise. But that was only on the outside of itself. And if those who were so pitiless as far as the city was concerned would just bother to stop for a while and think, then they would realise things. Like: the Mallee wasn’t on its own with a three-o’clock-in-the-morning soul. Like: this city wasn’t without a heart. It had its own particular soft, three-o’clock-in-the-morning echoes when it quieted itself to a lyric drone and turned then to looking at things – things like Marjorie. When it nodded and hummed to itself because it could see what would be good for her. She was naked, it could see. And that was no way to live. Marjorie was just like so many others who had already done what she had done – run away from their certain somewhere to here. Arriving in fright, without any decent covering to protect themselves. It was time that Marjorie needed more than anything, as far as this city could establish. Time to fix things after all that naked running. That, and the same thing that all those others were after. All those runners just like her who had arrived here to hide within the camouflage of its bustle. It knew that all they ever wanted was a decent chance to be somewhere else – somewhere other than where they had come from. And a good city always had plenty of both of those things: time, and somewhere else.
And it had Aunty Agnes to help – her there doing the sagacious watching:
‘How is Bill going?’ That was the first question she would ask her brother down the telephone line.
‘What’s a bloke to do? He’s keeping a stiff upper lip. He’ll get through in time,’ said Pa.
‘He might need more than a stiff upper lip to get through this one, I think,’ she said.
‘Eh? What’s that you say?’ said Pa.
Aunty Agnes shook her head at the Bakelite telephone on the wall. ‘You know there are better ways of dealing with things than just ploughing paddicks and going out and killing more rabbits,’ she said.
But Pa was so tired. And there were no women anywhere in the house no matter how hard he tried not to look for them. And he and his son were rattling and bumping around that lonely, empty house like the last grains of broken wheat in the chook bin. And he actually didn’t know of any better methods for dealing with the sorrows of life than a good rabbit poisoning could provide, so he said nothing at all down the telephone line to that.
‘I’m worried about Marjorie,’ Aunty Agnes said into the silence.
‘Why? She’s doing alright there with you, isn’t she? She’s not the one stark raving mad and locked up in a bloody lunatic asylum,’ her brother pointed out. ‘She’s not lying dead and buried. She’s young. She’ll be right.’
‘She won’t talk about it.’
‘’Course she won’t. She’s got a good head on her shoulders, that one. What’s the good of yapping about a thing all day long? You think me and Bill sit around here all day long talking about it? What’s the bloody good to be got from that?’
‘A lot more good than two grown men pretending all day and all night.’
‘What?’ said Pa.
‘Marjorie just stays in bed all day. Won’t come out of her room,’ Agnes said.
Notions of gardens and bees stirred in Pa. ‘Eh?’ he asked, and he was crumpling and slumping even as he did. Because try as he might to consider 1080 the best answer to life’s unanswerable troubles, he did know what his sister was getting at. And he did know too that his son – out there every day from dawn to dark, furrowing up every paddock from here to kingdom come – he knew Bill already had far too much on his plate for one man to manage and the shotgun always ready and willing and capable there in the shed. ‘Well, what are you letting her do that for? Go in and get her out of there, Agnes. By the cripes, do you want her to end up like her mother lying about in bed all day? And Bill having two raving bloody lunatics on his hands along with an already dead daughter?’
‘She’s suffering. She’s like those soldiers you hear about that come back from the war all staring and not making any sound.’
‘Suffering? Of course she’s bloody suffering after what she’s been through! But what about her father? Does she think he’s not suffering? Put her on the telephone. Let me have a talk to her. I’ll flamin’ fix things.’
‘And just how do you plan on fixing her? With dead rabbits? Or by ploughing a paddick?’
Pa was quiet down the line again. He was punctured and squashed by his sister’s infernal questions; bewildered by lives that couldn’t be fixed by farming. ‘Does she ask after me, Agnes?’ he whispered into his silence.
‘She doesn’t ask after anyone.’
‘Go and get her please, Agnes. The girl can’t stay lying about in the bedroom all day and not talking to anyone. Tell her I want to talk to her, please.’
So Aunty Agnes did as she was told and went to tell Marjorie that Pa was on the telephone and wanted to talk to her. And Aunty Agnes was shocked, because Marjorie did come to the phone.
‘It’s Pa here,’ said Pa.
‘Mmm,’ Marjorie replied.
‘How’s the city treating ya, then?’ Pa asked.
Marjorie shrugged.
‘Starting to get on top of things then, are ya? Starting to settle in?’
Marjorie shrugged down the phone.
‘You can come back up here, girl. I could do with a bit of a hand with the rabbits. Your father and I are rattling around in the place now. It needs a bit of a woman’s touch.’ Pa tried to fight it, but it was pleading that escaped from his mouth and raced down the telephone line, because what he really wanted to tell Marjorie was I miss you. I miss both you girls. I am afraid for you and your father. But that is not what a man says.
How can I go back there? Why would I go back there? she wondered. The girl sighed.
‘Put yer Aunty Agnes on, will ya?’ said Pa as his nerves undid themselves.
‘The girl’s in a bad way, Agnes,’ he told her.
‘Really!’ said Agnes.
Vexation doesn’t travel well over telephone lines though, it seems. And neither, it appears, does irony. So both must have leaked out by the time her voice got to her brother. ‘Get her a job. Get her out doing a decent day’s work,’ he said. ‘That’ll usually fix things. The girl needs to start looking at what’s in front of her. There isn’t anybody that can do anything about what’s in the past,’ said Pa.
Pa was blundering. But he was right, so Aunty Agnes did. She did for Marjorie what she had done for Bill all those years ago. ‘You can’t be lying about the house all day, you know. You will never be able to pull yourself together that way,’ was her softly delivered advice to Marjorie the next morning as she placed the newspaper gently, firmly, on Marjorie’s pillow. ‘We need to take your mind off brooding about things that can’t be changed. Decent, hard work is the best medicine for most things in life. That, and a good couple of decades of the rosary,’ she added as a seeming afterthought.
Marjorie’s eyes followed Aunty Agnes. What about in death, Aunty Agnes? Is decent hard work the best medicine for most things in death, too? Marjorie said silently to her bedroom walls.
But Aunty Agnes had made up her mind now, and she had Pa on her side, so no amount of silence and dry dull eyes was going to change her mind. ‘Come on, Marjorie. You need a respectable outfit to wear to job interviews,’ she said. ‘We will go to the department stores in the city. We need a decent pair of shoes and stockings. And we are going to the haberdasher’s. And you are going to start looking in the Situations Vacant and start applying for jobs.’ Aunty Agnes stopped and turned to examine Marjorie’s hair messing itself all over her pillow. ‘Did Elise ever attempt millinery?’
Marjorie spoke then. She said the first decent words to Aunty Agnes that she had said to anyone in a very long time. ‘Millinery?’ she whispered.
‘Hats. Doesn’t matter. I know how,’ said Aunty Agnes, blinking and blinking at the whispered word.
*
‘You look very smart,’ he said from behind the carved oak desk. His head tilted at her. The gold-plated Schaeffer fountain pen reclining in its silver-plated desk set glinted at them. He reached for it and his right thumb rubbed it as he stared at Marjorie.
‘You do indeed,’ said the woman at his side. She smiled. ‘Marjorie, isn’t it?’ she asked, glancing at the pile of job applications in front of her.
Marjorie nodded. She sat up straight. Hooked one ankle discreetly behind the other. Clasped her hands over the lines of the box pleats in the skirt. She imagined her father standing in that long line of hatless men out under the sun in that factory yard.
‘It looks like a Chanel,’ the woman had said when she directed Marjorie into the office. Her raised right eyebrow questioning the decency of a young girl wasting money on a store-bought Chanel suit. And if she could afford a store-bought Chanel suit, then why did she need this job?
Marjorie thought of Aunty Agnes’s Singer sewing machine. It would be luminous by now, she knew. And redolent of metal and wood and Singer sewing machine oil. She could see the gentle afternoon sun creeping through the lemon tree in the front yard before it melted through the lace curtains in Aunty Agnes’s front room. Before it laid itself softly all over the surface of that Singer sewing machine. It was not her mother’s sewing machine. It was Aunty Agnes’s. Marjorie smiled a bland smile – it was the only smile she had these days, but it seemed to suit everyone – and tried to tell herself that the palms of her hands were not sweating away underneath their protective finger clasp.
He had stopped playing with his pen now. ‘So why should we give you this job, Marjorie?’ he asked.
I really have no idea why. Because Ruby isn’t here anymore? Or perhaps because my mother is here still. She is apparently busy fulfilling a long-term commitment at a mental hospital here somewhere. Is that a good reason for wanting this job? ‘Because I have always loved books,’ Marjorie said. She smiled. Her hand went to her throat and she clasped, as a comfort, the pearls that Aunty Agnes had given her. (‘You have them, love,’ Aunty Agnes had said. ‘I want you to have them.’)
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘That is very commendable in a young lady. A love of good literature will carry you safely through life. But,’ he said, ‘there is much more to working here than liking books. We need someone with an enthusiasm for the enormous importance of all that this institution – its processes and procedures – stands for.’ He leant forward, peering at Marjorie to see if she was fully appreciating the responsibility of the position. ‘That is what I need,’ he finished.
The woman nodded.
I need a sister. I need a mother. I need a job, apparently. That is what Aunty Agnes thinks will do the trick. That is what I need. ‘I think books are important for a progressive society,’ Marjorie said. But books, it turns out, are not always as safe as you might think. So I will watch them very carefully for you in here from now on, she could have added.
He looked at her legs. And at her high heels. ‘There will be quite a lot of running around,’ he said.
Marjorie smiled again. I am good at running, she thought. She nodded.
‘Can you start immediately?’
‘Yes,’ she said and nodded again.
‘How old are you, Marjorie? Do you have a driver’s licence?’
‘I can drive,’ Marjorie said.
‘Wait outside, thank you,’ he said.
So Marjorie bent to pick up her handbag and gloves, then stood and walked from the room. Her high heels clicked across the tessellated tiles.
The chief librarian resumed rubbing his fountain pen as his eyes watched her legs – no doubt checking, as any boss had the right to do, that the seams of her stockings were straight.
Marjorie got that job. Aunty Agnes’s job-getting magic had worked once more. And both Marjorie and Aunty Agnes always thought it was on account of the neat little hat perched on the top of her shiny dark hair. Because Marjorie didn’t wear a tie, like her father had done so many years before when he got his job. But she did wear a hat. Just like her father had done.
*
The woman’s name was Patricia (not Patsy!). ‘Follow me,’ she had said as she clipped off down the corridor. ‘You are to start at the bottom. You will be trained on ephemera. Do you know what that means?’
‘No.’
‘Ah!’ said Patricia. And she stopped momentarily to look at Marjorie with a slight, superior shake of the head. ‘It is to do with all that does not last: newspapers, magazines, journals and the like. But I imagine you are too young to fully consider the enormity of all in this world that does not last.’ Patricia glanced at Marjorie.
Marjorie smiled back. You are so very wrong about that, Marjorie thought, smiling pleasantly.
‘You will begin with newspaper clippings. You will assist our patrons with their ephemera requests. You will then progress to magazines and journals, if you prove yourself. After that . . .’ Patricia shrugged. ‘We’ll see,’ she said.
She handed Marjorie a pile of newspaper clippings. It was a collection of articles about last year’s Melbourne Olympic games. Ruby loved the Melbourne Olympics, she thought. On the top of the pile was a photograph of a young woman, her legs and her heart pounding their way to the fulfilment of glory. It was Elizabeth Alyse ‘Betty’ Cuthbert. Australia’s golden girl running into Olympic and Australian history. It was a big year for running that year, thought Marjorie. ‘Do you think she is running to or running from?’ she asked as they both gazed at the photo.
‘She’s running to the finish line. For a gold medal,’ Patricia said. ‘She’s just running.’
‘No one just runs,’ said Marjorie.
*
Marjorie surprised herself. She really liked her job. She wasn’t making books on a printing press like she always imagined but she was surrounded by them. And that was something. She found too that she could hide away from everybody for hours within all that paper. For days and days and weeks and weeks. And she didn’t have to talk hardly at all. And when she did it had to be hushed, slow, weighty talk. Which suited her just fine. Because paper is heavy. Even newspaper and magazine paper, if it is piled high enough, can be very heavy. And ephemera is so much more substantial than anybody ever realised. Except Marjorie. She soon realised. She fitted right in with this job because she appreciated the dead weight of impermanent things. So, Marjorie worked away – caring for fleeting, fragile, dead weight ephemera. There in the city.
And the city whispered into the air all around Marjorie as she watched it out of her tram window; out of her library window; out of Aunty Agnes’s lounge room window. It brushed against this girl as she walked all alone through the midday lunchtime crowded pavements, or through the after dinner, early night, silent suburban streets. It sighed as Marjorie sighed. It spoke so kindly to her about such things as burnt, dead sisters, or mothers who preferred the sweet treasures of madness to her daughters, or a boy who would now be stranded and bereaved, slowly dying of thirst as he wrote yet another letter that would be crushed unread into a handbag before being taken out and smoothed down and laid against a cheek and breathed slowly in – then jammed neatly, unread, with all the rest of them in the bottom of an old brown suitcase at the bottom of Aunty Agnes’s old brown wardrobe, as the boy clung by himself in the star-littered dark to a relic of an old blue bench. But even though it talked so softly, this city could see how hard it was for Marjorie to listen, this city could see that such things as it had to whisper were hard to hear. And even though that was not what this city had in mind, this is what Marjorie did. She grafted bits of this place on. She mortared and stacked. Carefully plastering layers of it all over the place. Until she was encrusted. Until she was a slight, delicate, pretty, distraught thing – a piece of battered reef – a coral skeleton that had caked and iced its ethereal beauty all over those wheat bags. Until Marjorie’s burden of wheat bags was practically invisible, non-existent to anybody who didn’t know what was going on. Until the average Joe Blow could have been mistaken for thinking Marjorie had forgotten all about the Mallee and what could go on there.
A proper graft needs careful attention, though. It needs to be done precisely. It needs to be watched for a long time. There is no place for sloppy, slapdash grafters on a farm. Grafts will turn on those sorts of grafters. They will protest and wither and die and drop off – just to prove a point. And encrusting and encasing someone is no different. So it took Marjorie more than a year to do all that grafting.
But time taken doesn’t bother a city. What are years to a city? And what Marjorie didn’t realise was this city knew more about grafting than she did. It knew that grafting is a charity. It knew that a grafted thing is a healing thing – a graft lets things grow again. So the city helped Marjorie. For months and months. Streets and laneways, patient and gentle, whispered to her.
‘I found another art gallery hidden down a back street in the city today,’ Marjorie might say as she flung patent leather shoes and handbags at her bedroom door.
‘Did you, dear? You mother always loved the art,’ Aunty Agnes might reply – dauntless in the face of Marjorie’s anticipated hostility.
‘More books?’ Aunty Agnes might ask, indicating the ever-increasing pile wobbling away in Marjorie’s bedroom.
‘Don’t say anything about anybody!’ Marjorie might warn.
‘Look at all that rain – look at all that grass,’ Marjorie might comment as she watched the men in Aunty Agnes’s street cossetting their particular bit of nature strip with its perfect push-mower surface.
And Aunty Agnes watched as Marjorie’s patent leather high-heeled shoes transported her anywhere she wanted to go in this city. As the city paraded its footy grand finals and its spring racing carnivals and headed for the magic of Myer Christmas window displays. As all those soft summer days courteously gave way to cool summer nights. Not like the Mallee, where the summer night leered and jeered at you from outside your totally ineffective bedroom window and blasted you with its dark, eighty-degree midnight heat. Yes, this city knew what Marjorie needed. And Aunty Agnes did her best to see that this job and this city were as mild and as kind to Marjorie over the next few years as they could be, given what she had done.
But it wasn’t all like that. There was that particular bit of the city that dragged at Marjorie at the mental hospital. Try as she might, Aunty Agnes couldn’t do anything about that. That bit of the city was like the Mallee. It showed no mercy. It was gristly and soggy, that bit of the city. It was sullen all around that mental hospital and it sucked at Marjorie and tried its level best to pull her into it. Because it knew that there were many times when Marjorie would have been quite happy to be pulled in. To be pulled under. To stay there. It was the still, silent sea of her waiting salt lake – shallow and stinking and biding its time until you stepped onto it. When its devious crystalline beauty would break under your feet and turn into a sucking black stinking morass. Grasping at you with its dank air, its lack of dust, its beautiful cast-iron bars, its beautiful lush gardens, its beautiful wrought-iron fence.
Marjorie went every month to the mental hospital. (So she said.) Month after month. Like going to confession. She should have gone with Bill when he came down to visit Elise – like Aunty Agnes did. She should have gone to the hospital once a week – when Bill wasn’t there – like Aunty Agnes did. Like she had gone once a week, sandwiched between Ruby and Pa in the back seat of the car, to mass at the dusty little Catholic church in the Mallee. But once a month was better than nothing. And before once a month it had been nothing.
Aunty Agnes, though, went every week without fail. ‘Perhaps it would help if you came along, dear,’ Aunty Agnes had suggested early on. ‘You might be able to settle a bit if you saw her.’
Settle a bit? I’m not a bloody bucket of milk that you want to get the cream off, Aunty Agnes, she thought. But Marjorie was not sharp in her reply to her aunty. She was mild and contemplative. And why wouldn’t Marjorie be? Sheltered as she was now within her encrustations. She felt she could view the world with the serene detachment of an under-the-salt-water organism from where she was now – without having to actually touch any of it. ‘No, thank you very much, Aunty Agnes. It is not convenient for me right now,’ she said. ‘Dad can go with you when he comes down again.’
‘Your father keeps asking if you have been to see your mother yet. What should I tell him?’ asked Aunty Agnes after a number of her lonesome faithful weeks of visits.
And Aunty Agnes must have caught Marjorie at low tide. Those encrustations must have been exposed to the air and dangerous. ‘Tell him to bloody come down here and see her for himself! Tell him to do it! Tell him it’s his job! Bloody hell, Aunty Agnes! Bloody hell!’ Marjorie roared.
The face of her thoughtful and gentle Aunty Agnes turned red at that and crumpled in on itself. It was a sagging pavlova with leaking, syrupy sugar as tears sprang from her gentle old eyes to wind their way down the furrows in her cheeks.
That is a bloody awful job of ploughing they have done there on your face, Aunty Agnes, thought Marjorie as she watched the slow syrupy travel of an old lady’s pain. Those furrows are all over the place like a dog’s breakfast. Marjorie turned away from the wet, crumpled face. She stared out the kitchen door instead, at the Sacred Heart of Jesus with its perpetual bleeding heart. It was giving nothing away – as usual. But Marjorie could see it was sorely tempted today. She could see its index finger itching to break away from catching those drops of blood. Itching to point itself at her and break the seal of confession. You are responsible, Marjorie, those sorrowful eyes were saying. Why do you bother me with your ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned’? The fact is your mother has fallen into temptation and succumbed to the evil of insanity; and your sister threw herself on the pyre. And you failed to stop either of these things happening. What can I do? It is a sin. A mortal sin of omission. And now sins of torment as well, Marjorie?
‘Do you know anyone who has committed a mortal sin, Aunty Agnes?’ asked Marjorie.
‘Of course not, dear,’ said Aunty Agnes.
Oh yes you do! thought Marjorie. And the Sacred Heart of Jesus won again. Because it showed Marjorie that pain and suffering needed to be looked at square in the face when you were a mortal. And Marjorie had to admit that her best opportunity to look pain and suffering squarely in the face was at that mental hospital with her mother.
Or maybe it was because she had already stared someone else’s pain and suffering squarely in the face with those tears she caused to spill themselves from the kindly eyes of her Aunty Agnes. Maybe that was what made her do it? Anyway, Marjorie and her encrustations explained things thus: What’s the point of dwelling on your personal blameworthiness and letting it wear you out so that you end up dying early if you are only going to end up in hell for eternity, you and your pile of mortal sins? So, Marjorie started going – once a month only, mind – to the mental institution. On Fridays – the day set aside by any Catholic worth their salt for eating fish, and for the perpetual remembrance of death. She went after work.
‘Are you coming out for drinks after work, Marjorie?’ workmates would ask.
‘No thank you. I am sorry but I have charity commitments I must attend to now,’ Marjorie would say. Except that many times she was lying. Sometimes she just stayed in the city and wandered the comfort of the streets. And she never felt the need to explain to anybody why she lied about this. Neither the boys at work who wanted her to go for drinks nor poor old Aunty Agnes who refused to let up on the belief in a mother’s love to overcome everything bad in the world.
But every now and again, imprecisely, Marjorie would actually visit. Where, at this gristly and soggy place, Marjorie would watch. Marjorie’s dry hard eyes would watch all its crying women with their feeble bunched hankies, their twisted and forlorn hospital dresses, their frightened eyes and their whisperings. Her face would screw up at its stark men with their lifted dribbling chins and their clenched jaws. Their jangling legs and arms. Their useless mutterings. Marjorie wasn’t a shirker, though. She took it upon herself to be responsible for things at these visits. At each of these fitful, sporadic visits Marjorie counted the half-filled, saucerless, teaspoonless cups of lukewarm tea scattered randomly, crouching anxiously on bare wooden tables everywhere in that room where the residents were marshalled to receive their guests. She counted the sensible tin plates with their scrubby supply of stale Arnott’s Milk Arrowroot biscuits. She counted the tables and the sensible chairs. And Marjorie would sort these things out.
‘Hey! Don’t touch those. They’re my tin plates,’ one of the crazy men would protest. And he would lunge at her and stretch his insane eyes to their limits at her. But he was mistaken if he thought his insane eyes were a match for Elise’s. He didn’t frighten Marjorie. And Marjorie was quick. She would just step aside and let him sprawl on the floor, or stagger into chairs or other inmates. She really didn’t care which. ‘That girl is stealing all the biscuits again! Stop her! Someone get the help!’ one woman with painted nails and impeccable diction would screech. But Marjorie was not deterred by her either.
There was never a thought to look around for her mother when she arrived. Marjorie didn’t need or care to do that. She knew where she would be. Elise would be jammed as she was every time in that timid expanse of a visitors’ room. With its silent, watchful orderlies in their white coats. Elise and all her companions sitting on those metal chairs. Or slumping, or squatting. Or not sitting at all. Elise always was sitting, though. Upright. Her head naked of any decent tea cosy.
And Marjorie didn’t know either if Elise cared to watch out for her in those early days. Because Marjorie never bothered to look. She just went straight to work. She straightened the tables and chairs – even the occupied chairs, if she felt like it. She would push the chairs equidistantly into the tables and arrange the chairs equally among the tables. Then she would place the lukewarm cups of tea – equally, comfortingly, squarely in front of each chair. Then she would arrange the tin plates with the biscuits – grabbing them out of hands if needs be. She was methodical. She was at peace and with purpose as she carved out sensibility and order. As she set the tables.
She did speak to her mother, though. ‘So this is your lunatic asylum, is it?’ she said the first time she went. On subsequent visits Marjorie would say the following when she had finished her table-setting chore: ‘There,’ Marjorie would proclaim. ‘The tables are set, Mother. There are no tablecloths. Or serviettes. It is a bit of a handicap to set a proper table under these conditions. I have done it appropriately otherwise.’ And she would turn as she spoke to the empty fireplace near the window. Because that was where Elise would always be. Sitting in a chair beside the empty fireplace – staring at its emptiness. Marjorie would go over to her mother and would reach down. It looked like she was putting her arms around her mother to give her a hug. But she wasn’t doing that at all. Marjorie had no hugs left these days. ‘Why don’t you spit some more tablets into the fire before I go, Mother?’ she sometimes said.
Or: ‘So, are you happy now?’ she often asked.
Sometimes Marjorie left her mother a different message. It was a simple one. ‘We did it, you and I,’ she would murmur into her mother’s ear.
Her mother never replied.
Aunty Agnes wouldn’t ask Marjorie how Elise was after these visits. She knew better than that – even if she didn’t know enough to realise that Marjorie might not even have been to the mental hospital at all.
Marjorie always telephoned the farm, though. Every month. Because how were they to know whether she had visited or not? Certainly Elise wasn’t in any fit state to tell them. And all Marjorie had to do anyway was visit the confessional and say, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have been telling lies,’ and everything would be alright again.
Bill would ask about Elise, though. Or Pa would ask. Depending on who got to the telephone first. And Aunty Agnes would always listen. Aunty Agnes and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
‘How’s your mother then?’ Bill would ask.
‘She’s alright.’
‘How are you then, Marjorie? You keeping your chin up? Aunty Agnes says you are doing a fine job at that library.’
‘I’m alright.’
And Pa would say: ‘Oh, it’s you, then. How’s that mother of yours? It’s about time she started coming good. She’s been bloody months in that place. She coming good yet?’
‘She’s alright.’
‘What about you then, girl? Are you coming good?’
‘I’m alright.’ As she wondered at the spindly voice of Pa that crept now through the Bakelite. Pa’s voice is not steady on its feet anymore. These telephone lines are wearing him out, she would think.
‘Everybody roundabout’s been asking after you. I let them know I reckon you’re coming good,’ her father would say.
Coming good? Or going bad? Marjorie would wonder. And Marjorie would listen to the dry whisper of her father’s voice and ponder on what had gone wrong with the modern telephony system that it had lately turned her father’s voice into the sound of a thousand wheat husks in the wind.
‘Did your mother ask after me?’ the wheat husk voice might ask.
Marjorie would shrug. ‘No.’
‘Your father’s thinking of coming down. What do you think, Marjorie? I can’t seem to make up my mind on things these days. He’s just been down. What’s he gunna do while Elise just stares at him with those eyes of hers and never a word to say?’ Pa might ask.
‘Is the ploughing finished?’ asked Marjorie of the spindly voice.
‘Why don’t you come up and help with the ploughing? There’s still a bit to be done,’ the voice might reply. ‘You could tidy up about the place for us. We rattle around in the house by ourselves these days, I don’t mind telling you. This house has too much of a man’s feel about it and it could do with a girl’s touch now even if I do say so myself,’ Pa’s delicate, skinny voice might offer.
‘I don’t think so.’ Marjorie would shake her head at the telephone on the wall.
‘Put Aunty Agnes on, love,’ Bill would say.
‘Put Agnes on, girl,’ Pa would say.
And Marjorie would hand the Bakelite receiver to Aunty Agnes. She would wander off down Aunty Agnes’s hallway and into her bedroom. She would shut the door – softly. And lean against it – carefully. And watch the gentle city lights outside her bedroom window as the whispers went to and fro between the adults.
‘It is funny how silent a screaming place can be,’ Marjorie said one Friday night after she had truly been to visit her mother. She said it to the front door as she slammed it shut.
‘What’s that you’re saying, Marjorie?’ asked Aunty Agnes. She had rushed from her kitchen when she heard Marjorie at the door and now she stood and she wiped her hands over and over on her apron as her eyes went red. Because she had recently indulged in a timid hope that things were beginning to come good for Marjorie. ‘That sounds like nonsense talk,’ she said. ‘You stop with that, you hear?’
‘Lonely too,’ Marjorie said. ‘A messy heap of lunatics all cluttered together and tripping over themselves in their own little imprisonment creations. All shouting or crying or muttering or screaming. Which is ridiculous. Because no one hears. Because they are all deaf – by choice. They don’t want to hear anyone or anything. Not even themselves.’
‘Don’t talk about the less fortunate like that, Marjorie.’
Marjorie had taken off her double-breasted, worsted wool coat and matching hat with velvet trim and had flung them at the hallstand while she was talking. She was peeling off her gloves now, carelessly, as you would a peel a banana. She tossed those just as carelessly in the same direction. She paused then, after all the tossing and flinging, to straighten Aunty Agnes’s pearls that Marjorie now wore. ‘Oh no, Aunty Agnes,’ she said. ‘They are not the less fortunate. We are. We are the ones who have to slog on in the realities of this world. We are the ones left behind to face things, to clean up the mess, while they flee and fuss and pamper themselves in their madnesses.’
‘Marjorie! You are being cruel and unchristian. That comment is uncalled for!
Marjorie shrugged. ‘Thank you for that, Agnes, you sound just like my mother. And that is certainly just what I need! Any chance of a cup of coffee?’
*
It ended up taking the best part of a year for any proper words to be spoken on those fitful visits to that mental hospital. Which gave Marjorie plenty of time to perfect her encrustations. No soft, delicate baby coral for Marjorie. Running helped with the process. Marjorie hadn’t let the city stop her running. After all, she had run from the Mallee there to this city here, so she just kept on going all through that year. But she ran on her own these days. There was no Ruby. No Jesse.
She would run early in the mornings before work. Especially on Fridays. Especially on the Fridays she had appointed as mental hospital visiting days. Running around and about the streets and lanes, train lines and yards and factories. All around this lovely place. Running with all those dependable engines. She would run past the awakening trams – blinking and shuffling and screeching their morning calls. Their mouths yawning open and shut. She would run alongside the solid, dependable trains – shunting and shoving at each other in the goods yards. She would circle around lines of utes. Empty. Waiting quietly to lend a hand. Marjorie loved these engines. All that metal. They smelt like blood. Marjorie ran for a year before her mother spoke.
‘There is no tablecloth.’ Those were the first words Elise said to her daughter at that mental hospital.
Marjorie’s arms jerked up and folded themselves across her chest. She lifted her chin and did her best to glare at this mother of hers who had killed Ruby and then abandoned Marjorie for nearly a year. ‘You talk, Mother,’ she said. ‘I am here, and your words are for a tablecloth.’ And Marjorie didn’t go back there for a long time.