The weatherman says clear today, He doesn’t know you’ve gone away, And it’s raining, raining in my heart …
Slowly she circles my living room, her arms wrapped round herself. Allegra in Aunt Nina’s dress, sad and creased from a long night’s dancing, flowers drooping in her waist-length hair. A kitten plays with her shadow on the floor, leaping empty champagne bottles and ashtrays spilling over.
Oh misery, misery-ee, What’s gonna become of me-ee?
The black lace of her skirt sends patterns swirling through the room.
Up the hall, Cathy and her boyfriend wave to me and open the front door. Pale light slips briefly down the hall, then folds on itself and is gone. Car doors slam, an engine comes grumpily to life and the gears crash twice as they drive away.
Allegra has given me a New Year present, a pink stone in the shape of an embryo. It’s 1984, George Orwell’s year, the sun now rolling blocks of light across the floor.
She has been weeping off and on for days. She tries to come out of it, only to start weeping all over again. Her cheeks and her lips sting and the folds of her nose are sore.
She and Nin still live here, but we are besieged by David. When he isn’t trying to heave windows up from the outside or kicking at doors, he’s on the phone. He wants to talk forever, so we leave the phone dangling down the wall and every fifteen minutes or so, Allegra says yes or no into the mouthpiece.
He’s off his rocker. Sometimes I find him huddled on my front doorstep when I leave to go to work in the mornings. He threatens to kick the door down if I don’t let him in. The door is covered in kick marks. Then it’s red roses all over again, one a day, first with a card saying he’ll leave her alone, then with a plea, then with a farewell, then with the announcement that someone else wants to marry him.
No real attempts have been made to kidnap Nin, though once he took her from our mother and sat with her on my front verandah until Allegra came home from work. There, she was only just holding on to her job after having been away so long and coming back before she was well enough. He began, ‘I don’t want my child anywhere near that woman, do you hear me? I said, DO YOU HEAR ME?’
‘I heard you.’
‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’
‘Perhaps you could mind her?’
‘What do you mean, I could mind her? You know fucking well I can’t mind her.’
‘You could if you tried.’
‘I can’t. I’m not living anywhere.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why not, she asks!’
‘Well, she’ll have to stay here with me then, won’t she? If she’s not worth finding a home for.’
‘I’ll contest Allegra. I warn you.’
Maggie, Kelly and I have decided to take Allegra on a holiday. Maggie is brewing coffee behind me in the kitchen and Kelly is shunting the remains of last night’s party into garbage bags. There’s a young chap cleaning up in the yard outside. I don’t know who he is – a gate-crasher, maybe, or someone Eli knows, except that Eli’s away with his friends. Anyway, he seems to be polishing the shrubs. He’s taken the fallen python lilies and made stacks of them like party hats in my rockery. He seems to have wrapped up the outside rubbish in Christmas paper and tied it with bows. It’s poking gaily out of the tin.
I suppose if I were a proper modern woman, I’d stride firmly out into the yard in search of an ulterior motive in the cleaning, stuff the fact he’s actually found room for the rubbish.
‘What are you?’ I decide to demand from where I am, jacked up on the wall beside the open back door. ‘Some kind of …’ I can’t think of the word, ‘… altruist,’ I say at last. He is carefully extracting a green pea from a lily trumpet: now he holds it in the palm of his large hand and stands before me, a castigated child flexing his knees. What knees! They are round as newborn baby heads under his twitching thighs. From the back (I tell him to turn round so I can have a look), his knees have that bland sleepy expression knee backs tend to have on people who are disinclined to strut. His back is very straight and his shoulders broad – he is the stamp of boy a Motte would be proud to own. I can’t think why I didn’t notice him earlier. I tell him he can turn back round again now. He is hiding his eyes away under a big forehead, and when I fish them out, they are light green. ‘Sorry,’ he says, and lowers his head.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Sorry I’m an altruist.’ When he smiles, his teeth are big, white and gappy, but he moves his head to keep me away from those green fish under their ledge.
This isn’t meant to happen at all. Ideologically most unsound. You’re meant to have them quaking at the knees by now, and confessing drug habit. Then you’re meant to say the habit is no concern of yours in a voice that sounds as if you were chewing a fistful of rubber bands. But I say instead, ‘It’s 1984. Matching thongs are in. You people without them are meant to go and sleep under bridges and content yourselves with cheap drink. Would you like to have some coffee?’
‘Okay,’ he says and I ask him his name.
He says he is called Link, because his name is Philip Chaney. Not related to either Lon or the senator. His dad is called Newsome, a fly-by-night, present whereabouts unknown. Sitting on the back step while Maggie tries to tempt Allegra from her trance with coffee, Kelly and Link and I talk of fathers and whether it’s worth chasing them up if they abandon you, until it occurs to me to ask him if he often goes round vomiting in strangers’ rockeries uninvited.
‘Well, um, actually, I was invited. Allegra asked me to come, but I think she forgot. I mean I think she forgot she asked me, and she forgot who I was, and as I didn’t have anyone much to talk to, I got drunk. It was a good party, though.’
He used to drive a delivery van, he tells me. A while ago it seems he dropped off some paintings to their owners after we cleaned out the storeroom at Mad Meg. ‘Usually I just pick up the pictures from the galleries and shoot through,’ he says, ‘but I wanted to ask Allegra something, so I hung around. I didn’t quite know how to look casual. First of all I just sort of stood around with my arms crossed. Then I leant against the upright of a door. Allegra was busy packing the paintings into cardboard. I kept thinking she must’ve thought I’d gone already, so in the end, I kind of coughed. Then she looked up and she sort of said something like did she have to sign a docket. And I said, uh, no, she didn’t have to do that, but would she mind telling me – because I’d noticed her name was Coretti and the signwriter who’d written it on the gallery window did a really bad job – the letters were all the wrong size. Anyway, I wanted to know if she was a relative of that man whose pictures I’d seen in the National Gallery?’ He rubs the back of his head, screwing up his eyes at the complications.
‘And I found out he was her father. She said you were a better painter than him, but she didn’t have any of your work to show me. I ran into her again last week at the market and I asked if there was anywhere I could go to see your paintings. She said if I wanted to see for myself, why didn’t I come to this party? She said you’d be having a New Year’s party, and that’s why I came.’ He takes a deep breath, stretching his magnificent arms like a little boy about to jump into a swimming pool, then blows out his breath and relaxes again, glad to have got that lot off his chest. ‘But I don’t think you could possibly be a better painter,’ he adds in a scarcely audible voice, ‘and anyway,’ he continues, ‘I saw some of your paintings here. I wandered into a few of the rooms. And you’re not, so there.’
Casually, I empty a bottle of soda water over his head, but he is hardly even surprised. It splashes down over his shoulders and fizzes through the fuzz on his legs without him doing anything to stop it. He just sits there, unimpressed, his arms jacked up on his knees and folded across his chest. ‘Those ones in the front room upstairs, for instance …’
‘There’s only one in the front room upstairs. A couple of Stone’s Green Ginger Wine bottles lying at the base of a wall.’
‘Yeah. That’s the one. I mean, I can’t see the point of it. There’s hardly anything in it.’
‘How much do you know about Australian painting, Link?’
‘Not much, I’ll admit. But I trust my own judgement. I like to think I have some judgement … though I probably don’t have.’
‘It’s one of my father’s most famous paintings. It’s the subject of litigation at this very moment. I’ve had to have a burglar alarm installed. I’m not given to securing my possessions,’ I explain, ‘and if Where the Nice Girls Live No. 2 belonged to me, it wouldn’t be protected. It belongs to my son and my niece, however – or will do one of these days. I’m not much of a guardian. I have always lived with an open door.
‘Not so long ago a show of mine was vandalised and some of my work was destroyed. Other people urged me to be angry and sue, but I was sorry for the person who did it, really sorry. To him it must’ve seemed that my work was directed against him. But one’s artistic work is only ever about what one knows. I was sorry for having caused someone unconquerable pain, sorry he had to lard his actions by roundly disparaging my talent, but if I fail to paint, even in my head, there’s nothing left for me. I didn’t take the matter any further, though people said I should have.’
‘That means that person gets away with what he’s done.’
‘No. He probably lives with it all the time. He needs help. Not my help, but some kind of help. No one will help him. Perhaps no one knows how. I don’t suppose anybody wants to help, either. You go seeking help for people like that and doctors turn round and tell you you’re sick. People have the attitude that it’s a waste of time to try to salvage vandals and bashers, but what they’re really saying is such people are inconvenient. It’s passive extermination. Like poor people are inconvenient.’
We drink our coffee slowly, letting the new sunlight warm the blood in our eyelids, like lizards on a rock. Then Link wants me to explain Dadda’s painting to him so I take him upstairs to where the painting is hanging.
Reg Sorby brought it here and had it bolted to my wall. The seeing eye blinks on and off above the door behind us. It isn’t an ideal place to hang the painting, a small, front-facing room giving onto a balcony through curtained French doors. There’s a lot of natural light, which means the painting will deteriorate over time if I don’t cover it in summer. Reg’s insurer suggests a large pane of bullet-proof glass anchored into the wall with steel pins. It seems a bit extreme to me and would cost me more than the guardianship is worth. Furthermore, although that would protect it from attack, it would hardly cope with the light problem and my walls are of such poor quality that anything heavy falls off them, taking chunks of plaster with it.
Dadda’s painting is a seeming blank, and yet it is a hive of riches. I explain the surface qualities and the latent messages in what is depicted. Little ironies in graffiti and subtleties in the application of the paint that cause the image of a girl to come and go as the viewer moves. I explain how it is a transitional painting, making reference to abstraction and hard-edge. It is an unusual painting for its time, clean and puritanical in execution but depicting something unclean and licentious. In the middle of the wall, in neat little letters, is written: LET HER R.I.P.
We dawdle downstairs. The summer morning has come up sleepy and still. It isn’t hot, but long in shadow and very green. Water is in the leaves of things and great hydrangeas, mysteriously blue, are being born from leaf wombs. It is the season of blue in Melbourne, the season of petal skulls, of agapanthus and intense lobelia, of purple marguerites growing in globes. Allegra is swaying slowly now, from foot to foot, as Link and Kelly and I stroll about the house, talking in low voices, waiting for it to be time to pack our car and go on our holiday. In the sitting room now, with Allegra, we stand each side of the fireplace, me swivelling on my right heel, grasping the mantelpiece; Link swivelling on his left, also grasping the mantelpiece; Kelly leaning back towards the fireplace.
We are talking about Mad Meg and what our hopes were for it, when a key is thrust noisily into the front door lock and loud, angry footsteps sound in the hall.
‘My God, it’s David,’ I whisper, my heart knocking in my chest. He was supposed to have gone to spend New Year with Bart in Sydney. I run into the hall, flailing my arms about and crying out, ‘My God, this is pretty ridiculous!’ But David thuds on up my stairs and tries to wrench Dadda’s painting off the wall. Why has David got a key? Why does he know the painting’s here? Is it Eli who’s told him?
‘It’s bloody stupid, David, you know I’ll only have to get the police! Don’t be so silly! Please!’
I keep going for his arm like a puppy, and he, single-minded, having worked himself up into a fury, keeps pushing me off.
I yell for Link. When he reaches the upstairs room, David is still yanking away at the canvas with seemingly indomitable determination. Link lays his great hands on the door lintels. ‘I think you’d better leave it alone,’ he says. And it’s extraordinary – men are baboons – David takes one look at big strong Link and changes his tack completely. He stands there, to one side of Where the Nice Girls Live No. 2, like the sober subject of a Renaissance allegory choosing between a life of action and a life of contemplation and, sensing that the only advantage he has is age, he enquires almost genially, ‘And who are you?’
Link lets go of the door lintels. He strolls into the room, keeping his knees stiff. He folds his hands across his chest and stands, legs apart, with his weight evenly distributed. ‘I think you’d better leave,’ he says.
Then David says, ‘This is my painting,’ and does a John the Baptist appealing to God with his left hand.
The gesture is too much. ‘God, I’m sick of you, David!’ I scream. ‘Get out of my house!’
I have cost Link the situation. Archly David descends the stairs, but instead of heading for the front door, makes for the kitchen. He pours himself a cup of coffee.
‘You bastard!’ I roar. ‘I don’t want to talk to you! This isn’t your house! Get out!’
David gazes out at the challis lilies, plucking his purple lower lip with his superb hand – how can he have such beautiful hands? ‘Those lilies are taking over,’ he says smarmily. ‘What do you call them again? Python lilies? Isn’t that your name for them? Your house is being strangled, Isobel. Snakes outside and snakes wivin.’
‘Oh, how ridiculous you are! Why don’t you wake up to yourself? If the painting belongs to anyone, it belongs to Eli and Nin.’
David turns his back on the garden, faces me and folds his arms, elbows to his sides, like a bat. He is smoking, the smoke draws a sophisticated squiggle up his shirt and over his face. Casually he blows it to one side. ‘You’re going to seed, Isobel,’ he says in a low voice, so Link, who is straddling the stairs to block the way, can’t hear. ‘Your skin’s all dry. You have cicatrices in your chin. You’re also a talentless bore. You come from a mad family. You’re mad yourself. Your father made a dreadful mistake when he married your mother and he spent the latter part of his life trying to unmake it. That’s why you inherited nothing. He left his work to the people who knew what it was worth.
‘That painting you have upstairs belongs to a series all collected and owned by one person. You and your sister were most injudicious in having it removed. It belongs to the Siècle Trust and that is where it will end up.’
Link comes into the kitchen and says, ‘You’d better go.’
‘Who is this bore?’ David snaps.
‘Go,’ says Link, without raising his voice.
‘How old are you?’ David harps at him, and it’s such a pathetic ploy that I feel a weary laugh hump in my chest.
Link raises an eyebrow, takes a sharp little breath and repeats, ‘Go.’ ‘Are you a painter?’ David pesters. ‘Haven’t I seen you around before? When I find out who you are, you’re done for. Do you realise that?’
‘Go,’ says Link and casually saunters into my sitting room where he sits on the arm of a chair and begins to whistle noiselessly. Her back to us, Allegra is standing stock-still.
‘Isobel, if you don’t tell me who this person is, I’ll sue for my share of your ridiculous gallery.’ David has begun to hiss and jab.
‘That would be an odd pretext for suing,’ I mumble.
‘I think you said his name. It was something like Link. Yes, it was Link, wasn’t it? You said Link …’
‘No, it was Michael, actually,’ I answer on an impulse. ‘Michael Beatty from Ballarat, remember? You said you rather liked his water-colours once. Miles showed them about three years ago at Figments. He can draw, too.’
‘That’s not Michael Beatty.’
‘It is.’
‘Yeah, I’m Michael Beatty,’ says Link from the sitting room.
David sits down on the edge of the kitchen table, slaps his forehead a few times with the heel of his hand and starts to laugh. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he goes, rocking back and forth. ‘That isn’t Michael Beatty. You’re insane. That man’s name’s Link. I remember where I’ve seen him. He delivers paintings for shows. He’s a truckie! Isobel’s taken up with a truckie! Ha ha! Ha ha!’ And then he barks, ‘You’re a liar!’ and he dances up to me and does the John the Baptist thing at my face as if he were about to beckon my brains out of my nostrils. ‘You’ve never told the truth in your whole life!’
‘Keep trying, David,’ I sigh, ruing the terrible waste of time. I leave the kitchen slowly and go to sit on the other arm of the chair where Link is sitting. It is as if we agree at all costs that Allegra is to be protected. David thunders after me. All Link has to do is stand. He is much the bigger man. David, faced with physical defeat, suddenly struts out of the house, slamming the front door heartily as he goes.
The very molecules of air unclump themselves as we relax.
‘Why does he have the key?’ Link asks.
I’m worn out and my voice begins to shake. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was Eli, or perhaps I left one lying round inadvertently, I’m careless with things like keys.’
‘I’m going to ring a locksmith.’ He looks at me for assent.
‘It’ll cost a fortune on New Year’s Day,’ I say.
‘He’s a maniac,’ says Link simply. ‘He could kill you.’
‘Only by accident,’ says Allegra at last, still turned away from us but meeting our eyes in the mirror over the mantelpiece. ‘He judges his bashings. If I were as strong as you I don’t suppose his slaps would even feel hard.’
Link raises his large palm as if to warm it at Allegra’s hair. I think he is madly in love with Allegra. ‘What you’re saying is preposterous,’ he whispers.
‘But there’s something else wrong!’ she says.
‘No. It’s plain what’s wrong.’
‘But it matters where the violence came from,’ she says. ‘He learnt it. He learnt to blame women for everything that goes wrong in his life and to punish them. He keeps on doing it because it’s a catharsis for him. He goes away, gets all worked up over what he thinks is a real situation where people are pernicious and out to destroy him. No one will take him aside and show him there are other, more effective ways of behaving. The person you hate can’t teach you love. It needs to be someone else, someone with a baritone and muscles. Men who hit are men who learnt it from their fathers. Only men they respect more than their fathers can unteach them. They’re terribly injured and they inflict terrible injuries as a consequence.’
‘I’m going to stay here tonight,’ says Link. ‘And then I’m going to call a locksmith.’ He says to me, ‘You ought to get ready now and take Allegra for her holiday.’
‘It’s so squalid, so ridiculous, so stupid.’ I shoot my hands out, dolefully. ‘It isn’t just happening here. All over Melbourne there are people chucking themselves about in an aggrieved stupor. I don’t want to involve you. You can’t imagine how tiresome and stupid it all is! Allegra and I used to ask each other why it is that people paint; and now it seems that Dadda painted to cause wars. His wife pretends his memory is sacred and sets herself up to make millions by saying so. At Mad Meg we thought we were fighting her kind of evil and inventing a new way of life, when all we were doing was fighting pettiness with obscure gestures. Rose Hirsch – you know her, she’s the embroiderer – well, she is being dragged into something that isn’t her fault at all. Reg Sorby – everyone knows Reg Sorby – he’s playing Robin Hood with Dadda’s paintings, and David is locked into a fight that none of us comprehend. Why get involved in a mindless melee, Link?’
‘Where do you stand?’
‘Peace! All I want is peace. To paint. To buy my materials and continue with my thoughts and my life. I’ve had enough.’
‘Would you be calm down at the beach tonight if I didn’t stay here?’
‘No. I’d lie awake in a lather of anxiety. You’re right about David. He is dangerous, and he’s also a tool in other people’s hands.’
Link says, ‘Well, I’m going to stay and guard the house and the painting … If you want me to. Do you want me to? It’ll save me from having to sleep under a bridge in my unmatching thongs.’
I accepted his offer and, anyway, I’d begun to wonder why all mothers didn’t call their sons Link. It suddenly seemed a noble name. My love calibrator was obviously measuring him, poor boy, because his was obviously measuring Allegra.
As we drove, Allegra slept on my shoulder and Nin on my lap, while Kelly read us strange, sad poems by John Crowe Ransom. It set us hankering after Browning, a neglected favourite of ours from our school days. We did a patch job on ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, but when Kelly tried to finish it with, Dear dead women, with such hair, too – what’s become of all the gold/Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old, the three of us wept as though our golden age had passed.
We were going down the Great Ocean Road, the tragic headlands folding and unfolding towards Lorne, tragic because in February ’83, while I was formulating my politics with the aid of Uncle Nicola’s diaries and the Mad Meg collective was deciding to subject our shows to both male and female criticism, fire had swept down from the hills, surrounding Lorne and cutting it off in all landward directions. A town further up the coast towards Melbourne was burnt out almost completely, but as we’d driven through it, there was reconstruction going on everywhere, and the headlands, so many Golgothas, were already sprouting greenery.
In April, I had taken a trip with Beryl Blake to collect and photograph the ground orchids that are only ever seen after fire. ‘Cruel flowers,’ she had said. ‘Cruel, cruel little flowers that need mountains to be razed before they’ll show themselves. That’s vanity for you, Isobel, and the doggedness of frailty.’
We passed the Lorne pub, over whose crowded balcony a helicopter had hovered during the blaze, reporting it back to a stunned Melbourne, a hundred or so kilometres away. Melbourne suffered, first, a thick and shocking rain of topsoil blown over by strong winds from the Western District, and then flaming branches, singed leaves and coals, the outfall from Hell.
That summer Melbourne’s magnificent deciduous trees had suffered. To keep them alive it had been necessary to dig trenches in the gorgeous parks and gardens and water the roots directly with reclaimed sewage water. There had been losses and the filthy outfall from the storm complicated things further by coating the vital surfaces of leaves.
When we arrived in Lorne the house we’d rented was a disappointment; the tenants before us had obviously been roistering on New Year’s Eve. There was rubbish everywhere and sick in all three of the bedrooms.
‘Well, at least they didn’t stick around,’ Maggie said. Kelly had to race outside and retch into the bushes. Nin played with the kitten on a patch of garden by the house’s back door. It had wandered into our party off the street. Kelly decided to keep it and had brought it along, tied in a sock, where it had squirmed and parped in her lap and stuck its miniature claws through the mesh. Now it was happy to be out, skittering through grass tussocks.
Maggie and I, mothers both and quite unmoved by vomit, got busy cleaning the place up. Maggie, ever the sensible one, had brought a spade, so we were able to bury the rubbish. The sick was another matter. To wash it off under the shower would have clogged the drains, so we took bedclothes and mats out and beat the solid bits against a post and rail fence, then chucked on buckets of water.
Allegra, meanwhile, did meaningless tasks in slow motion in the kitchen. ‘God,’ said Maggie, ‘we’ll have to watch her, Bel. She’s completely out of her tree, poor thing. We’d better make sure someone’s with her all the time.’
And so we did make sure. She didn’t put on her swimming costume to go to the beach but, still in Aunt Nina’s wedding dress, sat cross-legged in the sand, sifting handful after handful of it. Every so often, Nin would peer up at her face through her hair and say, ‘Mummy.’ She would crouch in front of Allegra, grinning enticingly. Sometimes Allegra would be lost somewhere; sometimes, though, she would stroke Nin’s hair, but when she tried to speak the tears would splash and contract into tiny craters on the sand. If Nin put her arms around her, Allegra would cry even more, though she didn’t ward her off.
We had taken the place for five days but Maggie said, ‘We mightn’t be able to stay that long, not if Allegra doesn’t get any better.’
Maggie and Kelly had planned to go bushwalking the next day. I said I’d stay with Allegra and Nin as it was obvious Allegra wouldn’t be up to it. That night we slept in our own sheets and burnt mosquito coils, which lessened the stale smell in the house. Allegra had seemed to go to sleep long before the rest of us, who sat up playing cards. She still hadn’t changed from Aunt Nina’s dress, but we thought it best to let her be. In the morning, I would run a bath for her; she could have a good soak and I’d make her breakfast. We had brought grapefruit, which we now passed round to one another, pressing the cool yellow globes against our cheeks and enjoying the fresh, light smell.
Maggie was off to Sydney in February, having graduated in photography and scored a good job in a Sydney tech. The Pantechnicon had folded before Mad Meg and the Kellys had run a market stall for a while, but then they sold up and Kelly and Chantal had taken up apprenticeships; Kelly in cabinet making and Chantal in electricity. Chantal was one of only two girls in the state to qualify.
As we had feared, the building housing the Pantechnicon had been demolished and now, freeway-free, the inevitable marble-coated shopping mall was on its way to becoming … what? What, after all, is a shopping mall, particularly one with more marble in it than Milano Centrale?
Though, on the whole, the new architecture was excessive, I had to confess a sneaking admiration for some of it; some of it really was new and surpassed the ugly and often gerry-built sixties boxes. I liked the clothes, too – they had regard for shape and finish, as seventies clothes never had, and certain designers had their tongues firmly in their cheeks. But often enough, the new stuff was extraordinarily expensive, and that which was made for poor tarts like us was generally thrown together in as hideous a fashion as ever before; only the price tags had risen. There were so many mirrors now in shops, you ran the risk of banging right into yourself, but one thing they demonstrated was that although the shops dripped opulence, the populace looked just as daggy as ever.
We yacked as we played, all of us nicotine abstainers now, breaking off the ends of our matchstick stakes and chewing on them. We sipped a bit of cask white while Kelly told us about her new bloke. ‘His name’s Guitar,’ she said, pronouncing it Geet-ar. ‘He’s a Hell’s Angel.’
We laughed at the thought of Kelly, slender, blonde and pretty, as a bikie’s moll. ‘Oh, it’s not like that,’ she said, ‘not quite. Only rides at weekends. He’s doing the apprenticeship. We’ve started up a little business and we’re going to call it Shadow Cabinets. We’re going to be really careful where we get the wood from. It’ll be Australian, as far as that’s possible, and crafted by Australians, too. None of this wood-chip shit. We’re going to have a workshop up in the hills and train kids how to make stuff and design it. There’s a bit of a market for handcrafted stuff up in the hills, what with the mudbrick houses and the mudbrick hippies.’
‘When are you going to start?’ I asked.
‘Well, we’ve started. Mum’s got us a dance floor and a heap of other recycled stuff, and guess who’s renting us the workshop? Your mate, Reg Sorby. Christ, that guy’s got a finger in every bloody pie, I can tell you. This workshop’s next to a factory he owns that makes snail bait. I tell you, he’s the snail bait king of Victoria.’
Talk of Reg made me wary. Before he came round to my house with Where the Nice Girls Live No. 2, he called in with his easel and paint box to paint my python lily. We hadn’t sold Mad Meg back then and were still trying to work out ways to save it. ‘H’mm,’ he hummed, his back to me as he dabbled the python heads onto the canvas. ‘You two are in a fix, aren’t you?’
‘We have to sell,’ I’d said.
‘So it would seem,’ he answered, standing back and smiling coyly at a nymphette he’d slipped in behind the bush.
‘She’s pretty fat in the thighs, Reg,’ I said. He pursed his lips, but then sniffed and smilingly added nipples.
‘Well, I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’m going to do you a favour. Since you were kind enough to let me paint these lilies, I’ll buy the others out of your collective so you and your sister can hang on to your gallery.’
‘Christ!’ I said. ‘We’d be the laughing stock of the universe if we sold out to you! Imagine! You in charge of Mad Meg!’
‘Mussolini paid thirty-three thousand lire for a Modigliani nude once,’ he said.
‘Yes, Reg. But Modigliani was dead.’
‘How about if I made you a gift of some of your father’s paintings, then? I’ve got a potential buyer. You could sell some of them and get yourselves out of trouble.’
‘Well, that’s an idea! So you’ve got some of Dadda’s paintings, have you?’
‘Well, no-o. But I can get some. You see, I own some of the paintings that are in dispute, but I own them jointly with Harry and Viva. Viva’s forgotten that I bought from Rose, and then, because I’m not stupid with money and never have been, not like you and your sister, I deeded them back to Siècle – a gift, you see, that I could write off my tax. But it was partly a gift to myself, because I’m part of the Siècle Trust. Your father wasn’t, because he went off and married your mother before the Trust had been properly thought out.
‘I thought you said you didn’t like Dadda’s work, Reg?’
‘I don’t like it much.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, I just don’t. But I’m a rich man now, Isobel. I don’t need Henry Coretti. I have a feeling that if I opt out of that Trust I’m going to be worth at least a quarter, if not a third of its assets. You ought to have your father’s paintings. I look upon them as yours. And, as I said, I might have a buyer. How much do you need to save your bacon?’
‘Fifteen, twenty thousand dollars. Preferably twenty.’
‘Ah. Well, two of your father’s paintings would probably fetch thirty.’
But though Where the Nice Girls Live materialised, Reg’s buyer didn’t, and our troubles, instead of diminishing, seemed to multiply. I didn’t know whether we had come by the painting legally or not. Harry Laurington thought it was probably legal that we had the painting, but Reg was not above getting hold of it by illegal means. I sighed to think of the mess our lives would be in if Reg had stolen it.
‘Pontoon,’ said Maggie. We were all pretty tired by this and lacking the coherence of mind to play further rounds, so I went to bed in the same room as Allegra and the slumbering Nin, and Maggie and Kelly bunked down in the sitting room.
We woke about half past eight or nine the next day. Nin had been sitting beside my head for an hour or more, pretending to read from a pile of books we’d brought along for her. Kelly was already in the kitchen, cutting the juicy, golden fruit into halves and brewing up tea. We’d decided the night before to cut down on coffee and go for health- and strength-giving tea. There was a mint patch in the so-called garden at the back of the house, so the smell of mint was in the air, and the house was in better odour than it had been. Allegra was asleep, so I decided to let her be until after Kelly and Maggie had gone and I could take care of her and Nin without distractions.
We ate brown toast dripping with honey while Nin sloshed around in a plate of muesli. Kelly had put on shorts and kept her clodhoppered feet on the rung under her chair seat. Maggie came out of the bathroom in a hat with corks hanging round the brim and we laughed. They were about to go when Maggie put her head around the bedroom door where Allegra lay sleeping. ‘Do you think she’s all right?’ she said. ‘She’s awfully still.’ She went into the room with a jacket on her arm and stooped over the bed. I saw her take Allegra’s wrist and shake it, and I buried my head in my arms as if I were about to be in a crash. ‘No pulse,’ Maggie said. The worst of it was I’d known it subliminally for hours.
An ambulance came and took her to the local hospital. There, they said there’d have to be an autopsy, but I was freaked out, I couldn’t bear them to touch her. The blood sample already showed an overdose and there was an empty pill bottle in her bag.
Kelly had taken Nin swimming to distract her. Whenever my mind turned to Nin I felt the uncomprehending ache of a little child and knew this terrible new reality would break on her and do her great harm. Surely Allegra had thought of that; but as I pictured her weeping on the beach, I realised that she had gone beyond coping even with her child’s love. She had gone to the point of thinking her life would ruin her child’s. And she had gone to needing only to die.
There would have to be an autopsy in Melbourne. ‘It’s the law,’ they said. ‘How would we know if it wasn’t the barbiturates that killed her? We know it’s the most likely thing, but we don’t know if it’s the actual thing. We have to rule out any suggestion that she didn’t die by her own hand.’ So I had to sign the wretched paper giving them permission, though I felt my hand being clawed back and I felt her nails wounding me deep between the bones that run to my fingers.
I went back to Melbourne with her in the ambulance. I would have to tell my mother. I knew I would break down in front of my mother, so to help me tell it, I would ask Beryl to be with me. Beryl would be the best person to ask. A kind person, someone with authority. How would I even open my mouth to tell my mother over the phone I was coming to see her? I would ask Beryl; Beryl might have been a drunk, but she was kind and calm. She understood the need for grace in life.
In the ambulance, I wept, held Allegra’s hand and bit her wrist as if I were a baby trying to rouse her. Tears and saliva bound us. There was a nurse in the cabin with me. She kept talking gently and patting my head, but I couldn’t hear a word she said and the pats felt as though I were being lightly pelted with little bags of sand. I fell into a kind of doze with my head on Allegra’s belly, and dreamt a little bit that when I woke the world would be transformed, Allegra would wake up and I would stop crying. But too soon the ambulance was in the parking bay of the morgue, the doors were being opened, the temperature and light in the cabin were changing and I had to let her go. Instead of a sweet, peaceful awakening, the most horrible duty of my life to perform, when I myself was stricken almost to dumbness.
They were good and rang Beryl for me; and so I wept and waited, waited and wept until she arrived – good Beryl, ugly, real, compassionate.
‘I think we won’t ring first,’ she said, squatting in front of me and patting my knee, so I caught a little whiff of her, female and motherly. ‘We’ll just call around. It’ll be hard, but I’ll be there.’
My face a cascade of tears, I rang the bell and drum collection. She opened the door and I took her in my arms: my mother, my dear mother, for whom we had had such years of anger. ‘Allegra,’ I said in her ear and her embrace grew firmer. Then we came apart and she stepped back, tears popping from her eyes, wiping her arthritic index finger upwards under her nose. ‘I can’t cry,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been able to cry.’ She blew her nose, not on a Kleenex, never on a Kleenex, but on a proper hanky. ‘One of Neen’s,’ she said, dangling it and making a little laugh.
‘This is going to be hard for you to believe,’ she said, ‘but I heard your grandfather singing his round-up song last night and I knew it was Allegra. I’ve even been expecting you, my poor darling, poor little darling. I suppose she did it …?’
‘To herself! Yes! To herself!’ I cried, suddenly feeling that she ought to have stabbed herself or jumped from a high place. ‘Fucking sleeping tablets! What a coward! What a coward!’
‘Oh, darling, people like Allegra don’t grow old. They bloom brilliantly and drop.’
‘No, no, no, no, no!’ I writhed around what she had said. ‘No! She was sad. She was unhappy. It didn’t mean she had to kill herself.’
‘Darling, there are some people …’
‘Not Allegra!’
‘Oh well, not Allegra then,’ she said with a kind of resignation, nodding her head. I’d touched her in a place that hurt, but I was suddenly furious with her for assigning Allegra so easily to death. It didn’t occur to me till much later that my mother had had to assign a lot of people to death while being expected to soldier on herself. I didn’t stop to think that she’d done her best with what had been available. I became passionate and accusing. ‘You never believed in her!’ I cried.
‘I did. I admired her courage and the way she took up causes.’ And then she broke out, ‘Hell! Didn’t I get down on my hands and knees trying to fix up the floor of that bloody gallery? And where did that get you both? I wanted you girls to have good lives. I didn’t want you carrying the can for everybody else, as I’ve had to.’
‘You haven’t had to,’ I roared. ‘You chose to. You tried to reform Dadda when it would have been better if he’d reformed us!’ Suddenly, here I was in the middle of a pitched battle, not knowing why I was there and why my mother and I were instantly at each other’s throats at a time when we ought to have been supporting each other. I was sure the fault lay with her, but, of course, I’d gone to give terrible news to my mother and had expected her to react impeccably, to suddenly have words and wisdom she’d never had before, to be dignified in her sorrow, when where is the dignity in the suicide of your child? Instead of catching her emotional intentions, which were to bring comfort and express sadness, I fell into an old habit of my own: I took her at her word. Behind the statement that meant she believed Allegra was the type of person who’d kill herself was something evil, a kind of maternal curse.
Afterwards Beryl said she hadn’t known what to do, both my mother and I had closed ourselves off to reason. And then she said, ‘There’s such a thing as forgiveness, Isobel. It’s not just a Catholic precept, it’s an actual gesture, but you can’t make it unless you leave yourself open to feeling it. I’m sure your mother loves you and I’m sure she loved Allegra. I wouldn’t be surprised if her grief went very, very deep.’
‘You don’t know her,’ I said.
In the next few days, my mother and I hung around each other, hugging then hurting, hugging then hurting, until she said she couldn’t bring herself to look at Allegra dead, and didn’t have the strength to go to the funeral. Beryl and Eli were both with us then, and when I went to attack her, Beryl said, ‘No, Isobel, no.’
‘But Allegra’s her daughter!’
‘Be merciful,’ said Beryl, ‘this is Allegra’s mother.’
Eli said, ‘Go, Mum. I’ll take care of Grandma. Otherwise, she’s all alone, and even if she went she’d be all alone.’
What about me being all alone? I thought. The scene of Arnie and me on the beach came back to me, surrounded by oyster shells. Once again, I was the one to be sacrificed. I would have to be my father and mother. I would have to reconcile this war of opposites both in myself and by myself.
Bouquets in cellophane wilted along the hall of my house, while outside, the streets never seemed so ordinary: shut grey weekday terraces, waiting dogs by rubbish bins. No wind. Onion weed flowered in the bluestone lanes.
You were a trap for the light, Allegra. Beautiful as a spider’s web, your hair arranged to hide the coroner’s work. A shadow fought itself in the stillness under your thumb.
David came with Miles and stood around, surly and speechless. He stroked the back of his hand down your cheek, but that was his only moment. Nin clung to my hand.
Following the hearse in my battered car, we could talk, and did, as if there were no funeral, hoping it wouldn’t rain, hoping we could keep up with the fast-moving cortege. I put my foot down flat on hills, I shot through intersections. An empty yoghurt cup rolled around the floor.
At the cemetery we couldn’t find the gate, and walked with the other mourners in our best high heels or polished boots in a quagmire beyond the fence, helping each other over puddles. Nin ducked in ahead of everyone through a broken bit of fencewire, grinning, but she soon came back to me, a grimy little posy of grave weeds in her hand.
We threw in after you flowers, clods of earth, a stone – a river stone, smooth, pink, shaped like an embryo. I heard it thump on the coffin lid. There are only hard things to cling to in this life: facts have edges and cut into your palm, mysteries are slippery.
We filed back to the cars. The paths were narrow, runnelled and pot-holed. It seemed ridiculous, a hole in the ground, the knocking of clay clods on the lid of a box. A ritual without solace.
A prayer worth saying would be made of stone. Disbelief is the first reaction. You wake in the dark, expecting something to happen. It doesn’t. There is no knock on the door, ‘Sor-ry!’ and the arms around your neck, the voice rocking in your ear, real.
You tumble into daylight and do things, then tumble out of it into a sleep you think was dreamless in the recalling of it. Why dream? If you want to dream, you might as well stay awake. Those times you wake up at two o’clock, three o’clock, in pitch dark, can probably be accounted for by worry – you’ve a lot on your plate – or a full bladder, too much instant coffee, not enough physical exertion. Cut the coffee. Jog. Go to yoga classes, and say your mantra over and over till none of it matters.
Allegra, when I talk to you, doors bang, taps run, and radios talk back to me. A rat scratches in the ceiling, there are ticks, clicks, squeaks; the floorboards shift and the dust falls under them.
I try to draw you, but your image baulks at my hand.
I try to write you. The words come down on the page. Word, word, word, word: nose, eyes, lips, hair. I scrape, I rake, I assemble lines in the dark, and they feel nothing like you. They are small, pointy, rutted, but your hair was crisp, electric.
I chop. I grope. I live in the forest now, where my axe rings cries from the trees. The chips fly out from the divots: wretched, broken, dangerous little things that, stuck together, cannot make a tree.
A hot wind bashes the house and sets the flyscreens thudding. Hydrangeas sock their moppet heads against the fence slats. The ground cracks, the lobelias rust like wire. The summer dances wildly with itself. Is it you? Oh, if it’s you, Allegra, come into my room.
Autumn, and the torn tired gardens reel giddily. The leaves come down without changing colour. They are crisp underfoot, then soaking.
Then the winter falls in with an immense, laboured groaning, bending the branches back like fingers in an iron tango, snapping against the torsion of the trunks. Great crows, like incinerated pages, ride the currents, and clatter on the roof.
There is a false spring. Buds appear along the branches, growing where they can, but the sun, treacherous, early, abandons them to storms. Then there is lightning, then rain.
Listen, Allegra. The rattling of the last tram has stopped. The distant boom of an all-night tanker passes. In a far room the soft head of a dog bumps under a chair. Green digits in the dark go 3.00, 3.00, 3.00. You can hear the night pressing onwards with a high-pitched sound that varies in amplitude like the wheels of millions of minute wagons turning.
Listen. The sound you hear is the sound of mortal time. You hear it on the skin and under it; you hear it on the fringe of sense. Rhythmic, fearful, it is measuring life in years lived, things owned, children had, marriages, mortgages and love run out of. Sometimes it seems contained like a dead weight in a flour sack, and other times it is as insubstantial as a bead of light rising in the sky. It is the booming of air in arid valleys where progress is the passage of light through moving clouds and your voice is a light thing, dispersing. It is that music, that mud music. It is the birth of moments, hours, days and years to come.
The fender of night is about to bump softly on its mooring. It is a vast, scudding shipful of sound, and what if … it does not bump? Are we poured into it, dreamless, forever?
I try to shape the dark into your image, dancing slow, sad and quiet. But you are black air moving on useless hands.
I couldn’t bear our mother’s pity. It was real, sweet, and when she offered it, I wept. But I couldn’t bear it. For the time being, I was set against my mother and longed to drive my fingers through the leaf litter under the trees at Harry Laurington’s beach house to feel my father on my skin.