The door opened and a woman came in, her hair in filthy Rasta dreadlocks down to her waist, no shoes. She looked unwell, in need of a decent feed; behind her stood the child, Giselle. He smiled at the little girl but she showed no hint of recognition and did not smile back.
‘Evenin’, Sylv,’ the woman said. ‘Say hello, Giselle.’
‘Hello,’ said Giselle.
Jonathan was unsure of the etiquette; would the mother think he was an old perv if he talked to Giselle? He wanted to tell her that he was a big fan of her artwork but he was not sure how this would be taken, so he stayed silent. The woman was standing there, possibly reading the menu above Sylv’s head, an uninspiring list of pies, sausage rolls, seafood basket (for two), hamburgers and assorted sandwiches (freshly made).
‘Kitchen’s closed,’ said Sylv.
The woman seemed to be waiting for something; perhaps she was waiting for him to leave. Giselle was inspecting the tempting array of lollies kept at the counter. ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘can I have a Wagon Wheel?’
A Wagon Wheel! Did they still make them? ‘My favourite,’ said Jonathan, taking his onions and his change. ‘I used to buy one every day after school.’
‘Redskins were my fave,’ said the woman. ‘And milk bottles and bananas and them pink and white ones, what were they called again? Strawberries and cream?’ She had a deep smoker’s voice, rough as guts, and the broadest working-class Australian accent he had heard in some time.
‘Come on, Giselle. See youse,’ the woman said, turning and walking away. ‘Say goodbye, Giselle,’ she said at the door.
‘Goodbye,’ said Giselle.
‘Thanks, Sylv,’ he said, turning to leave too. He was not going to ask.
‘Mum’s an ex-druggie,’ Sylv said. ‘Boyfriend committed suicide. She’s staying with Jules.’
Could everyone’s life be reduced to a couple of lines? Would he be Jonathan, whose wife ran off? What of the teeming kingdom of which he was comprised, frail in its particulars, impossible to name, the hundreds and thousands of hours of compromises and hesitations and moments of bad faith, those bright flares of illumination, of wanting two things at once? What of the great stream of complicated decisions and inconsistencies and seemingly insubstantial moments that had turned his life this way instead of that? He should have taken off and seen the world, just as Sarah wanted; he should have agreed to the packing up of their lives, tossing caution to the wind, turning their faces to the tremulous unknown.
‘Poor kid, eh,’ he said. He thought of his own daughters: Madeleine, proud, stiff-backed, and soft-hearted, wayward Amanda.
‘Oh, she’s all right,’ said Sylv. ‘Tough as old boots, like all kids. They survive.’
Do they? He saw Giselle’s small triangle of a face, her knotted hair. This is me.
Outside there was no trace of Bites.
Back at home, he continued with his preparations: he had brought the main ingredients up in an esky. He steamed asparagus with snow peas and haricot vert, intending to pour over everything a little dressing he had invented, using the merest drip of walnut oil. He removed fat, ripe cheeses from the fridge; a nice stinky blue, a runny Tasmanian brie and a hard cheese he had originally tasted on a mountainside in the French Pyrenees, sitting with his legs in the grass after a long day’s solitary hiking, the cheese, a stick of bread and a bottle of red he drank straight from the bottle. He had never tasted anything finer—the cheese, the bread, the wine—and it was the first time the air had moved freely in his chest again since Sarah left him. He could have stayed in that grass all the days of his life except that he was a man of responsibilities and his real life was far away. Everyone he loved was in Brisbane so there was nothing for it but to stand up and walk down the mountain.
ELEVEN
New Australian
Marie, watching the six o’clock news, made an annoying tsk-tsking sound with her tongue which Penny heard, magnified, from the kitchen. ‘Those Muzzies are trouble,’ she said. She rubbed the sore lump which was burning; inflamed.
Penny poured herself a gin and tonic, double-strength. ‘That’s a bit rich coming from you. And don’t call them Muzzies, Marie. You make them sound like mosquitoes.’
‘Mozzies, Muzzies. Same thing.’
Penny walked into the lounge room. ‘Seriously? A mosquito is the same thing as a Muslim?’
‘Don’t be smart, Penny. A mosquito is a nuisance, buzzing around, nothing to do except annoy people.’
Penny sighed. ‘Just like a Muslim.’
Marie took her eyes from the television. ‘These Muzzies come here because they don’t like life in their country. Then they want to change our country into one just like the one they left.’
Was it worth taking this on? She knew her mother had her own unexamined reasons for being harsh about Muslims, but Marie also disliked asylum seekers (woe betide if someone was both), Indians and—just to be even-handed—Jews. She herself was a refugee! But Marie’s life was a shrouded sorrow, apparently comfortless. She was Christian in the way that most Australians were Christian, that is, nominally, a tick in a box on certain hospital forms. She attended church sporadically, an Anglican church way out in Chermside where—for some reason—Penny’s father’s funeral was held. Penny had long ceased to enquire about her mother’s vanished life; she had once overheard Mrs O’Brien asking Marie whether she had grown up in a bilingual family. ‘What a stupid question, Wendy,’ she replied. ‘How can it possibly matter?’
Penny looked over at her mother. ‘You were a New Australian once, Marie. I bet everyone thought you were trouble too.’
Her mother did not bother to take her eyes from the television. ‘Don’t speak of what you don’t know, Penny,’ she said. ‘It is vulgar.’
‘What’s wrong with your eye?’
‘Ce n’est rien,’ said Marie. Nothing.
Marie only ever spoke French to shut her up.
In Brisbane in 1955, many people had never met a foreigner. Sometimes, asking for something in a shop, she drew a small crowd; children stared at her as if she were a mythical creature, a talking snake. Whatever it was about Australians that could not be known to her and reflected—manners, customs, body language, some native knowledge locked from her—distinguished her as a foreigner. What was in her body shut her out, the accent on her tongue, everything it knew, whatever unknowable thing it was she exhibited that signified the boundary between her and them; not just the entire historical pasts of Australia and France, but the entire past of herself. Once, in the house where Marie lived when she first arrived before she moved in with the McCanns, a boarding house for young ladies in the ridiculously named suburb of Wooloowin, she came down late for breakfast one morning (a dried-up slice of pawpaw from the tree in the garden, bitter to the tongue; a bowl of hard, crusted-over porridge, a cup of stewed tea; everything protected from the flies by little knitted doilies with beads sewn around their edges) to find two other young ladies—Maureen, known as Maw, a country girl from a property out near Thargomindah (how did Australians come up with these names?) and Betty, from Goondiwindi (!)—were already seated at the long communal table. Both were on teacher’s scholarships to Brisbane Kindergarten Training College, but they were also saving up to go to London, where their real lives would begin.
‘Morning, Marie,’ they said together as she sat down, making it sound sarcastic. They didn’t like her; they couldn’t make her out.
Marie usually ate breakfast first thing, before anyone was up, to avoid Maw and Betty, often beating Mrs Baxter, who hadn’t even laid the table, but on this particular morning she had uncharacteristically slept in. When she awoke she did not feel refreshed but overcome by a morbid lassitude, an inability to command her limbs to rise and begin. She lay for a long time, staring at the ceiling, paralysed. Only through an extreme effort of will did she eventually conjure a worm of energy which allowed her to move from the bed.
‘Anyway,’ Maw was saying, ‘I gave him a good clip around the earhole.
’
Maw was doing her teacher training practice at a rough school in some distant sun-struck suburb. Marie did not know what a good clip around the earhole was, but she could guess. Her stockings itched, as if they were made of wool. This reminded her of the silk stockings her father brought back from a business trip to England for her tenth birthday, her first pair, which her mother immediately outlawed, declaring them wildly inappropriate. ‘She doesn’t even own a suspender belt!’ she cried. ‘How is she supposed to wear them?’ Marie begged to borrow a belt from her mother so she might at least try them on, but her mother leaned across the table in a bid to snatch them from her hands, causing Marie to leap up with the stockings and run to the bathroom. Her mother followed, leading to a frenzied wrestling match with her hysterical mother, scratches on her face, the stockings—beautiful, lost, never seen again—flung from the window.
Marie’s porridge was cold. She wondered, again, why Mrs Baxter didn’t keep it warmed on the stove, ladling it out as required.
‘Ask the old so-and-so for a fresh bowl,’ said Betty. ‘That looks disgusting.’
‘That might be how Marie likes it,’ said Maw. ‘They might eat it like that where she comes from.’ She sniggered.
Marie picked up the spoon and began to eat the hard, cold porridge.
TWELVE
Out of the corner of one eye
Giselle had recently learned to distinguish left from right because of a large freckle on her left knee. Miss Wilson showed her, because she kept getting mixed up. ‘See that freckle, Giselle? That’s your left freckle. God put it there especially for you, so you could learn the difference between your left and your right.’ Ever since Miss Wilson showed her, Giselle knew exactly where left lived, and where right lived. She was waiting for similar guidance from God in telling her the difference between ‘b’ and ‘d’, the same little curved pouch, the same stem, an upside-down flower turned this way or that. She always spelled the name of her best friend Dan wrong, no matter how hard she tried not to. She stared and stared and still the letters would not reveal which one was which, just like the Richards twins, refusing to tell her which one was Jackson and which one was Jayden.
Giselle sat at the table, doing her homework. She was trying to keep the numbers from scrunching up together on the left side of the page, but they kept moving in that direction, bunching up, as if the right side of the page was not the place to be. She tore the page up and started over, but once again the numbers crowded over to the left, as if they had all been invited to a party.
‘Jeez,’ said her mother. ‘I never had homework when I was seven.’
‘You didn’t have Miss Wilson, did you, Mum? She’s very strict.’ She wanted to ask her mother how to stop the numbers moving to the left, but she knew her mother was watching TV and would not get off the couch. She looked at her mother carefully; satisfied, she returned to her difficult work.
When Giselle looked again, her mother was asleep. Giselle got up and turned off the television. She was hungry and made her way to the kitchen. Jules had not come home. She opened the fridge; unlike the contents of the fridge at home, this one was filled with mysterious objects, tubs of creamy, unspecified mixtures, fresh herbs Giselle could not name, labels reading gluten-free on unidentifiable substances. The fridge did not appear to contain anything she could actually eat, so she turned to the cupboard. This was even worse: packets of nuts, seeds, root stuffs, grasses, everything to feed a possum, but not Giselle. There was no sign of a handy packet of instant pot noodles.
Giselle was starving so she reached for the only thing she recognised: muesli. The label, which Giselle read carefully, said GM-free and fructose-free and 97% sugar-free, which did not make muesli sound as much fun as a Wagon Wheel. Giselle did not know what fructose was but it sounded yummy.
She went back to the fridge and got out the organic milk, which Jules said was better for you than ordinary milk. Giselle was not exactly sure what organic was, but Jules had once been sick and now she was cured, and she said she would never eat anything ever again that was not organic. Jules’s other drink of choice besides organic milk and organic tea was Diet Coke, which Giselle supposed must be organic too, but she could not see the word organic on the label.
Giselle was not sure what to make of Jules and she watched her out of the corner of one eye, having never lived with an adult who got up every day and went not to school, like Giselle did, but to work. She was away longer than school, longer than the school bus, not getting home till it was dark, declaring herself ‘bone-tired’. Giselle had not heard this expression before and had not known that bones got tired. Jules had grown up in Melbourne like her mum, and she knew mum’s sister who died, Aunty Pauline. Giselle sat under the table on the veranda out the back, listening, drawing, while her mum and Jules got drunk. Every now and then she piped up to remind her mother that she was counting how many cigarettes she smoked. ‘Twelve, Mum,’ she said, and her mother and Jules killed themselves laughing.
‘She’s the fucking thought police,’ said Jules, and they laughed again.
Jules had no children, probably because children were a nuisance.
After Giselle finished the muesli, she walked around the empty house, turning on the lights. She wasn’t allowed to go outside in the dark, but she supposed it was all right to go out into the backyard, which ran down the hill, fenceless, the garden opening onto the street that ran around the lake. It wasn’t even properly dark yet. Giselle knew that from a certain vantage point beside the fence dividing Jules’s house from the house next door she was able to see into the house where the two babies lived. She liked babies—no, she loved them—and sometimes the mother let her play with them, on the lawn. Once the mother let her walk the smallest baby, whose name she could not pronounce, and she did not tell the mother that once she had wheeled the pram around the corner, she took the baby out, sat down on the gutter, and held him on her lap. The baby was heavy, squirming, and she almost dropped him. ‘No,’ she told him firmly, sitting him upright, facing her, his fat fists grabbing her hair. He smiled and she pushed her face into his and he slobbered all over her. ‘Yuck,’ she said, wiping it off, nearly dropping him again. She put the baby back in the pram.
Now she dragged one of the outside garden chairs close to the fence. Standing on tippy-toes she saw into the house next door: the mother, the father, the two babies, the smallest strapped into his highchair. The mother was laughing and everything looked like it did on television or in the movies; lit up, framed, a little play especially put on for her, Giselle. There was the sound of bats, of the rising wind knocking the trees about, the dry rustle of palm trees; dead husks rattling against trunks.
THIRTEEN
A fly on the wall
Marie insisted on walking to Jonathan’s, even though she did not feel particularly well. She was beginning to think she had something nasty in her eye but, if she did, she did not want to know. She had taken some trouble with her hair, which would not twist properly, and she was still not completely satisfied it was sitting as it should. Penny waited impatiently as her mother eased her walking frame through the front door, annoyed because Marie had already kept her waiting while fussing about with her hair; actually, she would have preferred Marie not come at all. She was also worried about her mother’s eye, which Marie refused to talk about, which only annoyed Penny even more. Showing great self-control, Penny held her tongue and waited while Marie inched her way down the stairs. Penny’s house was on the corner of Blackboy Street and Goodchap Road, opposite Sylv and Phil’s. Goodchap Road was named for Mrs Goodchap. Back in the days when bushrangers still roamed, the celebrated Aboriginal bushranger Jimmy Cooney was discovered pillaging Mrs Goodchaps’s pantry, which was unfortunate for him since Mrs Goodchap, late of Warwickshire, was a hefty woman with arms like Christmas hams, and Jimmy was a slight young man. She surprised him from behind with a length of clothesline and manhandled him to the floor, trussing him up and boxing his ears for good measure.
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Penny didn’t know this story, but Sylv could have told her. Mrs Goodchap was buried in the cemetery on the village outskirts, built in 1873. The Landing’s dead would have returned unacknowledged to the oblivion of the earth, joining the thirty massacred Gubbi Gubbi people buried only a few years earlier in a mass grave a few miles south by the three farmers who shot them—for no particular reason other than that they believed them to be a sort of blight on the natural environment—but for Sylv. It was she who stumbled across the village graves and what remained of the cemetery while out bushwalking twenty-five years before, when she was still in early middle age and not yet a chain-smoker, still holding out hope of staving off the fat threatening to engulf her. If it engulfed her now, so that she was squeezed into her skin like a plump pork sausage, her hopes of resurrection as a skinny woman had long since faded. Now Sylv no longer bushwalked or indeed walked anywhere at all, having trouble navigating a greater distance further than the shop to the car or the steps leading from her house to the garage. All day she sat in a plastic chair in front of the shop, checking out who was coming into town and who was leaving—and with whom—only heaving herself up to walk painfully from the chair to serve someone at the counter.
Sylv, back from closing up the shop, was watching the proceedings from the viewing platform of her enclosed veranda, sucking hard on a cigarette as she observed the mother negotiate the driveway of the house Sylv still referred to as the Collinses, even though Pete Collins had been booted out by his wife and now lived down the road. Phil had already told her about the mother’s arrival. She knew, too, that Penny did not get on with her mother. How could you not get on with your own mother? She, Sylvia, a devoted Catholic, had been the epitome of the dutiful daughter, driving every second day all the way to Gympie to visit hers, who suffered from dementia, to make sure her hair and nails were kept nice. Penny had once thoughtlessly remarked to Sylvia that she would rather be dead than end up in a locked dementia ward. ‘But every human life is precious,’ Sylv said tartly. ‘And, anyway, you don’t know how it feels to have dementia. Who are you to decide whose life is worth living and whose isn’t? You might find you feel differently when it happens to you.’ But Sylv had obviously not been tart enough; Penny, who had less sensitivity than a dog, did not give up. ‘That’s not life, Sylvia,’ she said. ‘That’s vegetable existence.’ How could anyone talk like that about a living, breathing woman who ate her custard and tapped her foot to a sprightly song? It was true her mother no longer recognised her, or knew which day of the week it was, or even how to find her own bedroom. She regularly wandered into the wrong rooms or ate someone else’s dinner. Once, shamefully, her mother had smeared her own excrement over every wall in the bathroom but, thankfully, Sylv was the one who found it and, crying, cleaned it off before any of the care workers found out. Her sweet, well-brought-up mother; how ashamed she would be, Mrs Muriel Gallagher, formerly of Hockings Street, Clayfield, a proper lady who had all her dresses made by a dressmaker and who still wore hats to go into the city for lunch! Sylv had not spoken to Penny since. Her mother had been dead nine years and now she cared for her mother-in-law, Phyllis, as if she were her own mother, even if Phyllis sometimes made her blood boil, even if Phyllis sometimes irritated her so much it forced Sylv to retire to her bedroom on the pretence of a headache. Phyllis was family, and family was non-negotiable (although if she and Phil had been able to have children, and they had ended up with a daughter who was a slut like Scarlett, that might have been another matter). No, Phyllis was her husband’s mother, which also made her Sylv’s mother (she called her Mum), and as long as she was alive, Sylv would watch over her. She was proud of herself.