Those Brisbane Romantics, page 14
“Oh yeah, they’ll bring their women.” He saw her frown and added, “You’ll be all right. You’ll enjoy yourself once you get there.”
“I don’t want to go. I’m scared of those places. I won’t know anyone. Couldn’t we not go?”
“We have to go, kiddo. It’d look funny if the coach didn’t turn up.”
Tara switched on the car radio. “Okay, we’ll go.”
Alan got the message. “I’m an ordinary fellow, Tara, the average Australian bloke. I like beer and films and football and women.”
“In that order?” she threw at him.
“The order varies according to my mood. Try and get over Joe.”
He had broken an unspoken rule by mentioning Joe Gordon’s name. Tara pretended she hadn’t heard him. “Isn’t the view terrific from this hill? Have you ever thought you could fly?”
“Hell no.”
Tara had a flash of how her life would be if she married Alan. It would be very lonely once the sex wore off.
“Sometimes,” she said, “when I’m up really high, I feel as if I could step off, that I’ve escaped from myself for just a moment. But the minute I move or even realise what I’m thinking, I’m back in there again, imprisoned. Have you ever felt that?”
Alan shrugged. “Don’t think I’d want to. It sounds a bit dangerous to me.”
Surfers Paradise, that ambitious little town, love child of land-developer Mayor Bruce Small, was ablaze with lights, for it was Brisbane’s real nightspot. The coastal strip was jammed with hotels, motels, car-o-tels, caravan parks and restaurants, most of them still low-rise. During the day, the miles of glittering beaches were crowded. Well-to-do Australians came from the south to spend the winter; there was even a sprinkling of overseas tourists—sometimes even a few Japanese, to the horror of the older residents. The smell of the salt air mingled with the scent of French perfume, suntan oil, cosmetics and the stench of money changing hands.
A huge crowd was already at the hotel, singing, dancing, yelling and breaking glasses. The painted metal tabletops were awash with spilt beer. To Tara’s childlike eyes, it was Babylon all over again.
The footballers’ women were bottle blondes with eyebrows plucked to one-hair thickness and straight skirts not straight enough. “Poured in and forgot to say when,” was how Alan had once described them. They looked as though they’d dressed and applied their make-up in the dark. When Alan told them that Tara was an agricultural scientist (Oh, thanks very much, she thought), they were on the defensive. She understood this, but she lacked the confidence to speak up and dispel the barrier.
When the hotel closed at ten o’clock and they were forced out into the street, they went to a nearby flat two of the men were renting for the weekend. They sat at the laminex kitchen table, drinking and talking under a merciless fluorescent strip light. The beer and soft drink quickly ran out and everyone began to drink straight rum. The men talked football until the women were bored and tired with it all. But Alan was not the man to whom you could say, “Let’s go home,” so Tara leaned her elbows on the table, looked from this face to that, and tried to make sense of the conversation. She was at home with rum, and once the women became tired and tipsy she felt on safer ground. Still, she couldn’t escape the feeling that her life was on hold.
Beyond the window, the stars were flung across the sky like popcorn.
“What’s up, kiddo?” Alan asked on the drive back to the city.
“Nothing.” He was tying her down. Putting words around her ankles, binding her to the ground. She wanted to think, dart here and there in her thinking. The slowness of spoken words infuriated her. Looking back on it later, she supposed she’d been manic. It happened sometimes, the up side of down.
“What’s wrong?” Alan asked again.
“I don’t know.” A rare restlessness she didn’t understand stirred in her blood like wild and lovely music, suggesting the possibility of some better state. If she held on, might she not find someone else like Joe? Or was the whole romance thing a delusion? Her mood began to plummet.
Alan read it in her face. “Cheer up, honey, cheer up. There’s no need to be so grief-stricken.”
“It’s just a mood, it’ll pass.” But it was not your average mood. They seemed the very essence of her, these intense mood swings that drove her mad with happiness on the up and near to suicidal on the down. Damn, Tara thought. She felt tears on her face and groped around in the glovebox for a tissue.
Alan didn’t seem to notice. They were back in the city now, he had to watch the traffic. They passed a girl sitting alone on a bus seat. She was wearing a white cotton cardigan over a full-skirted summer frock. She, too, was crying, head bent, into a handkerchief. Who was she? Tara wondered. What was her pain? There seemed to be no end to it. People passed it on to one another like an infection.
Alan sought for something concrete to explain the state Tara was in. He was a scientist. Concrete problems had concrete solutions. “It’s my fault, honey, I shouldn’t have given you so much rum.”
“The rum was okay. The rum was good.” The rum had made the whole thing bearable.
Now he was thinking aloud that perhaps her blood sugar was low, that he should’ve stuck a steak into her before they went to the pub. “Would you like something to eat?”
Tara considered. It wouldn’t hurt to eat something. She couldn’t remember when she’d last had a proper meal. She tended to exist on bottles of milk and chocolate bars. The truth of the matter was that she couldn’t eat at home. If she sat down at the kitchen table to eat, it was a signal for her father to sit down on the other side and start an argument, as he’d done with her mother before her. Tara had reached the stage where just the sight of a table made her feel ill.
“I wouldn’t mind a bottle of pineapple juice,” she told Alan.
He pulled up outside The Windmill, one of the few all-night cafés in Brisbane, and even that closed at 1 a.m. He shut the car door and spoke through the open window.
“I’ll get you the coldest one in the shop.”
Watching him hurry into The Windmill, Tara felt a stab of pity for him. Poor coot, she’d never be satisfied. She’d tear him to pieces, bit by bit, like her father had torn her mother. Better there was an end to it.
Nearby, a pie stall was perched between two No Parking signs. On the footpath, a drunk urinated in a doorway. He fell on to the pavement shortly afterwards, but there was still plenty of room for the late-night people to walk around him. An advertisement flashed on the building across Countess Street.
CHUTNEY, the sign said. CHUTNEY.
And underneath, VINEGAR, written in blue.
The words flashed alternately: CHUTNEY, VINEGAR. CHUTNEY, VINEGAR.
Tara and her father had passed that same sign, inexplicably flashing, on their way into the city on the morning they’d gone to visit Tara’s mother in Ward 16. There’d been a cold wind blowing, she remembered—a westerly—so it must have been July or August. That was when the westerlies hit Brisbane, regular as clockwork, every year.
They’d travelled on a tram into the city, sitting in the smoking section; her father liked to smoke as he watched the scenery slide by. Tara hated the smoking section, it was always full of old men with tobacco pouches and pipes. To her ten-year-old eyes they seemed unkempt and vaguely threatening in their tweedy clothes and unironed shirts.
The hospital grounds held an air of suppressed panic. Tara and her father dodged ambulances and grim women carrying flowers. They took the lift to Ward 16 in the main building. At the reception desk, they were confronted by a stout woman in a white uniform.
Tara’s father spoke gruffly. “We’ve come to see Eileen Mahoney.” That was when Tara realised how ill at ease he was, how ashamed to be there.
The woman in white shuffled papers. Farther inside the building, someone cried out, more a howl than a cry of pain.
Tara clutched at her father’s hand. “What was that?”
“Nothing, girl. Be quiet.”
The woman in white lifted a huge bunch of keys from a hook on the wall of the reception area. “Come with me.”
Tara and her father followed the woman through a maze of corridors broken by a series of doors, all barred as if they were entering a jail. They paused at each while the woman rummaged through her bunch of keys until she found the right one. Then she locked the door behind them.
Deeper and deeper, they ventured into the unknown, Tara’s terror rising with each door locked behind her. She wanted to flee from this place with its smell of antiseptic and panic that turned her stomach. But her mother was somewhere at the end of the labyrinth (fairy cakes and pansies), so she held her nerve.
Pausing at yet another door, the nurse flicked her eyes towards Tara, then back to Jack Mahoney. “Are you sure she’ll be all right?”
“Oh yes,” her father replied. “Tara’s tough, she can cope with anything. Can’t you, love?”
“Very well. But your wife’s just come out of ECT. You can only stay a few minutes.”
Eventually there were no more doors. They found themselves in a large room filled with laminex tables and plastic chairs. The residents looked up as they entered. All were dressed in washed-out blue. Their eyes were strange. Tara was frightened until they returned to their board games, jigsaw puzzles and newspapers.
A couple of people were sprawled across the tables, apparently asleep. One woman’s long unkempt hair was strewn across a table like spilt blood. Jack Mahoney approached this figure and spoke softly.
“Eileen? Eileen, it’s me, Jack.”
The nurse came over and shook the woman by the shoulder. “Wake up, Eileen, you’ve got a visitor!”
To Tara’s dismay, her father sounded frightened, a first for him. “Is she all right?”
“Oh yes, it’s only the sleeping pills. They give them to the patients to relax them when they’re having the ECT.”
Tara echoed her father. “Is she all right?”
The woman softened her voice. “She’ll be all right later on, luv. She’s just sleepy right now. They’re always sleepy after the ECT.”
Tara’s father took the strange woman (not her mother, surely not, no) by the shoulder and shook her gently. “Eileen, Eileen, I’ve brought Tara to see you.”
At the sound of her daughter’s name, the woman sprawled across the laminex table made an effort to rise. She lifted her head and stared straight at Tara.
“Don’t let them take you alive!” she cried and fell back on to the table.
The nurse hustled them away. “That’s it, luv. Better you come back another day if you want to see her.”
The residents watched them leave. They passed through all the doors in reverse, the nurse with all her keys clanking like the chatelaine of an ancient castle.
“Well, that’s that then,” Tara’s father said as they waited across the street from the hospital for a tram back to the city. The finality in his voice chilled Tara.
There were no more visits to Ward 16. If Tara’s father ever went back, he didn’t tell her. After a while, she managed to push the whole thing from her mind. Never happened, it never happened. Not her mother, no.
CHUTNEY, the sign said. CHUTNEY.
And underneath, VINEGAR, written in blue.
It was a month of strange skies. Klari stood on the corner of Albert and Ann Streets, waiting for Joe.
“Double tragedy at Banyo Creek! HOO, the double murder!” the paperboy cried. Klari bought flowers from the old woman who always sold them on that corner. She turned heads, standing there with her flowers, thirty minutes, forty minutes, fifty. She was a stunning person, with a glow about her as if she were lit from within.
After an hour she gave up the wait and caught a tram out to the tower house. The air was hot, and heavy with the cloying smell of frangipani. The people working in their gardens looked as if they’d been cut out of cardboard. The trees looked as if you could slice them off at ground level with a razor blade, and the morning had a timelessness that frightened her.
She arrived at the tower house to the smell of burning toast and knocked on the open front door. Still in his pyjamas, Bill was doing a solitary cha-cha in the living room. He cha-chaed down the hallway to Klari.
“Shall we dance?”
“Your toast is burning.”
“Gawd! So it is.” He ran into the kitchen, pulled the blackened pieces out of the toaster and tossed them into the sink. Looking enigmatic in its jacket, Bill’s double bass stood in the corner behind the back door with a clean tea towel draped over the head. “Gee, Klari, if I knew you were coming I’d’ve baked a cake.” He broke gradually into the ’50s song as he led her into the kitchen and concluded, “But where are my manners? Take a chair.”
Klari sank gratefully into the chair he offered. “Thank you, Bela.”
“Say, I like that Bela business. Bill is just plain old Bill, but Bela sounds passionate, romantic. If I grew a moustache, do you think I could look passionate and romantic?”
Klari laughed in spite of herself. “Oh Bela, you are so funny. Here,” she held out a brown paper packet. “I bought you a family pie.”
“Thanks. Joe’ll be back Sunday night, I think he said, didn’t he?”
This was news to Klari. “Yes, that is correct. Sunday night.”
“Gee, it’s good to see you, Klari.” Bill leaned against the sink and began to roll a cigarette. “Things are a bore with all the Mates away, I’ve been pining to death here by myself. Only person who’s called besides you was a bloke who came selling mops.” He took the flowers from her and dumped them, paper and all, into a milk jug he filled under the tap. “Would you like something to eat? You look plumb tuckered out. I’m just making breakfast.”
“I would like a cup of coffee, but no food.” She was wilting like the flowers. “I … am rather tired. I have been in the town, shopping.”
“Yeah, that shopping sure takes it out of you. You don’t mind if I eat, do you? I’m starving.” He threw some bacon rashers into the frying pan and switched off the toaster. “I’ll make that later. Say, is that fresh bread you’ve got there?” He prodded longingly at the half-loaf wrapped in white tissue paper. “Jeeze, we haven’t had fresh bread in weeks; all we’ve got is this.” He held up the heel of a loaf. “I don’t mind the mould so much, you can cut that off. It’s just that the bread’s so hard the toast tears your teeth out by the roots.”
“Here, you must take this loaf.”
Bill made reluctant pushing-away gestures. “Aw no, I couldn’t.”
“We don’t really need it; we’ve still got some left from Friday.”
“Well, if you’re sure.” Bill placed the bread carefully in a large china bread crock on top of the refrigerator, turned over the bacon and broke two eggs into the pan. “We’ve only got instant coffee, is that all right?”
“That’s fine, t’anks, fine. Can I put the kettle on for you?” She felt desperately in need of the coffee.
Bill shook the kettle to check the water level and held it out to her. Before Klari could take it from him, she fell to her knees without warning, threw up under the table and passed out.
“Oh dear oh bloody dear.” Bill picked her up easily and carried her, still unconscious, into his room. Placing her down gently on the unmade bed, he sat down beside her and wiped the vomit from around her mouth with the corner of his pyjama top. Her hair, unbraided, cascaded over the pillow. He picked up a strand of it and rubbed it thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger.
When Klari came to, she seemed confused. “What has been happening to me?”
“You fainted,” Bill said, “but you’re all right now. You just lie there while I make that coffee.” He grabbed up a pair of worn chinos and a shirt from the end of the cast-iron bed and went into the kitchen. There he dressed, fussed with a bucket and mop until the kettle whistled, and clattered the cups as he made the coffee, all the while muttering to himself, “Oh dear oh bloody dear.”
Back in his bedroom, he pushed a chair up to the bed, placed a mug of black coffee on it and propped Klari up in a sitting position with two pillows.
“Try the coffee, it should be all right now.”
“Urk.” She made a face. “It is so strong, and there is so much sugar.”
Bill sat down on the edge of the bed. “I spent last holidays with my sister. It was the only thing that’d settle her stomach in the mornings.”
“What was wrong with your sister?”
Bill reached into the breast pocket of his shirt for his tobacco and papers. “She was expecting a baby.”
Klari was too tired to deny it.
“You come to tell him?”
“Never that! He was supposed to meet me in the town, but he forgot.”
“Yeah, that’s him. Always forgetting something. You wouldn’t consider … Alastair knows a doctor.”
“No. I do not want that.”
“Tell him, Klari. If you tell him, he’ll marry you. You gotta tell him. He ought to know.”
“Please, Bela, listen to me. He could not support a wife and baby in Europe on the scholarship. And he does not want these! To be concert violinist, this is what he wants. Promise you won’t tell him.”
Bill frowned. “What about you? You can’t be pregnant and single and still run a ballet school. No one would send their daughters to you.”
“Christine can look after it for me. She has worked with me together twelve months now. I shall say I am going on a trip. Yes, that is what I shall say. A trip.”
Bill puffed agitatedly on the newly-lit rollie. “How are you going to explain your reappearance with a baby?”
“Let us wait until after the competition. If Joe fails, perhaps then. I want him to have his chance.”
“What about the little feller—doesn’t he deserve a chance as well?”
Klari had no answer for that.
Bill drove her home, the old car hiccupping all the way. As soon as she had waved him out of sight she ran inside and began to pack.
