Pursuing Love and Death, page 18
Ginsberg felt his hands sinking into the sand as a wave pushed around his body. It smoothed down Kate’s righteousness, even as she said, ‘If you can learn to accept yourself, you should be able to deal with anything,’ and he thought her level of self-awareness scary. Her introspection would win points with his mother while her level-headedness was worthy of his father’s approval. Ginsberg had a lot to learn from her. If he was with her for a lifetime, he would never stop learning. Deal with it, he laughed. How does one ‘deal with it’? Ginsberg looked down and over at Kate’s belly. ‘How did you deal with it?’
‘I ran away.’
He swore he saw a ripple of movement in her belly. ‘Was that …? Oh my god!’
She smiled at him. ‘You saw it move?’
It was the most amazing discovery of his life. He smiled, crouched himself in front of her, squeezed both her hands: ‘I’ll never run, Kate Smith.’
THE TINY STUFF
‘I’m cooking!’ An African pop song filled the kitchen alongside smells of onion, garlic and game. ‘Kangaroo bangers and mash.’ Mark smiled and kissed Luna hello.
Luna had been thinking take-away, something easy, nourishment involving no preparation, so walking through her front door and seeing Mark busy at the stove should have pleased her immensely. But not with his declaration of meat and potatoes. So masculine. And there were far too many sausages sizzling to excite her. Are we seriously meant to eat all this? Regardless: ‘You’re a gem, aren’t you?’ She ran her fingers through his hair and kissed him on his nose.
Luna walked down the hall, calling over her shoulder that she was having a shower, she’d only be a minute.
‘Dinner will be on the table when you’re all clean and dressed to kill,’ he sang to her disappearing body.
Once behind the closed bathroom door, she considered the cliché: girls wanted to marry their fathers. The sight of Mark with many pots and pans on the go had given Luna a start, but not in the way that she would have expected.
She’d always thought her father’s love for food and passion for presentation was something unique and sublime. So feminine, she said to herself, negating Mark’s actions. With her father being the way he was, it wasn’t a wonder she ended up a restaurateur.
One of her best – if not the best – memories of her dad was when he’d asked her if she wanted to help him cook dinner. Luna was trying to settle into living with him: she missed Ginsberg and, though she’d never admit it to anyone, and especially to her father, who she pitied with an open-handed tenderness, she missed Velma too.
Velma had a way with saying good night that her father couldn’t quite master. Before she tucked Luna into bed – since she was a little girl and even as a teenager – she would crawl in next to her, wrap one arm around her waist or use one hand to play with her hair, and ask how tomorrow was going to be better than today.
There was always some minor discord at home and both females in the house usually had their defences up before going to bed. Velma wanted more for them, was forever insisting tomorrow would be better. So they made up stories about how Velma might find a secret flower, only one of its kind, pick it for Luna and lay it on her pillow so that it was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes in the morning. Or how Luna might be granted a wish by the moon and ask that Velma sleep through the night, waking in the morning, well rested and strong, to a breakfast of pancakes made with the magical cow’s milk – the one who had jumped over the moon – prepared for her by her only daughter. These were often elaborate stories that made both mother and daughter wipe their previous discord away and focus on their love for each other. Because it was there. It just needed coaxing.
Luna unbuttoned her black fitted shirt and felt herself inflate. She was ovulating. She could feel it in her cervix. She looked in the mirror at her breasts. Thirty-seven and still perky. What’s the point? she asked the mirror, feeling empty from their friskiness. The mirror had no answers.
Luna opened the shower door and turned on only the hot. Days were still warm, but nights getting colder. She wanted to heat her body from the outside in so that the warmth would stay with her all through the night. She could hear the sizzle of Mark’s sausages over the sound of water hitting the shower’s floor tiles and she winced at the thought of him overcooking kangaroo. Nothing tasted worse. And she was annoyed that he had diced the onions, rather than slicing them.
‘Luna,’ her father had said as he knocked on her bedroom door. It was only a week or two since she’d returned to the old house. Graham was fumbling as a father. They’d both felt it.
‘Come in,’ she’d told him, still getting used to someone actually knocking before entering. This was a house of privacy. For the most part, a house of very little noise.
‘I was hoping you’d want to help me cook dinner tonight.’
He wore a pained and expectant face. Luna didn’t want to say yes because she was doing her homework and, unlike most of her friends, she truly loved doing her homework. She was a very diligent student and had big dreams about moving to England to go to university. She set down her pencil and stared at the lamp on her desk. She needed to say yes, and she knew it.
Graham had given Luna an onion and a chopping board. ‘Here, we’ll do it together.’ He’d shown her the proper way to cut an onion, by leaving the ends still intact so that the onion was easier to manage when slicing.
As Luna concentrated on not adding the tips of her fingers to the sliced onions, tears began to form in her eyes. ‘It stings!’ she yelled, completely surprised. When she looked at her father, tears had formed in his eyes too.
‘I know!’ Graham heard a hearty laugh fill the kitchen. It was his. Checking his daughter’s progress he realised he was happy. This was good. ‘You’re a natural, Luna!’
Luna felt real joy in the compliment. When she’d finished, her once round and large-as-a-fist onion had been reduced to thick half rings. Her father’s were sliced much thinner, appearing to have more order and structure. Luna wanted hers to look like his and Graham saw her questioning, almost down-hearted face.
‘Your onion is first class, my dear.’
‘But it’s nothing like yours. It’s awful, really.’
‘If you want you can help me every night with the meals and, in no time, you’ll have the onion mastered.’ Graham hoped this offer appealed to Luna. He knew if he could just get her helping him with the food, they might be able to form a bond which would never be duplicated with any other soul.
As the shower rained down and turned her skin pink, Luna wondered if she could offer to spruce things up without offending Mark. Surely they had a tin of red beans. She could pick a bunch of baby spinach from their backyard. But that was silly. There was nothing wrong with bangers and mash. There was nothing wrong with Mark. In fact this tiny annoyance was just that: tiny. It was only stress. It was only food.
Luna thought back to her father’s call the night before. She did miss him. Horribly, in fact. She tried to shake off this longing to be young again, to be chopping vegetables next to her father, to be following his instructions about turning the meat, about stirring the broth while adding in the flour, about getting the proportions just right.
She cooked without thinking these days, sometimes helping in the kitchen of Fruba only to feel the eyes of the chefs on her, amazed at her ease, the way she never broke into a sweat. Cooking never stressed her out, even during a dinner rush. When sizzles were loudest and too many people in the kitchen were asking where some condiment was, Luna felt relaxed. At home. At her father’s home.
She washed her stomach, wondering whether, if she envisaged a baby hard enough, and if she and Mark had sex tonight, would she be pregnant on her wedding day? And if she and Mark had a baby, would she one day teach the child to cook? Would it love creating wild combinations with fruit and meat, with quinces? Luna closed her eyes and imagined a tiny white sperm cell tunnelling into her egg. What if they created a girl and it turned out to be ‘feisty’, like Velma?
Luna had always feared she had too much of her mother in her. It seemed she spent the bulk of her younger years and then some trying to hide any similarities. But now, with her wedding occupying the very next day to be crossed off their kitchen calendar, Luna feared her mother’s DNA. How many tiny things would push her to a breaking point?
She’d never understood her mother’s reasons for leaving her father. ‘Your father couldn’t tell a joke to save his life’, and that was worth all the trouble and pain? ‘Your father lived too frugally, never let me buy expensive sheets.’ She wanted to believe it was more than that, more than ‘He hated going to parties’. But if she was honest with herself, Luna had to admit that she was afraid to believe her father could hurt her mother in any fundamental way. She wanted, more than anything, to believe it was all her mother’s doing and that her mother’s intense need for drama was the cause of their momentous split. That it all came down to tiny things made mammoth by an inexplicable woman.
Luna turned off the water. The steam rose from her body. Your father cooked very basic meals. Is that what she would tell her own children?
Luna dried herself, walked out of the bathroom without a stitch of clothing on her body and sat down at the table, where a glorious dinner of bangers and mash awaited her.
Mark laughed. ‘Aren’t you cold, Lu?’
Luna took the first bite of her kangaroo sausage. It needed some rosemary. Perhaps a decent sprinkling of sage, even. ‘I’m perfectly fine, thank you. And this dinner,’ she said, looking hard at Mark, not needing to be sexy with her eyes because she knew her body was doing the part, ‘will certainly get you a root tonight.’
PLAYGROUNDS ON TOP OF HOTELS
Tessa and Rachel were cooking a grand dinner. The kitchen was abuzz with a mother–daughter laughter and ease with which Velma and Luna had never been quite comfortable. Of course Velma and Luna had laughed, and not always at the expense of the other, and they’d even been known to cook together on very rare occasions, but it was the ‘ease’ that had Velma confounded. In her experience, the laughter came either before or after some niggling annoyance was brought out in the open, which made for a lingering tension. Nothing was ever easy. Their feelings, while together, always seemed to be ‘managed’.
Tim and Stan, Rachel’s very chiselled and blokey husband, were watching the Friday night football, beers in hand. Stan occasionally yelled at the television ‘Holding the ball! Holding the ball!’ while they both drank largely from their beers. The pre-feminism functionality of this family was eerie and Velma refused to contribute to it. Rather she played with little George in his own little room that Tessa had organised for him when he was still at his mother’s breast. They built hotels with George’s Duplo. They were surrounded by the coloured bricks, so that it would be difficult to move if Velma had decided to leave.
‘And does this ho-tel have a playground?’ George asked. ‘Hotel’ was a new word for George. Velma had explained that it was the best building they could erect because everyone wanted to go to a hotel. That people travelled all around the world just so they could stay in hotels. That was enough to set George’s mind spiralling and the Duplos stacking.
‘I think it should have a playground, most definitely,’ she told him. ‘I also think it should have a swimming pool.’
George looked up at Velma with very large, round eyes, trying to imagine a place where people could play, swim and sleep.
‘Here,’ she told him, gathering up some blue pieces and placing them in front of her knees, which were bent like lightning bolts angling out of her body; Velma knew she would pay when she finally straightened them out. ‘Why don’t you find as many of these as you can and we can make a very large pool for the visitors to swim in? Can you find all of the blue pieces, George?’
Velma watched George gather the blue bricks and then showed him how to begin the pool. As he added more and more pieces Velma watched him with great tenderness. She remembered Ginsberg when he was three – when she had taken him away from his father. Three is too little, she thought. How could he have ever understood?
The day Velma had taken Luna and Ginsberg to their new home in Kensington Gardens, only a short drive from their father’s house, her emotions were everywhere. She had just said goodbye to the man she had come to know as her greatest love. At the time she had no way of knowing that thirty-two years later she would still think of him that way but, for the moment, she was fairly confident she had done the best thing for herself and for her children. Why should they grow up in a house without love? because Velma was sure that if she had stayed with Graham, the love that had once seemed so endless between them would certainly have come to an end. She was still young, only twenty-seven. There was still time to find a love that could match her imagination and sustain her needs.
Luna was five. She had always shown a temper when things weren’t going exactly her way but when they entered the house, with boxes in every room and furniture bare of any adornments, it wasn’t about her temper. It was about her anger. When Velma tried to specify when exactly their relationship had become strained, she realised it was when she’d asked Luna how she liked their new home.
‘I want to be with Daddy! That’s where my home is!’
‘But Luna, sweetie, look at your new room. I thought we could paint it together. Is there a particular colour you’d like to paint your new room?’
‘I don’t want to paint my room and I don’t … want … you!’ Her arms had been folded up until these last few words and then she dropped them to her sides and made two strong fists. Her lips were set. Her eyes challenging. She turned on one heel and marched into the new room, slamming her door behind her. No matter how Velma tried to get her to come out, Luna wouldn’t budge. Eventually, when she became hungry and heard the clinking of dishes in the kitchen, she sheepishly joined her diminished family for dinner. But she refused to talk. And when she was done eating she went back to her room.
Velma felt she had lost her little girl but also that it would pass. Luna was too young to hold a grudge for a lifetime, wasn’t she? Certainly she’d come good; and at least there was Ginsberg, her gorgeous, intuitive little boy. He knew exactly when to cuddle into his teary mother’s lap. Exactly when to make her laugh because she appeared in good spirits. And exactly when to leave her alone – for example when she barked at him to leave her alone. How would she have ever got through that first tumultuous week without her precious Ginsberg?
Luna lowered her shield of enragement after a while but the anger never truly left. From the very moment when she stormed into her skeletal room, Luna would always be slamming doors. If only Velma could find the words to get them open – or just break through with bodily force.
And so it was Ginsberg and Mummy. And that’s how it would remain. Even during the turbulence of pubescence Ginsberg had religiously kissed his mother good night. He was always such a darling, Velma thought, handing George two more blue Duplos. ‘Shall we build the playground now?’
When Ginsberg came out to the family, Velma was anything but surprised. Not only did he exhibit what she thought to be tell-tale signs of misplaced femininity (there were the long discussions about hand cream, his fortunate sense of day versus evening wear, the exaggerated facial expressions – but then who’s to say those didn’t all come from Velma?) but he still gave her kisses good night.
She was delighted by his coming out. So proud of her boy for exerting his nature and she found homosexuality rather fashionable, really. It added some extra culture and grace to their family.
She let him frolic, as a young gay man should, and didn’t expect him home at a reasonable hour. In many ways she became more his friend than his mother, but then perhaps it had always been that way between them. Luna had left. Ginsberg was all she had. Not only did she not want to inhibit his growth in this new identity, she didn’t want to push him away either.
Eventually he left, as all men do. Gay or straight, they leave. And now this Kate. How she was shaking everything up! Everything Ginsberg and Velma had worked so hard to nourish and to protect. Their perfect awareness. Their compassion for authentic feelings.
‘Can we put the playground inside the hotel, Velma?’
‘Sure, darling, why not?’ It can never work, she thought. It can never work.
APPLAUDING ALONE IN APPRECIATION
One word became a sentence became a paragraph, a complete thought, his fingers moving with agility and his energy level rapidly rising. He was directed. Inspired. He was in the zone. This is it, he smiled to himself, assured of his genius, my goddamn magnum opus! and he was one man summing it up, ignoring the roaring in his ear and not even noticing the swimming of his head. He had answered every question in the world. He understood the definition of ‘human’, saw the preposterousness of ‘good enough’, uncovered the mystery of purpose and meaning, found that the space in his heart reserved for his family was bursting to the point of busting seams and ripping membrane. It was an obituary that wasn’t an obituary, quite possibly the last thing Graham Smith would ever write. What more could he ever say?
And with his final words, he clicked save and sank back into his chair, hands behind head, whirling in emotion. What now? he asked himself. It was time to cook his tea.
In the kitchen he hummed Tchaikovsky while chopping red capsicum. He was quick on his feet. Yes, he was dizzy, but did he let it control him? No. Graham felt alive for the first time in five months – wait, years – and he had no need for kitchen yoga. The last time he’d felt this good was when he’d won the Walkley Award. His children and his brother had been there to share in his achievement. (Velma, unbeknownst to him, had been there as well. She’d remained in the foyer, listening at the door, unable to enter and risk the chance of sending Graham the message that she was proud of him and wanted to be a part of his success.)
