The Underhistory, page 12
It was awful, but she was soon bored with her war hero. He was a gentle but unimaginative lover and she found herself falling asleep while they were making love. She watched the big brawny labourers, so unworried by anything at all, and wished she could play with them as well. Could she? How much hurt would there be?
Her war hero was like a puppy dog. Very sweet and kind and he made a serviceable egg and toast. He was a clever man, with plenty to say and a good ear. He was good with his hands, too, and creative.
He suggested making clocks out of the aeroplane parts that remained. ‘I’ve got a watch made from the plane my father was killed in. We’ve got nothing else left of him.’
She collected up some of the smaller fragments and the next time she was in the big city, took them to a watchmaker who created the most beautiful timepieces. ‘It doesn’t matter if they work,’ she said, knowing they’d stop anyway. She wondered if one day she could control her effect on time. If she would no longer stop the clocks.
25
THE HEAD ROOM (THE MEN’S DRAWING ROOM)
1993
‘You won’t find a room like this in any modern house,’ Pera said to the father and Lucky. ‘Well, I guess you could say that about every room here.’ She heard shouting, scuffling, and talked over it. The more The Men fought amongst themselves the less they’d be concerned about the others. She’d seen this in men over and over again.
She’d never been in here as a child; it was a place for gentlemen. Now, one wall was almost taken up by a painting, completed by her cousin Frank before he died; his memory of how the room was, once upon a time, when it was the men’s drawing room and women were not allowed.
She’d decorated the room to stay true to how Frank remembered it from a single visit: dark walls, leather chairs, animal heads. Dusty paintings. Thick curtains. He’d walked in and been so clear, so definite, about how the room had looked before. He’d said, ‘I never forgot it because they said I was a man that day. For a long time I had the wrong idea of what being a man meant.’ It was the first time he apologised for being a bully. She didn’t know if his memory was correct but had no reason to doubt him and no other ideas for the room. As a child she’d imagined easels and art pencils, the men drawing vases of flowers, or a pile of books.
1950
The men’s drawing room was the soldiers’ favourite room once it had been cleaned up. They dragged chairs in – really building crates with some hessian thrown over – and made it as their place. They’d found magazines hidden under loose floorboards, surprisingly intact. Pieces of them, at least, enough to see skin and lady bits and other things that seemed to make them happy.
She drank here with them most afternoons.
Then the soldiers packed up and left, back to their lives. Renovations stalled for a while, and Pera travelled Australia for six months, place to place, city to city, friend to friend. She felt thirsty for new experiences, finishing with a three-week visit to New Zealand, but at the same time she ached for her home.
1993
‘Nothing lasts forever, though,’ Pera told Lucky and the father. ‘I had a wonderful time with the men rebuilding my house, hearing all their terrible stories of war, but all their hilarious jokes, too.’
‘Do they haunt this room?’
‘No, not them. They were too happy. They had too much life in them. I was slightly in love with one of them, if truth be known. It’s my cousin who haunts here. A frustrated genius, by his own account. He’s very jealous; any artists amongst us?’
There were none. ‘That’s actually good. He hates artists. He’s been known to scratch anybody creative. To make people slip and fall. He’s never done any lasting damage, though.’ She liked to believe Frank would have loved this; not only her pretending he was a ghost, but also pretending he was a frustrated genius. She imagined him laughing his head off at that.
1951
She was home from her overseas adventure. Man’s shirt on – she wasn’t sure which man, it had appeared in her luggage and she wasn’t sure which of them had left it behind – rolled up to the elbows. A pair of old pants. Her hair tied back and all of her dotted with orange paint.
The door chime rang downstairs. The old one didn’t survive the crash and she’d hated it anyway. It rang dark and low like a falling tree. This one tinkled, and she sheathed her paintbrush in a tin, glad of the excuse to escape the fumes for a bit. Whoever it was, she’d offer them tea on the lawn.
It was a damaged man.
He stood, arms straight down, eyes closed.
One eye squinted shut and surrounded by shiny scar tissue. Shoulder hitched up, left hand splayed as if out of control. Cheek scarred. Neck bright red. Mouth askew.
‘Hello, Temperance.’
‘Frankie?’ Her cousin.
‘Frank,’ he said. ‘I’m just Frank now.’
‘And I’m Pera. As ever and always. What …’ she started, but then, his face … he closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see her reaction to his damaged face. ‘They’ve tried to do a facial reconstruction but not the best of jobs. But I’m still the same man.’
‘Of course you are,’ she said. ‘Come in. Come on. I’ll make us a cuppa.’
He shuddered. ‘I really don’t like the indoors. Can’t abide a roof. Can’t stand confinement.’
‘And yet you locked me up like that!’ She tried to keep her tone light.
‘I know! I’m a terrible person, Pera. I always have been.’
‘Hey, I got out! It’s okay.’
But she could see he’d carry the guilt with him no matter what she said.
They sat outside on the veranda and he told her how war had been for him. She’d heard many such stories, but his was different because she’d known him as a child. It was hard to connect the brave man who went back over and over to the battlefront, sustaining twenty-eight injuries, with the boy who used to stab her with his geometry compass.
‘How did they let you in? You were only sixteen when the whole thing was done!’
His eyes shifted and she understood that the war he was talking about was not the one the other young men had fought. He’d had battles all his own.
‘I was in Korea,’ he said. He lifted the corners of his eyes to make them appear slanted, and she saw a glimpse of his old awful self.
‘You poor thing,’ she said. ‘How dreadful.’
He needed a place to stay and the best she had for him that wasn’t too enclosed was the temporary shed the soldiers had made to keep sand and tools in. There was no roof on it now – a great wind had blown it off and into the pet graveyard – but it offered some protection.
‘You’re welcome to stay here if it suits.’
‘You always were the best of us,’ he said.
She took him meals out, and they would sit quietly together. He walked into the town once a week and always returned with a gift for her. Something small and sweet that she could not reconcile with the boy he had been.
He was quiet, once his story was told. Almost silent. She couldn’t get a word out of him then. When he was a boy he couldn’t shut up for a minute.
This was a lesson for her: people can change.
He came back with house paints. Mr Thomas, the hardware man, would ask about him next time she was in. ‘Polite chap,’ he said. ‘Troubled.’ He began a massive painting on a board he made out of loose planks. It was a room he said he remembered from the old house, the one he called the Head Room and she knew as the men’s drawing room.
‘I always pictured men doing drawings in there,’ she said, and he laughed for the first time since he’d arrived.
‘Mostly they looked at pictures of women,’ he said. ‘I found it very awkward. I didn’t want to look at any of it, so I had a lot of time to study the room. All these animal heads! I don’t know what happened to them all.’
‘All burnt or wrecked or pinched.’
He added the animal heads to his painting, but also other treasures, things he knew she’d lost. There was evidence he’d always listened to her, even when she was a child.
This was his gift to her. His apology. He told her it was his one and only piece of art, just for her.
‘Thank goodness you went away,’ he said. ‘I was so awful to you.’
‘I was sent to Borstal!’ she said, but laughed. She offered to get him a job with the building company she worked for but the idea set him shaking so hard she said, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry. You stay as long as you like. But don’t you want to see your dad?
‘Not like this. And I don’t want him in trouble, if the army come looking for me.’
‘All right for me to be in trouble, then?’ Pera teased him.
‘You can cope with anything, Pera. You have to swear not to say anything to him.’
She promised.
She took Frank a cup of tea and a scone most afternoons. Usually he’d be lying on his camp bed, in a pair of shorts and nothing more. Not sleeping; his eyes wide open, staring up.
He was covered in scars.
Usually he sat up when she called ‘ooroo’, gave her a smile. This day, he didn’t even have the energy for that. He’d finished his painting and seemed to lack motivation for anything at all.
She put the cup and plate next to his bed, on the square rock he’d found and used for a bedside table.
‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘Lying around. There’s plenty to be done.’
He turned his head to her.
‘You do it. I’ll rest for a while.’
He always had been lazy but she didn’t say this. He needed to feel he was welcome, and that she wouldn’t give him a hard time.
His voice slurred and he didn’t even lift his hand to swat away a fly.
His eyes slid closed. His lips were dry and he breathed in and out, weak, erratic. It wasn’t right.
She searched frantically around him. ‘Did you get bitten? Snake or spider?’
He managed to lever himself sideways to reveal an empty bottle of pain medication. She’d always been suspicious of his pills; he said he had a friend who was in medicine.
She ran inside to telephone the doctor. An ambulance would take an hour or more.
‘Sit him up if you can,’ the doctor said. ‘Give him black coffee, see if you can get him vomiting. Try to keep him moving till I get there.’
But there was no movement left in him.
After the undertaker took Frank away, she found a note, addressed to her.
You made my last days happy and comfortable. I’ve never felt safer than I did under your non-roof. I’m sorry for being a shit. Anything I have is yours.
He had very little. A couple of books, some photographs of a swimming pool she didn’t recognise, and his rat king in a glass box, the terrifying thing she’d had nightmares about as a child. She didn’t know where it came from, but it was always kept a secret from Uncle Alan.
And now it was hers.
Her cousin Frank may have died feeling a failure, or as if the world had failed him. That he couldn’t live with his nightmares. But he would be buried a hero. He’d been injured twenty-eight times defending his country, and that made him worthy. She wanted them to know that one of theirs was dead. She wanted him given a hero’s burial.
She made phone calls to the authorities and discovered that her cousin was a deserter. There was no official record of injuries sustained in battle. She spoke to one of his company, who, while trying to be polite because she was a relative, could still not hide his contempt.
‘Some of it came from fights he never had a hope of winning. That was him in a nutshell. But did he not tell you what he did to himself?’
He hadn’t.
‘Set fire to hisself, love. Worst thing any of us ever saw and we saw it all. Poured petrol over himself, lit his Zippo. Did it behind the shed where he thought no one would see; I’ll give him that. But they saw, and put him out soon enough. It was the infirmary he got away from.’
They buried Frank quietly, she and her uncle Alan. It was so good to see him she cried. He didn’t blame her for a minute for Frank’s death, although he did scold her gently for not telling him where he was. There were no other mourners.
‘He was a man of violence,’ Uncle Alan said.
1993
A man of violence. Like The Men in her home.
‘Mrs Sinclair? Are you all right?’ the father said. Tour members always called her that, although her married name was different. She was never sure what to go by; none of it seemed to fit. Her husband had been dead a long time, but then so had her family.
She started. ‘My apologies. You caught me daydreaming into the past. Time doesn’t mean much in Sinclair House. Don’t mind me if I drift off. Old ladies like me have a lot of memories.’ Sometimes it was useful to be perceived as elderly. They walked to a large window and gazed out. The mother was sitting peacefully on a bench, her head tilted to the winter sun. The children were running in circles, collecting things off the ground. Flowers and rocks, Pera guessed.
‘Where are youse?’ Devon called out. ‘Oi! Ike wants the keys.’
Pera shook herself. ‘Let’s move on,’ she said to Lucky and the father. ‘Let’s move on quickly. The ghosts are on the move.’
26
THE STONE ROOM (ART GALLERY 6)
‘There you are!’ Devon said, finding them as they climbed stairs to the second floor, heading for the Stone Room. ‘Where’s everyone?’
The father started to answer, presumably to tell Devon where his wife and children were. Pera ‘accidentally’ hit his shins with her cane.
‘The boys are all about! You should try to find them and we’ll meet up,’ Pera said. But it was too late. Alex found them, jumping down the stairs three at a time, stomping and whooping. He carried a walking stick that she knew concealed a knife and the menace in his smile chilled her. Wayne shouted, ‘Where are you? Wheeeree arreee youuuuu?’
‘Here, mate!’ Devon called, but his voice was weak, a kid’s voice, so Alex stood with his mouth cupped and called for them. Ike, Wayne and Chook appeared.
Pera sorted through the keys and unlocked the door. ‘The Stone Room is one of the most beautiful rooms in Sinclair House. My husband’s life’s work is kept there. He only had a short life but you will see that he was a brilliant sculptor. It is one of life’s great tragedies – as well as a very personal one – that he was taken from me, and from art lovers as well.’
It was a beautiful room, a testament to a very talented man. His small sculptures, his larger works, his hand studies arrayed around the room. Stone, but also wood and metal. An antique grandfather clock sat in the corner. Its tick always sounded slow, but it was the only clock that kept time.
‘Oh my God, this is incredible,’ the father said. ‘He must have been an amazing man. So you married that Deniston fellow? The one you fell in love with?’
‘Oh! No. Not him. I met my husband not long after that, though. I always say he fell in love with the shape of my hands before anything else. I fell in love with … well. His talent, perhaps, but he was a wonderful man as well.’ She often shared her life story on the tours but some things she kept to herself.
‘So what, anything worth shit in here?’ Ike said. He lit a cigarette. Pera didn’t want him burning her beautiful room, or spreading ash, but was anxious about asking him not to. She thought about the gun hidden under the man’s shirt.
She said, ‘One piece has been valued at close to a quarter of a million dollars. But of course you’d have to find a buyer.’ She found a saucer from under a pot plant and gave it to Ike. She was surprised that he took it and used it as an ashtray.
Devon prowled the room, poking at things. Chook watched Pera, his fingers flexing.
‘You like telling people what to do? Like knowing more than other people?’ She couldn’t help laughing at him. What a ridiculous man. His shoulders flinched and she understood just how weak a man he was.
Lucky and the father walked around admiring the work, much of it found pieces of masonry that had been reimagined or changed. The Men tilted the art, made jokes about dropping things.
‘A lot of these are sculptures of you!’ Lucky said. ‘He must have really adored you.’
‘I think he did, rather. He was very focused on his work, but he often said I kept him alive. He had some very dark days, as many artists do.’
Ike stood too close to Lucky. ‘He adored her, mate. No chance for you.’
Lucky blushed. ‘I wasn’t.’
None of them asked how she met him. Pera wished people weren’t so predictable; it was always a woman who asked this question. A man had asked only once in all these years. She said, ‘How did I meet him, do you ask?’ She loved to tell the story.
1951
The night she met her husband Pera had arrived home from work past eleven. It was so dark the headlights of her car seemed to push it forward, like a blanket, only to have it fold in behind again. When the night was black like this, even the nocturnal creatures stayed put, but still she watched for rabbits and kangaroos.
She should have left the office earlier but there was so much work to be done and she was keen to spend the next day at home rather than go back in to finish it off. Plus she’d been late for work, as ever. Much as she loved her job it didn’t mean she could make time behave for her.
As she neared the house, she saw a small glow. Thinking it was the reflection of her car headlights in an animal’s eyes, she slowed down. It could be a cow wandered over from another property, or a fox.
It wasn’t an animal, she saw as she pulled in, but the glow of a cigarette. She pulled her car around so that the person was highlighted and she saw him, sitting on the front steps. A broad man, she thought. No hat. He stood as she parked the car. Later, she would reflect on the number of times she arrived home to find a man waiting. Almost as if she summoned them up.
