Coda (12 page)

Business was slow.

It seemed never to stop, this mediterranean mode.
Ai yi!
carolled sumptuous Nina, jittering along with the Gipsy Kings, who sounded as if they had missed the last train to Madrid and were determined everyone would suffer.
Ai yi!
she cried as diners straggled in.
Ai yi yi!
With small heel stampings, arms curved above heavenly head, fingers clicking. Brain wondered if she were having a breakdown and patted her with lingering hand on his way to
mix highballs and uncork wine with spurious flourish. Yet later, the diners vanished in puff-balls of dust on the hill road, he would yield to her taste for the saccharine and sing once more
M'han detto che domani, Nina vi fate sposa
, even though his eyes caught a tiring light on the edge of hers.

‘Does it matter?' she would ask in the sensual mornings, moisture still dripping from gutter and leaf, sunlight carving through green. She would roll, lazily naked under the sheets that were still too hot and heavy to bear.

‘What? Does what matter?'

Sometimes he thought disloyally that since leaving Bosie he had merely changed guards.

‘The money, my dear, the money.'

‘What money? We're not making any. My overdraft is strangling me. This is game-playing, isn't it? It really is.' He was afraid to gouge out the truth of the matter: that each of them had used the other as an excuse for shedding a worn-out relationship. He cursed those fallaciously greener distant hills!

Nina flung her portion of sheet pettishly across his and stalked naked to the bathroom. Water would restore.

But it restored nothing beyond a temporary freshness of skin that lasted minutes only and the days, weeks, months, developed their
own patterns of boredom and predictability as each secretly began wondering about their former partners and the flattened curves of their life-styles. Nina began gallery hopping again. Brain resumed golf. Their flight from responsibility rewarded them inversely for the gallery crowd took up their restaurant as an out-of-town dining quirk and golf club acquaintance spicked up in the club bar began eating there on Saturday nights. A bit of a buzz, really, they told each other, to drive fifty miles for nosh up one of the worst back roads on the coast. Still, that dame of his was definitely something else and by the second bottle of Dom Perignon it all seemed worth it. The food wasn't too bad at all, they convinced themselves, if you liked pictures of food on plates. That
nouvelle cuisine!

Once or twice Nina's extrovert welcomes made strangers wonder if she went with the coffee. Scatty Brain refused to be amused.

Could their renaissance in this gimcrack Eden last?

They feared asking each other in the perfection of those dud, those imperfect days.

Mother had
rung.

Mother had rung from Brisbane.

Bad news comes in half-heard spurts on faulty lines, in blotched faxes, in hysteric mouthings impotent to control the outpourings of disaster.

Her house, she had told him, was being resumed for an expressway. Yes, of course she had known. For years, actually, but knowing government departments, had believed it would never happen. How long? The last five years. Well? Well, she had a month to move.

How could he explain without the corollaries of pain-giving, of rejection, that they had only just begun their business, that things were dicey? Over eight hundred miles of rustling and
trembling wire he recognised her recognising rejection.
What about Sham?
he had asked brightly, hoping for respite. The silence became one of those cartoon balloons designated to be filled in with suitable captions. He couldn't think of any.
Well, yes, okay
, he agreed to the unspoken exegesis.
She's a pretty busy lady, I guess
. (Lady! Sham! … Jesus! Married to that slack-mouth whose limpness of feature measured his limpness of political purpose yet who managed, despite obvious defects like a low intelligence quotient, a dependence on liquor and a fluid expense account, to con his electorate every few years into returning him to the perks of office! Len had even escaped from the Heart of Darkness with minimal losses in his bank account. Wherever that was! No resting place for an outspoken woman like mother, who was now forgetting what she wanted to be outspoken about. Who forgot to pay bills or paid twice. Who missed bus, train, plane connections and stopped mid-sentence and asked, her tired eyes baffled and pained by the memory lapse, ‘Now what was I saying, Brain? I've totally forgotten.')

‘The Croziers,' he would prompt. ‘You were telling me about the Croziers.'

‘Who are they?'

‘The people you went to visit … oh never mind.'

‘Oh.' He could feel distant mother tense
as she struggled with the name. ‘No dear. I think you've got it wrong. I can't remember anyone of that name.' Half an hour later, he knew, it would all rush in, drowning, a deluge of memories but twenty years earlier. She would probably ring back. ‘Oh Brain, those Croziers. The ones who …' And off she would rattle on a nostalgia binge the edges of which he could barely recall himself.

Now, oh now, he yielded.

‘Do you want to come up, Mum? For a visit? Just till you get things sorted?'

‘Could I, dear? Not for long, I promise. Remember old Sam whosit, after three days guests and fish stink. I think that's what he said.'

‘Johnson. Sam Johnson. He said that.'

‘Did he? Well, he was so right. Probably something to do with his skin problem. Hard being a host with skin problems. Sham always makes me feel I have scrofula before I even arrive, to say nothing of that dreadful husband of hers.'

‘The minister for transports!' Brain chuckled.

‘Who else?' He could hear his mother's answering laugh.

They fixed dates, times. Nina said of course. She had liked Brain's zany old wool-gatherer of a mother the moment they met.
When was it—two, three years ago at one of those Christmas bashes Bosie insisted on having. Why, she might even help out, in the least tiring way, of course, on the busy nights, if ever there were busy nights. Did Brain think she would mind?

Brain had shaken his head. Of course she wouldn't mind. He was beginning to understand at last the healing quality of being needed, just at that point, though he didn't realise that, when his mother was tiring of being used.

He sighed now and looked at his watch.

His mother's plane was due in an hour and shortly he would drive down the zigzag track to the coast plains and head south for the airport, dumped between the constant sea and the constant hills.

The police had run Kathleen to earth in a small motel in Buderim. She was tackling her second breakfast egg. They were very kind to her, rang her daughter and checked to see the old girl had been picked up later that morning.

Shamrock was ferocious at having to drive all that way to collect (she made it sound like a
parcel in her recriminations), having booked her mother on the tour out of kindness. Len received concessions on most of those things.

‘Why did you do it?'

When the tour bus had stopped for a morning-tea break, mother had wandered off and hidden in a shopping mall, emerging only when she thought the rest of the party might have moved on. The bus captain, bedevilled by timetables, had reported one missing passenger to the local police and driven the other pensioners off along the coast.

‘They were boring old farts,' Kathleen said.

She seemed unaware that she had done anything amiss.

Now Brain, hanging around the airport terminal, sweating charity, dread and love, recalled another phone call barely a month ago, coming mid-evening as he and Nina had been wrestling with a pudding course for three picky diners. His mother's voice was barely audible. He had asked her where she was calling from. She told him she didn't know. What city? he had inquired with heavy irony. She was testy when she said it was somewhere in Brisbane, New Farm way she thought, having strolled into the park, dozed on a seat by the river and absent-mindedly wandered out the wrong end. ‘I'm not sure how to get home,' she said.
‘There don't seem to be any buses and I don't want to walk back through the park in the dark. All the shops round here are closed.' ‘For Chrissake!' Brain had screamed. ‘Why me? Why don't you ring Sham?' She complained that her daughter got too angry. He suggested she ring a cab. There was no phone book, she told him. She was lucky there was a handset. Stay in the call-box, he instructed her. Don't move. He would fix something. He seemed to be on the phone for hours. The pudding was ruined.

The police were pleasant that time, too, and drove Kathleen right home, seeing her to the very door.

Was she more difficult than vague? Was that it? Sometimes, he had to concede, she was sharp as a tack. As far as he knew she coped with being alone, still managed with reading, the garden, getting to the shops. He didn't want to admit she needed companionship, fought that admission when that was the one thing, he was beginning to realise, he could possibly do without.

A small history of forgetfulness started. She was locked after hours in a gallery, a cemetery, two large city stores, and overslept in several cinemas. ‘She talks to herself a lot,' Sham had replied to his concerned phone calls. ‘I've heard
her out in the yard admonishing plants. God, Brain, I can't handle it.'

Beaten. He was forced to yield.

‘She's bloody lonely,' he said. ‘You could do something about that.'

‘So could you,' snapped his sister tartly.

 

 

 

 

Investigations
are still under way to discover the identity of an elderly couple found seated late last night in the departure lounge of a Sydney domestic air terminal
.

Police were alerted by staff long after all local flights had ceased
.

Both people, who are estimated to be in their late seventies or early eighties, appeared dazed and incoherent. They had no identification on them and medical reports indicate each is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. The woman, who is slightly more lucid than the man assumed to be her husband, insisted they were waiting for the return of their daughter who had gone to check luggage
.

At present they are being looked after in temporary hostel care
.

Anyone who can identify the couple from the above photograph is asked to contact Sydney metropolitan police
.

Sydney Star,
15 December 1990

I
T WAS A NEW SOULSCAPE
, this
once-familiar home town with its highrise hotels and plethora of shopping ritz. But the rock remained immutable, its ugliness and scarred eastern face racing her so fast into the past, she felt choked for air, still standing on those lower slopes where once the traveller in electrical goods had kissed her stupid.

They drove by former landmarks—her childhood home, the rented house on Stanton
Hill with Ronald gloomily surveying the coast. Flinders Street had been transformed into a lengthy walking mall of trees and cafes, the esplanade a relentless string of motels. It was only when the car moved north from town, threading back-streets to the highway, past still-remembered gardens and verandas hiding behind mango trees, that she became aware they were actually leaving those lost, secret but open places of her youth.