Listening to Mondrian (12 page)

However, the eruption, not of Roger himself, but of the date, had reminded Callie that it was three years now since they’d left the kids’ dad, and Mum was only thirty-nine. Jesus, she could still have a baby. Anyway, she’d probably like to settle down with someone. And that’d mean . . .

Concrete, think concrete.
Constituting an actual thing
;
real
;
concerned with realities or actual instances rather than
abstractions
. . .

‘Cheer up, it might never happen,’ she quoted Mum at herself.

But Callie still didn’t feel like any pizza.

She got out the cards and let the kids win in turns till nine o’clock, then read Damien a Paul Jennings story until she thought he’d wet the bed from laughing.

Callie sat at the dining table with the concrete books, and let the house settle down around her. She made a pot of lemon-grass tea, then left it in the pot. She read a few pages about reinforcement. She practised doing her hair into a French plait. She made the cards into houses. She washed the plates. She read a few pages about nineteenth-century limestone mortars. She trimmed her fringe. She even got out the ironing board. And then it was still only ten o’clock.

Finally, at 11 p.m., she turned off the light in the room she shared with Soph, and lay down in Mum’s bed. Although Voula wasn’t staying, Callie still found herself wanting to go to bed there. Maybe it was like when she was a little kid, and it was comforting to snuggle in with Mum. (Or perhaps it was an insurance policy, in case the evening was a success and Mum brought him home.)

One thing you can say for concrete books, they send you to sleep.

At first there was nothing, just a vast grey-white area. Then the camera of the dream pulled back and Callie was crouched on the whiteness, trying to smooth it with a trowel, but the more she worked, the bumpier it got, and the harder it was to smooth, for it was setting fast around her, setting her into it, her feet were sticking, her arms were aching with the weight of the trowel, and all the time more and more concrete came pouring and pouring from the mixer that clattered and knocked and rattled beside her, as if someone was trying to get in the window . . .

She woke to see the hand, and screamed before she recognised Mum’s face.

‘Forgot my key,’ Mum was saying, ‘Sorry to frighten you, it’s only me, Cal, it’s Mum.’

Callie opened the front door and clung to Mum for a moment. The terrible aloneness of the dream was still in her. Mum thought it was because of the window fright, and stroked Callie’s hair till Callie looked at Mum’s face and realised that it was the comforter who needed the comforting. But what do you say to a grown-up mum who is suffering a knockback?

‘Cup of tea?’ Callie suggested.

‘I think we could both do with one.’

Mum boiled the water, warmed the pot, scooped the tea in, got out the mugs, brought the kettle back to the boil again; but when it came to pouring the water into the pot, her hand started shaking too much, and Callie took over.

‘Oh Cathleen, I’m a fool, a fool, a vain vain fool . . .’ Her own words seeming to run out, Mum broke into poetry: ‘
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down!

’ Callie took Mum and the tea out to the dining table, and stroked Mum’s head and let her cry for a moment, till she looked up and blinked and lit a cigarette.

‘It’s OK, I’m OK now. I’m not heartbroken or anything, it’s just my own stupid pride I’m crying for. And oh Callie, I feel so
old
.’

Callie poured Mum’s tea black, and slurped a dash from the whisky bottle into it. The story, as far as she could make out, was this:

Roger had met Mum at the pub as arranged and taken her to a place where there was a barbecue. Although Roger was only a couple of years younger than Mum, all the other people there were Callie’s age. ‘Well, maybe a bit older,’ Mum said. ‘You know, twenty-something.’ The place was a big communal house with cockroaches and posters and heavy-metal music and mattresses on the floor and no fridge to keep the beer cold and the air full of dope, and all the people looked at Mum as if she was old as the hills and some bourgeois shit. (‘You were dead right about The Dress . . .’) Roger was in some political unemployed group, and this place was the headquarters, and it was a fundraising party, and no one talked to her, and Roger had only asked her because he wanted to pick her brains about whether there was any truth to the rumour that there was going to be a new series of dole cuts in a month or so.

‘What a creep!’ Callie agreed. ‘Fancy pretending to ask you out because he liked you, and then he just wanted you to be a spy!’

But this just made Mum turn on Callie.

‘Oh no, Cal, Roger was right, they should know what the Department’s planning, so they can organise against it. No, it was me that was wrong, to twist a simple invitation into some bloody Mills & Boon story! To think I call myself a feminist, and the minute some bloke wants a bit of political solidarity, I just go over the moon at the thought that he might want me for my fat wretched body!’ She dropped into her poetry-quoting mutter again. ‘
Pull
down thy vanity, pull down!

’ There was nothing to say after that, so they sat in silence. Now that the threat was over, Callie found herself desperately wishing that the evening had turned out well. Though the poster in the backyard dunny warned that
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle
, Callie suddenly couldn’t see why a fish couldn’t have a bike to play with, if she wanted one. After all, Mum had had such a rough time, what with Callie’s father and the kids’ dad, she was surely entitled to a bit of happiness before she booked into a retirement unit.

‘Go to bed, darl,’ Mum said. ‘I’ll be in with you soon.’ She was rummaging through the CDs.

So Callie went back to Mum’s bed, and listened for a while to Janis softly singing to the Lord for a night on the town; and didn’t wake until it was morning.

Mum had got up already, or maybe she hadn’t been to bed. Callie found her in her old jeans and khaki shirt, up a ladder, cleaning the kitchen ceiling with sugar soap.

‘Look at the difference!’ Mum pointed to a circle of cream in the middle of all the smoke-stained ceiling colour.

Later, coming out to join Callie on the back step for a coffee, she was quiet. Then suddenly muttered in her poetry voice: ‘
But to have done instead of not doing/this is not
vanity
. . .’ Back to her Mum-voice, she added urgently, ‘What’s the time?’

‘Eleven forty-five.’

She disappeared, and Callie heard the ding that the phone made when you dialled.

When she came back she was pleased with herself, but still steady with it: there was none of the pink-cheeked excitement of the past week.

‘Roger’s coming over for lunch,’ she said.

‘Mum! You didn’t!’

‘I told him it’d just be warmed-up pizza.’ As if the menu were the only issue.

You didn’t ring up a bloke, not after a knock-back, you didn’t ring up a bloke and ask him out! Callie didn’t say it out loud; didn’t need to.

‘Listen, Cal, I haven’t the time or the energy for a romance. The watching, the waiting, the acting, the manoeuvring. The games. If Roger’s OK, he won’t think twice about me ringing. And if he doesn’t understand, then he’s not the kind of bloke I’d be interested in. Besides – this isn’t a seduction – it’s a political meeting. I realised this morning that the worst thing about last night was that we didn’t get to discuss the dole cuts.’

‘What’ll you wear?’ Callie asked slyly.

Mum took a last gulp of her coffee, tossed the dregs into the hydrangeas. ‘I thought I’d just stay as I am.’

ALIEN

It’s the town music festival today. You’d think that would be something that my parents would stay out of, but no — here they are, all dressed up and raring to go.

‘Do I look OK?’ Mum asks.

‘Yeah, great!’

It’s true, she does. She’s wearing jeans, but she plays a lot of netball so she’s in good shape, and the T-shirt is from her vintage collection. (
Bob Dylan Live! at the Sydney
Sportsground, April 1978,
the words across her back announce.)

‘You look terrific, too,’ she reassures me.

Well. That’s debatable. I must’ve got changed five times this morning. Trying to get it right. (I wonder: what did Bob Dylan wear for
his
first gig? But then his first gig wasn’t in the Open Talent Competition at the Buskers’ Stage on the foreshore at the Radiance Bay Music Festival. Not that this is really my first gig. But it’s the first time I’ve played in public since we moved down here. And somehow it seems worse to risk making a fool of yourself in a small town than in the big city. I mean, when I used to sing in the subway I was just another anonymous bit of rush hour, but here I’ve got to walk into the classroom on Tuesday morning and face twenty-two pairs of eyes staring at me as they remember that I froze up and forgot my words and then, when I finally managed to get going, the lyrics were crap and the music was worse and my voice sounded like a cane toad with bronchitis and the amp kept getting a screech through it and the whole performance was a huge, vast mega-disaster and – why did I ever put my name on the list? I wonder: should I get changed again?)

Now Dad’s here. ‘Got your ticket?’ he fusses at me, and waits till I pull it out of my pocket to prove it. He thinks he’s smart because he scored complimentary passes to the festival for the three of us by doing all the graphic design for the brochure and poster. The amount of time it took him, he could’ve done a paying job that made enough to get us to the World Music Festival in Adelaide. Mum meanwhile keyed in registrations, stuffed envelopes, even helped put up the tents.

I sometimes feel that if anything even
looks
like happening in this town, my parents are there. Netball, cricket, the Community Centre, the Bushwalkers Club, the Historical Society, the Arts Council, life drawing class, the Foreshore Committee, Meals on Wheels . . . Since moving down here from the city three months ago, Mum and Dad have got into everything. (And I’ve – forget it!) But I still reckon they could have stayed out of the music festival. After all, music’s
my
thing. My special thing, my only thing. And besides, what can Mum and Dad, of all people, get from a music festival?

‘Have you had breakfast?’ Mum signs at me.

‘I don’t want any,’ I sign back. She can lip-read perfectly well, but at home I tend to speak in my parents’ language.

‘You should have some,’ Dad argues. ‘Settle the butterflies.’

I pretend I don’t see him. Pick up my guitar and head out the door. I’ll walk in to town. They’ll get there before me, of course, in the car, but I’d rather go by myself.

Sometimes other kids get up the courage to ask me, ‘How come
both
your parents are deaf?’ As if having one deaf parent was normal, but having two is over some sort of limit.

I’ve got heaps of different answers, depending on what the parents of the person asking the question are like. For instance:

‘How come
both
your parents are schoolteachers?’

‘How come
both
your parents are Greek?’ (Or Lebanese or Vietnamese or Anglo or whatever.)

‘How come
both
your parents are into foreign art movies?’

‘How come
both
your parents are Christians?’

‘How come
both
your parents drink too much?’

Let’s face it – people tend to fall in love with people they’ve got something in common with. Schoolteachers meet at schools. People who like foreign art movies meet at film festivals. Christians meet at churches. Drinkers meet at pubs. Greek Australians meet at Greek community events. Deaf Australians meet at deaf community events. (And – OK, I admit it – I hope to meet someone at the music festival. I don’t mean the love of my life
.
But it’d be good to have a bunch of people to hang out with over the weekend.)

The next question always is ‘Then how come
you
aren’t deaf?’

I go: ‘Why should I be? Are
you
the same as
your
parents?’

Usually people stop asking me questions at this stage.

But occasionally someone brave will go on and voice the question that everyone really wants to ask.
‘Do you mind?’

Do I mind?

No, I don’t mind that Mum and Dad are deaf. That doesn’t get in the way at all. But sometimes I do mind that they worry so much about me minding that they throw themselves into every possible school activity and community activity in order to show that I am just a normal kid with normal parents who can do normal things. (And of course they
can
do everything just like ‘normal’ people – whatever that word means. But do they have to? Why can’t they just be selfish couch potatoes, like most parents?)

So yes: I do mind the way they seem to connect onto everything, and into everything. The problem with my parents is – I am not like them. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve come from outer space.

And here it is:
The Seventh Annual Radiance Bay Music
Festival
(as the banner strung across the main street proclaims). The foreshore is already hopping. In between the festival tents are the market stalls, with people selling home-made jewellery and home-grown vegies, homespun wool and home-kilned pottery, home-baked cakes and home-knitted tea-cosies, plus all the other home produce like jars of chutney and pickle and jam, leather belts and potplants and herbal vinegar and breadboards made out of local trees and mobiles made out of bent forks and aromatherapy oils and crystals and hand-painted cards and self-published books of poetry. There’s a coffee-and-cake stall (fundraising for the hospital) and a sausage sizzle (raising money for the volunteer fire brigade). Mum’s helping on one, Dad’s on the other. Wouldn’t you know it? (Well, at least that’ll keep them away from the Buskers’ Stage.)

I see some kids from school. Melissa, Sarah, Josh, Noah, Turtle. Say g’day. Move on. I haven’t made any friends here yet. I mean, I haven’t made any enemies either, but I’m not in a gang. I wasn’t in one at my city school either. I guess I’d rather play my guitar, write songs, than spend a lot of time talking to a whole lot of other people. At the Buskers’ Stage, the school music teacher is the MC for the Talent Comp. She’s introducing five guys who are wearing tattered jeans and nothing else, unless you count the black, red and yellow headbands tied around their dreadlocks. There are slashes of white paint across their bare chests.
‘So put your hands together for the Feral Didg
Mob . . .’
Ms Pappas glances down to check a promo sheet.
‘An urban Koori band who play a unique blend of reggae, rap,
rock, country and traditional music!’