Spotted Lily (6 page)

Out in the bedroom, I stepped into the jeans and was pulling them up when I felt resistance at mid-thigh. Glancing back to check what was wrong, I stuck.

The wall behind me was mirrors and my movement drew my eye. Full-length mirrors had not been part of my life. I felt like a butterfly pinned to cardboard, both fixed in my stupid position, and fixed in my gaze. That person was both a stranger and worse—me—the me I had dumped years ago. I had never seen so much of myself before, and at this crucial time in my transformation, I hardly needed memories intruding.

Anyway, I couldn't wear
this
. The bitch had given me the wrong size. These jeans were not shape-camouflage—the
only
style I had worn all my adult life, except for the bank uniform that made me walk with my eyes down—the polyester blouse that gapped just wrongly, and the laugh-at-me black skirt. Ugh! Once retrenched from the bank, I had never needed any other outfit than the one I always wore. Ultra-baggy shirt, ultra-baggy pants, everything in black. I didn't use a belt for the pants, though the waist stuck out behind like an open shopping bag. The shirt covered all.

Gordon once asked me why I wore this—a silly question. I pointed out that everyone in Bettawong wears baggies (who isn't a pensioner or public housing type, or a magistrate or something, but, say, everyone in Nostramamma's), and mostly in black, including Gordon. He dropped the subject.

I had a few boyfriends before I left Wooronga Station, who
said
they liked the way I looked, but once I got to Sydney Uni, the big hurts started coming, without even laughter, and always, it seemed, in tender moments of post-coital intimacy. These comments were so blandly objective, so helpfully accusatory, that I stopped allowing myself to be led into vulnerability, and adopted body camouflage. I was not depressed at the situation. Rather, I was relieved.

And once I knew my writing intentions and  the heaviness of the places I was trying to break into, the panache of celibacy gave weight to my gravitas, especially since the body image I ideally needed—it was clear from the black-and-white bio pics—jutting collarbones, jutting hipbones, a hard-edged sharecropper face shadowed by long-fingered, veiny hands—this look was unachievable for me, no matter what I ate. I had hoped that it wouldn't matter, that I could do a Garbo and hide. Be lauded, loved, and celebrated—in absentia.

It was Brett who made me realize that hiding was hopelessly naive. That I couldn't be a name without a face, without a look. I had to be seen, with a look as important as the book, for fame, lasting fame. Not only that, but a look that suits my book, that fits my name, Desirée Lily.

Names came back to me.
Little Bustle
, from my father.
Peaches
,
Rockers
(my brother Angus's abbreviation for Rockmelons), and variations on that theme.

I remembered my other brother Stuart's party trick at shearing time (biggest audience then) of balancing a mug of tea on my bum while I had my hands full and couldn't do a thing. The mug always fell off, but only after teetering for the longest while. If I shook it off, I exacerbated the situation.

Mugs of tea would have been balanced on my chest if the blokes could have gotten away with it. As it was, I developed a powerful set of fists.

My waist only made the situation worse. My hands (small) could almost meet around it, and all my brothers' friends and every station hand grabbed at the waist of the girl with the jokey postcard shape.

All of that I had forgotten, until now—as I shoved the jeans down to my ankles. The T-shirt at my feet was probably just as bad as the jeans—ready to laugh at me if I tried to pull it on, sticking like a rubber band, just above my breasts. My eyes roamed over the disaster in the mirror as my brain raced over my problems. Would my normal uniform, plus the accessory jewels, work? Would my figure be guessed at anyway? Discussed in critical reviews of my work?
Could
I be Desirée Lily?

And then there was a knock on my door, and before I could say 'Just a minute', the door, as it
would
,  flew open.

—10—

Although I have a painfully good memory, I cannot recall every detail of the next few minutes, though I was conscious through every moment.

My exact words, I don't remember.

My position:
You
try to turn your back, yank stiff, straight jeans up from around your ankles and over an impossible swell of thigh,
and
bend over and cover your body front and back with your arms, all at the same time. You might end as I did, knotted on the floor, a lump forming on your forehead from clonking your head on the hardwood—and your arse, if it is like mine, is pointing (a funny word in my case) high in the air, facing directly towards the doorway. Briefly, I tried to lift the thing that hurt so much that I wished it belonged to someone else—my head—so I could look towards the door, but trying to crane around only made me dizzy. My eyes jammed shut and my forehead kissed the floor again, not gently. Blood that I could hear wooshed between my ears, sounding like milk being shaken into butter in a goatskin, milk with shards of something sharp hitting the back of my eyeballs ...
woosh, stab, woosh
.

Brett said something. That was his voice, but I couldn't identify words. What I do remember clearly was the voice of Jim, saying 'Excuse me, Miss Lily. I'll just put these here.'

I remember yelling, but not the words. There mightn't have been any words as such.

And I remember being alone in my room, my head impossibly heavy, my thoughts a cloud, and me still folded over on the floor.

I remember the smell of roses, and ... shit, runny with piss.

~

I woke in a lake—slicking my arms, kissing my head. Jerking myself upright, I almost fell forward again, but balanced.  Yet again in my life, this ingrate that I fed and clothed paid me in humiliation. I wanted, powerfully, to punish it, and I would have. I
would
have, if it wouldn't have hurt me. I tried to get up but my legs were asleep and my feet now woke with needle stabs too painful to touch. Instead, a rivulet ran down the side of my nose which identified, as if I wanted to know the details—flowers, fruit, filth—and my brain paraded Jim saying, 'Excuse me, Miss Lily. I'll just put these here.'  In my brain's version, he was full-face centre of the picture, so my mind's eye watched what I know he must have been doing when he said those words. Smirk.

He had to be a champion smirker, for his paid smile was so good. So while I was unable to escape, my brain made me watch Jim enter and say those words, and smirk, and then delicately flare his nostrils and I watched his pupils contract, or would they dilate—I couldn't decide—but the smirk played clearly and with close-ups at least three times before my feet said I could move.

I rolled over in the muck and punched my legs till they obeyed me. Prying the jeans off, I ran with them and the shit-sodden shirt to my shower, where I rammed those taps to maximum downpour, then grabbed bottle after bottle and poured. Anything I could reach I used on me and the mess, stomping on the clothes so hard I could have drawn juice from stones.  Eventually, I stopped, but I wasn't finished. My old jeans and shirt, I fished out of the trash and piled on the counter. The sodden lump of new clothes, I threw in the trash.

Using fresh towels and another armful of bottles, I scrubbed the floors, including each of my footsteps, and then pummelled those towels till they were rags and the only smells I could detect on them were dreadfully expensive. And then I stood under another downpour and used everything left on myself—purifying, scraping and polishing till an epidermal layer had whirled down the drain and my skin and hair jangled smells only of bottled scents.

Exhausted, but finished washing, I sniffed ... roses!

I tried to open my windows to dump those stinkers, but they were hermetically sealed. So I buried vase and all under the sopping clothes disasters, and dressed.

~

Brett did
not
understand my humiliation.

We were in the lounge, Brett up on his futon mountain, me in the chair that I'd dragged from my room. My hair was still wet. The
eau de
homeless person scent of my old clothes was already overwhelming my washed body. The roses in the entry hall insinuated the lounge's air, but I was too tired to bury them. Besides, I had higher priorities.

Brett did not see that he should have waited for my assent to enter.

I hadn't objected when he first dropped in on me at Kate's place, had I? And he had only bothered to knock here for the show of it, so the Restonia chap could deliver my flowers, which I
had
asked for with some degree of urgency, hadn't I? How was Brett to know I'd be naked?

He was a better self-excuser than I have ever been capable of. His faults he spun to be my shortcomings. 'And once the chap was there, and he'd already gotten an eyeful, what was I to do? Shove him away and compound the problem? Better to let him finish delivering the flowers and leave, and I wager you a tadpole to a muffin, the empty-headed varlet wouldn't have remembered the incident for a moment. Besides,' Brett reminded me . . and on and on he went, in a liturgy of not-to-worry.

If, he assured me, the Restonia lived up to its reputation to fulfil every desire, and if this hostel was of any venerance, the only outré aspect of my activity could be its bad taste—if clichés are judged that harshly. Why, the likes of that young blue-eye must have servanted dining tables in the person of my folded-up body, oh ever so many times, years ago. With candlesticks flaring from ...!

Oh, Brett could tell me of ... and he
did
.

So what was I worried about? What was there to be
embarrassed
about? It couldn't be the hired help. And certainly not Old Brett, eh?

~

Brett just didn't understand me. Actually, he was right about himself. If it had just been Brett at the door, it would have been a temporary shock, but when I thought about it—no more so than my surprise when I entered his room where his nakedness stared at me. And less of a shock than when I thought he'd been reading my journal over my shoulder. My shape, I was sure he didn't notice one way or the other, having seen so many he must have been bored stiff by any of us. And, besides, neither Andrew nor the luscious Simone had gotten a rise out of him. So that left the indescribable—my filthy shame right in front of his eyes—and that didn't bother me when I contextualized it for his culture. The worst part of it, the shit pouring out of my arse and running over the floor, was, when I pictured it from his point of view, just everyday-person stuff. In Art History, I'd seen many pictures of naked people in hell, in all kinds of embarrassing positions, often with things poking up their bums and surrounded by environmental conditions murky in the extreme. Brett couldn't regard filth with the same derisive horror as we. Maybe the gross failure of bodily functions didn't register with him as anything different than, say, a burp after eating. Nature.

But that still left Jim,  who had called me then, for the first time, 'Miss Lily', and who I was absolutely positive, would have smirked. And Brett couldn't say for sure that he hadn't, because, although I hadn't actually seen Jim's face, Brett hadn't been looking at him, either.

Brett was blind to the absolute horribleness of this, the intolerableness, the impossibleness of my position, not only now, but in the future.

And the worst part was: Brett didn't see why anyone would want to know what.
What was there precisely
, he asked again and again,
to know?

His ignorance made me feel silly, and I know it is silly that this snowballed into another feeling, but it did. Because I felt silly, and he didn't understand why, I felt petty to feel silly, and resented feeling petty, and felt angry that I felt petty—a little angry at Brett, which had no adequate outlet, but which made me feel everything all over again, and more so—which made everything so much harder, and impossible to explain.

I didn't get into the issue about my name—that he'd utterly ruined it, and I'd have to pick another—because he genuinely sounded like he was trying to understand. He just couldn't see what there was to be upset about on my part, given that I had forgiven him his honest mistake. Of course he'd take greater precautions in front of others, so as not to compromise my sensibilities, so now let's have a smile, and everything's hunky do?

I just couldn't pretend to be hunky do, whatever that was. Wearily, and tearily, I left him. I had no idea how to deal with tomorrow, but he could order his own dinner, or not, as he chose.

I dragged my chair back to my room, closed the door, took the packet of Tim Tams out of the fridge, climbed into bed, ate the lot—and for afters, cried myself to sleep.

—11—

Brett woke me with a polite knock at the door.

I didn't bother getting out of bed. 'Come in,' I said, and he instantly appeared just inside without opening the door, as his hands were full.

He carried a breakfast tray adorned with a red rose, and set it on the bed. I threw the rose on the floor and smiled at him. He was trying.

I offered him the foot of my bed to settle on, and he did. I sat up, still in my pongy shirt, and examined my breakfast. It was the same as I'd ordered before. That reminded me. His clothes.

He didn't have BO, his smells being related to his moods and health. His clothes still looked fresh, but I was sure he had no others. Each item fit idiosyncratically, like factory rejects, pulling around the shoulders on the shirt, tight in various places on the jeans, nothing quite  symmetrical. I wondered about the state of his socks. He had a habit that I'd noticed, of easing the laces on his boots. A half-memory of something when he was in Kate's house fluttered around my brain.

'What happened to your trunk and bag?'

'They're here,' he said.

I'd expected so.

He watched me eat, and I forbore asking if he'd eaten. Not asking restored a bit of my dignity, and also helped me build up the courage to tell him we couldn't stay here. We'd have to move today. But where?

And now, that perfect name we had made was ruined. I loved the idea of being Desirée Lily, but now she couldn't be.

I was swallowing the last dregs of my procrastination when he announced a 'wonderful surprise'.

'I've taken care of your problem,' he said, 'so we can go to work with no further interruption. And do you want some clothing advice?'

He put the breakfast tray on the floor as I sat up to hear what he had to say. He was so confident, he gave me confidence.

But he wouldn't explain more. 'I've saved the sporting part for you,' he said, as he led me to the lounge, and in there, to the gym.

Jim was stretched there in an extreme athletic position, his arms, legs, head and mouth bound with strips torn from his own clothes.

He opened his eyes. He must have noticed me but he looked at Brett. Big, blue, dilated eyes fringed with curly black lashes. Then he closed his eyes. I thought he might make a noise through his gag, some primal scream, but he made no sound at all.

Brett perched on a part of the gym's extensive anatomy. 'You have the choice,' he said to me. 'Draw and quarter, difficult in this space. Though for you...' And he bowed gallantly. 'Or boiling in oil, or impaling, or crucifixion of course, or the old intestine wrap, or a turn of the screw here...' And he reached to demonstrate, bringing on another display of eyeball exposure and lash-fluttering, but no noise.

I threw my hand up, which stopped Brett.

'Or,' he continued, 'there's always a simple hanging, though I wouldn't choose hanging as the ceiling here is a trifle inconveniently low.'

He looked to me, but Jim there was quite a gobstopper. I simply couldn't answer. I could only goggle.

'Well then, though we might be troubled afterwards by a gritty residue between the floorboards, you might prefer the currently popular burial in sand with only his head sticking out, and stoning him till he's dead. Or—'

I tore my eyes from Jim, whose eyes were now shut though his eyelashes trembled like leaves under rain. 'You're pathological!' I whispered at Brett with all my might.

He winced, I think.

'Where did you get him?' I asked, not that it mattered.

'Why, you were so upset, I grabbed him before he left, just in case.' And he smiled winningly.

'You mean he was here all along when we were discussing...' I couldn't continue. But I had to, so I forced myself. '
Listening
to us?'

'If he could hear through my bedroom door. Is there a problem?'

I sat on an unoccupied limb of the cold chrome body of the gym. 'That was very considerate, Brett.' I leaned closer to Jim. He looked both exhausted and attentive to the drift of our conversation. It annoyed me that during his painful death being discussed and this discussion occurring after his night on a rack, he still controlled himself to a ridiculous degree. Not a quiver of muscle nor a dribble through the anal outlet.

He'd stay right where he was, I decided, until we decided what to do.

'Brett,' I said. 'Let's go to your room.'

His room was as bare as before, except for his bag and trunk at the head of his rice-cracker mattress.

I sat cross-legged at the foot of his bed and he stretched out at the head, leaning back against his trunk.

He waited for me to talk, so I did.

'Thank you, Brett, for thinking of me. No one else has ever been as thoughtful of my feelings. But you can't just kill someone because he's in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

'I don't.' Vertical lines appeared between his brows. 'You do.'

'I don't do anything of the sort!'

'Angela! Desirée. You. You people. You always have.'

He could
infuriate
. 'What are you talking about? Are you
insane
?' Why, indeed, was I asking?

Probably better if I hadn't asked.

'I hate false accusations,' he murmured. The room fogged with that choking smell I had tasted once before.

I struggled to breathe. To understand.

'Justice!' he yelled.

'Gawhhhh.'

'Justice,' he repeated in a conversational timbre, as he waved the fug away. 'Angela,' he said. 'Most of the people you condemn and kill were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And whether I meet them or the others do, or they disappear as if they never were ... is all a continuation of the same. The state of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like Jim.'

He sensed that I was not with him. 'Do you know anything about the Inquisition?'

I nodded. 'A bit. They killed a lot of people who didn't believe in Jesus, and killed more to make them believe. And there were a lot of people killed for reasons I never got down.' (History 101. I passed, barely.)

'Did the Grand Inquisitor,' he quiz-showed, 'when he died, come to hell or heaven's gate?'

It depended, didn't it, on what people thought of him? Mean old cuss, but then he was the Grand Inquisitor. Did he suffer his fall in respect before, or after death? I didn't know, so couldn't answer.

'And did,' Brett asked, as if I would know 'those judged and convicted by him meet blessed fates or fire and pitch?'

I didn't answer.

'Well, I'll tell you. So much depended on the state of the Grand Inquisitor's dyspepsia, the size of the crowd for an auto-da-fé—'

Like a good primary school teacher, he noticed my confusion. 'The kangaroo court?' he offered, and then went on. 'And then so much depended on whether the fire spluttered out before it reached those sinner's legs writhing at the stake. Or in other condemnations the rope broke, or the axeman missed, or the horse bolted with the damned on her back. Or the mob's wrath outgave... ahhh, revolutions...'

For a minute, he was lost in memories. Then he began all over again. 'Have you ever thought of the witches of Salem?'

'Of course.' I had a good grounding there from the Higher Light, where one shelf was 'Wimmin, Wiccans, and Goddess Worship'. I'd read every book in the shop by my second month there, not that I was into the stuff. It was something to do, and it did make me laugh

'I'll tell you a bit,' he said, generously, meaning that he didn't think I knew a thing about the witches of Salem, or any other witches. He spoke like he had firsthand knowledge.

'If you had a wart,' he said,' or were uncommonly beautiful, or a widow with property someone else wanted, or liked little kitty cats, or noticed your neighbour doing something he hain't supposed to do, then all it took was a dunking. Dunk and if she drowns, she's innocent. Or was it guilty? Witches in Africa, witches in Europe, witches, witches, witches. Stick her hand in boiling oil, and if she blisters, she's a witch. Light a fire under her, and if it goes out before it reaches her toes, she's a witch. If so, burn her! And to find her in the first place? See that woman walking down the road, leading her pig to market? We're in need  of a fine witch. Might as well be she? Or...' And his words ran dry.

We sat for a while. I thought. He looked lost in thought. Maybe he was just waiting.

But that was historical, and we were in Now. 'Justice now,' I pointed out.

'Throw the cards in the air, and they don't come down fair, me pretty!'

And here, he uttered a high, screechy cackle that grabbed the back of my neck in shivers.

He stopped and regarded me with the impersonal affection of a city person to a brown egg.  'I don't mean to scare you, my dear,' he smiled. 'But the way of the world has been that justice comes to those in the wrong place at the wrong time. Always has.'

'But we've progressed!' I protested.

'Hoo hoo!'

'Democracy, and all that.' I was going to lecture him when he interrupted.

'Do you read, child?' he asked, not unkindly, but this tone does make me want to punch someone's lights out.

'Yers.'

'Do you follow the War on Terror?'

'Yes!' But I lied. I'd had enough of it, didn't own a TV or radio, and bad news had cured me of reading the papers.

'Angela?'

'Well, not too much. But you should be much more busy because of it. Especially as the evil is so clear-cut.'

He leaned forward and peered at my face, looking for all the world as if he was searching for blackheads.

'Do you mind?'

'Don't you care what's happening, Angela, in your world?'

He was in some respects, so
other
worldly, and curiously dense. 'Brett,' I told him, keeping my sneer as safe as I could make it, 'You might have power in your place, but a person like me has none whatsoever here.'

He accepted that. However, it didn't deter him. 'Don't you care?'

If he were Gordon, I would have clouted him. 'Care,' I explained patiently, 'is only worthwhile when it's something that does something for you. I don't get off on demos, and ... but this is beside the point. There is justice, you know. Not perfect, but then nothing is.'

He waved his hand in a swirling motion, and a heavy pile of newspapers fell upon the bed in front of me.

'Read' he commanded, in a tone that brooked no argument as to the humanly impossible. I scanned as fast as I could. I scanned to the last grubby broadsheet.

~

'And?' he asked.

'Well...'

'They shoot suspects, don't they?

'Mm.'

'You're saying they might be just poor bastards guilty as chooks?'

'I hadn't thought to describe them so colourfully.'

And the bombs going off against anyone in their range, condemned by the bomber, terrorist freelance, terrorist state. And a lot more that was the reason I didn't do the news, and wouldn't again. I felt sick.

'And now, it's your justice to keep,' he said, sweeping the papers to the floor. 'What is your sentence?'

I couldn't talk. Politics and history and news and morality bore me
utterly
. That's why I love living for art.

But I couldn't shirk my responsibility in the present situation.

'What will happen to him?' I asked.

Brett sat up, suddenly agitated.

'What do you think will happen to him?' He seemed to want to ask something, but didn't. His face took on a greenish tinge. He was growing ill at an alarming rate.

'Are you ...?' This time it couldn't be garlic.

'Nothing.' He waved his hand impatiently, and shot out a question. 'Do you believe in fate?'

'That's a crock,' I laughed.

'Crock? Crocodile?'

'Crock of shit.' I blinked. The expression suddenly sounded crude in his presence. Funny, that. The image of shit in actuality struck me as natural in his context, but the language was crude ...

'And ... heaven?' he interrupted.

'Never thought of it before you came along,' I answered immediately, and completely fair dinkum, expressing for the first time what I had always felt but never said, even to myself.

He hesitated, but blurted. 'Me?'

'You're here, aren't you? So yes, and I guess that means that heaven must exist, too, but like getting married, I never expected to go there.'

'What did you expect?' He looked enthralled, and terrified.

I'd never thought about it. But now that he asked, 'The worms crawl in. You know the rhyme. You know pinochle?'

'I think so.' I think he didn't, but he didn't want to stop the flow.

And I am also sure that he wanted to ask another question, but couldn't. His sickness seemed to grow, flicker, and then fade away. Maybe it was like, as my gran used to say, when someone walks on your grave.

We eye-balled each other, and he didn't have to tell me that I was procrastinating. I knew.

'Do you think he was a happy person, someone who has friends?' I asked.

His left brow jerked upward, and he nodded his head.

'Then can you kill him in a humane way?'

'If that's what you want?'

'Maybe he'll go to heaven,' I said, though when the word 'heaven' poured from my mouth, it left a saccharine aftertaste. There isn't any heaven, that taste told me—and I couldn't really imagine a believable hell, though the Devil was there in front of me, who could deliver newspapers with a flick of his wrist, and possessed a tail more beautiful than Boofhead's.

He stood up and reached his hand out. 'Proceed?' he asked.

'Yes,' I answered, feeling that it was my responsibility, as a human being.

We walked out together, but Jim must have had a heart attack during our conversation, because his muscles had slackened to their final resting place, and then grown stiff.