The Children's Bach (2 page)

Elizabeth did not want to tell Dexter about her mother. Although the news was more than a year old, he would be so portentously and profoundly sorry for her that she would be embarrassed into making some smart crack, which would shock and grieve him and then he would rebuke her and she would not be able to prevent herself from blushing and hanging her head. She wanted to say, as well, ‘Don't call me Morty. Nobody calls me that any more.' But that would sound snotty and he would laugh at her.

‘Mum died,' she said. ‘And don't you dare feel sorry for me.'

‘She
died
.' He did not stop walking, or even turn his head to look at her. He had the weird boy slung over his shoulder like a saddle bag. He held out his arm to her. ‘Take my arm, Morty,' he said. ‘
We'll go together down
. Who wrote that?'

‘Browning. “My Last Duchess.”'

‘Dear Morty,' said Dexter.

‘Also,' she said, ‘I think I am about to get stuck with Vicki.'

He shook his head. He was still not looking at her. ‘Morty. Morty. I know what it means to be stuck with someone. You mustn't think about it like that. It'll only make you miserable.'

They stopped at the gate lounge. The door opened.

‘Here she comes,' said Elizabeth.

‘Which one is she?' said Dexter.

The man walking behind Vicki was talking to his friend, he had a faint stammer, not much more than a hesitation. ‘ 'Mazing guy, Gaz. Always thinking about his mem, mem, member. There was something in his brain that just went sprong. He'd see a good looking chick dancing in front of the stage, he'd go down between sets and find her, and he'd be back five minutes later doing up his fly.'

His story was bodyless. A mosquito might have been whining it next to her ear. The footsteps of the hastening passengers beat light and fast. Either the windows were tinted or Melbourne was already dark.

The hostess at the open door showed her teeth. Vicki came out into the world. She saw the man beside Elizabeth and slowed down. That couldn't be Philip. Philip couldn't possibly look like that. Philip played in a
band
. She whipped off the rhinestone ear-rings and shoved them into her pocket.

The freeway was dark. Vicki's toes were so cold that they felt like rows of marbles inside her shoes. The strange boy was strapped into his car seat beside her. He mooed and murmured to himself. She stopped trying to listen to the conversation in the front, and stared out the window. Low down on the sky was a narrow band of apricot, all that was left of the daylight. Dexter threw back his head and laughed at something Elizabeth said. Vicki experienced the small prickle of power that comes to the one who rides in the back seat. She saw her captors as they would never see themselves: two silly heads of hair, two sets of shoulders, two unsuspecting napes. She hated them. She closed her eyes with hatred. Dexter saw her in the mirror and thought she had fallen asleep. Unresisted now, his tenderness for the whole world rushed to envelop her.

*

Athena flung in broken briquettes and clanged the door shut. The pot-belly stove began to roar, then settled into its long single note. She spread out the
Herald
on the kitchen table. In the sports section there was a picture of a footballer with his baby. She hastened to turn the page. Now every baby photo reminded her of the famous one of Azaria in its oval frame: the blurred form, pupa-like in swaddling, the wrinkled brow, the head turned sharply from the light, the fists and eyes squeezed shut. Athena kept her pointed scissors packed away, up high.

There was soup in the pot. ‘Soup means lots!' Dexter would say when he came in. Where were they? She propped the Kabalevsky open on the piano and tried again. She had laboured through a dozen bars when the car slid down the driveway outside the kitchen window. More than two doors banged. She got up from the piano and took a knife to the rest of the loaf.

Dexter flooded in on a tide of cold air. He loved coming home.

‘Athena! Look who's here!'

The three women stood still and stared at one another.

‘Sisters,' thought Athena, with that start of wonder which family resemblance provokes. ‘Big one's tough. Little one's miserable.'

‘She's beautiful,' thought Vicki. ‘It's warm. I wish I could live here.' Her chest loosened and she began to breathe.

‘She's a frump,' thought Elizabeth with relief; but Athena stepped forward and held out her hand, and Elizabeth saw the cleverly mended sleeve of her jumper and was suddenly not so sure.

‘Come in,' said Athena. ‘Dexter, can't you close that door?'

Because it had only one source of light, a yellow-shaded standard lamp at head-height against a wall, the Fox family's kitchen was like a burrow, rounded rather than cubed, as if its corners had been stuffed with dry grass. The air shimmered with warmth. The table, large, wooden, scarred, was laid at one end with a bleached cotton cloth, a pile of bowls, a fistful of spoons. All the objects in the room looked like cartoons of themselves: the flap-handled fridge, the brown piano grinning, the dresser where plates leaned and cups hung.

Dexter made the presentations.

‘We can't stay, I'm afraid,' said Elizabeth in her grand manner. The closed door next to the stove must lead to the bathroom: she could hear the dull splatter of a leaking shower tap.

‘Yes you can,' said Dexter. He took the lid off the saucepan. ‘Soup! Soup, Billy. Soup means lots. Sit up, everyone. Where's Arthur?'

‘At the Papantuanos',' said Athena.

‘I hope he's not watching TV.'

‘They're making suits of armour in the shed.'

‘I'll go and get him,' said Dexter. ‘Athena – Vicki must be sat near the warmth. She's from sunnier climes, aren't you, Vicki.' He rounded her up, sidling and dancing with his arms out in their big curve. Vicki scowled with embarrassment, but obeyed. Elizabeth abandoned her plan to watch ‘Sale of the Century', and allowed herself to be shuffled to a chair. She drew off her gloves.

A bigger boy ran in the back door, and kicked it to. He had the same home-cut hair as Billy's, a helmet of blond silk.

‘Sit Billy up, Arthur,' said Dexter.

Arthur seized his brother by the shoulders and turned him towards the table where the others sat watching. ‘Come on, Billy!' he shouted. He kept his eyes on his audience and made a great business of seating Billy on the bench. He stuck a spoon in the child's fist, and turned like an actor to face an ovation.

‘What a ham,' thought Elizabeth.

‘I wonder where their TV is,' thought Vicki.

Athena stood up with the ladle.

‘Two four six eight, bog in don't wait,' said Dexter.

Vicki had never seen anything like Dexter at table. She was disgusted, and ashamed for him. He gripped the spoon so that the whole handle vanished in his paw; he bent over the bowl and slurped so loudly that he seemed not to be using the spoon at all, but to be transferring the food from bowl to mouth by suction alone. Athena could eat properly – why didn't she correct him in private? But Athena went on spooning up her soup, glancing from time to time at the children, and spread around her a shy, attentive calm which even Elizabeth, to whom Dexter's table manners were merely one more avenue to her complicated memories of his family, found soothing and agreeable.

Dexter emptied his bowl for the last time, then lifted it in both hands and licked it out, pushing his face right into it. There was soup on his nose, his chin and the front of his hair. He wiped it off on the sleeve of his jumper and sat back with a sigh. He was fed: now he could be sociable again. Nothing, thought Vicki, could be worse than the way he eats. Now things can only get better.

The soup was thick. The bread was fresh. The stove's dry heat reddened their cheeks. The walls curved in around them. Outside the house, which was at the bottom of a neglected street, no cars passed.

Not late, but in a starry cold that lifted them off their feet, they went out to the car.

‘Christ, it's cold,' said Elizabeth.

‘But you can smell things growing,' said Dexter. ‘Not long now.'

‘Still the mindless optimist.'

‘Where's the toilet?' said Vicki.

‘Right down in the corner of the yard,' said Dexter.

Vicki lit the candle. The door would not stay shut. She had to keep one knee against it so that the sound of her meek trickling would not escape into the black air.

She wiped herself. The door swung open. Just as she reached up for the chain, she heard a noise. Something trotted, something dragged itself. She stood still with her hand hooked through the metal loop. The noise came again, a small and intimate sound. She blew out the candle and sight returned like the slow relaxing of a muscle. Ten feet out from the lavatory door was a cage, a derelict chook pen, covered in creeper. Something in the cage was shifting in its straw.

Up there under the leafless vine they were talking. Vicki saw their breath. From the angles of their bodies she could tell they were arguing. Dexter was trying to make Elizabeth do something.

‘It's not my job,' she said. ‘Why the hell should I?'

‘Because no-one else will,' said Dexter. ‘Because there's nothing else. What else is there? Otherwise we're all just dry leaves blowing down the gutter.'

Vicki got into the car and kept her face against the side window. She saw sour street lights, a house standing in a junk yard: old washing machines, tea-chests, a car with no wheels. Elizabeth sat silent with folded arms. Dexter sang aloud in a foreign language.

They turned into a long, important-looking street with silver tramlines. The buildings looked like closed shops. They had flat fronts and stone vases on their roofs.

‘This is it, Dexter. Stop here.'

Elizabeth got out and slammed the door. She looked up and down the street with her hands in her pockets. Vicki dragged her suitcase on to the pavement. Dexter did not want to abandon her. He blundered out of the car and skipped behind the two silent women to the door of the building.

‘Vicki! You must come to our place whenever you like! Athena's always there. Come round the back. We never lock the door.'

She turned her bleached face to him and gave a small nod. Elizabeth rammed the key into the lock and twisted it back and forth. Dexter looked at the shop-fronts opposite. One of them had a dull red light over the door; its number was painted in numerals as tall as a man.

‘Morty!' he said. ‘Shouldn't you be living in a proper house?'

‘Oh shutup. You're worse than Mum.'

Dexter fell back to the edge of the pavement and they went past him into the building. The street door clashed behind them.

Elizabeth took the stairs very fast, making a lot of heel noise. Her coat billowed and Vicki tramped in a wave of perfume. They went up and up. The staircase was concrete. At the very top there was another big door.

Elizabeth strode straight across the boards to the bed and pulled a cassette player out from behind it. She shoved in a tape and went to the bare window; she turned her back on Vicki and stood with her feet apart and her hands on her hips. She looks like a record cover, thought Vicki. Tape hissed, music burst out. Elizabeth begin to dance: no, not to dance, but to move her body, to sway forward from the waist, as if she were on a stage, as if the audience were outside the black window.

What is this, thought Vicki. What is in here? It is a warehouse, it has no walls or rooms. There is a row of windows, each one shaped like an eye with its brow raised. There is a TV, a phone on the floor, a bed like a big pink cloud. Where does she cook? Where does she wash herself? Where will
I
sleep? Everybody needs a bed. There are no walls or rooms.

Elizabeth turned round and saw her standing there beside her suitcase. She was ashamed. She turned down the music.

‘I'm not set up,' she said. ‘Tonight you'd better sleep with me. Tomorrow we'll think about what to do.'

The sisters got into the bed: it was cold and there was no sofa and nothing else to do. Elizabeth sat up and crocheted. Vicki lay flat, and kept well out to one side so as not to be in the way. She thought, ‘I'll be awake all night. I must try to keep still.' The tops of her thighs went numb. But she did doze, swam lightly away under the quilt, under three inches of sunny water, crows flapped against the wind high up near the blades of the windmill, all her papers blew away, her nerves gave a jolt and she woke with her heart thumping.

‘Look, Vicki. It's the Pope.'

Vicki sat up. On the bright little screen at the foot of the bed a man in a white skullcap moved slowly along a row of people. He stretched out his hands in a quiet, formal manner, he smiled and inclined his head, he leaned to them. Someone held up a child and out came his hands, fingers spread starwise like a blind man's, to touch the baby's cheeks and temples. His movements were so exaggeratedly slow, and from this slowness emanated such theatrical power, that he reminded Vicki of a spaceman.

‘He's weightless,' she said.

‘You were asleep.'

‘What's he doing?'

‘Blessing them, I suppose. What a lot of mumbo jumbo.'

‘Don't you think blessing does any good?'

Elizabeth looked up sharply, as one does at a small child who asks its first coherent question. ‘No. No, I don't, actually.'

‘It looks nice though. Don't you think? I wish someone would bless me.'

Elizabeth twitched her crochet hook in and out. A sucker for a cult, she thought. Better keep her out of the city at night. ‘The last time anybody blessed me,' she said, ‘was when I took a bag of old clothes to the Salvation Army opshop. But I did get myself baptised when I was a student.'

‘Did they push you right under?'

‘I wasn't a fundamentalist, thanks very much. Just a cross on the forehead, a bit of nice music, turn to the east, forswear the devil and all his works. And guess who my godfather was. Dexter.'