The Children's Bach (4 page)

Vicki saw Athena's foot in its thick sock and sandal. She wanted Athena to recognise her, but she prepared a speech of reminder just in case, though it galled her that all she could think of to say was ‘Remember me? I'm Morty's sister.' She reached out and tugged at Athena's sleeve. Athena jumped and turned and blushed. She's
shy
, thought Vicki.

‘Vicki! Are you all right?' The girl was white, and looked tightly bound into her clothes.

Vicki nodded. Until that moment she had not realised that she was not all right. ‘I feel a bit funny,' she said. ‘I feel as if part of my brain has sort of come away, at the back.' She raised one hand to indicate the trouble spot.

A hypochondriac, thought Athena. ‘Is Elizabeth here too?'

‘No. She's still asleep. I can't live there. There's only one bed. I was looking at the house ads.'

‘Does Elizabeth know?'

‘Know what?'

‘She'll want you to stay with her, won't she?'

Vicki began to jabber. ‘Do you want to know what kind of person Elizabeth is? She's the kind of person who doesn't slow down when she comes to an automatic door. She buys herself a pair of jeans and gives them to you straight away because they're stiff and she's too impatient to wear them in, then three months later when they're all broken in and perfect, she asks for them back.'

Embarrassed, they looked away at the window full of white cards.

‘There are some nice-sounding places,' said Athena. The girl was in a state.

‘Yes, except this one,' said Vicki. She crouched down and pointed to a grubby notice right at the bottom of the mass. Athena bent over. ‘To let,' it said. ‘One room, limited daylight only, $25 per week. NB house
not
communal.'

‘Limited daylight!' Vicki let out a pant of laughter. As Elizabeth had done when Vicki gave her opinion of papal benediction, Athena looked at the girl with sharpened attention.

‘What are you going to do now?' said Vicki. ‘I haven't got anything to do.'

They went into a cafe and sat at a table. Music was playing, not the usual kind of music you hear on a jukebox. The back door of the cafe had been left open; through it they saw new leaves, a lane. An Italian man with a narrow, tired face and a stern parting served them.

‘What will you do, in Melbourne?' said Athena. ‘You'll go back to school, won't you?'

Vicki shrugged. ‘On the plane,' she said, ‘I read a tourist book. I want to go and look at old monuments.'

‘You mean – like the Shrine?'

‘No. Old houses. Famous ones with all the furniture in them, and you can see how the servants did the cooking, and the funny bathrooms. Elizabeth hates that kind of thing.'

‘I can't believe she's really as bad as all that,' said Athena.

The coffee came.

‘What's that in the cage in your yard, Athena?'

‘A rabbit. I'm going to let it out.'

‘Won't cats eat it?'

‘Not if I take it to the country.'

‘Once humans have touched them,' said Vicki, ‘the other animals can smell it on them, and they kill them. Nature red in tooth and claw.' She curved her fingers and bared her teeth.

Again Athena stared at her. There was a sudden flutter of colour in the corner of her eye. ‘What was that?'

‘I saw it too,' said Vicki. ‘I think there's a lady out the back with a net dress on.'

‘At eleven o'clock in the morning?'

‘Maybe she's getting married.' Vicki blew on her coffee. ‘Funny music, isn't it. Arab or something.'

‘It's a tango,' said Athena.

*

Spring came. In the mornings, when the first person opened the back door, the whole bulk of air in the house shifted and warmed. Women sighed in expensive dress shops, as if even to contemplate fine stuffs were too much to bear. Dexter took Arthur to the National Gallery. On the way he spoke to the boy in magisterial tones about the lives of artists: Dexter loved tales of exalted suffering, of war and failure and unsympathetic wives and alcoholism. Arthur loitered in front of an etching called
Se Repulen
: two devils, one wielding a huge pair of scissors with which he was about to cut the other's toenails. ‘Looks like me and Mum,' said Arthur.

Philip, too, got out the clippers and trimmed Poppy's toenails while she recited, for her exam, the circulation of the blood. ‘The right atrium contracts,' she droned, ‘and the left . . .' ‘I thought it was “auricle'',' said Philip. ‘It used to be,' said Poppy, ‘but not any more. They've changed the name.' ‘How the hell can they change the name of something?' said Philip. He dug the lower blade of the clippers under the nail of her big toe and snapped the handle to. She gasped. The lump of nail flew across the room and bounced off the desk leg.

Elizabeth used the presence of Vicki at her place as an excuse for sleeping nearly every night at Philip's. He did not mind: he was not the kind of person who could be bothered minding. But he stayed out later, fell into strange beds in houses where a boiling saucepan might as easily contain a syringe as an egg; he excited pointless passions in girls who knew no better than to sprawl for hours among empty pizza boxes at the studio and wait for somebody to notice them. He came home at that hour when light is not yet anything more than the exaggerated whiteness of a shirt flung against a bookcase, a higher gloss on the back of a kitchen chair. Poppy left her writings on the table and he read them eagerly: her happy flights of fancy, her visions of an adult world, her lists of invented names: the endless ingenuity of the only child. ‘Finn and Angela have arrived on Dasnin,' he read in the light of the open refrigerator, ‘to find an abandoned and desertous planet completely devoid of any living form.' If he came home late enough he found her sitting up to her solitary breakfast. She had cleared the table and placed before her a cup of tea and a plate of toast and bacon. She had already been out for a jog around the park. She was clean and bright. She read as she ate; some great work or other,
Norah of Billabong, The Once and Future King
. She did not leap up and swamp him with greetings: she raised her face to him with her composed, modest smile. All about her was the order which she had created. God, the joy of her, the pleasure! He put down his guitar case. Will anyone ever love her as much as he does?

Vicki slept and woke alone in the high room. She was scrupulous about keeping her clothes in the suitcase, out of the way behind the partition. One day she tried on all her sister's things: the slender shoes, the Italian cotton, the crushable linen, garments whose subtle cut invested their mannish shapes with a femininity so intense that Vicki, standing before the mirror, saw herself to be not yet an adult sexual being. She staggered to the fire escape in the towering heels, pushed open the door, and walked straight into the tree. Its fingery leaves flicked her across the open eye and she cried out and crouched with her hands over her face, blinded with shock and gushes of chemical tears. A voice she did not recognise as her own choked and groaned. She crawled back inside in the stupid shoes and curled up on the bed, weeping with self-pity and foolishness. She wanted to tell Athena.

The back door was open. She tiptoed down the passage. Athena was lying under a blanket on the big bed with her back to the door.

‘Are you sick?' said Vicki.

‘No,' said Athena. ‘Just having a read before the kids get home.'

‘Don't get up,' said Vicki. ‘I'll sit at the desk and draw or something.'

The scratching of the lead pencil put Athena to sleep. She half-woke once or twice, when the phone rang and Vicki scampered down the hall to answer it, and when music came floating from the kitchen radio and plates rattled dully in water. Good grief, thought Athena, she's washing up.

Athena's life was mysterious to Vicki. She seemed contained, without needs, never restless.

‘I'm bored,' said Vicki. ‘Un-bore me, Thena!'

Athena laughed. ‘I don't even know what boredom is.'

But how could she not know? thought Vicki, watching jealously out the front window the arrival of Athena's friend to visit with her two children: the slow ritual of getting out of the car, the back door held open against the hip, the unstrapping of small bodies, the unloading of the blue plastic nappy bag, the toys, the pencils, the Viking helmet, the Maya temple colouring book; the endless patience with the whining, twining children; the slow talking about nothing in particular; the friend gasbagging about health and sickness while Athena stood ironing at the board, keeping her head half-turned to show that she was still listening.

‘The woman next door,' said the friend, ‘went and had colonic irrigations. And the lady who did them found stuff inside her that she'd eaten
ten years
ago!'

‘How could she tell?' said Athena.

‘
Anyway
,' said the friend, ‘she rang up and told me he'd gone off with some
child
, a girl of eighteen. So I said to her, “Get some interesting knitting. Something with a complicated pattern. And stay home and just
sit it out
.'' And that's what she did.'

They were talking like this when Vicki left to have her hair cut, and they were still talking like this when she got back, the only difference being that the table was now covered in dirty cups and cake crumbs.

‘Look!' cried Vicki. ‘Now I feel
terrific
. Is that red mark on the back of my neck still there? Do you know what that is? She cut the squared-off bit at the back with those shears.'

‘Clippers?' said the friend.

‘Yes! Clippety clip! And once she was going clippety clip right into my skin!' She gave a high, excited laugh.

The two mothers looked at her with their calm smiles. She felt as jerky as a puppet.

‘Last time I had my hair cut short back home,' Vicki chattered on, rushing to the round mirror in the corner, ‘I looked so ugly that I cried all night. And when I woke up in the morning my eyes were so swollen that I looked like a
cane
toad!'

‘You certainly don't look ugly now,' said the friend, in her slow drawl.

‘I know!' said Vicki. ‘I'm so elegant now that I ought to be lined up and
shot
!'

The friend laughed, but Athena heard Vicki trying for Elizabeth's smart tone, and it squeezed her heart.

Vicki began to hang round the Foxes' house in Bunker Street earlier each day. They heard her old pushbike crash against the rubbish bins at breakfast time. She sprang up the concrete steps, checked her hair in the glass, and stayed an hour; ate an egg that Dexter had poached for himself; tried to make herself useful and agreeable, though she was domestically incompetent: she tipped tea-leaves down the sink and blocked it; she put embers from the pot-belly stove into a plastic bucket and melted it. But she began to know where things were, she was cheerful company, she laughed at Dexter's jokes, she played with Arthur. She laced his boots for him, though he had been able to do it himself for years.

‘Can I walk down to school with you?' she said. ‘Do you mind?'

‘Yes,' said Arthur, with his nose in a cereal packet.

‘You do mind?'

‘I mean yes, you can come.'

When the mail arrived and Athena opened envelopes, Vicki watched and said, ‘I never get any letters.'

Athena suppressed an impulse to say, ‘You can read mine.'

Vicki loved their lavatory in the corner of the yard, its shelves made of brick and timber stuffed with old paperbacks, broken tools, camping gear and boxes of worn-down coloured pencils. She loved the notes they left for each other, the drawings and silly rhymes, the embarrassing singing, the vegetable garden, the fluster under which lay a generous order, the rushes of activity followed by periods of sunny calm: Vicki was in love with the house, with the family, with the whole establishment of it.

‘Bunker Street is her
god
,' said Elizabeth.

Dexter was flattered. ‘I feel sentimental when I see you, Morty,' he said. ‘Why don't you bring this Philip round here?'

‘Philip? What would I bring him here for?'

‘He's your bloke, isn't he? Aren't you going to get married one of these days?'

Elizabeth shouted with laughter. ‘Marry
him
? Forget it! He's already married! And anyway can you see me as a married woman?'

Dexter clenched his fists and danced up and down on the spot. ‘But I
want
you to be happily married!'

Elizabeth raised her eyes to the ceiling.

‘I don't understand the way you live,' said Dexter. ‘What are the rules? Does he – you know – betray you?'

‘Of course he bloody “betrays'' me,' said Elizabeth. ‘When you've been with someone that long, what else is there to do?'

Dexter flung out his arms and turned to Vicki who was at the mirror by the piano trying to tie a scarf round her head.

‘I hate modern life,' he said. ‘Modern American manners.'

‘It's just love,' said Vicki, turning and twisting to get a back view of herself.

‘Love!' roared Dexter. ‘I've never been in love, then. In
lerve
. I don't even know what it is. What's so funny?'

‘You'll find out one day,' said Elizabeth.

‘I don't see why people think falling
in lerve
is inevitable,' said Dexter. ‘Anyone would think it was some kind of disease, or plague. People only fall in lerve because they've read about it in some cheap American magazine, because they
want
to, because they're bored and have nothing better to do. I don't want to, therefore I'm not going to.'

‘But weren't you in love with Athena?' said Vicki, scandalised.

‘No,' said Dexter. ‘Not in that tortured way you read about.'