The Children's Bach (6 page)

‘It's rude.'

Poppy smiled and shrugged. Athena stood by the door and watched. Philip, glancing about him for support, caught her eye. He was surprised: she looked
dignified
; her limbs were narrow, her hips were wide, her hands were large and cracked. Her hair looked as if she had cut it herself, pulled it forward and chopped at it. She blushed, and he kept her glance in his and nodded several times: it might have been the courteous nod that accompanies formal introduction, except that they had already been introduced. Elizabeth strode in with an armful of bottles and a bag of ice. Vicki ran out for a lemon off the tree and cut it up. The kitchen was full of people smiling, shifting an elbow or a foot to make room, saying ‘Sorry!'

‘What book are you reading?' asked Arthur in his loud, sociable voice.

Poppy turned up the cover to show him.

‘I've seen you on TV,' shouted Arthur.

‘Who, me?' said Elizabeth.

‘No, him.'

Philip shook his head. ‘Couldn't have been me, mate.'

Poppy looked up from her book and directed a blank, level stare at her father.

‘Yes I have!' said Arthur. ‘On Countdown. You had longer hair and a sparkly shirt.'

Elizabeth laughed. ‘Sparkly!' Philip dropped his head and smiled.

They began to eat.

‘He doesn't actually go on TV,' said Poppy. ‘He makes up songs, and he does sessions at night. Is there meat in this?'

‘If you go on Countdown you get a lot of money,' said Arthur. ‘They pay you a
lot
of money.'

‘Oh, they do not,' said Poppy.

‘Some Countdown people were making a clip in the park once,' said Arthur urgently. He was bolting his food. ‘They said I might be able to go in it. They were going to pay me about two hundred dollars.'

‘Bullshit,' said Poppy. ‘Countdown don't make those clips. They just put them on TV.'

‘I want to get one ear-ring,' said Arthur.

‘Don't be silly, Arthur,' said Dexter.

‘A boy at school's got one.'

‘Why don't you get a tat?' said Elizabeth.

‘A what?'

‘A tattoo,' said Philip. He put down his fork and rolled his shirt sleeve up to his shoulder. It was a very small butterfly. Muscles and green veins rolled under his skin; his forearm was covered with fine black hairs. Arthur was so thrilled he could not speak. He gulped down the rest of his plateful. Athena could not help staring at Philip. Whenever she took her eyes away she felt him looking at her. It seemed they took it in turns.

‘Have you been to America, Philip?' said Vicki.

‘The sort of singer who lounges across a glass piano,' said Elizabeth.

‘I like to have tortellini of a Friday,' said Philip.

‘She was wearing these daggy flares,' said Elizabeth, ‘with embroidered insets.'

‘I got my hand jammed between two speaker boxes,' said Philip. ‘My finger burst like a sausage.'

‘You know?' said Vicki. ‘One of those horror movies where she drives up to this house and gets dismembered?'

‘I got to Reno on the bus at eight o'clock in the morning,' said Philip. ‘People were stumbling about the streets in full evening dress.'

‘She had all the colour and dynamism of a parsnip,' said Elizabeth. ‘You could not by any stretch of the imagination drum up feelings of sisterhood for her.'

‘We've got a rabbit in a cage,' said Arthur.

‘I walked in to our first gig,' said Philip, ‘and they were sticking red cellophane over the lights. I thought, Oh
no
.'

‘I went through centuries of torture,' said Elizabeth. ‘I'd emerge exhausted from the Crusades and the Black Death only to realise that I still had to drag myself through the entire Spanish Inquisition. I never touched it again.'

‘They only cost twenty-five dollars,' said Vicki, ‘so I bought two pairs.'

‘Does anyone want more spaghetti?' said Athena.

Dexter got up and cranked open a tin of pears.

‘Sing something,' said Poppy to Elizabeth. ‘Sing ‘‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do''.'

‘Oh, not that,' said Philip.

‘You do the come-ah come-ah,' said Elizabeth to Philip.

They sang. Billy flung himself about in Dexter's arms, loopy, with rolling eyes. Their rhythm was solid, they slid their eyes sideways to meet, and smiled as if to mock each other for their unerring harmonies. Athena saw they were professionals. The piano is such a lonely instrument, she thought: always by yourself with your back to the world. The music, thought Dexter irritably, is American music. He remembered Dr A.E. Floyd's quavering voice on the radio: ‘Some people pronounce it Pur
cell
: that's an Ameddicanism.' The song ended. ‘Now
we
'll sing,' said Dexter. He put down Billy, who wandered away; he made Arthur come and stand beside his chair, and they sang ‘The Wild Colonial Boy'. Arthur had the long song word-perfect. He stood to attention and threw back his head on the high notes. Vicki watched with a cold eye. ‘I suppose,' thought Elizabeth, ‘that he is trying to keep something alive.' It embarrassed her to see the righteous set of Dexter's mouth between verses: she looked away.

Drunk on performance, Dexter hardly let a pause fall before he cried, ‘And now I'll sing ‘‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross'' . . . And pour contempt on awhaw-hawl my pride,' he bawled. He drew breath and looked around him, smiling, with tear-filled eyes, his right arm still extended in its melodramatic curve. No-one spoke. Poppy turned a page.

‘Mind if I sing another stanza?' he said.

‘Yes,' said Vicki. ‘I do. Hymns are boring.'

Had anyone ever crossed Dexter before?
Had
anyone? He jerked back as if he had been struck. His chair splintered under him and he saved himself only by flexing his legs and grabbing the corner of the table with one hand.

The gin bottle was empty.

‘Why was that teenager so rude to that man when he was singing?' said Poppy on the way home.

‘Who knows,' said Philip.

‘But I like the mother,' said Poppy. ‘Athena's perfect, isn't she.'

‘Perfect – you reckon?' said Philip.

Elizabeth looked at him. ‘She'd have to be, to live up to the name.'

‘The goddess of war,' said Philip.

‘I didn't mean
that
perfect,' said Poppy.

‘Of war and needlecraft,' said Elizabeth.

*

It was a grey rabbit. It had no name and its life was not a happy one. When Athena's parents came to visit and saw it crouched in the old chook pen half buried in Virginia creeper, her father said, ‘What the hell are you keeping that for?'

‘Dexter thought it would be nice for the boys,' said Athena.

‘What would he know about rabbits. Knock it on the head. Wring its neck. Flaming pests.'

‘At least in the cage by itself it can't breed,' said Athena's mother.

One morning Athena and Vicki lowered it into a deep cardboard carton with grass in the bottom and a teatowel over the top, and put the box on the back seat of the car and drove it out through Footscray and down the highway.

‘We'll have to get far enough away from civilisation so there won't be any feral cats,' said Vicki.

‘I have to be back for the boys,' said Athena. ‘I didn't mean to come this far out.'

‘There's heaps of time,' said Vicki. ‘We can get fish and chips. Did you bring any money? Aren't we near the sea? Go down the side road.'

There was thick grass at the verge, and a brown dam fifty feet inside the fence. Vicki knelt up on the seat and lifted the teatowel off the box. ‘We should have got someone to kill it. Can Dexter kill things?'

‘He killed a chook once. A dog bit the back of it right off and it was full of maggots. He held it down on a log and chopped its head off. He went white.'

They dragged the box out of the car and laid it on its side in the grass, but the rabbit would not come out. They stood waiting. The wind combed the surface of the dam into fine ridges and raised the hair on their arms.

‘Is he still in there?' said Vicki. She gave the box a tap with her toe. ‘Come out, come out.'

They began to giggle.

‘I feel sick,' said Athena.

‘Tip the box up.'

‘I can't. You.'

They were convulsed with laughter. Vicki stamped her foot. Together they seized the carton and tilted its mouth to the ground. The rabbit, its ears laid back and its head withdrawn into its torso, slid towards the air. It dropped out, they whisked the box away, and it crouched shuddering between tussocks, under the huge blank sky.

*

He should have rung up first, but he didn't have the number or the last name, and anyway that wasn't the way he did things. The back of the house was shabby, and the jasmine, whose smell he remembered from the night visit, seemed the only thing holding it together, but someone had already been working in the garden and had left neat piles of weeds all along the path to the lavatory. A row of children's tracksuit pants, frayed and dripping, hung on the line, and the bins stood with bricks on their lids at the foot of the concrete steps. All the doors and windows were open.

He made a lot of noise going in, to warn her, but the music – an orchestra, a cello – was on so loudly that she wouldn't have known if an army had marched in the back door. The passage was cool; a telephone sat on the lino. He stopped at the door through which the music poured. She was lying on her back on the floor with her eyes shut, her knees bent and her arms spread out. One foot kept the beat and her torso and her head rolled from side to side. Her face flickered and blurred like that of someone making love: a laugh relaxed into a smile, then into a vagueness as her head turned; she took a gasp of air and let it out, and all the while she rolled in time to the music, small rolls this way and that, as if she were floating on water and being lightly bobbed by a current.

He turned and walked quickly back to the kitchen, and sat on a chair and waited. The piano was open but he did not touch it straight away. He was holding his breath with embarrassment and curiosity.

She heard him out in the kitchen when the music stopped. She heard him go to the piano and plink with two fingers a tune whose name she did not know but which she had surely heard from the radio in Vicki's room. ‘Tsk,' she said. ‘He would play that kind of stuff.' She stepped into the passage, thinking herself safe and superior; but he struck one quiet chord, a wide blue one, a chord from the kind of music she knew nothing about and was too tight to play; she stood still, listening, and he left a silence, and then he resolved it.

How fresh and pretty he looked, sitting at her piano in his clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the top button fastened! She said, ‘You look gorgeous!'

He laughed and looked down. ‘What was that you were listening to?'

‘Haydn. It's in C major. Isn't that supposed to be the optimistic key? I could never understand why I always felt so cheerful after I'd heard that concerto, till I thought what key it was in.' She blushed: what an idiotic generalisation. Surely musicians were beyond such crassness. Nerves cause chatter. Least said soonest mended.

‘Let's go somewhere?' he said.

‘Where?'

‘Just out. Look at things.'

‘Wait till I get my bag.'

She stood in the middle of the bedroom and looked at the rows of books. She read novels fast, lying for hours on her side holding the book open on the other pillow; they blurred into one another and were gone. Great passions are ridiculous, she thought, although it is terribly cathartic to have felt. She imagined that Philip had indulged in sexual perversions with strangers. Every man she met was inferior to Dexter, but only, perhaps, because she had chosen that this should be the case.

He would have liked to move around her house and examine all its icons, or to hang over the front windowsill with her and make remarks about the dress and gait of passing pedestrians; but he wanted also to get her outside and on to his own turf, into public places where no-one was host and no-one guest, where everything had a price, where he could get what he wanted, pay for it, and keep moving in long, effortless, curving afternoons unsnagged by obligation or haste: the idea of destination meant almost as little to him as it did to Billy.

‘I'm supposed to be on my way to work,' he said.

‘I thought you only worked at night.'

‘Something came up.'

‘Are you worried about getting there on time?'

‘No. I'm just worried about being comfortable.'

‘Did you say “comfortable”?' said Athena.

‘Yes, I did. But I didn't mean it.'

That was his way of talking. When she pressed him he was not there. Like most women she possessed, for good or ill, a limitless faculty for adjustment. She felt him give; she let herself melt, drift, take the measure of his new position, and harden again into an appropriate configuration. There was something to be got here, if only she could . . .

In the street there was a dusty summer wind, a morning not quite hot enough. If they walked shoulder to shoulder, if they sat side by side, it was in order to become the world's audience instead of being obliged to perform their personalities for each other. They bought tickets, they travelled. Their mutual curiosity was intense, but oblique. They watched one another witnessing the world: how two fat businessmen examined as merchandise the girl who pouted and pretended to read the paper in the cafe window with her skirt up round her thighs; how the waitress in Myer's mural hall crossed the vast room with both arms high above her head and a dirty tablecloth hanging from each hand; the hippy boy on the tram who bought a ticket to St Kilda and announced to the other passengers, ‘I must go to the sea. To the ocean'; the girl whose lips moved as she read a book called
Tortured for Christ
. The world divided itself for them, presented itself in a series of small theatrical events. ‘Now,' said a woman to a man at the bus-stop, ‘I'll tell you the whole story. See the thing was that . . .'