Bittersweet (30 page)

B
ear Olsen had found himself a routine that kept him out of the way of his wife and sons as much as possible; after trying to eat two slices of toast for his breakfast, he put his hat on his head, shrugged himself into his jacket, and went out the front door, down the path through the front gate and onto the street. There he turned to walk down the slope of Trelawney Way to Wallace Road, crossed it, and kept on going until he came to George Street, the main thoroughfare that bisected all Corunda City.

Though Maboud’s general store sat on the corner, he went past it and trudged all the way down George Street to the main shopping centre, where some windows were fragmented with brown-paper bands glued across the glass to indicate permanent closure. No matter; he stopped to peer into every shop, open for business or defunct, down the north side as far as the last store, then back up the south side. Finally he arrived again at Maboud’s, with its newspapers, comic-cuts, magazines, packets of tea and tins of baking powder, sugar and butter and flour, women’s and men’s and children’s clothing, teapots and kettles
and mixing bowls. Bashir Maboud, who liked him, always attempted to strike up a conversation, to which Bear made little or no response; then eventually he would return up the slope of Trelawney Way and let himself into his front yard again, having walked ten miles and spent the best part of the day in doing it.

He had lost a great deal of weight, albeit he wasn’t yet emaciated; food didn’t interest him any more than his wife or sons did. From the moment he was back after his slow, clockwork progression, he sat in the garden upon an old park bench Jack Thurlow had brought home in happier days, his hat on the slats beside him, his chin sunk onto his chest. Not knowing what significance this action might have, Grace had puzzled as to why, from the time he started sitting there, he had reversed the bench so he sat with his back to the house and his family.

After many fruitless attempts to get Bear interested in doing something —
anything!
— Jack had ceased to visit while Bear was at home; it was just too painful to see external events destroy such a good, decent, caring man. Jack visited while Bear walked.

What did the family live on? Teeth clenched, Grace accepted the bare minimum from Charles to let her family subsist. Beg though he did, Charles couldn’t persuade her to take more, and she made it clear that what she did accept was for the sake of her sons. In return she insisted on making things for Kitty’s larder that a French chef would despise, like Anzac bikkies, lemon-curd butter and red, green and orange jellies.

Bear’s mind was not a sluggish slough of self-pity; had it been, people like Grace, Edda, Jack and Charles might have worked to cure it. But what went on in Bear’s mind had neither purpose
nor logic nor agony of any kind; it was a literal jumble of idle thoughts, stray little snatches of songs or wireless jingles, all run down so badly that even Bear, the owner of the thoughts, had no concept what they meant, how they were relevant to his existence. His image of self — of his body, even — was in the throes of disintegration, so that when Grace, as terrified as exasperated, cried out things to him like “Pull yourself together!” he had no inkling what she meant or why she was so upset. The shop windows with their criss-crossed brown-paper bands were something to look at, just as Bashir Maboud was someone who mouthed words; this last, vague, vestigial part of himself seemed a machine that had to be used up and worn out by walking and looking, walking and looking … When he sat, his back to the house, on his garden seat, he was so exhausted that of thoughts there were none at all.

Charles Burdum and the Latimer GP, Dr. Dave Harper, came to see Bear several times; each visit saw Grace hanging on their opinions desperately.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do,” Charles confessed to her. “However, his condition doesn’t seem to worsen. It’s three weeks since our last time here, but Bear is unchanged.”

“He abrogated his responsibilities as a man, a husband and a father,” Grace said bitterly.

“Abrogated is just a word, Grace. Blaming him isn’t going to improve anything, you know that. My dear, you’re so brave, so staunch! No one can criticise you, even for railing about Bear occasionally.” Charles patted her arm. “Chin up, Grace!”

“We eat fish paste and home-made jam, but that’s a lot more than many families are eating, for which I thank you, Charlie,”
said Grace, hating the faint patronisation but understanding she had no right to say so. “I also know that if you had your way it would be ham and steak. Well, I won’t take them. I’m grateful that you pay Bashir Maboud’s bills, but if Bear were in his right mind, he’d deplore
any
charity. I’m no leech.”

“I admire your independence,” said Charles sincerely.

“Supercilious bastard,” Grace muttered to herself. “All the world suffers, but not Charlie Burdum, cock of the walk.” A sentiment she repeated to Edda, who slapped her down by reminding her that Charles had seen
his
son stillborn. “Yours mightn’t eat ham sandwiches, but they’re healthy as cart horses fed on the best mash, so pipe down, Grace.”

Edda was looking, thought the deeply unhappy and frustrated Grace, quite superb. They were twenty-five years old now, once considered past the peak of feminine attractiveness — but that was outmoded thinking. The longer, more shaped clothes of late 1930 suited Edda, whose height and suppleness carried them well: she was so —
elegant
! Red always became her, even the rather trying rust-red she wore today, a dress of thin, clingy crepe. No petticoat either, yet she contrived not to give the slightest impression of trollop. And she was growing her thick black hair long — why was she doing that?

“Underneath his posturing Charlie’s all right,” she said to Grace, smoothing one silk-sheathed leg to make sure the seam of her stocking was straight. “He means well, it’s just that he can never overcome his Pommyness. To us, he patronises, but he has no idea it seems that way. Look at what he’s doing for Tufts — you have to be glad over that, and it’s all his doing.”

“Yes, yes, I’m very happy for Tufts!”

Edda’s string bag thumped on the table. “You know bloody well I’m not patronising you, sister, so use what’s in there without getting huffy. Some sliced ham, slices of devon sausage, lamb chops and a piece of corned silverside. You have to eat better meat than sausages occasionally.”

Grace flushed, but held her temper. “Thank you, dear, most kind of you.” She fished in the bag and put the meat in her ice chest. “Fancy a woman as deputy super!”

“It might have been you if you’d stuck to nursing,” Edda said, a little cruelly. “Wrong sex or not, our Tufts will do very well. Charlie’s helping her get a degree in Science and accountancy qualifications, so the Lords of Creation won’t be able to attack her on educational grounds.” She gurgled in the back of her throat. “And good luck to any man who fancies taking Tufts down a peg or two! He’ll wind up singing soprano.”

Grace giggled. “You’re right. But wouldn’t you have liked the deputy’s job, Edda?”

“Not if it were Bart’s or Guy’s. I want to travel.”

“So you keep saying, but when?”

“When I’m good and ready.”

On 25th October 1930 the state of New South Wales had gone to the polls to elect a new government. Its people voted Jack Lang in; New South Wales now had a Labor government whose Premier implicitly believed that Sir Otto Niemeyer’s drastic program of retrenchment was wrong, wrong, wrong. What Jack
Lang wanted was to increase public spending and get as many men back in jobs as humanly possible. The Sydney Harbour Bridge and the underground railway system were suddenly going again, and Lang was adamantly opposed to paying back interest on the state’s City of London loans while so many Australians suffered because of those loan interest rates.

Even cranky Grace was lifted out of her perpetual troubles as she pored over the newspapers Bashir Maboud saved for her every day, talking, as had become her habit, to an unresponsive Bear as he sat on his bench after his walk.

“Jack Lang has to be right,” she said, waving a broadsheet at him coming on toward Christmas of 1930. “Look at Corunda!” she exclaimed. “Almost everybody has a job, so the Depression hasn’t made the inroads here that it has everywhere else. Thanks to the building of the new hospital! Dearest Bear, your misfortune was to have your skills in something first and hardest hit. And after that, you were too proud to take the dole because you can’t do the work it calls for. Well, lots take it anyway!”

He made no answer at all, but then he never did; or listened, or seemed to realise that she sat beside him rustling her newspapers and prattling on, forever talking, talking …

Done with the first two pages of the
Corunda Post
, a journal with grand pretensions, she turned to page three, more entertaining.

“Fancy that! Suicide rates in Corunda are increasing,” she said, her voice still light and breezy. “Why do people hang themselves? It must be an awful death, dangling at the end of a rope slowly choking, which is what people do who hang
themselves
. When the law hangs a criminal, the
Post
writer says here, he or she falls down a trapdoor and the sudden jerk when he or she stops literally breaks the neck. No, I wouldn’t choose to hang myself, and I hope I never do anything that sees the law hang me …”

Her voice faded to a murmur, then spontaneously rose again. “Women like to put their heads in the gas oven, but men don’t. I wonder why? Gas smells horrible, and it’s choking again, isn’t it? Taking poison isn’t popular, I suppose because one always dies in such a frightful mess, and it’s certainly not fair to those left behind to have to clean up the mess. No, it always comes back to men hanging themselves and women sticking their heads in the gas oven.” She got up, chortling. “Interesting, if macabre! Time for me to start cooking tea, too. Sausages again, I’m afraid, but I’ll curry them for a change. Edda brought me a bag of raisins.”

Busy in the kitchen chopping up some of the precious raisins finely to add a tinge of sweetness to the curry — very mild anyway, as the boys disliked too-spicy food — Grace boiled the salt out of the sausages before slicing them into thick coins and tipping them into a pot. She mixed melted lard, flour and curry powder to a paste, worked it with water until it was a thin sauce, poured it over the sausages and tipped in her shredded raisins. Simmer slowly … There! Brian and John would love it, and maybe even Bear would eat a little of it, especially if she fried some bread as a base to pile the curry on. Rice was horrible stuff if left savoury, but stale bread, cut into doorsteps and fried on both sides, always went down well. The only way rice was edible was as pudding.

“Tea, chaps!” she bellowed out the back door to the boys.

Brian and John came at once, Brian half dragging his little brother, faces beaming because they were always starving and they loved everything their mother cooked. They even loved fish paste or Marmite sandwiches, bless them! Oh, for the days when she might have used butter instead of lard, and stock instead of water!

“Bear! Tea!” she yelled out a window on the plant verandah.

He was sitting bolt upright on his garden seat, his jacket pitched on the ground — unusual for Bear to be untidy, even in his state of mind. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and his hands apparently in his lap, for all she could see were his elbows — sharp, bony pyramids covered in callused skin.

“Bear! Tea!” she yelled again.

When he didn’t move, her mouth tightened; so he was about to pass into a new phase of his dry horrors, was he? Didn’t he understand the effect it had on the boys? She left the house through the back door and so came upon him in profile, hands loosely in his lap, where a great dark red stain had gathered, seeped into the wool of his trousers and the cotton of his shirt, then, saturated, dripped between his legs onto the rusty ground. His pen-knife was glued to his fingers by jellied blood and his face was serene, eyes three-quarters closed, mouth faintly smiling.

Grace didn’t scream. First she ventured close enough to see the deep gashes in his forearms, on their insides and running up from his wrists many inches. Yet for all of his thoroughness, he had missed the arteries, at least while there was sufficient blood in them to spurt; his was a slow, steady, venous bleed, and it must have taken him the entire making of a curry to die.

Satisfied as to what had happened, she turned on her heel to walk back to the house. Inside, she went about the routine of feeding her sons their curried sausages. Only when they were eating did she go to the phone and ring the hospital.

“Put me through to Dr. Charles Burdum, and don’t you dare tell me he’s not there.”

“Yes?” came his impatient voice.

“This is Grace, Charlie. Please send an ambulance to my home. Bear has cut his wrists.”

“Is he alive?”

“No. But send someone for Brian and John.”

“Can you cope until help reaches you?”

“What a stupid question! If I couldn’t cope, someone else would be talking to you this minute. Don’t dither, Charlie. If Liam is there, send him — he’s the coroner, and it’s a suicide.” She hung up, leaving Charles winded.

For once there were no curtains drawn furtively back on Trelawney Way; people stood outside their houses to watch as the ambulance drew up quietly and was let into the Olsen yard. Charles followed it in his Packard with Edda and Tufts; Liam rode in the ambulance.

Tufts took over the children, getting them ready for bed. Who in the old days would ever have dreamed that Grace could be so sensible, so forward-thinking? The boys weren’t perturbed, she had behaved so normally, and they knew nothing of ambulances or inquisitive neighbours as they splashed their
way through a bath and dived into their bed, a double one that they shared.

Liam Finucan and the two ambulance men cared reverently for Bear Olsen, one of them even going so far as to hose down the lawn and the garden seat so that it wouldn’t fall to Grace to remove her husband’s blood; the ambulance departed as quietly as it had arrived. Only busy vocal cords on the party line told various garbled versions far and wide of what had happened to the unfortunate, inoffensive Bear Olsen.