On Brunswick Ground (16 page)

‘“Vell, I asked zem to make zis German remedy for me. I had ze old bottle with ze German ingredients on it. All zey had to do vas copy. But no, zey told me zey had an Aus-tralian equivalent. So I asked zem, most politely, if zey had a choice between an FJ Holden and a Mercedes, vich vould zey choose? A car zat vent plom, plom, plom across ze desert, or a car zat vent vroom, vroom, vroom on ze autobahn?'”

Mitali smiles through her tears. Her skin glows like honey across her cheekbones.

I look at the house erect in the slanting shadows. She frowns.

‘You understand why I needed to go to Germany. I had to. I expected many things, but not that it would be so easy, so …'

She stops a second or two before continuing.

‘There's nothing sexy about Hamburg, but I keep thinking of it. A quiet, contained place, tired hills, out of breath – dull greens, heavy skies, a congested
hausfrau
beauty. Olga's mother's house was nothing to write home about either. German, clean, recycling bins with tags on them, jams with tags on them, bedrooms like dormitories for one. But fuck, her poems were something else.'

She shakes her black cloud of hair.

‘As soon as we walked in the door it was as if we had always been there. Suddenly, there was no need to discuss anything. It was the first time I ever saw the woman. But we were soon going through the easy motions of life together. There we were having tea, breakfast, getting up, talking in the garden, having walks, reading by the fire, but it didn't matter
what
we did – we were fucking happy, the three of us – even though grief, worse than grief, is what got us together. She's coming to see us next year. Just before we left she gave me something of Olga's,' she touches her yellow scarf. ‘Nothing else was needed, no explanations, no condolences, not even the circumstances of Olga's dying.'

She looks up.

‘Can you believe it? Such closeness, really, such undefined closeness.'

I stop digging and look at her cloud of hair, her slim neck, her Indian cleanliness that makes me feel I could eat from her floor, her impatient smile that seems to defy anything before you can think it up. Yet she always helps me to hear the great power of gentleness all around us, as wild things do. A magpie lands close to us and I ask:

‘Do you remember Bea?'

‘Yes, of course I do, we worked in her garden a few times. You got on well with her, didn't you? I thought you would.'

I close a little grave and pat a seed safely into the earth.

‘Bea and I
do
get on well. She told me that some people die bit by bit. They start acting out who they used to be, what they used to say, but they're just going through the motions – already, they're no longer really there. This happened to Bea's father. She was never that close to him. It made it even worse – a double leave of absence. Towards the end, she felt like lifting her father's eyelids to see if he was still behind them.'

Mitali wrinkles her brow again.

‘The last time Olga came here, to Brunswick, she
was
kind of different – like a student again – a student, but not Olga … Maybe Olga started dying then …'

I stop planting, and say:

‘Maybe even people who die as a result of an accident begin dying before they are killed.'

Mitali continues working without lifting her head, without answering.

‘Maybe our stories end, and our lives just find a way out. Maybe there are no more pieces to finish the puzzle, and we've done our dash.'

‘You and your maybes …'

Her frown snaps back into place. I suppose it's an easy guess to say she's thinking of her brother.

‘I killed him too, you know.'

Her tone is almost conversational, which makes it all the more of a jolt.

‘I did. I pulled the plug. He was clinically brain dead. They were keeping him alive on a life-support machine. The doctors asked us if they should do it or if we wanted to. They all looked at me. I had no choice.
He
would have wanted me to do it.'

She doesn't move now, nor does the garden, nor do I.

‘Fuck, why do I tell you all this?'

I wait and ask:

‘Olga's mother. She's made everything better, hasn't she?'

She turns round to face me.

‘Yes, she has.'

I dig the next seed deeper than I should. It will have to crawl and fight its way to the surface. Maybe our story, Jack's and mine, has ended, and like that seedling, it's buried too deep in memory to be recalled. Suddenly I feel Mitali's hands covering mine over my trowel, unearthing the seed and lifting it up to a shallower grave. I know that she's not supervising my gardening. We both look up at the sky that seems higher than usual, as unattainable as the white ceiling you stare at from a hospital bed. Going back to work and shutting up seems the best thing to do after that.

Then it happens. Like all the things you don't expect, it seems perfectly ordinary at first. Mitali keels over in the earth, she crumples upon herself in slow motion and then just lies there. I notice her extended palm half uncurled. The rest of her body could have been dropped from the sky. I snap out of my trance. Half-remembered information pops into my brain. I try to find a pulse on her wrist, near her neck. I can't find anything. I grab my phone and stare at the keyboard for a split second before keying triple 0. A female voice answers and I ask for help. I explain where we are. I describe Mitali's faint. She tells me to wait near her, to cover her if possible. I hate myself for not knowing first-aid procedures. I strip off my jacket to cover her, and put my ear against her heart. It's beating. Then I call and leave a message for Ian while I'm waiting for them.

Again time is like a drop of water that won't fall. The whole winter sky is bending over us, making us as minute, as infinite, as each dripping second. But suddenly the ambulance is there, parked in the street behind the gate. Two paramedics, a man and a woman, come floating up the drive. As I stare I don't see which one has opened the gate, which one is walking in front of the other; all I see is a wave of quiet urgency and composure that surges up, kneels, takes her pulse, probes, lifts her eyelids, forces her mouth open and gives Mitali an injection in one fluid stream. At the same time, they are shooting questions at me. Then, in a twinkling, she's on a stretcher, looking slight and frail. They lift her too easily, taking her away so fast that I have to run after them, feeling stiff, like you do in those clogging dreams where you wade through syrupy air. Soon we are in the ambulance. They are feeding me information all the time, explaining quietly that she has probably had an aneurysm. I text Ian again to tell him which hospital they are taking her to.

When the ambulance docks in the emergency bay, he's already there. He must have known it would be the Royal Melbourne. Everything is held in his quiet eyes as he runs to her side. He looks the same as usual, except for his face, which seems whiter than anything in the hospital. He hardly has the time to bend over her; they are wheeling her away. A woman at the information desk comes up and tells him what is going on and how long he will have to wait before he can see her. Then Ian and I are sitting next to each other. He has his elbows on his knees, holding his own hands as if he were going to fall. I daren't move or speak. When he asks me what happened, I answer in the shortest, clearest way I can. I don't say any consoling things. I just wait with him, our shoulders, our knees touching without our being aware of it. We just wait and wait - half an hour, three-quarters. Then the woman at the information desk beckons Ian forward. He can go and see her now. I hover in the background, but he grabs my arm. I know suddenly that he is scared. I recognise the animal fear of loss.

Soon we are in a treatment room wide open to the corridor. Mitali is lying in a metallic cot, looking tiny, her cloud of hair on the dead-white pillow. Ian walks in to her with a rushing slowness as if time had got mangled in his long stride. He is bending over her dark face and only then do I see that her eyes are wide open. She's on a drip. The room is like an operating room with a curtain flung wide open, a theatre with Mitali lying like a small votive offering to an unnameable fear.

I wait on the edge and look at them. A doctor walks in and explains that she has indeed had a small aneurysm, that she will have to be on medication and be checked regularly, but that she should be okay to go home tomorrow. Ian asks if he can stay and they agree. The anxiety drains from his face. It's time for me to go.

I walk along the hospital corridor, with smaller rooms, with smaller curtains flung aside, each with its white purgatorial bed, and its emergency patient exposed. Then the young doctor who diagnosed Jack walks past – I recognise him, but he doesn't remember me.

16

SYDNEY ROAD

A week goes by, and another one. Not seeing Mitali at work, my days become shadows of themselves. Tonight I go and see her at home. When I ring the bell, Ian greets me easily, as if I were a sibling turned up out of nowhere. He points to the garden, and follows when I go to find her. We discover Mitali gardening slowly, planting a grevillea. Her boyishness has vanished. Ian stands behind me with his hands in his pockets. She sits back on her heels when I come and flicks my knee with her muddy glove. I sit down next to her on the ground. And suddenly all is as before. She swears about the medication, or Ian's fussing about her, but the sting has gone from her tone.

When I leave, it is not dark. The armless melaleucas with their unimaginable sap, their sagging folds, usher me down the street. I walk into the empty house. Its tiny garden is looking depleted, out of breath. My mobile rings in my pocket. It's Mary. At the start I don't understand what she wants. It's about an art opening.

‘You remember that guy Philip Paulson? It's his exhibition … a show of his latest works. You must come, please. We can't do this without you old mate.'

I smile, but before I can say anything she presses on.

‘Sarah will be there with my Dad. They're both turning up. Please … Listen, I
know
she told you he's alive and kicking.'

‘With your Dad …'

It takes me a few seconds to digest this.

‘But that's grand, Mary.'

Mary is not so enthusiastic.

‘They'll probably be quarrelling all the way over … Or fucking like rabbits … Anyway, it's now. I wasn't even going to be there, but … I changed my mind. It's in Sydney Road, just around the corner from you. So you have no excuse.'

All the same, she spells out the address in a grave tone as if it were some outlandish place. As she begs and explains, you'd think she was asking me to be present at her guillotining in the city square. ‘Listen, Philip has painted me and included the thing in his exhibition. The picture is here, in Brunswick.'

‘But why did you let Philip impose this on you if you're not keen?'

She allows herself a small silence.

‘It was a last-minute decision. Now it's done. I'm there already. And they're both going to see it.'

Soon, a handful of tram stops later, I'm in Sydney Road. I scan a crowd spilling out onto the street – girls in bright socks and big boots; slim-ankled, narrow-waisted, white-haired beauties in tuxedos; men in T-shirts and tight jeans with hangman's cravats; a gamut of pixies, giants, divas and trendy academics, beers in hand. The exhibition is in a hidden laneway with warehouses, graffiti, big dustbins and music on loud. Then you go up a few steps into a white space.

As I climb those steps, I have no idea what I'm going to step into. I can't make any sense of Mary's phone call. Why was she so worried? Surely, the chance of her parents getting back together can't make her that unhappy. As I step into the room I look for a burqa and see none. There's no painting of a blue-veiled woman either.

I recognise Philip in the middle of a long wall of paintings. He's standing next to a blond girl. Her hair is cut in a bob. Each line and detail of her face quiver into beauty. But when she turns round towards me, I see that her other profile is marred – from temple to chin, by a scar the shape of a large blood-red goldfish, swimming down the side of her cheek.
She was burnt, just like your grandmother
, something whispers in my head. The girl is staring straight at me. Suddenly I know this is my friend Mary. I start walking towards her.

She and Philip are in front of a large painting. It's hung among all the others, which seem to converge towards it, as do the people draining their way to a focal point – the picture of this face, of this girl, who emerges from her burqa, a blue puddle at her feet. She is painted like an El Greco, with streaks of colour, where the strong and the doubtful blend to form a rendering of a mangled figure which is neither smothered, nor flaunted, but which has kept itself, somehow, intact.

This is a painting of a woman with her two feet on Brunswick ground. It is more a sound than a picture, almost a cry. Not of beauty, or of ugliness, or of terror, or of seduction, but of all of that. Something seen and heard in all its disquieting presence, accepted as it is – a breathing whole.

Julia Gillard has just been white-anted out of politics. The crowd in the room is buzzing with her ousting. There is something quietly apposite in Philip's painting. It has nothing to do with politics, and yet everything. Its clarity transcends all mere difference of opinion. In spite of himself he may have created, for some, a sacrificial figure – when all he has done, it seems to me, is to paint a human being: a human being like Jill Meagher, like Julia Gillard, nothing more, but surely never anything less.

I move nearer and Philip shakes my hand.

‘I got to paint her in the end, eh.'

His kind, still eyes stare into mine without a hint of disquiet. We could just as well be in an open field, in the sunlight, to meet up for a picnic, a picnic where no balloon is taking off, no helium escaping into the air we breathe. Philip and Mary are standing close to each other, without touching. They remind me of columns on a Greek island. Nothing is left of the temple except for those pillars against the sky on top of a hill.