The Eye of the Storm (15 page)

A silveriness about the room brighter than the mists of vision: a faint afternoon breeze deliciously flirting with your steamy hair, but chilling, alarming to boiled skin. This is the cool side of the house: the western rooms will be in flames. Nothing should alarm: at least you won't die; that has been proved over the years. And Basil coming, probably at dusk (you might look better by artificial light) to act out the scene an actor expects. A travesty, of course, but you can't condemn artifice without dismissing the whole of art.

An unnatural wraith of steam rising to the left in the humid evening is what is making you cough. You alone, not Alfred, probably responsible for Dorothy's bronchitis, for Basil's super-selfishness disguised as genius. Better a cow cocky or bank teller than an artist. Yes, now you've said it: what good is an artist to those who want to love him? We are never the one they think;
we are not one, but many. Father was expecting his daughter to read Browning to him as usual, when there she was dawdling beside the river of drowned dolls, plaiting grass, listening for the sound of hooves on the bridge, the evening he put the gun in his mouth. ‘Blood exhaustion', Mrs Lippmann calls it. But there are still, even now, the little delights.

Out of the wraith a voice asking, ‘Mrs Hunter? Did you have a nice rest? Are you ready for your sponge?' It is Sister Manhood with the Spode basin they are allowed to use for menial purposes.

‘I had such horrid dreams.'

‘I thought you didn't sleep.'

‘Oh, you can dream, can't you? without sleeping?'

‘I don't know.' The nurse had embarked, if not conscientiously, then at least professionally, on one of the duties for which she was paid: to sponge a geriatric case.

Mrs Hunter smiled. She would wait. She knew she could play Flora Manhood without her suspecting she was on the hook. In the meantime, the sponging made you feel better.

The nurse might have been peeling a fruit: she was so detached. In theory powerful. When it was the soft, tepid sponge which exercised the power, seeping into crevices, smoothing the wrinkles out of thoughts. Objects, including the human ones, are often more powerful than people.

‘Anyway,' said Sister Manhood, ‘it's a lovely evening, Mrs Hunter.'

‘Is it?'

The life of Sydney was streaming past and around, you could sense as well as hear, pouring out of factories and offices: by this hour men in bars, a confraternity of Athol Shreves, had begun inflating their self-importance with beer; ambulances were hurtling towards disasters in crumpled steel and glass confetti; in semi-private houses, mothers would have started sponging little boys, their still empty purses, while nubile girls looked in glasses to pop their spots cream their skins dreaming of long-hoped-for but unlikely lads.

The children: thank God they didn't know it, they were the all-powerful—not that silly princess, nor, judging by his letters, the famous bankrupt actor, but Dorothy and Basil, more devastating in their silences than Elizabeth and Alfred Hunter with all their authority, money, experience of life, and practical, but finally useless, advice. Parents are wraiths beside their children, who are drained in turn by the business of living; sometimes their candour and perception are returned, but almost too late, when they have become thinking objects.

If Alfred hadn't died too soon it might have been different: you were learning to speak to each other in what seemed a revealed language, discovering unexpected meanings.

‘Did I hurt you?' Sister Manhood asked.

‘It was Alfred I was dreaming about. Did you know my husband died of cancer?'

‘Oh, how dreadful!' It wasn't convincing: a nurse performing her professional duties shouldn't be called upon too suddenly to turn into a human being.

‘And I nursed him. You didn't know that,' Mrs Hunter said, and laughed.

‘No, I didn't.' Nor did she believe it: that was what made you laugh in advance.

‘How did you manage—without the experience—if the illness was a prolonged one?'

‘Oh, it was long—not in years, or months even. I managed. By will. Which I don't think you believe in, Sister. By instinct too, I suppose. Why do people start writing poems—or making love? You ought to know that—some of it at least.'

Sister Manhood had done with the sponge. This was the sort of thing which drove you up the wall: at times when you had got past pitying to liking, or farther, to almost having a love affair, the two of you and a sponge, the old bitch would start hacking, to remind you that you really hated her.

‘Sister Manhood, you're making my nightie grate the length of my skin.'

Let it grate. ‘P'raps it's a cheap nightie.'

‘You're not angry with me, are you?'

…

‘Sister?'

…

‘About what I said? After all—isn't it our instinct to love—or try to? Surely you must understand
that
? By instinct!'

‘I don't know.' There was nothing you really understood, or so they told you regularly—Col Pardoe and old Mrs Betty bloody Hunter; you were either a body for fucking, or a log for the axemen (or -women) to hack at.

‘Where are you going, Sister Manhood?'

‘To throw out the dirty water.' If you could have thrown the baby with it.

‘You won't forget your promise, will you?'

…

‘Sister?'

…

‘The promise!'

Like hell you wouldn't. Not for a moment. You were never ever allowed to forget what you were there for.

Sister Manhood flung the water into the bath; sometimes it was the lavatory, but because she needed greater scope, tonight it had to be the bath. In that great bloody carpeted bathroom as big as somebody's whole flat. The smooth mahogany seat on which Her rich bloody arse hadn't rested since God knew when. The sealed jars of bath salts, the bowl of brown dusty potpourri, were what best explained the unused bathroom in terms of Elizabeth Hunter. One day, Flora Manhood sourly decided, she was going to take off her clothes and make use of that fucking bath, take her time on the polished mahogany ledge, before slipping down the white, sloping sides into untroubled waters.

Tonight the west was on fire outside the window: the bathroom was Flora Manhood's furnace. From which she stumbled panting, gasping, into the cooler, what Jessie Badgery called, Nurses'
Retiring Room (I ask you: as if you could ever
retire
with Her around the corner) to dab the wych-hazel.

Col's favourite perfume: said it was neither nursey nor tarty one of the sweet natural smells
just what I'd expect of you Flo.
Oh yeah?
I may be natural but nobody could call me sweet.
Not when you could never tell for sure the sincere from the sarky in other people; they never let you know, or else you were stupid.
Your trouble Flo you've got wrong ideas about yourself for that matter nobody knows what he really is.
Not according to Her:
only oneself can know what one is really like Sister.
So it was always this: hacking into you from either side.

Along the edges of the park the pines deepening in the silvery light grass whitening the lake silver which from close up was a mud colour smelling of mud invisible dead fish and the droppings from long-legged ugly birds. Coot, Col said they were.

Always Col! Or Mrs Betty Hunter. What if the old girl wouldn't let you go if you said you wanted to chuck up the job? E. Hunter was more powerful than any man you could remember. Or Snow. Must be from living so long that Mrs Hunter got the stranglehold. She'd sucked the living daylights out of all the people she'd killed: that husband for instance; or half-killed: Princess Dorothy you could see at a first glance had almost been swallowed; the real proof would be the son arriving tonight, whether he had survived the mother to become the great actor, or whether he would start acting her tame zombie.

Be fair though, Flora: wasn't the old girl always saying
this man Sister you're going with I can tell by your touch I can tell by his voice when he brings—no need—the medicines we've telephoned for—they've got the boy with the bicycle haven't they to deliver—that this is the man you're intended for.
As if it was any of her business.
Oh reely Mrs Hunter?
(snicker snicker). Made you feel such a silly drip. But the point was, she couldn't want to hang on to you for her own ends. Then there was nothing that you could truthfully accuse her of, except her scratchy bitchy ways; but she was old and oh God tired and sick.

So there was no one to protect or save you from Col Pardoe.

Only Snow.

All along the parkside the dead dwindling grass. It would be dark by the time the actor came. Snow was an albino though she called it a natural ash blonde. She'd develop skin cancers later on, specially working in a burning bus, and at the depot, sitting on a bench in the sun smoking with the blokes waiting for the handover. Snow smelled like white-coloured women do: more like a man. She smelled of the coins she had been handling, and sweaty leather, and too many smokes. But you had Coff's Harbour in common: my cousin—my only living relative.

While Mrs Hunter insisted
this man Sister you went with your last day off—to Noamurra—or wherever it was—tell me about it—I mean him!
As if you would have known how.
And what is this delicious cosmetic of which you are smelling? Ah
(snuffle)
that is wych-hazel I've often wondered.
Wonder what she smelled under the wych-hazel: perhaps those goats she went on about.

They had gone that day to Noamurra, it was true.

‘Why Noamurra, Col? Such a godforsaken sort of a place!'

‘That's what appeals. The bulldozer won't nose it out, or not yet. And that's what I want today.'

He was driving the old Mercedes SSK (whatever it means). He had traded in the Valiant, and done up this old car; he was clever at that sort of thing. Col would have been clever at anything he put his mind to, but said what he wanted was peace of mind. As if you didn't, all of you; but what was it? and how to get it?

‘Noamurra! Who'd want to live
there?
Amongst all those old neglected orchards.'

‘You could listen to yourself living at least—in between hearing the oranges drop.'

‘Not very progressive. I'm for progress.'

‘You could stand for mayor, Flo.'

In other circumstances she might have got angry but the warmth, the sound of the road, had drugged her. And the scrub: each swathe
identical. She giggled slightly and it bumped her against the back of the seat. Col was smoking the pipe with the aluminium stem, which made the spit sizzle at the bottom of the bowl. Along the sandstone ridges the sun glazed and dazed: through the open window sun-wind was flung harsh as sandpaper against the skin.

Farther back, while the suburbs were still streaming, she had tried to benefit from travelling by Mercedes, but you couldn't ever: this one was so old-fashioned nobody would have recognized it, not amongst the glossy up to date models. Now that there wasn't that much traffic, one or two dislocated fruit and vegetable trucks, here and there a family bus, what you looked like hardly mattered.

Was this being happy? If, as she suspected, it was, nobody, not Col, not even the Old Bitch of Moreton Drive, would have dragged the confession out from between her lips, parted like an idiot's, she realized, as she moistened their nakedness with her tongue.

‘This Mrs Hunter, because she's old, comes out with the biggest nonsense. And thinks she can get away with it.'

‘Such as?'

‘Oh, I couldn't tell you!'

‘If you can't tell, why did you begin?'

‘I was making conversation.'

‘That isn't conversation; it's frustration.'

‘Oh, well.'

She settled down. She liked being with Col at times, and this was one of them. She would have liked to take a look at him, but might have given herself away. More than anything it's what you see; but that would not have done for poor Mrs Hunter, who had to invent theories about smells, and grow spooky over voices. Did the old thing remember with any clearness what she had seen when she had her sight? Men's hands, for instance; their hard throats: men show you their thoughts in their throats, or anyway Col does. She had to have just one look.

‘What are you looking at?'

‘Thought I saw a signpost. But there wasn't. God, scrub like this never stops once it begins.'

Or it only stops for Noamurra.

They were gliding at last into that different deeper green, paddocks with sprung hummocks, orchards with tangled, scaly trees, past a waterhole with scum on it: that was the deepest, deadliest green. Where there were houses they were faded or unpainted weatherboard, all old. Only the service station was new, the ads, and the drive-in pictures. The people too, seemed old, their weather-cured elephant skins, wedding rings eating into the leather. On a veranda almost screened by privet an old couple sat drinking tea out of white cups, and munching at something, probably scones. A daughter in a long straight cotton frock, and her simple brother, sat looking only at the road; they were younger than the old people of course, but elderly.

The privet which recurred round most of the cottages began to overwhelm, to suffocate. If you turned your head a tropical moisture was tumbling, bouncing around your field of vision: which was always of the same deadly green, sometimes splotches of oranges, or pallid privet blossom.

Col wanted to walk. So they walked the back roads. There was a child, a little girl squatting on the edge of an orchard, beside the road, fiddling with something in a glass jar.

‘What is it?' She bent to ask the child, who wouldn't answer at first, but hid her face, as appetizing as dark plums.

‘What are you playing with?' you tried again, more than anything to hold your own.

‘A lizard.'

It was a lizard all right in the jar, and the lizard had already lost its tail.