The Idea of Perfection (17 page)

Harley guessed she would have said
the bloody sugar,
if she had not been on her best behaviour with the expert from Sydney.

What sort of fruit is it? she asked.

She was not really interested, but it was a way of trying to get back on the right foot.

Coralie had got a little rag and had wrapped it round her finger. Now she was pushing it between the buttons of the cash register, cleaning out the dust.

Yes, well, that particular one was the Sevilles. The rest of them aren’t worth a bumper, your Navels and your Valencias.

She wet a fresh fingerful of rag with spit and wiped along between the buttons. After a moment something occurred to her and she added quickly,

Course, there’s plenty swear by Navels and the rest of them. I’m not saying they’re no good. Only I personally like to go for the Sevilles.

Her lips pressed together as she squeezed her finger along between the buttons of the cash register.

Harley could see that it was Coralie’s turn to feel that she had made a mistake. She seemed to spread it like a disease, being
wound.

Oh no, she said, I agree about the Sevilles.

Coralie looked up, pleased, from the cash register.

Then you know about Sevilles! she exclaimed. Most people think they’re blessed mandarins.

She leaned forward eagerly over the table. Harley tried not to draw back. She had not meant exactly that she
knew
about Sevilles.

Now, do you use the muslin bag, Coralie said, or how do you do it?

Harley put the jars down on the counter and made a big thing of getting out a hanky to wipe her fingers.

Well, she said.

It seemed too late to explain that she was just being polite.

She had watched marmalade being made one afternoon a long time ago, in a house she and her first husband had shared with others. Her memory of that afternoon did not involve any kind of bag, or muslin in any form.

Coralie drew back over the counter and ran her rag along the top of the register.

Course, she said casually, there are those who just cut it all up and bung it in, she said. Nothing wrong in that.

Harley was looking down, concentrating on wiping a little speck of nothing off the lid of one of the jars. There was a pause.

What I do, Coralie said, is I get a muslin bag, about so big. I put all the rubbish in there, the fruit and the pith and that. For the boiling-up.

Harley nodded in a neutral sort of way. She remembered the boiling-up part, the orange-smelling steam filling the kitchen. She remembered getting a bit tight with George while the boiling-up part was going on. They had had fun, laughing at the fussy little man in charge of the marmalade.

Actually, they had been rather nasty to him. In the beginning, George had liked the
dangerous streak
in her because it made him laugh. It was only later that he stopped liking it.

A man with big ears under his hat came into the shop. He nodded at her and when he took his hat off, she recognised him as the man who did not know how to get through a fence. She smiled, but it was too late: he had already turned away and was staring at the coat-hangers as if they were interesting.

Now it would look as if she had snubbed him. Not in town two days, and already she was getting it wrong.

Coralie seemed to have lost interest in the marmalade, just in time for Harley, who was starting to feel tight in the chest from having to pretend to
know about the Sevilles.

We’re on our last legs, here in Karakarook, Coralie announced. Freeway cut us right off, so Livingstone got the McDonald’s. And Badham got the Prison Farm.

It seemed to Harley that Coralie was being careful not to glance at her.

She had made that problem, all by herself She had not needed to mention
family
at Badham, but some devil in her mouth had made sure it popped out, and now it was a little knot in the thread of things with Coralie.

Coralie was going on. She was speaking quite loudly, as if she wanted the man to hear.

We don’t get the passing trade like we used to.

The man was somewhere behind the rocking-chair, looking at the beanies. Harley tried to keep an agreeable expression on her face, for when she could catch his eye.

Coralie watched him for a moment, her lips pursed, then leaned over the counter.

Help you with anything at all?

Harley thought the tone she was taking was not quite the right tone to take with a customer.

He ducked his head, smiled vaguely without looking at the women, mumbled something, moved around to the bedsocks. When he picked one up it stretched like a concertina as it had for Harley, and he put it down hastily.

We’ve got to get the tourists, Coralie declared. As a matter of urgency.

She was starting to sound like someone at a public meeting.

Instead of pulling things down that will bring them in.

When she was not speaking, the shop was silent, in a deafening way. The man dislodged a painted door-stop and it fell on the floorboards with several different kinds of clatter.

Sorry, he said, and laughed.

They already got rid of the bridge here in town, Coralie said. Could have been a real drawcard. Old, you know, and a bit tatty, the way the tourists like. That was the Shire. Stacked the meeting.

She was quite shrill now, and sounded angry.

And now the old Bent Bridge, she said.

She made the words
old Bent Bridge
very clear. They carried, easily, to every corner of the shop. The man would probably even have heard them from outside.

The tourists would love it. That’s why the Heritage thing, she said, and nodded at Harley.

It seemed best to nod back.

The Museum and that. You’ll see, tonight at the meeting. We’ve got no shortage of ideas.

She straightened up and stared towards the man, although he had got himself behind a stand now.

There’s more upstairs, she said loudly. Feel free to look round, won’t you.

He came out from behind the stand. The way he did it, it looked as if he might have been trying to hide. He smiled again, and mumbled something, and suddenly went out of the shop. Harley still had the agreeable expression on her face, but it was turned towards an empty doorway.

Coralie was staring after him sternly, but suddenly laughed.

Did you see him drop the bedsock! she cried. Enough to frighten anybody off.

She put the jars of marmalade in a plastic bag.

Here, take these. On me, love.

Harley took the bag, and thanked her. It was simpler to just take it than to get into the business of the muslin bag again.

Anyway, she knew that Coralie knew. She had looked at her, and known that the expert from Sydney had never made marmalade in her life, with or without a muslin bag, and for some reason best known to herself was fibbing about it.

 

 

Outside on the street, the man with the hat had already vanished. That was a funny thing about little places like this. They had a way of swallowing people down into themselves and leaving everything empty.

The dog followed her back up the hill to Delphi Street, but Harley did not so much as glance at it. It thought it had another day’s reprieve, and in a way that was true, because of the way she had kept on forgetting to ask anyone about it. But a reprieve was all it was.

She could hear its nails clicking on the footpath, the air panting in and out of its chest, but she did not look around.

THE MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE was a high gaunt room with a stage at one end and a pressed-tin ceiling with flowers picked out in blue and pink. Against the green walls, the effect was of molecules recoiling violently from each other. In the middle of the room was a big table with a group of people drawn up to it like a dinner-party.

All the faces turned towards Harley as she came in, and straight away she started sneezing. It was the ceiling fans whirring away so hard, wobbling in their sockets far above, stirring up dust that smelled of feet and furniture polish and disinfectant. Between her sneezes, the hot room thrummed as if about to take off.

She groped in her bag for a tissue, sneezing all the time, and when she had the tissue to her face she went on sneezing some more.

The faces around the big table watched as if mesmerised. It was starting to be like something out of the
Guinness Book of Records.
Finally Coralie pushed her chair back and went over to a switch on the wall. The fans slowed down.

Bless you! she called. Bless you, love!

Finally the sneezing stopped, although her nose still tickled.

Thanks very much.

She could hear how her voice was thick, as if she had been crying.

The faces all turned towards her seemed green in the fluorescent light, Coralie’s hair so black it was almost purple. She supposed her own nose was red and her eyes shrunken after so much sneezing. Without the sneezing, and the tissue up in front of her face, she felt exposed to the glare of so many strange faces.

She had made an effort that evening, getting ready for the meeting of the Karakarook Heritage Museum Committee: put on lipstick and her African dress, and fluffed up her hopeless hair in one of Lorraine Smart’s many mirrors, to try to hide some of the uncompromising shape of her skull. Under the fluffed-up hair her face was as intractable as ever, but she had practised a warm smile in the mirror, one that did not show her fang-like eye-teeth, or look patronising.

She had not practised the sneezing.

They had all written their names on a piece of paper that Coralie passed down to her.
Coralie Henderson, Leith Cousens, Merle Armitage, Helen Banks.
In old-fashioned careful copperplate gone a bit wobbly,
Beryl Trimm.
Someone called
Felicity Porcelline
had done circles instead of dots over her
i
’s.
Bert Cutcliffe
was a large firm cursive, underlined.
Alfred Chang
was tiny secretive letters like the Rosetta Stone. More names ran on down the side of the page.

Good evening, she said, and an alarm immediately started up somewhere close. Two notes went on insisting, piercing, seeming to say it over and over:
you’re weak, you’re weak, you’re weak.
She stood helplessly under the noise, pinned to the spot, accused.
You’re weak, you’re weak.

Suddenly it stopped in mid-note. The silence that followed seemed to throb: big, solid, an object in its own right.

That’ll be the alarm, someone said.

It was an Asian man, smiling easily around at everyone as they laughed, settled themselves on their chairs, glanced around at each other.

Good evening, she tried again.

Coralie nodded away, smiling encouragingly, the picture of someone being
all ears.
Harley wondered if she looked nervous, the way Coralie was being so reassuring.

My name is Harley Savage.

As if cued by the name, an old woman, her face a cobweb of lines, unfolded a plastic bag in front of her and started to feel around inside. Everyone looked at her, but she went on obliviously, pawing clumsily at it and filling the room with the loud ugly noise. A middle-aged man in a shirt and tie frowned across at her, tapping his biro on the table.

Assuming the Asian man was
Alfred Chang,
the man with the biro must be
Bert Cutcliffe.

Finally the old woman found what she was after, another plastic bag in which there was some small soft object. She put it on the table in front of her, where the plastic creaked and popped as it slowly uncreased.

With an effort, Harley made herself stop watching the bag unfold. She smiled around brightly. What with one thing and another, she seemed to have lost the thread. She was the expert from Sydney, and everyone was waiting. They had come out after dinner, when they could have been watching telly, or taking advantage of the off-peak STD, to talk about setting up a Heritage Museum in a small and undistinguished country town that had run out of steam.

She glanced down at her notes.
INTRO,
it said, unhelpfully.

 

 

People usually thought museums wanted the heirlooms, the cameo brooch, the engraved silver tea-pot, the lace christening robes that had come out from England with the great-great-great-grandparents.

It was a safe bet that Karakarook was full of lace christening robes and silver tea-pots. They always survived because they were never used, just brought out now and then to be admired.

The trouble was, the same things that had survived in Karakarook had survived everywhere else as well. No one was going to turn off the freeway to look at somebody else’s great-grandmother’s silver teapot.

What would put Karakarook on the map were the things that were so ordinary that no one had thought of keeping any of them. Ordinary dresses and baby’s jumpers and men’s work-shirts, and all the improvised things made for their houses by people who never had enough money to buy one from the shops.

Those things did not survive, because no one thought they were worth keeping. They were just used until they fell to pieces, or were thrown away as soon as you could afford something better. There was a kind of shame at keeping an old pair of children’s overalls made from cut-down man’s pants, or an apron made out of a sugar-bag. It was like admitting you picked your nose or farted.
That old thing!
they always exclaimed when Harley asked for them.
That rubbish!

Things only survived by accident. Harley had found the
Ploughshares Quilt,
now in a humidity-controlled environment at the Museum, in a fruit box full of
terrible old things from Grandma
that had been about to go to the tip, in the back of a garage in Tenterfield. The now-famous
Beamer Collection
of work-clothes had been wedged into a hole in the side of a shed to keep the rats out.