The Idea of Perfection (5 page)

She was at the end of the shops now, coming up to the park at the corner of Virgil Street. There was a bin in the park, outside the public toilet. She could just pop in through the gateway and drop the bag in the bin, and pop out again, and that would be that.

She glanced around. Outside the Mini-Mart, old Mr Anderson was still standing on the footpath, although it was hard to know if he was watching her. She could not see in, but the Acropolis Cafe across from the park was open, and it would be just her luck that Ellen would be glancing out the window as she dropped the bag in the bin. Greeks were such busybodies. In a little place like this, someone was always watching you. It would look funny, to be throwing something in a public bin. Ellen might be curious enough to go over and look, and everyone in Karakarook would know who grew the ox-heart strawberries. Ellen would pop over to tell Coralie in the Cobwebbe Crafte Shoppe. Australians were busybodies too, really. Before you knew it, everyone in Karakarook would know.

That was the kind of little place it was.

The best thing would be to burn the whole lot in the incinerator at home. They would make a bad smell, burning, but if she went home and did it quickly now, the smell would be gone by the time Hugh came home. She had got the knack of the incinerator now. You would be surprised how often there was something that needed burning, what with one thing and another.

Hugh might smell the smoke in his office at the Land & Pastoral, but he would never guess that it was coming from his own backyard.

Burning was always the best idea. It tidied everything away marvellously. And ash could never create any kind of
awkwardness.

CORALIE HAD BEEN right that Lorraine Smart’s house was
not real flash.
The front gate sagged off a single hinge and a length of gutter slanted across the front porch like a demonstration of something in geometry. Inside, everything was broken, faded, worn-out, improvised: the kitchen window with a length of white cord hanging out of its sash like a rude tongue, the mantelpiece full of glass swans and china horses that had been broken and glued together again, the laundry where the taps were covered by a brown-paper bag with DO NOT USE in big letters.

Harley had dreaded Lorraine Smart’s house, imagining matching tea-cups that she would chip, and polished tables that she would scratch, and a Master Bedroom with the private shape of someone else’s feet still in the shoes in the wardrobe, and the troughs made by other people’s lives still in the mattress.

But she was starting to feel she would probably like Lorraine Smart, whoever she was. She liked the fact that the ornaments had all been broken at least once already, and when the kitchen tap came off in her hand and had to be fitted back on, she felt at home. The fridge door, speckled with rust, as if it had measles, was covered with photos of people lined up, squinting at the camera, smiling. In some of them you could see the shadow of the photographer, stretching out over the grass to meet them.

A space had been cleared among the photos for a note:
Welcome, make yourself at home, Best regards, Lorraine
held on with a pineapple-shaped magnet that said
Greetings from Rockhampton.

The kitchen window looked out over the backyard, which was
not real flash
either. There was grass as faded and dry as straw from the drought, and a few limp shrubs, and dead sticks where other shrubs had given up. There was a big messy gumtree hung with ragged ribbons of bark, and underneath it, tilting on the hard ground, a Garden Setting in white plastic. There was a Hill’s Hoist with a little brick path leading out to it, and a square of pink concrete underneath to stand on while you pegged out the washing. A bare wire archway with a few dead sticks tangled in it had obviously been meant to have roses
rambling
over it.

Harley opened the window and leaned out. The sun was beginning to lower itself down towards the hills and although it was still hot the light was beginning to thicken into gold.

It was another planet out here. The city became merely a dream, or as distant as something you had read about in a book: something you could remember, or not, as you pleased. The country made the city and all its anxieties seem small and silly, and yet when you had been too long in the city, you forgot how the sun moving through its path was a long slow drama, and the way the sky was always there, big and easy-going.

When C.
Henderson
in brackets
Mrs,
Hon. Sec. of the Karakarook Heritage Museum Committee, had written to the Sydney Museum of Applied Arts, no one there had been very interested. The setting up of the Karakarook Heritage Museum sounded a worthy project, but small-time, and it looked a long way on the map.

The letter was just a photocopy. You could tell that C.
Henderson
in brackets
Mrs,
had sent it off to the National Trust as well as the Sydney Museum of Applied Arts, and the Historical Association of New South Wales, and anyone else she could think of.

But
C. Henderson
in brackets
Mrs
had applied to the Cultural Affairs Board for a grant to establish the Karakarook Heritage Museum, and the grant included money for an expert to oversee the setting-up.

The Curator in brackets
Textiles
at the Museum happened to mention it to the
Consultant
in brackets
Part-Time.
The
Consultant
in brackets
Part-Time
had expressed interest. No one grew rich making artistic patchworks, or being a
Consultant
in brackets
Part-Time,
and there was the matter of some outstanding medical bills.

The grant from the Cultural Affairs Board did not run to accommodation for the hired expert, so C.
Henderson
in brackets
Mrs
had suggested billeting, but the
Consultant
in brackets
Part-Time
would not agree to that. The various complicated baggages that the
Consultant
in brackets
Part-Time
carried around with her took up too much room to be accommodated in someone else’s spare room.

For a while that had seemed to be the end of the whole idea. The
Curator
in brackets
Textiles
filed the letters from C.
Henderson
in brackets
Mrs,
and the
Consultant
in brackets
Part-Time
put the Road Map of New South Wales back in the glove box.

Then there was another letter from C.
Henderson
in brackets
Mrs.
The daughter of a woman called Lorraine Smart, no brackets, had just had twins, and Lorraine Smart was going up to Sydney to help her out.
Able to offer you the use of a fair-sized house,
the letter said.
And any other assistance we can provide.

To the
Consultant
in brackets
Part-Time,
the fortuitous arrival of Lorraine Smart’s daughter’s twins had seemed like a little nudge.
Go on. Go.

 

The dog was there, ranging around Lorraine Smart’s backyard nosing at the Garden Setting, lifting its leg against the wire archway. She had not invited it to come. While Coralie had stood outside the Cobwebbe Crafte Shoppe giving her directions, tilting her face up earnestly so the lenses of the red glasses flashed —
First right, first left, past the church, left again, you can’t miss it —
the dog had got itself into the car, sitting up on the back seat looking out the window like the Queen of England.

It had not seemed the right moment to have an argument with a dog, there and then in the middle of Parnassus Road, with everyone behind their shop windows, watching. She had started the engine, repeating
first right, first left, past the church,
and waved out the window to Coralie, and watched her in the rear-view mirror, waving back.

Now the dog was nosing along the fence and suddenly a shrill voice called
Come here! Come here!
The dog jerked back guiltily and Harley did too.

It was coming from the next backyard. She peered out cautiously and saw a big white cockatoo in a cage beside the fence, hauling itself up by its beak. It stuck its head out between the bars and she could see the crop moving in its beak as it called again:
Johnny? Come here, Johnny!
‘It was not interested in the human at the window. It was watching the dog.

Harley was no expert on dogs, but this one did not look special in any way. It was biggish, and greyish, blotched all over like camouflage paint, with a big feathery tail. There was a thin white stripe down the centre of its forehead and its eyebrows were picked out neatly in tan.

She thought it would probably go home soon. Her boys had done the same thing as children, wandered off, attached themselves to people, had adventures. The middle one had gone across the road one day with his little suitcase packed with underpants, and told the woman who lived there that he had come to stay.
That’s lovely, dear,
the woman had said, and when the catch on the bag had come undone and all the underpants had fallen out she had picked them up and taken him inside for a chocolate biscuit.

Harley had laughed, the way you were supposed to, when the neighbour told her the story.
The look on his dear little face when all the underpants fell out!
But there had been a pang, that he had thought this woman with her chocolate biscuits might be a better bet than she was.

At the end of the day, though, the boys had always come back home, even from the best adventures. After the chocolate biscuits, or the walk to the railway embankment to look at the trains, or the conversation at the bus-stop with the smiling woman with the flowered hat, the boys had always come home and had their dinner.

 

She thought it was probably much the same for dogs.

 

 

Beside the kitchen, along the other half of the back of the house, was a glassed-in verandah that the Smarts probably called
the sunroom,
with a daybed covered with a faded Indian bedspread. A great pale wash of afternoon light fell into the room from the windows. A stripe of warm syrupy sun lay along one wall and sloped across the polished boards of the floor. A tree alongside stroked leaves over the glass with a whisper. It was like being outside, except that it was inside.

The
Livingstone & Shire Weekly Clarion
lay on the daybed showing a big headline: TOWN SPLIT ON BRIDGE. There was a grainy photo of a small river with a timber bridge, and a smaller headline:
Councillors Call for Calm.

Harley heard herself laugh. It was very loud and abrupt in the silent room. She glanced around and caught sight of someone looking around furtively in a mirror, which she recognised as herself.

It was the only problem with Lorraine Smart’s house: the mirrors. She had already startled herself in the living-room, catching herself frowning, and in the kitchen a magnifying mirror had given her a fright, staring at her with a huge close cold eye.

After fifty years of looking into mirrors she felt she had looked enough. She knew all about the big flat face, the meaty cheeks, the naked domed forehead, the thin hair. All her life people had been sure of what she should do about her hair.
Perm it,
they had said and she had permed it.
Grow
it out, they said, and she had grown it out. Whatever she did with her hair it made no difference to the way her face looked..

She knew just how the two deep grooves beside her mouth gave her a stern and unapproachable look. She had put them there, over the years, by making sure her face was stony and unyielding. Some admirer had once told her,
the eyes are the windows of the soul,
and she had put the stoniness there to stop anyone peering in her eyes at her soul.

Now her face stared back at her, truculent, at its reflection. After enough years, the look you put on your face to hide behind became the shape of the person you were.

She approached herself in the reflection until she swallowed herself up in it, and took the mirror in both hands, lifting it down and leaning its face to the wall.

She sat on the daybed, hearing it creak. After a moment she lay down and stretched out with her hands behind her head staring at the white ceiling. The stripe of sunlight angled up from the wall, over the ceiling. Sunlight and shadow lay together in big simple shapes.
Light, dark.

There was a tremendous emptiness of the air here in the country. She took a deep breath. It was so pure it almost hurt. Silence filled her ears like noise. The big pale simple skin of sky she could see out the window was blank, crossed only with the chirp of a bird darting past.

Wall. Window. Sky.
They were simply themselves. No weight of meaning needed to attach itself to them.

She had got ahead of herself, travelling along the freeway. Now she had a space of time before she caught up with herself. For a short time, she could simply be
woman,
looking at
ceiling,
just one more object in Lorraine Smart’s house.