On Brunswick Ground Read online

  ON BRUNSWICK

  GROUND

  ON BRUNSWICK GROUND

  CATHERINE DE SAINT PHALLE

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © Catherine de Saint Phalle 2015

  First Published 2015

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  The publisher acknowledges the work of Melbourne’s street artists. A glimpse of Baby Guerilla’s work appears on the back cover. The artist whose work appears on the front cover is asked to approach the publisher so he or she can be acknowledged in future editions.

  Cover and author photography: www.kipscottphoto.com

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-1-921924-92-7

  A Paul, l’amour de ma vie

  1

  THE ALDERMAN

  Tonight I’m in a bar in Brunswick, on a high stool with a book and a beer, hanging in the middle of a blur of voices, like some strange fruit from another tree. Losing myself in the story, downing a cool redemptive sip every few pages, I keep a weather ear out for the floating ‘no worries, mate,’ ‘I’m easy,’ and ‘you’re right’ that, like the sea spume tightening one’s hold on a ship’s rail, keep my feet firmly hitched on the rung of the stool I’m sitting on.

  The hum of the bar has become the sounds of a marina. The cluck cluck of boat hulls knocking against each other, with a little splash here and a little gurgle there, hang on the outskirts of my book. The bar itself holds a net of stars and bar lights around me in a night that is no longer made of darkness. That’s when I meet Bernice. She climbs onto the stool next to mine, and plumps down with a sigh. Her presence is immediate, and even though she doesn’t say anything at first, her worry, in the air around her, is as thick as velvet. You could cut her out of it with a pair of scissors. Then she orders a drink with a frown on her baby face.

  The bar owner’s green eyes look out at everyone from under her black fringe. Bernice is obviously a regular customer. They’re so different, it’s amusing. One is a deep, dark secret, the other a redheaded Bridget Jones – her posture childlike, and her elbows, marooned on either side of her glass, disconsolate. She seeps into a silence that permeates my reading. I hear her gulps and her breath coming in spurts.

  ‘What’s your book?’ she asks suddenly.

  I show her the cover of Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day and she wriggles on her stool.

  ‘Oooh, I loved it.’

  I put it down and smile at her good and proper. The shared love of a book always feels like ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’

  ‘I’m Bernice,’ she tells me, and without making a comment on my accent, knocks back her drink.

  ‘I’m going to do IVF. Thirty-nine. No time left.’

  She puts the words down on the bar like physical things she can no longer lug around with her. I have difficulty remembering acronyms and nod encouragingly. Without being patronising, she nevertheless translates:

  ‘I’m going to try having a child by artificial insemination.’

  Her shoulders heave.

  ‘I saw a donor rock up to the hospital today. He looked awful. I was sure he was a donor because I recognised the bag with the leaf on it.’

  She doesn’t really want to go through with it, she explains. But there’s no choice left to her. Women of her age have a less than five per cent chance of conceiving naturally. Then she casts a reckless glance around the pub.

  ‘I could test my five per cent chance on a one-night stand now, but it’s not the right time of the month,’ she moans.

  Bernice explains it all to me. Nothing is left in the shadows. It’s all very scientific: they stick a catheter into the uterus at the most fertile time of the cycle and then they empty the contents of the test tube inside you. To listen to her is to hear a woman shouting on the ramparts of some ancient city, menacing a higher power, taunting the gods for what she wants.

  I wonder if a child doesn’t come of its own free will, on the heels of a desert wind, choosing a particular person to bring it into the world. A child happens. Surely, it can’t be wanted like a thing you can get. Bernice is talking of prams now.

  ‘The best ones are English,’ she says decisively. ‘Silver Cross. You can get them much cheaper on the internet. The Bugaboo is for yuppies and duffers. But Stokke is my other favourite because it can become a high chair too. Just think, two clunky pieces of furniture in one.’

  She takes a breath.

  ‘My first choice would be a Silver Cross perambulator.’

  The old traditional pram is the royal way, for her. She describes it in detail – a big dark blue body with high white wheels. She could be describing the queen’s carriage; all it lacks are horse guards trotting alongside it.

  ‘Of course, I wouldn’t choose that one,’ she adds regretfully, ‘you can’t get it into a car.’

  I’d prefer to wrap a child around my body in a sling. Surely your steps, your heartbeat, even your daydreaming, would rock it to sleep better than a perambulator. But I remove myself from such thoughts. I learn that it’s very practical to have a maxi-cosy capsule that fits in a modern Silver Cross base.

  ‘It goes straight in the car! You don’t even need a baby seat. Two in one again!’

  She’s absurdly convincing, but her phrases seem to have an echo. I discover that Bernice is the child of another era. Her grandmother brought her up. Her values revert a few generations, like a sunflower to an older sun.

  ‘Ah,’ she sighs, ‘the English know how to do prams. They even make a bassinet that becomes a cot and then becomes a junior bed. What more can you want?’

  What more indeed? I wonder why this information is so important to her, instead of daydreaming about the tiny stranger who could be orbiting around her. I also learn that Bernice has been buying baby clothes for her friends’ children for years. She gives baby tea parties, and babysits at the drop of a hat. But she’s worried that IVF could give her triplets, especially as twins are common in her family.

  ‘It would be hard to cope alone with three babies,’ she muses.

  The unknown father hovers too, a disincarnate spermatozoa. Bernice will have to flick through a catalogue of faces to choose her baby’s progenitor. How will the child manage to guide his or her future mother’s erring thoughts to the right face? The dating world is Bernice’s pet project, and also her Inferno.

  ‘I tried,’ she says with a dutiful sigh.

  Suddenly I sense all the men around us in the bar, hanging in clusters, sitting alone or with a woman. Tall men, blond men, dark men, swarthy men, pale men, men with hairy hands or thick necks, men with kind faces or tight, withdrawn expressions, men with strong chins or no chins, men with a smile sewn onto their cheek muscles – men you need to make a baby. She sees them every day at work.

  ‘I don’t get men,’ she moans. ‘Generation X is a nightmare. They can’t commit.’

  The word ‘commit’ seems obscure. I understand it on one level, but it doesn’t sink in. It’s not a real word for me, rather half a word, or even a quarter. Later, I look it up. Originally, it meant to give charge, to entrust, to unite, to connect, to combine, to bring together. It takes a while to unjumble all those words, as if they’ve been tossed in a salad bowl. Wikipedia concedes t
hat the evolution of the word ‘commit’ into a modern range of meanings is not entirely clear. In ancient Latin, it meant ‘perpetrating’ – not ‘penetrating,’ as I first misread with a slight jolt. Of course, you commit a crime. But do you commit love? Strangely, the last and most modern meaning, ‘to commit oneself,’ is influenced by existentialism and Sartre’s emotional and moral engagement. When you think of Sartre’s track record with women it’s rather ironic. But Bernice would agree with that definition. The men she meets can’t emotionally engage with her project.

  The night is still young when I decide to leave the bar. Bernice slams her empty glass down and comes out with me, her tiny handbag slung over her shoulder like a sailor’s holdall. I walk her home because she’s had too many Pimm’s Nº 1. On her doorstep her soft hands clutch at my sleeve. She is anxious about me returning to my place alone.

  ‘Let me call a taxi.’

  There are still people about. I shake my head and back away smiling and waving.

  ‘Call me when you get there,’ she urges, and totters forward to hand me her card.

  ‘You can’t be careful enough after what happened to that poor girl.’

  Today there was a peace march held in honour of a woman named Jill Meagher. Something about her being raped and murdered in Brunswick has ripped the fabric of the neighbourhood. The light itself seems to have suffered a rent and let in something that wasn’t there before. It’s not only about fear or danger, but more about a subtle presence that has taken some invisible space in the air. Even I, a stranger, can feel it. Calling it evil would be too crude, as if the word were too short, too stark to express a constellation of meanings.

  I think about the man in prison. He has already tried to kill himself. And though they are now separated, he once had a wife and children – a family he probably held dear. I wonder what was once done to him, what hurt of his past has come hurtling back at him like a boomerang.

  The last living glance we have of Jill Meagher is on the video camera of a bridal shop. Something about weddings reeks of death. The rigor mortis of it, the march, the sacrificial white dress, the silent crowd in the church ingesting the ceremony, the tears of a mother. A bridal shop: the sad irony of it. Aristaeus, the beekeeper, tries to rape Orpheus’s wife on their wedding day. As Eurydice runs to escape him, a viper bites her ankle. Orpheus goes down into hell to retrieve her, but, like all the newspaper articles and all the policemen of the world, he can’t bring his Jill Meagher back to life. Her photographs splashed on front pages, the peace march in her honour, are nothing but Orpheus’s backward glance into Hades as Eurydice swirls away from him.

  I see the back of the suspect’s neck in The Age as a policeman’s hand guides his head into a car. It’s a surprisingly young, freckled neck; the humanity of it is frightening. The rent in the Brunswick light is there, in that neck. They always seem to push suspects into cars that way. The hand of the law is over him now – he is no longer directly accountable for the consequences of his actions, not even for the bumping of his own head. A lawyer will talk in his stead. He has forsaken his parrhesia, his right of say. This man has walked the streets, drunk a beer with his elbows on the bar, watched the football and barracked for a team. He has a mother – he may even be a sperm donor.

  2

  CAT

  I don’t want to remember why I am here. Mapping my way as I walk, I just want to remember forward, as the desert light slinks into Brunswick, making the dust glitter, creating mysterious, nocturnal places under the curved metal roofing over the shops.

  Of course, I have no idea how this desert light reaches Melbourne’s inner suburbs. It makes no sense; the desert is hundreds of miles away. It’s probably only in my head – but here, in Lygon Street, I’m always expecting a desert just beyond the last 7-Eleven. Trees, footpaths, shops, cafés and supermarkets waver on the brink of existence. They could just as well duck out into another world. Yet they choose to stay.

  A wind, as fickle as the Khamsun, picks up as I walk, rustling through the corrugated iron of the awnings. A cocktail of seasons can whisk around in a single day. A woman overtakes me and cries over her shoulder:

  ‘More of this crazy Melbourne weather!’

  Everybody repeats this in the same tone, with the same tilt of the chin. The leitmotiv makes a home of the constant change of wind, rain and sun.

  I should know more about the weather because I’m a gardener now. My boss Kim is a spare woman. Her eyes are a blue absence. She is taller than me, with big, untamed hands that seem to have a will of their own. She looks up from her spade to throw competent glances at the world. Not only does she tend people’s gardens, she also landscapes them. Her drawings are tied in a roll and look beautiful. I met her in the street. When I asked her if she had some work for me, she lifted her head from her digging, keeping her boot on her spade. Her glance sized me up as if to say ‘this will be a joke.’ But she gave me a job anyway. I was to start the next afternoon. After shuffling around a few seconds, I waved goodbye to her digging back. It took me a minute to realise that I had become her worker and, in that second, things had subtly changed between us. Two days later my body no longer felt my own. As I dug, pruned and swept, it had strange flashes of intuition in its elbows and knees.

  Every afternoon I am with Kim, but when we stop for tea and biscuits, no intimacy grows between us. I would like to know gardening, to understand it in that same flowing way she does. But when she shows me things, my mind escapes like a shoal of fish. I become stupid, unassertive. I dig the wrong hole or tip a whole barrowful of mulch onto the wrong bed. It has to be done again – by her. She never complains, just states my mistakes without dwelling on them. It’s worse than if she were to rant and rave. When I say sorry, she digs her spade in, stopping all the clocks in my vicinity. Leaning on the handle, she slowly wags one long finger:

  ‘People who work for me don’t say sorry all the time. Here we don’t say sorry.’

  I gulp.

  ‘Oh, sorry.’

  She smiles wryly, murmuring ‘bloody hell’ under her breath, because she knows I have not meant it as a joke. We carry on like this for months.

  Mitali, the other extra gardener, gets on with Kim better than I. They talk knowledgeably of seeds and cuttings. The names of trees and varieties of plants are brought back to me in Mitali’s smile and light tread. She has a cloudy night of hair and the darkest, shiniest eyes I have ever seen. When we work together, the information she has gleaned from Kim seems to be transmitted directly to my suddenly adroit hands. The roots and the foliage, the diseases and the bugs become part of my world through cross-pollination.

  As time goes by Mitali and I seem to team up, and usually end up working side by side. One day, Mitali, kneeling next to me to plant crocuses, tells me how haunted she is by Jill Meagher’s death. Suddenly it becomes more than shocking news, as she says:

  ‘I know I never met her, but I can’t stop thinking about it. And why was she raped and murdered in Hope Street, of all places?’

  Then her words die on her. Her eyes glaze over. Before I know it my hand is on her arm as if she were falling. She makes a grimace, snapping out of it with a frown, and I move away.

  ‘I’m fucking tempted by death. It’s another option, like gaming. I’m interested in it as a premise, as an alternative to life.’

  ‘Have you always been like this?’ I ask.

  She stares at me. I have the feeling she is making a decision inside her head.

  ‘My brother committed suicide. I was eighteen then. He was seventeen. We could have been twins, for fuck’s sake.’

  She knocks at a stone with her trowel. It makes a weird little sound.

  ‘He didn’t die straight away. He lasted a few days in hospital – in a coma. I live with his death. It just stays there.’

  She knocks the trowel again.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I usually don’t speak about it. It’s Jill Meagher … Her murder moves things – things t
hat don’t usually move.’

  She stabs at the clods of earth with her trowel for a while. I usually have a sense she has a sort of Jain feeling for worms and bugs, and is normally on the look out for them – but not at this moment. Her mind is on crime, as if it were some kind of relief for her.

  ‘At about the same time,’ she tells me, ‘there was another murder in Brunswick. It was in the newspapers. An Indian man killed his wife and set fire to their home, burning them both in a kind of joint sati.’

  She gives the earth another vicious dig.

  ‘That disaster, directly connected with my parents’ culture, doesn’t touch me as much as Jill Meagher’s death. Her killing takes as much room in my mind as in the bloody newspapers.’

  She thrusts and buries a bulb into the soil without gently covering it up as usual.

  ‘And that’s not all. Just two days ago one of my old students, from RMIT, died in a motorcycle accident in Vietnam. He volunteered in a soup kitchen on the weekends and did well at his studies. And this is without counting my friend Olga … She was my oldest friend.’

  The wind blows her hair in her face and she brushes it angrily away.

  ‘But even she doesn’t haunt me like Jill Meagher. All I can do now is mourn this unknown woman who was nothing to me.’

  She wipes her nose with the heel of her hand.

  ‘Jill Meagher seems to be holding a candle in all my dark cupboards.’

  As we plant the bulbs, her anger spreads out as blindly as the roots of the trees in the soil around us. I don’t say anything. You can’t come near that kind of pain. It’s there, like a thunderstorm you can only witness until calm returns. Yet my simple presence seems to be part of the process. I am carried along in spite of myself. From time to time, Mitali casts a glance at me, like a wild animal surprised by human company, half accepting it, half rejecting it.

  Soon the afternoon of work is over. Kim drops us at Mitali’s. She and I live in the same street. As we stand in the unquiet dusk, Mitali shivers and asks me in for a cup of tea. She lives with her partner and his adult daughter who has come back home for a while. I stay on the small verandah. I’m too tired to pull my boots off, and lean against the warm sanded weatherboards, looking through a dappled maze of leaves. The wood has an old honey glow. Someone must have peacefully sanded it with no eye on time. I press my fingers to its soft texture and let my thoughts wander through the meandering path of their small garden. Mitali returns with two cups. Her husband Ian appears – a tall, lanky man. He squats near Mitali without a word. His humorous eyes take us in, dirt, weariness and all. They seem to be full of land, as if they contained a view seen from a train window. Suddenly everything is perfect – a perfection that is part of the leaves and the enormous sky. One of those moments, lasting seconds, just enough time for a sigh, a koan, a haiku.