On Brunswick Ground Read online

  A woman appears round the corner with two yellow weights in her hands and a stunned sadness on her face. Maybe the weights are not about fitness at all, but to keep thoughts at bay, to feel or remember each step, or only to give her night walk gravitas. Sarah starts as if she were going to speak to her, then thinks better of it. We watch as the woman ploughs her way past us. Even though there is a wind whisking around, the melaleucas with their broccoli hairdos are just as still, hushed and careful as us. Sarah hugs herself.

  ‘That woman’s daughter committed suicide. She’s been walking the despair out of her system for three years. Maybe it’s the best thing to do – walk – when there is nowhere to go.’

  Sarah’s eyes stare at the invisible trace of the woman’s footsteps. Her face has lost its bravado.

  She leans against the garden wall of an Edwardian house. I have the strangest feeling that the bricks will tumble onto the grass … just like that.

  ‘I was a shit mother,’ she murmurs.

  I wish I could say something, but I feel like a melaleuca. Suddenly Sarah jerks her head up.

  ‘But my daughter is alive, isn’t she?’

  I nod vigorously.

  ‘Yes, she’s alive, Sarah.’

  Then I watch her go.

  On my way back alone, I meet the cat a little further down. He stops and leans against my legs. He even lets me stroke him.

  3

  BURQA

  I dig my spade deep into the earth and feel it open easily, as if I had found the exact place for a spade to find its way into the ground. Kim’s face turns round in slow motion to cast a glance at me. I notice that since I have stopped trying to meet with her approval, I make fewer mistakes. This afternoon the clouds are sodden above our heads, yet refuse to let go of their rain. Kim’s in a hurry to finish before it all comes down. I am alone with her. The swish of her broom is a relentless metronome. When we have swept the leaves and cleared the paths – always our last job – she drives me home.

  A thunderclap gets rid of the day in one kick. I run to my door just as lightning rips through the street. A flash lights my doorstep and I see Sarah standing there like a demobbed soldier.

  ‘Sarah!’

  Her face is white and her green gaze unfocused. She seems to be in a quiet panic.

  ‘Can I come in,’ she asks without the tone of a question, all intonation ironed out of her.

  I ram the key in the lock.

  ‘Of course.’

  I’d like to help this woman who’s obviously not in the habit of asking for help. I walk to the kitchen and jump-start the kettle and pull out of the fridge everything I can get my hands on. She sits with her hands in a downward prayer between her thighs. Her hair is still slick, but her skin looks different – clogged with unshed tears, a bit like the sky.

  I rustle around the kitchen, trying not to interrupt her sadness, letting it lean on air like her sculptures, without prodding it with questions. She casts me a grateful glance, as if my silence were a gift. I find some cheese and olives and put them on the table. Then I drag my chair and sit sideways from her. She takes a deep breath.

  ‘It’s Mary, she’s coming to Melbourne. I should be thrilled but I’m terrified.’

  She waits for a bit.

  ‘We have no common language, you see.’

  When the thunder claps again, she smiles and adds:

  ‘Sounds like the rap of a poltergeist or someone knocking at the door.’

  But her smile and her comment are more like an attempt to defuse the atmosphere, or to get a grip on herself. A daughter is a stranger to her mother. The Shakespearian banality of it fills her eyes. She has nothing else to add. This is it. Few people have the moral courage to unpack their tragedies so cleanly, without any alluring veil of mystery.

  ‘Why does she want to come?’ I ask.

  Sarah stares blankly at me.

  ‘It’s for a holiday or … maybe they’ve broken up and she wants to stay at my place to find a job – in a burqa.’

  With her wry smile, she adds:

  ‘Well, even if our prime minister finds them confronting, she’s not banning them altogether. At least Mary won’t be sent to a detention centre.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I wait, putting cheese on rice biscuits and pouring out wine, water and juice. Glasses sit in a row in front of Sarah. She chuckles.

  ‘This is starting to look like my bar.’

  I clink her glass with mine.

  ‘Quite a few people wear burqas.’

  ‘I know, but generally they’re Muslims.’

  ‘And she isn’t …’

  ‘Not any more than you are.’

  ‘It could be a cultural, political statement …’

  ‘That’s more my style than hers.’

  More than an expression of anguish, her bittersweet smile shows the extent of her despair. She sighs before adding:

  ‘It feels like something deeper.’

  I stop trailing my finger in the eddies of wood grain on the table.

  ‘Something that has nothing to do with Islam?’

  Her head jerks up. Her ‘Yes’ rings hollow and sad. For some reason it reminds me of the lonely beach somewhere near Frankston I walked on the other day, alongside the dry scrub, where skeleton trees on the foreshore rubbed their antique limbs in the wind, as the sea rustled and fretted on the grey sand – a sad, sad beach.

  ‘Have you tried asking your mother what it’s about? You said they get on.’

  She takes a hearty gulp of wine before answering.

  ‘Ha, beyond the weather, I can hardly speak to my mother. She won’t even mention her cancer to me.’

  ‘When’s Mary coming?’

  I hand her a biscuit with cheese on it but she’s staring at her knees.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Why has she sprung this on you so suddenly? Surely…’

  ‘She probably had another plan that fell through. I’m the last person Mary would have gone to. But if she wants to find a job in Melbourne – which is my guess – then she’s broken up. Why would she want to stay with me when I’ve just come back from Adelaide? She’d stay with friends if it were a holiday.’

  After that, Sarah blitzes her wine. All I can think of is that Frankston beach. I ask what Mary does.

  ‘She’s a book designer. She’s studied typography and also illustrates children’s books. Even as a kid she was always playing around with fonts. I used to call her Gutenberg. I thought at one time she would become a printmaker.’

  I imagine the two of them tiptoeing around each other, then bursting into electric disagreements about porridge, or the bathroom roster. I imagine them walking along rigid corridors and stepping into silent kitchens – prisoners of a period of climactic misunderstandings, where furniture snarls and ceilings hang so low you feel squashed.

  ‘Have you any idea what is going on with her husband?’

  She peers into her glass.

  ‘About as much as you do.’

  I ask her if Mary is driving, flying or coming over by train.

  ‘Flying.’

  The rain now seems to be lashing pebbles instead of drops against the window.

  ‘Can you come and get her with me?’

  I lower the rice cracker I was going to put in my mouth and stare at her.

  As suddenly as it came, the storm has left, leaving behind it a rainless, shining darkness. It’s a long time since anyone has involved me. I think of Bernice’s word ‘committed.’ Why do we feel human again when we are asked to do something, when we feel useful? Why is digging the earth not enough? I should have learned my lesson. I brace myself to let it go, to let the thing loose. You can like people, drink with them, eat cheese and rice biscuits with them – you can lend yourself to them – without jumping on board. I breathe in and out a few times. I let the room settle. I let go of this woman and her story. Then I say ‘Okay.’ That’s okay too.

  Her eyes flicker over me. She has asked the right person. S
he’s like the drunk. She knows a stranger when she sees one. Even if I’m not leaving, her secret is as safe with me as if I were taking it overseas, far, far away from Brunswick.

  ‘The plane is at eleven-thirty tomorrow. I can pick you up at eleven. Is that all right with you?’

  I nod.

  ‘Yes, that’s fine with me.’

  Sarah’s gaze flickers over The Age lying on the table. Jill Meagher’s face is sailing on a sea of print. We both stare at it as if her death is in some way linked to every pain happening at the same time, however small by comparison. I point to the newspaper.

  ‘I hunted on the web and found that a violent father physically abused the alleged killer. It wouldn’t excuse him, but it might explain something, mightn’t it? While Jill Meagher’s uncle told the press that her bubbliness and kindness were almost a cliché of happiness.’

  Sarah nods.

  ‘A scary symmetry.’

  On the table is a book by Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, lent to me by a friend. Thinking of the man in prison, I grab it and point out a passage to her: ‘He thought of the hot dark hut, of strangers lying packed about him on their bunks, of air thick with derision. It is like going back to childhood, he thought: it is like a nightmare.’

  ‘Do you write?’ she asks.

  She probably senses I am tinkering with something when she notices the books and notes scattered everywhere. It’s true I have sat at my laptop writing about this presence on the edge of my mind for so many years now that it feels like a joke. I am trying to tame a ghost, flitting through the pages, but it never shows its real face or its real story. Yet I hang on, grasping at straws. I don’t know why I do this. It has become a kind of reflex action, a morning habit I can’t shake off, haunted by an awareness older than my own. Memory seems to be the problem of my life.

  ‘Is it a thesis?’

  I try and tell her.

  ‘My grandmother died thirteen years before my birth, I never knew her. I don’t understand why I’m so hung up on her. All I have are the blank facts of her life. What I want is to discover who she really was. I do that by trying to write what she feels – felt, I mean.’

  Her ironic smile surfaces:

  ‘We’re into women up to our necks, aren’t we?’

  She looks at her rice biscuit and adds:

  ‘I also want to get to discover who my daughter really is.’

  I wonder if she’ll ever find out. Maybe someone, at this minute, is trying to find out who Jill Meagher really was too, as if there were some mystery behind her sunny personality. I notice, or perhaps I imagine, in one or two of her photographs, a fleeting sadness around her eyes, belying her smile. These fragments, these vestiges left behind, have something to say to us.

  Sarah gets up and lays her hand on my shoulder. Thanks, her hand seems to say. She is not a touchy-feely person. You can sense it feels crass to her to loll in emotion or milk a mood. I get up and follow her to the door. She turns around on the threshold, smiling without moving her lips – a phantom smile.

  ‘See you tomorrow, then.’

  I don’t know what to say. I have no idea what my presence can achieve, probably nothing. But I can understand her trying anything. I ask:

  ‘What about her father? Have you discussed this with him?’

  Sarah’s face closes with a slam. I can nearly hear it.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I can’t do that.’

  She waves and slides into her station wagon. In a second, she’s gone. I stand on the doorstep and look at the street. The trees are silent, not a rustle in the air. Spring is unnaturally quiet. And it is still cold.

  4

  LETTER

  Next day at 11 am, Sarah is at my door. We walk to her car and we drive off. Just like that. I’m kidnapped, out of the blue, out of my morning. It’s coolish and drizzling. I clear my brain of any thoughts and just check the trees out of the window. Sarah drives with precision and gusto. She follows the road rules, but the ride has an exciting edge. We swerve around the bends and pound down the freeway.

  ‘Have you had breakfast?’ she asks, and hands me a decaf coffee in a takeaway cup, waving away my thanks.

  She’s even remembered I don’t drink real coffee. Her eyes are firmly stuck on the road and silence fills the car as I cradle the warmth. The freeway leaves the suburbs in piles behind it. The sky leans in, swallowing a great gulp of void to make room for the planes. I cling to the cup and try not to wonder what I’m doing in this car. Sarah chuckles.

  ‘What can we call you? A buffer, a chaperone, a decoy perhaps?’

  I don’t go so far as to believe she reads my thoughts; she’s just got this strange brand of common sense.

  I don’t know how I get myself into these situations. Was it the thunderstorm? It’s as if something slips and I slip with it. Sarah comes to a halt at Tullamarine and we sit in the lane for quick pick-ups. An airport official is about to move us on, when Mary appears. It’s easy to recognise her. She’s a blue torch among all the relaxed travellers. Sarah beeps her horn. As I jump out to help Mary with her case, I catch the glimpse of a presence through the grilled blue lattice and smile towards it.

  ‘Hello, Mary.’

  She nods and gets in the car. Sarah grabs her arm and leans in towards her with her whole body. There is something desperate in her sudden intensity. Her reaching expression can clutch at nothing. The burqa reminds me of Bluebeard and his forbidden room, except that for Sarah, it’s her own daughter incarcerated in that blue room, a room to which she no longer has access.

  Her usually deep voice nearly breaks into a falsetto.

  ‘How was the trip?’

  ‘Fine, Mum.’

  Mary’s voice is young, Australian, certain. It has a healthy, no-nonsense tone. As I help her with her case, her hand, damp with perspiration, slips on the handle. I wonder if it’s due to the burqa or to nervousness. Soon a damp sheet of silence is also hanging in the car. Throwing myself on mute cliffs, I’m a gull, flapping around to find something to say. I cough and comment on the rain. They don’t answer. Sarah concentrates on her driving as if she were hugging a cliff road instead of a freeway. Wading still further into triteness, I ask Mary whether she prefers Melbourne or Adelaide.

  ‘I don’t know yet. I couldn’t say. I’ve been back in Adelaide for seven years now. But I’ve good memories of Melbourne.’

  Sarah’s two palms grip the wheel enthusiastically.

  ‘That’s good news.’

  Mary turns her blue head to her mother.

  ‘It wasn’t all bad.’

  I can’t fathom if this is a joke or just a hard fact. I decide to relax and think of my grandmother. I let her sit beside me in the car, feel her slim body bounce on the road, her hands quietly folded in her lap. Death has brought her wisdom, humour and peace. I let my gull fly out to sea. An old man whispered to me in Sarah’s bar that they don’t know where gulls sleep. It’s a deep mystery. Even scientists don’t know, he assured me. I like this information so much that I don’t want to check on the Net to see if it’s true. I wonder if I am going to be brought home or if Sarah is planning to keep me hostage through a silent lunch.

  As if on cue, Sarah’s voice rings out unnaturally.

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  Mary’s naked hand emerges from the blue cloth.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Sarah clears her throat.

  ‘Surely you must be hungry.’

  Inexplicably, her daughter turns to me.

  ‘There was stuff on the plane.’

  The motor seems to have acquired a warlike roar. At last, we’re approaching Melville Road – Brunswick bound. Sarah takes a ragged breath.

  ‘Shall we all have a bite in the café down the road?’

  I find myself murmuring assent. Mary says nothing. Now we are parked. The car shudders into silence, and spits us out.

  Soon, we are sitting in a café on Barkly St. We choose sandwiches and coffees. The waitress’s enormous
breasts and buttocks are soft moving hills around the tables. She tosses a glance and a joke over her shoulder. She reminds me of someone from my childhood, or from a film, some nice memory just on the verge of oblivion, surging back into reality in the flesh. There’s a bicycle hanging on a wall and, here and there, terrariums. These big glass jars containing plants remind me of some wacky, self-sustaining, domed city – decided, planned and sprouting before any human beings can come to live in it. I peer at the plants – maybe tiny people are hiding under the leaves. The music is loud, thank God.

  Soon we’re all stirring our spoons, in sync, in our coffee cups, even though none of us take sugar. Sarah jerks her head up.

  ‘So it’s over, hey?’

  Mary’s head doesn’t budge, but her spoon stops turning round and round. I suddenly wish I had a burqa. It must be comfortable in there, ‘heard but not seen,’ a vengeance on childhood’s ‘seen but not heard.’ I wait for her answer like an idiot. What has this got to do with me? Yet I can’t help but feel Sarah’s anxiety churn in my own stomach. Mary lays the tips of her ten fingers on the edge of the table:

  ‘Yes.’

  The word just hangs there between us.

  Sarah doesn’t really deserve this; she uses none of a mother’s cheap tricks. The ten fingers disappear again. Mary sighs.

  ‘He didn’t beat me, or anything like that. It’s just over. Lasted seven years, not a bad run really. We were actually just thinking of having kids and then …’

  We’re both staring at her blue folds. The waitress, bearing our sandwiches, weaves her hills and valleys around us. We bend our heads as if we’ve just received Holy Communion. That grandmother of mine was a Catholic and a church fiend, with a hard-edged virtuous streak, yet that’s not the voice I hear. I hear a strong, warm heart, dispensing with the chaff, a wide-eyed awareness. If only I could access some if it now. Sarah fiddles with her coffee spoon, before taking a casual sip of coffee.