On Brunswick Ground Read online

  ‘What were you saying, Mary?’

  The blue head turns swiftly.

  ‘No kids. There were no kids. I can’t have kids, Mum.’

  Suddenly her voice is clogged with tears. Sarah and I stare at each other again because we have no other eyes to look into. We could be in a ring, three boxers not throwing any punches. Why do these women want children so much?

  The mother’s eyes are two dark slits. The daughter coughs and suddenly she is filling in the empty space with words.

  ‘Thanks for putting me up at the last minute. Billie can’t have me because she’s staying with her parents. I didn’t even check if she was still in her flat. I just presumed she was. Turns out she’s had a cancer scare. Just told me about it. But she’s okay now, hopefully. Do you remember her stepmother, Mitali?’

  I jump.

  ‘Mitali? Is she Indian? Does she work in gardening? Is her partner called Ian?’

  Mary stems my staccato questioning.

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Melbourne’s a small place, isn’t it?’

  I explain that I work with Mitali. The blue head turns swiftly my way again.

  ‘Billie says that she’s been a better mother to her than her own mother.’

  By her instant check, you can see that Mary wished she hadn’t said that. But it’s too late now. Sarah takes a quiet sip of her coffee. I would like to put some sugar in both their cups.

  Silence snakes in on us again. I notice Sarah putting her hand out in a futile, ineffectual gesture, as if she were trying to stop a forest fire or hold on to someone already too far away. Then her hand falls.

  ‘Mary, I’m sorry. Sorry.’

  It reminds me of how she expressed her sorrow for Jill Meagher’s family. She’s embarrassed with pain; she can’t bear her own overwhelming compassion. She has to keep succinct. I can feel something in the blue material – the daughter could be smiling at her mother, who knows?

  ‘It’s not your fault. It’s just a fact. I’ve done all the tests. We could have adopted but that wasn’t on the agenda for him. He wanted a …’

  Sarah supplies the last word:

  ‘… a son?’

  What does it mean? There certainly seem to be no Islamic leitmotivs floating around in Mary’s talk. One wonders why Mary is still in a burqa, if it’s not for her man. Catholics, Scouts, businessmen, rock stars, politicians, doctors’ wives – most people have a credo that slips into the slightest of their utterances. But Mary’s clean Australian voice rests on itself, without the support of any ideology. Is her blue outfit some kind of disguise? I guess one doesn’t question someone’s vegetarianism, gluten-free diet, football team – or burqa.

  Suddenly it’s all finished. We have eaten our sandwiches and drunk our coffees. The waitress comes with the bill. Sarah pays and refuses any contribution. We could have been sitting there for hours. It’s not real time we have spent there. It reminds me of fairytale time, when you follow a staircase under a forest and live down there for a hundred years. But you eventually return to the surface and the clocks say you’ve only been away for five minutes. We get up so awkwardly the legs of our chairs make a terrible noise on the cement floor. We could be gangsters springing up with our hands on our holsters – but we’re just walking to the door.

  As they leave me on my doorstep, Mary clambers out.

  ‘Hey, nice meeting you,’ she says, lifting her hand.

  I reach out vaguely and touch her blue sleeve, like a Catholic touching the Pope’s robes to collect an extra blessing for the road. I watch them drive away with a vague feeling of anticlimax. Maybe some crude Pavlovian response in me expected bombings, terrorist attacks or hostage-takings – instead of just despair. Then, realising the time, I fumble for the key and rush inside to jump into my gardening gear. When I step out again, I am suddenly uncomfortable in my heavy jumper, jeans and gumboots. Maybe they too are a disguise. Things have acquired the habit of becoming strange – not only clothes, but also the house, the street – everything except for the cat.

  On the way out I try not to check the letterbox. Avoiding disappointment can be made into an art form. That’s when I see the letter poking out in its white envelope. I haven’t received one for nearly two weeks. I grab it and push it into my jeans pocket. The wind has picked up and the sky is clear of rain. Kim expects me at the first garden we’re working in, near where I live. I’m conscious of the letter all the way there. I can’t read it running down the street. I should have left it in the box, but I‘m too scared – an evil wind could blow it away, or rain could wash away the ink.

  Every time these letters come I keep them with me. I wear them. For an hour or two I can’t bear to open them. The idea of breaking the newness of them would tip them over into the past that devours everything. The fact that the letter stays in my pocket preserves its status – keeps it free, full of unopened promise. I run down the road and feel its faint rustle against my hip. I have the feeling that a complete season, quite apart from the one surrounding me, has inserted itself in my day: his season. The cold isn’t so cold, the trees are nearer, the footpath isn’t so hard, the recent rain smells good. Everything is stranger, sharper; even the air has a different taste. Maybe mountain climbers reaching a certain altitude at last feel like this. They may trip, blunder, fall, but with one glimpse of the summit, they feel at home – as I do with my letter.

  When I get there, Kim is busy and has no time for sidelines.

  ‘Just dig a hole in this bed,’ she says.

  I push my spade into the mud. The Australian earth welcomes me. I could die here, I know, and never be in fear of becoming a roaming spirit, a dybbuk, a djinn, in search of home. My home is the thrill of paper, the rustle against my thigh, of Australian words written by an Australian hand.

  5

  JILL MEAGHER

  On those days when Kim absents herself, Mitali and I sometimes work like dervishes. It can be a kind of joke for us, to have done more than Kim would have expected, to try and eke out her elusive approval. But soon our flow changes, and finds its own rhythm, because the gardens call the shots, not the gardeners. Mitali suddenly flings herself down on the garden bed with her shovel in her arms.

  ‘Fuck this place, it’s cheesy. Look at that row of preening pink camellias. Enough to make you puke.’

  And she leers at the sky making retching noises. It could be a slim boy of seventeen lying there – black jeans, old leather jacket, the cloud of hair invisible against the dark earth. I could easily go and read Jack’s letter in the shed, but I continue digging, throwing a few clods in her direction. The rain has stopped; instead a door of clouds is shut across the sky. Mitali is soon back to work with her spade to keep warm.

  Jack has been advised to write. One day, the exchange of letters will trigger something, they say. He phones his mother, his father, some friends, but he writes to me. It’s probably easier to deal with that way. For the moment, he’s working at the Werribee Zoo. In his last letter, he explained how working with animals gives him a sense of his own presence. Animals look back at him as if he’s really there, instead of an echo of who he was.

  He doesn’t want to see me for the time being. The love in my face must be as sickening for him as that row of pink camellias is for Mitali. The other day a giraffe pushed her soft muzzle to his cheeks and stared solemnly into his eyes. And so he speaks of feelings, of sensations, of smells, of touch. He’s like the puzzle of a looking glass, but the broken shards don’t fit. Bringing them together to form a pattern makes him feel queasy. Yet that’s just what the doctors advise.

  I wasn’t there when he had his accident but I witness it again and again in my dreams. He was stepping off a tram. His head turned suddenly as if someone had called his name. He didn’t sense or hear anything coming. The car hit him front-on. He lay there in the middle of the road while the traffic was stopped so bystanders could get to him. When he regained consciousness, he seemed all right, just stunned, as if he’d taken a simple fall. An ambulan
ce drove him to hospital for a check-up anyway.

  By the time I arrived at the Royal Melbourne, he was fine – the scans were all good. The doctors were going to let him go, but one of them, the youngest-looking, was frowning: something was wrong. This guy was too vague, too polite. As I walked into the room, the young doctor barked at him:

  ‘What’s your name?’

  Jack’s voice reeling off his name, age, and date of birth welcomed me. But there was a lake of silence in his stare as I ran up to him. I touched his chest, but my hands felt like two strangers, even to myself. He remembered everything else. He just didn’t remember me. The two other doctors were trying to repress the smirks on their faces. It was pretty easy to guess what they were thinking. Selective amnesia: what a perfect stunt for a break-up. But the doctor who had queried Jack’s memory didn’t smile.

  He soon got Jack to have tests and scans and X-rays. He sent him to see specialists. Selective memory loss is a not so rare side effect of head injuries. Relationships, special talents, homes can be forgotten, while others are preserved. I’m just part of what he forgot, like his own address, and his songs. He can no longer play his guitar. But he remembers his father and mother, his friends, his school, his childhood. His memory is a patchwork of colours and black holes.

  We lived together for months like polite strangers, Jack and I. I’d tell him where the mugs or the fuses were, and he’d ask me for the neighbours’ names and the dustbin night. But apart from that I didn’t test his memory, and schooled myself into becoming a housemate. We developed a friendship of sorts – cool, collected, diffident. The guitar stayed leaning against the wall. Then one day he told me he had found a job as a keeper at the zoo. It was easy because he had started studying to become a vet, before dropping out to join a band – now he was dropping out of music. His fingers no longer stroked his guitar, as if it were an animal. What used to flow became distant. I don’t know if he continues writing to me because the doctors advised him to, or if he has become used to my friendly missives. I am careful to never answer out of turn.

  I can see us both reflected in the shed window. Jack is striding around with me standing on his shoes in the hallway, we are laughing. I put down my shovel and take a breath, forcing myself to look at opaque surfaces, before I start digging again. Not thinking about the past is another kind of discipline.

  Films are good. You can concentrate on them like bits of your life, except that they’re not your life. Last night I rented Billy Elliot. Without education, Billy, the city boy, roams the streets – like we roam for love, stumbling about. Billy needs to dance. He dances everywhere – in gutters, train yards, housing estates. Somehow, he joins a ballet class of little girls in tutus. Sniggers wash over him. He dances as he breathes. Then he’s noticed and is brought to a famous ballet school. A panel of sour-faced academics test his talent. Just before leaving the interview he is asked a simple question: why do you dance? His face is a blank. He has no words, no cultural shape to pour his answer into. His features stare, empty and mute before he turns listlessly to the exit. One judge has a faint, searching expression when the point of contact to this unknown boy’s world is about to be severed. Then, just as the door opens to swallow him back into his cultural void, Billie glances back in slow motion, and answers in extremis: ‘Because when I dance I disappear.’

  I’ve made a loop, I’m back to Jack. His presence, his absence. But then, everything reminds me of Jack. Now I disappear into gardening. I garden myself into a coma.

  Mitali swings round towards me, holding her shovel like a machine gun.

  ‘My stepdaughter is completely out of the woods now. Every day is so fucking new, just knowing that. I love that kid. I’ve never understood why I love her so much.’

  She frowns.

  ‘I’ve never understood why I love people. You, for example. What a strange idea to love you, hey?’

  And she frowns again as if it were truly impenetrable to her. Now she’s kneeling on the ground and I am pruning a bush beside her. I can’t see her expression. The garden has us in its womb.

  ‘It’s beautiful to watch the cancer leave her system, the trust in her own body return. I know it’s an illness and all that, but it feels more like a presence that can come but also leave you.’

  Her words are so different from what Sarah says of her mother’s cancer, which feels more of a shared hex, a common sadness their two hearts can no longer contain. But before I can think any more about them, Mitali stops and looks up at me. Like an animal, she knows instantly when someone’s real presence is no longer there.

  ‘Like death. Death travels through us, doesn’t it? It’s not supposed to stay. But sometimes – it just does.’

  Her face closes down and I know she is thinking of her brother as if she had cried it out in anger and pain. Sometimes I have a sense she is asking me silently for help. A feeling of ineffectual urgency overpowers me. But all I can do is to carry on clipping my shrub. A fine mist of rain is in the air. A palace of drops has formed around us. An hour goes by. Dedication creeps into our movements again. We could be kneeling in a Zen monastery. But when Mitali brushes her hair aside with her muddy glove, it bares the permanent question on her brow: Why am I alive when my brother is dust in the ground? Then she bends down once more – a gardening devotee. I speak to her angry cloud of hair.

  ‘I’ve just met someone from Adelaide who knows your stepdaughter.’

  She jerks her head back with a cackle.

  ‘What makes you think I like corny coincidences?’

  I stifle a laugh, and give an extra snip before answering:

  ‘Well, whether you like it or not, here’s one. Your stepdaughter’s called Billie, isn’t she?’

  A car roars behind the hedge, blanking out the garden’s green silence.

  ‘Are you talking about Mary?’

  I nod. The rain seems to have been blown off far over the bay. I picture it blowing over Werribee. Mitali frowns at her working hands.

  ‘I think Mary and Billie said they’d pop round this afternoon. I’d forgotten. It’s a bit late now though. Mary’s eerily beautiful, no kidding.’

  I say nothing. I just wonder if the blue robe will come round too, or if it’s just some incredible disguise from Sarah. It feels crazy but something in me can’t help imagining it’s all a hoax. Would a daughter find it hard to have such a cool mother? What happened between them? Surely something must have. I turn to Mitali.

  ‘Mary’s mother, Sarah, is a friend of mine. Have you met her?’

  Her answer is slow.

  ‘Sure, I know Sarah.’

  This fits with Sarah’s personality. You don’t chat about Sarah. We concentrate on the earth again. Mitali grabs her trowel.

  ‘Do you remember me mentioning my obsession with Jill Meagher?’

  I nod.

  ‘I still dream of her, you know. She sits at the foot of my bed, looking at me. She’s wearing the dress and platform shoes of the wedding shop security video. She talks to me earnestly. I can’t hear her words. She bends closer, but I still can’t hear her.’

  Mitali chucks in her trowel, as if the whole idea of gardening was a bad joke.

  ‘Do you ever dream of her?’

  When I shake my head, she insists.

  ‘Never?’

  When I shake my head again, it seems to infuriate her. Dusk gathers around us. We can hardly see our tools, but she picks the trowel up again with a vengeance.

  When you work near someone every day, near the gestures they choose, the silences they keep and the comments that pop out of them, patterns emerge, eddies form under your eyes and a moving, changing portrait surfaces – a living blueprint of that person. You are never surprised by your workmates’ quirks. You are not surprised if they read Dostoyevsky, get blind drunk, are transvestites, or sing in a choir. I am not surprised at Mitali, hacking away, in a mood she can’t shake off. I don’t need any explanations.

  It’s strange to mourn a stranger, with tears
that aren’t our own – like a sound you can’t quite catch. A bit like trying to write my grandmother’s story. But whatever it is, we are doing something. Maybe dealing with the dead is another sort of gardening. We are digging again. I listen to Mitali wield her shovel and fight with the earth, intent on disinterring, exhuming – a reversal of the putting to rest of seeds and bulbs. The clods of clay fly behind her back as I mix in the gypsum. A large bat, flying low, swoops into the tree on our left. The branches seem to sigh and sway on receiving him, a signal for night coming on. We should have stopped half an hour ago. But it doesn’t matter.

  Mitali slows down a bit.

  ‘Billie will be going back to her flat soon, but I’m still stuck with the fear of losing her. Her leukaemia opened up degrees of affection that were just fucking there, waiting. Now that she’s recovered, I’m still not happy … I don’t believe in this health business, because death is still there, looming. It didn’t help that Jill Meagher … ’

  Some memory in me stirs. I think I’ve seen Billie walking in the street, so I finish Mitali’s sentence for her:

  ‘ … looked like Billie? Has she got black wavy hair and …?’

  Mitali’s head jerks up.

  ‘Yes, exactly. They look so alike. Now one is alive and the other is dead, like my brother and me.’

  She rests her hands on the higher garden bed in front of her and closes her eyes.

  ‘I’m fucking tired.’

  The way she leans against the earth reminds me of all we don’t know about how gulls sleep.

  She speaks again, without looking at me, her eyes on the earth.

  ‘My friend Olga … The one who died a month ago … She was in a coma, hooked to a machine. I still haven’t phoned her mother. I thought it was because I didn’t have the time, the emotional time. But now I know the real reason. I’m fucking scared to. Because when I call her mother, Olga will be well and truly dead, won’t she?’

  Again I have the feeling that she’s asking me for help. And again, the only thing I can help is the garden.