On Brunswick Ground Read online

  ‘The things they ask you,’ she sighs.

  ‘Do you go to the pub? No, I do not go to the pub. They didn’t ask me if I go to bars.’

  Her forehead puckers.

  ‘That wasn’t a lie, was it? By omission, I mean.’

  Before I can answer, she answers herself under her breath.

  ‘Maybe it is …’

  Then her tone perks up.

  ‘As for pubs, I never go to pubs. The other night was an exception – it was a work function.’

  She then returns to post-traumatic stress.

  ‘You know, you should both be going to see someone. I bet you have nightmares. Even being burgled is a shock to the system. People get depressed over losing their television, let alone having a knife flashed at them by an icy creek.’

  Bernice often prepares herself for the worst, a bit like a sign I saw once in a fire station: Imagine Hell and Get Ready.

  Sarah, serving customers, glances over. That water has made us closer. We suddenly seem to have acquired some kind of bond neither of us is used to. We acknowledge it wordlessly, me by coming to the bar more often, her by these inclusive glances, as if my presence has moved into a more familiar octave. She’s now pouring white wine into glasses for two men who have just walked in.

  They’re continuing a discussion they were having in the street. Sarah is listening to it. I can see them on the other side of Bernice, who has her back to them. Their arms and elbows have freckled skin and russet hairs. Their skin hues blend so much they could be brothers, but the bone structure of their faces, their voices and their evident friendship are not the silence and intermittent bursts of talk between two brothers. Here is an easy conversation between old friends – soothing, seamless, filled to the brim with just the right amount of silence and talk. They seem to have both walked out from the desert with their sandshoes and their beige shirts with buttoned pockets over tired jeans.

  Yet their freshly laundered clothes and clean-shaven faces speak of some kind of old-fashioned academic fastidiousness. They could be engineers or anthropologists. They could be psychoanalysts, farmers or defrocked priests for all I know. Anyway, they seem interested in miscellaneous information.

  ‘A woman has just died from drinking ten litres of coke a day,’ floats over to me.

  There is so much compassion in the voice that I turn round to catch a glimpse of the speaker. He looks like a smoother, russet Raymond Carver, and his friend a freckled Cormac McCarthy.

  When the Raymond Carver says, ‘There’s a good chance of an African pope,’ I see Sarah smile.

  Bernice, her head sunk in her shoulders, is oblivious, complaining about Triple R.

  ‘I don’t know how long I can do this show anymore. Listening to all these people and pretending to be this happiness-whisperer … Oh, my God …’

  She sighs.

  ‘What is wrong with me? After I’ve had one evening with them, they’re gone. I could be an advertisement for how to frighten men away faster than a shrill transvestite.’

  Her tone tries for sarcasm, but her syllables rise up in the air, as clear and crisp as a choirboy’s. I notice smiles spreading on the two men’s faces.

  Bernice is now shaking her head despondently.

  ‘You know, I’m sure I’ll end up with twins. My family is rife with them. Single mother with twins: what a combo.’

  The bar around us is full and starting to sway like a ship. It’s the moment in the evening when a bar takes off. I can sense the two men listening to Bernice. Then they return to their conversation.

  ‘Children have been killed by televisions falling from walls,’ Raymond Carver says, before his face falls and he throws a comical glance at Cormac McCarthy, thrusting his chin in Bernice’s direction, as if he were afraid of having committed a blunder next to this woman speaking of kids.

  He seems to be the kind of man who treads around women tenderly, in fear of causing a single sigh, lest their mysterious feelings be hurt. He could possibly be reading Jane Austen in his spare time as a form of guilty pleasure. I imagine a woman proffering a ‘Let’s fuck,’ and he, after painstakingly removing her clothes, helping her put them back on again afterwards. Then, when she has left, he’ll sit on his bed staring down at his hands. His friend shakes his head reassuringly.

  ‘Did you read that in The Age on the tram over here from work?’

  ‘Yeah,’ nods Carver, ‘nothing like the archaeology of the present.’

  They remind me of two cowboys, sitting in their saddles at a station, staring straight through their horses’ twitching ears – at loose trains of thought. But Bernice’s ears have pricked up for the first time. Their words have trickled into her lower cortex. She swings round.

  ‘Is that true? How many children have died?’

  They turn round as one, to gaze at Bernice properly and when they do, they have the same reaction – their smiles broaden again.

  ‘Two, I think, in the past two months, in Western Australia.’

  Bernice bounces on her stool.

  ‘That’s one a month.’

  They nod at her benignly and penitently. Soon she knows their jobs, where they come from, and what they are doing in Melbourne. They are now inviting us for a drink, and include Sarah, who throws me one of her indecipherable glances as she comes over to give them to us. She never drinks when she’s behind the bar.

  They are archaeologists, working in the CBD, called in when a big excavation is made for the foundations of a new building. Soon we are all talking together, as archaeology brings the bones of our elbows closer. Sarah leans forward:

  ‘How interesting. One always imagines Aboriginal remains being dug up to rival Africa as holding the oldest DNA in the world. Finding remnants of the Jazz Age seems more flippant somehow.’

  To their credit the two men take this with good grace, almost bashfully bending their heads. No chip on the shoulder in sight. I feel myself warming to them. Raymond Carver rubs his shaved chin with the heel of his hand.

  ‘Yes … It does seem that way. But it’s really more about culture than DNA. Memory and culture – what Australians crave. Yet we have so much of it. You wouldn’t imagine the stories we dig up.’

  Bernice’s eyes light up. She majored in history. Raymond Carver is called Harry. He has some land outside of Melbourne and on weekends lives on it in a caravan, renting a bachelor pad in the city with his friend. They’re looking for somewhere quieter, because working in the CBD is noisy enough. Cormac carries the more unconventional name of Francis, because his mother was a fan of St Francis of Assisi, even though she wasn’t Catholic. She had read the Fioretti and knew the story of his life backwards.

  ‘I never understood why,’ he adds. ‘She was a staunch atheist, but there was something that drew her. Maybe it was the way animals were more impressed by him than were bishops. Then she was killed – out in the bush – by a fallen branch. She should have known better than to pitch her tent under an old tree in a storm. She was good in the bush and would never have wandered off in an uninformed way. Her body was found weeks later – unrecognisable. Animals had … ’

  He stops, his face suffused with a painful blush. His friend Harry is staring at him.

  ‘You never told me that.’

  The blush deepens.

  ‘No, I … don’t usually … ’

  Many truths are uttered in the cloister of the bar. Maybe the things we say when we drink, when we get a bit looser, have something saintly about them, and explain Sarah’s choice of pew-like wooden seating.

  Bernice sits up, clutching her beer.

  ‘Well, I think she died in a beautiful way. I would love to go in one fell swoop when my time has come.’

  Francis is no longer flushed.

  ‘Yes, they told me she hadn’t suffered, probably hadn’t even known what happened to her.’

  When one isn’t grieving, a comment on someone’s death can be such an invasion of privacy. Yet Bernice has managed it in a blink.

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sp; Francis’s eyes seem to hover over Bernice as if she’d melt or disappear if he took his eyes off her. I notice that Harry’s eyes are behaving the same way. They may not be brothers, but they seem to have the same taste. Bernice is at her best; you’d think she was on her radio show. She’s sunny and natural, unimpeded by dating anxiety or Victorian angst.

  After that all five of us seem to be on an even keel, as if Francis’s mother had given us her benediction. We have even accepted her scavengers.

  An hour later, it’s neither Sarah nor I who walk a slightly unsteady Bernice home.

  9

  BEA

  According to ethologists, dogs and babies read your intentions, which is why they seem to understand the meaningless syllables you utter. Maybe we are all like that. My gut reads something wrong in the silence of Kim’s van. I look around to try and reason myself out of this feeling, but everything is the same as usual. Anyway, whatever it is, it can’t be that bad. Since Jill Meagher’s death, it’s easier to kick fears into proportion.

  I glance at Mitali. Seen from the back, her slim neck rising out of her T-shirt could be a child’s. That neck immediately understood the importance of Jill Meagher – a meaning I can’t coin, or put away by folding a newspaper. Unresolved, it inhabits our lives. We all secretly share some part of the killer’s resentment and some of the victim’s vulnerability. But Mitali is the only one to express it openly. Surely religions are born of this kind of event? A death people continue to carry, that can’t be put to rest, an injustice that awakens new pathways of thought and a new kind of awareness. As a musician, Jack knew that the religious impulse is not confined to churches. He once told me he wondered if sightings of Elvis at the supermarket were not of the same ilk as the one on the road to Emmaus. Then I stop looking at Mitali’s neck and listen to her conversation with Kim.

  I know she has quarrelled with Ian by the drift of her talk. She’s tossing sexual anecdotes in the air with a small, bitter laugh.

  ‘Last week we did it in the woods against this enormous ghost gum. It tore at the back of my new jumper. He chooses the strangest places. Another time, coming out of a country pub, we stumbled on a derelict merry-go-round in the middle of the night. I can tell you, it’s a disadvantage being so light, before I knew it I was having an orgasm with a orange moose breathing down my neck and a blue giraffe peering over my shoulder.’

  Kim chuckles, proffering no sexual anecdotes of her own. Some people have a gift for talking of their intimate workings in the same tone they would use to talk of their lawnmower or their toaster. The vulgar, ridiculous, coarse or insensitive pitfalls, or the simple fear of being exposed, frightens most other mortals senseless. Anger and pain have blowtorched all that out of Mitali. Her survival mode, anger, is always there below the surface. She needs it at hand since everything reminds her of her brother’s death. Sometimes Mitali has a titter, ‘Ian and I have tragic sex.’ I slowly understand that she means this literally. Ian seems to have a direct access to her loss, even fanning its flame – maybe because that’s the best way to reach her and truly be with her.

  The van is speeding along Brunswick Road and the calm energy of Kim’s gear-changing seems to pull the road up as if she were riding it. I relax into the bags of fertiliser and feel, without looking at Mitali, that we are both staring at exactly the same stretch of sky, like two people looking out of the same window. Kim has the radio on now. A female voice is talking about the 1918 influenza epidemic:

  It killed many more active members of the population than the war itself. Yet we remember the mud of the trenches much more than the terrible epidemic.

  Maybe that’s why we tend to obsess about Jill Meagher, rather than transparent tragedies like earthquakes or tsunamis, in which there are no moral issues at stake. The woman’s intonation fills the car.

  Only those with a lower immune system, like children and old people, survived it.

  Kim murmurs:

  ‘A karma of sorts – only the potential gun-carriers struck down.’

  She would have survived with a low immune system or a high immune system, say her untamed eyes in the rearview mirror. I can nearly catch the thought elbowing its way through all the pilots, brigadiers and snipers. I keep thinking about the 1918 epidemic. I don’t want to think about what’s going on around me this afternoon, as if a storm were gathering in the unsuspecting sky.

  Despite Kim’s energetic driving, nothing slides around. Each broom, each rake and each pair of shears has its place. Even Mitali never attempts to pack the van, and hands things to Kim at the end of a job, like a nurse to a surgeon. When you climb in, you could be climbing into her mind. The radio has been turned off. The program is finished. Mitali and Kim are chatting again. This is unusual – we often stay in silence on the last stretch of the ride to work, as if the gardens needed concentration, a kind of vegetal prayer, to approach them properly. Instead of listening to their phrases bouncing back and forth, all I can hear are their slightly ominous pauses. When Kim starts slowing down to find a parking spot, I avoid asking: ‘Is there something wrong?’ Unlike what most Australians would do, I wait like an ostrich, with my head buried in the potting mix, hoping that what I sense will pass me by.

  I love jumping out of the van when we arrive at a garden. We are a gang, a troop landing on a beach. According to an unexpressed agreement Kim never bothers telling me what to do, but gives Mitali our marching orders. We are ready. I put on the pair of freshly washed gardening gloves Kim has handed to me. Now that Kim and I have accepted that we do not communicate so well, our mutual sympathy seems to have acquired more elbowroom. This time the garden has a Japanese feel and its beauty is a surprise.

  ‘Are the owners Japanese?’ I ask.

  ‘No, she’s an older woman … Australian,’ says Kim.

  ‘Is she nice?’

  Kim doesn’t usually answer this kind of frivolity, but to my surprise she smiles and puts a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘She is.’

  I start work, still wondering what’s going on. Today the hard digging passes me by. Then the day flushes itself out as usual. Mitali and I are back kneeling next to each other and Kim is lopping a tree, called to high things because of her long limbs.

  ‘Have you been here before?’ I ask Mitali.

  She nods and looks over her shoulder.

  ‘Bea’s a bit like a fucking garden herself.’

  I look around. Everything manages to be both personal and universal: the low-browed house steeped in shade; the big, wise tree at one end, supervising our lesser activities; the wandering paths that always take you somewhere; the aromatic herbs and flowers that both define and weave into each other; the bins behind an asymmetrical row of bamboo, which you’d never think to call a hedge, restrained by sheets of corrugated iron under the earth; the small grey bench, so simple it could have grown there.

  A little later, when I am weeding by the bins, I see a woman in her seventies and hear her call out.

  ‘Hello, I’m Bea.’

  Her grey-blue eyes are smiling down at me, as if I had willed them into an appearance. She’s been standing on a stone trying to secure a plant to the fence. I extend a hand up to her, feeling like a character in a Nativity play. She grabs it and jumps down nimbly. Mitali and Kim have vanished. I can still hear them in the other part of the garden, but their voices are swallowed by the sunlight. The unknown woman and I seem quite alone in another garden of time. She moves to the grey bench and pats the wood next to her.

  ‘I know you should be working, but will you sit down with me?’

  ‘But what would the owner of the garden say?’

  Bea laughs.

  ‘Oh, we needn’t worry about her.’

  I sit down and two butterflies lace the air in front of us, settling on a flower, then on a leaf, drunk with summer air.

  ‘You have to wait until their wings are closed, you see, then you can pick them up without hurting them at all,’ she explains. ‘I saw a lot of butterflies in L
ondon during the war. It was as if nature knew what was going on, as if it were trying to restore some sort of balance.’

  The war, for the child Bea, was a shortage of toilet paper. She remembers the Americans giving millions of rolls away to the Londoners.

  I notice her clothes. They have a season of their own. Then the neighbour’s dog wriggles under the fence into her garden. She introduces him to me.

  ‘Here’s Larry,’ she says and pats his head. ‘I like dogs with pointy noses, they remind me of horses.’

  She has just come back from a trip to Langkawi, an archipelago off Malaysia. There she met a Muslim family, the women veiled, all waving to her in the midst of their Pilates exercises on the beach. Bea found unexpected friends in them. Then, without warning, she veers into another, suddenly more personal topic.

  ‘I had a Malaysian husband once.’

  She smiles peacefully.

  ‘He was a drunk. He would disappear for whole nights and come back in the early morning, pale, washed-out, composed. He needed to disappear from his mind. There was no other way, he told me, and he couldn’t explain it any further.’

  She knits her brow.

  ‘He’d come home and I’d say goodnight or good morning, maybe. It was no use saying anything else. Apart from that, it worked well between us. We were good in bed, good out of bed, good at living together. But, even though I like wine, the drinking got to me in the end. It was like having a python, even if it is a mild carpet snake, living under the house, knowing it was there, all the time, whether he drank or not.’

  She glances at me, calmly in control of her story.

  ‘When I finally left we both cried. A few years later, living quite alone, he stopped drinking. He asked me to come back, but I’d already married someone else.’

  Like her garden, Bea’s story settles me. It transforms the pattern of my day, changes its chemistry, shifts it into serenity, as if her words expressed something beyond their immediate meaning.

  ‘Do you like gardening?’ she asks me.