Part 55 (1/2)

”Thank you.”

”But always.”

It went on, we will leave it there. Let me say only that there were soon more tears-even Goldstein joined in-and soon I was walking through the warm bright streets of Sydney with my dancer on one arm and my gentle son upon the other. We proceeded towards my tower and you will understand that at a time like this a Chinaman's dead finger might easily escape my notice.

45.

You, my dear sticky-beak, already know the conditions of life on the fourth gallery, but for me it was a revelation.

My son had made his workplace like a cathedral and I had expected him, therefore, to live in a palace, not a prison. It was easy to see why the most normal person would not wish to sleep in the so-called flat where my boy (presuming me well past such a grubby thing as copulation) made up a bunk for me, throwing on children's bunny rugs and heavy eiderdowns although the night was warm and the air stifling. The flat had no windows, merely small opaque skylights which-I could see the rusty trails-leaked every time it rained. No wonder his children preferred the company of their mother. There was a ripe odour of horse meat and ageing apples, both of them pervasive smells that get themselves soaked into every surface so that a fellow trying to block his nose from them will find his blankets are as contaminated as the air itself.

How could you compare this with the prospect from the fourth gallery where you could gaze upwards and find the sky full of bruised thunderclouds or blinding blue, on whose varnished rail you could lean, like a first-cla.s.s pa.s.senger on an ocean liner and watch the customers perform their antics on the ground floor below? Here you could have the most beautiful birds on earth to amuse you, and at night you could find your way into the green watery depths of sleep via the cool tanks of dreaming reef fish.

And yet, for all this possibility, the style of life on the fourth gallery had none of the poetry I had imagined when, just that morning, I had stood below and craned my neck to catch a glimpse of it. And yes, I admit it, I was disappointed at first and I did not like the way they permitted the overweight goanna to drag its peeling belly across the floor so that one had to be reminded-constantly-not to trip over the nasty thing. Emma tried to persuade me to pat it, but I merely touched it.

They had made a slum of it.

It is true that Mr Lo kept his cage tidy. And Goldstein, likewise, living in the rejected lattice, kept everything neat and spartan. She had a chair and a little desk. There was a newspaper photograph of me hanging on the wall in a neat black frame. But the rest of the place was-you know already-like a toolshed, a warehouse, a junk room, a repository for broken toys, empty saucepans, dispossessed chairs, unhung curtains, rope, nails, women's magazines and leftovers laid out for the goanna and then not found suitable by the recipient who spent its mornings next to Emma's cage, basking under an ultraviolet light.

When I saw the fourth gallery my face, I am told by a dancer, went very odd. She said my skin went taut and then rather grey and after that it took on a white waxy sheen. Doubtless she tells the truth, but this pessimism, this shock, while quite natural, would not have lasted for a moment. It did not take me a minute to see what was to be done, what I was to do, and I was not angry or irritated, but delighted, that I had been given an occupation, that I could deliver value to my family so easily and quickly. I did not disapprove, as Leah thought I did, of the tangle of humanity. It was the tangle of objects that I loathed. It was the objects that seemed to rule.

To reach the bedroom one had to pa.s.s through the kitchen where meals were prepared for both pets and humans. There was no decent lighting. The feed bins were smeared with broken egg. Fortunately the wall that separated it from the gallery did not appear to be structural. I would need a sledge-hammer to begin the opening out. There were a number of tools I would need at the same time, and a quant.i.ty of rough-sawn hardwood.

So even while my son was busy making sure I did not share a bed with Leah Goldstein, I was turning my mind to his fourth gallery. I thanked him for his bed quite graciously and accepted a loan of a toothbrush for my dentures. I was then taken to say goodnight to everyone, and I shook the older boys by the hand and accepted a kiss from their younger brother. When I said goodnight to Goldstein I gave her a wink and a grin and kissed her on her nose. Neither of us argued with our sentence.

They put me in my hole and turned off the light. Was I resentful? No, I was not. I threw off my blankets and pulled a damp sheet over my ears and nose and waited for sleep.

My aches began to set themselves up like instruments in an orchestra. First the low grumbling oboe of my back, then the violin sciatica in my leg. Teeth and kidneys arranged themselves and I greeted my afflictions by name.

I was used to a coir mat in Rankin Downs. Its subst.i.tute was too small and soft. I dragged it off the bed and set it up on the floor, but the apple smell seemed worse down there, and anyway I could not stop my brain from spinning. Too much had happened in one day, to have pa.s.sed from prison to freedom, from murder to love, and now, as I lay on the floor in this airless room, to the problems of architecture.

It did not come to me immediately. I was down there wrestling with it for an hour or two before I saw it. This was no job for hessian or tin or chicken wire. It should be thin and elegant, with gla.s.s and steel and walls full of swimming fish. There wasn't a pencil in the room. I turned out the drawers but they held only socks and school reports. I put on my tired and sticky s.h.i.+rt and went out to the kitchen to find a pencil. I could see through the kitchen window that the gallery lights were out and I was reluctant to draw attention to myself. I flashed the kitchen light on and off but could see no pencil. I stood on something nasty but it was perhaps only a grape-although if you were guided by your nose you would think it a fish's kidney or an eyeball. I could feel millet and other seeds beneath my bare feet.

I slipped out the door to the gallery. It was very quiet, but also full of the currents of breathing air. Emma was lying on her back and was the loudest, but I could hear them all, the soft whisper of children's breath included. I went to the rail and looked up at the skylight. There was no moon and the stars were bright. I could make out the giddy powder of the Milky Way and I stood there, craning my neck, trying to make out the Southern Cross. I could not find it, of course (what Australian ever can?) but that is not the point at all and you will appreciate that a skylight full of stars is not a thing that a prisoner, even one from Rankin Downs, is used to. I began to incorporate a telescope in my plans. I would need to drop a concrete pier through four storeys, but it could be done elegantly, I knew it could, and you can imagine what it would be like to lie in bed with skin touching skin and the two of you looking, sighing, staring at the rings of Saturn.

My thoughts then, although occupied in the most sentimental way with copulation, were really more concerned with architecture, the placing of the concrete pier in such a way that I did not destroy the open s.p.a.ce I loved so much.

I was, as they say, a million miles away, when Leah Goldstein put her lips one inch away from my ear.

”I'm a bit partial,” she said.

We will forget the fright she gave me, the wild alarm of skipping rhythms she triggered in my heart so that, for a moment, it careered around like a car on a wet corner, and remember rather, that we kissed, most gently, and retired to the privacy of my room.

But here, I must confess it, I was as nervous as a boy. I had not been sorry to put off the moment I also wanted so much, and when Charles locked me away I did not complain because it suited me. Ten years in a prison does not engender confidence in these delicate matters which one, at the same time, has spent so many hours dwelling on, so in the end one has enough material to make a palace from the leftovers. I had not, as Goldstein imagined, come seeking her out. Had I known she was waiting for me I would have stayed alone on my mattress on the floor.

A prisoner's memory turns love-making into something at once sweet and coa.r.s.e, as saccharine as a pin-up, as rough as his hands on his c.o.c.k, all worried whether his s.e.m.e.n will splash on to his clothes or go into the bucket and I had forgotten the tiny intimacies of that ache I had named a f.u.c.k, the small pinching fingers on my nipples and belly, the ripe musky honey beneath the sweet bush of shampooed hair, the way a face in the dark (in the light too) changes its meaning and how words you thought yourself too old to say, sentiments you imagined dead and drowned, bubble up from the muddy floor and burst in such explosions of light, of perfume, floral yeasts and uric acid, and my Leah's eyes were huge and s.h.i.+ning (nebulae, supernovae) and as she arched her back and locked her legs around mine so we were held hard, tight in a rack, Herbert Badgery was caught by surprise to find himself awash with grat.i.tude, a prisoner in a rocking-horse of sighs.

46.

Herbert Badgery lay in Leah Goldstein's arms. She smelt the musty odours of Rankin Downs seeping from his skin, like old rags kept in a cleaner's bucket for too long a time. He was already asleep.

Down in Pitt Street a drunk was pouring forth an endless mantra of echoing abuse against the empty summer streets.

Herbert Badgery began to snore, quietly. She was sorry she had not told him what she meant, had not said it properly. She had belittled herself. It was a stupid habit. She had made light of her ability to earn ten quid a week, as if it had been bought lightly or maintained easily. She had told him that the stories were hack work, which was true, and that they were women's stories, which was true in that they were written for the demands of the editors of women's magazines. But she had not told him that this constant production was like walking, each day, through a field of thigh-high mud. The fiction editors were arrogant and stupid enough to think themselves superior to their readers. You could only supply them with what they wished by thinking badly of human beings.

And yet she had taught herself to do this work because it was work that could be done anywhere, in a cafe in Sydney or sitting by a roadside at Goondiwindi. It would provide enough, with Herbert's pension, to live free of Charles's charity-they would not need to be family pets like Mr Lo.

She dreamed of landscapes cut with raw red roads, hills sliced by deep crimson cuttings, yellow ochre rocks striated with the long straight stabs of jack-hammers. Her mind, perversely perhaps, found peace in pictures of wide khaki seas around small treeless towns with the paling fences so new you could smell the tree sap in them. In these landscapes, by these roads, she found a shrill, ragged, unaesthetic optimism. It was ignorant and guiltless, and she had not yet told him but it was what she craved.

She could tell him tomorrow, but tonight she could now tell herself something else-she could allow herself to feel the hate she had for the pet emporium. And, indeed, lying in the unventilated dark, on a mattress on the floor, with the grease of cosmetics still on her face, she allowed a ripple of hatred, an electric jolt to pa.s.s down her body.

”I hate this place,” she said. She said it out loud just to make herself hear what she thought, so that she could no longer pretend to herself that she thought otherwise.

”Signed,” she whispered, ”signed, L. Goldstein.”

Herbert rolled on to his back and she dragged her arm out from under him. She loved him, but she would rather go and sleep in her own bed by herself. It was a habit, probably a selfish one. It was this last thought that made her stay and, also, her wish not to hurt him. She put the sheet over him and sat, hunched, on the edge of the mattress.

She hated it. She wanted to leave so much that tomorrow would not be too soon. She would not waste another moment of her life, that river filled with jetsam which had once-it looked so sad and pitiful now-been so important to her.

No longer would she be understanding Leah. She liked and cared for Charles but her feelings for Emma and her children were false emotions and she tasted their taste in the cosmetics on her face. She had cooked their bland meals for them, wiped their noses, mended their socks, done all the simple things they all appeared to be incapable of doing. She had accepted the mindless ordinariness of their lives because she did not wish to live alone, perhaps, or because she could never explain to Charles why she might want to leave his custody.

But she was not a young girl any more. She was thirty-seven years old and had a crease beneath her bottom and a little roll of fat on her middle. She was thirty-seven and had, for the most part, wasted her life as if she hated it.

She started to make pictures in her closed eyes, a habit she had developed on her insomniac nights in Bondi. She could make perfect pictures: twisted white eucalypts at a corner of a white road near Cooma, bristling khaki banksias in the foot-burning sand at Coolum, Gymea lilies in the scrub around Dural, like burning weapons on long shafts placed defiantly to warn intruders. She saw the cliffs and waters of the Hawkesbury lying in the water like the scaly back of a partly-submerged reptilian hand.

”Cdwerther,” said Herbert Badgery.

She turned her head. He also was sitting upright.

”What?” she asked.

”C-wder. Ah, strewth, I can't even say it.” Then, laughing, he lay down again, still asleep.

Leah Goldstein started giggling.

Tonight, when he lost his temper with his naive son, she had been so pleased. She had been pleased, anyway, to see again her blue-eyed scoundrel and confidence man, but she was pleased, particularly, to see that he still could care about a thing like that, care enough to lose his temper.

At last, she thought, I've done something right.

”You're so much nicer,” she told the sleeping man. ”You're not hard and scratchy any more. Can you hear me?”