Part 61 (1/2)
I said: ”Not long for this old planet now.”
They couldn't understand a word I said, and it didn't matter, because I was only lying to cheer them up. Death was their hobby, their dream, their fear, the only subject worth consideration.
Afterwards we went back for drinks at the emporium and George and Henry puffed and grunted carrying me up four flights of stairs.
You would not glorify the affair by calling it a wake. They were all too old and depressing and I went to my room and left them to mutter about how ill I looked, I could hear them sighing and farting and rattling their cups in their saucers, but I had serious matters to attend to-I had my Vegemite jar back.
The thing that killed my boy was not half goanna and half human at all. Neither was it one of the s.h.i.+fting miasmas that had so frightened Sergeant Moth. It was a dragon, a solid being, two inches tall. When it saw me the evil f.u.c.ker puffed up its throat and showed its red insides to me. Oh, Christ, it was a nasty piece of work. It reared up on its hind legs and scratched at the gla.s.s with its long black claws while its whole body pulsed with rage, changing from a deep black green to a bloated pearlescent grey.
I did not start to battle with it immediately. In fact I made myself ignore it. I began by working on the rusty lid with a little piece of wire wool. This may sound simple enough, but when your left arm does not work it is a difficult enough task to occupy all your attention. When the lid was s.h.i.+ning clean I used meths and rag on the gla.s.s while I listened to Emma's keening through my door.
If the death had not also revealed the financial frailty of the structure on which the family relied, it may well have served to draw us all closer together.
Those jumbled pieces of paper on Charles's desk contained enough information to indicate that the business was not only making a loss, but that the situation was not acceptable to either of the other two shareholders. This was no longer, as everyone thought it was, Schick Inc. and Gulf & Western. Gulf & Western had sold their holding to a Chicago company called Jayoyo Pty Ltd whose function no one knew. The majority shareholders, it would seem-they had not said so in writing-were willing, eager even, to continue their support of the business providing the lucrative banned species could be ”facilitated” out of the country. Charles had blithely ignored all such requests.
The state of the books suggested only two possibilities: either the family complied with the majority shareholders or they sold out to them.
Everybody had a different point of view. I heard them squabbling through my door and I know that it is an important part of any funeral, that the squabbling and thieving takes people's minds off their grief. That was the day Henry's wife stole a pair of rare apricot-coloured budgies which she claimed Charles had promised her. George took the mist nets. Even Henry Underhill (whose heart was bad) tried to get away with the ladder, although he had to abandon it on the first landing, where it stayed, propped against the wall, for five years.
Emma would not take any notice of them. It was a week before any one could get her to pay any attention to the question of the future. I took no direct part in this. No one, by the way, asked me to. In any case, I was busy with the Vegemite jar. I crooned to it. I sang it songs as well as I could. In the end it behaved no differently from any nervous horse which, although it may snort and rear and flare its nostrils, can be quietened in the end.
But although I took no part in the discussion I saw, from my window, big bow-legged Henry stride across the street with his pretty wife in trail. I saw all the supplicants-George, Phoebe, Van Kraligan-they all came, all of them. Some carried briefcases, others rolls of paper, others no more than a belligerent face.
Goldstein came and told me of their propositions. I kept my bottle under my rug while she fed me porridge. She talked about how stupid they were, that they could not and would not accept the situation, that the days of the pet shop were over-there was nothing left to argue over. She did not need my answers but I gave her some gurgles anyway. The building would have to be sold, the debts paid off, the company liquidated. You should have seen her eyes-all afire with her enthusiasm. She fed me fiercely, happily, shoving in porridge before I had finished swallowing the last lot. There would be just enough money, she said, to buy Emma a little house and give her a pension.
The rest of us, she said, would have to make our own arrangements.
But Goldstein's agitated happiness was premature because when the widow understood the situation, she became very quiet. She was, at the moment Goldstein finally made it clear to her, sitting behind her late husband's cedar desk, with her thumb under the edge, and her fingers flattened on the top.
”This is my home,” she told Leah Goldstein.
”Emma, look at this.” Goldstein pushed a bookkeeper's journal towards her, but Emma would no longer look at figures written on paper. ”It is not your home at all. It belongs to the Yanks.”
Emma murmured and ran her fingertip along Goldstein's arms.
”Emma, you've got to face reality. You are not calling the tune. They are.”
Emma smiled. It was the first time she had smiled since Charles had died.
”My boy will look after me,” she said, meaning Hissao, although she did not name him.
”Emma, he can't.”
”Oh yes he can,” said Emma. ”You watch him, girlie.”
The last person to call Goldstein ”girlie” had been Mervyn Sullivan. She did not take to it at all.
62.
Leah Goldstein no longer saw the building as a construction of bricks, mortar and other inert matter. It had fibrous matted roots that pushed down into the tank stream. It sweated and groaned and sighed in the wind.
Its whole function was entrapment and its inhabitants could happily while away afternoons and years without any bigger scheme, listening to the races on the radio, reaching out for another oyster, worrying only that the beer gla.s.ses were free of detergent and kept, cold and frosted, in the fridge. They discussed the quality of the harbour prawns, got drunk, and crunched the prawns' heads, imagining themselves free and happy while all the time they were servants of the building. It made them behave in disgusting ways.
Leah looked at the cold hard look in Emma's glittering eyes. It was not grief. It was something else and Leah recognized the feeling as one she had known herself.
As she followed Emma out of the office Leah vowed, in a properly formed, silent sentence, that she would stand, one day soon, in Pitt Street and watch the emporium fall to the earth as sweetly as a dress slipping off a coat-hanger, dropping softly, lying formless, broken in the dust.
To this end she took Hissao to a beer garden in Redfern. She did not choose Redfern for any particular reason. It happened to be a hotel that she knew from Labour Party meetings and it was close to the university. Later in the day it would turn into a snake pit and, as it reached its broken-gla.s.sed climax at six p.m., it would be a place where crims paid off coppers and, occasionally, shot their compet.i.tors. But at this time, eleven in the morning, it was sunny and fresh and the wall-eyed barman had hosed down the bright gravel and driven, with the force of the water, yesterday's cigarette b.u.t.ts and dead matches out of sight. He had picked up the sodden paper napkins and the bare chop bones and Mich Crozier's was ready for another day.
The term ”garden”, of course, gives a misleading picture of Crozier's-it was a mostly shadeless area of crushed quartz like the Parramatta used-car yard Mich had owned in the 1950s and, in the middle of this blindingly white sea was a redbrick island labelled LADIES LADIES and and GENTS GENTS. If you did not mind the smell you could enjoy the shade the toilet block provided or, if you did mind, which Leah did, you could choose one of the tables next to the lattice that Mich or Rosalie had nailed to the paling fence and screwed to the brick wall of the printing works next door. They had planted jasmine too, but people kept p.i.s.sing on it and it died.
The tables were slatted, with each slat painted a different fairground colour and, as it was almost impossible to make the tables steady, beer spilt easily and then dripped through the slats.
Hissao sat there with beer-wet knees in his corduroy trousers, looking across at Leah Goldstein, wondering why she had asked to meet him. She wore a pleasantly faded blue-checked s.h.i.+rt, the simplicity of which was contradicted, or at least underlined, by a thin gold chain she wore around her remarkably smooth neck. Her hair was untidy, flecked with grey, and she had pushed it back from her handsome face as if she were impatient with it and had more important things to consider. She lit a cigarette in a very businesslike way, inhaled, exhaled, and lined up her packet of matches with her cigarettes.
”Cheers,” she said, and raised her gla.s.s as if she were in the habit of drinking beer at eleven in the morning every day.
”Cheers,” said Hissao. He was a little frightened of her and also very curious. He had known her all his life and yet knew nothing about her. He guessed, but had never been told, that she had been his grandfather's lover. She had been married to the notorious Izzie Kaletsky. She had been a dancer in the Great Depression. She had had an interesting life and he hoped that, in the hothouse emotions generated by his father's suicide, they would, at last, be able to speak to each other. He felt they would have much in common.
Leah, for her part, was suddenly nervous of Hissao. She had not been expecting nervousness, but she was keyed up about her objective and she suddenly felt that tightness in the throat, the slight tremolo in her voice that she experienced when called to speak in public. She knew nothing about Corbusier and thus missed the significance of the bow tie. She thought he looked unpleasantly slick, like a real-estate salesman.
Hiss...o...b..gan to talk to cover the uneasiness of silence. Nothing in his manner or the timbre of his voice suggested anything but social ease. He felt shy and awkward.
He made some observations about the nature of beer gardens and wondered, out loud, about the habit of painting the slatted tables in different colours. Perhaps, he said (suddenly hit with the idea that she had brought him here to tell him that his father had not been his father at all) perhaps the colours of the tables were really a reference to seaside umbrellas and deckchairs, a signal about leisure and working-cla.s.s holidays by the sea.
Leah heard only urbane drivel of the type, she imagined, people spoke at c.o.c.ktail parties. It made her less confident of success, but she waited for him to finish, smiled when he had and, having provided enough punctuation with a deep draught of cold bitter beer, told him what she had come to tell him. Her voice was too tight. She had the sense of talking into a deep well, of shouting against air. She ignored her quavering voice, and pushed on, outlining the risks for him, both legal and moral, of doing what his mother seemed to want, i.e., running the emporium as their American masters wished.
Hissao had no intention of being a lackey. He was not worried about these so-called risks. He was worried that Leah Goldstein seemed serious and unhappy.
”Ah,” he said, raising his eyebrows comically, poking gentle fun at the seriousness. He tilted back on the chair and then dropped forward. ”Ah so,” he said, making himself look as j.a.panese as anything in Kurosawa, ”Ah, so-deska?”
Leah misunderstood the performance. She was suspicious of the smiling face and all this animation at a time when he should, given what he had witnessed, be filled with grief. He was spoiled and young and corrupt and she saw, in his white collar and smarmy tie, the salesman's desire to please.
”So I am directed to be a smuggler, eh?” Hissao smiled into his beer. It was easy to forget he was only eighteen years old. ”That's the plan. The business is viable after all?” He was being funny, so he imagined.
Leah had never been good with irony. She lit a second cigarette and frowned.
”We'll all be rich,” Hissao said gaily. ”We could have sports cars and lovers.” He was joking of course, but he dropped the word ”lovers” into the stream of his talk as deliberately as a fisherman letting a mud-eye float past a watching trout. He wanted Goldstein to talk about lovers, her lovers, his mother's lovers. He wanted confessions, secrets, all the lovely laundry of the past.
It was, however, the wrong approach for Goldstein. She thought him frivolous and silly. She gave him a stern lecture on the American takeovers of Australian industry-a subject she had been researching for the Labour Party-and talked about the political ramifications of it, both in terms of ever-increasing dependence on American investment and the paybacks a client state must make, like fighting wars in Korea and other places.
It was all unnecessary. Hissao knew almost as much about the subject as she did. He was soon bored and boredom-because he was not a meek young man-soon gave way to irritation.
”I see,” he said, now parodying the very quality Leah had misread in him. He filled his beer gla.s.s from the jug. ”But it doesn't matter, so long as the Resch's is still cold.”