Trio Page 14

  ‘This heat will sap their strength, affect the strings,’ he said, agitated, ‘if we don’t get on with it.’

  Celia wondered – how many years earlier had it been? – five, seven? She could never keep track. They had newly arrived in Daglish, it was certainly after ’75, yes, that momentous period in Australian politics. And on that day she was wrestling with a small tree she’d just bought for the front garden. The nursery people had stowed it inside the gate, heavy in its black soil and plastic pot. She and Marcia were at that stage entering into a new phase of domestic planting, to Mickey’s amusement, and he was away down south, looking at a new arts centre.

  It was too large and heavy for her to shift. She thought James might lend a hand – he was a sturdy little man; between the two of them they could move it closer to their front verandah. Marcia was out and she wanted to get on with the task, so she walked around the back of James’s house.

  ‘Oh! Sorry.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Jeremy, rising from his sitting position on the steps. ‘James isn’t back from the shop yet. Can I help you with something?’ He was waiting to have his lesson.

  They introduced themselves, the beautiful young man, still a teenager, with the respectful air and, to him, an older woman, looking at him with candour, demurring then at asking him to lift something that might damage his hands. That consideration simply made his eyes warm with a smile. He moved it single-handed to the exact place she wanted it.

  After that he always waved to her, a little splay-fingered gesture, whenever he came for a lesson if she was reading or gardening out the front. It always made Celia smile. Some boys still possessed a brand of old-world refinement in their mannerisms.

  That seemed a long time ago. But his sweet ways persisted.

  The carols were about to begin and sheet music was being handed around. James had recently told her that Jeremy was living by himself in an old house in White Gum Valley, rented by his parents but paid for by him out of his dole allowance. He frequently fell behind. Added to his habits was one of visiting the casino whenever he thought he had surplus money.

  Eating on the front verandah, Celia asked him about his house. No, he said, he wasn’t happy there, because the timber floor went from one end of the house to the other, past the windows and there was something eerie about the place. She pondered this information, looking at him, wanting to ask him whether he still played the piano but the very idea was preposterous.

  ‘Does it scare you somehow, this eerie feeling?’

  ‘It doesn’t scare me,’ he was unwilling to own up to girlish fears, ‘but it’s an uneasy house. And I’m all alone there.’ It was a funny thing, she noticed, how he could talk the talk, until a piece of nonsense entered into it.

  ‘No girlfriend, Jeremy, a handsome boy like you? There used to be someone.’

  ‘No, Celia. I’d love to have a relationship and I never really have.’ And he turned away.

  James had told her he’d discovered that Jeremy had first started taking dope in his final year of high school, a time when he was very popular with the girls.

  ‘He could have taken his pick of the girls,’ James said with pride. But Jeremy was that rare phenomenon, a chaste lad. At that time he was more interested in music.

  ‘He’d have been better off experimenting with girls and leaving the pot alone,’ Celia said. But James had looked sour about this, as if he was relieved that Jeremy had kept free of girls even though he had seen the boy eyeing them off, in the way that boys did, covertly.

  Celia shook her head. ‘The whole Jeremy phenomenon is a mystery,’ she said in an undertone to Marcia.

  ‘Not really, when you think about it,’ said Marcia. And they sat together, having eaten and drunk a little, saying no more about James and Jeremy. What after all could you say about a loss of talent that hadn’t been so much lost as thrown out of a window like an old rag. Then there was James with his unspoken, certainly undeclared and probably unwanted love, looking on helplessly at what was, by now, a mental illness.

  But it was Christmas and everyone was making an effort. Two men in the room were now talking animatedly about computers, getting in a few words before the singing started. James was preparing to conduct and gave them a swift look. One speaker was quietly but obviously reaching a humorous end to the anecdote. Almost on the punchline Jeremy called out to no one in particular: ‘All I’ve got in my kitchen cupboard is a tin of curry! That’s the only thing in the whole of the larder, a tin of curry powder! I could find nothing else.’ He was laughing into the silence of this conversation-stopper.

  James said angrily, ‘Well chum, you should have added some water and noodles and eaten it!’

  ‘I did, mate!’ said Jeremy with a yelp of glee, addressing his old music teacher in a way he never would have before and missing James’s wrath completely.

  No one had ever heard Jeremy say anything mildly resembling levity bordering on disrespect. But there was a faint sympathetic laughter in the room and someone put his arm around Jeremy’s shoulders and led him outside to try some food while the concert started. Marcia looked over at James and said in a voice smooth as cream: ‘We’re waiting and ready, James dear. Tell us when to sing our parts.’ He grunted a little and gave his usual explanation of the work they were all going to sing. All ended well enough, with Celia sneaking out the back to talk with Jeremy, who appeared to have gone. She saw a taxi across the road start up with a flash of a black shirt in the back. They were headed towards the city, in the opposite direction to Jeremy’s house and in the general direction of the casino.

  11

  Perth, 2000

  Celia knows what’s getting her down, the niggling objections she has; it certainly has nothing to do with table manners. It’s the complacency all about her; Mickey was right. She was bored rigid by the complacency: people banging on about their successful children if you gave them half a chance. She had recently overheard a matron decrying the death of a young man from a rich family, not because he was a young man, but because he was ‘an achiever’. If he’d been a poor young man of limited abilities, she supposed his passing would have been of little account.

  Then there was the guy on the corner, a champagne-swigging self-proclaimed Communist who dismissed any pale centrist position, who couldn’t apparently see the falseness of his stance, attending conferences on the perils of alcohol, whilst drinking so much with other delegates, after the conference, he could barely stay on his feet (he confessed this to her). After which he would write up his ‘research’ and sleep like the just, she imagined, never lifting a finger to distribute any of his considerable wealth to the needy. Unless he made beaux gestes of a financial nature that he kept to himself. There was always that outside chance.

  Trudy was another one: outraged, on a recent trip with Elena through desert regions in the north-west, by the degenerate state of Aborigines they’d seen. And Trudy’s eyes had flashed and her hackles were up because, she says, they do not work. No, said Celia who had read a deal on the history of indigenous matters, one had to agree, that community of people don’t work; they are past the stage, many of them. Well the situation is impossible, said Trudy, fork held in her fist with the prongs upwards, it’s a disgrace. But whose? thought Celia, fuming inside at this righteous and ill-informed person whom she hardly knew. But she was the hostess and she said nothing.

  Well then: should she judge her guests? Damn right she should. Every day is a day of judgement as far as Celia is concerned: assessing, considering, reviewing what has just been said and seen. Moralising, if you like. But what have people got against morality? It’s what we’re all supposed to have been taught since kindergarten in some form or other, in order to make society work, to name but one reason, no?

  As far as wrongdoing is concerned, it’s now called illness or stupidity: ‘I did something stupid,’ says the sportsman who accepted bribes, when he means he did something wrong. And no one corrects him. ‘He needs counselling for a drinking prob
lem,’ they say of someone who has caused grievous bodily harm, when what he needs in Celia’s opinion, is punishment. Let’s not resile from damage done: paying your debt to the community you live in, and at considerable ease.

  What would Marcia think of all this?

  Celia felt the need for a short evening walk to the nearest park and back. Firecrackers, celebrating something, were blasting away in the distance, calling to mind childhood joy at the Catherine wheels, Tom Thumbs and sparklers – all pretty tame and domestic compared to the gargantuan displays and racket going on now. Mickey once said she was too precious with this aversion to any kind of loud noise. But all those years ago she’d been merely a tot in a house of three, with just-functioning parents and herself. There was steady drinking, no violence, but her role was to be quiet and play with her dolls. Celia hated dolls so she lived in her head with imaginary friends. And then there was Grandma who told her that Mummy and Dad were not very well so she had to be good. No sibling turned on her with a hissed insult. Nor gave her a hug, or a thump, or got in the way.

  Discord had a hold on her. As the evening deepened a choleric mood got the upper hand because she could hear something ugly. A pair of youngsters from across the way, adolescents, were having a hideous quarrel, the boy and girl screaming abuse at each other and both choking with anger and tears. Their voices began to diminish but the boy wanted the last angry word as he moved off:

  ‘Janice takes it up the bum for ten dollars!’ he yelled to the world.

  ‘Not anymore with you, but,’ cried the girl immediately. He’d never get the last word with that one, maybe that’s what made him sound utterly impotent. Celia could only feel compassion for both of them.

  If she had reported this interchange with Marcia, as indeed she used to, her friend would have smiled at the girl’s punchline but seeing Celia immersing herself into it unduly would have said:

  ‘We mustn’t dwell for too long on things unpleasant.’

  ‘Why mustn’t we? Don’t we need some sadness in the everyday to offset the happiness.’

  ‘Yes, but you shouldn’t, um, go seeking things to be unhappy about.’

  ‘Well, I don’t. They come looking for me.’

  A stretch of newly-laid concrete slabs along the way made a fresh footpath. Scratched deeply into the finely-chiselled smooth edges were the usual obscenities. Graffiti villains had got to them before the drying-out process, leaving the ageold marks for posterity. Anything new here? She scrutinised the words. No. If this was to do with immortality, wanting to leave a piece of damage behind you, it’s no more than what humankind has been doing for millennia, and to a greater degree than this. But mortality? Who said these kids had any such highfalutin thoughts as leaving a legacy? – the need to despoil through boredom is all this was about.

  The original Vandals, if she remembers correctly, came from somewhere in Scandinavia. Yes! her teacher at the convent had exclaimed, those mild-mannered, fair-looking people we know today, at that time took it into their heads to ride south, plundering and sacking as they went. When was it? Around the 400s they descended upon Spain, and on they sped to Roman-held Africa where they took possession of the wheat fields and created their own granaries. So then, thought Celia, they weren’t just having their way with half of Europe simply for the fun of it, but to lay claim to valuable commodities. And they looted Rome while they were about it. Sister Imelda, passionate woman, always with a project, scrambling through her skirts up a ladder in the library to reach some precious book, taught them how the Vandals have been given a bad press: that when they took Rome they did not massacre and stoop to arson. And they had an innings of about a hundred years. Sister Imelda’s brother was a cricketer.

  But domination of anything, anyone, passes; this was as clear as a spring day to Celia – something to bear in mind. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s loser. And in the end it’s all a waste of time, thinking you’ve made it to the top of the heap for good. Nothing is for keeps. Pillage and devastation is the history of mankind. Then rebuilding and more destruction. Order, chaos, then order again, for a while. There seemed no sense or reason to anything on earth as far as she could see, simply endless cycles. She liked to play with the idea of experiencing something after her own death – but doubted that one ended up as anything more than a piece of charcoal, or an atom of a piece of something.

  Celia had to get away from Australia when she was young. She’d gone to England first, and the following summer discovered the Mediterranean, in all its sparkling lustre and glory. Her first meeting with Mickey was yet to come. The Côte d’Azur was splendid but where were Audrey Hepburn, and Cary Grant? She had yet to learn that this was her time, and she had the chance to make it her own.

  But it was Rome and all places north of it that seduced her in the first place, not Naples or anywhere else in the mezzogiorno where those stunted, impoverished people she remembered from teenage years came from. Indeed Rome appeared to have nothing to do with the Italian boys she had met at home. The Eternal City took her over, until she knew that she could claim it as much as any other working person living there. Sleek Romans, groomed and self-pampered, knowing they were on view, paraded all around. Was there a nation, she wondered, a people anywhere, with such a sense of themselves on show? At the same time, where else did ordinary mortals have the courtesy to greet perfect strangers in shops and small spaces, nodding to each other with a ‘buongiorno’ – a civility that Anglo-Saxons had long since abandoned towards strangers, if ever they had observed it. Australians were better like that, she thought, friendlier. But Italians were not being friendly so much as polite. It was Marcia who had made this observation, all those years ago – strange, Marcia, so English in her understated way, yet who responded to the innate Italian sense of style and acknowledgement. Was Marse still the same? Or had she changed in Australia while Celia, wholesome youngster who could have come off a Vegemite poster felt she herself had become someone else, someone more tactful. Was that possible?

  Perhaps she would ring Marcia tonight. Why was it that they had allowed an unforeseen rift to become a long-term estrangement?

  Celia understood now, even past middle age, that Perth was a city for young people: spacious and noisy. After visiting an art gallery she walked down a street in her birthplace town, so warm and seductive on this balmy summer night. Everything looked brand spanking new, no matter how often you went away and returned. It was decided when Celia was barely past childhood, that anything of historical interest here must be pulled down with all speed to make way for shiny edifices of indifferent design. What they were developing in her view were their own bank accounts, rather than any real cohesion of current life.

  But now just three kilometres out of central Perth, where dinky cottages and a few old buildings were still permitted to stand, she set off one morning to the post office. She hadn’t been on this street for decades, and what a transformation! The air was fragrant; flowers were spilling out of hundreds of buckets all along the main thoroughfare. There were a number of deli/ florists along here and the colour combined with the scents made the whole road a thing of beauty and a joy forever. But today it exuded carnival. Young women, matrons, hairy young men were all walking into the shops and coming out with their arms full of glorious bunches of every flower imaginable.

  Ah! It was Mother’s Day. Even people, she suspected, who paid scant attention to their mother for most of the year, were overcome by sentiment and goodwill on this day, seduced by the beauty of the blue May sky, the anticipation of their mother’s smile and the liveliness of the street that gave them an opportunity to participate.

  Celia herself felt no such sentiment, since she’d not had the chance to give her mother flowers. Daddy and Mummy had destroyed themselves by the time Celia had reached the age of reason. She’d asked a migrant acquaintance recently why she still lived in Australia; now that things are so much better in her own country, didn’t she want to return and live near her sisters and brothers? The woman r
eplied incredulously, ‘I’m here for my son, of course.’ And the son had done well for himself, this was true. But who was to say – she wanted to ask – that her son’s life was more worthy of fulfilment and family proximity than the mother’s? She found a coffee shop and sat down to think in comfort, looking at passers-by.

  Celia had just finished with someone. Which was different from dropping someone. The same sense of relief must accompany the end of a long affair. How strange and disturbing that one or the other is holding the right cards in these matters, as though, what? one’s pride? is at stake. She would of course get over this glitch, this stop-and-start and final stop with the woman she had convinced herself, only a week ago and out of a sense of self-imposed isolation, that she couldn’t foresee her future without. Not that there had been sex involved but she could feel the other’s moving towards it. Oh, give Celia a cup of tea any day with a nice straight woman, rather than the prospect of hot sex then tedium with someone you could hardly call gay. She’d finally sorted out her sex life anyway, happier by far was she not seeking to be like everyone else but an abstainer. Any port in a storm was wrong-headed; yes, she should have known that, years ago.

  The weather had changed altogether. It was autumn, after all. The sky had changed its mind. Light rain was starting to fall in a sly sort of way, a fine Scottish-mist class of rain, pretending it couldn’t be seen. Increasingly soft drizzle made everything smell even sweeter, soaking into her reveries. She decided to buy some flowers; they would be all right until she got back to Fremantle. And she went towards the flower shop by herself, accompanied by her familiar old friend, loneliness.

  In the late afternoon of the next day, she left her house to buy a couple of food items. Putting on a coat she noticed two buttons missing; must attend to that. There was a mercer’s not far away where they sold all kinds of old-fashioned things, where women customers and staff murmured about wool thickness and alternative types of stitch, in voices one only heard now in this kind of store. She could think of no other place where this kind of quiet exchange took place, certainly not libraries anymore, where people did talk if they felt like it and no one checked them. Though most visitors were now sitting in front of a wretched computer, clicking and pressing buttons.