Do You Love Me or What? Read online

  She tossed back her head and laughed. They went back to the porch.

  ‘There’s lots to eat,’ he said.

  ‘It takes me back,’ she said.

  After a silence, she added: ‘Drinking milk, I mean.’ And after another silence, she said:

  ‘I always think ice blocks make things festive.’

  After several refills of milk, he looked at his watch, which allowed her to look at hers. ‘Nearly midnight,’ she said brightly. She still believed in his party.

  ‘What’s for your dinner tonight?’ he said, because of her bright laugh.

  She was torn between honesty and the desire to make her fridge seem glamorous. She decided on honesty, which she always did.

  ‘Old spaghetti,’ she said.

  ‘I have some cereal,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  There was a pause.

  ‘To eat?’ she asked.

  They ate cereal in his kitchen. He owned two bowls, so they ate from bowls. There wasn’t any sugar, and she didn’t offer to run to her house for some, because she suspected her packet in the cupboard was limp with emptiness and perhaps black with ants. Besides, there was something brewing in the atmosphere, the way he dabbed his finger in the milk at the bottom of his bowl, touching the china as if – she thought with another blush – as if it was her. The thought wouldn’t stop. As if it were her breasts. What if he guessed her thoughts! He might laugh. On the other hand, he might declare love. She wouldn’t know where to look. But when his plate was dabbed clean, she felt the thought fade.

  She began to move her legs under his laminex table as if she was about to leave. She was at his front gate before he spoke.

  ‘Would you stay tonight?’ he asked.

  She thought of her bed, narrow and forlorn in her silent house.

  She stayed.

  In the dark he seemed less shy. To her surprise, little was asked of her. Only that she hold him, which she was glad to do, damply and clumsily. She was also glad that the bedding operation happened at the far end of her body and she didn’t have to look, just murmur encouragement.

  By morning, she felt a certain fondness, especially because he’d ended with such gentleness her thirty-nine year wait. She boldly kissed his chin, though it was prickly already. She wanted to thank him, though that might not be appropriate.

  ‘Why have you been a virgin so long?’ he asked. She laughed, to fill the space of the room.

  ‘I know!’ he said. ‘It was because you wanted to make things last.’

  He touched her curly dark hair, as if he was marvelling that she was there beside him. It was very pleasurable to her to fill a room with an acknowledgement of happiness. It was almost like happiness.

  ‘I might hold another party soon,’ he said. ‘If a party can bring you to me.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ she said quickly.

  ‘When?’ she asked after a while.

  ‘Maybe next year,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not so soon,’ she said, gently, so he wouldn’t feel criticised.

  She laughed again, to show how soon she wanted his party, and him.

  ‘When would you come to another party I held?’ he asked.

  She wanted to say tomorrow, but that might seem greedy. She so wanted to be perfect.

  ‘In six weeks,’ she said.

  He set the exact date, even to the hour.

  He wanted to be prepared. He wanted to be sure she’d come, and he thought that exactitude might provide a guarantee.

  She didn’t like to tell him that in her happiness, she hadn’t taken precautions. He would’ve assumed she had. She didn’t know how to explain. She left the city immediately. And by the last day of winter, in a rented house in a country town that didn’t prove friendly, she gave birth to a child. She still didn’t know what words to say to such an urbane man who was surrounded by urgent messages. In fact, she didn’t contact him for three years.

  But one day, because her child expected it of her, she wrote him a letter.

  She counted the hours before he’d receive it. She thought he might read it when he got home from work.

  After twenty-four hours, she allowed herself to think He’ll be reading it now. Right now. She could imagine his face so clearly, reading her modest words in his kitchen.

  She recited her letter to herself, sure she could even tell which word he was up to.

  She waited for his reply.

  But there was no reply, and as the days and weeks passed, she felt abashed. Perhaps this sophisticated man didn’t even remember her.

  She hadn’t guessed that when she left the morning after the party, Gerard didn’t clean or rearrange anything in his house. He didn’t move the jars or touch the boxes of cereals. He wanted his things to be like they were when she’d gazed on them. He kissed the bed sheets every night, the very spot where she had lain. It was the most difficult waiting of his life, that six weeks waiting for their next party. All year lay in those six weeks, the heat of summer, the chilly fear of autumn, the dreariness of winter, the hope of spring. And then the joyful evening, which became the dreadful evening when she didn’t come walking up the street into his arms, not at dusk, not mid-evening, that dreadful moment at three in the morning when he had to agree with the snickering voice inside him that she wasn’t going to turn up. He’d wept then. He felt he’d never wept before, not when his mother left, not when his father left, if this was weeping. Grey-faced with exhaustion and despair, he couldn’t go to work the next day, or for many days, until despair became resentment, and he could kick things, like the walls of his house, or himself.

  When her letter arrived in the post three years too late, with her name on the back of the envelope, his heart had left his chest, and only crept back in terror if he promised not to open it, not yet, not yet. Because there has to be an end to pain. He didn’t put her letter in his garbage bin, but on his mantelshelf, where he’d allow himself to glance at it, still unopened, his timid heart saying Not yet. It might be there still on his mantelshelf to this very day but he ran out of paper one day for a new shopping list, and his heart allowed him to take her envelope down, of course only so he could use the envelope for a message to be hung on his string in his hall. Once he’d torn the envelope, it seemed wasteful not to read her words, her wonderful, wonderful words. He shouted until his neighbours cupped glasses onto their walls to listen to the noisy man next door who’d always been so quiet.

  He left the city that evening for her country town.

  ‘That’d be Craig Johnson’s old house,’ said a taxi driver at the station.‘ Craig had some tenants, but they left a week or two ago. And Craig’s passed on now.’

  In the dark, he could make out a small house in a garden of weeds with a big yellow sign saying ‘For Sale’.

  ‘Where have the tenants gone?’ he asked the driver.

  ‘Don’t know,’ the driver said. ‘She kept to herself. You can probably get in, we leave back doors unlocked here. We’re not like you city people, we’re all friendly.’

  ‘How long have they been gone?’

  ‘It’d be just a matter of days.’

  He followed Gerard into the house. He heard her voice. He smelled her. Every door he opened, he was sure she was there behind the next one and the next one. The house was full of her laughter and of something else, the gurgling of a child. In a dark cupboard Gerard found a stuffed toy, a smiling shark with threadbare fur.

  ‘Funny what kids take to,’ said the taxi driver.

  He saw Gerard’s face move and feared he’d overstepped the mark and that he might lose his tip.

  ‘She’d be missing it,’ he added. ‘It’s been loved. Got kids myself. They always pester you to go back for something they’ve lost. And you always end up giving in.’

  Gerard was holding up the toy. He could see dangling from its tail, and illuminated by street light, one single curly childish blonde hair. He turned to the taxi driver.

  ‘What’s the kid
like?’ he asked.

  He was surprised to find that as he asked the simple question, his voice trembled. He cleared his throat, to cover the tremble.

  ‘Smart,’ said the taxi driver, who didn’t remember at all.

  ‘Smart!’ repeated Gerard proudly. He put the toy on the mantelshelf, because a mantelshelf had brought her back before, or at least it had held her wonderful letter.

  ‘A bit of a dump,’ the taxi driver said, looking around.

  ‘I’ll buy it,’ said Gerard. ‘Can you take me to the owner right now, Craig Johnson, did you say — his relative?’

  ‘Sure,’ said the taxi driver, brightening up because this fare was turning out to be a good one.

  ‘Once you put some paint on this place, you won’t know it,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll wait and see’, said Gerard. ‘You never know.’

  Passport

  He was my first love, and unrequited. The first of many, as if I must teach myself again and again that though you pull at invisible cobwebs in the dark, they cling, they hide you from what’s possible.

  We were one of those sad, violent families living noisily at the edges of a dusty Australian bush town. The trouble with such families is they only have each other, for relatives dare not come near, and each family member is too crestfallen to make friends in the great beckoning outside. It would’ve required smiles we couldn’t muster, I couldn’t muster. In that era, we had few media distractions – a crackling radio, a grey and white TV with American game shows, and a wall-hung phone that never rang.

  But my father illuminated my life, partly because of his paintings, and partly because of his mystery. I didn’t know how to love my mother.

  I was the youngest child, the only girl. I was the one who tore home along the bush track from the school bus to watch my father paint. Most afternoons of my childhood till dinner time, I spent silent, motionless, not even slapping flies, listening to the quiet brush on the weave of the canvas, the quiet scrape of the palette knife, the dipping of his brush into the squeezed-out coils of colours, lazy despite their immanence, and my father’s voice almost whispering:

  ‘Out of the way,’ if I was in the path of his hand. There seemed to be eyes on the ends of his fingers as he, gazing at the canvas, dipped the brush always into the right coil: cadmium yellow, cerulean blue, alizarin crimson, viridian green, vermilion, burnt sienna, lying in the ritual order that, even as a woman, I can still recite, an order that seemed intrinsic to the world, like the order of the planets.

  There was a further delight: I found as I grew older that if I breathed with him – now in, now out, now in, now out – after a while he’d forget I was separate to him and murmur his thoughts: ‘If I lighten that post with chrome white it will leap to the foreground’ – and it leapt! – how can a person predict that? – ‘What matters is not the shape of the leaves but the shape they cut out of the sky’ – yes, now I saw that cut-out sky – ‘It’s not the flower itself, it’s the feeling of the flower: see the petals without looking, enter them’ – and slowly the hot room, sticky with sadness, dipped and fell away and I entered the fleshy petal.

  Those afternoons were rainbows in my childhood.

  They’re my justification for the adoration: who wouldn’t fall in love with such a parent?

  We children could recite the romantic story of how our parents met. At a dance, my father met the local beauty, a girl with an exotic past, her olive Spanish complexion dramatic amongst the pale Anglo-Saxon girls, her long cascades of black wavy hair, her eyes as unfathomably dark as a country sky at night. He took from his pocket a piece of paper and a carpenter’s pencil, and drew a house. We all knew what followed by heart:

  ‘What’s that for?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll build it for you if you marry me.’

  ‘What are the little dots at the windows?’

  ‘Our children.’

  My father told me that when my mother introduced him to her mother at Central Station, the old woman punched him on the nose.

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘Fell over,’ he said. ‘On my back. There on the platform.’

  ‘Why did she punch you?’ I asked.

  ‘She thought I was putting off marrying your mother,’ he said. ‘She hated men. A man had just stolen her fortune.’

  ‘Fortune!’ I gasped. It sounded like something out of a fairy tale.

  ‘But I longed to marry her – I was only waiting for the fuss to die down before I put my name on the papers. I was proud of winning your mother, the most beautiful creature ever.’

  He paused, thinking, I was sure, of my mother’s eyes, so sweet that when she fixed them on you, however thin and prickly you were with indignation, you’d become like water and swim into her. I longed to belong to her beauty, so some of it would somehow rub off on me.

  ‘Beauty is a woman’s passport,’ she’d say. I knew she was implying that I had no passport, being plain-faced, red-headed and blue-eyed like no one else in my family. So I’d never have a passport.

  I didn’t ask, ‘What fuss?’

  Instead I asked the question that intrigued me more.

  ‘What fortune?’

  Apparently my widowed grandmother, descended from a Spanish family of great wealth and eminence, had entrusted her fortune to a doctor who then put her in an asylum, and disappeared.

  My father’s life before I and my brothers were born, a life in faraway London, was a closely held secret, tantalisingly hinted at, but whenever he’d begin to push the curtain aside, my mother, helpless in much else, had unexpected power: she could silence him.

  Despite my mother’s best efforts, my father’s past in faraway London spilled out and we children delighted in glimpses of what seemed a scandalous life. For example, he’d gone without shoes, a glorious liberty we were only allowed on odd visits to the beach. Once, when I complained about soggy salad sandwiches for lunch, he said he’d have been lucky to get bread wrapped in a bit of newspaper.

  ‘Newspaper,’ I’d echoed enviously, and longed for school sandwiches wrapped in newspaper, which I’d be able to smooth out and read at school, rustling it like an adult. When I complained about having to eat an apple every day, my father said that he and his brothers considered themselves lucky that they lived near the markets, because markets have big rubbish heaps of fruit, if you got in early for the best bits.

  ‘So eat your nicely washed apple and be grateful.’

  Once he told a story of how he’d glimpsed ripe pears hanging from a tree and he’d climbed across a roof for them. I can see them still, the golden pendulous pears glowing against the dark leaves like light globes. But the roof turned out to be a glass house and he’d fallen through—

  ‘Don’t make out you were a thief,’ cried my mother.

  He was always hushed so easily.

  ‘Did you get away?’ one of my brothers whispered when my mother had left the room.

  ‘I was always lucky,’ he said.

  When my brothers got jobs to deliver newspapers before school, my father said that, as a child, he’d got up at four in the morning and worked two jobs. Unlike my brothers who didn’t want to go to school, he’d been in the scholarship class, the top class – and hoped to become an architect but he’d had to leave at twelve years old, as my mother had.

  ‘Why?’ I asked in quick sympathy, because I was the bookworm of the family and hoped to somehow be allowed to remain at school even though I was only a girl, and a girl’s place was to become a housewife.

  ‘To support my family,’ he answered.

  In my imagination he would’ve been like my brothers, bicycling around the neighbourhood, accurately hurling rolled newspapers over trimmed hedges and into neat front gardens, except it would have been colder in England, and he would’ve been wearing a thick coat.

  There were no photographs of his parents, or Florence or John or Frederick or George or him – I could recite their names, these children of such liberty who were a
llowed to go shoeless and rummage in rubbish heaps. Only a postcard showing a suspension bridge – in Pitlochry, Scotland, said the quaint, old-fashioned print.

  ‘I’d walk that bridge wearing a kilt,’ he said. ‘The wind would blow ice up my legs.’ He added that he and his brothers and sister sometimes went for holidays to his mother’s people in Pitlochry, but suddenly that all ceased.

  Instead of becoming an architect, he went to work in a munitions factory with his older brother. By now the First World War had broken out. He walked miles there with George every morning, and miles back again at night. There were often explosions, and the workers were stationed in small huts to prevent any explosions taking the entire place out. Their hut exploded.

  ‘Were you all right?’ I asked.

  ‘We were only singed,’ he said. ‘I was always lucky.’

  Then he ran away to sea instead, to be a mess boy to escape his mother—

  ‘Don’t!’ shouted my mother.

  And so we never heard more about that.

  By a peculiar quirk of fate, my parents shared the same birthday, the tenth of May, though they were born years apart. There seemed to be a decade between them – ‘seemed’ because I grew up thinking he’d been born in 1901, but my brothers thought 1903 or 1905. Again, we weren’t suspicious. We were all firm in the knowledge, however, that he’d been born into the world’s cultural centre, the most civilised, the most powerful, the only sophisticated city in the world, a land where all along the streets there were art galleries and paintings gleaming with oils – why, you could pop into any gallery and gaze at a Rembrandt whenever your mother sent you to the local shop for bones for the dog. Like his handyman work, he was entirely untutored in painting, but I assumed that anyone from such a land would be good at painting.

  He’d joined the navy – we children never knew to ask if it was the navy or the merchant navy – and his ship had been torpedoed but had sailed on, eventually coming to this cultural desert, Australia. They’d moored in Adelaide, and then he’d fallen in love with the light. So he’d jumped ship. To my childish mind, this was of no more moment than his other exploits, say, with the golden pears. He’d gone bush and, to survive, had become a rabbito, and soon he was painting bush schools. My childhood picture of him leaving the ship was of a boy in a white and blue sailor suit – sailor-suit blouses were fashionable in my childhood, so I was on home ground there – stumbling down a gangplank like the one at Circular Quay, tripping over the raised boards meant to steady people’s disembarking for he was too dazed by light, his astounded eyes not on the unfamiliar city before him, but on the transparent blue heights above. Or, as I got older, did ‘jump ship’ mean he dived off it? This, too, I was sure, was done in a heroic dive, my father in his sailor suit flashing past the ship’s hull into the murky harbour.