Blue Skies Read online

  The pram squeaked, and my brain squeaked along with it, keeping time. It squeaked with the effort of wondering what to say to Mother-in-law waiting round the next bend. You couldn’t just dump a baby and run. She wasn’t that kind of person.

  The truth is, I didn’t talk much to anybody. But Mother-in-law I did talk to. There she would be, in bed in her lovingly crocheted pink bed-jacket, preparing for a standard Thursday-morning chat.

  Her bedroom was at the front of the house; large windows faced the street, draped and discreet for no purpose. There were pink-painted peeling French windows at the side, opening onto a gloomy concrete verandah. This in turn led down by some steps at the opposite end, onto the front lawn. The lawn was badly drained and boggy—a very imperfect lawn. I thought of bringing my demented neighbour round to look at it, by way of reassurance.

  Down the street we would go, shattering the early morning daze, making little puffs of dust as we kept carefully to the sides of the road. Safety first. Dust rose to settle all over the teak-veneer coffee tables in all the houses down the road. The sunny hum of early morning hoovers filled our ears.

  A big daring swerve took us to the middle of the road, ready for the big run-up needed to carry us over the swampy lawn without getting stuck. We bumped backwards up the steps, front pram wheels spinning noisily in mid air. A final hearty shove across the concrete verandah and we were at the peeling pink doors. They were open.

  ‘Good morning, dear.’ There she was, sitting up in bed, surrounded by litter and all the props of a poor sleeper, sipping milkless, sugarless tea from a thermos flask. I crossed the room and sat on the bed.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘How is James? He said he would call in to see me on his way home last night, but he didn’t. I expect he’ll telephone me today. Or call in this evening.’

  James is her son: the youngest, the nearest to home, the one I’m married to. James hadn’t come home last night.

  ‘Oh he’s fine. But tired, you know. He’s really busy at the moment. I’m sure he’ll phone today.’

  ‘Well, my dear, you mustn’t let him work too hard.’

  Here followed various health warnings and gloomy predictions as to what might happen if James worked too hard.

  Next, Angelica. Angelica is James’s daughter, the baby, and her grand-daughter. ‘How is Angelica? Oh, do bring her in. I long to see her.’

  An Angelica-sized space was cleared and she was carried in from the pram and placed face down on the bed. It may not look natural, but face down was how she liked to be: she got into the habit at the hospital where she was born; they programmed her to do it from birth. ‘It brings up the wind and is comfortable for Baby,’ they said. Not only that. At the moment it showed off her plastic pants to best advantage. They had an extravagant rosette on the seat, made up of different-coloured ruffs of pastel plastic. I had bought them the day before at the Baby Bar in the local chemist. I awaited delighted reactions complacently.

  ‘Oh, how sweet. Oh, aren’t they fun. You do look after her so beautifully, my dear. I will say that.’

  Terrible vistas opened up of what she wouldn’t say. We both have this problem of what to call each other. She has settled for ‘My Dear’. I have settled for nothing.

  ‘Do go through and make yourself some coffee, if you want. There should be some nice biscuits in the tin.’

  I went—there was still a quarter of an hour before the bus to town passed the top of the road, and I was starving. The coffee made, biscuit tin placed under one arm, I returned to the bedroom.

  ‘My dear. Couldn’t you find a plate? I’m sure you could if you looked.’

  There wasn’t much time left now. The rest of the conversation was obscured by the biscuit cramming my mouth. It kept getting stuck and the coffee wouldn’t make it go down.

  ‘You’d better go. You’ll miss your bus. I’d hate you to do that on my account.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  I kissed her cheek as she expected, and patted the baby on its plastic rosette.

  ‘I’ll try not to be late.’

  ‘Don’t worry, my dear. You know how I love to have her all to myself. You cut along now and enjoy yourself.’

  I cut, and quickly. My left sandal strap snapped as I ran up the street to the main road. Just in time: I could see the bus approaching at high speed. It pulled up; the pneumatic doors folded back. I climbed up the steps, paid the driver, and fell into the nearest seat. I wound down the window and threw the other sandal out. Barefoot and free. You couldn’t pile it on too thick on Thursdays.

  From town I took another bus, a country-bound bus, square and slow. Full of mailbags and chicken crates, it went out through the surrounding bush townships in the early morning and came back in the late evening. The driver was young and greasy. I thought he must be English. He wore his hair in a beautifully oiled duck’s tail; it must have left dreadful marks on his pillow or wherever he kept his head. He wore a purple suit and blue suede shoes. A large Japanese transistor radio balanced on top of his dashboard. It crashed against the windscreen at every hole in the road and was never quite on the station, but gave a pleasant blurred effect with occasional blasts of static. That bus had atmosphere. Today it also had a team of lady bowlers, who were off to an away match at a country ground. They were arranged two-by-two along one side of the bus, exchanging pleasantries and egg sandwiches, their starched white dresses and uniform hats giving off static of their own. Their bright enamel club badges glittered and flashed victoriously in the sun; their stringy brown calves rippled healthily above sterile white socks. The bus had a clinical air this morning; in contrast the driver looked dirtier than ever. The newspapers and loaves of sliced white bread in their waxy red-and-white wrappings were loaded into the back.

  We moved off, creaky and overloaded, crawling through the suburbs to where the thin stream of weatherboard houses trickled out into a pool of rusting car bodies, rotting mattresses and ragged-edged beer cans. The telegraph poles continued, pulling themselves out of the tangled mess of the town into a taut straight line and marching purposefully ahead from horizon to horizon, ignoring geography and natural obstacles and playing tricks with perspective.

  First off were the lady bowlers. They disembarked just past the airport and disappeared into a little wooden clubhouse by the roadside. We drove on, round scrubby hills, blue-green and smooth at a distance, coarse-grassed and rocky up close. Dotted on these hills were little trees with rounded tops: toffee-apple trees from nursery wallpaper. Overhead the high bright blue sky was stretched tight and shiny between pink-tinged clouds. The road ahead was a shoelace of white dust. The colours were primary, hard-edged, acrylic-clear. I scraped myself, in my bus shell, across the perfect clarity and colour of that day—a bag of white skin full of passionate reds and purples and boiling yellow-green jealousies. If the bag split, those colours would spill out and spoil the scenery. But it didn’t. There was no bursting with happiness. Or anything else.

  As the bus lurched round the next corner I saw Ben waiting. He was waiting for his mail, he said. He had a lot of friends overseas, and their pale blue letters filled his canvas mailbag and his life with interest.

  Once Ben had tried living overseas. He took his wife and son and went by boat to England: to a small dingy room in London, where the rat aspects and dirt of big-city life got him down. So they moved to a small provincial city in the Midlands, where they rented the last house in a long row of grey terraced houses. Some claimed that it was the longest terrace in England; later the National Trust put a preservation order on it. The end house, his house, ended in a blind brick wall facing bleak countryside. During the first week there he borrowed a ladder and painted his wall with a bright tropical landscape, and it became a local landmark. A man from the Sunday Times came and took a photograph of it, and it was reproduced in the colour supplement as an example of urban street art. Someone cut it out and sent it to him, and he pinned it on his workroom wall. It hung there now, fly-spotted an
d brittle-yellow with summer heat.

  Through his back windows Ben had been able to see nothing but ploughed fields, in which, it seemed, nothing was ever planted or grew. In winter, snow fell and it was white and silent all round for miles—except for his incongruously glowing tropical landscape. It was so glittering and pure and clean that his nerve broke. One evening, after picking a quarrel and breaking all the windows, he ran away, back to London, where he spent ten grey days, worrying his wife sick as she waited it out in that cold English landscape burning his pictures to keep his son alive and warm. So he had nothing to show for it. A wasted trip.

  I knew of this, not from him, but from Gloria. We sat together one day by a dried-up summer creek; she with a shoebox of photographs to show me: mementoes of the trip. To make the most of it, they had taken the long way home, through Europe and various other bits of the world. She showed me a photograph of herself with son in arms on top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

  ‘That’s where I had decided to commit suicide. I was going to jump—I would have put the boy down first, of course—but Ben stopped me. I think people who try to stop other people killing themselves are boring. And stupid.’

  She placed the lid back on the shoebox and told me the story of their trip. Her face in shadow under her large sun hat, all the snow and ice and the miserable solitude that she described seemed safely at a distance— a vast distance. I smiled and held her hand as we walked slowly back to the house. I hoped that she felt safe in her hot land.

  I saw Ben waiting for the bus, the mail and, it being Thursday, me. The bus pulled up at his feet. The dancing dust surrounded him in a cloud. He was wearing a long black djebella and sandals—a misplaced Arab.

  The local people thought him mad.

  They thought his wife noble, fine and longsuffering.

  They thought his son a poor little mite to have such a father.

  In the town, among the more sophisticated who could think of these things, it was rumoured that he took drugs.

  It was rumoured that he slept with his sister.

  Stories were told of how, at the age of thirteen, he had run away. He went missing one midnight and stayed so for weeks, while his frantic parents had the entire state police force out after him. When he was found in the central highlands sitting in a clearing stark-naked chewing roots, they took him away and talked to him on couches, and gave him electric shocks. It had done no good, it seemed. So much, they said, for modern medicine.

  Crazy Coot.

  They bought his pictures, these town folk. Slowly at first, but as his exploits became more embroidered, the more his pictures sold: a bit of decoration to hang on the wall; a bit of himself; a bit of scandal; a conversation piece.

  Today his wife had left in her battered blue station wagon to teach at the local school. She took their son, who was in the infants’ class. She worked to support the painter, while the painter dreamed of success in the posh private galleries of the mainland, where people are prepared to pay more, being used to that kind of thing.

  But these are all my conclusions. He did not speak of these things to me, but let me dream around them. Sometimes this annoyed him, and sometimes I thought it amused him, but he let it happen either way. I found myself telling stories about him, and I told them to anyone who would listen. I tried to stop it, but could not help it. He said nothing. I knew he knew what I was doing: spinning my life out of his.

  I got off the bus, and Ben collected his mail. We went to the house, an old colonial farmhouse, beautiful and battered. There was a great deal of land attached to it, but Ben didn’t farm the property. It belonged to his sister, and he let bits of it to a neighbouring farmer to graze sheep, while the other bits he left to nature. A creek ran roughly through the middle. In summer it was a canyon with steep, hard, red-earth sides and a few slimy puddles at the bottom; in rainy seasons it flooded. He had channelled some of this creek water into a pond, where he kept ducks for his own amusement.

  We walked around the house to the back door, which led across a small wooden porch straight into the kitchen. There we made tea, and then we sat at the large pine table and rolled cigarettes and smoked them, gazing thoughtfully into each other’s eyes. We wondered why I had come.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Good morning. Let’s go.’

  We went through to the bedroom. It contained twin beds. Once I had taken this to be a sign—a bad marriage: all was not right in the bedroom—where all the problems start, my mother said. But this time my mother and I were wrong. He told me how it was.

  ‘When you sleep together you naturally cuddle up, right? Nice and cosy. Mmmmmm. Why not? Well, what happens is, it drains you off. All that touching gets to blunt the edges. So you don’t want to fuck so much. Right?’

  ‘Right.’ He was making speeches. Leaving clues for me to go over later.

  ‘This way is better. You go to bed together for one reason. When you really want to. It’s good. Very sharp. You have the best times when you feel like that.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. You should try it. Or maybe you wouldn’t like it. Too straightforward for you. You’re too bloody evasive. So soft.’ He said it like a long word, smiling all the way through. ‘Soft at the edges, but hard as rocks somewhere in there. Very nasty.’

  ‘Put your glasses on,’ he said, ‘and get what you fancy out of the trunk. A bit of old velvet might be nice.’ He went to his bed and pulled it out from the wall into the middle of the room. I took my clothes off. It was terribly hot in there. The windows, blistered shut in some past heat, wouldn’t open. Ben climbed over his bed and disappeared. His head reappeared on the far side and spoke. ‘There’s some new stuff we can try today. A beaut little number I picked up in the Salvation Army shop in North Hobart.’ He vanished again.

  I went over to the old trunk in the corner of the room and searched through it for something interesting.

  This trunk was Gloria’s pride and joy, her family heirloom, which she seemed to love out of all proportion. It was only a load of old clothes after all. Once upon a time, she told me, it had contained some bits of old cranberry glass, a Bible and the family silver, as well as old clothes. Gloria’s mother had disposed of the valuables years ago, but Gloria didn’t care: she liked the clothes best. She was fond of describing their romantic history: how her great-grandmother had lugged the trunk out from the old country long ago, in the days of sail, packed full of her best things and lengths of silk, velvet, lace and several pairs of little white gloves which the old lady had supposed it would be hard to lay hands on in the Antipodes.

  Gloria regularly dosed the trunk with mothballs and lamented the damage done by silverfish. Ben and I started playing with this stuff one day, a few dressing-up games that just lately had got a bit out of hand. Ben had developed what I considered sometimes to be an unhealthy interest in old clothes.

  ‘Here, try these on,’ instructed Ben from behind his bed. His latest purchases rose into the air, somersaulted over the bed and crumpled in heaps at my feet.

  Ben stood up and dusted himself down. He shoved his bed back against the wall to cover the loose floorboards. He kept his bundles of second-hand clothes in plastic sacks in the space between the floor boards and the foundations: his dressing-up clothes, the stuff of fantasy, chosen for their colour, their texture, the way they felt on the skin.

  Gathering up armfuls, we went into his work room, a glassed-in verandah along two sides of the house. We made a soft, shifting, multi-coloured moun.tain in the middle of the room.

  Alone with the heap of beautiful things in the silence—the silence that comes from being enclosed in thick sunlight. It insulated us like thick golden cotton-wool. It kept out air; it kept out sound. It kept us isolated and secret. It was too thick to penetrate the glass; it wrapped itself round the house. We were playing in a private golden ball.

  We played with our pretty mountain. We chose the pieces of material and clothing we needed. We needed them to act charades—the Vic
torian parlour-game kind: choose a word, act each syllable and then do the whole word. We took it in turns: one-man shows. Sometimes it was very funny, and we laughed a lot. Sometimes it was very sad, and we made ourselves cry. Occasionally we would be drawn into frightened fantasies. He would twist my arms, give me Chinese burns, whip me with his plastic belt bought in New York, rub me between the legs with his choicest materials, take polaroids of my reactions, stride about in Chelsea Cobbler cowboy boots—Kings Road souvenirs—masturbate into a faded pink velour Victorian remnant. Colourful times. Hot days. We ended asleep, buried in clothes drifts.

  Ben woke first; made tea; held the steaming mug under my nose; brought me round with chocolate biscuits. He said I slept like a dead fly—on my back with arms and legs sticking skywards. There were a lot of dead flies in the workroom. They rimmed the window ledges in dry black lines. When a breeze disturbed them they rustled like leftover Christmas decorations.

  Packed away, washed, dressed, brushed and fully restored to order, we sat sipping tea and chatting till his wife and son returned. Since we didn’t have much to discuss, we spoke mainly of my neighbour. I reported to him our brief conversations, which he considered cryptic.

  Ben wanted to meet my neighbour. I had told him that this wasn’t possible, that she’d die of shock at the sight of him, especially wearing a dress. Ben looked pleased at this. ‘How about,’ he suggested, ‘I drive down and park outside her house. I could just watch her and she’d think I was a travelling salesman taking a break.’ But I didn’t trust him. I saw him leaping from the car in a frenzy and doing dreadful things on her lawn—the kinds of things I’d heard vandals did on altar steps in churches. Half of me found the prospect delightful, but the day-to-day half decided it couldn’t cope with all that outrage. I kept putting him off.