Because—duh—it was a song about an actor. Celine was with an actor. Shagging. It made her sick. He was not even a Christian so was he putting up with Celine’s bullshit to make a happy family? Was he turning the other cheek? If so, don’t do it on her account. She stood on a kitchen chair and pulled the hems of Celine’s dresses, tugging, dragging until clothes pegs popped and clattered against the wall. She twisted clothes hangers beyond their useful shapes and the room got lighter and brighter until finally the ceiling was all bare and she didn’t know who she was cross with but she fetched the black rubbish bags from the kitchen and stuffed them full of Celine, five full bags of them and tied them up with yellow ties. She was a cat running screeching over lily pads, nothing to support her, each pad sinking as it took her weight. She waited and waited but her father stayed upstairs. Finally she locked the front and back doors and the window to the lane.
At her father’s door she called to him. Are you OK?
The streetlight illuminated his blue shoes protruding from the murky blankets. She found a place beside him in the musty tangle.
Will Mummy come back?
Yes my love. He tucked a quilt around her and she did not wake until the middle of the night when he carried her back to her bed. In the morning she found him in the kitchen drinking instant coffee. The black rubbish bags were now lined neatly against the wall and Gaby saw that the attack on Celine’s clothes would not be undone now. Those body bags would still be there, lined up in evidence against her, when her mother finally came home.
After school the four girls, the Keppel Street Quartet, as they called themselves, were walking north along Rathdowne Street. They were not really a quartet at all. They were Gaby and Katie and Nina, but they always had to include Katie’s little sister. Her name was Jenna and she needed a good whacking.
Crossing Elgin Street they all saw Frederic carrying another cardboard box entirely on his lovely head. It was a shock, Gaby said, to see his beauty displayed in public and to recall how she had bled onto his sheets and listened to his feathering clicking nails, black as beetles.
Jenna said, Hello Frederic. In a cheeky tone of voice.
Frederic lowered his burden to the footpath. As anyone could see, the box contained a brand new Knoll office chair, but Jenna asked: What’s in the box, Frederic? The lurker loser, it was not her place to speak at all.
Frederic said it was a chair. He was being funny. They did not get it. He was a hundred times brighter than the lot of them.
That’s nice, Jenna said. Did it fall off the back of a truck?
Gaby said, Shut up Jenna. She gave Frederic a quick nod.
Hubba-dubba, said Jenna and the other girls stayed silent. Katie lifted her finger at Jenna who stuck her tongue out. Frederic picked up his heavy box and continued up Elgin Street without any sign of strain, walking with that beautiful bounce, presumably towards his home.
He’s strong, said Nina, as he walked away. He has endurance.
At which Katie and Jenna both burst into laughter.
You’re really rude. Gaby spoke to Jenna but she included Katie, obviously.
I’m what?
Your little sister told him his father was a thief.
Get real, Gaby, said Katie. His father is a thief. Everyone knows that.
His father is an anarchist, said Gaby. Did you know that?
Gaby, darling, Katie said, selling left-wing newspapers doesn’t stop him being a thief.
Have you ever heard of Proudhon, Katie? No, you haven’t. Don’t smirk at me, Jenna. You couldn’t even spell it. Just look it up, Katie. See what Proudhon said. And leave Frederic alone.
Hubba-dubba.
Babe, you’ll only get your heart broken, Nina said. I had a friend who fell for one of those. It destroyed her life.
Well, I don’t have that sort of problem, said Gaby who was amazed with herself for making up the story about Proudhon.
Well, you have some sort of problem.
No, you do.
What sort of problem do I have?
This, cried Gaby, swinging her bag by its straps so it whizzed past Katie’s freckled button nose. And that was how they temporarily resolved their problem shrieking all the way to Keppel Street. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da in vinyl talk.
13
CELINE DROVE HOME through a hurricane, along the Great Ocean Road with her eardrum broken, buzzing, throbbing. The driver-side windscreen wiper stopped working as she passed the little church at Mount Duneed. She was one-eyed through Geelong in a hailstorm, and up the endless, awful Melbourne road.
It was and would remain, she told the tape recorder, the stupidest thing she had done in all her life—no, not running away to Moggs Creek with Fergus, no, she meant letting Sandy put her in the wrong.
So she committed adultery. OK. But Sandy bought the house without her, and left her name off the deed. So who was the biggest liar and cheat? She did not even like Fergus, but he was there, waiting, ready, able, unemployed. Also he was intellectual and working-class and would beat the shit out of Sandy soon as look at him.
Sandy was like some Labor Party saint. He would turn the other cheek. He would not cry out when tortured. Fergus was the un-Sandy, with unapologetic calculating eyes, a million miles from all those smooth-faced creatures who made up the Footlights Collective, actors who were still having to relearn the Australian accents they had lost while auditioning in London, artists who could only impersonate what Fergus really was. He argued as he acted as he fought, dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee, from Nietzsche to Solon and back to the dangerous edges of Douglas Credit. By the time you had assembled your rebuttal he had moved on elsewhere. Žižek before we even heard of Žižek, Celine said on the tape playing on the floor a thousand kilometres away, twenty-five years later. It was perfect casting: the fucked-up energy, the rawness of his speech. He was mad in bed, wide and barrel-chested and covered with fine curling hair like a beast and his penis had a distinct upward curve to it as you might imagine on a satyr or a pig.
Celine had always been inflammable, easily intoxicated by her burning bridges. She wasn’t nice, she knew, but how do you compare that to leaving your wife’s name off the title deed?
Based on all available evidence, Sandy had cheated her. Fergus had wanted her, had flattered her, had listened to every single word she said. She knew what he was doing, as she always knew when men did that nodding thing. She was not at all surprised that when he finally had her in Moggs Creek he never agreed with her again. She had not come for conversation anyway. Once he had fucked her she could not get away with anything, and she was in the mood for that as well. It was dangerous. You could not bluff him. There was no dare he would refuse. Celine would have to go out further, beyond the Moggs Creek surf, if she was to be with Fergus, which was what she had done for all those weeks.
Then they drank whisky and he told her she was a yuppie bitch.
She was high as a kite, reckless, off the map. She told him he was feral. She said some other things, quite personal.
And the bastard nearly killed her for it.
The rain stopped at Werribee and she drove back into Melbourne along Dynon Road where her mother had learned to dodge the Yankee trucks, up past the hospital where she was born, and into Carlton. She blew her nose and heard the air whistling out her broken ear. She came home incorrectly labelled with disgrace. She parked, badly, at Macarthur Place. She was no more in the wrong than he was.
It’s her, Gaby cried, but stayed where she was, halfway down the stairs.