Celine heard the stairs creak and then saw her husband’s legs and then his face peering down from the upper floor. He did not speak.
She noticed all her clothes were gone. She did not connect this absence with the bright black bags.
She closed the door quietly and sat on the sofa as if it were the middle of a set. The audience knew exactly who she was.
OK, she said, and put her hands up in surrender.
How stupid.
Gaby retreated up the stairs as Sando descended and Celine knew, as they passed each other, that an upsetting intimacy had developed in her absence. As he emerged from the shadow Sando was older, with two stark new creases from his nose to the corners of his beautiful mouth. So he had suffered too. She thought it was fifty-fifty and he would join her on the sofa, but he stood over her, towered above her, with an expression she took to be a sneer. Then, as he shook his head, the light caught an actual teardrop. She was appalled then pleased. She moved to one side and he surrendered. She gave him a tissue and held his hand. It was not yet clear to her what she had done.
14
COCKATOOS WERE RIPPING the bark off the angophora while the oily-haired fugitive inserted four new Duracell batteries and played a cassette he had labelled “Celine 4.” His eyes were dark and hollowed and he stared at the machine with his head cocked.
Is this what got you boys so hot? she said.
Pause. Rewind. Sip. Play.
Is this what got you boys so hot? That I would blow myself up? That I would do anything? You knew I had fired my mother. That must have looked like something but when Doris did not come chasing after me, when I ended up sleeping in Sando’s car, I cried myself to sleep each night.
Fast forward.
You saw me in my mother’s house, back in Springvale, ripping photographs from frames.
The fugitive had never personally witnessed such a thing.
Fast forward.
It was the same in the stupid business with Fergus, she told the tape recorder. Sando must have heard my ruptured ear whistling but no-one saw my hurt. No-one knew how I wanted to be forgiven.
A spy would never see the beauty speaking to the journalist, but he might hear grief, a certain flatness of affect, or even wonder why so many of us talk like that.
So I came back from Moggs Creek, she said, and guess what? I did not exist. Gaby vanished me. Sando wrote his bloody letters or read about saintly Samoans exiled in vile materialistic Australia. He was steely. It is not how people talk about him but he could be totally unbending. And of course, she said, he would not make love to me. He could be very cruel.
Pause.
Play.
I had thought we shared the blame fifty-fifty but now I just wanted him to love me like before. He had lied and cheated with real estate and I was the only one who said sorry. I was weak. I traipsed after him to Coburg and waited to be forgiven. I did penance. I ripped up the lino and killed the slaters and the cockroaches and kalsomined everything as was required. Of course the whitewash only served to emphasise the jagged shadow where the floorboards failed to meet the walls. As everyone said, the house had good bones: large square rooms and massive sash windows and once the filth was scrubbed off or covered up, it should have felt wonderful. Yet even when the morning sun washed across the hallway floor, it was clear that something awful had happened there. This was not “the electorate.” It was a site of trauma, a place with unsafe floors, where the fabric of society had been ripped and torn. This was where the saintly Sando brought his wife and child, to get away from “your Carlton tribe.” And although he and Gaby had got their way, I know they felt what I did. My dialectical materialist was made angry by talk of ghosts, and he turned sarcastic when I suggested that rooms might contain echoes of their past. Just the same: the hair rose on his arms. He had me buy him curtains and kept them drawn at dark. The junkies parked their car in the lane, so close to the kitchen window that you could see the flare of the match against the silver foil.
I should have abandoned them. I stayed.
Sando was shitty with me because I made so little money, but I was exactly the creature he had wished me to be. I had been going to teach school just like he did, but he wanted me to be an actress. It made him amorous to sit in the theatre and see me on the stage. Naturally I made no money—what did he expect? But after Moggs Creek I agreed to do those soup commercials and that got me kicked out of the Collective.
Gaby was so triumphant I had lost Macarthur Place. She became an instant Coburg girl with made-up vowels. She set off each day up the narrow footpath, lumping her backpack to Bell Street High School, up past the stripped car, the broken syringe, the clinker-brick St. Bernard’s with its depressing ’50s bronze statue of the saint. Whatever happened to her each day I was not allowed to know. She refused to see anything was less than perfect. She insisted Bell Street High was “really, actually, academically the best school I could be in” i.e. she was siding with her father.
Bell Street High School was rotting, neglected, faction-ridden, falling apart. In heavy rain the power points exploded, sending extraordinary blue sheets of Pentecostal fire dancing above the pupils’ heads. The Anglo kids were called skips or bogans, as a matter of course. Gaby’s Turkish classmates boasted as if they had personally killed the Australians at Gallipoli. There were, naturally, second- and third-generation Greeks and Italians who were not suffering the cultural shocks of the Turks and Lebanese, but by the time my daughter arrived the suburb was filled with disorientated Muslim families who had begun life in the poor and isolated mountainside of Denbo. There was a boy who had been kept in prison alongside decomposing bodies. There was a girl who drew decapitated heads in pools of magic marker.
Gaby was in the foyer on the day it collapsed and hurt the gym teacher. Where had the state funding gone? Ask her father. She had a fifteen-year-old classmate who had been left in charge of the family while his father returned to Denbo to marry another wife and thereby protect the family’s property. The school hired an Arabic teacher, but it turned out he was a Coptic Christian and the Muslim families did not trust him. The teachers doubtless gave their all, but everywhere there was cultural resentment and misunderstanding. Gaby watched her maths teacher insisting that a Muslim boy look him in the eye, a request the kid could not obey because it was disrespectful. Even she knew that.
She was in the Roman room when a mild, polite Turkish boy urinated into the plastic bin containing Lego blocks.
The urine could be seen, quite clearly, pooling in the bottom of the bin.
What’s this, Feyyas? the teacher asked. The liquid was pale yellow.
It’s water, Miss.
The teacher was also a mild and decent person, up to that point anyway. She was buxom and pretty with long dark hair. Get a cup, she said.
The boy fetched the cup and the previously mild teacher tried to make him drink his urine and the previously mild boy punched her in the chest.
So I wasn’t surprised to find Gaby sneaking back to Carlton to visit her old friends. Was I a bad mother for letting her? Sometimes I was left in Patterson Street alone and I hated it, but I was always happy to think she was somewhere better than I was. I was not complacent. I was vigilant in fact. If she was sleeping over I would always call her at ten o’clock and—when I had got past the recorded message—we always had our whispered conversation.
Patterson Street was neighbourly enough. The Greeks were polite but stand-offish. The Italians were chatty, united by their hatred, of the plane trees, and of the council which neglected to collect their fallen leaves.