Besides, she told herself in her scarier moments, I'll soon be in that state myself, except that I won't be. I won't hang around to get up at three in the morning like poor Grandma and make scones for people who've been dead for thirty years. I'll finish it first. I'll take the bun and the pills …
(This grandmother had lived with them. As a grown girl of fifteen she had been sent out, burning with shame before the neighbours, but also before the old woman herself, to bring her in when she went aimlessly wandering. On several occasions that now seemed like one, they had stood shouting beside a fence in the overpowering smell of honeysuckle. The old woman whined, screeched, wheedled, tried to shake off the grip on her wrist; dogs barked, children stared, other old women shook their heads behind blinds — she could still feel the pain, the humiliation of it. But the centre of the occasion had shifted now from the unwilling and angry girl to the wilful old woman, who with her hair awry and her gown open stood barefoot under the streetlamp saying over and over, "Why are you doing this to me?” The old woman was herself.)
She shook her wrist and the chain clanked against the gallery rail, as leaning forward she allowed her eye, which was sharp, to sweep the crowded amphitheatre.
Eleanor had just come in, high up in the stalls. Tall, in an emerald cloak, she was waiting for the people in her row to get up and let her through.
How like her! There was stacks of room up there, not like these gallery boxes — stacks of it! But Eleanor continued to stand, and when at last the whole row had risen to its feet, the silly woman, holding her cloak about her, moved through, gracefully inclining her head and smiling and thanking people. Settled at last, with the cloak thrown back for later, when the air-conditioning would turn the place into an icebox, she looked about; then cast her gaze upwards to the gallery and waved.
Clay immediately relented. Oh God, she told herself, I'm such a bitch. It was touching really, Eleanor's little wave — a real leap in the dark. Too vain to wear glasses, and half-blind by habit (as who wouldn't be after forty years with the dreaded doctor) she could barely see her face in the glass.
Clay produced in response one of her brisk salutes, a real one made by bringing two fingers of her right hand up to the temple and flicking them sharply away. It was her trade-mark; from the days when she had modelled little suits of a military cut for Molyneux in Paris and was considered a sport. It too was a leap in the dark since Eleanor couldn't see it. But she made the gesture just the same — as an acknowledgement to herself of the old, the unkillable Clay McHugh, since there was, God knows, so little left of her.
(She had taken to avoiding herself in mirrors and in ghostly shop windows; her eyes were too sharp; she hadn't, like Eleanor, developed the habit of not-seeing-clearly-anymore. But at some point back there she had let her attention wander, lost her grip on things, and the spirit of disintegration had got in. Well, she was fighting it — tooth and claw— she was holding on; she got tired, that's all. Your attention wandered. You got tired.)
She came quickly to the alert now. Eleanor was making a play in the air with her fingers that meant they should meet later and share a taxi home. They would — they always did — and Eleanor, who was generous and tactfully tactless, would see to it that they did not share the fare.
They were neighbours. Eleanor, Mrs. Adrian Murphy, lived in a unit-block three doors from her own, and once a week, on Fridays, they went down in the Daimler (Eleanor drove only in daylight now) and had coffee together: down among the heavy-eyed Viennese, all reading air-mail papers that were two weeks old, and those deeper exiles who had been born right here, in Burwood or Gulgong or Innisfail, North Queensland, but were dying of hunger for a few crumbs of Sacher Torte and of estrangement from a life they had never known. What a place! What a country!
Years ago, in Brisbane, where they had been at the same convent school, she and Eleanor Ure had hated one another. “That stuck up goody two-shoes" was the phrase she found herself repeating in her twelve-year-old's voice; though she couldn't recall how Eleanor, who had been mousey, could have deserved it — not then. It fitted her better twenty years later when the dreaded doctor appeared.
But that period too had passed; and now, with nearly sixty years between them and the girls they once were, she could accept Eleanor Murphy for what she was: a spoiled and frightened woman, too insistent on her own dignity, but generous, loyal, and very nearly these days a friend.
That first winter after they found themselves neighbours, Eleanor had slipped and broken her leg. Clay had gone across each afternoon to sit with her: not in the spirit of a little nursing-sister — she had none of that — but in a spirit of brisk cheerfulness, of keeping one's stoic end up, that revived the bossy schoolgirl in her. Eleanor was happy to be organised. They spent the afternoons playing cards (rummy) while the westering light touched with Queensland colours the baskets of maidenhair and the tree-orchids and staghorns of Eleanor's rainforest loggia, and Mrs. Thring, who came in to clean, and who served when Eleanor entertained, made them scones and tea.
Things had levelled between them. She was no “that Clay McHugh,” unmarried and trailing clouds of dangerous appeal. And Eleanor, with the dreaded doctor gone, was no more the gilded and girlish dependent of a Household Word. They were alone, alive (widowed or not, what did it matter?) and had no one close but one another.
(Eleanor in fact had a son whom she doted on, worried over, and never mentioned; a forty-four-year-old hippie and no-hoper called Aidan, for God's sake! who wore beads, wrote unpublishable poetry, had two broken marriages behind him, and lived in a rainforest — a real one — on sunflower-seeds, bananas, and old rope. Eleanor's bedroom was full of photographs of him when he was an angelic six-year-old. Clay knew all this, but was meant not to. There were days when all Eleanor had to say in the long silences between them “Aidan, Aidan, Aidan, Aidan.” It was hard then not to cry out, "For God's sake, Eleanor, I thought we were friends, why can't we talk about him?” "About who?” Eleanor would have said. “Who can you possibly mean?")
The Year of Eleanor's Leg had been followed by The Year of the Rapist. For five months their Point was at siege. The rapist specialized in high unit-blocks and only assaulted older women (they had shared, she and Eleanor, a phone code that made Eleanor at least feel safe) and had turned out to be a twenty-two-year-old cat-burglar, so round-chinned and mild-looking that nobody believed it was really him.
Clay did. Standing at the glass door to her balcony, with her old dragon-robe about her, she had come face to face with him. He was spreadeagled against the wall, his cheek flat to the bricks. There were only feet between them; he in the cold air, high up above the fig tree and its voracious flying foxes, she safe behind glass. Below, the whole Bay was lit. The police were on to him. Their searchlights crossed and re-crossed the fern-hung balconies.
Let me in, his eyes had pleaded. He was blond, with a two-day growth that made a shadow above his lips. She shook her head.
He had smiled then and nodded; as if she were some silly old girl who could be fooled by a soft look and didn't know he was a tiger, a beast of prey, and these tower blocks were his jungle. Nervously his tongue appeared, just the tip, and slicked his lips. He was perplexed, he was thinking with it.