The Children's Bach (12 page)

‘I'll finish him off,' shouted Dexter.

He cast himself on his knees beside Vicki, took the face washer from her hand and raised his big round voice: ‘I'll sing you a song of the fish of the sea – o-oh, Ri-o!'

Vicki, upstaged, scurried away into the kitchen.

A glass jug stood on the table, full of a thick reddish-orange liquid. ‘Flash drinks,' said Elizabeth.

‘Why do you have to fight with everyone?' said Vicki.

‘Me? He started it!'

‘You both started it,' said Arthur. ‘I don't care if people fight. I think it's rather interesting, actually.'

‘Mister Cool,' said Elizabeth. ‘Tiny Tim in the kitchen corner.'

Arthur shot her a flirtatious smile.

‘I must say, Arthur,' said Elizabeth, ‘you have very spunky legs for a boy of your age.'

‘I've got a girlfriend at school,' said Arthur.

‘I'm not surprised.'

‘Want to see some photos of me when I was a baby?' said the boy. ‘I'll go and get them.' He darted out of the room.

‘You always con people,' said Vicki.

‘I have no shame,' said Elizabeth. ‘Let's drink these.'

They began. It was still raining steadily. The room was almost dark.

‘Don't you care about Philip and Athena?' said Vicki.

‘Course I care. I always care. But there's no point in making a song and dance about it, like that night he stayed here. Know something? There's only one thing that'll bring 'em back, and that's indifference. The one thing you can't fake.'

‘But you
are
faking it.'

‘At the moment I might be. But as soon as it stops being faked and starts being real, he'll turn up. Rule number one of modern life.'

Vicki shuddered. ‘You're cold. You're too detached. You're scary.'

Arthur romped in with a packet. He spread the colour photos out on the scratched table top. Elizabeth bent over them. ‘They're rude!' she cried. Arthur skipped about, squint-eyed with laughter. The photos were of a naked baby boy lying on his back like a frog, flashing the enormous, raw genitals of the new-born.

‘That's what I get for coming on to yobbos,' said Elizabeth. ‘Put them away, you hoon.'

‘I bet you're not really shocked,' said Arthur. ‘I bet you're only pretending.' He sniggered to himself and gathered up the photos.

‘Come on, Vicki,' said Elizabeth. ‘Let's get smashed.'

‘Hang on,' said Vicki. She separated one of the photos from the slippery pile. ‘Who's this?'

It was a picture of two men standing in a garden so green that it could not have been in Australia, the kind of green that to Vicki's untravelled eye looked like a trick of the camera: a deep, lolling, effortless green without even a tinge of yellow.

‘Is that Dexter?' said Vicki.

Elizabeth tilted her chair to look. ‘It is. It's Dexter and his father. In London. That must've been taken nearly twenty years ago. My Gahd. Will you look at that suit he's got on. The seams are all lumpy. It could do with a good press. That boy always did look a sight.'

The older man, Vicki saw, stood side-on, as if about to slip out of frame: his smile was crooked, almost sly. But Dexter! Dexter faced the camera with a frank, cheerful look. His hands were plunged deep in his trouser pockets. His hair was shockingly blond: it sprang back off his high, narrow, unlined forehead. He was young. A teenager. An HSC student. Hardly older than herself. He was not afraid of the camera, of the world. He liked the world, and he expected the world to like him. What was the word for the quality that shone in his plain, open face? It was
goodness
.

‘You know, Vicki,' said Elizabeth, ‘you've got to go back to school in February. You've got to study.'

‘You didn't,' said Vicki. She slipped the photo under a newspaper.

‘I did so! I went to university.'

‘You never got your diploma.'

‘Degree is the word.'

‘Degree, graduated, whatever it's called.'

‘No, but I studied.'

‘I bet you didn't study any more than you had to.' Vicki guzzled her drink. ‘I bet I know what you did at uni. You fucked.'

Arthur let out a high-pitched giggle.

‘You should talk,' said Elizabeth. ‘And don't call it uni. Only people who've never been there call it that.'

‘What's for tea?' said Arthur.

‘We're drinking,' said Elizabeth. ‘We're getting drunk. Why don't you cook something?'

‘I'm hungry,' he said, with more force.

‘Eat some cheese.'

Vicki laughed, and drank. Arthur thought for a moment. His eyes slid to the closed bathroom door. ‘Billy will be hungry too when he comes out of there,' he said. ‘He'll be absolutely starving. And he can't cook.'

‘But you could,' said Elizabeth. She turned her full attention on him, and he rose to it.

‘But I don't know how to.'

‘But you could if you tried.'

‘But my mother never taught me.'

‘But I can teach you.'

‘But you're not my mother.'

‘But I can still teach you.'

‘But I'm not allowed to turn on the gas.'

‘But I can turn it on for you.'

‘But I might burn myself.'

‘But I'll rub Savlon on your wounds.'

‘But fat might splash in my eye and make me go blind.'

‘But I'll get you a guide dog.'

‘But we haven't got a kennel for a blind dog.'

‘But he can sleep beside your bed.'

‘But he might piss on the floor.'

‘But you can clean it up in the morning.'

‘But Mum won't like it.'

‘But she's not here, so she won't find out.'

They stopped on a rising note. Dexter was standing in the bathroom doorway, holding Billy by the hand, lit from behind through a cloud of metallic steam.

‘Some things, Morty,' he said, ‘strain a person's sense of humour.'

He swept through the room. The three of them sat foolishly, with fading smiles. It was dark, and the rain had stopped. Vicki stood up and switched on the lamp in the corner: the disorder of the room, its stuffiness and neglect, would have made her feel guilty had she not been already half drunk: as it was, she witnessed minor twinges of the appropriate emotions occurring distantly, as if to some other girl in a similar circumstance. She pushed her glass across the table to her sister, who filled it again without meeting her eye.

By the time Dexter splashed down the sideway with the pizza boxes on his fore-arms, Elizabeth was setting the table. He stopped to wipe his feet and saw the big, free, two-handed gesture with which she flung out the tablecloth, a movement which seemed to him so carelessly proprietary, so symbolic of serene domesticity, that performed by someone other than his mother or his wife, parodied indeed by this viper, it became a travesty of truth and beauty. And yet the face she turned to him when she heard his feet scraping the mat was softened by the flush of alcohol: in the inadequate light she looked younger, sorrier, more deferential, more as he preferred to remember her.

Vicki was trying to find music on the radio. ‘I'll turn it off, Dex,' she said, ‘if you don't feel up to it.'

‘No, leave it,' he said. He held out the boxes to Elizabeth and sat down. ‘That's Berlioz. Leave that on.'

‘Opera,' said Elizabeth under her breath. She opened the cutlery drawer and scrabbled among the metal.

The announcer, a young and bashful man whose tentative voice could have reached the airwaves only on an amateur station, began to read out a synopsis.

‘In the next act,' he murmured, ‘Margaret waits for Faust. She waits and waits, but in vain: he does not come. He is in the depths of the forest, invoking Nature.'

The sisters glanced at each other over Dexter's head. Elizabeth laid one hand over her heart and raised the other in a gesture of tremendous romantic suffering. ‘Invoking nature!' she mouthed. But Vicki would not laugh. She stood in the middle of the room, not knowing what to do with her hands, and looked uncertainly at Dexter. Her face was blurred. She's drunk, thought Elizabeth. And so am I. She lowered her arm and set five places on the cloth. Dexter was sitting quite still between the children, looking down at the curl of steam that rose from the round hole in the pizza box. He was listening to the music.

Elizabeth lifted the lid off the pizza. Everyone sat forward. They ate in their fingers. If there is a spectre at this feast, thought Elizabeth, I'm it. She saw that though she had been able to bring a momentary order to this room, putting things in piles and clearing a space for action, she had not cleaned it, or made it into what they were all waiting for. Its surfaces were dull with the absence of meaning. The house itself was waiting.

She took a taxi to Philip's house. Poppy was asleep against the cushions with the phone beside her and an exercise book still open on her knee. ‘It's dark and smoky in the Paradise Cafe,' she had written. ‘You order a coffee, and you get it straight away. You can't eat croissants at the Paradise Cafe. But you get good coffee for the price you pay.'

Elizabeth turned on the television and sat down. It was an old French movie, half over. She wondered if she could dress like one of those maids, and trot about in high-heeled shoes with a strap across the instep, in a little fitted black dress to the knee and white collar and cuffs. She would need thin French lips, eyebrows plucked to a fine line, black curls over her forehead, and a piercing voice, sharp as the tinkling of her mistress's silver bell. A maid: but whom should she serve?

When the film ended a Greek man explained in his native tongue the details of the government's health scheme. It took him fully ten minutes, with diagrams, and then an Italian came on and repeated the performance in his language. Elizabeth watched and listened. She recognised a word here and there. It was soothing, this patient setting out of facts and services. She picked up Poppy's legs and arranged them across her lap. The tendons behind the girl's knees tightened like wires. ‘You smell nice,' murmured Poppy. ‘This lovely smell.' A choir of old people in blue robes sang to close down the station. It was a Jewish choir. ‘In joyful strains then let us sing, Advance Australia Fair!'

*

Vicki began to talk. She held her head in her two hands, but was in danger of dropping it among the pizza crusts: it swayed, her elbows were too pointy, the table was too wooden. She had a lot of things she needed to say to Dexter. She was not sure whether he was paying attention; from time to time he did not seem even to be in the room, but then she would swing her head round and find him still sitting opposite her, looking at her from a long way away. The boys had gone. Someone must have put them to bed.

‘I hated it when she came home for visits. They fought and fought, and Mum used to cry in the bathroom. After she died I used to think I would get sick too. Elizabeth said I was a hypochondriac, but
I
said at the doctor's they just look on your card and if you're a hypochondriac it shows. Let's make another one of those drinks. Where's Elizabeth.'

‘She went hours ago. I'm going to put you to bed now. Come on. Can you stand up?'

‘Yes. I can.' She could, and did, with skill. ‘I can put myself to bed.' She walked to the door. ‘What about the washing up?'

‘Go to bed.'

‘Goodnight.' She came slowly back to the table and held out her hand to shake his. ‘Goodnight, Dexter. I have enjoyed our conversation.' He put out his hand and she pumped it vigorously. She laughed. ‘And now you're supposed to say “What soft hands you have! All the better to touch you with!”'

‘Go to bed.'

‘They should be bloody soft, what with all the cream I put on them every day! They are soft, aren't they?'

‘Very soft. Go to bed.'

‘I'm going, I'm going. Now you have to say ‘‘God bless you. Sleep tight. Sweet dreams.'' That's what my mother used to say. Did you ever see my mother?'

‘Yes. I danced with her at Morty's twenty-first.'

‘Did you? I was only a baby then. You didn't know me then, did you?'

‘I saw you. I was allowed to hold you.'

‘Did Athena?'

‘No. I didn't know Athena then.'

She let go his hand and backed away.

‘I'll bring you a bucket,' said Dexter.

‘What for?'

‘In case you chuck in the night.'

She stared at him, and blundered out the door.

The buckets in the bathroom all had underclothes soaking in them. He emptied one lot out into the basin and carried the dripping bucket into Vicki's room. She had not taken off her clothes; she was lying on top of the sheet. Her eyes were open and the overhead light was on.

‘If I shut my eyes,' she said, ‘I get the whirling pit
so bad
.'

‘Shouldn't you drink a couple of glasses of water?' he said. She made no response. He folded two pillows and wedged them under her neck, to keep her head upright. Her feet were bare, and the gap between her big toe and the next one was ingrained with grey dirt. He pulled up a blanket and spread it over her.

‘Night,' she sang. ‘Ni-ight.'

Damn braces; bless relaxes. Dexter could not utter the words God bless you. She had forgotten him, anyway. He stood with his hand on the light switch and looked at the small hump she made under the blanket. He did not know which of the two of them was the more pathetic. He tiptoed out of the room and turned off the light behind him.

On his way through the kitchen he screwed up the pizza boxes and tried to force them into the stuffed bin, but they would not go so he left them standing in the corner. He shuffled the newspapers into a pile and his fingers slid across the cold surface of a photo. He picked it up and looked at it with dull eyes. Green. The boy, the young man was smiling in the garden, and the father was walking away.