The Children's Bach (3 page)

‘But he's the same age as you.'

‘I know.'

‘What would he know about it?'

‘You don't have to know anything. Just turn up on the day.'

‘That's terrible,' said Vicki. ‘That's really terrible. I think things like that ought to be stricter, if people are going to do them at all. Otherwise they don't make sense.'

*

‘You have to tell me a story,' said Poppy to her father. ‘Before you go to work.'

‘You're too old,' said Philip. ‘Why don't you just read, or do some practice?'

‘It's not the same. It's no fun on my own.'

‘Don't make me feel guilty,' he said. ‘Someone has to bring home the bacon.'

‘Why can't you work in the daytime like everybody else?'

‘I can't, and you know why. I don't know any stories any more.'

‘Yes you do. Stories from your life. Just make something up, like you used to. It's easy. You go “Once upon a time'', and then say whatever comes into your head.'

She plumped up the doona and moved over to make room for him. He sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘When you go to high school next year,' he said, ‘are you going to tell your friends your father still tells you a story every night?'

‘That depends,' said Poppy, ‘on whether they're the right sort of person. Come on. I'm listening.'

‘Once upon a time,' said Philip. ‘There was a wonderful cafe. It opened very early in the morning.

No. It stayed open twenty-four hours. It never closed. They never turned off the machine. That's why the coffee was perfect.'

It was easy. He slid into it.

‘At night, because of the noise of people laughing, they turned up the treble on the jukebox. But in the early mornings, in the peaceful shift when customers on their way to work were reading the papers, you could clearly hear the trip and run of the bass lines. Some people came alone, with a library book, dressed in clean clothes of sober cut and colour. Others brought their children and taught them, with smiles and soft words, how to behave in a public place. The clever children read aloud to their parents from the Situations Vacant, the Houses to Let. The big windows of the cafe faced east. People sat with their backs to the sun, and the iron bars of night softened in their shoulders. On the other side of the road, which sparkled with passing cars, a deep garden overflowed its iron fence.'

He glanced at her to see if he was getting too fanciful. She was looking at the ceiling. ‘Don't drone,' she said. ‘You're starting to drone.'

‘It was a place that waited,' said Philip. ‘It was a place of reason and courtesy. On the jukebox they had Elvis Presley. They had Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. They had Les Paul and Mary Ford singing “How High the Moon''.

‘People danced there, in the daytime, in the middle of the morning, down the aisle between the two long rows of tables. The songs they favoured were South American ones with titles the Australians passed over in ignorance, thinking them Italian: the songs were more passionate, more driven, more intellectual than anything we know of here. They danced in each other's arms, with their elbows up high and no expression on their faces: it was all form and precision. They did the tango, the rhumba, the samba. They knew the steps. They never stumbled. Their arms and legs were long and sinewy. The dresses were a spray of light. The men's trousers hit the shoe just right.

‘There were two waiters. Neither of them had ever forgotten an order in his life. Kon, a Greek, was as handsome as a statue, cheerful and young. He had a glossy folder of photos of himself and wanted to get into modelling. Marcello was a reformed gambler with slicked-back hair and an expression of weary, courtly bitterness. He stood behind the machine, he held a drawer open with his thigh and counted money. He had confidence with a wad. He pinched each note between thumb and forefinger. He had been in Australia twenty years but he could still hardly speak English.

‘There was graffiti in the lavatories. Linda Love-lace's mother went down on the Titanic. Lisa is a slut. Renato is a spunk and you molls will never have him signed Lucy and Maria. People in the Paradise Bar read the daily graffiti as if it was the news of the world.'

‘As if it were,' said Poppy.

‘The Paradise Bar does not serve alcohol. It doesn't need to. Something happens, once you pass that heavy fly curtain . . . Are you listening?'

It was dark. The television was turned down low in the other room. Poppy was dropping off. She rallied.

‘Yes. Keep going. Once you passed the . . .'

‘The Gaggia hissed. Behind it on a shelf stood a row of triangular bottles, red and green and yellow.'

He paused. She was breathing steadily.

‘Pop?'

No answer. He dropped his voice and began to speak more rapidly. ‘At night it's different. The waiters are low-browed and covered in tattoos. They wear black jeans and tight T-shirts. They look more like crims or bouncers than waiters. When they set down a cup of coffee some of it slops into the saucer.

The owner of the Paradise Bar seems uncertainly in control of his employees. Dope is bought and sold at the Paradise Bar. It is not the kind of place outside which you would like to see your daughter sitting, under the Cinzano umbrellas. On Saturday nights you cannot get a seat at any of its twenty tables. The marbled concrete floor is slippery with spilt liquid. Occasionally some girl, limp with excess, collapses into the arms of her shrieking friends. They hustle her outside, holding her by the shoulders and the ribcage. Her feet in their flat shoes drag behind her in ballet position. Hot Valiants cruise close to the kerb, gunning their motors. The games jingle their piercing tunes in the big back room, the air is thick with smoke, other things are going on upstairs. The Italian kids walk in and out with a lot of money on their backs. They walk in and out, shaking out their expensive haircuts, shaking their glossy Italian hair.'

She was fast asleep. He did not know whether she had done her homework. For dinner they had gulped a souvlaki, walking home through the park. He got off the bed. At the door he turned round and said in a whisper,

‘And men fuck girls without loving them. Girls cry in the lavatories. Work, Poppy. Use your brains.'

Maybe Elizabeth would come over. He left the car keys on the table just in case.

That night at the studio they finished early. There were no taxis, so he walked. He didn't know what time it was but thought it must be after two. The cafe was still open, hollow as a Hopper painting behind the empty bus shelter. Philip passed on the other side of the street, too far away to determine the sex of a couple of white-faced students who were sitting at a corner table under the neon sign, not talking to each other. He plugged on up the rise towards the housing commission flats. By the time he passed the first block he was singing to himself, some old Stevie Winwood song with a riff that made him think of that small figure, arms outspread, hovering like a mosquito between banks of keyboards.

There were people against the railings of the carpark. Six, or eight. His skin stood up. It was dark. He made air go in, and out, and kept walking. They stood quietly and let him pass. He waited for the thump in the back, in the neck, the foot stuck out to trip. He wanted something to happen, left right left right come
on
.

‘Hey, you.'

He propped and spun round. The briefcase swung out from his side.

‘What's in that bag.'

He felt his charming smile push up the flesh of his cheeks, the vertical wrinkles form beside his mouth. He took a step towards the boy he thought had spoken, lowered his head and nodded many times.

‘Money,' he said in a conversational tone. ‘Money, and drugs.'

The boy was too young: he looked quickly left and right. Was it a joke? He had no answer. He twisted his face away in a grimace of disgust and self-consciousness, as if a teacher had ticked him off, and fell back among the other children against the rail.

Was that all?

*

Vicki woke. Elizabeth was still sleeping, with her face to the wall. Her hair, flattened in the night, had formed matted curls which reminded Vicki against her will of what can be seen inside vacuum cleaners or the ripped seat of railway carriages. From the street downstairs, out the raised-eyebrow windows, rose a screeching of metal. Vicki slid out from under the pink quilt and went to the window, but the tram had launched itself again and was away, its little flag fluttering. The room was so high above the street that there was no need for curtains.

Vicki poked around and found a partition behind which there was a bath with one of those hand squirter things she had only ever seen in magazines. She squatted down and washed herself carefully. There was a lot of steam and when she pushed open the fire-escape door beside the bath a gumtree branch presented itself right in front of her. She leaned out and put her face among the leaves: their edges were as hard as school rulers, the air was cold. She could see a fire escape of wooden stairs and tubular railings, and a narrow yard out of which the tree came soaring straight up as if fighting the building for space. A woman in a blue coat hurried across the carpark with a fat satchel in her arms.

In the huge room beyond the partition the phone rang and she heard Elizabeth pick it up. Before the caller had a chance to speak, Elizabeth said in a slow, low, very distinct voice, ‘Don't
ever
ring this number at this hour, ever again. Is that clear?' Vicki turned off the taps and stood in the bath. Sensible plans of action such as ‘Step out on to the floor' or ‘Call out and ask her for a towel' clicked their wooden sides together without meaning, like building blocks. She heard bed-clothes rustle, then a stillness. If she stood there long enough the drops of water would dry on her. Would her whole life be made up of these moments? The difference between these moments and being dead was that live people were always supposed to be doing something. Dead people could just shrivel. Her mother was lying on her back in a dark box, crabbed and cramped as a bat; her arms and legs were drawn up against her torso by the hourly drying and tightening of her skin which was by now no longer skin but had become cracked leather, dark reddish brown and ridged and shiny like what you saw on cooked ducks in Chinese food shops. Vicki had an idea that this was not scientifically accurate but she preferred this theory to thinking about dampness and worms. She closed the fire-escape door as quietly as she could. There was no sound from the bed.

*

Vicki ran her hand along the rack of pink and green T-shirts. The radio was on in the shop. Music stopped and a man read the news. ‘A twelve-year-old girl, shipwrecked three years ago and given up for dead, has been found alive in the jungle of Sumatra, covered in moss. It is believed that she kept herself alive by absorbing pollen through her skin.'

Two salesgirls were leaning against the front counter. One of them was holding a bottle of metho and a soft cloth. Their eyes met.

‘Moss?' said one. ‘Pfff. She absorbed
pollen
through her
skin
?'

They laughed. Vicki watched them closely, ready to be included in their amusement, to roll her shoulders in scepticism as they did, but they pretended not to see her and turned back to their contemplation of the street outside. In a minute one of them would come over and tell Vicki to stop handling the clothes.

Vicki knew what her retort would be: ‘Don't be
silly
.' She would turn her mouth down, and her eyes would become cold, glittering slits. And if a waiter said anything to her about going straight through to the toilet without being a customer of the cafe, she would put her hand on her hip and say, ‘First I piss, then I eat – do you
mind
?' And then she would order something
really cheap
, like one donut or a packet of CCs. In this frame of mind, savage with homesickness and loneliness, she roamed the city, daring it to tackle her. It paid her no attention.

*

Athena understood why people gave up playing an instrument. She knew she did not play well, that her playing, even when correct, was like someone reciting a lesson in an obedient voice, without inflection or emotion, without understanding: a betrayal of music. She took her hands off the keyboard. There was dust on all the keys except those an octave either side of middle C. She closed the lid.

She stood at the tramstop opposite the long railed side of the cemetery. Someone had written in black texta on the lamp-post DARREN WAR LOURD. No tram was in sight, but she saw an orange campervan coming fast down the street, heading south. It had neat curtains and a sink, and a lone man at the wheel. He and Athena exchanged a friendly look and she got in and he turned the van round and drove the other way, on to the freeway and out past the turn-off to the airport and the Italian houses with white porticos and palm trees, past the city limits and the wreckers' yards and the paddocks where broken-winded horses stood patiently at the wire and out on to the great basalt plains with their tall thistles nodding, and further and further until it was desert with a sky so dry and high that they slept out on the ground at night with never a drop of dew.

There was still no tram coming. It was lazy to wait when she could be walking, and only three-quarters of a mile.

When Vicki saw her for the second time, Athena was standing in the wide doorway of the bookshop, arms folded and head tilted back, scanning the window covered in handprinted cards on which people advertised rooms to let in their rented houses. Athena lived, for as long it took to read a card, in each sunny cottage, attractive older-style flat, spacious house, quaint old terrace, large balcony room with fireplace, collective household with thriving veggie garden. Her children dematerialised, her husband died painlessly in a fall from a mountain. What curtains she would sew! What private order she would establish and maintain, what handfuls of flowers she would stick in vegemite jars, how sweetly and deeply she would sleep, and between what fresh sheets!