The Feel of Steel (23 page)

Who Spilt the Wine?

W
e were going to eat at Grossi Florentino, so I wore my perfect Vanessa Lucas dress. Light and silky, it buttons firmly to the waist, then flows out in abundance to just above the ankles. Its colour? An airy argentine that faintly dreams of pink. On my way out the door, I snatched up a pale wool Indian wrap.

The Bourke Street pavement diners were cosmopolitan that balmy evening, and so was I, tra la, my lovely dress reflecting fluidly in shopfronts. Up the carpeted stairs I soared, alighted between Dad and my sister, smoothed my skirts and stowed my shawl against the wall. Would the
signora
like something to drink?

The wine I chose was red.

The glass of merlot stood in front of me, quivering untouched while I admired the white geraniums in the window box. A heavy wetness slopped into my lap,
skidded across me in a sweep, and struck the wall beside me. I felt it ricochet right up my back, as high as the clasp of my bra. My mouth fell open. I thought, insanely, that someone at the next table had leapt up and flung his drink over me. Only then did I see that the source was my own unbroached glass, still toppling, spewing over me the rest of its contents. The whole right side of my cloud-coloured dress was soaked purple. Wine bounced on to the floor and the pale shawl sucked it up.

My sister gasped, ‘Ohhhhh – the dress you got for Alice's wedding!' Past and future drained out through the soles of my feet. I stood up and mumbled in a hopeless voice, ‘I'll call a cab. I'll go straight home.'

But the hostess, a pretty young woman in a red polka-dot jacket, hustled me across the room to the toilets. ‘I'll go and ask the other girls,' she piped, ‘if anybody's got anything to lend you.' I picked up my stained skirt in handfuls and hauled its bulk round to the front of me. I plunged it into the basin with the cold tap running. I soaked myself to the skin, from waist to ankle. I couldn't tell if the stains were fading. Numbly I attacked the shawl.

The hostess rushed back, now wearing jeans and a shirt. She had her polka-dot jacket under one arm, and held out to me, by its tiny little straps, a short and slinky black dress.

‘Madam!' she said anxiously. ‘Would you care to wear these? What I had on?'

What – squeeze my fifty-eight-year-old body into the mermaid slip of her youth, the brave scarlet jacket of her
Italianness? I wanted to cast myself at her feet and howl. I was speechless but she read my face. She darted into the toilet cubicle to put her clothes back on. I wrung my shawl into a dripping lump the size of a basketball and slunk out into the restaurant.

But the table! The table we'd been sitting at was bare. No father. No sister. Not even a cloth. I thought I had lost my wits. Was this a Buñuel movie? Had I been scrubbing away in there for years? I staggered back to the toilet, calling out, ‘Where's my family?'

‘I moved them to a better table,' called the hostess. ‘Turn left.'

There they sat, with their menus. I squelched up. They gaped at me. I said, ‘I'm going home.' Without giving them a chance to answer I bolted down the stairs and on to the pavement, head down, hands full of sodden fabric, making for the Windsor cab rank.

The taxi interior was plastic-coated. I leaked a couple of litres down the back of the seat. At home I got out the Sard's Wonder Soap and laboured at the trough. I forked in baked beans cold from the tin. There was nothing on TV.

By sunrise the clothes were dry and the stains, by a miracle, gone – but my heart still seethed with grievance and self-pity.

‘And to think,' I lamented to another of my sisters, ‘that ten minutes before it happened, I was striding down the street thinking, ‘Gee, I look great in this dress!''

‘Just goes to show,' she said, slanting at me the sort of look that only a sister can give. ‘Pride goes before a fall.'

The Nanna-Mobile

I
drove the nanna-mobile out to Highpoint West and bought a baby seat, silvery grey with dark blue flecks, much more sumptuous than the seatcovers of the actual car, which are of a dull, coarse, uninspiring fabric. A bloke at Toyota in Elizabeth Street charged me a paltry sum to bolt the seat into the correct position. Cool! Now I can snatch the kid, chuck her in the back, and light out for the border.

Only fooling.

Sort of.

I may as well admit that I have fallen in love with this baby. I can't say I wasn't warned, but as usual I wasn't paying attention – and anyway, who ever listened to a warning about love?

The thing is, four and a bit months ago I saw her slide into the world. Her eyes were closed. Her tiny face was
compressed into an expression of profound, unshakeable composure. At the sight of her I was pole-axed by an emotion unlike any I have ever felt before. The word
love
hardly touches the sides.

At my age you do not expect to be consumed by a passion so intense. I can't stand it when people say, ‘Grandchildren are wonderful!' then add, in a roguish way, ‘because you can give them back.' I don't
want
to give her back. I am almost frightened by the ferocious love I feel for her. I have to discipline it, to ration my visits to her shrine, to relegate myself over and over to a secondary figure, a servant, a helper. If I'm not careful I could turn into a monster nanna, the sort everyone wishes would find a new husband or take up dangerous mountaineering.

I understand now those people you read about in magazines who go crazy when their children's marriages end and their contact with their grandchildren is cut off. A friend of mine, whose son was murdered, rages against the killer not just for taking her son but because ‘she has stolen the future from me. Now I will never have grandchildren.'

When the baby was newborn I was on deck daily in the kitchen at her parents' house. If their friends came to visit, if they picked the baby up and held her for too long, if she appeared to be at ease in their arms, I was obliged to go outside and take deep breaths in the back yard. A visiting four-year-old boy (a fellow-sufferer perhaps? – he had a small brother) spotted at once the black jealousy I was trying to conceal: he told his mother he didn't want
to see that nanna again, ‘in case she does something mean'.

My jealousy shocked me. I'd believed that grand-motherhood would be a peaceful state, sunny, relaxed, benign, something one moved around in at will, maturely, being useful. Instead, this primal murk.

Once I used to sing along earnestly with John Lennon's ‘Imagine': ‘nothing to kill or die for'. Then I had my daughter, and realised what wimpy bullshit that fantasy was. Now that I've seen and come to know my grandchild, our demented mother is not the only wild woman in the family.

Occasionally a short-sighted person will assume on a tram or in the supermarket that I am the baby's mother. Popular mythology supposes this to be a mistake that flatters a woman, but I don't like it. I'm amazed at how urgently it matters to me that my real relationship with the child be known. Why? It's not as if any particular benefit would accrue.

Or would it? In a recent issue of the
Australian Book Review
, a Sydney writer and critic whose wife runs an upmarket secondhand book business conducted a casual survey: which successful Australian novels survive the generation of their first publication? Apart from those who'd succeeded internationally, he found very few. Hardly any. Almost none. And mine were not among them. Indeed, my name was mentioned among those writers whose first novel sells secondhand at insultingly low prices, even in hardback.

My reaction was a double-decker. At first I felt bleak.
A bit forlorn. Ah well, I thought with a sigh,
sic transit gloria
. One must bow the head, and be drearily splendid. But then into my mind flashed an image of startling clarity: a woman and a small girl walking away along a dirt road, hand in hand, talking pleasantly to each other of this and that. I knew them at once. They were my future. The vision was accompanied by a lightening of the heart that lifted me off my feet.

I described the moment to a psychoanalyst friend. He called it ‘the collapse of ambition'. Collapse? It felt more like a flourishing, an opening out. Ambition may have collapsed, but not me. Not this nanna. She's only just taking off.

Das Bettelein

I
was washing my hands in the Concert Hall toilets when a trembly, middle-aged voice rose from one of the lavatory cubicles. ‘Is anyone there?'

I glanced up.

‘Is anyone out there?' called the voice, more urgently. ‘I can't open this door!'

The woman beside me at the basin moved uncertainly towards the cubicles.

‘I'm sorry!' called the trapped lady. ‘It must be something silly I've done to the lock!'

Outside, the bell for the start of the performance was ringing. I dried my hands. All I wanted was to hear the Windsbacher Knabenchor sing Bach's
Christmas Oratorio
. But the invisible woman was beginning to babble: she'd come down from the country for the festival – she was terribly sorry to be such a nuisance – what a fool she felt!

‘Should I go and, um, find someone?' the helpless Samaritan called to her through the locked door.

A violent rattling and clicking exploded inside the cubicle. ‘It's all right!' cried the voice. ‘I think I've got it!'

The door burst open and the entombed concert-goer stumbled out, red-faced.

I dashed away to my seat. And as I watched the German choirboys filing on to the stage, I suddenly remembered something I hadn't thought of for twenty years – since August 1980.

It happened in Venice, where I'd gone on holiday from Paris with some gay boys I knew, one Australian, one French, two Americans – four cheerful, affectionate hysterics. Privately I disapproved of their obsession with fun, with youthful beauty and clothes and sex and cruising and special cocktails. For some reason they seemed fond of me, and they were adorable – ingenious, kind, always laughing – but in my heart I thought of them as moral lightweights.

In a crumbling heap of a cheap hotel on the island of Giudecca we shared one long, high-ceilinged room. It contained nothing but single beds made up with coarse white sheets – austere beds, like the ones children sleep in. I'd wake early each morning and find the sun-tanned boys still asleep in a row, each on his narrow pallet.

One hot siesta time we were all lying about in our
room, reading and dozing. I got up, wanting to wash, and wandered along wing after wing of tiled hallways to the bathroom. It was windowless and damp, divided into sections by pebbled cement walls which almost reached the ceiling. I locked myself into one of these morbid cubicles, sat on the toilet, then stood for a while under a cool shower. When I went to open the door, the lock was jammed.

I tried everything on that ancient latch: patience, jiggling, furious bashing. No point yelling. Nobody would have heard me. I started to panic. The boys would sally forth into fabulous Venice without me. They would forget me and go back to Paris. Winter would come and I would die there, locked in a dunny on a foreign island.

Eventually I worked out that I could stand on the lavatory seat, get one foot up on the shower taps, hoist myself on my belly across the top of the wall, and drop painlessly on to the free side. I raced back to the dorm and found the boys, fresh from their nap, happily squabbling over their colourful shirts. I acted out the story of my daring escape. They turned from their suitcases.

‘You mean,' said one of these libertines, ‘that you climbed out and left the lock jammed? You just
walked away
?'

‘What else could I have done? I was trapped!'

‘Helen,' said one of the Americans. ‘I can't
believe
you'd behave like that. It's so selfish! Now you go straight back down there. Climb in, and pick that lock.'

The others supported him in a chorus. I could not find
an argument to dent their united front. Crestfallen, I took my nail clippers, scrambled back over the bathroom wall, and worked the latch open.

We took a boat across the water, and went out eating and drinking in the beautiful city. They drove back to Paris. I came home to Australia. Twenty years later, as far as I know, only two of them are still alive.

The famous German choir, some of them tiny boys, some almost men, is singing now about the birth of a baby. Their voices are controlled and clear. This is not grand, monumental Bach. It's intimate. Something about making a ‘
Bettelein
'. A clean, soft little bed. Something about a heart, a place to rest? When I get home I'll look up the words in the dictionary. Tomorrow I'll go out and try to find the CD.