I for Isobel (19 page)

If she had ever had that, she wanted to know it. Boring or not, the book had to be tackled.

When she grew tired of tracing, she went back to the book and considered opening it.

Come on, it isn't all Saint John of the Cross. Some of the saints were real dashers, like Augustine (not yet!) and Saint Thomas More.

How did she know? Something stirred in the dead country. How did she know so much about the saints? Not from the convent; she had left it too young—and there it was all bright little holy pictures of the nuns' favourites. Saint Joan in silvery armour had been Isobel's favourite, Saint Isabel being a dull old queen who didn't rate holy pictures and Saint Agnes with her lamb, her eyes turned towards Heaven, altogether too much of the good child. Those holy pictures were a bright spot in memory; there were special ones, set on plaster of paris with a ribbon to hang them by, prizes for good work—she could remember carrying one home, full of pride at having done the right thing for once.

The book.

She tried Augustine first, thinking of that prayer: Give me chastity and…something…only not yet. It wasn't there, surprise, surprise. They had the scene in the garden, but she skipped that because it made her nervous, the thought of being tapped on the shoulder, press-ganged, by the Almighty or anything else.

Saint John of the Cross. Now come on, no dodging.

She read the instructions for entering the dark night of the senses, trying to give them respectful attention though she thought that anyone who gave away worldly pleasures when he didn't have to was mad.

Rules for mortifying truly the desire for honour…well, here's something for you, Isobel.

1. Do those things which bring thee into contempt, and desire that others may do them.
(Like wearing a notice
KICK ME
on the appropriate spot. You do that all right.)

2. Speak disparagingly of thyself, and contrive that others may do so too.
(You're still in.)

3. Think humbly and contemptuously of thyself, and contrive that others may do so also.

It was such a picture of Isobel the nuisance that she had begun to giggle at the first one and after the third she was laughing quietly but steadily. Well, well; on the way to Heaven and she hadn't known it.

Still grinning, she turned to Saint Thomas More.

On Death

…Reckon me now yourself a young man in your best lust, twenty years of age, if ye will. Let there be another ninety. Both must ye die, both be ye in the cart carrying forward. His gallows and death standeth within ten miles of the farthest, and yours within eighty. I see not why ye should reckon much less of your death than he, though your way may be longer, since ye shall never cease riding till ye come at it.

That had wiped the grin off her face. Her tears indeed had begun to run quietly as she read
young man in your best lust.
They were for Nick, for whom she hadn't felt entitled to grieve—but she was entitled; she was one of them. She saw Helen and Trevor, holding each other so tenderly, but Mr Walter, too, and Olive, moved to such kindness as they heard the rumble of the cart.

She closed the book. It wasn't news, of course. Mrs Prendergast had had the same message, but Saint Thomas More put it better. It was just the putting it better that made it news.

Mortality. That's where love and brotherhood have to start, in what we have in common: you belong because you are mortal. Like:
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls
—that isn't religion, it's a kind of poetry.

And for those who hear nothing, the dead in life, her mother and Diana—you could shed a tear for them, too, but don't get carried away. Look to your own awakening.

That was enough of the book for today. She went back to her tracing, knowing what she had to do tomorrow. She must go back to the suburb she grew up in, retracing her steps to see if she could find a memory, a clue to the meaning of the book. She could hardly believe it of herself that she was going down memory lane, can you imagine, what a scenic tour, the corner where she had wet her pants and waddled home with the cold wet cloth sagging between her legs and Deirdre Fitzgerald following her all the way uttering complicated peals of grown-up laughter and pointing to her wet socks.

That memory encouraged her, because she didn't feel any particular shame at seeing it again, could have been either of the little girls, the one waddling or the one laughing; you had so little choice in what you did.

Now she put two and two together and connected the agonies of her bladder with the big girl, the class dunce with the moomoo eyes and the long, spindly legs, who had defended the entrance to the lavatories against her, dodging from side to side with hands outstretched ready to slap. Jesus Christ, everybody has the right to go to the lavatory; you don't have to be a charmer for that. She looked back at the waddling figure with a new tolerance.

She woke up next morning knowing at once what she had to do, but putting the thought of it away for the moment. She spent the morning washing her clothes and working on the enlargement—at this rate she would put in the first stitch this weekend. The loose flap would still be visible, of course—she was amused at that, but it did not matter, since she had discovered a small authentic piece of her lost self.

After lunch, she got ready to go out. One thing, it wasn't far to go. As she went to the bathroom, she thought, the bathroom being at the back of the house, this is the furthest point, and the loo being at the back of the bathroom…what a thought. At least there wasn't anybody dancing about in front of it, that was progress. But how far? Two miles? Not very far to travel in nineteen years, not counting work, of course, and some excursions, like that boarding house where they used to spend the summer holidays, but that was different—she had been taken there. On her own, she hadn't got far.

She put the book in her bag, the charm against phone boxes and who knew what else.

It mightn't be as bad as she expected.

The funny thing was, she reflected on her way to the bus stop, the funny thing was that, though it was a short journey in space, it seemed like a long one, in time, yet she had left less than a year ago. It couldn't be a year since Margaret had stood crying in the empty lounge room, while Isobel stood breathing the air of freedom.

The suburb she was going to visit belonged to earlier days. She had a confused thought about the city one builds, the insect city with its threadlike paths, inside the geographical maps.

In the street there were couples strolling, following their own ant-tracks. One couple had stopped to look in a shop window; in the halted stroller the woman had been wheeling, a silk-skinned jewel-eyed baby had captured one of its swivelling legs, thrust the foot, covered with a lacy white sock, into its mouth and was sucking it steadily.

In the cart carrying forward. Not strollers, she thought with horror, hearing remembered screams, thinking what the price of human love might be.

When she got into the bus, she was still thinking with anxiety of the enchanting, perishable baby. The cart carrying forward was not a thought to dwell on. Do not dwell on the thought that we dwell in the cart. She squashed the little insect word as it came to life, before it could distract her. This is serious; you are mortal but you must live as if you were immortal—otherwise, who would dare?

Love begins in the mortal flesh and must not know it.

You'd be like Mrs Prendergast, making offerings to the idol every minute, sighs and lovely wreaths and little white coffins…forget it. It was bad enough, thinking of that baby growing into, dying into, a stout woman with varicose veins and a hairy wart on her chin—that was death at the rate one could stand it.

One must know and not know. It was evident that there were degrees of knowing. Or else think so much of life, to believe it was worth it. Worth the coming and the going.

The bus stopped at the top of the main street of her home suburb. She got off and walked. How quiet it was! Parramatta Road had drawn off all the Sunday walkers; the street was empty, and not only of people. Of course, this stretch, from the church to Parramatta Road, had never been one of her ant-tracks.

She looked about like a tourist at the old-fashioned houses, the fanlights, stained-glass panels like Fifty-one's, steps with marble treads and patterned tiles set in the…what was it called, the vertical face? There was a special word…

Then it began. All the nameless things threatened and the colours pestered: sea-jade, chocolate, no word for the sullen grey-flaked white of marble.

She felt for the book, took hold and the word factory stood still. She walked on, protected.

Here was the church, in red brick crumbling away at the corners, so inoffensive…why hadn't she gone in, attended Mass and thought her own thoughts? Plenty of other people did, no doubt, but not our Isobel. She had to skulk about back streets, pretending she was going to ten o'clock, walking, walking, rapt in a mutter of thoughts she was too frightened to express, like, I have a right to my beliefs, as much as anybody else, but petrified all the time with the fear of being seen and reported to her mother.

She felt guilty still, not of missing Mass, but of the skulking and the fear, but no more guilty here than elsewhere, less perhaps, because the old building made a statement of peaceful indifference.

As she walked through the dim porch, with its rack of pamphlets and its parish notices, the holy-water stoup made no claim, but when she went into the church, she understood why she couldn't have treated it with contempt, a church having it over other buildings, in that it was always a shell, so much less important than what filled it—at this moment, shadowy peace and quiet, stained, here and there, by patches of wordless emotion. Around the big crucifix at the back, she sensed not prayer, but a faded anguish; the crucifix was smaller than it used to be, which was right for the scenes of childhood: the blood-marked feet which had loomed at eye level were now of neat size and remarkably close to the floor. The church broke the rules, being bigger than she remembered.

About the confessional hovered guilt and unease. At each side of the altar a kneeling angel held the stem of a bright brass candelabrum which branched and sprouted candlesticks, each one tipped with a tiny whitish bulb like a deformed fingernail—she had pinned some furious analogies to those bulbs, glaring secretly from behind her prayer book, condemning artificial virtue, artificial candlelight, artificial devotion, and they were still there, maybe prompting other young anarchists to meditation. There must be a gentlemanly salesman with a hypnotic smile and a slight limp behind the counter at Pellegrini's. ‘I recommend these, Father. They are very…attractive.'

You'll go to Hell, Isobel Callaghan, for laughing in church.

The pulpit was a surprise. She could have sworn it was higher and enclosed in carved oak, but it was low-set, unpretentious, with only a faded red curtain hanging from a brass rail. The pulpit for some reason touched her feelings, giving out the same friendly calm as the book.

God, you're a nut, going about like a water diviner holding a twig in front of you waiting for it to dip…yet she had felt it twitch in her hand and was disturbed.

She stood waiting, but the pulpit had nothing to say to her, so she went out walking along past the presbytery to the school and a memory she didn't have to grope for, the terrible day of the mental arithmetic test. Fifty questions and Isobel has got them all right, so she is sitting alone among empty desks, the rest of the class being crowded round the walls. There is to be one more question each and the wrong answer will bring down the cane the nun is brandishing. One thin little girl with bright straight brass-coloured hair has grey eyes that hold a skyful of fear. Isobel's face is expressionless. Nobody else knows what that word means; it is not being calm like marble, but naked, skinless. It is a disgusting failure of privacy, like an exposed liver.

Why couldn't you have got a couple wrong? Why did you have to set such a standard for the rest of them? But how many would be safe? You might have been out there too, and you couldn't risk that, could you?

She peered through the wire fence, past the camphor laurel trees, at the neat pale concrete of the playground, empty of children and of ghosts. No ghost running—she had walked, first, with the others gathering behind her, keeping stamping time with her tread, and whether she quickened her step or they did, she did not know, but she was running, round the side of the building to the cul-de-sac of the lavatories—poor thinking, Isobel, but then, what's the use of thinking? That won't help you. She had run, with the pack after her, and had fetched up in an angle between the brick buttress and the wall. She had turned round in despair and had found the leading boy close behind her, so close that their eyes had met uncomfortably. And after all, nothing. Nothing had happened. The boy had advanced his hand, given her hair a gentle, ceremonial tweak, then stood staring. Somebody at the back had shouted, ‘Get on with it,' and so released him to turn and shout, ‘Mind your own fucking business,' and to plunge back into the mob which rolled away on its new centre. Leaving her disappointed. She had not been so close to anyone before.

She followed the fence around the corner, found the buttress of brick and the sloping half-brick which covered the join between the thicker base and the upper part—stopped and gaped, because she remembered the purplish sloping half-brick coming level with her nose. The mental arithmetic expert, the political animal, the survivor, was a little girl twelve-and-a-half bricks high.

Isobel Callaghan, pick on somebody your own size.

Another thing that astonished about the bricks was their nakedness: no Isobel there, hiding her guilty face in the angle, nothing but a piece of information, a true memory. Of course, in a true memory, you don't see yourself. All the miserable self-images were invention, or at least embroidery.