My Hundred Lovers (28 page)
We were staying together at a motel. Our father had not long moved into the aged-care home which had for several years housed our mother. My father flirted with the women who served his meals and his tongue still desired his evening drink of three parts overproof rum and one part Coke. The night our mother died he was in his bed, after falling asleep, drunk. Our brother Paul was long in his grave.
I remember the drive back to the motel. It resembled the long, flickering dreamlike drive through deserted streets the rainy night my sister was born: the earth suddenly silent, the flimsy fabric between the past and the future ripped asunder, the body's radar picking up every sound, sensation and smell of a strange new world. We didn't speak and as we turned into the motel, the first pearly light came into the sky.
There was only a double bed in the room. We were so exhausted that we brushed our teeth before stripping down to our underwear and getting into bed.
âI love crisp white hotel sheets against my body,' said Jane.
âMe too,' I said. âI love the smell, and the feel.'
She backed into me, so that we were spooned like an old married couple. âCuddle me, sis,' said my beautiful sister.
I put my arm around her slender waist and snuggled into her warm back. She put her hand around my arm. âI love you, Debs,' she said, raising my hand to kiss it.
I sometimes wonder if, like me, she remembers.
NINETY-FIVE
Another house as object lover
I LOVED THIS HOUSE AS
soon as I saw it. I loved its outline, its shape, its crooked roof and low front door. I loved that it was two hundred and seventy years old, older than the first European-built house in Australia. I loved the huge crusty oven set into its bricks and the cellar, the well in the garden, its many windows opened in welcome to the church bells ringing out the hours. I loved its old shutters and its ancient stone walls and straight away I wanted to know the stories of every single person who had lived in it. If I have settled anywhere upon the earth, it is here.
In this part of southern France, spring agricultural fairs are common. The Master of the Cassoulet brings out his robes, the Mistress of the Cheese, the Commander of Flour, all dressed as if in mayoral finery, with sashes and ribbons and heavy medallions hanging from golden chains. Great long tables are set up in communal halls, or beneath marquees on the grass, and huge cauldrons of stews or cavalcades of sausages are dished out to communards. In my village every spring there is also a procession of tractors, huge shiny new red ones, as big as fire engines, and little ancient machines from the early twentieth century, trundling along with enormous wheels like old-fashioned prams. The farmers sitting on the tractors tip their hats or wave, and we who line the streets wave back. Everyone knows we are saluting animals, grass, wheat, rain, air, soil and the sun, every living thing that brings us our existence.
I take back ripe spilling mature cheeses to my house. I take back wine and bread and cuts of meat that my butcher proffers tenderly, cradling them as carefully as if they were a new baby. I take back the proud new shoots of asparagus, which the asparagus seller makes sure I know how to cook. He looks dubious about selling perfect new-season asparagus to me, someone he mistakes for a
rosbif
, who might murder it in its moment of glory. I take all these things and make a meal from them, sitting in the dissolving present moment in a tended garden of apple trees, rhododendrons, lavender, scarlet geraniums and early spring roses. I live as if everything that happens to me is a magnificent afterlife.
I own this house because of the Sydney property boom of the late twentieth century, which magically turned the ordinary house where I grew up into a goldmine, transforming my father and mother into well-off people. When they died my sister and I inherited enough money to buy, respectively, a studio flat at Bondi Beach for my sister to use during her infrequent visits to Australia and a ramshackle house in France for me, for which I feel both grateful and obscurely guilty.
The money I have left over supplements my modest editing income, as well as my son's desire to study at Saint Martins in London. My husband's father is still alive, ninety-two and still painting and drawing, and our son lives with his grandfather in a beautiful house in St John's Wood. A sensitive boy, my son learnt long ago not to talk to me about his father, and never to mention my sister's name. Of course I am ashamed of this, but I was born preferring death to surrender. Like my parents before me, I am the possessor of violent emotions.
Where I have chosen to live is close enough to London for my son to visit. I pick him up in my old banger from Carcassonne airport, now on the airline budget route from Stansted. I wait for him in the flimsy terminal as pale English tourists are disgorged, together with befuddled locals, and then the face of my adored, newly adult son, that face more dear to me than any face I know.
I keep a room for him. He is a young man of grace and charm, half-English, half-Australian, a French speaker, his heritage to be forever torn between north and south, a lover of northern-hemisphere seasons and southern-hemisphere skies, with roots reaching out in all directions. Like me, he loves freezing Christmases and sweltering Christmases, his exiled heart schooled to pursue what is beyond.
SHE DOES NOT LIKE TO
think of her brother. She hates to think of him, in fact, breathless, stopped, that boy who once dragged a reluctant dog across a polished floor.
Steph told her that her brother was no less real even though she could no longer see him, just as Russia was no less real even though she couldn't see it.
Steph advised her to adopt the Gestalt technique of speaking out loud, saying carefully and clearly: âI choose to have a brother who is dead.'
She tried it, but only once.
The words in the air sounded so bleak, so bare, so awful, that she rushed from the room, leaving them behind, running and running.
She does not like to think of all the things she did not do: go to him, hold his hand, drag him screaming to some faraway place to stop him drinking himself to death. She does not like to think of her own culpability.
What happened to those years between him rising from the bed and getting into that car? How did she come to not know her own brother?
The guilty truth is that the woman did not see her brother Paul often. One time she did not see him for three years straight, when he was in the Northern Territory working and she was in Paris, grieving. He lost his driver's licence in Gove, where he was working at the mines, for drink driving. He was jailed in Darwin for driving a mate's car while drunk. It was these years that turned out to be crucial, the years when it might still have been possible to reach out and save him. But as he was going down she was looking the other way, and she did not know what was approaching.
She has a bag which contains all his worldly possessions: a jumper with holes, smelling of cigarettes and of him; a fraying wallet; a couple of old vinyl records (
Harvest
, which they used to play over and over); and an old torn photograph of all of them at the beach in Queensland, her brother, her sister and herself, still children, their parents standing behind them, much taller than their children, more beautiful and more glamorous than they could possibly hope to be.
Paul, Ro, Super Nan, her mother and father, citizens of that vast republic of the dead. Nana Elsie, stilled.
Where have they gone, the pictures inside Nana Elsie's head of dancing around a room with a handsome captain? What of the pictures inside Paul's head, and Ro's, and that picture in her mother's head of holding a knife against a daughter's soft throat?
Where will her own pictures go? Who but she apprehends the world with her particular eyes, grasping it with her ten particular fingers and ten particular toes? What body but hers bears these unique scars, the story of a life made manifest? No self without a body, no body without a remembering self to animate it.
The woman who now lives alone in a cottage in southern France is careful to catalogue her body's memories. In the urge to tidy up, to sort through her body's archaeology, she makes sure that pictures pass from head to head, a collective remembering. Her son remembers a sixteen-year-old blind girl growing watercress on a flannel during a long sea crossing in order to have something fresh to eat. He carries a picture of Mademoiselle Joubert, too, adrift in the Australian bush, the daughter of a baker from Angers. As well as inheriting his grandfather's small, girlish hands, her son has also inherited the sound of Aggie thwacking her stick, together with the sound of six sisters, giggling, the youngest one frightened of bushrangers.
But he will never remember his mother longing to kiss the lips of Justine Gervais. He will never recall how her stomach lurched whenever she saw that dissolute lover, as if she were travelling too fast in a car over an unexpected hill.
These memories will vanish along with her body, lost to the far place that holds the memories of that vast republic.
But while she still breathes, nothing is lost, forgotten or forgiven. While she still breathes the past is permanent, unredeemed, and the present dissolving, slipping away. Oh, to be capable of smelling ripe cheeses and roses! What it is to be breathing!
ON THE FACE, THE EYES
closed, head back, upturned. Water trickling into the coiled ear, round the back of the hair, down the neck. Standing naked in the garden, before anyone is up, not even an animal. The rain against your shoulders, your breasts, your belly, your grateful face, making the soil dance around your feet.
EVERYBODY KNEW BUT ME. PAOLA
knew, and Celestine knew and, unforgivably, Horatia, because Celestine told her. Why didn't anyone tell me? I never spoke to any of them again.
I spoke to my sister only once after I found out. Rather, I
screamed
at my sister only once. I can still hear the sound of that scream, as if it hangs permanently somewhere in the air.