The Idea of Perfection (3 page)

It took her a moment, but then she bustled out from behind the table and it looked as though she was going to make up for staring, and the sound of that disappointed
Oh,
by shaking hands.

I’m Coralie, Coralie Henderson. I’m the one wrote the letter.

She gestured vaguely, and Harley got her hand ready to shake, but she was too late, and in the end they did not touch. The gestures hung like a mistake in the space between them.

We weren’t expecting you, Coralie cried, and got her hands out of the way on her hips.

Till later on, type of thing. Round tea-time.

She was shouting, and standing too close, as if proving she was not afraid.

I stopped the night, Harley said. In Badham.

Like an ectoplasm, the thought seemed to form in the air:
where the prison farm is.

She heard the words come out in a jerk like a cough, too loud again.

I used to have family there, she said impulsively, and wished she had not.

But they’re gone now, she added quickly.

The shop woman said
Oh!
again. Then she waited for more. Being so close, and being so short, she had to tilt her face up towards Harley.

She was prepared to wait. She had plenty of time. She was more than willing to wait for a brief version of the life story, and in particular as it impinged on
family,
and
Badham.
She was sorry for the sound of that first oh, Harley could tell, and had forgiven her the unravelling tee-shirt. Now she wanted to be friendly. She had a warm attentive look on her face, getting ready to hear all about it.

But Harley did not find it as simple as that. She could see that this Coralie Henderson found other people easy to like, their stories always worth hearing. She was probably a gossip, but that was just a nasty way of saying she found people and their lives interesting.

Harley felt herself tighten against Coralie’s warm curiosity. She knew she had gone a hard ugly red that made her eyes look small and desperate.

In the corner the fan changed its tone as if the air had grown thicker. A knitted baby’s bonnet suddenly slipped down from a pile on to the floor and Coralie bent down to pick it up again.

Look, she said, like someone beginning a confession.

Lorraine Smart, lovely woman, known her all my life, do anything for you.

She was smoothing away at the bonnet, where one of the ear-flaps kept popping up behind her fingers.

But her place, where you’re staying, it’s not real flash.

Harley tried to think of something reassuring to say.

That’s okay, she said. I don’t like things flash.

But Coralie did not seem convinced. She took her glasses off, cleaned them on a doily.

You could have my spare room, you know, she said. Fresh curtains, the lot.

She looked at Harley.

Maybe you’d rather be on your own, though.

Harley could feel her feeling her way. She seemed a kindly woman, this Coralie, and was trying to set her at her ease. It was no fault of hers if Harley Savage was never at ease.

There was another pause.

We’ve got a lot of interest in the Heritage thing, considering, Coralie said.

She pressed her lips together as if putting on lipstick, thinking.

We’ve got Leith Cousens, and Glad Fowler and Felicity Porcelline. And then we’ve got Freddy Chang, and of course little Helen Banks. Bert Cutcliffe from the school. And we’ve got old Mrs Trimm, she goes right back to well before the War.

She was nodding and smiling as if everyone knew little Helen Banks and old Mrs Trimm.

Harley tried to make an interested noise. It came out a pitch higher than was quite appropriate.

That’s good, she said.

She cleared her throat.

Wonderful, really.

Outside somewhere, a crow made a long agonised noise like someone being slowly strangled.

THERE HAD BEGUN to be a little
atmosphere
in the butcher’s shop. It had got so that Felicity tended to put off going there. The problem was, the butcher was in love with her.

She hesitated outside the dusty window of the closed Karakarook Bakery. She wished there was something to look at, something to make hesitating look natural, but it seemed to have been a long time since the Karakarook Bakery had been open for business, and there was nothing in the window but a few shelves with a lot of dead flies on them.

From the school behind her, she could hear the distant strains of the National Anthem.
Our land is girt by sea.
As a child, she had had an Aunt Gert, a big woman smelling of face-powder, and for a long time it had been confusing. She had gone through the anthem carefully with William when he had started at school a few years ago, but telling him about Aunt Gert had only seemed to make him more confused.

She glanced up Parnassus Road once more. Sometimes, if she dawdled like this, someone else would come along and she could go into the butcher’s shop with them. Fiona, or Christine. Christine’s husband the truck driver liked meat three times a day, so she was always in and out of Chang’s.

The trouble with a little place like this was, a person could not dawdle too long on Parnassus Road without becoming conspicuous. You could not window-shop convincingly in Karakarook, unless you were in the market for dead flies. And there was no way you could sit somewhere and be
watching the world go by.
The
world
simply did not
go by
in Parnassus Road, Karakarook.

The butcher’s shop had an awning that went out over the footpath, held up by old turned wooden posts. The sign said ALFRED CHANG SUPERIOR MEATS in curly sign-writer’s cursive, and higher up there was a wedding-cake effect of thickly painted decorative plaster and
1889
in raised letters that each cast a small black shadow.

The awning made the shop-front very dark. You could not see into the shop at all, but of course the butcher would be able to see out, if he should happen to be standing there, looking out the window. It would look bad, if the butcher glanced out of his window and saw her dawdling, putting off going into his shop.

She brushed away a fly that was circling her face, and shook her arm when it landed there. Then she bent down and brushed her leg, although it had not landed there yet.

Sometimes a person could actually be pleased at the diversion a fly could provide.

Partly it was that the butcher was Chinese. She was no racist, and wanted him to know that she did not count it against him, him being Chinese. The trouble was, not wanting to be thought racist always seemed to make her too friendly. She could hear that her voice was a little too loud and a little too sprightly in the quiet shop. She smiled too much, and did not know how to stop.

She was no racist, but noticed, every time he spoke, how he spoke exactly the way everyone else did. She was no racist, but listened for something Chinese in the way he talked, the little foreign something. The funny thing was, it was never there. She had tried closing her eyes when he talked, and you would never have guessed. If you happened to find yourself with him in the dark for any reason, you would never know he was Chinese.

In the dark, he would sound just like any other man.

The woman from the craft shop had told her one day that Changs had been here, meaning in Karakarook,
since the year dot.
They had come for the gold in the first place, she said,
but had the sense to see there was more money in food.
She had caught herself thinking
but it’s not the same.
Her own family had only been Australian for two generations, but somehow it was different.

She was no racist. She was sure of that. But she never thought of Alfred Chang as
Australian
in the way she herself was
Australian.
He was
Chinese,
no matter how long Changs had been in Karakarook.

The other thing that was the tiniest bit awkward was the business of the bridge. As she crossed the street, she could see the poster, sticky-taped to the window of his shop. Even from here she could read SAVE THE BENT BRIDGE along the top, although the rest of the rubbish about
Heritage was
too small to see from here. From this distance, the photograph of the old bridge curving into its backdrop of bush looked like a question mark.

She had never actually seen the Bent Bridge because it was out of town on a tributary of the river, on a road that did not go anywhere she had ever wanted to go. But it was obvious that it had to be replaced, as the one in town had already been replaced. It was too old. It had become an eye-sore. Also, it was a danger to the public. Hugh had also explained that there was some problem about Shire liability. It was the sort of thing he liked knowing about and he had gone into it in some detail.

Heritage
was well and good in its place. She was a great believer in Heritage. Look at the way she was taking care of Great-Grandmother Ferguson’s old quilt. Now that was Heritage. She had written away to the Library to find out about the special acid-free tissue-paper to store it in, and everything. But it was not enough for something to be old to be Heritage, and if there was a matter of ratepayers’ money, it was important to keep things in perspective.

One way and another, though, it was becoming just the tiniest bit
awkward
in the butcher’s shop. There were several subjects she felt she had to be careful not to mention: the bridge, or the Shire Council. Or being Chinese. Or being Australian. Or love.

It would have been perfectly possible to avoid the little
atmosphere
with the butcher by going into Livingstone for the meat. It was only half an hour in the car, and she had the freezer.

But Hugh had insisted that as the manager of the only bank still left in Karakarook, he had to be seen to be supporting the town. Actually, the Karakarook branch of the Land & Pastoral would be closing at the end of the year. But no one in town knew, and in Hugh’s view that made it even more important to be seen to be involved in local issues like the bridge business, and buy locally.

When the branch was closed they would be transferred back to Sydney, and William would go to a decent school, and they would get a nice place in Lindfield or Strathfield, and get away from the heat and the flies. She was counting the days, quite frankly. Sometimes, though, she wondered if Hugh actually liked it in Karakarook, and would be sorry to have to close the branch and leave. He had said, several times, how closing the branch would be the
death-knell
for the town. Privately she thought that a
death-knell
might be the best thing that could happen to a place like Karakarook, but she had not said so.

The street remained obstinately empty, apart from a scruffy woman further down who seemed to be watching her. She looked to the right, looked to the left, looked to the right again. There was no moving vehicle anywhere, in any direction. She wished the woman further down would stop watching her.

She hooked her thick blonde hair back behind her ear and it fell forward again straight away. She liked the feel of it, swinging against her cheek: smooth and slippery. Something about the way it swung against her cheek made her feel girlish.

She knew she looked, well,
attractive
was the word she used to herself. Looking
attractive
was taking longer these days, and required a fair amount of work with the beauty routine. What had come naturally at twenty had to be worked at when you were forty-one. But she had only just turned forty-one. A month hardly counted. Really, she was still only forty

So many of the women in Karakarook seemed to let themselves go when they got to a certain age. Overweight, or their grey roots showing, or those terrible stiff perms that were so ageing.

She checked her reflection sideways in the window of the Karakarook Bakery. She had always had a good bust, and the little blue top set it off well. In the reflection you would never imagine she had just turned forty-one.

The woman standing with her hands on her hips was still looking in her direction. She swapped the basket from hand to hand, pushed her hair back again, and crossed the road.

 

 

Hugh had said something this morning before he left for work. She thought she had been listening, but now somehow she could not quite remember.
A nice bit of T-bone,
had it been, or was it,
I fancy a couple of snags?
No, that had been yesterday. Or was it the day before?

The human brain could only remember plus or minus seven things. She had learned that in her last year at school, in the
How the Brain Works
chapter in the science text. She had not forgotten. It had turned out to be one of the plus or minus seven things.

She remembered the days before her marriage quite thoroughly, more thoroughly than she could remember what Hugh had said this morning. She could remember how she had sat on the bus on the way to the
Ladies‘Dresses
Department at Honeycutt’s, after she’d left school, and carefully embroidered pale green chain-stitch on the pale green blouse she had saved up for. Honeycutt’s had only been for the time being, while her modelling career got off the ground. The Palmolive ad had gone all over Australia.

The green blouse had been pure linen, and she had had to save up for weeks to buy it, even with the staff discount. She had not been able to afford the one that was already embroidered, but had done it herself. Hugh had liked it. In fact, he had proposed the first time she had worn it. Not long after that, he had finished his Accountancy, and the Land & Pastoral had sent him out to Campbelltown, and they had got married. The wedding dress had had such a pretty little fitted waist, and a sweetheart neckline that had made the most of her bust.

She had thought she could keep the modelling going, but what with the distance from town, and one thing and another, it had drifted away. Hugh was terribly supportive, but he had pointed out that modelling was an uncertain income, whereas a bank career was dependable, so it made sense that his job should come first. When he did so well at the Land & Pastoral, and he got the first promotion, and they were sent to Dubbo, that was the end of it, really, with the modelling.