The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (17 page)

S
pring gave in to summer, and the pavilion uncurled itself in the warmth. Cath and I would take turns at the turnstile, Grace gurgling in her basket, sitting up smiling at everyone as they filed through. Eric prowled the grounds, leaning on his broom more than he swept with it, dragging his gammy leg, propping himself against the wall to roll a smoke and watch the women, the winterwhite bodies that started to appear on the beach and baste themselves in sunshine. The weather grew warm, then hot, then – after Christmas – too hot. By then we were dark brown from mornings on the beach, slimmed down from the appetite-sapping heat. Grace was brown all over, golden brown apart from the white depths of all her folds and creases. She was quick to smile, to laugh. She dribbled as her teeth appeared, and the sand collected and dried in the streaks and runnels of spit around her mouth and down her chin, and in the fat white creases under her fat little face. I’d dip her in the sea –
one, two, threeeeeee!
– and she’d burble like the waves, matching their pitch and the shape of their sound. Then I’d bundle her up in a sun-warmed towel, cuddle her to me and we’d roll on the sand, giggling, tickling.

Afternoons were for sleeping, still and quiet, staying away from the sun. Thick velvet, blood red curtains hung from the windows of my room, a gift from Uncle Valentine. I’d close them each morning when we woke, as the sun rose and the early morning cool remained in the room. When Grace and I returned to our room after lunch, we walked into a deep violet darkness, trapped cool behind the curtains and the thick limestone walls of the building.

I’d lay Grace on the bed and lie beside her. She spread her arms like a little fat sea star, always gravitating to the middle of the bed. I arced my body around her, crescent moon to her star. We hummed to each other, call and response light with fatigue in the dark of the room, until we fell asleep. We’d sleep the afternoons into evening, drawing back the curtains only once the sun had dropped behind the ocean, orange piercing blue.

Nights were not for sleeping. Nights were for walking, while others slept.

From an early age, Grace would wake at night, unable to be fed or otherwise persuaded back to sleep. One hot night, my head nodding with sweat and tiredness, I scooped her up in my silk robe, tied the sleeves to fasten at my back and, Grace cocooned as I remembered Balinese babies in batik cocooned, we stepped out of our room in the tower and onto the squeaking white sand to walk ourselves towards sleep. I hummed as we walked, my voice in my throat low under the roll and phizzle of the waves and foam. I walked on the edge of the ocean, on the cool sand angling down to water that sucked at my toes, kissed my ankles. Lulled by
the jogging action my walking made, Grace’s head would loll, her humming fade to a gentle snore. I’d walk under the jetty’s wooden uprights, feel it cooler, smell wooden must. While Grace slept I’d sit on the jetty’s edge, rocking her gently against me, my whole torso moving with her. No lights showed from the pavilion, and few from the houses beyond. Looking to the north, up the curve of the coast, only occasional pinpoints of light pitted the dark. I felt alone, yet no longer alone: I had Grace.

I started writing my story, that summer – this story; writing it for Grace. The story of us. I’d been alone, then I’d had Trix; Trix had left me, but I was no longer alone. I had Grace. I wanted to tell her my story, the story of before her, of how she’d come to be. There was no one to tell her but me. I bought a typewriter – a big black Underwood – and set it up on a table in the corner of the north tower of the Pav. I’d never used one before. I was slow, my fingers not used to the heavy hand they needed to make the keys shift the levers, the hammers with their little metal letters, like the hammers of a piano, nothing like a theremin.

I started with my first memories. Would Grace’s first memories be of sounds, of water? My fingers stabbed the story out, made hard imprints on the thin paper, sometimes ripped it in my enthusiasm. I tapped out the story of Uncle Valentine before he got too fat to swim at the beach, of the Misses Murray, of ships and sound and light; I tapped monkeys and snakes; butterflies, dolls and bees. I tapped the story of the Professor. I tapped out Trix, how she came and went. I typed it for Grace, a few pages each day, while
she slept. As the pile of paper grew, I kept it in a box, kept it safe with a lid. I was no longer alone; we had each other. And I would write our story for Grace, so she’d have it when I was gone.

G
race didn’t walk until she was sixteen months old. A fat healthy baby, she was passed from me to Cath, from Cath to whoever happened to be with us – and there were many people with us in Grace’s first summer as we worked and lazed by turns at the beach. Grace would go to anyone, her arms outstretched, sticky spitty face ready to press into any shirt front or chest. She was everybody’s baby, beloved. She rolled and crawled where she needed to on the sand, and had only to put her fat arms out to be picked up, whizzed from here to there with a kiss on her fat brown cheek. And so, summer turned to autumn and Grace turned one; and autumn turned to winter, and still Grace crawled and slithered and demanded, raised her arms to be lifted, relied on others to move her. She had no need to walk.

If Grace didn’t walk, I too had my lacks; I hadn’t played my theremin since before Grace’s birth – indeed, not since some time before her conception. The theremin – dragged with me across the oceans – now rested in the corner of the room in the north tower, covered with one of Uncle’s old sheets; not neglected, not abandoned – just not played.
There was some sense in which I needed to make music with my body – just my body – without the electronics intervening.

So, I hummed.

It had started when I was pregnant with Grace, when I would send vibrations down from my mouth and my tongue and my throat to her, the growing Grace inside me. I closed my lips, felt them relax against each other, felt my soft palate relax and engorge, the drone swell from my throat, inside my head, through my sinuses and down into the depth of my belly to my darling girl.

I hummed for Grace tunes I didn’t remember remembering until she was there to prompt them, lullabies my mother had hummed and sung to me. French words, remembered phonetically, half understood from lessons with the Misses Murray, bubbled out of me; Malay words from my earliest memories, the sound of bees, of paper on comb; and sounds I pulled from the air, assonant, feathersoft.

I hummed to Grace, the vibrations in my lips and my throat. As I hummed to her, I moved my hands, close to her body but not touching her. She began to sigh,
aaah ah aaah
, in time with me, in response to me. Later her response would gain a consonant,
maah maa maaaah.
Her sounds echoed mine, responded to my voice climbing up and down the register, my rhythms quickening and slowing. We developed it into a game, Grace and I. Our humming game.

And perhaps I tested her, at times – higher, lower, faster, slower. Three-four time, an arpeggio, a scale.
Grace responded differently each time, sometimes in close harmony, sometimes shouting across and above me. Always though, I would see her eyes on mine, as if she could interpret the music through my eyes. Or perhaps she just saw the reflection of her own face, recognised herself through the mirror of my eyes.

Perhaps there was electricity, machinery in the air, on the day that I drew the dust sheet from the theremin. I connected the wires from the machine to the wall, from the machine to its speaker. I heard the hum of valves warming. Grace said
maaaah maaaaah
behind me, from the rug in the middle of the room where she sat like a buddha, watching. I raised my arms into the old accustomed pose – ready to dance, right arm high, left arm at waist height. My old partner’s humming turned to harmonic keening. I twitched my finger and the keening sang
vibrato
. I played a scale, up then down, the timbre brittle, malformed. I adjusted the dials at the front of the machine to change the wave shape. I played again, the same scale, up then down – yes, that was better; sweeter. I played the scale again, faster. I remembered this; my arms and body fell into remembered patterns, my muscles settled. I felt the electricity surge in me, through my fingers and down through my belly.

I felt wetness on the backs of my knees, a tight clasping.

Fat dimpled hands were hanging on for dear life. Grace had walked to me.

‘Maaaaaaaaah. Ma-maaaaaaah!’

I turned, bent and swept her into my arms, ‘Clever girl, Gracie! Walking girl!’ I showered kisses on her fat face.
I twirled her around the room, both of us giggling and wheeeee-ing. Holding her up, kissing her face, I ran us downstairs to tell Cath.

The kitchen was empty. I filled the kettle, put it onto the stove to boil for a cup of tea, to celebrate. While it heated, I knelt on the ground with Grace, urging her to walk to me again, across the room. She keened at me, a sound like the theremin, then walked, clapping her hands, before collapsing onto me, both of us giggling.

The kitchen door jiggled then opened wide. Cath stood framed in the doorway, a string bag fat with groceries in her left hand, a bunch of boronia, green-brown and yellow, fragrant, an upside-down V in her right. I scooped Grace up in my arms and we stood, the table between Cath and me, the kettle steaming up to the boil on the stove behind me.

‘Cath! You’ll never guess! Grace walked! She walked to me!’

Cath hefted the bag of groceries onto the table. The bag collapsed, limp, the contents shifting to their new arrangement.

‘Oh Princess. We’ve declared war on Germany. We’ve declared bloody war. Bloody buggery bloody war.’

Her face was shiny with tears. I stepped around the table, moved towards her and put my arms around her; we both supported Grace between us, held her there and cried on her until she cried too – like us, not understanding, but knowing the need to cry. The boronia had dropped from Cath’s hand and its scent rose as it crushed under our feet: dusty lemon, sharp with spice, a smell like bruised purple.

L
ives are lived at a different speed in times of war. Grace’s childhood, like mine, was spent in the shadow of a distant war, her life inked in by the actions of men.

But there are some things that war doesn’t stop. People will always make music. And people will always dance. There were dances everywhere in the city, but the dances at our beach were the best. Bands played in the rotunda, and people would dance up and down the pier. But the best dances were at the Pav.

Don Armstrong and his Strong Arm Boys held dances at the Pav every Wednesday and Saturday night, from spring through to autumn, when the weather was forecast fine, which was most of the time. The dance floor had no roof, was open to the stars. It had as its ceiling a violet sky, picked out with starlight and a slice of moon. On rare nights when a rainstorm arced across the sky and dumped sudden big, hard, hot rain on the dancers, they’d run to huddle at the edges of the dance floor, under cover of the porticoes that lined it. Tables and chairs were set up there, for supper. The raised stage where the band played was under cover, so
the band would keep on playing through the rain, playing louder to drown it out.

The Strong Arm Boys played the songs of the moment, jazz and swing, anything the dancers wanted. They were good enough, rough enough, fast enough for dancing. Two guitars, drums at the back, Don on piano with a microphone to sing into; a horn section of trumpet and saxophone; and Danny, a farm boy from Dandaragan, on bass. They dressed in matching black suits. All of them but Danny were over fifty; Danny was younger, and no one quite knew what kept him out of the forces – and of course they called him Dannyboy. They played with gusto, the Strong Arm Boys.

The dance floor was next to our flat in the Pav. A door led through to the hallway that led in one direction to the kitchen and Cath and Eric’s room, in the other to the north tower. When you walked through from the dance floor to our flat and closed the door behind you, the music would hum through the wood of the door, vibrate your spine and arse if you leaned against it. Up the stairs, in our room, Grace would rock herself to sleep, to the sound thumping and thrumming through the walls and the floor and the limestone of the building, up through the still night air and in through the open windows of the room in the north tower of the Pav. I’d come to check her in the night and find her asleep, legs splayed, on her belly in the warm night, one hand down her pants and the other in her mouth, jammed in to the knuckles, fingers wet with spit.

Eric, of course, with his gammy leg, hated to go to the dances, and he hated Cath to go. But she went. We’d go
together. After I’d put Grace to bed, tucked her in tight, rocked her to sleep, sung her a song, I’d dress for the dance, put my make-up on, curl my hair. My old clothes came out, the old clothes from Sydney, formal clothes that had lain long unused in the bottom of the trunk. They were years out of fashion, but because the fabrics were so fine, so rich, the cut so beautiful, I didn’t change them. I looked out of time; but that was how I felt anyway, so I didn’t mind. Silk and satin skimmed my body, hugging it tight – I could fit into the dresses again, since my body had lost the softness from Grace’s first year. It felt delicious to dress this way again. I enjoyed the outline of my body in the mirror, under the cloth. I liked myself hard, after the Grace-softness.

Some nights saw just a score of us at the dance. We learned to dance the man, or the woman, as required; to play the part, take the position. Other nights there were hundreds, especially when our boys were in town, and anything female was in high demand.

Our boys
, that’s what they called them, and most of them were just boys: farm boys, city boys, skinny and uninteresting, either hardened from war, or yet to go and scared. And they were scared of a woman like me; I terrified them with my old-fashioned clothes and my haughty way of speaking.

God, I loved to dance! It took my mind and my body back to the days in Sydney, took me away from the war. At the Pav, we couldn’t have stayed away if we’d tried, the music would have come to us. I loved to walk through that
door – both ways. Men would say to me, to Cath, ‘Can I walk you home?’ and we’d say yes, link arms with them, and get them to walk us to the unmarked door at the edge of the dance floor. Then we’d turn around, wave at them and close the door tight behind us. We’d lean against it, on the safe side, breathing hard, laughing hard, hearing the music distorted and muffled on the other side, hear them knocking, confused.

And on the nights when the dances weren’t on, Cath and Eric and Gracie and I’d troop across the road to the Lido, to the pictures. Even Eric loved the pictures. From the beginning of summer, the deck chairs and screen were set up, and the projector started its clickety whirring once it became dark enough to see the pictures moving on the screen. Gracie – like all the children – ran wild between the deck chairs, or she’d sleep on a rug by my feet, curled into herself, her fingers in her mouth. The air smelled of hot chips in newspaper, cigarette smoke, and beer from sly bottles stashed under the deck chairs.

To tell the truth, our lives didn’t change much because of the war, not in those first years. The boys, the men, went away – but they came back in uniform, and ready to dance with the girls with a new urgency. That was what changed – there was an urgency to people’s lives in wartime. People were reluctant to waste time. They grabbed at things they might previously have held back from. Grabbed not without thinking, but with a different way of thinking, a different way of seeing the world. This
only increased when, instead of the men coming home, their names started to appear in lists within a sombre, black-bordered box on the front page of the newspaper, in rank order, alphabetical, all lined up in columns, uniform.