The Point (32 page)

But shortly afterwards she told me she had decided to have a tubal ligation. It was my turn to weep, the tears running down my cheeks, the dreadful salty taste of them in my mouth, the crusty deposit after, these things the gritty texture of grief. I begged, I pleaded, but she said it was for the best. Trust me, she said, I know it’s for the best. Children die when they are small and beautiful and you love them. Or they grow up and turn into monsters.

Not all of them. We didn’t. Elinor’s girls aren’t.

Look at those kids with the baseball bat. Look what they did to the willow sculpture. And killing Terry.

Ours wouldn’t be like that. They’d be like us, we would love them, they would be good.

Or they get killed in car accidents. Or they take drugs and die of heroin overdoses. Or run away from home and live on the streets.

Flora, I said, you are not being sensible. Those things do not have to happen. When you love your children and look after them, you can save them from those terrible fates.

I couldn’t save Adrian.

But I am saying, such a death wouldn’t happen again. We’d know, we’d be vigilant.

She didn’t seem to hear me. I asked her at least to wait, and she did. But didn’t change her mind.

Despair. The spectacles of despair. That see the man on the distant building ready to jump, and he does. You can run, and shout, speak to him softly, beg him to think; you will be too late, he will not hear, will not listen. He does not look at you, and he jumps. There are no angels sent to save him.

30

Clovis was fast asleep beside his warm air vent, undrunk, though he’d had some glasses of red wine, but these days he didn’t care to wipe himself out, except of course for the night when he’d sat in the ferry shelter and drunk just about the whole cask, but he forgave himself for that, he understood that he was asking quite hard things of himself and would not always succeed. When he first began this life he was dead drunk every night, he couldn’t see another way of dealing with it. Now he didn’t often drink too much. A lot, but not too much. He was sleeping as he did these days, deeply, satisfyingly, with dreams sometimes but without insomnias or fitfulness, perhaps because he spent his days walking, long loping trajectories around the lake and along the bike paths. A good sleep but one he woke out of quite easily. As he did now, aware of someone beside him. He sat up quickly. It was Gwyneth. She was hunkered down, and without needing to touch her he could feel that she was rigid. Even in the dark he could sense the way she held herself, as though every muscle in her body was tense, held tight by her will. Against … against some threat was how it seemed. His own body went tight, ready to go with her. He spoke her name, softly, as to a child who has awakened from a nightmare.

Can I stay with you, she asked, her voice breathless, squeezed out in little gasps from that rigid body.

Of course. Come on the other side, where the warmth is. Are you cold?

She got up painfully, like an old woman hobbling, and stepped over him.

Are you hurt?

She lay down beside him. Her body began to tremble but without losing any of its tension. Some sobs hiccuped out.

Gwyneth, what is it?

He realised she was shaking her head. He could see the glitter of tears running out of her eyes. So dark it was, but these little salty drops found, somewhere, light to glitter by.

Gwynnie?

She pushed herself close to him, and after a little while he let himself put his arm around her. The last woman he had held was Lindi. However long ago? She had been of a different stiffness. He had always been faithful to her. It sometimes surprised him to think that. There were women he could have had affairs with, over the years, but he had chosen not to, not always easily, and not out of love for Lindi, out of some notion of himself as an honourable man. An honourable man: there it was, if nowhere else. And now he had his arms around this waif, as though she might have been his own daughter, who had never asked that of him. Or should he consider that perhaps it had not been offered to her, in those days when he worked such long hours, busy establishing the family, make money now relax later, until it was too late, there was no habit of cuddling. He could feel the stiffness of Gwyneth in her bones, the shuddering sobs escaping from time to time, his own arm gentle, relaxed. Till gradually she quietened.

Gwynnie, he said again, liking the affection of the name, against the grander Gwyneth, and slowly she calmed, and went to sleep, and so did he.

She awoke with a start, later, when a half moon was laying its cold light over them, and fought against him, waking him, then realising where she was, going limp again. He looked into her pinched little face, even bluer and more harshly shadowed in the moonlight, and touched her cheek lightly.
And my poor fool is
dead
… Gwynnie, he said, his voice caressing the word. We must get you some cream for your complexion. The cold air, and now this vented stuff, it’s dreadfully drying, you’ve got such pretty skin, we must look after it, keep you looking pretty. He was babbling, the way you do to children or beloved people, to soothe them.

It’s so not worth it, she said, turning on her back, staring up at the sky. Trash like me. Stinking stinking trash. Cessy.

No. You smell nice. And you aren’t trash. Nobody’s trash. He paused. Well, not somebody as good as you are.

I am so so stinking trash, she said again.

He waited, drawing her into his arms, laying her head on his shoulder, making himself a father. She was still stiff, but not in that rigid way of earlier. She heaved a deep sigh. Then she started talking.

She’d needed to get some more methadone, so she’d gone to those boys she’d seen before, they could get anything they said, but this time they hadn’t got any, so she went to some others that they told her about, they said they’d fix her up, these others. Then they said she didn’t have enough money, these others did, the stuff’s hard to get, it costs, but they’d give it to her cheap if she’d let them fuck her. Two of them, there were. So she said yes, what else could she do? No big deal. Not when she needed the methadone. She wasn’t a slag but she needed the methadone.

They made a time for a meeting, at a house, in Red Hill it was, they told her where to go but it was quite a long walk and steep too and she was tired by the time she got there. That was last night. But when they let her in the door it turned out there were six of them. She told them it was supposed to be only two but they said six or no stuff, so she let them. What else could she do? They’d have done it anyway.

Gwyneth, said Clovis, that’s rape, we can go to the police, you know the house, their names, they mustn’t get away with it.

She was silent for a minute. I so can’t go to the police, she said, you know I can’t. And I agreed. I can’t say it’s rape. They didn’t really hurt me.

It is rape, though. You were coerced.

Leave it, Clovis. I got the stuff.

Who were they?

You’d tell.

No. Only you can do that.

Well, the one that did the deal was called Steve. I suppose it was his house. Some house. A palace, I reckon. Massive. Carpets in this real pale pink and lots of gold furniture. I don’t know who the others were, they had those woollen beanies on that come right down over your face, with holes for eyes … of course I know it was the baseball-bat guys, but I couldn’t
see
them. I just wanted it to stop. Get the stuff and get out. Six is too many.

One’s too many, when it’s coercion. Oh Gwyneth,
all
of this has to stop. It can’t go on, you know. What about your little boy? You must be missing him, and I’m sure he’s missing you. What’s his name? Brad?

This time the silence lasted for several minutes. Where she had been stiff before, Gwyneth was jumpy. Clovis was wondering what he was doing. His words felt lumpy in his mouth, like large awkward clumsy clichés, he had trouble getting them out; he thought he should utter them out of duty to this child, the child the daughter the fool that the father has to try to save, but they didn’t seem to be working. They clunked like rocks into the silence, the air quivered, there was no healing in them. Gwyneth twitched in the moonlight.

Thing is, she said, there isn’t a little boy. I was pregnant, all right, that was my stepfather, he’d been doing it for years, but I didn’t tell Mum that because of what he said he’d do to me if I told, I’d seen what he could do, you had to believe him when he said. I was fifteen. Mum, she goes, You better have it done, and I did, but afterwards I thought, there would have been a little kid, maybe a little boy, I’d have liked a little boy, you wouldn’t want a child to be a girl, and I could have called him Brad, and he’d have belonged to me, there could’ve been just the two of us, it would have been lovely, no drink or hitting or hurting, just him and me, and sometimes it did really seem there was my baby boy called Brad, and I’d talk to him and dress him in nice clothes, I did get some from that shop, lovely ones he’d look beautiful in, and I’d take him in his pusher for walks and people would say isn’t he such a lovely baby. But he might have been a monster my mum said or a cripple with me being a slut and not knowing who his father was, and then I said my boyfriend was that guy who cleans windscreens at the lights in Barry Drive, he looks like Mick Jagger, just to get her off my back, and she was all for getting him to pay but I go, Leave it, and she did, get her to have another drink and she doesn’t worry about much my mum. My stepfather told her I was a disgusting little slag and not fit to live with decent people but he did front up the money, don’t let your mother know, he says.

Oh Gwynnie ...

I did hang about with that guy at the lights but he wasn’t ever my boyfriend. He was cool. It looked dangerous, ducking in and out through the cars but you knew he’d be okay, he was so cool, even off his face the cars could never touch him. And there was Saul, but he didn’t last. They never last. They fuck you for a while and then fuck off.

And what about gaol?

Well, I did do the shoplifting, a few times, the baby clothes, and it was true about the underwear, all lace it was, I put them on and walked out, I got away with that, but not the jeans, they have these plastic bits that make the sirens go, and then they discovered the perfume, and there was some lipstick, it’s all right at first but then you get caught a few times and they shut you up. I didn’t ever take any Rohypnol but, they keep that stuff well and truly locked up. People who get hold of that, they do it stealing prescriptions, and anyway I don’t like it, I don’t feel good on it. But I did break my parole, I thought, I’m sick of this, and just walked away. So here I am.

God. That’s some tale, you’re a real story teller. What about the rest of it – what about your stepfather dying?

Oh yeah, he’s dead all right. And I did say about him doing those things to me. Not when they made me lose the baby, but later, when I was getting put away and Mum was shouting at me about being a slut and a slag and a dopehead, so I said, Well who’s fault’s that, and told her about Daryl, cause then he couldn’t get me, and she goes, You’re a lying little brat as well, and then he gets sick and kicks the bucket, serve him right, I say, the way he used to put it away, and then she goes, You killed him, when I never did, it was the drink did that. You should have seen her bawling her eyes out at the funeral. And the bruises he give her on her legs and stomach still blue. He used to hit her where he thought it wouldn’t show but I knew, I had a peephole in the laundry where the shower was, there was this little hole in the fibro and I poked it with a nail and made it bigger, I used to watch him and his big purple thing wagging about in the hot water and think, I’d love to cut you off, you worm.

My god, said Clovis again. He could hear Gwyneth warming to her tale, telling it with dreadful gusto.

She stretched out her hands to the sky, holding her palms flat as though it was a weight, just there, that she was supporting, or maybe holding off. She seemed to be examining them, their pallor in the bleaching moonlight, as though they were made out of lead, and her pushing up was partly their own weight that they were supporting, but when Clovis looked her eyes were vacant.

Clovis said, You don’t need locking up, you need help.

Help is locking you up, they reckon. I’ve been there, I know.

You should be being looked after. You could be somewhere you don’t have to sell yourself for methadone.

You always have to sell yourself for something. How would you get on in life if you didn’t? What do you reckon that Flora does, or Jerome? Or you used to?

Well, he said, maybe then it’s a matter of the price you’re getting. I think you’re selling yourself too cheap.

Yeah, I reckon. Should get a job in Fyshwick and earn real money.

That’s not what I meant.

She seemed calm now. He recalled people talking about postcoital calm. This was, what, post-narratorial? She turned her back to him, into him, and went to sleep. He marvelled, that a creature the world had so damaged could be so trusting.

Now he couldn’t sleep, he had too much to think about. There was horror for Gwyneth and her grotesque stories, which who knew were any more true now than before, and admiration too, and wonder that she could turn over and go to sleep so easily. Postnarratorial catharsis. She had handed the burden of her stories over to him; he could bear them now, and she could sleep. She was like the Ancient Mariner, and there was something ancient about her, as well as innocent. And now she’d slung her albatross round his neck, what a relief for her.