Gwennie's Girl Read online

  But Lizzie had lived and the man had survived—thrived even. Gwennie who was Mum had been a bit like that. She had never been mean as Lizzie’s husband was mean and somehow things did often seem to work out for her—at least that was how she saw it. But now that woman was dead, the girl was a woman and a man was smiling into his glass. He was so sure of himself in his well-cut suit with his manicured nails and blow-waved hair and blue, polished eyes. He was sure of himself and sure of her. Her “accident” had unsettled him for a while but he had learnt to be more careful, more discreet. So he was very sure. His wife could be difficult, even highly strung, but that could be accommodated without too much effort. Her swearing and occasional lapses unto public sarcasm were distasteful, of course, but a man just had to cope with them. But, but, but. He always had a “but” to come back with in any discussion, whenever he was confronted, whenever he was accused or threatened. To himself there was an inexhaustible supply of “buts”. It was as if he had some giant, crawling, “but” machine somewhere between the large and small intestines, a machine that was inserted at birth by a Monty-Python doctor who added exigencies and extenuating circumstances and needs for rationalisation and pragmatic innuendoes all over the devious little device. Lizzie back then had mused again that she who understood him so well could not touch or affect or manipulate him: yet he, who understood her so little, always seemed in control of her life. Mum would never have let any man get the better of her, she knew how to keep them guessing and loving it.

  There had never been any dearth of men around Mum, a widow with three children and never enough money to scratch herself. How did she do it? The answer was obvious. Gwennie loved everyone, the world was a circus, and she was always the star. Even when things went wrong, as they did frequently, Gwennie was still the star. From one role to another, she moved with panache and poise. Now the cultured widow living in a condemned house in the worst slums of South Melbourne, with no silver, no lace and no roof. Now the naive young girl struggling with an unskilled job to support her darling daughters. Now the woman left by a lover who had taken the little money and the few rings she possessed. And always the loving, warm person who gave and loved joyfully. Gwennie had loved and been loved.

  Once upon a time, Lizzie had thought that love was for happily ever after. Mum and Nanna had been all for it. A solid, sensible man. Neither of them had contemplated marriage at her age but they thought she needed to be safe, and it would be nice for her to be protected and supported. For a while, she wondered if that was why Mum had finally agreed when her own good man said, ‘I think we should get married,’ when he was told it would only be for a little while before the rat would win.

  But Mum had had plenty of choices. Lizzie was tired of being the manager, the capable one, the one who could sort things out and find a workable solution to everyone else’s problems. She had been tired of running a house and caring for her sisters, the younger children. So she had married. That meant running a house and caring for someone else… No wonder she hated teaching “Clear Thinking”. Her comprehension had not been good. The solid, sensible boy was solid and sensible only as long as he was cared for and supported. He had chosen the girl he thought was capable of making decisions and helping him. It was a sterile match. Sterility wasn’t just childlessness and germ-free instruments. There was one in Lizzie’s hand right now, a germ-free instrument. Peel the spuds, open the packet of frozen, minted peas, separate the almost thawed chops, mix the sauce, rattle for serrated knives and sullen, stainless-steel forks, add the salt, turn on the exhaust fan to remove the ugly smells, sponge up the suds that bilge over onto the stove from the potato pot. That’s it. Dinner is served. Chomp. Gobble. Slurp. That’s it. Now for the dishes. It was almost the same, almost every night. She was peeling the spuds for vichyssoise. She would mint the peas herself. The chops would be cooked in red wine sauce and served with salad nicoise. The bread stick would be swabbed with garlic butter and wrapped in foil, a tasty phallus if ever she’d seen one. The claret would be opened and left to breathe heavily into the air. The husband was doing the same.

  So was the bitch, she from next door who was his current “fling”. After coyly accepting a drink, she was now heading for the door in top gear gyrating boobs and bum in all directions. What a love machine! What a fucking bore! Lizzie, playing the frumpy wife, grinned and quickly turned it to a plastic hostess smile while admonishing herself for the vulgarity of the pun and resisting the temptation to upset the regularity of the scene by sharing it with these two robots.

  One might do such things, fucking, that is, but one must never say it. Those were the rules of operation or “modus operandi” if one had been to a better public school. One always played by the rules in public. That was the essence of the schooling. She wondered if she should wave a lace wisp of handkerchief as the bitch was propelled slowly to the door and down the drive. Bugger it. She didn’t have a lace wisp of a handkerchief to flutter. Never mind, save it for another time. Perhaps when there is someone to share the joke. Shit! Would there ever be anyone to share the joke?

  Funny that no one seemed to see the fear inside her. Not even the other man—the man she must not think about—who had shared the jokes and made her feel so whole. He made it safe to be the same outside as inside her head. With him, what she said was what she felt, thought and was. He liked, he loved, the woman she really was, the woman that Nanna and Mummy had recognised. He had recognised her, loved her and wanted her to go with him. Why oh why had she stayed?

  Lizzie had become aware of a silence. Oh shit, he thinks she might suspect about the bitch and is trying to be affectionate. Tweak a breast. Knead a bum. Have another drink. Pick your nose. That wasn’t fair. He didn’t pick his nose, at least not in public. That was just his way of showing her he cared—tweaking the breast and kneading the bum—not picking his nose. He was hovering around the kitchen as she prepared the meal. Chop. Squish. Slurp. Mix. The action was easy. She had come a long way since stuffed marrows and old Joe. Now the man would make “polite conversation” until he became aware that she was not engaged. She knew how faithful he was, didn’t she? She sure did, buster.

  She hid her amusement and appeared understanding. If she tuned out the sound, he looked quite grotesque, rather like some walled-up creature from Edgar Allen Poe’s cellar or someone drowning in a glass case. Except, of course, he would have had his nose flattened against the wall or glass. His nose wasn’t flat. She wondered briefly if that was what novelists meant by “apoplectic”. It was a lovely word but she had never been sure of the symptoms. This certainly looked like it. He was very fit and he did jog every day but he was almost spluttering in his irritation. It did seem out of proportion to her silence. Oh, he was annoyed because she wasn’t reacting. He felt ignored. Perhaps she should cry? It just required too much energy, and she couldn’t really be fagged but well, if needs must. Tears it was, then. By concentrating very hard, she could squeeze enough to look dewy-eyed, and if she clenched her mouth, it looked as though she were being brave and putting on a good front. Yes, it must be working because he was calming perceptibly. It won’t be long. Get ready for it. Tweak a breast. Squeeze a bum. Scold gently now. Get another drink.

  ‘Once upon a time…’ That was what Mum and Nanna and everyone else had thought about their marriage. Handsome, respectable, middle-class boy meets plain girl from dubious social background, falls in love, white wedding and happy-ever-after. Funny how those two women with all their loves, living, poverty, laughter, strength and conniving had both wanted her to settle into middle-class security. Neither of them would have done it. Neither of them did it. At least not until almost the very end when Mum did. In the same church as the girl had married the respectable boy, the mother married a respectable man. Two weddings. “For better or for worse, in sickness and in health till death do us part”—or something like that. For the woman in blue it was mostly sickness, and death was only fifteen months away.

  Gwennie moved into her very own
house with the gentle man who loved her. In all her fifty-one years, she had never lived in a house she or her family owned and she had lived in many houses. So had her girls though only the eldest really remembered them, the other two had been too young. They probably thought the Housing Commission house was it. Gwennie had thought it was it and a bit. The Housing Commission had allocated it to her when it was almost new and the newness hadn’t worn off for a while. At first, she had been so thrilled with simple things like a whole roof instead of a holey one and a budgie that was kept briefly in a cage instead of pigeons in a no-longer-there roof, kept until they all agreed to leave the cage door open.

  Funny little house, Gwennie’s married house… But Lizzie shared her mother’s pride in it. By then she had her own house, but it was never as much fun as Mum’s. Lizzie really was a housewife. Mum was playing mothers and fathers for the first time in her life. Predictably, the main colour themes were blue. Mum spent much time and effort with “the front room” which would house the double bed, joking all the time about probably being there more than in the kitchen. The room looked like the set of a Noel Coward play: Queen Anne Suite (reproduction of course), blue frilly bedspread, deep maroon carpet, crystal on the dressing table and romantic ladies in flowing draperies simpering limpidly from every wall. There were a few small, beautiful pieces. The dressing stool was upholstered in fine tapestry worked carefully and delicately by old Mrs. Berkowitz from the Housing Commission as a wedding gift. A small porcelain figure of a girl glowed translucently. The crystal jewel-bowl held the tiny pearl earrings the girl had brought with her very first month’s salary. The little gold clock with its fine enamelled face ticked softly on the crocheted doily protecting the bedside veneer. In the kitchen was a Wedgewood tea set. In the lounge, some Venetian glass won by Nanna on a quiz show: she had chosen it instead of some electrical appliance that would have been useful. The rest were props, setting the scene for the last act.

  When she was first confined to bed, Mum had played the invalid with grace, elan and a lacy bed jacket. She did the “being brave” routine to perfection. So well, in fact, that Lizzie didn’t realise for a while that the fantasy was being devoured by the terrible reality of gnawing, frightening, shit, shit, shit, awful pain. She didn’t realise until the day she heard her mother scream.

  A scream full of bewilderment and frustration and gut-tearing fear. A scream that was both acknowledgement of and concession to that creeping, implacable, devouring death-thing that was eating her alive. You let that happen, you bloody God. And expect us to understand. Like shit we understand, you bastard, God, you bastard.

  Gwennie had said she wanted twelve months so when she had fifteen she seemed to think it was a good deal. Of course, the last three months didn’t really count. That bloody God of hers was a stingy giver but by then she wasn’t taking any chances of offending Him. She shouldn’t have died. She was needed. There were still things for her to do and say, and the girl needed her. Gwennie knew that. She should not have died. Gwennie was loved. In her heart, Lizzie knew that Mum didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to leave her girl alone at the head of the mortality queue.

  Poor Gwennie. She closed her eyes against the pain. That bloody pain. It was gnawing away at her bones like some bloody great rat with its beaky little claws tearing away at a carcass. She was sitting on the pillows clutching her knees to her body rocking, rocking, rocking. The tears dribbled out from under her lashes, balanced precariously and then slowly, slid down the puffy cheeks.

  It was the drugs that made them like that. The fine layers of flesh that remained had risen like dough, and she kept expecting it all to collapse each time they gave her an injection. But it didn’t. Perhaps the needles worked like a pump. Perhaps they would just keep on blowing her up like some grotesque party balloon until she exploded and it was all over.

  How long would it take? She rocked on the big double bed. If only she could grab that pain, or touch it or press on it or warm it or any bloody thing. It evaded her grasp, hiding just out of reach, like a child hiding in a cubby that adults could look at but were too big to enter. She could cry, threaten or cajole. Still she couldn’t grasp it. So she screamed.

  Gwennie screamed because she didn’t know what else to do. And she screamed because she knew it wouldn’t go away. The scream bounced around the wall until she thought it would crack the mirror. It didn’t, of course. Nothing as dramatic as that. The story of her life, nothing was ever truly dramatic—she just made it seem like that sometimes.

  The rhythm of her movements was broken. The flaccid arms tightened about her knees, holding them in a firm embrace. Fleetingly, she remembered other embraces and other rhythms but again the pain smothered her thoughts. Now she lived only for those brief respites after the drugs. There had always been intermittent good times. More just recently, of course, as her kids grew up.

  She twisted the golden ring on her wedding finger. All her fingers were swollen now, and her ring made a gentle waist in the puffy flesh and a small blue stone glittered coldly. Blue for weddings. She had always loved blue, in clothing, in stones and the summer sky. She wouldn’t last till summer now. The girls would be sad for Christmas. They had given her the clock last year, and now she lived by it. Her hands reached out for it again. Those hands which were so like her rough old Mum’s despite the red varnish.

  Was it really another hour before she could have some more of that stuff? Oh God, please make it go away. God, please. She didn’t know what to do. Please. Make it go away. Please. She was rocking again. Rocking. Rocking. She nursed her pain and tried to coax it to sleep. It took a long time.

  It was no good blaming Mum. It was bloody God’s fault. If he existed and Lizzie didn’t believe in him anymore anyway. It was all so bloody senseless. And she was scared even more now that she didn’t believe in him. She remembered Paneloux’s second sermon in The Plague, ‘We must believe everything or deny everything. And who, I ask, amongst you would dare to deny everything?’ She was scared and no one even knew about it now that Mum as gone.

  Nanna had died, but that was different because Nanna was old and just decided that she had had enough. The last few months with the nuns must have been rather a trial for all concerned because Nanna was bored with living and thought she might as well see what the alternative was like. Lizzie didn’t feel sad when Nanna died, just rather lonely, and she had wondered why Nanna didn’t want to stay with them. She felt so alone when Mum died. It was as though she had been betrayed and abandoned. She was resentful that Mum would do that to her, just go off and leave her all by herself.

  When she had called at the house the Sunday before, Gwennie’s man said that she was dying and that he wouldn’t let them hospitalise her. He had forty years’ leave accrued from when he had nothing to do but work. Without knowing it, he said, he’d been saving it for Gwennie. He said she was dying. Lizzie heard it but didn’t comprehend. In the little kitchen of the first house her mother had ever owned, she mixed a drink of egg and milk and Akta-vite, carried it to the bedroom and saw her mother semi-sleeping, semi-conscious. The beautiful eyes were deep in the grey face. Mum’s eyes always looked like that when she was sick. The pain was bad; her daughter knew that. That bloody treatment seemed almost worse. The soft black hair was going and that bloody wig screamed at them both from the dressing table. Never again, for plays at school, or any cosmetic purpose, would Lizzie be able to handle false hair without screaming inside her head. What a spiteful bloody God to do this to someone so lovely. If it were true and she was his creation, why the hell would he want to fuck it all up like that? There was no sense in anything. Softly, she touched the arm that had been flung out to ward off the invisible rat that was inexorably eating away, eating away, at the marrow of existence, and the eyelids flickered weakly. There was a brief moment of recognition.

  ‘That’s my daughter.’

  Lizzie had wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t. She knew that if she acknowledged it was bad, it would be and as long
as she didn’t say it out aloud or even think it in words it would be all right. Mum was very sick. She needed nourishment. The bent, invalid straw was placed gently on the dry parched lips, and the poor tired head was supported to facilitate a few sips of milk. It wasn’t a breast, and it wasn’t enough.

  Mum died two days later.

  What a bitch!

  She shouldn’t have died. She was needed. There were still things for her to do and say but less than two years after the wedding, everyone was back in church for Gwennie. Happy the bride the sun shines on and at rest the dead the rain falls on. At rest? Crap! There was no soft bed and no blue quilt in that hard little uncompromising box. No lace bed-jacket either. At least Lizzie didn’t think so. She had refused to look at that thing in the middle of the aisle. The organ played again, there were flowers again and candles again. People cried again and prayed again. But she wouldn’t kiss her mother again, ever. That’s what funerals were like. The absolute conformity of a funeral that was just like everyone else’s funeral. A husband, children, friends, flowers, a proper coffin. A proper funeral. Gwennie was nowhere to be seen, nowhere to be felt, nowhere to love her girl and make it all better. Gwennie was gone. Oh, shit, Lizzie missed Gwennie and Nanna. She hated being the one left behind. If they had really cared about her then at least one of them should have stayed with her instead of buggering off, leaving her neatly sewn up in the marriage strands. She supposed she knew they meant it for the best but she wasn’t secure, she was secured, procured. The nightmare of that other night kept slithering back.

  She had thought it was just another dinner with the boss and his wife. You bloody man, you, how could you do that to me? You really thought you could swap me off to that old lecher but you were mistaken, playing your much more sophisticated version of “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine” than the kids play behind the shelter shed. Except that you miscalculated, because I’d never played that game at the convent and I didn’t want to play the grown up version either and that really screwed things up and not the way you all intended it would. What an innocent. What a fool. Mum and Nanna never told me about swaps. I wonder if they played. I bet they didn’t. No one would want to swap them away—not Mum who was beautiful and Nanna who was something different but just as good as beautiful. So I didn’t know about the rules until the game was on. I thought they were an entertaining couple. I knew you were attracted to her. I thought he liked me too. That made it harmless fun, I thought. Foolish virgin. Well, foolish anyway. The last chaste wife left on planet earth who thought that promises and vows were meant to be for real, who thought that wife swapping like venereal disease and the road toll was something to read about in the Sunday Press, but could never happen to me. This was the bright one!? Oh, brother.