On Brunswick Ground

ON
BRUNSWICK
GROUND

ON BRUNSWICK GROUND

CATHERINE DE SAINT PHALLE

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

www.transitlounge.com.au

Copyright © Catherine de Saint Phalle 2015

First Published 2015
Transit Lounge Publishing

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

The publisher acknowledges the work of Melbourne's street artists. A glimpse of Baby Guerilla's work appears on the back cover. The artist whose work appears on the front cover is asked to approach the publisher so he or she can be acknowledged in future editions.

Cover and author photography:
www.kipscottphoto.com
Cover and book design: Peter Lo

Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group

A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the
National Library of Australia:
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

ISBN: 978-1-921924-92-7

A Paul, l'amour de ma vie

1

THE ALDERMAN

Tonight I'm in a bar in Brunswick, on a high stool with a book and a beer, hanging in the middle of a blur of voices, like some strange fruit from another tree. Losing myself in the story, downing a cool redemptive sip every few pages, I keep a weather ear out for the floating ‘no worries, mate,' ‘I'm easy,' and ‘you're right' that, like the sea spume tightening one's hold on a ship's rail, keep my feet firmly hitched on the rung of the stool I'm sitting on.

The hum of the bar has become the sounds of a marina. The cluck cluck of boat hulls knocking against each other, with a little splash here and a little gurgle there, hang on the outskirts of my book. The bar itself holds a net of stars and bar lights around me in a night that is no longer made of darkness. That's when I meet Bernice. She climbs onto the stool next to mine, and plumps down with a sigh. Her presence is immediate, and even though she doesn't say anything at first, her worry, in the air around her, is as thick as velvet. You could cut her out of it with a pair of scissors. Then she orders a drink with a frown on her baby face.

The bar owner's green eyes look out at everyone from under her black fringe. Bernice is obviously a regular customer. They're so different, it's amusing. One is a deep, dark secret, the other a redheaded Bridget Jones – her posture childlike, and her elbows, marooned on either side of her glass, disconsolate. She seeps into a silence that permeates my reading. I hear her gulps and her breath coming in spurts.

‘What's your book?' she asks suddenly.

I show her the cover of Ishiguro's
Remains of the Day
and she wriggles on her stool.

‘Oooh, I loved it.'

I put it down and smile at her good and proper. The shared love of a book always feels like ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume?'

‘I'm Bernice,' she tells me, and without making a comment on my accent, knocks back her drink.

‘I'm going to do IVF. Thirty-nine. No time left.'

She puts the words down on the bar like physical things she can no longer lug around with her. I have difficulty remembering acronyms and nod encouragingly. Without being patronising, she nevertheless translates:

‘I'm going to try having a child by artificial insemination.'

Her shoulders heave.

‘I saw a donor rock up to the hospital today. He looked awful. I was sure he was a donor because I recognised the bag with the leaf on it.'

She doesn't really want to go through with it, she explains. But there's no choice left to her. Women of her age have a less than five per cent chance of conceiving naturally. Then she casts a reckless glance around the pub.

‘I could test my five per cent chance on a one-night stand now, but it's not the right time of the month,' she moans.

Bernice explains it all to me. Nothing is left in the shadows. It's all very scientific: they stick a catheter into the uterus at the most fertile time of the cycle and then they empty the contents of the test tube inside you. To listen to her is to hear a woman shouting on the ramparts of some ancient city, menacing a higher power, taunting the gods for what she wants.

I wonder if a child doesn't come of its own free will, on the heels of a desert wind, choosing a particular person to bring it into the world. A child
happens
. Surely, it can't be wanted like a thing you can
get
. Bernice is talking of prams now.

‘The best ones are English,' she says decisively. ‘Silver Cross. You can get them much cheaper on the internet. The Bugaboo is for yuppies and duffers. But Stokke is my other favourite because it can become a high chair too. Just think, two clunky pieces of furniture in one.'

She takes a breath.

‘My first choice would be a Silver Cross perambulator.'

The old traditional pram is the royal way, for her. She describes it in detail – a big dark blue body with high white wheels. She could be describing the queen's carriage; all it lacks are horse guards trotting alongside it.

‘Of course, I wouldn't choose that one,' she adds regretfully, ‘you can't get it into a car.'

I'd prefer to wrap a child around my body in a sling. Surely your steps, your heartbeat, even your daydreaming, would rock it to sleep better than a perambulator. But I remove myself from such thoughts. I learn that it's very practical to have a maxi-cosy capsule that fits in a modern Silver Cross base.

‘It goes straight in the car! You don't even need a baby seat. Two in one again!'

She's absurdly convincing, but her phrases seem to have an echo. I discover that Bernice is the child of another era. Her grandmother brought her up. Her values revert a few generations, like a sunflower to an older sun.

‘Ah,' she sighs, ‘the English know how to do prams. They even make a bassinet that becomes a cot and then becomes a junior bed. What more can you want?'

What more indeed? I wonder why this information is so important to her, instead of daydreaming about the tiny stranger who could be orbiting around her. I also learn that Bernice has been buying baby clothes for her friends' children for years. She gives baby tea parties, and babysits at the drop of a hat. But she's worried that IVF could give her triplets, especially as twins are common in her family.

‘It would be hard to cope alone with three babies,' she muses.

The unknown father hovers too, a disincarnate spermatozoa. Bernice will have to flick through a catalogue of faces to choose her baby's progenitor. How will the child manage to guide his or her future mother's erring thoughts to the right face? The dating world is Bernice's pet project, and also her
Inferno
.

‘I tried,' she says with a dutiful sigh.

Suddenly I sense all the men around us in the bar, hanging in clusters, sitting alone or with a woman. Tall men, blond men, dark men, swarthy men, pale men, men with hairy hands or thick necks, men with kind faces or tight, withdrawn expressions, men with strong chins or no chins, men with a smile sewn onto their cheek muscles – men you need to make a baby. She sees them every day at work.

‘I don't get men,' she moans. ‘Generation X is a nightmare. They can't commit.'

The word ‘commit' seems obscure. I understand it on one level, but it doesn't sink in. It's not a real word for me, rather half a word, or even a quarter. Later, I look it up. Originally, it meant to give charge, to entrust, to unite, to connect, to combine, to bring together. It takes a while to unjumble all those words, as if they've been tossed in a salad bowl. Wikipedia concedes that the evolution of the word ‘commit' into a modern range of meanings is not entirely clear. In ancient Latin, it meant ‘perpetrating' – not ‘penetrating,' as I first misread with a slight jolt. Of course, you
commit
a crime. But do you commit love? Strangely, the last and most modern meaning, ‘to commit oneself,' is influenced by existentialism and Sartre's emotional and moral
engagement
. When you think of Sartre's track record with women it's rather ironic. But Bernice would agree with that definition. The men she meets can't emotionally engage with her project.

The night is still young when I decide to leave the bar. Bernice slams her empty glass down and comes out with me, her tiny handbag slung over her shoulder like a sailor's holdall. I walk her home because she's had too many Pimm's Nº 1. On her doorstep her soft hands clutch at my sleeve. She is anxious about me returning to my place alone.

‘Let me call a taxi.'

There are still people about. I shake my head and back away smiling and waving.

‘Call me when you get there,' she urges, and totters forward to hand me her card.

‘You can't be careful enough after what happened to that poor girl.'

Today there was a peace march held in honour of a woman named Jill Meagher. Something about her being raped and murdered in Brunswick has ripped the fabric of the neighbourhood. The light itself seems to have suffered a rent and let in something that wasn't there before. It's not only about fear or danger, but more about a subtle presence that has taken some invisible space in the air. Even I, a stranger, can feel it. Calling it evil would be too crude, as if the word were too short, too stark to express a constellation of meanings.

I think about the man in prison. He has already tried to kill himself. And though they are now separated, he once had a wife and children – a family he probably held dear. I wonder what was once done to him, what hurt of his past has come hurtling back at him like a boomerang.

The last living glance we have of Jill Meagher is on the video camera of a bridal shop. Something about weddings reeks of death. The rigor mortis of it, the march, the sacrificial white dress, the silent crowd in the church ingesting the ceremony, the tears of a mother. A bridal
shop
: the sad irony of it. Aristaeus, the beekeeper, tries to rape Orpheus's wife on their wedding day. As Eurydice runs to escape him, a viper bites her ankle. Orpheus goes down into hell to retrieve her, but, like all the newspaper articles and all the policemen of the world, he can't bring his Jill Meagher back to life. Her photographs splashed on front pages, the peace march in her honour, are nothing but Orpheus's backward glance into Hades as Eurydice swirls away from him.