The Children's Bach (13 page)

‘The blushing apricot, and woolly peach,' said Dexter, ‘Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.'

Vicki's eyes rolled up, and closed. The room lurched into motion, the bed tilted, there was a shallow rapid panting. Each pore squeezed out an icy droplet. She fell and fell, backwards through the universe, and the starry emptiness above her shrank to a circle the size of a plughole, and when that went out she would be dead. Her ears were full of a stellar drone, her jaws ran with spit. She flung herself sideways and the bucket edge dug into her cheek.

Somebody stood in the doorway, somebody came in in the dark. Somebody weighed the bed down and put his arms round her, and held her head and wiped her mouth.

‘Don't, don't let me,' she babbled.

‘Don't what?'

‘Don't let me fall asleep. If I go to sleep I'll die. I don't want to, don't let me.'

*

Athena woke at six o'clock in the morning. Philip was not there, nor had he been. The room was full of heavy, dark pieces of furniture. The impression that her presence made on the room was so slight that the turbulence of its former occupants, of a great line of passing strangers, swarmed and tumbled about her in its stuffy atmosphere: their boredom, their panic, their trembling fantasies: wire coathangers, shoes with worn-down heels, jumpers smelling of men's sweat, trousers too long or too short for the fashion, bras with greying straps, skirts whose hems dipped at one side. She pulled back the curtains and expected them to fall apart in her hands.

The street was brightening. She heard the sharp clack of a woman's heels, and looked down. The woman was wearing a shapeless dress and carried two plastic supermarket bags. She stopped in front of the closed grille of a shop. She had her back to Athena. She put down one bag, as if to get out a key. Athena did not want to be seen watching. She got back under the sheet. She heard the heels again: the woman was walking away.

What do I know about him? He cleans his teeth standing upright and looking himself straight in the eye in the mirror. Oh, I've never
seen
him clean his teeth. I know this is how he does it because there is a splattering of drops of dried toothpaste all over the bottom half of the mirror. Now I come to think of it, this means he must do it in a slightly bent posture. He is tall. If he did it upright, he would spray the top of the mirror.

She would wait, and see.

At eight o'clock she passed quickly through the lobby, keeping her eyes straight ahead, but she thought the girl at the desk gave her a smart look. She stood in the street outside the hotel. A warm wind was sweeping the grit away: the pavements shone like bone.

What do tourists do? They walk, they stand, they look, they buy. They fumble for money on buses, not knowing whether to pay the driver or the conductor. They visit famous monuments, fountains, old houses full of stone and shutters and anachronistic lace. They notice that the day without duty passes with the slowness of a dream. They know that their existence is without point. They envy those who go arm in arm, who have a home to go to.

In the art gallery she saw a painting of a woman in a dress like molten metal. All she could bear to look at were head portraits and domestic still lives. She looked for pictures of rooms, of windows, of light coming in through windows, of tables on which sat utilitarian objects, of people sitting at tables, of people busy on humble matters. She stopped in front of a painting called
Reading Woman
: she sat in her bonnet inside a room, turning her book towards the window through the top panes of which (the bottom ones being shuttered) fell a splash of yellow light on to the floor at her feet. The floorboards were wide. Three oranges in a tin dish sat on a chair. In the foreground two big pink shoes lay at cast-off angles on the floor.

She walked on and on, until she came to the railway station and bought herself a ticket home.

In the afternoon she went out on the sparkling water to the zoo, and stood for half an hour watching gangs of very small monkeys as bald and as serious as businessmen marching about their rocky enclosure. From there she turned and looked back across the water at the bridge. On its summit wriggled a tiny flag. A man standing near her said to his daughter, ‘I bet when they finished building it they all sat round the table feeling excited, and someone said, ‘‘
I
know what. How about we stick a little flag right on the very top?'' And the others said, ‘‘All right!” '

Just as the sky turned green she passed the conservatorium, white as an ocean liner, with its two high palm trees flying like flags. She stopped on the slope of the lawn and stared up at the lighted first-floor windows: they were open, and three students, each in a separate room, were practising: a piano, a violin, a clarinet. The threads of melody, never meant to combine, mingled and made a pleasant, meaningless discord.

She walked down the neon streets, and up again, and found her way back to the hotel. It was dark.

He was lying on the bed watching a band on television. A girl was sitting at the dressing table, also watching, a spiky girl in a black and white houndstooth dress. Athena spoke from the door.

‘I'm going home tonight.'

He sat up with a jerk. ‘Come in,' he said, as if she were a visitor. ‘Athena, this is . . . ummm . . . She's been showing me a song she wrote.'

‘I was just going,' said the girl. The music was very loud. All these songs, thought Athena, are about the end of love, or its wrong beginnings.

‘Hang on,' said Philip. ‘Excuse me, Athena. Listen. I like your song. Look, I'll give you a tip. Go home and write it again. Take out the clichés. Everybody knows ‘‘It always happens this way'' or ‘‘I went in with my eyes wide open''. Cut that stuff out. Just leave in the images. Know what I mean? You have to steer a line between what you understand and what you don't. Between cliché and the other thing. Make gaps. Don't
chew
on it. Don't explain everything. Leave holes. The music will do the rest.'

The girl nodded and nodded. She backed towards the door, keeping her eyes on his face. Athena stood aside for her and she ducked out into the passage and ran away.

‘Where have you been all day?' said Philip. ‘I waited for you. Let's go out and eat.'

‘I'm going on the train. Tonight.'

‘Wait another couple of days. We'll fly back.'

She shook her head. The music stopped and the screen was filled with the smiling face of a young man.

‘Course,' said the man, the boy, ‘an album's a major statement of where a band's at creatively.'

‘Aren't you being a bit iron-clad?' said Philip. He swung his feet to the floor. ‘It's because I didn't come back last night, isn't it.'

‘Dexter came looking for me.'

‘Here?' He laughed, and turned off the television. ‘Bloody Elizabeth. Big-mouth.'

‘I sent him away. He was crying.'

He bent his knees in front of the mirror and flicked his hair about. ‘I can't help you with that one, Athena,' he said. ‘Jealousy. You'll have to handle that one on your own, I'm afraid.'

He straightened up and faced her. They were like two ghosts, now that the blood had gone out of them, two empty sets of garments hung opposite each other in a cupboard.

‘Of
course
,' said Athena. ‘Of course I know that. I only came back to get my bag.'

Are there longer nights than those spent sitting up in a second-class seat between Sydney and Melbourne?

At dawn her own reflection receded from the glass, the train groaned and halted, and she looked out at the basalt plain, the striding power lines, the nodding thistles. The landscape was sheep-coloured. Sheep thronged by dams and under trees. The sky was clear. Someone at the front of the carriage turned on a radio, and in the stillness of the sleeping train, before hoarse voices could cry to it to shutup, she heard the music begin again, the whine, the false drama, the seductive little whispering of despair.

Dexter turned over in a muck sweat. There was somebody else in the bed. It was not Athena. But he had his arm around this person. She had her back against his stomach and his hand covered a small, hard breast. A whiff of vomit hung about her hair.

He sprang away to the edge of the bed. She did not move. He crouched there with his feet on the bare boards and his elbows between his knees. The hugeness of what had happened, of what he had done, fell on him like a haystack: the light went orange, the air was full of stalks and dust, and then there was no more air. He got up and stumbled out to the kitchen.

So he was as bad as the rest after all. He was just another exploiter. He was no better than that tattooed, guitar-playing turd who'd pushed her up against the fridge and then turned around and taken Athena away. The feminists were right. Men were bastards.
He
was a bastard, a low, rotten perv, a slimy seducer of children. He was practically in loco parentis. He had abused Morty's trust. He had broken faith with Athena. He was like one of those men his father made old-fashioned jokes about: he had let a girl get drunk and then he had taken advantage of her. And what if she was pregnant? What if she had to have an abortion? What if that deadshit had given her the clap and now she'd passed it on to him? He felt this one act spinning out its consequences forever into infinity. He felt himself going off the deep end. He went to the sink and made himself drink off a couple of glasses of water.

The boys must be awake. What if Arthur went into the bedroom and saw her lying there where his mother was supposed to be? He ran to their room to head them off.

They were lying quietly in their bunks. Billy was singing in his high, vague voice, a sound more like whistling than singing, and Arthur was up on one elbow reading with such fierce intensity that he did not even notice his naked father in the doorway. The small room was full of sunshine: its window, closed, was too bright to be looked at, and the air was fuggy with the smell of children.

‘Dexter!'

It was her. He crept away, back into the front room. She was sitting up in the tangled sheets.

‘I dreamed about you,' she said. She was giggling. ‘I dreamed you died. And at the funeral I had on a black dress without a petticoat and everyone could see my pants.'

‘Vicki,' he said. ‘I think you'd better get up. Straight away.' Daylight changed everything. Her breasts grew so high on her ribcage that he could not help staring at them. ‘Quickly. Before the kids come in here.'

‘But I need more sleep,' she said crossly.

‘Get up. Get up.' He whipped the top sheet away.

‘I think I'm gonna be sick again.'

She trotted away to the back door and he stripped the bed like a professional. He took the sheets down the back steps and thrust them into the old washing machine under the porch. He had no idea how to make it fill up. He tried to read the instructions on the scratched dial. He realised that he was standing in his back yard with no clothes on, and that a naked teenage girl who was vomiting in the lavatory would emerge at any minute on to the concrete path in full view of any neighbour who cared to stick his head over the fence.

He hid in his bedroom until he heard her shut the bathroom door and turn on the water. It was Sunday morning. Someone in the street was pushing a hand-mower. The smell of the cut grass seemed to belong to some other, better world that he had shut himself out of. For a moment the rhythmic gnashing of the blades and the distant pounding of the shower covered a smaller, more human sound. Was she
crying?
He dragged on some garments out of the dirty clothes basket and sneaked back into the kitchen.

She was not crying. She had her radio in there with her and she was singing with it: the voice, a man's but pitched high enough for a girl to sing comfortably in the same register, and taking itself very seriously, sang, ‘Oh, I'm the kind of guy/Who is always o-o-on the' He could not catch the last word. The radio and the girl sang with a light, slow, sure rhythm. ‘Where-ever I lay my hat/That's – my home.' Her voice came and went in clarity and volume: he imagined her turning, bending, raising one arm and then the other, standing with a blind smile under the stream of water. He felt his heartbeat slow down.

Out she came, splendid as the Queen of Sheba, wreathed in pink steam, wet-headed, and wrapped in a threadbare towel. He held his breath for the moral crisis.

She smiled at him. ‘I bet I lost half a stone with all that spewing,' she said. ‘See how my hip bones are sticking out? I look fabulous! But boy, have I got a headache.'

‘Vicki. Listen. I feel terrible about last night.'

‘Oh, I know. I must have been foul.'

She rubbed herself with the rag of a towel. Her bottom was flushed, her flesh was so new and firm that even vigorous movement did not make it jiggle.

‘No – I mean
I
feel terrible. About what I did.'

She was not even listening. ‘I get this thing, you know? where I think I'm going to die if I fall asleep? Must be a neurosis or something. You were really nice to me.'

‘Nice?' The young savage, thought Dexter. I am as irrelevant as a missionary. I am being ridiculous. ‘But we'll have to tell Athena, of course,' he said.

She looked up. ‘What? Don't be stchoopid. It was just a one-night stand. We're not in love, or anything! I'm not, anyway.' She gave a gay laugh and put one foot up on a chair to dry it. ‘You can tell her if you
like
. But it might make her feel worse. Like a sort of punishment for going away.'

He had nothing to say.

‘Anyway,' said Vicki, ‘Athena can hardly complain. That would be hypocritical.'

He sat at the ravaged table and watched the girl dry herself with efficient strokes, sawing between her toes and twisting her shoulders to reach the backs of her thighs. This was modern life, then, this seamless logic, this common sense, this silent tit-for-tat. This was what people did. He did not like it. He hated it. But he was in its moral universe now, and he could never go back.