The Children's Bach (14 page)

*

She walked down the sideway. The car was not there. There was nobody home. The windows were closed, the kitchen was airless, the bathroom floor was flooded, the sink was greasy, the table was piled with papers and dirty plates, the rubbish bin overflowed in the corner, and pizza boxes, screwed into stiff wands, lay around it. Athena put down her bag and walked from door to door. In Vicki's room she smelled vomit. The children's room was still warm. The big bedroom had been stripped and the mattress was half off its base.

She opened the front door and sat down on the step. The cement was dry and already hot. She watched ants crawling over the hose. She noticed that the window panes of the house opposite reflected events which were not taking place in the quiet street: the passing of a truck, of a car, of a bunch of cyclists. She thought carefully about this, turning her head, and worked out that the housefront opposite must be tilted at such an angle that its windows reflected the highway half a mile away, behind her own house, beyond the creek.

She got up and started work.

She opened every window and every door. She carried the newspapers and the pizza boxes down to the bottom of the yard and lit a fire in the incinerator. She turned on the taps of the washing machine and poked the sheets down into the water. She stood in the rubbish bins, trampled their contents down, and lugged them up to the street for tomorrow's collection. She filled a bucket with boiling water and scrubbed the hardened food dribbles off the cupboard doors. She washed, she washed, she washed. She tended the incinerator, and when the fire burned low she kept it going with hunks of wormy timber that she wrenched off the disused rabbit cage. She did load after load of washing, and hung it out to dry. She plunged her hands into the lavatory and carved its stains away. She mopped the kitchen floor and covered it with sheets of news paper. She got down on her hands and knees and scraped the mould out of the shower and tugged clumps of hair out of the plughole. She emptied the fridge and set a pan of boiling water inside its ice-clogged freezer. The sheets dried so quickly in the sunny back yard that before she had finished the cleaning she was able to remake the beds and tuck them in tightly. The bedrooms smelled of cotton. Every kitchen surface was dry and bare. She picked up the newspapers from the clean lino and took them out to the incinerator, over which a blast of molten air quivered: the leaves of the nectarine tree jumped and wavered in its colourless exhalation. She could hear Mister and Missus Fuckin' cursing each other behind the fence. Their inarticulate croakings were punctuated by the blows of a hammer and the explosions of the flywire door.

She ironed a cloth and spread it on the kitchen table.

And then she sat down and waited for them to come home.

And they will come!

And Vicki will say, as they drive in through the gateway, ‘Hey! The bins are out! Athena must be back.'

And Billy will not even have noticed her absence, and Arthur will come and stand beside her, trying not to smile, and Vicki and Dexter will not touch her straight away,

and the clothes on the line will dry into stiff shapes which loosen when touched,

and someone will put the kettle on,

and from one day to the next Poppy will stop holding Philip's hand: he will drop his right hand to her left so she can take it, but nothing will happen, and when he looks down she will be standing there beside him, watching for a gap in the traffic, and she will not hold his hand any more, and she never will again,

and Dexter will sit on the edge of the bed to do up his sandals, and Athena will creep over to him and put her head on his knee, and he will take her head in his hands and stroke it with a firm touch,

and the tea will go purling into the cup,

and Athena will dream again and again, against her will, of Philip, or rather of not-Philip, of searching for him, of climbing endless stairs in a building full of rooms whose occupants have just quitted them, leaving warm cushions and sunny floors and disturbed air,

and Elizabeth and Vicki and Athena will go to visit Como House, they will go arm in arm through the high rooms, and will stoop to examine the inlay tables, the angle of flush in the pink and white marble,

and as they approach the Paradise they will feel the city shudder under the soles of their feet, and will see the heavy strands of the fly curtain swing out on a gust of air, and will hear the soft laughter and the slide of dancing shoes on the speckled concrete, and oh! the machine will be hissing, the tables will be clean, the sun will be shining through the glass,

and Athena will play Bach on the piano, in the empty house, and her left hand will keep up the steady rocking beat, and her right hand will run the arpeggios, will send them flying, will toss handfuls of notes high into the sparkling air!

Acknowledgement is made to EMI Music Publishing Australia for permission to quote from E. Harold Davies' introduction to the music book
The Children's Bach
.

The lines on page 140 are from
To Penshurst
by Ben Jonson.

I am happy to acknowledge the generous support given to me by the Literature Board of the Australia Council during the year it took me to write this book. Some of it was written during a term I spent as a writer-in-residence at Griffith University in Queensland.

‘A lyrical, rough-edged novel full of warmth and uncompromising feeling'
Sunday Age

Inner-suburban Melbourne in the 1970s: a world of communal living, drugs, music and love. In this acclaimed first novel, Helen Garner captures the fluid relationships of a community of friends who are living and loving in new ways. Nora falls in love with Javo the junkie, and together they try to make sense of their lives and the choices they have made. But caught in an increasingly ambiguous relationship, they are unable to let go – and the harder they pull awayfrom each other, the tighter the monkey grip.

‘Helen Garner is an extraordinarily good writer. There is not a paragraph, let alone a page, where she does not compel your attention.'
The Bulletin

In two of Helen Garner's finest short stories, she examines the idiosyncratic and bothersome notions of honour by which her characters – adults and children – shape their untidy lives.

Honour
is about a couple whose marriage, though abandoned in practice, persists in spirit. But the arrival of a new lover obliges them to make a proper separation and draw their child into the conflict.

Other People's Children
is a witty, sad story of the breakdown of friendship between two women, Scotty and Ruth, and the collapse of their collective household. Scotty loves Ruth's daughter as only the childless can love other people's children, but the broken friendship leaves Scotty with noclaims. Into this mess blunders Madigan, looking for something that Scotty has long ago trainedherself not to give.

Late in the afternoon my mother and Auntie Lorna and I walk along the beach to Surfers. The tide is out: our bare feet scarcely mark the firm sand. Their two voices run on, one high, one low. If I speak they pretend to listen, just as I feign attention to their endless, looping discourses: these are our courtesies: this is love. Everything is spoken, nothing is said.

From one of Australia's most celebrated writers come eleven stories about the complexities of life and love; of looking back and longing; of what it means to be a stranger, on foreign ground and known, told with the piercing familiarity and resonance we have come to expect from Helen Garner. Remarkably honest, often very funny and always woven in ways that surprise, these stories tease out everyday life to show the darkness underneath – but also the possibilities of joy.

‘She glories in the ordinary and makes it glow'

Adelaide Advertiser