Blue Skies (6 page)

Packed away, washed, dressed, brushed and fully restored to order, we sat sipping tea and chatting till his wife and son returned. Since we didn't have much to discuss, we spoke mainly of my neighbour. I reported to him our brief conversations, which he considered cryptic.

Ben wanted to meet my neighbour. I had told him that this wasn't possible, that she'd die of shock at the sight of him, especially wearing a dress. Ben looked pleased at this. ‘How about,' he suggested, ‘I drive down and park outside her house. I could just watch her and she'd think I was a travelling salesman taking a break.' But I didn't trust him. I saw him leaping from the car in a frenzy and doing dreadful things on her lawn—the kinds of things I'd heard vandals did on altar steps in churches. Half of me found the prospect delightful, but the day-to-day half decided it couldn't cope with all that outrage. I kept putting him off.

When conversation lapsed I looked at his pictures. There were always several in various stages of completion, and piles of drawings. One large painting he was working on was of my head—a very large head, with narrowed watchful eyes behind the cracked pink sunglasses I usually wore, surrounded by riotous scenes of naked men, women, children and animals enjoying themselves in most possible ways. All this joyful activity went on under my cold, once-removed and possibly critical gaze. I recognised little scenes taken from our dressing-up days. And in a bottom corner, very small, a middle-aged woman mowed her lawn.

By the time our mutual boredom reached its pitch, his dependents returned. Gloria and I left father and son together and took off for the hotel in the nearest township, bouncing over the impossible little roads in a cloud of dust, swerving to avoid the worst potholes.

‘Jogging up and down in the little red wagon,' she sang happily. ‘Jolting up and down in this rusty blue wagon,' she laughed, one hand on the steering wheel, the other swatting wildly at some gaudy, dangerous-looking flying insect that had been sucked into the car. I trailed my hand out of the window, the air buoyant as water.

‘How was school?' I asked politely, to get something going.

‘It was all right. Same as usual. Don't let's talk about that. How's your tiny nuclear family?'

‘It's all right. Same as usual. Don't let's talk about that.'

Gloria didn't know James very well. She had been overseas during our brief haphazard courtship, and the letter I had written to her about it, care of Tasmania House in the Strand, she claimed not to have received. I had described it since: how we kept bumping into each other at parties and rebounding off into the night together for long talks. James had been the first man to explain the American electoral system clearly to me. One pretty evening, as we sat side by side on the end of a falling-down wooden jetty in the moonlight, he asked me what I had been doing when Kennedy was assassinated. For one wild moment I thought he was accusing
me
. He went on to say that he thought it would be one of those things that, whenever it was mentioned, people would be able to remember exactly what they had been doing at the time.

‘Like the day war broke out,' I agreed. ‘My mother told me she gave three cheers the day war broke out, because she had this plan to lie about her age and run away from home to join the Land Army.

‘ James looked puzzled but wouldn't be put off. He really wanted to know what I had been doing at the time. I said I couldn't remember, so I supposed I was asleep. I was relieved that this undramatic information did not put him off. James was very interested in America.

In the course of our talks I conceived a dreadful passion for him which I went to ridiculous lengths to assuage. He finally obliged me one night on the back seat of his mother's car in the back row of the drive-in movies where a lot of that went on.
Alfie
was showing at the time. Michael Caine flickered wanly across the screen suspended in the sky while James struggled wildly to free his feet which were entangled in the speaker wire. In the end he solved the problem by booting the speaker out of the car, where the actor's adenoidal tones squawked away unheeded on the gravel. We only just got sorted out in time to be sitting respectably upright when the floodlights came on. Car doors slammed all round us as people rushed from their cars to the refreshment area underneath the screen. James nervously flicked his hair from his eyes and adjusted his clothing. Taking my hand, he carefully explained the situation to me, so that there should be no misun. derstandings later. He had a lot of girlfriends, it seemed—filter-tipped secretaries from work whom he took to Saturday-evening dinner dances at local motels. He bought them steaks at the Starline Grill, which revolved while you ate, with panoramic views of the wharves and the gothic mountain that loomed behind the town. These girls didn't go in for drive-ins and that kind of thing, he implied.

When I found that I was pregnant and he took me home to meet his mother, it was like winning a lottery you didn't know you had tickets in. You don't know whether to laugh or cry.

So Gloria and I wouldn't talk about that. Instead we kept our minds on higher things.

‘Those gum trees,' I said, meaning the gum trees that lined the road, their trunks patched and stringy-looking, but graceful and pale at the same time, ‘are just like Greek columns. Like bits of a leftover civilisation.'

‘No they're not,' she said. ‘I bet you've never seen any real Greek columns.'

She knew that I hadn't.

‘The sky,' I ventured, ‘is a beautiful blue. If a little unnatural.'

‘Well, you do know where you are with a beautiful sky of an unnatural blue. It's those moody grey skies that keep naturalistically changing that I don't like.'

We sang ‘My Blue Heaven' in harmony all the way to the hotel—well, the chorus, anyway.

In the bar it was very exciting, because we were not supposed to be there. Not that there is a law or anything, not any more. We just weren't supposed to be there—females. It caused a lot of nudging and desert-boot shuffling in the bar. It caused painful moderations of the spoken word—a distortion of comradely language—which we liked. We liked the jukebox too. One song we would play over and over. I hoarded five-cent pieces all week for that purpose. Tammy Wynette would hit shrill notes—
Stand by your man
—while we rocked back and forth with the kind of giggles you can't stop at the time but should grow out of.

We always drank brandy and dry ginger—you don't need so much of it. We would buy a bottle and drink there, and take the rest back—plus a bottle of wine that the barman would dig out of a room at the back with the air of one discovering buried treasure.

The rides back were better than the rides there. Stops were made to admire rocky shadows, ghostly gums, the moon, the stars and the Southern Cross— but where it was I never discovered for certain; fortunately it's on the flag. The conversation was not so good—more and more a question of semantics. Pick a word and elaborate. More and more that word would be jealousy. After various definitions made on various rides back from the hotel, I came up with a winner.

‘Why,' I said brightly. ‘My dear, I do declare, I do believe it's the only thing that makes your life worth living. All that excitement keeps you going.'

‘Maybe that's right,' was what she said.

When we got back she started to cry, quite quietly— then loudly and a lot, all over her dinner.

‘What have you been saying?' Ben muttered at me. ‘What's happening? What's the matter?'

She left the table and fled bedroomwards: door shut, lock turned, dull Bette Davis sobbing. Meanwhile back at the table all was Joan Crawford stifled hysteria and grimacing.

‘What did you say to her?'

Since I couldn't tell him what it was, or whether it had to do with me at all, I couldn't answer. He bent my little finger back, hard. But nothing came to mind. So that was that.

This was not the usual Thursday evening behaviour. It spoilt the Thursday pattern and was the first of the signs that Thursdays were ending. It proved to be the penultimate Thursday. I blame myself.

Usually Thursday evenings were much nicer: good food accompanied by lots to drink, and faint surprise that alcohol worked as well as anything else— and let you talk at the same time.

‘I can't get off on words,' Ben would say. ‘Pictures are more my thing.'

Somewhere out there in the dark, the bus was always getting closer. Usually I tottered down to the gate and stood swaying as it pulled up. I could just make it up the steps and into the front seat.

If I wasn't already hovering mothlike in the head lights, the driver would honk his horn and hang about till I appeared, which was nice of him. Perhaps he was lonely. Not once was there anyone else on the bus for the Thursday night trip back to town—just a lot of objects: bags of potatoes and pumpkins, boxes of eggs, leftover newspapers, mail sacks, things like that. I wondered whether he was lonely on other nights, or whether each night he had a different lone passenger.

I used the homeward journey to sober up. He used it to make conversation. He told me once how, in his youth, he had been a big number-one Eddie Cochran fan. ‘You know Eddie Cochran?'

‘I've heard of him,' I said, humming through a few bars of ‘Summertime Blues' to be nice.

‘Yeah, well, you're maybe a bit young,' he said kindly. ‘He was killed. Went out on his motorbike. The best way there is. All over the road. He was the greatest, no question. ‘

‘Like James Dean,' I said, anxious to please.

‘No, he was a film star. It's not the same thing. An American film star. Jesus Christ.'

For a while he drove on in disgusted silence, making the bus hit all the ruts and ridges in the road, to teach me a lesson. Something dark, furry and forgotten scuttled along the bus, in the shadow of the seats.

Then he resumed our chat.

‘For five whole years after Eddie bought it, me and the other real fans used to hire a charabanc and go to the place where he died and put flowers on the road. We'd have a motorcycle escort out in front. In black leather gear like Eddie wore. Those were the days, like they say. The good old days is right. It's all changed now. The whole country's gone down a lot. No sense of direction. To think, we used to lead the world.' He sighed regretfully, squashing a headlight-dazzled possum under the nearside front wheel. ‘That's why I've come out here. It's the country of the future, no question.'