We hadn't taken two steps before we heard the sound of a splat. I pulled toward the sound. He pulled me back into the murk under the fig tree, put his finger to his lips, and then pointed.
I hadn't noticed the Lily Perspective banners before, since they were in the shadows on both sides of the brightly lit entrance. They were over a storey long, and featured that same flower detail Brett and Percy liked so much.
We watched as four men swung balloons, and each let go. Two balloons hit one of the banners right in the middle of its image, and the third and fourth balloons splatted with the same degree of accuracy. Now both banners had the art part as a big black splotch. A cheer went up in the crowd.
Above us, a frantic umbrella opening-and-closing announced the panic of the fruit bats taking off en masse.
The assembly wasn't put off by the bats. After a further back slap or two, they began to sing,
'Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.'
The whole group sang, and while they had no harmony, they made up for that, with earnestness. They sang the whole sentence twice, then settled down to the
we shall overcome some day
over and over, till it petered out as several of them walked out to the tarmac, looking up and down the road.
Then they all milled around for a while.
There was a small disagreement between two of the men and one woman about no one having notified the police or the press.
Someone flash-bulb popped three times, once in front of each banner, and once, standing back far enough to photograph the group with the banners in the background.
Then they left.
Brett turned to me. 'Please explain.'
Passively, I watched them walk away, but I wanted to run after them and tackle someone, and say 'Please explain,' with my knee against his throat. Then I could splotch the pavement with his head. I was still trying to figure out what to tell Brett when they turned the corner and were lost from sight, and two policemen arrived on foot.
Brett took my elbow and we strolled toward the museum.
One patrolman politely blocked our path.
'Invitation, sir?'
'Is there a problem?' an imperious voice rang out from the top of the steps.
Instinctively, I grabbed Brett's arm, ready to run.
'Everyone's waiting,' the voice rang out, and now the owner of the voice followed, jangling enough jewellery to bury someone under.
'He's the artist,' I explained to the flustered patrolman, as the curator of the exhibition tore Brett from my grasp.
~
They had waited for us. We were pushed through the musk and burble to a couple of chairs on the speakers' platform.
But first, the director of the art gallery spoke. I had, it seems, funded a to-be-built, permanent new exhibition space. My roles were discussed: the grand-niece to Percy Lily (never 'Reverend', his affiliation with a higher life form never mentioned) whose original drawings inspired my partner, the performance artist Brett Hartshorn, 'to take to the static'. Even though the director's intro was mostly about me, his drone almost put me and the crowd, to sleep. So I jerked in my chair when he turned to me and asked when my book was due out ... and then he extended his hand, saying 'But she can tell us all about it. Please. Miz Desirée Lily.'
My speech was hot in my hand, but my face was hotter.
'Brevity is the soul of something or other,' I said, which got a laugh. Not that I knew at that moment what the something was, any more than I knew what name I was.
'And so, I will be brief.'
Expectant silence. I took my time looking over the admiring, but especially the envious eyes. It was lovely being someone others wished to be.
'Even briefer than you expect.' I added, and smiled. I attempted my best smile. I wouldn't have been able
not
to smile, but I think it was lopsided.
And then I left the podium, to wild applause.
Brett's speech was all art-talk, most likely brilliant—but I didn't listen any more than anyone else. Because I was facing the crowd, I was able to look at its eyes. I was happy for him that the eyes had it—everything he could have wanted, if he wanted to feel human. Admiration, but even more deliciously, envy. Of course I hoped that much of that envy had to do with me.
We left an hour later, graciously declining an after-party celebration of garlic prawns and champagne.
'Later,' Brett assured the assembled, and we walked off into the night.
~
He took me to a place he had found in a tourist brochure, the best luxury hotel in Sydney, it said. Five hundred rooms and a view of the Harbour Bridge. He had a suite in his name.
Looking over the toiletries, I missed the Restonia's water room. Cleopatra would have thrown a tantrum here, but I endured.
He seemed strangely down.
When I questioned him, 'A touch of the vapours?' he shook my hand off his shoulder.
'I'm going out,' he announced.
'Checking on home?'
He swung around, facing me with the anger I'd seen on a couple of occasions.
Without meaning to, I sniffed. He didn't put out a smell. He didn't even look jaundiced. But he disappeared with a puff and a bang. I went to his room, and just as I expected, his bag and his trunk were by his bed.
'Never leave home without them!' I yelled it into the empty room. 'I challenge you to a contest of clichés.'
The sound of the electric lights answered back.
~
I was so down, I opened the bar fridge and took out a pathetically common bottle of alcohol. I was so down, I thought about my parents. There was a little twinge of guilt that played in the back of my mind. It was late, but if I rang during the day, Dad would be out. And if I rang during the evening, he could sometimes be out, too. It was eleven o'clock, but they were always so excited to hear my voice.
After quite a few rings, Mum's voice answered.
Or rather, someone picked up the phone.
'Who's this?' I demanded.
'Angela?'
'Mum?'
'Where are you?'
'Sydney.'
'Oh.'
The phone line was clear as night during drought.
'I've got great news about Uncle Percy, Mum.'
'I didn't know how to get you, Angela.'
'Percy was an axionymist,' I chuckled.
'Oh,' she said, with no exclamation mark about it.
She was such a deflator. I was ready to hang up already. 'Aren't you gonna ask me what an axi—?'
'If you'd told us how to reach—'
Stuff her! 'Where's Dad?'
She coughed into the phone. This was a woman who never had a sick day in her life.
'Mum, if you're gonna get shirty cos I can't ring for a while, that's no incentive—'
'Angela, blossom. A tree fell on him.'
'On Dad,' she said as if I hadn't heard. 'Are you there, Angela?'
'This is precisely why I don't ring,' I snapped. 'Your histrionics. Can't you once in your life make this a normal communication? Why do you do this?'
'Angela. Listen to me. A big redgum,' she said, just like her.
With a valentine cut in the bark
I almost added, but she didn't need my prompting. She was making this up as she went along. My whole body began to vibrate, wanting to smash her for having a life so small that she would want to punish me for not coddling her for a while. I would have screamed
Get a Life
into the phone if I thought she would understand.
'Put Angus on, Mum.'
She took a big breath. A better sign. 'Remember the Griffiths' place?' she asked.
'Speak up, Mum. Or enunciate.'
'He was helping out there.'
'Who?'
'Angus, of course.'
'Well?'
'A silo accident.'
'He okay?'
'He was
buried
, Angela.'
Buried by wheat as the silo filled. These things happened, but not to Angus.
'When?' I asked.
'The month before Dad.'
Had she gone menopausal insane? I'd read about this? Poor Dad.
'So how's Dad now?' I asked, my fingers drumming on the veneer of the night table. She had about three minutes left before my patience ran out, if she refused to put Dad on.
'He left you a note, Angela. It was evening before I ... I wouldn't have found Dad without Fly come to get me.'
'Fly?'
'His best dog, Angela.'
So hard to keep track. And the names of the hands were so often the same as the dogs.
'Who's there?' I asked.
'Me, Angela.'
'So where's Dad?'
'What's wrong with you, girl?'
My mother
never
cried.
Never!
'Mum, it's okay' I crooned. 'I know about this. Do you want me to send you some articles or find you a doctor? It happens to lots of women—'
'Just look,' she snarled. 'Just look in the bloody obituaries!'
My gut twisted like a cut snake. She was telling the truth. I wasn't ready for this.
'Angela?' she eventually asked. 'You alright?'
'Right as rain. Mum, sorry. I thought you were ... you know. Where's Stuart?'
My youngest brother could sing the bugs out of trees, and he was always the joker of the family. How could he let Mum get like this?
My mother blew her nose with the honk of a person who lives alone. 'In America, blossom.'
'Fuck! Fuck, sorry. What's he doing there?'
'His song
On the Land
won the Country Music Award. He's in Nashville, recording.'
The pride in him, the happiness for him, swelled her voice. He'd made it, really made it, out of there.
'We thought,' she said, calm now, 'you didn't want anything to do with us, that you'd made it, too.'
'No, Mum.'
The clear line didn't even give me the excuse of air interference.
'We love you,' she said.
'Me, too, Mum. Talk to you soon.'
I hung up, not able to take any more.
The dress pinched. And though Brett had remembered to bring his own luggage, he hadn't remembered a nightdress and slippers for me.
Or even the buttonhook I needed for these boots.
I tore off the dress and with my boots on, took a shower.
It didn't help. I couldn't stop thinking of Dad.
~
Wee willie winkie, run through the house.
The seven little pigs, counted on my toes, with the last little pig running
aahhl the way home
, Dad's fingers galloping up my foot up my leg, tickling my tummy, then skittering all the way up to my head, and then his booming laugh joining my giggle.
Him with his arms around me, and me on his lap, and the book on my lap.
Me saying with him, and pointing to the pictures where there weren't words, 'But the little red
hen
said, "No you won't, I'm going to eat it myself!"'
The little red hen, yellow yellow butter, the man who killed seven flies at one time, and wore a special belt for doing so.
'We wouldn't do that here, would we?' he'd ask, his eyes as big as a cow's as he waited for my reply.
'No, Dad,' I'd say, very solemnly, 'because I could smoosh a dozen in an instant with my little finger.'
And I'd hold up my hand, as big as a lamb's ear.
'That's me little flykiller!' Dad would say, and he'd grab my hand and plonk it on his mouth, and kiss it.
His spit always bothered me, but I wiped off the wetness without letting him know.
My
Anderson's Fairy Tales
was from him, and
Grimm's
, and
Aesop's Fables
, and a sanitized version of
Arabian Nights
, and
Alice in Wonderland
—all from him.
Then, almost the next day: the boys I'd played with, and wrestled with, and swum with when there was any water in the creek, now sniggered at me and grabbed. The mug-of-tea teasing began. And Dad's nickname for me changed to Little Bustle, and he stopped having me on his lap, and didn't know what I would like to read, he said, as he didn't know 'young ladies' taste'.
It was his idea that I should leave, for 'a proper education, and to get out in the world', though Mum didn't need convincing. Mum did the speaking when they told me that they'd decided. Between us, two flies fought over a few grains of spilled sugar on the formica table.
That day I left, Mum was distracted. She cut her finger slicing tomatoes for a bang-up breakfast. And on the drive out to town, she snapped at Dad. Before breakfast that morning, when he went out to feed the dogs, I saw him—crying behind the water tank.
~
A tropical shower in Fiji. That's what the water felt like, falling on my back as I sat in the shower stall. My fingers had pruned. The boots were so sodden that when I rubbed them, the leather moved with my finger, as loose as the skin on a rat drowned in a bucket when its fur has rotted away.
I turned off the shower and pulled off the boots.
A robe hung from a hook, waiting for me. It was embroidered with the hotel's name.
—30—
Moaning and animalian growls woke me. Brett was back, and he was having one of his bad times. The hotel's clock/radio said 8:34.
I spoke to his bedroom door. 'Knock, knock.'
The audible pain ceased, mid-groan. 'Good morning,' Brett replied, his tone muffled by the door.
It was stupid, me talking at a door, but I didn't presume to open it. 'Can I help?'
The handle turned and he stood in front of me. Though I expected him to look sick, he was—decrepit.
I pushed him back into the room, threw back the bedclothes, and started unbuttoning his shirt.
He grabbed my hand. 'What is this about?'
'You're sick, dummy!'
He turned away. 'Never mind about me.'
What a way to wake up! My whole life wasn't worth a dog fart. 'Who the fuck else am I gonna mind about!'
I ripped at his shirt, the shirt I'd only seen off once. I put my hands to his jeans, but he took both my hands in his. 'Does it matter to you what happens to me?'
A tear ran down his cheek. I didn't know it could.
That opened up my gates. I wrapped my arms around him and cried into his chest. He smelt not like what he had when he opened the door (asafoetida and vomit), but of good clean hot iron. His chest was moderately hairy, and one of the curls tickled my nose, so much that I sneezed.
A hanky swirled. Pink silk.
'Ta,' I smiled up at him, and he smiled down at me.
'You are my hope,' he said.
~
We ate a room service breakfast, he wanting the same as me for the first time. The full Aussie brekkie: Two fried eggs, bacon, sausage, grilled tomato, mushrooms, lots of toast. Coffee. He'd cut off his stiletto nail.
The toast, tomato and mushrooms intrigued him, and he didn't like the coffee at all. I had never seen him consume anything other than raw meat and blood, so him tucking into the cooked stuff was almost as good as the breakfast itself, which was heavenly.
'Why didn't you eat this stuff before?' I asked, thinking how lovely it is to talk with your mouth full to someone who doesn't care.
'Adjustment problems, Angela. The process is a painful one, physically and mentally.'
And the groaning? Could I ask? 'Your nights? And those ... sounds.'
'I must go back. You know that.'
'To check, or be checked up on?'
'Both, actually.'
'And those groans and—'
'I am sorry to have disturbed you. I have problems, Angela. Nothing I can release there. They come out here. But I will try to make sure they don't.'
'No!' That was a shock to me, how fast that came out. 'You can't. I know something about psychology.'
'I fear your university education and your Higher Light are lacking in—'
'Don't you "I fear" me, my man!'
He'd gotten under my skin, like a splinter. 'You're in transition. Big deal. Millions of trannies are, too. They cope. I bet you're worried about failing. About acceptance.'
His mouth was hanging open in a beautifully stupid way. It gave me the confidence I needed to make my final guess.
'I bet you even get outbreaks of pimples in your crotch!'
'Angela!'
I flung a piece of his toast in the air, and caught it in my mouth.
'Welcome, Brett, to the human condition!'
~
I'd torn his shirt. He made up a new one just like it. And then he rustled up something for me. Just something simple for going out walking, not transmogrifying. Just for buying papers at a newsagent, so we could read reviews of the show.
Brett was a lousy tailor, all glance of an eye but no talent for detail, nor a clue about construction. Everything was uncomfortably tight, or bagged in the wrong place—even, now that I noticed, his own shirt. I didn't mention any of this, because he was all little-boyish with wanting to know about the show.
'You did like it?'
'Yes, Brett.'
'Why?'
'It had wit.' That was honest. It did.
'Do you understand it?' I asked.
'What's there to understand?' He was genuinely puzzled.
It is odd, isn't it, that
fuck
and
shit
came so easily to my mouth, but the fact of an innocent flower part turned into an in-your-face double entendre, or an anti-societal pornographic work, depending on your view—I couldn't find the words, but he read my chest blush.
'Don't you find the centre of your beauty a beautiful inspiration for art? And isn't nature amazing? I never knew till your great-uncle introduced me.'
He was serious. The innocence of him.
'Oh!' He picked up a gift-wrapped package from his night table, and handed it to me.
'For you.'
I untied the ribbon and tore off the wrapping to reveal a thin, grotty thing, its pages spotted with brown—
Orchids of the Bunwup region
by P. Lily, F.R.S., etc.
'Everything came from that,' Brett said. 'Isn't it funny how orchids are called lilies.'
From the way he handled it, there was only one way to deal with this thing.
'Uncle Percy would want you to have it,' I said, holding it out.
'I will treasure it,' he breathed.
And to my amazement, he wrapped the book as best he could, tied on the ribbon, walked over and lifted back the creaking lid of that weird, winged trunk, and placed the package in.
The lid clonked shut without giving me a peek.