The Best Australian Stories 2014 (14 page)

Too Solid Flesh

Angela Meyer

An ageing actress looks out at the view from her hotel room: a shopping centre, KFC, a discount garage; the Pacific Ocean somewhere behind it all. A city that feels too big or too small (compared to the country, compared to London). You can't get lost. Her phone makes the sound of a Bernard Herrmann score.

‘Hi honey.'

It's her daughter, Laura – the reason she's in town, to see the grandkid. And there was that other business she'd had to take care of in Sydney. She'd been reluctant to leave the little place she'd rented in Oban in the Scottish Highlands. Stretching peach and golden sunsets through to bedtime. Getting used to being alone with the voices of characters she'd played. Ophelia, in particular, whispering to her at bedtime. Memories of being twenty-four and floating in mire.

She makes arrangements with Laura, and then presses her hands down at the corners of her notebook, to flatten it. She hasn't kept a journal since Robert died.

I was recognised at the airport yesterday.

In the tiny terminal with its dolphins, whales and footballers on the walls a woman in her early thirties touched her on the arm.

‘I'm sorry, but aren't you …'

She waited for it.

‘Brenda from
Play School
?' At least she got the name right. Brenda is often called Benita, even Noni. She was on the show for five years, so she understands why people remember her from it. She was a part of their childhoods. But didn't they follow her career afterwards?

Woman's Day
did one story on her theatre career at the beginning.
New Idea
were going to, but the story was bumped for Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel wedding pictures or baby pictures or something. It is all beginning to blur.

Some dates Brenda will never forget, like when she met Sir Ian McKellen for the first time as an extra in the film of
Richard III,
or when she won the role of King Lear in the Fortune production, despite her gender. She remembers the first time she stepped away from the marital bed. She remembers baby Laura in her cot at 4 am, just settled, and the rain outside and ‘The Time Warp'–like static in her head.

Her daughter leans against the railing in the aquarium hallway, feeding her baby. Behind her, slimy fish with big black eyes make figure eights. Brenda never liked breastfeeding. Laura loves it, she tells her mother, and it is good for the baby. Brenda remembers being so sick of the smell of milk, the stains it made on her favourite green velvet dress (which she squeezed back into three weeks after the birth). Laura's baby, tiny Sam, is an extension of his mother. Brenda stares at the fish in the tank, a
Hognosed brochis,
with its little moustache like Robert's.

‘You must miss Dad,' Laura says.

Brenda nods. It's just dawning on her why Laura has chosen this place. She and her father came here all the time together. It was comforting to her – to both of them, perhaps – when Brenda was away.

‘I miss him.'

‘I know you do, darling.'

Brenda suggests coffee, though it's really whisky o'clock. She has to be careful, or she might soon only be chosen for ‘friendly matriarch' roles. She wants to stay lean – Swintonesque – play a few more head nymphs, wartime nurses or hard aunts. Maybe that won't be a problem with the drugs and diet restrictions to come. Her agent has been talking to the BBC about a role in a miniseries. Brenda's still a bit reluctant, a bit scarred by TV. And films she's done often went straight to it. But TV is the new black, it seems, and Palmer thinks it will be the best career move she can make. It's period-set, too, which is always fun – except playing winter in spring: corsets and itchy knits.

‘Where are you, Mum?'

‘I'm here.' Brenda smiles and places an achy, swollen hand on the baby's soft head.

Laura leads her to a cafe near the aquarium. Brenda is conscious of being anxious about running into people, people who
never left.
The cafe is a tearoom designed to look like it's been there for centuries, but it wasn't there when Brenda lived here. A young woman in a pink gingham apron with a shiny black bob takes their order. It's stiflingly warm and Brenda wonders what she and her daughter will talk about for the rest of the week, the rest of the day.

‘I saw that they're attempting to do a play of
Ulysses
.' Laura is engaging on her mother's terms.

‘Oh, my dear God, yes,' Brenda smiles.

‘We sometimes get to the little playhouse here, some of it's very corny though.'

‘Everyone starts somewhere.'

Doesn't she want the city? Brenda wonders. To see big productions, downstairs monologues, overseas bands, comedy, arthouse films, recitals …

‘I'm so drained lately,' Laura says, with lightness but a bit of a wobble in her voice.

‘It'll get better.'

‘You did so much when I was small.'

‘Your dad was at home at the time, writing.'
Writing a failed play.

There is a pause.

‘Did you … miss me when you were in Sydney? And Melbourne?' Laura asks. ‘I can't imagine being away from Sam.'

‘Of course I did. But if I'd stopped acting …'
Do we have to go over it again?
‘It was hard … being here. I always needed to get away.'

‘What's wrong with it?' Laura asks, hurt. There are those who understand the
pull
and those who don't, the way everything glitters until it doesn't and you have to move on. Robert didn't ever entirely understand it himself, but he did understand, and support, her need.

She never thought – when she brushed Laura's hair in front of the pine dresser, with that antique art-deco brush – that her daughter would turn out to be so different to her.

‘There's nothing wrong with it, it's just … chain shops and only one bookstore and bad coffee.' She times this unfortunately as the waitress is back with their mugs of cappuccino. Brenda smiles politely and sees the waitress recognise her and gasp a little before flushing and walking quickly away. Laura rolls her eyes.

‘You don't look hard enough, Mum,' her daughter says. ‘Lots of famous writers live here, up in the mountains.'

‘I know, I know.'

‘You can live anywhere, now, with the internet.'

‘You don't have to tell me that. But don't you ever want to walk the streets of
London
?' She is acting.

Too flushed, too angry. And contradicting herself, too. London is no romantic period film. What about the stressful underground? The chain pubs all serving the same meal, the horrible postwar buildings, the drizzle, the tiny rooms, the poverty?

‘No place like London …' Laura sings, ironically. ‘You can go to Paris for a weekend … If you can afford it.'

‘Scotland. You should come and stay with me. While Sam is still little, he'll sleep on the plane. I took you to New York when you were just a baby.'

‘I know.'

Brenda sips her coffee. She would hate to admit it but it is strong and smooth; perfect. Better than any she'd get in the UK.

That night she's in the hotel room – Laura had said she could stay with her, but she prefers this anonymous space, no dirt and no children, no encroaching images of the dead husband and the dead lovers: the first affair, with tall, dark-haired Anthony, who could have played the suspicious, awkward villain in a Hitchcock film. He was her wiry younger Romeo, on the stage in London.

Laura was two years old and Brenda took a break from
Play School
when she scored a UK agent.

She wanted to drop everything and leave Australia for London, but Robert said it was better if they just rented out the apartment and went for a six-month trial.

On their way into the city on the tube one morning Robert pulled out his A5 folder and turned to the notes he'd arranged for the Tate Modern. Brenda felt intense pressure in her head. She snatched the folder out of his hands. Laura began to cry in her arms and Robert raised his eyebrows, baffled.

She slammed the folder shut and it slipped onto the carriage floor. Robert stood up and retrieved it, giving her a scolding look. They rolled their eyes at each other.

‘I don't always want to know what I'm in for,' she said.

Recalling this one specific moment, Brenda becomes flushed with shame and regret, and lets out a little howl. It can't be worse – but somehow it seems worse – than the time he found Col's briefs drying, intimately, over the tap in the bath; or those many airport goodbyes where she'd suddenly become overly fond of him and would apologise for the way she'd treated him that day, that week, that month, that production. The next time would be better; she'd learn from her mistakes; she appreciated everything he did for her. How could she have gone on, and on, without him? Her reliable burden, the man she trusted, the man who knew her. The man who should have left her.

But Anthony … she thinks now, guiltily, sinking into the giant, cream-coloured bath. The way his young, dark lips pushed out words like ‘beauty', ‘jewel' and ‘consume'. The way, when he finished a scene in rehearsal, he would dip his head to look at the director and touch one finger to his lips. He'd glance at her sideways, then, without moving his head. The second or third time they ran over Act V, Scene III, her chest and face rushed with colour and heat and she forgot the lines because the dead Romeo, beneath her, was hot and hard. But he was nervous and sweet, so eager. She denied him at first, but then, her flesh already felt
world-wearied
– as is the fate of an actor – and she indulged.

*

Brenda hangs out cloth nappies, Laura's Target clothes and Jason's jocks on an old-fashioned Hills Hoist, remembering what it was like to have all this brown, crackling space around you. For years her clothes have lived on clothes horses – those little white wire things – in lounge rooms or on balconies. In Scotland it's simply too cold to hang anything outside; she has a dryer on top of the washer in the kitchen.

She pushes the clothesline around and a magpie pops up on the fence, tilts its head.

‘Hello,' she says. She has always spoken to animals without meaning to.
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.

She is just beginning to think that the quiet is nice, the caress of an afternoon breeze and bursts of bird song, when a drill starts up in the next yard. She remembers now: always the renovations going on. Extensions, pools, knocking down walls. If people didn't move away, they moved everything around. The noise used to drive her mad. It was specifically suburban or regional. In the inner city, there was so much noise that it became a general hum. In Oban, it was so quiet you caught yourself breathing. Here, noise always announced itself.

She hangs the last nappy just as the drill pauses to be followed by the sound of a loud belch and then spit hitting concrete. She hurries inside before the man puts on the radio – that most dreaded of noises. The chattering ads and muffled, droning songs.

By the time she's inside Laura's house with its smell of garlic and tomatoes she feels frazzled. She sits next to Jason on the couch, who holds the gurgling child. Her daughter is cooking, and Brenda feels a quick beat of anger at this too.

‘How was work?' she asks Jason.

‘Oh, it was work,' he smiles at her quickly before looking back at the TV. The news is on: a low, alarmist buzz.

He knows all about me, she thinks: the absent mother, making up for it with a week of hanging a few nappies; the diseased; the bereaved-but-not-enough.

‘Beer?' he asks.

She looks at the one in his hand. Boag's Premium. Helmut Newton directed ads for Boag's in Tasmania in the nineties. ‘Yes, I think I will,' she smiles. It would calm this discomfort.

What she needs is her diazepam. She left it at the hotel.

She was in a polaroid of Helmut Newton's, just one. It was shot from the ground up and she wore a pink lace bikini brief, tits out.
New Idea
picked up on it back home, years later, and it caused an overrated, and quickly forgotten, scandal. The article didn't mention the name of one play she'd worked on since being in London. Was it around the time all that stuff came out about Jack Thompson living with the two sisters? No, that must have been earlier.

Brenda considers telling Jason about it, about Newton, asking if he knows his work, but the baby starts to cry.

Jason bops Sam up and down to the fridge and back and hands her a beer.

‘Do you like the new Holden?' Jason asks. But before she can answer he seems to reconsider and asks her if she can recommend some good films. He is trying.

When they sit down for dinner Jason goes to pour Brenda a glass of red but Laura frowns.

‘Should you have any more, Mum?'

‘It'll be fine.'

Jason pours just half a glass. They all take a few mouthfuls of spaghetti in silence.

‘Mum, we have to talk to you.'

Oh God, here we go.
Jason looks at his wife and nods in support. Brenda wonders why people even bother getting married nowadays. Even in her day the ritual was losing its gloss.

‘They've just built this new dialysis centre here. There's a lot of space, a view, a library.'

Brenda puts up her hand to block her daughter's speech.

‘Lau, I've already told you. I'm training to do it myself. I can do it at my place in Oban, and when I'm in London there's a private dialysis unit.'

‘What if something goes wrong, you need someone there?'

‘I'll hire a nurse.'

Laura and Jason look at one another. ‘Mum, you can't afford a private nurse. Be realistic.'

‘I'll be working.'

‘You'll be dialysing
three days a week.'

Brenda nibbles at her garlic bread. Laura starts to shake. When she gets angry she doesn't raise her voice, she just speaks quickly and low.