How Bright Are All Things Here Read online

Transcendental Ben would perhaps appreciate my state of mind. Here I am, delighting in buttons, when everything has, in fact – and again, darling, pardon my French – turned to merde. There is, however, one intractable clod of reality on which I stub my metaphorical toe. I keep coming back to them, don’t I? The children.

  PAULA TAKES THE TRAM

  Martine, the Director of Nursing, offered to call a taxi, but Paula said she was okay and walked from Rosevale to the tram stop. She no longer had the company car, and Dave needed the Subaru for work. But she was used to public transport now, and in fact she rather liked the freedom – no parking, no traffic jams. As she said to her friend Iris, sending herself up but meaning it all the same, ‘A slight reduction in global-warming guilt.’

  She told Dave, ‘I really don’t miss having my own car,’ and he’d muttered something about it being just as well, as there was no way they could afford another one, plus two lots of rego and insurance.

  Usually it worked out. Like today, when, as if by prior arrangement, her tram was stopped at the lights and waiting. She didn’t start work until ten-thirty, so she could have gone home for an hour, but just before Glenferrie Road she pulled the cord on a whim, got out and walked up to Bliss’s flat.

  Montmorency was a big art deco block made of liver-coloured brick with bands of speckled cream tiles outlining the windows and French doors. The foyer was wide and scrupulously clean. Bliss’s flat was on the ground floor.

  Paula had her own key. It was a sensible arrangement, initiated by Bliss herself, in case she locked herself out and the neighbours were away. Or if she slipped over in the bath, as elderly people do. She’d laughed at that. She didn’t see herself as old. Even after the fall she told them all with a touch of asperity that she was able to manage perfectly well on her own. Well, she wasn’t. She couldn’t. For two weeks before the move to Rosevale, Paula and Anne had taken it in turns to stay with her.

  Bliss had been relieved, really; Paula could tell. Even before she fell, she had begun, uncharacteristically, to fuss and dither. Then after the Rosevale decision was taken she just stopped, and a kind of serene inactivity washed over her. Sometimes she watched TV. Sometimes she just sat. There were a few visitors – the family upstairs, the young couple over the road, a neighbour from Balwyn who still kept in touch – but she didn’t expect constant attention. She dozed for much of the afternoon. The nights were harder; she seemed to have more pain then, and Paula became accustomed to the broken sleep.

  Then there was the intimate stuff, like taking her to the toilet. At least she’d been able to wipe herself. The shower was more of a challenge. Paula had never seen Bliss naked before – they hadn’t been that kind of family – but she remembered her stepmother at the beach in her Italian one-piece costume. Long legs, flat belly, smooth skin turning gold. Now, helping her undress and faced with that unsteady, sagging, shrunken little body, she’d tried to spare them both by looking away, but Bliss said, ‘It’s all right, darling. I don’t do dignity any more. You’ll get used to it.’

  What Paula couldn’t get used to was the legs. The right ventricle of the heart was no longer able to pump efficiently, explained the district nurses, and so the circulation was compromised. Compromised! Below the knee Bliss’s legs were twice their normal size, like whole hams, scaling in parts, weeping, mottled hot pink and scarlet. They smelled like flat beer or old cheese sandwiches. The nurses came daily to peel off layers of dressing (they used incontinence pads under gauze and elastic bandage to soak up the fluid) then they spread antibiotic cream on them and swaddled them up again.

  Why hadn’t she known this was going on under those long skirts?

  Bliss intercepted Paula’s horrified glance from the legs to the nurse. ‘Remember the miniskirt?’ she asked with an ironic smile.

  ‘Yes. Dad said, “You can’t go out in that, everyone will look at your legs,” and you said, “Darling, that’s the point.”’

  She filled the jug first, and then opened the curtains and the blinds and turned on the gas heater. When the water boiled she made herself a cup of green tea, stretched out on the sofa and shut her eyes. In January, the flat had still been scented with coffee, Bliss’s perfume and the expensive soap she’d always used. Now, apart from an impersonal hint of cleaning product, it smelled of nothing. Which was somehow relaxing, and for a few seconds, her mind was totally empty, like the clear sky that the yoga teacher told them to find – until it turned into a blue Mac screen and worries began to pop up like icons. Money. Bills. The business. Dave.

  Dave. Dave. Dave. Right now their marriage seemed like so much relentless and unrewarded labour. Like shovelling shit uphill, as Dave himself might say. She understood only too well how the knocks and failures of the past few years had got to him, but she felt like shaking him out of his gloomy lethargy, demanding, insisting. ‘Get your shit together, Dave! I am!’ But if she so much as mentioned the word ‘depression’ he hit the roof.

  Where was the Dave she’d fallen for? He’d been warm, funny, interesting – a bit rough around the edges, but after Tony, her first husband (a ‘smooth operator’, as Bliss always called him), that was part of his appeal. And now, even her sure knowledge that he liked her, really liked her, was beginning to erode. It was that liking – not the sex or even the love – that had always been the real gift in their relationship. Lately, she just seemed to irritate him.

  A bad patch, she kept on telling herself. It’s temporary. But she could understand why women of her age bailed out. Like her friend Laura, who after thirty years said she’d rather be on her own. She told Paula, ‘Dave’s the same as my ex. He’s a depressive and he’ll just take you down with him. Save yourself. Leave.’

  No. Paula knew she couldn’t. Did she love him? The question was almost irrelevant. She had argued the point repeatedly with her therapist.

  ‘We know why you feel responsible, Paula. We know what brought you to this state. We also know that Dave is a capable adult man. What we need to ask is why you continue to need to look after him.’

  Paula answered, ‘Because I don’t know what else to do.’

  Their conversation that morning was typical.

  Dave had slept in the spare room and was only just up as she prepared to leave the house.

  ‘You’re opening late?’ she’d asked.

  ‘Ten. Ten-thirty.’

  ‘Did you change the sign on the door?’

  No answer.

  ‘Dave?’

  ‘No, I didn’t change the bloody sign.’

  ‘If you don’t open when you say you will, the people who do come will go away and not try again.’

  ‘They don’t come. They fucking stay away in droves. There’s no point being there at nine, or ten, or fucking midnight.’

  ‘But if you just –’

  He didn’t let her finish. ‘Just leave it, will you?’

  ‘I wasn’t –’

  ‘Yeah, okay. Say hi to Bliss for me.’

  More icons on the screen. Bliss. Money. Her money. Her will.

  She had one, of course. Bliss had no intention of dying intestate. She’d told Paula that more than a year ago. ‘Mr Lombardi has my instructions. Mr Lombardi will handle everything. Nothing for you to worry about, darling.’

  Paula, however, had medical power of attorney. ‘You’ll tell them to turn the machine off, won’t you, darling Paula?’

  But there was no machine. Just Bliss in bed, drowsing and dreaming, sucking on that morphine like there was no tomorrow.

  The flat had two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a living room, plus a small dining room, kitchen and laundry. There was a paved area with a trellis where Bliss used to smoke. Dave had recently pointed out a similar flat in the weekend property guide. It had sold at auction for six hundred and fifty thousand.

  ‘People like those thirties buildings. They like ceiling roses, leadlight windows, all that stuff. The maintenance must cost a bomb, but then it’s always immaculate. Should be dead easy to sell.’
r />   ‘It’s not ours to sell,’ said Paula. ‘We got our share when Dad died. This is hers. She can leave it all to the Lost Dogs’ Home if she wants.’

  ‘Who else is she going to leave it to, if not the three of you?’

  Dave was right, of course, and the money from the flat would pay off their debts. There might be a few other properties as well; Bliss and Alec had believed in real estate. They wouldn’t be rich, but at least – at last – they’d be comfortable.

  Comfortable. It was a word Martine had used several times today.

  ‘What we’re aiming for is to keep her comfortable. That’s what we all want, isn’t it? We want Bliss to be comfortable.’

  Paula had looked at her curiously. ‘Of course.’

  ‘She’s getting very tired,’ said Martine.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Paula. ‘It’s since she had that respiratory infection.’

  ‘It can be like this with heart failure. Up and down, but each time a little further down. As I said, she’s getting very tired.’

  Now, lying on Bliss’s pillowy sofa, she understood that ‘comfortable’ and ‘tired’ were code words. Comfortable meant no more tests, no new drugs. No tubes and machines. And tired meant she had given up the struggle. It meant –

  Paula didn’t want to say the word, not even to herself.

  There was a scrabbling at the door, and then a knock. The door opened before Paula got to it, and a dirty Maltese terrier rushed in and leaped onto the sofa. Bliss’s neighbour, Anna-Mae, attempted to follow.

  ‘Pippa! Paula, I’m sorry . . . Pippa! Pippa!’

  ‘Wait there, I’ll get her,’ said Paula.

  The dog yapped as she gathered it into her arms, and she wondered how Bliss had put up with it.

  As if she had read Paula’s mind, Anna-Mae said, ‘Oh, don’t worry – Bliss never minded her on the lounge. She used to look after her for us.’

  ‘Me too! Me too!’ squeaked Anna-Mae’s daughter, clinging to the doorframe. ‘She looked after me too.’

  ‘Hello, Tiffany,’ Paula said as she handed the struggling terrier to Anna-Mae.

  ‘Dimity,’ corrected Anna-Mae. ‘Did you see Bliss this morning? How was she?’

  ‘Much the same. She’s wandering a bit, talking to herself.’

  Anna-Mae pursed her lips. ‘She talks to your father.’

  ‘I see. Yes, perhaps she does.’ She’d always felt that Anna-Mae didn’t like her.

  ‘She loves seeing Dim. We thought we might go and see her tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘Granny Bliss,’ said the child loudly. ‘I love Granny Bliss.’

  Paula made herself smile. ‘I’m sure she loves you too.’

  ‘She does, she does, SHE DOES!’

  ‘I’d like you to use your inside voice, please, Dim.’

  Could she ask them to go? It was easier just to leave.

  ‘We’ll lock up for you.’ Anna-Mae smiled. ‘We don’t mind. Anything to help Bliss. We often come down to air the place out, don’t we, Dim?’

  ‘For when Granny Bliss comes home,’ said Dimity belligerently, looking straight at Paula as if daring her to disagree.

  Paula grabbed her coat and forced herself to sound normal. ‘Thank you! See you again!’

  The tram slid up to the lights and it suddenly appeared to Paula as a huge metal slug. A dream image superimposed on the everyday waking world. Ridiculous. It was an oddity of hers and had been since she was small. She used to worry about it – especially when she was a teenager – so she never told anyone, not even when the weirdnesses came thick and fast and she’d thought she was going mad. It didn’t bother her any more. If anything, it was amusing. Slug-tram, she said to herself with an inward laugh. Tram-slug. And then the laugh died.

  She was five, in the garden, picking violets for Mummy because she was sick. Squatting, looking hard into the flowerbed, she saw a slug, and the closer she looked, the bigger it seemed, until it was enormous, like a monstrous overripe banana, as big as a bus, as big as a tram, sliding on the tiles under the leaves. There was something on its side – a hole in the mottled moist surface, a wound, where some flesh had been gouged out – and inside the wound was a cluster of tiny red insects. They were riding along inside the poor hurt slug.

  She’d started to cry and when Beatie came out to ask her what was wrong, she couldn’t stop crying and it came out all muddled – the slug and Mummy and the violets and the little red mites – and though Beatie, sensibly, led her back inside for milk and biscuits, Paula knew that she’d seen something terrible, never to be forgotten: a glimpse of the infinite, patient sadness at the heart of the world.

  DARLINGNESS

  Over the bedpan and washcloth, Karen’s thinking about sex.

  ‘Have you got a new boyfriend, Karen?’

  She giggles. ‘Yes, I have. Can you read minds now?’

  Can I read minds? I can tell you this: Sunny is dreaming about cheap flights home to the Philippines, and Stella wants a drink. Omniscience is so very tiring. It’s like having the radio on all day and all night, but with no control of the dials.

  I’m joking, of course. Did you nearly believe me? I nearly believe me sometimes. I can’t read minds, but I can read the signs; it’s the same thing, and I have become very, very good at it. It doesn’t take much in the way of intuition to see how sad Paula is. Tired and sad, the way only the really good are.

  Only last week I asked her, ‘What are you worrying about now?’

  ‘Nothing, Bliss.’ She paused. ‘Except you, I suppose.’

  ‘There’s nothing worrying can do for me, darling. Come on, tell me the truth. What is it?’

  It’s refugees, Pakistani child brides, poker machines, climate change, disposable nappies and, just this morning, an item in The Age on how the global financial crisis is impacting on the charity sector . . .

  ‘The world is so broken, Bliss.’

  Has it ever been whole? I wouldn’t know. I’ve always simply strolled past the world as if I was viewing the dioramas at the old museum. The headlines may have screamed carnage, ferocity, injustice – Suez, Rhodesia, Vietnam – but I skipped ahead to the fashion pages.

  ‘Yes.’ I took her hand in mine. ‘But not our own little part of it, here, now. We are lucky, you and I.’

  She shook her head, refusing to be comforted.

  ‘Yes, we are,’ I insisted.

  ‘Oh, Bliss, it’s Dave.’

  David. The He-Beast, I call him.

  ‘Business is bad, and he’s depressed.’

  ‘Yes, darling, but you needn’t be.’

  ‘I know that, but it’s been months . . .’

  The world, her husband and me. No wonder she’s dragged down, down, down.

  Anne, by contrast, is always up. When she’s not directing the proceedings, she prattles. House and garden, in-laws, friends. Committees, meetings. Matty, of course, and the children. I find it tedious, don’t you, when people won’t stop talking about their picture-perfect lives? ‘The Wonderful Story of Me’, I call it, and I wish I could tell her that the message has been received loud and clear: I’m happy, Bliss. I don’t need you. And yet her weekly visits are taken up with the effort of keeping her feelings at bay.

  At least she visits. Feckless, reckless Tom is up there in Sydney with Roly and their harbour view. Paula and Anne keep in touch with him, but he and I haven’t met face to face since the big party Anne held for her second son Jake, and that was nearly four years ago. Roly sends a tasteful card at Christmas.

  You know, sometimes I think they’ll all be glad when I’m dead.

  Yes, I’m exaggerating. Dramatising, as I did, as I do. It’s this: I am frightened that when I’m gone, the children will judge me harshly. You see, I chose, very deliberately, not to tell them about myself. I wanted to be bright and shiny for them, with no problems, no past. But now, knowing so little of my life, without context (which should be, as my old friend Rob always said, the key to our judgements on everything), will the childr
en make a parade of my mistakes and misjudgements and misdemeanours? Will they take what I said and, more to the point, what I didn’t say and hold it against me forever and ever and ever? Even Paula, who loves me? That’s what I’m afraid of.

  May I say, in my defence, that it was hard? I’ve told you, haven’t I, about the day Alec introduced me to his children? When I saw them in the flesh, real and solid at last, I was shaken. Their histories were already in place. What could I do? Nothing, certainly, about their mother.

  When she was good, she was very, very good,

  And when she was bad . . .

  When Nina was bad, she was utterly toxic.

  She couldn’t help it. I know that. You wouldn’t choose to be mad as a meat axe, to destroy yourself, damage your children and make your husband’s life a hell on earth. Neither would you volunteer, just for the fun of it, to be locked up, tied down, electrified and medicated into a state of shambling semi-idiocy. Nina was very, very ill.

  From what little Alec told me, I gathered she suffered from what they would now call post-natal depression.

  Beatie (bless her!) told me a bit more. Nina was a lovely girl, a fascinating girl, but she’d always been what Beatie called ‘a bit flighty’. Who can blame her, really? Perhaps, in the stultification of 1950s Balwyn, she did indeed wish for wings. Post-war, it was babies, babies, babies and, poor Nina, her pregnancies were lousy. She had the baby blues after Paula’s birth and again, a double dose, after Tom and Caroline came so close together. The marriage fell apart. Yet bizarrely, when they reconciled, she said she wanted another child.

  Alec must have known it was unwise. Nevertheless, the diaphragm stayed all powdered and dry in its round white pouch and nine months later Nina plunged into a psychosis so severe that after a fortnight baby Anne was taken from her.

  When they released her from hospital, she spent ten weeks with a cousin in Portsea before she returned home to her family. At first she seemed well – happy, even – but soon, again, the bad days began to outnumber the good.