Patrick White: The Hanging Garden

On and on the voice till we reach Thrussell Street where you plunge down towards ‘Mornington’. You remain rooted to this spot in the asphalt as everything else moves around you, Trish’s voice, the over-fertilised Wahroonga shrubs, Gil taking the Vaucluse corners at a giddy speed.

If you are stunned by the brassy light of this golden afternoon, Trish is hypnotised by her own voice and the rushing of the midnight air ‘… pretty well delicious, but afraid he might crash Maxie’s car … persuaded him to pull up beside the Gap. What if we’d driven over. There could never have been a more perfect suicide — thoughtless and perfect — better than waiting to find out somebody’s bad and boring points. Instead we sat inside the car — and that was perfect too — a gale blowing outside — when Gil…’

You must have begun to shiver.

‘What’s wrong, Ireen? Are you sick or something?’

Could be. The sweat is running down your skin.

‘Nothing. Could have the flu coming on. Better go home. Tell your mother I…’

‘But come down to us. I’ll ring Dr Keep.’

‘No. I’m going home.’

‘We’ll run you there.’

‘Walk a bit. Sweat it out.’

Trish obviously thinks you’re quite crazy, or could she know? Not possible Gil didn’t mention Eirene Sklavos, this black Greek and oddball character. As you fade away alongside this long ribbon of undulating bitumen, out of reach of Trish’s eyes, if not her laughter, you will not trust anybody again.

At Turramurra where this little pocket of leftover bush fringes the road a middle-aged man unbuttons himself with his left hand. He has an iron hook where the right should be.

You hurry past. In the dwindling glare a car pulls up. An elderly clergyman offers you a lift. Says he noticed the ‘Ambleside’ uniform. So much respect for your Miss Hammersley, a really exceptional lady. You accept his lift, from despair as much as anything. In spite of the respect Miss Hammersley has roused in him, why should an elderly clergyman be any more reliable than a middle-aged bloke with a hook for a hand unbuttoning himself and beckoning from a pocket of bush? Anything can happen. But nothing does. He puts you down at Lockharts’ gate.

‘Your mother is a lucky woman.’

Oh God, can’t recite family history. Thank the old boy for his kindness. You are mincing your words, simpering through these silly little baby teeth.

Nobody at home. Only the silence inside it keeps this house from falling apart, it is so fragile. The familiar objects, even in your own more or less private room, so unnecessary. Keep your hands off that diary. Better to explode in a shower of pus than to wallow in what I expect the secure, the ‘adults’, would see as a stream of self pity.

* * *

An extra spurt of week-end energy gardening for neighbours, running old ladies’ messages, shopping for the sick, has got Bruce his motorbike. Alison and Harold helped towards the end.

The tarnished monster stands propped on the broken concrete to the right of Alison’s garage.

‘It’s a second-hand BSA. Can’t be choosy in wartime, Reenie.’

Hardly remember what wasn’t wartime, but we all act and talk as though we did. A cloud of happiness envelops what we think of as before the war.

Bruce has been working on his bike. Chrome is beginning to gleam again through the veils of baked oil and patches of rust. The rigid grid above the rear wheel is what he refers to as a pillion.

‘When I’ve had a few practices around the place, I’ll take you for a ride, Reen.’

Ought to feel grateful for Bruce’s promise. He is inviting you to a celebration of power and fame. Sitting at the rear of Bruce Lockhart’s bike you will act as the equivalent of the flowing figure on the bonnet of Maxwell Fermor-Jones’s Rolls. What if Trish, swirled by Gil Horsfall in the Rolls, ever caught sight of you bumping along dislocated on Bruce Lockhart’s pillion. But Vaucluse and Cremorne are worlds apart.

* * *

The invite is issued on one of those evenings of early winter when a razor is running its edge over the skins exposed to it, and every bay round this almost landlocked harbour is roughed into leaden waves. Regardless of a difference in hemisphere and climate, you see the same razor skinning the prisoners of war across the straits up north, when not lending a hand in cutting throats. In Greece Greeks will be dying of this wind, gunfire, and the starvation which comes from a diet of weeds.

Greeks are fated to die, when here a pseudo-Greek is only numb from the south-easter and the very remote prospect of death. Unless a crash is thrown in your way, as you cling to Cousin Bruce’s ribs from the pillion of the second-hand BSA. We are on the ride to celebrate speed and status. B. has opened his mouth and is screaming into the face of the wind. You can feel his lungs expanded inside the cage of ribs. You can visualise Bruce’s skeleton, from the taut ribs, and the mouth and the eye sockets, which you cannot see but know.

‘Okay, Reenie?’ He calls back over his shoulder.

‘Okay! Okay!’ We are all okay since the Yanks came.

I can feel my forehead drained white below the roots of lifted hair. Eyes staring like Bruce’s in their sockets. Teeth not grinning, but clenched. Because this pseudo Australian is the crypto-Greek expecting the death which is aiming at her. But Brucie doesn’t envisage death for a moment. Australians are only born to live. To end in a cemetery or crematorium doesn’t bear thinking about. So you don’t think. When here is this morbid Greek thinking about the death which will release her. Whamm! You are floating back rejoining the bloodstains on the Pindus snow the brains mashed into the paving outside the National Gardens the choirs of worm-eaten saints all that you have ever known and felt and cried about and prayed for, on your knees, and in cold beds.

Let Gil Horsfall stay alive in Australia, it is what he deserves.

You cling even closer to Brucie’s ribs when there is no need, he is slowing down, coasting in the approach to some sort of destination.

We have arrived at this suburban mixed business with jerry-built milk bar added on. Bikes similar to Brucie’s are propped in the dust and devil’s pitchforks outside. The browned out light in the interior has turned the milk bar or soda fountain into a devil’s cave. Brucie’s mates are gathered at the bar gulping the stuff out of the metal floats, spooning up the ice cream, those of them who have scrounged or snitched cigs dragging on their loot, jerking out unintelligible information in their new, men’s voices. You would like to hear and understand, but you aren’t invited to come inside. No girl has been added to the circle of relaxed males stretching their thighs and their adam’s apples. Only the proprietor’s wife, more a priestess than a woman, sets the drinks whizzing, or drizzles from on high green or crimson synthetic flavours.

You walk about the other side of the road. It is no longer cold, but you warm your hands one in the other. They have absorbed the journey’s dust and some of the grease from the BSA. Down through the lantana scrub, the jungle of gums, pittosporum and looped vines, the harbour sets up a mauve glitter.

What are you here for? Will nobody tell you what to do? You are almost mewing like one of the unwanted cats their owners dump in the suburban bush, when Bruce comes out from his magic cave, carrying one of the battered floats.

He crosses the road. ‘Strawberry,’ he says, and turns back.

Strawberry must be for girls, whether they like it or not. Sipping the sickly stuff is at least an occupation, even though you feel you may fetch it up. Pour the contents into the dust, but what to do with the empty float in the next half hour, or eternity.