MARGO LANAGAN
I should have realised straight off. Of all people, I, Tess Maxwell, should’ve seen him for what he was. I mean, I knew something was different, something big. My eyes kept going back to him. But I was caught up in people leaving the Art Cottage, and he was in the crowd going to the basketball courts, and we got swept away from each other, Keenoy Ribson and me.
I tried to work it out at the bus stop, the way you try and get a whole dream back using the one little shred you remember. But it turned into a flutter among flutters in my mind, and the bus came, and I went home.
I went home and I went to work - same place. I work in one square of home; ‘the parlour’, Mum calls it, a polite name for such a messy, personal kind of business premises.
My first client was a woman who was after her husband. He was right there with her, of course; the thick, dark string of his tether went from his worn slipper-toe to her right shoulder. He hung over her, griping.
‘He’s saying “Don’t burn the snags, Merrill,”‘ I told her.
She laughed. ‘Oh yes, of course. Yes, that’s him. Same old whingeing bludger. God, I miss him!’ And she cried. They always cry when you tell them that kind of detail.
And then there was a man. He had a very handsome boyfriend - well, the handsome version alternated with a blotched, dying one who slid down to lie between us on the Turkish rug. ‘He’s very grateful for everything you did for him,’ I said. ‘It made it easier, he says. You did everything right. Robert, his name is.’ And the guy nodded, and he dissolved in tears, too. ‘You’re doing good work,’ I went on. ‘You think it’s pointless without Robert, but every day of your life you make a big difference to a lot of people. He’s not saying that; it’s just ... clear, around you. There’s all this value; you’re very solid. What is your work?’
‘I’m a nurse,’ he said, through the complimentary tissues.
‘Oh, there you go, then.’
After him, I was tired, because it is tiring. But two clients means a hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars a week is a good amount - it means we can live, as well as keep Dad at Bernard House. If I were really determined I could do more, but ... but I guess I’m not. We’re managing, aren’t we? We’re managing fine on two a night.
Mum was in the kitchen with a fruit-shake and a cheese muffin for me, and Dad was there, too, on home-care. I sat and ate and thought about bed.
‘Take Dad for a walk?’ said Mum.
I nodded. It was too early for bed; a walk would clear my head ready for homework.
It was cold outside, grey and darkening. I wheeled Dad up to the park, because the paths there have got nice, rounded corners, and I needed to be somewhere quiet, among trees and rotundas and curly metal seats. I started to wake up there; I started to come back to myself. You can’t hurry that; all you can do is wait.
* * * *
I used to exhaust myself over Dad. It didn’t do any good. I can feel his brain almost as if it’s in my own skull, and half of it’s just drained, of juice, of life. And nothing on the living side’s very strong, either. Everything shimmers at the same level, with no memory bigger or better than the others, and there are no links between the memories, or feelings tied to them; everything’s just random poppings-up, a sort of play of life like a small, settled fire that won’t actually burn anything up.
Once, right back at the beginning, Mum asked what I could see. ‘They say the life force can flow back in, bit by bit,’ she said. And she looked up from Dad, wanting hope - from me, probably the only person in her world who couldn’t give her any.
I was so embarrassed for her I couldn’t speak. Life force - where’d she get that idea? And who were ‘they’ supposed to be?
‘But that’d be for mild strokes, I suppose,’ she finished, turning away.
I recovered a bit. ‘He’s there, but he’s all mulched up. He doesn’t hang together.’
‘Is there any point,’ she asked, ‘in it being us, who look after him? Does it make any difference? Does he recognise us?’
‘Not very often. And not much happens when he does.’
Which was why we eventually put him in Bernard House, to get some life back for ourselves, some time not tending that fire. We do still tend it, but only on a few weeknights. Mum wheels Dad home and parks him in the kitchen-family room he designed and built, and feeds him while I work - she says she doesn’t want me feeding him, doesn’t want me to have memories of that. And she talks to him. She’s hoping to get something back, an eye-flicker, a noise that sounds like an answer. Stubbornly she goes on, serenely talking, about the news, about people they both used to know (but now only she knows them) goes on and on breaking her heart over him - or maybe not breaking it so much as wearing it away, grinding it gradually down to nothing.
I won’t do that to myself. I know it upsets Mum that I don’t talk to Dad, but what’s the point if he doesn’t exist enough to hear me? Mum still thinks he does - time and time again I see her making up that alternative life, seeing his eyes brighten, watching him throw off his rug and stand up: I’ll just get that doorknob fixed before dinner, he says, or What are we all sitting around here for, with long faces? But even when his voice is so clear, coming through her, I can’t believe; I know Dad’s kind of damage never mends. He won’t come back.
* * * *
Next morning I woke up breathing the deep calm of a Dad-free house. Whatsaname Ribson, was my first thought. Keenoy. The air around him is absolutely clear and silent. Yeah, that was it. No strings attached him to any yearnings or losses. He was clean; he was himself; he was completely self-contained. Like me. Excitement stirred tentatively under my ribs. Could there be someone like that? Or did he have some attachment I just wasn’t seeing yet?
I dressed and took coffee in to Mum, stroked her head to wake her up and gave her one of those big morning hugs - better than coffee, she says - which are like being drunk out of, but like drinking too. And I smiled back at her, which I can do, some mornings.
‘Busy day ahead?’ she said. Beside her the bedclothes were flat and uncluttered, where for a long time after Dad’s stroke there’d been a mound, a Dad-shaped mound that Mum had put there.
‘Busy day every day. Want toast?’
‘There are some muffins left - I’ll have one of those. Please, I mean.’
‘Your wish is my command.’
‘Thanks, love.’
* * * *
Going up the hill to school, I saw a tall boy’s curly blonde hair ahead. Ah, yes. Him.
He was talking to Slade and those guys. He said something that made them laugh. They were easier to see for a moment - those guys are usually so stuck about with hang-ups it’s quite painful to look at them. But when the veils of fear and bad home life and wanting-a-red-car clustered back around them, Keenoy Ribson was still clear and unobscured. My eyes searched around him automatically, wondering where he hid all his stuff - some people can do that - searching and searching and finding nothing. Nothing at all. It was kind of stunning, like a fine day after a long rainy spell. I watched him closely - his relaxed walk, his personal version of the school uniform, the beaten-up school bag with his old school’s crest on it, with the motto KNOW THYSELF - and I waited for interference, but he stayed as crisp and clean-edged as a photograph.
Several times that day I saw him, always with totally different groups of people. He didn’t seem to care who he was seen with, Slade’s roughnecks or Mandy’s knitting circle or that nerd Purtwee. He always looked perfectly comfortable; the group was always cheerful and busy with conversation.
‘Did you see that new guy?’ I heard Josh Bateman say. ‘What a suck - see him talking to Bannister? Getting in with the school captain ...?’
But at lunchtime there they were, Keenoy and Josh and all the soccer-heads together, out on the oval, kicking a ball around.
Nobody had a problem with him, unless you call the girls’ instant wild crushes problems. ‘Such a babe,’ Blossom O’Malley said to me - I happened to be standing near her when Keenoy walked past.
‘You think?’ I said.
‘What, are you crazy?’ She goggled at me.
‘You think he’s good-looking?’
She gazed after him. ‘Well, it’s not so much the looks, though they’re okay. It’s more, he’s so happy.’
I liked Blossom for a second, then, with that note of longing in her voice. Just for that brief time, she had dignity, before all her usual cutesy, kittenish attachments bobbed in around her again.
* * * *
My work makes it hard for me to like people. They seem so despicable sometimes, going around inside out, all their weaknesses showing in their walk, in their clothes, in their I’m-in-control-of-it-all faces, let alone the visible holes in them, the baggage-people they drag around with them. Mum says these things are only obvious to me, though. I must remember, not everyone can see what’s so shatteringly clear to me. I envy other people that, and I despise them. I can’t see how they can live, so cluttered up with other people’s lives and influences; I’d hate to live in someone else’s shadow. Worse, I’d hate to go around with my insides all blurted out like that, moaning my wants to the whole world, mourning what I’d lost.
* * * *
And Keenoy Ribson went on being happy. (I should’ve realised then, at least.) He didn’t take on any of our hang-ups, didn’t join any of the cliques. He seemed to enjoy himself, to enjoy being at this school, with us. He volunteered for the daggy old musical; he played sports - not well, but with lots of energy; he worked hard enough but didn’t do brilliantly. And he talked. He chatted, he greeted everyone, he joked, he had deep-and-meaningfuls when deep-and-meaningfuls were required. He was always in there with people, close up, interacting.
I kept waiting for some insufficiency, some little longing, to show itself near him, but it never did. I’d have to talk to him, maybe, get to know him better, or just get him away from the crowd and see him against a plain background, before I’d know for sure.
I did follow him home one day - well, not all the way home. Somehow I lost him near the freeway overpass, just got distracted for the second it took him to disappear up some lane or into some house.
I didn’t try again. I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to be disappointed. (Funny how, through the whole thing, I always expected disappointment, even though I went after hope. ‘Went after’ - hmph. I sat like a lump, doing nothing, letting hope grow all by itself, like ivy, latching onto me with its millions of little suckers.)
* * * *
‘How does it come to you, the Knowledge?’ one of my clients once asked me, a client who pulled a whole bunch of mooing, chattering gurus into the parlour with her, all their tethers snarled together.
It always annoys me, that soft, awed tone of voice. I sighed. ‘It’s very simple. You know how some people have been hurt so badly that they shuffle when they walk, or they hunch over and hug the inside edge of the pavement? You know how angry people wear this angry face around all the time, with the pulled-down mouth and the eyes kind of flashing to warn you?’
‘Yes, you’re right!’ She sounded surprised, as if this was new to her. ‘It’s as if their experiences are imprinted in their bodies somehow!’
‘Well, exactly. And all you have to do is look a little bit closer, and all the details of that imprint will show you the shape of the thing that’s giving them pain, or anger, or sadness. Usually it’s another person, but it can be some thing they want badly, like a big house or a pile of gold - that can push you out of shape, too.’
But I’d lost her - she’d gone all reverent again. She wanted me to be another guru, the guru of gurus, to give her the final answer that would pull all the others together into one simple rule for living. ‘It’s a wonderful gift.’ She thought she was agreeing, but she was actually preventing herself from seeing. People do this all the time.
No, it’s not a gift. Anyone can do it - but nobody does. Nobody bothers to read, from the way a person’s spine bends or the way their voice turns all feathery when they’re stressed, the shape of the other person who stands behind, or over, or inside, or squashed underneath the client. Absent ones, Mum calls them, but in fact they’re very present. They’ve carved themselves into each client - sometimes gently and in a good way, sometimes with a single thump or shout spoiling a life, cramping every movement from that moment on. Just open your eyes and you’ll see them.
* * * *
It was a Wednesday evening, getting into autumn. I was pushing Dad home from the park. Everything looked coldly blue, except for the golden interior of Bar Piccolo, like a little lantern between the closed minimart and the vacant shop that had once been the Bibliophile bookshop. Kids from school sat laughing around a table in there, among them Keenoy Ribson.
I guess I kind of loomed up to the window out of the dark, and Dad’s wheelchair’s a bit of an eye-catcher, and ... anyway, Keenoy looked up, and lifted a hand as if we were old friends.
I put a smile on my face that died as soon as I was past the window. Then I heard footsteps, and there was Keenoy beside me. ‘Tess! I need a word with you.’
‘Oh?’ I tried to casually hide the wheelchair behind me.
‘Sorry. You in a hurry?’ He indicated Dad with his eyes.
‘Not really. Um, this is my dad.’
‘Hallo, Mr Maxwell.’
Dad’s head wandered around to look at him.
‘He’s had a stroke,’ I said. ‘He can’t speak.’ In fact, he isn’t really here at all. Please act as if he isn’t here.
‘Ah.’ Keenoy nodded to him anyway. ‘I was just going to ask you, Tess. We’re short one Beggar Maid in the musical. D’you think you could fill in the gap?’
Surprise made me laugh. ‘Hey, I’m not really performing material.’
‘All you have to do is sit in a bunch of Maids and sing a chorus, sway a bit. Nothing too hard.’
‘Sounds very not me.’
He made a pleading face that I had to laugh at. ‘Come to rehearsal tomorrow,’ he begged. ‘Take a look.’
‘Okay, I’ll take a look.’
‘Good on you!’
‘I’m not promising anything.’
‘Look, you don’t have to.’ He backed towards the cafe. ‘See you then.’
He was gone. And I walked home smiling. Idiot.
* * * *
I’ve made them sound really powerful, those ‘absent’ ones. But in the end it’s the clients who decide how helped, how timid, how lost they’ll be. That’s why I was so sour on making this thing of mine into a business. Before Dad died - sorry, had his stroke - I never would have dreamed of doing it. All I was doing, I felt, was taking money for telling people what they’d already spent years telling themselves - that Grandma was the only one who ever properly loved them, that she must be watching them from above, continuing to wish them well. Or that their dead child still lived somewhere - which it did, inside them - beaming innocence out into the world.
You want certain voices to speak to you - lovingly or bullyingly or whatever. You want it so badly that you throw them out from yourself, and when I hear them and repeat back to you what they say, it seems like proof; you forget it’s your own ventriloquism, your own loss, your own hankering written into the space around you for just about anyone to read. I feel like a thief, charging you my fee, but if you need to hear, but won’t listen for yourself, and if we need the money so badly, I’ll do it. I won’t like doing it, but I’ll do it.
* * * *
I went home smiling and I told myself not to get silly. I should have been tired, but I wasn’t. Mum had lit a fire in the parlour fireplace, and I sat with her there for a while. In the firelight Dad just looked like somebody’s dreamy old grandpa, mesmerised by the flames, and Mum and I had a sleepy, bitsy conversation. I almost told her about the musical, but then I thought, No, she’d be too delighted. She’d pin more on it than I want pinned ... for now. Instead I let myself feel the occasional roll of excitement inside me, let Keenoy’s face rise in my memory and shine across to me some of its happy light and warmth.
I went to the rehearsal next day. I volunteered straight up, and got parked among the Beggar Maids.
‘Oh hi, Tess,’ said Zenardia. ‘I didn’t know you were musical.’
‘Oh, I’m not. I’m only doing this as a favour to Keenoy.’ It was the first and last time I ever said his name, and it made a funny feeling in my mouth, a kind of embarrassing tang, as if I’d used a special, intimate name I had for him, loosed it in public.
But then the rehearsal started. It probably seems like nothing to a normal person, but I enjoyed myself. It was a silly romantic story, interrupted by the soppiest songs, but I got caught up in it anyway. Everyone else was taking it so seriously! When Lexie Nelson, the main girl, was singing her duet with Keenoy, they were both so excellent, even standing there in their school uniforms, that I saw Lexie clearly for the first time. Her mother climbed down off her back and her pushy brothers faded away to nothing, and for several minutes she didn’t care that Nick Stefanopoulos didn’t love her the way she loved him. I sat there with all the other Maids - who’d stopped chatting to listen, just as impressed as I was - and I let myself think, Maybe life could be like this.
* * * *
Right back when I first discovered that other people didn’t see what I saw, all I wanted to do was get out, climb down from this kind of princess’s tower my knowledge puts me in, mingle, be with other people, act like them - unaware, laughing at my own mistakes. I can see that people’s ignorance is blissful - I’d like to turn around and say to some clients, Hey look, you’d be happier not knowing. Really, don’t make me tell you.
Because knowing is hard. For my clients, knowing just their own stuff is hard to cope with; for me, knowing everyone’s ... Well, I used not to cope; a school assembly used to make me pass out. Nowadays I can block out quite a bit of the noise and bother around people, but it still takes some strength to deal with, say, a half-full train carriage, where there’s room for each person’s burdens and yearnings to swell out and speak up and compete for attention. Whenever a new passenger climbs in, everyone’s yearnings check out the new ones and then go back to their own blabbing and yowling. It gets exhausting. I only really have any peace when I’m on my own, shut away from everyone. The rest is ... well, it’ll always be hard work, won’t it. I just have to face that.
* * * *
After the rehearsal, Keenoy walked me home. He was exactly the right height, just a bit taller than me. It makes me miserable now to think how perfect he was.
I told him everything. Well, he’d seen Dad, so he knew about all that, and he wanted to know more, and he asked about the stroke, and listened, and was sympathetic but not ghoulish about it. ‘That’s hard on you and your mum.’ His tone of voice, of course, was righter than most people’s, with no awkwardness in it. He must have some kind of similar experience behind him, I thought, but where? If it hasn’t left a mark on him, what’s he done to get over it? What power does he have? What makes him so strong?
I looked up at him occasionally as we walked and talked. His skin was totally spot-free, unmarked by freckles or acne or any other kind of imperfection. Blossom was right; it was a happy face. Happiness was built into it, the mouth always ready to smile if not actually smiling, the eyes kind of smallish but active, taking in everything and having a quick thought to match each taken-in thing. I liked him. For the first time in my life I could see how it was possible to like a boy, even for someone like me.
I didn’t feel awkward at all, saying ‘Would you like a hot drink or something?’ when we reached my gate.
‘Sure,’ he said.
I held open the gate after me. ‘Where do you live, anyway?’
‘Just a little way along from here, really. Over Oaky Park Way.’
‘Really? Why don’t you go to Oaky Park High, then, instead of trawling all the way across here?’
‘Oh, well, you know ...’
I opened the door. Something went crash! in the kitchen. ‘So clumsy!’ came Mum’s voice, her really-upset voice. ‘You’ve turned into a baby - no, worse than a baby! You’ll never grow up! You’ll never be more than this clumsy wreck -’
I froze on the doorstep. Another crash. Sobbing.
Keenoy took my shoulders, moved me to one side and went in towards the kitchen. I started after him; I didn’t want him to see, didn’t want Mum to know he’d heard her losing it.
Dad was there, with food spilled down his shirtfront. Mum was down next to him, trying to scoop the mush on the floor back up into the bowl with a shaking spoon. She looked up and saw Keenoy - and recognised him! (Well, she would, wouldn’t she?)
‘I just wanted him to try,’ she said desperately. ‘Maybe he could feed himself! Maybe something’s knitted back together in his head by now! Maybe he’s healing in there and none of us can see it yet!’ She said it all in a garbled, tear-hiccupped rush, while Keenoy took the bowl and spoon from her, put them in the sink, then turned back to put his arms around her - whoa! She was sobbing against him; she looked very small wrapped up in there, and he felt suddenly very big in the room. It seemed a big thing for a person to do, to comfort someone just because she needed it.
I stood by the door feeling sick. If it had been me, I would have concentrated on the mess: wiped up the mush, told Mum to sit down, made her a cup of tea, cleaned up Dad’s shirt, moved around and around her and not touched her once, biting back my irritation. ‘I could have told you Dad would drop it! Don’t you listen when I tell you? He’s not there!’ I never would have hugged her. I would have been too angry.
I went away, full of shame. I put my bag in my room, went into the parlour. Twenty minutes and my first client would be here. I’d have to be calmed down by then.
Five minutes later Keenoy Ribson came in. He stood in the doorway with a mug of hot chocolate in each hand, smiling.
‘She okay?’ I said gracelessly.
‘She’s fine. A “momentary lapse”, she said. We all have ‘em.’ He handed me a drink and sat down in the client chair.
‘She’ll never stop missing him. It’s almost all she ever does.’
‘But not you?’
I tried to take a sip of my drink, but it gave my lip a warning scald. I blew on it instead. ‘Sure, I miss my dad. But that out there in the wheelchair, that’s not him, and it never will be him. There’s too much damage. I’m not going to fool myself.’
‘No, you’re too clear-eyed for that.’ There was no sarcasm in his voice. He looked so singular and baggage-free in that chair, the chair I usually saw through such a fog of ghosts and inhibitions. For once, someone was looking at me to give me something, not to suck a reading out of me, not to be saved. He was looking, he was caring, he was interested. Nobody looks at me like that - and I’m not talking about romance here; this is so much more important than romance. I’m so lonely in my life! I remember thinking. I’ve got no one! What a sad novelty it was to confide in someone, to tell about just me. Usually people’s sympathy locks straight onto Mum, and we all help and console her; I’m so competent and practical, it must seem like I don’t need consoling.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ I said - and it was a wonderful feeling, to be able to say anything I liked and know I wouldn’t be laughed at, or revered - ‘Have you got a talent like mine?’
‘Which talent’s that? Like, of all your talents?’ He raised his mug to me and took a sip. ‘I mean, I can sing, you heard me - ‘
‘The talent of seeing ... extra things about people.’
‘Extra things? What, like their potential as Beggar Maids?’
‘Like their hang-ups.’
‘Their hang-ups?’ And then he drank down his hot chocolate. In two gulps - I heard them both. He put the glass on the table next to the tissue box. His smile was a little strange, a little fixed.
‘It’s almost a psychic thing,’ I said, frowning from the empty mug to him. And despite that look in his eyes, which said clearly, Don’t go down this road, I told him all about it, about my work, the things I see, and how he didn’t fit into the system. Boy, did I blather on. ‘You don’t even seem to have any parental pressure, which is crazy for a sixteen-or seventeen-year-old. Every other boy I know carries his father around on his back like a sack of cement - sometimes his mum’s there too, trying to heave off a bit of the dad’s weight, trying to make life a bit easier. You don’t seem to have anyone. Nothing gets to you; nothing pushes you out of your own shape. I don’t see how that’s possible. Are you some kind of strange non-grieving orphan? Have you got some kind of religious belief that clears all your gremlins away?’ Blah, blah, blah.
When I finally shut up, he laughed gently. ‘You don’t want to know, Tess.’
‘But I do! I’m busting to know! Because whatever you’ve got, I want it too!’ And I blah-ed on about that, too - clarity and self-assurance and kindness and -
He was still laughing. He was at his best-looking, laughing - maybe he was hoping that’d distract me.
But it didn’t, and he laughed on, too long, too watchfully.
And then he slipped. His gaze flicked to the floor just for a second, and when he looked back to me his laughter had definitely turned nervous.
I looked down. I was trying to hide it from myself and see it at the same time, so the tether was very fine, disguising itself by following the pattern in the Turkish rug. But I knew that pattern; I could see where the line had to cross from one motif to another, wriggling through the pile like a snake through stubble. A thread of darkness ran from one side of the rug to the other, joining Keenoy’s foot to mine.
‘You idiot,’ I heard myself say.
Keenoy’s smile was feebly apologetic now. His eyes wobbled, and then began to widen down his collapsing face, dragging the smile down with them.
‘I thought you were too good to be true,’ I said, trying to save face.
Keenoy’s head was a melted heap on his chest. His torso deflated with a wet pop!, his arms shrinking into his shoulders.
‘You twit.’ I hit my head with my fist, over and over. ‘You sappy, cloth-brained, stupid -’
He was shrivelled to a tiny black blob on the end of the line, whipping back across the rug into the toe of my shoe. I hadn’t noticed him leave, but now I felt him come back into me, like water-balloons bursting in my chest and throat. Then I was brim-full of my own self again, unhappy but unstretched, not yearning, not fooling myself.
I sat there for a bit, recovering. I could hear Mum humming along to the radio in the kitchen. Keenoy’s empty mug sent up a last lazy curl of steam. I felt like a complete fool. But at least it was over now; I didn’t have to wonder any more.
And then the front gate clicked open, letting my first client in. Taking a deep breath, I got up and went to the door.
First published 2000.