body.
'I hate this place,' she said. She said it out loud just to make herself hear what she thought, so that she could no longer pretend to herself that she thought otherwise.
'Signed,' she whispered, 'signed, L. Goldstein.'
Herbert rolled on to his back and she dragged her arm out from under him. She loved him, but she would rather go and sleep in her own bed by herself. It was a habit, probably a selfish one. It was this last thought that made her stay and, also, her wish not to hurt him. She put the sheet over him and sat, hunched, on the edge of the mattress.
She hated it. She wanted to leave so much that tomorrow would not be too soon. She would not waste another moment of her life, that river filled with jetsam which had once – it looked so sad and pitiful now -been so important to her.
No longer would she be understanding Leah. She liked and cared for Charles but her feelings for Emma and her children were false emotions and she tasted their taste in the cosmetics on her face. She had cooked their bland meals for them, wiped their noses, mended their socks, done all the simple things they all appeared to be incapable of doing. She had accepted the mindless ordinariness of their lives because she did not wish to live alone, perhaps, or because she could never explain to Charles why she might want to leave his custody.
But she was not a young girl any more. She was thirty-seven years old and had a crease beneath her bottom and a little roll of fat on her middle. She was thirty-seven and had, for the most part, wasted her life as if she hated it.
She started to make pictures in her closed eyes, a habit she had developed on her insomniac nights in Bondi. She could make perfect pictures: twisted white eucalypts at a corner of a white road near Cooma, bristling khaki banksias in the foot-burning sand at Coolum, Gymea lilies in the scrub around Dural, like burning weapons on long shafts placed defiantly to warn intruders. She saw the cliffs and waters of the Hawkesbury lying in the water like the scaly back of a partly-submerged reptilian hand.
'Cdwerther,' said Herbert Badgery.
She turned her head. He also was sitting upright.
'What?' she asked.
'C-wder. Ah, strewth, I can't even say it.' Then, laughing, he lay down again, still asleep.
Leah Goldstein started giggling.
Tonight, when he lost his temper with his naive son, she had been so pleased. She had been pleased, anyway, to see again her blue-eyed scoundrel and confidence man, but she was pleased, particularly, to see that he still could care about a thing like that, care enough to lose his temper.
At last, she thought, I've done something right.
'You're so much nicer,' she told the sleeping man. 'You're not hard and scratchy any more. Can you hear me?'
'Mm,' said Herbert Badgery, and started snoring.
'I love you,' said Leah Goldstein.
She peered at him closely in the dark. His eyes were shut. He was breathing through his partly open mouth. 'You are asleep, aren't you?'
'I hate this place,' said Leah Goldstein.
47
You may recall me mentioning a certain widow in Nambucca. I said she had a shell shop and it was her I left behind when I cycled up to Grafton looking for a job with the General Motors dealer.
In truth it was a milk bar, but I always liked the idea of a shell shop. I had a picture in my mind of glass cases with those twisted shapes, soft and pink on the inside, all set out neatly on beds of tissue paper. I had no objection to cleaning the glass myself. I knew all the bus drivers on that route and many of them said they would have stopped there if there had been shells but we never got around to it.
I came into that shop in 1937. I had been working for an oyster farmer down at Port, and that was pleasant work most of the year, but I was not getting ahead. I did not have a scheme in mind, but I bought a second-hand Malvern Star bicycle and thought I'd ride it up to Queensland. There was a small buckle in the back wheel, but in every other respect it was a good machine. I left Port at sun-up and I was in Nambucca for lunch and that was where I found Shirl's Milk Bar (although it was not called that at the time) and I parked the bike and went in for a pie.
You know the sort of place. It stands back from its own little patch of yellow gravel. It has a peppercorn tree or a big old gum tree in front of it. There is a wooden veranda with its floors a few feet up from the ground. The boards are a bit rotten. When you walk into the shop there is a torn fly-screen and a little bell rings down the back. You look at the curtain hung across the passage and you expect to meet a big-bellied woman with breathing troubles, or a bent one with a dangerous mole in the middle of her forehead. You look at the lollies behind the streaky glass -tarzan jubes, traffic lights, licorice allsorts, musk sticks in three colours, freddo frogs, jelly babies, eucalyptus diamonds, and just the way they sit there in their cardboard boxes tells you to expect goitre, canker, wall-eye, gout, crutches.
So when I heard Shirl coming – click, click, click, click – it was not the right walk for a shop like this. I knew what she looked like the minute I heard her – short, broad, verging on muscly, with brown skin and a nice set of lines around very lively eyes. She emerged from behind her curtain with her make-up properly done, the seams of her stockings straight, and her hair fresh from the domed oven at Mrs M. Donnelly, the Nambucca hairdresser. She could not have been more than fifty.
I put off the pie a moment and bought a threepenny glass of lemonade, to give me time to consider the matter.
I asked her if the shop was hers. I was surprised to hear her say yes, because it was a shop for dying in, and she did not look like the dying sort. Then she told me about her dead husband and I understood.
When I finished the lemonade, I ordered a strawberry spider. I told her she didn't belong there. I came straight out with it and although she did not look up – she had her arm deep into the ice-cream tub, scratching around to get enough into the scoop to make my spider – I could tell she was pleased to hear me say it.
'No,' she said. 'I deserve a ruddy big palace, and silk sheets and a little black boy to do the housework and rub my back.' She dropped the scoop of ice-cream into the glass, ladled on the strawberry and splashed in the lemonade. The spider frothed up pink inside the glass and spilled down the sides. She had bright red nail polish on and her nails looked pretty holding that frothing pink glass.
'You do,' I said.
If I'd been stuck with the shop I would have opened the place out a bit, like one of those Queensland fruit stalls, or even like a Sydney milk bar where all you have at the front is a sliding door, and once it is open you are truly open. You smell the ocean and the dust. You'd be alive, not half dead.
The truth does no harm on occasions. I told her what was on my mind. I gave her a bit of a sketch. I used a piece of wrapping paper which she was kind enough to tear off a loaf of bread.
She leaned across the counter. She had that smell of a woman fresh from the hairdresser. 'That's all very good,' she said, 'but you're forgetting the westerly.'
'Your shop faces east.'
'That's so,' she said, but she did not lean back, or start wiping down the counter. She ran her finger over the plan, as if it were a road map. 'So you're a handyman, are you?'
She looked up and we considered each other a moment.
'I was looking for a place to board,' I said. 'Give me a room and my keep and I'll do the job for you. It'd be a pleasure. You could have oranges in racks right down the wall…'
I could see the choice of oranges, or perhaps the numbers I suggested, puzzled her.
'And sea shells,' I said, 'in glass cases, for the tourists. The main thing though is the light. It's that mongrel wall that makes the shop so miserable.'
'What about materials?'
