‘Why?’
‘Jack, please, if you care for me, just drive me to my car so I can go home and sleep.’
‘You can sleep at my house, not the Bilgola house, the one here. You could be in bed in five minutes.’
‘Jack, I’m tired, I’m not interested.’
‘Maria, please, I’m not talking about sex.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not coming to your house.’
He put his hands on the wheel and his head on his hands. ‘I’m getting angry because I feel I’m ruining something very important in my life. We are just getting to know each other and I’m ruining it.’
‘Jack,’ she said. She unclasped a hand from the steering wheel and held it. ‘You’re very sweet and gentle, but you belong to an alien culture.’
He took his other hand from the steering wheel and put both his hands around hers. ‘I can change. Don’t roll your eyes.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m tired.’
‘If no one can change,’ he said, ‘what point is there in anything? If we cannot affect each other’s lives, we might as well call it a day. The world is just going to slide further and further into the sewer.’
She turned away from him. He saw her staring into the brightly lit shop where they advertised Comme des Garcons and Issey Miyake at 50 per cent off.
‘You don’t believe that we can change?’ he asked. ‘We can.’
‘You should have said these things to me when I was twenty. How would you change, Jack? What would you do?’
‘I could become a person you could trust, whom you could rely on totally.’
‘Are you that now?’
‘Not totally, not at all really.’
‘Why me? Why am I so important to the Catchprices?’
He hit the steering wheel with his fist. He did not know his nephew had done a similar thing with a glove box lid. ‘I’ll drive you to the hospital when you go into labour. I’ll come round and do the laundry for you. I’ll make the formula. O.K., you’ll probably be breast feeding, but I’ll do what you need. I’ve got money. I’ll hire help. Maria, please, I’ve done some rotten things, but the only reason I’m sitting here with you is that I’m not going to be like that any more.’
‘You’re going to be transformed through love?’
‘Yes I am.’
She shook her head.
‘Parents die to save their babies through love,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing romantic about it. It’s a mechanism. It’s built into us whether we like it or not. It’s how the species saves itself.’
She was listening to him. She was frowning, but her lips were parted, had in fact been parted so long that now she moistened them.
‘If we can’t change,’ he said, ‘we’re dead.’
He leaned forward to kiss her. The Tax Inspector took his lips in hers and found herself, to her surprise, feeding on them.
56
At half-past eleven, standing in her kitchen, Maria Takis drank the bitter infusion of raspberry leaf tea and worried, as usual, if she had made it strong enough, if it would really work, if the muscles of her uterus were being really aided by this unpleasant treatment, or if it was some hippy mumbo jumbo that would – if it was too strong – give her liver cancer instead.
She removed her make-up, put on her moisturiser in the bathroom and then lay on the living-room floor to do her pelvic floor exercises. In bed she massaged her perineum, swallowed three 200mg calcium tablets and a multi- vitamin pill. By the time she could begin her ‘Visualizing, Actualizing’ exercise it was already half-past twelve. She turned off the overhead light and flicked on the reading light. She propped herself up on two pillows and closed her eyes.
She descended the blue staircase (its treads shimmering like oil on water, its bannisters clear, clean, stainless steel).
At the bottom of the blue staircase she found the yellow staircase.
At the bottom of the yellow staircase, the pink.
At the bottom of the pink, the ebony.
And the end of the ebony, the Golden Door.
Beyond the Golden Door was the Circular Room of Black Marble.
In the centre of the Circular Room of Black Marble, she visualized a Sony Trinitron.
She had found a picture of the Sony. She could visualize it exactly, right down to the three small dots beneath the screen: one red, one blue, one yellow.
She imagined turning on the Sony Trinitron. She imagined the picture emerging: Maria and her baby, sitting up in bed. She had done this almost every night for three months now, but still she could not get the mental picture clear. It was a little girl she tried to visualize. She made her pink. This was corny, but achievable. She could visualize the colour but not her face. The face shifted, dissolved, shivered, like an image on a bed of mercury. She held the shawl against her. She held it to her breast. She pressed her eyes tight, trying to stop thinking about Jack Catchprice. The picture of her baby would not come clearly. It never would. The baby cried and pushed at her. She could feel anxiety and impatience, but not the things she wanted to. Love was not visual. It did not work.
At twenty-past eleven, Cathy McPherson was still celebrating with the band. It was her last night inside the enclosure at Catchprice Motors. She poured a Resch’s Pilsener for Mickey Wright. On stage he would wear the glittery black shirt Cathy had chosen for him, but now he was his own man and he wore blue stubby shorts. a ‘Rip Curl’ T-shirt, and rubber thongs. He had sturdy white legs and heavy muscled forearms. As she poured the beer he tapped the glass with a ballpoint pen. He was a drummer. He couldn’t stop drumming. As the beer rose, the pitch changed. It was not a joke, not an anything. He could not help himself. With his right hand he paddled a table tennis bat upon his knee. He was the drummer. Drrrrrrrrrr. He was the one who had to take the drummer jokes.
The truth was: Mickey was the best musician of the lot of them, and as for independence (the ability to keep different rhythms going simultaneously) he had it in bags. There were drummers making records, famous drummers on hit records, who could barely keep two patterns going. Buddy Rich could do two. Mickey could do four.
He was the ambitious one. The others would settle for a living, but Mickey was always pushing towards places it was bad luck even to dream about.
‘I’ll tell you what you want to do, Cathy, you want to get “Drunk as a Lord” to Emmylou Harris. No, no, not her agent.’ He had a squashed-up Irish face, a boxer’s nose. His whole manner was dry, dead-pan. ‘Not her agent. Agents never know. You get it to her, direct.’
‘The truth is,’ said Howie, who was playing poker with Stevie Putzel, ‘Emmylou Harris wouldn’t do it half as well, you want to know the truth.’
‘Sure,’ said Mickey. He made a paradiddle with the tennis ball against the table: drrrrrrrrr. ‘We’d all get rich listening to her fuck it up.’ He looked up at Howie, blank-faced. Who could say if he would be trouble or not.
Howie was playing poker with Steve Putzel. The two of them were standing up, using the ping-pong table for the deck. Howie was watching Cathy more than his cards and was losing badly because of it. Cathy was mad at Mickey for calling in the lawyers.
‘Come on, come on,’ Steve said to Howie. ‘You chucking out or what?’
‘We’re going to make it, Cath,’ said Mickey. He drummed the bat, table, knee: Drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Mickey could talk about success like other guys could talk about sex. He was never sick of it.
Cathy smiled. The apartment did not feel like a home any more, but like a clean-up room in a country motel. There were peanut husks and empty beer cans on the floor. It had never looked so good to her.
‘This time, no shit,’ Mickey said. Drrrrrrrrr. ‘We’re the right age for it. You read your history books. We’re the
