Last Days of Ava Langdon Read online

  The fire. The fire is still warm. That should have been the first thing she looked at when she came inside. What is she thinking? Without her pith helmet her thoughts are scattered all over the shop. Moths around a light bulb. She grabs a sheet of newspaper and a fistful of kindling, and quickly blows the flames to life. A practised hand. Seems like only a moment ago she was doing this. Has a whole day passed again? The flames crackle. Soon the place is toasty warm. Does she have enough wood for the night? Yes, bags. Plus there’s a bucket of pine cones. She throws a few on. In a while they start spitting at her. She positions the chair holding her coat in front of the hearth, to dry the sherry out of it and, presumably, her blood. Her leg is aching mutely again, not so much from the cuts or the stitches or the tingle, but the greater thump she received from the headlight. Her femur is aching. The warmth will soon put that right. Plus she has the pills the nurse gave her. She’ll need a hot-water bottle on it tonight, though. One of the rats pokes its snout out from its alcove to investigate.

  ‘Greetings, Plutus,’ says Ava. ‘How goes the war?’

  The rat does not reply.

  Yet she knows what he’s after. Ava finds the bread and saws a heel of crust off the loaf. She has to move the wrapped stone aside to make elbow room. She spreads jam on the bread and bites off a corner. How she wishes she had some hot pufftaloonies, or some rhubarb, those sweet treats from her past that she and Red used to love, to warm up her gooey innards. Her duodenum in particular. She’s sure there’s something wrong there. No cure. The bread and sherry will have to do. She thinks about that phrase used to love. That soup was nice, when was it? Was that today? Surely she’s had ten meals since then. She remembers fondly a particular piece of carrot. What did they mean, malnourished? She scrapes crumbs from the bread board into her hand. She places them on the window ledge by the table along which the rats have their run. Unafraid, the two of them emerge and begin to test the air.

  EVENING

  Ava fetches down a sheet of cardboard from her pile of Weeties boxes on top of the tall cupboard. She lays it flat on the table, face down, and angles a look at it, the unproved vista of it, grey, what the blind might see, or perhaps her dolls if they could speak. The grain of the cardboard stretches into the distance. The shack creaks around her, the fire shifting, sticks falling on the roof, corrugated iron protesting. In the other rooms of her imagination, faint as a mosquito in the corner, she hears a new sound. She listens. Nothing. A buzzing in the brain. Her cochlea coming loose in her ear. Perhaps the corporeal manifestation of an idea being born, if that’s not being, she thinks, a tad too fanciful. There it is again. Louder. It’s real. The boy! She jumps up, shoves the cardboard back and goes into the bedroom, where she is able to peer out the window at the venomous world. From here she has sometimes seen menacing figures creeping through the scrub. Sometimes they throw rocks on the roof.

  The shrill buzz grows louder. It’s a noise she’s unaccustomed to, like a cricket in a bottle, or a lawnmower falling out of the sky. Through the wattle she sees a motor scooter weaving slowly between the darkening trees. It stops. The motor cuts out. Silence and perfidy. A tall Martian steps off it. At least, it looks to Ava like a Martian. Perhaps she’s imagining things. Wearing a silver space suit, with an alien’s smooth helmet containing the brain and masking the hideous features. This is it, she thinks, they’ve tracked her down, the end has come. She’s trapped. There’s no back door. She wishes she had something to defend herself with. A gun, for preference. She looks around the hut. The gurlet is all she has, nestled in the wood box like a prehistoric bird.

  The alien is walking towards the hut. It’s a slow, measured step, working a way through the trees, as if still getting used to the force of gravity. The wattle branches flick back as the figure moves through them. Ava scampers to the kitchen and plucks the gurlet out of the wood box. Now she can hear footsteps outside, the twigs cracking. Pause. There is a knock at the door. Would an alien bother to knock? Then a muffled, alien voice calls out:

  ‘Saviour.’ Or is it: ‘Favour?’

  Then she realises that perhaps someone is calling her name.

  The latch rises and the door gradually opens. The alien in the silver space suit fills the doorway. With a fierce battle cry Ava leaps forward, the gurlet held high in her fist, as if the ancient bird had come to life and she was seizing it by the talons. The figure jerks backwards, stumbling off the welcome stone, arms raised.

  ‘Whoa,’ the voice calls through the helmet. ‘Steady on.’

  It’s not a space suit, she sees that now, just a type of motorcycle jacket. The figure quickly slips off the helmet and says:

  ‘Hold your horses. It’s me.’

  Ava stares at him. The Adam’s apple. It’s like her heart stops. Who is imagining whom?

  ‘Vladimir Ilyich?’ The words are raw in her throat.

  ‘Hello, Mum.’

  * * *

  So he comes in, this boy from the past. If not the golden past, then at least the nickel-plated one, from a time when her children were tiny and impoverished and everything was simple. A part of her has repressed the memory of nappies. The sleeplessness. That wasn’t so romantic. But here they are, on a platter before her, image after image repeating through her brain. Even all the terrible things go into the soup. The fragments of that other life. What other life? This other life. See Ava fragment.

  She remembers one of them eating dirt.

  ‘How are you, Mum?’

  ‘I’m – I’m very well, thank you.’

  It’s been so long since she’s seen him. He’s a man. Look at those shoulders. Who taught him to be a man? And is this not even more alien than she had imagined?

  ‘Come in. Won’t you come in?’ she remembers to ask.

  He steps inside the hut. The vision enters. She closes the door and bustles about, her mind going at a hundred miles an hour.

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘I brought some food.’

  That pulls her up short. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Chops.’

  They stop talking and look at one another. How long has it been since she’s seen him? He was eight years old and belonged to her. He collected marbles. Is that right? Or was that someone else? Then suddenly he was fifteen and she had no claim on him. He did not know her. And there was that gap of seven years when she was locked away from the world, when her husband had her committed, and when her children grew apart from her. Out from under her shadow. Grew into strangers. Then she worked in the Auckland library and repaired the bindings of books. Her thoughts doing what they were supposed to. Then she came back to Australia, and no one remembered her. How long ago was that?

  Well, they’ll remember her now.

  Vladimir Ilyich has his helmet under his arm, still looking a bit like a space man though without the hideous features. He smooths his hair down. She doesn’t want to think of the helmet looking like a severed head. It’s a helmet. It’s a helmet. What if it starts talking to her?

  ‘Don’t just stand there,’ says Ava, snapping out of it. ‘Make yourself at home.’

  Looking around the room, Vladimir Ilyich, her son, this man, places his helmet beside the bread board, where it is not dissimilar in shape to the parcelled stone. Not that he knows what’s inside the parcel, nor any of the other parcels he must see scattered about the place. Does he wonder what on earth are they for? What are they for? She doesn’t know herself. Along the windowsills and shelves the gaps between the books too are punctuated with small dolls who watch from their nooks and crannies the goings-on in the room. They’ll explain to her who this stranger is. Philosophy texts are interspersed with novels and Greek drama in no particular order.

  Ava watches him glancing around at the hut. It is impossible to tell what his first impressions are. He sits at the table and, after a moment, she takes the seat opposite him. It’s a plain, straight-backed chair with
legs that scrape painfully. The silence is awkward. A puff of smoke wafts back into the room when a gust of wind blows down the chimney. It’s not drawing very well. In a corner sit the large boxes covered in a sheet containing the manuscripts, not that he knows that either, but why else has he come, thinks Ava, why else? They are the only things of value. She watches him from the corner of her eye.

  He studies the old photo of his aunt as a young woman pinned to the wall, her red hair, sepia here, drifting in the breeze. She is holding a tennis racquet. One thing about Red, she was the athletic one, although she couldn’t handle the picking in the end. On a cupboard where he might have expected to find cups and saucers there is a photo of a pile of paper. Human consciousness is nothing but a reflection of itself. When, in curious exploration, he casually reaches out and opens the cupboard door, he finds that the photo on the outside is exactly what is inside the cupboard. Namely, paper. On another wall a yellowed newspaper clipping showing a much younger picture of his mother, and a review of her first novel. It looks so old it might crumble if he touches it. Otherwise the decorations consist of a couple of indistinct paintings done on cardboard and pinned to an interior wall, as much to block draughts as anything else, it looks like. The primary focus of the room, he sees, is the typewriter on the table.

  ‘What happened to your hair?’

  ‘I cut it, Mum.’

  ‘You used to have such lovely hair.’

  Vladimir Ilyich doesn’t want to pursue the topic of his hair, the floodgate that will open. To no avail. Ava wonders how she must look to him. What he must think of how she lives. Her mind, or its reflection, is rambling.

  ‘I remember when you were little, a toddler, we had a dog, Descartes, who had to have stitches in her belly. I forget why. What ever happened to Descartes? Do you remember her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She had one of these upside-down lightshades on her neck to stop her gnawing the stitches out. It looked sad and funny at the same time. Anyway, you used to have such a sweet tooth, I gave you the big tub of honey to take over to the bench, and the dog, Descartes, saw the chance and was dancing around your feet, slavering. “Quick, hold up the tub,” I cried, and you, with your eyes fixed on the dog’s big pink lolloping tongue, slowly raised up the tub of honey. Raised it up, as children will, out of the dog’s reach, turning it upside down – so that the honey drained down over your head, your beautiful hair, and into the cone around the dog’s neck. I snatched it off you but it was too late. Inside the dog’s cone the honey just about drove it spare, its tongue couldn’t reach, you see, slavering about, impossible to reach. Almost went mad. You had to have your hair washed, and you cried and cried like a, well, like a kid having his hair washed, soap in your eyes and all that.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about this.’

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t remember. Your father thought it was funny, but I bet he’s not the one you think of as a tyrant.’

  ‘I haven’t come here to talk about Dad either.’

  He’s trying to derail her, stop her prattling. How long has she been waiting to tell this story? Or does it loop around in her head all the time?

  ‘How long have you lived here, Mum?’

  Ava, derailed, has to think. ‘Fifteen years.’

  ‘Jeez. And you like it?’

  For a moment she is stuck for words, stuck at the enormity of the question and all it might imply.

  ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I? This bed thy centre is.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit isolated? So far from town. I had a hell of a time tracking you down.’

  ‘It’s private. Privacy, that’s what I crave. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and moi. My own company. As long as that old bitch over the road leaves me alone, I’m happy.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Swami Apogee, or whatever she calls herself. I think it’s her. Someone comes creeping around here when I’m out, disturbing things.’

  ‘What is there to disturb?’

  ‘My things.’

  ‘She’s probably just checking to see if you’re all right.’

  ‘Well, I wish she wouldn’t.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘I caught someone trying to set fire to the grass out the back.’

  ‘Really? Who was that?’

  ‘The boy.’

  ‘I hope you gave him an earful.’

  ‘I took his matches and gave him a belting. Or at least I tried to.’

  ‘Mum, I think that was me.’

  ‘No. It was that boy. The rude boy. No fucking respect. No brains either. He was trying to set fire to green grass in winter … Called me a nut case.’

  Do these words actually come out of her mouth?

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘I grabbed him, his arm, like this, tight, I didn’t touch his hair, and I said if I saw him here again I’d peck his eyes out and eat his liver. It’s what he wanted to hear.’

  A pine cone pops in the fire.

  ‘And he was suitably horrified?’

  ‘You bet. Machiavelli’s first rule of defence.’

  ‘Mum, are you crazy?’

  ‘That was never proved.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that … And you didn’t touch his hair …’

  ‘They had no evidence.’

  Ava wonders if her son wonders where this conversation has come from. Where has it come from?

  It’s hardly the fanfare Vladimir Ilyich might have been expecting. It’s like the rusty straitjackets of their roles – mother, son – must be tried on, to see if they still fit, before they can be sheared away. From Ava’s point of view the house hasn’t had this much conversation in it since she can’t remember when. A log cracks in the heat of the fire and a healthy spark shoots out onto the floor. Vladimir quickly gets up and flicks it back into the ash with the toe of his boot.

  ‘You’ll burn the place down if you’re not careful,’ he says, considering the hut.

  Ava stares at him, the dispenser of advice and moral wisdom. She doesn’t bother to point out the old paint tin full of water for just such emergencies. She doesn’t bother to point out that her terror of bushfires burning her alive, burning her manuscripts alive, keeps her very alert. What does he know? He may as well be someone she’s conjured up.

  ‘Vladimir—’

  ‘You can call me Vlad.’

  ‘Is that what people call you?’

  ‘Some people call me Itchy. As in Ilyich. Get it?’

  ‘Really? Vlad,’ she tries it, ‘why have you come here?’

  ‘I’ve come to see you, Mum. Aren’t I allowed to come and find my mum? And let me say, you took some finding. I’ve been looking all over.’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘I asked around. How do you manage, out here on your own? You can hardly just nip down the street if you run out of milk.’

  ‘I walk. I’m very fit.’

  Now it’s her turn to want to change the subject. It’s hard to find a topic that agrees with both of them.

  ‘Will you listen to me,’ she says, ‘I haven’t even offered you a drink. Would you like a cup of tea? Or a dollop of Penfolds?’

  Vlad remembers: ‘I’ve brought some beer.’

  ‘Beer? Whacko. Your head’s screwed on.’

  ‘It’s on the Vespa.’

  He remembers his aunt telling him a schooner or two might get Ava to lay out the welcome mat. How does he remember that? Ava gives him the memory.

  Her son, this man she is slightly afraid of, jumps up again, throws open the door and marches out to his motor scooter. Such energy. Ava follows him to the door, not wanting to let him out of her sight, wanting to make sure the whole thing is not an apparition. She watches him unbuckle the straps of the pannier and lift a clinking bag of bottles out. For a moment he
hesitates, looking into the darkness of the pannier. Then Vlad returns and closes the door behind him. He seems real enough. He’s so tall and handsome, and unlike his father, of whom Ava does not want to be reminded. How could this strapping figure of a lad have come from her? That’s who he reminds her of – herself. Little old Ava. Mother and son. Her thoughts are his thoughts. How could they have taken him from her? Untimely ripped. How have the nerves that bind them maintained their link after all this time? She can feel them. Frayed at the edges, like a tooth clinging by its root, but there.

  He bounces a little on his toes.

  ‘Your floorboards feel a bit loose, Mum.’

  He pulls three bottles of Resch’s from the bag. King browns. You beaut, thinks Ava. They look real. Lined up on the table they look like the tines of Neptune’s trident. He’s about to screw up that bag and toss it on the fire when she stops him.

  ‘No, I’ll keep that.’

  She takes the bag, smooths it flat, and tucks it into a drawer in the sideboard which seems to be stuffed with other paper bags. While she’s there she fetches a couple of glasses and a bottle opener. No, not glasses exactly; she finds a tin cup and an old Vegemite jar. Lucky she washed the turpentine out of it. If it’s all a dream then it may as well be on her terms. Vladimir Ilyich pops the cap. He pours, the froth angling up the sides. Nectar of the ancients. They clink receptacles.

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Salud.’

  One thing that can be said about Ava, and she sees that Vladimir recalls it with a vague pang that pierces him: she drinks like a man. Is this what the young boy in him remembers? The amount her mouth is able to contain. Glug glug glug. She has stamina. Soon they are toasting again.