Last Days of Ava Langdon Read online

  If your decision is to accept this manuscript for publication then would you please reply to Ava Langdon, care of Katoomba Post Office, at your earliest convenience? If, however, your decision is the converse then could I ask you to address your correspondence to Mr Oscar Wilde, care of the same address, above.

  Oscar can handle the rejection.

  Alas, I cannot.

  If this latter is the case then I would beseech you to preserve the manuscript for me in the bowels of your deepest archive, don’t fret about publishing, merely guard it with all your being. I shall be o’erlooking from the vaults of Heav’n.

  Yours in sincere anticipation

  Ava Langdon.

  Ava compares the tone of this to her last cover letter, or was it the one before? Where she declared – what were her words again? Yes, that they were reducing her to a puking, retching gangrenous corpse. That had some style: a puking, retching gangrenous corpse. This is much more civil and optimistic. She slips the two rubber bands around the whole bundle. She slides the wad of paper, all four hundred pages of it, like a brick, back into its parcel, and places it in her calico bag. Bag, it’s more of a sack really, but it’s all she has. It has its own memories, its own sense of ambition. She glances at herself in the window’s reflection. What’s missing? Ah, the final touch – her white topi, the pith helmet lined in red velvet hanging on its nail beside the photograph of Red with her heart-shaped face. I dips my lid.

  She is ready. With her helmet she can face the world.

  The rats have disappeared.

  Before she leaves, Ava takes another sheet of newspaper from the basket by the fire. The headline is something about Mr Whitlam. She’s heard of him. Been in the news a bit lately, although she doesn’t really care why. She opens the door and, crouching carefully so as not to spoil her trousers, she picks up the bloodied feathers that are lying on the welcoming stone. She lays them side by side on the sheet of paper, the quills all pointing in the same direction, though not the feet, curled in a final clutching spasm; these she tosses aside. She wraps the feathers in the paper, folding it delicately but firmly. Then, locating a square of chicken wire amongst the scraps scattered outside the shack she folds it around the parcel of feathers, bends flat the wire ends so they do not snag. She takes it inside and adds it to the others in a corner by the tubs under a window. A great day. A day with great purpose, looming large.

  With helmet on and thoughts focused, Ava picks up her bag of priceless cargo, her coat and machete, and starts her adventure. She locks the flimsy wooden door behind her and pockets the key, even though she knows it wouldn’t take much to knock the door down altogether or pull it completely off its hinges. There is just the one door. It is the only way in or out. The cats follow her as far as the old bus in which she keeps her other, less valuable things. It is the shell of an old school bus, speckled with rust, that she cannot lock. Nothing to write home about. More feathers. Rocks wrapped in chicken wire. Memorabilia. Dried flowers the meaning of which she has forgotten. Never mind. What does a door symbolise? A door, adore. With each step she takes, the world expands before her, opening up like a lotus. She inhales mightily. As the breath in her breast swells, the pain in her organs, the appendix and pancreas specifically, correspondingly recedes. Ava is acutely aware of these quirky hiccups inside her. All except the pain in her heart which has been a lifelong tribulation, like her tricky knee, despite which she marches forth. Forth and forthwith. And don’t a machete and a white pith helmet, albeit a faded one, make for marching as the most suitable form of perambulation? Yes, they do. She gives the helmet a tap. She needs to get the fluids circulating, find the tide of the day and float with it. Her joints and limbs start to loosen up. It doesn’t take long for the blood to start galloping in her like a puppy after a ball.

  Birds chatter in the trees as Ava sets out on her expedition. She steps onto Princes Road, which is not very princely. She follows it for a couple of cricket pitches then steps through the trees into the nearby orchard owned by the local madwoman, Swami Apogee, or whatever her crazy name is. Strange that her neighbour should be a madwoman. Ava thinks about that phrase. The grass is crisp with frost. Her old brown boots crunch through it. In summertime there are cherries, and nectarines and peaches. However, today there are only a few left-over walnuts, their shells like wizened brains, some apricots and some unripe figs. Ava picks a few and puts them in her pockets. Swami Apogee, in her skillion-roofed farmhouse, has been supplementing Ava’s diet like this for years. In summer it’s quite lucrative, perhaps nutritious is the better word. Swami no doubt believes in sharing and would let Ava take whatever she wanted, if only she would ask. She watches Ava roving like a bee from tree to tree in a measured dance. At least Ava imagines Swami watching her. Ava’s imagination brings sentience to the world and casts it in a luminous light, like looking at a dragonfly in a bottle. Her hand briefly touches the bark of every tree trunk. For Ava the orchard is a gentle reminder of those glory days when she went fruit picking with Red, the way breakfast is the reminder of every breakfast and is, in fact, an echo of the breast. An orchard is a place of whispering, familiar voices. Where are they now, her happy ghosts? Why, alive in her heart, that’s where. How long has the orchard, originally propagated by monks, been here surrounded by bush? Ava does not know, but she offers up a vote of thanks to the old forward-thinking Franciscans who planted it in the first place. Good lads, those chaps. She wonders if she has it in her heart to be a Franciscan. A vow of silence? Hardly. A vow of genius. Yes, more like it.

  She eats a few withered apricots. Weeties and apricots, what better way to start the day’s great mission? Several parrots and rosellas are helping themselves to the highest fruits that have not fallen. Ava knows all about them, the opportunists who provide a sense of continuity in the harvest; some for the birds, some for the market stall. At her feet in the grass the acrid stink of fermenting apples. She moves on before her neighbour takes it into her head to apprehend her. What a silly name, Swami Apogee. Ava supposes it has some sort of significance, like a dried flower. A commune of some denomination, she believes. People heading in and out, wearing funny clothes. They never stay long. She has seen them come and go, living a life she can only wonder at. Enlightenment, she supposes it is they’re after. Well, good luck to them. If only she could glimpse inside their heads, then she would know what was wrong with them, though why would you want to? Murky-grey is the only sense of clarity Ava’s ever had, apart from that moment when a book comes alive in her and eclipses everything. Then look out. Perspicacity, oh yes. It’s the vision she carries burning in her mind’s eye as she returns to the road, her footsteps striding behind her in the frost like something with small feet following. Ava turns to the right and takes the next step.

  * * *

  It’s a fair hike from her hut into town. The demons of the night at last shrugged off. A puddle from yesterday has a crust of ice on it, flawed and fractured, bubbles trapped underneath. She toes it with her boot until it cracks, and moves on.

  It’s about three or four miles in the old money and it never gets any shorter. Sometimes, purely for variety, she cuts through the scrub to the cemetery by the hospital; it’s hardly a shortcut, distracted as she sometimes is by the narrative of the headstones, or the inquisitive pleasure of the grave-digger on his back-hoe excavating a plot. Rabbits dig and make play amongst the stones. It adds a bit more time to the trek, but there’s less traffic, and what has she but time? However, that is normally a summertime distraction and it is not summer.

  Ava’s hut is the furthest building, the furthest anything, from town on the north side of the highway at the end of the dirt track, beyond the last of the bitumen. Beyond her hut Tenth Avenue dwindles off into the scrub. Why she lives out here she sometimes has to struggle to remember. Then the circumstances of her ownership come back in no particular order. She imagines the people, the women in their houses behind the photinias and rhodod
endrons, as she strolls past, peering at her from behind their lace curtains. What would it be like to be them? The novelist in her is curious. People used to be able to tell the time by Immanuel Kant’s daily jaunt to the shops. She wonders if she is of that calibre. An engineer in the machine that maketh the world turn. Smoke rises from their chimneys as if it is the signature of domestic civilisation. What do they see, these women? Resplendent gentleman on his morning constitutional? Intrepid explorer of other worlds – or untamed harpy? She has been called all these things. And worse. She contains multitudes. Immanuel Kant, he sounds like he had a few problems.

  In the distance, to the left of Queens Road, in a shallow valley a flock of cockatoos sits in the tree tops like a fistful of desiccated coconut. They rasp and croak to each other in what can only be called communion. Or at least what she can only call communion, though perhaps it is enterprise? A language not of her understanding. For every word there is a better word. She marches on. See Ava marching. Left, right, left, right, hup hup hup. Sometimes, as now, Ava has the sense of inhabiting another body just to the side of herself, a couple of picture frames back in the movie, from where she is able to watch herself, see herself from the outside being brilliant. Sometimes, after a hard night, Ava shuffles on her old bones, yet today in her mind she is striding out. Good morning to you ladies, she says to herself, even going so far as to tip her hat. Her helmet. Ava tipping her helmet. A sola topi of the classic style worn in the wilds of the old Limpopo, all set about with eucalyptus trees. It’s her Rudyard Kipling hat. One of her prized possessions, dispensing one thought at a time like a copper coin to the beggar boys. A little the worse for wear now, with the passage of time, the shade of old lemons, but proud (if hats can have pride) of its battle wounds. Tooth mark, claw mark, bullet ricochet. Faded saffron urinous yellow, but that is hardly the topi’s fault. To grow old. Age has its virtues. People notice her in this helmet. It’s her tiger-shooting helmet. She strikes a commanding pose, just for a second. Wonderful word, eucalyptus.

  ‘Garn, you old nut case.’

  A voice. A boy’s voice. A beggar boy, yelling out at her from the verandah of his house. She stops. He is holding a stick. Perhaps he has been pretending it is a gun. Here is an example, the first of the day, of what she might term recalcitrant youth. No respect for their elders. How would you go about understanding them? She is not envious of the young, but that does not mean she has to like them.

  ‘I remember you, my boy,’ she calls.

  The boy framed by the pale cladding of the house. She remembers his luminous red hair, the freckles like semi-colons all over his face, the gangly limbs seemingly with lives of their own. A magpie would like a lock of that hair for her nest.

  When she stops, her words make the boy drop his stick and scoot around the corner of the house and disappear. He runs like a scarecrow on fire. Another voice comes from within:

  ‘Eddie, get in here.’

  Ava wonders if she should go up to the house. Enter the yard, climb up the steps and knock on the door. Knock commandingly on the door, and interrupt the baking. Excuse me, madam, but some things are beyond the pale. She wonders if she should confront the boy. The rudeness of this creature. Should she take the brat out from under the table and bend him over her knee and paddle his backside with the flat of her machete. You see if I wouldn’t, she thinks. Oh my baby, the mother might cry, or else the mother would be thankful. There, good lady wife, pray wipe your tears. Your gratitude is thanks enough. Ava realises she has no idea what a mother might think if you took to her child with a machete, irrespective of the moral righteousness of it. Surely as a writer she should have a greater understanding of what goes on in the minds of others. She must try harder. However, this is not the time or place to go about dispensing charity. More pressing matters. Maybe it wasn’t her the boy was calling out to? Should she give him the benefit of the doubt? That would be the generous thing to do. A sweet child. Once suckling babe. Yes. Ride on, stranger. She hoists the calico bag higher on her shoulder, lifts her head and rides on. Well, walks in a cloud of indifferent nobility. The white net drapes shift slightly as she passes.

  She’s puffing like a heifer by the time she gets to the top of the hill near the highway, her pulse dancing a merry old jig. Trucks rumble past, east and west on their way to important assignations. All that cargo. The world is speeding up, though still, for Ava, at walking pace. She passes the hospital, averting her eyes. If she cannot see it, then it does not exist. If it does not exist, then it cannot harm her. Is this what Immanuel Kant has taught? No, someone else. She blocks her ears and hums – la la la. Instead she watches a train rattle west towards Lithgow, that bleak star. Nothing wrong with trains.

  The helmet not only stops her thoughts from escaping, from leaking out her ears, it also stops other, wayward thoughts from entering at inappropriate moments. She walks. See Ava walking. It never gets any faster, walking pace, but sometimes she barely notices the journey at all. Good ideas come to her while she’s walking. Like today, suddenly here she is passing the old Renaissance School with its tall fenestrated tower, and the sandstone courthouse (more trouble brewing), and look – already at the Council Chambers. Bullshit Castle, as she’s heard it called. Not yet open for business. What goes on in there is beyond imagining, but she’ll give it a go: arcane rites and sacrifice. Goats slaughtered on the mayoral table, Ava wouldn’t be surprised, to the tune of bagpipes and smoky incense.

  She crosses the highway. A truck honks its Klaxon at her because she has not waited for the green light. She never does. The passing truck’s slipstream buffets her. Ava doesn’t abide by petty constraints and regulations. It’s a philosophical position. There are enough pedantic rules in this world. She’s more of a footpath anarchist. Revolution at ground level. She wonders if her mind will ever slow down to match the pace of her feet; she has to pull her helmet down to her ears.

  She passes the first hotel, Gearins, then nips across the railway line, boom gates up like bayonets. Behind her an EH Holden bumps and rattles across the tracks past the signal box. In no more than a dozen steps she arrives. She has arrived. See Ava arriving. Town. It’s like the air is different. There are people all over the place. Hapless pedestrians, commuters racing for the city train, poor mute fools, when will they learn? She is a social animal, no longer alone. (Is that Rousseau?) She barely registers the exertion in her lungs. Or the fact that her armpits are damp. She’s fit for an old bird. Puffing a bit. Thinking in short sentences. The town is waking up. The company of her peers. Or is that conspiracy? And no, not peers, if truth be hinted at, it’s the company of her species, those ill-used victims, like talking with parrots, or trying to converse with ants about the meniscus of the honey jar. Even that is stretching it a bit. Only yesterday did she feel a tingly sensation of communion with one of her fellows, a shivery feeling of unity. Was it only yesterday? It could well come again. We are one, you and I. I am you; our thoughts are attuned, she had thought, only to find it was a complete misunderstanding about the ingredients of her sandwich. Not cucumber at all. God, how they laughed. She wonders if she can recapture that again, that fleeting sense of harmony. Why? Because it felt nice. Horripilation. The melancholy of hope. Today’s likely outcome. No! Banish that thought. Replace it with munificence. The munificence of hope.

  The shops are just opening for business, stirring the night air within. Shop girls bringing out signs and billboards onto the footpath. Last-minute schoolchildren running for the bell down the hill to St Canice’s. Buckets of flowers outside the florist’s. Macarthur’s Electricals with vacuum cleaners of all shape and size in the window … Clearance Sale … Half Price … Everything Must Go … All this literature! In a nearby café the chalkboard sign: Feeling peckish? C’mon in … Yes, she is feeling peckish. And there is still plenty of time, a whole day in fact. Ava opens the door – she has to give it a little weight – and goes into the tea shop. The window seat is free. She takes her u
sual table, where she can watch everyone go about their business and, more importantly, they can watch her. What could be more harmless? A woman taking her morning café au lait. She can be conservative. She can play that game. She takes a seat and lays her machete in its scabbard across the table. She peruses the cardboard menu, playing the part of a woman perusing a menu. A bus pulls up outside the café and disgorges a gaggle of early-morning tourists. Don’t see as many of them about these days. Must be the weather. Ava glares at them. Don’t they care that it’s winter and they should be somewhere warm? They’re disrupting her view of the street, crowded together like ducks in a puddle.

  The waitresses behind the counter whisper to each other. One of them, a girl called Marjorie, Ava rekindles the story in her mind, has just finished an assignment for uni and has been dropped off at work by her paternal parent. The assignment is about Immanuel Kant’s notion of apriori knowledge transcending the bounds of experience, but that is really beside the point. The manager has ticked her off for being late again and Marjorie worries that she has clocked up too many negatives in her short career at the café. This is the scenario Ava has imagined for her. It may well be true. Marjorie does not dislike this job. She needs it. The shifts are flexible, which helps with her lecture timetable. The money is adequate. No, Ava edits, the money is brilliant. It’s close to home. Her black skirt has not been washed and she hopes that the manager does not notice this dereliction of duty. She hasn’t had time. There are floury handprints on her apron. And now the first customer of the day is this funny old woman, the same one who comes in every other morning sitting in the window seat. She hopes they can get the ingredients right today. Marjorie sighs, from exasperation as much as the impression it gives that she is working hard.

  While Ava settles herself the second customer of the day comes in after her. It’s a young lad; Ava’s never seen him before. He’s got the wispy straggle of the first attempt at a beard. What’s the point of that, Ava wonders. If you can’t grow a fully fledged, starling-hiding bush of a beard then why bother? Something you could lose your keys in.