Last Days of Ava Langdon Read online

  ‘Name?’ asks Mr Menthol.

  ‘You mean you don’t recognise me? Ah, I see you don’t. Langdon. Ava Langdon.’

  Ava shows him her profile, the yellow cravat at her throat like a bloodthirsty budgerigar. He studies her without expression.

  ‘The same Langdon that was in here yesterday?’

  ‘None other. Was that impertinence I detected in your voice, sir?’

  ‘Not from me it wasn’t. Would you like me to go and check.’

  ‘Nothing would exacerbate my pleasure more.’

  Surely Menthol can’t be his real name. Dieter passes through the swinging door and disappears out the back. This is where Ava’s imagination has to take over.

  In the back room Dieter fills the kettle with water and pops it on the stove. She sees him get a cup down from the cupboard and spoon a generous amount of instant coffee into it. One sachet of sugar. He has worked out how to take advantage of being invisible. On the windowsill a clay pot with the dormant corm of a freesia in it. Presumably freesias have come to symbolise something – what exactly Ava can work out later. Nothing in the mail basket. Sacks of yesterday’s letters waiting by the door for the truck. His packet of cigarettes (mentholated) waiting for him also. Only so much time can be spent out here, Ava deduces, without raising suspicion.

  What on earth is he doing? She finds herself staring at the various posters and advertisements on the walls – Passport Applications, for instance – the smooth, burnished wood of the counter, the scales for weighing parcels. She wonders if she can lean over far enough to reach the cash drawer. Behind her a slant of sunlight creeps in through a window.

  Eventually (she’s feeling mean-spirited) the ginger moustache and its host Dieter return.

  ‘Nothing today,’ he says.

  ‘No? That’s a disappointment. I was expecting something from my publisher. Angus & Robertson, perhaps you’ve heard of them? A missive.’

  ‘Really,’ says the impudent fellow.

  ‘Yes, really. Would you mind terribly checking under my other name? That is if you’re not too predetermined.’

  ‘Eh? I can check, I suppose. What’s the name again?’

  ‘Wilde. Oscar Wilde.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ says the fellow, his eyebrows raised to the heavens like a couple of leeches smelling blood in the vicinity. It is the usual reaction. People never believe her when she utters the truth, which is why she is prepared like a good girl guide. Ava takes from her bag the official deed poll certificate of name change which the department of changing names has sent her. What is that department called again? Yes, that’s it, the Department of Nomenclature. She carries it for identification, not just for proof of existence. Here it is. She taps out with her finger the title for the clerk to read plain as day. Oscar Wilde.

  Yes, he has heard correctly. He recognises all the officialdom of the certificate.

  ‘Wilde,’ he says. ‘I’ll go and see.’

  Ava’s reverie follows him through the swinging door. His cup. The kettle hasn’t boiled yet. It feels like she’s in two places at once.

  Meanwhile Oscar folds away the certificate. It’s a certified copy, one of many, signed by a Justice of the Peace, if you please. Again the posters, the dusty sunlight, the scales. Yes, the cash drawer is out of reach. She puts out a finger and presses the scale plate, watches the needle fly around several chaotic kilograms. The trespass feels delicious.

  Dieter and his leeches return: ‘Nope. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s a relief. Now, on another matter, I wish to procure a sac postal.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘An envelope. Plus postage. This is a post office. You are the postmaster. I don’t mean to tell you your job.’

  ‘What do you want to post?’

  ‘This.’

  Ava opens her bag and extracts the parcel from which she pulls the hefty manuscript in its two rubber bands. She lays it on the counter. She can feel the heat radiating off it. Four hundred pages. Four hundred and one, actually, if you count the cover letter. Single spaced. Pink as a newborn rose. Her eyes positively sparkle. What a journey they’ve been on together.

  ‘That’ll cost a bit.’ He doesn’t look surprised, as if people come in every day to post great works, post them by the truckload, putting themselves at the mercy of the universe, no, the service of the universe.

  ‘The cost is irrelevant.’

  Mr Menthol reaches out a hand to take the bundle in his nicotine-stained fingers.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ava squeaks, snatching it back.

  ‘I have to weigh it.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course.’

  She lets him take the manuscript, not taking her eyes off it, nor her casually placed hand off the machete’s hilt. What if the world were to end right now? What if a meteor were to hit the post office? What loss. What a vacuum. So if she has to take his hand off at the wrist she is ready. He centres it on the scales. She is interested in how far the dancing needle goes.

  ‘Just under two kilos.’

  ‘Goodness.’

  Think of that. She thinks of that. The clerk selects a large parcel-envelope and, after assessing the weight, hands over the appropriate bevy of multi-coloured stamps. Ava pays. The commercial pecuniary aspect of it is straightforward. It’s a cost she has factored in.

  ‘Bring it back to me when you’ve finished addressing it.’

  ‘Thank you, garçon.’

  She can smell the osmidrosis off of him like the tang of green bacon. A part of her wonders if it might be her. The smell of her organs rotting.

  Ava turns away. She takes the envelope and her parcel, her latest, greatest work, to the privacy of a far counter beneath a window. There is a line of fat and skinny telephone books along the bench. Two kilos of radiance. Her kneecaps tremble with excitement. One last look to check that everything is in order.

  She stares at the title page with vague anticipation. The Saunteress. The plain font is beguiling as to the marvels contained within. Perhaps she should take the whole bag of brilliance home and read it again? What if one of those waitresses has got the pages out of order? At random she lifts about a kilogram of it and, turning it like a wave in the mottled sunlight from the window, reads:

  … from the bright surface where the ducks raked their feathers with quiet pride. The long hose pipe of the pump sucked river water through its great peristaltic intestine and, travelling via a complicated system of pipes and conduits, fanned it out over the orchard in a dizzying mist. Half-a-dozen rainbows flirted above the tree tops, vanishing and reappearing as the sprinklers revolved. The birds, cockatoos and crows mostly, flew through the arcs of isolated rain and threaded them together in a dance beyond my understanding. It was like some glorious music box, a chandelier circling in the air. The heat of the morning was powerful and I was torn between throwing myself in the river, wantonly, clothes and all, not caring who might be watching, or a more immediate, primal urge. Hunger.

  ‘Come on, Red,’ I said, ‘I’m hungry. Engels won’t miss us.’

  ‘Let me just finish this sack, Dave.’

  The river could always come after, so now, while Engels was away, we wandered through the orchard towards the watermelon patch on the far side overlooking the wide Buckland valley. One of the other pickers called out from his leafy perch:

  ‘Where are you two off to?’

  ‘None of your ear wax,’ I rejoindered. They all jealously wondered what adventures we got up to. Our elevation above the menial. Our shoulders felt free from the weight of the apple sacks, free as if our wings had been torn out by the roots and, for the moment, we enjoyed a priceless, immortal freedom. The quiet voices of the pickers drifted through the leaves. Several unused ladders stood akimbo in the grass. In the untouched trees apples hung suspended in the air like Turkish lanterns. A couple of days of hot
weather would bring them on nicely, and Engels would shift us over to pick this corner of the orchard. In a number of these trees dead cockatoos hung strung up by the necks, shot by Engels as a warning to other birds to touch his apples at their peril.

  The melons lay on their sides, fattened piglets asleep in the sunshine. They were warm to the touch, and echoed with a hollow, corky sound when we rapped our knuckles on them. Rat-a-tat-tat. Red chose her melon and I selected a fine specimen still attached to the ropy vine by its umbilicus of stem. A fine melon, a rambunctious melon, the sort of melon you’d give to Caesar on his birthday, royally pale underneath where it lay on the dirt, like a shark’s underside. Neither of us had a knife. We broke the stems and raised our melons overhead not unlike Abraham hoisting Isaac high unto God’s silver platter. But there was no God. No mighty voice to stay our hand. Only us and the golden sunshine and the river defined by a line of trees in the distance. And the sacrifice that was rightfully ours. Down we threw them and smashed the melons on the fertile earth. The melons broke into several pieces. Red and I each picked up a chunk of flesh, sun-stunned, warm as blood, and buried our faces in the sweet, juicy pulp. We drank. It was like drinking champagne sunlight, or like being kissed by the purring Queen of the bees fresh from winter sleep, the fruit so sweet and delicious. We sucked as if it was the sun’s blood and we ate and when we pulled the melon husks off our faces the juice ran down our chins and throats, dripping on our manly chests. We spat the seeds at each other. God how we laughed. Red had watermelon seeds in her hair, and I suppose I did too. It was the sweetest means by which to quench a thirst I could ever have imagined. Then we went and washed our hands and faces in the river. Our clothes, we knew, would dry in next to no time. Afterwards we strolled back to the orchard to start picking again. The trees were calling us. The rumbling music of apples tumbling into bins came to us on the air, a murmured dialogue, like two lovers talking quietly at dawn. As we walked up the row we each plucked the most perfect example of appledom we could find and, after polishing them on our bibs, took a big, horsey crunch. Engels, the boss-cocky, was waiting where we had left our ladders and picking sacks, our bins half full.

  ‘Where the heck have you two been?’ he demanded.

  ‘Not your affair, friend,’ said Red, munching her apple with big beautiful tombstone teeth that filled her heart-shaped mouth.

  ‘Those apples won’t pick themselves, you know.’

  ‘Keep your hair on,’ I interjected. ‘Aren’t we allowed to have some lunch?’

  ‘It’s not lunch time. Lunch from twelve-thirty is.’

  ‘Oh, give it a rest, you silly nit,’ I said.

  Boss-cocky Engels was an annoying fellow. About as fat as a match with an accent you couldn’t quite place. He had a funny little moustache like a toothbrush which did him no favours at all and did not endear us to him. We wondered if it was a fake and whether he peeled it off at night and kept it stuffed up his nose like a mouse in its lair. I bent over to pick up my sack when all of a sudden he was on me breathing his fried breath. It must have been the last straw for him.

  ‘Don’t you talk with me like that.’

  ‘Get your hands off me, you drongo,’ I said.

  ‘I’d go a pound or two for a round or two with you any day of the week, Dave, at the drop of a hat. You see if I wouldn’t. I—’

  But before he could progress further with this fine speech I clocked him one full on his proboscis and sat him down hard on his btm. He went down like a proverbial pile of bull’s droppings. Blood sprayed from his nose like the Rose of Tralee, like rust-red river water fanning from the sprinklers over the orchard. I stood over him like Cassius Clay over Sonny Liston and the force of my gaze kept him pinned to the ground. Bluebirds seemed to flit in orbit about his head. Red was grinning from ear to ear and looked more beautiful, standing there in the sunshine, than I had ever seen her. She was nineteen.

  ‘There, Engels,’ I said, ‘how do you like that from a girl?’

  She looks up and breathes. Her pupils bright sparks. The sprinklers and their rainbows slowly fade from their illumination swimming through the vitreous humour in her eyes. What magician has transported her here to this dusty post office in Katoomba on a winter’s day? She has been elsewhere. She’d not be surprised to find an apple in her pocket. She turns another page and her attention is caught by something Dave has written:

  Give me a glass of poison of the true vintage

  Peppered with piss and aloe and tomato sauce,

  I’ll toss it down with a cyclopean grimace

  And the lilies will sprout from my dainty corpse.

  The pure, cool bloom of raw despair

  Flies from me like an undisputed fact

  And I am found. All hope is here

  In the lancing of truth’s blind cataract.

  Fine sentiments for an apple picker, she thinks.

  Ava taps it all together and slides the manuscript back into the parcel and closes it. The rubber bands, the cover letter. Everything into the large, heavy-duty envelope on which she now prints the address. (She knows it off by heart, just as she knows Douglas Stewart will instantly recognise her handwriting.) She licks and affixes the stamps, giving them a satisfying thump with her fist. The taste of the gum is not unpleasant. It is the taste of adrenaline and of possibility, which is how, in her heart of hearts, she would like to face every day. That is, bravely, proudly, resolutely. She turns and takes it back to the clerk. Dieter Dieter onion eater. There are now several people in the queue before her. Where did they come from? She is happy to wait, holding her baby, wallowing in the future. She shuffles forward. The time has come to say adieu. When her turn arrives to yield it up, the clerk seals the envelope, punches it with his date stamp. She watches him place it in a tub to await the postal truck and the practical, esoteric magic that will whisk it away and transform it into a tome. A monograph. A legacy.

  ‘Goodbye, dear creature,’ she says. And old Menthol, not sure, she thinks, if Mr (or Mrs) Wilde is addressing him, or the parcel, or the human condition in general, anticipates his coffee break with disproportionate enthusiasm.

  * * *

  Ava steps out the door feeling significantly lighter. Two kilos lighter. Fancy that. The weight of her wings. She smacks her hands together. Her task is done. She confronts the red post box outside, the one invented by Anthony Trollope, so that’s surely a happy omen. She circles it three times in one direction, then three times in the other. The spell is cast. Voilà!

  Now she has the whole day to get through, and yet no responsibility. Her spirits are lofty, like flying buttresses. What else does she have to do on her list? Damn it, she has forgotten the list. Let’s see if she can remember. Her novel has gone; that’s the most important thing. It’s now in the lap of the gods, or at least winging its way towards the lap of the gods. She sends blessings after it. She is two kilos lighter, therefore what she needs – yes – is a new ream of paper.

  She executes a turn of the town looking for the newsagent, the one who specialises in her brand of paper. She finds it where she left it and the proprietor, Mr Gordon Shoebridge, has one ream of pink paper left. Lucky last. She wonders who else is buying all the pink paper. There’s been a bit of a run on it, like a commodity share price. A part of her contemplates shoving the ream into her bag, or up her shirt, and making a run for it, but the last time she did that she had to languish in the police lock-up for two days until Douglas Stewart was able to get away from his desk and bail her out. She’s learned her lesson. Sorry, Your Honour, won’t happen again. Good old Doug. It might be stretching a friendship to call on him again for a similar misdemeanour so soon.

  It wasn’t just the paper. It was worse than that.

  She remembers that day in the library marching up and down the aisles of tomes, all hardbound, mummified in plastic. Neither of her books could be found. She asked the librarian if, perchance,
they had both been borrowed. The librarian had never heard of them. The Apple Pickers nor The Golden Cravat. Perhaps the latest bestseller would do to satisfy her reading needs. Ava spat – Pah! Wouldn’t know literature if it bit them on the arse. (She was angry that day.) In the general fiction section Ava discovered a well-thumbed edition of the latest bestseller. One million copies sold! Pah again! She cracked the book open at the spine, knew just where the join was weakest. She laid it open like a sacrificial goat on the carpet, hidden between the shelves of books. Then she unleashed her machete, samurai-warrior style, and raising it above her head brought it down, and cleaved the book in twain, splitting it down the middle like a coconut. And that was when, seeing the scimitar rise again, the librarian screamed. A young policeman came and hauled her away. Ever since, the library has been a kind of Cuba to her, even though she told them that she knew how to repair the book. It’s a dying craft and she’d have been happy to teach them. They declined.

  Following this, Douglas Stewart, famous poet and editor, sacrificed a fair bit of his time and patience bailing her out. He’d had to catch the train up from Sydney when there were so many other needy poets after his attention. Meanwhile Ava languished in solitary. No one would listen to her confession, and one or two other drunken women refused to share a cell with her.

  ‘No more, Ava,’ Douglas had said once the papers were signed. ‘No more.’

  He left her at the station with a few dollars to tide her over.

  So she will not make a nuisance, much as she reserves the right to. She will not cause a scandal. No fuss. Not for Douglas. Leave anarchy on the footpath. All she’s after is some paper.

  So she pays. It’s in her budget. It is, God forbid, tax deductible. It makes her feel like an upstanding citizen, and there’s something to be said for that feeling. A right and proper member of society. Mr Shoebridge remembers very well who she is and keeps an eagle eye on her. To him she’s as bad as the shoplifting schoolboys. Ava imagines his home life, but then dismisses it as beneath her, at the present. He has a system of convex mirrors set up so he can see behind magazine racks and around corners if people are letting drop his merchandise into their cavernous pockets. Nevertheless, he is happy to take her money.