Last Days of Ava Langdon Page 9

  One of them shouts: ‘Snap!’

  She’s got a lot on her mind and the pencil is helping.

  The maelstrom is a code

  For losing language, word by word

  Imaginings swirl and topple

  From the mighty pedestal

  Of higher things. It is far to fall

  And the gorge is strewn with rocks.

  The threads of coincidence

  Are makeshift and frail

  Ideas lost, large and minuscule,

  On the tongue’s broken building blocks.

  Another word for maelstrom, she thinks, what is it – where you stir the tea too vigorously with a spoon? Nope, it’s gone. Perhaps there is no word for it.

  She folds the napkins together and stuffs them in the bottom of her bag. Fodder for later.

  The tall spaceman gazes about the room but now does not seem to be looking for anything in particular.

  Someone shouts: ‘Shut the door.’

  The figure pulls the helmet on again, eyeless behind the visor, and backs out, hand raised in apology. The draught goes with him and the air stills. So, others could see it too, Ava thinks. It’s not just me. She is not even the centre of her own imaginings. She’s at the periphery of her delusions. And from the edge of her dark mind she can hear the sound of hooves, or is it glass breaking? She smells the daffodil, even though she knows it is plastic.

  She quickly gobbles down the rest of the bread roll. The fragrant steam wants to make her blow her nose. Perhaps she’s coming down with something? Cancer, maybe. Here in public she does not elect to employ the bushman’s hankie. Instead she reaches into a pocket and discovers not her kerchief but a withered apricot. How did that get there? For a second she thinks it might be an organ which has somehow slipped through a hole from her stomach into her pocket. In another pocket she finds a green fig. In another, ah, some toilet paper. She blows her nose with a wipe and a wiggle, leaving the sodden tissues in the ash tray. She gives full focus to the remains of the soup, lukewarm now, chewing the cud of a well-cooked carrot. Nothing like a well-cooked carrot. Glancing up at the clock she sees that already it is afternoon.

  * * *

  Where has the day gone? What has she accomplished? If only she had another life. She fortifies herself with a surreptitious swig from the sherry bottle, slides it back into her overcoat pocket. Mr Stroganoff watches her from his own table nearby, still talking to himself. She does not catch his eye for fear he may try to engage her in further conversation. What must it be like living inside his head? That’s the trouble with these poor old blabbermouths; they think their opinions are the most important you’re going to come across in a day’s march and you can never get a word in edgeways. Well, stuff and pickle that for a joke. Coat on, helmet on, bag over her shoulder, Ava leaves the warm, steamy hall and steps outdoors again. Again the pigeons erupt upwards, settling on the low-hanging eaves of the library, place of betrayal and deceit. For a moment she wonders what pigeon tastes like. One of these days, you never know, maybe it might come to that. She heads uphill towards the railway station and the underpass. It might be interesting to enumerate her steps, she thinks, count how many steps to the corner, but that would be pathological, like wanting to know how many lunches she’s had, and Ava is not pathological, no matter what they say. To mention the word stroganoff three times in the one breath, now that’s pathological. She is lucid and aware, on the verge of a new discovery. She just needs to clarify what it is without falling into the lava again. How would you begin to imagine, for example, your way into another person’s shoes when your own are so riddled with holes?

  * * *

  From the edge of her imaginings Ava can see Mitch coming, as if on a horse, galloping towards her …

  Mitchell Dunning (they call him Mitch although sometimes they call him Dunny) has been sent by his boss to fetch four hot pies and a litre of chocolate milk from the bottom bakery in Katoomba Street. His boss has tossed him the keys and a twenty-dollar note with specific instructions. Sauce on his. And don’t drag the chain. Dunny can have what he likes. Ava sees them as clearly as if they were on a piece of pink paper, busy chopping down a big tree, a Pinus radiata, growing too close to the railway line along Bathurst Road. Mitchell works for Gary Bailey, whose business goes by the fanciful title of Bailey’s Tree Surgery. Pruning. Removal. Chipping. Free quotes.

  Mitchell is nineteen. Ava remembers nineteen.

  It is Bailey’s job to monkey up the trees with the assistance of two great spikes embedded in his boots, which stick into the sides of the trunks as if he is climbing a glacier. A noble, manly pursuit. Starting at the top he cuts the uppermost branches with a small chainsaw which dangles from a hefty leather belt at his waist. He leans into the safety harness like a leather pelvis, the belt which wraps around the tree somehow keeping him up there in defiance of gravity. (Can you imagine it? In defiance of gravity!) The size of the chainsaw increases the lower down the tree he comes, so that when he is at last on the ground it is a monster-sized chainsaw that slices up the trunk like a wheel of cheese. Mitchell spends a lot of time with his head craned back watching for hand signals as to what he is supposed to do. Fetch. Carry. Look out. It is his job to gather up and collect these lighter branches, the brush, as they float down (it is a deceptive illusion), and stack them into piles where they can be cut into a more manageable size before being carted off or chipped into garden mulch. As a young man Dunny is impressed with all this destruction that he wants so much to be part of. His job involves a lot of sweat and a stiff neck. He is still young enough to take his body for granted. That morning, once the tree is down, Bailey says to Mitchell: ‘Here’s twenty bucks. Take my ute and go fetch us four pies from the bakery and don’t be all day about it. And don’t forget the sauce.’

  Bailey has no sons, but he has five daughters. Why not? Ava’s imagination is going off at a tangent, but never mind. Mitchell finds it amusing that Bailey has, through force of propinquity, come to adopt their style of speaking. Huh? Wiry, gristly, middle-aged Bailey often uses the language of his teenage daughters quite unconsciously to engage with people, and to express his more general disdain of the world. He regularly calls Mitchell a dweeb, or a nerd, or a goose, or a dropkick, or a total. He says oh man, and wow, more often than necessary, and calm the farm, and take a chill pill, language which seems completely out of place in his sun-creased mouth. He dislikes Mitchell simply because he is of an age his daughters might possibly find interesting. They do not. At least, ostensibly. They refer to their father’s labourer, who turns up early each morning while they breakfast in their pyjamas, as that dweeb, nerd, goose or dropkick, and ask him embarrassing questions like What sort of cheese do you eat?

  Ava sees that question in quotation marks. She does not know the answer.

  They ridicule the sparseness of his beard. However, they do it with passion. Bailey therefore makes Mitchell work harder than he might another groundsman of another age. He even makes Mitchell work in the rain, as he might have done a son he was trying to mould in his own image. Mitchell secretly hates Bailey, and he hates the daughters also, for all their skimpy breakfast pyjamas and the way they scratch themselves unselfconsciously. He doesn’t even like cheese. He hopes Bailey’s safety harness might one day snap, with all the heroics that would entail. Mitch wishes instead that he had been sent to the café where Marjorie works. He likes her, but no, Bailey wants pies.

  So Mitchell takes the keys and the twenty dollars and climbs into Bailey’s ute. He is exhausted, and sitting down, even like this for five minutes, feels slightly luxurious. Being paid to sit down, is that a perk of the adult world? Being paid to drive to the shops. It is almost decadent. He is prepared to enjoy this brief respite from the hard physical labour of the morning. The cuffs of his pants are full of sawdust which spills on the floor of the ute. He intends to take his time and feel the breeze. He turns the radio on. The
radio plays ‘Bennie and the Jets’. He drives into town and finds a spot to park in the main street. For a brief moment, behind the wheel, he can pretend he is Mr Bailey, Tree Surgeon. He can imagine he has another life.

  The girl in the bakery has just the sort of hair Mitch likes, though not as honey-blond as Marjorie’s. She is glowing from the heat of the ovens, and the smell of baking he attributes to her. There is cinnamon in the air. He makes his order and she packs four pies into paper bags for him.

  ‘Sauce?’

  ‘Yeah. Better. Not on mine. Thanks.’

  ‘Bye, Dunny.’

  Not knowing how to talk to her he pockets the change, Bailey is sure to count it, and steps outside. There was a squall before, but it looks like the rain is passing. Mindful of Bailey’s order not to dawdle – he’s been long enough – Mitch presses his foot down on the accelerator, climbing as fast as the ute will go up the steep hill towards the corner. And now he is coming.

  * * *

  Ava goes into the Paragon café and asks for a spare plastic bag. They look at her curiously, it is after all a chocolate shop, not a plastic bag shop; however, they give her one, proving that not all human interaction is fraught with self-interest. She wraps her new ream of paper in the plastic and secures it in her calico sack, which is secreted now beneath her coat, giving her an odd, lumpy shape. Just in case the rain … She’s thinking ahead. There is a woman on the footpath collecting signatures, or money, or both from passersby. She’s calling out to people – save something, or free something, or stop something, it’s not clear what. Her protest sign would take some dedicated reading, there’s such a lot of fine print on it. She’s just the sort Ava would often stop and chew the fat with. Save what? Free what? Do they want to be saved? Normally she would stop and engage with the finer points of the fine print. Spelling, for example. Syntax. The meaning of apocalypse. But today she doesn’t.

  She continues up the hill to the corner, soup still warm in her belly. Cars swishing up and down the street. People filing into the Savoy to see the lunchtime feature, which today is a family show called Death Wish starring Charles Bronson. Two hundred and forty-three steps from the Paragon to the corner. She steps off the footpath between two parked cars. Another vehicle, a ute, nips around the curve of the corner – appears slowly out of nowhere – skidding suddenly on the wet road, and, Ava looming large, knocks her flying into the gutter. Does the sound of breaking glass come before the impact, or after? She sees herself flying, putting out her hands to break her fall. The road rising to meet her. It’s like she’s already bounced back up again, but she hasn’t.

  Then there’s an awful thump and pies go tumbling off the seat. In her pocket the sherry bottle bursts dully, muffled by toilet paper and figs, and the left-hand headlight of the ute bursts on impact with the bottle. The wind is knocked from her sails. Her head cracks on the road, lucky she’s wearing her … Ava is surprised to find herself lying in the gutter looking at the stars. Who said that? No, no stars. Clouds. Lying in the gutter looking at the clouds. Not even clouds, just a grey, overhanging canopy of cumulo— of cumulo— of fog. Or is that her eyes glazing over? Street signs and shop awnings. Little pinpricks of drizzle needling her face.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ she says.

  The sky seems to grow purple over her. Christ, her leg hurts. In a moment there are people, men mostly, filling her view with their broad shoulders. The expressions on their faces all wide-eyed with concern, all talking at once.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asks one.

  ‘Is she dead?’ asks another.

  ‘Where does it hurt?’

  ‘Can you get up?’

  ‘Don’t try to move.’

  Too many imperatives.

  ‘No, I’m not dead,’ she answers the most important question first. Surely that much is obvious? She can feel the rainwater in the gutter seeping through her beautiful pinstriped trousers. It’s not warm like blood, so that’s a positive sign. Her helmet she sees lying further along the street, the carmine velvet of its interior upturned like a Pope’s begging bowl. She tries to sit up, but someone holds her down. Her hand finds a numb lump on her head somewhere between the size of a wren’s egg and an emu’s egg.

  ‘Best not to move, I think.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ she says, although her thigh hurts, not so much from the impact, but from the damned broken bottle. All these friends, worried for her welfare. It’s a surprise that so many people care for her. Better not let that feeling go too soon. In adversity breeds friendship. These dozens, scores, hundreds of friends, all concerned about her. There was that lady at the fence. She was nice. What was her name again? Marjorie from the coffee shop, the chap who gave her soup, all with a kind word, a human face. Would you class that as friendship? Are they friendships worth dying for, like the one Dave had with Red? The lost love of sisterhood. Time immemorial. Two hundred and forty-three steps.

  Mitchell appears in the throng, looking down at her, shaken, nervously tugging the wisps of his beard.

  ‘Is he all okay? He just stepped out in front of me.’

  ‘It’s a lady.’

  ‘Someone call an ambulance.’

  ‘A lady? I thought it was a man. Just stepped out in front of me. I wasn’t speeding.’

  Ava manages to sit up.

  ‘Get off me,’ she says to the owner of the hands holding her down.

  ‘Better not move, love,’ says another fellow.

  ‘I’m fine. But you really ought to watch where you’re driving, young man.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Mitchell.

  Ava studies his face, trying to decipher his shock, but that would appear to be impossible.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, son,’ says someone else.

  Where the sherry bottle has broken, Ava can feel her pocket full of glass like seashells or shark teeth. That’s what is hurting her, the glass cutting through her trousers into her thigh; that and the humiliation.

  ‘Here’s a cop,’ says someone else.

  Pushing his way through the curious crowd – Ava recognises the young policeman from earlier this morning.

  ‘You again,’ he says, giving her the once-over.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t Officer Tickle-my-toes,’ she says, grimacing.

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘Tickety-boo,’ says Ava, ‘except for my leg.’

  ‘She just stepped out in front of me,’ says Mitchell, looking around for some support.

  ‘I think she’s been drinking,’ says another stickybeak.

  Everyone trying to get in on the drama.

  ‘Let me up,’ says Ava again.

  It is hard to retain a skerrick of dignity while sitting in the gutter surrounded by inquisitive well-wishers.

  ‘She must be drunk.’

  And some not-so-well. Passersby staring from the footpath. The traffic banking up behind the ute with one broken headlight, like a doll with one eye.

  ‘Can you move your leg?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Her hip is starting to hurt now, but she thinks she’ll keep that information to herself.

  ‘Here’s the ambulance,’ says another voice, and with the utterance of that phrase all her problems have been solved—

  Or else they’re just starting. The ambulance pulls up alongside the kerb, blocking the other side of the road. That’s more like it: bring the city to a standstill, she thinks. Cool as a couple of Siamese cats the ambulance men step from the vehicle, its light twirling lazily on the roof. With their arrival the histrionics subside and the onlookers start to move away, going about their business. No one will be asked to block a spurting artery with a thumb; no one is going to need to hold a limb while it is amputated here at the roadside. Save that story for the dinner table.

  The ambulance men give Ava a cursory examination. They peer into her eyes, f
eel her head – ouch – watch it, fellah. They check her pulse and other vital signs. They ask her questions, one of which is: ‘Did you hit your head?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How did you get this lump?’

  ‘Oh, all right then.’

  They find the broken glass in her pocket, mixed up with some walnut shells and lacerated green figs.

  ‘I’m all right, I tell you.’

  They decide (Ahmed and Ben) that to be on the safe side they’ll take her to the hospital for observation and some precautionary X-rays. This news releases a squirt of adrenaline in Ava.

  ‘Not the hospital. I can’t go to the hospital.’

  She swoons against Officer Fowler’s arm.

  ‘It’s a precaution.’

  ‘I hate the hospital.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s protocol,’ says one of the ambulance men, Ben, ‘when someone hits their head.’

  ‘But I’m fine, really I’m fine. See, I can stand. I can walk a straight line. Besides, I’m needed at home.’

  ‘We’ll be the judge of that,’ says the other, Ahmed, a nice-looking boy with a pair of red-roseleaf lips. If only they’d let the nice ones talk to her. Officer Fowler waves the remaining onlookers away, nothing to see here. Despite her protestations they gently manoeuvre her to the back of the ambulance, checking how she favours one leg. At least it’s not broken.

  ‘How’s your hip, love?’

  ‘Fine. How’s yours?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I won’t go to the hospital,’ she says, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Too late.’

  They hoist her up the step into the rear of the vehicle. Ava feels like she is mounting a catafalque, though without the ceremony. She looks out at the dissipating throng, letting the afternoon return and settle after having been blown about by the commotion like leaves, or like a new perm on a windy day.

  ‘Just stepped out in front of me,’ Mitchell is saying to Fowler on the footpath. Ava can read their body language like a Saturday pantomime.