FICTION: an extract from Bluebird, a new Aussie classic by Malcolm Knox
In Bluebird, a smart satire on an Aussie way of life in its twilight, author Malcolm Knox presents a family falling apart in a world we recognise with affection.
“How’s things, anyway?”
Kelly and Ben were crossing the vacant lot behind the re station. A public right-of-way ran through the lot, where the community had begun a herb and vegetable garden.
“Wait, what?”
Unlike Gordon, Kelly didn’t repeat herself for Ben. He heard what she said, it just took time to sink in. She loved him and, in the circumstances, indulged him, but she had her limits. “Good,” Ben said.
Kelly bent down to the corten retaining wall separating the herb and vegetable beds by produce and “owner”. The community gardeners had initially staked signs with twee painted signs such as GIVE PEAS A CHANCE and DON’T STOP BELEAFING, but more recently the messages had become a more tersely proprietorial MEG + JANE or PETE + LIZ, and the council had put up an explanatory sign saying visitors were welcome to “enjoy” the garden, meaning look but don’t pick.
Ben watched his mother pluck some sprigs of rosemary, dill, coriander and parsley. “Mum, you can’t do that.”
“I’m cooking pasta tonight. Wouldn’t you like some fresh avours?”
“It’s against the spirit.”
Kelly considered him for a moment. “It’s a community space, right?” “Wait, what?”
“It can only be a true community space if the produce belongs to the community.” Ben wished his mother wasn’t so smart. He hated getting into philosophical arguments with her. “The signs,” he said helplessly.
“Which have been put up by that horrible council. Next thing, they’ll be putting out tenders for lockable fences.”
“Because of you,” Ben said.
With handfuls of four types of herb, Kelly pushed herself to her feet and brushed the dirt off her knees.
“If I can’t enjoy the garden, it’s a private space, which couldn’t be legal.”
“If everybody did what you do, why would the gardeners plant anything?”
“Ah, but everybody doesn’t do what
I do.” She grinned. “And I only pick a few leaves here and there; it’s not like I go for the carrots and tomatoes.”
People called Ben’s mother a cheat. It seemed worse than the other things they called her, because it was true. She’d cheat community gardeners out of their herbs. He didn’t want to say anything, though. Her hobbies, like Bikram and Pilates and golf, were meant to calm people down, but in Ben’s experience, exercise wound his mum up like a prize- ghter. When she had her golf shoes in her hand, she always came home looking for an argument. “You sound like your father,” Kelly said as they resumed walking. “Always the moral high ground.” Ben thought it was pretty rich of his mother to talk about morality, but he didn’t take her on. “Why can’t Dad be happy?”
Kelly let that sit between them all the way past the re station and the BSLSC to the bottom of the stairs to The Lodge. She thumbed a text message. Ben knew she was asking Gordon if Dog was in the house.
Poor Mum, he thought. Poor Dad.
Not getting any response, Kelly started out up the stairs. At the rst landing, she stopped. “You might not believe this, but it’s all I’ve ever wanted.” …
Kelly waited until Ben looked her in the forehead. The sun went down behind his back. “I’ve only ever wanted your dad to be happy. But I’ve come to the realisation lately that it might not be possible.”
Ben followed her up the stairs, wishing he could say something. He could smell the herbs in her hand. Too smart, she was; so smart she could be mean without knowing it.
****
These wobbly wooden steps from the beach brought to mind the places she would rather be. She wanted to travel – somewhere landlocked like Mexico City or Udaipur or Madrid. The Himalayas. It didn’t matter as long as it was a million miles from the ocean, high and freaking dry.
Butter ies rose in her stomach as she came to the side door to see a portrait of the men in, or on their way out of, her life: Gordon, his phone with her neglected message on the card table, was shunting saucepans around the kitchen with a towel slobbishly over his shoulder (how many times? How many freaking times?). Dog, at the jigsaw puzzle, was annoying Josie, Tonsure Man and Red Cap. Jesus. And she had to walk in and pretend this was her home.
She skirted around the deck and followed Ben to the balcony, where he was avoiding the crowd inside and mind-sur ng the waves below. “I don’t want to go in either,” she said. “Fancy a spot of coordinate geometry?”
Maths was to Kelly what sur ng was to Gordon. You had to have something you did with your son. Doing maths with Ben made her want to strangle him half the time, but it was better than only sharing an interest in whether he had cleaned his room.
“Wait, what? I’ve done my homework.”
“You’re in Year 11, darling.
If you’ve done your homework, we do revision. It’ll be fun.”
Ben returned her brittle friendliness with a withering microsecond, his standard length of eye contact. You couldn’t say he was unable to express non-verbal emotion. He could, with impressive economy. She occasionally wondered if the vacuum left by Gordon’s passive acceptance of the whole break-up/in delity thing had drawn out Ben’s latent hostility to her, and therefore done his emotional development a favour.
A blessing in disguise, then.
Freaking good disguise.
He turned away from her and went down the external stairs. Which, she had to concede, was what she deserved.
“Okay, no geometry then,” she said to her vanished son, as if they had come to an agreement. She entered the living room, where the notice the men took of her inverted her needs. Ben, who she loved more dearly than life, had run away from her. Dog, who she generally wanted to punch or f**k but at this moment to show the door, gave her a blandly pleasant hello
and competitively tap-tapped a jigsaw piece between Red Cap and Josie.
And Gordon, for whom she had a perplexed overhang of strong but complicated feeling, greeted her with a relieved smile and a sign language offer of dinner.
“I’m looking for guinea pigs,” he said. “Wasn’t it my cooking night?” she said, throwing a savage look at the guests, meaning Gordon was supposed to have kicked them out by now. Gordon led her into the kitchen. He swung through the saloon door like Steve McQueen sorting the place out, only he was going the wrong way. He picked up an expensive pot holder and wrestled for control of a vast quantity of fettuccine. The fancy pot holder was, she noticed, one of those Eastons gems. Once he’d explained these out-of-character purchases, she fell a little bit – a tiny, tiny bit – in the general vicinity, the hazy insinuation, back in love with him.
She dipped a nger into the sauce, let out a gasp of pleasure, and picked up a spoon to go in again.
“Haven’t you been fed this week?” Gordon asked.
“I just get so hungry after golf. Where did you learn to make an arrabbiata like this?”
“Thank you,” Gordon said. “Only you could make a compliment sound like an accusation.”
“You must be having an affair,” she said. A proper arrabbiata. Next it’d be a haircut less than 10 years behind fashion. And then shoes without socks, and she’d be dead to him.
“I brought you some goodies.”
She tossed her gleanings from the community garden onto the benchtop.
Gordon gave them a snooty look and said, “You know I don’t deal in hot herbs.”
“Of course not. You’re the saviour of Old Bluebird.”
“Unlike pilfering community herb gardens, which is really sticking it to the man.”
“Oh, you drive me mad,” she said without feeling. For lack of anything else to do, she began to run the tap to wash up, but then, remembering that she might look like a wife and mother, dropped a handful of utensils with an over-dramatic splash and stripped off the rubber gloves she had just put on. Her throat tightening with some kind of dirty emotional bomb, she moved to the window. “This is an inch thick in salt scum,” she said. “How can you enjoy the ocean through that?” But she knew the answer: Gordon saw the world through salt-covered glass.
And he had an abiding affection for scum. “Don’t you have some buddy who cleans on the cheat?”
Gordon’s eyes widened. She wondered if she had said that or thought it. So Freudian. Was it Freudian when you came out with stuff like that? “Cheap,” she corrected herself.
Kelly moved to the saloon door and watched the jigsaw players, who could have been something particularly dire from Cézanne. She knew how to tag an emotion with a great painter’s name – Merci beaucoup, Workers’ Education Association night courses! She had to look outwards at this stage of life, and the art appreciation classes she’d taken up distracted her commentary from, in this instance, “Look at those no-hopers stuck in their rut” to “Aha, Cézanne, something like The Absinthe-Drinking Jigsaw-Playing Desperates”. She would soon move on to abstract expressionism, and those people, those blobs of paint, would be stuck here forever. Although, or perhaps because, she had grown up in Bluebird as the only daughter of the village chieftain, Kelly had always thought of Bluebirders as “those people”. They’d always suspected that she looked down on them, but they didn’t know why, as they couldn’t tell the difference between entitlement and entrapment.
“Have you been seeing that new hairdresser?” Josie squawked up the slope of the oor at Kelly, who self-consciously touched the back of her head, undercut two days earlier.
“Which one?” Kelly asked unenthusiastically, trying to recall if any of her recent Tinder dates had been a barber. Josie was giving her a look that was either fed up or startled. It was hard to tell with Josie, her affect was so mixed up since her brain surgeries. Kelly thought: a face straight from Van Gogh, equally confused and confusing, a handful of pieces missing.
“She’s Indian,” Josie said signi cantly.
Kelly couldn’t think of which of Bluebird’s two dozen working hairdressers in four competing salons Josie might be talking about, but that was irrelevant because Josie was really talking about her, about Kelly. … Months and years could pass without her being reminded of the colour of her skin. She was not Indian, of course; she was Australian. But to a certain generation of Bluebird people, birth could not wash out your “real” origins. No matter where you were born or to whom, Josie deemed it important that you knew “another” Indian person on the beaches, just because, well, you lot might want your hair cut by your own kind.
“Do you know her?” Josie persisted. ... Kelly had to get out of here. But – oh bugger, she couldn’t. She lived here. She had to get them out of here. But she was outnumbered. Again.
She slapped the diagonal pine feature wall and stomped downstairs, out of the house for – what, a romantic walk on the beach, hand in hand with herself? And who should she run into but another of them, Gordon’s omigod-daughter on her way up from a board session.
Admitting defeat, Kelly slumped onto the driftwood log that served as a bench on the patch of lawn and watched Lou come up. The girl was built like a wheelie bin, but in her one-piece swimsuit all that wet muscle looked kind of sexy. “You look like you’re running for your life,” Lou said. Kelly felt mildly offended – Lou did not know her well enough to say something so insightful … “I’m stuck here,” Kelly said. “What’s your excuse?” AWW