Read an extract from Maggie by Catherine Johns

Start reading the unforgettable Maggie by Catherine Johns

Prologue
 

. . . we possess nothing certainly except the past . . .
EVELYN WAUGH, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED

For more than twenty years after I left school, I put up a shield against memory.

I couldn’t bear to listen to certain music: The Beatles; Beethoven’s Symphony Number 6; Christmas carols sung by a choir.

If I brushed against a cluster of star-jasmine flowers, I inhaled with the scent an unblemished, forgotten bliss, and I was no longer on a Melbourne footpath but beside Delia in the line of boarders, waiting to go in to mass at the convent in Cumberland, the air sweetly spiced from the old jasmine vine arching on the cloister: beyond it the chapel’s shadow lay blue-green on the lawn, the garden was golden in the early morning sun. Or if I heard the shrill, ratcheting sounds of plovers, I was in the bottom paddock with Delia after school, talking in the peaceful air, she eating her orange and I my apple, blameless and content.

Other times, I heard the querulous calls of doves outside my window in the morning, and I was in the room in Abernant I shared with Anne, waking to the cold stone of dread in my chest, fumbling beneath my pillow for my book.

And for years I couldn’t sleep in a motel.

But it was the memories of my years at the convent before I met Lloyd that left me winded, stranded in the space between present and past.

Then one morning I open the door and see Delia on the verandah. I hug a ghost and touch flesh, solid and warm. We stand back and look at one another.

Delia says, ‘You look just like you did when you were twelve – as if . . .’

‘. . . the wind would blow me over! You look the same. For goodness’ sake, are you going to stand there all day?’

In the kitchen, we sit opposite each other at the table. The grey stippling Delia’s hair, the shallow furrows between her eyebrows and at the outer corners of her eyes, one moment cause me pain, the next are as light as a layer of dust.

After almost twenty-five years, she is the same: her rapid speech and staccato laugh, her practical haircut, her shirt collar folded over her crew-necked jumper. She still wears no make-up, no adornment. For this reason, the slim, gold chain that slides in and out of her left sleeve is invested with a subtle, mysterious meaning. I try to picture her with her husband and children, but I can’t.

She unpacks from her briefcase the papers she has to put in order for her conference in the afternoon. I can’t stop looking at her hands, which are knobbly-knuckled, more square than oval, and as familiar as my own. But they belong on the scarred surface of a school desk, on the basket-weave pattern of a laminex table in the refectory. On the official papers I see her name: Dr Delia Cusack. She’s famous, in her field. She travels the world. The work she does betters people’s lives. I’m proud of her, as though we were related.

When she leans back in her chair I wait, and yes . . . she tips it onto two legs and balances, her fingertips gripping the edge of the table. Delia was never afraid of falling, and she never did.

Which of us gets a word in first? So many years sketched in over an hour at my table. I picture the old farmhouse she lives in now with Martin and their two small children – her youngest has just started kindergarten, mine Year 12, while my two older ones have already left home. While we talk, I’m aware of the incongruity of Delia’s presence in my kitchen, as if she travelled here across time as well as space.

Then she says, ‘It wasn’t easy to find you. I knew you were probably still living in Melbourne, that was all.’

‘I heard you’d gone to study overseas after you left Sydney. I used to send letters care of your mother, but you never replied. I thought she might’ve thrown them away when she saw my name on the back of the envelope.’

‘Why?’

‘The big scandal. The scarlet woman.’

I remember Lloyd’s silhouette against the window of the senior library, when he stopped beside me where I was drawing alone at the big table: his round collar shiny and white above the black suit. Delia was in the classroom next door: the day, the moment my life took off in the opposite direction I’d planned, right off the edge of the map, like falling over a cliff.

Delia says, ‘That was hard for me, having to keep it a secret.’ It’s not an accusation; it’s a fact.
I asked too much of her, but she was loyal. Giving in to the need to tell someone about him – it could only have been her – was selfish. I told no one else about what led me into the false starts, the wrong turns, the dead ends – the way I see my life now, sitting opposite Delia.

‘I know. Now I do. I’m sorry.’

For a moment neither of us speaks.

Then I say, ‘I have dreams about trying to go back to school. But there aren’t any uniforms to fit me, or there’s some other reason I’m not allowed back in. In one of them Sister Theresa looked angry and bitter. I said, “I was young, I didn’t know anything.” But she just laughed a mocking laugh. The other night I dreamed I was standing in front of a big cupboard. I’d left all these things behind and I had to face the mess, it was stacked to overflowing. I didn’t know where to start, or where to take the stuff. All I knew was I couldn’t take it home.’ 

'Oh, Maggie.’
I can’t tell her how I wake from these dreams with a grief as sharp as physical pain. I don’t know what else to say, and as though she senses this,

Delia says, ‘I’m glad they’re holding the conference here. I wanted to see you, of course – and Melbourne’s a lovely city.’
‘I can see it, but I can’t feel it. I think it’s because I didn’t choose to live here.’
‘Why did you stay?’
‘My children were born here, I didn’t want to uproot them. And their father lived here.’
Delia looks up at the unframed painting on the wall, the blue outline of a nude woman. ‘Is that you?’
I laugh. ‘No, I painted it in a life class a long time ago. I never finished it.’
‘I thought you might have become an artist.’
‘I never studied art.’ It feels as hard to explain to Delia about my life since school as it was to explain to her then about Lloyd.

When it’s time for her to leave, Delia packs her briefcase, and we walk together down the hall and out onto the footpath. The life in her still burns and warms the air, it seems, on this cold Melbourne day, as it did on winter mornings at St Dominic’s, standing beside her waiting for the click of the wooden clapper – the signal to enter the chapel, or after mass to walk along the cloister outside the hall to the refectory. Now she walks ahead of me with the same gait, springing on each foot – almost bouncing: I remember telling her once that she looked airborne, as if she touched the ground only lightly, without depending on it. A taxi slows for her and stops.

‘I’ll see you tonight.’

She slips inside the taxi and I lose sight of her in moments. I go back inside and wander through the house as if seeing it for the first time. It’s another rented one. Beyond the front room on each floor it is dark. Some of the plaster is peeling and cracked; the paint is flaking on the window-sills. I have an image of the house where Delia’s children will live until ready to leave: the trees planted when they were babies, the nurtured garden, the verandahs shaded by vines.

In this house the arrangements in every room are makeshift. All the light shades are made of paper. The kitchen table is too big, bought for another room. Each object my gaze falls on – a vase, a cushion, a lamp – seems to belong to someone else. I have lived in this city as a stranger.

From next door, where an extension to a dilapidated Victorian mansion is being demolished, I can hear the intermittent pounding of jackhammers. Until the Health Department closed it down it was a nursing home. Once an old man in a dressing-gown knocked on the front door. When I opened it he begged me to call a taxi to take him home to Ashburton, but, guilty and sad, I took him back to the institution next door. For the rest of that day I felt his displacement: his grief. Where the stripped brick walls have been prised away they are exposed to the weather, and jagged doorways open onto air. The building has been turned inside out.

When I open the back door to go to the laundry, I notice the dust that shrouds the brick paving and the leaves of the peach tree. I see everything differently now that Delia is here: it is as though everything familiar and solid behind me, as I stand on the step looking down, is being demolished too.

Delia leaves the next morning. I think how strange and yet normal it felt to be sleeping under the same roof, as we did at school for six years. I think how just as on our last day together there – I don’t remember saying goodbye before her mother scooped her up, it seemed, into her car and away – our parting feels like an interruption to a long and intense conversation which might never be resumed.

We hug, and Delia shoves her bags into the back of the taxi and says something to the driver, who laughs. She slides into the passenger seat, and is gone.

I stand shivering in the doorway. I’m aware of the bland ness of the sky above the tops of the trees and of the backdrop of the buildings opposite, of the now meaningless spaces between the trees in the park at the end of our street. From where I stand, the familiar streets and paths wind away in a maze.

That winter, I lie in bed in the grip of the flu. Delia’s visit has shattered my defence against the memories of what happened when I was seventeen, and afterwards. When the noise of the jackhammers stops in the afternoon, the house is quiet except for the sound of the wind, which threatens to shake the house out of its socket. In the pictures of the world framed by the two long windows, I can see the people bend under its weight, the cars plough into it; the trees are acrobatic. The turbulence inside me, and in the city outside, are seamless. Then the rain falls. It plummets. It beats and beats the earth. The gutters overflow.

In the sea of rain, the house is an island. The world I drift in is fluid, the world outside – buildings, trees, trams – is blurred. This house becomes another one that in my mind is always dark. Once, in a feverish dream, I walk in daylight along the path from the gate to the verandah of the house in Abernant. An unseen force propels me to the front door, which opens at my approach into the darkness of night, and I awake in a long forgotten terror.
By the middle of the afternoon it is as dim as twilight, and the darkness and the cold seep through the bricks and mortar; they glide, ghost-like, through the shuddering windowpanes. The room I lie in becomes all the cold, dark rooms where I once lay with Lloyd. Time shifts like water, and I sink further and further into an inward world.