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Robertson, Deborah : Proudflesh (1997)

Proudflesh

Proudflesh

The shoes are outside the screen door. They are white and very clean, almost new. Their hard vinyl looks unrelenting; they are shoes of briskness and efficiency. They are modest, they will do their work and make no demands. But there is a note of defeat about them; the laces hang open in a broken way as if torn at in a fury to release the foot. If you're curious, if you see these shoes as you're opening the screen door and crouch to peer at them, you will notice that inside they are covered by a glistening wetness. When you lift the shoes the blood will fill your palms. And then you will see that there are gouts of blood on the step before you, as you open the door you will see that the blood is there too, it has crossed the threshold; the blood is in your house.

The day is cold and sunless but as she alights from the bus she brings with her the tropics. Her feet on the step are tanned and strong, the toenails shimmering coral; her sandals are nothing but a few elegant twists of copper leather and an heraldic bronze buckling at the ankle. The bones of her feet are light and sure. They might be winged feet; the winged feet of a messenger, feet dusted with the gold of myth.

I cannot lift my head to meet her eyes. Hiding in the crowd, I have already seen her searching for sight of me from behind the bus windows. Her face shows all that she is, and has been.

Her feet hurry towards me and I am overcome by an approaching humidity. There are frangipanis on her dress. She holds out her arms. My mother has great strength as she pulls me towards her, trying to crush between our bodies the time and distance that have kept us apart.

The doctor was handsome and chocolate-eyed, he wore a silk tie that my mother admired. She told him that she and her three children were new to the city, that her husband had one day vanished and the money in the bank account had vanished too. Have you looked for the body of your husband at the morgue? the doctor asked. Yes, she replied, he wasn't there.

My mother took off her white shoes. She explained that she had bought these shoes for her job, that she was a cleaner at other people's houses. These harsh shoes were all she could afford. She showed him the injuries they had committed upon her feet.

The doctor said he could help. He said that a young woman with such fine legs should have been a dancer. But what were his thoughts as he loaded his needle and injected the anaesthetic? Did his mind travel up under her skirt to recall the arousal of other men who had held a woman's crippled foot; the tiny golden lotus, broken and bound? Or perhaps his thoughts were no more than a gardener pruning a troublesome rosebush. The doctor snipped the tendon that gave life to my mother's smallest toe; it fell like a sickly bud. Although the anaesthetic had dispensed with the pain, her heart felt the electric drill. The doctor gouged at her wounds, drilling deep holes in her heels and her toes, her soft arches crumbling, long wet curls of flesh falling to the floor. My mother's voice was underneath her terrible nausea. It was underneath her fear. It was underneath the sound of the drill and the doctor's voice. He was telling her about his daughter. I am a weak man, he said, if it is a horse she wants, then it is a horse she shall have. The blood could not be contained by pressing at it with a cloth so the nurse brought a bucket, for her to bleed into. The nurse mopped the floor and wiped the instruments, and when the doctor was finished she knelt on the floor and bandaged my mother's feet, staring into her eyes as if there were something she wanted to say.

Outside the surgery my mother checked her purse but there was not enough money for a taxi. She picked up her bags of groceries and started up the hill towards home. The wetness came first, the oily filling of her shoes. This was followed by uneasy thoughts; perhaps the doctor had fitted her into the shoes, into her new life. Perhaps he had cut her down to size. And then the anaesthetic wore off, and the pain began.

My mother finds much to delight in as I show her around my flat; the view of the city is fascinating, she finds the jarrah warm, my wildflower arrangement talented. But I feel as though we have stepped into a doll's house and are looking at imitations of the world; the city view is painted on the lid of a matchbox, my books are crayon strokes on a cardboard wall, and I too am flat and substanceless, watched at all times by a giant eye, moved about in this replica life by another's whim.

As my mother unpacks she tells me about the work of the American archaeologist she met on the bus, the unusual kindnesses she observed between the co-drivers, and the games she was taught by the Muslim children who were travelling to meet their grandparents. All of these people will know about her holiday with her daughter, she has carried a great excitement with her on the long bus journey from her home. I am racing the clock of her disappointment; I lie and tell her that I like the T-shirt she has bought me and will wear it all the time when summer comes. On the front of the T-shirt there is a koala lounging under palm trees, the koala is wearing a pair of spotted bikinis and sipping a long drink; leading a tropical life. It will make a change from all your black, she says.

The headmistress walked me to the door of my new classroom. I had already heard the bell and seen the children flee the playground. I was late therefore; I was not in time. When you sang it was important to be in time or you would be heard, a peep coming after the others had finished their chorus. I was late and apart from the other children; I was in a little boat of lateness, drifting the deep waters of their island, not able to come ashore. I followed carefully behind the stranger's back while her heels clipped the asphalt. On my schoolcase the name of my old school had been crossed out and the new name written in texta. I thought of the sandwiches I carried in my case; my mother's hands folding the rainbow paper around them, little triangles at the end, like a present. There was sadness in the sandwiches; I could feel her sadness crossing the roads all by itself, coming down the street, all the way to the school; there was sadness inside the pleats of the skirt bouncing on the stranger's calves, there was sadness in the sky and in the taste of breakfast in my mouth.

That night I lay in bed and listened to the sounds of television through the wall and my brothers' breathing in their beds on either side of me. My brothers' bodies hurt me. I studied their small shapes described by the light from the hallway. My youngest brother was sprawled wildly across his blankets as if thrown from a great height, the other lay neatly, his arms by his side, in the centre of the bed. He looked like a lower-case l, and the covers over him were smooth; he was hardly there at all. All day I had watched for their bodies; across the playground I had seen them eating their sandwiches, running behind the other children. I couldn't look at them anymore. I closed my eyes and looked, instead, at the darkness there.

My friend has been invited to a costume party in a mansion by the sea. The hostess is a charismatic woman with a gift for the orchestration of spectacular events. For this party she has bestowed upon each of her guests the character of a famous person. The hostess will be Cleopatra. My friend asks if I will help her prepare for the party, and my mother says she is happy to come along. I fill a bag with make-up and jewellery, and arrange for myself an attitude of equanimity and good humour.

My friend is waiting for us, smoking a cigarette, at the top of the staircase that curves through the voluptuous interior of her apartment building. I look up at her as we take the first terrazzo step, and see that already, although she is wearing only stockings and a nude petticoat, she is becoming Joan Crawford. She taps a satin toe towards us, as if impatient, and she is able to do entrancing things with the smoke from her cigarette; feathers and even whole wings of smoke fly from her mouth and nostrils. My friend's personality spills down the staircase over us out onto the brushed lawns and topiary. The hostess has perceived an undercurrent in my friends matriachal nature; for this night she has been granted permission to enjoy her tyranny.

My mother sits on the edge of the bathe and watches as I draw a merciless blooded gash across my friend's thin lips.

Other friends arrive to share the taxi ride to the beach. They are party-excited and besotted with their new selves - practising an accent here, a gesture there - and they do not extend the full courtesies to my mother when I introduce her. The hostess has seemingly flattered them all: Andy Warhol, Dorothy Parker, Robert de Niro, Ivana Trump, Jean-Paul Sartre. They are hyperboles of themselves; their latent identities have been summoned. I expect there will be trouble amongst my friends tonight.

As we walk home I try to be as lively with my mother as I was with my friends. I tell her what I have heard about the ruined mansion by the sea; that the ceiling of the lilac ballroom has swollen and burst and a confetti of plaster roses showers the dancers while the chandeliers, broken free of all but one or two of their chains, tip and swing their lights over their heads, across the walls the putti fly with their cheeks and buttocks smashed as if something could not resist biting their gorgeous rounds, the curtains are stiff with salt, the seagulls cry. Punch is served from a gold-clawed bath.

My mother says that she is sorry I'm not going to the party. I lie and tell her that I want to spend the time with her.

I could've had a quiet night watching the television, she says, and I realise she would have liked the time alone.

I don't tell my mother that I have not been invited to the party. I provoke no identification with a famous person; for that, one must have clear lines. I try to imagine elaborations upon the theme of myself but I can only imagine a swamp, a column of smoke or at best, for comic effect, a spectre costumed in a white sheet with cut-outs for eyes, dragging a heavy chain, moaning.

My mother says: You could have gone to the party as Marilyn Monroe. I am too surprised to ask her why she has made this connection. You could have lightened your hair and worn a white dress and stilettos, she says. And then she too looks surprised, and troubled, and it seems neither of us knows why she has said this strange thing. I turn our thoughts towards dinner.

There were journeys from which my father did return. He rolled up his sleeve and put his arm out the window, the horizon charmed him, he drove until suddenly, like elastic, he reached the limit of his extension and was snapped back home to us.

When my father returned, he rested. The blue Holden cooled its engine in the driveway. The car's rear fender had been crumpled by a kangaroo and insect juices smeared the headlights, there was a mash of feathers and blood on the windscreen.

I would remember this damage when my mother walked. When my mother walked I thought it sounded like birds hitting the windscreen. This, of course, was not true. There was only the faint cracking sound of her ankles and the dull padding of orthopaedic shoes. But I thought I heard it anyway; I heard it everywhere she went.

I find my mother weeping in the kitchen. I startle her as I enter the room and see that she has been muffling the sound with a tea towel, trying not to wake me. She has been crying for a long time; the fine blood vessels between her eyebrows have burst and left a mark like a tiny red flower. I remember this now from childhood; we called it the tear rose. I touch her arm and ask her to tell me what is wrong.

I haven't eaten meat since I got here! she sobs.

I rush to my drawer of vitamins. Do you need an iron tablet? I say. I've got three sorts.

She shakes her head. Maybe I'm just homesick, she says. Your ways aren't my ways. You don't need a mother, I don't know what it is you need. I need meat. I need fresh air. She flings her arms up. Why do you keep all the windows in this place closed?

We walk to the shops in the rain, sharing an umbrella. For this I must speed up and my mother must slow down. It is awkward at first, but then we get it right. My mother cheers up the moment she sees the butcher. I stand outside the intimate circle of their negotiations and remember other moments like this, other butcher shops, chemists, newsagencies, bootmakers; moments of succour. Now I agree with her choice of some comma-shaped lamb chops, and find that I am hungry.

We buy sweet potatoes and take the long route home so that we can stop to get a few cans of beer. On the way my mother says, that butcher was a pleasant man, and then she wants to explain something to me. Butchers know about being alone, she says, they might not be alone themselves but it is a way living they respect. It must be different now, I'm sure when you buy six mushrooms and two bananas and the smallest carton of milk, the person at the check-out doesn't bat an eyelid. But when I first left here and was alone and not anybody's mother anymore with a trolley piled high, the shop assistants were different. The kind ones pitied you and the others made you feel you were asking too much of them, they handled your things roughly - the food you had chosen to eat - as if they wanted to shake you or slap your face. But butchers were not like that, they'd stand in front of the chicken breasts, lifting each one up for you to see, turning it this way and that, and they'd suggest green beans and a glass of white wine to go with it. Or if you felt like a roast beef they'd be happy to do one up for you. Enough for a meal and a cold lunch, they'd say. And when they handed you the white paper parcel, it might have been small, but it was a treat.

The first time my mother went to the podiatrist, she went alone. After the visit she had to cross the bridge from his surgery to the bus stop on the other side of the highway. A strong wind was blowing. She carried groceries, she was late for work, below her the bus she must catch was moving quickly through the traffic. She thought of the podiatrist's gentle hands touching her feet, his face grave and withholding as if he was in the presence of an atrocity. In her next heavy step was the day before her and the night to follow; on the crest of the bridge she stopped. The groceries dragged on her arms, her bus pulled into its stop and out again, but she could not move. When people passed by and saw her, they moved instinctively closer to the railing. But one woman was curious; she looked once and couldn't help but look again. My mother held her eye. My mother whispered to her: Help me. And two policemen came; one held her arm, and the other held her shopping, and together they brought her back down to the ground again.

After our lunch ot lamb chops and beer my mother wants to watch Days of Our Lives. She reminds me that on days when I was home from school she would leave the milk bottles souring in other people's sinks, the plugs of hair blocking their drains, and we would watch this on television together. Now I open the windows for her; it is raining again. Things are stormy in Salem too; characters hushed interiors wearing water-spattered overcoats, shaking themselves down. But this is a night of particular tempest: THE STRANGLER IS ON THE LOOSE. He is killing the promiscuous women of Salem. It is easy for him to identify these women because they wear dark lipstick and their laughter is full and throaty. These women work in the service industries; they are barmaids, waitresses, beauticians. Now the thunder begins to roll: the strangler, when he stops his killing and brushes his hair, is engaged to be married. His is a lovely fiancee, golden-locked, moist-eyed, fluffy-tongued, and she does not work for a living. We see her warm and safe on this lousy night: she sits at the end of her single bed, her teddy bear like a magistrate upon the pillows. She turns, with exquisite delicacy, and pain, the pages of a photograph album. Her fingernail caresses a picture of herself as a blond and ringleted child, party frock and sweet smile. Then something happens deep down inside; she lifts her head and sets her chin and her purpose. She defiantly returns teddy's stare: she has decided she will do this, she will, she will travel through this night of turbulence and danger to The Assignation, to the motel, to meet her fiance, to give of herself this first time, to MAKE LOVE TO HIM.

The plot sickens, says my mother, grinning at me.

Life has changed in the little town of Salem since my mother and I last watched this together. These characters are new to me, there is no family here, organising a central plot. It was always the family, suffering deep haemorrhage from within or struck by the wanton cruelties of the outside world, and the traumas were of a different kind: inoperable tumours, obstructed love, the sudden appearance of a hitherto-unknown son or daughter, accidents resulting in lower-body paralysis, appearance-altering surgery, amnesia.

The strangler's fiancee is driving through the storm. Branches lash the windscreen of her car. On the radio there is a newsflash - the strangler is still on the loose. Her eyes widen in terror but she is forced onward; the passion of her sacrifice is far, far greater than her fear.

I recall tales of amnesia from those earlier episodes. I remember when the favourite son was struck on the head, or perhaps struck by lightning. His name was Mickey. He forgot himself and wandered away from his family and his important job at the hospital and began a simpler, happier life elsewhere. My mother and I did not like this story, we felt uncomfortable when we possessed greater knowledge than a character, we hated having to watch them move about as if in a maze, we wanted to scream - that's the way out, that's the way out - it shredded our nerves. And there were other, quieter amnesias suffered by women; they remained within the family and continued to drink the family coffee and sleep in the same clean sheets, but they were puzzled by the love of the people who now were strangers, and spent their time trying to seize something, like sunlight on water, with which to tell their story.

The strangler is in the motel room, checking his watch. He paces like an animal, his body twitches. And then there are headlights maddening his eyes; she has arrived. In the car his fiancee applies fresh lipstick. The motel's neon blinks on, and off. She knocks on the door of room 22. My heart is pounding. I am longing for something, I am full of this longing. I want her to die. I want to see her die. I want to see him wrap his hands around her throat and I want to see the final knowledge in her eyes; and when he has combed his hair and turned from the mirror to face her extinguished body, I want him to take off his fraternity tie and hang himself high from the shower rail.

I want no last minute rescues, no sudden police sirens, no recoveries from unconsciousness or inability to go through with things.

I want her innocence. I want his repentance.

My mother's feet were disfigured by heavy encrustations of scar tissue, unfleshlike; like sedimnetary rock, the podiatrist said. After the first time, I accompanied my mother on her visits to the podiatrist. I sat beside her as he worked on her feet, a trolley of shining instruments between us. He would not touch her feet without first explaining his methods. From the podiatrist, his large hands illustrating in the air, my mother and I learnt about the nature of wounds; between the wound and the scar there is proudflesh. After injury, healing begins. Only healing and death are inevitable, he said. Across the surface of the wound, stealthy and irrevocable, grow the bridges of capillary and connective tissue. The flesh is now Schiaparelli pink or red; it is drunk with blood. Proudflesh is the flesh of healing but it is too tender and miraculous to last; it has its moment and is gone. The podiatrist said that the fibrous scar tissue which replaces the proudflesh is numbed and aloof, indifferent to its origins. He wanted, he said, to go beyond the scar, to get back to the wound. With a scalpel the podiatrist cut fine slices of tissue from the mounds on my mother's feet. He was careful and did not hurry. The tip of the scalpel pierced the scar. There was layer upon layer of scarring, he called each layer a deposit of time. He was precise. He was going deeper. He wanted to go beyond the scar, to get back to the wound. He wanted to restore feeling.

I was careful not to wake my brothers as I got out of bed. Through a gap in the door I could see my mother. She was smoking a cigarette, television light flickered over her face. In the bathroom I crouched to open the cupboard below the washbasin. This was the cupboard of bad things. I was searching. Iwas longing. In the dark beneath my eyelids I had seen a place, a place elsewhere, and I wanted to go. I was searching and longing and then I found it, as I knew I would; I found the poison.

My mother heard me stumble in the hall. I believed my eyes were liquid and dripping down my face, when she shook me I held up my palms to catch a final sight of her. I only wanted to go but there was her face, wet in my hands, her love staring back at me; she had hold of me by the arms, the sleeves of my nightie twisted; if I went her hands would come too, I would be elsewhere with her hands on me. She held on, she was trying to keep me from going but some of me had left already, burned up by poison and desire, so I let her have what was left, and fell to the floor.

The doctor put his stick down my throat and held me over the toilet while I discharged steaming gruel and yellow-green waters until I was empty of longing and could only tremble against my mother's body. From my bed I could hear the doctor whispering outside the door: How does a child get this into her head? He offered my mother a prescription: Don't let her watch any more Adults Only television. Beside me there was a glass of milk that he had insisted I drink; a white balm so that I may once again be pure. My mother saw him to the door and then she came to me carrying a teaspoonful of strawberry Quik to stir into the milk. I had taken a nasty blue drink and now I must have a sweet pink one. She smoothed my hair and I could smell the tobacco on her fingers and feel the absolving coolness of her wedding band. She leaned close so as not to wake my brothers. The world was her before me. It's all right, she said, it's over. She kissed my temples and pulled her hands over my eyes, drawing the lids, conjuring sleep. It's over, she whispered, repeating the spell. Her breath in my ear: We will forget that this ever happened.

My mother and I are serious about farewells; we believe there are right and wrong ways of saying goodbye. We do not farewell one another at the bus station. She travels slowly through one day and into the next, hour after hour drawing away from me, moving towards home. While she travels I sleep nine restful hours, work and eat, I throw out the dead flowers and fold away the bed on which she slept; I suture my life together around her absence.

I give her time to unpack and to look around, and then I phone. When I enquire about her bus trip, and she asks if the weather has cleared, we are coming apart, like the slow separations of an egg, or cloud. She tells me that when she arrived the mangoes were thick on the ground and the geckoes raced at her for a feed of mince. We begin to discuss the episode of Four Corners from the night before. In the distance I hear a screeching sound growing louder. The cockies are at the vegies, she says, hang on a sec. I feel the telephone receiver drop at the other end; I imagine her tearing down the back steps past the stiff washing, kicking aside the wasted mangoes, a crimson blur of bougainvillea, hands parting palms, their fronds clack-clacking behind her, the lean branches of the poinciana tree raised like her arms in appeal to the sky mercy mercy mercy. I hear her cry shoo shoo, running at the cloud of screeching white cockatoos lowering onto the vegetable patch. She runs fast between the rows of staked tomatoes, the green heads of lettuce and pumpkin globes, her bare feet striking the ground, wings at her heels, the fine red dirt flying.

mercy

When we were grown, she left us. She chose the town for its warmth and because she had been told: Betyond the Tropic of Capricorn the light burns you clear and the rain washes you down. She found her house and in the fine red soil, the pindan, she began her garden. The sand filled her heavy shoes and sweat ran between her toes. No one was there to see or to question; my mother took off her shoes and the bandages and hobbled barefoot in the dirt. She walked up and down the vegetable garden and then further, walked for miles on the hot baking iron-red earth, the heat rising into her flesh like fingers, unknotting, smoothing, and the sand abraded her skin and wore away the scar tissue; sandpapering it down to a polished newness. The changes were small and she took her time, one step after the other along the cool edges of the Indian Ocean, salt biting, looking behind her to see water fill her footprints and erase them from the sand.

I hear the screeching of the birds fade away. She picks up the phone and says: Can you hear them? They're calling: we'll be ba-a-a-ck we'll be ba-a-ack. They ate the scarecrow while I was away! What were we talking about?

I can't remember, I say.

Neither can I, she says.

It doesn't matter.

And then I think I hear trouble in the air and it sounds like the birds are back to play too and she'll be off out the door again, fleet-footed, leaving me dangling in the sticky and garish tropics; not my scene at all. So I mention one or two things quickly, and she mentions one or two more.

And then we say goodbye.