Isobel Blackthorn's Blog

Asylum- 10th instalment Asylum – 12th and final instalment

Asylum – 11th instalment

To catch the beginning of this story go to Asylum �� a novel in weekly parts.

In which Yvette makes a surprising discovery about Heather’s brother Angus…

3.5

Having forgone a tattered National Geographic, Yvette flicked through an old copy of Vogue, before tiring of that as well. She was in the waiting room of a nearby doctor��s surgery, located in a dilapidated weatherboard house. It appeared nothing had been done to the d��cor of the room since the seventies. All the walls were papered with repro-Paisley wallpaper, tan, grey and washed-out orange against an off-white background, wallpaper that clashed horrendously with the ancient loop-pile carpet of deep-purple swirls. The reception area was crammed into what must have been the former kitchen, accessed by patients through a high serving hatch. A series of posters pinned to a wall beared down on waiting patients with bold warnings of the consequences of imbibing and injecting and gorging on junk food. On a rack nailed to the wall beside the hatch was a selection of pamphlets on a range of health matters, from anorexia to UTIs.

Yvette was seated between a doddery old man and a plump mother whose sniffling child scrambled about on the floor at her feet. Yvette ignored the child. Hers would never turn out like that.

She was surprised to find she was filled with a placid acceptance of her lot. Never mind the paternal contenders �� what a self-absorbed bunch they were �� the course of her life would turn out fine. Fate was no bad thing. As well, she was awash with the unconditional kindness and support afforded by Heather who had insisted she seek medical attention.

Yesterday, while munching through the breakfast of bacon and eggs Heather had cooked for her, Yvette complained that she couldn��t afford the doctor��s fee, whereupon Heather whipped out her wallet, extracted two fifty dollars bills and thrust them into Yvette��s hand saying, ��that should cover it.�� Yvette had been too overcome by her friend��s generosity to decline. Heather had even made the appointment.

Tired of glossy photos of nubile women draped in designer clothes, all pouts and come-hither eyes, and not keen to return to images of breathtaking scenery and endangered animals in striking poses, she went to the wire rack and rifled through the leaflets, extracting a bi-fold on the Fremantle Prison which clearly didn��t belong there, any more than Profits of Doom had belonged in the reference section of that library. She returned to her seat and read the pamphlet blurbs, slipping into reverie, in her imagination an army of beleaguered convicts in ragged slops lumbering limestone boulders in the blistering heat. Then she heard her name.

She put the pamphlet back in the rack and followed the doctor to one of the rooms in the front of the house. The doctor was a crone of a woman, her long white hair, parted in the middle, drawn away from her face and clipped in place by two carved wooden combs. Her face was weather-beaten with a pair of beady brown eyes, a hook nose and sparrow-beak mouth. Dressed in a grey blouse and straight black skirt she looked half public servant, half witch.

Yvette sat down on the edge of a wooden chair beside the desk and with a quiver of trepidation explained the purpose of her visit.

The doctor observed her closely. ��When was the date of your last period?��

Yvette thought back. ��About twelve months ago.��

The doctor looked puzzled.

��I had a termination last April and I haven��t had a period since.��

��Can happen. Why do you think you are pregnant?��

��Morning sickness.��

��So when do you think you conceived?��

��About the middle of November.��

��Okay. We��ll date the pregnancy from the first.�� She scribbled a note on Yvette��s new-patient file. ��And the father?��

��I��m not sure.�� Yvette felt the colour rise in her cheeks.

She detected in the doctor��s face a wry smile that faded as quickly as it appeared. The doctor wrote out a request for a blood test and told her she didn��t usually ask for an ultrasound at this stage but since they had no real idea of how long she��d been pregnant she requested one as well and told her to return once she��d had the tests.

After paying at the counter, Yvette left the surgery clutching the two forms. The appointment had left her uneasy, her placidity replaced by harsh reality; her circumstances yanked into the brilliant light of the day.

3.6

Angus was in the back garden when she returned. As she tramped down the hall she could hear him chatting to Viktor. Heather, it seemed, hadn��t arrived back from work. She sat on her bed, knees drawn to her chest. An ultrasound? The receptionist at the doctor��s surgery told her the cost was a hundred dollars. A hundred bucks to have her uterus scanned when women have been having babies for millennia before that technology had come along? She screwed up the referral having reasoned away the need.

Then she reached into her shoulder bag for her phone and ran a finger over the keypad. She had to call her mother. She hadn��t been in touch since she moved to Heather��s place and had been ignoring Leah��s calls. Told herself she was too busy. Now she felt she had no choice. She dialled the number.

Straight away her mother asked if she had any news. She said she didn��t. Then she listened with no interest to her mother��s blow-by-blow account of Debbie��s latest confrontation with Simon��s music teacher and how sweet and unsure of themselves the boys had looked in the choir at the folk festival. Leah said she was sure Peter forgot the words to one of the songs. Yvette made polite introjections, thinking she��d never tell her mother she��d joined a choir.

At last Leah turned her focus back to Yvette.

��How��s the flat?��

��I��ve moved to Fremantle.�� She braced herself for the reply.

��What do you want to live there for?��

��It��s changed since the America��s Cup. You know that.��

��Nowhere can change that much. It was, and always will be, filled with Italians.��

What could her mother possibly have against Fremantle��s Italian community? Yvette felt her own irritation rise; Leah still hadn��t mellowed her prejudices. Was this a veiled attack on her choice of men? Leah had been almost accepting of Carlos in her letters, assuming he was Maltese which was somehow acceptable since Malta was a former British colony, but as soon as Yvette mentioned his nationality, Leah never mentioned his name again.

Yvette knew Leah would never condone the exotic mix of ethnic possibilities on the paternal side of her grandchild, which leant her predicament a new if perverse appeal.

��You��d better give me your new address,�� Leah said.

Yvette told her, adding, ��I��m staying with Heather?��

��That Scottish girl.��

��She��s been incredible.��

There was a moment of silence. Then her mother said, ��Terry��s been looking for you.��

��Really?�� She didn��t want to hear it.

��He asked after you in the post office and the newsagency.��

��Why?��

��Why? Because he still cares for you.�� That inflexion again.

Yvette didn��t answer. She was struggling to accommodate Leah speaking to her this way, as if she were still eighteen. She felt herself pulled back to a younger self as she pulled in the opposite direction, determined to be who she was. Yet another part of her sensed, albeit dimly, that her mother wanted for her a lesser catastrophe than the one she was bent on fashioning for herself.

��You could do a lot worse,�� Leah added as if in agreement.

There was no easy way to do this. ��Mum. I��m pregnant.��

��Pregnant?�� There was a long pause before the inevitable question. ��How far are you?��

��About four months.��

��Why didn��t you tell me?��

��I��m telling you now.��

Leah said nothing for a while. Yvette pictured the down-turned mouth, the stern eyes beneath a furrowed brow. ��Well, congratulations,�� she said at last, with little warmth in her voice.

��And the father?��

��Um�� Does it matter?��

��Of course it matters!��

��I don��t know.��

��How can you not know?��

��There��s a choice of two.�� Which sounded a lot better than three.

She heard her mother sigh. ��And this is what you want?��

��Yes.��

Her question filled Yvette with doubt. Something she��d never let her mother know. She��d burrow her way into it like a worm.

��At least now you��ve solved you��re immigration problem,�� her mother said, with a cool, pragmatic air.

��You think so?�� Yvette said, doubtfully.

��You��ve told the authorities, haven��t you?��

��No.��

��No? Why not?�� Her voice rose in exasperation.

��I want to wait until I hear the outcome.��

��Be it on your own head,�� she said in a low voice and hung up.

Yvette reeled. To her mother she supposed she would always be an insufferable disappointment.

She had never been able to ascertain if beneath her mother��s harsh exterior there lurked a caring heart. It was why, when Leah had left London with Yvette��s step-father and sister ten years before and settled in Cobargo, Yvette stayed behind. She wanted to make her own decisions. She wanted then what she wanted now, to be out from under her mother��s influence. Then she��d thought half the world would be just about beyond earshot. Besides, she��d had an offer from Goldsmiths. Art school was her way of rising from the narrow aspirations of her parents. And she was not without talent. She��d duxed her final school year in art, her paintings hung in all the school stairwells, one even finding its way into the office corridor, bearing down victoriously on the school roughs waiting outside the Headmaster��s door.

Her mother had tried to persuade Yvette to go with them, insisting that as a child Yvette had loved Australia. Yvette didn��t know where her mother got that idea. Not the heat. Not Mrs Thoroughgood��s cruelty. Nor her father��s tornado of a temper. Maybe her mother selectively recalled the flush of Yvette��s face, the gleeful smile she wore when she came home from Heather��s place.

When they arrived back in England and spent that first Christmas at Grandma Grimm��s, Yvette felt deep in her core a cultural resonance. She would stare out the upstairs bedroom window looking down on snow-covered gardens, the very cells in her body fibres in the fabric of the place. Encoded in her DNA were the houses, the garden sheds, the leafless trees, the half-light of winter, the accents, attitudes, television, food, and all of it made perfect sense.

She wasn��t to know the tribulations that lay ahead, that she was to attend one of England��s roughest underachieving schools, its pupils, all two thousand of them, roared to order by an ex-military sergeant garbed in gown and water-board. He instilled terror in all but the most hardened sort. He made Mrs Thoroughgood seem almost affectionate. But he had no influence on the bullying, the malice, the threats. Coming from Australia, skinny and timid and cursed with an Aussie accent, Yvette was a target from the first day. Words flew from the tough girls�� mouths like bullets from a machine gun. Girls with peroxide blonde hair, mean faces and scarred wrists. Yvette survived six years. She retrieved her south-east London accent. Defiance grew in her like jam in a pressure cooker and when her mother announced they were to return to Australia it erupted in scalding splats across every inch of her faith in her family.

3.7

Early-autumn sunshine shafted through her bedroom window, a sea breeze causing the shadow of the paperbark in Heather��s back garden to dance on the opposite wall. Yvette made a mental note to suggest to Heather that she move the block print to avert fading. She turned onto her back and gazed absently at the ceiling, placing both hands over her belly, feeling the heat from her palms on the taut skin around her navel. And a quiet triumph pervaded her despite her apprehensions. In under a year she��d replaced the fruit of one man��s seed for that of another. For the first time she thought of Carlos as part of her history. She could conjure his image without craving his presence, and Malta, that island filled with the artefacts of the underworld, at once glorious and grotesque, was set free. She��d even lost her compulsion to check for messages from Josie on Heather��s lap top, relinquishing her disappointment that Josie hadn��t been in touch since her arrival in Australia. Still she craved her friend��s forgiveness, which had left her untypically hanging like a door loose on its hinges, flapping back and forth in a fickle breeze.

Her triumph dissipated the moment the fly screen door snapped shut and she heard the steady throb of chords, meandering, then what had become for her an annoyingly twangy prattle. She was anxious for Angus to move out, tired of shoving his doona aside when she wanted to sit on the living-room sofa, tired of his lackadaisical attitude. Angus was condemned in her mind as nothing but a wastrel with delusions far in excess of his abilities. His presence in Heather��s house made her recoil and it was as much as she could do to be polite.

She kept her contempt hidden from Angus, with whom she remained civil, and especially from Heather. She didn��t want to appear to her friend ungracious. Besides, she had no idea the strength of their filial bond. It was impossible to gauge with Heather at work, shopping, visiting friends or otherwise rarely at home.

Before long, the strumming stopped. Footsteps tacked across the kitchen floor and the fridge door opened and closed. Hearing that sound she was hungry again. Which left her no choice. She joined him in the kitchen.

He was bent over his script. ��Leichhardt had an incredible drive you know.�� He straightened, clenched a hand and punched his chest. ��I feel it, here in my gut.��

She stifled a laugh. The fool had no idea where his organs were.

��Writing this script,�� he went on, ��It��s as if I��m becoming the man himself.��

��Wow,�� she said, but what she thought was good grief.

��I��ll have to take the part. I don��t think an actor would do him justice.��

Could he think of nothing else?

She went to the fridge and pulled out a container of the frittata Heather had made last night. She cut a hunk and levered it onto a plate, grabbed a fork from a drawer and turned to see Angus gazing at her.

��That bump of yours sure is growing.��

��Thanks.��

��I must set to work on the script while there��s still peace in the house.��

��I thought you were moving out?��

��All in good time.��

She tried not to contemplate the thought that he might never leave.

She noticed the local newspaper, tucked under a pile of opened envelopes at the end of the bench. She picked up the paper and took her plate to the table, taking up the chair furthest from Angus. Ignoring him was an effort. She forked chunks of frittata and opened the newspaper, keeping her eyes firmly on the print, scanning all the articles from the first page: Old-age pensioners celebrate opening of new Senior��s Centre; school kids raise money for cancer; street crime spike in Hamilton Hill; local men��s group determined to fight on for the rights of fathers. She quickly turned the page, casting an indifferent eye over all the adverts, then the TV guide, the What��s On page and even Trades and Services. Arriving at the penultimate page she stopped, short of sport, to read the small ads.

She had to find a job. With the pregnancy came additional expenses. She��d need a cot, a pram, baby clothes and nappies. She scanned the ads. Cleaner, cleaner, cleaner �� nope. Bookkeeper, gardener, dog-walker, and, finally, something she could do – junk-mail delivery. The only requirement was a passion for keeping fit. She went back to her room and called the number.

The following afternoon, leaflets, fliers, and glossy brochures from Coles and Woolworth��s advertising the week��s specials were piled on Heather��s kitchen table. She had to collate the junk mail herself. She��d been allocated South Fremantle, with a junk-mail drop of about one thousand. She made two cents per leaflet. Today��s delivery amounted to a hundred dollars. When the distributor, Kylie, a jolly woman in her thirties, had dropped off the leaflets, (something she generously offered to do when Yvette explained she had no car), she��d told Yvette she was lucky: It was a bumper week. Heather had tried to talk her out of it before she left for work that morning but Yvette was resolute. Angus had stared in disbelief at the leaflets, mumbling an annoyed, ��I suppose I can write on my lap,�� before tramping to the living room with an arm full of his Leichhardt script.

Four hours later, Yvette crammed the folded junk mail into two large shoulder bags. With a rough outline of a route and a gut full of determination she left the house.

She reached the end of the street and already her shoulders were tense. She could head left down to Marine Terrace or right and up to the end of the next street and down the other side. She headed up the hill.

It was a punishing ascent. At the crest she crossed the road and worked her way down, passing, over on the other side, blocks of units with letter boxes out front, all huddled together in low brick walls. Damn! On her side, on about every third letter box was a No Junk Mail sign. She loathed junk mail, a crass form of advertising, a useless waste of paper and therefore trees, but delivering this heavy bulk she couldn��t help resenting every No Junk Mail sign she passed.

By the time she reached Marine Terrace, her bags felt no lighter than when she��d started. After that, she turned every corner and went up every street, her bags emptying, her heart filling with resentment and humiliation. She could think of at least five ways she��d rather keep fit, swimming, dancing, tennis, yoga, the gym, anything but this. It occurred to her that at least detention-centre detainees have all their basic needs met, a thought she slapped away before it had a chance to take hold.

3.8

When she returned to the house, Angus was in the living room, a luxurious space, with walls of terracotta red, the damask of the sofas in complementary sienna, strong colours tempered by cream curtains, cushions and rugs. The room was a sanctum, sullied now by Angus slumped on the sofa with a can of beer, his eyes fixed on the television.

An even greater abhorrence unfolded on the screen. A close-up of a careworn woman, the voice over telling viewers she��d just given birth to a premature baby and they both faced deportation to Nauru. Nauru. That hellhole! Yvette wondered what Dan would have made of it; at once troubled by her own lack of engagement, her initial interest dwindled to chaff drifting at the bottom of an empty sack of grain. The few morsels of Profits of Doom she��d managed to retain had faded into the background of her awareness. What happened to the burst of illumination she experienced that day? Even her initial creative fervour after the night of her troubling dream had abated. Artistically, she still found herself in a space between her old precisionist ways and something new, but her mind was hazy and unstructured. She left Angus undisturbed and dumped her bags in her room.

She found Heather in the kitchen, dicing zucchinis. Behind her, onions sizzled in a frying pan. ��Smells delicious,�� Yvette said, sitting on the chair nearest the bench.

��Cheers honey.��

��Can I help?��

��Stay where you are. You look exhausted.�� She scooped the zucchini into the pan and gave the contents a stir.

��I��ve never done anything so gruelling,�� Yvette said. Which was true, she wasn��t given to hard labour.

��Does it pay?��

��I made a hundred bucks,�� she said with a surge of unanticipated triumph.

��I make that in an hour,�� Heather said, benignly. Adding, ��I��m sorry. I didn��t mean��

Yvette deflected the rancour that rose in her defence. ��That��s okay,�� she said. ��The annoying thing is I��m a graduate. I have a Masters for heaven��s sake. But of course, painting doesn��t pay.��

��Unless you paint walls.��

��In cream.��

They both laughed.

She watched Heather crack six eggs into a bowl. The steady rhythm of the fork chinking against glass, the sight of the fresh herbs, the mound of grated cheese, the tomatoes and salad vegetables laid out along the bench, it was all so consummately homey.

��You could teach,�� Heather said reflectively.

��I don��t think I��d be good at it. Besides��

��I meant in the future. For now you are stuck.�� Heather poured the eggs in the pan. With her attention on the omelette she added, ��The mother of Angus�� daughter is a teacher.��

��I never knew he had a kid!��

��Hasn��t he mentioned her?��

��No. But then, we haven��t talked much.��

��He��s the silent type. Doesn��t give much away.��

Yvette found the remark an odd assessment of Angus. He was a gas-bag in his exchanges with Viktor. She let Heather��s belief pass without comment, keen to find out more about his offspring. ��How old is she?��

��Amy? Five. Cute little thing but we don��t see much of her.�� Heather left the stove, a look of sadness fixed in her gaze.

��That��s a shame.��

��It is.��

��Where is she?��

��The mother, Julie, has custody. She��s in Adelaide.��

��A bit far.��

��He��s moving over there as soon as he��s fixed up the bus.��

Angus started to make sense. Heather had never displayed to her brother anything but a diffused goodwill, accommodating his presence on her sofa with tolerance and sympathy. The whole time she��d been here, Yvette found her friend��s attitude towards him astonishing. Even with this new insight into his character he still hadn��t shifted far in Yvette��s estimation. All along she hadn��t doubted the Leichhardt script would come to nothing yet at least now she could see that perhaps it didn��t matter. The script was his way of coping with his loss. He was a little less a wastrel, a little less delusional. He��d become to her a larrikin with a wound and she made a mental note to regard him with a measure of respect.