How old are you.
Old he said and sucked his teeth. You wanna get a soda.
I nudged Eliza forward. We had just found a reason to keep a low profile. Look I said when we were in the street. Don’t tell me she replied. We had to get all that furniture out of there fast, make some money while we still could. And if this Albert turns up. We’ll destroy the letters, say we never heard of him. He can take the flat but if it’s empty what can he do. We’re within our rights.
On the Avenue that afternoon we made a start at intervening. Though I had considered how otherwise rewarding it could be to hang around as long as it took to get to the bottom of the whole obstruction in a formal way, the fact was Eliza had recognised the situation the moment she got my news in the mail. It was a sudden opening, a time to strike. There was no room for two agendas. My first premonition trumped the second. No. The scales fell from my eyes. The ultimatum hit me with the usual cumbersome aplomb. Fat chance losing anything until you find it but you can always try shaking off even the submerged facets in the market. Hail Jonus moneta! The hardest currency is monochrome! In other words somewhere among the tumbled down debris of our brief effort I got over it. Revisions, I thought. Carp ’em, my ink is ice. Of course one is still struck by moments of transparency but the façade is the last to fall from even the miserablest heritage listing and frankly I said to myself or at least do now which is the same thing, if from the rising waters of nature’s own superbly rendering sheets the most mucked up growler wrinkling in the perfumed air before the spring lets go a pure floater or two from its equally crystalline delitescence, the tide of time, that’s literalture. It runs against you, vainly repulsive. I stood stupefied in the rubble of my opulence. A chanceable hitting, some of us perseverate young. I was still in my salad days of self control. It was before I got ink and paper. If we can’t shift all this before he comes, Eliza pondered aloud as she would faced with my almost unrelieved leisure respecting efforts at conversation, innocent of the flood gates she had divided in me.
We’re through. What else was it after all to be between us to begin with.
Eliza wanted to know if I could remember the names of anyone Dodge had had dealings with. She had sat down on a pile of old magazines. In the living room they were all that was left of a collection that had come up to my knees in most places, even as I grew older. There was too much to tell. Factaque sparsa. But great masses of accumulation. From where. Impossible to tell. The venereal flow of international bric a brac. Open sesame. Here we go again. Deliacious ecstasy oh it doesn’t matter and refuse of an interminable bargain that sends you senselessly out of your depth even as it generates the very jetsam that keeps you floating on tides of junk capped by dirty Kleenex drifting albums fold out star charts cigarette tins calendars empty perfume bottles bits of lead type terracotta picture frames torn up ferry time tables cameo heads playing cards needlework monogrammed gloves and combs and suitcases strings of beads and heaps and other. The spectacles she used to buy from the chemist, themselves a wonderful piece of work in the world’s catalogue. Infinite seed. A list is nothing, details lost to view in their own ascendance save a glint from between the dark stacks of a microlith flake shard of creamware a pencil or a choker a broken light bulb pharate still in the striped box a jade brooch at most a briefer stretch of turpiloquium. There was a stuffed blue Persian cat. You had to be careful where you trod. One day Dodge slipped on a glossy leaf and came down safely on a brittle stack of weather reports, flakes of yellow paper flurrying around her petticoats.
Help!
That evening she put her hands on her hips and said I think it is time we cleared this up. We used the suitcases and we bundled the best things together and carried them over to the Wayside Chapel on Hughes Street and dumped them on the doorstep. A candle in a crown of thorns. We stuffed the bottles and the broken pots in doubled garbage bags and I took them in the lift to the bins in the courtyard. Then we put the paper and the books together and I took them down to the courtyard in garbage bags one by one until the bins were full. We piled the rest in the bathtub and we burnt it. We burnt the photo albums. They glowed red and turned to ash. By the time we went to bed the same scene that Eliza was sitting on a pile of old magazines in had begun to effloresce through the emptied space a neat square whose matching furniture gave it the tenuous coherence of a window display returning to view under streaks of dust as if the shadows of the objects drawn off had held on. I feel like I have said that before. In any case, a clearing far more efficient than the one in the office in Wolomooloo the place of plenty. The sort of holocaust the solicitor was doomed to dream about as he shifted the Gestetnered pulp of his reckoning from one end of the room to the other, pages like drops of water no of blood, that on their own are almost nothing and in conglomerate can suffocate you or burst walls.
Dodge went on shopping after that but only for repairs and perishables. Bit by bit we put the old rooms back in order polished and dusted the original knick knacks fixed what we could. I was eleven years old and that year I got my period and Dodge almost stopped shitting herself. It was a false sign. Her guts had taken a secret turn for the worse.
I couldn’t remember. Do you know I asked Eliza how much any of this stuff is worth.
With composure she looked around until her eyes came to rest on the bookcase: a fine squat deep hued piece much older than the rest of the furniture. It looked like the most valuable thing in the room. I wondered if Eliza knew something about furniture. No she said but we could find out.
After some asking around she bought the latest two editions of the Australian Antiques Collector and took them back to the flat to study. Unfortunately they had nothing in the way of a general guide but she read me an interesting article on rabdophilism. A cane whose knob is a fly made of black and blond horn fits snugly in the hand. Portraits of mute film actors and actresses appear on shafts. Valentino is represented in ivory. One finds the cheap metal bust of American presidential candidates and Walt Disney characters increase in price. Caricatures of faces from the curious bones of the whale’s inner ear. Camphored stretcher. It went on like that, the siren call. The turned and tapered legs are capped and shod in copper. There was nothing in the magazines that looked like anything we had so to start with we thought it would be useful to make a roll. We began in the living room. The problem, we found, was we didn’t know the proper names. Armchair I said. Eliza made a note on the back of my letter, which she had taken out of her bag along with the greater part of a pale blue Derwent pencil. What dilated in me at that first real flare of her own peculiar galaxies. Maybe it has it written on it somewhere. I turned the chair over onto its back but the sagging hessian, though its pores exhaled an odour like old straw, was blank. For some reason Dodge had left me with something resembling a respectable vocabulary for materials but if she knew what kind of furniture any of it was she never mentioned it. Striped, offered Eliza, writing. In bad condition.
The dining room was equally incommunicable. By the time we got to Dodge’s bedroom Eliza threw the sheet of paper half full of her commentary on the kidney dresser and declared the exercise a dead end. She sat down on the bed, which was still unmade, the tartan quilt rolled up in one corner and trailing on the carpet. The room, whose denomination as forbidden territory had lingered between Dodge and myself long after the early years, though it had for practical reasons become a dead metaphor, now touched off in me the frisson from a loss of mystery, an immediate pleasure or uneasiness, the sheer idea of Eliza’s midnight search representing at the end of such a prolapse a broach of far less murrain character than that of the literally superficial contact for which I had been improperly broken in. It was enough to know that the mole grey oak doors of the dressing table, the wardrobe, though closed now, had been opened. Distracted by a new sense of permissiveness, curiosity creeping up from the ruins of censure, I knelt down and reached my hand under the bed. My knuckles struck loaded cardboard. Putting in both hands, I dragged out a box.