I think I’m starting to get the hang of these peripli of the mind.
As I was unequipped at the time to unload such sonnets on to her, she nodded and smiled and kept nodding equally dumbly until I suggested we go to bed and talk about it in the morning. It was not, she admitted then, referring to my earlier contribution, a shite idea.
We were woken up by the phone. I was back in the dining room to answer it before Eliza arrived with her pyjamas tucked into her jeans mussing her curls and resembling under the foreign velour of the morning light nothing so much as any other punk kid. There goes the beggar king. The morning makes us new.
Hello is this Mrs. O’Rourk.
Still that pulverised voice cascading nonsense out of the receiver. Ont ont.
I passed it to Eliza.
What did she say.
Sounded like something about hell and a house.
Since I knew by then that she didn’t have any better idea than I did what her mother was saying I went to see about breakfast. But we had eaten the place bare so when she was off the phone I told Eliza to get dressed and took fifty dollars from under the paperweight and we went down to the Piccolo Mondo for a meal then doubled back to the Woolworths on George Street to buy groceries. The glass doors slid open on more rows of packaged goods than Eliza was used to taking in at once. Even the flagship supermarket on George Street was no Roselands but somehow the way she flew up and down the aisles in acquisitive figure eights made it seem like enough forever, a millennial storehouse. What shall we. We bought mineral acids, milk, Cornflakes, Wheatbix, sugar, apple juice, tea, a large bronze packet of Vittoria coffee, a dozen eggs, sprouts, bread with a rising sun on it forget the name, ham, Swiss cheese, other cheese, butter, plain flour, jam rolls, ribbons of bacon, shaved turkey, a sack of frozen peas, canned fish, water crackers, peanut butter, popcorn, stuffed olives, garlic, lamb chops, greenish oranges, the biggest iceberg lettuce we could get our hands on, sprouts, onions, potatoes, India rubber, noodles, rice, something resembling spinage, new and pickled cucumbers, button no, yes that’s right button mushrooms, shallots, shamrock, rosemary, fennel, asparagus, cans of Queensland tomatoes from a pyramid of canned Queensland tomatoes, carrots from South Australia, hopefully stoneless sardines in cans, maybe they all are, the lucky dumb animals, an elegant variation on cream buns, Black Forest cuckoo, macadamia nuts, almonds, green and ruby table grapes, kiwi fruit, dates from the U.S.A., Monte Carlo biscuits, sour cream, marmalade, mayonnaise, a whole chicken, canned peaches. Brother. If that doesn’t put me on the syllabus nothing will. I have to foam out my own confusion on the poisoned pastures. We piled what was in fact our carnival into a shopping trolley and rolled it up the street to the flat, then we crammed the trolley into the lift and took the stairs at a gallop to catch the doors before they could close. We had breakfast again. I put the money that was left over back under the paperweight on the writing table and took out the mail.
You know we’re not going to be able to pay for groceries much longer at this rate.
Eliza said through a mouthful of burnt toast something like it won’t matter if we make a quick sell.
A what.
You remember she said licking her fingers. What you said about the flat. If we sell the flat quickly.
You’re sure you want to sell it. You sure you aren’t. Overr. I mean are you sure that your mother, since she’s the only one left. This place is the only link she’s got to. Eliza raised her hand against such impressionism and said it won’t make a difference to her who owns it.
The mail was three envelopes and I had seen them all before. Still standing by the desk I had torn into the one branded in red ink with an insignia shaped like a cameo brooch whose crucifix or crossroads already reminded me of the shield on Loftus Street, perhaps because, though it lacked the crown and the waratahs, it seemed to be grown over with something. Orta recens. One for the archive. Ms. Rose. I got halfway through before returning to the top and reciting the whole thing. That’s a rent notice said Eliza.
It’s a rent notice.
She didn’t even ask to see it for herself, the truly incredible thing by now being possession, whereas she seemed quite ready to throw up everything including what she had just got her hands on with hearsay. The promise of the night before went the way of the rest of her malapropisms. Eliza extended herself on the sofa and closed her eyes. She mumbled something about where had it come from but then said never mind and clearly, how many weeks are owing.
Six. We don’t even have enough to pay the rent.
How did that happen. How did she lose all that money and then the flat and no one know when or how and there be nothing left but old furniture. That is unless the furniture is spoken for. Damn it I guess we have to go and see the lawyer again and find out what kind of a ball up we’re really in.
We went to the office but the door was locked and the light off. On the way down the stairs we ran into a man in a burnished suit with a face like a layer of crumbling plaster cradling a smeared paper bag and an open book in both arms and Eliza either guessing right away or grabbing at straws said are you Mr. Looper?
He was. Bernard was at court but if we went there now we might catch him at his lunch break. So it was back to Macquarie Street and over to the Supreme Court before we’d counted on it. The steel ribbed glass panels of the new tower in Queen’s Square rose from street level like the facets of a quartz crystal or ice, the entrance not its most conspicuous feature. Inside an employee with a thing around her neck pointed us from behind a red hooded information desk to the busy wall where the court notices were tacked together on a notice board in one long patchwork bulletin. Eliza had written the key points of Bernard’s matter on the back of her hand and I elbowed our way between the varied, ebbing crowd until we had a place before the notice board from which to look for a matching copy. Looper had remembered right, their case wasn’t coming up for another hour, so we asked someone how to get to the cafeteria and were shown the red doored lifts and told to go up to what would become the Buena Vista Bar and Café on level fourteen. It’s important to have an historical perspective. I believe I’m coming to look back on all this with something like the rigour it has been asking for.