All that time I was pretty and did not know it.
This thought could still make her rheumy eyes water – she had been brought up to think herself so goddam plain, such a collection of faults – wide mouth, small bosom, thin legs – which would all be clear for all the world to snicker at if she did not listen to her mother’s advice about her shoes, her skirt, her lipstick colour.
I could have married anyone I damn well pleased.
When she walked into town in gum boots, holding gelignite in her clutch-bag, her dancing shoes in a paper bag, she had decided to get married, to anyone, she did not care – anything would be better than staying in that house another year – but when she opened the wire gate in the fence around the C.W.A. rooms, she almost lost her resolve and her legs went weak and rubbery and she really thought she was going to faint.
She saw men in blazers leaning against the ugly concrete veranda posts. There was a string of coloured lights in a necklace underneath the veranda guttering. Under the wash of blue and red there were girls she recognized, people she had ‘dealt with’ in the shops who were now powerful and pretty in scallops of peach organza. They did not try to speak to her. The smell of beer came out to meet her, as alien as sweat, hair oil, pipe tobacco. She had to make herself continue up the path in her gum boots.
Inside it was no better. She sat beneath the crepe paper streamers, on a chair in a corner by the tea urn, and removed her muddy gum boots. She kept her head down, convinced that everyone was looking at her. When she saw that the gum boots were too big to fit in her paper bag, she did not know what to do with them.
If it had not been for the gum boots Cacka might never have spoken to her. If she had come in with shiny black high heels, he would almost certainly have found her beyond his reach. But he came from a red clay farm where you had to wear gum boots to go to take a shit at night. His mother wore gum boots to get from the back door to the hire car which took them to their father’s funeral.
‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’m going to put these out the back. You tell me when you want them. I’ll get them for you.’
‘You’re most kind,’ she said.
‘How about a dance when I get back?’
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘I know I’m not an oil painting.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That would be lovely.’
He had this bulk, this thick neck and sloping shoulders, so all his strength seemed centred in his chest, which occasionally touched her breasts when he danced with her, formally, apologetically. He held her as if she were somehow fragile, and she let herself be held this way. She had spent three years being ‘strong’ and now she was so tensed and wound up that when, by the fifth dance, she allowed herself to give her weight to him, she could not give a part of it, but laid the full load on his shoulders which she dampened with a tear or two.
His nose had a big bump in it just beneath the eye, and his left ear was slightly squashed and the skin around his left eye was blue and yellow, but he was also very gentle, and it was not that opportunistic gentleness the roughest man will adopt around a woman – it was written permanently on his lips which were soft and well-shaped and formed little cooing words she felt like warm oil-drops in her ears. This was a man whose secret passion was the Opera, who had the complete HMV recording of Die Zauberflöte hidden beneath his bed – eight 78 rpm records with a cast most of whose names he could not pronounce – Tiana Lemnitz, Erna Berger, Helge Rosvaenge, Gerhard Hüsch, and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.
Die Zauberflöte, however, meant nothing to Frieda. She was thirsty for what was practical, and when she drew him out she was the daughter of a man with little coloured pens and pretty pencils and paper plans on flimsy sheets of tracing paper. She loved to hear him talk about post-hole digging, barbed wire, white ants, concrete fencing posts, poultry sheds.
‘You really want to hear this stuff?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes,’ she said.
‘Truly?’
‘Truly and really.’
And when the band played ‘Begin the Beguine’ she held him tightly and sang the words softly in his ear. It was that which put the little wet spot on his Jockey shorts – that voice she did not even know she had. He told his mate, Billy Johnston, with whom he shared a room at the Dorrigo Court House Hotel, ‘I didn’t even kiss her, mate. I didn’t even touch her. She’s got these little tits, you know. I think I love her.’
At ten o’clock in the morning on the day after the dance, he came to call on her. She met him in her gum boots – halfway up the muddy drive – and told him she was going to have a flower farm there. She was going to blast those trees herself if no one would do it for her.
She said this almost angrily, for she had to say it and she expected that saying it would drive him from her, but Cacka was too shocked to laugh – he thought he never saw a sadder bit of country in his life.
‘If it’s flowers you want,’ he said, ‘I could show you land more suitable.’
All her life she would accuse him of lying about this, but even she knew this was not quite fair. Cacka withheld things and had secrets but he rarely told an outright lie. This land did exist, forty-five minutes from the central markets just the way he said it did. He was happy and in love. He really saw the land. He really saw Gerberas on it. It was the opposite of lying.
What he omitted was that it was part of a deceased estate and held up for probate.
It was ten years before Frieda and Albert Catchprice finally got possession of that land, and then she was the one who showed him how he could put a motor business on it. The only thing she had ever wanted was a flower farm, but what she got instead was the smell of rubber radiator hoses, fan belts, oil, grease, petrol vapour, cash flows, overdrafts and customers whose bills ran 90, 120 days past due. It was this she could not stand – she did it to herself.
12
It was the day they had tried to put her in a nursing home, but it would be the same on any other day – when Mrs Catchprice went to lock the big Cyclone gates of Catchprice Motors, she would look up at Cathy and Howie’s apartment window. The look would say: just try and stop me.
At six o’clock exactly – in two minutes’ time – Howie would look through the Venetian blinds and see her apartment door open, like a tricky clock in a Victorian arcade. First, the old woman would put her nose out and sniff the air. Then she would look down at the cars. Then she would come out on to the landing and stare at the window where she thought her enemy was waiting for her to die.
She thought it was Howie who conspired to commit her. She needed no proof. It was obvious. He was fiddling with the books, renting other premises, preparing to set up as a Honda dealer, in opposition.
He was plotting, certainly, continually, every moment of the day, but what he was plotting to do was to have a life like Ernest Tubb, The Gold Chain Troubadour. He was plotting to have his wife run away with him.
It was only Cathy who kept him locked inside those Cyclone gates. She had an entire band trying to drag her out on to the road. She had ‘Drunk as a Lord’ with a bullet on the Country charts. She had fans who wrote to her. She had a life to go to, but she was a Catchprice, and she was tangled in all that mad Catchprice shit that had her shouting at her mother while she fed her, at war with her brother while she fretted about his loneliness, firing her nephew while she went running to his cellar door, knocking and crying and leaving presents for him – she bought him dope, for Chrissakes, dope, in a pub, to cheer him up. You would not want to know about that kid’s life, his brother either. They were like institution kids with old men’s eyes in their young faces, but she loved them, unconditionally, with an intensity that she tried to hide even from her husband. Howie could not trust those boys, either of them, but he had learned not to speak against them in his wife’s presence.