Turn Left at Venus Read online

  The music of your youth, you can never love music the same way again, never so intensely, never so flavoured with the anguish and euphoria of becoming and an understanding that the music exists for the expression of your own soul.

  ‘Well don’t you two look but beautiful!’ This was one of the slender, elegant men, Les Messieurs. His companions, either side of him, looked at them with a heedful gaze, an impression of protectors or guardians.

  Ada and Leyla, entering the club, stopped, and struck a pose. Leyla lifted the edges of her skirt and turned in a balletic arc from side to side.

  ‘Thank you for wearing those outfits.’ Or he said, ‘Thank you for being the ones to wear those outfits.’

  And the way he said it. So this was Charles, he who had designed and made the frocks they wore tonight.

  ‘I nearly also bought that emerald green,’ said Leyla, ‘but I think you had someone taller in mind.’

  Charles said, ‘I can be prevailed upon to undertake alterations.’

  It was understood that they’d go for fittings, pick-ups, consultations, or eventually popping in because they happened to be free just before the end of closing on Fridays.

  On Friday afternoon, Charles was not available for appointments with the clients he called Society Ladies. They lived in the Eastern Suburbs or Lower North Shore in harbourside houses, had subscriptions to the symphony and spoke of trips Home meaning to England. Now that the war was over they could all book their voyages for a trip Home.

  Charles’s clothes were to be found in the Bon Ton Dress Shop in Double Bay, his creations being the only locally made product among the imported fashions. The owners, originally from Beirut, whose foreignness suggested intrinsic knowledge of fashion, chic, comme il faut, quelque chose comme ça, brought back selected fashion items from their annual trip, although perhaps not during the war. Imports from Europe, from Paris, from Vienna. Europeans were a season ahead on the other side of the world. So Australians were lucky, they would tell you, to have prior knowledge of what had really taken off, a preview, before choosing their own new outfits.

  That was where the Society Ladies found Charles’ frocks, with their appeal of the unique and pre-approved, and a small number of them were permitted to discover that they could have their dresses and suits altered by him, and even made especially for them by him, and they came for fittings during the day. ‘They have their marital duties at night,’ said Charles in a tone Ada had begun to appreciate.

  Double meanings were good. Exaggeration, innuendo, jadedness, worldliness, archness were good. Artifice was to be adored not deplored. Naturalness had nothing going for it but the potential for transformation.

  This was right up their alley. Leyla and Ada used to enjoy repeating the things people said who said it naturally but to them it sounded absurd and revealing. They loved saying deadpan ‘Mum and Dad’ and ‘God save the Queen’ and ‘dinkum beaudy’ and thinking it hilarious.

  Charles did not open on Saturday mornings either. ‘Not after my Friday nights,’ he said. No one opened any business on Sundays. Sundays were like death in this city, they said.

  Charles worked in a world of artifice and fantasy in his flat on Macleay Street. ‘Mon atelier’ he called the room where he sewed and stitched and did his fittings by lamplight. He kept the windows covered. ‘I cannot compete with nature.’

  The windows in the adjoining living room however were open upon the raw magnificence of Sydney Harbour. They looked across Elizabeth Bay to a vast expanse of glittering water, a panorama of bays and headlands, sweeping your uplifting eye all the way to the Heads.

  Where all the ships passed en route to or from The Old World.

  ‘That’s me, on my way to Paris,’ said Charles, pointing at a large ship making its way from the Harbour.

  ‘That’s the sailors leaving, bless their cute caps,’ said one of Les Messieurs.

  Leyla was being fitted in a black frock, all black.

  ‘So,’ Charles confirmed, rather pleased about it, ‘no touch of colour at all?’

  Leyla produced her lipstick, blood red, applied it thick and waxy on the curves of her lips.

  She got on a chair to give them all a perspective.

  They were united in their appreciative pleasure in the insouciance and dash of Leyla.

  ‘Like a French film,’ said one of them. They thought she looked a bit like Garance in Les Enfants du Paradis.

  Leyla shimmied her shoulders, threw her head back, her lips kiss-shaped. Leyla basked in attention but when attention was paid to her she amplified whatever had gained it, it made her act as if she was trying to penetrate indifference.

  Bold colours for Leyla, pale neutrals for Ada, panels and drapes for Leyla, fitted tailoring for Ada with a peplum flaring out from the jacket.

  They never looked like those pairs of girlfriends Ada noticed all her life long in so many settings, dressed alike, finding a common style to go together in.

  Even though they matched by way of vivid contrast; that’s what Charles made them do.

  Nothing would have happened without her. It was Leyla who made it come about, this lovely life, Leyla who left school and went to The Cross and found a room and Ada followed, of course she did, life with Leyla was hers, in the city, not the city of department stores and banks and offices, that city which entirely closed down at the end of each day, where nobody lived at all, but their part of the city at the city’s edge, here at The Cross where people kept whatever hours they pleased and spoke whatever language they knew.

  Ada never would want to live anywhere else but in this part of any city.

  They earned their living. You wanted a job a job was yours. There were waitress and bar jobs. They were adequately paid. Leyla and Ada always wanted more money but they had chosen this life. People didn’t give tips so much in those days, not until the Americans came. Which was only one more thing that made Americans even more disliked and more liked, depending.

  Anyway, Ada and Leyla lived somehow. They each had a room. They weren’t hungry. They met in the street and held hands, swinging their bags and laughing all the way home.

  Living in Kings Cross, Ada and Leyla did not need the clothes needed by typists and schoolteachers. Soon they were getting their clothes from Charles who made them feel they were already who they wanted to be. They knew where to go for the music, and it was somewhere full of warmth and enjoyment.

  There was a war and there was the end of the war and there was after the war, and the war was held far away from here but now, once it was over, no longer the case, its reality seemed at the same time all the stronger and stranger for being the past, now all aftermath and movement away.

  ‘Still waters run deep, don’t they, Ada?’ said Charles. Leyla had to command a spotlight, but Ada was never invisible to Charles. Every now and then she caught his glance.

  ‘The princess disguised as a mouse. No, you’re not the princess. Princess Leyla is the princess. What are you?’

  ‘The witch.’

  ‘The wizard. That sounds better. I’m sorry but it does. The wizard disguised as a mouse.’

  Ada thought she was more of a witch, actually. Wizards were showy, all star-studded swirling cloaks. Witches were guileful, beneficent.

  ‘More of a witch,’ she muttered.

  ‘What are you muttering, dear?’ asked Leyla. ‘She mutters,’ Leyla said to the others. Ada never muttered when it was just her and Leyla.

  ‘A girl’s best friend is her mutter,’ said Charles. ‘The muttering mouse.’

  Charles knew it meant that anyone else could pretend not to hear, pretend even to themselves. He always heard.

  Each of Charles’s frocks was unique. He said, ‘You’ll never run into yourself, in this city or anywhere else.’

  There were great designers of clothes, in Paris, and they were artists, and over there everyone knew it. Clothing might be Art.

  Ada already had firm ideas of what she would and wouldn’t wear. Charles made her a sma
rter version of the skirt and long sweater she habitually wore with thick black stockings. Leyla was the vamp, Ada the ingenue.

  Ada saw, Charles made her see, that the right clothing could reflect your own truest self. The part of you that had escaped and become free. You became the part you dressed for. Charles perceived her deepest notions of herself and made them manifest. Or illustrated them.

  Charles was pinning fabric onto Jack, who was Jacqueline in a frock, pronounced in a Frenchified way. Jzah-kleen.

  ‘Still waters run deep, don’t they, Ada?’ said Charles. Every now and then he turned his gaze to her. It’s as if he knew everything that was going to happen to all of them.

  The frock of course was not for the street. It was for the parties only Les Messieurs went to. Charles gave the frock a swooping curve of ruffles from one shoulder to opposite heel, a sort of fabric gesture of an exaggerated femininity that suited Jacqueline.

  This is a vivid moment of a realisation that Ada had no words for, as she watched Jack pinned into his frock.

  One day she would put it into words. That feeling that made no sense, as they sat about drinking tea, or was it sherry that day, watching Jacqueline switch on the mannerisms the frock required, the gestures and stances that said, I Am Female, or something not exactly like that.

  Ada felt that she herself was what Jack was. An impersonator. She herself was a female impersonator, not in the way Jack was. Ada was feminine, couldn’t hide her femininity or female self behind those suits and the loose sweaters, the point of her clothes being, in a way, to show she remained feminine while encased in severe lines. While Jack was hiding another side. A different one, that is.

  Ada’s bookishness – what they’d called being brainy at school, wanting to read, being alone – meant she wasn’t a real woman. And that was fine with her. Because those ideas about real women came from the lands beyond, from the empire of thought control.

  This moment might at this point be a memory from the future.

  ‘If they could see me now!’ Jack began to joke. ‘What would The Straights at work say!’

  That was Jack who called it The Straights.

  Charles called it The Squares.

  Another, The Suburbans. ‘It’s not about where you live,’ he added.

  ‘I know where I want to live.’

  ‘Aren’t you living in it, Dorothy?’

  Ada offered what she knew: Flaubert called it the bourgeois. Ada muttered it, and Leyla said it aloud, as if she were the one who knew this: ‘Flaubert called it the bourgeoisie.’

  ‘Live and Let Live’, that was the song Ray was singing. A song about how people should let people be, about everyone minding their own business.

  So Ray must have been there that day. Charles’s group. Mostly men. Men like him. They used many words with emphasis, deliberation, a meaning that bound them, but they never named a collective identity as far as Ada ever knew or remembered. What would it be? Was there a word?

  The fact of certain private sexual practices or desires did not seem to be the point. Or she couldn’t understand its role in the collective identity.

  Ada probably already gathered that suburban men also indulged in the same but only in utmost secrecy and the pretence that it never happened. Jack said, ‘Pansies in the shed, he-men in the street.’ Was that what he said? The standard suburban backyard shed was where a bloke kept his lawnmower and hammers. Hid away from the oppressions of wife and offspring. Of having to be the kind of man he thought he had to be.

  Chez Charles, what they all had in common was a sensibility, a taste for refinement, a distaste for a whole vast class of humanity that made up the larger part of the society they lived in. They had disclosed themselves at least to each other, further horizons explored to various extents, some merely thought experiments for now.

  The war had been over for a while now and Charles was going to Paris at last. He had put it off because his business was thriving. Or that was an excuse, because once your dreams come true what then?

  ‘At last,’ Charles said.

  ‘Too late,’ people told him, ‘it is all sad and ruined.’

  Charles said, ‘I should have gone when I was too young to go, I should wait until probably I’ll be too old.’

  Monsieur Jack said, ‘Why go to Europe when Europe is coming here?’

  It wasn’t the same. Europe was all those places of drama, romance, fame. Extreme antiquity, extreme modernity. The Colosseum. The Eiffel Tower. The Bridge of Sighs. The latest fashion, the latest cinema. It was all about the way people were over there – to them, being over there was normal. They sipped cocktails at sidewalk cafes. They quipped and alluded. They did it on Sundays.

  ‘It’s where people are not embarrassed to say they like who they like.’

  ‘You don’t have to be secretive.’

  ‘You don’t have to be invisible.’

  ‘You wear any colour you feel like wearing.’

  ‘They think artists matter.’

  ‘You come from there,’ one of them said to Ada; ‘what’s it like?’

  ‘We were only children, don’t ask us,’ Ada replied.

  Leyla though said something very definitely. ‘Everyone knows who their enemy is, and they never forget it.’

  Ada remembers that but not whether anyone responded. There didn’t seem to be age-old enmities in Australia, the young country.

  The war was over, Charles was going to go to see Europe at last. The Europe that people went to not the Europe people had fled.

  What about the Society Ladies?

  ‘They’ll come back,’ said Charles: the ladies would return to him once he returned having imbibed all the great couturiers, art treasures, boulevards.

  ‘But you won’t come back,’ someone predicted.

  Charles smiled as if he’d been complimented.

  ‘You come from there,’ one of them said to Ada; ‘what’s it like?’

  Had Ada thought about life outside Australia? Their mothers had never talked about it. It was an unexpressed understanding that the time before Australia could not be expressed.

  ‘They are traumatised,’ said Leyla, when they talked about their mothers the only time they did again once they’d moved to Kings Cross. Or if not the only time, it wasn’t what they kept talking about as they had before.

  How vile the world can be. This sense remains. As if inherited.

  They believed they understood their mothers better than the mothers had ever understood them. Traumatised, end of story, that made them the way they were and they weren’t going to live like that. Something was missing for them, too, but they would find it in the life they had, the one starting here.

  10

  THERE WILL NOT BE A CHANGE

  ‘“13 Things only people who read Lueshira books when they were kids would understand

  “That moment when you realise what The Stranger has just worked out they’re telling him at the Second Crossing.

  “The way no other book made you feel so weird about your genitals.

  “Your own parents never had a smartphone but this dude predicted them in the 1950s.

  “When The Stranger learns about the Dark Saga and you know something worse than the worst things you’ve ever heard about are what this means.

  “When The Stranger has to”

  Blah blah and blah.’

  Thank you, Jay, we didn’t need to hear it all. Written by people who are grandparents now, and now the kids are finding this online.

  ‘I understand all that, it was all in the film. It was on TV when I was a kid. It was too long ago. So it was later I found out it was a book. It’s good they’re making it again. MahLila is an awesome choice. Don’t you think? I mean, for this age we’re in!’ Jay’s directing this query Ada’s way, with no expectation of reply. Jay continues to follow unique pathways through accumulations of opinion, persuasion, dispute, archived forums, the other things they’ve had, the various platforms, and whatever they’re saying now. />
  ‘“Her first novel remained obscure until a film adaptation” … Will I click, uh, go back, too much information … Ah, “casting dispute in geek classic remake”. That’s what I’m talking about! Right choice, end of dispute, you all.’

  Jay pauses a moment, as if taking in the expected shower of respect.

  ‘“Now recognised as a pioneer in women’s utopian science fiction … Famously reclusive, the author’s Twitter account and Facebook are maintained by fans … Citation needed … She composes on a typewriter …”’

  Smokey-voiced Jay keeps reading aloud, willing for Ada to hear. This reading has been going on for some time. Any amount of time. Eye-rolls and frowns and decisive head movements modulate Jay’s voice, Ada can sense it.

  ‘“Anarchism!” I knew there was a word for it. ‘“Anarchism is a system that people who don’t want to be part of a system can be part of.” Wait, what?’

  Jay’s small gasp reading the latest message. Tapping return texts.

  ‘Definitely worth investing in the new phone, you should see this screen,’ says Jay. To Ada. Not because Ada is going to look, but it’s Jay’s method, talk to the patient all the time.

  Single caws and bursts of digital kookaburra laughter punctuate the hour.

  ‘“AL Ligeti Portal”,’ says Jay. ‘“GenderQueer corner”. Don’t gotta ask twice. This is the one The Coilsplit Twins designed. “AL Ligeti is one of our godparents, one of our elders, one of our path makers, one of those whose works of imagination ignited popular culture’s ideas of …” We totally know … What-what-what?’ A text has just demanded Jay’s attention. ‘OK, I get it, I’m meant to read this other thing … “Going Out”, which one’s that again?’