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EVENINGS WITH FRANCES (PART TWO)
We play the evening like this, like badminton with a shuttlecock, back an forth. An once it's dark the night has a habit of crawling especially slowly across us. I do the dishes, scrub away at the pots, where the tuna has turned hard an black. She smokes, makes smoke rings, figure eights an all kinds of designs an configurations in smoke - she's good at this - watching very quietly as the smooth patterns of smoke in front of her rise up to the ceiling, slowly disappear. At around 2.00 or 2.30 we go to her room an go to bed. She pulls back the pale green sheet an doubles up her body into the foetal position, sighing an yawning an scratching. Instead of any kind of nightgown she's got on a huge white T-shirt that once belonged to her dad. In the yellow light from the bedside lamp I notice a line of dirt on her neck. She hasn't washed herself properly, she doesn't take enough care. She's working way too hard, so hard she has not time to have pride in herself. I know that money is the start of this sickness, that much is clear. In her it is a rotten, insidious sickness that grows into dreams, dreams that run out of control. Frances needs so very much money for travel - travel to the big places, the great an distant places, Europe an America of course. She has to go there or else, or else, what? She'll die? She desires an lusts for travel in such a way that she is prepared to grind her own self into a state of bad repair. She is stricken by this yearning, this wanderlust. "You really don't understand at all, do you?" This is how the lecture begins, almost every night, sitting at her kitchen table by ourselves, the sea breeze died out, the bottle going down. She's loosened up, she waves her arms in the air, brandishes cooking implements at me. "I have to leave this place before I get any older. Can you not see that? It's so small an cloistered I feel I'm being choked", she indicates her bronchial syatem. "Everyone in this town knows everyone else, you can't go anywhere without your past creeping up on you, meeting some bastard you know only too well...who'll remind you of some stupid episode to make you appear foolish. You can't have any secrets to yourself, steal away into the night, you know, have a fling with a total stranger, it's just not possible. You're selling things, selling yourself to the same people, the same fucking buyers who'll grow up here, work here, marry here, die here". She pauses an exhales wearily before accommodating me in this scheme of things. "You've heard all this before my dear - but of course it doesn't actually sink into you. You sit in that chair every evening, wait for me to finish, quite content in your own way, after a fashion. An this town an all our friends are a crutch for you, you don't ever imagine how it would be to, put it this way, to climb to the top of a tall hill an look down on this town an everybody here, to see it from far away, from a vantage point, to realise there might be another way of living, an that it's not essential to continue with the way things are here". On an on it goes, the lecture. I sit polite an listen but I admit I don't understand the urgency, I don't see why I should be forced to share this panic. In fact the intensity of her frustration seems to me sort of childish an unnecessary, I can't help but suspect that she's forcing these feelings, working herself up to it, just throwing stones at a hornet's nest inside her. An Jesus, why am I still here every night, night after night? I don't know, I do it for reasons I don't fully understand. The wine goes down so easy, we pay for that with pain the next morning. It's like a mathematical equation. Sometimes the pain stabs on all through the day, we just have to cope with that. I know it's harder for Frances - not that she admits as much to me; she has quite a formidable guard, an she rarely lets it down. But I've learned to recognise the cracks, anticipate them. I've seen her off to work some mornings; she seems OK, she fixes her face an dresses OK, an puts all her personal stuff in her maroon leather shoulder bag; she takes a few steps out in the sun, out along the footpath to the bus stop. But then before she gets to the flame trees she totters to a stand-still. She has to sit on the curb, her shoulders crumple up, she bows her head right down, she has to rest, breathe, maybe cry a bit I don't know. Her mind's all cluttered so she mumbles, but nothing of any sense comes out, just sad little individual syllables that don't go together, taht aren't in the right order. She sits like this on the side of the road for a few minutes, head cradled in her arms, then slowly picks herself up, runs her fingers back through her yellow hair an pats it down, trying to put all the different strands of hair back into their original places. Frances wipes her nose an then wipes the back of her wrist on her shirt. Without looking back at either me or the house she goes an waits beneath the flame trees.
© David McComb
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