Under the Knife. Andrea GoldsmithЧитать онлайн книгу.
house. They’d spent the day packing and chatting and laughing together and at last the old place was empty. The mattress was tied to the roof of a borrowed Mini, the cabin was choked with Paula’s possessions. There was barely enough room for one person in the car, much less two.
‘You drive,’ Paula said, and clambered on to the roof to sit Buddha-like on the mattress, her feet looped under the ropes.
‘You can’t do that,’ Eddie said, more concerned about being caught than Paula’s falling off.
‘Just watch me. Or rather don’t. Watch the road.’
It was not the first time they went to bed together, although it easily might have been, the two of them lugging the mattress up a couple of dozen stairs, dumping it on the floor and themselves on top.
‘Are you happy now?’ Paula says, reaching across and touching Eddie’s forehead. ‘My, real sweat. And on a brow that would frown at perspiration.’
Paula’s hand on her forehead a mere fraction of a second, and Eddie is on her feet and fleeing that too-sweet touch she absolutely must not want.
She was happy just to look at her. Paula singing or playing the piano, Paula alone or with friends, luxuriant Paula in her flowing red clothes. ‘You’re my ruby-dazzler,’ Eddie once said after too much wine.
There was an extravagance to Paula. ‘You act as if life’s too short,’ Eddie said.
‘Not too short,’ Paula replied. ‘There’s simply too much of it.’ And would drag Eddie off to see a pair of huge dragon gargoyles atop an inner-city building, and then to the beach to watch the waves in the moonlight. Later still, she’d pull her to the ground in a shadowy park to search the sky for falling stars.
‘This is heaven,’ she’d say. And seeing Eddie wide-eyed and stiff in her arms, ‘Relax sweetheart, there’s no one about, not at three in the morning.’
But how could Paula know?
‘You can’t wait for the orchestra to begin,’ she’d say, ‘not if you want to sing.’
And the next day her mother would fuel her unease. ‘She’s a bad influence on you, Edwina. What do you think you’re doing with your life?’
Paula rode a motorbike with a sidecar. The latter was primarily for Dinah, a playful thirty-eight kilograms of Bernese Mountain dog, although was shared by Paula’s stream of friends. ‘But you’re Dinah’s favourite,’ Paula assured her, as Eddie and Dinah squeezed into the sidecar. And Paula would mount the bike and careen down the road singing above the roar: ‘Eddie, Eddie, give me your answer do.’ As the drive lengthened so the singing became more bawdy, until they would be blistering along the Nepean Highway with Paula embellishing well-known tunes with lyrics to make a libertarian squirm.
Paula’s blood was spiked with explosive. She was wonderful and exhausting, she was exciting and terrifying. Her place was centre-stage and that’s where Eddie had to be if she wanted her wild spark.
‘Are you happy yet?’ Paula would shout, and Eddie would wonder what on earth she was doing.
Before Paula crashed into her life, Edwina always knew exactly what she was doing. It was a situation that did not make her particularly happy, but it supplied the security she wanted, and a measure of comfort. And it was comfort she was feeling one autumn evening as she made her way from a quick dinner at the union to the library and a few hours with Chaucer. Her marks were good, her friendships were under control, she had managed to remove Russell, her latest boyfriend, with a minimum of fuss, her mother was off her back and she’d just had her first short story accepted for publication. Very comfortable indeed. And might have remained so if she’d been watching where she was going, or for that matter, stayed for coffee with friends rather than rushing off to the library. But instead she was in a glazed-eyed walking, books and folders clasped in her arms, and then she was on her knees and hanging on to a pair of crimson legs.
‘Have I killed you?’ were Paula’s first words.
Eddie was very much alive but more than a little winded by the figure in front of her. From red hat through flowing red dress to red stockings and lace-up red leather boots, this vision was foreign to the university circa 1975, and to Eddie no matter what the era. She recognised Paula immediately. For weeks the campus had been plastered with posters advertising the Paula Harding concert. Paula, only twenty-four years old, with several shows to her credit and an opera that had created an uproar among the Puccini and Verdi set, was the music world’s wunderkind and feminism’s favourite child.
Paula helped Eddie to her feet, gathered up her books and notes, then pulled a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket. ‘Where in the hell is the Monash Theatre?’
Eddie started to explain, but with the direction part of her brain a ‘black hole’, Paula asked to be guided to the door. And once there Eddie stayed. How could she not when Paula sat her on a stool in the wings promising to soothe her bruised and battered body? As for Chaucer: ‘He’s been around for six hundred years,’ Paula said. A few more hours won’t make any difference.’
Paula Harding filled the stage. A ruby-red figure with red-rimmed glasses, she sang with her whole body. Her head swayed with the music, she sent the words flying, her hands flounced over the keys, her feet danced, and the voice, a magical braiding of loose layabout strands, was pure silk. Edwina sat in the wings, her copy of Chaucer clenched to her chest while her desires took flight. This, she realised, was another way of living.
Most of the songs were Paula’s own compositions. She sang about politics and the ironies of love, she sang the blues and torch-song seductions, and in between she’d talk to the audience with the same ease and intimacy one would use with old friends. Whether singing or talking, she managed to be both outrageous and serious, and the audience loved her. Edwina, with beating heart and Chaucer biting her skin, marvelled that anyone could be so bold, so indifferent to expectation that she could trounce one sacred cow after another.
‘Don’t you ever worry what other people think?’ Eddie asked a few weeks later.
‘Honey,’ she replied in a southern drawl, ‘Ah don’t have the time.’
Paula resented sleep. There was nothing to interest her in unconsciousness, she said, and besides the night was ‘so divinely succulent’. So it happened that a month after their first meeting, at exactly twenty-five past one in the morning, Eddie awoke to music outside her bedroom window. It was a love-song with guitar backing, no pianissimo seduction but a full-throttle, you-can’t-refuse-me, country and western plea. It was Paula, and threatening to wake the neighbourhood. Eddie was out of bed and at the window begging her to stop. ‘Not until you come outside,’ she says. Eddie grabs some clothes, anything, just be quick, a girl serenading her in the wee hours and not what Harry and Beverley Frye have in mind for their daughter. She clambers across the dressing-table and through the window. And how can she be furious when Paula is so pleased to see her?
Eddie begs her to leave. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, I’ll see you any time, just leave now before you wake my parents.’ But having extricated her from the family bosom, Paula is not about to give up. Soon she has Eddie ensconced next to Dinah, and the three are speeding down the highway to the hills. Paula stops at the edge of Sherbrooke Forest. With the bike turned off, the night is dark and fiercely hushed, but it doesn’t worry Paula. She pulls a rug from her pack, a bottle of champagne and a handful of Baci chocolates. She settles Dinah and a jittery Edwina, then opens the bottle.
‘I love you, Edwina Frye,’ she says, dipping a finger in the fizz and running it round Eddie’s lips.
And suddenly finding herself a trespasser in another life where the rules aren’t her rules and she’s no longer responsible, Eddie takes Paula’s face between her hands and kisses the full, smiling mouth, and then is kissing the whole face, the ears the neck, and slipping her cold hands beneath the red clothes to the warm woman’s skin. Another life or her own and it no longer matters, and she is swarming over that body, scooping its softness and warmth, making love in the still, crisp air.
‘I