Story for performance #245
webcast from Sydney at 07:42PM, 20 Feb 06

vanished decades ago
Source: Hala Jaber, ‘Saddam to hang ‘within months’’, The Sunday Times in The Australian online, 20/02/06.
Tags: home
Writer/s: Caroline Lee

I didn’t have any idea until I finally went to her apartment, the place in East Melbourne she’d lived in for so long. I hadn’t been there for a couple of years, maybe even three or four, because after all the twins are five now, starting school. I’d taken them to see Beatrice at the flat once or twice earlier on, but then Angela was born and that was it. Three babies under fourteen months. Actually I think it was us, Virginia and I, who disappeared at that point. Disappeared under a pile of washing and cleaning and working.

Beatrice hadn’t been answering her phone, ever, at any hour of the day or night. I started by calling at all the usual times, but then grew increasingly desperate and called any time, any time of the day or night, but she still never answered. I heard the same sonorous message over and over until I couldn’t bear it any more. ‘Hello, I’m sorry I’m not able to answer the telephone at the moment, please leave your message.’ Not even promising to return the call. I didn’t think about the significance of that for quite a while. She never lied, but Beatrice was a mistress of avoidance, the deft change of topic, the sleight of hand. She played bridge. Played at a ladies club in the city. On Thursday nights. Or was it Wednesdays? And I mean a club for real ladies: retired headmistresses, lawyers, dentists, or servicewomen like she had been. Smart women with pasts and a lot of dignity. Eventually I rang a couple of her friends, who, similarly, had lost touch with Beatrice. With their support I finally got the key from the Real Estate agent, the inimitable Gary Stollery; forced to conjure images of a stinking body, and, probably more saliently, of friends and family prepared to sue, before he was prepared to hand it over.

So one rainy Tuesday, I drove to the flat, climbed the familiar worn marble stairs, and carefully opened the front door, which opened directly into the living room. I had to take a moment to manage the vertigo. Beatrice’s flat bore virtually no resemblance to the flat I had once known so well, except structurally of course. Everything was entirely different. Her bed, although was it even her bed? was in front of me, in what had been the living room, and there was barely any other furniture, just one bureau in the corner which had a collection of things on it; vases, pictures, porcelain. There were no books, anywhere. No television, no radio, no couch, no rugs, nothing. My stomach was churning. Everything was hers, the very particular mark of her was on everything, and yet it was all so unfamiliar, so unlike her. And she was nowhere, nowhere to be found.

I went in and it all became even more disquieting. Her bedroom had been turned into a work space, most of the room taken up by a beautiful old dining table, with claw legs, that I was sure I hadn’t seen before. I finally noticed that everything, everything: the furniture, the collection of ornaments, but also the sheets and the blankets and the pillows and the cutlery and even the tea towel hanging over the handle of the oven, had a tiny clear label on it. I had to get my glasses out to see that each label had someone’s name and a phone number on it, written in black in her beautiful neat hand; Amelia 95107628; Gloria 98184352; The Brotherhood 94170095. My name was there, on a couple of things, in particular a gravy boat that had been her mother’s. That’s when I first started to ache. There was such aloneness in those labels, yet also strength, and attention. I, in contrast, had clearly not been attending. I thought for a moment that I might fall apart, there, right there in that strange evanescence of Beatrice, but I had no handkerchief. Where was she? What had happened? What had she done? I didn’t feel that she was dead, although I did take some care walking into the bathroom.

When I pieced things together, having gone through the papers in her workroom, her bills, her mail, all of the small bits of her life that remained, I realised that she had been doing it for a long, long time, slipping away little by little; that pieces of her and her life had slowly and gently, but very carefully, been being erased, misted over, subtly altered so as to have no meaning, so that they didn’t fit into the jigsaw any more, so that things ceased to connect, to make any viable narrative. It must have taken her years, decades, but then, finally, she vanished. Permanently, absolutely, utterly. Vanished without a trace.

I still watch for her. Once I was on the tram and I looked up to catch a woman’s eyes, staring at me intently through a crowd of bodies. They were her eyes, I was sure; grey-blue, mischievous. She had a beautiful cream hat on, and seemed quite thin, but her eyes were still bright. My heart leapt, my lips closed, beginning to form her name…and then she disappeared. I got up, pushed through the unyielding press of bodies, but there was no cream hat anywhere. I don’t even know if it really was her.

I wish I’d been able to lift my head from my desk, from my endless stream of cases, or look for a minute out of the window of my office, or take a moment as I walked from the office to my car to realise how much I loved her. I miss her terribly, the elegance of her apartment, of her; her cadence, the lightness with which she walked in the world. I wish that I could tell her that I think of her, often, Bergmanesque, in some old-fashioned airport somewhere, smoking and waiting; waiting for the next inexplicable flight to somewhere else.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Caroline Lee.