Read Online Cosmo Cosmolino by Helen Garner - Free Book Online

of things. Mend as she might, clothes wore out. Things broke. Paper came briefly into her possession, was scanned or scribbled on, then screwed up and thrown away. Even the black mist that her fingers left on a café counter evaporated before the cup could reach her lips. It was painful to watch an old woman—and Janet was only forty-five—stumble unshepherded down the back steps of a bus while an energetic young one, admired by all the passengers, bounded aboard through the front, holding out her money. To see a couple of any age lean towards each other across a restaurant table caused Janet’s stomach to fracture like an egg.
    She looked at herself in a shop’s long mirror and saw that she had grown crooked. Her right hip was higher than her left, and the opposite side of her top lip had developed, as it were in compensation, a bitter upward twist. If she placed two fingers against the outer point of each cheekbone and gently raised the skin, her jaw-line smoothed out, her upper lip lost its tense and radiating lines, and she saw a version of the girl she had once been; but the only thing that could take the years out of her face now was surgery, and the vanity of that she scorned.
    She scorned many things. All she believed in was the physical, the practical, the stoical. Bite the bullet, she said. Plug on, one foot in front of the other andkeep going. She had no children. Her family was scattered. She was too proud to take advice or sympathy: to a woman like Janet, nothing is more enfeebling than pity :and so she fell out with all her friends.
    It was already years since she had severed herself, with rough strokes, from the demanding work she had been trained for, and had arranged her life so that she could earn a living without needing to leave the house more than two or three times a week. She could turn her hand to most things an old-fashioned typewriter was used for. She could review, she could edit, she could sling words around grammatically into sharp little pieces for fashion magazines, weekend colour supplements, and the glossy publications found in the seat pockets of domestic airlines. She was known for keeping a deadline; and if anyone asked, she called herself a journalist.
    So she lay on her bed and read. She sat at the table in her upstairs room and tapped the keys. At night she would open the blind and lean out when the pub on the corner of the avenue was closing, and watch the real people going home with gaiety, some singing as they slung their legs over saddles and pedalled away, their fitful dynamo lamps blossoming on the dark surface of the road. And sometimes, now, in the empty house, she heard her own footsteps hurry past on the other side of a wall, her own voice, more girlish, laughing in a closed room. Unwelcome memories of happinessrustled behind her or pounced from doorways. She remembered being the youngest person present, being a student with a job: how it was to tie on an apron and slap together sandwiches in a shop, taking orders, chiacking with the customers; to have sore feet from standing up all day to serve; and later, the surprised pride of being on a payroll and a promotions list, of belonging to a union and knowing where she fitted into her society. She remembered the pleasure of being driven to work on sunny mornings by a bunch of older colleagues from the staffroom, married men with shaven cheeks, viyella shirts, maroon ties: the tonic, laundered smell of the car when she climbed in with her newspaper at the pick-up point near the start of the freeway.
    Janet was not a mother, but she was a natural aunt. Her friends’ children had loved her: she could not work out why, she was so brisk with them; she paid them so little attention that whenever she did speak the wildest of them sprang to obey her.
    â€˜Ah no,’ she used to say, stroking the polish on to her toenails, ‘I was a feminist. What if I’d had a girl? I would have felt it my duty to dress