Read Online Cosmo Cosmolino by Helen Garner - Free Book Online Page A

her in overalls and force her to play with Lego. Lego is the reason why I never had children. I hate going into houses and seeing those little bits of plastic scattered all over the floor.’
    The real reason, which nobody knew, was that at thirty, between lovers and contemptuous of her ownromantic fantasies, she had presented herself so plausibly to a gynaecologist that he agreed without demur to perform on her a tubal ligation, and did so within forty-eight hours. Janet came to in a hospital bed with a parched mouth, a clamp in her scabbing abdomen, and a terrible sense of having been rushed, rushed past herself into a future with no outcome. Somebody should have argued with her, somebody should have stopped her: but who? She was beholden to nobody ,and that was her proudest boast. An old woman in the next ward was laughing, deep unstoppable harsh spasms of it, not crazy laughter but a response to something genuinely funny. Beside Janet’s head lay a sandwich. Feeble with pain she peeled off its top layer and found inside it a tiny sliver of tomato which lay on her tongue, refreshing her, while she passed out.
    Her house, bought with a windfall as deposit twenty years ago in a suburb not yet fashionable, was a two-storey corner terrace, one of those narrow and yet imposing Victorian arrangements of rooms which have been likened, by the disobliging, to railway carriages.
    â€˜Every room has a room off it,’ chattered a visiting child to its mother, ‘and every room with a room off it has a room off it .’It was littered, at the time when this story begins, with the detritus of many a failed household. Janet knew that one day she would have to hire somebody to put it in order, or else sell it and buy herself a hard, bright little apartment on the other side of theriver: but in the meantime she retreated before chaos, closing doors as she went, leaving timber half-stripped and plaster unpainted, until only in the kitchen and her bedroom was any kind of order maintained.
    In fact the house had always been her liability. In the seventies, when collective households regularly formed and crashed, when teaspoons had holes drilled in their bowls to frustrate the passing junkie, when cooking was rostered and bands practised in the bedrooms and toothbrushes like icicles hung by the wall, it was demonstrated to Janet many a time that property is theft. Households exploded or collapsed, friends quarrelled and parted forever, the police thundered on the door at five a.m. and hauled the junkies away, and the one left behind in the echoing house, picking up mess off floors scarred by the repeated dragging of heavy club chairs, was always the hapless owner.
    Take the wrong tone at breakfast, said Janet, and you were laying a heavy trip .Mention the mortgage payments on pension day and you were a slum landlord, the last worm on earth. People stopped talking when you entered your own kitchen; the word my could cause sharp intakes of breath round the teapot. What were we thinking of, in those days, said Janet. For all our righteous egalitarianism we were wild and cruel. We had no patience: our hearts were stony: our house meetings were courts of no appeal: people who displeased us we purged and sent packing. We hatedour families and tried to hurt them: we despised our mothers for their sacrifice.
    Some of us, said Janet, fell into the gap between theory and practice, though we called it overdose, or suicide, or falling asleep at the wheel. We had not learnt the words with which to speak of death. ‘Poor Chips,’ whispered the last of the household children, a little girl whose head bristled with a hundred tightly yanked plaitlets, holding Janet’s hand in a bleak crematorium chapel: ‘he died by loneliness .’They sat in a pew, dry-eyed and desolate, listening to the ideological ramblings of a contemporary with scum on his lips who knew of no comfort to offer, no blessing to call down, nothing useful or