Madigan Mine

Part I

Communion

- 1 -

It doesn’t take much to change the world.

A broken heart. A broken mind. A single phone call.

Her brother, Bailey, ringing at six minutes to ten on a Thursday morning, the ache in his voice so fresh and raw, so palpable, that I almost hung up on him. Because I guessed, because I knew. Even before he said the words, of course I knew.

You wouldn’t have recognized her, Alex. Her poor little head…

One phone call, and the whole. World. Changed.

Madigan, my Madigan. My love, with her green eyes and pale Irish skin, that detested sunless complexion passed down from her mother; her mother’s, too, the thick auburn curls that will no longer tumble from her fresh-cropped skull. What have they done with them, those locks so savagely shorn and discarded on the bathroom floor? Thrown out, probably, scooped up with a dustpan and bagged for easy disposal. Would they have saved a curl or two for me, if I’d thought to ask?

Even now, I can still smell that hair, the green-apple of her favourite shampoo and the muskier scent of her scalp beneath. How much of it I must have thrown away myself: wet and matted clumps pulled with a curse from the shower drain, long strands sliding sly between kisses down the back of my throat, carpet-dwelling knots that defied every attempt to vacuum them up.

Christ, Madigan, I snapped at her once, watching a copper coil surface in my morning coffee. You’re worse than a damn cat with all this shedding.

A cat, huh? Her smile was cool and thin. Then be grateful I don’t steal your breath at night.

I think we fought that day. Not because of the hair, but no doubt over something equally pointless. It was hard to love Madigan without hating her as well. A mild hatred born of resentment and frustration, of jealousy and the special brand of guilt she unwittingly forced on anyone who came too close. No, not unwittingly, never that. She was only too aware of the emotions she provoked in people—provoked and most carefully fostered: love me on your terms; hate me on mine.

And I did both.

And I still do.

A suitably dismal day on which to bury her, this. Mute grey huddle of storm clouds, the last autumn leaves clotting wet and limp in the gutters, and a light drizzle to blur the edges. I’m early, stepping off the tram outside St Patrick’s to face the huddle of black umbrellas and sombre overcoats, the Toorak set with their consoling murmurs and silk hankies to dab the tears: designer garb with grief to match. Few would have even known Madigan, fewer still would’ve cared, but God forbid they miss a Sargood funeral.

Too harsh? Too unkind? But their world isn’t mine and never could be, its edges brushed only briefly through Madigan, my perceptions coloured by her own well-heeled scorn.

They never do anything, Lexi. It’s all dinner parties and nights at the theatre, vintage wines lying undrunk in cellars, and cars that never leave the garage. Grass you can’t walk on, possessions you can’t touch. They don’t live, they exhibit.

It wasn’t just hair she inherited from her mother.

Katherine Sargood. Ethereal, beautiful Katherine Sargood, who strolled through the streets in summer shielded by a parasol, her face unmade and hair blowing loose, the family’s mongrel dog snuffling at her heels. Katherine Sargood, who fed her two kids on peanut butter sandwiches and sent them off to public school.

Just because they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth doesn’t mean they have to choke on it.

Katherine Sargood, my second mother for so many years. We’d sit, Madigan and me, listening as Katherine read aloud from Auden or Yeats or some other dead poet whose words could have held no real meaning for our young ears. But her voice. Those lilting, Irish rhythms so foreign and strange and intoxicating that I lay spellbound for ages on the sunroom floor. I remember how pale her legs were, her ankles so white they were almost blue. Sometimes she would rest her feet in Madigan’s lap, allowing her toenails to be painted garish pink or bright, glitter-spun green.

Or red. That deep, luxurious red which bled so quick and sudden into the thick cream pile the time I kicked over its tiny bottle. An clumsy accident, but what horror I felt, sure that I would be banished immediately and forever, and how amused Katherine was to see it in my face. Smiling, slipping down on her knees to run a finger through the sticky crimson stain: I think you shall be a famous artist one day, Alex. And then this little scrap of carpet here will be worth more than the entire house.

But, as always, the last words fell to Madigan, pouting and huffy over the wasted polish: Lexi can’t be an artist, Mother. He’s just a stupid little boy.

She was proved right, in the end—though it had taken much of high school and two and half years at art college for realisation to finally sink in. It still hurts, the wound inflicted that final miserable Friday, my latest abject sketches pressed beneath my arm as the neo-hippy life-drawing instructor cornered me between easels after class: Bishop, a word. But more than one word, many more. You have no talent, man, okay? You don’t hear the music, you don’t see the visions; you’re not an artist and you won’t ever be an artist. So, give it up, yeah? Go find something you can do.

Which would be what exactly?

Nothing, it seemed, nothing at all. Swapping shifts between video shops and convenience stores, working hours no one else wanted. Enough money to get by, just, but my life little more than a directionless wander through limbo-land until Madigan came back into it. Madigan, wrapped in obsession and deadly lunacy; a madness I couldn’t bring myself to see until it was shoved with bloody hands into my face.

That last night, the green rabid glint in her eyes come full circle by then, driven sane at last by sheer force of insanity, and her smiling mouth which haunts me even now, her lips forming words unforgettable—

‘Hey, Alex?’

Joaquin. For once I’m almost glad to see him, relieved to be dragged back to here, to now, to the chill press of the boy’s fingers against my wrist, and yet my voice still catches on his name and I can’t smile, can’t even meet the gaze of those imploring brown eyes. Puppy-dog eyes, Disney eyes as Madigan called them, nudge nudge, wink wink: He has such a crush on you, Lexi, you could have him in a second. Staring instead at the cathedral, its green-black stone rendered even gloomier by the rain. The stir of cloud makes the spires appear to lurch forward and back, a movement so subtle it takes a moment to catch it, to notice how the entire structure seems to shift and swell with morbid pride.

Joaquin nods towards a band of mourners clustered to one side of the cathedral steps. The Marionettes have turned out in force, and none but Kate would’ve had much trouble finding something funereal to wear. Blonde and bird-bone thin, the girl looks even more anaemic than usual without her trademark psychedelia, with what must be a borrowed black shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders. Poor Kate; she’s the only member of the group I give half a damn about.

Joaquin coughs. ‘You reckon it’s cool if we go inside? We weren’t, like, invited or nothing.’

Christ. Funeral Etiquette with Uncle Alex.

‘I guess so. It’s an open service.’

‘Yeah, that’s what we thought, pretty much.’ Long fingers fiddling nervously with the intricate lacework of his shirt collar. At least he’s gone easy on the make-up today, just some black eyeliner and a smudge of charcoal on his lips. ‘Dude, we don’t see you much anymore…’

Reproachful, but what the hell does he expect? They were Madigan’s acolytes, not mine, her tribe of starry-eyed space cadets to command and exploit for whatever grim ends she had in mind. I stopped asking questions early on.

The Marionettes. Ruth dubbed them with that shortly before she moved out. Concerned Ruth, biting a fingernail in the kitchen. Sensible Ruth, wanting to know just what the hell was going on with those kids anyway. And they were just kids, Joaquin the eldest of them at seventeen, so of course it fell to me to know better.

It’s your house, Alex. You don’t have to let this go on.

Nothing’s going on. They just come over to talk to her.

Talk? Just what do they talk about, I’d like to know. What twisted little mindgames is she playing with those kids?

It’s not like that, Ruth. They just like to hang around, that’s all. My laughter forced, a futile attempt to defuse the situation. Madigan says they make her feel like an old mother hen sometimes.

Madigan says. A hiss of breath through her teeth. Madigan says whatever suits her purpose.

I didn’t listen, not then, not ever if truth be told, because Ruth was, after all, just Ruth. A good friend and well-intentioned, but never more than that.

And Madigan was … Madigan.

Now dead, soon to be buried, and god it hurts, the thought of her cold in the ground. Untouchable. Gone.

‘…hearing me?’ Joaquin’s chatter is suddenly unbearable and I want to grab him by his scrawny little throat, to feel his larynx bobbing hard against my palms as I throttle every last gasp from his body, because how dare he even breathe when she cannot, when she will not, not ever again, and he will not shut up shut up shut up shut up—

shut up, Lexi. you’re raving

I can hear her whispering those very words in my ear, blunt and matter-of-fact, my own private admonishing ghost, and so I do shut up for now. For now just wishing I had a drink, a double whisky to start with, something to dull the ache and stop that fucking spooky sway of the cathedral against the sky.

Joaquin mumbles on, his arm linked through mine, and I’m walking with him I realise, being led over to them, mawkish grief-pale faces and eight sets of eyes trained hungrily on—the Marionettes cut loose; who now shall tug their strings?—me?

No. I stop, shrug off his grasp. ‘I’m going inside.’

‘But we’ll see you tonight?’ Joaquin asks. ‘Right?’

Tonight, the stupid vigil he’s just been babbling about, their clandestine midnight mass. I can see them now: their weepy cross-legged circle around her grave, rosary bead mutter and the hot dribble of candlewax, me in the centre, Master Puppeteer…

I shake my head no. No, Joaquin, I can’t. I won’t.

But on the steps I look back, catch the brunt of their reproachful, collective frown. Only Kate stands aloof, her face turned carefully to the side, and hers is the very glance I wish I could catch, hers the disapproval I would willingly bear for the chance to say sorry—sorry I didn’t know, sorry I wasn’t there, so damn sorry for not being able to save her, our Madigan, because if anyone could, it might have been me, and so for all that: sorry sorry sorry.

I pause for a second longer, willing the girl to feel my stare, to meet it, but other people are coming up the steps now, their slow tidal push taking me forward into the cathedral, and it’s this last glimpse of Kate I take with me: the soft, flaxen fall of her hair, the pale arc of her cheek damp with silent tears.

The vestibule is gloomy and ill-lit, guarded by a somber-faced man with a pile of booklets cradled in his arm. A slight, one-cornered smile hooks his mouth as he holds one of them out to me. I accept it automatically, returning the man’s curt little nod with one of my own as I realise that this is just another job to him. Hand over the merchandise, smile politely, transaction completed, Have A Nice Day. Well, maybe not the last part, under the circumstances.

Yes, I’m too cruel today, too fucking cynical, and if there’s anyone who deserves to stand trial for hypocrisy, then it should be me. Good old Alex, with all my sober talk of love and responsibility and being there whenever she needed me—until, of course, she really needed me. Until. Unless. Except. Terrible, ugly words, and I’ve built my defense from them. Scratched out limits within my own heart, where I’d promised there would be none. Too late to remove them now, too—

oh god

—late.

The casket waits there at the end of the aisle, white and wreathed with flowers, calla lilies arching like small, soft trumpets from their greenery. The lid is closed up tight, of course, no open caskets permitted at a Catholic requiem, and there’s nothing at all sinister about it apart from the knowledge of what—of who—lies within.

It’s one thing to know she’s dead, but to see it…

I slide into the nearest pew and close my eyes. How did this happen? Is it possible to go back through the weeks, months, years even, to trace out some pattern of inevitability, some evidence of a chain of events well beyond my ability to change or control? Or would that just be an exercise in masochism, serving only to point out opportunities missed and decisions wrongly made, to reveal all too clearly an entire damning sequence of culpability and blame? And, darkest of dark thoughts: which would I prefer?

There’s a creak of old wood as someone settles beside me on the pew. I keep my eyes shut, not wanting to make even the most cursory contact with anyone—especially not one of the Marionettes.

A hand touches my shoulder, lighter than breath. ‘Alex?’

Bailey, looking older than ever in his black suit and tie, his platinum-framed glasses pushed right up against the bridge of his nose. Only four years between us, but it has always seemed infinitely more than that. Even when we were kids, Madigan and I considered her older brother more as one of the adults than someone like us. He’s a lawyer now, contracted to one of those high-class firms on Collins Street, and looks every inch the part.

‘We’re glad you could make it,’ Bailey says, clearing his throat.

I nod, not trusting myself to words.

‘Alex, we’d like you to come by the house afterwards. For the wake. We—Dad and I—would really appreciate it.’

‘Man, that might not be such a good idea.’ Bailey’s presence alone is making me uncomfortable and self-conscious. With my usual jeans and a black cotton shirt beneath my overcoat, it’s easy to imagine myself sitting in a corner of the Sargood mansion, the object of well-tailored glances and snide, half-whispered remarks. That’s him, the ex-boyfriend … goodness knows what she saw in him … quite the nerve turning up here, all things considered…

‘Please.’ Bailey squeezes my shoulder. ‘It would mean a lot to him. Also, there are some things we need to discuss. The sooner the better.’

‘Things?’ I frown. ‘What things? Look, how about I drop by next week maybe, when you’ve all had a chance—’

‘No.’ An abrupt, vehement shake of his head. ‘Alex, this is important. It’s…’ He pulls a white handkerchief from his pocket and coughs into it, his eyes too bright all of a sudden. Too wet. ‘It’s about her.’

I glance away. ‘Sorry, Bailey. I’ll come. Of course, I’ll come.’

‘Give your name at the gate.’

Then he’s gone, weaving slowly up the central aisle, waylaid at almost every step by consoling handshakes and pats on the back. There’s something almost ritualistic about this passage; a trial by sympathy too painful to witness, so I turn my attention elsewhere, to the whale-ribbed arches of the ceiling, to the glossy red plastic cherries on the hat of the woman sitting before me, and finally to the booklet lying forgotten in my lap.

Its cover is made of thick white card—the kind of smooth, matt finish that will show even the shadow of a fingerprint—and embossed with silver filigree that curls along the border to embrace a mournful pair of doves in each of the four corners. Uncomplicated silver print announces We Celebrate the Eternal Life of Madigan Sargood, and inside there’s textured ricepaper dry as old skin but soft, almost soundless as I turn the pages. Flicking past hymns and gospel readings, prayers and responses; the entire mass laid out in black, easy to follow type. All of it utterly foreign to me, a non-Catholic, non-anything for that matter. Not even Madigan in her best sulk had been able to drag me to a church service before now.

I never did understand why she started to attend mass again, not completely. You have to come, Lexi, you have to feel it for yourself. New crucifix around her neck, tiny golden Christ figure glinting on its cross as she’d stroked it absently, almost sensuously. There’s power there, old power, far older than that empty religion and its pallid little harvest god could ever imagine.

I wanted no part of it.

Now, come at last, I feel nothing except mild unease at the unfamiliarity of it all, and a growing irritation with the thick, golden light that filters through the cathedral’s windows. Stained glass, the colour of week-old piss.

The music starts, majestic pipe organ chords so sonorous that every conceivable space fills to bloating. I close the booklet, prepare to stand with the rest of the shuffle-footed congregation. But my breath catches as I see the back cover, see her, head tilted to one side with that alluring smile I know so well, lips parted to reveal the merest glimmer of teeth. Her eyes bright green, wide open with an impish gleam and almost iridescent against the pale, lightly freckled skin of her face. And all around the wild tangle of hair so flagrantly red you’d have thought a filter had been used to take the photograph. But no, no, because I’ve touched that hair, held it to my mouth, held her…

oh, Lexi

God, it’s beautiful, she’s beautiful. When was it taken, how long ago? A year at least, more likely two; there’s none of the gauntness that stole over her in recent months, no hint of the panicked shade of madness. So, two years then, yes. Right about the time I found her again or, rather, the time she found me.

hey, Lexi?

That first day—would I take it back now, given the chance? Take it back, along with all the days that followed?

Would I?

That first day…

- 2 -

‘H ey , Lexi!’

I was halfway up the steps to Flinders Street Station, shuffling wearily home after pulling graveyard at an inner-city 7-Eleven, when she called out to me, her voice cutting sudden and sharp across the growl of early-morning traffic.

‘Lexi!’

Only one person had ever called me that.

Scanning the blank-faced jostle of commuters, I wondered if I had imagined it, had misheard another cry altogether, but then there she was, standing right in front of me, wide manic smile and arms outstretched to grasp my shoulders. Not a little girl anymore—twelve years of water washing beneath that particular bridge—and for one confused moment, I mistook her for her mother. My god, she looked like Katherine.

‘Lexi?’ A flicker of doubt, her smile faltering. ‘It is you, right?’

It was all I could do to nod. ‘Madigan?’

So much time had slipped away since she’d left. Since she’d been taken. That sudden inexplicable departure, just one tearful phone call the night before—Ireland, Dad says and We’re never coming back and I hate him so much, I hate him, Lexi—and then nothing. No more phone calls, no forwarding address, although three years or more ticked by before I’d stopped writing those hopeless, homeless letters, dug them all out from beneath the bottom drawer of my dresser and burned them. And now she was back, was here, right here: Madigan, in the flesh.

My Madigan.

Then her arms were around my neck and she was hugging me close, her warm breath in my ear—‘I knew it was you, I knew it’—and I hugged her back. It felt awkward at first, her body a supple mass of unfamiliar bumps and curves. She was as tall as me now, her shoulders almost as broad; long red hair tickled the backs of my hands, and her face felt hot against my cheek.

Finally she stepped back, reached out to grab my hands in hers. ‘What are you doing right this minute, Lexi? Anything that can’t wait?’

At that point, even my own funeral would have taken a number.

The Temple of Isis, one of her semi-regular haunts. An upmarket licensed café at the swanky end of Collins Street, faux-Egyptian décor and a breakfast menu that would total only marginally less than last night’s pay cheque; little wonder we’d never bumped into each other there. A thin, blonde-bobbed waitress came to take our order, starting in on the merits of the breakfast specials before I held up a hand.

‘Just coffee, thanks. Black.’ More than that and my bank balance would likely fall short of the rent, already a few days late.

But Madigan shook her head. ‘You must be starving after working all night. I’m the one depriving you of sleep; the least I can do is make sure you eat a decent breakfast.’ Waving away my protests, she ordered for us both, her long pale fingers flicking speedily across the menu: this, this, this and this.

‘Don’t turn all chauvinist on me, Lexi,’ she whispered once the waitress was out of earshot. ‘I can afford it, you can’t. It’s that simple.’

And somehow it was. Her words were just a bland statement of fact, devoid of any insult or social implication. Had it been anyone else sitting across that table, I would have felt belittled, indebted, would have tried to extract the promise of allowing me to return the favour one day, but her tone was only too clear: Don’t fuss. It’s forgotten. It wasn’t only physical characteristics she’d inherited from her mother, then. Being around Katherine was just like this. She had the same uncommon, enviable grace, the ability to make you feel instantly at ease, to dissolve any sense of awkwardness, no matter what the situation.

It’s not something I could’ve put into words as a kid. I’d just known that Madigan’s mother had made me feel wanted and welcome and whole in a way that my own family never could match. Which might be a bit unfair, I guess. As well as me, Mum had my twin sisters on her hands, born just as I started school, and she was pretty much on her own, with Dad working long hours at the furniture factory and hardly ever around. But still, they seemed more than happy for me to go home with Madigan most days after school, to spend the bulk of my weekends and holidays at the Sargood place.

Sometimes I’d pretend that Katherine was my real mother, forced for some dark, mysterious reason to give me away to a family who only called themselves mine. Who stared at me over the dinner table like I was some alien put among them, some freaky science experiment. It’s not that I didn’t love them, Mum and Dad, Ginny and Sarah. I just never really felt like I belonged with them, like I was wanted. Not then, not now. Most of the time, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to belong. Being on the outside was a lot easier.

‘Look at you, Lexi.’ Madigan wrinkled her nose and smiled. ‘You’ve gone and got all grown up on me.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It just sort of happened. And you … you look so much like your mum now, it’s amazing. Is she back in Melbourne as well?’

I might have slapped her, for the sudden way she sat back in her chair, eyes wide and one hand lifting to shield her mouth. ‘Oh, Lexi…’

Then the waitress was back with our breakfast. The combined aroma of coffee, bacon and hot-buttered croissants woke up my stomach and I flushed, embarrassed by its loud, ill-timed rumbling.

‘Madigan?’ I reached across the table to touch her hand. ‘Are you okay?’

‘They never told you? No, of course they didn’t. They wouldn’t have even thought…’

‘What? What is it?’

Her eyes met my mine, green and glinting. ‘My mother’s dead, Lexi. She’s been dead for six years.’

My mother’s dead.

There were no words in the world with which to respond to that. I just sat there and squeezed her hand, my gaze locked with hers.

‘She was sick for a while,’ Madigan said, pulling her fingers gently from my grasp. ‘Her whole life, actually. Her heart was … not good. That’s why we moved, you know. Mum wanted to see Ireland again, wanted Bailey and me to see it with her, before she died. At that point, I think my father would have done anything to make her happy. He would have bought the damn country and shipped it over here if he could.’

‘Was she?’ I asked. ‘Happy?’

‘I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure she was happier than if she’d been stuck here in Melbourne, but she always looked so sad. Distant, you know? Not really there. That’s all Ireland means to me now; it’s the place my mother stopped smiling.’

‘I’m so sorry, Madigan.’

‘I’m sorry you weren’t told. You loved her, too.’

‘Well, you know.’ I shrugged, tried to swallow the hurt with a mouthful of coffee. ‘It’s not like there was anyone here to tell me; Ireland’s on the other side the world.’

‘No.’ Madigan shook her head. ‘Father came back here almost straight away, with Bailey.’ All packed up and ready to go in less than a week—a shade of bitterness now creeping into her voice—as though he’d been just marking time, waiting for his wife to die. Madigan refused outright to return to Melbourne with her family, choosing instead to stay behind in Dublin and finish school, to spend each long night on a lumpy fold-out bed in the house of a friend, mourning silently, privately, until her grief had run itself dry. Only then had she moved on. Only then had she been able to leave both Ireland and her mother’s death behind, the two forever intertwined, never to be forgotten.

Or forgiven.

She’d begun to travel. The British Isles first, then years spent ranging through Europe and parts of the Middle East, crashing with half-strangers and semi-formed friends, anyone with a spare bed and enough patience to tolerate her endless questions, if only for a few days. Some had become lovers—this tidbit dropped casually but with a careful sideways glance—some she had even fallen in love with, or thought she had, but there was always something else to see, a reason to keep moving, and she hadn’t stayed with any of them for very long.

I remembered this intensity from when we were kids. Once she had a goal set in mind—whether it had been mastering a piano concerto, or plotting revenge on a classmate for some real or imagined slight—Madigan had always pursued it stubbornly, relentlessly and to the exclusion of everything else, of everyone else, in her life.

But there was something else, something she seemed careful to omit from the bright babble of her travelogue: the why of it. What had driven her to such a state of constant flux, as she called it, to run from any form of stasis like it was cancer? I could only guess at this missing piece in her potted history. Maybe the loss of her mother had affected Madigan much more than she was willing to acknowledge, even to herself, and maybe not all of her grief had been left behind in Ireland. One small sliver bundled up for the road instead; a chafing reminder of the consequences of letting yourself get too close.