Kate

When Kate was younger she looked just like Elizabeth Taylor. This statement is always made with a hint of sadness and a palpable sense of loss. As a kid I had no idea who Elizabeth Taylor was, but I knew that Kate used to look like her. My mother would sigh, knowing that maybe things could have been different. Wishing that she too had violet eyes and a velvet complexion. She had been very beautiful.

 

Kate was my Dads friend. She worked at Ruby’s Café on Rundle street. We went there for breakfast on my 9^th birthday. I had pancakes with fresh strawberries and cream and afterwards we went to the zoo. The following year Ruby’s got knocked down and they built a cinema there. After that I’m not sure what Kate did.

Like a lot of my Dads friends Kate drifted in and out of my Dads life. Sometimes she would see my Dad a lot and sometimes we wouldn’t hear about her for years. She had a daughter called Charlotte who was a little bit older than me and a son named Beau who was older still. Charlotte was disabled and had a wheelchair. Once she was on the news once because she was undergoing therapy that allowed her to regain movement in her legs. I don’t remember Beau, although I always imagined him handsome, lonely and far away.

When I was in my early teens Dad took my brother and I to her house. It was an old place on the corner of a street in the eastern suburbs somewhere. The block was large and filled with fruit tress. We pulled up across the road in Dads van, filed behind him and rang the door bell. We remembered Kate, of course, and I remembered Charlotte but we didn’t know much about them at all.

Her lounge room had a big purple couch and a coffee table. It was dark inside because of batik cloth hanging over the windows and she was burning sweet incense. There was a musky, lived in smell. The walls were lime white, with high ceilings and a pressed rose. On the north wall was an open fireplace, the mantle was a dark wood and held photos and dried flowers. I admired her art deco mirror and she told me she got it from Ruby’s after it closed. On the coffee table was a bowl of pomegranates. I had never seen one before. I asked Dad what they were, too scared to ask Kate directly. She overheard, grabbed one of the bright fruits and took me in to the kitchen. “wait until you see the inside” she said. She sliced it open and exposed the small, glossy orbs.

The kitchen annex led on to a sun room along the western wall of the house. It was a long, awkward space but the sun leaked in through the large glass windows from the garden. Kate’s enormous Rottweiler joined us, wagging his docked tail stump with enthusiasm. His enormous, slobbering mouth nuzzled up against my hand leaving a residue. I had inherited my mother’s fear of large dogs and this one was no exception.

Kate was small with dark hair. She had a lovely smile and always spoke kindly. Her eyes were bright and as she stood in her sun room smoking a cigarette I could sense the energy that surrounded her. Her tiny stature meant nothing to her personality. She made conversation with my brother while we sat at a red laminate table drinking sweet tea. She talked about her art projects, her sick mother and asked us about school.

She was full of energy, but she was unstable. That much you could tell by the way she gripped at the cigarette in her hand. It was the angle that her upper body sat in regards to her waist. It was her shoe laces tied far too tight and the nervous way that she brushed her dark glossy hair away from her face. No one had ever told me why Kate didn’t look like Elizabeth Taylor any more, but I knew it was because of this instability.

My parents both alluded to the fact that Kate was a user. It made sense I guess, someone so pretty and so lost. I can imagine in her youth that Kate would have been a great personality and that she had just got mixed up in the wrong crowd. Some motorcycle riding, strikingly handsome, leather clad bad guy who took her away from all the problems of her childhood. She was creative and so lived on a level which is easily corrupted by addiction. Maybe that’s why her kids are older than me, maybe that’s why Charlotte is in a wheelchair.

A few years later my Dad brought boxes of things over to my house. Nick nacks, silk scarves, tumblers and crockery. They were Kates things. Her mother had died and she had sold her house. Like me her kids were grown up. Kate had stored things in my Dads shed, he was a great collector of junk. All she had left was a beautiful old Jaguar, in a deep merlot with leather everything. It purred as she drove away, through the gum lined country roads near my Dads place.

She had disappeared for a few months after that and then turned up again, asking to stay with Dad. One morning Dad woke up, his whole flat filled with smoke and Kate gone. He went into the kitchen to find a saucepan on the element, empty, blackened and belching putrid hot smoke.

I never heard about Kate again. I don’t know where she disappeared to, or if she is even still alive. I don’t know what became of her kids. The things of hers that my Dad gave me are still in my house: the purple lampshade and the silk scarf. Every time I mention her my mother repeats the same line, “She used too look just like Elizabeth Taylor, you know”. Only now I understand the subvert sadness a little bit better.