She felt uneasy. It reminded her of movies about World War II, and people escaping from prisoner-of-war camps, and Nazis in hard round helmets with flashlights and huge, wolf-like dogs gnashing their teeth at the shaking trees. She bent her head over her book. Her eyes were sore and she was tired, and thought enviously of Geraldine snoring peacefully in the room next door. Oh, to be that age, she said to herself; not a care, not a worry. Just to feed your guinea-pigs, play with your friends, and eat your dinner. Of course, Violetta had already forgotten what it was like to be Geraldine’s age.
It was over twenty minutes later—Violetta kept looking at her watch—before her parents’ car approached the corner again, but this time they turned and pulled into the garage as they should. She softly closed her chemistry book and waited, listening.
‘Okay!’ she heard her father say as he slammed the garage door, probably waking the neighbours up with the bang. They were murmuring as they came in the front door—her mother even laughed, although perhaps it was a rather bitter laugh.
Violetta got up from her desk and went down the corridor. She crouched against the wall in the darkness, listening. The hall door was slightly ajar, and she could just see into the living-room where her parents were sitting. Her father no longer drank alcohol, because of his ulcer, but her mother was drinking a beer from a short square glass. ‘Perhaps it won’t make any real difference,’ she was saying, in the voice of a person who wants desperately to be contradicted.
‘It’ll make a difference,’ said Violetta’s father, sounding at the same time firm and uncertain. ‘It must.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ sighed her mother. ‘I mean, where we’ll go in the meantime, I don’t know. What does it matter.’
Her voice dropped, and she rubbed her tired eyes, shaking her head softly, fair strands of her hair falling in her face, while she brushed them back with her white fingers.
‘We’ll arrange something,’ said her father, again a mixture of confidence and doubt. He picked up the toy bear on the coffee table and stroked its prickly head.
‘What about the girls?’ her mother asked. ‘When shall we tell the girls?’
Her father was silent, apart from the air noisily pushing in and out his unhealthy battered body. He puffs and pants like an old man, thought Violetta.
‘Straight away,’ he said. ‘It’s settled, after all. And we’ll have to make a move quickly. The sooner they know the better, really.’
She heard him get up, and swiftly as a spy Violetta scuttled back down the corridor to her room. She sat on the edge of her bed. He would come in, in a moment, to kiss her goodnight. He always did. No matter how late he was up, she was always up later.
Violetta waited for him to come. She waited, motionless, listening to the blood rushing about her body. She waited and waited, but he did not come.
Ezra was also up late that night, thinking about Tory. And about Geraldine.
He couldn’t understand himself. He couldn’t understand why he had told Geraldine about Tory. He had told no one else; no one at school, no one in Animal Liberation. Why had he told her? He could easily have said she was a cousin or something—what would Geraldine care? Why on earth had he told her the most secret thing in his life?
He didn’t even like Geraldine, and he knew she didn’t like him. She’d only asked to come over because of those two men in the car. They weren’t friends, not at all. And she’d just sat there in his room, looking about her with that frightened, sulky expression on her face, and he’d gone and told her about Tory.
Now she would tell everyone, and all the world would know. Her sister, her parents, those other girls she sat with on the ferry. They would come after him, ask him questions, they would want to know everything. That’s what people were like about death. They wanted to know.
Although Geraldine hadn’t. She hadn’t said a thing. She’d just gone white, and started reading a book about guinea-pigs. Even her freckles had faded. She was a strange-looking girl. How did someone grow up to look like that, Ezra wondered. What would Tory have looked like at Geraldine’s age?
Tory. Every day he still thought about her, and he knew his parents did as well. Little, dead Tory.
Geraldine lay on her stomach in bed, dreaming of Alberta. Alberta was taking her to task about her poor ability as a tennis player—how weak her shots were, and how rarely her serve ever entered the right square. Geraldine tearfully defended herself, screaming, ‘I don’t care! It’s not true! I hate you!’ She shouted in her sleep, and those were the words she woke up with sounding in her ears.
She sat up in bed, shaking. Perhaps she was getting sick. But her nose was clear, her throat was soft, she had no temperature. She had sometimes envied her friends at school who came down with glandular fever, forced to spend half a term in bed at home. How peaceful that would be, lying under the covers, eating buttered toast cut into strips …
She leant over to her window and looked into the night. The sky was clear, but the air was arctic. She stared up at the stars for a moment, and the round flat grey-flecked moon. She wished she had been alive when the people had flown up and walked on the moon, even driven a jeep on it—she’d seen a picture in an encyclopaedia. She’d asked her mother about it, but ‘Oh yes, 1968, was it, or 67?’ was all she’d said, with little more interest than if Geraldine had asked her when Abraham Lincoln was born.
She laid her head sadly on the pillow. Geraldine loved the moon. She yearned for it, and felt a biting envy for those astronauts.
12 · Good News?
Violetta saw neither of her parents the next morning—she stayed in bed as late as possible and then ran out quickly into the cold at the last moment. Geraldine was still asleep as she left, and was obviously going to miss the ferry. Normally their mother woke Geraldine up, or sometimes their father. Very occasionally Violetta might take it upon herself to rouse her little sister, but only if their mother asked her to specially. Otherwise she preferred not to get involved—Geraldine was so bad-tempered at half-past six.
Violetta had intended to buy herself a doughnut at Circular Quay for breakfast, but she now realised sitting at the bus-stop feeling her seven o’clock hunger and the light weight of her wallet, that she had run out of the house without any money. An empty stomach and an empty heart, she thought miserably.
She watched Ezra coming up the hill, lugging his bag, his grey school hat half-coming off his head. The sight of him reminded her instantly of Simon, the bright-eyed boy in the bookshop, and she brightened a little herself. It would be nice, she thought carefully, to see him again.
Ezra was relieved to see Violetta alone at the bus-stop. He didn’t want to face Geraldine that morning, after last night. He crossed the road, upended his hard plastic school bag and sat himself down on it.
‘Oh Ezra,’ said Violetta, breaking their usual morning silence.
Ezra shook in his damp blazer, swinging his head around. Now it was coming. Geraldine had told her and she was going to cross-question him. Oh, I heard the sad news from Gerry, Ezra. How awful, how tragic. Poor Ezra. What happened? How old was she? Will you ever get over it? Is your mother going to have another baby? I’m so sorry …
‘I met someone who knows you last night,’ said Violetta. ‘Simon?’
‘Simon?’
‘You know, from Animal Liberation. He went to your meeting.’
‘Oh, Simon.’
Of course, Ezra only knew one Simon, so it had to be him, but still he found it hard to imagine a place or a circumstance under which his Simon and Violetta might meet. Ezra’s view of the world was that after school or work, people went to their homes and ate dinner. This was despite all the evidence he had observed to the contrary, but Ezra’s attitudes were not always as scientific as he might have liked them to be.
‘In town, in a bookshop,’ said Violetta, looking over her glasses at him. She was not read
ing this morning, but she felt uncomfortable without glasses. They protected her eyeballs from the cold, she told herself.
‘Oh.’
Really, this boy was hopeless. Hadn’t he any curiosity? Or, if not, any social graces? Couldn’t he think of something to say? What did he and Gerry argue about all the time?
They heard the bus squeaking and puffing from the nearby hill, making its tortured way towards them. Violetta took off her glasses and slipped them into the soft crimson case she kept in her coat pocket. Ezra stood up from his school bag and tugged it from the ground.
‘Actually, he rang me last night,’ he revealed as the headlights of the bus came round through the fog.
‘Did he?’ Did he?
‘He wants to come round, for a visit or something,’ muttered Ezra, losing interest in Simon as the long grey day loomed ahead of him.
Oh. Violetta pulled out her bus pass. She stepped up on the wet metal slatted stairs into the bus, her heart lightening.
Geraldine woke up to a morning-warmed eiderdown and a world outside her window that looked surprisingly sunny. She found her watch beneath a pile of books and scraps of paper on her bedside table—eight twenty-five. And the ferry that brought her to school on time left at seven-thirty. The next one she could catch now did not come until ten-past nine. Perhaps if her father were at home he would drive her down, so she wouldn’t have to take the bus.
She stretched out her legs and shook her head a little. She felt better for the extra sleep, or was it just waking in the light and warmth instead of the cold darkness? Or the knowledge of the quiet, almost empty ferry trip ahead of her, instead of being full of uniforms and quarrels and minor confrontations?
She pulled herself out of bed, and wandered out towards the kitchen. Why had no one woken her up? Her father was sitting in the living-room on the green sofa, talking, or rather, booming away on the telephone. He looked very clean and washed and was laughing while he talked. He beckoned to her to come over and sit next to him. He squeezed her shoulders and laughed again, and hung up.
‘Well!’ he said. ‘Good morning! You’re up late!’
‘You didn’t wake me!’ Geraldine objected.
‘I’ve got good news!’ said her father, standing up and pulling her with him. ‘We’ve found a buyer for the house!’
Was this good news?
‘Oh,’ she said.
Her father blew air from his puffed cheeks theatrically, like cartoons of the West Wind. ‘My God, what a relief!’ He rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. ‘I can’t believe it.’
‘When do we have to move?’ asked Geraldine, not feeling able to ask other questions, like who was buying the house, and why was it such a relief, and would they be very poor, and what was going to happen?
But Geraldine’s father did not seem to hear her. He marched into the kitchen and poured himself some coffee from its mottled silver percolator on the stove, filling it with sugar and taking a grateful swig.
‘We should have a party,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we have a party?’
Geraldine shrugged. ‘Will you drive me down to the ferry?’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get the ten-past nine.’
He heard that at least. ‘With the greatest pleasure!’ he declared.
Geraldine ate a wet tomato sandwich for breakfast, which she found in a paper bag by the sink—one of Violetta’s rejects from the day before. Then she went out the back and pulled the guinea-pig cage over to a newish patch of grass for them to destroy. They screamed and disappeared at the sight of her, as usual. Ezra’s guinea-pig manual had said that this was one of the most delightful attributes of guinea-pigs, how they always greeted their owner’s approach with ear-piercing shrieks.
Ezra’s house was silent and locked up—his parents would be at work, of course, and Ezra would have caught the seven-thirty. The little girl in the photograph was alone inside, waiting for them all to come home in the evening. Geraldine heard her father hooting the car on the road out the front, so she hurried in, picked up her bag, and ran out, bending over to tie up a shoe-lace and slamming the front door behind her.
No sign, she thought with a jolt, of the grey car and the two men inside it who had spent so long waiting for her parents last night. But just the memory of their visit made her shake with fear, like in old movies when the figure of death comes knocking at people’s doors, with a black hood and cape and a big curving axe in his hand.
‘Dad,’ she said, as she strapped herself into the front seat beside him, but that was as far as she got. He did not hear her, or at least, he did not answer her. He was whistling, and then he turned on the radio and opened the windows so the breeze spread out his long hair in a fine brown net.
She looked down at her feet, her scuffed black shoes with the shoe-laces in knots, and knew she would say nothing about it. If the two men wanted to see him, they would come back. Her father could deal with them. They were probably his friends, anyway. He often had friends to visit. Why should she find these two so sinister?
She tapped her father’s arm to get his attention. ‘Where’s Mummy?’
‘Gone into town!’ he replied, with a strained smile. ‘Up with the birds and off she went. What a priceless, marvellous mother you’ve got.’
He braked and turned into the deep street leading down to the water where a dozen or so shoppers and late starters were gathering at the wharf as the ferry rolled towards them in the distant dark-blue river.
‘I know!’ he said. ‘Let’s give her a birthday party! When did your poor mother last have a birthday party? Probably not since she was eight years old!’
Geraldine undid her seat-belt and leant over to kiss him goodbye. He smelt so clean and his blood was so warm, she felt a great, comforting love for him; his hands firm on the wheel, his mouth, though not his eyes, grinning. Despite all her own formless worries, she felt her heart lift and she smiled back. ‘She’d love it!’
She got out of the car, pulling her school bag onto her back and breathed in the air rising from the water. She turned and waved as he did a circle and sped back up the hill.
13 · Invitations
They were moving house. In a hurry.
There was so much to do: packing, sorting, discarding. Their mother never stopped. She slept in the same long fair plait that she wore during the day. She didn’t seem to want any help. ‘Leave it to me, girls,’ she said. ‘You’ve got your exams, Violetta, you mustn’t get distracted.’
Geraldine had no exams, but she was grateful to be included in the sweep of this exemption. Removalists came from time to time, loaded up books, furniture, carpets, and took just about everything away. Violetta and Geraldine sat on the front verandah and watched strangers in green overalls carry off their belongings in the sunshine. Violetta brought them glasses of home-made lemonade, which they co-operatively gulped down, and even asked for seconds.
Their things were being stored in a warehouse, their mother said. They might sell half of them, anyway. Depended where they ended up. Her sentences grew daily shorter and more pessimistic.
Their father was all over the place. Sometimes he packed and sorted and discarded too, but more often he was out, leaving scribbled messages of instruction here and there which no one ever found in time, mainly relating to what to say if a particular person called. But their mother was careful to get to the telephone first, and she knew what not to say. Then he would bang in through the front door and kiss whichever daughter happened to be in his way, hug her and say, ‘How was school today?’ then frown as he remembered something to tell their mother and bustle off again.
Geraldine did not look well. That’s what she told herself when she looked into the stained mirror in their bathroom as she brushed her teeth. Her skin was yellow and her eyes red. Her lips were disappearing into her mouth, all the blood gone from them. Her teeth felt sore—should she tell someone? Every movement she made s
eemed to take so long. Even raising her toothbrush to her mouth had an agonising slowness to it. She could hardly bear watching the procession of the bristles through the air.
Alberta.
In the daytime, it was all right. Out in the sunlight Geraldine allowed herself to imagine that Alberta had come to a gruesome but deserved death in the suburban wilderness, her remains being digested by a local Doberman. Or, when she was in a kinder mood, that Alberta had passed on naturally in her sleep, her thick white body now rotting away in peace in a secluded niche of a neighbour’s garden, to be dug up as a fossil by geologists in hundreds of millions of years and put in a museum and puzzled over and wondered at.
But at night, it was not so easy. At night, in Geraldine’s dreams, Alberta became monstrous again. Her eyes grew unnaturally large, like a cat’s, and her rodent teeth curled out of her mouth. Geraldine found herself staying up past midnight, afraid to fall asleep, listening to people talking on her transistor radio, and waking up exhausted the next day, the little red light of the radio still on and the faint morning mutterings oozing out of it.
If Alberta were still alive, though, where was she? How had she survived? Ezra’s books said that guinea-pigs were vegetarians, so at least she hadn’t been eating mice or destroying populations of endangered native cockroaches. Did she scurry over to Milly and Martha in their cage at night and mock them, like rabbits in Watership Down, urging them to escape and join her? Or was it possible she envied them, wished she could get back behind chicken-wire and have carrots and pellets brought to her, and snuggle up in a blanket with her fellow pigs? Geraldine knew what she would prefer, but Ezra said human responses were not a reliable guide to the feelings of animals.
She felt terrible about Milly and Martha. She had no idea what she was going to do with them. She had lied to her mother, told her that she’d found them a home, a girl at school who was very keen, and her mother had nodded and then obviously put them right out of her mind, crossed them off her list with a big black Texta.
The White Guinea Pig Page 8
