The Golden Book

by Kate Ryan

  Now she cast an eye around, realised there was no Celia, no Martha — they were both working full-time now — and wondered why she kept forgetting. There was the usual tight, laughing group of mothers, and others like her who had a shifty, sidling air, fiddling with phones and feigning interest in the kids’ artwork on the side of the office. It was almost a formula. What the hell did you do before mobile phones?

  She checked for messages. Nothing yet. She felt a wave of disappointment and was putting her phone back in her bag when a text came through as if by magic. She slanted the screen away from the light. The details weren’t confirmed yet, Eli said, but it was probably Church Street and then a gathering at Cal’s place afterwards. That part might be impossible. Meringo Street. She tried to picture it. Except for the new houses leaking up and around the road heading to Tathra, she knew every street.

  Yes, the street with the Baptist church. Eli probably cut and pasted this message to fifty people, but still she felt the thrill of connection. And there was the last bit. Let us know if you need somewhere to stay. It was a remote, polite offer. She was hardly likely to stay anywhere except with her parents, though Eli didn’t live in Bega, hadn’t lived there for years. Maybe after her non-response about them on the phone he thought they were long gone. In any case, fake politeness or not, it gave her satisfaction, being included.

  She had a moment to think, again, that now was the time to tell him she couldn’t come after all, and then the bell blasted, and almost immediately bunches of kids were spilling out. The messy ones were her favourites: girls with bedraggled ponytails and too-small T-shirts, boys, tiny but with boat-like runners, all of them trailing bags and hats and jumpers. Then the cool kids — she liked them less, girls with little patterned skirts or brightly coloured shorts, brown legs and bouncy ponytails. They had an air of composure, as if nothing could ever be hard for them, though who could tell.

  Then she saw Tam, denim shorts and messy ponytail, odd socks, and again she felt it, the relief, the wave of love that overwhelmed her. Tam rushed over with a girl Ali didn’t know. She was lank-haired and wiry, freckles, wearing the optional green-checked school dress, beltless. ‘Mum, can I go to Bettany’s house?’

  Ali looked around for Bettany’s mum or dad, but there was only an older sister, a Year 8 or 9 high school girl, wearing tight jeans and staring at her phone. Bettany pushed herself against her. ‘Megan, Megan, can Tam come to our house?’

  ‘Mum’s not home, remember,’ the girl said baldly, a long-practised deadness just masking irritation. Her flat face was closed and haughty.

  ‘Hi, I’m Ali.’

  ‘Hi,’ said the girl, glancing up as briefly as possible.

  Tam pushed into Ali’s legs and tugged her hand. ‘Mummm, can I? Can I?’

  ‘Sorry, darling, not today.’ She was glad to remember Tam’s piano lesson, not wanting the trouble of a new child. ‘You’ve got piano. Maybe another day.’

  ‘The day after camp, Mum?’ The girls surged around her.

  ‘Okay, maybe I could get your mum’s number, Bettany — or dad’s.’ She looked towards the older girl, who was still refusing to register the presence of anyone. ‘You’re Bettany’s sister? Megan, is it?’ She smiled. ‘The girls seem pretty keen to get together.’

  The girl ignored the smile and the introduction. ‘You could ring Mum.’ Not looking at Ali, she droned the number.

  ‘Okay, thanks. I’ll do that.’

  She nodded and tapped away at her phone again, and Ali turned towards Tam, feeling a delayed wave of annoyance. ‘Okay, Tam, we’d better get going. Carly’ll be at home soon for your lesson.’

  Megan put her phone into her rounded back pocket and walked off, not even turning around, her long hair down her back like something living. Tam hugged Bettany, who ran after her sister, the lurid soft toys on her backpack bouncing.

  Tam was quiet as they walked home, suddenly tired.

  ‘Is Bettany new?’

  ‘Yeah, they came from the country. Bettany had chickens. They live in the flats. You know, the ones with the playground in the middle.’

  The flats were the haunt of local druggies, which was why the playground was nearly always free of kids. Ali knew she was making judgements about Bettany’s family, shades of her mother, and that Tam was oblivious.

  It was a five-minute walk, and Tam became more animated as they left school behind.

  ‘How was cooking?’ Ali asked.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘We made poppyseed muffins. They were great.’

  ‘What else did you make?’

  ‘What’s that stuff,’ Tam screwed up her face, ‘sort of like curry but clumpy?’

  ‘Satay?’

  ‘No.’

  Ali was blank, and then said with sudden inspiration, ‘Dhal?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tam, with vehemence, ‘that was disgusting. The yoghurt thing was nice, though.’

  ‘Raita?’

  She nodded seriously and corrected Ali, ‘Yeah. Rai-ita,’ while making scrapey, experimental sounds with her runners on the pavement.

  Something made Ali tell Tam first, as if to go were decided, mandatory, though she hadn’t even told Ed. ‘I’ve got to go back to Bega for a few days, Tam, to stay with Nanna and Grandpa. You know my best friend from when I was young, Jessie?’

  Tam nodded, her mind on the noise she was making, its sensation.

  ‘Well, she died.’

  Tam looked towards her, and tears were suddenly in Ali’s eyes.

  ‘Oh.’ As Tam walked ahead of her through the front gate, she paused to squeeze Ali tight. ‘Sorry, Mumma.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s sad.’ And as she put the key in the lock, Ali felt this for a moment, before she excised the thought, how sad it really was. They walked into the house, and she turned around to Tam, who had already dropped her bag and was pulling off her runners in the hall. ‘The thing is, it means I’ll have to miss your concert. Because of the funeral. Ed’ll be able to take you though — or Dad.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Tam moved past Ali, giving her another quick hug. Ali went into her bedroom to drop her bag and heard the click of the biscuit tin.

  5

  The next day she got to the pool earlier, 6.15. She went three, sometimes four times a week, was back in time to get Tam to school. Ed knew the drill, grunting and turning over, his face into the pillow, straight back to sleep.

  It was an inside pool, protected as a fish bowl, but it wasn’t easy to ignore the fact of the water, and there was no comforting chlorine steam rising to show they had heated it much either. If she allowed it all in, she was overwhelmed. To go or not to go.

  And then she remembered.

  The trick was not to think.

  She looked at the pool. Except for the splashes generated by the four or so other early birds, the water was still and flat as a wintry lake. She felt her shoulders contract, put her towel on a bench, walked to the edge, levered herself in.

  She let go. She began to swim.

  She imagined crying in water. She didn’t think of it as sad exactly, more that it might bring about a link — maybe between her body and her mind — maybe the water would finally release her. The idea seemed beautiful, necessary. Tears mixing with chlorine and skin flakes and floating hair, lost elastic bands, the odd bit of rubber dislodged from someone’s goggles.

  The people there: a girl in black Speedos, graceful, ethereal as she had eased herself in, a businessman pounding into his day, a couple of middle-aged women like her. What did they want? Release, the comfort and forgiveness of water on bodies that had been marked in some way: childbirth, disappointment, the easing of myriad small hurts, the feeling of propelling yourself forward, of progress. She considered the phrase ‘failure to thrive’. They said it about babies, or they used to, though never of Tam, who was what her mother might describe as a bo
nny baby: large, vigorous, making her presence felt from the start.

  On a whiteboard at the side of the pool was a sign telling people to take hairpins out before entering the water. They were leaving rusty marks on the bottom. Like dried blood.

  In Jessie’s room, posters of Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath covered every peeling surface of the walls. There was the record player in its white vinyl case, and her prized collection, with Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy — its weird cover of naked, pre-pubescent children — on constant rotation. Diane would have been driven to discuss it — Objectification! Kids are powerful! — but at Jessie’s it raised no comment. Then there was Physical Graffiti, Paranoid, High Voltage, TNT, Highway to Hell, and a couple of early Rolling Stones, Aftermath and Let It Bleed. The fishing stuff: Jessie was passionate about the sport but never successful. There were reels, a couple of scrounged rods, rusty hooks, and a battered tackle box that she had picked up on a tip excursion with Cal.

  Jessie had zero interest in her clothes apart from the band T-shirts and the metal windcheater, and most of them were chucked in a couple of milk crates. Occasionally Aggie tried to get her into a dress, and these were at the very bottom — trailing, floral things that reminded Ali of decaying flowers on graves. Jessie would not have been caught dead in any of them, especially as they resembled the stuff Aggie wore.

  The one anomaly was a carefully placed poster of Simon Le Bon above her bed.

  ‘Why do you like him?’ Ali sometimes sneered.

  ‘I just do, all right.’

  If Ali kept at her about what exactly she could possibly like or started singing ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ in a sing-songy way, knowing she should shut up, maybe after some annoying thing Jessie had done, suddenly that would be it. Jessie would turn away. Any of their rolling plans — heading down river for tadpoles, going for Sunnyboys, stealing lollies, shrinking Twisties packets in Jessie’s blackened, mouse-shitty oven, riding out bush, snorkelling at Kianinny and shadowing stingrays like dark shadows, basting themselves on Tathra pier, scaling the oak tree in the backblocks where they had bashed in a few boards for a cubby. All over.

  Jessie would lie on her bed, refuse to speak for as long as it took, picking at the dry skin on her dirty feet or staring at the ceiling.

  Ali was left to slink home, a feeling of dread and triumph mixed.

  Ali looked at the clock. It was 6.45 am, and a half dream state still seemed to pervade the pool despite, or perhaps because of, the swish and drive of limbs. She ploughed on, made the turn, and went again. She would gain half a length if she could do a tumble turn, but she was afraid of bashing her feet on the end of the pool.

  It was summer. Sunlight patterned the water. The desire to cry was so strong now it seemed to fill her whole body, seductive, spreading from her mind to her limbs.

  She thought of all the stages leading up to that minute, and the stages that would come after. She was aware too much that they would lead inevitably to death. Was it Nietzsche who said it? She felt herself turning towards it.

  The day passed somehow: coffee, breakfast, Tam’s school lunch, the empty but essential refuge of housework. Certainly no writing. Not even an attempt.

  Then it was six o’clock, and Tam was home, Ed too. As Ali made pasta, she thought of Jessie again, of what Ali herself knew that Ed did not yet know, that Jessie was dead.

  He had moved in at last, so it wasn’t her and Tammy anymore. Tam. She hated Tammy now. She had grown, and the time for just them was over.

  It wasn’t a problem for Tam. Ed wasn’t her dad and he left her alone, which was what she liked. At other times he taught her guitar chords on request, and she trailed after him as he pottered in the backyard. He didn’t alter himself with children, and this made them respect him. Ali was glad Ed was there, finally, though there were losses, too.

  But now none of that mattered. There was just Jessie. The yearning, like a physical pain, to drag up the details of her, her essence, her smell, her way of being in the world. She remembered overhearing her father say it. She had the whiff of life about her.

  The meal once it was done was dull, slapped together, the sauce made from canned tomatoes, zucchini chopped roughly — this nutritious ingredient thrown in knowing Tam would probably reject the meal in its entirety because of it. And grated Tasty cheese — they had run out of Parmesan.

  She set the plates on the table. Ed had been home for an hour, but she was waiting for the right moment to tell him. The right moment. She was aware of her reluctance, as if not saying anything would mean it wasn’t true. And the power in withholding. As if she were a child again, and she would not share Jessie with anyone.

  Tam’s attitude to the meal was so predictable that Ali wondered why she did it. Tam had always been this way. As expected, she used her fork as if she were picking through rubbish, tentative and disgusted. ‘Mum, what are these green bits?’

  Ali considered saying the zucchini was something else, but nothing came to mind. Ed looked at her, raising his eyebrows. ‘It’s zucchini, just a bit.’

  ‘Mum. You know I hate it.’

  ‘Sorry darling. It’s hardly any, and there was nothing much else to put in.’

  ‘Mum.’ Tam’s face contorted and she pushed the bowl away.

  ‘Give it here,’ Ed said. ‘I’ll eat those bits.’

  Tam didn’t reply, a subtle power realignment making her turn towards her mother. ‘Can I have some toast instead?’ She made her voice a little perkier, more winning. ‘I’ll make it.’

  Ali was aware of the usual struggle within herself; when did things not matter? ‘No, Tam, this is dinner. Have some salad if you don’t want the pasta.’

  Tam’s mouth turned down again as she picked a clump of avocado out of the salad with her fingers.

  ‘Use the salad servers, Tam.’

  Tam frowned and went exaggeratedly slowly, using the salad servers like a surgeon to claim every piece of avocado she could find.

  Ali ignored this deliberate, elaborate provocation. She talked to Ed about this and that, his school day, his music, but she could see he was elsewhere, probably thinking about the drum and bass that was thudding through the walls before dinner. She could feel tightness around her mouth, in her stomach. Not the right time.

  Suddenly Tam dropped her fork and moved, positioning herself to lie sideways from her chair to Ali’s so she could lay her head on her lap. All at once tears were in Ali’s eyes. She stroked Tam’s hair. Now she was holding her, it was hard to imagine letting go.

  ‘Tired, darling?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The next part of the evening was filled with getting Tam to bed, teeth brushing, reading. She let the whole palaver take her over, a release from thought, as if nothing had changed.

  By the time it was done, Ed had headphones on, away. She saw him in his music room as she walked past into the kitchen. She sat down at the bench, uncapped the bottle of red wine, poured herself a glass and picked up her phone.

  First there was an annoying email from Graeme. She skimmed it. He was going interstate for work, couldn’t take Tam to the concert. This kind of thing was so usual that she scarcely took in the details. Graeme was a sommelier. ‘A wine bore,’ Ed called him. It was true. He was one of those people for whom knowledge was a means of establishing power, conversations a competitive sport. If she hadn’t got pregnant accidentally one of the first times they had slept together, and then been driven by some deluded notion of children needing parents, no matter how incompatible, to live together, she wouldn’t have lived with Graeme at all.

  But now, at least for the time being, Graeme’s irritating characteristics were immaterial.

  If she imagined for too long being seen by them — walking into a room and them turning to look at her — Eli, Matty, Aggie, most of all Cal — and Jessie gone, the fear was too great.

  But it w
as longing that made her do something, for what she wasn’t even sure. She spent too long working out the phrasing of the message, finally settling for the bland. Hi, Eli — it was ridiculous that even after his coldness, even now Jessie was dead, she felt excited typing his name — thanks for the lift offer. I can’t come till the day before so will book flight. She wavered, finally wrote, See you there. Even as she typed, she thought, I am not committed, I don’t have to go. It was a trick that had allowed her to sleep as a child.

  But as for Eli, after all these years, she got a strange pleasure in seeing the sameness of their names, only a letter to separate them.

  6

  The next day, Tam was getting ready to go to camp. Life went on.

  Ali had given her an early dinner and helped pack her stuff, and now she lay on the couch in front of the TV, an unusual concession at this hour. Ed was chopping chilli and vegetables, and Ali was sitting at the bench, drinking a glass of wine. It was times like these that she usually loved — small, contained, almost over before they started — that stopped, for a minute, her feeling that life was ticking on relentlessly. She was just for one minute there.

  ‘So that’s everything.’

  Ali coughed a little from the chilli in the air. ‘Yeah, great.’

  He meant his stuff, mainly his guitars. There were five: two electric, two acoustic, one double-necked. They were the last things, brought over carefully after the other loads, as if they were his more vulnerable children. They required things — a room of their own, for a start — and Ali’s house had this — a kind of box room out the back, tacked on to the side of the kitchen, which Ed had been fixing up gradually.

  He had replaced the cracked, filthy louvres with new ones, sanded the floor, painted the walls white. He had installed his guitars, amps, a drum kit, probably a thousand records, hundreds of CDs, several boxes of 78s, a battered cello he inherited from his friend Paddy when he went overseas, which Ed was intending to teach himself to play, a handful of flutes and a clarinet. Despite all this stuff, now it was set up, Ali felt drawn to the room. There was an ease to it that reminded her of Ed himself.