The Golden Book

by Kate Ryan

  Ali had bought the house with the inheritance she got from her grandmother years before, carefully invested by David so that when she had Tam there was enough for a deposit. It was one of the advantages of being an only child. No one to share it with. The down side was the unarticulated skirmish with Diane about Melbourne versus Canberra — not even Diane would push for the south coast — but Ali had her teaching job in Melbourne by then, so it was a futile battle.

  Other than music-related stuff, Ed didn’t have much: a good dining room table and chairs that he had inherited from Emma, his ex-girlfriend, his uniform of weekend T-shirts and jeans, his ‘good’ work shirts and pants, various mismatched plates and a handful of artworks given to him by friends, still leaning up against the wall in the hall, boxes of books. There was the photo of John Cage in a crumpled white T-shirt, surrounded by a lot of musical equipment, an inscrutable expression on his face. This had been given to Ed when he turned fifty by his friend Tom, though it probably would be Ali who got him to put it up.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here properly at last.’ Ali walked around the bench, put her arms around him, and rested her head on his back. He smelled dusty, a little garlicky, the tang of warm cotton and clean sweat. She felt the pulse of his arm muscles moving as he chopped.

  ‘Yep, me too.’

  They talked a little about the school where Ed was a somewhat reluctant music teacher, had been for fifteen years. It was where they’d met — before the whole Graeme debacle and before Tam, when Ali came down from Sydney to take the job. She remembered Ed as a tall figure at the pub one Friday night with all the other teachers, complaining as they always did — dark jokes about the Year 9s and the principal, money. Ed not saying much but looking at her now and again as she answered Cindy the English teacher’s questions about Sydney, and how Melbourne was measuring up. She remembered looking across the room when she came back from the bathroom and he had gone. If she had got together with him then, instead of letting herself be set up by bossy Cindy (‘Graeme’s a reader, you’re a reader. You’ve got so much in common!’), there would be no Tam. Another child perhaps — though who knew — but no Tam.

  ‘Dylan’s on the rampage again,’ Ed was saying. ‘I’ve gotta take another six kids.’

  ‘How can you?’

  ‘Dunno. And he wants a Year 9 ensemble now as well. Some half-arsed scheme to keep them under control.’

  ‘Do you think it’ll make a difference?’

  ‘Unlikely.’ He stirred the curry, took some coriander out of the fridge. ‘You know that lot, they’ve been feral since Year 7.’

  Wild. Her mother’s descriptor amounted to the same thing. It wasn’t just Cal; sometimes when she thought Ali couldn’t hear, it was Jessie too.

  They talked about a particular girl, Sienna, who was giving Ed a lot of grief. ‘Don’t engage,’ Ali said. ‘Getting a rise out of you is exactly what she wants. Obviously.’

  ‘Easier said than done. She sits there blatantly checking her Instagram or whatever bloody thing when I’m teaching some kid a chord right next to her.’

  ‘Just ignore her. She’ll get bored.’

  ‘She is bored.’

  Ali laughed. ‘Yeah.’ She thought of Jessie baiting Muirhead, their Year 5 teacher. She was getting angrier. She chucked scrunched-up paper when his back was turned, put rotten sandwiches and a copy of Playboy on his desk. Another day it was a caricature of him, fat and spitting with Coke-bottle glasses, Billy Bunter braces holding up too-big shorts. Seeing it, Muirhead’s eyes had flickered and gone still. He coughed and shuffled the drawing to one side. It wasn’t enough for her.

  He was writing something on the blackboard when she began reciting, low but loud enough, ‘Wroses awre wred, violets awre blue…’ Pause. Low, uneasy laughter. ‘Mr Muirhead, how we do love you. Wroses awre wred, violets awre blue…’ The room went completely silent. Muirhead couldn’t say his Rs. Wwight, he said when he wanted to say right. He swung back to the class, his comb-over flopping. Jessie stopped, sat up with a hammy engaged expression. Someone snickered nervously. Muirhead’s face mottled. He eyeballed her, pointed to the door. ‘You — out. Now!’

  Jessie stood up, exuding a puzzled, saintly air. How she loved to be looked at. She gathered her exercise books filled with scribbles, caricatures, picked up her jumper from the floor, exaggeratedly slow.

  The room was hushed, expectant, and Muirhead filled it again. He screamed, ‘Get out now!’

  ‘Okay,’ Jessie muttered. ‘Hold your horses.’

  Muirhead’s Adam’s apple shifted. ‘Go on. Hurry up, you little shit!’

  She strolled to the door with a demure blank expression, opened it, and slammed it with everything she had.

  Muirhead looked vacant, bleached out, old, as if he had forgotten where he was. He turned slowly back to the board.

  Ali saw Jessie out the window, curving across the grass on her bike. It was as if she were the inverse of everything — the sweaty, cramped classroom, their heavy-lidded boredom, Muirhead’s droning beginning again as if he would never stop. She was mountains, sky, hidden river, air.

  She didn’t come back to school for days after that. Maybe it was loneliness that drove her back.

  In a while the curry was ready, and they sat at the bench and ate. The back doors were open onto the dusty garden, and the patchy drought-affected greenery cast a pattern of dappled shadows, just the faintest jangle from Tam’s TV show in the next room.

  ‘What happened to you today?’

  ‘Not much.’ Ali paused. Ed’s hand picking up a wine glass seemed to expand to fill her mind. ‘But I got a call. Jessie died.’ She didn’t tell him it was a day ago. How to explain the oddity of waiting to tell him, sitting with it, like a secret, a treasure?

  He looked up quickly. ‘What happened?’

  Ali was suddenly conscious of not having asked for details, mesmerised as she had been by Eli’s voice, by the fact that the thing she had been expecting for so long — the thing in the heart of her — had finally happened. ‘I’m not sure. She was never that good. You know what Mum said. She’d been sick for the last few months. I don’t know, maybe her body just gave up.’ Her eyes were wet now. ‘It wasn’t much of a life anymore.’

  Ed nodded, though of course he meant no. No life.

  Ali sipped her wine. ‘I should go. To the funeral.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Not really.’ But even in saying this, she had decided. Ed’s doubt made her want to be braver. ‘I might go to Mumbulla.’

  Ed looked at her steadily. ‘Do you want me to come?’

  She flicked her eyes away. ‘No, I’ll be okay. Mum and Dad’ll come to the funeral. I might not even go to the wake.’ She didn’t say Mumbulla again. ‘I might want to make a quick getaway. Easier on my own.’

  ‘Are you sure? I’ve got leave owed. We could bring Tam.’

  She shook her head. The impossibility of Tam being scrutinised by all of them, what she had that Jessie could never have had. Over the years she had avoided taking Tam to Bega as much as possible, getting Diane and David to come to Melbourne if she could. But now she was surprised by a longing to be stripped back, as she was then. Before Ed. Before Tam. To be there with Jessie’s family, part of them instead.

  As they ate, they talked about Jessie: shame, waste, the terrible place she ended up in, all old people. ‘Are you okay?’ Ed asked.

  ‘Yeah. I guess so. It’s better. No point in her going on.’ But she couldn’t judge any of it. She had no idea whether it was true.

  ‘When will you go?’

  ‘Sunday. Early. You’ll be okay with Tam?’

  Ed raised his eyebrows. They were grey and black mixed, the odd hair poking out at an angle over brown eyes.

  Ali shrugged. ‘I know. It’s just hard. To go.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ed moved over to hold her.

&nbs
p; Ali stayed still in his arms. She wondered now how she would leave her. ‘She’s got the school concert, and Graeme’s just told me he’s away.’

  ‘I’ll take her. Maybe Patti can come.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Ed sat down again, and she changed the subject, asked him about another student of his, whose mother died in a car accident a few months back. Ed had been keeping an eye on the boy, Aden. He was a good guitarist and Ed liked him, but he couldn’t do much. ‘Have you talked to him about her, his mum?’

  Ed shrugged. ‘Nah, he’s not the talking type. Just trying to keep him turning up to lessons.’

  Ali chewed a bit of broccoli stem. It was woody, unpalatable. She thought of herself at thirteen until she was rescued or obliterated — she was never sure which — by teenage drinking. Alone in her room, her mind, a kind of breaking apart. What was real and what was not? Terror.

  Many times, she’d lost the sense of herself, as if she was not a person but a bit of space junk, not fixed. Not human, not alive, not dead. No thing.

  Her shallow intake of breath, a pulling back into herself, the light from the living room under her bedroom door, her feet, toes, legs, arms, chest, head. Thinking, where have I been? And then, was that what it would be like to be dead?

  She had been alone; Diane impossible, David too, the counsellor useless. Of course a teacher, of all people, could not have done anything either. But still.

  ‘What teenager is the talking type, really?’

  Ed’s eyes seemed to deepen, and she looked down at the mush of her curry. ‘Sure,’ he said mildly. ‘But he’s more introverted than most. I figure music might help. So I’m just trying to keep him coming,’ he repeated, a minor reproach.

  Ali caught herself. ‘Yeah, it’s good. It’s good you are. Finished?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  As she gathered the plates, she thought of walking in Jessie’s gate. She wondered if the house was still there. In all these years of going back to visit her parents, she had never again gone down Jessie’s street. She thought of them all: Cal’s sarcasm, his teasing banter, his way of seeming to know everything, of anger barely held in; Matty’s eyes glazed with weed; Eli, who looked the most like Aggie, beautiful too.

  A part of her thought she could go back to that house and Jessie would still be there.

  7

  Aggie was the one she usually encountered first when she came over, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking lemongrass tea and smoking her endless rollies. The smell of dried herbs and weed, and the faintest edge of damp. Often one of the men from the bakery would be there — Mick or Tojo — or Claudio, her on-again, off-again boyfriend from the scrappy organic farm out of town. ‘Out the back, love,’ Aggie would say, or ‘Who knows, darl. Somewhere round.’

  Sometimes Ali caught bits of conversation about local struggles of which she was vaguely aware: the tussles between the hippies — the ring-ins, they were called — and the conservative forces of the old farming families. Everything thrived in that rich soil — dairy, corn, fruit — but Aggie’s friends liked to complain. Such and such was a fascist. He refused to take Claudio’s apples because they were small and oddly shaped. ‘Fucking typical,’ he said, ‘even apples have to conform.’ Aggie laughed quietly with her even, white teeth, her soft, pink lips.

  She was often busy with something. Her beads, her letter campaigns; stopping woodchipping on Mumbulla mountain, closing Pine Gap, not very skilfully doing the graphics for a poster Claudio wanted to distribute around town — Meat Is Murder dodgily hand lettered above a photo of a soulful-looking calf.

  If some man was sitting beside Aggie working on all this, Ali came upon a scene of palpable intensity. Most of the ‘alternative’ men and boys in Bega were in love with her, not to mention a fair share of the rest of them, no doubt: the sun-battered farmers and the mechanic, the drinkers at the pubs, the teachers, the accountant and the optometrist.

  Aggie’s skin was smooth and plump, her eyes huge and dark, her long hair secured on top of her head with a chopstick, a hairdo of considerable sophistication as far as their town went.

  Aggie in the hammock reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, sitting on the verandah steps, a ragged towel around her bare shoulders; her stained fingers. Watching her leaning over the henna bowl and seeing the muddy bed of her parted hair. Ali thought of Suzanne taking Leonard down river for tea and oranges. Aggie was the most beautiful person she had ever seen.

  But Jessie liked to imitate Aggie’s pathetic meat is murder calf.

  ‘Mooo,’ she cried. ‘Mooo,’ bellowing and moving in to butt her head into Ali’s stomach when the spirit took her. ‘I have a soul. Mooooo. Don’t eat me!’

  Ali would splutter and back away, laughter bubbling up in her. ‘MOOOO!’ Jessie beseeched. ‘Help me!’ Pushing in harder and harder until Ali fell back onto the carpet.

  ‘Get away, Jessie!’

  Jessie kept going, she always did. ‘MOOO, MOOO, MOOO,’ went the Jessie-cow, licking and pushing into Ali’s legs.

  ‘Jessie, you’re disgusting! Piss off!’

  Not until Ali was pinned against the wall, trying to shove her away, half-screaming and half-laughing and nearly wanting to cry, just at the point where she thought she would wet herself with claustrophobia or laughter or rage, at that exact point when she thought she could not take it anymore, Jessie would give up.

  Ed stood and picked up their glasses, took a last swig of wine. ‘Have you spoken to Jessie’s mum?’

  Ali shook her head. ‘Not yet.’

  It was strange hearing Aggie referred to that way. Mother. Would she be relieved? ‘My boys,’ Ali heard her say once to Claudio, ‘my boys will look after me when I’m old and grey.’ She had laughed, pushing her long hair off her shoulders in a characteristic gesture. Easy to pretend to contemplate a state so removed from the perfect specimen she was. And no mention of Jessie.

  To Aggie, there was too much but also nothing to say.

  After Tam had gone to bed, they half-watched some French jazz doco, drank tea. Slumped against Ed on the couch, Ali couldn’t be bothered with the subtitles, and she found herself talking about Bettany. She couldn’t stop, couldn’t shut up.

  ‘I don’t know if she should go over there. The older sister was pretty rude. I know nothing about them.’ At this point she hated the words coming out of her mouth, so she lapsed into silence.

  Once she had forced Tam to go to a birthday party when various mothers weren’t letting their kids go. The kid’s mother was supposed to be a junkie, the father in jail. ‘Ella’s not going,’ one mother had said. ‘You know the family …’

  ‘It’s at a bloody indoor play centre,’ Ali had railed self-righteously to Ed. ‘What do they think will happen?’

  The stupid thing was that Tam hadn’t even liked the girl.

  ‘Why don’t you have her over here?’ Ed turned his head on one side just the slightest bit as a piano piece started, jagged, off-tempo.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I should.’

  Ali must have dozed for a bit, because the credits were rolling and Ed was saying, ‘You know Patti’s coming tomorrow?’

  Ali closed her eyes again, murmured, ‘I thought there was going to be a bit of time just us.’

  ‘What about Tam?’

  Ali pushed her feet to the floor, rubbed at her face. ‘Yeah, I know … I just thought we’d have a bit of time to settle in. The three of us.’

  ‘Patti’s got a share-house she’s looking at next week. She might take it. And she’s waitressing most nights, so she’ll hardly be here.’

  Ali nodded, but suddenly the desire for things to be as they were before — just her and Tam — was like an ache. She clutched a cushion to her chest. ‘Going to bed?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He walked across the room in his bare feet. She heard him turning the lock on the back door, padding down the hall, water
running in the bathroom. Then at once it was strange and lovely that he was not going anywhere. There was no other house. It had taken six years. Always Ali’s excuses. Tam wasn’t ready, Ed’s mother’s Alzheimer’s, Tam starting school, more change would be hard. It seemed crazy now — all that wasted money, all that exhausting shuffling around. Finally, they were visiting Ali’s parents when Tam turned to them and said, ‘How come you two have two houses?’ And Diane’s customary pithiness, ‘Out of the mouths of babes.’ Lying in the half-dark, too tired to get herself to bed, she thought of the slow walk back from childcare, Tam pointing at things with her tiny finger. ‘Rose! Car!’ The small meals of steamed vegetables and rice, the fruit in the Peter Rabbit bowl. The spooning of yoghurt into the pink, gummy mouth. It wasn’t the whole picture. Ali had struggled with the excruciating slowness of those days. But there were moments. Tam saying, ‘Look! Look!’ and Ali just for a second narrowing her eyes into her world. The stencilled cat on a wall, the sparkle of a coin some joker had glued to the pavement, the mushy crunch of brown plane-tree leaves under foot. It was an enclosed world, and sometimes its wonder kept the fear at bay.

  Now it was different. There were things she shouldn’t do, shouldn’t have done, but she felt compelled. Still making Tam drink out of plastic glasses at the age of seven, picking up after her, choosing her clothes, stopping her using a decent kitchen knife when she was helping chop vegetables for dinner. Grabbing the bunch of marbles that had ended up at the back door, removing glass from the bathroom, and putting poisons out of reach when she was way beyond experimental sips of cleaning product. She tried not to do these things, but it was hard.

  When Ali walked into the bedroom, Ed was pulling off his T-shirt to get into bed. ‘You know I’ve got the thing with Marlo on Friday?’ He was excited, all boyish energy, the long planned all-day jam session.