by Kate Ryan
‘Come on, we’ll have to jump down the next bit too.’
Jessie didn’t wait, just launched herself, a crack on the roof below like gunfire. Her ankles buckled, but then she was up again. Ali gulped in air, scanning for another way down. And then without thinking, a bit crookedly, she jumped. She barrelled into Jessie, nearly making her fall backwards, and her knees bashed on the roof. But she was up and grinning. Jessie smiled — everything was okay — and then she shot away to the edge of the next level, not as far down this time, and jumped again.
Ali turned and let herself drop. She heard the caretaker calling again, ‘Hey!’ The last part was easy, just the pipe. She saw Jessie drop and land again, wait a second until the guy appeared, and then run around the side of the building.
Ali rode into the park and heard Jessie whistle. She knew at once where she would be, tucked away in the tunnel filled with graffiti tags. She dropped her bike, crouched and edged her way in. ‘Fat bastard couldn’t keep up,’ Jessie said. ‘I could hear him wheezing.’ Ali laughed. ‘Stopped for a smoke and then he had no hope.’ Ali smiled, pushed her back against the tunnel. Inside, sounds were muffled, the light dim. She turned her watch towards Jessie; the small silver face with little black hands, a present on her twelfth birthday. ‘We’ve done all that,’ she said, ‘and it’s not even eight!’
Later, at school, it was extra reading again, and everyone’s eyes were on Jessie as Mrs Holmes stood at the open door — she of the flaky skin in her eyebrows, the pinpricks of black hair visible through her sheer stockings, her smell of talc, sickly sweet. Ali tried to smile at Jessie, as if reminding her of all they had done. This morning, up high, none of this had existed. But Jessie kept her head down as she left the room, would not look her way. Mrs Bradley droned on about rainwater patterns in South Australia. It was so boring Ali wanted to die. She thought of what Jessie knew about: music, trees, grass, climbing, her brothers, rocks, shells, feathers, animals, bits of old tin, river water, sand, dirt. Ali imagined her caught in the stuffy room off the office. Imprisoned. Legs jiggling against the chair leg; cobwebs in the corner. How she made Ali laugh one day describing Mrs Holmes’ black leg hair stretching back inside her like a spider’s nest. How she sometimes cast a spell of death on her. Ali thought of Mrs Holmes saying, ‘Can you sound out this word, Jessie?’ She thought of what letters must look like to her, a jumble of shapes maybe, A and Z, G and D. ‘Can you sound out this word, Jessie?’ Of course she would know it was a dog. There would be a stupid-looking one right there, brown, boring, like no dog either of them would ever want. Sitting there in that stupid baby picture book. She thought of Jessie shouting DOG! and ripping the book right out of Mrs Holmes’s hand and throwing it across the room. It was such a clear image that for a second Ali wondered if it were true.
13
Tam had extracted a promise that a playdate with Bettany would be organised while she was at camp, and after a few hours’ writing Ali decided to do it. Look, she reminded herself as she did periodically, I am a good, reliable mother. And, firmly, Tam will be okay. Of course, Diane was exactly that, more than that, and it had made no difference. But still. There were bargains, tricks for the mind, and Ali made use of them. Bettany’s mother answered on the last ring, loud, abrupt, just when Ali was hoping to hang up. ‘Hello.’
Ali was momentarily thrown, and then she spoke quickly, ‘Hi, is this Bettany’s mother?’
The woman sounded guarded. ‘Yes.’
‘I’m Ali. My daughter Tam’s a friend of Bettany’s … from school. She’d love to have her over and I was wondering if that would be okay with you? Maybe the day after camp. It’s a curriculum day — they come around with amazing regularity, don’t they?’
There was a longer than usual silence, and certainly no laughter at this lame attempt at humour, and Ali filled in the space. ‘Sorry … I didn’t ask your name.’
‘Terri.’
‘Hi Terri. Would that suit you?’
‘I think so.’ Another awkward pause. ‘Megan could bring her. Her sister.’
‘If that’s okay? I could drop Bettany home.’
There was no embellishment or thank you, and Ali heard the falsity in her voice, all the more because of the absence of anything coming the other way. ‘Great, great. Tam will be so excited.’ She gave her the address, and after they hung up, she realised Terri hadn’t asked anything about her.
She took the call in the late afternoon the next day. ‘Is that Alison?’
‘Yes.’ The name tripped Ali up first. No one called her that. ‘It’s Marg, from Dundee Street.’
Then a charge through her body, her vision locking as she stood at the kitchen bench. She stared at a bruise on the side of an apple. ‘Is Tam okay?’
‘Yes, yes, sorry, I should have said. Tam’s fine.’ Marg lowered her voice confidentially. ‘She’s just got herself into a bit of trouble with another girl. Bettany O’Kane. Do you know her?’
‘Yes.’
‘The thing is, they broke into the kitchen and stole some things … biscuits, ice creams. Also, Bettany had a phone. They were caught mucking around with it, even though they knew there was a technology ban.’
‘I see.’ Ali should have been saying something more, how horrified she was, how she would make sure Tam understood how serious it was, blah, blah, but words didn’t come. Her mind felt thick.
Marg went in harder as if to force a suitable response. ‘Look, Alison, we seriously considered sending them home, but because they’re back tomorrow anyway there didn’t seem much point. You would have had to come and collect her.’ Marg paused, allowing the magnanimousness of this to be appreciated. ‘Anyway, we’ve decided that the best thing to do is to have a meeting with you and Bettany’s mother as soon as the girls get home. We’re treating it with the utmost seriousness, of course. They’ve been separated for a start, and we may suspend them for a few days. We want to reinforce the seriousness of the stealing.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Ali said. ‘I’ll make sure she understands.’ She thought, but Tam’s alive. Even so, reality was shifting. She wanted to ask her again. ‘Are you sure she’s okay?’
Marg’s tone became brisker. ‘Okay then, we’ll be in touch about that meeting. To reinforce things.’
‘All right, thank you.’
They hung up and Ali thought about her words. Why had she thanked her? An image of Jessie came to her, hauled up the front of the classroom yet again. What had she done? Her cheekiness; her insolent laughter; the discovery of dirty cartoons of teachers and kids; her never making any attempt to follow the lessons, not that she could. Mrs Bradley’s face had been tight with dislike. ‘Jessie Morabito, give me the sketchbook.’
‘No.’
The blotchy red spread over Mrs Bradley’s neck, and there was sweat under the arms of her floral blouse. She held out her hand — flat and white, with long, manicured nails and a dainty silver watch at her wrist.
Jessie’s face was pale, her back straight. She looked ahead at nothing. Everyone was quiet, an expectant hush.
‘Jessie, now.’
‘Noooo!’ she screamed. ‘Fuck off!’ There was a crash as if a wild animal had got trapped in the classroom, Jessie’s chair falling to the floor as she left. When she came back the next day — by this time, particularly, she did not like to be alone — it was a ruler to the back of the legs at the front of the class, as an example. Ten. Jessie did not cry.
That night, at a Turkish restaurant with Ed, Ali had gone over Marg’s call again and again. She asked him whether she should ring Tam, made him reassure her, but mostly he just laughed. ‘They’ve done all that already? Pretty good effort for a two-day camp.’ This levity helped a bit but not for long. The fear was growing, a kind of spiralling — Bettany was a child who had not been kept so safe. She tried to force herself back. There was the other call she’d had. She hardly cared about it, but to talk abou
t it was something, a move away from drowning. ‘Marcie’s contacted me about a job,’ she said. ‘At Eastview. It’s just maternity leave, but she seems to think the woman won’t come back. English and history. It’s a drive but not that far.’
Ed nodded. ‘I thought you wanted to take some time out, though. Do your writing.’
Ali picked at some rice and took a sip of wine. ‘Yeah, I know, but it’s not working.’
‘What? I thought it was going well. I thought you’d had a breakthrough.’
Ali shrugged. The slanted daylight-savings sun pooled the restaurant, lighting up pictures on the wall — dark fruit in a brown bowl, a woman in a blue dress.
‘Hear this?’ Ed said, tuning into the background music. ‘I know this woman … what’s her name?’
Ali ignored this digression. ‘Maybe I’ve stuffed around enough.’
Ed held his head still, and Ali knew he was thinking about the music, the woman’s voice rising and falling, the intricate layers of flute and voice.
‘Are you listening?’
‘Yes.’ Ed turned his eyes towards her.
‘I’m a good teacher so maybe I should be teaching.’
‘What about waiting a bit longer, seeing what happens? You said you’ve been writing well. You love the class.’
‘Mmm … I don’t know, nothing much is happening. Mostly I’m becoming a housewife, worrying about crumbs on the bench. Maybe I’ve been deluding myself that it’s a good thing, writing. I don’t really have any idea what I want to say.’
How many times had they talked about this? Giving it a try, not overthinking it, just playing around. Everything Ed was able to do. He was the only person she had told about her tentative longing to recover her childhood ambition. The fact that she could speak of it, and all it entailed, meant he was the right one.
‘When do you have to decide about the job?’
‘Next week.’ Ali thought of Tam again. There was a fracturing edge to the room; everything looked too bright, as if it might be moving towards her. She wanted Tam back.
‘Wait a bit longer,’ Ed said. ‘Why jump in just yet? There’ll be other jobs. There doesn’t have to be an agenda with the writing, does there? Just give yourself space to do it.’
She cleared her throat. ‘I feel scared,’ she said.
‘Of what?’
She felt tears collecting in her throat. ‘I heard a man talking, on the radio, about how he shot his friend in a hunting accident. He tried to kill himself, destroyed his family, his marriage.’
It was too late now. She shouldn’t have said anything. Cat out of the bag.
‘You were a kid.’ Ed held her hand across the table. ‘It’ll be okay.’
Ali looked down and tried not to cry. She longed for Tam, to hold her the way she had when she was a tiny baby.
14
In the latest teaching parlance, there were so-called golden words — who, what, where, when, why. You couldn’t visualise these words because they didn’t connote an object, like ‘dog’ or ‘water’, so they were almost impossible for some children to comprehend.
Long ago — though sometimes it seemed like yesterday — Ali had read to her.
She imagined herself a conjurer, bringing rabbits, strange treasures, where before there was only air. Hercules had to be burned alive to become immortal, and his mother, Alcmene, died of grief. The emotions were large, uncontainable. Beatings, rapes, horrifying curses, and then the goddesses getting their own back, defeating their husbands through inventive trickery, poisoning. The shape-shifting — into rocks, animals, boiling seas. Ali felt such power. She imagined the words opening up in Jessie’s mind like flowers.
The collecting of words began. After much deliberation they bought a notebook from the newsagent. They were both dead against anything childish, like kittens or puppies, and florals were out of the question. A pleasantly faded red notebook with a gold border and a matte black one were both considered. They were looking for gravitas, which made Jessie’s ultimate choice almost comical — gaudy gold, with lined pages. Jessie christened it the ‘Golden Book’, overlooking the despised category of Little Golden Books, both of them unaware of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which Ali came across at nineteen — a small thud of horror.
At first Ali wrote with a pen Diane had given her for her tenth birthday. It came with a bottle of indigo ink. You opened a little catch at the bottom of the pen, sat it in the ink, and waited for it to fill. Then you took it out, closed it, and pressed it against the paper. First there was the tiny blob of blue, then the ink ran out like magic water.
She gave up on the pen after a while. She kept forgetting to bring it or running out of ink, and eventually boredom with the process crept in, so she wrote with whatever was at hand. Interesting words were at the front, hundreds, and then at the back of the book, which Ali turned upside down and wrote towards the middle, were the quests, their childish set of secret plans.
Jessie made Ali repeat the words over and over. Sometimes, if she dropped in unexpectedly, she would come across Jessie flicking through the Golden Book dreamily, lips moving silently, ruminating on words, shapes, something. ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘I had a feeling you were coming.’ She grinned. ‘I wished for it.’ She put on a fake pommy accent. ‘What shall we write today?’
Ali smelt burnt garlic as Ed opened the front door.
‘Hi.’ Patti was beaming, her cheeks flushed, a large glass of wine beside her on the bench. She looked beautiful, her red hair haloed around her face. Every single dish in the kitchen appeared to have been used, and she stood like a queen amid the wreckage. Two pots, one containing burnt-smelling Napoli sauce and the other a bechamel sauce, bubbled away on the stove; bits of chopped vegetable littered the bench. It was getting cool now, but the doors were open, and Ali saw a rollie butt stubbed in one of Diane’s teacups. A boy with dark eyes looked up and smiled.
‘Dad, Ali, this is Max.’
‘Hi,’ Ed smiled, picking up his guitar and plucking at the strings.
‘Hi,’ Ali said, rubbing at mascara under one eye. ‘This looks like a big operation.’
Max laughed too loudly, and Patti’s eyes closed over a bit.
‘Smells beautiful,’ Ali added, a weak lie.
‘I’ve only made it once before,’ Patti rallied, ‘but it should be good. I hope.’ She smiled again. ‘Sorry about the mess.’
‘Oh no, it’s fine.’
‘Good dinner?’
‘Yeah, a new place. Turkish.’
Ali looked towards Ed, but he was already moving out of the room. Patti tugged a baking tray from the crammed cupboard under the sink and it clattered onto the floor. She put it on the crowded bench and opened a packet of pre-cooked lasagna sheets, the kind that were meant to cook in the oven but never did properly. She looked up at Ali.
‘Wine?’ She indicated an expensive bottle of pinot gris that Ali had bought a few days before.
‘Thanks. I might have a shower actually. I’m a bit chilly.’ And though she’d had one only a few hours ago, after her swim, she retreated to the bathroom.
It was ten when Ali emerged from her bedroom to make a cup of tea. Patti was laughing. ‘Fu-uckkk, what a disaster.’
‘Not that bad, Paddo,’ Max said.
She was pink-cheeked, flyaway hair everywhere, smudges of tomato on her shirt. They had finished the white and opened a red.
‘Tea?’
‘No thanks,’ Max said. ‘Still on the vino.’
The kettle boiled, and as Ali poured water into her cup, Max rolled a cigarette. He shook the lighter. She felt ill-equipped for small talk but then remembered the band. ‘How’s it all going?’ she asked.
‘So well,’ Patti said, accepting the limelight without question. ‘We’ve got in at a pub in Footscray over the summer.’ She looked at Max and her eyes shone. ‘Max is help
ing out on drums because Daz is away.’
‘That’s great,’ Ali said, not asking which pub, knowing she should but also that it didn’t matter. Patti didn’t even notice. Max nodded and stroked Patti’s leg, and she went on and on about how she had been writing some new songs, how she was trying to take more risks artistically, about how she might go to Mexico that year.
It was the first Ali had heard about this, and she wondered if Ed would be less than thrilled about Patti, with her enthusiastic embracing of risk, heading off into the ether. If it were Tam at twenty-two, she would discuss all these plans in detail, but now she just wished Patti would shut up. ‘I’ve heard it’s fascinating there.’
‘Yeah,’ Patti said. As long as she was still the centre of attention she didn’t care. She said vaguely, ‘I’m thinking about Cambodia too … or Cuba.’
Ali nodded, bored, and Patti glanced sideways at Max. ‘Maxie, we’re not meant to smoke in here. Ali’s got a kid.’
Ali thought, she’s got a name, and Max looked up, reddened. ‘Shit, sorry,’ he said, taking a last puff and butting it out in a saucer.
Patti stood up, laughed. ‘Hang on! Got one for me?’
Max rolled cigarettes for both of them, and Patti followed him out the glass doors and lit up, screwing up her eyes as the smoke drifted inside.
Ali left the room, went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. Ed’s music — accordion, strings — Turkish, she supposed — sounded through the wall. She felt trapped already with Patti — her energy, her mess, her youth. She thought of riding her bike home from Jessie’s in the dusk when Diane was still away — cool air in her face, lights coming on, trees, houses flying by, the singularity of it, as if, at that moment, she was the essence of who she could be. She thought of Eli’s gentleness, so different from Cal and Jessie, who forced their way into any situation, and from Matty, too, who seemed secretive, inward, absent. She wanted to see Eli, and she wanted to see Jessie. The sureness that was exciting as well as infuriating. So strange to think that she was going back, and Jessie would not be there.
