The Golden Book

by Kate Ryan

  When she came back into the kitchen, Patti was on her phone. Max was rolling another cigarette and watching her, lifting his head slowly like a cat.

  ‘Naah,’ Patti was saying. She laughed, low and growly, and Max smiled as if he knew what the joke was. She raised her eyebrows at him and laughed again, flirtatiously. ‘Okay, see you then.’

  She hung up, plucked some clothes out of a bag in the corner, and went into the bathroom. Ali filled a glass with water and Max did nothing, sitting very still as if he was waiting for something to start again, for the lights to come back on. Ali sat at her desk under the window, trying to pretend she was acting normally, and opened her laptop, looked up the ABC website, then for the hell of it, Bega. She was reading about Bega Secondary’s Year 12 results — how proud, how hard-working — when Patti came out of the bathroom. She was wearing black jeans and a green jacket. She beamed, and her teeth were very white against her dark-red lipstick. ‘Hope it’s okay. I borrowed your lipstick. Such a gorgeous colour.’

  Max stood up and looked at Ali. He was all dark eyes and stubbly beard. Patti turned her big smile on again. ‘We’re just going out for a quick drink. Don’t touch a thing. I’ll do it all when I get back.’

  ‘Okay.’ Ali felt her face heat. The lipstick was somewhere in her makeup bag, in the cupboard. She turned away.

  In a minute, sitting on her bed with her laptop, she heard Patti’s quick steps to the front door. Max’s slower steps in her wake.

  15

  They had found a dead wallaby on the side of the road near the high school, and Jessie said Ali had to put her hand inside the pouch in case there was a joey in there, still alive. The pouch was saggy and covered in congealed blood. ‘It’s fate,’ Jessie said. ‘Laying an unquiet one to rest. Go on. Do it. Otherwise, it’ll die.’

  Flies buzzed around. The wallaby was in the gutter, next to the dry nature strip. A few cars swished past. Ali wondered whether someone, her mother even, would stop and get out of the car. What do you think you’re doing?

  But no one did.

  ‘We should just call the wildlife rescue place.’

  ‘No,’ said Jessie. ‘We need to do it.’ Suddenly she smiled up at Ali. ‘We could raise it. It’d be …’ She struggled for the word.

  ‘Imprinted.’ It was from The Snow Goose. Ali had relayed the plot to Jessie recently.

  Jessie nodded. ‘Yes.’ She wouldn’t admit to not knowing the word; their minds were one, Ali’s words her words.

  Ali wanted this to be true, but also perhaps she didn’t.

  Up close, the wallaby’s fur was matted with dark, dry blood. It looked almost black. Ali pushed her sweaty hands on her jeans. She felt like vomiting. She wanted to run. ‘I can’t …’

  ‘Okay forget it. I’ll do it.’ Jessie leant down and pushed her palm against the body of the wallaby. It was small. Ali was afraid of seeing a pink, furless joey, tiny slits for eyes. She was afraid — not that it would be dead, but that its body would move towards its mother’s teat or them in blind need. Would there be milk even if she was dead? Jessie paused, sat back on her heels, then knelt down again, and poked her hand inside the pouch.

  Ali turned away, sour bile rising in her throat.

  When she turned back, Jessie was standing up. ‘Nothing in there.’

  Every part of Ali released, and she had the ridiculous urge to laugh. ‘We should cover her,’ she said. Really, she thought, they should bury her, but it seemed too hard. She wanted to go home. They pulled some straggly branches from a gum tree nearby and made a kind of cocoon around the wallaby. But the flies still came, clouds of sticky ones that couldn’t be shooed away.

  Jessie jiggled a little, contemplating what they had built. ‘At least she’s in the shade.’

  Ali nodded.

  They got on their bikes.

  Ali hated her, but she felt the swirl of self-disgust too.

  She waited, always, for Jessie to tell her what to do.

  That night she sat up in bed and wrote in the Golden Book by torchlight: Jessie was afraid of the Unquiet One but Ali knew what needed to be done. There would be no peace in the land until the Unquiet One was given the respect of proper mourning and burial. There would be a ceremony with full honours. And what Ali said came to pass.

  Ali saw her small figure wheeling a case, shoulders hunched over, where other kids leapt around and laughed. Tam stopped, looked up at the emptying bus, and then Bettany was beside her, their two heads bent, two lots of mousy hair almost touching.

  Ali walked over and hugged her, feeling a softening, a profound relief even with Tam stiff in her arms. She was tired, dirty, and blank. Except to mutter, ‘Why do we have to go? I wanna go home.’

  It was the crisis meeting — straight off the bus and into the principal’s office for maximum impact — and Terri wasn’t even there. After the phone call with Marg, Ali had rung Graeme and got the usual non-response — he couldn’t come to the meeting, so much work on — but would make sure he talked to Tam. ‘Get to the bottom of it,’ he’d said. Then there was the potential skirmish when he tried to dig at Ali. Why was she doing this stuff? ‘Is something going on? Is it a reaction to Ed moving in?’

  Ali snorted. ‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

  For once, Graeme had not gone all self-righteous, so Ali had breathed out and deliberately let it go.

  The meeting was a farce. Tam endured the talking-to from Marg and the girls’ teacher, Donna, and Ali attempted to look concerned and attentive. Next to Bettany was Megan, roped in by default and looking ostentatiously vacant, making the meeting all the more nonsensical. ‘Well,’ Marg was saying, ‘we won’t be suspending you this time’ — Ali saw Bettany’s tiny smirk and the corners of Tam’s mouth twitching — ‘but that is on the condition that there will be no next time. You girls must realise that stealing is very serious. We will be making no more exceptions.’ Donna was nodding strenuously, and Ali, belatedly, remembered to nod too. ‘Girls, do you understand?’

  They said ‘yes’ in quiet voices, and thankfully did not laugh, and after a brief silence Marg stood up and let them go. Megan was the first to slouch to the door, Tam and Bettany trailing after her, both of them suddenly, it seemed to Ali, looking small and vulnerable. As they ran into the playground, she saw the energy returning to them, laughter escaping, a loosening in their bodies like a current.

  The first day of primary school. More a feeling than a memory. Ali in the blue-and-white-checked school uniform, neat within an inch of her life: blue cardigan, white knee-high socks and black lace-ups, hair shining in neat pigtails with a perfect part at the back. Scared. The big, gaping concrete yard. Sounds. Someone crying, an empty feeling. Her mother gone. Then the first sight of Jessie.

  Carroty hair a bushy tangle, shorts and a T-shirt with something hippie on it, the memory of its effect on Ali, like magic. Was it a mandala? Jessie was in brown scuffed sandals, unbuckled. Freckles everywhere. They were herded into two lines, girls and boys. What made Ali smile at her? A kind of crackling, dazzling energy.

  Jessie shoved Sharon Davies out of the way, who looked as if she would cry but didn’t. She took Ali’s hand. Jessie’s was warm, soft but tough, maybe a bit clammy. They were five years old, some of them only four. Babies. Could she really remember it, her hand in hers?

  16

  On the walk home in the late-afternoon sun, Ali gave up pantomiming an air of disapproval. She would rather lean in and inhale Tam’s smell, take in the fact that she was still there, whole. She reached for her hand, but Tam shrugged her away. She frowned and dragged her feet, sullen and silent, as if Ali were responsible for the whole ludicrous chain of events.

  An hour or so later, as soon as Ed got home, Ali gathered her stuff for the pool. Tam was sitting at the kitchen table, eyes glazed, body still as if beyond exhaustion. She stared ahead at nothing, chewing at Vegemite toast. ‘Shower aft
er that,’ Ali said. Tam nodded, too tired even to argue.

  As Ali walked to the pool the sky was big and purplish. She looked up and a few big drops of rain fell on her eyelids. The air smelled of change, of hot and cold. Now Tam was home safe, she wanted to get away.

  At the pool she put her bathers on, and texted Terri again. She had tried her that morning but had heard nothing back. She shoved her phone back in her bag. The night before, struggling to sleep, she remembered Bettany’s visit. She was desperate to cancel it. There were ‘the consequences’, but, even more, the idea of Bettany was scarcely bearable.

  She walked towards the water, stood for a minute, lowered herself in. Cold. She waited to feel relief as her body was absorbed into the water, and there was some — a kind of softening at the edges of her thoughts. She pushed off, turned her head, moved her arms, kicked. She was surprised anew at how it worked, the act of moving in water. The no-diving sign was yellow, with an arrow on it like lightning. This morning she had gazed at a photo in the paper as if it would tell her something. A man had shot his wife, his three children, and then turned the gun on himself. All dead. A boy, 12, unsmiling, manly looking, as if he assumed the role as a matter of course, a girl, 11, serene looking, with a low ponytail pulling back her brown hair, a cherub-faced girl of 10. So close together, it must have been hard for the mother. But perhaps when they got to a certain age, they would have been a tight little unit of kid. Self-sufficient. They did not look abused. They did not look afraid. The mother was beside them in the photo, pretty with dark, wavy hair and eyes like the boy’s. There was no picture of the father. He had erased himself after erasing them. How had this come to be? She wanted it to matter but now they were gone.

  Years before, Diane had given grim little updates about the missing Bega schoolgirls. Ali was living in Sydney, aware, but not wanting to be, of the terrible story. Diane’s prurient reporting. ‘Everyone is devastated. We’re all doing what we can, but the families … I just can’t imagine …’ she’d said.

  Then the girls were found, their murderers too, and life went on.

  There was squad training. Two lanes taken up by the boy gods doing butterfly, churning through the water as if it were solid, like earth-moving machines. Their shoulders rose improbably from the water; their faces appeared inhuman, encased in goggles, caps. The pool was full of shouts and instructions; the coach overseeing with a stopwatch in his hand. There was a rush of splashing, a race. The winner whooped and pumped his fist, and then the pitch and adrenaline, boy-men voices, laughter, splashing. At last the coach stood before them, a louder, deeper voice above it all, and then an ebbing away of sound.

  The boys got out and elbowed their way to the changing room, strong thighs dripping, flicking wet hair and rubbing their faces with towels.

  Then quiet.

  The texture of things revealing itself to Ali as the laps passed. The perfect pale-gold midriff of a girl who clung to the steps with her friend, reluctant to take the plunge. Spots of mascara in Ali’s goggles. An amazingly hirsute man struggling to climb out of the pool. Leaves on one plane tree but not the next. Were they both dying? She had heard that trees can go on producing leaves for years and years.

  Patterns of light fell across the water and she watched them, allowing her mind to scatter and fall too. The sun caressed her back. She remembered the light in Jessie’s room, greenish, like a beach cave. She thought of Tam saying when she was about four, ‘When I die I will give Eckie to my children.’ Ali thought don’t die, don’t die and then registered the change in Tam, empathy perhaps, that she could imagine giving her most precious soft-toy rabbit away. But then Tam’s expression had turned smug, self-satisfied. ‘No, ac-tually, I won’t. I will keep him when I die.’

  She was noticing more and more the grime and rust in the pool. It was gathering in the corners in little blotched patterns. She looked at the bare tree again; its limbs reminded her of musical notes or fingers reaching out into air. She would like to think that if Ed had not moved in, things would still be how they once were. But it wasn’t true. Tam had made a decision to create space between them.

  They trudged home in silence most days, the smattering of children fanned around them in the street, little pockets of laughter, headphones, the odd iPhone clasped and hunched over. Tam glanced around, and Ali knew she would prefer to be walking with her friends, to be shuffling and nudging someone, laughing about little private jokes.

  There were many signs like this. She didn’t wear the jumper Ali laid out, but bunched it back into her drawer, grabbed a different one, crinkled her nose just slightly when Ali kissed her in the morning. What was it? Coffee smell, perfume? She didn’t want to hurt Ali, exactly, but she wanted her to know. It had been the same between her and Diane.

  Tam had stopped giving her things too: smooth pebbles she had found, a leaf as transparent as a wing, seedpods, cards and stories. The leaf series. The tale of a green leaf. The laugh of an autumn leaf. The cry of a brown leaf. All the stories stapled together and put into the wooden box that Ali kept on her desk. Jokes. What made the tomato blush? What did the cow have for breakfast? Moo-sli. The tomato one she remembered from her own childhood. It was incredible that they were still circulating. And yet not. Her childhood and Tam’s seemed enmeshed. Just as when Tam once floated within her, her blood Ali’s, her heart beating so close but invisible, inseparable from hers.

  Ali tried to turn her mind to qualities of water, washing away, cleansing, releasing, but it didn’t work. This morning, post Patti’s lasagna extravaganza, she got up to a huge pile of burnt cheese and tomato-encrusted dishes. She’d started doing them, banging around, not caring how much noise she was making, and then stopped, leaving them half-done. Ed finished them before he went to work but now Ali’s annoyance towards Patti sat within her. She must have waited to emerge from Ed’s music room — where she had retreated with a doona at whatever time she got home — until after Ali went out.

  She tried again to quiet her mind. If she knew enough about science, she would know what water actually was. Was it matter? Molecules? She turned to breathe and looked over at the oval where students ran. Something made her think of Eli, and when she turned again, there was a speck of black against green, someone propelling themselves around the track.

  They never talked about their respective families, but once, smoking weed in his room, he’d told her about the different fathers of Aggie’s children, filling in the gaps of Ali’s minimal knowledge. The fathers had seemed so peripheral — Aggie was at the centre of everything, more than enough. Ali felt a tense, stoned attention, as well as the belated shocking realisation that Jessie had never talked about her father, or her lack of one. ‘You know after Aggie dumped him, Cal’s dad turned all landed gentry and produced a whole different family? They all went to private schools, got everything they wanted basically. Aggie got some pittance to help with Cal. No contact either. Not that Cal would ever have said he wanted it. He was some sort of footy star. Then he became an accountant.’ Eli laughed bitterly. ‘As if it would have worked out with Aggie.’

  Matty’s dad was Claudio, Aggie’s on-again, off-again boyfriend. ‘Arsehole number one, or maybe two,’ Eli said. Ali knew bits about Claudio. He worked here and there, sometimes out at one of the organic farms, sometimes house maintenance, mowing or weeding. Mostly he hung around the house, smoking with Aggie and talking about some café or bar he was going to open. But then something happened. An incident with Jessie, maybe more. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Jessie had said one day, eyeballing Ali and opening her mouth wide. ‘I screamed at him to fuck off, and Cal came and whacked him across the head.’ She laughed. She didn’t seem traumatised. ‘That’s the end of him. Even Aggie isn’t that desperate.’ Ali wondered about Matty. Where did that leave him?

  ‘You know my dad died?’ Eli had said. ‘I never knew him. Car accident. I was three. Suddenly she got good taste. That’s what she said, anyway. He was an a
rchitecture student, a lot younger. Aggie said after he died the family cut her off completely. They even hated my name. They wanted Aggie to call me Thomas — that was his name and his father’s too.’ Jessie might have laughed at this — Tom, Tom, Tom — but she never mentioned it, and by the time Ali knew about it, she was grown up, lying on Eli’s futon, flashes of sky and jacaranda coming and going through the torn piece of fabric blowing at the window. ‘Where would I be if I was a Thomas?’

  Ali pushed her arm under his neck and pulled his warm head onto her shoulder. Things were still good between them then, in a way. ‘You’re a good Eli.’

  He was sad. ‘Not really.’

  17

  When Ali got home, Tam was on her iPad, no sign of Patti. She put her head into Ed’s music room.

  ‘Good swim?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Ed looked over her shoulder, smiled a little awkwardly. ‘Patti said she’ll babysit tonight — she wants to make up for the mess.’

  ‘We can’t. I’ve got my class, and we shouldn’t both go out when Tam’s just got home. There are supposed to be consequences.’ She picked the word up and said it ironically.

  ‘Yeah, I know. I’m sure you’ll come down on her very hard. But Patti just wants to do something for us. You.’

  ‘Ha, really?’ Ali laughed in spite of herself.

  Ed smiled and raised his eyebrows. ‘She does indeed. Make the most of it. It’s like the second coming. Maybe we can see a film? Meet you in the city after your class?’

  Ali hesitated, then said, ‘Sure, why not.’ Suddenly she wanted to shore herself up, with Ed, their life, before she went back.