The Golden Book

by Kate Ryan

  But then the loud, blokey voice Ali knew, the thud of work boots following Eli’s bare feet. Eli came into the kitchen, gave her a look as if to say What could I do?, and then to Cal, without any enthusiasm, ‘Want a coffee or something?’

  Ali crossed her arms over her breasts, bare under the T-shirt. She thought wildly of pretending she didn’t know who he was. ‘Hi, Cal,’ she said.

  Like some stagey villain, torturing them, he looked at Eli, then her, and then back to Eli again. Eli gestured to a chair.

  ‘Ali-son.’ He smiled meanly. Eli moved towards the stove, picked up the coffee pot and began to unscrew it, and she felt the full force of Cal’s attention. He sighed. ‘You two? You’ve gotta be … fucking kidding me.’

  Ali licked her lips. Eli turned around. ‘What’s it to you?’

  Cal sat down, pushed his fingers through his hair. He put on an exaggerated Aussie accent. ‘I was down in the big smoke, doing a job around here, and I thought I might drop in on my little brother. Little did I know …’

  Ali felt her face heat. She thought of leaving the room, but to stand up, to have Cal’s eyes on her as she moved, would have exposed her fear and shame for what they were, for what they had been all that time.

  He picked up a cup from the table, weighed it in one hand as if he were deciding what to do with it. He spoke more quietly now, as if he had given up the game. ‘This is bloody cosy, isn’t it? You two. Now she’s rotting in some old people’s home.’

  ‘Shut up, Cal. What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘What? You’re saying Jessie has nothing to do with it? And you’re telling me to shut up. You with your dirty little secret.’

  ‘Shut up, Cal. What do you know about anything?’

  Ali felt Cal’s eyes on her, though she stared ahead. ‘And then there’s you. You with your little book. He know about that, does he?’ He nodded towards Eli. ‘Ali-son isn’t the little goody-two-shoes she seems. Turns out she wrote a lot of toxic stuff about Jessie, her supposed best friend. Her best friend who couldn’t read.’

  Eli glared back at him, scoffed. ‘You reading the secret diaries of twelve-year-olds now?’

  Ali was frozen. The leg she had tucked under her was completely numb, but she couldn’t move. Her vision ticked. All the fear came down. What if Jessie found out, understood somehow, and it literally killed her? Her thoughts seemed to collapse in on themselves, one after another. Her parents, her course — she would fail it — Aggie. Maybe Cal was right. Maybe there was something wrong with her. And now she had taken up with Jessie’s brother. Maybe she was a monster.

  Somewhere in the street a car door slammed, someone laughed. Upstairs the cistern ran, and the bathroom door opened.

  Cal was still looking at Ali. ‘You never go away, do you? I wish you would.’

  The stovetop pot began to bubble, and Eli turned to take it off the heat. ‘Leave her alone, Cal. What’s your problem? Whatever Ali wrote, they were little kids, for god’s sake.’ Ali licked her lips again, rubbed one hand over the opposite arm. Eli’s defence of her made no difference. What Cal said was true. She was bad.

  ‘Aggie know about you two?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  All at once Ali felt separate from Eli, as if she hardly knew him. As if she had woken up, and everything she had thought real no longer was. She tried again to think of something to say. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She started to cry. Someone jogged down the stairs.

  ‘That’s it?’ Cal said. He sat for a moment and then, without warning, he reached out his arm and swiped everything off the table. Milk, tepid coffee, newspapers, ashtray, books. Ali’s legs and torso were splashed with coffee and ash. Eli jumped back. ‘Fuck, Cal!’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’

  Ali still didn’t move. There was a creak in the hall, and Sylvia was calling, ‘You okay, guys?’

  Ali saw Eli as Cal must, as weak and pathetic. What had he ever done for Jessie? He bent over and righted the milk, picked up a cup. Without looking at him, he said, ‘Just leave, Cal. Get out of my house.’

  Cal stood up. He didn’t seem angry any more. ‘Good fucking luck to you,’ he said, and Ali heard the sorrow in his voice. This, more than anything, was the worst part. Then he was leaving, and Sylvia was coming into the kitchen, looking at the mess and saying, ‘Hey, what’s going on? What the hell was that about?’

  ‘My big fucking brother,’ said Eli, and Ali heard the front door being slammed. It seemed to echo in her chest as if her body had struck rock.

  One day she had found Cal in Jessie’s room when she came over, Jessie with the Golden Book open on her lap. He was sitting next to her on the floor. Ali’s stomach dropped. She wanted to cry, but in a dry way, as if to do more might break her body into pieces. ‘Hi,’ Jessie said. ‘Wanna go to Kianinny? Eli says he’ll drop us and pick us up later.’

  Cal looked up at Ali, who felt her face redden. She shook her head too much and turned towards the window, clouded with dust and fly specks, dotted with peeling stickers. ‘Um, not sure. I can’t stay long. Dad said Mum’s gonna ring. She wants to talk to me. About Gran.’

  34

  After she had stopped the thing with Eli, she gave up her share-house and went back to Bega. She didn’t react to her mother’s enquiring looks, her careful questions. Were things okay? Did she want to talk about anything? What was happening with her course? ‘Darling, stay as long as you need to.’ The operative word being need. Ali needed her.

  Within a few days she was agitated and restless. With her parents at work, she prowled the house. No place was right, nothing was worth doing. In a trunk in her bedroom were her old notebooks, more than a dozen, dating back to when she was five or six. The first was embarrassingly innocent: Jessie and I played hopscotch and went swimming. We had ice cream and spaghetti for dinner. Then one from when she was ten or eleven: lists of likes and dislikes, scraps of story, heavily influenced by the Famous Five. Shipwreck at Bermagui. The Two Go Adventuring Again. It was Jessie’s idea, that they call themselves the two, but it never caught on. It sounded twee and self-conscious, even to them, and it dropped away.

  She chucked the journals into the incinerator at the back of the garden: the sagas of her teenage years, her hostility towards her mother, her crushes, the drunken parties and the desperation for escape, for annihilation. Words, words, words. She watched them all smoulder and blacken and go up in flames. It was something for Jessie.

  After that, nothing. She lay in bed for weeks. Where fear had been, there was now tiredness in every part of her — her arms, her legs, her toes. She couldn’t read or write; even thinking was painful. Diane made her go to the doctor. A kind man, with blue eyes and short grey hair, a wiry runner’s body, who had known her from when she was very young. He looked over her head at her mother and shook his head. Ali wasn’t speaking at this stage. ‘Rest,’ he said. ‘Counselling, maybe.’

  It was as if she were a sick child or someone very old. Water hurt her skin; her eyelids ached as if light would disintegrate them. She remembered the zoetrope horse from years ago and it haunted her, its long, elegant limbs, its mane flying back. Jessie would never be like that. Amy came up from Sydney. Do you want me to pull up the blind? Lizzie was asking after you. What happened with Eli? Are you going back to uni? We saw the Specials. You would have loved them. Jen got together with that guy Ian the other night at the Kingston. What a dickhead. She was completely out of it. He thought it would be on. She was mortified.

  She prattled on and on.

  And after a while she went away.

  Diane was always bringing Ali tea and trying to get her to talk. She was too bright and alive, as if, by contrast, Ali was slipping into death. Days, weeks, a month passing; time was so slow but compressed. She lost all track of it. Then one morning, David was snapping up the blind, angry when he never was. ‘You have to get up.’ He almost pulled her out o
f bed and came into the room every five minutes to make sure she got dressed. He and Diane had taken long-service leave, but the European trip they had planned never eventuated.

  He made Ali walk.

  At first, before work, it was around the streets of Bega, the heaviness in her legs and the breeze like pain. Then on weekends he shoved her into the car with sandwiches, fruit, water, a thermos of tea. They drove to Merimbula beach, or Kianinny Bay, or parts of the national park — anywhere and everywhere except to Mumbulla. Their weekend walks got longer, from twenty minutes to an hour, and then an hour and a half. He didn’t expect her to talk. Just walking; sun, sky, trees, their feet plodding, his grizzled, freckly neck in front of her on the path. The days they didn’t go, she slept in. When the house was empty, she drifted through it, looking at the bookshelves, the rows and rows of books that added up to nothing. She had no desire to read them now, those stories that had once drawn her into other worlds, away and beyond. The only ones that interested her were textbooks: Teaching for a New Age, A Place for Knowledge, Creative Teaching for the Future. In Ali’s childhood these books had seemed as appealing as chewing cardboard, but now she took them back to bed and began to read them, in snippets, like salvation. She would finish her course. She would be a teacher.

  Then, on one of the walks with her dad, she had caught herself laughing. Something silly, one of his puns or ridiculous sayings, such and such a league player isn’t the sharpest tool in the box. He was wearing a bag of fruit. A what? Bag of fruit. You know, suit. She laughed, groaned, forgot herself, didn’t think of Jessie or of dying for a few minutes. And then, for a time, she started to get better.

  35

  She rang Ed. It was strange to talk into that other space, the space of her real life, from her childhood bedroom. ‘How are things?’

  ‘Good. Patti and Tam made tacos for dinner again. Tam is on her third. Aren’t you, Tam?’

  ‘How was the concert?’

  ‘Good. Pretty funny, actually. Tam was a triumph.’ He laughed.

  Ali heard Tam in the background, imagined a plate of soggy lettuce and curling bits of tomato, beans from a can.

  ‘Great,’ she said. She told Ed a little about Eli. ‘He’s changed a lot. Given up philosophy. He’s making computer games now. Seems a bit wrong.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He knew a bit, not a lot, about Eli. Knew that he was Jessie’s brother but not about the thing they’d had. She wasn’t going to tell him. It was the part of the story that might be beautiful. There were these things, like tiny flecks of gold, in the sad story.

  ‘I’d better go,’ Ed said after a few minutes. ‘Patti’s here … for dinner. She’s brought some Sicilian desserts. They look pretty good. Tam’s itching to get into them.’

  ‘Okay.’ There was a pause. Ali felt suddenly very far away. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, meaning Patti but knowing that it wasn’t clear, that she could mean anything.

  ‘I’m sorry about Jessie.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She scratched her finger on the doona and thought of Matty in his hotels, wearing his elegant suits. People could transform themselves sometimes. Matthew. Into space, light, openness, the clean lines of hotel rooms, when in the end that house must have been all darkness and pain and anger and confusion. It was hard to say whether Matty had done well, though he appeared to have. She thought he loved Jessie the least, but how could she know? She didn’t know how that family worked, not really. She had no siblings. ‘Ed.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s all right. I don’t mind.’

  She heard Ed breathing. ‘What?’

  ‘I mean she should stay. Patti.’

  They were quiet again, and there were voices in the background — Tam, Patti, home. ‘All right,’ Ed said. ‘D’you want to speak to Tam?’

  ‘No, it’s okay.’ She wanted to hear her voice but not the distraction, the lack of need. She had a private world now, evolving every minute. And there were not even three years between the age Tam was now and the age she and Jessie were then. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow. Give her a big hug from me. And Patti. Enjoy your dessert.’

  They hung up.

  Too late she thought of a silly pun, the kind David favoured before his mind started to go. Just desserts. She lay back on the bed and tried to make it work. Then she thought about the Golden Book, whether she would stop dreaming about it now Jessie was gone.

  36

  After Cal turned up, things began to change between Ali and Eli. She waited for him to ask about the Golden Book, so she could say it was exactly what Jessie wanted it not to be. A book of Truth or Dare. Childish. In the not asking was the terror. At times the unspoken tension was unbearable, and she filled the space by picking at him. When was he going to do something? What happened to the overseas plan? He’d never go if he smoked all the time. She was trying to give up. It made her paranoid. Once, after some too strong hash, she had to be talked down from a belief that Eli’s room was closing in on her. She lay there, paralysed, jarred by small noises, voices from the street so vivid that they seemed to be in the room with them. Was Cal coming back? What would he say? She must have fallen asleep, but when she woke it was still night, and the horror was in her, dense and sticky, like tar embedded in her skin. The lamp was on and Eli held her, murmuring that it would be okay, falling in and out of sleep himself as she gazed at the spines of books in his bookcase. She wanted Eli to take it all away, but even in her stoned state she knew that he couldn’t. In the morning, she picked up the bits and pieces she had scattered around his room — the toothbrush and jumpers and books. She was cold and sullen as she dressed. Thinking, as she reached the street, heading back to her share-house, which suddenly seemed like a haven, that maybe she hated him. Maybe she would never see him again.

  But she couldn’t stop herself.

  They were in his room a week later, drinking beer, and he was going on about reincarnation, Buddhism, how central the concept was, how interesting. She felt prickles of irritation — couldn’t he just shut up? ‘It’s bullshit,’ she snapped. At that moment she knew this was what Jessie would have said. ‘Just an excuse not to change things. No better than Christianity. Just keeps everyone in their crappy place.’

  ‘That’s not true. It’s much more complicated than that.’

  Ali gave a shrug and turned away, slugged at her beer. She was sitting on the floor next to the bookcase, and she plucked out the books, dropping them. ‘Sartre. Haven’t read … Barthes … Haven’t read … Foucault … Haven’t read. Can’t even say his bloody name.’ She looked up at him. ‘Not that you’d know. You never listen to a thing I say. You just love the sound of your own voice.’

  ‘No, I don’t actually.’ He looked at her. ‘What’s wrong? Why are you being such a bitch?’

  I’m bad, Ali thought. I cause damage.

  Ali glared at him. Eli seemed frozen, waiting for something, her fury. Perhaps he wanted this; perhaps he was waiting for her to leave. Perhaps he wanted this too. Again, the fury. ‘You’re just fucking hopeless,’ she said.

  The last time she slept with him, Eli’s touch was repellent. She turned away from him to sleep and when she woke, she felt herself crying, after dreaming of the house, of Mumbulla.

  Eli woke slurry with sleep. ‘What’s wrong?’

  She couldn’t speak, terrified of saying it out loud. She sat holding herself, knees against her chest, waiting for the horror to seep out of her. She got out of bed, forced herself to go downstairs into the kitchen. She sat hugging her knees, shaking. Ten minutes passed before she could even plug in the kettle to make tea. Eli didn’t come to find her.

  37

  Ali lay on the bed, with her eyes closed. In her mind, she could almost have flicked through the pages, flecked with fake gold at their edges. It was so quiet, no traffic noise at all, just the faint brush of the silver birch against the window. She thought of
the cake Diane bought after her first day at high school. For once, she’d put aside her preference for less teenage-appealing cakes like carrot and walnut or flourless orange. When Ali got home from school, she saw the cake in the middle of the kitchen table. Her name was in curlicues of paler chocolate across an expanse of dark-chocolate sponge, layer upon layer of cloying chocolate cream and a note saying ‘Help yourself! Love, Mum and Dad.’ Diane must have done some serious manoeuvring to get it there. Maybe she had come home at lunchtime before rushing back to her classes.

  When Ali saw the cake, she felt hot and overwhelmed. She had spoken to one girl a bit — Grace. She was okay. But all she knew was that Jessie had not been there. She cut an ugly slab of the cake, left the smeared knife on the table, and later, after dinner, had refused to eat any more. ‘I feel sick,’ she said. ‘It’s too sweet.’

  ‘What’s with the book?’ Cal had said once. He was smoking a cigarette on the front steps, a stifling day, blackish clouds gathering. Ali was heading home, Jessie’s record player was booming out ‘Brown Sugar’, and suddenly everything was still, like a photograph. The long grass, the rust around the gate, Cal’s long legs spread in front of him and his broad bare feet, the sickening smell of smoke in the heat. Ali swallowed. Diane was due back that night, and she had a sudden longing for her.

  ‘It’s nothing, really. Just a game we’re playing.’

  Cal didn’t reply, quietly smoking.

  ‘I better go,’ Ali said. ‘See ya.’

  Diane told her afterwards that all kinds of assessments were about to take place. A reading specialist was coming to see Jessie. Aggie was making desperate belated attempts to help her. There had been talk of approaching Jessie’s father for money, of a private school maybe, something Cal and Eli were for, but which made Jessie furious. There had been huge scenes at home. Ali overheard her parents talking quietly about Jessie’s troubles. ‘What? Are you sure?’ David said. ‘Not that crazy Redmond kid?’