The Sparkle Pages

by Meg Bignell

  TUESDAY 14th NOVEMBER

  Take it out of my hands, oh, please, just take it out of my hands. There’s no good time for this, it will never fit with my plans. But it’s so cold it burns my skin, just take it out of my hands …

  Who sings that song again? It doesn’t matter. It’s today’s theme song regardless.

  Yesterday the children and I talked to Valda Bywaters about Valda Kent. We heard about the olden, golden days of her mother teaching her music, of her performing at the Theatre Royal and, once, Carnegie Hall! Daphne was with us too; they used to sing together. Great friends. Daphne lives in Devonport but she’s here staying with her granddaughter. I listened and listened and got blissfully lost in their days. I wish Henry had been there. And Ria.

  But here’s what else happened: once Hugh had arrived with fish and chips for everyone, I said, ‘I’ll give you back your records, Valda.’

  ‘What records?’

  ‘The ones you gave to Mary-Lou.’

  She looked surprised. ‘Ah, of course that’s where I put them. I do forget things. Yes, they’re me. Doesn’t matter what happens with them really, but at odd times I get it in my head that they might be of value.’

  ‘Of course they have value, Valda,’ Daphne tutted.

  I agreed. ‘Priceless. I’ll get them copied and archived and they’ll last forever. Do you have any recordings, Daphne?’

  Daphne smiled. ‘One or two. Not solo, though. Valda had the voice.’

  Valda added, ‘Ah, but Daphne had the beauty.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Daphne. ‘Your nose was always a shame. But I’d have given anything for your whistle notes.’

  ‘Do you still sing, Daphne?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘Ah, no. I was a smoker. Too many bouts of bronchitis. We didn’t know it was bad, did we, Valda?’

  ‘Daphne lost her range, and her gift. It was terrible.’ Valda looked pointedly at me and said, ‘Susannah is a gifted violist, Daphne. But she gave it up.’

  I tried not to wince. Valda went on. ‘She’s terrible at mending, her garden’s a mishmash and she makes awful egg sandwiches, but her music! Her music is something else.’

  ‘But you haven’t heard it,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I have,’ she snapped. ‘Rafferty played it to me. Something you played with the TSO? Something for the Queen?’ She waved her hands around in the air dismissively.

  ‘I haven’t played for the Queen,’ I said.

  ‘“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen?’ offered Hugh. ‘That was a great one.’ I was shocked he’d remember. I loved that performance too. It came just as the orchestra had offered me full-time permanency, about a month before I discovered I was pregnant with Eloise. I bought a Carla Zampatti gown for that performance. My life had started to feel like one of those flying dreams.

  ‘Whatever,’ Valda said (which proves she’s been spending too much time with Raff). ‘It was very, very good, Daphne. But oh, well. Anyone who can walk away from that talent doesn’t deserve it anyway.’

  ‘Valda!’ said Daphne. ‘My word, you can scathe. I don’t —’

  But she was interrupted by a clear, firm voice saying, ‘Oh, Valda, please will you just shut up? Just leave it alone, fucken oath.’ And then I realised with surprise that the voice was mine: my voice, with extra strength. And swearing. People gasped.

  Valda looked completely taken aback just for perhaps a millisecond before she said, ‘My dear girl. It’s not fuck-en, it’s fuck-ing.’

  Hugh laughed nervously. Then Daphne put a neat hand over her mouth and giggled. But that newly strung, resonant voice of mine went on: ‘I had a terrible thing happen too. I didn’t get sick. I’m sorry for that, Daphne, but I can’t play any more because of it.’

  There was silence for a moment. Daphne’s hand was still covering her mouth. My hands were trembling. Jimmy, who was sitting next to me, touched my arm. Raffy’s big eyes looked up at me. Mary-Lou leaned into my arm. And then Eloise said, ‘Mum? What terrible thing?’

  I put some shaky fingers into Mary-Lou’s hair, let them play with the silky curls. I let my tears come and then I looked through them into a little nursery room in a Newtown house, a room that was just the right temperature for a baby. On the wall was a black and white frieze with the alphabet and a series of framed manuscript papers containing the original composition for the ‘Starlit Sonata’ – a gift from Ria. There was a cot with a bottle, some fluffy toys, blankets. And a baby. All, all alone.

  I wiped my eyes and looked at Hugh. He nodded. And so I took a deep breath, the sort of breath you’d take if you haven’t taken any for a long while: right up from your feet. And I spoke:

  ‘Darling, something happened when you were a baby. After you were born, I took some time off from the orchestra, but when you were six months old I went back to work. I was travelling a bit, Dad was just getting the business started; we were busy. We hired a full-time nanny to take care of you. We were there in the mornings and home in time to give you dinner and put you to bed. I tried to be there most weekends, but I wasn’t always.’ I stumbled on the lump in my throat. I looked at Hugh. He gave me a tiny smile. I closed my eyes for a moment and looked at the black-blue inside of my lids in case there might be something written there that could help. There wasn’t, so I opened them again.

  ‘When you were nineteen months old, just over a year after I’d gone back to work —’ I paused and swallowed. ‘I came home at midday with a nasty cough that was disrupting rehearsals. I found the dinner cooked and the washing folded. I found you in your cot. You were awake but quiet, sitting up. You had your bunny and your blankets. You were sodden. And the nanny wasn’t there.’

  There was a gasp from Raffy. I shuddered out another deep breath. ‘I went to you, I put my hands out and you … you just looked at them as though they were something completely foreign. You didn’t smile. You just stared and stared at my hands, and then you reached out and touched them with one tiny finger, as if checking to see that they were real.’ My tears starting coming then. I looked at Hugh; he had some tears too.

  ‘I got you out of bed. I changed you. You’d had terrible nappy rash for a long time and it was very sore. But you didn’t cry. I called the nanny and she answered straight away. She sounded just the same. All bright and capable. She said you were sleeping and that she was just folding the washing. She told me to have a great afternoon. I hung up. I called your dad and he came home. We sat on the couch with you and we waited. And four and a half hours later, she came back.’

  ‘Where did she go?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘She’d been going to a second job. She’d been putting Eloise in her cot every weekday at ten o’clock and leaving her there until half-past five. Five days a week.’

  Both Daphne’s hands were over her mouth now. Folded over one another like an X. X for wrong. I looked at Eloise. ‘Everyone said how amazingly good you were. I was so proud of our perfect baby – she sleeps through the night, she’s so quiet, she never cries. But you never cried because no one ever came. No one ever came.’

  Through my tears, I could see Eloise moving towards me: a rippling, slender mirage, impossibly tall. She put her arms around me and Mary-Lou and said, ‘Mum, it’s okay, it’s okay.’ And then Raffy joined in, wriggling his arms around my legs, then Jimmy, then Hugh. Hugh cupped a hand around my head and pressed his lips to my cheek. He sniffed. I felt his tears.

  WEDNESDAY 15th NOVEMBER

  Sparkle notes: nothing startling but Hugh and I lay in the spoons position last night. We were awake and we didn’t talk, not at all. I could hear his blinks. We lay there for a long time and his breath on the back of my neck was filled with the words we didn’t have to say. There were no crackling sparks keeping us awake and we fell asleep like that.

  This morning when we woke up we had moved apart in the night and as Hugh was getting up he said, ‘How often do you think about it? Eloise?’

  I touched his back and said, ‘It kills me at least once a day.’

  And he s
aid, ‘Me too.’

  He got up then. And suddenly I didn’t feel warm and spoony any more. I thought, I don’t believe you. And, did you sail away to Antarctica from pregnant me and three babies and think about it every day? Didn’t you want to stay close as close? Or did you need to apply ice to the wound? Did you think about it this year when you had plans to leave us again?

  2012

  I hated the time when Hugh went to Antarctica. Hated it. By then we’d moved into West Hobart, had three children and deeply immersed ourselves in domestic affairs. Hugh was making the transition into his own forensic practice, but before he did, he decided that some wild oats needed sowing, in the South Pole.

  ‘Zannah, what do you think about a season in Antarctica?’ he asked one Easter when we’d taken the children camping on Maria Island. It was a March Easter, one of those postcard-lit autumn days when the sun is low and gets into everything and you want to skip up hills. I was feeling altogether intrepid, having brought two children and a toddler on a camping holiday (drive to Triabunna, get on ferry, put a tent peg in) so I said, ‘Well, I’m up for anything these days,’ and held up my toilet trowel.

  He laughed, then didn’t. ‘I’ve often thought about going, and once I’m entrenched in my own business there probably won’t be the chance. And they’re advertising for a supervising engineer …’

  ‘Are you serious? And leave all this?’ I made a grandiose gesture around Maria’s particularly fetching landscapes. Jimmy sneezed onto my shirt.

  ‘It’d be a five-month season in Davis Station, leaving in October.’

  I looked at him properly. Frowned. ‘You have to be joking.’ If hackles were visible, he might have seen mine go up like warning flags.

  But instead he started talking rapidly about what an opportunity it would be, great for his career blah blah blah … I don’t really know the detail because my brain filled with umbrage that must have foamed up and blocked my earholes. I dragged him a distance away from the children and hissed, ‘You mean to tell me that I’ve been waiting all these years – that I ditched my going-away dreams to stay here with you, bear your children, wash your shirts, prepare your food and be generally broken in, tamed and domesticated, all the while wondering when we might at least temporarily migrate north, only to find that you’ve concocted plans to move south? SOUTH! Without me!’

  ‘Jesus, I didn’t realise it’s all been such a trial for you,’ Hugh said angrily. ‘I thought you were happy.’

  ‘And I thought you might one day take me away.’

  ‘Well, clearly now’s not the time —’

  ‘No, clearly not —’

  ‘Not the time for us all to go.’ He was shouting now.

  I raised my own voice. ‘Right, so when you get back from Antarctica, how about I gallivant off to Vienna with Ria for a season, just me?’

  ‘If you go for music, then great, terrific, I’m all for it.’

  ‘Oh, and what, you’d get a nanny, would you?’ He was silent then. My voice was softened by sob. ‘You’d let them have those enormous biscuits from the school canteen,’ I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else. ‘Barky would die of thirst and no one would floss.’

  He rolled his eyes and said, ‘Wouldn’t hurt them to be less looked after.’ His face was tight, and somehow different from the face I knew so well.

  I think we both left that conversation with a bit of Antarctic ice in our hearts. And if I’d looked, his beautiful autumn eyes might have taken on a grey tone. Perhaps he’s truly never seen me the same way since then. Thick rankles are not very attractive, I suppose.

  Later on that Maria trip, I took Eloise up the Bishop and Clerk track and she fell on the scree. I had to carry her all the way back to Darlington. It took us hours to reach Hugh and the boys and, by then, Hugh was worried. But I felt sort of reinforced. ‘Mum rescued me,’ Eloise said, and Raffy gave me a pat and said, ‘Well done, brave Mummy.’

  On the ferry back to Triabunna I said, ‘You should go to Davis Station, Hugh. I can see it means a lot to you. But, for goodness sake, don’t get trapped down there, don’t dedicate your life to penguins, don’t forget about us and don’t fall in a crevice.’

  He squeezed me tight and said, ‘It’s just an application at this stage. I probably won’t even get in.’

  But of course he did. And a week before he left, I discovered I was pregnant again. And perhaps we did fall into a crevice, or at least a rut. Regardless, I unfolded my brave face, sent him merrily off on his stream and determined to be all cheery and capable. But Hugh had set up some rigid scaffolding for us in the form of Alison, Laurence, Hire-A-Hubby, Jim’s Gardening, Mum and Dad, so I didn’t get a chance to be capable. I’d be gathering myself together in the sickly mornings after a sleepless night with restless Jimmy, and Alison would show up, rested and coiffed, with a basket of bakings and remedies and trilly advice. She’d cast an eye at the state of things, wipe Raffy’s nose, braid Eloise’s hair and throw away the cold raisin toast. She taught me the meaning of officious. Also, how hopeless I can be.

  Sometimes Laurence would come over and say that a tree branch looked dangerous or put a broken wheel back on the wheelie bin. Then they’d leave again, all buoyed by their do-goodery. Then Jimmy would cry and Raffy would get bored and break things. Eloise was just disturbingly stoic. I’d overuse the clothes dryer, have nightmares about tree branches falling on the children and wish Play School went for longer. At the park I envied old people their freedom.

  Mum and Dad were only moderately better; they were good at whisking the children away so I could tidy up in my own time, or sleep. But everyone would return from thrilling adventures, the children would be filthy, exhausted and wide-eyed from seeing fairies or catching a fish, and I’d be elevated to a new level of boring. Boring and bored, I suppose. I longed for my music but it was a yearning that felt altogether wrong, fraught with danger. What if the music took me away too?

  By the time Hugh finally arrived home from his intrepid, life-changing adventure, our house was sparkling and the wheelie bin wheels were fine, but mine had fallen off. The sight of him with a beard, my relief and my sense of injustice combined and made me feel faint. He said, ‘It’s so good to see you. You look different somehow.’ We laughed because by then my belly was swollen with Mary-Lou. But it was more likely to do with having all my self-belief chipped off.

  MONDAY 27th NOVEMBER

  We’ve reached that time of the year when the teachers stop setting homework, you stop worrying about iodine supplements and times tables, and you start collecting loo rolls for Christmas craft. When the days stay warm until eight so you have to have a gin and tonic on a Monday. When you feel as though it’s time for the year to have a little lie-down.

  But it can’t because Christmas. And because the Sparkle Project should be drawing to a close. And sparkles remain elusive (unless you count the tinsel Mary-Lou has been flinging around everywhere in readiness for the Christmas tree).

  Hugh is an exception. He doesn’t seem to be winding down at all. I’m not sure how he could have absented himself from work for another Antarctic trip … I fear I’ve renewed my bitterness on that front; perhaps I should stop the recollecting now. I think it’s clear where our history gets a bit dark and cumbersome, and ‘Remembering is only a new form of suffering,’ said someone once.

  To be fair to Hugh, though, he’s been very loving lately. Not passionate, just supportive-style loving. Kind. He’s been kissing me a lot. Actually, more like pecks, as if just reminding me he’s here, even when he’s work-distracted. So that’s nice. Different, but nice.

  Funny things they are, pecks, when you think about them. If kissing is scientifically proven to be an early manifestation of basic human desire, what is a peck? An IOU? Dr Folds says we’re all meant to kiss our beloveds for at least seven seconds if we want to keep our flames burning.

  TUESDAY 28th NOVEMBER

  Eloise flatly refused to go to school today. And I didn’t argue. They�
��ve entered the ‘consolidation’ stage at school, which means they all pretend to finish off projects but are actually cleaning out classrooms and going on excursions to Richmond Gaol, etc.

  So we went Christmas shopping. Her suggestion, clearly. I have never thought about Christmas shopping in November before. It turned out to be an unexpected delight. Eloise put her head on my shoulder for a second when we were walking through the mall: a tiny, leaning bit of it’s-okay-thank-you-I-love-you, which almost brought me undone. Tenderness from a teenage daughter is a bag of pink diamonds and a punch in the heart.

  I took her to an extravagant restaurant and we laughed about how suspicious Mary-Lou is about Father Christmas while Jimmy is sailing along in blissful, fairy-lit belief. Then out of the blue she asked, ‘What happened to the nanny?’

  I swallowed a painful lump of half-chewed chicken salad. I looked around for water.

  ‘Did she get arrested?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’ Eloise frowned. ‘Isn’t neglect a crime? She had a duty of care. I looked it up.’

  I flinched at the words ‘duty of care’ and put down my fork. ‘She was very young. Twenty-two. She was the oldest of eight children. That’s why I hired her. A lifetime of experience, I thought. Her father was chronically ill and her mother was an alcoholic. I don’t think neglect registered as a thing.’ I sighed. ‘She was doing three jobs to support her family. It’s no excuse, but I didn’t like to see her charged. Dad agreed. We made sure she’ll never work with vulnerable people again.’ My voice cracked on ‘vulnerable’.

  Eloise was staring at me, her head tilted: fascinated, distanced, grown-up.

  I looked back at her and said, ‘It was my duty of care.’

  ‘But, Mum,’ she said, ‘weren’t you busy? Music was your job, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You were my job. You were my life. Music took too much.’

  She frowned. ‘Ria told me that you’d go mad without your music. Are you going mad, do you think? You can be weird sometimes.’