How long have you not been here, Dad? Marjorie wanted to ask Bill.
‘Mum needs to go to bed – and so does Marjorie,’ said Ruby.
‘No! I need to go to school,’ shouted Marjorie. Starting up in terror of the idea.
‘I need someone to look after Elise,’ said Bill.
‘Why don’t you give it a try?’ said Marjorie. ‘Isn’t that your job?’ Her panicked arms dislodged the chairs and tumbled them onto the immaculate floor.
Elise moved her head at the clatter. Ruby and Marjorie saw the look of wrathful indignation strut into her face. ‘Still here, are you, Marjorie? Still destroying all that is clean and pure – after all I have done for you?’ She went back to her coffee. ‘Get out of here. You are a filthy little guttersnipe. I’m sick of the sight of you. Go on to school!’
But it was going to be a bit hard getting to school today. Marjorie had just noticed the cleaning that had occurred while she dozed. Elise had excelled herself. She had finished with a cleaning crescendo of all things plastic. Including the plastic flowers. It was an adoration of the plastic. And the adoration was painstakingly arranged all around the room. Pristine glasses held bunches of colourful toothbrush flowers – bobbing and curtseying in a wild dance of love. Sturdy tin mugs sensibly held hair combs sprayed and fanned in a polite salute. Anxious jam jars caught now bent and boiled hairbrushes. Stolid hairbrushes with their scalding injuries, serious in their endeavours to bow from the waist.
And the plastic flowers were caught in eternal giddy obeisance to each other. Leaves flung in all directions in an outpouring of pleasure at the work of Elise. Stems caught weaving and flowing in sublime delight. Petals twirled and coiled and curled. ‘What have you done with the brushes and combs?’ yelled Marjorie. ‘How can I go to school if I can’t do my hair? And what did you do to the toothbrushes?’
‘Don’t speak to your mother like that,’ Bill warned.
‘Why not?’ Marjorie screamed into Bill’s face. ‘She’s boiled the guts out of all the brushes and combs and toothbrushes. They’re all bent out of shape. They’re useless. How can we go to school now?’
Ruby grabbed Marjorie. She put both arms around her. ‘Come on,’ she whispered. ‘Let’s just get ready for school.’
‘She is the cat’s mother,’ said Elise.
‘See that? Hear that?’ Marjorie pushed Ruby away and pointed at Elise. ‘Do something. She’s turning into a lunatic.’
Ruby tried to grab Marjorie again.
‘Don’t you speak about your mother like that,’ warned Bill. ‘By the crikies, I’ll give it to you.’
‘Leave the girl alone,’ ordered Pa as he stepped into the kitchen and in between Marjorie and Elise. ‘The girl is right. Bloody do something.’
Marjorie stared. Shocked at her unexpected ally. ‘Do you have a brush and comb, Pa?’ she said.
‘’Course I bloody do. Got bloody hair on my head, haven’t I? Go on, you two,’ said Pa. ‘Go have a look on my dressing table. Then get yourselves off to school.’
So Ruby seized Marjorie again and shoved her out of the room before Bill or Elise had a chance to do anything.
They didn’t waste time. They were not going to be around for another aftermath of a glittery smile. Ruby threw books and whatever into their schoolbags while Marjorie threw clothes on herself. Then Ruby shunted Marjorie down the hallway, grabbing Pa’s hairbrush and ramming it into her schoolbag as she went.
Ruby stopped the ute halfway to the bus stop. She reached across and grabbed her sister’s hand.
‘Cigarettes from the doctor aren’t going to stop it this time, Ruby,’ Marjorie whispered.
Ruby stared straight ahead. She nodded.
Ruby and Marjorie spent the school day traversing all the necessary people and mundane activities. They did their utmost. Like pretending the worst thing that could happen to you was not doing your French homework. It was a practised art. A necessary skill. ‘Aren’t you two eating any lunch?’ asked someone more intent on other people’s business than their own.
‘We’re fasting. It’s a holy day, isn’t it? You’re such a non-Catholic pagan,’ said Marjorie. It was enough to deflect, but Marjorie was exhausted. She slumped.
Ruby jumped to her feet and pulled Marjorie up. ‘Come on,’ she said piously. ‘It doesn’t mean we can’t drink water.’ And she steered them away towards the bubble taps.
The two girls bent and drank. They paused for a bit to catch their breath then drank some more. It was all they had to fill their stomachs and they still had the whole rest of the afternoon to get through. They were not even going to think yet about how they would manage life after school. They stopped when they couldn’t force any more water down their throats. Now they had to find a safe place for the rest of lunchtime. A place where curiosity and conversations could be minimised. ‘We could go to the library?’ Ruby suggested.
‘Yeah,’ said Marjorie.
The two girls walked into the school library, avoiding the gaze of the librarian at the front desk. They grabbed a handful of books and headed for a table in the corner, behind the bookshelves.
Where they almost collided with Wheat Bag Boy, who was lurking there clutching his own pile of books. A collision would have been a disaster. Books would have clattered. The librarian would have materialised. Kids and teachers would have noticed. ‘What are you doing here?’ hissed Marjorie in alarm. Imprisoning her books tightly between her arms and her chest.
Jesse looked at Marjorie, then at Ruby, then back at Marjorie. He might have been sizing them up. Choosing which one was going to be butchered for this fortnight’s supply of mutton. ‘You two alright?’ he asked softly.
‘Yes, thanks,’ answered Ruby. ‘Just doing a bit of research. Come on, Marjorie.’ Ruby pulled Marjorie away towards a waiting table.
‘So am I,’ said Jesse, watching Marjorie. ‘Doing a bit of research. A library is a fine place for research.’
‘Bugger off,’ whispered Marjorie, as forcefully as she could in a library. But Jesse did not. He followed Ruby and Marjorie to their table at the back of the library stacks. And seated himself and his own heap of books at the table next to theirs. He sat with his back to them and stretched out his long legs, and began to casually leaf through his own assortment.
Jesse seemed to take no more notice of Ruby and Marjorie. He seemed to also pay scant attention to the several curious wanderers. He would just glance up at them, and the raised eyebrow and the look in his eye and the casual stance of the legs and the shoulders all said one thing: Come any closer and I will skin you and gut you and leave your skin to dry out and crack up, crucified and choking in the dust on a lonely barbed-wire fence somewhere.
That lunchtime in the library saved Ruby and Marjorie. No one came near them. Jesse spoke to them once more during that library lunchtime. ‘Want a sanga?’ he asked, waving one half of a half-dead tomato sandwich at them.
‘You can’t eat in the library,’ Marjorie whispered, looking around for any librarians with a good nose for a warm tomato sandwich.
Jesse shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said and started to eat.
‘We’ll have it. Thanks, Jesse,’ said Ruby as she grabbed it out of his hand.
Marjorie even went to sleep for a time. Guarded carefully by Ruby. Guarded just as carefully by Jesse. But before she wanted it to, the bell rang and it was time to begin the long slog of the afternoon. Marjorie sighed. She was not sure she had enough energy left to attend to the irrelevancy of school today. And then, before she ever wanted it to be, it was home time.
Marjorie avoided everyone on the school bus by doing what she always did – flinging herself into a seat and burying her head in the latest book she was reading. She tuned out the world of the school bus. She tuned out the world. Ruby sat beside her but Marjorie had no idea what Ruby did. And then, before she ever wanted it to be, it was
time to get off the bus.
Marjorie and Ruby stood there in the middle of the road as the school bus lumbered off with its crowd of dust. The old ute was parked under the usual tree. On the other side of the road an immense goods train was rumbling over the railway crossing in a deliberate, persistent procession of wheat trucks. Marjorie turned and watched. ‘We could jump that train,’ she said.
Ruby said nothing.
‘It wouldn’t be hard.’
Ruby threw her schoolbag into the back of the ute.
‘We could jump on and not go home.’
‘Get in the ute,’ said Ruby.
‘We could go somewhere else. We could go and live with Aunty Agnes. Or just live forever on the train. Just travel all over the country . . .’
‘Get in the ute, Marjorie,’ said Ruby.
‘We could stay away.’
‘No. We can’t stay away.’
‘Not go back.’
‘Marjorie! Get in the ute!’
So Marjorie got in the ute.
Ruby drove home. Slowly. And Marjorie opened the gates. As slowly as possible. They didn’t talk. There was nothing to talk about. They had no plan.
The house gate was swinging in a warm northerly wind when they got home. Swinging and slapping and waiting for them. Marjorie grabbed it and slammed it hard shut behind her as she went through. And followed Ruby up the front steps of the house. The house was quiet. There was no creaking, no rattling from the wind. It watched, accepting as it did the tinking of the questioning sticks and stones on its roof, cast there by the wind.
Ruby and Marjorie walked side by side down the long hallway to the kitchen.
They found Pa sitting in his chair at the table. ‘You’re home,’ he said.
They nodded.
‘Get yourselves some tucker then.’ He nodded at the pantry cupboard.
Marjorie stared. Suddenly understanding that Pa knew they had fled to school without any food.
Pa looked away. Embarrassed that his weak concern had been so easily discovered. ‘Gorn,’ he said. ‘Get some tucker into ya. Stupid buggers. Tearing off without any breakfast. Not taking your bloody lunch.’
The two girls ate quickly and in ravenous silence. Food shoved in mouths. Milk gulped. Mouths wiped with backs of hands. With no regard whatsoever for a polite thin slice of bread or a proper allocation of butter or the correct use of a bread-and-butter plate. Or a butter knife. Or a serviette. When they had finished, they looked at Pa. ‘Your father has taken your mother to the doctor’s. Your mother is ailing,’ said Pa.
The girls stared. ‘Thank you for your hairbrush,’ said Ruby. Marjorie nodded.
‘Humph,’ said Pa. His fingers tapped themselves on the table.
Marjorie started to rise, her chair scraping along the lino. ‘I suppose I better do the vegies.’
‘No,’ said Pa. ‘There will be no tea here tonight.’
Marjorie stood. The two girls watched their grandfather.
‘Your father called on the telephone. The doctor said your mother has to go away – to a bloody city hospital. She needs treatment. We don’t have it here in the Mallee,’ said Pa. And his tapping fingers could have said, That is because us Mallee folk don’t generally need that sort of treatment.
‘What do you mean? What sort of treatment?’ Marjorie glared at Pa.
‘You know what I mean,’ growled Pa. ‘Your mother’s not right for this place. I said the Mallee would kill her in the end. And it’s having a pretty damn good go at it right now.’
‘No, we don’t know.’ And Marjorie was shouting again. ‘We don’t know anything! We’re never told anything!’
‘Yes you do. You bloody do know!’ shouted Pa. ‘You know as well as I do. We all bloody do.’
‘Where is she going, Pa?’ Ruby asked quietly, and her look stopped the pair of them short in their shouting.
‘A damn fool mental hospital in the city,’ said Pa. ‘Your mother’s gone stark raving mad.’ His hands slapped down on the table. ‘Now gorn and pack a case. When your father gets back, we have to drive to the city.’
But what about school? What about the chooks? What about the dogs? Who’s going to milk the cow? Who’s going to check the windmill? Who’s going to go round the sheep? What am I going to say to everyone at school? These were all things Marjorie wanted to ask but she didn’t have time because she only had time to pack a suitcase.
*
Marjorie and Ruby had made the car trip to the city before. Holiday trips. Long trips but happy ones. This trip, though, was interminable. The Mallee did its best to hinder them. Slowing them with splatters of dust and dirt. Or bursts of kangaroos out of the darkness on the sides of the road. The girls and Pa sat motionless in the back seat, Marjorie once more clinging to Ruby like a strangle vine. Bill drove silent in the front. Elise sat at Bill’s side and sang quietly to the darkness – or to Bill. And conversed throughout the night-time miles with the plastic flowers left to guard the kitchen in her absence. She ignored Ruby and Marjorie. Except for the various times she was bidden to scold Marjorie once more for being a bold, brazen little article who jolly well needed to be taken down a peg or two!
It was a night strangely similar to the previous night. There was Marjorie, sitting trapped while Elise used her wondrous voice to sing and to scold. Marjorie was grateful for this night, though. There was no kitchen light swinging and illuminating on its brown cord. The car was dark. Marjorie couldn’t see the glittery smile.
Like the night before, Marjorie eventually dozed. And woke to a pre-dawn city sky silently passing the windows of the car. To the comfort of tram wires overhead and electricity wires overhead and those strange Marshalite traffic signals with their red, orange and green dials on a giant clock. The comfort of things telling Marjorie she was not in the Mallee, and that there were others besides Ruby who might help.
Bill deposited Ruby and Marjorie at Aunty Agnes’s place as the city sun poked over the rooftops to see what was going on. They scrambled out of the car. Pa got out and grabbed their suitcases from the boot. He threw them on the footpath while Bill struggled to keep Elise in the car. Pa climbed back in to help Bill with Elise for the rest of the journey. They had a commitment to keep.
Aunty Agnes fussed over Ruby and Marjorie. ‘Bill used to live here,’ she said. ‘When he had to come and work in the city to save the farm.’ (As if perhaps the girls did not know Bill had been used as ransom to save the farm.) She made them open their suitcases and have a bath and wash their hair, which she then insisted on brushing. She forced them to eat poached eggs on toast and drink milk poured from a milk bottle with a beautiful tin foil hat. Then gave them a shopping basket and her purse and made them go to the corner shop and buy things for her – like bread that had been baked just that very day. And boiled lollies. Aunty Agnes told them to go into her lounge room and watch the television set and eat the boiled lollies.
It was well after dark when Bill and Pa came back. That would have been normal for Bill in the Mallee. But it was odd and scary in the city.
‘How is she?’ asked Aunty Agnes.
‘Bloody hell, Agnes,’ said Pa. ‘Give us a chance. We’ve only just got home.’
‘How is she, Bill?’ Aunty Agnes asked.
‘She’s committed,’ replied Bill wearily. Placing his hat on his old peg behind the door.
Dad is sad. And scared, thought Marjorie. And she was very frightened, so she charged into the conversation. ‘What does that mean? Committed?’
Bill stared at Marjorie for a very long time. ‘It means,’ he said, ‘that your mother is in a mental hospital. She will be there until she is released.’
‘How long will that take?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bill, rubbing his hands over his face.
‘When will you know?’ Marjorie glared hard at Bill.
‘Come on, Marjorie,’ said Ruby. And snatched Marjorie away to the safety of their Aunty Agnes bedroom.
*
It soon became apparent to staff at the mental hospital that the commitment was for the long term. It was estimated to take weeks and weeks. Evidently Elise had suffered a major nervous breakdown. And that takes a long time to repair.
A major wheat harvester breakdown only takes days to fix. The same for a major tractor breakdown, and for a major car breakdown. A major shearing plant breakdown only takes hours. You break down a gun to clean it. It is a good thing. Marjorie was at a loss to know why it should take so long for the major nervous breakdown of Elise to be fixed.
After the first couple of weeks, Bill and Pa and Ruby and Marjorie had to go back to the Mallee. Pa went back to checking the water in the dams – because he could still manage a farm, couldn’t he! Bill went back to the back paddock – because that was a long way away and a man had the time to cry like a man should back there. Cry for his wife, cry for his daughters.
And Marjorie went back to school. She would have liked to never go back. But Ruby needed to finish her Leaving Certificate.
‘What will I say tomorrow?’ Marjorie asked.
‘Don’t say anything.’
‘But what about when they all ask?’
‘No one’s going to ask anything.’
‘Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they?’
‘Because, Marjorie, they don’t have to ask. They would have figured out weeks ago what’s happened,’ said Ruby.
‘How would they?’ asked Marjorie, her voice rising in panic at the thought. ‘How could they? We haven’t told anyone.’
‘Who do you think’s been looking after the farm?’
And, of course, it was the locals. Those stalwart, loyal locals who had pledged to lend Bill a hand in the event the family was under the weather – in the event Elise might not be one hundred percent. They had all pulled together. Nothing had been said to anyone who was not local. But all the locals hereabouts knew about Elise and her nerves that had managed to break down. So they had been doing what they could for Bill and Pa and the girls.
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