Cousins

by Patricia Grace

  Five

  It was still dark when she woke. There was a square of grey light high up, which was from a little window in the box that was a room. Bubba was crying in the kitchen and she could hear her uncle out under the tank stand snorting and blowing. Through the doorway she could see Aunty in the lamplight by the stove, scratching at the grate with a long poker, tumbling the wood, turning the damper, shifting the water tin.

  After a while her aunty came into the bedroom with Bubba, laying her down with a bottle and going out again. Bubba sucked noisily, stopping occasionally to let the bubbles go because the teat had collapsed — just the way Baby Myra did at the Home. Suddenly Myra’s eyes would close and she’d be asleep and even though you’d watched, kept your eyes fixed on her eyes, you didn’t see it happen. Like Bubba now. Bubba was asleep.

  Her uncle came back into the kitchen and she could hear Aunty telling him what to bring home, then he went out, his boots rattling the yard stones. How would she know when it was seven o’clock, time to be out and kneeling for morning prayers?

  ‘Come and have a cup of tea, May,’ her aunty said from by the door.

  Then she didn’t know what to do — there was no room between the beds to kneel for prayers and she couldn’t get her clothes out of her bag without waking Missy. Anyway she didn’t want to get dressed in a room where there were boys. Also she wasn’t allowed tea.

  But she wanted the tea.

  The kids were still asleep. She hurried into the clothes she’d worn the day before that were supposed to be only for best. No brush and couldn’t do her hair. Went into the kitchen.

  ‘Tea, May, nice and hot. Milk in the billy, sugar in the jar.’ Aunty was at the stove stirring porridge. In her other hand, clipped between her thumbnail and fingernail, she had a butt of cigarette which she put to her lips now and again, drawing her cheeks in, little threads of smoke coming from her nostrils. The milk had gone off and was floating in lumps on the tea. ‘Have this before the kids wake up,’ her aunty said as though she was pleased, ladling porridge into two plates and bringing them to the table, sitting, leaning into the light-circle, reaching, smiling. ‘Bread on the board and golden syrup to put on.’ May thought Aunty might like her.

  ‘So, May, you nearly eleven?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like your cousin Makareta, our brother’s daughter, the brother killed in the war.’

  Telling her things as if she were grown up.

  ‘Your mother was two years older than him, the oldest in the family. Our big sister. I’m the third one, then there’s Aperehama.’

  Her own mother’s sister?

  The realisation pierced her. This aunty was her own mother’s sister, knew things about her own mother.

  ‘We would’ve got you, May, if your father let us. Keita and Wi, your grandparents, they been trying to get you.’

  Just then Chummy called out, Bubba started to grizzle and Aunty was swallowing the last of her tea and getting up. ‘We have to take the washing down the creek,’ she said. ‘Have to have our wash down there too because the tank’s low.’

  Manny went through the kitchen and out the door and she heard him pissing in the grass. Piss was a bad word, you were supposed to say wee. Manny was doing a wee, fast and noisy — sounded more like pissing. God could read your thoughts and knew everything that was in your heart. He was everywhere, even in the spider lavatory. She wondered what a low tank was.

  There was still a flame in the lamp but the circle of light had faded because daylight had come. Her aunty reached up and turned the wick down and a thin finger of smoke rose from the slot where it had gone.

  My father didn’t let them have me.

  She went into the bedroom, slid her case from under the bed and changed into her pinafore, which was a faded green except where the hem had been let down and the darts opened out. Last year it had been Maggie’s. She brushed her hair, pressing the springy curls down as best she could — bad curls that had to be cut, cut, cut, Matron snapping with the scissors, pulling down hard with the comb. Bad. She had to flatten her hair down with water every morning and slide her two long clips in to try and stop it from springing.

  Betty Crosseyes had curls that her mother set in rags every night, that hung down loose and goldy when they were taken out in the mornings. Each curl was brushed round a finger with a slow twist of the brush. Betty had shown her how to do it on the doll. She had a white ribbon that tied in a bow at the top of her head, and clips with bluebirds on them that kept the ribbon from sliding.

  When Matron had finished cutting her hair she would tell her to get the pan and brush and clean up the mess, so she’d sweep up all the bad curls and carry them down to the incinerator. One day James, the caretaker, had been down at the incinerator when she’d taken her hair to burn.

  ‘Been shearing the black sheep, have they?’ he’d said.

  There was no water, no mirror. She combed her hair down as flat as she could and slid the clips in at each side. Bubba was watching her from Aunty’s bed.

  They took the path that went past the lav, through the cold grass, sourgrass and stinging nettles. The bag of washing that she carried over her shoulder kept slipping in her grip and every now and again she stopped and changed shoulders. The washing stank.

  Her aunty, ahead of her, had Bubba tied to her back in a blanket and held a bundle of clothes in front of her as though she carried a big pumpkin with two tweaked leaves at the top of it. Manny was ahead with the water tins and Missy and Chummy, behind them, were stamping and grizzling with the billies and the bread.

  Past the lavatory they went up to the top of a small hill where they rested. ‘Down there,’ her aunty said, and looking down May could see a small brown house with big trees around it. ‘Your grandparents’ place.’

  Further on there were other houses, pretend houses, box houses, wood and tin, silver-looking, with worn tracks going here and there towards them through the grass and the trees. And in the distance was a house or a hall, triangle-shaped, that had high weeds growing all round it. They made their way down the slope, across a paddock and down a tree-covered bank to the creek. There was a clearing where the creek had been dammed.

  Aunty took Bubba’s clothes off and dropped them at the edge of the water. Missy and the boys stripped too, then went up along the bank rude. Aunty tucked her dress up and began undoing the bundles, sorting the washing into piles. Bubba, sitting beside her mother, slapped the water, laughing and screwing up her face.

  She hadn’t seen a creek before except from the window of the train. She thought of eels. ‘Come down, May,’ her aunty called, but she didn’t. Instead she stood and watched Aunty soaping the clothes, rubbing and rinsing, then wringing them and tossing them into a tin behind her on the bank.

  After a while her aunty called again, ‘Come down, you can rinse, over in the running water by the stones. Kids can spread them on the bushes … Missy, Manny,’ she called.

  So May took her shoes off, went down the bank with the tin, stepped into the water thinking of eels.

  ‘Tip them out, May, rinse, then chuck them back in the tin … Funny with only us home.’

  Aunty had said the same thing that morning when she’d sent Manny with a billy somewhere to milk a cow — their grandparents’ cow. Chummy had gone too, to feed chooks and a dog. He’d complained and cried about having to go, slapping his elbows against his sides as though he was pumping up tears. Aunty had given him porridge scraps and rotten milk for the chooks and two bits of old bread spread with fat, for the dog. ‘What about her,’ Chumchum had said with his feet planted, rocking his head in her direction. Aunty had had to smack him before he’d run off crying. ‘Don’t you eat that bread, for the dog,’ Aunty had called after him. Then Aunty had turned back from the doorway and said, ‘Funny with everyone gone.’

  About an hour later Chummy had come back smiling, carrying a tin with five eggs in it. ‘None broken,’ he’d said. Manny was behind him walking carefully with the billy
of milk.

  Her aunty went up the bank with Bubba and began spreading the rinsed clothes over the bushes. May squeezed and wrung the last of the washing and went up to help, pleased to have her feet out of the water. ‘That tree back of you,’ her aunty said, ‘that’s where your cousin Makareta was born.’ She looked at the tree but didn’t understand what her aunty was talking about, hadn’t heard of getting babies from trees. There was a hospital in the street next to her school where God left babies, but she hadn’t heard of him leaving any in a tree. She was too shy to ask Aunty about it.

  When they’d finished spreading the clothes Aunty sat Bubba on her hip, picked up a sack and they went together upstream where the ground was hard and stony in places, muddy and soft in others. Every now and again Aunty called, ‘Manny, Missy, Chumchum,’ and the kids answered from somewhere.

  At a place where the creek was shallow and wide, her aunt gave Bubba to her to hold then stepped in and began picking handfuls of green plant that grew there. ‘Growing good,’ she said. Her dress was wet all round the hem.

  Suddenly Manny was there with a tin which he poked close to her face. ‘Yaar,’ he shouted. In the tin were insects, or something ugly, and he laughed when she jumped up squealing. He reached in and took out one of the insects, thrusting it at her, and the insect, close to her nose, waved its legs and its two big pinchers. She left Bubba and ran into the water. ‘Stop that, Manny,’ her aunty called. ‘Missy, Chumchum, give you all a hiding I come up there.’ They were laughing as though they might never stop. ‘Koura, May, don’t get scared. You kids …’

  But she was scared — of eels coming, of those pincher things. She wanted to get out of the water, lifted one foot and then the other, looking down at the stones wanting to hold on to Aunty’s dress. ‘Wait till I get those kids …’ They’d gone off through the trees taking Bubba with them, laughing, naked and rude.

  The boys had their shorts on and Missy was wearing black bloomers. They’d put a singlet on Bubba, who was lying in the grass drinking from her bottle. She hoped they’d get a smack from Aunty but they were keeping out of their mother’s way. The tin, with water in it, was sitting on two stones with dry grass and sticks stuffed in between. The pinchers had been tipped out onto the ground. Manny struck a match, lit the grass, and the twigs crackled and flared. As the water began to boil her cousins picked up the pinchers and dropped them in while her aunty cut the bread into big slices with a butcher knife and spread them with syrup.

  After a few minutes Manny moved the tin carefully with two sticks, tilted it so that the water drained out, then tipped the pinchers into the upside-down lid of a billy. They were dead. They were red. ‘See, May, you can eat …’

  But she wouldn’t. The kids were picking them up, blowing, tossing, pecking, getting little specks on their thumbnails which they put into their mouths. Aunty poked little bits into Bubba’s mouth too and they all licked and sucked the shells, breaking off the pinchers and sucking, looking at her to see if she would have any but she wouldn’t, even though she was hungry and the piece of bread hadn’t filled her up at all.

  Later, when the water tins were full and the washing had been collected, Aunty and the kids went into the water and began soaping themselves and bobbing up and down. Chumchum and Missy were ginger, with ginger skins and ginger and yellow scraps of hair. Manny was black, with black hair sticking up like a brush, and Bubba was whitish with black curls on the top of her head. But on the back of her head she had no hair at all. Aunty had a light brown body, a dark brown face and dark brown arms and legs, black hair with bushy curls. Bad hair. Aunty passed Bubba to Manny while she soaped Missy’s and Chumchum’s hair and they ducked down under the water, leaving circles of soap on the surface, up again, blowing and spitting and popping their eyes.

  At home she and Jean had to help Colleen and Margaret with their baths, washing their ears, necks, hair and helping them to dry themselves properly. Colleen and Margaret weren’t sisters but they were twin-looking, skinny and white with wingy bones sticking out of their backs. Shivery, grizzly noises came out of their mouths as they were dried and helped on with their singlets. They were like scraggy, squeaky dolls.

  ‘Is it paying day?’ Missy asked as she dressed. Aunty was helping Manny to hitch the bundle of washing on his back and giving Chummy the billies to carry.

  ‘Bring Bubba please, May,’ she said. ‘And if you can bring that bag … just pull it.’

  So she picked up Bubba, resting her on one hip, and began dragging the bag of watercress. ‘Is it paying day?’ Missy asked again, and Manny and Chum stopped walking, stared hard at Aunty. ‘Is it paying day?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Paying day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dadda coming?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Keep quiet. Shut up about Dadda.’ Aunty went ahead of them with the tin and the kids started hurrying after her with the billies and bundles.

  She sat up late with Aunty drinking tea, just as if she were grown up. The kids were all asleep. There was a lamp in the middle of the table and her hands were in the circle of light holding a tin cup. Aunty’s too. No faces. No ceiling, no walls, no floor. But there was a spot of red where the range was, from the last bit of fire in the stove.

  She remembered she hadn’t said prayers and hadn’t read her scriptures since she’d been on holiday. Learning to be bad. After she’d finished her tea she thought she might get her scriptures from her bag and read them in the patch of light. On the other hand if she waited, made the tea last a long time, Aunty might say something — as she had yesterday and this morning — something important for her to know. She kept reminding herself that Aunty was her own mother’s sister, her mother without a face. Aunty might say something about her mother’s face.

  And why she left me. And after that, why did she die?

  There was a brown door, long ago, at the top of stairs that had a dark smell. The doorknob was high on the door, but she couldn’t remember much of what was behind it except for a big window with six panes of glass and a brown couch where she would kneel and look out. The window looked down over roof tops, gorse banks, railings, lampposts, concrete steps and a zigzag path. Sometimes at night she had seen the searchlights looking for enemy planes, crisscrossing like knitting needles, knitting up black patches of sky.

  Also in the room there was the shadow that was her mother and the shadow that was her father. She remembered having a schoolbag and a new dress because she was starting school. Her mother had put lunch and an apron into the bag and they’d walked together to school, holding hands. She remembered her mother’s hand.

  At school she’d hung the bag in the porch and her mother had bent down and kissed her, said goodbye and gone. There was her mother’s hand turning the handle of the porch door — but she couldn’t remember her mother’s face. Couldn’t remember her mother’s voice, only that she’d spoken. In the classroom there were rows of desks and chairs and she’d sat still, wanting to be good, trying to know what to do.

  When she’d gone to her bag at lunchtime there was no lunch in it. The teacher was very angry and knew who had taken the lunch and had smacked a boy hard on the legs with a ruler, afterwards had given her an orange.

  After school her mother hadn’t been there to meet her so she’d hurried on home, wanting to tell about the boy and the orange. But the brown door had been locked when she arrived and she’d waited at the top of the stairs until it was dark and her father came home. He’d rattled the door then gone downstairs and come back with a key and she’d gone inside and waited for her mother. When she woke in the morning her mother still hadn’t come. Since then she’d waited every day.

  Other people had come. A man and a woman came and talked to her father, then one day the woman packed her clothes in a bag and they’d gone in a bus to a big house where she thought her mother would be.

  There were voices, men laughing. ‘Hear that?’ her aunty
said. ‘Your silly drunk uncle coming.’ She listened. The voices came closer then she heard bottles clinking and footsteps coming across the yard.

  ‘Hey, hey,’ a voice called.

  Her aunty slid the knife out of the door, it opened and her uncle stumbled in with an armload, ‘Come in, Nonny.’ The other man was bending, tugging at his bootlaces. He pulled his boots off and leaned for a moment in the doorway. ‘How you, Gloria?’

  ‘All right, Nonny.’

  ‘How’s the fire, Glory?’ Her uncle went to the stove, dropped the grate door open and began putting wood in.

  ‘What about your kids? What about a feed for them?’ her aunty said.

  ‘Wake them up.’ He went towards the bedroom door. ‘Wake up, kids. Dadda got chewing gum, Dadda got chocolate fish …’

  ‘Shut up and leave them alone, too late now,’ her aunty said, shifting the lamp onto its high hook as Bubba began to grizzle. ‘See what you done.’

  ‘Glor-ee-a …’ he sang,

  It’s not Maree

  It’s Glo-ree-a

  It’s not Cherie

  It’s Glor-ee-a ….

  ‘You got tin milk and potatoes?’

  ‘Tin milk, potatoes …’ He began pulling potatoes from his pockets and putting them on the bench.

  ‘Where’s the rest, the sack?’ Aunty Gloria asked.

  ‘Fence, where they drop us off. And flap.’ He unwrapped a wet parcel and began cutting the mutton flaps.

  She’s in my every dream …

  ‘Get the beer in, Nonny, get my darling a beer.’ He dropped the bones into a pot, began peeling potatoes and washing them in a scrap of water in a bowl, ‘Get our niece some chocolate fish,’ he said.

  The fire was rumbling. She watched her uncle pull handfuls of watercress from the bag and put it in the pot. ‘Not so smart ‘cause Glo-ree-a is not in love with you … Hey hey, sing up, Glory, sing up, Nonny, drink up, ha ha.’

  Her aunty and the man called Nonny were drinking beer out of tin cups. There was another parcel on the table and Aunty unwrapped milk powder, flour, comics, chocolate fish and chewing gum, putting the things away on the shelves made of boxes. The man called Nonny filled the cups again.