Three Summers

by Judith Clarke

  ‘YOU were sound asleep,’ Dancey said now, and her voice held a trace of incredulity, as if it was a wonder to her how anyone in the world could sleep sound.

  That walk home last night must have tired me out,’ ‘yawned Ruth, and was puzzled to see a sudden tide of colour spread across the girl’s pale cheeks.

  Dancey turned sideways and then put up a hand to hide the blush. Almost immediately she took the hand away, because what did she care if Ruth saw and wondered? Let her! What did she care about anyone? She stared sullenly at the two framed photographs which stood side by side on the chest of drawers beside the bed.

  There were photographs of Ruth’s grandmother and her mother. Margaret May and Polly.

  There was no picture of Ruth’s dad. The photograph of Margaret May as a young woman had probably been taken by her friend Father Joseph; Ruth had found it in her nan’s special box after her grandmother had died.

  Dancey picked it up. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘That’s my nan. Her name was Margaret May.’

  ‘Margaret Ma-ay,’ repeated Dancey in a singsong voice. She studied the face behind the glass, and she thought it was a face that looked out at you, straight.

  ‘She looks a bit like you,’ she said to Ruth, though grudgingly, as if, even in saying something as ordinary as this, she might be giving a little of herself away.

  ‘You think so?’ Ruth smiled. She sat up and threw her hair back over her shoulders, as if Dancey’s remark had made her eager to start the day. It was young hair, the girl noticed. Heavy. Hardly any grey.

  ‘Nan was my favourite person,’ said Ruth.

  Dancey said nothing, and Ruth considered her stern profile, the straight forehead and elegant nose, the determined tilt of the chin. She thought how there was nothing childish in it.

  Dancey put the photograph back down on the chest of drawers and said, ‘She looks brave, your nan.’

  ‘She was brave,’ agreed Ruth, remembering Margaret May’s childhood in the orphanage, the years skivvying out at Fortuna, the marriage of which she had never spoken. She reached for the photograph and looked into it: Nan was in her garden, sitting on the wooden bench; behind her heavy roses bloomed along the wall. ‘She had the most beautiful garden,’ Ruth said softly, remembering the feel of warm sandy paths beneath her bare feet, the scents of thyme and basil, the humming of bees and the squabble of magpies, a lone cicada singing from high up in the gumtree.

  ‘I know a garden,’ the girl whispered.

  ‘You do?’ It was difficult to imagine where in Dancey’s blighted history this garden might have been. ‘Was it in America?’ Ruth asked gently.

  ‘America?’ For a moment the girl looked bewildered, then she said, ‘Oh no, it wasn’t there.’ She touched the smooth skin of one temple, and added in a sudden rush, ‘It’s got a lake with pink waterlilies, and big old trees, and—’ Her voice trembled, her hand rushed to her mouth as if she’d said too much.

  ‘A dream garden,’ said Ruth, smiling, thinking how Dan–cey’s dream garden sounded like the image she’d had of Tam Finn’s garden at Fortuna, and how, in those first lonely weeks after she’d left Barinjii, she’d dream of walking there with him.

  ‘It’s not a dream garden,’ said Dancey, as if she had to make this very clear. ‘It’s real. It’s somewhere, in a real place, only I don’t know where.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll find it some day,’ said Ruth, and then they both fell silent, as if there was some mutual agreement to leave the subject of gardens alone.

  Ruth put the photograph of Margaret May back on the bedside table. ‘She’d have liked you,’ she said to Dancey.

  The girl’s head jerked round. ‘No, she wouldn’t!’ For a second the grey eyes blazed at Ruth, then they swerved away. ‘And anyway, I wouldn’t have wanted her to! I don’t need people to like me!’

  Ruth made no response. She was treading her way cautiously through the wilderness that was Dancey, seeking steady ground. The girl had only been with her for two months.

  Though that was longer than she’d been anywhere. ‘And she hasn’t run away!’ Sandy Jimpson had exclaimed delightedly.

  ‘I didn’t lock her up,’ Ruth had replied.

  A sudden breeze rattled the blind, sending a swirl of warm air into the room. A blue shirt thrown carelessly across the back of a chair fluttered for a moment and then went still. Ruth glanced at the clock and saw that it was only ten to seven.

  ‘Hot again,’ observed Dancey, her face once more expressionless. She reached for the second photograph. It was the one of Polly which had sat on the mantelpiece in the house at Barinjii. The girl stared down at the beautiful face. ‘Who’s this?’ she whispered.

  ‘My mother.’

  ‘Your mother?’ said Dancey incredulously, as if mothers should never look like that. ‘This is your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’ Ruth smiled again and Dancey blurted, loud and sudden as a child, ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She died when I was a baby. I never saw her, not to remember, anyway.’ Ruth thought of the presence she used to sense out at the crossroads in Barinjii when she was a girl, and how, even now, on the borders of sleep, she sometimes had that sweet feeling of being rocked and held.

  ‘I wish I’d never seen my mum!’ exclaimed Dancey with a sudden fierce passion, and again Ruth said nothing, and the girl’s words seemed to float in the air and give out their meaning over and over again.

  ‘How did she die?’ Dancey asked at last. ‘Your mum? Did she kill herself?’

  The question might have seemed surprising until you remembered that Dancey’s mother had done just that. More or less.

  ‘She died in a car accident,’ answered Ruth.

  ‘Was she drunk? Was she wasted?’

  Ruth took a deep breath. Sometimes it was hard. ‘Of course she wasn’t,’ she said, struggling to keep any edge of anger from her voice. ‘She was only a young girl with a baby.’

  ‘A young girl with a baby,’ echoed Dancey thoughtfully, and though she said no more, her rainy grey eyes held an old expression which said quite plainly, You can be a young girl with a baby and still be wasted. Carefully, expelling a tiny breath from her lips into the air, she put the photograph back in its place beside the one of Margaret May and studied the empty space beside them. ‘Didn’t you have a dad?’ she asked.

  Dad, thought Ruth, and saw him standing at the crossing gates, leaning on his old bicycle, waving at the train that was carrying her away. Poor Dad.

  ‘Didn’t you?’ persisted Dancey.

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘How come there’s no photo of him, then?’

  ‘We just weren’t a photo-taking family, I suppose.’

  ‘Did you have a husband?’ asked Dancey. ‘Kids?’

  ‘No kids,’ said Ruth. ‘I had a husband once, when I was younger. For a little while.’

  ‘Didn’t take, eh?’ The girl smiled knowingly. Sometimes it was difficult to believe she was only thirteen.

  ‘No, it didn’t take,’ agreed Ruth.

  ‘Better off, I’d say,’ said Dancey, and then added in the same low passionate voice she’d used about her mother, ‘It’s better to have no one. Then you can’t get—’ she broke off. The blind knocked on the windowsill again – tappety-tap, tappety-tap – and the girl spun round, white-faced, as if that innocent sound had been someone come for her, knocking at the door.

  ‘Dancey,’ Ruth began, but the girl broke in, ‘I’m going outside, out into the yard for a bit.’ She turned and almost ran from the room.

  ‘Don’t go too far away,’ Ruth called after her. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and at once felt a sickly warmth strike up from the polished boards beneath her feet. The heat got everywhere. ‘I’m going to get us some breakfast in a minute.’

  There was no answer, only the sound of footsteps running down the hall. The front door squealed open and a wind with the smell of smoke upon it rushed into the house. Far away there was the faint splutter of a motorb
ike and somewhere high above the roof, a sudden wild screech of cockatoos.

  two

  Dancey ran blindly across the prickly grass of the front yard, anger fizzing inside her head, sparking and spitting like fireworks in the dark. Her heart banged so hard against her ribs it could have been the fist of some crazy little person hidden in there, struggling to get out. She threw her arms out and began to whirl in circles, round and round and round, then stopped and stood for a moment with her head tossed back, waiting for the dizziness to subside. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid!’ she muttered furiously, while the sun banged down on the top of her head like a big hot punishing hand. ‘Will you never learn?’ She pinched the soft flesh on the inside of her arm, hearing her own treacherous voice back there in the bedroom, saying, ‘It’s better to have no one. Then you can’t get—’ She’d stopped herself there, at least. She hadn’t said the rest of it, which was ‘messed up and then left all on your own.’ But she’d almost said it, hadn’t she? And then Ruth would have known that there’d been a time when Dancey had wanted people to love her. She’d gone and told her about the garden, too, the garden with the beautiful trees and the shining lake that had come into her mind back when she’d been a little kid at Roseland. At least she hadn’t told her about the peacock and the dark-haired man; she’d kept them to herself.

  Telling private stuff was something Dancey had crossed off, crossed right out of her life; it was something you should never, never do. You told them stuff and then when it turned out later that they didn’t want you, you’d gone and given little bits of yourself away. For nothing! They forgot, of course; most of them couldn’t wait to put Dancey Trelawny right out of their tiny minds, but it still left you feeling stupid, and ashamed. Soft.

  She was getting soft, because look at what she’d gone and done when they were walking home from the community meeting last night! Ruth had been worrying about the fires, really worrying, so you could feel it coming off her, like vibrations in the air. Even in the dark you could see tears shining in her eyes.

  Dancey herself loved fires: the snap and hiss of them, the roar and rush, the mad smell of smoke in the air like there’d been from the fires over at Mount Hay. Under control now, the firemen had told them at the meeting – but there’d be more. It hadn’t rained once, not properly, all through the spring and early summer, and now the real summer was here – January – and still it hadn’t rained. The wind raged, and the bush had a dry powdery look about it, and a knowing, waiting air. Dancey ran to the fence and climbed up onto the bottom rail, staring out towards the horizon where there was a long smudge of grey – you couldn’t tell if it was cloud or smoke or simply brimstone sky. Dancey didn’t care! Let it burn!

  Ruth was dead scared, though. ‘I can’t bear to think about it, Dancey,’ she’d said last night as they’d trudged towards home down Hayfield Lane, which was no more than a bumpy track hemmed in by trees and dry scrub on both sides. Some of the trees had black scorched trunks so you could see a fire had been through before. Five years back, Ruth had told her. ‘I wasn’t living here then,’ she’d said, and that’s when she’d started going on about how she couldn’t bear to think about fire: ‘all the old people who won’t be able to get away in time, and all the animals, Dancey! Running, trying to escape, and the birds, falling from the sky—’ she’d broken off with a little choking sound and that’s when Dancey had done it, broken all her rules, actually reached out and clasped Ruth’s hand. Only for a second, because she realised at once what she’d done and quickly snatched her hand away. But to do that! To actually reach out and touch. Touching was a thing Dancey had crossed out for good. You never touched them.

  ‘Come and give us a birthday kiss, love,’ Janine, the last foster mother, had coaxed her, pouting her lips and making kissie sounds. Dancey wouldn’t, she wasn’t going near her.

  ‘Ah, c’mon, don’t be like that! It’s my birthday!’ Janine had cried, but even when Barry, the foster dad, had given Dancey a backhander for being a spoilsport and upsetting people, she’d stood her ground. She wasn’t kissing any of them.

  They’d taken her back, then, like they all took her back, as if she was a toy they’d bought that didn’t work properly. They’d told on her; Janine had told that snatch-faced social worker, Sandy Jimpson, that Dancey had no proper feelings: ‘No emotions, like. She’s a little psychopath!’ Then Barry had put his oar in. ‘Like those serial killers,’ he’d said, ‘those ones you see on the TV.’

  Dancey jumped down from the fence and though it was boiling hot she began to run around the lawn in circles again, because thinking about stuff that had happened, about Barry and Janine and Sandy Jimpson and all the others, everything, made her body want to move, and move fast, as if in the running she could somehow get rid of the bad things, leave it all behind. Round and round she went, until she was so dizzy she couldn’t stand up anymore but fell down on the grass and lay there looking up at the sky. The grey smudge on the horizon was bigger now, but she still couldn’t tell if it was smoke or cloud or just the colour of the sky. The wind whistled in the telephone wires, hoo-eee! hoo-eee! and there was a sudden loud snap! as a branch broke from a tree and tumbled to the ground. She jumped up and went over to the gate, but she couldn’t see where the branch had fallen; there were so many trees out there, all crowded together, soughing and swaying in the wind.

  From far down the lane came a faint putt-putting sound and then the postman rounded the bend on his yellow motor-scooter and came bumping down the track. Mikey, he was called, a fat, squidgy boy with hair the colour of old axle grease and a great big pimple blazing crimson in the middle of his forehead like a fiery third eye.

  ‘He’s Melissa Lygon’s big brother,’ Megan Stoyles had informed her, but Dancey was none the wiser, she didn’t know who Melissa Lygon was, she’d only been at the school for two months and the kids all seemed alike to her – a lot of squealing white rats locked up in a pen. The only ones whose names she remembered were the kids in her home class and the girls in Megan Stoyles’ gang.

  ‘’Nother hot one, eh?’ Mikey greeted her as he stopped his scooter by the gate and rummaged in his bag.

  What a brain! Dancey tossed her wild black hair. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Fires are out over at Mount Hay.’

  ‘There’ll be more,’ said Dancey. ‘Lots more.’

  ‘Ya reckon?’

  Dancey nodded. ‘Everything will burn,’ she said. ‘The houses and the people who can’t get away. And all the animals will be running, the kangaroos and wallabies, the foxes and the rabbits and the sheep left in the paddocks, running and running – and the birds will fall out of the sky.’

  He goggled at her. ‘Ya reckon?’ he said again, and handed her two letters, one big and one small and both addressed to Ruth Gower, Hayfield Lane, Medlar, NSW.

  ‘Saw you at Macca’s last Saturday,’ Mikey said. ‘Over at Woodie.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You were with Megan Stoyles and that lot.’

  ‘None of your business where I was,’ said Dancey. ‘Or who I was with.’

  The snub didn’t stop him. ‘You ever fancy going out somewhere a bit more classy with yours truly—’

  Dancey cut him short. ‘There’s nowhere I’d fancy going with yours truly in a billion years,’ she said and his pudgy face turned scarlet and his whole body flinched away from from hers. His eyes had a look of terror in them, as if he thought she might suddenly fly though the air and sink her teeth into his throat.

  ‘If that’s the way you want it, then,’ he mumbled.

  ‘It most certainly is,’ said Dancey, deepening her voice, making it sound so cold and severe you’d have thought she was Matron Trapcott back at Roseland. Mikey shot her a frightened glance, stamped the pedal on his scooter and lurched away down Hayfield Lane.

  Dancey slid the two letters down the neck of her tee-shirt and made her way round the side of the house, where a row of tall fir trees formed a shady green tunnel against the wall. It was a pla
ce she liked a lot, a place where she could be private and think about her garden, imagining the big trees and the paths which shone white in the moonlight and the tiny little waves which lapped at the shore of the lake, shusha, shusha. She knew that garden, not because she’d been there, but because it was somehow her place, it was in her blood. Once she’d fallen asleep out here beneath the fir trees and the dark-haired man and the peacock had come round the side of the house, she could sense them, watching her sleeping. The dark-haired man was whistling his song very, very softly, as if he thought she might be worn out from all the bad things that had happened and he didn’t want to wake her up.

  Dancey settled down comfortably on the deep carpet of pine needles and took the letters from her shirt. The smaller one in the white envelope was from Mrs Fiona Howe, 21 Hopeton Street, Barinjii, NSW. Mrs Fiona Howe was Ruth’s best friend; they’d grown up together in this little town way out in the country and to Dancey it seemed an utterly amazing thing that they’d kept on knowing about each other for so long. She couldn’t imagine that ever happening to her, couldn’t imagine anyone would ever bother with her for years and years or that she’d ever bother with anyone. People moved on, or they died, and after a while you just forgot. Even her mother’s face was growing dim. She could remember the sound of her mum’s voice all right, because sometimes it woke her up in the middle of the night, that steady whine she used to get when she started up saying all that stuff about the way she hated the sight of people and how she’d be better off dead.

  Only little Frankie’s face stayed clear and lovely in Dancey’s mind.

  She put Mrs Fiona Howe’s letter down on the pine needles and weighted it down with a small round stone. She turned her attention to the other, larger one which was more of a packet than a letter, a big brown envelope fastened with tape and covered with lines of postage stamps which said, India India, India.

  She knew what was inside. In the evenings when Ruth was out watering the garden, Dancey went into the study and examined the emails on the computer and the letters in the desk drawers. Ruth might not have any kids of her own, but she had godchildren, lots of them; the shelf along the wall was filled with their photographs, and the lopsided vases and pottery dogs and cats they’d made when they were little kids, and the photographs of their wives and children now they were grown up and even getting old.