Sleep came in an instant and my dreams were pleasant and vivid. When I next woke, I found Pearl seated on the chair beside me. I sat up and rubbed my eyes and she presented me with a hot cup of tea. I could hear the ocean, steadily drumming the shore beyond our window, a relentless, present rhythm and through the window was the small bead of a moon watching over us.
‘I have never loved another boy like I loved Jack,’ Pearl said. ‘We’d known each other since we were tots and our mothers would leave us to play together while they drank tea and chatted on. He’d be waiting on the corner near my school for me every afternoon. And he’d walk me home. If my mother had known,’ she said and smiled just slightly, ‘well, she would have put a stop to that, to be sure.’
‘My mother never had much room for kindness.’
I found myself marvelling at the woman she was, sitting comfortably inside herself, holding the threads of an inconsistent world.
‘I don’t think it was something she had known herself or understood how to give to anyone. My elder twin sisters got what little of it she ever had. Life was hard,’ she added. ‘There was no denying that. My days were filled with getting up early, tending chores, walking to school, those brief moments with Jack, then chores till dark. I wasn’t allowed out to play. I don’t want you feeling pity for me,’ she said. I didn’t interrupt her to acknowledge that pity was the last thing I felt for her. I sat up straighter in my lounge bed and sipped my tea quietly.
‘But there was a way of these things, you know. We didn’t go to dances or school outings. My parents weren’t religious. They were hard and I pity them for that, now. I snuck out that one night, with Jack. He showed me the jar of money he’d been saving up for us. He said it would be another six months before he’d have enough for a ring and a wedding. Even with everything that happened after, if I ever had to go through it again, I would still have gone with him that night. The feeling of his hand on my cheek and his lips on mine. His body holding me tight and the knowledge that out of everyone in the world, we had found each other. It only takes one night. And the world can change. I didn’t have time to tell Jack before I left. And in my childishness I thought I could find a way back to him.
‘I’ll never forget that moment on the train station. Standing in my red coat with people looking at me. And you know, Ruby, I could have let their hatred eat at me. Scorn is a physical thing. But I had Jack and a baby growing inside me and that small glimmer of joy was enough. There were places they sent girls like me back then. We were supposed to give our babies away but I couldn’t bear that thought. So I escaped before my time and your mother was born inside a railway station.’ She was quiet and sipped her tea. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it as a rule,’ she said as a small laugh rocked her body. ‘Your mother always hated that coat. But it kept her warm for those first few days.’
I didn’t know why she was telling me. Or perhaps I did. I wasn’t sure how to react, it seemed so barbaric and cruel and I was torn between a deep empathy for her and admiration and something else I couldn’t understand. But she leant forward and cupped my face. ‘Anyone ever tell you how absolutely perfect you are?’ I reached out and hugged her to me, I held her tightly like she was the only raft I had.
‘They say that Sally has no chance of ever recovering,’ I said, feeling Pearl cling to me as tightly as I held her. ‘There was a bleed in her that caused the coma. She’s on so many drugs to keep her body alive and the baby won’t survive anyway.’
Pearl pulled back and I told her everything.
‘I can’t help feeling like she’s there inside. You know? That if we save her baby we save her. I feel like part of me is there.’
‘There’s a lot of things we can never make right, Ruby, love. No matter how much we wish and hope.’
‘Or pray,’ I added.
Pearl took my hands in her own. ‘We’ve got work to do.’
I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a baby growing inside me. I’ve never been one of those girls to go all clucky and stupid over babies. Again, that’s more like Becky. And if there was one thing Sally and I shared in common it was our shared feeling in this regard.
I remember talking about it one night before Mum and Sally left. Sally had come into my room after lights out one night, bringing a packet of chocolate biscuits – god knows where she got them from and how – but we shared them together, my doona forming a tent above us held fast with my torch.
‘Can you imagine a creature growing inside you?’ she started.
‘No.’
‘Something pushing you out further and further from the inside.’
I pulled a face in the dark.
‘Knowing that at some point it is going to have to come out!’
‘A watermelon though a pee hole.’
I started laughing and couldn’t stop. The thought of giving birth to a baby, of pushing it out with doctors and nurses and your own husband – presumably – watching was something akin to a horror movie. And yet we were girls and our bodies were supposedly built for that.
‘Poor Aunty Karen,’ Sally said, though I was still laughing too hard to answer. Dad’s sister in-law had been due to have her baby any day. A matter of weeks after that night our cousin James was born. I heard Aunty Karen tell my mother that the only thing good about childbirth was an epidural.
Our conversation deteriorated into grossing each other out with the most embarrassing scenarios we could invent for ourselves.
‘Imagine going to kiss a boy and sneezing in his face,’ I said.
‘Or knocking teeth.’
‘Or having a bird fly past and crap on your hair.’
‘Or you’re on a date and you get your dress caught in your knickers and you don’t know.’
‘Imagine going into labour in the supermarket.’
‘Or your waters breaking in Myer.’
‘Gross.’
‘Gross all right.’
All that sugar from the biscuits had given me a headache and my mouth felt dry and furry.
‘I’m leaving home as soon as I possibly can,’ Sally said. ‘How about you?’
I don’t think I said anything.
You don’t talk about the details of life when you’re young, only the bigger picture. You talk about sex and boys and babies and what you’re going to wear to the Royal Easter Show and how, if you ever got picked for Australian Idol, you’d sing Total Eclipse of the Heart on ‘Eighties Night’. You have opinions on whether it is possible an Australian could ever win an Australian Open tennis final. You listen to your favourite bands and talk at lunch about whether you’d be considered pretty in the standards of beauty in the eighteen hundreds. You spend too many hours on geometry and algebra and the poetic genius of Shakespeare, but you never talk about things like imminent death and certainty and how, when the dice of life roll against you, you might not be ready. You draw sketches of dresses in your sketchbook and dream of fame and reputation, but you never dream your twin could be part dead and part alive, all at once. Or your mother could believe in a god with rigid moral lines who could strike you down for being disobedient. We don’t talk about those things, yet they were happening to me. At seventeen I knew that life and death were split seconds apart and the world could crash in on your shoulders one night while you weren’t looking. And shame could run you through like a dagger, it could stab you in the back years before you were ever born. I knew that love made no sense at all. We want it neat and uncomplicated; we want simple rules and no mistakes. It was love that had Sally tied in knots, a twisted love that kept Dad away, and Mum outside her door. I wondered if love was the reason Sally had kept her child and the reason she was coming home; love like Pearl had for her boy next door. I would never know.
18.
Pearl talked continuously as we worked and I was glad for the distraction because I still hadn’
t called Dad. I learnt that the silkworms consumed her life for a little over two months of each year when she would take thousands of eggs and nurture them as they grew into fully grown worms that eat and grow, eat and grow. They shed their skin four times and Pearl would feed them, clean their baskets and watch them for signs of change. She described the end of the process with something akin to awe, the moment a worm would stop eating and begin waving its head in lazy figure eights. She would place each worm, tending them by hand, into spinning baskets – a little like egg cartons – which encouraged each worm to spin well-formed cocoons.
The thread comes from the top of their head, a fine silken strand rich in seracin glue that bonds the thread to the spinning surface. They lay the foundations first, she said, a spread of dense, mesh-like strands that suspend the cocoon.
As we finished our shift she put her arm around me as we headed back inside the house for another few hours sleep.
‘You see a beautiful silk thread or fabric and you don’t realise how much can go wrong on the way. If there’s something not right in their environment, or the temperature suddenly changes, it can throw their entire equilibrium off and there’s no compass to guide their spinning and their cocoons are like flat rods, instead. You can’t spin rods.’
‘Is that what’s in those baskets,’ I asked.
She nodded.
‘So what can you do? I mean how do you make sure they spin the right cocoon?’
‘Love ’em, give them plenty of food. But you can’t control the weather, you know. Sometimes things just go wrong.’
‘Did you ever find him? Jack,’ I asked. My voice barely a whisper because I wasn’t sure I should even be asking. But all the same, I had to know.
‘When I did find him he was already married with a son a few years younger than your mum.’
‘But how—’
She cut me off. ‘They told him I had died giving birth. He was a good man, you know. Life is never a neat parcel.’
It didn’t seem right. Somehow I hoped there would be some kind of happy ending. I thought of what it would be like, having gone through everything on her own, only to find he’d moved on without her. I didn’t have a fraction of her courage.
Inside, Pearl rummaged about in her cupboard by the sink. ‘Now where did I put that,’ she said more to herself. ‘Ah,’ she said, taking a small parcel and moving over to the couch where I had curled up against the arm, clutching the pillow to my chest.
‘I don’t get them very often,’ she said sorting through what appeared to be a handful of letters. ‘But your mother does write to me occasionally.’
I sat up a little straighter, totally surprised by this. I didn’t think Mum talked to Pearl at all.
‘Yeah, there’s a bit of religious stuff, but . . . Ah,’ she said, reading from one of the letters. ‘Button is doing very well. You know she sews, don’t you? It’s not always to my taste, but that girl has talent and I know her father is as proud as can be.’ Pearl glanced towards me. ‘Sally tells me that her sister wants to enter the Young Designer of the Year Award. Turns out I have a very talented daughter.’
I was speechless. Truly speechless. Mum had never even hinted at this before. I had no idea she even thought much about me, let alone felt something close to pride.
‘What’s it like?’
‘Huh?’
‘The dress or whatever it is you’re entering. Tell me what it’s like?’
I took my sketchbook out from underneath the couch. I held it on my knees, tucking the pillow behind my back. But I couldn’t bring myself to open it or show her anything. And it had nothing to do with feeling inferior or not good enough. It just didn’t seem right anymore. How could I think of those things after what had happened. ‘I’m not entering,’ I said. ‘Not with everything that’s going on. It wouldn’t be right.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Pearl.
I was so tired yet I couldn’t sleep. I had two halves of me fighting it out inside. For the first time since the accident, I had ideas and thoughts and designs running through my head, but the other part of me was so heavy with sadness it wanted to drag me down. When we were working together, or Pearl was talking or taking me somewhere in this new place, I felt free and uninterrupted. But when it stopped and I was quiet with myself I thought back to that moment I bought a ticket for Tonga instead of going back home to Dad. I had a childish need to fly free from the real world and lose myself in some faraway place. I had run away.
It wasn’t even clear to me what I wanted other than to turn back the clock, to thread myself through the needle of time and find Sally before it was too late. I missed her with an aching futility. I loved her wildness, her confidence. I loved her without restrictions. I couldn’t stand the thought of her finality. The future had been my comfort, that one day we would make it back to each other like it once was. I was such a child. I wanted to stamp my feet and yell and scream and cry and ignore reason. I wanted to blame them all for letting her die. And for leaving me.
I exhausted myself with this tug-of-war and my last thought before sleeping was of Barry.
‘I don’t know why I came,’ I told Pearl.
‘Yes you do, honey,’ she said.
‘It just doesn’t make any sense, now. I just ran away.’
‘Let me show you something.’
Pearl put her knife down on the table, wiping her hands on the apron tied around her waist. She edged her way between furniture and baskets, bits and bobs in the room, before reaching the two large baskets in the corner. After removing the lid she reached in and removed a handful of the tussled silk I had seen earlier.
‘I had two years back-to-back where something went wrong and damned if I could figure out what it was,’ she shrugged her shoulders. ‘Remind me to show you how to spin sometime,’ she said absently.
By then I knew that after the silkworms had spun their cocoons, Pearl spent her next few months spinning the silk into hanks. These were boxed and posted to various cottage industries in Australia that sold raw silk in all its forms and fashions. There wasn’t much money in it, she told me, but that wasn’t her motivation.
‘Thing is, you can’t spin broken thread. All these rods and throwsters waste can’t be spun. You ever seen silk paper?’
I shook my head.
‘The natural glue in this form of silk means you can fuse it together with heat,’ she passed me a hunk of the silk rods and I held their hard, irregular form in my hand.
‘Fluff it out and use the other stiffer silk pieces to form shapes and patterns. Iron it together and, voila, fabric.’
Despite my anxiety about explaining myself and my reasons for being here, I found my mind sparking with ideas. They came as tingles of possibility, a sense of energy about what sort of dress I could create with it.
‘Bit like tapa,’ she said, watching me.
I looked up and listened. I didn’t know if it was my imagination or not, but the sound of those worms eating seemed louder that day. It felt urgent, that sound, like it would build to a crescendo before it released.
‘You called your parents?’
I looked down and shook my head.
‘Think you’d better do that. With everything going on. Don’t you?’
‘I’m going to have to go home.’
‘They are probably going out of their minds with worry.’
I called Dad and he was rightfully furious with me. I told him about what Mum said about trying to marry Sally off and wanting me to come live with her as well. He was stunned. I told him how angry I was that he didn’t come with me and left me to deal with Sally and Mum and the Aberdeen all on my own.
‘Listen, Button,’ he said. ‘You are seventeen years old. You’re not a kid anymore. You get to decide what happens to you.’
I can’t believe I conjured al
l sorts of things about him. That I really thought he would push me away and force me to live with Mum after we’d been together so long. I realised I’d betrayed him.
‘I’m sorry. It was really stupid. I just felt like I was going crazy.’
Dad did something completely unexpected, then. He cried. I could hear his voice waver a little, before his words came in small sobs.
‘I love you both so much it hurts.’
‘I know.’
‘There’s a flight back home for you leaving tomorrow afternoon. Can you make that?’
‘Yes,’ I mumbled.
‘And I will be there to meet you at the airport. You were right, I should have gone with you. I shouldn’t have let you face it all on your own, okay?’
‘Thanks. I love you, Dad.’
‘I’ll get a message to your mum.’
I felt a sense of peace as Pearl and I tended the silkworms. In the afternoon we headed out, arm in arm, to pick fresh leaves. Together we walked through small groves and bush land stripping the leaves from mulberry bark trees. We were followed by small groups of children, giggling and laughing at us. Pearl chattered with them and enlisted their help in picking the leaves.
At home we continued chopping and feeding until the late afternoon. I left Pearl napping and walked down to the water, taking my shoes off to let the sand in between my toes. I forgot about time as I walked, concentrating on the sound of the water hitting the beach, the far-off cry of birds and that sweet smell. I inhaled deeply, willing its peace and promise into my soul. I wanted it to fill me, to chase away my shadows. I thought of Barry. Despite throwing myself onto him and not replying to his text, I couldn’t help the same fluttering feeling inside. I couldn’t turn off the feeling of liking him and wanting to be with him. I knew it was futile, but I felt it all the same. Why couldn’t I like a boy in Melbourne, someone who went to my school? Someone with whom there was the vague possibility of kissing without Sally and death and grief wedging its way between us?
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