On Monday morning Plum had gone to school, because the choice was to plead sickness for the rest of her life or to tell Mums the reason why she didn’t want to go. During the bus journey she had noticed the absence of something, some feeling she’d come to know: and what was gone was the bubble that’s her home-self, her certain-self. The bubble didn’t sink that morning, because it wasn’t there to fall. Plum looked inside, and found it no longer existed. That piece of her was gone. She felt like someone living alone on a planet.
She’d expected rumor of the briefcase to have reached the school before she did — for Dash and Samantha to have caught an early train so every girl could hear the story before the ringing of the assembly bell. But in the corridors no one looked at her sideways or sniggered as she walked past. This could only mean that nobody knew. Plum wasn’t so foolish as to hope it meant nobody would ever know. Rachael and Samantha and Dash would leak the scandal slowly, like poisonous fumes from the ground; and part of Plum was morbidly interested to see it happen. In the classrooms she had watched as the story flowed like a tide from girl to girl, passed inside notes, whispered into ears. Watching, she’d felt unusually and keenly alive, alive the way a knife is sharp, so the humiliation she was enduring was perfect, like the paring of skin from a hard apple.
At lunchtime Plum hadn’t known what to do or where to go. She discovered it is difficult — it is almost impossible — to maintain the pretense of preoccupation for an hour. She knew that some girls were staring at her, following her with their words. Other girls neither stared nor cared, uninterested in her crimes and indifferent to her plight. Finally she found a concrete corner, far from the lawn with its graceful oak tree, littered with icy-pole sticks and chewing gum and cardboard, yet still a sanctuary: she had covered her face with her hands and cried, hot with anger and lank with suffering, and crying didn’t console her but it did kill some time.
During the last lesson of the day, Geography, a girl had circled an arm around her pencil case as Plum walked past her desk. “Mine,” the girl said, and there had been giggles and snorts. Plum had taken a desk in a corner, and no one sat beside her. She concentrated on the blue lines on her paper until they wavered and blurred. She thought about The Village of the Damned and The Stepford Wives. She thought about Carrie, and wished she was her.
The days that follow are the same — wretched, and much too long. Each morning Plum boards the bus hoping that this will be the day of reunion, that Tuesday will be the day of pity and Wednesday the day of remembrance and Thursday the day of irresistibility, but the week isn’t like that at all. Rachael, Samantha and Dash don’t look at her; it’s clear that, to them, Plum doesn’t and never will exist. Victoria and Sophie wear the faces of the recently bereaved: Plum no longer exists for them either, although she might be a ghost. Caroline sees her, but only once makes the mistake of smiling — then she’s jerked to her senses so violently by Samantha that her scrawny neck almost breaks.
They do not need to worry, however. Plum doesn’t try to speak to them. All her energy is devoted to maintaining a force field around herself. The force field is not like the bubble had been — it does not rise and fall. It is permanently raised in an attempt to keep everything out. She dips her head in her locker when her friends walk by, she takes a seat among the misfits in the back rows of the classrooms. She draws no attention to herself by asking or answering questions. She lurks in the shadows during gym, wary of medicine balls coming toward her head. At lunchtime, she goes to the library. During recess, she hides. At home, she keeps her suffering to herself, bottled up in her hard cold glassy body, and does not ask for comfort. It is better that way.
But it’s not better — nothing makes it better — and by Friday Plum is brittle with desperation. When she sees Sophie standing, unguarded, at the tail of the tuckshop line, she doesn’t hesitate to duck into place behind her. “Hi,” she says. “Buying a Wagon Wheel?” Because her old friend loves Wagon Wheels, it’s a small sweet knowledge that links them.
Sophie turns, and looks at her. She doesn’t smile, but she doesn’t sneer. The tuckshop is in a corner of the undercroft, far from the brightness and swirling air of the open doors. In the gloom there’s a kind of privacy, but Plum feels her vulnerability. “Did you see Dash’s face?” she asks, and her voice is brassy, she has no practice at apologies. “She must really love Abba. She thinks she’s so ace, but she loves Abba. What an idiot!”
“I like Abba,” Sophie replies. “I love Abba.”
“So do I!” Plum squeaks. “I had a T-shirt! When I was about eight, a yellow T-shirt with a picture of Abba, and Abba written on it in big purple letters. I meant — what I mean is — it was just a badge. It wasn’t like an autograph or a record or something, it was only a badge, she loves a dumb badge —”
“Yes,” says Sophie. “That’s why you took it.”
Plum lurches, the queue has moved forward, they can smell the calorific aroma of doughnuts and strawberry milk. “No, I didn’t take it — well, I took it, but I was only borrowing. I was going to give everything back. I had this plan, it was a game —”
“A game!” Sophie’s face crumples. “If you’d wanted to borrow my bracelet and the lamb, you could have asked. I would have said yes. But you didn’t ask, you just took, without caring about me — wanting me to be sad!”
“No! No! It wasn’t like that!”
“I cried about my bracelet, Plum! You saw me crying, and you just sat there, pretending to be my friend —”
“I am your friend!”
“Don’t lie, Plum!” There is real fury in Sophie, Plum hadn’t anticipated. “All you do is lie! You haven’t even said sorry!”
“Sorry!” Plum yowls. “Sorry sorry sorry!”
“Shut up! You’re not sorry!”
“I am sorry! Do you want me to say sorry or not?”
“I want you to be sorry — sorry for stealing, not for being caught!”
“I’m sorry.” She can’t say it in a way that makes it sound sincere. Desperation makes her plead, “If you were a friend, you’d forgive me!”
Sophie answers, “I don’t want to be your friend. You’re a mean person, Plum. I thought you weren’t, but you are.”
“Rachael is meaner than me!” Plum protests. “Samantha is much meaner!”
Sophie stares at her; she gives a short, gusty laugh. “You’re strange, aren’t you,” she says. “It’s like you’ve got nothing inside.”
And although they have reached the head of the queue now, with the tuckshop lady staring at them and a box of Choo Choo Bars right there at Sophie’s elbow, the girl strides away without ordering, refusing to stand in Plum’s rotten shade one moment more. She walks through the undercroft without looking back, heading for the open doors and the sunshine and the grass and the trees beyond.
Plum steps out of the queue, into a blissful darkness. Here is a place where light never reaches, where dust has gathered for decades; here she has almost vanished. She feels herself contracting until only her eyes are left large and open. Everywhere she looks she sees girls clustered in friendships like flowers — fields of flowers, and tidy posies, and dainty perfect pairings. All of them have somewhere to be, something to do, someone to talk to. But Plum is isolated, a writhing repulsive creature, and not one among these holy hundreds is obliged to make space for her. No explanation will redeem her. Begging is what she’d bow to, but it would not work.
She goes home that afternoon something other than what she’s been.
Plum Coyle has never been very happy with herself — she’s chumpish and she’s awkward and there’s something else wrong about her, some objectionable streak to her nature which means she’ll never be popular, things will go askew, she’ll frequently be misinterpreted. In her heart there are many admirable things, but it’s hard for these to wriggle through her thick skin of obtuseness. She’s tried and tried to be, for the world, the person she knows herself to be. She can’t do it though, it’s impossible. Time and a
gain, that good person gets twisted about, or goes unrecognized. It’s exhausting, and it hurts. Better, then, to stop exposing that fragile Plum to the dangerous light. Better to extinguish her completely, and become something steely and impervious, a ball bearing or a chunk of earth. The good Plum’s loss would serve this world right; and it must be easier to live feeling nothing, as does a chunk of earth.
And the peculiar thing is: Plum is relieved. Deciding to feel nothing means she can stop trying to be something. It’s a relief to turn off the force field, which has been draining her strength. Nothing doesn’t need protection, because it cannot be harmed.
She knows that Mums and Fa and Justin and Cydar will go on loving her anyway — they won’t mind if she’s a ball bearing. The thought of their affection makes Plum teary. From now on, she’ll keep within the circle of her house and her parents and her brothers, and never care about anything beyond these, but live like a canary that’s content in its cage or like that prim authoress who roamed the moors and hid in her room whenever company came to the rectory. She will follow the world’s progress by watching TV, maybe get a telescope like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. This will be her, a stone in a lake, untouchable, unseen, undisturbed, and the prospect fills Plum not with loneliness, but with peace. Stretched out on her bed, she smiles up at the ceiling; for the first time all week, she’s willing to live and breathe. It’s luxury to think that she’ll never be hurt again. She will have her family and her home and perhaps Maureen, and that will be enough.
But she can’t tell about the briefcase and the unraveling of her party — not yet, and maybe never. Maybe one day when she’s extremely old, too old to be ashamed, but not before. Her family would forgive her, and possibly understand; Justin and Cydar might even be amused. But for now Plum’s disgrace is a howling thing, and she simply cannot. She hasn’t opened her window all week, she has kept her bedroom door closed. She’d like to go down to the den and snuggle into her father’s side, she’d like to lie on her neighbor’s lawn and grow sleepy to the sound of Maureen. But, for now, it’s easier to be alone. A single soft glance could still kill her.
SHE TAKES THE OPPORTUNITY. Justin is unlocking the door of his car and she’s there, on the footpath: “Justin. Hello.”
He looks up, across the roof of the Holden — she feels his gaze leap to her. A week hasn’t changed him. He’s still slim and somehow windswept, his hair falling in black curls and his watch loose around his wrist. The casual untidiness, she’s always thought, of a riverbed. Yet the week has been long, like a slow sea journey, long enough for Maureen to fear he’ll have forgotten the things that brought him back time and again; and in fact something catches in his voice when he says, “Hi. Maureen.”
“Do you remember me?” This makes him smile, which is an answer she adores. “Going out?” she asks.
“Yeah,” he says. “Nowhere interesting.”
“That’s where I’m going. Nowhere interesting.” She is holding a cream envelope, as on the first day they met, and she waves it at him. She would like to take his hand and, knowing what she knows now, lead him back to that very first day. A week of reflection has made her see that they have been too tentative, allowing themselves to be hindered by elements that aren’t really obstacles at all. The best way is to be forthright from the start — to craft him into who she wants him to be while he is still blind, as men always go blind. If she’d done so, she would not be standing where the footpath meets the Coyle driveway in a line that she’s unable to cross. Serves herself right; but nothing is irretrievably lost, and she won’t make errors again. “I’ve missed you,” she tells him.
Justin shifts his weight. “Well, I’ve missed you.”
“It seems an eternity.”
“Well,” he says again, “it’s a week.”
“A week!” She raises her arms in exasperation, the envelope flying up like a dove. She tucks away for later contemplation the fact that he knows the number of days. “Every time there was a footstep, I thought it was you.”
He smiles slightly. “No.”
“Oh, I know! I felt very teased. I think David thought I’d gone mad. Maybe I have.” She gives a small shudder to illustrate. Her voice is loud, her grin wide, standing here on the footpath she feels as exposed as a mannequin, but she cannot cross the line and go to him, yet nor is she willing to turn and leave . . . It has rained in the night, and the path is stained with greasy plates of damp, the melaleuca in the naturestrip still dripping. It’s not cold, but it is possible to detect a coming thinness in the weather, a veil brushing the skin. She hugs herself against this, and against the flatness of his stare. “You should have visited on Wednesday. Bernie was away all night, and I wasn’t doing anything. I should have sent a little birdie to whistle for you.”
He shakes his head, “Maureen . . .”
“If you miss these opportunities, Justin, they might never come again.”
Justin says, “Maureen.”
She looks away quickly, her sights careering. “Look at those clouds! Black as night. It’s hard to believe there’s such a thing as summer. They’re saying on the radio that it will be a wet winter. Rain, rain, rain, as if cold old winter isn’t bad enough. How is Aria, Justin?”
He says, “I never know who you’re talking about when you say that name. We call Ariella Plum.”
“Plum, Aria, Ariella: I haven’t seen her all week. That’s not like her. I gather something happened at her party — your mother said the guests went home suddenly, without explaining why. Is Plum all right? Is she well?”
Justin, for the first time, hesitates, glancing at the car and across it to the newspaper lying on the lawn, and then down the concrete driveway to her; and Maureen knows she has driven home a nail. In this moment she hears him sliding and sliding — wanting her wisdom, needing to shed the weight of the week, remembering that he trusts her and that she is the silver lining to his otherwise predictable world — and she stands saying nothing, letting him slide. He smears a raindrop from the roof of the Holden before meeting her eye. “No one’s sure what happened. No one heard anything. They just turned around and left. Plum hasn’t talked about it — not to us, anyway. She stays in her room most of the time.”
“Something awful’s happened, obviously. Those friends of hers — they’re catty girls, the worst type. But have you actually asked what happened?”
Justin shakes his head, plucks a melaleuca spike from the car’s roof; and Maureen realizes there’s a hollowness at the core of his family, a fear of discovering what it is that turns inside the hearts of one another — and that they know about this failing, and are ashamed. “She’d tell us if she wanted to. Anyway, it’s probably nothing. She’s fourteen — everything is bad when you’re fourteen. She’ll forget about it.”
Maureen smiles. She would go to him and slap him, cradle him, but it’s impossible to cross the line. She says, “Who ever forgets anything about being fourteen?”
He doesn’t answer immediately, flattening raindrops one by one. He’s the kind of person whose trials are writ in water; but even he has waited by an unringing telephone, even he has futilely hoped, even he carries memories that continue to smart. A corner of his mouth pinches, and he looks at her. “What, then?”
“Well, somebody should talk to her. Otherwise she’ll grow up feeling no one cared enough to bother.”
“That’s not how it is —”
“Of course it isn’t. But that’s how she’ll remember it. You’ll have to say something to her, Justin. This mustn’t be ignored.”
“But what do I say?”
“You’ll think of the right thing.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to talk —”
“She will. Underneath, she will. Be careful, though. No matter what you think, this is serious for Plum. Don’t treat it like a joke.” Maureen pauses to reflect, tapping the envelope in her hand. “It’s a pity she doesn’t have a sister. This is exactly the time when a girl needs a sister.”
&nb
sp; Justin looks up sharply. “Could you talk to her?”
Maureen’s taken aback. “Me?”
“You’d be better at it than I would.”
She can see the idea dawning on him like sunlight. “No,” she says. “This is something you should do, Justin.”
“But Plum likes you.” The responsibility is a hot stone in his hands, he can’t pass it on fast enough. “I think she’d prefer talking to you . . .”
Maureen sighs. On the footpath by her shoe a snail is inching painfully over the cement. “I suppose I could,” she says eventually. “If the opportunity comes, I’ll say something. Not for you, though — for her.”
The change in Justin is instant; he smiles, once again boyish and easy, and Maureen is overcome, as she always is, with gratitude that he is hers. She could fly to the sky on the sheer brilliance of this truth. He will always need so much from her, and she will be infinite for him. In its bare bones, everything is simple, yet more incredible than life. In several swift footsteps she crosses the line, going to him because this new beginning must be acknowledged. He turns his face from her cupping hands so her lips meet his cheek rather than his lips, his wariness of discovery still deeply ingrained, but what matters for now is that he’s returned. “You have to go,” he mutters, and, “Don’t worry,” she says, “I’m going.”
Cydar stands before the fish tanks, the light from the fluorescent lamps falling dustily around him. He knows that his face will be ghostingly lit, as he has seen so many faces lit; that green weeds will be wavering in the dark center of his eyes. He’s never had a guest to the bungalow who wasn’t riveted to this spot, the furied, the addled, the untrustworthy, the depressed, all of them lulled by the cruising of the fish. The aquariums cast over Cydar himself a cloak of etherealness: he knows that people think of tranquillity when they think of him, mistaking the placidity of the fish for a Franciscan simplicity in him. The only girl Cydar has ever really loved stood in this exact place one day and said, “These fish are glittering pieces of all the good things in you.” And although Cydar didn’t know everything about himself, he had known that she, like everyone else, was confusing him with somebody he’d long ago decided not to be; and that eventually she would discover this, and feel he’d somehow misled her.
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