This weekend, Tommy’s sister Beth would have been ten years old. She died before she was even born, which still seemed to Tommy like an impossibility – how could you take a life from someone before they even really had it? Tommy was four when his mother went to the hospital to have the baby. She had packed a bag with soft things in soft colours, and Tommy had put his favourite toy lizard Alphonse in the back seat of the car so the baby would have some company on the long trip home. He wanted to put a real lizard there too, as they were far more interesting, but his father said no. Tommy was excited about having a live-in playmate, a friend in residence. He had been talking to the baby in his mother’s stomach for months, telling her what to expect out in the world, about the things they would do together. He planned on adding her to the entourage of toys he carted around their property in his green wagon, and then, when she was old enough, they could play cricket in the driveway, go yabbying in the creek, camp out and have bonfires in the western paddock with their dad and go on rambles in the bush looking for gold together.
When he and his mother met older women in the street, the women would look from the bump to Tommy and then to his mother, and grimace. ‘Someone will have his nose put out of joint,’ they warned her. Tommy was never quite sure what to make of this. What exactly was the baby was going to do to his nose? But his mother just shrugged. ‘He’s looking forward to it,’ she would say, her fingers gentle on the nape of her son’s neck. In any event, Tommy did not get the chance to be jealous. After seven long days in the hospital in Welonga, his mother came home without any baby, and with Alphonse still strapped in the back seat alone, slumped over the seatbelt.
At home, Alice moved between the bedroom and the bathroom and back again, slowly, like she was swimming through the air. Tommy hovered around her. His father had told him that the baby was gone now. At four, Tommy had very sketchy understanding of what might have made this so, but he knew the word gone. Gone meant disappeared. No longer. That part was easy enough. Where once there was a baby, now there was not. And the not-baby made his mother weep like a sponge being squeezed out; it made her pale and empty-faced like she was now, like a blank sheet of paper.
Tommy’s mother usually laughed a lot, more than the other mothers, and she made other people laugh. She did everything quickly with fast hands moving like fluttering birds, conjuring up her famous apple teacake, making the beds, dusting the windowsills, talking on the phone and reading a book with her legs tucked under her, seemingly all at the same time. She sang along to the radio even though her voice was terrible and she wore things that didn’t match and she stuck pens in her hair like chopsticks and she drove with one hand on the wheel and the other out the window, weaving and slicing the air. With those hands, she was a magician; she made old things new, a kite out of a dress and a toy monkey out of a pair of stockings. When their clothes wore out she ripped them up and wove them into rag rugs. She could do somersaults underwater and play the piccolo and Tommy’s father used to catch her by the wrists and say, ‘Slow down, Alice!’ as she bustled past him, but she just laughed at him and kept doing everything quickly.
She made up rhymes for Tommy about all their farm work, and invented what she called the sandwich, where she hugged him from the front and his father hugged him from behind, and Tommy was caught cosily in the middle, sandwiched between his parents. She didn’t swear but said, ‘Bother,’ and ‘Gosh-darn it,’ and she had three pet chickens called Rosie, Ruthie and Rhubarb. She knew the name of every flower and every plant on their property; she knew which things you could eat and which things to put on burns, and which things to brew in tea to take away a head cold. But the not-baby took all her quickness, too.
‘She’ll get better soon,’ Tommy’s father had told him. ‘She just needs to be sad for a while.’
His father knew everything that his mother didn’t, so Tommy asked him how long did she need to be sad for? His father moved his hands apart like he was holding a box between them.
‘This long,’ he said, and winked. Tommy tried to push his mouth into a smile but it would not move.
‘Can I go in there?’ he asked.
His father shrugged, and drew his hands down over his face, rubbing his fingers over his eyelids like they itched. When he took his hands away, his eyes were red. Then he put a hand on his son’s head, spreading his fingers out so they cupped Tommy’s scalp like a cap.
‘Big head you got there,’ he said.
‘Full of brains,’ Tommy was supposed to reply. But he didn’t. His father let his hand drop to Tommy’s shoulder and then he put on his boots and walked outside. Tommy went to the bedroom and wrapped himself around his mother, one leg hooked over her hip and his hand nestled in her palm. Alice was his mother’s name, and Tommy pictured a sheaf of wheat when he heard it, tall and thin and graceful like his mother. His friend Sarah’s mother was called Susannah, a name that sounded like something metal grinding against something stone. The baby would have been called Beth. A cotton-wool cloudy drift of a name, Tommy thought. Beth would have been soft and gentle like a cloud.
‘Bye, Beth,’ he said into his mother’s belly, and she cried and cried.
In the weeks that followed, she cried less, but her quickness never came back. She got slower and slower until she stopped altogether.
Tommy had been thinking about Beth quite often lately, though he would never tell anyone he had been. He would have liked a sister. He had Sarah, but nobody could really have Sarah. And besides, he needed a sister to tell him what to do about Sarah. A girl to help him make sense of other girls, to explain what things meant, the crying and the shouting and the low gentle voice. How they could look at you like they wanted to eat you and then the next minute like they wanted to claw out your eyes. Things had been changing with Sarah, lately. They had been friends for so long, but it was different now. Suddenly Tommy was so aware of himself when he was with her; he thought about things like where to put his arms and how his hair looked. He could have cried when he said stupid things to her, and sung when she laughed at his jokes. He felt like a king when he got it right with Sarah, and like a fool when he got it wrong. But he never knew which was going to happen.
Sarah had been around for as long as he could remember. So Tommy supposed he had always loved her, in a way, but it was like loving air, or water. You didn’t love those things as much as need them; require them for your own existence. Loving someone like that was just a fact, you didn’t even think about it. But recently Tommy had started really liking her, loving her, properly, in a way that was less factual, less simple. It had become complicated, complex, knotted and tangled inside him; both more wonderful and, at the same time, more terrible. He knew things were changing for her too. For the first time ever, they were a boy and a girl, and a space had opened up between them where none used to be. Sarah had reached her foot out and taken a small step into it just a couple of weeks ago, and what did Tommy do? Run. Literally, he had turned on his heel and run. No wonder she wasn’t coming to sit with him today; she was probably furious at him. They always used to have lunch together. But nothing was as it used to be.
Tommy let the book in his lap fall shut. He looked up and watched as Marjorie and another girl, Valerie, a plump and friendly farm girl with a blonde plait roped down her back, both reached for the ball at the same time, grasping at the air. Marjorie delivered a firm spike of her elbow into Valerie’s ribs, and Valerie faltered, stumbling and almost falling. Marjorie caught the ball and then passed it on again before Valerie had even straightened up. Survival of the fittest, thought Tommy. Sarah had always said Marjorie could not be trusted. She was right. That girl would trample anything that came between her and the thing she wanted. Marjorie Wilkinson, Monica’s girl, as pretty as a picture. But don’t go crossing her. She was like a Venus flytrap, looking beautiful and drawing people close to her and then snap! Ensnaring them.
Tommy flipped to the index at the back of the book. There was a similar plant in Australia, a sundew.
He found it by its Latin name, Drosera arcturi, and turned to that page. It looked a bit like a colourful spider lying on its back. A carnivorous plant. That was Marjorie, all right. Carnivorous meant predatory. He imagined being a bug, just buzzing about, landing on a sundew and expecting a nice bit of nectar but finding yourself sucked into a sticky vortex with tentacles folding over you like a hand closing into a fist. It would be terrifying.
Tommy looked across the parade ground and out to the oval at all the tiny figures in the distance tripping and hurling themselves around on the grass. None of them was Sarah. Despite the heat, he felt cold all of a sudden. He pulled his legs in tight and folded his arms over them, lowering his head to rest on the plank of his forearms. It was like he’d been knifed in the spaces between his ribs, this feeling. It sat high and sharp inside him, making him sick with it, how stupid he had been. If he could just talk to her, explain himself, Tommy was sure he would feel better. But clearly Sarah didn’t want to see him.
Tommy’s jaw locked and he seized the empty Popper box from the ground beside him and crushed it in his fist. Could he actually explain himself anyway? It would sound ridiculous to Sarah. Besides, if he told her the truth she would probably be angrier at him than she was now. Or worse, she would never speak to him again. Never even come near him. Because the truth was that he was no better than Marjorie, in the end. He seemed like a normal boy, but he had a superpower. And it wasn’t the good sort, not the flying sort or superhuman strength, not the power of invisibility or unimaginable speed. No, his superpower was not so glamorous, not so useful. His superpower sometimes made him wish he’d never been born. It was this:
He made everyone he loved disappear.
chapter five
Geraldine Knight was hanging out her washing when the thrum of a crop-dusting helicopter made her turn her face up to the sky. The noise woke Graham, who went over to the second-storey bedroom window to investigate. In the backyard, he saw his wife’s hair lift and then settle in the breeze. The sight of her long white neck exposed and catching the sun made him remember her as a girl, back when they were teenagers and they would all picnic at the pool, sunbaking on the adjacent grass tennis courts until they very nearly bubbled and crisped. Susannah Vale came sometimes, when her father would let her leave the house. She had a modest navy one-piece, when all the other girls had bikinis. It was the sixties, but not in the Vale house.
Geraldine put her hand up to shield her eyes against the glare and both she and her husband watched as the helicopter dipped away and glided over the horizon. The noise subsided. Graham opened the window. From somewhere in the sloping bushland that led down to the creek at the back of their property, he could hear their dog Crosby, barking frantically. Geraldine looked up at her husband and he looked back at her, and, after a long moment, shrugged. She turned away and continued pegging tea towels onto the line. She was small and bent. Even the set of her shoulders, slumped and weary, looked disappointed. It had been a long time since Graham had had the answers to the questions his wife asked. Graham Knight – a few beers short of a six-pack.
The barking continued and Graham leant out the window, trying to discern the dusty brown shag of Crosby from the khaki of the undergrowth, but the dog was successfully camouflaged. Graham looked down at the floor. Beige sisal wool carpet, because it was practical, Geraldine had said when they moved in. How he hated that carpet. Graham slipped off his shoe and ran his bare foot over it, tracing the weave. The chopper motored north again and the wind carried the sound directly into his head, as though the sweep of air from the spinning blades was knocking at his skull, making his temples throb with each rotation. Crosby darted out of the bush and over to Geraldine, nosed at her ankles, and then bounded back to the edge of the bush. Geraldine peered after Crosby and, seeing nothing, shook her head at him. It occurred to Graham that Geraldine loved the dog more than him, and he was not jealous. He thought about leaving her, this house, that lovable stupid mutt, this whole town, as he did every day. And every day, a second thought came sailing in, a punch in the face of a swift rejoinder: he could not leave Banville. If he left Banville, Graham would have nothing. There was not much in the world he cared about, and the little he did was in this town. This town had him over a barrel. Hook, line and sinker, he was caught.
Geraldine would probably just move to the centre of the bed and let his vegetable patch slowly wither and die if he left, and that would be the only way her life would change. No parsnips for winter soups, no plump, round pumpkins cleaned and left by the sink as an offering, no fresh tomatoes flushed and still warm from the sun, sliced with crumbling, sharp cheddar and eaten on soft, fresh bread. Geraldine would not care. She would just stop eating vegetables.
Crosby barked again once more, an insistent ruff like an assertion – things are not okay here. Geraldine flapped her hand at her husband and gestured into the trees: go and see what is wrong with the dog. They had stopped talking to each other with actual words some time ago. Downstairs, Graham pulled on his boots, collected the dog’s lead from the hook in the laundry, and wandered into the bush. Dead leaves crackled under his feet and slender threads of cobwebs stretched and broke against his shins as he picked his way through the scrub. He found a stick and tapped it against his boot as he went, hoping to scare off any snakes, but truth be told, if it was a snake that Crosby was barking at, then Graham would not be much help. For a country boy, Graham was not especially fond of nature. He had a vegetable garden that he loved, tamed and orderly as it was, but the unwieldy, sprawling tangle of the Banville bush encroaching at every edge of the town like rising floodwater made him feel threatened, cowed. He never usually went this far into it.
He could hear Crosby close by somewhere, barking still. Stupid dog, thought Graham. He’d probably tried to play fetch with a snake and then wondered why it bit him. He parted the screen of branches and leaves with his stick until he could smell the hanging dankness of the creek in the air, and his feet met the mud of the bank. Sure enough, Crosby was there, galloping about with his pink tongue lolling. He was not alone.
In the water stood a girl, submerged to her chest. Even just seeing the back of her head, Graham knew who she was. He felt his heart flip once, neatly. He had been waiting for so long, and now here she was. She had come to him. Crosby barked at a mosquito teasing his nose, and the girl’s head turned a fraction towards the sound, but that was the only movement she made. The sun moved behind a cloud and the mosaic of light on the surface of the water dulled. Crosby opened his mouth and gulped down the mosquito with a snap of his jaws. Graham swallowed hard, and then opened his mouth to speak.
‘Sarah,’ he said.
chapter six
On Sunday morning, Tommy went down to the creek. He’d spent the whole of the previous day clearing the dead leaves from the guttering on the roof of Elspeth Mackey’s house, and cutting back the trees near the house. Bushfire season was upon them, and Elspeth paid him a few dollars and a decent lunch to secure her house as best he could. She let him take whatever cuttings he wanted, too. The late Marvin Mackey had tried to recreate an English cottage garden when he had bought his block in Banville, but to no avail. Waratahs and banksias sprung up on the graveyards of the bluebells and columbine seedlings that had perished in their gestation, and an unruly kangaroo paw (Anigozanthos flavidus) waved triumphant little red flags by the clothesline, where Marvin had pictured a spread of delphiniums. It was a satisfying sort of justice, Tommy thought; the stubborn victory of the native world.
Equally satisfying were the five-dollar note and homemade lamington he took home, so tired that he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, sleeping the clock around until seven this morning. He had woken with only one thought, written in his mind in Christmas lights: Sarah. Yesterday he had worked, for the money and food; today all he needed was to see Sarah Vale.
The air was so hot that it felt like the town was covered in a heavy blanket, damp and thick with humidity. Sarah would be at the creek
for sure, Tommy thought. He’d stopped by her house, but she wasn’t there. Susannah snored like an idling tractor in her bedroom, but she was alone. Anyone with a half a brain would be in the water today. The council pool would be as warm as a bath, full of little kids weeing in the shallow end and older kids loitering to try and cop a feel of a curve of flesh brushing past them in the deep end. Sausage rolls smeared with sauce and chocolate paddle pops for lunch and then back in, to swim in that soup of Banville residents’ germs. Tommy could think of nothing worse.
He pushed his hair out of his eyes and tried to ignore the heat of the bitumen road pulsing up through the holes in his old Dunlop Volleys, and ran the last few steps to the Millers’ paddock. His feet thanked him as they met the grass and then thanked him again as he took off his shoes to walk barefoot on the cool dirt track down to the water. At the bank, he paused, and looked around. Where was she? He looked up at the sun. It must be about ten already. Late for Sarah, she didn’t sleep in. Ah well, he would have a dip while he waited for her. He had brought her a present today. Hoping she would take it, and forgive him. A jam roll from the bakery, the cream already melted away but the bun still thick and sticky with the jam. Saliva puddled in his mouth at the thought. But this one was for her. A smile nudged at his lips when he thought about the look on her face when he gave it to her, the careful way she would eat it, the sigh she would let out when it was gone. She was so thin, her collarbones stuck out like a shelf and in her togs he could count her ribs under the fabric, like bird bones, webbed down her sides. It made him clench his teeth and sit on his hands to stop from reaching out to hold her. He dreamt of bringing her swags of cream buns, maybe wheeling a whole barrowful down here and watching her eat them one by one, sugar dusted on her lips. Before his eyes she would grow full and healthy with colour in her cheeks and flesh smoothing out all her sharp edges.
The Vale Girl Page 3
