The Vale Girl

by Nelika McDonald

  ‘And the senior citizens.’

  ‘Right, we’ll come back to that.’ Delaney mopped his brow with his handkerchief and shuffled the papers in front of him.

  ‘Is anyone taping A Country Practice?’ someone asked the room at large.

  ‘I’ve really gone off it since they got that new fellow in who thinks he’s just the cat’s pyjamas. You know, the one who plays Catherine’s long-lost son,’ said Petra Lumley, shaking her head.

  ‘They don’t even look alike,’ agreed Vernon Charge.

  Delaney raised his voice. ‘Well, we’re almost done, folks. Just one last item on the agenda.’

  Tommy got to his feet. Thank God. He was just about ready to crawl out of his skin with frustration.

  ‘The time has come . . . for us to decide who our Grevillea Princess should be this year.’

  Tommy sat back down, slow and soundless. Around him, the noise level in the room escalated to fever pitch. This was what they’d been waiting for. Tommy looked down at the floor, his feet upon it. He had even worn shoes for this meeting. He shoved back his chair and stood up again. The chair made a scraping noise on the floorboards. A few people turned and looked at him, including Delaney, still on stage. Their eyes met for a moment, and then the chairman turned away. Tommy walked towards the door. At the doorway, he waited a beat or two for someone to stop him, but nobody did, so he slammed the door behind him and continued walking out of the hall and out onto the street, his feet feeling hot and claustrophobic in his shoes and his skin crawling and prickling like he had bathed in an ants’ nest, hot and stinging with rage and disappointment. He went home and got straight into bed, pulling the covers up over his head and listening to the brush of leaves on the tin roof for hours, waiting until his anger cooled enough for sleep to come sliding in under it.

  chapter twenty-nine

  I thought things were supposed to get better with time. I thought things were supposed to hurt a little less, get a little softer, brighter, each minute a balm. It’s not true. I’ve been waking with my jaw sore from clenching it. I can’t stop shivering, but I know it isn’t cold. I keep scratching my arms. The air here is so dry each breath is like swallowing sawdust. But, still, I’m alive.

  It’s looking like I’m going to miss the Grevillea Festival this year. At this time of year, the talk in town is exclusively about the festival, which, although boring, is a reprieve – at least it distracts them from my mother. You’d think the Queen was coming, the way the people of Banville act in the lead up to the festival. I’m not at all sorry to be missing it. I wish the Queen would come, see what a mess her royal subjects have made of life. Her Majesty could stay at the Banville Bluebell Bed and Breakfast, in the Sunflower Suite at the end of the hall. Next to the toilets. An extra $3.50 per night would grant her the privilege of a tray outside her door in the morning bearing a square of cold burnt toast with marmalade and a teabag in a cup of tepid water. The Country Continental breakfast. Or she could self-cater. If she came on a Wednesday she could take advantage of the two-for-one gravy beef kilogram bargain buys at the butcher’s. The best-before is just a rough guide anyway, Bruce says. Stay until Friday and she could get all dolled up for bingo at the bowls club. Lavender, legs eleven! Number one, buttered scone.

  The Country Women’s Association held a baking competition with various categories and tensions are usually pretty high through the qualifying rounds. Some of the women around these parts act like their baking is a direct reflection of their worth as a person. If their lamingtons are judged to be not each exactly the same size as the next, with a velvety sheen of chocolate and an even sprinkling of coconut like a powdery snowfall (tweezers were recommended to ensure precise distribution of coconut), they carry on like they can never show their faces in town again. They have failed as people.

  There’s a cattle show at the Grevillea Festival too, junk stalls, craft displays, a carnival section with a booth where you throw the balls into the clowns’ mouths and a rickety old swan ship ride that’s wheeled out for the kids each year. The day culminates in a parade down the main street led by the Banville Primary School recorder band and ending with a float shaped like a giant tractor featuring the newly crowned Grevillea Princess sitting on a throne next to the also newly elected mayor. It’s supposed to be the big reveal. Who would be the Grevillea Princess? Who would be the mayor? But everyone knows anyway because the Grevillea Princess is inevitably the girl sitting in a corner of the council office all day with a head full of curls and a face caked with makeup, nursing a can of Passiona, unable to go outside and see her friends lest the humidity wither the hairdo and threaten the matte complexion the staff at Sharon’s Beauty Hub had toiled over that morning. And the mayor is a Doyle. Which one is irrelevant. They work it out among themselves. In any case, I’d find out later that night when the victor arrived after the fireworks to celebrate with my mother, payment in a brown paper bag. That would be a photo opportunity for the Banville Courier. At least that issue wouldn’t end up mulching the garden.

  Banville puts on its best dress for the Grevillea Festival, but it’s held together by sticky-tape and safety pins. There are sweat stains under the arms and the petticoat is greyed and ripped at the hem, with patches so threadbare you can see right through to the rotting carcass underneath. The festival is when it’s trying its hardest to be charming and, like when Monica Wilkinson squeezed herself into Marjorie’s miniskirt to chaperone at the blue-light disco, it’s when it’s failing most miserably. Approximately one-third of Banville is out there on display. Not exactly a representative sample.

  When I was ten I decided that, come hell or high water, I was going to be elected to carry the Brownies flag during the festival march. I wasn’t in the Brownies. Being a member necessitated money and uniforms and signatures on permission slips and supplies and excursions and, besides, those girls would not even sit next to me at school. Occasionally, someone’s mother would have a fit of conscience and invite me over to play after school, but the other girls present usually huddled in a corner whispering about my unbrushed hair and op-shop clothes. Then they play-acted scenarios in which their dolls would all go shopping together while the doll with the pen scribbled on her was left behind to ‘take a shower’. After a while, I declined any invites. Why set myself up for a fall? But I figured if I practised a lot, was seen doing good deeds and acting in a generally Brownie-like fashion, I would be granted admission based on my undeniable suitability. Once in, I would dazzle them with my skills and be instantly promoted to flag-bearer.

  I had a Brownies trademark yellow scarf that I had liberated from someone’s bag left outside the Scout den during their weekly meetings. I wore it twenty-four hours a day, and I had even learnt the pledge from listening in at the hall. I recited it solemnly to myself in bed each night.

  I promise that I will do my best;

  To do my duty to God,

  To serve the Queen and my country

  To help other people

  And keep the Guide law.

  Tommy didn’t understand why on earth I wanted to be a Brownie. He snorted incredulously as I described how Hooting Owl Katie had brought in her family’s dirty dishes for the Brownie troupe to wash so they could learn how to do it properly. They got a badge for that. Domestic hygiene.

  ‘Why would you want to do someone else’s dishes?’ Tommy asked in disbelief. His approach to dishes was to wait until they were all dirty and then put them out in the yard to get rained on.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I said.

  He agreed. But he came with me anyway and read Teen Titans comics while I spied on them. The week before the parade, I was watching from my verandah as Katie Floss led her flock in marching drills down the cricket pitch in the park. I was practising in unison, holding a rake aloft. Tommy was lying on the floor, trying to make an obstacle course for ants, but they wouldn’t cooperate so he got bored. He tied a tea towel around his neck and stuffed two pinecones down his shirt, tightening his buttoc
ks as he high-stepped along the verandah.

  ‘Follow me, little owlets!’ he trilled.

  ‘Tommy!’ I shushed him.

  ‘Come on, let’s do something else.’ He was starting to whine.

  ‘Like what? Collect flowers?’

  ‘Okay, sure.’

  I sighed. Sarcasm was lost on Tommy.

  ‘Is your dad around?’ I asked him. ‘Maybe he could take us bird-watching again.’ I liked Tommy’s dad. He could do all the bird sounds, and the summer before he had shown us how to train possums to come and eat bread out of our hands.

  ‘Nah,’ Tommy said, and lay on his back. He kicked his legs up in the air like a beetle. Tommy’s father had been going away a bit lately. Sometimes he left food or money, sometimes he left neither.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I dunno.’ Tommy played with the little leather pouch he wore on a string around his neck. I heard him telling some boys at school it had poison in it, but I knew it was just an old tobacco pouch of his dad’s. Sometimes he put birdseed in it to feed the birds at the creek.

  ‘I don’t care, anyways – he’s teaching me survival skills,’ Tommy continued.

  I was sceptical. ‘Survival? All you’re learning, Tommy, is how to nick stuff or go hungry.’

  Tommy nodded. ‘Exactly. Survival.’

  Graham Knight’s head appeared over the top of the verandah railing as he was coming up the stairs.

  ‘Did I hear that someone was hungry?’ He held two Bubble O’ Bills out in front of him and beamed. His pale blue eyes shone.

  ‘Thanks!’ Tommy accepted the ice creams, but I was silent. Graham waited for a moment, and then walked inside. We slurped in companionable silence for a while.

  ‘You should’ve said thanks,’ Tommy remarked after a while. He had eaten all the chocolate off the ice cream first. The rest of it was dripping down his hand onto his wrist and he had a smear of brown around his mouth.

  ‘What for? Graham’s a creep.’

  ‘A Brownie would’ve said thanks,’ Tommy said.

  I frowned at him but he didn’t look up. Katie was leading the other girls back across the park to the scout den. Their mothers would probably come to pick them up in their cars, then they would take them home and the girls would play the piano for a while, maybe do some baking. At night, their mothers would make them dinner, roast chicken and vegetables that they had to eat without complaining, and they would all sit together at the table. Their fathers would tell bad jokes. They would talk about the weekend, going into Welonga to go to the movies at the drive-in. The father would tell the girl that he had fixed her roller skates, so she could take them with her and try them out on the new boardwalk by the river. Her mother would ask her what flavour ice cream she wanted for dessert. Which friend she wanted to take on their outing on the weekend. If she wanted to wear her blue sandals the next day or her sneakers in case they had sport. Her mother would know that they often had sport on Mondays. And those would be all the things the girl had to think about. Sandals and ice cream.

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t care. Brownies are stupid.’ I ripped off my scarf and threw it over the edge of the verandah. Tommy came and stood next to me and we watched it float down to earth, becoming snagged on a branch before twisting free and wafting down until it lay in the dirt. I kicked at the rotting planks of the railing in front of me. I felt them move a little, so I kicked harder.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ Tommy said.

  ‘The stupid wood is all ROTTEN!’ I yelled. Tommy started kicking at the next plank along. We kicked them until they disintegrated, and the pieces fell onto the ground, covering the scarf until only patches of it shone through, flamboyant yellow in the green-brown murkiness of the garden.

  ‘It’s piss-coloured,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. I should piss on it,’ Tommy said. It didn’t make any sense but we laughed hysterically. When we had stopped laughing, I became aware of the nausea in my belly. The sickly sweetness of the ice cream lingered on my tongue.

  ‘I’m going inside,’ I said.

  Tommy nodded. ‘Okay.’ But he just stood there.

  ‘Well, fuck off then,’ I shouted. I ran inside and slammed the door.

  When I went inside, I cried to my mother. She stroked my hair, but offered no sympathy.

  ‘Brownies? Why would you want to be in Brownies? All they do is teach you to follow the leader. Like little lambs trailing after their mama sheep. Baaaa.’

  After that I went and lay on my bed for a while, listening to my mother laughing in her bedroom through the wall. I could hear music as well, and voices, like in a movie. I thought about how good it would be if you could climb into your television and enter the movie you were watching. Just pass through the screen and into another world. I tried to decide which movie, which world I would choose, but all I could come up with was – anywhere but here. I vowed to myself that one day, when I was old enough to tell my mother instead of ask her, I would just go. I would get on a bus or a train and I would go. My mother said she didn’t want me to repeat her mistakes, so I would not: when I left Banville, I was never coming back.

  Later that evening, when I went back out onto the verandah to hang the towel out, I saw that Tommy had brought the scarf back upstairs. It was folded and placed on the small table by the door.

  chapter thirty

  On Friday morning, Tommy slipped around the back of the police station to enter the lunchroom by the side door. He sometimes caught a few juicy snatches of information that way, before they realised he was there. Henson’s car wasn’t in the driveway, but he often brought a bit of extra lunch for Tommy these days. Neither of them mentioned that Tommy should have been at school. Sure enough, on the table in a brown sack were a few cold sausages, some crackers and a slice of jam roll nestled next to a Granny Smith apple. The bag had a ‘T’ printed on it in biro.

  Tommy perched on the bench and tucked in. Roberts walked past, with difficulty. He was wearing his police-issue blue trousers so tight that a long step would have split them at the crotch. He sneered at Tommy and Tommy gave him the finger. But then he thought of something, and called out, ‘Oi, Roberts.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Got a message for you. My friend Marjorie – you know, Marjorie Wilkinson?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She reckons you’re a bit of alright. Always going on about you. Can’t see the appeal myself, but no accounting for taste, is there?’

  ‘Askin’ about me, yeah?’ Roberts looked sceptical, but he came into the room and stood before Tommy, who continued eating, nonchalant.

  ‘Yeah. Do me a favour. Ask her out to the drive-in or something, would you? Anywhere. Just to stop her going on about you. Matthew,’ – Tommy made his voice all high like a girl’s – ‘is going to be in all the magazines! Roberts will probably get an invite to the Logies and if I’m his girlfriend I could go too!’

  Roberts leant against the bench. ‘She’d be lucky.’

  Tommy shrugged, but watched him.

  ‘I might just do that.’ Roberts gave Tommy’s leg a hard pinch as he passed him. ‘Thanks.’

  Tommy waved him away. When Roberts had left, he smiled. That was a moment of genius. Roberts was going to make an idiot of himself if he asked Marjorie out. She only had eyes for Cameron. She and Roberts would make a good pair though. They deserved each other.

  Tommy heard Crane talking to someone on the phone in the other room.

  ‘Well, where do you reckon a young country fella would go when he gets to the big smoke? The eastern suburbs? Don’t bloody reckon. Yep, yep. Drugs – well a bit of grass . . . Not sure. Black hair. Fifteen, but he’d pass.’

  Tommy chewed as quietly as he could. Cameron.

  ‘What I want, you thick bloody oaf, is for you to get your arses to Kings Cross and turn every brothel, crack house and pub upside down and shake them until this fellow falls out, got it? Not that fuckin’ big an ask, is it? You are supposed to be police.’

>   Tommy mouthed to himself, shake them until this fellow falls out. He pictured a pair of burly policemen holding aloft a squat grey pub the size of a doll’s house, and the tiny figure of Cameron Wolfe falling to the ground as they rattled it. A thimbleful of beer sailed out after him and left a splash on the ground the size of a single raindrop. They could step on him like an ant. Tommy finished the sausages and started on the jam roll.

  From the office came an almighty crash and the sound of Detective Crane swearing and stomping around. Tommy slid off the bench and sidled out the lunchroom door and back around the front of the station. He met Sergeant Henson going in.

  ‘Tommy,’ said the sergeant, and smiled at the smudge of jam on the boy’s chin.

  ‘Sarge,’ said Tommy. He waited.

  ‘Well, it looks like your posters did some good. Mrs Montepulciano has made a positive identification of Sarah being assaulted by the Wolfe boy and his cronies on Friday morning and then coming back down the hill about half an hour later.’

  Tommy nodded. He summoned again the image of Cameron being ground into the dirt under the heel of a boot. Face first.

  ‘Was she alone?’ he said. His voice came out choked.

  The sergeant nodded, his mouth set in a line. ‘At that stage. Mrs M went inside then. But we’ve got a hitch. The forensics results for the other hairs found at the creek came back. They’re not Cameron’s.’

  Tommy’s stomach seized and he tried desperately to override the nausea that bubbled in his gut. Lightheaded, he bent down and rested his hands on his knees, not wanting Henson to see him like this. Cameron was going to get away with it. He had been at the creek with Sarah, Tommy knew it. Mrs M had seen them arguing, everyone knew how much he and Sarah hated each other. But that didn’t matter; it was only circumstantial. The hair would have been the evidence they needed. It was probably just some swaggie’s, though. It could have been there for months. Years. When he stood up again, Tommy felt suddenly, overwhelmingly tired.