Mercy Street

by Tess Evans

  ‘Not so much for Marianne, but Claire’s certainly did.’

  ‘What do I do?’ George is humbled and his sister gives a gratified nod.

  ‘Bill made ours.’

  Bill! George swallows hard. ‘Would he make me one?’

  ‘No. But he can show you how.’

  ‘Now,’ George says in what he hopes is an encouraging tone. ‘We’re going to make a dream-catcher.’

  ‘No.’ Rory looks really scared. ‘Don’t want one.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  Rory looks astonished, as if she can’t believe he could be so dim. ‘I don’t want to catch them. I want to send them away.’

  The kid has a point. George tries to explain. ‘You make a kind of net and hang it over your bed and the bad dreams get trapped.’

  ‘Above your head?’ The emphasis on the last word is more like a shriek. ‘Your own head?’

  ‘To trap them. They’ll be trapped.’

  ‘No way.’ Rory folds her arms and channels Shirl. ‘It’s sheer madness, George.’

  George is too tired to be amused. All that time he’d spent with Bill threading bloody beads and drinking nonalcoholic cider. It’s enough to drive a man to drink. And it does. He goes to the fridge and settles with a can of beer, while Rory sits glowering at the television.

  ‘So much for Shirl’s ideas.’ After another sleepless night George can barely keep his eyes open and peers at Redgum’s figure as it ripples and sways, making him feel slightly drunk.

  ‘Can’t say I blame her.’

  ‘Puts me back at square one, though.’

  Redgum scratches his chin. ‘Send them away. That’s what she wants.’

  It’s at this moment that George, who had never had a creative thought in his life before Rory, invents the scarewolf. ‘Like a scarecrow,’ he gloats. ‘Only it scares wolves.’

  Redgum raises his glass in homage. ‘You’re a genius, George.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  By the time he picks up Rory from school, George has assembled all he needs. ‘Now,’ he says, as she finishes her milk and biscuit. (Milk good. Biscuit bad. He’s not perfect.) ‘Come outside. We’re going to make a scarewolf.’ Seeing her frown, he explains, ‘Scarecrows scare birds called crows and scarewolves scare wolves. We’ll put it right outside your window.’

  George has already made the frame out of garden stakes he found in the shed, and Rory helps him stuff his old gardening pants and flannel shirt with wadding he bought from the craft shop. (He knows about the craft shop because he spent twenty dollars there on beads and feathers for the dream-catcher.)

  ‘We have to give him a real mean face,’ Rory says. ‘Wolves don’t scare so easy.’

  ‘Would you like to do it? I’ve got some special markers.’

  So Rory draws a mouth full of sharp teeth, black, red-rimmed eyes and several livid scars across its cheeks and chin. She looks over at George, who shivers in mock terror. ‘Wow! Even I’m scared.’

  ‘Now his hat.’ George has bought a plastic Viking helmet with horns and he lifts Rory up so she can place it on the scarewolf’s head. ‘Just you wait, you wolves,’ she shouts.

  As bedtime approaches, her bravado wanes. ‘It will work, won’t it, George?’

  ‘In all my born days, I’ve never seen a wolf go anywhere near a scarewolf,’ George replies. ‘Now off to bed and I’ll be in to read your story in a jiffy.’

  That night, there are no wolves. Nor the next night. Or the next. ‘They hate scarewolves,’ Rory tells Shirl. ‘In my born days, I never saw a wolve go near a scarewolf.’

  Shirl regards George with something akin to admiration. ‘So you solved the problem all by yourself. Who would have thought?’

  10

  George closes his book. Biggles triumphs yet again. Speaks to him across the years. He sits back and savours the certainty, the rightness of his boyhood hero. He had gone to the bookshop to buy some more Richie books for Rory, keeping a promise he had made when she moved from the preparatory level of readers (red) to yellow. So far, she has eight of the series and is making a very good effort to read them for herself. She can pick out quite a few of the words, and now he’s a reading mum, he’s confident that with his assistance, she’ll be reading them in no time at all.

  The bookshop owner seemed to know all there is to know about books and George had ventured to ask about Biggles. All it took was a few keystrokes and she had the information he needed. A new presentation set was available, published only last year. A bit expensive, but then when did he last spend money on a treat for himself? ‘For my nephew,’ he explained to the saleswoman, as he registered the order.

  ‘Of course. Your nephew.’ Their eyes met. He knew that she knew but it didn’t matter. Elation clutched tight to his chest, he left the shop like the respectable, elderly man that he is. That was a week ago and they rang today to tell him that his order had arrived. He staggered to the car, clutching the heavy box, and unable to wait, devoured the first book along with his lunch.

  Three o’clock! And he’s still sitting over his lunch dishes. He puts on his jacket and sets off for the school, turning up his collar against the chill wind. Where has the day gone? In recent times, where have any of his days gone? Since Pen died, he had spent every day in the same way – without motivation – stagnating in a morass of futile wishing. Enduring the solitary nights while the hour hand crawled its way up to ten, the time he could go to bed and forget for a little while that she wasn’t there beside him. He hadn’t thought of it before, but his days then, like a dead battery, were truly spent. And his life was no more than the sum of those worn-out, washed-out days.

  But now – now that Rory was in his life, the days slipped by like minnows in a river. Like Shirl, he is always ‘on the go’. And he enjoys it, this new routine. Sharing breakfast with the pyjama-clad Rory, making her lunch, walking her to school. Staying on Tuesdays for his reading-mum duties. On the other week mornings, he goes next door for a cup of green tea and watches while Mrs Nguyen paints her delicate watercolours or draws with black ink on wash. Mr Nguyen beams with pride at his wife’s skill. ‘She paint memories,’ he tells George. ‘See. That her house, the Mekong River, the market-place . . .’

  George understands the longing in the soft colours, the nebulous ink-lines. Memories must be approached with stealth, gathered swiftly and savoured briefly before the ‘now’, with its insistent colours and sounds, destroy this tremulous communion with the past. Mrs Nguyen reconstructs her past on silk and lives her ‘now’ with equanimity – a state of grace that George envies and admires, and at times, aspires to.

  When there’s a child, however, the ‘now’ is at its most insistent, and after the daily tea ritual, it’s time to head for the shops, or start the laundry or any number of the myriad things that having a child entails. He still has a beer with Redgum, but earlier in the day. ‘Can’t pick the kid up with beer on me breath.’

  George makes himself a sandwich and a pot of tea and takes it outside to enjoy the early spring sunshine. It’s going on four months since Angie left – in no time at all it will be a year since she came to his rescue that day in the lane. Her phone calls are becoming less and less frequent. On the rare occasions he manages to speak to her, Angie is guarded, almost hostile, and while still insisting that she loves and misses her daughter, has given up all pretence of looking for work. ‘Need to do me own thing for a bit,’ she says. Whining and wheedling. Explaining and excusing. ‘I missed out on a lot, having a kid so young.’ She sends a postcard from Adelaide and another from Albany. He doesn’t show Rory the second one. The Adelaide card (with a picture of the casino – for a child, no less) had brought on another asthma attack and George feels justified in vetting the mail from then on.

  It’s happening less often, but some nights, out of the blue, Rory asks for the mermaid story – ‘the first one about the wings’. Her reaction is always the same. When he’s finished she says, ‘I wish I had magic wings.’r />
  ‘That would be great fun.’

  ‘Not for fun, Poppy George.’

  Her anxious little face all but breaks his heart. ‘You won’t need magic wings, sweetheart. She’ll be back.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  There has been no repetition of the distress caused by Bree’s first visit. She comes every Friday, expecting and getting a roast-lamb dinner. She’s so thin that George wonders if this is the only square meal she gets all week. Her promised help consists of vague sketches of people who know people, but George has no more illusions on that score. He suspects that Angie is in touch with Bree more often than she lets on. There have been a couple of worrying slips and he’s troubled by indications that, for Amp at least, drugs are now (or always have been) part of the picture.

  His reverie ends abruptly when he find himself at the school gate and he nods distractedly at the young mothers who greet him with smiles. They probably just see him as a grandfatherly old man. He, however, sees in each of them, the archetypal mother. The mother that all children deserve. The mother Penny would have been. Should have been.

  Doctor Fraser had been blunt. ‘No way to make this easy,’ he said. ‘Your tests show a very low sperm count. The likelihood of fathering a child is as good as zero.’

  As good? Nothing good about it. Shock. Then anger. Finally, despair. It was his fault there was no child. His fault that Pen would never grow and bloom, rub her back with that smug, rueful smile, or hold their baby to her breast. She would continue to act as babysitter, godmother, aunt; to knit bootees and read stories to other people’s children. And he would stand back and watch, humble and shamed at the diminished life he condemned her to share.

  The Mercy Street house, chosen (it didn’t seem so very long ago) with love and hope, was as bleak as it had ever been since Pen left him drunk on the sofa. Too weary to make a meal, George sat in the darkening lounge room and allowed himself to cry. His heart (Soft as butter, his mother used to say) was flayed by knowing, and lay in his chest as open and vulnerable as a child’s. Slow, fat tears scalded his cheeks. He had cried a lot as a youngster, but one day, after a particularly vicious beating from his father, he found strength enough to suppress the tears. The well from which they sprung was treacherous, but despite this, he was proud to be the obstinate little bastard everyone said he was. At ten, and nearly a man, he couldn’t, wouldn’t allow tears. Ever. Until now. Now he was twenty-seven years old, sitting in his own home, blubbing like a baby.

  Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, he understood what he must do. It calmed him, making a decision, but as distress drained away it was replaced with a terrible melancholy and his shoulders bowed under its weight.

  That Tuesday so long ago, George took his blue suit to the dry cleaners. (His only suit – the one he wore at his wedding.) He picked it up on Thursday after work. On Friday night he scorched the collar of his white shirt so on Saturday morning he called at the shops to buy a new one before going to the barbers for a haircut. On Sunday morning he nicked his chin shaving. (His hand was unsteady and he wanted a really close shave.) After staunching the bleed and checking his unusually dapper image in the mirror, he set out at ten o’clock, twenty minutes earlier than he needed to.

  Pen had agreed to meet him in the park. (Neutral territory – her sister had advised this.) He was early, and as he approached the park bench, he was surprised to see that she was there already, sitting in that neat, compact way she had, ankles crossed, hands folded in her lap. She wore her navy-blue winter coat, he noticed, and a thick fall of hair obscured her face.

  ‘Pen.’

  She looked up. ‘George.’

  ‘I’ve kept you waiting.’

  ‘I was early.’

  Their eyes met with startled brevity. George sat down beside her, careful to leave a space between them, his gaze finally settling on her gloveless hands. White knuckles, fingers tightly laced. He wanted to reach over and coax those fingers into repose. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  She inclined her head but continued to stare at the pond where a mother and toddler were feeding the ducks. ‘Sue’s picking me up in half an hour.’

  Thirty minutes. He’d never had a way with words and had rehearsed what he wanted to say, but sitting there beside her, he failed to regain those careful, measured phrases. ‘Pen. I’m so sorry for – everything.’ He ventured to look at her again. Saw the thin, serious face; the pallor that accentuated every freckle. ‘Look at me. Please.’

  Her eyes were troubled and lined with fatigue. He had always thought of them as a soft blue, but realised for the first time, that they were mostly grey, a strange, shifting, sea-storm grey. He had asked her to look at him but could barely meet her gaze. ‘I was so wrong. Wrong to—’ (he choked on the word) ‘—hit you. I was wrong not to go for the tests.’

  She bit her lip.

  ‘Pen. I saw the doctor. It’s me. It’s me that can’t have kids.’

  Pen looked away, hair shielding her face. ‘Poor George.’

  George felt the thrill of her hand over his and thought he might cry with relief. But there was much more to say and he removed his hand in case his hard-won courage evaporated. ‘I love you, Pen. I want you to know that.’ He had said this so seldom in their married life. (Difficult thing for a bloke to say. Surely she knew. Women always seemed to know these things.) But today there could be no misunderstanding. He licked his lips and continued. ‘That’s why I have to do the decent thing. I’ll give you a divorce. Then you can . . . find someone else. Someone who can give you babies.’ She continued to look at her hands, clenched, now in her lap. With a gesture that was almost timid, he lifted her hair, revealing the long, sharp profile. ‘Pen? Do you understand what I’m saying? I’ll do whatever I have to. I just want you to be happy.’

  ‘You’d do that for me?’ Her voice was unsteady. Tears squeezed out from under her lashes and she shut her eyes for a moment before seeking his. The anguish and love in her face both shamed and heartened him. She touched his cheek. ‘You’re an honourable man, George.’

  ‘I want to make things right,’ he said.

  ‘Walk with me.’ They stood up and she took his arm. ‘I miss you,’ she said.

  How could he have let this woman slip through his useless, blundering fingers? ‘I miss you, too, Pen. I’ll miss you as long as I live.’

  She lengthened her stride, away from the lake and the family tableau. ‘Do you remember our wedding day?’

  ‘You looked real nice.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said drily. ‘But I wasn’t fishing for compliments. We promised to stay together “in good times and in bad, till death us do part”. You do remember that?’

  He squeezed her arm. ‘Yes I do.’ Those words were engraved on his memory. They’d frightened the bejesus out of him not because he feared being ‘tied down’ as his mates used to call it. They (he and Pen) had said the unsayable. Even while sealing their pact, they had anticipated surrender to the enemy.

  Stopping under a paperbark tree, Pen ran her hand over the soft, grey bark, tearing it off in long strips. ‘You say you want me to be happy. Well, I was happy to be your wife. And I could be again. We can’t have children. But that loss is not just mine – it’s yours, too. We’d have to make a life that’s a bit different from what we planned. It can be a good life, though. Just different.’ She took his chin, forcing him to face her. ‘I’m coming home, but if you ever hit me again . . .’ He started to speak but she stopped him with her eyes. ‘I’ll leave you for good, George. I swear to that.’

  It took George some time to broach the question of adoption. But finally he did one evening when they were babysitting Shirl’s children.

  Pen went to check on them. ‘Snug as bugs,’ she said, when she came back to the sitting room.

  George cleared his throat. ‘It’s nice to have them to ourselves once in a while.’

  Pen smiled, but only with her mouth.

  It’s now or never.
‘We’ve never talked about adoption.’

  ‘Don’t imagine I haven’t thought of that.’

  ‘So why didn’t you say something?’

  Pen, it turned out, had a school friend who had become pregnant at seventeen. ‘She wanted to keep the baby, but they took it away. She doesn’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl.’ Pen twisted her rings. ‘I couldn’t take a child whose mother might want it.’

  There were all sorts of arguments he could have used, but George knew his wife. This was her final word on the matter and he never raised it again.

  11

  George enjoys being a reading mum. He begins with four children in his group. (Not Rory. Apparently, it’s not considered wise to assist your own child in this way.) After the first few weeks, he is given a fifth child, one who needs extra help.

  ‘You seem to have the patience he needs,’ Ms Hamilton says, smiling at him in that charming way she has. ‘If you could stay with Joel, say, another half hour each day, I’d be so grateful.’

  ‘No probs.’ George has managed his other charges rather well, and has begun to wonder if he might not have made a very good teacher. He decides to start by reading Joel stories. (It makes sense, doesn’t it? If you enjoy stories, you’re more likely to want to read them for yourself.) Realising that early school readers lack something in the story department, he decides to bring some books from home.

  The one-on-one reading takes place in a glass-walled area off the classroom, a space George comes to think of as his. He has begun his program with Joel and it seems to be going rather well. He has no idea what is causing Joel’s learning problems, but the boy seems to enjoy their time together.

  ‘So the museum gave Richie a gold medal and twelve packets of . . .’

  ‘That’s mine!’ Rory, face red with rage, snatches up the book and kicks out at George and the hapless Joel. ‘I hate you. I hate both of you.’

  ‘What on earth’s going on? Rory!’ Ms Hamilton flings open the door as Rory swings around.