‘There is a girl on our street,’ the boy said, ‘who doesn’t go to school. The teacher comes to her house. I wonder if I should do that.’
It was with the boy, that was when it was clearest: the time to be silent, the time to speak. Martin listened carefully to the words, tipping his head down to his shoulder to prise loose a snippet of something that had lodged itself there. ‘There is a problem at your school.’ Finnegan waited for him to say more. ‘A problem with a particular boy, I recall. You don’t tell your mum and dad because . . . ?’
‘The school will call a meeting. And I’ll cop it bad.’
‘But you cop it already.’
The boy didn’t argue with that. ‘He weed on my bag. And in my water bottle.’
Martin reeled in the line. ‘I’ve not heard that before.’
Finnegan shook his head. ‘You just heard about the rock.’
‘He threw a rock at you?’
‘I told you that.’
‘Yes, you did. Now we should tell someone else. The school will know what to do.’
‘No, they won’t. They’ll call Mum and she’ll have a fit . . . I’ll tell her. I will. just not now. I think we have to get back now, Grandie.’
Martin put the rod on the ground. He knelt down then and held his grandson by both arms. As clear as the day, as the line between the cliffs and the sky. ‘This boy is a little criminal. And you are his victim. He has tricked you, Finnegan, into thinking you can’t change that, but you can. You just have to be brave. Let’s go and tell your parents. We can do it together.’
Finnegan listened, nodding his head. ‘After dinner, Grandie,’ he said. And then: ‘I didn’t drink it.’
‘You didn’t drink what?’
‘Nothing . . .’ For a moment the boy looked like he was expecting something to be said, then he smiled, the smile of someone older than his years, an incongruous mix of relief and regret. Just a flash and it was gone and they were packing away. ‘Tell me about Nana again, about how she stepped on the painting of vomit,’ the boy said. ‘I like that bit best.’
As they walked up the hill, the sky tinged orange with the waning sun, a flock of cockatoos burst from the branches of the big conifer. The boy and his grandfather laughed at the flurry of movement and sound. Then the tree was empty again, and the boy and the birds were gone, nothing changeless: the surface of the water was still, but always beneath, Martin thought, the pull of the currents, and deep down in the sand, the edifice of a greater plan.
Maggie, it was Maggie, wasn’t it, who led them back to the garden? It was Maggie who kept them under the night sky.
It was she who held the pencil in her hand.
‘Let’s go. Let’s go back to the loft.’
‘Not the loft,’ she says. ‘The garden . . .’
The rush of blood. Blood on weed, weed on speed.
‘Let’s see it in the dark.’
As though the dark is benign. As though the streets still rustling with their homeless ghosts have formed a single lane leading to a softer earth . . . They walk with clasped hands, past the lamppost where she had stopped to scribble in her notebook, the sidewalk now empty of art and books, the corner where the water had burst from the hydrant now dry underfoot, past the pigeon lady’s window and across the Bowery, the old man still sitting in his beanbag, and outside the Chinese grocery store, different girls walking the same walk.
Between them is a mind tunnel, all the way nothing said. Then he stops, shoulders the door open, and they step inside.
Chapter 19
When Maggie knocked, Iris came to the door.
‘I was working on a box,’ she said, then looking down to the satchel in Maggie’s hand: ‘You really here to do the painting?’
The house was quiet. Peggy and the children had gone back to Dubbo, so today it was just Iris and Tilly, and Tilly was sleeping.
Maggie nodded. ‘Why don’t we go back up? You can keep working and I can make a start.’
Upstairs, Iris’s room was clean and spare. The bed was made with just a blue sheet and a single pillow and on the chest of drawers sat an empty vase. With its sloped roof and small windows, the room had the feeling of an attic.
Along the wall beneath the windows were the tubs of shells. The half-finished box was the shape of a leaf. ‘There’s a gallery in Canberra that’s gonna take ’em,’ Iris said. ‘Reckon they want four by the end of the month. First they asked for bridges, but I told ’em I’m done with bridges. I am sticking with the leaves and bush flowers.’
She sat down cross-legged in the middle of the floor, wearing the same clothes she had worn on Maggie’s first visit, the orange Hawaiian shirt with the long floral skirt, and again her brown feet were bare.
‘Where you wanna sit, Maggie?’
Maggie got down on the floor against the wall and pulled out her sketchpad and pencil. ‘This’ll do fine.’
Iris did not make a move to start on her box, but sat watching Maggie, waiting. ‘You want me to look at you or something?’
Shoulders hunched and head tilted down, the half-smile was that of a supplicant. Her hooded eyes gazed back with uncertainty, waiting to be guided. Maggie felt the weight of that trust, the privilege, and with it a deep and wrenching affection for this woman she had only recently come to know. Every day over the last week it had been in her thoughts, coming back here to paint Iris—a light at the end of a darkening haze.
‘Why don’t you just keep going with the box,’ Maggie said, ‘and I’ll do a few sketches.’
The two women went to their work without speaking, the only sounds the call of the mynah birds clinging to the windblown branches outside the window and, inside the room, the graphite scribbles of Maggie’s pencil. Iris painted glue on shells of different shades and shapes, pressing them lightly onto the surface of the box before letting go and moving on to the next. Her hands moved so quickly they seemed careless; it was only after Iris has almost finished the lid that the pattern emerged and Maggie could see the rhyme in it, the flow of movement and the interplay of shells with shadow and light.
As she worked, Maggie studied the woman’s face, the wiry white of hair and the burnished brown skin of her forehead, the maze of lines etched at the corners of her upturned lips, the furrow between her eyes as deep as a crevice in a rock, and in the corner of her left eye socket a tiny fold of skin. Within a frame of pale, sinuous lines, Maggie sketched in matted scribbles as though the face were a landscape, rugged and untouched—untinted, unplucked; there was barely the trace of an eyelash but like an old stump the hair sprouting from the mole on her cheek remained. Maggie doubted the pores had ever been clogged with makeup or the wrinkles patted with cleansers and creams. Recalling the cloud of invisibility that had descended with the slight sagging of the skin on her neck, Maggie doubted whether the same sagging, the same irreversible process, had at any time caused Iris a moment’s concern.
‘Do people always like it?’ Iris asked. ‘How you paint ’em?’
‘Mostly. I have to paint them as I see them. Sometimes they say: “I don’t want anything disturbing,” or, “I want to be able to hang it in the bedroom so it’s got to be something that makes me happy when I wake up.” I get in trouble with the motifs.’ Maggie explained the motifs, how in the process of painting the object would come to her. ‘The more people pay the more they think they can put an order in. There was a woman once, and in the corner of the painting there was a little Kachina, a doll. She didn’t like it because she thought it looked as though the doll was laughing at her. She wanted me to overpaint it with a butterfly. She even told me the colours she wanted in the wings.’
Iris laughed. ‘Like the bloke in Canberra telling me what shape to make my boxes. They say you create what you see when you close your eyes; well, I don’t see the fucking Opera House, I can tell you that.’
The side of her box complete, Iris stopped, looked at Maggie with her watery eyes and that humblest of smiles.
‘You ask him abou
t Rodney?’ she said. ‘Did he remember him?’
Maggie put her pencil down to answer. ‘Yes, I asked him, and he remembered. He said he’d thought Rodney wasn’t a bad fellow but that he’d got himself mixed up with the wrong people.’
Maggie recalled the conversation she’d had with Martin. He had hesitated when she’d asked him the question, and answered her still looking down at the photo in his hands as though it contained the requisite information. They were his words, nothing more—not a bad fellow, just mixed up with the wrong people.
‘And this woman Iris that you see, she is his mother?’ Martin asked.
‘Yes,’ Maggie said. ‘I wondered at first if that wasn’t the reason you’d gone up there that day.’
When he looked at her then his eyes dimmed with a worn and bleary sadness—the sadness, Maggie thought, of having no answer and no way to find it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘I wondered if you hadn’t seen him again, this man. Perhaps he’d come before you in court; he is in prison again and I thought . . .’
But Martin shook his head. ‘No, that isn’t it, Maggie. I’ve not seen him. If he’d come into court I would have had to recuse myself, and I’d remember it. That isn’t right.’
‘No, very well, and it doesn’t matter anymore. You are here, and look at this, these photos—these are wonderful.’
After hearing what Maggie had said about her son, the sadness now in the eyes of Iris as she went about gluing shells to the side of the box was of a different kind: though old, it was not blunt with age but jagged and barbed like a broken bottle. She mouthed a word, but made no sound. Only minutes later did she nod and speak.
‘He’s right, your judge,’ she said. ‘About Rod being mixed up with the wrong people. But in his case it was just one, just her. He can shake off his idiot mates alright, but not Kayla. I remember back then, when he went inside that first time, I thought he’d come to his senses. Before that, he’d done a bit of thieving; that was the sum of it. Then he met her, Kayla, and she was greedy for the drugs, and soon enough he was hooked like she was, and they were as bad as each other. The only difference between them is that he wants to be free of it, in his heart I know he does. But not her, not Kayla. They had Tyson when they were just kids themselves, and she never stopped using, not for a second. To get that filthy shit she’d sell her soul if she could. I don’t like to say that, she’s kin, but it’s hard to lose your boy like I done. It’s hard when you can’t even bring yourself to imagine the kind of life he’s leading.’ She stopped and picked up the box with both hands. ‘I do that, though,’ she said, her voice a low monotone. ‘I sit here making my boxes, thinking what he’s doing right now, in there, inside—with every shell, every day, like I’m sharing it.’
And Maggie could see in the old woman’s eyes that for the short time she spoke of her son she had indeed left the safety of the room—brought back only by the sound of footsteps downstairs, and soon after the sound of a cupboard slamming.
‘Just the boys coming for a feed,’ she said, then sensing Maggie’s anticipation: ‘Not Tyson, love. He never goes straight to the kitchen. He always comes to see me first.’
A few minutes later, voices called up the stairs, ‘Thanks, Nan,’ and the house was quiet again.
‘Do you get to see Rodney?’ Maggie asked.
‘I sure do.’ As though anything could keep her from him. ‘Every Sunday I take Tyson. He’s at Windsor now so we can do it. When he was in Lithgow we only made it once a fortnight. They move ’em around so much, it’s a bugger, I’ll tell ya.’
With that Iris put the box down and stretched her arms out to the sides like she was waking to the day. It was enough sitting, enough talk. She pushed herself up off the floor before turning to ask the question: ‘We done?’
And so they were.
When Maggie came back for the second sitting she brought a larger satchel of tools. Iris watched as she laid out a square mat and pulled from the bag an ink stick and a small stone bowl the colour of charcoal and, last, a case of brushes—the largest of which she dipped into a cup of water and blotted onto the centre of the bowl. With the ink stick she stirred the liquid for a number of minutes, Iris watching all the while, eyes alight with the spark of new discovery.
‘What’s it made of?’ she asked.
‘Soot and glue,’ Maggie said. ‘They make a dough then dry it and use it to make ink.’
‘You don’t just buy it?’
‘You can. But this is better. Can you smell it?’
The smell was pine and sap, fresh peat. And after she had stirred it, the shining black liquid was the texture of melted butter.
Iris smiled. ‘Aw, Maggie, that’s lovely, that is, that’s like the ochre . . . How’d you learn that?’
Maggie told her the story of Mrs Bess, the pigeon lady, and how they had continued writing letters and sending drawings to each other long after Maggie had come home.
Iris reached over and picked up the ink stick to smell it and feel its weight, dipped her finger into the bowl and ran it over a scrap of paper on the floor. She smiled and, when Maggie began painting, she sat back and looked away, down at her box. ‘I don’t want to see it until it’s finished.’
Iris paid no mind to being watched, working again now as though she were alone, until she was done for the day and she pushed the box away, leaning back against the wall. ‘Your people, Maggie,’ she said, ‘they ain’t from here?’
‘No, my parents were from Hungary. We came here when I was a little girl.’
‘How often you go back to see your mob?’
‘I’ve been twice.’
Iris cocked her head. ‘Just the two times?’
‘My parents both died here. They left Hungary before the war and I was born in Lisbon. I didn’t remember my aunt or cousins. I went to Hungary when I was younger to find where my parents had lived, and again after my mother died. I met a cousin then who lived in London.’ She stopped now too and looked at Iris. ‘I envy you your family.’
It was an unlikely envy—both women thought it—but there it was, a fact.
‘You just wanted the one, your boy?’ Iris asked.
They had tried for more, Maggie said. ‘But there was always a reason not to try harder.’
The old woman shrugged. ‘You done what you did.’ Then she leant in closer. ‘I was thinking about you this morning, Maggie,’ she began. ‘I was thinking of that story you told about you diving off the jetty, and it reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about since I was a kid on the mission here . . . There was this one girl: same as you did, her parents had come after the war and she was living in a migrant camp, but this one was here in La Perouse, over the hill at Frogs Hollow. It was full up with migrants like you that came after the war. There was just one school for all of us, black and white—the kids from the mission and the migrant camps. So this little girl—I’ve been trying, but for the life of me I can’t remember her name—this little girl made friends with me cousin Nell. She had skin so white looked like it had been painted on, and big blue eyes, and there she was runnin’ round with grubby Nell and the rest of the little ones. There was a big fence around the mission; the game was to stay on it all the way around. It was so damn narrow they may as well have been balancing on a wire. I remember seeing her do it, this little one; she fell off and climbed right back on with her bleeding knee like nothing happened. But what I remember best—what I remembered this morning—is what she done the day the truck came for little Willy Madden. We saw it coming, and we all ran off and hid like we did every time we heard that truck, and the little girl, you know what she did? She came running too and hid among the trees along with the rest of us—like they’d take a white one just as well as a black. Like there wasn’t no difference. Like you, jumping in that water. I’ll say it again, Maggie: there’s lines between us. I can feel ’em as sure as I can see you sitting here.’
It was the first of many stories that Iris would tell Maggie about her
childhood on the mission, stories that flowed one into the next, about waiting in the dunes at dawn to watch for fish and digging pipis out of the sand and cooking them on fires on the beach, about the spirits in the trees that wailed in the wind, and about the grog-fuelled manager who barged into their shack at nighttime to line the kids up for inspection. Iris told stories and finished another side of a box as Maggie painted her picture.
They were almost done for the morning when the footsteps came charging up the stairs, and a boy in a football jersey appeared panting at the door—not the boy from the paper, not Tyson.
‘Tom’s done a fuckin’ runner,’ he cursed. ‘You seen him, Nan?’
She hadn’t, Iris said, not since last Tuesday when he slept over then buggered off in the morning with her spare change and her best coat. And, as quickly as he had arrived, the boy was gone. Not long after there was a man’s voice calling from downstairs. Maggie followed Iris down to see two police officers standing in the open doorway.
‘We just want to have a look at the room where he stayed, Iris,’ one of them was saying. ‘If you don’t let us we’ll go get us a warrant and come back.’
‘You just go ahead and do that,’ Iris hissed, closing the door and shuffling back down the hall. And when she reached the kitchen, all in a day: ‘Cuppa, Maggie?’
Tom was Tyson’s brother; different father, though, which made him no blood tie to Iris as far as Maggie could work out. But by then she knew better than to question ties. In the five weeks Maggie had known her, Iris had been to as many bedsides or funerals, two in Dubbo, back and forth by bus and train. Every Saturday she got herself to at least one of her grandsons’ footy games and screamed loud enough at the ref last month to get a caution from the club. Sunday was the trip to Windsor, and through the week if she wasn’t hauling one out of a pub at closing time she was enrolling them back in school or taking them up to the dentist. When there was no one at the house to watch Tilly, she took her along, pushed her in her stroller, pulled it in and out of buses. Maggie stopped asking her how she did it; there wasn’t a logistical problem the woman couldn’t steamroll.
This Picture of You Page 17
