by John Clanchy
16
Saturdays are normally yuk days in our house. Nobody does anything. Mum washes and shops, Philip reads the papers in bed, then watches the football on TV while he’s supposed to be watching Thomas, and Katie’s always off somewhere or in her room playing movie stars with one of her friends. So I’ve started to go into the uni, to the library, to do extra study. I go to the Fisher, Mum’s old library. She worries about this, especially since I go by myself.
‘School all week and university on Saturdays?’ she says.
At this rate, she thinks, I’ll burn out before we even get to the exams. She thinks I’m hiding, using study as a cover for my other ‘problems’. I tell her I don’t have any problems. And anyway, I don’t only study while I’m there. Some days, if it’s sunny, I go over the footbridge and up into Glebe, and browse in the bookshops, the music stores. Other days, at lunchtime, just for a break, I might take a bus from one end of Glebe Point Road to the other, and back again. Just to look at the streets, watch the people walking in them or shopping. I never see anyone I know.
‘You lost or something?’ a boy once asks me. We’re halfway up Glebe Point Road, headed for Rozelle.
‘No.’
‘Just the way you’re looking,’ he says. ‘I know all the streets. What are you looking for?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No chance of a drink, I spose? There’s a good pub at the junction, eh?’
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘No, I’ve got to study this afternoon.’
‘You at the uni?’ He looks me over, for books.
‘Yes.’
‘You are lost, then. You’re going totally the wrong way.’
The Saturday I find her, and then lose her again, is no different from any of the others. Lunchtime, Glebe, a bus, people moving in and out of the shops, chatting, drinking coffee, families strolling in the sun, almost a Sunday feel, and – at a cross-road, just as the bus lurches through an orange light and over a small rise -she’s there, in black heels, skin-tights, a blue and white striped sailor’s top, and blonde, her fringe grown out. A spunk. Half the people in the bus – women as well as men – turn their heads. And the thing I see clearest, that makes the strongest impression, isn’t her clothes or her hair, but just her arm, her white arm stretched to press the button for the traffic lights to change. The flesh of her arm – as she holds the button down, and insists the lights change – is so white and confident and strong, it makes me feel like a schoolgirl, and about twelve, just looking at it.
‘Toni –’
Just for one second, as the bus is on top of her, I think her eye flickers and she’s seen me, but in the same second we’re already past, and she hasn’t. I see her push off, without turning her head, and stride out across the intersection, and a man – passing her -turns and looks at her legs, her gorgeous bum. Then she’s gone.
‘Toni?’ I must have said aloud.
‘Someone you know, dear?’ a woman opposite, her hands folded over her bag, says to me. And I realize how stupid I must look, with my knee up on the seat, and my face flattened like a goldfish against the glass.
‘Sort of.’
‘You might still catch her.’ She nods at the Stop button. ‘She’s only walking, isn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ I say, and press. Because it is the woman who has suggested it. The bus drags on and on, down the hill now, and when it finally judders to a stop and I stumble off it, and the woman’s called, ‘Wait’ to the driver and followed me and given me my bag and I’ve thanked her and she’s said, ‘You’re welcome, no one likes to miss a friend,’ there’s only the hill in front of me and hundreds of metres of empty concrete and the lights turning again at the top. And, as fast as I run, they’ve turned twice more by the time I’ve reached them, and there’s no sign of her anywhere.
I stretch out my arm to touch the same traffic pole as Toni has done minutes before, but my arm is not hers, not firm and confident and demanding like that, but trembling, and I can’t believe the sound of my breath in my ears, how my heart is pounding. Mum’s right, I realize, I’ve got lazy, I’ve done no running or swimming since we got back from the Centre, I’ve become nerdish and ugly. A hermit. A slob. And if Toni appeared now -
And then she does, she’s there. I’m actually looking at the door of the shop – a bakery – at the very second she swings out of it, a fat newspaper gripped under one arm and a baguette in a brown paper sleeve laid across the bones of her neck. She looks so grown-up. Maturrre, I hear her say. And beautiful.
Toni, I say, I think, without speaking.
She crosses the road, away from me, without looking – she’s that confident, that at-home – and I feel unwanted, a stranger, an invader here. Then the lights change and the crowd picks me up and carries me across with them and dumps me on the other side. And there’s nothing left for me to do then but to follow her. I don’t even know what this street is called, it’s off Glebe Point Road, is all I know, and it’s not so busy – just little shops and some terraces, and if she turns once, she must see me. But she doesn’t. It doesn’t occur to her – or to me even – that she’s being followed.
She goes on to the last shop in the row, a florist’s, and stops there and bends – just at the knee – and in one motion, without pausing to choose, snatches up a bundle of wildflowers from one of the white buckets on the pavement outside. I hear her voice, but not the words, calling out to someone in the shop, and then, without going in or seeming to pay, she darts back across the street, and through some iron gates and up the steps of a terrace house opposite.
The ironwork on the fence and over the tiny verandah is rusting and brown, but the front door is freshly painted, a bright blue, and the brass handle at its waist is polished and shines in the sun – as does the bell on which her hand now rests. And I have to pull back then, like a thief or sneak, under the awnings of the shops because she must turn, now, as she waits. But she doesn’t. She stands facing the door, and I can tell the full force of her concentration and happiness is centred there. Her body and whole attitude are so intense, I want to look away, but I can’t. So both of us stand there, fixed on the blue door, willing it to open. And finally it does. Mr Prescott takes the flowers and leans forward over the step to kiss her. And then steps back for her to go in. And it’s only then, at the very last minute, as she steps up onto the stone block of the entrance, to her house or his, that she turns and looks down into the street and straight into my eyes.
Go away, little girl, her eye says then. Why don’t you just mind your own business, and go away.
I find then I can no longer see clearly. Her face has become featureless, a blank wooden sheet of blue, with a blaze of gold where her mouth should be. And the street is empty suddenly, as though anyone who had any right or business there had decided to go indoors, to go inside where they lived, and talk and have lunch and make love and do whatever grown-ups do, and shut the rest of the childish, intrusive world out. And I have to recognize then that, right up to this minute, I’d believed her and thought the reason she’d kept everything from me was to protect me. And not herself.
17
‘But, darling,’ Mum says, ‘it doesn’t make any sense.’
It’s Sunday, the day after I’ve seen Toni in the street, and Mum’s dragged me off to the pool. ‘You’re going to exercise,’ she’d said, ‘if it kills you.’ And it nearly does. But afterwards, having coffee in the pool café, I’m glad. ‘Not ashamed to be seen at the pool with your mother,’ she says, ‘now Thomas is weaned, and my shape’s coming back?’ ‘No, I think it’s safe to go back in the water. Just,’ I say, as she slaps at my arm. ‘I’ve been worried about you,’ she says. And I don’t really want this just now, I think, a counselling session on me and my life habits, so I tell her about Toni and the letter. To distract her. Because now it doesn’t matter any more.
‘It makes no sense at all,’ she says again. ‘Because until the letter turned up, this whole thing was dying.’
‘I kno
w.’
‘It’s a mistake. You only glanced at it, darling. People’s handwriting …’
‘Mum, I know Toni’s handwriting as well as my own. I’d know it anywhere, and I know the paper she uses for letters. I was with her at Uluru when she bought it.’
‘But what would she have to gain by writing such a letter?’ Mum will puzzle and puzzle away at this. ‘What’d be the point unless she wanted to make trouble for Mr Prescott?’
‘And herself,’ I hear myself say. ‘That’d be crazy.’
‘But you’re the one who’s saying she did it.’
‘I’m only saying it was her writing.’
‘Isn’t that the same thing?’
Through the glass wall of the café, we look directly out into a small training pool. A man is there, standing to his waist in the water, holding a baby under its belly while it splashes its arms and is gradually immersed. The baby screws its neck and smiles up at the man with pleasure. Beside me, I see Mum making a mental note to ask about Thomas and swimming lessons on the way out. My mother is relentless. And dangerously unpredictable. You can’t take your eye off her for a second.
‘Why,’ she says suddenly, ‘are you telling me this now?’
‘What?’
‘It’s months now since all this happened. Why are you telling me now?’
‘I just think about it sometimes,’ I say. ‘Because it’s something I’ve never understood.’
Mum looks at me. ‘Has Toni made contact?’
‘I haven’t spoken to her. If that’s what you mean.’
‘Something’s upset you.’
‘I’m just worried about exams and that, I suppose.’
‘No, you’re not,’ she says.
‘Well, I’m suddenly wondering –’
‘What?’
‘Whether Toni was really serious after all, and it wasn’t her that cut Mr Prescott, but him. And when they got back, and he was with his family, and nothing was happening –’
‘The letter was a way of bringing things to a head? Forcing him to make a choice?’
‘Yes.’
Mum thinks about this. And then she says – because she’s always making these weird, dumb jumps in logic:
‘You’ve seen her, haven’t you?’
When she couldn’t possibly know this. For a fact anyway.
‘Just from the bus. Yesterday I was just passing in the bus, and
I saw her in this street near the uni.’
‘Well, that’s something. At least she’s somewhere. And she didn’t see you?’
‘In the bus? She didn’t seem to.’
‘How did she look?’
‘I’ve never seen her looking so happy, so pretty. She looked about twenty-three.’
‘Oh,’ Mum says. ‘Was she by herself?’
‘Yes. She was just walking in the street.’
The baby in the pool is squawking now, it’s got water in its eyes. The man’s trying to comfort it, but the baby’s screaming, its face screwed up and red, its mouth stretched wide enough to swallow the pool. It’s strange, because it should be breaking the sound barrier by now, but through the plate glass of the café wall, we can’t hear anything, the child’s screaming, the man’s words of comfort. We can only see their mouths moving. Like different species of fish.
‘And …’ Mum says, still watching the man and the baby, ‘what did you feel?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘When you saw her, on the street, looking so pretty?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say stupidly.
‘But she looked well?’
‘Yes.’
‘And grown-up and independent?’
‘Yes.’
‘And pretty?’ she says, and turns finally and looks at me. And Mum’s eyes are weird. They’re the colour of sea-water over marble, not blue at all but green.
‘Yes,’ I say, and I expect her to give me the usual dumb bit about how pretty I am as well. But she doesn’t. Instead she says:
‘Toni was always so pretty.’
And in the end, though I hate doing it, she makes me so mad I’m forced to say it myself: ‘You always said I was.’
‘No, darling,’ she says, ‘you’re not pretty.’ And she searches every inch of my face to prove it. ‘Toni’s pretty. Even I’m pretty.’
‘I know that –’ I say. And I feel my own lip, which is fat – like those women in Africa who insert those plates and bits of wood in their bottom lips so they don’t need saucers when they’re having their coffee – I feel it curl, because I don’t know why she’s saying all this. But she is, and she won’t let me look away.
‘When Toni walks in the street,’ she says, ‘I bet men turn their heads and watch her.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. Determined not to sulk. Or appear to.
‘And I bet she gets served first in the shops, and shop-owners give her discounts.’
I shrug and drag my eyes away and watch the baby again. Who’s stopped yelling, and is splashing its feet in the water and laughing, and its face and the whole world has changed in seconds.
‘And at the garage, men offer to service her car for nothing.’
‘She doesn’t have a car.’
‘Like they do me,’ she says, refusing to be put off.
‘What? I say then, and I have to look at her. ‘Disgusting. Just because someone’s got a pretty face?’
* *
In a lift once, in Macquarie Street, on my way up to the dentist’s, a man put his hand on my buttock. Just like that, in a lift. I was in Year 10, in my uniform. The man was in a suit, a red tie. I could see that in the reflection of the steel doors of the lift. All this was at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon, straight after school. There were other people in the lift, men and women, standing in front of us, all facing the lift doors. I wasn’t afraid, I was only afraid one of the people in front would turn, and see.
‘Nine,’ the man whispered. ‘Get out at nine.’
And I was unable to move, to look around, or see his face. And his hand was still there. It moved slightly, roundly.
And the thing was, my blood was racing. Not just in my face.
‘Nine,’ the man whispered again, and I couldn’t be sure – my whole skin was burning – whether his hand was still there, or not. Or that I wouldn’t get out at nine, with him. Because all I could hear in my head was Nine, and the numbers over the lift doors were moving to nine. And as the lift stopped, and the 9 lit up, in red, the man pressed slightly with his hand. ‘This is nine,’ he whispered, but a woman at the front turned round as the doors opened and said in an impatient voice: ‘Is there someone for nine?’ and this broke the mood of everything, and I found I could say something then: ‘Don’t,’ I said, and pulled away, and the man said, ‘Sorry,’ as if he’d just brushed me by accident in getting out, and he slipped past me and out the door, and I only ever saw the back of his head – he never looked back – his blue-black hair curling with grey at the ends where it met his collar.
‘You must tell me, Laura …’ poor Dr McGuinness, the dentist, said, in shock, fifteen minutes later when I burst into tears in his chair. ‘If I’m hurting you, you must tell me.’
But I never was – able to tell him, I mean. Or anyone, even Mum. I was too ashamed.
* *
‘Do you think,’ Mum says, as we pack up our bags at the pool and pay for our coffee, ‘Toni’s still seeing Mr Prescott?’
‘Mr Prescott? What makes you think that?’
‘I was just wondering,’ she says, as she thanks the girl at the counter and takes her change. ‘If she provoked things, to make him choose, and now she’s looking much happier …?’
‘Prett-ier,’ I say, as we reach the door. I stand back and wait for Mum to push it open. She doesn’t.
‘Darling, what do you want me to say? That you’re pretty too?’ ‘Don’t be stupid. Of course not.’
‘Because you’re not. I wish you were. If you were merely pretty, your li
fe would be so much easier. But you’re not, and you know it – and if you don’t, if you’re actually that dumb, and not just playing dumb, then it’s time you took a good hard look in the mirror. And faced the truth.’
‘Mirra-pirra,’ I say, as we push against our own reflections, and emerge, side by side, in the street.
‘Yes, you could use a mirror,’ Miss Temple says. ‘What else?’
‘A hubcap,’ Toni says.
This happens in Communications, in our creative writing class the week before we go to the Centre, and we’re doing a unit called Writing in Persons, like first person and third person. And Miss Temple’s explaining to us problems that writers have with using the first person, because if you’re doing first-person narration and your character is going, ‘I did this’ and ‘I saw this,’ and everything in the story is ‘I this and I that,’ then how does the reader know things like what you look like, because you could hardly stop the story and say ‘Oh, by the way, I’m four foot two, I’ve got a big nose and I look like a Kalahari Bushwoman’ – it’d sound so fake, like something you’d read in the Personal columns of the newspaper, and it wouldn’t be that practical anyway, cos how many Kalahari Bushmen read the Sydney Morning Herald ?
‘One way in which writers do it,’ Miss Temple has just explained to us, ‘is they cheat. They make the character catch sight of themselves in a mirror and say something like, Oh, why did he leave me? I was thirty, sure, but I still had my looks, the blonde brows, the cornflower eyes he’d always sworn he loved…’ And then, after she’s explained this, Miss Temple asks us how else we could do it. Apart from the mirror trick.
And that’s when Toni says: ‘You could always use a hubcap.’
‘A hubcap?’
‘If it was a dwarf, say.’
‘Thank you, Antonia.’
‘Or if she’s walked into a garage where they’re fixing her car, and it’s up on a hoist.’
‘Yes, I think we’ve understood the automobile example. Thank you, Antonia.’
‘A door, or a shop window,’ I say, before Toni pushes Miss Temple too far. ‘You know, she wondered who the elegant stranger was that she could see reflected in the Grace Brothers window … and then you describe the woman and how she looks elegant but sad as if her boyfriend who was rich and going to be a war hero has just died of AIDS or something, and say: And then, with a shock, she realized the woman was no stranger but herself… ’
