by Peggy Frew
‘Hi Nan. It’s me, Junie.’ Rustling, a freshness—leaves, grass, has she been out then, on the horse? But that was before, she’s getting mixed up, Junie’s grown now. Grown, off and away, Junie and, oh God she’s tilting, she can’t get it straight, the other girl, the one they lost, what was her name?
She can’t speak. She can’t move. Listening is tiring, and peering out all the time. She lets the slice close for a while, and another vista opens, wider, brighter. She shrinks and flies into it. Running down the hill to school with Mary Lyon. New socks, she will keep them white forever.
She makes a sponge cake, eggs flour sugar she could do it with her eyes closed, the electric mixer groans, it smells like burning if she turns it up too much.
Frank is dead, coming home from the Cowes RSL, drove into a pole. Mal Jennings at the door in his police uniform, taking off his hat like in a film.
Churchill State School, third grade, five fives are twenty-five, six fives are thirty, banging out the blackboard dusters with Gladys Martin and there at the window is Billy Harding, Lo-is and Gla-dys, yer lunch’s full of mag-gots, chalk-dry fingers, turn to the empty yard, Just ignore him, Gladys, just pretend he’s not there. Miss Eldon with legs that go straight down, no ankles, brown stockings. Seven eights are? Straining upwards until her shoulder cracks, waggling her fingers, me, me, me! Miss Eldon scans. Anyone? Anyone? Oh, all right then—Lois. At lunch Billy Harding pinches Gladys on the arm but Gladys doesn’t ignore him, she does a show-off yelp like a fat little pig and then smiles privately and Billy grins too, running like a madman across the yard although he has nowhere in particular to go. So now she says, Please don’t sit with me, Gladys, I’d rather be alone, and she chews her sandwich with dignity and doesn’t think of maggots, she drinks her milk, she smooths her dress, she tugs cardigan cuffs over frayed sleeves, she says her eight times table in her head. She knows what makes Miss Eldon hate her, what makes everyone hate her, and oh, she has lost Gladys now, her only friend, but when Gladys comes back with half a crumbly shortbread, saying, Look, your favourite, she stares just past her soft nice shoulder. No thank you. Later she’ll cry but not now. She knows why they hate her, everyone except Gladys. Ike, they call her, Lois Ike Green, and Ike is for I Know Everything. But she cannot stop, she will not, the more Miss Eldon ignores her the higher her hand goes.
Frank: The trouble with you, Lois, is that you always have to be right.
Lois: But I am right.
Frank: Generally speaking, yes, you are. But you don’t need to let everyone know all the time.
Well, she was right. She was right about that damn Helen. But yes, Frank, perhaps she should’ve kept it to herself. Is that what it means, then, to be a mother? To suppress your own intelligence, to allow them their mistakes, to say, Of course you should, you just go ahead, yes, that’s a good idea. And then later, when they come, angry, saying, Why didn’t you warn us, isn’t that your job, then what? Well, then there’s no other option but to go on with the charade. Oh dear, what a shame, I’m so sorry, I had no idea it would turn out like that. So you can’t win; you’re either a know-it-all or an idiot.
Her father’s voice now: Nobody likes a know-it-all.
And her mother is in the kitchen with Aunty Kit, playing cards and smoking, and probably drinking whisky too, but her mother sneaks into the drawing room to pour it so the bottle’s not on the table, and so it must be a Friday evening and her father’s at the RSL, and Ruby’s out with Kelvin Harris and she’s in her room reading but then she sneaks into the corridor to listen and her mother says, I do worry about Lo, it’s as if she goes out of her way to put people off. And Aunty Kit says, Oh, perhaps she’ll mellow, and her mother hisses in smoke and says, I doubt it, and Aunty Kit says, Gin! And her mother says, Darn you, and then, At least I’ve got Ruby.
They are there still. She notices sometimes the feeling of someone beside her, or of a hand holding hers, or touching her arm or leg. That feels nice, she’d like to say, or, Thank you, but the phrases dissolve. The nurse descends from time to time, and the room lightens and darkens, although it’s not as easy to tell, her little slice seems to have shrunk and blurred, an uncleaned window with the shade half-down. But she doesn’t mind. She wishes she could let them know, reassure them, because they’re upset, that much is clear. I’m all right, she wants to say. I’m fine, really, but again the words are barely formed before they’re gone, clouds of breath on a cold morning.
Bitsy, she was called, the white dog. Bitsy the bitser.
And no one would dance with her at the Leaving dance, and it wasn’t because of her dress, which had been Ruby’s, which their mother took down as much as she could but which pinched under the arms and, once heated by her skin, gave off the smell of Ruby’s stale sweat. Nobody spoke to her as she stood alone with her elbows in trying not to let the smell out, her feet hurting in shoes that had also been Ruby’s, marked inside with the prints of Ruby’s toes in grey. Ruby had danced, of course, Ruby had danced until she sweated, until her toes made marks in her shoes. Ruby wasn’t a know-it-all, people liked her and now she worked at Bilson’s and spent her money on Nice Things and did her nails of an evening with a little pot of special cream and an orange stick and said, Come on, Lolly, let me do yours, and why why why when she could sit in front of the fire and put her cold hand in Ruby’s warm one and have Ruby lean in close with her sweet breath would she choose to shake her head and go into her room and close the door? But this is what she does, Lois Ike Green, who nobody will dance with.
On the other side of the dance floor Gwen Barker and Phyllis Neville are whispering and smirking and giving her looks and she pretends not to see, she pretends to be watching the dancers plod and wobble, or glide, in the case of Dianne Kelly. She even nods her head to the music, a bit but not too much, as if she doesn’t mind it although it’s not her favourite song, her favourite would be something much more sophisticated, which nobody here would even know of. And then there is someone at her elbow and a smell of lavender and a soft fat hand on her arm and Gladys Martin says, Hello, Lois, I just thought I’d come to say hello and I think you look lovely in that dress, and she turns and poor Gladys is in something ludicrous with purple flowers, like an armchair, and Gladys’s nose is shiny and her little smile trembles. And she wants to say, Gladys, I’m sorry I’ve been so mean, ever since third grade I’ve been mean to you and I have no excuse, I suppose I’m just a mean person, but then the music stops and Mr Thomas is up on the stage, calling out in his headmaster’s voice, Ladies and gentlemen, and Gladys whispers, I’d better run, I’m helping give out the prizes. And Gladys’s hand lets go but she grabs it and pulls and feels her eyes stinging with tears and hears her own whisper hot and fierce: Gladys, you are a good person.
And Frank! Who she took for granted for so long, his freckly dullness, his determination. Well, Lois Green, you’d better be ready on Friday evening because you’re coming with me to the pictures, like it or not. She was rude to him, she was dismissive, from the beginning there was a weight in her heart that said, Of course this is all you get, Lois, a trainee accountant with ginger hair.
Frank coming for dinner, a Churchill winter, smoky, dark. She doesn’t change her dress and when her mother says, Put out the good tablecloth, she mutters, What for? Frank combed and tidy, the rims of his ears pink. Cutlery instead of conversation, the four of them knifing and forking as if their lives depended on it. Frank, at last, bravely: This is delicious, Mrs Green. Her father picking up his chop bone to gnaw, her mother inhaling through her nose, her father putting the bone down again. Afterwards her mother produces a trifle and the cut-glass dishes and Frank says, Mrs Green, you didn’t have to go to so much trouble, and her mother says, Oh, no trouble, but makes a performance of the serving under the hanging lamp, passes out the dishes like a sacrament. And after that, a glass of sherry in the sitting room, her father at the fire, clanging a good deal longer than necessary with tongs and poker. Frank sits beside her on the couch and she stiffe
ns like a dog. She wants to shout, I’m not sure I even like him, can we all just wait a moment, please! Her mother says to the air, Ruby gave me the recipe for that trifle. Calls for a six-egg custard, very rich. Frank says, Oh. His fingers are spread on his knees, there are freckles even on the knuckles. Do you know Kelvin Harris? says her mother. No, says Frank. Ruby’s husband, says her mother, he’s an architect. Draftsman, says her father. Her mother pretends not to hear, sips her sherry. They’ve bought a place out on Mackeys Road, and they’re going to make improvements, Kelvin’s already drawn up the plans. Her father goes out the back to get more wood and then someone knocks at the front door and her mother says, That’ll be Edna with the pattern for Ruby, and rushes to answer it, and she turns to Frank and a horrible simpering voice comes out of her and says, That’ll be Edna. Don’t you know Kelvin Harris? He’s an architect, and then there’s a catch in her throat and she thinks, Shut up, Lois, you fool. But Frank smiles gently and she notices for the first time how nice his teeth are. With one finger he touches the back of her hand.
Oh, she’s harboured some terrible thoughts. That Helen, she couldn’t stand her; fast they used to call girls like her, and fast she was, whizzed right by them all and John under her thumb like that, a pushover, weak, no wonder she left him. She’s thought it a shame those two daughters were ever born. She’s thought John did it on purpose, finding exactly the wrong sort of woman and marrying her, she’s thought he did it to spite her. When the girl was lost she thought they both deserved it, that it was their comeuppance. That’s what happens, Helen, when you put yourself first, she thought. That’s what happens, John, when you go in for that sort of a marriage. Terrible thoughts; good thing she kept them private.
But she was jealous, really that was it. What she would have given, to have been allowed Helen’s audacity. To have been allowed to put her brain to use. That little smile Helen would have on at the dinner table, what was that smile saying? I’m better than you, Lois? With my degrees and my honours and my career? And I’ve got your son and he loves me and he doesn’t even like you? No. No. Helen didn’t care enough about her to even bother to gloat. Perhaps it was a smile of pity, which would have been worse. Perhaps it had no meaning, was just a smug expression, a habit, like her own face that all her life she’s caught in mirrors with that jaw and those frowning eyes, a face that says, Life has disappointed me.
She was jealous of Helen but she was jealous, too, of the love between Helen and John, that early love, you couldn’t miss it, it was a passion really, a love like a glittering sea.
One day, before they moved to the island but well after the boys had gone, it was winter, grey and sharp, and Bitsy hadn’t been at the door in the morning but she’d been busy making biscuits for the library volunteers and then when she did go out she found her dead in the dog yard, cold and stiff by the water dish, and she hadn’t liked Bitsy, who chewed things and was smelly even for a dog, and she was not afraid of a dead thing, God knows how many pets’ graves she’d dug over the years, and how many chickens disposed of, but she began to shake like mad, her teeth chattering. Her knees gave and she sat on the wet grass. She might have sat there all day if Stan Harding hadn’t come with the coal and seen her and he must’ve gone and fetched Frank, not that she was paying any attention, she’d completely dropped her bundle, it’s like empty space to think of it now, she didn’t even feel the cold. But then Frank was there and she was inside and he had her changed into dry clothes and in front of the fire, and he just sat with her and held her hands, and none of this she remembers properly, just a sort of coming-to and him there and her bleating like a pathetic little goat, Poor Bitsy! Poor Bitsy! And then after a while, Nobody loved her and she died all alone. And then eventually she gripped Frank’s hands and stared right into his eyes and said, The boys will never come back. They hate me. All they see is a mean old woman. And Frank didn’t speak, but he looked at her. He saw her, and he stayed where he was, not letting go.
Frank died and left her on the island, which was always his place. She made the best of it, and she did love it, she loves it now, the bright summers, gold and blue and the red of the rocks, and then the breezes sweeping in of an evening, and her garden, her roses, walking down the slope of lawn, the heavy petals, the perfume thick and warm, you could swoon breathing it. And the lemon-scented gums stirring overhead at night as she lay, as she lies now. She has loved the island, but it’s Churchill she thinks of, she flies over it, the dark hills, the houses and damp gardens, the eaten-out valley behind, the smokestacks. There is her house, hers and Frank’s, with the back verandah they had built in when Rob needed his own room, the crabapple tree and the woodpile, the incinerator, the dogs, she can see them running, and there’s little John running too, around the house. And he vaults the front fence like a gymnast, he rises to meet her and she sees his falling-down socks, his knees red with cold, his darling face, he wants to tell her something, he’s bursting with it, and all she has to do is listen but she can’t hear him, his little voice darts away and now he’s falling back, getting left behind and she can’t turn around, she’s flying on along the row of shops that are teeth to the road’s tongue and down to the other end of town where, before the railway line curves out and away between hills, there is a low flat place and God knows what became of it, a supermarket most likely with a car park and fat people waddling to and fro, but it’s not yet and it’s not Greyson’s wrecking yard yet either, with its rusted car skeletons, where Billy Harding went to work in his blue singlet, the muscles popping up on his scrawny arms and the stubble on his face like smudged dirt, because even when he was forty and a father of six he still managed to look like a ratbag kid. The cindery sky has wound itself back and back and taken the land with it and on that swampy flat where the houses were smaller and meaner and had yards speckled with rubbish and too many children, there is the house of her childhood, the tidiest one, and there is the outhouse and the chicken run and the passionfruit vine, and now she is swooping down and the chimney throws smoke at her and the fence flashes white and the letterbox, and now she is on the front steps and the sunlight stops at the fourth step up and if you sit at the right place you can split into two halves, a front that is bright and a back that is shadowy. And there is her father, his long legs, his hands in his pockets, he is walking up the path and he makes the steps creak and then he turns and down he comes beside her, enormous. He sighs and rests his wrists on his knees and she can see the black hairs on the backs of his fingers. What do you know, Lo? he says, and she takes hold of the material of his pants leg, and she looks up and sees his face lit but the back of his head in shadow and right then she does know something, but it’s not something you can say, it’s something you can only sense, like the coolness of a body of water—his mind, inside, a private mechanism that, like her own, like that of every person who exists in the world and ever has and ever will, speaks its own secret language.
In the Churchill Public Library a man came in drunk. She didn’t know him. Army uniform, that Changi look, skinny, ruined. Came straight to the desk and took her hand, his fingers shaking, his lips hot on her knuckles. Dianne Kelly, he said, you were the prettiest girl in Churchill. A tear landed on her thumb. If I had my time again I’d marry you quick before anyone else got a chance.
Dianne Kelly! Her black hair, her green eyes, the collars of her blouses perfect, a swan of a girl. They didn’t stay, girls like Dianne Kelly, didn’t marry a ginger accountant and work at the library.
She didn’t say, I’m not Dianne Kelly. She didn’t say, Dianne Kelly swanned off to Melbourne, married a doctor, left us all behind. She didn’t say, We don’t get our time again so might as well make the best of what you’ve got. She didn’t say anything; she raised her other hand and touched his hair, his ear, his cheek.
APPLEY AVENUE
Sun May 17th 1998
Arrived at Monica’s. Bloody freezing. House is still a shitbox, don’t know how she doesn’t have major depression. (Perhaps she doe
s?) Greg’s room like a cell, he sleeps on a camping mat. Seem to recall a reason for this: he rips up mattresses. Will keep the door shut so I don’t have to see.
M’s room’s okay, although reeks of old maid. Nice view of garden. I think that’s all she’s got.
No sign of cat. Put food out.
Called Ally, no answer. Didn’t leave a message. Drank most of a bottle of wine then called again. Many times. Still no answer. I MUST STOP DOING THIS, THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS WEEK AT MONICA’S IS TO GET OVER ALLY.
Mon May 18th
Appley Avenue, sounds so pretty, like there should be apple trees, blossoms, but it’s big dark cypresses, overgrown gardens, twisty ti-tree. Don’t remember it being so dark. Guess I’ve never been here when it’s not summer. Even the beach seems gloomy, grey, grey, grey, and brutal wind. Got paints out but no energy, did a few sketches. Did not see one person.
M rang. Greg needs eight teeth out! Root canal and some other procedure involving bone, didn’t catch details. M crying, ‘All my fault, I should have done more, but so hard just getting him to eat and wear proper clothes, let alone clean his teeth for him,’ etc. etc. My heart goes out to her, what a life. I should help more. Aaah! Don’t need any extra bad feelings right now.
