Bea had told her what they did to little girls: they took off all your clothes and tossed you about like a ball, playing Devil’s Catch; you could feel their claws in all your softest places; and then they made you drink blood. Bea said it had happened to her.
Katherine would hold tightly to Grandpa Llewellyn’s hand, watching the long dark toes of the Terror that Walketh by Night, watching those toes flirt with the edge of the path. She was grateful, then, that her grandfather was taller than the Noisome Pestilence, that he was as safe as the shadow of the Almighty, that he dwelt in the secret place of the Most High. As she sat on the wooden outhouse seat in the darkness, listening to the tinkle of her own water, Grandpa would whistle to keep the presences at bay. Rock of Ages, he would whistle. Or Men of Harlech perhaps. Or Jesu, lover of my soul. And beyond the circle of his breath Kay could hear the night powers gnashing their teeth. Kay, Kay, she could hear them calling.
“They’ll never catch me,” she told Bea.
“Oh yes they will,” Bea said. “They can get through cracks in the house. They’ll suck you out one night when nobody’s looking.”
Bea was older and went to kindergarten already. She lived round the corner, but their two back fences made an L around a paddock of long grass and thistles and buttercups. Every day, when Bea came home from school, they slipped through the fence railings and met in the buttercup patch.
“This is what they do,” said Bea, sliding her hand under Katherine’s dress and tickling her secret places.
“Don’t! Don’t!” Katherine shrieked in a pleasurable terror. “They’ll never catch me, they’ll never !”
“Oh yes they will,” promised Bea.
2
Sailor, Sailor
Once upon a Melbourne day, Charade says, after Hiroshima but before all the Yanks had gone home, a man came up to Bea and Kay while they played in the buttercup patch.
“Hi, little girls,” he said.
It was a funny word: hi. Not a word they had heard before. They said hello, and then they stuffed their fists into their mouths and rolled in the grass and giggled. “Ah’ve got a present,” he said, “for a pretty litty girl.” It was a strange way to talk, as though he had fruitcake in his mouth. “M’name’s Gene,” he said, and they shrieked and bit on their fists to think of a man named Jean. “Ah’m a sailor. And ah’ve got a present all the way from Tennessee for the prettiest girl in Australia.”
“That’s Bea,” Kay said. Her voice came through between her fingers, mixed in with the bubbles of laughter. “Bea’s the prettiest girl in the world. Mr Bedford said.”
“Yes,” said Bea. “I am.” She had a face that was shaped like an almond. “I’ve got cow’s eyes.” She liked to open and close them and feel the lashes brush against her cheek. She liked to pull on the dark curls that grew around her face like tendrils, and let them spring back again. She pulled one across her forehead and stretched it down to her chin. She smiled at the man from behind it.
“Oh,” the man said. “Yes, sir. You are definitely the prettiest girl in the world.”
“I know. Mr Bedford said.”
Gene picked a buttercup and stuck it behind Bea’s ear. “And who might Mr Bedford be?”
“He’s a man at our shop, he gave me a present, he bought me a pineapple iceblock. But it’s a secret.”
“Aha, but you told it,” the man said. “A little girl who can’t keep a secret.”
“I can so, I can so,” Bea chanted. She did a somersault in the buttercups so the man could see the little pink flowers on her panties. The man lay down on his stomach in the grass and took off his white hat. The hat looked like a dog dish. It was the silliest hat they had seen. He set it on Kay’s head and she bit her knuckles very hard and nearly choked with nervous mirth.
“Guess ah’m just going to have to give my present to your cute little friend,” he told Bea. “ ‘Cause ah can’t trust a little girl who can’t keep a secret.”
“I can so, I can so,” Bea said, and she pulled the hat off Kay’s head and put it on her own.
Kay asked: “Are you in the R-Double A-F?”
Bea said: “My father was in Egypt, but Kay’s father wouldn’t fight, he only made parachutes.”
Kay said: “Are you in the RAAF too?”
“No ma’am,” he said. “Ah most certainly am not in the RAAF. Ah already told you, ah’m a sailor, a sailor. Ah got me a bee-ootiful battleship for my home. And ah’m going to take one lucky little girl to see that ship if she can keep a secret.” He picked up Kay’s foot and unbuckled her sandal and began to play with
her toes. “This little piggy went to market,” he sang. “And this little piggy ate roast beef.” And when he got to the little piggy who ran all the way home, his fingers began skittering up Kay’s leg, past her knee, past —
“Don’t! Don’t!” she shrieked, giggling, and rolling away in the grass. She didn’t know whether she liked it or not. She wanted to whisper to Bea: “Is he one of the Powers of Darkness?”
But Bea was turning cartwheels now, and the man was watching her. She cartwheeled in a circle around him and then she sat in the buttercups and unbuckled her sandals and began throwing them into the air and catching them. “Who wants to see a baddleship, a baddleship?” she sang. “Mr Bedford gives better things. But I’m not telling what, ’cause it’s a secret.”
“On my ship,” Gene told Bea, “you can sit on the big guns, va-voom.” He made a circle with a thumb and one finger, and poked another finger through it. Then he put the circle up to one eye. “The windows are round and you can put your face up against them and say howdoody to a fish. But ah guess ah’m gonna take your friend here,” and he reached for Kay’s foot again. He played the piano on her ankle, he hummed songs up and down her leg. Kay squirmed and giggled and tried to pull away. She thought perhaps she didn’t like it. Then she thought perhaps she did. The man sat up and lifted her foot to his mouth and blew between her toes.
“Stop! Stop!” she shrieked. “It tickles.” Bea went on playing catch with her sandals, the shoes flying higher and higher. “It tickles, it tickles!” Kay cried.
“I’ve got a present for a tickly little girl,” Gene said. “But first you have to tell me your name.”
“Katherine,” she gasped, twisting and laughing. “It’s Katherine Sussex, but I’m Kay. Stop! Stop!”
“Kay,” the man sang. “K-K-K-Katy, you’re the one that I adore. Oh I love little Katies, I do.” Bea lay on her back in the buttercups and kicked her legs to keep time with the tossing of her sandals; she pointed her toes, and her dainty feet went up and down, up and down, like birds soaring, plummeting. Gene put Kay’s toes in his mouth and sucked them, and waves of something ran right to the tops of her shoulders. He tickled her panties with his finger and she gasped with shock. Sounds came out of her mouth, but she couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying. “Va-voom, va-voom,” laughed Gene, catching hold of her feet again. “This little piggy went to market,” he said, running his tongue around one toe. “And this little piggy stayed home. And this little piggy flew all the way …”
Right then one of Bea’s sandals came sailing by and Gene lunged out and caught it, “Aha!” he cried. “Now ah’ve got you!” Bea squealed and catapulted herself against Gene, and he caught her with his left arm and waved the sandal high above her with his right. They rolled in the grass together. Bea gulped with laughter and kicked and squirmed until Gene knelt in the buttercups and pinned her between his legs. “If you keep still like a good little girl,” he said, “maybe you’ll be the lucky one to come and see mah battleship.”
Kay thought: Bea’s the one. It’s her he wants to take.
The hammers inside her chest slowed down, she was glad it was Bea. Then again, she would have liked to be the one. Perhaps.
Bea, imperious, commanded: “First you have to put my sandals on.”
�
��Why, ma’am,” Gene said. “A pleasure.” He sat back on his heels, and pinned Bea’s leg between his while he strapped and buckled. She wiggled her toes in the space between his thighs. “Oh, oh,” he said. “A regular little witch.” He tickled the sole of her foot. “Little witches need to have their bottoms spanked. Guess ah’m just gonna have to take you right on down to mah ship and take you back to Tennessee. We’re gonna sail across —”
“Katherine! Bea!” came Grandma Llewellyn’s voice. “Where are you?”
Kay and Bea and Gene all jumped as though they had been shot. They sat up still and straight. “Guess ah have to get on back to mah ship,” Gene said. He put his fingers over their lips and whispered: “Now ah sure hope you can keep a secret, because if anyone tells about the lollipop ship, the boogey man comes and eats her up.” And then he went jogging away through the buttercups till he came to the lane at the end of Bea’s fence.
“Katherine! Katherine!” called Grandma Llewellyn.
Kay and Bea stared at each other.
“Katherine! Bea! Where are you?”
They somersaulted across the buttercups and crawled through the railings into Kay’s back yard and ran up the path to the hen house. “We’re here,” they called, “we’re here.”
And then they said: “Nothing. We weren’t doing anything. We were just playing in the paddock.”
Grandma Llewellyn went on putting eggs into her basket. “Don’t get into any mischief,” she said, before she went back inside the house.
Kay and Bea looked at each other and then they put their fists in their mouths and rolled in the grass outside the hen house.
“Jean, Jean! Mah name is Jean!” spluttered Bea, catching hold of Kay’s foot.
“Gonna take you to Tennis-y,” Kay mimicked.
“Ah’m a sailor, a sailor!”
“Ah’m gonna spank your bottom!”
They shrieked and struggled and tickled until they were exhausted. Then they climbed the plum tree and stared out over the paddock. Sometimes, if they sat very still, a bird came and pecked at a plum. Kay worried at a piece of bark with her fingernail, thinking, thinking. Bea sat hunched on her branch and stroked her ankles.
At length Kay announced soberly: “I didn’t like him.”
“That’s because you’re a baby.” Bea hooked her knees over the branch and swung upside-down, her curls flying. “I told you that’s what they do. When Mr Bedford buys you an iceblock, you’ll see.”
“Do you like it?” Kay asked.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe I do too.”
“Not as much as me,” Bea said. She moved back and forth like molasses, her fingertips trailing through air. “I always like things more.”
Kay tried to decide: what she liked, what she didn’t like. It was true, Bea always liked things more. Bea liked. What did Kay like? She liked to close her eyes and see things. She saw Bea’s hair spreading and spreading, she saw it growing grape leaves that reached out and touched the grass. She saw Bea growing into the buttercup patch, she saw bunches of grapes, she saw stickiness and juice. She saw Jean the Baddleship Man: how he walked without seeing, how stickiness pulled him, how Bea’s tendrils could wind themselves around him until he wouldn’t be able to move.
“I didn’t like him,” she said decisively.
“I didn’t too,” Bea shrugged. “But that’s what they do.
You’ll see.”
Bea always knew more, so Kay told Bea: “I know what Tennis-y looks like.”
“I’m going to go there,” Bea said. “Jean’s going to take me.”
Kay frowned. “I’m going to go there all by myself.”
Bea licked her finger and crossed her heart. “I’ll go first,” she promised.
But Kay closed her eyes and saw that Bea’s fingers and toes were sprouting little green pads, that her hair was green, that she was part of the plum tree and the buttercup patch, that she would never get away.
No, she thought. I’ll go first. I’ll be the one. By myself.
3
Brisbane
Brisbane, Charade begins …
Along the front fence was a leggy colony of poinsettias that had to be cut back and cut back, and down through these each day the arm of the postman would reach. The house was set low against the embankment of road and footpath, and when Kay curled herself under the trees, waiting, she could hear the soft overhead thunder of the postman’s coming. She could see the tips of his shoes above her head as he leaned forward, fishing between leaves for the mailbox.
She would climb the oldest and thickest tree and part the splashy red flowers and peer out. “Do you have a letter from Bea?” she would ask wistfully.
There was a year without Bea, and Bea never wrote. Not once.
Kay herself wrote to Bea every day.
Today, she would begin, and the news of grade three would follow, in drawings and signs, in the language that lay to hand. The letters always ended the same way. When was Bea coming? Had she asked her father yet? They could both come, there was room on the verandah. Would she please come soon.
Love, Kay.
It seemed to Kay that the shadow of the Almighty, which had covered them all so snugly — like a tucked-down quilt — in Melbourne, did not stretch quite so far as Brisbane. Or perhaps was pulled too thin, full of gaping holes through which harm could reach and twist this way, that way, hissing in your ear: Don’t tell, don’t tell! If you scream, if you tell, it will just get worse.
There was no Grandma Llewellyn in Brisbane, no Grandpa, no Bea.
Dear Bea, Kay wrote. Please send me a letter. Love, Kay.
There were letters, other letters, not from Bea; there were many letters, their contents mysterious, but these were given to Kay by her teachers and by her parents. She carried them back and forth, helplessly, knowing that events would whoosh out of the envelopes like sheet lightning. Miss Kennedy would make a slit in Kay’s fate with a brass letter opener, purse her lips, shake her head, and send Kay alone to the library while the rest of the class went outside for maypole dance practice, or perhaps filed off to the nurse for tetanus shots, or perhaps marched to the local theatre to see some educational film. All these things were forbidden to Kay.
At lunchtime she was a connoisseur of trees — mango trees, banyan trees, especially Moreton Bay figs, especially broad-leafed dense-leafed trees with low-hanging branches. Kay was an adept of the quick disappearance. She knew the top of each head, she had a God’s-eye view. She was privy to many private acts of treachery that flourished like cobblers’ pegs and wet-the-beds: she heard what Diana whispered to Leigh about June, and to June about Leigh, and what June and Leigh said about Diana in Diana’s absence. She drew certain conclusions about the nature of friendship.
She knew what Patrick and Diana did in the ditch beneath the Moreton Bay fig, how they took turns and giggled; how once Patrick would not give back Diana’s underpants but ran away with them, red in the face with wicked glee. And how Diana, crying, ran home from school. After which, in the course of the afternoon, Diana’s mother and the headmaster appeared at the door of the classroom, and Patrick was called away.
A sense of gravity and horrible expectation filled the classroom. The absence of Patrick went spinning and glittering between the desks like fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night, full of dazzle and menace.
Then Patrick returned.
He looked once around the class, defiantly, and tossed his head. Three livid blue lines, roughly parallel, raised themselves across the calf of his right leg. This was a turning point, a notch in the passage of class history. There was always before those blue stripes, and after. Among the boys, the secret sign was a badge of rank, but the girls were afraid of Patrick; they lay awake at nights in the grip of delicious shivers, thinking about his now purple and yellow-green legs and about Diana’s underpants (for somehow the word g
ot around; Diana’s mother told June’s mother who told June who told everyone).
Every morning when Kay, trembling, passed the knot of boys at the school gate, she would glance sideways at the last minute, watching for Patrick’s smile. It touched her like something feverish. In dreams, she smiled back; in the schoolyard she was afraid to. Once a boy pushed her over, and Patrick helped her up and punched the other boy. In dreams, Patrick held at bay packs of dogs as she passed (a bunch of leashes like ribbons in his hand). He intercepted the deadly flight of cricket balls bound for her head. He spread blankets when she fell on the gravel. The shadow that Patrick cast was like the shadow of the Almighty.
They never spoke to each other, she didn’t know why.
She did know, since her branch of the mango tree was level with the classroom windows, what Miss Kennedy did during lunchtime: how, after the blackboard was cleaned down, and the copybooks taken from the old wooden press for the afternoon lesson, and the sandwiches eaten, Miss Kennedy would close the door and press her ear against it, as if expecting warning messages from the verandah; how she would return to her desk and remove the gold-tasseled bookmark from the grade three reader and dangle it down the front of her dress, tassel trailing back and forth, back and forth, like a pendulum. Miss Kennedy would close her eyes and part her lips and her tongue would move like a lizard’s.
Kay felt she would run out of storage room for all the puzzling things she knew. Most of her knowledge was of the wrong kind. She could, for example, rattle through the names of the books of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, but could not produce the name of a single horse in the Melbourne Cup. She had never even heard of Phar Lap — “the legendary Phar Lap,” Miss Kennedy said, incredulous.
Charades Page 11
