On the other hand, she knew that the blue bodypaint of Boadicea’s warriors was called woad, and that King Harold had been felled by an arrow in the eye at the Battle of Hastings.
Miss Kennedy, surprised but grudgingly pleased, asked: “Now just where do you pick up these things?”
“In the library,” Kay said guiltily. In the library, while the rest of the class engaged in maypole dancing and sundry other forbidden and licentious acts. “In the picture book encyclopedia.”
Not acceptable, she knew it instantly. She could feel the disapproval like a sudden tropical fog. They would do things again, the boys would, if Patrick wasn’t with them, and if they caught her alone after school. Don’t tell, don’t tell, they would taunt. If you tell, we will get you tonight.
She thought of sleep as a trickster to be outwitted. They got her when she fell asleep, they came snarling in packs, their teeth were sharp as knives.
She wished for Bea. Bad dreams would never touch Bea, the very thought was ridiculous. Bea would fling them off the way a terrier shakes off water. Bea had all the right kinds of knowledge. Bea would never be sent to the library, where Kay kept picking up, picking up, haplessly, more useless and dangerous facts. And how could she possibly sort out what it was not permissible to know, and not permissible not to know? For instance, for instance, she had gone and memorised the page on Phar Lap in the picture-book encyclopedia. She waited and waited and when at last he was mentioned again by Miss Kennedy, her hand shot up. “His greatest win was the 1930 Cup,” she said, breathless. “He had thirty-seven wins, the last one in America. And then,” she rattled on, “he was murdered by the Americans, but his heart was one and a half times the normal size for a thoroughbred.”
There was an eerie silence.
They all looked at her very strangely, she could feel the stares like pins and needles on her skin.
“What would youuuuu know?” someone taunted.
Wowser, wowser, wowser! voices said.
“Youuu’ve never been to the races in yer life.”
What would you know you know you know? voices chanted later, in the playground. And the circle formed, a kind of dance, a skip, a game. Kay’s nerves stood on tiptoe, ready for flight, and she watched. It was what she did best of all, watching; she missed nothing, she waited for the first sign, the direction of the first pleat in the loop around her, the dip toward her, the first shove. She called this the Circle Game. Every night it closed round her like a tourniquet from which she woke gulping for breath, her room blue from lack of air, her nightgown sodden.
Kay wished for Bea. If Bea should appear, kaboom, like Jesus walking on the ocean, the storm would seep back into playground chaos, a wave into water.
Kay prayed that Bea would come.
But only the ministers came. Every Monday they blew in, a little coterie of penguins, black and white, and Miss Kennedy called out the religions and the rooms. Methodists to Mr Clarkson’s room, Presbyterians to Miss Waddley’s, and so on and so on, the whole school mingling. Kay tried to imagine such good fortune: to be part of an acceptable religion, one that everyone else had heard of, one with a sayable name: Metho, Prezy, C of E, Mick. To be anything but Others.
“Others to the library,” Miss Kennedy would say.
There were, in the whole school, nineteen of them. Others. They looked at one another warily in the library, drawing no comfort, no kinship at all, from shared fate — caged randomly, a small zoo of oddities. Sometimes the code words of their otherness were read aloud by teachers: Mormon; free thinker; Jehovah’s Witness; Jewish; Pentecostal; atheist.
Others.
They never spoke to one another, but scuttled to the corners of the room, intent on browsing through the stacks, intent on the book in front of the face. There was one girl, a grade eight girl — like all grade eights as distant as the sun — whom Kay studied with fascination (and with utmost surreptitiousness) in the library on Mondays. The girl had very thick long black hair that shone like glass and hung loose to her waist. She had eyes so large and brown that Kay thought of possums and of cows. And she had stillness; she had the stillness, it seemed to Kay, of a possum when it hears a footfall. Or perhaps of God when he brooded over the waters.
There was a picture of this in the family Bible. God himself was not actually in the picture. He was so still, brooding over the lapping ocean, that even the smoke-thin edges of the clouds were sufficient to screen him. Only His God-ness, a radiance bleeding through, betrayed Him.
The girl in grade eight did not mind about the library on Mondays. It was nothing, it fell off her the way water rolls from a bird’s wing. She would look up from her book and stare out the window and see something that was not the kindergarten children on the swings and not the gardener. She would watch it for so long (whatever it was) and listen so intently, and hold herself so still, that she would frequently not hear the bell that signalled the end of religious instruction.
Once Kay heard the teacher in charge say: “Snap out of it, Verity.”
Verity, Kay said to herself, delighted.
Verity of the secrets.
Kay watched, Kay studied, Kay thought. What was the secret of not minding? Of never being frightened? Of letting Other-ness slide off like rain from feathers? Perhaps it just happened when you got to grade eight.
Once upon a Monday, Verity turned from the library window and looked at Kay, looked directly at her, as though she had felt Kay’s eyes on her skin. Caught out, unable to lower her gaze to her book, Kay stared back, her breath catching in her throat. Verity, not hostile, not annoyed, watched her gravely. She did not smile. Kay could hear the ticking of the clock, loud as thunder. Then Verity looked away again.
Not till lunchtime did Kay’s heart stop flinching and galloping.
Three days later, by chance, waiting in line at the tuck shop, she turned around and there was Verity behind her. In a sudden spasm of nervousness, Kay tripped. She stumbled over her own feet and pitched forward, and Verity, reaching out, caught her.
“Are you all right?” she asked — although in fact Kay did not hear the words at all, only the pitch and toss of voice, an orchestral excitement. And she was all right, there was no help for it, and Verity let her go, betraying not a flicker of recognition, not the slightest flicker.
But how was it to be expected that a Being in grade eight could tell any one grade three child from another?
Mondays. Kay, assiduous watcher, began to wait for Mondays with feverish interest, she became addicted to Mondays. She learned something new. Whenever Verity looked out the window, her right hand was hidden in the pocket that lay demurely flat in the side seam of her school tunic. Kay, positioning herself at a desk on Verity’s right, ascertained that the hand was never absolutely still; it clenched and unclenched itself slowly. Sometimes the fingers splayed themselves out, pressing against the fabric of the tunic like the roots of tree orchids. Sometimes they rippled beneath the cotton, sifting or assessing some object; or objects.
This was surely a fact: the mysterious contents of Verity’s pocket were the source of her magic. Kay was obsessed with the hand and with the pocket. She watched so fixedly that the eyes of the teacher-in-charge were drawn in the same direction.
“Verity!” the teacher said — a sharp sudden sound — and all nineteen of the Others jumped. “Verity Ashkenazy! What are you playing with?”
The room went into slow motion, the floor dipped
and swayed. Verity turned white and held herself taut, so taut that the air around her cracked. Kay heard it, a painful singing in her ears.
“Verity!” the teacher said again. “I asked you a question. What are you playing with?”
“Nothing, Miss Warren.” It was a mere whisper. It was a voice dragged into the room from an immense distance.
“Bring it here, please,” Miss Warren said. “Put it on my table. Whatever it is in y
our pocket.”
Something happened. Like the shawling of waves up a beach, a vibration spread across Verity’s body, rippling, surfing out from the side seam of her tunic. Kay, the betrayer, was appalled, she was terrified, to see a crack, a rift, an abyss in Verity’s stillness.
“Aha!” Miss Warren said, triumphant. “I thought you were up to mischief. On my table, if you please. This instant.”
Something happened again. The tide turned. Calmly, almost disdainfully, Verity moved — the room made way for her, the table came to rest at her fingertips. She placed a handful of raisins on it. She held her head high and tossed it slightly and for a fleeting sweeping second looked every one of them in the eye, Miss Warren included. Kay recognised the look: the same one, exactly the same one in Patrick’s eyes after he stole Diana’s underpants and acquired three stripes on his leg.
But raisins, Kay thought with astonishment, baffled. Raisins?
Miss Warren, also baffled, said testily: “No food in the classroom, that’s a rule. You will come to the office after school this afternoon.”
At which a flicker, a ghost of a smile, crossed Verity’s lips, as though this were the most ludicrous, the most hilarious of outcomes, to follow on the revelation of raisins. And then she looked suddenly at Kay, sharply, attentively, and then away.
And Kay, stricken, thought: She knows. She knows it was me who told. In a manner of speaking, told.
“And you, Katherine Sussex,” Miss Warren snapped. “What are you staring at?”
“Nothing, Miss Warren.” Red-faced, Kay dropped her eyes to her book, but the words swam across the page. She wanted to go out and hang herself. She sobbed into her pillow that night. She prayed for Bea to come. All night she tossed and was spiked and battered on dreams, and in the morning she told herself: I dreamed that, about the raisins, about Verity turning white and shivering, about Verity being afraid. Verity is never afraid.
I dreamed that, about Verity looking at me. It wasn’t me who told, it wasn’t me. And Verity is never afraid. She has never ever been afraid.
Furtively, when the next Monday rolled around, she watched for the hand in the pocket, and there it was, the same nervous burrowing … as though there had been no reprimand, no brush with a teacher’s anger, as though nothing had happened.
Nothing had happened, Kay reassured herself.
But then, why did Verity nod at her? Just a small nod. She was almost certain that at the beginning of the class, as they all filed into the library, Verity gave her a slight nod and perhaps a kind of smile, the edge of a smile. And how did she (Kay) know there were raisins in Verity’s pocket? Did she know? Because the raisins made no sense. The raisins could not explain the look on Verity’s face when she fingered the contents of her pocket so constantly, so restlessly.
She studied Miss Warren. Sometimes Miss Warren glanced in Verity’s direction, sometimes her eyes rested on the hand in the pocket. Then they veered away. Verity, Kay thought, makes Miss Warren nervous. Miss Warren doesn’t like her, but she’s afraid of her. This knowledge flickered across the surface of Kay’s skin, pins and needles, tingling, obscurely exciting.
After this — because of this? — Verity appeared one day in the middle of the Circle Game, the real Circle Game, the dreaded playground one, not the one that tightened its coils in sleep. Verity appeared and she walked on water. Kay did not know whether this happened or whether she dreamed it.
She has never known. The fall happened, oh yes, that happened. But did Verity appear? Whenever Kay replayed the last few moments before the shoving and the fall, Verity was nowhere to be seen: neither walking across the pool, nor on the steps.
“And yet, Charade,” Kay will one day say, looking back at this moment from the future, “more than thirty years later, I can’t shake it. There’s this conviction, this ludicrous and irrational certainty, that for a crucial moment she was there. Which is crazy, of course, but there you are. I can’t shake it.”
Back in her childhood, Kay is standing in line on the concrete steps leading up to the swimming pool, her small duffle bag slung over her shoulder, her towel around her neck like a scarf. Three times a week this happens. She is afraid of the compulsory swimming lessons, but then of what is she not afraid? She cheats and does not open her eyes under water as ordered. She knows the deep end is waiting, she does not need the chlorine sting beneath her lashes to remind her; if the water catches her off guard she will be gone, swallowed … the boys will do something, the pool will drink her, though if only Bea would come …
Then, on the concrete steps, it happens. The circle forms, and Bea is in Melbourne, and oh where is Patrick with the stripes on his legs? Where is Patrick-the-sometimes-Protector? Where is the lost shadow of the Almighty? The circle forms. Is it because of Phar Lap or the letters or …? There is always a reason she can never quite grasp. The circle forms, they are pushing, Kay is falling.
Somewhere between the top step and the bottom one, somewhere on the slow golden arc of that voyage which is punctuated by bright visions of shoes and bare feet and flashes of chummy-gold embedded in the chalky pockmarks of the steps, somewhere there, with the bottom step reaching for her but before it folds her in its hard embrace, Verity appears. Verity walks across the surface of the swimming pool at the Wilston State School and meets Kay in the air above the steps. She draws her hand out of her pocket.
“Eat these,” she says. The raisins.
Kay eats, the circle vanishes, and someone is dabbing at her bloodied knees. And isn’t Patrick there too, swinging punches? And then there are teachers. And then she is sent home — with a note, of course, from Miss Kennedy.
Kay tears up the note and drops it through a grate in the gutter. She puts spit on her handkerchief and rubs the blood off her legs and arms, though it keeps dribbling down from
one knee.
“What happened?” her mother asks, distressed hands to
her cheeks.
“I fell,” Kay says. Nothing else is translatable, not into the language of parents, and Kay does not try. She says only: “I fell down the steps at the pool.”
By night she is running a fever. She speaks of raisins.
For days she shudders so uncontrollably that the pastor is sent for, and he presses his hands against her forehead (God’s tourniquet, God’s Circle Game) and he prays. Raisins, Kay whispers.
The pastor is “casting out demons”, his prayer is noisy, he is hectoring someone (God? Kay? The Powers of Darkness?) Kay feels like a paper mouse in the talons of the Almighty. She dreams of Bea, she cries out to Verity.
“No matter how many raisins we give her,” her mother says, pressing a hand to her lips, “she keeps on asking for more.”
Kay missed one week of school, and also the next.
There was an afterwards, a back-at-school time. Kay was branded now. Like Patrick, she wore stripes, and this gave her a certain kind of status. Once Patrick himself paused in a headlong football rush, seeing her, and made a circle with his thumb and index finger. He winked, and raised the circle high above his shoulder, emphatically, as though it were a medal she had won.
Kay was waiting for Verity’s signal. Across Miss Warren’s desk they stared at each other, unblinking.
Was it you? Kay’s eyes asked. Were you there?
Verity’s look went on and on, but Kay could not translate it.
Why are you never afraid? she silently pleaded. What is the secret?
Verity never smiled. Three seconds, four seconds more, her eyes lingered, and then, clear as a bell, Kay heard Verity’s voice inside her head: You already know. And then Verity looked away.
But I don’t know, Kay wanted to shout.
When the bell went, Verity was the first to leave the room. She never spoke to Kay, she never offered raisins. The Christmas holidays blew her right into high school and it was five years before Kay saw her again.
Over Christmas, hidden high in the mango tree, Kay made plans. If Bea doesn’t come, she decided, I will run away. I won’t go back to school.
But Bea’s father died, and Bea came.
There she was, sharing Kay’s bedroom, so that Kay would wake suddenly in the middle of a night that seemed noisy with the sound of Bea’s breathing, and would clutch at her own chest and think: “I made her father die.”
Those were the rules of the game. And so, with the utmost diligence, she avoided wishing to see Verity again, lest harm should strike.
4
The Man in the
Pandanus Palms
When Bea, my mum Bea, was a child, Charade says, she was impossible. Everybody said so.
“This is the border,” she told Kay. Down the middle of their bedroom she made a dotted line of dirty socks. “You can’t spread your neatness across.”
Bea’s side was rank as a forest. Underpants bloomed on doorknobs, stockings fluttered, clothes and bedding ran amok across the floor. There were comic books in geological strata, deep undulating layers of them, and there were other things, stranger things: a Men at Work sign, a railwayman’s cap, a schoolroom clock with no hands. “Stolen,” Bea announced, patting such possessions with a small contented smile. Under Bea’s mattress lurked the deeply and potently forbidden: cigarettes, movie posters, shocking pictures.
Is God waiting to strike her dead? Kay asked herself.
Though Bea would give Him a run for His money.
Once, in church, while Kay’s father raised his hands above the bread and wine and closed his eyes and tipped his head back to gaze at heaven, Bea nudged Kay and passed her a Bible. Open it, she mouthed. At the place where the bookmark was, Kay found a postcard. I fell in love with Surfers, it said. There were breakers, a curve of white sand, a clump of pandanus palms — the kind that grew in the dunes at Surfers’ Paradise and Burleigh Heads. An innocent beach, but high gloss. Glazed lines shimmered and crisscrossed the waves and pandanus spears, and made Kay’s eyes water. She looked at Bea, puzzled, and Bea smirked. Tip it, she mouthed, making an up-and-down motion with her open hand and squinting.
Charades Page 12
