“Here we are,” the bus driver would say, letting Bea and Charade off at Goodna. “Sooner you than me, luv. I wouldn’t touch that place with a forty-foot pole. Not if you paid me.”
What did Charade remember of the trips to Beenleigh and Brisbane and Goodna?
She remembered Babs. A high-voltage woman, that was how Charade thought of her in later years. She was someone who vibrated, who gave off the kind of steady hum that turned heads, that burned up anyone who came too close, that left Babs’s own nerves in a constantly inflamed and smoking state. When Babs lit one of her cigarettes from the stub of the last, her fingers trembled. When she laughed, Charade believed she could see blue flame. There was a glow about Babs that few people could resist for the short run. In the long run, the charred men reeled from her house.
When Babs McGinnis and Bea Ryan walked down Queen Street to wait for the Ipswich bus, Charade saw people fall like dominoes in their wake. Not just men. People turned, people crossed the street to see them better, people looped around in their tracks and followed.
Babs McGinnis talked with her hands. She made manual lightning. And then Bea would laugh, and the laugh of Bea Ryan was something to haunt people’s dreams: a throaty laugh, so sexy and infectious that children joined in, women felt edgy but couldn’t stop themselves from smiling, men thought feverishly of ways to meet her, they racked their brains for something witty to say to her, they considered a mad sprint, a collision, anything to touch her. And Babs laughed with her hands, made her hands flutter like birds, whoosh, whoosh, how her fingers went off like sparklers, and Brisbane held its breath and stopped to watch.
On the bus, after Babs hugged her goodbye, Charade warily inspected herself for scorch marks.
And what could Charade say about Goodna, that place of lost souls? She remembered greyness, endless variations of greyness: in the grounds where even the flowers seemed defeated; in the reception room where grey officials asked grey questions; in the corridors where grey ghosts passed up and down, seeing nothing.
Close to Bea however, and Charade stayed very close indeed and held her mother’s hand, close to Bea there was a bubble of light and colour.
Bea would stop in the common room where a woman wrapped in a grey housecoat stared at nothing. She might have been a goblin — no, a troll — folded up into one corner of a couch. From her crossed arms and clenched hands, knuckles and elbows protruded like little white arrowheads, and her hair writhed spiky and snake-like about her face. Charade shivered. Charade thought of someone dipped in a rubbish pit. She bit her lip and tried not to look at the woman’s legs, but they pulled her eyes and she stared with horrified fascination. Was it real skin? It was shiny, wrinkled as used tissue paper, the shin bones pushing so close against it that they seemed about to cut their own way out. The woman wore grubby socks, short ones with the cuffs rolled over, and a pair of men’s slippers a couple of sizes too large. The socks gave her a clownish look, a grotesque circus look: World’s Oldest Little Girl. Perhaps the most awful touch was a satin ribbon tied to a lock of her hair, a dirty pink satin ribbon, its ends trailing across her forehead.
“Maeve!” Bea called, and the bubble of light fell across the woman’s face. “Maeve darling.” And Bea would laugh and bend over and hug her.
Something happened then.
There was a thing Charade had seen at school, a thing her teacher had done to show the way plants breathed. First a jam jar was placed on the windowsill and filled with water, then red dye was added, then a lily was placed in the jar. Now the miracle: Michael Donovan took bets on how many minutes as the lily sipped up colour through its stem, blushed along the cheek of its creamy petal, bled along its flutes and curves, became a striped lily, then a strawberry one, then a blood-red bougainvillea lily.
This happened to Maeve. “Bea,” she sobbed. And colour began to move through her. “Oh Bea, oh Bea, where did my ribbons go?” And the colour moved past her socks, past her knees, over the bony elbows, up to her cheeks. “I hid my sequins, Bea,” she laughed. “They can’t find my sequins, they can’t take them away.” She gurgled. She began to do little bower bird dance steps in her floppy slippers. Her excitement spilled into tears and giggles, into strange behaviours.
Charade, fascinated, watched the housecoat open and close, open and close. She saw tattered lace drawers.
“There, there, Maeve.” Bea was motherly, calming, a gentle buttoner-upper, a re-tier of pink ribbons. “Let’s just sit.”
On the grey couch in the colourless room, Bea and Maeve sat in their bubble of light, and Maeve put her head on Bea’s shoulder, and sometimes Bea sang. Sometimes it was Lily Marlene. Sometimes it was the lullaby she’d used for Charade, for Siddie, for all of them, the same song that drifted out to the mango trees on the side of the Tamborine Mountain.
Charade would think with amazement: Mum loves Maeve. Mum really loves her.
Did Bea love the Sleeping Beauty? Charade couldn’t decide. When the bubble of light that moved with Bea fell across the Sleeping Beauty, nothing happened.
“Is she blind?” Charade asked.
“No,” Bea said. “She’s looking at something we can’t see. It gets in her way.”
“What’s her name?”
“Her name’s Sleeping Beauty.”
“No, but her real name, Mum.”
“That’s what the nurses call her.”
“Why hasn’t she got any hair, Mum?”
“The nurses shave it off. If they don’t, she pulls it out. She hurts herself.”
The Sleeping Beauty sat in a rocking chair by the window, her back straight as a ramrod, her possum eyes black and glittering and fixed on something only she could see. Her skin was as white as that of a china cup. There was something breathtaking about her shorn head. It was as though the bones themselves were … what? Charade fumbled through words and decided: proud. She had proud bones. All of them: the high cheekbones, the forehead, the gaunt sockets, that carefully held spine. Her feet were tucked under the long grey skirt and you could never see her hands, she kept them tucked somewhere too. But the head! It made Charade think of African sculptures in art books in the school library. An African or Egyptian queen, but white as milk.
This was what Bea did: she stood behind the rocking chair and stroked the down on Sleeping Beauty’s bony head. (Charade had seen her do that with Trev, with Tiz, with all the babies, stroking head fuzz with a fingertip while she rocked them to sleep.) Bea would push the rocking chair and hum. At the first movement of the chair, Sleeping Beauty’s feet would shoot out, rigid, and Bea would softly rock, softly rock, humming sounds without words, and the feet would relax, would disappear back under the folds of the skirt. That was the only sign the Sleeping Beauty ever gave.
Did she like being rocked and sung to? There was no way
of knowing.
When Bea was done, she would kiss the top of the downy head. “Say goodbye, Charade,” she would murmur.
And Charade, with a thrill of dread and awe, would stand on tiptoe beside the rocker and place a kiss on that high cold cheek.
Charade remembered how Maeve would follow them down the corridor, giggling: “They can’t find my sequins, Bea, I hid them good.” And she remembered the man whose breath smelled like a public toilet who called after them: “Put your shirt on Ulysses. Last race at Doomben, can’t lose.”
All the way back to Brisbane, Bea stared out the window of the bus.
“Mum, Mum,” Charade would pester. “What did Maeve do, Mum, before she went to Goodna?” But she had to poke Bea, and pull at her sleeve, as though Sleeping Beauty’s disease were catching. “Mum, what did Maeve do?”
“She’s a dancer,” Bea murmured, heavy-lidded. “At the Black Cat on Elizabeth Street. Leave me be, Charade. Stop pestering.”
“How long ago, Mum? She’s old as old can be, she must be a hundred. How long ago did she dance?” Ch
arade tugged and tugged at Bea’s sleeve.
“She’s still a dancer,” Bea said, slurring her words, tapping her forehead. “She’s still Black Cat Maeve.”
“Mum, how come you’re so sleepy?” Charade jiggled in the bus seat, strangely excited, strangely frightened. “What about the Sleeping Beauty, Mum? What did she used to be?”
But Bea stared at the Darra cement works, flickering by.
“Christ,” she said to Babs every time, the second she got off the bus. “Christ, I could do with a drink.”
3
Jacaranda Time
A letter came.
On the very day the jacarandas dropped their first purple, Bea showed it to Babs, and Babs sneezed.
“It’s the jacarandas,” she complained, her eyes streaming. “They do it to me every time.”
They were sitting in the Gardens, a ruckus of duck-feeding nearby, and three purple trumpets drifted down onto six-weeks-old Charade. The blossoms stirred, twirled, slumped like tired ballerinas, drifted off into the grass. Bea touched wood. For good measure she crossed herself, rather haphazardly and clumsily and, in fact, inaccurately; but it was a leftover habit from her dad who had died in jacaranda time (not that he knew, not in Melbourne). Nevertheless almost the first thing she remembered, one of her earliest memories of Brisbane, was jacarandas moulting all over the place and Kay’s eyes widening with shock. With gratifying shock.
There was blood and black stuff on his pillow, Bea said. It was still dribbling out.
Oh Bea! Kay whispered, a white hand over the trembling O of her mouth.
There was something Bea acknowledged to herself, though not in words, and not even in the clear-cut shape of thought.
It was something registered in the flow of quiet and disquiet in her body, it was to do with the kinds of expectation that keep a life on its cogs: the din of cicadas at night, cyclones in January, men hovering, men buggering off, milk in her breasts. And for Kay to be Kay.
Bea’s hands clenched themselves around two tufts of grass and yanked. At the tearing sound, at the sharp smell of earth, she let her forehead butt against the ground. Bugger Kay! But her fingers relaxed and she smiled in spite of herself.
Bugger Kay.
Babs sneezed again, and another small cyclone of flowers came down. Bloody hell, she grumbled, batting at them with a straw hat, taking swipes, swatting the air, lungeing into space.
“Ahh! careful!” Bea had entered that phase where the world was either me-and-the-babies or not me-and-the-babies, and where everything that was not me-and-the-babies was fraught with possible harm. She fussed. She bent over Charade, fanning off the December heat — not that anything helped. Down in the grass, however, if she burrowed down where the sprinklers had been, it was soft and cool; well, cooler; and now she was sorry she’d left Siddie in Tamborine. She touched wood again,
thinking of Julie, the Wentworth’s thirteen-year-old daughter
and the local child-minder. Whatever is going to happen, happens; that’s the sensible thing to believe. But still. Sometimes, when beer glasses and counters were being washed at McGillivray’s, there’d be a splintering sound; things could slip through Julie’s hands. She should have brought Siddie with her. She shouldn’t have brought Charade. She shouldn’t have come.
Ah, stuff it. Take the bull by the horns was her dad’s advice. Dig in your heels. So. She picked up one of the jacaranda trumpets and put it in Charade’s hand. The fingers closed around the flower and around her own finger like tiny grappling hooks. God, she thought, feeling faint, dizzy, as the great wave came swooping up, something inside pleating itself into surf, a swoon warning.
Did you ever get used to it?
Wanting to eat them, wanting to die for them, wanting to wrap them up in silk and tuck them somewhere inside your own body to keep them from harm?
She put her face down close, panic kicking at her, till she felt Charade’s wisp of breath on her cheek.
“Don’t,” Babs advised. “She’ll get a rash. The jacaranda, I mean, get it off her.” She sneezed again. “I can’t read this, my eyes are too puffy.”
“It’s from Kay,” Bea said. “Came two weeks ago.”
“Jeez,” Babs sniffled. “Kay.” She sneezed again. “She makes me nervous, eggheads always do. She as churchly as ever?”
“I dunno.” Bea had never seen the university. No one spoke English there, or not English you could understand, and when Kay had begged: Oh c’mon Bea, please, I want to show it to you, Bea had refused. “I’ll tell you one thing,” she had said to Kay. “You ever start talking to me with a plum in your mouth like those stuck-up uni sheilas, you can kiss my arse.” And Kay, reverting to the ways of the buttercup patch, had stuck out her tongue and wiggled her fingers from her ears. Me? she’d said. You gotta be joking, Bea.
“I dunno,” Bea sighed. “She’s different.” Not churchly, not such a ninny anymore. “Not stuck-up different. But different.” And perhaps what Bea meant was that Kay wasn’t keeping to the rules, not playing the proper role of Kay, not gasping with awe, not putting shocked hand to mouth.
“Haven’t seen her since before you left the Duke, when you were big as a bus with Siddie,” Babs said. “Where’s she been?”
“Teaching up north. Near Cairns. She’s home for Christmas.”
“Yeah?” Babs dabbed at her eyes. “You gonna see her?”
“Yeah.”
“She know about Charade?”
“Not yet.” Bea rolled over onto her back and looked up through purple at the sky. “Me and Kay,” she said. “I reckon we both wanted the same thing for our twenty-first. I reckon both of us got it.”
“Listen, Bea, I gotta get away from these bloody jacarandas.” Babs couldn’t stop sneezing. “So whad’ja both get?”
“Dumb question.”
Babs peered at Bea through watery eyes, frowning. “You mean Nicholas?”
“Yeah.”
“Serves you both bloody well right then.”
Twenty-one. Almost a year ago now, and Mick Donovan is hanging over her kitchen table, there’s a bellbird outside the window, shrike thrush get their noisy tuppence-worth in, summer hangs heavy, the mountain is wet and green. The 26th of January 1963, Australia Day, and the twenty-first birthday of Bea Ryan. Over the babbling of Siddie — fenced in on the verandah with cushions and tea chests — she is listening for every truck, every car, every sound of tyres on the dirt road.
“Listen, Bea,” Mick Donovan is saying. “Say the word and I’ll walk out on Maureen tomorrow. Swear to God. Don’t matter a bit to me about little Siddie.” He goes to the verandah to prove a point, hoists the baby onto his shoulders. “Bonzer nipper,” he says, flexing fatherhood muscles, showing them off. “I’ll take him on any day.” Meaning: provided you are part of
the deal.
“Listen,” he says. “Ya can’t work as a barmaid all your life. It’s not right.” He is offering, in shorthand, the security of runaway husband and pig farmer.
Bea hears a crunch of tyres from beyond the mango trees, outside McGillivray’s, and goes still.
“Struth,” Mick Donovan says, on the prongs of exasperation and desire. “You listening to me, Bea Ryan? Who you waiting for?”
“No one. Just some people coming up for my party. Brisbane people.”
“A bloke?” he growls.
“Jesus.” It annoys her, anyone keeping tabs. “You think I’m the kind who only knows blokes? I got a whole busload of women coming, fr’all you know. My best friend Babs from the Duke of Wellington for starters. And my sister Kay for another.” (Liar, liar. Bea bites her lip. She has always had a king-sized scorn for liars, yellowbellies, people with gravel rash chests, the ones who chicken out. She can take her licks.) “Yeah,” she says, hands on her hips, feet apart. “Could be a bloke.
So what?”
Is it her fault tha
t Kay is off in north Queensland teaching, getting rich, meeting fancy schoolteacher blokes? Is it her fault if Babs can’t come? (Of course Babs couldn’t, a new baby, a new man, it would have been a waste of time to invite her.) A certain kind of smile — though she tries to hide it — quirks up the corners of Bea’s mouth.
Mick Donovan scowls and shuffles.
(At McGillivray’s, bets are being made.)
“What I’m telling ya, Bea … say the word, and it’s done. I’ll stick around, starting tonight.”
But her eyes are out there where the bougainvillea is, she might be a dragonfly, transfixed, hearing the footsteps of spider legs on the funnel web. A car door slams. Is it …?
Ignition. Tyres again. Someone driving away.
Bea’s body goes slack. Not yet then, but he’ll come, she knows the kind of bait he can’t resist. She has written a letter. She imagines how he will read it, smile at it, preserve it and how it will be, say, like finding a horse that can sing, but not just any old singing horse, a Baching horse. She laughs. It had taken him half of one afternoon at the Duke to explain that joke, but he had thought it worth the trouble; and it is this, perhaps, this lunatic exotic intellectual tenderness that holds her. Anyway, he will have to come to deliver his witty lines, he’s addicted to her pleasure in them; she knows this; he doesn’t know she knows. He will spin long strings of sound that will please her as much as — and make no more sense than — noisy pitta birds fossicking through leaves.
“Bloody hell,” Mick Donovan fumes. “Wake up Australia. What I’m tellin’ ya … and I’m deadly serious, Bea …” A crinkled vein ticks at his temple. “Maureen’s expecting again, you don’t seem to — which means I’m damned to hell, but it don’t make a bloody …” He is painting broad peacock-blue strokes, he is sloshing colour all over the mountain, he is painting the lurid edge of risk. “Bloody hell, Bea, I got young Brian’s eight years old and me wife’s expecting, and here I’m offerin’ ya —”
Mildy startled, Bea turns from the window. “What?” she asks. “Sorry, Mick, I wasn’t listening. Whad’ja say?”
Charades Page 27
