The Last Summer of Ada Bloom

by Martine Murray

  Her voice was what had first drawn him to her; it was slow and she left sentences hanging. She made allusions to sex. She flirted with him and laughed or made throaty noises of appreciation. They had met on many ‘family occasions’, at school fetes, sports days, and then every now and then at the bottle shop, where she had confessed to him that whisky made her horny. There had been a dinner at her house, with her husband Joe. She had worn a silk shirt, undone enough to reveal a significant cleavage, and a short skirt, even though her thighs were large. She had licked her fingers, drunk too much, put on a fake moustache and posed for photos. Then there were the times when she was visiting Martha, caressing the teacup, leaning over the kitchen bench with her breasts. Finally, she had rung him at work. She drawled like Elizabeth Taylor. She wanted to come in and discuss her will. He felt her drawing him in, pulling him closer. And it excited him. He felt her desire for him in her voice, in the risks she took, the way she would return his gaze, say something coarse or something sweet. Vulgarities and tendernesses issued from her with the same sort of carnal intent.

  ‘Tell me, Mike, what were you like as a child? I bet you were a scamp?’ Her voice was syrupy with suggestion.

  The truth was, he hadn’t been a scamp at all. Until now he’d been a well-behaved battler who had wanted to win from the moment he knew what winning was. And as he’d grown up in a country town, which still retained its gold-rush grandeur, he’d got a whiff of what winning was early on. The shine of it had caught at his soul. From their modest rented weatherboard home, his father left each morning to drive trams, and his mother cleaned houses and played bingo on the weekend. He and his brother had their weekly bath warmed by the old chip heater and spent afternoons aimlessly kicking a football on the vacant block. In winter they went to bed early to escape the cold and listened to the crackle of the radio serial, that faraway voice that whispered the stories of elsewhere, awakening in him the possibility of other possibilities. He was startled out of this somnolence by the much-touted arrival of the Ashman’s television set, which came in time for all the neighbours to crowd in and watch the Melbourne Olympics. Sometimes, after that, they went to the Ashman’s at 6.30 to watch The Lone Ranger. The television, with its Olympians and lone rangers, spurred Mike’s vague ambitions, which later were realised in the singular glories he achieved on the football field.

  Obviously Susie was picturing a young rogue who ran barefoot through the paddocks. And Mike knew that when he called himself a country boy, it wasn’t only to excuse any lack of urban sophistication, but also to lend him a rugged hue that didn’t belong to him. He’d never sat on his father’s knee in the tractor; he’d never milked a cow or mended a fence or shot and skinned a rabbit. At Christmas when his dad brought home a chicken and they watched him chop its head off, Mike experienced a very unmanly sort of horror, which he tried not to show, because it didn’t do to be a girl about these things. Likewise, he didn’t cry when he was strapped to the dentist’s chair and choked with chloroform. Whatever courage he had he’d forced upon himself; it hadn’t come naturally. His adolescence took place mostly on sporting ovals and riding around in the town centre checking out girls.

  The enviable pleasures the city offered were carefully stirred into Mike’s boyish soul by Arnold Buch. Arnold’s father was a Jewish barrister and, according to Arnold, a descendant of the Hungarian oligarchy. The family had left Hungary during the Soviet occupation. Arnold, whose pale, fine face was crowned with glossy dark curls, did in fact have a regal manner. Mike could still picture him sitting on the tram like a dark bird, with ankles flashing bottle-green socks, and a wry smile, which usually foretold a witty comment about whoever or whatever had just caught his eye. It was a mystery to Mike why he had been chosen by Arnold. Though this bestowed on him a sense of superiority, it made him all the more aware of the lowliness of his origins. If it weren’t for his athleticism, and the moments of transcendence it afforded him, he wouldn’t have had the heart to strive for more. He had tasted glory, and it had awakened a hunger. He began to look for something bigger. Then along came Arnold—delicately hewn, glowing and sardonic. His elegance was bold and his aim precise. Arnold had no interest in sport beyond that of making incisive and sometimes cruel comments on the strange culture that he, like an exotic plant in the wrong landscape, had found himself in. But he had an interest in Mike. Before school finished, Arnold had devised a plan for them to flee. Mike had used the anticipation of this to quell the usual gnawing of youth, so that when he launched his life, it would be with the force of a stone released from its catapult. And when he went, he took with him not a glimmer of canny knowledge or intention—just hunger, guts, his good looks and his best mate Arnold Buch.

  Three years later he returned with Martha.

  The instant of meeting her swerved his whole life in a direction he hadn’t been planning to take.

  Mike wouldn’t tell Susie any of this. Men should make their own plans. And he wouldn’t speak of Arnold. Every time his mind arrived at Arnold Buch, it reared up, like a horse coming across a snake.

  ‘Yeah, I was a bit of a scamp,’ he lied.

  Mike wasn’t ready to give Susie Layton up. Not yet. But now Tilly had threatened everything. He was annoyed at her for this. He wasn’t a man to drag his thoughts into the heart of things. He rarely wondered what other people might feel. It wasn’t his business—just as this wasn’t Tilly’s. As for Susie’s husband, he and Joe weren’t proper mates—they hadn’t played footy together; they just knew each other the way anyone who had been living here long enough did. It would be awkward were Joe to find out. He was a decent sort of bloke, well liked—Mike had nothing against him. But what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Who was Tilly to throw that high-pitched moral outrage at him? How could she chastise him as if she knew better than him, when she was too young to understand anything of marriage? She didn’t know what it was like to be married to Martha. No one did. His anger started again. He turned away from Martha and closed his eyes.

  But what if Martha did find out? He hadn’t really thought about this possibility until Tilly had stood there saying she knew. What would Martha do if Tilly told her? He didn’t love Susie. He loved having sex with her. And did he even love that? It was more the whole affair that he loved, not as much for the physical pleasure it gave him, as for the discovery of the erotic tension it had erupted from and gave life to. The affair with Susie Layton had thrown his life back into the headiness of his youth. It had unstitched the seams that had enclosed him within a home, a job, a family. It had undone the package that he’d become and pulled him off the conveyer belt towards the looming inevitability of old age. Susie had done that as soon as she whispered in his ear a word that Martha would never have used. He hadn’t even known that a word could stir him up as it did—he hadn’t known that this dirtiness could be thrilling. It had opened up in him a gaping hunger; suddenly the scent of something lay before him. His life was now rushing into an alluring darkness. Distracting thoughts overcame him at work. He drove like a young man, already stirred up, to orange brick motels in the afternoon. It was sordid, alive, full of possibility and danger. Yet, he didn’t want to leave Martha. It would never occur to him to not be with Martha, and if she left him, what would he do? The affair could not exist without Martha.

  She had reached over and turned off the lamp. In the dark he could hear her breath and feel the warmth of her body. She lay apart from him, but his hand grazed hers and she didn’t move it away. There was the familiar smell of her in the haze of heat that enclosed them. Or was it the interwoven smell of them, the two of them together? This was what he had lived within for twenty years. It was placid now, familiar. And yet, Martha was still beautiful to him. He still watched her as she dressed in the morning. She always got up before him. Sometimes he ignored the whole scene; sometimes he pretended he was asleep. Sometimes it saddened him to watch her, it was better to dream.

  On occasions Martha made an effort. She wore earrings, perfu
med her wrists and made up her eyes. She didn’t do it to please him; she did it to show him. She danced in the kitchen if the right song came on and although she didn’t dance well, or because she didn’t dance with any style, he was reminded with a pang, of his attraction to her. In her graceless eruption of energy, there was a wild untethered girl. He’d imagined she would abandon herself, that together they would be animals in life. It had never happened. Martha still had a suggestive look about her sometimes, and she stomped her hoof as if she knew it, but she never gave in to the gallop. Instead she became stiff and clever. These days, if she drew his attention, it was only so she could throw it away again, or so it seemed to him.

  And yet sometimes she crawled into his arms. When she was beaten. When she was tired or sad or defeated by her own frustrations. When she had argued with the school that art classes should not be removed from the curriculum with the funding cuts and failed. When she had cooked soup for a sick friend and dropped the whole pot. Then she came inside and crawled into his arms.

  Mike wrapped his hand around hers. He encircled her small wrist; he had always loved her wrists.

  14

  Thunder cracked open the sky, but only a few fat drops of rain splattered on the tin roof. PJ woke Ada. He always did when there was a storm. He climbed onto her bed and shivered, pawing her and shuffling closer every time the thunder rolled. Ada waited for the floods of rain, but they never came. The sky withheld. She could feel it—as if the sky folded its great arms across itself. Only that sliver of breeze escaped and swayed the cardboard fish she had hung in the window. Had the terrible doom already happened? Was the affair, as she now called it, since that was what Tilly had called it, the terrible doom? Since the mechanics of sex had been explained to her, Ada had been filled with dread for her future with boys, and now that sex had been presented, by Mrs Layton and her father, with a close-up view, Ada thought of it as an urgent and frightening activity. Ada felt about it as she would feel about having an organ removed in an operation in a hospital.

  But it was how you had babies.

  Did that mean Mrs Layton would now have a baby? Ada would have to ask Tilly this, even though Tilly had told her not to think about it anymore. Because the baby would be related to Ada, and Ada had always wanted a younger sister. With these thoughts, Ada drifted back to sleep.

  When she woke in the morning, and while Tilly and the others still slept, she ran outside with PJ and checked for signs of life in the cherry tree after the few fat drops of rain and the new coolness in the air. The sky was calm and grey, and the air smelt of grass and peppercorn. PJ almost galloped with relief. She broke a twig on the tree, but it still snapped, as brittle and grey as before. Not one blade of grass had sprung back up. Even so, there was a new feeling in the air, and it would take time for the world to know it and respond. Ada stared straight back at the dim blaze of sun to let it know that it hadn’t overpowered everything. Then she went to the coop to see if George and the chickens were pleased and would share her satisfaction. Esmeralda was in the nesting box. Peachie and Bolshie bustled at her legs and the Famous Friends and the Outsider, skittish as always, dashed straight past her. She gave them some clean water and threw some seed. Then she crept under the trampoline and lay still, closing her eyes and letting the cool seep into her so that she could keep it.

  A fresh, overturned, beginning feeling filled the house and her mother was happy. Their father even took them all to dinner at the Railway Hotel. Martha wore the Arnold Buch dress, which Ada touched to check how soft it was. Ben drank beer with Mike and played pool with some older boys. Ada had cheesecake for dessert. Only Tilly was quiet and withdrawn, and Mike tried to draw her out by giving her horse bites on her leg, and when this didn’t work, by making jokes about how he didn’t understand women’s moods, and Tilly forced a smile in return, which seemed to make her even quieter. She hardly ate her food. Martha said Tilly was ungrateful and ruining everyone else’s good time. It was true that Tilly was ruining the night by being the only one not to have a good time, but though Ada knew what Tilly’s reason was, Tilly had promised that nothing would change, and Ada was doing her best to make sure that nothing did. If she let the affair stop her enjoying her cheesecake, then the affair would have won.

  But deep down this disquiet of Tilly’s ruffled Ada’s faith in the calm, and for a while she resented Tilly for it. She wanted to believe that the thing that was going to break had broken and everything else would be fine, but Tilly had not returned to normal. And then two things happened in that last week of the holidays that turned events towards the next hour of their lives. Only it was Tilly’s and Ben’s lives, not hers, and it compounded for her the sense that she was going to be left behind.

  Ben was caught smoking a bong in his bedroom with Jimmy Grigson. Ada ran outside to see the bong: it was a satisfyingly ugly and threatening object that had all the trappings of criminal activity, having been produced behind backs, with conniving, but also with know-how. It was made of old transparent hose that had yellowed and was folded over at the top. It had a stand made of a coat hanger and other smaller scientific bits, which Ada couldn’t make out properly as Martha held it away from her (it ponged) and carried it directly to the outside bin. What Ben supplied to the making of the bong and the procuring of the marijuana, Ada wasn’t told, even though she did ask, but she suspected that it was considerable because of the fuss it seemed to cause. Tilly was always cross about Ben having his own bedroom, separate from the house. Ben got the room, but Tilly was the oldest. Martha had said it was because of Ada, who everyone knew, still crept into Tilly’s bed. Fortunately for Ada, Tilly didn’t believe this was the reason.

  ‘It’s just because Ben is the favourite,’ she said to Ada on the side, because no one could accuse their mother of any wrongdoing or injustice without retribution. Their mother had a bad temper.

  There was talk now about whether Ben could be trusted to have the outside room, and for a dreadful moment Ada feared Tilly would be given the room after all. But instead Ben was put on probation. If he did it again, he would be returned to the house and grounded for a month. But it was clear to Ada that even though their parents had desperately thrown threats at him, Ben would still slide out from under them, wriggle free and pad slyly away, hands in pockets, looking for the next thing. Martha must have felt this too, because she became irritable and snappy again and stayed in bed with a migraine for a whole day and night.

  The other thing that happened was that Tilly received a gift. It came from Mr Layton. She and Ada had gone to the Layton’s together. Tilly wanted to go alone, but when she told their mother she was going to Alice’s house, Martha said, ‘Well at least take Ada with you. I’ve got a headache.’ Tilly complained, and Ada did a quick calculation of other options. She was still in her huff with Louis and she had decided he was too young and cowardly to play with and the whole Maguire family, who were the neighbours on the other side, had gone to the beach for the weekend. But she didn’t want to go to Toby Layton’s, because she didn’t really know him very well and she wasn’t sure how to play with him since she didn’t like games such as football or cowboys. But what was worse was that she was now afraid of Mrs Layton. She was embarrassed that she had seen Mrs Layton in the nude and that her own father had touched Mrs Layton’s bare bosoms. She didn’t know if she could hide that sort of embarrassment. Tilly told her not to say anything to Toby Layton about it, but Ada couldn’t trust herself not to tell. She had no intention of playing with boys anyway. On the other hand, Alice and Tilly didn’t play anymore. They just talked, and Ada knew they would want to talk on their own. She was exactly the wrong age for everything: too young to listen in and too old to play with boys just in case they thought of sex. Also, she knew things that Toby Layton wouldn’t know. She knew for example, what a bong looked like. She knew all the endangered Australian animals, she knew where there was a windmill and a deep hole, and now she also knew about sex.

  Alice lived on the other hill (
the town was nestled in a valley and all the nicest houses were perched on the surrounding hills), and Ada would have usually got there by walking cross-country, through the bush tracks. But Tilly went on her bike, which was quicker, so Ada reluctantly followed on hers. The sky was bright and cloudless. It was a hard ride and the brightness of things hurt Ada’s eyes. The heat seemed now so locked within the ground, the sky, the fences and trees that everything was bone silent. The air was starved of breath and the birds were dead quiet. Ada felt she might just melt too. They went along the little path that ran between the tennis courts and the creek.

  Evie was coming the other way with her little dog. Evie was old and sat in a wheelchair that went along like a little car. She wore a large white cricket hat and an orange nylon dress, which made her sweat and turn red in the face, like an umpire. Ada got off and stopped to say hello. Evie wanted to chat, of course.

  ‘Hello, Ada.’

  ‘Hi, Evie.’

  ‘It’s a hot day, isn’t it? I just went to the shops for some bacon.’

  Evie had a bowl cut and eyes as wobbly as poached eggs. Her voice was as high and as eager as a kid in a cheerful mood. Her face arranged itself with an unnatural effort into a large beaming smile. Ada sometimes felt like she was more grown up than Evie, which was why she liked talking to her. Evie was old and alone, apart from Elmer, her shaggy little dog, and she had to sit in that funny chair and couldn’t even walk. She could stand up though at home and make dinner. Ada knew this because she had asked her. But what was even worse was that Elmer had one of his eyes bitten out by a dog in a fight and then the other one got infected and had to be taken out by the vet, so now he had no eyes at all. But he still led the way, sometimes wandering off the path, and bumping into the trees, so Evie had to call him back. Elmer still wanted to be a help to Evie and Evie let him believe he was the one leading the way, because she knew that would make him feel useful. It was a fumbling back-to-front kindness, which Ada appreciated.