Goose Girl

by Joy Dettman

  Sally was three weeks away from fourteen, and fourteen year olds weren’t supposed to stay in flats by themselves, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to be dragged off to another emergency care place. She’d take off for Melbourne, live on the streets, if they tried to drag her away again.

  Mrs Jenner gave her a really good dinner that first night, vegetables and meat and gravy. Sally felt a bit bad when she told her that she’d telephoned her grandmother and she’d be coming down from Melbourne tomorrow. Mrs Jenner looked at her a bit funny. She probably already knew Mummy’s life history, but she didn’t say anything, except, ‘Would you like some apple pie and cream, dear?’

  Anyhow, who did everyone think had been looking after Mummy since Daddy died? And as sure as hell, it would be a damn sight easier just looking after herself and not having to dodge flying port bottles.

  She stayed away from Mrs Jenner after that, but she went to school every day. She cleaned up the flat, put the rubbish out on Wednesday, watered the garden. It was okay too – until Mrs Jenner contacted the school. Then everyone got into the act.

  Mrs Bertram, who taught art and sewing, asked Sally if she’d like to go to her place for dinner that night. She and her son had a farm.

  Sally said, ‘I’m okay. My grandmother is coming tomorrow. She got held up, but she’s definitely coming tomorrow.’

  But Mrs Bertram knew from the school records that Sally only had Mrs Jenner’s name as the emergency number to ring. She also knew Sally had holes in her shoes and that she’d had no school lunch for a week, and she probably knew that she’d nicked a chocolate bar from the canteen. Karen Matthews had seen her do it and Karen was a lanky goody-goody dobber dork.

  ‘Come out for dinner and have a look at us. You might decide you’d like to stay for a few days, Sally,’ Mrs Bertram said.

  So she went. Just for dinner, though, because she was massively hungry and any port in a storm.

  Mrs Bertram’s son, Ross, looked like a man. Sally was wary of him. But he wasn’t really a man, just a giant-sized eighteen year old, and already a footballer. He ate heaps that first night and she couldn’t help but stare at his plate, which he kept on filling up. Then they had farm cream in a sponge cake and he tried to make Sally eat as many pieces as he did. She ate three pieces. All she’d had since that first night was cereal for breakfast and pancakes for dinner and a couple of chocolate bars. The fridge and her mother’s purse were empty.

  ‘Stay the night, and we’ll talk about it tomorrow,’ Mrs Bertram said.

  So Sally stayed in the sleep-out bedroom and Mrs Bertram found her a T-shirt for a nightie, and there was porridge and thick cream for breakfast and so much toast and homemade jam and milk from a cow, and they were so sort of laid-back friendly that she told Mrs Bertram that she’d lied about her grandmother.

  ‘She died when I was about three, so unless she does a Jesus and rises from the grave she won’t be coming to look after me. Right?’

  Mrs Bertram tried not to laugh. Ross started it, then Mrs Bertram joined in and they bellowed with laughter. Sally just sat there, wanting to laugh but refusing to give them the satisfaction. Stickybeaking busybodies. She’d known too many of their type, but the food was good and there was acres of room at the farm. She wouldn’t have to see too much of them except at meal times.

  The only trouble with that was that they weren’t really the true do-gooder types. Mrs Bertram was big and fat, a bit like Raelene’s mother, but a reddish blonde with a huge face and a snub nose. Ross was the living image of her except his hair was only short blond spikes about half a centimetre long. And also, they knew about losing people, because when Mrs Bertram drove Sally to the flat to pick up some clothes, she said how Ross had lost his father when he was twelve.

  Sally showed her the photograph of Daddy, which was face-down on the cabinet. ‘He died when I was eight.’

  ‘You don’t look like him. Do you look like your mum?’

  ‘Yeah, worse luck. I’m going to have my face fixed when I stop growing.’ She offered the second photograph. ‘That’s Shane and Robby and Nicky. They’re dead too. Shane looked like Daddy. So Mummy says. I don’t remember any of them.’

  ‘You poor little girl,’ Mrs Bertram said, and she kissed Sally’s cheek.

  Sally drew back, all hot and embarrassed. But Mrs Bertram put her arms right around her and she gave her one of those soft squishy hugs like Raelene’s mother used to give, and she kissed her again.

  It was like . . . like . . . like deep-sigh, little-kid safe, like being held in Daddy’s arms and him making the hurt all better. Sally’s thumb went to her mouth and tried to get in. But she snatched it away, then stepped away. Fast. It wouldn’t last. If you didn’t have anything, then no-one could take it away from you, and the taking away was worse than the not having and she wasn’t going to let anyone take anything else away from her. Mrs Bertram would pack her off soon to someplace, or they’d let Mummy out and she’d start packing the ornaments.

  But she was still in the nuthouse when Sally had her fourteenth birthday. No-one knew it was her birthday and she didn’t tell them, but that night she decided to give herself a present and she went to Davis’s pharmacy with Mrs Bertram after school and got herself a bottle of nail polish, which she palmed then slipped into her uniform pocket. That night she painted her nails black, because she felt black.

  ‘You’ve got beautifully shaped nails,’ Mrs Bertram said. ‘I always wanted to have beautiful nails.’ She picked up the bottle of polish and looked at it, then she took five dollars from her purse. ‘If I were you, Sally love, I’d give that to Mrs Davis tomorrow, and I’d tell her I was very sorry.’

  ‘I’m not sorry, am I?’ Sally put the money in her pocket and gave her nails another careful coat of varnish.

  ‘That’s your decision, my love.’ Mrs Bertram placed a ten-dollar note on the table, and Sally wouldn’t look at it. ‘It’s yours. Put it in your pocket.’

  ‘I don’t want it, and I don’t want your pity either. And you don’t know anything about me.’ She took the five-dollar note out of her pocket and tossed it to the floor.

  ‘I know that you’re a frightened and angry little girl.’

  ‘Who cares?’

  ‘I care.’ She didn’t say anything else, just started cooking dinner. Then Ross came in and he saw the ten dollars on the table and the crumpled five-dollar note at his feet and he started talking about the bull and Sally sat there, tears trickling. And when they still wouldn’t look at her, she swiped the ten-dollar note to the floor too.

  They just kept on talking about bulls and heifers and ignoring the money, just walking over it, so Sally stood up and yelled, ‘It’s my fucking birthday today,’ and she ran into the sleep-out and wouldn’t come out for dinner. They didn’t care that she was starving either. She could hear them scraping their plates and talking, probably laughing about her starving.

  The next morning she thought they’d pack her off somewhere, but it was like nothing had happened.

  ‘Oh, Sally love, I was just thinking. Would you like to invite a couple of your friends out for a barbecue and a sleep-over on Saturday night?’

  ‘I don’t need your . . . a party.’

  ‘I like parties. But it’s up to you.’

  ‘No-one would come, anyway.’

  ‘They certainly won’t come if you don’t ask them,’ Mrs Bertram said.

  ‘Ask who?’

  ‘Some of the girls in your class.’

  So, just to be rotten, Sally asked all the girls in Year Seven, and nearly all of them said yes, and it seemed like a good joke too, but by the end of the day it had started to feel like a bad joke, and she got too scared to tell Mrs Bertram.

  She told her at the dinner table and she waited for her to scream or something, but all she said was, ‘Did you tell them to bring their sleeping bags?’

  On the Saturday morning Ross found an old tent full of dust and spiders and Sally helped him put it up in the back yard, and
by six o’clock no-one was there. She knew they wouldn’t come, that they’d been making fun of her.

  Then suddenly the cars started driving up, and everyone brought sleeping bags and presents and they played games and ate heaps and drank bottles of Coke and when Ross and Mrs Bertram went to bed the girls talked about boys for half the night, and then Deb Davis said she was having a party the next weekend and could Sally come.

  That night Sally fell in love with Mrs Bertram and she prayed her first prayer in five years. Please, God. Let me stay with her forever. And please, God, let me have Ross for a brother forever, amen.

  He was a brilliant football player. She hadn’t known a thing about football before the Bertrams, but most Saturdays she and Mrs Bertram drove to Melbourne to watch him play, and to call in on Mummy – if she was receiving visitors.

  All the way to Melbourne Mrs Bertram talked and asked questions. Sally told a bit about the crash and how, if the window had been open, Shane could have got out. And how she should have found a bit of wood or something and broken the window.

  ‘You were an eight-year-old baby, my love. There was nothing you could have done.’

  There was nothing you could have done. Words offered like a lake full of clean, warm water, and she dived deep into them, and it put out the fire dream. Just like that.

  The next Saturday when Mrs Bertram was driving to Melbourne, Sally wound up the car window, which was good because it was winter and the rain had been blowing in. She still held tight to her seatbelt, her hands ready to open it, and she still watched the road for kangaroos, she watched the trucks and trams in the city, but when they got to the football she learnt to yell as loud as Mrs Bertram, ‘Come on, Ross. Kick it, Ross.’

  The yelling was good, too. It let out all of the hard old hurting, like all the years of locked-in screaming had found a safe way to come out.

  Lakeside had been invented by God, and he put the Bertrams there, just for Sally, but so she wouldn’t start thinking the town was actually heaven, he invented Sleimans.

  They owned about half the land beside the lake and when one got married they built another mansion. It looked like an exclusive holiday resort with a tennis court, a swimming pool and a razor-wire fence. And one Sleiman was Mummy’s doctor.

  He met them at the Melbourne hospital one Saturday and he said Mummy could go home next week, and Sally didn’t want her to go home. That was being honest, like Mrs Bertram said that people should always be honest. Not that she’d want to hear that much honesty. But no more farm, no more laughter?

  Please, God, I don’t want to play watchdog again, be the local garbage again. Please, God, don’t make me go back to Mummy and I won’t nick things from the shops ever. Please, God, don’t make me leave Mrs Bertram.

  Prayers didn’t work; she gave up religion the day they let Mummy out, and it was back to purple carpet and Grandma’s dining room suite and two new packets of pills.

  But she didn’t lose Ross and Mrs Bertram so she only nicked things from the shop people she didn’t like, not from the ones where the Bertrams did their shopping.

  Mrs Bertram sort of adopted Mummy, and Sally watched how she treated her. She discovered that if she treated Mummy exactly like Mrs Bertram did, Mummy thrived on it. Sally gave her Bertram hugs, and patted her back when she cried. And when she did the old killed ’em song and dance routine, Sally didn’t scream, she said Bertram things like: ‘Gee your hair looks nice when it’s first washed, Mummy.’ Or, ‘I love the colour of that jumper on you.’

  It worked too. It worked well for the longest time. For two whole years, life was almost good.

  It wasn’t real, though. Sally still wanted to scream that she was sick of living with a crazy nutcase. Deep inside she still planned to pack her bags and get on a bus, go to Melbourne and stow away on a plane and get as far away from Mummy as a plane could take her. Then get her face fixed.

  She was the image of Mummy. Everyone said it. Her hands, feet and hair were like Mummy’s, even her fingernails, so how could the inside of her head be any different? And keeping all the mad and bad and the angry inside was like Mrs Bertram’s pressure cooker when the steam hole got blocked with rice. The whole thing could blow.

  Sally hated the inside of her head; she could hide it from Mrs Bertram and Ross, but she couldn’t hide it from herself. Sometimes the pressure of un-screamed words got so bad that the only way she could hold the scream in was to hide in her room, crawl under her old bed and pull a blanket over her head. Hide there in the dark and suck her thumb, just as she had when she and Mummy had hidden beneath the bed when the man came knocking on the door.

  She was hiding there one day when Mummy went off her lid again, and all because Sally wanted to go on a school camp for two nights. Just two lousy nights. Mummy wouldn’t sign the papers, even though Mrs Bertram said she could stay those two nights at the farm so she wouldn’t be alone.

  No way. That wasn’t what she wanted and one way or another Mummy always got what she wanted. Always had. Always would. She popped half a packet of pills and ended up in the psychiatric hospital again and Sally got to go back to Mrs Bertram and Ross.

  Hallelujah! Oh, Hallelujah!

  She was sixteen and a bit, and the football season was almost over so Ross had to go to a posh dinner in Melbourne. First he wasn’t going because he didn’t have a suit, and then he was going. He’d hire a suit. Not worth buying one. But he’d feel a fool going by himself when he’d be sitting at a table with all the other players and their girlfriends, so he wasn’t going after all. Then he didn’t know what he wanted. He was standing there, rubbing his mouth and looking at Sally.

  ‘For goodness sake, Ross. Ask her.’

  ‘No’, he said. ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘Ask her, you great big galoot. She’s a young lady now.’

  Ross blushed and rubbed his mouth. Sally was looking at him, hoping they were talking about what she thought they were talking about.

  ‘Would you like to go to the footy dinner with him, Sally love?’ Mrs Bertram said.

  Radical. Like wow! She didn’t get to go to the school camp but she was going out to a big footy dinner in Melbourne. She ran at Ross and bear hugged him, then she raced outside to the back garden and she screamed, ‘Yippee!’ And the dogs all barked yippee too.

  Mrs Bertram made her an after-five dress. It was a dusty peach pink. ‘Perfect for a girl just bursting out into bloom,’ she said. ‘And what a bloomer you are going to be, my Sally De Rooze with those big navy-blue eyes. They’re like the lake in spring. Men are going to drown in those eyes before you’re much older.’

  Tiny Sally in peach pink. Big Ross, popping out of his hired suit. So proud, so protective of his date.

  What a pair.

  What an incongruous pair.

  Sunsets and Sex

  1988–1998

  It took two years for Ross to get up the nerve to kiss her. It took Mrs Bertram’s funeral. That big, beautiful decision-maker, matchmaker, dressmaker, life-remaker, was dead in the top paddock with a tonne of tractor on her when Ross came home from football training one cold winter night.

  Like Jaws. Like, just when you think it’s safe to get back in the water.

  Like . . . like black, wipe-out desolation.

  Emptiness.

  And bloody Mummy acting up, screaming out for attention as if she was the one who had lost everything. She’d lost her little yellow taxi and its patient driver. That’s all she’d lost. She’d lost two willing ears. That’s all she’d lost.

  Ross had lost everything. But there he was working and walking around, white as a ghost and shaking, his mouth, his eyes, his hands; just shaking and doing what had to be done. Driving sheep, penning steers. Just doing and shaking.

  And –

  God! God! God! It wasn’t fair.

  Sally wanted to run away. Head for the hills and keep on running to some place where there was magic and nobody ever died. And she could now. She’d been working at the superm
arket for eighteen months and saving hard. She had eight hundred dollars in the bank. That would be enough to run on.

  Couldn’t run, though. Couldn’t leave Ross to get through the funeral alone. She’d wait for a week, then pack a bag and run, just go and never, never, never look back.

  Half of Lakeside was at the funeral. People from the school, schoolkids forming a guard of honour. Even old Mrs Sleiman and her daughters-in-law were there.

  Sally sat with Ross in the front pew. She was still crying buckets of tears, couldn’t make them stop. Ross wasn’t crying, though his big hands were shaking so hard today she thought they’d shake off. And she couldn’t stand watching them, so she took them in her own hands and held them tight. After that he wouldn’t let her hand go, like he’d found something to hang on to. Then at the cemetery, he asked her to go home with him, help him clean out his mother’s room. That’s what he and his mother had done when his father died, so he had to do it for his mother.

  ‘That’s what she would have wanted us to do,’ he said. ‘She always said that life was for the living. That’s what she said when Dad died. He wouldn’t have wanted us to crawl into the coffin with him, she said when he died.’ He kept talking, talking, afraid that if he ever stopped talking, he’d howl.

  Sally left Mummy at home, going bananas, and she went with Ross to the farm where she cried more tears, cried for all of the things Mrs Bertram had taught her, and for all the things she’d had no time to teach. She’d learnt to cook in her kitchen, but she still couldn’t make the light fairy sponges. She’d helped Mrs Bertram crochet a bedspread during long winter nights beside the open fire, but she’d never learnt to follow a knitting pattern. She’d learnt to hand-stitch hems, but not how to use a sewing machine.

  What had she learnt from Mummy? Just fear and tears and guilt and how to pack china, squash cockroaches and clean up mouse dirt. And cry.

  Standing at Mrs Bertram’s bedroom window, wiping her eyes, she was looking at the land and at the last sunset. Mrs Bertram had loved the sunsets. Often she’d called Sally and Ross to this window to watch the sun setting behind the distant hills. And God must have known how Mrs Bertram loved his sunsets because he’d painted a super special red one for her tonight. It was like he had the world’s heart bleeding for her, and there was this huge drop of red-hot metal, perched on a hill.