Dad drove our mother mad with his sad dark stories and miserable songs. She could not abide them. She wanted what was new and bright. A modern split level, a shiny car. The passion that had swept her off her feet and in to the arms of the wandering artist had dissipated in the effort to keep up appearances in a cramped bungalow with a roof that he would never get around to fixing, so that it leaked whenever it rained, the drips singing plinkety plink plinkety plink in a bucket beneath the tattoo roll of the southerly. His impracticality and his dark moods drove her mad, but his sudden cheerful optimism was as infuriating. For as quickly as the darkness fell, it could lift and be replaced by a happy impulsiveness when anything might happen.
The pony, for instance.
Our mother was sewing a party dress for Maddie. She had her mouth full of pins and Maddie was standing on the dining table, turning round and round for the hem to be done, when our father burst into the room, saying, ‘Come on, come out! I’ve something to show you!’
‘Turn,’ said Mum to Maddie, but Maddie was already off the table and running out to the back porch in stiff blue organdie. Our mother removed the pins from her mouth.
‘Well, let’s see what he’s been up to now,’ she said.
We stood on the back step. There, tethered to the clothesline, was a small black and white pony, heavy bellied and with a bristly mane and a long swishing tail.
‘What do you think of that?’ said Dad. ‘His name’s Tonto.’
‘Who does he belong to?’ said our mother.
Dad was marching toward the clothesline and untying the halter rope.
‘Isn’t he grand?’ he said, concentrating on the knot. ‘Come and say hullo.’
Maddie was already at his side. ‘Oh,’ she said, reaching up to stroke Tonto’s patchy nose. ‘Oh, he’s gorgeous!’
‘Here,’ said Dad. ‘Give him this.’ He took an apple from his pocket. He showed her how to hold her hand flat, the apple balanced on the palm, as Tonto reached over with his pink rubbery lips and took it from her.
‘Clare?’ said Dad. ‘Come and give the pony an apple.’
I approached more cautiously. Dad held my hand steady as Tonto’s huge tongue swept over my skin, scooping the apple into his mouth. His teeth were big and yellow, and creamy swirls of foamy apple drool dripped from his jaw onto the grass.
Brian dug his head into our mother’s leg.
‘Come on, Brian,’ said Dad. ‘He won’t harm you. Here, I’ll hold you.’
Tonto switched his tail and stamped one rear hoof. Maddie was stroking his neck, her face rapt.
‘No!’ said Brian as our father tried to lift him up. ‘No! No!’
‘Leave him be,’ said our mother, taking her son in her arms. ‘He’s frightened.’
‘There’s nothing to be frightened of,’ said Dad. ‘He’s quiet. He’s been ridden by dozens of kids. See, Brian. Look at Maddie. She’s not frightened.’
He hoisted Maddie onto Tonto’s back. She sat straight in a billow of blue organdie, holding her heels down by sure instinct and long practice on the oil barrel with the string bridle. ‘And Clare’s not frightened either.’
And there I was, lifted up with my bare legs spread over Tonto’s prickly hide and my arms wrapped tight round Maddie’s skinny waist. I could feel the twitch of muscles beneath Tonto’s skin, the way his body flexed as he shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He seemed enormous, and I a long way from the ground.
‘Hang on tight,’ said Dad. ‘We’ll go for a ride.’
I needed no instruction. I held on grimly as Dad clicked his tongue gee-up and led Tonto off around the garden.
‘What’s he doing in our yard?’ said Maddie. ‘Who does he belong to?’
‘Us,’ said Dad. ‘He’s ours.’
At that our mother snapped to full attention.
‘Ours?’ she said. ‘You mean you’ve bought it?’
‘I got him from a man at the races. All his children learned to ride on this one. So don’t you go worrying there. He’s as steady as a stone.’
‘How much?’ said our mother.
Our father was making sure Tonto didn’t stumble as we neared the corner of the lawn by the hen house and turned along the path by the potatoes. Tonto’s huge solid body swayed between my legs like a sofa that had decided to trundle off on its short wooden legs. I clung to Maddie.
‘His children have all outgrown him, but he kept him for company for a mare he was training. But now he’s bought another horse, so he thought Tonto was ready for a new home. And that’s us, isn’t it, girls?’
‘How much?’ said our mother.
‘Ach, nothing,’ said our father. ‘He’s that quiet you could put a baby on him.’
Brian kept his face firmly pressed against our mother’s neck.
‘How much?’ she asked.
‘I had a win,’ said Dad. ‘Twenty pound. That’s it, Maddie. Back straight. You’ve the knack of it now, a real Lacey. All the Laceys had a way with horses. You ride him like you’re a couple of princesses, so!’
Mr Powell was stringing up his peas in the orderly region beyond the garden fence. He looked up as we rode pasts.
‘Howyadoin, Clive!’ said Dad, waving grandly. ‘Eyes front, Clare. Head up, heels down …’
‘Twenty pounds!’ said our mother. ‘When I think what we could do with … When I think … !’
‘With a bridle and saddle and a cover for the winter,’ said Dad. ‘Curry comb, brushes, the lot.’
‘Can I brush him?’ said Maddie.
‘Course you can,’ said Dad. ‘He’ll need to have his tail combed and the mud rubbed from him, and you’ll need to feed him in the winter.’
‘And where are we going to keep him?’ said our mother.
Dad looked around the overgrown back lawn. ‘Here,’ he said, as if it were obvious. ‘A bit of wire to fence off the vegetables and he’ll do fine. You’re always saying you want the grass kept short. And Tonto here is your man for cutting the grass.’
Mum turned and went inside, Brian in her arms. We could hear her banging pots in the kitchen as we circled the back yard on the patchwork pony, riding round and round the clothesline like a couple of princesses.
A gingery man. A clown who, if he saw us waiting for him at the gate at five o’clock, would do tricks to entertain us, standing up on the saddle or executing a handstand on the handlebars, skinny legs waggling in the air, the way he’d learned to when he worked once upon a time for a circus in America. The same circus that had a lion who had eaten his little finger, just snapped it off like a radish at the knuckle and swallowed it down whole for a snack. (It had to be true: he had no little finger on his right hand, just a stump. It was certain proof, though we did not always believe his stories even then: not the one about coming to New Zealand on a big boat where he shovelled coal the whole way till no one could see him after night fell, he was that black. And how they nearly all came to disaster on account of a fire in the hold that started up in a cargo of toilet rolls. We didn’t believe that then, though once years later I looked up a site listing disasters and near-disasters at sea, and there was indeed a fire aboard a ship called the SS Canton en route for Sydney in 1957 that was caused by the spontaneous combustion of a load of toilet rolls. So perhaps the lion was also true.) A man with a humorous mobile face. A man given to sudden impulses.
Brian took after him, with the same elfin intensity, while Maddie took after our mother, former lady-in-waiting to the Coronation Carnival Queen. Our mother could have been a film star, our father said, and the newspaper photograph proved it. Blonde hair swept up into a French roll, full red lips smiling for the camera in pink tulle and tiara on the back of the giant swan. We examined the image closely, seeking in that vision the woman we were familiar with who was blunt cut, tight lipped and serious. The same woman in a later, less satisfactory phase.
Maddie was fair too, with a sweet rosebud mouth, though it was she who flung the fork when we were arguing as teenagers ove
r who had used up all the milk. It flew straight towards me, lodging a millimetre from my right ear in the pinex front of the cupboard behind. It hit the wood with a musical twang, like a chord on a finely tuned guitar, and hung there vibrating while I regarded my little sister with new respect. I knew at that moment without a shadow of a doubt that she could kill me — maybe accidentally, maybe with just a shred of deliberate intention — and was not to be pushed too far.
She was sweet and fair, with blue eyes and flawless skin, slender in a red bikini as she rode the current horse into the breakers then kicked him into a gallop down the beach toward All Day Bay, leaping every heap of driftwood on the way.
I was the odd one out, the dark one, with my crinkly black hair crimped like a poodle’s coat. It was common enough where my father came from, he said. Round the coast you got these throwbacks to the Spanish sailors who had come over to fight Queen Elizabeth and been wrecked in a terrible storm. I thought of him, this long-dead sailor, swimming ashore in his big velvet rompers while his galleon smashed to splinters on the jagged rocks, its proud sails ripped to ribbons. I’d fight to drag the comb through my curly hair and curse this ancestor stumbling ashore, his bare feet bleeding, but blessed after all with a degree of luck, for he wasn’t instantly put to the sword but survived at least long enough to father a child with a local woman, beginning a whole line of crinkly-haired descendants. Like my father’s Uncle Leo who had been dark. Like me.
Brian was carroty like my father, with freckles and ears that stuck out like two little pink wings on either side of his skull. His colouring was not adapted for life on an atoll in the South Pacific famed for the clarity of its light, that intense light that makes everything crystal clear. Black is black and white is white. He was better designed for a northern climate with soft rain and a scrumble of low cloud. He was scaly with eczema, and at the slightest hint of exposure to the sun, he burned and peeled. Our mother pasted cream on his vulnerable skin and lamented. That long keening that accompanied our childhood. The grieving for her son, the perfect baby, the engaging little boy whom everyone adored, the genius who could walk when he was ten months old and spoke in complete sentences when other children were still babbling and pointing. At two and a half he could write his own name. She had proof: a dog-eared copy of the Woman’s Weekly dated August 1960 in which there was a surprisingly mature drawing of a child with a big round face atop a smaller body, and wobbly legs and arms — and a row of circles and sticks which were recognisably a B, a back-to-front R, a floating I, a clear A and a wriggle that was clearly intended for an N. BRIAN.
Brian the prodigy.
Until the accident.
Brian was, like our father, impatient at restraint. He would wriggle away when anyone tried to hold him close, fighting the affectionate confinement of their arms, kicking and writhing till he was lowered to the floor when he would run off, all busy engagement, into the garden. Or further.
‘That boy has made a wreck of my gladioli!’ said Mrs Powell, thrusting him back over the fence, a trail of broken blooms in his wake.
‘Here you are, Kathleen,’ said Ozzie Moses as he bore him, another of her errant children, up the front path.
Our mother blushed, carrying her son indoors. She snibbed the lock, told him he must not, do you hear, must NOT run away. But the next day he’d be off again. The house would go suddenly silent: no happy clatter from his room, no squeak from the swing by the back door. He had gone off through one of the gaping holes in the front hedge, ignoring any temporary repairs: the scrap of corrugated iron here, the bit of a Gibraltar board there. Brian simply found a way out. And when our mother finally retrieved him and carried him home once more, relief leaving her tremulous with anger, her husband refused to be bothered. He liked the hedge. I did too. I liked its clusters of pink, the sweet scent of it on a warm summer day, its hidden places. I’ll mend it, he said. I’ll get onto it right away. (Another patch of corro, a couple of waratahs.) Yes. This weekend he’d definitely mend the hedge.
Then Brian was hit by a car. Not a fast car. Not one of Jacobsen’s stock trucks rattling down from the yard at the top of the hill stinking of sheep piss and terror, but Miss Conroy, backing her Austin out of the garage first thing one Friday morning to drive round to the Supersave for the week’s groceries and a nice piece of Napoleon cake to have with her tea.
‘I didn’t see him! I looked but I didn’t see him!’ She stood by his inert body on the grass verge, her hands plucking at the throat of her blouse. ‘I always check so carefully. I had no idea he was anywhere near. I had no idea …’
Brian’s skinny legs sprawled at odd angles. Our mother knelt at his side in her holey cardie and worn slippers, careless for once of what the neighbours might think, and there were plenty of them to act as witnesses. They stood by, a silent chorus, as our mother knelt on the muddy grass, stroking her son’s face and not daring to lift him as she longed to do, or hold him close, because Mr Powell had done a St John’s course and said it might make things worse, not better. She leaned over her son, rocking back and forth and keening, ‘My baby! My baby!’ like some ancient crone, like something primal and barely recognisable as our mother, Kath Lacey from Number 45. Then the doctor arrived, and the ambulance, the stretcher, the calm medical attendants who knew exactly what to do, and Brian was lifted up properly and taken away.
Maddie and I were taken to see him a few hours later at the hospital. He was firmly tucked into a high white bed with shiny rails round to keep him in. He had a bandage wrapped about his skull. He looked very small, and a deep purple bruise covered one side of his face. He received our gifts of lemonade and his favourite red Tonka truck. Our father handed over a packet of jubes, then stood by uneasily as our mother fussed, pouring a glass of lemonade, helping her son drink it through a straw. Brian sat like some small rajah, serenely indifferent to her ministrations, eating his jubes and running his truck up and down the snowy mountains and valleys of the hospital bedclothes.
That night I woke, late. Night was still a black border round the Holland blind. The hall lamp was a reassuring glow beyond our bedroom door. It took a few seconds to hear again what it was that had wakened me.
A strange noise.
A rhythmic thwack thwack thwack.
It seemed to come from the street, and when I looked out through the pink frosted panel by the front door I saw the gleam of the Tilley lamp that we used during power cuts.
The hedge had gone.
In its place stood a row of bare mangled trunks. The front garden was buried beneath great mounds of torn branches. Whippy tendrils of honeysuckle, rose canes, olearia tinder dry at the end of a long summer. A pink man was hitting one of the pink trunks with a pink axe. I could see the rise of it, and the fall. Thwack. The trunk shuddered. In the spotlit gleam of the lamp I could see the blade rise again and fall. The trunk cracked, leaned to one side. The man was lit side-on, etched with deep shadow. His hair was wild and tangled with leaf. He had his shirt off and his singlet clung to his sweating body. His skin was torn and scratched. Little rivulets of blood seeped into damp cotton.
Our mother was standing on the veranda in her dressing gown. ‘Come away in, Mick,’ she was whispering. ‘What do you think you’re doing? It’s three o’clock in the morning! You’ll be waking all the neighbours.’
Our father swung the axe. Thwack. The trunk jumped into the air a little, and fell. He kicked aside some branches, wiped his forehead with his arm, moved to the next mangled tree. Thwack.
The lights were on already in the Powells’ front room.
‘Stop it, Mick!’ said our mother. ‘Come in!’
‘Everything A-okay over here?’ said Mr Powell from across the fence.
‘Yes, thank you, Clive,’ said our mother. ‘We’re fine. Mick is just fixing the hedge.’ She had on her bright neighbour voice.
Thwack. Our dad dumped another skinny trunk on the pile.
‘Well, I must say he’s picked an odd time for that,’ said Mr Pow
ell.
‘It’s none of your business what time we choose to do the garden,’ said Mum, suddenly cross, suddenly abandoning any pretence and reverting to plain unvarnished Kath Mulcahy from the Annandale hotel. ‘So why don’t you just go back to bed.’
Dad had laid down the axe. He was fossicking about behind that great pile of branches. He was lifting up a jerry can.
‘What the hell are you up to now?’ said Mr Powell. ‘Mick? What are you doing?’
The air smelled of petrol.
‘You’re not about to set fire to that lot are you?’ said Mr Powell. ‘If you set fire to that, I’m calling the police, you hear?’
‘Mick!’ said Mum. ‘Stop it!’
There was the flash of a match flying like some small bright insect into the air. It alighted on a branch, in a nest of brittle leaf. It glittered, caught, ran the length of a twig, found a pool of petrol and blazed up. Dad stood by with the jerry can in one hand, staring into the flames as they took a breath of warm summer night air and gathered their strength.
‘Bloody hell!’ said Mr Powell. There was a crackling, a deep-throated roar, a leap of flame up into the dark sky, a shower of brilliant sparks flying. Lights were going on across the street. ‘What do you think you’re playing at? You’ll have the whole place on fire!’
It could be true. Maddie had come out to stand beside me at the door and we could feel the heat on our faces. For weeks after we were able to pop blisters in the green paint on the windowsills. The fire danced from branch to branch. Leaves crackled and curled to ash.
‘Right,’ said Mr Powell. ‘That’s it. I’m calling the police!’
‘Take it easy, Clive,’ said Ozzie Moses who had materialised from the darkness and stood, big and stolid and unperturbed by the burning pyre. ‘Look, there’s a hose here. Let me give you a hand, mate. We’ll damp things down a bit.’ He turned on the garden tap and the hose gurgled. He lifted the nozzle so that water arced into the air and across the fence. Water splattered cool and temperate onto carefully painted weatherboard. ‘No need to call in the cops. It’ll all be over in a minute or two.’
Limestone Page 9
