I only realised at the end that next year when school starts again I will be in secondary school across the road so you won’t be my teacher anymore. But when you gave us the books you said it didn’t matter where we started and finished and maybe the journal will never be finished but it doesn’t matter. I kept writing mine these holidays so that you will know you were right. I have been thinking and thinking about when we went to your house to see the budgies and they ate seed out of your hand, and you said Tyler our true friends never ask us to do favours as a test and you looked so sad. I want to say, I hope you are not sad now because you helped me and I tried to be brave like you said and now I think I’m going good.
I still remember where you live. I’m going to put this in your letterbox. I hope that is OK. I hope you are still living there. If your budgie’s eggs hatch please will you call one of the babies Alicia. One day I will get an aviary and then I will come and get her, Mrs Carlyle. That’s my promise.
AFTERWORD
Bruno Bettelheim would strike my name from the Fairytale Teller’s League, I’m sure, but when I read my daughter fairytales I find myself automatically censoring and sanitising some of the more nightmarish bits – girls dancing on hot pokers, mermaids having their tongues severed and having to walk on legs that felt like knives, woodcutters being ordered to cut out a child’s heart – no wonder they were called the ‘Grimm’ brothers! Even before my daughter could talk I’d expurgate nursery rhymes. ‘She gave them some broth and she gave them some bread,’ I’d chant, smiling, ‘then she kissed them all soundly and tucked them in bed.’
I rationalise by telling myself that it’s the twenty-first century now and life is different for children; they don’t face the same life-threatening perils. However, the more I thought about the story of ‘The Wolf and the Seven Kids’, the more I was persuaded that even in contemporary, ordinary suburbia, where I wanted to set my story, the perils for some kids are all too real.
In the fairy story, a mother goat leaves her kids to go shopping, warning them not to let the wolf in. He tries to trick them into opening the door, disguising his voice as their mother’s by eating chalk, but they recognise his dark paw on the windowsill. He covers his paw with white flour and returns, speaking in his softened, disguised voice and holding up the white paw as proof, and this time they open the door, thinking their mother has returned. He chases and eats up all of them except the littlest kid, who hides in the grandfather clock. When the mother goat returns she finds the smallest kid and they go together and find the wolf sleeping by the riverbank, his belly full of the other kids. The mother goat takes her scissors and cuts the wolf open and all the kids jump out unharmed. They each find a big stone and they fill the wolf’s belly with them, and the mother sews him up again with her sewing kit. They make their escape and reach home safely. When the wolf awakens he’s so thirsty he leans over the riverbank to drink. The heavy stones overbalance him and he falls in and drowns.
In one version, when the smallest kid tells the mother goat his siblings have been taken by the wolf, she says shortly: ‘We’ll see about that.’ My daughter always waits for that line and recites it herself with great relish. I feel something of what she’s feeling, I think – a relieved, exhilarated sense that even though the mother’s unwisely left her children unprotected and a predator’s got them, he’s messing with the wrong goat, and now it’s payback time.
Why did I choose this story, apart from the genuinely unforgettable creepiness of the wolf’s sly, premeditated imitation of someone trustworthy? Because it came to mind when I was sitting with my sister-in-law watching our children splash in the pool last year. We sat there, drinking in their graceful freedom, and she said out of the blue: ‘You know, I always considered myself a pacifist, but the moment I had kids I realised I was wrong. If someone hurt my children I would kill them. I wouldn’t even need a weapon. I would kill them with my bare hands.’
I looked at her and nodded. Then we both looked back, eternally vigilant, at our swimming, carefree, oblivious children, and I thought we were like two grim lionesses there in the sun: vigilant, from the same root word as both vigil and vigilante. So I wanted to write about contemporary peril, and the guises a wolf might come in, and who, in spite of everything, might be keeping watch, grimly thinking: we’ll see about that.
You think you know this story, don’t you? You think you know who did what to whom, and why, and how it all turned out. You think you know who was bad and who was good, and every time you remember the ending you feel glad that all involved got their just desserts. Am I right? Of course I am!
But there is a whole other side that you don’t know about. How could you? You weren’t there. I was, and I’m prepared to be honest if you promise to withhold judgement until the end. Some of what I’ve got to say isn’t nice – in fact, it’s distinctly gruesome in places – but rest assured I’ve already been punished. My sister and I have been through enough public humiliation to last us the rest of our lives. Just remember this isn’t about you; it’s my story, and I’m not looking for anyone’s approval or understanding or forgiveness.
No one ever bothers to ask where we ended up, do they?
It’s impossible to say exactly how many people are in the ward with me, but by the constant moaning, the clearing of throats, the hoarse whispers and foul stinks, I guess that all of them are old and horrible. My surgeon was just in here with one of his sidekicks – an Indian, judging by the accent.
‘So what have we here?’ the sidekick asks in that hearty way doctors have. I am immediately alert. Surely the bandages on my eyes, the cuts and scratches on my face and throat and hands tell him enough. The surgeon mumbles something to deflect him, then bends to fiddle with the bandages. He is so close now I smell him over the sharp tang of hospital disinfectant and urine and the disgusting mince we had for lunch. He has a nice fresh smell, like mint, and I’m tempted to grab his hand. Am I going to see again? My heart pumps with the enormity of what I want to know. Tell me, please, doctor, will I see again? Perhaps he plans to take the bandages off. But after a few moments I realise that he is just checking to see that they’re secure.
‘So how are you, Skye?’ he asks quietly.
‘Okay,’ I say, stiff as a pole.
‘The operation went well,’ he tells the other man. ‘We just have to wait.’ He takes my hand and squeezes it briefly. ‘Try to be patient.’
‘Will I . . . be . . .’
But the word blind swells in my throat like rising dough and jams my mouth.
‘You know I can’t promise anything,’ the surgeon says gently. ‘It could go either way, but . . . we remain hopeful.’
‘An accident?’ the Indian murmurs.
‘Not exactly.’ The surgeon puts a hand on my shoulder and leaves it there a moment. Against every brittle instinct in my miserable soul, the gesture comforts me. This man wishes me well. I can feel it through his fingers.
‘So what happened?’ the sidekick asks. I turn away, steeling myself. Whoever he is, I hate him. Why doesn’t he go back to where he came from? And take that soft singsong voice with him while he’s at it! Do I have to lie here and listen to strangers discussing what happened to me yet again?
The surgeon mutters something, but the only word I can discern is attacked, nothing else. I can feel a stillness between them and I know they are looking at each other and that all manner of information is being passed between them silently.
‘But how?’
Tears tighten my throat, but I hold them back by imagining how I would throttle this underling, how I would wrap these big ugly hands around his fat little brown neck and squeeze! Hands that I tried for so many years to make soft and creamy and white. What a surprise if a nineteen-year-old blind girl reared up in her hospital gown and attacked him. Oh, the idea of it comforts me mightily.
But my surgeon, bless him, doesn’t answer. He picks up my hand again.
‘Three, maybe four days,’ he says quietly, ‘and we’ll kn
ow. Try to be patient.’
‘I will.’ I try to smile. ‘Thank you.’
‘Good girl.’
I had a dream last night, a dream so vivid that it is with me still. I am walking along a dirt road under a hot blue sky with hardly a cloud apart from a few high wisps like skeins of ashen hair. Then a sudden heavy shadow cuts out the light and warmth. I look up and see a thousand huge birds quietly circling above, with no sound at all except for the flapping of their wings. How ominous is that sound! Swish . . . swish, the beat of their wings like the rhythm of a terrible doomsday opera. Swish . . . swish. Round and round they fly, steady and silent, watching and waiting for the right moment.
Reine and I came from money, heaps of it. Our father was in real estate and he’d made a fortune. He was a wheeler and dealer at nineteen and had made his first couple of million by twenty-eight, a self-made man, real entrepreneur, hard-nosed, loud and generous to a fault, especially with us. It seemed like he’d only just finished buying one business and setting it up with the right people and equipment when he was taking on another.
We’d lived all our lives in beautiful houses. My favourite was the apartment we had on the twenty-first floor right across from the Opera House. Whenever we visited Sydney we stayed there. First-class air travel for everyone, including our friends. When we grew older there were parties and fabulous clothes and any luxury we fancied – beauty treatments, massages, holidays . . . Our home in Melbourne was a three-storeyed mansion in Toorak. Then there were houses in Noosa and Portsea. Our mother had never done a day’s paid work in her life. Come to think of it, we always had housekeepers and maids, so it wasn’t as though she did any unpaid work either, apart from picking us up from school occasionally if there was no one else around. My parents were negotiating to buy land in Italy, right next to Lake Como, for their latest dream home when . . . when it all started to unravel.
Not that it happened all at once, or that we had any idea that the demise would be so . . . complete. I suppose it took nearly two years for everything to go down the gurgler. One after another, each piece of the business fell into insolvency. Unbelievable! It began with Dad making some very bad financial decisions. He borrowed too much from the wrong people, sold at the wrong time and then . . . well, I don’t pretend to understand all the details. All I know is that his affairs featured prominently in the financial pages for about twelve months before the end, and then, to our complete humiliation, on the front page. He was being sued left, right and centre and it seemed he’d become everyone’s bad boy overnight. All his dodgy dealings and desperate attempts to stem the flow of money by borrowing more were paraded in the media for every cretin to pore over and discuss.
Reine and I were in our last year at the top posh girl’s school when the shit began to seriously fly. Suddenly there was no actual cold hard cash for anything, including school fees. We were allowed to see out the year, but everyone knew.
‘Is that your father in the paper today?’
‘Did you know he was a . . . crook?’
‘Is your family going to be . . . all right?’ our classmates whispered, their eyes wide with fake concern. Did they really think we couldn’t hear the gleeful undertones? Or see the merriment in their eyes or the furtive glances of amusement? Other people’s woes are always so amusing, aren’t they? We knew that. What we didn’t know was that one day our family would take centre stage.
Our parents screamed at each other behind closed doors, but at least we were still in our lovely home in Toorak. We had our clothes and jewellery, the beautiful cars and furniture. The fact that it was all on credit wasn’t really our concern. Our mother was the same. Daddy is going through a bad patch and everything will be all right soon. I suppose none of us quite believed that things could get worse. We were going to wake soon and everything would be back to normal.
The truth hit the day the trucks arrived and all our furniture was carted off to an auction house. It just seemed so totally outrageous that a gang of horrible little men in dusty shorts and sweaty T-shirts with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths could pick up our stuff and put it in their trucks. We begged Dad to do something, but there was nothing he could do. Out went my sound system and my huge flat-screen. The antique sideboards, the solid oak antique French beds and dressing tables, even that exquisite Venetian light from the sitting room, all the beautiful leather furniture from the downstairs study . . .
When the last truck had left and the four of us were standing in a more or less empty shell, I remember Dad turning to us.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, holding out both arms helplessly, ‘girls, I’m so sorry.’ It was the first time we’d ever heard him apologise for anything. His face was grey and drawn, and the clothes that used to fit perfectly were now baggy. In fact, he had aged so much over the preceding year that he was almost unrecognisable.
We just sniffed and walked out of the room. I see him still: my father’s stricken face as I turned my back on him. It is the most vivid image of my life. As far as I’m concerned, nothing we did to her comes even close to what we did to our own father.
He walked out of the house with nothing that day, not even his wallet or phone. He must have had some cash in his pocket, because we found out later that he hailed a taxi. But from that day he just disappeared out of our lives. His body washed up eventually, in a little backwater of the Goulburn River near Yea in central Victoria about six months later. Apparently he’d been dead for five days when they found him under overhanging trees, wedged between a rock and a couple of old tyres.
The three of us, Mum, Reine and I, moved into a two- bedroom flat out the other side of town. Reine and I had to share a tiny bedroom. There was nowhere for our clothes or cosmetics, or for anything much, really, except the two beds. And there was only one small bathroom. Our mother had to go to work for the first time in her life, answering calls in the office of a business that we used to own. The three of us were at each other’s throats most of the time.
Neither of us had the brains or the inclination for university. We’d grown up believing Dad’s promise that there would be jobs for us in the business as soon as we finished school. It went without saying that we would eventually nab a wealthy younger version of our father who’d provide everything we were used to. So we sat at home and moped and waited for phone calls that never came.
Then Mum brought Jack home . . .
She met him in a hotel one Friday night after work, and after knowing him for just on three weeks she told us that they were going to get married.
‘Jack says there’s room for all of us in his house,’ Mum gushed with that mad, half-drunk look in her eye that told us she was putting a scheme together. ‘So we can move out of this flat.’
‘I know it’s very sudden,’ the poor sucker added, reaching out to squeeze our mother’s arm, ‘but neither of us is getting any younger, are we sweetie?’ Reine and I looked at each other and said nothing. Was it our responsibility to warn him? I don’t think so. Anyone with half a brain could see our mother was more reptile than human. Any man would need all his wits just to survive her, and this idiot obviously had none. We found out later that his wife had died only eight months before, so he was emotionally vul- nerable – is that the term? Whatever. In short, he didn’t know if he was coming or going.
‘So when do we move?’ Reine asked stonily. She’d seen the guy’s car and told me it was a piece of crap – a Commodore, I think – so it wasn’t like we had any illusions about the house. On the other hand, anything would be better than living in that poxy little flat.
‘What about tomorrow?’
‘I’ve seen the house,’ Mum whispered later, ‘and it’s much better than this. You’ll have a room each.’
‘Okay,’ we mumbled in unison. What she was telling us was that this guy Jack would be the first step on our climb back to the world we once knew. We trusted our mother. She’d always had an eye for the main chance.
They forgot to tell us that Jack h
ad a daughter until the day before we moved all our things over to his house.
‘Ella,’ he said, squeezing the last load of Mum’s clothes into the car. ‘The sweetest girl in the world.’
‘Oh?’ I said warily. ‘Does she mind us . . . coming?’
‘Not at all,’ Jack smiled. ‘As soon as I told her you’d be coming to live with us, she offered to move out of her room so you two could have the two rooms near each other – they’re bigger, too.’
‘What room will your daughter have?’
‘There’s a spare room at the back of the house.’ Jack hesitated. ‘It’s been a junk room, but we cleaned it out. And it’s only a stopgap until I get the bungalow built.’
‘How nice is that?’ Mum turned around in the front seat and gave us one of her vicious little smirks. ‘You girls will be sure to say thank you, I hope,’ she added in a syrupy voice.
Reine and I mumbled something, but we were both suspicious. What kind of a retard would willingly give up her room?
‘So she offered to move into the junk room?’ Reine asked unbelievingly, ‘without having met us?’
‘Yep.’ Jack smiled proudly. ‘She’s always been like that, generous to a fault, just like her mother. She just loves doing things for people. Wanted to make you both feel welcome.’
‘How old is your daughter?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice serious. Reine was doing her squashed-spider mouth, all tight and pursed up, and it never failed to make me laugh.
Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 Page 23
