Closed for Winter

by Georgia Blain

  Frances.

  And in the seaside suburb that was their home, the police were also searching. They, too, were sifting through each fact that was presented to them. Up and down that beach, in the burning heat, sifting through each grain of sand, and out on the ocean, using helicopters and boats, looking above and below.

  And they questioned; they questioned neighbours and shop owners, and friends and family, over and over until they pieced together a picture, a broad picture. They knew what she looked like, they knew who her friends were, they knew what she did, but they did not know, they did not really know, who she was.

  Hate to say it, but that’s what happens to girls like her, and they would all snicker.

  Girls like her.

  Over the back fences, they would shake their heads in disapproval, or look at each other knowingly. Washing flapping, clean against a blank morning sky, as they would catch up on the latest news: Did you hear they’ve been questioning Terry’s kids? Nothing serious, just routine.

  Hate to say it, but I always thought that girl would come to no good.

  And they would thank the heavens their kids weren’t like that.

  In the classroom, the bell would ring, sharp and jarring, and they would slam their books shut and run out into the yard where they would gather in their various groups. Under the shade of the tea-trees, out on the oval, skirts hitched up to the thighs, by the canteen or in the airconditioned cool of the library.

  My mum says she had it coming to her, and they would all look at Jo-anne or Diane or Lisa and nod their heads in agreement.

  You look like you’re asking for it and you’re gonna get it. Sooner or later, and they would all nod again.

  Police reckon she was raped. Probably by a whole gang, and there would be a moment’s silence.

  Well, you know she’d already done it? Disbelief on all their faces.

  True. Johnno’s sister, Kerry, told me that most of those boys had done it with her.

  So it would go. Over and over and over. Throughout that summer and into the winter, dragging on, the full force of its momentum gradually dying until it was reduced to just a few small scraps, the occasional word, rekindled haphazardly and then burning out again because they had picked it bare. All of them. Picked it to its bones without ever knowing, really knowing, who she was.

  And I stand now, in the doorway of my mother’s room, looking at it all and feeling like I no longer know it. Any of it. Because all I have held to be familiar can no longer be trusted. It has to be seen differently now. It has to be, and I walk in without knocking.

  41

  My father sits in a picture frame by my mother’s bed. This photograph and her words are all I really know of him. When I try to see him as he was when he was home, I can only see his face as it is behind that glass. When I try to hear the words he would have spoken, I can only hear her words.

  What was he like? Martin once asked me.

  I told him I did not know.

  Dorothy lies flat on her back, her newspapers strewn across the blankets. Her eyes are closed but I doubt she is asleep. Her breakfast tray rests on the empty space next to her, an empty cup of black coffee, strong, the way my father liked it, and a leftover corner of toast.

  I pick it up and put it on the bedside table, near that picture.

  I do not remember him, I told Martin. I was only four when he died.

  I hold the photograph under the light, wanting to see his face, but in its brightness, there is only reflection.

  Dorothy moves. I see her shifting. I see her wanting to know what it is I am doing but not opening her eyes.

  I wipe the dust from the glass and tilt the frame away from the light. This is the face of the man who is my father. This is the face of the man who met my mother, down under the jetty, and in the darkness, pressed her up against the pylon, out of sight of the others, out of hearing. My mother has told me this. I know this. But I do not know why I always felt that there was more. Drunk on whisky with her body crushed by his, she did not know how to stop something she did not understand.

  He married her because she was pregnant. Because he had to, Frances would whisper. But did she ever whisper more than that? There are things I sense. I know her words and I know Dorothy’s words. I know what those words say and what they do not say.

  My mother opens her eyes. One blue, one green. The sky and the trees. Or was it the lakes and the trees? I do not remember.

  She is looking at me, watching me as I put the photograph back in its place, leaning it up against the wall where it has always sat.

  My hands are shaking.

  Where do I begin?

  In the silence of this room, in the silence of this house, you could hear a pin drop, you could hear a breath of wind from off the ocean, you could hear the next-door neighbour slamming the back door shut behind her, and you can hear her now, out the back, her voice carrying down the side of the house and into my mother’s open window as she tells him, John Mills, that it looks like winter is over. Finally, she says.

  I know, he answers, it’s a beautiful day, and his words are clear, loud and clear, in this room.

  My mother does not take her eyes from my face.

  You heard? I ask her and she does not blink. You heard us? John and me? Before?

  Outside they continue to talk. How is she? the next-door neighbour asks him, and he tells her she’s on the mend. It won’t be long before she’s up on her feet, he says.

  Dorothy coughs.

  You must speak to me, I say. You have to talk to me, and I am reaching for the photograph again, but she stops me, her hand cool and dry on mine.

  Don’t, she says and it is all she says.

  In the darkness of this room, I can just see the two of us. There, reflected in the mirror on her dressing-table. I cannot see our faces, only my torso and, there, on the bed, the shape that I know is my mother, her hand outstretched to mine, both of us reaching for him. My father.

  I let my arm fall.

  My father worked on the lines, out where the scrub lies low and flat and the soil slips dry like sand through your fingers.

  He did not want to leave me, and Dorothy would sigh, but we had no money. It is a testament to our love. Because he did love me. This much, and she would stretch her arms out wide, or was it Frances who did that? I do not know.

  My father came home when he was between jobs. A week here, a few days there, and in the year he died, he was back for a couple of months.

  If I try to remember him from this time, I have only a sense of his presence. I have no solid memories, no incidents that I can recall; I was only four, I told Martin, my recollections are vague. I have nothing but a sense; a sense from years of stumbling in the dark. This is all I can rely upon.

  Did he do it? I ask my mother, finally finding the words I want, but as I speak, I know there is no point. She speaks in stories, one piled on top of the other. Any truth that once existed has long since been buried, so dark so deep so forgotten, rotten at the bottom of the pile.

  She looks at me and she looks beyond me.

  We loved each other, your father and I, really loved each other, and she wipes her hair back from her face, her beautiful hair, the envy of all the other girls, as she talks of him, the same words over and over again.

  She reaches for my hand and I am about to pull away, I am about to turn from her, but then I see us both again, there in the mirror, just the two of us, her lying in her bed and me standing by her side.

  There is only her and me. This is what is left. And she will have no answers for me. Not if I shook her, not if I shouted at her, not if I begged or pleaded.

  She was only eight, I say, but I am saying it to myself.

  Please, sit with me, she asks, and I do not move.

  Please, she asks again, and I find that I cannot.

  I am turning my back on her and I am walking out of her room and out of this house. I do not know where I want to go. I just know that I have to get out, and I pus
h the front door with the entire weight of my body so that when it opens, I am catapulted out on to the verandah, squinting in the brightness of the last of the day.

  My sister, I whisper to the first tint of pink in the sky. My sister.

  My voice is louder now; loud and clear across our yard, over the road and behind me, back into our house.

  My sister was not what you thought she was.

  I am telling myself, I am telling her and I am telling the world. Because it has to be said. Out loud.

  My sister was not what you thought she was.

  And my voice is shaky, but it is strong.

  I walk down our steps and along the road. I have my back to the sea and I am walking away from it. But I could just as easily be walking in the other direction, towards that stretch of sand, towards that jetty, and far out, the old men fishing, there at the end.

  And I remember. It was Frances who had told me that they fish for sharks. I had accepted what she had said but I had never really believed her. I hadn’t wanted to think that they were out there. Not that close to shore.

  But I should have listened. It seems she was right.

  And I want to tell her that I am sorry.

  I want to tell her that I should have listened.

  But all I can do is repeat those words, over and over again. My sister was not what you thought she was. Chanting them to myself as I walk with my back to the sea.

  42

  When I first moved in with Martin, I rang my mother twice a day. In the morning and in the evening.

  It’s a bit excessive, isn’t it? Martin used to say.

  He thought I was overly concerned about her. She’s a survivor, he would tell me. Tougher than she looks.

  He did not understand that it was not just concern that made me call.

  I missed her. In a way I could not explain.

  Because when you have lived with someone for a long time, just the two of you, it is not so easy to leave the other behind. It is not so easy to turn your back and walk away. Even when it is what you want.

  My mother and I lived in this house, just the two of us, for fourteen years.

  There was no one else.

  We did not have a lot to say to each other. Our acknowledgement of each other’s presence was infrequent and insubstantial, but that is not to say that we were not enmeshed. We could not help but be. We only had each other.

  So, when I left her, I could not leave her.

  I am bound to her. Even when she fails me.

  I sit in my mother’s kitchen and from the other room I can hear John Mills reading to her. I can hear his voice, going over each of the stories in each of the papers, and I put my head in my hands, not wanting to listen.

  I am sorry, he said when I came home yesterday afternoon and found him still waiting.

  I did not want to talk to him about it. Not then.

  Today when he arrived I was in the garden finishing the last of the planting. He wanted to speak. I could see it in his face. But still I could not find the words and, again, he knew.

  I’ll just go and see how she is, he said, leaving me as I wanted to be left. Alone.

  He was still in Dorothy’s room when I came inside and I could hear her, dictating to him, her endless letters to others with a similar story. And when she finished, she asked him if he would mind reading just a few articles to her, only one or two, before he left.

  This is my mother.

  I put my head in my hands and I close my eyes, not wanting to hear.

  This is my mother.

  I am bound to her, but this is not the place to which I have to return.

  I have arranged to meet Jocelyn at her house after work, and when I arrive, she tells me I am doing the right thing. It feels terrible at the time, she reassures me, but you will soon wonder why you didn’t do it earlier.

  She drives us both up the long road that leads to Martin’s mother’s house. We do not talk. I stare out the window, looking at the houses I know so well, and remember the day when he drove me here, all that I owned in the boot of his car.

  It will be all right, he had reassured me when he had seen that I was thinking about her, Dorothy, alone in that house. You will soon wonder why you didn’t do it earlier, and he had patted me on the leg and told me to cheer up.

  When we pull into the drive, the house looks like a house I do not know. But then this is how it has always seemed. It has never been my place. It has always been Martin’s mother’s house.

  There are leaves on the path that leads up through the neatly clipped lawn to the entrance. The next-door neighbour’s dog has been at the hose again, and I know that Martin will swear loudly when he sees where it has been chewed.

  Jesus Christ, he will say, as he comes stomping through the front door, being careful to first wipe his feet on the mat. It’s about time she did something about that animal, and his words will echo unanswered down the hush of the carpeted hall. But then this is how it has always been. I gave up answering him a long time ago; hearing him, but not hearing him.

  Jocelyn waits for me in her car while I let myself in. All the blinds are drawn and it is dark inside.

  My few clothes are in the wardrobe, my shoes in a neat row on the floor. In the spare room, my box is unopened at the back of the cupboard, as I left it all those years ago.

  I am about to leave, I am about to close the door behind me, when I realise I have forgotten something. For a moment, I cannot think where I put it, and then I remember. I left it in the laundry, the blue satin nightgown that Dorothy gave me for my twenty-eighth birthday.

  The clothes-horse is folded and stacked by the door. The bucket in which I tried to soak the stains out of the material has been put back under the sink.

  For a moment I am at a loss as to where to look, but it is only for a moment.

  I know Martin. I know him well, and I open the cupboard and take out the rag bag, Dorothy’s nightgown shining silver-blue on top.

  It is slippery smooth beneath my fingers.

  I shake it out and let it run, like water, over my arms and into my bag of clothes.

  That’s all? Jocelyn asks me when I come out to where she is waiting for me.

  That’s all, I tell her.

  She turns the car in the cul-de-sac at the end of this street and I do not look back as we drive off, away from the house that I had once hoped would be my escape and back down the road I know so well. The road that leads to my mother’s.

  Are you all right? Jocelyn asks me as she drops me off.

  I tell her that I am fine.

  I stack my things in the hall, knowing that Dorothy will see them when she is well enough to walk. They are stacked by the door. Soon she will see them and she will see that I am not going to stay.

  Where will you go? Martin asks me on the telephone. Back to Dot’s?

  I tell Martin I do not know my plans. I do not know where I will go.

  He says he has started seeing someone else. He tells me he wanted me to find out from him. He hopes it will not affect our work relationship.

  I do not know what to say.

  I look at the keys to his mother’s house, still on my key ring, and I wonder how long it will be before he gives them to her. Not long. I cannot imagine Martin by himself for long. But I do not want to think about it. Not yet.

  43

  It takes about three weeks for a fracture like my mother’s to heal enough to be able to walk and, as she leans on my arm, we make our way, carefully, step by step, into the yard.

  I have not told her about the garden, but I know she knows. Just as she heard John and me speaking that morning two weeks ago, she would have also heard us discuss this, the rows of lettuces and herbs along the side, and by the back gate, the flowers and corn that will soon grow high enough to cover the fence. But she has not said a word. And nor have I. This is the way it is. This is the way it has always been and this is the way it will probably stay. There are no miraculous changes, just slow steps forward, inch
by inch.

  In the bright sunlight, Dorothy squints. I show her each of the plants and she does not speak.

  These, I tell her, are foxgloves. And these, I reach to touch the tiny leaves, are sunflowers.

  The pigface has gone? she finally asks me.

  I tell her that it has.

  It was not so bad, she says, and she looks around her.

  I do not know if she likes what she sees. If she did, it is unlikely she would tell me.

  And who will look after all this? she asks.

  When I tell her that she will have to, she shrugs again.

  I guessed as much, she says and turns back towards the house.

  I have arranged to meet John this morning. I want to talk about how we can care for her. But this is not all. He sits with Dorothy during the day, arriving after I have left for work and leaving when I come home. We pass each other. Speaking briefly about her health, a few words at the back gate under the darkness of the evening sky. He has tried, once or twice, to lead me back to what was said. He has tried and I have not yet followed. Eyes down, the gate closed, telling him I would see him tomorrow.

  Not yet, I wanted to say, but I could not even say those words. Not yet.

  The street is empty. There is a cool breeze from off the ocean and the more slender of the branches overhead lift and fall, lift and fall, slow and distant. On the path to the beach the grasses would be swaying, the ripple of a cloth as it settles, and the sand and the sea would be sparkling sharp and clear under the stark blue of this sky.

  John Mills is in his back garden. I see his head over the fence and I knock, once, on the high wooden gate, before letting myself in.

  This is what I see first. Him, and beyond that the back door where I once knocked loud enough to wake the dead. I do not see what lies at my feet. I do not see it in all its splendour until I am standing on it, and the dazzle of the colour that surrounds me is overwhelming.

  I have finished, he tells me.

  It is beautiful. Eyes of china blue, each iris the size of a fist, each lash coal black, cheeks of eggshell, hair that tumbles gold and red, and in her hand a single flower, open wide, showing its face to the world. The colours dance, they glitter and dance, alive before me, sparkling in the early morning sun.