The Science of Appearances

by Jacinta Halloran

  ‘From shock, I suppose,’ he replied with a mysterious smile, though his eyes were distant and sad. ‘I’m shocked at how tall you’ve grown.’ He put his hand gently upon her hair as if to stop her upward surge.

  She found the mark again yesterday: so faint, slightly off-kilter, now at the height of the tip of her nose. She sometimes wonders if her legs are lengthening out of sadness, or a queer kind of restlessness that sends her running off to Joan’s house the minute her mother’s back is turned.

  There’s a rise and fall to her days now, a monthly rhythm instead of monotony. Some days her skin prickles with an uncomfortable excitement, and Mr Welsh’s voice seems to grate like fingernails on the blackboard. She likes to draw on these prickling, knife-edged days; to take a black crayon and draw quickly, pressing hard against the paper. She finds herself sketching fanciful, cruel things: fire-breathing dragons, strange birds with curled plumes and dark, shaded wings. As she walks home from school the tree branches cast sharp and twisted shadows, and the town itself shimmers like a mirage in the sunlight.

  She wears cloth pads that she washes in the laundry tub when Dominic isn’t home. Joan gets to wear Modess, bought from J.G. Charles. Mary’s seen them on the chemist counter, in their brown paper wrapping, and next to them the box into which women drop the money so they don’t need to ask aloud. Joan once showed her the Modess booklet that her mother had sent away for. Growing Up and Liking It sported pictures of pretty American girls ice-skating and playing basketball and, on pages nineteen and twenty, diagrams labelled uterus, vagina and ovaries. In the side-on sketch the vagina lay squeezed between the urethra and the rectum, a narrow sliver of a passage. ‘That’s where the blood comes down,’ Joan told her. She made a sour face. ‘It’s ugly.’

  Mary took the book from Joan and spread it open on her knees. ‘Then I’ll look by myself.’ In the front-on diagram the vagina wasn’t there at all; instead, the swollen uterus and globular ovaries took pride of place. The ovaries were cloaked in a folded dangling membrane, so that the whole thing resembled a pair of large flapping ears on either side of a narrow face. A goat’s muzzle. She had to laugh. ‘You’re crazy,’ Joan said.

  The Modess pads are soft and sleek and stay firmly in place. Joan once gave her one to try and she felt like a queen, for a few hours at least. A packet of Modess costs three and six, far beyond what her mother can afford, so she must make do with the bulky cloth pads. It’s a temporary hardship, she tells herself, along with the tough mutton stews and fatty sausages, and the dull brown hand-me-down winter coat sent in the post from Geraldine, her Sydney cousin. This isn’t how her life’s meant to be, not how it will be when she becomes her real, true self. She’s tried to explain this to Joan. ‘What are you talking about?’ Joan said. ‘You don’t suddenly wake up one morning a different person. You’ll grow up and get married and have children, just like I will. Isn’t that what you want?’

  It is not. Of course she’ll get married, but she doesn’t want her mother’s life, nor even Joan’s mother’s life, if it came to that. She finds it laborious enough now just to help with the household chores: peeling dirty potatoes; ironing shirts; washing dishes, the fat congealing on the plates as the water cools. Imagine a life of such chores, day in, day out — why, she’d go mad after a week.

  Dominic does the man’s work, chopping the wood and setting the fire. He also feeds the chickens, talking to them as he scatters the corn and vegetable peelings. In the mornings he brings in the eggs. This morning Mary watches as he climbs the back steps. His shoulders are hunched, his head hangs: the chooks haven’t laid well today. ‘Only two,’ he says to their mother. ‘Perhaps they know we’re moving soon.’

  Mary’s mother opens her hands and Dom lays an egg on each of her upturned palms. ‘Still warm,’ she says. She smiles, just a little, and Dominic smiles back. It’s unfair that Dominic earns approval for bringing in the eggs (and only two at that), as if he’d laid them himself, when her work in the kitchen is taken for granted. ‘Why can’t I bring in the eggs and Dom peel potatoes?’ she asks.

  ‘Because Dominic feeds the chickens and cleans out the coop.’

  ‘I can do that too, if Dom does my chores.’

  Her mother ladles out porridge. ‘The hens lay well when your brother looks after them. He keeps them settled. We need those eggs, Mary. Best to leave things as they are.’

  ‘But I can settle them too. I can sing to them. Mr Welsh says I have a lovely voice.’

  Dom laughs quietly into his bowl. Her mother’s mouth tightens. ‘Enough now, Mary. Eat your breakfast.’

  Mary stirs her porridge, clanking the spoon against the bowl. She catches Dom’s eye and glares at him. ‘What?’ he mouths, shrugging his shoulders. She’d like to empty her stinking porridge right over his head. Mr Welsh has complimented her singing. Dominic knows it’s true because he was there, at the other end of the row, as they practised ‘O Sacred Head Surrounded’ before the Monsignor’s visit. He might have stood up for her but instead he’s sided with their mother. She feels the pang of rejection, doubly so: the two of them denying her, and her brother the favoured one.

  ‘Stop that noise with your spoon,’ says her mother over her teacup. ‘Go and get ready for school.’

  At the front gate she dawdles, tying her shoelaces with a double bow, a triple. Eight more nights, then a new front gate with a new house behind it. She thinks it might be closer to Robbie’s. The sun comes out from behind a cloud and all of a sudden the air is drowsy-warm and filled with the smell of jasmine and of earth drying out from the overnight rain. Already Dom’s betrayal hurts her less. She turns her face upward and screws up her eyes, then stands with arms outstretched, her shoelaces forgotten. She’d like to lie naked in the sun, and she will, one day. A gold-tiled swimming pool, mounted with stone urns and cascading pink flowers, the lap of warm water, the lazy humming of bees: all this crowds her mind with such force and richness that it begins to feel like a prophecy. There she is, lying on the flagstones beside the pool, not a stitch on, warm as toast, every golden inch of her. Robbie appears, bare-chested, and lies beside her. Their pinkie fingers touch. And it begins again, the languid pull both in the pit of her stomach and between her thighs. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other and back again, twice, three times, and thinks of Robbie’s green eyes, the cleft in his chin.

  At the sound of the front door closing she reluctantly opens her eyes. Dom saunters towards her, and she can tell straight away that he’s penitent. ‘Walk with me to school? We can go the long way if you want.’

  As they walk she sings the descant from ‘O Sacred Head Surrounded’, just to test him. ‘Nice, Mares,’ he says, when she’s finished. ‘You sound good when you don’t sing too loud.’

  ~

  All Saturday they carry boxes to the new house on Beauchamp Street. His mother borrows a trolley from the Corrigans, and Dom pulls it, laden with pots and books and blankets, along Wedge Street and into Beauchamp, right to the end, near the river, where the land begins to slope downwards to the water. Their house, too, leans towards the river, and the front verandah’s puckered and warped. ‘Needs restumping,’ Brian’s dad, Frank Fairless, says when he arrives with the beds and the couch in his truck. Brian is Dom’s best mate, though now Dom thinks of Mr Fairless only as one of the six. John Hennessy, Des Farrell, Terry Dwyer, the Tierney brothers, and Frank Fairless: no longer simply the dads of kids he knows from school, but the six brave men who carried his father.

  His mother pulls a cushion from the tray of the truck and holds it to her chest. ‘They’ve told me it’s safe. Should I believe them?’

  Mr Fairless shrugs. ‘It’s safe enough. Won’t come falling down on top of you.’

  ‘Then it will have to do.’ She holds the cushion at arm’s length and beats it with her hand until the dust stops rising.

  In the backyard Dom imagines great works to come — a lemon tree in
a sunny spot, a passionfruit vine along the fence, pumpkins as big as boulders. His chooks scrabble and fuss around him, unsettled by their caged transport across town, the smells and sounds of a new place. He hopes there aren’t foxes by the river.

  His mother comes outside and stands beside him. ‘A lot of work to do out here.’

  ‘I’ll rebuild the coop tomorrow,’ he says. ‘And I’ll start the beds next week after school.’

  ‘I know you will,’ she tells him. ‘I know I can count on you.’ She shields her eyes with her hand. ‘And it’s about time we had the telephone installed. If we can afford it.’

  They’ve never had a telephone. His father was always against it. ‘There’s enough idle talk in this world,’ he used to say. But a telephone call to the doctor: twelve, fifteen minutes saved. He wouldn’t have had to run. Dom drops his head. ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ~

  In their old house on Baynton Street Mary roams echoing rooms, searching for things left behind. Discarded treasures, forgotten heirlooms — a heart-shaped locket closed tight upon a wisp of silkspun hair, perhaps, or a gold watch engraved with mysterious words, hidden away in a hole in the skirting, under the floor. Did I ever live here? she wonders, now that the walls are stripped bare and all traces of herself soaped away. It’s only her ghost that now lingers, the phantom of her younger self, the Mary who first came here as a crying, wheedling baby, lying top to tail with her brother in the old wooden cot.

  She’s at the front gate when Robbie comes past. She didn’t know he was back. ‘Dom here?’ he asks, hands in pockets. His voice is thicker, more musical, and she senses in him something new and keenly felt, something that angles his shoulders towards her, that drives him to look at her face, her breasts. He’s finally noticed her!

  She smiles. ‘Dom’s at the new house,’ she says, meeting his eyes. She closes the gate and steps right up to him. He doesn’t move away. ‘Come on, I’ll take you there.’

  On Wedge Street she tells him she’s leaving school at the end of the year.

  ‘To do what?’ he asks.

  They pass the Morans’ house, with its scrabbly front garden, and Mary prays with more fervour than she’s ever been able to muster: Please God, let Eunice see me walk past with Robbie. ‘I’ll get a job of some sort,’ she says airily, her eyes to the Morans’ front windows. ‘But I’m going to be an artist. That will be my real job.’

  ‘That’s not a job,’ says Robbie.

  She’s surprised by his vehemence. ‘Of course it is,’ she says. ‘It just happens to be the sort of work that’s different every day.’ She casually brushes his hand with her own. ‘But I’ll still get married, of course.’ Robbie looks doggedly ahead.

  Oh, that Wedge Street would go on forever, straight and sunlit, and Robbie Cameron at her side. For twelve bursting minutes she imagines it so, until they turn the corner into Beauchamp Street and the sun slips behind a cloud.

  3

  On the last day of school Mr Welsh calls out the names of those who are leaving: ‘Sandy Donnan, Annie O’Reilly, Paddy Vincent, Mary Quinn. Come out in front of the class.’ They stand on the rostrum and Mr Welsh gives them each a certificate on thick, cream-coloured paper. He shakes their hands, one by one, and asks the class to applaud them. ‘The best of luck in your working life,’ he says. ‘Keep learning, even though you’re no longer in a classroom.’ Mary rolls her certificate — she likes the feel of the paper but otherwise doesn’t care a hoot for it — and taps it against her thigh while Mr Welsh speaks. She catches Dominic’s eye and pokes out her tongue. Look at me! No more school, but you have to come back! He pulls his trademark face — eyes crossed, cheeks bulging — then grins and looks away.

  His speech over, Mr Welsh goes to his desk and takes from the drawer four presents, all shapes and sizes, wrapped in red-and-green Christmas paper. Mary thinks he might be handing them out at random, but no: when she cranes forward over Annie’s shoulder, she sees a little card with Annie’s name on it.

  ‘It’s a sketchbook, isn’t it?’ she says to Mr Welsh at the end of the day. She’d thought she’d bolt from the classroom the second the bell rang, but instead she’s dawdled at her desk, stowing into her school case the dog-eared ends of her schooldays — pencil stubs, the butt ends of rubbers, the worn exercise books, covers grown thick and greasy — while the rest of the class has filed past and out into the yard. They are all there still, shouting and making plans for the holidays. There’s the thump of a ball against the outside wall, and Joe McKenna’s hoarse, crazy laugh, and all at once she has a sense of an ending, a sense of something known and comfortable moving away from her. The classroom seems old and sad now, as if it too needs a holiday. Her feet echo on the boards as she walks to the front of the class for the very last time. ‘My present, Mr Welsh. It’s a sketchbook, isn’t it?’ She places it on his desk. ‘I can tell by the shape.’

  Mr Welsh stops packing his worn satchel. ‘Why don’t you open it and find out?’

  The wrapping paper is decorated with bells and sprigs of holly and little churches with snow-covered steeples. Her fingers have been itching to tear it all afternoon, but instead she says, ‘I might wait until Christmas. You don’t mind, do you?’

  Mr Welsh smiles, just as Mary knew he would. ‘Merry Christmas, Mary. Keep up the drawing, won’t you?’ He leans towards her over the desk. ‘You have an artist’s sensibility. It won’t feel right — you won’t feel right — if you don’t pay it heed.’

  An artist’s sensibility. Only Mr Welsh, out of everyone in Kyneton, would have thought to string two such beautiful words together. She’s seen him in Hayes’ grocery, buying cans of soup and loading them into his bicycle bags, and has imagined him eating his tinned soup at home, toasting crumpets on the fire. Perhaps she could visit him from time to time and sing to him? Or they could sing a duet, practising at his house in secret all summer and surprising the whole town with a perfect performance come autumn.

  But Mr Welsh has told the class he’s going to a place called Anglesea for the summer holidays with his brother, his brother’s wife and their six little children. Anglesea is a seaside town, Mr Welsh said, where people fish in the slow-flowing river and go to the beach and have barbeques every night.

  Now, as she stands by his desk, another plan presents itself: she’ll join Mr Welsh’s beach excursion as a helper for his nieces and nephews. Or, if it comes to it, she could stow away in the boot of the car, hidden under a blanket. She could paint on the beach every day while the children played in the water, and at night she and Mr Welsh could discuss art and music while they nursed each other’s sunburn with calamine lotion. There was bound to be a bit of sunburn.

  She hoists her present under her arm. ‘I don’t need to say a proper goodbye, because I’m sure to see you around town.’

  ‘What about au revoir, then?’

  Mary laughs. She’d like to kiss him on the cheek because he’ll never again try to help her with equations, but from the corner of her eye she sees Eunice Moran hovering in the doorway. ‘Yes, until we meet again. Some sunny day. Happy Christmas, Mr Welsh.’

  ~

  Dominic wants to play for Collingwood when he leaves school, just like everyone else in the town. He’ll have to get a paying job too. Maybe he’ll become a teacher like his father. ‘You could go to university,’ Mr Welsh tells him one afternoon, in the middling heat of December, as they stand looking at Mr Welsh’s new bike: a Raleigh Lenton Sports, three-speed, Brooks saddle. ‘Spend a few years exploring different fields, working out what you’d like to do. A bright lad like you.’

  Dominic wonders what it’s like for the kids at the bottom of the class, the Jimmy Minogues and Paddy Vincents of this world. Must be like having a head cold, he thinks, except without the fever and sore throat. The brain all stuffy and slow. Thoughts flowing thickly, congealed, like treacle from a tin. He pictures his own thoughts as arrows, flying fas
t and straight, homing to a target, not that he’d ever mention it to anyone. Say something like that around here and you’d never be allowed to forget it. It doesn’t seem quite fair that he understands algebra almost without being taught it, and that he finishes his equations — and gets them all right — before the rest of the class are through the first column.

  Still, he’s glad this skill has been granted to him, and not to somebody else. A goal from fifty yards is a thing to behold, but secretly he prefers the triumph of thinking, grasping, understanding. Knowledge, for a moment shiny and new, and then embedded, folded into the other things he knows, like his mother folds flour into batter, so that very soon he can’t believe there was ever a time he was ignorant.

  Since his father died he’s thought about becoming a doctor, but he’s not sure he could stomach it. Not just the blood, not especially. He’s seen how Dr Cameron’s treated in the town. He doesn’t think he could bear all the attention. People tire him out; not at first, but after a while. He’s happiest sitting under a tree with a book. Is there a job in that?

  ~

  Soon it’s February, and the stuffy afternoon classroom heat is forever a thing of the past. Mary teases Joan now: ‘Arithmetic! When are you ever going to use it? Such a waste of time. Poor you.’ She doesn’t tell Joan about the gnawing in her insides when, on one of her visits, she finds a new sheet of choir music on Joan’s piano. She can’t let on that she misses it.

  Still, she can sing to herself as she cleans at the Camerons’. She smiles to think of Mrs Cameron at their door, the very first day of the holidays. She’d practically begged Mary’s mother. ‘I’m travelling back and forth to Melbourne so often these days. Did you know we’ve bought a little flat in South Yarra? What with seeing to Robbie, and all Julius’ bookwork, I simply don’t have the time to keep the house running here. Mary would be such a help.’

  Mary goes to the Camerons’ twice a week. On Tuesdays she does the washing and hangs it out to dry. She also vacuums the carpets — still quite a novelty, and much easier than sweeping — and mops the floors. On Fridays she changes the sheets and towels, scrubs the bathroom tiles and cleans the kitchen. But each week there’s an extra job here and there. Sometimes Mrs Cameron asks her to wipe out the inside of the refrigerator or polish the doorknobs. On another day she’s sent to the garden to weed the lavender beds and cut peonies for a vase.