Sensing the ebb of her mother’s anger, Mary takes her chance. ‘Can I stop going to the presbytery now?’
Her mother’s body stiffens. Her anger’s returned, Mary sees, but now it’s cold and righteous; the worst kind of all. ‘How dare you lie about Father Clancy like that, just to get out of work.’ Her mother speaks as if she’s in pain, as if every word’s torn from some deep, raw place. ‘It’s so terribly sinful. You’re sinful.’
‘And so are you.’ The scream’s there now, gouging the back of Mary’s throat, ready to do her bidding. Her voice could break glass. ‘Everything about you is a rotten stinking lie.’
Oh, the slap is like a blessing when it comes. The air’s cool and forgiving against the sting of her cheek, and Mary’s released from the fate her mother’s assigned her. In that kitchen piled high with washing and chores — that ugly deadening house — her mother’s disappointments have crept in so close they’ve almost become her own. To be close to her mother is to give up on life: there’s no middle ground, there never was. This is your lot, Mary Quinn, put up with it — but she won’t, she bloody won’t. And she doesn’t have to. It’s not for anyone else to tell her how to be.
She puts a grateful hand to her face. It’s as if the slap has sent her moving, forwards and away. Now things can change. Something’s been severed, smashed into pieces, something that needed to be undone. Her childhood, perhaps; those last frayed apron strings. ‘Thank you,’ she calls to her mother, even though she’s left the room. They’re the last words she speaks in that awful place.
The rest is easy. Her school case and her carry-all stuffed with clothes, Mr Welsh’s sketchbook under her arm and, in the kitchen, three pounds six shillings from the golden-syrup tin. At the Camerons’, she bangs her fists on the door. No one home, just as she knew it would be. She knows, too, where the spare key’s hidden. Her course is unimpeded, her mind as clear as the glass in the presbytery windows she’s washed, over and over and over again. It’s supposed to happen like this. In Robbie’s parents’ bedroom, she empties the coin jar onto the bed and stuffs all the loot into her pockets. ‘Goodbye, house,’ she says to the shadows on the walls. ‘I’ll be seeing Robbie soon.’
She finds Dom at the school gate, talking to Brian Fairless, who frowns when he sees her hovering. Dom turns. ‘Is something the matter?’ he asks, a shadow crossing his face. She knows he’s thinking of their mother.
Mary takes Dom’s sleeve and pulls him away, out of earshot. ‘Hey!’ Brian calls after her. ‘We’re in the middle of something.’
‘Keep your shirt on. I just need him for a mo.’ To Dom she whispers, ‘I’m not going back to that rotten presbytery.’
He scowls. ‘Why not?’
The faintest clink of metal as the priest’s belt came undone, the smell of linseed oil (she’d polished the desk herself), the stiff hairs at his nostrils. But she got him back, didn’t she, spitting on her hands and trailing them down the banister, the whole bloody way? Oh, the dirty smudges she made. The tears are pricking but she holds them back. Instead she kicks at the wire fence until her foot hurts. Dom knows, she can see it. He knows it’s something bad.
‘What happened, Mares?’ He’s nicer now. ‘What did you do?’
She begins, hesitates, closes her mouth. What if he doesn’t believe her either? More than that: what if he hates her? She couldn’t bear to think of it. Dom hating her, just like her mother — she’d rather not tell him than risk such a punishment. Better to hold it in, keep it a secret, just like any other. Like her drawings of flowers that grew in her mind into drawings of her sex, and the feeling she has whenever she thinks of Robbie. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says. Oh, but it does! She understands this much: if it doesn’t matter, she might as well give up on herself. ‘But I’ll never go back. Never bloody ever.’
‘They’ve sacked you?’
‘They most certainly have. And I’ve sacked them.’ She laughs hard, not meaning to, pressing her hands to her back where the arm of the chair has left a tender spot.
‘Stop laughing,’ Dom says. ‘This is serious. Have you told Mum? What did she say?’
‘She slapped me. Across the face.’
She’s glad to see him flinch, even momentarily. The bruise on her back now seems more her mother’s doing than the priest’s. ‘Hard, Dom. Hard across the face. Is there a mark?’ The blow doubly felt, though less by Dom than by her. She’s cushioned it for him always, the first born, the most favoured. He has to know that it’s always been easier for him. She’s taken the blame and the rottenness, let her mother save the little bit of sweetness she has all for him.
‘Come back with me now, Mares.’ He tries to coax her. ‘I’ll talk to Mum. She’ll see reason. And you’ll get another job.’
She shakes her head: no to all of that. He can’t help her, if he ever could. ‘I’m going to Joan’s.’ She stands on tiptoe — her dear, perfect, infuriating brother, grown so tall. She kisses his cheek. ‘See you later.’
‘You’ll be all right?’
She puts her hand on his, hooks her little finger into the crook of his thumb. ‘You could come with me. We could go somewhere together.’ She waits for him to ask, ‘Where, Mares? Where will we go? Let the adventure begin!’ Instead he slowly shakes his head and repositions his satchel across his back. She sees how the strap digs into the flesh of his shoulder. How full his satchel is, crammed with all the duty and discipline and tenacity that belongs to him alone. ‘I’d better go home,’ he says.
~
When Mary doesn’t come back by six o’clock and his mother returns alone from Joan’s house, Dominic understands she’s gone for good. At the school gate, as she rose on tiptoe to kiss him — she’d been taller than him until two months ago — he’d known, hadn’t he? That sad look she turned on him, that faraway glaze to her eyes, as if in her head she’d already up and gone. He’d known, and he’d let her go.
From his bed he looks across to hers, where the ripples in the blanket, the trailing corner of the sheet, seem like her penultimate act of rebellion. From the kitchen comes the clatter of saucepans, the thud of a knife against a board. His mother is getting on with things. He stands to straighten his bed, and his sister’s, too. Might he have stopped her from leaving? Talked sense to her, or dragged her home and let her cry it out? In whose interests would he have tried? He smoothes down his hair and goes to the kitchen to set the table for dinner.
Drift and Adaptation
6
There’s a Joan at the Argo Street hostel — at least, that’s what the matron calls her. To the other girls she answers only to Jo. ‘You won’t call me Joan if you know what’s good for you,’ she says to Mary in the laundry.
‘My best friend’s called Joan,’ Mary tells her. Jo only sniffs. Later she says, ‘I hate that name, and I’ll bloody call myself anything I like. Who’s to stop me?’
Jo’s sixteen, just ten months older than Mary. She’s lived in the hostel twice before. ‘Home away from home,’ Jo says through her teeth. ‘At least for us wayward girls.’ Wayward. Mary’s always liked the word, to her mind a mixture of way and forward. That’s exactly where she’s going.
‘Richmond,’ Jo declares, when Mary asks where she’s from. ‘Just the other side of the river. The wrong side.’ Elbow-deep in suds, Jo tells Mary of her parents. ‘My dad’s a boozer, and my mum’s worn ragged from too many kids.’
Jo reminds her of Mrs Boyle, behind the counter at Hayes’ grocery. She remembers the rebellious little observations that escaped from the side of Mrs Boyle’s mouth as her customers stood captive, waiting for their change. There’s a hard rhythm to Jo’s declarations that Mary enjoys. A place for everything, and everyone in their place. She doesn’t believe the world is like this: she knows that things are intrinsically fluid, constantly shifting in form and position. People, too. Still, sometimes she likes to rub against the hard lines that people
draw — it makes her feel more contained, more rested. It amuses her. She follows Jo from tub to mangle, into which she feeds the dripping sheets, and out to the yard with a full washing basket. ‘You’ve got yourself a little puppy dog, Jo,’ a fat girl named Dorothy calls from an upstairs window.
‘Can’t help my natural charm, can I?’ answers Jo. Exactly what Mrs Boyle would say.
At the washing line Mary hears of the legion of brothers and sisters. As Jo speaks of them, they appear to Mary as a great shouting mob; at the dinner table, at the football ground on a Saturday afternoon. Punches are thrown and ducked, jokes come quick as breathing. There’s the oldest boy, the reliable one, who works at General Motors in Fishermen’s Bend, and the younger sister, too pretty for her own good, who Jo lectures whenever she’s home. ‘I’ve told her you wouldn’t believe how many times, don’t get sucked in by any boy, no matter how decent he looks or how much he promises. Don’t make the same mistake I did.’ Jo’s also spent time at the Albion Street home in Brunswick. ‘You think this place is rough,’ Jo says. She bends over the basket and wrestles a sheet free, and Mary understands: Albion Street is part of Jo’s mistake and part of her bravado.
Richmond, Punt Road, Fishermen’s Bend, Brunswick. The wind gusts through the yard and the sheets push their damp weight against her. For fifteen years Mary’s lived in a place where every brick and blade of grass was known to her, but the comfort of the familiar has never been hers. She thinks of Dom, his head bent over his homework, his own particular smell: of earth and grass, the musty odour of chook feathers and grain. She sighs; perhaps there are a few familiar things she misses. But here, everything’s instead to be discovered. There are even rooms in this big old house that she hasn’t yet seen, despite living here for close on two weeks.
‘Do you know of a school that’s like a castle?’ she asks Jo.
‘None that I ever went to. Why do you want to know?’
She tells Jo of Robbie, and the uniform he wears. She describes it exactly: the navy blazer with the blue-and-gold crest of mitre and bible, the dove-grey trousers and navy jumper, the yellow-and-blue tie. ‘You don’t half go into detail, do you? How would I know what’s sewn on their jackets?’ Jo asks. The knowledge comes easily because Mary knows it so well: it’s there, right in front of her, as if she were still at Robbie’s wardrobe, pressing her face to his blazer, breathing in his scent and the traces of all the places he’s been.
Taking a peg from her mouth, Jo says, ‘You’re heading for trouble.’ And, ‘What would he want with a girl from the mission?’ And, ‘Why would you come all the way to Melbourne when you can see him back home?’ She pegs the last of the sheets and turns to Mary. ‘Yeah, I know the school, as it happens. It’s the posh one on St Kilda Road. I’ve seen them on the tram. A cocky lot, mostly.’
Mary squeals and throws her arms around Jo’s neck. ‘You’ll tell me where it is?’
Jo pushes her away. ‘You’re a fool. But yes, I’ll tell you.’
The sheets strain at their moorings as the wind comes up again. Mary raises her hands in the air. Soon she’ll find Robbie! She turns two, three, four times — ignoring Jo’s command to bloody-well stop showing off — until the cool wind against her knuckles takes away the sting of the bleach and hot water.
After tea in the refectory, which the girls call the ‘ref’, they wash dishes, mop the chequered linoleum floors and scrub down the kitchen benches. Despite the chores, there’s a certain recklessness to this time of day, now that the matron, Nurse Raven, is out of their hair, tucked away in her granny flat across the overgrown garden. The cook, Mrs Hall, has hung up her apron and gone home, and the kitchen belongs to the girls. Over the washing-up they swap stories about their lives before Argo Street: the teachers they drove to distraction, the cheek they gave their mums and dads — and the hidings they got in return — and the drippy, lying boyfriends. They’re side-splitting stories, mostly, although last night Nancy Mullens ran out in tears. When it’s Mary’s turn, she tells them about Dom. ‘He’s a dead ringer for Jimmy Stewart. And he’s such a good footballer,’ she adds. ‘Best in our school.’ She’s not exactly sure it’s true but she enthuses for his sake, and for hers. She wants every one of them to fall head over heels for him.
Thin, silent Miss Werner, the night-duty nurse, barely leaves her ground-floor room. As Mary mops the downstairs floor she hears dance music playing behind Nurse Werner’s closed door. ‘The radio’s just to make us think she’s in there,’ Margie Burrows says in the kitchen, ‘while instead she’s snuck out to prowl the streets, looking for young girls.’
‘To bring back here?’ Mary asks.
‘Maybe.’ Margie wrings out her mop and lets it fall back into the bucket. ‘But not until she’s bitten them in the neck and sucked out all their blood.’ She takes a step closer and lowers her voice. ‘She’s either a vampire or a spy. You know she’s a Gerry?’
Evening in the dormitory, that precious hour before lights out, is the best time of day. They sleep in bunk beds, sixteen to a room. Sixteen girls’ voices whispering at once, hushed conversations rising and falling from every nook and cranny, the occasional sharp burst of uncontrollable laughter — it’s usually Carmel Kavanagh — and the smell of violet soap and starch. Betty Short told Mary yesterday that they all have their monthly at the same time. ‘That’s what happens when girls live together. It’ll happen to you, if you stay long enough.’
Mary leans from her top bunk to talk to Jo beneath her. ‘It’s like boarding school, being here.’
Jo grunts and rolls onto her side. ‘Yeah, it’s exactly like boarding school, except your mum and dad don’t have to fork out a penny.’ Mary lies back and closes her eyes. She’s a boarder, like Robbie in his castle, just a stone’s throw from here. Perhaps tomorrow she’ll wait at those golden gates to meet him. She might pack a picnic and they’ll eat it on the riverbank at Fishermen’s Bend, then go dancing at the Trocadero, which she’s heard of from the other girls, on a dance floor so shiny you can see yourself smiling.
~
Each morning now, Dom rises at five and dresses swiftly in the dark. Boots in hand, he feels his way to the kitchen, past his mother’s door, where a floorboard invariably creaks underfoot. If only he knew how to fix it. It’s something he’ll have to learn, and soon.
In the kitchen he reheats the porridge his mother made the night before. His gut tightens at the sight of it: this warm, sluggish mass that falls like a lead shot to the pit of his stomach, when all his stomach wants, like every other part of him, is to sleep on and on, into the tail end of morning. He sweetens the porridge with three teaspoons of sugar and swallows it down, reminding himself — as he must, every day — that to miss breakfast will cost him dearly. In his first week he ventured it twice, and both times he found himself mid-morning by the roadside, his bike propped against a fence as he scoffed down his lunchtime sandwiches like a stray starved dog. Then nothing more to eat all day, save for the two arrowroot biscuits Mrs Egan offered with an afternoon cup of tea. The worst of it was the ride home: twenty-five miles on a howling stomach while the northerly taunted him, tilting him sideways, delaying his dinnertime. So now he eats his fill of porridge, scraping the sides of the bowl, washing it down with long draughts of water. He has learned something, he tells himself, about cause and effect — a life lesson. Learning is no longer an abstraction, the stuff of dog-eared textbooks and chalk diagrams, of sitting back in one’s chair and thinking. All that is over. He’d be far better served by a trip to MacBean’s Hardware to study nails and screws.
His mother has made his sandwiches: great doorstops of bread filled with leftover mutton or cold sausage, and relish made from the tomatoes he trussed last summer and watered every day. These he takes from the cold safe and puts in his satchel, along with a thermos of tea, if he’s found time to boil the kettle.
This morning his mother’s already in the kitchen, lighting the stove
. ‘Go back to bed,’ he tells her. ‘I can manage.’
‘I won’t sleep,’ she says. ‘I’m awake for the day now. Besides, I could do with an early start.’ She takes the kettle from the hob and fills it at the sink. ‘I’m helping Mrs Corrigan make some new curtains. She insists on paying me, so I’m going to swallow my pride and take her money.’ She looks out the window, craning to make out the sky. ‘It might rain today. You’ll carry your mack, just in case?’ He doesn’t tell her that his old school mackintosh now rides up to his elbows and is ripped at the seams.
If there were another way, he’d take it, but what other way is there? Money must be earned, and he’s the man of the house — the responsibility rightly falls upon his shoulders. The widow’s pension barely buys their milk and bread. Still, they might have scraped by if it were just a case of milk and bread. Home-grown vegetables, the occasional rabbit brought down with his father’s old gun: he imagines some sort of noble self-sufficiency. But the rent must be found by the end of the month, and every month after. There are no magic beanstalks, no pots of gold. He’s lucky to have found a job. Let him concentrate on that.
Ah, but there are times, many times, when he longs to again bury his head in a book, or to use his limbs simply for the fun of it. His ambitions, cut off at the knees, have grown wild, unruly wings. Ascension College, no longer his birthright, is gone from his thoughts; instead he now dreams of the grand libraries and green playing fields that Robbie Cameron’s described to him.
‘I’m going to be a doctor,’ Robbie had told him last Christmas. ‘Not that I’ll be coming back here to work.’
The two of them had been at Robbie’s house, mooching about in his room. The electric train set was packed away under Robbie’s bed, and a desk and chair now stood in its place. Robbie taught him to play poker, and they wagered with the coins in a jar that Robbie took from his parents’ room. Despite Robbie’s boastings that his dad would never miss a few measly coins, Dom handed back his earnings at the end of the game. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the posh school blazer hanging on the wardrobe door. While Robbie banged on about the girls in Melbourne, he thought back to the arithmetic bee of primary school: Mr Welsh at the rostrum calling out the sums, and all the kids lined up, grim and silent, against the classroom wall. Come the very last sum he’d be at the top of the line — first place, every bloody time — while Robbie would be third, after Mary-Anne McKenna. This paltry victory nagged at him — a stubborn, shameful gloating. Why did that posh blazer belong to Robbie, and not to him?
The Science of Appearances Page 6
