‘Well, you’ve got it all planned out. Is this Robbie’s idea, or yours?’
‘Mine, though Robbie will agree. We just haven’t had time to talk about it yet.’
‘You’re heading for a fall, Mary Quinn. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
~
Instead of Ascension College, which his mother now abhors, Dominic enrols at Rosary House, a bluestone residence on Hutton Street, recently turned makeshift school to fifty Catholic boys. Fairless goes there, and Dom knows many of the others from middle school.
The plan — his mother’s — is that he’ll do Leaving and Matriculation in one year. ‘We won’t have that debt to Mrs Egan hanging over our heads a minute longer than necessary,’ she said, the day after she’d telephoned to accept the offer. ‘You’re bright enough to do two years in one.’ The headmaster, Brother Brendan, was somewhat sceptical though ultimately resigned. ‘Our mission at Rosary House is, first and foremost, to guide our boys in the teachings of the Church,’ he said, pressing solid fingers together as if about to pray. Dominic’s mother pulled distractedly at her glove. ‘Matriculation results must come second.’
‘Don’t worry about all that,’ his mother said, as they left the brother’s office and walked home at her cracking pace. ‘You can be a good Catholic and matriculate with honours. There’s nothing sinful about doing well at school.’
He takes only Matriculation classes and makes up the gaps in his knowledge with extra work at home. He knows nothing of calculus, and has missed a whole year of chemistry, but the thought of catching up to his classmates, perhaps even overtaking them, sees him turning out the light at eleven only to wake at six for another stint before breakfast. He sometimes wonders what it is that drives him on like this. A competitive spirit: yes, he’s reluctant to admit to it — other than on the football field it seems somehow wrong — but it’s there at the core of him, a slow-burning fire. He absolves himself with the thought that he competes not just to win in some meaningless way (who cares if he ends up Dux of Rosary House) but to earn himself something tangible: a university place, a profession, a way out of poverty for himself and his mother. Mary, too.
Mrs Egan’s money. The thought pulls him up every damn time. That there’s money for his schooling, some sort of bankable amount, seems incredible for starters, but that it’s been lent to him by someone who owes him nothing and wants nothing in return? Each morning he thinks he must have dreamed it up during the night. His next instinct is to telephone the Romsey post office to ask Mrs Egan if she’s sure, but it’s an idle, half-awake thought, and he’s a hypocrite for thinking it. He won’t telephone because he doesn’t want to give her the opportunity of changing her mind. His course has been set: he doesn’t know what he’d do if someone were to change it now. Instead he must work hard and distinguish himself, so as to give Nuala Egan the satisfaction of backing the right horse.
Cricket season lingers, and Rosary House is in dire need of new bats and balls, the last lot having mysteriously vanished from the shed over the summer holidays. Fairless blames the high-school kids. ‘Proddy dogs,’ he mutters, raising to his shoulder the old pick handle that’s now their only cricket bat. ‘Too cheap to buy their own. Do they think we’re made of money?’ Dominic, taking his turn as keeper at a wicket made of sticks, thinks it’s more likely to have been an inside job, but he keeps this thought to himself.
Terry Duggan and his dad come up with an idea to raise money for sports equipment. ‘A rabbit drive,’ Terry says at Tuesday recess. ‘We can sell the meat to Harry Portelli and the skins to Uncle Jim.’ Jim Duggan is known as the local hide merchant. ‘We’ll need a big group of men to herd them into a corner. We can use our back paddock. Dad said he’ll reinforce the corner of the fence if Brother Brendan’ll pay for the wire.’ It’s an old idea, tried and tested, and the district’s still plagued with the creatures, nicely fattened on the pasture meant for lambs.
The date is set for the Saturday morning after next. Father Clancy makes an announcement after communion at Sunday Mass, urging all able-bodied parishioners to join in. ‘Bring sticks and bits of tin, bring your ferrets and dogs. Anything to get those vermin moving.’ Father Clancy’s face is flushed with the effort of rousing the troops, his voice harsher and more impassioned than the one he reserves for his sermons. Dom watches him and thinks of Mary.
‘I don’t want to go,’ he tells his mother on Friday evening.
She’s darning the elbow of his grey jumper. She puts it aside and looks at him, and he has the sense that she’s been waiting for him to speak. ‘Why not?’ she asks.
He’s not entirely sure. He’d always wanted to go rabbiting when he was a kid. Something’s pulling him away, some contrariness that tells him to question and resist. ‘I’d rather do some study,’ he says lamely.
‘It’ll be harder if you don’t turn up than if you do.’ She winds a stray strand of wool around her hand. ‘You know how it is around here. It’ll be the rabbits or you.’
So early the next morning he cadges a ride with Fairless and his dad to the meeting place — they plan to start the hunt on the corner of Sidonia and Baynton roads, some three miles from the paddock where the rabbits will be trapped. There’s already quite a crowd, mainly Rosary House boys and their fathers, the occasional mother and sister. Eunice Moran approaches him, wearing dungarees, the dry frizz of her hair held back in a scarf. ‘Any news of Mary?’ she asks.
‘No.’
‘We’re praying for her at our place.’
‘Thanks.’
Eunice leans in close. ‘Do you think she’s on the street?’
‘Piss off.’ He turns quickly and walks away. He’ll be damned if he’ll let Eunice Moran see him cry.
The men stand around smoking like they do after Mass, talking about the weather, the footy, the price of wool. Dominic congregates with his classmates, half an ear to their talk, while he looks east out over the paddocks to where the sun still sits low. The sky is streaked with pink-edged grey clouds: maybe it’ll rain cats and dogs, and the hunt will have to be abandoned. Maybe Eunice bloody Moran will slip in the mud and break her neck in a ditch.
Mr Duggan shouts instructions to the crowd and waves them on. Dominic, who’s heard nothing of what he said, follows at the back of the pack with a stick and a tin can. The stick he soon discards: there’s such a din already — whistles, shouts, stamping feet, the drumming of a hundred sheets of tin — that he doesn’t need to add to it. The rabbits will be scared witless as it is. Kevin McGuire’s dad plays rousing battle music and marching tunes on his bugle, and the men fall into step. They sing along: It’s a long way to Tipperary … Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag.
‘C’mon, Quinn,’ Fairless calls out to him. ‘Look lively.’
The crowd spreads out across the width of the paddock, and in front of their advance the exodus takes shape. ‘They’re running,’ someone shouts. ‘We’ve got ’em running!’ The rabbits are everywhere, materialising out of the ground; a hundred — maybe two hundred — pairs of twitching ears and shivering haunches. They run, stop and smell the air, and set off again, some criss-crossing the paddock but inexorably moving forward. Run sideways, Dominic finds himself urging them. Jump the fence. Can’t you bloody see?
They’ve crossed four large paddocks and must be still a mile and a half from their destination. A southerly has sprung up and the dark clouds are building, but the men are at fever pitch, and Dominic knows that rain won’t stop them now.
Afterwards he’ll remember it as the day he discovered that Eunice Moran had more courage than he. As the skies broke open and the rabbits cowered in the corner against the reinforced fence, climbing over one another in their terror, he’d seen her bring her stick down hard on a rabbit’s skull, again and again, the rain in her face, her wild dry hair loosened from the scarf, until the creature stopped writhing.
~
As the weather warms, and the north wind springs up to dry the washing as quick as you please, Mary thinks of the sea. She’s seen it before with Robbie, one Sunday in July when Robbie did a bunk from school to take her to St Kilda. How he managed it she didn’t really know, except that he’d told her he was planning it when they’d met on the Friday before. It had been so romantic, so thoughtful of him: ducking out on a Friday afternoon for an hour was one thing, but a whole Sunday took some planning. It had something to do with the new boarding master and someone who owed Robbie a favour — that’s all he’d say. She’d done a bunk from the hostel too, but Robbie didn’t ask about that. What mattered was that he was next to her as the tram turned into Fitzroy Street, and as the door slid open in the sway, she breathed deep and knew the sea was close.
They rode the tram to the last stop, and there it was, just across the street. The brightness of it: that’s what she remembers. All that space, that soaring sky. She couldn’t take her eyes off the horizon. How could it be that she’d not known until then how water could melt into sky? Robbie went to buy fish and chips while she stood on the footpath outside the shop, staring out to sea until her eyes hurt. ‘Lost something, love?’ a man said, and tipped his hat at her.
They’d taken their lunch across the Esplanade (the wind toying with her skirt as the sea breeze picked up) and onto the beach, where they hunkered down against a warm stone wall. The fine sand was slippery against her legs, just like silk stockings might feel. She held the newspaper bundle to her chest to soak up its warmth until Robbie wrestled it from her. ‘This is our first meal together,’ she told him. He tore a piece of fish in two and gave her half.
The gulls soon found them. They stood around and cocked their frightening little heads, their bright eyes full of cheekiness and pleading. They reminded Mary of two girls back at school — Lizzie O’Riordan and Margaret Dunne, who’d sidle up to her at morning break, always hungry for what she had, even if they had something nicer. Mary held out a chip to the smallest gull. There was a flurry of flapping and screeching, and a bigger bird took off with the prize in its beak. ‘Stop feeding those bloody birds,’ Robbie said, through a mouthful of potato cake.
They walked on the pier, past the kiosk where people sat drinking beer, all the way to the end. There they turned and looked back to land, far away. The sun came out from behind the clouds and silvered the water, and Robbie took her hand. Fishermen, swaddled in scarves against the winter air, sat dangling their legs alongside thermoses and picnic baskets, the ash from their cigarettes skittering across the timbers in the wind. ‘What language are they speaking?’ she asked Robbie, who studied French and Latin.
‘Italian. The Eyties like to find food they don’t have to pay for. They pick grass and weeds from the sides of the railway lines, too.’
Robbie cadged a cigarette from one of the fishermen, and he and Mary smoked it together, backs to the railing, squinting up at the blue-grey sky. The water rose and fell lazily against the piles, as if there was nothing better to do. ‘I wish I could stay here forever,’ Mary said. ‘This very spot.’
Robbie squinted at her. ‘Stay out here? You say the craziest things.’
Now that the air is stirring with summer, Mary wants to return to St Kilda. She wants to walk on that pier again, right to the end, where the water’s deep and she knows that she’s truly left the land behind.
Mary tells Jo that she’s planning to bunk again. ‘You want to come with me?’ she asks as they peg clothes in the yard.
‘Not on your life,’ Jo says. Betty Short crosses the yard and dumps her washing basket at the other end of the line. Jo lowers her voice. ‘You’re asking for trouble, risking it a second time on a Sunday. You know that Raven can turf you out on your ear any time she wants to.’
Mary doesn’t care, she really truly doesn’t. She wonders why Jo does. ‘If Raven throws me out then I’ll find somewhere else, just like I always meant to. This was always a resting place on the road to something better.’
Jo thrusts a sheet into Mary’s hands. ‘For God’s sake, keep your voice down. You talk like you’re in a bloody film.’
‘And if I leave, you can come too, and we can live together in our own little place. Won’t that be fun, Jo?’
Jo jackknifes over the basket and wrestles with a sheet. When she straightens up, Mary sees that her eyes are wet. ‘You’ve got no idea, have you? You go out there with no money, no family, and see where you end up. You’ll be breaking the door down to get back in here.’
The basket’s empty and the sheets hang like ghostly corpses between them. Mary thinks of Jo’s baby, somewhere in the world, and the sadness Jo carries with her instead.
In the tram down St Kilda Road, the shilling from Miss Poynter grows hot in Mary’s hand. Threepence for the fare each way: that won’t leave enough for her lunch. And a little thing too for Jo — a stick of striped rock or a tin of dolly sweets. As the conductor approaches, she slides the shilling into the pocket of her dress.
‘Where to, Miss?’
‘St Kilda Beach, please.’ She pats gently at her cardigan pocket. She frowns and pats at the other, and dives deep into the pocket of her dress. Her eyes grow wide. ‘My purse. I’ve lost it.’ Her voice breaks. ‘This is terrible. I had at least a pound in it. My day is ruined.’
The conductor’s eyes narrow and he purses his lips just like Mrs Boyle in Hayes’ whenever a customer summoned the courage to question a price. Mary wishes she hadn’t added the last little bit. She decides to force his hand. ‘Do you want me to get off the tram?’ What’s there to lose? She can always wait for the next one and try again.
‘No, Miss, you stay on,’ he announces to the half-filled tram. He punches a ticket and leans in close to her. ‘Just don’t try it again, right?’ he says under his breath. ‘I know what you’re up to.’
Mary rests her cheek against the cool of the window. She doesn’t set out to be a liar, but circumstances increasingly call for a little dramatic licence. What would happen if she didn’t sometimes bend the truth? Exactly nothing, that’s what. She’d be stuck at the hostel, day in, day out, with no chance of seeing Robbie, no opportunity for a bit of fun.
Jo had been sure Raven wouldn’t grant permission for a Sunday outing, but Mary had managed it in the end. A story about a family friend who lived on the Esplanade, in a white house with a turret and a telescope looking out to sea. Matron Raven’s painted eyebrows had arched like the nave of a cathedral, but the hastily added detail of the invalid husband in a wheelchair — war wounds, she’d said — had done the trick. ‘Ask Miss Poynter for your tram fare,’ Raven said with a sigh, marking down in her black ledger the name — Mrs Edna Poole — and address Mary had given, on the page marked Sunday 26 November 1950.
She slides her hand into her pocket and closes it around the shilling. The only money she has in the world. Rather than frightening her, the thought of its singularity spurs her on to enjoy what it will provide, every last crumb of it.
ATLANTIC ETHYL reads the neon sign above the petrol station at the junction. Mary wonders who Ethyl is and what she might have done to get her name in lights.
On the Esplanade, the wind in her face, Mary feasts on chips doused in vinegar that come wrapped in a tight little package of her own. Across the street a tall white house with a balcony echoes the description of the imaginary house she had given to Raven: was it always there, or has she wished it into being? If she could just make friends with its people, why, her lie would become a truth, and she could visit St Kilda more often. She crosses the Esplanade and stands sentry on the footpath, but the front door remains closed, the windows empty. A man in a brown double-breasted lingers at the fence. ‘Do you know where I can find a good time around here?’ he asks through fleshy lips. His worn-down teeth are one shade lighter than his suit.
Mary considers this question. She doesn’t think he means a walk along the beach, so she’s not
in a position to advise. ‘Excuse me,’ she says. ‘I have to go.’ On the other side of the Esplanade she turns and looks back, but the brown-suited man is nowhere to be seen.
On the pier a crowd has gathered in front of the kiosk. She wends her way to the front of the scrum, breathing in as she slips between a backside in front, a chest behind. A young man with a shiny, scrubbed face is holding the tail of a silver fish, while at his feet a whiskered brown creature balances a ball on its nose. ‘It’s a seal,’ Mary says, clapping her hands.
‘A sea lion, love,’ a woman corrects her. ‘Seals can’t walk on land.’
The silver fish dangles. The ball trembles and is suddenly airborne, to be caught again on the same expectant nose. The fish drops through the air as the creature’s mouth hinges open like a rabbit-trap. The crowd claps, and the sea lion does too.
‘Who’d like a kiss from Ernie?’ the young man asks the crowd. ‘It’ll bring you luck.’ He scans the group and his eyes rest on Mary. ‘How about you, ma chérie?’ he says grandly. ‘Ernie’s a very good smoocher.’
Mary steps out from the crowd. She can’t remember ever being chosen for anything before. ‘What’s your name?’ the man asks, and after she answers: ‘Say hallo to Mary, everyone.’
He produces another fish from his bucket and guides Mary to a chair. ‘Sit here and hold it up high,’ he whispers in her ear, ‘and with your other hand pat your cheek. Ernie knows what to do.’
She does what he tells her. The sea lion lopes closer. Doesn’t it look a bit like a dog, with its whiskers and fur and its knowing black eyes? She holds her breath as something wet nudges her face; she feels rubbery skin, and a warm, snuffling breath that smells of the wondrous sea. The creature smiles, baring blackened teeth, and she can’t help but smile back. It ducks its head and covers its face with a fin. Laughter ripples through the crowd. ‘Why, Mary!’ says the young man, ‘you’ve made Ernie blush.’ He leans forward, sotto voce: ‘Touch your cheek again now.’
The Science of Appearances Page 9
