The Science of Appearances

by Jacinta Halloran

  The sea lion peeps at her from under its flipper. The poor, poor thing: all this for a fish it could catch in an instant, were it allowed back in the water. ‘Come on,’ she whispers, already a seasoned performer. ‘Let’s finish this off.’ She kneels down beside the creature and puts her hand to her cheek and, in a flurry of whiskers and salty, fishy affection, the kiss is bestowed. She stands as gracefully as she can and throws her fish high into the air. It reaches its zenith and begins the downward tumble, its silver scales catching the light. The sea lion lumbers forward. The fish is deftly caught, the crowd applauds and the creature barks — it is like a dog! Pennies and sixpence are dropped into the young man’s proffered hat. ‘What will happen to Ernie?’ she asks him as the crowd disperses.

  ‘You watch.’ He claps his hands, hard. ‘Off you go, Ern, off home now.’ The sea lion lollops to the pier’s slippery edge and dives with such grace that Mary is comforted. ‘He’ll be back soon enough. He knows which side his bread is buttered.’

  The man, whose name is Tom Jessop, takes her into the kiosk to wash the mackerel smell from her hands. He sits her on a barstool. ‘Would the mademoiselle fancy a milkshake?’

  She hasn’t had a milkshake since — she screws up her eyes, remembering. Since the Swallow tearooms with Joan, on the morning her father died. ‘Caramel, please,’ she says softly.

  ‘Coming right up.’

  The change from the shilling hangs heavy in her pocket. She remembers Jo’s sweets. ‘But I don’t have any money.’

  ‘It’s on the house,’ Tom says. ‘Wouldn’t dream of charging you after that star performance.’

  A stout woman is wiping down tables. ‘How did it go, Tom?’ she calls across the room.

  ‘Great, Mum, as always. Ernie’s a trooper. This is Mary.’

  The woman approaches. ‘You helped out today, love? Good for you. Tom will look after you.’

  She excuses herself, telling Tom she’s going upstairs for a lie-down now the lunch rush is over. Mary rests her chin on her elbows and watches him. His hair shines under the lights. The tumbler shines too as he angles it under the mixer. He’s thrown the red-checked tea towel over his shoulder, and the seat of his trousers is stained with grease, but what she really notices is how he loves this place. There’s an ease, a sense of comfort in the way he reaches for the bottle of caramel topping without even having to look, the confident flick of his wrist as he opens the refrigerator door. He knows she’s watching and he’s puffed up with the pride of it: this is his princedom, and he wants to show her that he knows his way around.

  The sight of the frothy milk draws a sigh from somewhere hungry deep inside Mary. She could feel right at home here. In an odd way it’s as if she belongs already. Mary sips and thinks of Joan’s house: its buttery smell, and the striped wallpaper in the lounge, where Joan’s mother would sit, knitting, after making them afternoon tea; how the sunlight warmed Joan’s bed and the pretty bedroom curtains — so pretty that she’d once wrapped herself in one and called to Joan to bring her a mirror. ‘Oh, Tom,’ she says, ‘it’s delicious.’

  ‘Always do my best for a pretty girl.’

  She smiles.

  Once the milkshake is finished, she fiddles with her straw, playing for time. ‘Tell me about the kiosk, Tom.’

  ‘Dad’s got a good head for business. During the war he put down a dance floor here’ — Tom gestures to the tables and chairs — ‘and got a band together to play every Saturday night. The Yanks liked to come and throw their money around, you know, show off to the girls. Big tippers, the Yanks; give you an extra bob for every drink you sell them. Some of the locals weren’t so happy about them being here, but we weren’t complaining.’

  Tom tugs the tea towel from his shoulder to give the bench a cursory wipe. ‘I could give you a history lesson but, better still, why don’t I show you around?’ He pulls a cardboard sign out from under the bar: Back in five minutes. ‘Come on, before Mum wakes up.’

  Tom takes her outside. ‘The pier is five hundred feet long,’ he shouts into the wind. ‘Lucky for us, people can really build up a thirst walking all that way.’ He taps on the door with an authoritative finger. ‘This coloured glass is Italian, from some famous place in Venice, put here when the joint was called Parer’s Pavilion. Very posh, in its day.’ Inside again, Tom locks the café door and they tiptoe upstairs. ‘My room,’ he says proudly, swinging open a door.

  The bedroom, glassed in on all four sides and warmed by the sun, is full of boyish things: rope, pieces of wood, a tray of nails and screws, a bicycle wheel with a few broken spokes. Brown glass jars with stoppers, like those in a chemist shop, are lined up on a corner table. He’s a scavenger, Mary thinks, but an orderly one. The comics are stacked neatly, and each strand of rope lies tightly coiled on a shelf. She remembers the sparseness of her bedroom in Kyneton, the room she shared with Dom, her few little trinkets lined up on the dressing table like sad, lonely soldiers. ‘You’re allowed to keep all these things in your room? Your mother doesn’t mind?’

  ‘Why would she mind? I’m an inventor. She’s happy about it. Sooner or later I’m bound to invent something that makes us a fortune.’

  The salty air licks around the closed windows and rattles the panes. She picks up a rusted kerosene tin, cut away on one side. ‘What’s this?’ she asks, putting it to her face. ‘A Ned Kelly mask?’

  ‘It’s my old diving helmet. Made it myself.’ He takes it from her and wrestles it on. ‘The celluloid face mask sits in here, see? And the air supply screws in at the top. I made lead weights, too — boiled down the lead from some wires I found running underneath the pier. Later found out they were telephone wires. PMG had to come and re-lay the lot. Dad never let on it was me.’

  His story makes her dizzy: the things she’s never done. ‘Do you still dive? What do you see down there?’

  Tom grins at her through his helmet. ‘Mermaids. Much like you.’

  She half believes him.

  By the time they’re downstairs again it’s decided: all Tom needs is his dad’s say-so. ‘Mum could use the help, and when I tell her where you’re staying now …’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she keeps asking. ‘Pinch me, Tom. Are you sure?’ First the white house on the Esplanade, and now this offer of salvation: could her life be going backwards, and her present wishes simply memories of a perfectly happy past?

  Tom checks his watch. ‘Dad’ll be back real soon. Why don’t you wait till he gets here? If everything’s all right we’ll telephone your gaolers and let them know the score. Tomorrow we can take you over there and pick up your belongings. Safety in numbers, Mary.’

  This afternoon she was kissed by a creature from the sea. Now she returns the favour.

  ~

  Although it seems there’s another new Austin A40 or Holden FX in town every day, Mr Welsh still rides his bicycle. Dominic sometimes sees him when both are on their way to school, Mr Welsh riding leisurely down Yaldwyn Street, his old satchel slung across his chest. They always stop to speak. ‘How are they treating you at Rosary House?’ Mr Welsh asks, when Dominic’s been there long enough to know.

  ‘Leaving me to my own devices, mainly.’

  ‘That’s a good thing, I’d say.’

  ‘You’re not tempted to buy a car?’ Dominic asks, one drizzling day at the corner of Yaldwyn and Powlett. He’s in Bernie Egan’s mack while Mr Welsh is coatless.

  Mr Welsh laughs. ‘It’s only water. I’ll dry. Truth is, I like the cycling. It keeps me grounded, you know? But you must think I’m talking rubbish, after all that riding you did last year. I hope it hasn’t put you off bikes forever.’

  ‘Just for a year or two.’ They used to talk bikes in the schoolyard, Mr Welsh and he. He’s glad that it’s remembered.

  ‘I have lots of spare time in the evenings, so if ever you want to throw a few ideas around — about schoolwork, but other t
hings too — please drop in. You know where I live?’

  Dominic nods. He’s known since primary school. ‘Are you any good at calculus?’

  ‘All right in my day. Would need to dust off some cobwebs, but yes, I could give it a shot.’

  Dom smiles. ‘I’ll take you up on that. Thanks.’

  ‘Come by whenever you want. I’m always there, talking to myself.’

  Dominic’s visits to Mr Welsh’s house are sporadic. Extra attention from a teacher is the sort of thing that gets you singled out in Kyneton, so he’s careful not to make a habit of it. Once calculus is dealt with, they move onto other things, none of them strictly curricular. Books and music, mostly. There’s a bookcase in the sitting room stacked with orange-spined paperbacks. The gramophone is usually playing when he arrives. ‘Better turn this off for calculus,’ Mr Welsh said, on the first of Dom’s visits. ‘It’s liable to distract. Not you, but me.’ He turns the music on again when the lesson is over and they have drifted into talk, and will often stop mid-sentence to say, ‘Listen to this. What do you think?’ It’s modern jazz, Mr Welsh has told him, but to Dominic it’s a disorganised, confusing amalgam of sounds that he can’t read or settle into. He wants to be able to predict what comes next, he tells his teacher, but this music is defiantly unpredictable.

  ‘Ah, but that’s what makes it so great,’ Mr Welsh responds, tapping his hand on his knee. ‘It’s iconoclastic, revolutionary. It challenges convention.’

  Mr Welsh’s house is much like theirs in Beauchamp Street: just two small bedrooms, a kitchen and a sitting room. Dom follows Mr Welsh into the kitchen when he makes tea, and sees how a bachelor lives. The sitting room, too, is comfortably strewn, as if anything one could possibly need — from a hoe to a horse blanket — is well within reach. Mr Welsh doesn’t make apologies for his housekeeping. His attention’s caught by other things. To his relief, Mr Welsh never asks about Mary.

  Except for the very last visit, the week before the Matriculation exams begin. They’ve run through some of the fundamental theorems of calculus — if a function f is continuous on the interval [a,b] — and detoured into physics, revising the laws of Coulomb and Dalton. Dom’s packing up his books when Mr Welsh says, ‘I’m not going to pretend I understand what it’s like for you now that Mary’s gone. But I want to say this: Mary was different.’

  Dom nods dumbly, his eyes downcast.

  ‘Her temperament would have led her away from here sooner or later,’ Mr Welsh continues. ‘I’m sorry for your sake that it was sooner, and in such a manner. But perhaps she had to leave the way she did.’

  Dom looks up. ‘Why hasn’t she contacted us?’ He’s surprised by the harshness in his voice. ‘Doesn’t she understand what it’s like not to know?’

  ‘Her instincts might be telling her to stay hidden, at least for now,’ Mr Welsh says quietly. ‘But I don’t doubt that her thoughts are with you.’ He pauses, as if deciding whether to go on. ‘She’s following her nature, I’m sure of it. She’s becoming herself.’ His face takes on the same expression he wore in the classroom whenever he read poetry aloud. ‘Don’t you find it remarkable, that inner compass in all of us, steering us onwards along our individual paths? Look at you, Dom. Your path is science. You were deviated from it for a while, when you had to leave school, but look how you’ve come back to it! Mary’s the same, but different, if you see what I mean.’ He walks Dom to the front door. ‘Do well in your exams,’ he says, as Dom collects his bike from the verandah. ‘I know you will.’

  ~

  The Jessops have given Mary the room across the landing from Tom’s, one tiny perfect corner of the house that was, until last week, a storeroom for baking supplies. Tom carted bags of flour and sugar to the shed, and hauled a trundle bed upstairs. ‘Used to be mine when I was a kid.’ He slid it against the wall and bounced the mattress springs. ‘Good as new, once the dust settles. You’ll be pleased to hear I was never a bedwetter.’

  There’s a wooden chest in the corner of the room with the words Shell Motor Spirit painted in red cursive across the top drawer. Mary traces each word with her finger. Shell because they’re at sea. Motor for Tom’s little boat tied to a pile — he built it himself, and he’s promised to take her for a ride in it soon. Spirit for the watery breath of this place, and for the golden kindness of the Jessops, who’ve taken her in.

  Best of all, though, is the porthole window. When she stands close to it, she looks across water to the elbows of land on either side. When she lies on the bed, the window reveals a circle of sky. She imagines Robbie star-gazing beside her as evening turns to night, and longs for it to happen: for it to be the two of them and only them, perched like lovebirds in a nest.

  She turns from the porthole window, thinking of Dom, at home with their mother. They’ll be drawing the curtains in Beauchamp Street while this room, her room, blushes pink with the sunset. This evening she’s heavy with the lack of him, her good, dutiful brother, but she can’t hold the heaviness like he can. Already it’s lifting from her, as the smell of corned beef climbs the stairs and drifts under her door. Some things rise, some fall and some stay steady.

  She wants to write to Dom: Don’t worry about me. Look after yourself. That’s all she’d have to say. She couldn’t bear him to know that staying behind was far worse than leaving.

  She gets up to find her notebook, and puts pen to paper with a resolute hand.

  Dearest Dom, I left because I had to. How could I go on living in a house where truth and lies were switched around? I would have gone crazy within the week. Be careful, Dom. Be careful she doesn’t confuse you. It’s not wrong to be happy.

  She folds her note into ever smaller squares, posts it through the open porthole window and watches it coast for a brief, hopeful moment before it drops into the sea.

  The following Tuesday evening she sets pen to paper again.

  Dear Joan, she writes. I knew that coming to Melbourne was going to work out, and I was right. I’m now living in the most magical place, but I can’t tell you where. All I can say is that a wonderful family has taken me in. I’m working in the family business (never a dull moment!) and they’ve given me a room in their house. If only you could see where I live, and the view from my bedroom window. There’s a bloke, a year older than me, called Tom. Boy oh boy he’s a scream, and great fun to hang about with. There’s not one thing he can’t put his mind to. But don’t go thinking there’s anything in it. I’m not interested in him that way. He’s like a brother …

  And this one she posts in the mailbox in Fitzroy Street.

  ~

  Joan Corrigan’s at the front door, blushing and stammering, while her mother hovers at the gate. Joan holds up an envelope. ‘I didn’t know what to do. Mary asked me not to tell — you’ll see when you read it — but Mum said I had to.’ Her eyes fill with tears. ‘We’re worried sick.’

  Sure enough it’s Mary’s handwriting — the comical backward slope of the t, as if even an envelope’s a thing of joy. Dominic shouts for his mother to come. ‘Mary’s alive. She’s all right.’ This last he can tell, even without reading what she has written.

  ‘She sounds happy,’ Joan says. Her lower lip trembles. ‘Will she ever come back? I miss her dreadfully.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he says. He could say more: No, she won’t come back. Why the hell would she? Why didn’t she write to me? But his mother’s already hurtling down the hallway, untying her apron as she runs.

  8

  Dominic’s mother insists on coming with him. ‘I won’t be able to rest until I meet these Nevilles and see the state of their kitchen. And I have to check the mattress. We’re paying good money. I’ll be letting them know if your mattress is too old.’

  He hasn’t the heart to argue with her. Neither does he remind her that it’s Nuala Egan’s money they’re spending. The night before he’s due to leave for Melbourne, he telephones Mrs Egan to sa
y goodbye. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he tells her, blushing into the mouthpiece. ‘I’ll try not to let you down.’

  ‘Enjoy yourself, Dominic,’ Mrs Egan says. ‘University will be a grand adventure.’

  He’s about to hang up when she says, ‘And Mary. I’ll be praying every day that you find her.’

  He and his mother travel to Melbourne on a Saturday morning, a windless day in the middle of February. As they wait on the station platform, the warmth of the sun on his face brings on a strange, sad worrying. Will there be days like this in Melbourne? He’s heard that it rains all the time, and the summers are cloudy and cool. He looks along the platform to the land beyond the railway line, to the pockmarked stone walls and yellowed stubble, and beyond, to the Praters’ farm, half the paddocks still blackened from January’s grassfire. Who knows when he’ll be back? He turns to his mother with half a mind to tell her that it’s all wrong, he can’t possibly leave, but before he can speak she shakes her head at him. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but it will soon pass. This is the right thing, Dominic.’

  The sun has brought some colour to her face, and all at once a line of perspiration breaks out across her forehead. She reaches for her handkerchief and dabs the sweat away. ‘I might wait in the shade for a bit,’ she says.

  He follows her to the waiting room, where they sit side by side. The green light that comes through the glass makes his mother’s face sallow, and the skin under her eyes looks bruised. The thought of what her life will be now is too difficult to hold onto. He wants to take her hand and hold onto it instead, but it seems like weakness, or a breach of decency. He’s afraid of how she’ll respond.

  ‘You’ll look for Mary, won’t you?’ his mother asks. ‘I know you have to study, but you’ll try to find her?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He leans ever so slightly against her and their shoulders touch.