One Whole and Perfect Day

by Judith Clarke

  Rose had flinched then, as she always did when her sad history was mentioned. ‘I know,’ she said quickly, wanting this subject of her parents to pass. ‘But –’

  ‘But but BUT,’ cried Clara, and her voice had risen to a shout. ‘Mum, why do you always make excuses for him? He’s just a rude old grouch!’ She’d stomped from the kitchen, where so many of their quarrels seemed to take place, stopping suddenly in the doorway, swinging round on Rose. ‘You could leave.’

  At first Rose hadn’t realised what her daughter meant. She’d thought Clara was talking about the job at the library, which Rose enjoyed. She loved books, she even liked readers, and matching one to the other. ‘You will love this!’ Rose would greet Mrs Fitchett, holding out the latest novel from the old lady’s favourite author. ‘It’s his best, I think!’

  ‘Leave? But I like my job, Clara.’

  Clara had clicked her tongue impatiently. ‘Not your job. I meant –’ She’d pointed to the ceiling, through which both of them could hear the head of the household splashing in the shower.

  ‘Leave your dad?’

  ‘You’ve got it, Mum!’

  Rose’s right hand had risen protectively against her heart. The young were so hard; they saw everything so sharply, like – like traffic lights: red meant stop and green meant go and the amber one they had no patience with . . .

  ‘You’ll never do it, though,’ Clara had decided. ‘Mum, I know what you’re hoping for: some kind of miracle, the sort of thing that never happens, here on earth, so it’s not going to happen here at 46 Harkness Street, Lidcombe. Dad won’t change, you know, become the kind of person you like to think he is, deep down inside. It will never happen,’ she’d repeated, and marched off down the hall.

  Two weeks later, after a row with her father about her fourth-year thesis topic, Clara had left home. She lived at the university now, and never came home to visit; she rang Rose at the library, and they met every few weeks at a coffee shop in town.

  ‘What’s your room like?’ Rose would ask her daughter.

  ‘Oh, just ordinary.’

  ‘What kind of furniture?’

  ‘What you’d expect,’ Clara would answer maddeningly. ‘A bed, and a desk, and a chair. Little sink in the corner, built-in wardrobe. You know.’

  ‘What colour are the walls?’

  Clara would shrug. ‘Don’t remember. Never noticed, I suppose.’

  They must be white, decided Rose, and in her mind she pictured a narrow cold white cell. Bare, too, because Clara hadn’t taken anything from home except her books and clothes. The room would have cold bright echoing floors. Rose shivered. ‘Would you like me to make you some curtains?’ she’d asked hopefully. ‘I could come and do the measuring, I wouldn’t interrupt your work . . .’

  ‘I’ve got curtains, Mum.’

  Rose had been hoping all these months that Clara would ask her to visit, to see the place where she lived. Clara hadn’t, and Rose had been afraid to suggest it. What if Clara said, ‘No’?

  The water in the bath was growing cold. Rose got out and wrapped herself in a deep green fluffy towel. Then she padded down the hall towards her bedroom, put on her nightdress, and lay down on the bed.

  She could go there, she thought suddenly. She could go without an invitation, and visit Clara’s room. Why shouldn’t she? Clara was her daughter, her only child. Except for Charlie, Clara was Rose’s only relative on earth.

  Yes, one day soon, she promised herself, she would go. Just to look, to see. On her day off, thought Rose sleepily – not tomorrow though, tomorrow was too soon. Besides, standing up to Charlie as she’d done tonight deserved a special little celebration of its own. Tomorrow she would take a different trip: back to the suburb where she’d grown up, where she could buy her mother’s favourite sweet: a whole lovely box of gulab jamun.

  Downstairs in the living room, Charlie turned off the television, but he didn’t go up to bed. He was too unsettled. What was happening?

  Rose had never done this before. Spoken to him in a cool sharp voice that sounded like a stranger’s, got up and flounced – yes, flounced, like Clara used to – from the room. She’d even slammed the door. And instead of feeling furious, as he had every right to, Charlie felt uneasy. Small shivers were running through him. What if Rose, like Clara, decided to – ah no, Rose would never do a thing like that. Charlie got up from the sofa and headed for the stairs.

  Though often sulky and silent in terms of speech, Charlie could make a lot of noise about the house; his footsteps clattered on the stairs, doors slammed, taps were turned on full force. But tonight he walked softly and opened the door of the bedroom gently. He could see from the glow of the hall light that Rose hadn’t left him; she was fast asleep beneath the eiderdown. The relief that surged through him turned almost instantly to grievance. Asleep! As if it didn’t matter in the least that she’d wounded him.

  Charlie turned and walked down the hall to Clara’s old room where the door was always closed. He went inside. The emptiness assailed him like a blow. Grief fills the room up of my absent child, he remembered his frightening Year 12 English teacher declaiming, in her small chalky room at the top of the senior stairs. Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me / Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words . . . ‘Poetry consoles,’ she’d told them and she’d been wrong, because the lines slid through him like a blade.

  Charlie crossed to the wardrobe and opened the door. Empty wire hangars jangled inconsolably. Beneath them on the floor lay something pale and crumpled. Charlie bent down and picked it up. It was the soft pink sweater he’d bought last year for Clara’s birthday; the sweater she’d worn every day for weeks.

  She’d left it here. She didn’t want it anymore. No doubt it reminded her of him. Charlie folded the sweater carefully and reached up to place it on the shelf. As he did so, another line from his English teacher’s repetoire slid into his mind: How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.

  That was better, he thought. Now that really did console.

  19

  BESTIE

  Lily switched on her bedside light and reached for the copy of Bestie she’d brought home. Normally Lily had no time for magazines like Bestie: they were full of scary articles like Are you too fat for your cossie? What do they talk about behind your back? and I can’t stop pulling out my hair! You didn’t have to be particularly sensitive for stuff like that to keep you awake at night, once you started thinking about it. Particularly if you had a crush on someone, because having a crush made you feel vulnerable, and even more vulnerable if the person you had a crush on didn’t know you existed. But this afternoon, waiting with her groceries at the supermarket checkout nearest to the news-stand, Lily had caught a glimpse of a tantalising heading on Bestie’s cover: Does he notice You? And how to make him.

  Did he? Did he notice her? Lily had never worked out if that little tremor she felt between herself and Daniel Steadman when they passed each other in the playground or the corridors was real or simply in her mind. So she’d weakened and bought Bestie, hoping it might just, well, tell her something she needed to know.

  Now, in the privacy of her room, she flipped through Bestie’s shiny pages: makeup, clothes, makeup, clothes, clothes. What figure type are you? Makeup, clothes, makeup. I slept with my bestie’s boyf.

  Yuk, thought Lily.

  Clothes, makeup, clothes – and at last, Does he notice you? And how to make him.

  But the article which had sounded so promising was really no help at all. It was full of guys talking about what they liked in a girl:

  Beauty

  Intelligence

  Personality

  Sense of humour

  Kindness

  In short, every gift a good fairy godmother, leaning over your cradle, could bestow. Every gift you could pretend to have. Because that was the gist of the second part of the article (How to make him).

  Pretend.

  And who wanted to pretend? Who
wanted to make people notice you? Who wanted to make people do anything? She was out of touch with the world anyway, decided Lily: the ‘befores’ in the makeover section looked better than the ‘afters’.

  She flung the magazine aside and set off for the bathroom, where if you stepped back far enough, the mirror showed almost the whole of you, from the middle of your forehead down to the bottom of your knees. What figure type are you?

  Squat, decided Lily. When you were shortish, like she was, there was less actual room for any fat to spread, so you looked plumper than you should be, which surely wasn’t fair. She moved up close to the mirror to examine her face: small straight nose, curved lips, dark eyes, a face that persistently reminded her of someone she could never seem to identify. Her eyebrows were too thick, almost bushy. Lily pulled open a drawer in the bathroom cabinet and took out a pair of tweezers. Tentatively she tweaked at a stout black hair. And tweaked again, and again. Ouch! She was surprised how much it hurt, and it was a complete waste of time anyway, because when she tossed the tweezers aside and peered into the mirror, her eyebrows looked no different. Except that the skin around them had turned red, a nasty, bulgy shade of red. Inflamed. Gross, as Tracy Gilman would say.

  ‘What’s wrong with your eyes?’ her mum asked, encountering her in the hall.

  ‘Nothing!’ snapped Lily, and then, guilty at her mother’s hurt expression, she said in a softer voice, ‘I was just pluck –’ she paused, sensing that ‘plucking’ would be the wrong word for her mother, who didn’t go in for activities of that sort. Mum’s tweezers were for removing splinters and other small emergencies of a non-cosmetic kind. ‘I was just thinning my eyebrows,’ she amended.

  ‘Thinning them?’

  You could never win. ‘Plucking them, then,’ scowled Lily.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’re too thick. Don’t you think they’re too thick?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? Mum, look properly.’

  Her mother came closer. ‘They’re just definite,’ she said.

  ‘Definite!’ scoffed Lily, but she felt pleased all the same. Definite sounded good: clear and reasonable, strong. Lily retreated to the bathroom to look at her definite brows. The skin around them was even pinker now. Lily reached for the Savlon and dabbed it on thickly. Now she bore a distinct resemblance to Santa Claus. She rubbed the cream into her skin and her eyebrows went slimy, as if a snail had walked along them. ‘Never mind,’ she consoled herself. ‘Never mind.’

  When she went back to her room she found Mum in there, Bestie in her hands. She looked up from its pages quite guiltlessly and grinned at Lily: Mum had been born before the age of privacy. ‘I thought you didn’t like these kinds of magazines,’ she remarked.

  ‘I don’t,’ snapped Lily. ‘It’s for a project. A report on – on advertising.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her mum flipped the magazine shut, glancing momentarily at the list of contents on the cover. ‘What’s a boyf?’ she asked.

  ‘Boyfriend.’

  ‘Ah. I slept with my beastie’s boyf,’ she read slowly. ‘You mean, this girl was into animal abuse?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Slept with her beastie’s boyf!’

  ‘It’s Bestie, Mum, not Beastie.’

  ‘Bestie?’

  ‘Best friend.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her mother began to laugh. ‘Oh, dear!’

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Oh, oh nothing.’ Marigold stared straight into her daughter’s eyes, and Lily suddenly felt that Mum knew all about her crush on Daniel Steadman; knew how she lay awake at nights and thought of him, how she couldn’t stop herself walking past the senior common room hoping for a glimpse, and even how she’d bought this stupid magazine because she’d actually thought it might tell her how to get a boy she liked to notice her . . .

  Mum was frowning now.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Lily nervously.

  ‘Put some antiseptic on those eyebrows. They look really sore.’

  ‘I did. What do you think this slimy stuff is?’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Her mother left the room. Ten minutes later Lily heard her voice from the room next door.

  ‘Lily?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have you thought of anything we can make for dinner tomorrow night?’

  ‘I’m just getting round to it,’ sighed Lily, and closed her eyes. How old did you have to be, she wondered, before you could get Meals on Wheels?

  20

  RESTLESS NIGHTS

  Clara slept dreamlessly that night, and so did Lonnie, and Jessaline. Marigold took ages to get to sleep because she was still worrying about old Mrs Nightingale’s children finding someone to look after her while they went on their second honeymoon. Mrs Nightingale herself stayed up very late reading the poetry of Robert Burns again: Blythe hae I been on yon hill, / As the lambs before me, / Careless ilka thought and free . . .

  Lily longed to dream of Daniel Steadman. Lara Reid said that if you wrote a person’s name on a slip of paper and placed it beneath your pillow you would dream of them.

  Had Lonnie also had that idea? It was rubbish, of course, Year 6 girly stuff – Bestie stuff, or Beastie stuff, as Mum would say. Was it possible that Lonnie had taken to reading Bestie? Lily found the very idea of her brother sitting up in bed at night reading girls’ glossies thoroughly disturbing, because despite all that dropping out, Lonnie was intelligent; Lonnie’s favourite writer was Emily Bronte. But love, as she’d discovered, even simple crushes, could make you do really funny things that weren’t like you at all. Look at the way Lizzie Banks jogged past Simon Leslie’s place day after day after day, in the hope he’d come out and talk to her. Lizzie, who’d always hated any kind of sport!

  And look at her! Look at Lily Samson, writing down Daniel Steadman’s name on a page torn from her notebook so she could dream of him. At least she only wrote it once: no need to overdo things, like Lonnie had done. Lily slipped the scrap of paper underneath her pillow and fell asleep at once.

  And dreamed of the wrong person, dreamed of Mr Roberts, the old lame duck Mum had brought home; the one who’d stolen her yellow dungarees. He was wearing them in her dream and Lily was wearing something soft and silky which she couldn’t see properly but somehow knew must be Pop’s wedding dress. Bells were ringing. She was getting married to old Mr Roberts. ‘No, stop! Stop!’ she screamed, but no one heard her, and then she slid into another dream; a dream of a garden adorned with streamers and fairy lights, a long table covered with a white cloth, flowers everywhere – all the details of the party she’d been hearing on the phone from Nan. Boring, she’d thought, as Nan went raving on. Boring, boring, boring. And impossible, anyway, with Pop and Lonnie fighting – it was the sort of happy Nan-like fantasy that in their family could only end in tears.

  But there was such an amazing sense of happiness in this dream garden that when Lily woke in the morning she could still feel it, as if she’d had a vision instead of a dream, and suddenly, inexplicably, she found she wanted that party almost as much as Nan. The kind of party proper families had. One whole and perfect happy day . . .

  Daniel Steadman’s throat was itching. Very, very faintly, so that he couldn’t tell, floundering through the depths of sleep, whether it really was itching or if he simply dreamed it was. Certainly he had been dreaming, the most peculiar dream where he was standing by the window of the senior common room talking to his mate Jase, when he suddenly felt struck down. Struck by this weird feeling that he had to turn round and look towards the open door. Only when he did, there was no one there, only the sound of footsteps growing fainter in the corridor. A girl’s footsteps? ‘Hey! Wait!’ he called, and tried to run towards the door. His feet wouldn’t move. ‘Hey!’ he called again.

  ‘Daniel?’

  Daniel blinked. There was light in his room and his mother was bending over his bed. ‘Daniel, are you all right? I heard you calling out.’

  ‘I had this itchy throat,’ sai
d Daniel. ‘Only now it’s gone. And then there were these footsteps . . .’

  ‘Only a dream,’ said his mother.

  ‘It didn’t seem like one,’ said Daniel. ‘It seemed too real.’

  Up in the hills, Stan was also having a restless night. He’d been having quite a few of them lately, ever since he’d found his mum’s old wedding dress down at the back of the shed. He’d go to sleep and then wake up again, trying to remember a dream. Tonight he’d dreamed of that scene in the kitchen, seventy years ago, when Mum had shown him and Emmie her wedding dress and they’d giggled fit to bust.

  How come he couldn’t remember the colour of her eyes? Had they been dark brown, like his? Hazel? Blue? Had Mum had blue eyes? Grey? It was such a tiny thing, yet it kept him awake at nights, as if there was something more to it than you’d think. As if it was important to remember, and that when he did, something that had gone wrong could be put right.

  Bloody nonsense. Why was he thinking like this? Plenty wrong in their family, but what the heck had the colour of Mum’s eyes to do with anything? He wished he’d never found that wedding dress. Like a feed of bad oysters, it seemed to have unsettled him.

  Could Mum’s eyes have been green? Green didn’t ring a bell. Stan shifted restlessly beneath the doona, waking May. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you remember the colour of Mum’s eyes?’

  One of the many things he loved about May was how when you asked her something unexpected, even downright stupid, she never asked you why. Now he waited while she thought this one over carefully, taking a long time before she answered finally, ‘No, I don’t.’

  You couldn’t blame her; Mum had passed away in the first year of their marriage, before Marigold had been born. There was no one else to ask, now that Emmie had gone and he was the only one left. Stan felt he’d lost something important, and lost it carelessly.

  ‘Why don’t you go home?’ suggested May, and for a terrifying moment Stan thought she’d finally had enough of him, enough of his tempers and sulks and quarrels, and was giving him the chuck at last.