One Whole and Perfect Day

by Judith Clarke

  All Mr Corcoran came out with was, ‘Say that again.’

  ‘Say what?’ asked Lily, startled, afraid she might have spoken her thoughts out loud.

  ‘What you last said.’

  ‘I can’t remember what it was.’

  ‘Say anything.’

  ‘But I don’t –’

  ‘That’ll do!’ Mr Corcoran held one hand up, like a policeman.

  What would do? Lily didn’t like to ask because she thought he might be even madder than Ms Jessop; there was a high breakdown rate amongst the teachers at Flinders Secondary. His eyes were gleaming and she wanted to run, only she felt instinctively that this might not be wise; he could be manic, like Mum said old Mr Roberts had been on that day he’d stolen her yellow dungarees and wandered out into the street. Lily stood very still.

  ‘Perfect!’ Mr Corcoran exclaimed.

  ‘Perfect?’ she whispered.

  ‘I’ve got just the spot for you, girlie. In fact, you’re exactly what we need.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘The school production.’

  ‘But I thought you said there weren’t any places left.’

  He waved her words aside. ‘School auditorium, 3.15. Be there.’

  She was there on the dot. She caught a glimpse of Daniel, and the merest glimpse was enough to send that weird fizzy feeling sparking through her veins, and the floor seemed to sink away, as if she was floating in the air. Daniel himself stood firm upon the stage, close to the tall skinny girl from Year 1l who played Ophelia. Their heads were bent over their lines. For a few seconds, hope as well as jealousy surged up warmly in Lily’s breast; could that be what Mr Corcoran had meant when he’d said, ‘You’re exactly what we need!’ Could he want her for Ophelia’s understudy? And then the tall girl, who was pale as well as skinny, might catch glandular fever and have to stay in bed for months and then . . . Even as she had this pleasing thought, Lily knew it couldn’t be: only a blind person would choose a squat plump girl with frizzy black hair to understudy Ophelia, and despite those weird-looking blue spectacles he wore, Mr Corcoran wasn’t blind.

  ‘Ah, Lily, here you are.’ Mr Corcoran thrust a battered copy of Hamlet into her hands.

  The script? Lily’s heart began to throb so loudly she felt sure the teacher would hear it. Was he blind after all? Was she really understudy then? Or had he found another part for her, one he’d forgotten that he hadn’t cast? Hamlet’s mother?

  ‘Come along.’ Mr Corcoran seized her arm and led her towards the stage. Daniel Steadman’s gaze lifted from his script and swerved towards her. Or did it? Perhaps he was looking at Mr Corcoran.

  ‘Down here.’ Mr Corcoran led her though a small door Lily had never noticed before, set into the side of the stage. Down five steps – ‘Mind how you go!’ – into a tiny box-like room with a wooden chair in its centre, and a narrow slit in the ceiling through which Lily glimpsed Daniel’s strong ankles above his school socks, and the Year 11 Ophelia’s anorexic feet in ballet shoes.

  ‘You’re absolutely perfect,’ Mr Corcoran growled at her.

  Lily backed away.

  ‘The perfect voice,’ he told her, pointing at the script in her hands, ‘for our prompter. Soft, but carrying; clear as the proverbial bell.’

  Prompter!

  ‘Sit down,’ said Mr Corcoran, waving at the chair. ‘Take the weight off your feet.’ He flipped through pages. ‘Act 3, scene 2, that’s where we are today.’

  Daniel wouldn’t see her, then. No one would see her, down here. He’d hear her voice, that was all. And she’d hear his, and see his feet.

  Lily sighed. It seemed that would have to do.

  25

  MAY’S DAY

  Lily thought her nan was the softest person she’d ever come across, so she’d have been surprised to see the steely glint in May’s eyes this morning as she toiled up the hilly streets towards the gorge in the company of her imaginary companion. There was a big green shopping bag hanging from her arm and you could tell it was heavy from the way May’s right shoulder pulled downwards, and how she had to pause from time to time, to take a breath and switch the bag to her other hand.

  ‘I’ve made my mind up, Sef,’ she puffed. ‘I’m absolutely set on it. I’m having this party and Lonnie’s coming to it; and Stan can say what he likes!’

  Though the funny thing was, Stan hadn’t said a single word – not yet, anyway – about Lonnie being forbidden to come. ‘Forbidden,’ sniffed May. ‘Just let him try any forbidding!’ As if she’d let Stan get away with anything like that! Neither had he threatened to go out if Lonnie was coming, as he did when May had Mrs Petrie and a few other lady friends to lunch. In fact, except for complaints about the smell of glue (May was making all the place-cards and invitations) and the sandy bits of party glitter which had got between the sheets, Stan hadn’t said anything much about the party.

  ‘Lonnie’s coming,’ repeated May. She added softly, ‘Too many people have been lost.’

  First there had been her own unknown mother, whom May always pictured as a thin, dark-haired girl, creeping away across the lawn of the children’s home, vanishing into a shadowy bank of trees. And Stan’s dad had gone from the influenza, and then his mum the year after their wedding; and later on, poor old Emmie, when she was barely sixty. Then there was the second child she and Stan had hoped for, and who’d never come along, so that May always thought of him (she was certain he’d have been a boy) as getting lost on the way to be with them. There was Marigold’s husband too – though even May felt Oliver DeZoto didn’t really count. Marigold and the children hadn’t even kept his name.

  They were such a small family: they couldn’t afford to let any single one of them get lost. And getting lost was easy. May remembered Stan’s mum telling about her own brother Joey: how, when he was fifteen, Joey had a row with their dad and left home. He’d gone up north to work. Letters came at first, then the spaces between them grew longer and longer until there was only space. ‘It’s the strangest thing,’ Stan’s mum had said to May, ‘all that growing up me and Joey did together, the secrets we had, and now he’s vanished. If I passed him in the street I probably wouldn’t know him.’

  That wasn’t going to happen with Lonnie. Lonnie wasn’t going to vanish; he was coming to her party, and he and Stan were going to make it up and stop their silly nonsense. The making up might even be happening already, because although she hadn’t said so to Stan, May had hopes of his trip into town today. His train would pass the station where Lonnie lived, Stan would see the sign – Toongabbie – and he’d soften; he might even get out and find his way to Lon’s boarding house and make it up right away. Well, he might. ‘It’s possible,’ she said to Sef. ‘Anything’s possible.’

  Sef herself had vanished, a long long time ago. May could still remember the morning her friend had disappeared; how she’d woken in the dormitory and found Sef’s bed empty beside her: the blankets gone, the grey mattress with its pattern of black stripes quite bare. ‘Where’s Sef?’ she’d asked the other big girl, Dolly.

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘She got adopted, didn’t she?’ Dolly had said excitedly, ‘And I think – you know what? I think by someone grand! Because she was so pretty anyone would want her. Even the king and queen!’

  They all hoped for this, secretly: to be taken by someone grand – by kings and queens or movie stars, even a prince and princess would do.

  How old would Sef be now? At the Home she’d seemed a big girl, but May herself had been so small that a girl of six would have seemed big to her. Suddenly, with great clarity, she remembered standing beside Sef at a window, looking down on children playing in the yard. May had needed to stand on tiptoe to see from that window; Sef had simply stood. Sef wore a green dress with buttons on the shoulders; when May leaned against her, the buttons pressed into her cheek. So Sef had been only a head taller. Two years older, perhaps. Seventy-eight then, thought May, who’d be seventy-six next
November. Sef would be about seventy-eight, and unless you were unlucky like poor Emmie had been, seventy-eight was no great age these days. So somewhere, Sef might still be around. If they met in the street, would they know each other?

  ‘’Course we would!’ puffed May, pausing to switch her big green bag to the other hand. ‘We’d know each other any old age, wouldn’t we, Sef?’

  This part of the road had been a bumpy bush track fifteen years back when Stan had retired and they’d moved up into the hills. Now it was tarred and level and the houses beside it were brand new, with pointed gables and sleek stone columns by their doors. Huge houses they were, two stories, even three – greedy houses, thought May, picturing with affection her daughter Marigold’s little house, ancient and tumbledown. A dump, Stan called it, and May had to admit that she didn’t like to stay there overnight; there were things in the walls, nasty scuttling things that Marigold said were possums and May feared might be rats. All the same, Stan shouldn’t keep threatening to burn it down.

  ‘Of course your pop won’t burn it down!’ she’d reasoned with Lily. ‘Of course he wouldn’t!’

  ‘He showed me the matches!’

  Matches. May had tried unsuccessfully to suppress her smile. It would take more than matches to burn down Marigold’s place; even at the height of summer, dampness was palpable inside.

  ‘What are you smiling at, Nan?’ Lily had demanded furiously. ‘It’s serious!’

  ‘Your pop’s all talk,’ May had told her. ‘All breeze and bluster; you should know that by now.’

  Apparently she didn’t. Stan was noisy, May admitted that, and he seemed to have a funny knack of striking on the children’s nerves with his boxes of matches and his silly old axe.

  ‘I bet Lonnie has nightmares about that axe!’ Lily had chided her. ‘I bet he’ll never come up to your place again. Never ever!’

  ‘Your pop wouldn’t hurt Lonnie, love. Even if he was angry.’

  ‘He lifted that axe, didn’t he? Right over Lonnie’s head? His hands are trembly, Nan. What if he’d dropped it?’

  Lily had a point there, May had to admit it; Stan’s hands were getting trembly.

  So here she was, this bright blue morning, on her way to get rid of Stan’s axe.

  Down the gorge.

  The big houses were thinning now, only one more left before the road became a track. ‘Nearly there, Sef,’ she said, plunging into bushland, and thought she heard the faintest tremble in the air, as if the real Sef was right there beside her and had taken a breath to reply. May paused to listen, but there was only the sound of magpies carolling, and the usual tiny noises of the bush. She walked on to the lookout, lowered the big green bag, took out the axe and walked with it right up to the edge. She looked down: beneath her lay a sea of foggy dew, white cottony waves of mist that rolled up towards the sun. May lifted her arm and hurled the axe from her; saw it glint once as it went down; heard it clang against a rock, another rock, another – and then there was a moment’s silence until the final, faintest ‘chung’, a sound as small and harmless as a pebble flung into a stream. ‘Gone,’ said May with satisfaction, wiping her hands down her skirt, brushing the last traces away. Now they could have their party, now they could have a perfect, happy day.

  26

  THE GIRL IN BLACK

  Stan’s homeward train was a late one. He’d had to pick up party stuff for May in town: damp-resistant streamers (‘just in case, though Sef and I are almost sure it will be a perfect day’) and more of that blasted glitter stuff that got everywhere – in your bed and in the sugar bowl and even in your whiskers if you hadn’t got round to a shave. It was a train that stopped at Toongabbie; Stan saw the sign slide by the window and remembered that this was the suburb where Lon lived now. How could he help remembering, when May had stuck the address up on the fridge door, so that he saw it every time he went to get the milk for tea? Lonnie: 5 Firth Street, Toongabbie.

  Stan didn’t soften as May had hoped he would: he didn’t leap up from his seat and hurry out onto the platform and then on out into the street, searching for his grandson’s new home. All that happened when he saw the sign was that Stan gave a guilty start and turned his head away. Then he got mad. Because why should he be feeling guilty? He hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of; he wasn’t the one who couldn’t stick at things, who wouldn’t put his hand to the plough, who worried his mother and drove her into tears. All the same, as the train pulled away from the station, Stan weakened just a little bit; he turned back to the window and pressed his forehead to the glass as if he half expected to catch a glimpse of the boy who used to be his grandson walking down one of those unfamiliar streets. But the window was dark and all he could make out, behind the reflection of his own old face, were lines and lines of lights.

  When he’d been Lonnie’s age, this place had been all paddocks, country; now the train rushed on through built-up suburbs as the city spread farther out: here was Seven Hills, now Blacktown – and at Blacktown a young girl boarded the train. She came through the door at the end of his carriage, and she was dressed in black. That was all Stan registered at first: the dusty crumpled black a lot of young girls wore these days; a couple of years back even Lily had worn it for a little while. As if they were in mourning for something, Stan thought irritably, when they hadn’t even lived. He leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes, until he heard a man say sharply, in the kind of voice you wouldn’t even use on a dog, ‘Go away!’

  Stan’s eyes snapped open. Further down the carriage the girl in dusty black was standing silently beside a seat, her hand held out.

  A beggar.

  Stan hated that, simply hated it – at least when they were young. It made him cringe inside.

  ‘Go away!’ said the voice again, and the girl moved on without a word. At the next seat Stan saw a hand reach out to her, and money pass over. Good, he thought, good! And then there were no other hands held out to the poor kid, all the way down to him. He reached for his wallet, took out a five, then changed it to a twenty when he saw her face, because she was so bloody young, this one. Her face was grubby in the way he remembered Lonnie’s being grubby, years back, when he’d been a little kid. There was a cardboard sign hung round her neck, like a child in a primary school tableau.

  ‘I am sixteen and pregnant,’ read Stan. ‘My first baby is in care, and I have no home and family. I am – ’ the ink in this last sentence had smeared so badly he couldn’t make it out. He could see the small mound of her stomach beneath the flimsy cotton dress and it made him mad, bloody stinking mad. The whole thing made him mad.

  Sixteen. The same age as Lil. Only Lil could never come to this; Lil was strong and she was fortunate. This kid would have been, what? fourteen, when she’d had the baby who’d been taken into care, and now there was another one on the way. So what had happened to this girl’s parents? Kids themselves, he’d take a bet on it.

  And the grandparents? Why hadn’t they looked out for her? Stan shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Written her off, that’s what they’d done. A shiver ran right down his spine.

  The girl was beside him now; he handed her the twenty, watched her grubby little fingers slip the note safely out of sight, then watched her walk on down the carriage without a single word.

  ‘Shouldn’t have done that, love.’

  ‘Eh?’ Stan looked round. Two old chooks across the aisle were shaking their heads at him.

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Given her money. She gets on here every day, see? Well, every day we go into town, anyway.’ She turned to the woman beside her. ‘We always see her, don’t we, Dawnie?’

  ‘Her and others like her,’ sniffed Dawnie. ‘On at Redfern, off at Parra, on at Blacktown again – it’s her little business.’

  ‘Business?’ echoed Stan faintly. ‘Business?’

  ‘She’d get the dole, or something like it, they all do, but it’s not enough, see? Not enough for the drugs, so they get up this little busines
s begging on the trains –’

  ‘And outside the malls, and down the quay –’

  There was a kind of roaring in Stan’s ears. He knew their type: they’d been around in Mum’s days, and they’d be round in Lily’s; they’d be round till Judgement Day. He remembered how Mum used to give him the once-over before he went out into the street to play; checking he had shoes on, getting the flannel to his face. ‘There!’ she’d say, ‘That’s better. Can’t have some old chook reporting us to Welfare.’ The old chooks hung over their gates and judged the neighbourhood; they didn’t miss a trick. And Mum had been a woman on her own, two kids to bring up . . .

  Stan glared across the aisle. Tight-arsed bitches! he felt like roaring. Bet ya still got your lunch money from school! Instead he thought of May and took a deep breath, and when he spoke it was to say something May would have thought, even though she’d be too polite to shout it at them, right out loud and in their faces like he did. ‘Haven’t you any hearts?’

  Gotcha! he thought, watching their necks and faces mottle, the looks of shock and outrage turned upon him. The one called Dawnie made a choking noise deep in her throat; her mate gasped, ‘Well! Some people!’

  If this had been a swanky train, some first-class sleeper off to Perth or Melbourne, those two would have pressed a button and had him slung right off; but that wasn’t something you could do easily on the 5 pm All Stations to Penrith and the hills. Stan glanced down the aisle, hoping the girl might have heard, but she’d gone upstairs; he could see her standing waiting by the door.

  The train was slowing into Mt Druitt now and it was raining out there, thick teary drops were sliding down the window, pooling on the sill. She had no coat. The black dress wouldn’t keep out a good dose of May’s foggy foggy dew . . .

  Abruptly, the girl began to make sounds. They were terrible sounds, thick and gutteral, echoing through the silent carriage as if some poor tormented animal had suddenly found its voice. Stan knew at once the girl was deaf and dumb; he knew because of that friend Marigold had had in kindergarten, the little girl called Christobel. He recognised the thick loudness and the desperate sounding urgency.