One Whole and Perfect Day

by Judith Clarke

  ‘Want anything?’ she asked. ‘Want some scrambled egg?’

  The very thought made his stomach turn. ‘Not hungry,’ he croaked at her.

  ‘Some junket?’

  Junket? He hadn’t eaten junket since pre-school. Junket was a kiddy food, like chicken pox was a kiddy disease. If his mates at school found out, he’d never live it down – they’d make chicken noises as they passed him in the corridor, they’d flap their arms like wings.

  ‘How long does it last?’ he muttered.

  ‘The chicken pox? Or the itching?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘The itching should go away in a few days, if you don’t scratch. And you’ll feel better too.’

  ‘How long will I be off school and stuff?’

  ‘Three weeks.’

  ‘Three weeks!’

  ‘If you don’t scratch, that is. Then it could be longer.’ She smiled at him tenderly. ‘Sure you don’t want anything. Some milk?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes, I am sure I don’t want anything. Especially not –’ his stomach churned again – ‘milk.’

  She laughed again. How heartless she’d become! Just because he had a kiddy disease. She’d giggle, he could almost hear her, when Dad got home and she passed on the news.

  ‘Juice?’ she asked him sweetly.

  ‘No!’ he roared. ‘I don’t want anything.’

  ‘Right,’ she said coldly. ‘There’s water by your bed.’ She tiptoed to the door. ‘Shall I put out the light?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Daniel took a sip of water from the glass and let his head fall back against the pillows. Three weeks. Daniel liked school; he’d be bored to death at home. And he was in Year 11; he’d miss things. Already, today, he’d missed rehearsal for the school production. Three weeks more and they’d get someone else to play his part.

  Besides, there was another reason he didn’t want to miss rehearsals – a wave of wooziness surged beneath his burning forehead – a special reason. Only what was it? He couldn’t remember, except that it had something to do with a voice, a beautiful voice, the most beautiful voice he’d ever heard.

  Whose voice? Everything had got all vague and cloudy. Did chicken pox destroy your mind? Had Mum put something in that glass of water? Tablets from Dr Ryla? The wooziness flowed over him. His eyes closed. In less than a second, Daniel Steadman was asleep.

  29

  MARIGOLD WAS LATE

  It was a quarter past six and Marigold was late. She hurried into the washroom, fumbling in her handbag for lipstick, comb and blusher. Getting home late was one thing – getting home looking a wreck could bring on the kind of lecture from Lily that Marigold was tired of hearing: how Marigold was overworked and underpaid and should get herself a better job. ‘With your qualifications, Mum . . .’

  Marigold was in no mood for such a lecture this evening; she’d had a hard, exhausting day. Captain Cuthbert had asked her to marry him again and become quite stroppy when Marigold had refused. Old Mrs Nesbitt had wandered off and the police had taken the whole afternoon to find her, then Mr Roberts had mislaid his special coffee cup, the one his wife had given him for their last anniversary. Red in the face and shouting, he’d accused Mrs Nightingale of stealing it, even though Marigold and the little circle of old people ringed round him could clearly see the mug-shaped bulge in the pocket of his old tweed jacket.

  ‘It’s there,’ Marigold had said gently. ‘It’s in your pocket, Mr Roberts.’

  He’d pulled the mug out and turned it wonderingly in his hands. ‘How did it get there?’ he’d asked them. ‘How?’ and the astonishment in his voice, the expression in his moist blue eyes had reminded Marigold of Lonnie when he was little – the time he’d touched the iron and burnt his fingers. ‘But it hurt!’ Lonnie had kept on saying, in exactly the same wondering way. ‘Mum, it hurt!’

  Then her mother had rung up again to remind her once more to tell Lonnie to come to Pop’s party.

  ‘So Lonnie and Dad have made it up?’ asked Marigold.

  ‘Not exactly, dear, but –’ Here the line had crackled, her mother’s voice slipping away into the void, and the door of Marigold’s office had burst open and Leonie rushed in with the news that poor old Mrs Nesbitt had been found. ‘At the crematorium, can you imagine, Marigold! The cops told me she was looking at the wreaths – “Happy as Larry!” they said.’

  Now Marigold studied her face in the washroom mirror. She did look awful. She looked, as her dad would say, like something the cat had dragged in. Lily would say it too. As she stroked on blusher and applied her lipstick, Marigold remembered how Dad had hated her wearing makeup while she was still at school, so that coming back from Saturday outings with her friends, she’d had to scrub her face in the Ladies Room of the local railway station before going home for tea. How strange it was that now she was putting on makeup so that her daughter wouldn’t rouse on her the minute she walked in through the door . . .

  ‘The evenings are drawing out, don’t you think?’

  Startled, Marigold looked towards the shadowy place at the end of the room, from where the voice had come. A tall old lady was standing in front of the last washbasin, surveying Marigold with glittering green eyes. She held a comb in one hand, and from the crown of her head, long rippling waves of soft white hair flowed down past her waist: she looked beautiful and unearthly, like an elderly Rapunzel watching at the window of her tower. Who on earth? And then Marigold recognised the smart navy dress the old lady wore, with its neat crimson leather belt and trim.

  Mrs Nightingale. She’d never seen Mrs Nightingale with her hair loose before; normally she wore it in a braided coronet above her ears. What was she doing in here so late? ‘Haven’t your children come to collect you?’ asked Marigold.

  Mrs Nightingale placed her comb on the ledge of the sink and began to braid her hair. ‘Why should they do that?’ she asked, and Marigold felt a twinge of panic. Was Mrs Nightingale’s memory beginning to slip? Was she back in the past, like so many of the daycare centre’s clients were; back in the time when they had been the ones who did the collecting, picking up the children who now collected them?

  And where were Mrs Nightingale’s children? If they’d failed to show up, and if everyone else had gone, Marigold would have to ring round, possibly even drive the old lady home. Bundling the lipstick and blusher and comb into her handbag, Marigold nodded at Mrs Nightingale and hurried out into the recreation room. With a surge of relief, she saw the old lady’s son seated with his wife in the armchairs by the coffee table. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said. ‘Your mother’s in the bathroom if you’re looking for her.’

  Sarah Nightingale nodded. ‘Fixing her hair.’

  Her husband looked up. ‘We know,’ he said in his terribly boring voice.

  ‘Takes hours,’ said Sarah, ‘and she hates it if I try to help.’

  They were poring over more shiny travel brochures, Marigold noticed. So they must have sorted things out then, about their second honeymoon. They must have found some kind of arrangement for Mrs Nightingale.

  ‘So you’re going?’ she said brightly. ‘On that trip in September?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Sarah bleakly.

  ‘No?’

  ‘There’s Mum,’ said her husband dolefully.

  ‘Oh, sorry, I thought –’ Marigold gestured at the scattered brochures. ‘I thought you’d found someone.’

  ‘Ah, no,’ said the son, whose name Marigold could never remember. Gerald?

  Randolph? Robert? Robbie, that was it. The name didn’t suit him.

  ‘But we like to dream about it, you know,’ said Sarah plaintively. ‘We like to look at the pictures –’ Her finger traced a curve of shining beach.

  Look at the pictures! The words clawed at Marigold’s soft heart. It was all so sad. ‘How long is this second honeymoon?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t it – really short?’

  ‘A long weekend,’ said Sarah. ‘Three days in September.’

  Three days was nothing. Words rushed to Marigo
ld’s lips, words she’d promised Lily she would never speak again. ‘Look, if you like, your mum can stay with me . . .’

  Oh, Lily would be furious! fretted Marigold as she drove off down the highway. Lily would be – tight-lipped. ‘But you promised!’ she would scold. ‘And Mum, listen, proper psychologists don’t do this!’ (How Marigold hated that word ‘proper’!) ‘Proper psychologists don’t bring their lame ducks home! Mum, it’s unprofessional.’

  Suddenly – perhaps it was the exhausting day behind her, or the dread of telling Lily, or the image of Mrs Nightingale’s poor mousey daughter-in-law tracing the curve of that shining beach – an unaccustomed anger rose in Marigold’s heart. A weekend. A long weekend in September. Three miserly little days. Surely Lily could put up with that! Had she no compassion?

  No, she hadn’t, Marigold decided. Compassion, to Lily, was simply being soft. ‘You’re too soft, Mum,’ she was always saying. ‘You let people take advantage.’

  And yet Lily was a good girl. She was the sensible one in the family: never a moment’s trouble at school; homework and assignments always done on time; and she helped with the housework, shopping and cooking –

  But oh, she was bossy! So bossy and bullying, so certain she was right that sometimes she reminded Marigold of – face it: Lily reminded Marigold of her dad. Of Pop. They were like as two peas in the way they took up all the space around them, and other peoples’ too. All the oxygen; all the room for easy breath. Beside them, other people were like wraiths.

  Marigold had planned to put off telling Lily about Mrs Nightingale staying with them. After all, anything might happen in the days before September. Now she decided to tell her daughter the moment she reached home; no cowardly delaying, no being – soft. I’ll simply tell her, resolved Marigold, and that’s that.

  She drove faster, almost eager for the confrontation, sailing along down Victoria Road. In no time at all she was cruising into her drive. She wrenched the keys out, slammed the door and hurried up the shaky steps to the porch, groping in her handbag for the separate ring on which she kept the house keys. They weren’t there. Marigold hammered on the door.

  When Lily opened it her mother saw she’d been crying. Lily? Crying? Lily never cried.

  Lonnie! thought Marigold, with an icy clutch of fear. ‘What’s happened?’ she gasped. ‘Is it Lonnie?’

  ‘Lonnie?’ Lily raised a tear-stained face. ‘No, it isn’t!’ she shouted. ‘Why do you always think of him?’

  ‘What is it then?’

  Lily dissolved again into tears. ‘I’ve broken my nails and I can’t find the scissors!’ she bawled out. ‘I’ve laddered my best tights, and, Mum –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mum, I saw myself in the mirror and I thought I looked just like Pop!’

  Marigold put her arms around her daughter. ‘Of course you don’t look like Pop,’ she lied, smoothing the wild corkscrews of Lily’s frizzy hair. ‘Not a bit.’

  ‘Honest?’

  ‘Cross my heart.’ Marigold smiled treacherously. ‘And there are two pairs of scissors – for emergencies – in that little basket on the laundry shelf.’ She patted Lily’s back. And decided she’d put off telling her daughter about Mrs Nightingale’s visit – for a little while.

  30

  OFF TO THE HILLS

  Lonnie was off to the hills to make it up with his pop.

  They’d driven him to it, all of them. Nan and Mum for starters, always on the telephone or leaving messages, urging him to make it up with Pop so as not to spoil the party.

  Clara was prodding him too. ‘Go on! What’s so scary? He’s an old, old man.’

  ‘I’m not scared.’

  ‘Proud then. Too proud.’ She’d leaned towards him and tickled at his ribs. ‘Too proud to say sorry.’

  ‘Why should I? Why don’t you make it up with your dad, then?’

  She’d laughed. ‘I might do, when he’s eighty.’

  Lily was worst of all. ‘I want that party,’ she’d told him. ‘I want it to be perfect, Lon.’ There’d been such urgency in his sister’s voice that Lonnie had asked, ‘Are you all right?’ It was weird how keen she was on this party. She’d always hated family gatherings.

  ‘’Course I’m all right. Why are you asking?’

  ‘No reason. You just sound a bit des –’ Some happy instinct of self-preservation made Lonnie choke off the word ‘desperate’. ‘Um, worked up,’ he’d amended, but she’d got mad with him all the same.

  ‘I’m not worked up!’ she’d protested, and then her voice had dropped down to a whisper. ‘Lon, don’t you ever feel you have a right to some kind of perfect, happy day?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘A whole perfect day.’

  ‘Eh?’

  He obviously didn’t know what she was talking about, Lily thought on the other end of the phone. Why should he? Lon probably had plenty of whole, perfect days with his lovely Clara, while she . . . it didn’t bear thinking about. She only had this vision of Nan’s party, that was all. And though he wouldn’t mean to, Lonnie would wreck the party, she just knew it. Or else Pop would.

  ‘Oh, forget it!’ she’d snapped.

  ‘Why do I have to make it up, anyway?’ Lonnie had snapped right back. ‘I’m not the one who lost his block, I’m not the one who –’ And here he suddenly broke off, visited by a distant memory of Mum walking towards him through a door, holding something wrapped plumply in a shawl. ‘Here’s your little sister,’ she’d said. ‘Here’s Lily.’

  Lonnie had given in. ‘Okay,’ he’d sighed. ‘I’ll go and see him. Right?’

  So here he was, in the steep back streets of Katoomba, in a midweek quiet so intense you could hear the tiny sounds of radios playing in back rooms, the clink of china, an old lady’s voice quavering, ‘Fancy a cuppa, dear?’

  Pop’s territory was a country of retired people, creaky old couples, ancient ladies whose husbands, as Nan put it, had ‘passed away’.

  Pop wouldn’t pass away – that phrase was far too gentle for him – he’d go out roaring. ‘Kick the bucket,’ as Pop would say himself, and kick it noisily, so it slammed against a wall. Or – the thought struck Lonnie surprisingly – Pop might go like Emily Bronte, refusing the doctor, refusing to lie down. And then, when he’d gone, Lonnie would miss him . . .

  Miss him? Miss Pop? Surprised again, Lonnie realised that he would. Things would be really quiet when Pop was no longer around. It was hard to imagine a world without Pop in it: Pop roaring and stomping through their lives, telling them all what to do. It would be a strangely quiet world, for sure, and Lonnie wasn’t sure he’d like it. Lily might be right: perhaps they did need some kind of whole perfect day.

  Making it up with Pop wasn’t the only reason Lonnie had come up here to the hills. There was something he needed to find out before he brought Clara to Pop’s party.

  Was Pop some kind of racist, as Lily seemed to think? Lonnie didn’t really know; those weren’t the kinds of arguments he ever had with Pop. It was like they’d never been able to get past the subject of Lonnie’s own inadequacies long enough to quarrel about more important things. Dimly he remembered Nan once telling him how Pop had refused to go to the new dentist, Dr Tsai. Was that because Dr Tsai was Chinese? Or had there been some other reason? And would baulking at a Chinese dentist mean that you might baulk at a Chinese daughter-in-law? That is, if, say, one day he and Clara decided to get engaged, or married, or simply live together.

  Engaged! Married! Living together! Even to form these words in his mind made Lonnie feel self-conscious, sensing an invisible audience of people whose mouths would drop open in astonishment if he so much as hinted at such serious intentions, who would exclaim: ‘You?’ as if he was twelve instead of twenty-two.

  He wasn’t twelve. And that invisible audience didn’t matter, Lonnie told himself firmly. Clara was the only one whose opinion mattered, and if she felt the same way he did, then perhaps one day – here Lonnie simply couldn’t stop from smiling
.

  Only when that day came, would Pop be a problem because he couldn’t cope with the idea of a ‘foreign person’ in his family?

  ‘For sure,’ Lily would say, but what Lonnie thought was that you simply couldn’t tell about people. People were mysterious. Look at sensible, hard-headed Lily: who could have imagined she’d get so worked up about Pop’s birthday party? And look at Dad . . .

  Lonnie always told people he couldn’t remember his Dad, and this was true, except, occasionally, brilliant little pictures would surface in his mind, pictures framed with feelings. Like: sitting on the rim of the ocean baths at Curl Curl, high tide, waves crashing in, snuggled up to someone whose big warm body curved about his own, someone who kept saying, ‘It’s okay, Lon, it’s fun. Nothing can get you, I’m here –’ That was Dad. Unless he’d dreamed it, or made it up, and somehow Lonnie knew he hadn’t. That was Dad then, when Lonnie had been little, and yet he’d left them and now he was nothing more than an awkward voice on the telephone.

  Yeah, people were the mystery of the universe. Who could tell how Pop would act when he met Clara?

  ‘Are you all right, son?’ An old white head was peeping round a screen door. ‘Only we saw you through the window and you’ve been standing there so long, I said to Alf, I said, “I’ll just pop out there and see there’s nothing wrong –” ’

  ‘I’m fine,’ called Lonnie, straightening up and smiling brightly before she went back inside for aspirins or the castor oil. ‘Getting my breath, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re May and Stan’s grandson, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘They’ll be that pleased to see you, love.’

  Well, Nan might be, at least. Lonnie turned the corner into Ridge Road, where he could see the house a little further down – the neatly trimmed holly hedge, the wooden gate that squeaked familiarly when he pushed it open. His footsteps sounded so loudly on the path that he was reminded of that story Mum used to read to him when he was little: There came a soldier marching along the high road – one, two! One two!