A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  She swung her feet clear of the blankets and leaned forward to stand up—knocking heads with Glory who was bending down to look at Elsie’s feet.

  ‘Ow!’ The girl rubbed her forehead. ‘No colour on your toenails. Not like Mum.’

  Elsie rubbed her own head with one hand, supported her weight with the other. The room had felt a little fluid around that crash. ‘Coloured toenails?’ she asked. ‘How fancy! Well.’ She pushed herself up, smiling. ‘That must make her a movie star!’

  Elaine snorted, steadying her daughter as she stood. ‘I guess it puts a little glamour in my day,’ she said.

  Glamour. Elsie sighed. She’d always thought her daughter beautiful just as she was—and Donny just so handsome. They were both lovely.

  ‘Part of your job as a mum,’ Clem had said to her one day, ‘to think them as fair as you can.’

  But they were no movie stars.

  Elaine seemed to be standing a long way off this morning, and as Elsie took a step forward to see her better, her shoulder rammed the doorframe.

  ‘Mum!’ Her daughter’s hands shot out, one buttressing Elsie’s body, the other cupping her head. ‘You’re burning up. Sit down, while I get you a drink.’ She steered her mother back to the bed while Gloria bounced all around. ‘Settle down, Gloria. We don’t want another crash. And anyway, where’s Dad?’

  Elsie sat forward, felt Elaine straightening the pillows behind her back. ‘Thanks, love. He’s up with Don and Carol—their new bath.’

  Elaine sniffed. ‘I don’t think you should be here on your own—what have you got you can take? Some Veganin? I’ll ring Dad and tell him to come home.’

  A band of tingling heat tightened across Elsie’s shoulder blades in a shiver. She’d be all right, and Carol needed that new bath. But Elaine had left the room, was in the kitchen—Elsie could hear the cupboard doors, a drawer or two opening and closing.

  ‘In the bathroom, love,’ Elsie called. ‘In the cabinet.’

  Gloria snuggled in close. ‘Poor Nan,’ she said, patting Elsie’s arm. ‘I listen to your chest.’ She crawled onto Elsie’s lap and laid her ear down flat. ‘Ah-thump. Ah-thump. Ah-thump.’ She tapped the time of the pulse across Elsie’s wrist.

  ‘That sound OK, Glory?’ Elsie pushed the dark red hair back from the little girl’s face. ‘Such a lovely, pretty thing you’re going to be.’

  There was shouting from the road—a group of kids went riding by on their way to the river, calling and chiacking as they went.

  ‘And we need to get a bow for all that hair.’ Elsie made a small plait, twisting its end to a fine point like a paintbrush as one last bike rode by, its bell clanging wildly and a voice calling, ‘Wait! Wait for me! Wait for me?’

  ‘That was always your Uncle Don,’ said Elsie, nodding towards the road. ‘Trying to catch up to your mother—she was fast.’

  ‘Here.’ Two white pills lay like eyes in the palm of Elaine’s hand. Elsie swallowed them with a gulp of water.

  ‘I like a bike. A bike is fun.’ Glory sprawled across her grandmother like a knee rug, blinking at her mother with wide eyes.

  ‘I could pedal faster than anyone.’ Elaine held the glass forward again for Elsie. ‘I was always trying to get a bit further away. Here. Finish this.’

  ‘A bike for Glory?’ The little girl had curled around to gaze straight up at Elsie.

  ‘Of course a bike for Glory,’ Elsie said. ‘I bet Grandad already has his eye on one for you.’ She had a clear image of Elaine surging down a hill—wind in her hair and her face so incredibly free—but she was sure she’d never seen her ride like that. That would have been something; that would have been something to see. She squeezed her granddaughter’s hand. ‘Let’s see how fast you can go.’

  ‘Mum! A bike for Glory!’

  But Elaine was refolding the newspaper, and tilting the blinds, and moving the cut-crystal canisters on Elsie’s dressing table—a little to the left, and back again. It was a while before she spoke. ‘I’m sure your grandmother will get you whatever you want.’

  That flatness in her voice: it made Elsie wince.

  And then: ‘We should get someone in here to dust.’

  ‘Oh, Lainey, leave it be—I’ll do it next week.’ Elsie lay back on her pillows, her eyes closed. The very thought of having someone in to clean.

  ‘Come on, then, Gloria, you’ll have to come with me. No—’ Elaine raised her hand like a stop sign, and Elsie, opening her eyes to see the flash of its movement, didn’t know if it was to pre-empt a protest from Gloria or from Elsie herself. ‘We’ll leave Nan here in peace—she needs a rest.’

  Elsie closed her eyes and counted—slow—to five before she opened them again. ‘You know she’d be all right to stay.’

  ‘Then she’d get sick or you’d be more tired. It’s all right. I’ll bring her back another day.’

  Grandmother and granddaughter smiled at each other. ‘Well, I’ll come and wave you off then, all the same,’ said Elsie, pushing herself out of bed again, ignoring Elaine’s remonstration.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Mum!’

  ‘I will blow you a kiss from the car,’ said Gloria, taking Elsie’s hand.

  ‘Thank you, pet.’

  It was cool on the front porch; the sun had not yet swung around to touch that side of the house. The three of them stood a moment in the shade, and Elsie shivered, pulling Gloria into a hug.

  ‘I spy something in the letterbox, Glory—perhaps Mum could hold you up to pull it out?’

  The girl wriggled free to skip down the stairs, and her shoes left small footprints in the springy grass.

  ‘Post on a Saturday?’ Elaine followed, and held her daughter up at arm’s length. ‘Someone must have dropped it in. There now—run that up to Nan and we’ll go on.’

  Elsie kissed her granddaughter on the head and watched her go, Gloria blowing the promised kiss from the car window and Elsie making a show of catching it. She waved the thin white envelope as Elaine drove around the corner, and Gloria’s hand waved back its reply.

  Inside, Elsie fanned herself with the white rectangle—cold, then hot; she really wasn’t well—then she ran a finger beneath its flap and shook its contents free. A postcard slipped out, and a square photograph—the portrait by Ida Lewis.

  As if she had conjured it up.

  She squared the message between her fingers and read:

  I was sorting through my papers the other day and found this—thought you might like it. I still like the way I caught your far-off gaze. With all best wishes. IL.

  No return address for a reply.

  The photograph’s colours weren’t quite right—she could see that straight away—and the details she remembered so clearly were no longer visible at such a reduced scale. She couldn’t bear to see herself so small. She didn’t want it to feel disappointing.

  She turned the photo facedown on the kitchen bench, and pressed it down hard with her hand. She wished the tablets would hurry up and work.

  I can give this to Clem, she thought. And then: No, I will keep it myself. She slipped the print into her pocket.

  Turning to head back to the bedroom, her arm knocked the letter rack from its perch on the bench as she went. The floor was papered with notes and bills.

  Leave it, she thought to herself. You don’t want to be bending down too much. You can tidy it up later.

  But as she turned to go on again, she saw a wodge of tiny white-edged photos that had slipped free, and she reached down for them, fanning them out like a strange deck of cards. Clem’s mother. Clem’s mother’s garden. The river from the wharf where Clem got the ferry to. There was a beautiful close-up of an angel in the cemetery on the hill, and a picture of the clock on City Hall.

  She flipped this last one over VP Day. Brisbane, in Clem’s careful schoolboy writing. And there was another of a city street, the air full of confetti, like snow.

  She shook her head: she couldn’t really remember the end of the war—busy with the kids
and wanting her own world kept intact. Those huge bombs in Japan: she’d wanted to keep them at bay. But here was Elaine, a month shy of four years old and climbing onto her lap—Elsie remembered that, as clear as a bell. And there it was, the horror of atomic warfare spread across the week’s papers, a bomb that had seared to death all living things, animal and human, in the city. The worst of the nasty stuff dug up from her very own country, the newspaper had said—Elsie had wanted to cry with the shame.

  She’d wanted no part of that vast event to touch her daughter and she’d quickly turned the pages. A scientist said atomic power would get man to the moon—Elsie had almost laughed at that, but the laugh became a cough as she saw another story. Some man barely reprimanded for the constant mistreatment of his children. He’d even fashioned a special whip to lash them with.

  ‘Mother of God!’ She’d never used such a phrase before and she fairly shouted it out as she pushed Elaine away from the pages and off her lap. ‘Who are these people? What are they doing?’

  The little girl had taken two steps back, and was standing by the door. ‘It’s me, Lainey, that’s who it is. I’d come for a cuddle with you.’ So utterly matter-of-fact.

  Elsie screwed up the newspaper and stuffed it into the dustbin.

  ‘I want to see, Mum. I want to know what’s there.’

  They were the words that Elsie registered, and she over-my-dead-bodied them at once. And Lainey slipped away, leaving Elsie scared and beset in her own kitchen. Afraid for the world and her daughter all at once. Send her a small, quiet world and keep her safe. She wished she believed in the power of prayer.

  Nearly twenty years on, Elsie still felt sick as she remembered the scene. She should have held her daughter closer, drawn her in.

  She flicked the next photograph onto the top of the pile: the inside of a shop with rows of bottles along its shelves and a window looking onto the next room. It was a chemist’s shop and the photograph was taken from inside the dispensary. She brought it closer to her face. She frowned, and the creases in her forehead hurt her too-hot head. There were figures in it, a man’s shoulder, and a woman staring straight into the lens. She tilted the shiny paper towards the window, trying to see something more. Who are you? Where are you from?

  The man was barely part of it, a shoulder and an arm in a crisp white shirt or some kind of coat—the chemist, Elsie supposed. But the woman, the woman was somehow the point of the picture, looking straight at the camera with a coy kind of smile.

  She turned it over and saw, in Clem’s neat handwriting, just two words: Jan, 1941.

  Jan. As in January? Or Jan, a person? Had he ever talked of anyone called Jan? Janet? Janelle? Such a tiny waist this girl had, and her hair pulled in close to her head. Who is she, Clem? What’s she doing in my kitchen, among my bills?

  Her head hurt. She wanted to lie down.

  And then a coldness touched her: the idea of Clem and another girl. There might have been—there must have been. She pushed her sweaty hair back from her head: 1941. The year the twins were born.

  And then her fever spiked, and she felt herself fall.

  When they were courting, the sheer coincidence of having just happened to be in the same place at the same time on that street in Brisbane had screamed inside Elsie’s head.

  ‘How would I have found you?’ she whispered once, frantically, when they were lying in bed together, one morning after their wedding. ‘What would we have done about that?’

  ‘I’d’ve found you, Elsie,’ he said, one finger running a line from her collarbone and down, and down. ‘Wasn’t looking for anyone else.’

  She heard it, all these years later. She heard that, and she wondered if it was true. Almost twenty years old she’d been—never held a man’s hand before, apart from her dad’s when she was a kid. What if there was someone called Jan somewhere out there now, someone who could remember her own time with Clem Gormley, wondering where he was, wondering how she let him get away?

  The smile on that woman’s face in the picture; it was coy, yes, but there was no mistaking it was for the camera. Maybe he had other pictures hidden away in other places. She rubbed her head. She wouldn’t ask.

  Pulling herself up, she reached for a box of Bex that Elaine had left on the table and shook the powder into a glass. She put the photographs back into their holder, hidden among the other papers, as she’d found them.

  But this woman, this Jan—she’d keep her apart.

  Her body swayed again as she pushed a kitchen chair into the hallway, pulled herself up to stand on the chair. She opened the little trapdoor that guarded the manhole that gave onto the dusty darkness of the roof cavity, and she slapped the photograph face down on the nearest beam.

  Out of the way. Out of my way.

  Then she pulled the photo of the painting from her dressing gown pocket. And you there too. Her secret. Safe and sound.

  She balanced herself against the wall, ignoring the marks left there by her now-dirty hands and setting her feet safely back on the floor. Walking towards the bedroom, she glanced into the bathroom—Elaine had left the mirrored cabinet open, and Elsie, rather than seeing herself, saw instead an empty room, the house beyond.

  Then she climbed back into bed, and she slept.

  19

  The flowers

  ‘Valentine’s Day,’ said Ben without expression. He was clipping his bag closed, getting ready to leave for the day. ‘The onslaught of roses.’ He kissed his wife. He kissed his son. He headed out the door. ‘You didn’t shut the laundry, Lu.’ His voice came up the stairs. ‘Something’s been rummaging in stuff.’

  One whole section of the yard was buried in a snowstorm of Elsie’s doilies scattered across the grass, their white shapes bright against the green.

  ‘Wow!’ said Tom, looking down from the deck as his father went into the park. ‘Ta-da!’

  Lucy stood and counted at least three dozen, wondering what sort of possum would do this.

  They went down when Tom finished his breakfast, collecting them and shaking them and stacking them up like the thick pages of an old manuscript.

  ‘Star,’ said Tom. And: ‘Flamingo’—pointing to a tiny pink petit-point bow.

  Near enough, thought Lucy.

  ‘And flowers—Mumma’s flowers.’ Pointing to a rose embroidered in bright red silk thread.

  ‘Yes, our roses.’ Lucy pointed to the roses by the fence.

  ‘More roses—more roses, Mummy. Look.’

  There was a young man taking a huge bunch of roses, the softest, palest, gentlest pastel shades, from the back of a delivery van. Crossing the road. Coming to their gate.

  ‘Hello?’ Lucy called. ‘What number are you looking for?’

  ‘Lucy? Lucy Carter? Number twelve?’

  Lucy frowned. ‘Lucy Kiss,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think they’re meant for me.’

  The young man peered at his list, then nodded as he turned the clipboard around for her to sign. ‘Lucy Carter,’ he said again. ‘Number twelve. These are for you. Happy Valentine’s.’

  Lucy Carter. No one called her that. She held the bouquet away from herself as she watched the van drive off, afraid somehow to smell its blooms.

  ‘Pretty,’ said Tom, reaching up towards their lushness.

  ‘Yes, they are,’ said Lucy, sitting down on the grass as she opened the card. It was typed and the printing was smudged. She read the short message: Welcome home, love from—an initial. Which might have been an E or an F.

  ‘Pretty flowers,’ said Tom again.

  ‘Come on. Let’s put them in water.’

  •

  Valentine’s Day, somewhere back in the nineties. Lucy was sitting in the tiny university office where she was working when a courier arrived, squinting at the professor’s name on the door, which wasn’t Lucy’s name.

  ‘You Lucy Kiss?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Great name for Valentine’s Day,’ he said then, angling the huge bouquet of flowers—an explo
sion of red, orange, yellow—onto the one piece of desk not obscured by piles of paper. ‘Best name I’ve seen today. Have a good one.’ And he was gone.

  Lucy sat, diminished by the size, the appearance of such a thing. And then she reached for the card. A Valentine’s tribute for Lucy, who never expects such a thing. And no name.

  Her professor came in, making a show of inching around the mass of flowers. ‘Your boyfriend’s done well,’ he said, twisting a petal free from one of the roses and letting it drop to the floor.

  ‘If only I knew who he was,’ said Lucy, passing him the card.

  ‘When did you find out who sent them?’ Ben had asked when she told him this story. It was when they first started dating, and she told him she didn’t like Valentine’s Day flowers, that she’d never expect them from him.

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I never did.’

  ‘And so somewhere in the world,’ said Ben, ‘there’s a poor guy who every February remembers the year he sent flowers to a girl called Lucy Kiss, who completely ignored them. Poor bugger—he’s probably never recovered from that, you know.’

  ‘One vardøger of Lucy Kiss might have married him,’ she’d said once to Ben. ‘In that other universe, I might have been swept off my feet.’

  And then, just after they’d moved in together, on the first evening when there were no boxes to be considered, no decisions about placements or possessions to be made, Lucy came home to find, in the middle of the table, what appeared to be an exact replica of that long-ago mystery bunch—reds, oranges, yellows, crayon-bright.

  ‘As if . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ben. ‘As if I’d sent you the first bunch, years before I met you.’ The huge smile he wore as he watched her gaze at them.

  ‘Well, didn’t you turn out romantic?’ Lucy squeezed him a hug. She twitched a single petal free and held it up, twisting it into flight as she’d watched the professor do years before.

  As it dropped, she made a wish.