Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls

by Danielle Wood

  I arrived there late in the morning and chose a table whose pile of books was topped by a yellow-jacketed tome titled British Poultry Standards. And although I walked through all of the interior rooms and looked at the hundreds of cups I could choose from, and considered seriously a gold-lined Aynsley with burnished fruit, a Blue Paragon with roses and a Womble cup depicting four of the little scavengers paddling a bathtub, the cup I really wanted was one that I had drunk from before. I knew that I should try something different, but I was feeling low, and in need of comfort, and it was no time to be stern with myself. So I asked for the Red Domino (Midwinter Pottery, 1953, designer Jessie Tait), a good-sized white cup with a red rim that was trimmed with small white dots, and it was brought to my table, along with a plain white teapot and milk jug, by a waiter with a black apron strung tightly across his narrow hips.

  Outside it was raining, and although I was not exactly cold, I could still have done with a quilt to pop over my knees, or a hot-water bottle to hold against my chest. I poured my tea and drifted into the clear circle of thinking space that seemed to open up around it. Well, I thought, I had excelled myself this time. Within a matter of days I had bruised my heart and lost my job, however unlovely the job. Was this how it was to be for me? Instead of learning to make fewer mistakes, I would simply rack them up more swiftly?

  These were the questions I was asking of myself as I looked out through the drizzling window, and saw somebody that I did not expect to see. It was her. Surely. She was on the wrong continent, of course. And she did not appear to have aged a day in the ten years since I’d seen her last, on a train chuffing through the English countryside. But it had to be her. She was wearing the very same polka-dot dress with the flopping polka-dot bow at its throat, and the same neat little black shoes with their laces and high heels. She carried the same umbrella, but it was opened this time, and she held it steadily above her head as she stood on the corner across the street from the tearoom, looking directly at me.

  Raindrops bounced on her polka-dot canopy and the traffic lights changed. And changed again. And then one more time. But she simply stood there, half-smiling at me, until — at last — I understood. That she had been there at every crucial junction, in one guise or another. She was there, that night in the Hyphen-Wilson’s boatshed, pinned to the wall as Miss August, wearing nothing more than the pants of a polka-dot bikini. She was at the hospital on the night I had six stitches between my eyes, her long blonde hair held back with a polka-dot bandana while she asked me questions and allowed me to tell myself the truth. She was the smut-cheeked child with the Christmas wreath, and the hand in the spotted glove that I had noticed hovering protectively at the edge of one of the photographs taken on the day of my christening. She was what I had been reaching for when I had chosen, on this very day, the dotrimmed cup that I now held in my hand.

  I smiled at her across the shallow river of the wet road. And she smiled back, and lifted one hand to wave: the kind of wave in which the four fingers move as they would in a quick scale of as many piano keys. She stepped off the kerb then, and, without waiting for the lights to change, crossed the road. She entered the tearoom and the chime-bells of the door continued to tinkle while she shook the raindrops off her umbrella, collapsed and furled it. For just a moment, I doubted myself. Perhaps she would simply sit down at any one of the empty tables and order a cup of tea. But no. She took a seat at my table, and as she did so the waiter set down in front of her a cup that was black with white polkadots, resting in a saucer that was white with black. Of course.

  ‘I came to tell you something,’ she said, pouring milk, and then tea, from my jug and my teapot, into her cup.

  ‘Tell me something?’

  ‘Mmmmm,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it wonderful when the first sip of tea is precisely the right temperature? One of the great pleasures in life, in my book.’

  ‘You were saying? That you came to tell me something?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, her smile revealing some flecks of cerise lipstick on her front teeth. She sipped her tea again.

  ‘What did you come to tell me?’ I asked, trying to keep my impatience in check.

  She took another sip and inclined her head towards me.

  ‘That your laces are undone, dear,’ she said softly.

  My laces? I looked down at my boots.

  ‘And in here, too, dear,’ she said, tapping with skewed and wrinkled fingers at the centre of her polka-dot chest.

  I looked inward at my heart. And indeed, there too, the criss-cross corsetry was slackened and gaping. I was all undone. Potentially, I could spill. Or tangle. And so I began to tug at my own heartstrings, pulling them up tight until there was just the right amount of tension at each criss and each cross. Then I bent down to my boots and laced them firmly too, first the left, then the right, finishing off on each side with a surgeon’s shoelace knot.

  But when I looked up from my boots, eager to ask who, where, when, why …she was gone.

  She was no longer in the tearoom, and she was not anywhere to be seen in the street. The waiter shrugged in answer to my searching face. She had simply vanished, leaving her polka-dot cup on the table, half full of milky tea. I put my hand on the side of her cup and felt both the warmth of it, and the warmth of the knowledge that she was out there. Somewhere. My heart swelled gently within the safe net of its lacing, and my toes flexed inside their casing of cherry-red leather. In a moment, I would take a bold and good-sized step, out into the woods again. But first, I would finish my tea.

  A Note on Sources

  The line from Christopher Hampton’s play Les Liaisons dangereuses that appears on p. 4 is reproduced with permission from publisher Faber and Faber Ltd. Information contained in ‘A Word from Rosie Little on: Penises’, pp. 8–9, was drawn from a range of sources including Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality, by Roger Short and Malcolm Potts, and The Penis Book, by Joseph Cohen. The Elephant Information Repository referred to in ‘Elephantiasis’ can be found online at elephant.elephost.com. My thanks to Jessica Dietrich from the University of Tasmania and Judith Hallett from the University of Maryland for verifying the Latin translation of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on p. 198.

  Acknowledgments

  For being Rosie’s perfect reader and first editor: Anica Boulanger-Mashberg.

  For laughs, and for listening and never seeming to mind: Heather Brown.

  For angelic guidance (and laughs too): Heather Rose.

  For backwards spelling lessons: Brother Brian Godfrey.

  For advice and assistance: Alan Champion, Maeve Arwel, Robyn and Adrian Colman, Geoffrey Kirkland, Graeme Riddoch, Andrew Sant, Elle Leane and Joanna Longbottom.

  For wit, wisdom, friendship and allowing the occasional petty theft: Nelli Noakes, Jane Hutchinson, Kate Mooney, Lou Braithwaite, Mona Blackfish, Claire Konkes, Anna Johnston, Lisa Fletcher, Andrea Crompton, Katherine ‘Fuzzle’ Legg, Rachael Treasure, Carol Altmann, Joanna Richardson, Yvette Blackwood, the Curry Girls, the CRAFT sisterhood and honorary girlfriend Sister Peter Sharp.

  For various aquiline noses: my colleagues at the University of Tasmania.

  For energy: my students at the University of Tasmania.

  For ‘supervising’: Richard Rossiter and Barbara Mobbs.

  For making Rosie real: Annette Barlow, Christa Munns, Ali Lavau, Andrew Hawkins and all at Allen & Unwin.

  For being the family of a writer, with all that it entails: Jenny and Peter Wood, John Godfrey, Axel Rooney and the Divine Miss X.

  Table of Contents

  COVER PAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CONTENTS

  NOT FOR GOOD GIRLS

  VIRGINITY: THE DEFLOWERING OF ROSIE LITTLE

  TRUTH: ELEPHANTIASIS

  TRAVEL: ROSIE LITTLE IN THE MOTHER COUNTRY

  BEAUTY: THE WARDROBE

  ART: EDEN

  LOVE: THE ANATOMY OF WOLVES

 
COMMITMENT: THE DEPTHLESSNESS OF SOUP

  MARRIAGE: VISION IN WHITE

  WORK: ROSIE LITTLE’S BRILLIANT CAREER

  LONGING: LONELY HEART CLUB

  LOSS: THE TRUE DAUGHTER

  DESTINY: ROSIE LITTLE JOINS THE DOTS

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS