‘Wow,’ I said, sitting on her bed and looking at its red, shiny sides and smooth, white cross. ‘What can you do with it?’
She flicked open one of its attachments. ‘This one,’ she said, ‘is for filing your nails.’ She flicked open another. ‘This one’s for when you go camping and forget to take your can-opener, and this one,’ she flicked up a long, sharp blade, ‘is for cutting you from ear to ear if you ever go to the movies with Simone and Stella without me again. Joking.’ She smiled at my stricken face.
Even now, all these years later, I’m not so sure she was.
What she did use that blade for was to carve two intertwined As on the underside of our kitchen table, gouging her initials deep into the wood while I listened out for Rose, so she could quickly put the penknife in her lap and say, ‘Great scones, Mrs de Longland.’
It was, she said, whittling away at the pine, verilitaly important to leave your mark in life, but I could have told her, even then, that she didn’t need an engraving to do that. She loved to sit at that table, running her fingers along the double As, eating Rose’s biscuits and rolling her eyes at Mattie and Sam spitting crumbs at each other – ‘You two really are quite disgustellent, aren’t you?’ we’d groan.
Then we’d go up to my room to sit cross-legged on my bed, spending hours sorting through tiny coloured love beads I kept in a box Rose had given me, stringing them together to make bracelets we wore up and down our arms in summer.
We would face each other on that bed and paint our skin with shimmering eye shadows and creamy blushers, pinning our hair up and down and holding mirrors to our faces, not yet grown into.
We would sunbake in my backyard, stretched out in our bikinis, eyes hidden behind plastic sunglasses, skin bubbling beneath lashings of coconut oil, leaping up when Mattie and Sam turned the hose on us.
At Annabelle’s, in the summer we would race down to the conservatory at the far corner of the garden in our bikinis and jump into the river, shrieking as its cold fingers touched our skin, shrieking more when Annabelle would swear she just saw a river rat swim by. I would tear out of the water, Annabelle chasing after me, and we would roll around in the grass half-screaming, half-laughing and daring each other to go back in.
If I was staying overnight, we would play hide and seek in the River House’s rabbit warren of rooms, carrying dripping white candles and casting huge shadows on the walls, screaming when Frank ran out at us in the darkness, once causing me, much to Annabelle’s delight, to wet my pants.
On weekends and holidays, we caught the bus out to Wattle Beach, fifteen minutes away, but another country.
Surfie chicks with hair like white gold shimmered in the sun, grommets hung around the milk bar flipping their skateboards, sand-covered boys emerged from Kombi vans with girls who had lied to their mothers about being there, and little kids with stripes of zinc across their noses hurtled into the sea.
Sometimes I’d ask Simone and Stella to come with us, but Simone would say something that annoyed Annabelle, Stella would inevitably cry and we would all spend the bus trip home staring out the windows.
So mostly I went to Wattle Beach with just Annabelle, which was exactly how she liked it.
Catching the bus to Wattle, walking back and forth to each other’s houses, Annabelle leaping up the front steps two at a time at mine, calling out: ‘Hello, Mrs de Longland, anything to eat? We’re starravenous!’, Sam and Mattie grinning from ear to ear and tumbling about on the lounge-room floor, Annabelle adding my initials to hers under the table, our days and nights overlapped into weeks and months, and spilled into seasons.
Then, in the summer that we both turned fourteen, Frank gave us a gift.
‘Frank’s building us a tree house,’ I told Rose one afternoon after school. ‘He says that now we are turning into young ladies’ – I giggled – ‘we need a place of sanctuary.’
Rose sat down and pushed a plate of Iced VoVos towards me.
She was wearing Greta, a striped pink and white seersucker smock dress, and looking not unlike an Iced VoVo herself.
I giggled again.
Rose looked at me. ‘What are you laughing at?’
‘You,’ I smiled. ‘You look a bit like one of those biscuits, Rose.’
Rose looked at the plate.
‘And you,’ she replied, ‘look like a Tim Tam.’
We both glanced down at the dark chocolate layers of my St Rita’s School for Young Lesbians uniform and laughed.
‘What’s this I hear on the neighbourhood tom-toms about Frank Andrews building you girls a tree house?’ Harry said, home from work and looking for something to eat.
‘Harry – tools,’ Rose said automatically, gesturing outside and shaking her head as he picked up his toolbox from the floor. ‘I don’t know how many times I have asked your father not to bring his tools into the house,’ Rose said. ‘Harry, boots!’
Harry stood in the doorway, looking down at his feet.
‘Sorry, love,’ he said, walking back outside again.
Rose and I smiled at each other across the table.
‘So,’ Harry said, returning barefoot and pulling up a chair, ‘what about this tree house?’
‘Frank’s going to build us one,’ I replied. ‘He says that now we are growing up, Annabelle and I need a place we can escape to – Frank says everyone needs a place they can escape to.’
‘You’re telling me,’ Harry said. ‘When do I move in?’
‘Sorry, Harry,’ I said, ‘it’s just for me and Annabelle, it’s going to be amazible.’
‘Is that right?’ Harry said. ‘I might have to take a look at it myself, see if Frank needs any help with the plumbing – surely this extravaganza is going to have hot and cold running water for you girls, isn’t it?’ he teased.
‘It’s going to have everything,’ I said. ‘Annie’s calling it Frank’s Folly.’
‘Well, she’d know all about that,’ Rose said, biting into a biscuit.
Sometimes Greta could be a real bitch.
But it wasn’t just Rose’s skin Annie Andrews got under, it seemed the whole of Juniper Bay was unsettled by her – and they didn’t even know the whole story, like I did.
Long before Frank, Annie Andrews had been Anne Grunker, a name, she told me, she so hated that from the moment she was first forced to write it with her pudgy five-year-old fingers, she had become determined to shed it.
At school she had insisted that her increasingly bewildered mother, Ruth, label all her schoolbooks ‘Anne G’, had steadfastly refused to answer to her surname at rollcall, and at seventeen had met a beautiful but stupid Italian boy called Roman Barantis, a name Annie found so entrancing, she married it.
She had shown me a photo of a fading Roman Barantis once, caught behind a bit of plastic in one of the ring-bound photo albums Annie kept in a trunk, and we had sat together contemplating her former husband of just six weeks.
‘What was he like?’ I asked, and Annie had run her fingers over his face in the photo, as if it would help her remember.
‘He was lovely, actually, mad about me . . . Of course, his mother went absolutely ballistic when I left . . .’
‘What about Roman, how did he feel?’
Annie flicked the album shut, tossed it back in the trunk.
‘How should I know, Tallulah? I didn’t ask him.’
Annie Barantis had walked out on her marriage one morning with nothing but the newspaper off the front step, and her husband’s name.
Both would prove helpful in Annie’s new world.
In the paper she would find an advert for artists’ models wanted at the Cove studios, and years later Mick Porter, who would become world famous for his ‘Cove Nudes’ series, would recall the moment when six-foot Annie Barantis walked in, dropped her green velvet cloak and perched her dimpled bottom on the stool.
&n
bsp; He had, he said, turned to his students and announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Eve has entered the garden.’
Whether or not Mick Porter actually uttered those words didn’t matter, it became part of Annie’s folklore, along with the time she’d sent a test tube filled with her own blood to the then Minister of Health to protest against the lack of women’s health care services and how she’d openly lived with the writer Marie-Claire Lyons during the early sixties – ‘They didn’t put THAT one on the cover of the Weekly, Lulu,’ she told me.
Her new name made her daring. Annie Barantis said things and did things that Anne Grunker would never have contemplated, including attending a barbeque at Mick Porter’s one October afternoon where she met a well-oiled and paint-splattered Frank Andrews.
The Weekly would trill in the story that accompanied the wedding cover: ‘It was a meeting of the minds and the hearts, as Annie and Frank bonded over Mick Porter’s famous king-prawn shish kebabs and Peter, Paul and Mary’s infectious ‘If I Had a Hammer’.
Annie, however, had her own version: ‘We got completely pissed, shagged each other senseless on Mick’s couch and moved in together the next day.’
And for a long time, the union of Frank and Annie Andrews (she dropped the ‘Barantis’ for the more well-known ‘Andrews’ quicker, my mother said, ‘than a plate of hot scones’) was, by all accounts, a good one.
Frank, always slightly troubled in some way, like a ripple on a perfectly still lake, became, everyone said, steadier, and when Annabelle was born two years after the wedding he was, as he’d say himself, ‘skyrocket happy’.
‘I picked you up and you were like a little pink crumpled starfish,’ he liked to tell Annabelle over and over again. ‘I told you, “It’s all right, little one, I am yours.”’
And he was, which was just as well, because, despite wearing the stamp of her mother’s name, Annabelle was never really Annie’s.
‘I don’t think I was cut out to be a mother,’ Annie said once during a radio interview we had all listened to in the River House’s cavernous lounge room. ‘I never really wanted to be one, not like some women, you know, breasts leaking at the very sight of a baby. My real passion, during my early twenties and thirties, was my work, my paintings, and the demand for them, as you know, just grew and grew during that period. But I always did have a bond with my daughter, and for me, the really surprising part is how fond I’ve grown of her over the years. I don’t know if you’d call it mother love, but it’s fierce enough, I think, to be.’
On hearing this, Annabelle had walked out of the room and slammed the door. Annie had stood up, sighed, and called after her: ‘I said fierce, Belle, fierce.’
As for Annie’s own family, Annie rarely saw them, explaining during the same interview, ‘The problem is they are Grunkers, and I’m not.’
What the Grunkers thought of Annie I never knew. Like a lot of things in their daughter’s life, they had gradually faded away, Christmas visits and birthday calls becoming increasingly fewer, then disappearing altogether.
The Grunkers lived out their years quietly, footy season after cricket season, Sundays at the beach and sausage sizzles, their rhythm only occasionally interrupted by a journalist wanting to know about Annie.
‘We’re very proud of her,’ Ruth Grunker would say politely before shutting the door and going back to her life without her daughter in it.
It was an arrangement, as far as I could tell, that suited everybody.
*
‘American Oregon,’ Frank announced, ‘Californian softwood – nothing fancy, nothing posh, just good to work with, flexible, gives you what it has to.’
He ran his hands along the wood as Annabelle and I exchanged glances, then smiles.
‘But the beauty of this particular timber is that it’s also really hardy, able to withstand all sorts of weather, all sort of conditions, all sorts of assaults on it – even from two teenage girls,’ he grinned.
We were sitting on a benchtop in Frank’s shed, swinging our legs and watching him through the tiny particles of dust that hovered in the air.
‘So,’ Frank clapped his hands together, making the dust dance, ‘it is with this wood that I intend to build your tree house, girls, and not just any old tree house either. Now, allow me to show you where it shall stand,’ he said, opening the door with a flourish.
Leading us out into the backyard, whistling and holding up branches to duck under as he went, Frank stopped at a mango tree pregnant with fruit at the broken fence line.
‘You’ve got to be kidding, Dad,’ Annabelle said. ‘What about the possums, what about the bats?’
The three of us stood beside the tree, Annabelle and I looking uncertainly up into its shadowy green and black branches.
‘Don’t worry about that, Annabelle,’ Frank grinned, ‘what about the mangoes?’
In Frank’s hands the tree house grew into a strange, wild nest, springing, it seemed, from the branches themselves, spreading across the breadth of the tree and reaching upwards to where the sun peeked through the moon and star shapes he had cut out of its walls.
It was, of course, a work of art – a Frank Andrews original, off limits to everyone but Annabelle and me.
‘We’ll need a table.’
‘Mmm-mmm, and two chairs.’
‘And some shelves, for our things.’
‘And some candles.’
‘Rose won’t let me have candles.’
‘What are you, Tallulah, six years old?’
‘I’m just saying, Rose won’t like me having candles up here.’
‘Will she know?’
‘No.’
‘Well then – candles, and definitely food.’
‘Okay – chocolate, obviously, and some chips.’
‘Mmm, and lollies – freckles, mint leaves, milk bottles . . .’
‘What about rats?’
Annabelle looked at me. ‘Well, I won’t be eating them, Tallulah, but if you really want some . . .’
Our laughter hooted down through the branches.
It was, just as Frank had said, a sanctuary, the perfect place for Annabelle and me to escape to after school, slip away past the knots of boys from St Joseph’s who had started calling out our names when we walked past, those tectonic plates beginning to shift beneath our feet as our training bras itched beneath our tunics.
We were, as Sister Scholastica beamed at us in Social Instruction, ‘blossoming into womanhood, flowering,’ she said, ‘into perfect, young blooms’, while rows of girls sat with shaking shoulders desperately trying not to laugh, especially when she warned us of the dangers of ‘pollination’.
‘There will be bees,’ she warned, while Annabelle moaned beside me in quiet hysteria, ‘and they will try to take your nectar.’
‘Oh dear God in heaven,’ Simone muttered from the row behind us.
Sister Scholastica’s ‘There will be bees’ speech was destined to go down in St Rita’s history, year after year of giggling schoolgirls able to recite it long after its creator had gone to meet hers.
But whenever I looked at our class photo from that year, I could see that Sister Scholastica’s horticultural homilies, however disturbing, were right – row upon row of girls with untouched faces, bright eyes, lovely smiles, like a garden.
Like Annabelle.
She was in the back row, her height dictating this position in each year’s St Rita’s snapshot, standing, as always, a little bit apart from everyone else, as if she had wandered accidentally into the frame. Her hands were resting loosely on her hips, her shoulders tilted back, her head tilted forward, her green cat’s eyes staring directly into the lens. Her lips were plum red and unsmiling, but turned up slightly at the corners, and I wondered if she had been making an effort, thinking of Annie’s words when we’d left that morning – ‘Try to smile in this year’
s photo, darling, I would like one photo of you at school that doesn’t look like you’re an inmate on death row.’
Her hat was tipped back on her head, her uniform slightly rumpled and her tie hung loosely around her neck, transgressions she would be in trouble for later.
She had Frank’s olive skin and Annie’s wild curls, not red, like her mother’s, but dark brown and whenever I looked at her in that photo, I thought of Sister Scholastica’s ‘perfect young blooms’ and wondered how I ever thought I stood a chance.
Simone and Stella were there too – Simone, with the long dark pigtails she would cut off the moment she finished school, staring straight at the camera with a penetrating look television viewers would come to know years later, and Stella, plump and lovely, also staring at the camera, but with an eager smile and a ‘Prefect’ badge pinned to her chest.
I was, as always, front and centre, holding up a chalkboard with our class name and year written on it, looking, as always, slightly embarrassed to be doing it. I was there because I was tiny, the shortest girl in the class, relegated to this position because I was also the neatest.
No rumpled uniform for me, no messy hair or loosened tie, Rose had primped me and starched me to within an inch of my life: two long, perfect golden plaits with chocolate-brown ribbons framed my face, my smile was wide and toothy, a smattering of freckles bridged my nose, and my eyes stared straight into the lens, as chocolate brown as my uniform.
Years later, in Grade Twelve, Joshua Keaton would demand to see my Grade Eight school pictures, study this photo and declare I look like a Crunchie bar.
‘Makes me want to eat you all up,’ he would say, and I would take those chocolate ribbons out of my hair, and let him.
*
There was a soft knock at the door just as I finished packing.
I opened it to the smiling woman with the cleaning trolley who asked, ‘So, did you have a good stay, love?’ I had absolutely no idea how to answer that question.
Instead I smiled back and asked her if she would like the magazines I’d brought with me.
Walking on Trampolines Page 3
