Walking on Trampolines

by Frances Whiting

  I’d stood, stunned and silent, as he’d rammed a final pair of navy socks into his luggage.

  ‘Is that it, Lulu?’ he had continued, zipping up his case. ‘Because if it is I am glad I’m going to Hong Kong because I am getting really, really tired of dealing with it.’

  Then he’d walked out of the bedroom and slammed the door.

  I heard him go down the stairs and out the front door into the street below to be snapped up, I presumed, by some other woman out there who wouldn’t be able to believe her luck that here in this city there was a perfectly normal, nice man, who usually never raised his voice, or swore, or walked out of an argument, and who separated her whites from her coloureds when he did her washing.

  A smart woman.

  ‘Sorry,’ I had said out loud to the room, which was strangely silent and still in the aftermath of Ben’s anger. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  But not sorry – or smart – enough not to go.

  Now there he was on the answering machine, trying to make up for the fight, for our awkward goodbye at the airport, making a supreme effort by even asking about the wedding, while I – well, what had I done since he left?

  Unwelcome, the memory of the wedding night flashed across my mind.

  I saw Josh through the keyhole of my hotel-room door, swaying in the hallway, smiling when I opened it, leaning in to me, half-saying, half-singing the words from one of the songs from a sixteen-track mixed tape he’d once made.

  ‘No, no, no,’ I said out loud to myself, banishing the picture by shaking my head and resolutely beginning to pack for Harry and Rose’s.

  But Josh kept singing and took a step towards me.

  ‘NO,’ I said, shaking my head and hurling a pair of shoes on the bed. Usually I just took an overnight bag, but this time I reached for my suitcase – I thought I might be staying a while.

  The phone rang once more and I was running to get it, certain it was Harry asking me if I was coming, wanting to reassure him that, of course, I’d be there, when a different voice cracked through the answering machine.

  ‘Tallulah,’ Annabelle Andrews said, ‘I was just wondering if you could have waited until the confetti had actually hit the ground before having sex with my husband.’

  I stood stock-still on the spot, irrationally certain she could detect any movement through the airwaves.

  ‘I know you’re there, Tallulah,’ she said calmly. ‘Pick up the phone, immediately.’

  I snapped the suitcase shut, and fled.

  The ninety-minute trip from the inner-city apartment I shared with Ben back to Juniper Bay felt like forever, and I kept looking in the rear-vision mirror to see if anyone was following me, but the only thing that chased me all the way home was my own guilt.

  Turning into Plantation Street, I don’t think I have ever felt so relieved to be home, where I could walk through the gate, past the sign – freshly painted every few years – up the stairs and know exactly what to expect. Even if Rose was in the other place she inhabitated, with its half-shadow rooms none of us could enter, there would still be fresh flowers in the hall, the kettle would feel warm, and Harry’s unlaced work boots would be by the back door. It was as familiar as the pink chenille bedspread on my childhood bed and the sticks that had been placed under it, put there by Mattie and Sam’s hands, no matter how old they grew. Even though they were both away in Canberra on a one-term exchange for the physiotherapy degree they were studying, I had still automatically reached under the bedspread the first night I got home, checking to see if my now strapping twenty-two-year-old brothers had left me a present.

  *

  I had been home for about a week, looking after Rose and hiding behind the house’s familiar walls when Harry approached me in the garden.

  ‘What’s going on, love?’ he asked, leaning on a rake.

  ‘What do you mean, Harry?’

  ‘Well, love,’ he said, ‘I’ve just seen Annabelle’s mum on the telly.’

  ‘On the telly?’ I echoed stupidly.

  Harry took a long look at the rake.

  ‘Yes, love – talking about how you ruined Annabelle’s wedding. It’s going to be on that Maxine Mathers show tonight.’

  Harry was looking at me, one hand moving up and down at the back of his neck, his signature move for worry.

  God.

  He didn’t need this – first, Rose, and now this, his daughter, caught like a rabbit in the headlights on national television.

  There was not much I could do about that – it was done, and clearly I was done for, but I could, at least, still help him with Rose.

  ‘It will be all right, Harry,’ I smiled at him. ‘You know Annie, she’s always being melodramatic about things – I better go in to Rose.’

  It wasn’t much but it was all I had, and I left him in the garden with his anxious question mark of a face.

  Rose was sitting at the kitchen table, crumpled.

  ‘Hey, Rose,’ I said, sitting beside her and putting my hand on Doris’s sleeve, ‘the jonquils are out, do you want to come and have a look?’

  She stared ahead, her hands folded neatly in her lap. I reached over and put her head on my shoulder, patting her hair. We sat for a while in the quiet, which was broken only by one jagged little sigh from Rose.

  I reached into my bag of tricks to find the one that might help her, words and pictures learnt as a little girl sitting by my mute mother’s side.

  ‘How about I sing, Rose, would you like me to sing to you?’

  A slight shift, Rose’s shoulders next to mine.

  I began to quietly sing an old tune, ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’.

  It calmed both of us; it was always easy to forget the outside world when it was just Rose and me, dreaming in her kitchen.

  Later, when I had managed to get Rose to sit outside with Harry in the garden seat, its red hibiscuses faded, its fringes long gone, nicked by an assortment of birds over the years, I sat on my bed and watched, half-horrified and half-mesmerised, while Annie’s heavily kohled eyes blinked from the television.

  A video montage of Andrews family moments played, while the voice-over intoned:

  They are one of Australia’s oldest and best known dynasties, respected internationally across every field of the arts.

  But the passions that drive the uniquely talented Andrews clan also divide them, and tonight, exclusively on Channel Nine, wife of Frank Andrews and Archibald Prize winner Annie Andrews speaks for the first time about the scandals that have dogged Australia’s first family of the arts.

  The montage played out, replaced by a single, black and white photo of Annabelle and me that filled the screen.

  The phone next to my bed rang. It was Simone.

  ‘I’m not sure what exactly what Stevie Nicks is going to say,’ – Simone was not particularly fond of Annie – ‘but I hope you’re going to get a chance to tell your side of the story.’

  I had no intention of doing so, but if I did, I knew where I’d start: that first summer when we were all together, Annabelle, Josh and I, sharing the heat of the sun.

  ‘Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow,’ said Annabelle, running across the hot sand. ‘Why you insist on coming down here on weekends is beyond me,’ she continued, flopping down on her towel.

  ‘You don’t have to come if you hate it so much, Annabelle,’ I said, ‘I really don’t know why you do.’

  But I did know – we both did.

  Annabelle came because if she didn’t I would go with Simone or Stella, and there was no way she was going to let that happen. So instead she sat beside me, sniffing distastefully at the smells of summer – Hawaiian Tropic tanning lotion and boys, mostly – and literally drawing a line in the sand around us.

  ‘See that,’ she would snarl at any tousle-haired surfer who would, lured by her mermaid curls, recklessly amble over to us, o
nly to retreat moments later, cheeks stinging harder than the salt on their skin, ‘that line means do not cross, do not disturb and do not talk to us – I drew it because I know how hard it is for you surfer boys to understand English.’

  ‘Annabelle,’ I would say, outraged and thrilled at the same time by her rudeness, ‘you shouldn’t speak to them like that.’

  ‘Oh they love it,’ she would shrug, stretching out on her towel like the cat who’d swallowed the suncream and showing an understanding of the male psyche it would take the rest of us girls lying on the beach, cluelessly rubbing coconut oil into our skin, years to grasp.

  The only male allowed to cross the line was, of course, Josh.

  Annabelle, perhaps sensing I would put up a bigger fight for him than I had for Stella and Simone, had never attempted to exclude him. Instead she shuffled across from her seat next to mine and let him in. The three of us had grown increasingly closer that summer – picnics and songs and getting drunk in the park on Fruity Lexia, telling jokes and shouting at the sun – until all our lines blurred, and it was hard to tell where we each finished or began.

  We were, of course, too close.

  Rose could see it, her brow furrowing as the three of us trooped upstairs to my room; Annie could see it: ‘Annabelle, why don’t you go and find your own boyfriend to eat us out of house and home?’; even the Piranha Sisters could see it.

  ‘Excuse me, Sister,’ Stacey had shot her hand up in French class one day, staring directly at Annabelle and me, ‘but some of us were wondering what a ménage à trois is?’

  The rows of chocolate-clad girls tittered as Sister Eltrees, the youngest and most easily unsettled nun at St Rita’s stopped, Encore Tricolore in hand, mid-flutter.

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure, dear, some sort of cake I think.’

  Which really was funny, I suppose, seeing as Josh eventually got that cake, and ate it too.

  The only person who didn’t see it was me, or if I did, I rolled over in the sand, and dove in, head first.

  Besides, there were too many moments that belonged exclusively to Josh and me – laughs and sighs and promises that were just ours – for me to worry about all the others in between.

  That was the summer before Annabelle and I started Grade Twelve, and the year they put an outdoor roller-skating rink next to the Wattle Beach caravan park, and all the families would gather there in the early evening, mothers with eyes in the back of their heads watching their children wobble around and sunburnt fathers telling stories to each other on the sidelines.

  Later, when the stars came out, the DJ would say: ‘All right, young lovers, don’t be shy – choose your partner for the couples’ session,’ and the older kids would circle the ring and each other, dancing on wheels beneath their feet.

  Annabelle hated the couples’ skate, pushing herself off to the barrier, where she would stand and sulk and flick boys away from her as though they were the annoying moths drawn to the red and green and blue light bulbs strung up around the ring.

  But I loved it.

  I loved Josh’s arm around my back, his fingers curled into my shoulder, his other hand holding mine, swaying back and forth together until he would skate around, in one fluid movement, to the front of me and push me into the barrier.

  Pressing hard against me he would whisper, ‘I love you, Tallulah-Lulu,’ and even the stars would sigh.

  *

  Annabelle and I were lying on our towels beside the Craybourne Island pier, taking in the sun on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

  And Josh was standing in front of us, his tall, dark body casting a shadow over ours, putting his board down and shaking ice-cold drops of water onto our skin.

  ‘Can I come in, girls?’ he grinned, not waiting for an answer but instead dropping to his knees and lying his whole, cool body on the entire length of mine, and cocking his head to my ear.

  ‘Hey baby,’ he murmured, ‘you smell like coconut, makes me want to eat you all up.’

  Little bumps rose on my skin as I shivered in the sun.

  ‘Oh, get a dune,’ moaned Annabelle.

  He rolled off me and squeezed between us. Annabelle and I both turned towards him, and Annabelle announced: ‘Annie’s entering the Archibald.’

  ‘The what?’ Josh murmured, his mouth on my neck.

  ‘The Archibald,’ Annabelle said, ‘although I wouldn’t expect a philistine like you to know what it is.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A philistine – it means a person who does not appreciate art, someone who is hostile to artistic achievement – an uncultured, uneducated, peasant sort of person really,’ she smiled.

  ‘Geez, Annabelle,’ said Josh, ‘bit harsh.’

  ‘But true, Joshie,’ she teased, ‘sadly, all too true.’

  Flipping over to lie on her back, she continued, ‘Now, while I tell Tallulah all about it, why don’t you run off into the ocean and go pee in your wetsuit with all your surfie friends?’

  Josh sprung to his feet and swept Annabelle up in a fireman’s carry. ‘I think you’re the one who wants to go for a swim, Annabelle!’ he laughed.

  Annabelle squirmed out of his hold, shrieked and ran, tearing down the sand on her long, brown legs with Josh bearing down behind her, their lean bodies casting shadows like stick insects on the sand.

  Like twins.

  I sat up, shaded my eyes from the sun, and watched them disappear further and further away onto the shadowy shore, watched them tumble and wrestle in the sand before Annabelle wriggled out from under him, ran straight to the water and dove in, a perfect arc of olive skin and flash of white bikini.

  Josh charged in after her, and together they went under, while I sat on my towel waiting for them to surface, and it felt like forever.

  That night, Josh and I lay under a jacaranda tree by the river, our faces close and whispering.

  ‘Josh,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Tallulah-Lulu?’

  ‘Do you want me to get a white bikini?’

  *

  The next day, on the way home from school, Annabelle walked ahead of me, trailing a stick along the fences.

  ‘We’re not going to mine,’ she said, ‘so don’t even suggest it.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to go to mine either.’

  ‘Doris?’ Annabelle asked me, in shorthand.

  I nodded.

  ‘Annie?’ I asked her.

  She nodded back.

  ‘She’s being particularly dramatic at the moment,’ she sighed.

  ‘Bloody women,’ I said, grabbing one end of the stick and leading her away with it. ‘Come on, it’s so hot, let’s go to the river.’

  A lot of people wouldn’t swim in the river that wound its way through Juniper, under our bridges and at the bottom of our gardens, quietly lapping away at our edges.

  They said it was polluted, they said it had giant black eels in it that could wrap their slimy coils around your legs and drag you down, never to be seen again.

  Jessica McCarthy swore that her father, a commercial fisherman, had seen two-headed fish jump from its brown depths, and Sarah Scott told a gaggle of suitably impressed eighth graders that her brother and his mates, who went water-skiing most weekends, often skied right over the top of dead cows floating down it.

  ‘Like a ski jump,’ Annabelle said brightly, spoiling Sarah’s moment.

  But Annabelle and I had found a corner of the river not yet marred by flesh-eating eels or decomposing bovines. It was to the right of the canoe club, a pale grey jetty that jutted out into the water.

  Sharp shells clung to its underbelly, and hundreds of tiny, silvery fish darted beneath its uneven boards, swarming together in one direction, then precision-turning into another.

  We could strip down to our underwear and lie in the shallows underneath the boards, winks of sunlight shining throu
gh, while tiny waves – wavelets Annabelle called them – flirted with our toes.

  It was the one place we hadn’t told Josh about, or taken him to.

  An unspoken agreement between us, we kept it to ourselves, going there when it was too hot for the tree house, which we occasionally allowed Josh to infiltrate, and too far to the beach.

  ‘You look like a mermaid,’ I told her that afternoon, when neither of us could face our mothers.

  ‘So do you,’ she smiled at me, and added, ‘I wish we bloody were.’

  ‘Me too,’ I answered. ‘Then we could just swim away.’

  ‘Where nobody could find us,’ she agreed, adding, ‘Frank and Annie are really fighting over this Archibald thing.’

  ‘Why?’

  Annabelle sighed, ducking her head under the water, and re-emerged seconds later, smoothing her dark hair off her face. ‘Because Frank doesn’t want her to enter it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He says that she’s not doing it for the right reasons. He reckons she’s just in it for the publicity and the money.’

  ‘How much money is it?’

  ‘About twenty grand, I think.’

  ‘That’s pretty good.’

  ‘I know, and Annie says, you know, that God knows we need it, with Frank not doing much art himself lately,’ – Frank’s work was always like Frank himself, haphazard and sporadic – ‘and who does he think pays for me to go to St Rita’s, and does he have any idea how hard it is to keep his name out there . . .’

  Annabelle was gone, lost in Annie world with her jangling bangles and her jangling voice.

  I wiped some water from my hair, the droplets running down my back.

  ‘But I still don’t really get what he’s so upset about. The Archibald is pretty prestigious, isn’t it, it’s not like she’s entering a colouring-in competition, or anything . . .’

  Annabelle laughed. ‘I think it would be better if she did.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, ‘I still don’t get it.’