The heat hung in the car, reducing our conversation to lazy snatches that went nowhere in particular for the rest of the trip.
As we got closer to home, I checked off all the familiar milestones for Jazzy and Jarrod, now awake with their heads hanging out opposite windows.
‘That’s where I went to primary school,’ I said. ‘That’s the pool I learnt to swim in! And that’s my old high school, St Rita’s.’
‘That’s the oval I shagged the entire football team on,’ Duncan said under his breath.
I ignored him. ‘This is my street – and there’s my mother!’ I said, waving at Rose, who was standing in Kitty on the footpath, smiling.
We pulled over, Duncan bounding out of the car before I’d even unbuckled my seatbelt.
‘Hello, hello, you must be Rose, who by any other name would surely smell as sweet,’ he beamed, crushing her in his arms.
Back off, I thought, back off, Duncan, you’re too big, too much for her.
But Rose was laughing and patting her hair, purring, I thought, in Kitty.
She’d been, I realised with a shock, and to use a phrase from the radio industry, ‘McAllistered’.
‘And Harry!’ Duncan was booming. ‘Let me shake the hand of the man who brought excellence back into plumbing. And now may I introduce Jasmine and Jarrod, two of the finest fruits from my loins, and Barney, who I believe may be eating your sprinkler as we speak.’
We all turned to look at Barney and I was about to say something when I realised everyone else was already heading inside, Duncan’s suitcases at my feet.
‘Hurry up, Lulu,’ he called from the door, ‘Rose has made some sort of fruit punch!’
Once Jasmine and Jarrod were upstairs in the spare room, colouring in the felt pens Rose had bought them, stomach down and ankles up on the beds – new bedspreads on both, I noticed, butterflies for Jazzy and spaceships for Jarrod – and Duncan and Harry had been sent outside with cold beers and a cheese platter, and Barney was somewhere under the house gnawing at its foundations, I sat with Rose in the kitchen as she took the lamb out of the oven.
‘Saved you the shank,’ she smiled. ‘Don’t let the men know.’
‘Rose,’ I said, ‘you’ve gone to so much trouble.’
‘I love it,’ she said simply.
‘I know you do,’ I said, and added, ‘you look great, Rose.’
‘I feel it.’
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ she smiled. ‘You’ve got to stop worrying, Lulu. I really am so much better.’
‘How long have you been good?’
She smiled, twinkling – I loved it when Rose twinkled – ‘Now there’s a question, might be better to ask how long I’ve been well.’
‘All right, how long have you been well?’
‘Fourteen and a half weeks.’
‘That’s so good, Rose.’
‘Well,’ she said, handing me the shank to chew.
*
That night at dinner we sat shoulder to shoulder around the table while my fingers, as they always did, led themselves to the double As carved underneath, tracing them from start to finish, making me wonder all over again about the girl who had left them there.
Pointing out the signposts from my childhood to Jasmine and Jarrod, I had seen her everywhere, coming out of the school gates, caught in the slipstream of schoolgirls, ducking her head under the showers at the pool, standing on corners with her hat pulled low. I saw her beside me in the tree house, leaning out the window and fluttering down notes to Frank below – PLEASE SEND LEMONADE ASAP – and hauling up the provisions in the basket attached to the rope Frank had made us. I saw her at my door, taking off her school hat to show me her hair, dyed jet black, I saw her flailing arms hitting out at Stacey Ryan: I will shove your arse clean through your ears.
I smiled, looking out the kitchen window, looking for Annabelle on the street where we grew up, always a step or two ahead of me, her face turning back to me to laugh at something we’d shared.
Josh was there too, looking up as we had driven past Snow’s, wheeling his pushie up Ladbroke Hill, sweat forming a V on his back, sitting on the wall outside St Rita’s, waiting for me, legs swinging, Sister Bonaventure shooing him away. I saw him with Sam and Mattie in our backyard, the boys rolling over him like waves, Josh rolling on the grass in laughter. I saw him at our door: ‘Hi Mrs de Longland. Anything to eat?’ I saw his face in the half-light of a street lamp, bending down to kiss me, and I heard him whisper, ‘You’re my girl.’
They were everywhere I looked but nowhere I could touch them, and only by tracing their initials under my mother’s table – Josh had added his one Christmas – could I be certain they had ever once sat at it.
I felt Harry’s eyes on me, willing me back into the conversation.
‘So, Duncan,’ he said, carving the lamb at the head of the table, ‘what brings you to our neck of the woods?’
Duncan answered with a long spiel about the joys of small-town living, but I knew there was more to his visit than his professed longing to see Juniper Bay – it was there in the way he kept glancing at me, then lifting up his eyebrows in exaggerated ponder.
Later, when everyone else had gone to bed and we sat sipping red wine on the garden swing, I turned to him.
‘So, Duncan,’ I said, ‘you want to tell me why you’re really here?’
‘Annie Andrews.’
I sucked in my breath.
I hadn’t mentioned Annie to Duncan since that night at the cocktail party where I had met Ben, and she had shocked me with her entrance, then her tears, and Duncan hadn’t either, but I assumed that might have been because he had no recollection of it. I still didn’t know how they knew each other, although I could probably guess.
‘What about Annie Andrews?’
He leant in towards me. ‘The reason I am here, Tallulah, is because I am interested to know what happened to you in this little town that made you so boring when I first met you . . . Honestly, you were like a little Amish person.’
‘Oh come on, Duncan, I’m sure you’ve extracted the whole story out of Simone by now.’
‘Only bits here and there, Lulu, bits and pieces. Simone only tells me what she wants me to know, infuriating woman – another lesbian, you know, town’s bloody full of them in their cowboy shirts – and when I tried to get your friend Stella drunk at your birthday party to loosen her lips she had one glass of wine and burst into tears.’ He leant in further. ‘But I do know that it’s something about Annie Andrews and her family,’ he narrowed his eyes, ‘some deep dark secret you’ve all harboured for years.’
‘It’s not that big, Duncan,’ I began, but he silenced me, putting his fingers to my lips.
‘It’s all right, Lulu,’ he said, ‘I’ve figured it all out anyway, figured it out the night we ran into Annie and you went all limp and I had to carry you outside.’
‘You carried me outside?’
‘Yes, and for the record, I do wish you could control your intake a little more when we’re in public – but anyway, I figured it all out and I want you to know that your secret is safe with me.’
‘What secret, Duncan?’
He stopped mid-swing and peered at me.
‘That Annie Andrews,’ he paused dramatically, Sherlock Holmes in tasselled shoes, ‘is your mother!’
I stared at him.
‘Born out of wedlock, and left to a then childless Harry and Rose as a changeling on their doorstep to grow up, become best friends with Annabelle, Annie’s legitimate daughter, only to discover years later that she is, in fact, your half-sister, and leave you wondering evermore who your real father is.’
I was completely speechless.
‘It’s all right, my dear,’ he said soothingly, ‘your secret is safe with me, I’m an old bastard myself, you know.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You, you’re a silly old bastard, Duncan McAllister,’ I said, starting the swing again.
‘Not right?’
‘Not even close.’
‘Well, what then?’
‘You really want to know?’
‘Yes I do.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it matters to me.’
‘All right,’ I said, and told him.
‘That’s it?’ he said about half an hour later.
‘What do you mean, that’s it?’
‘That’s it? Some pimply-faced adolescent walking around with a permanent erection broke your poor little small-town heart by running off with your best friend, and you didn’t get to be king and queen of the prom. That’s the terrible past that made you the most boring woman on earth when I first met you? That’s the big secret, the love that dare not speak thy name? Jesus, Lulu, who didn’t get their heart broken in high school? My first girlfriend gave me the clap and then ran off with her driving instructor.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Who?’
‘The girl, the one who ran off with the instructor.’
‘Chloe,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘With a K.’
We both laughed so hard we nearly fell off the swing.
*
‘I’m sorry, Lulu,’ he said later. ‘I shouldn’t have belittled your story, as pathetic as it really is.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘You’re right, anyway, I let the whole thing go on for far too long, made it much bigger than it really was.’
‘No, I’m not right,’ he said. ‘Perhaps if I had loved so deeply I would not be on my way to divorce number four.’
He patted my arm, moved closer.
‘Don’t even think about it, Duncan.’
‘I’m not,’ he said, ‘furthest thing from my mind, actually.’
Then he put his arm around my shoulder and told me the real reason why he had come.
The man with the platinum tonsils had throat cancer.
With treatment, radiation, chemotherapy, perhaps surgery, they could, he said, buy him some time, but how much was hard to say, and the bloody doctors wouldn’t give him a straight answer.
Either way, Duncan said, he would probably lose his voice, which some people, Duncan smiled, would probably think was not such a bad thing.
When I was eight Harry had taken me to a squash court, and had accidentally hit me in the chest with the hard black ball, sending me to the floor, the breath knocked out of me.
Duncan’s words felt exactly like that, like someone had hit me with a hard little sphere of rubber, leaving its imprint stinging on my chest, my hands flying to it automatically.
I felt it, the body blow.
From the moment Duncan told me, I began to ache for him, the physicality of it surprising me, all the little pains of a heart breaking.
Driving back to the city on the Monday evening, after a weekend of sightseeing and pretending not to know Duncan’s secret, I could hardly bear to look at him, hardly bear to think about his action plan, as he called it.
‘Time to tidy up,’ he had said that night on the swing. ‘Tie up loose ends, finish unfinished business, fix what’s broken.’ He had looked at me with his watery eyes, not from tears, of course, but from the huge Cuban cigar he’d been smoking. ‘And that includes you, Lulu.’
‘I’m not broken,’ I said, ‘I told you, I’m all right about all that now.’
‘No, no you’re not,’ he said, ‘and that is why, when Annie rang me recently to ask if I could put some sort of meeting together, I said I would try.’
I put my hands over my eyes.
‘I know,’ he puffed contentedly on his cigar, ‘if I wasn’t dying, you’d kill me.’
‘I don’t want to talk to her, Duncan, I don’t want to talk to any of them.’
‘Ah, but you see you have to, Lulu, to get closure.’
‘Did you just say “closure”?’
‘Yes, I did,’ he nodded sagely. ‘Kimmy says you need it.’
The mist began to clear. ‘Kimmy, you’ve told Kimmy all this?’
‘Well, I told her my illegitimate daughter left on doorstep theory – backed the wrong bloody horse there, didn’t I? – but no matter, you have to do this, Lulu – if there’s one thing I’ve learnt in the last few weeks it’s that you must have your chance to say goodbye. It’s the words we don’t say, Lulu, not the ones we do, that linger longest.’
But I had said goodbye. To both of them.
*
I had said goodbye to Annabelle in the tree house.
Harry came into my room about a week after I had found Annabelle and Josh by the river and told me they were leaving for Canada at the end of the month, where Fergus had arranged some work experience for them on one of his shoots.
‘I’m sorry, love,’ Harry had said, patting my knee from the end of the bed where he sat rubbing the back of his neck, ‘I know this has got to hurt a lot – still, might be best that they go, out of sight, out of mind and all that rubbish.’ He had kissed the top of my head, turned out my light and shut the door behind him, leaving me panicking in the dark.
I’d felt like I was being erased, that things I said and did no longer mattered, that I could literally disappear into the shadows of my room, spill silently into its corners. It felt like Annabelle had taken over my life, slipped into my shoes when I wasn’t looking, and that if I wasn’t careful no-one would ever know about the other girl who had once worn them.
I did not sleep most of that night, and in the early hours of the morning I got up, took the book from my bedside drawer, put it in my backpack, got dressed and let myself out of the house.
Then I rode my bike over to the River House and ran across the backyard with my heart thumping in my chest and my neck craned towards Annabelle’s window, and climbed up to our nest in the mango tree for the last time.
I took the book I had written for her, and put it down in a corner.
Then I pressed my face against one of Frank’s windows – the diamond one – and looked out at the still sleeping River House.
‘I was here,’ I whispered into the early morning light, feeling everything slip away from me. ‘Don’t forget that I was here.’
*
I had said goodbye to Josh at the skating rink.
About a week before he and Annabelle were leaving, he had rung and asked me to meet him there, so we could talk, he said, in private.
‘Without Annabelle,’ I said, ‘without your girlfriend?’
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t, Tallulah.’ And I didn’t, I just met him at the rink where he stood waiting at the entrance, green checked shirt I’d bought him for his last birthday, jeans, sneakers, hair curling around his collar.
I bit my lip, played at it, drawing blood, tasting it in my mouth.
‘Lulu, I’m glad you came.’
I nodded, stupid.
‘Do you want to skate?’
The moon hung over us, watching as I sat on the steps, bag by my side, struck dumb, immovable in its light.
‘Do you want me to put your skates on?’
He unzipped my bag, took out my skates, bent his head, and held my foot in his hands.
‘I’m so sorry, Lulu,’ he whispered.
He slid my shoes off, put my skates on, tying and checking the laces and I could hardly bear his touch, his hands on my feet, holding them firmly, turning my ankles and threading each lace so carefully with those hands I knew so well, the swollen knuckle, the bitten fingernails, the touch of them on Annabelle’s skin, reaching for her face as I turned mine away.
‘Look at me, Lulu,’ he’d said. ‘Please
look at me.’
But I could only stare at my white skates, my head to the ground.
Josh lifted my chin and stood up.
He led me to the rink, put his arm around my shoulders and took my hand.
We began to skate around and around, swaying, as we always did, against each other, and when my tears came, he pulled me to him, took my face in his hands and said, again, ‘I’m sorry, Lulu,’ and I knew that he was leaving.
He had not come here to tell me it had all been a mistake, an anomaly, that it was me he wanted, not Annabelle, that he was not going away and had never really intended to.
I looked at him and realised he was already gone.
‘It’s complicated,’ he was saying, ‘it just kind of happened, I know it’s really bad for you . . .’
I closed my eyes, thought it was true that you could actually feel your heart breaking.
‘But I love you, Tallulah-Lulu,’ he said, ‘I always will.’
He leant in towards me.
‘You’re my girl,’ he whispered.
That is what Josh Keaton said to me as the moon rose and his tears fell with mine on the night we said goodbye.
Duncan swung the car into my driveway.
‘I had a really great time this weekend,’ he said, ‘thank you.’
We hadn’t spoken about his cancer after that night on the swing, a night that ended up with the two of us underneath a blanket Rose has brought down for us, Duncan further outlining his action plan, which mostly involved keeping his news from as many people as possible.
‘Join us, Rose,’ he’d said.
‘No,’ she’d answered, ‘I think I’ll just turn in.’
‘God,’ Duncan sighed, snuggling in beside me, ‘it’s just like being on Walton’s Mountain.’
We hadn’t spoken about it on the way home, either; Jarrod and Jasmine were in the car and small ears did not need to hear such big stories.
Instead we’d listened to the tapes he flicked in and out of his cassette recorder.
‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,’ Duncan had said again and again, rewinding the tape back to the beginning of the phrase, smiling to himself each time he said it.
Walking on Trampolines Page 13
