Andrew was right, Linda Mayberry was a good egg.
Two weeks; there wasn’t much chance of Frank being ready in that time, but he was coming to Willow that afternoon with my family, so at least we could talk about it.
I was so happy Frank had said yes to my invitation, and had spent most of the morning searching the island for the perfect stem of frangipanis not to burn off for him.
They arrived late in the afternoon. ‘We’re here, Lulu,’ Harry’s voice called, somewhere in the middle of Barney’s barking.
‘Hi Louie-Pooey,’ my brothers chorused, bigger, if that were humanly possible, than the last time they were there.
‘Oh, Lulu, you’ve done wonders.’ Rose, in Phoebe, smiling at the door.
‘Lulu – it’s delightful, a man could get used to this.’ Frank, in his Bonds singlet and baggy shorts I would swear were welded to his legs, was running his artist’s eye over the corners of the WIASA.
Over the next few days, the house quivered again with the sounds of my family meshed with the Willowers, Rose chatting to Julia, over like a shot when she’d heard them coming up the lane, Frank, Harry and Boris, hands on their chins as they went through each room, Frank down on his knees running his hands over the slate, Harry up a ladder, checking the gutters, Will and my brothers in and out of the sheds, it seemed, all day long.
I wandered in and out of their conversations and watched them gathered around the enormous kitchen table, filling its spaces, just like Duncan had hoped.
Late one afternoon, I was upstairs re-arranging some pictures in the hallway when I heard Rose and Julia chatting together in the third bedroom.
‘What a lovely dress, Rose.’
‘Thank you, it’s an oldie but a goodie, as they say.’
‘Like us.’
‘That’s right, Julia, exactly like us.’
They were hanging the curtains Julia had brought over, Rose admiring the way they fell, Julia confessing that Boris, in fact, had done most of the work.
‘He doesn’t like people to know,’ Julia said, ‘but he’s an excellent seamstress.’
‘Really? Do you think he’d make me some new dresses? There’s nothing I like in the shops and I haven’t got the patience anymore to sew myself.’
‘I can ask him, although I think the dresses you have are lovely, Rose, at least all the ones I’ve seen are.’
‘Well, you’ve probably seen them all; I’ve been wearing variations of the same frocks for years, Julia, and it’s well and truly time for an overhaul, something completely different.’
My ears pricked up, was Rose really thinking about bringing some brand new members into the chorus line?
If she was, it was truly astoudazing.
‘I’ll ask him,’ Julia was saying. ‘I think he might be pleased. He had a shop once, you know, in Melbourne, before we met.’
‘A dress shop?’
‘Mmm-mmm, just with his own designs.’
‘What happened?’
‘He told me he never sold enough dresses to make any money, and his father hated him having it. In the end I think he just gave up.’
‘What was it called?’
‘The House of Boris.’
The thing I loved about my mother was that she didn’t laugh.
*
‘So,’ I said to Rose later, ‘I heard the House of Boris might be back in business.’
‘Heard or overheard?’
‘All right, overheard.’
Rose smiled.
‘Well, now that I am going to be a businesswoman, I thought I’d better start dressing like one.’
‘I’ll tell Boris to get out the shoulder pads.’
We were setting the table for dinner, and I knew the next time so many faces would be gathered around it, I would not know any of them. Strangers – guests, I told myself firmly, guests who would come and love the WIASA’s creaky old bones as much as I did.
Watching everyone at dinner that night, laughing at one of Sam’s ridiculous impressions, Rose’s face tinged to match her name, Will talking to Frank with a pen sticking out from behind one ear, Julia curled like a cat around Boris – I realised I was button-undone happy.
It had been one of Duncan’s sayings, and I thought that of all the absent guests that night, of all the people who might once have been there but were not, it was Duncan’s absent place at the table that seemed the emptiest.
Duncan had said button-undone happy was when for one moment everything was exactly as it should be. ‘You’ve gone to work and it’s all gone smoothly, none of the bastards have been able to get to you, you go home and the traffic’s not like a bloody blocked artery, and you have dinner and the person sitting across from you is the exact person you want sitting across from you, and the food is good and the wine is better, and you’re having a cigar and you reach down to undo the first button of your jeans and let it all hang out.
‘That,’ I heard Duncan say, ‘right there, that’s it, that’s button-undone happy.’
That was how I felt that night, looking at the people gathered at my table.
It had been a long time.
*
Frank was throwing a ball to Barney in the garden early the next morning when I finally got the chance to tell him about Linda Mayberry’s assessment of the tree house’s chances of survival.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s bad news, should have gotten a wriggle on about it earlier.’
‘We’ve still got a couple of weeks. I need to stay here for the few days but I could come over after that and we could write the objection together, and I could drop it into council on my way back.’
‘Do you think it would do any good?’
‘I think if we made it really, really long and really, really complicated, we could at least stall ’em,’ I answered, echoing Linda’s words.
‘That’s my girl,’ he said, which I thought was very generous of him, considering his real girl was miles away, because of me.
‘Lulu?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d like you to have Annie over to the island sometime.’
‘Oh, well, I don’t know, Frank, I don’t know if she would want to come. I’m sure I’m not her favourite person in the world.’
‘You’re one of them,’ he answered.
‘I don’t think so, I don’t really see how I could be,’ I said, remembering Annie that night on television staring out of the screen with her raccoon-ringed eyes, her mouth dripping crimson.
‘You are, Lulu – the thing is, I think you’ve forgotten.’
‘Forgotten?’
‘You’ve forgotten Annie – the best of her.’
That afternoon, taking Barney for a walk on the beach, I thought about Annie, and tried to remember. Annie, who seemed to come and go from that big house like some exotic tenant, filling it with her noise when she was there, shrouding it in silence when she wasn’t; Annie who never remembered to help Annabelle with her homework, get her uniform ready; Annie whose signature both Annabelle and I had perfected so we could sign all the school forms she had forgotten so Annabelle could go on school excursions carrying the lunch box my mother had packed for her.
Annie who had left, just ‘upped and gone’, the other mothers at school had whispered, half-shocked, wholly thrilled; Annie who had sent her daughter postcards that never said wish you were here, because she didn’t.
But.
How many Doris days and nights had I slept under her roof, Annie dragging the camp bed out and putting it beside Annabelle’s, how many times had I walked in with my school hat pulled down so low you could not see my eyes and Annie had tipped it back and said, ‘There, don’t ever be afraid to show your face, Lulu’, how many times had Annie quietly been there for me, no questions asked, when my own mother wasn’t?
With a s
hock, I realised that in her own way Annie Andrews had been as much of a mother to me as Rose had been to Annabelle, neither woman conventional but both filling the gaps the other left when they needed to.
With the sun beginning to dip behind the bay, I remembered.
We all walked down to the boat together, Boris and Julia already waiting there to say goodbye, Boris handing my mother a folder – designs, I guessed, from the House of Boris – and I wondered if my mother would christen this new wardrobe. I decided that I would quite like her to have a Lily if she did.
Sam and Mattie raced into the water, yelping like overgrown puppies and ignoring Rose’s futile instruction to two grown men not to get their clothes wet. Harry came and stood beside me, watching out for Will at the edge of the water.
‘Well, love,’ he said, ‘thanks for a great few days, and call me if you need anything – that hot water system’s a real bugger, but I think I’ve got it sorted. Rose will be over in a couple of weeks so I could come over with her then, if you like, check to see it’s working properly.’
‘I assumed you would be coming with her anyway, Harry.’
‘No,’ he said, watching Rose giving up on the boys and hitching up her skirt to join them, Lauren’s hem dragging through the water, ‘she says she’d quite like to come by herself.’
‘How do you feel about that?’
He looked at me, scratched at the stubble on his chin. ‘Like I did taking you to your first day of school.’
‘How was that?’
‘Wanting to turn around and take you to work with me, where I could keep an eye on you.’
I hooked my arm through his. ‘I’ll look after her.’
‘I know, love. I thought I might take a few days off myself, go camping.’
‘Camping?’
‘I used to do it quite a bit, on weekends, in the holidays, when I was a young tacker.’
I looked at him: Harry who used to camp a lot, who probably used to do a lot of things, before Rose came along and he raised a family with her and took the plumbing industry to new depths of excellence. Harry who, having taken care of his wife for so long, would not quite know what to do with himself when she no longer needed him to.
‘Do you have a tent?’
‘Somewhere in the shed, I think – just a one-man.’
Harry went to join the others down on the beach, and I thought it had been a very, very long time since he had been that.
Just the one man.
*
Rose rang that night to let me know they were all back safely.
‘We had a marvellous time, Lulu; I hope we weren’t too much for you.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you were a great help, I wish it had been longer.’
‘Well, I’ll be back soon to kit out the kitchen with you and to bring over some fabrics for Boris.’
I giggled, thinking of Boris hunched over the Elna in his back room, furtively running up frocks for Rose and hoping that Deano and Mick from the bowls club wouldn’t catch him.
‘Are you going to name them?’
‘The dresses? Well, I thought I would; don’t want them feeling left out.’
‘Any ideas?’
‘I thought perhaps Romy and Charlotte, or I was thinking I should call one of them Julia . . .’
‘I thought Lily.’
‘Lily?’
I wanted my mother to have a lily – I liked the way they kept themselves inside, wrapping their petals around their throat and not unfolding their bell-shaped beauty until they were good and ready.
‘I think it would suit you,’ I said.
‘All right, darling,’ she said, ‘I promise I’ll name one of them Lily.’
I put down the phone, smiling.
*
I spent the next couple of days constantly on the phone to the council, checking I had met every compliance order to open Barney’s B and B, sorting out details like fire escapes and safety procedures, maximum number of tenants, procedural conditions for the ‘serving of food in a public place’. I didn’t tell them about Rose’s biscuits – I wasn’t about to fill out another two hundred forms for jam drops.
No, I decided, flopping on the couch with Barney, Rose’s biscuits would just have to be contraband, smuggled over from the mainland and doled out to darting-eyed guests under the cover of darkness.
I was exhausted, too tired to even begin to try and move Barney’s dead weight lying across my feet. I lay there, reading a book of Duncan’s, watching the text bob up and down, when the phone rang.
‘You answer it, Barney, go on you lazy sod,’ I said, flexing my feet underneath him.
He grunted.
‘You’re right, we’ll let it ring.’
I heard my own high-pitched, too-hearty voice on the machine.
‘Hello, you’ve called Barney’s Bed and Breakfast,’ I squeaked. ‘Please leave your name and number and we’ll get back to you.’ Andrew had wanted me to say, ‘And one of our reservation staff will return your call’, but I had baulked, saying, ‘It’s not the bloody Hilton.’
My father’s voice, came through. ‘This is Harry de Longland, leaving a message for Lulu de Longland . . .’
‘Harry,’ I picked up the receiver, ‘what are you doing calling in the middle of Parky?’
Harry, Rose and Michael Parkinson had a three-way date every Saturday night – Rose loved Parky, she said he had a face you could abseil off.
‘Harry?’
He didn’t answer.
Barney left the couch, and pressed his body against me.
‘Harry?’
He made a noise into the phone.
‘On a scale of one to ten?’
My mother rustled past me.
‘Harry, on a scale of one to ten?’
She put her floured hands up to her face.
‘Harry,’ I said again, ‘on a scale of one to ten?’
She kissed me, butterfly wing against my ear.
‘Ten, love.’
She was slipping behind the kitchen door.
Disapanishing.
Rose.
She was outside my window then, in bare feet.
I saw the wind lifting Grace’s skirt as she walked towards the dunes, and I started to run to her with Barney as my shadow.
She was walking straight towards the water and she knew I was behind her, because she kept looking back at me over her shoulder when I shouted her name.
I ran all the way to her and the water was not cold at all, but warm as the eugaries began their dance.
They were tumbling back into the ocean and Grace’s skirt was getting wet as she followed them.
I shouted at them that she didn’t know the steps, that she had only just begun to dance.
Then Rose turned and leant in to me, and put her lips to mine.
‘There is no such thing as afar,’ she whispered.
Grace and Alexis and Betty and Phoebe and Greta and Madeleine and Lauren and Kitty and Audrey and Constance put their arms around each other, smiled up at me, then bowed deep and low.
Rose.
Mumma.
There was something soft and warm around my neck, and someone’s hand was moving up and down the small of my back quickly, like they were trying to start a fire.
‘Come on, Lulu,’ – Julia, in her dressing-gown – ‘we need to go inside now.’
I nodded at her, wondering why she was outside. She should be home, I thought, with Boris, helping him with Rose’s dresses.
‘It’s the shock,’ someone said in a low voice and I wanted to tell them to go away but my own voice had slipped down deep inside the sand, gathered itself there in a cool, dark place where, I imagined, it would hold its breath for six months.
‘We need to get her inside.’
‘Sto
p talking as if she can’t hear you.’
‘Who found her?’
‘Lyle Wilkins – he could hear Barney barking from his house.’
Will sat beside me.
‘Lulu,’ he said, ‘I’m going to pick you up, all right? I’m just going to put my arms around you and pick you up, like this.’
I felt him lean down into me, take up my arms, and loop them around his neck.
‘You don’t have to do anything,’ he said, ‘but hang on.’
I nodded at him, still mute.
*
‘Sweetheart,’ Simone said, at the boat ramp, standing beside Stella.
‘Lulu,’ Stella said, and I saw she was crying.
‘Stop it, Stella,’ I heard Simone hiss at her as they put my bags in the boot.
‘I can’t,’ Stella said, ‘I can’t.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told them, looking out the window at the nothing, all the way home to Harry’s.
Left into Swan Terrace, right into Plantation Street, past the bus stop and some ginger-haired girls sucking on ice-blocks, looking at my face through the window. One of them poked her tongue out, stretching it out like a purple lizard in the sun, and I poked mine back half-heartedly at her. Past Mrs Delaney’s front blinds, closed like winks against the sun. Simone and Stella in the front, me in the back with Barney, his head in my lap, my hands around his collar.
I waited, looking for the sign.
De Longland Plumbers – Plumbing the Depths of Excellence.
‘We’ll walk you into the house,’ Simone said, pulling into the driveway.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Lulu,’ she said, ‘I think you should let us come in with you.’
‘It’s all right,’ I told her, getting out of the car. ‘I know the way.’
I waited until I was sure they had gone before I walked up the path, and called out ‘Harry,’ and went out to the back garden, where I knew he would be.
‘Hello, love,’ Harry said, looking at me with old and startled eyes from the garden swing. ‘Good trip over?’
Walking on Trampolines Page 29
