The Red Shoe

by Ursula Dubosarsky

  Then she heard a voice.

  “You nearly hit me!”

  Not for a moment did Matilda think it was her imagination or that she was hearing things. She sat up straight and said, “I didn’t know you were there.”

  It was Floreal. He was one of the Argonauts and he’d come right out of the radio. His whole name was Floreal 22. He didn’t actually ever say so, but Matilda knew. There were some things Matilda knew, just as she knew he was very small and flat, although he never mentioned it himself.

  But he mentioned lots of other things. Lots and lots and lots. At first she was glad, she liked to hear him talk. He talked about everything, there was nothing he didn’t know about. He talked until the sun came down and the windowpane turned grey, then blue, then black with lost light. At last Matilda was worn out with listening. She wished he would go back inside the radio, then she could just turn him off.

  Finally she said, “I think I better go now.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Floreal and his voice disappeared at once.

  Matilda stood up, shaking her legs from pins and needles. She went over to the radio and put her hand on the top of it. It was still warm with dying electricity.

  “Hallo?” she said, in the dark and quiet house. “Floreal? Are you there?”

  Matilda thought that she had offended him and he would not come back. But he did.

  Four

  SUNDAY, 11 APRIL 1954

  THE NIGHT AFTER THE lizard crawled up the back step, Elizabeth paced up and down in her bedroom with a terrible restlessness. I can’t stand it, she thought. I have to go out.

  Elizabeth was a night walker. She went out walking at night because she couldn’t sleep. She undressed, put on her nightie and lay down on the bed, but she did not fall asleep and she did not wake up. It was as though she had forgotten how. It was the opposite of Rip Van Winkle, or Sleeping Beauty. Could such a thing be possible? Could you be awake for twenty years, instead of asleep? It was not the sort of thing she could ask the doctor.

  “You need to rest,” that’s what the doctor said.

  He came to the house to see her. He had a black bag, just like doctors in storybooks. He gave her medicine to take.

  “You’ve been trying too hard,” said the doctor. “You must stop trying.”

  He meant at her schoolwork, she supposed. What else could he mean? She couldn’t really remember much about school, so perhaps he was right. There was a pile of books on the shelf in her room. Her English teacher, Mr Wells, had brought them round to the house when he’d heard about the nervous breakdown. He’d come to the door, and her mother had asked him in and made him a cup of tea.

  Elizabeth knew he was there, because she heard his voice, but she wouldn’t come out of her room. She climbed inside the wardrobe, sat on top of all the shoes, and shut the door, waiting in the smell of leather and sweat for Mr Wells to go. She felt so cold in there. She shivered and her teeth chattered, until she had to hold her jaw closed with her hands.

  “Why don’t you go and see your friends?” her mother said. “Have a chat. Go out together.”

  But Elizabeth couldn’t remember having any friends. She didn’t know what her mother was talking about. The only thing she remembered clearly was the bus – the rumble, the lurching movement, the silver-edged steps up and down. That day she had come home with the white ribbon tied on top of her head, she had got off the bus with one sentence inside her: I won’t go back. And she hadn’t – not so far.

  “I won’t go back,” she told her mother. “I don’t want to go.”

  “Aren’t you bored?” her mother said. “Sitting around here all day?”

  Elizabeth was not bored. For one thing, there was the newspaper. Now she was at home, she could read it all day long. She had always liked reading the newspaper, but since her nervous breakdown she had begun to read every single word, really every word. All the conflicts, crimes, unknown names, excitements and miseries, all those numbers and letters and reports of rain and snow. She read the legal reports and the obituaries and the medical notices and the houses for sale and the employment columns and the entertainments. Everything seemed to fit into a mysterious and beautiful pattern, connected like fine strands of coloured cotton strung across each other to form curving parabolas.

  “It all means something,” she nodded, “but nobody knows what.”

  She wasn’t bored. When she wasn’t reading the newspaper, she watched her mother. She could see her mother thinking all the time. Sometimes she wanted to reach forward and touch her hand and say, Stop thinking, it’s no good, just stop it. In the afternoon, at about one o’clock, after a morning’s housework, her mother would lie down for a while in bed with the curtains drawn. But she wasn’t sleeping, Elizabeth could tell. She was lying on her side, thinking. What did she think about? I live at the ends of the Earth, her mother said, without a friend in the world, except for Yvonne and she’s a thousand miles away.

  Yvonne was their mother’s great friend. They’d been at school together and then at work together, in a big office in town during the war, when all the men were fighting far away. There was a photo of her mother and Yvonne on the way to work, all dressed up, taken by a street photographer. Such smart clothes they used to wear! Such hats, such shoes.

  “What did you do in the office?” Elizabeth asked, staring at the bright eyes, the shy, strong smiles.

  “Oh, office things,” said her mother dismissively.

  When Yvonne was nineteen, she got married to a man from New Zealand and off she went to live there, near his family. Then their mother got married too and went to live at the ends of the earth. My very best friend, their mother said, and I haven’t seen her in fifteen years.

  Their mother wrote long letters to Yvonne on thin sheets of paper, like flakes of sweet pastry. Yvonne wrote back, usually postcards. “Yvonne doesn’t waste words,” said their mother. “She gets on with the job.” “What job?” asked Elizabeth. Yvonne worked in a paint shop now. Yvonne’s husband was killed in the war, in the Solomon Islands. “That’s his story,” said their mother. She didn’t believe it. “He just took off with a native girl,” said their mother, “and pretended he was dead.” Like a zombie? thought Elizabeth. She had read about zombies in the Sunday papers. The living dead. “He was a shocker, alive or dead,” said their mother. “Yvonne deserved better than him. Yvonne deserved the best.”

  “But what happens to her children when she’s in the paint shop?” asked Matilda. Their mother looked after them, who would look after Yvonne’s children? But Yvonne didn’t have any children. “Not that you know about,” said their father. “Oh excuse me,” said their mother. “I’ve only got one friend, and she’s a thousand miles away, so just leave her alone.” Chopping, washing, dusting, sweeping and the sound of the radio.

  “Elizabeth has to go to school,” said her father.

  “But I don’t want to go,” said Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth would not go back to school, ever, no matter what her father said. Why did he want her to go to school so much? They couldn’t make her, Elizabeth knew. It was the law. She was fifteen. She could get a job. There were plenty advertised under “Women and Girls”, columns and columns of them. Elizabeth had circled a few with a red pencil. “A CAPABLE YOUNG LADY who is interested in FIGURE WORK” was one. “Girls or young women, positions requiring average ability and common sense. Good prospects for suitable types” was another. Or “Catholic Girls, 15 years. Required all Departments” or even “Girls about 18 yrs age wanted for bottling and labelling”. She was fifteen, but she could look older. But the doctor said she was not ready for a job.

  The doctor told her to eat two eggs for breakfast every day.

  “Why?” asked Elizabeth, who did not like eggs.

  “Greensickness,” the doctor replied.

  Greensickness was when a person’s skin turned green because they didn’t have enough iron in their blood. Eggs were full of iron, the doctor said, God’s medicine. Silly old f
ool, said their mother, but she didn’t say it to the doctor.

  Whenever she passed a mirror now, Elizabeth inspected herself carefully in case she was turning green. Sometimes she thought she was, sometimes she thought she wasn’t. It was one of those things, once you started looking, you could never be quite sure of. You couldn’t be sure of other people either. Sometimes Elizabeth thought her mother’s skin had a green look about it, or Frances’s or Matilda’s. Not her father’s, though, or Uncle Paul’s. Only women could get the greensickness, that’s what the doctor said. Silly old fool, thought Elizabeth.

  Now, in the middle of the night, she stood up from her bed, pulled on her sandshoes and her coat and slipped out the front door. She picked up the bucket she kept by the flowerbed, and reached into her coat pocket for her torch.

  There was a sandy path that led to the beach through a stretch of dense bush. There was no one about, no one at all, it was the middle of the night and she pushed her way through, tiny branches stinging her face. But it wasn’t dark, she had her torch and the light of the moon and stars and the eyes of possums glowing in the trees above her.

  When at last she broke through the bush and saw the wide black opening of the world, she ran down to the edge of the water and breathed in the wind, as though she was drinking the waves, like the giant in the fairy story who drank the whole world dry. She lay down on the sand, her head to one side.

  My headache is gone, she thought, all gone.

  Perhaps she did fall asleep, after all. It was much later when she was finally back on the road that led home, time for the sun to come up. The sky was silver and the leaves of the gum trees were wet with little bubbles of dew. Soon the milkman would come, milk bottles clinking, and the paperboy.

  She had nearly reached her own front gate, when two beams of light swung behind her and she heard an engine purring. Elizabeth turned and saw a black car pulling into the driveway of the big pale house next door. She remembered what Matilda had said at lunch, about a black car and men with umbrellas.

  The car stopped at the top of the drive, and two men got out. Elizabeth stood still behind a tree, watching. Goosebumps gathered along her arms and legs in the cold sea breeze. The front door of the house opened, and one of the men went inside.

  The other one stayed alone outside in the darkness and lit a cigarette. He sat on the front step, silently smoking while Elizabeth watched, just a shadow of a man and a tiny flame like a firefly, becoming brighter and dimmer and then finally disappearing.

  Five

  MONDAY, 12 APRIL 1954

  ON MONDAY MORNING Matilda leapt out of bed and bounced down the hallway with both feet together, pretending to be a kangaroo, until she reached the laundry. She had decided to find her father’s tennis racquet, which he kept next to the laundry tub with a couple of old tennis balls.

  Maybe I can be a champion tennis player when I grow up, she thought.

  Matilda was still feeling angry about Uncle Paul shooing away the lizard. When she was angry, she tried to fill up her mind with something else, to stop it splitting into little tiny pieces. So she decided to think about tennis. There were some big girls in sixth class at her school who had tennis lessons. She had seen them riding their bikes, in white dresses and white socks and even white shoes, with their tennis racquets strapped to the handlebars. Maybe when she was in sixth class her father would let her have tennis lessons.

  She took the racquet and balls and ran out into the back yard. She stood in the middle of the grass and threw the ball high in the air and tried to hit it. The first few times she missed, the racquet was too big for her and too heavy, but she held it tight with both hands and tried again. Then she hit it once a little way and then once a long way, and she couldn’t find the ball anywhere.

  So she tossed up the second ball and down it came, and she held the racquet up like a frying pan, and the ball bounced down onto it. She hit it up as hard as she could.

  “Oh no,” said Matilda, because the ball went right over the fence to the back yard of the big house.

  The fence where the two yards joined was grown over with ivy and weeds and kept upright with bits of broken stone. Matilda stood up on a slab of sandstone, and peeped through the cracks of the grey, splintering wood.

  There was a man in the middle of the yard, feeding little bits of bread to a kookaburra. The man was still in his pyjamas, slippers and a blue dressing gown. He had longish grey hair and a round face and he looked strange to Matilda. He did not look like her father or the headmaster or the postman or the mad old man next door.

  He was taking deep breaths in and out, in and out. He tossed the last scraps of white to the bird, who nipped it up in a beak like snapping scissors. When the man opened his mouth, his breath was like smoke in the morning mist. He stamped his feet like a racehorse ready for the starting gun, and the kookaburra flapped away cackling into the tall trees. Then the man stamped his feet again and raised his arms in the air and swung them about.

  Matilda stared. The man seemed to be listening for something. Perhaps it was the waves, rolling over the sand they couldn’t see, or the morning wind in the dry leaves on the lawn. Or the koalas fighting high in eucalypts, or the sound of a motorboat somewhere very far away. Perhaps he was thinking about something someone had said, or trying to remember the words of a song. Is he praying? wondered Matilda.

  “Hallo,” she called out, before she knew she was going to.

  The man turned around.

  “Hallo,” said Matilda.

  The man stepped towards her, hesitantly. He seemed puzzled.

  “Um,” said Matilda. “Did you see my tennis ball?”

  Matilda leaned over the fence as far as she could and looked up and down the big and green yard filled with plants and rockeries, not like the dandelions and rusting clothesline in their back yard.

  “There!” she said in relief, and pointed.

  The ball had rolled underneath a huge flowering tree, and lay among the fallen purple and white petals. The man raised one finger in the air as if to say, Ah, now I understand! He walked to the tree, picked up the ball and then came back to the fence.

  “Thank you,” said Matilda, although he hadn’t given it to her yet.

  Why didn’t he say anything? Maybe he’d had his tongue cut out, like that man in the Arabian Nights. But then he made as if he was going to toss the ball to her, so she held out her hands to catch it. He threw it, just a little lob in the air over the fence, and it landed in her open palms. They smiled at each other.

  “Thank you,” said Matilda again, for something to say.

  The man bowed slightly. He glanced back at the big house.

  “Goodbye,” said Matilda.

  It was difficult to have a conversation when the other person didn’t say anything, so she decided to stop trying. She waved at him and then hopped down from the rock so she couldn’t see him any more, and ran back to the laundry, tossing the racquet and ball under the tub.

  In the kitchen, Elizabeth was at the table reading the paper and her mother was standing by the sink, gazing out the window.

  “You’re in trouble,” said Floreal.

  Matilda made a face.

  “Who were you talking to?” Her mother wiped her wet hands with a tea towel.

  “Just the man next door,” said Matilda. “In the big house.”

  “You mustn’t talk to strangers,” said her mother.

  “He didn’t say anything,” Matilda defended herself. “Only I said things.”

  “Who are those people, anyway?” said their mother, to nobody in particular.

  “They’re spies,” said Floreal.

  The room was filled with the sound of the radio and butter spitting in the pan on the stove. Spies? thought Matilda, scornfully. Spies weren’t real, they were only in films and comics. She sat down at the table next to Elizabeth, who shuffled along in annoyance at having to move the newspaper to make space. Their mother was cooking scrambled eggs. She did it for Elizabeth�
��s greensickness, but Frances and Matilda had to eat them as well.

  “I’m not green,” Matilda complained, holding up her pink hands. She preferred toast and jam.

  “You might get green,” said their mother. “When you’re Elizabeth’s age.”

  But Matilda didn’t think she would ever be Elizabeth’s age.

  “I’d better wake up Frances,” said their mother.

  She put a glass of milk down on the table in front of Matilda and left the room. Matilda sipped the milk up, licking the white from her lips.

  Perhaps it was just as well the man in the yard next door hadn’t said anything to her. What if he had come over to the fence and asked her in for a chocolate biscuit? Would she have said yes? She knew she shouldn’t, but it was hard to tell until he asked her.

  Six

  MONDAY, 12 APRIL 1954

  FRANCES WAS ALWAYS THE LAST to wake up, the last to get dressed and eat her breakfast. She liked sleeping. It was hard for her when the sun came in the window and the night was over.

  She was awake, but still in her pyjamas, sitting up in bed leaning out the window when her mother came into the room.

  “Look at the cars,” said Frances. She had her eiderdown draped around her shoulders, like the Queen’s royal robes.

  There were two cars now parked outside the big house. They glistened. Her mother sat on the bed next to her and looked.

  “They must be really rich,” said Frances, screwing up her face, but her mother had left the room.

  Frances pulled on her uniform, rubbed the sleep from her eyes and followed her mother out to the kitchen. Elizabeth had taken her eggs and the paper into the back yard, where she lay on the grass on her stomach kicking her legs in the air, her head bent down.

  “When will Elizabeth go back to school?” asked Matilda. “It’s not fair.”

  Their mother bit her bottom lip. When she dropped a knife on the floor, the clatter made her jump.

  “Shhh,” she said, pointing to the radio. “Let me hear.”