“Where do you think you’ll go?” she asked, kissing her goodbye.
“I don’t know,” lied Frances.
She went quickly outside and put the sandwich and the drink bottle in the white wire basket of her scooter. She pumped up the tyres as high as she could, so she could fly on the air. Her father had told her that, when you ride on tyres you are riding on the air.
Frances had a strange feeling as she pushed on her scooter and began to slide away from her home, as though she was running away. No, not exactly that, it was more as though her home might not be there when she returned, that it would have disappeared into mist like a vanishing palace in a fairytale.
One of the black cars from the big house came down the hill past her, then another one, then another one. They’re driving too fast, thought Frances, they might kill someone. She pushed harder on the road, to get away as quickly as she could.
By the time she reached the top of the hill where the school was, she was already sweating and her head itched. She stopped and took a sip of water out of the drink bottle. The playground on the other side of the school gate was empty, of course, empty concrete and grass, empty trees, empty monkey bars and swings, like a haunted house.
Maybe it was haunted – there were stories about things that had happened at the school in the olden days. A boy who had fallen out of a window, a teacher who died of a heart attack during a thunderstorm. When Frances was in second class, there had been a big storm full of thunder and lightning and their teacher had made them all get under their desks until it was over, as though bombs were dropping from little aeroplanes in the sky. Their teacher had clutched her grey bun and sunk under her own desk at the front of the classroom, waving her ruler in the air. It was a big thick ruler with pictures of boomerangs on it.
Frances started on her scooter again. This was where she had to think. She had to try to remember the direction that Mark and his mother had walked. She glided past the houses, the trees, past hard yellow front lawns and thorny rose bushes and children running, past neat white fences and broken rusting fences and letterboxes. She could hear a baby crying from somewhere inside as she went past, crying and crying.
Matilda had cried like that when she was a baby, wrapped up in a sheet. Frances had been four when Matilda was born. A lady down the road had come and cooked their dinner while their mother was in hospital. She had made rice pudding. Frances didn’t like it at all, she had pretended to eat it and then spat it out in the back yard.
How Matilda had cried when she came home! When their mother unwrapped her, Matilda’s little red toes stood apart and shook with rage as she cried.
“She’s all right, really,” said their mother. “All poor little babies cry.”
“Why?” asked Frances.
“Because they can’t talk,” said their mother.
Frances knew she must be getting close to Mark’s house and she started to feel anxious. She wanted to see Mark, but what if he really did have polio? What if he was one of those children she had seen in the newsreel, that had to lie in bed with an iron lung, that couldn’t even breathe by themselves? Just lie in his room like little Karen in the fairy story she had read to Matilda, little Karen with her wooden feet who could never go to church with all the other children but just looked sadly at her crutches and cried out, “O God! Help me!”
And suddenly she was there. She knew even before she saw the stony fence, because there was Mark’s mother, unmistakable in the broad flowered dress, standing with a hose in her hand in the front yard of their house. Frances was transfixed by the stream of water coming out from the hose. What would she say? Now she was here, what would she say?
“Hallo,” said Frances, stepping off her scooter while the wheels still spun.
Mark’s mother turned around. Her hair was black and she had Mark’s beautiful dark eyes. A little brown dog stood up from under the edge of the house and ambled over, wagging its ragged tail.
“Hallo,” said Frances again.
“Hallo,” said Mark’s mother uncertainly.
“Um,” said Frances, tightening her grip on the handlebars. “Is Mark home?”
Mark’s mother held out her hand towards Frances, the hand that was not holding the hose. She was shaking.
“You want to see Mark?” she said.
She had a funny voice. Was she foreign? Frances did not know any foreign people. She did not know anybody who was not like her.
“Is he allowed to play?” she asked.
The water dribbled from the hose. The dog licked it up.
“They don’t tell you?” said Mark’s mother.
“Tell me what?” said Frances, feeling herself go still.
“Mark is dead,” said Mark’s mother. “Mark is dead.”
Mark with his head down on his desk in the classroom, with the sunlight shining on his hair, always with his grey jumper on, even on the hottest days.
Mark’s mother leaned back on the wall of the house. The hose fell on the ground. Then down fell the tears, large and terrifying.
“God help me,” said Mark’s mother.
But we are getting married, Frances wanted to say. We are getting married. He’s inside, look for him, he’s there. He’s lying down inside in his room, waiting for me to come. He can’t walk, but I can.
“He is in the cemetery,” said Mark’s mother, wiping her eyes, but more flowed out, on and on.
Mark wasn’t dead, thought Frances, he couldn’t be. He must be lying in his bed, waiting for her. In her mind she saw his black hair, his pink lips and his sleepy eyes, but she couldn’t put them all together. It was like trying to imagine what someone you’d never seen looked like, someone who was dead before you were born.
If she went inside the house, surely he would be there! He would raise his head and smile at her, his slow, gentle smile, as though he had just woken up from a deep sleep, his lips red like her mother’s red earrings, tiny drops of blood.
“You can see him, in the cemetery. You come with me, I take you,” said Mark’s mother, reaching out both hands to Frances.
I have to go away, thought Frances. I have to leave. I can’t stay here.
She found some breath, gulped it in out of the blue sky around her.
“I have to go now,” she said.
Her hair swept back in knots in the wind as she sped away, faster and faster. Her heart ached, her legs ached and she had a stitch. The smell and sound of the ocean was so very strong it was as though the waves were rolling inside her head from one ear to the other. There was a rumbling crack in the air, like thunder.
She left the street and all the houses, she flew away, past the school, the milkbar and the newsagent’s.
HELP ME said big black letters on the newspaper posters outside. There was a rumbling crack in the air, like thunder. HELP ME said the newspaper poster, said Mark’s mother. HELP ME, cried their mother that day at the Basin, God help me, cried little Karen. Help me, thought Frances.
“And her soul flew on the sunbeams to Heaven, and no one was there who asked after the Red Shoes.”
Frances pushed with her foot then lifted it off the ground and began to skim downwards, bits of loose gravel spitting up on either side of her.
Twenty-one
EASTER TUESDAY, 20 APRIL 1954
IN ELIZABETH’S ROOM there was a crack in the curtain that let in just enough daylight to see the newsprint.
“Ja nie chat chu,” Elizabeth read out loud, sounding the words, curiously. “Ja nie chat chu. I do not want to go.”
She was still in bed because of her cold. She didn’t feel well, but she was tired of being inside. She had read all the papers, and now she was reading them over again.
“Mrs Petrov this morning visited, probably for the last time, the pleasant brick home she shared for three years with her husband. At the end of the visit, a bodyguard of three burly Russians pushed her into a black limousine.”
Elizabeth felt sorry for Mrs Petrov, squashed in the back se
at of the black limousine with three burly Russians. It would be hard to breathe, especially if they didn’t let her open the window. Perhaps they would open it a tiny bit and she could put her nose out, like a dog. It would take hours to drive from Canberra to Sydney, and there would be nothing but dust and gum trees and cows. And it would be night. Mrs Petrov would look out and see nothing at all, as though she was at the ends of the earth.
Maybe they wouldn’t let her even look out. Lenin was not allowed to look out when he took his secret train from Germany back to Russia to make the Revolution. Elizabeth had read about it in a history book in the school library. Black curtains had covered all the windows of the train carriage, so no one could see in or out. In the book there was a map of Europe, with a thick black dashed line that showed the route of his journey from west to east. Lenin wrapped up in black, making his way across Europe, all the way to beautiful, golden, cold, cold Russia, secretly and silently, like a fox.
Elizabeth folded the newspaper up. She couldn’t read any more. She wanted to speak to her father, to explain to him why she couldn’t go back to school. If she could just talk to him, then he would understand. But no one knew where he was, that was the problem. He should have come home by now. He was missing. Elizabeth knew this, although no one had told her. But she had listened to her mother and Uncle Paul, whispering, and all those desperate phone calls. Have you heard from him? Have you seen him? Where is he? Nobody knew where he was.
Perhaps he’s still on his ship, thought Elizabeth. He’s hiding in his cabin. Perhaps he’s tired or frightened or perhaps he just forgot to get off. If he was on his ship, she could go to the post office and send him a telegram. A telegram could reach a ship.
Elizabeth had no money for a telegram. But she could steal some. She could go into a shop and take some out of the till when the shopkeeper wasn’t looking. Or she could steal someone’s purse.
“Whoever steals my purse steals nothing, it is trash.”
That was Shakespeare – or was it? Trash was an American word, that’s what they called garbage, so it couldn’t be Shakespeare then. Words hummed in circles through her head. She was sick of them. She didn’t want to think any more in words.
“True love need not necessarily end in death,” said Elizabeth out loud, surprising herself.
What was that? Was it a poem? They had been reading a poem in class the day she’d had her nervous breakdown and came home with her plaits tied on top of her head. She remembered looking down at the page and seeing each word separately. The words do not want to be in this poem, she had realized. They want to stay apart from each other. It is not right that they should be all here in a row, made to mean something they don’t want to mean. Then she had gone home on the bus and had her nervous breakdown.
Perhaps one day she would find a world where there were no more words. Elizabeth looked over at the paperweight that her father had given her, catching sunlight on the bookshelf, the little fish trapped in glass, its gold fins like floating leaves. Even with the curtains drawn, the glass gleamed and she could see the shadow of the fish. Under the sea it would be very dark and quiet, the sun wouldn’t reach down there.
Under the sea it was always night, there was no counting of hours or minutes, there were no beginnings or endings of things to have to change clothes for, to eat meals by. Nobody spoke, there was no English or French or Russian, just bubbles rising up to the surface and disappearing, like shadows of submarines.
I would be safe down there, thought Elizabeth. Even the H-Bomb would not find me.
But it would be cold in the ocean, cold as Russia. Russia was full of snow, people froze to death in it. But Russia was beautiful, so much more beautiful than Australia. There was nothing beautiful in Australia, thought Elizabeth impatiently, it was all bush and ocean and tin roofs. In Russia the cities were built of shining, onion-shaped golden domes and deep, glorious music rose up out of them, like magic clouds. And people dressed in bear furs, and there were wet, lovely dark green forests filled with wolves.
Russia was beautiful, but in the small inky print that came off on Elizabeth’s fingers, she read that in Russia there were Communists and that they were building a big bomb and planes would fly over and drop it and all the world would disintegrate in seconds, all the cities and roads and farms and people, all gone like a dream. Then there would be no more days and no more dreams.
Ja nie chat chu. I do not want to go.
She stood up from the bed and went over to the wardrobe she had hidden in the day her English teacher had come to visit. She took out her sandshoes, put them on and did up the laces in careful bows, twice over. She would go for a walk to the beach. She needed to walk. There would be nothing to think about except her feet rising from the earth and coming down again, her arms swinging and the world moving back and forth.
Elizabeth walked out of the quiet house, up the gravelled road, along the sandy pathways through the bush. By the time she reached the beach, a wind had risen and sand was scattering across the shore like a low fog.
She gazed out over the ocean. Her father was out there somewhere, standing on the deck of a ship with a telescope, wondering what he would find next. Like Jason, she thought, on board the Argo with his Argonauts, searching for the Golden Fleece. On Boxing Day, she had stood on the opposite shore at the Basin, looking back at the land where they lived. But Elizabeth had carefully made that day disappear from her thoughts, like ironing out a crease in a shirt.
There it was again, though, crisp and clean.
She and Uncle Paul playing soldiers with dead matches. Her mother and Frances, swimming in circles, their heads bobbing up and down in the shiny thick water. The splashes they made with their arms, like the sound of falling tennis balls. Matilda digging in the sand, and running away, Matilda always running away.
And then they were crying, all of them. Everyone in the whole of the Basin was crying. The trees were tall and the trunks were white and the cliffs were huge and they heard a scream and everyone rushed forward and they found him. Their father was hanging from the tallest tree in the Basin, with a rope he had brought in the picnic basket under the sausages and bottles of beer and the tomato sauce. He hanged himself, like a murderer is hanged in prison.
“Why, why, why?” said their mother, on her knees on the ground next to where he lay when they lifted him down just in time, her head on his heart.
It’s the war, everyone said, the war, it’s nobody’s fault, nobody’s fault, it’s too much, it’s too hard, come away, come away now. But why, why, how, sobbed their mother, if only I’d known.
Elizabeth had known.
She had seen him. She knew. She could have done something. She had seen him that morning, packing the rope at the bottom of the picnic basket. He hadn’t seen her, he didn’t know anyone was watching. He had pushed the rope down in a neat spiral like a snake, under the tartan blanket when he thought no one was looking.
Elizabeth had seen him but she hadn’t said anything. She had hardly thought anything. She hadn’t understood. But she should have. She should have told her mother, she should have told Uncle Paul. They could have stopped him.
On the ferry going home, they had all sat together in the Ladies’ Saloon, except for Matilda. They sat on top of each other like a bundle of parcels and no one said anything. That’s when it started, thought Elizabeth, my greensickness. She saw the marks on her father’s neck from the rope, and she began to go green.
Her father hanged himself but he didn’t die. Nothing could kill him, not even himself. Down in the dark hallway he had crawled on his hands and knees, banging the floor with his fist, that night he came home at last when the war had ended. Elizabeth had seen him then too, banging the floor and weeping like a child, and she had stared in the darkness.
Her father said she had to go back to school, back to the world of words.
Ja nie chat chu. I do not want to go.
“But I won’t go back,” Elizabeth said calmly. “I don’t want
to go.”
Now at their own beach, with the waves lapping at her feet over the tops of her sandshoes, she saw herself turning green again like the glass of a lemonade bottle, and curved and stiff but somehow molten as well.
I am a glass bottle, she realized without surprise. I have turned into glass. I can throw myself into the Pacific Ocean and I will float. I will float all the way around the world, even as far as Russia. I will float as far as my father’s ship, and he will bend down and pick me up and shake the water off me.
Then he will take the cork from the lid and inside he will find a little piece of paper folded up in a scroll. He will take it out and unroll it, and then he will see written on it in tiny words, so small he will need to use his telescope to read them, he will see that it will say Ja nie chat chu.
She stepped right into the water. The only people on the beach were far enough away not to care what she was doing. She walked further into the freezing water, until her feet were nearly numb, until it was as though she didn’t have feet.
Soon I won’t feel anything at all, thought Elizabeth with relief. She stepped right into the water up to her knees, but she only felt cold, cold and colder. It hurt, deep down into her bones.
Then she heard something resounding from a distance, back towards the house. It was a crack, a banging sound. She looked up.
A cloud moved in the big sky and there was a boat with its white angular sails and the world around her was enormous, quite enormous. And quite suddenly, she didn’t want to be cold any more.
Twenty-two
EASTER TUESDAY, 20 APRIL 1954
THE FRONT DOOR SLAMMED. Uncle Paul was back. He’d been at the pub and he was whistling. He was a good whistler, when he was in the mood. He was whistling “Happy Birthday to You”.
“It’s nobody’s birthday,” pointed out Matilda.
It was dull without Frances and Elizabeth, and her mother asleep in bed, waiting for their father to come home.
The Red Shoe Page 10
