‘You no longer know what the truth is,’ he said.
After that there was silence.
I thought about this conversation for a long time. My father wanted us—Pippa and me—to stay with him. I couldn’t work this out, though I was touched by it. If he wanted us to stay, he must like us; if he liked us, why wasn’t he nicer to us? It was a puzzle. He had of course been very nice to me after my mother had hit me, but I regarded that as a mysterious aberration.
The following day I tried to get a word with Pippa, but couldn’t manage it until the afternoon, when we returned from school. We trailed down our street together, she as usual walking a step or so ahead of me in the hope that nobody might think we were related.
‘Did you hear Mummy and Daddy talking last night?’ I asked.
She slowed. ‘No. Why? What were they saying?’
I wasn’t sure how to relay the conversation, violent and dislocated as it had been. I honed in on the one new thing that had emerged. ‘Mummy said she was going to leave.’
A grimace passed over Pippa’s face. ‘Good riddance,’ she said. ‘She’s a bitch. Who needs her?’
‘But I love Mummy,’ I said. ‘Don’t you love Mummy?’
‘Not much at the moment, I have to say.’ She shrugged, supremely careless.
‘I don’t either,’ I said. ‘Not at the moment.’ Then, thinking Pippa might be interested in my father’s strange behaviour, I added, ‘Daddy doesn’t want us to go.’
‘Us? You and me? Why would we be going anywhere?’
‘I think Mummy thought she might take us with her. When she goes.’
‘Like hell she will,’ said Pippa.
We walked the rest of the way in silence, but later, when I was in my room, she knocked.
‘What did they say, exactly?’
I told her, as nearly as I could recall.
Her lips were drawn in a hard line.
‘Will Mummy really go?’ I asked, when I had finished.
‘Who cares?’ she said, but this time it sounded more like bravado.
At the end of dinner, when we were all pushing our chairs out and about to stand up, my mother put her hands up, palms outwards. ‘Hang on,’ she said.
My father began to make a kind of protesting noise.
‘Shut up, Frank,’ she said.
We waited. I could feel my heart beating.
‘Pippa, Nicky, I need to tell you something.’
And then she faltered. She had been crisp and forthright, but her face crumpled, and one hand went to her curls and started to rake them in her old way. I glanced at my father, who had a set, dogged expression, and at Pippa, who was looking belligerent.
‘I have to do this,’ she said, so quietly I could hardly hear her. ‘You won’t understand; I know you won’t understand, but when you’re older you’ll see why I had to do it, why I don’t really have any alternative.’
‘You’re leaving,’ said Pippa.
‘I might,’ she said. ‘I might go away for a little while.’
I had intended to be very cool about all of this, but it was impossible. It was like some ghastly nightmare; it was worse even than the Unscared Game, and I knew it was real. I started to cry.
‘But why, Mummy? Why do you have to go?’
‘Good question,’ said my father. ‘Explain that one, Jen.’
She shot him a look of hatred. ‘It’s not you I’m leaving, Nicky,’ she said. ‘It’s not you, Pippa. I love you. I love you both very much. Eventually, I’d like you to come and stay with me. For good, I mean. I want you to come and live with me.’
‘With you and him, you mean,’ said Pippa. ‘Well, you can forget that one. This is my home. I’m not going anywhere.’
‘But I love you,’ she said, so uncertainly that it sounded as if she didn’t believe it herself. ‘It’s just that it’s not working,’ she said, piteously. ‘I can’t make it work anymore. Don’t you see?’
‘But you’ll come back,’ I said. ‘You’ll be coming back, Mummy?’
Her face worked.
‘I don’t have to sit here and listen to this,’ said Pippa harshly. ‘Neither do you, Nicky. We don’t have to put up with it.’ She stood and looked directly at my mother. ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘Go. We don’t need you. Sooner the better.’
My mother put her head in her hands. Pippa headed off up the stairs. I sat there and cried.
‘That went well,’ said my father.
‘I hate you,’ cried my mother, tears sliding down her distorted face. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’
I couldn’t take any more and escaped. My mother called after me but I took no notice. I ran to my room and closed the door and flung myself on my bed. Brutum was lying on my pillow and I clutched him to my chest. Nobody followed me.
Although my mother’s impending departure had hung like a dark mist over us, although I had heard my parents discussing it, although I had myself foreshadowed it to Pippa, nothing had prepared me for the dreadful thud of her announcement. It was for me something so foreign to my experience, so unimaginable, that my mind could not encompass its dimensions. I lay and sobbed for a little while, but there was a curious emptiness inside me and my tears dried. I opened the door and could hear my parents’ voices, furious but low-pitched. I closed the door again and sat on my bed, wondering what to do.
Since nobody was taking any notice of me, I thought I might skip the bath and teeth-cleaning elements of the evening. So I changed into my pyjamas. Then there seemed nothing to do but to go to bed, so I did. I was trying to read when my mother came in without knocking.
‘Nicky, darling,’ she said.
Her face was angry, but her voice was soft and friendly. She sat down on the side of the bed and held her arms out for a hug. I submitted cautiously.
‘I’m so sorry about tonight,’ she said. ‘It must have come as an awful shock to you.’
It hadn’t, of course, since I already knew about it. I didn’t say anything.
‘Do you understand, Nicky, darling?’ she went on.
‘Why you’re going?’
‘Yes.’
This seemed a stupid question to me. ‘No. I don’t understand it.’
‘One day you will,’ she said.
‘But you’ll come back?’ I said. ‘You’re only going away for a little while?’
‘I won’t come back. That’s impossible.’
‘Do you mean we’ll never see you again?’
She sighed impatiently. I felt hurt that she was impatient: how could she expect me to understand all these tangles?
‘Of course you’ll see me. Nicky, I’m not going to be living here anymore, but I won’t be far away, and we’ll still see each other, lots and lots. You can come and stay for weekends and holidays, and we can do lovely things together. And then you can come and live with me, you know. It might be best if you stay with Daddy for the moment, but you can come and live with me whenever you want to.’
I couldn’t imagine living with Mr Bloomberg, and it didn’t seem to me that she thought it was a real option, either. In a way I thought it would have been better if she were going a long way away, perhaps to another country. If the break was complete, we wouldn’t have to think about her all the time. We could just get used to never seeing her and then, when she came back (I could not rid myself of this assumption), it would all slot into place and everything would be all right again. Having her still around sounded messy and difficult.
‘Will you come and cook dinner sometimes?’
‘You don’t understand,’ she whispered, her fingers entangling her untidy curls. ‘It’ll all be different. I can’t come and cook dinner here. But you can come over to me and I’ll cook you lovely dinners, there.’
‘Where?’
‘Where I’m going.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Not far away.’
‘But why, Mummy?’
‘You don’t understand,’ she repeated. ‘You’re too young
. But one day you’ll see how it is, Nicky.’
‘I do understand,’ I said, swallowing the giant sob rising in my throat. ‘I do understand. You don’t love us, and you don’t want to be with us, and you’re going away with Mr Bloomberg, and I hate him, and I hate you. And I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it.’
‘You don’t understand,’ she said yet again, as if I had not spoken. ‘But one day you will. One day you’ll fall in love, and you’ll understand how impossible it is—how incredibly impossible it is—to—to pretend it hasn’t happened, to ignore it, as if it wasn’t—wasn’t—’
I waited, but she had reached the end.
I hit her, then; I hit her as hard as I could in the softest parts of her, her chest, her belly; but absently she clasped my flailing wrists and stilled them. Then she stood up and moved away from me, and in her eyes all the time was that remote untouched look, that look that told me she did not see me, did not know me, did not love me. At the door she hesitated.
‘I know you’re cross and upset, Nicky.’
These were hardly appropriate words for the fury and desolation and fear that filled me. I tried to tell her this, but the choking thing was happening in my throat and I started to gasp.
She made a faint clucking noise. ‘Breathe,’ she said. ‘Just concentrate on breathing.’
It was an easy thing for her to say, as the furry thing in my throat swelled and bucked, but I tried.
She stepped a little closer to the bed. ‘I think you’re starting to use this, just a little, Nicky,’ she said.
The unfairness of this was so spectacular that the choking got worse.
‘Daddy’s right,’ said my mother. ‘I think I’ve babied you too much. You have to grow up.’
The hurt was dreadful. I was still struggling for breath and couldn’t speak, but I fixed my eyes on her to try to convey my reproach and pain. Wayward and inaccessible, terrible in her unconcern, she walked from the room, closing the door behind her.
That night my mother left the house very late, after a shouting match with my father that went on for a long time and must have disturbed the neighbours. It was the only time I’d ever heard them both give full rein to their anger and although I couldn’t distinguish many individual words or phrases there was no mistaking the strength of their feelings. My visitors clustered derisively at the end of my bed and mocked me as I curled myself into a ball and tried to shut out the terrible sounds of rage and hatred exploding downstairs.
In the morning she was gone. My father, his face long and grey and creased, woke Pippa and me for school and somehow we stumbled through breakfast and making lunches and the sudden and monstrous splintering apart of everything. My father drove us to school and promised that he would be home early.
‘We’ll talk then,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a good talk.’
It wasn’t, in the event, what I would have called a good talk. Pippa and I realised when we reached home that our mother had been there during the day and had removed many of her clothes. When Pippa relayed this to my father, who had not thought to check the wardrobe or the chest of drawers, his face sagged. We sat around the kitchen table and my father said that we must all pull together, and that it would be better soon. Pippa asked why he thought it would get better and he seemed not to have an answer to that. We sat around the table in a sad silence.
‘I know you two will do all you can,’ he said. ‘And I’ll do my best. We’ll manage.’
‘But Mummy will come back?’ I said.
Pippa rolled her eyes.
‘Yes,’ said my father. ‘Let’s hang onto that. I do believe she’ll come back.’
On Friday night, after we had limped through to the end of the week, I lay in bed thinking about Rose and Grandpa. Of all the terrible things that had happened, the extinguishment of their trust in me ranked high. I could not bear to think of Rose’s face as she wrecked the jigsaw, but the more unendurable that thought became the more clearly I pictured it, the more clearly I could see her eyes and the contemptuous unfamiliar curve of her lips. I thought at this stage more in fact about Rose than I did about my mother, perhaps because the dimensions of my mother’s departure were too enormous for me to cope with. And there was nothing I could do about my mother, whereas there was possibly something I could do about Rose and Grandpa.
If I could clarify matters all would be well. If Rose and Grandpa were to be made aware of the truth, surely their hostility and disappointment would disappear. And then I could go back there, and lie on the old sofa by the fire, and hug the scarlet cushions, and smell the sweet smell of Rose’s baking. As I imagined this scenario, and thought of all I had so unjustly lost, tears of self-pity rose in my eyes and I determined that I would try to put matters right with Rose and Grandpa.
Perhaps the next day I could slip over. It was the day of the first semi-final, and I assumed that my father would go to the match: it was Hawthorn and Essendon, after all; and I couldn’t imagine he would miss it. But nothing had been said about me accompanying him, and I thought it likely that I might be left under the lax (or indeed non-existent) supervision of Pippa. There would be an opportunity, probably in the early afternoon.
And then a wondrous and fearful thought occurred to me.
I needn’t wait until tomorrow. I could go now.
I didn’t know what the time was, but it couldn’t be too late: I hadn’t been in bed long: my light was still on, and my father was still watching television downstairs. I could be over to Grandpa’s and back again before he went to bed. It had been raining, but the rain had stopped a while ago and a little bit of wet on the pavement could present no problem. I imagined the drama of my arrival. I could say that I couldn’t bear to wait any longer, and that would assure them of the extent of my desperation. I would appear out of the darkness; and as I pictured their astonishment and delight I could hardly restrain myself. The ghostly presences would swarm forward once the light was out; but I needn’t put the light out. Although perhaps it would be wiser to do so, in case I was back later than I anticipated and my father glanced inside my bedroom en route to his.
I decided I should tell Pippa where I was going. I tiptoed out to the landing: her light was off. I knocked softly at her door. There was no response, and when I put my ear to the keyhole I could hear a faint snoring noise from within.
I did not pause for long. I slung on my dressing-gown, pocketed Zarlok, pushed my feet into my slippers and tried to lever off the window screen. It took me a while, but I managed it and switched off the light before clambering out the window to the oak’s broad branch.
In descending from the oak, I headed first for the tree house and then down the rope ladder attached to it. Probably because it was a while since I’d done it, and also because the ladder itself was so wet, I missed my footing, and fell onto the damp grass. I was shocked and winded, but not hurt. I sprawled there, not much enjoying the sensations of wet and cold, and wondered if I had what it took to pursue and complete my plan. Now that I was out of the house and on my way, the journey was acquiring something of a different aspect: what had seemed straightforward when plotted from the comfort of my bedroom now had a perilous look to it. I thought of Launcelot, who had never refused an adventure out of fear; I thought of Leigh Matthews. If Leigh Matthews were to be lying at the foot of a tree in the middle of the night, he would pick himself up, dust himself off and set out undeterred. This I determined to do. I trod gently over the gravel, knowing what a giveaway its crunch would be, and reached the street. This was darker than I had expected: the moon was half-hearted and kept swimming behind clouds; the streetlights seemed high and sparse and their light surprisingly thin. Walking around during the night was not something I’d done much of, and I was unprepared for the blackness of the shadows and the cold sting of the air and the dark sheen of the wet road and the alien look of the most familiar landmarks. I kept going, however, thinking of how surprised Grandpa and Rose would be to see me, and how pleased they would be to
know that I had never been disloyal to them as they believed, and how they would hug me and make much of me.
When I told them my mother had left, perhaps they would even invite me to come and live with them.
I walked along the pavement, wishing I had worn ordinary clothes instead of dressing-gown and pyjamas, trying for soundlessness, pretending shadows did not pool around me, pretending the moon was bright, pretending I felt happy and relaxed about what I was doing. I looked straight ahead; I controlled my breathing. I am in charge, I muttered to myself. I am in charge. I have what it takes. My fingers closed around Zarlok.
I heard footsteps behind me and quickened my pace. The footsteps also quickened; they were heavy and threatening. A voice called. Nicky, it cried, deep and harsh. Nicky! Come back!
I glanced around. It was the Tree Man, his feet thudding on the footpath. He was brandishing his tomahawk, which gleamed in the watery moonlight; he was shouting at me. Perhaps the others were following him? Nicky! the voices shouted, not in concert, but in disarray, pushing and crowding over each other, squawking, shrieking. Nicky, Nicky! Nicky, come back! I broke into a run. The deadly harpy swooped low and flapped her wings close over my head, screeching in insane malevolence. I ran harder. Nicky, Nicky, the voices rained over me; the harpy’s long cruel claws hung over the back of my neck and I felt the rush of cold air under her wings. I knew it was Didie, come back to haunt me. The Tree Man was galloping along now and his tomahawk would any moment now be within striking distance of my throat. I tripped and fell, screaming in my terror. The Tree Man fell on top of me, panting, and gripped me as if he would never let me go. I lay in his clasp, faint from terror. My glasses had fallen off and the world had descended into chaos.
‘For Christ’s sake, Nicky,’ said the Tree Man, when he could speak. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
It was not the Tree Man. It was my father. I said it to myself. It is my father.
I felt his heaving warmth and I let myself sink into him. Although I knew now I was safe, I couldn’t stop crying.
‘Nicky,’ said my father. ‘Didn’t you hear me calling you? Why were you running away from me?’
The Starlings Page 23
