‘I thought you were the Tree Man,’ I sobbed.
‘Okay,’ he said. He waited. ‘But I’m not. Am I?’
‘No,’ I wept. ‘Of course not. But I thought you were.’
‘Okay,’ he said, yet again. ‘Did the owl hurt you?’
‘The owl?’
‘It swooped down on you.’
‘It wasn’t an owl,’ I hiccupped, trying to breathe deep and calm down. ‘It was Didie.’
‘Okay,’ said my father. ‘Nicky, where are your glasses?’
‘I don’t know,’ I sobbed. ‘They fell off.’
‘Okay,’ he said again. He loosened his grasp on me and helped me stand up. ‘Don’t move,’ he said. He turned on the torch he was carrying and scrabbled around on the pavement until he found the glasses and handed them to me. I clutched them.
‘Nicky,’ he said. ‘It’s cold out here, and the ground’s wet. Shall we go home?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, please.’
He hoisted me up and carried me. When we were home he wrapped me in a rug and sat me at the kitchen table and made hot Milo. He was getting better at making Milo.
‘Why were you running away?’ he asked, but not crossly, more as if he were puzzled. I explained that I’d wanted to see Grandpa and Rose and talk to them and make them see that I hadn’t betrayed them, that I had given them my loyalty and that I still deserved theirs. My father stirred my Milo and made some for himself, too: his brow was heavy and the long sombre grooves ran down his cheeks. I don’t suppose I made a lot of sense, particularly at the beginning, but he listened and asked cautious questions and to my surprise made none of the sardonic comments I had come to expect from him.
‘I thought you must be trying to run after Mummy,’ he said.
‘I don’t know where Mummy is.’
‘No more do I, Nicky.’ He sighed. ‘No more do I.’ And then he said, ‘Who is the Tree Man?’
‘He’s got an axe,’ I whispered. ‘A little axe. It gleams. He comes to my room.’
‘When does he do this?’ He handed me the mug and sat down.
‘At night.’
‘Every night?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But the others are there.’
‘The others?’
‘Somebody’s there every night.’
‘Tell me about the others.’
I was tired and weepy and overwrought. Still hiccupping, I told him about the Unscared Game, and the Bad Angel, and the wombat ghost, and the Drowned Man, and the Green Knight, and the black lion downstairs with his silver claws, and Didie the harpy; I told him about how the door had to remain closed.
When I had finished, he moved his chair closer to mine, and tentatively rubbed my back for a little while. He was clearly uneasy doing this, and it was so unexpected that I wasn’t sure that I liked it either, but it did soothe me. We both sat there quietly, sipping our hot drinks, him rubbing a small area in the centre of my back.
‘Does Mummy know about them?’ he asked.
‘About—?’
‘These—visitors. The Tree Man. And the others.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve never told anybody.’
‘I’m sure if Mummy knew about them she wouldn’t have always shut your bedroom door at night.’
I thought about this, but said nothing. I wasn’t sure it was true.
‘I’ll tell you what. From now on, we can leave your door open at night. Wide open if you like. Would that be good?’
‘That would be good,’ I said. ‘That would be very good.’
‘And also, Nicky, I’ll have a word with Grandpa, see if I can explain to him how it was, with Mummy, that it wasn’t the way he and Rose thought it was. Would you like me to do that?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said. ‘I’d really like that.’
He took me up to bed, soon after that. He tucked me in and sat on the side of the bed, looking embarrassed, as if he didn’t know what to do. On impulse, I hugged him goodnight. He made a gruff sort of noise, but he didn’t seem to mind. He sat there for a little while.
‘One thing I don’t understand, Nicky. I mean, I see about your visitors, and so forth. And I see it’s frightening for you. But I don’t understand about the bird thing.’
‘The harpy,’ I said, after a moment’s incomprehension.
‘Yes, the harpy. Why do you think the harpy is Didie?’
‘It just is.’ I didn’t know how to explain it to him.
‘But how do you know?’
‘It has Didie’s face.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see.’ His forehead was corrugated in thought. ‘Well, Nicky, do you know what I saw when the harpy was chasing you?’
‘What?’
‘I saw an owl.’
I said nothing.
‘Listen to me, Nicky. I was following you and I saw what was happening. I’ve seen that owl before. It lives in the park around the corner, the one we go through when we go to Grandpa’s. I even know what sort it is: it’s a powerful owl. It swooped low over you. It must have been scary as hell, but I can tell you quite definitely that it was not a harpy and it was not Didie. It was an owl.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, unconvinced. I thought he was trying to be nice to me. I appreciated his effort, but I knew better.
The next day, to my surprise, my father stayed at home. He listened to the radio all day, and while the Hawthorn–Essendon final was on he sat, his body clenched in unendurable tension, hunched over the kitchen table. He didn’t suggest that I join him, so I went to my room and tried to concentrate on ways in which I might manage a successful presentation of Macbeth. But in my mind’s eye (a phrase from Hamlet of which I was fond) I kept seeing my father’s hunched body. When I thought it must be around half-time I made my way downstairs. ‘How are we going?’
He half-grinned at me. ‘We’re ahead.’
‘Truly? Against Essendon!’ I tried to look pleased but not astonished.
‘My very word.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ I said, wishing I hadn’t allowed my better self to propel me down the stairs. My father clearly had no need of support or consolation.
‘You never can tell, of course,’ he said, and then lapsed back into concentrating on what the commentators were saying. I fiddled around in the kitchen, getting some biscuits and milk, and escaped back to my bedroom.
Alas! My father’s happiness was short-lived. When I next came down, as it was darkening outside, he was slumped back on the kitchen chair. His expression was tragic.
‘Bad news, Nicky,’ he groaned. ‘They were too good for us.’
‘Oh no,’ I said, sitting down opposite him. ‘How much did they win by?’
‘Forty points,’ he said. ‘Forty points.’ He shook his head.
‘Tell me all about it,’ I said, in as comforting a tone as I could manage.
It turned out that at the beginning of the third quarter Essendon had charged in with all flags flying. Our men had faltered: the treacherous slipperiness of the ground had affected them and they lost their momentum. Essendon sneaked in with a couple of lucky goals, kept the pressure up and forced us into errors; we had panicked and fumbled and fallen to pieces. Matthews had spent the second half of the match on the bench. Brereton had gone missing; Wallace hadn’t got on top of things; Dipper had been but a shadow of his finest self. The rug had been pulled from under our feet, my father said, and we had been caught with our pants down. We would need to pull our socks up. Essendon had stitched us right up.
Essendon’s spot in the grand final was secured. The following day Footscray easily defeated North Melbourne: this meant that Hawthorn and Footscray would play each other in the preliminary final: the winner would play Essendon the following week for the Holy Grail, the greatest prize of all.
THE PRELIMINARY FINAL
When I was six years old my mother, as part of her quest for my improved education, gave me a picture book about the eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed Pompeii. After all
this time, it seems to me an extraordinary topic to choose in order to instruct young children (would one write a child’s version of World War II? Of the siege of Stalingrad? Of human sacrifice as practised by the Incas?), but my mother hadn’t seen it like that. Following this I had a series of graphic nightmares about volcanoes erupting, and became obsessed by the possibility that a similar catastrophe would overcome our leafy street. The horror of it for me was the unexpectedness of it. One day, you would look into the sky and find hot ash and fiery embers raining down, and you wouldn’t be able to escape any of it.
My mother explained to me that when Vesuvius erupted over Pompeii it was not unforeseen, that the mountain had grumbled for days beforehand and that when the actual eruption happened many Pompeiians (she actually said most Pompeiians) had already escaped. For a while, I kept a weather eye on the distant range of hills, the Dandenongs, lying peacefully to the east of Melbourne, in case they should show early signs of producing pumice or ash and I might prove to be my family’s saviour by issuing timely warnings.
My mother’s leaving home was to me a catastrophe of at least Pompeiian proportions. And we had all foreseen it, or could have foreseen it. The signs had been there: the absences, the quarrels, the growth of my mother’s emotional distance from the rest of us, the entire removal of her loving attentiveness to us. What I couldn’t fathom was how, having seen the signs, we could have prevented it. Having the possibility of such a disaster hanging over our heads, how had we failed to avert it? What could we have done? I felt as if we had been watching the mountain quiver, hearing the rumbles, witnessing the early spilling of lava and the preliminary showers of ash, but sitting tight, hoping like the Pompeiians it would all go away—when we should have been rushing to take some kind of action.
Yet what this action could have been I still do not know.
And, while I had half-imagined my mother’s removal from our lives, I had not been prepared for the hard-edged specifics. It was not just that she wasn’t there to read me bedtime stories, to comfort, to control: she wasn’t there to do the laundry or make the lunches or cook the meals or tackle any one of a hundred different tasks that I had never given much thought to. The emotion of coping with her absence was enormous and thunderous; the purely practical disadvantages of that absence were endless and the radical disruption of our lives came as a terrible shock to me and I am sure to Pippa and my father also.
And always there was the wound, bleeding and raw, the wound from not having been loved enough, from not having been wanted, from having been left behind.
Yet our lives went on: after that first dreadful, aching week we made our adjustments, even if they jarred. Pippa took over making lunches; instead of being driven to school in the mornings she and I left earlier and went by tram; my father adjusted his schedule at work so that he did not have to stay past five o’clock. It turned out that my father could cook, after a fashion, and he did. We filled in gaps; we cobbled things together. My father was as good as his word and continued to let me leave my bedroom door open at night: this did not eliminate my visitors but it diminished the intensity of their presence. They were still there, but they retreated into the shadows and the corners.
Without our properly realising it at first, there was a change in the family dynamic. Of course, we had moved from being four to three, yet the changes still took me by surprise and I think they were unexpected for my sister and father too. Without the constant friction between my parents, the interactions between all of us seemed to soften. It was not all sweetness and light: my father was frequently impatient, I still annoyed the others by getting upset and by crying and Pippa continued to have outbursts in which she lamented the idiocy of those with whom she was condemned to live. But our roles had shifted. Without my mother there to provoke him my father no longer provided a kind of sardonic Greek chorus to our lives; although he could still be caustic, he was less critical of us, and became indeed meticulous about thanking us when we had made an effort of some kind. And I think Pippa and I responded to this new kindness of his. In particular, I was grateful to him for not mocking my fear of my nightly visitors.
During the first few days of our mother’s absence I asked Pippa whether she had seen her on the senior campus.
‘She’s not around,’ Pippa said. ‘She’s taken sick leave.’
‘Is she sick?’ I felt suddenly anxious.
‘Of course not. It’s just what she’s calling it. Mr Pritchard asked me today how she was.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said that so far as I was concerned she was perfectly fine,’ said Pippa.
‘Is Mr Bloomberg still there?’
‘Yes,’ said Pippa.
My father rang Grandpa and spoke to him, as he had promised. I never knew the full details of this conversation, but his report was disheartening.
‘I think we just have to let a bit of time go by, Nicky.’
‘Don’t they believe me?’
‘I don’t think that’s the issue. Well, actually, I’m sure Grandpa does believe you. And he’s explained it all to Rose. They do see how it happened.’
‘Well, then?’
‘I think Grandpa’s having a few problems at present.’
‘Problems?’
‘Well, with Rose.’
‘What kind of problems?’
‘Oh, Nicky, sometimes couples have problems. Well, you know Mummy and I have had problems. And Grandpa and Rose are having problems right now.’
‘Will Rose go away?’
‘I don’t know. But things aren’t happy there. I think Grandpa might be feeling—’
‘Feeling—?’
‘Grandpa might be feeling that perhaps he’s rushed into something he shouldn’t have.’
‘Oh,’ I said, not much the wiser. In some mysterious way, now that my mother was not around, it was easier to converse with my father. The upheaval of the family had altered our relationship. I didn’t comprehend why this should be, but it was comforting to be able to speak with him more directly and honestly.
‘What did he rush into?’
‘Nicky, you know you told me about Elaine and Launcelot and how Launcelot was enchanted?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you wondered if Mummy had been enchanted?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I think perhaps something like that happened with Rose and Grandpa. I think perhaps Rose had Grandpa under a bit of an enchantment.’
‘But enchantresses are bad people,’ I said. Even though she had destroyed the jigsaw, I was still clinging to the notion of Rose as a good person.
‘Ah. Well, maybe they’re not always entirely bad people. Aren’t there any good enchanters in your fairy stories?’
‘They’re not fairy stories.’
‘Oh. Okay. But King Arthur, and those people.’
‘The Arthuriad,’ I said.
‘Yes. Are there any enchanters who are good?’
‘Merlin is good,’ I said, ‘and he’s an enchanter.’
‘Well, there you are. I think Rose might have put a sort of enchantment on Grandpa. And maybe Grandpa’s sort of woken up from it now.’
‘Oh.’
‘I wouldn’t mention it to him,’ said my father.
‘No,’ I said. ‘So the enchantment’s worn off Grandpa. Already.’
‘Yes, I guess so.’
Well, maybe Mummy’s enchantment will wear off soon, too.’
He made a curiously diffident gesture. ‘It might. Well, yes, it will. I think it will, Nicky.’
‘Okay,’ I said. And then I thought I might as well ask the other thing. ‘Daddy?’
‘Mmm?’
‘Daddy, is it true what Mummy said about Rose?’
‘About Rose?’
‘About Rose killing Didie?’
My father covered his eyes and rubbed them. Then he joined his hands and observed his fingernails.
‘I don’t know, Nicky. Well, I don’t know for sure. I did th
ink it was nonsense at one stage. And—well, yes, it probably is nonsense.’
‘But you don’t know for sure?’
‘Not a hundred per cent, no.’
‘Could you ask Grandpa?’
‘No, I won’t be doing that. I don’t think I’d be able to ask Grandpa that kind of question, Nicky. I don’t think you should, either.’
‘How will we find out, then?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I can’t answer that. We might never find out.’
‘Does it mean Rose might have murdered Didie?’
‘No,’ he said, and then stopped. ‘If it happened, and I don’t know that it did happen, so … But if it happened, it would be what people call mercy killing, which is different from murder. It would be trying to help Didie, trying to stop her from suffering. But I don’t believe it did happen. I don’t believe Grandpa would have done that.’
‘But Rose might have?’
‘I don’t think so. But I don’t know.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. I could hear the wail in my voice.
‘These are hard questions, Nicky. I don’t understand, either, and I don’t know what the answers are. Try not to worry about it.’
He might as well have told me not to breathe.
I went back to the other matter. ‘So what you’re really saying is, Grandpa believes me and Grandpa would like to be friends, but Rose won’t let him? Rose doesn’t want to be friends with me.’
‘I guess so.’ He spread his hands. ‘It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on there.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Does Grandpa know Mummy isn’t here anymore?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘And Rose knows that too?’
‘I’m sure he would have told her.’
‘But she still doesn’t want to be friends with me.’
‘Just give it time, Nicky. Let’s see what happens. Rose might not be around much longer.’
This conversation had so far yielded the wrong answers, but at least it had been friendly, and unblemished by the impatience that for so long had been characteristic of interchanges between us. I decided to push for one more clarification. ‘Daddy, you do think Mummy will come back, don’t you?’
The Starlings Page 24
