by Karen Foxlee
When Jamie and Samantha came back from their walk they were pale-faced and exhausted by the sun. They'd been to the park; it was written all over their faces. They were folded up into the arms of their mother, Aunty Louise. Patrick and Jonathan looked at the floor.
“It's too terrible, I know,” whispered Aunty Louise into Jamie's and Samantha's ears. “Try not to think about it.”
It would have been easy for them because there was so much they didn't know. For instance they didn't know that:
The wilder Beth grew, the bluer her eyes became, and the bluer her eyes became, the wilder she grew.
She chewed her nails. She chewed them down to the skin until they bled.
When she laughed she closed her eyes and tilted her head backward. She put one arm across her stomach.
She could melt Nanna's stony heart with one smile. After her heart was melted Nanna always said, “What on earth will we do with you?”
She ran away often and when she returned we all tried to act as though she had never gone.
She felt keenly the pain of insects and then the pain of people.
She gave up dancing at thirteen.
Parts of her kept disappearing. Small pieces that she gave away.
Sometimes she drank methylated spirits with her wine, just a dash.
She wanted to save everything but couldn't even save herself.
We put the box away before Danielle woke up. Angela stayed sitting on my bed memorizing the contents while I went through the bottom of the cupboard looking for a blue-lined exercise book. I found an old grade 5 book that was only partly used. It contained mostly information about Greek and Roman history, which was Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's favorite topic, especially the Spartans, who made her glasses fog up. Mostly the pages were filled with towering roman numerals. Angela ripped them out to make a clue book into how I lost my voice.
The ripping woke Danielle and she scowled at us when she opened her eyes. Mum said Danielle was an expert at scowling and she could win a medal for it. I held my breath. Angela held the exercise book in her hand. Danielle sat up ramrod straight in her Milwaukee back brace. I thought she knew about the box from the way she looked at us. She scowled more and looked suspicious. But then she took the sketchbook from the desk so she could draw a picture of the end of the world and went away. Her Milwaukee back brace clunked as she left the room. The quietness in the house settled again like dust, it rained from the roof onto our faces, it clung to our eyelashes.
Angela took the exercise book and a pencil. I took the cricket bat and tennis ball from under my bed. We went out through the still house. The washing was piled up in the laundry. Ashtrays had filled and overflowed. All the roses and lilies had thrown back their heads over the edges of vases and died. They had cast their petals on the floor. The living room smelled of dead water-logged greenery. Even though Christmas had been and gone the calendar stayed on November 1982.
We passed my mother sleeping on the sofa. We moved quietly so she wouldn't wake. When she was awake she moved from room to room like she was lost. She opened doors and peered inside with one eye. She wept suddenly and wildly when we least expected it. At night great storms of tears came and went and woke me from my sleep and made me rise up in bed.
“Lie back down, chickadee,” Dad said each time.
And he got up slowly from the mattress between our beds to go to her.
But none of this was visible from the outside. From the road I was surprised to find our house looked no different from the others in Dardanelles Court. It stood brave-faced. It stared with its front sliding glass windows straight ahead. It kept its screen door mouth shut tight. Its little porch chin upright. I looked at our house from the footpath and Angela, chewing on the end of one of her golden braids, waited for me.
The five houses in Dardanelles Court faced each other across the cul-de-sac, which is French for dead end. They were all identical: rectangular, metal-clad, and mint green. They were exactly the same as every other company house in Memorial South. The poinciana trees reached out to each other across the pavement and dropped their red flowers. It was very quiet except for the droning of the outdoor air-conditioner units.
There was no Mr. O'Malley singing about the sea. No Mrs. O'Malley nodding from her patio to me. No Miss Schmidt peeping through her venetian blinds. No Irwin girls sitting on their front steps dreaming of escape. There was no Marshall Murray standing beneath the fountain of his yellow cassia tree. The five houses faced each other as though nothing remarkable had ever happened.
We walked out of Dardanelles Court onto Memorial Drive. We passed the entrances to all the other courts, which had the same houses huddled in circles. We didn't talk.
In Memorial Park I had to squint my eyes after spending weeks in the weeping house. I was unsteady on my feet. The park tilted toward the sky. The calf-high yellow grass shone. The sunlight rested its hands on my shoulders and burned a crown on my head. Angela bowled to me and I cracked the tennis ball into the sky. It was only when we had exhausted ourselves that we lay down in the grass and Angela opened up the book.
“Let's begin at the beginning,” she said. “What do you remember?”
She had her pencil ready to write down what I said.
“What do you mean?”
“About what was in the box.”
“The braid,” I said.
Angela wrote
the braid.
“The hair combs. The piece of newspaper.” “How do you spell ‘combs’?” “C-o-m-b-s.”
the piece of newspaper.
“The black band,” said Angela, writing slowly, “the ballet shoes.”
“Why are you asking me if you remember already?”
“Because,” said Angela when she had finished writing.
“This is stupid,” I said.
“No it isn't.”
She showed me the cover, where she had printed in her messy handwriting The Book of Clues.
“All we have to do is go backward,” she said.
Angela Popovitch was my best friend. She'd been my best friend since grade 1. She had two sisters like me but none of hers had died. She had never lied to me.
She watched me, her brown eyes and freckled nose screwed up against the sun.
“Trust me. We can find your singing voice,” she said. “It's simple.”
The unstitching of an embroidered flower.
The unraveling of moments.
The unspooling thread of things.
THIS IS THE STORY OF ELIZABETH DAY. I have pieced it together with my own two hands. I have made it from things I saw and things I did not see but later knew. It is made from the tatters of terrible things and the remnants of wonderful things. I have sewn it together before it fades.
My nanna said everything began at the lake. The day Beth fainted and afterward saw the whole world with a golden glow.
“You can take it or leave it,” she said, “but I know it, something happened that day and nothing was ever the same again.”
We had begged for that day. Dad hadn't wanted to go. He didn't want to take the car out on a dirt road. It was Saturday. The races were on. He was feeling lucky and the radio wouldn't work out there. The corrugations would wreck his wheels. We'd all get duck lice. The place was full of weeds.
“You promised us,” said Beth. “First you said after I turned thirteen, then you said when school finished.”
“School finished a week ago,” said Danielle. “Beth's been thirteen forever.”
“Bloody hell,” said Dad. “All right then.”
I cheered and clapped my hands.
“What are you so happy about?” he asked.
“You always say you're going to do things but then you don't and this time you are,” I said.
Mum told me not to be rude. She smiled her I-told-you-so smile at him from the bathroom door.
Dad combed his hair back slowly so it met in a ducktail at the back. He had sea-green eyes and a teardrop-shaped birthmark on his ch
eek that made him look sad. He shaved his face slowly with the razor. He shaved close to where the teardrop birthmark sat beneath his left eye. Sometimes when Dad held Mum around the waist and kissed her in the kitchen and they thought we weren't watching, Mum put her finger up to the teardrop birthmark as though she was going to wipe it away. After he finished shaving he coughed into the sink. He always coughed into the sink in the morning and the night. It was a perfectly ordinary day.
Dad packed his beers along the bottom of the cooler in the ice. Mum made us sandwiches. She asked Dad would the ice melt? Would the sandwiches get wet?
“Of course it'll bloody melt,” he said. “It's a hundred frigging degrees outside.”
Mum wrapped the sandwiches in gladwrap. Twice. She got out the tape and taped the gladwrap edges down when Dad left the room. I could tell she was panicking. She put some of the sandwiches in my lunch box and some in Danielle's and then because the lids wouldn't shut properly she sticky-taped them down.
When we left we each took our turn to hug her. When she hugged me some of her worry about the sandwiches rubbed off onto me. When it was Danielle's turn she got tears in her eyes.
“Give me strength,” Dad said.
The station wagon had no air-conditioning. We drove with the windows down. The road was long and dusty and dead straight. No bends. It headed straight for the horizon. Long flat-bottomed boat clouds sailed low across the sky. My job was to open the cooler and pass the beer to Dad. When I took the beer out I looked down at our lunch boxes. They were entombed in the ice. I tried to rearrange things a bit by bringing them to the surface but Dad heard me rummaging.
“Shut the lid, Jenny,” he said. “Everything will melt before we get there.”
I tried not to worry about the sandwiches swimming in the melting ice. I sang some Slim Dusty songs and everyone joined in, even Danielle, who usually told me to shut up when I sang.
It usually takes a long time to get to somewhere you really want to go. For instance it takes a whole day to travel through the desert to the sea. A long day. The parched plains with their bleached grass and white bones try to exhaust you with their emptiness. The flattop hills in the distance call out we are all there is. They want you to wander off toward them. The land pretends to contain nothing. You have to concentrate on where you are going. That makes it take a long time to get there.
Beth, sitting in the front, moved the blue plastic combs through her long blond hair.
When I asked her how long till we got there she said soon.
And then the landscape started to change.
The long straight road to nowhere started to bend. Hills sprang up with mangy coats of spinifex and yellow grass. They were speckled by trees with wild lady hair. Sheer rock faces, almost pink, almost orange. We hit a cattle grid and the road became pavement. A little unmanned ticket box stood beside an open boom gate. We rounded the last corner and there the blue water lay, the white dam wall shining in the sun.
The last time we'd been to the lake our mother had been with us. We had been smaller; she hadn't let us wander around by ourselves. She said stay where I can see you, so many children have drowned in this lake, the weeds hold on to their legs and drag them down. They are never seen again. This is what happens to little children, she said.
But Dad gave Beth a five-dollar note.
“Go and buy yourselves some ice cream or something,” he said.
It was very hot, even beside the water, which was too bright after the desert. Stars danced on its surface. We had to walk with our eyes half closed. There were canoes out on the water and people everywhere cooking barbecues and there were pelicans wandering between the tables. The sunlight flared around their open wings. The hot grass crackled beneath our feet.
“I'm going to swim for hours,” said Beth.
Then we had a normal conversation about lollies: candy cigarettes, cobbers, musk sticks, Milkos, and Redskins.
If we had known everything would change we would have turned back. But we didn't know. That's how things happen. Especially sunny days hide dark moments in their pockets.
At the kiosk counter Beth had the five-dollar note in her outstretched hand. I thought it was weird the way she was holding it, as though it was a golden cup or a flame.
“Come on, love,” said the kiosk lady, “we haven't got all day.”
Beth was going to speak; her mouth opened. Her pupils expanded inside her blue eyes. She fell backward, gracefully, perfectly straight, the way a tree falls. Her head hit the ground with a thud. Her mouth made a clunking noise like Nanna's false teeth. She expelled a small noise. It could have been a no. Her eyes rolled back into her head.
The kiosk lady didn't open the kiosk door but jumped straight over the counter. She bent down beside Beth and then called out for help so loudly that I had to cover my ears. People looked up from their picnic tables and came running from the shore. Danielle shook Beth's shoulder but she wouldn't wake up.
“Find Dad,” she shouted at me.
While I ran I mostly thought about what would happen if Beth died, for instance that Mum would get a shock, especially since her main concern was the state of our sandwiches. And at the back of my mind was Beth's face as it looked after she hit the grass and her eyes had closed: luminous.
“Beth's fallen down and she won't wake up,” I said when I finally found Dad untangling a fishing line beside the wall. I wiped the snot from my nose with the back of my hand.
A large crowd had gathered. We had to push our way through the damp bodies that smelled of the lake and suntan lotion. Beth had opened her eyes but she seemed dazed; she kept looking past all the faces bent over her toward the sky. Her lips moved. A very faint smile crossed her mouth. The crowd was very quiet. Other than for the craning of necks, no one moved. Someone brought lemonade. Dad lifted Beth's head and Danielle put the tin against her lips. Some of the sparkling liquid rolled down her chin.
“What is she saying?” said the kiosk lady.
“Shush,” said Dad.
He bent his head closer, bringing his ear to her lips, but she stopped her whispering then and woke up. Her eyes found Dad's face and recognized him. When she saw she was on the ground she started to cry.
The crowd shivered and moved backward in a single motion. Dad picked Beth up. He lifted his arm to move the crowd aside but it had already parted in two waves. A corridor was opened up. Dad carried her through it. Danielle and I followed in the strange parade.
“You'd want to get her checked out,” said the kiosk lady, who walked beside us.
On the way home Beth lay on the backseat with the blanket rolled up for a pillow. Danielle and I sat in the luggage compartment behind her. The kiosk lady had given us bags of lollies and we ate them while we watched her. I lit a candy cigarette with my imaginary lighter and passed it down to her and she held it between her pale lips.
“I'm sorry” was all she had to say.
Mum sat Danielle and me down at the kitchen table and grilled us over what had happened. What had we seen? What were the series of events? When did it start? When did it finish? Nanna screeched into the driveway with her smelling salts. She yelled at Dad. She said we should have eaten our sandwiches as soon as we got there. She took the wet sandwiches out of the cooler and waved them in front of him as evidence. Dad told her to keep her big nose out of it. Beth, on the sofa, called out for them to be quiet.
“What happened?” Mum pleaded in a soft voice.
“She fainted,” Dad pleaded back.
Nanna made a clicking noise with her tongue.
“Her face was shining,” I said.
“What?” shouted Mum.
“Ping off,” said Dad.
“What's she talking about?” asked Nanna.
“She wouldn't bloody know,” said Dad.
But I did know. I knew a lot more things than him. He didn't know, for instance, that sparrows were passerines, which meant they could sing, and that some swifts built their nests out of saliva and that
Sirius was the next closest star to the sun. That was just for starters.
I knew a butterfly wing couldn't repair itself once it was torn.
This was a very important fact. A butterfly wing is built of veins and covered in scales made from a substance like dust.
All through their sleeping stages butterflies dream of flying but when they first open their wings they need to wait. They must be patient. The wings are wet and they need time to dry. Butterfly wings are easily broken.
There is no hope for a butterfly once this has happened.
If you find a butterfly in a spiderweb with a broken wing there is no point in removing it however sad it might seem. If you remove it, it will only struggle on the ground and die some other kind of death. It will be carried away on the backs of bull ants to a bull ant feast and eaten alive.
Beth was always rescuing winged insects from spiderwebs. She stood on chairs and rescued moths and climbed trees to save cicadas.
“Here,” she said to them, “let me help you.”
She used pencils and scissors and her own fingers to release the trapped things. She held them in her hand or on her fingertip until they flew away. If they couldn't, because they had stopped struggling and given up or the spider had already started wrapping them up for later, it made her very sad. Even if you said to her don't worry, it probably didn't feel a thing.
It couldn't be explained to her that at the very same moment a butterfly is struggling in a web, all over the world there are insects eating insects, hundreds of millions of spiders eating butterflies, lions eating gazelles, crocodiles eating cows, and countless worms turning inside of perfectly normal-looking fruit.
Dad shooed me away with his hand.
“Go play outside,” said Mum. “We're discussing something important.”
After the lake everywhere Beth looked there was light. Dad, face bent over her, wore a halo. A tree was on fire with white cockatoos. The dam wall shone like a bride's skirt. The star-covered lake moved inside her. In the car our faces glowed. The sky pressed its bright face to the window.
