by Karen Foxlee
“For the end-of-year concert,” Beth said. “These are called happy shoes.”
The girl's skin shone like fine bone china when Beth looked at her. The yellow grass of the park waved like flame. The dome of the sky was incandescent.
“You look stupid,” said the girl.
“You should look in a mirror for a change,” Beth said.
“How long is your hair?” ordered the girl.
Beth took out all of her bobby pins and undid her bun and shook out her hair. She put her hand behind her back and pointed to where her hair stopped beneath her shoulder blades.
“You're tipping your head back,” said the girl.
“She is not,” I said.
“Who asked you?” said the girl.
She turned her back to show us how long her own hair was.
“Mine's much longer,” she said, “and, anyway, all blondes go brown in the end and then they have to get it out of a bottle.”
Beth asked her where she got her information from. The girl said her stepmother knew for a fact and she didn't lie. Beth asked her what happened to her real mother.
“I don't know and I don't care,” said the girl.
“I'm going to be dancing in the National Ballet by the time I'm seventeen,” said Beth.
“You are not,” said the girl.
“So I suppose you can see into the future, can you?”
“Maybe.”
She got off the swing. She said she was going down to the river to look for wild horses. She was going to ride one bareback. Did Beth want to come? Beth said no, she couldn't go in her leotard because it had taken Nanna three weeks to embroider. The girl shrugged and turned away, easily, as though she didn't care either way. Beth shrugged too as if it didn't matter as well.
But at home that night Beth had a faraway look in her eyes.
“Penny for your thoughts?” asked Mum, not knowing Beth was already taking her first small steps away from her and us and everything.
“No thoughts,” Beth said.
She was seeing the girl in her mind. They were riding wild horses. They thundered across the dry riverbed. Up and down dirt tracks. They rode them bareback. They were flying like the wind.
Mr. O'Malley sang a sea chantey even though we were a thousand miles from any sea. I leaned on the outside of the metal fence and Mrs. O'Malley leaned on the inside.
“In 1919 a great disaster occurred,” I said.
“Oh dear,” said Mrs. O'Malley.
“A tank with millions of liters of molasses burst and flooded Boston.”
“Go on then,” said Mrs. O'Malley. “You're having a go at me.”
“It's true,” I said. “Lots of people died. And in 1966 another great man-made disaster happened in Wales.”
“Oh dear,” she said.
“A slag heap collapsed and fell on top of a school.”
“I remember it, you know, a terrible thing.”
“I'm glad there's no slag heap near my school.”
“They wouldn't put them near schools anymore.”
Mrs. O'Malley pulled a hankie from her bra strap and wiped her face. She looked annoyed as Mr. O'Malley swept around her.
“Don't sing so loud, Mr. O'Malley,” she ordered. That's what she always called him. “Me and young Jennifer can't hear ourselves think.”
“And how is the young Miss Day?” asked Mr. O'Malley.
“Pretty good,” I said.
When he was gone Mrs. O'Malley leaned closer over the fence to me.
“Here,” she said, “tell me who this new girl is with the long dark hair.”
She nodded her head toward the patio of our house, where Miranda Bell was sitting with Beth. Mrs. O'Malley wanted to know who her parents were and where they'd come from and how and why and what part of town they lived in now.
“Just blew into town, hey?” said Mrs. O'Malley when I couldn't answer any of her questions. “I thought as much.”
Miranda had an aristocratic face but she lived in a caravan with a broken door. Sometimes she used the window beside her narrow bed to come and go. She was named after a wine and she lived with her stepmother and her stepmother's boyfriend, who had David Essex eyes. She was porcelain-skinned. Sometimes her cheeks flushed red like an English girl's in a storybook. Like Snow White's.
She said she had red cheeks because she was from down south. She had lived everywhere. She had lived beside beaches, beside rivers, real rivers, rivers that ran, in small towns and in big cities with ten thousand streets. Her whole life had been spent heading up north. She had been to at least fifty schools. She couldn't remember the real number. She didn't count them anymore. She was going to start grade 9 with Beth.
“Who cares?” she said. “It's only school. My stepmother says one school is the same as any other.”
“But where's your real mother?” Beth asked.
It was the first time we went to the creek together. Miranda thought for a while. She looked through her mental catalog of towns and cities and rivers and bridges and seaside roads while biting on her bottom lip.
“I think she is somewhere near the Big Pineapple,” Miranda said. She'd seen most of the Big Things in Australia. “Or maybe she's gone back to Sydney. Dad left her on the side of the road. I don't know. She could be anywhere. But we were near the Big Pineapple.”
“Has she ever written you a letter?” asked Beth.
“How long ago did it happen?” asked Danielle, appalled.
“Do you know the address of the Big Pineapple?” I asked.
“Don't be stupid,” said Miranda. “As if the Big Pineapple has an address.”
We were sitting on the bank of the dry river in a long strip of shade cast by a white gum. The pale river stones reflected the sun. We had to cover our eyes. The hot blue sky weighed down on us.
“It might,” said Danielle quietly before Miranda cast her a glare from beneath her heavy bangs. Even Danielle, who was the Queen of Mean Stares from Beneath Bangs, couldn't equal her.
“I was seven,” said Miranda. “I got my stepmother a little bit after that.”
“You should try writing to her,” said Beth.
“Why?” asked Miranda. She seemed interested.
“I don't know. Because she's your real mum. She might be looking for you.”
Miranda laughed at that.
“Don't you get it?” she said. “She asked to be dropped off. She didn't want to stay in the caravan anymore.”
“Did you say goodbye?” asked Danielle.
“I was asleep,” said Miranda.
That made it even worse.
“Stop talking about it,” said Beth suddenly.
She looked at Danielle and me as though we were the cause of all the trouble.
“Let's look for the horses,” said Miranda.
We stood up to go, dusting the pale dirt from our bums.
“Not you two,” said Beth.
It was like a slap. I don't remember her being mean before that. It made Miranda smile. The smile unlocked something in Beth like a key.
Miranda slept at our house night after night. Mum asked her if she was sure her stepmother approved and Miranda assured her everything was fine. Miranda's stepmother worked late at the Imperial Hotel in the Blue Tongue Lounge Bar. Lounge bars have comfortable chairs instead of bar stools and Aunty Cheryl said certain types drank in them. Miranda didn't like staying at home with Kevin. She said he was annoying after a little while.
Miranda was good at sounding certain about things. Mum liked Miranda then. She liked her in a Christmas holidays type of way. She thought it would all be over once grade 9 began and Beth would be back to her normal self.
Beth's old grade 8 friends knocked on our front door. She received them sullenly. She stood with her arms folded without inviting them in. She answered in single words: yes, no, dunno, sure, maybe. Miranda waited in the living room with the pleased look on her face.
“I don't think I like the way you're behaving,” Mum said whe
n Beth came back inside. “Why didn't you ask Tiffany in?”
“She didn't ask to come in,” said Beth. “She just wanted to say hello.”
“Well you should have offered.”
“I will next time.”
“That's not good enough.”
Miranda and Beth went to the bedroom and closed the door. When I knocked they told me to go away. If I told Mum and they were forced to let me in they made me sit at the bottom end of the bed.
“If you say a word I'll kill you,” said Beth.
Sometimes they sat on the floor and made friendship bands. The bands were made out of colored cotton and woven like the macramé that Mr. Willow taught in grade 7. They made lots of them. They sat cross-legged, heads bowed, blond hair and brown hair nearly touching, as they weaved. They didn't talk but sometimes looked at each other and laughed. Beth wore six and so did Miranda. They made them for each other to remind themselves that they were best friends. They wrote FRIENDS FOREVER in black pen on their arms.
Sometimes they braided each other's hair into hundreds of tiny braids. They used up whole packets of rubber bands. Sometimes they played records on the record player Beth had gotten for her thirteenth birthday. Sometimes they put black kohl on their eyes and rouge on their cheeks and practiced making their lips red by biting them. They pouted in front of the mirror. They compared their breasts. Beth's breasts still only fit into a training bra but Miranda wore real bras. If I giggled Beth put her finger to her lips.
Christmas came and went. The silver tinsel Christmas tree dropped its tinsel on the ground. Christmas beetles the festive colors of anodized baubles flew into the patio light and banged against the walls. No matter how much Beth put them back on their feet they rolled over onto their backs. It is a well-known fact that Christmas beetles cannot be saved.
Mum had a worried face. She put the tree away and vacuumed up all the tinsel.
“I'm not sure about this Miranda girl,” she said.
In the evenings the sun didn't set until nine o'clock. Beth and Miranda walked out of town along the riverbed. They took whatever food they could steal: bread, sugar in a jar, arrowroot biscuits. Miranda assured her she had seen the wild horses before, it was just a matter of finding them. Miranda talked about her stepmother's boyfriend, Kevin, with the David Essex eyes. He was going to buy her a horse. He'd promised it. A horse trailer too.
“What happened to your father?” Beth asked.
“He took the car,” Miranda said. “He went to the pub one afternoon and never came back and that's how we got stuck here with just a caravan and no way to tow it in this stupid town.”
“But aren't you sad he's gone?” Beth asked.
Miranda laughed at that.
“A bit, at first,” she said. “Kevin's nice, but don't you love his eyes?”
They followed the river out to where it snaked through the new half-built suburbs. Where the bush had been bulldozed and the trees piled up into pyramids and the air rang with the sound of hammering and the clatter of aluminum sheeting hitting the earth.
Miranda had cigarettes. They were Winfield Greens because menthol cigarettes were good training cigarettes. They sat inside the burned-out shell of a ghost gum tree and practiced smoking them. Miranda was an expert. She rested her back against the blackened wood and sent plumes of smoke up through the empty innards of the tree into the sky.
After the builders went home the half-built suburbs became very still. They walked among the houses. Some had no roofs. Others had no walls. They went inside and imagined the rooms. Miranda knew exactly how she wanted her house to look. She walked and pointed: sunken lounge, shag rug, queen-size water bed.
When Beth tried to describe her dream house the words got stuck on her tongue. She felt strange. She tried hard to picture it but couldn't and instead she found herself imitating Miranda's descriptions. She preferred to look up through the framework as dusk came and the sky changed to a deeper blue. The bushland at the edges of the bulldozer scars changed too.
Everything that she saw glowing during the day seemed tarnished beside the light that was at the heart of evening. The bleached color of things was replaced by a beauty that stole into everything. The pale yellow leaves grew golden. The white gums opened up their hearts and shone.
I DARDANELLES COURT
SOMETIMES AT NIGHT, WHEN HIS BROTHER FINISHED YARNING AND TELLING JOKES AND STAGGERED OFF TO BED, MARSHALL REMEMBERED HER. His memories were curiously silent, even though in those days the earth still talked to him. The background of dirt streets, tin huts, the hospital tree full of brawling cockatoos were all soundless but her face, her perfect round face, it spoke to him. He heard her eyelashes closing over her black eyes, her breath against his cheek. He liked to remember her late at night; he hoped she would appear in his dreams.
They had always lived together, Arthur and him. They'd never left the town since they arrived except once to go to war and after that they vowed never to leave again. Or at least Arthur vowed (in the same way he'd vowed that they should never love another woman) and Marshall listened. They'd lived in the town since before the pavement roads or bridge across the river and since the mine was just a head-frame on the tallest hill.
In the beginning Marshall tried to describe it to his mother in letters, the sheer size of the sky, the sound of the bush at night, rustling and clicking and shivering in its own skin, the sight of the stars, the smallness of their canvas tent. In each letter he enclosed a bob, king faceup, between the pages.
It was Arthur who fell in love first. Arthur, who preferred the public bar, tobacco smoke and sweat, the slow unwinding of stories, the uncomplicated company of men. It was an unexpected event. The girl was Mary Price, the daughter of the publican of the Imperial Hotel. He tried very hard to ignore her but she was nearly a woman; she had red hair and wore trousers and swore. She'd been kicked out of three boarding schools and didn't care. She was forbidden by law and by her father to come into the public bar but she slouched around the door to the kitchen making eyes at Arthur.
They heard the publican telling his daughter to steer clear of him, Arthur Murray, a scalawag and a drunk who would amount to nothing but would break her heart. Marshall sat and drank his beer and watched his brother grow quieter. He watched the exchange of glances from kitchen door to bar stool and back again.
Mary Price and Arthur Murray began their love affair behind the Imperial in an alleyway lined with kegs. She smoked his cigarettes and stuck out her chest like in the movies. They kissed beneath the hotel rooms. He told her he would marry her, he'd build a house, he'd treat her like a queen before he went back inside for last drinks.
God knows Marshall could remember trying as well back then. He smiled shyly at the girls returning home from boarding school and at the ladies in their sun-faded whites lining up beside the picture theater. But he felt too large beside them, grotesque, with his chipped front tooth from a split rock and his faded hat-flattened hair. Instead he picked Arthur up from the ground more nights than he could count and lurched home with him along the dusty streets. He cooked dinner and cleaned the plates. He put Arthur to bed and woke him in the morning. He explained away his brother's absences from work. He washed away the vomit stains from the front canvas wall.
Arthur took the wild Mary Price for drives in the desert, first parking his borrowed truck down the road so her old man wouldn't see. She smoked cigarettes beside him as he drove. On the way he didn't say a word but by the brown water, beneath the noon sun winking and scribbling messages in light on the rock walls, he promised her everything. They undid their clothes and hung them from the trees.
When the war came they trained for a year beside the sea. Arthur could've returned twice but didn't.
“I should've gone home,” he said each night when he'd finished staggering the length of Flinders Street after drinking in every pub. He wrote to Mary Price telling her he'd be home soon.
“You should have married her,” said Marshall quietly. “You sho
uld have married her before you left.”
Marshall wrote to his mother. He explained what the jungle sounded like at night, so close, like someone constantly whispering in your ear, then the sudden deafening roar of rain. He described the intricacies of drinking raindrops from palm leaves, in dripping groves, above the millpond sea. He wrote when Arthur lost his right arm.
In the hospital, where the sea sighed loudly through the windows, Arthur waited daily for Mary Price's letter. He waited hourly for her letter.
When the war was over they headed west again. For a while, after the closeness of the jungle, Marshall found he was terrified by the open space. It was the flat faded land, the straight road, the towering sky. It was too full of air. He felt buoyant himself, that if he stepped from the truck his feet might not even touch the earth and he might instead drift upward and slowly away.
Mary had married another man and run away to Sydney. Her father told them at the pub door. Arthur was still in his uniform. He held his arm out to shake the publican's hand before he realized what was missing.
“I can't fathom it,” said the publican, “why she'd give up on a fine man like you?”
Arthur and Marshall took up their stools at the bar and began to drink again. They bought a block of land alongside the empty river and began to build a house.
“We are better off this way,” said Arthur. “I'm going to keep away from them from this day on. You'd do well to do the same, my brother. I don't want a woman to set foot in this house again.”
Marshall didn't disobey. That life was not for him. Women were a puzzle that could not be solved. He listened to his brother as he always had. But he fell in love. Without warning. By accident.
The woman's name was May, a nurse, five years older than him. She had long brown hair that she wore pinned back with fifty bobby pins. She had a curious squashed-in face and fierce black eyes. Arthur had fought a man on the main street and busted his nose and May had dressed it. Each week Marshall needed to find a new excuse to be near her.
He had a cough that would not go away.
“Your temperature is normal,” she said.
