by Karen Foxlee
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Who are you talking to?”
“Nobody.”
I didn't ask her if everything still felt wrong. She didn't ask me to leave her alone. I sat beside her looking at all her rock star posters and her old ballerina paper dolls pinned to the curtains and her Dolly Varden lamp shade with a dusty skirt and her record player with all her little 45s and her books in her bookcase, which were ordinary books like Anne of Green Gables and the Nancy Drew mysteries and What Katy Did and What Katy Did Next.
I turned my Bionic Woman doll's head slowly backward and forward to use her supersonic hearing to understand the secret conversations.
I asked her, only once, what she had done to Deidre Schelbach that day in the park. I hardly believed it anymore. We had pretended so much not to notice it that now it seemed impossible.
I asked her what had happened in a roundabout way, exactly the way that Nanna and my mother asked their questions because I had learned it from them.
“I wonder why Deidre fell down on her knees that day?” I said.
I made it sound like I was only thinking it aloud to myself and Beth didn't say anything for a very long time. She stared at the wallpaper, which was a pattern of squares and circles interlinked. Finally some words came to the surface.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” she said.
Angela crossed out the half-a-broken-heart pendant and the ballet shoes. She turned to a fresh page.
“Now we're getting somewhere,” she said.
“No we're not,” I said.
I was checking my inner tube for punctures because I had smashed ten marbles with a hammer on the driveway and then ridden over the top of them.
Dad had taught me how to find a puncture by running the inner tube slowly through a bucket of water and watching for bubbles. Sometimes I looked for a puncture even though I knew there wasn't one. It was only a little piece of knowledge but it felt as shiny and solid as a new twenty-cent piece in my hand to know I could find the thing that was wrong.
“I'm going to ride out to the horse paddocks and steal a horse,” I said to Angela when I had finished checking the inner tube.
“As if you would,” said Angela.
“I would,” I said. “I'm going to ride right out of town at dawn and never come back.”
“They'll send out a search party like in Little Boy Lost.”
“He couldn't ride a horse,” I said. “He was a baby. They'll never find me.”
“What would your mother do if you ran away?” asked Angela.
“She wouldn't notice it,” I said.
Sometimes after school I climbed onto Mum's bed beside her. If she was lying on her back I put my head on her chest and listened to her heart beat. Or I put my hand inside her hand and squeezed. Sometimes she squeezed back.
“Did you have a good day?” she sometimes asked.
Sometimes I said, “Yes.”
And other times she didn't say anything at all because she had no words.
“You wouldn't even know how to find water in the bush,” said Angela.
“Yes, I would,” I said. “Remember what Mrs. Bridges-Lamb taught us?”
We had done bush survival skills with Mrs. Bridges-Lamb. In the afternoon Mr. Starlight, who was Gavin Starlight's grandfather, had taken us down to the bush behind the oval and showed us how to find bush tucker and look for tracks. We had found the tracks of a goanna and also a dog. When he showed us he talked with a cigarette in his mouth, which moved up and down with his words. The sun scorched us. Tanya Moorhouse, who was very fair, fainted after half an hour.
Angela pretended not to be listening to me. She wrote in The Book of Clues.
“We have to find Deidre,” she said.
The Shelleys changed their minds about Beth, slowly, piece by piece. At first they'd called her a freak whenever they saw her because of what she had done to Deidre. Deidre hadn't come back to school. She didn't go to the speedway on Friday nights. When they tried to phone her, her brother said she'd gone to stay with her aunty.
After she had been touched Deidre had gone down on her knees. All that day she had kept wiping at her head, as though there was something, some mark, which could be removed. She had cried.
No one had ever seen her cry before.
She had wept.
But then, at the end of the day, after all of the tears had passed, something had changed in her. She had wiped her eyes and looked at them and her eyes had been very clear. When they asked her to come with them to drink on the steps behind the town hall she had said no.
Simply.
Without any rage.
After Deidre was gone Rochelle became Queen of the Tough Girls. Rochelle was the size of two girls. She had pale tree-trunk legs covered in stubble. She wore her red hair short and five earrings in each ear.
She took possession over the fiefdoms of the grandstand, the laneway behind the bike rack, the cicada-filled smoking trees beside the cricket nets, the toilet blocks near the oval, all the imperial routes of travel along the highway, the court of the water tower in Memorial Park.
They called Beth a freak because they were frightened of her but when their words did no damage they stopped.
They liked that she had not told on anyone.
They liked the way she wore Marco's necklace as though she wasn't afraid.
How she went down the laneway between the science block and teased the boys from grade 10.
How she smoked a cigarette while she rode her bike to school.
There was something irresistible in the way she did not hide the bruise. She walked right past them with it showing. She let them see how they had stamped her with their sign. It was important. Bruises were badges of office. Of honor. They all wore their bruises like their black rubber-band bracelets and blue ink tattoos.
Michelle Wright was the first to change her mind. She was a girl with dark polished-wood skin. She had brown hair and amber-colored eyes. She had perfect white teeth because in her house they used charcoal from the campfire for toothpaste. She smiled at Beth, once, while all the others were scowling. Beth smiled back. A small smile. Low voltage. A dot. A dash. They Morse-coded each other with these smiles. Michelle Wright fingered one of the black rubber-band bracelets on her arm and bided her time.
I took a can of cream soda to Nanna's flat. She'd asked me to stop bringing her apples and bread. It wasn't necessary. Soon she was going to drive her Datsun Sunny to the shops. She was just waiting for her hands to stop shaking so much. Uncle Paavo was buying her bags of groceries and riding with them on his bike from town. Nanna's little fridge was half full but she was very thin, thinner than I had ever seen her. Her false teeth clacked inside her mouth when she spoke.
She was lying on her creaking bed. She had her ashtray beside her. Every movement seemed to exhaust her. When she lit her smoke it was like she was moving underwater. I hadn't told her about Angela's plan to find my voice in time for the Talent Quest. If I'd told her that I would have had to tell her I'd looked inside the box. I didn't tell her about my plans to run away.
Nanna lay on the bed smoking and not talking to me and I lay on the bed beside her. It made me remember all those weekends when Beth was growing wilder and sadder and stranger and we were sent to Nanna's so things could be sorted out. Because Beth didn't come with us anymore then, because mostly she ran away on weekends, I got to sleep on an inflatable mattress instead of next to Nanna, who smelled like dust. But secretly I had missed her. I had missed our wordless turnings and counterturnings and our secret, creaking conversations.
Back then she tried to teach me how to embroider. Nanna was a very good embroiderer. Her mother had started teaching her when she was only very small, maybe six or seven. She said because I was starting late my fingers would have already grown clumsy and I would probably never be very good at it. She said if Mum had paid a little bit more attention to our upbring
ing instead of letting us run wild, up and down the creek bed and out along the highway looking for willy-willies, things might have been different. And mostly I just ignored her when she said that.
When Mrs. Bridges-Lamb tried to teach us embroidery on Friday afternoons, even though Massimo's father, Mr. Gentili, staged a lone protest because he said it was not a good thing to encourage in boys, she was impressed at what I could do. Nanna had taught me how to do a very neat chain stitch and I could do a small daisy easily whereas Angela's took up a large section of her sampler.
But embroidery lessons didn't last long with Mrs. Bridges-Lamb. We disappointed her greatly with our Slovenliness and our Unruliness. Sometimes we pricked each other's fingers and became blood sisters. The boys’ tongues hung out of their mouths and their sweaty fingers slipped on the needles and it made her greatly upset.
She would have preferred the boys weren't involved—they didn't fit her image of embroidery class—but we disappointed her just as much, a classroom full of miners’ daughters in faded blue hand-me-down uniforms and long yellow socks wilting around our ankles.
But I liked embroidering with Nanna. Apart from saying I had clumsy fingers, she was very nice. She made me sing to her or she told me stories as we went along. She told me stories of how Uncle Paavo got to be so rich by never getting married and working every day and only eating potatoes. She told me things that her mother had told her, for instance, if you are unhappy with an embroidered flower you should unstitch it. It is the same with life. If you are unhappy you must unstitch it until you find the wrong part and make it right. Everything can be fixed. Nothing is unchangeable. She told me that story when she taught me how to make a ribbon rosette.
She told me the story of the boat trip and the albatross, which she had told me one hundred times before, and how my great-grandmother was buried at sea. Sometimes she stopped in the middle of a story and said I was doing very well and maybe I wasn't going to be such a bad embroiderer after all.
Danielle always came closer when Nanna told the ship story because it was very sad and horrible and she especially liked tragic things.
“Tell us again how she was buried,” she said.
“She was wrapped in a tablecloth with sunrises and bluebirds and sewn up in a calico sack and weighted down with some lead,” said Nanna, “and then she was tipped into the sea.”
“Where?” said Danielle. “Near land?”
“No, it was the middle of the ocean, I'm sure.”
And I wondered what the longitude and the latitude were for the place of her burial and if the captain marked them in his book but I didn't say it. We kept embroidering.
“Tell me about the albatross,” I said even though I had heard it a thousand times before.
“It was soon before arriving here,” she said. “It flew beside the ship for days and nights, never touching the sea. It was only a week since my aiti had died and still I saw her everywhere, at the dining table, going down the stairs, the back of her turning a corner not far ahead. But this bird came then. I was standing on the deck and it was in a squall and the boat was heaving this way and that and it flew closer and closer. It flew so close that it was maybe only two arms away. So close I could see its eye. And it only hovered, like this, with its wings outstretched and it looked straight at me.”
“Did it look at you like it knew you?” I asked. This was my line and it was my job to recite it.
“Yes,” said Nanna. “I swear on my life that this albatross knew me. And after that I was not so filled with fear for coming to this new land and not so full of grief. Instead I was given hope.”
After that story was finished we sat where we were with our needles in our hands just imagining it. Embroidering with Nanna had felt better almost than being at home, where Dad kept coming home late and bumping into the walls and Mum kept following him from room to room clicking her tongue just the way Nanna did. And where Beth seemed to take up all the space. Where she filled whole rooms with her scent and her glow and where she overwhelmed our mother's heart.
“What should I do with this?” I asked Nanna, holding up the can of cream soda.
She looked at it like she had never seen such a thing. I could tell her mind was a long way away. Slowly she came back to earth. She shivered. It was getting colder.
It was nearly six months since Beth had died. Mum still drifted from room to room, stopping off to lie on beds along the way. If Dad worked day shift he never came home afterward the way he used to. He didn't come home until late at night and I would hear him fumbling with his key in the door and then dropping things and accidentally smashing them in the kitchen while he tried to make himself tea. Nanna kept growing smaller and quieter. I had not found my singing voice.
Nanna sat up slowly on the edge of her bed.
“Now let us see if this will work,” she said. “Go and get a cup from the kitchen.”
I drank the cream soda from the wrong side of the cup. Some of the bubbles came out of my nose. No songs erupted from inside me but I could feel them pressing against my chest.
“Will you be coming to our house again?” I asked.
“One day I hope,” said Nanna.
“I wish it was soon,” I said.
Before everything happened I wished I had a double voice box like a songbird so I could sing two songs at once, the way a bird can harmonize with itself. I wanted to sing crystal clear notes. I wanted to sing them one after another in ascending order. And at the same time I wanted to let another fountain of notes descend from my heart.
Before everything happened I did not understand how the bones of a bird wing could be so similar to a human arm but end up so different. For instance, a bird has a humerus attached to its shoulder bone, just like us, and an ulna and a radius in the lower arm. In a wing most of the finger bones have been fused together to hold the primary feathers but they are still recognizable. They could still belong to us.
Before everything happened I sometimes thought Nanna's albatross story was only half true. She had taught my mother how to be the master of half-facts and she was the queen of them herself. The facts she had right were that great soaring birds, such as albatross, fly over the sea on long slim wings. They fly very high and for a long time without ever touching earth. From a distance they look like flying white crosses.
When Mum wouldn't get out of bed Nanna told me to go down on my knees and introduce myself to God. To say I am Jennifer Day. I want to help my mother. To invoke these saints in order: Saint Flora for abandoned people, Saint Gertrude for the newly departed, Saint Helena for failing marriages, Saint Genevieve for disasters, Saint Joseph for families, Saint Jude for hopeless causes, Saint Anne for all mothers. She said please tell her that I love her.
But I did not get down on my knees. I didn't invoke the saints and angels. I didn't tell Mum that Nanna loved her. Mostly I stayed away from her bedroom, which was dark as a cave and filled with crumpled sheets and her soft movements, her small flutterings, like an injured bird's.
The songs I had inside me pushed against my chest, looking for a way to escape. They writhed like snakes. I could not tell which songs they were anymore by their shape or taste. They were too badly deformed, like the strange litter of dead kittens that Angela's cat had, which Mr. Popovitch told us not to look at but we did and then afterward had to breathe into brown paper bags to calm down.
When Mum came out in May she had a shower and washed her hair and sat in Dad's recliner and turned on the television. She wrapped her yellow Japanese happy coat close to herself. She watched a whole episode of The Wombles. I sat beside her, kneeling on the floor, holding her hand. She tried to cook us dinner but gave up halfway through and lit a cigarette and went and sat back in front of the television. Dad tried to hold her when he came home from the pub.
“Don't you dare touch me,” she said.
MUM THOUGHT SHE KEPT THE NEW RULE WELL BUT BETH STILL FOUND WAYS TO ESCAPE. She waited until Aunty Cheryl and Mum were gone together. She pe
rsuaded Kylie, who was her babysitter, with threats over the picture of Des. She told us if we loved her we would help her. She said she would do the same for us. She promised me she would go through my whole box of feathers. The whole box. Each feather. Latin name. Common name. One at a time.
She offered Danielle money for her perm jar.
The first of the winter westerlies arrived and hummed through the grandstand on the oval. The air was spiced with sulfur fumes from the stacks. She skipped school.
She left her bike in the bike racks but then doubled back along the riverbed, stepping through the remnants of creek camps, through the shadows of the bridge, along the creek beside Sandy Creek State Primary School, where I daydreamed through the window.
At night Beth lay on her bed and waited for us to go to sleep, then she stood at the back door and looked at the night. She couldn't stay inside. She wheeled her bike across the dry grass. She opened the gate slowly so that it wouldn't squeak. She left it open for when she returned.
I heard her go.
The sky was bright with stars. It was cold but she didn't feel it. She rode along the wide empty streets. Nearly all of the houses were quiet but here and there a lone light still shone. Occasionally she heard cars prowling in the distance. The constant rumble of road trains along the highway. She rode without purpose. Up and down streets, over the river crossing, past horse paddocks, past the cemetery, the quartz graves gleaming in the dark.
A late moon rose above the ranges. She took her hands off the handlebars and weaved backward and forward across roads until she came to the park. She wheeled her bike up through the scrub to the water tower and sat on the ground among the broken glass. She watched the mine glittering over the town.
She had settled something that first time. Entering into the night was like swimming. She felt cleansed.
And part of her unraveled.
It was like shedding a skin.
Before dawn the sky behind the hills turned a deep blue. Stars still shone. The blueness slowly flooded across the sky. She lay back on the ground and watched the first of the earth-colored hawks ascend and circle above her.
