by Karen Foxlee
Inside she sat in front of her duchess and brushed her hair. She brushed it in long slow strokes. The strands shone under the electric lightbulb. She put in her two blue hair combs. She painted her lips. First in delicate brushstrokes upward to the bows of her top lip, then she filled in the valley between. She painted the fullness of her bottom lip. She put mascara on her eyelashes. She drew kohl along the inside of her bottom lids. She looked at her reflection. She stared into her own eyes.
She didn't cry. She didn't say goodbye to anything. She didn't look at all the things in her room. Her old stuffed rabbit. Her record player. Her dancing sashes. Her running medals. Her tambourine with its faded pink ribbons. She put the two checks inside her bag.
“I left something at Michelle's. I'm going to get it,” she said at the kitchen door.
Mum was washing the dishes. She kept her back turned to Beth. I could tell by the movement of her shoulders that she was crying. In the living room Dad and Aunty Cheryl stared ahead at the television. Beth touched Kylie on the shoulder as she passed. It was only a light touch but Kylie jumped like she had been burned by a match.
“I'll be back soon,” said Beth.
The house was quiet after the front screen door banged shut. Mum went after her then. She ran barefoot across the wet front lawn.
“I told you I'll be back soon,” said Beth.
“Please,” Mum said, holding Beth's face, smoothing back the hair, and looking into her eyes.
All that night while I tried to go to sleep I kept feeling the words of a song trying to come through. It was a slowish song, humming along inside me. It felt like If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone, you will hear the whistle blow, one hundred miles, one hundred miles, one hundred miles.
ON HER LAST NIGHT ON EARTH SHE WENT TO MICHELLE WRIGHT'S FLAT. Michelle told her there was a party. It was only a few streets away. All day the road had been filling with cars. Miranda was already there. Hadn't she told her? She knew someone who knew someone.
The party was in a brand-new double-story town house. There was a crowd crammed shoulder to shoulder inside. It was filled to the brim with the smell of smoke and sweat and spilled drinks and a riot of voices, conversations rumbling and punctuated by laughter. Word spread quickly of her arrival.
She had time to put her cigarette out and her bottle down before Miranda grabbed her and they waltzed wildly around the living room. People jumped out of the way and clapped and wolf-whistled. They looked at each other while they spun and everything was forgiven. Beth's blond hair fanned out behind her. Her little canvas backpack was thrown into the corner, her black flip-flops beside it.
She drank wine coolers that weren't hers. She drank them quickly because she had no buzz. A man who played A Grade football poured her a Southern Comfort and then another. He was a big man. An eighteen-year-old built like a giant. He smiled at her while she drank. He rubbed his hand up and down her thin arm.
“I heard you give good head,” he said to her.
She didn't answer but moved away from him then. She went downstairs in the cement courtyard. Cigarette butts rained like fireflies from the balcony above. Finally Miranda came and found her with her head between her knees.
“Do you want to go home?” Miranda asked.
“No,” she said.
Beth wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“Do you ever get so drunk that you forget your own name?”
“No,” said Miranda.
“And then when you remember it, it's like you can't believe that's what you're called. You say my name, my name, I never knew that was my name.”
She pulled herself together, sat up straighter, and tucked her hair behind her ears.
“What are you talking about?” said Miranda, laughing.
“I dunno,” Beth said.
The little balcony led off from the dining room upstairs. There were a lot of people standing on it. Beth had washed her face. She moved through the crowd. She hoisted herself up onto the railing and sat there with one arm around the corner post. A wind had sprung up suddenly. It played tricks with her hair, caused the waves to twist around her face and over her shoulders like a glowing river.
It was Miranda who lit her cigarette. Beth removed her arm from the post to cup her hands around the lighter. She lost her balance and began to fall. Miranda grabbed her by the arm.
She pulled her off the rail into the crowd who had raised their arms toward her in unison. The crowd breathed deeply, together.
Someone called, “Taxi.”
“You scared the shit out of me,” said Miranda.
“Don't be scared,” said Beth.
They brought their heads very close together.
“I didn't know what to do,” Miranda whispered.
“Don't worry,” said Beth.
“I was scared they'd do it to me.”
“It's all finished now.”
When she was leaving Miranda ran out after her.
“Where are you going?” she shouted.
Beth was standing on the edge of the long straight road with her bike beside her. A giant desert moon was rising. The wet earth sang to the sky. The stacks shouted their plumes of smoke straight up to heaven. The streetlights bowed their heads before her. She felt very calm.
“I want to see something,” she said.
THERE IS SOMETHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE GIRL WHO FELL, SOMETHING MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE FALL ITSELF. You should forget that last and most spectacular souvenir of herself.
After the party she went down the streets looking for something. She rode past the cemetery with the quartz graves gleaming in the dark, she rode past the river that was just beginning to run, she rode past Nanna's small flat looking out into the desert.
She turned into Dardanelles Court, where all the poincianas reached out to each other across the cul-de-sac and the moon watched her through the leaves.
Marshall Murray saw her from the bedroom window. He was rolling Arthur on his side so he wouldn't choke on his own vomit. He saw her go past on her bike. He thought, for a moment, the air around her was surrounded by light. Frieda Schmidt saw her too. It took her breath away. The girl was trailing cigarette smoke and a glow. She put a hand to her heart, which ached.
The O'Malley house was all in darkness but inside, in the silence, lying side by side, Eva and Joseph heard the wind pick up and the sound of bicycle tires on pavement. Philippa Irwin woke from a dream where she was speaking in slow steady sentences without stammering. She opened the window. She smelled the rain and heard the singing night and smelled green-apple shampoo.
Beth rode past our house.
I was sleeping.
I did not see her go.
I WAS AT SCHOOL WHEN THE POLICEMEN CAME TO THE HOUSE. It was ten o'clock in the morning. I was sitting in my chair with my arms crossed waiting for Mrs. Bridges-Lamb to speak. She surveyed us with her glasses on and then she tried it with her glasses off.
“I want you to listen very carefully to what I have to say,” she said.
She turned her back to us and wrote in large neat letters FRACTIONS.
“Fractions,” she said, “are a very important part of life.”
She put one of the ends of her glasses into her mouth and watched us.
“I believe that in the last few weeks none of you, yes, not one of you, has been taking fractions seriously at all.”
The policemen were opening the gate and walking up the front steps onto the patio and knocking on the metal border of the screen door while Mrs. Bridges-Lamb drew the large cake again. She was dividing the cake up into pieces.
It was Mum who came to the door because Dad was on night shift and was asleep. When she came to the door and saw the two policemen she let out a small cry.
“What's wrong?” she asked.
“Is it Mrs. Day?” said one of the officers, who was very thin, holding his hat in shaking hands. The other, who was stockier, stood silently chewing on his bottom lip.
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Mrs. Bridges-Lamb asked me what fraction of the cake I would have eaten if it was divided into six and I ate two pieces.
“Two-sixths,” I said.
“And what if you ate three pieces?”
“Three-sixths.”
“And what does three-sixths equal?”
I looked at her blankly. She put her glasses on and sighed.
“Yes,” said Mum. She was Mrs. Day.
“Can we come in, Mrs. Day?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
She had been vacuuming in the living room. The two officers stepped over the vacuum cleaner. They stood looking at Mum with their hats in their hands. Mum held her hand over her mouth.
“Is your husband here, Mrs. Day?” asked the thin officer.
“Yes,” said Mum. “He's asleep.”
“I think you should wake him up,” said the other.
“What's happened?” shouted Mum. It was a three-quarter shout, one-quarter wail.
“I think you should wake Mr. Day,” said the thin officer.
His hat shook violently in his hands but his voice stayed calm. He looked very young.
“Jim,” screamed Mum down the hallway. She staggered toward the bedroom door.
Dad came out with only his undies on. They were red. His beer belly hung over them. When he saw the policemen at the end of the hallway he said sweet Jesus and went back into the bedroom and pulled on his shorts.
“What's going on?” he shouted.
Mum stood at the door with her hand over her mouth and didn't answer him.
“I'm very sorry,” said the thin officer when Mum and Dad stood opposite them in the living room. The stockier officer motioned them to sit but they kept standing.
“There has been an accident and your daughter has died.”
“What?” said Dad.
He had never heard anything so improbable.
“Which daughter?” screamed Mum.
“I'm sorry,” said the thin officer, and he held out Beth's school ID. “Elizabeth Jane Day.”
“No,” said Mum.
She collapsed against Dad, who half dragged, half carried her to the sofa.
“How?” said Dad. “What do you mean?”
“Mr. Day,” said the thin officer, “it appears she has fallen.”
After little lunch we had to sit very quietly and think about taking fractions seriously. How would we ever understand percentages if we couldn't do simple fractions? How would we function in society if we didn't know a half from a quarter? How could we even begin to think that we could move to grade 6 if we didn't know the difference between a numerator and a denominator?
In the silence I started off with the numerator and denominator. The numerator sat on top of the denominator, didn't it? Like a monkey on a man's back? Or was it the other way round?
“I hope you are all thinking about fractions,” said Mrs. Bridges-Lamb in a menacing voice from her desk.
In the silence I heard footsteps coming from a long way away. They started somewhere near the headmaster's office and echoed on the wooden floorboards of the veranda. As they drew closer the classroom louvers began to rattle. It sounded like an army marching toward us.
“What's going on?” said Mrs. Bridges-Lamb to herself and to us in a warning voice. “Keep thinking.”
The footsteps turned the bend onto our grade 5 veranda. I looked up from my thinking and saw first the headmaster, Mr. Kilburn, flanked by a thin policeman and then my father and Danielle.
Dad looked in through the louvers at me. I had never seen the type of expression he wore on his face before. It looked like a mixture of sadness and pain but then when I had been summoned from my seat to the door and I was standing in front of him he broke out into laughter. It was a terrible laughter, it lasted only a few seconds, three loud hiccuping guffaws that cascaded into sobs. Dad grabbed me by the top of my arms and shook me without saying a word. Then he placed me beside Danielle and commenced the march back down the veranda. As I passed the louvers to my class I looked inside and saw thirty faces, white, slack-mouthed, sweaty, staring back at me.
Halfway down the veranda Danielle took my hand.
It was a lady named Mrs. Lee, who collected bottles for recycling and lived in a half-falling-down house, who found her. Our mother had talked about Mrs. Lee before because she used her as an example of how lucky we were. She said what if you had to live in a house like Mrs. Lee's house and I was your mother but I had to collect bottles to find money to feed you? Children still starve, you know, she said. She didn't know then that Mrs. Lee would find Beth in among the broken glass and cigarette butts at the base of the water tower.
She was lying on her back. Arms stretched behind her head. There was nothing in the day to suggest such a deviation from the norm. The sky was pale blue with clouds streaming like a running lady's hair. The wind rolled the yellow grass over all along the sides of the hill. The sound of trucks spilled off the highway and into the streets. The ticking witch ticked slowly in her pipe. Mrs. Lee dropped her bags and a hundred glass bottles rolled away, in a fountain, down the hill.
Mrs. O'Malley was on her patio when our car turned into Dardanelles Court. When I turned to face her she only nodded at me. The cicadas were singing and singing and singing, one-noted, one-worded, the double drummers drumming and the green whizzers hissing. The one word sounded like “please.” The whole world was falling down.
I unstitched all of my embroidered daisies. The ones from school and the ones I had made with Nanna. I unstitched them until my fingers bled.
Our mother screamed and screamed and screamed. She screamed in circles, finishing where she began. She screamed long panting screams as though she were giving birth. Aunty Cheryl pulled us away from the bedroom door.
Nanna bashed the Bible against her forehead until a red mark appeared and then the beginning of a bruise and when Dad tried to take the book from her hands she spoke in her other language like a banshee. The phone rang and rang and rang.
When night came I could not stop shaking. Every part of me shook. My teeth shook in my gums. My hair shook on my head. My fingers shook against the cup.
I shook in my bed when Danielle placed me under the sheets. She tried to hold my arms down to stop me. We didn't say a word to each other at all. We talked to each other with our eyes like wild animals.
Danielle took the bedspread off her bed and put it on top of me. She put my dressing gown over the blanket and then her dressing gown. She climbed in beside me and put her arms around me. She held on to me tight to stop the shaking.
I shook violently, thrashing under the blankets, but Danielle kept holding me. It seemed like hours before I stopped shaking. I cried tears onto her hand, which was beneath my head. She cried tears into my hair.
In the house there was a feeling like a trapped bird beating its wings against a cage that remained until the shaking subsided and the cool outflowing of tears began. Then the feeling of the trapped bird disappeared. I may have slept. Danielle moved apart from me. There was no noise in the house.
In Dardanelles Court the wind breathed against the windows and rattled the doors. In the blue night fat-bellied clouds rolled across the sky. The moon rose and gazed down on the town. A willy-willy danced along the street.
There was no thunder. No lightning. The sky held in its storm belly with a moon-shaped buckle.
Marshall Murray woke.
Lord, he said.
He sat up with his old bones sawing against each other. He staggered to Arthur's door but his bed was empty. He found him in the living room, with the bottle beside him on its side. The TV hissed. The wind tapped and whispered at the windows.
He turned on his bedroom light and drew an old suitcase out of his cupboard. He threw in some clothes. He pulled on his best jeans and a good shirt, reached into the dark of the kitchen for his hat on the wall, the keys on the bench. The car sprang to life beneath him, one turn of the key. He did not check the oil or water; there was no time
.
Joseph O'Malley woke with the wind. Eva opened her eyes at the very same time. He felt for her hand. The night shivered against the house.
They turned to each other.
He looked at her eyes. She looked at his eyes.
He touched her cheek. She touched his cheek in return.
“It was not our fault,” she said.
“It was not our fault,” he said.
“Do you know how much I loved her?” she wept.
“We loved her, we loved her,” he wept in return.
The house rattled and jittered and creaked. The roof threatened to go.
Frieda Schmidt held apart the blinds with two fingers. Her heart ached. Her skin ached. She rearranged the knives in the knife block, blew away imaginary crumbs from their tips. How would she go on? She dressed herself.
She glimpsed herself naked in the mirror.
She was pale-stone-colored. She moved stiffly. She went to lace up her shoes but instead carried them to the front door, where she threw them into the night. The power had gone off. From the emergency drawer she took a candle and lit it. She wanted to light them everywhere. She wanted to torch the house. Make one giant candle. She left the house shoeless without combing her hair.
She passed the place where the girl had fallen and slept beneath the tree, candle flame flickering in her hand.
She banged on the door until Mrs. O'Malley came stumbling in her nightgown.
“I'm so lonely,” Frieda Schmidt said.
It was ferocious, her sorrow. She held her hand to her mouth, apologized.
But Mrs. O'Malley stretched out her hand.
“Come in,” she said. “Come in, come in. Don't stand outside.”
Monica Irwin woke to the sound. She found her sister sitting on the edge of her bed.
“What is it, Pippa?” she asked.
“Something's happened.”
In the dimness they could hear their parents breathing side by side in the next room; they hadn't woken. Their father, with all the answers, hadn't heard a thing. Philippa slid the window open quietly and wave after wave of storm-wet air entered the room. Monica watched her sister's hair lifting with each gust.
