by Olga Masters
We walked down the track crushed together, me thinking already of looking back on this wonderful change of events, but worried about my bony frame not responding to her embrace.
She let go of me near the bank and stepping forward a pace or two began to take off her clothes.
One piece after another.
She lifted her dress and petticoat over her head and cast them onto the branch of a sapling gum. Her hands came around behind her unhooking her brassiere which was something I dreamed of wearing one day and threw it after her other things. When she bent and raised one leg to take off her pants I thought she looked like a young tree. Not a tree everyone would say was beautiful but a tree you would look at more than once.
She jumped into the water ducking down till it covered her to the neck which she swung around to look at me.
“Oh, you should come in, darlink!” she said. She lifted both her arms and the water as if reluctant to let go of her flowed off them.
“Watch, darlink,” she said and swam, flicking her face from side to side, churning up the water with her white legs. She laughed when she reached the other bank so quickly because the hole was so small.
She sat on a half submerged log and lifting handfuls of mud rubbed it into her thighs.
“Very healthy, darlink,” she said without looking at my shocked face.
She rubbed it on her arms and shoulders and it ran in little grey dollops between her breasts.
Then she plunged in and swam across to me. She came up beside me slipping a bit and laughing.
“That was wonderful, darlink,” she said a little wistfully though, as if she doubted she would ever do it again.
The bush was quiet, so silent you could hear your own breath until a bird called and Clarice jumped a little.
“That’s a whip bird,” I said hearing it again a little further away, the sound of a whip lashed in the air.
“Oh darlink, you are so clever,” she said and began to get dressed.
No one at home noticed I’d been away too long. My father was dawdling over afternoon tea just before milking and my mother bustling about made a clicking noise with her tongue every time a cow bellowed.
“It’s no life for a girl,” my father said referring to Clarice and making me jump nervously as if there was a way of detecting what we’d been up to.
“She took it on herself,” said my mother, prodding at some corned beef in a saucepan on the stove.
“I’ll bet they never let on to her about old lolly legs,” said my father slapping away almost savagely with his tongue on his cigarette paper. “Landing a young girl into that! They’ll expect her to wait on that old sponger before too long.”
He put his tobacco away. “I’ll bet Jack Patterson hardly says a word to her from one week’s end to the next.” He stared at his smoke. “Let alone anything else.”
My mother straightened up from the stove. Her sweaty hair was spikey around her red face which wore a pinched and anxious expression, perhaps because of the late start on the milking. She crushed her old yard hat on.
“I’ll go and start,” she said.
My father smoked on for a minute or two then got up and looked around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time.
He reached for his yard hat and put it on.
“What do you think of Clarice?” he said.
I laid my face on my knees to hide my guilt.
“She’s beautiful,” I said.
When he stomped past me sitting on the step he kept quite clear to avoid stepping on me.
I got a chance to go and see Clarice one day in the Christmas holidays when my mother went into Berrigo to buy fruit for the Christmas cake and cordial essence.
Clarice put her arm around me standing at the window watching Elsie Patterson at the clothesline.
Elsie was football shaped under her apron and she carefully unpegged shirts and dresses, turning them around and pegging them again. She took the sides of towels and tea towels between her hands and stretched them even.
“Why does she do that, darlink?” Clarice asked me.
Berrigo women were proud of their wash, but I found this hard to explain to Clarice.
She laughed merrily when we turned away. “People are so funny, aren’t they darlink?”
She suggested going for a swim because the day was what my mother called a roaster.
This time she took off all her underwear at home leaving her thin dress showing her shape.
“Oh, darlink!” she said when I looked away.
I followed her round bottom with a couple of lovely little dents in it down to the waterhole.
The bush was not as quiet as before. Someone is about, I thought with a bush child’s instinct for such things.
“I’ll go and watch in case someone comes,” I said, and she threw a handful of water at me for my foolishness.
I ran a little way up the track and when I lifted my head there shielded by some saplings astride his horse was my father.
I stopped so close the flesh of the horse’s chest quivered near my eyes.
“Don’t go any further,” I said. “Clarice is swimming.”
My father jumped off the horse and tied the bridle to a tree.
“Go on home,” he said. But I didn’t move.
“Go on!” he said and I moved off too slowly. He picked up a piece of chunky wood and threw it.
The horse plunged and the wood glanced off my arm as I ran.
At home I beat at the fire in the stove with the poker and put the kettle over the heat relieved when it started to sing.
I went to the kitchen door and my mother was coming down the track from the road. I heard Tingle’s bus which went in and out of Berrigo every day go whining along the main road after dropping her off.
She had both arms held away from her body with parcels hanging from them.
I went to meet her not looking at her face but seeing it all the same red under the grey coloured straw hat with the bunch of violets on the brim. She had had the hat a long time.
String from the parcels was wound around her fingers and it was hard to free them.
“Be careful!” she said, hot and angry. “Don’t drop that one!”
When she was inside and saw the fire going and the kettle near the boil she spoke more gently.
“It’s a shaving mug,” she said, hiding the little parcel in the back of the dresser. “For your father for Christmas.”
YOU’LL LIKE IT THERE
The child came into the room bending her body towards the old woman in bed. The room was actually the child’s and the old woman’s, but the latter’s illness made it necessary for the child to sleep on the lounge.
The lounge was the old-fashioned kind eventually to be discarded and the sloping back caused the child to wake up when she turned over and hit her face against it.
She dreamed once she was being crushed by a hill caving in but she did not tell her mother because she knew what the reaction would be.
“Hear that, Barry!” the mother would have said to her husband, the old woman’s son. “She can’t get a proper night’s rest. She needs her own bed!”
Her husband would twitch his body, indicating he had heard (and agreed) and would pull his face in, losing more of his chin, of which he had very little. He was a slight man with skin and hair of a washed-out colour, like separated milk.
“Barry looks like the milk at that factory where he works,” the old woman often said to herself. “Drained of all its strength.”
So the child very quietly would fold her blanket and sheet each morning and put them under the loose cushions on the lounge and put her nightdress in a drawer in her room.
She had the nightdress now to put away before she left for school.
“Can I bring you anything, Granma?” she said.
The old woman moved her head on the pillow. The bedclothes were tight across her except for a little hollow where her mouth was. The child moved closer and peered into the hollo
w to judge better how ill the old woman was.
“Granma?” said the child.
“Nothing,” the old woman said. “I’ll be better soon and you can come back to your own little bed again. I only put the light on twice last night.”
“Only twice!” the child marvelled as if she were the adult and the old woman the child.
“Once to take a pill, and once for a drink of water. I knocked the glass over, but it dried up I think. Take a little look and see if it dried up, will you?” The old woman’s whispering voice lost its strength, like wind passing through dried grass.
The child felt the table and moved a package containing the old woman’s pension card, and covered some dampness with it.
“Are you going to school now?” the old woman said. The child was in her check dress with her hair newly done and the ribbons pulling it upwards from her ears so it was obvious she was.
But the two talked to each other this way.
“You’ve got your brown cardigan on, Granma,” the child would say. The old woman’s frame had shrunk since she bought the cardigan ten years before, and wearing it now she had the appearance of a peg doll dressed in something too big for it.
“Ah, stupid!” the child’s brother would say, lunging out a leg and kicking her, and the mother’s face would tighten and her eyes flash agreeing that she was.
Embarrassed the child would raise her rump higher and lower her head over her book on the floor and colour in with more vigour. The old woman’s hand crunched on her knee would want to reach out and touch the child’s hair.
Now the old woman wanted to take hold of the child’s hand hanging loose with the nightdress under one arm.
But her own arms were bound to her sides in bed.
The way she makes a bed, the old woman thought shutting her eyes against a picture of her daughter-in-law stretching the tugging and tightening the covers, so the old woman had to wriggle her way into bed leaving her nightdress well above her waist.
“Granma?” the child said again.
“Nothing,” whispered the old woman and struggled in her mind to find something to share with the child. Without looking she knew the bright blue of the child’s eyes would be distinct from the white.
“Put your nightie away,” the old woman said glad to have thought of that.
The child was crunching it into a drawer when the mother came into the room.
“Don’t do it that way!” she cried. “Don’t squash and wrinkle up everything!” She snatched up the nightie, rearranged the other clothing, and folding the nightie flat laid it down one end. She slammed the drawer shut going tch-tch with her tongue as if to say here was something more disrupting the place.
She lingered at the dressing table, changing expression at the sight of herself in the mirror. Few would guess to look at her that she worked on a delicatessen counter, discarding her outdoor clothing when she arrived at work for a white overall and cap. She wore a long black skirt that swished about the top of her black boots, an imitation fur jacket and cap to match. Her hair had a red rinse which she was sure no one detected, and it was cut in such a way two ends lay in spikes on her cheeks, matching her spikey fringe.
She turned her head admiring her profile but frowned when her eyes met the eyes of the old woman reflected in the glass.
She can’t escape me, the old woman thought turning away.
“Get your schoolcase and things,” the mother said to the child, not looking at her but pinching and plucking her coat about the shoulders and stroking and twisting the hair spikes.
“Well, go on,” she said with irritation, and the child scuttled ahead of her out of the room.
“I’ll shut this,” the mother said loudly as if the old woman was deaf.
The child’s eyes, like a piece of blue sky, showed briefly in the crack before the door closed with a snap.
The old woman heard the mother’s boots and the child’s school shoes tap down the steps and quicken on the footpath then lost in the noise of the traffic.
Peace fell on the old woman’s face like pale sun but there was no sun. She ran her tongue inside her dry mouth.
“I’ll get up and move around and get my sweat going,” she said feeling an itch of her dry skin.
The wardrobe door was closed on her dressing gown. Her daughter-in-law could not bear the sight of anything scattered on the floors so her slippers were out of sight too.
“Bugger me. I haven’t got the strength to get them,” she said.
“But I’m not laying here. You rot in bed.”
She got her feet out and swung them above a small bedside mat.
“Japanese rubbish,” she said looking down at it.
She stood up gingerly.
“Weak as a cat,” she whispered, staring at the door, willing it to come closer.
Pins and needles raced up her legs. But she trotted forward and opened the door onto the carpet in the hall. The carpet was an off-white colour put down from earnings at the delicatessen. The daughter-in-law treated it with reverence. Coming home each day her eyes fell on it for marks. Leaving each morning she sometimes took a brush and kneeling in her good clothes brushed the pile upright. Now the old woman wished she could avoid walking on it. She felt so heavy she was sure every footstep would flatten it. But she was so light she wafted across it like thistledown in her billowing flannelette nightgown.
In the living room she took hold of two chair arms, turned herself around and sat down.
“Ah,” she said, pleased at the achievement and putting her head back. It rested on one of the daughter-in-law’s cushions and immediately she snapped her head forward. She had heard the daughter-in-law’s boots pummelling the floor that morning as she went through the ritual of straightening mats, fixing cushions and pulling chairs to the angle she wanted them.
The old woman crossed her legs and began to rock a foot. The foot was a purplish brown colour like her leg covered with hundreds of little criss cross lines. She thought of the child’s legs as she saw them that morning above her white school socks. Like fawn satin, she thought holding the memory under her shut eyes. She slept a little because she opened her eyes surprised at the sight of the living room furniture.
All those sharp edges, she thought, feeling as if they were cutting her. The daughter-in-law always rubbed fiercely at the edges of tables and chairs with her polishing cloth as if she wanted to turn them into weapons. The old woman remembered the furniture at the old place. There was the fat old sideboard crowded with sepia pictures, the cruet set, water jug and glasses.
“Damn rubbish,” Barry had said for his wife who looked sharp and ferret-like on that last day.
There was a little tapping noise and the old woman opened her eyes. The venetian blind had swung around in a small wind from the window and speared at the air with its slats.
“Those things,” the old woman said with scorn.
“Give me my old red curtains any day.”
She saw them burning in the back yard and Barry walking around throwing sticks and leaves on the fire to make them go faster. One of the tassels had blown away and burned out lying a little away from the fire. She remembered it shaped like a little bell in ashes on the green grass.
“Pretty,” she said, wondering why she hadn’t shown it to the child.
Why hadn’t she? Where was the child that day? Had she been born then? Agitated she rocked her foot harder, plucking through loose ends in her brain to get events in order.
“You went to Hilda straight after the old place was sold,” she said stern with her muddled brain.
She saw them together, two old bandy legged women struggling up a hill in the wind to buy cat food and indigestion powder (Hilda really had cancer and died and it was decided then that the old woman’s two sons should have her turn about for six months).
She saw herself waiting with Barry for a train to take her to Corrimal where she was to spend the first six months with Percy, the other son.
“You�
��ll like it there,” Barry said when a great hiss and puff from the engine had died away.
“You can go and sit on the beach whenever you want to.”
The old woman remembered the wind lifting the sand and flinging it against her face. She saw Percy’s wife making ridges in it with her hands. The two boys blue like skinned rabbits in wet trunks were hunched over sniffing in the cold. All of them were set apart reminding the old woman of gnomes in a garden.
They all looked out to sea as if to find the answers there.
Five months and four days after going to Percy she came to Barry because Percy had been given his holidays (he said) and her time was nearly up anyway.
She saw herself waiting with Percy for the train to Sydney. His wife was already getting the room ready for the younger of the boys.
“You’re only a spit from all the shops,” Percy said. “You’ll like it there.”
She looked down remembering how she stood with only one case. When she went to Hilda she had three. What happened to the other two?
“Bugger me. They must have got lost somewhere,” the old woman said.
She rocked her foot and dozed. She must have dozed because she opened her eyes and Barry was there rolling a cigarette between his blue white fingers. In his job he started at dawn and came home at midday.
Licking the cigarette paper Barry saw a picture crooked and went and straightened it.
“Damn kids,” he said. “Jumpin’ about the way they do. Wreck a place.”
He sat on a chair well forward to smoke.
The old woman with her head forward to avoid touching the cushion was so still she might have been a drawing.
“You still crook?” Barry said.
“Not too bad,” the old woman said.
She rocked her foot and Barry smoked. Then he screwed his rump around to put his tobacco in a back pocket.
“You ought to go into one of them places,” he said.
The old woman halted her rocking foot. She took hold of the two chair arms. She had a vision of a row of beds with grey haired women in them. The floor was a vast slippery sea. She was struggling from one of the beds, made tight like the daughter-in-law’s beds, to look for a lavatory.
