We’re winding up the hose in the soaked garden when Joy chimes me in from her place next door.
“What’s that noise?” asks Patricia.
“Oh, they’re Joy’s wind chimes—she must want me for something. Lately she’s taken to blowing the chimes with her fireplace bellows whenever she wants me to come over to her at Number 25.”
“That’s a lovely sound,” says Patricia. “I wouldn’t mind sleeping to that.”
Popping through the brown gate, we see Joy on the other side, waiting with the bellows in her hands and a rosy flush across her cheeks.
“There you are, my darlings! Are you having the most scrumptious time together?”
We agree that we are, and Joy invites us inside for sweeties and lemon myrtle tea.
I pick the best leaves off Joy’s lemon myrtle tree, and while I’m heating the teapot, Joy says to Patricia: “I was at Wendy’s today, pet, and your mother sent some things home with me to give to you. She thought you might need some fresh clothes and your shampoo.”
Patricia seems to take that in her stride, but I am completely confused.
Why was Patricia’s mother at Whisky Wendy’s? And why would Patricia’s clothes be at Whisky Wendy’s house? I think about it on and off for the rest of the day.
Settling in for another night of head-to-toe, I ask Patricia: “When you said you were staying in Glebe, did you mean you were staying at Whisky Wendy’s place?”
“Well, yeah, at Wendy’s place. Where did you think we were staying?”
I hadn’t really thought about it, I tell her.
“When we got off the train from Armidale, we didn’t have anywhere else to stay, so we just headed to Wendy’s and bunked down there.”
“Is she your other nana?” I ask, puzzled. I didn’t even know that Patricia knew Wendy.
“Nah, I don’t have another nana,” Patricia says, as though there are obvious things I simply don’t get. “Wendy’s just friends with my mum; she’s friends with lots of people. Mum calls her a good stick. She lets women—and their kids—stay at her place, especially if they have to get away quick smart and have nowhere to go.
“Yeah, she’s great, Wendy, and she’s pretty gutsy too for someone who’s old.” Patricia is arranging the sheet on the bed so that we have the same amount at both ends.
“This all-frazzled-up woman arrived in the middle of the night, the first night we were there, and her two little kids. You should have seen them: they were both covered in chicken pox. They slept in the room with us, on a mattress on the floor. Both of them were itching and whimpering all through the night. Wendy was up putting aloe vera gel on their sores when their dad came banging on the door, drunk as a skunk.
“Through the blind, Wendy told him to bugger off. She had a cricket bat in her hand, and I tell you what, she looked ready to swing it. He was completely gutless, just yelled out some swear words and staggered off up the path.”
I’ve never seen a drunk-as-a-skunk man before, or kids covered in chicken pox, or a gutsy old lady telling someone to bugger off. It keeps me awake for a while, but eventually I drift off to sleep dreaming of Wendy caring for kids with her cooled aloe vera gel and keeping watch at the window, cricket bat at the ready.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Hey, do you want to go to St. Brigid’s now that it’s empty?” says Patricia with a burst of enthusiasm while packing away the Monopoly board. “We can carve our initials high into a branch of the mulberry tree.”
Patricia’s suggestions always seem clever and completely compulsory. I hadn’t thought about what the school might be like all emptied out, without the jiggling energy of the kids and the responding restraint of the teachers. I wouldn’t mind seeing that—with Patricia—now that we’ve both left St. Brigid’s and before she goes back to Armidale.
There are no cold cuts in the kitchen, so we collect some eggs and I cook them with little soldiers of buttered toast, and that impresses Patricia no end. We make enough noise in the backyard with a hiding game to reassure Matilde, who is busy at her machine, that we’re occupied. Then after two-hundred-apple-pie we sneak down the side path and set off to make our mark on the mulberry tree.
Patricia scrambles up the trunk first. She grabs at branches just beyond reach with one hand, then the other, then the first again, until the sight of her is almost lost in the white-green leaves of the mulberry tree. She’s impossibly high. I think I’ll just watch her from down here on the ground.
“Come on, Ally, join me up here at the top. It’s a great view.” Patricia’s voice is encouraging. “Don’t be scared—you’re able, remember? You stood up on that surfboard and you rode those waves…you can climb a bloody tree.”
But I am scared. Stuck-to-the-ground scared.
“Ally, I’m telling you, if you can ride a wave, you can climb a tree.”
And so with Patricia calling me up, telling me I can do it, her confidence that doing one brave thing means that I can do another becomes my mantra.
If I can ride a wave, I can climb a tree, climb a tree, climb a tree
Ride a wave, climb a tree
Climb a tree
A little way into my climb the branches begin to cooperate, and after a few reaches they take shape to form a spiral staircase. They aren’t so much taking me away from the ground now as bringing me up toward the sky.
If I can ride a wave, I can climb a tree, climb a tree, climb a tree
Patricia’s legs are dangling above my head, looking loose and free.
Mine are trembling beneath me but somehow managing to find their footing.
If I can ride a wave, I can climb a tree, climb a tree, climb a tree
“Keep on coming, Ally, you’re almost there.”
My saliva is frothy and foamy and slightly metallic.
If I can ride a wave I can climb a tree, climb a tree, climb a tree
And I arrive….
I’m here….
I’m at the top of the mulberry tree with Patricia.
“You made it, Ally! I knew you could do it.”
We sit straddling the same branch, and Patricia holds me by the tips of my elbow wings: two friends roosting.
We look down on the lunch benches below and the barely-there hopscotch chalk markings on the asphalt like astronauts with a new view of the world.
Patricia produces a key from her pocket, a key she tells me is from the old flat that she and her mum had to run away from when her fake dad went on that last bender. She starts carving our initials into the bark so that the mulberry tree will never forget us.
“Do you have a middle name, Ally?”
“Yep, I do. It’s Belinda.”
“Hey, that’s a cool name…Belinda. Yeah, I like it—Belinda really suits you. Mine is Faith.”
PFO + ABE is scratched into the tree, sealing memories of the friendship we forged at St. Brigid’s and grafting us to one another forever.
Patricia leaves out L for Liberata, my Confirmation name, but I don’t mention that. Since she missed the day altogether, she probably doesn’t have a Confirmation name. Anyway, it looks better balanced with three letters each.
“It’s cool up here,” she says, breathing in.
“Yeah…it is…cool.” I breathe out. And now, feeling steadier, I get an idea.
“Let’s take some of these mulberry leaves back for Joy’s silkworms,” I say, snapping off twigs and sticking the woody ends into my waistband. “You’ll really like Joy’s silkworms—she breeds them to feed to Simone de Beauvoir.” Patricia’s immediately on board and starts snapping too.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Back at Number 23 I take a tray of tea and honey toast in to Matilde at her Singer. It keeps her energy up and her curiosity down about what we might be up to. Afterward Patricia an
d I slip over to Number 25 so I can show her the silkworms in Joy’s glasshouse. It’s early afternoon and stinking hot, so Joy is sure to be having a rest on her chaise longue under the fan in the front room.
Inside the glasshouse to the left of the door is a lineup of shoeboxes with holes in their lids; all are full of wriggling silkworms. The worms are about to become fatter and juicier after their feast of mulberry leaves. Simone de Beauvoir will be well fed, and Joy will be delighted.
“What are these?” Patricia asks, looking curiously at the neat rows of little glass bottles on the shelves above the bench.
“Oh, they’re Joy’s emotions,” I tell her, realizing for the first time that that sounds a bit weird.
“Her emotions? What do you mean her emotions?”
“Well, Joy feels things, you know, down deep, she feels things in her bones and in her waters, and so she does quite a bit of crying.” Patricia is looking completely fascinated so I keep going. “She cries when she’s sad, but also when she’s really happy. Sometimes she cries when she sees something astonishing or just because she realizes something for the very first time. And when she cries, she catches the tears running down her cheek with these little glass bottles…see, like this.” I take a fresh bottle from Joy’s carved storage chest and press it against my cheek below the corner of my eye.
“Then she corks the bottle and labels it and keeps them all here in the glasshouse. She’s done it forever. I help her go through them and dust them every now and again, and always on my birthday.”
“Jeez, Ally, your nanas are really the chalk and the cheese.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Well, they’re both really cool, I like them both—a lot—but they are deadset totally different. Joy’s done enough bloody crying here in these little glass bottles to fill an entire ocean, but I can’t imagine that Matilde would ever cry. Even if you cut off her leg, she wouldn’t cry. She’d be too busy getting up and getting on with things.”
Patricia is right. She says things out loud that I’ve known forever inside.
“And what’s in that one down there?” Patricia asks, pointing at the cupboard beneath the sink where Joy prepares the lettuces for Simone.
“I don’t know. We’ve never gone through that cupboard.”
“It’s a bit sticky.” Patricia is pulling hard at the small handle. “It seems stuck closed,” she says, getting out her key. Working at the door, Patricia leans in, using all her strength to lever it open with the key. I’m not so sure she should be trying to get into that cupboard, but suddenly the door flies open and hits the wall next to it with a bang.
“Look, there’s a whole lot more glass bottles down here…behind these rags. I don’t think she’s been dusting these ones; they’re filthy dirty.”
Patricia starts bringing them out, one at a time, carefully placing them on the bench.
We count them out loud, thirty-two altogether. All the same size and all with similar labels. But they’re grimy and smudged and difficult to read. I join Patricia in spitting at them, and we wipe away the dust with the bottoms of our shorts. Now we can see that they all say the same thing.
BLAMED FOR BELINDA
Patricia stops speaking.
I stop breathing.
That part of my heart that wishes you can un-see something so you can keep on not knowing makes me want to put all the bottles back—quickly—and shut the cupboard door and stick it stuck forever.
“Was your mum called Belinda?” whispers Patricia. “Ally?” She brings her forehead gently against mine. “You can tell me. Was that her name?”
“I think so,” I squeeze out with held-in old air.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Patricia has gone back to Armidale, Rick has gone surfing up the coast, and with Christmas behind us I have little to do but wait out the long January days before I start at my new school. Everything is nudging on different, and that part of my heart that pumps out me is feeling slightly offbeat. At some point, hard to pin down precisely, between the October long weekend last year and New Year’s Day just gone, even the tilt of our street seems to have changed.
The neighborhood kids have moved from playing table tennis in the Lucky Listers’ rumpus room and Marco Polo in their pool to hanging out as a gang in their garage, sometimes with the door open but mostly with it closed and the sound of Deep Purple vibrating its wooden panels and hot silver handle. There’s plenty of space in the garage now because Mr. Lister’s station wagon is never parked there anymore. The Lucky Listers’ front lawn has grown prickly weeds, and their pool has gone a murky green-brown color.
On the occasions I used to make it into the Listers’ rumpus room on Fridays after school, I never felt altogether comfortable there. But, if I flattened out into the thin space between an outline and a shadow, no one asked me to leave. And it felt better being there and watching than just wishing I were there and wondering. Now I’m pretty sure that Lucinda, her older brother Mark and the teenagers they hang around with wouldn’t want me with them in the garage in any shape or form. But today as I’m walking home from Dave’s Mixed Business and Milk Bar with table salt and vinegar for Matilde’s pickling, the garage door is open, and Lucinda waves at me and invites me in. Even though the two-year age gap separating us has remained the same, the gulf between us has opened up to become a mile wide.
The garage door goes down behind me, and Lucinda studies me closely and lights up a cigarette. She has a holiday job at Miss Fashion so she has money, and with that money—she tells me—she buys Alpine Lights. With the Alpine Lights she does the drawback, the dragon and double smoke rings while pimply Geoff Alderman, who lives a few streets away, announces each one as though it were a gymnastic display. After the smoke rings she chews gum—with big, slow rhythmic movements—freshening her breath and keeping all the boys in the garage focused on her mouth. Lucinda, it seems, knows the power of her pout and the clout of her curves.
“So, Ally, I hear you got into Sydney Girls High,” she exhales.
I tell her I did.
“Yeah, well…good for you…I didn’t know you were brainy!” Lucinda is looking at her chipped painted fingernails between drags. “You know that’s where I go.”
I tell her I do, that I’ve seen her in the uniform and actually I didn’t know she was brainy either. That seems to prickle the gang but not to bother Lucinda.
“So I’ll be there too, but I won’t be able to talk to you at school, or look at you, because, you know, I’ll be a third former and you’ll be a First-Form Dropkick. You should just act like I’m invisible to you. But if there’s anything you need to know before you start, if the garage door’s up, you can come in. I’ll sort you out.” Lucinda is blowing smoke from her nose to the side of my left ear.
I say, “Yeah, that’s all right, I get it, I won’t go anywhere near you at school, or look at you either. And by the way, thanks.” Lucinda gestures to Geoff, who pushes up the garage door.
I back out, trying to look like I don’t need sorting out even though I’m not wearing a tube top, puka shells or a pair of velvet slaps on my feet like all the other girls smoking with Lucinda in the garage. Clutching the bag with the table salt and vinegar, I head home to Number 23, hoping that Matilde doesn’t get a whiff of the Alpine Lights. If she ever thought I’d been smoking, she’d most certainly set me on fire.
Coming up our path, I realize I should have asked Lucinda if she had any old uniforms that she’d outgrown. When the list arrived last week with everything I needed for high school, Matilde shook her head and ticked her tongue, horrified at the cost of the two school tunics, blouses, blazer and the sports uniform and bloomers. She said she refused to pay such ridiculous prices and that instead she’ll be running up all of mine on her machine.
I’ll be starting high school invisible to Lucinda, badly needing sorting out and looking complet
ely homemade.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The twenty-eighth of January 1975 is finally here, and I’m ready for my first-ever day at Sydney Girls High School.
Sort of.
Joy has spent the past week filling an orange glass bottle labeled ADJUSTING TO CHANGE that she’s given to me in a small velvet box. And there’s another aqua-blue one—LAUNCHING LIBERATA—that she’s placed on the shelf with the rest of her emotions.
Outwardly I’m all set to go—early, thanks to Matilde’s planning and packing, sewing and scheduling.
Inwardly I’m not so sure. What if I get lost at the big high school campus or behave like a First-Form Dropkick—without even realizing? What if I don’t have anyone to sit with in class or make any friends? Suddenly I’m wishing I was going back to St. Brigid’s: the Popular Group was mean and annoying, but at least I knew what to expect every day.
During the holidays Matilde showed me the way to the bus stop. The bus takes the girls directly to their gate and the boys to theirs. So at least I’m feeling okay about that first part of the trip. But now, as I head out the door, Matilde is closing it behind us and insisting on coming too: “Just to make sure you aren’t confused about where to get on, Allegra.”
I wasn’t confused in the slightest, but I’m certainly embarrassed now, especially because Lucinda Lister is walking only slightly ahead. Luckily we had that conversation in her garage about the importance of being invisible.
The bus pulls up with piles of kids hanging out all the windows, hollering, wolf-whistling and waving to their waiting friends. One boy squirts a water pistol out the back door at a bunch of ducking girls, who giggle as they get on.
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