“You have to tell Mrs. Lister, Al…you have to tell her everything you know. It’s a bloody shame you got involved with this…jeeez, Al.” Rick is rubbing his fists along his thighs toward his knees. “I should never have taken you to Wendy’s.”
“It’s not your fault, Rick.”
“Well, maybe not, but that’s not how someone’s going to see it.”
“Who? Matilde?”
“Don’t worry about that now. C’mon, we need to get you across the road to speak with Mrs. Lister.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
All hell has broken loose.
Mrs. Lister listened quietly at first, taking everything in and offering me a second Monte Carlo biscuit as Rick and I sat side by side on the white cane settee in their swirly-yellow-wallpapered sunroom and I coughed up all I knew about Lucinda and Rob’s plans to have the abortion thing. But then, when Rick said, “That about sums it up; we’d better push off,” Mrs. Lister chucked a complete mental, and now she’s following us back across the road to Number 23—Cyclone Tracy at our heels—this time demanding to see Matilde.
“Forbidden to have any contact with my daughter! Really…Really!” Mrs. Lister is wild-eyed and yelling at Matilde, who has come to the door with her apron half off and her mouth fully agape, trying to make sense of the stormy outburst.
“So how do you now explain that your perfect little granddaughter organized for Lucinda to have an abortion? Yes, that’s right—you heard me correctly—an abortion! The hide of her! The hide of you!”
“Now, c’mon, Tracy, that’s stretching the truth a bit….” Rick is working hard to secure things to the ground. “Al didn’t organize an abortion; she was just passing notes between Lucinda and her boyfriend.”
“It was more than that, Rick—you heard it yourself. She organized for Lucinda to stay at some den of iniquity…overnight! Whisky Wendy’s, for the love of God! Hiding my daughter from me, so she could be spirited away, and now she’s gone to Canberra with that imbecile…for an abortion!” Mrs. Lister looks like she’s about to suck up all the tessellated tiles on our front porch, blow off the roof and scatter our garden furniture three streets away. It’s hard to picture Matilde’s expression in the wake of all this: I can’t bring myself to look anywhere near my grandmother’s direction. But no doubt she’s shocked. She’s disgusted—knowing this time for certain that her perfect granddaughter is a Riffraff.
“If she ends up dead like Belinda…Christ Almighty”—Mrs. Lister moves to a Category Five—“your family will have not one but two deaths on their heads!”
The barometric pressure in my heart plunges. For one elongated moment things go strangely calm and my ears feel full of cotton wool. I’m no longer hearing the fury around me; I’m pulled into the eye of the storm. There’s no sound, no gusts, no squalls. But then—bang—I’m surrounded by the eyewall and circled by a ring of severe weather. The cyclone reintensifies, unleashing a lashing for all in its path.
“Go inside, Al. Now…GO!” Rick’s voice breaks through, giving an in-case-of-emergency instruction.
I run to my room, slam the door shut and slide in under my bed.
I want to take cover. I want to take cover here in this dark space forever.
What have I done? Something bad? Is it something very bad? Have I maybe killed Lucinda Lister? Why was Mrs. Lister saying…“dead like Belinda”? What did my family do? How did my mother die? According to Mrs. Lister, that’s on my family’s head….Is it on my head too?
I nudge up against something hard. It’s the box of Mother’s Day stall gifts from the past seven years, sitting under my bed and pretty much forgotten from one year to the next. I’m wishing more than ever that they’d had a destination other than here in the dark collecting dust in a box. I wish they’d been given to an alive mother, unwrapped with a pretty-mum smile and gratefully received with a warm hug. Not kept for a dead mother, a dead mother like mine.
The silver figurine of the mother angel holding a baby is at the top of the box. A Mother’s Love Is Forever. I’m holding it tight and hoping that’s true, but I’m thinking that if the death of my mother is on my head, then I’m no angel, that’s for sure, and maybe there’s no forever either, and I am definitely, completely and utterly unlovable.
“Allegra!” Matilde is back in the house, calling down the corridor and into the kitchen. “Allegra, where are you?”
“Al.” Rick is somewhere out the back. “C’mon, Al, we need to talk.”
They can keep calling all they like. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to listen. I’m staying here forever. I’m better off in the dark.
I move farther under the bed and feel my quilt hanging down on the wall side touching the floor; I loop it up and tuck it under the mattress all the way along and make a tight chenille hammock. I can hear Matilde and Rick both calling out the back now, their voices moving separately from near the chook shed, behind the compost bin and down the side path. I climb into my bed, roll across to the far side and down into my new hiding pouch. It’s dark and suspended between the mattress and the wall. Matilde is still calling out my name, and now she has opened the door of my room and is looking under my bed. I’m invisible. Clutching the mother angel inside the chenille hammock, I can easily imagine what it’s like inside a warm dark womb, yet to be born, a heartbeat other than my own giving me life, keeping me safe until I’m thrust into the world. I’m going to stay here. I’m going to sit out this cyclone, to the point where they’ll be so planet-sized pleased to find me alive that they can’t possibly stay shocked or disgusted. They’ll just go back to loving me in their own weird and separate ways.
The mother angel is warming up; she’s the same temperature as my hand. The mother angel has a pulse. It’s faint but it’s unquestionably there, and I can feel it pressing against my thumb. Some of its beats are short dots, some are long dashes, and now a pattern is emerging. Three short dots, three long dashes, three short dots again. It repeats over and over, again and again.
Matilde’s voice is coming from the strangest direction now….Her voice is coming from the other side of the fence, in at Number 25. For the first time in my whole life Matilde has actually gone through the brown gate and is talking very loudly to Joy:
At Joy.
“Well, if she’s not here, where could she be? It’s nine-thirty at night, and she is nowhere in the house or anywhere out the back; she has disappeared. And Joy…I blame you! Yes, I do, you! It is you and your crazy friends who have filled her head with all this women’s-liberation nonsense and deceit and running away from home….You have put Allegra in danger.”
“I don’t know what on earth you are talking about, Matilde. I would never put Ally in danger.” Joy is clearly caught by surprise at this accusation but is firm with Matilde.
“Yes, Joy. Yes, once again you have done it—you have pushed a young girl to have an abortion. It must have been you who gave Allegra the idea to send Lucinda to that ridiculous Wendy woman.”
“You are speaking complete rot, Matilde. I’ve done none of those things.”
Matilde starts bellowing with a belting, blaming beat, “It wasn’t enough for you to take Belinda, to take her from me, my only child…and her baby too.”
The mother angel’s pulse is getting stronger. The dots are definite, the dashes unmistakable.
“You are wrong, Matilde, and you are cruel. Harsh and cruel!” Joy’s emotions are thickening the air in my hiding pouch. “You fabricated that explanation in your bitter head so you never had to face the facts. You pushed Belinda, you pushed her with your version of her future—her life was never her own. You made her feel that she had to make up for all the things you thought the world had deprived you of. You made her study medicine. She didn’t want that; she just wanted to be with Ally.” It would take hundreds of colored glass bottles to catch Joy’s unleashed emo
tions now.
“You pushed and pushed Belinda until she felt she had no choice, and when she was pregnant again she just couldn’t face the thought of your disappointment, your judging and your disdain. It was you, not me, who forced her to make the decision that led to her death.”
“No! It was you!” Matilde is screaming. “You stole my only daughter and her unborn child. You killed them both. You deprived Allegra of her mother and a baby sibling.”
My heart is punctured…BLAMED FOR BELINDA.
I picture the dirty labeled bottles hidden away under the bench in Joy’s glasshouse. Is my dead mother on Joy’s head? Matilde thinks so…and that’s why she hates Joy. But I don’t want to think that. I don’t want to hate Joy. But I could have had an alive mother with a pretty-mum smile and an alive sibling, not be this kid on my own revolving around this angry adult world. Joy has bottled all that blame, but now she is blaming Matilde. Who is it? Who should be…blamed for Belinda? I love Joy and she loves me. I love Matilde and she loves me. I am their flesh and their hearts and their histories. They are my left side and my right side. I am their future.
I can’t stand this. I can’t stand this anymore. I can’t stand this sadness throbbing inside my body, hurting my head and pounding my soul.
The mother angel is pulsing hard.
Three dots, three dashes, three dots.
She is sending me a message. What does the mother angel want me to do?
Three dots, three dashes, three dots.
“Stop! Stop, both of you!” It’s Rick. My dad is in there with my grandmothers at Number 25. “First you don’t bloody speak for years, and finally when you do…this crap! No wonder Al’s shot through. You might like to remember where I fit it in. It’s my daughter who’s missing, and I’m going to get on and find her.”
For a moment that silences both of my grandmothers.
“Look,” says Rick, sounding like he’s taken in a deep breath. “She might be at Wendy’s. She knows that Wendy helps girls in strife—maybe she’s gone there.”
“How on earth would Allegra know how to get there?” Matilde demands.
“She’s been there with me—a couple of times,” Rick confesses without remorse.
“What! She has been there to that crazy woman! You are both…both…unbelievable! Take me to this place, Rick, immediately. I need to get my daughter’s only child.” Matilde is demanding this of my dad. Joy is sobbing that she’s going with them, to bring her granddaughter safely home. And before there could be time to catch any tears in little glass bottles, I hear the van doors slam and the sound of its motor whiz down the drive. I am alone in the dark with the mother angel and her offbeat pulse.
Three dots, three dashes, three dots.
She is pulsing harder now.
S…O…S
Save Our Souls
Three dots, three dashes, three dots.
She is feeling hotter now.
Three dots, three dashes, three dots.
What am I to do now?
Three dots, three dashes, three dots.
S…O…S
Smash Our Sadness
The mother angel wants me to smash our sadness. I have to smash those dirty labeled bottles. I have to smash Joy’s emotions and Matilde’s bottled-up anger. I have to smash it all….I have to smash BLAMED FOR BELINDA.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Simone de Beauvoir pops up from her pond as the mother angel and I burst through the brown gate. She follows us into Joy’s glasshouse. I work hard at the cupboard under the sink until it springs open, revealing the thirty-two bottles labeled BLAMED FOR BELINDA. And now the mother angel is swinging at the bottles, swinging hard, smashing them one at a time in all directions, spraying colored glass and tears and emotions into the air. They are all over the walls, dripping down the windows and shattered across the floor.
DEVASTATION, the mother angel decides, has to be smashed too. There it is high up on the shelf, a whole row without a story, obscured by SELF-ACTUALIZATION.
And down it comes…smash…smash…smash…into a hundred tiny pieces.
DEVASTATION is released—everywhere—and now it is nowhere.
The mother angel’s pulse is quickening, but it no longer has a pattern. Dots and dashes, daaash, dot, dot, dashes and dots. It’s pounding, missing beats, racing ahead as though it has an end in sight.
My muscles are weak, my flesh is hot and my bones feel old, achy and tired. My eyes aren’t working the way they usually do. And now I am falling…falling…onto my knees…falling…onto my elbows…falling…onto the floor. The mother angel and I are lying on the linoleum surrounded by shattered glass and released emotions and bottled blame with Simone de Beauvoir coming in and out of focus nuzzled into the crook of my elbow.
“Hold on, Allegra, hold on,” whispers Simone. “You can transcend this disequilibrium.”
My heart flutters. It misses a beat. It races toward another…and it stops.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Something is pushing from behind my eyes, and after a couple of shoves they open against a heavy load. My mind tries to find the right channel. It lands on a fuzzy white room.
I’m floating on a bed in that white-room ocean. The outline of Matilde is at my side and a statue of Rick is on an outcrop by the window. There’s a pulsing, a whooshing and a mid-range beeping. I want to call Matilde and Rick in, let them know I’m still on the surface, but the weight of outside wins out and pulls my eyelids down.
I have become a hot climate: a furnace hovering just above the earth, heating cold deserts and warming all oceans. My blood is a river of embers, my throat a burning pipe and my fiery fingers aflame.
Joy is a torch: a humming, singing, scorching torch, caressing and weeping white-light love.
Coming up again. It’s dark now. I am alone. The room is slightly aglow. A silver figurine is shimmering from the other side of the window. It’s the mother angel. Her lips are moving; they are forming a heart shape. They are whispering now with the words coming toward me in engraved running writing.
I want to follow the mother angel into the night.
But Patricia has arrived at the door, standing firm opposite the silvery window. She is a plaster mold but feels real in the room in flesh and blood and future. She is holding a book with blank pages and waves at the angel outside. The angel’s smile sends back a million glass pieces from shattered bottles that light up the room. She speaks now in capital letters:
OUR SADNESS IS SMASHED
The sun is pushing out the last of the dark, the mother angel has gone and I’m here in the damp and cool. And with me, asleep in chairs either side of the bed, are Joy and Matilde. Rick is curled in a ball, anchoring my feet to the bed. We are all together in the one room.
“I’m thirsty,” I say to no one in particular.
I don’t have to choose between them: Joy and Matilde have taken each of my hands. Rick is on his feet and reaching for a glass.
They are not livid or disgusted or looking at me as though I’m a Riffraff. But they have glistening eyes that seem to have gone back to loving me, in their separate ways, and in this small space they have no way of avoiding each other.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Arrhythmia,” says a man dressed like a doctor with a serious frown. “Her heart rhythm remains irregular; profoundly so, I’m afraid. Did she have a fever in the past week, or was she taking any medication?”
“No,” reply Matilde, Joy and Rick all at once.
“Or was it ever suggested, when she was born, that she had any type of congenital heart defect?”
“Certainly not,” clips Matilde as though that would be some fault on her part.
“She was born a picture of perfect health,” Joy chimes in proudly.
“And she’s been s
trong as an ox ever since,” adds Rick.
“Well, it’s a puzzle, especially in light of all that. And the fact she’s been so unwell here for days.” He takes the stethoscope from around his neck. “Mmmm…a bit of a mystery, really. Sometimes in young people it can be caused by an imbalance brought on by stress, but that’s rare.
“Allegra, I’m just going to listen to your heart again. Is that all right with you?”
It takes some effort but I nod, and the doctor warms the metal end of his stethoscope in his cupped hand and places it against my chest. I can see in his eyes as he listens that I’m still not right.
“There are medications we can try, but of course they come with side effects,” he says, and I can tell by the looks on their faces, just the thought of that is giving Matilde, Joy and Rick side effects too.
“I’ll write something up to start this afternoon and we’ll see if that makes a difference. It might take a bit of trial and error. Meanwhile she’ll need to stay in, with plenty of rest, at least for another week or so.” The doctor takes the clipboard off the end of my bed and disappears into the corridor. I can’t keep my eyes open any longer and sink back into a deep sleep.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Twisties for breakfast—that’ll sort you right out.” Patricia is here, really truly here. Not a cold plaster mold but my best-ever friend, with a pleased-to-be-here grin and hair smelling reassuringly of green-apple shampoo. She’s telling me that she’s managed to sneak in—and what’s more, find me—before visiting hours have even begun.
“What time is it?” I ask, my eyes feeling crusty and voice husky.
“Almost six-thirty,” she says. “In the morning, in case you’re a bit muddled up. I came straight from Central Station; Mum put me in a cab as soon as the overnight train pulled in. Cost me a fiver; good thing I’ve been babysitting a bit lately. Mum and I were coming down from Armidale next week, but she said we could bring the trip forward by a few days after Wendy rang up and said you were real crook.”
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