A Girl in Three Parts

by Suzanne Daniel

  The fish tastes smoky, slightly tinny, but delicious, and I lick the last of it off the foil as my spud cools down. The spud is burnt in parts on the skin but fluffy on the inside and golden all over thanks to the big dob of butter that Darce slaps on when I open mine up.

  “Blokes’ tucker, so we don’t have a salad to serve ya, Alligator,” says Darce. “But don’t be too disappointed—we do have dessert.”

  He cuts five bananas longways through the skin and into the flesh with his penknife, stuffs bits of Old Gold chocolate into the slits, wraps the bananas with foil and places them on the hot embers that now look like way-off city lights. The bananas don’t take long, and we each peel one and tuck in without speaking. As I finish the last of mine, I think for the second time that it really is a good thing that Matilde’s livid doesn’t reach out here, because she certainly wouldn’t like to hear me tell Darce and his boys: “That’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted in my whole entire life.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  A golden sun is rising and Rick, Darce and the boys are paddling out together for Dawn Patrol. I’m taking it easy this morning, just watching from the beach.

  After a while Fat Matt comes in, towels himself off and plonks himself down on the sand next to me.

  “It’s getting kind of messy out there,” he says, sounding puffed. “Okay if I sit here for a bit?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I say, keeping my eyes on Rick out the back.

  “I hear we’ve got something in common, Alligator,” Matt says, on the friendly side of matter-of-fact. “Not the best thing, but something at least.”

  I look across at him, wondering what I might have in common with Fat Matt.

  “Yeah…we’ve both lost our mums,” he says, looking younger now that he’s away from his big brother. “And your dad tells me we were exactly the same age. You were only three, just like me.”

  I nod, thinking, Rick never actually told me I was only three.

  “But he said you’re lucky enough to have two grans. That’s cool.”

  “Did he say that? The lucky bit?” I’m kind of surprised that Rick would say that. Think that.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure he said the lucky bit. My grans had both gone by the time my mum died. Would have been good to have had them around after we lost her.”

  A few waves later I ask Matt, “How did she die…your mum?”

  “Cancer. Sixteen years ago now. And yours?”

  “Actually, I’m not really sure….I’ve never been told that part of the story.”

  “Probably time you asked, then,” says Matt. “I’m sure your dad would tell you. He’s a good bloke, your dad, and he seems like a pretty straightforward sort of fella.”

  “Yeah, he is….”

  “Probably do him good to talk about things while he’s up here surfing in Crezzo. Hey, we’ll give him a few extra beers tonight,” says Matt, like I’ll be in on the plan. “That can get a bloke talking. It’d be good for my dad too, to have a yarn. Get some stuff off his chest. We’ve got a tough job to do in the morning.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Later that evening we’re all sitting around the campfire, and Rick’s about five beers deep. He offered to cook dinner, and while the others just took it in their stride, it almost stopped me in mine: I’ve never known Rick to cook dinner before. I’ve never known Rick to cook anything at all.

  I watched closely. Rick said no to a sixth beer, but he had two as he turned the steak and eggs, another with his food on his lap and two more sitting around the campfire yarning afterward. I lost count with Darce, but from what I could tell nothing came off his chest, except maybe a few rounds of a smoker’s cough. Rick’s chest seems to stay completely intact.

  And now we’re back in the tent, settled on top of our sleeping bags.

  “Good night, Al,” Rick says from down on the ground.

  “Good night,” I say, although I’m not really ready for sleep.

  “Rick…,” I whisper. “You know how in the hospital you told me you had a story in your head…about what led to my mum’s death? Well, I don’t care if it’s different from Matilde and Joy’s….Can you tell it to me now, your story about Belinda?”

  I’m not sure if it’s the beer, the dark tent or simply because I’m almost a teenager now, but Rick does more talking in the next thirty minutes than he’s done with me in the last thirteen years.

  He says, “Okay then, Al, I’ll give you my version of events. I reckon others might dispute it, but it’s as close to the truth as I know it.”

  And his version of events from all those years ago goes like this:

  “When I was eighteen, still living with Joy, I was deadset keen on the girl next door, Matilde’s daughter, your mum…Belinda. She was beautiful, in every way—inside and out—with this fiery mind and crazy imagination.”

  It’s a weird sort of warm thinking of Belinda on my side of the fence.

  “She was creative too, Al, ace at drawing and painting and sculpting. She was always angling to use Joy’s pottery wheel. It was kept in the glasshouse—before it was overrun by all those bloody bottles.

  “Belinda spent hours at that wheel and would turn a flawless pot, then give it a little squeeze or a twist, so she made it what she called ‘perfectly flawed.’ She was delighted with imperfections…guess that’s why she liked me.” Rick pauses for a while before going on.

  “She really wanted to go to art school once she finished the Leaving exams, but Matilde, well, she had other ideas. Your grandmother was hell-bent on Belinda going to uni and becoming a doctor, because that’s what she was set to become herself, in Budapest, before the war got in the way.”

  So that’s where the doctor thing comes from.

  “Well, I almost put an end to that, because halfway through Belinda’s last year at school we found out that you were on the way, Al. And this might be hard for you to hear…and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way…but Matilde was fuming, she could barely speak to Belinda, and she couldn’t even look at me. She wanted me as far off the scene as possible, to stay on my side of the fence.”

  Rick rolls over and I can see his outline facing me.

  “But once you arrived, Al, you were this little package of love and potential, and Matilde’s heart softened right up. In her eyes you were pretty much perfect. And Belinda, well, she fell in love the second you were born, when she reached for you with both hands and brought you in to her chest. You stayed there for months. Your mum couldn’t stop gazing at your face, said it was like the sunrise: glorious and a little bit different every day.”

  I wish I could remember my mum’s gazing face.

  I wish I could hear her voice and listen to her words.

  “Joy was mad about you too, of course. She and Matilde had been good friends over the years that they’d been neighbors, helping each other out because both of their husbands had failed them in one way or another. And now they had you, a granddaughter in common, to bind them to each other forever…only it didn’t quite work out that way.”

  I just can’t imagine my grandmothers as friends.

  “Belinda did go to university to study med,” says Rick. “I think she did that mostly because she couldn’t disappoint Matilde again. She threw herself into it and got some pretty good results too.”

  My mum was smart, smart just like me.

  “But honestly, I think she would have preferred just to stay at home with you for a while, going at your pace and doing her art thing.”

  I bet Belinda had a pretty-mum smile.

  “We moved into the flat above Matilde’s garage—your mum, you and me—and Matilde kept a desk in Number 23 for Belinda so she could study. Matilde and Joy cared for you during the day while Belinda was at uni and I was at work. I focused on that, bringing the money in. I
’m not proud that after your mum died some of it went out again placing bets, which didn’t impress Matilde because her husband ruined himself through gambling, but I’m getting on top of that now.”

  So that’s why Matilde thinks she has to pay for everything.

  “Joy and Belinda were pretty close. Belinda was the daughter Joy had always wanted, with the bonus of bringing a baby girl into her world. They pottered and planned and spoke about things Belinda would never talk about with her own mother.”

  There are certainly things I’d never talk about with Matilde.

  “And despite it all, Belinda and Matilde were close too, in that way that mothers and daughters can be, especially when a baby links them together.”

  Rick rolls onto his back. “Then something bad happened, Al. When you were about three. Belinda didn’t tell me, but she found out she was pregnant again. I wish like hell that she’d told me, because we would have got through it together—I’m sure we could have survived it.”

  And I wouldn’t just be this one girl on my own. I’d have a brother or sister too.

  “But she just couldn’t face Matilde, not again, because by then Matilde was telling anyone who’d listen that her daughter Belinda was more than halfway through her medical degree. So Belinda confided in Joy instead. She told Joy that she felt herself sinking, that she just couldn’t be a mother of two children, as well as finish her degree, and work as a doctor, she didn’t feel ready, and she didn’t think Matilde would cope with another disappointment and blow to her plans.

  “And Joy didn’t tell me at the time, but she was worried that Belinda was headed for a breakdown, and she was worried about what that would mean for you, and for me. So she helped find a place, a clinic in Bondi with proper doctors where she could be ‘fixed,’ and she gave her the money for the operation.

  “It was the abortion thing, Al, like Lucinda, but I was completely left out of the plan.” Rick’s voice is shaky now, and I’m feeling a bit shaky too. “Joy took Belinda to the clinic after I left for work one day and picked her up once it was over. I came home in the afternoon and found Belinda resting ‘with a headache.’ By the next morning she was doubled up in pain on the bathroom floor.

  “Then she started screaming; she told me, ‘Just get Joy.’ I ran into Number 25 and once Joy got there, she told me the truth about what had gone on and we took Belinda back to the clinic. But they didn’t want to know about it, not now that there were ‘complications.’ I wanted to go to the hospital there and then, Al, but Belinda was hysterical, said they’d call the police, and she was terrified that Matilde would find out as well, so she insisted that we just go back home.

  “She had a really rough night, and the next day she was pale and shaking and all burning up. I put my foot down then. Just carried her to the van and got her to hospital…but it was too late.”

  Behold My Mother.

  “They said she had an infection, a thing called septic shock….

  “She died a couple of hours later.”

  My mother angel.

  “So, Al, that’s why you don’t have a mum. And it’s why everyone left behind has been hurting and blaming. It’s why Matilde, in that clamped-up taut way of hers, hates Joy—she blames Joy for taking Belinda to the clinic where she had the procedure that led to her death. And Joy, well, she’s mad at Matilde for the pressure she put on Belinda that meant she felt she had no other option, and she’s sick-sad that Matilde blames her.

  “But I can see it behind Joy’s eyes—in that forced-happy face—that she does blame herself to an extent for what happened. And while I’ve tried not to blame her too—and the way she cut me out, gave me no say in what happened—that’s been hard over the years. And if the truth be known, on some level, Al, Joy blames me for Belinda dying after being pregnant again. And I…I blame myself too.”

  Rick stops. His words hang with a sad weight in the tent.

  My mother angel wanted all that sadness smashed.

  I roll off my air mattress and lie on the ground next to my dad.

  The cool earth vibrates beneath me.

  I’m neutralized.

  Soothed and strangely energized.

  I can’t see or hear my mother, but I feel her.

  I put my arm over Rick’s chest; to comfort him, and that comforts me.

  My mother angel wants my soul to sing our song.

  “I don’t blame you, Rick,” I say for her, and I say for me. “And I don’t blame Joy, and I don’t blame Matilde. And I can tell you, Belinda doesn’t blame any of you either.”

  Our breathing falls into sync.

  “If you forgive yourselves,” I whisper with our next falling breath, “then maybe you can forgive each other.”

  We inhale the salty air.

  “There’s a huge lot of good in you, Al,” Rick says. “Just like your mum. And you should know…despite it all, I do see the good in your grandmothers too. You’ve got the best parts of each one of them.”

  I really love hearing my dad saying that.

  “I want to be like you too, Rick,” I tell him.

  “My Al Pal,” he says, putting me under his wing.

  The chambers of my heart open up to each other.

  My good self is reaching toward ready.

  Ready to be charged by the best parts of all four.

  Able now to become me.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  There is a shadow outside our tent. It’s sticklike and moving, prodding me out of a rock-solid sleep. Rick is lying still on the ground next to me, snoring gently, unaware that the walls of our tent are breathing in and breathing out. But I’m aware, and know without doubt that they are definitely moving in response to the motion of the stick shadow on the other side of the canvas.

  It comes in closer and now I see it’s more of a baton than a stick, and it’s bringing up the beginnings of the twilight before sunrise. It’s tuning up the day: the waves and the breeze. I hear low oboe murmurs from the other side of the campfire, where Darce, Matt and Glen have been sleeping in their tents.

  The murmurs become more—they join the morning song—each one with a frequency, a voice and a rhythm and it’s then that I recognize the first bars of Franz Liszt’s “On Lake Wallenstadt.” Nature’s orchestra is playing out as a melody in my mind. I open the slit of our tent just wide enough to see the boys and their dad silently moving with their boards on their heads. They must be doing a Pre-Dawn Patrol.

  I watch from the headland as the three of them climb down the still-dark rocks. In a straight line they launch themselves onto their boards and paddle across a border of small breaking waves.

  They are the first out and into the clear water, even before anyone else has appeared on the beach. But they are not interested in positioning themselves to ride the pristine morning waves. Instead, once out the back they sit up, straddling their boards with their feet in the water. In the lifting light I see them orient themselves toward the horizon and then link their strong arms.

  After some time, Darce pulls a small flask from his board shorts and holds it up to the sky. Together their gaze follows a cloud of ash that Darce releases into the air before it drops gently onto the sea. They bow their heads and sit silently surrounded by a circle of ash, now floating on the water. It seems to mean something to all of them…be something of all of them…and nothing to do with me. I go back to our tent and lie down on my sleeping bag next to my dad.

  I don’t know why Franz Liszt woke me to witness this private mystery, and I’m not fully sure of what I’ve just seen, but that part of my heart that beats by baton, and ritual, tells me that it was connected to something quite sacred, and a tune everlasting.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  “Hey, Alligator, you gonna stand up on that McGrigor today?” Darce calls out to me from his car
window as I get my togs off the line. “Reckon today might be as good a day as any,” he adds, egging me on. He’s obviously noticed that for the past six mornings I’ve paddled out behind Rick on my board but only caught the whitewash lying down rather than the green curves standing up.

  Rick says that I’m doing “just fine,” building up my strength with my paddling while learning a healthy respect for the ocean. But now, prompted by Darce, I’m feeling that today might be the day to change my position and spring up onto my feet.

  “Got something here to fuel you up, young lady,” says Darce. “I’ve been to the bakery and back while you were still in your boudoir getting your beauty sleep.”

  He pulls a loaf of white bread from a brown paper bag, tears it in two and passes me half. I copy what Darce does, dipping my hand into the warm softness within the brown crust, and then I down it with the carton of chocolate milk he lobs at me through his car window.

  “If you want to surf like a bloke, Alligator, you don’t need to be built like a bloke, but I reckon it’s gonna help if you eat like a bloke,” he says, scooping out another handful of warm bread with his big crocodile paw. I sure don’t want to look like Darce, but I don’t mind eating his version of blokes’ food.

  I follow Rick down onto the rocks this time, carrying my board on top of my head. Today’s the day, today’s the day, today’s the day, my heart tells my feet as I hop from one rock to the next. “I’m going to go for it today, Rick…I’m going to stand up,” I say, committing myself aloud so I won’t wimp out. “Reckon you will, Al,” he replies, pleased, like it’s something he’s been waiting to hear. “It’s a good day for it too: there are nice breaks happening right along the beach and we can find a few waves all to ourselves.”