by Kate Ryan
In the living room, a beige couch with a crocheted rug sat next to a smelly kerosene heater, and a wonky bookshelf was half-filled with copies of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic. Piles of newspapers, tied up with string into bundles, were up to the ceiling in one corner.
Jessie tried, against the odds, to liven things up. ‘Shall we investigate his chamber? His bloody chamber?’ Posh English accent and crazy laugh again.
While Ali hovered in the doorway, Jessie marched ahead into the first bedroom and pushed open the wardrobe. A few checked shirts rattled, and one fell off its hanger. ‘Boring as batshit.’ Jessie shut the wardrobe with a bang. She picked up the small trophy resting on the white chest of drawers and handed it to Ali.
‘Under 12 tennis champ.’ Ali grinned and handed it back. ‘Wow, wouldn’t have predicted that.’
‘This could be it!’ Jessie said suddenly, holding it up high. ‘Our talisman.’
‘No,’ Ali said quickly. ‘It definitely should be edible.’
She watched as Jessie hesitated, put it down and glanced around again. ‘Chenille bedspread and a single bed. Urgh!’
The second bedroom was larger. A double bed with another chenille cover, faded blue, perfectly smooth, spreading out like a calm sea. Jessie bounced up and down on the bed, threw herself back and made star shapes with her arms and legs. Ali opened the wooden box on the chest of drawers and sifted beads and brooches through her fingers. She opened the wardrobe. It was full of old lady clothes — flowery polyester dresses, crepey blouses and old tweed coats. She thought of her mother again. Disrespect. ‘We haven’t got much time. Let’s just get the golden apple and get out of here.’
‘All right, spoilsport,’ Jessie said, though clearly, for her as well, the house failed on all counts.
They glanced into the bathroom — all pink and white ’50s fixtures, a small, square mirrored cupboard over the basin, a single toothbrush in a cup, and a tube of cheap toothpaste. Jessie opened and closed the cupboard. ‘Not even Brut 33,’ she said. She looked at herself in the mirror, teasing out her hair and sticking her tongue out at Ali.
‘Come on. Let’s go,’ Ali said.
Back in the kitchen, she opened the fridge: a few carrots, half a cabbage, a kid’s-size carton of milk, a burnt chop on a saucer, a block of Coles cheese, one of those cloying chocolate desserts kids brought to school sometimes. A few spoonfuls had been eaten, and the rest covered in plastic wrap.
‘Weird. He’s a neat freak in here compared with the yard carnage,’ Jessie said. She leant against the cupboards, pausing for dramatic effect. ‘Welll,’ she said. ‘Boring as it is, we’re here now. I guess it’s gotta be the chop.’
She wrapped it in the tea towel that was hanging from the oven door, and they left.
They grabbed their bikes from around the corner and took the chop to the park. Even the sight of Hoffman’s ute rattling back toward home could not excite any frisson of fear. It was a small chop, but Jessie managed to pull the charcoal meat off the bone and divide it into two. They stuffed the meat into their mouths at exactly the same time.
‘The Golden Apple,’ they said, chewing and grinning. Jessie laughed and opened her mouth wide. ‘The Gol-den App-le,’ she spat, disgorging a bit of chewed gristle. ‘Hopefully it won’t contain fatal poison,’ she said, wiggling her eyebrows.
Ali tried for a minute to summon something magical. She closed her eyes and chewed, tried to imagine the sinews of human flesh.
It didn’t work.
‘He’s not well,’ her mother had said. She had attempted to explain — mental illness, something about Hoffman’s father. Ali hadn’t listened. Now she wondered. How did you gauge such things? What was the difference between someone who was well and someone who was not?
That was where Ali had got to, the bones of it coming out in a rush of exhilaration, and then tweaked and honed all week. She knew they wouldn’t get it, but it was good to put it down. The tameness of the tone was wrong, of course. How to bring across the beginning of something like that? How to convey the thing they had, of which the pathetic quests were just the start? But that was the problem. At the beginning, Ali had not known.
Then a day later the phone call, as if she had conjured it, caused it.
‘Ali?’
‘Speaking.’ Why answer him as if he were a cold caller, a salesperson? She knew immediately who it was, and the only reason he would call.
Still, his voice saying her name, a tiny salve.
‘Ali, it’s Eli. She’s died.’
She nodded to the air and said, ‘Oh no, yes,’ other words, she couldn’t think what. She was calm, sounding like the grown-up woman she was, or maybe not. Maybe she sounded like an automaton. Or a child, pretending. Maybe all of it. It was hard to judge, that space between reality and unreality, grief and relief.
As for him, he sounded different. No waftiness, no woundedness. He sounded cool, matter of fact, more like Cal.
Ali waited, listening for something, though she wasn’t sure what it was. Dead. Then she knew she had to speak. ‘I’m sorry,’ she heard herself say. ‘I’m really sorry.’
‘Funeral’s in Bega,’ Eli said, brutal, brisk. ‘Tuesday. I’m going to drive up on Saturday from Melbourne — I’ve gotta come down for work, as it turns out.’ This last part sounded weird, wrong, and she wondered if it were true. She waited again. ‘If you wanna grab a lift. With me.’
A bleak, embarrassed pause then — the other times she got in a car with him, and Jessie too. Once on a warm night full of cloudy stars in a dark sky, the bush around the lighter road as if it were a breathing, expanding force.
Eli turned even more businesslike. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘Aggie wanted you to know.’
Ali felt a familiar lurch. Why exactly did Aggie want her to know? And what about him?
The conversation staggered on. Ali mentioned teaching and her redundancy, leaving out the writing. It was so vague, and, as Cal would say, she sounded like a wanker. Eli said he still lived in Sydney, worked in IT. Her heart twisted at the lack of romance in this, like giving up. Matty — Matthew, he was called now — was in Sydney too, not that Eli ever saw him. He was a businessman. ‘Hotels.’ Eli swallowed a scornful laugh at this.
This was new too, Ali thought, cynicism, though Eli and Matty had never bothered with each other. Not a skerrick of interest. Not like Cal and Eli, locked into something, or Matty and Cal, sparring partners.
Cal and Aggie were still in Bega. ‘You probably know that — your parents …’
‘No,’ Ali said slowly, as if trying to bring an answer to the surface, as if it were a test.
Another pause, and then Eli coughed, said to ring if she could come. ‘We’d all love to have you there.’
It woke Ali up, him saying that. We. You. And it sounded false, so far from the Eli she knew, who didn’t lie — for where did love or enjoyment come into any of this? And why would any of them want her there? It made it easy to wind things up, asking him to please send her condolences to Aggie, everyone, saying she would see what she could do about Tam and the funeral. They said goodbye.
In the bathroom, she leant in to look at her face in the mirror — a scattering of dark freckles, lines deepening across her forehead, beginning around her mouth. These were the most shocking. Her hair was dyed back to its original dark brown, dark eyes like her father’s. Her hair colour looked harsh against her skin in the morning light. Probably she should stop dyeing it.
She walked back outside to hang up the rest of the clothes, now warm and patchily dry. There was the sudden urge to hurl the washing basket at the fence. Then swimming, she thought. I’ll go swimming. This allowed her to keep pegging, sun on her head, light bright and harsh at her eyes.
She thought of driving up to Bega, the hours of small talk that would be required, the crappy coffees and lunches along the way, their bodies
close. And Cal’s reaction if they turned up together, no matter how middle-aged and changed she was. No.
She didn’t know whether it was possible, any of it, but she finished with the washing, dropped the basket into the laundry. Step one. Step two: she went into the kitchen and opened her laptop to look for flights. Flying — its fantastical process and the pretence of adult status it would bestow on her, though she had travelled that way countless times to see her parents — allowed the idea to float. She could hire a car and drive from Canberra; three hours to Bega. The car was comforting. She could leave quickly whenever she needed to, not even stay a night with her parents, despite the expected pressure.
Ali had done almost everything Jessie wanted her to, and there was a creeping, resentful feeling that the funeral was another thing. But as well as that, a sense of excitement beginning in her — a shadow feeling, as if she were going to Jessie even now, riding her bike through the streets on a Bega Sunday morning.
3
Jessie’s house was greyish, a weatherboard sinking into its foundations in the sloping part of town, near the river, things breaking down, rotting, maybe magical.
You never knew what would be going on. Everyone or no one might be up. Fried bread and scrambled tofu for breakfast, or just a tray of mangoes beginning to blacken and burst on the kitchen table. Zappa jerking out of the speaker Matty had put in the kitchen window, while Dylan wailed out of Aggie’s bedroom. Cal slurping a Coke, or eating a peach after drinking all night, the juice running down his chin, wiping his large brown paw across his face and chucking the stone somewhere into the high grass around the flowering gum. Maybe Eli cooking eggs, and Matty smoking a joint on the front steps, long dark hair across his face. Jessie eating a red icy pole, pale, barefoot, stirring a big pot with a stick, like a junior witch.
‘Tie-dye,’ she said, grinning. Her fingers were stained with pink and blue, and there was a warm vegetable smell coming from the pot. She lifted the water-logged T-shirt and it dripped murkily.
Jessie. Her long red hair, her colouring that varied from a dead pallor to an ivory and purple blotchiness like stained marble. Her skinny white legs, freckles on the calves, the knees, bruises dotting the shins, scratches around the ankles bleaching from red to white. Her grey-green eyes, and the freckles covering her entire face but concentrated in a darker splodge across her nose. Sometimes she wore a pale stripe of zinc, but even so her nose was pink-tipped and often peeling. Her shoulders were thin and freckled too, her toenails bluish; sometimes her big toe was blackened and bleeding under the nail. If she could avoid it, she never wore shoes.
Her too-big band T-shirts — they found them in the local op shop, or in Merimbula or Batemans Bay if they trailed along on a trip with David or one of the boys. Sometimes Cal picked them up somewhere: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, AC/DC. They had to be black. The tie-dye was pure experimentation — Jessie would never wear such garish, hippyish items. There was her pathological hatred of ABBA, her love of heavy metal and, with a characteristic inconsistency, Duran Duran; one time singing ‘Girls on Film’, loudly and tunelessly, as they followed the track to the falls, their thongs clicking in counterpoint. And her brothers. The summer when Ali and Jessie were 12, Cal was 20, Matty 18, and Eli 16, nearly 17, and they were inextricably bound up with Jessie’s difference, her allure.
Ali’s parents were always up early: the neat shake of Diane spooning tea into the blue-and-white pot, David reading the Canberra Times, his glasses pushed down his nose, ABC radio, the dull quiet below it all. Their little white weatherboard was two minutes by bike from the main street of Bega, and only five from Jessie’s place, but another world: hydrangeas, a patch of clipped lawn and a silver birch, a couple of cast-iron chairs and a table on the verandah, where her parents unravelled their days over a drink in the early evening. They were both teachers at the local high school — Diane and David — such clean names, so boring, Ali thought as she slouched and eye-rolled into incipient teenage-hood. A sip of wine or beer and the latest instalment of Emma Paterson’s drunken father trying to grab her for an access visit, weird Phillip Smillie’s talent for writing despite a home life of strife and chaos, poor little Stacy Michaels getting her period in class. ‘She had absolutely no clue,’ Diane said, her lips pursed.
Ali swung on the gate, listening in the attentive but dreamy way of an only child, and at an opportune moment, when the conversation was picking up, punctuated by her mother’s sudden shrieking laugh, she would pipe up, ‘Can I go to Jessie’s?’
‘It’s nearly dinner time, so just an hour,’ Diane would say. ‘And helmet.’ Of course she was one of the helmet’s earliest advocates.
In a minute Ali would be on her bike and halfway up the empty road. She’d slow down just for a second, to chuck the helmet into a bush at the park.
The feeling of walking into Jessie’s place. The oniony-sweet smell of the long grass, the bougainvillea spiking around the crooked gate. The slight effort it took to raise it off the grass to get her bike through. It was strange anyone was moved to close it. Ali never discovered who performed this banal conformist task; it was one of the things she liked to mull over when she was away from them. Cal and Jessie loved to slam doors — bedroom, kitchen, front door, back door, bathroom — helping the house slide into further dilapidation. Another part of their thrilling lives; no one in Ali’s family would ever do anything so pointlessly melodramatic.
The small strain of getting in added to it, the specialness of standing in that garden. There was an unravelling hammock under the peppercorn tree, a mattress tossed out where Jessie or one of the boys sometimes slept, even Aggie sometimes, rusty rollerskates, a pair of stilts and juggling balls from Matty’s circus period rotting in the grass. Cal once claimed to have eaten leaves from the oleander, prompting surprisingly urgent action from Aggie, and then rage when, en route to Bega hospital in Claudio’s car, he said it was all just a joke.
Cal, the eldest. The wild boy, Diane was fond of saying, with a hint of admiring fascination — and Ali always thought of the Wild Colonial Boy. Easy to imagine him a bushranger: his hulking six-foot-four frame, his greasy dark hair and his white teeth, the revolving array of girlfriends on the back of his motorbike — Em with the long black hair down to her bum, Stacey with the peroxide-blonde mullet, Nicky with the big boobs and spray-on stonewash, Lena with the leather jacket, massive hoop earrings, and screechy little voice.
Ali and Jessie liked to dissect them. ‘God, there’s a new one,’ Jessie said. ‘One rides out,’ she grinned, ‘and another bloody one rides in.’
Of her three brothers, Jessie loved Cal the most. She wore his flannel shirts and the big, ragged windcheater he’d got her — Metal Rules scrawled spikily across an electric guitar. Popping his head into her room when Ali was there, Swallows and Amazons on her lap. ‘Hey Jessie,’ he mouthed over the thud of the music, pretending she was going deaf. Miming exaggeratedly, swinging his arms around until Jessie got up to perform a dramatic air guitar solo. She moved into a final head-shaking frenzy as ‘Highway to Hell’ reached a crescendo, then let her arms relax as if she were accepting the cheers and screams of the fans. She bowed low, her hair screening her face. Cal was still in the doorway, gesticulating, miming gibberish. With small, precise movements, Jessie took the record off and put it in its sleeve. Then, with a sudden lunge, she grabbed a pile of dirty clothes off the floor and attempted to shove them in Cal’s face. He held her off and they laughed, wrestling. Ali watched, aware of every part of herself; legs, arms, scalp, tight face, audience member of one.
‘I’ve been askin’ you,’ Cal said, holding off Jessie’s wiry arms with his big hands.
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m going to the tip. Wanna come?’
Ali watched with a clear, focused attention. All they had that she did not.
But the garden.
One of Aggie’s clumsy abstracts might be leaning against the flowe
ring gum, dirt and bits of flower mashed into its surface. Jessie snorted at these blotches of colour, which even Ali knew were no good. One of Cal’s motorbikes might be parked crookedly, like a threatening animal, and two or three pushbikes dumped on the grass.
Ali dropped hers too, trying to fling it without plan or intention, to change as she came in that gate, to become just like them.
In that instant it seemed like falling into a painting or a secret garden — no time, no place, no rules. A dinner of blackened potatoes and Coke, and then falling asleep beside Jessie on a lumpy mattress, the jab of her pointy limbs and the smell of Aerogard; watching the coals fade to pinpricks of red. Being woken at two in the morning by Jessie’s curses and the loud whine of ‘Maggie’s Farm’.
No Dylan for Jessie, no Cohen, and definitely no Joan Baez. She hated Joan with a passion, perhaps something to do with her passing resemblance to Aggie, around the eyes.
Waking again when the morning was hazy, before the sun was high and hot: the smell of damp grass and the flickering of dragonflies, teeth chalky and unbrushed, in that moment of waking, somewhere between dream and life.
4
In the playground, Ali waited in the shade to avoid talking to anyone.
Until this year, when she started Year 4, Tam would launch herself across the playground and into Ali’s arms. Ali would look down to hide her smile, and warmth would spread through her whole body. She knew other eight-year-olds were beginning to put a lid on their passions for their mothers, to summon up or convince themselves of a nonchalance they copied from the older kids. No doubt some child psychiatrist would have described their relationship as too close, stifling. And what would she do when Tam stopped loving her with such fervour?
Then it was happening. Tam was copying her friend Milly’s stroppy tone with her mother, predictable phrases: You can’t make me, yeah right, leave me alone, I hate you. A sniff, an eye roll, a turning away. At times such words threatened to break her.