by Kate Ryan
Ali nodded. ‘Yeah, sure. It’s fine.’ She had forgotten, and it made her feel flat, though she loved the fact that he had his music.
‘Okay great,’ Ed was saying. She heard his relief — no random obstacle blocking access to the thing he loved.
After they turned off their lamps, his breath became even and slow, and Ali lay awake and thought of Jessie. She thought of swimming, of water holding her body suspended, the strangeness of this. She thought of reading to her about Heracles, Zeus and Hermes, Sisyphus. Then what happened? What do you mean? What happened in the end? He was sent to Hades. He could never leave. He had to push the boulder up the hill forever. He was pulled apart by eagles. He wandered the earth, lost. The gods never let him return to Olympus.
Ali knew she could say anything, embellish, make it all up. This made her feel powerful but sometimes sad. The way Jessie took in stories seemed different from the way she did. Ali imagined words were weightier for her, powerful, like amulets, offering protection, leading her into other worlds.
Jessie closed her eyes and when she opened them, they would be glossy and sealed in like a secret pool.
It was Ali who came up with the idea of holding one of Jessie’s rocks, a lumpy piece of quartz shot through with bits of red, when they worked out the quests. She stole the idea — the conch in Lord of the Flies — but she never told Jessie that.
At the beginning, Ali wrote what Jessie told her to, what they agreed to. A description of the quest in her best cursive. Quest 2. Climb to the top of the tallest place in the land. We will reach the summit and survey our kingdom and everything within it. We will observe our subjects and make the decisions necessary for their fate.
After it happened, somewhere between Ali sleeping and waking, the puzzle of Jessie and words became an obsession. It seemed that once she understood it, this knowledge would be the key, then everything would be reversed, and Jessie would become herself again, magically, like a sleeping princess whose finger had been pricked.
In the twilight between the awake world and the sleeping one, words became strangely distorted, like hieroglyphs or Arabic characters. She watched them flicker across her closed eyelids over and over, as if she were watching the zoetrope her dad had given her once, the image of a horse walking, trotting, galloping, its dark mane flying back.
Then Ali would see the letters as if through a kaleidoscope: light, colour, patterns so beautiful she longed to sink into them, and she felt a sudden euphoria just as when she and Jessie made invisible ink with lemon juice and waited for the second until the letters appeared. At that moment, she thought she really had it.
But then the light would come through her window, and her hope would disappear, like sunlight leaching the ink away. And the frozen day would begin again — the unreality that became the real.
8
By Year 6, every second day Ali watched Jessie stalk across the room, called out of class for extra tuition with her nemesis, the gushing Mrs Holmes.
Ali imagined the indignity of working away at the early readers. Dog, Cat, Ball. After half an hour Jessie would march back in, fury stiffening her limbs like a soldier on parade, refusing to look at anyone.
There were conferences with Aggie up at school. This seemed impossible. How could it be? Aggie, that extravagance of rollies, sandalwood soap and floppy dress, in the principal’s drab office?
They were both old for their class. Ali because of Diane’s strong views on children’s learning stages, and Jessie because Aggie didn’t get around to starting her until she was nearly six. They would both turn thirteen early in the first year of high school.
Ali heard Cal talking to Aggie in the kitchen as she was letting herself in one day. She paused. ‘What the fuck’s going to happen to her? She won’t be able to get a job, do anything.’
‘She’ll be okay,’ Aggie was saying. ‘In Steiner, kids don’t even start to learn to read until they’re eight, at least.’
‘Aggie, that’s a fucking joke and you know it. And she’s not bloody eight.’
Ali turned around to see Matty coming in the gate, so she couldn’t sneak away. ‘Hi,’ she said, edging her way into the kitchen, filling the space with asking when she usually didn’t. ‘Jessie around?’
‘Come in, darl. She’s around somewhere.’ Aggie smiled and rubbed at her kohl-rimmed eyes, and Cal took a stubbie from the fridge and shoved the door closed with one hand, so the contents rattled.
‘Thanks.’ Ali moved past him quickly, up the threadbare carpet to Jessie’s room.
Jessie looked up and smiled, no sign she had heard anything. She was laying out her rocks into sedimentary and metamorphic, humming, while Houses of the Holy thumped out of her speakers. Ali settled herself, cross-legged, beside her.
In a while, Cal poked his head around the door. ‘Got something for ya. Found it at the Hutchens’ place when I was checking out Tom’s new bike. Nearly ran over it.’ He opened one hand and held out a small, flat rock.
Jessie looked at it closely and gave a nod as if he had confirmed something she had suspected. ‘Fossil.’ She took it, flashed a smile, and Cal left, whistling. He was so different with her. His eyes lost their hard glitter. He was never sarcastic.
Ali felt dark and excluded and lonely all at once.
‘Look,’ Jessie said. ‘Bird’s claw.’ She took a shoebox from the shelf, opened it and laid the fossil inside. She held the box out to Ali, who stroked the ghostly surface, cool, porous, making her think of dinosaurs and giant ferns.
Ali was hanging around later that day when Jessie wandered off to have one of her infrequent showers. Thinking everyone was out, she drifted into the kitchen and picked up a book of Aggie’s from the kitchen table. Some Eastern philosophy book — reincarnation, deities, auras, stillness. The words were comforting and pretty, though they made no sense to her. She looked at the pictures, running her hands over the images of Krishna.
She felt the satisfying weight of the book, noticing a little dog-ear where Aggie had marked a page. The sensual pulse of holding something of hers; the sound of Jessie’s shower a gentle pounding across the hall.
Then without warning Cal was in the doorway. His maroon T-shirt rode up over his belly as he put his arm up to touch the lintel. She closed the book with a thud, aware of its dusty op-shop smell, with a bit of Aggie’s cloying perfume mixed in, as if she had cast her spell on it. Cal glanced at the title. ‘Eastern philosophy now,’ he smiled without his eyes changing. ‘Smart one, are you?’
Ali shrugged.
‘I hope you don’t make her feel bad,’ he said. ‘Just because you can.’
Ali felt scared. Did she? Maybe she did. ‘No.’
Cal waited, and Ali felt the blood rising in her face. Her mouth felt claggy. She shook her head. ‘I don’t.’
He waited just a little longer, his dark eyes on her. ‘You better not. It’s bloody hard enough for her as it is.’
Through the doorway Ali saw Jessie leave the bathroom, wafts of steam puffing out, a ragged towel around her skinny body, and Cal went away.
9
Near dawn Ali’s fatigue was a dull wakefulness. She tried to turn her mind to a practical plan for the day — employment websites, fixing up her CV.
It was better; again, the idea of using words seemed wrong. Perhaps, for all her growing passion, she would give up the writing class. What was the point?
She felt a sense of her life passing. For a little while, in her time of intermittent writing, there had been small satisfactions in domestic life, things that her former ambitious self would have scoffed at. She had been cooking more elaborate meals using recipe books, making slices for Tam’s lunchbox, reading her way through every volume of the Narnia books. She had been supervising homework and ferrying Tam to netball and friends’ houses, tidying the house more than was necessary. And now she wondered, what was she? Not a writer. A hou
sewife? What was her life about?
She looked at the shapes of Ed’s clothes on the chair next to the bed. There had been something on the radio only the other day, an electric charge straight to her brain. Primary schools were embracing different ways of teaching kids who struggled to read. They were learning to feel words, hear them, see them, all at the same time.
When a child learnt to read in the ordinary way, it was like moving from the roots of a tree up the trunk and along the branches. It was orderly. It worked. With some children, though, it wasn’t like that. They were looking down on the tree from above, they were caught in its branches, its venous leaves, its dense foliage — nothing could be distinguished.
Ali had felt lost in that tree too — its artistry, its complication.
But then the woman said there might be beauty in this mode of thinking, that such children might have unique gifts, which might flower in adulthood.
Ali had turned it off.
Even Diane wouldn’t go there. She still subscribed to educational journals, but when they caught up in the teacher-to-teacher conversations that Ali half-dreaded and half-enjoyed, they stuck to safe topics: inspiring educators, new research on boys’ learning, technology in the classroom (this last one an unexpected and irritating development in Diane’s focus). ‘It’s amazing, darling, how technology can be harnessed. It makes perfect sense. Kids love it!’ But never the basics, the essence. Reading.
As the day lightened Ali remembered Testament of Youth. She had read it at eighteen — Vera Brittain’s World War One memoir of losing, in quick succession, her lover, her brother, her two closest friends. After the visceral shock upon shock upon shock, for a time she became convinced that her face was being overtaken by a dark shadow, that people were drawing back from her in horror.
It was as if she had taken in the dead parts of those she had lost: ash, smoke, blood, darkness.
The beautiful tree on the radio seemed a joke now Jessie was dead. For a minute, as Ali listened, Jessie might have been fully formed, adventurous but grounded — endowed with gifts.
But then even the fantasy Jessie punctured this. Beautiful, she might have snorted. What’s bloody beautiful about it?
10
That summer Diane was often away from home. This meant that substitute teachers had to be found, a freezer filled with chicken and lamb casseroles that Ali and David rarely ate in her absence. Diane’s mother, Nance, was dying, though to Ali this meant only the guilty pleasure of being left alone.
Meals were reduced to baked beans on toast or fried eggs eaten in front of the TV; the relief of not having to talk. Her father sitting at the table in his old grey shorts, shirtless, his sun-damaged shoulders, his freckled neck bent, reading the papers: the Canberra Times, then the Sydney Morning Herald, moving on to bushwalking guides, a cricket or explorer biography of Hillary or Tyson or someone, a linguistic study of remote tribes in Mali.
When Diane rang, she didn’t ask Ali any of the usual specific questions. Didn’t mention the Eiffel Tower project, nor make the usual dreaded inquiry about swimming progress, didn’t even ask about Jessie. There were voices in the background, and Diane spoke quickly, rushing on, ‘Glad things are okay there, darling. I’d better go.’ Ali heard her breath, quick and shallow. ‘The nurse is here to see Gran. I’ll speak to you and Dad in a few days.’
‘Okay, bye, Mum.’
For a second after her mother hung up, Ali felt the word Mum in her mouth: dull, reliable, comforting.
Then the feeling was gone, and she stomped back to the TV, slumping in front of Sons and Daughters.
There were many compensations. With Diane away, all the other stuff was removed. No shopping, no cleaning, no boring discussion or negotiation. Ali turned the TV on and off whenever she felt like it, without her mother’s insistence on time limits and vetting of what was suitable. There were slow, silent games of chess on the verandah with her dad.
Coming and going with Jessie whenever she pleased.
‘Off, are you?’ her dad said vaguely the day Jessie began it all, looking up over the cracked frames Diane was always trying to get him to replace. ‘Bring Jessie back if you like. I’ll cook up your catchings.’
‘Mmm, maybe.’ Ali was non-committal because they were planning to cook their fish — they liked to pretend they would catch something though they never did — on a campfire in Jessie’s garden.
David nodded and went back to his paper, though she hadn’t given details about anything.
‘Bye, Dad.’ She pecked the top of his head and got her bike from the side garden.
And she was gone.
The day’s fishing fizzled out because Matty hadn’t come home to drive them — he was often stoned and notoriously unreliable.
They were playing racing patience, and the day loomed wide and flat. It was hot and Jessie’s room was stuffy with the heavy curtains drawn.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Jessie said, pausing to whack a two down on her ace of clubs. She was viciously competitive. ‘I think we should start an experiential club.’
‘What?’ Ali watched Jessie pick at the mozzie bites on her skinny mottled ankles below black footy shorts. She looked up and beamed.
‘Yeah. I’ve got it all worked out.’ She got up, reached under her pillow, took out a crumpled packet of PK and pushed a chewy to the top. ‘Want one?’
Ali reached out to take it — warmish, creased, grey, as if it had been around for some time.
‘We make a list of experiences we have to have before we turn thirteen.’ Jessie leaned over her ankle and peered at it closely, spat on her hand, and picked at a bit of dried blood with a black, chipped fingernail. ‘They’ll be like tests or … quests.’ She nodded in satisfaction at coming up with the right word. ‘Yeah … they’ll get harder — like when knights had to do things to prove that they were worthy of being knights. Like an initiation. Yeah, initiations. Like they did in the olden days. Before we turn thirteen.’
‘Sort of like truth and dare, you mean?’
‘No,’ Jessie snapped, with such contempt that Ali blushed. ‘Not some pissy truth-and-dare thing. It’s got to be the real deal. The tests have to … push … us somehow — physically, getting past the fear, that kind of thing. Only these will be things … experiences we have to have. Things that will change us.’ She pulled Tales of the Greek Heroes off the shelf and handed it to Ali. ‘Here, take this one. Oh yeah …’ She reached under her bed and pulled out a book. ‘Cal got me this one too’.
The new book was a hardback with orangey-red typeface embossed on the cover and delicate black line drawings inside. King Arthur and His Knights.
Jessie wiped her nose on her sleeve and smiled. Her teeth were small and white and square in her pale face. Everything about her drew Ali in — the tooth at the front with its chip from when she had fallen off Matty’s skateboard, her air of potential chaos, of possibility.
‘Okay, I’ll look at them.’
This meant Ali would read them and summarise the contents.
Cal often gave Jessie things. Constantly on the lookout for parts for his motorbikes, he found small treasures for her: jigsaws, pretty broken clocks, old maps, the odd record or book, hoping, perhaps, that one of them would unlock something within her. Sometimes when Ali came over, Cal would be lying on the grass, smoking, while he gently pushed Jessie in the hammock with one foot. Strands of red hair trailing over the side, and her pale foot resting on the ragged rope keeping the whole thing off the ground; their voices low, like jazz notes on a turned-down radio.
One day, Ali was on the floor reading aloud about Odysseus and the Cyclops — My name is Nobody, Odysseus said — and Jessie was lying on her bed with her eyes closed when Ali became aware of someone behind her. She swung around to find Cal in the doorway. ‘Don’t stop,’ he said in his teasing, ironic way. ‘I want to know what happens next.’ Ali blushed scar
let, and Jessie opened one eye and said, in an aged-teacher voice, ‘You’re too old for bedtime stories, young man. Off to bed for you.’
‘Never too old,’ he said, glancing at Ali before slouching out of the room.
It was as if he could read her mind, as if he knew that it was important to her, that she held it close, the fact that she could do things that Jessie could not.
There were maybe half a dozen books in Jessie’s room: A Child’s Book of Poetry with its soupy inscription To our darlingest Agnès, Love always, Mummy and Daddy; Tales of the Greek Heroes; Swallows and Amazons — Jessie liked to pore over the sailing maps; the John Burningham books — Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers, Mr Gumpy’s Outing — A Fisherman’s Guide to the Southern Coast, The Field Guide to Birds. The last few Cal had got for her. Lots of pictures. Ali knew them all by heart — flicking through while waiting for Jessie to come back from the toilet, from grabbing hunks of watermelon or a handful of squashed-fly biscuits from the kitchen before anyone else got to them. Ali knew the different creaks in the hall: Eli’s even, broad-footed tread, Aggie’s soft saunter, Cal’s solid clomp, and Matty’s semi-shuffle. You had to listen hard for Jessie’s bony feet, but one board outside Aggie’s room always gave her away. Ali slid the books back onto the shelf.
On the day of the first quest, David was cooking pancakes when Ali got home, and they ate them in front of a documentary about child soldiers. Her mother didn’t let her watch that kind of thing — too traumatising. Ali chewed away at her pancakes, imagining her and Jessie forced to kill, to drive knives into people’s sides. She was sure Jessie could do it but doubted she could. Her mind went straight to the horror, all those layers of flesh and blood.
‘By twelve they’re old hands,’ the TV man said, ‘completely immune to violence. But what happens to the child inside?’
After the program, when Ali was sprawled on the floor reading, the phone rang. Her father went into the kitchen to answer. Ali always knew when it was her mother — a muted quality came into his voice as if he was trying not to give anything away. Ali stretched out on the carpet, pointed her toes. ‘Pancakes,’ he said. He laughed. ‘Well, we’re baching … No … Yes … Soon.’