by Kate Ryan
‘How’s Gran?’ she said when he came back into the room.
‘Not so good.’ He shrugged slightly. ‘Mum’s going to have to stay longer until she gets Gran more help.’
Ali nodded. She loved her grandmother, but she was glad. In Diane’s absence she felt smug suddenly, self-sufficient, perfectly poised for life.
11
After dropping off Tam at school with her backpack and sleeping bag, Ali walked to the pool. She tried to keep her mind blank, but it seized things, one, another, circled, landed, circled, landed; fallingoutoftreesbusaccidentsmolestationbullyingchokingdeepwater. Once she got inside, the sight of the pool was a small relief; it was sterile, a constructed body. There was only one other person, an old man, maybe mid-70s, labouring up and down. As Ali waited, he paused at one end and tried to engage the pool attendant, a young man with blond hair, pale skin, and very white ankle socks, in reluctant conversation. She was getting into the pool in the far lane as the old man was saying, ‘We were taught differently in my day, you know. All from the shoulders then, shoulders and legs. These days it’s from the tum …’ She couldn’t bear to see the young man’s disinterest, so she pushed off quickly. A sigh in her body as it felt the water. Once she was moving, she concentrated on watching one arm making the same movement, rising, bending, her hands breaking the surface, a thousand bubbles spreading outward. In solidarity with the old man, she tried to feel her stomach muscles as her arms moved. She wondered whether what he said was true. She hoped he was not too lonely.
A spindly tree was visible through the wall of glass. Was it replacing some big old tree that had died in the drought? They persisted in planting European trees, despite the amount of water they had to pump into them to keep them alive. She tried to bring her focus back to the tree, but it wandered again and again to Tam. Her drawings, her collections of nests and feathers, the little books she had made about elephants, which were her most recent obsession: the elephant posters, the wooden elephants lining her shelf, the Babar books, which she now claimed she was too old for. The other day she’d heard Tam saying to her friend Lizzie about one particular elephant, ‘Look at this one. Isn’t it soooo adorable?’
‘Yess,’ Lizzie gushed like a forty-year-old. ‘Adorable.’
Ali registered their smarmy adult tone, the world adorable, not one that she or Ed or Graeme would dream of using. Graeme’s partner, Marina, perhaps? What mattered was that they were assembling themselves — words, poses, attitudes, dislikes, enthusiasms. As if everything about a person could become solid, as if nothing could change.
There wasn’t much to hold her attention in the tree. It was barely there, more a collection of twigs, as scrawny as an adolescent. She thought for a minute of Patti — girl-woman, lush, perfectly rounded, life force — and remembered with less than enthusiasm that she was coming that day. Then of Jessie, her legs too long for her torso, her tiny breasts, the slightest rash of pimples beginning to coarsen her white, freckled forehead. Ali had been curvy, with embarrassing breasts beginning even then. She had blushed in fury when overhearing Diane say to David that the trauma must be delaying her period. The pads and tampons had been placed in the cupboard months before in preparation.
When Ali’s period finally came, a year after, Diane tried to embrace her. ‘It’s wonderful, darling. A whole exciting stage ahead of you.’ Ali rolled her eyes, but later, alone in her room, she had curled into herself, and then sat punching again and again into her round thighs. Punching so long and hard that bruises came afterwards. What difference would it make if Jessie was a woman or forever a girl?
The words she collected for her: Miasma, chiaroscuro, tempest, surfeit. She tried to let them wash through her, wash away. ‘Say it again,’ Jessie would say. She liked words with rhythm: machinations, predilection. It was something they shared. Watching a shimmer of bubbles, she thought of her writing. Perhaps she needed to keep it going before it vanished. In the last six months there had been the beginnings of a few short stories, stream-of-consciousness writing, the grandiosity of a novel considered. There had been fits and starts and paralysis, but now, with the class, and writing about Jessie, she felt as if she were embarking on an affair, an illicit sense of having something of her very own.
When she got home, there were, just inside the front door, a shoulder bag, a scarf trailing off it, a denim jacket. She walked into the living room and saw a black leather backpack, half spilling its contents: a rollie packet, a notebook, a lipstick, and a few used tissues. Ali briefly considered opening the notebook, reading her way into Patti’s young life, but she didn’t. She took her bathers out of her bag and hung them over the bench in the garden to dry. She could hear the shower going and loud, tuneful Joni Mitchell coming from the bathroom. A smell of dusky perfume and the edge of cigarettes hung in the air. She opened the back doors wide and went to put the coffee on.
Patti emerged from the bathroom after a ten-minute shower, round pink and white limbs emerging from a green towel, dark-red hair wrapped in another. She held a messy bundle of clothes. ‘Hi, Ali. Didn’t hear you come in. The water pressure here is so great!’ She laughed. ‘Last house I was in it was a dribble. And either tepid or boiling.’
Ali smiled. ‘Hi, Patti.’
‘Thanks for letting me stay.’ Patti beamed, and Ali felt old and sour. ‘Hope it’s okay. My friend Danny’s dropping in a bit of my stuff later, but I can leave most of it at his place.’ She rested her hands on the couch. ‘This opens out, doesn’t it? I can just crash here.’
‘Sure. No problem.’
‘Awesome,’ said Patti. She picked up her trailing backpack. ‘Can I get dressed in your room? You’ve got a full-length mirror, haven’t you?’
Patti waitressed at a tiny Sicilian place in Fitzroy, all rustic sardines and Moorish tiling, tumblers of wine and tangy green olives. Ed and Ali had been a few times and seen her in action. Her red hair piled high around her flower face, her dark-red lipstick, her easy flirtations. Except for the red hair, she looked nothing like Jessie, but there was something. A bravado, a refusal to acknowledge failure, a refusal to be afraid.
Patti was from Ed’s other life, the one before Ali. When Patti was born, Ed was in his twenties and playing in bands around the city. ‘We didn’t always have an enthusiastic following,’ he said drily. In the end it was the usual thing — drugs, too much drinking. His friend Jim disintegrated and never recovered. Now he survived on a pension, living in a unit in Geelong, looked after by his ageing parents. His days were punctuated by his daily trip to the bottle shop, and in manic phases he spouted religion. When Ed went down to see him, he came back sad and quiet, shutting himself away with music, the only thing that seemed to help. Jim going under was probably the reason Ed stopped playing live. ‘Too many show ponies,’ was all he said.
Patti’s mother, Emma, was the singer in the band and a definite show pony. Ali had seen the photos. Emma in a boxy eighties dress with shoulder pads, Cuban-heeled boots, and scarlet lipstick. Ed, ridiculously skinny and tall, on bass, and Jim, choirboy blond, drumsticks raised. They all looked about sixteen, but apparently they’d been twenty-five. ‘I just got sick of it all,’ Ed said. He certainly got sick of Emma.
After they split up, he became a music teacher. Jobs were easier to get then. School music departments weren’t so obsessed with qualifications. Later, it took Ed five years to finally get his degree, juggling it with work. But through all this, money meant more instruments, more records, more live music, and then, when he wasn’t working, the time to make music. Ed didn’t care when people didn’t respond to his music. It was just him. A guitar always around ready to be picked up if he had five minutes spare while he was waiting for the pasta or for the coffee to boil. Ali would come home to find him with earphones on, fiddling with sound levels or listening to Chet Baker or Satie, or developing an idea inspired by a Palestinian singer who wailed as if she were sending her voice out across the desert.
Ed beaming as she got in the door, washing up not done, dinner barely started. ‘Listen to this. It’s amazing.’ It was infuriating, but she admired it too.
He always had a melody he was fiddling around with, an idea for a new song, a particular way Charles Mingus arranged his pieces, a thudding bassline with a counterpoint of twangy guitar. He sent bits and pieces to a couple of musical friends: Bill, an old jazz musician of seventy, and Marlo, a thirty-year-old clarinet teacher. They had met at a gig and bonded over Herbie Hancock. They swapped songs and chords, editing each other’s work and adding bits that to Ali didn’t seem to make them different to how they were before. Sometimes when she got home, she found Tam sitting beside him on the couch learning the parts to a song. Her sweet, clear voice following his lyrics or saying some odd contrasting phrase. I am gone, she is gone, we are gone, over and over.
Ali remembered it now — the feeling of enclosure, creation, the strange power of writing a world of her very own.
12
As usual they were at Jessie’s place, cross-legged on the floor, chewing gum and looking for diversion. Jessie wanted to climb one of the big old trees at the edge of the state forest. Matty, who knew about such things, said they were the tallest, oldest trees for miles, massive and gnarly like ugly old giants. It was a long way up, even to the lowest branches. Ali remembered standing underneath and staring up, the tops swaying giddily, the leaves variegated against the sky.
‘It doesn’t have to be a tree,’ she said. ‘It could be a man-made thing. Maybe the bridge over the river or the pavilion at the showgrounds?’ Deliberately, she had mentioned equipment for the tree climbing — ropes, harnesses — and Jessie had become bored. She hated detail, fuss, having to slow down.
Now Jessie said nothing for a minute or so. Head down, she picked at the stencil on a T-shirt. Rose Tattoo. She wanted to get rid of the word rose. She detested the band, but the ‘Outlaws’ bit was irresistible. ‘Maybe. The showgrounds could work.’
‘Yeah. You’d be able to see for miles up there.’
‘We should go at night.’
‘Not at night. We want to be able to see. That’s the whole point.’
Ali saw Jessie starting to dig in and then, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, a decision to give up. ‘Okay,’ she said, scratching at the letters so that tiny flecks of white, like dandruff, fell on her black footy shorts. ‘Let’s do it.’
The next morning, at 6.30 am, Ali wheeled her bike into Jessie’s garden; the mushy sound of the frame landing on the wet grass. She pushed open the back door. It was still dark, but someone — probably Cal not having been to bed — was singing low and soul-ish from the shower. Baby baby, where did our love go? Jessie was winding up the string of the old kite when Ali poked her head around her bedroom door. ‘Ready?’
‘Yeah.’ As they walked down the hall, Jessie wrinkled her nose against the smell of incense outside Aggie’s room. Loudly enough to carry, she threw over her shoulder, ‘New dickhead in there.’
Their bike tyres made a shhhrrr sound from the rain the night before, lights coming on, a single car starting. Past library, op shop, mechanic, all closed and waiting. Past the pub and the fish and chip shop, the bakery, only the newsagent open, a small glow in the dark.
Free.
In minutes they reached the showgrounds. Jessie swung a leg over to stand on one pedal, came to a stop, dropped her bike to the ground. Ali pulled up behind, got off her bike, and leant it against a tree. The gates were locked, but further along there was a small hole in the mesh. Jessie crawled through, with Ali close behind.
There was the oval where the parades and the sheepdog competitions were held, a row of steps all around. They had been once or twice with David to see the trials. The farmers whistling up their cattle dogs, poor dumb sheep being pushed around every which way. Ali loved how the dogs lay down low on their bellies, their eyes like black stones, got the sheep to do things just by staring. All that power without saying a word.
The plan was to get up onto the roof of the hall. The caretaker’s house was at the back, but they knew he wasn’t there — the gates were never locked when he was. Next to his place was a lowish lean-to. Once up on that, you could climb all the different levels of roof and shed until you reached the highest part with its pitched roof. It was a hundred feet up at least.
Ali looked up, felt excitement and dread competing in her belly as, without a word, Jessie fitted her runners into the ridges of the drainpipe and swarmed up, pulling herself along. Six feet, twelve feet. The pipe was next to a mesh fence, where you could see through to the pool next door — ‘Maybe we can swim after,’ Jessie called down.
Ali turned towards the pool, empty and still, strange now it was devoid of people, as if it were waiting for something, for someone. She looked up again. The tin creaked and shifted as Jessie pulled herself up onto the next level, ran along, pulled herself up again, and then again. Ali heard her grunt, watched her lever herself up by her fingers. Quickly she leant her body into the pointy part of the roof and slowly sat up, legs on either side of it, gripping with her hands as if she were on an upside-down boat adrift in the sky.
Back at the bottom, Ali felt the metal of the pipe cool under her hands. Starting was hardest. She wedged her runners into the gaps, pulled herself up. This bit was nothing. Even if she fell, it wouldn’t hurt from this height, and once she was climbing, she could be as good as Jessie. First bolt, second, grip onto the metal bracket, up, stomach on the roof, smell of rusty tin. Don’t look down now.
‘Coo-eee!’ Jessie called.
Flat against the roof Ali flinched a little. She stood up unsteadily and moved across the space. Safe in the middle of a horizontal expanse, she paused to look out. It was growing light, and even from here, the grey-greens of the paddocks appeared contained, magically reduced and defined, the winding river, the streets somewhere with their puny houses. She thought of Jessie’s kite, of diving off, dipping and arcing, flying as she did in her dreams. The sun was coming out now, stripes across the paddocks. She thought of lying in the long grass all day, getting warmer and warmer until she could almost melt. Then she looked up again at Jessie. Seeing her up so high, all at once she felt stuck.
Jessie always knew. ‘When you’re at the last bit, stretch your arms up and I’ll grab you,’ she called down. ‘It’s easy. You should see the view up here — it’s amazing. There are ridges you can hold onto. More comfy than you’d think.’ She raised one arm in the air like a rodeo rider, ‘Whoa! ’
Ali moved. Soon she was across the roof, pulling herself up onto the next level, across and up again. And then the last bit. She tried to pull herself up, but she kept sliding back. She couldn’t go up and she couldn’t go down. Once, twice, a third time. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I can do it.’
She was starting to panic. Her fingers were sweaty but cold, her hands shaking. This was the moment she often came to, the place where Jessie never seemed to go. A kind of blurriness in her mind, an agitation in her arms and legs as if they were not part of her. She stopped for a second or two. She tried not to look up, not to think of the sheer drop on either side of Jessie, of what would happen if she fell. She thought for a moment of her father, how when she held his hand everything was alright.
‘Here.’ Jessie reached down, her pale freckly hand stretching out so all the bones beneath the skin were visible. Ali saw her leg gripping the roof, how skinny it was, braced hard against the tin. She reached her hand up. Jessie’s fingers grabbed hers. ‘I’ve got you,’ she said. ‘It’s okay.’ Ali held on tight. Letting her weight be supported, she stretched out her other hand and reached for the peak of the roof. She hooked one foot up and over, then one knee, and then heaved her torso up so that she was shakily astride, her stomach against the roof. Then, slowly, slowly, she raised her upper body, hands gripping tightly, a feeling in her like liquid. She steadied herself, smiled just a little, at the air, at
Jessie.
All around her the world, better, brighter, clearer: trees, mountains, houses, laid out before her in miniature. She only had a minute to enjoy it, and then Jessie made a sudden feint as if to swing a leg over the edge, and Ali went hot/cold and clutched the roof like a vice. ‘Jessie, shit,’ she hissed.
‘Ha! Don’t worry. I won’t jump. Not that dumb. But I wonder whether, if I bent my knees and rolled, would I be able to not break my legs?’
Ali said nothing. She calmed herself again, looking out — the huge open sky, the breeze on her face.
They sat awhile, not talking. Ali tried to work out what was what among the tiny versions of things: hospital, oval, high school, nursery. She moved her eyes over them quickly, across to the mountains, all the different greens and browns, further off the sea. She saw a car on the Tathra road, all silvery and quick, moving around the bends like a fish. She thought of swimming at Kianinny, dusk, her body under the water just like that. The day was getting brighter, a movement of shadow across the grass.
Then suddenly Ali felt the beat of an engine in her body, heard the yawn of a car door opening. She looked down and saw the caretaker unlocking the front gates, headlights showing the shape of him fiddling with the lock, metal clicking. Then his voice, loud because it was so quiet. ‘Hey! What do you think you’re doing?’
This was what Jessie loved. In seconds she had swung her legs back over towards the lower level, dropped with a thud and was moving across the roof. ‘Come on,’ she called. ‘Let’s go down the other way.’
For a second Ali felt trapped, and then she swung her legs over and swivelled around to drop. It was easier down than up. Her ankles wrenched when they hit the bottom, but she remembered to bend her knees. Jessie had gone another way. It was maybe ten feet to the next level. Crash, and Ali landed next to her, sprawling, breathless.