I will think about this carefully, Angel said to Angel. I wonder what the music for hands will be? I know the colours – black – dark brown spider hairs and ugly and she carefully listened to the music inside her for help or a clue but the current offering was unchanged and into its second movement.
Persia Potts’s boarders mostly referred to her as Pottsy, but only in the privacy of their minds or in whispers.
There were five boarders (six if one counted Angel Martin). Four were permanent and others came and went. There was always a room (if you could call it that) waiting for a casual. Some boarded for the house’s proximity to the sanitarium but most who found themselves at Persia Potts’s Bushland Boarding Establishment were like lost souls with barely two pennies to rub together. Like ghosts, they were, floating in and out. Always hungry. Tramps in their way, for a night or a bludging day. They went out as skinny as they came in and, for a reason Angel could not possibly have explained, she always tip-toed, ssshhh, past their rooms, as a sign of respect for the lost.
One of the permanents was Mister Barnaby Grange. Barnaby was from Suffolk, not far from London, and had the pale complexion and hair of an Englishman. He was very tall, and seemed to be a nice man who, when asked his age, simply said ‘five eight’. He didn’t bother anyone and was always scribbling and solving mathematical equations, calculations, problems and theories about everything he saw. Barnaby Grange reminded Angel of an alabaster sculpture of a man she had once seen in a book – pale, a little fragile, with a head clearly full of lines and wires and connections and a heart that delicately pumped when it was necessary to do so. His jacket was crumpled and a little worn at the cuffs but, as Missus Potts had observed once: Quality is quality, even if it’s scuffed.
‘And see how his shoes are always clean. The Kiwi’s smudged a bit as though he’s not used to doing shoes himself – well, he wouldn’t be would he, where he comes from. His family pay well to look out for him – not like some. And close to the sanitarium if he ever needed it.’
‘Is he royal?’
‘Not far off so you be good-mannered around him, Angel Martin, and don’t chew your hair in front of him.’
Angel studied Mister Grange’s pale, clever hands, never without a pencil in the right one and notepad in the left, and felt quite safe to be near them. He wrote in numbers, spoke in numbers, numbered his days and all he observed. He probably dreamed in numbers, she imagined. Inside his jacket was a pocket watch. His father had given it to him, she was told. The watch was gold with wings beautifully engraved on it and it ticked exactly an hour slow. Missus Potts once asked, Why the wings? and Mister Grange answered in his quiet way, for he rarely spoke in words at all, To make time fly.
Missus Potts told Angel he was what they called a remittance man – more often than not they were mad geniuses sent out from the Mother Country by their toffee-nosed families who didn’t want to be embarrassed by them.
‘But left to themselves, harmless in their way,’ she said. ‘And there’s no trouble with paying, like I said, not like some,’ which was of course aimed at Angel. A bull’s eye.
Barnaby Grange did keep himself to himself and Missus Potts was so grateful for the regular money, plus any extra for things he needed and some he didn’t, that she often served him an extra potato with gravy. Angel hoped she would understand his language one day so he wouldn’t be lonely. She knew nothing about numbers but she could learn.
Missus Potts mumbled away while she stirred tired and greying sheets with a worn copper stick in a copper that had become lukewarm. Angel was told she had to stay and help with the wringer.
‘But why would Mister Grange choose this house, Missus Potts?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean? This place is as good as any!’
‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’
‘Then, think. Why do you think? Peace and quiet for one, and it’s close to the sanitarium. I told you, Lord and Lady Up Themselves wanted him close to the sanitarium.’
‘Is Mister Grange a genius with music as well?’ asked the dear little wise orphan at the wringer.
‘Not that I’ve heard – not a sound has come from him but his numbers. Numbers, numbers, numbers, but you’re always humming something when you’re not chewing your hair and talking to yourself. Come to think of it you two should get along like a house on fire.’
‘Doesn’t he ever talk in words?’
‘If he does, it’s nothing much I can understand. Just numbers, numbers, numbers. There’s no harm in him, he’s just mad.’ Missus Potts had to remind herself that she was talking to a child, but a child was better than nothing at all. Apart from the clothes prop man, she had no friends.
In Angel’s opinion she’d been ‘taken in’ to a boarding house packed to the roof with mad people or people teetering on the edge of madness, but she wanted to get to know each one. Even then, she thought that. Angel only knew a little bit about madness, but she could learn. There must be many levels of madness and Angel imagined that by now Missus Potts would have got to know every one of them. Not her though – not Pottsy, Angel whispered to Angel. She’s not clever enough to be mad.
Early that morning Angel had been to the gully to pick flowers for the long dining table. She put them in a water glass and sat them in the middle of the stained sheet Missus Potts used for a tablecloth. There were fresh stains, recent stains and old stains. Like the rings of a tree you could count the numbers of washes the old sheet had had. The Persia Potts’s Bushland Boarding Establishment tablecloth was a history of stains. Angel placed the flowers over a recent egg.
‘What’s that supposed to be?’ asked the lady of the manor.
‘Wildflowers. I picked them this morning.’
‘Well, don’t! I don’t want weeds cluttering up the place.’ And Missus Potts threw them out the window all over the terrified blowflies trying to get in. ‘More mess to clean up.’
For breakfast, Missus Potts slopped something lumpy and warm with two-day-old milk into tepid plates, laid down a chipped bowl of boiled eggs, courtesy of the chooks down the back, and placed pepper and salt and jam and toasted old bread standing in a single file next to an urn of weak tea on the long table with the stained sheet. She then told the old, familiar story of her Mister Potts who couldn’t join them for meals owing to the fact that, while he was very rich and dealing in timber somewhere in a jungle in Brazil, he was too busy floating logs down the river to be with them. She wanted them to know that the very table they were eating from was Brazilian, but no one had ever seen the table because of the cloth.
One of the boarders, who imagined Angel had not heard the story, said she felt sorry for Missus Potts but the story changed a little each time and she’d begun to doubt the existence of the man in Brazil.
‘Maybe she’s just lonely,’ said Angel. ‘It’s easy to make up people if you’re lonely.’
But in Angel’s eyes, Missus Persia Potts was a foul woman and nothing like the neat doll of her mother. Missus Potts was big and brawny and tough as the stews she stewed and stewed until the ingredients were drowned and decomposed. A big iron pot on a wood stove boiled rabbits to bits with their scrags and gristle and innards – nothing was wasted – and carrots dug from their graves, potatoes with their eyes cut out, tough runner beans that wished they’d died before they were drowned and celery with strings strong enough to tie up ships. One of the dirt-poor boarders once retched into her handkerchief and despite a ‘sorry’, Missus Potts needed to remind her of the importance of the war and doing without and the poor woman had hung her head and excused herself from the table. On occasion, Angel would pick at a potato and leave some and Missus Potts would preach to her, too. But Angel was not afraid of her – in fact, she was afraid of very little, not Missus Potts, nor any of the boarders. If she felt at all uneasy she would simply turn up the music in her head. No one could sneak up behind her after old Mister Canning di
d what he did – worse, if you like, than Mister Daisyfield on the stairwell. Angel’s eyes and ears were ready for anything. At that period in 1942 Angel considered herself to be experienced and experience to Angel meant trusting nobody. It was for Angel the year of the beginning of knowledge for human females.
‘Go on,’ Mister Daisyfield had whispered to her on the stairwell, fingers ready. ‘There’s good marks for composition your way … go on. You’re not much good for anything else.’
‘I’m better than anyone here!’ Angel had said before she ran in disgust from him and down behind the weather shed in the rain to read one of her stolen books about another world far, far away from a very disappointing plot on Planet Earth.
Angel Martin firmly believed that books were the key to all knowledge. She’d found one or two in the school to be entertaining, but there were not enough of them. She adopted a quiet corner in the local library and thought of it as her private classroom. The books she borrowed from the local library but never returned were those she loved – she only returned those she didn’t. Her current book, The Gorilla Hunters, will be a book she will forget to return and would be seen by the librarian to be stolen but Angel did not think of herself as a thief of the worst kind, but as an adoptive reader and guardian of books that might otherwise have been damaged or forgotten. It had always been so, ever since Angel could read.
‘I’ve never seen a child read so many books but you must return them. This is a lending library. You’ll be the death of us.’ But the librarian was kind and intrigued. ‘You will bring them back, Angel, won’t you?’
‘Okay.’
‘And you mustn’t come during school hours. We’ll all be in trouble.’
‘O, don’t worry about that. Mister Daisyfield said I can do what I like,’ said Angel Martin.
‘I expect I’ll have to find you a bed somewhere out the back. I need the room you’re in,’ said Persia Potts glaring down at Angel with her hands on her wide, childless hips. She had a cold sore on her lower lip and a growth above her right eye that sprouted stiff, grey hairs. It was hard to guess her age – somewhere between fifty and death, Angel thought. Missus Potts was a cranky woman – there was anger and frustration so close to her skin surface that it was possible sometimes to see it move. Angel had long known that the condition of anger is not the fault of its victim but of some outside force. Like the sufferings of her mother. Her poor, poor mother.
Angel Martin had a favourite writer at that time. It was Mister Charles Dickens and he would have loved Persia Potts. In fact, she thought Charles Dickens would have loved the whole bloody thing – the boarding house and its madness and milk carts slipping down the surface of Duffy Street, never mind the season. He would have loved it all.
Mister Dickens would have wrapped Angel up in an old torn shawl and tossed her into snow if he could find some. She had stolen a Dickens book from the library – not the first and not the last – and she’d read and read it and there were old-fashioned illustrations and in one was a woman just like Missus Potts – big, with a stomach and chins! Around her stomach, Pottsy wore an apron she called a pinny that was never taken off unless she was at the shops, demanding service on the cheap, in her business capacity.
The old bag of the manor born, was Missus Potts. If anyone had asked the grocers, green or dry, or the butcher or the deli man, they would have all agreed that worst was best for what she offered – lard for the roast scrags and stews, the stale end of a corned cow for a special occasion, potatoes, potatoes by the sack, dying cabbages and the turnips the cows rejected.
‘And is that the best you’ve got to offer?’ Missus Potts poked a cringing carrot.
It was generally thought that if the Potts boarding house was not so close to the sanitarium its owner would be begging for alms by the side of the dirt road where she belonged.
There was never a sign of the rich Mister Potts and it was thought that if he existed he must still be in Brazil or maybe one of the hungry ghosts of casual B & B boarders who sneaked in and out without anyone seeing or hearing them. There was no sign of Mister Potts, only tales of timber and jaguars and pythons long enough to circle the world and of cedar and mahogany jungles cut down and sent to the saw mills on river currents. Angel once wondered if his wife had killed him and put him in the stew pot. There was one particular day when the stew was almost edible.
After her mother’s death, Angel was left with a few belongings, which of course she had to hand over to the disappointed Missus Potts. There were just a few pounds, the pearl brooch, a Japanese tea set fine as new egg shells, a very old silver tankard from China with a bas-relief dragon on it, a cedar standard lamp, a gold-plated motorcycle speed trial trophy, a fine-timbered wireless and an old Wertheim sewing machine, which was operated by a wheel that Angel remembered being allowed to turn when she was tall enough.
‘I never told your mother I’d take you in for nothing and nothing is what you’ve got there, Angel Martin. You’ll work hard for your keep, my girl.’
Angel knew Missus Potts got a good price for the lot. She would have liked to keep the gold star speed trial trophy and the tankard for a memory of mother comfort, but she knew she should not ask. Angel stood straight with her hands on her hips and her thin lips jammed together. Persia Potts stared at Angel and Angel stared right back. It was hard not to stare at the face of a woman Charles Dickens would have wanted at any price. He would have paid a fortune for her.
‘So, what do you want me to do?’
‘After school you’ll do what I say and you won’t give me cheek.’
‘Can I sleep upstairs down the back, somewhere with a door lock?’
‘You’ll go where you’re put.’
‘It’s because Mister Canning touched me.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘He touched me – down there – you know what I mean.’
‘No, I do not, missy.’ But her cheeks were red. ‘Don’t play games with me.’
And of course, Angel hadn’t told her about Mister Daisyfield. However, she was given a bed upstairs down the back with a door lock. It wasn’t much bigger than a broom cupboard (in fact all the rooms were not much bigger than broom cupboards) but she felt safer and there was a window where she could see the gully and its trees at the back of the house, the honeysuckle over the old paling fence. She could even see a bit of the creek if the sun shone on the water, like stars swimming and a breeze that made them swim like fireflies.
Angel was given her list of chores to work on after school. One involved climbing up Duffy Street to meet the ‘rabbito’ for rabbits he’d killed – mind the shot he’d always warn – and then on to the shops where the butcher kept Missus Potts’s stew scraps and then on to the grocer for cheap day-old bread and a ration of butter on the turn and something in a bottle, not coffee, and then to the green grocer for roots and tubers and anything else that was cheap and not grown near the septic tank behind the boarding house. Once, when the ice man was overdue, she was given a canvas carrier for a heavy block for the ice chest. It was very hard work.
Occasionally, there were shoes to take to the bootmaker for repair. The bootmaker had no legs – they were cut off right up to the hips – and he propelled himself around by the biggest arms Angel had ever seen. He could even climb onto the counter with his great arms and Angel clapped and they laughed and became friends. Not far from the bootmaker was the blacksmith’s shop, all horse shoes, anvil and hammers and sparks and the smell of metal. Angel liked to watch him and he didn’t mind. After all, they were neighbours in Duffy Street. As sparks flew like on cracker night through air of metal there was some very small thing that hid behind the music in Angel’s mind that was familiar. Her father? There was something about that smell.
Angel earned a little pocket money for doing after-school shopping and anything the boarders wanted her to do. As little as it was, she was grateful for
it. The grocer once told Angel he was sorry for her, she didn’t know why, but he gave her a bag of broken Monte Carlo biscuits and she wondered how he could possibly have known that they were her favourites.
Chore two was cleaning the up and downstairs bathrooms, and the dunny out the back. When she could, Angel minded the neighbours’ babies for two shillings and pushed their strollers up the hill for a little more. She saved like mad. She saved for the local picture theatre on Saturdays, if there was something decent on, but she saved mainly for Sundays. On Sundays she took the train to the city and then a tram to the aunts’ house at the Bay. She made herself a rag bag to carry her money. And Angel saved on shoes – she never wore them.
‘You’re too young to be riding in trams all that way alone,’ Persia Potts said one day in a rare change of mood. ‘No wonder things happen.’
‘Don’t call me young! I’ve never been young,’ said Angel. ‘And what things do you mean?’
‘Men!’
‘I can look after myself.’
‘The aunts don’t want you down at the Bay, anyway. They hated your mother. She told me all about the troubles.’
‘I’ll make them love me.’
‘What about her – your mother?’
‘You can’t hate dead people, can you? There’s no fun in that.’
Angel, armed with a billy can and a matchbox, escaped to the gully. She went to the green place whenever she could. It was her green-leafed, perfumed and peaceful retreat. She picked blackberries and sucked honeysuckle and once made a fire to cook two yabbies she caught in the creek. She ate and drooled like something feral but the smoke was seen from the house and the brigade was called and a fireman told her she could go to jail for lighting fires in the bush, but Angel said she didn’t care and told him where she lived.
The Aunts’ House Page 2