The Aunts’ House

by Elizabeth Stead

  Elsa was shaking. Angel knew how she must have felt – humiliated and hurt and not saying a word for fear of something worse happening. It was a terrible thing. Angel had been Missus Potts’s target more than once, but to see a grown woman slapped was a terrible thing.

  ‘You’re late this Sunday, Angel. Did the tram break down?’ She was in the kitchen now, washing shells as though nothing at all had happened. Her cheek was red and Angel was sure she saw a tear in her eye. ‘Did the cable lose its grip?’

  ‘No. Are you frightened of Clara and Jessie, Elsa?’

  ‘Certainly not! Mind your business. There are things happening, that’s all. Now, tell me why you’re so late.’

  ‘What things are happening, Aunt Elsa?’

  ‘Rent! Rent’s happening! Now, will you answer my question?’

  ‘I met a friend, that’s all.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a friend. Not a boy I hope.’

  ‘It’s a lady who used to live near the shopfront. Just a friend and we talked and—’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘What’s it like to have a friend?’ Elsa turned from the sink, all wet from the shells and hands hanging by her side, red from scrubbing. And under her moon hat was a creased, dry face with its creek beds running wet from eyes to chin. She just stood there, defeated and scrubby like one of her dish towels. She just stood there looking at Angel and Angel ran suddenly to her and hugged her and snuggled into her shoulder.

  ‘Having a friend is like this!’

  ‘O, Angel – you are the strangest Angel I’ve ever heard about …’ Trying not to cry. ‘O, what an old fool I am.’

  ‘Elsa, does that Jessie really own this place?’ Angel still clutched the gully wildflowers. The maidenhair fern had died of thirst. She threw them into the kitchen bin.

  ‘Yes! And don’t start me on the subject. Jessie and her family got everything from your grandfather. She charges rent and it’s rent she’s come for and it’s rent we haven’t got.’

  ‘Can I help you with Sunday dinner, Aunt Elsa?’

  ‘Too late. I kept some tomatoes for you and a slice of meat – ssshhh.’

  ‘O, Elsa, thank you. I’m very hungry.’

  Suddenly Clara and Jessie were standing at the kitchen door.

  ‘Jessie’s decided she wants something to eat, Elsa, if there’s anything left she likes – pipi porridge, sea snails all alive’o, occo ink sauce, bluebottles with the stings left in! You know what she likes. Same as the old dad.’ Clara’s voice was thin and mean. ‘And what’s she doing here?’

  ‘Angel is only here for a little while. I’ll see what I can do, Clara. Don’t make a fuss, please,’ Elsa said mildly.

  ‘She wants us to mend the balcony railings with money we don’t have, like the rent!’

  ‘We’ll manage somehow, Clara – don’t make things worse.’

  ‘And she wants the yard cleaned up! How are you going to do that at your age?’

  ‘You simply don’t look after the place,’ said Jessie, sweet as gravel. ‘Renters are expected to look after the places they rent. I could turf you two out if I felt like it in a split minute.’ And her black cloak flapped around her like a devil’s brolly.

  ‘O, Jessie, stop saying such things. You wouldn’t. You couldn’t do such a thing to us.’ Elsa’s greatest fear was eviction from the beloved ramshackle in Brooklyn Street on the point of the Bay that she and Clara had lived in for almost half-a-century.

  ‘She could and she would in a devil’s minute! What’s she still doing here? I’m sick of the sight of her.’ Pointing to Angel.

  ‘It’s Sunday, Clara. She’ll go after she’s had something to eat.’

  ‘We’re not paying for Sunday food for outsiders every Sunday!’

  ‘There’ll be something.’ Then she turned to Angel and changing the tone of her voice for the benefit of Clara and Jessie said, ‘But don’t think you’re getting much, girl! It’ll be leftovers if there are any leftovers.’

  ‘Thank you, Elsa,’ said Angel, understanding completely. ‘Can I go down to the rocks?’

  ‘Sooner the better.’

  ‘But if you call me I’ll come right away and help you, Aunt Elsa.’

  ‘Stop calling us “Aunt”,’ spat Clara. ‘We didn’t want you in the first place so just stop it! Imagine Peggy called an aunty. She’d be sick.’

  ‘Who’s Peggy?’ asked Angel.

  ‘My sister, Peggy – she had the sense to leave. None of your business anyway,’ said Clara. ‘She wouldn’t have liked you. She had the sense to be in London when you were born.’

  ‘My mother never told me about her. Did my mother know her?’

  ‘No! Peggy would have throttled her,’ snarled Clara. ‘Your father was her favourite brother!’

  ‘Don’t bother with it now, Clara. Go down to the rocks for a while, Angel.’ Elsa gave Angel an apple to go on with.

  ‘Okay,’ said Angel. ‘But I reckon I’m not the only one around here not right in the head if you really want to know.’

  ‘Shut your mouth and mind your manners!’ Jessie shouted behind Angel as she ran through the long grass to where the rocks took small things into their pools and sheltered them from the rising tides so close to the ocean and the old house.

  For a short time, for she was nervous about missing the tram, Angel cooled herself by the harbour’s salt breezes and splashes on her tough, bare feet. She sat cross-legged on a flat ledge, held her hands against her ears and sucked strands of her hair. She could still feel Elsa’s soft shoulder. She wondered and wondered why Clara was so angry and she gave a thought to the witch, Jessie. Angel would have liked to have seen her floating around the point in her wet, black cape until she drowned just out of reach of the rocks instead of the poor man who’d waved to them. Angel would have enjoyed that. She was beginning to see that the water could be a friend and not just something to fear. Angel stroked a small crab and sucked her hair and was content – one Sunday she would ask Clara to teach her the names of the tides and their swells.

  ‘Leftovers if you want them,’ Elsa called to the rocks. ‘You’d better hurry, it’s nearly time to go.’

  ‘Coming, Elsa!’ Just like family, that was, being called. Almost belonging. A beginning. Another performance of Giselle wafted down the stairs to the kitchen and Angel hummed the music between mouthfuls. She loved Giselle. It was the music of betrayal.

  ‘I’m beginning to understand the music. It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Ssshhh,’ Elsa said, with her finger to her lips. ‘Leave her quiet.’

  Angel had not mentioned the need for art gallery shoes. She had not forgotten about them, but on the way to the aunts’ house that Sunday she’d had an idea. Angel visited a friend she had not seen for a very long time.

  ‘Angel, darling! What a long time it is since I’ve seen you.’

  The babywear shop that was over the road from where Angel had once lived with her mother had not changed a bit. Bonnets and bibs, booties and rattles, shawls and bunny cuddles filled every corner like a population explosion. The woman waved her hand through the air of the shop.

  ‘Still all handmade, but we miss your mother. Just sit on the step for a moment and I’ll be free soon. Won’t be long.’ A cheerful soul was the baby shop lady. Baby’s breath and bubbles, that’d do it, determined Angel. She sat on the step at the entrance and looked across the road to the shopfront her mother had called Bon Ami but she couldn’t remember what it was like inside.

  ‘It’s a hat shop now. Jannette. Very expensive. Some of my customers have bought hats there but they’re mostly grandmothers with money …’

  The baby shop lady chattered on as though everything about her visitor was normal. She pretended not to see the dark rings under Angel’s beautiful eyes, the worn cotto
n dress with a tear at the back, the almost skeletal look of her.

  ‘You’ve grown, Angel – well, of course you’ve grown, silly me. You’re taller, I like the way you stand so straight. Where did you get the wildflowers?’

  ‘The gully up north. I picked them for the aunts but I think they need water.’

  ‘I’ll drip the tap over them. Come out the back with me. Did you have a good tram ride down?’

  ‘O, yes. I always do. I love the trams. I ride in them as much as I can.’

  ‘And what else do you do?’ The baby shop lady asked at exactly the right moment and the experienced Angel knew she was moving traffic in exactly the right direction.

  ‘I read a lot. I go to the local library and there’s always music inside me to listen to, always. And I went to the art gallery in town and I was swimming with all the colours – every colour in the whole world. I wanted to live there. I could have died there and I told one of the guards that and he said he was glad I liked it so much but that I couldn’t go again without shoes.’

  ‘Shoes?’

  ‘I’ve tried to save up but there’s the tram fare to the aunts’ house and—’

  ‘What sort of shoes? Don’t you have any at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘O, sweet Jesus! I thought you were barefoot just for the Bay. Shoes? I’ll get you some shoes, darling. Will sandals do? What size are you – O, silly of me. If you have no shoes then you wouldn’t know your size …’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I pretended to buy some and they measured me and said I was a five.’

  ‘Five it is then. I just can’t believe you go to school in bare feet.’

  ‘I’m not the only one and the headmaster Mister Daisyfield doesn’t care what I do.’

  ‘You come and see me next time you come down, Angel, and in the meantime I’ll look around for sandals – size five. I might get a five-and-a-half as well just in case. When will you be here again?’

  ‘Next Sunday.’

  ‘Well, I’ll have to get going, won’t I? Will you mind if they’re second hand? Nice, but second hand?’

  ‘No, anything will do. You’re a nice person. Do you have children of your own?’

  ‘Sadly, no.’

  ‘You should. You’d be a terrific mother.’

  ‘What a nice thing to say.’

  ‘I will pay you back but it might take a while.’

  ‘We won’t fuss about that now.’

  ‘Well, I think you’re the kindest person I have ever known.’

  ‘O, Angel. Shoes. O, my goodness. We remember your mother. I have a customer waiting, dear, don’t forget your flowers. Go out the back and get them out of the sink. Your aunts will love them.’

  ‘I don’t care if they do or not, now.’ And Angel quickly kissed her cheek. She was glad she was not wearing lipstick that day.

  On the way back across the park at the end of the day at the Bay, Angel whispered to Angel that it was sure to be the bootiful liddle goo goos that made people kind. It was all those cuddles – all that love. The memory of being so close to Elsa made her feel soft inside. She grinned all the way to the tram and climbed on board.

  ‘You look pleased with yourself.’ The tram driver smiled while he waited for stragglers.

  ‘I’m getting shoes for the art gallery. Next Sunday there’ll be shoes and I’ll go to the gallery and study pictures of oceans and all the other colours. O, the colours. Have you seen them?’

  ‘No. And what about oceans?’

  ‘It’s another country right next to ours – didn’t you know that? There’re things living there with their own language and their own music and mountains and valleys and forests of kelp, tall as cathedrals, and canyons deeper than anything we have and—’

  ‘All right, all right, that’s enough. Where did you get all that?’

  ‘The library – in big books about the sea – and, well, I just know.’

  ‘You’re all over the place. Got your fare home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then, stop jumping around – we’re off.’ And as the last straggler climbed aboard the driver turned his lever and ding ding dinged away from Angel’s Mariana with its high sandstone borders. She was unfamiliar with the music playing inside her at that moment but she was sure it had something to do with the ocean, colours and the art gallery. Angel asked Angel to listen carefully.

  Two of the stragglers, women, were regulars and sat across the aisle from Angel Martin. They studied her while she gave herself instructions.

  ‘If you want to know what I think,’ said one, ‘it’s some sort of autism.’

  Ding ding!

  Sea pictures #1

  It was still high summer over the gully behind Persia Potts’s Bushland Boarding Establishment. All was gently cooled on the hill but not as much as in the east where the sea breezes blew from the water. In high summer the gully had its own cool climate at the end of its northern day – moist in the shadows and the damp light of the yawning sun that dappled through the trees and ferns – and it was the colour green.

  Angel thought it extraordinary that in a matter of an hour or two she’d sat on harbour rocks splashed by low swells sent to delight her by Mariana and was then in a world of thick scrub and trees dripping from the humid – almost tropical – day in a jungle that could have been created by RL Stevenson. The earth that spun her backwards and forwards in time was different at every turn. Humans, animals, birds, heat and ice – all different in their way and there was a greed in her to know more and more of her earth and the great ocean nation she had named Mariana.

  Angel wondered how she was going to survive the wait for shoes so she could go back to the art gallery and study the colours of paintings and paintings of oceans – their white horses and enormous waves and everything that was powerful about them.

  She hoped the baby shop lady had not realised that she had begged for shoes like a trickster.

  Angel was aching to go to the toilet when she got back from her Sunday with the aunts and she went to the gully and peed behind a fern tree near the creek. She didn’t think it would mind. She was reluctant to go to the boarding house for a while and stayed until dark in the gully where she felt safe. It was around seven o’clock when she finally went inside the house as though she’d just arrived.

  ‘You’re late! There’s nothing left,’ snapped Missus Potts.

  ‘She can have mine,’ said a casual.

  ‘What’s on tonight?’ asked Angel.

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘Terrible times frightful triple-squared!’ Barnaby Grange laughed. Angel didn’t know what Barnaby Grange’s numbers meant when he described the food that way, but he spoke in words and she thought they might have been the first unmathematical words he’d spoken in a long time. And he seemed as though he was quite pleased to see her.

  ‘The aunts gave me food at the Bay – I’m not hungry.’

  Added to the egg yolk stains on the old stale sheet that covered the long table were other stains of other colours and Angel was even fascinated by these. A dob of berry jam reminded her of the red tops on the summer bottles of school milk cooking in their crates, which were made of a particular shiny red foil. Angel liked the tops but she never drank the milk.

  ‘Aren’t music and colours really, really, the most wonderful things?’ she said, almost to herself. ‘And not one the same as the other – reds and reds and reds and gullies of green and …’

  ‘Take no notice,’ said Missus Potts. ‘She’s not normal.’

  ‘She’s got a right,’ said another.

  ‘Not for what she pays,’ said Potts. ‘And with no idea what’s going on here in the house. She doesn’t know, does she? Out all day mucking around at the Bay with things happening here.’

  ‘What th
ings?’

  ‘Well, just for starters, Mister Canning dropped dead with his heart.’

  ‘Old Mister Canning? Did he really?’ Angel grinned her small, sharp teeth. ‘Good riddance!’

  ‘Angel! That’s a terrible thing to say,’ said a casual, not knowing.

  ‘Yes! It was a terrible thing to say,’ said Missus Potts, knowing. ‘And not a relative to be found. What am I supposed to do about that, Miss Know-It-All? This residence is not a boarding house for the dead. Does this establishment have a notice out the front saying “Dead people welcome”?’

  ‘Dig a hole down near the septic tank and bury him there, Missus Potts, who’s to know?’ Angel said, still grinning. ‘And then he can lie there in peace and stick his finger up his own bum!’

  ‘There’s a mind for you – dirty!’ But everyone else laughed – even Barnaby Grange.

  ‘And of course, there’s his relatives. His people must know. There’s the ambulance to pay, for one.’

  Barnaby Grange silently left the table with his papers, pads and pencils but smiled at Angel as he passed. His glance was kind and friendly. She felt comfortable with him; her experience could easily tell the difference. Angel followed him down the passageway to the door of his room. Barnaby seemed to be aware of her but did not turn until he put his key into the lock. He still smiled his blond smile but there were tears in his eyes like something lost and found.

  ‘Do you like colours, too?’

  Barnaby nodded.

  ‘I’m going to sneak away from school one day soon and go to the art gallery in the city – want to come? I’ll have shoes by then – you have to have shoes – and they’ll let me in and I have to tell you about everything in that place. The colours are enough to make you faint dead away, let me tell you. I’m not making it up. Do you want to come with me?’

  ‘O, Angel, yes, yes.’ Barnaby Grange in words. In perfectly good English words with not one number attached to them.

  ‘We’ll go then. After next Sunday at the aunts’ house. I have to go to the Bay on Sundays.’

  The babywear shop on the main road to the Bay opposite what used to be Bon Ami had its door open just wide enough to let in one customer at a time. Sundays were by appointment only so as to never break a sacred law. The baby shop lady heard the Sunday tram stop at the cross-beamed terminus and she waited, with a little excitement, for Angel Martin – she had been shopping like a mother for its child.