Listening to Mondrian

by Nadia Wheatley

  Meanwhile, the next Easter came and went, and I was in Year 10. I’d always been one of the nobodies at school before this: just passing or just failing, not popular, but not hated, a quiet misfit who no one particularly noticed. That had changed when Maree went missing. For a month or so, when it first happened, I was notorious. Teachers, even Year 12 kids, would stop me in the playground and ask: ‘Any news?’ I felt like putting my answer on tape: ‘No . . .’ ‘Not yet . . .’ ‘Not really . . .’ Eventually, the questioning died down, but a bit of ghoulish fame clung to me. After all, I was the girl who was the sister of the girl whose body might be . . .

  The pain of it all, of course, was that I was still in her shadow. But without her presence I did maybe seem a little more something in myself. Before, it had been as if she were the positive, and I were the negative. She was sharp, vivid, with a cloud of fizzy gold spiral curls and a face that was all movement. I was stodgy, stolid, with limp brown hair that just sort of flopped down in strands over the broad bones of my cheeks. With Maree gone, I somehow felt less dull.

  Or maybe it was the glass that made the difference. Now that I was working with colour, through colour, perhaps something of the light alchemised into my soul. All I know is that I started doing better at schoolwork (before it had been Maree who was brilliant, though slack as slack).

  The crunch came just after the Year 10 exams, when it was my turn to see the careers adviser.

  ‘You’ve done quite well, Marta . . .’ I could hear the surprise in her voice. ‘Have you any idea what you’d like to do – whether you want to stay on at school . . .’

  At our school, it wasn’t unusual for kids to leave at the end of Year 10. I’d always imagined myself escaping as soon as I could, but I’d never given any thought to what I would do afterwards. Now I found myself saying ‘Yes. I do know what I want to do. I want to make church windows.’

  Mrs Whalan stared. ‘But no one does that, Marta. I mean, maybe in the past, when the old churches were being built . . .’

  ‘Well, maybe the windows in the old churches break sometimes, and have to be mended. Or maybe new churches sometimes need leadlight windows.’

  Mrs Whalan looked very doubtful. She didn’t have any pamphlets. But over the next week she got me to bring in some of my work and show it to the art teacher, and then she made inquiries and said the best thing would be to focus on Art for the HSC and then go to TAFE and do some sort of design course. It would probably still be impossible ever to get a job making lead-light windows, but perhaps I could teach a hobby course, in making lampshades or something.

  ‘OK,’ I said. I would have agreed to anything, just to keep on working with coloured glass.

  Mum and Dad didn’t seem to care either way when I told them, but as a special reward for my good Year 10 results they gave up a Friday night of searching to come to the end-of-year prize-giving. I didn’t win anything, but a couple of my pieces were on display in the front hall and it felt like a prize, having Mum and Dad go out at night for me.

  There was supper after the speeches and Mrs Whalan and the art teacher talked for a long time to Dad. Mum sat in a corner, unable to eat anything, holding back her tears. She knew a lot of the Year 12 kids, because they’d been Maree’s friends, and all the way home in the car my mother kept saying she couldn’t help thinking that if things had been different, Maree would have been among them. She’d probably have been dux, or school captain, or at least won the English prize – she was always so good at poetry . . .

  It was a wet night, and I remember observing the way the yellow street lights along the freeway made a series of golden haloes, like flowers in a field of dark. If I could capture that, I thought.

  By the time we got home, it was pouring. We parked in the garage, then made a dash up the path towards the back verandah. Sitting there on my leadlight table, sheltering from the rain, was Maree.

  ‘Where have you guys been?’ she said. ‘I’ve been waiting for hours.’

  When the Prodigal Son returned, his father had compassion and ran, and fell on his neck and kissed him. In our story it was the mother, but the rest was the same.

  Mum took Maree in, and put her in a hot bath, and clothed her in my quilted dressing gown, then fed her cocoa and raisin toast.

  ‘No questions, OK?’ Maree threatened.

  I saw Dad crying with happiness as he watched the toast.

  ‘I’ve said I’m sorry,’ (she hadn’t, actually) ‘but I just don’t want any hassles. OK?’

  And of course it was. They were scared that if they said something she’d go again. So they said nothing at all.

  That Sunday when the three of us went to church (Maree was still asleep) the congregation gave thanks to Almighty God for answering its prayers.

  Now that Maree was back, we had to share the bedroom again, but at least I had my leadlight work table on the verandah and I could escape out there, and didn’t have to watch her lolling on the bed through the long summer days, examining her fingernails, leafing through a fashion magazine, laying out a game of Patience, braiding her hair into dozens of skinny plaits and unbraiding it again. Maree could always think up a hundred and one ways to do absolutely nothing; still can, in fact. (Dad sometimes used to call her ‘Lil’, short for Lily, from the bit in the Bible where Jesus says to consider the lilies of the field who never toiled or helped with the chores.)

  It was towards the end of January that Maree did one of her crawly-crawlies to Mum and Dad and said she’d seen how stupid she’d been, and she’d decided to go back to school.

  ‘Go back!’ I yelled when they told me. ‘To my school!’ If she went back now, she’d be in Year 11, the same as me. It had been bad enough having her two years ahead, but if she was in the same year!

  ‘It was Maree’s school before it was your school,’ Mum pointed out. ‘Besides, Maree will be able to help you. She’s so good at poetry and things.’

  One Saturday just before first term started, I took a few pieces to the market as usual. Now that Dad didn’t search for Maree I had to go on the train, but I’d made a special portfolio and could (just) carry it. When I got home, late that afternoon, I could hear the noise from the street.

  It turned out that Dad had invited the church Men’s Group to our place for a working bee. He’d provided the materials, and they’d been flat out all day extending the back verandah and closing it in, to make it into a room. Now there was a party to celebrate. Dad had really turned it on: dozens of T-bones, and mounds of snags for the kids, and the wives were all charging around the kitchen putting mayonnaise in the coleslaw and passionfruit on the pavs. When I asked what the hell was going on, Mum just said, ‘I thought you’d be tickled pink, love. Now you’ve got the bedroom back to yourself. And Maree can have the new little room.’

  The new little room. That just happened to be the back verandah where I did my work. There was no way Mum would let me solder and do stuff in the bedroom. I might as well say goodbye to coloured glass.

  I went into ‘my’ bedroom and refused to come out for the party.

  It was the next morning, cleaning up, that I talked to Dad. Maree was still in bed, of course, and Mum was at church, and Dad and I were fossicking around the yard for stray paper plates and plastic cups.

  ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘when it’s me that stayed home and didn’t give you any trouble – why do you never do anything for me? And yet she goes off for nearly two years, and she has sex with blokes, and gets into drugs and stuff, and you give her everything. Why?’

  My father was a quiet man, a clerk on the water board, who wore grey rib-knit cardigans and (before the Maree trouble) used to propagate dahlias. Very occasionally, as a form of affection, he’d call me ‘Sis’. He never did that with Maree.

  ‘Sis,’ he said now as he started to dismantle the trestle tables, ‘Sis, I know it seems unfair, but you have everything that I can give you, for already you have travelled far beyond me. But Maree is a child who still wants what I can give, an
d who will always need more than I will have.’

  I thought that he had finished, because he worked in silence for a while as he concentrated on making the trestles form a tidy stack against the fence. At last he turned to me, and I noticed how pale the blue of his eyes was, as if the weeping for Maree had leached out most of the colour. ‘Do you really think,’ he went on, ‘that this one time away will be the end of it? No, Maree will be back and forth like a botfly. That’s why I built the room, so she can come and go, down the side passage, without waking your mum. Because this will go on, Sis.’ He looked me straight in the eye, almost as though committing me to something. ‘She’ll leave home, and come back, and leave again, and return again, but no matter what she does, I want her always to have a refuge from the storm.’

  I was only sixteen at the time, so I was much less moved then by my father’s words than I am now, writing this down. At the time I said, ‘But what about my lead-light?’ Dad said, ‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about that. How would you like to have the garage?’

  The garage! All that space, closed in. I could build a proper workbench, store my pieces really well. ‘But what about the car?’

  ‘I can keep it on the street. Actually I’ve been thinking, now Maree’s back and I don’t have to drive around so much, I might sell it. Put the money into a couple of bank accounts, for when you and Maree leave school.’

  It was as if he knew what was going to happen. Two years later, just after Maree and I did Year 12, he had a stroke and died. Mum inherited the house, of course, and I had my half-the-car money for Art School fees. Maree moved out again, spent her car money on – whatever she spends her money on. Moved back home, just as I was leaving to start my apprenticeship as a travelling restorer of old church windows. Over the next few years, as I went around the country building up my skills, Maree moved out again – back again – out again – back again – then out again to live with Brett up the coast . . .

  That’s what Mum was on the phone about, a while ago: ‘Marta, it’s about Maree. She’s left Brett. Reckons he’s a lazy so-and-so . . .’

  (Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.)

  ‘So anyway she’s packed her bag – she’s got no money as usual – had to ring reverse charges – and she’s hitching down. Oh Marta, I do worry . . .’

  ‘She’ll be OK, Mum. She’s done it before.’

  ‘I know. But maybe this time . . .’

  ‘No, not this time, Mum. Nothing will happen.’ (Why do I always argue when I speak with my mother?)

  ‘Anyway the thing is, I don’t know that – just at the moment – I’m quite up to it. I mean, as you know, Maree’s always welcome here – you both are, though you never . . . But anyway Doctor said, just last week, what with my blood pressure . . .’

  It went on longer than this of course, much longer than this, because we had to go back over the whole saga of Maree leaving home the first time, and why was that, and if only her father were here, and if things had been different, and (yes, I swear it!) ‘Maree was always so good at poetry . . .’ but in the end I said, ‘Mum, when she arrives, stick her in a taxi with just enough for her fare, and send her over to my place. She can camp here for a while.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ and ‘I couldn’t possibly!’ and so on – we even had an argument about whether or not Mum should send some extra bedding with her, or maybe a few tins of things. ‘I know how hard up you students always are.’

  ‘Mum, I’ve got money! And I’m not a student – I got the St Paul’s job. My first window!’

  Naturally that passed right over her – or she passed over it. ‘Well, if you’re sure, love . . .’

  ‘Sure I’m sure.’

  I can hear the taxi outside now. Maree’s laugh as she tips the driver. The slam as he gets her haversack from the boot. I look back at my phone doodle, my design for the east chapel: the arrival of the Prodigal, seen from the point of view of the jealous sibling. A load of self-indulgent shit.

  Ah, but all around the border is the theme for a cheerful parable: for I have drawn, I realise, the lilies of the field, who toiled not, neither did they spin, and yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

  (Imagine the colours I’ll be able to explore with this!)

  The door is open. Maree comes in, her bright face bringing the sense of sunlight that always seems to shine right through her.

  ‘Thanks, Sis,’ I tell her, lifting the heavy pack off her shoulders: for, extravagant as ever, she has given me my first window. A miracle in deed.

  THE CONVICT

  BOX

  Some of this story is about me, and some of it is about a fictional person. I’m not absolutely sure where the reality stops and the invention starts, so I’ll try to put it down just as it happened.

  I am sixteen years old and I live in Katoomba, New South Wales, and my name is Dan Baker. (Or it mostly is. But you’ll see.) It was last winter when this started (it’s the morning of 31 December now) and maybe I should say that last winter was really bad.

  I don’t mean the weather (though it gets pretty bliz-zardy up here in the Blue Mountains), but Mum. She was on my back all the time, really getting at me. ‘Clean up your room!’ ‘Turn that music down!’ ‘Don’t leave your skateboard in the passageway!’ ‘Do the washing up!’ ‘Put the peanut butter away after you’ve used it!’ ‘Pick up your skateboard!’ ‘Turn that bloody Jimi Hendrix down!’ ‘Will you clean up your room please, Daniel Baker!’

  That was normal. I could cut off from that. But as well as all this usual stuff there was a new track on the record, about how I was in Year 10 and the School Certificate exams were coming up and if I didn’t pull my finger out, I wouldn’t be able to go on to Year 11, and what would happen to me then? ‘It’s your future,’ she kept saying, ‘It’s your future, not mine, that’s at stake.’

  One night we had a really bad argument, and I snapped. ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I yelled. ‘It is my future, not yours.’ I told her that I didn’t want to go on to the HSC anyway.

  She got spitting mad then. ‘If you think I’m going to have you hanging about the house doing nothing – and you would be doing nothing, there’s no jobs up here . . .’

  No worries, I told her. I’d go to Perth and live with Dad. Then she’d be free of me for good.

  I thought she’d hit the roof, tell me I couldn’t, she wouldn’t allow me, etc. etc. She’s always been a bit funny about me even seeing Dad when he comes across to Sydney for a gig, about once every blue moon. (He’s a muso, see, and a bit of a pisspot, and she’s scared it might be catching.) But she just said, ‘Oh well. If that’s what you really want . . .’

  After that, she stopped nagging, but things were somehow worse. It was as if I’d already gone, the way she ignored me. She enrolled in this textile design course at TAFE, and I heard her telling Nan over the phone that when I moved out she’d turn my room into a studio. ‘The problem is these bloody pine trees block most of the light from the window. I’m thinking about asking the landlord to put a skylight in. Don’t know how he’ll feel about it . . .’ It was as if me leaving home was the opportunity she’d been waiting for.

  Funnily enough, now that Mum had stopped going on all the time about homework, I didn’t seem to mind it so much. Or maybe it was something to do. There was this sort of embarrassed silence between us if I went out into the lounge room to watch TV with her, so I just stayed in my room, most nights. A lot of the time we didn’t even make eye contact.

  Anyway, that’s the background. The story really starts one day in June, when Ms Papadopoulos, that’s our History teacher, gave us this assignment. We’d been doing early white settlement, convicts and all that. We’d gone on an excursion out to the old courthouse and jail at Hartley, near the Coxs River, and we’d looked at this sandstone culvert that the road gangs had built on the Victoria Pass. We’d read photocopies of old documents about living conditions and stuff, and now Ms Pap said, ‘I want you to imagine you’r
e a convict, and you’ve been assigned as a servant to a master in the bush, and all your belongings in the whole world fit in a box the size of a shoebox . . .’

  So we had to collect all the things for our own convict box. We had a month to do it in.

  That night, over tea, I told Mum about it. I don’t know why – I guess it was just something to say. I could see she was really interested – she loves watching history documentaries – but she just said, ‘Poor things, it must’ve been so hard for them, leaving their homes . . .’ And then she bit her tongue, because since the night of the argument, we’d avoided any mention of ‘going’ or ‘leaving’ or even of ‘home’. (I wondered what it’d be like, living four thousand kilometres away in Perth. I mean, the furthest west I’ve ever been is Dubbo Zoo.)

  Of course, with a whole month to collect the convict stuff I put off doing it, but over the next few days I found myself making little lists in my head. I’d be skating with my mates in the car park, and I’d think, Candle! Or I’d be listening to Jimi Hendrix (I do like lots of new stuff too, but he’s the best guitarist ever) and I’d think, A spare bit of boot leather would come in handy . . . And one Saturday, when it was too wet to go out, I went to the garage to oil the bearings on my skateboard, and I found myself picking through the shelf of old stuff that previous tenants had left over the years – bits of wire, all sizes of nails, a huge old bolt, a piece of dog chain, a rusty tobacco tin, three fish hooks . . . If you’d been sent halfway across the world with nothing, then stuff like that would probably seem like treasure.

  Mum came in then, to get the axe (we’ve got a fuel stove as well as the electric one). I thought she was going to tell me to split some wood, but she just said, ‘You’d probably have to cook for yourself a lot of the time.’

  It took a moment before I figured out that she was talking about Perth. Dad was on the move a lot, the band did country gigs as well as city pubs. I guess I’d kind of imagined that I’d travel round with him, but I suppose (I thought when Mum said that), I suppose he wouldn’t always have room in the van for me, and I’d sometimes have to stay by myself in the flat. ‘No worries,’ I told Mum. ‘I’d just get takeaway or something.’