‘Good. It comes to three pounds, all up.’ He handed her a piece of paper. ‘Give this to your fa– I mean your mother. Don’t write your name on anything until it’s paid for.’
Ruby loved having new stationery. She spent the whole break stacking everything neatly in her desk and washing dried ink out of her inkwell.
At lunch time, though, she had nothing to do and nobody to do it with.
‘Mum said I should look after you, but you’ll be all right, won’t you?’ May said.
‘Of course I will,’ said Ruby. Sitting on a long, low bench, she watched, trying not to feel envious, while May walked off arm in arm with Lorna Seidel.
Ruby undid her package of sandwiches – half plum jam, half mutton – and began to eat, starting with the jam ones. Everybody else seemed to have someone to sit with and talk to. Doris, sitting on a patch of dry lawn with her ankles neatly crossed, was eating her lunch with a Grade Six girl called Verna Pfeiffer.
Before long the boys returned to their football and the girls started a skipping game with the long rope. In another corner of their playground some of the younger girls began to play brandy. ‘Barleys!’ they shrieked when they were hit. Once the dirty old tennis ball they were using rolled under Ruby’s feet, and she picked it up and threw it back.
‘D’you want to play with us, Ruby?’ called Bee, who was ‘he’. But Ruby shook her head. She knew she’d never live it down if she, a Grade Seven, were to be seen playing with Grade Three and Four children. Still, she was glad when two little boys sat on the bench next to her. It made her look less alone. One of the boys had a pile of ‘Us Fellers’ comic strips, cut out of newspapers.
Ruby put her mutton sandwiches in the rubbish bin. Then she took her empty water bottle and filled it up from the waterbag hanging beside the rainwater tank. The water didn’t look very clean, and there was a wriggler in it, so she tipped it out. She sat on the bench again, and watched.
Country children weren’t a bit like her schoolmates in Adelaide. It wasn’t just that her old school was only for girls, or that everybody there wore school uniform. Most country children had sunburned faces or freckles. They moved faster, and their voices were louder, and they laughed more. And a lot of them looked really poor. Several of the girls wore blouses or jumpers that were too tight, and skirts with hems that had been let down. Ruby could see the lines where the material hadn’t faded.
The girls who were skipping were Grade Sixes and Grade Sevens. They ran in and out of the rope’s long curve, singly and in pairs, chanting:
I saw a nanny-goat
Putting on her petticoat
In – side – out!
May was turning one end of the rope, and Lorna held the other end. It thudded steadily on the ground, speeding up when Lorna yelled, ‘Pepper!’
Ruby loved skipping. I’ll ask if I can join in, she thought. May mightn’t like me, but that doesn’t mean everybody else will hate me too.
As she was about to stand up, Verna Pfeiffer came and sat down next to her. Ruby smiled, but Verna didn’t smile back.
‘Think you’re a bit flash, don’t you, Townie?’ Verna said.
‘What? No, of course I don’t.’
‘Why are you wearing them clothes, then?’
Ruby sighed. ‘Because it’s a school uniform. And I’m at school.’
‘It looks stupid.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
‘Does too, Townie.’
‘Please don’t call me that.’
‘Ooh, so sorry, Townie. I didn’t think it would bother you, seeing as that’s what you are. Anyway, you can sit with us if you like. Doris says.’
‘All right,’ Ruby said. But I’ll just do it to be polite, she told herself.
Sitting with Doris and Verna wasn’t nearly as much fun as being with Marjorie and Sally and the twins, Ruby’s friends at her old school. All Doris and Verna did was gossip about the other girls. They talked about their clothes, and their hair, and whether or not they had a boyfriend.
Ruby couldn’t help wondering what they’d been saying about her, earlier. She was glad when Mr Miller rang the bell for afternoon lessons.
When it was time to go home, Ruby found that her satchel wasn’t in the porch where she’d left it. It was May who found it at last, hidden under the woodwork bench. There was a rip in the leather, and somebody had tried to scratch out Ruby’s initials, which were embossed on the front in gold. And when Ruby opened the flap, she discovered, with a horrible sinking feeling, that her little china dog had gone.
Ruby stood holding the empty satchel and sniffed back tears. ‘It’s bad enough that they’ve ruined my bag,’ she said to May. ‘But there was something in it, and someone’s stolen it.’
‘Was it valuable?’
‘Not really. It was just my little china dog, but it – it meant a lot to me.’
‘If it meant a lot to you, why did you take it to school?’
I wish May wouldn’t always make me feel that everything is my fault, Ruby thought.
‘Does it matter?’ she said. ‘Somebody has ruined my bag and somebody has taken my china dog.’
‘Most likely it’s boys teasing,’ May replied. ‘They wouldn’t steal your dog. They’ve probably only hidden it.’
‘But why would they want to tease me?’ Ruby asked, hurt. ‘What have I done to them?’
‘Nothing. You’re just . . . different. You’re wearing a flash uniform and you’ve got a flash schoolbag. Some of the kids might think you’re pretty fond of yourself.’
‘You should have told me that before we left home, then.’
‘I can’t tell you what to wear,’ May replied, shrugging.
Ruby grew hot with rage, right up to the top of her head. ‘That’s not fair,’ she said. ‘You knew what everyone would think. You could’ve helped me, and you didn’t.’
May didn’t reply at first. Then she said, ‘I’m sorry, I suppose it wasn’t very fair. But now we’d better get going. Bee and I have got the milking to do.’
All the way home Ruby felt angry and sad. May had apologised, but it wasn’t much of an apology, and it didn’t change anything. She hated the school. She hated the way her schoolmates kept looking at her, the boys laughing and the girls whispering behind their hands. She hated having to walk all the way there and all the way back: the dust got in her eyes, and she had a huge blister on her left heel.
Back in her shared bedroom, she ripped off her school uniform. Then she pulled off her school shoes and stockings and flung them into a corner.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Bee, coming in. ‘Why are you in your undies?’
‘I’m in my undies,’ said Ruby, ‘because I am never wearing my school uniform again. Never ever.’
Putting on a cotton frock, she went in search of her mother. She found her sitting on an old rattan couch on the side verandah, mending a torn pillowslip. Aunt Flora was snoozing in a cane chair nearby, a large white handkerchief covering her eyes.
Ruby flopped down on the couch. ‘Hello, Mother,’ she said. ‘Did Baxter behave himself?’
‘More or less,’ Mother replied. ‘He slipped his chain after you left for school, and I found him digging in the vegetable garden. I don’t know how he got in through the wooden fence, but he did. Then there was an unfortunate incident with one of the cats, so I had to put him back on the chain. How was school?’
‘It was utterly horrid,’ Ruby told her. ‘Somebody stole my china dog that Mrs Traill gave me. Everyone laughed at what I was wearing, and the girl I have to share a desk with is like Brenda Walker, only worse. Oh, and you have to pay three pounds for my books and stationery.’
‘Three pounds?’ Mother’s face fell. ‘Ruby, I don’t have three pence to spare, let alone three pounds.’
‘What? No! Can’t Dad send you some money?’
‘Your father has nothing. He has given me an allowance so that I can pay Uncle James a small amount each week for our board. That’s all we have.’
‘Wh
at about Uncle Donald?’
‘I shall certainly not ask for charity from Uncle Donald.’
‘Uncle James?’ But even as she said it Ruby knew how impossible that was. Then she brightened. ‘I know! I could sell some eggs.’
‘Ruby, do be sensible. The eggs aren’t yours to sell.’
Ruby made a face. ‘What can I do, then?’
‘You’ll have to give it all back. I’m sure you don’t need new pens and pencils and exercise books – you still have what you were using at your old school, don’t you? And perhaps you could borrow textbooks.’
Ruby kicked at the floor. ‘Do I really have to give everything back, Mother? It’s so embarrassing.’
‘It’s a sight less embarrassing than being in debt,’ Aunt Flora said from beneath her handkerchief. ‘There’s no disgrace in being poor, lassie.’
‘Oh my hat,’ Ruby whispered to Mother. ‘I thought the old witch was asleep.’
‘Witches can see with their eyes closed,’ said Aunt Flora, lifting the handkerchief and staring at Ruby. ‘They just pretend to sleep, so they can catch young gerruls out. Eggs, indeed.’
RETURNING all that lovely new stationery was one of the most humiliating things Ruby had ever done. In an instant it turned her into the sort of person other people felt sorry for.
Mr Miller was able to find a couple of dirty, dog-eared old textbooks for her, but she could hardly bear to touch them: one of them, the arithmetic book, looked as if it had fallen in somebody’s greasy dinner. And later there was even more humiliation.
‘Have you done much sewing, Ruby?’ asked Mrs Miller. The headmaster’s wife took the older girls for sewing lessons while Mr Miller took the boys for woodwork. Everybody enjoyed these lessons, because formal rules were relaxed. ‘Did you make clothes for your dolls?’
Ruby shook her head. ‘No, sir. I mean, no, Mrs Miller.’
‘Oh. Does your mother sew?’
‘Not much. We always buy our clothes from the department stores.’
Mrs Miller clicked her tongue. ‘I’m afraid you will be quite a long way behind the other girls.’ She gave Ruby some squares of pale blue fabric, a needle and a wooden spool of thread, and an exercise book. On the pages of the book were pinned pieces of the same blue fabric, each one showing how to do a different stitch.
‘Before you can make anything, you must learn to do the following.’ Mrs Miller counted them off on her fingers. ‘Tacking. Running stitch. Backstitch. Hemstitch. French seam. Cross stitch. Featherstitch. Buttonhole. Copy the examples as neatly as you can, and make sure you look at both sides of the fabric. Doris will help you, won’t you, Doris?’
Ruby flicked through the pages of the book. She was very aware of Doris, beside her, breathing noisily through her mouth.
‘We did all those stitches in Grade Five,’ Doris told her. ‘I’m making a nightdress now, see? I might do some embroidery on it, too.’
Ruby cut a length of cotton thread, licked the thread as she’d seen Doris do, and pushed the licked end through the eye of her needle. She looked over at May, who was hemming an apron. Her cousin was working quickly and skilfully, looking up now and again to compare her work with what Lorna was doing. The two friends laughed and whispered together.
Of course May is good at sewing, Ruby thought. May is good at every single thing I’m bad at. She stared at her pieces of blue fabric.
‘Start with the tacking,’ Doris advised her. ‘Any fool can do that.’
Ruby stuck her needle into the cloth. In, out. In, out. After several minutes a line of long stitches wobbled across the lower edge.
‘That’s not straight,’ said Doris. ‘And your thread is pulling out because you didn’t do a double stitch at the start.’ She heaved a sigh. ‘I can see I’ll have to teach you everything.’ She dug around in the bag hanging from two hooks at the side of her desk, and brought out a handful of sweets. All the children except Ruby had these book bags. They were made from old sugarbags, and the girls had decorated them by pulling out threads of hessian and weaving brightly coloured wool into the gaps. ‘Here,’ Doris said, pushing an unwrapped toffee into Ruby’s hand. ‘Have a lolly.’
Ruby saw that it had bits of grit stuck to it. She gave it back. ‘No thank you.’
‘Oh, go on! No wonder everyone thinks you’re a snob.’
‘I’m not, honestly.’
‘Take the lolly, then. Dad works at the pub, and he gets them free.’ Doris moved closer to Ruby. ‘I told the other kids you can’t help being a townie. Don’t worry, I’ll stand up for you if they tease you.’
‘I can stand up for myself.’
‘You still need a friend, though. We could be best friends. Verna is starting to get on my nerves. I’d like a proper best friend.’
So would I, Ruby thought, but I don’t want my best friend to be Doris Spinks. She started again on the tacking stitch. Her thread had looped and tangled, and now there was a knot in it.
‘You cut a piece that was too long,’ Doris said triumphantly.
Feeling as if her life couldn’t get much worse, Ruby unpicked the tacking again.
Doris had been Ruby’s best friend for three weeks now, and as usual she was waiting for Ruby at the school gate. Because Doris lived in the town, she nearly always arrived at school early.
‘Hello, Ruby! I’ve got something real good for you today,’ she said.
Ruby didn’t want to, but she stopped to talk to Doris while May and Bee went off to meet their own best friends. Bee’s special friend was Anthea Hartwig, and everybody called them Ant and Bee.
If you have a nickname, that means people like you, Ruby thought, as she half-listened to Doris complaining about somebody who’d been mean to her. At her old school her friends had called her ‘Ruby Q’. Here nearly all the children called her ‘Townie’, but not in a friendly way. Ruby felt sometimes that everybody else was a member of a secret club she wasn’t allowed to join. And still nobody had returned her little china dog, or told her where it was hidden. It must have been stolen, after all.
Although she didn’t really like Doris, Ruby tried hard to be friendly. The shameful truth was that she needed her. Doris was still the only person in the school who wanted to be her friend, and in class Ruby had to keep borrowing her textbooks. In return Ruby let Doris use her good Lakeland coloured pencils.
Like Ant and Bee, Ruby and Doris now did everything as a pair. They lined up next to each other for assembly. They were ink monitors together, mixing the ink powder with water to fill the white ceramic inkwells set into every desk. At the weekly Physical Training classes Doris made sure that she and Ruby were partners – throwing beanbags to each other, pulling each other up, legs locked, in sit-ups.
At lunchtime they ate their sandwiches together while Doris talked. She told Ruby that Iris Dunn was stupid because she’d been born backwards. She said that Lorna Seidel had worms. She whispered that she’d seen Betty Pfitzner and Bob Turner kissing behind the barn where the children who rode to school stabled their horses. Ruby wasn’t sure if these things were true or not, but knowing them made her feel uncomfortable.
None of the other children liked Doris. ‘Why are you such good friends with her?’ Bee had asked Ruby once on the way home from school. ‘She says horrible things about people, and she tells fibs. She told everyone that May only came top last year because she cheated in the exams. May would never cheat, not in a hundred million years.’
Most of all, Ruby wished Doris would stop giving her presents. This morning her gift was a bottle of rose scent so strong and sweet it made Ruby’s nose itch.
‘It was my mum’s, but she said I could give it to you,’ Doris said. ‘Go on, take it. Wearing scent makes you feel like a film star. I bet Jean Harlow wears scent like this. Have you seen her in Hell’s Angels? It was on in the Mount Pleasant Institute.’
Ruby took the bottle, and then wished she hadn’t.
Being friends with Doris makes me feel as if I’m being suffocated, she thoug
ht. I can’t talk to Mother about it. She’d tell me that Doris means to be kind, and I should be grateful. If only Dad was here!
But Dad wasn’t here. In fact Ruby didn’t know where Dad was. She only knew that neither she nor Mother had heard from him for a long, long time.
RUBY tucked her cold hands under her armpits and hopped up and down, trying to warm her freezing feet. It had been almost dark when she’d gone out into the paddock with May and Bee to drive the house cows, Daisy, Minnie and Bossy, into the milking shed. Now she was watching while May milked Daisy. This Saturday morning she was having her first milking lesson.
Getting up at dawn hadn’t been as bad as she’d expected. Although she hated getting her shoes soaking wet in the dewy grass, she enjoyed the cold freshness of the air, and hearing the magpies starting up their early morning warble. And when the very first rays of the sun slowly turned the sky pale gold, she caught her breath in wonder. It was the first time she’d ever seen the sun rise.
May’s fingers worked in a steady rhythm and the milk squirted into the bucket, the level foaming higher and higher. Several cats groomed themselves in the sunlight as they waited for a milky treat.
After a while May slowed and stopped. ‘That’s it for Daisy,’ she said. ‘You can have a go at Bossy now. She’s quite gentle so long as you don’t upset her.’
Oh my hat, Ruby thought. What if I do upset her? She went to the next stall, sat on a low stool, and found herself staring into the hairy, black-and-white side and huge swollen udder of a very large cow.
‘Don’t pull on her teats,’ May said. ‘If you hurt her, she won’t let her milk down. Put your finger and thumb right at the top and then squeeze downwards with all your fingers, the same as I was doing.’
‘All right.’ Ruby grasped two of Bossy’s teats. They felt warm and rubbery, a bit greasy. Taking a deep breath, she squeezed.
Bossy blew through her nostrils and shuffled sideways, her big hoofs scraping and clopping on the concrete floor.
‘Relax,’ said May. ‘You’re making her nervous.’
Ruby and the Country Cousins Page 4