What are godchildren? Dancey hadn’t actually asked this question, but Ruth must have read it on her face because she’d answered. ‘Godchildren are your friends’ children. It means I go to their christening – that’s when they get their names in church – and promise they’ll be good.’
‘And are they?’ Dancey couldn’t help asking.
‘Oh yes,’ Ruth had said, smiling. ‘But not because of me.’
Ruth had friends all over the place: teachers like she’d been, old students, people who read the books she’d written, people who wrote books themselves. The one who lived in India, the one who’d sent this letter, was called Bansi and he was Ruth’s favourite of all. This would be the special photograph of his family and their new baby he’d been promising to send.
The tape was already half unstuck; Dancey pulled it off and slid the photograph out into the light.
She looked down at Bansi’s family. They were standing in a garden, a beautiful garden which was a bit like hers, with green lawns and gravel paths and waves of little white flowers flowing over a stone wall. There were big trees and a pond with a statue standing in the middle, even a peacock, his tail spread out like a jewelled fan. It wasn’t her peacock, of course, only one that looked like it. The man who’d been Ruth’s student was quite old, at least forty, and the woman beside him wasn’t all that much younger. They weren’t particularly beautiful or handsome but their faces had a kind of light shining from them, which Dancey thought might be happiness.
At Roseland little Frankie’s face used to have that light on it when he saw Dancey coming into the room.
The man wore a grey suit, and the woman a silk sari in the brilliant colours of the peacock’s tail, and the baby was wrapped in the kind of shawl that Ruth wore on those rare evenings when the heat dropped and a cool change swept in – a deep crimson shawl with gold embroidery, so light and fine that you could pass it through a ring.
Dancey hadn’t believed the thing about the ring. ‘Show me!’ she’d demanded. ‘Show me how it goes through!’ So then Ruth had taken off the old wedding ring she wore on her right hand, which wasn’t her own ring, but had been her mum’s, twisted a corner of the shawl, and then, like a kind of magic, the whole thing had slid right through, floating in the air like smoke from a genie’s lamp.
Can I do it? Dancey had wanted to ask, but she didn’t, because it would have made her sound like a kid, and then Ruth had said, ‘Here, you have a go,’ and the great silky cloud had floated through the little ring for Dancey, too.
‘Bansi gave me that shawl when he got his PhD,’ Ruth had told her, and then Dancey had wanted to ask what a PhD was, but she held the question back; she hated letting on that there were things she didn’t know. She kept the question in her mind and looked it up later in the library at school; it was always better to do stuff on your own.
As well as the new baby lying nestled in its mother’s arms, there was a little girl in the photograph, a little girl in a pink dress resting her head against her father’s side. She looked about four, which had been Frankie’s age – though the little girl was a proper four year old, with arms and legs that worked and a mum and dad and a new baby sister or brother and that whole beautiful garden to play in every day. There’d be a house somewhere, too, a big beautiful house to go with everything else.
Dancey had been four when she and Mum had lived with Mick in the caravan park up at Maclean. She’d liked it there; she’d liked the way you could hear the sea at night, like a sweet breathy voice that went, ‘La la la.’ It hadn’t lasted though. Mick hadn’t lasted and the place hadn’t lasted and soon they were back in a squat somewhere in Sydney and Mum was on something and it wasn’t long till Dancey was in care.
She held the edges of the photograph and gazed right in. Sometimes she had the feeling with pictures of places she liked that if she stared into them hard enough, really concentrated, then the picture might open magically and she could slip right in. She thought that this might have been what little Frankie had been doing at Roseland when he gazed through the window at the sunlight shining on the leaves: wishing himself out there, away, part of the sun and the breeze and the dancing light. Perhaps that was where he’d gone.
It had never happened to Dancey though, and it didn’t happen this time; she stayed where she was, in the cool private place beneath the fir trees, round the side of Ruth’s house in Hayfield Lane, Medlar NSW. And that was probably a good thing, because imagine if she had got into that photograph! Imagine: a great wind would rush through the beautiful garden, the big trees would rattle and bend and sway, the peacock would run away screaming and the little family would rush into their house and Dancey would be left on her own, standing there until someone inside made a phone call and the police came to take her away.
But it wasn’t the beautiful garden that she longed for, even though it was so like hers. It wasn’t the garden which brought the sudden raw pain to her heart and a gnawing in her stomach like she hadn’t eaten in a long, long time. It wasn’t the flowers or the peacock or the baby’s shawl or the little girl’s pink dress.
It was love.
Love was in that photograph.
‘I love ya,’ Rolly Miles had said to her in Roseland. Rolly was nineteen and worked in the kitchens, Dancey was ten and Mum was drying out somewhere. She hadn’t liked Rolly all that much but she’d let him mess her about. When the Roseland people found out they said it was abuse but Dancey knew it wasn’t. She’d let him, hadn’t she? Even though it had hurt. And she’d let him because he’d said that word to her. Love. Back then, if anyone said that word to her, Dancey was gone. Even to see it written down, in one of Mum’s magazines, or scrawled up on a wall, would make her eyes jump and the gnawing feeling come.
She knew now that the way Rolly Miles had used the word, and the way the kids in the street family had used it, didn’t mean anything you could rely on. It wasn’t love, that. But knowing this hadn’t stopped the word from getting to her, calling up the idea of the real true thing, the thing that made her raw to be without, and which she had a pretty good idea she’d never ever have. Her fingers trembled at the edges of the photograph. The love that was shining out of it was the real true thing. You could see it in the way the mother was holding the baby, in the way she looked down at it and the baby looked back at her; you could see it in the way the father was resting his hand on the little girl’s head, gently, lightly, but you knew it meant he’d look after her for ever and ever, amen.
‘Dancey! Dancey!’
Ruth was calling. ‘Dancey! Breakfast’s ready!’
Dancey slid the photograph back into its envelope and thrust it down the front of the big green tee-shirt which Ruth had bought for her, all new, at David Jones. ‘Would you like one with something written on it?’ Ruth had asked. ‘Or a picture?’ but Dancey had said no, she wanted it plain, because the green colour was so beautiful it reminded her of the song the dark man whistled, walking with the peacock in the garden that was Dancey’s special place. ‘Coming!’ she called, scrambling to her feet and hurrying round to the front verandah. ‘I’m coming!’ She forgot about the other letter. It lay on the pine needles beneath its little stone, and a gust of wind lifted one corner and then passed on and let it lie.
three
Oh it was hot, so hot. Ruth pulled up the blind in the kitchen and stared out into the glare of the front yard.
Everything was achingly dry: the grass scorched brown, the leaves on the plum trees limp and curled, a veil of powdery dust hanging over the earth. The sky was a hard, ungiving blue and far off on its rim was a long smudge of grey. Smoke?
The fires at Mount Hay were out; she’d turned on the radio to check the Fire Bulletin, and then the RFS website, to see if any new ones had started overnight. There’d been nothing so far, but it was early, only half past seven, the morning had just begun. Temperatures would be in the high thirties in the mountains today and strong winds were predicted, strong winds that had been blowing since
midnight. It was another day of Total Fire Ban, the sixth since Christmas, three weeks ago. There’d been no mention of rain on the forecast; so the grey smudge on the horizon was probably smoke drifting in from the extinguished fires. After all this time, rain was unimaginable.
Dancey was out there, whirling in circles round the lawn. She stopped suddenly, and the way she stood there, head thrown back, hands on hips, while the wind tugged at her skirt and the tangles of her blue-black hair, reminded Ruth of Helen Hogan beside the creek at Barinjii, standing in exactly that way, hands on hips and head tilted, scowling at Ruth and telling her, ‘Just remember that you know nothing, okay?’ It had been true, thought Ruth, though Helen Hogan probably hadn’t known all that much more than she did.
Dancey did look a little like Helen; she had the Barinjii girl’s pale translucent skin and the blue-black hair. And Tam Finn’s rainy grey eyes. An idea stirred again in Ruth’s mind; an idea which had been growing on her ever since Dancey had come, and which she’d struggled to keep at bay because it was so fantastic, so like wishful thinking, wanting something to be true. It couldn’t be true, except – the dates were right, and Dancey’s grandmother had been called Helen: Ruth had seen the name on Dancey’s record in Sandy Jimpson’s office, a record so brief it made your heart ache for the child. Mother: Tammy Trelawny; Father: Unknown. Tammy Trelawny’s mother was Helen Trelawny, and Tammy’s father was also recorded as unknown. A list of girls’ names, Ruth had thought, no fathers around – and then unexpectedly she remembered the little wooden statue in the church at Barinjii, of which her nan had been so fond.
Could Helen Hogan have married a man called Trelawny in Sydney all those years ago? And given his name to the daughter she’d got from Tam Finn? Tammy Trelawny? So that Dancey, with her blue-black hair, pale skin and rainy grey eyes, could be the grandchild of Helen Hogan and Tam Finn? ‘Tam Finn’s child,’ Ruth said aloud, watching the girl climb up on the front fence and stand staring out into the bushland.
Be sensible, she told herself – Dancey was simply one of the many thousands of children whose family had vanished and left her on her own.
‘That’s your emergency bag,’ Ruth had told her a few days back, pointing to the blue backpack she’d prepared and placed ready in the hall.
‘Emergency bag? What for?’
‘In case a fire comes and we have to leave. I’ve put in a torch and a water bottle and a change of clothes, and I’ve left room for anything special you might want to take with you.’
Dancey had stared at the bag, her face quite blank, her body tense as strung wire. But the tension hadn’t been about the fires. ‘Are you coming too?’ she’d asked, her eyes fixed on Ruth’s face.
‘Of course I’m coming! What did you think? That I’d go off on my own and leave you?’
Dancey hadn’t answered that. ‘Where’s your bag, then?’ she’d asked suspiciously.
‘It’s in my room; I haven’t finished packing yet. Then it’ll be out here, right next to yours.’
‘Ah,’ the girl had sighed, and her small heart-shaped face, the whole of her slight body, had relaxed and Ruth had realised that for Dancey Trelawny there were far worse things than fires – and being left was one.
‘Would your brain boil, inside your head?’ she’d asked on the way home from the community meeting last night.
‘What?’
‘If a fire came, when it got you, well – you know how your brain sort of floats in watery stuff? So would the watery stuff start boiling, inside your head? And your brain get cooked? Like a big dumpling in a pot of soup?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ruth had replied, revolted. ‘Anyway, if it did, you wouldn’t feel it.’
‘Wouldn’t feel it? Wouldn’t feel your brain boiling?’
‘No.’
‘Why wouldn’t you feel it? This kid I knew in America pulled a pot of boiling water off the stove when no one was looking, and boy, did she feel it!’
‘People in fires generally die of smoke inhalation before the flames get to them,’ said Ruth, struggling to sound calm.
‘Does it hurt? Does smoke inhalation hurt?’
Yes, thought Ruth, imagining the terrible searing of the throat and lungs, the struggle for air where there was no air, the agonising suffocation. ‘No,’ she’d lied.
‘S’pose it’s not a bad way to go,’ Dancey had observed in the strange little elderly voice she used sometimes, and they’d walked on in silence until she said, ‘I’ve met lots of people whose brains boil, and they’re nowhere near a fire.’
Ruth held her breath, but the girl had said no more. She was thirteen and she knew all kinds of horrors. ‘My mum tried to put her head in the gas oven once,’ she’d remarked last Sunday lunchtime as Ruth was sliding out the chicken in its roasting tray. ‘Only it wouldn’t fit, see? Her head? She couldn’t get it in properly. You know why?’
‘No.’ The tray had rattled as Ruth set it on the kitchen bench. Her hands had been shaking.
‘She’d forgotten to take the shelves out!’ whooped Dancey. ‘And when she caught on that they were actually there, and that’s why she couldn’t get her head in the oven, she wanted me to take them out for her – she was too pissed to hold things properly. But I wouldn’t do it, so then she got up and clouted me and I ran off and she came after me and she forgot all about doing herself in. For that time, anyway.’ She’d stared at Ruth defiantly and Ruth hadn’t known what to say. She was never sure if Dancey’s sudden dreadful confidences were meant to be confidences or attempts to shock her. The stories, whose truth she never doubted for a moment, could even be some desperate form of letting go – she noticed how the girl’s eyes would widen as she related such episodes, how she’d talk faster and faster, almost to the point of breathlessness. And she realised that no matter how offhand and unfeeling the girl might appear, Dancey was afraid of the deep chanciness of the world in which she’d grown.
‘My family,’ she’d confided another time, ‘my street family, that is, the one in Portland: they bashed up this old tramp down in the underpass, bashed him with sticks and chains and bars and stuff and then, guess what? We all ran off and left him there.’
Ruth hadn’t been able to stop herself from asking, ‘Did you bash him?’ She’d expected an outburst but instead Dancey had greeted the question with a kind of sober thoughtfulness. They’d been washing the dinner dishes and she’d put the cup she’d been wiping carefully on the bench and stood there quietly in the lighted kitchen, tea towel in her hand, while she sorted out her memories and her feelings, trying to get them right. ‘I couldn’t,’ she’d said at last. ‘My hands weren’t free.’
‘Your hands weren’t free? Oh, Dancey, you mean someone had tied you up?’
‘No, no, not like that. I was holding them behind my back, tight as anything, so I – so I couldn’t do anything.’
‘Ah!’ Ruth had almost gasped her relief.
Now she began to lay the table for breakfast: the two yellow bowls and plates, the glasses, knives and spoons, the cereal, the bread for toast, the Vegemite and honey and strawberry jam.
‘It would be all ash,’ Dancey had said last night in Hayfield Lane.
‘What would be all ash?’
‘All this—’ she’d waved both arms in a grand gesture that encompassed the lane with its canopy of great overhanging trees and beyond it, the whole night landscape of valley and mountain bathed in smoky moonlight – ‘all ash. Like the end of the world. Whoosh! Everything gone.’
‘Oh Dancey, don’t!’ Ruth whispered, because hadn’t she imagined this herself? Especially on the wild windy nights of this fire season, when helicopters rattled overhead and there was a sound of sirens on the highway. ‘Don’t!’ The word had come out in a kind of sob.
And then Dancey had slipped her hand into Ruth’s. Only for the merest fraction of a second, sliding it out again so quickly that Ruth had wondered whether she’d imagined those warm fingers inside her own.
‘Don’t expect affe
ction,’ the social worker had warned her. ‘They don’t do affection. There’s a time when children learn how to love, learn the words, the actions, and Dancey’s missed it, I’m afraid.’
‘But surely,’ Ruth had protested. ‘Surely, if she’s given love—’
Sandy Jimpson had shaken her small head slowly, definitely, from side to side. ‘They just don’t know how, Ruth. They’re damaged. They don’t know what love is.’
But in Hayfield Lane last night, there’d been that fleeting touch of Dancey’s warm fingers, which had comforted Ruth all the way home.
She opened the fridge to take out the jug of orange juice; breakfast was ready now. Glancing through the window she saw that Dancey had gone from the front yard. She was surprised by the cold drop of her stomach, and then the lift of gladness when she called the girl’s name and heard the sound of big feet running round the side and Dancey’s untroubled voice calling, ‘Coming, I’m coming!’ as if she was an ordinary undamaged child.
four
There was a red mark and the beginning of a bruise on the girl’s arm. ‘You’ve hurt yourself,’ observed Ruth from across the table.
‘Bumped into a tree,’ said Dancey. ‘You know, mucking round, doing whizzies like some stupid little kid, not looking where I was going.’
‘Ah.’
There was a silence in which Dancey took a slice of toast from the rack and stared at it hard.
Ruth fiddled with a spoon. After a moment she said gently, ‘Where did you get your name, Dancey?’
Dancey dropped her toast onto the plate. She glared at Ruth across the table. ‘Mum gave it to me,’ she hissed. ‘And I hate it, I told you. Helen: hate it, hate it, hate it! It’s pissweak, just like her. She said it was her mum’s name, but if she had a mum, I never saw her.’
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