Three Summers

by Judith Clarke

  ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘Nah, something happened to her before I was born.’

  Something happened to her. She’d have been the same age as me, Ruth thought, thinking of Helen Hogan. She remembered Helen in her red dress down by the creek and thought, yes, it was easy to imagine something happening to her. ‘She came to grief,’ sighed Ruth, and Dancey stared at her and echoed, ‘Came to grief,’ making the phrase sound as if grief was a special country into which Helen Hogan might have wandered. The idea that Helen was this child’s grandmother was most likely a complete fantasy; all the same Ruth decided that next time she went into town she’d check if there was a death recorded for her. And she’d check if Helen Hogan had become Helen Trelawny, and if she’d had a daughter called Tammy, father unknown.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Dancey, ‘I don’t reckon I had a gran.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I reckon my mum just grew out of the ground, like a toadstool or something,’ began Dancey, and then stopped short, as if she’d only just remembered how her mum was dead and buried, back down beneath the ground. She rubbed at the red mark on her arm, rubbed and rubbed at it.

  ‘Your real name’s what I meant,’ said Ruth gently. ‘Dancey.’ She remembered Tam Finn telling her about his peacock, that first time in Starlight Lane. ‘His name’s Dancer,’ he’d said. She leaned towards the girl. ‘Where did “Dancey” come from?’

  More than half a century ago at Barinjii Infants, Ruth had a teacher called Mrs Lupin. When Mrs Lupin wanted silence in the classroom, she’d pinch her thumb and forefinger together and draw a wavy line in the air, in and out and in and out, as if she was sewing a seam. ‘Let’s sew our lips together,’ she’d tell the class. ‘Sew our lips up tight.’ And she’d demonstrate with her own lips, drawing them into a mean, straight line.

  Dancey did this now, setting her lips together so tightly it seemed no words could ever force their way through. She picked up a knife and began to spread butter on her toast, so ferociously that the bread shattered into pieces on her plate. ‘It’s my name,’ she said at last.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Dancey attacked the toast again.

  ‘Here, leave that.’ Ruth whisked the plate of crumbs away and handed Dancey a fresh one, with a new piece of toast. ‘I just wondered where you got it from, that’s all. It’s an unusual sort of name. There’s a character in a book—’

  ‘It’s mine,’ said Dancey again. ‘Not from any old book.’ She stared at Ruth with narrowed eyes. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Well, it suits you so,’ said Ruth, smiling. And she meant it: the name suited the girl’s heart-shaped face and blue-black hair, the flying moods, and the thin taut body which was so swift and light. ‘It’s like – your essence,’ she said.

  ‘What’s essence?’ said Dancey, forgetting herself for a moment and asking another person straight out the thing she needed to know.

  ‘The heart of Dancey,’ Ruth replied. ‘Exactly you.’

  It was the way Ruth had spoken the word ‘you’. It must have been, Dancey thought afterwards, the way her voice sort of lingered on it with a kind of tenderness, as if ‘you’ meant someone who was special to her. Important, even. Whatever the reason, or even if there was no reason, only a sudden fierce longing she couldn’t control – without for one second meaning to do it, Dancey told.

  It was a precious secret, as precious as the garden and the peacock and the dark-haired man, and she’d never shared it with a single soul, and now she went and told.

  ‘One time when Mum was really out of it,’ she began, ‘when I was ten, before we went to America, they put me in this place called Roseland.’

  ‘They put me in this place called Roseland.’ The matter-of-fact way the girl spoke these words sent a little wave of cold right down Ruth’s spine; Dancey might have been describing a toy grown sick of, put away in a box.

  ‘And there was this little kid in there,’ Dancey went on, ‘in the hospital part. He was called Frankie and he was only four.’

  ‘Four,’ echoed Ruth.

  ‘Yeah – but if you hadn’t known he was four, if you hadn’t read it on the chart at the end of his cot, you might have thought he was a baby. He had this big head, but the rest of him was really small and spindly, and he couldn’t do anything,’ – Dancey shook her head suddenly, very fast, as if she was trying to shake something awful away – ‘he couldn’t sit up, or stand by himself, or walk, or talk, only lie in his cot and turn his head a bit to stare out the window. And he made these sounds, sort of like words, but not quite, you know?’

  Ruth nodded.

  ‘So there was a big tree outside the window,’ Dancey went on, ‘and it had a little mirror tied to one of its branches, one of those little mirrors they have for birds, and on bright days it would catch the sun, see? And then all these little ripples of light would come through the window and run across the ceiling over Frankie’s cot, and they’d move like they were dancing and Frankie would watch them and move his mouth a bit and you could see he was trying to smile. It wasn’t a proper smile, like other people’s, but he meant it to be.’ Dancey leaned her elbows on the table, cupped her chin in one hand, and gazed earnestly at Ruth. ‘They said he couldn’t talk, that he’d never be able to, but you know what? One day when we were watching those reflections dancing on the ceiling, he suddenly smiled at me and sort of slid his eyes to the reflections and he said, “Dancey, dancey!” He meant the reflections were dancing. Honest he did!’

  She leaned forward, grey eyes fixed eagerly on Ruth’s face. ‘He did, didn’t he?’

  ‘Of course he did.’

  ‘And that’s where I got my name,’ said Dancey. ‘From Frankie. Frankie gave it to me.’

  Ruth swallowed. Beneath her pity and sorrow for the little boy’s story there was a small pang of disappointment. She’d been hoping Dancey might say she’d got her name from a story her mother had told her: about how when her gran, Helen, was young she’d been in love with this boy in the country who had a peacock called Dancer . . .

  ‘So did you tell them about Frankie?’ she asked. ‘The people at Roseland? Did you tell them how he’d said a real word? That he knew the reflections were dancing? That he could understand things?’

  ‘Wouldn’t have done any good if I had,’ said Dancey in that same dull matter-of-fact voice. ‘They never believed you in that place. And it was too late, anyway.’

  ‘Too late? How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, next day Frankie was gone, see.’

  ‘Gone?’

  Dancey didn’t seem to hear. Her face was faraway with grief.

  ‘You mean, he died?’ said Ruth softly, and Dancey came back and said, ‘Dunno. He might have. You never knew, when kids like him were gone: whether they’d died or just been taken away to some other place. No one ever said, and if you asked they just told you it was none of your business.’

  ‘You must have been sad, though.’

  Dancey shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘No use blubbering,’ she said. ‘Things happen, that’s all.’

  But she had been sad. Back at Roseland she’d been a baby. Not in years perhaps, because she was already ten, but inside, where it mattered, she’d still been soft and weak like a very little kid. She hadn’t worked out yet that it didn’t pay to care, that the only thing caring did was to get you all upset, and sometimes into trouble, too. She’d bawled for days when Frankie had gone. ‘Dancey, Dancey, Dancey,’ she’d repeated to herself, standing beside the empty cot, watching the sun patterns dancing on the ceiling.

  It occurred to her now, though she didn’t tell Ruth, that the feeling she’d had for Frankie might actually have been love: that little catch of the heart she’d felt walking into his room and seeing his face turn towards her – that was love, surely. That was proper love, that was the real true thing. And Frankie had loved her – there’d been that look on his face when he’d seen her at the door, that shining tender expression like the peopl
e had in Bansi’s photograph. His lightsome look, she’d called it, because it was as if his whole tiny body, every single bone and cell and pore of it, had suddenly filled up with light.

  When she lost Frankie – that was the first time the peacock had come, and the dark-haired man beside him, singing his beautiful song, which she’d known was meant for her. She’d seen the garden before, seen it often on the edge of sleep and knew it was real, and that it was her place, but she’d never seen the peacock before, spreading his tail to show her his colours, the jewelled greens and purples and blues, never heard the dark-haired man whistling the pure true notes of his song. They’d come to comfort her because Frankie was gone.

  Suddenly, right there at Ruth’s kitchen table, without the slightest warning, tears sprang into Dancey’s eyes. She fought them back; she hadn’t cried since Roseland, she couldn’t start crying now, when she was big, when she was thirteen, not in front of another person. She jumped to her feet, scraping the chair back over the wooden floor.

  Ruth stretched out her hand. ‘Dancey!’ she said. ‘Dancey dear!’

  Dancey flew into a rage. ‘Don’t call me dear!’

  Ruth’s hand went to her mouth. ‘I’m sorry, I—’

  ‘Leave me alone!’

  Dancey rushed past her, but halfway across the room she stopped dead and Ruth watched as the girl drew herself together: she saw the brave tilt of Dancey’s head and the way she held her narrow shoulders, straight and defiant, as if she was saying with her body, the only thing she had, ‘I don’t care!’ Just as Tam Finn had done that last time in Starlight Lane, walking away from her out into the night. Exactly like him.

  As the girl walked out of the kitchen and disappeared into the hall, Ruth was almost certain that Dancey Trelawny was Tam Finn’s child.

  five

  ‘We’re goin’ into town,’ Megan Stoyles’ voice boomed from the telephone. ‘Ya wanna come?’

  ‘Into the city?’ asked Dancey.

  There was a pause, then Big Meg spoke again. ‘Nah. Just into Woodie.’

  Woodie was Woodfall, the largest town in the mountains, two train-stops or a bus ride away.

  ‘You comin’ or aren’t ya?’

  ‘I guess,’ said Dancey. It was halfway through the morning and there was nothing much else to do. And she wanted to keep clear of Ruth; Ruth had seen her almost cry.

  ‘Meet ya down the bus stop in half an hour then, right?’

  When Dancey reached the shelter by the highway, only three of the gang had shown. It was a small gang anyway: there was Megan, the big fat blonde, her sidekick Folly Walker, a tall, watchful girl with dusty dreadlocks that no one but Big Meg would be dumb enough to trust. Then there were the white rats, as Dancey thought of them, Kimberly Brent and Janis Taylor, two scrawny girls with whitish hair which fell about their tiny faces and pale blue, pink-rimmed eyes. And Laura Laurence, who was the sort of girl from a good home you sometimes found in real street families, trying to be wild. All of them, even Big Meg, were impressed that Dancey had been in America and lived as a street kid there. Except for Laura Laurence, they were even impressed that she’d been in care. This exotic history was the reason Big Meg had let her in the gang. Not that Dancey had really wanted to be in it – but sometimes you got a bit bored, and then you tagged along.

  The white rats had stayed home. ‘Said it was too hot, the losers,’ growled Big Meg as the dusty old bus came lumbering into view.

  ‘Too hot!’ marvelled Folly, rattling her dreads.

  They scrambled up the steps and settled right down the back. ‘Yeah, too hot, that’s what they said,’ repeated Big Meg, rolling her flat blue eyes. ‘Both of ’em. A bit of hot weather and they want to lie down and die! Ya gotta be tougher than that! I mean, it’s a long summer, right?’

  ‘Right,’ agreed Folly. ‘It’s a long summer.’

  Laura Laurence didn’t say anything. She turned her head and stared sadly through the back window at their little town growing smaller in the distance, as if she was some poor displaced person driven from her home. Dancey had the feeling that, not today perhaps, but pretty soon, Laura Laurence was going to cross the gang right off.

  ‘Yeah, you gotta be tough in this old world,’ rumbled Big Meg, stealing a sideways glance at Dancey.

  None of them were tough, reflected Dancey, not even Big Meg. They weren’t even really wild. In term-time they wagged a bit of school and did a bit of stealing from the shops at Woodfall, all red in the face, panic-eyed and gasping as they sidled out the door with their pathetic loot: tubes of cheap makeup, flimsy little scarves, hair stuff and the kind of jewellery you’d find at the bottom of a supermarket Christmas stocking. In a bigger place they’d have been nabbed right away – as it was the girl behind the checkout at Sam’s Treasure Trove had laughed at them – no loss to her if a bit of junk went missing.

  One day last month the gang had ventured into the city, and Dancey had tagged along. Janis and Kimberly had gone to school. In town they hadn’t been able to think what to do. The wind was blowing coldly off the harbour and no one had wanted to go across to Manly. They wandered round the shops for a bit and finally decided on a movie, sitting in a row and eating popcorn and ice-creams like little kids on a birthday treat. The cinema had been full of soppy old couples holding hands and even older ladies who had bigger gangs than theirs and kept popping out to the toilets and then coming back and asking each other what was happening on the screen.

  Afterwards, Dancey couldn’t remember what the movie had been about. All the way through it she’d been thinking of the street family she’d belonged to back in Portland. Normally, she tried not to think of that time, but she’d been sitting next to Laura and the smell of her apple-scented shampoo had suddenly brought it all tumbling back. Not that the street family had used apple-scented shampoo – no, it was a kind of memory of opposites: the scent of Laura’s shampoo, so clean and sweet and somehow innocent made her remember the lice and the sores the street kids had. And how, after a bit, no matter how hard you tried, all your clothes and your hair and even your skin got this coffin smell, like you’d been buried under the earth and someone had dug you up. In the soft reflected light of the big screen, Dancey had looked along their little row of clean shiny girls and thought how there wouldn’t be a single mark on their bodies, not one bite or sore or wound. She’d slipped a hand beneath her tee-shirt and felt round the back for the little scarred hollows where Drago’s belt buckle had bitten in that first time she’d tried to run away.

  In the street family you had marks and you made marks, too, if someone betrayed the family or didn’t show respect. Traitors had to be punished, and you had to take your turn at punishing like everybody else, because that was the family’s way. And you had to do it, or the family would do it to you. They would, they’d done it to Star when she’d refused to take her turn. They’d beaten her, then taken all her stuff and kicked her out, dazed and half naked, to wander in the street.

  Dancey could remember the feeling of beating someone, punishing: how it felt as if it wasn’t really you that was doing it, but some other person, while the real you was crouched down, small as a peanut or a sesame seed, small, small, small, deep inside you, eyes closed and hands over its ears. Even to remember that time made her feel sick. She’d closed her eyes and sensed the beautiful garden begin to open round her, the paths and flowers, the big heavy-leafed trees, and far off the sweet glimmer of water that was the lake.

  In the gloom of that big city cinema, Dancey had begun to cross off the bad things from the past. ‘I’ll never hit anyone again,’ she’d said aloud, and then Big Meg had leaned across Laura’s slight body and hissed, ‘You goin’ mad or what?’ and at the sound of her voice the beautiful garden had faded, disappeared.

  TO DAY, when the bus dropped them off at Woodfall there was nothing going on. The sun was blazing, and half the shops were closed because of the heat. The main street had a deserted look; tourists were staying down in the city. They trudged up
the hill to Sam’s Treasure Trove, but having to work in the heat had got to the girl behind the checkout counter and she was in a mood. ‘You kids come in here and I’ll call the cops!’ she roared. ‘And your poncy school as well!’

  ‘Stupid cow!’ cursed Big Meg as they scurried out into the street. ‘She’s got it in for me because she fancies Tice and he won’t even look at her.’

  ‘Why should he look at her when he’s busy lookin’ at you?’ smirked Folly.

  ‘You got it,’ Big Meg agreed.

  Tice Brady was Big Meg’s boyfriend, or so she said, a blubbery boy whose roly-poly limbs reminded Dancey of the rubber turrets of a kid’s bouncy castle.

  ‘Wanna go up to the hot bread shop?’ suggested Folly, nudging Big Meg’s arm. ‘You might see him there.’

  ‘Nah, he’s not workin’ today.’

  ‘Tired him out last night, didya?’

  The big girl leered. ‘Whaddya think?’

  What Dancey thought was that they were virgins. All the gang would be virgins, every one of them, including Big Megan Stoyles. ‘Saving themselves for Mr Right,’ she thought with a smile – Matron Trapcott had told her that, way back in Rose–land, after the trouble with Rolly Miles.

  A huge sign stood outside the post office. Total Fire Ban, it read, and the big scarlet letters seemed to pulse out into the air. They stared at it in silence until Folly said in a low voice, ‘My dad says this whole place is going to go up any day.’

  ‘Pissweak,’ growled Big Meg.

  Dancey thought of Ruth and how scared she was of fires. But Ruth wasn’t pissweak; Dancey had a feeling that if a fire ever did come roaring down Hayfield Lane, Ruth would be brave.

  ‘He got the car serviced last week,’ Folly went on, ‘so we could leave the moment we heard there was a fire in the mountains that might come here.’