‘Shall I get some chips?’ Meg asked.
‘Sure.’
Meg raced inside and grabbed a packet of chips from the jumble of goods in the sideboard platter.
‘Don’t turn the outside light on, Meggie,’ Bill yelled. ‘It’s nice like this.’
Meg returned and opened the packet of plain chips.
‘You know, sometimes it is best to let things go, Meg. Let people fight their own battles. That’s how they learn, get stronger. Not escalate them, anyway.’
‘I know.’
‘Knowing doesn’t mean doing.’
‘I know,’ Meg teased.
‘Still, we’re not paying to dry-clean his bloody blazer. I’ll sort that out if they call. What was he drinking?’
‘It was a fizzy green thing.’
‘Doubly deserves it, then. Who drinks fizzy green drinks?’
Meg snorted.
‘Well, we should get ready soon. It’s getting on.’
Meg turned her head on the side and peered sideways up at her dad and asked, ‘Or do you want to stay here and order a pizza?’
‘And eat it in the dark with my bum hanging out?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I reckon that’s a perfect plan,’ Bill said, standing. ‘I just need to cancel our booking.’ He wrapped the towel around his waist and was at the sliding door with his hand around the cold metal. He turned and walked back and sat down, wincing as he did. He wanted to sit properly to say it. ‘I need to ask you something. So I just have to ask to make sure. There’s no easy way to go about it. You know about your periods, Meg?’
‘Oh, god. Yes, Dad. You don’t have to give me that talk. I know all about them. I’m twelve, Dad. And I don’t have them yet, if that’s what you want to know.’
‘It’s not whether I want to know anything or not. I just need to tell you something. You don’t have a mum.’ It physically hurt Bill to say those words out loud. For some reason, it felt like his failure, how it had ended up being just Meg and him in the world. ‘So it’s my job as your dad. I know I’ve never had them, obviously.’ Bill paused, looking down at Meg’s bare feet. He looked up. His heart was thumping faster than his bum. ‘But they just mean you’re healthy. They are nothing to be embarrassed about. Don’t ever let anyone make you think they are dirty. They are a normal part of life for every healthy woman. Princess Diana has them.’ He didn’t know why he mentioned Princess Diana. ‘Do you have any questions, Meggie? Maybe I could answer them.’
‘God, no, Dad.’
Meg didn’t look up, but he could tell she was listening to every word. Bill went to stand up. ‘I know I’m not qualified here, about this, about how it feels, but I remember sometimes your mum had a bit of pain, cramps and stuff at the beginning, and that’s normal. She used to take Panadol and she liked to use a hot-water bottle for the cramps.’
Meg looked up at him. Her fingers were holding her fingers. ‘Okay.’ She nodded.
‘Just in case that comes in handy. In case no one has told you about the hot-water bottle.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘A hot-water bottle is the secret.’
‘Probably one of many, Meggie.’
Bill held on to his towel with one hand as he walked to the sliding door, closing it behind him softly to minimise the volume of mosquitoes that would steal inside tonight and screech around their heads when they were trying to sleep. He found the phone number of his special restaurant in Darlinghurst in the trusty small notebook he kept in the top pocket of his shirt whenever he left the farm. It had all the important numbers, all the important events, addresses, bits and pieces he needed to remember written inside it.
As he dialled the number, he watched his daughter through the glass putting a chip into her mouth, one leg up on a plastic chair. She was grabbing chips without thinking and scratching her knee with her other hand ferociously. As he cancelled his reservation, saying a string of polite words to a stranger, he thought he had never seen anything as beautiful in his life.
CHAPTER NINE
‘Meghan Patterson, you will be accompanying Eve Hardy every Wednesday from next term to cello lessons,’ Johanna Waters said, walking up behind and startling a group of Year Seven boarders at dinner. As soon as the deputy principal addressed the group, as were the rules, they all had to stand up, put their hands behind their backs and face her.
They could hardly disguise their annoyance at being disturbed from discussing their first school holidays coming up in a week, and fingers scratched arms, legs knocked into the table and feet became tangled in chairs. They had all been comparing who they were going to catch up with and what they were going to do and how their mums were going to cook their favourite meals when they went home on Friday. Except Eve. She had just been listening at the end and chewing her meal until it disappeared into vapour on her tongue. She wasn’t in a group, but she was near one.
‘You will walk her to and from her music lessons at Ms Dovkic’s home. The walk is approximately fifteen minutes. You will start this week, as a practice run.’ Ms Waters’ vowels were rounded and big, hitting the back wall where the beef stroganoff and trifle sat sweating in the bain-marie, as though she was on her way to audition for the London stage production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Ms Waters was much nicer when she was by herself, Eve thought.
Eve’s mother had organised for her only daughter to continue her cello lessons in Sydney with a teacher who lived within walking distance of the school. No buses or trains were involved, which was a paperwork bonus. It had taken nearly all term for Hillary to find the right teacher. That is, a good one who lived close by. They weren’t giving it up now after all that hard work, Hillary said to Eve over the phone. Eve wondered whether her mother thought she was the one who practised the cello every day.
Eve was genetically blessed for the cello. It wasn’t just her natural ear for music; she also had great, solid finger pads for plucking the strings and strong thighs for gripping the side of the instrument, keeping it still while freeing her mind to concentrate on playing whatever she was asked to. Her talent was backed up by a peculiar ability to stick at things. Eve was one of those determined people you never saw coming. She didn’t slam doors, she didn’t raise her voice at the dinner table, she would set about getting what she wanted quietly and methodically, with no fuss. And Eve wanted to be good at the cello.
When Eve was four, nearly five, Hillary told her she would have to stop sucking her thumb. ‘You start school in six weeks, Eve. You can’t suck your thumb there.’
The next day, Hillary brought a white paper bag into the country-style kitchen and stuck it on the bench near the stovetop. She had raided the shelves at the chemist and brought home a special nail polish that would taste bitter if Eve sucked it, she said to anyone in the small house who would listen. She also had sporting tape to wrap around Eve’s fingers and thumbs to make her little hands paddles. When the town dentist was last in, to pick up some painkillers for his bad back, she had asked for his advice, and he said it was the latest technique: make the thumb unavailable, strap it into the hand for a couple of days. Eve was an ambidextrous thumb-sucker, and strapping both of her thumbs to her hands did feel cruel to Hillary. But, desperate times. She also had mittens that you pulled in around the wrist.
The package stayed up next to the stovetop all through dinner, past cleaning-up, and was still there when Eve went to bed. It could have been a severed human head up there, Eve thought as she looked at it and then wished all through a repeat of The Flintstones that she hadn’t.
Eve went to bed that night telling her mother, before she wriggled under the sheets and organised a book beside her, that she would give up there and then.
‘We’ll start next week. I have to do something, Eve. You can’t be wandering around school with your thumb in your mouth. I should have got on to this earlier …’ Hillary said, walking out of Eve’s room, down the hallway and back into the kitchen.
That night at about 9.30 pm, two hours
after Eve had gone to bed, just as Hillary and Jim were turning out the lights and checking that the back door was locked, they heard a quiet cry. Eve was lying on her side, curled up in the foetal position but with both arms stretched out in front of her. Tears fell from her eyes and onto her pillow. She looked up at her parents as they entered the room. She hadn’t been to sleep.
‘Oh, Eve,’ Hillary said, sliding onto the side of the bed and brushing her daughter’s dark hair from her fine, pale face.
‘I miss them,’ Eve said shakily. ‘I miss my thumbs.’
‘How about you just stop during the day. You can suck them at night. No one at school will know.’
Hillary looked at this steely, soft girl lying like an old dead person and wondered why it mattered if five-year-olds sucked their thumbs.
‘No,’ said Eve. ‘I’m not doing the stuff in the bag.’
For three nights, Eve went to bed, stuck her thumbs as far away from her as possible and cried, cried from the grief and hardship of losing her thumbs, her comfort. Hillary and Jim would hear their four-year-old sobbing hours after she went to bed. Each night, the same things were said, the same hair was stroked.
On the fourth night, Eve fell asleep without crying, and she never sucked her thumbs again.
‘I don’t want any girl from this school walking the streets by themselves. The lessons are an hour, Meg. Take something to read or some homework. Okay, it’s a date,’ Ms Waters said to the girls to finish off, feeling a tad amusing before walking over to the servery.
The chaperone system was not complex: Meg was the only other boarder in Year Seven who had nothing scheduled for Wednesday afternoons.
Eve was lucky – everyone said so. She had scored the bunk bed near the end wall. Her privacy level was a fraction higher than the other girls, and everyone was envious. She would have swapped with anyone, preferably for a bunk bed right in the middle of the room. Hillary kept telling her, ‘It will take a while to settle in, Eve, but before you know it …’
It was nearly the end of term and Eve was walking to a different beat, despite her best efforts at keeping perfect time. If the Year Sevens were doing a dance, Eve would be in the back row a step behind wearing callipers. The more behind she got, the more reason for the other girls to roll their eyes, feel relieved it wasn’t them and make sure she stayed there. Someone had to.
Eve had the feeling again. It had attached itself to her permanently this first term, sometimes rising out of nowhere to wash all over her, sometimes just puddling at her feet. Running inside Eve at this minute was such deep shame for being Eve, mixed with a self-consciousness that had seen her change the way she placed the peas on her fork in week four to just like Elizabeth Barron did and imitate Dianne Peatling’s inside-cheek biting. When Dianne was thinking in class, she would suck in the left side of her cheek and bite it like a gorgeous, neurotic French movie star. Dianne was beautiful, and the way she bit the inside of her cheek when thinking was beautiful.
Eve stared intently at something brown lying defeated in a green-tinged sauce on the plate in front of her, wondering whether she should look up at Meg and do some head movement that said sorry about that, can’t believe she’s made you walk with me. But, by the time she decided she should do something, Meg had gone to get dessert.
On the day of the trial run, Meg arranged to meet Eve at the side gate at 3.40 pm. Meg said it would give them plenty of time to walk the six or so streets they had to so they could be there by 4 pm. Eve agreed and was waiting.
‘Jesus,’ Meg said as she approached. ‘I forgot about that. You have to lug that thing the whole way. It’s huge.’
‘I’m used to it, been doing it for years.’
Meg shrugged and continued out the gate. She didn’t seem to mind that she had been chosen as Eve’s walking companion.
They walked to the end of the street and turned left. Eve had been given a map the night before and had to put her cello and music down on the footpath to look at it.
‘Do you want me to take the directions?’ Meg asked pragmatically.
‘Oh, yeah, thanks. Thanks for this. I mean walking me to lessons. I don’t know why they won’t let me do it by myself. It’s not that far.’
‘It gets me out of there for a little while,’ Meg said, picking up Eve’s music and throwing her head back in the direction of the traffic. ‘Take a right up here.’
The two girls, in school uniforms and felt hats, continued walking. They turned into a side street and there was silence, except for the odd car driving past and some schoolkids in ones and twos walking up driveways and preparing to make themselves a Milo, watch some TV, get on the phone to friends. Eve wondered if she should strike up a conversation with Meg. Maybe talk about how short Casey Evans was wearing her skirt or Alice Forest’s detention for not doing homework. As the cello started to weigh her down and her right arm started to throb, she kept walking and almost came out with, ‘What’s the story with long division when everyone has a calculator these days?’ But, just as she started, she stopped. What a stupid, pointless thing to say, she thought. What did it mean? ‘You know …’ came out of her mouth for some reason, and Eve couldn’t think of anything to say next. Meg was busy looking at the map and didn’t even seem to notice.
‘Number fifty-six, it’s here,’ Meg said, pointing to a cottage with some scattered trikes, colourful chalk scribbles on the front path, a soccer ball sitting on top of the side shrubs and a wide-open front door.
‘It doesn’t look very musical,’ Eve said, stopping at the front gate.
‘What does musical look like?’
Eve looked at Meg and smiled. ‘Okay, I’m an idiot.’
‘You’re an idiot for playing the cello. Why didn’t you go for the flute or clarinet or even the piano? You wouldn’t have to carry a piano around,’ Meg said, standing at the front door with the offensive, bulbous cello leaning under the doorbell.
‘Again, idiot.’
They giggled as heavy footsteps came towards them.
Eleanor Dovkic was forty-two and had travelled the world with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. There was something wild and guttural about her playing that would spellbind people. She would sweat and was so unselfconscious of her movements that the more conservative members of the audience found her embarrassing to watch. But that was five years ago, before she had Charlie and Grace and a husband who worked fifty hours a week in the city.
‘Hello, girls,’ a voice called from the shadows inside. Then the attached body appeared. Eleanor was wearing what appeared to be a home-made rainbow turban on top of her head. Most of her hair was tucked into it, but she had missed chunks of chestnut here and there around the right ear. Her orange seersucker dress clung to a low mountain range of bosom and eventually fell to her ankle, skimming three leather anklets on her left foot. Her bare feet had purple painted toenails that bled onto her flesh. Her face was severe, her body relaxed, and the overall effect was hippy praying mantis, with bosoms.
‘Aren’t you girls sweet? Come in, come in.’ The girls looked at each other. Their world was navy and white and brown leather shoes. There were regulations for length of skirts, where the tie knot should sit on the blouse, how to wear hair.
‘You like?’ Eleanor said, pointing her purple toes and twisting her feet in half-circles like a model. ‘Charlie did it. I think he has a future in beauté.’
After a quick introduction to the children – Charlie, four, and Grace, three – and a green cordial, Eleanor asked Eve to show her what she was made of.
Eve put her cello on the floor between a train puzzle and a pair of tiny underpants with a fairy on them and unzipped the black case. She leant it against the low chair and pulled out the bow, tightening it in one quick motion. Meg left them to it and walked outside through the kitchen to sit on the back steps. She pulled out her book, Mansfield Park – they were studying it in English – placed it on her lap and looked at Charlie and Grace running through the sprinkler in the nude.
Meg wished she had more family than just her dad. It’s risky. She knew that he knew that. A mournful feeling swept through her body, and then she heard it and realised she had been hearing it for some time: the deep, sad howl from the cello. She walked up to the back door and looked into the lounge. There was Eve, her dark fringe pulled back with a clip, her body wrapped around those curves, one arm floating backwards and forwards as gracefully as a ballerina, then as short and sharp as a boxer, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, the other arm holding the neck, fingers moving nimbly up, down and across the strings, thighs spread wide and clutching. Her face looked in pain. It was all screwed up. Her eyes were closed. Her upper body kept moving, swaying, begging.
The sound poured over Meg’s body like warm treacle, solid and sensual, drowning sight, taste, touch and smell. As it rose in the humblest of ways, it entered Meg and sat in her chest, cradling her heart, making it a soft nest. Meg looked back at the yard; the western sun was coming in low across the clothesline and through the sprinkler. Her vision became hazy and confused from the slivers of yellow sun bouncing off the water towards her. Maybe from the music. Meg leant against the doorframe for support. She dropped her book on the kitchen floor. Mansfield Park may as well have hit Eve across the face; she was released from her trance. She turned to the noise and dropped her bow.
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