by Terri Janke
‘Here she is.’ The doors open and Clarissa gets on. She is holding her schoolbag in her arms. She usually carries the strap on her shoulder.
‘What happened?’ I ask.
‘Look,’ she says. The furry head of a kitten rises out of the bag opening, sitting between her lunchbox and her reader. Shane pats the small head. The kitten licks his hand.
‘Can I hold it?’ I ask.
‘Sshh.’ Clarissa holds her finger to her mouth. ‘Don’t let the bus driver know, he’ll throw us off.’
We get off at Amuller Street. Clarissa lifts the kitten out of her bag. The round furry ball uncoils like a spring. Now I can see it is a grey and white kitten.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘From the church. Father Thomas’s cat had kittens and the nuns were giving them away.’
I sidle in close to her and touch the soft fur. ‘Mum and Dad won’t let you keep it.’
At home we give it milk in a saucer. Nobby barks and snaps when we put the kitten on the ground. Shane holds Nobby down. ‘You have to be friends,’ he says. Nobby reluctantly licks at the grey kitten, not wanting to make my brother unhappy.
When Mum gets home from work the cat is sitting on the lounge, in between my brother and me as we watch television.
‘Whose cat is that?’
‘Father Thomas was giving them away. Can we keep it?’
‘No way. It’s going back as soon as your dad gets home with the car.’ She goes to the kitchen and fills a saucepan with water. The kitten meows and rubs up against her leg.
‘Now, don’t try and suck up to me,’ Mum says. ‘I wanted to have a cat when I was a kid but my mother said I couldn’t.’ She bends down to pick the kitten up. It flicks its paw at my mum’s hair. She turns the kitten over, checking it out from nose to tail.
‘Come on, Mum. You want one too,’ Clarissa says.
‘Can we keep it?’ asks Shane.
‘It’s a little girl kitten,’ says Mum.
‘You can give it a name,’ I add.
‘Flurr,’ says Mum.
‘Yeah, Flurr,’ we all say.
When Dad gets home it is dark. In the morning we hear him talking to the kitten and giving her some milk in her bowl. ‘Where did you come from?’ he says.
‘That’s the new cat,’ Mum answers.
Flurr sleeps outside in the garage. She likes to run under the car once Dad has parked it, while the engine is still warm.
Two months later, the wind is up. On the radio a man is saying there’s a cyclone alert. My mother ties the windows with rope.
‘I hope your dad comes back soon. We need more rope from Uncle Tally’s house.’ Dad is at work and is due home any time now. Mum has to use our skipping rope, then her stockings to tie the wooden latches.
‘What about the louvres?’ I ask.
‘Boards. We’ll put heavy boards against them.’
I go to the verandah in search of a piece of wood I have seen lying at the side of the house. The air is violent. I see a large piece of tin flying across our next-door neighbour’s yard. I can smell dirt and mud. I see cane toads swimming in the backyard. The water is pouring like sheets of plastic, creating a giant whirlpool.
Clarissa calls from the back door. ‘Tarena, get inside.’ She acts like she is my mother and I am her baby doll.
‘Mum,’ says Shane, ‘there’s no power.’ He’s flicking the light switch.
‘Get the candles,’ she orders him.
I can hear rain hitting hard against the tin roof of our small house. I stand still in the lounge. Water drips from my shorts onto the lino. It is only about four o’clock in the afternoon but it is dark like midnight.
The plastic radio crackles. I can hear the siren warning on 4CA.
‘Cyclone Nina is approaching Cairns harbour,’ says the announcer’s voice. ‘The eye of the cyclone is due to hit at 4.30 p.m. today.’
I look at the clock. It is 4.25.
‘People are advised to stay indoors. All cars should stay off the road.’
My mother is still placing boards against the louvres and nailing them down. Hammer, hammer, hammer. ‘We need more rope.’
Dad comes home. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, but we need more rope. Can you get some from Uncle Tally?’
Dad goes back outside and gets in his car. I look out the window. The rain is too thick to see anything. Even though Uncle Tally lives only a couple of blocks away, I have visions of flooded streets and stalled cars. I hope Dad will be all right.
Things happen in threes. That’s what my mother always says. One old aunty passed away last week; the next-door neighbour’s grandmother died on Saturday. Who is going to be the third? A flash of lightning splits the sky. The wind rages.
‘Get in the bathtub,’ Mum tells us kids. The old weatherboard walls are thin, and Mum knows that the safest place is the tiled walls of our bathroom. We sit in the tub together as the wind batters outside. Dad returns. I can hear him tying down the front door.
‘Dad!’ Shane screams. ‘What about Nobby?’
‘Dad, please get him,’ says Clarissa.
Mum gets up and opens the back door. The rain is horizontal. I try to follow.
‘Get back inside!’
‘Nobby!’ Shane yells. The dog is under the back stairs; he has a bad cut on his ear. When Mum drags him in, blood drips on the tiled floor. The window ties are slapping like drums, a percussion section. I feel my voice rising in my throat. ‘Where’s Flurr?’
Dad looks down. ‘Don’t worry about Flurr.’
I get up to run. ‘Dad! Where is she?’
My mother screams, ‘Calm down, Tarena!’
‘She got hit by the car when I drove to Uncle Tally’s house,’ Dad says. ‘I’m sorry, Tarena. You know how she liked to curl up under the engine.’
We kids start to cry. Clarissa hugs Shane. Shane hugs Nobby. The cyclone escalates. Salt runs from my nose. My eyes are itchy and wet.
At last, some time between eight and nine o’clock, the house is finally still. Only one candle remains alight. My mother looks in the cupboard and opens a can of corned beef. We eat cold slices between Sao biscuits.
Later, we are lying in Mum and Dad’s bed. Shane and Clarissa are asleep. I’m pretending to be asleep too. Dad comes inside.
‘Did you bury her?’ I hear Mum ask.
‘Yes. I feel so bad.’
‘There was nothing you could do. You had to get the rope.’
‘Yeah, but I feel so bad for the kids’ sake.’
‘What’s the latest on the cyclone?’ asks Mum.
‘It’s headed off the coast. There’s nothing to worry about.’
follow the pink doll
Cairns, 1975
The Cairns Show is held every July. My mother has dressed me in a red T-shirt with a scratch-and-sniff strawberry on the front that matches my wraparound skirt with red flowers. I am walking heavy in cork-heeled shoes with red straps. We walk past flashing lights, men calling out in the games’ alley.
‘Step right up, I’ll guess your weight,’ calls one man.
‘No thanks, I’d rather keep people guessing,’ says my mother.
I run towards the booth with the moving clown heads. Their mouths are open, hungry for more ping-pong balls.
‘Every child wins a prize,’ says the woman as my mother hands over some money.
Behind the counter, I see what I want. It is the most beautiful doll, with painted blue eyes and plastic blond hair moulded to her head. She is wearing a pink sparkly dress. There is a look of surprise on her face. She is stuck on top of a stick of cane. I put the balls into the clown’s mouth. They twist back and forth. I wait impatiently while the woman adds up the score.
‘Three and five is eight, and six is twelve. No, I mean fourteen. Plus two – well, yes, that’s sixteen. And four, that’s twenty. Yes, here we are. You can have a nice yo-yo.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. I tuck the yo-yo in my show bag. I want to tell
the woman to keep the yo-yo and let me have the doll, but I know it’s not polite.
We walk through the exhibition pavilion. The smell of freshly baked cakes is tantalising. There are sugarcane stalks, measured and prized with three different-coloured ribbons. Blue for first prize, gold for second and red for third. My mother stops.
‘What is it?’ says my dad.
‘I think I saw old Uncle Essa,’ she says.
‘Well, go and say hello.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘He banished my mother when she married Dad.’
‘Go and speak to him.’ He pulls her hand.
She shakes her head and releases herself from his grip.
‘Well, I want to go and watch the car-racing,’ says Dad.
We enter the seated area. I see a doll on a stick, moving through the crowd. I have not noticed that I’ve let go of my sister’s hand. Sticky from fairyfloss, my fingers have escaped. My eyes and heart follow the doll. I am led through the crowd by a pink doll on a stick. I follow past the dodgem cars, jugglers, and the show-bag stalls.
Then I see a tall, thin girl in red-and-white knee-high socks. She is wearing clogs. She is waiting at the waffle stand and she is holding the doll. The girl’s hair is blond and curly-tight. She brushes the curls with her hand. They unlock and straighten and then, as they are released from the pull of her hand, they spring back like a closing petal.
‘Where have you been?’ It’s my mother. I have been on the trail of the fairy, but hearing my mother’s voice I start to scratch my arms.
She has a desperate tone that I immediately recognise. ‘We’ve been looking everywhere for you!’
‘The fairy.’ I point to the doll on the stick.
‘Don’t tell me, Tarena, that you walked away from us to follow a stupid doll?’ My mum smacks me on the back of my legs. ‘You could have been taken by someone.’
There is heat and tears in my eyes.
‘Don’t ever do that again!’
The music spins in my head. The doll is laughing at me. I watch its pink face fade out of sight, into a swirling sea of colours and lights.
goodbye to an old friend
Cairns, 1992
I drive into the familiar street. Real this time, not just in my dreams. In the driveway, there is a van. Men are packing furniture and boxes into the back of it.
‘Do you mind if I look around? I used to live here as a kid.’
One of the men smiles at me. ‘Sure, it’s my uncle’s house. He’s moving out.’
I linger on the steps, just as I did as a five-year-old. A coat of paint has changed the exterior from orange to white. I remember the front yard with the partly concreted driveway, and that fence I once fell off. And there’s the old frangipani tree. Our cubbyhouse was in the right-hand corner of the yard. We made it out of old crates. There was also a strange lump of concrete, which I pretended was an old well. It was right in the middle of the backyard, and I remember the white-painted wooden trellis at the side of the house. There was a creeper with yellow flowers that were sticky and sweet.
A house is a house, but the memories locked inside it can be more vivid, more real than its four walls and two doors. I step into the kitchen; the stove is to the right, in the same place. The cream-coloured phone is there too, no longer sitting on the bench but affixed to the wall. We only got it a few months before we moved, after years of having to use the neighbour’s for emergency calls.
The day we left the house, my parents were here in the kitchen, making sure everything was in order. We were moving to Canberra because my dad had a new job. He had spent the previous month there getting everything settled and ready for us to follow.
My mother’s tone was strained. ‘Have you organised to disconnect the power?’
‘Yes,’ answered my dad.
‘What about the telephone?’
‘Yes, it’s all been arranged, dear.’
‘I don’t want to leave, Frank.’
‘But I’ve got an opportunity to work in an office, learn something new,’ my father pleaded. ‘I don’t want to be doing shiftwork, sorting mail in the post office all my life.’
‘It’s so far away from here. It’s far from Tally and all my friends.’ Mum’s voice was cracking.
‘C’mon, you agreed it would be better for the kids – it’s better for us all round.’
Their voices fade.
We used to play snakes and ladders in the room my mother called ‘the front room’. Here we watched television too, though we were among the last families in the street to get one. Ours was black and white, but most of the kids at school already had colour television. My dad used to joke that ours was a coloured television.
Through an open window, I can smell the frangipani flowers. I sniff and walk down the narrow passageway. The peeling wallpaper reminds me of my itchy, flaking skin. But this is not our wallpaper. I remember white-painted walls in the front room, and lilac in each of the bedrooms.
I walk into the room my sister and I shared. It was here she learned to play the guitar and wrote her first song. We used to fight over who could sing the best. This is the room I hurried back to whenever that boy from grade two called me names and chased me home from the bus stop. He was a bully and would wait day after day to catch me on my own. In that corner we plastered posters of pop stars: the Bay City Rollers, Sherbet, Leif Garrett, and other male singers of the 1970s. I loved this house. Looking at it now, like a long-lost relative, I want to embrace it.
Often in the night the roof would make strange noises. Sometimes I could hear the floorboards creaking in the passageway outside my parents’ bedroom. I would lie awake, too scared to call out. Instead I hid under the bed. It was hot there in that space, with only the sound of my heart beating. The low-hanging coils of my bed poked at my sweaty face. I would stay there until I heard the milkman clinking bottles in the early morning. The sound of money jingling in his apron pocket as he stepped off our porch was my signal. Now it was safe enough to go back to my bed.
At the rear of the house there is a long verandah. We used to play old 45s here on the record player. We would sing and dance, pretending to be rock stars. I don’t even have a record player any more.
That large tree looming over the fence is such an old friend. I close my eyes. Yes, I can still hear the laughter of childhood innocence. I almost sing the words to the tree: ‘Can I take you with me?’
‘Did you say something?’ The owner’s nephew is standing at the door.
‘Sorry. I was talking to myself. I’m not mad, you can rest assured.’
‘I’ll take your word for that! It’s just that we’re going now.’
‘Yep, me too. Thanks for letting me look around.’
The good nephew is closing the windows as I drive off in the hire car. When I reach the corner I realise that it’s this street – and that house and that tree – I remember most. And that I’ve never really left, until today.
ivory towers
Sydney, 1992
The office tower is in the northern end of the city. I walk by it twice before walking in. The revolving door delivers me into a foyer. The marble floor is slippery, so I walk slowly. The tap of my heels is hollow. An odd-coloured sculpture made out of metal is bolted to the floor. Two girders like arms reach up towards the wood-panelled ceiling.
I try to look busy, like the man in front of me. He holds a black folder under his arm. He has a pass with his photograph around his neck. Maybe I’ll ask him directions. As I step towards him, his hand reaches out and shakes the hand of another man in a pinstripe suit. They revolve out into the street.
I’ve forgotten the floor number, and rummage through my handbag for the torn-off piece of paper that has the details on it.
‘There’s a directory over there,’ says a courier with a red-and-white bike helmet. He pushes past.
Gardners is on the twenty-fifth floor. There are two sets of lifts. Low rise and high rise. The beep of the lift is mid-tone. I get in, finally fi
nding the right button to press. The steel doors close, but then a hand is between them. A man gets in and presses twenty-six. We both face the doors as the lift goes up. He puts a hand in his pocket and plays with the coins in there. He smells of aftershave. The lift moves fast. My ears pop just as the lift beeps again to signal our arrival at floor twenty-five.
Two other applicants are already there, on soft leather lounges. Coffee cups and a plate of biscuits. The shoes, the briefcases, and the big-town eyes.
I walk towards the front desk. ‘Are you here to deliver something?’ says the receptionist.
‘Yes.’ I hand over the envelope with the firm’s profile in it and the letter inviting me for an interview. I turn back to the lift and press the down button. It lights up, and in ten seconds the lift beeps and the doors open. I walk in, scratching the back of my elbows. Why didn’t I say anything?
soccer
Canberra, 1981
Our new home is three houses away from the sports field of the nearby school. In spring the magpies make nests in big trees at the field’s edge. In summer we run through the sprinklers on hot afternoons. My halter-neck top and floral shorts get soaked to my skin. This is our favourite place to play after school.
Four big boys run onto the field with a soccer ball. ‘The tough boys from school,’ Shane whispers.
A body pushes past me. ‘Get out of the way, blackie.’ He brushes against my wet skin.
The boy walks towards Clarissa. She stands straight. Only her wet hair moves. Water is dripping from her curls. ‘Leave us alone, Mike,’ she says.
I wipe my mouth with my arm. I can taste the salt on my skin.
‘Get going, big tits!’ Mike is taller than Shane and me but he’s not bigger than Clarissa. She’s his age but towers over him.
‘No, we were here first.’
The other three boys are kicking a ball around.
‘Challenge you for a game of soccer?’ I yell. I look over at my brother. Shane’s small arms are twisting and his thin chest rises.