The Vale Girl

by Nelika McDonald

‘Hmmphh,’ the librarian said, her glasses pushed down on her nose as she flicked through the card catalogue. ‘Sounds lonely.’

  Towel goes out on the railing, we’re open for business. Towel comes back in: Sorry, sir, Ms Vale is not taking any more customers. We’ve sucked you dry and we’re finished with you. This is mother–daughter bonding, the morning after: victors with the spoils. My mother used to tell me that what she liked about her profession was how explicit and uncomplicated the transactions were. A service was provided and payment was received for said service in the form of money. When the deed was done and the debt was paid, each party walked away, untethered to the other, with nothing left behind. There was no legacy. There was no wheedling, no compromises, no bargaining to be done or emotions available to manipulate. She was a product, she was for sale, you bought or you did not. It didn’t matter to her; the customers were all the same. If you didn’t buy, someone else would.

  It was a gradual shift. In the beginning, I was taking the money and doing the bookings only if my mother was with another customer. I made them drinks, brought them magazines or stalled them if she needed a break. Sometimes I had to run up to the milk bar for change, and it was easier and saved her time if I was taking care of the payment side of things while she was getting herself and the bedroom ready. She said it was more efficient, and that successful businesses operated by the mandate of efficiency. She had learnt that in her father’s hardware store. Maybe some of the customers were uncomfortable at first, dealing with a young girl, but they got used to it. It’s amazing what you can get used to, if you have to. The absurd can become ordinary in the space of minutes.

  The drinking was just at night, at first. Dutch courage, or whatever nationality’s courage was on special at the bottle shop. In the last few years, the drinking went from just at night to not before three. And then, why not before three? It’s just a hand on a clock. Time stands still in this godforsaken place anyway, baby. Each year just smudged into the next, punctuated by the Grevillea Festival rolling in like the tide. It was enough to drive anyone to the bottle, she said. Festival time was when she hated Banville the most.

  The first Grevillea Festival was actually the brainchild of her father. I heard this story many times. I heard all her stories many times. She said she wanted me to learn from her life, her mistakes, so I would not repeat them. She told stories well, and the same way each time, so I know them like they’re my own. In my head they’re in the cadence of her voice, like she’s sitting inside my skull and whispering them into my eardrums. My mother had always wanted to be an actress, and she said that’s what good acting was – telling stories well. She said that sometimes when people told stories, they just told you what happened. That was just like a skeleton of a story, and that was bad acting. But when you told someone what it was like when something happened, that was the flesh. That was what made the story come alive.

  On the morning of that first Grevillea Festival, Susannah had stood on a chair in the kitchen of the town hall while her mother let down the hem of her church dress. Susannah was holding her script for the Drama Society production of Romeo and Juliet, trying to learn her part. She was the understudy for Juliet’s nurse, and also a parishioner in a church scene. She had exactly one line: ‘It was not!’ She had practised that sentence over and over, in the bath, at her mirror, lying awake in bed. It was not, it was not, ’twas NOT!

  She and her mother had to be on stage with her father while he gave the opening address at the festival, and he had insisted they wear their Sunday best for it, even though it was sweltering outside and not much cooler in. Susannah’s dress was blue with a white Peter Pan collar and a white belt; she had outgrown it, and she hated it. She wanted to wear a black dress with a Brigitte Bardot neckline and a patent leather handbag to match. Or better yet, her swimsuit. At least she would be cooler then. She sighed and her mother poked her in the small of her back to make her straighten up.

  ‘You just keep growing,’ she said, her mouth full of pins.

  ‘I know. I hate it.’ Susannah looked down at the top of her mother’s head. She had rollers in her hair, with a pink scarf over the top. The scarf had pictures of strawberries with little arms and legs marching across it. It was the only frivolous thing her mother owned. She reached down and touched one of the strawberries, and her mother swatted her hand away.

  ‘I feel like a giraffe.’

  ‘Psshh. You could be a model, with these long legs. Like Twiggy.’

  ‘I’d rather be an actress,’ Susannah said. ‘I’ve been practising.’ She demonstrated for her mother the range of expressions she could do: dismayed, frightened, shocked, overjoyed.

  ‘You can be anything you want.’ Her mother smiled up at her daughter and then wheezed suddenly, dropping her measuring tape on the floor and gripping the edge of the sink.

  ‘Mum?’ Susannah jumped down from the chair.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ her mother said, shaking her head and waving her away. ‘It’s these rollers. They’re keeping all the heat in my head.’ She smiled at her daughter. ‘Serves me right for being vain.’

  Susannah smiled back, but she watched her mother carefully.

  Later that afternoon, they sat on folding chairs off to the side of the stage while Winston Vale gave his welcoming speech. As usual, he was funny and clever, and the crowd lapped it up. Looking out at their faces, glowing with laughter and turned up to her father like flowers to the sun, Susannah felt almost sorry for them. They were so easily tricked. Some smooth talking, a nice suit, a square jaw and a few bad jokes were all it took for Winston Vale to draw his audience into the palm of his hand. It was like watching a magician, Susannah thought. She could learn from him, if she could bear to be around him more than she absolutely had to – he was the greatest actor she had ever seen, playing the part of a man who was normal.

  ‘Anyway, I’ll stop talking so we can get into our positions, and make this the best country festival those city folks have ever seen,’ her father said. ‘And so I can get one of Ethel’s jam drops before Bob eats them all!’ The audience clapped and laughed like it was the funniest thing they had ever heard. Winston Vale put a hand out to his wife and daughter, indicating that they should stand and walk offstage with him. Susannah ignored his hand and stood up, waving at the crowd, pretending their applause was for her stage debut and that instead of Banville’s town hall this was Carnegie Hall, New York City. Her mother stood with her. From the corner of her eye, Susannah saw her sway for a moment before her knees buckled and she fell to the floor, her head hitting the stage with a dull thump. Her eyelids shuttered to slits and a trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth, down her neck and onto the mandarin collar of her grey silk dress.

  ‘Curtains!’ yelled her father, and the stage hand yanked on the rope to lower them. Later, Susannah thought how that moment was her father in a nutshell. Instead of calling for help for his wife, Winston Vale had called for the curtain to drop to prevent others from seeing any part of his world that was not choreographed by him. Heaven forbid they see something that was true.

  Fortunately, Dr Gresham was in the audience, and he came straight up onto the stage, pushing the drapes aside. Others trickled through the gap behind him. Susannah knelt, mute, her mother’s cool fingers between her own as the people around them parted and the doctor bent to Elizabeth. He unbuttoned her dress and pulled apart the two sides of her bodice to slide his stethoscope onto her chest and the onlookers all drew in their breaths. Someone swore and an unsettling chain of whispers began to creep around the room. Mrs Vale’s chest was a deep dark purple, with patches of yellow and green the colour of the sky before a hailstorm. Almost all the skin exposed was bruised so heavily that the patches of regular colour were not the norm, but the exception. Annie Darcy, a neighbour, pushed through the crowd and came to Susannah’s side. She squeezed Susannah’s shoulder before bunching up her cardigan and sliding it under Elizabeth’s head.

  Susannah’s father kn
elt on the other side of his wife. ‘What’s happened here? My darling, so clumsy, she must have fallen in the shower . . .’

  The doctor did not look up. ‘Call an ambulance,’ he said to his wife, and she ran off the stage.

  Winston Vale looked around at the gathered crowd in agitation. ‘Please give my wife some room,’ he called, and the spectators backed off a little. Susannah saw something in their faces then that she hadn’t seen before when they looked at her father. Something like suspicion, or mistrust, and a small triumphant part of her waved a victory flag, as worried as she was. Finally, people would know the truth about him. They would see the man that she saw. She held her breath and watched as the doctor examined her mother, squeezing limbs, running his fingers down her spine, lifting her eyelids and prodding her scalp. When he had finished, he looked at Annie Darcy and shook his head. Susannah’s chest tightened and she choked on the air in her windpipe. Annie slid an arm around her waist. The doctor turned to Mr Vale.

  ‘Injuries such as these can only have been sustained through blunt force trauma,’ he said. His voice was low and he could not, or would not, look at Mr Vale. ‘She needs to be hospitalised immediately, and the police –’

  ‘The police? Surely that’s not necessary. As I told you, it was a fall in the shower.’

  The doctor did not reply.

  Susannah felt Annie inhale and she looked at her father. Talk your way out of this, she thought. He appeared to be examining the floorboards, his forehead puckered. His fingers twitched and plucked at the buttons on his jacket. Usually he was so composed; he must have been anxious if he was fiddling like that, probably calculating how best to manoeuvre his way around this very public airing of Vale dirty laundry. How disconcerting for him. Susannah wondered what would happen now that it was all out in the open. He would be arrested, certainly, and then she and her mother would begin their lives again. In Banville? In Sydney? Anywhere they wanted. She looked hard at her mother. You stay with me now, she told her, silently. You need to stay here so we can start our new life, okay? This won’t ever happen to you again.

  ‘Dr Gresham,’ said Winston Vale, and he reached his hand inside his breast pocket. ‘As I told you, my wife is clumsy. I think we’re all getting worked up over nothing.’ He withdrew his handkerchief and sponged his upper lip. ‘And I’m certain you’d agree,’ he continued, ‘what happens inside a man’s home is surely the business of nobody but himself.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘It would be unfortunate if this was to mar today’s celebrations. The townspeople have been looking forward to the festival for so long.’ Winston Vale gazed out in the direction of Main Street, a rueful look on his face, as though imagining the poor townspeople, their toffee apples soured and lemonade bitter with the thought of Elizabeth Vale’s injuries. Both the doctor and Susannah stared at him. Annie Darcy busied herself with buttoning Elizabeth’s dress. When it was fastened at her mother’s neck, Susannah thought how fragile it looked, like her head was the bud of a flower stretched out on a thin stem, so delicate that a strong gust of wind could have snapped it in two. Necks should be stronger, she thought. It is stupid making them so brittle. Why are they so brittle?

  ‘Perhaps you could put their minds at ease,’ Winston suggested, waving his hand at the street outside the hall. ‘Tell them how common these injuries are, from people slipping in the shower and so on.’

  He leant a little bit closer and, involuntarily, both Susannah and the doctor drew back. Annie had found a comb somewhere and was brushing her mother’s hair back off her forehead. She took out the clip that had held her chignon in place, rewound the coil more loosely, and then replaced the clip. Her hands were shaking. I should have done that, Susannah thought, and bit down on her lower lip so hard she tasted blood. She looked down at her mother’s face, and put her fingers to her lips to reassure herself she still breathed. From between Elizabeth’s lips a faint breeze came, and Susannah put her nose to her mother’s neck and breathed in: talc, witch hazel, Shalimar, aniseed wheels. Antiseptic lotion. Elizabeth moaned a little, and Susannah’s gaze fell on her two front teeth, the left one turned slightly like it was marching away from the right. Her father had knocked that tooth out of place with the handle of a copper-bottomed saucepan when his wife had burnt the pastry on his beef Wellington. Susannah held her mother’s hand tighter. The doctor had not replied.

  ‘How’s the wife, doc? Arthritis still troubling her? And your girl, Cecilia. Quite the looker she is now, eh?’ Winston’s tone had changed; it was conversational, interested. Susannah began to have trouble breathing.

  ‘They are fine,’ said the doctor, his fingers curling and uncurling.

  ‘Quite the looker indeed. About my Susannah’s age now, isn’t she? Almost a woman.’

  Outside, they heard the siren of the ambulance cut off as it crunched across the gravel in the car park. Winston Vale smiled as though he had suddenly had an idea that pleased him.

  ‘Say, I bet the surgery could do with a few improvements. Some of that gear must be older than you! I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you a donation, how does that sound? Time you had a bit of an upgrade. We should be able to provide the same standard of care here as in the city, don’t you think?’ He glanced at Annie Darcy. ‘Consider it a token of my gratitude – for your help with this situation.’

  Susannah looked at him hard, but her father did not flinch or even blink, nor did he look at his daughter. She could not quite believe what she was hearing. He was like some sort of gangster movie villain, so lacking in morals it was almost comic. But not quite. She turned her gaze to the doctor and watched the parade of expressions across his face. Contempt, resentment, gratitude. Winston Vale had him, and he knew it. So did Susannah. She had been inside that surgery, she had seen the rust and ruin and disrepair with her own eyes. It was a case of necessity. The greater good, the lesser evil? Which was which?

  Annie Darcy’s son Lucas had been born with a hole in his heart and severe asthma. Susannah and her mother had visited them once and Susannah had to sing ‘Daydream Believer’ by The Monkees inside her head seven times because the sound of Lucas’s laboured breathing made her feel like she would vomit, or cry, or both. Annie and Lucas took the train to Sydney twice a month to see specialists there. They had sold off half their Hereford bulls in the last year, and leased four of their seven acres. Susannah had seen Annie’s husband in her father’s hardware store once and thought he must have been in his seventies. Every part of him was tired and drooped but he smiled like a child and had clear, sweet blue eyes. Later, her mother told her they had gone to school together, and Mr Darcy was around the same age as her. Thirty-six.

  The paramedics came through the door, and Mr Vale signalled them over.

  ‘What happened?’ asked one, while another knelt down to Mrs Vale.

  There was a pause, and Susannah held her breath. Please, she thought, please. Annie’s arm was around her waist again.

  ‘A fall in the shower,’ said the doctor, his voice flat and tired, and he turned and walked off the stage.

  Susannah stayed in her place on the floor and the paramedics loaded her mother into their van. Her father followed behind them. As they watched the dust swirl around the car park in their wake, Annie finally removed her arm from around Susannah. The locals flocked around them, asking what had happened, how dreadful, was poor Mrs Vale alright?

  ‘A fall in the shower,’ Annie Darcy said. ‘Might need to install a handrail.’

  ‘Or one of those mats with the little suction cups that you put in the bath.’

  ‘My mother has one of them.’

  ‘They’re supposed to be very good.’ They all nodded at each other. Agreement.

  Susannah looked first to Annie, then to each of the others, and then she walked away, taking slow, deliberate steps. When she was around the corner, she started running, her skin prickling in the navy dress and her head burning under the straw of her church boater. As long as she was running, she co
uld tell herself her face was wet from sweat. Thirteen was too old to cry.

  Later, when her mother was home and recovering in bed, sedated and still, Annie Darcy brought banana bread to their door in a basket covered by a beaded doily. Susannah took her offering and made tea in the good china cups with primroses inside the rim. They drank without saying much, but when Annie was leaving, she clutched Susannah’s forearm with her hand.

  ‘We have taken vows,’ she said, ‘to love, honour and obey our husbands. These are the duties of a wife. Your mother is a believer; she knows that all is God’s will. Your father spoke truly, what happens inside a man’s home is the business of nobody but him. My thoughts and prayers are with your family.’

  God’s will, thought Susannah. Is it God’s will for her to die at his hand? Because that is what will happen. You keep telling yourself it’s not any of your business, Annie. You keep turning a blind eye to her bruises and bandages, and mine. But I ask you, is that really it? Is that really why you kept your mouth shut, why everyone here keeps their mouths shut about this monster in our midst? Because it is none of your business, and all is God’s will? She could not stop her lower lip from trembling with the effort of containing herself.

  ‘In a town like this,’ Annie Darcy said, looking from the verandah over the orange rooftops of Banville, ‘we live in each others’ pockets enough as it is. Some places have to be private. Do you understand?’ Her tone was apologetic but Susannah was not softened by it. I understand perfectly, she thought. I understand that he buys your silence. Yours, the doctor’s, everyone’s. With X-ray machines, meat trays, new football shirts and books for the library. Sometimes not even that much.

  ‘Don’t forget your doily,’ she said to Annie Darcy, and went to hold open the door.

  After about three weeks, her mother could sit up again. Her father said if she could sit, then she could cook, and clean, and wash, mend, iron. Susannah read film magazines in her room and bided her time. When she slept, she dreamt of fire, cleansing and swift, reducing the whole town to a blackened wasteland with only the creek remaining, cut into the land like a scar.