chapter three
The train seemed to take a long time to arrive, and there was nothing to look at that I hadn’t already worn out my observations on a million times before. There was the dim and empty platform opposite, and the bright channel of sky pouring slow morning light, leaving slabs of shadow on the ground. There was the air, creaking with the slight movement of trees leaning toward the sun. There was the flapping of birds, song spilling from their beaks and breaking over the leaves. There was probably even the dull thud of thoughts turning over inside heads sunk in pillows, and the patter of feet whose soft, slippered steps padded people up hallways toward the beginning of another day. Another day, I thought to myself and sighed because it was a hefty thought and I’d had to heave it out of myself, as if it bore the weight of all those people who wouldn’t bother to think such a useless thought themselves.
But you had to face it; the days did just keep arriving, even if you didn’t want them to. You had to get through them in one way or another: plod up the hall, spread some butter on toast, and go. “Not this one, though,” I told myself. I’d decided it would be different. I wasn’t plodding, I was swooping and carousing, and though everything else seemed just waking, my thoughts were already busy hopping from one thing to another, like a sparrow on a lawn.
I was still thinking about Harry, actually, even though he was exactly who I didn’t want to be thinking about. I meant to tell him, before I left, that I didn’t hold him responsible for what happened. I never said I did, but he might have felt I did, by the way I acted around him afterward. Like a cold fish. I didn’t feel like a cold fish. I just didn’t feel like anything I’d ever felt like before. And there were expectations. People were looking at me as if I was an exhibit. Exhibit B, Miss Disaster Study. So I was taking great care to hold everything inside. I was all buttoned up and private. I didn’t know what kind of monstrous thing might come out if I let it. So I shut up and became cold stiff fish numero uno.
The very first time I saw Harry he didn’t strike me as being anything in particular, but he did have an effect. I was looking straight at him, but he didn’t notice me at all. He didn’t even give me a look. Most boys give a girl at least a look, but Harry Jacob didn’t. He was lifting an old church pew into his house. He had it on his shoulder and he was humming or whistling, and he looked as if he was having a nice time just lifting that pew into the house. He seemed more interested in how to angle the thing through the door than in having a squiz at someone else. I wasn’t looking because I fancied him or anything, but just to see what kind of a family was moving into that old mint-chew house. I was betting they’d be bogans or animal abusers, but they weren’t. They were the Jacobs, and Harry was the youngest. Still, he was older than me, and he could drive.
Driving impressed a lot of girls, but not me. Susie Newbound only went with guys who drove. If he could take her to Bendigo and buy her a Big Mac, then he was the man for her. She wasn’t fussy. I was. I was very particular. It wasn’t that I had tickets on myself, it was just that I didn’t feel anything for most of the boys at our school. I don’t know why. Maybe I was hard of feeling. But I was waiting for the real thing, for someone first-class.
I spent a lot of my life waiting, to tell you the truth, which was why I was getting out of town. It was a deliberate strategy, a counterattack to waiting, which wasn’t getting me anywhere. There are two types of waiting. There’s the waiting you do for something you know is coming, sooner or later—like waiting for the 6:28 train, or the school bus, or a party where a certain handsome boy might be. And then there’s the waiting for something you don’t know is coming. You don’t even know what it is exactly, but you’re hoping for it. You’re imagining it and living your life for it. That’s the kind of waiting that makes a fist in your heart.
When I was as small as a dog, I went and lay down on the couch and spread my hair out, the way Sleeping Beauty would’ve spread her hair. I closed my eyes and smiled, just the way an angel would smile if it had accidentally fallen asleep on a couch. I waited with my sleeping hair and my angel smile for Mum to come looking for me. But she never came looking. She never came and found me like that. Usually, after about a minute, I got sick of lying still. Or Eddie would burst into the room with a water pistol and ruin the atmosphere. I was used to Eddie ruining atmospheres. He really knew how to do that. I don’t know if it was because he was older or because he was a boy, but Eddie always took up more room.
As I sat on the platform, the morning light was all broken up and gleaming, winking diamonds of it caught in the scraggly blue trees. Long shadows lay over the yellowed fields like leftover fingers of night still stroking the paddocks in sleep. But I wasn’t one bit sleepy. I just couldn’t find a strong line of thinking to follow, since Harry Jacob thoughts kept cutting into thoughts about Eddie, or about poor Dad, or the thing I most of all wanted to think about: the thing I didn’t know yet, the thing that was like a runaway kite pulling my heart forward. That pulling forward thing was exactly what Harry didn’t have. But I can’t remember a time when there wasn’t something tugging at me. My body was forever making plans, pushing awake all stupid and eager, a conspiracy of flesh and sap pulling me onward and onward. And I was just a hapless passenger, weary, bleary-eyed, sitting sideways, waiting to become the real Mannie—not the old Mannie, but the new one, the better one, the very best truest Mannie. It was as if the best truest Mannie lay miles ahead of me in the future and it was this Mannie Clarkeson who tugged me forward. That’s why (I explained as if Harry was listening) I had to change tracks, not go up and down the same old roads. I wasn’t getting closer to the best truest Mannie at Blackjack Road. I needed a new arc of sky to unwind the odd and faltering thread of my life into. I just did.
chapter four
By the time the train came there were quite a few people gathered on the platform. I stayed at the end near the bushes and planned not to bump into anyone I knew.
You should never plan.
On the train Alison Porrit’s mother almost sat right next to me, but when she saw it was me she changed her mind.
“Oh, Manon,” she said as if I wasn’t a real person, as if I was a cow poo she’d accidentally trodden on. “Hello.”
“Hello.” I was sitting next to the window. She stood before me, clutching a snakeskin handbag and smiling.
“And what are you up to? So early?”
I didn’t like seeing Mrs. Mrs. Porrit. In my mind I called her a double-Mrs. because that’s what she was, more Mrs. than anything else, so I had no intention of telling her what I was up to. For a start, the way she asked made it sound as though I was involved in a World War Three conspiracy. Mrs. Mrs. Porrit always thought Eddie and Harry Jacob and I were bad influences on her Alison. So, Mrs. Mrs. Porrit and I weren’t off to a good start. I said I had business in Melbourne. She sniffed and put her hand to her mouth as if it was about to make an unseemly sound.
“You’re very dressed up, Manon,” she observed, raising her eyebrows in a way I didn’t exactly appreciate.
“Yeah, I am.” I agreed with her, but only on this one point. I even ran my hands over my dress and fussed about it a bit, just to emphasize my tremendous worthwhile elegance. Mrs. Mrs. Porrit’s face became all long-nosed and pinched-up, like a goldfish who has suddenly come up against the glass. It quite amused me to think of Mrs. Mrs. Porrit as a goldfish, and I was compelled to watch her as she flapped her plump pink fins all the way to another seat. Then I pulled back the ugly plaid curtain and rammed my gaze up against the window.
I decided I’d just start again from here. Forget the Harry Jacob sighting and the bike ride and snotty Mrs. Mrs. Porrit. This was the real start of my new life. A train was a perfect place to start an adventure. Movies, for instance, always start at the platform in a cloud of mist, or dust, or something to blur the edges.
As my train pulled out of the station there was no mist, only a big dad in a red Windbreaker running along the platform, waving to his child. His tummy b
umped up and down, but still he ran all the way to the end of the platform, puffing and waving. The few strands of hair that he had left on top of his head ruffled up so that he looked like an overused stuffed toy. I didn’t like the feeling it was giving me, watching that big pale dad puffing and running and aching in his floppy old heart as the train pulled out with his little child. That child was probably on its small knees looking out and hooting with the joy of that chugging, shaking train and the way it seemed to take you through life, instead of life always passing by you.
A woman sat down opposite me. I was annoyed at her for sitting there. The moment of my departure was meant to be completely mine and I needed it to remain open and full of possibility, like a window without glass. So I felt as territorial as a barking dog about my moment, only I didn’t bark. I used the more sinister strategy of neglecting to make the woman feel welcome. Not only that, I looked at her as if she were a dirty great cloud drifting into my endless clear sky. It didn’t make her get up and flap away like Mrs. Mrs. Porrit, but she turned her head and looked out the window, and I consoled myself that my bad behavior had warded off potential discussions about her bright-spark children winning races and trophies and prominent positions. It would have really annoyed me if my unfriendliness, which was sour and sinking inside me, had been for nothing.
The woman wasn’t what Eddie called a babe. She was about fifty, and had a pear-shaped head that made it look as if all the matter inside had sunk down into the jaw and filled it out too much. She wore a serious expression, and her lips were moving in a whispery way, as if there was a thought or word she was rolling over in her throat. She was dressed in dark, loose-fitting clothes, though she did have a large floppy white hat on her lap. She bent down and pulled a sandwich out of her bag, took half, and ate it carefully, cupping her hand underneath in case some of it fell. It didn’t. It was a very wellpacked sandwich, with grated carrot and other healthy things. A person who bothers to grate carrot for their sandwich is a very particular person, a person quite unlike me. I imagined her folding the corners of her blankets. I started thinking about all kinds of things she probably did that I never did: like dabbing her mouth with a napkin, or keeping all her socks matched, or taking an umbrella just in case, and doing up her seat belt every time. I pictured her at charitable dinners with a husband who was unspectacular but wore a necktie. I figured she had normal thoughts too, and she said kind things to her two children. And her two children would grow up with T-bar sandals and optimistic outlooks. What did her husband do? Real estate agent? I had no respect for real estate agents. Harry said I was judgmental. But Harry wasn’t discriminating. He never was. He accepted anybody. Any old body.
The woman began peeling a mandarin. She put the skin in a brown paper bag, then broke the mandarin in half and leaned forward, with one half wobbling on her flat palm. She was offering it to me.
“No, thank you,” I said. The words bolted out before I had time to think. I looked down immediately and saw the woman’s shoes, which were alarming and not at all in keeping with the rest of her. I felt vexed by this. No one likes being contradicted by a pair of shoes. They were more like socks with rubber on the bottom and a special place for the big toe. And not only was she wearing funny shoes, she was offering me some mandarin. I looked up at her.
“Are you going to Melbourne?” I asked with a little world-weary sniff. The last thing I felt like was chatting. Some people are natural at chatting and they can talk to anyone. But I can’t. People weren’t likely to like me.
“Yep, well, kind of, straight to Tullamarine. I’ve got a flight to catch.”
“Where to?”
“Just to Sydney.” She smiled at me, as if she was a little bit amused, and I leaned forward.
“What are you doing in Sydney?” I asked, knowing it wasn’t quite right to ask.
“I’ve got work to do there. I’m only going for the day.”
“Do you live in Castlemaine?”
“I wish I did. I live in Melbourne. My parents live in Fryerstown. They’ve retired there. I was just visiting. What about you? Where are you going so early?”
I sat up straight and crossed my legs like a lady.
“To Melbourne. I’ve got some business there.” I knew she was thinking I looked funny in a long red dress at six o’clock in the morning. I folded my arms across my chest.
“Business, huh?” She grinned as if she might even understand just how delicate a matter my business was. I considered explaining, but when I reached back into my mind I couldn’t find the right beginning. It was the cold fish state of affairs. You can’t go telling stuff when you’re still swollen with it. I had to swallow it down first and make it regular, packageable, clean like a box. Something I could carry around without it causing a disturbance, without it causing floods or gaping.
I shifted in my seat and looked at the woman—right in her eyes—not to see her but just to hold on to something. Her eyes were soft, and I felt all right looking at her soft eyes.
She was actually quite different from what I’d first thought, now that I knew she wasn’t a country person. To me, a person’s interestingness was measured by the lines of distance that spanned from where I lived out into the world. The longer your line was, the better you became. Once I met a man who had been to Argentina. So far, he was the best.
“What’s your business?” I asked the woman. She spat a pip into her hand.
“Theater director. And you?” She said it softly, as if she’d just said dental nurse or bank teller. I was suddenly ashamed of myself.
“Me, I don’t do anything yet. I’m only seventeen. Are you really a theater director?”
“I’m afraid so.” The woman shrugged apologetically.
“Well, my mum was an actress.” I smacked my palms onto my knees in triumph.
“Really? What’s her name? Maybe I know of her.” She had a half smile on her face. It was secretive and inward, but it showed up in the open shape of her eyes. I let myself be encouraged by it.
“Emma. Emma Legrande. And then, when she married my dad, she was Emma Clarkeson. But you wouldn’t know of her because she was an actress in France, before she came here. She didn’t do any acting here.”
“Why not?”
“She wasn’t well. And she lived in the country. You can’t do anything in the country.” I rolled my eyes and shook my head to indicate the frustration that I myself was subject to, living in the country. The woman nodded, and I felt sure she understood. She was, after all, a theater director, and I had a lot of respect for those kinds of people, creative people like my mother.
“Well, I reckon you’ve inherited your mother’s theatricality, anyway.”
“How can you tell?” I said, resting my hand on my chest.
“Well, I guess I’m used to telling, part of the job. But the dress is a dead giveaway.”
“Not as much as your shoes,” I said with a little pout. At this the woman laughed out loud. She pulled her pants up a bit and lifted her feet to show them better. She faced the rubber soles toward me and explained that she got the shoes in Japan while she was working with a Butoh company, and that they were so comfortable that she forgot to take them off sometimes. I had no idea what a Butoh company was, but I didn’t let on since the woman thought I was a theatrical person, and true theatrical people should know what Butoh was. So I said, “Of course,” and “Once I almost wore my slippers to school too,” which was true.
“I’m Helena.”
“Manon.” As I reached my hand toward hers I felt that I was doing something utterly perfect. Even the way I said my name—“Manon,” not “I’m Manon,” not “Mannie Clarkeson,” just “Manon”—was exactly as it should be. Exquisite and delicate. Not too much one way or another, just hitting the right lovely ringing note. The quiet music of it surged through me and, just as the glow of the sun spread over the fields, I could have shone with it. I lifted my palms to my cheeks to touch the glow and, even after Helena took out a book and I
sank into my seat and stared out the window, I could still feel the moment’s perfection smoldering within me. The skinny old trees and bare pastures looked like they’d just put on a brand-new, luminous dress.
I knew it was a sign.
chapter five
The train arrived in Melbourne at eight o’clock in the morning. Helena gave me a card with her telephone number. Helena Dubrovnic, it said. I put it in my wallet. She said I could call her if I needed to. She smiled at me and I could tell that she was a true person, not like Mrs. Mrs. Porrit. She wasn’t smiling for the sake of niceness, to make sure she got to heaven. I didn’t know why she thought I’d need to ring her, though.
“Oh,” I said, “I’ll be visiting a relative.”
She couldn’t have known it was a lie because I said it very nice and prompt, as if it was the truth, as certain as a pale hand in a white glove extending out.
When Helena walked away, I almost wished I could go with her. I pictured her home for a minute. I thought it would have large couches and paintings on the walls, and maybe she would ask me to live with her forever and I would become a star protégée in her theater company, and we would eat in restaurants and laugh. But she hadn’t asked me, so I couldn’t. I went and got my bike.
The station was crammed with people who tunneled forward and backward with small cases banging at their knees. I weaved my bike through them and frowned, just to create a serious impression. In case people might think I looked funny in my red dress, I held myself quite like a member of Parliament and steered straight into the city, with purpose.
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