It didn’t seem very long ago that I would have gone nuts just sitting and watching something and not being part of the action. And I wasn’t sure what made me happy to just sit there and watch; it was a new, different kind of game I’d just happened upon, and it involved my head much more than my arms and legs (which suited me better now that my leg was bung). What I did with my head was I tried to clean it out, as if it was a cupboard full of stuff and I wanted it all emptied so it was ready for new things to go in. If I wiped out everything I knew, then I could look through my eyes as if I’d never seen anything before. That was when the trees started to look sad to me.
“Hey, Harry, how’d you like to be one of these poor trees, not allowed to grow its branches in its own particular shape, but being forced to look like every other tree and stand in a row and hold apples for people to eat?”
“Mannie, I’d be pretty pissed,” said Harry, tossing an apple high in the air and catching it, “if I was one of these trees.” And then he kept whistling. I watched Eddie for a while with my cleaned-out head, and then I watched Harry, and then I switched my eyes quickly from one to the other, just to see if they came out different in my mind.
Eddie was longer and looser than Harry. That was the first thing. He had thin arms and a long neck and tanned skin, and people said he was handsome. Eddie and I both had dark hair and eyes like our mother. His upper lip was sweating and he was squinting upward. Eddie just seemed to hang from himself as if he was only a coat he was wearing. He did everything in this easy way, hands relaxed. I knew he wasn’t thinking anything much, just fixing his mind on getting apples.
Harry had taken off his shirt. Harry was more intentional than Eddie, if you know what I mean. They both had pickers’ canvas bags on their fronts. Eddie was up one of those yellow steel ladders and Harry was on the ground. He had freckles on his shoulders, sprinkled all over. His body wasn’t loose, like Eddie’s—it was knowing and slow and direct, as if it was ready, sprung or loaded. But I couldn’t tell what loaded it. Maybe it was just the way his eyes sloped down at the corners, which made him appear always slightly amused, as though there was a silent slight laughter inside him. Anyway, I liked the look in Harry’s eyes when he looked straight at you. It made me smile, even though I didn’t mean to.
But what I liked best was watching Harry with the apples. His arms were thicker than Eddie’s, and he could catch an apple in one hand without it even making a thud. Eddie could do it too. Maybe all boys can do it, I don’t know, but I especially liked watching Harry because he was different, as I said. It was as if his hand saw the apple falling and reached and fell with it; even as it wrapped around the apple the hand kept falling as if it had become the falling apple, and to the apple it must have seemed like a soft ride. That was how he could catch them, loosely and softly but also exactly. And he and Eddie got the picking and dropping and catching going in such a way that it was like watching someone getting pushed on a swing, when you can see just how the swinging feels and you get lulled by it, so that I almost stopped thinking altogether. It made me quiet.
“How’s school, Mannie?” said Harry, but he didn’t stop to ask. He kept working and I hardly wanted to speak myself since the thinking part of me had sunk down and almost disappeared.
“All right.”
Harry lifted his arms behind his head and stretched, and I could see the hair under his arms. It was fine and long and sticking to his underarms because of the sweat. Half of it pointed up and half pointed down. What I thought was that Harry Jacob was strong and he would be able to carry someone if, for some reason, someone couldn’t walk. It was funny; Harry wasn’t handsome but he was something. I was trying to find a word for it, for what Harry was, and as I was searching my mind Harry looked at me, for no apparent reason. He was almost smiling but I couldn’t be sure. What I did know was that he was seeing right into my thoughts. I felt myself blushing and looking back at him as if I could see into his thoughts too, and if Harry saw the blush he didn’t say, and I didn’t either, but both of us must have seen that something had happened. The way we knew each other had just slipped and turned the way a season begins to turn and slip into another.
chapter fourteen
I should have known something was brewing with Mum. She was suddenly happy that autumn. She was like a girl. We even went shopping for a winter coat, all the way to Myer at Bendigo. We got a blue coat with wooden buttons that slipped into cord loops and reminded me of the thing you wind a kite string on. She let me choose it myself. I could tell she didn’t much like the duffle coat, but at least she didn’t say it was ugly. She went off and bought stockings. I saw Susie Newbound in Bendigo. She was having a smoke. She didn’t say anything about my new coat. She wasn’t very fashionable herself. Susie was working behind the bar at the Albion Hotel. She didn’t look hugely pregnant, just a bit bigger than usual. I said I didn’t think you were meant to smoke when you were pregnant, but Susie said she couldn’t give it up now. She told me about a party on Saturday night in Castlemaine, but I didn’t want to go anyway. Not that I had other plans.
I was wearing in the new duffle coat in the car on the way home. It had a hood, but I didn’t wear the hood. We were going along the Midland Highway and a train was suddenly alongside us on the tracks, making such a loud noise we couldn’t even hear the radio. Mum looked at me and she was grinning.
“Shall we beat it?”
“Okay,” I said, and with that she tossed her head back and laughed, like a horse about to bolt. She leaned forward and made the car go so fast that I held on to the seat. Her hair was blowing about and she kept taking her hand off the wheel to tuck her hair back, but it didn’t stay. She was excited, racing, racing the train. I hardly ever saw her like that, but when I did it was good. Her eyes were laughing and the train was roaring and the steering wheel was shaking and I was sticking my head out the window, my face wide in the mad pressing whoosh of air, and I was laughing too. And when it finished, when she had to brake at our road, she hooted the horn at the train and she looked at me, a calm and insistent triumph in her eyes.
“We won,” she said. I nodded, because I did feel for a minute that we’d won. Not the race, but something else. We’d won over the distance that was jammed between us. We’d tripped up and landed side by side. For a minute we were together in life; for a reckless wild minute we laughed the same laugh, and I wished it could always be like that.
I didn’t know what she was planning.
I was walking up the road on my way home. Once daylight saving was over, if you stayed back at school or if you hung out anywhere, you could feel the air, rustling and furtive, turning dark and cold. I liked this feeling: the earth preparing for change, the whispering flutter of the trees, the soft gold wedge of light beckoning from windows, saying come, come and be warmed. There was a smell, a damp smell of dirt and life, of tramped-on leaves, of steam coming off soups, of animals and dew, of plans life was making, of restless darknesses ribboning out and infusing the air with promise. Every year it smelled the same, and it was a nose memory; you remembered something, just vaguely, not a specific event, more a time, a sense of a time that leaves and returns, leaves and returns. Noses have softer, larger, fuzzier ways of remembering. They’re like animals.
Harry Jacob and his dog, Blue, were walking along the road, coming toward me. Just him and Blue. I’d never seen Harry on his own. It was always with Eddie that I saw Harry. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to see Harry on my own, but I’d definitely been imagining what would happen if we did. The minute I knew it was him I got a bad attack of the funnies. (The funnies was what me and Lucy called the icky feeling you got around boys, especially if they put their arm around you or tried to hold your hand. It made you shiver.) That wasn’t at all how I imagined it. I tried to walk nicely, not to limp.
“Hi,” said Harry.
“Hi,” I said back. “Where’re you going?”
He leaned his head to the side and squinted into the sun, which was sinking ov
er the railway bridge behind me. He had his hands in his pockets and he swayed a little.
“To the tunnel. Wanna come?”
“Why you going to the tunnel?”
“You’ll see,” he said and he didn’t seem too concerned whether I came or not. So I tagged along. We walked toward the bridge, the two of us, and it felt funny to be walking along with Harry, as if it was he and I who were friends and not he and Eddie.
“Where’s Eddie?” I said.
“Footy,” said Harry.
Everything seemed to be shining with trueness. The sky, the ground, the distance. Puddles of sinking sun lay in the paddocks. The trees cast long, proud shadows and the tall grasses glittered in appreciation, as if basking in the glory of it all. A flock of parrots flew over us and I could hear the whoosh of their wings. The air was full of sighing, as if it was sinking down and settling, like a sheet flung over the earth in rest.
Harry led us up Blackjack Road and then along the path that followed the train tracks. We turned down and went under the bridge, and he leaned up against the wall. It was a narrow tunnel, with curved brick walls on either side and a thin trail of wet along the bottom. Inside it was cool and echoey.
“Is this all you wanted to show me, Harry? ’Cause I’ve already been here plenty of times,” I said as I leaned against the opposite wall. Harry glanced down at his watch.
“It isn’t a thing to see, Mannie. It’s a thing to feel. Wait, will you. Another few minutes.”
I didn’t care what it was, anyway. I wasn’t getting the funnies anymore. I was getting something else.
“Eddie’s going ‘round with Alison Porrit,” I said.
“I know.”
“He’s dead keen.” I don’t know why I said that. Eddie wasn’t dead keen on anybody. He just liked Alison because she was pretty.
Harry didn’t answer me. He was looking up at the roof and running his finger along where the drips were coming down.
“Did he tell you?”
“Tell me what?” Harry squatted down on his heels; his hair fell over one eye and he blew it off.
“Did he tell you ’bout Alison?”
“Yeah. He told me.” Harry grinned and I didn’t know what he was grinning at but it must have been something.
“What do you know, Harry?” I said, sliding down the wall so I was looking at him eye to eye.
He raised his eyebrows as if he was going to tell me, but then he was distracted. “Hey! You hear that?” He jerked his head behind him. It was a train’s whistle. “It’s the goods train.” Harry stood up, so I did too. The sound was drumming through the tracks all the way. It came louder and louder and the mounting of the roar got me excited; it boiled up your blood with the sense of something frightening and violent and mad charging toward us. But underneath it there was not a sound, there was nothing that even whimpered or budged in our tunnel and it seemed Harry and me were tightly sealed inside something, like two secret letters lying next to each other in an envelope. Harry looked up at the roof as the train went over. He laughed, but I couldn’t hear the laugh, I could only hear the train going over us. I laughed too. It was so loud it was funny. And then, just as quick as it came, the noise started to sink away. We stood still and listened, the way you watch someone walk away. We watched with our ears.
“Worth it?” said Harry, when the noise had completely gone.
“Yeah.” We looked outside the tunnel, back over the paddocks and trees, which were still and quiet as ever. The cows had their heads bent down to the grass, and were just chewing away like they always were. The trees were looking all important, black and tall, composed and unworried by the layering tumble of days upon them. And just looking at them like that did a strange thing to me. First, there was this unfamiliar quietness, as if I’d never before really heard a quietness, or listened to it. For an instant, a great endless space opened up in my mind, but not only my mind, in the whole of me, and into that lovely startling stillness poured the truth of those trees, and that sky and the cows and the whole thing, the whole mysterious sense of it. I couldn’t hold it there, though, since the instant I recognized it, my mind jumped up and down with excitement and trampled all over it. I stared in a wild way, wondering what it was, what was there in the world that lay at your feet so quiet and beautiful that it couldn’t be held by any part of you. I was lit up, and I wanted to tell, but it wasn’t tellable. It couldn’t fit into words. I was feeling I could have been a tree myself, and though it was almost the finest feeling I’d ever had, I made myself look down at my shoes so that I’d stop brimming with treeness, in case I looked funny and Harry might think I was a nutcase, not a tree.
What I did know was that I’d had a moment of pure happiness. The day had gone, the noise and goings-on subsided, and the last throw of light was like a curtain coming down on the end of the show. I felt as though I should clap and cry “encore,” but I restrained myself and wondered instead what had caused that happiness. I couldn’t be sure if Harry had caused it or not, or if the noise of the train had caused it, or if I’d just caused it myself. So I didn’t let on about it. I didn’t even look straight at Harry. He walked me all the way back to my house and I raced inside to make sure he didn’t feel obliged to say good-bye in a meaningful way.
When I got inside, I could hear music coming from the living room. I could hear my mother laughing. The rest of the house was dark. I went in but she didn’t hear me. She was there with Travis Houghton. They were standing opposite each other and he had his arm on her waist. She was throwing her head back, laughing. When she laughed she always threw her head back, her hair spreading down like molasses. She was wearing lipstick and hoop earrings and a flared red skirt. The record was still going around. Travis was in his work clothes and his hands were dirty. He saw me. He dropped his hand from my mother’s waist and wiped his mouth.
“Look, it’s Manon,” he said, taking my mother by her shoulders and turning her toward me. She smiled.
“Hello, darling. Look, I’m trying to teach Travis to dance but he’s hopeless.” Then she smiled up at Travis. She never called me darling. I think it was a mistake.
“You’re really hopeless, you know?” she said to him, and by the way she giggled you could tell that she didn’t mean it badly, not like how she meant it when she said it to me. He laughed and flopped down on our couch, as if he was in his own living room, as if he was staying around. His dirty hands rested over the back of our new couch.
“Isn’t Eddie home yet?” I said to Mum.
“Eddie? No, he’s at footy training.”
“Where’s Dad?”
She frowned and stamped her foot. She was wearing high heel shoes. She said I knew very well where my father was. He was at work still. She prodded a pile of magazines and acted as if she were arranging them more neatly, as if she were being a housewife. Then she turned and smiled again at Travis.
“You’re home late, Manon,” he said, and I didn’t like the way his eyebrows moved.
“Mmm,” I said, and then I went and turned on all the other lights in the house. What I really wanted was to go and think about Harry, but I was irritated by Travis and I wouldn’t relax until he left our house.
chapter fifteen
Ivy took my hand and held it between hers. There was great sadness on her face. I knew what she was thinking and I didn’t want to talk about that. I had other things I wanted to talk about.
“Ivy?” I said quickly. “What went wrong with Mum?”
“Why did she run off, you mean?”
“No. I mean is she schizo? Is she mad?” After my mum ran off with Travis Houghton, she was never herself again. She rang up from Melbourne where she was living with Travis. Eddie didn’t want to speak to her. It put him in a bad mood.
“Mad? No. Not mad. She’s unwell. She’s unbalanced. Manon, I should tell you, your mother never liked me very much. We never got on very well, she and I. I don’t know whose fault that was; I’m not blaming her for that. There’s a lot of
things I do blame her for, mind you, but not that.” She paused as if to give time to that revelation, though I’d known it anyway.
“Your father’s a very good man,” she said. “He always was, but he’s not fancy, he’s not an ambitious man. By God, he fell for your mother, though. You know, marrying her was the most ambitious thing he ever did.”
“Why? Why was that ambitious?”
Ivy looked up at the ceiling and considered a way to explain it. She scratched her head.
“Well, it was like a dog marrying a cat. Anyone could see how different they were. Not that that’s always a bad thing. But in this case it was. See, your dad’s a gentle, loving man. Your mum, she was complicated.”
“How did they meet?” Of course I’d heard the story before, from them, but I wanted to hear it again, from another angle.
“He was studying Vet Science at the time he met her. He had a friend, this fellow, Sam Wheeler. Sam was in promotions. He drove a big car and he had this big laugh, you could hear him a mile off. I don’t know what he saw in your dad. Ned was always a quiet one, but he and Sam were good mates. Anyway, it was Sam’s fault that Ned met your mother. Sam took him to a party, it was something to do with that theater company—the French one. Your mother was there. It was only a couple of weeks later they were engaged.”
Ivy nodded to the photo on the bookshelf. “Ned was as happy as I’d ever seen him. She was too, at first.”
I looked at that photo. I remembered my dad, the way he used to toss a piece of fruit in the air and catch it with a snap, as if he were pleased with the way things were about him—the blue air, the market vegetables in a big basket on the table, eggs cooking, Saturday. And Mum, she was happy when there were other people there. She would giggle and serve milk in the pale green jug and butter placed in a neat slab on a little glass dish. And she put fresh flowers everywhere, even in the bathroom.
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