Playing Beatie Bow

by Ruth Park

  ‘I’ll get over it,’ she thought. But she felt she was different from the others.

  She’d never had the frequent infatuations of other girls. She’d never been rapt in anyone before. And also there was that knowledge she’d had, that after she fell in love with Judah the empty place inside her was no longer empty. It still wasn’t empty, though very soon it would become so.

  But now she had to put him out of her head, go to sleep, lead the ordinary life of that ordinary schoolgirl, Abigail Kirk. She jumped out of bed, slid aside the window and leant out into the icy, whipping sea-wind.

  ‘The winds go through you like a bodkin, taking a stitch or two on the way.’ She could hear Granny’s voice talking about Orkney.

  ‘I have to forget Granny too, and 1873, and Beatie, and Dovey’s little ring with the garnet!’

  She stared blindly down upon the scintillant city, up at the gemmy Bridge, across at the Opera House, faintly luminous like a marvellous butterfly poised on the sea.

  ‘Whatever did Beatie think of that? A giant’s magic palace? I never did have a chance to explain to her.’ She gave a sob that was half a snort because of the wind blowing into her mouth. ‘That beastly place is more real than this one! And it isn’t, it isn’t. There probably isn’t any shop any more on the corner of Cambridge and Argyle streets. I mustn’t cry. My eyes will swell up, and Mum will notice tomorrow morning. I’ve got to go to sleep!’

  She folded up her green dress and took it to bed with her. She stroked it softly, and after a little while she slept.

  But her sleep was full of dreams.

  They were strange dreams. She saw Trooper Bow, his legs and arms chained together, and the chain threaded through an iron ring on the wall. His eyes wandered wildly, and tears ran down his cheeks in a ceaseless stream. She knew they had put him in the lunatic asylum and his family could not rescue him. She struggled desperately to tell the attendants: ‘He’s not mad. It’s just his wound. He’s the kindest of fathers. Don’t take him away from the children!’

  She saw Beatie in someone’s study, for the walls were lined with bookshelves. Beatie sat at a leather-topped table, her head bent over a book. Small and upright, she was not a child any longer, but a young woman. Her hair was plastered smooth and parted with mathematical precision in the centre. The rest was caught up in a black knitted snood or net.

  ‘Oh, Beatie,’ cried Abigail gladly, ‘what are you reading? Is it Latin? Is Mr Taylor tutoring you after all?’

  But Beatie did not hear. Her face was severe and resolute. It was then that Abigail noticed that not only the snood was black; the girl was in mourning.

  ‘But for whom? Not dear Granny? Oh, did Gibbie die after all?’

  In a flash the study vanished and Abigail was on a ship. The waves ran along the side, leaping and hissing. They were as grey as marble. The ship rolled and creaked. There was a drumming from up in the air, where the wet sails flickered out showers of salty drops. But she felt no movement. Muffled in his pea-jacket, a woollen cap on his bright head, Judah sat on a roll of canvas, mending some ship’s gear, or so she thought. He had not got older as Beatie had.

  ‘Judah!’ she cried joyfully, but he did not look up. The pulley and rope in his fingers changed to a knife and a little wooden figure he was whittling. Somehow she knew it was herself. With an exclamation she could not hear, he tossed it overboard, where it turned into Abby herself, clad in Dovey’s blouse and serge skirt, rising stiffly up and down in the waves like a statue or a ship’s figurehead.

  ‘Oh, Judah,’ sobbed Abigail, ‘how could you?’

  She awoke, confused and frightened, to find her mother shaking her. ‘You were having such a nightmare, yelling and crying.’ She sat down beside her daughter who was blinking dazedly into the light. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘He threw me away,’ sobbed Abigail. ‘But I saved Dovey for him, didn’t I?’

  ‘There, there, poor pet,’ soothed her mother. ‘It’s just a nightmare. My goodness, what a dramatic one!’

  ‘Oh, Mum,’ sobbed Abigail, ‘why is life so awful? Why do people have to put up with so many terrible things? Why is it when you love someone they don’t love you?’

  ‘Hush, now,’ said Kathy. ‘You’ve been dreaming. It’s all right now. You’ll have forgotten in the morning.’

  Next day Abigail did not speak of her dreams, and her mother concluded she had forgotten them. But she took her daughter by the shoulders and looked at her searchingly.

  ‘You are different!’

  ‘How could I be, Mum?’ asked Abigail with a smile. Kathy shook her head.

  ‘Of course you can’t be.’

  ‘The main thing is that you’re just the same,’ said Abigail.

  She walked into Magpies with the sensation that she was returning after a long absence.

  It was so different from Samuel Bow, Confectioner, so cunningly arranged, so full of vivid or comical treasures. Against the walls stood painted flats from ballet companies which had visited Sydney in Kathy’s childhood: Scheherazade’s gold-latticed windows and Ali Baba jars; and mysterious avenues of trees from Les Sylphides’ enchanted grove. There was an embroidered stool and an autoharp painted with yellow roses, and miniatures of little boys with sailor suits and tomato cheeks.

  Kathy was busy cleaning the family pictures she had brought from the sale at St Mary’s. Some of the portraits had been hand-tinted.

  ‘Amazing colours the Victorians wore,’ she commented. ‘Look at this – blue crinoline skirt, magenta jacket, and a yellow feather on the bonnet.’

  The poor people didn’t,’ corrected Abigail. ‘They wore brown holland, and a grey woollen stuff, and a white pinafore. And funny stockings with stripes going round and round like Glasgow Rock.’

  ‘What on earth do you know about Glasgow Rock?’ asked her mother.

  ‘Saw it in an old sweet shop window,’ replied her daughter truthfully.

  She felt defeated and restless, and as Kathy had come almost to the end of her cataloguing and pricing, she asked if she could go home.

  Kathy gave her a keen look. ‘Feel all right, do you, pet?’

  ‘Bored with holidays, that’s all.’ Abigail shrugged. ‘But I’m not going home to sit in the bear chair and mump. I thought I’d take a walk around The Rocks and look at things. It’s such a funny old place.’

  Before she went she hugged her mother and said, ‘It’s all right about Norway, you know.’

  ‘Well, I’m blowed!’ said Kathy. She stammered ‘But … what … how …’

  ‘I don’t know why I made such a fuss,’ said Abigail. ‘I just don’t know. I suppose it was a shock or something. But it’s all right. If Dad still wants me to come, too, then I will.’

  Kathy’s eyes shone. She gave a little jump of excitement.

  ‘Sssssh!’ cautioned Abigail. ‘A customer. See you tonight, Mum.’

  As she hurried up Argyle Street it was almost as if she were going home. She could almost smell the sugary odour of the sweet shop; she looked around to see if Beatie were stamping up the street, frowning and discontented.

  But Argyle Street was sunny and deserted. It was not the right time for tourists, or perhaps they were all in the Argyle Art Centre. She went past the Art Centre, and stood under a bare tree and looked at the wall on the corner of Cambridge Street. A brick wall. She didn’t know what was behind it, and didn’t care either. Across Cambridge Street fluttered strings of laundry just as they had in Granny’s time. The traffic bellowed overhead on the highway.

  In this sunny, empty world she wandered about; it was clean, and seemingly uninhabited. Was it only last night she saw this street teeming with ragged, grubby, and vital citizens, selling, buying, yelling, exhibiting fighting dogs, piglets, the Infant Phenomenon? The Garrison Church didn’t look any different, except that now it had a symbol of the Trinity on its east end. Broken steps that ran nowhere, a tangle of blue periwinkle and brambles, climbed up behind the church to the ridge where
the residence of the schoolmaster had stood in what was then Princes Street. Had Beatie ever run joyfully up those steps to Mr Taylor’s study, there to achieve the education for which she had been so famished?

  It was amazing, terrifying, that all signs of the family’s life could have so completely vanished, as if they had never been. It was as if time were a vast black hole which swallowed up all trace of human woes and joys and small hopes and tendernesses. And the same thing would happen to her and her parents.

  Abigail turned away, walked through a maze of lanes still familiar. Where the incline became too severe, the alleyway turned into a flight of steps; cottages still clung and perched, or were built into the living rock. The cliffs were water-stained under the winter-flowering vines. Fig-roots snaked down as they had always done. There were still privies at the end of shoebox yards. Only the people had gone, the beggars, the urchins with dirt-stiff hair, the dogs with mange, the hatter with twelve hats, ‘all clane’. Queer how independent and jaunty they had been. Poor as dirt, but full of vitality.

  She did not dare to go to the top of the cliff above Walsh Bay, where she and Beatie and Judah had climbed down the Jacob’s Ladder to the seashore and the dory. It would be all docks, all different.

  It was like a dream, and one that hurt as if a knitting needle had been stuck in her chest. The empty place inside her had become so empty she could not bear it any longer and turned towards home. She took her cut-off hair and green dress and went down the back elevator to the big incinerator that belonged to the tower block.

  It was easy to rip the Edwardian fabric to pieces. It was perished, anyway, after all. She threw it into the incinerator and poked it down with the iron rake. The crochet yoke remained in one piece. She held it a moment, inhaling those old odours of Dovey’s bridal chest, mothballs and lavender and a faint sweetness that came, so Beatie had told her, from the tail of a muskrat, sewn up in muslin.

  She threw it in on top of the smouldering rags of her dress. The flames blazed up briefly. She saw a line of crimson run around the outline of a flower, turn black and charred.

  ‘No, I can’t!’ said Abigail, and she put in her hand and snatched it out. She stamped out the small flames that wagged here and there, shook away the blackened pieces, and folded it up small.

  ‘I didn’t say “honour bright” to Beatie,’ she remembered.

  She put it away with Dovey’s stockings and Mrs Tallisker’s shoes.

  Chapter 12

  A few days later Kathy brought Abigail’s father home for dinner. What a good-looking man he is! thought Abigail. As with many people of Scandinavian descent his hair had faded rather than gone grey. From an ashy gold it had turned to ashy silver.

  ‘Oh, Lynnie,’ he said, opening his arms.

  Her face pressed against his suede coat, Abigail thought of that other time when her nose was tickled by Judah’s coarse woollen shirt. Her longing was unbearable. Her father, seeing the tears in her eyes said, ‘I feel rather like that myself. And you didn’t object to my calling you Lynnie, either.’

  Abigail blinked away the tears. What was the use of crying? She was about to enter upon a new life with new people. She wouldn’t even have Mitchell or Natalie any more. The world of Beatie Bow would be a whole earth-distance from her in space as well as time.

  And surely space would make things better. It was not like time, that could stretch and twist all in a second and turn into some other aspect of itself.

  ‘What a little dope I was, Daddy,’ she said. ‘But still, I do feel more like Abigail now.’

  Kathy Kirk, watching, crept silently away to the kitchen. She thought she’d let them get on with catching up.

  Weyland Kirk told her of his plans, how they would go sailing and ski-ing, how marvellous the Norwegian boys were.

  ‘You ought to see them in their blue velvet evening gear,’ he said. ‘Breath-taking.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’ She smiled.

  ‘But you’re too young for anything serious,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be fifteen soon,’ she said. He sighed.

  ‘Yes, not so young, I suppose. Old enough for me to explain about Jan? Because I think we ought to have everything clear before we form a family again. Your mother understands but perhaps …’

  He looked so anxious, so embarrassed, that Abigail smiled.

  ‘You don’t have to talk about it, Dad. I know how it was. You thought she was just a kid, and then you found out she was in love with you, and things got complicated.’

  ‘How did you guess –?’ He stopped and said painfully, ‘Oh, Lynnie – Abigail – I’m so sorry, for everything.’

  So it was decided that Abigail would go back to school for a term. It was, anyway, the long summer vacation in Europe during that time, and they would leave for Oslo in August. That would give Kathy time to tie up the ends at Magpies, find a tenant for the unit at Mitchell, and for them all to prepare themselves for a long Norwegian winter.

  It was a time when Abigail’s long practice at keeping her feelings to herself was useful. She was sure that neither her father nor her mother realised what was going on inside her. And all she knew herself was that the empty place inside her was so desolate that she fancied she could hear winds blowing within it, round and round, looking for some place to rest.

  She took Natalie and Vincent to the playground occasionally. The children there had given up Beatie Bow as a game; they were now crazy about something else. Natalie said wistfully, ‘It’s queer, Abigail, but I never see the little furry girl any more. I wonder where she is?’

  ‘She’s probably at home,’ said Abigail, ‘brushing her hair and hoping it will grow long enough for her to be bridesmaid at a wedding.’

  ‘Who’s getting married?’

  ‘Her brother and her cousin.’

  Natalie broke into delighted laughter. ‘Oh, you’re making up a story about her! And did her hair grow long enough?’

  ‘I don’t know, Natalie. I’m not really making up a story. And we have to go home, it’s getting so dark.’

  ‘All right,’ said the little girl docilely. ‘But if you think of some more of the story, Abigail, you’ll be sure to tell me, won’t you? Will she have a new dress for the wedding?’

  ‘I told you 1 don’t know,’ said Abigail, so curtly that she was ashamed of herself. For she longed to sit down somewhere with Natalie – some place Vincent would not find them, or any adult – and begin a story: ‘Once upon a time, over a hundred years ago, there was a little girl called Beatrice May Bow who had the fever. Her mother died, and her baby brother died, and they cut off all her hair, because that was what they did in those days …’

  She realised now that not only did she long for Judah, but she was homesick for all the Bows. She wanted to see Dovey kneeling beside her bed, her lame leg stuck out a little askew from that abominable red-flannel dressing-gown, saying her prayers with such simple faith. She wanted to help Granny make skirl i’ the pan, which was fried onions thickened with oatmeal and browned, and rather tasty in a disgusting way; or hotch-potch which was just mutton stew; or oatmeal scones to be baked on the heated round of metal called the girdle. She hadn’t even finished telling Gibbie the story of Treasure Island. She wondered whether anyone ever would, or would he go to his grave without learning the fate of Long John and the parrot.

  She had to know what had become of all those people. She had to find out before she left Australia, so that she could still think about them in Norway.

  She knew she was doing a stupid thing – like biting on an aching tooth and rubbing salt into wounds, and all the dusty old sayings; but she went to the Public Library newspaper room and asked for the files of the Sydney Morning Herald for December 1873, and January and February of 1874. She had to fill in a form stating why she wished to see the papers, and wrote ‘Historical Project’, which, she supposed, was correct. The enormous bound files were brought and placed on the sloping reading tables. She was amazed to discover that each newspaper had
ten or twelve pages of advertisements before the reader came to what she thought must be the major news pages, though there were no banner headlines.

  What was she looking for? She knew Judah and Dovey would never dream of putting a notice of their wedding in the newspaper; that was for the grand people of the High Rocks. Just the same, she read down the births, deaths and marriages column. No Talliskers, no Bows.

  On the cable page she saw an occasional reference to a name she knew, Mr Gladstone, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Disraeli, the Duke of Edinburgh marrying a Russian princess. She hadn’t known there was another Duke of Edinburgh.

  She looked up to see an old man across the table giving her a poisonous look and realised she was turning the stiff old pages with too much of a rustle. Cautiously she turned to the advertisements. Ah, now she was home – ironmongery departments selling girdles, kerosene lamps, cooking ranges, camp ovens; Mark Foy’s corsetry department; David Jones’s new shipment of finest velvets, ribbons, osprey and ostrich plumes, ex ship Oriel. She was excited, for now she felt that at least the 1870s had really existed, that high-steppers and fashionable ladies bought their hats at David Jones, and when Granny Tallisker’s corset wore out she might get a new one at Mark Foy’s. Though more likely she’d get a second-hand one from a barrow, she mused, gently turning the pages, the days, the weeks flitting past, throwing up a name here, a headline there, columns of shipping news, random paragraphs, accidental death from bolting horse in Pitt Street, ship The Brothers sinks with all hands.

  She felt that her heart had stopped. After a little while she realised that her unseeing eyes were fixed on the old man opposite, and he was snarling even more poisonously at her. She returned her gaze to the paragraph. Heavily laden with timber, The Brothers had turned turtle in a gale and sunk off the coast a hundred miles north of Sydney. Some of the valuable cargo had drifted ashore and been salvaged. The date was 4 February 1874.

  She did not recall walking home along the Quay. As she went into Mitchell’s lift, Justine and the two children tumbled out. Justine said cheerfully, ‘Bet you’re in a fluster, getting ready for Norway. Lucky you.’