Like her father, Jo takes a systematic approach to her studies. She reads books from cover to cover, in the order that the pages are given, never (like Linda, for example) sneaking a look at the ending or a random point halfway through. She even makes herself read the boring pages at the beginning. This book is by Norman Hoss and Illustrated by James Ponter. It is Edited under the Supervision of Dr Paul E. Blackwood, Washington D.C. and it has been Approved by – hey, can that really be a man’s name? Jo is pleased to have found the first thing that needs explaining. She gets up, book in hand, to ask Evan.
Evan is sitting on the floor on the other side of the room, wearing headphones, listening to whatever it is going around and around on the record player. Jo sits down cross-legged beside him. Evan’s eyes are shut and he is frowning slightly, nodding slightly, but these only serve to accentuate his essential stillness. Evan becomes aware of a presence and opens his eyes. He puts a finger up to make Jo wait. He carefully lifts the needle by means of a tiny lever, and pulls his headphones off his ears, letting them hug his neck. The glossy black record continues to spin, the needle hanging half an inch above it. Evan is happy to interrupt his music to talk with Jo about stars. He gets ready to explain something. All he needs is a question.
‘Dad, is this a man’s name?’
Jo keeps her finger on the book as Evan tries to turn it around to get a proper look.
‘Let go of it, Jo, I can see the bit you mean.’
Text and illustrations approved by Oakes A. White
Brooklyn Children’s Museum
Brooklyn, New York
‘Yes, Oakes is the man’s first name. His last name is White.’
‘An oak is a type of tree, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. But this is just someone’s name, it has nothing to do with a tree.’
‘What does the A stand for, Dad?’
Jo knows this is a stupid question, but it’s too late now.
‘How am I supposed to know that?’ says Evan sharply. But then he softens, keeping the conversation going.
‘It could be Anthony, or Andrew. It could be anything starting with the letter A.’
‘Oakes Anything White,’ quips Linda from the couch.
‘Americans have funny names,’ says Jo.
She is thinking of a couple of visiting NASA men who came to the house for a barbecue. They were Chad and Mitch and they asked for ketchup.
‘How do you like the book?’ asks Evan. ‘Is there anything you don’t understand?’
‘I’m only up to this page,’ says Jo, pointing at the upward-looking boy and girl.
Evan puts his headphones back on, lowers the needle and is instantly reabsorbed into the music. Jo wishes she had come over with a more interesting, longer-lasting question.
The white dots on the black background on the book of STARS remind Linda of an advertisement for anti-dandruff shampoo she had seen in Reader’s Digest. In the middle of the page there was a plain black square over which the reader was invited to lower his or her head while scratching his or her scalp. Linda did this and saw the white dots appear on the black square. She saw that she had dandruff. After she had completed this experiment, she brushed her dandruff off into the air, letting it land wherever it would.
Stella watches Mrs Kelly grating yellow cheese over a pot of simmering water.
‘Why are you grating cheese over the tea towels, Mrs Kelly?’
Stella is laughed at – from all corners of the room – for this misapprehension.
‘It’s soap, pet,’ says Mrs Kelly, holding out the bar. ‘Have a sniff.’
But now there’s another question.
‘Why do you always boil things?’ Stella is sitting at the Kelly dining table as if she were a member of the family, impertinently firing questions across the room. Mr Kelly is there, brooding over a cup of tea.
‘It’s because she’s an old boiler,’ he says slowly, looking Stella straight in the eye.
Another gale of laugher.
Mrs Kelly says, ‘Oh shoosh up, Kev! I’ll give you old boiler.’
‘Doesn’t your Mum boil tea towels?’ asks Susan.
‘No,’ said Stella. ‘She just puts them in the washing machine.’
‘Everything together?’ asks Susan. ‘Hankies, pants, everything?’
Now Stella can’t be sure. ‘Yes.’
‘She doesn’t even boil the snotty hankies?’
‘No.’
Susan widens her eyes and retails a bit of her mother’s philosophy: ‘You shouldn’t mix germs. You shouldn’t mix pants germs with hanky germs.’
‘Susan!’ says Mrs Kelly. ‘People can do their washing however they want.’
‘But you said! Never mix pants germs with hanky germs!’
‘What did I just tell you, Susan? Do you want a smack on the bottom?’
A pause.
‘Now we’re cooking with gas,’ says Mr Kelly. He has a collection of phrases he uses here and there. His voice is soggy; he is wearing the white singlet that speaks of sleep.
‘I’m taking my tea into the sewing room and don’t try to follow me,’ says Mrs Kelly to all present. ‘Don’t let it boil dry.’
With Mrs Kelly gone there is a sense of freedom, of the loosening of bonds, but also a loss of leadership, of not knowing quite what to do next. Mr Kelly adds another teaspoon of sugar to his tea, and stirs.
Susan and Stella go out into the backyard, behind the toilet.
‘Let’s swear,’ says Stella. ‘You go first.’
‘Bum,’ says Susan, her eyes darting.
‘Bum,’ says Stella.
They looked at each other quizzically. Not as thrilling as expected.
Then they hear Kevin Kelly’s voice: ‘How can I dance with a little girl on my foot?’
They come around from the back of the toilet to see Kevin Kelly with a little straggly-haired girl standing on his feet, her small bare feet curled over his large bare feet. They’re dancing, hand in hand.
I’m watching from my cage. I’m dancing, too.
Linda Johnson is boiling tea towels and snotty handkerchiefs late at night, after the children have gone to bed. She is smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee, reading ‘Life’s Like That’ in Reader’s Digest. Evan is, as usual these days, working very late. She rinses the steaming items under cold water in the sink and hangs them out on the clothesline in the soft air of night, under a star-rich sky. When Stella wakes up in the morning the handkerchiefs and tea towels will already be there, pegged out on the line, unremarked, unremarkable. Stella will be none the wiser.
Linda doesn’t go to bed just yet. She takes paper and pencil and makes sketches for her Moon Ball dress. It will be silver and shimmery, to suggest the moon itself. But it should not look too much like a theatrical costume; it must still be elegant. Perhaps there will be a split up the side to show off a long brown leg. Her hair will be piled on top of her head in a series of artful curls. Or perhaps not. Perhaps left long and loose or in a low ponytail – shades of the bohemian, of Greenwich Village. Or perhaps not.
Linda Johnson is not the only woman in Port Badminton thinking about outfit and hair, of course.
In the days before the Moon Ball, the town’s hairdressers will be run off their feet. Afterwards, the ladies will preserve their hairdos for as long as possible by going to bed with satin scarves wrapped around their heads, or by using satin pillows. They will then be seen going about their usual business in casual slacks and flat shoes with hair that is still magnificently ‘up’, though gradually subsiding. To wash and brush it out immediately after the ball would be considered a waste.
In just a few years’ time, Linda will throw all of this aside, declare herself a feminist, study sociology as a mature-aged student. But in 1969, shortly before the Moon Landing, she’s still working hard at Normal. A glo
ssy, perfect Normal.
The Johnsons suddenly disappear. Their car is still sitting beside the house but Jo and Stella aren’t there. Marj tells Susan they’ve gone to see relatives in Melbourne; they’ll be back soon. Soon is no good to Susan. She stands on Clam Street looking down the road, waiting for Stella and Jo to return.
Marj says: ‘They’ll be back, Poppet,’ and then, ‘What’s wrong with your sister? Play with your sister.’
Susan looks at her younger sister with her inferior hand–eye coordination and refuses. The snubbed sister cries. Susan continues to stand at the gate, alone, waiting.
While they are away, Marj takes her into the Johnsons’ house to water the houseplants. They acknowledge the revered car that Susan was born in and enter through the back door. Marjorie fills the watering can in the laundry, looking absently at Linda’s dried-out mop. Everything seems impossibly clean and new and ordered.
Marj stands before each potted plant, worrying about giving it too much or too little. The house is silent, slightly unnerving. Evan’s expensive stereo player sits on the floor on a thick cream rug. There are books on the bookshelves, including an entire Encylopaedia Britannica, yellow-spined National Geographics and a row of Reader’s Digests. A glazed ceramic ashtray seems ugly to Marjorie, but she trusts that it must be the in thing. She decides to buy one like it.
A vase sits low on a coffee table of polished teak in a position that could not be countenanced in the Kelly household. It would be swished off by child or animal in two minutes, break into pieces on the floor. The coffee table itself would quickly drown in miscellaneous items: a pile of clean underpants brought in from the clothesline, pages out of the Northern Times, a large clamshell being used as a bed for a small doll. Marjorie allows Susan to look at things but not touch. Susan’s eyes are drawn to the giant wooden fork and spoon on the wall above the head of the dining table. She finds them spooky. She would find it difficult to eat her dinner with this giant cutlery looming over her.
They make the most of these visits because they don’t often see the inside of the Johnsons’ place: social intercourse between the two families mainly takes place at the Kellys’, where there are no ceramic vases on low coffee tables to tip over and it is a good place to corral noisy children that might wake up Evan Johnson, who often works overnight shifts and needs to sleep during the day.
Susan is putting her doll to bed in the clamshell when Kevin calls her.
‘Susan! Your little playmates are back!’
Susan goes rushing out of the house and there they are, Stella and Jo, in all their returned glory.
While they were away in Melbourne, Stella and Jo had watched television. They saw Adventure Island and Skippy. The Kellys have never seen television, other than pictures in The Women’s Weekly.
‘And we saw ads,’ says Jo.
‘What’s an ad?’ asks Susan.
‘Don’t you know?’ says Jo smugly.
Jo has a mental image of an ad, but she is not sure how to explain it. So she describes it.
‘There was a lady having a bath in lemonade,’ she says. ‘People were standing around her with jugs, pouring in the lemonade.’
‘Did she sip it?’ asks Susan.
‘She didn’t drink any, she was just having a bath.’
The Kelly and Johnson children are a pack. They have gradually expanded their range beyond Clam Street and have begun to tour the outer reaches of the boggy samphire flat and make unsupervised forays to the seawall. When they get back Mrs Kelly lines up plastic cups and sloshes green or red cordial into them. She’ll hand them out, saying things like, ‘There y’are, pet,’ or, ‘Don’t gulp it!’ or, ‘What do you say?’
‘Thank you.’
Sometimes Kevin Kelly will look at them all: seven girls. How can there be so many girls? He had imagined boys – one boy at least – to go fishing with.
The girls come down with chicken pox, each with a rash of red spots on the belly. They lift their skirts to compare notes. Other ailments come and go, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes overlapping or at different times: diarrhoea, vomiting, sores, scabs, burns, a nose so runny and afflicted it is not just snotting but bleeding, forming scabs to be picked off. Boils. Midge bites that must be painted with calamine lotion. Doublegees in the feet, hot sand and bitumen burning the soles. Sand in the crotch of bathers. The peeling of sunburn. The discomfort when sleeping with a severe case of sunburn. Eyelids swelling up from being so thoroughly sunburned.
The Johnson and Kelly children don’t go to school together. They all set off together from Clam Street, but the Kellys turn off in the direction of the Catholic school; Jo walks on, stepping through the gates of the state primary school.
From time to time, Jo feels socially obliged to stand at the stone wall of the Convent – that’s what the state school children call the Catholic school – chanting ‘ConDOGS! ConDOGS!’ At first she stands back, puzzled. But over time, she discovers that it is like barracking for one’s sports team or using the correct colours in a scribble pattern: some things in life are governed by the spirit of the hive. Shouting her Condogs, Jo catches the eye of a Kelly girl and falters.
‘State, State, fulla HATE!’ shrieks the Kelly. The quick look she gives Jo says: Don’t worry, it’s just a game.
They play together after school as usual.
When they hear the trackers’ minibus, Susan’s face clouds over. She never wants Jo and Stella to go home. She hangs on to an elbow, or stands in the doorway to block their exit. She watches them scamper off to receive Evan as the door rolls back and he steps out.
Dish: Stand by. Incoming rueful thoughts Jo Johnson.
Galah: Roger.
Jo Johnson: When I try to conjure up his face, all I can see is a black-and-white photograph that was taken not long after we arrived in Port Badminton. He is sitting at his console full of knobs and dials. His face, behind his horn-rimmed glasses, is in three-quarter profile because he has swivelled around on his chair to discuss something with a colleague. He is wearing a long-sleeved white shirt with a dark tie. There is a biro hooked over his pocket. This is not a memory of my father; it’s a memory of a photograph of my father.
I’d run to watch him get out of the minibus. He’d be parting with his colleagues in a little effusion of banter and jokes, always ended by the roll and slam of the sliding door. Then I’d be at him, asking questions, telling him things. The interval between the end of the school day and my father’s return from work was long and lavish. It was like a second day with its own beginning, middle and end. I spent a lot of this time playing with the Kelly kids from next-door-but-one.
I knew Susan was watching wistfully as I ran to meet my father. Hers was away for weeks at a time on a prawn trawler, or, more likely, at the pub getting drunk. I’d leave the friendly noise and chaos of her house and enter mine, all neat and ordered, holding my father’s large warm hand. I had a room to myself. On the rare occasion she came into the house, Susan would stand in the middle of my room, marvelling at all the space I had just to myself. She’d hold out her arms and spin on the spot to relish it. She’d say, ‘Is that your own doll? Is that your own picture?’ And I’d say yes, yes, it was all mine, mine alone. I had a long-limbed clown doll sitting just so on a cream chenille bedspread. There was a lamb’s wool rug on the cool polished floorboards. I had a white mirrored dressing table with a little metal stool before it – not really for sitting on – upon which there was a fuzzy purple cushion.
I had a low bookcase with a row of Vegemite jars on it containing tiny specimens. There was a baby crab claw and shells collected from the beach at the Blowholes; the scaly sloughed-off skin of the leg of a skink, a dry piece of kangaroo vertebrae with red dust clinging to it. A piece of dark yellow mookaite rock that looked like broken toffee, edible. A nasturtium seed sprouting in wet cotton wool. A dead beetle with a brim all the way around it like the br
im of a hat. A doublegee had lodged in my heel. It, too, had been given a place in a jar and labelled. If you looked closely, you could see how the end of one of the spines was darkened with my blood.
I had a small microscope for looking at a hair, or the big juicy cells of an onion, or a drop of water from a puddle in which translucent beings jerked around in a little world of their own.
Susan would look solemnly at each thing in turn. Later, we asked Mrs Kelly for a spare jar, so Susan could put a specimen in it.
‘To put what in, pet?’
‘A pebble, or a prickle,’ said Susan.
‘I can’t spare a jar but you can have a tin to play with,’ said Mrs Kelly.
We weren’t playing. This was science.
I saw how Susan, disappointed, took the tin and put a pebble in it and found it wanting.
Sometimes I’d give Susan something out of my room – a tiny pink doll’s pram, for example – and she’d run home with it immediately, keen to show off her prize.
Susan’s things were shared among five girls. The floor of their room – they all slept in one small room – seemed to be permanently littered with small pieces of old broken toys. There would be a pink plastic doll’s arm, a head somewhere else; marbles to roll underfoot and trip you up so that you landed on your bottom and were laughed at; the wheel of a tricycle; stuffing out of a teddy bear. Sometimes the Kelly girls would tidy up by simply sweeping everything under the beds.
The oldest girl had a bed to herself; the other four slept at either end of two single beds. The room was a bit smelly – a lot of wet sheets passed through it – with sweeter notes, possibly biscuit crumbs or strawberry jam.
I can’t remember them having a cupboard in there. Where did they keep their clothes? I do remember an old wicker basket full of washing that lived on the kitchen table. It would be put on the floor before a meal, then hoisted back up again afterwards.
Dish: Over.
Galah: Roger.
Evan and Jo are sitting at the table, drawing circles. Some are worked using a compass, others, wobbly, are hand-drawn. They draw three circles, barely touching but not intersecting. In the curved space left between the three circles Evan directs Jo to draw a small circle which touches all three big circles – again, just grazing them – and then a circle all the way around the outside. These are the inner and outer soddy circles.
The Lucky Galah Page 14