by Peggy Frew
And so. The bones of his fire fluff into nothing. He lets his hand fall. He has it now. Not Molly. Girl on Molly, and him stuck in a burrow once or twice, or actually more times than that, because what he saw, waiting, still, squatting green and brown, was many things, different times, what he saw was
girl running down
little then
scissor legs
she belongs at the gumtree place
big garden
garden lady
old lady
always there
there when he was different
before
when he walked out bright
a boy
Garden lady on her steps, and him a boy on the fire track. Here, she says. Here, Greg. Lemons, for your mum. Noisy white bag, lemons inside shoot clean smells.
But he’s gone off again. He’s lost the shape. Just go back quickly over it. Molly, that was it, and the girl on top. The
girl
little
garden lady’s little girl
running
and him
brown hiding
girl running
down to the beach
Little girl with scissor legs, then she gets bigger, but always she has another one, her own girl, always smaller, running behind. When they are little they run close, hands holding, then they get bigger and they run apart, one dark, one light. They get bigger but
now
a time
of not
no girls
just garden lady
sad on the path
sad in her legs
sad in her soft shoes
And now big girl, back, but she’s lost her own girl. And now this is sad, and it’s a bit like how Mum
lost
him
Mum still looks
she looks in him
she comes too close
she tries his eyes
his ears
his mouth
she talks like her boy might hear
but her boy is gone
and
he
wishes
he could bring him back
but
he
can’t
he
doesn’t
know
how
He gets up. His eyes are wet. The morning is gone now. Pink, beautiful, winking morning, gone away.
Time to creep
hop, hop, rabbit
along his paths of green and brown, with utmost care.
Down on the beach Molly left poo, a message for him. Golden, round, he feels it fall from her high tail, plop to the sand. Remember me, says the poo. Beautiful Molly! And that girl on top, so sad, sad knees, sad fingers holding Molly’s reins. He sends his own message, sends it out with brainpower, along the track of Molly’s hooves: Hold on, girl.
He makes sure he is properly brown and green, and then he lopes along his path.
MOLLY
Junie hates going to bed in that room, across from the other, empty, bed. She stays up late, watching TV with Nan, squashed into a corner of the couch, feet tucked under, hands drawn into the sleeves of her jumper. Nan’s small bar heater glows red and gives off a singeing smell. In its light Nan’s feet are brown and shapeless, crossed at the ankles, toenails reflecting orange-pink.
Nan finishes her whisky, gets up and slices an apple, passes Junie a piece. On the telly the green fields and hedges and narrow roads of All Creatures. One of the vets, drunk, gets ready to deliver a calf; he bends over a bucket to wash his hands and the soap goes flying. Then there is Derrick, the German detective with his leather jacket and creepy tinted glasses.
‘It’s the doctor,’ says Nan. ‘You watch.’ And when it is, when Derrick and the police barge in and grab him and put on the handcuffs: ‘I write the scripts, you know.’
Sadness at these in-jokes, these repetitions. Junie feels it in her lungs, like she can’t get the breaths all the way down.
A strobe-flash of memory: sounds in the darkness and then the light blazing, everything flat and stark in their bedroom, the something’s-wrong feeling of the middle of the night. Dad’s big legs going past in pyjama pants, Dad’s hair all sticking up. Anna’s face against the pillow, the scrape of her breathing. Tears rolling out, one each side. There was a tiger lying on my chest. Dad with the puffer. Only a dream. Here, sit up, big breath, ready?
‘Junie,’ says Nan. ‘Go to bed.’ The telly is off, the heater cooling. Nan’s fingers tap her shoulder, rest there for a moment. ‘Go on. You’ve got an early start.’
She gets up, follows Nan through the kitchen.
In the second bedroom she passes Anna’s bed without looking at it, falls into her own.
She has trained herself to wake early. The window an only-just-there rectangle; plover calls raking the darkness. She pulls on jeans that smell of dirt and animal. She walks blind to the toilet and her urine smells animal too, rich, like cut grass.
In socks she passes Nan’s open doorway, pausing to check for the dry whisper of her breathing.
Shutting the back door quietly, bending for her boots, then away—past the clothesline, the geraniums, the letterbox and white-painted fence. She strides, silent, to the gate, and through.
The shining road, the sleeping houses. Moist, cool air on her face, sliding into her lungs. She pushes up the slope, feels the strength in her legs.
Cypresses at Mr Pierce’s. Spider webs, fresh and taut. The gate’s chain cold and heavy. The shed mouth is black; she’ll have to feel for the bridle and saddle, and not think about spiders. At the back of the paddock, in the velvet shelter of the trees, there are legs, wisps of white, the turn of a head like gauze floating.
‘Molly.’ Taking out the apple.
The horse comes out of the dark, a magic trick, a developing Polaroid. Hooves, ears, nostrils, black-edged, as if soaked in ink; galaxies of dapples across her chest.
From the top of the hill she can see the pink sky, the wedge of sea through the break in the scrub. Black, pink, soft grey—new colours, like something just born. She feels so high on top of Molly. It used to feel like falling, but now it’s more as if she could take off and fly down, skim the car park, the ti-tree, the sand messy with seaweed and rocks, the rising curves of waves. She nudges the horse down the slope, leans back into the one-two, one-two of their descent.
Junie Worth, seventeen years old, riding a horse in the dawn, down to the beach. What is everyone else doing, these September holidays?
In the last week of term Cassie Dean had stopped Junie outside the lockers to issue an unforeseen and inexplicable invitation, redolent of Extra chewing gum: Come to Lorne, Junie? Tammie’s coming, and Juliet, and Ricky and Spence; it’s gunna be awesome.
And there was Samantha Holmes, skinny, friendless, pink-rimmed nostrils and crooked teeth, coarse brown hair cut in a shelf of fringe, Junie’s unacknowledged companion in maths methods and biol. Samantha the shy smiler and lender of pens. Her blush, her nervous hands: If you don’t have anything on in the holidays, maybe we could …
Junie shook her head at Samantha. She shook her head at Cassie. She shook her head at Ms Howell, who called her back after chem. Now, Junie, I understand things at home have been a bit—difficult. If you ever need to talk …
She has splintered off. From them, and from what her life might have been.
They reach flat ground, the car park, and Molly’s gait loosens, her neck lengthening as they enter the beach path, the dark passage through the ti-tree.
The beach is a moonscape, the sea metallic. Molly snorts and props at a pile of seaweed. This is intentional, Junie knows—high spirits—but a week ago such a stunt would have had her off balance, jaw tight, heart pounding. Now, she lets her back give, sways with the horse’s little sideways jump. She clicks her tongue, sends a message with thighs and seat: Enough of that.
It had been Nan’s idea, Molly. Nan knew Mr Pierce, who read the water meters, and
also Mr Pierce’s daughter, who worked at the supermarket. He’s bought another horse, said Nan. His wife’s not happy about it. An Arab mare, lovely temperament, very quiet. He says would you like to ride her, keep her from getting too fat.
Really?
Go on, it’ll be good for you, get you out of the house.
But I haven’t ridden for years.
What about that horse camp? With school?
Yeah, but …
It’ll come back to you.
So, no supervision, nothing. She has never even met Mr Pierce.
That first morning, opening the gate, clumsily replacing the chain, she had a bubble in her chest that threatened to burst into fear, into failure. The camp, the camp—what could she remember? Her classmates’ R.M. Williams and spotless jodhpurs and the shame of her own jeans and op-shop boots. The cabins, small, unheated; metal bunks with vinyl mattresses; Amelia Wright squealing at a centipede. What about the actual horses? Riding? Lessons? All Junie could dredge up was one long, plodding trail ride, with Amelia Wright complaining of a broken fingernail, and the dim interior of a large shed in which a woman—tracksuit, dirty sneakers, red hands and a scowl—brusquely applied straps and fastenings to a long-suffering knock-kneed bay, and then, pointing to the animal’s shoulder, said, That there’s the intercostal nerve centre.
She had nothing, really, no knowledge. She was on her own.
But then Molly herself, her patience as Junie fumbled with saddlecloth and buckles, her placid acceptance of the bit. And then, when they were finally out on the road and she’d clambered up and got everything arranged, armpits and back prickling with sweat, the sudden, unexpected, arrival of instructions. Not from the horse camp, or from an earlier, dusty, sun-blasted visit to Macca’s Trail Rides here on the island, which now seemed like ancient history, and which in any case her memory abruptly withdrew from, like a finger put to hot metal, because of Anna. (Anna on that galloping pony, helmet tipped forward, red laughing mouth.) These instructions came from somewhere even further back; from a long-neglected part of her mind. Complete sentences, she saw them, floating, black on white, in the blockish, serif print of childhood library books. A straight line should run from the rider’s heel to ear, through hip and shoulder. Rein length depends on gait and activity. Imagine a piece of elastic stretching from the bit to the rider’s elbow. She clung to these, those first few rides, rigidly and joylessly, girded herself with rules and invisible lines, and returned to Nan’s sore and exhausted, and full of a kind of tense triumph.
The pleasure, the strength, in meeting Nan’s How’d you go? with an equally off-handed Fine.
It was time that showed her what else was to be had, that thawed her, woke her up to the beach, the dawn, the secret wildness of it. The piles of rocks, their tide-smoothed edges. The carved channel where Saltwater Creek met the sea, the cleanness of its low, vertical sand walls. Molly’s snorts and head-tosses, her mane flicking like seaweed, like the froth of waves, the plunging of her hooves.
She walks back in the glare, ravenous, unshowered, needing the toilet. The sky still white, the air not yet warm. The flat damp grass, the lemon tree, the vegetable garden rioting behind its fence. She is tired, and empty, and this is how she needs to be. But still, before she can get inside and into the bathroom—Anna! shouts the sky, the lemons, the ants rushing on branches. Anna! Anna! Anna!
Nan and Mrs White from next door in the shade of the mirror bush, one each side of the fence, low voices. Junie behind the compost heap, kneeling, hidden.
Nan: You try to think of explanations. She’s never been an easy kid. Always sick. Prone to asthma, things like that. Trouble sleeping. Bites her nails. But Rob was like that, my first son. You never saw a boy so worried about everything. It was the war, I think, not that he remembered, but he’d have heard us talking about it. If a plane flew over he always came inside. Didn’t say anything, just came in and stood beside me, waiting for it to pass.
Mrs White: Yes, but he turned out all right, didn’t he? Rob?
Nan (impatiently): Well, maybe he did, Rhoda, but do we really know? We just sent them off to boarding school, who knows what happened to them, if they were all right or not?
Mrs White: Yes, but look at him now, he’s—
Nan: He told me he hated it. He came home for his first holidays and didn’t say a word, and then when I drove him back for second term, he just said it quietly, as we pulled up to the gates. I hate it here, Mum. Just like that, sad little voice. He knew it wouldn’t change anything.
Mrs White: Poor boy. But he came good, didn’t he?
Nan: I think the difference is, with kids these days, kids like Anna, well they just don’t know where they stand. They’ve got these parents saying, All we want is for you to be happy. Happy! We never worried about happiness, we just got on with it. Rob wasn’t happy, was he, but yes, he got on with life. And John, well, he was happy enough, far as I knew, and now look what a mess he’s made of things.
Mrs White and Junie on the fire track. Junie head down, half-turned for the gate.
Mrs White: Mr White and I are thinking of your family, dear. And praying, although your grandmother doesn’t approve of that!
Junie (mumbling): Thanks.
Mrs White: She’ll come good, don’t you worry.
Junie: Thanks.
Mrs White: And Lois—your gran—tells me that Anna’s stayed back these holidays, at home, with Mum?
Junie: Yep.
Mrs White: Pardon, dear?
Junie: Yes, that’s right.
Mrs White: Well, that’s nice, isn’t it. For her to have that time. That attention. That’s probably the best thing for her.
Anna crying in the night. Anna’s asthma. Anna rocking her head side to side on the pillow after lights-out. What are you doing? Stop it! Anna’s bitten fingernails, her cuticles red and oozing. Anna’s blinking, her tapping, her throat-clearing, the pink spot of scalp where she’d pulled hair out. Stop! But I can’t help it! Anna on the whizzy-dizzy at the park, seven years old, head tipped back, laugh spiralling into an animal bleat, leaning out and further out, the flick of her unseeing gaze. Letting go, hitting the gravel and skidding, the hollow at the base of her throat, the spurt of yellow vomit. Anna on the pony, her wild grin, her laugh, her hidden eyes. Anna at twelve, smoking cigarettes at the tram stop. Anna at fifteen, smoking on the roof at Mum’s, coming back in through the skylight, school dress catching to show cuts on her thighs in tight rows, fresh ones scabbed and dark, older ones pink, like raised texta marks. Anna seen by Tammie Markos at Flinders Street Station with some guys, older, drinking from a hipflask. Anna at Dad’s, shouting: Shut up, shut up, shut up! A wineglass exploding against the skirting board.
Anna will be all right. This is what Dad said, in the car, driving back to the flat, which is where Junie lives now, with him, where she sleeps alone in another room with two beds, meant for two sisters.
Anna won’t go to Dad’s. Anna keeps making new rules for herself.
She’ll be all right. Looking away. The mad tick of the indicator.
And again, after parking in the sunless yard at the back of the flats, on top of the big number six, faded white inside its faded white rectangle. Pittosporum lunging from the fence line, indentations in their lower foliage from the bonnets of the cars. Putting his hand on Junie’s knee. She’ll be all right.
But how could he know?
LOIS
Awake, bed … Damn, the thing, the—the—strabe. Stran. Toke. She was out in the spar, walking the plants, and
She was in the garn, knees wet, she dropped the horn. The slobe
it dropped and wet her. She was spanning up she thought but no, sideways and something digging. Stickins. Cranchels
Awake, bed, hobe—home. Window-top, door. Someone there. A close voice: ‘Mum?’
A stoke
in the granden
she dropped the drove and it wet her knees
she was sideways in the bushes and cranches stuck in<
br />
Words are harb
worbs take worb
too mush worb
So tire. Rest, close her gars.
Words come. Quite easily, on their own, if she lets them. It’s the trying that breaks them, makes it worse.
Here she is again. Awake. Dark now, someone there though, beside her, too high to see. Only that small opening, a slibe. Slice. I’m here, hello?
Light again. She’s fairly sure she can’t speak.
She is awake though, can’t they see? Tiptoeing about, ridiculous. She’s here, here! In the bed, awake and hearing. Seeing too, though only a clinch. A—bit. Only a bit. Top of window, doorway.
Someone bends in. A woman, a stranger. ‘Just going to turn you over now, Mrs Worth, that’s it …’ The window goes, arcs away, now it’s the dresser, the photos in their frames.
‘Can she hear us, do you think?’
‘It’s possible, yes. Talk to her. Just try. It might feel odd at first but it’ll get easier.’
Someone near her feet, heavy hand through the blanket. Someone crying. It’s Rob. Or John. One of her boys. Big now, though; a man.
‘Mum, I don’t know if you can hear me. It’s Rob. Everyone’s here. And a nurse, she’s the one who’s been turning you over.’
A stroke. She knew—off to her left the air swung like curtains and her arm went and the hose fell and she was sideways in the correa and there were oval things, beautiful with veins hairs silver-green, but the word blew away, Leith, feiths, and she went after it, thump thump, grab and grab, into the dark
Job. Rob. Rob? John? I’m here. But no answer so yes, the words mustn’t be
Through her slice are the pictures in the frames, Johnny in the Austin, grinning out the window, and little Rob with the dogs, the kelpie and the other one, the white bitser, what was her name, and there had been another dog Rob used for rabbiting and there’s a rabbit stew now in that big pot with the wrong lid never fit properly and in the kitchen at Churchill she wrings out the dishrag and hangs it on the back of the door and one of the boys calls, Did you know, Mum, I’ve still got every marble I ever won, a hundred and five marbles, and outside the crabapple tree shakes its branches, the fruit bright and hard, mean little things, but then they foam pulpy in the pot, toffee smell and the teaspoon test the chilled saucer the wrinkling skin and oh tipping into jars the clear red liquid, pure, that’s the word, breathing the steam sweet and tart