by Peggy Frew
‘Hanlon. McKenna. Metcalfe.’
‘Right. Fuckheads.’
‘Yep. I hate them.’
She moved back and forth, feet still on the ground. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’ He was surprised—he hadn’t known he was going to say it. He hadn’t even known it was true. ‘Yeah. They don’t—they’ve got everything. Their parents are loaded, they never have to worry about … stuff.’
‘Like you do?’
Something had shifted between them, something had been taken down.
‘Yeah,’ he said again, and the feeling was huge, like letting drop a heavy backpack he hadn’t realised he’d been carrying. He thought for a horrible moment that he might cry, but it passed.
She swung, slowly, gently. ‘Well, here we are,’ she said. ‘A lonely jock who hates his friends and a lonely weirdo who has none.’
He laughed. ‘Here we are.’
‘So,’ she said, ‘do you ever feel like you’re not?’ Her voice was languid, dreamy.
‘Not what?’
‘Not lonely.’
‘Sometimes. When I’m running. Feels like I’m just, you know, a body. Feels good.’ He glanced at her—her face was hidden. Her arms on the swing’s chains were very thin and white. ‘Do you?’
She skated her feet through the tanbark. ‘At my nan’s, at the beach, there are these huge rocks you can climb up, and there are all these sort of tunnels through the bushes where it’s like it’s your own world. That was kind of our special place. Me and Junie.’
‘Don’t you go there any more?’
‘Junie does.’
‘But not you?’
‘Not any more.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well. Things are kind of divided, in our family. I’m with Mum, and Junie’s with Dad. And Nan’s on their side—well, she hates my mum, anyway. She doesn’t say it, but you can tell. And Junie …’ She swung higher; the chains creaked. ‘It was our special place, from when we were close, and now we’re not close, so I guess I’m kind of scared. That if I go there again with Junie and it’s not special any more, then that would mean it’s all lost.’
Ryan thought about those two lit windows in the house up on the hill, those imagined bedrooms. A sister, a sibling, a special place. This whole world that was Anna’s, that she carried around inside herself, behind that skirt and hair and the scowling and spikiness. Something brilliant and warm and private—that he could never access—but something that she was now also outside of, a reflection, a memory, something she could hold and know, but not actually be in any more. He felt dizzy, with tiredness, with ideas.
‘I think it’s lost anyway,’ came Anna’s voice over the sound of the swing. ‘Junie’s changed. She hates Mum too.’
He’d only seen the mum a couple of times—a tall woman with dark hair, not like the other school mums, not trendy like them, or sporty. What was she? Stylish? Striking—that was the word. Junie had the same look to her, and maybe Anna would too, if she wasn’t so floaty and pale. Something timeless in their features, old-fashioned. He thought of a picture he’d seen once of Ned Kelly’s mother—a proud face, strong eyebrows and cheekbones.
He eased his legs out and folded his arms; it was getting chilly on the slide. ‘Why do they all hate your mum so much?’
Anna was swinging high now, her hair streaking through the dark. ‘Well, she did some stuff,’ she said. ‘She had an affair with this guy. Dad can’t get over it.’
‘An affair?’
‘Yeah.’ Her voice had changed again—now it was breezy and quick. She was swinging so high that the chains went slack each time she got to the top. ‘An affair. And so what?’
The spell was breaking. Something—caution, a sense of risk—had returned to the air between them.
Back Anna flew, and then up again, and at the peak of the swing she left the seat and went curving out through the grainy air, arms spread, legs reaching, her neck long, and her landing was so light it seemed to happen in slow motion. She turned to him and put one hand on her hip.
‘So what?’ she said again. ‘She fucked some guy. Get over it.’ She had her chin stuck out, but she didn’t look tough at all. And was her chin wobbling, were her eyes wet and blinking? Ryan looked away.
A breeze ruffled the leaves all around. Ryan got up. ‘I’m going home.’
She didn’t say anything, but when he started off towards the path she went with him.
They didn’t speak again. Together they walked through to Avoca Street and up the hill, and when they reached Anna’s house she turned into the driveway without looking back.
It was a long time later that Ryan heard about what had happened to Anna Worth. He was working as a lawyer, back in Melbourne after living in London for five years and Boston for three. He’d been at a dinner with old friends from university, in the city, and they’d gone on to have a drink at the Supper Club. He was leaving, and as he went towards the stairs that led down to the street someone got up out of an armchair and accosted him.
‘Mute?’ the person said. It was a man, lean, short-haired, with intense blue eyes.
‘Sorry?’ said Ryan.
The man grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘It is you! Mute, you old bastard, don’tcha remember me? Will Metcalfe!’
Of course he remembered. Those mad eyes. The hair, though, was different—it no longer hung in strings over his forehead, but was buzzed short, and patchy at the temples.
‘Mute-o, I can’t believe it!’ Will exclaimed. ‘What happened to you, mate? We missed you at the reunion. We tried to find you but it was like you’d disappeared. Gone without a trace. Like the fucken mystery man you always were.’
It wasn’t really a conversation. They remained standing in the space between the back of the chair Will had been sitting in and the railing of the stairs, wait staff squeezing by, back and forth. More than once Will tried to make Ryan sit down with him and the other men he was with, and Ryan refused, each time saying that he needed to leave, although not actually doing so.
As he spoke, Will smoothed the front of his shirt, and into Ryan’s mind sprang the image of him doing the same thing on the oval at school, Siamese eyes under that lank, pale brown hair.
Will said: ‘Finance’, and, ‘consultancy’, and, ‘moved to Sydney’, and, ‘Macca, remember him?’ and, ‘coupla kids, lovely wife’.
Ryan said: ‘Law’, and, ‘London’, and, ‘Boston’, and, ‘back now, new job’.
Then Will said: ‘Few tough times’, and then, ‘engaged’, and, ‘lost her three and a half years ago’, and, ‘breast cancer’, and, ‘my depression’.
Ryan gazed at those eyes under their now slightly slackened lids—so incredibly familiar—the hand on the shirt, the way Will licked his lips before speaking. Pity ran in him like nausea.
‘Shit,’ he said, but then bit his lip. I will not feel sorry for you, he thought. There was a fuzziness in him though, a bafflement.
He had imagined the school reunion, when the invitation came—imagined it in two ways. In the first he stomped all over them, those fuckheads; wordlessly and brutally he took them by the collars of their pinstriped shirts and beat the shit out of them. This vision had come from nowhere, and shaken him with its explosive violence—he’d had to tuck it away as fast as possible. In the second imagining, which emerged later and with slow but forceful dread, he stood voiceless and meek amidst the preening and the designer suits, unable to respond to even the most superficial banter—a shame-filled sidekick, an underling, a toy. He put this vision away also, and tore up the invitation.
What he had failed to imagine was this—an offering on the part of one of the fuckheads, an opening. He did not know what to do with it.
Will drew himself up. He said: ‘Better now’, and, ‘never forget her of course’, and, ‘wife’, and, ‘baby on the way’, and, ‘how lucky I am’.
Ryan was out of words. He seemed to be stuck in just looking, mesmerised by those eyes, that hair, that
tongue as it performed its lip-moistenings.
Will did not appear to notice, and kept talking. It wasn’t clear how he got to the subject of Anna Worth; perhaps it was to do with his being lucky, with ways in which things could have been worse. But suddenly her name was being spoken, and some dense screen within Ryan’s memory collapsed and she appeared, completely intact, jumping up onto the tram, shuffling past the lockers in her ruined shoes, smiling her secret smile.
‘Disappeared?’ said Ryan.
‘Yep. Vanished.’
‘When?’
‘Ninety-four. So our year twelve.’
‘But how come I didn’t—’
‘No one knew about it, then. It must’ve been right at the end of the year, and it didn’t get out, at school. You remember what Junie was like. She wouldn’t’ve said anything to anyone. I only found out about it at the reunion.’
‘From Junie?’
‘No, she wasn’t there. Just from some girls. Ladies, I guess they are now.’
‘So Anna, she—what—ran away?’
Will shrugged.
‘But she wasn’t kidnapped or anything?’
‘Nup. She just went off one day and didn’t come home. Never been found. But she was, you know, troubled. She was into drugs. Well, that’s what everyone said. Maybe she got mixed up with some bad people. Got in over her head, and …’ Will’s gaze had softened, slid down and to one side. Quietly he said, ‘Never found. Terrible thing.’
Behind them one of his companions delivered a punchline and there was a round of hoots and roars.
‘And you know,’ said Will, looking up again, ‘I feel bad. She got a hard time at school. Remember, we used to call her Worthless?’
‘Not me,’ said Ryan.
‘Huh?’ Will blinked. ‘Yeah, ’course you did, mate. We all did.’
‘No. I never called her that.’
Will put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. ‘Come on, Mute-o. Don’t try and tell me your shit doesn’t stink.’
Ryan reached up and took Will’s hand. It was warm and slightly damp. ‘Don’t try and tell me what I did and didn’t do,’ he said.
Will’s eyes gave a startled flash. He tried to pull away but Ryan held on. They stood like awkward dance partners.
‘You right?’ said Will. ‘Mute? You wanna let go of my hand?’
‘My name’s Ryan,’ said Ryan. He let go.
Will laughed. He wiped his hand on his pants. Then he said, ‘No it’s not. Not to me—to me you’ll always be Mute.’ He swung out his arm as if to touch Ryan’s shoulder again, but didn’t quite make contact. ‘Mute-o. Beaut Mute.’
There was an urge to do violence so vast and seething that the edges of Ryan’s vision trembled. He breathed, slow and deep, focused on slowing his heart.
‘Come and sit down, Mute,’ said Will, in a new, gentle voice. ‘Come and have a drink with me, for old times’ sake.’
Ryan saw it then: Will was fond of him—or at least of the memory of him. Ryan stared into those blue eyes and saw in them a fondness that was easy, entitled and ignorant of its privilege, but also genuine and helpless.
‘Mute-o?’
‘Sorry,’ said Ryan. ‘I can’t.’ He tore his gaze away, looked down at the floor.
How close their bodies had come, so many times, out on the school oval—shoving and swinging and grabbing at each other, falling together onto the bruised grass, a sweaty, pimply mess of limbs. A brute closeness, but a closeness still. And perhaps it seemed sweet to Will now, untrammelled, but for Ryan it would always be heavy with compromise, with shame and envy and resentment—it was polluted, it was difficult, and the sweetness that lay somewhere in it was perhaps the most unbearable part.
Ryan lowered his head and pushed past Will. He went down the stairs and out into the February city night, into the noise, the streets filled with boozy crooked walkers, with taxis and arguments and barefoot women carrying their shoes.
Home in bed, Kim asleep beside him, his thoughts eventually loosened and circled back to Anna. He remembered her on the ladder at Avoca Park, flying from the bar of the roundabout, floating out from the swing. Her trembling chin, her brave, wet eyes. What difficulty, what compromise, had lain like dirt within the folds of her love, her lonely loyalty?
They went to have lunch with Ryan’s mother. It was still strange, the new house, the old furniture shrunken and—if it was possible—shabbier. And Al, with his big, careful hands, his clean jeans. Taking the roast from the oven, apron tied.
‘We’re eating in here,’ said Al. ‘If that’s all right. Margie’s got a jigsaw going on the dining table she can’t seem to finish.’
‘That’s fine,’ said Ryan and Kim together.
There was a newness between the four of them. Something tender, almost painful. Each of them nursing the cautious joy of a person who had expected to be lonely, but now was not.
Ryan put the plates out on the scratched green laminex, thinking of his mother in the kitchen at the flat, up late with her ledger, her pencil. Her joke: Come into my office.
He left Kim with Al and found her in the dining room, taking napkins from the sideboard.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, love?’
‘Remember that photo from year twelve? The whole-school one?’
‘Of course. You want to have a look at it? Show Kim?’
‘Don’t know about that. But have you still got it?’
She took him into the sunroom. Beige carpet, a built-in desk along one wall with her sewing machine on it, and a basket of clean laundry, a couple of her uniforms on top.
The photo hung next to the door, along with some of his individual school ones. He could barely stand to look at them.
‘I was so proud of you,’ said his mother. ‘You were such a good kid.’
‘You always say that.’
‘But it’s true. And I’m still proud of you. You were a good kid and now you’re a good man.’ She gave a nod. ‘And now I’m going back to help Al, before I cry.’
He grabbed her hand for a moment, and she shot him a look, bashful, almost girlish, and he got a glimpse of the other person in her, the one that wasn’t a mother, and which he could never know.
She went out and he moved closer to the whole-school photograph. He scanned the faces. There was Will, crazy stare not quite aligned, wetted lips grinning. There was Melanie, mouth bunched in a funny, transitory pout, eyes half-closed. There was Ryan, bad haircut, bruised-looking gaze. And there was Anna, head slightly back, unsmiling. One hand up—one fist punctuating the blue of her blazer, gripping the lapel.
Anna, Will, Sam, James, Ryan, Junie. Cassie, Juliet, Shareen, Kristy. All there, in the multitude of faces, each floating, separate in the blue. Some of them lonely, but none of them lost yet, or found.
PAINTINGS, 2008
ANNAS
by June Worth
All paintings oil on canvas.
Anna in the Garden at Avoca Street
A man stands in a suburban back garden, on a circle of lawn. Beside him are a wheelbarrow, a shovel and rake. Tears run from his eyes. He holds out his hands, in gardening gloves. The garden beds are crammed with flowers. A woman, naked, lies in one of them, among the flowers. She is smiling, her back to the man, reaching to something outside the frame. From the other side a tree leans in. On one of its branches stands a girl with blonde hair. She is high above the man and woman. She wears a blue school uniform, very short. There are red lines on her thighs. Her arms are over her head. She is poised, as if about to take off into the sky.
Anna at Dad’s Flat
Inside a kitchen. A girl with dark hair lies on her back on a round table, staring at the ceiling. Balanced on her stomach is a plate with a roast chicken on it. The man from the first painting sits at the table, eating a chicken drumstick. Against one wall, low down, is a red stain, with broken glass under it. The blonde girl is under the table, lying on her front in a one-piece swimming costume. She is reading a book and eating a round
fruit: a plum, or a peach.
Anna at Mum’s Boyfriend’s House
A bedroom. The bed is covered in flowers, and on it the naked woman lies on top of a naked man, a second man, not the one from the other paintings. Their faces are pressed together, their arms around each other. Outside, through the window, is a yard, concrete, corrugated-iron fence, completely bare. The dark-haired girl stands outside looking in the window. Behind her is the man from the other paintings, his hands on her shoulders, his eyes closed. Behind both of them the blonde girl, in the swimming costume, rises into the air, arms out, toes pointed, as if floating away.
Three Annas in the Garden with Mum
A garden bed, overflowing with flowers. In the flowers lie the woman and the blonde girl. The woman is on her back, her arms around the girl, who rests her head on the woman’s chest. Both the woman and the girl wear peaceful expressions, their eyes closed. A long white cloth is wound around the girl, binding her arms and legs. One end of it trails onto the grass, and has the word permission printed on it. The other end passes under the woman and up to the fence top, where a second girl with blonde hair sits, unwinding the cloth from her limbs. She wears a school uniform and her legs have red marks. Overhead, in a tree, a body lies along a branch, completely wrapped in white.
Anna at Esther’s Birth
A hospital room. A woman, recognisably the dark-haired girl from the other paintings, sits in the bed, holding a newborn baby. The baby is wrapped in a long white cloth, the end of which trails off the bed. The woman gazes down at her child, smiling but also crying. The trailing cloth runs along the floor and up to the open window, then out. The part of the cloth that goes up the wall and over the windowsill is torn in places, and stained yellow and brown, and also with what looks like blood. Outside the window is a city in darkness, a streetlight showing falling rain.
Anna in Her Other Life
A young woman with blonde hair stands on a city street, hands on hips. She wears jeans and a t-shirt, and sandals. On her t-shirt is the word maybe. Nearby is a rubbish bin, and beside that a suitcase, opened, on the ground. The suitcase is empty. Out of the top of the bin pokes a blue school dress and some wilted flowers with broken stems.