Untidy Towns

by Kate O'Donnell

  My failures loomed in my mind angrily like Dickensian ghosts.

  And each time I closed my eyes I watched Jarrod walk away, over and over again.

  To add insult to nightmare, I did eventually sleep, but woke up at 6.57 am. I lay there, forcing my body to be still, keeping my eyes closed. I caved quickly. I held my phone above my head and clicked and clicked the refresh button on the site. I suddenly and angrily wished that I had registered for them to send me a text with my results. But the page accepted my student number and details and there it was.

  My score.

  Not good enough.

  I hadn’t even wanted a good score; I had scorned the whole idea. But I felt my blood run cold. It was so cliché.

  I heard the blood rushing in my ears, like the ocean, but grosser. White noise.

  My stomach dropped and I felt both liquid and solid.

  I stayed in bed. Lay there, sometimes blinking, but mostly just looking at the ceiling. I thought about university and how I wouldn’t be getting into Melbourne and that all those girls from school, even if they didn’t say anything to me, they’d be judging me behind my back and when their parents asked, ‘How did that nice country girl do in the end, after her little “problem”?’ all of their sniffy expectations would have been met.

  Water leaked from my eyes to spite me and trickled down the side of my face, dampening the pillow.

  I didn’t want to be crying. Crying over grades was something people who cared a lot about school did. Not people like me, who had higher, better plans. So what if here and there I had forsaken the plan and entertained thoughts of a quiet homespun Emyvale life? I still had plans that involved adventure and poetry and bad busking on the street in strange cities.

  I cried and cried.

  Mum came in, which was embarrassing. ‘What’s wrong? Adelaide, what’s happened?’

  I held my phone out.

  She read the screen, handed my phone back to me, then started starting smoothing out my sheets.

  ‘I worked really hard,’ I said in a snotty voice.

  ‘Did you?’ she asked, with a raise of an eyebrow.

  Even I knew it was a bit of a lie. ‘You’re probably so disappointed in me!’

  She grabbed at my feet and, in spite of myself, I laughed. Then she tucked the ends in, where they’d all become rucked up in my hysterics, and she whipped the doona from me and it flew from my hands and into the air, then Mum flicked it once and brought it down again softly and evenly across the bed.

  With the sheet over my head, I said, ‘And Jarrod and I had a big fight.’

  ‘I’m sure Jarrod will come around.’ She then sat on the bed beside me. ‘I’m not disappointed in you, Addiekins. Not even a little bit. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You’ve lost perspective. So you might not get into Melbourne University (here she waved her hands in the air, rolled her eyes and emphasised the words with a posh, dramatic voice), but you can go somewhere else. This score is not terrible. You’re being too hard on yourself and being a bit of a snob, my darling. You could start somewhere and transfer. You can wait a few years and work instead or you could set the plan in action and go overseas and travel and work. Just don’t miss it all. Don’t wallow. It’s no fun for anyone. Especially you.’

  I let her keep her hand on my shoulder. It made me feel better. I didn’t feel like crying anymore, but my mind felt fuzzy. Like everything I had known to be true, or known to be part of the plan, or one of my daydreams, had been tumble-dried.

  Emyvale was one hundred per cent summer now. Hot, hot heat, and dry. Bushfire nightmare. But it was business as usual down at the historical society, even on my last day.

  I put my hair up in a ponytail and got down to it.

  I went to collect the cash box from out the back. It lived in the gross dirty cupboard and when I reached down to get it, my fingertips came back heaps dusty. There were scrape marks in the dust where I pulled the cash box every day and there were four tiny half circles at the very edge of the shelf, fingerprints where I had grabbed it for balance the day Mrs Dobbs had dropped a teacup and frightened me.

  Enough was enough. I got a cloth from the sink, rinsed it in hot water and wiped that damn cupboard down. The dust came away, but it was so ingrained it was almost sticky.

  ‘We’ll have to get the sugar soap out,’ said Mrs Dobbs from the doorway.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, though I had no idea what sugar soap was. ‘I’ll do that this arvo.’ I rinsed the cloth out and picked the cash box up again.

  ‘I hear you did quite well on those exams in the end, Miss Addie.’

  My heart sank, or at least I felt a sinking feeling inside me. ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘Now, come on.’

  ‘I’m not going to get into any of the courses I applied for.’

  She nodded somewhat absently and started to make a cup of tea. Soon she asked, ‘What about other courses?’

  Mum had asked a similar thing and I’d scoffed at her, had possibly whined a bit. Now I was just quiet. Wrong-footed.

  ‘There’s more than one way to get from A to B,’ she said matter-of-factly.

  If A was here, maybe B was NYC. ‘I think I’m going to take a year off,’ I said. ‘It’s always been my plan to have a year off.’

  ‘A year off from what?’

  ‘From … from studying.’ Like you even studied that hard, said a voice in my head. Mrs Dobbs’s voice? No, my voice.

  ‘And what will you do?’

  ‘Have fun,’ I replied. Then realised how indulgent that sounded. How ridiculously fortunate was I? I quickly added, ‘And figure out what it is I want to do.’

  ‘That’s not a bad idea.’

  ‘I want to travel.’

  ‘That’s nice. You’re very fortunate to have all the options you have. All those choices – study, travel, work. Do you want a cup of tea?’

  I shook my head; it was way too hot for a cup of tea. ‘How did you decide what to do after finishing school?’ I asked Mrs Dobbs.

  ‘Well, I didn’t.’

  ‘Someone else decided for you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t finish school. My father had been killed in the war and we needed money. I found work in a nice hotel down on the coast, and I became a cleaner and a maid for two years. Then I met Mr Dobbs and we were married not long after.’

  The bell on the front door jangled with a dinky trill.

  Mrs Dobbs poured her tea and sat down at the little Formica table with a P D James novel. ‘We ended up moving back to Emyvale to care for my mother, have children, put our little house in order – all of that. Oh, we had a nice little life. But I would have liked to go to university. I think I’d have done well.’

  I poked my head out of the kitchen. Jen and Emma were loitering around the front desk. I watched as they physically reacted to the heat. Jen propped the front door open.

  ‘You go,’ said Mrs Dobbs. ‘I’ve got plenty of time to tell you my dull old tales.’ I watched her hand tremble as she brought her cup to her mouth, watched as her pursed lips pressed against the china and as her ever so slightly shaky hand brought the cup back down ever so slightly shakily.

  ‘Hey,’ I said to the girls.

  ‘Hey,’ they both replied at once.

  Emma glanced around the main room. ‘It looks different in here,’ she said.

  ‘Adelaide went gangbusters,’ interjected Bill from across the room, where he was plugging away at the data entry, tapping one key at a time, and surprisingly speedily too.

  ‘I’ve been cleaning,’ I said. ‘What are you guys up to?’

  Emma scanned through the brochures for local attractions, straightening and putting them back in order. Jen leaned against the desk, in the general direction of the standing fan. Her hair blew in the breeze like in a shampoo commercial.

  �
�Thought we’d just check in, drop by, see what you’re doing.’ Jen shrugged, clearly trying to be casual. Her slightly awkward pose gave her away.

  ‘I’m doing okay,’ I said. ‘Sorry for being incommunicado the last few days.’

  ‘That’s okay. As long as you’re feeling better.’

  ‘I think I am,’ I said. ‘There are courses I can get into, for sure. I think I’ll still take a year off, though. But stop, shut me up. How did you go?’

  Jen’s face broke into a massive smile. She lit up, was incandescent, all those things. ‘Really good. Great.’

  Emma leaned towards me. ‘She got a perfect bloody score! The local paper’s already been to take her photo!’

  All I could feel was elation. ‘Congratulations! I knew you would be amazing. I’m so happy for you.’

  Jen blushed, across her face and right down her neck into the V of her t-shirt. ‘Thank you. I’m pretty chuffed.’

  ‘You worked so hard.’

  ‘Yes. Yes I did.’ She put her hands on her hips and grinned proudly.

  ‘So what now?’ I asked. ‘Medicine?’

  Jen nodded, eyes bright. ‘In Melbourne,’ she said. ‘Well, it’s not certain …’

  ‘Mia’s going to uni in Melbourne,’ I said.

  Jen smiled. ‘I know.’

  ‘Hi, Ma.’ I dropped down onto the couch beside her.

  ‘You seem better.’

  ‘Only a bit better.’

  ‘Well, you’re dressed and upright.’

  ‘True. I even showered.’

  ‘Congratulations. Quite an achievement. So did I, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She was grinning in a slightly mocking way, my mother, but she was also rubbing slow circles on my back.

  I felt torn between wanting to shrug her off and cry patronising!, but let her do it because to be absolutely honest it made both of us feel better, and I was willing to let her enjoy it. It really did feel like I’d made some kind of breakthrough.

  ‘I guess I do feel better,’ I confessed.

  Now the results were out and I’d sat with them for a few days, things really didn’t seem so bad. It wasn’t the first mistake I’ve ever made, and I doubt it will be the last. Accidents happen, things go awry anyway, no matter how I thought it would play out in my head.

  Not to mention that even the past isn’t clear – let alone trying to predict what will happen in future.

  Gran and Grandad didn’t look ahead and see their only son dying before he was forty – if they had maybe they wouldn’t have let Dad do anything at all and I wouldn’t be here. Or maybe they’d have discouraged him from coming back to Emyvale and I would still have my dad. But no. It doesn’t help to think like that.

  Mum could have met some painful grungy dude, or she might have even gone home to Brisbane and been some perky beach Queenslander girl. But then, on the other hand, Mum had dreamed of a life for herself with my dad in Emyvale and maybe if she hadn’t bothered to imagine and dream then she wouldn’t have bothered to give it a shot at all.

  I hope she’s happy.

  We went out to the backyard and she made us fresh, sweet mint tea. I watched her crush the mint into the tall Moroccan-style glasses she had ordered online, pressing on the leaves with a silver spoon. ‘You should have actually gone to Morocco, Mum.’

  ‘It’s a long way to go to buy some pretty cups.’ She poured hot green tea into the glasses from the antique teapot I gave her for her birthday. Mum used the long end of the spoon and swirled the mint and sugar around, the liquid whirlpooling towards the lip of the glass. ‘Maybe I still will,’ she said. ‘I’m not dead, you know. Is it on your travel hit list?’

  Berlin, New York, Iceland. ‘I don’t know. Maybe?’

  ‘It should be. Maybe me and Clover will come join you. My beautiful headstrong girl, you know you can do whatever you want.’

  ‘I clearly can’t,’ I said, through gritted teeth. ‘I bombed the exams, remember?’

  ‘Honey, not that long ago you weren’t even going to take them. Where’s that bold girl from before? University of life! If you want to study, you’ll get there. Here’s the opportunity you’ve been dreaming after: freedom to go and do as you please.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You know, your dad and I used to make up little stories about who you would be when you grew up.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like when you read The Secret Garden twelve times, we imagined you living in a whitewashed cottage on the moors for a year – Oh! And when you were born you had so much hair in this perfect little hairdo and Matt said you looked just like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and we imagined you running around Rome as a teenager, having the most wonderful adventures.’

  I did have the most ridiculous amount of black hair when I was born, which all fell out suddenly when I was about four weeks old and I was bald, bald, bald for months.

  ‘Or—’ she started laughing ‘—when your favourite thing to do was dress up in that wild black silk thing of Verity’s and wear the mop head as a wig, your dad would call you Old Mrs Mopadoo who lived in Timbuktu with her twenty-two little mop-headed children.’ Mum was crying she was laughing so much. ‘And we said we would come and visit you on holidays and help you wash all the babies in buckets and brush their hair with the garden rake!’

  Something was blooming in me, I could actually feel it in my chest or my stomach, somewhere honestly internal, a coil of smoke, an uncurling of petals. I smiled.

  She wiped her eyes, and sighed a long, laughing sigh. ‘He was a born adventurer who never got to travel, your dad. He would have loved talking about and planning a gap year with you.’

  ‘He would have?’ Why was I being such a stick in the mud? I was done with the school thing, I had some money in the bank and the support of my family. There should be nothing holding me back. I looked around, but my vision turned inward. ‘I do really want to see the world. I want to figure out what it is I love, what it is that I want to do – at uni or for a job or just in life.’

  ‘I think that sounds wonderful, Addie. Perfect.’

  The moment felt momentous and I had the urge to run and run to somewhere with more space, just to deal with this thing that had just exploded in me. But I pulled myself back.

  The mint tea was delicious. Hot but refreshing, sweet but not sickly.

  ‘Are you happy, Mum?’

  ‘I’m happy, my love.’

  ‘But you’ve been stuck here for almost twenty years.’

  ‘I haven’t been stuck, Addie, never stuck. I was as a teenager; my parents were stuck and they made me stagnate. Since then I’ve only ever done exactly as I wanted.’

  ‘And you’ve rolled with the punches.’

  ‘Leave the clichés behind! You can’t control what’s going to happen, you just have to let it happen.’

  ‘But how do you know what to do, how to act?’

  ‘Ah, that’s the fun bit. You just react. And you be kind to people and be kind to yourself.’ She picked up her gardening gloves, the dirt ingrained in the cracks of the leather, but she didn’t get up. She seemed in-betweeny. ‘Addie? Adelaide? There is something I wanted to talk to you about. How would you feel if Clover and I went to America for a few months? Maybe a year.’

  ‘Wow.’ I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I felt nervy. ‘When?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Soon? Before she starts school. Nick’s mother hasn’t been well, which you know, and Nick would like us to spend some time with her. I thought with you starting your new life and heading off on adventures it could be good timing. You could even come visit while we’re there. But the thing is I’d have to rent this house out to make it work. And I don’t want to rush you at all or make you feel like you have to leave. You don’t. Really, Addiekins. I just wante
d to start this chat, and when you know what you’re going to do we can talk again.’

  World exploding. But … ‘I think it’s a great idea, Mum. You should definitely go.’

  She leaned over and kissed my head. My hair was so warm from the sun I could practically hear it crinkle as her lips touched softly. Then she put her gloves on and headed towards the veggie garden.

  Clover and I sat in the paddling pool for hours. I’d dragged it underneath the big tree by the back verandah so we had lots of shade but Mum still kept coming over to yell at us about putting sunscreen on.

  Because Clover kept pulling off her hat all the time, I ended up fashioning her a fantastic sun-shield with a big straw hat that I fixed under her chin with a ribbon. She put her little chin up and was very serious as I tied a bow.

  It was mesmerising to watch her; she had grown so much and was suddenly a real little person. I felt like all those people who say, ‘Oh, hasn’t she grown?’ and – gesturing with their hand wildly at some space, around the height of their knee – ‘I remember when you were just this big’.

  I mean, I do remember when she was newly born and all weird legs and arms and skin and so strange smelling. And now she was all determined, walking and running around, she laughed at things she found funny, and she had ideas of her own.

  Clover splashed about and tottered over with a bucket to offer Tim some water, tipping it on his hooves. She probably did a wee in the pool, but by mid-afternoon the water was so warm anyway that it didn’t matter.

  I lay in there and read – My Family and Other Animals. Corfu definitely had to go on my list. Jarrod would have laughed at Gerald’s boat, the Bootle Bumtrinket. A memory of salty olives on my lips.

  I left my curtains and windows open all night. I let the night come in and swirl around and bring me lightness and positivity. I let the night suck out the failure and my embarrassment and shame over the same. I lit my oil burner and let the scents waft about, and ran through memories both happy and sad, both welcome and less welcome until I fell asleep.