The Last Summer of Ada Bloom

by Martine Murray

  After the pool, she and Susie steamed themselves in the sauna. Susie leaned back, lifted her feet and circled her ankles. ‘What’s on today?’ she said.

  ‘Dishes, chickens, dog, children—my exciting life.’ Martha didn’t mention Arnold Buch. He was coming for tea and she was trying not to think about him.

  Susie rolled her eyes.

  Martha went on. ‘I dreamed I came home and everything in my house had been stolen. It was completely empty. I started to tell someone what I needed, what I would miss, and I couldn’t remember—I couldn’t remember what was even in the house.’

  ‘You want me to analyse?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Okay, you’re sad about some loss, but you don’t know what that loss is?’

  Youth, Martha thought, but she didn’t say it, because this was obvious and dull. She had fallen to thinking about how there was really nothing in the house after all, nothing she would need to take with her, nothing she could count in the big tally at the end of it all.

  ‘Joe is depressed,’ Susie said. ‘He was reading about John Lennon today. It’s two years since he was shot. Joe’s got such a tender heart. He despairs about a world in which John Lennon can get assassinated.’

  Martha felt a pang of love for Joe. It made sense that Joe loved John Lennon. He was the guiding star of her burst of youth. He stood against the tide of opinion and Martha had admired that. A madman had gunned that all down.

  ‘Apparently the man who shot him was reading The Catcher in the Rye. Have you read it? I was in love with Holden Caulfield when I was young,’ Susie said.

  Martha had read it. She wasn’t sure she would like it now. She felt old and despairing. It was as if in failing to escape a steadily advancing orthodoxy, she had been flattened by it. It crushed the peace movement and John Lennon, and it turned the ear away from birdsong.

  And then, on top of all that, Arnold Buch was coming.

  3

  Tilly didn’t see why she had to be there. Ben had got out of it because he had cricket practice. Usually she was just a disappointment. Martha always berated her afterwards. Why didn’t you use their names? Please look at someone when you speak to them. Stand up straight, you’re always hunching, you don’t want bad posture,

  When Mr Buch arrived, Tilly stood up straight and said, ‘Hello, Mr Buch.’

  Mr Buch said, ‘Call me Arnold. No one calls me Mr Buch.’

  But she couldn’t call him Arnold. She didn’t call any adults by their real names. She would have to avoid calling him anything and her mother would be annoyed.

  Mr Buch crossed his legs as he settled into the living-room chair. He was a tall grey-haired man, elegantly dressed but awkward in the chair, as if his limbs were not amenable to folding. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. Martha told Ada to get an ashtray. Ada was staring at him, wide-eyed. Because he was unknown and had arrived from their parents’ past—that exotic place that seemed to have happened in black and white on beaches and outside motels with names like Time and Tide Motor Inn. Arnold Buch looked like history, like someone you might meet on an overnight train. Tilly suspected he was an intellectual, because of his style, which was dignified and seemed impervious to trend, though his expression was similar to a baby’s, gazing about in wonder. How could her parents fit with this man? They were so unremarkable, so normal, so humdrum. What exoticness had her parents’ lives once touched? Martha had gone to a lot of trouble. She had vacuumed the house, puffed the couch cushions, and made cake with the blood plums. Then she put on a dress with a panel of black lace, which made her look like she had borrowed someone else’s glamour. She wore lipstick. Even this seemed extravagant.

  ‘Tilly plays the piano,’ Mike said to Mr Buch.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Tilly, appalled. She didn’t play. She’d never had a lesson. What she did on the piano was like finger painting.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ said Mike. ‘She doesn’t learn; she makes things up.’ Her father was doing his best to impress Mr Buch. ‘Arnold is a great pianist,’ Mike explained, crossing his feet. He didn’t know where to look. Martha blushed. Tilly began to crumple inwardly.

  ‘I can play chopsticks,’ Ada jumped in.

  Mr Buch nodded, but he didn’t say anything to Ada. He looked at Tilly.

  It was surprising he didn’t indulge Ada like adults usually did. Obviously he had no experience with kids. He leaned forward, as if about to tell her something important.

  ‘Would you like a drink, Arnold?’ Martha interrupted. ‘I’ve even made a plum cake for dessert. I never make cakes, so be warned.’

  Mr Buch stared at Martha as if he had never seen her before. For a moment he didn’t answer her. Then he smiled and slipped his cigarette packet back in his coat.

  ‘So, what do you do now, Arnold? Do you have a family?’ Mike drew Ada onto his knee. Ada was curious enough about Mr Buch to oblige and stay.

  ‘Yes, I have a dog. Beefheart. A fine family we are. We often go out walking. Over the hills.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘In a small village in England, near Bath. I spend a lot of time walking in the woods, so to speak. Occasionally I come back here to see my mother and sister. I lead a fairly itinerant life, but that way I can cause as much trouble as I like: I’m always about to leave.’

  ‘What’s itinerant?’ said Ada, wriggling.

  ‘That just means he is always on the move,’ said Mike.

  ‘What sort of trouble do you cause?’ said Martha, arriving with a gin and tonic.

  ‘Oh, just the usual. Highway robbery. That sort of thing.’ ‘But what’s your line of work?’ pressed Mike.

  Arthur Buch’s eyes showed a sort of faint amusement. He glanced down at the ice in his drink and swirled it around, as if he had found in the drink whatever it was he was looking for.

  ‘Well, I’m a futurist. Which means I look at what could happen in the future and, in some cases, what should happen in the future, in order to prevent what might otherwise happen in the more distant future.’

  There was a silence. Martha frowned. She looked as if she was not even listening to Arnold Buch, even though she stared right at him. Ada jumped off Mike’s lap and helped herself to cheese and biscuit. Tilly watched her mother.

  ‘Jesus, Arnold, that sounds complicated,’ said Mike.

  ‘Not really. It’s like being a weatherman actually.’

  Martha smoothed her dress over her knees.

  ‘What do you see, then, for the future, Arthur?’

  ‘Dark times, mainly.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean as long as we continue to believe that prosperity depends on economic growth…I mean we pollute the ocean, the sky, the earth. We’ve forgotten what makes life liveable.’

  The way he said this, with his eyes faintly closed, like a priest, as if this was a religion, was magic. Tilly stared. What he said had to be true.

  ‘That’s a bit dramatic,’ Mike said.

  ‘Have you forgotten too, Arnold?’ said Martha. Her voice was cold.

  Arnold Buch faltered. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’ It was the first time he seemed uncertain. Tilly liked him better then. As if he felt it, he turned to her. ‘How old are you Tilly? Do you like the ocean?’

  Tilly startled. It wasn’t that it was an odd question, but it was odd coming from Mr Buch—he looked as if he knew what she was thinking, as if he and she both knew something that no one else would understand.

  ‘I’m seventeen. I like the sea. But we never go there.’

  Mr Buch didn’t reply. He didn’t even seem to take much interest in the answer after all. Perhaps she wasn’t any different from anyone else, after all.

  ‘We have a son, too. He’s fifteen, but he’s playing cricket right now. He’s very athletic. Like Mike,’ said Martha. She glanced at Mike.

  Mr Buch smiled. He turned to Ada. ‘And what about you?’

  Ada frowned as she cons
idered this. ‘I just make things up to play.’

  ‘Oh, that’s the very best way to play, I think,’ said Mr Buch.

  It was always Ada that people liked the best, thought Tilly. She didn’t care. She took a biscuit and left the room. Even if Martha would tell her off for it later.

  4

  Mike knew they would have to talk about it. Martha would ask him. She always dragged everything through such unnecessary scrutiny. He had already begun to prepare his thoughts. He envied Arnold, who would now be sitting on a train, alone. There would be no one countering him, prodding him. What did Martha need to discuss, anyway? They had performed their lives for Arnold as well as they could.

  Of course, Arnold was never going to be impressed by anything as conventional as their lives. But Mike had inadvertently managed to impress himself. He and Arnold had stepped from the tidy living room into the garden, with its sun-singed lawn, strewn with relics of family life: a rusty swing set, totem tennis, the homemade tree swing that Ada had painted sky-blue, PJ panting in the shade of the elm. This wasn’t just his life’s backdrop, it was inscribed with his existence, it proved him. His children’s lives were worn into this patch of earth. His bones knew this place. Even the house’s atmosphere was alive in him. He had a life worth holding onto. His gaze roved so possessively over the garden that he was almost oblivious to Arnold, and the quiet rapture that came from the perceived sense of his own life entirely absorbed him.

  But later, he clapped Arnold on the back as he got on the train more with a sense of relief than triumph. He realised he no longer needed Arnold’s approval. At one point in his life, to have proved something to Arnold Buch was everything.

  Martha was already doing the dishes when he got back from dropping Arnold at the station. She was wearing an old dress.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ he said. The dress had been for Arnold, not for him. She hardly ever dressed up for him. His happiness rushed out of him.

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘I didn’t want to get it dirty.’

  He knew that sigh, that tone of voice. Like a north wind it came, full of hot, silent reproach. For what this time? Had he said the wrong thing? Maybe he shouldn’t have boasted about Tilly playing the piano. Had he embarrassed Martha by revealing their little failures as parents? Martha was difficult. His family, the warm little rosy unit he had just folded into his heart, was already dissipating. He leaned against the bench, folded his arms. Could he be bothered trying to rally her? He could put his arms around her. She would probably prefer he get the tea towel.

  ‘Where are the girls?’ he said, doing neither.

  ‘I don’t know. Tilly is probably in her room. She’s obsessed with her John Lennon record now. She’s playing it over and over.’ Martha didn’t turn from the sink.

  ‘Have you got a headache?’ His voice was weary, full of sighs too. Martha’s despair was always contagious.

  ‘No, I’m all right.’ At least she turned. She looked at him, while wiping her hair off her face with her forearm, her hands deep in yellow rubber gloves.

  ‘Arnold seemed well,’ he offered. One of them had to say something. Arnold Buch had always been a silence between them. Mike had expected her to prod him. Anything she said would feel like a prod because of what he had buried in the unstable terrain of memory. It was bound up tight, but waiting for an innocent footstep to dislodge it. Now that Arnold had come and gone without incident, he could relax again.

  ‘I guess so.’ She turned to face him, leaning her back against the sink.

  ‘It was a shock seeing him as a middle-aged man. We must have looked old to him too. Old and boring.’

  So that was it. She felt the opposite of what he had felt. He had wanted to come home, to the room with his family in it, his lovely wife who made cake, his daughters who had accomplishments, and his son who was athletic like him. But Martha had changed into an old dress, had got herself in a sour mood, and his children were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Honey, you still look young,’ he said. He wasn’t lying, even though he felt as if he was. He had got so accustomed to lies, sometimes the truth felt more awkward.

  ‘No, it’s not that, it’s what I feel…I feel like I…failed…I don’t know…’

  At least she wasn’t questioning him about Arnold Buch. At least she was, as usual, thinking about herself. She pulled the yellow gloves off and came towards him. She leaned into him and began to cry.

  ‘What is it?’ he said. He did love her after all. He did. He held her head as if it was a precious thing.

  She turned her face to the side, resting it against his chest as she hugged him close.

  5

  A foreboding had got inside Ada and she couldn’t get it out again. Something felt threatening and inevitable. The sun had shrunk the whole town, turned it brittle as a pip and sucked the creeks dry. The cherry tree had died, even though Ada had emptied the cold kettle water under it every day. No wonder the people of the town were tired; if the sun didn’t stop drying everything to a cinder, their hearts would turn as black and hard as coal. They all needed to sit still and pant. Or lie on their backs in the shade. But they carried on, just like the flies that buzzed and thudded like fools against the kitchen windowpane.

  ‘These flies drive me crazy,’ said Ada.

  When Tilly didn’t reply, Ada let out a loud sigh and added, ‘The way they carry on!’ She leaned over the stool and hung her arms as if they had just died. The flies weren’t really to blame, but it was relieving to blame something: something small enough to do battle with, something other than the scorched summer days that arrived, one after the other without stopping, emblazoned and glaring and wiped of detail. The density and darkness and edge of life was all gone.

  Tilly was smoking a cigarette and wearing a nice dress. She had turned on the fan above the stove and was standing near the window, so their mother wouldn’t know. ‘There’s a fire at Mount Macedon. It’s burnt the whole north side of the mountain already. Because of the drought. That lemon tart shop has probably already burnt down,’ she said.

  Bushfires didn’t scare Ada. There were enough people afraid of them; she wasn’t joining that queue. She had her very own fear and it belonged only to her and she preferred it that way. The heat and Ada had their own private struggle, but the heat was winning.

  ‘I heard about this woman,’ Tilly continued, fanning the smoke with her hand. ‘I heard her talking on the radio because she got burnt so badly by a ball of fire that her skin was black, and she nearly died. Well, she would have died if the neighbour didn’t put her in the pool. And she lay in the pool nearly dying and watched her blackened skin float around her. And when she was in the hospital, every breath she took was so painful the nurse couldn’t bear to watch it, and she thought she would die for sure. But she had two little girls who she had saved from the fireball by putting a blanket over them. She wanted to live for them. And she believed in God too. It always helps people survive if they think God is going to lend a hand.’

  Tilly said this with a little sniff, and Ada knew what it meant. She didn’t like it when Tilly besmirched God. Ada believed in him. That ghost man who watched from the sky and looked like Gregory Peck and made your wishes come true if you were helpful to your mother.

  ‘Mum wouldn’t have done that,’ Tilly said. She squished her cigarette into the gold-rimmed china saucer and ran water over it.

  ‘Wouldn’t have done what?’ asked Ada.

  Tilly shrugged. ‘You know.’ She leaned on the kitchen bench and sighed, pulling at her dark fringe to smooth it.

  Ada got off the stool and turned it upside down and tried to stand inside the upturned legs.

  ‘She would have for Ben, though,’ Tilly continued airily. ‘She’d put Ben under the blanket first.’

  Ada gripped the legs of the stool and began to rock it. She could ride it. She could ride it right out the door and keep going.

  ‘You’ll break it, Ada, or you’ll hurt yourself.’ Tilly’s sigh spread l
ike a damp cloud over everything.

  Ada stopped rocking. She squinted at Tilly suspiciously. If she looked hard enough she might see past the new Tilly through to the old one. The new Tilly was hard to understand. Even the way she stood promised something and hid it too. What it promised Ada didn’t know, but she did know it wasn’t a direct thing—it was smoky and silent and sideways. Tilly wasn’t a child anymore, and she wasn’t grown up either. She was seventeen and no one was grown up till they were eighteen, but Tilly was trying to be eighteen, and Ada thought it gave her an unnatural sort of poise. It wasn’t only because she was wearing lipstick and her hair was brushed, it was the sense of her being purposeful and sly. Tilly pulled at her shining dark fringe as if it might curtain her off from the world.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Ada.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere, yet. I’m looking after you, remember, till Dad gets back.’ Tilly spoke with a slow whisper. She lowered her gaze, as if it had been too heavy to hold. The flies buzzed at the window. Ada poked at a half-eaten piece of watermelon on a plate.

  ‘Why are you dressed up then?’ Ada stood the stool back up the right way and sat on it very straight and tall. She was uncomfortable again. The summer strain was mixed up with Tilly becoming different and she couldn’t quite separate the two feelings. There should be a way that this could be worked out and got right.

  ‘Well I’m just ready for the party.’ Tilly had turned her head away and was staring into the hot still air. What was she thinking? ‘Whose party? Will there be boys there? Raff Cavallo?’ Ada sang his name. Raff Cavallo had divorced parents around whom Ada sensed an enticing whiff of scandal. He was in the gang that included her brother, Ben, and Will Rand. Will Rand’s mother smoked marijuana and let her three children do whatever they wanted, but their father was strict, and all the children were frightened of him. Raff, who was in Tilly’s class at school, was the most interesting in Ada’s opinion because his mother was rumoured to have been a musical star when she was young, and she still dressed quite flamboyantly. Even better, she had never baked a cake for the school fete, let alone attended it, all because she preferred to play piano.