The Last Summer of Ada Bloom

by Martine Murray

  ‘Okay,’ said his dad. ‘Mrs Layton is coming over later to go over some insurance stuff.’

  Ben nodded. What did he care about Mrs Layton’s insurance policy? It was his dad’s way of signalling his unavailability tonight, just in case Ben had thought that since Martha was away, they might drink a beer together. Ben smiled to himself. As if he would have thought that, as if he would even have tried. He’d rather go to his room and roll a joint. He would lie on his bed and make some plans.

  8

  Ada couldn’t sleep. It was too hot. She threw off her sheet and clapped at a whining mosquito. Maybe she had slept and hadn’t noticed since the night was quiet now, except for the fluttering of the curtain and the occasional eruption of small lonely sounds that lived outside and tugged dreams out of sleep before they had properly unknotted. Her thoughts were tight and beating against her head, because of the heat and the pale, moon-bleached sky or the empty bed beside her. Tilly wasn’t home; the bedcovers were ghostly still.

  Ada lay and watched the room. The moonlight had crept in and bathed everything in eerie shining tones. Everything that looked so familiar during the day was now hiding its true self in a cloak of shadow. Something monstrous lurked in that sort of stillness. It was getting ready. Ada didn’t like it.

  Her old wicker pram, which she didn’t play with anymore, was parked with its nose indignantly in a corner; Big Baby probably lay abandoned inside it. Ada ran her eye along the top of the bookshelf, which was covered with indistinct shadowy things like the matching porcelain rabbits in blue jackets that were now dust-covered and so haunted with Ada’s own long ago that they belonged to an elsewhere that time had closed off. Though it was satisfying and right to be so much older than she had been, Ada sensed in their merry frozen faces the remains of a magic that had now been spent.

  And then, in the corner, was the special stained-glass lamp that Ada had accidentally broken one day and their mother said she would never buy them anything beautiful ever again, because Ada and Tilly had no respect for the quality of things. Her mother was wrong about that. Ada felt very fiercely that she knew the beauty of things. It wasn’t just the sunsets, which everyone knew about, but Ada knew also the coiled patterns of snail shells and the sliding of raindrops down windows and the fine veins in leaves, the glass balls of dew on nasturtium leaves. Tilly used to notice things, but now she sometimes forgot to look.

  Tilly’s jar of buttons sat next to the broken lamp. Ada got out of bed and took it down. She squatted on the floor and emptied the buttons. They splattered on the floorboards, shiny, hard and colour-less. She picked one up and held it close to her eye. It was a button, only a button and nothing else. There was nothing lurking in it.

  Ada straightened up. She wished she hadn’t tipped the buttons out because now she’d have to pick them up. She left them there and opened her door and padded down the hall. Later she wondered what had made her go down the hall. It wasn’t that she needed to go to the toilet; it was just that she wanted to go away from the buttons—and that she’d heard something.

  The sound came from a person, but the person wasn’t talking. The lamp was on in the living room. Its glow spilled down the hall and with it crept the sound of the breathy voice, as if it had rushed away from itself and come seeking her in the hall. Ada was frightened. Should she run back and hide from it in her room? Should she go and find her father? She was motionless for only a second as the breaths came towards her with an urgent sound, as if something was about to break. The note of pain frightened her, but she was trapped by her own curiosity, which drew her forward.

  What she saw, she saw only for an instant, but it etched itself vividly and permanently on her mind. Her dad and Mrs Layton had no clothes on, though her father, who lay on his back, wore one black ribbed sock. Mrs Layton was sitting on top of him, leaning forward, her arms straight and holding her up, her back arched while her head tipped forward and her hair fell across her face. Ada could tell it was Mrs Layton. Toby Layton was in her class at school. Toby Layton was one of her friends, and it was from his mother that the breathing sound came, and it went along with her movements, upward and down again. Ada’s father’s eyes were open, and he watched Mrs Layton. His hands were reached up catching her large breasts. He had a look in his eye that Ada had never seen before. It was a half-lidded, pained look and it made him seem not like her father at all, but like a snake, someone she didn’t know.

  Ada drew back into the dark hallway and ran back to her room. She grabbed Big Baby out of the pram and climbed into Tilly’s bed. She would wait for Tilly to come home. She closed her eyes but as soon as she did, the scene in the living room replayed in her mind. She turned on the lamp and stared out the long window into the moonlit garden where the tree branches struck out across the night sky. Should she run outside to Ben’s room and tell him? He might know what to do. Someone should stop them? Ada’s mind was in a commotion. Mrs Layton on her father, her father so consumed, he didn’t even see Ada even though she looked straight into his eyes.

  Ada shook her head and clutched at Big Baby. Big Baby wore an ice blue crocheted bonnet. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was open. Her padded arms were flung up, and she looked as if nothing bad had ever happened. Ada held the baby doll and curled up on her side. Poor Big Baby; she wasn’t real. Nothing was the same as it used to be. What she had seen had got inside her and Ada knew it would never sink down into the pleasant, jumbled obscurity of other memories.

  She felt serious and old, and she pushed Big Baby away. Now she really was too old for dolls.

  9

  Tilly had gone to the party even though she didn’t really want to. She had worried about it all day. She hadn’t really been invited. Not by Gwendolyn Bell who was having the party. It was Alice who had told her to come: ‘You have to come,’ Alice said, as though it was Tilly’s duty to be there alongside her.

  Alice was going with her boyfriend, Simon Marsh, who was picking her up in his car. If Tilly went, she had to go on her own.

  Alice had taken her by the arm and stroked her soothingly. ‘Please come, please, you’ll have a nice time,’ she’d said, and Tilly had felt cross and obliged all at once—obliged to go, and obliged to have a nice time. It was Alice who would have a nice time. She always did. The thing with Alice was that she had a way of organising life so that people and circumstances agreed with her. Now she had organised to arrive in a shark grey Holden with Simon Marsh who was twenty-two, while Tilly had to arrive on her own, uninvited, to be there in case Alice needed her. What an expert manager Alice was. No matter what Tilly did, there was a mess about it. Nothing could be worked out neatly, and her mind ached with the failed effort of it. She would sit gingerly on Alice’s bedspread, careful of creasing it and wary also of a little inward duplicity, because sitting so pertly was pretending, and the room was as unreal as a stage set. Tilly sometimes felt like an actor in Alice Layton’s version of life.

  She didn’t know what Alice was aiming for, but it seemed she would get it and the inevitability of this always struck Tilly as similar to the inevitability that Tilly would fail.

  Still, it was annoying that Alice expected her to arrive on her own. Would Alice have done that? Very unlikely. It would be much more cosy to just stay at home, and let Alice cope without her, and yet…Alice knew how to have a good time. Alice laughed and beamed her white teeth, while Tilly was quiet and inwardish. It was an effort to fight her way out. But Alice knew it was like that. She tugged Tilly forward. Alice, after all, was Tilly’s best friend and it was true wasn’t it, that Alice cared about her more than anyone else did, apart from Ada. Wasn’t this something to cherish, to care for and keep alive and to allow, even with its failures, too?

  When Tilly got to the party, she stood and listened to the muffled hum of voices and clouds of laughter that burst against the door. What an intruder she was.

  It was a white door and the knocker was like an ugly silver tooth. It felt as if everyone in the world was inside th
at house, being cheerful with each other, and she was outside faltering. She stood heavily and stared out into the distant bush that blanketed the hills. Something might appear. An animal in trouble. Something she could attend to instead of going inside. Or Ada would turn up and call her home. But there were no animals in trouble, and Ada had gone. There was nothing except her and the still night air that hung over the row of sombre weatherboard houses. Amidst them Gwendolyn Bell’s house hammered and thronged and glowed like a lit-up beating heart.

  The longer Tilly stood there, the louder her silver shoes glittered and mocked. And she began to blame them for showing off and for being untrue. Ada knew all along. Ada knew things without being able to say what it was she knew; she had a sense for things, just like Ben had an inclination for trouble. The shoes were trying too hard and they didn’t match her at all, and if her mother found out she would be in big trouble. And she would find out—Martha had eyes of steel. Tilly shouldn’t have come.

  As she turned to scuttle away, a boy opened the door and stood like a puppy in front of her. He raised a bottle of beer, for a swig. ‘I’m Frank,’ he said, wiping his mouth with his arm. ‘You coming or going?’

  Put like that, so straight and simple, Tilly buckled. His bluntness nicely bludgeoned the delicacy out of the whole matter. ‘Coming,’ she said.

  Frank looked at her with a singular sort of enthusiasm, before he turned and marched inside, swaying only a bit. Tilly slid along in his wake like a little fish. She squeezed past the people crowded in the hallway and lost Frank somewhere along the way, but landed beside a table laden with bowls of chips and half-empty bottles of wine. She poured herself a plastic cup of wine.

  Suddenly she had a place at the party. It was thrilling. The excitement gave her some weight and some lightness too. She jiggled with anticipation. Alice wouldn’t even know what that was like. Alice would just saunter in, cool and blonde, with her boyfriend, so entitled. But Alice wasn’t anywhere yet. Tilly loitered for a while by the table, pretending she was hungry and not entirely an imposter. She looked up and tried to imagine that the light shade on the ceiling was her God of all things and that she and it could work it all out. But there she was, depending on dolmades, perched on a rickety wooden stool, acting as if this party mattered.

  Two girls danced together. One was very round and loud and she wore a tight silver dress. She was proud of herself, oozing there in her fleshy resilience, like a big, rich field mushroom. The other girl was more sober and plain and trying hard to be lively, but it was clear that she was as steadfast and reliable as a donkey. Both of them had one eye out into the crowd and one on each other. This was how it was at parties, one eye in and one eye out and a lot of disingenuous chatter in between. Talking at parties was hard work—you had to wear your party self, that pretend sort of lively shining self, and the effort to conjure it showed through like a dirty mark on a pale-coloured dress. Sometimes it was all Tilly could think about and the more she fixated on the dirty mark of truth, the bigger it got, until the conjured liveliness was completely absorbed by the real her, the one she tried to keep hidden. Then she would trudge home with the feeling that she had let herself out and ruined everything.

  She finished her wine in one gulp and leaned back on her small stool with her legs straight out. She quickly admired her legs in the silver shoes. What a faker she was. Where was Alice? Tilly got off her rickety stool and looked into the sea of people; perhaps there was someone else she might know. A man with a handlebar moustache arrived by her side and leaned across to reach for the dolmades. He said ahem and struck up a conversation, told her about his ‘charming abode’ and his ‘humanist tendencies’, both of which would make anyone uneasy. He said abode instead of house. And what was humanism? He must have thought she was older than she was. It was a party of older people after all. Tilly poured herself some more wine, which seemed to relieve her of the need to care about humanism and whatever other beliefs she had or didn’t have. Sometimes the worst was not having beliefs. As for people, she told the humanist, searching for a position on humanism, she loved some of them, though they annoyed her too sometimes and other times they just frightened her and they were terribly disappointing too, but really so far no one had disappointed her as much as she had disappointed herself.

  The humanist rubbed his moustache. Either he hadn’t understood or he had tired of the dolmades, as he excused himself and moved towards a more promising cluster of people. What a great pity to be so disappointing. Either improve, or lighten up about not improving, she said to herself. But all this improving was tiring and lonely, especially if Alice didn’t show up.

  But there was Frank, leaning ungracefully against a wall. The little flame in his eye was now bleary as his gaze roamed around the room. She could imagine him with horns, reddish ones. It was easy to tell he didn’t put a lot of time into gathering beliefs. But he seemed puzzled and she could feel close to puzzled people, even if they had horns. He saw her, grinned and then came lumbering over.

  As Frank moved from his post at the wall, Tilly saw Raff Cavallo sitting on a couch, one arm over the back of it, and probably around the girl who sat next to him. Tilly had never seen him out of the normal context, with Ben and Will—they were all on the footy team together and ended up at her house after a game. Together they were coarse and gang-like, but if you separated one from the others, you would see that while Will was as sturdy as a loaf of bread, Raff was the sort to steer clear of, unless trouble was your game. Maybe it was for her.

  It was always hard to tell what Raff Cavallo had fixed his mind on. He never attached himself to anything but seemed like a torrential rain, full and sudden and then gone.

  He listened to the girl beside him. He smiled too. What was she saying that made him turn so tenderly towards her? But Tilly couldn’t hear, and Frank was there, slouching in his camel corduroys.

  ‘You never told me your name,’ he said.

  ‘You never asked.’ She offered him a chip.

  He shook his head and sucked at his beer.

  ‘Want to dance?’ she said. It would be too dull to just stand and talk—she could tell that already.

  Frank was reluctant, even slightly appalled. He leaned against the table, shaking his head slowly. ‘I warn you. I don’t dance.’

  ‘I’m not expecting pirouettes.’ She moved towards the middle of the room, assuming that he would follow, but he lurched forward and grabbed her arm to stop her.

  ‘What do you do?’ His eyes blinked in confusion at his own impulse.

  ‘I’m a humanist.’ Frank didn’t get the joke. It didn’t seem to matter to him what she was. He didn’t reply, but he followed her dutifully to the dance floor, looking at her with distant bemusement. He hadn’t lied; he was a terrible dancer, thick and heavy and heaving like a ship. The more he wavered there, as drunk as a Viking, the more it was possible to merge with the party and for this Tilly was grateful. She floated as easy as the smoke-filled air. She had found the right mood, an invisible, reckless mood. The silver shoes dazzled. Frank lurched his hands towards her. He leaned in and pushed a hot gush of breath at her ear. He wanted her to come with him into the garden.

  It was dark there and quiet. They sat on a cold stone bench and Frank asked if he could kiss her. Why didn’t he just go ahead and kiss her without asking? Especially as the kiss, when it came, was violent. He might have called it passionate, but it went against the quiet of the garden, its shaking leaves and faraway sky and the muffled music snaking out the door. All this, and still he lunged heavily and thrust his tongue right into her mouth as if he was invading a small foreign country. She had wanted some disarming tenderness, a great, hidden, unfathomable depth.

  She unravelled herself from his arms, shook off her disappointment and walked inside. She had been kissed now. She had earned her place at the party. Now she could stop trying. She had finally gotten rid of herself. She would dance. She closed her eyes.

  Someone took her hand. It wasn’t Frank.
It was Raff Cavallo. He had a cigarette in one hand and he was laughing.

  ‘Tilly Bloom, you’re drunk.’

  ‘So?’ She would have taken her hand back, but he pulled her in and swung her out again, and spun her under his arm like an expert.

  It was so surprising, she frowned. ‘Who taught you how to dance?’

  ‘Why do you care?’ he said, dropping her hand carelessly. He was looking at the rest of them through his green eyes. If only he would leave her to enjoy her glorious mood. Instead, he swept them both back into a dance as if she was just something he’d carelessly reached out and caught. He had timing, she had to admit, and he knew how to dance her along with him, into him and out again. So typical of him to show up with hidden talents.

  The lamp’s dim glow mingled with a haze of smoke and heat. No one was really themselves anymore—they had slid their party selves into the atmosphere, as if their bodies were made of air. People were kissing. Tilly didn’t know where to look. What was swaying? Everything? Her little heart too. Waves of Raff Cavallo washed over her. She could feel the warmth coming off his body. The dance had drawn her closer and set loose a current between them. It snaked up through her spine. The night had taken hold of her too. She didn’t care. Her soul had turned over and the shiny side was up. It was like being drawn out to sea, when she’d aimed for the shore.

  Then, just as stealthily as he’d arrived, Raff let her go. He didn’t speak, just turned and walked out of the room.

  It was as if she was falling.

  ‘You’re here!’

  It was Alice. She had landed in front of her, as she stared out to where Raff Cavallo had gone, as if lost in his wake.

  Tilly started and grabbed Alice happily. ‘Listen to this,’ she said. ‘The strangest thing just happened. I danced with Raff Cavallo. I didn’t mean to. But he was here. He can actually, really dance.’