The Last Summer of Ada Bloom

by Martine Murray

  ‘Raff?’ Alice laughed. ‘I wonder who invited him.’ She frowned and, struck by another thought, she shrugged, ‘He’s strange. I can’t work him out.’

  Before Tilly could plunge into any further thoughts about Raff, Alice passed her a bottle, ‘Here, drink some of this. It’s ace. I’m as high as a kite.’

  10

  Ada woke up as Tilly slipped into bed. ‘What time is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Move over. Don’t you want to hear? About the party.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ada, solemnly. It was her duty. She sat up and blinked. The moonlight had gone and now she could see the black branches outside and hear their rooster, Captain George, crowing. That meant it was almost dawn. Oh, Captain George, she thought, because he was always there calling out in the morning.

  ‘It’s funny, at the beginning I almost ran away and came home. I didn’t want to go in,’ said Tilly with a little laugh.

  Ada remembered how she had felt afraid to see Tilly being swallowed by the mouth of night and now she realised why she’d had the fear. It was a premonition of the living room and her naked father on the couch with one sock on and Mrs Layton on top of him. In comparison to that terrible thing in the living room, which had filled Ada with an unnameable horror, Tilly seemed so exactly like the Tilly she knew and could count on that she began to hope the world would be returned to how it had always been. Tilly’s story would take over; it would sweep away everything that had happened in the living room.

  ‘But you did go in, didn’t you?’ Ada said.

  ‘Of course I did. A guy came to the door and I went in behind him. Later he kissed me. He was a terrible dancer and a terrible kisser too. He was drunk enough to like me, I could tell.’

  Ada snuggled back down into the bed, relieved. She would close her eyes and just listen.

  Tilly lay on her back stiff with excitement and her feet danced a little. ‘Here’s some advice, Snug, for when you’re older. If a boy can’t dance, he probably can’t kiss either, because it shows he doesn’t know tenderness and listening.’

  Ada made a mental note of this. Tenderness and listening. In the morning she would write those words in her diary. Even though she had no interest in boys. Or kissing. But dancing was important. Everyone wants to dance.

  Tilly yawned. She told Ada about the humanist with the charming abode and how she had got cross with herself because she didn’t know how to be interesting, and how she was scared of something and it could have been the shoes or it could have been just the feeling that she couldn’t be true.

  Ada couldn’t see how Tilly could not be true, but then she remembered that Tilly had become sly. If only she would go back to how she used to be.

  ‘That’s silly,’ mumbled Ada. But she couldn’t muster the right authority. Tilly ignored her anyway and went on. ‘You still awake? I haven’t got to the main bit.’

  Ada’s eyes were closed. She nodded. ‘Keep going.’

  ‘Well I got it in the end. I found the right mood—the wine helped. And I didn’t care at all, about anything. And then someone took me by my hand while I was dancing. Open your eyes, Snug, this is the good part. Who do you think it was?’

  Ada obeyed. Tilly had a wide smile, which she shone up at ceiling as if she was seeing God himself up there. Ada stuck her finger through one of Tilly’s black curls, which were spilled out on the pillow.

  ‘Raff Cavallo.’ Tilly gave a little laugh and then forced into it a condescending note, which Ada didn’t like, and although Tilly had turned expectantly towards her, waiting for Ada to share her scorn, Ada frowned and turned on her side, with her back to Tilly.

  ‘Why is that so funny?’ she whispered. She felt grave. Romantic figures shouldn’t be laughed at. Ada didn’t like it. She had not forgiven herself for what happened at the windmill. She had failed to impress Raff. Had Tilly impressed him without even meaning to? That would be too unfair.

  Tilly didn’t answer.

  Ada lay quite still for a moment. The filtering of morning light had begun to restore the room to its ordinariness. Things were distinctly things again. Their outlines came back with the same old exactness. Ada could no longer blend things into a sense of endless possibility. Tilly’s night with all its glittering grown-up mystery was over now. Life was plain old life again, with its list of things to do, and Raff Cavallo was still Ada’s secret hero.

  Tilly turned over, cuddling Ada to her. ‘You be little spoon,’ she whispered.

  For a moment all was quiet except for the 5 a.m. train hurtling through the dawn and the first uttering of birdsong announcing the end of night’s long haul.

  Ada listened to Tilly’s breath getting deeper. She was sinking down into sleep. ‘Tilly?’ Ada said in a panic.

  ‘Hmmm.’

  Mrs Layton had not gone away. Ada had to tell Tilly before the night was over, before the day really began, when she would get up and see her father and not know how to look at him or what to say.

  ‘I saw something. Something bad. It was Dad…’ Ada stopped. If she said it out loud it would become something, it would become a fact, it would push its way in alongside all the other things that happened—breakfast, birthdays, holidays, illnesses—with all its ugliness lit up like a shop sign. It wouldn’t belong to Ada anymore, it would belong to the great span of life, delivered into existence by Ada’s voice. But Tilly had to know. Ada couldn’t hold it all alone.

  ‘What was he doing?’ said Tilly, waking up.

  ‘He was with Mrs Layton,’ Ada declared. ‘On the couch, in the middle of the night,’ she said. And just to make sure Tilly understood, she added, ‘With no clothes on.’

  11

  Martha caught the 9.20 train home on Saturday morning. It was already hot. Summer was too bright; she was always having to hide from it beneath wide-brimmed hats and dark sunglasses. She put her hat on her knees and stared out the window. A man sat down opposite her. He could have sat somewhere else. There were empty seats after all. Martha preferred to have no one sitting opposite her. More room to dream. But here he was. She would be compelled now to watch him from behind her dark glasses, and she would imagine something about him. That was what she did. She really shouldn’t do it. She would try to decide who he was, even though she could never know. She would construct his life and then she would wander through that life as if she was that man, in his shirt, on the train, as if she was no longer herself. She was always losing herself in other lives, while her real life waited there, like an empty seat without a window view

  The man opened a large textbook on his lap. A suit coat, a wristwatch, black hair with grey streaks, unshaven lined face, similar age to her. He was probably married. She peered close enough to read the book’s title. The Competition Market Challenge. She leaned back, instantly disappointed. Would he be just as tedious as his book? If he had been reading Thoreau, that would have been nicely surprising, and she would have wanted to find out more. But now there was nothing to be interested in. She might be wrong. People were always more than what you thought they were, but not always in an interesting way. And all those houses the train rushed past, like new false teeth. She shouldn’t dislike them either. But she did.

  Susie had tried to talk her into staying away and doing an aerobics class. Martha didn’t like aerobics. She did it once, and it was exhausting. ‘No, I have to come home.’ She didn’t explain properly. She was too tired. She didn’t even know why. Home. She was constantly heading for home. Not because it was that cosy place with the dog, but because if she kept hurrying towards something, she would rush right past the hollowness. Bypass whatever it was that made her uncomfortable. Envy or regret, or even just longing—deep, aimless, habitual longing.

  ‘Are you sure? Would be good for you,’ Susie had said. ‘You’ll need a bit of time after visiting your mother.’ Susie always pushed. Always knew what was good for Martha. And it was true; she did. But what was one aerobics session against the great onslaught of life. She had had enough of the city. It made her
want things she didn’t need. She had bought Tilly a record, Revolver. It had been one of her favourites. She would listen to it with Tilly and together they would sing ‘Good Day Sunshine’. It was so hard to share anything with Tilly now that she had shut herself off. But Tilly would love the record.

  Then she had bought shoes. She didn’t need those shoes. No one needs yellow shoes. Her mother would either be silently impressed or would think Martha was wasting hard-earned money on fripperies. Martha just wanted to feel the rush that extravagance gave her. It was like buying a different life, in which she was someone who had an important role, with shoes to match and more than one handbag. Martha wasn’t that person, and she’d hate the shoes before long for their false allure and their evaporating joys. Already she wanted to go home and lock them in her cupboard. But she didn’t like being at home. The house jammed her in. The chicken poo on the veranda defeated her, as did the broken lawnmower, the pine needles in the gutters, the singed lawn, the dust, the struggling roses, and the dying trees too with their branches as leafless as bones. Those big trees, the magnificent silent creatures were dying from the outside in. Her garden was almost a graveyard; she felt responsible. And in the face of that, she had bought yellow shoes.

  If only she had stayed in the city or even better if she had travelled, found a job and got an apartment in a real city like London, had the life of a single girl, done something affecting, important, lived a higher life. She shouldn’t even think of it. Her friend Fiona Dark had gone off to London and never come home, and her friends were the type of people who funded film festivals in Transylvania and owned old mansions on private beaches in Italy. Martha imagined them with wind in their hair, belting down country roads in convertibles.

  Martha fixed her gaze on the last sprawl of brick suburbs. The uniformity of them intrigued her and depressed her, and in some way terrified her. The sprawling homogeneity. It would overtake them all. She was running from it, but was she just running into a different version of the same thing?

  But what had happened to her life that there was no place for a frivolous, unreasonable shoe? She didn’t want a completely sensible life, which was why her heart had pounded with a confused sort of trepidation as she paid for them, just as it had when, as a child, she once stole a cream bun. Just as it still did whenever she visited her mother. It was a feeling all pummelled with hope and childish longing, and wariness too.

  But Martha was visiting Glenda this time. Glenda’s oasis of cool white space was admirable and painstaking and elegant. There were no tennis balls or socks on the floor at Glenda’s. There was nothing but vases and ‘pieces,’ primitive statues carved in black stone. Martha felt judged by so much good taste. And yet she admired it and sometimes hoped to find things that imitated Glenda’s ‘pieces’, and if she did find a vase in the op shop that just might be good, she would try to picture it in Glenda’s house to see if it fitted. But this was demeaning, she was always behind Glenda and in deference to her. Martha had her way of making up for it. The pale blue, silk dress with the black-lace panels for instance. Glenda had admired it but she couldn’t have it because Glenda was fat and only ever wore full-length black dresses. Martha had not yet gone that way. Her hair was not yet grey and she wasn’t fat and she could escape into that dress, like men sped off in their sports cars. That dress or those shoes or that vase, they all refused the drab, repetitive, frugal, appropriate life that threatened her. Or did she just believe they did? Had Arnold Buch seen through it instantly? Was that why her head ached?

  Martha was already forty-one, and there were signs: sunspots, lines, sagginess, but nothing—she struggled to reassure herself—that couldn’t be hidden or overlooked, even forgiven. And while Glenda’s face benefitted from her plumpness, Glenda hid her gluttony just as Martha avoided the close scrutiny of her own skin. Martha came to Glenda when Glenda felt low. She listened and talked to Glenda in all earnestness and made Glenda feel attended to, and they gently soothed each other’s hidden shame and private failures. Yet Martha always came away feeling discontent. Perhaps it was that the unspoken underlying comparison undermined all her good intentions towards Glenda. She’d gorged on something without being nourished by it. She left Glenda’s house feeling inadequate and inelegant, and she strained to go home and redeem herself by being at least in some way a good mother and wife. If she couldn’t be sophisticated, she could at least be wholesome. She would plant broccoli in the vegetable garden and hide away all evidence of her city binge.

  Martha shifted in her seat to avoid the sun’s glare and brushed eyes with the man opposite. He looked up as she moved. Then he put down his fluoro marker and closed the book. He leaned back in the seat and folded his arms.

  Should she talk to him? She could tell him how tedious his book looked. That would start a conversation. She noticed with some relief that he had a pot stomach. She would easily forgive it. But what was the point? They weren’t teenagers. There was neither a future, nor freedom. What sort of wife waited at home for him? Was she happier with him than Martha was with Mike? Did his wife love his little paunch? Did she care if he flirted on trains? He stood up and reached for his bag. The train was stopping. It was all about to be over. All these endings, the losses and failures, accumulated and filled her with melancholy. She took off her glasses and smiled at him, if only to fend off the gloom. He smiled back and said goodbye. Once off the train, he walked past her window and waved. She waved back. His smile was purposeful, well aimed. A perfectly timed collision. Her whole body leapt towards it. Something sprang to life inside her, which she knew at once had nothing to do with that man, but which he had caused. The train pulled out and he was gone.

  Martha closed her eyes. It was sometimes terribly dull to be married. And yet she couldn’t imagine life without Mike. It was her fault really. She didn’t make enough effort. Love was an effort. She would cook him something fiddly like lasagne, buy a bottle of wine and stay up.

  When she arrived home it was midday. The old weatherboard house slumped quietly under the blaze of sun. She found Ada in the garden, lying under the trampoline with Louis and May and PJ. Martha squatted down to see them. May was wearing nothing, as usual, though Ada and Louis wore bathers. They all had wet hair and drops of water still wobbled on their shining skin. They were lying on their tummies looking at Ada’s Endangered Australian Animals cards. Ada was playing teacher. There was something about the three of them with their small suntanned bodies lying in a row in their hiding place that gave Martha an instant rush of maternal warmth and then a stab of regret that she was not privy to these moments of childhood for her youngest child. She was too busy, too swamped with chores and obligations. And yet it wasn’t even that; it was something else. She had rushed through all of her children’s lives, because she just always rushed forward, rushed away from where she was. Her tenderness rushed out to claim them, and so claimed her too. She had never known love to move like a flood as it had then. Who was here looking after them now? Her heart jolted angrily. Had Mike left Ada by herself?

  ‘Hello, monkey,’ she said.

  ‘Mama!’ Ada slammed her cards on the grass so she could scramble out. ‘Mama, Tilly is still in bed!’ Ada looked as if she expected this to be terrible news and she was frightened for Tilly. She whispered carefully, ‘Because she went to a party and didn’t get home till nearly morning.’

  ‘I see,’ said Martha, stiffening. Ada was right. This did irritate her. She had never liked anyone to sleep in. It was slovenly, a waste of the day. And Tilly should have been up to look after Ada. ‘Well, where’s Dad?’ she asked.

  Ada frowned. ‘He’s taken Ben to footy.’

  ‘Why didn’t you all go? Didn’t he tell Tilly that she should be looking after you and not sleeping in?’

  Ada shrugged. She twisted away from this interrogation. Louis and May watched wide-eyed from under the trampoline. PJ heaved himself up and limped out to say hello. Martha gave him a pat and sighed and kissed Ada and, remembering her gush
of maternal feeling, she asked Ada if she’d put sunscreen on and if they had remembered to use the bore water sprinkler and not the tap water. Had they eaten fruit? Did they want her to make them some cheese and tomato toasties? May piped up. ‘Not with tomato. Just cheese.’ Louis nodded silently in agreement. Ada wanted olives in hers. Martha went inside.

  She went straight to her bedroom and took the shoes out of the shoebox. Things were always more affecting when they weren’t hers, and these already seemed to be no more than simply another pair of shoes. She pushed them to the back of the wardrobe. Then she put the record in there too. She would give it to Tilly when she wasn’t feeling so full of resentment. She changed out of her good clothes.

  She stuffed the shoebox in the bin and started on the toasties. She moved quickly. She always did. No one had cleaned up the breakfast dishes and she soon came across the greasy fish-and-chips paper in the bin. Her irritation flared again. Why didn’t Mike make them some dinner? Why were the dishes always left for her? Tilly should be up. Mike was hopeless. How had she managed to marry the only country boy who couldn’t use a hammer or fix a lawnmower, let alone boil an egg? Susie Layton’s husband could fix anything; he could build a whole house if he wanted to. Whereas Mike was like a prince, a sensual sort of athlete who had ended up in a suit and tie. He called himself a country boy, yet really he grew up in the suburbs of Bendigo.

  Martha had been drawn to Mike because his smile suggested waywardness, which she had interpreted as individuality and adventurousness. It was after Mary Galmotte’s party. They were at the beach in the early evening of the following night, and she had sat on the ground and lit a cigarette, balancing the matches on her knees, while he picked up a stick and swung it like a golf club, his whole body flinging itself, exploding in a simple, unquestioning upwards arc. Her desire flared, and it had so startled her that she assumed it was love. What was it? A conflation of honeyed light and a man’s body: assured, intelligent, caught in an action that gave the moment a deceptive fervour, an exaltation of what was simply physical. And in that moment she had decided.