The Last Summer of Ada Bloom

by Martine Murray

  Ada could see Tilly ahead of her, waiting. She had to pedal off before Tilly got grumpy waiting. Ada called out to Tilly by way of an excuse, ‘But did you see Elmer, with no eyes?’

  Tilly frowned. She stood still and watched Evie and Elmer in the distance. She looked confused and hot, but she didn’t tell Ada off for holding her up after all.

  Tilly got off the bike and pushed it. Ada was relieved. She didn’t like to be the one to get tired or afraid first and hold people back. She began to push her bike too. She was sweating and thirsty.

  Alice lived in a grand house with a front lawn that was always mowed and arranged with proper, squared-off flowerbeds that had no weeds in them. It had a sense of order about it that their house didn’t have. Their house was tumble-down; the front fence showed straightaway how it was, with its missing fence palings, like the gaps in an old person’s grin. In front of it were the sad, sizzled remnants of a lavender hedge. Over the path to the front door, there was an arch with a dogged old apricot rose that could hardly be bothered flowering. But since no one used the front door, the house was all round the wrong way—everyone came in through the kitchen at the back. The veranda, once you reached it, was an embarrassment to their mother. You could hardly walk down one side it was so cluttered with junk: doors that had been replaced, boxes of hand-me-downs, Ben’s old drum kit, a rain-ruined table-tennis table as warped as the sea but still okay to play on if you could find someone who would play with you. Mostly Ben and Tilly couldn’t be bothered playing with Ada as she wasn’t as good as they were. There were also hoses, some with holes that were meant to be fixed one day, and spades, and a woodpile, which was dangerous because snakes like to sleep in woodpiles. Alice’s front porch had no junk on it at all, no snakes, just some pot plants and two matching chairs with a small table where Alice’s parents probably rested their glasses of gin in the evenings. Mrs Layton had nothing to be embarrassed about on her veranda. But Mrs Layton had other things to be ashamed about.

  When Alice opened the door, Tilly made a face. ‘Sorry, I had to bring Ada.’

  If Alice cared, she didn’t show it. Alice was polite to everyone. She pulled them both inside cheerfully. Not only was the house in order but it was calm and cool, and once inside Ada forgot about the stifling heat outside.

  ‘Ada,’ Alice said. ‘You can do whatever you want. We have loads of puzzles. You could watch a movie.’

  ‘I’ll watch a movie,’ Ada said. She was too old for puzzles and felt insulted that Alice had suggested them, but a movie meant it wasn’t going to be too bad after all. Alice was the only person Ada knew who had a video player.

  Alice steered them both to the kitchen for cordial. Ada loved cordial. Martha didn’t believe in cordial because it was just sugar and colouring and artificial flavouring. She made them drink water. Sometimes she would buy a big bottle of Harcourt apple juice, but she got cross if everyone drank it straightaway and there was none left. But how could you not drink it if it was there? Alice’s father was at the kitchen table, which surprised Ada. Usually fathers were not home during the day, but then she remembered it was Sunday and her father was only out because he was playing tennis. Alice’s father was older than hers. His hair was already grey. He was reading the newspaper, but he looked up when they came in and then stood up immediately. He was like Alice, very polite.

  ‘Hello, Tilly. Is this your little sister?’

  ‘This is Ada,’ Alice answered for Tilly because Tilly was shy. ‘She’s going to watch a video.’

  Alice’s father smiled. He understood, Ada could tell, that she was being shuffled out of the way by everyone today.

  ‘A movie,’ he scoffed. ‘Why don’t you have a swim? Toby will go for a swim with you.’ Ada was so alarmed at the prospect of swimming with Toby that she accidentally smiled.

  ‘She doesn’t want to play with Toby, Dad, she wants to watch a movie,’ said Alice.

  ‘I see,’ he nodded his head and Ada felt he really did see, though what exactly he saw, she didn’t know. He turned to Tilly.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here, Tilly. I’ve got something for you. Wait a minute. I’ll get it.’

  Tilly looked alarmed, then embarrassed.

  ‘For me?’ she questioned, as if it couldn’t possibly be.

  But it was. He returned with a white plastic shopping bag and handed it to Tilly, explaining that he had thought of her when he saw it. Tilly pulled a record out of the bag. Keith Jarrett, The Köln Concert. On the cover there was a black-and-white photo of a man with dark air, his head hanging forward and his eyes closed, as if sleeping sitting up. Tilly stared at it apprehensively. She didn’t know who Keith Jarrett was, and neither did Ada.

  ‘He’s a jazz pianist and this is a famous concert—it was all improvised,’ Alice’s father explained. ‘I’ve heard you improvising here. Which is why I bought it for you. I thought it might be inspiring. But it’s a waste of your gift, I think, if you don’t have lessons. Tell your parents you should have lessons. Try Daisy Cavallo. She’s good.’

  Gift? He had said Tilly had a gift. Ada had never thought of Tilly as being good at anything. Their mother had always said Tilly was hopeless, and Tilly seemed to agree. She wasn’t top of the class, she wasn’t even a neat writer, she wasn’t good at drawing, and she never remembered jokes.

  It must have shocked Tilly when Mr Layton said she had a gift, because she just stood there and didn’t say a word. She stared at him and when her voice did finally come out (Ada was ashamed it took so long), she only said, ‘Thank you’, and she went red and looked down at the floor instead of looking at Mr Layton. But what Ada heard in Tilly’s voice was the choking sound that Ada knew was the cramming down of tears. Why would Tilly cry when she had just got a present? She should have been happy, but Tilly behaved like she had an internal pipe leak. Tilly wiped secretly at her eyes, while Alice tried to change the tone by saying that her dad was always getting presents for people, but he was right, Tilly should have lessons and Mr and Mrs Bloom should get their piano tuned properly.

  Afterwards, as they picked up their bikes, Ada asked Tilly about the record. Ada had watched To Kill a Mockingbird. Now she was feeling a bit sensitive and concerned, though she wasn’t sure what she was concerned about. Tilly had pulled the record out of her bag and was examining it.

  ‘Do you like your new record?’ Ada asked.

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’ve never heard of it before.’

  ‘It was nice of Mr Layton to give it to you, wasn’t it? Poor Mr Layton…’ Ada didn’t know how to continue. She didn’t want to think of Mrs Layton’s embarrassment and how Mr Layton would feel if he knew.

  Tilly gave a crooked smile.

  Ada persisted with a different thought. ‘Is the man who plays the piano a Negro?’

  ‘Negro? I guess so, why?’

  Ada didn’t answer. In the movie, they called a man a Negro and they put him in jail and killed him even though he didn’t hurt anybody. Ada couldn’t talk about it because she didn’t want to think about it.

  Tilly stuffed the record back in her bag just as she stuffed her thoughts back in her head. Ada could tell when Tilly was clammed up with thoughts. Tilly kicked her bike stand up.

  ‘Are you going to ask for piano lessons?’ Ada was determined to get at Tilly’s feelings, even though Tilly was not in a forthcoming mood.

  Tilly shrugged. ‘I don’t know. They won’t say yes. It will be too expensive.’

  ‘Ask Dad. He might.’

  ‘Dad…’ Tilly’s eyes rolled scathingly. She straddled her bike and showed with a little jerk of her head that she was ready to go.

  But Ada hadn’t quite got to where she wanted. ‘Why were you sad when you got the present?’

  Tilly didn’t look cross or surprised that Ada had noticed. She stared out over the town and sighed. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I think… Just because he was kind. To think he went out and thought about something for me.’ Her lip wobbled. It sounded as if she might cry again, but
instead she blew out a long breath and took off down the hill on her bike.

  Ada paused before following her. Was this possible? Can you really feel sad when someone is kind? She had felt a strange sort of sadness when the father of Scout in the movie (who was called Atticus but was really Gregory Peck) had sat on the porch with Scout, in a swinging chair, and tried to cheer her up. And when Scout had crawled into his arms, Ada’s heart had lurched as if it was she who had crawled in and felt the radiating warmth of the truth and goodness of Atticus Finch’s love and intention. And all at once she was so happy for Scout it made her want to cry and she had to jam her fists in her eyes to stop the tears rolling down.

  15

  Martha’s nerves were frayed. She wasn’t sleeping well, she never did in the heat, but this was worse. Sometimes she lay awake for hours. Mike’s breath came from the depths, while she twisted on the surface. Her back ached too, and she had other stabbing pains and tingling or numbness, which terrified her. Surely a deathly disease. The doctor told her it was her nerves. But what did a country GP know? She should see a specialist in Melbourne. And then there were the migraines. Martha dreaded them the most; the fear of a migraine could be enough to bring one on. She had to stop thinking so much. She was becoming anxious about her own anxiety.

  As soon as they had all left in the morning, she strained to make the most of her free time. She had to decide quickly what would be the best way to spend it so that she didn’t fritter it away doing housework. She would ignore the fridge, which needed a clean out. Instead, she would practise her relaxation exercises like the doctor told her to. She lay down grudgingly on the floor and bent her knees. She closed her eyes, wriggled her shoulders and waited for calm, but she instantly felt agitated. Even relaxing felt like another chore, another thing that had to be done. She was annoyed at it, just as she was annoyed at the fridge for getting messed up again, for being in the way of what she wanted to do: that unaccountable thing. She wanted to do something that would add up to more than a clean fridge, something inspired and consuming, something that was hers and that would count. It was always like this. Always, the creeping fear that a part of her was unlived, uninhabited, and that life’s grand tide had swept her far away from her true self. And that self she’d never even tried on, was snagged back in her past—a frayed and shrunken old skin that would no longer fit her even if she did find it. Should she waste her time looking? How would she find anything as lost to her as that in just an hour or two? The flies were making it impossible to relax. The heat too. The whole house was stuffy and as dark as a hole. She would pull up a blind at least.

  Martha stood up and began searching for the flyswat; it was that time of year when the small, sticky flies arrived in swarms. Their buzzing addled her; she was constantly swiping them from her body. She couldn’t hear herself think, let alone relax. She set herself upon the flies. Her neck hurt.

  What had gone was the expanse of possibility, the space of unlived potential, the feeling of being hurled through endless days like a bird goes at the sky, unburdened, hungry, oblivious and free. And now all that energy had collected its wild momentum and unrolled itself into the sedate, solid form of a weatherboard-enclosed family. She’d rushed to get here and now nothing more would happen; life would just plod on, achingly downwards. More worrying, more cleaning and more sleepless nights. A life inside a house. A small life.

  She could live that small life, if she’d only taken something with her from her youth, something like what Daisy Cavallo had. She envied Daisy even though Daisy was divorced and had that wild boy to rear on her own and was as ill-fitting in this country town as a black horse on a city street. Susie scathingly referred to her as ‘the whore on the hill’. She was convinced Joe fancied her. He probably did, but Joe would never act on any fancy; he was loyal for one thing, but also too morally upright, and he would pale in Daisy’s presence. Susie knew this, which was salt to the wound, and, perversely, she blamed Daisy for the infatuation. It wasn’t just Susie; other women didn’t like Daisy Cavallo either. ‘She’s aloof.’ ‘She doesn’t contribute to the school community.’ ‘She’s a terrible mother to that poor boy.’ It seemed that Debbie Rand, around whom similarly scandalous conjecture gathered, was Daisy’s only friend—the talk that followed them hovered above the Cavallos’ house where the barrage of opinion had hounded them into a friendship.

  Martha doubted these opinions affected Daisy. Unlike Martha, Daisy had a passion that was unequivocally hers, and it lifted her above the sting of disapproval or made her impervious to it. Because of her talent, a creative talent (Martha imagined her always singing), no one could touch it; upon no less-than-perfect husband did it depend. Daisy Cavallo hadn’t thrown all her eggs into the thinly woven basket that marriage had proved to be.

  It was at once a terrible possibility and a strange comfort for Martha to wonder if she hadn’t found her talent because she simply didn’t have one to find. Her heart shrank. She dropped the flyswat and wiped her finger over the dust on the top of the piano.

  But Daisy Cavallo was all alone; she should feel sorry for her. And think of Glenda, without even a child to love. And then there was Imogen. When they were children, Imogen had been everything to Martha. Imogen with her pale freckled face and blinking eyes, her large house and the older brothers making model boats on the back step. That was where Martha had been happy: studiously ignoring the taunts from the brothers, even though she secretly marvelled at the boats they made. She and Imogen had a club, which enclosed them in a world Martha’s mother couldn’t touch. Nor could the big brothers rubbish it, or their boat-building feats compete with it. There were special rites of entry into that world, secret ones. They were elaborate and always expanding: there were lines to avoid on the footpath and others to jump on. And the invisible creature who lived in a crack in a neighbour’s wooden fence, acknowledged, worshipped with violet petals, cocoons, loquat pods. Words had to be uttered in all solemnity or whispered in code. A very particular magic illuminated and circumscribed it all.

  What had become a vivid and enthralling game faded from their lives as they got older and turned to bottles of Lilydale Cider and dance classes with rows of boys in buttoned-up shirts. As soon as they left school, Imogen was instantly married. Martha did up the long line of cream cloth buttons on the back of Imogen’s wedding dress as they stood in her bedroom, the one they had grown up in, while Imogen giggled over a glass of champagne. Although it had once seemed impossible, their lives gradually separated. Imogen had two children, one with partial deafness. There were all the operations to fix it, and then later she divorced her husband. The children grew up and moved out, and Imogen went on a cruise, met a younger man and moved for a while to Argentina. And while Martha knew the basic plot of Imogen Ashton’s life—she’d even seen a photo of Luis the young boyfriend—whatever had been between them when they were at school had vanished. Martha’s life with Imogen was only something she remembered every now and then, like a house, a holiday, a season. Martha had put it down to Imogen’s light-heartedness, until her husband rang Martha and said Imogen was suicidal and had been hospitalised. Martha visited her, out of loyalty. Imogen had her own room. Her hair was pulled back and she sat in the bed in a pale-yellow nightgown as if she were ill, and Martha couldn’t tell what was wrong and neither could Imogen. ‘Are you happy in your marriage?’ Martha had asked. ‘It’s okay,’ said Imogen blankly. Her voice droned as if it wasn’t really her speaking but a recording of her. She didn’t once smile, even though Martha was there.

  Martha wept afterwards. Imogen never even remembered the visit. She later laughed when Martha mentioned it. Imogen had suddenly invited her for afternoon tea and explained that they had zapped it all out of her and put her on medication and now she was happy again. She gave a hearty, brutal sort of laugh. Her eyes blinked happily, closing out any elaboration of thought. She had made a passionfruit sponge for Martha’s visit, but she wouldn’t eat any of it, because she was dieting. Martha had pani
cked. She felt desperate to remind her how alive they had been.

  ‘But you remember sitting on my roof, don’t you? When we stole the vanilla ice-cream tub out of the freezer and ate it with our fingers, clawing it like little cats? And the sky looked like a wave that was about to crush us. And we tried to watch the stars appear. And there was the sense that we weren’t just girls sitting there, we were just as real as the stars and just as tiny and just as much a part of the universe. Don’t you want that feeling again?’

  Imogen gave a dead smile. They had zapped even this out of her. Martha clung to the memory of that feeling, as if Imogen’s loss of it imperiled everything, as if the root of all possible manifestations of that wholeness had been cut away—sizzled by Imogen’s electric smoke.

  Imogen said, ‘You know I hardly remember anything. I don’t even read anymore. But Janie does. She is reading all the time. It’s such a relief that she likes books. You always loved books, Martha. I remember that.’

  Martha didn’t want to remember, now. This was the problem with relaxation—in marched all the thoughts she had done so well to keep at bay. Better she accomplish something, feel the simple satisfaction of having cleaned out the fridge, turn her mind away from that creeping yearning. She was Martha Bloom, wife, mother, housekeeper and this was her life; she should step into it without resentment. But it was nothing; she’d achieved nothing. She didn’t even volunteer. She should clean out the fridge. No, she shouldn’t. She should make a pot of chamomile tea and write to Fiona in London, write a nice poetic whinge, which only Fiona would appreciate.

  But Martha didn’t do that. There was a ‘Yoo-hoo’ at the kitchen door. Susie Layton poked her head in.

  ‘Oh good, you’re home. It looked so quiet I thought everyone was out.’