The Last Summer of Ada Bloom

by Martine Murray

  ‘Do you mind waiting, please?’

  ‘No, I can’t wait, no.’ Martha’s voice choked.

  ‘All right. How can I help you?’ she soothed.

  ‘A fox attached me.’ A sob escaped her. ‘And I killed it.’

  28

  When Ada got home, Martha was lying on her back on the couch. She looked like someone who was dying. Ada tiptoed forward. Martha raised her head and gave a feeble smile. Ada leaned on the edge of the couch.

  ‘Have you got a migraine?’ Ada asked.

  Martha sat up and shook her head, raising her bandaged hand as an exhibit. ‘The fox attacked me. I have to go to the hospital. Anne Dresden is coming to pick me up.’

  ‘The fox that ate the chickens?’ Ada stared in disbelief. ‘Did it really bite you?’ Ada had never heard of a fox biting people.

  ‘Yes, and my foot. Look. And I killed it. I had to kneel on its throat to make it let go. I feel terrible.’

  ‘Oh, poor Mama!’ Ada was exuberant. This was something. It was alarming in the best way. The doom. The fox. The lurking feeling. And now an attack. Ada had to know the details.

  ‘How did it happen?’ she whispered as if this was the greatest secret of all. Martha told her. Ada’s hands flew to her mouth in horror. To think of the fox clamped on the end of her mother’s hand. Ada patted her mother’s good arm. She wouldn’t tell her what this really meant. Her mother was too ailing already. Instead she had to take charge.

  ‘Mama, I’m going to see the dead fox.’ Her mother recoiled.

  ‘I don’t want to see it. Can you get Ben or your father to bury it as soon as someone gets home? Anne should be here any minute.’

  Ada flew outside and ran to the pine tree. The dead fox lay on its side. A fly already buzzed around it. Her mother was right. It was dead. The fox wasn’t inside its body, just like socks sometimes don’t have feet in them. And now that it was dead, Ada was surprised that she didn’t hate the fox anymore. Because it was a poor thing—its eye white and rolled back, never to peep again, its body like a jumper that someone had thrown off and left by the tree to become damp and forgotten. ‘Poor fox,’ Ada whispered. It shouldn’t have tried to eat Martha. ‘Couldn’t you tell, little fox, that you were too small to eat a person? Couldn’t you tell?’ She had to say it twice, like you do when you talk to PJ, because animals can’t answer even if they are alive. What happened to its cunning? It was only a little animal. Did she want to touch it? Just to see what death felt like. Poor fox—dead as the chickens now.

  Ada reached towards it. She changed her mind and pulled her hand away quickly and hid it under her arm. She’d probably catch a disease—gangrene or leprosy, gruesome old diseases that rotted your limbs off. And to be fair, if Ada was dead, she wouldn’t want the fox to touch her. It was taking advantage.

  But she had to do something. Death was in the garden again. It would keep returning if Ada wasn’t careful. She went over the events in her mind. The fox had killed the chickens and her mother had killed the fox. Her mother would be next in turn. There was a pattern to things. Ada saw it everywhere. Spider webs, seasons, ocean waves, seedpods. Her mother would be the next to be killed. Ada stared hard at the dead fox. It had to be wiped away and removed from the garden. Perhaps Ada could even make it that the fox hadn’t died after all but had just run away.

  Ada knew exactly where the fox could be vanished forever—in the old windmill’s hole. Down at the very bottom. No one, not even the sun, would know. And then her mother would be safe.

  But how would she get it there? She didn’t want to carry a dead fox. She would have to drag it on the picnic blanket, which she went and found rolled up in the chest with the badminton and the tent and the totem tennis bats.

  She squatted down and took hold of the fox’s paws. What if it was pretending to be dead? She watched its face. Would it open its eye now to see who was holding its paw? Its face showed nothing. She dragged the fox onto the blanket. She was relieved there was no blood. No guts or sticking-out bones. Nowhere for things like diseases or curses to come out. But still, poor fox. Poor chickens. Poor Elmer with no eyes. Poor PJ, because he was old too. Ada’s heart grew bigger in her chest to fit them all in. She frowned for a moment and waited, in case she would cry. But she didn’t. She wrapped the dead fox in a bundle and lifted it up. She had never carried a dead animal before. Did you hold something dead in the same way you would hold an alive one?

  She hadn’t got to the gate before Tilly arrived.

  Tilly frowned. ‘Ada, what have you got?’

  ‘A dead fox. I thought you had a piano lesson.’ Ada stood still. Should she tell Tilly? If only Tilly hadn’t grown up so much lately, she would understand and they could do it together, but now Ada couldn’t be sure whose side Tilly would be on.

  ‘Where did it come from? How did it die?’ Tilly faced the sun and put her hand up to shield her eyes. She wore jeans shorts. She looked like she was going to the beach. She wasn’t dressed for a death mission.

  ‘Mum killed it, because it was biting her. She crushed its throat.’

  Tilly rubbed her face. She was astonished. ‘Mum killed it? I can’t imagine Mum killing a fox.’

  Ada didn’t respond, and she hoped Tilly wouldn’t ask any questions so that she wouldn’t have to decide whether to let Tilly in on the problem with death. This could be the last chance for Tilly to join in with the meaningfulness of life. Tilly was cutting herself off from death and life and foxes. She wouldn’t understand how the fox was a part of everything. It would be better if Ada told her something that would keep death’s doom out of it.

  ‘Can you help me take it to the windmill? Mum doesn’t want to see it. She’s going to the hospital and now she has a migraine and bandages on her hand.’

  Ada was pleased with this account of events. It had skipped over the meaning of everything and just made it facts. Tilly was still trying to understand how it could have happened and because she was stunned, she just naturally took the fox from Ada.

  Ada was pleased—now not only did she have a mission but she had her old accomplice, and this was exactly how she liked life to be, with secret purpose and great meaningfulness—and with Tilly. All these things added up to great happiness.

  But it didn’t stay like that. Once they got out the gates and turned to head up towards the bush, there came a shout. It was from Ben and he was with Raff Cavallo, and though Ben sometimes did come home with Raff it was different this time because Ada knew Tilly had danced with Raff. She glanced quickly at Tilly to see if she still looked at Raff as if he was a criminal or if she now looked at him as if he was a dancer who knew tenderness and listening.

  ‘What have you got?’ Ben shouted out.

  Tilly stopped. She looked at them. Her face was gentle and shy. She was hiding something—there was an artfulness behind her expression that only Ada knew. And she wasn’t looking at Raff Cavallo as if he was a criminal.

  Ada was cross. She shouted back. She was at least going to be the first to tell. No one knew it like she did. ‘A dead fox,’ she said with pointed drama. She wanted to keep going. She was afraid that Tilly would leave the mission and that Raff would look at Tilly in a different way too and that these differences were exactly what was straining everything. They excluded her in a dreadful way and just the fact of them was pulling Tilly away, just when Ada had brought her back in.

  Raff Cavallo stepped forward. ‘Shall I carry it for you?’ He smiled at Tilly. He asked Tilly, not Ada. He looked directly at her and held out his hands, and Tilly gave him the dead fox in the blanket even though it belonged to Ada and even though Tilly could have carried it herself. Something passed between Tilly and Raff, something more than the fox, and it looked like they both knew it. Tilly went red.

  Ben, at least, was as appalled as Ada. He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself, mate. I’m going inside. Too hot out here.’

  Ada called out to Ben, ‘Well, don’t tell Mum. I’m telling her the fox didn’t die and it ran away.
Because she feels terrible about killing it.’

  Ben nodded. He didn’t care about dead foxes.

  The fox had been passed from Ada to Tilly and now from Tilly to Raff, and Raff carried it in his arms as if it was a baby, which made him look suddenly like a grown-up man. Tilly walked beside him. She was alert and brimming and skipping along on her long legs as if she was a deer, beautiful and frightened of everything. Ada had lost her completely. Nothing could be crueller. Ada wanted to run up and hit Tilly and make her stop it but instead she put her head down and forgot even to look at the trees. She was lonely and sad and whatever the other two said to each other just sounded like faraway music that wasn’t playing for her.

  The old windmill didn’t look the same as it had when Ada first discovered it. It didn’t look like anything except a windmill. Ada knew it was because Tilly and Raff were there too and the old windmill was hiding its true self from them, just like the trees were. The three of them stood there and Raff held the fox, and no one said anything for a moment.

  ‘Do you know there is a wallaby around here and her name is Emily Dickinson?’ Ada said suddenly.

  Tilly looked at her as if she was just a kid.

  Ada continued, undeterred. ‘You know, I found the old windmill.’ This was directed at Raff.

  ‘Ada makes friends with the trees here. She has names for them. This is her patch of bush,’ Tilly explained. Ada didn’t need it to be explained. Explaining it was ruining it.

  Raff smiled. ‘When I was your age, I had this place, a vacant block that’s been built on now. It was all overgrown and there was this tree that had fallen down and it was covered in ivy. I called it the Ivy Palace. Because it was like a throne. I used to go there and feel like I was a king.’

  You are a king, thought Ada with a deep breath. Did Tilly even notice he had said that? Tilly stood still staring at the hole. The sun flared and made her look like magic had struck her.

  Raff watched her for a moment. ‘What shall I do with the fox then?’ he said squatting down at the edge of the hole.

  Tilly turned to Ada. ‘Should we just drop it down?’

  ‘First we should think nice things for it.’

  ‘It didn’t think nice things about the chickens when it killed them,’ Tilly said.

  ‘I bet it did. I bet it licked its chops,’ Raff said.

  Tilly smiled at him. Again, something passed between them, a secret understanding, and it made Tilly look sly and beautiful in a way that Ada didn’t like.

  ‘You know why this hole is so awful?’ Tilly said, turning back to the hole. ‘Because you can’t see where it goes. So it makes you wonder.’

  ‘It’s Wonderland!’ Raff said.

  Tilly smiled as if only she could understand what he meant. ‘I doubt there’s any rabbits down there.’

  Ada knew they were talking about Alice in Wonderland and she wanted to prove it. Tilly was still wrong about the hole.

  ‘It’s not that type of hole. I went in it.’

  ‘We know. We’re just saying how a hole is like—it’s like something unknown, and what we don’t know we imagine instead.’

  We? Tilly had said we as if she was speaking for him as well, as if they were having one thought together and Ada was having her thought alone and differently. How did Tilly know if Raff was thinking what she was thinking or if he was thinking what Ada was thinking—that the hole was a hole of doom. She looked at Raff. He was squatting at the edge of the hole. The bundle of dead fox was at his feet. He looked straight back and grinned. His eyes were still the eyes of a villain. Shining with plans. Ada couldn’t tell what they were though.

  ‘Let’s drop the fox into the hole,’ she said. This was her plan after all.

  He nodded and picked it up. ‘Then Tilly will know what’s down the hole and she won’t have to imagine things anymore.’

  Tilly said, ‘But I’m not looking.’ And she turned her back.

  Ada was glad. That left her and Raff to be the important ones together.

  She gave Raff a grave nod to go ahead and he took the poor limp fox out of the blanket and lowered it in the hole. Tilly didn’t even turn to see it. She even put her hands over eyes, just like Martha would have. Ada and Raff leaned over and watched it fall into the darkness, but they still didn’t hear it land.

  29

  Susie Layton had rung Mike at home. She said Joe was out for the whole day. He had a job in Elphinstone.

  ‘Can you take an hour off? Come here?’

  There was the deep, breathy voice, the throaty giggle and the well-worn line. It was all so calculatedly cheap, but that was what got him. She turned him into a player. They’d never done anything at her house. This was a riskier transgression. He looked at his watch, pretending to himself that he was considering.

  ‘I’ll come now,’ he said. After all it looked like Martha had a migraine coming on. It was better he leave the house.

  As he drove he wondered whether he would tell Susie that Ada had seen them and that Tilly knew. If he did, he would do it afterwards. It would ruin the mood if he did it before. But afterwards…Afterwards was already becoming complicated. Susie had started to linger, snuggling up to him and talking about things. He hadn’t wanted to hear why she married Joe (because she was desperate to have a child), how Joe had problems sexually, how he loved her, though, how he would do anything to please her, how he still read stories to Toby at night, and how her own father had died suddenly and she still hadn’t really recovered. It wasn’t that her stories bothered him, it was just that he wasn’t interested in knowing her in that way. He didn’t want to become close. He never asked her anything, yet she spilled herself all over him, showing him a woman, just like Martha was a woman, a woman whose body was exposed and lying beside him on a hotel bed, in the late afternoon. The instant she nestled her head onto his chest and spoke of love, she weighed a tonne. He wanted to fling her off before she buried him. He didn’t want her love; he wanted her hunger for him. No, it was better he tell her nothing about Ada and Tilly knowing. Better that he not encourage this sharing of confidences. As it was, she would be exactly as he liked her: she would sweep him up, pounce on him as soon as he walked in, lead him where he wanted to go. He imagined what she’d be wearing. She would have prepared herself. His mind happily succumbed to a stampede of possible scenarios…

  He drove fast. Something of the hunger of his youth, the sense of anticipation, seized him. But it wasn’t the same; it was dirtier. When he was young, everything was explosive and ardent and dream-like. That’s how it had felt when he met Martha.

  But Arnold Buch had ruined that night. And Mike had fled from it for good reason. Arnold had broken every rule. Those rules had the rigour of a sport; they were played on a field with boundaries marked with fat white lines. Mike should have seen it coming. But it was so fluid between them with their complementary tactics, that Mike hadn’t noticed the shifting terms. Had Arnold? Had it been part of a master plan from the beginning or was it just the culmination of the night’s lawlessness? And then afterwards, Mike cut him off. He’d had to. Even now he flinched at the memory of it.

  Martha had been asleep on the bed. He and Arnold were drinking. They sat at the window. Mike lounged back in the old armchair, half dazed and sodden while Arnold perched feverishly on a bedside table, issuing wild observations, which became more incoherent and passionate the drunker he became. He lapsed occasionally into moments of absorbed quiet from which welled the sound of the ocean as it shifted its great bulk on the world’s surface. Finally, Arnold began reciting poetry. Mike closed his eyes, bored.

  Arnold had demanded he listen. He had claimed that if Mike did not listen to poetry then he did not have a soul.

  Mike didn’t understand poetry, not even when he was drunk, and he had no intention of listening. All he understood was that Arnold was making some sort of criticism of his nature. If he did have a soul, and Mike didn’t even believe in such things, it was a utilitarian one, and he liked it that wa
y. The words still sailed over him, like the sound of the sea and the salt wind that came off it.

  When Mike’s eyes opened, Arnold was bent over him. His face, through the darkness, showed an unfamiliar expression of pain or, thinking about it now, maybe it was ardour. Mike began to sit up properly, but Arnold seized his face and, with unrestrained fervour, kissed him on the mouth.

  Mike’s mind twisted at the memory of it. It can’t have been his fault. Had he loosened his grip on himself? Arnold’s speech had swum over him, like a story he wasn’t really paying attention to. In fact he had been in his own sort of pleasant swoon for Martha. But Arnold’s mouth crushed against his before his mind could even register what was happening. He had been ambushed. And he was pissed. It took him a moment to pull himself back together and when he did, he pushed Arnold off him, of course. He should have done it sooner. Not submitted, like a girl.

  Arnold stumbled and fell. Mike got up—not to help Arnold, but to get away. He’d shouted at him, called him a homo. Martha stirred on the bed but didn’t wake. They’d both stared at her. She was a woman, not a part of this, but the point on which everything pivoted.

  Arnold had begun again on his damn poem, as if life would go on as it was before, and night would raise its curtain on a new day, clean as the baker’s truck.

  Mike saw it all then. Arnold Buch was soft and mad and queer. Their whole friendship turned on its side, twisted and gaped open, the past lifted like flesh from a bone. Mike turned away from it. He was disgusted. He had kissed a man. The night sky leered, stars mocked. Everything he had known to be true jeered at him with the maniacal persistence of Arnold Buch’s poem. He didn’t know what else to do but to get out as fast as he could.

  And from there his life sped away, on the run from such sinister uncertainty. When he and Martha managed their own courtship and then headed straight down the Calder Highway, right back to the plain country, back to the heartland of the goldmines, it was because he was still running. Martha’s pregnancy brought the sobering necessities of marriage and a job. He had rung an old mate whose father managed the Wattle Gully goldmine. And they were back there, in the first wave of new residents to the old towns. Most of the others were ‘earthenware’ to him: ceramicists or beekeepers, long-haired people in overalls who built mudbrick houses and grew their own vegetables. But Martha was happy; she had a new baby and her own house. She made friends with the hippies, even if Mike never would. Mike was as suspicious of hippies as he was of homosexuals. Ever since Arnold’s kiss, everything he did—his marriage, his work, his self-assurance—built his case: he was not a homosexual. He had proved it over and over. When Mike heard that Arnold Buch was going overseas, he had been relieved. It would end the story and the threat within it.