She took a deep breath before picking up the receiver. ‘Hello?’
‘It’s Mum. How are you?’ Her mother’s voice was as far away as a star she couldn’t see anymore.
‘I’m all right, thanks.’
‘That’s good.’ A pause. ‘How is university?’
‘It’s okay.’ Tilly lied. She was skipping lectures. ‘How is PJ?’
‘He’s the same.’ Martha sounded sad. ‘How is your house?’ she said.
‘Good.’ Why should she offer her new life for her mother to examine? Tilly held it all in like a child hiding an unfinished drawing from her mocking sibling’s eyes.
‘Well, who does the cooking?’
‘No one cooks much. Sometimes Frank makes pasta. How is everyone at home?’
Another pause.
‘Ada isn’t well, actually. I mean it’s nothing serious. But it just seems to be going on longer than it should.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘Oh, she’s just not herself. We thought it would cheer her up to see you.’
So that was why she was calling. Ada needed her. Now they would see that she was a good person after all. ‘So do you want me to come?’
‘Yes, would you?’ Her mother’s voice broke into a childish plaintiveness. Was she about to cry?
‘When?’
‘Just when you can.’ There was a long sigh.
‘Wednesday?’
‘Okay, let me know what train you’ll be on. I’ll pick you up.’
Tilly padded back up the hall. No doubt Vince had been listening. She walked quickly past his room. She went out into the back garden. No one looked after it. The poor garden. There were crimson flowers with yellow-button centres, but you could hardly see them for all the long grass. Tilly began to tug at the weeds. She thought of her mother’s small voice, without its whip edge. She thought of Ada.
She caught the early train on Wednesday. She didn’t phone to say which train. She wanted to surprise Ada. She had used the newspaper to wrap up a parcel of things: a bottle of bubble bath, a sea urchin shell, and some Hubbabubba bubblegum. She had to work out how to tell it all to Ada, how to break it up into the sort of moments that Ada would like to hear. It was exciting to tell Ada. Telling Ada was what she always did. She would say, ‘Guess what?’ Ada would say, ‘What?’
She would say, ‘At work I can eat as much spaghetti Bolognese as I want. They throw out buttered white bread rolls and leftover cakes. Straight in the bin.’
Ada’s eyes would pop with envy.
‘And outside there are people asking for money to buy food. Really. This is the city.’
Ada would be solemn.
‘And in my share house, my room is half the size of ours.’
Of ours? It was Ada’s now.
‘And my window looks onto a fence and I bought a blue cupboard and a second-hand dress with a ruffled collar like a clown. You’d like it. It makes me look like royalty. Don’t tell Mum, she’d hate it. The park is full of people walking dogs. I miss PJ!’
It was true, the thought of PJ. His fat waddling form. His obliging face. His unerring love. If only people could love like that.
‘I went to the Crystal Ballroom. I wore eyeliner. Everyone there wore black. There was a band. We drank a drink that looked like the sunset. Then I danced till morning. There is no one to tell you when to go home. Imagine.’
Ada would grin.
‘And I played table soccer in a pub.’
‘Who won?’ Ada would ask.
‘I did,’ Tilly would say.
Did it sound true? She couldn’t lie to Ada. Ada would be excited to think of a boyfriend, especially if it was Raff. Raff was her first false dream.
It was so early when she got there, the town was still sleeping; its wide streets were empty and there was only the dimly lit bakery and the smells of baking bread. The morning was hers. The town’s bones were bare. She walked up the middle of the road just because she could. There was the church in golden sandstone, with clambering piles of shrub and winding paths, all leading upwards.
Something had shifted for her in that church at Mr Layton’s funeral. Or perhaps it hadn’t, perhaps it was just the solemnity of the occasion made life so luminous and fleeting that she had wanted to align herself with its mystery, with its light pouring through the high windows and slanting down across the bowed heads and the backs of the people, as if holding them in joint reverence.
The limits of her world crammed beneath that beam of light at the funeral of Joe Layton. What had struck her was the way those lives were so entangled, so caught in the threads of other lives, so that they moved not by their own impulse but by imperceptible communal patterns. It was what steered everything forward. But it suffocated too. It pressed her into the shape the world wanted of her. Joe Layton’s body lay in the coffin—the whole effort of a life, all its labour and goodness thrown down a hole. Didn’t it waste that sort of sanctity, that effort?
She had experienced a sudden social claustrophobia and had had to get clear of everyone. That was when she saw Daisy. She was stealing away. Tilly watched her. A solitary woman, pulling a sunhat over her as she moved into the distance with an uneven, faltering step. It seemed to Tilly that Daisy was not walking musically but was stumbling, while the hat was failing to protect her. Even someone as spontaneous as Daisy wasn’t inured to sadness.
And then Alice went away. She missed Alice more than she could have realised. For her the town was just a place full of vanished hopes and hurts. All that had to stay behind her now.
There was the old house sitting on the hill, as if guarding her old life. PJ came towards her. His whole body wriggled. She knelt down to him. ‘Oh, PJ,’ she said. ‘Old PJ.’ His silent, steady love, unquestioning as a worn old sock waiting in the drawer. He was the heartbeat of the old house.
PJ had come from the pound, already with his name and no one knew what it stood for. Ben said it was short for Peter Jackson cigarettes. But Ada said it was short for pyjamas, and Tilly believed her.
Tilly went to the kitchen door. She pushed it open. Everyone was still asleep. She crept quietly down the hall to her old room. Ada turned in the bed. A smile broke across her sleep-squished face and then her eyes welled with tears. Tilly laughed, and she hopped on the bed and gave her a kiss.
‘Don’t cry, Snug. I’m home.’
‘But did Mum say you could come?’ Ada sat up and wiped her eyes.
‘Yes, she rang me. She said you were sick. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Did Mum say I might die?’ Ada looked eagerly at Tilly.
‘No, of course not. She said you hadn’t gone back to school, though.’
Ada caught Tilly’s wrist and tugged it insistently. ‘Well, I might die. You never know.’
‘Look what I got you.’ Tilly pulled the parcel out of her bag and pushed it into Ada’s hands. Ada held it on her lap thoughtfully. Her lip trembled.
‘I thought you were never coming back again.’
Tilly took Ada’s hands and began pulling the clench out of them.
‘Well, even if Mum had said no, I still would have come back to see you.’ It was a paltry offering, she knew—had she even thought of visiting Ada? She had been too busy living her new life. Maybe Martha was right. She was selfish. She squeezed the soft little hands, urging her presence into them. Ada wasn’t selfish.
‘Why can’t I live with you in Melbourne?’ Ada said.
‘Mum wouldn’t let you. I can’t even cook. And what about PJ? He would be so miserable without you—’
‘You don’t want me to come!’ Ada drew her hands back.
‘It’s not your time yet, you’re still a kid.’ Tilly groped for something reasonable. ‘Remember Evie and her little dog, the one that can’t see?’
‘Elmer,’ Ada said.
‘I’m like Elmer. I’m just bumping along, trying to find a way. I need to find my way before I can show you anything.’
Ada shook her head and w
hispered, ‘Evie already knows the way—she just lets Elmer think he is leading because it makes him feel important.’
‘That’s what I mean. You have to let me feel important for a while and find my own way.’
There was a moment of quiet. Tilly had lost something that Ada still had. Ada was still herself.
Ada eyed the parcel on her lap. Slowly she began to open it. She laid out the things one by one. She lifted the bubble bath to her nose and felt the prickly surface of the anemone shell. Her movements were deliberate, circumspect. It was unsettling. Where was the old Ada who rushed headlong into everything? She was like someone trying to create an answer by adding one thing to another. As if the substance of things could hold out against the falling away of beliefs. Poor Ada—too young and true to ignore the changes that upturned the long-lived silent direction of the heart.
Tilly wanted to hold her close, to be submerged again in the familiarity, the warm drowsy breath of childhood, of all that had passed, and all that had stayed, still caught in the gaps between them. Right there between her and Ada and the large trees that leaned in the sky towards them.
Ada took all the presents and put them on the floor. She began to cry.
‘Now, move over. Don’t you want to hear about my new house? And how I went out dancing?’
‘All right,’ Ada conceded solemnly and wriggled down into the bed.
Tilly meant to sound strong and safe and tidying up everything, but she didn’t sound like that at all. She curled up behind Ada and pulled her in close, breathing in their half-lived lives.
‘You be little spoon,’ she whispered.
49
Ada and PJ went together to the burnt patch of bush. PJ plodded, and Ada didn’t go too fast either, since she had a wheelbarrow and the seven seedlings she had grown from the seeds she salvaged there. It was time to plant them. She wanted to communicate this all to William Blake, who had survived the fire in part, which is why she stood for a moment there, showing off the seedlings. There were tiny smoke-blue shoots climbing his branches.
Now that the canopy was gone, Ada could see the fullness of sky everywhere. She could see the hills behind and if she stood up she could even see the glint of a tin roof that was the Laytons’ old house. She still thought of it as Toby and Alice’s house, even though it now belonged to people Ada didn’t even know. No matter how Ada looked back at the summer, she couldn’t help feeling that something had reared up, a sort of force that came right up out of the earth and flung everything off balance. She partly blamed the old windmill, since it had stood like a sentinel at the beginning and end of everything. It had jangled loudly with a satisfied sense of portent and gloom, and now it was as silent as the air. What had come up must have come out of the old windmill’s hole and gone back inside it too. It had dragged the truth so far inside that no one could see it anymore. Bones had filled the hole; the hushed, gone-away bones of the past. The withholding of things had gone against the telling of things, and the clash of telling and not telling unleashed a violence, as pressing and as mighty as the sun. Only Ada had the memory of it now, a secret stamped on her.
Summer, when it went, took the hot whiff of sky and the stench of secrets with it, but something had sunk so deep within her that it had transformed itself, like far away bones and burned trees, into the strange and careless agitation of her soul.
Ada stared up into the burgeoning new shoots of William Blake and began to sing him, her travelling-along song, Did you ever come to meet me, Farmer Joe, Farmer Joe. She stomped out a circle to help her decide where she would dig the holes. PJ lay down in the shade and watched her with one eye. After a while she tired of her one line of song over and over again and wished she could remember how it went on. That was what she wanted to think about. Not the way the summer had gone.
There was no reason why time, instead of stopping, could not also go round in circles like she was. Like the sun did. And the moon. And PJ, when he was about to lie down. If time kept always marching away from you, then you had to run after it and keep up or you would be left behind like that old deathly windmill, rotting over the hole. Ada didn’t want to be nothing.
The way she saw it, the new Ada Bloom was beginning. Her trees were beginning too. William Blake was regrowing. There would be a new forest to go along in. Time would not run away from her there.
She straightened up and began to skip. What she needed most of all was a new travelling-along song. Soon she would be in double figures. All she had to do to keep going was just do what she had done to get there already. Tilly had sent her a card with a painting on the front that was just colours, like pools of water, bleeding into each other. Like time slipping from one moment to another. Ada would tell Tilly that was what it was on the telephone. In the meantime she would look after her trees, she would pat them down in their holes and she would bring them water. And she would warn William Blake that she would now also be reading novels.
PJ lay and watched, though sometimes he closed his eyes and kept one ear open instead.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, Varuna Writers’ House, for two weeks of unimpeded time. And Rachel Power for reading a draft and offering valuable insights and encouragement. For other versions of support, thank you, Liam Wratten, Anna Read and Sally Rippin. And many thanks, Jane Pearson, for your work in lifting this up.
Martine Murray was born in Melbourne, and now lives in Castlemaine. Her much-loved books for children and young adults have been published internationally and translated into several languages. The Last Summer of Ada Bloom is her first novel for adults.
martinemurray.com
textpublishing.com.au
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
Text copyright © Martine Murray 2018.
The moral right of Martine Murray to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published by The Text Publishing Company 2018.
Cover design by Lisa White
Cover photograph by Mark Owen / Trevillion Images
Page design by Imogen Stubbs
Typeset by J&M Typesetters
ISBN: 9781925498714 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925410938 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
The Last Summer of Ada Bloom Page 22