‘He was a bigger freak than we all thought, that’s what,’ Arch said and he bent back over the rack to pull off another comic.
It was then that I noticed. There was a big clump of his hair missing, right on the top of his head. He had a bald spot, glaring white, the vague outline of the bone prominent beneath. I must have gasped because Arch looked back at me. He gave a rueful sort of smile, tenderly touching where his hair should have been. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The Freak had a secret side to him.’
‘Did he do that?’ I gasped.
Arch shook his head. ‘No, he didn’t do that but he did something far worse.’
Now I wanted Arch to stop. He knew somehow. He knew what Roy had done to Dante. But it was too late to stop him. Arch began talking quickly, impulsively. ‘He started that fire up behind our place. I found a box of matches in his pocket along with a packet of his mum’s smokes. An’ when I asked him about it, he just laughed. This real evil laugh. He started that fire alright but no one will believe me.’
I nodded my head. I believed him. I felt too sick to speak but Arch didn’t need any encouragement to keep talking.
‘I told my father an’ he went over to Schluters swearing blue murder, accusing the Freak of ruining all our hill country. Schluter got all stroppy. I could hear them from half a mile away swearing at each other. Anyway Dad came back in an even fouler temper. Schluter quit on him. Refused to work another day. Dad was livid. The hay was cut, ready to bale. He needed him. So he took it out on me. Said it was my fault he’d lost his worker when he needed him most. Said I’d made that story up and deserved a thrashing.’
Arch lifted up his shirt. There were thick welts all over his torso. ‘He set to with a dog collar. Beat me with it. Beat me till my hair came away in his hand. That’s how he was holding me. By the hair.’
I shuddered.
‘But the pain wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was looking up and seeing the Freak, standing off a ways. Watching. You know, I wasn’t sure about the fire till then. It was just a hunch. But seeing the Freak and the look on his face, so … gloating, I knew, just as if he’d admitted it aloud. It was written all over his face. He hated us. Hated me. Hated my family. I knew he was capable of anything.’
‘Did you tell your father … ?’
‘I don’t talk to him no more. I won’t talk to him till he apologises. Though I reckon he don’t even remember half of what he did. Oh he knows he hit me but he was still half blind from the night before. The big party we had at our place after they put the fire out. It was still going on when the sun came up.’
We said nothing for a few moments. ‘Wish I was going away to boarding school like you next year. Wish I could go early,’ said Arch wistfully.
I wanted to tell Arch what else Roy had done though I knew I mustn’t. I stood there hesitating, unable to think of anything to say that could provide comfort. In the end, I said nothing, but picked up a comic myself and we stood there side by side at the counter, reading, until Mrs Sampson appeared in the doorway, calling Arch away, refusing his entreaties to buy him a comic. I put the comic back. In truth I hadn’t read a word of it.
It never occurred to me at the time. It was only years later, as many as five years later, that it dawned on me, the obvious explanation for Roy’s behaviour. I hadn’t thought of Roy in a long time. It was what I discovered at the very bottom of the freezer that reminded me. It was the very last bag of Dante.
Ice had claimed the bag. That was why it was still there. It was frozen to the side of the freezer and no one had bothered to dislodge it. Being the dog tucker freezer, no one had bothered to defrost it either. I had to chip away at the ice with a spade to free it. I had no other choice. There was no other dog tucker left. My father had done his back in and couldn’t kill a sheep for the house let alone the dogs. I knew he was secretly pleased by those circumstances. He hoped he might pressure me into making the kill for him, something I had refused to do for years.
Finally, after much careful chipping, I was able to pull the bag free. I heaved it over my shoulder and carried it to the killing shed to thaw. It all came flooding back to me. That night when Dante was slain and for some reason those words of Aunt Evelyn’s, the theory she had concocted, she did it for love. That sentence rolled through my consciousness like a wave, building in connotation and portent until it broke upon me, the startling possibility, that perhaps Aunt Evelyn hadn’t been entirely wrong, merely attributed the motive to the wrong person.
Perhaps Roy had done it for love.
It was such a staggering thought that I lost my grip on the sack I was carrying. Had Roy loved me? It was ridiculous. I had been such a sight at that age. It was hard to imagine anyone falling in love with me, fat and bespectacled as I was then. I picked up the sack and continued on to the killing shed. But once the notion had entered my head, it was impossible to dismiss it. The more I thought about it, the more possible it began to seem. We had done intimate things to one another. We had kissed, caressed, made each other come. We had done what we knew people in love were supposed to do. We were so young. Perhaps Roy assumed that to do such things meant we were in love and that I loved him back. He was so lonely, so reviled. Perhaps he was desperate enough to fall in love with someone as unattractive as myself. Perhaps looks were unimportant to him or perhaps he managed to see me the way I saw myself, through the haze of a childhood fantasy, beautiful like Judy.
I had stopped walking, absorbed in my thoughts, the sack of meat was burning cold fire into my back. But I deserved the pain. Whether Roy had loved me or not was likely to remain unknown. What was undeniable was that I had treated him cruelly.
6
Chapter 6
My parents were particularly insistent that we should spend a lot of time rehearsing for our Christmas Eve concert that year. My father even gave us time out from the hay-making which was unheard of. It didn’t take a genius to work out why. They thought our rehearsals were a wonderful distraction from that night.
Our concert was something we’d been doing since we were very young. We always entertained our parents and Grampy the night before Christmas. It had developed over the years from a few Christmas carols on the veranda to plays that l devised and which tended to lack any Christmas theme whatsoever. This was a deficiency Aunt Evelyn could never tolerate.
Aunt Evelyn always tried to take over our concerts. She had guided us through our early efforts and despite our obvious reluctance with every passing year for her ‘direction’, showed no sign of relinquishing her role. She insisted on attending our rehearsals, changing everything around and incorporating Christmas carols somewhere in the show. ‘It’s topical,’ she would say, though we all knew the reason they had to be included was because she liked joining in from the audience.
Even if our play was set in outer space, where time had no meaning and Christmas was unheard of, Aunt Evelyn would insist that ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ must be the finale of the show. It was her favourite carol, as it demanded all those glorious high notes that she loved to linger over.
With our parents being so supportive of our show, we enlisted my mother’s help in getting rid of Aunt Evelyn. We outlined an ultimatum. The show would only go ahead if Aunt Evelyn bowed out.
My mother did it as gently as possible. She said we wanted the show to be a surprise for Aunt Evelyn. She then went on to suggest that Aunt Evelyn’s contralto was desperately needed to strengthen the golf club ladies in their annual excursion to Glenora Hospital where they sang carols to the patients. Aunt Evelyn, always the actress, accepted this rebuff gracefully and the only clue to her state of mind was the thoroughness with which she began to tidy Lou’s bedroom. ‘She’s searching for our script,’ said Lou.
We didn’t have one. Without Aunt Evelyn around to insist on things being done properly, we dispensed with such niceties. Our performance was going to be more free form and contemporary yet still retain the all important ‘topicality’. It was inevitable that the rec
ent events, arguably the most sensational ever to have occurred in Mawera, would influence us in our choice of a suitable drama. We had decided to re-enact the slaughter of Dante.
The casting of the roles caused considerable dissension. Everybody wanted to be Jamie and no one wanted to be my father. In the end, we had to dispense with my father as a character. No one could recreate the awful noise he had made that night. I eventually agreed to Lou being Jamie, but only after she’d created a wonderful wig out of baling twine and sprayed it black with aerosol sheep raddle. I would be the villain of the piece. Belinda Pepper.
We practised our play behind the henhouse and tied one of the dogs by the corner to warn us in case Aunt Evelyn should come prowling about. Within a week we were ready to perform it. Invitations were issued and Uncle Arthur, Aunt Evelyn and Grampy came up for dinner on the night of the show. After dinner, the adults all took their chairs outside and lined them up on the lawn opposite the back veranda. This was the traditional venue for our concerts. The veranda was raised up from the lawn and we always waited for the sun to go down, then turned the veranda light on, so that it gave more of a theatrical atmosphere to the evening. We also charged an admission of fifty cents for the same reason. It just made things so much more authentic and professional.
The play was entitled Belinda Pepper: She Did it for Love. It was Babe’s job to walk out on stage, announce the title and then launch into her opening line after the applause subsided. She was bewildered when she announced the title and the audience failed to clap. She stood there waiting and waiting, despite our urgent whispers to continue regardless. Finally, she sidled off the stage. ‘Why didn’t they clap?’ she asked.
It wasn’t a promising beginning. Lou pushed her back onto the stage and I strode on after her. I sat down on the bale of hay which was centre stage and began to twirl strands of my long black hair round my fingers. Babe kept glancing between me and the audience, wondering if she might still be greeted with the applause she’d been denied. The audience remained implacably silent. She stood there biting her lip, her line forgotten. I jumped forward to my first speech.
BELINDA: Rodney. Rodney darling. Climb up the haystack and let me ply you with kisses.
Babe stared at me angrily. She had been cheated out of one of the few lines she had to utter.
BELINDA: Climb up my hair. The knots and tugs in it will serve as your steps.
From offstage, Lou began to quack. She was the sound effects. In between quacks she hissed at Babe to climb the haystack. Babe approached the hay bale and I twirled my pigtail at her provocatively. She failed to seize it as she was supposed to. She was sulking over her lost line. I yanked her up onto the top of the hay bale and grabbed her in a fierce embrace. I would have liked to strangle her for being so useless. Lou erupted into a frenzy of quacking and I gave Babe a push (rather harder than necessary) off the hay bale. She fell to the floor and writhed about, her moans much more convincing than they’d ever been in rehearsal.
BELINDA: Sorry Rodney. I could never be your nursemaid. I want a career in fashion.
Lou entered wearing a red cross armband and the two of us transferred Babe onto the hay bale and bore her off the stage. I re-entered.
BELINDA: I’m so bored in my new job already. I wish this shop had a menswear department.
Enter Lou as Jamie, wearing some clothes of his that we’d borrowed off the clothes line. There was an exclamation of recognition from the audience.
BELINDA: Hello sir. Can I help you?
JAMIE: I hope so.
BELINDA: What do you want?
JAMIE: You.
Belinda squealed with delight and ran from the stage with Jamie in pursuit.
Babe was sulking and refused to help me with my first costume change. Into swimwear. We’d cut up one of my old singlets, painted it and a pair of my jockeys brown, and then dabbed yellow dots all over the top of that. I hadn’t been too keen on wearing this bikini and revealing so much of myself in front of an audience, especially Jamie, but Lou insisted it was vital to the drama. When I did actually put the costume on for the first time, with the wig, I was amazed by the transformation. From a distance, I really did look identical to Belinda Pepper in that photograph.
No one cheered or whistled when I made my entrance, as Lou had assured me they would. The silence was unnerving. I began to pretend to drown, and Lou as Jamie rushed onstage to rescue me and give me the kiss of life. I wished she could resuscitate the show as well. This was the romantic conclusion of act one and still no one had clapped.
‘They’re being very unresponsive,’ I complained as I struggled out of the bikini offstage. ‘This was our best costume.’
Lou peered out at the audience. ‘I can’t understand it. It’s our most ambitious production ever.’
I joined her to peek out at the audience. It was impossible to see anyone’s expression. It had grown so dark out on the lawn. But their silence and the way the men had their arms folded so rigidly across their chests, suggested a grim response. Then Aunt Evelyn leaned forward to stare at Jamie, and for an instant her profile caught in the light from the veranda and I could see that her lips were pursed in disapproval. That was a very bad sign. We had expected Aunt Evelyn to commend our originality.
‘I thought your mother would like it at least,’ I said. ‘Seeing that it’s a theatrical challenge.’
‘It doesn’t have “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” though, so she wouldn’t like it on principle,’ Lou whispered back.
The beginning of act two was the dramatic climax of the play. Babe (playing herself) and Jamie entered.
BABE: I’m so scared that the fire will creep up in the night and consume us.
JAMIE: Don’t worry, Babe. I’ve discovered where your mother hides her buckets and I’ve got them filled with water at the bottom of your bed. I’ll protect you if the fire comes near.
There was a grunt from my father in the audience.
Enter Belinda.
BELINDA: Oh I’m so unhappy. I asked Jamie to marry me and save me from a life of drudgery selling pantihose and he refused. Now my life is shattered and there’s nothing left for me to do but escape from my troubles by smoking a marijuana cigarette. I hope no one finds out.
Out of my pocket, I pulled one of Uncle Arthur’s cigarettes that Lou had snitched. ‘Light that and I’ll tan your hide,’ my father growled from the audience.
‘I wasn’t going to light it,’ I sniffed back at him.
I put the cigarette in my mouth and mimed lighting it. I inhaled deeply, then again and again, more and more frantically with every inhalation. I became a woman possessed. I dropped the cigarette and began to screech and howl and tear at my hair.
BELINDA: I’m in a murderous rage. I’d like to kill him for rejecting me. Or kill one of those stupid animals whose company he likes better than mine.
Belinda dashed from the stage. We had draped a cowskin rug over Babe’s tricycle and I pushed that onto the stage and then began to stalk after it, levelling Lou’s slug gun to my eye. I took aim and fired.
SOUND EFFECTS: Kaboom. Kaboom.
Jamie and Babe began to scream in terror. Belinda stared dumbly at Dante.
BELINDA: Ohh, what have I done, while under the influence of a marijuana cigarette. I must flee the scene of the clime. I will flee to Australia.
Belinda ran screaming from the stage. Jamie and Babe crept forward to examine the dead Dante. Babe knelt down to stroke him and Lou made a non-scheduled exit. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘It’s not working. They’re not clapping or laughing much,’ Lou said desperately.
‘They’re not laughing or clapping at all,’ I retorted. ‘They hate it.’
One scene remained. The finale where Belinda sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane”.
‘Maybe you should sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” instead. At least then Mother will like it and it’ll finish on a happy note for her. Perhaps they’ll forget about the bits they didn’t like.�
�
I didn’t like this idea. It ruined the narrative which I had so carefully constructed. But after sneaking another look out at our silently sullen audience, I could appreciate the sense in Lou’s suggestion. We had to redeem ourselves somehow. ‘Okay,’ I agreed.
I stepped out onto the stage and began to sing.
Hark! The herald angels sing,
Glory to the newborn king;
Peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinners recon-ciiiiiiled.
Suddenly, my voice cracked, veering completely out of tune. I didn’t know what had happened. I was the best singer in the family after Aunt Evelyn. I always performed the solos in our Christmas concerts and at school. Tentatively, I tried the line again but I couldn’t make that final note. My voice wouldn’t work with its usual grace and ease. I froze, humiliated. I didn’t know what to do, how to save the show and myself. For once, Aunt Evelyn was showing a most untimely reluctance to join in and take over.
Then, from the audience, Jamie began to laugh. At first it was merely a slow chuckle. Then he rose out of his chair and wandered towards the stage, his laughter growing louder and louder. I watched him approach. He seemed dazed. He lurched a little as he walked, and was laughing so strangely. I sank to the floor. I didn’t even have the will to walk off the stage.
‘Don’t … stop,’ said Jamie, but he could hardly get the words out, he was laughing so much.
Suddenly, I felt scared of Jamie. He didn’t seem like the same person. This laughter seemed maniacal, malevolent and laced with malice. It was the same laughter that I heard so often when I was teased in the playground, when names were hurled at me and everybody began to laugh and mock me. I wanted to shut him out, cut out this laughter that was echoing in my ears and jarring through every nerve in my body. Then the rest of our audience began to laugh too, the way people do, out of politeness, as if someone had told a joke, even if it wasn’t particularly funny. But no one had told a joke. There was just me. On the stage. Bathed in the light.
50 Ways of Saying Fabulous Book 2 Anniversary Edition Page 9