The rain started up again and I ran for the shelter of the fig trees, crouching in between the cavernous roots, carefully sheltering my bag against the trunk. I curled into those canal-like tree roots as quietly as a secret. The rain pitter-pattered against the leaves and a magpie opened his agile beak and sang too-ra-lie. I felt so tired. My eyes closed only for an instant, or so it felt, and when I woke the sky had gone yellow, sunshine trapped in the silver clouds. Someone coughed.
‘Are you all right there, miss?’ a voice said and I squinted up into the light. A lady was looking at me from under a large spindly umbrella, her blonde hair escaping her beret, a voluminous black velvet coat nearly dragging in the mud. She reached out her hand to me, speckled with silver rings, and I took it. That was how I met Miss du Maurier.
She didn’t ask me any questions and was happy to accept whatever rent I could pay her until I secured myself a job. She led me to her house, the both of us under her umbrella, the smell of her exotic perfume dazing my senses. ‘You look like a lost thing,’ she said. How close to the truth she was.
When she showed me to my new room, clean and bright, I took my father’s magic book and placed it under my pillow, hoping I could dream him up. Instead I slept like the dead.
I pulled out that old book and placed it again under the pillow, my fingers running across the cracked spine until I resolved sleep was useless. Could I avoid facing Billy? I made myself get up, get dressed, close my bedroom door quietly behind me. Miss du Maurier was coming in from the letterbox, flicking through the mail; when she saw me on the stairs she stopped and waved an envelope in the air, white as surrender.
‘One for you, my dear,’ she called out to me and I panicked, almost flew down the remaining stairs. Had my letter been sent home after all, with the return address in Miss du Maurier’s hand? Was this the reply? My hand flew to my pocket and patted the envelope, still reassuringly unsent. I didn’t want any good Samaritan posting it for me, I wasn’t sure I wanted to post it all.
‘It’s good news, I can feel it,’ Miss du Maurier said and handed the letter into my keeping.
It was addressed to Lily del Mar and Ari Pearl, our names a sweet trill upon the paper. As I walked through the house, I tore it open, my eyes flicking across the page as I narrowly avoided bumping into things, including Billy who sat at the dining table, his eyes following me. I ignored him, even though he was waiting for me to say something, his mouth opening and closing. I dreaded the moment we would have to speak. I didn’t stop; the words on the paper urged me forward.
Before my father left for the war, for the scoop of the century, he decided to teach me the one trick he knew. It was something he only ever did on special occasions – birthdays, Christmas, Easter. He knew the value of a trick’s mystery, just as Houdini did – either do it rarely or make it so dazzlingly brilliant that it blinds everyone as to what is really going on. My father was no Houdini, so he stuck with the first option.
A fortnight earlier he had collected his uniform, the buttons as shiny as fresh minted coins. It hung on the outside of my parents’ wardrobe like a guest too shy to go in and mingle with the other garments. The slouch hat sat lonely on my mother’s dresser, the only masculine thing among the feminine paraphernalia: the ivory-handled brush, the silver-backed mirror, the photograph of my parents on their wedding day.
It was hot; flies sought the moisture from the corners of our lips, the rims of our nostrils, the ducts of our eyes. The house was made overly hot by the stove burning all night to roast the meat my mother had insisted on for Christmas, the eve of my father’s departure. The Christmas pudding boiled in its pot, the tin lid like a drummer rat-a-tat-tat-ing, steam filling the house.
We took our places at the dinner table for the baked lunch, a halo of steam following my mother back and forth from the kitchen until our plates were filled with pork and turkey, baked carrots and potatoes. We said grace with one hand waving away the flies. Once our best plates were cleared, my mother placed the jug of custard on the table, the gentle clink of its beaded cover signalling the special time between the dinner and the dessert, the moment when my father would pull a penny from his pocket and proceed with his sole magic trick.
‘See this penny, it is an ordinary penny.’ He would pass it around and we would all good-naturedly tap it on the table or inspect it for strange markings, as we had many times before. I always gave it a tap on my teeth for good measure, convinced that the magic lay somewhere in the coin.
‘Now I will proceed to make this coin disappear by rubbing it on my arm.’ My father lifted his elbow theatrically and placed it on the table and the penny on the tilt of his forearm. With the constant friction, the coin fell to the table every now and again, spinning from his grasp. He would sigh and begin the determined rubbing again and again, the coin always making its bid for freedom. Until it vanished. We would each take turns to feel my father’s skin, half-expecting the coin shape to be detectable beneath it. Again my father would start the furious rubbing of his fingers against the skin where the coin had last been seen, at first seeming to get frustrated with his lack of success, and then suddenly out of nowhere the coin fell, returned to the table. The smile upon my father’s face was victorious. The pudding was served, and every silver shilling I found between my teeth would be placed on my own arm to see if it would disappear.
Late that evening when the shadows of the nearby gum trees fell on our roof and cooled the house, the tin roof ticking like a malfunctioning metronome, I sat on my bed flicking through the pages of my magic book. It had been my birthday gift the year Houdini never arrived. Then my father came in and sat on the edge of my bed and offered to teach me his secret.
‘Til the Lil, it is all a matter of distracting your audience. The artifice is more important than the mechanics, the performance more important than the trick.’ He looked at me so earnestly I felt he was trying to communicate something beyond his words. ‘The coin, Tilly, does not get rubbed into the skin. It is the audience who is tricked into thinking this happens because of the repetition. The trick works because the magician feigns his frustration. As one watches one gets used to the release and fall of the coin, and thinks nothing of it. When the magician retrieves it with his hand and starts again, the rubbing continues, but lo and behold it has vanished. Where has it gone? It has been placed by the hand behind the neck, where it sticks with perspiration, the audience never questioning the moment when the magician rubs his neck in mock exasperation, while waiting for the impossible.’
My father handed me a coin and watched me rub it into the pale stretch of flesh on my forearm. The coin flew spectacularly across the room once or twice, but eventually I could move it onto my neck without risk of detection.
My father clapped loudly, as if I had accomplished something truly magnificent. The unusual sound was like a lure: my mother appeared at the door. When she saw it was my father teaching me his coin trick, she quietly retreated, her footsteps hushed on the floorboards. My father didn’t even look up, but squeezed my hands in his.
‘Now, Til the Lil, don’t forget it. Someone has to do it at Christmas time while I am away. It is our own little O’Farrell tradition, small as it is.’ The way he looked at me made me fearful. ‘Just in case, darling,’ he said in an attempt to reassure me, but all I could think about was the rest of the sentence: in case I never come back.
‘But there is one more thing,’ he said as he pushed back my hair and peered inside my ear, frowning. ‘What on earth have you got in there?’ He pretended to extract something out of my ear, his fingers dancing around a small shining thing, a little silver brooch the size of a coin which he placed in my palm.
‘What does it say?’ I asked, looking at the strange arrangement of letters.
‘Mizpah,’ he said. ‘It means the Lord will watch over you when I cannot,’ he said, kissing the top of my head.
‘But I don’t want the Lord, I want you,’ I said, stifling a sob in my throat.
‘I’
ll be right as rain. Every little bird you see will bring me word of you, you can be sure of that,’ he said, a forced jollity in his voice.
The cold silver of the Mizpah brooch started to warm and I fumbled trying to fix it to my nightgown. It caught the light and winked at me. I had something for my father in return. I went to my cupboard and slid it out from where it had lain wrapped in a sheet of newspaper to shield it from the dust. My father’s face lit up with curiosity as he peeled back the wrapping. It was the key to our town, meant for Houdini, which I had salvaged from the rubbish bin. I had read the tale of a bushranger who had taken a bullet through a locket and survived; perhaps this key could protect my father too.
My father looked at me in surprise, his face crowded with questions, then he reached out and crushed me to him, a shiver rippling through him. ‘Take care of your mother,’ he whispered.
He wore the key around his neck, a funny lucky charm, or so the letter from his mate said. But it was not returned with his watch and his wallet after he was laid to rest with the thousands beside the battlefields, where they said poppies now grew.
By the time my foot hit the back stoop I had already had a thought. It was risky, maybe even impossible, but it was worth a try. We had one card we hadn’t played: our black spade, the raven. Not just a beauty, her midnight chrysanthemum feathers abloom beneath her chin, she was surely smarter than all the other birds too.
I hadn’t expected to find Ari in bed. Perhaps I should have gone away and come back later, but the letter burned in my hand, the fire of an idea blazed in my head. He read it, his face growing darker with each passing moment, then he folded the letter until it was the size of a postage stamp and flicked it on top of the bed.
‘I can’t believe this. Is Clay asking what I think he is asking? I won’t ask it of you!’ Ari raised his voice vehemently, and the startled lyrebird swished his tail, sending dust motes falling through the air.
Couldn’t Ari see what Clay was offering? It was more than just a contract, it was a real chance. Carefully I retrieved the paper, laid it on my thigh and smoothed out the creases with my palm.
‘My father used to tell me a story,’ I said, my voice sounding surer in my thoughts than out loud, ‘about a girl who could turn into a swan by donning a swan-feather cloak. She caught the eye of the Irish god of love, Aengus.’
Ari sat up, pulling the blanket around his shoulders against the chill.
‘That reminds me of something,’ he said. He reached over to the stack of books on the crate, the blanket slipping to reveal the dark chest hair fanning out like a span of wings on his chest, before he pulled the blanket back. He flicked through the pages until he found what he was looking for. His voice was hesitant yet sonorous, as if they were words he had composed, but I knew they were not: I could see that the name Yeats was pressed into the spine.
‘I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.’
He looked up at me. I felt hot in my face, my mouth parched, and I could not swallow for wondering if I had enough courage to carry this through, our bold new enterprise.
SIXTEEN
Billy
The taste of Lily’s kiss surpassed expectations – her lips plump cushions for my sting. I may have forced my lips upon hers, but her lips certainly pressed back – soft at first, but then with a greater pulse. She was not fiery, though her mercury would roar upwards at my command in time. I did not care that the Jew’s eye was upon me; let him learn to savour disappointment, it would be his lot soon enough. Lily’s kiss had the slight candied scent of camomile. My memory of Merle’s was like the burn of mustard gas.
After my time in the holding cell I had risen enough in Crisp’s opinion to become involved in patient consultations. I had obviously passed the first of the hurdles he had for me: little did I know how many there would be and how high they would become. I was sure he wanted me to take over in the consulting room eventually, so he could spend more time coercing the librarians into believing that their precious permanent collection actually belonged to him.
One day the shop front looked brighter and I hesitantly walked through the door, thinking fleetingly the shop had changed hands until Merle looked up at me from behind the counter, her eyes shining.
‘You like it?’ she asked. ‘I cleaned the windows. Come up a treat.’ She looked almost pretty, her voice a bright bubble of enthusiasm. Even the counter seemed to have an extra special gleam, the product no doubt of her elbow grease. ‘Go right in. Father is expecting you.’
Crisp sat solemnly at his little table in the middle of the room, a sheaf of paper weighted down with his fancy fountain pen. He saw my eyes flutter along the gold spines arrayed behind him, but under such acute observation I could not let my gaze linger long enough to discern his recent additions. I would not be distracted this time.
‘Today, Mr Little, is the day you see how I work my effects upon the patients. Today, you will be privileged to see working methods that very few have seen and survived! Ha ha, to see your face just now, worthy of a photograph. You must learn humour, Mr Little, it will make your face more handsome.’ If he kept talking in this fashion, it would be my fists making a joke out of his face. ‘Come, take a seat.’ He pulled out the chair beside him and I eased into it gingerly, as if into an overly hot bath.
‘Now, the patient will come and sit in the chair opposite us. I will introduce you as my son and fellow apothecary, as they are used to my company alone. You are to say nothing. Not even hello. To do so will disturb the confluence of healing taking place in the room.’
Healing, my arse – huckstering, confidence tricks, suggestion, mind manipulation and a good deal of persuasion to convince them that the elixir was more than the piss it was.
‘The patient will pour out their concerns and ailments. Do not listen to these too closely; otherwise you will be distracted from your intentions. However, at all times you must ensure eye contact. If for some reason you break eye contact, nod your head thrice and meet their eyes again. In doing so, the healing will resume and you may continue looking intently. But do not, I repeat, listen too closely.’
I wanted not to listen too closely myself, as I felt my bile rise. So much waffle needed to cover up his secrets.
‘The empathetic nod is your friend, the compassionate ear is not. If you start caring, you may as well move your sorry Catholic arse and go open your bleeding heart to your mate Jesus H. Fucking Christ. You will find none of that nonsense here, Mr Little.’ His eyes held a determined gleam. ‘I’ll have you know that this is a legitimate business, regardless of what means and methods of healing we use. A business which, if you have the mind to pay attention, could earn you a tidy sum and time to pursue other fancies.’
As if on cue, there was a rap on the door and Merle poked her face around the corner, a strand of dark hair falling into her eyes. The effect was so fetching, it was as if she had stood behind the door and preened in a mirror to see exactly what alluring effect she could create.
‘Doctor, your first patient is ready to see you,’ Merle said, her voice almost breathy.
Crisp looked away from me then and I felt strangely released. Fatigue tugged at my eyelids.
The patient strutted through the door, a pretty if skinny thing, her teeth pressed into her lip as if she was frightened of what she was going to say. I sized her up: a delectable specimen. Oh, I could have made her press my flesh with those pointed teeth. It was clear at once what her problem was.
‘Doctor,’ she cried she took her seat, her pert bottom smacking the veneered wood, ‘I am tormented by my thoughts. Every night and day I think of men …’
Before my ears could ab
sorb her salacious thoughts, I felt a sharp heel grinding into my foot as if extinguishing a cigarette butt. The pain seared hot and I willed my limbs to be still. All I wanted to do was shout out, an expletive hot on my tongue. I wanted to grind my heel into his foot as if it were a mincer and his foot only gristle. Instead my rage was interrupted by the nymphomaniac’s rant.
Furiously I nodded my head, near breathless, wanting my ears to fill with her smut, but my head just nodded, in a complementary rhythm with Crisp’s, his up, mine down. Hypnotically, the cap was free of Crisp’s pen as he wrote a fantastical prescription, the paper folded authoritatively before he handed it to her. Her walk was primmer as she exited, her hips no longer swaying, as if with her confession she had folded up her desires like a nun. Crisp looked at me and opened his mouth, and instead of bracing myself in my seat for his rancid words, I stood to do the gentlemanly thing and let her out. Through the doorway then, a glimpse of the person I thought least likely to see. Was it some sort of joke? My heart did a sick twist in my chest and I looked back at Crisp, who offered me a curious smile.
‘Is there a problem, Little?’ Crisp asked as I stepped behind a medical screen, but I didn’t have time to respond, for in came Merle, and hot on her skirt tails, the next patient. My surprise popping up behind her like a jack in the box: my father.
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