‘Hello, Connollys,’ says Ken Lewis in a hearty voice.
Their heads swivel.
‘Ken!’ says Margaret. ‘Hello!’ She beams; Ken Lewis will save the moment with his big, tanned face, his tennis-champion’s confidence.
The others murmur their greetings; Chris stands and shakes his hand. Stephen leans lazily forward, holds Ken Lewis’s hand for a moment and drops it, then sits back in his chair. Ken stands with his hand on Margaret’s shoulder, listening solemnly while she talks about Geoff, about all the kind cards and things from Geoff’s friends from the tennis club, from Rotary. The others sit with tight smiles, waiting for Ken Lewis to go. Eventually he sighs, patting Margaret on the shoulder.
Then he leans over to Mandy and says, ‘Next time you’re home we would love you to come and talk at Rotary.’
She stares back at him with her arms folded. Ken Lewis looks suddenly nervous, and then he says, ‘Not now, obviously. Not a good time, obviously.’
Mandy only nods, unsmiling, arms still folded.
Ken Lewis looks around at the others in an alarmed way. ‘So, what’s everybody having?’
Stephen grins nastily at Ken and says, ‘I’m having the Adriatic Salad.’
‘Oh, Genevieve had that last week. Said it was fabulous.’
Mandy stares down the table at Stephen. Margaret, flustered, says goodbye to Ken Lewis. As he walks away, Stephen drains his half-glass of wine, and reaches across Cathy for the bottle, pours himself another to the brim. ‘So, Mandy, what are you having?’
Mandy whispers, ‘Get fucked, Stephen.’
‘Mandy!’ says Margaret.
Stephen’s still smiling, controlled, amused. He won’t stop. ‘Why do you care what it’s called? You’ve been around. You’ve seen people who don’t have any food. Do you think they would care what it’s called?’
Their mother looks on the verge of tears; Mandy notices but can’t stop.
‘Yes, I do. Because that’s what’s wrong with this fucking country.’
‘Mandy,’ Margaret calls weakly. The others say nothing.
Then Chris turns to Mandy. ‘Come on,’ he mutters, close to her face. She has to stop now. But she won’t. She stares past Chris to Stephen.
‘Because these people don’t even know where the Adriatic is, for fucksake. Do you think anyone here even remembers Croatia, or Bosnia, or Kosovo? Do you think they care that bodies are still being found in backyards in those towns?’
She reaches back to her cigarettes, rips open the lid.
‘You can’t smoke in here!’ Margaret is pleading.
Stephen isn’t smiling anymore. He says coldly, slowly, ‘You’re so fucking superior, Mandy. Why do you have to despise everyone who doesn’t know as much as you do?’ He pauses, eyes glittering. ‘Why can’t you just let them have a go? For all you know, naming the fucking salad could be the most adventurous thing they’ve ever done! Maybe they’re reaching for something—’ he’s snarling now, stumbling over his words—‘that might lead them towards something—bigger. Some grander fucking fate than Rundle can offer! What’s wrong with that?’
‘It’s not enough!’ Mandy’s voice is unsteady, on the edge of tears. ‘You know why? These people–’ she flings an arm out furiously; Chris puts a hand out to push it down—‘have every opportunity to know about the rest of the world. But they get cable TV so they can watch fucking sport! They choose ignorance!’
People two tables away are staring.
Chris begs in a low, desperate voice, ‘Shut up, Mandy.’
But she only grows louder. ‘All around the world, right now, people are being blown to fucking pieces. Kids playing with balls, just like them—’ she gestures wildly at the window—‘are having their fucking legs blown off, or are trying to hold their sisters’ heads together in their hands, because people in Australia—people in Rundle— don’t give a shit!’ She shoves Chris’s hand away again, violently. ‘Or, they care a tiny bit, if they’ve been there. But they’ve only been to Tuscany, or fucking Bali! And then they only care about the fucking restaurants, or the bloody architecture!’
Stephen spits out a noise of derision. Margaret is calling, ‘Mandy!’ and Cathy is murmuring fiercely through her teeth, ‘Both of you just shut up, shut up.’
Chris has given up. He stares at the table, his chin jutting.
But Stephen is aflame. ‘You just hate ordinary people, Mandy. You hate ordinariness. But the poor bloody people overseas you are always going on about, that you make your famous living out of? You know what they want? Ordinariness. They want exactly what it is about this place that you despise!’
Mandy is silenced. She puts a cigarette to her lips, staring at her brother. She has never hated anyone so much in her life.
‘You can’t smoke in here!’ Margaret cries.
Mandy wrenches the cigarette from her mouth, turns to her mother and shouts into her face, ‘I know, Mum!’
And five tables of people watch the violence of her shoving out her chair and walking through the blond wood and the coastal glass waves, out of the restaurant, through the over-lit foyer, past the staring people on the desk and through the big glass doors out into the street.
She walks to the end of the building, flicking her cigarette lighter. She hurls herself back against the bricks and drags deeply on the cigarette, and then exhales a coughing sob of tears and smoke.
Across the road the boys are still playing with their ball on the wide footpath outside the old Muswell & Co department store, now Best & Less. The sun has gone, and the light is low, the air warm. The boys’ long limbs move through space slowly, their baggy shorts and surfwear t-shirts loose on their bodies. The boys’ reflections ripple across the closed glass doors, patterned with stickers and sale signs, and their shouts are counterpointed notes falling into the quiet air. They are a jostling ballet with a football in the fading, uneventful evening of an Australian country town.
THE FAMILY sits staring at their menus. Except for Margaret, breathless, who cannot understand what has just happened. She looks wildly around the table, and then around the restaurant at the other families turning back to their meals, eating quietly, the men with glasses of beer and the women with wine. They murmur to one another, nobody looking at the Connollys’ table. Even Ken Lewis is talking in a studied way to Genevieve. But they have all watched the scene. Grown adults fighting like children. She is still red with bewilderment and shame, and opens her mouth to speak when a waitress appears at her side.
‘Are you ready to order, Mrs Connolly?’
Margaret rears back to look at the waitress, and realises it is Patsy Hackett’s granddaughter. Elissa, or Alisha, something like that. Margaret has seen her photo in the paper to do with school, or girls’ cricket.
She flops her menu onto the table and gathers herself. ‘I’ll have the Tuscan Lamb, please, love. Thank you, love.’
The others are tightlipped, but take their cue, ordering quietly, handing their menus gently to the girl. Except Stephen, who says clearly, ‘Adriatic Salad, thanks,’ clapping the pages of his menu together and smiling as he hands it to the waitress. She flicks a confused glance around the table, then lowers her eyes.
Cathy shakes her head at Stephen in disgust.
He leans towards her, whispering deliberately, ‘It’s just food.’
‘I’m not fucking interested,’ Cathy mutters, not looking at him but along the table to her mother.
Margaret says nothing, but breathes out a long, weary sigh. Then she asks woodenly for another glass of wine, which Chris pours. She sips it, and puts the glass down. Then she gives Stephen a long, sorrowful stare.
‘Thank you very much, Stephen.’
‘Mum—’ he begins, but she puts up a hand.
‘Enough!’ She feels the rage flaring inside her. ‘I am Sick. And. Tired–’ she hears her loud voice, its shrillness—‘of being sidewinded by you all.’
There is a silence. She stares around the table, a little shocked at
her command, finally. Then Cathy mumbles, picking at a coaster, ‘Do you mean blindsided, Mum?’ at exactly the same moment Chris says, ‘Sidelined?’ She stares at them, breathing in the strange, humid air of the restaurant. Beyond the piped music she can hear the poker machines’ carnival burbling. What did she mean? She no longer has any idea how to communicate with her children. She is not the same person she was, cannot recognise them, herself.
Across the room studded with its spangly lights, Alisha Hackett is walking unsteadily towards her, concentrating on the huge white plate she carries in her two hands. She reaches the table and with an uneven knocking sound, dumps the plateful of orange-coloured meat down in front of Margaret.
Margaret stares at the thick sauce sludging its way down the hillock of meat and thinks, I am no longer the mother of this family. She is no longer a wife either, not adult, even. She is a strange and lost, unformed person. She thinks of the woman with the terrier face all those years ago, birthmarked and tufted, walking across the road as if everything was normal. Margaret lifts her head to see these people: Cathy, Stephen, Chris; and Mandy’s empty chair.
And it comes to her finally. Their father, her husband, has fallen off the roof. He is going to die. And it has cast the whole of their lives in an unfamiliar, new and dreadful light.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Day five
MANDY WALKS, Leia panting beside her, along the Rundle footpaths in the early morning.
She has been awake most of the night, lying silent in bed when the others came home. Chris came into the dark room and got into the bed without a sound; she knew he could tell she was awake, but they both pretended otherwise.
She walks faster, beginning to sweat under her arms and her breasts. After a while Leia drops behind, and when Mandy turns around she sees the old dog, her head dropped low, padding slowly back towards the house. Mandy keeps walking, breathing deeply in and out. She is sorry, and not sorry. She hates Stephen, is filled with shame for upsetting her mother.
The town is blank this early in the morning. She wants coffee, but does not want to speak to anyone. And anyway, it seems nothing is open. She walks the few blocks of the silent main street. The footpath paving is new, appears swept clean. The guttering is pale and new, and also clean. She looks ahead, down the street at the horizontal rows of modest signs hanging beneath the awnings; their fading, hand-painted lettering. Rundle Workwear, The Book Nook. Even though it is early, the sun is bright, and without the clutter of cars the street is wide and bare.
From the trees beyond the shops on either side of the street come the irregular squawkings and chirrupings of morning birds—currawongs, lorikeets, magpies, noisy miners. Somewhere else a dog barks, once, twice. Mandy walks more slowly now, breathing deeply. She feels cried out, her face dried and parchy.
She will apologise to her mother. She will not apologise to Stephen. She will leave. But she can’t leave. She walks, watching her feet come and go on the footpath before her. She passes the Sea Bream Café; it alone among the shops is open, and the coloured plastic fly strips of its doorway flap lazily into the street. She hesitates, tilts her head to look through the strips. There’s no coffee machine; it would be watery instant. She keeps walking, seeing but not looking at her hunched reflection in the windows. Rundle Real Estate, Vera’s Fashion, Uncle Joe’s Pizza N Pasta with its painted red and white chequered window-panes. Then she hears a noise and looks up. Ahead of her outside the Commonwealth Bank, two older men are strolling along towards her, chatting. Each of the men holds a nylon leash, and at the end of each leash a tiny white dog patters along the street. One is a Jack Russell and the other a Scotty, the dogs’ equanimity mirroring their owners’. The four walk slowly, but with ease, in the sunny morning.
Mandy rubs her face quickly with one hand. Compared to these upright men she feels dishevelled. She takes a deep breath, straightens a little.
‘Morning!’ one of the men calls as they approach. Both men smile broadly. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ says the other to Mandy, gesturing at the summer air. She smiles back, nods.
Then a hearty shout comes from behind her.
‘Ah, Gawd save us!’
The men grin more broadly now, and Mandy turns to see another man approaching from a few doors behind her. He strides along, meets Mandy’s eye and smiles a big, knowing grin at her. ‘Look at these poor old buggers with their seein’ eye dogs!’ he cries, winking at her as he stops to talk to the men. Mandy smiles back, and goes on past.
The sun shines down on the empty street, and as she walks, the shopfronts become a coloured mosaic in her peripheral vision. She listens to the men’s low, jovial chatter until she’s too far away and it fades beneath all the ordinary beauty and the squeaks and peeps and carolling of the high noisy birds.
It’s after nine when she gets home. She pulls the back door closed behind her, entering the warm grey chaos of the laundry. Then, through the kitchen doorway she sees Stephen bent over the table, the painted white table of their childhood, and it is stained with bright swathes of coloured tissue paper.
And Mandy is somehow suddenly released, in this instant, from everything that has gone wrong between them. What she sees is Stephen making a kite in the colours of childhood, and there is something insistent and primary in it, and this moment is the gap through which she might reach out at last to her brother, through all their mistakes and the torn years behind them. She steps through the doorway into the kitchen, saying his name—and then she sees that hunched at the table over the kite, that brilliant, patterned possibility, is a second person.
It is Tony.
HER FACE is white, stricken.
‘You know Tony,’ Stephen says, reaching for a Stanley knife. He watches Mandy’s drained face with interest—a knife-pleat appears between her brows and then disappears, replaced so instantly by her usual cool neutrality that he wonders if he saw it at all. It occurs to him that for a long time, seeing Mandy on television, and now in these last days, he has wondered how any man—even Chris—could find her attractive. She’s like a corpse.
‘Yeah,’ she says now, blank-faced. ‘Hi.’
And she turns and leaves the room.
Stephen looks at Tony to see if he’s insulted, but he’s sitting exactly as before, pressing the dowel beneath his fingers, waiting for the glue to dry over the fishing line. He does not concentrate, but scans the room around him, looking intently at the fridge, the cupboards.
‘She’s nice,’ Tony says then, nodding at the empty doorway.
Stephen snorts. ‘She’s scary,’ he mutters, more to himself, as he bends to concentrate on cutting a notch into a piece of the wood. The notches he made earlier were not deep enough, and the fishing line skidded off the end of the dowel when he pulled it taut. He lowers himself over the stick. His neck aches.
‘I think she’s nice,’ Tony says, seeming to focus suddenly. ‘Smart.’
Stephen breathes out through his nose, hunched over, going at the dowel with fierce little nicks of the knife. ‘Yep. She’s very smart.’
It was Tony’s idea to help with the kite. In the corridor of the hospital he’d asked Stephen about the book, about what he was going to do. Stephen had talked about going up to the transmitter tower on the outskirts of town, said that he had to talk Cathy into helping him.
‘I’ll helpya,’ Tony had said then, and asked Stephen about the kite, about aerodynamics and weight and lift.
Now they are trying to make the kite’s diamond outline, running the nylon line through the notches in the ends of the crossed spokes. Cathy would have been more useful, Stephen thinks, in this knotting and then gluing of line and dowel, but she still has the shits with him from last night.
He’s trying once again to tie the tiny, accurately spaced knots with his too-big fingers, and Tony’s not a good listener, staring around the kitchen while he fails to pin the cross of the dowel firmly enough to the table for Stephen to tighten the line.
‘Is that Port Arthur?’
Tony says.
Stephen grimaces; he’s got the line taut now, but has to tie off the knot at the last notched end to keep it that way. He pulls the line tight. And the entire length goes loose; the loop has slipped off the other end of the stick.
‘Shit!’ He stands up straight again and stretches his neck before bending back to the kite. ‘Can you just press down a bit harder?’
But Tony is squinting at a postcard, from one of Margaret’s friends, held to the fridge door with a magnet. Elegant stone ruins in a sweep of Tasmanian green. Stephen turns his head to answer Tony’s question. ‘Yeah, I think so. So mate, if you can just hold that really firm for a second?’ He waits for Tony’s focus to return to the kite; to nod, to do as he’s asked.
Then Tony says, lowering his voice, ‘You know Bryant didn’t do it.’
Stephen frowns, his face very close to the end of the stick, dragging the end of the loop over the slit with his fingernails. He glances back to the centre of the kite, and Tony obediently pushes harder to keep it still. It works.
‘Excellent,’ Stephen says, straightening and sighing. ‘You can let go now. What d’you mean, he didn’t do it?’
‘Couldn’t have,’ says Tony, flexing his fingers. He folds his arms and leans forward, his voice taking on a self-important tone. ‘Explain this. Sixty-four bullets to kill thirty-five people, wound twenty-two others and cripple two cars.’
He pauses, looking stern. ‘And Bryant had no military experience at all, and yet he kills nineteen of them with a single five-point-six millimetre bullet to each head.’
Stephen snorts in surprise, eyebrows raised, as he holds up the skeleton of the kite, two fingers at each end of its elegant spine. He thinks of the white-haired boy, loping through the ruins. ‘That’s a lot of numbers, mate.’
Tony is undeterred; this is a point he has made before.
‘Some of the best fast-moving combat shooters in the world couldn’t be so precise. And he’s supposed to be just some loony kid wandering around.’ He rears back in scorn, as if the idea is impossible.
The Children Page 17