‘Hopefully,’ Det mumbles.
‘Det!’ I laugh.
‘She’s in her eighties and she wants to die, so … let her die.’
‘But not without seeing me.’ I pick up the letter and put it carefully back in my bag. ‘You can be very mean, you know.’
‘Mean?’ Det sniffs dismissively. ‘Yeah well, mean works. Take it from me. Mean is exactly the way to go when families are involved.’
I remember her physical state. ‘So, how are you?’ I bluster. ‘How you feeling?’ She’s so thin still.
‘Good,’ she says matter-of-factly.
Her casual attitude makes me wonder if she might be rethinking her decision to stay pregnant. I cross my fingers and secretly hope that some of what Cassie had to say has sunk in.
We sit there a while, Det frowning as she sips the coffee.
‘Crazy that they were both here, though, isn’t it?’ she says softly. ‘I mean, your grandmother as a kid and your mother as a fucking nun. And then you get a job here the very day you find that out. That’s totally weird … It’s verging on spooky.’
The same thought had occurred to me. When I look at Det there is a gleam of mischief in her eyes.
‘Why don’t we see if we can find a photo of her?’
‘Who?’
‘The nun.’ She smiles. ‘Your birth mother.’
‘How?’
‘There is an archivist. He’s got all kinds of stuff.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, I’ve met him. Nice guy. I’ll call him up and ask for an appointment.’
‘Can you do that?’
‘Yeah. He’ll be able to look her up. Do you know the years she was here?’
I’m suddenly nervous. I don’t want to do it. But I don’t want to not do it either, if that makes any sense.
‘Sometime in the sixties, I guess.’
‘Hmmm, it would be cool to see a photo of her, wouldn’t it?’
‘I dunno, Det.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s just that …’
‘We’d just be looking at a photo, if there is one,’ Det says.‘That doesn’t mean you have to get involved.’
‘Okay.’
Within two minutes we have an appointment with the archivist for the following week.
‘Stella is going to have a field day,’ I sigh, getting up to go.
Det smiles. ‘You told her yet?’
‘I wanted to talk to you first,’ I say. ‘I’m dreading telling her.’
‘Why?’
‘It will affect her too.’
‘Stella is okay.’
‘She’s not okay, Det. Look at the size of her!’
‘She’s fat. So what? She’ll be okay. I’m going to ask her to sing at my launch.’
‘Good luck,’ I say.
‘You don’t think she will?’
I shrug and shake my head. I haven’t heard Stella sing for a long time.
We could all tell things were tipping over into crazy when Stella started taking flowers to school for her music teacher, Ms Baums. She’d wait for her outside the staffroom after school to tell her about such and such concert or this and that problem. Then she dug up Ms Baums’s mobile number and started leaving her heaps of messages. She’d developed this bizarre theory that because Mum didn’t have a musical bone in her body somehow this woman had been sent by the gods or the universe to take Nana’s place.
The Saturday of the auditions for the big school musical, Stella spent all afternoon getting ready and emerged from her room looking totally gorgeous in a fantastic long white tunic dress with beading around the neck and hem, a glowing, bubbly mess of insecurity. She was desperate to play the main role. Everyone, her friends and the other teachers, thought she was a shoo-in. She’d been practising the songs and they sounded wonderful.
Her hair was piled up at the back of her head and she had long dangling red earrings to match the beading. ‘Do I look all right?’ she giggled nervously.
‘Fantastic,’ I said, smiling, meaning it absolutely. ‘I’ve never seen you look better.’
‘You think Beatrice will approve?’
Det and Cass were there. Dad was going to drop Stella off first and then us off to see a film. None of us knew Ms Baums at that stage, but we all chorused our approval.
Det grabbed Stella’s hand. ‘Babe, she’ll want to eat you,’ she said seriously, ‘but she’ll have to fight me to do it.’
Stella had the best singing voice in the school, so when we pulled up outside school again later that day we were expecting to congratulate her.
After telling us she’d missed out, not just on the main role but on any role, she’d taken the front seat next to Dad and immediately wound down the window to put her face out.
‘She told me my attitude wa all wrong and that I wasn’t physically right for … any part. In front of everyone. They all laughed.’
Cassie, Det and I were in the back and none of us knew what to say.
When Dad started the car I leant forward and squeezed Stella’s shoulder, but she didn’t turn around. We got every red light on the way home, but when we got there she just kept sitting in the car. So we all sat there too, waiting for her, not saying anything.
At last she turned around. ‘Ms Baums is so right. I’m an idiot. Tomorrow I’m going on a serious diet. And I’m going to change my name to Beatrice,’ she declared.
There was a moment’s pause while the rest of us took it in. Then Det lunged over the front seat and grabbed Stella in a tight neck embrace.
‘Please do not do that,’ she said hoarsely.
‘Why not?’ Stella sounded startled.
‘Because … you’re … Stella.’ Det hardly ever got emotional. But here she was flinging the car door open and shouting, ‘And we all really love Stella!’ She got out and slammed the door. ‘And I for one absolutely hate the name Beatrice!’ She marched off down the street, calling over her shoulder,‘Not in my wildest dreams will I ever call you that poxy fucking name. So forget it!’
A bewildered Stella turned around to look at Cassie and me.
‘Det is crazy,’ she whispered.
‘Yep.’ I grasped one of her hands and Cassie leant over the seat and took the other one.
‘But she’s right,’ Cassie murmured.
‘You think?’
‘Oh yeah. Stella is your name, babe.’
We all got out then, and Stella never spoke again about changing her name.
But within a week she’d developed an appetite, a hunger that couldn’t be sated. Stella stopped going out. Stella stopped seeing her friends. Stella stopped practising piano and caring about how she looked. Stella simply … ate.
Home now. My front-door key is already in the lock when I notice the bunch of flowers at my feet. A lovely full bunch of white roses within a mass of frothy green fern, bound up tight in bright red paper with a twine bow. I pick them up and open the tiny card pinned to the red paper.
Sorry, it reads, Fluke x.
I let the flowers drop to the ground, my face hot with shame because I’d been thinking of him. I push open the door, close it quickly behind me and stand in the hall, my back against the door, breathing hard. I can hear Stella watching TV so I tiptoe up the stairs.
I assumed that university would be the next step for Luke after he got his VCE, but instead he applied to the police force and was accepted. The police force! I didn’t know any policemen, or anyone who thought of it as a career option.
‘I want to be a detective,’ he told me seriously when we were walking home one night. Then he grinned at me shyly.‘And running the fraud squad by the time I’m thirty-five.’
A detective! It took me a while to get my head around that one. He had a sharp brain for sure and was a genius with technology, and so I saw no reason to doubt it. But still … a detective?
Stella took to Luke straight away but my other friends took longer. I think they were wary more than anything. But I didn’t care.
He was nothing like anyone else I knew. He was tall, well muscled from all the outdoor physical work. His face was square, his nose and chin sharply defined, and he loved listening to loud, hard music, like me.
Of course I did care. When Cassie declared her approval I was enormously relieved.
‘He’s great, Peach,’ she said. ‘Just what you need.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, he’s courageous.’ She smiled. ‘I like that.’
I knew she was referring to the way he’d managed to transcend his dismal background, and I both loved and hated her for it. Cassie is always so practical. But anyway … I was pleased.
Det was more cautious and her approval meant more to me. Det can be very harsh and if she doesn’t like someone, then she never holds back. We were in the kitchen of her grotty sharehouse, the grot piling up around us, the dog whining outside the back door, and Fluke was in the other room trying to fix her old computer.
‘He’s okay, you know,’ she said thoughtfully, lighting a cigarette and giving me the thumbs-up at the same time. ‘In fact, he just might be the real deal.’
The real deal? But I knew what she meant.
I get off my bed, go downstairs and retrieve the flowers. I find a big vase in the laundry, fill it with water and the flowers and set it on top of Stella’s piano in the front room. I bury my face in them. You are such a shit, Fluke. I wish. I just wish …
I’m turning to leave when Stella pokes her head around the door. ‘Hey,’ she says, her face alive with anticipation, ‘so?’
‘What?’
‘You ticked the box.’
‘Oh.’ I smile. Here goes.
So I tell her about the letter and the grandmother and the fact that my birth mother was a nun.
Stella’s mouth falls open and her dark eyes become as wide as saucers as she listens. ‘Can I read it?’
‘Sure.’ I race upstairs, get the letter out of my bag and bring it to her.
She sits on the couch and reads every word, twice, while I sit next to her, my arm around her shoulders. I look around the room trying not to look at the flowers, but my eyes can’t seem to focus anywhere else. The fact that they’re so beautiful makes the pain worse somehow.
After she’s finished it the second time she is uncharacteristically quiet, so I twist myself around to see her face. I want to get some idea of what she’s thinking.
‘This is so absolutely fantastic,’ she breathes at last, shutting her eyes. ‘A nun. Your birth mother was a nun! That is so cool, Peach.’
‘What is so cool about it?’
‘It is totally cool,’ she exclaims loudly. ‘It explains everything!’
‘What?’ I have to laugh.
‘So much,’ she whispers, and her eyes fill with tears. She blinks them away and turns to stare at me as though seeing a whole lot more in my face than she did five minutes ago. I find this slightly unnerving.
‘Stella, I’m me. The same person you’ve always known.’
‘No,’ she sighs, ‘no, you’re not.’
‘She’d stopped being a nun when she had me!’ I say impatiently.
‘That doesn’t matter.’ Stella cups my face in her plump hands and stares into my eyes.
‘It’s where you get it from.’
‘What are you talking about, Stella?’ I sigh in exasperation, pull away and get up. ‘I’m not religious. I’m—’
‘What are you going to do?’ she breaks in.
‘Wait until Mum and Dad come home, I guess.’ I walk towards the door.
‘You know they’ll say to write back!’ she calls from the couch.
‘Yeah … I suppose.’
‘You don’t have to wait.’
‘Well, maybe not, but I …’ I stop a moment by the door and close my eyes. I’m not really pissed off with Stella. She is just being herself. It’s the questions, clawing at the edges of my mind like ants, that get to me.
‘Oh, Peaches!’ She hauls her body up off the couch and holds out her arms to me and before I can think, I run back over and fall into them, and burst into a flood of tears that comes from a part of me that I didn’t even know existed. We fall down onto the couch together and I’m clinging to my sister as though she is the only connection I have left in the world.
‘Oh, honey,’ she croons as she rocks me, ‘what is it?’
I shake my head.
‘Come on,’ she insists.
‘I … I just wish.’
‘What?’
‘I wish I’d never even met Fluke,’ I whisper. Believe me, she is the only person in the world I would risk sounding this pathetic with.
‘Fluke?’ I hear the disappointment in her voice, and I start laughing through my tears. She’d much prefer to keep talking about nuns.
‘Yes.’
‘But you did meet him.’
‘And I can’t get him out of my head even though he’s …’
‘He’s what?’
‘A complete dickhead.’
She pushes me away, puts both hands on my shoulders and looks me fair in the face. ‘So are you, Peach,’ she says.
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Yes, you’re a complete dickhead, but,’ she tightens her grip on my shoulders and peers into my face, ‘you are also the daughter of … a holy woman!’ she whispers hoarsely.
‘She wasn’t a saint, Stella! She left the convent. And she had me.’
‘She was strong enough to withstand the temptations of the world,’ Stella mumbles dreamily, looking off into the distance. ‘A strong spirit.’
‘Well, you can have her!’
‘No, I can’t. She’s yours.’
‘Will you please shut up about it?’
‘But it is so totally cool.’
‘What am I meant to do about him?’
She smiles and raises her eyes to heaven. ‘Think about what attracted you to him in the first place.’
It was one of those wild freezing midwinter nights that Det thrives on and just about everyone else wishes away. We’d been invited down the coast to celebrate Dicko’s birthday. His parents were loaded and he had access to what he described as ‘an awesome pile of bricks’ for the event.
I wish now that I’d taken heed of Stella’s warning. She’d come outside while I was waiting on the front verandah in my warm coat and boots for Fluke to pick me up.
‘Be careful, Peach,’ she said, frowning at the apple she was eating.
‘Why?’
‘Clear sky, full moon, winter.’
‘So?’ I laughed.
‘Be careful.’
‘I’m always careful, Stella,’ I said, jumping up to hug her goodbye as Fluke pulled up out the front. I picked up my waterproof and my overnight bag.
‘Enjoy the concert!’ I kissed her on the nose and hurried to the gate. ‘And don’t let Dad go to sleep!’
She and Dad are obsessive J.S. Bach fans. They had tickets for a special choral work that night at the Arts Centre in town. After a long day at the hospital, Dad has been known to go straight to sleep as soon as the concert starts, and then embarrass everyone around him by snoring.
She laughed and hugged me back. ‘I’ll take the hatpin.’
I was ready for a party. Mid-year exams were over. Fluke had a few days off from the pier. Heading down the coast together was going to be fantastic.
Fluke drove the car he shared with his mother and I sat next to him. Det, Nick and Walter, a really nice Canadian guy that Det had hooked up with the night before, were in the back. I could tell straight away that Det was still a bit wired. A few weeks before she’d had a nasty break-up with a guy she’d been crazy about, and it was still clouding her mood. She hadn’t wanted to come but I’d insisted. Sitting home all weekend wasn’t the answer to anything, I’d told her sternly. But now I wasn’t so sure. Det often found big social occasions difficult. Maybe I should have let her stay at home to lick her wounds.
Walter was older than us – probably late twenties –
and for most of the way down he entertained us with stories of growing up in sub-zero temperatures.
‘So how do you take a piss in all that gear?’ Nick wanted to know.
‘Well, there are these little flaps and …’
‘What about sport?’
‘Ever heard of ice hockey, Nick?’
Basically we gossiped and joked and blathered on about our lives all the way. Fluke and his mum were big fans of the blues. Underneath our chatter a succession of old gravelly songs moaned on about someone doing bad by someone else, until the rest of us couldn’t take it any more.
‘Jeez, mate,’ said Nick good-naturedly, ‘I’m aware that these guys are like the king daddies of everything and all but I’m ready to slit my wrists. You got any other kind of music?’
‘Radio?’ Fluke laughed.
‘Yes please!’ everyone chorused.
‘So, what?’
‘Bland and banal, please,’ Nick moaned. ‘Kylie would be better than this.’
We wasted a fair bit of time taking wrong turns and peering at maps. Dicko’s instructions were not very accurate, but at last we found the dirt track turn-off and we knew we were right.
Most of the house was secluded behind a high fence and overhanging trees but the rest of it loomed up before us like an ocean liner. The second-storey windows blazed out into the surrounding darkness like the top deck.
‘Oh shit!’ Nick groaned. ‘Don’t you just hate rich people?’
‘No,’ Walter drawled coolly, ‘I love them. Especially when you get to use their stuff!’
Within moments of us calling through the intercom, the gate slid open and we were driving up to the front of the house and parking alongside a number of other cars. We got out to stretch after the long drive, delighted to be there at last. Music was thumping out into the night all around us.
Dicko met us at the open door in a white dinner suit, silk tie and patent leather shoes.
‘Shit, man, were we meant to dress up?’ Nick tried to look concerned. He was in an old jumper and grimy jeans.
‘Yeah.’ Dicko threw an arm around his shoulders, and motioned us all inside. ‘Feel bad, Nick. Feel really bad.’
We pulled off our coats and shoved them into one of the cupboards in the vast plush hallway.
The Convent Page 18