The Golden Day

by Ursula Dubosarsky

  Obediently, gladly, the little girls would run away through the heavy-branched trees and careful rose bushes, across the samples of grasses from South America. They would stand and listen to the bubbling fountain, and the clip-clopping of the ducks as they paddled about the glossy pond.

  This was just the sort of thing you should be able to write a poem about. But when Cubby listened to the fountain it only made her think of the broken cistern in the toilets under the gym, mossy and dank and smelling like a dead body mixed up with old cartons of rotting milk. You couldn’t write a poem about that, could you? Although Icara said you could write poems about horrible things just as much as beautiful things.

  ‘Did Miss Renshaw tell you that?’ asked Cubby, feeling doubtful.

  ‘I don’t need Miss Renshaw to tell me how to write a poem,’ replied Icara scornfully.

  Icara and Miss Renshaw did not get on.

  ‘Miss Renshaw doesn’t like me,’ Icara told Cubby.

  Icara is too much of an individualist, Miss Renshaw sighed, which usually meant that Icara disagreed with Miss Renshaw.

  ‘We’re enemies,’ said Icara.

  ‘Why?’ asked Cubby, alarmed. Enemies? Enemies were countries, tanks and planes, soldiers in uniforms with helmets and guns, not ordinary people in classrooms.

  Icara shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She didn’t seem to care particularly. ‘It might be because my father is a judge.’

  It was true, Icara’s father was a judge. He sat in court in red robes and a white wig and sent people to prison. Or worse. No wonder Miss Renshaw didn’t like Icara. After all, it must have been a judge who decided that Ronald Ryan was to be taken away, hanged until he was dead.

  ‘Miss Renshaw hates me,’ said Icara.

  ‘We must work together for the common good,’ Miss Renshaw declared. ‘Icara is too reserved. Reserved is a synonym for distant, which is a synonym for far, far away. What is another word for far away?’

  This was a kind of game. Miss Renshaw would say a word, and see how long a chain of similar words they could make.

  ‘Remote,’ said Georgina.

  ‘Isolated,’ said Elizabeth with the plaits.

  ‘Far-flung,’ said Cynthia through a mouthful of pink meringue she was secretly eating underneath the desk, and that was the end of the chain, nobody could thing of anything else.

  ‘Far-flung,’ wrote Miss Renshaw on the board in yellow chalk. Miss Renshaw had large, round, sloping, marvellously neat blackboard writing. Nobody could write on the blackboard like Miss Renshaw. ‘Icara is far-flung.’

  Far-flung

  But with Cubby, Icara was not far-flung. She was nearby-close-at-hand-a-stone’s-throw-away. They were friends without either of them really knowing why. It was as though, after that first day when Icara had taken hold of Cubby’s frightened hand, she had never let it go. Cubby and Icara could sit together in the playground or on the bus or in the library not saying much for hours, just a lovely rhythmic silence, like the sound of breathing when you’re asleep.

  THREE

  Poet under Tree

  AFTER THAT FIRST MEETING with Morgan, Miss Renshaw began to take them to the Ena Thompson Memorial Gardens quite often, at least once a week, sometimes twice. Usually she would tell the little girls to run away and write poems, but other times she made them all sit down in a circle under the fig tree and listen to Morgan.

  ‘Poets know so much,’ said Miss Renshaw. ‘You should listen to Morgan, he knows. About nature. About life.’

  They didn’t mind, it was easy to listen to Morgan. Not only his eyes were beautiful, but so was his voice, low and owlish. He talked and talked. He smoked while he spoke, and his cigarettes had a strong smell, like burnt Christmas pudding. Morgan knew all about flowers and plants and soil and earth. He knew how living things catch life and grow, and then how death arrives and they lie down and give up.

  ‘But I don’t let them give up,’ said Morgan. ‘I make them feel powerful again, so that they can keep going.’

  Morgan was tender, he held the dying plants gently in his hands, the same hands that took up a pen with ink as brown as the earth and wrote his poems in the black leather book he kept in his top pocket, like a miniature Bible. When he had finished mowing the lawn or planting bulbs or digging up weeds, he would sit under the tree and thoughts of poems would come to him as he smoked. Words entered his mind through the thin violet beauty of the smoke winding upwards to the sky, and down he would write them until it was time to get up and start digging again.

  Morgan knew more about the secrets of the foreshore than anyone alive.

  ‘From his childhood, Morgan has belonged to the earth,’ Miss Renshaw told them.

  Well, he likes digging, thought Cubby. Morgan had a giant spade which he would send sharply into the chocolate earth like an axe.

  ‘Morgan is a conscientious objector,’ said Miss Renshaw.

  ‘Do you know what that is?’

  Nobody dared answer. Sometimes Miss Renshaw did not want an answer, she wanted another question.

  ‘What is it, Miss Renshaw?’ asked Bethany at last.

  ‘A conscientious objector is a person who refuses to fight in war, refuses to join the army, even when conscripted. Surely you little girls must know what conscription is?’ said Miss Renshaw, her voice rising in despair.

  In the distance, past the sea wall, they could hear the cries of seagulls and the lapping of the ocean, and they breathed in gusts of salty air. Beyond, they knew there was war, far, far away somewhere else, in Vietnam. That’s what conscription was for. Boys left school and got into uniforms and went on boats and planes to fight in the war. Boys and men, off they went.

  But not all of them. Not Morgan. Morgan knew it was bad to kill people, to run through a village with a gun and scream and shout and throw bombs at children and mothers. Morgan would not join the army. Instead he tended the Ena Thompson Memorial Gardens and composed poems in his little leather book.

  ‘We won’t mention these meetings with Morgan to our parents, or other staff, will we, girls?’ said Miss Renshaw, when they were safely back in the classroom, their round straw hats hung on the pegs on the wall like a row of faded moons. ‘We won’t mention Morgan. Will we?’

  ‘Why not, Miss Renshaw?’ asked Bethany.

  Miss Renshaw breathed in and out, deeply. Miss Renshaw was good at breathing. She had learned to breathe properly because she had trained to be an actress and actresses need to breathe very deeply so they can say all their words long and loud. She tried to make the girls breathe deeply too. Breathe down, said Miss Renshaw, not in, down, into the diaphragm, feel your diaphragm, can you feel it? But none of them could, although Cynthia thought she might have once.

  Why not, Miss Renshaw? asked eleven pairs of eyes and Miss Renshaw breathed deeply and did not answer. Not exactly, anyway.

  ‘I know I can trust you, girls,’ said Miss Renshaw. ‘It will be our little secret.’

  Out in the playground, the little girls sat on wooden benches and ate their sandwiches and played with each other’s hair.

  ‘Miss Renshaw loves Morgan,’ said Georgina. ‘I saw them kissing.’

  ‘No you didn’t,’ said one of the Elizabeths at once. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘Where did you see them?’ asked Martine, naturally curious.

  Georgina wouldn’t say. She turned red. She had freckles, lots and lots and lots of them, and when she blushed it looked as though there were even more.

  Where did Morgan live? Cubby wondered. Did he have a house with rooms like other people? Or did he live in the gardens, sheltered by the trees, nestling between the massive arm-like roots at night when the gates of the gardens were locked shut, and nobody could get in or out. Only Morgan remained, trapped inside like the little insect in the teardrop of amber that hung around Miss Renshaw’s neck.

  ‘This little creature fell in honey hundreds of thousands of years ago,’ said Miss Renshaw, holding up her necklace to show them.
‘Think of that, girls. It’s been there ever since.’

  The sunlight glinted through the golden drop, revealing a net of tiny limbs and wings.

  ‘Oh Miss Renshaw,’ said Bethany, aghast, her eyes filling with tears. ‘The poor thing.’

  ‘Now, now, Bethany,’ said Miss Renshaw briskly. ‘We can’t be crying for every dead creature on earth. It’s not reasonable. Save your tears for greater sorrows, girls.’

  Probably Miss Renshaw was right, thought Cubby. Certainly the sorrow she felt for the insect in the golden necklace was nothing to the dropping of her stomach when she found her pet guinea pig, Agamemnon, dead in his cage on a very hot day in the summer holidays when it was over a hundred degrees and birds fell from the sky in the South Australian desert.

  A shudder in the loins engenders there

  The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

  And Agamemnon dead!

  Miss Renshaw cried out unexpectedly, reading aloud from her favourite collection of poetry. She stood by the window looking noble, and her voice had a thickness in it, almost as though she might be about to cry. The windows were high and webbed, edged with cracking paint.

  Of course, that poem was about another Agamemnon altogether, not a poor guinea pig lying on his back with his little legs stiffly in the air and his fur all spiky, almost as though he had fallen from the sky himself. Save your tears for greater sorrows, Miss Renshaw said, but then, reflected Cubby, Miss Renshaw hadn’t known Agamemnon.

  FOUR

  Four Schoolgirls

  ‘ICARA! CUBBY! STAY TOGETHER!’

  On the morning Ronald Ryan was hanged, the voice of Miss Renshaw sailed across the treetops as the little girls dispersed like drops of light rain, down the winding paths and through the maze of shrubs and flowerbeds. Cubby would certainly have stayed with Icara, but she couldn’t see her anywhere. How still it was! A white cat sat by itself on a painted bench, its tail twisting. When it saw Cubby, it leaped from the bench onto the bright green carpet of grass and ran into the wet labyrinth of the trees.

  ‘Cubby!’

  She turned. Martine and Bethany were galloping towards her from the other side of the pond, two little girls in identical hats with bunches of hair bouncing out from underneath. Martine was new to the school. She was from New Caledonia, so she spoke English with a French accent. Her parents had brought her to Sydney to go to school because they said she was learning nothing at all in New Caledonia. Nothing!

  ‘But you can speak French,’ said Cubby. This was miraculous to the little girls. ‘We can’t speak anything.’

  ‘You can speak English,’ Martine pointed out.

  Oh English. Anyone could speak English.

  Martine came from New Caledonia on a big white boat covered with fairy lights.

  ‘There was a swimming pool on board,’ she told them, ‘and every night you could have as much icecream as you wanted. But my brother was seasick and he couldn’t eat any of it at all.’

  ‘Did you get seasick?’ asked Cubby.

  ‘Not once,’ said Martine with satisfaction.

  Martine was very neat. She sat down on the grass, careful not to crease the skirt of her tunic. Her long white socks had frills on top. She had brought them all the way from New Caledonia. Bethany flopped face-forward next to her.

  The golden February sun glowed high above their heads and the ducks swam to and fro on the pond. Cubby sank to the ground and lay on her back with her eyes wide open.

  ‘Look,’ said Martine from her sitting-up position.

  ‘There’s Icara.’

  Cubby raised her head. Icara was walking towards them, scuffing her shoes on the path, both her arms loosely swinging. Humming, she sat down on the grass next to the others.

  The sun lay upon their shoulders like a summer blanket. They breathed in the warm air and the scent of flowers, and listened to the sounds of unseen animals rustling in the reedy islands of the pond. A little breeze rose from the harbour.

  ‘I wonder who Ena Thompson was,’ said Bethany, getting up on her elbow. ‘To have a whole park named after her.’

  ‘She must have been famous,’ said Cubby.

  But what could she have been famous for?

  ‘Swimming,’ suggested Martine. ‘Maybe she swam to New Zealand.’

  They thought about it.

  ‘New Zealand is too far,’ said Icara. ‘Nobody could swim that far.’

  Icara is a realist, said Miss Renshaw, but the world needs dreamers, not realists.

  New Zealand, Noumea, the Cook Islands, Hawaii, Cubby thought sleepily. She looked up at the sky, which was like a great big ocean, with drifts of clouds as islands. On the blackboard Miss Renshaw had drawn a wonderful chalk map of the South Seas, with a curling line of pink dashes to show where Captain Cook had sailed, right to the very end.

  ‘Maybe Ena Thompson died here, in the park,’ said Bethany, rolling over on her side. The realisation of this thought spread in shock over her whole face. ‘Maybe she fell out of a tree and died, and then her husband buried her under it.’

  ‘Maybe she was stung to death by a bee,’ said Martine. She had once been stung by a bee in the Ena Thompson Memorial Gardens, although it had not led to death. ‘I hate bees.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a ghost,’ said Bethany. ‘The ghost of Ena Thompson.’

  Could you have a ghost outside, in a garden? Cubby had always thought that ghosts were only found in houses, creeping up stairways, hiding in cupboards.

  ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts,’ said Icara.

  ‘Yes there is,’ said Martine. ‘I’ve seen one.’

  Bethany sat up straight.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At home,’ said Martine, in a matter-of-fact way. ‘On the Isle of Pines.’

  The Isle of Pines! Tell us, tell us, tell us. They bent towards her. Tell us.

  ‘It was my grandmother,’ said Martine, pleased with the attention. ‘She was dead for three years already, but I saw her. It was at night. She went into my father’s bedroom, where he was sleeping. I crept in and watched.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing happened. She just lay there on the bed next to him,’ said Martine, ‘like a cat.’

  That was it?

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Then she just got up and went away.’

  ‘Did she walk through the wall?’

  Martine shook her head. She was bored with the story now.

  ‘I don’t remember. She just wasn’t there any more.’ She straightened up the frills on her socks. ‘It was not so special. Everyone sees ghosts on the Isle of Pines. It’s normal.’

  Normal?

  ‘It was just your imagination,’ said Cubby, looking at Icara, hoping. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t have any imagination,’ Martine pointed out smugly.

  ‘Miss Renshaw said so.’

  The four girls were sick of sitting. Shifting like spoonfuls of sticky toffee, they got up from the grass. They drifted together towards the duck pond and stood with their arms resting on the railing, watching the duck families swimming forwards and backwards. The black water swirled below them.

  Maybe there are ghosts, thought Cubby. Maybe they’re like the feet of the ducks. They’re there underneath, there in the dark, and we just can’t see them…

  ‘Let’s go and find Miss Renshaw,’ said Bethany.

  They made their way up one of the several winding paths, half-slipping on the leaves underfoot, through the overhanging trees that were heavy with the smell of drowsy fruit bats. It didn’t take them long. Miss Renshaw and the other seven little girls were sitting with Morgan, cross-legged in a circle under the fig tree. When Miss Renshaw saw them, she waved. She seemed excited.

  ‘Girls! Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you.

  Sit down, quickly and quietly. Q and Q.’

  Cubby, Icara, Martine and Bethany squeezed themselves into the circle. Morgan rubbed his beard, and smiled, but seriou
sly.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said, in his owl’s voice.

  ‘Morgan is going to take us somewhere special today, girls,’ said Miss Renshaw. ‘You are very lucky.’

  ‘Ouch!’ said Bethany loudly. Then she whispered, ‘Sorry, an ant bit me.’

  Miss Renshaw frowned.

  ‘This is a sad day, as you know, girls,’ she reminded them.

  ‘A very sad day.’

  The little girls tried to remember the sad day. That’s right. Ronald Ryan. But already thoughts of Ronald Ryan had flown away like feathers.

  ‘So that’s why we are going to do something very special,’ Miss Renshaw went on, ‘to help us remember this sad day. Now, listen to Morgan.’

  Listen to Morgan, listen to Morgan. It was easy to listen to Morgan and his deep, bubbling words and his wispy hair floating over his eyes...

  ‘There are many secret places,’ Morgan said, looking around the circle, but somehow not really looking at them. ‘So many hidden spots along the harbour, places nobody knows about.’

  ‘You know about them,’ said Georgina.

  ‘It’s just a way of speaking, Georgina,’ said Miss Renshaw, irritated. ‘Don’t interrupt.’

  ‘Places hardly anyone knows about,’ Morgan corrected himself.

  Caves, he said, hidden caves with Aboriginal paintings from the Dreamtime, thousands of years old, he said.

  ‘We know about the Dreamtime,’ said the tallest Elizabeth. ‘Last year in Term One we did fairy tales, in Term Two we did Greek myths and in Term Three we did the Dreamtime.’ She counted them off with her fingers.

  ‘I hate myths,’ said Martine.

  ‘Ah, but you don’t really know about the Dreamtime,’ said Morgan, pulling a cigarette from his top pocket, ‘if you haven’t seen these caves.’

  ‘Are you an Aborigine?’ asked Cynthia.

  An Aborigine! The little girls had never met an Aborigine. But no. Morgan tapped the cigarette on the back of his hand. No, he said, no he wasn’t, but as a child he had spent time with a tribe and they had taught him many things.