– Helen
I refolded the letter and crammed it, shaking, back in the envelope.
My father hadn’t chosen us. He’d been ditched.
Chapter Sixteen
Dad touched a finger to his lips. ‘Get up, CP,’ he whispered. ‘Come and watch the sunrise with me.’
I crawled out of bed and followed him to the living room. The sun was melting like hot butter across the horizon. We watched it ripple in waves of heat until it became too bright to look at. Dad turned and began rummaging in a crate on the floor bringing out a flattened cardboard box, and laid it carefully on the table like a small coffin.
‘Sorry, it got squashed.’ He opened the lid, stuck in his finger and brought it out dripping with chocolate, then pushed the soggy mound towards me. ‘Here, CP. Happy Easter from the Christmas Bunny.’
I smiled. He’d tried so hard lately to be the old Dad, I couldn’t stay disappointed with him. I scooped chocolate onto my finger and looked around the living room of our new house. It sat on the side of a hill overlooking Boroko, two streets behind the Breuers’, and although it had no beach view, at night the suburb below sparkled like gems on a giant’s shoe. My bedroom was at the back and looked out onto a driveway lined with pine trees that whooshed when the wind blew. There was a large living area with an alcove off to one side that Dad claimed for his desk and his old clock. Down in the garden was a stand of sugar cane which Josie hacked pieces from for me to chew. It was pale and woody, smelled like molasses and set my teeth on edge, but the juice was rich and sweet. Josie’s boi-haus was big, with plenty of room for Husband Number Five when he was in town. Dave had been replaced.
‘Too jealous,’ she’d said.
‘What’s your new husband’s name?’ I’d asked.
She’d laughed. ‘Just Husband.’
Dad tapped my shoulder. ‘Come and see what else the Easter Bunny left.’
I loaded my mouth with chocolate and followed him to the verandah. There, propped against the railing, was a bicycle.
‘For me?’
‘I owe you for your birthday, CP. Go on, hop on.’
My own bike. Freedom, escape, legs.
Mama wasn’t too sure about me having a bike. Her eyes narrowed whenever I took it out, as if she couldn’t decide whether it was a good thing or not. It meant she didn’t have to drive me to school but it also meant she didn’t know where I was, and because she was working so much she was often not around to find out. She was making a name for herself as a photographer who’d go anywhere and take pictures of anything. Close-ups of snakes, fights, pictures taken standing in the middle of a river in flood – all a far cry from the fearful mother I’d seen on the Vailala River years before.
She and Dad had re-established their routine and the three of us spent evenings at home like any other family; reading, listening to the radio, playing cards or records. They talked about their work, went to the Boat Club or the movies together, and threw dinner parties. But things were different. Dad’s chirpy, expectant look had given way to a new seriousness, and my mother’s eyes – once dreamy and distant – darted about as if she had too many pots on the stove and one of them was sure to boil over. One of those pots was my schoolwork, a subject she never tired of. Her lecture was always the same. ‘You’re going to have a university education so you can pick the eyes out of life. I won’t have you washing dishes or emptying bedpans to make ends meet. But you must work.’
I was working. Not for my future but for Christopher Bright, the only person who challenged Stefi’s position at the top of the class. Mind you, Diane Rudge wasn’t far behind. The three of them had animated, eye-watering discussions about chemistry and physics and I was determined to show Chris I could do more than just get a good strike rate at softball. I couldn’t decide whether his interest in me was personal or not. I saw him looking – more often than I liked – at Diane and it stumped me what he saw in her. She didn’t seem special enough for a boy like Chris. Sometimes he looked at Stefi with the same soft – almost sad – gaze he gave Diane, but he never looked that way at me. Stefi wasn’t interested, but Diane was, and Stefi would tease me about it.
‘Maybe . . .’
‘Maybe what?’
‘Maybe she mucks around with him. You know, lets him do things . . .’
I wouldn’t have blamed her if she did. But my mother’s recent warning was still fresh in my mind. She came into my room one day looking like she had to say something that I wouldn’t like.
‘Lindsay, I found a picture.’
My heart rolled up my throat.
‘Yours, perhaps.’ She held out my photo of Chris which must have fallen from my book. I snatched it back. Chris was mine and I didn’t want her having anything to do with him.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’m not upset. He must be someone special. Will we get to meet him? Perhaps you could bring him home for dinner.’
To meet, or to eat? Neither. Ever.
‘Look . . . ah . . .’ she circled the room. ‘It’s time you knew about men and women and how babies get here.’
She had to be joking; now she wanted to tell me? Too late, Mama, years too late. But she was off, rattling on about body parts and sex as if she was calling a horse race. Not a word about how different sex could be, depending on who you were with. Didn’t she know? Didn’t she know about fun sex, or disgusting white-maggot pervert sex, or attack sex? Hadn’t she ever felt that slippery roller-coaster feeling I got when I thought about me and Chris?
‘Have you heard of menstruation?’ she said.
‘Yep.’
‘Every month, when your body becomes mature enough to carry a baby, you bleed – unless you’re pregnant of course. Note – I said when your body becomes mature enough. The rest of you isn’t mature enough until you’re an adult. Sometimes, not even then. Pregnancy before marriage will ruin your life. The boy will regard you as cheap and ditch you. The world will regard you as cheap and ditch you. Your child will carry the stigma for its entire life and even if you manage to land a husband, you’ll lose all hope of having a career. Complete disaster. Any questions?’
‘No.’
Mama hovered for a moment, then gave me a half-smile, glanced again at my photo of Chris, and left.
At school I watched Diane Rudge . . . wondering. The thought of her fooling around with Chris made me sick but if it made him think she was cheap, all the better. Diane and Chris. His hands on her, his beautiful hands. Why? I ripped a page from my exercise book and gave Diane whiskers, a rat’s tail and a pimply arse. I showed the drawing to Stefi and she laughed, but nervously. Stefi was worried. Sooner or later, she reckoned, I’d get caught drawing.
I didn’t think so. I kept my sketching things in a narrow gap between the wall and the built-in bunk in my bedroom and I never risked painting.
‘But someone might dob you in,’ Stefi said.
‘Why would they? No-one knows I’m not allowed to draw. My mother’s too ashamed of me being a thief to spread it all over Moresby.’
‘You’re not a thief. Kids steal all the time. Anyway, if you’d stolen anything else besides paints, it wouldn’t have mattered.’
‘What do you mean?’
She blinked. ‘You’re hopeless, Lindsay! Your father’s mistress was an artist. Who do you think your mother is reminded of when you paint?’
I was out of sketch paper. I’d used every square inch of the pad Helen Valier had given me. I needed a new one and I still owed her money. Luckily, having my own bike made things easier.
Her shop was only a ten-minute ride from school. As I scooted down the backstreets with eight-and-six saved from my pocket money, I tried not to think about what my mother would say if she knew where I was going. If she did, I had my excuse. I was buying a book, a photography book. That’d shut her mouth. I’d get away with it. Once.
I pushed my bike behind a hibiscus bush and went into the shop. She wasn’t there. A fan rotated slowly, lifting a corner of the
South Pacific Post on the reading table. I noticed a new set of sketches on the wall – ink drawings of birds, finely detailed and brushed over with watercolour. There were cockatoos, birds of paradise, parakeets and a hornbill, a single perfect hornbill that reminded me of Horace at Ihu. Mrs Valier’s hornbill, however, was completely different from mine.
‘Hello, Lindsay.’
She stood in a doorway leading to the back of the shop, a bright splash of colour among the shadows.
‘Hello. I’ve come to pay you for the pad and pencils.’
She raised her head in a half-nod. ‘Oh yes.’ She went to the counter and stared at the till as if waiting for it to pop open. ‘One-and-six,’ she said. ‘No, um, one-and-three.’
One-and-three? For that pad and those pencils? Three bob, more like it. I pulled out my purse and pushed a shilling and three pennies across the counter before she could change her mind. ‘Thanks,’ I said, as she dropped the coins into the till. ‘I need a new sketchpad, too.’
She turned to the drawers behind her.
I leaned over the counter. ‘May I . . . may I look at the paints? I can’t buy them, but . . .’
‘Yes, by all means. Come through.’
I stood beside her, so close I could smell her perfume, jasmine perhaps. Before me lay a sea of tubes, each with its colour striped on the front. She picked up phthalo blue. ‘Have you used these before?’
‘At Tempe’s, a long time ago. They were great. Do you use them for all your pictures?’ Some of her watercolours were so delicately tinted I wondered if perhaps she used paint tablets.
‘Yes, they’re very versatile.’
‘I wish I could paint like that.’
‘Like me?’ she said. ‘Why would you want to paint like me? Paint like yourself.’
‘I only meant I wish I knew all the different ways you can use these paints. They’re not like tablets which are so hard to get colour on the brush.’
‘No, they’re not.’
I gazed at the drawer, conscious of time. ‘My sketchbook,’ I said, ‘and then I’d better go.’
My mother told me once that there are hundreds of muscles in a person’s face, but in that moment I swear Mrs Valier moved none of them. Yet I knew she saw inside me. I knew she knew my mother had banned art and that she understood what it felt like. She knew I was a thief and she didn’t care.
Sketchbook. Pencils. You’d think I ate them the way they disappeared.
The next time I went to her shop there was a card in the window.
Closed Wednesdays from 2.30 pm.
Sod’s law, as Dad would say. I pushed the thought away. I didn’t want to think of her and Dad. I went back to get my bike and noticed a door open at the rear of the shop. A bead curtain across it clacked gently in the breeze. I went over and peered through. Mrs Valier sat at a long bench, her fiery hair caught in a narrow ribbon, painting, and muttering to herself.
I waited for a moment, then coughed. ‘Excuse me.’
She swung around. ‘Lindsay, what are you doing here?’
I stood in the doorway, feeling clumsy. ‘I just wanted paper and pencils. Sorry. I didn’t know you were closed.’
She dropped her brush in a jar of paint-tinted water. ‘Come in.’ The room was long and bright. A wide wooden bench ran around two sides of it. One side was covered in papers and account books, the other in brushes, paper and tubes of paint, all laid out according to colour. The sight of it made my throat ache. She wiped her hands on her apron which was creased and caked in paint, messy compared with her neatly arranged paints. I couldn’t help smiling.
‘What’s the joke?’ she said.
‘You look like one of my paintings.’
She picked up a tube and screwed on the top. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
I twirled Stumpy in my pocket. ‘I haven’t painted in nine weeks.’
She looked away. ‘That must be very difficult.’
‘I’ve been drawing though.’ I pulled the sketchbook, crammed with drawings, from my satchel. There was a silhouette of a bird in a tree. No background, no foreground. ‘I’m not good at backgrounds,’ I said.
She squinted at the picture. ‘Hmm, it lacks context. See here, you need darkness, Payne’s grey below the horizon line. Hard to do without paints. You don’t even have a horizon line.’
‘What’s a horizon line?’
Her eyebrows shot up. ‘Where the sky meets the earth or sea.’
I had a sudden image of my mother at Ela Beach with her arms around her knees, her eyes locked on the horizon, watching and waiting for . . .
‘Most paintings have a horizon line,’ said Mrs Valier, ‘even if you can’t see it. Floor meets wall, wall meets ceiling. Everything in the picture relates to that line. To show your bird against the light, the horizon line on your picture should be low. Low or high but not in the middle. It chops the painting in half and makes it look like a child’s picture. No tension. I’ll get your pad and pencils.’ She went through to the shop.
While she was gone I studied her picture: a gecko, perfect in every detail. He clung to a branch with round suckered feet, head up, eyes alert, skin scored with tiny lines.
‘He’s a beautiful gecko,’ I said, when she returned.
Her eyes roamed the drawing with the gaze of a mother. ‘Maybe,’ she said, pulling out a piece of blank paper, ‘you could use a softer pencil and draw your bird like this . . .’ She sketched some lines on a pad – a bird with a curved beak and a sweeping wing – then smeared the lines downward with her fingers, fluffing the feathers and softening its plump belly.
I sighed. ‘That’s so clever.’
‘Thank you, but it’s really only practice. I’ll get you some of these pencils. My treat.’
I peered at my watch in the gloom. How much longer could it go on? Margot Fonteyn fluttered across the movie screen. Die. Obediently, she fell to the floor. Beside me my mother and Mrs Breuer heaved women-sighs and Stefi stared open-mouthed at the ballet. Ladies in frothy tutus and feathers dipped and swayed around the dying swan but still she jerked and writhed. So much for Saturday afternoon at the movies; I couldn’t decide which was worse: Swan Lake or Movietone News with its boring cricket scores, boring President Eisenhower, boring Republicans and boring Cold War. Give me Cary Grant and Grace Kelly or Hayley Mills any day. Overhead giant punkah fans flopped backwards and forwards. The swan stopped struggling. Good. Now we could go . . . nope, still not dead. I started humming.
Stefi elbowed me. ‘Shush.’
Afterwards, sucking on a chocolate malted milk, she said, ‘What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you think that was beautiful? I wish I could dance like that. I’d love to be a ballerina.’
‘Why don’t you?’ I said. ‘You’re the right shape.’
She shook her head. ‘Ballet dancers are beautiful.’
‘No they’re not. Not all of them.’
‘Oh, Lindsay!’
‘What?’
‘You were supposed to say I am beautiful.’
‘You are,’ I said. ‘I think you are.’ Inside. ‘Go on, ask your mother.’
‘Ask me what?’ said Mrs Breuer.
‘Stefi wants to do ballet. Will you let her?’
Mrs Breuer shrugged. ‘Why not?’
Stefi’s ballet lessons were held in the school hall on Saturdays. There were always kids hanging about, watching or playing sports. I asked Mama if I could go and watch.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Do you good to mix.’
I didn’t go to mix. I went to draw. An extraordinary thing happened when Stefi danced. She really was beautiful.
‘You can’t draw ballet,’ she said, as I tried to capture her with my pencil. ‘It’s a movement, not a pose.’
‘I know that.’ I didn’t want demure faces and fluttering hands. I wanted Stefi leaping and twirling, her hair streaked out in ginger ribbons. I didn’t want to draw Stefi doing ballet but what ballet was doing for Stefi.
‘You can’t want ano
ther sketchpad already.’
‘No, I’ve come to ask you something.’
She leaned against her desk, arms crossed. ‘What?’
‘I want to know how to draw movement. My friend Stefi is doing ballet.’
‘Ask your art teacher at school.’
‘I don’t have an art teacher at school. Not until grade nine. Didn’t you know that? I mean, because you sell school books.’
‘Yes, of course. I was thinking of Ela Beach School.’
‘Will you show me?’
‘No, Lindsay. I’m sorry, I can’t.’
‘You showed me how to do the bird.’
‘Yes, but . . . no. That was just a moment . . .’
I felt my stuffing falling out. ‘Why not?’
‘You know why not.’ She fiddled with the heart on her wrist.
‘Look.’ I took the sketchbook from my bag and held it out. ‘Look what I did with the bird.’
She glanced at the picture. ‘Yes. Good.’
‘Please, Mrs Valier. I’ll pay you. It’ll be a business arrangement.’ There was nothing personal in business arrangements. You didn’t have to be friends and Mrs Valier didn’t have to do me any favours.
‘No, Lindsay, it’s not about money. Even if I wanted to do it, I couldn’t show you in five minutes. It takes time to learn these things. A long time.’
‘I’ve got time.’
‘Practice. Patience.’
‘I’ll practise. I’m patient.’
She plucked a tube of paint from the neat pyramid on her desk, examined it and tossed it back, upsetting the pile. ‘You need to know anatomy and understand how muscles work.’
The Beloved Page 18