The Trapeze Act

by Libby Angel

  They wondered where they’d gone wrong. They were from good English families with aristocratic roots, had not a drop of convict or foreign blood in their veins. They had been educated at the best colleges in the state, still remembered how to tie a half­windsor. They went to tennis lessons, gave generously of their time to charities, took Thai cooking lessons. They picked their children up from school on time and put their husbands’ careers before their own ambitions, all while maintaining their own interests.

  How was it possible, they asked themselves, that a carnie like Leda had nabbed and procreated with one of the most successful barristers in the state? How was it possible that a woman such as she—who, let’s admit it, although attractive, was highly eccentric—could be living in an architect-designed house with her own side in a walk-in wardrobe?

  Where was the justice in that?

  There were certain things about my father that could be understood only by examining the negative space around him. By rifling through the effects on his side of the walk-in wardrobe, by exploring his chambers while waiting for him after hours.

  Since moving to the spaceship, I sometimes walked to his work after school in hope of getting a lift home instead of having to walk up the hill from the bus stop. I walked along the edge of the parklands into the city and through the main square, where I’d stop to inspect the bulbous goldfish in the moat-like pond out the front of the police station. (Some people liked to drop coins in there as if it were a lucky place, one worth returning to.)

  My father’s chambers, made of bluestone, were one of the oldest buildings in the town. The stairs leading to the entrance were worn as smooth as bowls. The front door was painted brick red.

  First, I would report to the receptionist’s office in the front room. Ruth, the receptionist, kept a photograph of her three dogs—two greyhounds and a Great Dane—on her desk. She once told me that they slept on her bed. Behind where she sat at the switchboard, a one-way mirror adjoined one of the barrister’s offices. From his side (they were all men) it was a window through which he could witness a stream of unsuspecting visitors preening themselves.

  My father was usually still at the courts or in a meeting when I arrived, so I would head to the kitchen to wait; I’d make the first of many cups of tea and raid the biscuit drawer, always taking the biscuits from the back of the packet. I would spread out my homework on the laminex-and-chrome table, then, ignoring it, heap teaspoon after teaspoon of sugar into my tea.

  An original fireplace housed an old iron stove, a window looked out onto a paved courtyard, a yellow-green glory vine wound over a pergola, and a row of bins stood against the brushwood fence. Every tick of the clock on the wall seemed loaded with the weight of the law. Even the bins seemed more important than other bins. I waited there quietly, as instructed, until I heard my father’s voice or the sound of his door opening at the end of the hallway. Occasionally, a barrister would pop his head around the kitchen door, ask how my mother was and take out a spoon or fork from the drawer. I smiled and nodded at them, as if from the bottom of a well.

  If I had to wait longer than I felt was reasonable I would go exploring, creeping up the stairs into the original part of the building, along the narrow passageway lined with bookcases, shelves bowed with cases and judgments. The doorways were low enough that tall people had to dip their heads to pass through. At the end of the hallway a small window looked out across the lane and over the police-station car park.

  Inside each room, if he hadn’t already left for the night, a lawyer like my father would be toiling for justice. I learned where the weak points in the old pine floorboards were, how to avoid the creaks. Any rustling from within one of the rooms would send me scuttling down the stairs, devoid, as I was, of any legitimate reason to be there.

  You couldn’t count on lawyers going home in the evenings. According to my father, like him, most of his colleagues kept odd hours. Some worked well into the night, others arrived at the office as early as 4 a.m. I had seen them crossing paths in the kitchen, one winding down drinking beer with loosened collar and tie, another sitting at the table reading the paper and eating muesli in cycling gear.

  When, at last, he arrived back at chambers from court or emerged from his office to find me waiting, Gilbert would look at me as if I had dropped in from a distant planet. I suppose you want a lift home, he’d say.

  In his office we would pick a path through stacks of papers on the floor; I’d sit in his chair and try on his horsehair wig, looking sideways at any material on his desk while he collected his things. From every wall, bookcases loomed. And piles of books and briefs covered every surface of the room: the two desks, the red leather club chair he had bought at the side of the road for ten dollars, the carpet. In the corner by the door, a bentwood hatstand held his suit jacket, umbrella and monogrammed bag.

  Outside on the street, the air stank of boiling honeycomb from the nearby confectionary factory. My father would double lock the front door of the chambers, and we’d cross the road to the car park. He would drive us home, his face reflected in the rear-vision mirror, his gold-capped tooth glinting, his brown leather satchel sitting on the back seat like a well-behaved child.

  Kingston rushed towards adolescence like a road train with brake failure down the freeway hill. The interior walls of the spaceship were plasterboard and the few internal doors slatted, so when he kicked a wall, his foot sallied straight through it, and when he railed against the many injustices imposed on him—no television on weeknights, no smoking, no stealing from the corner shop—the rest of us heard him raging into the night, swearing at the moon.

  But the moon didn’t give a rat’s, and neither did my father. Until a small article appeared in the local paper with a picture of my brother’s school and, inset, the same old picture they always wheeled out: Mr Gilbert Lord Esq. smiling in his wig. An anonymous source had seen my brother buying marijuana from another student in the park across the road from the school. He had alerted the principal and also, it seemed, the local paper.

  Upon seeing the article, my father stood up from the breakfast table, screwed up the page and bowled it over the breakfast bar into the bin. The stainless-steel bin lid swung back and forth, while he wondered, aloud, why he bothered having a family at all.

  As if my mother, brother and I were one entity, a three-headed hydra, his ruination the sole purpose of our existence.

  My mother was blithe. Every second person in the town was stoned, she pointed out. Many people she knew grew marijuana crops alongside their tomatoes.

  I’d heard my parents’ various tennis partners speculate about the government’s tolerance of marijuana. Perhaps it was an indication of the progressive nature of the town, they posited, a sign that it was becoming more like Amsterdam.

  Amsterdam? my mother had scoffed. Are you sure you don’t mean Amish town?

  As soon as my father had finished his rant and left the room to collect his satchel, my brother salvaged the article from the bin. He primed himself for schoolyard fame, but, alas, he was suspended and spent the next week sulking in his room, and then returned to school without fanfare.

  Despite the odds, my parents continued to display a modicum of faith in my brother. After several weeks without serious incident—no phone calls from the school, nothing in the newspapers, no emergency services or officers of the law called to the house—they rewarded him by allowing him to invite his friend Lloyd over for dinner.

  It was a Friday evening. My father was reading briefs on the dining-room table while my mother attempted to assemble something edible in the kitchen. I was in the master bedroom, on the phone to a school friend, negotiating my role in a collaborative geography project.

  Through the window, beyond my own reflection taking form against the falling night, I could just make out the shapes of the two boys in the driveway. A small flame sparked between them; perhaps they were sharing a bong.

  Then came the boom. A flare of light seared the darkness followed
by a magic-trick-like billow of white smoke. I heard Kingston and Lloyd screaming in half-broken voices.

  I heard the sound of my mother in the kitchen dropping a saucepan onto the floor and throwing a handful of utensils into the sink. My father appeared in the bedroom doorway and shouted at me: Call an ambulance!

  Um…I said into the receiver. I felt calm and cruel. I think I’d better—

  Gilbert snatched the handset, hung up the phone, and stabbed at the zero key with a forefinger.

  It wasn’t a bong they’d been lighting in the driveway but a pile of gunpowder. My brother had leaned in closer and closer, trying to set it off. While Lloyd reeled backwards away from the blast, my brother was stuck on his knees in the gravel. His face was torched like a crème brûlée.

  My mother rode in the ambulance and my father drove the hangdog Lloyd back to his parents. I stayed at home and stood in the kitchen, trying to work out what the hell my mother imagined she would cook with a bag of dried seaweed and three lemons.

  It was too bad for my brother, of course, but I was hungry, so I rang the local pizza place and ordered a margherita. When the delivery boy brought it to the door in a thermal box with a free bottle of Coke, I paid him in ten- and twenty-cent pieces from my piggybank.

  My father ate the rest of the pizza when he came back later that night. My mother returned with Kingston in the morning. My brother was temporarily devoid of eyebrows and eyelashes, and his face was bandaged up like the Invisible Man, but his features were otherwise intact, which was lucky, my mother mused, for one whose looks were so capital.

  Perhaps owing to the spectacular nature of Kingston’s injuries, both he and Lloyd escaped disciplining at school. The headmaster instead expelled the final-year student who had procured and sold them the explosives. It was mean-spirited of me, I knew, but I did not share my brother’s relief. I wanted him punished.

  With the Mr Whippy case fast approaching, my father soon went back to his lonesome workaholic ways. He was preparing to represent a suspect by the name of Keuper. He rang at dinnertime to say he would be back late from the office or not at all. I would have to catch the bus home for the foreseeable future. I was too old, anyway, he told me, to be relying on my parents for transport.

  I imagined him, my father, eating dinner with Mr Gore beneath the hanging plastic vines at La Ricetta, the photographs of canals and bridges on the walls, the starched tablecloths and the candles in Chianti bottles. They would be eating calamari, discussing ballistics.

  I imagined the girls next door at the peek-a-boo rubbing themselves against the doorframes. I thought about Mr Whippy lying dead in his van with a hole in his head and I thought about the corpses of homosexual men that were occasionally found floating down the T River.

  This was when the boobook owl arrived in the banksia tree outside the TV room. All day it slept on its branch, bobbing up and down, then at night it flew off hunting, or sat watching us with its eyelids at half-mast, as we moved in and out of the yellow-lit rooms. My mother spied on it through a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses, celebrating when the bird brought back a mouse or small lizard, fretting if it hadn’t returned by morning. She checked regularly through the window until it was safely reinstated on its perch.

  One day I heard her say to the bird, I know what you’re thinking and, even though you are one ugly bird, I have to say I agree.

  We came to treat one another, the four of us, like guests with no common language at a shared-bathroom hostel, opposing magnetic fields drawn to our own various pursuits: my father to work, my mother to the owl, my brother to delinquency, and me to the yard of bones.

  At the end of spring, an army of black cockatoos descended into the pine tree outside my bedroom window. Splaying their mohawks, they marched sideways along the branches from pine cone to pine cone, eating pine nuts, spitting out the spines, tossing refuse on the ground like aristocrats at dinner. Their pillage complete, they swarmed into the sky, flapping and shrieking, You don’t belong! You don’t belong!

  The tree stood ragged, tangled in shadows, the ground beneath carpeted with poisonous brown needles. At night, the branches scratched against my bedroom window like the fingernails of the dead.

  I tried to make my peace with them, the dead. On the way home from the bus stop I walked the gravel avenues of the cemetery between the rows of giant pencil pines, before the marble gazes of saints, virgins and angels of grief. Sometimes I lay down on the weedy graves and peered through the cracks in the asphalt, down into the earth’s core, looking for a coffin lid, a femur bone. Here lay husbands and wives, strata of generations, ribcage to ribcage, pelvis to pelvis, dust to dust. I tasted their names in my mouth: Elizabeth Anne, Henry Edwin. At the far end of the cemetery, backing onto a disused quarry, strangled by sour sobs, were the cot-sized graves of stillborns, little fallen soldiers with unmarked wooden crosses at their heads.

  I returned home pale-faced, despite the effort of hiking up the hill.

  I am trying to make my peace with them, I told my mother.

  With whom? She briefly unglued the opera glasses from her face.

  With the dead.

  With barely a flicker of recognition, my mother looked at me. That’s peculiar, she said.

  Catholics bury and build monuments; Protestants burn and throw their ashes to the wind, my father told me. I wouldn’t find any relative of mine in the cemetery.

  He was right. The dead down the road were not my people. They were strangers, no more interesting than the living, and I had no business talking to their remains.

  But neither did I seem to belong with these individuals who called themselves my mother, father and brother. More than ever, I felt like an imposter on a stage set, as if, at any moment, the spaceship house with its backdrop of scrub, rock and sun might suddenly fly up into the heavens, and my family be revealed to be constructed out of cardboard: brightly painted, highly flammable, but not quite real.

  No discernible crime had taken place, and yet I felt compelled, somehow, to look for evidence. The most obvious starting point was the walk-in wardrobe. I began with the filing box that lived on the floor beneath my father’s coats. Perhaps I had a chronic condition my parents were concealing for my own benefit: leukaemia, or autism, as my mother had suspected soon after my birth. But surely, if that were the case, they would have sought treatment for me. Was it possible doctors were calling by to examine me at night while I slept? No, my parents were too disorganised to maintain such an elaborate deception. All I found in the box were bank statements, insurance papers, and other boring sundries.

  I rummaged through my mother’s costumes, sprayed her perfume into my hair, slipped one of her dresses on over my clothes. I tried on a couple of her wigs, slopped around in her high heels until I rolled an ankle, and, with her lipstick, drew a grotesque smile around the outside of my lips.

  Of course, any secrets worth discovering would be on my father’s side.

  I turned to where his suits hung on wooden hangers like empty men. Closest to the wall was the overcoat he’d purchased in England some years before, still covered in static plastic from the drycleaners (it was never cold enough in the town for such a coat). There were sports jackets, including one made of brown corduroy with leather elbow patches, a row of shirts, and a tie-hanger full of ties decorated with the stripes and shields of the various cabals to which my father belonged. I patted down his pockets like a security man and found a parking ticket and some matchbooks: one from La Ricetta, another from the twenty-four-hour pancake kitchen in town, a place I could not imagine my father patronising.

  Beneath the rail, his shoes stood in pairs—running shoes, tyre-tread sandals, shiny dress shoes, and two pairs of Made-in-England brogues in which were inserted shoetrees. My father was a great believer in quality shoes, a pair for every occasion. Further along, on a shelf above a set of drawers, was a collection of three round embossed leather boxes in which my father kept spare change, studs and cufflinks. I examined his collecti
on of fifty-cent pieces (memorial coins celebrating Captain Cook, the Royal Wedding and the Commonwealth Games), and his favourite pair of cufflinks (gold coins embossed with fat swallows) and then placed them back in the boxes.

  Using the drawers as footholds, I climbed up until I could see over the top shelf of the wardrobe, which ran the length of the wall. There, behind the suitcases, next to my father’s .22, in a ripped and filthy pink satin pillowcase, I discovered the haul of papers—time-worn, discoloured, shat upon by flies—which turned out to be a series of expedition notes belonging to my father’s great-great-grandfather, Ernest Lord, along with the journal recorded by his wife, my namesake, Henrietta Lord.

  Clinging to the top shelf with my foot in my father’s sock drawer, I opened one of the notebooks. Henrietta’s were the first words, in faded blue cursive, that met my eye: Even before the moment of Death, her body starts to decay. I take a draught of Whisky to stifle the stench. A man stumbles across the deck and vomits.

  History, I learned, is a dirty business, even when written in a steady hand.

  Elephants, I read, Ivory. I dragged the pillowcase towards me, eased it over the edge of the shelf and let it drop to the floor.

  The manuscripts were mine, I decided. They spoke to me.

  After stashing the pillowcase under my bed, I went to the bookcase in the lounge room to do some research in the Children’s Encyclopaedia:

  Before the advent of plastic, silk was harvested from worms, shells were ripped from the backs of tortoises and whales were butchered for their bones and blubber. Elephants, sea lions, warthogs and walruses gave their lives so a man could be a gentleman and a woman a lady with combs in her hair, corsets to narrow her waist and soap to cleanse her skin.

  You can barely count the ways ivory embellished the lives of men: in bangles, bracelets, brooches, bookends, buttons, hair brushes, billiard balls, chess pieces, snuff, pill and shoe boxes, perfume flasks, combs, letter openers, umbrella staves, bagpipes, piano keys, inlays for coffins, spillikins for pick-up sticks; in decorative inlays on pistol butts and hunting rifles.