Fire Song

by Libby Hathorn

  Mum had shocked some of the people in town by dancing with him in the church hall. Sergio Fratelli, the new greengrocer, hadn’t exactly been welcome to that social event in the first place. And yet he had come to that dance soon after his arrival in town, his hair glossy with brilliantine, and his shoes extra shiny, his smart blue and white striped shirt and his navy tie putting every other man to shame.

  Mum had sat herself down gracefully, right beside Mr Fratelli. Of course this gave the dago the right, Mrs Smithers said later, to ask her to dance, just as if he were one of them. Well, really, with his sharp clothes and those overdone continental manners of his! Mum had danced with him more than once; and Dom had danced with Ingrid. He didn’t stand back shy like the rest of the schoolboys clustered in the doorway, but was eager to show that he knew how to dance, too. And he did.

  It didn’t seem to matter that Robyn Smithers had sidled up to Ingrid, when they stopped for supper and said in that smiling way of hers, ‘You know, Ingrid Crowe, I wouldn’t be caught dead dancing with that dago’s son. And Natalie said she wouldn’t either.’

  Ingrid had danced with Dom again after that and then she’d laughed like mad, because he insisted on dancing with her baby sister and let Pippa stand on his shoes exactly the way Uncle Ken had done with her when she was little. Round and round the dance floor. Pippa’s cheeks were bright pink with excitement and everyone was laughing, especially Mum.

  And when the band took a break, Dom had come back to her with drinks of green cordial and they’d gone out into the cool of the yard. They sat at the base of a huge tree so old its branches reached the ground in places and its great lumpy roots thrusting out of the ground made rough seats for them. Sitting so close to Dom she could smell a mixture of wool and open fire and brilliantine. There was a silence as they both sipped their cordial. And then, looking up into the great spreading branches, she said, ‘I can see why people make up stories about whole worlds in a tree – you know, magic worlds!’ And then she regretted saying it in case Dom thought that made her sound like a little girl bringing up the subject of fairies and magic.

  The music began again and with a smile Dom pointed to the yellow lit window, where people bobbed past in time to the music. She smiled, too, because it was funny to see so many heads made unfamiliar by their jigging movements as they went by.

  And then he said one of those ‘Dom comments’ that could sometimes leave her unable to think of a thing to say.

  She saw that his gaze by this had passed from the brightly lit church hall, past the purplish shadows cast at the side of the small stone church, to the churchyard itself defined with dark headstones, the older ones already askew. ‘The living and the dead, hey? In one swoop. ‘Was he making a joke? She knew his mum had died long ago in Italy. Was he angry thinking about that? What?

  But he took her hand and she didn’t have to say anything. She could see his face change in the dim light as he leant towards her and kissed her gently. It seemed the most natural of things to happen. She kissed him back, tasting the lime on his lips and this kiss was not like the first, or like those kisses she reserved for Pippa or any other kiss she had ever known. This kiss was one she wanted to prolong as he did, but could not, because suddenly she heard her name being called.

  ‘Ingrid! Ingrid! Where are you?’ Robyn Smithers was sillouhetted in her sticking out dress on the hall steps, peering into the darkness.

  ‘You better go,’ Dom said, but not before he had squeezed her hand.

  ‘And I’ll see you inside.’

  ‘Coming,’ she answered, before Robyn came down the steps and saw that Dom was with her and reported them in some ghastly way to her school friends.

  She liked Dom Fratelli a whole lot more after that dance.

  Next day Dom’s dad arrived at their place with a box of stuff for them from his fruit shop, and stayed in the kitchen talking to her mother for a good long time.

  Mum stopped calling him the dago and he came quite often. Well, she’d only said the word once more.

  He’d come at least once a week with fruit and vegies and Mum would let him take heaps of their lemons or whatever was in the orchard for his shop, though a lot of it was shrivelled or rotten with fruit fly since Grandma Logan died.

  Ingrid loved those times, because Dom would come with his dad, and they’d talk about a lot of things they could never discuss at school, and though they didn’t kiss again, to Ingrid it always seemed to be in the air and close to happening in a peculiar and nice way. Once he helped her put up a swing in the orchard especially for Pippa. It made that quiet child yelp with joy, as her tiny feet almost touched the branches and her pigtails flew round in the wind, when he pushed her as high as he dared. And she thought that Pippa might actually say something, she was so excited.

  And inside you could hear Mum’s laughter, a lovely sound mixing with Mr Fratelli’s. Once she and Dom had stood together to watch their parents dance with each other on the side verandah in that graceful way they had, while Grandma’s record player produced rills of bright music. Mum was pretty happy after those visits and, often as not, her happiness kept going.

  That was when she told stories to the girls at night about when she was little and funny things that had happened. About all the boys who’d loved her when she was a teenager, one even hiding in the tree outside their house just to see her. She didn’t say whether it was their dad or not, but Ingrid guessed that it was. It was good to see Mum like this, all her anger melted away, her face soft, looking prettier than ever, after Mr Fratelli came to visit.

  Mind you, that was well before he spoke to Mum about his bride, who it turned out was soon to arrive. His ‘pathetic, soppy little mail order bride’, as Mum described her, narrowing her eyes and drawing really hard on her cigarette at the thought. Ingrid remembered how Mum had gone to pieces the day he came and told her that he shouldn’t really visit them anymore. He had sent for this young woman from near his own home village in Italy, because Dom definitely needed a mother now. It was a terrible blow to Mum.

  ‘He’s a rotten little dago, just like they all said.’ She spoke bitterly that night with the venom Ingrid always dreaded. ‘He said he’d still bring us some fruit, but he can keep it far as I’m concerned.

  ‘He needn’t bother darkening my doorstep ever again. And that goes for his blithering fool of a son, too!’

  Dom wasn’t blithering and Mum knew it, but seeing her distress, Ingrid said nothing in his defence. She remembered how dark Mum had been with her nasty comments that night and all next day, about Dom needing a mother from a village far away in Italy.

  Ingrid could hear her slapping those big heavy linen sheets round, after she lifted them on the bleached white copper stick, one by one from the bubbling cauldron into the steaming tubs. She went to the laundry with the wicker basket, ready to take the wet burden of the sheets and Mum’s anger out to the yard – after Mum had finished with them.

  The water flew when Mum’s strong, angry arms screwed those sheets round and round good and proper, as if she were screwing someone’s neck. The dago’s neck, really. Although the basket was heavy, Ingrid loved taking the washing out to Grandma Logan’s garden and up the yard to the clothes line, just short of the apple orchard, with Blackie getting up to greet her and Pippa trailing behind her, hoping for a leg-up into one of the trees.

  ‘Want an apple, Pippa? Say, “Yes, please, I’d like an apple!”’

  She didn’t say a word, but she nodded.

  ‘Then wait a mo, Pip.’

  Ingrid lowered the clothes prop, that big forked stick Uncle Ken had made for them, that wonderful time he’d visited them in the Blue Mountains. The prop always made her think of him, and then of Daddy as she brought the line down not too low, but low enough to spread out the sheets without letting them touch the ground. Then she raised the line triumphantly, up and up to the full height of the prop, where Mum’s white-as-white sheets whipped and flapped against the blue mountain sky.

 
Thinking about Mum’s anger, she decided she really should not go to Mr Fratelli for help, but to his son, who was still her good friend. Their place was on the other side of town. She could run there right after she had bought the tobacco and papers. She could fill the billycan with milk on the way back. Then she’d have to run fast on account of Mum waiting impatiently for her ciggies, and the time she’d already taken at the police station. She hesitated. There was no knowing what Mum would do when she was angry, if she had to wait too long. And getting to Dom’s…

  She faltered. Maybe she should just do the shopping and get home.

  Or then again, there were Ruth Klein’s parents. Mr Klein and Mrs Klein lived real close by, in a tiny wooden cottage down Hat Hill Road. Mrs Klein said she loved the name Hat Hill, it was so strange an image to conjure up. And she liked the way Australians used English. They have such a sense of humour here, she’d say, as if where she had come from there hadn’t been very many laughs.

  ‘Maybe not many laughs for the likes of her,’ Mum snapped, when Ingrid told her.

  Mrs Klein even commented on the name Emoh Ruo, when Ruth told her about it after her first visit. ‘How endearing!’ she said, smiling broadly, as if it was funny to spell a house name backwards, but also something else – quite nice.

  Ingrid helped Ruth the day she arrived at school, scared witless and already looking different in her funny foreign dress and with her brown lace-up ankle boots, the likes of which had never been seen in the Blue Mountains. It hadn’t taken long to like the girl, but her first impression wasn’t the best.

  ‘What about those funny brown-rimmed glasses she wears. They’re so ugly!’ Eileen Featherstone had breathed, as soon as Ruth entered the classroom.

  ‘My mother said she’s a Jew-girl,’ Robyn Smithers had whispered after Mrs Marks introduced her. ‘Everyone, this is Ruth Klein. She’s a new girl all the way from Austria, a country far away in Europe. Who knows where that is on the map? Of course you do – near Germany. It’s one of the places where the war was waged and when it was over, many people had to seek new lands.’ Mrs Marks’s voice always went a bit shaky at this, because, like Mum, she had lost an older brother in the fighting.

  ‘Welcome, Ruth Klein. You can take a seat next to – ’

  Don’t let it be me, Ingrid remembered thinking at that second. But of course it was.

  ‘Next to Ingrid Crowe and she’ll help you on your first day. Won’t you, Ingrid?’

  ‘Yes, Miss.’ Her face felt hot, because she really didn’t want to be saddled with any new girl, and especially one in such an old-fashioned looking dress, weird boots and boring glasses. But she’d taken to Ruth the moment she sat down and Ingrid could hear her short frightened breaths, as she smiled in that nervous new-girl way. Ingrid had felt that same rush of something she always felt for Pippa, whenever Mum got mean with her and she had to somehow distract Mum and whisk Pippa away.

  After Ruth’s shyness melted and her English improved, she turned out to be really funny.

  In the ice-cold playground, on that first day, as the winter wind swooped up from the valley in gusts that sent them all into a wild frenzy, Robyn Smithers started it – just as she had with Dom, when he arrived the year before. She had teased him about being a dago, but it had backfired because he was a good fighter and great with a football. Poor little Ruth, though…

  ‘Jew-girl, you go back where you came from. We don’t want you here,’ Robyn chanted as an interested group formed round them.

  There were Ruth’s short, scared breaths again.

  Ingrid took her freezing hand. ‘And we don’t want you here, Robyn Smithers. You can go to hell!’ She’d marched Ruth away and ignored the handful of gumnuts tossed after them, and Robyn’s voice above the wind.

  ‘You swore, Ingrid Crowe, and I’m telling. And she is so a Jew. Mum said.’

  ‘That ain’t real swearing, Robbie,’ Evan Evans cut in. ‘And what’s a Jew, anyway?’

  ‘Same as a dago or a chink, but different,’ said Robyn Smithers. ‘My mum says that their religion is different and she says we don’t need any more foreigners here, overrunning the country.’

  Evan had lost interest. There was a game of footie starting in the paddock. Dom was one of the players, and he was Dom’s mate.

  ‘Righto,’ he said, because he was a bit sweet on Robyn Smithers – but that was all – and then he was gone.

  Ingrid couldn’t bear Ruth’s grateful smile, so she made her draw a hopscotch on the tarred bit of the playground near the school with some old bits of chalk she carried in her pocket, exactly for that purpose. And then watched Ruth’s strange-looking boots do some good, as she kicked her way round the chalk marks – not expertly, but not as pathetically as she’d imagined. And it was good to see Ruth could laugh and that made Ingrid laugh too, as if they were old friends. Even so, she couldn’t help saying when the bell rang and they walked back towards the class line, ‘You better get a proper school uniform, Ruth, quick as you can.’

  That afternoon she’d asked Mum a dangerous question. Mum was in a good mood at the time, because a new boarder was going to arrive at Emoh Ruo and had paid a month in advance. She’d been baking that afternoon and she offered Ingrid a slice of teacake before she’d even hit the kitchen. Things were peaceful.

  Ingrid slid her Globite school case clear across the verandah, patted the dog and promised him a walk. Then she went straight into the kitchen, took Pippa on her knee and jiggled her up and down in the warmth of the stove and Mum’s happy face. She ate the whole slice without speaking and then Mum sat down opposite them as if, for once, she were waiting for Ingrid to speak.

  ‘Robyn Smithers called the new girl, Ruth Klein, a Jew-girl, Mum,’ Ingrid said, licking her fingers and feeding Pippa the white creamy icing she liked, ‘as if it was a real bad thing to be.’

  ‘As if I care,’ Mum said quickly, ‘whether she’s a Jew or a Calathumpian. Or about anything that Smithers girl says.’

  Ingrid looked up a bit alarmed at Mum’s tone, to see a warning frown creasing her brow. ‘But aren’t we a bit Jewish?’ She knew she was risking a change in Mum’s mood by asking this, but it seemed like as good a time as any, because Grandma Logan had told her a bit about their family. To her surprise, Mum didn’t yell, but leant across the table and said quickly, almost urgently, ‘For heaven’s sake don’t go blabbing about that in this town, or you’ll know what is.’

  ‘Know what what is?’

  Like so many adults, her mother often spoke in riddles. But she cut another slice of teacake and Ingrid took that as a good sign.

  ‘Mum?’ She thought she might get more out of her if she trod softly.

  ‘My grandmother was a Jewish woman, yes. A good woman, come to that, and what a cook! And seamstress. She could turn out a dress quick smart, and often did on Saturday afternoon – one for Ivy and one for me, if there was a dance.’ Something in her voice told Ingrid that her mother had loved this grandmother who was rarely spoken of. ‘She lost everyone in that horrible war. Everyone but my mother. She was sent here with a lot of other migrants. But mostly, in the family, well, we kept good and quiet about the Jewish bit.’

  Dare she ask why? Mum was unfolding.

  ‘Why, Mum? Why did you keep quiet about it?’

  ‘Had to – like a lot of things. Especially in a small country town. There weren’t many Jews – none, really, where we were. And people don’t like anyone different. They get nervous, you know. Like things will change, get out of hand. Foreigners might be funny, eat queer stuff, have queer ways, believe in different things and spoil things. And people can be cruel, Ingrid, you know that – even here, in this dump. Look at all the name-calling that goes on in this town! But not just names; things can get far worse than that!’

  How? What was she talking about? Had people been cruel to Mum’s grandmother, then?

  ‘So we all kept quiet about our foreign grandma when we moved to Sydney. It was better that way. True blue Australians �
�� not from foreign parts, sort of thing.’

  ‘But didn’t everyone come from foreign parts?’ Ingrid asked, thinking of the sailing ships and the first settlers she’d learnt about at school. ‘Other than the Aborigines, that is.’

  ‘You talk too much, Ingrid Crowe. Far too much. Just eat up and then you can give me a hand. Dom’s dad bought me a whole heap of fresh peas that need shelling. The potatoes need peeling, too.’ And she shook the crumbs from her bright apron and stood up and Ingrid thought there was nothing more to be said on the matter. But there was one more thing.

  ‘Don’t you go hanging around the new girl, what’s-her-name Klein, or go to her house, now will you? And don’t say a word about what I told you, understand?’ She nodded, but Ingrid didn’t understand why Mum was making it such a secret, as if her old Jewish grandma was something so shameful. Nobody liked to talk much about what had happened to them in the war, it was so terrible. They had sympathy about it, though, if ever anyone did mention it, so why this secrecy now?

  She’d gone to visit Ruth Klein’s house as soon as she could, not to spite Mum, but because Ruth told her at school that she’d found a nest of kittens in her backyard. Six of them, blind and mewing and gorgeous. And she liked Ruth and was interested in all that she’d told Ingrid about her parents. And interested in what a home was like where you were the only child.

  Mr and Mrs Klein had been more than welcoming whenever she visited after that. She was fascinated to find out that Mrs Klein ran the whole house from a wheelchair, because something bad had happened to her that meant she had weak legs for life, Ruth told her. Mr Klein had made special wooden ramps for the house so she could get up and down the steps to the kitchen and the bathroom all by herself. She preferred it that way.