by Carmel Bird
When a Girl Marries
The gods saw two rows of houses on either side of a gravel street. This was after the Second World War, before television, before the pill. Some houses had cellars where boxes of faded photographs and broken kitchen chairs gathered mould; some had little attics where trunks of crumpled ballgowns collected dust. Between the attics and the cellars were rooms full of everyday life, busy with pop-up toasters, vacuum cleaners, pressure cookers, and radios that told the story. Each house was surrounded by a garden. In the front there were lawns with flower borders; at the back there was a lemon tree and a circular clothes line. Next to most back fences was a little henhouse, and beside some of the henhouses were the trapdoors leading to the trenches which the fathers had dug for the safety of the families in the event of an invasion of Japanese.
Number Ten
Jack and Margaret Petman lived at number ten. They had a daughter called Kay who was rather pretty. She looked quite good in her high-school dress. This dress was pale blue with a white collar and was worn with a Panama hat and white gloves. Kay always got very good marks in English, history and art. She was going to art school when she was seventeen. But first she was going to be a deb. It was one of the things her mother had been looking forward to for years.
Apples kept well in the trench.
Kay would sit at the desk in her bedroom drawing the designs for her deb dress with inks and coloured pencils. The background of the drawing was a dream forest of carefully drawn leaves and bright flowers against which the white spun sugar of the dress blazed and sparkled. Kay put some of the designs in her satchel. She was going to take them to school where she would show them to Miss Battista, the art teacher.
Danger
Francesca Battista was exotic. She was little, thirty, dark, beautiful, foreign, unmarried, mysterious, artistic and Roman Catholic. She also drove a car.
When Margaret Petman was doing the sheets and towels in her washing machine, and when Jack Petman was checking the level of the brine for the icy-poles at the ice-cream factory, Francesca was squeezing bright oil paints onto palettes for the girls in the art room. Kay watched as the soft snake of yellow ochre slid onto the wood.
‘Miss Battista, can I show you the designs for my dress?’
When Francesca saw the drawings she decided to save Kay before it was too late.
The Invitation
So while Margaret hoses the leaves from the crazy paving, Francesca says to Kay:
‘Would you like to bring all your designs to my house on Saturday?’
Kay goes funny inside with surprise and pleasure at the invitation and says:
‘I’ll ask.’
They are making pineapple icy-poles at the factory today.
Idea
After the ball, and after she leaves school and before she gets married, Kay could get a job in the office at the ice-cream factory.
Saturday
Kay is allowed to go to the art teacher’s house with the drawings for the deb dress. Margaret reminds her that the ball is in six months’ time and everything will have to be settled before too long. There is also the question of a partner. Is she going to get round to asking Robert Scott quite soon, because if she doesn’t hurry up somebody else will ask him. Somebody such as Mary Robinson for instance. And has Kay heard that Mary got ninety-one in her grade five piano exam?
Jack is mowing the lawn.
They Talk About Dreams
In Miss Battista’s flat all the little windows are open and calico curtains with borders of blue flowers flap a bit in the wind. Insects fly in and settle as Miss Battista admires their colour and form. On a pale table a yellow bowl of daisies blooms. A white cat. The smell of expensive perfume. Huge velvet cushions. Miss Battista is cleaning her teeth.
They have cakes and coffee and talk about French poetry. And Botticelli. And the Divine Comedy. And the stars. The dresses Kay has drawn are very pretty. So are the forests. Where did she get the forests from? From dreams. They talk about dreams.
Miss Battista sketches as she talks. She hums. Kay is drawing too. There is a sweet scratch, scratch of their pencils on their drawing blocks.
‘May I?’ says Miss Battista and corrects the line of the daisy Kay is drawing.
Query from Gods
‘Is that how it happened, then? How Kay Petman stepped out one Saturday straight off the straight and narrow path of her mother’s crazy paving, and down among the primroses, waving goodbye to Robert Scott as he waltzes in the moonlight with Mary Robinson in his arms? Such a simple little thing, so sweet and very Italian, and she lifts her finger and Kay Petman says, “Oh yes, yes, I never wanted to be a deb at the Masonic Ball. I’ll get a job and save up and go to Italy.”’
The Shiny Skin of the Earth
Jack is cleaning the car. And waxing it. He does a thorough job.
The three-year-old girl at number fourteen has sliced the top off her finger with a wire for cutting cheese.
Kay goes into Francesca’s laundry to wash her hands. A little picture is stuck crookedly into a corner of the window frame. It shocks her. Black Madonna in jewelled robe; black child. Their crowns are held up by angels in short skirts. Kay stares at the picture with her mouth half open. In what is known as a split second she sees some bright thing springing from the darkest cracks in the bleeding earth. The rocks are ripped apart and an unearthly light screams swiftly in across the light of day. She washes her hands and returns to her drawing.
‘There is something the matter,’ says Francesca.
Mozart piano concertos playing softly.
‘Nothing the matter,’ says Kay.
(I have seen something black and terrible. If I go back to the laundry to look at it again, will it still be there, staring so sadly, looking through the skin of my eyes into the stream of my blood, the look swirling round and round in me until my heart is pierced and split with slashes, cut with a burning sword? Or if I go back, will the picture be gone? Did it bubble out from the shiny skin of the earth, stick to the window for just a minute, and then dissolve into the thin air, sail through the little invisible cracks in the ceiling of the laundry?)
‘In Italy,’ says Francesca, ‘the sky is quite a different blue, you know.’ Margaret Petman is peeling parsnips.
‘I had better be going home now,’ says Kay. Jack is putting away the car.
‘Come again another time. What about next Saturday?’
‘I have to go to the first rehearsal for the ball.’
Francesca’s eyes are brown as the eyes of a deer.
Mary Robinson is speaking to Robert Scott’s mother. Robert will be home from football soon.
Kay lines up all her pencils in the tin.
The Hair and the Teeth
People broke into the house one time when we were out at the supermarket. We were gone for about an hour and a half. The older children were at school, but I had the two little ones with me. They were only three and two when this happened and so whatever we did, we did slowly.
You drive to the shopping centre and park the car in the basement. Then you take the children out of their car seats and get to the lift that takes you up to the level where the supermarket is. You have to get the children past the toyshop with the Humphrey B. Bear that will sing and dance if you put money in the slot, past the pink elephant ride, past the Coke machine. If you put the children in the trolley at the supermarket there won’t be enough room for the stuff you have to get, but if you don’t put them in the trolley you have to be prepared to move very, very slowly. So you move slowly. You get the music, the lights, the smell of disinfectant, and all the colours. Everything shimmers in the supermarket.
You fill up the trolley and stand in the queue. The queue moves very slowly. Every trolley in front of you has things in it that need to have their prices checked. You want to just grab the children and leave the full trolley where it is. But you wait and you pay and you wheel the trolley to the lift, to the car. You pack the car, strap the children in
, park the trolley, drive to the exit, pay to get out, drive home. It is dusk now. When you get home you put your key in the back door but the door won’t open because the burglars (what is the correct word here? Is it robber, intruder, thief, crook, bugger?) the burglars have bolted it from the inside.
As soon as the door would not open, I knew what had happened. I left the children and the shopping in the car and went round to the front of the house. The window was wide open and the curtain was flapping, billowing out, like a ghostly bride. One of the children in the car had started to cry. I went back to the car, took two packets of biscuits from the shopping and gave a packet to each child.
‘You eat these,’ I said, tearing open the packets and handing them to the children. The crying stopped and both children looked surprised but they obeyed. I locked them in the car and went round to the front door. This door has no bolt. I opened it, put my hand in to turn on the light, and stood for a few moments listening and looking into the hallway. On the floor at the foot of the stairs was an earring, and halfway between the stairs and the front door was the lid of a jewellery box. The phone was on a table near the front door. I rang the police.
People tell me it takes a long time for the police to come to a break-in, break-ins being so common and policemen so rare, but these police seemed to be there by the time I had put down the phone. Possibly, because of the shock of the whole business, my sense of time was distorted. Anyway, the huge (it seemed to be huge) white car with blue writing and blue lights zoomed up the street and slid in beside the kerb and two police, a man and a woman, jumped out and were suddenly standing beside me. The first thing I thought about was how healthy they looked. They looked very, very healthy. He was big and young and smiling and sweet. And she was little and young and smiling and sweet. They had hats. They looked very clean—in blue, sky-blue and navy. They both smelt of nice soap.
They searched the house for hidden people while I got first the shopping then the children from the car. The children had finished the biscuits. I gave them some chips. By this time the ice-cream was beginning to melt and blood was dripping out of a plastic bag in which there was a chicken.
‘Can you leave the kids with a neighbour while we get on with things?’ the policeman said. So I took them in next door.
We went all over the house, the police and I, finding evidence of what they said was the ‘work of a real professional’. We sat at the kitchen table and made a list of what was missing.
I used to keep jewellery in the top left-hand drawer of a chest of drawers. They must have emptied the drawer onto the bedspread and then rolled up the bedspread and used it as a sack. I imagine two rat-like little men, real professionals, wearing masks, tiptoeing swiftly down the stairs, one with the sack over his shoulder, the other with an armful of leather coats. I start giving the policeman a list of things that have been taken: coral necklace, princess ring. He writes it all down carefully. The kitchen light seems to be too harsh, the paper the man is writing on too white. The clean strong police faces seem sympathetic but as helpless as the children we have sent next door. I offer them biscuits and coffee but they say no. Jade ring, silver bracelet with lapis lazuli. They have stolen a basket of firewood. The police cannot explain this. Suddenly I remember that among the sentimental treasures in the drawer were the locks of hair and the baby teeth of the older children. Then my voice starts to waver and I think I am going to cry.
I had wrapped the teeth in a piece of silk and put them in a tin from a machine in the Paris Metro. Snow was falling. The Metro was warm. I put the money in the machine and got an oval tin of lollies with a wreath of violets on the lid. The lollies inside the tin rattled. They were dusted with sugar.
Will I tell the police about the teeth and hair? Will I say in my litany: ‘Two tortoiseshell combs (Spanish), four ivory bangles (African), nine deciduous teeth (human), and two locks of human hair (golden)’?
They look at me kindly as I sit weeping at the kitchen table. I drink coffee and whisky. They keep writing. Periwinkle necklace, gipsy keeper (garnet).
I ask whether they think I will get any of the things back and they say that, in a case of this nature, it is unlikely we will recover any of the missing items.
I put in the insurance claim and a woman from the insurance company came to interview me. She had a briefcase under her arm and a shrewd look in her eye. She was fat but graceful with a black dress and a fur jacket and beauty parlour make-up, hairdo and fingernails. She was wearing Chanel, and her shoes were Italian. She stood on the doormat with the blue sky behind her and she could have been an advertisement for something, probably wine. Or funerals.
‘Mrs Halliwell from Phoenix Insurance. I rang,’ she said and I took her into the sitting room. I realised I couldn’t discuss the basket of firewood and the jewellery in the bedspread with Mrs Halliwell in the kitchen. I offered her coffee but she didn’t want it. The ordinary rules of hospitality do not apply to the police or to women from the insurance company. She had a typed list of all the things that were stolen. As she sat down, the sofa suddenly looked very shabby. A plastic fire-engine lay just near Mrs Halliwell’s left foot.
‘I will need more detailed descriptions of some of the items reported missing,’ she said, looking up at me over her glasses. ‘You will have to be more specific. A princess ring means nothing to me. What is a princess ring?’ We came to the coral necklace, which I said was made from round beads of coral, pale pink and smooth.
‘Polished?’
I said I supposed they were polished. ‘Angel skin’ she wrote. Then she asked how long the necklace was, and when I told her she wrote ‘Opera length’. Satisfied, she then said aloud, ‘Opera length, polished angel skin,’ and she almost smiled. ‘Is there any other item you have omitted to report missing? This is your final opportunity to claim.’ I tried to think of something, as if I needed to please her. Then I thought of saying half the things I had just told her were lies. Then I remembered the hair and the teeth, and all I said at last was no. She said we would have to put in an alarm system, arrange for a security patrol, get security doors and windows, or else get a reliable watchdog. I asked her for the name of somebody who puts in security doors and windows, but she said I would have to look in the Yellow Pages. Then she said ‘reliable watchdog’ again as she tucked her briefcase under her arm. I showed her out.
‘And a peephole and a security phone on the door,’ she said as she walked away.
The next day a man came to measure the doors and windows for bars. He handed me his card at the door. On the card was a picture of a shark behind wire mesh.
‘Joe McClaren,’ he said, ‘from Shark.’ He looked around the garden and said, ‘Nice large block you’ve got here. Surprising in this postal district.’
When he had finished measuring, and when we had discussed the quality of the optional one-way mesh and the need for the tri-safe locking system with the three-point deadlocking and anti-pick lock, he had a cup of coffee in the kitchen. We had some shortbread and a cigarette and I told him about the robbery. He said I was lucky and told me about people who had been completely cleaned out. ‘Nothing left standing except the electric light. Lucky you weren’t here when they came. Then they’d have done it with violence. There’s a terrible lot of it these days. Armed robbery with violence. It’s on the increase. I see all the statistics, of course.’
So then I told him about the hair and the teeth, and he said that was the worst.
‘And the mongrels would just chuck the babies’ curls into the gutter. I went to a lady’s place where they’d taken nearly everything. And all these photos of her son that was killed in the war. You know they just let the photos blow away in the street, in the rain. And weeks later the lady was still finding the remains of her photos in the weeds by the side of the road. She never got over it.’
As he talked, the man from Shark, I remembered something else that had been in the drawer with the jewellery. Something else that had been stolen. It was a small wax
doll. I first saw her one night in the lighted window of an antique shop in Paris. She was a naked little girl with blue glass eyes and a wig made from real hair. The next day I went back to the shop when it was open. I thought the doll was very expensive, but I bought her.
Pomona Avenue
A long time ago, when we used to live at number eleven Pomona Avenue, my mother committed suicide. I have wondered about how to tell you a thing like that. I have thought of beginning by describing the street, the house, the garden and then the things that happened. I have imagined how it would be if I gradually led up to the fact of my mother’s death, led you up to the fact and then eased you away from it so you would feel first interested, then shocked, then comforted.
Here is how it could be:
The Street
My mother and father and I lived in a very nice street. It was a respectable street in a small town and in the street lived an accountant, a builder, a radio announcer, a shoe-shop manager, and so forth, and the wives and children of those people. My father was a plumber. But I have already shifted from the street and its houses to the people. I didn’t mean to do that. The street was on a slope and although the road was sealed with bitumen, the footpaths were covered with orange gravel. Small children would stumble on the gravel slope and graze their knees. Once when a girl I knew was walking along the top of one of the fences she slipped and fell onto the gravel path. First she cut her leg on the sharp fence and then she grazed her face and arm on the ground. She had to go to the doctor and have stitches. The blood from her leg went all over the gravel and Mrs Hamilton, who was the wife of the builder, came out later to hose it away but it left a stain on the footpath that stayed there for ages. Many of the houses had high cypress hedges that the men kept in shape with hedge clippers. I liked the smell of cut cypress. Some places had picket fences, some had brick, and others had fences made from fancy wire trellis that you don’t see around anymore. Ours was this wire kind of fence and we had a cypress hedge as well that grew behind the wire and went up about five feet above it. I used to burrow into the hedge and sit, and I kept some toys in there. Bandicoots lived in the hedges. Our hedge used to grow into our letterbox, which was a big wooden one made by my father and painted green. The wire fence and gate were also painted green. My mother used to complain about the dust that got into the letterbox because of the hedge. And the spiders and snails. Sometimes a snail would eat part of an envelope. The front gardens had flowers that the women looked after and vegetables were grown in the back garden by the men. Most of the houses were brick, not grand but pretty and romantic and very neat. They looked like houses in picture books, illustrating nursery rhymes or fairytales, with little pointy gables and criss-cross leadlights and chimneys with smoke coming out. The knocker on our door was made of brass and shaped like a goblin. The radio announcer and his wife and two children lived in a house that was older and bigger than all the other houses and had an orchard out the back. Nobody ever pruned the trees. That house had more dogs and books than all the other houses in the street and people said the radio announcer’s wife had been married before. Once the children and I took a wardrobe from the house and used it as part of a fort in the orchard and the radio announcer and his wife didn’t seem to mind.