by Carmel Bird
Came the day when Charmaine knew she would have to contact Shad and let him know that Doreen and the fireman had skipped off to California with the kids, and that Doreen had, furthermore, produced the fireman’s baby.
It was early December, and Charmaine sat down at the kitchen table with a writing pad and a biro and, fortified by a substantial glass of Southern Comfort, tried to begin her letter. She stared for a long time out the window at the brilliant deep American Beauty red of the bougainvillea. She poked the end of the biro into the spaces between her teeth. Nostalgic songs were playing on the radio, sad love songs of regret and tears—hearts broken and beyond repair.
‘I see your face in every flower; I hear your voice in every breeze that blows.’
Charmaine was sorry she had to be the one to tell Shad that Doreen was gone forever. Better come to the point.
‘Dear Shad,’
Here it is nearly Xmas once again. I hope you’re okay. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but somebody has to. I have decided to just give you the facts. Which are that Doreen and Andrew Martin have cleared out overseas. They have gone somewhere in California. They took Bronte and Teisha with them. And the other thing is that they have had a baby boy. You know I never like to give you advice, but I really wish you could bring yourself to forget her. It’s really truly over, Shad. I feel that now you can get on with your own life, meet some better woman and have the garage and settle down. You know we all feel she was never good enough for you anyhow. I am sorry to say that. It is sad about the kids, but there you have it, they are gone. Maybe when they are older they will come to know you as their father. I look forward to hearing some good news from you. And I send my love and wish you Merry Xmas, and hope it is.
She read it through and wondered if she should have told him about the baby. Then she decided that was perhaps the very fact that would finally bring him to his senses. She sent the letter to where he had last been working, on a sheep station in outback New South Wales.
Shad’s Christmas letter came late. It was early February before it arrived, and Charmaine was terribly afraid that what she had told him in her letter must have tipped the balance and maybe finally sent him crazy. What if he went racing off to California? What if he shot himself? At the sight of Shad’s handwriting Charmaine felt first relief, and then a kind of panic. What if it was a suicide note after all? In the still heat of the afternoon, she sat on a bench under the grapevine in the backyard and tore open the envelope. She spread out the thin blue paper, just one sheet, and read.
Sorry I didn’t write at Xmas. I know I always do. But your news was pretty hard to take and I was a write-off. Went on a bit of a bender and ended up at the funny farm. Am better now. Off the grog. The shrink says I’ll be okay soon enough and maybe I’ll come down and see you. I think I can say I’ve put Doreen behind me. There was a time, as you know, when I imagined I could see her everywhere I looked. I’d look in the mirror behind the bar and she’d be there beside me, if you see what I mean. I used to see her face in the clouds and if there was a crowd on TV I’d see her in there, waving a banner or getting trampled to death. Sorry to rave on. I enclose a photo taken shearing last year. Hope you are well. Don’t worry.
Your loving brother, Shad.
P.S. I’ve got her out of my system—she used to haunt me but now her face has disappeared.
Charmaine looked in the envelope and there was the photo. It was a picture of Shad, beaming from the upstairs window of the shearing shed. Below him was a flock of shorn sheep staring at the camera. Charmaine looked first at Shad in his blue singlet, and then she traced the long shadow that fell from the image of her brother, down the wall of the shed, pointing like a finger at one of the sheep. There was no mistaking it. The sheep’s face staring into the camera was horribly familiar.
It was Doreen.
Kawasaki 500
My brother was killed on his motorbike outside the Ovaltine factory. That was a year ago. I still can’t walk past the factory without seeing the accident all over again in my head. It’s just as if it’s happening.
He was nineteen, my brother. His name was Ian. He was mad about bikes. So as soon as he went to work he started to save up for a Kawasaki 500. Two weeks after he got it, he ran into the back of a truck that was turning right into the factory gate.
I didn’t actually see it happen. But I have a very clear mental picture of it. I keep thinking back over that whole day. The truth is that if he hadn’t been doing me a favour, it wouldn’t have happened.
It was a Tuesday. The next day I had an English test at school. I got up, and I felt really sick. Mum took my temperature and said I had to stay in bed. I said I couldn’t stay in bed because I needed to get my books to revise for the test. Mum said it didn’t matter.
We got in a real row, and I was yelling and crying. I said I’d take some Aspros and go to school. Mum said it was no use taking anything unless I went back to bed. It went on like that and Ian came out of his room and said, ‘If she wants the books so much I’ll go and get them.’
He was like that, Ian. He could see what was the commonsense thing to do, and he’d help you do it. Even if it meant giving up his lunch hour to go to my school and get the books.
So I took the Aspros and went to bed. I was really glad to be in bed. Ian came in to get a list of the books I wanted. He was carrying his helmet. As I remember it now, he looked very handsome that morning. I wrote out a list on a back page in Ian’s diary. All the books I wanted him to get for me. I put down the number of my locker. Three, three, three. He laughed.
‘I reckon that must be a lucky number, Susan,’ he said. That was the last thing Ian ever said to me. He went to the schoolyard and found my best friend, Jenny. She took him to my locker, and he got out the books on the list. He couldn’t find my copy of I Can Jump Puddles, so he asked Jenny for a spare one. She got one from the class library. You see I keep thinking about the timing of things.
If Ian hadn’t bothered about that book, he would not have been behind that truck when it turned into the gate. But you can go mad thinking like that, I suppose. If I hadn’t been sick. If Ian hadn’t been Ian. If I hadn’t had the English test the next day. If Ian had never bought the motorbike. Yes, you could go mad thinking like that.
He got all the books. Then he put them in his saddlebag and went to the corner pub for a pie and a beer. He played some snooker with some of the boys there.
I know these details off by heart. They go round and round in my head. Not all the time. But often, in the middle of the night. Or in the middle of anything. I can be peeling an apple, or doing a sum, and suddenly all this starts up again. He went to the pub. He had a pie. And so on.
Some kids at school said, later, that he must have been drunk. But I know that he wasn’t. Anyhow, it was proved that he wasn’t. They tested the alcohol content of his blood. Later. In the hospital.
When he left the pub, he had only ten minutes to get back to work. He was working as a bricklayer on the new library. Because he was running so late he took a short cut. He was speeding, too.
He must have been too close to the truck. Maybe he wasn’t watching where he was going. Anyhow, the truck turned right to go into the factory and Ian ran into it.
He was thrown in the air and the bike fell on him. His neck was broken.
The saddlebag flew open and the English books went everywhere. They were collected later and brought home. They were all dirty. Some of them had blood on them.
A man from the factory called for an ambulance. Ian was still alive then. The police came. The traffic piled up. Crowds gathered. And in the centre of it was Ian, lying under the bike.
The first I knew that anything was wrong was when Mum answered the phone and then came into my room. She was white-faced and shaking.
‘There has been an accident,’ she said. ‘Ian has been taken to the hospital.’
I got dressed and we called a taxi to take us down to the hospital. Dad was already t
here. I’ll never forget the smell of that hospital. And while we were sitting in a corridor, Ian was somewhere behind glass walls, dying.
We seemed to be there for hours and hours. I don’t know how long it was, really. The guilt about sending Ian for my books had started in the taxi on the way to the hospital. Maybe I’ll never get rid of it. I know that I can’t bring him back, going over and over that day, the way I do. Nothing can bring him back.
I have kept some of the pictures of bikes that he had on the walls of his room. They help to bring him closer, somehow.
And I never did do that English test. Some of the pages of my folder are probably still blowing around by the fence outside the Ovaltine factory.
Special Connection
Mrs Calvert was a religious woman. She belonged to the Church of the Special Connection Between God and Man. She lived alone in a house that was darkened by a great umbrella of oak trees, and underneath the trees grew carpets and curtains and cushions of ivy and moss. If Queen Victoria, who hated ivy and had it removed whenever she saw it, had gone to Mrs Calvert’s house she would have been horrified. Into this green gloom I went with my mother to visit Mrs Calvert, who was one of our neighbours. To keep me quiet and amused Mrs Calvert handed me a toy rabbit and a bunch of artificial violets.
I was pleased with both of these things. The violets looked real, but were invested with a strange importance because they were not real. The rabbit was made from pure white velvet and was as big as a little loaf of bread. In the dim and mossy house I became the sudden owner of a bunch of artificial violets and a rabbit.
But when the visit ended and the door was opened and light from the sun in the sky came pitter-pat through the gaps in the umbrella of the oak trees, Mrs Calvert took back the violets and the rabbit and that was the empty-handed end of it.
O Violet, flower of hidden beauty, virtue and the humility of God Incarnate; O Rabbit, lunar animal, attribute of Moon Goddesses and Earth Mothers, I lost you then.
I never visited Mrs Calvert again, and I am now pleased she kept the rabbit and the violets because I have come to believe that if she had given them to me to keep, I would have valued them differently from the way I value them today. I might have treasured them for a while; I would almost certainly have lost them by now. They would have drifted away from me in the flotsam company of Golly, Teddy, Neddy and Cordelia and the doll in organdy. Because I can identify the time the rabbit and the violets ceased to be mine, following that one short, fickle afternoon, my memory of the rabbit and the violets is sharp with the shining edges of regret. The rabbit and violets represent a break in the perfect eggshell surface of my early life.
‘I do not grant you ownership of this rabbit and these violets,’ said Mrs Calvert, tall and thin and old upon her doorstep. ‘I grant you something far more valuable, my dear. You may have the image of this animal, these flowers, upon your memory. They will be engraved upon your heart; they will become icons on the golden altars of your infancy, emblems of the sorrows in your soul.’
These Moon Goddesses and Earth Mothers have a habit of going on like that. Since she got up on her high doorstep and told me this, I have had toy rabbits and pet rabbits; I have seen babies who look like rabbits, men who behave like them. I have worn hats with bunches of artificial violets bunching on the brim; I have fastened clumps of violets tied up with rare green ribbon at my throat. I have written stories in which rabbits are important characters, and other stories where you couldn’t miss the violets in all their hidden beauty and humility. I discovered that if you see violets and strawberries together in a religious painting you are meant to think ‘the truly spiritual man is always humble’, because strawberries are symbols of perfect righteousness. That was news to me.
Mrs Marsden had strawberries and violets in her garden. She had paths made from stepping stones winding in and out among shrubs and flowerbeds; and she had a black statue of a naked boy beside the pond where waterlilies grew and goldfish swam. Mrs Marsden was my elocution teacher. I went to lessons in her romantic house where the window frames were black (surely ebony) and turrets (two? three?) jutted from the upper storey. The room where I had my lessons was downstairs beside the lily-pond–fishpond, and was called the Blue Room. It was a small intimate place with a window seat, and the carpets and cushions and the curtains were all pale velvety blue. Mrs Marsden had blue eyes. We had biscuits dusted with sugar and I used to read aloud from lovely books and learn to walk around and stand and breathe and to project my voice. One of the books was Alice, noted for the appearance of the White Rabbit. I have now assembled Mrs Marsden and Mrs Calvert, one with blue eyes and one with, it seems, no eyes to speak of, side by side in my memory as Two Women With White Rabbits. Perhaps in life they never met. (If they are not about a hundred years old they are dead.) It could be that by revealing them like this I am participating in their resurrection. I raise them up from the pearly ashes of the long-lost-and-forgotten, and dress them in the flowing silver silk of angels in a heavenly pantomime, and to each I give a rabbit, one fashioned from white velvet, loaf-of-bread size; one tall as a woman and looking at his watch. At their feet are twined the strawberries and violets of the truly spiritual man who is always humble. It is an unusual picture.
What if the Marsden and Calvert descendants (shadowy Messrs Calvert and Marsden never darkened my vision, and yet they no doubt existed) were to come to me and say: ‘You can’t do this to our ancestors. Just who do you think you are, plucking these innocent women out of their burrows and placing them here there and everywhere in your stories just for the fun of it like felt figures on a felt board who-do-you-think-you-are?’ I am a writer, fellas, and this is what writers do.
‘Good grief, is nothing sacred?’ cries Mrs Calvert on her drastic doorstep. ‘Can’t a woman be granted custody of her own rabbit anymore? Why should I not reclaim my own bunch of violets? Earth Mother, Lunar Goddess am I? Says who?’
‘I don’t mind,’ sings Mrs Marsden from the hollow by the lily-pond. ‘I bask in attention and besides I taught her everything she knows. Well, nearly everything…A story called “Special Connection”, now that would surely be about the transport question, one way or another. Or perhaps the telephone. Communication of some kind. I always say it’s not so much a matter of where these writers get their ideas from, as what they do with them when they’ve got them. I used to know a man whose house burnt down. Now that’s a terrible thing. He was fully insured of course, but nevertheless. His name was Tom or something and we were more than friends. Tom came from a very artistic family, you see, and one of his uncles was a silversmith. So every baby in the family had a special silver object made for the occasion of the christening. Tom got this lovely silver rabbit. When he was a baby he was allowed to chew it and so the poor dear rabbit was quite dented with marks from Tom’s milk teeth. I thought that made it all the better, and I told him so. Well, when the house burnt down and it was just this smoking smouldering rubble of ash and brick and lonely chimneys and smashed and blackened glass, Tom wept and poked around there with the handle of a rake. The only thing he found, he said, was a silver rabbit, black and blue with burning, and he took it in his hand and looked at it in wonder and astonishment. The milk-teeth marks were filled with dust and ashes and he put the rabbit in his pocket and went to stay with his sister. He said he couldn’t touch the rabbit for a long time because it made him sad, and then he got it out one day and polished it and came around and said, did I want it. I was very touched by that. He was a sweet man and I kept the rabbit all my life.’
‘Oh, but where I come from,’ Mrs Calvert says, standing on the dignity of her doorstep, ‘we do not tell such tales of fire and passion and rabbits and sexual innuendo. We close the doors and draw the blinds and shine up the house with good sandsoap, and on special occasions with White Lily. We shine it up and wait upon the Lord and we tell the story of the righteous and the humble and the peace of God which passeth all the understanding. It does not have a plot, and there is litt
le conflict, scant confusion and utterly no climax, unlike the Bible.’
‘Does it get into the papers, make headlines?’ Mrs Marsden asks.
‘Of course not, my dear,’ Mrs Calvert replies with a touch of condescension. ‘I speak not of the newspapers and the journalism, but of the Great Good News and the Connection. Once upon a time, for instance, I met a child who came into my house quite silently. She stared at me with the soft sad eyes of an idiot until I was moved to pass to her for her inspection a bunch of silky violets that I wore on my hat to celebrate the equinox; and as well I handed her the velvety white animal, a rabbit, as I recall, made for me by my grandmother when I was young and small. The child began to chatter to these icons as these children are wont to do, and when her conversation was complete she silently returned the objects to my keeping, and made her weary way on idiot legs homeward across the sunny open fields.
‘This, you understand, is the type of mild and utterly improving story that it is our custom to impart.’
‘I think,’ Mrs Marsden says, ‘that you have just described a sad and cruel case of Indian giving—if you will excuse the racial slur, no slur intended. I strongly disapprove, myself, of your behaviour towards the child. She would have been scarred, marred and windblown in the childish mind by deep unhappiness and sad regret. The only right and proper thing to do, under the circumstances, here in the violets and the strawberries and other creeping plants, is to give the girl the icons once and for all.’
‘But they are mine.’
‘All the more reason and incentive. Oh you are so selfish, Mrs Calvert. It will be your undoing. They will come up behind you and flick the zipper of your zip and split you open, slide you suddenly in two. Undone with all your stuffing on the carpet. And might I point out that, apart from all this God Incarnate and humility and so on, rabbits signify as well great lust and quite terrible fecundity. And should you consider keeping rabbits for the pot or for their fur, you must remember not to feed the animals on raw potato or on rhubarb. Pedigree fur rabbits thrive in small suburban gardens, and their flesh is so white and tender that if certain parts, the head, heart, liver and kidneys, are thrown away, the rabbit may be mistaken for a chicken. Remember also that the age at which each individual specimen will come into full fur varies so very much that it is necessary to observe each rabbit separately. So much for rabbits. As for flowers, the less said about flowers the better. If I were you I’d hand over those things to the child herself before they taint you utterly.’