by Toni Jordan
She lights the still-warm stove to boil water for the oats. She opens the front curtain to a late frost: a dusting on the bottom corner of each pane and, up close, a lattice of crisp white ferns creeping across the glass. Beauty everywhere, even in this town, she thinks, provided you don’t touch anything.
Then she glimpses a girl standing across the street, leaning on the black railing of the apartment building opposite. She’s wrapped in a good coat, arms deep in the pockets. One leg is bent for a foot to rest on the step behind her and the boot that’s visible is yellow against the last dirty snow. A heavy dark scarf all but covers her face. She’s picked an odd place to wait for someone, Rachel thinks.
Later, Walter, George and Rachel are leaving for church. Her mother isn’t feeling well, she says, as though it’s her asthma that’s kept her indoors this last week and not the great bruise on her face. Rachel notices the girl is still there, standing with the other foot raised this time, wrapped like an owl on a branch. Now that Rachel is outside and closer, there is something about the girl that is familiar.
‘Can that be Helen over there?’ she says to her father.
‘Who?’
‘Helen. From the mill.’
He doesn’t so much as glance. ‘How should I know?’ he says. ‘Am I in charge of every loony girl in the neighbourhood?’
Rachel takes George’s hand. He wriggles it free.
‘Yeah, Rach,’ he says. ‘Is Pop in charge of every loony girl?’
They’re on time for church, for a change, though they walk fast in the brisk air. George chats all the way. How much does a bicycle cost, Pop? I’m going to get myself a paper route soon, aren’t I? When I get a bicycle. And then I’m going to save up for a car, and when I get a car, I’m going to take you and Mama for drives on Sundays and we’ll have ice cream. Rachel can come. I guess. If she says please. He dances along, half in the gutter, tightrope walking the edge of the kerb.
At the door of the church, Walter stops. ‘I’ve been good in the eyes of the lord this week,’ he says. ‘The two of you go on.’
‘But Pop,’ George says.
‘Go on now. The good lord will understand.’
‘What will he understand, Pop?’ says George.
‘That a man needs one blessed day with no damn questions,’ he says. He guides George inside, steers Rachel with his hand in the small of her back. This close to him, she can smell his lathering soap.
‘We’ll wait for you after the service, Pop,’ she says.
‘No,’ he says, and he takes off his hat and holds it in his hands. ‘You’re a grown woman. You can find your own goddamn way home.’
They do. It’s not far, but Rachel and George dawdle because if there’s one thing that’s rare in their lives, it’s time that’s unaccounted for. They play I-spy as they walk. By the time they reach their own street, it’s late. Their mother greets them at the door in Walter’s bathrobe.
‘Where is he?’ Mary says at once.
She’s let the stove burn low and Rachel goes to feed it.
‘Someplace where there’s no damn questions,’ George says.
Rachel sets the table for four with forks and knives and ironed napkins, and they eat their dinner, and they sleep. In the morning there is no Walter but they find his key on the dresser next to an empty French cameo glass atomiser that was a gift from Mary’s Aunt Vera. Rachel goes to work and George to school. Walter is not at the mill. Only a little way into her shift Rachel notices an empty machine in the back row. Helen is also missing.
At lunchtime, Rachel plucks up all the courage she has and asks Mr Dimley if, beg your pardon, she might have a word about her father.
He blinks and he focuses, as if she’s materialised from the air in front of him. ‘And who are you, when you’re at home?’
Rachel Lehrer, she reminds him. The daughter of Walter.
And then she is bawled out for her trouble, for the inconstancy of people, their lack of appreciation for a good turn. As if it were Rachel who worked there first and vouched for her father instead of the other way around.
‘I should fire you while I have the chance,’ he says to her. ‘Bad blood.’
Instead, he pays her what she should always have earnt: a grown woman’s wage.
In that first week without Walter, Mary’s bruises grow richer and deeper and George asks When is Papa coming home, it seems to Rachel, on the hour.
In the second week new bruises which Rachel has no memory of seeing inflicted bloom from deep within her mother’s flesh where they’ve been waiting their turn.
There are no more questions from George. The air is heavy, a shoe waiting to drop.
One night Mary wakes from a dream screaming, covering her face with her hands and Rachel crawls into her bed and holds her until she falls back to sleep. In the front room, there’s a flyer on the table that Helen’s brothers handed to everyone at the mill at the end of yesterday’s shift: Missing Girl, it says, above a grainy photo of Helen with her hair flattened by a woollen cap, squinting into the sun. Reward offered. They made every worker take one, or more. Their faces, gruff and set. Gritted teeth.
‘I don’t suppose you know the whereabouts of your father,’ the elder one says to her, standing too close. ‘We’d like a word.’
Rachel shakes her head.
By the third week they are short of money, with only Rachel’s salary, but George picks up some hours after school, cleaning barrows at a foundry. He stops gripping her in the night, his skinny fingers no longer squeezing her wrists. Mary takes in some mending. They eat corned beef and beans and crackers. In the fourth week, Rachel’s mother’s skin mellows into its own colour—warm prairie wheat. Rachel is nineteen now, her mother thirty-four. They would have looked like sisters if not for her mother’s missing teeth. On Sundays they sleep late if they choose. As the weather gets a little warmer there are Rachel’s vegetables: new potatoes, parsnips, green onions. They trade the surplus for eggs and a little salt pork and eat cold pork and eggs fried in butter with their fingers, sitting on the back porch. They have what they want.
Here is the fact: Walter ate a lot, and he drank. Men require walking-around money—they feel belittled without the tinkle of coins in their pocket—so the three of them have more than they would have guessed. Rachel even manages to save a little money that she keeps wrapped in a handkerchief in the bakelite canister with the flour. She sleeps all night through because small sounds no longer wake her; there is nothing to check on, no vigilance is required.
One day Rachel comes home from work to see Mary sitting up at the kitchen table shelling peas from her apron into a saucepan, and smiling. Mary does more, cleans more. It seems to Rachel that she wants to see the house shine because it’s theirs, not because of the trouble that would otherwise rain down upon them. Before bed, she sits behind Rachel and brushes her hair with a hundred strokes. George is the man of the house, he is growing into it. Rachel hides her father’s key at the back of a drawer in the dresser.
‘I don’t want him back,’ Mary says, one night at supper.
Rachel passes George the beans.
‘I want you both to know,’ Mary says. ‘It’s not his temper. That’s part and parcel of being a wife. It’s the shame of it, this missing girl. The way folk look at you in the street. I don’t want him back.’
In the beginning of the tenth week, when Rachel rises to light the stove there is a strange smell in the front room. Faint, but clear: tobacco. She feels her mouth fill with saliva. She creeps to the small window beside the front door and teases open the curtain an inch. There is a dishevelled man asleep in the corner of the porch, collar pulled high, hat pulled low, coat spread like a blanket. He’s thin as a hickory stick but she can tell by the jut of the shoulders that it’s her father.
9
Brisbane, Queensland, 1986
Another day off, and Caddie finds herself again on the ferry approaching the university, but this time it’s mid-morning. It’s only been a week s
ince she was last here. The campus is deserted this early in February, flat and baking despite the sprinklers on the playing fields twirling hypnotically. She changed her mind a dozen times last night. She can barely believe she’s here. She might have gone to all this trouble for nothing but she couldn’t bring herself to ring first. The premeditation of it, the acknowledgment of her own intent: she would have lost her nerve.
From the river it’s a fair walk up through the bowels of the student union complex, past the Refec. The complex is gloomy inside and the doors to the Student Legal Service and the hairdresser and the Womyn’s Room are locked. There’s no one sitting on the bench seats and tables out the front, no market stalls of incense or tie-dye T-shirts and no Hare Krishnas giving away rice and dhal.
Inside the Great Court, she waits under the cloister just outside the Forgan Smith, leaning on the sandstone. She knows where the office is, the one she’s come to visit, but she needs to compose herself before climbing those stairs. She waits. She breathes; she calms her racing heart. The grotesques leer at her. This morning she couldn’t force the muesli past her lips so she left the house with two baby cheese wheels in her pockets, like creamy erasers wrapped in softening red wax. She’s scoffed one already and rolled the wax into tiny bullets. She imagines watching her younger self strolling by and flicking the wax at her. She wonders what she would say to herself in warning.
Christ, Caddie, she thinks. She must want to unravel the puzzle pretty badly. This is nature’s way of telling you to fix your life. Find something to care about. Ten-pin bowling; line dancing.
The man she’s waiting for is not the kind of person who changes his habits so it doesn’t take long. He appears through the open door, walking with a young woman towards Caddie. The woman—girl, really—is in a denim skirt and thongs and an electric blue singlet. Her black hair is pulled into a high ponytail and her face is fresh, scrubbed. She’s holding a pile of books to her chest and she has a black backpack over one shoulder and she’s walking fast to keep up with Philip. She’s a student of his, Caddie guesses. He’s talking, gesturing with his free hands, animated and present: right here. The girl is nodding, rushing after him. He stops mid-sentence when he sees Caddie and the girl pulls up too. There’s a softening before his mouth tightens. Her heart thumps.
He raises one eyebrow, like an actor. His eyes are chips of blue ice, his hair is straw. He’s wearing a short-sleeved blue linen shirt and pleated camel cords and boat shoes. He’s even more handsome than Pretty, whose real name is Jon. That’s saying something.
He clenches his jaw and folds his arms across his chest: a fighting stance, a makeshift shield.
‘Well, well,’ he says. ‘The prodigal student returns.’
All she can say is hello, in a voice somewhat similar to her own.
‘Jo, be a dear and start without me, won’t you? I shouldn’t be long,’ he says, without taking his gaze from Caddie.
‘Sure,’ the girl says. ‘I’ll just get your usual, shall I?’
He nods. The girl, Jo, walks on along the cloister, ponytail swinging.
Philip leans against the sandstone.
‘It’s been a while,’ Caddie says.
‘Your gift for understatement is intact, I see. Have you been well? You’re thinner, I think.’
Yes, she tells him. She’s been very well.
‘And your father? He’s well too, I trust.’
Yes, she says without a pause. He’s fine.
Longing, that’s how she felt about Philip at the beginning. She was eighteen years old and destroyed by wanting. Sometimes she thought she would die. No one had warned her that love would strike that way, like a disease. She sees it clearly now, the progress of her downfall. Her exuberant, giddy falling; his reserve in reaction; her devastation. His pragmatism as he unveiled her naivety—she was immature to think this was love. She didn’t understand how the world worked. She was too impulsive. Is, still.
Those first few weeks after it ended with Philip, every bit of her ached. Her eyelids, her toenails, the pads of her fingers. It was hard to move and impossible to eat. The years since have passed in a flash, like when you come out of an afternoon movie and all at once it’s night. When she looks at him now, though, her body remembers; it’s ingrained in every cell. Her pulse speeds up, she’s conscious of the way her tongue sits in her mouth. A moment passes. Philip was good at silences, she remembers. Manufacturing holes for you to step in. His face is just the same. Even more handsome, if that’s possible. A little greyer and more confident.
‘Your small talk hasn’t improved much.’
‘No,’ she says, and she recognises her voice again. ‘I need you to tell me about the mechanics of book publishing in the US in the late 1930s.’
Ten minutes later, they’re in his office. Philip behind his carved desk, swaying in his executive chair with one ankle resting on his knee. Caddie in front of it, in an armchair reserved for visitors. The door is open. The window behind him looks west to the wide sky, towards the playing fields. His office is bigger: a wall has been removed and now it incorporates the room next door. This is a good sign, in university semiotics, as is the tiny futuristic computer on his desk. Its beige screen—roughly cuboid, but with angled, sloping sides—is sitting on top of a box no bigger than a Betamax, with a floppy disc drive in front. He’s come up in the world. There’s even a spare desk in the corner—for a research assistant, she guesses. There are still stacks of papers overflowing everywhere and the cracked old tan leather couch that was always a bit dodgy now has one leg missing and is propped up on books. He’s forgotten all about Jo, waiting somewhere with his cold cappuccino. Caddie doesn’t remind him.
‘So, how have you been, Philip?’ he says. ‘I’m deeply sorry I haven’t been in touch. Tell me, Philip, what you’ve been up to over the last six years?’
‘How rude of me. I should have asked. I’m sorry. How are you, Philip?’
He waves a dismissive hand. ‘Muddling along. Working on another book, though it’s a wee bit over deadline and my agent is ripping out her hair. But never mind that. I admire the way you get down to business. Let me follow your lead. I don’t remember you being particularly interested in history or publishing when you were here,’ he says. ‘Romantic poets were your thing, weren’t they? And Inga Karlson.’
‘History of the Book was an elective,’ she says. ‘I was busy with other things, if you remember.’
‘Oh, I remember.’ He smiles lazily, looking into the middle distance. ‘I don’t know how much you remember, but it wasn’t my subject. Jamieson taught that. It doesn’t exist anymore. They cut it.’
His desk is covered in books and papers, purposefully ordered. There’s a stickytape dispenser and a fountain pen in a case next to the phone. There’s nothing in this whole room that seems specifically his except a poster for Raging Bull on the wall beside the door. De Niro, battered and shirtless: sweaty, brutal and brutalised yet defiant, focused on his fate. Caddie tries to imagine Philip bedraggled and bloody, squaring up to his opponent. The battles of tenure and office size and first years and sabbaticals are a glancing, sideways business. Shake hands and slap backs and slide a thin blade between the enemy’s ribs.
Philip reaches for a handful of coloured paperclips from a glazed pottery bowl on his desk and begins idly to straighten them. He knows enough to help her, she is sure of it. In the years before she met him, one of his major successes was a paper on All Has an End. His interest in Inga had come from nowhere and soon faded but it earned him hundreds of citations and helped with his promotion to associate professor.
‘But you know about that stuff, right? The history of publishing?’ she says.
‘I covered for Jamieson the year of his sabbatical. He should have retired by then but—tenure, what can you do? If a man wants to occupy an office and go to seed in public and eventually drop at his desk while reading Yeats, who’s to stop him?’ He rips off a few small pieces of stickytape and wraps them around the ends of
particular straightened paper clips.
She clears her throat. ‘How difficult would it have been to learn typesetting in New York in 1938?’
‘As I said, it wasn’t my subject and the university dropped it anyway. The book is dead, Cads. People like Jamieson should be decomposing in the zoology department somewhere between the dinosaur footprint guy and the nerds working on continental drift. Or they should make him take all the first years. God, first years. Talk about delusions of grammar.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘Ta da.’ He holds up the paperclips. ‘What’s this? Guess.’
He’s unfolded and woven them together into a flat grid with the outside made of two straightened yellow clips reinforced by a couple of green ones along the bottom half, and a blue and a black one threaded vertically and a red, horizontally.
‘I can’t imagine.’
‘Come on, make an effort. It’s genius.’
He waves it in the space between them in line with her eyes, pinching the yellow ones together between thumb and forefinger. ‘It’s the London Underground map, obviously. See? The red one’s the Central Line.’
‘Of course. London. Silly me.’
He throws it in the bin beside his desk like a frisbee, then he leans forward conspiratorially. ‘It’s becoming a jungle around here. The politics. If I didn’t have tenure I’d tell them where to stick it. There’s a uni in Vancouver looking for a reader in Commonwealth literature. I’m seriously considering it. That’ll wake them up.’
If the department is truly becoming a jungle, she has no doubt who’s at the top of the food chain. Philip is Machiavelli in a tweed jacket.
‘Please, Philip.’
‘Pretty please,’ he says. ‘With sugar on top.’
‘I’d really appreciate it. You’d be doing me a huge favour.’
He waves his hand at her, which she takes to mean continue.