Dancing on Coral

by Glenda Adams

  Solomon leant back and squinted at Lark. “You could be a boy, about twelve, whose mother will insist on his getting a haircut because he’s beginning to look like a girl.”

  Lark pulled at her hair, bringing it forward over her ears and forehead.

  “I’ve got to get back,” Solomon had said, opening his eyes and looking around. “My mother will be furious if she knows I’m around the rocks.” He stood up. “She doesn’t want me to get into trouble before I go away.” He straightened his shirt. “I think she’s glad I’m going.” He looked at his watch. “Lunch. She’ll be furious.”

  “You sound like a boy yourself,” said Lark, “scared of your mother.”

  “You didn’t go around the rocks, did you?” asked Lark’s mother. She had recovered from Lark’s attitude and was back at the carton of papers, holding up drawings done by Lark as a child, pictures of perfect families, mothers and fathers with sons and daughters in equal numbers, all with names and ages printed under their shoes, all arranged by height. She was glancing through the letters Lark had written when she had been sent away to the mountains.

  “I don’t remember,” said Lark.

  “Mrs. Baker said you went around the rocks with him,” said Lark’s mother. “You know what happens around the rocks. It’s not nice for a girl, for one thing, and for another the waves can be dangerous. They can kill.”

  “And watch that blowhole,” said Henry Watter. “That blowhole is the thing to watch. It can creep up on you. On this continent nature has gone berserk.” He looked back at his book. “Did you know that Mousehole is pronounced Moozel, in England? It’s a town. Therefore, blowhole should be blew-el.”

  “Solomon Blank’s leaving,” Lark said. “You don’t have to worry about him and me anymore. He’s off, lucky devil.”

  “Please, Lark, no language,” said Mrs. Watter. She handed Lark the letters. “You might want to keep these. They’re of historical interest, perhaps. They show your fear of atomic bombs at a very early age.” She turned the drawings toward Lark. “But you don’t want these anymore, do you? I always thought you could grow up to be a commercial artist, such a good job, good pay, but I don’t think there’s any point saving these. I don’t think you’ll be a commercial artist. I don’t think you have the gumption. I think you’re too caught up with your university friends. But remember, a woman has to be able to earn a living, to stand on her own two feet. Just look at me.” She spread her hands wide and shrugged. “I can’t do anything.” She walked to the window and contemplated the clothes on the line and the long grass. After a while she said, “We’ll rent a sheep.” She turned back to Henry in the armchair. “I hear you can rent a sheep for one week a month to keep the grass down.”

  “More wildlife?” groaned Henry Watter. “You’re joking.”

  “Or a goat,” said Mrs. Watter. “But goats eat more than just grass, they say. Sometimes they eat your gravel path and your washing and clothes pegs.” She took a deep breath. “I’m going to polish some of my stones.”

  Lark walked slowly along the cliff road from the house to the little school with the iron fence. Solomon Blank had flown off to America.

  “We’ll have to fly,” Mrs. Watter had said once, when Lark was very young and they were running late for the bus into town. Mrs. Watter had seized Lark’s hand and run down the front path, hauling Lark along, who expected that at any moment they were to rise into the air and fly to the bus.

  Lark stopped at the school gates, leaning her forehead against the bars, her eyes closed. The cicadas were shouting, like a male chorus, causing the air to throb, the sound waves almost palpable. She heard again those mouth organs, the recorders, triangles, tambourines, little drums, and the sound of spoons beating against saucepans, and saw those children, some fifty of them, parading in a circle around the school lawn, looking neither happy nor sad. The older ones, Solomon Blank among them, were playing the musical instruments, the younger ones were banging the spoons and saucepans. Lark was crying because she had only two spoons to beat together. The headmistress stood on the school veranda and announced several times, wringing her hands, “We have won the war in Europe, children. God was on our side. Hitler and the Germans have been brought to their knees.”

  A girl who was a celebrity in the school because she had been in England when the war broke out was allowed to plant a tree in a special ceremony.

  “VE Day will be our May Day forevermore,” said the headmistress. “And now there remains only the Pacific to be won.”

  In the cloakroom Lark stole the woolen beret of the girl who had planted the tree. She crammed her own Panama hat on her head, trying to tuck the beret under it, out of sight. When the girl cried that she could not find her beret, the teacher wrenched the Panama from Lark’s head, exposing her in front of all the children. Her face leant down into Lark’s, and Lark thought of smashing it, like the face on the eggshell.

  “Two hats?” the teacher said, dangling both in Lark’s face. “Get your own beret, if you want one.”

  But with wartime rationing, only the rich had woolen berets.

  “What is May Day?” Lark had asked her father.

  “Mayda?” He sat up, his book face-down on his knees, delighted with the question. “Mayda is a legendary island southwest of Ireland, and west of Brittany.”

  “May Day?”

  “You mean Mayday! That’s an international distress call. Do you want me to teach it to you?”

  “No,” said Lark. “I’ll never need to know that.”

  Then she remembered leaning against the mulberry tree and watching her mother chop the head off a chicken. The body ran around the yard. The Pacific War was over and they were celebrating with a special chicken dinner. The Bakers took down the flags of the allies, which they had flown every day of the war, and offered the French flag to Lark. Lark was surprised that the blue, white, and red cloth was woolen and extremely rough to the touch. She wrapped the flag around her, like a cloak. She put on her father’s gas mask and crept to the fence and peered over at the Bakers’ boy. He ran to his mother, screaming that there was a monster on the back fence, and Lark heard Mrs. Baker telling him that the Watters were a strange lot.

  “You see,” said Mrs. Watter, “all that smashing of Hitler on the eggshells really helped. We won the war. They drew the Kaiser on my eggshells when I was a girl, and we won that war, too.”

  For several years Lark’s school report read: Lark imagines difficulties where there are none; her ability to lead in a helpful manner is developing slowly; her ability to work as an individual could be better; her ability to solve problems could be better; her concentration could be better; participation in group conversations is improving.

  It was decided that Lark had been upset about something for years. It was thought that the war had affected many children. She should go away for a while, to the Blue Mountains, said Mrs. Watter, to herself, since Henry Watter wanted no part of sending the child away. And off Lark went for a month to a children’s boardinghouse, in the middle of winter, where she was the only guest. It was not the kind of journey she had been planning. She did not want mountains. “Remember about maintaining your toothbrush, when you go,” Henry Watter whispered to her. “Trouble with your teeth when you travel is a catastrophe.”

  The first night Lark turned the tap full on to rinse off her toothbrush. “That’s the way my father taught me to rinse my toothbrush,” she explained, rather proud of the technique.

  “Damages the bristles and wastes water,” said the woman in charge of the boardinghouse, perched on the edge of the bathtub.

  Lark dried her brush on her towel, aware that the woman was noticing the drying of the brush in particular. “He said the brush goes mildew in the wretched climate of this accursed continent if you don’t dry it,” she said.

  “Spreads filth on the brush,” said the woman. “And don’t use words of that ilk in this house.”

  Lark wrote that she was ready to come home after only two week
s: “I am very unhappy in the mountains. One of the things she says about me is that I’m spoilt. I can’t eat her rhubarb. And she says ‘ilk.’ I know I should stand up to it, but I can’t. Another thing is that I clean my toothbrush in the wrong way. Will you please get me away from here? When I wrote this I was crying. I can’t help it. Your loving daughter.”

  Mrs. Watter wrote that she had paid for the full four weeks and that the change would be good.

  Lark wrote: “I heard over the news on the radio that an atom bomb is going to be dropped in Sydney, and that after the fire come the ashes which fall and cover everything. It is true. Please get me home. Your loving daughter.”

  Just a few days later Henry Watter appeared on the veranda of the boardinghouse at six in the morning, banging on the wooden door. He had traveled all night on the milk train, and Lark could see that he had his pajamas on under his suit. He had come to take her home.

  When they arrived back in the house on the cliff, Mrs. Baker in her front garden, noticing the pajama cuffs, shook her head. And Mrs. Watter, shaking her head, said, “Henry, you really shouldn’t have fetched her. The change was supposed to be good. You were supposed to have four full weeks of rest,” leaving Lark in some doubt as to who was supposed to be getting the rest and for whom the change was intended.

  “Thank you for saving me,” she told her father.

  “Ask me the stops on the first air route from Sydney to London,” Henry Watter said to little Lark. “It won’t be long now, before I go.” Then he continued, without waiting for her to form the question, “Sydney, Brisbane, Gladstone, Townsville, Karumba, Groot Island, Darwin, Kupang, Bima, Surabaja, Batavia, Klabat Bay, Singapore, Penang, Bangkok, Rangoon, Akyab, Calcutta, Allahabad, Gwalior, Karachi, Gwadar, Dubai, Bahrein, Basra, Tiberias, Athens, Brindisi, Rome, Marseilles, Mâcon, Southampton, London.”

  Lark lifted her head from the fence rail. The cicadas, accompanied by lawnmowers, were still at it.

  For her Qantas interview Lark wore a floral blouse buttoned to the neck and a dark green linen skirt with four buttons at the back, forming the four points of a square, like the buttons on a man’s double-breasted jacket. She thought she looked rather like an air hostess already.

  “With those buttons, I hope you don’t have to sit down,” Lark’s father said.

  He was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for his lunch. Lark, dressed for the interview and with her coat on already, was grilling him a lamb chop. In her coat pocket she carried Solomon Blank’s first letter. “The leg season has arrived here; legs are visible again after the winter, decked in the new season’s Bermuda shorts in subtle variations of color, cut, and style. The legs thus exposed show the same variations, not always so subtle, but often of interest to a lonely male doctoral student.” Solomon Blank seemed to be in the most exciting place in the Northern Hemisphere, and acculturating very easily.

  Lark dumped the chop on a plate next to a mound of lettuce and pushed it in front of her father.

  “I’m not a rabbit,” he said. Lark grabbed the lettuce in one hand and thrust it back into the crisper. Henry Watter lifted the chop with his fork and peered at the plate. “It’s a case of excess blood of the lamb. Please.”

  Lark flung the chop back onto the griller. She looked at her watch. “But I have to go.”

  “You’ll go, all right. And when you go, you’ll be in trouble your first day. You’ll see. It’s not straightforward, the world.” Henry Watter waved her to the chair opposite him, then looked around to check that they were alone. From under his cardigan he pulled out a sheaf of paper, both sides of each sheet covered with his beautiful handwriting. “Read this,” he whispered.

  “‘Ash,’ by Sydney London?” Lark took the pages, turning them over.

  “My pen name,” he said. “Nomme de ploom.” He leant forward to confide in her. “Sydney to London, understand? I’m entering the Daily Mirror short-story contest. One thousand pounds, first prize. It will be my spending money in London, after I win my boat ticket on Jack Davey.”

  In the story a man was standing shaving, examining his lean, square jaw in the mirror.

  “But don’t tell your mother,” said Henry Watter. “She doesn’t read the Mirror and will never even see it when it wins.”

  The lamb chop was burning. Lark leapt up and forked it onto the plate, a hard, black little knob. “I have to go,” said Lark, stuffing the manuscript into her handbag. “I’ll read this when I’m there.”

  The secretary told Lark to take off her coat before she went in to the personnel officer. “He has to check your deportment,” she said. “In the meantime, I’m sorry but he is running late, so you’ll have to wait, I’m afraid, if that’s all right.”

  Lark perched on the edge of an upholstered bench, avoiding sitting on those buttons. She read her father’s manuscript. Every morning when the man looked in the mirror he saw that another feature had changed. The eyes were blue, no longer brown. The hair blond, not brown. The mouth had become a thin line that bent in a half smile. He began not to recognize familiar faces—his wife, his daughter. Everyone was a stranger. One morning he looked in the mirror and could not recognize his own face. He seemed to be a child, not himself but some other child. But when he spoke he recognized the voice and knew that the boy—or it could be a girl—in the mirror was indeed he. And then the voice ceased altogether, leaving the child in the mirror mute, and before his own eyes, the blond, blue-eyed child in the mirror crumbled into ashes. The man who shaved leant forward, his forehead resting against the mirror, and saw on the bathroom floor, reflected in the mirror, the ashes of the image.

  “You can go in now,” said the secretary. “Take off your coat. He needs to see your figure and your deportment.” Lark abandoned her coat and entered the huge office, where a man in a brown suit sat behind a desk at the far end and watched her as she walked to him. She was still clutching her father’s manuscript.

  “Why,” he asked, “do you want to be a Qantas air hostess?” He tapped a pencil against his finger, as if he had asked a riddle about the meaning of life.

  Lark hesitated, suddenly conscious of the pages of writing she held on her lap. She thought of saying she had always admired Qantas and had wanted to serve that particular company ever since she was little.

  “I want to get away,” she said. “I want to travel.”

  “What’s that?” the man asked, indicating the papers in Lark’s hands.

  “Just,” Lark knew the word “fiction” would alert this man to all kinds of shortcomings in her and in her family. “Just nothing.” She smiled weakly. It was unusual for anyone to carry about bundles of paper covered with writing.

  “I see,” said the man. “You do realize that in addition to a deep desire to serve others, our hostesses have to be good-looking girls. The best of the crop. Our passengers demand no less.”

  Lark had to walk out again, across the vast floor, with that personnel officer watching those four buttons and judging.

  In a postscript Solomon Blank had added: “I’m going shopping with a lady friend who will help me choose a pair of Bermuda shorts for myself, in one of those outrageous plaids that used to make us laugh at Americans.”

  Lark wrote to the student newspaper on the subject of colonialism and imperialism. “We must stand on our own feet,” she said. “We must support the newly emerging forces in their struggle against imperialism. If we continue to toe the line drawn by America, we will always lose the race.”

  Lark met her first American in the cafeteria line at the university. She had hidden an extra pat of butter under her bread roll, which was something they all did, to save the extra penny. Everyone was saving to go away.

  “Americans have lost all sense of culture,” said this voice behind her. Americans were rare enough in Sydney to make Lark turn around whenever she heard an American voice in the tram or a shop. He was short, with light brown curly hair that touched his collar and covered his ears, which meant that he did not get it cut e
very two or three weeks like all the young men she knew. It gave him a softness, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses and a baggy tweed jacket with leather elbows, which also added to this gentle demeanor. He held a camera up to his face, as if it were binoculars, and scanned the cafeteria. This was Tom Brown and he seemed to know a great deal.

  “Americans have lost all sense of history and beauty in their language.” This Tom, without taking the camera away from his face, was addressing the young woman next to him, Donna Bird, editor of the student newspaper.

  Lark had watched Donna Bird for several years as she floated around the quadrangle, looking like some kind of court jester, always arguing and waving her arms about, always surrounded by groups of the important students—the libertarian who wore no shoes and tied his khaki trousers with a piece of rope and wrote lewd columns for the newspaper; the architecture student who was caught by a security guard on the floor of the library stacks with the psychology fresher; the leader of the student conservative club who was known only by his initials.

  Donna Bird always wore a sun visor, trailed a scarf around her neck, and carried a diary, one of those exercise books that children used in primary school. Donna Bird covered her diaries in brown wrapping paper, on which she lettered a quotation. On the cover of the present volume, clamped under her arm, was written, “‘We must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.’”

  That day Donna Bird was wearing gray slacks, gray socks with silver threads, brown leather sandals, a gray turtleneck sweater, sunglasses, long, gold clip-on earrings, and, of course, her sun visor and one of her scarves, chiffon with a brown and white snakeskin design, wrapped around her neck several times and hanging limply. Today she had braided her long, curly, red hair in an original way and kept fingering it as she spoke, tossing it around, then stroking it as she responded to Tom, looking at herself every now and then in the glass of the food cases.