‘Everyone has the right to representation,’ Cleg would say. ‘It’s the fair thing. More important than the money.’
Cleg’s car was a beast, skewiff as it shambled up the driveway, drawing into the ring of illumination thrown from the front of the house. He’d become a nervous driver after the accident, but it didn’t stop him from crawling around the countryside, well under the speed limit, dragging a small caravan behind him.
‘Still looks like a hobo,’ Rue muttered as Cleg walked up to the verandah.
‘Nothing’s changed with the death trap, I see,’ William said to his brother.
Cleg put his tongue in the corner of his mouth and jabbed a finger at the car. ‘All the other drivers, truckies included, keep a wide berth, Blondie. No one wants to tangle with that beauty.’
The children were happy to see him, mostly because it meant they could stay up later, but also because there’d be driving lessons. Archie still had to sit on Cleg’s lap and just steer but Olive had graduated to proper driving with the gears. Sebastian had become unenthusiastic, saying he already knew how to do it and that it wasn’t such a big deal.
‘It’s got yellow bits on it, and green too,’ said Archie, looking over the railing at the Holden, its panels held in place with masses of fluorescent tape. It had been the Mercedes Cleg had crashed, no insurance. ‘And I can see one door that’s different, maybe grey.’ Archie went and stood next to his uncle. ‘It looks funny.’
‘Looks aren’t everything, little man,’ said Cleg. ‘Just check out your dad and Brucie.’
‘You have a very deep voice.’
‘Old basso profundo, that’s me. Not like my brothers. That’s mid-range over there…’ He raised his glass at Bruce. ‘And this one here we used to call “wheezy”, but he grew out of that.’ He slapped William’s chest with the back of his hand, then reached for Archie. ‘Come here, you look like you need a horse bite.’
William asked Cleg about business and Cleg said he had a new case, a group had contacted him the month before, asking for help.
‘Please tell me it’s not more fruiterers,’ Rue said.
‘They’re women this time—a regional group I suppose you could say.’
‘Not women’s libbers?’ Rue was standing with her arms crossed.
‘They’re mothers. The organiser is from the city. She started the group, but there are historical connections to regional hospitals, like Bendigo, and Melbourne ones too.’
Thistle looked up. ‘Bendigo?’
Rue said she would make another pot.
‘What is the group?’ Thistle said.
‘Ah.’ Cleg looked like someone who had just remembered it was a person’s birthday. Olive was waiting for him to say he was sorry he’d forgotten her birthday. It had only been a week ago but she saw no sign of a present. Rue said she wasn’t ever to ask.
‘Say it.’ Thistle’s voice had dropped.
‘They’re women who’ve lost their babies.’
‘Lost, you say.’ Thistle was folding and refolding her fingers, pale white bones moving in the corner.
‘What?’ said Archie. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘Taken away from them without their mothers’ permission right after they were born,’ Cleg said.
Olive sat up. This sounded interesting.
‘Cleg, please,’ said Rue.
‘I thought you were making another pot,’ Thistle said.
‘It needs to be talked about more—which is half the problem in the first place, if you think about it,’ Cleg said.
‘Agreed,’ Thistle said.
‘Some people aren’t meant to be mothers,’ Rue said.
‘But what happened to the babies?’ Olive wanted to know.
‘It was probably witches,’ said Archie.
‘Doctors and nurses. Social workers, not witches,’ Cleg said.
‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ Thistle said.
‘Why?’ Olive wanted to know.
‘Because they were evil,’ said Thistle.
‘No, why to Cleg.’
‘Because they weren’t married at the time. Most of them were only girls.’
‘Like me?’
‘No, not as young as you.’
‘Anyway,’ said Rue. She looked at William then kept on, her words clipped. ‘These women, they’re not really mothers, not if their babies were taken. Not that I’m saying it was a good thing, but I do wonder why haven’t they forgotten by now, moved on?’
Cleg cleared his throat but Thistle interrupted.
‘The babies would be wondering what happened,’ she said. ‘They’d be looking for the mothers.’
‘If they know,’ Rue said. ‘Better they don’t, if you ask me.’
‘No one is. And what do you mean “if they know”? Of course they know, they have to. Especially, if they are over eighteen—and it should be sixteen, even—but certainly by twenty-one.’
Rue shushed her.
‘Don’t pat me. And what do you mean they’re not really mothers? Of course they’re mothers, that bit doesn’t ever change.’
‘They should keep it to themselves,’ Audra said. She’d come out for a last menthol. ‘It’s a ridiculous act of “look at me”. Why tell the world? Publicising their anguish, if you ask me. Careless, unthinking revenge.’
‘Nobody is, I said. Who is asking any of you?’ Thistle had risen to her feet and was standing in the corner.
‘So,’ said Cleg. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he said to Rue, lifting a hand in Thistle’s direction. ‘As for you, madam…’ He turned to Olive. ‘Care to earn some pocket money?’
‘Yes,’ said Olive. She liked money a lot and had eighty dollars saved already. She was going to buy walkie-talkies and a hand-held microphone for her tape recorder and hopefully have some left over for ice creams.
‘Well, we’ll see,’ said Rue. ‘Time for bed, children.’
‘You look like Santa,’ Archie said to Cleg.
‘It’s Father Christmas,’ Rue said. ‘We don’t say Santa, only the Catholics say Santa.’ She started to gather the teacups again.
Cleg went to park the caravan out the back and Olive watched from the window. She saw William had moved the ute so it faced the tree with the rabbit spots on, to light the scene as Cleg circled it like an old dog getting ready to sleep. It took him forever to get the van in place because he’d had beer.
In the bathroom, Olive rinsed her mouth and sucked a squeeze of toothpaste off her finger. She got into bed. Mandy was breathing lightly and there was a sweet yoghurt smell in the air. Olive climbed under the sheet and put her arms inside. She rocked to one side, then the other.
She couldn’t sleep on her front anymore so she tried spreading flat on her back, arms wide. She thought about the play the next day and whispered, ‘Bloody hell’. Rue said it was important that they all try to help Thistle be happy.
‘But what about me?’ Olive said under her breath.
She reached her hand to the window ledge where she had her things, her collection of gifts from Grace. Moving her fingers across them she listed them in her head. The twist of orange plastic from a drink bottle lid. The half-bead (blue and green mixed). The scrap of wire with a soldered end. The eyelet (from a shoe, Thistle thought). The pink scrap of ribbon. There were more at home, lined up with her wishbones on the ledge in her bedroom. She was collecting the things, all the treasures that Grace gave her. They were important in a way she couldn’t have explained. ‘Junk,’ Sebastian said it was. ‘Rubbish,’ said Rue. But Thistle had understood and tried to keep them for her when Olive wasn’t there.
Mandy groaned in her sleep and Olive went through her wishes: to get a pony two hands taller than Snooky’s friend Megan’s, to find a baby owl and to be magic. She kicked at the sheet, threw her hands over her head so that her wrists were crossed. She thought about what Luke Sands had said at the diving pool and made herself think about it until, without knowing it, she fell to the true dark.
T
HE VERANDAH PLAYS
THE SUMMER PLAYS as Thistle called them had transformed over time. They’d been running for as long as Olive could remember. At first they’d been simple animal pageants, and Olive’s favourite had seen her dressed as Peter Rabbit with socks on her hands for paws. She had stood a long time in front of the mirror, loving herself. Cardboard cut-outs, a painted moon and stars that one child or another might move across the stage, and once, a freestanding tree around which the actors played with the plinking sound of the record player coming through the open window of the front room.
One year, real objects had been introduced. A picnic basket, an umbrella, a tennis racquet. There’d been a graduation to short poems—one year it was ‘Hist!’—but with acting. They’d had a Chekhov run, which had been deemed satisfactory, but then came the summer, three years before, when things had changed. Thistle had been in a high state of crisis. She had prepared and delivered reimagined, lengthy and scattered monologues that were supposedly from A Streetcar Named Desire but to Olive sounded made up. The children were reduced to props themselves, including Sebastian, who was placed centre-stage to stand—startled, skinny—in a white singlet: a trembling Stanley to Thistle’s sybaritic Blanche.
Last year, Thistle and Olive had clashed over artistic differences. Olive saw the plays as an opportunity to make it all up and do whatever they liked. It was freedom. While Thistle agreed that freedom was important in creative endeavour, she insisted there was greater liberty in telling truth. The whole purpose, Thistle had said, was to hold up a mirror to humanity.
‘She says she likes to be free but really she wants to be bossy,’ Olive said to Sebastian afterwards. ‘She’s a real hypocrite.’
Olive resisted, launching a counter-production of her own. She recruited Sebastian and Archie to be her co-stars. She’d approached some of the adults to play parts (thinking she could take a turn and arrange them on stage, have them standing or sitting and give them no lines but keep them like extras in a film), but each one declined saying they’d rather watch than be in it, which she knew was a lie one thousand per cent.
The Haunted House had been a flop. The actors had lost track of what they were meant to be doing and the adults had become restless and started talking in the middle of it. There was no real story Thistle pointed out, and dramatic turns that fell flat and showed lack of preparation and thought. You couldn’t just let things happen onstage, she said. Everything had to be worked out, which was why there were scripts. Olive had stalked offstage but not before seeing the satisfied look on Thistle’s face.
That day they were doing Shakespeare. The afternoon had become sluggish as the air quietened after lunch, and the actors were fatigued even before taking their marks.
Thistle came out wearing trousers and a belt and a man’s shirt. She was holding a pile of white fabric for the ghost and she gestured to her niece and told her it was the call.
‘You’re lucky.’ Thistle was putting on her bright face because of the play but her voice was flat. ‘I wish I were a girl again.’
Olive didn’t think she was lucky and was going to say so, but Thistle made a circle, arms raised.
‘Oh my porch, my porch, oh my new porch…’
Thistle had typed out the reworked scripts using purple carbon paper to make several copies. She had simplified the language, she told them in the pre-performance meeting. Made some adjustments because it was important, of utmost importance, for this production more than any other year, that the audience be able to understand. The words needed to be clear, both in meaning and enunciation. Archie had complained because his script copy was the faintest and he couldn’t read it properly so he was in the corner of the verandah going over it with pencil, asking how to pronounce ‘Lareties’ and squinting and shaking his head at the pages.
‘It would be better if we had a real skull,’ said Thistle, looking at the rock she’d found in Rue’s garden. ‘One with the tongue still in it.’
‘What about the one in your room?’ Olive got up to go and get it.
‘That’s a sheep’s head, not a man’s.’ Thistle tapped her nails on her arms. ‘No, this will have to do. It looks like a face, don’t you think?’ She started fussing with the fabrics.
Archie came up to them with the umbrella.
‘So I have to stab you? With this poison sword?’
Thistle nodded.
‘But gently, of course.’
‘Why isn’t Sebastian the man?’ Archie was pointing to the script pages, where Thistle had written the parts. ‘Why are you the man that I kill?’
‘Because it’s the lead role,’ said Thistle. She put her hands on Archie’s shoulders. ‘It’s the main part, so of course it has to be me, even though it’s not exactly my story.’
‘But why didn’t you choose a play that has a girl as the main? Are there even any?’
‘Because girl parts aren’t as exciting as man parts,’ Olive said.
Thistle went to the end of the verandah. She called for Rue, who came out with clothes pegs.
‘Boil me some eggs!’ said Thistle loudly in Rue’s face.
Rue told her sister not to be so ridiculous and to help pin up the material. They stretched it along the railings, bunching it in poufy masses at the end. Olive didn’t understand what white material had to do with the play but her aunt said they were clouds, that they represented the shifts in the emotional climate.
‘That looks like a camel, doesn’t it?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Rue, not even looking.
‘Oh no. I see it now. A weasel.’
‘Whatever you say, dear.’ Rue went inside.
‘Go and put your costume on,’ Thistle said to Olive. ‘I’m going to warm up with something else.’ She began to orate, her language clipped and precise:
‘Look, do you see them
Sitting by the house
The younger ones, like
Shapes seen in dreams?’
‘Where’s Seb?’ Olive said to Archie as she left the verandah. ‘He’s such an idiot.’
Archie’s face brightened at the rare moment of alliance.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘What an idiot.’
Archie was dispatched to find a goblet and he walked inside confused. Olive went in too and got the shirt she had to wear. It was from when they did Peter Pan and it was green. She hated it, hated the whole thing. She wished she could sneak out the back, grab Seb’s bike and go find Peter, go to the silo. Even running into the Sands brothers down by the railway would be better than this. Having to stand like a suck on the verandah, with the adults gathered, men drinking beer, their laughter getting louder, her mother smoking, her aunt Rue wanting to complain about having to make another birthday cake, or something else about dinner, or the garden.
Olive stood up and took off her shorts and t-shirt. She found a singlet and put it on, not liking how the fabric wasn’t properly flat across her chest anymore. She put her jeans on and the shirt, put on her runners and went down the hall back to the verandah.
‘Oh no,’ Thistle said. She put out her hands to adjust Olive’s shirt. ‘Tuck it in. Don’t you have a waistcoat? And proper shoes—what about your school ones?’
‘They’re at home.’
Archie arrived with a metal vase.
‘I’ve got this.’
‘Pardon me?’ Thistle was turning the vase over in her hands.
‘My school shoes are at home.’
‘Oh.’
Thistle became distracted with whether this was the best possible prop. Whether Denmark in those days would have had that type of metal, with that particular type of handle. Olive and Archie’s eyes met and they pressed their lips together in mutual entrapment.
‘I suppose it’ll have to do,’ Thistle decided, and put it inside the window where she could reach it later. ‘This is for the poison scene. I think it will be fine.’
•
The family moved out onto the verandah and the door clapped with each exit, rh
ythmic and loud. The men preferred to stand at the back even though Thistle had placed chairs for them around the proscenium of the back door.
‘Why won’t you sit down?’ Thistle said to the three brothers, poking her head through the back door. ‘I just don’t understand it.’
Mandy was complaining about being hot.
‘I don’t know what you want from us,’ Rue said, sitting down. ‘You want us to watch but you don’t want us to come through the door.’
Thistle had circulated a communication to the audience (by way of lavender-scented notepaper) about approaching the stage from the backyard, wanting the audience to walk around from the back door. They could then simply walk up the front steps and find their labelled seats. The Trap would be commencing at 3 pm.
‘Why am I at the front?’ Rue said. ‘Is there a reason for putting me here?’
‘You never want to know about the harder things,’ Thistle said.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘Some of us can’t just bake or prune things away.’
Rue twisted in her seat with exasperation.
‘Oh really, Thistle. Do you want a cake or not?’
Thistle went inside and Rue turned around to Audra with her hands raised in the air.
Olive waited in the front room and looked through the window where the record player was. Her job was to start the third song once Thistle gave her a sign from the doorway. In that room were a small table which had been moved under the window, a desk and some bookcases. The desk was interesting, it had a top that rolled: little strips of wood that joined in a curving wave that you could pull up—or down—using two brass handles. Olive was not allowed to touch the desk but she knew that inside it were some secret cubby holes, drawers and sliding parts. And inside one of the cubby holes was a key. An old-fashioned key made of metal with an end that opened into a circle. Olive had always wondered what that key was for. She had snuck it out to try to find an opening that it would fit into, inserting it into various locks around the place, but so far she hadn’t worked it out.
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