Ada

by Kaz Cooke

  Everything else was mully-crushed to slivers all down the hillside. At least it was dry as dry so we could salvage a few things, but hardly a solitary item had survived in one piece or without scratches or gouges or a smashed half. Poor Lizzie lost all her musical instruments, a zither, a mandolin. Only the excelophone was salvaged. Jim lost his banjo and his bones. Mattie’s lantern projector was gone. All of Zeno’s juggling kit was smashed and lost. It was a catastrophe.

  The relief coach took eight hours. We sat there on coats on logs in the merciless heat with heads in our hands, slapping at ants. Towards dusk all the cicadas in the world started up all around us. Such a noise to come out of fat little insects with wings like fairies. Everybody stuffed what they could in their ears and still our heads rang with it for hours.

  I’ll draw a veil over that night and day except to say I don’t think any of us could have felt much lower. In Warragul Jim announced from the stage what had happened and begged for indulgence, and many people who had already paid for their ticket went out to their buggies or nipped home to get lamps to help with the lighting. After curtain some of them threw extra coins onto the stage. Bless that hotel landlady who gave me a nightdress and had put out clean, linen sheets. I cried when I felt them.

  Later, Jim was stretched out on the bed with his feet poking out through the wrought-iron bed end, and one hand behind his head, and a little blunt rolled-up cigarette between his teeth. ‘Hush now, lass,’ he said, blowing smoke up towards the ceiling. ‘Your poor old lungs. I’ll find a way to get us away off and out of the travelling. We’ve got the South Australian tour before the end of the year, and we’ll find a place then . . . I’ll see you right . . .’ His voice trailed off and he was asleep.

  A month later Jim and I were married at a little church in the droughty, hot little town of Yarram, bushfires all around. It was late afternoon, in red-gold, smoky light, and we managed to shove ourselves in between the dairymaids and timber cutters whose horses dropped at the posts outside (getting hitched – pause for laughter). I wore my mauve and we had washed and dried Jim’s straw-coloured linen jacket on the back of the carriage from Sale, so it arrived covered in little ember burns.

  Bob Hall had collected me up a posy of delphiniums, Heaven knows from which front yard, somewhere behind that dusty high street. We stayed an extra night without a show and had a riotous supper with all of us from the Ada Delroy Company and everyone else staying at the Yarram Club Hotel besides. I remember Lizzie with a high colour, hoisted up onto the bar and going hell for leather on the excelophone with her hat on sideways and her spectacles all steamed up. She did look pretty.

  I suppose truth be told most of us are plain and make the best of it, until somebody loves us. It’s the somebody else loving you that makes you more beautiful. It could be a mother or a father or a lover, the way they see you.

  I wish I could say I was beautiful that day but I think already my eyes were glittery deep in my poor skinty face, and I had to concentrate very deliberate so as not to cough during the service. But I felt happy, and fortunate. When we arrived home after the show the landlady was in a state as the man in the room next to us had gone to the dentist that afternoon and never come round again – carried off under chloroform, he was, so we were offered cold scones, the best butter and a jar of marmalade for a honeymoon breakfast.

  I know some people say that Jim took up with me before Alice was gone, because she was older and tired out from eight children, a thousand skipping dances and lop-bites from the lodgings beds, and didn’t fancy the maritals any more. Who can blame her? When they get to a certain age I think men should have their unmentionables removed – it would just make it easier on everybody. When they’re twenty-seven or so should do it. Any road, Jim didn’t marry me because I was a sweet, young thing to hand who could look after him as he hoofed off towards his dotage. No. By that stage I was the one needed looking after. And I’ll say this for Jim, he could have stashed me anywhere between Bendigo and Sale and shown me his heels, but he stood by me and did the right thing. All those years it was the Ada Delroy part of the company that kept him afloat, but when I began to sink he didn’t walk away. More than anyone except Lizzie he knows what I’ve done for the family. It confuses people no end about whether we’re brother and sister, or husband and wife, and it doesn’t do to say ‘both’ as people shriek the house down, but it’s true.

  Condemn me if you will, Horrie – Marzella didn’t take a moment to decide. But I do ask you, be reasonable. Alice was gone, and there I was, twenty-five years a sister and an employee with a chance at respectability and protection as a wife. In return I haven’t been able to be much of a wife to him, what with the retiring-fromthe- stage and the taking-to-my-bed business – but we’re terribly fond of each other, and I can still make him laugh when he least expects it. I can come over all piquant when I’m not feverish.

  On the Tasmanian run after the wedding I could hardly do anything but lie down – Lizzie did all the Mahatma-ing and all the Serpentining and it was all too much for all of us. One night in Stanley I coughed so hard I think parts of my lung came up. I was terrified of being left in a charity sanatorium along the way. I think marrying me was Jim’s way of saying he wouldn’t leave me behind. Nothing sharpens up the marriage ceremony like a bit more oomph in the ‘until death do us part’ bit, you see. By that stage I was on my way to the Dancer’s Knackery, a cougher and a couchetter of the first water. And finally, after thirty years, I got to have the family name, too. I’m a Bell now, same as anyone. Who’s a Bell. Man and wife. Or man and scarry-crow, more like.

  Lizzie, though, surprised me by saying that it was Jim who should be grateful. Was he such a prospect himself any more, if you looked through the eyes of a chorus girl, she said. To us he’d always be the man with get-up-and-go, who got up and kept us all going as long as he could. But to an outsider, she said, he was an old man without even a wicker trunk of equipment any more, just a book of old jokes in his jacket pocket and the demeanour of a dear lanky old uncle who’s got an appointment in the insolvency court.

  Lizzie said that people talk of how every man wants to make his father proud. But Jim, having already surpassed his father at an early age in matters of ambition, and opportunity, and courageous leaps of faith in himself and his ability to render a living for the family entire, had no need of a father’s benediction, even from the grave. What Jim has always needed, she said, is his sons to say, you made the decisions properly, you chose the best path. Now we’re stopped here in Malvern his sons are scattered from him again, and they know he was in the bankruptcy court, and he could not hold the line. Just bad luck. It’s hard yards again for everyone now in Australian music hall and vaudeville. Bob Bell, my imitation-fiancée, does the sensible thing and tries to confine himself to Perth and Adelaide in the spring and autumn. He sends me postcards telling me all the gossip on the travelling acts he’s on with at the Tivoli. ‘Club-swinger enters and departs to dead silence.’; ‘Olga Baker cracked a rib attempting a Bessie Clayton kick in private.’

  How did I end up here? After our Victorian country tour Jim and I planned to get in the Lifeboat, which is what we in the theatre called Harry and Kate’s Tivoli circuit. It would mean dodging destitution, with a regular wage, and somebody else taking the risks and organising the travel. But it turned out I was fit only for retirement. Lizzie wasn’t good enough to be engaged for her own act, but she could perhaps become a music teacher. And when all else failed, Harry gave Jim a stage manager’s job. Of course he did, bless his pearly buttons.

  Speaking of costumes, look what else I’ve cut out of the Australasian Illustrated. Pansy Montague. Do you remember, the day you first visited me, the picture postcard of Pansy who exerted herself to get into a costume, bathing though it was, and you thought it was me? Cheek. Look at this. Arrested in London with her husband – that’s enough to make anybody cough, husband. He’s called Ferdinand Eggena, if you please, and they’ve been nicked for acquiring jewels
by false pretences. Do your own joke at this point, Horrie – I’m all out.

  Poor old Pansy. She always had such rotten taste in men. Strictly avoidable dudes, the lot of them. Treated her like a bush horse, every man of them. You could lead Pansy to a club full of barons and she’d pick the ponce resting his spindly legs in the gutter reading somebody else’s paper and waiting for his wife to give him a cut of her boot-factory wage. Advising Pansy to pick a nice one was like drilling a chicken on its Latin verbs.

  If it wasn’t for Jim and Alice, I might have been Pansy myself. What can you do but climb into your best frock and face the world? ‘Better than the roarrring mills!’

  I remember the best dress I ever had. Early days in Australia, it was. A New Year’s Eve, it was, 1889. We were playing the Coogee Palace Aquarium – as well as fish and seals it had two stages and a ballroom. The gown was a shouty cherry-blossom pink silk, shot through with tiny filaments of tin thread – wouldn’t last as long and was liable to go green in the rain and under the arms and shatter at the folds, but oh, it gave the most marvellous stiffness, you could make a bow stand out like magic, and arrange a drape that stayed just so. Close-fitted over the corset, with a separate skirt that rustled like billyo with all the tin in it. I thought it could stand proud on its own in a lady-shape, though it always slowly swooned to the floor whenever I tried it.

  I know it sounds daft, but I wanted to show my new dress to a fish. I’d taken up the habit of stopping to visit the aquarium tanks around the great hall. There was zebrafish, and flathead, and trevally, crayfish with their mad eyes on sticks, parrotfish, porcupinefish, and electric fish, and a ghastly live panorama of rude, graspy octopuses. I shall spare you the description of feeding time. All right, have it your way. Their first order of business is to pluck out and gobble the eyes of any poor unfortunate cousin plonked in with them. I knew you’d feel a bit queer. Serves you right.

  On my way in I passed the only natives I ever shared a bill with: the ‘Various Northern Territory Exhibits: Australian Native Men and Their Genuine Deadly Weapons’ were assembled near the door, waiting, without the weapons. Their manager, a self-titled ‘explorer’ called Harry Stockdale, said some of them came from Port Essington, up in the topknot of the Northern Territory, where he ran buffaloes on about four-hundred million acres or thereabouts. He said they couldn’t speak English and some of them couldn’t even speak to each other, being from different places, some from as far away as Port Darwin. And I must say, ‘native men’ was pushing it; some of them were only Cissie’s age if they were a day. Every morning they’d arrive early from the boarding house on the hill, to get out of their trousers and into their little, brown aprons kept snug over their whoopsie-parts with twisted strings over their hips. Of course I didn’t look.

  They had rather elegant woven-grass arm bracelets and fanned themselves with beautiful, glossy magpie-goose wings, inky black with an emerald sheen. They wore diadems across their foreheads with feathery strings swinging down across the forehead: for all the world like Lady Loch with her tiara and aigrette on upside down. Mr Stockdale said the native chaps had never clapped eyes on an aristocrat and seemed to have hit upon their adornments without copying. They showed Lizzie and Cissie their instruments: ironwood sticks for hitting together and a wind instrument of bamboo like a large oboe, with a strange, circular rhythm that Stockdale called a ‘lip-buzzed aerophone’ or ‘drone pipe’ during his eleven o’clock addresses to the crowds. Nobody else could get a blessed sound from it, not even Lizzie.

  Twice a day the poor fellows had to stand on a raised platform in the middle of the hall along with two stuffed buffaloes and three unstuffed Zanzibar monkeys chained to a ring on the floor. For two hours at a time, children and adults would throw apple peelings at the monkeys, but not at the men, who maintained an admirable dignity throughout. Stockdale would exhort them to strike bucolic poses with their weapons and throw a boomerang in the courtyard but more often than not they just stared him down. Cissie said they were pretending to be Alice.

  By the end of our run we was all politely nodding at each other. Professional courtesy. I do hope those chaps got home all right. Stockdale didn’t look to me the type to cough up somebody else’s steamer fare.

  So I nodded at them as I came past on my way to see my favourite creature. She was in her own tall tank on a plinth. She floated and danced above the featherous greenery at the bottom of the tank. She clenched and unfurled in a dreamy rhythm, a continuous, sinuous bowing and unfolding, this plump, long white pincushion covered in gaudy red polka dots. There were rippling red flounces on her extremities, like a ruffled hem, and on her head, if that end was her head, she had oak-leaf-shaped, transparent antennas. A wall-mount card in copperplate on the plinth said ‘Spanish Dancer (sea hare, or slug), caught off Brisbane’.

  ‘Hello, Miss Spanish Dancer,’ I said quietly. I’d introduced myself days before. ‘What do you think of my new tin-silk – can you hear the rustle?’ She got on with her trance-like writhing.

  That’s when I heard the preparatory throat-clearing next to me. ‘Ahem,’ said a gentleman’s voice. ‘I beg to differ with the label, my dear. From a little further south I’ll wager. In fact I classified and named that genus myself: Eiderdowneaous floribunda.’ Gawd save us.

  How do you like that? Calling me ‘dear’ without an introduction. Women know the type. We’ve all been blithered at on a public omnibus and bored to shrieks in a drawing room, I’m sure. That sort of man is like hall furniture in the bath: in the way for no good purpose. His sort is always telling you things you already know, or things that are plain wrong. Insufferable moustache-waggling engineers and wittering sensualists alike. They could all do with a sharp blow to the boko with a rolled-up newspaper.

  They’re the sort who say, ‘Who amongst us knows what women will do if they are given their head, and the vote?’ And you want to say, how about the women amongst us, sunshine, why don’t you ask one? But they’re too busy talking.

  I’ve heard unsolicited elucidations on thistle inspections near Wycheproof, and plans for sanitation systems in Broome, not to mention the best way to smuggle Greek antiquities (you’ll need some Greek, it seems), how to provision an expedition to Antarctica by rugby players, and the correct pronunciation of oologist (I’d plump for ‘egg man’ if I was you). I have gazed, insensible, at many a hairy-pelmeted cakehole trumpeting on about how one could plan a siege in Africa, prevent red nostrils on a coach driver, prepare Aboriginal skulls to send to the British museum (I almost fainted), conjure the perfect cup of tea from a servant (shout at the servant) and pack five thousand live cockatoos to send to Germany (quite tight).

  At any rate, here was another one of them at the Aquarium. I put my forehead to the cool tank glass and gave him some side-eye. He was certainly dressed as a gent: linen suit with matching waistcoat, holding cane to his chest. His Albert chain looked gold, and flashed a couple of charms. But still that was no guarantee of manners. As I may have told you, I’ve been instructed on morals by gentlemen who wished to rummage in my skirts, and accused of giving myself airs and graces by a man who could belch ‘Rule, Britannia’.

  This ‘gentleman’ seemed to have his eyes firmly on the scarlet silk rose on my bodice, possibly taking the watermelon brightness of my new gown for a sign of a fast character. I sighed, and turned back to my mesmerising old girl in the tank. She shivered and rippled, stretching and curling her flounces in waves of languid propulsion. The marine keeper had told me all about her.

  ‘They can eat anything, Miss,’ he’d said. ‘Anything. Poisonous anemones, and stinger tentacles, and then they keep on dancing, same as ever – but if someone tries to eat her, then she releases her poison stores, and the attacker ends up stiff as a plank. The other fish leave her alone, or pay the consequences. Listen, she makes a noise. Put your ear on the glass. Some says it’s like the tick of a hallway clock, but I says it sounds like the tap of a wire on a glass jar,’ he’d confided. I adjusted my hat an
d put my ear to the glass wall to hear her tiny rapping.

  The ‘gentleman’ went on (well, of course he did). ‘I’ve seen your performance, Miss Delroy,’ he said. ‘Why not accompany me to the Magnificent Twilight Grotto?’ Here’s two reasons, I thought: it’s dark on purpose in there and smells of mould.

  ‘Might I suggest I buy you something pretty afterwards?’ he said, adding the insult. ‘To match your Spanish dancer, perhaps.’

  I tapped very gently on the glass as she hovered closer with a few lazy phoofs. I smiled at him, and he gave up a hideous rictus, and then I said, ‘The Latin you’re after, sir, is Hexabranchus sanguineus; she is of the nudibranch–gastropod family. And I wouldn’t go near a grotto with you if you were the Prince of Wales. I wouldn’t go about with you, sir, if you gave me a diamond stomacher and a pair of matching elephants.’ I said it in that way that you don’t mean sir at all.

  ‘There’s a tank behind you, sir,’ I said, ‘in which you can make the acquaintance of the Wobbegong shark,’ I said. ‘It is almost feeding time. Why not hop in? Good day.’ I swept away and what a very satisfying rustle my skirts made. It would be worth every green underarm I had to patch later.

  I didn’t look around but I’ll put a sixpence on the man still standing there with his mouth open, like the common grouper. And I know what the Spanish Dancer would have done. Flicked her frills and gone on dancing and dancing. The show must go on. Until it can’t, any more.

  What shall I miss when I’m gone? That’s a slightly more cheerful question, Horace. I shan’t miss anything if I’m dead, I suppose, but if they wake me up to ask I shall probably say that I miss being in small, smoky, cheery, noisy rooms full of people laughing, the thud of enamel mugs shared between two or three, tea or gin, on a wooden table. The happy times: either round the Bells’ kitchen table in Blackburn, in a coach or an understage dressing-room, a settee at Parer’s, or round a lodging-house parlour piano. Little rooms full of laughing people. Now look at me, in a three-room house, rattling round all alone when Jimmy and Lizzie are out.