Would she include the ladybird wing cases? No. Too small. She couldn’t use her prized glider skeleton. It had fallen to bits and was gathering dust in a dish on her dressing table. She’d have to keep the bottom window closed so that the specimens wouldn’t blow away. Tilting her head to view the composition, she lifted her chin so as to send her voice out to the rest of the household.
‘Where’s the Indian ink?’ she yelled. ‘I can’t find it. Mum, do you know where the Indian ink’s gone? Mum?’
When there was no response, she went searching in the roll-top desk. Her mother was probably in the garden and out of earshot. ‘Where’s the Indian ink?’ she shouted again, not really expecting an answer.
She found Tony on the verandah steps, using a gimlet to bore a hole in an offcut, his tongue clamped between his teeth. ‘Tony,’ Laurie said, standing over him, hands on hips. He blew into the hole, put it to his eye, and resumed, his tongue returning to its position between his teeth. Laurie nudged his leg with her toe. ‘Tony, what’ve you done with the Indian ink?’
Tony withdrew his tongue to mutter, ‘Nothing,’ and then replaced it. Laurie produced a heavy sigh and wandered off. ‘Could be on the kitchen dresser,’ he conceded, calling after her.
‘Hurray,’ she said to herself as, with the help of a chair, she found the Indian ink within her reach. She flew about then, with fresh energy, hunting down scissors, finding a steel-nibbed pen in the desk and quietly stealing a sheet of Whatman’s watercolour paper from among her mother’s things. She would write out the labels for her specimens in her best hand, first checking the scientific names for the beachy things in Dakin’s Australian Seashores. Indian ink would look really good on that paper. Maybe she should do the names in pencil first, and then trace over them …
She set herself up on her bedroom floor with everything she needed. ‘Hells-bells!’ she said aloud. ‘Where’s the ruler?’ Her eyes closed briefly to give herself patience. ‘Ruler!’ she shouted.
There was no reply. She threw back her head with a groan, heaved herself up and went in slap-footed search of it. It was in the fruit bowl on the dining-room table, where it had no business being.
When she returned to her room, Miranda was there.
‘Did you take my ruler?’ Laurie demanded, more or less as a matter of form. Now that everything was in order and she could begin, she’d lost her annoyance of moments before.
Miranda took the question in the spirit in which it was uttered and didn’t reply. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked instead, picking up the paper nautilus and turning it over gently in her hands.
‘Leave it!’ commanded Laurie. ‘You’ll break it!’ She over-saw the return of the specimen, grunted when satisfied, and then surveyed her materials.
‘Are you doing your collection?’ Miranda asked deferentially. Her fingers reached out towards the wasps’ nest and then withdrew.
‘What’s it look like?’ Laurie murmured. Miranda’s fingers fluttered near the Jezebel. She picked her fingernails, sighed and wandered off.
Laurie sat on her haunches beside the sheet of beautiful Whatman’s paper, sizing up which way to approach the task of cutting it into label-sized pieces. She tapped the ruler against her head to help herself think. The pieces had to be big enough to fit in the scientific name as well as the common name, but not too big to look neat.
After some false starts, she settled on a size and got down to work.
She spent the rest of the afternoon there, writing labels. Crumpled labels lay scattered about, her fingers were stained with Indian ink and there were smudged black footprints on the floor.
Then, painstakingly, careful to get them straight, she stuck a label next to each specimen in her collection, and stood back to admire the effect.
No more than a few days later, a difference of opinion arose between Laurie and Miranda that led on – as points were made and stances taken – to matters of principle, and ended with Laurie calling Miranda dopey. Miranda, jostled by Laurie but not deterred, made for her sister’s room with a set face, and there her eye fell on the neat array of specimens on the shelves. She hesitated only a moment, and swept them off onto the floor. Breaking into sobs, she fled to her hiding place behind the cane trunk on the back verandah.
‘Mum!’ Laurie bellowed. Tears of outrage pricked her eyes. What Miranda had done was just spiteful. She crawled about on the floor, trying to retrieve the pieces through a blur of tears. All she’d done was call her dopey. Calling her dopey was nothing.
Besides, she was.
Not only dopey. Miranda flared up over anything. It made the rest of them wary of crossing her. Pulled up for leaving her scooter in the middle of the hall or a porridge plate on the verandah, or for eating spoonfuls of Milo straight out of the tin, she’d fly into a rage. Gnash her teeth and throw things. Afterwards, their mother would take her, howling and stiff-limbed, into her arms, shushing her, rocking her, drying her tears and streaming nose, smoothing her moist hair back from her face. She’d discuss the incident later with their father, in a voice too low for Laurie to make out most of the words.
She’s had too much attention, Laurie privately concluded. That’s the reason. She’s getting spoilt.
They spent the next Christmas at Nan and Grandad’s place at Mount Tamborine, and the next – and several thereafter – at home. They planned a trip to the distant Blue Mountains, writing away for information about accommodation, studying photos of the Three Sisters and discussing the feasibility of a day-long excursion to the Jenolan Caves. But they gave it up, in the end, on the grounds of cost. Once, in the August holidays, they camped just over the border in the flinty frosts of Bald Rock Reserve.
They did not return to Broody River for several years.
Sometimes, when her father was at ease in his armchair, reading the paper, Laurie would weasel into his lap. If Miranda hadn’t got there first. She’d settle in against his chest, feeling its rise and fall. It made a perfect nest, his arms, the paper, his face with Sunday whiskers. He smelt safe. Then she would bring to mind the whipping on the sandbank and try to make the link.
Fail.
The jacarandas were in bloom when Laurie first noticed something wrong.
She was making a poster for a school project – a diagram showing a cross-section of the sea, with pictures of sea creatures pasted in at various depths – and had gone to fetch the encyclopaedia from the piano. Her mother had let her use her watercolours to paint a pale-blue background, and she was tracing pictures from Dakin to colour, cut out and stick on when she remembered the picture of the oyster with its pearl.
Miranda had been making suggestions for the underwater scene – seagrass, sunbeams – and Laurie had left her with strict instructions to leave everything alone and make sure she didn’t knock over the rinsing water. ‘Don’t touch anything!’ she shouted from out the back. She looked at her sister suspiciously when she returned, but the glass of cloudy water was still upright, the brushes still in it, and the poster had not been tampered with.
Laurie sat cross-legged on the floor. She looked up ‘Oyster’ in the encyclopaedia and pressed it open at the page. Beyond the window, jacaranda blossoms fell in ones and twos.
‘Where’s the tracing paper?’ she asked. ‘Oh, here.’ Then she folded her legs under her bottom and bent to her task.
‘I’ll have to put in a reef or something,’ Laurie said, mostly to herself, ‘for the oyster.’
Miranda made no answer.
Laurie glanced at her sister. She was sitting on the floor, staring fixedly at the side of the bed.
Laurie followed her gaze. What was she looking at? A spider? But she couldn’t see anything, and anyway, a spider wouldn’t strike Miranda dumb. Miranda was a gasbag. Her tongue was never still.
Laurie frowned. ‘What?’
Silence. Laurie peered at the bed. Was it the design on the bedspread she was taken with? Couldn’t be. It was dull, familiar, faded by washing. There were no sunbeams falling thr
ough the window, no dancing dust motes. Nothing to hold her that way. She looked stupid, sitting there stubbornly saying nothing, making Laurie want to slap her.
‘What?’ said Laurie again, poking the glasses back on her nose. Under her bottom, one big toe scratched the sole of the other foot uneasily.
She put her pencil down and crawled around the sheet of paper to look into her sister’s face. It was vacant.
‘Miranda!’ said Laurie sharply.
Slowly Miranda turned towards her. When she spoke at last, it was with a slightly puzzled air.
‘I smelt –’ she broke off. She tilted her head in a way that brought an ache to Laurie’s chest. ‘Is Mummy making toffee?’
Laurie stared at her. And slowly shook her head.
If they hadn’t been left alone in the house, they would not have wandered off. If they hadn’t wandered off, they would not have found themselves at the old landing. If they hadn’t been at the old landing …
‘She’s been dreamier, and there’ve been tantrums too,’ Rosie said, rubbing her elbow as she stood at the door with Dr Fearnley, ‘but then, all kids …’
Miranda had been released and had shot back to a picture she was drawing out on the back verandah, a work that seemed, for the moment, to absorb her completely. Laurie hung about under the stairs, digging absently at a patch of putty in the ageing wood and watching her mother and the doctor from the corner of her eye. Vine leaves made the shade they stood in greenish. Ping! went tiny green grapes that would never ripen on the verandah boards.
Dr Fearnley laid a hand on Rosie’s shoulder and sketched the situation for her. No convulsions, no loss of bladder control, so her condition seemed to be mild, at least at this stage, there were promising new drugs on the horizon, and she should be able to lead a full and happy life. ‘However,’ he said, ‘I’d be getting a neurologist to have a look at her if I were you.’
‘Neurologist. I see. Of course. Yes … Do you think … Is there any chance that the – that when she –?’
‘That her recent trauma is to blame? Well, any type of insult to the brain can give rise to fits like these. How long was she in the water? You don’t know. She’s a fighter, so … but, in any case, yes, any cessation of breathing for more than a couple of minutes is worrying. The brain is a greedy little organ.’ He paused, for the moment out of words. ‘On the other hand, it has remarkable powers of recovery.’
They stood there while the jacaranda blossoms fell.
‘But she’s such a clever little thing!’ said Rosie.
The doctor looked silently at Rosie, at the street. ‘Hmmm,’ he said. He glanced at his watch. And then, with resolution, ‘Just give me a couple of hours to finish my house calls. Lynette’ll have a referral for you in the afternoon post. Meanwhile’ – he lightly touched her cheek – ‘chin up, eh?’
Rosie gazed past him. ‘She’s the apple of her father’s eye.’
‘What is it, Mummy?’ Laurie asked when he’d left. Her mother had gone out to the front garden to pick up a scooter that had been abandoned among the fallen blossoms. Some of the blossoms had stuck to the scooter and she picked them off as she answered.
‘Absence seizures,’ she said. ‘Petit mal.’ She looked at Laurie, but Laurie couldn’t tell if she was seeing her. ‘Epilepsy,’ she said.
If the sun hadn’t come out, they would not have gone outside. If they hadn’t gone outside, they would not have ended up at the old landing. If they hadn’t …
Tony went straight to his room. When Laurie followed him in, she found him staring out through the shutters.
‘Do you know what it is?’ she whispered.
‘Epilepsy,’ he murmured.
‘Yes, but what’s epilepsy?’
Tony took a breath so deep that it shuddered through his chest. ‘Storms in the brain,’ he whispered. ‘Something goes haywire and you get storms in the brain.’
Late in the night, Laurie was woken by the sound of retching. Then she heard her mother’s bare feet padding down the hall, and saw the ghost of her float in her dressing-gown past her door, on her way to Tony’s room.
The past fashions the present in two ways. The first is by the law of consequence: once the first step is taken, the rest must follow. The second way is remotely, by way of memory. It is this second way, this unattended mill of dreams, that slowly twists the heart.
Nan flung herself down on the sofa and kicked off her shoes.
‘Right, who’s doing the cooking tonight?’ she demanded, first of Tony and then of Laurie, arms outspread. The armpits of her blouse were darkened by perspiration. ‘Huh?’ she said, her face a mask of surprise, as they stood before her dumbly. ‘You thought it’d be me? Okay,’ she groaned, relenting, ‘my turn this time.’ She patted the space on each side of her. ‘Come on, come on,’ she urged. ‘Sit, sit, you two, and tell me what you’ve been up to.’
By now Mum and Dad and Miranda would be high in the afternoon skies, chasing the sun to Sydney. They’d left the house soon after Nan had arrived. They’d heard the taxi door slam in Wiley Street and then she’d come beaming at them from under a big straw hat, the dappled November sunlight falling on her through the jacaranda tree. She was wearing a peasant blouse and slacks and lugged a large, shabby leather port, and when they’d run to help her she’d taken them one by one into a humid embrace. ‘Phew!’ she’d said. ‘Isn’t it hot!’
‘That’s ours,’ their father had announced with traveller’s fatalism as another taxi slid into the kerb.
They’d stood at the gate and waved, and they’d seen the passenger window wound down and their mother’s head popping out, calling, ‘Don’t forget to make your beds and clean your teeth! Beds and teeth! Teeth and beds!’ and then withdrawing, and Miranda’s small fluttering hand appearing, and vanishing, and then reappearing, amid sky and fleeting tree reflections, at the rear.
Laurie and Tony took their seats obediently beside their grandmother. She smelt of body-warmed clothing and cologne-scented sweat.
‘Their plane’s a DC3,’ Tony informed them. He couldn’t keep the envy out of his voice.
Laurie was met on the verandah steps by a feeling of desolation. A curtain billowed gently from the French doors. No mother.
‘I’m here!’ came Nan’s fluting voice from deep inside. It was like when they were left with Dossie while their parents went to a show, or a play-reading, or a do at the golf club. Only worse. Because this was for days.
Laurie dumped her schoolbag in the hall and entered the kitchen.
Hands busy with a cracked, oozing egg, Nan pursed her lips and craned sideways for a kiss. Laurie came around the table to oblige and was presenting her face when she was hit by a blast of powerful fumes. She drew back in shock. Her grandmother’s breath reeked.
‘Pickled garlic,’ said Nan evenly. ‘Yum yum. Try some?’
Laurie blushed and shook her head with a small, wary smile. The reek was so earthy, so personal. It was like catching her grandmother at some indecency.
‘Found some delectables at Finneys, to my surprise and delight. Continentalia.’ With a wicked look, Nan wiped her fingers on her apron, fished a couple of pale, pungent cloves out of a jar and dropped them into her mouth.
‘Never tried garlic?’ she asked.
Laurie shook her head again.
‘My my,’ said Nan. ‘I’d forgotten about kids. They’re such stolid little prigs. Well you’ll just have to come to my mountain more often to have your horizons broadened. And there,’ she turned posh, sticking her nose in the air, ‘I’ll initiate you into the mysteries of things wondrous exotic.’ Laurie gave a wan smile.
Nan began whisking some batter and her voice was ordinary again. ‘You should see what we’ve got in our garden, Pushkin. Garlic, avocado pears, artichokes, rhubarb – let me see – fennel, Chinese gooseberries, watercress … Up there it grows along the roadside, thick as nettles. Grandfather’s in seventh heaven. Have a glass of milk.’
The kitchen was not itself
. There was an off-kilter air to it, of which the tang of garlic was the outside sign. Nan’s jollying only made Laurie feel emptier. A jangling hollow. Even later, at dinner, Laurie was quiet, thanking Nan in a small voice for the plateful of fritters and riotous salad set before her. Tony, being eleven and more polite, made efforts with small talk and used his napkin rather than the back of his hand to wipe his mouth.
Laurie was absorbed in segregating the fruit bits from the vegetable bits when the phone sprang to noisy life in the hall. As one she and Tony leapt to their feet, forks clanging to table and floor, yelling, ‘I’ll get it!’ They raced for the hall, but Tony, hindered by the need to mind his manners, had stopped to pick up his fallen fork and Laurie got there first.
‘Hello! Hello!’ she shouted. ‘Mummy? It’s me! Can you hear me?’
‘Gimme!’ Tony demanded, grabbing at the receiver.
‘No!’ Laurie applied her ear hard to the phone.
A cool, impersonal voice was saying ‘… you-too-ate-six-ate?’
‘What?’
‘I have a trunk call from Sydney for Brisbane, you-too-ate-six-ate …’
Tony wrenched the receiver from Laurie’s grasp. ‘Oh!’ she gasped, outraged. ‘I had it first! Give it back!’
‘Careful, you dope, you’ll –’ He held the receiver out of her reach and then nursed it close to his shoulder, turning this way and that to avoid her darting hand.
‘Hello!’ he shouted. ‘Yes. Yes.’ A long pause. He mouthed something at Laurie and then swung away from her. ‘Mum! … ‘What’d you say? … Yeah … Yeah … We’re good … What? … Uh huh … Uh huh … I will … All right.’ He turned to his grandmother, who had left her dinner, too, and was waiting nearby. ‘She wants to speak to you, Nan.’
Nan took the phone. ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ she said, pitching her voice high. She frowned, and then her face cleared. ‘Yes. Missing you a bit, I think, but otherwise right as rain … Miranda?’ Her head was nodding, her face screwed up. ‘And another one tomorrow? … I say another appointment tomorrow? … Uh-huh … She’s right here. I’ll put her on. Hugs, darling.’ Laurie was guided forward by a hand at her back. ‘Make sure you speak into the mouthpiece, pet,’ she said in Laurie’s ear as she handed her the receiver.
The River House Page 8