Closed for Winter

by Georgia Blain

  I am sorry, she would whisper into Frances’s hair, and half asleep in my bed I would not know whether those were her words or whether I had only imagined them, because if they were her words, I did not understand them.

  There are stories and there are truths, but the two can become so tangled it is impossible to know which is which.

  And how was I made? I asked her once.

  She did not look at me.

  Three years after their wedding and he had barely been back. Quick visits in between jobs.

  We had no money, Dorothy would say. He could not bear to be away but we had no choice. It is a testament to our love that we survived that time, and she would look at us both, each of us in turn, daring us to challenge her.

  I am four years younger than Frances, and I can only assume that I was made on one of those infrequent visits home. And then he was gone again. Gone for such a long time that I do not remember seeing him or even knowing of him until just before I turned four, when he came back for what seemed to be a few months. A few months that were not as happy as Dorothy would like us to believe. But I do not know. My memory cannot be trusted. It is comprised of not just my scraps, my own desires for what was or should have been, but also other people’s words.

  My father died working on the lines. Somewhere miles from home.

  An accident, they told Dorothy.

  I do not know if I was there when they told her, or whether it is only my imagination that sees him on a crane, bright orange under the blue sky, the tip touching the wires, and his panic as he jumped down, one foot on the ground, the other on the metal body.

  I do not know whether I really saw Dorothy, white and still, listening and not believing.

  I do not know whether I really saw Frances, sitting at the kitchen table, drawing and singing while they told her. Drawing and singing until Dorothy told her to shut up, slapping her, the white marks of her fingers stinging her cheeks.

  I do not know these things, just as I do not know what Dorothy thinks and dreams as she lies in her bed in a pethidine sleep.

  In the kitchen, I put the carnations in a vase. Their crumpled edges have already started to turn brown and their heads wilt on stems too slender to support their weight.

  John Mills tries to explain what has happened, but I am only half listening.

  It is really just a question of rest, he says and I nod my head to show that I have heard.

  He turns the salt and pepper shakers over in his hands and watches me as I start to put the food away. I know he is going to ask me how long I will be able to stay here for, and I am dreading the moment.

  He tells me she is going to need twenty-four hour a day care for at least two weeks, and I nod again, feeling the dread tighten at the base of my throat.

  Obviously you are going to have to work, he says, and she won’t go to hospital.

  I have emptied my plastic bag except for the four postcards. I do not know what to do with them.

  What I would suggest, he says, is that I come here during the day and you look after her at night.

  I am surprised by the generosity of his offer. Are you sure? I ask him, apprehensively.

  He insists that it is no trouble at all. He will bring his reading here, letters that he wants to write. It will make no difference to his life, he assures me.

  I do not have the words to tell him how grateful I am.

  It is only for a couple of weeks, he says, and seeing my postcards at the bottom of the bag, he picks them up.

  Is she giving these away now? he asks, and I know he is referring to Mrs Thompson in the shop.

  I tell him I bought them and I am embarrassed as I speak.

  No doubt you touched them and she used her inimitable standover tactics, he laughs. Curious what happens to the colours, isn’t it? He holds them up to the light. Everything distorts with age, and he leans closer. Or perhaps that is just the way they were.

  He sighs as he pokes his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose and, as he pushes his chair back from the table, the lino lifting under its legs, I know he is about to leave.

  You know where I am, he says, if there is anything you need.

  And for a moment, I want to ask him to stay, just a little longer, but I cannot think of the words I need.

  I’ll pop in over the weekend, he promises as we stand at the back door, looking out across my mother’s pebbled yard in the last of the daylight.

  He walks to the gate, his feet crunching on the ground beneath him. In this half-light, the yard looks even more desolate than it does in the day. Bare except for the rusted Hills Hoist and the scraggly pigface that winds its way through the wire fence.

  The gate squeaks as he closes it behind him. He is gone, walking back up the street to his own house, where he, like Dorothy, lives alone.

  I turn on the harsh light in Dorothy’s kitchen and I lay my postcards on the table.

  Dear Martin, I write on top of the first one.

  I look at my handwriting, neat, round and childlike, and I find I have nothing else to say to him.

  Dorothy’s newspapers are piled on the edge of the table. Next to them are her two latest books, ‘Similar Stories’ and ‘Possibilities’, the clippings sorted into two piles, ready to be pasted. They are part of who my mother is. It is only when I am forced to see them through someone else’s eyes that they become an oddity, An eccentricity, as Martin says.

  I take the largest pile, ‘Possibilities’, and in the quiet of this house I begin to read: a movie star with a mysterious past who looks, just a little, like Frances would have looked; a woman who came from nowhere and made millions; an anonymous spokesperson for people on the streets. As the hope has diminished, the links have become more tenuous.

  I read and I wonder whether Dorothy believes in any of them. I do not know. Like many things between us, we have never discussed why she keeps these clippings. She searches in her newspapers and her letters, and I hold my photograph under the light, the photograph I stole from John Mills because it seemed to capture something of that summer and those days on the beach. It helps me hold that day, the day that it happened, right there, so that I can go back, and keep searching.

  I push her pile of possibilities away from me, and I look at the clock.

  There has been no sound from her room. She must still be asleep, lying in her bed, with the photograph of Franco on the dressing-table next to her.

  I want to call Martin. I need to tell him I am sorry. I miss him and I want to come home.

  18

  And there was no sign of her, nothing at all? they ask me later, and I shake my head, eyes to the ground.

  I concentrate, trying to remember every detail of the house and what I did, but they are no longer interested. I can see it when I look up.

  They want to go back to the beach, and I cannot explain to them that I need to see the day as a whole. It is important to me. To go over that day from beginning to end.

  They thank me and tell me that they will talk to me again soon, and I am silenced. They do not want to hear any more.

  I am shown out to where Dorothy waits, wanting to tell them that I haven’t finished. But I can see it would be useless. The rest must remain in my head, where I will replay it, as part of the whole day, from beginning to end. Over and over again.

  In the late afternoon, the front of this house is drenched in sun, bathed in sun. They are not my words, they are words I have heard. Words used by adults in the cheap romances set on tropical islands, dog-eared and read by Dorothy late at night, and then secretly smuggled into our bedroom by Frances. Both of us in fits of giggles as Frances whispers cries of passion and clutches her stomach in the pain of love.

  I am the master of the house, she says, and you are the Hawaiian servant girl.

  I am dressed in a tablecloth, Frances has drawn a moustache across her lip. This is the way the roles are divided and I do not challenge them.

  We love each other, she tells me, but no one must know, and
we roll on the bed, gasping and sighing, until she pushes me away.

  As if she says and she throws the book on the floor in disgust. It’s not like that at all.

  She rubs off her moustache and I stand like a fool in my tablecloth.

  The game is finished. And she leaves me. Because this is the way it ends. Always.

  I am standing alone now. In our bedroom. I close the curtains because I cannot bear the brightness. My head hurts. It is 4.30 and Dorothy will not be home for at least another hour.

  I had hoped for some sign that Frances had been back and then gone out. But it is all as we left it that morning. Untouched. My side of the room, neat and organised, Frances’s a mess of dirty clothes and schoolbooks. My bed, smooth and tidy, Frances’s a sprawl of sheets and blankets.

  Once Frances drew a diagonal line, Your side and my side. I had the door and Frances the window. The battle was over the wardrobe. You never even use it, I said. You leave everything on the floor. But Frances wanted it. It was where she would hide things. Stuffed in the back of her side. Under a pile of T-shirts, in the toe of a sock or shoe. A new hiding spot every day. To avoid being caught.

  So the line was redrawn. A diagonal with a bump at one end. I had one half of the wardrobe, she had the other. And I thought, Right, if that’s the way you want it, that’s the way it will be, so every time Frances headed for the door, I stopped her.

  My side, I would shout, hands on hips, guarding the invisible barrier. But Frances would push straight past me. Because the line was only ever there when it suited her. Hers to cross when she wanted, and mine to respect.

  I take my bathers off on Frances’s side of the room. They are stiff with salt, and clumps of sand fall out in a heap. I kick them into the tangle of clothes on the floor. There is a damp patch on the carpet from my towel and I am pleased. I shake it out, vigorously, and a fine spray of sand flies across the mess of Frances’s things.

  Out the back it is cool. It is drenched in shade, bathed in shade. They are no longer the right words. But it does not matter. I hang my towel and bathers and watch the line swing lazily, once round, in the breeze.

  It is quiet. I make a sandwich in the kitchen. White bread, and a slice of cheese. I put everything away and wipe the bench clean. There are no crumbs. Not a smear of margarine, and when I have finished eating, I wash and dry my plate. I remove all traces, knowing there may be trouble when Dorothy comes home but not knowing who it will be directed at or for what reason. It may be Frances for not doing what she was meant to do, or it may be me for not waiting as I was told. If it is directed at me, I want it to be brief and contained. Trouble for not waiting and nothing else.

  With our mother, it is impossible to predict. Frances is locked in her room for stealing Dorothy’s cigarettes, then she is patted on the head the next day for not going to school. You are too much like me, Dorothy says, wistfully one day, furiously the next. We are hugged, passionately, tightly, by Dorothy in the middle of the night, My babies, and then ignored, forgotten for days that pass in a vague haze of burnt pans, overflowing ashtrays and longing sighs.

  So I do not rely on anything. Nothing is solid. I keep my life as self-contained as I can, a capsule that may be tossed and turned and thrown about, but that will not burst open, not leak, not break.

  In the living room, I also close the curtains. The cool is soothing. I sit on the floor and try to watch the television, but I am listening for the swing of the back door, or the sound of Dorothy’s car, jumping up at every noise in the hope that it is one of them coming home. And that everything will be normal again.

  Dorothy’s sandals lie at my feet. Strappy, high-heeled, the shoes she wears on days when she feels good. The days when she gets up and puts on bright lipstick and long black lashes. When she brushes her thick hair back and up, set in place with a mist of hair spray. Sickly sweet as she kisses us goodbye.

  I was a beauty once, and on those days I look at her and think she is still beautiful. Glamorous. Like a movie star. Like Ginger on Gilligan’s Island.

  But on the bad days . . .

  I try on one of the sandals. They are too big. But if I stretch my leg out and squint I can almost see what they could look like. And I get up slowly, unsteady on my feet, and stagger into Dorothy’s room to look at myself in the full-length mirror.

  Frances also has a pair of high-heeled shoes. I know. I have seen them hidden at the back of the wardrobe. Denim with lace-ups around the ankles. She has never worn them, never shown them to anyone, but they are treasured. I have seen her steal glimpses of them, and once I caught her trying them on. Walking around the bedroom in her shorts, practising, so that when she finally makes them public she will wear them without a hitch, with the same fluid walk she has in her sandshoes.

  I walk up to Dorothy’s mirror, trying to perfect the same stride. But it does not work. I do not have the same ease. And I am not as thin as Frances, A little lump of lard, and Dorothy tickles me under the chin. You won’t get into trouble. It is a joke, an affectionate joke, but I do not like it; I squirm out of her grasp.

  I sit at the dressing-table and pick up Dorothy’s lipstick. Fuchsia. A dark pink on my lips, and I wipe at the corner of my mouth where I have missed, before blotting the colour with a tissue. The way Dorothy does it. My mouth is huge, alarming, and I like it.

  The comb next, and I tease my hair, up and back. It is a mess of knots. But again, if I squint it could be something else. A do. And I spray it liberally, until it is lacquered stiff, unmovable.

  Eye shadow. There is a choice. A silvery blue or a green. I opt for the green. Moss. It is too dark. I look bruised, and I rub at it with my finger, until most of it is off and my eyes are sore, tender. The blue is more pleasing. It shimmers, sparkles, and I turn on the light next to the dressing-table to get the full effect. Unreal, I whisper to myself, trying to imitate the voice that Frances uses when she is excited or impressed.

  The eyelashes are the last, and again there is a choice. The mascara, or the long thick lashes that lie in the little plastic case next to Dorothy’s hairbrush. They are what I would like to use, but I have seen Dorothy put them on and take them off, Ouch, as she peels them back, and they frighten me. The mascara is easier. Three thick coats and my face is finished.

  Messy. If I look too closely. But if I step back, out of the light . . . I could be at least sixteen. And I stand and admire. Teetering in the high heels.

  Dorothy’s dressing-gown hangs on the back of the door. Ice-blue satin and I pull it down and wrap it around myself. There is only one more thing I need to complete the picture. A cigarette. And, unlit, I place it carefully between my larger than life fuchsia lips and pretend to draw back, slowly, seductively, before letting out a delicate trail of smoke and a heartfelt sigh.

  Darling, and I pick up the photo of Franco on the dressing-table, you know I love you. I will always love you.

  And in the intensity of my own world, I do not know, do not hear, that the back door has slammed and Dorothy has come in, bag of shopping on the kitchen floor, and wandered absent-mindedly down the hall, looking for us, until she stands, right there at the bedroom door, and she sees.

  And, not recognising me, she shouts, Frances!

  So loud that I drop everything, the cigarette, the photo, and turn, caught, sprung, terrified, to face my mother.

  19

  When Martin asked me to move in with him, he did not know what he was asking. He had met Dorothy but he did not know what it would mean for me to leave her. Even now, I do not think he knows. Not really.

  He first mentioned it when he took me home after our weekend in the country.

  We had spent the morning walking to a deserted slate-mining village. He and I and Marissa and Robert, walking high into the rolling hills behind their house. Hills the colour of wheat, gold under the sharp blue sky.

  Martin talked, his voice loud and clear in the stillness of that village, each word ringing out, echoing against the crumbling bluestone walls of what
had once been houses. I do not remember what he was saying. I tried not to listen.

  This was the church. Marissa led me away from the others and I stood with her, shielded for a moment from Martin’s words, and looked out through the window to the soft sweep of the hills tumbling down, one after the other, into the shimmering ocean beyond.

  From this distance the grass looks like velvet. Soft enough to lie in.

  She looked at me, surprised I had spoken, and smiled.

  Listen. She turned away, staring back out the window, and I listened.

  It was not loud, barely perceptible, a slight moan, as the wind weaved its way across the smooth flow of the grasses and through the empty walls. There was nothing else, just its sigh in the stillness, and I did not want to move; I wanted it to fill me. I leant against the wall, cool despite the heat of the day, and I closed my eyes.

  But the peace did not last.

  There you are, Martin said, his face still pink from the exertion of the walk. Praying for forgiveness, or more money for the arts? He chuckled, amused by his own wit, and took my hand, his palm sticky and hot around mine.

  I did not answer him.

  We left that afternoon, straight after lunch, Martin wanting to beat the traffic.

  You must come again, Marissa said to us.

  Any time, Robert added.

  And Martin promised them we would. I sat silent in the car, knowing they were lying and wanting to apologise, but not knowing what it was I wanted to apologise for.

  Driving home in the heat of the early afternoon, I closed my eyes and pretended I was asleep. I did not want to see the cars and trucks, the petrol stations and the used-car yards. I did not want to hear Martin. I did not want him to say to me, See, it wasn’t so bad, nothing to be scared of at all.

  I did not open my eyes until we came back into the city, waiting at the traffic lights where the road that leads to Dorothy’s house stretched in one direction and to Martin’s mother’s house in the other direction.

  Sleepy? he asked and patted the top of my leg.