Closed for Winter

by Georgia Blain

  But I am here, on this side of the road, standing at the postbox with my four postcards in my hand.

  I have addressed each of them, Martin Hislop, 14 Fern-tree Road, Stonifell, and put a stamp in the top right-hand corner. The question is whether I will post them.

  They are balanced at the entrance to the chute (post by 6 p.m., delivery next business day), but each time I think I have made up my mind to let them go, I find I am still holding on to them.

  What I love about Elise, Martin used to say, drunk and proud, is her calm. She would never do anything irrational, and he would squeeze my shoulder affectionately.

  He was comparing me to his wife, who was, by all accounts, far from calm. But Martin stopped making those comparisons years ago. It was not a temper he discovered in me. It was something else, and it was clear that it was not expected. Nor was it welcome.

  With my fingers gripping the corners tightly, I put the cards back in my bag.

  It will, I tell myself, be all right when he comes back, and I turn my back on the postbox and look down to the end of Grange Road, the sea still faintly visible in the fast encroaching night.

  This is not where I normally stop, but coming home on the number 12, I did not want to go to our local shopping centre. There are times when I do not feel I can cope with seeing their faces, any of them, and I pulled the cord early.

  I am a stranger here and I walk with my head down, staring at the scuffs on my shoes. I would not have even seen him if it were not for that instant when I look up, startled by the noise of a truck braking suddenly.

  Fat Tony’s fish and chip shop.

  And he is there.

  Out the front, leaning against the doorway, watching the slow crawl of cars down Grange Road. Above his head, the row of light bulbs along the awning flicker intermittently.

  Fat Tony. Squealing as the other boys push and pull him to the end of the jetty until finally they have him where they want him and, with one last shove, he topples, over the edge and into the ocean below.

  This was not the last time I saw him but it is how I remember him.

  I am walking past, eyes averted, in the hope he will not recognise me, but as he flicks his cigarette into the gutter and turns to go back inside, he calls out, losing certainty that it is who he thinks it is as soon as he says my name.

  It’s me. Tony, and he grins in the foolish way he has always grinned.

  I could pretend I had not heard. Or that he has the wrong person. But I don’t.

  I stop and smile shyly back at him.

  How ya been? As he speaks, a little girl with black ringlets and dark eyes tugs at his hand. He picks her up. This is Sophia, and he cuddles her proudly as she hides her face in his neck, embarrassed at the attention. She’s only three, and Sophia giggles as he tickles her.

  I ask him if he is running the shop now and he tells me he is. Sophia is squirming in his arms and he puts her down. Me and my wife. You remember Vicky?

  I don’t but I tell him that I do.

  We stand, awkward with each other, unsure of what to say next.

  So, what ya doin’ round here? he asks.

  I am about to tell him I am staying with my mother when Sophia comes back, holding a crumpled Chiko Roll wrapper out towards me.

  Is that a present for the lady? Tony kneels down next to her, his great belly straining against his stained white apron. Sophia nods.

  Thank you, and I take the wrapper, but she does not remove her hand.

  She’s taken a liking to you, Tony laughs.

  I also laugh.

  We both laugh a little too long.

  So, you doin’ okay? he asks me, and I tell him that I am.

  Fine, I say. Just fine.

  From the back of the shop, someone calls out his name. He looks in anxiously. I also look. All I can see is the television high on the ledge on the back wall.

  That’s Vicky, he says. I’d better go. Wanna come in and say hi?

  I shake my head and tell him I have to go too.

  Well, see you round, and he takes Sophia’s hand and heads back into the shop.

  But just as I am about to keep walking, he changes his mind. He calls out and I turn. He is nervous and wishes he had left things as they were.

  They didn’t do nothin’, he says. They were pricks but they didn’t do nothin’.

  It takes a few seconds before I realise what he is talking about.

  I just wanted to tell you, and he shrugs, awkward, aware of what he has opened up, and wishing he had not spoken.

  I do not know what to say.

  I just wanted to tell you, he says again, and he turns, feeling like a fool, to the door, just as I am thanking him, my voice a whisper in the traffic. Too soft to hear.

  Fat Tony. The only one of the boys who had acknowledged what had happened. He had sent a card. Gold, with a picture of a rose on the front. In sympathy for your loss, written in gilt inside, with his name scrawled underneath. Tony.

  Who’s that? Dorothy had asked.

  I had told her he was a friend of Frances’s.

  She had screwed up the card and thrown it in the bin. It was only four days after it had happened. Too soon for such messages. Not then. Not yet.

  But I had retrieved it. Smoothed it out and hidden it in the back of the wardrobe, in one of Frances’s old hiding spots.

  They didn’t do nothin’. The boys on the jetty. They didn’t do nothin’.

  I know what he was trying to say but I am so used to silence, his words do not comfort me as he had hoped. They only distress me.

  And I walk home, anxious, wishing he had not said anything, wishing he had just left me alone.

  28

  We do not talk about the past.

  We do not refer directly to it. Not in the way Tony did.

  This is not to say it is never mentioned, it is (or at least aspects of it are), but it is only Dorothy who speaks and she speaks of a past she has created. There are great tracts we never traverse, names we never utter and events to which we never refer; some facts, some fantasies, a pile of each on either side of me. And each year the space between us shifts. It is a desert and the sandstorms are constant, changing the shape of all I know before my eyes.

  I remember but I do not know what I remember any more. It becomes harder, not easier, to know what is truth and what is a lie.

  Fat Tony pushed off the end of the jetty.

  Fat Tony flicking his cigarette into the oncoming traffic on Grange Road.

  In sympathy for your loss, and Dorothy throws the card into the bin. She does not want to speak of certain things. She does not want realities.

  They didn’t do nothin’, and I do not want direct words either, walking down the road towards my mother’s house, hoping they will have faded into the heavy evening sky by the time the back gate swings shut behind me.

  Home from work and I am staring at my face in the bathroom mirror. Under the yellow of the bare light bulb, I can see my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my hair, my skin, and I am, as I often am, overwhelmed by the sensation of looking at the face of someone I do not know.

  One green eye, one blue.

  My eyes are blue-green. Neither one nor the other.

  I stare at myself and I cannot see the whole.

  There is mould on the mirror and on the walls. The paint peels in grey strips from the ceiling. The bathroom window is cracked, diagonally, a jagged line from top to bottom, and the shower rose is tied on with a piece of string. I look at each and every one of these realities and then look at myself once more before opening the door.

  John Mills is waiting to say goodbye.

  He is in the lounge room, and as I walk in, I know he has been looking at the photograph of Frances, the one on top of the television, the one that appeared in the newspaper. I know because I heard him put it back. I know because I can see the clear shape of where the frame once rested, dark in the surrounding dust. I know because you cannot help but look at it, and I know because I saw him turn
around, startled when I came into the room. I know we are both expecting not to speak of it, but I do not know if this is the way it should be.

  It’s fine, I say, nodding at the photo, trying to acknowledge what has happened.

  He apologises, feeling he has been caught in the act of prying.

  We are silent with each other and then he tells me he has to go.

  Tonight it is still. I have often sat in the quiet of this house, knowing the wind is blowing great sheets of sand on to the streets and the pine trees are creaking overhead, straining against the force of the storms, while the ocean chops furiously against the pylons beneath the jetty. I have sat in this quiet, listening to the sound of Dorothy’s scissors and the crumple of the newspaper beneath her hands, knowing the fury just outside our door. I have also sat here, knowing the calm outside, while inside Dorothy shouts and screams, or whirls around; words, words and more words.

  But tonight there is a balance. Still inside and out.

  I stand on the back steps and watch John Mills walk across the yard, the pebbles beneath his feet the only sound in the quiet.

  I’ll see you tomorrow. He waves, the gesture barely discernible in the dark, and then turns to walk down the road to his own house.

  In the kitchen, I take my photograph and put it on the table in front of me.

  The white border is grubby. The print is smeared with fingerprints. It has been bent in places and the cracks cut into the image, breaking the colours.

  I have looked at it so often that I no longer know what I am looking at.

  Two young girls.

  Frances and me, the sand, the sea and the jetty.

  If you look closely, it is possible to see a flurry of seagulls at our feet. A white blur of wings against the faded pink-gold of the sand. Or maybe it is the grasses in the foreground. I do not know.

  Frances and me, the sand, the sea, the jetty and the gulls.

  Frances and me, the sand, the sea, the jetty and the grass.

  I move the image so that it is directly under the light and peer at it more closely. Everything becomes a blur. Blue, yellow, pink, orange and white. It could be anything. I move the image away until gradually, one by one, the components take shape. The greater my distance the more I see.

  But if I close my eyes, it is not the photograph I see. It is the end of the jetty and she is there. She has her back to me, and in front of her the sky and the ocean glitter, more brilliant than they are in my photograph, sparkling clear and bright. She is balanced on the railing, her feet curled around the peeling paint, her arms still by her side. She does not move.

  I, too, do not move. I am holding my breath and waiting.

  Watch me. She turns around and looks at me. Just once.

  From the other end of the house, I can hear Dorothy calling me, wanting me to come to her now. I do not move. With my eyes closed, I am watching her.

  Completely still, and then she springs. From the balls of her feet, up high into the sky above, a perfect arc into the sea below. There and then gone.

  And I miss her.

  Elise.

  Dorothy calls me and I open my eyes.

  29

  I remember. Seeing Dorothy standing in the doorway, sandals in one hand, a trail of sand behind her. And no Frances. Not daring to ask, not daring to say a word.

  I had been kneeling on my chair and I had dropped my legs to the floor, slowly standing up, all the time looking at Dorothy, who did not speak. She just stood there.

  I told her to sit down, but she did not move, so I took her hand and led her to the table. I pulled the chair out for her and moved her towards it. I remember seeing her fingers curled around the top of the seat, I remember her nail polish chipped and bleeding around the edges of her nails. I remember her smell.

  Distress is sour.

  She took the pins out of her hair, one by one, and laid them on the table in front of her. I remember seeing the knots in her hair, gold and red twisting in and out of each other, and wanting to get the brush and to brush it out for her because sometimes she would let me do that. As a treat.

  But not that night. I knew that without needing to ask.

  I told her I would make dinner, but she did not answer me.

  She searched for a cigarette. The pack was empty and she screwed it up. There was another in the drawer and she took one out, hastily lighting it in a flash of sulphur.

  All the food was in the shopping bag on the floor. Dumped where she left it when she came home. The small parcel of chops had bloodied the butcher’s paper, staining it crimson brown. I unwrapped them.

  Three.

  I did not know what to do with the third but I did not dare ask.

  I remember putting the water on to boil the peas, my arms shaking with the weight of the saucepan as I carried it to the stove. I remember setting the table, three plates, three knives, three forks and three glasses of cordial, with her watching me, silent and still.

  In my memory the kitchen clock ticked, but that was not how it was. It is an electric clock and the minutes moved forward in silence, while Dorothy smoked, stubbing out butts in a saucer, or letting them burn out, the heavy headache of smoke filling the room.

  Don’t, Dorothy said as I put Frances’s plate in the oven. Let it get cold.

  I obeyed, and that third meal sat there, directly opposite, as I tried to eat, the chop fat slowly congealing and the peas swimming in a puddle of cold water while Dorothy smoked, cigarette after cigarette, eyes fixed on the clock.

  9.07 and the numbers flickered, electric dots of red. I pushed my plate away and also looked at them, waiting until Dorothy spoke.

  I am going to the police, she said.

  She threw the butts in the bin and dumped the saucer in the sink before turning to look straight at me. I am going to the police.

  I ran to put my shoes on, quickly, not wanting to be left behind this time, wanting to be there and ready when Dorothy got in the car. Because I knew the only way I would get to go would be if I was not noticed, if I was no trouble.

  This is the way it is with Dorothy and me.

  This is the way it has always been.

  I remember.

  I can hear Dorothy call me and I leave my photograph on the kitchen table and go to her.

  The light from the corridor spills into her room, dim but some relief from the darkness, just enough for me to be able to see her lying on her bed, head turned towards me.

  What is it? I ask her.

  I presume she is hungry but she will not tell me that. She does not like to go straight to the point.

  I am making dinner, I say, not wanting to wait for her to speak.

  No, I am not hungry, and Dorothy points to the pile of papers on the floor. I am so behind, she tells me.

  I do not want to do this, but I find I am bending down obediently, reaching for the top one, the Brisbane Courier-Mail.

  Not all the stories, Dorothy instructs me. Just the headlines, and perhaps the first paragraph. If it sounds possible or similar. She lies back, eyes closed, waiting for me to begin.

  I move the paper closer to the bedside light, but it is still difficult to see and I am forced to bend low, eyes close to the small print, my back twisted and uncomfortable in the small space next to my mother.

  Dorothy waits.

  The gas heater hisses.

  A moth flutters, its wings beating against the burning electric globe. I brush it away, the back of my hand accidentally knocking the framed photograph of Franco, and it teeters perilously, unbalanced for one instant as I lurch across to right it at the same moment as Dorothy reaches out too, both wanting to stop it but only knocking each other. And the photograph clatters, hard, against the bedside table.

  It is Dorothy who picks it up.

  I do not want to know.

  She turns it over. One sheet of glass. I breathe again and Dorothy slowly, carefully, puts it back where it belongs.

  We do not say a word.

  Again, I star
e at the newspaper in front of me. Again, Dorothy waits.

  The headlines. The first paragraph. A light-plane crash in the state’s north. I read the sentences, but I cannot say them out loud, and I look at Dorothy for help, but she has turned her head away, and, eyes closed, she waits.

  I’m sorry, and in the silence, my voice is small. I fold the paper, the pages dry and unmanageable in my hands, refusing to be put away neatly.

  Dorothy watches.

  I can’t, I say and I point to the papers on the floor.

  Dorothy’s eyes, one green, one blue, hard and still, watching, as she tries to reach out with one arm to the floor where the papers lie. Whatever pain there is, and there must be pain, is not expressed, but kept in, glittering and sharp, until she collapses back on the pillow, exhausted but triumphant, the paper in one hand.

  I do not move to help her. I watch, unable to do anything else.

  Please, I finally say, can’t we talk?

  But Dorothy has turned her gaze to the floor. Pass me my scissors. She does not look up.

  I can see them, too far for her to reach, but I do not move towards them. No, I tell her, surprised at the words I am speaking. Not until you talk to me, and as I speak I am overwhelmed by the feeling that my voice is the voice of someone else.

  She looks at me. My mother. I am reaching for her hand.

  She pulls away, and the recoil startles me.

  Please, I say again, but it is useless.

  She will not look at me now.

  I watch as she shakes the newspaper out in front of her and tries to ease herself up on the pillow so she can read. I watch as she runs her finger along each line, mouthing the words to herself. I watch and I feel foolish.

  I’ll get dinner I tell her.

  She does not even blink an eyelid.

  And in the pit of my stomach, I know what I am in for and I know it will last.

  It is silence, and it has begun.

  30

  You should stand up for yourself, Jocelyn once said to me.

  We were at work and Martin had questioned the number of staff I had rostered on over the weekend. I cannot remember the details. It was a long time ago. It was before Jocelyn knew about Martin and me. It was when she still used to call him a pompous prick to my face.