The front door stood open innocently to catch the sun.
Was he in there? Pop? Would he come rushing at him? Roaring ‘Out! Out! Out! You’re no grandson of mine!’
Lonnie swallowed. At least the axe had gone. He squared his shoulders, thought of Clara, and then of Lily’s yearning for a whole perfect day, and knocked on the side of the screen door. His nan’s voice floated out to him at once. ‘Is that you, Mrs Petrie?’
Mrs Petrie was Nan’s friend from the Gardening Club. It was the weirdest thing, the way they used each other’s surnames, though they’d been friends for fifteen years. He cleared his throat. ‘No, it’s me, Nan. It’s only me.’
‘Lonnie!’ A blur of colour rushed towards him up the hall. Lonnie gasped; his nan was tiny, yet the force of her welcome almost knocked the breath from him. ‘Lonnie! Oh, Lon!’ She stood back and beamed at him, her face alight with joy. ‘Don’t just stand there, love! Come in!’
From his dry throat Lonnie managed a single word. ‘Pop?’
‘Your Pop’s gone into town.’
‘Ah – ah,’ breathed Lonnie. He could sense Pop’s absence the moment he stepped inside the house; the rooms were quiet as milk. Even when Pop wasn’t shouting or stomping, his very presence seemed to make a noise – a humming inside the air, like a firework waiting to go off. ‘It’s his blood,’ Lily had told him once, ‘his wild blood fizzing in his veins.’
Relief swept through Lonnie in a sweet full tide, even though Pop being away meant he wouldn’t be able to make things up, or find out if Pop might make things difficult for him and Clara. Not today, anyway. Unless Nan –
‘You’re coming, aren’t you?’ Nan asked him, almost before he’d sat down. ‘To your Pop’s birthday party? You and Clara?’
Lonnie stared at her. How did she know Clara’s name? How did she even know he had a girlfriend?
Lily, he thought furiously. Lily must have found something that time she’d come to his room to leave the note. Or Mrs Rasmussen, yarning to them all on the phone when they rang up and he was out.
‘Are you?’ pressed Nan.
‘Sure. Sure we’re coming, Nan.’
‘Let me show you something.’ She jumped up from her chair and hurried from the room, to return a moment later with Pop’s wedding dress, the one he’d found in an old trunk down at the back of the shed. Nan had told him all about it in a long, long letter, which had also carried news of blue-wrens, jonquils coming into bloom, and a whole page on how Pop’s ‘bark was worse than his bite’.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ Nan held the dress up in front of him, smoothing the silky fabric with one plump hand.
Lonnie saw at once how perfectly it would fit Clara: how it could have been made for her – those tiny sleeves floating at her shoulders, the wide band of embroidery cupping the delicate hollows at the base of her throat, the silk flowing like water over her breast and hips and thighs. Made for her.
Except if Pop was a racist like Lily said, then Clara would never get to wear it.
He cleared his throat. ‘Nan? Can I ask you something?’
‘Of course, love.’
‘It’s something sort of – personal.’
‘Lonnie, I’m your nan.’
‘Right. Well then, okay. Um.’ He couldn’t bring himself to ask straight out if Pop was racist. How could he? Lonnie went about it long way round. ‘Um, you know how Pop won’t go to that new dentist? Dr Tsai?’
‘Silly old thing,’ said Nan fondly.
‘Dr Tsai?’
‘No, of course not. I meant your pop. Refusing to go.’
‘Oh. Why won’t he, Nan? Is it because Dr Tsai’s Chinese?’
‘In a way.’
Lonnie’s heart sank. ‘What way?’
‘Well, perhaps I shouldn’t say this, perhaps it might sound funny to you –’
‘No, go on.’
‘I wouldn’t like you to take it the wrong way.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Well, I think your Pop’s got this picture of Chinese people, as being –’ ‘Being what?’
‘Tidy,’ said Nan.
‘Tidy?’
‘Sort of very neat and clean and tidy, you know. And your Pop’s old teeth, well, they’re not a bit tidy, are they? I think your Pop’s embarrassed, really. He doesn’t want to show them to Dr Tsai.’
‘Oh,’ said Lonnie, relieved. ‘Is that all?’
‘All? What other reason would there be?’
‘Any message for your pop?’ Nan asked hopefully as the afternoon drew on and it was time for Lonnie to go back down to the city.
‘Er, yeah,’ said Lonnie, and then he just stood there in the doorway, shuffling his feet, trying to gather his thoughts, to work out feelings, find the words. ‘Tell him I’m sorry,’ was what he should say, obviously, since everyone seemed to expect it.
But somehow those particular words stuck in his throat; he couldn’t get them out. And why should he? Why should he say sorry for being – him. Because that’s what it boiled down to, didn’t it? When you thought about it? Apologise for being the sort of person who got on Pop’s nerves.
He couldn’t. He wasn’t going to. Even if it messed up poor Nan’s party and Lily’s longed-for perfect day. What a mess! Why did people have to come in families?
He couldn’t think what to say to Nan, and as he stood in the doorway and she waited, a whole life history of himself and Pop came surging suddenly into his brain. Not simply that last afternoon when Pop had run off for his axe, but all kinds of other scenes, like a film run on fast-forward: Pop stomping and raging; Pop being kind; Pop noisy; Pop quiet; Pop teaching him how to bait a fishing hook; to shave; Pop sitting silent on the sofa the day his old dog Ratbag had died. And though it was years ago, Lonnie could still remember how on that day he’d wanted to say something comforting to Pop, and couldn’t, because Pop’s grief for the old dog had made him tongue-tied.
‘Tell him,’ he said to Nan now, ‘tell him I’m sorry Ratbag died.’
It took her a few seconds to remember. Ratbag had been Pop’s dog, and Nan had had a few problems with him; she’d particularly disliked the way Ratbag had learned to open zippers: taking the metal tag between his teeth, pulling out the stuffing from cushions and armchairs, scattering chunks of foam and cotton like big heavy snowflakes on the floor. ‘Ratbag?’ she murmured, puzzled, and then, realising, ‘Oh, Ratbag!’ enveloping Lonnie in a quick, fierce hug. ‘I’ll tell him,’ she promised. ‘He’ll be that pleased you remembered!’ She stepped back to look at him again, admiringly. ‘You’re a good boy, Lonnie,’ she said softly.
‘No, I’m not,’ he said crossly, because really, she was too soft on him, she always had been, and he wasn’t yet quite sure he could live up to her belief. ‘I’m not an angel fallen down from heaven, Nan.’
‘I know.’
He couldn’t believe it. She actually winked at him.
31
RATBAG
Later that evening, as Lonnie lay on his bed in the Boarding House for Gentlemen, dreaming of Clara in Pop’s wedding dress, and doing sums in his head about how the pair of them might be able to support a life together, the phone rang down in the hall.
Lonnie tensed; he wasn’t psychic, yet somehow he knew this call would be for him. It wouldn’t be from Clara, because it was only 9 o’clock and Clara had a late seminar tonight and couldn’t possibly ring till eleven. Mum, then. Or Lily. He hadn’t told them he was going up to Pop’s place today, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t ring to check if he was planning on going there. ‘Mr Samson! Telephone!’ Mrs Rasmussen called up from the hall.
‘It’s your little sister!’ she told him when he reached the bottom of the stairs. Mrs Rasmussen’s cheeks were pink; she was utterly delighted for him, as if Lily was some sweet little girl he’d been longing to hear from for weeks. ‘Thanks,’ he mumbled, and Mrs Rasmussen smiled and said, ‘Big Day coming up, eh?’
Big Day? Lonnie glanced at her nervously. Big Day was the
term people used for weddings, wasn’t it? How did his landlady know he’d been thinking of the possibility that he and Clara might set up house together – when he’d finished his degree, of course, and found a job, and Clara had finished her degree, and if Clara . . .
Forgetting about Mrs Rasmussen and the telephone, Lonnie drifted into hopeful reverie.
The landlady eyed him curiously. ‘Your sister,’ she prompted, and Lonnie, startled, peered all round the hallway, half expecting to see Lily standing on the red linoleum.
Mrs Rasmussen pointed. ‘On the phone.’
‘Oh – yeah.’ Lonnie picked up the handset and the landlady retreated to her flat, leaving (he couldn’t help noticing) her door just a tiny bit ajar. She knew all about him, he was sure: Mum and Nan, ringing up and discovering a sympathetic ear in Mrs Rasmussen, would have told her everything. Starting with his babyhood, they’d have continued on through primary school, the saga of Dad leaving; then high school, dropping in and out of courses, yet being a good boy all the same, an angel fallen out of heaven. They’d finish at the quarrel with Pop, Pop’s party – of course! That’s what Mrs Rasmussen had meant by the Big Day: Pop’s party, not he and Clara getting married.
A violent quacking was going on in his right hand. Lonnie looked down and saw the handset still clutched grimly in his fingers. He raised it to his ear.
‘So have you?’ a strident voice demanded. Lily.
‘Have I what?’
‘Thought about making it up with Pop.’
‘Yeah.’
‘But have you actually done anything?’ He could tell from her tone that she believed he only ever thought and never did.
‘I went up there today,’ he replied coolly.
‘You went up there? To Pop’s place? Really?’
‘Yeah, really.’ He was pleased by her incredulity. She hadn’t believed he’d take action. She hadn’t believed he’d be game.
Then she spoiled it. ‘And?’
Lily always wanted results. ‘He wasn’t there.’
‘So did you leave him a message? With Nan? To say you were sorry? So we can – I mean, so Nan can have a proper party?’
Sorry for what? he felt like saying. For being who I am? Or not knowing who that is? Only that funny note in her voice whenever she mentioned the party – a vulnerable note he’d never have expected from his sister – stopped him. ‘I told Nan to tell him I was sorry about Ratbag,’ he said instead.
‘Ratbag. Right. You said you were sorry you were a rat-bag.’ There was a pause while Lily considered this. ‘Well, I suppose that might do.’
‘Ratbag the dog,’ he said. ‘Not me.’
‘What?’
She didn’t remember. Of course she didn’t. Ratbag had been a long long time ago: those slow walks with Pop stopping to pick the old dog up, carrying him in his arms – Ratbag with one ear up and one ear down, silky soft ears he let you play with, like velvet in your fingers – had taken place when Lily was hardly more than a baby, and Dad gone only a little while.
‘Ratbag was Pop’s old dog,’ he explained. And then, ‘Not me. I’m not a ratbag.’
She didn’t believe that, either. ‘Huh!’ she said, and put down the phone.
32
UNINVITED
Uninvited, Clara’s mum was on her way to visit her daughter at Mercer Hall.
A tiny glimpse, that was all Rose needed, the smallest little peep at Clara’s room. ‘I have a right,’ she told herself, recalling the bristly haired old fellow she’d met in the park who’d said the very same thing to her: ‘You’ve got a right!’
Even if she hadn’t been invited.
Once Rose herself had lived in a single room. A sad little room with a camp bed, a table and a chair, and that bare wooden floor which had echoed so frighteningly. Rose needed to know that Clara’s room wasn’t like this; she needed to know, silly though it seemed, that Clara’s room didn’t have an echoing wooden floor. She needed to see it.
Stepping out onto the platform at Central, that familiar scent assailed her – a mixture of dust and sunlight, petrol fumes, and the yeasty odour from the brewery beyond the railway lines. It swept her back to those first months after her parents’ deaths; to Wednesday mornings after her early lecture in cataloguing, waiting on this very platform for the train to take her back home, when that scent had seemed the very air of desolation. She was eighteen and her parents’ house belonged to her now, and she lived in one room of it, the tiny room at the bottom of the hall which none of them had ever really used. Rose had moved the junk out, leaving the old camp bed, the table and the chair.
She’d closed all the doors in the house except for the kitchen and bathroom: the door of her parents’ room into which she couldn’t bear to look, the living room which frightened her, even the door of her own room, which had memories of Dad and Mum coming in to talk or say goodnight. Yet there was always the sound of her lonely footsteps on the polished wooden floor.
It had always been loneliness she feared most for Clara, Rose reflected as she stood in the cold windy space of Eddy Avenue, waiting for the bus to the university. But wasn’t there something ridiculous about this fear? Yes, there was, she decided, climbing the steps onto the bus, finding a seat halfway down the aisle, watching the drab inner suburbs roll on by. Clara wasn’t alone in the way she had been when Mum and Dad had died. Clara wasn’t orphaned; she had parents, even if she didn’t like them very much. Clara hadn’t been left; she’d gone off bravely of her own accord. Leaving the bus, crossing the campus towards Mercer Hall, Rose felt soft and foolish; she wanted to turn and run. Only she couldn’t, because up there, from the window of her high room, Clara might have seen her coming, and then she’d see her turning back, scuttling away like a mouse in a night-time kitchen when someone switched on the light. So Rose kept walking, bravely, up the path, across a courtyard, and in through the big glass doors of Mercer Hall.
In room 1209 Jessaline woke sharply, believing Rose’s knock was on her door. She thought it was her parents. ‘Oh!’ she gasped, and slid down beneath the doona. She wasn’t properly awake, and now she entered into nightmare territory: somehow, her parents had found out she was about to drop Linguistics. Perhaps one of their colleagues had spotted her on that afternoon she’d crossed into the Hinterland and made her way into the Cathleen Cuthbert School of Hospitality. They’d spotted her and told. And now her parents were here to put a stop to everything. They would sit by her bed and argue, they would disapprove, and if Jessaline didn’t give in to them, they would get plaintive. Jessaline hated it when her parents got plaintive, when their voices sounded wounded, as if she, their only child, had done them wrong . . .
Jessaline lay perfectly still beneath her doona. If she played dead they might think she wasn’t there. Had she locked the door? Cautiously and very quietly, she poked her head out from the covers and, wide awake now, realised with relief that the knocking came from Clara’s door. She glanced at her bedside clock: 10.15. Jessaline had gone to bed late last night, having spent the evening with Mrs Murphy in her kitchen, making macaroons. They’d turned out perfectly, light as little clouds. Now she’d slept in.
At 10.15 Clara would be gone. Jessaline reached for her dressing gown. Of all the students on the twelfth floor of Mercer Hall, she was the only one who bothered with a dressing gown. It was long and pink and woolly, the kind that little girls wear.
Clara was obviously not at home, and in a way Rose was relieved, because she felt sure her daughter would have scolded her for coming, uninvited. Spying.
‘But I’m not spying,’ Rose told herself. All she wanted was one tiny little peep, so she wouldn’t keep on imagining that Clara’s room was the counterpart of the one she’d lived in all those years ago. Cautiously, Rose reached out to the doorknob – perhaps Clara had left her room unlocked. The knob refused to move.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Oh!’ Rose’s hand jerked back guiltily. A big gawky child had appeared in the doorway of the
room next door. She couldn’t be a child, of course, not if she was at university – it was simply the pink fluffy dressing gown and the way she wore her hair in plaits that had given this impression, making the girl look like those small children Rose sometimes saw on her evening shift at the library, all bathed and dressed for bed the moment they got home.
‘Are you looking for Clara?’
‘Yes,’ said Rose, flushing, hoping the girl hadn’t noticed her hand on the knob of Clara’s door.
‘You must be Clara’s mum,’ said Jessaline, and then wished she hadn’t. The only way she could have known this was because the lady was Chinese. And that was sort of racist, wasn’t it? Besides, she mightn’t be Clara’s mum; she could be her aunty, or a second cousin, or even, thought Jessaline wildly, a Chinese lady who had nothing to do with Clara at all.
‘Rose Lee.’ Rose held out her hand and the girl clasped it warmly. ‘Jessaline. Clara’s got an early tute on Fridays, Mrs Lee; that’s why she isn’t here. And then she goes to the library. Or sometimes, instead of the library, she goes out with Lonnie –’
‘Lonnie?’
Oops! Too late, Jessaline remembered Clara’s mum hadn’t been told about Lonnie. ‘Did I say “Lonnie”? Sorry, I meant, um, she goes out with some friends. Shopping and stuff, little things . . .’
‘Little things,’ echoed Rose. Lonnie. So Clara had a boyfriend. She could tell from the guilty expression on this nice girl’s shiny face. A boyfriend she didn’t want her mum to know about. ‘You’re doing the same course as Clara?’ she asked.
‘Oh, no,’ said Jessaline. ‘I’m doing Linguistics. Or at least, I was.’
‘Was?’
‘I’m changing to Hospitality.’
Jessaline hadn’t quite done this, not formally, not yet. She would, of course she would, but – the Admin. block was very near the Maths building where her parents worked. They might see her through their windows. They might come out from their rooms and follow her. They’d want to know why she was going to Admin., what business she had there.
One Whole and Perfect Day Page 15