All the windows were shut for the autumn. And although the heavy winds of the night before had eased, the air still forced its way through the cracks and grooves to shift and move the open curtains. The cotton arched up and down in such a way that the room seemed to expand and retract, like the slow breath of a long-sick patient. It was perfectly quiet for a few brief moments, until the dying fizz of the fly again woke the room, throttling and buzzing in its chorus of escape.
She pulled her hot water bottle from under the covers and clutched it for a moment, feeling the cool water sloshing within. At the foot of her bed, her party outfit was arranged neatly: heeled shoes with dainty straps, glossy like polished ebony; her blue party dress covered with soft flowers, their discreet petals folding in to one another until they seemed to disappear in each other's embrace; and her mother's silk floral corsage pinned to her baby-blue sweater. She kept it in defiance of her mother's protestations—it was not appropriate…it was too old for her…it would not do to take it to the party.
‘Come to breakfast, Eva!’ One of her sisters knocked, opened the door and stood staring at her. She was wearing men's striped pyjamas like the ones Audrey Hepburn wore in Roman Holiday.
‘Put on your slippers and come to breakfast!’ she said again and slammed the door closed. Eva heard her tramp away down the hall.
When Eva walked into the kitchen the table was still littered with the remains of her family's breakfast. Her baby sister's bottle of milk lay on the floor, dripping small, white droplets.
Her mother was moving around the room in a frantic manner, collecting the plates and cutlery and dropping them into the sink. As she attempted to clean the room, she kept rubbing her hands down her red-and-white patterned apron, smearing grease across it. She hummed a single phrase as she cleaned, a kind of nervous, tuneless ditty, in which she repeated the same unadventurous order of notes, over and over again.
Her father sat on his chair and read the newspaper, just as he did every morning, with the same obliviousness to the activity around him. His eyes were fixed downwards and he read each page with fastidious intent, occasionally licking the tips of his fingers to turn each new page.
‘Eva, pass me the milk, won't you?’ said her mother.
She stood up and placed the milk on the counter next to her mother and leaned forward to embrace her. She wanted to hold her mother at those times when she seemed most distracted. Eva looked at the places on her mother's hands where the bacon oil had spluttered out of the pan and left pink polka dots on her white skin.
Her father was looking through the advertisements. ‘Hey, Amy,’ he said. ‘There's something called a Deluxe Toaster for sale here. Says it has an ‘all-power-action’. I think I'd fancy some brown toast in the morning.’
‘I'd say a toaster would be awful handy,’ said her mother glancing briefly over her shoulder to look at him. As usual, Eva's father's eyes were immovably uninterested behind his spectacles, never looking up to regard her mother's face.
Her mother turned back quickly to the dishes and sunk her hands into the sudsy water.
Eva ate her breakfast in silence. Occasionally she lifted up the discarded sheets of her father's paper and read articles that interested her. She mainly preferred to look through the columns about movie stars and rock-and-roll music. Even though she read well enough, she didn't always understand the politics and historical events—the things which she knew to be of greater meaning in the external world. The news sometimes made her feel peculiarly alone, as though some vast spectacle had passed her by and was known to everyone else on earth but her.
She tried to read an editorial on the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted of spying for the USSR. There was something in the words that captured her imagination, but she could not marry them to any particular scene in her mind. She could not imagine how they must have felt to be caught, and what it was like when they died. She couldn't comprehend if it seemed fair that they had died in that way, and disappeared forever.
‘I'm taking the bus into town today,’ said her mother, sitting down on a chair beside Eva's father and placing her hand on his thigh. ‘I'm making a potato salad for the party tonight, and I to need to get some mayonnaise. Oh, and I'd like to pick up some bottles of Triple Sec and dark rum—Mrs Murdoch and I are going to make Mai Tais.’
‘Seems like a waste of time,’ said her father. He had not looked up from the advertising pages.
‘Eva's been itching for weeks about the party,’ said her mother. ‘Don't you spoil her fun, now. You ought to be coming along with us.’
‘Her fun?’ her father said, looking up for a moment to glance between them.
‘I've been looking forward to the party, that's true,’ Eva said. ‘For a while now. But I only want to see the women dressed in their best clothes, and with their hair done up like Grace Kelly.’
Her father turned quickly back to his papers. ‘These parties mean nothing to me. You can make your way with them Amy, but you know they're not for me. The Murdochs aren't a trustworthy sort of people anyway and I don't want you staying out too late with the girls. I don't want them waking up tired in the morning.’
‘Of course, dear,’ said her mother. Then she stood up quickly and moved back to the dishes. She stooped low over the grey water in the sink and Eva had the strangest sense that she was weeping.
The young winter wheat splayed upwards, its small shoots glowing greenly in the midday sun. Eva, with jeans rolled to her knees, scrambled through the fields until she reached the shade of a lone, white ash tree. She could see some large crows circling over a distant field. Their black wings shone in the sun as they climbed through the air. She had walked for a mile already and the strong winds had picked up again, blasting her face and hands.
She lay down beside the tree to rest, taking off her scarf and undoing the top button of her blouse. The sun, filtered by the yellowing leaves of the ash, fell across her neck and she stretched out to regard the sky. For a moment she knew that there was something perfect and shapely about the universe awaiting her.
After another mile she reached Mr Cooper's house. He lived in an old cabin beyond the perimeter of her father's farm. People in town thought he was crazy, but Eva didn't mind what they said. She knew that he had once been in the army and had travelled a great deal, collecting little items on his journeys through the Orient, Africa and Europe. Most of his things were just old tools and knick-knacks, keys without locks, or pieces of broken jewellery that he'd found in the sand on foreign beaches.
Eva was visiting him to borrow one item in particular—a blue gemstone brooch in the shape of a peacock. She knew that it would match the trim of her party dress. It was an exotic object and she had coveted it since Mr Cooper had first shown it to her.
It was very quiet in the valley where he lived. The cabin's porch was black and filthy and the beams on the roof had rotted through in places. The old, disused stable by the cabin smelt of decay.
Eva opened the front door. ‘Hello, Mr Cooper?’ she said and walked through the gloomy interior.
‘Oh, Eva, come in,’ she heard him answer from the kitchen.
Mr Cooper was seated in a large cane chair. A crimson cushion, smelling strongly of damp, sagged in his embrace. There were several leather-bound books on the table beside him, and a half-finished bottle of whisky.
‘Eva, I tell you I've had enough of them. And not just the Baptists, it's the churches, the whole thing altogether.’
‘I'm sorry to hear that, Mr Cooper,’ said Eva.
She looked at the painting on the wall that had been given to him by a young professor of philosophy when he was travelling in Nepal. It showed a bird sitting on a rabbit, sitting on a monkey, sitting on an elephant. Mr Cooper had told her it was called a Thangka and that it showed how harmony was possible, in spite of human difference.
‘Did you go to church this week?’ Mr Cooper asked as he looked down at his spindly hands.
‘My father's
not a religious man,’ she replied. ‘I don't go to church that much these days. He doesn't like the new teachings going around. He's just interested in his own business, or so he says.’
‘Oh,’ said Mr Cooper. ‘Well, Eva, that much I should've figured. After all, your daddy's a sensible man.’
‘What's the church done now?’ she asked.
‘Oh it's nothing to anyone but me. Maybe I'm just like your daddy. It's just that they're always standing about in those groups, in those darn circles, having meetings—looking so serious. They're always telling me what Jesus wants for me. They think they know how he tied up his goddamned shoes. But the truth is they don't know a damn near thing about it.’
Eva noticed an old Spanish guitar on the shelf; it looked like the ones the Mexicans played in Westerns.
‘Isn't that something?’ said Mr Cooper, noticing her interest. ‘I picked that up a day or so ago on the roadside. I don't know why a person would do a thing like that. Just leave that there, just for nobody.’
‘It's a beautiful instrument,’ said Eva. She walked over to the guitar and spread her long fingers across its bridge so that the strings made an unkind twang. ‘And will you go back to church next week?’ she asked. ‘You always forgive them for that kind of thing. Usually you do, anyway.’
Eva stopped by a grimy mirror to examine herself. Her pale skin shone in the thin light and her dark eyes moved quickly in their sunken pouches. She felt that she didn't know the person behind the glass; she couldn't relate to the strange, expressionless appearance. She wondered if she really was there in the mirror, if she was really the very same girl that had lain under the ash tree that afternoon. And when she turned up to the party in the evening, in her blue dress, would she be different again?
Eva turned back to Mr Cooper. ‘May I take the brooch?’ she asked. ‘The peacock brooch?’
She wanted to take it right away and hold it in her hands.
But she wasn't sure Mr Cooper had heard her. His eyes were like two pale stones, and his gaze was fastened on something distant, something very much outside the room.
‘No, no, Eva,’ he went on. ‘I can't forgive them. No more than I can forgive the devil for all his wickedness, or myself for that matter. I'm done with them. I can't repent with them. I won't do it, Eva, I won't.’
Eva stood in Mrs Murdoch's dining room and listened intently to the sounds of the party. She wore the peacock brooch fastened to the bodice of her blue dress. It was something from another world, outside the farm and her home. Wearing the brooch gave her a strange sense of strength. The corsage, which she had reluctantly unpinned from her cardigan, was hidden deep inside her pockets—stuffed within the layers of her skirt like a crushed heart.
She noticed that there was a large blackberry bush outside the house which kept dragging against a window. It cut across the music and laughter of the people who were speaking in loud voices. The adult guests were playing mimes and charades, while Mrs Murdoch glided around the room, grinning with her glowing red lipstick, offering cocktails and canapés.
There were many other guests coming and going discreetly from the party, but they were far from Eva's mind. They were only visions that moved in and out of a larger and more beautiful spectacle—the party itself. It was something transformative; it made her feel truly modern.
She watched her younger sisters sitting on a sofa by the orange glow of Mrs Murdoch's much-admired new lamp. Its translucent bulb, cupped by a tulip shade, sprouted from a tall chrome stand, casting a strange loveless glow across the little girls’ faces. They were clasping one another by the nose and squeezing til each almost suffocated and squealed violently.
Eva could also see her schoolteacher sitting on the arm of a sofa with her long legs drooping towards the floor. Miss Wells was educated at a university town in the north and was not married. She wore a moss green dress of shimmering brocade, with a high collar and tapered waist that fanned out at her hips. She was speaking to a good-looking man Eva didn't recognise. Miss Wells leaned forward intimately as she spoke with him, and her rhinestone earrings trembled against her neck. She was more modern than any person Eva had ever seen.
Eva's mother was clinging to the arms of men and women as they moved backwards and forwards to a jazz record. Eva didn't know the music well. It seemed like the kind of thing that appealed to adults. The guests sometimes threw back their heads as they danced, and the little coloured umbrellas bobbled in their cocktail glasses.
She felt that the orange glow from the tulip lamp had changed the faces of the adults so that their expressions had begun to disappear. Quite suddenly, she no longer felt sure that she recognised a single person in the room.
Eva walked off to the nursery and Mrs Murdoch's son followed her there. She had imagined she would see him at the party, but she was not expecting to meet him in the room like that, alone with her. She did not say anything to him. Instead, they stood in silence for a very long time, listening to the periodic laughter escaping from the dining room. Occasionally she looked about the room and examined the toys and dolls displayed on the shelves and chest of drawers. There was a row of encyclopaedias on the bookcase and a baby's cot in the centre of the room. She gave it a gentle push and it creaked on its hinges. The cot was full of perfect white lace, folded neatly into squares.
Mrs Murdoch's son locked the door and remained standing in front of it, tall and watchful. She refused to look at his face. In the cool darkness of the room there was only a single sense—never before had she felt such an overwhelming longing to be alone.
She sat down on the small seat of the rocking chair while he moved across the room and kneeled down beside her, quickly reaching out to run his hands over her stockings and up her legs. She waited quietly, resiliently immovable, and said nothing. The curtains in the room were drawn open so that she could see the shaking of the plane trees that lined the street, and she waited, with her head turned as far away from herself as it could be.
The music from the dining room continued to drift into the nursery. It sounded like her mother's favourite singer, Nat King Cole. Then she heard her mother's shrill voice break out above the other sounds, asking Mona Lisa if she was warm and alive or just another cold piece of art.
When Eva left the nursery she walked outside into the front garden. The sky was still dimly blue above the houses on Mrs Murdoch's street. It was a very new street, near the centre of town. All the houses were white and looked just the same as one another.
She crouched down beside the blackberry bush, listening to the hiss of the wind in the garden. Her knees were pressed up under her chin and her hands were clasped around her in the cold—her eyes were fixed on an unnameable distance.
The party was muted from the outside and suddenly she wished she had not left it so early. After having disappeared so quietly, she did not know if she could ever go back inside. So she allowed the night to grow peaceful, and soon the pleasant chatter of human voices ended. All that remained was the noise of the blackberry bush around her—its sinister dark leaves scything up against the window, the branches scratching habitually, as though pleading, all pressed up and dragging from left to right, to left and right again.
She was the only green-eyed girl in our street. The summer Bug moved in to the brick house across the road from me, I was six years old, she was seven. We formed a friendship the way most children do—in trees, in dirt, on the burning concrete. We were neither boy nor girl, we were one and the same—comrades of skinned knees and sunburn until dusk. Then, as the sun set, streaking pink and orange across the trees and red-roofed houses, her father would arrive home from work and call her inside for the evening. Those moments, watching the headlights coming down the road, and listening to the sound of the car pulling into the driveway, left me lost and listless in the twilight. It is a feeling that still returns in that grey hour of in-between, when the day is dying and the night is yet to carry me away.
We lived in a neighbourhood recently built out of an i
ndustrial wasteland. Planes flew low above the squat suburban houses and at night, when the street slumbered, you could hear the shaking steel of freight trains rattling down the rusted railway line which lay unused in the daylight hours. Our street, though, was lined with native trees, and their leafy branches, heavy with red bottlebrushes, bent over our fences all year long. And then there were the jacarandas, which I liked the best. In the spring, they rained lilac flowers all over the footpath, and little bell-shaped blooms would get stuck in my hair and to the bottoms of my shoes, in promise of the coming summertime.
I often think that my early memories could have been anyone's if not for the girl with the giant green eyes, staring out from every picture of my childhood.
Bug's father ran a funeral home a couple of suburbs away and their house was always filled with flowers, the leftovers of other people's grief. Bug's early years were spent dressed in black, accompanying her father to wakes and memorials because she had no-one else to look after her.
Often at night, after Bug had been around to play with me that day (which, in the summer, was more often than not) I would slip barefoot into the kitchen and hear my mother talking to my father in a low voice about ‘the poor little thing’. They looked at her—with her matted blonde hair, twiggy, skinned knees and gap-toothed smile—and saw an orphan girl, lacking the gentle hand and watchful eye of a mother.
I saw these traits as badges of courage. While these days I wonder what ghosts must linger in the backwaters of her memory, I rarely thought of this shadowy sadness at the time. Bug was an adventuress, braver than I, and I would never have thought to feel sorry for her.
From nine til six, Bug's house was empty. Her father worked six-day weeks and kept the world at a distance. During the day their windows remained tightly closed and curtained. Inside was a house furnished for a man living alone, bearing little trace of children's things. I never liked to play there. Our time together was spent in my backyard or on the street, collecting cicada shells and rocks. After a day in the sun we would retire to my house and take refuge under tables or chairs covered by old sheets, and lie with our backs against the cool floorboards.
The Life You Choose and That Chose You Page 18