by Ashley Hay
‘You’ll have that clock when I go, Donny,’ she said to him when he came in to see her later. ‘You’ll take good care of it. It’s all that’s left now of your father’s family.’
‘All that’s left, apart from us,’ he said.
She smiled, reaching up to pat his faded ginger hair. ‘You look just like your father, young man.’ She could say anything to her son—a stray memory; a sudden segue; a question from the depths of distant time—and he took it in his stride.
‘Young man!’ He gave her a smile in return. ‘We’re seventy next year, Elaine and I.’ He held her hand tight for a while. ‘Carol will love the clock,’ he said then. ‘I remember her talking to Dad about it—years ago, when we were first married. They were fond of each other, you know.’
Bless him for reminding her; she couldn’t tell him that his wife entwined sometimes in her mind with his sullen sister, and she could spend a whole morning wondering why her Donny had married such a woman before she unknotted the mess, located his real life, and settled herself back into some happiness with his world.
‘I was thinking about your first day at school, love,’ she said in a while. ‘How little and brave you looked—how it all went by so quickly.’
‘Your next great-grandchild will be at school before you know it, Mum—we’ll have to bring you along for that day.’
And bless him for imagining her future.
‘Wind it for me, Donny?’ She nodded to the clock on its shelf. ‘I don’t like the idea it might stop.’ And she watched as he fitted the key into its clean white face and turned it; she loved the sound of its gears. She loved its buffer against the silence.
‘You know I’m going to marry Clement Gormley,’ she said above the mechanical crick of the clockwork. ‘I met him the other week—just when war was declared. I was coming through the city on a tram and decided to hop off in Adelaide Street. He’s a lovely man, very gentle. I think you’ll like him, when you meet him. Should we have a little drink in celebration?’
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ said Don, emptying her bedside jug of water into the pot plant that stood on the sill. It was an orchid and so perfectly white that she wondered if he was rubbing its petals to see if they were real. ‘Who brought you this, Mum?’
Did they ask these things to be polite, she wondered, or to check how much she knew?
‘Gloria sent it—from London. It came the other day. Lovely girl, that Gloria. A shame she and her mother never found a way to be friends. A shame she never had kids of her own. I thought Glory’s kids would be my first great-grandchildren. And she’d have been such a good mum.’
‘I’m sure Elaine and Gloria are friends in their own way,’ said Don carefully, heading over to the kitchen. ‘It’s not everyone who takes to mothering like you did, and like Carol. Gloria was lucky she had you to make a fuss of her. All our kids were.’
‘I remember walking you and Elaine to school one morning,’ said Elsie. ‘She was so little—but she wouldn’t hold my hand. And she saw this girl, the little sister of someone in her class, I think, all pigtails and a pretty frock. “Do I have to do that, Mama?” she asked me. I always thought she meant wear her hair like that, or the frilliness of the dress—but maybe she meant having a child. Maybe I never heard them right, the things Lainey tried to tell me.’
Elsie’s hand was stretched out, as if to hold the hand of her tiny daughter. In this memory, the jacarandas were so thick and rich overhead that they seemed to make a canopy as wide as the sky. From beyond the footpath came the sound of hinged windows as a veranda was opened up. Elsie began to hum the music she could hear now from inside the house.
‘In the old days,’ she said as Donny came back with the tea, ‘they held dances in one of the houses by the school; all the women in pretty dresses, twirling and spinning in the night. I used to walk up in the evenings trying to catch the breeze at the crest of the hill. It was like peeking into a jewellery box, watching them all at their fun.’
‘Did you ever go, you and Dad? Did you ever go to those dances?’ Don was holding out a teacup, its china pure white against the sun-spotted skin of his hands.
‘Did we ever go?’ Elsie frowned at her son’s hands; how old they looked. ‘I wanted to—I can’t remember. I had a silver dress I wanted to wear: did anyone pack that? I can’t remember seeing it since I came here. Although I suppose there’s not much call for dancing. I still see your father sometimes, over there by the dressing table.’ She pointed to the corner where a single armchair sat. No mirror. No dressing table. No stool. ‘He comes home from time to time.’
‘Give him my love, and I’ll head off now,’ said Don then, downing his tea in a gulp. ‘I’ve got to take one of the boys to his swimming—a full-time job, these little ones.’ He rattled his cup against its saucer. ‘Pop in again tomorrow. I drove past the old place yesterday; someone’s done the front garden—I thought you’d like to know how neat it looks. They’re already planting trees; Dad’d be complaining about the mowing. But it’s looking lovely.’
‘Yes,’ said Elsie, wistful. ‘Yes.’ She blew him a series of kisses as he went, her lovely bright boy. He looked older now than she was, although she didn’t suppose that could be true. Such a surprise, when Lainey had slipped out in his wake; she hadn’t known she was having twins. Like all my Christmases had come at once, thought Elsie. She’d been poleaxed by how utterly and completely she loved them.
She’d look up sometimes when she was bent over helping them with their homework, entranced with the idea that she was guiding them towards some solution, some new piece of knowledge—entranced that she might have that power—and she’d catch sight of a softness in her husband’s face and she’d smile.
‘You make such a lovely mum, Else,’ Clem had said, and she said it was all she could do.
It was all she’d ever wanted.
She blew another kiss as she watched her son cross the garden to his car, and he paused, looked up and waved—for all the world as if he’d felt it.
We’ve got something special, you and me. It used to scare her to even think such a thing about her son, but she’d always known it was true. And there he went, two toots on the horn as always, and a cheery wave through the window.
Whereas her daughter—Elsie frowned. Never so much as a backwards glance. She shook her head: how had she gone wrong with her girl? In the forties, when Elaine was just tiny? In the fifties, when she was at school? In the sixties, when she did what Elsie had always hoped for—found a husband, had a child.
‘Be the making of her,’ Elsie had whispered to Clem. But he shook his head.
How right he had been. When all Elsie ever wanted was her daughter’s happiness.
The way Elaine spoke to her: so cold, Elsie sometimes waited for her to call her ‘Mrs Gormley’.
It was the puzzle of her life. What else could I have done? How else should I have been?
The hands of the clock inched around to three—they’d be in from school soon, and ravenous. Elsie looked around her new rooms—the clock, the orchid, the spackled ceiling, the shiny sink and bench—thinking of her old kitchen, with its heavy, rounded fridge and its cream and green enamelled biscuit barrel. But her world, her real world, had gone, submerged by a strange wash of time. She drank the last of the tea her son had made for her, stone cold now and in the wrong cup. Even Donny hadn’t found her favourite one to bring.
In the bathroom she stood splashing water onto her face—she must have splashed through a riverload of water in her years in this city, keeping herself cool through Brisbane’s summers. Now, she knew, another summer was on its way. Elsie loved the way the heat pressed against every plane of her skin.
She sized up the image in the mirror. Age seemed to have come on so quickly. ‘I have no idea who you are or why you’re here,’ she said clearly, and she took a mouthful of water and sloshed it around, then spat it onto the troubling reflection.
When she tried the door to the hallway—the one by which
Donny had left—it seemed jammed, somehow, or locked.
She closed her eyes, determined to think herself through.
3
The pendulum
From the long lounge in the middle of the living room, Lucy watched the closed front door. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she had a house to herself. Ben had taken Tom to see the purple brilliance of the jacarandas along the river, and she’d walked awkwardly from room to empty room, unsure what to do, before slumping on the sofa for a while, still and quiet. It was bliss just to be on her own—no one she had to pay attention to.
Houses could feel so different when you had them to yourself. She remembered, long ago, being home on her own after school—she was seven years old, her three sisters busy in other places, and her mother still at work. Most days, Lucy hadn’t minded her mother being at work—her mother was a doctor, a ‘general practitioner’. Lucy had loved the sound of so many syllables, such very long words. And most days there was something exciting about being home on your own. Something grown-up.
But that day, when she was seven, the house had felt different—lonely and bare. Lucy didn’t want her mother to be working; she wanted her mother to be sitting at home waiting for her, like her friend Astrid’s mother did. She wanted her to be sitting at the kitchen bench, like Astrid’s mother did, with a glass of milk poured and three home-made peanut-butter biscuits laid out on a small plate with a striped edge.
Lucy had looked at the empty kitchen. She looked at the full milk bottle in the fridge, and the mug her mother had left ready for her on the table. She looked at the biscuit barrel, full of plain biscuits bought at the supermarket. And then she ran away to Astrid’s house, where she was exhilarated to be gorging herself on seven of the famous biscuits, and asked for two refills for her glass.
‘My pleasure—any time,’ said Astrid’s mother, Linnea, as she filled the glass again. ‘It’s always lovely to see you.’
And then Lucy and Astrid played in the garden—a complex game where each separate path was a different room in their enormous mansion—until the light dropped and Linnea sent Lucy home.
She was letting herself in at the back door when her mother came in at the front calling, ‘Hello? Lucy-Lu? How was your day, sweetheart?’ And she realised that the whole excursion had been secret. She’d run away, and no one had noticed.
Now she sat inside this new house. It felt friendly. It felt good. Of the five offers made, theirs had been chosen. Maybe it was because they were a family, as the agent had said, but Lucy took it as a sign, as if the house had chosen them.
In the time since they’d moved in, she’d busied herself with the usual tasks and rhythms of Tom’s days—the good ones; the great ones; the ones that sparked with pure frustration, hers or his. There was a perpetual motion to parenting; no one had told her about that.
There was so much new life here. The yard was full of new birds, new bugs, new butterflies. Lustrous beetles glowed on the doorstep, and a python had crossed the road beside the river, right there in front of her and Tom. The spiders’ webs spanned entire footpaths, wide and strong and golden in the light, with their residents as big as saucers in the centre.
Hanging out their welcome, Lucy thought, watching one glisten through the window from her spot on the sofa. It was exquisite, but who knew which ones might bite?
‘Our little home,’ Ben said sometimes at the end of the day, when Tom was tucked in and asleep. He was remembering so many things about the place he’d left almost thirty years before, somehow alive with its history, its geography, its heat now that he’d returned. It was as if he was pulling out the pieces of an old jigsaw puzzle, turning them over and recognising how they might all fit together. She’d never heard him speak so much about this place—and the jigsaw’s picture was mostly mysterious to her.
‘I’m still not so sure where I am,’ she’d said to each of her parents, ringing her mother at her busy doctor’s practice, her father in his studio by the beach. She was used to settling quickly somewhere new.
But if she was honest, she hadn’t quite known where she was since Tom was born. Nothing dramatic, just a kind of wrong-footedness, from moving too quickly through different sensations: anxious, joyous, watchful, bored, and back.
‘A whole new life,’ Ben had whispered when they’d brought their baby home. She saw now that was about them as much as Tom.
‘Take your vitamins,’ her mother told her. ‘It’s exhausting, moving cities, and with Tom.’
‘Get Ben to take you to the beach for the weekend,’ her father said. ‘That’s all that’s wrong with Brisbane: there’s no beach.’
In the garden now, two crows cawed, their calls harsh and sudden, and Lucy jumped with surprise at the noise.
She was differently attuned to sound these days. Even when Tom slept, she was aware of and anticipating the moment he’d wake up. Crying. It seemed he mostly woke up crying—another thing no one had mentioned as a possibility of motherhood and one that made her heart ache.
Now, in the house, in its silence, she wanted a different kind of sound. Standing with her arms stretched high, she pulled a CD down from the shelf and put it into the player. It was an old compilation of nineties songs; she couldn’t remember where it had come from. She waited for the disc to load, and cranked up the volume.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d danced either—unless you counted swaying through a lullaby. Her father had told her once that she looked like a tree in a breeze when she moved to music, and she’d held onto that compliment, loving the idea of herself stretched out, sinuous and moving free. She wasn’t tall—‘average everything,’ she always joked—and she was rarely graceful. Now, just a year shy of forty, and always a little bit tired, she felt slower and duller sometimes, as if she needed to urge herself forward.
But when her body, her arms, her legs began to move in time to music, any music, she was a different being, extended and alive. It was as if the movement was drawn out of her, one long fluid line pulling her up and away. She scooped her long red hair up onto the top of her head, watching her reflection in the window. Her arms made a canopy over the space in which she moved.
A staccato four-beat drove on beneath song after song; she loved its insistence. It reminded her of the little pendulum that had marked out the tick and the tock of music lessons in her childhood, reliable and clear, while the melody played and curled across the top. She loved the predictable and perpetual beat of that plumb, the regular and contained arc it made from one side to the other, on and on. She tapped it out, that safe sound that kept music in check.
And then she started to sing along.
She’d always sung. Her mother had sent her off to singing lessons for years, and she’d won prizes in eisteddfods and talent quests. Her mother had thought she should try for the conservatorium, but she didn’t. She did an arts degree, a couple of drama subjects, and took a touch-typing course on the side. She took short contracts to work in university offices, travelling in between—and she became known for her knack of unravelling any problem, reorganising any mess, meeting the most impossible of deadlines.
Fixing things.
‘I thought you’d make more of yourself,’ said her mum.
‘As long as you like what you do,’ said her dad.
What she loved was standing in a crush of people at a gig, the whole darkened room shouting the words of a song straight back at the performer on the stage. That was power; that was life. That kind of communion she loved.
It was a long time since she’d felt that: the last gig she’d been to, before Tom was born, she’d suddenly felt scared among the bodies—felt him kicking hard inside her as if he were afraid too.
‘I need some air,’ she’d shouted at Ben and gone outside, not knowing she wouldn’t go back.
Now, there was a thrumming silence; the music had stopped, and the crows were quiet too. Across the street, someone was knocking on a door, and then she heard a cheery greeti
ng called.
It was funny; she must have filled thousands of hours before there was Tom—all the things she’d done, on her own, for herself. Now she fought to keep herself away from the washing that needed folding, the dinner she might start to cook. No. She wanted sound. She wanted movement. She wanted to feel like her old self. She notched up the volume, sent the CD around again.
Perhaps Elsie had danced here, in this room. Perhaps she’d sung too. Could you sense that, the traces of earlier moments? She waited, but could hear only the slam of the back flyscreen and a corresponding thump somewhere downstairs—something knocked down by the wind. There were often things moving and bumping in the crawl space, above and below. She tried not to think of the python: this whole city seemed wildly alive.
Or maybe it was a bit of Elsie, left behind. Lucy raised her hand to the empty room. ‘Hi,’ she said aloud, feeling foolish all the same. As if Elsie would come back and let herself in.
The songs looped again, and Lucy felt them beat into her body. She drifted into the kitchen, still humming along as she flicked on the kettle to make tea.
‘You even lived in London and you never drank the stuff,’ Ben had marvelled that morning. ‘I wonder why you’ve started now—some late-onset postpartum tastebud glitch?’
‘You and your grown-up descriptions.’ She’d laughed at him. The answer was behind the bevelled glass of one of the kitchen cabinets. A teacup, saucerless; a slightly fluted cream cup with a big blue floral blaze.
Peonies, thought Lucy, and something like a fuchsia. She’d found it forgotten at the back edge of the deck, the sludgy-mud rime of its last cup of tea still coating its bottom. For a few days, washing it with every load of dishes she thought of returning it to Elsie—ringing the estate agent, or looking up the address on the settlement papers. Then, on a whim, she’d taken it from the kitchen bench and made herself a cup of tea. One of Ben’s teabags. Weak, no milk; sharpened with a small slice of lemon. You could tell it was the drink the house was used to—there was no room for a coffee machine on the narrow bench top, and the decor predated anything hippy and herbal (as Ben liked to call such things) by several decades.