The Slightly Bruised Glory of Cedar B. Hartley

by Martine Murray

  There’s also an old mustard-coloured couch on the porch, a cape gooseberry plant which Ricci gave us, some jasmine winding round a long stalk of bamboo, a couple of broken bikes leaning against the wall, and two dolls sitting on the windowsill. One is a pear-shaped wooden peasant lady with a scarf, the other is just a plastic green bendy figure who has no features, not even a nose, but it’s wound around the sturdy little peasant lady in a passionate embrace. What a pair. You can probably guess who did that to the dolls. The key is above the gas meter and I can reach it by standing on the old shoe-cleaning box. Our door is painted white but the paint is all peeling off in a nice comforting way, and there’s a xylophone attached just below the frosted window, with the xylophone banger dangling from a piece of string (yet another Barnaby installation). It’s meant to be a doorbell, but most people just yell out.

  All this is so familiar to me I hardly ever notice, except when there’s something new. Like a lady with red hair sitting on the couch, cross-legged, eyes closed and a faint smile on her face. Smiles don’t usually disturb me, but this one did, probably because I was already disturbed and the last thing I felt like was coming home to a flame-headed vision of peacefulness.

  She opened her eyes as I stomped loudly up to the door.

  ‘Oh hello, you must be Cedar.’ She unravelled her legs and stood up, stretching her arms and standing on her tippies, just like I do every now and then. Not only that, she was skinny and her hair was untidy and piled up in a knot with bits spilling out. For a minute I wondered if she was me. An older, other version. She wore silver hoops in her ears and she had owl eyes, big and hungry. I watched the way she patted Stinky, because I always like to see whether someone is a dog person. As I’ve pointed out before, you can trust a dog person, just like you can trust corduroy. She was probably older than Barnaby and younger than Mum.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, noticing a big bulging old backpack lying at her feet. ‘I’m Cedar. Who are you?’

  She smiled at me. I was probably looking like the Black Death, and I didn’t feel like smiling back. I looked at the ground. I felt agitated. It was her smile – it seemed to know something I didn’t know.

  ‘You probably don’t remember me. We have met once before but you were only a baby.’

  ‘So, you’re one of Mum’s friends?’

  ‘Not yet. I’m your aunt, though I don’t feel like an aunt. It’s quite odd to say it, really. I guess that’s the first time in my entire life I’ve ever called myself anything as respectable-sounding as an aunt. Tirese is my name. I’m your dad’s sister. Half-sister, actually.’

  The smile broke again. Now I recognised it – it belonged to my dad. My dead dad. I have a photo of him with that exact smile, but now it had leapt off my photo and landed on the face of someone I didn’t even know. I wanted it to stay where it was, in my mind, tucked away in a quiet, special place that only I could visit. I went there sometimes and smiled back at my dad. So it was our place, Dad’s and mine, and now someone else was stealing from it. She’d got his smile and she could wear it, take it with her, any old place, to flash it at any old person.

  I knew my dad had relatives in Western Australia, because Barnaby went there and met some of them. He never met Tirese, though, because he would have told me if he had. He would have remembered her hair.

  ‘I’ve been in India,’ she said, as if by way of explanation, as I hadn’t responded to her announcement except to stand there with a frown. I didn’t exactly feel like meeting an aunt who’d pinched my dad’s smile. I’d had enough shocks for one day. Couldn’t she have come at Christmas or some other more appropriate time?

  She said, ‘You probably never even knew I existed. After all, I didn’t even really know your dad.’

  ‘Why didn’t you know him?’ I was somehow relieved. She may have his smile but at least she didn’t know him.

  ‘Your grandpa remarried when your dad was about sixteen, and by the time I was born your dad had escaped to Melbourne. So we never knew each other, except through letters and a couple of times when he came home for Christmas. Isn’t it funny, though? You and I have the same hair.’ She bent down and started putting on an old pair of leather sandals.

  ‘I didn’t know him either,’ I said.

  She folded her arms across her chest and sighed.

  ‘Yes, I know, poor love. Looks like we’ve got a bit in common then. Shall we have a cup of tea? I’ve come to stay a while. Do you think your mum will mind? Not too long. Couple of days. I’m just stopping on my way home. Thought I’d visit the other half of the family. I’ve been away for years.’

  Her eyes drifted, like little boats caught in a sudden wind, and I knew she had her own memories tugging her thoughts back. Maybe it didn’t matter that she had a part of my dad in her; maybe it would be a good thing. She hauled her pack up and dragged it towards the door as if it was a worn-out, battle-weary body that needed a good rest. I knew then that she’d be staying longer than a couple of days. I’m not sure how I knew, except that it had something to do with that mysterious drifting gaze she had.

  Chapter 6

  So, all in one day, Kite announced his departure and my skinny Aunt Squeezy announced her arrival, and life started all over again with its onslaught of change.

  Mum and I and my new skinny Aunt Squeezy had dinner together that night, and for a while I even forgot about the terrible, terrible thing because, I had to admit, it was interesting to meet my dad’s half-sister. I kept watching her curiously and listening to her talking about India, and I was kind of impressed because she had studied loads of weird things in India, like yoga and tabla (a drum that talks) and meditation (sitting down and thinking about nothing, which is harder than you think) and, what’s more, she could do a headstand and an elbow stand. Not all aunts can do that. I was glad my dad had a nice half-sister even if he never knew her.

  In the end, we moved the chairs in the living room and she showed me some yoga and I showed her some balances and Mum took photos and drank wine. She said wine was just as relaxing as yoga but required less effort. Then she started doing the proud mother thing and telling my aunt all about our circus and our benefit show and I started to feel bad again. I interrupted her.

  ‘Yeah, but Mum it’s all over now. Finito. Kite and his dad are moving to Albury. They’re joining the Flying Fruit Fly Circus.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said my new aunt.

  ‘That’s a real circus,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Cedy, that’s bad luck,’ said Mum, ‘Can’t you go on without them?’

  ‘Nup. No way. Not without a trainer.’

  ‘You’ll miss Kite.’

  I wasn’t sure what my mum knew about Kite. There are some things you just don’t tell your mum, and if she suspected something she didn’t let on, and neither did I. I didn’t answer her. I managed to hold back the emotional torrent, partly by picking at my toenail and partly as a result of all the yoga, which makes you breathe deeply.

  ‘What about finding a new trainer?’ said my aunt.

  ‘I don’t think we could. We can’t pay anyone, and anyway, no one would be as good as Ruben.’

  It was actually quite good to find myself talking about it in a practical way, as if suddenly there was simply a problem, as if it was a table with a broken leg and all I had to do was find a way of fixing it. It meant that I could see a way of separating one thing from the other. There were the feelings, the Kite feelings, and they were like air; you couldn’t fix them. You can’t patch up the air, you can only find ways of making sure you breathe it in and then you breathe it out. (Oh, see how I was already becoming a yogi.)

  But then there was also the circus. This was a real thing, not a thing like air but a thing with a broken leg or two. Perhaps this was a thing that could be fixed. Didn’t matter that I hadn’t a clue how, because right then I wasn’t in a mood for working with it, I was in a mood for getting gloomy and staring bug-eyed at the mess. I sighed dramatically and said I had to go to bed, the
yoga had made me too relaxed, and they both agreed that bed was a good idea all round. But I think I really kind of killed the mood.

  We put my new aunt in Granny’s old room, which was still called Granny’s room even though she had long since gone from it.

  ‘And what about Barnaby? Where’s he?’ asked Aunt Squeezy. Mum and I gave each other that look, which meant, ‘Who is going to try and explain Barnaby?’ I had a go.

  ‘He’s got a new girlfriend at the moment. So he’s always out with her. You’ll meet him tomorrow, probably.’

  ‘Is she nice?’

  ‘She’s a Goth,’ said Mum.

  ‘Her name’s Ada,’ I said.

  ‘She’s a bit troubled,’ said Mum.

  ‘They’re in a band together,’ said I.

  ‘I see,’ said Aunt Squeezy, nodding understandingly, but both Mum and I knew it would take a lot more than that for her to really understand either Barnaby or Ada, let alone what they were together, but we didn’t say.

  Once I was in bed I was glad to be able to finally plummet into my despair in private. It was as if the suffering sat squelched inside me, like a cork, and nothing else could get in and out until that cork had been let loose.

  Oh why, I wailed to myself, as I lay in my favourite pondering position on my back, staring at the ceiling, why must I constantly adapt? You work so hard to get things just right and then they spill out in exactly the direction you hadn’t counted on. And you have to start all over again. It’s as if you are a hungry little beetle who has spent days trudging towards a pile of crumbs it has spied in the distance. It has made great growing plans for those crumbs. It has been thinking up crumb recipes…it will feed its whole family on these crumbs and there’ll be crumb dinner parties for all its friends, enough crumbs for the whole of winter and no need to work, just a lot of sleeping in the slivers of sun, rocking on fat blades of grass and baking crumb casseroles. ‘Oooh, what a lucky beetle I am,’ thinks the beetle, and then, just as

  it’s getting near, a human wipes away the whole pile of crumbs with a pink sponge Wettex and they’re gone.

  So the beetle must turn around and go back. It isn’t lucky anymore. Now it’s unlucky.

  Before it saw the crumbs it was neither. Not lucky or unlucky. Just a beetle.

  I wish I was just that, just a beetle with not a crumb in sight. Imagine if you could live without little hopes always budding. Imagine if you never looked ahead and never expected great things to happen, never hoped for a greater pile of crumbs than what you already had. No doubt about it, I was a dreamer, but worse, I was a greedy dreamer. I was a small, skinny girl dreaming giant, fat, champion dreams, I was dreaming piles of circus and love – but how do you stop it?

  Maybe it’s not about stopping, it’s about choosing the right pile.

  All I knew was that Kite must have been holding up my dream, and now it was sagging like a tent without its pole.

  I wasn’t ready to prop it up with new poles, so I let my mind sink into the withering, watery wretchedness that I knew was waiting for me. I knew I had to feel it. Just lie there and feel it.

  Then I started to cry. Just a little bit. Just a few fat tears rolling down my face like little slugs.

  Chapter 7

  I must have cried myself to sleep because the next thing I remember is being woken up by a very strange guttural noise that moaned through the house and oozed under my door. Before I had a moment to figure out what it was, Barnaby flung himself into my room.

  ‘You awake? Cedy? What the hell is that? Who’s in Granny’s room? Sounds like a cow, a mournful one.’

  ‘Must be our new aunt. She’s come from India.’ I sat up. Stinky poked his nose in the door and I patted the bed, which signals to Stinky that he’s allowed up. He runs and leaps and then takes his time to decide which ripple of doona is the best one for him to nestle into.

  ‘What? Are you kidding?’ Barnaby plonked himself on my bed too, and rubbed Stinky on the head.

  ‘Nup. She’s Dad’s half-sister. Her name is Tirese. She can play drums and do headstands and Mum seems to like her a lot.’

  ‘Dad’s half-sister?’ He frowned and thought about it a while and tapped his foot on the floor. He always tapped quickly when he was figuring something. ‘Yeah, right. I remember now, she was the one in India. Do you think she’s okay? She sounds kind of woeful.’

  ‘She’s meditating.’

  ‘They did mention her when I was in WA. What’s she like? Look like Dad?’ His sneakers kept thudding on the floor.

  ‘She smiles like Dad, but actually she looks like me.’ I found myself beaming for a minute, as if I’d just won something. I’d won myself a family resemblance. Suddenly I realised my new aunt must have somehow belonged to me; we had a thing we shared and that was special. Maybe I even liked her, even if she did make strange noises in the morning.

  ‘You!’ Barnaby laughed and I crawled out of bed and thumped him.

  ‘Yeah, and I’m depressed, in case you want to know.’

  He laughed again. And then, when I persisted with my depressed frown, he tried to be serious. He stopped tapping his foot.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘The circus is over. Kite’s moving to Albury to join the Flying Fruit Flies. His dad is going to be the new artistic director.’

  ‘Albury!’ he sucked the air between his teeth as if it was painful.‘Well, look at it this way, no one could last long in Albury. He’ll be back. And in the meantime you can go train somewhere else and you’ll be just as good as him when he comes back. Or you can learn something else. Like drums. We could do with a new drummer. Atticus is a big pain at the moment. He’s just got no manners.’

  Atticus is Ada’s younger brother. The band is just Ada, Atticus and Barnaby. Both Atticus and Ada are dark and unusual. Their mum is a jazz singer and they live way out in Sunshine, and I don’t think the sun shines any more in Sunshine than it does here in Brunswick, because Ada says Sunshine is a hole. Atticus has a long black fringe, which hides his eyes, and he never wipes it out of the way so he looks like a sheep dog. Ada has the same hair, only hers is very long and you can see her face. She’s pretty, but she usually wears a tough expression by putting her mouth in a line and staring in a hot, accusing way, which makes you feel as though she might not like you. Neither Atticus or Ada have friends, though Barnaby says they’re really bright, and Ada is reading The Heart of Darkness, and when there’s no one else around they even laugh and make jokes. Ada sings, and the weird thing is she sings all sweet and ethereal, like an angel, even if the song is called Thanitos, which means hate in Latin. Mum and I aren’t sure about Ada, but she’s the first girl Barnaby has really liked. He’s kind of crazy about her in fact. He says she’s creative.

  ‘Where were you last night?’ I said.

  ‘Rehearsal. Looks like the tour’s going to happen. In fact we’ll be doing Albury, on the way to Sydney.’

  Their band is actually doing really well. They have a record company and a CD and they’re called Badlands.

  ‘Oh, so Badlands plays Albury. Great. That’s just great.’ Just what I needed. As my circus was dying, Barnaby’s band was flying and somehow the dreaded Albury was in the middle of it. I guess I was also a little bit secretly proud, but I didn’t want to say that. Kids at school thought I was cool because Barnaby was my brother and Barnaby was in Badlands. It was an easy way to get respect. But I wasn’t cheating. I never asked for it. There’s a song by Badlands on the radio. It’s called ‘I don’t live in the same places’ and I think it’s about being different. But that song is how they got to be known. You couldn’t say they’re famous, because they’re not popular. They’re alternative, which means that mothers and tennis players and people with briefcases will never buy their CD. But still.

  ‘Yeah well, Cedy, if you learned to drum in a month or two, you could get in on the act. Imagine that.’ Barnaby laughed and I snorted.

  ‘As if.’ But some part of my brain had a wriggle going in
it, and I got out of bed feeling a bit better than I did when I got in.

  Chapter 8

  This is how my thinking went as I walked towards school that morning.

  Albury.

  Boy, I hate that place. I mean, why would anyone start a circus way out there? Stupid.

  Albury. Boy.

  I’m going to kick that stone as far as I can.

  Not a great kick. Never mind. More important things to mind about.

  Like Albury.

  Such a long way away from me. We drove through it once on the way to Sydney for a family holiday. It would probably take about four hours on a train to get there, and it’s not exactly a ripping part of the country. Okay, let’s not be rude about Albury because actually it’s got a great raging river running through it, which is about ten times as wide as the Merri Creek and about ten times more exciting and scenic and swimmable, so there you go, that’s a big plus. The problem with Albury is just that it’s far away from me.

  Now, some people might say that’s exactly what’s great about Albury; not its distance from me exactly because, let’s face it, most people in the world don’t even know who I am (though they will one day, once I’m infamous). For now, it has to be admitted, I don’t even have an ant-sized amount of importance in the lives of the Albury-dwellers in general, but what they like about Albury is its distance from the city, which makes it a country town and not a major urban centre of much cultural activity and smog and stressed people honking. So in the end you have to just say, ‘Oh well, horses for courses,’ or whatever that saying is. My mum, for instance, would probably love Albury because she likes to think she’s the earth mother of Brunswick, though she really isn’t. Look at our backyard compared to Caramella’s. Ours is neglected and flapping. Caramella’s is all abundantly organised with beds of vegies and lines of fruit trees. But then again, Mum’s a single mother and she has a lot of other stuff to do before she can even think about gardening. Mum and I simply couldn’t live in Albury (and let’s not even consider Barnaby, because he’d just laugh in a scoffing way at the idea). The reason we couldn’t live in Albury is that Mum wouldn’t have her friends there and, more importantly, I wouldn’t have mine. I mean, who knows, Albury could even be a great place, and you could probably find a paddock for your horse, but what it doesn’t have is Caramella, Oscar, Ricci, Pablo and Robert, and all the rest.