Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls

by Danielle Wood

  Adrian drove, concentrating on the streets he travelled each day as if they had overnight become foreign. His soft nails flexed against the leather of the steering wheel. By the side of the river, he pulled over and turned to Meredith. Nervously, he fitted over her head the elastic of a sleeping mask. The sleeping mask was hers, she noted. She kept it in the bathroom for shutting out the light when she took long baths. She was momentarily put out that he had taken it without asking. When the car began to move again, Meredith could judge for a time, by the pattern of turns and roundabouts, where they were. Then she became uncertain, and lost her way.

  After he parked, Adrian helped Meredith out of the car and took her by the hand. They walked a short way, and then she heard him whispering to someone and the sound of coins falling over each other into a pocket. He guided her through something that felt like a turnstile, cold metal touching her on her stomach and her flanks. She had to push herself through like a boiled egg through the neck of a bottle. Blindfolded, Meredith could smell food, and hear children. Adrian walked her along quickly, talking loudly about trust, and about the ability of the other senses to compensate rapidly for the loss of sight.

  ‘Okay Mere, you can take it off now,’ he said.

  First there was the sunlight, which made her blink. Then, as her eyes slowly focused, the images that confronted her appeared, between blinks, as if in a slide show. She could almost hear the slides shunting through the carousel. And these are the things she saw:

  1. Directly in front of her, Adrian Purdy, down on one knee, a shivering bunch of white daisies in one hand. click

  2. A small child in a striped jumper, and in the child’s hand, the stick of a toffee apple. The red bulb of the apple was swinging like a pendulum towards the earth, and the child’s mouth, smeared red, was opened in glee. click

  3. Behind Adrian Purdy, a cyclone fence. click

  4. Over the cyclone fence, reaching, coming towards the shoulder of Adrian Purdy’s suede jacket, a gently swaying prehensile trunk.

  An elephant family is led by a matriarch, with the matriarch being the oldest and most experienced of the herd Elephant Information Repository

  My Auntie Rhona, my mother’s oldest sister and Meredith’s mother, does not remember the debacle with the pig card in the newsagency. If Meredith were to tell her about the lasting impact of the incident, Rhona would laugh good-naturedly and say, ‘Oh, you silly girl! What funny things you remember!’ She regards Meredith as her easiest child. She was always compliant, malleable, even-tempered and happy. She could almost have been pretty, with her flawless skin and shining curls a hair’s breadth from black.

  For Meredith’s twenty-fifth birthday, Rhona planned a special gift. She had framed for Meredith an enlarged photograph of a female elephant on her knees by a waterhole, her trunk wrapped around the torso of a calf sinking into the mire.

  Rhona had been worried about her daughter. Although Meredith insisted she was fine, she had definitely been in low spirits since her abrupt and unexplained break-up with Adrian Purdy. Rhona was looking forward, in a quiet way, to the expression on Meredith’s face when she unwrapped the photograph at her birthday party. The image spoke to Rhona of the extraordinary strength of her love for her daughter, of her determination to pull her through any kind of difficulty. And she was sure that Meredith, who was, bless her, so fond of elephants, would understand the message implicit in that coiled trunk.

  pink elephant

  A hallucination, esp. as reputedly experienced by drunks Macquarie Dictionary

  I was there on the night of Meredith’s birthday dinner (my gift to her was a pen in the shape of an elephant’s head, the nib extruding from the tip of its trunk) and it seemed to me that all of Meredith’s gathered friends were wearing lipstick a shade too bright, or a tie with a cartoon character grinning a little too insanely. They were determined not to allow the celebration to be affected by the absence of Adrian, and so they had brought with them to the little Thai restaurant their brightest, most shiny selves. Katrina King, as the closest friend, took the lion’s share of the responsibility for being in high spirits and kept putting her arm around Meredith’s shoulders and squeezing tight.

  Several of Meredith’s friends were wondering why Meredith was not opening her birthday gifts. On a small table behind Meredith a pyramid was forming. At its base was a large flat parcel wrapped in handmade paper and affixed with a card that said with love from Mum. The fact was that Meredith was not opening her presents in case they robbed her of her resolve. She was going to do it. She had promised herself that she was going to stand up in front of her parents, her siblings, her closest friends and favourite colleagues, and confess to them that she did not particularly like elephants. And to this end, she had written for herself a speech:

  Meredith’s Speech

  I have been searching for a collective noun for elephants. I know you’re all thinking, It’s a herd of elephants, Meredith! In my house, I have so many elephants that I need a collective noun larger than just four letters. I thought first of an ‘engorgement’ of elephants. Then I thought of a ‘lumber’ of elephants. Then I got it. What I have is a ‘burden’ of elephants.

  You see, there has been a terrible mistake. I don’t even really know myself how it started. Someone gave me an elephant, and then someone gave me another, and then everyone gave me elephants. I never chose elephants for myself, you see. I would not wish for you to think that I have not appreciated your gifts. Even if I am not especially fond of elephants, I am especially fond of all of you and I appreciate more than any material item in the world the love that came along with each and every one of those damned elephants. I have elephantiasis — the condition of being afflicted with too many elephants — and I ask you, as my family and my dearest friends, to help me find a cure.

  Meredith’s speech was short and, she hoped, sweet enough to save her — although she wondered if she should say the word ‘damned’ or leave it out for fear of offending Katrina King’s fiancé, a religious minister in training.

  It was a Tuesday night and the Thai restaurant was empty but for Meredith’s party, which took up a long, thin table, broken into thirds by two enormous lazy Susans. Meredith and her friends and family had chosen the banquet menu. Staff cleared the remains of the savoury courses, taking away plates with leftover blobs of sweet chilli sauce and squeezed wedges of lime. Dessert — bananas poached in sweet coconut milk, lychees and a selection of ice-creams — was still to come, but for a moment the table was empty except for wineglasses and splotches of curry sauce on the pink tablecloth.

  Meredith chose this clear, foodless moment between courses to stand up, clear her throat and unfold the single piece of paper she had held all night in her pocket, feeling its dangerous secret against her thigh almost as if it were a gun in its holster. Once she was on her feet, and the gathering had fallen silent, Meredith’s bravado abandoned her. It left her standing, breathing heavily, thinking that perhaps she could just fold away the paper and say a few cobbled-together words of thanks and sit down again. Then she remembered Adrian Purdy at the zoo, kneeling between herself and an elephant named Bhutan, proposing marriage. Her resolve steeled again. She would have no more moments of her life destroyed by elephantiasis. So intent was she now upon her task that she ignored the noise going on in the restaurant foyer, and began.

  ‘I have been searching for a collective noun for elephants. I know you’re all thinking, It’s a herd of elephants, Meredith!’

  Sherrilyn Grey, a highly strung teacher’s aide who spent Thursday afternoons in Meredith’s room, emitted a snort of suppressed laughter. Meredith smiled appreciatively at Sherrilyn’s acknowledgment of her wit.

  ‘In my house, I have so many elephants that I need a collective noun larger than just four letters —’

  The restaurant’s sound system began to crackle with the first touch of a needle on vinyl and Meredith looked up to find that she had not had, and did not have, the attention of her guests. They
were looking towards the foyer door as if they had become wax effigies of themselves.

  The speakers nearly burst with the opening chords of a tune. It isn’t, thought Meredith. And then she thought, Oh God, it is. And it was: The Baby Elephant Walk. Through the doorway came a saggy, baggy pink elephant. It was an elephant in two halves, like a circus horse, and the rear end was jack-knifing dangerously to the left. The guests on the opposite side of the table to where Meredith was standing parted in order to make room for the swaggering animal to approach.

  The pink suit split in two. The halves rumpled to the floor in two candy-pink shag-pile cocoons around the feet of blond men — their bronzed backs and buttocks bared — who swayed to comic lurches of the music. Hands clasped firmly over their crotches, they leaped onto the table and took their places on the twin lazy Susans. When they removed their hands, and spun around to face Meredith, she saw elephant ears fanning out over the elegram boys’ washboard stomachs, the black circles inside plastic toy eyes spiralling inside their casing, turning around and around in time with the trunks, the long, grey, pink-tipped trunks rotating like tassels on a showgirl’s nipples.

  Sherrilyn Grey was laughing so hard — mouth open, body shuddering — that her laugh had become soundless. Katrina King was dabbing at the corner of her eyes with a serviette which was almost the same shade as the electric blue mascara that was seeping down under her eyelids. Her fiancé doubled over in his seat and the skin on his face changed to the same colour as the hair of his silk-tie Yosemite Sam. The elegram boys swung their trunks to the left in unison, then the right in unison, then in opposite directions. They threw their trunks in the air and made trumpeting sounds. They smiled. Their perfect teeth glittered.

  Auntie Rhona was feigning shock, hands over her eyes. The Thai waitresses in their narrow split-skirts of emerald green lined up along the bar, watching the spectacle, shrieking with mirth. The elegram boys performed the final flourish of their routine before leaping down from the table and positioning themselves to pose for photographs with the birthday girl. They flanked her tremendous bulk like a pair of pink and bronze bookends, their shimmering chests heaving lightly. For quite a long time nobody, not even those with their cameras trained on Meredith and the elegram boys, not even me (I am ashamed to say), but not Auntie Rhona either, noticed that Meredith — her face creased, her cheeks marked by slender tracks of tears — wasn’t laughing.

  TRAVEL

  Rosie Little in the Mother Country

  This is a story that begins with the fact that my grandmother on the Little side was frightfully, frightfully English. Although she was prevailed upon, as a young bride, to immigrate to Australia, her Englishness proved quite impervious to the antipodean climate. When my father reached his late teens, Gran sent him ‘back’ to England to complete his education, being firmly of the opinion that while it was one thing to raise a son in a colony, it was quite another to allow yokels with rising inflections to teach him about Wordsworth. But despite Gran’s best efforts, my father’s Englishness was considerably more diluted than her own, and when the time came for him to send me off on my tour of duty to the Mother Country, it was for a holiday only. For the months between the end of school and the beginning of university, I was to stay with my godfather and his wife, a childless couple who lived in the countryside just out of London.

  ‘The countryside just out of London,’ I said to myself over and over in the excited weeks before I left. ‘The countryside just out of London,’ I told people behind the counters in shops, if they would listen. ‘The countryside just out of London,’ I told my friends, my vowels plumping up with each repetition.

  The English countryside I knew well, for although I had never been out of Australia, my childhood had been filled with the kinds of books that had the word ‘hedgerow’ in the opening paragraph. I did not know specifically what a ‘hedgerow’ was, although I assumed it to be a cousin to the more prosaically named ‘hedge’. But my ignorance was about to be rectified. I was about to see hedgerows, and primroses and brambles and cowslips (whatever the hell they were) and to discover, ambling about between them, darling little rabbits and hedgehogs that would eat nuts and berries from my hand.

  On the day before I left, Gran gave me the address of her childhood home.

  ‘It’s not all that far from where you’ll be staying. Go to see it if you get the chance. It’ll stir something in you,’ she said, pouring tea into her best china cups, the ones bearing the likenesses of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer.

  Soon I was sitting at altitude, wearing synthetic airline socks and carefully peeling the foil lids from cups of orange juice and tiny packages of butter, determined not to overlook one single aspect of my adventure.

  ‘The countryside just out of London,’ I told the flight attendant, as well as the Asian gentleman sitting beside me, just in case he’d not heard me tell the flight attendant. When the cabin lights were dimmed, I pushed the button to recline my seat and began to review what I knew of the godfather into whose loving care I would be entrusted, in the countryside just out of London.

  Details were sketchy. I knew that his name was Larry Trebilcock, and that he and my father had met within the hallowed halls of their respectably ancient university. I knew, too, that this sounded terribly Brideshead Revisited, but I assumed that my father and godfather had always been too interested in women to spend many summery riverside afternoons wearing cricket jumpers together. I knew that Trebilcock was pronounced ‘tre-bill-coe’, and that this was an English thing, like St John being pronounced ‘sinjin’ if it was a first or a middle name, but not if it came last. And that, I realised, was about all I actually knew.

  I was met at Heathrow not by Larry, who was in an important business meeting in London, but by his wife Judy. She was a quiet and sandy-faced person who reminded me rather a lot of a flounder, and who had the childless woman’s propensity to overfeed her cats. These gleaming and corpulent creatures were at the front door, mewing for second breakfast, when we pulled into the driveway of a vine-covered house, in the countryside …oh, you know.

  Both the countryside and the house were as perfect as their counterparts in my seventeen-year-old imagination. On that day, the overcast sky seemed pressingly close, and the ground was covered with wet, satiny grass. I too felt all misty-moisty and soft-focused as I followed Judy through the small-windowed rooms of her home, around the winding paths of the garden and into the garage. In here was a skeletal Aston Martin, with various of its parts and panels piled up or leaning nearby. In a far corner, clear of where they might drip blood on any deep green duco, two headless pheasants were hanging by their feet from a clothesline.

  ‘Lawrence shot those,’ Judy said, her placid expression betraying neither pride nor disgust. ‘He likes to go hunting on weekends.’

  I should make it quite clear that I do not regard childlessness, per se, as a tragic state. In fact, I think that more people should probably give it a try. But tragic it was for Judy, who was unable to have children, yet would have been in her element with a tribe of quiet and sandy-faced kids to feed. She was the first woman I had ever met who was not a stay-at-home mum, but just a stay-at-home wife. I had no idea what this might entail, but I began to find out on that first evening, watching her as she moved around her kitchen like a slow dancer between stove-top and bench, her black cat and her ginger cat keeping perfectly in step as they purred around her slippered feet. She chopped and measured and mixed and simmered, and it was quite clear that neither our meal, nor the cats’, was going to be an ordinary affair.

  At the precise moment that Judy set down on the table the third of three beautifully garnished plates of sole in dill sauce, the front door opened. I smiled in readiness to greet my godfather, whom I’d last seen at my christening, back before I was able to focus my eyes particularly well. Now, however, I could see quite plainly that the man walking into the dining room was of average height, with straight fair hair, the majority of which was on th
e back of his head. In front, it receded from an owlish face set with thick glasses that shrank his eyes down to pinpricks. Although he was wearing a suit, I could, if pushed, imagine him in knee-length breeches and a hound’s-tooth hunting cap, a magnificently feathered bird slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Hello Larry!’ I said, leaping up from the table.

  ‘Rosemary,’ he said, nodding in my direction in a way that seemed not to invite hugging.

  That was okay, we didn’t have to hug. I sat down again.

  ‘Rosie, please! Nobody calls me Rosemary. Not even Mum when she’s cross. It’s so lovely to be here, and to meet you again. I can’t get over how perfect everything is. It’s just how I imagined. I love your Aston Martin, by the way. Have you been working on it long?’

  He raised his eyebrows and looked at his wife, who looked at me imploringly.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, putting a hand to my mouth as it dawned on me that she wanted me to hush.

  Larry removed his blazer and placed it over the back of his chair, adjusting it so that its shoulders were equidistant from the edges of the chair-back. I observed a bit of tummy collapse over the waist of his pants and quiver like a poached egg does when it first hits the toast. He removed one cufflink, then the other, and dropped them one each into the left and right side pockets of his blazer. He rolled up his shirtsleeves — three quick tucks each side — then loosened his tie, and sat down at the table. I thought, for a moment, since Judy was sitting with her head slightly bowed and her hands in her lap, that we might be about to have grace. But then Larry picked up his knife and fork and began to flake apart the fish on his plate.

  And so we ate, and did not speak. Our speechlessness amplified all the small noises of a meal: the squeaks of silver on china, the setting down of a wineglass on a coaster, the muted chewing of soft fish-flesh. I became aware of a rhythm to Larry’s mastication and started to keep count. He chewed twenty times per mouthful, rarely more or less, although sometimes he paused to purse his lips and extrude a small white fishbone and place it, at a regular interval from the last, on the scalloped rim of his china plate. Soon all that remained of his meal was the frame of the fish and this tidy parade of curving bones. As his knife and fork clattered together on the plate, I breathed out in relief, certain that now conversation would begin in earnest.