Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls

by Danielle Wood

  For what seemed like a long time he stood there, although I couldn’t hear anything except water trickling around my ears, not even the sound of him breathing.

  Christmas wasn’t so much white as crystalline. Stretched across the narrow window of my bedroom at Larry and Judy’s house was a spider’s web threaded with sparkling beads of ice, and through it I could see the lawn frozen into spikes. Downstairs, there was a single, lonely present under the potted Christmas tree on the sideboard. It was for me.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ said Judy, as I unwrapped the gift of a pair of lamb’s wool slippers. Guiltily. I was almost certain that she didn’t know about the gift I’d already received, the one I’d found at the end of my bed when I’d woken: a three-pack of Marks & Spencer underpants (white, embroidered, dainty) that wasn’t wrapped, but had a gift tag that read ‘FROM SANTA’ in Larry’s uptight capital letters. He had been in my room when I was asleep. Ick. I bundled the knickers into a discreet compartment of my suitcase in the hope that out of sight would soon transpose into out of mind.

  Lunch, held in the formal dining room and attended by Judy’s parents and Larry’s aged mother, involved a Royal Worcester dinner service, two pheasants with chestnut stuffing, and an entire vegetable patch roasted to perfection.

  ‘You are so lucky, Lawrence,’ said his mother from beneath her orange crepe-paper hat. ‘Judy is the most superb cook.’

  ‘Why do you think I married her?’ he asked, carving into the voluminous breast of a bird.

  Nobody laughed or smiled. Maybe it wasn’t even meant to be a joke.

  It was on Christmas night, at Julian’s place, while his parents were safely turkey-and-red-wine replete in their part of the house and his younger sisters asleep, that I got the present I really wanted.

  ‘Have you done this before?’ Julian asked me after a couple of moist hours of petting, his naked and caramel-skinned body poised for entry.

  ‘Technically, yes. Effectively, no. What about you?’

  ‘Not even technically, I’m afraid,’ he said, trying to coordinate himself to hang onto the base of the condom and find the right spot at the same time.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, catching sight of the time on his wristwatch. ‘It’s already midnight.’

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be back by now.’

  ‘Oh, you want to go?’ he asked, disappointed but polite as ever, as he pulled away.

  ‘No, no,’ I said, taking matters into my own hands.

  ‘You should go.’

  ‘Shhh,’ I said, kissing his Turkish delight lips.

  ‘What will you tell Larry?’

  ‘I will tell him the truth.’

  ‘You will not.’

  ‘I will. I will tell him the honest-to-goodness, absolute truth.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I will tell him,’ I said, ‘that I was out in the woods, picking flowers.’

  Three hours beyond my curfew, light in the head and sticky between the legs, I stood on the footpath outside Larry and Judy’s. Avoiding the dead giveaway of the white gravel path, I crossed over the grass and went quietly through the garage — past the place where the Christmas pheasants had bled onto the floor — and around to the French doors that led into the living room. Slowly, slowly, slowly, I pushed down on the handle and eased the door open into the muffling thickness of the drawn curtains within. Quietly, I slipped through the gap in the curtains to find Larry, sitting in his pyjamas, dressing-gown and slippers, waiting up for me. The lights in the room were dimmed. Someone like Carly Simon sang a smoky song through the speakers of the stereo.

  ‘I can just imagine what you’ve been up to,’ Larry said.

  As he came towards me, I backed away, and soon he was between me and the door I’d just come through. His owlish face, normally quite waxy and pallid, was flushed as if he’d drunk too much port.

  ‘While you are here in my house, I am responsible for you, and I cannot have you out behaving like a wanton little slut,’ he said, with a disturbing amount of relish.

  ‘I am not having this conversation with you,’ I replied, trying to keep my voice steady even though I was shaking and could feel my pulse everywhere, even in the tips of my ears.

  ‘I am in loco parentis here, and I have no intention of sending you home to your father pregnant,’ he hissed.

  ‘Well you are completely loco if you think that I’m going to let you talk to me like this. My father doesn’t talk to me like this.’

  ‘What you need, you smart-mouthed little tart, is a good —’ He lunged at me. ‘— spanking.’

  But I was too quick for him. I was up the stairs and behind the locked door of my room before he could catch me.

  I was safe. But trapped, since even if I’d been prepared to find a way down from the upper-storey window, its double-glazed security panels opened out only a few inches. I could hear, out in the hallway, the sound of Larry placing a call on his rotary dial telephone. He was dialling an awful lot of numbers, and I realised that because of the time difference, it was not an even slightly unreasonable hour at which to ring my parents. He would catch them on the back deck, eating sandwiches full of leftover ham, while they listened on the radio to the Boxing Day test.

  ‘Nymphomania,’ I heard Larry tell my mother (another word I would not have been familiar with if it had not been for Geoffrey Smethurst), and ‘inappropriate behaviour’, along with ‘might need to get some professional help’. None of which bothered me half as much as when I heard him say ‘and the odd bit of cash has gone missing out of Judith’s purse, too’.

  And so it was that my adventure in the Mother Country was cut short. Although special dispensation was granted for me to have a stilted and supervised lunch with Julian before I was plunged, lily-white and lovesick, into the sudden, roasting, redbrick heat of a suburban Australian January. Mum and Dad took me to a counsellor who pronounced me quite normal, but it took a while, nonetheless, for the trace of suspicion to disappear from my parents’ faces when they looked at me with loving concern.

  ‘What exactly happened?’ my mother asked repeatedly during the weeks I spent indoors with the curtains drawn, oscillating between wilting and pining.

  Everything, I wanted to say. But then, not really anything at all. There were no fingerprints. There was no evidence. Even the underpants looked innocent with their forget-me-not trim.

  ‘He does care about you, darling, he’s your godfather,’ she said.

  ‘Not anymore he’s not,’ was all I would say.

  What had my parents seen in him, I wondered? What had been the basis of their friendship? I took down the baby-pink album from a high shelf in my parents’ den and found the images I was looking for on the third or fourth page of my life. There was a picture of me, my face a small, indistinct disc somewhere near the top of a smocked layette. There was a picture of my christening cake, shaped and intricately iced in the image of a baby’s pram. There were pictures of my parents, sometimes separately, but mostly standing together in matching purple outfits. And there was Larry, holding me out at arm’s length as he made his solemn C of E vow to keep me on the straight and narrow. I wanted to snatch my infant self away from him. How would I ever forgive my parents for not only inviting the bad fairy to my christening, but delivering me straight into his hands?

  In fact it was only very recently that I did forgive them. Properly. And for that, we must thank my mother’s conversion to the scrapbooking craze. Pinking shears and cropping tools blazing, she took to my baby pictures, and then gave me the revamped collection for my birthday. Perhaps it was the new layout that made me see the photos of my christening differently. Or maybe it was simply the passing of time. Either way, by now the photos stirred up nothing more than curiosity. Which of the crimes my parents had committed on the day of my christening, I wondered, should be considered the more unforgivable? Appointing Larry Trebilcock as my godfather, or dressing the way they did for the occasion? It was even possible, I reali
sed, that each of these lapses of judgment could be made explicable in the light of the other. For if you could choose to attend your baby daughter’s christening in a flared purple suit and a psychedelic black and magenta tie — with your facial hair trimmed, I might add, into the beard-but-no-moustache combination known as the Amish or Abe Lincoln style — then surely you could make dubious choices about friendships. And if you could imagine that you looked fetching in a purple crepe dress with a white ruffle around the edge of the bodice, it might also be possible for you to imagine that Larry Trebilcock was a good sort of a chap to be made responsible for a girl-child’s spiritual guidance. Amish beards once were the height of fashion. Ergo, Larry might once have seemed a good candidate to be godfather to one’s only daughter. Fashions change, after all.

  BEAUTY

  The Wardrobe

  On the day Justine moved in with Henri, he pushed the clothes in his wardrobe to one side to make room for hers. The wardrobe, with its oak-heavy doors closed, had looked to be an antique. But inside was a modern maze of shelving and compartments, all of which were filled with clothes that seemed to Justine to be weighty with quality. There were jumpers — black, cream, caramel and toffee — in softest alpaca, or else in thick-spun merino, densely cabled. There were jackets in supple suede and leather, and a woollen winter coat lined with black fur as luxuriant as a bear’s. The coat-hangers of dark polished timber looked expensive as well.

  Justine had left behind everything but her nicest and most favourite things, but even these seemed tatty hanging in the wardrobe next to Henri’s clothes. Thinning patches showed in cheap cotton, as did the pilling on part-synthetic jumpers. She could see the unevenness of her hems and how her seams frayed for lack of finishing.

  ‘You don’t really wear this,’ Henri said without a question mark, singling out a beige cardigan.

  ‘I don’t?’

  ‘Justine.’

  It was ribbed, tweedy, and made mostly out of real wool. It had been loose to start with, but was now stretched at the side seams from being hung on the line. It had a wide collar and knobbly buttons that Justine now saw, for the first time, were woven out of vinyl and not leather. Not that she would have cared even if she had noticed before. It was a cardigan for being relaxed and comfortable and having nothing important to do. It was a Sunday cardigan.

  ‘You’d look like something out of Starsky & Hutch,’ he said, tugging the cardigan off its hanger. It more than filled the small bin in the corner of his bedroom, one of its sleeves reaching over the side as if waving for rescue. But Justine was not paying attention. Soon all of the clothes she was wearing, and all of the clothes he was wearing, were heaped on the floor beside his bed, and she was thinking how, even when he was undressed, he was better covered than her. Hung next to his in a wardrobe, she thought, her pale and freckled skin would look as threadbare as her clothes.

  In the first few days that she lived with Henri, Justine spent time delving her toes into the deep green plush of his carpet, padding over tiles of his bathroom floor, and wondering if any of these surfaces would ever feel as if they belonged to her. The decision to leave home had been an easy one. The only difficult thing had been the discussion with her mother, who had just looked down into the squares of her newspaper crossword puzzle when Justine asked her what she thought.

  ‘Well?’ Justine had prodded.

  ‘I’m not sure. That’s all.’

  ‘You think I’m too young.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘I’m nineteen years old. You were married by now.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ her mother had said, looking up at last. ‘Perhaps it’s just that I’ll miss you.’

  ‘You always knew I would go. Nobody stays out here. Well, nobody except Jill.’

  Her mother had not leapt to the defence of her elder daughter (who showed no signs of moving on from her job in the local video store). She had simply sighed, indicating that she was, as ever, their incontrovertibly and irritatingly impartial referee.

  ‘I thought that when you went it would be for university, or for a job. Not for a man.’

  ‘He’s more interesting than guys my age. He knows all about things.’

  ‘I love you, darling, and I worry for you. That’s all.’

  ‘You don’t like him.’

  ‘We barely know him,’ her mother had said, and Justine had known herself to be included in the ‘we’.

  Henri worked long hours, and in the evenings before he arrived home Justine walked the stairs between the storeys of the tall and narrow house, counting each of the steps in an effort to own them. She noticed how the green plush was flattened in the centre of each step between the lowest storey and the middle storey of the house, but on the stairs that led up to the attic it was as good as new. The attic was neither secret nor locked, only cold and disused, nothing in it but some old department store mannequins. They had been stranded there by a deal gone wrong. Henri often bought things cheaply and sold them at a profit: the walls of a long passageway in the house were presently taken up with bolts of luscious imported fabrics. The buyer of the mannequins, Henri explained, had gone broke before the deal went through.

  The mannequins disturbed Justine. She didn’t like the way they bore their dismemberment so casually. The ebony girl balanced her torso on the locking pin that would have joined her to the racehorse legs that stood beside her.

  A woman’s upper body, its bald head the colour of stocking gussets, lay face down and parallel to its disconnected legs. Justine felt for the redhead most of all, because she reminded her of herself. She swivelled the mannequin’s wig around the right way so that the edge of her thick, matted fringe rested on her painted eyebrows, and tried to find her missing arm. There was a pile of limbs in the corner, the paint of their skin chipping away from fingers and toes, but Justine couldn’t find one to match the redhead’s fair, pinkish skin.

  Not long after the cardigan incident, Henri took Justine to a smart street in the city, to a boutique with shop girls as thin as straps of liquorice. One had a long ponytail and wore a miniature black dress and retro high heels. The other wore flares ruffled from the knees down and her hair in a sharp quiff that put Justine in mind of a shark fin. These women would be the type, Justine thought, to factor in the calories in the sugar-coating of their contraceptive pills. They greeted Henri like a pair of cats on heat, kissing his cheeks in the European style and brushing his lapels with their slender hands. Justine hung back in the doorway, taking in the opulence of the dressing-room drapes and the size of the gilt-framed mirrors, and wondering just how many other women Henri had brought here to shop.

  ‘A redhead?’ asked the ponytail girl, as if it were an unlikely choice.

  ‘I like them fiery,’ said Henri, grasping Justine by the waist, and the ponytail raised a dextrous and sceptical eyebrow.

  ‘So we’ll be staying away from most of the oranges, the pinks and the reds,’ said the shark fin, making clacking noises with coat-hangers as she began flicking through the racks.

  ‘And leaning towards rich creams, chocolate browns and greens, lovely greens,’ said the ponytail, her voice melodious over the percussive clicks.

  ‘Oh this, yes, this,’ said the shark fin, pulling out a swish of soft green with striped ribbon trimming at the capped sleeves and at the waist.

  ‘The martini dress. Oh, yes! You must have that. And this,’ said the ponytail, bringing out a fitted coat in cream linen densely embroidered with burnished flowers and green leaves.

  ‘Which would go with these,’ said the shark fin, placing by Justine’s feet a pair of knee-high and high-heeled brown backless boots with square toes and brogue patterning.

  ‘Perfect,’ sighed the ponytail.

  The shark fin held out a long, floating shirt in teal-coloured silk and Justine liked the forgiving width of its soft, draping folds.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she ventured, but Henri shook his head.

  He nodded to a snug black brocad
e pants suit and an olive knit bolero and a wispy evening gown with a split framed by feathers; to a passing parade of tight pants and skirts, tops, jumpers, dresses, wraps, shoes and stockings. Justine came from a family of statuesque women who referred to themselves as ‘big-boned’. But to wear the sleek and fitted pieces Henri was selecting, she would need to be an X-ray.

  ‘You don’t think I should try these things on?’ she said, when the counter was piled with linen and satin and velvet and lace, and when the floor was stacked with boxes of shoes.

  ‘They’ll fit,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not always the same size in tops and bottoms.’

  ‘Don’t worry. They’ll fit.’

  ‘There’s no way I’ll get into this,’ she said, holding up the martini dress and looking in all the usual places for a size label, finding it in none. ‘This couldn’t be more than a ten, and I haven’t worn size ten anything since I was at high school.’

  ‘Ah, you’d be surprised.’

  ‘Trust him, hon,’ said the shark fin at the cash register. ‘Henri’s a real wizard with fit.’

  Henri put all of her new clothes away in the wardrobe himself, folding jumpers into shop-perfect squares and evenly spacing the hanging garments, similar colours together, fronts all facing the same way. And then, when he had finished, he lay back against the pile of bolsters and pillows at the head of his bed and asked: ‘May I have the pleasure?’

  ‘We haven’t even talked about how much all this cost.’

  This had been worrying her all day, sitting in the bottom of her stomach like the feeling she got when (contrary to her father’s firm principle) she signed something without reading the fine print first.

  ‘Why would you want to have a dull conversation like that when you’ve got a wardrobe full of new clothes to try on?’ he said, smiling indulgently.

  ‘So I don’t need to worry?’

  ‘No, you don’t need to worry.’