Annabelle could imitate Fergus perfectly. I can still see her, squatting in her backyard, staring into a nonexistent camera, saying: ‘And so to the Wahi-Wahi people – as the sands shift in their drought-ravaged region, where to, for them?’ while I howled with laughter on the grass.
Going to the Andrews’ house was like visiting a foreign country; instead of running screaming from one of my twin brothers’ endless pranks – fake spiders in our shoes, itching powder in our sleeping bags – we’d sit barefoot in the lounge room listening to Frank’s record collection: ‘Now what you can hear in this bit, girls, is Coltrane’s three-on-one chord approach – can you hear that? There!’ he’d say, shaking his head back and forth.
Annie would come in with her glass of wine and begin to dance; if Annabelle was in a good mood, she’d join her, and I would sit on the rug drinking them all in, Frank, Annie and Annabelle, and wonder how I got there.
My own family, by comparison, seemed impossibly dull, something I hadn’t really noticed before Annabelle entered the picture. Even Simone and Stella, who I’d known since kindy, seemed to fade into the background when she was around; next to her vividness, my oldest friends seemed like sepia cut-outs of themselves.
Until the arrival of the Andrews family, my own world had been enough, but in theirs I had glimpsed something completely irresistible – the promise of more. Harry and Rose sensed it too, and after my first visit to Annabelle’s house, Rose insisted my new friend come to mine, a prospect I fretted about all week.
But I needn’t have worried. Annabelle loved my house from the moment she set foot in it. She loved my parents, and Rose’s cooking. She even loved Mattie and Sam, my six-year-old brothers, twin catapults of mischief.
‘I want to go to your house, Tallulah, come on, let’s go see Harry and Rose,’ she’d say.
‘No, we went there yesterday, and anyway, why can’t we go to yours?’
‘Because, Tallulah, as you well know, we may not actually be able to find mine.’
I never did understand why Annabelle was so keen to come to my house; it seemed so tediocre.
But years later, when I thought of my childhood home, I would ache for it. I would close my eyes and go back to the street with its hot footpaths and its sprinklers pirouetting on front lawns. I could smell the freshly mown grass and hear my little brothers’ voices, yelling for Annabelle and me to come and play with them.
‘Hey Lulu, hey Annasmell, want to kick the footy?’ I hated them calling Annabelle ‘Annasmell’, but she would just laugh and yell back: ‘No thanks, we don’t play with mini-minors.’
After school, we would walk all along Plantation Street, past the Deans’ and the Hunters’ and the Delaneys’, until we would come to my house – a home that, to my eternal shame, had a huge sign out the front that read: De Longland Plumbers – Plumbing the Depths of Excellence.
The first time Annabelle saw that sign, I thought she would have a conniptionary.
‘Oh my God!’ she shrieked. ‘Plumbing the depths of excellence, you have got to be joking, plumbing the depths of . . . oh my God, I’m going to wet my pants.’
Finally noticing that I was not laughing quite so hard, she stopped clutching at her stomach, sat down and said, ‘Actually, it’s really very good.’
I sat down beside her in the gutter and she put her arm around me.
‘Tallulah,’ she said, ‘I’m not laughing at you, I think that if I needed, you know, some plumbing done, I would want someone who, who, you know, could plumb my excellent depths.’
We both burst out laughing, and my shame faded to two bright dots on my cheeks.
Then we went inside where my Rose was waiting for us with afternoon tea, singing to herself and smiling, so everything was all right.
Our house might have looked like every other one on Plantation Street – apart from the fact ours had a huge sign advertising Harry’s plumbing business out the front – but things behind the front fence were a little more complex.
Rose suffered from anxiety and depression, the anxiety coming in panic attacks that left her backed into a corner with startled eyes, the black dog of depression growling in her ear, leaving her weeping at the kitchen table, her floured hands moving restlessly through her hair, and Harry hovering helplessly nearby.
‘Come on, Rosey,’ he’d say, ‘buck up – Lulu will make you a nice cup of tea, won’t you, love?’
Sometimes it would work, she would look up and wipe her cheeks and say, ‘I don’t know how you put up with me, Harry,’ but other times she would just sit there, lost, until my father, with his red plumber’s hands, would go to her, saying: ‘I know, love, I know,’ kissing her hair and trying to find her in his great big arms.
‘It’s not her fault, Lulu,’ Harry would say to me, while I stood eight years old and bewildered outside her bedroom door. ‘She’ll come out when she’s ready. Let’s have a game of Monopoly, hey, just the two of us.’
Rose’s childhood family, Harry told me, had been broken.
Not strong and steady like ours, he said, but a home full of leaking pipes and creaking floorboards, cold draughts and doors hanging off hinges that no-one cared about enough to mend.
A mess, Harry said, just a mess, and when a thirteen-year-old Rose ran away from it, no-one came looking for her.
‘Just as well,’ Harry said.
I hated hearing about the house Rose came from, hated the people in it who had not bothered to look for her, hated that something they’d done to her somehow did something to us.
Rose was ultimately placed into a foster home where two middle-aged sisters stood on either side of her at their great, wooden stove and taught her the secrets of measuring, of timing, of adding just enough butter. They took her hands in their own to stir with a wooden spoon, to ladle, to whisk, to dollop, to ice.
They saved her, she said.
At night the three of them would stand at a long, oak table in the living room, spread with paper patterns for Rose to cut out, pins to attach to fabrics, ribbons and buttons to take from jars and sew. They gave her restless hands something to do, and it was there in that house that Rose first began naming her favourite dresses.
‘Shirley,’ she’d said, picking up a polka-dot halter-neck to wear to her first dance; ‘Maria,’ she’d announced, taking out the sensible black tunic she wore to work on Saturday mornings in the haberdashery department of David Jones; ‘Morag,’ she groaned at the pleated white shift the sisters insisted she wear to her weekly tennis lessons.
When I was little, I would steal into her room and peek in the box at the bottom of her wardrobe where she kept three of her most beloved dresses. Pressed between sheets of white tissue paper lay Audrey and Constance, after the two sisters who had first put a pair of scissors in her hands, and Grace, who she was wearing the first time she met Harry.
I loved Grace – she was buttercup yellow, with a Peter Pan collar and a row of pearl buttons down the front to the waist, which fell into a pin-pleated skirt. Grace had two deep pockets and in one of them, still, a rose-pink handkerchief, with the letter R in the corner, embroidered by one of the sisters. I would take the hanky out and put it to my nose, before folding it carefully and putting it back in the pocket.
It smelt like my mother, when she was happy.
The summer I met Annabelle, Rose’s wardrobe rustled with Phoebe, Greta, Betty, Alexis, Madeleine, Lauren and Kitty, perched on their padded hangers like a line of gorgeous chorus girls.
She would wear variations of these dresses for years, changing their styles to suit the decades, but not their names, each becoming as familiar to me as sisters. Only Grace and Audrey and Constance remained untouched, and irreplaceable, folded between the layers of tissue paper for little hands to caress and wonder over.
I could read Rose’s mood by the dress she was wearing, Phoebe and the rest of the girls for good days,
a succession of shapeless shifts for the bad. I called the shapeless shifts Doris – I don’t remember when I christened them that, I just know that sometimes, when Rose had been sitting at that kitchen table for far too long, it gave me some kind of comfort to say to myself, rocking back and forth on my bed: ‘It’s okay, she’s just having a Doris day.’
*
One night, after Annabelle had been at St Rita’s for a whole term, she asked me to sleep over at the River House, and when I got there I saw that Frank had laid out two canvas swags on the back lawn, a gas lantern beside them.
‘It will be magical, girls, you wait,’ he’d said, striding back and forth from the house to bring us pillows and books and packets of chips.
We had grumbled, I remember, moaning about mosquitoes and sticks in our bums, but Frank was right.
We lay under a tablecloth of stars thrown across the sky, and later when the moon rose above us, and the possums began to scurry along the fence line, we whispered our secrets to each other.
‘Dad drinks,’ Annabelle said, her head on my shoulder.
‘I know, I’ve seen him.’
‘No, Tallulah, you’ve seen him drink a glass of wine, sometimes he drinks a lot more than that.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘No. I hate it, so does Mum.’
‘What does he do?’ I whispered, scared of the answer.
‘He sings.’
‘That’s not so bad.’
‘Yes it is, he sings and dances and shouts his stupid poems and grabs at things in the house and goes on and on about them – “Look at this statue, Belle, look at this flower . . .”’
‘Oh.’
‘He’s embarrassing, Tallulah, he’s so . . . much.’
‘What does your mum do?’
‘She says, “You’re a fool, Frank” and goes to bed.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I just wait until he falls over, and then I go to bed as well.’
Annabelle wriggled her body beside me, her words coming out in little puffs of frost from her mouth.
‘Tallulah,’ Annabelle said, ‘why do you call your parents Harry and Rose? I mean I call mine Frank and Annie because they’re – well, they’re not your usual sort of parents, are they? But it seems kind of weird that you do.’
I turned my body towards her, so we lay facing each other, our heads close and explained that I didn’t have the usual sort of parents either.
I told her about Rose’s depression, and about how she had never really been – apart from the baking – a ‘mother’ type of mother, especially after the twins came when she had stopped being any sort of mother at all for a long time.
I told how I had looked after the twins myself and how it was around that time that I started calling her Rose, and how my father became Harry by default.
Then I took a deep breath and told her about my mother’s wardrobe.
‘Rose names her dresses.’
‘What?’
‘She names them, all of them.’
I told her about all the girls – Phoebe and Kitty and Greta – and about how Rose gave them each personalities, stories about where they had come from and what they had seen.
I told her and waited, eyes closed, for her judgement.
‘Wow,’ she breathed, ‘that’s really astoundazing.’
Our breath danced in the night air.
‘So,’ she said, snuggling into me, ‘who do you like the best?’
*
St Rita’s had a courtyard right in the middle of it, and in the middle of that stood a huge macadamia tree with fading coloured benches at angles beneath it for rumpled tunics to sit on.
‘Meet you at the tree,’ girls would say to each other, and if anything was going to happen at St Rita’s, it was going to happen under those branches.
I was sitting on one of the benches waiting for Annabelle between classes one day when two pairs of stocking-clad legs stood in front of me.
Stacey Ryan and Jacki Goldsmith.
The Piranha Sisters.
‘Hi Lulu,’ Stacey said.
‘Hi Lulu,’ Jacki echoed.
I looked at their feet.
‘So,’ said Stacey, ‘I was wondering if you could help me with a little problem I’ve got.’
Whenever Stacey and Jacki walked past, Annabelle would drop her voice and impersonate Fergus: ‘With these particular animals, you must never let them smell your fear, never meet their eyes; instead, present your bum in submission.’
I smiled a little at the thought, despite Stacey’s chipped-glass voice in my ear.
‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘I’m going to this party on the weekend, and I was thinking of wearing Lucy, but then I thought maybe Amanda would be better, you know, because she’s so much fun, but Jacki thinks maybe I should wear Ashley because she gets so jealous if I leave her behind . . .’
It took me a minute to digest what they were saying, a minute to understand that she was making fun of my mother, and another minute to wonder who had told her.
‘So,’ Stacey was saying. ‘What do you think, Tallulah, who should I choose?’
I stared at her, knowing that by the end of the lunch hour, the whole school would know about my family, know all about my mad mother and her chorus line of dresses and her weepy, floury hands.
‘Stacey,’ I said, ‘my mum, she’s really great most of the time but—’
A blur of chocolate pleats and olive-brown arms pinned Stacey against the tree. Annabelle Andrews, green eyes flashing.
‘Actually, Stacey,’ she said, ‘Tallulah’s mother’s got a name for you too.’
‘Really?’ Stacey challenged.
‘Yeah,’ said Annabelle, ‘it’s Stupid Fucking Bitch.’
Stacey struggled beneath Annabelle’s grasp while beside me Jacki just shifted her feet, opening and closing her mouth like a demented salmon.
‘And if you ever,’ Annabelle hissed in Stacey’s ear, ‘say anything to anyone about this, I will shove your arse clean through your ears, do you understand?’
Stacey nodded, bit her lip.
‘Right,’ said Annabelle, letting her go. ‘Glad that’s sorted.’
Then she took my hand, and led me away.
*
‘Shove your arse clean through your ears?’ I said later. ‘Shove your arse clean through your ears? Bloody hell, Annabelle, what are you? One of the Kray brothers?’
We were at my house later that day, replaying what had happened: I was doing my Jacki demented-fish imitation and Annabelle was rolling on my bed laughing.
It had taken us about two minutes of detective work to suspect that Mattie and Sam had told Jacki’s little brother, Ben, about Rose, and then it had taken ten cents each to get them to admit it.
Later that night, I thought about Annabelle, appearing like an avenging angel in Bata Scouts, and how I had never, not even for one second, thought it could have been her who had spilt my family’s particular brand of beans.
‘Swear,’ she had said that night under the stars.
‘I swear I will never tell about Frank,’ I said. ‘Your turn.’
‘I swear I will never tell about Rose,’ she echoed. ‘Now choose.’
Annabelle said we had to each pick one star out of the sky and make our vow upon it.
‘Right,’ she said, pointing at the sky, ‘see that little one right there, there near the Big Dipper, that sort of fuzzy-looking one? That’s mine.’
I pointed to another.
‘Mine,’ I said.
‘Okay,’ said Annabelle, ‘now hold my hands.’
We had knelt towards each other on the damp grass that night, locked eyes, and promised we would never betray each other.
I had felt her hands digging into mine, closed my eyes, and
meant it.
I never really considered that one day it would all change, that it was in fact changing right beneath our feet as we walked back and forth to each other’s houses.
Little ripples were forming below the concrete that would eventually split and divide us like the tectonic plates they taught us about in Geography. I had no idea about those cracking, shifting plates beneath us; I didn’t even feel them moving.
‘Housekeeping.’
So this was it, then.
I could not spend the rest of my life lying on the tiled floor of the Hotel du Laurent’s bathroom, I could not put the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door and live out the remainder of my years there, becoming one of those urban legends people talk about at dinner parties – ‘The Woman in Room 27’.
I would have to get up, get dressed and get used to the new me, the one who apparently thought it was acceptable to wake up with someone else’s groom after their wedding night.
Oh God.
‘Just a minute,’ I called out, grabbing at a dressing-gown on a hook, knotting it at my waist and making my way out of the bathroom and across the debris of the room.
I opened the door to the smiling face of a woman in her sixties who reminded me of Rose, soft and plump and carrying a pile of fresh white towels in her outstretched hands.
‘Housekeeping,’ she said again. ‘Is now a good time or would you like me to come back later?’
I looked at the shipwrecked room around me – What must these people think of us? I thought. ‘Would you mind giving me fifteen minutes?’ I asked her, my voice like smashed glass. ‘I’ll be out of here by then.’
‘Of course,’ she said, still smiling, before adding, ‘You all right, love? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I answered, and wondered how she knew, wondered how long I had lain on that floor, half-awake and half-dreaming, visited by the ghosts of childhoods past.
I shut the door behind her, began to gather up my belongings, and let them all return.
*
For Annabelle’s thirteenth birthday, Fergus sent her a Swiss Army knife, and the most impressive thing about it was that it really was from Switzerland, while all the boys we knew only owned ones that came from Snow’s corner store, three streets away.
Walking on Trampolines Page 2