We were meeting Harry there; he worked on Saturdays and wasn’t sure what time he’d finish.
After driving past the gallery and seeing the crowd already gathered on the footpath, smoking and gossiping, we’d parked a couple of blocks away, the walk giving me time to breathe a little in my satin dress.
By the time we arrived, there was a queue, which Laura was sensibly keeping well oiled, sending out waiters with champagne and beer while she ran around inside, rearranging paintings she had rearranged from their previous rearrangements.
On the edge of the footpath, a fidgety knot of media waited, and from where Ben and I were standing we could see who was arriving, illuminated by silver flashes of lightning from the photographers’ bulbs.
Fergus Andrews was first, blithely strolling up the street with his own camera around his neck, looking, I thought, exactly as I remembered him – ‘Where to, for the Wahi Wahi?’ – but as he got closer, I saw how life had marked him.
He was still wearing the same clothes, khaki pants and shirt, with lots of complicated pockets with zippers and netting – ‘Wanker still thinks he’s in the Kalahari,’ I heard one of the snappers say – but deep lines were carved into his skin, mottled by the sun.
He had lost none of his swagger, though, and as the photographers swung their glass eyes upon him, he raised his own camera and began snapping them snapping him all the way to the top of the stairs.
I took a step back to let him pass just as a taxi rolled up and Duncan rolled out. ‘Good evening, wonderful night for Frank Andrews, isn’t it? Or are you here for me? No? What a pity. So, who’s here so far? Christa? No? What about Annie? Has she arrived? I wonder if she’ll turn up with a great big scarlet ‘A’ attached to her frock, don’t you?’ Then, spying Laura at the door, he strode towards her, saying, ‘Lana, what a pleasure it is to see you, my dear!’
A few minutes later, in a show of solidarity for Frank, I supposed, Christa and Annie arrived together, arms improbably linked.
They looked, I thought, standing in the queue, like two jewels, Christa wrapped up in an emerald kimono, her shock of white hair pulled tightly off her face in a bun, and Annie beside her wearing layer upon layer. ‘It’s my Sara Lee signature look,’ she used to laugh, and tonight she was wearing a confusion of tights and tunics, skirts, scarves and a wide-belted coat, like a pirate, all in varying shades of purple.
Both women smiled at the cameras, but then hurried inside, Christa murmuring, ‘It’s Frank’s night!’ to a question from a journalist. Annie demurely followed her, saying nothing at all, for once playing the dutiful, albeit ex, daughter-in-law, but in reality desperate (I would find out later) for a drink.
Then Frank arrived with Harry behind him, clutching Rose’s teacake in a metal cake tin with a kitten on it.
‘Frank, Frank, over here Frank!’
‘Look up here, Frank, just to your left!’
‘Frank – Gary Clarke, Insight, how are you feeling about tonight?’
‘Christa and Annie arrived together, can we take it family relations are thawing?’
‘Frank – Pete Taylor, the Bulletin, is it correct half of the works inside have already been sold to the Flintoff collection?’
‘Frank, can you just look over here? Sorry, mate, would you mind getting out of the way?’
‘No worries.’ Harry stepped back, looking embarrassed to be there, hating being accidentally caught up in Frank’s limelight.
Frank put up his hand, silencing the mob.
‘Thanks very much for coming along tonight. It is, as you say, a big night for me and it’s a night I’m very glad to be sharing with all my family. So, thank you all once again.’ He nodded his head, signalling to Harry to follow him up the stairs.
‘Who’s that codger?’ Gary Clarke, Insight, said as he walked past me.
‘Dunno,’ Pete Taylor, the Bulletin, answered. ‘Someone said he’s a plumber.’
‘Come on,’ Ben said, ‘let’s go inside and find your dad.’
I nodded and followed him through the door, feeling, I realised with a shock, not so much relieved but slightly short-changed that Josh and Annabelle did not seem to be coming after all.
God, I thought, looking down at Rose’s beautiful frock and patting the flower behind my ear, all this for nothing.
Then I looked across the room and saw Harry standing in the middle of it, stiff as a board and clutching a cake tin.
‘Not quite for nothing,’ I smiled to myself as Ben and I made our way over to him, a slow, complicated journey through arms and elbows and shoulders and a woman who laughed like a hyena.
‘Harry,’ I said, ‘saw you with the reporters outside, suppose you think you’re big time now.’
‘Hi Harry,’ said Ben, ‘want a beer?’
‘Oh yeah, mate,’ Harry said, reaching for his wallet.
‘They’ll be complimentary, Harry,’ I told him. ‘It’s the only way they can get people to come to these things.’
Ben left to get the drinks, and Harry and I smiled at each other.
‘Complimentary, probably should have known that,’ he said, then looked down at the cake tin. ‘Probably shouldn’t have brought this either.’
‘I’ll take it,’ I told him, ‘don’t worry about it.’
Harry smiled at me again.
‘Well, love, you did it.’
‘I did.’
‘I’m glad you came, Lulu.’
‘And I’m glad you’re here.’
‘I stick out like balls on a bull, though, don’t I?’
‘You’re fine,’ I said.
‘So are you,’ he answered.
When Ben came back with the drinks, I took the tin off Harry and went to the bathroom, checked no-one was looking and dumped the cake into the bin, crossing myself for the sin I was committing against both my mother and Margaret Fulton.
Then I went into a stall, closed the door and sat down to breathe.
‘Lulu,’ came a hoarse whisper from outside the door, a pair of white-tasselled shoes underneath it.
‘Duncan,’ I hissed, ‘what are you doing in here?’
‘Let me in,’ he said, then, affecting a girlish giggle, ‘I’m busting.’
‘Duncan, get out before someone catches you.’
‘Open the door,’ he said again.
‘No.’
‘If I’m in there with you, there’s less chance of someone seeing me out here, now isn’t there?’
I opened the door. ‘What do you want?’ I whispered as he barged his way into the cubicle. ‘What are you doing? Duncan, I am not doing cocaine in here with you if that’s what you’re after.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Lulu, it’s about six hundred dollars an ounce at the moment, not that I can’t afford it, I just refuse to pay such ridiculous prices so that some pimp in Columbia can get a diamond in his tooth . . .’
‘Duncan,’ I clenched my teeth.
‘What? Oh yes, I came in here to talk to you privately, now get up on the seat.’
‘What?’
‘Get up on the seat – didn’t you ever smoke in the toilets at school? Of course you didn’t, Miss Goody-Two-Shoes – you get up on the seat so there’s only one pair of feet under here and it won’t look suspicious.’
‘Oh no, as if we don’t already look suspicious.’
‘Ssshh,’ he said, putting his fingers to my lips. ‘Someone’s coming.’
We stood stock-still, facing each other and holding each other’s shoulders in the small cubicle, while I held my breath and Duncan pulled a series of what he thought were amusing faces at me.
When the woman left he said, ‘Right, up on the seat.’
‘I am not getting up on the seat, Duncan.’
‘Fine,’ he said, ‘but don’t blame me if Sister Scholastica catches us.’
‘Well, I just wanted to tell you that I have just seen Annabelle and Josh arriving, so you don’t get a shock when you go outside – forewarned is forearmed and all that.’
A little knot began curling its way around my stomach.
‘Now, Lulu,’ Duncan was saying, ‘I know this is not an easy night for you and I am very proud of you for coming.’
‘Thank you,’ I whispered, resigned to my fate of listening to ‘Monologue in a Toilet’ by Duncan McAllister.
‘I also wanted to tell you that you look absolutely breathtaking and I have checked out Annabelle who I have never seen in the flesh before in my entire life, but who I can tell you is far too skinny and has aged badly, and also Josh, who I can tell you has definitely had his teeth whitened, and not very well.’
The bathroom door opened once more, and we both stood still and waited for whoever it was to leave.
‘The coast is clear, my dear,’ Duncan said a few minutes later. ‘Now, we may make our escape – you go first, I’ll follow in a few minutes.’
I made it as far as the door when he whispered again.
‘Lulu?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘what now?’
‘I just wanted to let you know I also brought Barney. He’s on a lead out the back and I have told him, should this toothy Josh person give you any trouble, he has my permission to eat him.’
I walked out of the bathroom with the now-empty cake tin in my hands and gave it to a passing waiter.
‘Could you please put this in the kitchen?’ I asked him, ‘I’ll collect it later’, then I walked over to where Ben was standing in the crush.
‘What were you and Duncan doing in the toilets?’ he asked, more curious than concerned – he had known my employer long enough now not to be bothered about any departures from normal behaviour.
‘Did you see him follow me in?’
‘Lulu, everyone saw him follow you in. He did everything but drop to the floor and roll in behind you.’
Wonderful.
‘Lulu,’ Harry’s voice beside me said, ‘here’s someone who wants to say g’day to you.’
I turned and looked straight into Frank Andrews’ familiar face, older, a bit more weather-beaten, whiskery, greying at the temples, and that lovely mouth breaking into one of its wide-split smiles.
‘Lulu,’ he said, ‘I’ve missed you.’
He held out his arms, and I went to him.
Deep breath.
Coffee, cigarettes, turpentine, red wine, paint.
I breathed him in and nothing had changed, I flew through the green door, back to that house with its flickering river, back to the Andrews yard swinging on a rope as Frank held on to my legs saying, ‘It’s all right, Lulu, I’ve got you.’
Safe.
I closed my eyes and breathed him in, my friend Frank.
We stood close.
‘So, Lulu, your dad’s been filling me in on what you’ve been up to all these years. You’ve done really well,’ Frank said.
‘Thanks Frank, but what about you? These paintings are beautiful, and there’re so many people here to help you celebrate – you even got Harry into an art gallery and that’s not easy.’
‘I’m sorry Rose couldn’t come,’ Frank said.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘me too. She just wasn’t up to it.’
‘I know, Harry keeps me in the loop.’
I nodded, watching impatient arms begin to pull at him.
‘I shouldn’t monopolise you, Frank, there’re lots of people who want to congratulate you – but I’d love to come to the Uxbridge Arms with you and Harry sometime.’
He nodded and held his arms out once more, brushing his mouth to my ear.
‘Before you go, see Laura Metcalfe, the gallery owner. She has something for you, Tallulah de Lovely.’
When Frank walked away I was left by myself for a few minutes. Harry was advising the art critic from the Bulletin about installing a grey water system, and Ben, I could see from the corner of my eye, was at Laura’s makeshift bar.
I decided to get another champagne, scanning the crowd for Josh or Annabelle, so I could hide if I spotted them, and headed for a table sprinkled with amber flutes.
‘So, I see you’re finally old enough to drink legally.’
Josh.
Standing just behind me, his voice in my ear.
I turned around to face him. Josh who, unlike Fergus, did not seem marked by life at all. He looked, I thought, exactly the same, except his hair was longer and he’d filled out more, a man version of the boy I had known.
All the times I’d rehearsed this, what I’d say, how I would behave (I’d thought the right move might be to act like I had just run across a long-gone and distant friend – ‘Josh?’ I’d say, a slight question mark in my voice, ‘I thought it was you, gosh, I’m not even sure how long it’s been, how are you?’ putting the inflection on the ‘are’ just the way I’d heard Simone do it) proved fruitless as I stood there struck mute by the shocking familiarity of him.
I am not sure what I expected, but I did not expect this, for him to look and sound so much the same that I almost tucked my head under his arm, almost took a step towards him.
Instead, I saw him move towards me, saw the way his eyes opened slightly, his mouth forming a half-laugh, his hand leaving the pocket of his corduroy jacket to reach out to my cheek and stroke it, like it still belonged there.
And I stood there, letting him, somehow stuck beneath that stroking hand until my father released me.
‘Well, here’s a turn-up for the books.’
‘Harry!’ said Josh. ‘How are you?’
‘Good thanks, Josh . . . Well, this is something to tell Rose later, all of us here together after all these years.’
‘Yeah, yeah it is,’ Josh smiled, ‘it’s really great to see you, Harry.’
I stood between the two men who I had spent years watching through besotted eyes, standing at the bottom of the ladder as they cleaned the gutters of our house, stamping about the roof in their big work boots, calling out for someone to put the kettle on. I had seen them stand together at the smoking incinerator, rubbing their chins, drifts of their conversation floating up on curls of smoke to the verandah, and I had watched Harry let him go after the night I came home from the river.
‘What’s happened, love?’ he’d said when I came through the door. ‘What’s wrong, you look terrible, I’ll get your mother.’
They had put me in my pyjamas, and into bed with a cup of tea, while Rose soothed and patted and Harry turned his back on Joshua Keaton.
Josh had gone to see him once, Rose had told me, just before he and Annabelle left. Josh had gone to Harry’s office, and waited until Harry came out. Harry had said a few words to him, then refused to shake his hand.
Rose was upset, and told Harry that no matter what had gone on between his daughter and Josh, we were young and who knew at that age what they really wanted? People, she told Harry, fell in love with people they weren’t meant to all the time. She said that Josh was immature, with no father to guide him, but Harry was having none of it. ‘I trusted him to take care of our daughter,’ he said, ‘and he didn’t.’
And now they were standing together, the years, and Josh’s obvious delight at seeing him, mellowing Harry, as Josh spoke eagerly to him, his hand all the while resting on the small of my back.
‘How’s Rose?’ Josh was saying, ‘I was hoping she might be here tonight . . .’
I excused myself and weaved my way back through the crowd and out into the street, needing to get away from the gallery and Josh’s hand on me.
It had left me confused, unsure of what was more shocking, the fact that he would, after all these years, after everything, touch me so casually, or the fact I had enjoyed it way
more in the deep South, as Simone would say, than I had a right to.
I sat down on a step outside a closed café, pressing the backs of my hands into my eyes.
‘Tallulah.’
So this was how it was going to happen.
I looked up and saw her face, Annabelle, pale under the café light, long and angular and thin beneath a strapless black dress, a silver choker around her neck, some sort of talisman hanging off it.
Annabelle, like Josh, the same face, but older, surer.
Her green eyes danced.
‘I’ve just met your mate, Duncan,’ she smiled, ‘in a whirl of polyester.’ She gave an awkward laugh. ‘He warned me off you actually, said I wasn’t to hurt a hair on your head – must be nice to have a friend like that.’
‘It is,’ I found my voice and thought, Do you not remember, Annabelle? Do you not remember? I will shove your arse clean through your ears.
Annabelle grinned down at me.
‘Move over,’ she said as the years fell away and Sister Scholastica bustled between us, ‘I’ll just sit here.’
We sat shoulder to shoulder on the steps, and it felt like that first day of school when we circled each other at lunchtime, offering up bits of our lives to each other for approval – Annabelle saying, ‘Dolly magazine’s “Poet’s Corner” makes me want to varf,’ ‘Varf?’, ‘Yes, Tallualah, varf, it’s a cross between vomit and barf,’ ‘Oh well, then it makes me want to varf, too.’
It felt like we hadn’t moved since that first day in Sister Scholastica’s class. While I had been struck dumb upon seeing Josh at the gallery, with Annabelle I couldn’t stop talking.
There was so much to tell her, so much to fit in, and it wasn’t until I began speaking that I realised how much of a void she had left in my life, and how eager I was to fill it.
I could talk to Duncan and Simone and Stella about anything, but there was something in Annabelle’s green gaze, something that gathered at the corners of her eyes and in the way she threw her head back laughing, saying, ‘Stop, stop, I can’t stand it, wait, yes I can, go on!’ that had always made me brighter, funnier, more vivid than when I was with anybody else.
I talked and talked. I told her about how I’d met Duncan, how Harry and Rose were – ‘Rose,’ Annabelle said, ‘how I have missed Rose.’ I told her about my job at the radio station and living with Simone and Beth, and meeting Ben and it seemed like there weren’t enough words to tell her all I needed to say, except of course the one thing I couldn’t bring myself to speak about.
Walking on Trampolines Page 15