The Starlings

by Vivienne Kelly

  ‘Bye-bye.’

  The car started up and crunched over the gravel. I went to the window and watched it disappear down the street.

  I went downstairs to survey my kingdom. I strolled in a masterly way through the kitchen, the sunroom, the dining room, the lounge. All was as it should be, although my mother had left dishes in the sink, which was unlike her. I thought of reprimanding her, Hamlet-like, for this oversight. Good mother, I might commence. Then I thought perhaps it would be wiser to do the washing up myself. But she might not notice the effort I had gone to, and it seemed a waste of this short, kingly period to spend it doing something so mundane.

  I left the dishes in the sink and ambled into the lounge, where I straightened a few cushions. Everything was very quiet. No Madonna from Pippa’s room, nobody talking, no radio. Even Donizetti was nowhere to be seen.

  I returned upstairs, feeling chastened and uneasy for no reason that I could articulate. I was confident that I was neither lonely nor frightened, but I was aware of a feeling, which I did not care to investigate, that things were not all okay. I went back to working on Hamlet’s activities in the grave. Stinger, who was playing Laertes, had to have a fight with Zarlok (he grappled him by the throat as an enemy till the attendants parted them), and then had to shake hands with him. The reconciliation was short-lived, however, as the wicked Claudius persuaded Laertes to fight Hamlet. I faced a new problem with the closing stages of Hamlet: there were many sword fights and almost too many deaths, but the Lambs had given me little dialogue to work with. I finished up with such exchanges as this:

  Hateshi/Laertes: Ha, Hamlet! I do but play with you, and suffer you to gain advantages!

  Zarlok/Hamlet: Ha, Laertes! I know not that your blade is poisoned.

  Even I could see that this didn’t work, so I made adjustments as follows:

  Hateshi/Laertes: Ha, Hamlet! I do but play with you, and suffer you to gain advantages! (Aside) You know not that my blade is poisoned.

  Zarlok/Hamlet: Ha, Laertes!

  But the problem was that this made Hamlet look silly.

  I was pondering these difficulties, when I heard the back door open and slam, and the sound of someone who was undoubtedly Pippa running up the stairs and into her bedroom, the door of which also slammed.

  After a little while I thought I would say hello to Pippa, and let her know the astonishing news that I had been left on my own. I knocked on her door.

  ‘Go away,’ she shouted.

  I paused and listened. I thought I could hear muffled sobs. If I knocked again, would I only annoy her? If she was upset, I could understand her choosing solitude over consolation. I would have preferred it, too. As I dithered, the telephone rang.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ said my mother’s voice.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Nicky, listen, I’m having a bit of trouble with the car.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘I’m going to have to call the RACV. Such a nuisance. Nicky, darling, is Pip home?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Can you get her for me, please?’

  Pippa had opened her door already. She had definitely been crying: her eyes were pink and a streak of snot lay over her upper lip.

  ‘Is it for me?’ she asked, as if she hoped it was.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s Mummy.’

  Her expression turned from optimism through disappointment to confusion.

  ‘What do you mean, it’s Mummy? Isn’t she home?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She left me on my own.’

  Pippa looked at me in bewilderment. Evidently she hadn’t noticed that the car had gone.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, though I thought I did know. ‘She wants to talk to you.’

  ‘Where are you?’ were Pippa’s first words on the telephone. And then, after a long pause during which I could hear the faintest resonance of my mother’s voice, she repeated, ‘Yes, but where are you?’

  ‘All right,’ Pippa said then. ‘No, don’t worry. I’m home. We’ll see you soon.’ She replaced the receiver.

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked.

  ‘She says she’s at Maddy’s place.’

  We eyed each other.

  ‘You know you were asking me about Mr Bloomberg?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He rang, one night.’

  ‘He rang here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know. A couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Was I here?’

  I thought. ‘You were over at Gina’s.’

  ‘Did he say it was him?’

  ‘He said it was Ben.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing, really,’ I said. For reasons I found impossible to explain, I didn’t want to tell Pippa about our mother crying.

  She rubbed her chin. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Was Dad here?’

  ‘He had late surgery.’ I was trying not to look at Pippa’s red eyes. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I had a fight with Gina,’ said Pippa, starting to cry again and fishing a damp tissue from her sleeve. ‘She’s a bloody cow.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ I said, not knowing what to say. ‘Did Mummy say when she’d be home?’

  ‘She says she has to call the RACV man, so she doesn’t know.’

  Pippa kept on crying.

  ‘Can I help?’ I said, rather formally. Pippa (unlike me) was not somebody who frequently cried, and I didn’t know how to handle the situation.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I do understand,’ I said, with an obstinacy born of not understanding. ‘I do.’

  But she shook her head and turned away.

  It was dark, and well into the wintry evening, before we heard the sound of the car’s crunch on the gravel. In the meantime, Pippa had cooked her version of scrambled eggs on toast, which I’d eaten, but only because I was very hungry. She had then returned to her bedroom and played Madonna loudly; I stayed downstairs and enjoyed the unusual arrangement of being able to watch whatever programs I liked. I noted (with the luxury of one who didn’t at that point have to worry about such things) that Hawthorn had defeated Melbourne easily, and felt fleetingly sorry for Grandpa. My mother came in and dropped a kiss on the top of my head. ‘Nicky,’ she said. ‘Hello, darling. Everything okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She took the remote control and turned off the television. ‘You should be getting ready for bed, love. Go and run a bath.’

  ‘Is the car all right?’ I asked.

  ‘The car,’ she repeated, as if puzzled. ‘Oh, yes. It’s fine. But it took a long time. The RACV man didn’t come for ages.’

  ‘What was wrong with it?’

  ‘Oh, Nicky, for goodness sake. As if I know anything about cars!’

  I had a bath and went to bed. I heard my mother flapping gently around the house, like a bird that couldn’t find a comfortable perch. I drifted to a precarious sleep around the edges of which both named and nameless terrors smirked and sighed.

  My father returned from his conference on Monday, satisfied with having caught up with the world of teeth for another year. During dinner on Monday night my mother asked him various questions about how it had gone. She didn’t sound very interested, but none of us was, really.

  ‘Was Bill there?’ she asked.

  Bill was my father’s oldest friend. He had graduated at the same time as my father; for a few years they had worked in the same clinic, but then he had moved to Sydney. I had fond memories of Bill. He would slip dollar coins to me, winking broadly. Our families had gone on picnics together: my mother had got on well with Bill’s wife and I hadn’t minded his small daughter. Altogether Bill had been a good thing and I wondered suddenly if my father missed him.

  ‘Yes,’ said my father. ‘Going bald.’

  ‘Oh dear. Is he okay?’

  ‘Fine.’


  ‘Was there a conference dinner?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We went out on the harbour. One of those things where they give you dinner on board. Cruise.’

  ‘Was it nice?’

  ‘Very nice.’

  Silence fell while we munched.

  Then Pippa put in, ‘Is the car okay now, Mum?’

  ‘You’ve had trouble with your car?’ My father looked concerned.

  A flicker of something stole across my mother’s face. She glanced inscrutably at Pippa. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Only a little.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was out on Saturday. And I couldn’t get it to start.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I phoned the RACV.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Only over at Maddy’s.’

  ‘What was wrong?’

  ‘Oh, Frank,’ said my mother, with a delicate laugh. ‘What would I know about what goes wrong with cars?’

  ‘But he must have explained it to you.’

  ‘Oh he did, but I was just pleased to get it going again.’

  ‘But Jen, it might happen again.’

  ‘He said it wouldn’t.’

  ‘But what had happened? What went wrong?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said my mother, suddenly irate. ‘It was the doohickie behind the gizmo on top of the thingamabob under the doodad. What would I know? The guy said it wouldn’t happen again. Something fell out; something slipped and became—I don’t know—incapacitated, I suppose, if you want a description, and he put it back and made it all right again. I belong to the RACV precisely so I won’t have to worry about those sorts of things. I pay; they fix it. That’s how it works. Okay?’

  She took an angry bite. Silence fell again.

  My father turned to me. ‘We slaughtered the Demons, Nicky,’ he said, apparently thinking this would lighten the atmosphere.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, sixteen points.’ I added this information not to contradict him but to show that I’d been following.

  ‘Close enough to slaughter.’

  Since my mother’s plea for more time, we had seen little of Grandpa and nothing of Rose. I wondered exactly how much time my mother wanted. A week? A month? A year? Did she hope, by continuing to delay, that the problem would dissolve? Perhaps she needed help to enable her to confront the reality of Rose. I proposed to her the next Saturday morning (my father was meeting up with friends at the football and so my presence was not required there) that I might visit Grandpa.

  She looked strained. ‘Oh, Nicky, I don’t know if that’s a good idea.’

  ‘I thought Grandpa might be hurt,’ I suggested. ‘I mean, he got that jigsaw for me and I haven’t done any of it for ages.’

  I waited.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose there’s no harm.’

  ‘Can I go?’

  ‘I’ll ring and see,’ she said.

  I was allowed to walk over by myself, and was delighted to see the blue Datsun at the front. All was warmth and welcome. Rose was dressed in jeans and a soft emerald jumper: she wore her beautiful hair loose, and it cascaded in glossy waves over her shoulders, just like Juliet’s in the picture in my book. She was making a cake—a banana one, this time—and the delicious smell of its baking filled the house. The jigsaw was spread out ready; Grandpa was laying a fire in the garden room, and presently it began to crackle and blaze, giving the room a wavering golden light as well as warmth against the bleak winter’s afternoon. I could now see the sharp blades of the flames: Grandpa’s fires had once been a pleasant orangey blur, but with my glasses I could see how the delicate tip of each flare was paler than its scarf-like billowy body, how the colours blended and split, how unexpected streaks of indigo flickered within the blaze. I watched it for a while before I settled down to the jigsaw, with a sense of contentment: all was as it should be. I specially loved it that Rose made cakes for me. My mother was usually too busy for such things, and Didie hadn’t been a keen cook.

  Grandpa came over to help me, but had trouble seeing the jigsaw pieces properly. He looked around for his glasses. ‘I think I must have left them in the bedroom,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll get them.’ I jumped up and ran to the bedroom. The glasses were on the table next to Grandpa’s side of the bed. On the floor on the other side of the bed were crimson fluffy slippers with black velvet cat faces on their toes. A soft, pink dressing-gown lay on the bed. I glanced into the bathroom as I passed and saw that there was a satiny sponge bag and an extra toothbrush on the side of the basin. Everything (except perhaps the toothbrush) was pretty and soft, like Rose herself.

  I took the glasses back. ‘Are you living here now, Rosie?’ I asked.

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Rose. ‘Sometimes I just stay here overnight.’

  ‘A sleepover?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I guess it is a sleepover.’

  ‘Can I come and have a sleepover too, one night? I used to do that when I was little, didn’t I, Grandpa?’

  Rose, an odd expression on her face, glanced at Grandpa. ‘You’d be very welcome, Nicky,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ I said, suddenly discovering an elusive piece of mast and cloud. ‘I’ll tell Mummy, will I?’

  ‘Perhaps don’t worry your mum just yet, Nicky, there’s a good boy,’ said Grandpa. ‘I’ll talk to her about it, okay?’

  ‘Not too long, though,’ I said, fitting the mast in.

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Not too long.’

  When Rose brought the cake out of the oven it was a golden risen triumph. Wearing new pink oven mitts over her pretty hands, she paraded the tin to show us. Grandpa cheered and clapped, and so did I. She let us eat it while it was still warm, and she made Milo with marshmallows for me.

  ‘Aren’t we snug, just the three of us!’ she exclaimed as we clustered around the fire, eating our moist warm cake, drinking our hot drinks. She and Grandpa sat on the big old caramel-coloured velveteen couch, which was now worn in places and slightly out of shape. When I was ill and spending the day with Grandpa and Didie I had always lain on this couch, covered with one of Didie’s mohair rugs and surrounded by the vivid scarlet velvet cushions that helped to make the garden room so bright and cheerful.

  Before I left, Grandpa put on the radio and we heard that Essendon had beaten Hawthorn by thirty-six points. He and Rose walked with me halfway to my house. We were all snuggled up in caps and scarves and parkas, and when I hugged them goodbye and set off on the last leg of my brief journey home, I wished that I lived with them. I was sorry about Didie dying, and I felt guilty that I didn’t miss her more, but her death had flicked a switch that erased all the tension her presence had caused and made the three of us all happier and easier with each other. It was almost as if Rose and Grandpa were my parents, I thought. And I had changed my mind about Grandpa being old: his new alertness and confidence, bright and bushy-tailed as you might say, reminded me of the Mr Debonair photograph. I stuck my mittened hands deep in my parka pockets and thought about the comforting things I would say to my father about the loss.

  When I arrived home the front door was locked, and the house was dark and cold. I went around the back and let myself in. I heard Madonna wafting down from the top of the stairs, perhaps more quietly than usual.

  I went up and knocked on Pippa’s door. ‘Where’s Mummy?’ I asked, when she opened it.

  ‘Who knows?’

  Pippa looked shocking. Her eyes were puffy and her face blotchy.

  She scowled at me. ‘Why don’t you take a photo?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but you look awful. Are you okay? And, truly, where’s Mummy?’

  ‘We are deserted. Our mother has left us.’ She gave an exaggerated sigh and leaned against the doorway, folding her arms.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We are cast on the waters of abandonment. We float there, flotsam and jetsam bobbing around on the waves. You can be jetsam, if you like. I’ll b
e flotsam.’

  I didn’t understand her mood: she was speaking in a wild way which was different from her normal brusque self.

  I was starting to feel panicky. ‘Pippy,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand. Please tell me where Mummy is.’

  ‘Don’t look so tragic,’ she said. ‘Mum will be back soon. She’s gone over to do a little out-of-hours consultation with Miss Buchanan.’

  ‘Maddy?’

  ‘Yes, Nicky. Maddy. But there’s a fly in the ointment, you see.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A fly. Something wrong. In the ointment, in the argument, in the alibi. Because, my dear Nicky, the thing is, Miss Buchanan is back at school.’

  My bewilderment must have been plain.

  ‘You see,’ she said, ‘Miss Buchanan isn’t ill anymore, and therefore Mum doesn’t have to take her lessons any more, and therefore they don’t need to consult anymore. So where do you suppose she is?’

  I saw. ‘She’s with Mr Ben Bloomberg,’ I said.

  ‘Got it in one,’ said Pippa.

  ‘But what will we do?’ I asked. ‘Will she come home?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pippa. ‘Today she will.’

  As she spoke, we heard the crunch of car wheels on the gravel.

  ‘That’ll be her,’ said Pippa. ‘It’s too early for Dad. Nicky, if you say one word to her about what I’ve just been saying I’ll cut out your liver and fry it for breakfast.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I won’t say anything.’

  I must have looked forlorn: she bent and hugged me fiercely.

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ she whispered. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  But I didn’t see why, or how, this would be the case. And I didn’t believe she believed it, either.

  She closed the door. I considered going downstairs but instead went quietly to my room and closed my own door. I heard my mother come inside and move around in the kitchen. There were noises of pots and pans and taps and of the general paraphernalia of dinner. Eventually I heard her footsteps on the stairs and she passed my room to the bedroom she shared with my father. As she returned she called out, ‘Hi, Pippa; hi, Nicky. Dinner soon.’

  She sounded normal, and, when I went downstairs a few minutes later, she looked normal, too. She dropped a normal kiss on the top of my head.