Rose/Guinevere: Save me, dear Launcelot!
Fleshbane/Launcelot: Here, my darling Guinevere!
Grabs her and pulls her on to Slyder.
Knights: Ho! Stop him! Stop him!
Narrator: But Sir Launcelot and Guinevere were unstoppable. They rode away to The Castle of Joyous Garde and fortified themselves strongly. And that is the end of the tale of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere.
I hadn’t seen Rose for ages. But my devotion to her hadn’t shifted, and nor had my determination to finish the jigsaw. And second-term holidays had started. I asked my mother if I might visit Grandpa one afternoon. She looked dubious.
‘You don’t usually see Grandpa during the week, Nicky. Unless you’re ill, of course.’
‘But it’s holidays,’ I said. She looked exasperated, as if she had forgotten that it was the holidays (which she couldn’t possibly have done, because they were her holidays too), and didn’t want to be reminded.
‘Even so. You’ve got lots of other things to do, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I haven’t seen him for ages and there’s that big jigsaw I need to finish.’
She frowned at me, and I frowned back. I could tell she was scrabbling for excuses.
‘But when would you come home? It’ll be late and dark by dinnertime. And cold.’
‘Grandpa never minds driving me home. Or you could pick me up? And I don’t have to stay until dinnertime anyway,’ I added reasonably.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.
You had to play it carefully, when my mother was thinking about something. If you pestered her she would get annoyed and decide against you; but if you let her get on with her thinking unimpeded, she was likely to forget (or pretend she had forgotten) the whole thing.
But everything went smoothly for once. I somehow managed the walk over from our house to Grandpa’s on my own, in spite of my mother’s anxieties, and was soon absorbed in the jigsaw. Rose was nowhere to be seen and I asked whether she would return before I left.
‘I think so,’ Grandpa said.
‘Is she working?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Rose doesn’t work anymore.’
‘Does she just live here with you, then?’
‘Yes,’ said Grandpa, looking as if that arrangement made him happy. ‘She just lives here with me. But today she’s visiting her parents.’
I had never thought that Rose might have parents.
‘Where do they live?’
‘In the country. It’s a long drive. To be honest, Nicky, I’m not sure when she’ll be back. You might not see her today.’
We settled down to a concentrated spell of jigsaw, but the part I was up to was difficult and at the end of an hour we hadn’t got very far.
‘I thought the shapes of the waves would help,’ I said. ‘The crests. They don’t, really.’
‘No,’ said Grandpa. ‘There are too many of them, aren’t there? Never mind.’
‘We’re so close,’ I said. I was starting to get a headache, and I was full of discontent.
‘We are close. There can’t be more than fifty pieces left.’
‘Usually, when you get to this stage, it’s all much easier. You suddenly see where things will fit. But this one seems to get harder all the time.’
I kicked my heels against the chair legs. I’d hoped even to finish the puzzle today: it was frustrating not to be able to get a handle on the last tiny section.
‘Let’s have something to eat,’ said Grandpa. ‘I’m sure Rose has left some goodies there for you.’
While he was investigating the biscuit box, I wandered into the bathroom for a pee, and looked in the mirrored cabinet to see if they had any aspirin. I wasn’t supposed to self-medicate, but the small blunt hammer in my head was beginning to thud with purpose and I often found a couple of tablets taken early, before things got too serious, did the trick. But the aspirin bottle wasn’t where it usually was.
It was a nuisance. I didn’t want to tell Grandpa about the headache because I knew he would tell my mother and then there would be a fuss. I looked around the bathroom, but I couldn’t see it anywhere.
I knew there was a shelf in the wardrobe in Grandpa’s room where Rose had kept Didie’s medicines, and on my way back I peeked in there, just in case. Success! I was just reaching for the aspirin when my eye was caught by a box of tiny bottles in the very back right-hand corner. Half the bottles were missing; the label on the box read Morphine Sulfate. Underneath that, in smaller letters, it said For Intravenous Use, and, a little lower down again, Narcotic Analgesic. I didn’t know what these words meant, but I was fascinated by them. Next to the box lay a couple of syringes.
Naturally I was interested, and lifted the box down for a closer look. Morphine was a word around which charges of glamour and peril equally gathered. (Pirate was another such, and dragon, and assassin, and skull, and heart. And murder.) I had only a hazy notion as to what morphine was, but I knew there was something dangerous about it, something that placed it on the far side of the dividing line between what was acceptable and what was not. I examined the syringes as well: they appeared to be unused and were in sealed transparent packets. I returned everything exactly as it had been, and downed two aspirin. The aspirin bottle was pretty full, so I took the precaution of abstracting an extra two and dropping them into my pocket.
We gave up on the jigsaw shortly afterwards: it was too frustrating. Grandpa dug out the Scrabble and we played a desultory game. To my disappointment, my mother came to pick me up before Rose returned.
Hawthorn was lying fourth on the league ladder, and there were two home-and-away games left: after these we would be into the finals, the pointy end of the season. Essendon was top of the ladder: it had been defeated only three times in twenty matches and had the look of a club cruising towards an inevitable triumph. My father had been worried about the morale of the Hawks falling because of the Matthews affair; but the team was playing more forcefully than ever. In fact, Jason Dunstall, the lad from Coorparoo whom my father had once so despised, had grabbed the opportunity of Matthews’ absence and come into his own, kicking fourteen goals over the four matches and looking (my father said) bigger and better every week. But Peter Knights had had surgery on his knee and was expected to miss at least three matches. Being without Knights was a definite worry. And Dipper had been reported for thumping a Footscray rover the previous week.
But the Hawks won by a satisfying twenty-three points and made Carlton look (my father said) pretty silly. Matthews and Handley each kicked three goals, Dunstall two.
‘Only one week to go, Nicky,’ he said, during dinner. ‘And now we’re third on the ladder. Starting to get exciting, hey?’
‘Mmmm,’ I said. I knew that being third was important: it meant you had a double chance in the finals matches, so that if you were defeated once you had another opportunity.
There was an item on the television news that evening about the council of some inner suburb running a campaign to rescue its streets from the syringes and other noxious items left behind by druggies. We all watched it with a fuzzily comfortable notion that this didn’t happen in Hawthorn.
‘Thank goodness we don’t need to worry about that sort of thing,’ said my mother as she turned the television off at the end of the program.
‘How do you know?’ asked Pippa, who was in one of her argumentative phases.
‘Well!’ said my mother, half-laughing. ‘When did you last see a syringe lying around the gutters of this street?’
‘It doesn’t mean they’re not inside the houses,’ said Pippa.
I saw a chance to display knowledge and sophistication. ‘In fact, they are inside the houses,’ I said.
‘What are?’ asked Pippa, rather jeeringly.
‘Syringes,’ I said.
It turned into one of those moments when everyone looked at me.
‘What on earth are you talking about, Nicky?’ asked my mother.
‘Th
ere are syringes in Grandpa’s cupboard,’ I said. ‘And little bottles of morphine.’
Pippa burst into laughter. ‘Are you telling us you think Grandpa’s a drug addict? God, Nicky, you’re such a dipstick. Rose is a nurse, dumbo, that’s why there are syringes and medicine at Grandpa’s place. Didie needed them.’
‘I know,’ I said, defensively. ‘I know all that. I wasn’t saying anything about drug addicts or anything. I was just saying, there are syringes there.’
But my mother’s reaction was quite different. ‘I told you so,’ she hissed at my father. She leaned forward. ‘Little bottles of morphine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Vials of morphine,’ said my mother.
‘It said on it,’ I said. ‘Morphine something. Morphine sulfate. They were in a box. Is that the word for those little bottles? Vials?’
‘And how full was it. Was it full?’
But I was on another tack. ‘Is that the same word as phial? A phial is what Friar Laurence gave Juliet.’
‘Nicky, for God’s sake, was the box full?’
I was hurt. Normally she applauded my advances in vocabulary. ‘No.’
‘Half-full? Three-quarters full?’
‘Half-empty,’ I said. ‘Probably more than half-empty.’
‘You see?’ she whispered to my father.
‘Jenny,’ he said. ‘You’re making an awful mistake here.’
‘Oh, am I?’
‘What are we talking about?’ asked Pippa, her eyes popping with bewilderment and curiosity. ‘What mistake?’
‘Don’t you see?’ said my mother. ‘It’s proof positive.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said. ‘It’s so obvious. The morphine was used to relieve Didie’s pain.’
‘No,’ said my mother. ‘No. Didie didn’t want morphine. She told me that. She said she could bear the pain. She said the doctor had offered her morphine and she said she didn’t want it yet.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Pippa. ‘Are you saying Rose killed Didie, Mum?’
‘No,’ I said, horrified.
‘Well,’ said my father. ‘Rose had it there, for when things got worse, for when the pain was too much to bear.’
‘But Nicky said the box was half-empty. You’re being obtuse, Frank.’
‘You are saying that,’ said Pippa, in wonderment. ‘You are. My God. What are you going to do? Are you going to tell the police?’
A pause fell.
‘No,’ said my mother, recalled to the presence of her children. ‘Neither of you is to talk about this to anybody, do you understand? Not to anybody.’
‘But are you?’ said Pippa.
‘I need to think,’ said my mother, her fingers ripping through her hair.
‘Just remember,’ said my father. ‘Anything you do about this will implicate Dan.’
‘Dad couldn’t have known anything about it,’ she said.
‘But you told me Nicky said he did,’ said my father, with the air of scoring a point.
Pippa cast me a look of burning reproach. ‘What did you say, Nicky?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, beside myself at the turn the conversation had taken. ‘I didn’t say anything.’
My mother’s hand was at her cheek. ‘The gift,’ she said. ‘It’s not possible.’
‘She didn’t,’ I said, with desperation. ‘It’s not true.’
My mother looked at me as if she had forgotten who I was.
‘Nicky,’ she said, with apparent effort. ‘I know this is hard for you to understand, darling. Try not to worry about it.’
‘Oh, well done,’ said my father, in his sarcastic voice. ‘Of course you won’t worry, will you, Nicky. For Christ’s sake, Jen, get a hold of yourself.’
It was as if he had not spoken.
‘What we have to do,’ she said. ‘What we have to do is try to stop him making any kind of permanent arrangement. Marriage. The will. Anything like that. We have to save him.’
‘He’s probably seen his lawyer already,’ said my father.
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Rose said, one day,’ I said. ‘One day I was over there and Grandpa wasn’t there. Rose said Grandpa had gone to see his lawyer.’
My mother pulled her curls and rolled her eyes. She looked rather mad. ‘I might have known it,’ she moaned.
She stood up.
‘We’re not going to talk about this anymore,’ she declared. ‘And I meant what I said. Pippa, Nicky, this is family stuff. We do not talk about this anywhere else. Okay?’
Pippa looked mulish. ‘Or else?’
‘I will not have you talking about this with your friends,’ said my mother.
‘I don’t have any friends anymore,’ said Pippa, on a half-sob. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ said my mother irritably. ‘Why must you dramatise everything, Pippa? This isn’t about you, you know.’
I struggled badly with the aftermath of this discussion. I couldn’t understand the strange paths my mother’s suspicions were navigating. What was the link between the gift that Grandpa and Rose had given Didie, and my mother’s apparent certainty that they (or at least Rose) had murdered her? My mother was wandering in wild terrain and I did not know how to draw her back. A gift was surely a physical object, a box or a wrapped parcel, with a ribbon and a card. Grandpa and Rose had given Didie such an object; it had made her happy.
I wondered whether I ought to warn Grandpa and Rose of the danger in which they were placed by my mother’s misapprehension. But nothing further was said. I tried to raise the issue with my mother in order to explain to her the impossibility of the fantasy she had created, but she cut me off.
‘You are to discuss this with nobody, Nicky,’ she said, her eyes burning into me. That would have been acceptable on its own: it was in its way a conspiratorial call and likely to appeal to me. But then she added, ‘You’re far too young to understand any of it,’ which wounded me. Pippa buttonholed me and tried to make me tell her what I had heard and repeated to our mother, but I was too upset, and refused, pretending ignorance. This annoyed her, but I stood fast. As a last resort I said that I had been told not to speak to anybody.
‘I’m family, dumbo,’ Pippa cried. ‘She didn’t mean me.’
Normally I would have rejoiced in possessing information wanted by Pippa, but the whole thing made me feel sick. Not only was I distressed by my mother’s suspicions, but also I felt guilty because in some strange way I was responsible for arousing those suspicions.
Everything felt unreal. The holidays continued. Pippa and I spent more time than usual at home: Pippa no longer saw Gina, and I was forbidden to go to Grandpa’s. My father continued to ruminate on what the finals would bring; I worked at my plays; Pippa listened to Madonna. And yet behind this routine facade lay the turmoil of accusation and suspicion, and really, nothing at all was normal.
During the second week of the holidays my mother went out every day in the afternoon and was late home every night. She offered no excuses other than that she was very busy; without actually saying that she was spending time at the school (certainly not usual behaviour for her, during holidays), she implied this. Dinners were left in the fridge and the three of us obediently ate them without commenting on the absence of the fourth member of the family. She was absent from family life in more ways than one: even when she was in the house she was inattentive. It was the same thing—her eyes were contemplating vistas which I could not begin to imagine.
I knew Grandpa had rung to ask me over, because Pippa had overheard my mother’s end of the conversation.
‘She said you had lots of activities arranged,’ she reported to me. ‘She was really snappish.’
I looked around my bedroom, which was where this discussion was taking place. Zarlok and the others were lying on the floor; clothes and school stuff were strewn around, and the bed was unmade. The room was in this state because my mother had stopped caring about such things as tidy rooms and made beds,
and I had taken advantage of this. (So had Pippa, I’d noticed.) But it gave the room an unwelcoming air which privately I disliked. It did not look like the bedroom of a cool kid who had lots of activities organised.
‘Did you want to go?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
She looked unimpressed. ‘Well, if you did want to, I don’t mind. You could go over to Grandpa’s one day: I wouldn’t mind.’
We had been left on our own a lot during these holidays. My mother’s previous objections to leaving me in Pippa’s care for long stretches seemed to have been erased without trace. She would say, in a cursory way, ‘You’ll be all right, won’t you?—I’ll be back soon.’ And then she would drive off and be away for hours.
‘Do you mean you’d lie about it?’
Pippa jerked her shoulder. ‘She lies to us. Would it matter if we lied to her?’
‘But we shouldn’t lie to each other?’
‘Of course not.’
She waited. ‘So. Do you want to go over to Grandpa’s?’
‘No,’ I said miserably. ‘Thanks. But no.’ I felt I would be there under false pretences when I knew I was not allowed to talk to Grandpa or Rose about what was going on. I couldn’t think of anything worse than being with Grandpa and Rose while I was keeping such an awful secret from them.
‘You don’t bloody well care whether I’m here or not!’
My mother flung this accusation at my father that night, when she returned home very late. It was after ten o’clock and I should have been asleep, but the Unscared Game was exacting its toll and to hear my parents quarrelling was almost a reprieve: it drew me back across the threshold of safety from the cannibal ghost stalking me with his yellow teeth and sour breath and fork-like hands.
‘I mean, did you even notice? Dinner’s there, the money’s coming in, that’s all you care about. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’
I heard Pippa’s door opening. I braved the cannibal ghost and opened mine too, just a crack. They were still downstairs, but their voices floated up the staircase with disastrous clarity.
The Starlings Page 20