by Karen Foxlee
I knew she was never going to stay. I didn't know it in words. With all my might I summoned up images of Beth at a typewriter and there she sat in a gray office in a bleak building. I watched her glide through ill-lit corridors carrying manila folders. I saw her take dictation dutifully. She was very still, all of her, except for her hand, which raced across the page, spewing a trail of mysterious symbols. I willed these images into existence with all my might. But I had a feeling. It was a very bad feeling. It felt like the closing of a book. The ending of things.
After I made Angela skip school and then go to the caravan park she said she was never going to lie again. That's it, she said once the Talent Quest was finished. It was too late for things.
“Come with me,” I said about the address.
It was the last thing in The Book of Clues.
“No,” she said. “You know I can't. I'm not doing that stuff anymore.”
She handed me the book in her bedroom. I knew I had to go there by myself.
The address was written in Beth's hand. It was in Memorial North, a very long dismal road filled with smudged houses and flats with no grass and Hills hoists sagging with miners’ clothes. The sulfur fumes hung above the street, a flat brown cloud; I breathed shallowly and covered my mouth.
I put down my bike on the dirt of number 17 Normandy Street and walked up the driveway to flat number 3. I knocked on the door. I didn't know what I would find. The tall man who answered the door had long bangs that hung over one eye. I'd woken him up from sleep. He looked at me for a while and then his mouth opened.
Beth was a swan and I am only a sparrow but we have the same mole on our cheek and some of her face is in mine.
“Did you know Beth Day?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Did you see her on the night she fell?” I asked.
I was surprised at how brave I sounded.
“No,” he said.
He looked full of regret.
He shut the door. I heard him moving around inside. The television went on. A car chase. The thud of guns.
At the end of the street there was a girl sitting on the footpath with her feet in the gutter. At first I thought it was Angela but then I saw that she was bigger, older. She had short hair. Getting closer I recognized the stripe of black roots down the middle.
“Hey,” Deidre said.
I stopped my bike on the pavement with my foot.
“I seen you going in there and wanted to make sure you were all right and everything.”
“I'm all right,” I said.
“You're only little,” she said. “You should go home.”
Later, much later, she would tell me many things.
“I'm going,” I said.
Deidre stood up and dusted her bum. She smiled a half smile, looking down at the road.
“You ever got any trouble you should come and see me, hey?” she said.
“All right,” I said.
On the way home I rode through the hot close November air. I rode through the dog-eared streets, past the sun-faded houses, past all the families I didn't know, shut up inside with their air conditioners droning.
The highway was empty. I rode with my eyes shut. I let myself drift into the middle of the road. I could feel the desert angels everywhere. They were turning and somersaulting and soaring on open wings. The air was alive with their feathers and their breath.
A STORM CAME ON THE LAST DAY AND MY ICARUS WINGS FLEW. It came out of the west, tentatively, like a lady gathering up her skirts before stepping inside a doorway. A storm lady with her bunched-up cloud skirts revealing a deep blue petticoat of rain. The storm lady did not move but stood behind the mine, as though wondering whether to approach.
We slipped with sweat on our little laminate chairs and watched her through the louvers. Down below, shiny fat bullfrogs in the water troughs called out with joy and in the cassias beside the bike racks choirs of cicadas sang madly. In the scrub beyond the oval a lone storm bird cried its warnings.
Sweat stains expanded beneath Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's arms on her white frill-collared blouse. Her red and white zigzag-patterned skirt stuck to her bottom when she stood up. Massimo Gentili, who was slowly clicking down all the colors on his highly prized multicolored pen, sniggered when he saw it.
Mrs. Bridges-Lamb looked at us carefully, then she removed her glasses and listened to us. No one moved. Massimo's finger was poised above red on his multicolored pen like a kangaroo frozen in headlights. The ceiling fan, wobbling on its base, sliced through the warm, sticky silence.
The storm lady took the opportunity to step out from behind the mine and breathed the first cool breeze in through the louvers. Her breath smelled like rain clouds. Into the room she sighed the scent of raindrops hitting dry earth. The cicadas stopped singing and shivered in their shells. Every flower, every branch, every leaf, every twig opened up its heart and waited. The classroom filled with this scent of the dry earth waiting. A lost hornet hummed in through the window and hovered and then, as though realizing it was in the wrong place, left again.
Mrs. Bridges-Lamb returned her glasses to her nose. Sweat ran in rivulets from her hairline, converging into streams where her jaw met her ears, cascading down into the crinkles of her neck. The sweat washed away the topsoil of face powder, kept in a tortoiseshell compact on her desk and applied throughout the day. She looked at everyone except Massimo, who was the person she spoke to.
“Massimo,” said Mrs. Bridges-Lamb, eyes settling on Tanya Moorhouse. “Do we use pen in year five?”
Massimo jumped in his seat and clicked on red involuntarily. He dropped the pen to his desk and a pained smile stretched on his face and then dissolved. He did not answer.
“Jane-Anne,” she said while looking at Trevor Burton. “Do we use pen in year five?”
“No, Mrs. Bridges-Lamb,” said Jane-Anne Fryar.
“Now,” she said. “Whilst Massimo brings me the pen you will all open up your tidy boxes and retrieve your atlases and then wait with your arms crossed.”
The opening of the tidy boxes was accompanied by the first rumble of thunder. Everyone turned their heads to the windows. Into the room came the breath of the storm again. It shimmied around the room, playing games. It touched us. Placed cool fingers on our wet necks, lifted ponytails, sent a piece of paper on Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's desk pirouetting up into the air. It raced up to Mrs. Bridges-Lamb and kissed her on the forehead just as Massimo handed over the pen. For the briefest moment she closed her eyes. She took the multicolored pen and placed it on her desk where we could all see it. That was all. She did nothing more. Clouds moved over the sun.
We had turned to our maps of Italy when the first rain fell. The sky let go of its rain suddenly in a great burst of water. We could hear nothing but the sound of it on the roof. Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's mouth moved but her voice was drowned. And then, just as suddenly, it stopped. An orchestra conductor had waved his baton at the timpanists. The roof made shocked clink-clanks and tsk-tsk sounds as it contracted. The storm bird, momentarily silenced by the downpour, started up its warning call again.
Before Mrs. Bridges-Lamb could prize back our attention from the sudden rain, a second wave came. This time it was carried on the back of a wild and unruly wind. This wind bent the cassias over and knocked down bikes in the bike racks. It rattled the louver glass. It whipped the flag around the flagpole. All along the back wall our Icarus wings whispered and rustled and struggled against the one tack that held each pair down. The wings wanted to fly.
“Front row, stand and come and sit on the floor at the front of the room,” Mrs. Bridges-Lamb shouted over the wind and blasts of rain. “Quick, quick.”
The second row and then the third and fourth were marshaled down to the wooden floor in front of Mrs. Bridges-Lamb. She sat on her high-back wooden chair and we huddled, legs crossed, in front of her. The rain and wind were deafening. We were cocooned by the noise. The wind pushed against the louvers. It swallowed up Mrs. Bridg
es-Lamb's words.
She motioned for us to squeeze closer together. Downstairs, unseen things were banging and crashing and rolling on the concrete. Above us the wind was playing the roof like a wobble board.
An explosion of thunder erupted so close it lifted our bottoms off the floor. The blackboard duster fell into the bin beside the board. A row of books toppled over dead on Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's desk. The doorknob rattled. Angela put her hand on my arm but when I looked at her I found she wasn't that scared at all. She only had the look of someone riding the Cha-Cha at sideshow alley.
And then something wonderful.
The storm took a deep breath and blew open a row of louvers at the back of the classroom. Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's mouth opened. A spray of side-on rain entered the room and fell across our maps of Italy. The wind turned the pages of our atlases quickly and shut them all with a clap and turned its attention to the back wall.
Of all the wings on the wall the wind chose mine to tear free. For a brief and beautiful moment my yellow wings were released from their pin and floated upward into the room. The whole class held its breath. They flapped three times, gained altitude on an updraft, hovered briefly, and then fell to the floor.
When we walked home the whole world had changed. Rain tiptoed on rooftops. A hawk hovered, surveying the damage. The clouds had drifted away. Water rushed out of downpipes in fountains. Everywhere raindrops sparkled.
We did not want to go home. There was too much to see. The raindrops clung single file to railings. They decorated the park fence. They illuminated spiderwebs stretched between trees. They twinkled along the edges of the slippery slide. They shone. Beneath the swing the ditch had turned into a pond. Two ant explorers had climbed on board a leaf that circled slowly on a sea.
We examined raindrops clinging to blades of grass. We opened rattlepods filled with rain. We ran our hands over the wet surfaces of everything.
“By tomorrow the river will run,” said Angela at the end of Dardanelles Court.
In front of our house Nanna was pulling up in her beige Datsun Sunny.
“Quick,” she said, waving her arms. “It's Danielle's perm.”
Danielle was lying on her bed with hair like Leo Sayer's.
“Oh my God,” I said when I saw it.
“Don't say that,” said Mum.
“Dear Lord,” said Nanna.
“Don't say a thing,” shouted Danielle.
She turned on her side and faced the wall.
“Stop looking at me,” she screamed, so we all looked at the floor.
Nanna phoned Aunty Cheryl for tips on what to do with a bad perm. Aunty Cheryl said whatever you do don't wet it. Nanna relayed the message down the hallway to Mum.
“Whatever you do don't wet it,” she shouted.
“You must not wet it,” said Mum to Danielle.
“Shut up,” said Danielle.
She was lying on her bed with her whole life ruined. Dad was on the back steps coughing and wiping his eyes. He had been laughing soundlessly and then his laugh got caught on some cigarette smoke and he had started to cough. He had to get up and go outside, he was coughing so much. When Beth finally came home there was no one there to meet her but me. She came up the front steps and stood at the screen door like she was a visitor. I stood on the other side.
For dinner we ate meatball porcupines, which was Beth's favorite. At the table everybody tried very hard to forget what had happened. We pretended that Beth had never run away. We pretended that she hadn't fallen down drunk in Miss Schmidt's front yard.
Danielle had come to the table with her bad perm wrapped up in a scarf. She had washed her hair and tried to comb it out straight. Underneath the scarf I could see the tight curls reforming as they dried. It was as though she had a nest of snakes moving beneath the scarf.
“You really shouldn't have wet it,” said Aunty Cheryl, shaking her head slowly from side to side.
“It's going to have made it a whole lot worse,” said Kylie.
But Danielle wasn't listening. She eyeballed Beth from across the table. She ate her meatballs slowly, spearing them one by one, without taking her eyes off Beth, who was trying to ignore her. Mum noticed and told Danielle to stop.
“Oh great,” said Danielle. “It's never her fault, is it? She's always the right one.”
She said bitch under her breath as she pushed her plate away and some of the meatballs fell over the edge and onto the proper special occasion tablecloth. Her brace made a creaking noise as she got up and left.
“Christ,” said Dad.
“She said bitch,” I said.
“We heard her,” said Mum.
“Helmet head,” I called out after her.
“Stop it,” said Mum.
Beth laughed. She was eating slowly and deliberately. She kept her eyes downcast. Her hair was still damp from her shower. It hung down on either side of her face in pale waves. Her face was scrubbed clean. She was the picture of an obedient daughter.
The terrible thing about meatball porcupines was that sometimes if you used your imagination the rice poking out of the meatballs could look like maggots. Angela and I once saw maggots in a dead black cat near the river crossing. We cried all the way back to Angela's house and became hysterical when Mr. Popovitch told us that nature would take its course. He had to come with an old blanket and scoop up the remains and bury them in the backyard with a small funeral service. I looked at my meatballs after Danielle left the table and decided I couldn't eat them.
“Eat your meatballs,” said Mum.
“I can't,” I said.
“Well try very hard,” she replied.
“So what do you think of this secretary school thing?” asked Dad.
“Great,” said Beth, shrugging. “It's what I've always wanted to do.”
“We'll have to buy some new skirts and blouses,” said Mum.
Beth nodded her head meekly. She agreed with whatever they said. Mum talked about train tickets and good 40-denier stockings that didn't run and which bag she should take. She talked about foolscap folders, new pens, and sharpened pencils.
“She should get a nice new haircut,” said Aunty Cheryl.
Aunty Cheryl suggested something easier to manage. Something shorter.
In unison we all remembered Mum with the scissors and Beth on her knees in the kitchen.
Beth pushed her hair behind her ears and nodded without really looking at anyone. I listened and pulled my meatballs apart to remove the maggots.
“Well then,” said Mum when she had finished talking.
She lit a cigarette and so did Dad and Aunty Cheryl. They stayed sitting at the table. They smoked without saying anything. Beth chewed on a fingernail. Everyone looked very sad.
After dinner Beth went out into the backyard and climbed onto the trampoline. She lay there on her back with her hands behind her head looking up into the sky. I climbed on beside her and bounced a few times.
“Don't jump, Jenny,” she said. “I just want to lie here.”
She lay there thinking. Her eyes moved as she thought. It looked like she was having that conversation with someone in her head, watching them pace up and down in front of her. Occasionally her lips moved around words. The way they used to in the afternoons when she lay down after school. I stopped bouncing. I rested on my stomach with my chin in my hands.
Before the rain the earth had been closed fist-tight, cringing, battered by the sun. Now it unclenched. Curled leaves unfolded. Cowering grasses lifted their heads. Trees breathed deeply. A new wetness rose up from the ground. The earth opened its eyes and gazed at the star-strung sky.
“Do you know how to write a haiku?” I asked, hoping it would start a conversation.
“Yes,” said Beth. “Mrs. Rigid-Ram taught us that too.”
Mrs. Rigid-Ram was a horrible name that older children called Mrs. Bridges-Lamb when they were no longer in her class. They would never have dared think of a name like that if they were. Everyone knew she could read
your mind if you were thinking bad things about her.
“You shouldn't call her that,” I said.
Beth took her blue eyes off the sky and looked at me.
“I'm only joking,” she said.
“I like her,” I said.
“I know you do, Jenny,” she said. “Have you done Boadicea yet?”
“What's that?”
“She's just this wild woman in England who drove around in a chariot killing Greeks, or maybe Romans, I don't know, but Mrs. Bridges-Lamb loved her. We did her for a whole week. You wait till you do her.”
She was looking back at the sky. Even while she talked I could see she was only half thinking about it. She wasn't seeing chariots or wild queens. She told me about other things that we'd learn but her sentences kept drifting off into thin air. After a while she stopped talking altogether, midsentence. She removed her hands from behind her head and crossed them on her chest as though she had reached an impasse with herself.
“Are you going to go away?” I asked.
“Probably,” she said.
She lay very still. She stared straight ahead. She lay like that for a long time. The sky was ablaze with stars. The Milky Way burned a bright path above us. I listened to the clatter of Mum doing the dishes. Someone playing the organ in the Irwins’ house. A car turning out onto the highway. Beth uncrossed her arms. She reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes.
“Don't worry,” she said. “Everything will be all right.”
Her decision had been made. She looked at me and smiled. Already I could tell she was thinking about where she'd go. She was thinking somewhere, anywhere, there must be something happening. She sat up. She bounced up and down on her backside. She pulled a face at me. It was meant to make me laugh, so I laughed, but it was a counterfeit happiness, both hers and mine.
I forced out the laughter like a painful cough. My smile was screwed on tight. She grabbed my hand and held it hard. She hurt my fingers. I could see the sadness resting on her face like a veil. I saw it by the moonlight and the starlight.