P is for Pearl

by Eliza Henry Jones

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  FROM THE DIARY OF GWENDOLYN PEARL PEARSON

  I remember when Evie was born. Biddy and Dad were married by then, although it had only been for a few months. We were living in our house on the beach, Tyrone and I squashed into the same room.

  Biddy had Evie easily. I heard her telling one of her friends much later that she’d done her time giving birth to Tyrone, who had kept her in labour for thirty-six hours.

  Evie arrived a day late, and when I first saw her I was vaguely disappointed, half-expecting a fully formed human to greet me and ask me how my day was.

  She stared up at me, her round, pink face a little wrinkled and squashed. She was covered in fine hair that nobody had told me was normal for newborn babies. Even then, Evie hadn’t been a screamer. She was a scowler and a plotter.

  Tyrone was clearly as unimpressed as I was, especially at the prospect of a girl. He’d been very vocally hoping for a boy, a baby brother, and instead he now had two sisters.

  I’d wanted a sister, I’d wanted a sister very badly. Because if I had a brother he’d be benchmarked against Jamie. Over and over. Again and again, he’d be benchmarked against my dead baby brother. And I knew Jamie would become harder and harder to hold onto, with a new baby brother in the house.

  It was the only time, staring with utter relief into little Evie’s squashed, angry face, that I thought about the universe.

  Tyrone and I had both wished for opposites before bed each night, furious in the cramped room we shared that was like a battleground. Because the universe had heard us both, but had only listened to me.

  The universe knew I needed a sister more than Tyrone needed a brother.

  ‘Thank you,’ I whispered, holding Evie tightly. Her scowl intensified and she wormed one little pudgy arm free of her blankets, waving it blindly around until she caught my finger and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

  ***

  I loved Songbrooke. I loved the slow trickle of tradesmen, slowly doing the place up. Leaking gutters and rotted verandahs; uneven pavers and broken railings. It was amazing watching the changes happening, so different from living in the middle of it like I had when Dad and I had first moved in with Biddy and Tyrone.

  Mostly, I loved being close to Ben. He said he wanted to give me space, because he knew how important it was, when you were working out complicated things. I liked how gentle he was with the horses and how thoughtful he was before he spoke. And he was kind. I loved that he was kind.

  Mum sometimes said being gentle was the most important thing a person could be. Other times, though, the story changed. Sometimes she said it was better to be passionate; to be clever; to be funny. But I kept thinking of her saying how important being gentle was. It felt like it really mattered.

  Sometimes, I would find an old paintbrush on the grounds, the bristles all rotted from the handle. I would find scrapers and palettes and coils of wire Elsa told me would’ve been for sculpture work. I gave everything I found to Elsa, who eventually wanted to set up one of the buildings as a little museum of the commune, with art from the artists and details about their lives.

  There were sculptures, greened with moss, hidden by blackberry bushes. There were mosaics on some of the buildings, the curling shapes of waves and sea creatures, all tails and eyes and fins. There were carvings in the trunks of tall, thick-based trees. Curling patterns of lines and shapes that had weathered so much they had to be felt rather than seen.

  I loved watching Elsa work. She didn’t mind me sitting in the studio and sometimes gave me things to sort – feathers and glass and sea sponges. I had to be quiet, but I liked being quiet. I liked the feeling of being close to someone without having to speak.

  Being with Elsa in her studio, I wasn’t flooded with too many thoughts. I could stop myself thinking about my cove, about the smashed glass of the café and the little clay mermaid on my bedside table. I could stop thinking about my mother and Jamie and all of their missing things.

  Most mornings, I collected the sea treasures for her project and then headed up to the main house. I’d do the rounds with the animals, taking my time. They distracted me. And, somehow, they took the place of my lonely little cove, of my running, in comforting me with nothing but their presence; the sound of their hooves on the gravel, their rich, loamy smell. It was like sand and waves and wind.

  I felt so comfortable at Songbrooke. It felt so familiar. Like I’d been here all my life. Gordon brought me over some books about Songbrooke, but I hadn’t read them, yet. They were sitting in my bag, under a mess of torn notepaper and the stupid course guide.

  I spent my mornings mucking out paddocks. Once you got over the fact that you were handling poo, it wasn’t too bad.

  The horses breathed very slowly and very evenly.

  Amber came out of the house one day and we stared at each other. She didn’t look annoyed or frustrated. She just looked tired.

  ‘Amber! There’s still some left!’ Elsa called from the kitchen and Amber slowly went back inside, slamming the door behind her.

  ***

  I went to bed at eleven but couldn’t sleep properly. I was restless, drifting in and out of troubling dreams of tidal waves, Mum and Jamie.

  I gave up, put on shoes and a jumper and left the house for the cold, sharp-scented beach.

  Mostly though, I thought of Biddy. It was like since the incident with the man in the café had reminded me of my mum, everything felt freshly raw. I couldn’t look at Biddy. I felt like she’d tipped my mum over the edge. Somehow, she’d ruined everything by flirting with my dad while he was still married to Mum. Because it was flirting. I was sure it was flirting. And now Mum was dead and Biddy was the happy housewife, who slept against the warm bulk of my dad while Mum lay in a grave next to Jamie.

  She was Biddy, the reason I arrived home after dark during winter. The reason I attended school even when I was sick. The reason why I first began glancing enviously at other children, wondering why it was me . . .

  Me with what?

  Me with the weird mother. The mother who would bundle me with lavender to keep me safe; the mother who made me coffees as a preppy; who sometimes drank beer first thing in the morning.

  No, I told myself fiercely. My mum was something special. I was the lucky one. Me and Dad and Jamie . . .

  So that was why you avoided going home, the voice in my head murmured. Why you waited for Biddy’s attention like presents at Christmas and latched onto her in the playground like you’d never let go. That was why your dad flirted with her and spoke to her every night and defended her when your mum said bad things . . .

  ‘My mum could’ve changed the world. She was something special,’ I said out loud, shocked at the tremor in my voice.

  I thought of Tyrone, the way I watched him out of the corner of my eye as Biddy cuddled him and kissed him when he was still small enough not to shy away. The way her face lit up when he came into the room.

  Didn’t I wish it was me? Didn’t I wish at night so fiercely that my nails dug into my palms that Biddy was my mother? My mum was far too distracted; far too intense to be as focused on Jamie and me as Biddy was on Tyrone.

  I felt nauseous and rested my head on my knees, at the moment torn between hating myself and hating Biddy.

  Bridget Banks. I’d been happy with my mum before that. Happy, because until then I’d never been close enough to another mother to realise what was lacking in my own. Biddy had changed that. She’d given me a tantalising glimpse of how other mothers behaved.

  I stared out to sea. I scrunched a handful of cold, dead sand in my hand, wishing I had a mother to cradle me and tell me it was okay. Wishing I had a little brother who would pat my back and whisper commiserations, even when he had no idea why I was crying.

  Now I had neither. I had a dad, but he belonged to others now. He was no longer mine and I didn’t feel like his.

  I let myself imagine Jamie and Mum swimming in from the sea. I imagined them with tails and smil
es and hands that were warm and soft. I repeated Mum’s mermaid stories to myself.

  I felt cool hands touch my back and felt Mum’s lips press against my clammy forehead. I closed my eyes until the world spun and, for a moment, it felt like they were really there with me. Then I gulped in air and opened my eyes and the moment was gone.

  But it was enough.

  It had to be.

  ***

  I used to run. Every day, I used to run, run, run. I thought I was coping fine with it all, but I guess I’d just grown used to the constant ache in my legs and lungs.

  I lay in my bed that night listening to the waves, thinking the same four words over and over.

  What did I want?

  Stupid, I knew, but I couldn’t get this picture of Mum and Jamie out of my head.

  Then I thought about being in a classroom with a room full of Jamies, of having someone gaze up at me with the adoration that I’d once had for Biddy.

  And I wondered.

  ***

  One of the cabins at Songbrooke had an old, rusted table and chair on its porch that I sometimes took to sitting at with a cup of coffee and my course guide in the mornings before school. It was the cabin closest to the cliffs and I could see the froth of ocean, if I leaned in the right direction. There were old, mangled wind chimes that sounded a little bit like home.

  Someone had walked paint across the porch and I spent long swathes of time just staring at the blue-coloured footprints, the loop they did to the door and back down the steps, onto the dirt. I’d stood on the clearest of the prints. The person had smaller feet than me. Maybe they’d been a child’s feet, splashing blue onto the wood.

  I found a painting of a mermaid in the same blue paint. Rudimentary, like someone had smeared the shape with their fingers. I traced my fingers over it, backwards and forwards. I blurred my eyes until I could trick the painting into the shape of Mum, her body arched towards the edge of the building, as though Jamie was tucked around the corner.

  Elsa gave me a sketchbook and I tentatively doodled page after page of shells and trees and fins and my own hand, splayed on the paper in front of me. Sometimes, I just drew oysters and pearls and tried to remember what it was like to be Pearl.

  Mostly, Loretta came with me and read or studied while I doodled. Sometimes she made me do maths. And other times Gordon would join us, seated at the table with his own sketchbook. His drawings were beautiful, not that he often showed them to us. But I watched them forming on the paper, before he noticed and snatched the book away. People and wings and sometimes intricate patterns that looked like they were made of metal.

  ‘Look!’ I said, holding up my pad.

  ‘Is it a tree? It’s great!’

  ‘It’s my hand,’ I said, wounded.

  ‘Um. Hands only have five fingers.’

  ‘They’re shadows! I did shadowing!’ I whacked him on the arm with my sketchpad and he grinned.

  ‘Wish I could draw like you,’ I grumbled, propping my chin in my hand. ‘I mean, people can actually tell what you’ve drawn.’

  ‘Not always,’ he said.

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘Do you like drawing, though?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I really do.’

  ‘Well, draw. Who cares if people think the hand’s a tree. Who bloody cares.’

  Sometimes I’d walk around the property. There were some cabins and caravans towards the back of the place, hidden in copses of trees.

  Martin turned up one day and he and Elsa walked the entire property, making sure the dodgy plantations that had once been dotted over the paddocks hadn’t popped up again.

  ‘We’ll burn whatever we find, right?’ Elsa asked.

  Martin chuckled. ‘Of course!’

  ***

  The next day, I was feeding the goats when Ben and Elsa pulled up with a carload of animal feed. Elsa disappeared inside and I put the bucket down and helped Ben unload it all.

  As we quietly worked, Amber came charging out of the house and disappeared into one of the cabins, slamming the door shut behind her. Ben watched her. He put down the feedbag and took a step towards the cabin. Then it was like all the energy drained out of him and he slumped down with his back against the shed wall.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  He nodded, his eyes closed. He looked so tired. ‘What’s wrong with Amber, Ben? I won’t tell anyone. Not even Loretta.’

  Ben sighed. ‘I promised I wouldn’t tell.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ I said. ‘It just might help, that’s all.’

  He looked at me searchingly for a moment and then he closed his eyes again and reached for my hand. His hand was warm and rough and I almost trembled with the wonder of holding it.

  ‘She’s been in and out of therapy. But our parents weren’t coping and so it was either come here or start as a day-patient. The doctors thought here would be good for her. Elsa’s great and there’s hardly any phone reception. The crazy girl she was talking about putting me through the ringer? It’s her.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘She . . . she has a weird relationship with food. And she got obsessed with these forums about losing weight.’ Ben shuddered. ‘And school back home only made it worse. She’s not meant to be online unsupervised, because she goes back on them. And then she gets sick.’

  ‘So that’s why you kept checking up on her in the computer labs.’

  ‘And why she was getting so annoyed about it.’

  ‘She has an eating disorder?’ I frowned. ‘But . . .’

  ‘She’s not stick thin?’ He half-smiled. ‘Not everyone with an eating disorder is super skinny.’

  I shook my head. ‘I had no idea about Amber. I mean . . .’

  ‘I watched you,’ Ben said. ‘I could see you noticing the stuff she does. Nobody else noticed, but you did.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, she reminded me of my mum, I guess.’

  ‘You know how she disappeared? She was running up and down the beach, trying to work off a packet of chips she’d eaten.’ Ben shook his head. ‘I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone. I promised her we could pretend to be from Sydney. I promised her so much, Gwen.’

  ‘So why’d you tell me?’

  ‘Because I think you needed to hear it. I didn’t want you to think she was a monster.’ He blinked. ‘And I wanted to. Tell you, I mean.’

  I was quiet for a moment, watching a seagull fly across the yard. ‘You came here to keep her company, didn’t you? To make sure she was okay?’

  ‘She’s my sister, of course I did. She wanted me to come, but she’s felt so bad about the whole thing. She cries all the time and tells me and our parents how sorry she is, then the next minute she’s screaming at Elsa and me for being too controlling.’ He went to straighten up. ‘I better go make sure she’s okay.’

  I squeezed his hand. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘What do you mean, don’t?’

  ‘Ben, you can’t save her.’

  ‘She’s my sister.’

  ‘You can’t spend the rest of your life following her around, waiting to catch her out. That’s what my dad tried to do for my mum and . . .’ I took a deep breath. ‘Amber has to save herself.’

  His voice cracked. ‘I just want her to be okay.’

  ‘So, ask her,’ I said, kicking at a piece of driftwood. ‘Ask her what she needs from you. Ask her how. But you can’t spend the rest of your life like this. Just ask her.’

  He swallowed. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay, I will.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I found Elsa a dried-out seahorse on my way back to Songbrooke the next day. My mum had always said they were good luck, but I didn’t really believe that.

  ‘Keep it,’ Elsa said. ‘I heard they’re good luck.’

  I sat in her studio and watched her work, and Amber came in and sat down next to me and neither of us spoke. We both just watched Elsa, and when Elsa left the room to get a drink, Amber cleared her throat but didn’t look at me.
/>   ‘Ben said he told you about me,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. I won’t tell anyone, though. So don’t worry.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She fiddled with the cuff of her leggings. ‘He said you told him to ask me what I needed.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Thank you. Thanks for that. I’m so sick of people trying to get me to do things their way.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I just need to work it all out on my own.’

  I thought of my mother, of Jamie, of everything. And I nodded.

  After a while, Elsa came back in and we returned to being quiet. To watching. I looked up and Ben was standing in the doorway. He wasn’t watching us. He was watching Elsa, too.

  ***

  I slept badly that night. I slept too lightly to dream, but I woke up feeling gritty and unhappy with my seahorse under my pillow and my quiche recipe pulled off the wall and crumpled up in my fist.

  When I went to Songbrooke, Elsa frowned at me. ‘You look awful.’

  ‘Didn’t sleep that well.’

  ‘Take Silver out, if you want,’ Elsa said. ‘He’ll just plod down the beach and back again. It’s very soothing.’

  ‘What? Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure, I’m sure!’

  She showed me how to saddle him up. I’d been on a few rides with Mum when I was young, enough to know the basics, which seemed to be all Silver knew too.

  I did my early-morning beachcombing with Silver, who sighed a lot as we went up and down the beach. It was hard getting back on him after I’d jumped off to collect the things tossed up by the surf. Sometimes, I found an edge of bank further up the beach to use as a step, other times I just led him for a while and he just sighed and followed me.

  I paused in my hunt for beach treasures near our house. Tyrone was out on his surfboard. I waved to him, but he was concentrating and didn’t wave back. The sky was so dark and the air so cold that I shivered.

  After dropping off everything and turning Silver out into the paddock, I went home. In the lounge room, on the floor, was a roll of fabric that Mum had been saving to make a tail. A mermaid’s tail. She was going to make it for my eighth birthday. Why was it out here? Who had dared touch it? I saw the scissors, the needle and thread, and the thimble that was Biddy’s. My stomach lurched and something within me snapped.