The Best Kind of Beautiful

by Frances Whiting

  The Green Team had their small, shambolic office in the library and their banner was draped hopefully, if somewhat limply, across its entrance. Last year some local kids had spray-painted over its jaunty We Plant Dreams slogan, so it proclaimed: The Green Team: We Plant Pot! and Florence laughed out loud at the memory.

  She had supervised the sign’s original creation, working with the children from the nearby East Elm Primary School. They had painted its calico letters outside on the lawn, and the students in their hot-pink art smocks had looked like chattering flamingos on the grass.

  In return for their space at the library, granted by the long-standing local member Barry Piccolo, the Green Team was required to teach the children of East Elm about the wonders of nature – but not, Barry had warned, wagging his finger at them and wriggling his eyebrows, ‘the birds and the bees’.

  Florence found Barry Piccolo to be a very tiresome man.

  He gave out bumper stickers that said: ‘Need to Know? Call Piccolo’, sported a comb-over that stretched like cling wrap across his skull, and went to every single public event East Elm had on offer.

  Barry Piccolo, it was said, would go to the opening of a barn door.

  Nevertheless Florence and the other members of the Green Team voted for him at every election, worried that if he were turfed out, so would they be.

  Florence usually did one or two school sessions a week, sitting on a hard chair in the children’s section amid a flurry of five-year-olds clutching kidney-shaped beans in their soft, sweaty hands.

  ‘Are these Jack and the Beanstalk beans?’ a little boy had asked one morning, opening his fingers like a starfish.

  ‘No,’ Florence had answered truthfully, ‘that’s a fairy tale, it never happened,’ later earning a sharp rebuke from Monty Rollins, who explained to her the importance of magic and wonder, and Florence had explained to him the importance of reality.

  But the truth was, Florence didn’t need Monty to remind her of the earth’s magic. She felt it every time it cracked beneath her spade, the moment it yielded to release its strange scent of otherness. Florence loved watching the first trembles of the saplings she had planted, or the silent unfolding of a flower’s throat; when the earth’s skin broke and gave up its secrets, Florence felt like she was witnessing the real entrance into Narnia.

  Florence passed beneath the welcome sign and through the library to the Green Team’s office, where a man with a messy thatch of fair hair leant back in an armchair in the corner, the broadsheet paper in his hands, his work boots unlaced on his feet. He looked up and smiled at her.

  ‘Good morning, Florence.’

  Albert Flowers, who had his own particular scent of otherness.

  Albert was the first co-worker Florence had met when she’d joined the Green Team a year earlier. He’d pointed to his own embroidered name, before saying it aloud, and she’d echoed the gesture and said, ‘Flo,’ and then added, ‘Actually it’s Florence, I don’t know why they shortened it.’ Isolde’s face had flashed before her: ‘Probably to make you seem friendlier.’

  Albert had smiled at her. ‘They asked me if I wanted Bertie.’

  ‘The horror,’ she’d replied.

  In the days and weeks that followed, she’d come to realise that just as she was not a Flo, Albert was most certainly not a Bertie. Berties, she thought, were men who laughed like braying donkeys and drank beer from their tennis shoes.

  No, despite his rigorous social life, Albert was an Albert, no matter how many parties he went to.

  He was also attractive, if you liked, as Isolde said when she met him at Florence’s twenty-sixth birthday lunch, a man who looked like a garden shed.

  Looking at Albert now, his legs set like pylons on the floor, his arms hunkered around the paper and his thick jaw tilted towards her, she could see Isolde’s point.

  Albert was a giant – not Isolde giant, not all gangly limbs and sharp corners, but solid and sturdy, able, she supposed, to withstand strong winds.

  Exactly like a well-built garden shed.

  If you liked that sort of thing.

  That first morning he had led her into the Green Team’s office, saying, ‘This is Florence, everyone, be kind.’

  Because Albert Flowers was kind, not just to Florence, but also to Monty who was pompous and ridiculous in his spotted bow ties, and who constantly fussed around the library shelves like a moth caught in a bell jar. He was kind to the children of East Elm Primary who tumbled into the library like acrobats and blew their noses on their sleeves and didn’t care who saw them. Once she had seen him scoop up Mrs Trenton, an elderly sparrow of a woman, as she struggled to reach the slot outside the library to return her books. ‘Alley-oop,’ he had said, lifting her deftly off her feet and then returning her gently to the ground, where she’d stood rosy-cheeked and twittering.

  ‘Hello Albert,’ Florence smiled back. ‘It’s going to be hot out there today,’ adding, ‘I’ll think of you in the thirty-five-degree heat while I’m in here in the set-at-a-very-comfortable twenty-four degrees air conditioning.’

  Albert got up from his desk and plucked his daypack off the hook, tossing a water bottle in it.

  ‘Some of us, Florence,’ he said as he walked out the door, ‘have dreams to plant.’

  ‘Really, because I thought it was salt wattle today?’

  Albert grinned at her. ‘That too,’ he said, closing the office door behind him.

  Her family, she thought, would be shocked to see her like this, bantering.

  There were very few moments when Florence felt truly relaxed. She remembered being at one of those awful university balls when she was studying horticulture, and a boy from her class had passed her a joint saying, ‘Here you go, Flo, this will loosen you up,’ and Florence had refused, without telling him that was exactly what she was afraid of.

  But when she and Albert tramped into the park’s fold, with the flashing blurs of lorikeets swooping overhead, Florence felt herself settle. While she scattered seeds on the forest floor, or felt the satisfying tug beneath her fingers as a recalcitrant weed gave way, Albert would tell her his stories that began when the automated doors of the library closed quietly behind him at the end of each day. Then life would rush at Albert Flowers, taking him in cabs to parties, or drinks at rooftop bars in the city, or weekends on houseboats, and Florence would listen and sometimes imagine herself on the boat, or at the party, or gazing at the wash of city lights beneath her with a salt-lipped glass in her hand.

  Life did not rush at Florence when the East Elm Library’s door slid shut. It did not call to her or shout across dance floors. The siren song that Florence mostly answered to was the whistle of the kettle on her stove’s blue-lipped flames. Unless of course you counted being trotted out at various events as a paid-up member of the Saint Claire clan, or occasionally joining Isolde and her friends for dinner, or being dragged to gigs by Puck or . . . the other thing.

  Florence blinked and a faint colour rose to her cheeks, as if just by thinking about it her own particular cat would be out of the bag.

  The Green Team’s office door opened and Monty Rollins appeared.

  ‘Florence,’ he said in his rich, fruity voice, ‘your public awaits.’

  Florence went out into the library as a jumble of red and green checked tunics came tumbling in, smelling like wet sandwiches.

  God, thought Florence, it’s like being trapped inside a lunchbox.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Saint Claire,’ the children chorused, their voices like birds.

  ‘Good morning,’ she answered them. ‘I hope you’re all going to at least try to sit still today . . . Now,’ she asked brightly, ‘who would like to hear the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar?’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ answered Pedro Perkins, five years old, dark hair, strands of it permanently dangling over his left eye.

  ‘Tough luck, Pedro,’ she said. ‘We don’t always get what we want,’ earning a raised eyebrow from Monty hovering at the shelves
nearby.

  Well we don’t, she wanted to tell him.

  ‘Right,’ she said, pulling herself back to the cluster of children at her feet, ‘In the still of the night an egg lay . . .’

  After the last school group had left for the day, Florence stacked the beanbags in the corner, plucked the odd empty chip packet from the floor and returned the books she had read aloud to the shelves.

  She sat at her desk looking up plant species in the library’s bright red reference books, waiting for Albert to come in and say, ‘Still here, Florence? Fancy a coffee on the way home?’

  If he had somewhere to go, and Albert Flowers was a man who often had somewhere to go, they would part ways at the gate to her cottage, and she would stand by her pink-tipped camellia bushes and wave him off.

  Isolde, witnessing the goodbye from the upstairs window, once said, ‘Honestly, Florence, it’s like he’s going to war.’

  Florence would watch him wander down her street, stopping to chat to Victor, lying in wait behind the fence to ask Albert about his butter pumpkins. Then Albert would continue on his way to dinner or drinks with his band of friends, who he sometimes referred to as ‘the usual suspects’, a phrase that made Florence bristle, and feel momentarily glad she wasn’t one of them.

  Every now and again Albert would come inside the cottage, stamping his work boots on the mat outside the door, and hang his hat on the hook in the hallway, filling her house with his frame and smelling vaguely like damp forest leaves. They would sit at her kitchen table and he would fill her in on what he and his friends were up to that night, and she would smile and nod as if she too had a band of usual suspects, girls, she supposed, with names like Tilly and Flick who would take their shoes off to dance.

  Albert’s friends seemed to be mostly someone called Jeremy, and a girl called Lydia – whom Florence suspected was irritating.

  Florence found the name Lydia irritating all by itself.

  Somewhere in his telling, Florence would close her eyes for a moment and enter the story, elbowing her way in amongst the semicircles laughing at something Jeremy or Lydia – no, not Lydia – said.

  She would find herself walking home barefoot beside him, her feet damp from the grass, the thin strap of her shoes hooked on the tips of her fingers, the cool night air on her cool, dark skin.

  Sometimes Albert would tilt his head back and laugh at something one of his friends had done. He had so many friends, she’d thought once, panicking, and she only really had Isolde and Puck – and Victor, if you counted a man who said good morning to you from behind his runner beans every day.

  As a child Florence had never been the sort of girl to have a knot of other girls to link arms with; her ears had not been the ones secrets were whispered into; and in the migratory paths of mothers dropping their daughters off at homes around the neighbourhood on weekends, Kinsey had not been on the route.

  Florence knew why, she had always known why, and hadn’t much cared for the most part.

  The Saint Claires were not like the other families who lived in the streets around Kinsey, and the Saint Claire children were not like the other children who rode their bikes and skateboards along those streets. Sometimes Florence would watch them through the rear window as Richard’s van pulled away to take the Saint Claires to gigs, and she’d splay her hand against the glass. She wondered what might happen if she curled her hand into a fist and rapped loudly on the windscreen, so they would all look up from the bikes strewn on the footpath and see that she was there. Florence thought that Albert never really looked up and saw that she was there either, or if he did that he didn’t suppose she was the sort of person who would enjoy his nocturnal wanderings.

  Perhaps he thought she was not at all the type of girl who would find it fun – a lark, Lamanda would say – to swim all the way home by climbing over fences into people’s swimming pools.

  Scowling, she thought, I could have a lark, I could be larkish.

  Except she couldn’t, because she was prickly.

  Everyone said so.

  *

  When Florence was nineteen, she had overheard her mother and her best friends Leticia Pepsi and Nancy Adams through the lounge-room door left slightly ajar.

  ‘The problem with Florence,’ Leticia had announced, ‘is that she’s prickly.’

  ‘Like a cactus,’ her mother had agreed.

  ‘What’s that desert cactus?’ Nancy had asked. ‘You know the one like a big flat hand with all those great thorns jutting out of it?’

  ‘A prickly pear,’ Leticia had answered.

  ‘Well that’s her then,’ Nancy had continued. ‘Lovely but spikey.’

  Florence had blushed, mostly because Nancy had called her lovely, but also because she felt uncomfortable being discussed in this way, in any way.

  ‘And talented,’ Leticia had added. ‘It kills me that she won’t sing.’

  ‘I wish Lucas was here,’ Amanda said, ‘he’d know what to do with her,’ and Leticia and Nancy had murmured their agreement.

  Florence had padded past the door and into her father’s studio, where his music scores lay on top of the piano and his newspapers sat beside his wing-backed armchair, books stacked on top of them, scattered crumbs caught beneath one of their jackets.

  Photos of her father and Amanda, flattened like insects behind glass, stared from the walls: as Bonnie and Clyde on their way to a fancy dress party; of Amanda looking past her father’s shoulder on a boat, both of them laughing in the wind. In a cluster around them, photos of Florence and Isolde and Puck: Puck’s impish face smiling from behind the wheel of his pedal car; a tiny Isolde enveloped in her mother’s fur and high heels; and one of Florence on stage, holding a microphone bigger than her hand.

  Her favourite photo was one of the whole family at the beach beneath a red and white striped umbrella, Amanda’s hair tucked into a terry-towelling turban, and Florence wrapped in a towel in her father’s arms.

  It was like being inside a conch shell.

  Lucas Saint Claire’s ‘lucky’ clarinet leant against the wall, waiting for his lips to settle against the mouthpiece. He always moved his head just slightly to one side before he began to play, followed by a sharp and deep intake of a breath. When she was younger, Florence liked to sit with her back against the hallway wall, her legs straight out in front of her, listening. Her father’s music always soothed her, whether she’d been fighting with Isolde, or later if some boy she’d liked had met her blinking, eager glances with shrugging indifference. She would sit with her head tipped back against the smooth walls and blot out everything except the notes escaping under the door and dancing down the hallway. After a while, her father would poke his head around the studio door, sensing her presence in the hallway. ‘Come on in, Florence,’ he’d say. ‘Come and make some music with your old man.’

  The music room’s bay window looked out onto the street below and the enormous pine that stood sentry in the front yard of Kinsey with its three tyres still dangling hopefully from its branches, even though the children were long past swinging. Florence liked to sit at the window seat, chin resting against her cupped hands on the sill, and look out through the branches to the people below carrying groceries and holding children’s hands, sometimes looking up to the house where her family lived.

  When her family had started to become well known, people had stopped walking past Kinsey’s green and white gables and started pausing in front of it. They would crane their necks to the music room’s window, where a seven-year-old Isolde had once flashed her bare bottom against the glass, and Florence had been both horrified and full of admiration.

  Waiting for Albert in the Green Team’s office, Florence laughed, picturing Issy’s pale white cheeks pressed against the window, her dress hitched up around her waist. She could see Lucas striding across the music room floor to lift a wriggling Issy off the seat, but now Florence couldn’t recall whether he was shouting or laughing at her.

  Either was possible, but eithe
r way she couldn’t ask him.

  Because Lucas Saint Claire was dead, killed in the very ordinary, un-Lucas Saint Claire manner of crossing a road without looking both ways and being mowed down by a milk truck.

  Had he looked one particular way, he would have seen the van bearing down on him and felt its low growl in time to neatly sidestep it, wink and smile at the person nearest to him and say, sucking in his breath to form a long, low whistle, ‘That was a close one.’ But he had not looked, and he had died – Lucas Saint Claire, ‘famous jazzman, sometime actor, writer, husband, and father’ – ‘in a motor vehicle accident’, the obituary in the Argus had read. This was in deference to Amanda’s wishes that the unfortunate detail of Lucas being taken out by a Packers Dairy milk truck be omitted.

  The obituary spoke of his talent, his artistry, his break-out album Love Walked In, his mainstream hit ‘Santa Was A Jazz Cat’, his marriage to Amanda – ‘one of jazz’s most enduring professional, and personal, collaborations’ – and his three talented children, each named, it noted, ‘with trademark Saint Claire flair’.

  Amanda, in head to toe black, with a net cobwebbed over her face, had been inconsolable at the funeral, sobbing at her husband’s demise, mostly, it seemed, at the way in which he had met his end. ‘A milk truck!’ she had kept saying, ‘A milk truck!’ It was exactly, Florence thought, like Lady Bracknell shrieking, ‘A handbag!’

  Isolde, of course, had gone into fourteen-year-old histrionics at the wake, flapping around in complicated layers and getting in everyone’s way until Leticia had taken Florence aside and said, ‘For God’s sake, do something about your sister, she’s like a March fly in there.’

  And Puck?

  Puck had been Puck, in a deep blue velvet suit with a shiny blue tie, his pork-pie hat pulled down almost to his eyebrows, sitting on the grass outside the hall, drumming his fingers against his thighs.