What else had she missed?
Who else had she missed?
For someone with not too many friends, Florence thought, she really should make an effort to get to know people better – maybe then she’d make some.
‘We don’t mind a dollop of cabaret either.’
‘What?’ Florence asked, her voice a few notes higher than usual.
‘Cabaret – Sharon and I go often,’ Monty smiled, then turned to push a trolley pregnant with books towards the shelves and vanished into Historical Fiction.
Was Monty letting her know that he knew about Miss Suki?
What had he said? ‘Sharon and I go often.’ It had sounded, Florence thought, vaguely threatening, but then she remembered Monty’s smile as he said it, which was leaning far more towards the mischievous.
Florence made a coffee in the staffroom, said good morning to Erica Little, the junior librarian, who was wearing a sleeveless dress and, Florence noticed for the first time, had the cover of Slouching Towards Bethlehem tattooed on her upper arm.
Now that took some missing. She’d never taken a good look at Erica’s tattoo before, and Florence wondered how on earth she hadn’t noticed it. Florence felt like she supposed Isolde had the first time she wore glasses. Isolde wore contact lenses now, but when she was about eight a teacher had written to the Saint Claires to suggest that Isolde’s habit of bumping into things might be due to poor eyesight rather than ‘general clumsiness’. Florence had gone to the optometrist to pick up Isolde’s new glasses with her – bright green with studded red arms – and when Issy had put them on outside, she had looked around her, turned to Florence and said, ‘Leaves have edges.’ Isolde had looked around in astonishment for about two weeks, then left the glasses on her bedside table and gone back to bumping into things.
Now Florence felt, if not quite the same wide-eyed wonder as Isolde had for those two weeks, at least a strange sense of things being pulled into focus. She wasn’t sure why, but it had been a steady sharpening since she had begun spending her days tramping through the forest with the Green Team and her nights singing with Orla and Veronica.
That was enough to awaken anyone’s senses, every single one of them.
Erica noticed her taking in the image of Joan Didion on her arm, the author’s elfin face half wrapped in black, rectangular sunglasses.
‘You like it?’ Erica asked her.
‘I love it,’ Florence answered. ‘I love Joan Didion.’
Erica smiled. ‘You work in a library, Florence, you inhale gardens, you read like a madwoman, of course you love Joan Didion, she’s the patron saint of girls like us.’
Florence supposed she was, but she had slotted Erica elsewhere. If she had been made to guess which book cover the junior librarian would have inked on her skin, she would have definitely chosen one of the Brontë sisters – probably Emily.
‘It’s a beautiful tattoo, Erica,’ she said as she left the staffroom for the Green Team office, a little thrill inside at Erica’s ‘girls like us’.
Florence sipped her coffee. I am a girl like us, she thought. I am in a girl club, I have a crew.
She giggled as Albert walked in carrying two long-handled shovels.
‘I brought these from home, I thought we could use them at the southern entrance today,’ he said.
‘And good morning to you too, Albert,’ Florence answered, then checking the junior librarian was not around added, ‘did you know Erica has the cover of Slouching Towards Bethlehem on her arm?’
Albert nodded. ‘It’s good, isn’t it? All the librarians do it. Monty’s got Lady Chatterley’s Lover inked on his bum.’
For a moment, Florence believed him, then she laughed. ‘His wife Sharon’s got thighs like pistons, I bet you didn’t know that.’
‘I did actually,’ Albert said. ‘Anyway, how was your weekend?’
‘Great,’ Florence answered. ‘How was yours?’
‘Oh, I went for a couple of drinks with Jeremy and Lydia, and I went to a thingy at the Greek Club. Have you been there? Lots of columns and vines?’
‘No, I’ve never been,’ she replied. She had, actually: Miss Suki and the Nightshades had performed there during a Paniyiri Festival wearing one-shouldered dresses that had made them look like university students at a toga party.
Florence felt her lips stretching across her face in what she hoped looked like a smile. Just once, she thought, she would like Albert to tell her that he had spent his weekend pottering around. He looked like a potterer to her. But he was always out. With sodding Jeremy and sodding Lydia.
‘Are they a couple?’ she found herself asking, digging, more precisely.
‘Who?’
‘Jeremy and Lydia.’
Albert laughed. ‘Christ no. Although I don’t think old Jeremy would say no.’
Every now and again Albert’s speech slipped into the cadence of his other world filled with guffaws and back-slapping and young men who were called old. ‘Old Jeremy’, and ‘Old Liam’ and ‘Old Freddy’. It didn’t, Florence thought, suit him.
She kept her mouth stretched, regardless. ‘I went out with my friends Orla and Veronica to an Italian restaurant,’ pleased she had an actual, non-paying event to tell him about.
‘Orla and Veronica,’ Albert echoed. ‘I don’t think you’ve mentioned them before.’
‘Oh really?’ Florence said. ‘Well, they’re kind of my girl crew.’
The moment she said it, she wished she hadn’t.
Bloody, bloody, bloody hell. She blamed Erica for making her feel like she was in some secret sisterhood. Yes, it was Erica’s fault. Erica and Joan Didion.
‘So, this girl crew of yours, do you have a tag you use when you’re spray-painting the outside of buildings?’ Albert asked, his mouth twisting in its efforts to stay straight.
‘Yes, we do, as a matter of fact,’ Florence said. ‘It says “Piss Off Albert”.’
Albert laughed and handed her the shovel. ‘Come on then, Florence, let’s go, and if I really piss you off you can always hit me over the head with this.’
They drove to the south entrance of the park, the sun already hitting the windscreen and warming it.
Florence felt her eyes closing, and her head dropping towards her chest, and she jerked it back several times before she let go to the warmth of the car, and the motor’s hum beneath her feet and the feeling that it was rather nice to look at Albert Flowers’s profile before she went to sleep.
Albert woke her when they got to the car park, reluctant, he said, to leave her asleep in the van in the isolated south-west section of the forest.
‘I would have been absolutely fine, you just didn’t want to do all that digging yourself,’ Florence told him as they got out of the car and slipped behind the green curtain.
At lunchtime they sat on some granite boulders, the surfaces smoothed by time, and when they finished their sandwiches, and she was just about to tease him about his having the crusts cut off, Albert told her about Charlotte Markson and there was absolutely no teasing to be done.
This was not the usual tale of late-night carousing in late-night bars with the sort of people who sometimes reminded her of the crowd who hung off Lucas Saint Claire like flashy baubles on a Christmas tree. Florence hadn’t liked those people when she was young, and hadn’t entirely liked her father when he was around them either. When he was with them, raising a distracted wave to her from across a room, Florence felt like all his volume was turned up and hers was turned down. It felt like Lucas didn’t belong to her family, as if he was on loan. Florence preferred the quieter moments with her father, they all did, times when he would play his clarinet in the lounge room, so it was like a private concert, or sit quietly with Isolde, helping her decipher a score.
Florence was better at quieter moments, like this one with Albert who was rushing his words out, hurrying the telling in a voice so soft that she had to lean in across the granite to catch all the ways that Charlotte could have been a conten
der.
For the State water polo team, for the position of Ollie’s future first girlfriend, for the best friend her girlfriends would ever have in high school, for one of those people life throws forward every now and again, landing like sparking firecrackers.
Florence listened to Albert in the forest and said nothing at all, while Albert Flowers surprised her by crying, his head towards the faint white moon still suspended in the day’s sky.
It felt shockingly intimate to Florence, like walking into a room and discovering lovers wrapped in each other’s layers.
Albert wasn’t crying in any way she had seen or heard anyone cry before. Not like Lucas, who sometimes when he heard a piece of music would bow his head and raise one hand to his eyes as if he needed shielding from so much beauty; or Amanda, who ran the gamut of tears from gazing-into-the-distance sniffs to full-throated sobs. Isolde was a pretty crier, small drifts of tears on her cheeks, while Puck’s tears were rare and sprang from his eyes in watery spurts. But Albert Flowers was not so much crying as howling. It was not easy to watch or hear, but Florence held her gaze steady as she slipped her hand into his and began to sing. Florence recognised it as the same sort of song her mother had sung to her as they’d sat outside the Prentices’ house, Kinsey awash in red and blue. What had Amanda called it? A song of lament. That was what it was. There were no words or discernible melody, not a hint of a chorus.
She had never sung in front of Albert before, and if he was surprised, he did not show it. Instead Florence sang and Albert got the howl out. It was a strange duet, heard by all the unearthly creatures in the forest.
‘I’m sorry Albert,’ Florence said when the song stilled.
‘Thank you Florence,’ he answered. ‘I don’t exactly know where that came from.’
‘My singing or your crying?’ she smiled at him.
‘Both, I suppose,’ he said as they stood up to strike the earth once more, Albert’s shovel splitting its skin hard and fast.
*
‘Once you have seen a man cry,’ Amanda told her that night when she dropped over to see Florence and Isolde, ‘all bets are off.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked her mother.
‘I mean, that’s it, darling, it’s all over, either way.’
‘Either way?’
Amanda smiled her cat smile, the one that said, ‘I know things you don’t know and will never know,’ and drove her children to distraction.
‘If a man cries in front of you, Florence, it’s a surrender to either a great love or a deep friendship,’ she said.
‘Or,’ Florence said, tired of her mother’s romanticising, ‘it’s because a child died and it’s really sad.’
‘Well of course it’s sad, Florence,’ Amanda replied. ‘It’s the saddest thing in the world. I’m simply saying that this landscape gardener of yours obviously feels very,’ Amanda twirled one hand in the air, searching for the right word, ‘safe with you, and the person you should feel safest with is either your lover or your best friend. So which do you think you are, darling?’
Florence didn’t know. Albert was not like other men she had fallen for, other relationships where she had tumbled into bed with men she couldn’t keep her hands off. At university she had gone on a few dates, if attending university balls and trivia nights on the loose understanding that if you had arrived together, you would be leaving together, constituted dating.
There had also been, for a few months in her final year, Adam.
Florence still felt twinges of regret over Adam Best, who never seemed to mind her particular brand of oddness.
He was in his final year of Vet, and his family had a cattle property called Constantine about two and a half hours north-west of the city. The nearest town was Raleigh or, as it was known among its locals and on the billboard on the way into it, ‘The Best Little Town in the West’.
Florence had hated it.
She had liked Adam, though.
She had liked the way he spoke to her, always keeping his eyes on hers, and the way he had none of the swagger of the boys in their group but held his own among them. She liked the way he called her mother ‘Mrs Saint Claire’, even though her entire family, even Puck, had mocked him as he’d said it.
Most of all, she liked the way he used his hands.
Other boys at university – useless boys, Florence thought – behaved like their hands were strange shapes they had unexpectedly found at the end of their arms, uncertain what to do with them.
Adam Best did not have that same trouble.
He did however have five hundred head of cattle, several nippy farm dogs and a mother who wore pale olive jodhpurs and took one look at Florence and knew, just as Florence did, that she would not do at all.
For the rest of the stay, and for several return visits afterwards, Florence had tried. She had tried to imagine herself living at Constantine, creating a garden in the bush, coaxing beds into life and growing wisteria. She would close her eyes to see herself planting a cottage garden in front of the house, lavender at the stairs and bellflowers at the door, but she couldn’t. She was like Isolde, she supposed: too much wildness in her.
When she had told Adam it was over, he had cried wet tears into the back of his hands, and she had known straight away that she was losing not a lover but a best friend.
After Adam, there had been other men, but Florence had grown attached to none of them, and she had certainly not seen any of them cry.
‘What about Dad?’ she asked Amanda, now sitting beside her on the couch, her feet on Florence’s lap. ‘Did you ever see him cry?’
Amanda shook her head. ‘Only over music,’ she answered. ‘But I did enough crying for the both of us.’
It was true, Florence thought. When Amanda wasn’t singing, she was laughing, and when she wasn’t laughing, she was crying, or calling out to people from across the room, making sure everyone knew she was in it. Amanda wore her emotions on her sleeve like Erica’s tattoo.
‘Anyway,’ Amanda said, ‘I think it’s probably time for you and this woodsman to work out if you are to be friends or more than friends, darling.’
‘Albert,’ Florence said. ‘His name is Albert.’
*
In name, plumage and song, the Albert’s lyrebird lacked the startling beauty and range of its cousin, the superb lyrebird, with its preening outer feathers curled in the shape of a lyre. Albert’s lyrebirds did not have the same instrumental motif; they were, Florence thought, the avian world’s Aunt Margo to its Amanda Saint Claire. But both birds could mimic the sounds they heard around them, the staccato aaks of kookaburras, the unsettling mews of green catbirds and, increasingly, the sharp wails of car alarms and chainsaws.
The Albert’s lyrebird was the rarer of the two, and its human namesake thought he had seen and heard one in an isolated northern section of the Mount Bell State Forest.
Unlikely, thought Florence. There were fewer and fewer Albert’s lyrebirds to be found, thanks mostly to those car alarms and chainsaws they mimicked so gloriously. They were also notoriously timid and did their full-throated courting in winter.
It was summer now, and sitting with Albert Flowers in an already heavy cloak of heat, Florence began to prickle. It was the morning after what she had come to think of as ‘The Howling’, and they had pre-arranged to meet in this section of Mount Bell.
Florence had thought what had transpired yesterday would lessen the distance between them. She had lain in bed that night drawing Venn diagrams in her mind, and the intersection where she and Albert met had widened considerably, its shape a plump almond.
Now, sitting with Albert behind the clearing where he thought he had seen a chestnut blur and heard a mimicked bowerbird call, Florence felt the intersection instead narrowing.
This was not a coming together at all, but a pulling apart. Albert, she saw, could barely look at her. ‘It’s not my fault, mate,’ she wanted to shout at him. ‘You’re the one who started spouting like a geyser.’ It
was uncharitable, but Florence felt uncharitable and scratchy in the heat, as the space and silence between them grew.
It was Albert who broke it, his voice, Florence noticed, a semi-tone higher than usual. ‘Do you know the author Cat Morrison?’ he asked, and Florence nodded – so there was to be no new rhythm between them.
‘I’ve read a couple of her books . . . I think one was called Flourish.’
‘Nourish,’ Albert said, then added, ‘It was pretty good.’
Florence raised an eyebrow at him. ‘You’ve read it?’
‘Sure,’ Albert answered. ‘Or I may have flicked through Addie’s copy.’
‘And I think I read the second one too. I can’t remember what it was called though . . .’
‘The Burnt Chop and Other Syndromes,’ Albert said. ‘The one about how women, particularly mothers, will always keep the one chop that’s burnt for themselves and give the good ones to their family.’
‘Will they?’ Florence asked, amused, and mentally added another thing about the people around her she had missed: Victor’s fence pacing, Monty’s love of Scottish naturists, Erica’s homage to Joan Didion, and now Albert’s reading habits.
‘They will,’ Albert answered, ‘or at least that’s what Cat says.’
‘Oh, you know Ms Morrison, eminent American feminist, voice of a generation, woman who wears colourful hats, do you?’ she asked.
‘Well I’m going to the launch of her new book, Candy,’ Albert said, snapping a chocolate bar in half and handing a few squares to Florence.
‘Who are you going with?’ she found herself asking, her voice high-pitched and not her own.
‘Oh, the usual suspects,’ Albert answered, and Florence nodded.
Of course you are, thought Florence, of course you are going with Jeremy and Lydia who probably hasn’t even read Cat Morrison, while she, Florence, had not only read two of her books but had hated them both. Far too self-indulgent. Lots of bath-taking.
‘When is it?’
The Best Kind of Beautiful Page 10