Maybe her parents had known what they were doing after all.
Puck certainly did like to wander. Florence wasn’t sure how merry he was, though, and she wasn’t sure if she was angry at him for disappearing again or not.
When Florence was small, she wasn’t sure how small but small enough for it to be a problem, she had slipped her hand from Amanda’s in a department store and had had a lovely time with a woman behind a counter who called her ‘ducks’ and smelled like toffee. An announcement had been made over the public address system and soon Amanda Saint Claire had come click, click, clicking across the floor to glare at the woman behind the counter as if this was somehow all her fault. She had held Florence tightly to her chest, all the while shouting at her for being a ‘silly girl for running off’. Amanda Saint Claire was both tender and angry, leaving Florence confused as to whether she was in trouble or not.
This was exactly how Florence was feeling about Puck as she rounded the last bend on the path to the smaller rock pool where he sat, his back against a boulder, his legs crossed in front of him, his eyes closed to the sun.
‘Hi Florence,’ he said lazily, not opening them.
‘I thought this might be where you were. You should know that I’ve been up all night, worrying myself sick,’ she said, reprising an old joke between them, any residue of anger erased with the relief at seeing his slight form against the granite.
Puck smiled. ‘Sorry Florence – I’m sorry you felt like you had to come all this way.’
‘Oh, it’s no problem. I used this thing called a motor car. It really is the most marvellous invention. You might like to try it sometime,’ she answered.
Puck was still smiling, so Florence dived in.
‘I hear you and Isolde had an interesting chat,’ she said, and left it at that. Experience had taught her that the only way to get her brother talking was to stop doing it yourself.
Florence took her shoes off and sat down beside Puck, the sharp heat of the rock settling down after a minute or so to a comfortable spreading warmth across her back.
Two whipbirds sang their duet nearby, calling back and forth to each other, their notes cracking across the bush.
‘I went with him, sometimes – actually I went with him quite a bit,’ Puck said.
Florence’s eyes tracked a mother possum with a baby on its back – they were out early, she thought – making its way along a red cedar branch, then leaping from it to another. Such trust we all put in our parents, she thought, such blind belief that they will not let us go.
‘When he took me to lessons or rehearsals, he’d get me to wait in the car,’ Puck continued. ‘I didn’t mind. I’d sit in the front seat and listen to the radio, changing all the channels I wanted – remember how it drove Lamanda crazy when we did that?’
Florence nodded, hearing her mother say, ‘Choose one! For God’s sake choose one station and stay on it!’
‘We’d run into some woman at the studio and Dad would say, “Just go and sit in the car for a few minutes, mate,” or he’d give me some money to go the shop and get some hot chips or whatever.
‘Mostly I didn’t buy anything, I just kept the money to save up for my first Tama kit – remember that, Florence? It was electric blue and I thought I was Jeff Porcaro.’
Florence laughed. ‘Of course I remember, Puck – we had to put extra insulation in the music room so we didn’t all go deaf.’
She curled her toes around her brother’s, wriggling them a little to encourage him to go on.
Puck wriggled his back in answer and continued. ‘I kind of knew what was going on, Florence, and I think Dad knew that I did. It was sort of our little understanding that you girls didn’t know about.
‘And the thing that gets to me, Florence, the thing that feels so messed up, is that I kind of liked it. I kind of liked it that we had this thing he trusted me with, because it was the one thing we had that was just us.
‘I’d sit there waiting in the car and I’d get this feeling of almost, you know, pride that he’d trusted me with this information, that he’d enlisted me. And then we’d get home and I’d see Dad kissing Mum and making a big fuss of her, and I’d think how stupid she was, Florence. I’d look at her and think how dumb do you have to be to not know what he’s been doing? I was so angry with her, Florence, do you see? I was so angry, not with him, but with her.’
Florence nodded, remembering her own full-throated teenage tantrums directed mostly at Amanda.
‘I was angry because I wanted her to catch him out,’ Puck said. ‘I wanted her to not let him get away with it, I wanted her to say, “I do not believe you, Lucas. I do not believe you and Puck have been caught in traffic all this time,” because if she had said that and stopped things, then I could have stopped being his fucking little accomplice.’
Florence looked at Puck’s face – all Amanda from his nose down, all Lucas from his nose up.
‘And then Dad bought me the Tama,’ Puck shrugged, ‘so I guess that made everything okay.’
Florence remembered the gift, sudden and unexplained, making her and Isolde writhe with jealousy.
Extravagant, Amanda had said.
‘Why would you buy him something so extravagant, Lucas?’ she heard her mother asking when she saw the kit in the music room, electric blue and gleaming in the corner.
‘I’m sorry Puck,’ Florence said, ‘you shouldn’t have been put in that position. Lucas shouldn’t have put you in that position. It was utterly wrong of him to involve you.’
She shook her head. ‘And don’t worry about being angry with Amanda. You were a child, Puck, and kids put their anger in all sorts of weird places.’ Florence remembered that after Monty had told her that Pedro Perkins’s parents had split up, she had found a scrap of paper with Pedro’s father’s name balled up and hidden inside one of the library’s pot plants. ‘The point is, none of this should have fallen on you to work out, Puck, you were hardly a willing accomplice, you were just . . . there.’
Florence saw Puck at eight, sitting on the white and red leather seats of their father’s Fiat, fingers drumming on the dashboard, and thought it was lucky that Lucas Saint Claire was no longer around.
Otherwise she might just throttle him.
‘Do you think Amanda knew I was there all those times?’ Puck asked her. ‘Because that’s not really gold standard parenting either, is it?’
Florence shook her head. ‘No, Puck, I don’t think she knew at all. She knew Dad wasn’t faithful, but she thought there were lines he wouldn’t cross. I’m pretty sure an eight-year-old boy being deployed as a decoy was one of them.’
Puck nodded.
‘Thanks Florence,’ he said. ‘I’m okay. I just wanted to come here and clear my head a bit.’
Florence smiled. ‘How is it in there?’
‘Cloudy.’
‘Mine too,’ said Florence, standing up. ‘We can talk more about this any time, Puck, but it’s getting late now and we should go home – Isolde and Amanda were worried about you.’
‘Really?’ Puck asked.
‘Well, maybe not Isolde,’ she grinned.
She put her hand out to Puck, who took it and stood beside her.
Something niggled at Florence. ‘If you knew about Dad,’ she asked, ‘why did you get so upset when Isolde said he was’ – Florence could not bring herself to say ‘a root rat’ – ‘so unfaithful?’
‘Because I wanted to be wrong,’ he answered. ‘I wanted to believe that he really was just helping those women with their musical arrangements, or giving me money to buy chips because he thought I was a good kid, not because he thought it might buy him some more time.’
‘You were a good kid,’ she told Puck, putting her arm around his neck and drawing his head to hers. ‘Still are.’
Puck smiled. ‘And you’re not a murderer, Florence.’
Florence nodded – so Isolde had told him the whole story.
8
The library’s air conditionin
g had broken down, making everyone in it, not just Florence, prickly.
Monty went around opening windows and turning on fans, but all it did was move the hot air around listlessly.
Florence had not slept well the night before. She had lain on her bed, thinking about Puck. He was, she supposed, the sort of person other people might find strange, the sort of person they might raise their eyebrows at when his name was mentioned. At school he had kept his head down, his fingers drumming, hurting no one, and still he had been singled out for omission. She couldn’t remember him having any friends over to Kinsey, or going to any friend’s house himself, not even someone from the school orchestra. Music kids tended to stick together, especially in high school. They were herd animals, bound together by their beating, creative hearts. Music kids didn’t generally run with the main pack – and the main pack generally didn’t want them. But the music kids hadn’t wanted Puck either. Outside of rehearsal, he didn’t seem to spend any time with any of them. Puck was a solo artist, then and now.
He did have Lance Bueller as a friend – Florence liked Lance, she wished Isolde did too, but not as much as she wished someone would like Puck. Someone who would wander with him.
Florence rubbed her eyes. Through the open windows, she could hear the grade three East Elm Primary class lining up outside the library’s doors, laughter and shouts, one big bang – Pedro Perkins, probably – and then Monty’s voice. ‘Welcome, welcome. Good morning everybody. Now it’s very hot in the library today so I want you all to be on your best behaviour for Miss Saint Claire.’
Then Florence heard a collective groan and one child complaining, ‘But we wanted Mr Flowers.’
Tough, thought Florence. She had flirted with the possibility she wanted Mr Flowers too, but she, like 3G, had been disappointed.
What was that nonsense he had spouted at her, suggesting she wasn’t human just because she’d dared to reason that perhaps Cat Morrison might like to remove her headwear if it was causing her so much bother? Better yet, perhaps the solution to having so much trouble getting a hat off her head was not putting one on in the first place.
God, it was hot in here. She reached to scratch a spot at the back of her neck where the perspiration licked at it, and fanned her face with a pamphlet on hydroponic strawberries.
Albert, she knew, was grappling with a curtain of lantana they’d discovered smothering a thicket of grey myrtle last week. She was glad she wasn’t with him, and not only because the air in that particular section of the forest was usually thick with small clouds of gnats that suddenly loomed in your face. Florence was growing tired of Albert opening his mouth to offer sage but maddeningly obscure advice, dropping half-hints about his own life but never following through with details. She had told him about Puck, but what did she know of his family? He had met Isolde and Puck several times, and Amanda? Everyone knew Amanda. It was impossible not to know her – currently there was a giant billboard on the main road leading into East Elm with her picture on it: Amanda Saint Claire – Stories I Could Tell You.
Well, Florence, thought, Albert could start telling her his own stories, and not the ones that involved Jeremy and Lydia.
He hadn’t asked her to the wedding, even though she was fairly sure his invite would have come with a plus one. He hadn’t invited her to the book launch with that stupid woman with the hats welded to her head, and when she had invited him to see the corpse flower, which would have been putrid but interesting, he had declined. Florence knew she was being churlish – part of it was the bloody heat, making her swat and scratch at her skin – but it was clear their friendship was not going to gain the momentum needed to propel them beyond the library’s door.
Albert had a full life outside the library’s opening and closing hours, and Florence thought it was time for her to expand her own.
She remembered a woman who had written one of those self-help books Florence despised. The woman had turned her entire life around by saying yes to everything, invitations she would normally turn down, food she would normally not eat, activities she would normally not dream of doing. The book was called, unimaginatively, Say Yes to Everything! and Florence thought she might try it. Not everything – the idiotic woman had eaten a sheep’s bladder – but most things, including the gala evening Miss Suki and the Nightshades had been asked to play.
It was at the big ’ouse, as Orla called Avalon, East Elm’s historic estate, once a Catholic convent, now a parcel on the hill for people to point at as they drove past.
She had never been inside, but Florence remembered a long-ago summer when her parents always seemed to be tripping off to Avalon for dinner with its owners, the Elliots, Amanda swathed in off-the-shoulder clouds of fabric and Shalimar. She also remembered when they stopped going, her mother shouting at Lucas in the hallway loudly enough for Florence, upstairs in her room, to hear. ‘I will not be trotted out like a performing seal, Lucas. If Rosalind Elliot wants me to sing for my supper, she can bloody well pay for it like everyone else.’ The Elliots had left East Elm years ago, and Florence remembered some kind of trouble had been attached to their leaving. Had Lucas been that some kind of trouble? Florence frowned. Was it always going to be this way for her now, raking over memories for signs of her father’s straying?
The Bishops, she supposed, had bought Avalon from the Elliots, and she had never met them either and had never particularly wanted to.
Florence wasn’t the least bit interested in the house itself, but she was interested in its garden. Avalon’s garden had an interesting wildness about it, its hedges not tamed into animal shapes or stiff geometrical forms like military haircuts. Its flowers burst forth with colour all year around, shouty oranges and reds, deep purples and spiky yellows among the standard rows of waxy magnolias and gardenias. Once, walking past the fence that wrapped its iron curls around the property, she had not been able to resist reaching through a gap to brush her hand against the frill of a camellia, and two huge dogs had appeared from the drive, barking ferociously, their lips pulled back from their snapping teeth. Florence had pulled her hand back instantly, shaking and embarrassed but noting that the camellias were sasanquas, too messy for people who liked to keep their lawns pristine, due to their habit of dropping their petals coquettishly almost every day.
She would do the Avalon gig, she decided, although she usually preferred smaller, more intimate shows, and she would touch all the sasanquas she felt like on her way in. She might even steal some.
Florence smiled and looked at her watch. She had five more minutes until she had to disappoint the children of 3G by not being Albert Flowers who told them appalling knock-knock jokes and put on voices for different characters when he was reading to them.
She decided to make a list of all the things she was going to say yes to. Florence picked up her pen and wrote: Avalon gig. Mum’s show. Victor’s board game night. Out with Orla and Veronica. It was a pretty pallid list, but it was better than ‘Order water crystals’, or ‘Remind Isolde to hang out uniform’.
Florence slid open the drawer of her desk and put the list in it, then reached down to pick up a shoebox. Inside it were six fat white silkworms determinedly munching their way through a layer of green leaves from the mulberry tree in Rushton Park. The silkworm, she would tell the children, is not actually a worm at all, but a larva from the domestic silkmoth, the Bombyx mori, from the Latin ‘silkworm of the mulberry tree’.
Generally the children were not impressed by Latin – she still remembered the creeping horror on their faces when Monty had leapt up on the table in one of his lessons shouting, ‘Carpe diem!’ after becoming overly excited by Dead Poets Society – but they were interested in eating. So she would tell them how the worms only consume mulberry leaves, and that they ate them constantly between twenty to thirty-three days straight without a break. Their eyes would grow wide and Pedro Perkins would probably say that he could easily do that with pizza, and then she would let them hold the pudgy little creatures in their pu
dgy little hands and they would forget all about wanting Mr Flowers instead of her.
Albert appeared at her shoulder – that stupid woman who wrote Say Yes to Everything! would probably say she had manifested him. ‘Thought is intent is manifestation,’ she’d trilled on the radio, and Florence had rolled her eyes.
She hadn’t manifested him; it was just time for him to start work.
‘Silkworms!’ Albert said. ‘I loved them so much when I was a kid, didn’t you?’
Florence stood up and smiled as she made her way to the library door.
‘Not particularly,’ she said, remembering that Albert Flowers was no longer on her list of things to say yes to.
*
When Florence arrived home that night, she surprised Isolde by asking her if she’d like to go out for a drink.
‘Maybe we could ask Puck and all go,’ she said, and then Florence really surprised her by adding, ‘and I’m going to go and see Mum’s show too, if you want to come along.’
Isolde said, ‘Really?’ and when Florence nodded, she said, ‘Really’ again, and Florence snapped and said, ‘Isolde, it doesn’t matter how many times you say “really”, I’m going to go and see Mum’s show.’
‘When?’ asked Isolde.
‘I don’t know, maybe tonight.’
‘Tonight?’ Isolde echoed.
‘If I can get tickets.’
Isolde laughed. ‘I’m fairly sure if you asked Amanda Saint Claire she could get you tickets.’
‘I know,’ Florence answered, ‘but I think I’d like to surprise her.’
Isolde shrugged. ‘Sure, I’ll come, and I’ll ask Puck.’
‘Great,’ Florence nodded and went to look up the number of the Prince Street theatre where her mother was playing. She was not entirely sure why she wanted to hear Amanda’s stories she could tell you; none of them had bothered to see Amanda sing professionally in months.
The Best Kind of Beautiful Page 15