by Wendy James
Her name is Bridget Sullivan – Bridie – and she tells Jodie that she and her brother Rory are staying with an aunt, her mother’s sister and her husband, a childless couple who own the local newsagency. Her mother has had to go away for a while, she tells Jodie, because of the new man in her life.
She’s overseas somewhere, maybe in Italy, or is it Ireland? Anyway, somewhere, but Bridie knows it’s definitely not America. ‘My dad is dead,’ she says as they cram as many of the chewy chocolate caramels into their mouths as they can. ‘I did ten once,’ Bridie confides, ‘but I nearly choked to death. True story.’ Or maybe her dad just disappeared. She can’t be certain. ‘But he was definitely Irish and a Tyke, though me and Rory definitely aren’t Cathos ’cause my mum can’t stand the nuns, and that’s why I’m called Bridie – because my dada named me after his own mother, who was a blessed saint. True story. But it’s a stupid name, really, when you think about it because I’m not a bride and definitely not going to be because boys are the most stupidest invention ever – my brother is definitely the stupidest – and when I’m grown up I’m going to change it to Vanessa, which is the most perfect name in the world, because you can do that. Or maybe Cassandra, which is better because then I could be Cass. Cass. My mum is up to her third husband, though they aren’t actually married, and he’s an artist and so is my mum but she’s a sculptor not a painter like him though she can’t really afford to work very much as materials are so expensive, though once there was this man, a millionaire, who gave her a studio and all the clay she needed. True story.’
Bridie is her first, her only, friend. She is like no other girl that Jodie knows, like no other girl in Milton, and Jodie falls headlong in love, in the way that small girls do – spending every spare minute with her, counting down the hours until they can be together. Bridie’s not attending school for the short time that she’s there – it’s only meant to be a few weeks, though it stretches into a month and then beyond – so they spend every afternoon after school together and then the entire weekend, usually at Jodie’s place, hiding in the bedroom with the door locked against her brother, or at the park. Bridie has as much freedom as Jodie, it seems, but with the added bonus of money. Her aunt bribes the kids to keep out of mischief, with silver coins and the occasional note. ‘We’re actually meant to buy our lunch,’ Bridie confesses, ‘get fish and chips or a sandwich at the café, but I’d definitely rather get lollies, wouldn’t you?’
Bridie’s life is a revelation to Jodie. For the first time, Jodie’s unasked-for freedom from adults seems filled with excitement and adventure instead of loneliness and anxiety. And for the first time she has a companion – one who can give her pointers on how to survive. On the surface, Bridie’s own family situation couldn’t be more different to Jodie’s. Bridie loves her mother, brags about her constantly, quotes her, models herself on her. It’s an extreme contrast to Jodie’s already half-ashamed disregard for her own mother – her intuitive knowledge that her mother isn’t someone she can look up to, let alone brag about. Bridie even carries a creased photograph of her mother in her pocket. She is young, much younger than Jodie’s mum – and much prettier. She has long glossy hair, and wears the kind of clothes that Jodie has only seen in magazines or on television. She is blonde, her face serene, unlined, unworried. Bridie’s mother, constantly professing her love for her, promises the world – and Bridie is always expecting gifts and letters and postcards that never arrive. (‘I think she’s probably somewhere where there’s no postman – maybe Africa, right now. Or in Paris and they can’t read the address. That would be it. Definitely.’) She boasts about what her mother has done, what she might be doing, who she’s doing it with. Bridie’s mother has told her, has told both her children, that they should regard freedom as a right and a privilege, though to Jodie’s eyes the life they’re living here in Milton doesn’t seem to be all that much better than her own. Bridie’s aunt and uncle are constantly mad at her for some misdemeanour or other; her clothes – unlike those worn by her mother in the photograph – seem to be an assortment of hand-me-downs, or worn items bought at thrift shops. (‘Mum says that only people with nothing in their heads worry about what they wear.’) And though Jodie envies the fact that her friend doesn’t have to attend school during her stay in Milton, she doesn’t envy her the long days spent in front of the television, or the ten different schools that she has already attended.
During one of their rambles around the park, they discover a willow with branches that stretch right out over the river, easily climbed, and with a natural platform formed by a series of close-growing branches in the centre of the tree – high up enough to feel exciting without being particularly dangerous. They spend hours perched up there with their bags of sweets and the occasional tin of beans or spaghetti that Bridie’s aunt’s pantry provides, playing pirates, Robin Hood, princesses and dragons. They venture down to use the equipment only when the park is empty, occasionally encountering Bridie’s brother, who checks on them from time to time, a stolen cigarette dangling from his lips and a comic book in his hands.
In Jodie’s memory Bridie is constantly talking. About her parents, about the places she’s lived (‘in the desert’) – the houses (‘a mansion in the most ’sclusive part of Sydney’), the apartments (‘a penthouse – which means it’s right at the top’) – the schools she’s been to (‘this posh one was the worst where we had to wear hats – and gloves!’), the pets she’s had (‘a python, and even a monkey, once!’), her plans to travel the world as soon as she’s grown up, the jobs she’d like to do (‘a trapeze artist or a fisherman’). There’s one particular thing she says, though, that is to stay in Jodie’s memory for many years; one thing she would, if asked, say transformed her life.
The two girls are at Bridie’s place – the visit illicit, as Bridie has been told on no account is she to have Jodie over without supervision. They have stolen a packet of chocolate biscuits from the pantry and filled tall glasses with milk, and have taken them to the bedroom that Bridie shares with her brother. There’s a full-length mirror running along the wall opposite the bed, and the girls lie close together, watching themselves closely as they sip from their glasses, chew the biscuits. They watch the chewing – their teeth churning the contents of their mouths into a gluggy brown mush – very seriously, as if they’re conducting some sort of scientific research. When the chewing has been completed to Bridie’s satisfaction (‘You only chewed sixty times, definitely. I was counting. I got up to a hundred. Keep going!’), she considers her friend in the mirror for a long moment.
The two girls are a study in contrasts: despite her blonde mother (‘She’s a bottle blonde,’ Bridie tells Jodie proudly. ‘Peroxide. True story.’), Bridie’s hair is mousy brown, her body is slight, but her arms and legs are taut with sinew and muscle, she’s broad across the shoulders. Her eyes are dark, heavily fringed, her face freckled and elfin. Jodie is shorter, more solid. Her hair is white-blonde, but dirty, long and unkempt. Her eyes are a washed-out blue, her face long, pale, serious.
‘You know, Jodie,’ Bride says, ‘if you washed your hair and brushed it, you’d be really pretty.’
‘Do you think so?’ Jodie has never considered herself either pretty or not pretty. It’s something she’s never really thought about.
‘Definitely. All you really have to do is do your hair properly, maybe put it up? You wouldn’t have to wear make-up or anything, I don’t think. My mum says you’re lucky if you can just be natural, if you don’t have to work hard to look good.’ Solemnly: ‘She says I’ll probably have to work a bit, to overcome my im— imperfectness.’
Jodie doesn’t really understand what Bridie’s saying, but she knows a compliment when she hears one, and is happy to accept.
Bridie conducts an experiment: she pulls the tangled mass of hair off Jodie’s face, gathers it up in a makeshift ponytail. ‘See?’
And Jodie does see. She looks quite different to her usual self, looks suddenly like one of those gi
rls whose mothers pick them up from school, who have their hands held when they cross roads, whose shoes are shined, uniforms ironed, lunches packed neatly into special boxes. One of those girls whose mothers kiss them goodbye and hello – and possibly at other times in between.
Bridie watches Jodie looking at herself, gives a sympathetic smile.
‘You know, Jodie, you can actually be whoever you want to be. That’s what my mother always tells me. Definitely. Maybe you don’t have anyone to help you, but no one’s going to stop you either.’ Bridie grimaces at herself in the mirror, bares her teeth, widens her eyes. ‘I’m not totally sure yet, but I think maybe I’ll be a movie star when I grow up. Or maybe an artist, a sculptor like my mum. Or a musician. Or actually … maybe I’ll be a gymnast!’ Bridie executes a strange contorted somersault off the bed, landing with a thud on her behind. When their laughter subsides she stays squatting, her eyes meeting Jodie’s in the mirror. ‘What do you want to be, Jodie?’
Jodie scratches at the side of her nose, picks a loose bit of peeling skin, thinks for a moment. ‘You know what?’ She pulls her hair back into the messy bunch again. ‘I think I just want to be one of those normal grown-ups. The ones with pink lipstick, and high heels, and – and a station wagon.’ She purses her lips, turns her head from side to side. She thinks of her mother. Adds: ‘And a husband. I’d like a nice, handsome husband. Handsome and rich. Definitely.’
Close to the start of the school holidays, Bridie and her brother leave without any warning. Jodie walks to the newsagent and asks Bridie’s uncle shyly whether they’re coming back, and could she have their address.
‘Don’t even know where that woman’s taken them,’ he says, not quite looking at Jodie. ‘She turned up in the dead of night with some new fellow in a flash car. Woke those poor bloody kids up and took them just like that. Wearing their pyjamas, not even a dressing gown, bare feet. They didn’t have a clue what was going on, but then they never do. And she was six months gone. Women like that ought to be sterilised, if you ask me. Not fit to raise chickens, let alone kids.’
By twelve Jodie has made the decision to get as far away as possible, and as fast as she can. She insists her mother enrol her not at the local central school in Milton, but at one of the bigger comprehensive high schools in Arding. Her mother makes no real protest; there is no reason why Jodie shouldn’t go to Arding, no extra expense involved – school uniforms can be bought second hand, and bus travel is free. Her scornful observation – that of course Miss Big-britches couldn’t attend school with the local riffraff, could she? – is ignored by Jodie. What, in the greater scheme of things – this whole distant life she is set on creating – does her mother’s opinion matter?
From there it is easy to remake herself. In Arding she has no reputation; no one – neither teachers nor parents nor the other students – knows anything of her mother or her brothers. She joins student committees and councils, volunteers for various organisations, works hard at her studies, plays netball, cricket, establishes a reputation as a competent all-rounder.
Convinced that entry to a private school holds the key to her success, Jodie fills out her own Grammar scholarship application in Year Ten, forges her mother’s signature, then sits the exam. She has to work hard to persuade Jeannie to attend the compulsory principal’s meeting once the scholarship has been awarded, but this one meeting is enough to cement the school’s decision: the principal is impressed by this bright and determined young woman, and despite discreet opposition from several old girls on the board, Jodie is welcomed into the school community. Her mother’s indifference is made clear from the outset, her refusal to pay for anything additional noted – and a special bursary is set up to provide Jodie with those necessities – uniforms, books, excursions – that aren’t covered by the scholarship.
And Jodie proves to be a good choice – she brings honour to the school, winning academic prizes as well as civic awards. The other girls accept her, on the surface at least, and she is included in all the usual extra-curricular activities – invited to parties, for holidays to this girl’s property, another’s coastal holiday house – and parents are always welcoming and kind. But Jodie’s sense of being different, of being not-quite-good-enough never leaves her, keeps her distant, and she develops a reputation for being reserved, slightly cold, aloof. But the reputation is undeserved: if only they knew, she is anything but cold, wishes desperately to be one of them. She works hard to keep her home life as separate from her school life as possible, and hopes that nobody ever guesses how bereft of all the ordinary middle-class privileges and expectations, how wretched her home life really is.
So what her mother had said was true: she had run as fast and as far away from her home as she could. But it wasn’t just the poverty that she had run from, or the social exclusion – it was something more profound. What she had been most determined to circumvent was the paralysing sense of littleness, the lack of drive, ambition, simple resolve that seemed so deeply ingrained in the soul of her own family. And for years she has imagined that she had somehow managed to really escape this, has felt herself expand into the Jodie that she knew she could be – the Jodie of her dreams and imaginings. Jodie Garrow is not the mean, lazy, purposeless harridan that her mother was, that Jodie Evans was destined to be. She is generous, hard-working, busy, hospitable, dependable, respectable, and able, with few lapses, to negotiate the complex social proprieties and protocols of her adopted world.
But now, Jodie feels herself shrinking. Almost as if it’s a physical reality, as if she’s becoming smaller by the day, her sense of herself is contracting into some hard object. Stone-like, impervious, cold. Lumpen and worthless.
Her mother’s daughter.
19
If anyone had asked Hannah to describe her mother before all this happened, what would her response have been? Incomprehension? Uncertainty? Bemusement? Describe her mother? For heaven’s sake, there’s nothing to describe: she’s just her mother. Mum.
But lately she’s been forced to do just this. First by the police – sitting in her dad’s swanky conference room with some dykey policewoman asking questions in what is so obviously a fake kindly manner; with her father, who has only agreed to her being interviewed very reluctantly, on Pete’s advice, interjecting at almost every juncture – not appropriate, not relevant. The woman asks about her relationship with her mother – do they get on okay? Her father grimaces, and gestures for her to speak, but Hannah finds that really, she has very little to say. She tells the woman the truth, pretty much – they have had their problems, but they’re no bigger (well, until now that is) than any of her friends’. They have all the usual arguments – about cleaning her room, doing her homework, spending money, seeing boys, going to parties. Nothing special. Nothing out of the ordinary.
When the woman asks her whether her mother is ever violent, she laughs, and answers before her father has an opportunity to stop her: tells her no, her mother is never, and never has been, violent. She’s never hit her. Not even a smack when she was little. And she’s never hit her brother. Or her dad for that matter. Here the policewoman glances nervously at Angus, who sits with his legs stretched out, arms folded, his expression unreadable.
‘Mum,’ says Hannah in the sweetest, brightest, youngest voice she can come up with, ‘is a wonderful person. She’s kind and she’s generous and she’s calm and she keeps the house tidy, cooks excellent meals, helps in the community.’ Her mother, Hannah is saying, is in every conceivable way exemplary.
Naturally she does not tell the policewoman what she really thinks about her mother – that in fact she does not know what to think about all the claims that are being made, in the press, and by her own appalling grandmother. That she does not know whether what’s being hinted at has any basis in fact, or whether it’s just gossip, innuendo of the most scurrilous kind. That she has realised, shockingly, that she doesn’t really have any idea who her mother is, that this woman she has known – and loved – forever
, has turned out to be a stranger. That she finds her mother’s deep, unassailable ordinariness, her capacity to go on as if nothing is happening, outrageous and incomprehensible. And that right now – when it’s apparent that there’s a sword hanging just inches from their heads – she finds her mother’s utter paralysis, her seeming inability to change anything, stop anything, say anything in her own defence, utterly terrifying.
There have been moments when she has wanted to admit her fears, to fall on her knees before her mother, to be gathered in, comforted, to be a child again. She has wanted to be able to view her in that old adoring light, to have a sense of her as someone solid, essential, inseparably connected to her and providing a safe conduit to the world beyond. But there is no way back. Her father offers what he can in the way of encouragement, support, but though they’re close enough, there’s still too much unsaid. And too much that’s unsayable.
Both Assia and, in his own limited way, Wes have made tentative efforts to talk to Hannah about what’s going on in her family. Hannah appreciates their friendship, needs it right now, but cannot bring herself to confide. She would not know what to confide; in truth she finds it hard to articulate what she is feeling, even to herself. Lately it seems the only place where she feels right, the only place where her real self can emerge, is on the stage. Only then – when she’s someone else – can she say what needs to be said, only then can she find the way to say it.
Hannah stands before the drama class. The students have been asked to attempt a physical impression of somebody recognisable, someone the class will be able to identify. She doesn’t think much initially: when she performs she finds it’s best to just do, to be. She turns her back on the audience, makes some minor alterations to her physical appearance. She does her best to push her thickly layered hair into a tidy bob, smooths out the creases in her tights, pulls her school kilt down on her hips so that the hemline sits demurely above her ankles, tucks in her shirt, straightens her collar, sucks in her stomach, shrugs off her fashionably elegant slouch and squares her shoulders. She pulls herself in psychologically, quite consciously now, reins in every random, flyaway thought, and when she turns back to the class she is barely recognisable; it is as if she has discarded completely her own vivid, bulgy, irrepressible self, replaced it with another: taut, cool, opaque. When she speaks, her customary drawl has been abandoned for a more refined accent, her voice has been ratcheted up a notch; there’s a faint quaver (indignation? distress?) as she asks of no one in particular – an invisible antagonist, Hannah herself, perhaps – whether she really considers that to be appropriate behaviour for an intelligent girl, from a respectable family. The class’s laughter is more subdued than she expected, as if the audience recognises that this particular comedic effort is laced with something more dangerous.