Charades (12 page)

3

Brisbane

Brisbane, Charade begins …

Along the front fence was a leggy colony of poinsettias that had to be cut back and cut back, and down through these each day the arm of the postman would reach. The house was set low against the embankment of road and footpath, and when Kay curled herself under the trees, waiting, she could hear the soft overhead thunder of the postman's coming. She could see the tips of his shoes above her head as he leaned forward, fishing between leaves for the mailbox.

She would climb the oldest and thickest tree and part the splashy red flowers and peer out. “Do you have a letter from Bea?” she would ask wistfully.

There was a year without Bea, and Bea never wrote. Not once.

Kay herself wrote to Bea every day.

Today,
she would begin, and the news of grade three would follow, in drawings and signs, in the language that lay to hand. The letters always ended the same way. When was Bea coming? Had she asked her father yet? They could both come, there was room on the verandah. Would she please come soon.
Love, Kay.

It seemed to Kay that the shadow of the Almighty, which had covered them all so snugly — like a tucked-down quilt — in Melbourne, did not stretch quite so far as Brisbane. Or perhaps was pulled too thin, full of gaping holes through which harm could reach and twist this way, that way, hissing in your ear: Don't tell, don't tell! If you scream, if you tell, it will just get worse.

There was no Grandma Llewellyn in Brisbane, no Grandpa, no Bea.

Dear Bea
, Kay wrote.
Please send me a letter. Love, Kay.

There
were
letters, other letters, not from Bea; there were many letters, their contents mysterious, but these were given to Kay by her teachers and by her parents. She carried them back and forth, helplessly, knowing that events would whoosh out of the envelopes like sheet lightning. Miss Kennedy would make a slit in Kay's fate with a brass letter opener, purse her lips, shake her head, and send Kay alone to the library while the rest of the class went outside for maypole dance practice, or perhaps filed off to the nurse for tetanus shots, or perhaps marched to the local theatre to see some educational film. All these things were forbidden to Kay.

At lunchtime she was a connoisseur of trees — mango trees, banyan trees, especially Moreton Bay figs, especially broad-leafed dense-leafed trees with low-hanging branches. Kay was an adept of the quick disappearance. She knew the top of each head, she had a God's-eye view. She was privy to many private acts of treachery that flourished like cobblers' pegs and wet-the-beds: she heard what Diana whispered to Leigh about June, and to June about Leigh, and what June and Leigh said about Diana in Diana's absence. She drew certain conclusions about the nature of friendship.

She knew what Patrick and Diana did in the ditch beneath the Moreton Bay fig, how they took turns and giggled; how once Patrick would not give back Diana's underpants but ran away with them, red in the face with wicked glee. And how Diana, crying, ran home from school. After which, in the course of the afternoon, Diana's mother and the headmaster appeared at the door of the classroom, and Patrick was called away.

A sense of gravity and horrible expectation filled the classroom. The absence of Patrick went spinning and glittering between the desks like fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night, full of dazzle and menace.

Then Patrick returned.

He looked once around the class, defiantly, and tossed his head. Three livid blue lines, roughly parallel, raised themselves across the calf of his right leg. This was a turning point, a notch in the passage of class history. There was always
before
those blue stripes, and
after.
Among the boys, the secret sign was a badge of rank, but the girls were afraid of Patrick; they lay awake at nights in the grip of delicious shivers, thinking about his now purple and yellow-green legs and about Diana's underpants (for somehow the word got around; Diana's mother told June's mother who told June who told everyone).

Every morning when Kay, trembling, passed the knot of boys at the school gate, she would glance sideways at the last minute, watching for Patrick's smile. It touched her like something feverish. In dreams, she smiled back; in the schoolyard she was afraid to. Once a boy pushed her over, and Patrick helped her up and punched the other boy. In dreams, Patrick held at bay packs of dogs as she passed (a bunch of leashes like ribbons in his hand). He intercepted the deadly flight of cricket balls bound for her head. He spread blankets when she fell on the gravel. The shadow that Patrick cast was like the shadow of the Almighty.

They never spoke to each other, she didn't know why.

She did know, since her branch of the mango tree was level with the classroom windows, what Miss Kennedy did during lunchtime: how, after the blackboard was cleaned down, and the copybooks taken from the old wooden press for the afternoon lesson, and the sandwiches eaten, Miss Kennedy would close the door and press her ear against it, as if expecting warning messages from the verandah; how she would return to her desk and remove the gold-tasseled bookmark from the grade three reader and dangle it down the front of her dress, tassel trailing back and forth, back and forth, like a pendulum. Miss Kennedy would close her eyes and part her lips and her tongue would move like a lizard's.

Kay felt she would run out of storage room for all the puzzling things she knew. Most of her knowledge was of the wrong kind. She could, for example, rattle through the names of the books of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, but could not produce the name of a single horse in the Melbourne Cup. She had never even heard of Phar Lap — “the
legendary
Phar Lap,” Miss Kennedy said, incredulous.

On the other hand, she knew that the blue bodypaint of Boadicea's warriors was called
woad,
and that King Harold had been felled by an arrow in the eye at the Battle of Hastings.

Miss Kennedy, surprised but grudgingly pleased, asked: “Now just
where
do you pick up these things?”

“In the library,” Kay said guiltily. In the library, while the rest of the class engaged in maypole dancing and sundry other forbidden and licentious acts. “In the picture book encyclopedia.”

Not acceptable, she knew it instantly. She could feel the disapproval like a sudden tropical fog. They would
do
things again, the boys would, if Patrick wasn't with them, and if they caught her alone after school. Don't tell, don't tell, they would taunt. If you tell, we will get you tonight.

She thought of sleep as a trickster to be outwitted. They got her when she fell asleep, they came snarling in packs, their teeth were sharp as knives.

She wished for Bea. Bad dreams would never touch Bea, the very thought was ridiculous. Bea would fling them off the way a terrier shakes off water. Bea had all the right kinds of knowledge. Bea would never be sent to the library, where Kay kept picking up, picking up, haplessly, more useless and dangerous facts. And how could she possibly sort out what it was not permissible to know, and not permissible
not
to know? For instance, for instance, she had gone and
memorised
the page on Phar Lap in the picture-book encyclopedia. She waited and waited and when at last he was mentioned again by Miss Kennedy, her hand shot up. “His greatest win was the 1930 Cup,” she said, breathless. “He had thirty-seven wins, the last one in America. And then,” she rattled on, “he was murdered by the Americans, but his heart was one and a half times the normal size for a thoroughbred.”

There was an eerie silence.

They all looked at her very strangely, she could feel the stares like pins and needles on her skin.

“What would
youuuuu
know?” someone taunted.

Wowser, wowser, wowser!
voices said.

“Youuu've
never been to the races in yer life.”

What would you know you know you know? voices chanted later, in the playground. And the circle formed, a kind of dance, a skip, a game. Kay's nerves stood on tiptoe, ready for flight, and she watched. It was what she did best of all, watching; she missed nothing, she waited for the first sign, the direction of the first pleat in the loop around her, the dip toward her, the first shove. She called this the Circle Game. Every night it closed round her like a tourniquet from which she woke gulping for breath, her room blue from lack of air, her nightgown sodden.

Kay wished for Bea. If Bea should appear,
kaboom,
like Jesus walking on the ocean, the storm would seep back into playground chaos, a wave into water.

Kay prayed that Bea would come.

But only the ministers came. Every Monday they blew in, a little coterie of penguins, black and white, and Miss Kennedy called out the religions and the rooms. Methodists to Mr Clarkson's room, Presbyterians to Miss Waddley's, and so on and so on, the whole school mingling. Kay tried to imagine such good fortune: to be part of an acceptable religion, one that everyone else had heard of, one with a sayable name: Metho, Prezy, C of E, Mick. To be anything but
Others.

“Others to the library,” Miss Kennedy would say.

There were, in the whole school, nineteen of them.
Others.
They looked at one another warily in the library, drawing no comfort, no kinship at all, from shared fate — caged randomly, a small zoo of oddities. Sometimes the code words of their otherness were read aloud by teachers: Mormon; free thinker; Jehovah's Witness; Jewish; Pentecostal; atheist.

Others.

They never spoke to one another, but scuttled to the corners of the room, intent on browsing through the stacks, intent on the book in front of the face. There was one girl, a grade eight girl — like all grade eights as distant as the sun — whom Kay studied with fascination (and with utmost surreptitiousness) in the library on Mondays. The girl had very thick long black hair that shone like glass and hung loose to her waist. She had eyes so large and brown that Kay thought of possums and of cows. And she had stillness; she had the stillness, it seemed to Kay, of a possum when it hears a footfall. Or perhaps of God when he brooded over the waters.

There was a picture of this in the family Bible. God himself was not actually in the picture. He was so still, brooding over the lapping ocean, that even the smoke-thin edges of the clouds were sufficient to screen him. Only His God-ness, a radiance bleeding through, betrayed Him.

The girl in grade eight did not mind about the library on Mondays. It was nothing, it fell off her the way water rolls from a bird's wing. She would look up from her book and stare out the window and see something that was not the kindergarten children on the swings and not the gardener. She would watch it for so long (whatever it was) and listen so intently, and hold herself so still, that she would frequently not hear the bell that signalled the end of religious instruction.

Once Kay heard the teacher in charge say: “Snap out of it, Verity.”

Verity,
Kay said to herself, delighted.

Verity of the secrets.

Kay watched, Kay studied, Kay thought. What was the secret of not minding? Of never being frightened? Of letting
Other
-ness slide off like rain from feathers? Perhaps it just happened when you got to grade eight.

Once upon a Monday, Verity turned from the library window and looked at Kay, looked directly at her, as though she had felt Kay's eyes on her skin. Caught out, unable to lower her gaze to her book, Kay stared back, her breath catching in her throat. Verity, not hostile, not annoyed, watched her gravely. She did not smile. Kay could hear the ticking of the clock, loud as thunder. Then Verity looked away again.

Not till lunchtime did Kay's heart stop flinching and galloping.

Three days later, by chance, waiting in line at the tuck shop, she turned around and there was Verity behind her. In a sudden spasm of nervousness, Kay tripped. She stumbled over her own feet and pitched forward, and Verity, reaching out, caught her.

“Are you all right?” she asked — although in fact Kay did not hear the words at all, only the pitch and toss of voice, an orchestral excitement. And she
was
all right, there was no help for it, and Verity let her go, betraying not a flicker of recognition, not the slightest flicker.

But how was it to be expected that a Being in grade eight could tell any one grade three child from another?

Mondays. Kay, assiduous watcher, began to wait for Mondays with feverish interest, she became addicted to Mondays. She learned something new. Whenever Verity looked out the window, her right hand was hidden in the pocket that lay demurely flat in the side seam of her school tunic. Kay, positioning herself at a desk on Verity's right, ascertained that the hand was never absolutely still; it clenched and unclenched itself slowly. Sometimes the fingers splayed themselves out, pressing against the fabric of the tunic like the roots of tree orchids. Sometimes they rippled beneath the cotton, sifting or assessing some object; or objects.

This was surely a fact: the mysterious contents of Verity's pocket were the source of her magic. Kay was obsessed with the hand and with the pocket. She watched so fixedly that the eyes of the teacher-in-charge were drawn in the same direction.

“Verity!” the teacher said — a sharp sudden sound — and all nineteen of the Others jumped. “Verity Ashkenazy! What are you playing with?”

The room went into slow motion, the floor dipped
and swayed. Verity turned white and held herself taut, so taut that the air around her cracked. Kay heard it, a painful singing in her ears.

“Verity!” the teacher said again. “I asked you a question. What are you playing with?”

“Nothing, Miss Warren.” It was a mere whisper. It was a voice dragged into the room from an immense distance.