Charades (13 page)

“Bring it here, please,” Miss Warren said. “Put it on my table. Whatever it is in your pocket.”

Something happened. Like the shawling of waves up a beach, a vibration spread across Verity's body, rippling, surfing out from the side seam of her tunic. Kay, the betrayer, was appalled, she was terrified, to see a crack, a rift, an abyss in Verity's stillness.

“Aha!” Miss Warren said, triumphant. “I
thought
you were up to mischief. On my table, if you please. This instant.”

Something happened again. The tide turned. Calmly, almost disdainfully, Verity moved — the room made way for her, the table came to rest at her fingertips. She placed a handful of raisins on it. She held her head high and tossed it slightly and for a fleeting sweeping second looked every one of them in the eye, Miss Warren included. Kay recognised the look: the same one, exactly the same one in Patrick's eyes after he stole Diana's underpants and acquired three stripes on his leg.

But
raisins,
Kay thought with astonishment, baffled. Raisins?

Miss Warren, also baffled, said testily: “No food in the classroom, that's a rule. You will come to the office after school this afternoon.”

At which a flicker, a ghost of a smile, crossed Verity's lips, as though this were the most ludicrous, the most hilarious of outcomes, to follow on the revelation of raisins. And then she looked suddenly at Kay, sharply, attentively, and then away.

And Kay, stricken, thought:
She knows. She knows it was me who told.
In a manner of speaking, told.

“And you, Katherine Sussex,” Miss Warren snapped. “What are you staring at?”

“Nothing, Miss Warren.” Red-faced, Kay dropped her eyes to her book, but the words swam across the page. She wanted to go out and hang herself. She sobbed into her pillow that night. She prayed for Bea to come. All night she tossed and was spiked and battered on dreams, and in the morning she told herself: I dreamed that, about the raisins, about Verity turning white and shivering, about Verity being afraid. Verity is never afraid.
I dreamed that, about Verity looking at me. It wasn't me who told, it wasn't me. And Verity is never afraid. She has never ever been afraid.

Furtively, when the next Monday rolled around, she watched for the hand in the pocket, and there it was, the same nervous burrowing … as though there had been no reprimand, no brush with a teacher's anger, as though nothing had happened.

Nothing
had
happened, Kay reassured herself.

But then, why did Verity nod at her? Just a small nod. She was almost certain that at the beginning of the class, as they all filed into the library, Verity gave her a slight nod and perhaps a kind of smile, the edge of a smile. And how did she (Kay) know there were raisins in Verity's pocket? Did she know? Because the raisins made no sense. The raisins could not explain the look on Verity's face when she fingered the contents of her pocket so constantly, so restlessly.

She studied Miss Warren. Sometimes Miss Warren glanced in Verity's direction, sometimes her eyes rested on the hand in the pocket. Then they veered away. Verity, Kay thought, makes Miss Warren nervous. Miss Warren doesn't like her, but she's afraid of her. This knowledge flickered across the surface of Kay's skin, pins and needles, tingling, obscurely exciting.

After this — because of this? — Verity appeared one day in the middle of the Circle Game, the real Circle Game, the dreaded playground one, not the one that tightened its coils in sleep. Verity appeared and she walked on water. Kay did not know whether this happened or whether she dreamed it.
She has never known. The fall happened, oh yes, that happened. But did Verity appear? Whenever Kay replayed the last few moments before the shoving and the fall, Verity was nowhere to be seen: neither walking across the pool, nor on the steps.

“And yet, Charade,” Kay will one day say, looking back at this moment from the future, “more than thirty years later, I can't shake it. There's this conviction, this ludicrous and irrational certainty, that for a crucial moment she
was
there. Which is crazy, of course, but there you are. I can't shake it.”

Back in her childhood, Kay is standing in line on the concrete steps leading up to the swimming pool, her small duffle bag slung over her shoulder, her towel around her neck like a scarf. Three times a week this happens. She is afraid of the compulsory swimming lessons, but then of what is she not afraid? She cheats and does not open her eyes under water as ordered. She knows the deep end is waiting, she does not need the chlorine sting beneath her lashes to remind her; if the water catches her off guard she will be gone, swallowed … the boys will do something, the pool will
drink
her, though if only Bea would come …

Then, on the concrete steps, it happens. The circle forms, and Bea is in Melbourne, and oh where is Patrick with the stripes on his legs? Where is Patrick-the-sometimes-Protector? Where is the lost shadow of the Almighty? The circle forms. Is it because of Phar Lap or the letters or …? There is always a reason she can never quite grasp. The circle forms, they are pushing, Kay is falling.

Somewhere between the top step and the bottom one, somewhere on the slow golden arc of that voyage which is punctuated by bright visions of shoes and bare feet and flashes of chummy-gold embedded in the chalky pockmarks of the steps, somewhere there, with the bottom step reaching for her but before it folds her in its hard embrace, Verity appears. Verity walks across the surface of the swimming pool at the Wilston State School and meets Kay in the air above the steps. She draws her hand out of her pocket.

“Eat these,” she says. The raisins.

Kay eats, the circle vanishes, and someone is dabbing at her bloodied knees. And isn't Patrick there too, swinging punches? And then there are teachers. And then she is sent home — with a note, of course, from Miss Kennedy.

Kay tears up the note and drops it through a grate in the gutter. She puts spit on her handkerchief and rubs the blood off her legs and arms, though it keeps dribbling down from
one knee.

“What happened?” her mother asks, distressed hands to
her cheeks.

“I fell,” Kay says. Nothing else is translatable, not into the language of parents, and Kay does not try. She says only: “I fell down the steps at the pool.”

By night she is running a fever. She speaks of raisins.
For days she shudders so uncontrollably that the pastor is sent for, and he presses his hands against her forehead (God's tourniquet, God's Circle Game) and he prays. Raisins, Kay whispers.
The pastor is “casting out demons”, his prayer is noisy, he is hectoring someone (God? Kay? The Powers of Darkness?) Kay feels like a paper mouse in the talons of the Almighty. She dreams of Bea, she cries out to Verity.

“No matter how many raisins we give her,” her mother says, pressing a hand to her lips, “she keeps on asking for more.”

Kay missed one week of school, and also the next.

There was an afterwards, a back-at-school time. Kay was branded now. Like Patrick, she wore stripes, and this gave her a certain kind of status. Once Patrick himself paused in a headlong football rush, seeing her, and made a circle with his thumb and index finger. He winked, and raised the circle high above his shoulder, emphatically, as though it were a medal she had won.

Kay was waiting for Verity's signal. Across Miss Warren's desk they stared at each other, unblinking.

Was it you? Kay's eyes asked. Were you there?

Verity's look went on and on, but Kay could not translate it.

Why are you never afraid? she silently pleaded. What is the secret?

Verity never smiled. Three seconds, four seconds more, her eyes lingered, and then, clear as a bell, Kay heard Verity's voice inside her head:
You already know.
And then Verity looked away.

But I don't know, Kay wanted to shout.

When the bell went, Verity was the first to leave the room. She never spoke to Kay, she never offered raisins. The Christmas holidays blew her right into high school and it was five years before Kay saw her again.

Over Christmas, hidden high in the mango tree, Kay made plans. If Bea doesn't come, she decided, I will run away. I won't go back to school.

But Bea's father died, and Bea came.

There she was, sharing Kay's bedroom, so that Kay would wake suddenly in the middle of a night that seemed noisy with the sound of Bea's breathing, and would clutch at her own chest and think: “I made her father die.”

Those were the rules of the game. And so, with the utmost diligence, she avoided wishing to see Verity again, lest harm should strike.

4

The Man in the
Pandanus Palms

When Bea, my mum Bea, was a child, Charade says, she was impossible. Everybody said so.

“This is the border,” she told Kay. Down the middle of their bedroom she made a dotted line of dirty socks. “You can't spread your neatness across.”

Bea's side was rank as a forest. Underpants bloomed on doorknobs, stockings fluttered, clothes and bedding ran amok across the floor. There were comic books in geological strata, deep undulating layers of them, and there were other things, stranger things: a
Men at Work
sign, a railwayman's cap, a schoolroom clock with no hands. “Stolen,” Bea announced, patting such possessions with a small contented smile. Under Bea's mattress lurked the deeply and potently forbidden: cigarettes, movie posters, shocking pictures.

Is God waiting to strike her dead? Kay asked herself.

Though Bea would give Him a run for His money.

Once, in church, while Kay's father raised his hands above the bread and wine and closed his eyes and tipped his head back to gaze at heaven, Bea nudged Kay and passed her a Bible. Open it, she mouthed. At the place where the bookmark was, Kay found a postcard.
I fell in love with Surfers,
it said. There were breakers, a curve of white sand, a clump of pandanus palms — the kind that grew in the dunes at Surfers' Paradise and Burleigh Heads. An innocent beach, but high gloss. Glazed lines shimmered and crisscrossed the waves and pandanus spears, and made Kay's eyes water. She looked at Bea, puzzled, and Bea smirked. Tip it, she mouthed, making an up-and-down motion with her open hand and squinting.

Kay tilted the card and looked at it through half-shut eyes. She gasped and closed the Bible quickly. Inside, between the twenty-second and the twenty-third psalms, a man and a woman, stark naked, stood among the pandanus clumps.

Kay's father's voice lifted and fell and circled in prayer, going on and on. Flies crawled their languid way across the pews. Mosquitoes, bloated, glutted with pentecostal blood, mumbled lazy hymns. Kay stole another look between the psalms. The man and the woman were waiting, their bodies facing her. They were not looking at each other though their hands were reaching out, touching, playing blind man's bluff. The man was touching the woman's breast and the woman's fingers were touching oh shame oh unbelievable oh act which could not
not
be watched —

“He that eateth and drinketh unworthily,” Kay's father said, “eateth and drinketh damnation to himself.”

The Bible snapped itself shut, a divine clamshell. Kay waited for its covers to blister, she put her bruised and burning fingers in her mouth. She closed her eyes and felt her heart thumping and saw it as a dirty pulsing little ball that bounced through sewage and mud. She imagined God catching it, in His infinite mercy and patience and sorrow, and dipping it in the Blood of the Lamb and giving it back whiter than snow. Now don't get it dirty again, He said sadly.

She opened her eyes and saw Bea waiting, smiling, angelic in the House of the Lord.

Kay put her hand over her mouth to stifle a gasp that threatened to become subversive, irrepressible, a geyser of laughter. She looked up into the motes of dust, bright and blinding, where they eddied high at the treetop edge of the long slim windows, but God gave no sign, frown or smile.

He can't do a thing with her either, Kay thought. He's the same as everybody else.

About Bea, all grownups shook their heads and smiled.
But did Bea care? Did Bea care what anyone thought? She cared, Kay sometimes dared to hope, about what Kay thought.

And Kay, devoted, was prepared to die for Bea. She burned nobly, fervently, for the chance; although she knew how likely it was that Bea, a lightning rod of risk, would be the first to be consumed, going showily, extravagantly, into the Catherine wheel of the future.

It was a kind of miracle that Bea squandered time and attention on Kay, who knew only useless book-ridden things, who so often at school relied on Bea's sharp tongue for protection. (Verity, distant and insubstantial as the angels in heaven, having long ago moved on to high school.)

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
Kay's thumping heart promised, Bea would not let anyone
hurt me.

Everybody loved Bea. Everyone said she was impossible.

The first time Kay saw Nicholas, she thought immediately — for some obscure reason — of the man in the pandanus palms.

“Oh!” she said. There were candle flames pricking madly across the hills and valleys — especially the valleys — of
her skin.

“I saw him first,” Bea said.

Of course it was true. Bea knew the most interesting places, she found them the way a bee finds frangipani trees. “I know a place beside the high school,” she said. “You can see things.”

Bea was obsessed with the high school, though she herself did not expect ever to go there. “Too dumb,” she would shrug, not at all embarrassed. “In
some
ways,” she would add, rolling her eyes. Already, while only in the seventh grade (Kay, eleven months younger, trailing behind her in the sixth), Bea earned ten shillings a week working in the shop near the high school; she slipped cigarettes under the counter; she was very familiar with the high school grounds.

It was a new high school on the edge of Brisbane, where the rainforest came down from Mt Glorious in long slender lizards' tongues and licked at the edges of the city. At lunch time, and late in the afternoon, the high school boys and girls came in pairs and lay down in the long grass that parted and swayed and closed over the seedpods of their bodies.

“But from the trees,” Bea said, “you can watch. And I know another place, even better, in Finsbury Park. There's a boy from Churchie who comes there.”

“
Churchie?”

“It's a high school, you drip, for rich kids. Rich
boys.
Only boys go to Churchie.”

Kay followed Bea with awe up into the branches of a mango tree in Finsbury Park. The things Bea knew!

The Churchie boy came alone to Finsbury Park. He hung his hat from a twig by its grosgrain band (of school colours: blue and grey); he tugged at his blue and grey tie so that it lay slackly, a rakish noose, about his neck; he undid the laces of his heavy black shoes and kicked them off, he peeled off his socks. He rolled his trousers (flannel, charcoal grey) up to the knee. He undid the buttons of his shirt and laced his hands behind his neck and lay back in the grass. The sun glinted off the pale golden down on his chest and gathered itself like a corona on the butter-gold shock of his hair, the beautiful butter-gold hair that fell in curls
across his forehead and almost hid his right eye from view.

“Oh,” Kay breathed, and felt the pricking and fanning and sighing and burning of the thousand and one tiny flames that lived in the hollows of her body.

Bea's eyes glittered, green flecks on the brown-black, they glitter-darted like dragonfly wings. “His name is Nicholas,” she whispered. “He's mine.”

And Kay, resisting for the first time in her life, thought: She can have everything else. She can have anything else of mine she wants. I will give her my bottle of mineral sands from Fraser Island, with the blue and purple and pink stripes and loops, I know she wants it; and I will give her my jasmine soap still in its tissue paper and my white stone from the cave on Tibrogargan. I will let her mess up my side of the room and I will do anything she asks, anything else that she asks.

And I will never think about the man in the pandanus palms again — Kay squeezed her eyes shut, blocking out that wicked unforgettable sight — I will never think of him, dear God, dearest God, not ever, I promise, cross my heart and hope to die, if You will just …

Nicholas sat up and pulled a paperback book from the hip pocket of his trousers. Bea and Kay held hands and bit their wrists and clung tightly to the branch with their legs, buffeted by shockwaves of nervous pleasure.

“He always does that,” Bea spluttered. “He reads and reads. And sometimes he plays a recorder.”

“A recorder …?” The outrageous, the incredible things Bea knew. They had to stuff leaves into their mouths to keep their excitement tied up and out of Nicholas's hearing.

“It's true, it's
true!”
Bea hissed. “Just you wait. He keeps his recorder down inside the front of his pants. It's
true!”

This was altogether too much and Kay had to hug the branch with both arms and legs to keep from falling out. Squeezing her thighs around the bark, ignoring the scratching, ignoring the sticky sap, locking her ankles together, she bit into the mango bark and closed her eyes and when the pandanus sprang up, grove upon grove beneath her lashes, she only pressed her eyelids tighter and refused to look, not even when Bea swung monkey-like across her branch and tickled her and warned convulsively: “Don't wet your pants, don't wet your —” Then she whispered urgently, “Look! Look! I
told
you.”

Nicholas put down his book and lay back in the grass and there was a recorder in his hands. Kay blinked.

“He keeps it,” Bea whispered with wicked gestures, “down inside —”

“I don't believe you.”

“That's because you're —”

But Nicholas began to play and they were too love-struck, too besotted to speak. They were hypnotised. They were ill with desire.

“Oh,” Kay moaned. The air was thick with bellbirds, with hymns, with mango music. Choirs of angels swept through the stringybarks.

“Sometimes,” Bea whispered, “he pisses in the bushes. I've seen his dick.”

Kay put her hands over her ears.

“His name is Nicholas Truman,” Bea said. “And after he finishes high school, he's going to go to the university.”

“Shhh! He'll hear you. Shhh!” But Kay said it over to herself:
university.
It sounded thrilling, dangerous, an impossible and tantalising place.

“And when I've finished grade eight,” Bea whispered fiercely, “I'm gonna work in the shop all day and then he's gonna marry me.”

Kay wished it were possible to disbelieve Bea. In a year and a half, she thought, her heart fluttering. In just a year and a half.

“Watch me,” Bea whispered, swinging out, slithering, sliding along the slipways of the mango tree and dropping down inside the pandanus grass.

But Kay waited only until she heard the two voices touch each other, matchwood to matchwood. “G'day, Nicholas,” she heard. “I'm Bea, from the shop, remember? And Kay — that's my stepsister — she's up there in that tree, she
watches
you.” O treachery! There was a quick flare of response, the voices colliding and striking laughter; and then Kay dropped to the ground and ran.

“It isn't fair,” she yelled at the wattles. She grabbed a stringybark sapling in passing and yanked it, pulled it over till its tip touched the ground. “It isn't fair,” she said, addressing the comment upwards. She let the tree spring heavenward like
a whip.

Me and Nicholas, Bea said later. Me and Nicholas this; me and Nicholas that. Seventh grade, eighth me-and-Nicholas grade.

“I don't care,” Kay told her passionately, savagely pushing beyond the dotted line of socks, picking up underpants, stacking comics. “If he sees your room,” she said, “he'll be
sick.”

This is the scene Kay plays and replays.

First the two horses, one blue-black and the other chestnut, are coming out of the rainforest; not the Tamborine rainforest where Bea will one day live, but the pocket of forest on Mt Glorious right on the lip of Brisbane. The horses emerge from the hiking paths and stand muzzle to muzzle at the edge of the picnic ground. There are riders, of course, that much can be seen; but they are distant. There is no more reason to invest them with significance, or even to wonder idly about them, than there is to pay attention to the man over there at the lookout, the one who is adjusting the telescope, putting in his two-shilling piece and no doubt seeing everything from Ashgrove to the Pacific in a shining rush.

Bea is not present at this picnic. Bea is absolutely, definitely, absent. Quite often, these days, Bea just isn't around when it's time to leave for a family outing. She has “things to do, that's all”.

“Other fish to fry,” she tells Kay.

Before the picnic lunch, she is mentioned in prayer by Kay's father.
And Your wayward child, Bea, dear Lord, who is precious in Thy sight
 …

Bea is not present when the horses come out of the forest. Muzzle to muzzle, they crop grass at the edge of the picnic ground.
For ten whole minutes, perhaps, Kay watches them idly, not knowing that life is about to change, that time will convulse, turn a somersault, taunt her. In retrospect, it is this calm space (with the horses and riders
there,
in her field of vision) that tantalises her; that begets an addiction; that has her, on insomniac nights, prodding at ideas of randomness and fate, an eighth-grade philosopher obsessed with the laws of causality.

Is all of it chance? Or none of it?

“Oh look!” Kay's mother says. “Horses. Let's go over.”

Kay lifts her head, curious. Why is it wrong (well, at any rate, still improper, still unsuitable, still of absolute inconsequence at home) to know about Phar Lap, to pause in front of other people's radios and listen for those few frantic Melbourne-Cup minutes, but not improper to want to go and see two horses at the edge of a picnic ground? Clues are the stuff of Kay's daily life; gathering data; drawing conclusions. She joins her mother.

Was there a moment …? Could she pinpoint it …? Must there not have been some point, some particular second in Eastern Australian time, ten hours ahead of the Greenwich Mean, when a certain progression of awareness could have been pinned down, graphed, indicated with tiny black crosses in a mathematics exercise book …? And would it read jaggedly, a series of steps? Or would it be an impeccable curve, a flawless flowing from: