Charades (5 page)

7

One Way of Beginning

“Tonight,” Koenig says, “if you could begin at the beginning perhaps …”

But where, Charade wonders, is the beginning? And how does she cut her own story free from the middle of the history of so many others? In a sense, she is the epilogue to several lives.

Well then …

Here's one beginning, she suggests, in the rainforest, where time comes and goes like a bird.

The birds. To the tag end of trillions of years of decay and growth come the birds: bellbirds, lyrebirds, lorikeets, parakeets. Shadow and rotting sweetnesses lure them. On their wings is such a weight of colour that they float dazed on the green air, slowly losing height, drifting down to where Charade sits crushing the mosses and ferns. Oh, she gasps. Oh.

She is five, perhaps six years old, rapt, knees hugged up under her chin. The fallen tree trunk behind her back, given over to creepers, is collapsing softly, and along its jellied spine where a flock of new saplings has a toehold — there is walnut, silky oak, mahogany — the jostling and clamouring for light is constant and silent and deadly earnest. If she sits still long enough, the philodendron will loop itself around her ankles and kingfishers will nest in her hair.

That is my earliest memory, Charade says.

When I was six or seven, she says, I found a dead man in the rainforest and I kept him as a pet. He was my secret. I suppose he was a swaggie — he might have been someone who had walked from Cairns to Melbourne and was on his way back, or he might have been just a local drunk. He could have been one of my mother's lovers, it's certainly likely. One night when the sky was bloody with the sun (which never went quietly; which was always dragged, kicking, screaming orange and purple, down below the Tropic of Capricorn) … on such a night, I suppose, the man drank until he saw lightning, and then he went thundering off to some shack on the side of the Tamborine Mountain. One foot after another, he stepped precisely, he kept his starshot eyes on his shoes, he placed them down gently as eggs on the red clay road, but the rainforest reached out and got him.

It was the lawyer-cane probably; those wait-a-whiles had their hooks deep in his shirt and trousers when I found him. And his smell had its hooks into me. That was what reeled me in, gasping and fascinated. What I thought I saw, down against the curtained roots of the strangler fig, was a balloon man, slowly inflating. Every day he was bigger. Every day I held a handkerchief over my nose and mouth and watched the ants: the way they embroidered him and covered him with soft brown bunting. Birds spoke to him, and perhaps it was their beaks that punctured his purple balloon-skin.

I heard him sigh.

And then he began to deflate, at first quickly with little shudders and farts, but after that slowly, silkily, peacefully, like a glove as a hand withdraws. Each day he was thinner and flatter. I liked him better then, because his smell had escaped from him, bubbling away between the ferns. When he was clean and white inside his muddy clothes, when he smelled as sweet and yeasty as moss, I put flowers in his eyes. You can be my father, I told him. Jimmy Armstrong and Michael Donovan and Diane Stolley, they've all got fathers, but we've gone and lost mine.

Do you see how relevant this beginning is? Charade asks. It's a habit that set in early for me, these interminable discussions with profound but inarticulate men.

Or here's another beginning, at school.

Diane Stolley whispers to a circle of girls:
Charade Ryan has a dirty mother, Charade Ryan smells.
And out by the swings there's a chant:
Charade Ryan smells!

It's true. Tree bark and leaves can be found in my hair, matted in, part of the growth. There is always mud under my fingernails, my bare legs are crisscrossed with scratches, mosquito bites, bruises.

Michael Donovan taunts me: You stink as bad as your mother's snatch.

I guess you'd know, I call back … Your dad looks at it every night. He's always hanging around our place.

“It's astonishing, isn't it?” Charade asks Koenig, “how early we have that kind of knowledge? At seven and eight, we know how to draw blood quickest and deepest. Maybe later we just lose energy and lapse into kindness by default.”

When I was fourteen, she says, and being shipped off to high school in Brisbane, Michael Donovan, without any warning, swung down out of our mango tree and whispered “Big shot, eh? Bush high school's not good enough.”

“I don't want to go,” I said (a polite lie, in one sense, and absolute truth in another). “Mr Bobart says I have to, he arranged it.”

“Teacher's pet,” sniffed Michael Donovan, but he had his hands behind his back, and he scratched one calf with the other bare foot. “Brought something for you,” he said. Two things, in fact. An orchid — everyone knew how much I loved white orchids — and a Penguin book of Australian poetry. He held out his gifts as though they were dead fish caught at the culvert where the road smashed through our shrinking forest.

I was dumbfounded.

Only a month ago he had filled my schoolbag with mud. Michael Donovan himself had no plans whatsoever for high school. Already he was in business with his father, collecting the garbage bins from the school, trucking them to the pig farmers. Already, people said, he'd got a girl in trouble and would have been a father if things hadn't been taken care of down in Brisbane.

I could not imagine him at Wentworth's General Store and Post Office, where the cars came in off the south coast road, asking for a Penguin poetry book. I knew where the orchid came from; it was a prize bloom,
Tamborine Stella
, stolen from the trellis over Mrs Tierney's front gate. Very likely the Penguin book was stolen too.

“I'm sorry you're gonna go away,” he said. And because for once I was struck speechless, because I kept standing there, staring, tasting sexual power for the very first time, he added roughly: “Just don't come back talking with a plum in your mouth. Can't stand sheilas talk that way.”

Still not a word would come to me, not one, so I stood on tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. And then — after he dropped his gifts and grabbed me — on the lips.

But on that other day, back near the beginning of things, back on the day when he said I smelled as bad as my mother's snatch, on that day they had to pull us apart, and I did the most damage. I came away with a chunk of his hair and with long crimped ribbons of his skin underneath my nails.

Mostly, back then, I was left alone. Not just the boys, but the girls too steered clear of me. Their mothers warned them against me, in case my kind of family situation was catching, and certainly I preferred the company of my father, the bone man, who grew smaller and smaller in the rainforest. There was nothing I couldn't tell him. I could read aloud to him from any book and he never objected.

Books. There's another beginning.

My Mum — Bea Ryan, the Slut of the Tamborine Mountain, Queen Bea, Honey Bea, that Bloody Breeder B. — my mum would stare and shake her head. Never seen anything like it, she would say. There were always brothers and sisters, older and younger, falling all over each other and me. There were always the men, stopping by to have a beer with my mum. It was a small and noisy place, a fibro shack with lizards on the walls, and cracks and holes that were hung with sacs of spiders' eggs. But I would wedge myself into a corner, two sides protected, crosslegged on the floor, a book propped open on my knees, and I wouldn't even deign to acknowledge the
company.

How'd you get that one, Honey Bea? the men would laugh. Been fooling around with a cyclo-
pee
-dia, have ya? That accounts for her hair, they would say. (It stuck out in all directions like the pages of a riffled book; it was fair and my mum is dark.) This the little cuckoo in your nest? there was always someone to ask; and that someone always got slapped on the knuckles by Bea. Uh-oh, they would laugh. Cutting close to the bone, is it? Whyn't you ever come clean on this, Bea?

Get out of my house, she would say, and they'd shuffle feet and clink bottles and shake their heads at me. Well, they'd say, wherever she come from, Bea, you got an ugly duckling in that one, you'll never get
her
married off, you'd better learn her to be a nurse. Those girls make good money down in Brisbane.
Ask Harry here, he knows. His oldest's a bit broad in the beam for marrying; nice kid, just a bit doughy in the face, right Harry? But is she pulling in the loot at the Royal Brisbane! Sends her ol' man drinking money, right Harry?

Every man, says Harry, should have one plain daughter, to look after 'im in 'is old age.

They would drink to that, and forget about me. Not that I minded them, really. Michael Donovan's dad was nearly always there, and Diane Stolley's dad, and Jimmy Armstrong's when he was sober enough. Warmth came off those men, as well as violence. I didn't mind them. That's something I learned from my mum, how to handle men. How not to mind them.

They can't help theirselves, she'd say to me. It's the way they're made, that's all. Can't stand women go on whining about it. You just got to jolly them along, that's all.

Anyway, I didn't notice anybody, I forgot the whole world, as soon as I got my head in a book.

But can I convey, Charade asks, how exotic a book-reading kid was, in that place? Suppose your adolescent son were to take up
 … oh … needlepoint, say. A useless thing. An embarrassing thing. A thing almost frightening in its abnormality.

For the teachers, though, I might have been the unicorn itself. I was proof of miracles. I was evidence that doing time in a bush school might even be worthwhile.

Here's another beginning, a significant one, and an ending too, the painful falling into knowledge, from which there is no going back.

Here is Mr Murdoch, my grade seven teacher.

And here am I: thirteen now and wearing sandals to school (all the girls do, by this age, though the boys still go barefoot and wouldn't be caught dead in shoes, in sissy shoes). I am fanatic about daily showers, I stick flowers — especially orchids — into the fuzz of my hair.

Every morning I get to school early while Mr Murdoch is alone in the classroom, cleaning the blackboard, writing up the day's lesson plans in a book for the school inspectors. I adore Mr Murdoch, I am in love with him, when I grow up I'm going to marry him.

“Well, goldilocks,” he grins, seeing me. “What did you read last night, as well as under the desk yesterday? Yes, I saw you, sneaking a look at it under your social studies book, you little bluestocking.”

I think of this phrase, which he uses often, as a term of endearment. In my fantasies, Mr Murdoch and I are in a book-lined bedroom in a cosy tree house at the edge of the rainforest. He lies across the bed reading to me while I dance languidly, sensuously, over by the window, wearing nothing but shimmering blue stockings and garters and a few white orchids here and there. Mr Murdoch tries to go on reading, but his eyes are pulled up from the page and over, he pauses, he is mesmerised by my long long legs and blue stockings. Finally he says: “Here.
I can't stand it.
You
read.”

And so I take the book and I sit in the windowsill and dangle my blue legs into the room and I read. Mr Murdoch lies on the bed and closes his eyes. “You are a wonderful reader,” he sighs. He is in love with me. He wants me to read to him for the term of his natural life.

So each morning when he asks: “Well, you little bluestocking, what did you read last night?” I strive for worthier and more difficult trophies. “The Last Days of Pompeii,” I say proudly, “from the Everyman Classics Library.” I love the sound of that:
the Classics.
It gives off a fragrance of Latin and Greek and English cathedrals and gentlemen sipping port at Oxford. In the rainforest I have sat and pictured this world in detail, I know it intimately — how everyone speaks the way the Queen does in her Christmas message, and how everyone drinks nothing but sherry which they sip ever so slowly like tea that is scalding hot, and how they would never say anything more violent than “Dear me!” — not even during the last last days of Pompeii.

“Dear me!” Mr Murdoch says. “That second-rate Victorian melodrama. You'll ruin your aesthetic taste buds. Well, what did you think of it?”

“It's … er … I like
historical
things,” I say, crushed (I have been dreaming of blind Lydia and her noble sacrifice), “the stuff about Pompeii … Did they really have paintings like that on the walls of the villas?” (A brilliant strategy this.)

“Oh yes, indeed,” he says. “Look, I'll show you.” And he rummages in his chaotic cupboard for a book. “Must be at home,” he says. “Well, I'll bring it around perhaps this evening, shall I? I've got a book of photographs of the excavations.”

“And also,” I say, dizzy with excitement, “I've been reading
Journals of the Discoverers.
Abel Janzoon Tasman and William Dampier and Captain James Cook and people like that.”

“Good heavens!” he says. (He is really impressed, I am almost fainting with pride.) “Where did you manage to get hold of something like that?”

“I found it in the library, in the history section. Can I read you something funny? I copied it out.” I fish a scrap of paper out of my pocket. “This is William Dampier,” I say.

On the 4th day of January, 1688, we fell in with the Land of New Holland.

The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest People in the world …

Their Eye-lids are always half closed, to keep the flies out of their eyes; they being so troublesome here, that no fanning will keep them from coming to ones Face 
…
So
that from their Infancy being thus annoyed with these Insects, they do never open their Eyes, as other People: and therefore they cannot see far.