Charades (6 page)

Mr Murdoch laughs. “No flies on you, goldilocks.”

“Will you bring the Pompeii book tonight?” I prompt, scarcely able to breathe.

“Tonight,” he promises. “If I can find it.”

He doesn't find it. For weeks and weeks, he doesn't find it. Whenever I think of mentioning it, my throat thickens up. And then, long after I have given up on the visit, one evening when I am coming in late (I try to stay away until the littlest ones have dropped asleep in their bedroom), I am coming in late from one of my usual haunts — the library, the rainforest, the mango tree, I don't remember which — and I see him sitting at our kitchen table across from Mum.

Blood thumps against my eardrums. I spit on my palms and rub my hands together and slick down the flyaway edges of my hair. I spit on my hands again, and rub the sticky dirt-crusted mango sap from my legs. I pelt down to the bottom of the yard where the tree orchids are, and snatch two flowers for
my hair.

Grand entrance. In my mind, trumpets.

Here I am, Mr Murdoch, your little bluestocking, smelling of orchids and books.

Both of them startle, Mr Murdoch and my mum. My mum the Honey Bea, the Queen Bea of Mt Tamborine.

“Oh, Charade,” Mum says, jumping up. “I was just saying to Mr Murdoch here, that I never know where you are. She's probably up a tree somewhere with a book, I said to him. And here you are. Speak of the devil.”

“Did you bring the book, Mr Murdoch?” I come over to the table so that he can see what I have been reading
(Great Expectations),
and so he can see the flower behind my right ear.

“Book?” he asks blankly. He's very busy with priming the hurricane lantern (the power fails a lot on the Tamborine Mountain), he's bending over it, cupping his hand and blowing softly, coaxing, adjusting the wick.

“The Pompeii book,” I remind him.

“Oh good lord,” he says. “Pompeii. I forgot all about it. You should have reminded me.”

He is still not looking at me. “Is something the matter, Mr Murdoch?” I run through all the school possibilities, but can think of none concerning me.

“Matter?” He looks at me now, awkward, red in the face. “No, of course not.
Great Expectations
, eh? You've got a real little bookworm here, Mrs Ryan.”

There is something about the tone that makes me feel suddenly as though I'm out of my depth in the river, floundering, the current swirling me in circles.

“Charade,” Mum says. “Be a good girl, and just nip down to McGillivray's pub — the back door, not the front — and tell Mr McGillivray that Bea needs a little bottle of something for her cold. Tell him to put it on my bill, there's a good girl.”

It's a long long way to McGillivray's pub, and an even longer way back, and when I get back I feel older than the bone man down by the fig tree roots in my own private part of the forest. Through the kitchen window, I see them playing cards at the table, and underneath it they are playing feet.

“Sharp as a tack,” Mum says. “She doesn't miss a thing. I don't know what I'm going to do with her. I don't know how she's going to make her way in the world, it's a worry.”

“She's a regular bluestocking all right,” Mr Murdoch laughs. Judas laughter. “You really should pack her off to school in Brisbane, it's a waste to keep her here. Did you fuck a circuit court judge, or what?”

“None of your business,” Mum says, smacking him on the back of the hand. It's the kind of slap I've seen Sheba, our tabby, give to tomcats on the prowl. “But if you must know, he was a university man and an Englishman, so there. I've had class in my day.” She looks at him through her lashes. “I got a thing for book men,” she says.

I go to the bedroom window and call to one of the kids. Kevin, who's three years younger than me.

“Psst! Kevin!” I whisper. “Give this to Mum.” And I push the bottle through the window.

By moonlight I make my way into the forest — I don't care if the snakes get me — and I hunch up beside the bone man (I don't visit him much any more) and that's where I stay all night. In the morning — and here's something new, another beginning, and also an ending — Mum comes looking for me. I can hear the twigs snapping, the swish of branches pushed aside, and so I hide, I run. I know this ground well, it's not difficult to outwit her. I don't want to be intruded on here.

When she gets back I'm sitting at the kitchen table doing homework.

“Charade,” she says.

I don't look up.

“Charade,” she says. “This is the one and only time you'll catch me explaining the facts of life to you.” She takes two chipped and cloudy tumblers from the sink counter, and pours something out of her bottle into each. She pushes one across the table to me, but I ignore it. She clears her throat. “Love,” she says, “is one of these women's diseases like bleeding and babies, you can't do anything about it the first time. You have to have it once really bad, and once it's started you just have to sweat it out.
It's like having the bloody babies. You can kick and scream all you want — it helps to scream — but there aren't any short cuts. You just got to wait till it ends.

“But here's the difference. The babies keep coming like the men keep coming, that's the way it is. Love's different. You have one bad bout, then you're cured.” She drains her tumbler and pours some more. “Cured for life,” she says.

“There's one more thing I'll say, Charade, and then you'll never get another word out of me on this subject. You think I don't care, you think I don't know how you feel. Wrong.
I know exactly what I'm doing, and why. And I'll tell you why. The one time I had love — a very bad case, a very very very bad case — was your father, Nicholas Truman. Just don't you forget it.”

She tosses back her head and drains her tumbler again and then she's off. Off. Careening down the road to McGillivray's like a clipper ship in full angry sail, her hull rocking in the uncertain swell.

I stare at the cracks in the fibro wall. My eyes feel so dry, they prickle, a dangerous sign with me. This is what I see: me, dressed in a black bodysuit and bright blue stockings, sitting nonchalantly in a library in Oxford, reading the classics. A gentleman, very elegant, with a gold-topped walking cane, approaches.

“What are you reading, my dear?” he asks. “Oh, forgive me, I should introduce myself. I'm Professor Nicholas Truman, I'm a university man.” And then he invites me to his house for sherry.

And maybe that is the beginning, Charade says.

8

Fathers

“Fathers,” Charade says. “I've given a lot of thought to the subject of fathers.”

Fathers, Koenig thinks uneasily. It is not such a simple matter to be a father. A memory comes unbidden: La Guardia airport, about three years ago, the last time he saw his son.

Koenig was one of the herd coming down the cattle run from the Eastern Airlines shuttle, buffeted by pinstriped flanks, by tweed flanks, Boston executives, Boston academics, the morning's offload. Koenig's mind was on the conference — in particular, on the paper he was to give — so that when an arm obstructed his path, he simply stopped and blinked at it, disori­ented. He observed a hand, a fresh daisy, a printed message from the Reverend Moon; all this before his eyes followed the arm up to the shoulder, the neck, the face. His eyes moved in slow motion, in the ponderous viscous rhythm of a bad dream, instinctively afraid somehow of what he might … Was it a mole he recognised? The particular scribble of some vein?

Then: “Oh for God's sake!” he cried in involuntary disgust, eye to eye with his son, shock to shock.

His son seemed to recover first.

“Dad.” The voice quavered: it was part truce flag, part battle standard, part plea. One hand was instinctively thrown up to ward off psychic blows. Koenig was dimly conscious of the other hand … what? … 
hovering
, of flower and tract drifting to the floor, of the hand moving aimlessly, nervously, of its fingers fluttering dove-like (they might have been yearning above an ark) as they looked for somewhere to settle. Then a forlorn note sounded itself (Koenig actually thought, later, that he had heard a bugle, had heard the doleful cadence of the Last Post). He saw the hand falling back, giving up — in a sense, saw it; the movement was monitored in a sluggish region of his mind and was later replayed replayed replayed, always mingled with the mournful bugle replaying the Last Chance, the last chance, replaying the last, the end, replaying replaying
replaying …

But the mind is a faulty mechanism, not well synchronised with the affective system.

“Panhandling!”
Paternal fury leaped from Koenig's lips well before any knowledge of the word, or any intention, had formed in his mind. “Begging in public. Haven't you any pride at —”

But his son had turned already, his son was running, his son had vanished.

Koenig ran too, uselessly, into the maelstrom of people. He turned corner after corner after corner. Futile. Gasping for breath, asthmatic, he leaned against a wall and stood there trembling while the crowd lapped at him, knocked, mocked, buffeted.
Jesus,
someone swore, but Koenig couldn't move.

“Are you all right?” a janitor asked.

“Yes,” Koenig said, and he went into the men's room and locked himself into a cubicle. He had no idea how long he sat there with his head in his hands. It might have been hours.

At the conference, excuses were made on his behalf for the paper not given.

Fathers, Koenig thinks, and the word bleeds on and on inside him. He watches Charade as though drugged but sees his daughter Alison: how she either averts her reproachful eyes or is overly bright and … and … “Brittle,” he murmurs.

“Did you say something?” Charade asks.

“No,” he says, reaching out to touch her cheek. “Please keep talking. Please talk. You were going to tell me a tale of …”

“Ah yes,” Charade says. “Fathers …

I've given a lot of thought to the subject of fathers, she says.

They came like flies, in the evenings they gathered like a crust round our kitchen table, they all had cravings for my mum, the Honey Bea. My mum had a way with other kids' fathers.

Ten children, Bea, they would say, and shake their heads. How come you don't take precautions?

I
do
take precautions, she would say. I've taken precautions ten times. I got them and the old age pension, and that's all, for when I'm over the hill.

Fathers were a very hot topic for the children of Bea.

Here's a thunderstorm afternoon and Davey's come home with two black eyes, plum-dark, brilliant as eggplants. “Patrick Burke said I was a bastard. What's a bastard?”

“What we are,” Siddie tells him. “All of us.”

“Not me,” I say. “I'm a bluestocking.” The whole world told me so, I thought it was a compliment. Snicketysnack, my thoughts went, pirouetting, making leaps of blue fire. I catch Davey by the hands and dance him round the kitchen table, blue stockings for his blue-black eyes.

“Listen,” Mum says. And when she says it like that, you have to freeze. You have to hold yourself so still you can hear the spiders rubbing their legs against the walls. “I'll tell you what a bastard is,” she says. “I'll show you.” She is sitting on the front steps, shelling peas into the bowl of her skirt. Thunder growls and farts, but the rain has stopped for a bit, and the puddles are steaming back towards the sun. “Look here,” she says, pointing to the second step, which is rotting faster than the others, which feels spongy underfoot and gives off that thick yeasty smell that the lizards love. There are three of them, sunning themselves; and in the dampest part of the step, where the hole goes nearly right through, there's a baby wood frog. “Some people got to chop off a lizard's tail whenever they see one,” she says. “Some people got to put salt on a frog's back. No reason. Except the bang they get from watching lizards and frogs go berserk. Some people, because they can't lie in the sun all day, hate the ones who do. That's a bastard. I hope we haven't got any in this family.”

Fathers. I used to study them, I keep them pickled in memory.

Diane Stolley's father — an interesting specimen — used to roll around most evenings on the slow way home from work, bringing a pack of Four-X, sniffing up honey and sweet time, talking about his wife and daughters.

Diane Stolley's father put a hand inside his pants and scratched. I'll tell you about women, he said. They're an itch. They got this thing drives a man crazy, but he can't let it alone.

Me, he said. I'm a maker of women. Got four daughters, no sons, that tells you something. I'm like Abraham and Isaac and those blokes that got nations started; it takes one strong man and a lot of women. See, you need breeders and cookers and looker-afters to crank things up, and that's what I make. One day I'll be in the school books next to Henry Parkes and Macarthur and those blokes, one day they'll build me a monument. Billy Stolley: a Father of the State of Queensland.

Yep, he said, I figured that out one day I was driving a truck to Cunnamulla. Down on me luck, I was. My wife had just gone an' given me another baby girl, third bloody time, ah strike, nine months wasted. So I says to meself: stone the crows, I'm a doomed man, might as well shoot through. It was cyclone time, see, and there's been flash floods and this rock as big as a house has gone. Clean gone. Jesus, I says to meself, water is stronger than rock. Then this comes ter me right outta the blue, it's a pome: Water is stronger than rock, and cunt lasts longer than cock. Right outta the blue. And so I reckon the man who has daughters is king.

And that's me, said Diane Stolley's father, scratching his balls and reaching under my mum's skirt as she walked to the door with the potato peels. I can appreciate sweet sticky things and I can make them.

Well, King Billy, my mum laughed, slapping his hand in her mother-cat Queen Bea way. Keep your hands to yourself in front of my children, if you please.

And later, over the boiled vegetables and sausage, when I sulked as daughters will sulk: “How can you be so cheap? How can you let a dirty old fool like Diane Stolley's father
touch
you?” she made me sit down on the front steps.

“I'll tell you something, Charade,” she said, “that you won't find in any of your books. Every man has a right and an obligation to be a king inside his own mind. Every woman got a right and an obligation to be a queen. And you, Miss High and Mighty, you think you're the booksmart queen of Mt Tamborine, you want us all to bow and scrape. What makes you think you got a right to poke holes in other people's
coronations?”

At school, Diane Stolley showed me two things: a tin ring with pink flowers intertwined (won by shooting three cardboard ducks at the Brisbane Show) and the purple welts on her legs — both of them gifts from her dad.

“Your dad is a dead possum's stink,” I told her.

“My dad is my dad,” she shrugged. “Anyway …”

“What?”

“Some nights,” she said, looking into the distance, “he sings to us and tells us stories.”

“Yeah,” I said. Like everyone else, I knew how to draw quick blood. “At nights he tells us stories too. To my mum and me.”

She turned away and her fists clenched and unclenched themselves. I owed it to her. In Wentworth's store, her mother turned away from my mum as though she might catch something.

“My dad is my dad,” Diane Stolley said again. “At least I got one, Charade.”

Michael Donovan's father smelled of slop bins and pigs. When he visited, his smell came before him like an aura. You could
see
that smell: it twisted and turned like lawyer-cane, it battened on to the air like a staghorn fern to a tree trunk, he couldn't tear it away from himself no matter how much he bathed. And he did bathe, in rivers and rock pools and under the waterfall down near the Donovan shack, which had a dunny at the back of the yard but nothing so fancy as a bathtub.

“Don't need hoity-toity when there ain't no woman around,” Michael Donovan's father said. His wife Maureen died giving birth to Michael.

He was, in his own way, a fastidious man. He would not, for example, take a swig from a passed-around bottle, nor permit schoolteachers (with their chalky hands) to comb his children's hair for nits in the regular fashion. He shaved his sons' heads with a long-bladed razor himself, regularly, so that once a month they looked like prisoners-of-war. We called him the Slops Man or the Pig Man, but he could speak — after several beers — in a looping musical rage on the subject of kids who put paper and cardboard scraps into the “Food Only” bins.

“I seen a little pig,” he said, “cough itself to death because it took a mouthful of paper and plastic mixed in with the bread crusts and mush and soft apple cores. I seen it huffle and puffle and swell up in the face while I reach in an' try to pull back a plastic bag that's half swallowed. I seen it shudder and whimper and turn quiet.”

And a hush would fall on all of us children as two beery tears went looking for a path down the crisscrossed leathery cheeks of Michael Donovan's father. Maybe Davey or little Elizabeth would start to cry too. And my mum would take another beer out of the fridge and pour it for Mr Donovan and pat him on the arm. “You're a soft-hearted bloke, Mick Donovan,” she'd say, and she'd smile to herself and he'd smile back and next thing she'd be ordering us off to bed.

But there was another side of Michael Donovan's dad.

Across a thicket of too many beers one evening, he heard a
coo-ee
from out by our mango tree. “Christ!” he said, thumping the table.

My mum, reading well-known signs, said to me: “Charade, go out and see what young Michael wants.” My mum was a stepper-in-between. My mum did not like to see child or man — or animal either, for that matter — get hurt.

Well. It was an odd thing, going out there to meet my scourge of the schoolyard under our mango tree. Boys at school have a hard shell around them. They are full of spikes and sharp points. You can't come near them. But under the mango tree at night, Michael Donovan looked small and different, almost naked. Like one of my little brothers in his hand-me-down pyjamas, say, when I had to hold his hand and walk him down the dark path to the dunny last thing at night.

Michael Donovan and I stared at each other nervously, like strangers. Like dingoes waiting for the fight to start. Around us, the air was shrill with crickets. I never thought of Michael Donovan before as someone who might stand out under the stars and pleat eucalypt leaves between his fingers; as a mirror image, in a sense, of myself. Minutes passed. Stars dipped and swayed in the sky, the Southern Cross wheeled above us. And from the kitchen a voice called: “Charade!”

Michael Donovan and I both jumped, and I blurted: “My mum says what do you want?”

“Gotta see my dad,” he said.

“What for?”

He rubbed one leg against the other and looked away as though the words he needed might be nailed to the broken-down fence. “ 'Coz of Brian,” he said. Brian was an older brother who worked in Brisbane, where he was, more often than not, in trouble with the police, people said. “Come home this evening and went off in Dad's truck,” Michael said. “Smashed it up.” He turned to face me and his eyes were big and pale as Cape gooseberries. “I can't get him out from under, he's all
bloodied up.”

Fear leapt between us, and awe, and some kind of sordid thrill. And suddenly we were both belting across the space to the kitchen steps.

“Mum! Mum! Come quick! It's Brian Donovan killed.”

Disaster cuts through beer-fog as a single note, maddening and high, the kind of sound that breaks glass. It careened inside Mr Donovan's skull, I suppose, and he reached for the fastest relief. He struck and struck and struck. Michael Donovan took the blows on the face and chest and shoulders, yelling “Dad, Dad, I couldn't stop him, I couldn't help it.” A shambling progress was made, a violent blubbering whirlwind of arms and legs, down the steps and into the night where Brian bled.

I stood under the mango tree and listened till the thumping and yelling faded. I knew it would be years and years before Michael Donovan and I would look each other in the eyes again — if ever. Something else I knew too: it was not the blows Michael minded, but the fact that I saw. I thought he might never forgive me for that.