As for now: ‘I’m waiting on the cherries down in Young. They’ll start soon. And seeing as I was in the area, I thought I’d drop in on my old haunts.’
Liv was reeling. Could only start with what was nearest at hand. ‘How do you think
they
got here? The poppies?’
‘Oh?’ The woman seemed to have forgotten them. ‘Brought by birds maybe. Amazing how birds will spread a plant. Perhaps some bird lived up in that Golden Triangle or whatever they call it, Thailand, somewhere like that, and this bird ate a seed, and carried it down here in her belly, then done a poop and Bob’s your uncle.’
Liv reeled even more. To imagine a piece of Thailand (she remembered a TV documentary: water buffaloes and golden Buddhas; rice fields and refugees) here in Lithgow!
For a moment, the hills that surround the town receded, and Liv’s landscape opened up to include Mareeba and Marradong, Kyabram, Kakadu, the Golden Triangle, the World.
‘Course, she
had
to get married,’ the old woman said.
(Who? Liv was baffled by the sudden shift in the conversation.)
‘She was C of E of course, while all us were Presos or Methos or even worse, tykes. Menie Wilson that was. Oh and all la-de-da, you wouldn’t credit it! As a kid she’d be dressed in white broderie anglaise of a Sunday, with pale blue ribbon pulled through the eyelets in the cloth. Her mother used to copy the patterns for her dresses from what the princesses in England were wearing. She’d copy them from the magazines, and Wilhelmina Wilson used to tell us that she was a princess! And the cream of it was, she thought it was true!’
Liv blushed for her own fantasy: but at least it had just been a game for her. (Hadn’t it?)
‘And her dad working across here at the blast furnace like my dad, and everybody’s dad,’ the woman went on. ‘Least, while they had work. Ha! And meanwhile, for all the posh clothes, she mostly never took any lunch to school. Now, we didn’t mind sharing, it was share and share alike here in Lithgow. But the Wilsons, they used to share when you had it, and not share when they did, see? That’s why we called her Menie. We’d share our lunch and she wouldn’t.
‘And then, when we girls grew up a bit, we’d share our dresses for the dances, and we’d share our beaus too. We didn’t like to leave a girl standing as a wallflower, just cause she was fat and plain, like Menie Wilson was. So we’d tell our partners: go and dance with her.
‘And they would. And she’d steal them. Out the back of the hall and never come back.
‘Now there was some who said Menie Wilson was no better than she should be, though I for one never believed them, I mean, Princess Wilhelmina in her broderie anglaise and all! But then one day it was announced: next Saturday at St Pauls, the marriage of Wilhelmina Wilson, daughter of blah blah, and Douglas Gordon, son of et cetera.
‘The Gordons, see, were a Preso family hereabouts, and very God-fearing, and it was said that Menie Wilson only got Dougie Gordon to go to the altar with her because old Mr Gordon was an Elder of the Church. I mean, there were lots of others in the queue, but it was Dougie Gordon copped it. Course, that’s all ancient history now.’
Not quite, Liv thought, remembering how the witch had come oh-la-de-da over Mum on many an occasion, and how she’d sneered at Liv for only having Mum’s name.
‘But you said about the blast furnace. Your dads working here.’ Liv was still trying to imagine it all blasting and furnacing away. ‘What was it like?’
‘Like?’
Earth shudders. An engine throbs upon its pier. Coke burns inside the stoves. Air blasts through pipes and tunnels. Smoke belches out the flues. Molten iron, red hot, pours down through the furnace and out into the slits and channels and pools. And above it all, the noise roars through your Summer House and your Winter Quarters, through Hilltop Grove and Elvey Dell. This isn’t a playhouse, girl. Think of the photograph.
‘Like? It just
was
. And then suddenly it wasn’t here any more.’
‘Where did it go?’ Liv had never really thought about what had happened to the blast furnace. She had somehow imagined it slowly, slowly, subsiding back into the earth . . .
‘Don’t you know, love? Late 1920s it was, start of the Great Depression, they just closed down the industry here, and everything moved to Port Kembla, down near Wollongong. By Christmas 1929, I remember, this whole site here was a ruin . . .’
Liv reeled. To think that the power of something as great as the blast furnace could be broken, snap, like a twig.
‘And speaking of moving,’ the stranger was saying, as she got up from the step, ‘I’d better be making camp for the night . . .’
Alone now, in near darkness, the ruins that surrounded Liv felt for the first time like – ruins. And she felt helpless and betrayed. If the blast furnace could be beaten so easily, what hope had she: a fat, plain, ordinary girl?
Walking back across the wasteland, Liv noticed that there was a tarpaulin strung out from the roof of the yellow van, and that the old woman was setting up a camping stove on a card table, on which the poppies sat in a jam jar.
She’s senile, Liv told herself. She’s a crackpot, a weirdo, a nutter, a real loony.
Back home, the click of the flyscreen door unleashes the tirade.
‘Where’ve you been girl? Waltzing back in, free as you please, at this hour! Look at her, will you . . .’ Gramma was in her wheelchair in the lounge room with the others, and making the most of her audience.
‘. . . Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But you can’t tell me she’s been off by herself all afternoon . . .’
(Ha! If only you knew!)
‘. . . Oh no, like mother like daughter . . .’
Mum flinches, but Liv is impervious now to Gramma’s slanders. For if Liv is not a princess, and the tower is not a tower, then the witch is not a witch, and cannot harm her.
‘. . . No better than she should be . . .’
(If only you knew what I know about you!)
Liv goes to the kitchen and makes herself a bowl of cornflakes, takes it to the sleep-out and eats it in bed.
Waking from a dream she can’t quite remember (a beach, was it? Something wide and open, full of sky?), it seems only minutes later but must be hours, for the house is quiet and a shaft of moonlight funnels in through the louvres.
Idly, just wondering, Liv rummages through her school bag and pulls out the geography text. There’s a map of Australia printed across the front endpaper. She finds SYDNEY, then Lithgow, in tiny letters, a bit to the left. No Port Kembla . . .but here’s Wollongong, just below Sydney on the coast. She measures the distance between Lithgow and Wollongong: about 250 kilometres, checking against the map’s scale.
And now the fact that earlier had made Liv so desolate reverses its meaning, and she thinks: if a bloody great blast furnace can get out of the valley and start a new life somewhere
(‘It’s people’s own decision,’
something says in Liv’s head
‘what they do with their lives’
) then so can I, Fat Liv.
Oh not tonight – or rather today, because it is after midnight and the wretched un-birthday is over – but one day. In a year, or maybe two. Liv will put on her runners and go! And in the meantime she will plan her journey.
Gazing still at the map, Liv gets out the Harvest Table and traces her way through the litany of names till the continent alone is too small for her, and she is forced to flip to the back endpaper, where the whole world awaits her like an oyster (Liv giggles) lying open on its shell.
Through the flyscreen, Liv hears Gramma start to call for Mum, and goes in. ‘Upsadaisy!’ she bosses as she lifts the bag of bones onto the commode.
Stepping out onto the verandah while she waits for Gramma, Liv sees a spurt of flame, gold-blue, across at the ruins, and thinks she is imagining it until she remembers the gas stove. The thought makes Liv sniff, but it is not gas that she can smell, or the usual coal smoke of Lithgow, for the breeze that blows across from the blast furnace seems to carry a faint tang of salt.
It’s Mum on the phone that sets this off:
‘Marta, it’s Mum . . .’
Before I can get to ‘Hi Mum, how are you?’ she starts the conversation again:
‘Marta, it’s about Maree . . .’
Maree.
Of course it’s about Maree.
It’s always about Maree.
And always has been.
In the beginning there was Maree. And for ever and ever Amen there will be Maree too.
As Mum talks away in my ear I doodle a design for the window of the east chapel, and imagine how the conversation might have gone . . .
‘Marta, it’s Mum . . .’
‘Hi Mum, how are you?’
‘Fine, love, and yourself?’
‘Great, Mum, just great.’ Then, bursting with excitement: ‘Mum, I got the St Paul’s job! My first window!’
‘Your first window by yourself! And at St Paul’s! Oh Marta!’ She gushes on for a while, says of course I’ve always been
so
artistic, asks what sort of thing they want . . .
‘Something modern. But pictorial. You know – storytelling. And cheerful, they reckon.’
‘Cheerful? I guess that means New Testament.’
‘The Crucifixion was hardly cheerful.’
‘Oh well, you can always leave that bit out,’ she suggests.
‘It is rather the point of the story.’ (Why, even in my imaginary conversations with my mother, do we always end up arguing?)
But Mum (as always) talks over me. ‘What about the Parables? Or the Miracles? Now
they’re
nice . . .’
‘Oh yeah. Delightful. I could do everyone getting pissed at the marriage at Cana.’
‘Marta!’
‘Or perhaps the Prodigal, wasting his substance with riotous living. You know – unsafe sex, dirty needles, the full bit.’
‘Marta, really!’
As my fantasy conversation gets wilder and wilder, the real Mum continues the real talking into my ear, and I realise that my doodle really is a picture of the Prodigal. Which isn’t surprising, I suppose, because – looking back – it was the Prodigal that got me into all this . . .
It wasn’t till Maree left that the family started going to church.
No, to say it like that is wrong. Once Maree left there was no family, just three peas rattling in a two-bedroom brick-veneer pod: Mum, frantic in a monotonous way, obsessive, driven; Dad, even more withdrawn than usual, damp-eyed, wooden; and me, genuinely worried, of course (Had my sister been murdered? Or even raped?), but also secretly enjoying having the bedroom to myself, and resentful that now Maree was gone she seemed to get even more attention than she had when she was there. (Dad and Mum would spend every Friday and Saturday night driving slowly around the city, staring at kids on street corners, sticking posters on lamp posts: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? Meanwhile I’d be at home, eating things in tins for tea, forbidden to go out
in case the phone rings
.)
She left in February, just after term started (she was in Year 11, I was in Year 9) and we were regular parishioners of the local Uniting Church by Easter. (Uniting. I hated even the name of our religion. It was so humdrum and wishy-washy. If we had to crawl to God to get Maree back, I thought, why couldn’t we at least do it more colourfully? I’d been once to Greek church with my friend Effie: priests with long beards and pillbox hats and lots of candles and lovely incense. And I’d seen American churches on TV, with rock-and-roll singing and people throwing themselves on the floor and yelling out really interesting sins. But even when following the Lord, my parents took the middle road.)
That Easter, I remember, was when the minister began including Maree in the special prayers of the congregation. Along with the Queen and the missionaries and the people in hospital we would get:
Almighty and everlasting God
who alone works miracles,
please grant us the safe return of Maree,
beloved daughter of Ron and Elaine Powell,
and sister of Marta.
I would blush bright red and hope none of the guys from Fellowship was looking at me.
The only thing that made church bearable was the windows. I would spend the time gazing up, watching the light stream down through the coloured glass. At that time it was the tones, the shift and change of red and gold and blue that absorbed me. I knew nothing of art, didn’t even think to wonder whether the figures were clumsy or skilful, whether the compositions worked or not. I didn’t, in the beginning, even think of the pictures as having meaning. How could I? I didn’t know the stories when we started going to church. It was only after a few months of Bible readings and sermons that I was able to work out what was going on.
There, in the round window at the centre, was Jesus with his arms out, bordered by the wording of one of the Beatitudes: ‘BLESSED ARE THE MEEK’ (above) ‘FOR THEY SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH’ (below).
Ha ha de ha ha
! I used to think. Being one of the meek myself, I knew that was bullshit.
Flanking this there was a sort of Before and After shot of the Prodigal Son. On the left, he’d gone to the far country and spent his inheritance and now he was dressed in rags, feeding swine, looking hungrily at a corn cob that one of the pigs was gobbling. On the right he was back home again, clothed in the best robe, and you could see his father behind him calling out, ‘Bring hither the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and be merry: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’
Naturally I always identified with the Prodigal’s brother, who came back from the field and saw the party going on and complained to the father that
he
had always stayed home and been good, and yet
he
had never been given a barbecue so he could be merry with his mates.
But even though I rejected the moral of the picture, I was hooked on the idea of telling a story through coloured glass.
I guess it was about September, October – Maree had been gone seven or eight months or so – that I saw the ad in the local paper (underneath MISSING. MAREE POWELL. PLEASE COME BACK. WE LOVE YOU. MUM, DAD AND MARTA.) for evening classes in leadlight at the local Scout Hall.
Leadlight
.