She smelled like Winfield Green cigarettes. Her face looked tired. She opened up her hessian bag and looked for some chewing gum. Saving Marco made her eyes so blue that you had to turn away from them. Her face glowed the way it had the day at the lake.
Miss Elise rang Mum the following week because
she was so worried about Beth's concussion. All hell broke loose again. Beth and I had to go to the studio to apologize for our dishonesty. When we walked across the wooden floor toward Miss Elise I saw she had a Kleenex in her hand.
Beth spoke very well. She looked Miss Elise right in the eyes. She told her she didn't feel like dancing anymore but she never should have lied about it. She should have told the truth. I couldn't believe my ears. When it was my turn I couldn't get my words untangled. I said it was wrong, I was sorry, she made me and I didn't mean it, all in the same sentence. Miss Elise looked at me with a cranky face while she waited for me to finish.
In the end she still loved Beth, even though it was Beth who was leaving. Even though it was Beth who organized the lying. Miss Elise put her hand out to touch Beth's face. She touched her on the cheek where the old bruise was nearly completely faded and only the slightest trace of yellow remained.
“You should still do some sort of physical activity,” said Miss Elise, bringing the tissue up to her eyes. “I would hate to see your lovely physique suffer.”
That night I saw Beth pack away her dancing things. She put them all in a box: her leotards, her ballet shoes, her tights, her leg warmers, her black happy shoes. I thought she should look sad but she didn't. It was just another part of herself that
she gave away without looking back. She looked almost glad that it was over, that she was leaving it all behind.
“You're not going anywhere ever again until you tell me exactly where you've been going when you weren't going to ballet,” said Mum.
It was a very long sentence for something she already knew.
“Is it that boy called Marco?” she shouted. “Tell me where he lives. You're not leaving this house until you tell me where he lives.”
She went outside and shouted at the boys riding backward and forward past our house.
“Get lost,” she said. “We're not interested. There's nothing here for you.”
Mr. and Mrs. O'Malley came out onto their patio and sat down in their fold-out chairs to watch. Frieda Schmidt, at her letterbox, scuttled back inside her lonely house.
“Jean,” said Dad, but quietly, under his breath.
“Do you understand?” she said to Beth when she came inside. “Never again.”
New rules were going to be laid down. Thou shalt not wear makeup. Thou shalt not wear short shorts. Thou shalt not go anywhere without your cousin Kylie. Thou shalt not use your younger sisters to lie for you. Thou shalt not have a boyfriend. Thou shalt not have friends who lead you astray.
“We didn't pay all that money to Miss Elise Slater for you to go off and do whatever you want. Jim. Tell her. Did we?”
“It's a lot of dosh, sweetheart,” said Dad, looking up from the horse paper. “You shouldn't have just skipped.”
He winked at Beth when Mum wasn't looking.
“Great,” said Mum because she could sense things even if she couldn't see them.
Beth wasn't allowed out for two weeks except to school. Mum picked her up after. Marco rang the house but Mum snatched the phone off Beth.
“Who's this?” she asked. “Why are you mumbling? How old are you? Do you know how young Elizabeth is?”
“Jesus Christ,” shouted Beth.
After two weeks he left something in our letterbox. It was a tiny box. Mum found it first but let Beth open it. Inside was a silver chain with a half-a-broken-heart pendant. It meant Marco was wearing the other half and that they were in love. Her side was engraved with a
B.
“5?” shouted Mum. “5? Doesn't he know your name?”
She made fun of Marco then. She said he couldn't spell. Beth closed her door.
“I wish you'd leave me alone,” she said to Mum through the wood.
“I'm not going to leave you alone until you grow some brains,” said Mum.
Beth was kept apart from Marco.
“She'll forget about him,” Mum explained to Aunty Cheryl.
Aunty Cheryl puffed out a cloud of smoke and said, “I hope you're right.”
Mum thought if Beth was kept away from him she would turn back into her ordinary self, back to the way she was before Marco, before Miranda, before the lake. The Beth who laughed with her eyes closed and head tilted back, the Beth who wore embroidered leotards and happy shoes and bobbles in her hair, the Beth who wasn't quite so beautiful. The simpler and not so cunning Beth.
Sometimes Marco rode into Dardanelles Court on his trail bike and did wheel stands. His bike sounded like an angry mosquito. Mum watched him from behind the venetian blinds and shook her head. Nanna stood on the front patio with her hands on her hips. She prayed to Saint Monica, who is the patron saint of disappointing children.
For the whole Easter holidays Mum kept Beth at home. Miranda phoned and when she was told to stay away she appeared at our front door. Mum, hair in curlers, spoke to her slowly and calmly.
“Miranda,” she said. “Things are going to change around here.”
Miranda was not allowed inside.
Beth was restless. Trapped inside the house she couldn't sit still. She stood up and sat down. She lay on her bed and got up from her bed. She started an apple, she threw it away. She sat on the back steps and smoked a cigarette. She held it in between the steps as though it was somehow hidden. Sometimes she was happy. Mostly she was sad.
In the beginning Beth filled up the whole house when Mum made her stay at home. She filled up the house with the scent of green-apple shampoo. It hung in clouds over chairs where she had sat. It stayed at the dining room table after she had been excused.
And her blond hair expanded. It grew longer and thicker. It had a life of its own. It twisted over her shoulders if she did not make a braid. It shone.
When she sat in the little living room she seemed too big for our small house. She distracted people from the television. Dad's eyes moved backward and forward between the screen and her. Mum put down a color and stared.
She moved and talked but the new quietness kept filling up her face. It rested in the wide expanse of cheekbone. In the pale freckles on her nose. It settled in her heavy-lidded blue eyes. It lay coiled in the still braid hanging over her shoulder.
She grew taller and thinner. She shed her childhood like a skin.
She could not be contained.
“What on earth will we do with you?” said Nanna.
On Easter Sunday Uncle Paavo came for lunch as usual. He came on his bike all the way from Memorial North, where mostly the streets consisted of long lines of brick flats with rows of grubby letterboxes and boardinghouses with signs outside that said
SINGLE MEN
’
S ACCOMMODATION
—
AIR-CON,
COLOR TV
.
Uncle Paavo rode all the way along the highway in his pressed polyester trousers and his short-sleeved shirt and with his pen in his pocket and his notepad where he wrote down the prices of everything he had ever bought. He combed his pale white hair across his scalp with a wet comb and some Brylcreem and the sun dried the strands hard.
He did not look any different that day. He did not look like he needed rescuing. But I saw the way Beth looked at him, like he was somehow injured, like it was the saddest thing she'd ever seen.
Uncle Paavo's back bones creaked and popped when he took his place at the table.
“Listen to you,” said Nanna. “Your bones talk more than you do.”
“I am getting old as the hills,” he said.
“But we love you,” said Beth, sitting next to him, and she rested her pale long-fingered hand on his arm.
Her hand burned his arm. I could tell it, even though he didn't move his arm away. Tears sprang up into his eyes. No one said anything at first. An uncomfortable silence settled over the table filled up with bread and luncheon beef and Kraft cheese and tinned ham and a lettuce chopped neatly into one thousand pieces.
“Yes we do, Uncle Paavo,” said Mum after a while, and she handed a bowl of potato salad to him, which was his favorite, and Beth had to remove her hand so he could take it.
“Yes,” joined in Aunty Cheryl.
“Make sure you eat some of that lettuce,” Nanna said to Kylie. “It will help your small bones, and you, Danielle, it will make your backbone stronger.”
After that everybody talked about normal things like the price of bread and how much milk children should drink and what was the best time to shop at Kmart and everybody pretended not to notice that he was crying.
Gradually, by the end of the holidays, some of the light seemed to have faded from her. Her eyes were not so blue. Her hair was not so golden. She lay on her bed, curled, knees drawn up to her chin, facing the wall.
“What's wrong with you?” asked Mum. “Come
out of there and talk to your sisters. You've been lying on that bed all day.”
“She's sad,” I said.
“She is not,” said Mum. “She's foxing so I let her out.”
“You can't keep me here forever,” Beth said.
If I sat at the bottom of her bed and touched her legs or tickled the underside of her feet she drew them away from me. When she lay on her bed she had her eyes open and her eyes moved backward and forward as though she was watching something. Sometimes her mouth moved around the words of invisible conversations.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Who are you talking to?”
“Nobody.”
I didn't ask her if everything still felt wrong. She didn't ask me to leave her alone. I sat beside her looking at all her rock star posters and her old ballerina paper dolls pinned to the curtains and her Dolly Varden lamp shade with a dusty skirt and her record player with all her little 45s and her books in her bookcase, which were ordinary books like
Anne of Green Gables
and the
Nancy Drew
mysteries and
What Katy Did
and
What Katy Did Next.
I turned my Bionic Woman doll's head slowly
backward and forward to use her supersonic hearing to understand the secret conversations.
I asked her, only once, what she had done to Deidre Schelbach that day in the park. I hardly believed it anymore. We had pretended so much not to notice it that now it seemed impossible.
I asked her what had happened in a roundabout way, exactly the way that Nanna and my mother asked their questions because I had learned it from them.
“I wonder why Deidre fell down on her knees that day?” I said.
I made it sound like I was only thinking it aloud to myself and Beth didn't say anything for a very long time. She stared at the wallpaper, which was a pattern of squares and circles interlinked. Finally some words came to the surface.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” she said.
Angela crossed out the half-a-broken-heart pendant and the ballet shoes. She turned to a fresh page.
“Now we're getting somewhere,” she said.
“No we're not,” I said.
I was checking my inner tube for punctures because I had smashed ten marbles with a hammer on the driveway and then ridden over the top of them.
Dad had taught me how to find a puncture by running the inner tube slowly through a bucket of water and watching for bubbles. Sometimes I looked for a puncture even though I knew there wasn't one. It was only a little piece of knowledge but it felt as shiny and solid as a new twenty-cent piece in my hand to know I could find the thing that was wrong.
“I'm going to ride out to the horse paddocks and steal a horse,” I said to Angela when I had finished checking the inner tube.
“As if you would,” said Angela.
“I would,” I said. “I'm going to ride right out of town at dawn and never come back.”
“They'll send out a search party like in
Little Boy Lost.
”
“He couldn't ride a horse,” I said. “He was a baby. They'll never find me.”
“What would your mother do if you ran away?” asked Angela.
“She wouldn't notice it,” I said.
Sometimes after school I climbed onto Mum's bed beside her. If she was lying on her back I put my head on her chest and listened to her heart beat. Or I put my hand inside her hand and squeezed. Sometimes she squeezed back.
“Did you have a good day?” she sometimes asked.
Sometimes I said, “Yes.”
And other times she didn't say anything at all because she had no words.
“You wouldn't even know how to find water in the bush,” said Angela.
“Yes, I would,” I said. “Remember what Mrs. Bridges-Lamb taught us?”
We had done bush survival skills with Mrs. Bridges-Lamb. In the afternoon Mr. Starlight, who was Gavin Starlight's grandfather, had taken us down to the bush behind the oval and showed us how to find bush tucker and look for tracks. We had found the tracks of a goanna and also a dog. When he showed us he talked with a cigarette in his mouth, which moved up and down with his words. The sun scorched us. Tanya Moorhouse, who was very fair, fainted after half an hour.
Angela pretended not to be listening to me. She wrote in
The Book of Clues.
“We have to find Deidre,” she said.
The Shelleys changed their minds about Beth, slowly, piece by piece. At first they'd called her a freak whenever they saw her because of what she had done to Deidre. Deidre hadn't come back to school. She didn't go to the speedway on Friday nights. When they tried to phone her, her brother said she'd gone to stay with her aunty.
After she had been touched Deidre had gone down on her knees. All that day she had kept wiping at her head, as though there was something, some mark, which could be removed. She had cried.
No one had ever seen her cry before.
She had wept.
But then, at the end of the day, after all of the tears had passed, something had changed in her. She had wiped her eyes and looked at them and her eyes had been very clear. When they asked her to come with them to drink on the steps behind the town hall she had said no.