Mrs. Irwin called me over and asked me did my mother need anything. She said nothing was too big or too small. She sent her three daughters to our house every week to ask exactly the same thing.
Each week they stood at the front screen door and peered past me with their wild green eyes into
our house. They wore long-sleeved dresses that reached the floor and I'd seen the same dresses among Nanna's Butterick patterns from 1974. I would have asked them in but I couldn't, not with Mum lying on the sofa in her yellow Japanese happy coat smoking cigarette after cigarette until a slow whirling cloud hung from the ceiling. Not with Dad swearing in the kitchen because he couldn't find a single clean plate. Or Danielle refusing to hear the simplest of questions while writing sad poems or drawing pages full of girls with melancholy eyes.
“I don't think we need anything,” I said to Mrs. Irwin.
“Are you sure?” she asked, and made a sad clown face and a sighing noise. Later that afternoon I threw some rocks near the opening of Dardanelles Court with the hope that I would accidentally break her car window.
But first Angela and I crossed the creek. We crossed where the silt had been baked dry by the sun and cracked into scales like a snakeskin. Our feet crumbled the scales. We left our footprints on the snake river's back. The snappy gums still lay where they had fallen when the river last ran. Yellow grass grew up through the broken fences.
“This is it,” I said.
We walked beside the crumbling bank where the giant ghost gums arched their backs and stretched
their smooth white arms toward the river. We dipped our heads beneath the branches and ran our hands over the satin skin.
“What?” said Angela.
A sand track ran behind the bank. Beyond that the gums straightened themselves up and stood tall. They were perfectly spaced, as though they had been planted in an orchard. It was a quiet place. We walked between them, stepping over fallen branches, not speaking.
“What?” whispered Angela again.
There was no wind. It was almost as still as the day it happened. I could feel it, almost, hanging in the air.
We had arrived at the place of the kiss.
We stood where Beth had kissed the boy with crow-colored hair on a hot still February day. She kissed him beneath the trees beside the sand track and the empty river.
By then the light had started to fade from within everything. Nanna had stopped asking if she had a halo around her head.
“Is there any light at all left?” she asked Beth instead, hopefully.
“No,” Beth said.
“What, none?”
“None. Everything is ugly again.”
“Ugly?”
“Earth-colored.”
Nanna looked at me and back to Beth.
“Tell me again, what did you see that day at the lake?” she asked.
“Nothing,” said Beth.
Beth kissed the boy for a dare but straightaway recognized something terrible in him. I saw the way she looked at him. It was just the way she looked at a bird with a broken wing.
Marco rode a trail bike and was seventeen. His hair was thick, lustrous, worn long like Chachi's hair in
Happy Days.
He had a little mustache. It was just a few wispy hairs at the corners of his mouth.
He didn't speak. Another friend, Tony, did all the talking. Tony wasn't Italian. He had sandy hair and a face full of freckles, even on his lips. He had watery blue eyes and he stank of sweat.
“What are you doing down here?” asked Tony. “Don't you know this trail is only for motorbikes? I could call the fuzz on you for trespassing.”
Tony spoke to Beth and Miranda. I was left out because of my age and size. Miranda put her hands on her denim-clad hips. Beth pushed her hair behind her shoulders and tilted her head to one side.
Marco stood silently beside Tony. He looked at Beth from underneath his long black eyelashes but only once. Then he looked everywhere but at her. He
ran his eyes over the satin-skinned trees, the long grass in the paddocks, the sand road that bent away into the bush. Beth ignored him back while Tony dared Miranda to a ride.
“No,” Beth said. “We're going home.”
Marco's eyes came back to her from a close examination of the sky and then fell quickly to the ground. He jumped to start his bike. It roared to life. It drowned out the sound of Tony's daring. It exploded the silence between the two of them. Her mouth was open, as though she had something else to say, and then closed.
She looked angry all the way home but Miranda was excited.
“He loves you,” she said. “I know he loves you.”
“Don't be stupid,” said Beth, but her voice came out breathless, as though she had run a mile.
Whenever they walked along the creek Marco and Tony followed them. The two parties ignored each other but watched each other out of the corners of their eyes. The first kiss was for a dare. The boys were doing wheelies and burnouts and great clouds of dust rose and hovered in the air. We were at a place where the river bent and widened, dangling our feet in a small pocket of brownish water that had remained long after the rains had gone.
“I can just tell he wants to kiss you,” said Miranda.
“Don't be stupid,” said Beth.
She kissed him at noon when the sun beat down on the rocks and stones and the creek bed burned white. The trees were motionless. It was so hot that nothing stirred. All of the birds rested, hidden. The only noise was the sound of cicadas humming. A mirage wobbled over the pink pavement of the crossing.
Freckled Tony had picked his way across the rocks toward us; his whole shape rippled in the heat. Both sides knew what was to happen next. They knew it without words. It was written, already, into the hot still day.
“Go on,” Tony said to Beth. “We know you won't.”
“She won't,” said Miranda. “I know her.”
“Come with me,” said Beth.
I got up off the bank. I started to put my flip-flops on.
“Hurry up,” she said.
Tony laughed. Miranda looked at him with half-closed black eyes.
“Do you want me to come?” she asked.
“No,” said Beth.
Marco was waiting off the sand track. His trail bike was on its side. The scent of eucalyptus rose with each of our footsteps.
“Wait here,” said Beth.
She took me by the shoulders and placed me against a tree.
She walked across the trail, not looking left or right, walked right up to the crow-haired boy and kissed him on the lips. He was taller than her by a head. She had to stand on her toes.
When she stopped kissing him his hand went to her waist to pull her back. The sun beat down on us. The day quivered. The sky was as deep as an ocean. We breathed underwater. I lifted my hand to brush my hair from my eyes and it ached. The cicadas dropped a note. Beth moved backward, away from his hand. She turned toward where I was standing.
“Wait,” he said.
He said it loud, his first word.
Beth kept walking.
“Come on,” she said, taking me by the shoulder.
She held on to my shoulder the whole way down the bank. It was only once we were across the creek and into the shade that the day took a deep breath again.
After the kiss some of it still sparkled in the air around her.
I thought I was the only person who could see it but then Mr. Murray, who was watering his lawn, called out. He was standing in the shade of his yellow cassia tree.
It wasn't the scary Mr. Murray, who sometimes had pee stains down his trouser leg and sat all day on his patio drinking from brown bottles. Mum said we should never go near him. It was the nicer Mr. Murray, with the broken front tooth and the purple nose, who Mum said we could talk to from a distance.
The nicer Mr. Murray always asked questions that had no real answer: Tell me what you know? How long is a piece of string? What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?
“Breaking hearts yet?” he asked Beth from among the yellow bells when we were on his footpath. His face was spotted with light and shade.
Beth stopped and put her hand up to shield her eyes from the sun.
She smiled, one of her best saved-up smiles.
“No,” she said.
She had less than one year to live.
I didn't go to Nanna's flat until after school started. I rode to all four corners of the town but avoided her street. I entered each court in Memorial South, looping round each dead end like a small boat into a bay and out again. Up and down the long straight streets of Memorial East, where the rows of baby-blue houses faced the highway in regimental lines. Into Memorial North, stained, kneeling at the foot of the
mine beneath the smelter stacks, the workshops, the slag heaps, where the hills rose higher than anywhere else in the town, blackened, birdless, stripped of every tree.
I was looking for something but I didn't know what. I rode up and down the street before Nanna's. I rode past the end of Nanna's street. I saw her Datsun Sunny, which smelled of Craven “A”s and Yardley's lavender. Everywhere on its floor and seats were Butterick patterns and bags of rags for cleaning. Saint Christopher was Blu-Tacked to the dashboard. In her garden all the roses had turned brown. The air conditioner whirred beside the flat.
One half of me didn't want to see her. The day of the wake still burned my cheeks. One half of me longed for her.
I thought if I could be any bird I would be a wedge-tailed eagle. If I was a wedge-tailed eagle I would live only for the joy of flight. I would soar at great heights, on top of the wind. I would be above everything, over the desert and scrub, over the long empty rivers, over the little towns clinging to the highway. I would be apart from everything.
If I could have sung then it would have been a very sad song. I would have sung
If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I have gone, a hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles.
A long time before then Mum said I was born
with my singing voice already inside me like a gift. She said everyone was born with a talent waiting to be discovered. When she said it she was putting on her Grape Freeze lipstick in front of the mirror and I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub making up songs.
There are many different types of singing. There is singing to keep yourself company, which is like talking to yourself only with a tune. There is singing onstage to make other people happy, which requires practice and sweaty palms. And there is sudden singing, which happens when songs rise up, without warning, inside you and there is nothing that you can do but open your mouth and sing them.
Sudden singing was the only type I really missed. When sudden singing happened it came out of the blue and made me feel so good that my toes curled up and I got goose bumps all over my body and tears in my eyes.
Sometimes it was a simple unannounced
Somewhere over the rainbow
at the kitchen table. I would feel the tune coming. It unwound inside me. The words followed quickly and I couldn't stop them. They came out of my toes and my stomach and my skin. They flew out of my mouth like they had wings.
It didn't matter at home because everyone was used to it. Danielle would tell me to shut up. Occasionally a wild and unexpected
Hey sister, go sister,
soul sister
would startle someone or Dad would shake his head and say Jesus Christ after a surprising
Hallelujah.
After my singing voice got stuck I could still feel the sudden songs inside me piling up. I didn't know which songs they were, just that they were there. I could feel the outlines of them. It felt wrong. I held my stomach while they struggled. I couldn't even sing the anthem at school. I just had to hum quietly and the humming sounded strange in my ears. It had no tune.
When I knocked on the door Nanna didn't answer straightaway but I heard her moving slowly toward the door.
Finally her old crinkled hands came out of the dark cool inside and held my sun-warmed face between them.
“Jennifer,” she said. “I knew you would come.”
Inside everything was the same but she had changed. She was thinner. Her back hump stuck out more. The lines on her face had grown deeper. She hadn't brushed her two curtains of hair. When she opened the fridge to give me water there was only a packet of biscuits and nothing else. The kitchen window was shut and a fly buzzed madly against it. When she came close to me her breath smelled of sweet tea and sadness.
“Tell me,” she said, pulling out a kitchen chair for me and dragging hers closer. “Tell me.”
I told her about when the aunties and the cousins left. I told her about the beginning of school and Mr. Barnes. I told her about Angela but not the underarm hairs bit. I told her that Dad had gone back to work and how he made his own lunches. I told her that Danielle's perm had dropped quite a bit. I told her I was not allowed to visit her.
Nanna looked very tired and when she spoke it was as though finding the words made her feel weary.
“It is our secret,” she said.
She poked her bony finger into my chest.
“And what of this?” she said. “Is your voice still here?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Still stuck?”
“Yes.”
“Here, I have been thinking, I would like you to try this.”
She took my cup and demonstrated for me. Instead of drinking from the side closest to her mouth she put her lips over the farthest side. She leaned her head forward. Her chin was in the cup and she let the water enter her mouth from the wrong side.
“It is like drinking backward,” she said, and wiped her chin and neck, where a lot of the water had dripped.
She gave the cup to me and I had to do the same.
She made me drink the whole cup that way. She said drink it faster and it may dislodge something. I coughed and burped.
“Ah,” she said. “You see.”
But my songs didn't seem any closer to the surface.
“Some days I cannot breathe,” she said, “for all this sorrow.”
I didn't know what to say so I just let her hold my hands the way she liked and I kicked my leg backward and forward softly against the chair and I wondered if she could read my thoughts.
“Well I better go,” I said after a while.