The Beloved (27 page)

Stefi stared at the painting, her pale eyes huge. ‘It's beautiful.'

‘
You
are beautiful, Stefi, and you mustn't give up dancing. Not for anyone. Ever.'

Rain splashed on the wooden verandah, the first drops of the Wet. I sat at the desk in my bedroom, the new desk Mama had bought so I could study ‘properly', and looked out at the pine trees along the driveway. I pulled out the photo of Dad and Helen. And I began to draw.

The biggest hurdle had been deciding where I could paint the picture. I couldn't do it at the bookshop because I wanted it to be a surprise. I couldn't do it at school because the paper I wanted to use was too big for my desk. That left home. Stefi would say I was raving mad but I'd thought about it carefully, planning to do just a little each day after school and leaving plenty of time for the paint to dry before Mama got home. I would store the picture under my mattress. Now that I made my own bed even Josie wouldn't see it. I'd paint at my desk facing the driveway so if Mama turned up I'd have time to empty the paint jar and put the picture behind the radiogram where its warmth would dry the paint. Not even Josie looked there; it was full of cobwebs.

In a week the painting was finished. But it didn't quite satisfy me. I'd painted Helen as she appeared in the photo, wearing a halter-necked dress and with her hand outstretched. It looked like Helen, but not the Helen I knew: the artist, the teacher, the friend. I started another. This time I put Helen in her paint-splashed apron, still with her hand outstretched but now holding a paintbrush. Her eyes were wide and totally focused on her work. There was a hint of caricature about the picture, enough to stop it looking soppy, and this time I felt I'd got it right.

But would Helen like it?

Stefi danced the role of Cinderella to packed houses. I went to all seven performances, trying to stock up for the years ahead. I'd be able to see her on holidays in Sydney and eventually when I went to boarding school, but Stefi wouldn't be boarding now and it was a long time between trips South.

She wasn't the only friend leaving. Chris's father had decided not to renew his auditing contract with the Department of Works and the family was going South pinis.

I saw him, once, before he left. He was in Steamies, sitting on a stool trying on shoes, so engrossed in the struggle to cram his foot into a sandshoe he didn't see me. I watched him for a while, mesmerised, then I went over to say hello.

‘Will you be needing those where you're going?' I asked.

He looked up and his face broke into a smile. ‘Brisbane? Probably. But I need them now.' He wriggled his toes where they poked through the canvas of his old shoe and I laughed. He stood up, wincing in the new sandshoe, and put out a hand to steady himself. I caught it in mine, felt its grip and willed him to leave it there. But as soon as he had his balance, he let go. Then I felt him touch my hair; it was longer now and feathery around my ears. As his fingers grazed my cheek I scarcely dared breathe. I looked up, expecting to meet his eyes but he wasn't looking at me; he was staring at my boot, his blue eyes reflective.

‘Don't,' I said. ‘Don't feel sorry for me. I hate it.'

He shook his head slowly. ‘I don't feel sorry for you, Lindsay. Some people I feel sorry for, but not you.' He snorted; almost a laugh. ‘Myself, probably.' He moved back to the stool, sat down and wrenched off the shoe, dropping it on the floor. ‘I don't think this fits me after all.' He pulled on his old shoe, stood up again and looked into my eyes.

‘Goodbye, dear Lindsay. I wish you all the happiness the world can offer.' He raised his hand in a one-fingered salute, and turned away. I watched him walking between the counters, my heart following him out the door and into the sunlight. So tall. So fine. So Diane's.

The day Stefi left, Mama and I went to the wharf. I was so empty I couldn't even cry. As the
Bulolo
edged away, the yellow streamer between us tightened and I wanted to leap after Stefi and drag her back. But the streamer broke and she grew smaller.

Little Stefi. My best friend. Gone.

‘She's gone,' I said to Helen.

‘I'm so sorry, Lindsay.'

‘And I won't be able to see you the whole Christmas holidays. No Stefi, no painting.'
No Chris.
‘What am I going to do?'

She stuck out her bottom lip, making it tremble.

‘Don't,' I said. ‘You'll make me laugh and I don't want to.'

‘Something will fill the gap,' said Helen.

‘Tim's coming home.'

‘There you are, then.'

Tim stepped off the plane to hosing rain and crossed the tarmac beneath a Qantas umbrella. At seventeen, he looked more man than boy, nearly as tall as Dad. My mother was flushed and happy as he leaned towards her kiss.

Over Christmas, Mama hung around the house, around Tim and around me, but it wasn't like old times. Tim and I weren't kids any more, Santa was redundant, along with stockings and dolls' clothes. Without the Breuers, we abandoned the turkey. Still, we ploughed through a Christmas brunch, exchanged gifts and napped through the afternoon with books and magazines. In the evening we dined on smoked salmon and salad and a plum pudding Mama had sweated over months earlier.

After Christmas, Tim went to Goroka in the highlands to stay with a school friend for a couple of weeks. Dad was quiet, even more so in the days following Tim's departure. He sat in his chair in the alcove, feet propped on the desk, tapping a pencil on the blotting pad and staring out through the fly-wire. Not reading, not working, just staring. When Mama wasn't working, she took me to the beach or to the movies. On New Year's Eve the three of us went to the Boat Club. Mama drank too much and danced with anyone who asked her, which was just about everyone except Dad. He doodled invisible sums on his serviette and wiped them off on his mouth. I felt like a magnet, holding us all together.

My mother's first assignment for 1962 was to fly to Tapini, a tiny highland outpost, and do a spread for
National Geographic
. As luck would have it, she'd be away on a Wednesday.

As soon as she left I sped to Helen's with my second painting of her. I'd meant to give it to her before Christmas but Stefi's departure had been too much on my mind.

I pushed my bike into the bushes and hurried to the back of the shop. No-one there. ‘Helen?' I called.

Footsteps. A moment later she poked her head around the door from the shop. ‘Lindsay! I wasn't expecting to see you in the holidays. Come in, come in. Happy New Year.'

‘You too,' I said. ‘How was your Christmas? Did you . . . ?' I imagined her spending a lonely day pecking at a tin of salmon and a wilted lettuce leaf.

‘Lovely. My father came up and brought his new wife.'

‘His new wife? I didn't think people got married at that age.'

‘He's only sixty.'

‘Isn't that old?'

‘Not when you're sixty.'

‘So, is your new stepmother wicked?'

Helen laughed. ‘She's fine. She loves my father and he loves her and that's all that matters.'

I pulled the carefully rolled painting from my satchel and gave it to her. Her eyes widened expectantly but as she spread it out on the table her smile faded. My heart sank.

‘How did you . . . ?'

‘An old photo I got from Stefi.'

She stared at it, then slammed her hand on the table. ‘You are so
invasive
, Lindsay.'

My insides plummeted. I'd wanted so much to please her; I thought the picture made her look stunning, radiant; anything but invaded. She yanked furiously on the curl over her ear.

‘This is the most beautiful . . .
beautiful
gift.' She picked up a paint rag and wiped her eyes. Cobalt streaked her cheek. ‘I don't know what to say. You've turned me to mush.'

‘You do like it?'

She nodded.

‘Good. Can we paint now?' I unfolded my apron and set out my things. Then I took a sheet of paper and began marking out a kaleidoscope pattern. Helen turned to a sketch of frogs. I marvelled at her ability to bring them in total perfection straight from her imagination onto paper.

‘Helen?'

‘Mmm?'

‘Did you finish that picture of me?'

‘No, not yet.'

I was tempted to say that all she needed was to add a foot – crippled or otherwise – but not wanting anything to disturb our time together, I said nothing. After two blissful hours I cleaned away my things and refolded my apron. Dad would be home soon. ‘I'm off. I'm glad you liked the picture. I'm not sure when I'll be back but you'll be here, won't you? You're not going away?'

She shook her head. ‘No, I'm not going anywhere. I'll be here, Lindsay. Every Wednesday. Look after yourself.'

Chapter Twenty-two

I left my bike on the verandah and went inside. Something was wrong. I hadn't seen my mother's car outside but I could hear her voice coming from their bedroom in staccato bursts. I heard a thump; then silence. Slowly, I moved towards the open door. Clothes were scattered about the room as if flung with great force. Mama was staring at something on the floor, her face like a Picasso painting, layered and patched with angles. She looked up. For a moment we stared at each other, then she pushed past me out the door. Dad stood by the wardrobe, mesmerised by what lay on the floor. I heard the screen door slam, looked across at Dad and followed his eyes.

Helen stared up at me.

Her painting: the first one I'd done.

I turned and ran after Mama but she was already at the top of the driveway straddling Dad's motorbike. She leaped into the air and came down hard on the kick-start. The engine roared to life and she took off, zig-zagging up the driveway, scattering gravel. Dad raced past me, shouting over the roar of the bike, louder and louder, his voice breaking and splintering like glass and grinding, scraping metal and screaming engine. Running, running down the driveway and around the bend and there, on its side in the gravel, lay the motorbike, one wheel spinning. Beneath its shiny body my mother: staring up through one eye at the pine trees or the sky or something beyond.

Jesuses
and
Gods
spilled from Dad's mouth. He hauled the bike off Mama and tipped it on its side. Blood surged from her face, hand and leg. Her foot was a pulped mass. I felt the earth coming at me and the spin of darkness but a hand caught me under the arm and heaved me upright.

‘Don't you dare fucking faint! You hear me? Your mother needs you. Help me stop this bleeding.' He shook off his shirt, ripped it and wrapped a piece around Mama's hand. With the other he plugged her foot. ‘Hold this while I call the ambulance. Keep the pressure on,
hard
. You fucking move, you fucking faint, I'll kill you. Now do it!'

I held the shirt on Mama's foot. Josie hurried up the driveway, dropped down beside Mama and began stroking her hair, whispering. Mama shut her eye and went still. The sound of ambulance bells clanged up the street. Two men leaped out and went to work with injections and bandages. They put tubes in Mama's hand and a mask on her face then lifted her onto a stretcher and slid her into the back of the ambulance. Dad got in, the doors shut and the van rumbled off.

I stared at Mama's blood, shining among the stones. Mama's blood, Dave's blood . . . so much blood.
People aren't smeared all over with red, Bertie. Why don't you paint something real?
The bike gleamed. Josie kicked dust over Mama's blood and led me back to the house.

I lay on the couch. Cold. Josie put a blanket over me and sat beside me stroking my back. Her kindness hurt. Throughout the night, Dad's clock tick-tocked away the hours, each little click an echo of Stefi's certain prediction:
once it's happened, Lindsay, it'll be
too late
. . . too late, too late, too late.

Around midnight Dad phoned. Josie took the call and responded in sighs and silences. ‘Okay Taubada. Sad tumas. Tomorrow.' She hung up.

‘What did he say, Josie?' I whispered.

‘You mama plenty sick. Lotsa stitches – leg, hand, face, all sewed up. You daddy coming home tomorrow.'

He came in at nine the next morning, eyes sagging with fatigue.

‘She's not going to die,' he said, slumping onto a dining chair and patting the table top absently. ‘But her leg's broken below the knee and it's compromising the blood supply to her foot. They've operated on her foot but we won't know for a while whether they've saved it. The fourth and fifth fingers on her right hand are a terrible mess. So is her eye but they've saved that, thank God.'

‘She might
lose
her foot?'

‘And her fingers.'

What a piece of work. All my own.

Dad dragged his hand across his chin. ‘I need a shave and a shower and something to eat and then I've got to get back to the hospital.'

He telephoned Tim in Goroka and told him to stay put until he knew more. Then he cleaned up and left.

For three days Dad came home only to eat and sleep. Josie dished up food I could hardly swallow and went about the house with her usual calm efficiency. The world seemed to turn very slowly. I had nothing to do and couldn't focus on the simplest task. The thought of drawing or painting made me sick. Every time Dad came back from the hospital I expected him to say something that would shame me worse than any punishment because words go everywhere with you.
Slut. Cripple. Upside-down cockroach.
Add to that liar, cheat . . .
maimer
. But he said nothing.

On the fourth day I was allowed to visit. I hovered at the door to Mama's room, unable to believe the patchwork lady in the iron bed was her. She looked like a broken doll. Her good eye was shut, the other was a lurid slit. A ladder of stitches ran from its outer edge to the corner of her mouth, crisscrossed like badly drawn kisses. A box covered her foot and a mound of bandages encased her hand. I might as well have bashed her with a baseball bat or potted her with the pistol like I did Dave.

She opened her good eye and looked at me; not angry, not smiling, just looking. ‘Not yet,' she said.

Once, at the Sogeri Show, Mama had given me ten shillings to spend any way I wanted. There were rides, fairy floss, toffee apples, coconut ice, trinkets and windmills on sticks.

‘But when it's gone, Roberta,' Mama said, ‘it's gone.'

I should have heard the
Roberta
instead of
Bertie
but I headed straight for a coconut shy where a box of seventy-two Lakeland colouring pencils waited for me if I could just knock the monkey into the water. I was such a hot-shot with marbles and a gun it should have been easy but I whittled away the whole ten shillings without a single hit. The man handed me a piggy bank as a consolation gift. My mother handed it back.

‘She has to learn that everything has a price, and sooner or later, you have to pay.'

‘The wages of sin is death,' said Grandma.

‘Tit for tat,' said Granny Davina.

‘What goes around, comes around,' said Tempe.

‘Sooner or later,' said Stefi, and she was right.

Sooner or Later had arrived in Mama's body, our whole history. Every fight, every hope, every disappointment and betrayal. When you crack an egg or lever open a coconut – if you tap in exactly the right spot, they fall apart. This time, my aim had been perfect.

Every time Dad came home from seeing Mama, I braced myself for the inevitable lecture. When day followed day and it didn't happen, I became stretched like a rubber band ready to snap. Eventually I broached the subject myself.

‘Aren't you going to say something, Dad?'

‘About what?'

‘Mama, and the picture and . . .'

‘Oh.' He rubbed his chin. ‘That. Yes, you were a bloody twit to leave that picture in the house. I found it when we had the power blackout and I couldn't get the radio going.'

‘
You
found it?'

‘Mmm, and like an idiot I stashed it on top of our wardrobe. I meant to tell you to get it the hell out of the house but I forgot.' He glanced at his watch. ‘Look, can this wait? I have to go to the hospital and then I absolutely must get some work done. Thank God Gina seems to know what she's doing.'

Dad's new secretary was the dentist's wife. Her face, he said, would stop a bus.

‘I'll come to the hospital with you. Although last time Mama didn't want to see me.'

‘Well, she's in a pretty bad way.'

‘Thanks to me.'

‘What do you mean, thanks to you?'

‘I nearly
killed
her, Dad.'

His eyes widened. ‘What makes you think that?'

‘My painting . . .'

‘Oh, for Christ's sake, the painting didn't cause your mother's accident. She took the bike and she crashed it. She was tanked up and we'd been . . . arguing. Your picture had bugger-all to do with it.'

It was tempting to believe him, but I didn't.

She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling through her good eye. I tried to tread quietly but my boot clumped on the linoleum. A wooden chair stood beside the bed and as I sat, she closed her eye.

‘Mama.' I touched her hand; she flinched. ‘I'm so . . . so sorry.'

Her head looked small on the pillow. If only I had a magic wand to wave over her wrecked face and make it beautiful again.

If only.

She clutched the sheet against a spasm of pain and suddenly I was back in Melbourne, on the kitchen table, with Mama massaging my foot.
Come on, sugar. I know it's tough but you can do it. We're in this together, you and I, and you
are
going to walk again.
And I had. All that was left were scars – visible, and the rest. And Mama. For now.

I leaned close. ‘I'll do anything,' I said. ‘
Anything
to make it up to you.'

She didn't answer. Minutes passed; so much time I thought she wasn't going to answer. My foot ached. My boot was too small. I hated getting a new boot; the emblem of polio.

‘I can't . . . understand.'

Her voice stirred me out of a daze. My cheeks were wet. Tears.

‘I didn't even know you knew her,' Mama whispered, her good eye wandering over my face. ‘Let alone well enough to paint her. Why . . . ? No, better not answer that. I don't want to know.'

I'd painted Helen because I loved her. Not as I loved Mama; my love for Mama was bigger than I could handle, but it wasn't confident. I didn't want to test the limits of Mama's love in case I discovered where it ended.

‘We're blind,' she murmured, touching her stitched-up eye with her fingertips. ‘Where love is concerned, we're absolutely blind.'

‘No, Mama. I love you. I know it's hard to believe because I've hurt you so badly but I do. I do.'

‘Shhh, don't worry yourself. It's not you – it's me and my . . . dreams for you.'

‘I'll never, ever paint again.'

‘Don't say that.' Her voice was a wheeze.

‘I mean it.'

‘For now, maybe. For a while.' She looked up at the ceiling and squinted, as if its blank face held all the answers if only she could see them. She groped with her good hand for the water glass on the table beside the bed and I guided her fingers to it. She lifted her head from the pillow, took a sip, then sank back.

‘I promise I won't ever . . .'
Won't ever what
? See Helen again? Almost as hard to promise as not painting.

‘No need to promise anything,' said Mama. ‘No need. I'll be leaving.'

Canada. Pinis.

No. I could not let her go,
would
not let her go, even if it meant never painting and never seeing Helen again.