The Beloved (29 page)

‘
Not
shorts.'

‘Just a
damn boot
.'

‘Oh, you bloody . . . father!' I snatched a pair of olive-green shorts, a little longer than the others, and took them to the counter.

Tim's bike was chained up outside the hospital. Dad and I walked through the cool corridor to Mama's big room at the end. Tim was sitting beside her bed, reading aloud from the
South Pacific Post
. Mama opened her eyes – both of them. Persil-white whites, coffee-bean irises. She looked at my dress, then at Dad, then back at my dress.

‘Nice dress, Lindsay. Happy birthday.'

‘Thank you, Mama. And thank you for the bracelet. I love it. Look.' I held out my arm. ‘It matches my dress.'

‘So it does.' For a while she said nothing, gazing out the window, then she said, ‘I have news. My foot stays.'

I sagged with relief. Dad grinned at Mama but she wasn't looking at him, she was looking at Tim and Tim wasn't smiling.

She lifted her bandaged hand. ‘But my fingers have to go.'

Tim left Moresby two days later.

Mama had to lever him out. ‘The only thing that'll give me peace of mind is knowing you're back at school and doing well. It's your last year and I couldn't bear it to be messed up.' When he still refused to go, Mama refused to have the operation.

The doctor weighed in. ‘Gangrene and the tropics, son. The sooner you go the better.'

Dad swallowed. You could hear it all the way to Melbourne.

Chapter Twenty-three

The tide was turning. I stood in the shallows watching black mica bubble up through the sand and form tiny diamonds like the patterns on a puk-puk's back. Miniature cliffs rose as the water raced in and collapsed as it fell away, switching from black to beige and back again. Rivulets, fine as hair, whooshed and sucked into tangled pathways, constantly changing the mosaic. One minute I was looking at an entire landscape, the next at nothing.

A wind blew; the sea was turning dark and glassy. I got up and went to the change sheds where a bougainvillea trailed across the bricks. I gathered some blossoms and went up to the hospital.

Mama sat on the edge of the bed, testing her foot on the floor. A nurse hovered. I put the flowers on the tray-table and watched my mother take a step. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

‘New boot, Lindsay?'

‘Yeah.'

Wind whipped through the open window and the nurse hurried over to slam it shut. She watched Mama wrestling with the crutch. ‘You're doing well, Lily May. How's the pain?'

‘All right.'

‘I'll get you some aspirin just in case.' The window mirrored her retreating back, leaving me staring at the reflection of my mother and me. Her thin shoulders were hunched over the crutch like a coat-hanger. Her face was scarred and there was a bandaged stump where fingers used to be. Beside her I looked like Orphan Annie in a sagging smock and boots. I felt a surge of shame. This woman, my mother, had loved, nurtured and fought for me all my life, asking for nothing in return except that I make the most of what I had. As
she
was doing now with what she had been dealt, without a hint of complaint. I felt the minutes rolling by and it seemed as if I could see them stretching out like a long road all the way into the future until my life ran out. My parents would be gone, I would be gone. My boot would be dust. I stared at the reflection of a coward. A cripple? A word, a state of mind; not who you are. Unless you want it to be.

I waited in Helen's shop while she finished serving a woman and a little girl. I didn't recognise the girl so I guessed she must go to Ela Beach School. Like I had when I first came here with my toxic message. Floozy, trollop, harlot, hussy, woman-of-the-night.
Leave my father alone
. And she had.

She looked up, smiled and tilted her head towards the back of the shop. I went around to her work room. Everything was the same: my sketch of the marble-players in its usual place
on the wall, her painting of me still on the desk and still incomplete.

‘Hello, Cinderella.' She stood in the doorway wearing a green shirtmaker dress with turn-back cuffs. Her hair was tied with my bottle-green velvet ribbon.

‘Cinderella?' I said, my heart curling over as I thought of Stefi.

‘You've finally ditched the rags.'

‘Oh. Yes.' I was wearing my new shorts. I hated them. I felt naked but I was determined my mother should not be ashamed of me. I nodded towards her desk. ‘You still haven't finished that picture.'

She turned to look. ‘No, and I must. With boot or without?'

‘I don't care, Helen,' I said. ‘Either way, it's me.'

She nodded. ‘I'm glad to hear it. Done any pictures lately?'

‘No.'

She made her face a question mark.

‘You know why,' I said.

She folded her arms and tilted her head. ‘Who are you, Lindsay?'

My mother's eyebrows shot up. ‘Shorts! Your legs need some sun.'

‘I know. And I'm going to buy some dresses for school.'

‘Dresses or smocks?'

‘Dresses.'

‘Hallelujah.'

‘Mama, I have to tell you something. I've been to see Mrs Valier.'

‘That's nice. Draw pictures together again, did you?'

‘No.'

She leaned on her crutch and took a few steps. ‘I hope you've got the sense to apply yourself at school this year.'

‘I will, Mama, but you need to know I've dropped Maths II and I'm taking Art.'

She stopped. ‘Well. That promise didn't last long.'

‘I know Mama, but I can't be you. I'm me. I make pictures. It's who I am.'

She walked slowly towards the bed. ‘Right. Well, I've got that straight, at last.'

She came home in the third week of March. A painting I was working on lay on the end of the dining room table. Mama looked at it for a moment but said nothing.

Dad had shifted his things into Tim's room, but wasn't moving out of the house until he was satisfied Mama could manage on her own.

‘Don't stay on my account,' she said. ‘I can manage fine. I've got a backlog of work to do, including that job for
National Geographic
in Tapini, and then I'm leaving for Canada.'

Mama's foot was not yet strong enough to manage the clutch on her car, so Husband drove her around. She didn't complain that he crashed Iris's gears and she didn't complain about the daily physiotherapy which I knew must have been painful. She didn't complain about the long teardrop scar on her face or about Dad leaving her. She didn't even complain about me, and that scared me. I tried everything I could think of to persuade her not to leave but her mind was made up.

‘Stay for what? I'm redundant. Replaced by both of you.'

‘Not by me. Never by me. I need you, Mama.'

‘Yes, you do need me, but you want me only on your terms. You want me to pat you on the head and say everything's fine. It isn't, and I'm not going to watch you throw your life away. I'd rather live my own.'

‘Okay,' said Dad, backbone of the family that no longer existed. ‘Time out.'

Time out. Running out. My mother's Tapini assignment – her last – was set for early April and the closer it came, the more panicky I felt. Dad didn't try to talk Mama out of going back to Canada, but he was anxious that we part on good terms.

We were arguing, one morning, over who emptied the milk can when Dad grabbed the empty can and slammed it on the kitchen bench. ‘Stuff the effing milk can! I've had it with you two. If you won't sort yourselves out, I will.' That night he came home and slapped an envelope on the table. ‘This is a ticket for Lindsay to go with you to Tapini, Lily May. You owe her. The full story.'

‘I owe her nothing. I've given her everything I could, everything she'd take. She rejected my past when she rejected her name. What's left belongs to me.'

‘It belongs to her too. It belongs to everyone you affect, everyone who loves you. That accident should have been a wake-up call to you both. What has to happen before you get it? Does one of you have to die?'

The shadow of our little Piaggio aeroplane was a mosquito on the chasm walls. Above us, mountain peaks towered into clouds and below, valleys plunged thousands of feet. The plane banked sharply left, dropping and tilting and barely dodging the raised rim of a ledge that ran uphill into the stony side of a mountain. We dropped onto the ledge and roared up the slope, the windscreen filling with the great grey face of a cliff. At the last minute we stopped.

Ahead of us the patrol officer's house, an old timber building with peeling paint, leaned against the mountain. The pilot cut the engine and opened the door. A cathedral-like silence drifted into the cabin, sunlight shafted through towering trees and landed in pale smudges on the lush grass. A smattering of buildings and huts hemmed the ledge. From the shadows a native man appeared and padded across to take our bags. He led us into the house and our simple room. Two beds on an enclosed verandah, mosquito nets and army blankets for the chilly highland nights.

‘Tea in ten minutes, Sinabada.'

I unpacked my bag. Shorts, a dress, art things. Mama's face tightened as I arranged them on the table.

I touched her arm. ‘Mama, why do you hate art so much?'

She opened the narrow wardrobe and took out a couple of wire coat-hangers. ‘I hate what it does to you.'

‘What does it do?'

‘It takes you away from me.'

‘No, it doesn't.'

‘Yes, it does, it always has. When you were little and had polio you needed me, but the moment you got that wretched blackboard I lost you. You use art to distance yourself from people, Lindsay. It's made you a loner and I wanted so much more for you. Friends, a career, a good life.'

‘Art didn't make me a loner, Mama, polio did. Art is the one thing that connects me with the world. When I paint someone or something I'm always amazed at how much more there is to them than I first thought and it helps me understand them. When I paint I forget what I can't do because what I can do matters more.'

‘There's nothing you can't do if you want.' Mama pressed shut the wardrobe door and leaned her forehead against it. When she looked up her face was unreadable. ‘I guess we'd better get to tea.'

The lounge was a shabby but comfortable room. The patrol officer rose from a faded chintz armchair and introduced himself and his wife, a pale lady with a jutting bosom and a lilac cardigan she kept tugging across it. She poured tea from a silver pot and passed around crustless fish-paste sandwiches and a lemon sponge.