Brothers and Sisters (17 page)

‘Immediately following the news we have “The Media Report”,’ said the announcer.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Tony. ‘Here she comes. Now she is on for young and old.’

He stood at the back door of his Owner’s Cottage, listening to a bowerbird squabbling with a lyrebird, and the radio playing the interview from the kitchen bench. He mouthed what he himself said, almost by heart. A rhythm of short and long sentences, abrupt declarations, deliberate silences running to tantalising suspensions of speech (a Tony Watson touch)—during which he pictured listeners, paused in what they were doing, wondering what the next word would be.

The crumbs of forty years, this felt more truthful to him than any of his thousand-dozen jaunty attacks on all and sundry. If he’d been a carpenter talking about the craft of planes and saws, drills and sanding techniques, he could not have been more on to himself. Judy, watching his face throughout, gave him a hug.

‘Why, I was alright,’ he said, when it was all over. There was nobody in the room to hear him say this. Nobody in that larger room, either, going on and on through boundless space. Outside, sitting on a stump, Judy was crying.

Alan Corker rang: ‘I heard you, Tony. You made a lot of sense. I didn’t know you were an orphan. Never heard anyone talk better about coming from nowhere, having nothing.’

‘I’m depressed by my own intelligence,’ said Tony. ‘It goes to show how easy it is to talk intelligent crap.’

Judy met Alan Corker when she came down to supervise arrangements for getting Warwick Mickless and Betty installed in the Manager’s Cottage. Betty said she would die in the mountain winters, but Warwick wasn’t so sure, even after a lifetime of his thermostat being adjusted to the Top End. He might even like it here. On the way in, as they’d come through a paddock of mares and foals, Warwick had climbed from the car to open a gate and, when they were through, he started walking out among the animals, bringing them up to his hand.

When they were all in the cottage with mugs of tea, Judy brought out their presents, wrapped in white tissue paper and tied with blue-striped string. For Warwick it was the tooled leather change purse, with a motif of desert pea and quandong fruits, that he’d made in boyhood days of saddlery repairs and stock camp evenings, and slipped to Judy after a night of heavy petting at Randall’s flicks. She was returning it to him now with the thought that Betty should have it.

For Tony the gift was a battered Salvationist tambourine, bought in an op shop on Bondi Road.

Tony held the instrument to his ear, giving it a hissing shake. ‘This is the wind,’ he said, ‘wrapping itself around the bluebush on the old Louth Road.’

Tony turned to Warwick: ‘Come on, say something funny.’

‘You never knew it,’ said Warwick, ‘but when you started on the air, all round the country, I’d listen to you on this old trannie I had in my saddlebags. This was when I was at Katherine, not far from town.’

‘Cut to the chase, cowboy.’

‘There was a way you had, it was like a horse, you walked, trotted and galloped. I used to think . . .’ Warwick paused.

Tony looked at him: all teeth and hairless hackles.

‘You used to think what?’ he challenged.

‘Well, that you mightn’t a’ done what you did, said what you did the way you said it, without seeing it done by a pony.’

‘Might or mightn’t,’ said Tony, pulling his jaw shut. ‘I always thought it was the wind that drove me, that wind that never shut up on the river road, and I wanted to get inside out of it.’

‘When I got stuck with
Bluebell’s Voyage
,’ said Judy, ‘and I didn’t know what to write next, I remembered what you once said, darling, when we were kids.’

‘What did I say?’ said Tony, swivelling in Judy’s direction. ‘What’s all this getting at me about?’

‘You said all the words were there waiting, everything we’d ever say in our lives. You said the words were in the wind.’

‘Well, even without us the wind keeps blowing,’ said Tony, and without knowing why, felt radio drop from his life, needs, and necessity.

TROUBLE

Tegan Bennett Daylight

Emma and I were walking home from school together. It was September, spring, with a cheerful breeze running along with us, new leaves lit and flickering, the houses hung with wisteria and jasmine. We were walking with Peter, who had been troublesomely in love with Emma for several years. If she’d been alone he might not have dared to follow her, but her younger, noisier sister made it easy. I was, without knowing it, combative; sparring with me had relieved the nerves of more than one of Emma’s boyfriends. Emma walked silently beside us, a spray of jasmine dangling from one hand.

A truck, uncommon in our money-quiet suburb, screamed past us. When it had gone, Peter said, ‘A truck drove into my house once.’

‘No, really?’ I was balancing on the low stone wall that ran beside the road. ‘Tell us about it,’ I said, hopping off the wall to land next to him.

He glanced at Emma, who continued to watch the pavement in front of her, which was lumpy with tree roots.

‘We lived on a corner,’ said Peter. ‘It came too fast on the way round, and its brakes failed. It went straight through the fence and into the side of the house.’

‘Amazing,’ I said.

‘It was a big deal!’ said Peter. ‘If I’d been playing in the yard it would have killed me!’

Suddenly inspired, I said sweetly, ‘Do you often play in the yard, little boy?’

Emma snorted with laughter and Peter blushed angrily. He was quite a handsome boy, with thick blond hair and long eyelashes. ‘It was years ago. I was much younger.’

A magpie whose nest we were passing swooped suddenly, clicking its beak in Peter’s hair. He swung at it in fright. It flew up into the branches ahead of us and perched there, glaring.

‘Come on,’ I said, prodding Peter in the small of his back.

‘You’re much bigger than it is,’ said Emma.

We went forward, turning to face the bird as we passed, then continuing to walk backwards. The magpie snapped its beak again and hopped along the branch speculatively, but did not swoop.

When I was eighteen Emma and I moved to London, using money that our grandmother had left us. We had a place to stay: a flat, belonging to wealthy friends of our parents, who lived for the most part in their farmhouse in Surrey. They were in their sixties, and had no children. The flat was furnished with cream carpet and cream brocade sofas. The windows had double glazing, so that the traffic outside could hardly be heard, although it made the ground bounce under your feet when you went outside. The kitchen shone. We took our boots off at the door when we came in, and the carpet would always be warm underfoot.

In our second week Emma started applying for work. I went with her to her first interview and sat outside on the street, in a quickly shifting rectangle of sunlight. First the sunlight was on the steps of the office, which was in a silent lane of low sandstone buildings with pretty window boxes. No cars. Then it moved to the pavement, so I sat there, my back against the cold stone. When the light moved onto the road itself I stayed where I was, growing colder, watching it cross the narrow space.

The door next to me opened and Emma was handed out by a man in a white shirt and linen pants. My legs had gone to sleep. I tried to get up to say hello but the door closed before I was upright.

‘Did you get it?’ I said. I put one hand on the stone wall for balance while I flexed my stiff feet.

‘Pretty much,’ said Emma.

They were a civilised group of people—all men except Emma—working in a white, light-filled space with its tilted desks set up at a sociable angle. They rarely designed actual buildings—everything they did was a renovation, a conversion, of one of the many difficultly small houses, apartments and offices owned and rented by the well-to-do of London.

Emma’s office was only a few tube stops from our flat, and I met her for lunch sometimes, but mostly I sat at home, too weary to struggle along in the fine bubbles of her wake. I couldn’t get warm. It was only September, and the flat was centrally heated, but I was doing nothing except sitting at the table in our white kitchen, whose window overlooked Vauxhall Bridge Road. Sometimes I ate porridge oats, dry, from a bowl. There was something solid and sustaining about them. You could make porridge in your own mouth, mashing the oats into a warm paste with teeth and saliva. I could eat two or three bowls at once. I looked in the newspaper for work. Sometimes I had baths to try to ease the cold ache in my sides and legs.

One evening Emma brought a friend home from work. When they came into the kitchen I slipped down from my stool, shoving the book I was reading to one side. I wished they’d found me doing something, being busy. I saw myself in the face of the microwave, stomach held in, eyes ringed with black, mouth thick with red lipstick.

‘Your voice sounds English already,’ I said to Emma, unable to speak to Jerome. He was black, and the most beautiful man I had ever seen. He grinned at me, knowing he’d caught me off balance. He wore a grey t-shirt, close-fitting, and dark jeans. His smile made the skin on the back of my neck feel hot and tight.

‘Not to me,’ he said. His voice sounded flat London. He was looking around at the kitchen, at its broad white counters, deep drawers, its double-glazed view of the traffic and the city beyond that. ‘Nice place,’ he added.

‘It’s not ours,’ said Emma quickly.

I looked at her curiously.

‘We’re paying rent,’ she went on.

Mates’ rates
, I almost said, but it would not have been fair to her.

They wanted to know if I would like to come out to dinner with them. I knew Emma would have talked Jerome into this. He kept his body turned towards hers.

I didn’t. I said so. I didn’t have an English accent; I was not in England enough to acquire one. At home in the flat with the porridge and the paper, my voice was not needed at all. A friend had once said to me that I was like a shark that had to keep swimming—if I stopped talking I would die. It did feel as though I was sinking.

I stood up when the door had closed behind them and went into the bedroom. There was only one bedroom, with twin beds. There was a long mirror fixed to the wall between them. I looked at myself, lifted my Clash t-shirt and clawed a bit at my soft, white stomach. Then I lay down on my bed. Soon I was too cold, so I pulled off my jeans and got under the covers. After a while, I fell asleep, and didn’t wake when Emma came in.