Jacaranda Blue (4 page)

 

It was after one when she awoke to Martin's bellow from halfway up the stairs.

‘Are you awake, Daughter?'

‘I . . . yes,' she said.

‘Pardon?'

‘I was sleeping.' Her voice rose to penetrate the closed door and the distance between the speakers.

‘Sleep is a great healer. Do you feel like a little lunch . . . perhaps a boiled egg?'

‘No thank you, Father.'

‘Pardon?'

‘No. No thank you.'

‘I . . . I thought I might manage an egg. How might I . . . how might I go about it?'

‘Bring the water to the boil. Allow the egg to – ' She sighed. He would stand halfway up the stairs, calling his questions, and she would call down her replies. It was too hard. Easier as always, to rise from the bed and care for her aging child. Wipe away self, extinguish self, bury self. ‘I will cook your egg, Father.'

‘Pardon?'

‘Go downstairs. I'll be with you shortly.'

‘Thank you, Daughter.'

Her back hurt as she moved from the bed, and there was more blood. She showered, then dressed carefully, painfully. She slid pantihose over her bruised legs, remembering the constant white tights of her childhood. Hot. Too hot for pantihose today too, but legs must be covered.

She was standing before her dressing-table mirror when she saw the dark stain on her forehead. She touched it with a finger tip. It was tender, bruised.

‘Can't cover that one, dearest Mummy,' she whispered, and she looked at her bed wanting to crawl back into it and pull the quilt over her head, forget his eggs. ‘Give up,' she said, but her hand was reaching for her embroidery scissors. She looked again at the bruise, then carelessly she combed her hair forward, drew a careful part, and began cutting a fringe.

For too long she had drawn her fading hair back from her brow; the new fringe refused to lie flat. Curls, given their freedom, curled up, out. She dipped two fingers in the cold tea, dampening the shorter clump of the hair, then combing it, smoothing the fringe flat. Perhaps the sugar helped. Angel had always liked too much sugar in her tea.

A plain cream blouse with its high collar did not hide the still raw scratch beneath her ear. She sought and found a near forgotten scarf, knotting it loosely at her throat. Hot. Too hot for scarves. Too hot for the airless blouse also.

Her window was wide open. Heat blasted through, drying her fringe into spiky clumps, sugar sweet. She combed it again, then, with a well-practised twist, coiled the long hair into a knot. It looked odd in the dressing-table mirror. The heavy clump of fringe, the green scarf. Odd. Un-Stella. She couldn't go downstairs like that. He'd know.

Give it up.

Her back ached; the bed called to her. She sat on its edge, wanting to lie down, to sleep, to hide, to die.

‘Daughter?'

‘Yes.' He wouldn't let her give up.

‘What on earth are you doing up there? It's almost two.'

‘I will be down shortly.' Her hair spilling free to her shoulders, she walked from the room and downstairs.

 

The kitchen was hard, stale with unchange. She had placed no stamp of ownership here. It was as it had been in her childhood, as it had been in her mother's childhood. Its small windows, now in shade, cast little light into this room that had for too many years soaked up the odours of boiled swedes and sprouts and roasts on Sundays. It couldn't change, and like the minister, wouldn't change. He saw no need for change.

The floor, the walls, the cupboards, were a worn brown. Perhaps in a time before, the linoleum had boasted a touch of colour, a dash of shine. Now it was flat, dull, always clean, but never clean. Each week, Stella wiped its surface with a liquid polish poured from a bottle, and for a time the kitchen smelt of the polish, but the floor refused to shine.

She walked to the refrigerator and to the cool blast of air, savouring it, wasting it. Large, new, twin-door, her father had bought it last year when the old Kelvinator finally died. This one jutted out from the wall, aware that it was out of place, out of time in this room; thus it did not associate with the brown canisters on the mantelpiece, nor the walnut antique dresser at its side.

Two eggs in her hand, she let the door swing shut, close off the cool, and she walked to the electric stove. Old too, but not as old as she. It stood on the hearth, directly before its long disused, wood-burning antecedent. She hated that wood stove with an irrational hatred, and chose not to look at it, not to clean it. She wanted it gone, had pleaded with her father for twenty years to have it gone; still it remained, bricked into the chimney, where the black soot of yesterday still fell in showers onto unused hotplates, scattering black beads to today's floor.

A small stainless-steel saucepan taken from the bottom shelf of a walk-in pantry; she stood immobile, studying its copper base, aware that it was the best money could buy in Maidenville. Martin had purchased the complete set when he learned from the television that aluminium was unsafe. She sighed, and carried the saucepan to the green enamel sink, an aged, chipped beast of a thing.

The entire house had this same inconsistency. The dark and light, the old and the new living incongruously, side by side. The lounge room was panelled in dark wood, its glass doors, that had once opened to the morning sun, were shielded day and night by heavy brown drapes, kept drawn against the dark side of the house, kept drawn against the forest of trees in the neighbouring yard, and against the eyes of the neighbour who owned the untamed forest. The minister and Mr Wilson had not spoken for fifteen years. Long ago, Stella had given up opening the drapes for Martin to close. Given up. Given up. Given up everything. Every dream. Every desire.

Within the lounge room, a modern, wide-screened television dominated. An electric heater covered the open fireplace, and a huge tan recliner chair awaited the minister's pleasure before it. But against the walls, Angel's heavy, brown leather, lounge suite waited for Stella, as it had for all the days of her life. A dark room. Dark memories lived in that room. Sitting on a leather chair. Waiting on that leather chair. Always waiting.

The water was boiling. She gathered her thoughts and, with a spoon, eased the eggs into the boiling water. She turned the heat down to halfway, set the stove timer to four point five minutes, then stood watching the water boil while listening to the uneven rattling of eggshell on steel.

‘Eggs,' she said. ‘My God!'

‘Daughter?' His head lifted in question.

‘The water, Father. It . . . it splashed . . . '

A calendar hung behind the passage door. She stared at it, her shaking hand covering her mouth, while the eggs on the hotplate taunted her with their water dance.

From his position at the table, where he'd been writing on a notepad, Martin frowned. ‘Perhaps you should return to bed. You are not yourself today.' She made no reply. He shrugged and returned to his writing.

Bread in the toaster. Butter from the refrigerator. Plates from the top cupboard. Knife, spoon, eggcups. She was forcing her shaking hands to function, but her mind was still on the calendar when the timer buzzed and the eggs were done.

He pushed the pad aside for her to place two eggcups and their eggs before him, the two slices of thick buttered toast on his right. ‘Do you still feel nauseous?'

She shook her head, and returned to the sink. Perhaps it was his question, perhaps the smell of hot butter, perhaps habit, but she placed more bread in the toaster, and when it popped she buttered and ate it at the sink, while staring down at her ugly brown shoes on the brown linoleum.

I won't think of it. I will survive this thing. I will eat and sleep and the days will pass and I will survive this thing. What is done, cannot be undone. He didn't cut me, he didn't tie me, bind me, leave me to die on the side of a road. It is unlikely that – she looked at the table and at the two eggshells, empty already, and she turned again to the calendar. It is unlikely. And he is only a youth. There is little chance that he is carrying a disease. So much worse could have happened. So much worse.

‘Do we take our meals at the sink now, Daughter?'

‘I'm sorry.' An aged wooden chair pulled to the table, she sat opposite the minister, stirring her tea, and playing with her second piece of toast.

The table was as old as the house, as solid as the house, but she had covered it with a white lace tablecloth, then covered the lace with a clear sheet of heavy-duty plastic – safe from her father's frequent spillages. They had a dining room down the hall. It faced west, but its window was shaded by the front porch, and by two overgrown pencil pines. It was a good room, papered tastefully in some past era. The best of the old ornaments lived in the dining room. The antique lamp with its ruby glass bowl was on a fine old cabinet – both lamp and cabinet older than Stella's grandparents, but when Angel was no longer able to take her meals in the dining room, Stella and Martin began eating in the kitchen. Now the best room was used as the church guild's meeting room. Each week the women came to sit at the long oak table, to knit, to stuff and stitch the clowns, to pack them in their plastic bags, and to pass on town gossip.

The house was far too large for two people. Many rooms were rarely entered – except for dusting, and vacuuming. There were two small bedrooms downstairs; no doubt they had been the maids' rooms. Stella had claimed one for her ironing board and sewing machine. The second was still furnished with a small wardrobe and an old iron bed.

Allowing her mind to stray a while to the empty rooms, Stella's finger played with her father's fresh spill of sugar. Sugar grains were picked up from the plastic tablecloth, transferred to her saucer, one by one . . . two by two . . . three by three.

When he was small, Thomas had loved visiting the empty rooms, with their smell of age trapped there in old furnishings. She'd allowed him to jump on the aged beds.

‘Can we play trampolines, Aunty Stell?'

Until he was age seven, she'd been a second mother to him.

But memory of the good times only made what he had done that much worse. She shook her head, shook memory away.

‘How could he?' she said.

The minister glanced up. ‘I beg your pardon?'

‘I . . . I . . . ' She coughed. ‘How will he go on? Old Mr Martin. They say he does not realise his wife is dead. They lived for each other.'

‘Yes. I doubt he will survive long without her. It is hard to lose a partner.' He silenced, and again her mind was free to roam.

Another funeral. Flowers. She would have to go to the funeral, do the flowers. She would have to. Who would do the flowers if she didn't?

When?

Monday, no doubt. The family wanted it on Monday. Thomas will be back in the classroom on Monday, she thought. He will be sitting in the classroom with other children while we bury Mrs Martin. Age making way for youth.

God. He is only a child. Why?

In the past year, she had rarely seen him except at youth group, but even there his appearances were rare. Bonny's boy had been his best friend through primary school, but they had formed other friendships now.

Aunty Stell. She was honorary aunt to many children in town, but to Thomas, she had been more. She had walked him to school for years, waited for him at the school gate, listened to his spelling.

He had been her son. In those early years he had been as much her son as Marilyn's. Always too busy at the supermarket, Marilyn had seemed pleased to escape a mother's responsibility.

I will have to leave. Somehow. I will have to get away from here.

The minister cleared the table while she sat staring at an uneaten crust of toast. He dumped the saucepan, the dishes, the cups and glasses in the sink, then turned on the old brass tap, to splash its stream in a wide arc across the floor.

She heard him about his task and, as she sprang to her feet to save further chaos, the telephone began ringing in the hall.

‘I'll get it,' the minister said.

Cloth in hand, Stella stooped, mopped the floor. She looked at the cloth, smudged brown, stained by dirt, or by the brown of the floor.

The ringing silenced. Studying the cloth, she listened to the commanding, ‘Hello. Hello. Who is this? What do you want?'

Another wrong number?

A round-faced, battery-powered clock had lived for twenty years on the wall beside the sink. Now Stella stared at it, aware that the placement of the hands should mean something to her. ‘Two-fifteen,' she said.

‘Pardon?'

‘It's two-fifteen, Father,' she repeated, her hands repacking the sink. She picked out a chipped glass, placed it in the plastic kitchen tidy beside the stove, before turning to the minister. ‘Who was it?'

‘That young pest again,' he said, and he leaned at the door watching her at work. ‘You have an efficiency of movement, Daughter. Chaos bows readily to your hands,' he said. She made no reply. He coughed, gained her attention. ‘Do you think I should report these confounded calls?'

‘It's two-fifteen,' she replied.

‘Yes. The day has flown. I have had nothing but interruptions this morning. Shall it continue all afternoon, I wonder?'

‘It's Saturday. It's . . . It's Miss Moreland's day. I've got to go.' She turned the water off.

On Saturdays, she sat with Miss Moreland in her bright little unit discussing world affairs and cricket scores and watching the tennis. She never missed a Saturday. Miss Moreland's birth certificate might state that she was ninety-six, but she was younger in mind than many forty years her junior.

‘I'm late. I have to go, Father.'

‘Should I report the calls, Daughter? Get Johnson onto the young hooligan?'

‘What will be gained by reporting him? What good will it ultimately do?' she said, unaware she was answering her own unspoken question. ‘Please leave the dishes. Please don't touch the dishes. I'll do them when I return. And don't use that cloth.' She pointed, then took the cloth in her hand. ‘Look at it, Father. That came off the floor with one wipe. It's past time that we considered a new floor-covering.'