Nine Days (10 page)

Mum picks up Dad’s plate and scrapes the beans on to mine. ‘They repeat on your father.’

I scoop up the beans, soft and grey, on the side of my fork.

‘Viking cheekbones in our family, my pa used to say,’ says Mum. ‘Lucky for Jack he takes after my people. Look at that jawline. Doesn’t Emily have nice cheekbones? You can always tell breeding by the cheekbones.’

The trouble with Connie Westaway’s job, as I hear when I express interest, is not only that a newspaper is not a respectable place to work, but that Connie does not keep decent hours. She is often home late, dropped off by her boss, who has a car. The dapper Mr Ward, a widower with two small boys, should take more care. He should have an eye to propriety with a young girl in his employ. In fact, the news is this: Mrs Westaway confided in Joyce Macree in Tanner Street who told Mrs Arnold the draper’s wife who told Mum in the strictest confidence that Mrs Westaway has hopes for Mr Ward. She’s almost sure there’ll be an engagement soon, in spite of the age gap. Then Connie won’t be able to work.

And there’s no denying the difference it would make to that family. Mrs Arnold says Ward’s been in for tea and agrees that Francis is a serious boy and must go to the university and that takes money, even with a scholarship. The boys and their mother might even go live with them in his big house in Hawthorn. Although even then, Mum says, Kip will never make anything of himself, (‘that’s plain’), and if we have to send boys to fight overseas—here she gives me a nervous glance—’it’s layabout boys with no responsibilities, the Kip Westaways of the world, who ought to be going’.

For afters my mother serves the remains of the apricot cake and tells me that people are happier if they stay where
they belong and don’t try to become something they’re not. As indisputable evidence she tells me a story of the O’Riordan girl from Highett Street who Sid Lindsay got involved with and how badly that turned out for all concerned. If she was advising Connie Westaway, Mum would be telling her
don’t forget your place.
But if Connie’s set her cap at Ward, then it’s high time there was an engagement. Girls can’t be too careful. Far be it from Mum to suggest the girl’s done anything wrong, despite the absence of a father’s influence; sometimes when the man’s a drinker a family’s better off without him. And the mother. Mum purses her lips in that particular shape that means
common.
Still, there’s nothing to say that Connie’s let herself down. ‘It’s a shame,’ my mother concludes, ‘that the world is so full of gossips.’

When I go up to my room after dinner, there’re curtains on the window. New, tight on the rail, difficult to pull open. Red and white checks.

That night, instead of walking down to the Cremorne stretch of the river, I lean on the fence across the street from the Westaways’. The light in Connie’s window is still on. Now and then I can see a shape moving behind the curtain. If she opened her window she’d see me standing here. She’s reading or maybe sewing. Thinking about her photographs, about her future married to her newspaperman and raising his boys, being her family’s saviour. She is breathing the same air as me, on the same street.

It’s good that Connie has found someone to look after her, someone with money in the bank and a good job and a house. Someone who might take her dancing, someone who plans to live in this city for good and won’t take her away from her family. Mum says they’ve lived next door since I was a toddler. Just a fence away. I think and I think, but I can’t remember one story, not one detail. What a fool I’ve been.

After a while I move off from just staring at her room because it feels as if there’s something not quite right about that, something a man should be ashamed of. I keep walking until I reach the river. By moonlight it looks like beaten pewter, lumpy with rubbish. I think of Emily’s father and his shop.
He can do almost everything,
she said, but I can’t imagine him riding a horse, or fencing or shearing. I might be a coward but I’d rather be lost along with the arm than safe without it, regardless of the guaranteed employment as a lift operator. One day a soldier of the empire facing the Hun for King and country; the next a grown man sitting on a stool in a tiny box ferrying men with soft hands up and down. I think of Emily and her sisters as little girls, their tiny palms and fingers smoothing soap and water over that big calloused hand. His humility, their tenderness. Drying the hand with a towel, patting it as if he were a doll. But even this image stirs no feeling in me.

Tonight, no matter where I walk or what I see, I am still in the Westaways’ yard watching Connie fold towels with her quick hands. I think about living next door when the news of her engagement does the rounds. Looking down from my little window as she goes off to the church. Her mother
shining with pride; Connie ready to take her husband’s hand and begin her big adventure. I wonder how long it’ll take to get Mum and Dad sorted. I wonder what time the drill hall opens.

That first night when I got home—not home, I can’t say home—that first night when I got to my parents’ house, I still had the rattle of the train in my body. I swayed down the hall and had to convince Mum I’d not stopped at the pub. That first night—before I’d twigged to tiptoe down the hall in my stockinged feet, boots in my hand, and let myself out the front door ten minutes after their lights went out—that night, I didn’t know how I’d get to sleep. I tried to keep the old man up with me. We sat in the front room and I told him stories about every shearer and every sheep and about Jasper till his eyes were hanging out on stalks.
Can’t get a word out of him during the day,
he said, shaking his head.
Come bed time, can’t shut him up.
I said I’d toss him: heads, ten more minutes; tails, off to bed now.

The poor bugger. He’s an early riser, always was. He couldn’t stand it any longer.
I’ll have to call it a day, son,
he said, as I sent my coin spinning.
No need to squeeze it all into one night.
He grabbed it right out of the air. Plucked it like a lemon when it paused at the top of its flight and put it in his pocket. Pity. It wasn’t just any old coin. It won me my new saddle in a two-up school last winter, back on the station. That was my lucky shilling.

THERE IT IS again, that slight heaviness in my abdomen that I felt as I rolled on my side during the night. Not a twinge, exactly. More a weight. A disturbance in the flesh. I feel it as I stretch my arms above my head at the beginning of
surya namaskar
and again in
vriksana.
The sole of my foot presses against the mat and the toes are spread, firm but not clenching. I breathe and feel my muscles respond, loosen. The first class of the day brings the energy of the sun and these familiar poses balance and awaken and empower. The air is still bracing; these old heaters take some time. The class is lined up before me, concentrating. They have not noticed anything amiss. They are following my movements, my instructions for each pose, but I do not feel balanced.
There is something here that is not right.

‘Draw the flesh of the right inner thigh outward,’ I say. ‘Engage the thigh muscle. Engage the knee. Pull the skin on the inside of the left leg towards the back of the room.’

Some in the class are fluid and some are not. My heart goes out to the stiff ones, the way they try week after week, struggling with something that does not come easily. It gives me hope. It reminds me of the resilience and determination of life.

‘Soften the face, soften the breath.’

When I say this, they all concentrate on being soft. They see no contradiction in this. They do not understand the courage that is required simply to surrender. It makes me smile.

I sometimes take the evening class but this early one, before the sun is up, is the busiest of the whole day. It’s mat flush against mat—black for the boys, purple for the girls— all of them office workers or executives in their shorts and leotards. The men have this intense focus like they’re negotiating a corporate takeover in the middle of downward dog; the women’s hair is pulled back tight and they wear lipstick and mascara and earrings. Their suits hang in the change rooms: supermen and wonderwomen. They leave sharpened, ready for their day to begin. I cherish a hope that this morning peace they hold in their hearts will make them kinder accountants and bankers, more understanding real estate agents. I told Stanzi this once.

She shook her head. ‘No chance. Hitler did a mean downward dog and he didn’t start to mellow till he got to Stalingrad.’

I’m almost positive Hitler didn’t practise yoga, but there’s no use correcting Stanzi when she thinks she’s being funny.

When I was a teenager and first learning yoga, my teacher always started the class with a chant. We beginners sat on blankets or bolsters in our best attempt at legs crossed and said the words along with her, clear and loud, earnest like a spell. Only it wasn’t a spell. It was Sanskrit, and none of us knew what it meant. Sometimes in those beginning classes, I imagined all those serious people struggling to perfect their yoga and chanting:
two beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun
in Sanskrit. Chanting still makes me want to smile, but I don’t laugh out loud in class anymore.

After the class, my muscles sit better on my bones and my head balances high of its own accord but that foreign feeling in my abdomen remains. I wrap myself up in layers and as I walk up the hill in the dawn light, I see a cloud of seagulls swoop along the beach and settle in the carpark. It’s heartening. Even though birds are utterly free, they choose to flock. They prefer to be with their kind. There’s a sense of connection, I guess. An invisible thread. The birds rise again as one, soar over the road and start to squabble over a box of chips spilt in the gutter. I notice a gull standing on one leg; her other is hooked under her, toes hanging loose and wobbling as she balances. She hops towards a chip and loses it to a more agile friend. I wonder how a bird can survive such an injury, and whether she had it from birth. Then I see it: the glisten of a filament. She has fishing line wrapped tight around her claw. It is close to severed.

And there is nothing I can do. If I approach she will fly away, if I grab the dangling line I will make the injury worse. We humans fuck everything up, everything. I look at the seagull and it’s all I can do not to cry so I keep walking. The birds scatter, even the damaged one. The person responsible for that fishing line: karma better not forget about them. Stanzi would tell me to get a grip. I remember as a child spending ages every morning choosing which shoes I would wear and then worrying all day about the poor ones left behind in the cupboard, about how dejected they must feel having been passed over. Forsaken. I tried explaining it to Stanzi but she thought I was joking.

The tram is on time and as we go by, Luna Park smiles at me and I feel better. I smile back. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you can usually find something to make you smile. You just have to look for a sign.

At work, the roller door is already up. Craig is on time even though Sandra is in Daylesford for the weekend. He looks like he’s slept. His hair is smoothed down and he’s even shaved, a bit. He looks good with a little growth. Whiskers help him keep a sense of mystery about the line of his jaw. He is frowning like a little boy pretending to be grown up. The shop key hangs around his neck attached to a lanyard so everyone can see he’s the trusted one. It’s very cute. He’s checking the change in the till and has the order books spread across the counter.

‘We’re out of garlic tablets.’ He doesn’t look up.

‘How? We got a delivery last week.’

I don’t know who sells so much garlic. Perhaps it’s Kylie. I always tell her: garlic in a tablet is great to kickstart the immune system but for chronic conditions, she should focus on the diet. Wheat and dairy, out. Preservatives, out.

I put my coat and gloves and scarf in the storeroom. When I get back, he’s stacking the special bread orders on the bottom shelf. He never bends his knees when he leans over. It’s shocking for his back. Craig looks calm, but I can tell he’s not. He’s got them out of alphabetical order.

‘Where were you?’ He still hasn’t looked at me.

‘I fancied a quiet night. I meditated for a while then I read. That’s all.’

‘You might have said you weren’t coming. I left a ticket for you on the door.’

He practically throws the yeast-free up on the top shelf. One packet zooms across the top and flops to the floor. Craig stomps back to the counter. There is no
ticket for you on the door.
There are no tickets of any kind. There is no cover charge: the band gets ten dollars, a counter dinner and three beers each. Craig’s mouth is like a child’s drawing of a sad person.

‘I’m sorry.’ I pick up the bread, dust it off and put it back on the shelf.

‘It’s cool. Don’t come if you don’t want to.’

He looks at me then and I see his eyes. His eyes are soft and brown with long lashes, wet, deep Bambi eyes. It’s impossible to look into them without falling. Almost as soon as I met him I started thinking about how those eyelashes would
feel brushing my skin, how it would feel to kiss those eyes closed.

‘Sorry.’

‘I mean, I’d hate to put you out or anything.’

Take a deep breath, Craig,
I think. I send him messages of peace and tranquility.
Relax, Craig. Imagine the sun’s light pouring through the top of your head and coming out your chakras in different colours. Think sky-blue thoughts.

He doesn’t relax. He trudges to the fridge, opens it, stares inside, then closes it again. Then he tramps back to the counter. ‘Last night was important to me, Charlotte. You know that. We’ve been practising our new material.’

He looks so distressed. If he keeps this up, he’ll get a headache. He needs to sit down. If he sat down, I could rub his shoulders. He likes that. I reach into the bottom cupboard and find the oil burner, then look through the half-opened bottles to find something calming. Maybe Roman Chamomile and Clary Sage? ‘How did it go? The new material?’

‘Really well. Good. Fine. Jesus, Charlotte, you might have come.’

I set the oil burner next to the cash register. Matches. Where are the matches? ‘You don’t need me there every night, surely. I bet the crowd loved you. I bet you were a smash.’

‘Jon and Jamie’s girlfriends come. They sit at the bar and get the clapping started. It’s called support.’

‘I was tired.’ I light the burner. Soon he’ll start to feel better.

‘That clapping. It’s bloody exhausting, isn’t it?’ He claps, slowly, in case I have an incomplete grasp of the concept.

‘I didn’t realise they took attendance. It’s just a bar. You play almost every week.’

‘Fine.’ He turns back to counting the change. ‘Be like that.’

I pout and reach up to kiss him. ‘Poor baby. Turn that frown upside down.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘How about a coffee? I’ll open a fresh soy milk and you can tell me all about last night. What did you play first?’

He ignores me. I shrug. Scorpios. There’s nothing you can do. You can’t control the whole world.

The sign comes just after my lunch break. Craig needs some space so I make a ginger tea and spend most of the morning in the store room. There are deliveries to be unpacked, invoices to tick off, dates to check. Soon one of the reps will visit and try to sell us the wrong thing: a new pill for younger skin or weight loss, a cream that says ‘fills wrinkles from the inside’ in gold swirly letters on the label. A few times I hear Craig’s voice speaking to a customer and the juicer starts up. I think about wrapping my arms around him and telling him the real reason I didn’t go out last night, even though I’m not certain, even though I’m probably wrong.

At eleven, he pokes his head around the door. ‘Customer for you,’ he says. He can see I’m busy. He’s good with the customers. He could do this himself.

But when I come out, I understand. Craig listens to the old ladies talk about the bulbous joints and thready memory,
the middle-aged women talk about menopause in forensic detail, even the blushing girls describe their period pain. He has what Sandra calls ‘strong feminine energy’. Sometimes the girls from the convent school drop by for a smoothie, and to giggle and give him sideways glances. He knows what he’s doing, too: he dropped out of naturopathy with only one semester to go. He’s practically a professional. There’s only one kind of customer he’s not so good with.

In the middle of the centre aisle is a young woman with a stroller, and in the stroller is a sleeping blonde girl, two or three maybe, soft curls on her face under a beanie, dressed in a pre-feminist pink coat with a Disney princess on her stockings. Her cheeks are flushed and there’s a crust of snot around her nostrils. It only takes a second to see the white line across the bridge of her nose.

The woman smiles. ‘She seems to get colds all the time.’ She brushes the girl’s damp fringe. ‘I was thinking she needs something to build her up. Boost her resistance.’

It’s a typical story, this time of year. It’s what people come in for. All around us are bottles, pills and potions, herbs and extracts. It’s not that I disapprove. There’s something soothing about them. They contain all the hopes of the human spirit, all the refusal to quit, to keep believing people can feel better. The herbs are evidence of an understanding of our place in the universe. The minerals and vitamins are a return to the earth, an acknowledgement of the delicate balance in our bodies, the need for things that come from the soil or the sun. The woman in front of me is well dressed with sparkly stones on her fingers. The stroller is the expensive European
variety. I could probably sell her anything. I kneel next to the girl and she wakes with an almighty sneeze that I only just manage to dodge.