Nine Days (7 page)

I smile. I can’t help it. When I was little I loved sitting on her lap, my face buried in her neck, her arms around me. Some nights it was the only way I could get to sleep. She smelled of baby power and raw onions. I’d love to nestle there now but if I sat on her lap I’d put her in intensive care.

‘I’m thirty-five. You can’t sort out the parents of everyone who’s mean to me.’

‘Why not? Why can’t I? I remember Sharon Lisette, when you were in grade three. She was awful to Charlotte too. Charlotte the scarlet harlot, she called her. What did she say to you? Con Con smells like a tampon, was it? I spoke to her father about her filthy mouth. You’re never too old to be someone’s child. And if I get no satisfaction from those rotten parents I’ll go all the way to their headmaster.’

‘Small flaw in your plan. I don’t have a teacher anymore. Or a headmaster.’

‘I have a better idea anyway. I’ll get your father to work her over.’

‘He’s seventy-six.’

‘If he had the element of surprise—who knows? He could kick her in the shins and hobble away.’

It’s an appealing offer. I tell her I’ll keep it in mind.

Charlotte and I were born to two people who plainly adored each other. I was a teenager when I realised what a curse this was. It means I will never have a marriage like that. It will be impossible to find someone who loves me that much, ridiculous to think that lightning could strike twice in the same family.

And after all, what are my options? I know there are men out there who like a full-figured girl. I know there are fetishists and feeders, people who’d delight in my crevices and curves. Yet I don’t want anyone who loves me only for my body any more than I want someone who loves me in spite of it. And the acid test of my acceptance and selfesteem, my one shot at authentic living? The truth is, fat men turn me off.

Mum strokes my hand. ‘Are you sure about the soup? You always feel better when you eat something.’

Hot in my fist is the thing that’s caused me all this trouble. I turn it over in my palm and my fingers brush against Mum’s.

Maybe lightning isn’t the best analogy for love. Maybe love is more like a coin: moving between people all around us, all the time, linking people within families and on the other side of the world, across oceans. If we drew the path of a single coin, the trajectory it had taken, it would link us to all kinds of strangers. We would be connected to people we’ve never even met.

‘A shortbread? No?’

Fuck, fuck, fuck.
All at once I see it.

It was not Violet who was responsible for the violation of our relationship. It was me. I have crossed the line. Going to Violet’s home means I have put my own needs above the client’s. A major professional transgression. I can’t do this job anymore. Not for one more day.

There’s a draught in my mother’s kitchen, a window left open. The skin on my arm is puckered under my fingertips. I shiver: little goosebumps, a ghost walking over my grave.

‘It’s later than I thought,’ I say. ‘It’s time I got moving.’

WHEN I WAKE a couple of hours later my head is wedged between the wall and the mattress. My feet hang over the edge. The spare pillow has dislodged during the night and the cast-iron rung is cold and hard against my calf. I am used to sleeping in my swag or a bunk but this bed is only just broader than my shoulders. One turn too wide or too fast—if I dream I am back among the horses and the sheep, cutting and weaving across the paddock—I’ll be over the edge and face down on the lino. Way over on the other side of the room, three feet at least, the tiny chair is covered with my clothes. At least it’s good for something. It’d never hold my weight and my knees wouldn’t fit in that little space under the desk.

I’ve been home for months now, and they’ve a shop full of beds and mattresses and chairs downstairs. Furniture the right size could be up here in two shakes. Yet they don’t mention it. It seems I’m the only one who notices I’ve grown. And I don’t say anything either. This Gulliver life fits my mood, a stranger in a strange land.

There’s a rap at the door. ‘Jack,’ she says. ‘Are you awake?’

I can imagine her face close to the keyhole. She’s been pacing up and down the hall for the best part of ten minutes. She’s imagining what she might be disturbing. She is unsure how to mother a grown man.

‘Yep.’ Soft, but she’ll hear me.

‘I know it’s a Sunday, dear. But we don’t tend to lie in so long. Not normally.’

Sunday or no, every morning since I’ve been home she’s knocked around seven and said
we don’t tend to lie in so long.
She thinks me content to sleep half my life away in this littleboy room. She’s concerned I’ve developed lazy habits, despite the work I do in the shop, lifting furniture, cleaning and repairing the whole day long. She doesn’t know me. Not at all.

‘Jack? You’ll be coming to church with us?’ she says.

Mum and Dad hadn’t seen the inside of a church since my christening but that all changed when the King asked for prayers for the Empire, prayers that we’d defeat Germany good and quick. Since then, they’ve been every week and they’re not alone: St Stephen’s is packed to the doors. Another thing about this city I don’t understand. If the power of prayer is strong enough to keep Hitler at bay, it should have come in handy before now.

‘Not today,’ I say to the door. Her footsteps fade.

There is no air in here. The window is nailed shut. When I went down to get a hammer to pull the nails out that first night, Mum said,
No Jack, please don’t.
Her face screwed into a mess of wrinkles. She looked just like my mother, except older.
What with all the valuables we have downstairs and I’ve heard of burglars letting themselves in first-floor windows.
So that was that.

It’s not just this room, not just this house. Even the sky’s too low. The view is not the sunlit plains extended. Our part of Richmond, here on the hill, is an island. I can see over the roofs of the rest of it, mismatched shingle and rusty tin held down by lumps of rock and brick and jerry cans. A poor man’s paddock, an endless field of patchwork. Palings missing from every other fence, taken for fuel last winter or the one before and never replaced. Advertising hoardings on every corner so a man can’t even think his own thoughts without interruption. The barrenness, the ugliness, the sad crushed spaces.

For the life of me, I cannot see why people stay here. Do they not know what’s beyond the city? A few hours on the train and their chests would fill with pure air, their shoulders would settle, their hearts would open.

The neighbourhood is stirring. A handful of trees struggle against the grey bitumen, limp in the shimmering heat.

Across the lane, in the tiny yard next door, I see a girl. She is wearing an apron, weeding the vegetable garden. She kneels, first leaning forward to pluck something from the soil, now leaning back, weight resting in the hollow of her joined
feet. She stands and picks up the watering can, stretches to reach the runner beans on the far fence. She is dark-haired, slender and pale, a sapling bent with the weight of the water. She lifts it. The water arcs out and her body straightens. When the watering is done, she begins digging up potatoes with a garden fork. It’s a miracle anything grows in this mean soil, heavy with factory smoke and flecked with rubbish. She rubs each potato between her palms as if she’s spinning wool or making fire with a stick. When it’s cleaned to her satisfaction she slips the potato in the pocket of her apron.

The girl is Connie Westaway. We used to play together before I went away to school. Her brothers are too young to sign up and Kip is day labour for Dad, an act of charity on my parents’ part. I hardly remember Connie Westaway at all.

Now she is brushing her hands on the apron. Now she has picked up the broom leaning on the back wall of the house and she is sweeping the path that leads to the incinerator. I have finished dressing. I should go downstairs. Mum will have breakfast ready, or worse: she’ll be standing beside the stove waiting for my order, as though there was a typed menu on the kitchen table. But here I am, hands on the sill, watching the neighbours’ backyard. Connie moves her feet as she sweeps: a one-two sideways swish.

Now she stops. Is she talking to the broom? She holds it loosely between her looped thumb and forefinger while the other hand flutters at her chest. From this angle I can just make it out: she smiles. She curtsies. Honest to God, the girl just curtsied to a broom, as though she’s at a ball or in the pages of an old novel. I wish I had a telescope. I cup my eyes
with my hands to see her better. Now she places her other hand near the top of the broom handle and raises her eyes to the tip.

Bugger me dead. She is dancing.

One foot forward, then the other. Foot to the side, then the other, skipping to the fence, then back to the vegetable patch, one hand on the broom, the other holding her skirt. Now she twirls, skirt splaying out, a breeze of her own making. Around the post of the clothes line, back the other way. There is a young lilly pilly a few feet from the fence in the corner closest to our place: she is dancing around it and running her hands against the smooth trunk. Standing here in my bedroom, palms flat against the pane, I can somehow feel the bark on my skin. She dances back and I can see her feet, alive in small black boots. I can almost hear the music from the way she moves, as though there was a twelve-piece orchestra behind the fence. The piano cadenza as she bends at the waist, now a rising chorus of strings. The music is in my veins as I watch her dance, the rocking of her body, the turn of her white neck.

Then I notice: I am also swaying. If I had more than six inches of clearance I’d break into a jig. She has the joy of the morning in her, as if she’s the only person in Melbourne who even knows it’s a new day. Hours could pass and I’d still be watching Connie Westaway dance. She circles the backyard, once, twice, thrice, faster and faster. She is the loveliest thing I’ve seen in all these weeks I’ve been away from the bush.

She stops. The broom falls from her hand to the path—I imagine its clatter, wood on bricks. Mrs Westaway has come
outside, talking fast, arms folded, head snapping from side to side. Connie walks in to the house, fast but not running, eyes ahead, not down. The broom she leaves where it falls. Her mother walks in behind her. The music has finished.

Another knock and this time Mum opens the door. ‘Jack. What are you doing at the window?’ She comes in and stands beside me, looks down, then back at my face. ‘Your father’s already eaten. What is it you’d like for breakfast? I thought you’d fallen back asleep.’

‘Coming,’ is what I say. But maybe she was right and I had fallen asleep. Maybe I was dreaming.

I have had many different sets of parents and lived in many different houses. This is something only my mates from boarding school understand. Fact is, everyone changes a little bit, all the time. We age and shrink and grow and soften and harden. When you see someone every day the changes smooth out, like when a young dog takes on a mob of sheep all by itself and you can’t remember the exact moment it stopped being a pup. But when you’re away, the changes aren’t smooth. When you come home from school after five months or from working on a station after nearly eighteen—it’s like different people in place of Mum and Dad.

This visit, the old man can’t raise his arm above shoulder height because something went bung in the joint when he lifted a table funny last summer. Mum’s different too. She sniffs the air now, when she’s talking about other people. The
women who were always over for tea, knitting on their laps, the last time I was here. Not hide nor hair of them now.

Both these things, the shoulder and the missing friends, they add up to something. Put together with the way they both puff while they’re walking up the stairs, the way Dad looks for his glasses when they’re perched on his head. Mum standing in the laundry, squinting at the socks, holding them up to the light after she’s taken them off the line and still every other pair rolled in a ball in my drawer doesn’t match. One black, one navy. One with a stripe near the top, one an inch shorter. I’ve told her I’ll pair up my own socks, and I smile when I say it, but still it wounds her out of all proportion.

For of course we’re not really talking about laundry. We are talking about them growing old without family around. They think I shouldn’t have been so far away, working out west, even though it was them who sent me in the first place. With the war, they can hardly find able bodies for the shop. I’m only meant to be here for a visit but now that I’m back, I should stay.

Out on the station, everything’s the same as it’s always been. The hills and trees and rocks. There’s always a kookaburra on the same branch, fish in the same bend of the river. Every time I come back to this house, it’s a different world.

Sunday grinds forward. I chop some wood, clean my boots. I see sparrows in the yard: loathesome birds on a farm but still living, wild things. I watch them fly and I think good on them.
Go, you little brown buggers.
I don’t think of music or brooms or the way a skirt twirls. The movements of dancing ankles.

By midday Mum’s been watching my every move for four hours so I tell her I’m off out for a bit. I walk to Bridge Road and in the reserve behind the town hall there must be over a hundred blokes just standing around, smoking or cadging ciggies, having a yarn. There’s a fellow in a sharp suit walking around selling raffle tickets but you’d have to be a real bushie to buy one. Someone has a football and there are jackets and hats slung on the fence while a mob of them run around kicking and handballing. The fellow with the ball goes down under a pack and the ones on top of him can hardly breathe for laughing. Silly buggers.

I take my coat off and fold it over my arm. There’s not a lick of breeze and not enough trees for everyone to stand under. On the side of the oval, one of the stalls has penny pies and there’s a crowd gathering, brought close by the smell. I feel in my pocket for some coins but it’s too hot for pies. I can hear the talk around me: shrill, about the war.
Just because nothing’s happening yet don’t mean it won’t
, says one.
Anything’d be better than hanging around here
, says another. Before Mr Menzies declared us to be behind England boots and all, it seemed men were squaring off: one lot for love of Empire, the other believing we should only fight our own battles. Now that’s all changed—or else the doubters are smart enough to keep their mouths shut.