One Whole and Perfect Day (12 page)
When she went back to her room she found Mum in there,
Bestie
in her hands. She looked up from its pages quite guiltlessly and grinned at Lily: Mum had been born before the age of privacy. ‘I thought you didn’t like these kinds of magazines,’ she remarked.
‘I don’t,’ snapped Lily. ‘It’s for a project. A report on – on advertising.’
‘Oh.’ Her mum flipped the magazine shut, glancing momentarily at the list of contents on the cover. ‘What’s a boyf?’ she asked.
‘Boyfriend.’
‘Ah.
I slept with my beastie’s boyf,
’ she read slowly. ‘You mean, this girl was into animal abuse?’
‘What?’
‘Slept with her beastie’s boyf!’
‘It’s Bestie, Mum, not Beastie.’
‘Bestie?’
‘Best friend.’
‘Oh.’ Her mother began to laugh. ‘Oh,
dear
!’
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Oh, oh nothing.’ Marigold stared straight into her daughter’s eyes, and Lily suddenly felt that Mum knew all about her crush on Daniel Steadman; knew how she lay awake at nights and thought of him, how she couldn’t stop herself walking past the senior common room hoping for a glimpse, and even how she’d bought this stupid magazine because she’d actually thought it might tell her how to get a boy she liked to notice her . . .
Mum was frowning now.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Lily nervously.
‘Put some antiseptic on those eyebrows. They look really sore.’
‘I did. What do you think this slimy stuff is?’
‘Oh, right.’ Her mother left the room. Ten minutes later Lily heard her voice from the room next door.
‘Lily?’
‘Yes?’
‘Have you thought of anything we can make for dinner tomorrow night?’
‘I’m just getting round to it,’ sighed Lily, and closed her eyes. How old did you have to be, she wondered, before you could get Meals on Wheels?
Clara slept dreamlessly that night, and so did Lonnie, and Jessaline. Marigold took ages to get to sleep because she was still worrying about old Mrs Nightingale’s children finding someone to look after her while they went on their second honeymoon. Mrs Nightingale herself stayed up very late reading the poetry of Robert Burns again:
Blythe hae I been
on yon hill, / As the lambs before me, / Careless ilka thought
and free . . .
Lily longed to dream of Daniel Steadman. Lara Reid said that if you wrote a person’s name on a slip of paper and placed it beneath your pillow you would dream of them.
Had Lonnie also had that idea? It was rubbish, of course, Year 6 girly stuff –
Bestie
stuff, or
Beastie
stuff, as Mum would say. Was it possible that Lonnie had taken to reading
Bestie
? Lily found the very idea of her brother sitting up in bed at night reading girls’ glossies thoroughly disturbing, because despite all that dropping out, Lonnie was
intelligent
; Lonnie’s favourite writer was Emily Bronte. But love, as she’d discovered, even simple crushes, could make you do really funny things that weren’t like you at all. Look at the way Lizzie Banks jogged past Simon Leslie’s place day after day after day, in the hope he’d come out and talk to her. Lizzie, who’d always hated any kind of sport!
And look at
her
! Look at Lily Samson, writing down Daniel Steadman’s name on a page torn from her notebook so she could dream of him. At least she only wrote it once: no need to overdo things, like Lonnie had done. Lily slipped the scrap of paper underneath her pillow and fell asleep at once.
And dreamed of the wrong person, dreamed of Mr Roberts, the old lame duck Mum had brought home; the one who’d stolen her yellow dungarees. He was wearing them in her dream and Lily was wearing something soft and silky which she couldn’t see properly but somehow knew must be Pop’s wedding dress. Bells were ringing. She was getting married to old Mr Roberts. ‘No, stop! Stop!’ she screamed, but no one heard her, and then she slid into another dream; a dream of a garden adorned with streamers and fairy lights, a long table covered with a white cloth, flowers everywhere – all the details of the party she’d been hearing on the phone from Nan. Boring, she’d thought, as Nan went raving on. Boring, boring, boring. And impossible, anyway, with Pop and Lonnie fighting – it was the sort of happy Nan-like fantasy that in their family could only end in tears.
But there was such an amazing sense of happiness in this dream garden that when Lily woke in the morning she could still feel it, as if she’d had a vision instead of a dream, and suddenly, inexplicably, she found she wanted that party almost as much as Nan. The kind of party proper families had. One whole and perfect happy day . . .
Daniel Steadman’s throat was itching. Very, very faintly, so that he couldn’t tell, floundering through the depths of sleep, whether it really was itching or if he simply dreamed it was. Certainly he
had
been dreaming, the most peculiar dream where he was standing by the window of the senior common room talking to his mate Jase, when he suddenly felt
struck down
. Struck by this weird feeling that he had to turn round and look towards the open door. Only when he did, there was no one there, only the sound of footsteps growing fainter in the corridor. A girl’s footsteps? ‘Hey! Wait!’ he called, and tried to run towards the door. His feet wouldn’t move. ‘Hey!’ he called again.
‘Daniel?’
Daniel blinked. There was light in his room and his mother was bending over his bed. ‘Daniel, are you all right? I heard you calling out.’
‘I had this itchy throat,’ said Daniel. ‘Only now it’s gone. And then there were these footsteps . . .’
‘Only a dream,’ said his mother.
‘It didn’t seem like one,’ said Daniel. ‘It seemed too real.’
Up in the hills, Stan was also having a restless night. He’d been having quite a few of them lately, ever since he’d found his mum’s old wedding dress down at the back of the shed. He’d go to sleep and then wake up again, trying to remember a dream. Tonight he’d dreamed of that scene in the kitchen, seventy years ago, when Mum had shown him and Emmie her wedding dress and they’d giggled fit to bust.
How come he couldn’t remember the colour of her eyes? Had they been dark brown, like his? Hazel? Blue? Had Mum had blue eyes? Grey? It was such a tiny thing, yet it kept him awake at nights, as if there was something more to it than you’d think. As if it was important to remember, and that when he did, something that had gone wrong could be put right.
Bloody nonsense. Why was he thinking like this? Plenty wrong in their family, but what the heck had the colour of Mum’s eyes to do with anything? He wished he’d never found that wedding dress. Like a feed of bad oysters, it seemed to have unsettled him.
Could Mum’s eyes have been green? Green didn’t ring a bell. Stan shifted restlessly beneath the doona, waking May. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘Do you remember the colour of Mum’s eyes?’
One of the many things he loved about May was how when you asked her something unexpected, even downright stupid, she never asked you why. Now he waited while she thought this one over carefully, taking a long time before she answered finally, ‘No, I don’t.’
You couldn’t blame her; Mum had passed away in the first year of their marriage, before Marigold had been born. There was no one else to ask, now that Emmie had gone and he was the only one left. Stan felt he’d lost something important, and lost it carelessly.
‘Why don’t you go home?’ suggested May, and for a terrifying moment Stan thought she’d finally had enough of him, enough of his tempers and sulks and quarrels, and was giving him the chuck at last.
‘Home?’ he echoed weakly, because
this
was his home, this house in the mountains, this room, this bed –
‘Your mum’s place,’ said May.
‘You know it got pulled down. There’s only flats there now.’
‘I meant the suburb,’ said May. ‘It’s still there. The place where you grew up.’
‘Rent a room there, you mean?’
‘Rent a room? What are you talking about?’
‘Well, you said, “Go back home.” ’
‘Only for a few hours, love. You wouldn’t need to rent a room just to walk round the streets for a bit. You know, walk round where you used to go with your mum when you were little. Didn’t she used to take you shopping? To the barber’s? Things like that?’
‘Ah.’ Relief flooded through him like a warm sweet tide.
‘It might jog your memory, see?’
So it might, thought Stan, and he pulled the doona up to his chin, snuggled closer to May, and fell asleep quite easily.
It was years since Stan had been back to the suburb where he’d grown up, and there’d been changes even then: the bootmaker’s gone, and the Ham’n’Beef where Mum had sent him on summer evenings when it had been too hot to cook, to get sixpence worth of devon and a shilling’s worth of ham. But the Misses Parrs’ haberdashery had still been in business, and Coco Pedy’s Fashions, where Stan had often waited, scarlet and embarrassed, for Mum to come out of the ladies’ fitting room.
Now, turning from the station into Good Street, Stan stopped and stood, bewildered. Except for Woolies and the old Royal Hotel, both of them shabby and down at heel, almost everything had gone. Coco Pedy’s was a video shop, the Cash’n’Carry had become some kind of herbalist’s, and on the corner where the Misses Parr had sold their embroidery silks and knitting wools stood the Hong Kong Star Emporium.
Even the people had changed. He stood on the side of the footpath for a full ten minutes and in all that time, apart from a couple of schoolkids, he saw only one Australian face. Saris and veils passed by him, men in funny caps, even a tiny old lady in black pyjamas and a big straw hat – the exact replica of a picture he remembered from his Grade 2 Reader,
Our Oriental Friends.
Stan’s face took on an expression his mother and sister would have recognised immediately: pouched cheeks, pursed lips, a deep grieved groove between his brows. Stan was in the sulks. Anyone’d think he’d caught the QANTAS flight to Singapore instead of the 7.30 down to Central! ‘What did we fight the bloody war for?’ he muttered, and at once, almost as if she was standing there beside him, Stan heard Lily’s voice. ‘Well, you didn’t, Pops, did you?’
Okay, so he’d had flat feet and the army wouldn’t take him, or the navy, or the air force. He’d have gone if he could have.
‘Pops!’ Lily’s voice scolded inside his head. ‘You’re a racist, Pops!’
‘No I’m not. It’s just that –’ And here he’d stop. Because how could he explain to Lily, when he hardly understood the way he felt himself? When he couldn’t find words for the way the world kept changing on him? How, standing on the once-familiar corner of his old beat in the city, staring up at the tall buildings whose smooth glossy sides reflected clouds – the din of traffic all around him, strange music, the mysterious words of unknown languages – Stan would feel like a kid in a fairytale, a kid who’d been asleep inside a mountain for a hundred years. And woken in some foreign, unfamiliar land.
He’d never imagined it could happen here in the tatty old suburb where he’d been born.
‘Pops! lmagine!’ Lily’s voice again.
‘Eh? Imagine what?’
‘Imagine if there was a civil war, here.’
‘Here?’ Stan had paused and looked around him. He and Lil had been walking down a quiet side street in Katoomba. It was the middle of the school holidays and Lily had been visiting with him and May. They’d gone out for bread and now they were walking home. ‘Here?’
‘Yeah,
here
.’ Lily had spun round on her toes, arms outstretched, embracing the peaceful neighbourhood. ‘It’s not impossible, you know, Pop. Australia’s not all perfect, like you think.’
‘Look, I
don’t
think that.’
She wouldn’t let him finish. She never did. ‘And imagine you were on the losing side and got kicked out –’
‘What?’
‘If there was a civil war, Pop! And you had nowhere to go except on some tatty old boat to another country, with
nothing
, and then, when you got there, to this other country, people started giving you a bad time, especially the
old
ones. Called you names and stuff.’
‘I don’t call them names.’
‘Huh! Look how you’re saying “them”. ’
Useless to argue. ‘It wouldn’t bother me if they did call me names.’
‘Oh yes? I bet it would. When you were in a strange place and all on your own.’
‘Listen, Lil, I –’
‘Pop, people from other countries are human, like us.’
‘No, they’re not.’ He’d said it wrong; he realised the moment the words slipped from his mouth.
‘What?’ Lily’s voice had risen dangerously. ‘Not
human
?’
‘No, that’s not what I meant. You always take me up the wrong way, Lil. I didn’t mean they –’
‘Look how you’re saying “they”!’
Stan took a deep breath. ‘People from other countries, then. I didn’t mean to say people from other countries weren’t human. You’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. All I meant was, well, they’re different from us.’
‘How do you know? How do you know they’re not like us, Pop? Have you ever really met an Asian person? Got to know them? Ever in your life? Made a friend?’
He’d got her gist: she thought he was one of those types who wouldn’t give a home to refugees, who chucked boat people overboard, locked them up in prisons, kids included.
Stan felt hard done by. Of course he wasn’t like that! ‘Just because I get things wrong sometimes,’ he began, ‘use the wrong words . . .’
She mowed him flat. ‘Wrong words! Is that what you call it, Pop?’
‘Struth! Give us a go! Ms Politically Correct!’
‘Big Bigot!’
His lips had twitched. Then Lil’s lips twitched. Suddenly they were laughing.
It was always like that. He and Lil could row and row, bawling insults at each other, and yet despite their differences, they never really fell out. He never lost her like he’d lost Lonnie . . .
Hang on a minute! What was he thinking about? He hadn’t
lost
Lonnie; he’d chucked him out, he’d written him off, hadn’t he? Lonnie was no loss to him.
