One Whole and Perfect Day (16 page)
‘Go away!’ said the voice again, and the girl moved on without a word. At the next seat Stan saw a hand reach out to her, and money pass over. Good, he thought, good! And then there were no other hands held out to the poor kid, all the way down to him. He reached for his wallet, took out a five, then changed it to a twenty when he saw her face, because she was so bloody young, this one. Her face was grubby in the way he remembered Lonnie’s being grubby, years back, when he’d been a little kid. There was a cardboard sign hung round her neck, like a child in a primary school tableau.
‘
I am sixteen and pregnant
,’ read Stan.
‘My first baby is in
care, and I have no home and family. I am
– ’ the ink in this last sentence had smeared so badly he couldn’t make it out. He could see the small mound of her stomach beneath the flimsy cotton dress and it made him mad, bloody stinking mad. The whole thing made him mad.
Sixteen. The same age as Lil. Only Lil could never come to this; Lil was strong and she was fortunate. This kid would have been, what? fourteen, when she’d had the baby who’d been taken into care, and now there was another one on the way. So what had happened to this girl’s parents? Kids themselves, he’d take a bet on it.
And the grandparents? Why hadn’t they looked out for her? Stan shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Written her off, that’s what they’d done. A shiver ran right down his spine.
The girl was beside him now; he handed her the twenty, watched her grubby little fingers slip the note safely out of sight, then watched her walk on down the carriage without a single word.
‘Shouldn’t have done that, love.’
‘Eh?’ Stan looked round. Two old chooks across the aisle were shaking their heads at him.
‘Done what?’
‘Given her money. She gets on here every day, see? Well, every day we go into town, anyway.’ She turned to the woman beside her. ‘We always see her, don’t we, Dawnie?’
‘Her and others like her,’ sniffed Dawnie. ‘On at Redfern, off at Parra, on at Blacktown again – it’s her little business.’
‘Business?’ echoed Stan faintly. ‘
Business?
’
‘She’d get the dole, or something like it, they all do, but it’s not enough, see? Not enough for the drugs, so they get up this little business begging on the trains –’
‘And outside the malls, and down the quay –’
There was a kind of roaring in Stan’s ears. He knew their type: they’d been around in Mum’s days, and they’d be round in Lily’s; they’d be round till Judgement Day. He remembered how Mum used to give him the once-over before he went out into the street to play; checking he had shoes on, getting the flannel to his face. ‘There!’ she’d say, ‘That’s better. Can’t have some old chook reporting us to Welfare.’ The old chooks hung over their gates and judged the neighbourhood; they didn’t miss a trick. And Mum had been a woman on her own, two kids to bring up . . .
Stan glared across the aisle. Tight-arsed bitches! he felt like roaring. Bet ya still got your lunch money from school! Instead he thought of May and took a deep breath, and when he spoke it was to say something May would have thought, even though she’d be too polite to shout it at them, right out loud and in their faces like he did. ‘Haven’t you any hearts?’
Gotcha! he thought, watching their necks and faces mottle, the looks of shock and outrage turned upon him. The one called Dawnie made a choking noise deep in her throat; her mate gasped, ‘Well!
Some
people!’
If this had been a swanky train, some first-class sleeper off to Perth or Melbourne, those two would have pressed a button and had him slung right off; but that wasn’t something you could do easily on the 5 pm All Stations to Penrith and the hills. Stan glanced down the aisle, hoping the girl might have heard, but she’d gone upstairs; he could see her standing waiting by the door.
The train was slowing into Mt Druitt now and it was raining out there, thick teary drops were sliding down the window, pooling on the sill. She had no coat. The black dress wouldn’t keep out a good dose of May’s foggy foggy dew . . .
Abruptly, the girl began to make sounds. They were terrible sounds, thick and gutteral, echoing through the silent carriage as if some poor tormented animal had suddenly found its voice. Stan knew at once the girl was deaf and dumb; he knew because of that friend Marigold had had in kindergarten, the little girl called Christobel. He recognised the thick loudness and the desperate sounding urgency.
Across the aisle Dawnie and her mate were clucking at the noise.
‘Can’t you see the poor kid’s deaf and dumb?’ he shouted. ‘Can’t you understand?’
The train had stopped; she was on the platform now, her dusty black skirt spotted by the rain. For some reason he thought of Mum’s old wedding dress, hanging safely in the hall cupboard up there in the hills. He thought of its colour, that buttery gold which reminded you of kindness, and the way, when you looked at it, the dress seemed to shed a light: it was as far from that girl’s dusty black as anything on earth could ever be.
Stan scrambled to his feet and headed for the doors. He was too late. With a snap and a jerk they closed right in his face and the train began to move away. Anyway, what had he thought he was going to do? Take her home to May? Or to Marigold? He stumbled back down the rocking corridor and sat down again.
Where would a girl like that live? In some kind of hostel? In a squat? For a little while, until they’d found out about the boarding house, May and Marigold had worried that Lonnie might be living in a squat; and the word always made Stan think of stink and toilets filled in with cement, of scurrying scabby rats and broken glass scattered on the floor. Lonnie was all right. Lonnie lived at 5 Firth Street, Toongabbie, and he had a family. If things went wrong he knew they were there; he knew, whatever the quarrels, that they’d help him out. Sure he knew. He
should
know, anyway. If he had any sense at all.
It was that poor girl who probably lived in a squat. Or in a cardboard box down some dangerous back alley. He thought of the big black spots the rain had made on her dress, and an old phrase of his mum’s darted into his mind: ‘It shouldn’t be allowed!’ No, it shouldn’t, thought Stan. He closed his eyes but the image of sodden cardboard wouldn’t go away, and all the way to Penrith, across the river, up into the hills, the wheels beneath him rang and chuckled, sounding out his mum’s old protest: ‘It shouldn’t be allowed!’
A week passed and the weather grew warmer; up in the hills the blossom fell from the apple trees, showering Stan’s new-mown lawn with small pink petals like confetti.
Jessaline and Mrs Murphy made frangipani tart in Mrs Murphy’s kitchen:
Bake a puff-paste crust in a square
cake tin
. . .
Clara and Lonnie took the ferry out to Manly and walked along the beach to Queenscliff, then over the cliff to Harbord. It was brilliant.
Clara’s mother resolved that if she hadn’t heard from Clara by next week, she would go quite uninvited to visit her daughter’s room.
Wednesday came round and brought Lily’s second visit to the Drama Society and the school production.
She almost didn’t go. That morning she’d encountered Daniel Steadman walking slowly across the upper playground towards the library; she’d glanced at him as they passed each other, and he’d actually shivered. Or had it been a shudder?
A shudder, decided Lily. Because in the washroom at lunchtime, Tracy Gilman had said to her, ‘You smell really funny today. You know?’
‘Funny?’
‘Yeah.’ Tracy came closer, sniffing at the air round Lily. ‘It’s like – pooh! Yuk! – like the water vegetables get boiled in? You know?’
Lily did know. It was her turn to make dinner tonight, and realising she’d be late home because of the rehearsal, she’d got up early and made a stew. She’d boiled vegetables . . .
When the bell went at 3 pm she rushed to the showers and scrubbed herself all over. Then she smelled rankly of school soap, and her hair had frizzed out from the steam. She looked a fright, and so she almost didn’t go. Then she realised how the tiny cave of the prompter’s box would hide her from Daniel’s sight. And his sense of smell.
Daniel hadn’t been there.
‘Daniel Steadman!’ Mr Corcoran had yelled out from the stage. ‘Daniel Steadman!’ And then, looking round at them all, ‘Does anyone know what’s happened to Daniel today?’ There weren’t many Year 11s in the school production, only Daniel and the skinny girl who played Ophelia, and a few minor characters, two soldiers and a gentleman. Ophelia told Mr Corcoran she didn’t share any of Daniel’s classes on a Wednesday, while the soldiers and the gentleman had been off at the football match against St Xavier’s all day.
No one knew what had become of Daniel, except perhaps for Lily, who felt uneasily that he might have stayed away because of her. He might have noticed how she had this stupid crush on him: seen her walking past the senior common room, taken in the way her eyes always flickered towards him – and was keeping out of her way.
Like Simon Leslie kept away from poor jogging Lizzie.
He might even have asked someone about her. Someone like Tracy Gilman. ‘Lily?’ Tracy would have exclaimed incredulously, rolling her boiled blue eyes. ‘Lily
Samson
, do you mean? Lily Samson’s
weird
. Her whole family’s weird – what there is of it – you know her dad ran away? You don’t? Well, he ran away before she was even born. There used to be a loony sort of brother, but now he’s run away as well, and they live in this awful old dump down the street from us; it looks just like the Witch’s Cottage, honest! You should see the grass in their front yard, it’s up to their knees; my mum says she’s going to call the council if they don’t take care of it soon. Then there’s all these gross old people her mum keeps bringing home . . .
funny
old people.’ Lily could just
see
Tracy’s plump finger twirling at her forehead. ‘I reckon Lily Samson’s mum works in a loony bin.’
‘???’
‘You
bet.
’ Lily could almost
hear
Tracy chuckle fatly. Then she’d dig Daniel in the ribs; Tracy was a rib-digging kind of girl. ‘She does all this grotty housework, too,’ she’d go on.
‘????’
‘Yukky old cooking and cleaning and stuff. Haven’t you noticed how she smells of stale dishwater, and onions and boiled cabbage? If Lily Samson gets keen on you, do this!’ Here Tracy would hold her nose. ‘And then, start running!’
No, of course they hadn’t been talking about her. Of course they hadn’t. Daniel wouldn’t ask Tracy Gilman or anyone else about her, because he wasn’t interested enough (except to shudder when he passed her in the quad). And that shudder had probably been about something else entirely – like a Maths test he’d forgotten, or an appointment at the dentist’s first thing tomorrow morning. As for Tracy, she was always talking to boys. ‘Chatting them up’ she called it, and sometimes, ‘Trying out my hand’. Mostly, the boys walked away.
But what if Daniel –
No, stop, Lily told herself sharply. Stop right there. Of course Daniel hadn’t stayed away from the Drama Society because of her! How stupid could she be to even think so! What a long way she’d come since that morning in the kitchen when she’d decided it might be a good idea to fall in love with someone! What a long way, and all of it downhill.
Peter Pianka had taken Daniel’s part that afternoon. He’d made a rotten Prince of Denmark, curly-haired and chubby and cheerful, which wasn’t how you thought of Hamlet at all. Peter hadn’t known the lines, and Lily had to prompt till she was hoarse; he’d kept standing near her trapdoor and her eyes had fixed on his feet. He wore runners without socks, and his ankles were white and chubby, like a little kid’s.
Because of all the prompting the rehearsal had ended late, and it was almost dark by the time Lily reached her front gate. A single glance at the lightless house told her Mum was late as well. She mounted the shaky steps of their porch, swung open the rusty screen door, twisted her key in the lock, walked inside, and then, with a sickening lurch, was jerked straight back again. The strap of her schoolbag had caught in the handle of the screen door, and struggling to free herself, Lily tore two fingernails. They looked so ragged and disgusting she almost sobbed aloud. Right! Slinging her bag down she headed for her room, grabbed her nail scissors from the tray on the dressing table and sat down on the bed. The moment she opened the tiny silver scissors they fell apart. She flung the two halves on the floor. Right! It didn’t matter; they had plenty of other scissors in the house.
Seventeen pairs, in fact. The last time scissors had gone missing (back when Lonnie lived at home and never put anything in its proper place) Lily had made her mother sit down at the kitchen table and count up all the scissors that they should have had.
Two pairs of nail scissors
Mum’s good sewing scissors
Mum’s ordinary sewing scissors
Two pairs of kitchen scissors
The economy pack of cheapos they’d bought
last time scissors had disappeared
A
second
economy pack
It had added up to seventeen; eighteen if you counted the pinking shears. Seventeen pairs of scissors! So where were they, now that Lonnie wasn’t here and everything should be in its proper place? Nowhere, it seemed, neither in the drawers and cabinets and boxes where they should have been, nor the places where they shouldn’t, like underneath the sofa cushions or up on top of the fridge.
Bathroom! Surely there’d be scissors there. Lily hurried down the hallway and flicked on the switch at the bathroom door: there was a brief blare of light, a small ‘pop’ and darkness followed. The bulb had gone. Halfway across the room she trod on something soft and sodden which drew from her a little scream of fright. Seely? No, of course it wasn’t! Shifting her foot, Lily closed her eyes and worked it out: wet towels, that was all.
Only how could there be wet towels? Weren’t wet towels Lonnie’s speciality? Hadn’t she gone on at him about them, over and over again? And if he hadn’t been to blame for them, if it was Mum who had left them lying there, or even Lily herself, then why hadn’t he said? Why hadn’t he? Instead of leaving her feeling guiltily that she’d accused him wrongly? Abruptly, she remembered how he used to do her homework when she’d been in primary school. He never did his own, of course, but he’d done
hers.
Lily sat down on the damp towels and burst into noisy tears.
