One Whole and Perfect Day (2 page)

Lily quickened her step. She was very close to home now; just three more houses and she’d reach the corner of her own street, Roslyn Avenue.

And always, as she reached this corner, Lily suddenly stopped dead. She closed her eyes and counted to five, slowly, before she turned into her street. She knew it was ridiculous, the kind of thing a very little kid would do (like skipping cracks or crossing the road to avoid a black cat in your path), and yet she couldn’t stop herself. She
had
to do it, because turning that corner she was always seized by a panic that their house would be gone; nothing left of it except a pile of smoking dust and ashes and a thin trickle of smoke rising up above the trees of Roslyn Avenue, escaping into the pale wide sky.

And this was all Pop’s fault. Of course it was. Just as it was his fault that Lonnie had left home last January.

Pop hated their house. He said it was a dump. He said it was unsanitary and falling down, though not falling fast enough for him. ‘I could burn it for you,’ he kept on offering. ‘When you’re out, of course. You’d get a fortune for the land, and with the insurance, you could buy yourself a really decent place. Something –’ and here he’d give them a long sly grin, ‘fit for human habitation . . .’

‘He’d never do it,’ Mum said, but Lily wasn’t quite so sure, because there was something deeply unpredictable about Pop. Hadn’t he threatened Lonnie with an axe? Told him that if he dropped out of one more course or one more job, he’d feel the edge of it?

What kind of grandfather was that? Grandfathers were supposed to be kind and understanding, weren’t they? Sympathetic to their grandchildren’s problems? Lonnie hadn’t even done anything. Nothing out of the ordinary, that was; he’d simply been his same old useless self, and all at once Pop had lost his block completely.

‘One, two, three, four – five!’ counted Lily, and stepped bravely round the corner into Roslyn Avenue, where she saw at once (as she always did, every single afternoon) that the house was still standing. There it was, porch sagging, paint peeling, the windows crowded so thickly with ivy that even at the height of summer there was hardly any light inside.

‘Mummy, I want to go home!’ the small daughter of a charity collector had bellowed a few days ago, when Mum had asked them into the house while she went in search of her purse. ‘This is the Witch’s Cottage!’

It
was
like the Witch’s Cottage, Lily thought fondly, and yet she loved every crack and cranny of it, every leak and stain. Lonnie loved it too.

‘Is that mark on the ceiling of my room still there?’ he’d asked last time he’d rung up. ‘The one shaped like a cauliflower?’

‘’Course it is.’

‘You know, I really miss it. When I’m lying on my bed, thinking . . .’

And that would be most of the time, thought Lily. Though she didn’t say it, because calls from Lonnie were rare.

‘And I look up,’ he continued, ‘and the ceiling’s bare. It seems really funny not to see the old cauliflower . . .’

Yes, their house was a dump, thought Lily, forcing the gate open, closing her ears to the unearthly shriek it made scraping across the concrete – but it was dear and familiar too, even if it wasn’t proper, and a disgrace to their street. It was theirs and it was home.

2
THE SENSIBLE ONE
OF THE FAMILY

Lily was the sensible one of the family. She always had been. She could write her name and count to fifty before she started school, and even tie her own shoelaces, something her Mum said Lonnie hadn’t learned till he was in Grade 3. By age seven she was getting her big brother up for school in the mornings, since he never seemed to hear Mum’s pleadings. These days she cooked dinner every second night, made out the shopping list for Saturday, remembered when the car had to be serviced and bills paid.

Yes, she was the sensible one, but there were times (like this evening, alone in the gloomy old kitchen, swinging the fridge door open to gather the ingredients for spaghetti sauce) when Lily wished she wasn’t. She wished she was like the other girls in Year 10, like Lizzie Banks or Lara Reid or even awful Tracy Gilman. She wished she could, just once,
enjoy
filling in a quiz from
Bestie
without thinking it was bullshit, or talk about clothes without suddenly remembering the funny noise the washing machine had started making and how much it might cost to get it fixed. I’m like someone’s
mother
, thought Lily with disgust, as she took carrots and onions and parsley from the vegetable crisper and began to chop; like someone’s
nan.
The carrots were old and tough, the knife slid, Lily nicked her finger and felt like crying. Another tiny cut – even her hands didn’t look like real girls’ hands, covered as they were with tiny cuts and household scratches.

‘What do you
do
?’ Tracy Gilman had demanded yesterday when the 10B girls, gathered in their special lunchtime place beneath the pepper trees, were comparing the shapes of their fingernails. ‘What on earth do you do to get your hands looking so gross?’

‘Nothing,’ Lily had replied defensively, snatching her hands away. And then, defiantly (because anything was better than saying she did housework), ‘I’ve got a pet piranha.’

Though she did lots of housework, Lily wasn’t all that skilled. The most tender meat grew stringy when she cooked it, her gravy had lumps, cheese sauce curdled . . . she wasn’t a bit like Nan. Lily pictured her grandmother in the kitchen, busy at her clean scrubbed table, so calm and efficient – perhaps all that housework, years and years and years of it, was responsible for poor old Nan’s delusion that she had an imaginary companion. Perhaps one day, not too far down the track, she herself would begin to see another person standing at the kitchen bench beside her, shadowy at first, and then becoming clearer . . . Lily shivered, the knife slipped again, narrowly missing another finger. She chucked the tough old carrot in the bin and started on the onions. Started, and then, quite suddenly, stopped, flinging the knife down on the bench. Why did everything come down to her?

She knew the answer. Because Mum was overworked, and Lonnie had moved out of home. Though even when he’d lived here, her brother hadn’t been much use around the house. He was – well, Lily couldn’t think of words for Lonnie, only pictures, tiny incidents that somehow said it all: Lonnie helping her with the shopping one dark wet day last year, snatching the three litre jug of orange juice from the trolley and holding up another brand. ‘
This
one!’

‘What?’

‘
P and N!
’ He’d pointed to the label.

‘
P and N
. So?’

‘Don’t you get it? Pop and Nan, see?’

He was like a toddler. At the cheese counter he’d taken a fancy to a cheese called
La vache qui rit.

‘But that’s cream cheese, Lon. We don’t use it. We need ordinary stuff, the sort you use in macaroni cheese.’

He’d pulled a face, toddler-style.

She’d picked up a block of supermarket cheddar. ‘This kind, see?’

He’d wagged his head. ‘Yeah, but –’

Lily had dropped the block of cheese into the trolley.

‘Okay, Lil, you know best, but –’

‘But what?’

‘Oh, nothing.’ He’d flicked at the heavy lock of hair that fell across his forehead. It stayed there. He’d flicked again. And again.

‘Oh, leave it!’ hissed Lily.

Outside in the street it was raining. Mum had been home with the flu. Lon had just dropped out of his economics course. The fridge was packing up and the person Lonnie called Dad had forgotten to ring Lily on her birthday. Not that she cared about that
–
he always did it, forgot and then rang three months later, upsetting her all over again. Once he’d even got her name wrong. He’d called her Lolly.
Lolly!
It was strange how someone you didn’t know could make you feel as if you didn’t matter.

A wind from the Antarctic had scoured their faces as they emerged from the supermarket, and on the median strip in the middle of the highway, perched dangerously between two roaring streams of traffic, Lon had grabbed her arm.

‘We needed something laughing,’ he’d said.

‘What?’

‘That’s why I wanted it, the cream cheese. So there’d be something in the house that laughs. Even if it was only the cow on the cheese packet. “
La vache qui rit
.” ’

She couldn’t help noticing how perfect his accent was, how he’d sounded exactly like Mme Bispin at school. So how come he’d failed his oral French exam back in Year 12? Lonnie was a total mystery. Trucks and cars had roared round their tiny traffic island, the rain had pelted down, Lonnie’s face had gone vague and dreamy, as if his soul had been beamed up to some distant corner of the universe and only his shell was left here for Lily and Mum to mind. When a break came in the traffic she had to tweak at his arm.

‘C’mon’ she’d said gently, as if he were some frail and helpless creature she’d taken for a walk. ‘C’mon, Lon, let’s go home.’

What would Lon be having for dinner tonight? wondered Lily, dragging herself back into the present, their gloomy kitchen and the spaghetti sauce. Now he no longer shared their life and was out there in the big wide world on his own. Cheeseburgers from the takeaway? Hot chips? Pot noodles warmed in hot water in the kitchen of the boarding house she and Mum had never seen? If it even had a kitchen . . .

She glanced up at the clock. Almost six: Mum would soon be home. What would it be like to have a dad come home from work and in the door each evening? Lily shook her head, dismissing such a fantasy, took up the knife and began to chop onions again. No matter how hard she scrubbed in the shower, she was sure the smell of them stayed in her skin and hair.

3
MARIGOLD

In her small stuffy office at the daycare centre, Lily’s mother was about to turn off her computer.

‘Leonie!’ she called to her assistant. ‘Leonie!’

Marigold liked to have someone right beside her when she closed down, because you never knew what might happen, did you? Computers weren’t rational, they were random. Like family life, thought Marigold. ‘Leonie?’

There was no reply. Marigold glanced at her watch and saw that it was after six. Leonie would be gone then; she always left on the dot of 5.30.

Marigold leaned in towards the computer, so close her nose almost touched the screen. She pressed the commands lightly, as if she feared electric shock, sucking in her breath, holding it, sharp and painful, deep down in her lungs as she waited to see if things would go smoothly, or if some terrifying message would leap onto the screen. Perhaps that nerve-racking box would appear, the long grey box of small squares where you had to wait, alert and trembling, till every square filled itself in.

Tonight the process went without a hitch:
Logging Off
came up on a sky of perfect blue, the musical chimes rang out, and Marigold was free. She leaned back in her chair and yawned in sheer relief: ‘Ooooh-aaaah!’

It hadn’t been a bad day, she reflected. No one wandering from the premises, no adventurous old person sneaking through the gates and trailing down the highway, imagining it was a Saturday night in l937 and the Roxy dance hall was just around the corner. There’d been no brawls in the recreation rooms, no accusations of theft or slander or adultery – indeed the afternoon had been so quiet that Marigold had found time to ring Lonnie’s boarding house in Toongabbie.

She hadn’t been spying, she told herself. She hadn’t been trying to check up that he was still doing his course, still going to his lectures and tutorials, and not lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon. The idea of Lonnie lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon haunted Marigold, bringing an even more frightening vision of a middle-aged Lonnie, stubble-chinned and grey-haired, still lying there. Or an old, old Lonnie, long after she had gone. Would Lily look after him then? Would she? Marigold didn’t really know. Lily was a good girl – look how she helped around the house! Look how she did the shopping! And yet Lily could be a little hard sometimes; perhaps she’d give up on Lonnie like Pop had done, and what would happen to him then?

So when Lonnie’s landlady had told her he was out, Marigold couldn’t help asking, ‘You mean, he’s at the university?’

‘I believe so,’ replied Mrs Rasmussen in the cool efficient tone that made her sound more like a wardress than a landlady; a stout, stern person with a bunch of keys chained round her waist: the keeper of an Institution.

I believe so. It was a vague enough answer, devoid of any hard information, yet when Marigold heard it her mother’s heart had given a small leap of joy. Perhaps Lonnie would be all right after all, perhaps he was (as Marigold had been telling everyone for years) simply a slow developer, one of those people who matured late; who, in their mid or late twenties, or early thirties, or later on (eventually, anyway) discovered their true selves and dazzled everyone. Feeling oddly hopeful, almost light-hearted, Marigold gathered up her handbag and keys and headed for the door. It was 6.25, and with a little bit of luck she might be home in time to help Lily with the dinner. Not that it mattered if she wasn’t; Lily could cope, Lily could always be relied on, Lily was the sensible one in the family.

As she walked down the hall, Marigold heard voices coming from the recreation room. A male voice, coaxing, even deferential, seemed to be pleading with someone. ‘Mum? Mu-um?’

Marigold glanced through the open door and saw old Mrs Nightingale busy with a game of Patience at the centre table. Her son hovered beside her, a grey-haired, despondent man, who looked as if he might well keep to his bed in the middle of the afternoon. ‘Mum?’ he said again.

‘In a moment, Robbie.’ The old lady’s clear voice held a trace of irritation. ‘I want to finish this game.’

‘But –’

‘No buts, please. You’re spoiling my concentration.’

Another voice, small and mousy like some tiny anxious creature from a Beatrix Potter book, (Mrs Tittlemouse, perhaps, thought Marigold) squeaked abruptly, ‘Hello, Dr Samson.’

Marigold peered round the edge of the door and saw Sarah, Mrs Nightingale’s daughter-in-law, seated in the big blue armchair which old Captain Cuthbert always called, ‘My Chair’. He’d swing a punch at anyone who touched it and Marigold was relieved she’d heard the Captain going home this evening, shouting at his poor daughter as they passed her office, ‘You’re no daughter of mine!’