Owls Do Cry (3 page)

Daphne gathered the books and put them in her lap, stroking them because they were valuable.

—These are treasures, she said. Better than silver paper, this lovely writing.

—They’re not, said Toby. They’re just sums, grown-up sums.

—But they’re made like treasures. Why do they throw them away? And when you’re grown up you work at treasure, so it must be.

—No. It’s out of banks, said Toby. Where they wear striped suits and get red in the face when it’s hot.

And he tore some pages out of the books, though Daphne tried to hold on to them, and he made paper aeroplanes and wet on one to see if it changed to invisible.

And then they talked about the fairy tales that nobody had wanted and had put in the ashes to be burned. There was a little man, truly, the size of a thumb. He used to drive a horse by sitting in the horse’s ear and whispering Whoa or Gee-up. And there was a king who lived in a mountain of glass and could see his face in seventy different mirrors in one look. And a table that rose up through the earth the way the organ, they say, in the big theatres, rises through the floor and music plays before the people are settled and
God Save the Queen
begins.

And to make the table vanish the little girl in the story had to say only,

—Bleat goat bleat
Depart table neat.

—But, talking of tables, I’m hungry, Daphne said to Toby. What’ve we got?

They had nothing. Dinner time must be close, they thought, so they took one page of the blue writing of sums, in case it was really treasure for a glass case, and they walked home, passing the fruit shop on the way.

Daphne went into the shop that seemed always wet and being washed and the cabbages turning yellow and the fruit specked; and before the shopkeeper came (she was a Chinese woman with different funerals and weddings and churches from Toby and Daphne) Daphne sneaked an apple under her arm and crept out, so that she and Toby had half an apple each, dividing it fairly because it really belonged to Daphne, Toby having the green sour part with thick skin, and Daphne the rosy-cheeked side; though to emphasize the fairness of their venture and the importance of not telling, she agreed to let him walk on the sunny side of the street and be warm while she continued in the shade.

And in the afternoon they both went to school. The lady doctor had been. She had collected people and ticked off their names on white cards, with red ink, and given Norris Stevens a note to take home to his mother, about his tonsils. He was to have his tonsils out, he said, and everyone felt envious.

—Why were you not at school this morning, Miss Drout said to Daphne.

—I was sick, Daphne said.

And

—It came, was Toby’s answer to Andy Reid. And Toby was told to lie on the sick bed and they gave him a drink of milk at playtime, through a straw.

Their town, called Waimaru, was small as the world and halfway between the South Pole and the equator, that is, forty-five degrees exactly. There was a stone monument just north of the town, to mark the spot, in gold lettering.

—Traveller, the writing said, Stop here. You are now standing halfway between the South Pole and the equator.

What did it feel like to be standing at forty-five degrees?

It felt no different.

Waimaru was a respectable town with the population increasing so quickly that the Mayor kept being forced to call special meetings of the borough council, which were reported in the local newspaper, the rag, it was called. To decide if the reserves where grew native trees and shrubs should be offered for sale as housing sections, and the shrubs, and also the children who played near them after
school, be rooted out and planted somewhere else; but the Mayor’s suggestion was defeated and letters to the paper followed, threats of resignation, a special meeting of the afraid beautifying society who had given many shrubs; a defiant meeting of the Build Your Own Home Club; after which, calm fell like a sweet mantle, and the shrubs and children (including the Withers family) remained happily planted on the hills surrounding the town.

And the young Councillors shook their heads, saying,

—This is not progress. The northern towns go ahead, becoming bigger and bigger, while we stagnate here, in the south.

They were afraid.

—We shall be left behind, they said.

Left behind from going where?

Among the letters to the paper were some by Mrs Withers who called herself Tui, the native bird, to show she wanted the native bush left on the hills. And sometimes she called herself, if she were writing about bush, Miro, the little red berry. She showed her children the letters, and though they could not understand them, they knew their mother must be Someone, so they could say it in school, with the others who said,

—My father owns a car.

—My uncle can chop down trees faster than anyone.

—My mother writes letters to the paper.

—Yes, Mrs Withers would say, as she licked the envelope for closing,

—I’ll blow them up.

And Bob, her husband, would make a rude remark to her.

—Yes, I’ll blow them up. I’ll put my foot down. We women can’t be trodden on.

Sometimes, instead of signing herself Tui, she became Mother of Four; and instead of Miro, the little red berry, she changed to Disgusted, or, merely and universally, A Mother.

—I see Mother of Three has answered me, she would say. I’ll settle her.

Oh, as if gentle Amy Withers could settle anyone!

And then her husband, going to a lodge meeting, would call from the bedroom,

—Where’s my best tartan tie? I haven’t all the time in the world.

And Amy Withers would pick over shirts and socks till she was hit by a cascade of tartan tie.

—Here’s your tie, Bob.

She was afraid of her husband. She said Sh-sh to the children when Bob came home from work or parliament was on the air.

—Honourable gentlemen, Bob would say.

Honourable gentlemen.

He was Labour.

But, about the town. You should read a booklet that you may buy for five shillings and sixpence, reduced at sale time to five shillings, increased at Christmas to six shillings. This booklet will tell you the important things about the town and show you photographs – the town clock saying ten to three (the correct position of the hands for driving, says the local traffic inspector); the begonia house at the Gardens, and a perplexed-looking little man who must be the curator, holding a begonia plant in flower; the
roses in the rose arch and the ferns in the fernery; also a photograph of the Freezing Works, the outside with its own garden and fancy flower-beds, and the inside with rows of pegged pigs with their tiny trotters thrust out stiff; of the Woollen Mills, the chocolate factory, the butter factory, the flour mill – all meaning prosperity and wealth and a fat filled land; and lastly a photograph of the foreshore with its long sweep of furious and hungry water, the roll-down sea the children call it, where you cannot bathe without fear of the undertow, and you bathe carefully, as you live, between the flags; and beware of the tentacles of sea-weed and the rush of pebbles being sucked back and back into the sea’s mouth each time it draws breath. Certainly, inside the breakwater is a little shovel-scoop of bay, Friendly Bay, where you paddle and sail shells and eat ice cream bought from Peg Winter, the mountainous woman who moves like faith from town to town, leaving behind her a trail of sweet and ice cream shops, almost as if they dropped from her pocket, like crumbs or seeds springing into red and white painted shape, with cream-coloured tables and chairs inside, and other high swivel-chairs as the dizzying accompaniment to a caramel or strawberry milk shake.

And glass cases packed with chocolate, dark or milk, fruity or plain.

Everything in a glass case is valuable.

Sings Daphne from the dead room
.

Sometimes in this world I have thought the night will never finish and the real city come no nearer and I think I will stand for a breath under the huge blue-gum trees that I have in my mind. My eyes are used to the dark and as I see the tall trees with their bark half-stripped and the whitish flesh of trunk revealed underneath, I think of my father saying to me or Toby or Francie or Chicks
,

—
I’ll flay the skin off your hide, I will
.

And I know that a wild night wind has spoken those same words to the gum trees. I’ll flay the skin off your hide
.

And there is the skin hanging in strips. I smell the blue-grey gum-nuts, five ounces of them, flavoured and nobbly under my feet, and I take off my shoes and the gum-nuts dig in my feet and I walk to the foreshore of Waimaru where the sea will creep into the sleep of people and flow round and
round in their head, eating out caverns where it echoes and surges till the people become eroded with the green moth and all cry inside themselves, Help, Help
.

And then even the sun travels from dark to dark and I am not the sun
.

Yes, even the sun
.

And why will it rain so much after the night?

Rain
.

Up north in the winter-time or midsummer the rain drips in sheets of silver paper, my mother said, who lived there a long time ago, where there are wasps in swarms and a blossom week and palm trees, imported; where the daffodils are earlier than here, with wider and frillier trumpets, and the flowers more bright, painted, growing in the superlatives of memory; and the sea, why the sea more blue and warm and churned in the summer time with sharks whose presence is reported in the newspapers
,

Seen on the green lawn
.

And the footpath in the northern city?

It melts under your feet
.

And the rain falls in silver paper
.

And a kingfisher, colour-fast, will sit on a telegraph wire and be stroked and sing with the silver dazzle
.

Oh Francie, Francie was Joan of Arc in the play, wearing a helmet and breastplate of silver cardboard. She was burned, was burned at the stake
.

It was an afternoon in a hall filled with people, girls in their white spun silk, each holding shilling bags of coconut ice, pink and white, from the home-made sweet stall; mothers who smelled like a closed room of talcum powder and stored fur; with their parcels from the handwork sale, tablerunners and tea-showers in lazy-daisy and chain and shadow stitch.

It was the last day of the term and Francie’s last day at school though she was only twelve, thirteen after Christmas. She could count up to thirty in French. She could make puff pastry, dabbing the butter carefully before each fold. She could cook sago, lemon or pink with cochineal, that swelled in cooking from dirty little grains, same, same, dusty and bagged in paper, to lemon or pink pearls. She knew that a drop of iodine on a slice of banana will blacken the fruit, and prove starch; that water is H
₂
O; that a man called Shakespeare, in a wood near Athens, contrived a moonlit dream.

But in all her knowing, she had not learned of the time of living, the unseen always, when people are like the marbles in the fun alley at the show; and a gaudy circumstance will squeeze payment from their cringing and poverty-stricken fate, to give him the privilege of rolling them into the bright or dark box, till they drop into one of the little painted holes, their niche, it is called, and there roll their lives round and round in a frustrating circle.

And Francie was taken, on the afternoon of the play, like one of the marbles, though still in her silver helmet and breastplate and waiting to be burned; and rolled to a new place beyond Frère Jacques and participles and science and bunsen burners and Shakespeare, there I couch when owls do cry,

when owls do cry when owls do cry,

To a new place of bright or dark, of home again, and Mum and Dad and Toby and Chicks; an all-day Mum and Dad, as if she were small again, not quite five, with no school, no school ever, and her world, like her tooth, under her pillow with a promise of sixpence and no school ever any more. No black stockings to buy and get on tick with panama hat and blouse and black shoes, with the salesman spearing the account sheets in a terrible, endless ritual, licking the end of the pencil that is chained by a worn gold chain to the counter, carefully writing the prices, totting the account in larger than ordinary figures so as to see and make quite sure, for the Withers are not going to pay yet. It is all on appro. With the deliberation of power then, the salesman plunges the sheet of paper through the metal spear that stands rooted in a small
square of wood; then he moves the wood carefully aside, with the paper speared and torn but spouting no visible blood, and the total unharmed and large, and Francie (or Daphne or Toby or Chicks) staring sideways, afraid, at the committed debt. The Withers are under sentence. It is likely they will be put in prison. And the salesman smooths the sheet of account slips with the power of judgement and fate in the pressure of his hand.

—Will it be all right, the children ask, till the end of the month?

—Certainly, till the end of the month.

But rooted in his mind is the shining awl, the spear to pierce sheaves of accounts and secure them till their day of judgement, to the Last Trump, when the dead spring up like tall boards out of their grave.

But how shall there be room for the dead? They shall be packed tight and thin like malt biscuits or like the pink ones with icing in between that the Withers could never afford; except for Aunty Nettie passing through on the train.

So for Francie now, no black stockings to find and darn or uniform to sponge or panama hat to be cleaned with whiting and water and the time saying, Will you walk a little faster? And the marks not coming off, and Francie crying because Miss Legget inspected the hats and pointed to the ones not clean and floppy and said,

—A disgrace. Now quick march, girls, toes meet the floor first, quick march, but not Francie Withers.

Francie Withers is dirty. Francie Withers is poor. The Withers haven’t a week-end bach nor do they live on the South Hill nor have they got a vacuum cleaner nor do they
learn dancing or the piano nor have birthday parties nor their photos taken at the Dainty Studio to be put in the window on a Friday.