Rachael's Gift (2 page)

Mostly I remembered her dressed in a hospital gown. She’d been in and out since her diagnosis three years ago. We’d decided to have her cremated and her ashes were currently sitting in a black urn on our kitchen bench. I didn’t know what else to do with them. It had been a short and simple ceremony, only last week, but felt like years already. A few of her acquaintances had come. We put on a light buffet lunch at the house: Rachael served buck’s fizz in a jug and Wolfe drank whisky, kind words were exchanged, people brought cards; Rachael had put a picture of my mother next to the urn. It had been taken when she was nineteen, before she left Paris; with dewy skin, baby-blue eyes and rose-coloured lips – the photo had been hand-painted – her gaze lifted towards an invisible sky, smiling, as if she were a Hollywood star.

Items flew out of the closet into the air, creating a pile on the floor. A photo album crashed against the end of the bed, splitting open and spilling half its contents. ‘Rach, be careful,’ I said, but she didn’t hear me.

‘Hmmm, interesting,’ Rachael said, backing out and holding up a green and pink sequined black dress with tulle skirting, still in its dry-cleaning plastic. ‘This is quite something,’ she said.

She took off her t-shirt, pulled the dress over her head, and shimmied it down over her curves, the seams stretching.

‘What do you think?’ She wolf-whistled and ran her hands down the side of her body, twisting back and forth in front of the mirror.

Rachael didn’t look like my mother – my mother was blonde and thin while Rachael was dark and athletic, like Wolfe – but there was a pang in my chest, seeing her in my mother’s dress, the one she had worn to our wedding dinner. I remembered Wolfe’s father’s friend Terry twirling her around the dance floor while his wife watched with a glum look on her face; Terry couldn’t understand why my mother had stayed single.
A real looker like her
, he’d said.

‘Rach, it’s too small for you.’

Rachael perched in front of the dressing table, finding my mother’s old lavender toiletry bag, full of crusting Estée Lauder make-up, and lavishly applied purple eye shadow and pink rouge. Mémé had used the same brush across her cheekbones. I sighed. She could have been a little more sensitive. But then it was only make-up. Old, caking make-up that would have been thrown out anyway. Rachael saw me watching from the mirror and her expression changed. A match of mischief lit in her eyes. She took the gold lid off the lipstick, wound the end of it right out to expose a long pink stick, pouted her lips and circled the nub round and round, applying layer after layer, until it smudged at the corners of her mouth and reduced the stick to a messy stub. She continued staring at me, pleased with herself, and dropped the lipstick on the dresser; she opened her mouth and smugly wiped the corners with her finger. ‘Well, hello dahling . . .’

I shook my head. What would she think of next? I ignored her. All teenagers went through phases and I had to allow for her artistic temperament. You didn’t become a brilliant artist by being well-behaved! We all had our crosses to bear, whatever they were. Anyway all those afternoons at the hospital, you couldn’t fake that, and today I could see there was something bothering her. I could see it in her face when she didn’t know I was looking – a tiny trace of worry that didn’t seem to go away. A mother noticed these things.

‘What’s going on in here?’ Wolfe stuck his head around the door. Mr Brown appeared beside him, his tail wagging.

Had he seen this display? He looked impassive. Neutral. He never read into things, not like me. Wolfe liked things to be simple. Surfing, food, sleep and sex. And love, of course. Always love, like some big leftover hippy standing on the side of the road with his broken guitar and unwashed hair, thumbing rides up and down the coast, preaching love as the answer. Except he had been born in the late sixties and had missed the entire movement. Usually, he left me to do the worrying.

‘Your daughter’s wasting time,’ I said.

The match went out. Rachael’s face crinkled into an innocent smile. She blew her father a kiss. ‘What do you think, Wolfe?’ I flinched hearing her call her father by his first name.

Wolfe looked at me, saw my disapproval and decided to assist the bad cop. ‘Better do what your mother says.’

Rachael continued to admire herself in the mirror.

‘Right, that’s it.’ Wolfe launched himself at her and Rachael squealed as he bundled her up in his arms and threw her over his shoulder. Once again that delicate line between adult and child was crossed. I could not get used to that shift.

‘Wolfe, stop!’ she squealed. ‘You stink!’ She thumped her hand against his bum. Mr Brown jumped on the bed, barking madly, his dirty paw prints all over the sheets.

‘Hey, guys!’ I said, seeing the seams of the dress pull. He swung her up and about and then the photo album caught under his feet. ‘For goodness’ sake!’ I yelled, falling to the floor to rescue the mangled pages.

Their faces were flushed, their breathing erratic. Wolfe bent over, sliding Rachael to the ground, a mess of tulle, hair and sequins; the two of them looked at me sheepishly.

‘That’s right, you two, partners in crime.’

‘Better clean that up.’ Wolfe ruffled Rachael’s hair.

She pulled away from him, fixing her hair, annoyance crossing her face.

‘Watch out, or you’ll see the back of my hand.’ Wolfe winked at me and squeezed my fingers.

‘Never did you any good,’ I said, knowing his own father had been a brute, but he just stood there grinning.

Rachael remained on the floor, amid piles of clothes, the tulle fanning out like a big tutu. ‘Yeah, good one, Dad,’ she said. Wolfe had never laid a hand on her.

‘You just watch it, missy.’ A shadow crossed Wolfe’s face and I felt a desire to touch him, but he turned and headed back to the sunroom, Mr Brown plodding along behind. I tried to fix the pages back into the album.

‘Camille, who’s that with Mémé?’ Rachael asked, holding up a single black-and-white photo she had picked up.

Two young women gazed into the distance. ‘That’s her younger sister Francine.’

‘Very glam.’

‘Aren’t they.’

Rachael snatched the album from me. It was an old one with the sticky pages that turned orange after time and eventually decayed the photos. She turned the pages: there was my mother with my stepfather on a yacht and me as a young baby and then us as a family doing ordinary things families did, like going on holiday and mucking around in the backyard and my first day at school.

‘Is that my great-grandfather? And what about these people?’

She held out a more recent photo of a group of people. It was a photograph I had sent Mémé from Paris of her parents Anton and Marie, her sister Francine and Francine’s husband Rupert, and Lucien, one of the resident artists. They stood in the garden of their home in the French countryside in front of a mural that Lucien had just painted. I’d taken the photo.

I explained who they were and Rachael watched me coolly. She’d heard snippets about them over the years and vaguely knew who they were, but Mémé and I had never gone into detail. ‘Are they still alive?’

‘As far as I know.’

‘I can’t wait to go there,’ she said. ‘Have you heard from the school?’

‘Not yet.’ I had sent an application on behalf of Rachael last month to the Beaux-Arts, a renowned art school in Paris. In any case, we had been promising to take her there for years, but with Mémé ill and one thing after the other we had never made it.

She squinted at me as if weighing up whether to pursue it, then shrugged. ‘Maybe I’ll just go anyway.’

I thought back to my own experience. ‘You have her look about you,’ my aunt Francine had declared in accented English, upon my arrival as a naive nineteen-year-old. Here was my mother, unlined and assured, had she remained in Paris. She had the kind of voice that made you sit up straight, her consonants crispy and her vowels full-bodied.

I closed the album, sliding it into the plastic bag.

‘Wait a sec,’ Rachael said, wrenching the bag out of my hands. We tussled for a moment and just as I gave in, I heard a loud rip. The seam on Mémé’s dress had split, exposing a large triangle of Rachael’s skin and showering us in a rainbow of sequins.

Rachael looked at me, childlike. ‘Oops!’ She raised her hand over her mouth and shrugged. ‘It’s not like she’ll be needing it anytime soon.’

She stood up, reached for her t-shirt and peeled the dress off. It sank to her ankles, scrunching at her feet, a thistle of black tulle; she stepped out of it and left it lying on the floor.

I waited for Rachael to say something or to turn and pick it up, but she slunk off to the bathroom. Oh, Rach, I thought, and knelt down to collect each coloured sequin from the floor. I found an envelope for the sequins, folded the dress, and together with the album closed them up inside a large cardboard box marked
Keep
.

The fiery morning sun glinted off dashboards, car bonnets and side mirrors, as Camille and I drove to Rachael’s school. We’d had an urgent call to come see the principal. What on earth about, we were yet to guess. I had an uncomfortable feeling: what now? The air was parched, the grass was browning. Bushfires continued to rage and it was only October. Even the footpaths were too bright to look at. Camille was engrossed in her BlackBerry, her fingers madly clicking; she was classy in her tailored blue suit and black sunnies, her blonde hair brushing her shoulders, her legs extra-long in those heels. I was afraid to touch her in case she crinkled or stained.

I’d gone surfing as I usually did at the arse crack of every other dawn, but it wasn’t the same without Rach. We always surfed, Rach and me. She was a real natural – the type who could surf before they could walk. Just about, anyway. I remember her rocking around in the back of the pick-up, no seat belt, slamming the corners, sandwiched in between my boards. She’d be laughing with Mr Brown in her arms, his tail wagging, their mouths open, drinking wild ocean air as I drove cliff-side to the beach. But since Clippo it was just me and Mr B, and even as I sat behind the wheel, or slammed down on my board, or toked on a fat one, I just couldn’t shake this bad feeling.

I parked the Ford on a hill, beside mansion houses with stellar views, and placed a brick behind the back wheel; Camille rolled her eyes to the sky and wished aloud that I’d trade the truck in for something a little more modern. I winked and she gave me a greasy, marching off ahead. I grinned after her. I couldn’t help myself. After all these years, she still bit easier than a snake.

We walked down a winding asphalt path in the direction of the principal’s office. Girls in short blue skirts and yellow polo shirts played volleyball on the oval; they looked about Rach’s age, and I peered over the hedge to see if I could spot her, but Cam glared at me as if I were being a perv, and we moved on.

Carol, the receptionist, tapped at her keyboard – her coral-painted nails like claws. Finally, she led us into an empty office and told us to wait.

It was only ten and I could already feel my shirt sticking to my back and a suspicious intermittent whiff of B.O. I stuck my finger under the top button of my collar. It felt like prison, but Cam had insisted.
What kind of parents will they think we are?
she’d shrieked. As if a bloody tie would help! I loosened it anyway.

Cam sat with her back straight, staring ahead, stress pinching the corners of her mouth. She was cut off. Unreadable. Miles away. Her BlackBerry vibrated; she retrieved it from her bag.

The office was laid out sparsely in shades of grey and beige, with no hint of the personal; a desk diary, a laptop, some pens – all with the Rutherford emblem: a large black bird (a crow?) perched on a helmet and the words
Nec sorte nec fato
: Neither by chance nor by fate. There was a massive window with one hell of a harbour view. Blue skies, loads of sparkle and a bunch of old salties already setting sail. I’d have given my front teeth to be out there.

Portraits of all the old ducks who’d been principal before this one lined the wall. All grey-haired and poker-faced. And then Ms Sheehan bustled in. She was squeezed into her dress like a stuffed sausage, with a mop of grey hair, a square unpainted face and a mouth like a cat’s bum. A long gold pendant dangled on a chain between a set of hefty knockers. No, there was definitely no chance, nor fate around this joint.

It was Cam who’d wanted Rach to come here, where the girls wore straw hats and yellow ribbons in their hair and sang hymns at assembly and churned out nice young ladies. Where the land was more expensive than Parliament House, and older too, with a lawn rolling all the way to the harbour’s edge and a big white Federation house that once belonged to a founding father. I said we didn’t have the money, but Cam said we’d find it.

Cam rose and shook the woman’s hand. We mumbled hellos and how-are-yous, nodding and smiling and being generally charming. Ms Sheehan had an iron grip and a tough gaze and I found I put my shoulders back and stood up straight and suddenly I was sixteen again and about to be rapped across the backside for skiving school for the hundredth time.

Ms Sheehan seated herself behind her desk, and launched straight into business. ‘I’m sorry to call you in here so urgently, but we’ve got a situation.’

Cam and I blinked at each other.

Goddamn it, I knew things had been too quiet for too long. When it felt too good to be true, the old man used to say, it usually meant it was.

‘Rachael is currently sitting in the boardroom. I wanted to talk to you first.’ Ms Sheehan cleared her throat. ‘This morning Rachael made a sexual misconduct complaint against one of our teachers.’

Something clutched in my guts. I leant forward, struggling to focus. ‘Sexual misconduct?’

Cam’s eyes were wide open, unblinking.

‘Of course, I will explain.’ Sheehan raised her palm. ‘I summoned Rachael to my office to talk about Rebecca Tomlinson’s missing painting. Both artworks are in the running for the Whiteley Prize, as you know. But last Thursday Rebecca’s went missing. I received a report that someone had seen Rachael leaving the hall where both paintings were displayed, so naturally I called her in to ask questions. I’m sure you’re aware that since the two had a falling-out last year there’ve been a number of incidents between them.’ I remembered Becca – she had the sort of look that made your eyelids bleed. They’d been besties when Rach had arrived at the school the year before, but were now sworn enemies – over what? I was scared to guess.