Southern Ruby (3 page)

After everyone had left, I caught my reflection in a mirror and realised what an alien I looked like in the house. The week before Nan died, I'd had my hair coloured liquorice black and a blunt fringe cut into it. My eyeliner and foundation had disappeared with my tears at the service. The bluish tinge of the new colour was unnatural against my skin and made my vacant eyes stand out strangely. While Nan was alive, our home had been a haven, but now the plush beige carpet, striped wallpaper and pinch-pleat curtains felt dismal and smothering. It was no longer a home, just a dated Art Deco house. Many times, Tamara had offered me a room in her rental in Newtown; and the inner city, with its eclectic cafés and vegan food, was more suited to my personality than conservative Roseville, where my sequined tops and polka-dot skirts stood out among the linen pants and chambray button-up shirts. But I could never have left Nan. Now she had left me.

I sat down at the upright Beale piano and played a few bars of Scarlatti's Sonata in F Minor, which had been one of my pieces for my final music examination. Busy with my university studies and trying to establish myself in a career, I hadn't touched the instrument since I'd left school, although Nan still made sure it was tuned annually.

My grandfather, who died before I was born, had bought the piano for my mother to learn on when she was a child. According to Nan, my mother couldn't be persuaded to touch it, preferring tap dance and softball to studying music. It seemed ironic then that the top of the piano held so many photographs of her, like some sort of shrine. I gazed at the pictures that showed her as a baby in her bassinette, on her first day at the same school I'd gone to, and on the day she'd left for her road trip across the United States, where she'd met my father. That last photograph had always intrigued me. My mother had small, even features and the colouring of an English rose, but her peroxided-blonde hair stuck out in all directions. I couldn't help thinking that I'd
inherited my rebellious streak from her, and that's what Nan had always been afraid of.

I transitioned from Scarlatti to ‘Summertime' and remembered the first time I'd heard Ella Fitzgerald sing it — on a record at Tony's place. The music had moved something deep inside me: I fell in love with each phrase and every soft croon. Until then I had been addicted to Michael Jackson and Madonna.

But when Nan found me picking out the piece on the piano later she was furious. ‘The only real musicians are classical musicians,' she scolded. ‘Don't waste your time on any other rubbish.'

I knew even then that her comment had nothing to do with the quality of jazz musicians and everything to do with my father who had been a native of New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. If not for a horrific twist of fate, I might have grown up in that Southern American city instead of Sydney. I might have been Amandine Lalande instead of Amanda Darby. I might have known my parents.

‘Y
our grandmother left everything to you,' advised Tony, who Nan had appointed as executor of her will. ‘But you'd better hold on to the house for twelve months in case any long-lost relatives appear out of the woodwork and make a claim.'

Oh, God
, I thought.
Somebody appearing, no matter how unlikely — a love child, a long-lost cousin, a prodigal sister — would be welcome. Anyone who could help to relieve this feeling of being cast adrift in the world.

It took me six months to decide to rent out the house and go live with Tamara so I could figure out what to do next. It then took me a further four months to clear out the furniture and personal effects so tenants could move into it. I put sentimental items, like the piano, into storage but with every piece of furniture I sold or gave away it was as if I was destroying the life I'd had with Nan. The last room that I tackled was hers. I was tempted to leave it as it was and seal it up like a time capsule. Even when I worked up the courage to step inside, it was as if
I was invading her privacy and shouldn't be there without her permission.

I opened her dressing-table drawers and the sight of her neatly folded underwear and the scented soaps between them was too much to bear. I sat down on the bed.
I might have to ask Tamara to help me
, I thought. But then I dismissed the idea. It would have made Nan uncomfortable to have someone other than me going through the intimate parts of her life. I steeled myself and began to empty the dresser drawers, sorting what needed to be given away or thrown out from what I wanted to keep.

Nan and I had very different tastes in jewellery. She thought only yellow gold was worthwhile, and I loved silver, white gold and platinum. She had been buried with her wedding ring, but she hadn't left any instructions regarding her dress watches, pearls and charm bracelets. I decided I would give them to Janet. She could keep anything she wanted and give the rest to the church. I was placing the jewellery in a box when I came across a heart-shaped Lucite pendant with a pink rose accented by green leaves in its centre. It wasn't an expensive piece but it was pretty. I remembered Nan telling me that my grandfather had given it to her when they were courting. It made me smile to think of Nan as a young woman in love, and I picked up the pendant and put it around my neck.

‘I'll wear this in memory of you, Nan,' I said out loud.

The pendant seemed to give me a burst of strength, as if Nan was there telling me there was a job to do and to get on with it. She'd been born into a rugged farm life, where people accepted fate and were grateful to have food on the table and clothes on their backs and didn't endlessly analyse it when life dealt them a blow. They pressed on. So I pressed on too: emptying the bedside-table drawers and wiping away tears at the sight of her Bible and reading glasses; and deadening myself to the pain when I took her landscape paintings from the wall. I was
packing away her life and the room gradually began to lose its personality — her personality.

The wardrobe was another matter. I knew that somewhere in there were letters from my mother along with photographs from New Orleans. I knew about them because when I was fifteen, Nan and I had a fight about them.

‘For God's sake, Amanda! That man ruined our lives!' That's what Nan would say if I asked her about my father. That's what she always said.

I lay in bed and listened to her moving about in the kitchen, clinking plates and glasses as she stacked the dishwasher then locked the back door as she got ready to go to work. The sound of her pumps clomping down the hall sent me rolling onto my stomach and feigning sleep. She strode into the bedroom and put a list of chores on my bedside table, as she'd done each morning since last Friday when I'd been suspended from school. Nan had always been my greatest ally, my guide and my confidante, and I could talk to her about anything — except my parents, of course. Now she was mad at me.

‘It's time to get up,' she chided. ‘You can't lie in bed all day.'

‘Okay,' I replied, rubbing my eyes. ‘I'll get up in a minute.'

She kissed me on the cheek, giving me a whiff of Youth Dew. ‘I don't know what possessed you and Tamara to do what you did, but I know you're good girls at heart.'

‘Thanks,' I said, watching her hands as she patted down the sheets. I was fascinated by Nan's hands. They were thin and bony and translucently pale with freckles on the knuckles — not anything like my hands, which were long with tapering fingers that gave me an advantage on the keyboard but weren't very feminine. I had muscular hands that looked like I could crush an apple between my palms.

‘Your grandad left me an insurance policy and this house, Amanda. I don't need to keep working,' Nan said, looking at me with her piercing green eyes. ‘I'm doing it so you can get the best education possible. So don't pull any more stunts like that, all right?'

Ouch! Did I need to feel more guilty than I already did? The fees at the ladies college were hefty and Nan was putting aside money for my university studies as well. Dyeing my hair candy pink for the school sports carnival put me only two strikes away from getting expelled.

‘I wouldn't mind going to the local school, Nan,' I said, sensing I was pushing my luck with the topic. ‘They have a good music department. The master entered the school's rock band into the Kool Skools project and now they're getting assistance to record and package their own first album.'

I'd sung in Nan's church and even had some paid gigs at weddings and birthday parties but I longed to perform jazz like Ella Fitzgerald. What I wouldn't give to be making an album! But the only performing available at my school was in the corny school musical — where girls had to play the male parts as well — or in the choir.

Nan grimaced and hoisted her handbag onto her shoulder. ‘Singing for the pleasure of your friends is one thing but the life of a musician is nothing but drugs, debauchery, divorce and . . . death. A woman needs a profession these days and to get that you need a good education.' She kissed me on the forehead and headed out into the hall. Before she opened the front door she called back to me: ‘Your art teacher faxed your assignment description. I've left it on the kitchen counter. I think Miss Ellis is rather fond of you. She said you'd make a first-class architect.'

I heard her 1984 Volvo warming up in the drive and went to the window to watch her leave. I'd normally be going with her, to be dropped off at school before she continued on to work. I glanced at my reflection in my dresser mirror and ran my hand
through my thick hair, which had been dyed back to its natural dark brown by Nan's hairdresser.

‘Life's a bitch,' I said. There was a stack of
Cosmopolitan
magazines on my desk. I picked up the top one and flicked through it. The girls were so pretty with their voluptuous Victoria's Secret bodies and sculpted features. I hadn't told Nan that I'd dyed my hair because I was sick of being bullied about my appearance by the other girls.

‘Amanda came first in the freestyle today because she's got a nose like a dolphin!'

‘Hey, beanpole, what's the weather like up there?'

The hair colour was reverse psychology:
Here, I'll give you something to really talk about . . .

I put the magazine down and turned my CD player on full volume. Sarah Vaughan singing ‘Misty' filled the room.

A copy of Anne Rice's
Interview with the Vampire
lay in a hiding spot under my bed and I retrieved it to read it for the fifth time. I'd underlined the parts that described New Orleans. People found it hard to imagine that I might miss what I'd never had, but I did. I often fantasised about what it would have been like to be brought up by young parents and live in the lush, tropical atmosphere of New Orleans. I felt more affinity with Rice's descriptions of that languid and dark arts city than I did with Roseville and its neat houses and English-style hedged gardens. Sometimes I dreamed of a white house with a turret and a balcony that overlooked a garden scented with gardenias and verdant with palms and banana trees, but I didn't know if the picture was a memory or something that had come out of my imagination.

As a child, I'd wished that I could make Mother's and Father's Day gifts at school for my actual parents, like the other kids, as well as for Nan. My mother was visible around our house in the photographs on the piano and her sports trophies in the spare room, but my father was a taboo subject with Nan. ‘A devil who drove drunk with his wife and young child in the
car and ruined our lives!' It was obvious that my brunette looks and tall stature hadn't come from Nan or my mother with their petite figures and fair Anglo-Saxon features, which meant I must have inherited them from my father. He was half of me, and until someone told me at least one good thing about him, I'd feel despicable too.

Why couldn't I know something as simple as what he looked like or what he had done for a living? For the past year I'd been imagining that perhaps my father might have been an aristocratic vampire, like Louis de Pointe du Lac, and that was the real reason Nan wouldn't talk about him.

I spent the rest of the morning cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming the floors. In the afternoon, I lay on my bed with my stack of
Cosmopolitans
and read an article on rhinoplasty. Nan's friend Janet said with my height and striking features I should be a model, but the girls at school called me ‘a freak'. My nose was horrible in every way: long, dorsal-humped, with a boxy tip. Corinne Doulton tormented me at least once a week by sketching it and then passing around her artwork for the other girls' amusement.

‘It's the Leaning Tower of Pisa.'

‘No, it's the Eiffel Tower after a lightning strike.'

‘Ha haa!'

As I read the magazine article, it occurred to me that plastic surgery might change my life. I closed my eyes and pictured returning to school after the holidays with a pert ski-slope of a nose, no longer an ugly duckling but a beautiful swan. The younger girls would carry my books, and the boys from other schools would fall at my feet.

I was lost in this vision when something occurred to me. What if I'd inherited this nose from my father along with my colouring and long limbs? If that was the case, how could I ever change it? It would be like destroying the last vestige of him. But how could I find out?

I hovered at the door to Nan's chintz and rosewood bedroom with indoctrination and curiosity warring against each other inside me. I was a serial ‘dresser up' as a child and after one incident, where I'd used up an entire tube of Nan's pricey Christian Dior lipstick to paint my face, I was banned from her room unless she was present. Even now I was fifteen she kept that rule. But I'd seen her pack away documents in archive boxes at the bottom of her wardrobe. Maybe there would be something about my father in one of those? My heart pounded as I approached the wardrobe although I tried to justify my actions: if Nan hadn't been so reticent about my father, this sneakiness would not be required.

But an hour of painstaking searching through the boxes, so as not to put anything out of order, yielded only copies of deeds to the house, my grandfather's death certificate — giving the cause of death as cancer — and my childhood vaccination records. But then as I opened the last box, I found a smaller shoebox inside.

When I took the lid off and saw a picture of my smiling mother holding my infant self, I had to catch my breath. We were wearing matching harlequin costumes — I guessed for the New Orleans Mardi Gras. Under the photograph was a stack of letters in airmail envelopes with a New Orleans return address. From the curvy feminine handwriting, I assumed they must be from my mother. I pressed them to my heart. There wasn't time to read them now, but I knew what I would be doing in the next school holidays.

There was a yellow envelope at the bottom of the box. I picked it up, surprised at its weightiness, and pulled out a stack of photographs. I shuffled through them and gasped at what I saw. There were dozens of pictures of my mother with me — on a vintage streetcar, looking at ducks in a pond, sitting under an oak tree. But the other person in the frame — my father — had been either cut out or scribbled over with black pen. In a couple
of photographs a smooth tanned hand had escaped censorship, but nothing else. Nan had obliterated my father as deliberately from the photographs as she had from my life. But there was no mistaking it: my father's hand was exactly like mine.

‘What are you doing?'

I turned around to see Nan standing in the doorway. Mortification paralysed me as I realised I'd lost track of time. Her eyes fell to the photographs. Her jaw tightened and her face turned dark. She didn't look like Nan at all. She looked like a tiger about to bite.

She snatched the photographs from me and threw them in the box. ‘You're always asking me in what ways you're like your mother. Well, I can clearly see the similarity now. You are as stubborn as she was!'