The Beloved (30 page)

After tea we went out to explore. Mama went down one side of the ledge, I went down the other. There were no roads, houses or shops apart from a few wooden shacks and a small trade store. I walked down the long grassy steps and watched the sun dip behind a row of peaks, leaving shadows of green, grey and violet in their wake. With darkness, the temperature dropped and bright, clear stars peeped over the mountains. Grass bloomed in the pale light of a rising moon. Behind me, a generator puttered fitfully. Lights appeared. I walked slowly back to the house. Supper was simple: soup, bread, tinned fruit. We crawled into bed early, gulping the clear air, listening to thrumming mountain life: the
thock-thock
of frogs,
zzzhreeeezzzzzz
of cicadas and
skreeee-haaah!
of a wild bird.

Time in Tapini was nothing more than changing light. The valleys filled with sunshine and shadow, stars studded an indigo sky. I soaked in the air, sipped water from icy pools, lay on my back in deep grass as the sky changed colour and clouds swirled around mountain peaks. I watched mist form on the ledge and swallow me, then peel away like a magician drawing scarves from his hat. I filled my book with sketches – quiet dark people, ferns, trees, ravines and cliffs. Grass that was blue at the base, yellow at the tip. Rocks, damp and glistening in ochre and red, caramel chasms, purple-green pools. The moon on the horizon, full and egg-yolk yellow, changed to silver as it mounted in the sky. My mother took photos and tried to make notes. The loss of two fingers hadn't affected her ability to take pictures but she struggled to load film and it was painful to watch her trying to write. I offered to help but she refused.

‘No thanks, I need the practice. I'll get used to it.'

She was still slow getting around, especially when laden with gear, but she didn't want help with that either. Every morning I watched her face the mirror, dab on a little lipstick, smooth her brows, do everything she'd always done. She'd rarely used makeup before, her skin so smooth she'd never needed it. Now she applied it to her scars with as little emotion as she applied deodorant to her underarms. I watched her, feeling small.

One afternoon I put on my swimsuit and followed a stream to where it widened into a deep pool surrounded by boulders. I edged into the water – clear and ice-cold – and lay between two rocks, letting the stream rush over me. Above, the jungle soared like a cave and on the far bank a vine dangled that someone had knotted. I swam across, scrambled up the bank and began to swing on the vine, working up a lovely, slow rhythm. The feel and sound of air whooshing over my body made me feel limp and peaceful. After a while it seemed that the whooshing sound was coming not from outside of me but from inside, as part of my breath. All around, the jungle pulsed with life, its deep recesses spilling surges of colour into the air. Halos shimmered around every leaf, flower and rock; light and hue so clear it made ordinary light – even auras – seem pale. I looked down at my body; it too pulsed with light and my breath came and went on fountains of colour. My thoughts streamed like rainbows into a world where nothing was separate from anything else, where my heart was an open door to a universe in which all was exactly as it should be. Laughter rose and danced away from my skin. I looked at my hands gripping the vine and knew there was more to me than a girl on a swing, more to me than one poor, struggling foot. I was the river, the jungle, the ocean, everything in the world, yet no-one but myself; limitless, bootless, free. If I let go the vine my body would drop into the water but the real me would stay swinging.

The vine scraped on the branch over my head. I let go and plummeted into the pool.

On the bank, my back against a warm rock, I looked at my foot. Arched, twisted and scrawny. A chook's foot.
My
chook foot. I opened my sketchbook and began to draw. As I worked I heard something, a twig snap, a rustle in the bush. I turned and waited. A gust of wind caught my hair and lifted it off my neck. Nothing. Just wind. I bent to my picture and drew what I saw with no exaggeration and nothing left out. I drew the taut sinews, the steep arch, the drooping toes. I drew the nails – claw-like, the bent, bony ankle, the whole sorry lot. I shaded and cross-hatched until the foot was done. My foot. My foot, but who was
I
– some disfigured goblin or Lindsay Lightfoot? Was I going to own this drawing? Could I sign Lindsay Lightfoot at the bottom?

No.

Mama was right. No matter what I called myself I couldn't escape who I was. I was Roberta. I picked up the pencil, added two little bicycle wheels either side of the heel of the foot and beneath it:
Roberta
Lightfoot
.

It was growing dark when I got back. When I went into our room I found Mama standing at the table, absorbed in work. She looked up with an odd expression, and then I saw my paints. The tubes were scattered about, caps off, brushes sticky. My heart began to hammer. Surely she couldn't be wrecking my things
again
? I went closer and my jaw dropped. She wasn't wrecking my stuff, she was using it!

She stood back. ‘Can't see the attraction myself.'

I looked at her picture. Paint laid on like chewing gum, no water. ‘You . . .' My voice came out croaky. ‘You need water . . . What's it supposed to be?'

‘You can't tell?' She rubbed her forehead. ‘Things are worse than I thought.'

‘It's um, a . . . ?'

‘Disaster struck,' she said. ‘I dropped my film in the river when I was trying to reload.' She held up her hand. One thumb, two fingers, two puckered stumps, vermilion and somehow shameful. ‘Clumsy,' she said, as if she'd left them behind. ‘So I thought I'd try to paint the scene but this isn't what I saw through the viewfinder.'

Not so bad for two fingers, though. ‘Don't worry, Mama,' I said. ‘Most of my pictures don't look like what you'd see through the viewfinder either.'

She gave a little smile. ‘Hmm.'

I picked up a caked brush. ‘Have you finished with these or do you want me to show you how to use them properly?'

‘I think not.' She watched, arms crossed, as I ran water into a jar and screwed the caps on the paints. ‘You know, Lindsay, I said before that you use art to keep yourself apart from people but that wasn't right. You see things people don't want you to see, and when you paint them, it scares them and they avoid you. Remember the picture you did of Konrad Breuer, way back? It was so accurate – even before we knew how bad he was. It scared me. You saw too much and showed too much, but only of other people, never of yourself; until . . .' She paused. ‘That picture you did of . . . It hurt so much I couldn't bear it. So full of . . . love.'

‘Oh, Mama, if I'd painted you, there would have been so much more love.'

She gazed out at the darkening sky. ‘Can't be helped. What's done is done.'

I opened my sketchbook. ‘Look what I did today.'

She turned and took the picture. ‘It's . . . wonderful, Lindsay. Brave, honest. You really
can
draw.'

‘Roberta.'

‘What?'

‘Roberta. It's my name.'

She met my eyes. ‘Don't do it for me.'

‘I'm not. I'm doing it for me.'

‘Why, all of a sudden?'

‘You were right; I can call myself Boofhead if I want to, but I'm still Roberta.'

Mama smirked. ‘If the cap fits . . .'

‘I'm not calling myself Boofhead.'

‘So, what do you want me to call you?'

‘Roberta, Bertie, unless . . . Did you call him Bertie, Mama; your . . . ex?'

She moved to the bed and lowered herself slowly. ‘Please don't call him my ex.' She dragged the heel of her hand across her eyes.

‘Why?'

She waved me to the chair. ‘Sit, will you? No, I didn't call him Bertie and Robert wasn't my “ex”. He was my husband.'

In the silence that followed I imagined Mama was letting her words sink in. But they didn't. They just hung.

She stared at the floor. ‘At the children's home, before Papa adopted me, there was an eight-year-old boy who had skin exactly the same colour as mine and hair just as black. Henry Robert was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob's mother was an Indian, a Blackfoot.'

‘A
Black
foot?'

Mama nodded. ‘Blackfoot, truly. Even at that age, because we looked so much alike, it gave me a sense of belonging. I was a Blackfoot. Except of course nobody knew what I was. I certainly wasn't Bob's long-lost sister because his parents had died only the year before. But Bob and I – we went together like apple pie and cheese. He looked out for me and I loved him utterly. When I left the home he gave me the forget-me-not locket that had belonged to his mother; he said it would help me remember him. I didn't need help remembering him, which was just as well because Mama confiscated the locket until I was eight. She said I was too young for something so fragile but I think she wanted me to forget Bob. I didn't. He was my only link to a past I never knew.'

Mama went to the window. Night wrapped the world in gossamer darkness but the stars were so bright they touched her face with light. Her dear, ravaged face.

‘I did well at school and Papa was proud as could be when I decided to become a doctor. It wasn't common, in those days, for a girl to do medicine.

‘I'd just finished my second year and was heading home one afternoon through a dump of snow when I felt someone watching me. I turned, but I couldn't see anybody. I waited for a while but nothing happened so I went on walking. Then I heard the soft thud of footsteps behind me and I knew without turning they were Bob's. He came level and took my hand and we went on walking as if we'd planned it all beforehand. Like we'd never been apart. I hadn't seen him since I was . . . at most, five years old, but it seemed like we'd always been together, always known this would happen. We'd even chosen the same career, although he was an intern by then. We fitted together like two halves of a zipper and a year later we were married. There aren't words to express how happy I was.' Mama looked at me. ‘Like when you and Timmy were born. When Bob finished his internship he joined the army medical corps and was sent to Italy.' She examined her hand and frowned. ‘All so fast. All so very fast. Dead, in less than a week.'

My throat thickened. My mind swarmed with questions. I grabbed one. ‘No children?'

Mama rubbed her eyes. ‘Yes, I was pregnant. But Bob never knew. I didn't find out until later. It gave me hope. Then I miscarried. It was the last straw. I stopped doing medicine. I had no heart for it any more; I had no heart for anything. Unfortunately. I've come to regret it since. Maybe I'd have found myself in medicine . . . who knows? But I wanted out, so I used what training I had and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, hoping I'd get killed too.'

‘Really?'

Mama shrugged. ‘I don't know.'

‘And then you met Dad?'

‘Yes, I met Ed, and he was such a nice guy – and I know it sounds trivial but his name, Lightfoot, was like an omen of luck. Maybe I belonged with him now. He wanted to get married and have children and I thought by getting away from the past and making my own family in a new country I'd find some sense of myself that I couldn't lose. I thought willpower could make a marriage work but it can't. You find yourself through love, but anything you love is at risk of being lost. I cared deeply for your dad; I still do, but I never loved him enough and we ran out of energy to keep going.'

I went to stand beside her at the window.

‘All I had left of Bob was his photo, his ring and his name and when I married your father I lost even his name. So when you were born I gave you
Roberta
, thinking – misguidedly – I could endow you with a sense of identity that I never had. But you didn't need it. Right from the start you knew who you were and what you wanted.' She smiled a little. ‘To the exclusion of all common sense, still. You
need
a career.'

Mama. Abandoned. Left behind, at three years old, in a railway station. Left again, if you counted Bob. Three times, if you counted Dad.

‘Why didn't you tell me and Tim this before?'

‘Think, Lin– Bertie. What child wants to hear her mother say she loves a man who's not her father?'

I took her hand, her stumpy hand, in mine. ‘I understand things better now, Mama. But why Canada? Do you love your memories of Bob more than us?'

‘No! Of course not.'

‘Then why? What's there for you now?'

‘Bill, my parents . . . family. Such as it is.'

‘We're your family, Mama. Us; here, now. Tim and me. Such as
we
are.'

Chapter Twenty-four

The DC-3 sat on the runway, nose up, as if sniffing the air for flight conditions. Conditions were fine and in a few minutes my mother would walk cross the tarmac and be swallowed up by the plane.

For the umpteenth time I pleaded with her to stay. For the umpteenth time she refused. ‘I need to be on my own. I'll miss you to distraction but I have to discover who I am without Bob's shadow, without your father and even without you and Tim.' She touched the locket around my neck. ‘Look after that.'

‘It's yours, Mama. Take it for your new dreams.'

‘I'm through storing dreams, Bertie. I'm going to live them. More photography. More than just . . . pictures. Details, important details.' She trailed a finger across my temple. ‘Your eyes, for example; how luminous they are, how like the colour of forget-me-nots.'

‘How can you explore my eyes if I'm not there?'

‘You'll be here.' She touched her chest. ‘Always. You'll send me paintings and sketches.' She raised an eyebrow. ‘Such as they are.'

The loudspeaker bellowed her flight.

‘I love you, Mama.'

‘I know.' She put her arms around me and pulled me close. I clung to her. She pulled back and gave me a little shove. ‘Go, my beloved daughter. Go do what you love.'

I sat on my bed, Mama's letter in my hand. The handwriting was wobbly but legible and the paper had gone thin and furry from being read and reread so many times. She'd found a place to live not far from Tempe, at Rose Bay; a tiny flat with a water view. She'd bought a new camera, a Minolta, and had enrolled in a photography course, learning how to develop her own pictures in a darkroom. She'd already done some freelance work and had been promised more. I folded the letter and put it away, stood up and went to my wardrobe. Mama mightn't know who she was yet, but I knew who I was. And where I was going.

It was going to be a hot day. Not even six o'clock and the room was warm. Dawn spilled through the louvres, leaving stripes on my packed trunk. I opened my locket and looked at the new pictures of Mama and of Dad.

There was a tap on my door.

‘CP, you up? Come and have a look at the dawn.'

We went out onto the verandah together, Dad still in his pyjamas, and watched the sun, a fat golden blob on the horizon, pull away from the earth. Dad put his hand on my shoulder.

‘You sure this is what you want?'

I nodded. ‘Yes. Stefi will be there and I can stay with her on weekends. Anyway, I don't plan on boarding forever. Hopefully Mama will get sick of living alone.'

‘I expect she will, sooner or later,' said Dad. ‘Otherwise she'd have gone to Canada and not Sydney.' He looked into my eyes. ‘I'll miss you, Roberta. I'll be hanging out for those holidays.'

By nine thirty, the familiar smells of marine oil, fish and copra were strong. The flowers that ringed the harbour were just like those that had greeted us on our arrival eight years before: purple and orange bougainvillea, red, pink and white hibiscus, yellow trumpet flowers.

Dad inspected my cabin. Two bunks, a wash basin, wardrobe, postage-stamp dressing table. I took out Mama's photo of me, taken in Tapini with the last of her film. It showed me drawing my foot. I sat leaning against a rock, side on to the camera, oblivious to her presence. My sketchpad was propped against my knees and my hair streamed back in the wind. The photo didn't show my foot.

And they say the camera doesn't lie.

‘You going to be all right, CP?'

‘Yep.'

‘Give my best wishes to Stefi and Magda and say a special hello to your mother.' He wrapped me in his arms and I rested my head on his shoulder. His voice rumbled in my ear. ‘Good luck, old thing. Steady as she goes.'

I leaned on the rail, watching him stride down the gangway and arrange himself on the dock like an A: feet apart, hands behind his back. Black shoes, white socks, white shirt. Beside him Helen, in a floaty silk dress, looked like a butterfly beside a magpie. I tossed her a streamer and she blew me a kiss. Tart, trollop, floozy.

Beloved friend.

The gangway was hauled in, the funnel belched and we drifted away from the wharf. The streamer tightened. Broke. I pulled Josie's dark pink frangipani lei from around my neck, slid the blossoms from the string and dropped them, one by one, over the railing. They bobbed gently among the broken streamers and oily reflections and drifted away, like paint freshly dropped into water.

em tasol