The Convent (18 page)

Cecilia was sitting on the passenger side, with her whole left arm hanging out the window, thinking about the boy she'd danced with most of the night and kissed briefly under the stars before she'd got in the car to go home with her brother.

The boy had slicked-back hair and green eyes. He'd been wearing tight black pants, desert boots and a short-sleeved checked shirt. He'd been home all summer helping his father with sheep. Muscles rippled down his arms in small hard waves, and he knew how to dance. It was a fifty/fifty dance, which meant half rock-and-roll and half old-fashioned numbers for the oldies.

They had danced well together, and talked easily. He was three years older than she was, already at university studying engineering. Cecilia was intending to go to university herself if she was accepted. When the dance was over he'd walked her to the car, and while they were waiting for Dom he'd put his arm around her shoulders, which felt awkward until, quite naturally, they moved closer and began to kiss.

Cecilia remembered the rush of warmth she felt in her belly when his arms first pressed her to him, the strong hard hands moving up and down her back and holding her about the waist. Her hands had felt so soft and small inside his large rough ones and that was lovely, but confusing, too. Because although it was exciting and part of her wanted to go on kissing him, at the same time she felt an odd reluctance.
This is not enough for me. It's not interesting enough. If
I go for this, then nothing interesting will ever happen to me again.

‘So what gives, sis?' Dom suddenly asked.

‘About what?'

‘What you thinking about?'

‘This and that.' She grinned at him.

‘You like that bloke you were dancing with?'

‘Yeah. He's all right.'

‘You see yourself married some day?'

‘No,' she said without thinking.

‘Girls always say that,' he mocked, ‘and it's the one thing they want more than anything.'

‘Not me,' she said.

There had always been something recklessly honest about her brother that brought out the same in her. He turned the car from the main road onto the dirt track that led up to the farm, almost scraping the big rivergum that had stood in the same spot for at least two hundred years.

‘Dom, I should be driving.'

‘Relax!' He tapped on the wheel. ‘So come on, why not? Why don't you want to get married?' The cabin reeked of alcohol, but his voice was steady enough.

She brought her arm in from the window and looked at him. ‘I don't know, really. I just don't.' She wanted to tell him that she couldn't imagine herself in love. That when she listened to her friends talking about it and saw them with their boyfriends something in her recoiled. She liked the boys well enough, but she hated the way the girls were when they were with them. The way they simpered and giggled to win attention. Then, when she saw their older sisters, girls that she'd actually looked up to only a few years before, with babies in prams, their spark and prettiness submerged in domesticity, she'd think,
Not me. Never.
But how did you talk about that kind of thing with your brother?

‘What about you?' she asked to divert him. ‘Do
you
want to get married?'

‘Yeah,' he grinned, ‘of course. But … it's different for blokes.'

‘How so?'

He shrugged. ‘A woman sort of … gives up everything.'

Cecilia said nothing, but she was stunned. A wave of pure love washed through her. Trust Dom to put his finger on feelings that she didn't even understand herself. She looked over at his profile in the dark. With the long face, straight nose and high forehead he was like a Roman senator.

He'd been whistling along with the radio, one hand on the wheel and the other on the outside mirror. But he turned the music off suddenly and looked at her.

‘I mean, look at Mum,' he said quietly.

‘Yeah.' Cecilia turned away.
Look at Mum.

There were only a few photos of their mother as a girl, but it was hard to match that bright young thing with the dark wavy hair and slim build to the worried woman whose fair skin had weathered so badly in the harsh sun and whose legs were plaited over with thick, painful varicose veins. With nine children and a difficult husband, she was at everyone's beck and call night and day, and no one ever even said thank you. Not properly. Thinking about her mother always made Cecilia guilty and angry in a way she didn't understand.

‘Mum is the best mother in the world,' Dom cut in to her thoughts. ‘But she's done it hard.'

‘I know,' Cecilia said quietly. She loved her mother, but from the age of about twelve Cecila had stubbornly refused to be close to her, knowing that was what her mother wanted more than anything. Cecilia had coldly and calculatedly turned her back. On some unconscious level she knew that if she allowed herself to stay close to her mother, she would be dragged down into that compliant domestic cesspit of never-ending meals and cleaning and looking after other people's wants before her own. Her mother's acceptance of her lot had become totally
repugnant
to her.

But her mother wasn't just a drudge, and Cecilia knew that too. She was warm and spontaneous in a way that Cecilia was not. Cecilia envied her mother's capacity for joy. The way Ellen would burst into song for no reason other than that she felt like it. Right in the middle of making piles of sandwiches for school lunches or taking scraps outside for the chooks she would break into a Latin hymn from her schooldays, or a sad song about missing loved ones, home and family.

Cecilia and her brothers would go quiet. Even their father would sometimes stop to listen, shake his head and smile, because she had a wonderful voice, strong and rich and full of passion.

Dominic had once shouted at their father that it was totally outrageous that there was no piano at home for her, but Kev Madden had shrugged off the comment. He had enough to pay for without buying pianos. Nor was he about to take advice from his ne'er-do-well eldest son. Besides, Ellen never complained.

‘Are you looking forward to being married?' Cecilia asked her brother.

‘Oh yeah,' Dom laughed, and turned the music up high and began to thump the steering wheel. ‘If I find the right girl.'

‘You will.'

‘So if you don't want a husband,' he said, ‘then what?'

‘Not sure.'

‘Teaching?'

‘No.'

‘Nursing?'

‘God no!' Cecilia shuddered. ‘I just want …' She held her arms out wide. ‘I want to understand things.' She laughed, because it sounded so lame.

‘You've always been deep,' Dom said. ‘Even when you were really little.'

Sister Jane Francis, who taught Cecilia Literature and Religious Instruction, was the only person she knew with a truly inquiring mind. Cecilia loved watching and listening as the nun pulled apart poems and plays, bits of scripture. Getting the class to discover the hidden truth lying dormant under words was her gift.

‘So, university?'

‘Maybe,' Cecilia sighed. University would be great, but in a way it was just more school. Eventually you had to decide what to do with your life.

‘Come on!' Dom grinned.

‘I don't know.'

‘Politics? You want to be Prime Minister?'

‘No!' They both laughed.

‘What about being an actress? You were good in that play last year.'

‘No.'

‘So you don't want to be famous?' He was teasing now. ‘Come on, don't all girls want to be Liz Taylor?'

‘No.' Cecilia shook her head, thinking of the way the girls at school pored over pictures of actresses and models and fashion and secretly longed to be discovered and whisked off to Hollywood. With her fair hair and slim build, some of the girls suggested to her that she could be
the next Grace Kelly
, and they meant it. The fact that it didn't attract her in the least puzzled them.

‘You're good-looking, sis. Play your cards right, you could marry a really rich bloke.'

‘I'm not interested in that.'

‘Well, I give up,' he said finally. ‘You'll work it out.'

‘Or I won't,' Cecilia sighed.

The three-mile trip on the dirt track ended when Dom tried to turn the vehicle into the drive leading up to the house and fell short of a clean turn. There was a horrible sound of metal on cement. He'd scraped the side of the car along one of the pylons flanking the cattle pit. Dom groaned loudly and flung the door open, leaving the engine running. Cecilia got out too and they stood staring at the damage in the light from the full moon. Dom crossed his arms, leaned up against the car and closed his eyes.

‘Shit! He'll kill me.'

‘Yep.' Cecilia grimaced. ‘You should have let me drive.'

‘You don't have a licence.'

‘But I'm not drunk.'

‘Ah well, better get going. Face the music in the morning.'

‘Yep.'

But neither of them moved. They stood alongside the car, staring up at the brilliant soft night alight with stars around them. Her brother pulled a packet of cigarettes from the top pocket of his shirt. Cecilia hesitated before taking one, more to keep him company than anything else. The moon cast shivering silver light on the leaves of the nearby tree. The only sounds were the low male voice on the car radio and in the distance a howling dog.

Cecilia recognised the Buddy Holly classic and smiled.

She thought of the boy she'd kissed and felt sad suddenly, cut off and different to everyone she knew.

‘Do you believe in God, sis?'

‘Of course I do,' she laughed.

‘Do you believe that Christ died for us?'

Cecilia turned to look at him. Where was this leading? They'd never talked about such things. He shrugged when he saw her looking at him, pushed his hands deep into his pockets and stared up at the sky.

‘Well … do you?'

‘Of course' she said quietly. It was like asking if she believed she had skin encasing her flesh, or if night followed day, or if there was blood running through her veins. Evidence of God was all about her, in the trees around the house, the paddocks and hills and valleys, and in the change of seasons and in the music from the radio. She risked another drag, blew out and tried not to let the slightly nauseous feeling take over from the enjoyment of having the burning thing between her fingers.

‘So where does it come from?'

‘Where does what come from?'

‘Faith.'

The question stopped her in her tracks, because she knew where
her
faith had come from. And it wasn't from anything anyone had
said.
All those boring sermons she'd sat through in church, along with the rubbish those small-minded, narky nuns in primary school had dished up, had left her cold. They had nothing to do with this living
thing
that burned like a hot coal at the core of her being. No.

It was her mother who had first made God real to her. Her poor, downtrodden mother had been the one to show her the beauty and mystery of life in the simplest of things. When Cecilia was very little, her mother would call her outside to witness the overnight opening of a bud, or the beauty of the sunset, or the way everything grew and changed after rain. They'd walk hand in hand down to the creek, the mother with her only daughter. She told Cecilia softly, as if it was the most wonderful secret in the world, that the natural world all about them was God's creation, and that it was important to give thanks for it every day.

On those walks her mother had also taught her lovely long rambling prayers and told her dramatic stories about the angels and saints. Some of it Cecilia didn't understand, and yet they became part of her life along with God and his Son who died on the cross.

She looked at her brother, who'd been silent for some time.

‘What about you?' she ventured.

‘I don't know.' He sounded genuinely baffled. ‘I've been told all this stuff by people who know more than me, but if I really seriously believed what they told me, then surely it would have to change my life, wouldn't it?'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Well, if I really believed Christ died for
me,
then I'd have to take it seriously, wouldn't I?'

‘You don't?'

‘I mean, I'd have to try and
repay
the debt. I'd be a missionary or a priest or something, wouldn't I?' He looked at her. ‘If it's true, then shouldn't I give up everything – career, footy, marriage, kids, the lot?'

‘And?' she said curiously, because she knew he was trying to understand something important.

‘And … throw in my lot to go
follow Him
.'

The simple logic of what he was saying appealed to her. ‘And have you thought of doing that?'

‘Shit no!' He laughed.

‘You've never considered it?'

‘You must be kidding!' He roused himself and got back into the car. ‘When you're ready sis,' he called out the window as he turned up the radio.

Cecilia said nothing. She walked away towards the dam and stood watching the way the moonlight streaked across the water.

An image came to her of Sister Jane walking among the house teams on sports day, her face lively with good humour, laughing, talking and patting girls on the back and congratulating them, and yet on some important level she wasn't even there. You only had to talk to her for five minutes to know she had a deep, interesting
inner
life that didn't depend on other people at all. She wasn't trying to prove anything to anyone. She was above it all … in a different world altogether.

I want that.

The realisation came to Cecilia as fast and furiously as a clap of thunder. Why should she bother with all the tedious and accepted intermediaries, the boyfriends and social life, university and career, husband and family? Why not leave all that behind and
go for broke
like Sister Jane?
Why not? Excitement suffused her brain and rushed down into her chest and shoulders.