Three Summers (24 page)

Ruth hadn't been able to stop herself from asking, ‘Did
you
bash him?' She'd expected an outburst but instead Dancey had greeted the question with a kind of sober thoughtfulness. They'd been washing the dinner dishes and she'd put the cup she'd been wiping carefully on the bench and stood there quietly in the lighted kitchen, tea towel in her hand, while she sorted out her memories and her feelings, trying to get them right. ‘I couldn't,' she'd said at last. ‘My hands weren't free.'

‘Your hands weren't free? Oh, Dancey, you mean someone had tied you up?'

‘No, no, not like that.
I
was holding them behind my back, tight as anything, so I – so I couldn't do anything.'

‘Ah!' Ruth had almost gasped her relief.

Now she began to lay the table for breakfast: the two yellow bowls and plates, the glasses, knives and spoons, the cereal, the bread for toast, the Vegemite and honey and strawberry jam.

‘It would be all
ash
,' Dancey had said last night in Hayfield Lane.

‘What would be all ash?'

‘All this—' she'd waved both arms in a grand gesture that encompassed the lane with its canopy of great overhanging trees and beyond it, the whole night landscape of valley and mountain bathed in smoky moonlight – ‘all
ash
. Like the end of the world. Whoosh! Everything gone.'

‘Oh Dancey, don't!' Ruth whispered, because hadn't she imagined this herself? Especially on the wild windy nights of this fire season, when helicopters rattled overhead and there was a sound of sirens on the highway. ‘Don't!' The word had come out in a kind of sob.

And then Dancey had slipped her hand into Ruth's. Only for the merest fraction of a second, sliding it out again so quickly that Ruth had wondered whether she'd imagined those warm fingers inside her own.

‘Don't expect affection,' the social worker had warned her. ‘They don't do affection. There's a time when children learn how to love, learn the words, the actions, and Dancey's missed it, I'm afraid.'

‘But surely,' Ruth had protested. ‘Surely, if she's given love—'

Sandy Jimpson had shaken her small head slowly, definitely, from side to side. ‘They just don't know
how
, Ruth. They're damaged. They don't know what love is.'

But in Hayfield Lane last night, there'd been that fleeting touch of Dancey's warm fingers, which had comforted Ruth all the way home.

She opened the fridge to take out the jug of orange juice; breakfast was ready now. Glancing through the window she saw that Dancey had gone from the front yard. She was surprised by the cold drop of her stomach, and then the lift of gladness when she called the girl's name and heard the sound of big feet running round the side and Dancey's untroubled voice calling, ‘Coming, I'm coming!' as if she was an ordinary undamaged child.

four

There was a red mark and the beginning of a bruise on the girl's arm. ‘You've hurt yourself,' observed Ruth from across the table.

‘Bumped into a tree,' said Dancey. ‘You know, mucking round, doing whizzies like some stupid little kid, not looking where I was going.'

‘Ah.'

There was a silence in which Dancey took a slice of toast from the rack and stared at it hard.

Ruth fiddled with a spoon. After a moment she said gently, ‘Where did you get your name, Dancey?'

Dancey dropped her toast onto the plate. She glared at Ruth across the table. ‘Mum gave it to me,' she hissed. ‘And I hate it, I told you.
Helen
: hate it, hate it, hate it! It's pissweak, just like
her
. She said it was
her
mum's name, but if she had a mum, I never saw her.'

‘You didn't?'

‘Nah, something happened to her before I was born.'

Something happened to her. She'd have been the same age as me, Ruth thought, thinking of Helen Hogan. She remembered Helen in her red dress down by the creek and thought, yes, it was easy to imagine something happening to her. ‘She came to grief,' sighed Ruth, and Dancey stared at her and echoed, ‘Came to grief,' making the phrase sound as if grief was a special country into which Helen Hogan might have wandered. The idea that Helen was this child's grandmother was most likely a complete fantasy; all the same Ruth decided that next time she went into town she'd check if there was a death recorded for her. And she'd check if Helen Hogan had become Helen Trelawny, and if she'd had a daughter called Tammy, father unknown.

‘Anyway,' said Dancey, ‘I don't reckon I had a gran.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘I reckon my mum just grew out of the ground, like a toadstool or something,' began Dancey, and then stopped short, as if she'd only just remembered how her mum was dead and buried, back down beneath the ground. She rubbed at the red mark on her arm, rubbed and rubbed at it.

‘Your real name's what I meant,' said Ruth gently. ‘Dancey.' She remembered Tam Finn telling her about his peacock, that first time in Starlight Lane. ‘His name's Dancer,' he'd said. She leaned towards the girl. ‘Where did “Dancey” come from?'

More than half a century ago at Barinjii Infants, Ruth had a teacher called Mrs Lupin. When Mrs Lupin wanted silence in the classroom, she'd pinch her thumb and forefinger together and draw a wavy line in the air, in and out and in and out, as if she was sewing a seam. ‘Let's
sew
our lips together,' she'd tell the class. ‘
Sew
our lips up tight.' And she'd demonstrate with her own lips, drawing them into a mean, straight line.

Dancey did this now, setting her lips together so tightly it seemed no words could ever force their way through. She picked up a knife and began to spread butter on her toast, so ferociously that the bread shattered into pieces on her plate. ‘It's
my
name,' she said at last.

‘Yes, I know.'

Dancey attacked the toast again.

‘Here, leave that.' Ruth whisked the plate of crumbs away and handed Dancey a fresh one, with a new piece of toast. ‘I just wondered where you got it from, that's all. It's an unusual sort of name. There's a character in a book—'

‘It's
mine
,' said Dancey again. ‘Not from any old book.' She stared at Ruth with narrowed eyes. ‘Why do you want to know?'

‘Well, it suits you so,' said Ruth, smiling. And she meant it: the name suited the girl's heart-shaped face and blue-black hair, the flying moods, and the thin taut body which was so swift and light. ‘It's like – your essence,' she said.

‘What's essence?' said Dancey, forgetting herself for a moment and asking another person straight out the thing she needed to know.

‘The heart of Dancey,' Ruth replied. ‘Exactly
you
.'

It was the way Ruth had spoken the word ‘you'. It must have been, Dancey thought afterwards, the way her voice sort of lingered on it with a kind of tenderness, as if ‘you' meant someone who was special to her. Important, even. Whatever the reason, or even if there was no reason, only a sudden fierce longing she couldn't control – without for one second meaning to do it, Dancey told.

It was a precious secret, as precious as the garden and the peacock and the dark-haired man, and she'd never shared it with a single soul, and now she went and told.

‘One time when Mum was really out of it,' she began, ‘when I was ten, before we went to America, they put me in this place called Roseland.'

‘They put me in this place called Roseland.' The matter-of-fact way the girl spoke these words sent a little wave of cold right down Ruth's spine; Dancey might have been describing a toy grown sick of, put away in a box.

‘And there was this little kid in there,' Dancey went on, ‘in the hospital part. He was called Frankie and he was only four.'

‘Four,' echoed Ruth.

‘Yeah – but if you hadn't known he was four, if you hadn't read it on the chart at the end of his cot, you might have thought he was a baby. He had this big head, but the rest of him was really small and spindly, and he couldn't do anything,' – Dancey shook her head suddenly, very fast, as if she was trying to shake something awful away – ‘he couldn't sit up, or stand by himself, or walk, or talk, only lie in his cot and turn his head a bit to stare out the window. And he made these sounds, sort of like words, but not quite, you know?'

Ruth nodded.

‘So there was a big tree outside the window,' Dancey went on, ‘and it had a little mirror tied to one of its branches, one of those little mirrors they have for birds, and on bright days it would catch the sun, see? And then all these little ripples of light would come through the window and run across the ceiling over Frankie's cot, and they'd move like they were dancing and Frankie would watch them and move his mouth a bit and you could see he was trying to smile. It wasn't a proper smile, like other people's, but he meant it to be.' Dancey leaned her elbows on the table, cupped her chin in one hand, and gazed earnestly at Ruth. ‘They said he couldn't talk, that he'd never be able to, but you know what? One day when we were watching those reflections dancing on the ceiling, he suddenly smiled at me and sort of slid his eyes to the reflections and he said, “Dancey, dancey!” He meant the reflections were dancing. Honest he did!'

She leaned forward, grey eyes fixed eagerly on Ruth's face. ‘He did, didn't he?'

‘Of course he did.'

‘And that's where I got my name,' said Dancey. ‘From Frankie. Frankie gave it to me.'

Ruth swallowed. Beneath her pity and sorrow for the little boy's story there was a small pang of disappointment. She'd been hoping Dancey might say she'd got her name from a story her mother had told her: about how when her gran, Helen, was young she'd been in love with this boy in the country who had a peacock called Dancer . . .

‘So did you tell them about Frankie?' she asked. ‘The people at Roseland? Did you tell them how he'd said a real word? That he knew the reflections were dancing? That he could understand things?'

‘Wouldn't have done any good if I had,' said Dancey in that same dull matter-of-fact voice. ‘They never believed you in that place. And it was too late, anyway.'

‘Too late? How do you mean?'

‘Well, next day Frankie was gone, see.'

‘Gone?'

Dancey didn't seem to hear. Her face was faraway with grief.

‘You mean, he died?' said Ruth softly, and Dancey came back and said, ‘Dunno. He might have. You never knew, when kids like him were gone: whether they'd died or just been taken away to some other place. No one ever said, and if you asked they just told you it was none of your business.'

‘You must have been sad, though.'

Dancey shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘No use blubbering,' she said. ‘Things happen, that's all.'

But she had been sad. Back at Roseland she'd been a baby. Not in years perhaps, because she was already ten, but inside, where it mattered, she'd still been soft and weak like a very little kid. She hadn't worked out yet that it didn't pay to care, that the only thing caring did was to get you all upset, and sometimes into trouble, too. She'd bawled for days when Frankie had gone. ‘Dancey, Dancey, Dancey,' she'd repeated to herself, standing beside the empty cot, watching the sun patterns dancing on the ceiling.

It occurred to her now, though she didn't tell Ruth, that the feeling she'd had for Frankie might actually have been love: that little catch of the heart she'd felt walking into his room and seeing his face turn towards her – that was love, surely. That was proper love, that was the real true thing. And Frankie had loved
her
– there'd been that look on his face when he'd seen her at the door, that shining tender expression like the people had in Bansi's photograph. His lightsome look, she'd called it, because it was as if his whole tiny body, every single bone and cell and pore of it, had suddenly filled up with light.

When she lost Frankie – that was the first time the peacock had come, and the dark-haired man beside him, singing his beautiful song, which she'd known was meant for her. She'd seen the garden before, seen it often on the edge of sleep and knew it was real, and that it was
her
place, but she'd never seen the peacock before, spreading his tail to show her his colours, the jewelled greens and purples and blues, never heard the dark-haired man whistling the pure true notes of his song. They'd come to comfort her because Frankie was gone.

Suddenly, right there at Ruth's kitchen table, without the slightest warning, tears sprang into Dancey's eyes. She fought them back; she hadn't cried since Roseland, she couldn't start crying now, when she was big, when she was thirteen, not in front of another person. She jumped to her feet, scraping the chair back over the wooden floor.

Ruth stretched out her hand. ‘Dancey!' she said. ‘Dancey dear!'

Dancey flew into a rage. ‘Don't call me
dear
!'

Ruth's hand went to her mouth. ‘I'm sorry, I—'

‘Leave me alone!'

Dancey rushed past her, but halfway across the room she stopped dead and Ruth watched as the girl drew herself together: she saw the brave tilt of Dancey's head and the way she held her narrow shoulders, straight and defiant, as if she was saying with her body, the only thing she had, ‘I don't care!' Just as Tam Finn had done that last time in Starlight Lane, walking away from her out into the night. Exactly like him.

As the girl walked out of the kitchen and disappeared into the hall, Ruth was almost certain that Dancey Trelawny was Tam Finn's child.

five

‘We're goin' into town,' Megan Stoyles' voice boomed from the telephone. ‘Ya wanna come?'

‘Into the city?' asked Dancey.

There was a pause, then Big Meg spoke again. ‘Nah. Just into Woodie.'