Trust (9 page)

A little silence. ‘You said it, miss,’ said Angelo. ‘
Page
.’

‘Page?’ She raised her head from the support of her hands, frowning.

‘As in, paper,’ said Bianca, cool and acerbic. ‘We don’t really
do
paper.’ She stood up, raising her right hand, and Susanna noticed that she’d capped each fingertip with the bell of a jacaranda blossom. It looked magical. ‘Pre-digital,’ Bianca said, pointing at Susanna, then, turning, drew a big circle in the air around her classmates. ‘Post-digital.’ She sat down.

‘That’s right,’ said Tom, a photography major, not unkindly. He leaned over and tugged his laptop from his bag, on the floor beside him. Holding it one-handed above his head, he said, ‘See: these are our journals.’

‘And our art galleries, for that matter,’ said Bianca.

‘Like deviantArt,’ said Emily, a pre-Raphaelite swan of a girl. ‘DeviantArt is
huge.
’

‘A bit emo, in my opinion,’ Bianca said, adding, in a conciliatory tone, ‘but there’s plenty who like it.’

‘Susanna, we’re all posting images online, all the time,’ said Noor. ‘If you’re not online, you’re nowhere.’

‘Plus what’s coming up, what’s on. Reviews, opinions,’ said Angelo.

‘In between Flickr and Twitter and the blogosphere, a journal – like, an actual
book
– it’s kind of … history.’

There was a room-wide murmur of agreement. More students were pulling out their laptops, others holding up their mobile phones; not mere mobiles, Susanna presumed, but iPhones and BlackBerries. She couldn’t tell the difference; she hadn’t even got the hang of using predictive text.

‘I’ve looked at Facebook,’ she ventured. ‘I’ve seen photo albums on Facebook.’ She didn’t want to say she wasn’t a member. Were they even called ‘members’?

‘People who are kind of serious about photography don’t use Facebook,’ Tom told her, bringing his laptop to her table at the front of the room. ‘The resolution is too limited, there’s no way for people to see the detail of your work.’

‘Oh.’

Emily joined them with her own laptop open to the deviantArt website, clicking through it rapidly. Thickets of images flashed on the screen, a vast array that was apparently just the ‘
favourite deviations submitted in the last eight hours
’. Susanna ran her eye down the sidebar menu: traditional art, digital art, designs and interfaces, artisan crafts, manga/anime, community projects …

‘I put
heaps
of web addresses in my journal,’ Bianca was saying, and other students called out that they had too. Susanna looked up and Bianca fixed her with an interrogator’s gaze. ‘Didn’t you look at them?’

Susanna hadn’t. But she spent her lunch hour glued to the computer in the shared art department staff’s office, looking through the sites they’d emailed to her, fascinated and impressed. It was simultaneously very exciting and the most humbling experience of her teaching career.
I have been a snob
, she realised.
A sanctimonious, hopelessly outdated snob
. She saw again Bianca’s accusing, jacaranda-clad gesture:
pre-digital; post-digital
.

I bet I’m not the only art teacher who’s floundering with this
, she thought, and
ping!
Her brain lit up.
This isn’t a seventies issue. It’s topical, and pertinent, and sexy
. This
can be my piece for publication!

She felt a nervous inward shiver. Was she being ridiculous? So soon after the disappointing conversation with Belinda, could she actually have stumbled on another idea? One that might really work? And even if this topic was good, how could she, so spectacularly ignorant, write about it?
My ignorance is part of the story,
she realised
. I write that in: confess it.
Oh, and consider this: her students had already done half the research for her! She was reaching for a pen – how deliciously apt that she would instinctively reach for such a pre-digital tool to get her ideas down, on the despised
page
– when her mobile, on the desk beside her, leapt and buzzed twice, like a huge dying blowfly. Susanna jumped.
New message
, the screen said.

She picked the phone up and pressed the button.
OK with you if Leonard joins us for dinner tonight before book group? X M

Susanna texted back a single word:
Lovely.
She liked her mother’s friend Leonard. She’d had a notion that over this evening’s dinner, she might talk to Jean about her idea of a trip to Europe together next year, but that could wait.

I’ll bet Mum knows how to use predictive text
, she thought.
Probably even those face thingies: emoticons.
She gave a small chuckle as it occurred to her that she was actually going to
enjoy
writing this piece. What an extraordinary prospect!

Jean flipped her phone shut, pleased to have got Susanna’s quick response, then sat back in her chair, arms folded and lips thoughtfully pursed, regarding the picture she’d just hung on the wall. She had replaced one of her late husband’s watercolour landscapes with a portrait he’d made of their two daughters, aged perhaps eleven and six. It was not a great painting, but that was not the reason it had been sitting in a cupboard since she’d moved here to the retirement village. Despite the stiffness, the unconvincing hands, Neville had captured rather more of the sisters’ relationship than Jean liked: Susanna in the background, looking not out at the viewer but, with a proud smile, toward her younger sister, while Angie’s winsome blonde curls and bright eyes lit up the picture.
Always stealing the limelight
. Jean caught that thought, and mentally slapped herself on the wrist.
Stop that! It never bothered Susie, so why am I still letting it bother me?

Jean rose with a sigh and walked through to the kitchen of her neat, pretty unit.
Susie is truly a good person
.
A better person than I am.
She took the teapot outside and emptied the leaves on the meticulously tilled soil around one of the espaliered camellias in her courtyard. A few flowers on the gardenia bush had already opened; Jean leaned down to them and inhaled, but without really taking in the pleasure of their sweet fragrance. Her mind was elsewhere, wrestling with a problem more difficult than those brain-teasers her friend Leonard Styles enjoyed solving. It was Leonard, tactful and persuasive, who’d suggested she might put some pictures of her younger daughter up amongst the others on her wall; he who was encouraging her to tackle this most taxing of problems: forgiveness.

Forgiveness
. A concept that had always seemed as facile to Jean as a greeting card. Now she was trying to grasp its essence, what it might mean for her, and she was finding it very, very difficult.
It’s like learning another language. And I’m too old.

But that was merely an excuse, even though she was indeed seventy-three. Jean knew that forgiveness had never been her strong suit. She had resisted it all her life, and especially since Angie proved to be so … impossible.

Where had it begun? Where had things started to go wrong for her younger daughter? No – Jean corrected herself –
between
her younger daughter and herself?

She put the teapot down and started twisting the small furry bud-like seeds from the branches of the camellia. Helping a plant to direct its energy, its growth, that was easy. Just so with Susie: she’d been an easy child, a joy, always so open to guidance and advice. And look at her now: a good career, a solid marriage, two nice, capable children.

But with Angie, the problems had been there from the start, and the way people responded to her looks certainly hadn’t helped.
What a pretty baby!
That’s what Neville had said the minute she was born, and everyone –
everyone!
– had agreed. She was indeed a pretty little thing, like apple blossom, all white and pink, but Jean felt instinctively that it was a mistake to go on and on about it. Was she the only one who even noticed Susie, plain and brown as a nut, standing by as her little sister was cooed at and exclaimed over? Valiant little Susie, ignored but never complaining, never protesting, never resentful of the new star who’d stolen all her light.

Why could no one else see how
unfair
it was to make such a fuss of one child, especially for something as frivolous and unearned as prettiness? Fairness had always been a guiding principle in Jean’s life, and she had been a fair mother. Scrupulously so. Neville should have had more sense, but he was besotted. Father and older sister, both were Angie’s willing servants, as the demanding baby became a temperamental child, then a blindly wilful teenager.

Only Jean had treated Angie with the firm hand she needed. The things everyone else let her get away with! Even when she finally got expelled from school, Neville had been reluctant to chastise her. It was always,
She means well. She does her best. She’s highly strung. She’ll grow out of it
– to which Jean had snorted, ‘I doubt it!’ And she’d been proved right, alas, as Angie went from folly to disaster to tragedy.

Jean stood now by the espaliered camellias, face grim and shoulders rigid as the ghastly events of those years of Angie’s drug addiction beat at her again: the lying, the stealing, the police knocking time and again on their door, searching their house – the thousand and one betrayals both small and large. The tremulous hope Neville held out every time Angie swore she was giving it up, going into rehab, turning her life around. Time and again, the dashing of that hope.

It was what Angie did to Neville, that’s what Jean couldn’t forgive. The apple of her father’s eye; he’d had no defences against any of it.
He always had a weak heart, and she broke it: that’s what killed him.
And then Angie’s own husband, that poor foolish boy. He’d never touched heroin till he met her.
She killed him, too.

Forgiving Angie would mean that she’d got away with it all: the years of unremitting selfishness. The deaths. Let her take up with these fundamentalists and their born-again mumbo-jumbo; let
them
forgive her, if that’s what they were so keen on. Not Jean Greenfield. She had more steel in her spine than that.

But Leonard had put forward another proposition: that forgiveness might be the stronger, the more courageous thing to do. Jean respected him too much to dismiss this idea, much as she’d have liked to. Leonard was a former magistrate, a tough-minded, admirably fair and balanced man, a rationalist and atheist like herself. Therefore Jean had forced herself to listen, even though the very word
forgiveness
made her so angry she wanted to evict it from her mind. Even allowing it to sit there quietly was a challenge that at times felt downright dangerous.

And how does one forgive, precisely?
Jean had no idea. If there were a pattern, a recipe, a form, then she might be able to follow it, but there was none. After considerable hesitation she’d taken up Leonard’s suggestion about putting the portrait up, but look: here she was turning herself inside out, again, over this girl who’d always received far more attention than she deserved.

Jean clicked her tongue and bestirred herself, picking up the teapot from the white patio table. Make a cup of tea – that, at least, was a straightforward and pleasant thing to do. She went inside, closing the glass door behind her, only to pause and open it again. The air was warm, and sweetly perfumed. Why not let it in?

EIGHT

Stella-Jean had taken hold of Finn’s arm to tow him through the stream of kids surging out of the yard of the local primary school when she suddenly felt his skinny body go tense, like one of those antelopes on a wildlife program when it sees the lion creeping up. He stopped dead and the kid behind bumped into him, setting up a chain reaction of bumps and shoves. Swiftly Stella-Jean scanned the crowd for the source of her twitchy cousin’s alarm.

There: that clutch of boys up ahead, idling just outside the gate, sneaking glances in their direction. The one in front, with the show-off looks: she’d seen him before. They were waiting for Finn, and not with friendly intent.

She prodded his shoulder. ‘Come on, Finnster; stick with me,’ she said, and walked straight toward the gate at a fast clip. She fixed the boys with a tough look as she approached, but they had eyes only for their prey. Four of them had formed a semicircle around the good-looking kid, and all five now raised their right hands, each making a kind of microphone of his fist but with the thumb poking out stiffly toward his mouth. The leader counted them in, tapping his foot –
one, two, three
– and his followers drew a deep breath, eyes alight with excitement.

‘
Thumb, thumb, thumb, suck-a thumb, thumb, thumb
,’ they sang in perfect harmony. ‘
Suck-a thumb, thumb, thumb, suck-a thuuuumb
…’

She recognised this little outfit now: they’d been the stars of the school’s concert a couple of weeks ago. She’d come with Mum and Auntie Ange; Finn had failed to bang his tambourine in the back row of his class’s contribution.

Pretty Boy tossed his head back and opened his mouth wide. His big voice powered out. ‘
You suck your thu-ah-hum, ’cos you’re so duah-hum
.’ The gang of four kept their chorus going, their faces vivid and eager, waiting for their victim to crack. Other kids were nudging each other, stopping, watching. Any moment now Finn would explode and go for them, and then he wouldn’t stand a chance. And they’d say it was all his fault.

‘Stay cool,’ Stella-Jean told him tersely out of the corner of her mouth. She got between him and the group. Almost up to them now. Pretty Boy’s sneer was hardly endurable: she felt an insane urge to turn, grab him, slam him up against the wire fence. Another step, almost past – oh, but he was so
close
.

She spun around, and Finn turned with her. The group dropped their fist microphones, grinning avidly.