Charades Read online

  Mostly, back then, I was left alone. Not just the boys, but the girls too steered clear of me. Their mothers warned them against me, in case my kind of family situation was catching, and certainly I preferred the company of my father, the bone man, who grew smaller and smaller in the rainforest. There was nothing I couldn’t tell him. I could read aloud to him from any book and he never objected.

  Books. There’s another beginning.

  My Mum — Bea Ryan, the Slut of the Tamborine Mountain, Queen Bea, Honey Bea, that Bloody Breeder B. — my mum would stare and shake her head. Never seen anything like it, she would say. There were always brothers and sisters, older and younger, falling all over each other and me. There were always the men, stopping by to have a beer with my mum. It was a small and noisy place, a fibro shack with lizards on the walls, and cracks and holes that were hung with sacs of spiders’ eggs. But I would wedge myself into a corner, two sides protected, crosslegged on the floor, a book propped open on my knees, and I wouldn’t even deign to acknowledge the

  company.

  How’d you get that one, Honey Bea? the men would laugh. Been fooling around with a cyclo-pee-dia, have ya? That accounts for her hair, they would say. (It stuck out in all directions like the pages of a riffled book; it was fair and my mum is dark.) This the little cuckoo in your nest? there was always someone to ask; and that someone always got slapped on the knuckles by Bea. Uh-oh, they would laugh. Cutting close to the bone, is it? Whyn’t you ever come clean on this, Bea?

  Get out of my house, she would say, and they’d shuffle feet and clink bottles and shake their heads at me. Well, they’d say, wherever she come from, Bea, you got an ugly duckling in that one, you’ll never get her married off, you’d better learn her to be a nurse. Those girls make good money down in Brisbane.

  Ask Harry here, he knows. His oldest’s a bit broad in the beam for marrying; nice kid, just a bit doughy in the face, right Harry? But is she pulling in the loot at the Royal Brisbane! Sends her ol’ man drinking money, right Harry?

  Every man, says Harry, should have one plain daughter, to look after ’im in ’is old age.

  They would drink to that, and forget about me. Not that I minded them, really. Michael Donovan’s dad was nearly always there, and Diane Stolley’s dad, and Jimmy Armstrong’s when he was sober enough. Warmth came off those men, as well as violence. I didn’t mind them. That’s something I learned from my mum, how to handle men. How not to mind them.

  They can’t help theirselves, she’d say to me. It’s the way they’re made, that’s all. Can’t stand women go on whining about it. You just got to jolly them along, that’s all.

  Anyway, I didn’t notice anybody, I forgot the whole world, as soon as I got my head in a book.

  But can I convey, Charade asks, how exotic a book-reading kid was, in that place? Suppose your adolescent son were to take up … oh … needlepoint, say. A useless thing. An embarrassing thing. A thing almost frightening in its abnormality.

  For the teachers, though, I might have been the unicorn itself. I was proof of miracles. I was evidence that doing time in a bush school might even be worthwhile.

  Here’s another beginning, a significant one, and an ending too, the painful falling into knowledge, from which there is no going back.

  Here is Mr Murdoch, my grade seven teacher.

  And here am I: thirteen now and wearing sandals to school (all the girls do, by this age, though the boys still go barefoot and wouldn’t be caught dead in shoes, in sissy shoes). I am fanatic about daily showers, I stick flowers — especially orchids — into the fuzz of my hair.

  Every morning I get to school early while Mr Murdoch is alone in the classroom, cleaning the blackboard, writing up the day’s lesson plans in a book for the school inspectors. I adore Mr Murdoch, I am in love with him, when I grow up I’m going to marry him.

  “Well, goldilocks,” he grins, seeing me. “What did you read last night, as well as under the desk yesterday? Yes, I saw you, sneaking a look at it under your social studies book, you little bluestocking.”

  I think of this phrase, which he uses often, as a term of endearment. In my fantasies, Mr Murdoch and I are in a book-lined bedroom in a cosy tree house at the edge of the rainforest. He lies across the bed reading to me while I dance languidly, sensuously, over by the window, wearing nothing but shimmering blue stockings and garters and a few white orchids here and there. Mr Murdoch tries to go on reading, but his eyes are pulled up from the page and over, he pauses, he is mesmerised by my long long legs and blue stockings. Finally he says: “Here.

  I can’t stand it. You read.”

  And so I take the book and I sit in the windowsill and dangle my blue legs into the room and I read. Mr Murdoch lies on the bed and closes his eyes. “You are a wonderful reader,” he sighs. He is in love with me. He wants me to read to him for the term of his natural life.

  So each morning when he asks: “Well, you little bluestocking, what did you read last night?” I strive for worthier and more difficult trophies. “The Last Days of Pompeii,” I say proudly, “from the Everyman Classics Library.” I love the sound of that: the Classics. It gives off a fragrance of Latin and Greek and English cathedrals and gentlemen sipping port at Oxford. In the rainforest I have sat and pictured this world in detail, I know it intimately — how everyone speaks the way the Queen does in her Christmas message, and how everyone drinks nothing but sherry which they sip ever so slowly like tea that is scalding hot, and how they would never say anything more violent than “Dear me!” — not even during the last last days of Pompeii.

  “Dear me!” Mr Murdoch says. “That second-rate Victorian melodrama. You’ll ruin your aesthetic taste buds. Well, what did you think of it?”

  “It’s … er … I like historical things,” I say, crushed (I have been dreaming of blind Lydia and her noble sacrifice), “the stuff about Pompeii … Did they really have paintings like that on the walls of the villas?” (A brilliant strategy this.)

  “Oh yes, indeed,” he says. “Look, I’ll show you.” And he rummages in his chaotic cupboard for a book. “Must be at home,” he says. “Well, I’ll bring it around perhaps this evening, shall I? I’ve got a book of photographs of the excavations.”

  “And also,” I say, dizzy with excitement, “I’ve been reading Journals of the Discoverers. Abel Janzoon Tasman and William Dampier and Captain James Cook and people like that.”

  “Good heavens!” he says. (He is really impressed, I am almost fainting with pride.) “Where did you manage to get hold of something like that?”

  “I found it in the library, in the history section. Can I read you something funny? I copied it out.” I fish a scrap of paper out of my pocket. “This is William Dampier,” I say.

  On the 4th day of January, 1688, we fell in with the Land of New Holland.

  The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest People in the world …

  Their Eye-lids are always half closed, to keep the flies out of their eyes; they being so troublesome here, that no fanning will keep them from coming to ones Face …So that from their Infancy being thus annoyed with these Insects, they do never open their Eyes, as other People: and therefore they cannot see far.

  Mr Murdoch laughs. “No flies on you, goldilocks.”

  “Will you bring the Pompeii book tonight?” I prompt, scarcely able to breathe.

  “Tonight,” he promises. “If I can find it.”

  He doesn’t find it. For weeks and weeks, he doesn’t find it. Whenever I think of mentioning it, my throat thickens up. And then, long after I have given up on the visit, one evening when I am coming in late (I try to stay away until the littlest ones have dropped asleep in their bedroom), I am coming in late from one of my usual haunts — the library, the rainforest, the mango tree, I don’t remember which — and I see him sitting at our kitchen table across from Mum.

  Blood thumps against my eardrums
. I spit on my palms and rub my hands together and slick down the flyaway edges of my hair. I spit on my hands again, and rub the sticky dirt-crusted mango sap from my legs. I pelt down to the bottom of the yard where the tree orchids are, and snatch two flowers for

  my hair.

  Grand entrance. In my mind, trumpets.

  Here I am, Mr Murdoch, your little bluestocking, smelling of orchids and books.

  Both of them startle, Mr Murdoch and my mum. My mum the Honey Bea, the Queen Bea of Mt Tamborine.

  “Oh, Charade,” Mum says, jumping up. “I was just saying to Mr Murdoch here, that I never know where you are. She’s probably up a tree somewhere with a book, I said to him. And here you are. Speak of the devil.”

  “Did you bring the book, Mr Murdoch?” I come over to the table so that he can see what I have been reading (Great Expectations), and so he can see the flower behind my right ear.

  “Book?” he asks blankly. He’s very busy with priming the hurricane lantern (the power fails a lot on the Tamborine Mountain), he’s bending over it, cupping his hand and blowing softly, coaxing, adjusting the wick.

  “The Pompeii book,” I remind him.

  “Oh good lord,” he says. “Pompeii. I forgot all about it. You should have reminded me.”

  He is still not looking at me. “Is something the matter, Mr Murdoch?” I run through all the school possibilities, but can think of none concerning me.

  “Matter?” He looks at me now, awkward, red in the face. “No, of course not. Great Expectations, eh? You’ve got a real little bookworm here, Mrs Ryan.”

  There is something about the tone that makes me feel suddenly as though I’m out of my depth in the river, floundering, the current swirling me in circles.

  “Charade,” Mum says. “Be a good girl, and just nip down to McGillivray’s pub — the back door, not the front — and tell Mr McGillivray that Bea needs a little bottle of something for her cold. Tell him to put it on my bill, there’s a good girl.”

  It’s a long long way to McGillivray’s pub, and an even longer way back, and when I get back I feel older than the bone man down by the fig tree roots in my own private part of the forest. Through the kitchen window, I see them playing cards at the table, and underneath it they are playing feet.

  “Sharp as a tack,” Mum says. “She doesn’t miss a thing. I don’t know what I’m going to do with her. I don’t know how she’s going to make her way in the world, it’s a worry.”

  “She’s a regular bluestocking all right,” Mr Murdoch laughs. Judas laughter. “You really should pack her off to school in Brisbane, it’s a waste to keep her here. Did you fuck a circuit court judge, or what?”

  “None of your business,” Mum says, smacking him on the back of the hand. It’s the kind of slap I’ve seen Sheba, our tabby, give to tomcats on the prowl. “But if you must know, he was a university man and an Englishman, so there. I’ve had class in my day.” She looks at him through her lashes. “I got a thing for book men,” she says.

  I go to the bedroom window and call to one of the kids. Kevin, who’s three years younger than me.

  “Psst! Kevin!” I whisper. “Give this to Mum.” And I push the bottle through the window.

  By moonlight I make my way into the forest — I don’t care if the snakes get me — and I hunch up beside the bone man (I don’t visit him much any more) and that’s where I stay all night. In the morning — and here’s something new, another beginning, and also an ending — Mum comes looking for me. I can hear the twigs snapping, the swish of branches pushed aside, and so I hide, I run. I know this ground well, it’s not difficult to outwit her. I don’t want to be intruded on here.

  When she gets back I’m sitting at the kitchen table doing homework.

  “Charade,” she says.

  I don’t look up.

  “Charade,” she says. “This is the one and only time you’ll catch me explaining the facts of life to you.” She takes two chipped and cloudy tumblers from the sink counter, and pours something out of her bottle into each. She pushes one across the table to me, but I ignore it. She clears her throat. “Love,” she says, “is one of these women’s diseases like bleeding and babies, you can’t do anything about it the first time. You have to have it once really bad, and once it’s started you just have to sweat it out.

  It’s like having the bloody babies. You can kick and scream all you want — it helps to scream — but there aren’t any short cuts. You just got to wait till it ends.

  “But here’s the difference. The babies keep coming like the men keep coming, that’s the way it is. Love’s different. You have one bad bout, then you’re cured.” She drains her tumbler and pours some more. “Cured for life,” she says.

  “There’s one more thing I’ll say, Charade, and then you’ll never get another word out of me on this subject. You think I don’t care, you think I don’t know how you feel. Wrong.

  I know exactly what I’m doing, and why. And I’ll tell you why. The one time I had love — a very bad case, a very very very bad case — was your father, Nicholas Truman. Just don’t you forget it.”

  She tosses back her head and drains her tumbler again and then she’s off. Off. Careening down the road to McGillivray’s like a clipper ship in full angry sail, her hull rocking in the uncertain swell.

  I stare at the cracks in the fibro wall. My eyes feel so dry, they prickle, a dangerous sign with me. This is what I see: me, dressed in a black bodysuit and bright blue stockings, sitting nonchalantly in a library in Oxford, reading the classics. A gentleman, very elegant, with a gold-topped walking cane, approaches.

  “What are you reading, my dear?” he asks. “Oh, forgive me, I should introduce myself. I’m Professor Nicholas Truman, I’m a university man.” And then he invites me to his house for sherry.

  And maybe that is the beginning, Charade says.

  8

  Fathers

  “Fathers,” Charade says. “I’ve given a lot of thought to the subject of fathers.”

  Fathers, Koenig thinks uneasily. It is not such a simple matter to be a father. A memory comes unbidden: La Guardia airport, about three years ago, the last time he saw his son.

  Koenig was one of the herd coming down the cattle run from the Eastern Airlines shuttle, buffeted by pinstriped flanks, by tweed flanks, Boston executives, Boston academics, the morning’s offload. Koenig’s mind was on the conference — in particular, on the paper he was to give — so that when an arm obstructed his path, he simply stopped and blinked at it, disori­ented. He observed a hand, a fresh daisy, a printed message from the Reverend Moon; all this before his eyes followed the arm up to the shoulder, the neck, the face. His eyes moved in slow motion, in the ponderous viscous rhythm of a bad dream, instinctively afraid somehow of what he might … Was it a mole he recognised? The particular scribble of some vein?

  Then: “Oh for God’s sake!” he cried in involuntary disgust, eye to eye with his son, shock to shock.

  His son seemed to recover first.

  “Dad.” The voice quavered: it was part truce flag, part battle standard, part plea. One hand was instinctively thrown up to ward off psychic blows. Koenig was dimly conscious of the other hand … what? … hovering, of flower and tract drifting to the floor, of the hand moving aimlessly, nervously, of its fingers fluttering dove-like (they might have been yearning above an ark) as they looked for somewhere to settle. Then a forlorn note sounded itself (Koenig actually thought, later, that he had heard a bugle, had heard the doleful cadence of the Last Post). He saw the hand falling back, giving up — in a sense, saw it; the movement was monitored in a sluggish region of his mind and was later replayed replayed replayed, always mingled with the mournful bugle replaying the Last Chance, the last chance, replaying the last, the end, replaying replaying

  replaying …

  But the mind is a faulty mechanism, not well synchronised with the a
ffective system.

  “Panhandling!” Paternal fury leaped from Koenig’s lips well before any knowledge of the word, or any intention, had formed in his mind. “Begging in public. Haven’t you any pride at —”

  But his son had turned already, his son was running, his son had vanished.

  Koenig ran too, uselessly, into the maelstrom of people. He turned corner after corner after corner. Futile. Gasping for breath, asthmatic, he leaned against a wall and stood there trembling while the crowd lapped at him, knocked, mocked, buffeted. Jesus, someone swore, but Koenig couldn’t move.

  “Are you all right?” a janitor asked.

  “Yes,” Koenig said, and he went into the men’s room and locked himself into a cubicle. He had no idea how long he sat there with his head in his hands. It might have been hours.

  At the conference, excuses were made on his behalf for the paper not given.

  Fathers, Koenig thinks, and the word bleeds on and on inside him. He watches Charade as though drugged but sees his daughter Alison: how she either averts her reproachful eyes or is overly bright and … and … “Brittle,” he murmurs.

  “Did you say something?” Charade asks.

  “No,” he says, reaching out to touch her cheek. “Please keep talking. Please talk. You were going to tell me a tale of …”

  “Ah yes,” Charade says. “Fathers …

  I’ve given a lot of thought to the subject of fathers, she says.

  They came like flies, in the evenings they gathered like a crust round our kitchen table, they all had cravings for my mum, the Honey Bea. My mum had a way with other kids’ fathers.

  Ten children, Bea, they would say, and shake their heads. How come you don’t take precautions?

  I do take precautions, she would say. I’ve taken precautions ten times. I got them and the old age pension, and that’s all, for when I’m over the hill.