The Grass Sister, page 1
GILLIAN MEARS
THE GRASS SISTER
About Untapped
Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
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For Peter and Sheila
I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met. Lots of people say, ‘My mother was insane—I say it and I mean it. Insane.’ People laugh a lot at the memory of their mothers. I suppose it is funny.
PRACTICALITIES
MARGUERITE DURAS
Acknowledgements
This book was written with the assistance of fellowships from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the NSW Ministry of the Arts. The Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship enabled me to travel in Africa in 1990 and it was in the Keesing Studio in Paris in 1992 that much of the first draft was written. This support is gratefully acknowledged.
Two sections of the book appeared in early draft form in Scripsi and The Malahat Review.
Material from Practicalities by Marguerite Duras is reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd; material from Cry the Beloved Country is reprinted with permission of the Estate of the author and Jonathan Cape.
I would like to thank the following people: Liz Ashburn for allowing me three months at ‘Cooroonya’; Sonya Giles for a corner for my caravan in her garden; Karin Murphy and Susan Hampton for reading the early drafts; and Jane Palfreyman of Random House.
My heartfelt thanks to Drusilla Modjeska for her patience and editorial energy.
CHAPTER ONE
‘Hush your mouth,’ says Lavinia, though I haven’t been talking. ‘Hush your mouth,’ she murmurs and holds me close. I think for a moment about this expression Lavinia always uses in such a chiding, affectionate voice whenever it’s time for me to get back to the farm. Quieten your mouth, I think, would be a so much harsher way of saying the same thing. Or silence your mouth. Shut your mouth. Shut up. But there is nothing harsh about Lavinia. She is the community nurse at Redclack. I can tell that she was never a horse rider. Her skin is too smooth, too undamaged. No open-necked shirts ever let a hot day on the plateau burn spots and freckles onto this white skin.
It is an April afternoon and I’m afraid that in its cold light, Lavinia will be shocked by the way the skin is aging around my eyes, by what is happening to my throat immediately underneath my chin. I tuck my face into her neck. My toes are cold and arched away from Lavinia so they can’t startle her own warm legs.
‘I have to go,’ I say, not wanting to. ‘I said I’d help Ally with the tree house.’ The other day, she was leaning out the car window saying, It smells of fresh air! It smells like the tops of trees. ‘I’ll never leave if you keep doing that Lavinia,’ I whisper, tapping away her hand.
‘Ssshh,’ Lavinia takes my hands in hers and holding them cupped to her mouth, blows them warm with her breath. ‘Tomorrow,’ she says, ‘I’ll show you how to look after Iris Michaelhouse’s feet.’
‘Once I took my mother for a foot massage, when she was sick,’ I feel my face go stiff with painful memories. ‘She hated the experience. Do you really think old people like their feet being touched?’ Already I am wishing I hadn’t agreed to this idea. It will, I think, be worse than working in the library, requiring as much patience as the oldest borrower needing help to read her large print romance. Compared to Lavinia, I realise, I had no patience when I used to work at the Romance Library by the Sea. Tramps came into the toilets to pull at their beards in the mirror and I would herd them out as if they were cattle. Nor did I feel much tolerance for the aged borrowers with names now found mainly in cemeteries. There were women of all shapes and sizes who brought in badly-iced butter cakes or immaculate biscuits, depending on their skills, or the most beautiful roses from their gardens with heart-shaped petals and crimson and cold hips. Marguerite Rawlings, senior librarian, would have endless kindness for our borrowers. Whereas I’d view any request as an imposition on my time, and hide out in the office eating the treats they’d cooked for Marguerite, sketching like the wild artist I imagined I was becoming, Marguerite would be leading them on by their elbows to new authors they might like to try.
‘Isn’t it a bit invasive? Foot massages are so personal.’
‘Not at all,’ Lavinia says. ‘Human touch is what they crave. And if they’re bedridden, then it’s essential. Otherwise the feet curl up. They become all soft and perished. As if, I sometimes think, it’s possible in a lifetime to actually walk your feet away.’
‘Will they smell?’
‘Not Iris’. She still manages a bath for herself every morning. She’s so excited that it’s going to be you. I’ve been suggesting various volunteers for years. But she’s very fussy. She always ends up asking them not to come back.’ Lavinia waves her hands. ‘I’m sure you’ll find her feet are fine to work with. The main thing really with Iris is to keep her toenails short. They’ve been catching in the carpet. Tripping her up. She broke two toes last year.’
‘No foot could be as smelly as a horse with seedy toe in its hoof,’ I say, trying to persuade myself, trying to battle the sleepiness that comes from not sleeping all night, the warmth of Lavinia sliding over me, the rug falling off, my eyes shutting anyway.
When I wake up, Lavinia’s moving around the kitchen, heating milk in the orange saucepan. One of the cats is sitting on the counter, watching the wooden spoon moving through the milk.
‘You must’ve been dreaming,’ she says.
‘How long was I asleep?’
‘Less than half an hour but you were twitching like a creature.’
‘I think I did dream.’
‘What?’
‘Oh,’ I wave my hand. ‘Nothing. I’d better go.’ I sit up on the couch.
‘Feet tomorrow still?’
‘Well, I’m not sure. It might be upsetting.’ I bend down to pull on my boots. ‘I haven’t seen Iris since Ann-Clare’s memorial service.’ My boots are work boots, ugly and old, with hand-stitched repairs from where the axe went through the left toe. I scuff at a patch of leather which has lost all semblance of polish. Ann-Clare was once caned by the headmaster of Lindley Central School for wearing boots not shoes to school. I heard my sister being marched towards the headmaster’s office. I heard her greenhide soles on the verandah and looked out of my classroom window. There was no helping Ann-Clare. Mr May strapped Ann-Clare three times. When she came back past the classroom window I saw the red marks and that her boots were gone: in their place, a pair of gigantic black lace-ups from out of Lost Property. In Africa I think Ann-Clare must have remembered that headmaster. As she unlaced her walking boots and left them on the rock above the waterfall maybe it was of Mr May she was thinking, not me. Of Mr May lifting up the hem of her skirt. The freckles on his bald head as he flicked the cane.
‘Except, Able …’ says Lavinia.
‘Hmmm?’
‘You’ll have to dress up a little bit more than you do.’
‘I’m not wearing a dress. As far as I remember Iris was never interested in the heights of elegance. I’m quite clean.’
‘I know that.’ Lavinia sits next to me and examines the sunspots on my hands. ‘Iris probably couldn’t care less what you wear.’
‘Yes,’ I agree.
‘Yes,’ she says, laughing at the way my hair has tufted up on one side of my head. It is jaunty, she says, this bit of errant hair, like a little grass or emu wren’s tail. ‘Able?’ Lavinia calls, bringing me back when I am halfway to the car.
‘What?’ I say, cavorting just a little for Lavinia, as I return to the garden gate.
Lavinia touches my cheek with her tongue. ‘A lick and a promise,’ she says, shooing me away then, saying ‘Ally’s tree house. Ally’s tree house,’ a small portion of the sunset seemingly trapped behind her tiny ears as a red-orange glow inside which I could warm my mouth.
A large herd of cows filling the road when I’m halfway home from Redclack means I must drive slowly. The young man in shorts who follows them is barefoot. He is fat and pallid but his bare feet are so fissured with black cracks they resemble a type of espadrille. Henrietta. All Cream. All Cream Two. I watch the swaying udders.
In my dream, my sister’s face is blank. Eac
The young man with the bad heel cracks raises his arm and grunts at me as I edge past. I grunt back. I am past all but a few of the front cows when I catch sight of the old cat woman of Redclack, moving down the laneway from the pink farmhouse on the left. Nine cats move behind her as if strung on a line. She moves without shame in the direction of her letterbox. One paddock has recently been ploughed, but the next one is bright with potatoes or weeds. This pattern is repeated and repeated as far as the eye can see, along and across the rolling hills, giving the effect that the land has been home-upholstered in warm red and virulent green stripes. Against the chill of the afternoon, the old lady holds a small blanket at her throat as a type of makeshift poncho. The letterbox has been blown by years of wind to lie almost parallel to the ground in the way of an alpine tree. She’ll have to stoop to see if there is any mail. I drive slowly behind the last cow. The old lady becomes crafty. She begins to dawdle, pretending to survey the decrepit fence that wood-turners from other towns are always asking to buy because it was cut from red cedar over a hundred years ago. She picks an autumn leaf, hiding her face behind the trunk of the liquidambar. Some of the cats sit down and lick themselves. I think for a moment she’s going to turn back altogether but as I move past the cow and accelerate, she too speeds up again, the cats resume their line, and before I have rounded the bend, I am able to see in my side mirror, the way she cautiously lifts up the lid of her letterbox. The letterbox is empty. A finger goes up to her mouth and I feel like weeping. It is so sad, this lack of letters underneath the cold grey sky, the cows moving past her, not as much comfort in all the pendulous swing of their udders as there would’ve been in a little fat envelope from an old friend or a slender card of greeting from a sister who has left the Lindley Plateau years before.
I also wait too hard for my letters.
I hide in the undergrowth, watching the road through a gap in the foliage, for like the cat woman of Redclack, I don’t want my need to be so exposed.
Along one of the roads which run west from the plateau, I sometimes see a lone woman who knows no such restraint. She is young I think, no more than twenty, and new to the district. She reads her mail as she walks. She weaves on and off the gravelled track, almost giving an impression of mid-morning inebriation. Her feet, in very bright socks, slip across the leather of the Grecian-type sandals she wears. Once it seemed she’d almost fall over but the pages of the letter fluttered her upright again as if they were small wings grown from her hands. It seemed a shameful thing somehow. I felt ashamed for the girl. She didn’t know her need was so naked in front of a stranger-woman driving past. Or she didn’t care.
I suspect my own eagerness on the track to the mailbox tips my whole body forward so that my head juts from my neck and my bottom pokes out in my efforts to see in advance the box and what’s in it: the whole effect, I imagine, is incongruous, as if I’m wearing an outlandish old dress with my boots and winter socks.
The mail holds the most tricks about a month before Christmas. My father tells Ally she can open the cards. There will always be a smattering of black nativity scenes with Africans as wise men on the cards sent by those supporting an institute of race relations, as well as the more usual kinds of images. My father barely seems to read the letters folded inside the cards. I really don’t think he does any more. Each Christmas it seems to me that the way he glances over them becomes more and more cursory. In the time his gaze is on the page he couldn’t possibly have read all the information being given. The envelopes covered in antelope or other animal stamps are, without fail, the early Christmas letters from Africa—full of news and chat about sons and daughters and grandchildren who mean nothing to me or whom I might’ve met in the blur of the time my father and I spent in Zimbabwe and South Africa. The handwriting is unknown. Yet each year I still cannot prevent the sudden feeling that I am holding in my hand a letter from my sister, or someone known to my sister, or who knows of my sister’s whereabouts.
I think this, even with the knowledge of the certificate in a compartment of my mother’s desk. Wherever the word death occurs a typist has run a row of five letter x’s in lower case. Because there was no body, it is a Certificate of Disappearance. It is of a fine, crisp paper, like decrepitating airmail paper when held lightly between two hands. Someone, at some stage, has been smoking over it because there is a small cigarette burn in its lower left corner. The typist, I have always supposed, was the smoker. The typist who hit the space bar instead of the s when writing misadventure next to the apparent cause of my sister’s absence. So it reads, Mi adventure. Although I have written in the missing s I cannot help thinking, My adventure in Africa, whenever I look at the certificate.
I imagine the typist was young and careless and much more intent upon looking attractive to Mrs Pluke than upon what he was typing. He would’ve been smoking and using only his left hand to type.
Mrs Pluke, not Mr Dilley, handed the certificate to my father. Her skin was as flawless as a fresh blackberry. I remembered Ann-Clare and the horses. Dark purple froth around their bits when we fed them the blackberries. ‘I am so sorry to have to give you this,’ Mrs Pluke was saying.
My father was also apologising.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ said my father, wiping his face with a handkerchief. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’
The certificate has been folded about twenty times. I know this though I rarely look at it, because I watched my father doing so. In this way my father, in Africa, making the certificate smaller and smaller in his fingers as I counted the folds, unwittingly made it resemble some kind of game; a paper and pen game two sisters might force each other to play on a day so wet, going outside was impossible. My father tucked the certificate into his wallet and walked outside, saying again to me that he wished I’d worn something a little bit more respectable.
‘Or a bit of makeup.’
‘I don’t have makeup.’
‘You could’ve packed some of Alana’s,’ he said, referring to our mother.
‘We threw out all of her lipsticks and powders. Ann-Clare and I decided to because neither of us would ever have worn them. I don’t like makeup,’ I repeated, my riding boots slipping on the parquet-floor corridor past some fumigated cockroaches. ‘I don’t think it matters. It shouldn’t matter, Dad.’ But he was crying again. When I looked sideways at him, I saw an old man, as sad looking as Mr Pearl who lost Mrs Pearl in my fourth year at the Romance Library and who in all his attempts to remember his wife had decided to read every book she had ever borrowed. My father’s lips were shaking and the tears, which were little, weren’t following any particular wrinkle down his face.
As far as I know my father only brought the certificate from Mutare out again to put it into the smallest compartment of Alana’s desk when we were back in Australia. But by then it was too late. The creases that had formed like a grid over the typed details are set for good and won’t be ironed out. The fragility of the whole document seems to be increasing. In places, the paper has even begun to tear along certain crease lines as if someone is surely in the frequent habit of unfolding and then refolding the certificate. Over and over again the unknown fingers must have been doing this for I’m sure the paper has deteriorated. Only occasionally do I open up the tiny drawer by its delicately-turned knob to look down on the certificate. When I showed Lavinia the other day, she said that in its little drawer, the paper looked like a tiny white and black blanket, waiting for its make-believe baby. I found I couldn’t bring myself to disagree; that I couldn’t voice aloud my belief that in fact the certificate lies waiting for the day when my sister decides, for reasons she will tell me in her own good time, that she has disappeared for long enough. Then I will lead Ann-Clare to the drawer, laughing. And my daughter, whom she has never met, will be holding onto her other hand, also laughing, as she sees how alike, as I’ve always promised, I really am to my little sister.
