Ordinary Matter, page 14
‘Cancer.’
Val exhaled deeply. She gripped the bedspread with both hands.
‘Colleen, well, she doesn’t even know what … which …’ Pam moved her hands over her torso. ‘Her sisters won’t talk to her.’
Val felt squeezed all over again. ‘I’d best check on the tea.’ She rolled onto her side and pushed herself up. She looked down at Pam and touched her shoulder. ‘Unless you want me to stay. Unless we say hang it and the kids can eat porridge.’
‘Let them,’ Pam said, reaching for Val and sounding at once as old and as young as Val had ever known. ‘One minute? Lie down.’
Val would never get over the fear of losing her brother, who might very well survive, Stuart had said, in his matter-of-fact way. Who knew? They would all do what they could. She saw in her children the relationship she and Gordon had. A relationship with cracks and crevices. Ignoring each other, summoning help, picking fights, until one day it was easy to convince the other that your love was the same, even after years of pieces being taken out of you. Until one day your brother knocked on your door in Newstead and said with a winged smile that he was going to learn to fly, that he’d always wanted to, and although it was a small thing it was a skill he would like to know. She’d scoffed at that: a small thing. Imagine the man who thinks enormous things are small. Her brother would learn to fly. She felt tears coming.
Colleen’s sisters must be unfeeling or wicked, or both.
Pam echoed Val’s thought. ‘Such unkind sisters and daughters.’
How on earth Val was the mother of a girl, a thirteen-year-old, she couldn’t quite fathom.
But she’d have to stop this moping. Downstairs and all around her things needed to get done. She said to Pam, ‘Why don’t you go see what the children are up to? Send them straight to me if they muck around.’
Elizabeth
For the art prize they were in Elizabeth’s bedroom. She stood with her back against the door, holding a notepad and coloured pencils in a box. Wendy sat cross-legged on the bed, and Benjamin was prattling on beside his sister’s duchess, touching all the objects that were usually forbidden, like the photograph of Elizabeth, their mum and Gordon at Sandy Bay, and half a paper wheel of circle stickers, and novelty beer coasters bound in string, and a bottle of red nail polish she’d tried once and was now dried up.
‘Benjamin, are your hands clean?’
Elizabeth could see that the prospects of a roast and his Uncle Gordon as a pilot, staying up late and being permitted in the yard after dark were fuelling Benjamin’s excitement. ‘If you don’t want your dessert, later, Lizzie,’ he said, ‘will you give it to me?’
She made a face at her brother, who was lovable but predictable in his greediness. ‘If I don’t want it, which I will, I’ll give it to Wendy.’
Benjamin made a face back. ‘Fine.’ He wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘I think we should play a game.’
‘What game?’ Wendy asked. ‘We’ve got to draw.’
‘No, that’s boring. This is a game I’ve made up,’ he said, although most likely he hadn’t. Not yet. ‘It’s called Airman and it’s just like … charades.’
‘Charades are boring,’ Elizabeth said.
‘The game,’ he repeated, ‘is called Airman.’
Elizabeth thrust a sheet of paper towards him. ‘Everyone has to draw a picture to see who’s the best.’
Benjamin lifted a tin off her duchess and stubbed open the lid with his thumbnail. Unusually for him, he was keyed up and mischievous. ‘I don’t want to.’
Wendy was friendly about it all. Sitting forward, she said, ‘Do what Lizzie says or you won’t get to see the aeroplane.’ Benjamin screwed up his face, almost certainly thinking hard and unable to follow the lines of logic back to the spot where Wendy had control over whether he walked outside in a few hours and what, precisely, he would see.
He shook his head, darkly, and picked up a pencil.
‘Why don’t you draw an iguana, Benjamin?’ Wendy said.
‘Or a tapeworm,’ Elizabeth added, pretending to sketch.
‘Leave me alone,’ he said.
Elizabeth, while wanting to demonstrate to her mother that art couldn’t be summoned on demand and shouldn’t be ranked, also wanted, desperately, to win the prize. She was confident it would end up being money from their mother’s purse rather than the milk bottle top or the comb, and she could do with a boost to her funds in the lolly jar. She could do with reminding everyone of the talented recesses that existed in her brain. All the better to show how she’d been able to cultivate these with almost no help from the adults in her life. Her talent would emerge in a way that seemed miraculous.
There was a knock at the door and Benjamin jumped up, without having made a single stroke on his paper, to let Miss Loveling in. He stood with his hands behind his back and allowed her to kiss him. She slipped a hand into a pocket of her skirt and tossed three Minties onto the bed.
‘Finally,’ Benjamin said, lunging for them. ‘Thanks.’
‘I bought lollies for you too,’ Elizabeth said.
Miss Loveling was taller than their mother and thinner. Her hair was greyer now and longer than was the style. Elizabeth admired how her mother read the Women’s Weekly and made adjustments to her hair every few months. Miss Loveling seemed more inclined to do her own thing. And she didn’t crowd Elizabeth and Benjamin with loads of questions about their teachers and what they’d learnt at school. She was Benjamin’s godmother, which, to Elizabeth, seemed a mistake and probably not one anybody could ever politely reverse. Elizabeth was much better suited to being the goddaughter of a famous illustrator of children’s books. Once Benjamin had even called Miss Loveling’s friend ‘Gail’ instead of Colleen.
Wendy had met Elizabeth’s sort-of aunty before, had received compliments on her dress and questions about tennis, and a comment about her birthmarks, which she didn’t seem to mind.
‘Sit on the bed with us,’ Wendy invited now.
‘I’ll set myself up over here, I think,’ Miss Loveling said. She motioned to the writing desk and chair beneath the window. ‘I’m getting old.’
‘I can’t wait to get old,’ Wendy said.
‘Well, older. Not old,’ Elizabeth corrected.
‘There’s a difference,’ Wendy told Miss Loveling.
‘Of course,’ she replied. She picked up a pen, the blue one with an orange cap, and started making short sharp lines as though she was relieving the paper of an itch.
Wendy returned to her drawing: long slices like the segments of an orange. Elizabeth leaned in. A hot air balloon. She turned to Miss Loveling. ‘Do you think I could go to university one day?’
‘Absolutely. Why not?’
The magic of those words while Wendy nodded beside her, looking up from her picture. Elizabeth caught her smile.
‘I have three brothers and two sisters,’ Wendy told Miss Loveling. ‘My oldest sister, Jackie, is about to become a teacher and what if she gets a job at our school and becomes my teacher? Can you imagine?’
Miss Loveling blanched. ‘That sounds horrible. I should write a book about that.’
For some time, Elizabeth had been watching her sketch a boy in knee-high socks and two girls in chequered school dresses. Elizabeth thought Miss Loveling knew more than most people about the human body. Her brother’s expressions were right there on the page, in the face of the boy. Elizabeth was beginning to perceive a gulf between her work and Miss Loveling’s. By now, she had discarded her drawing of a pair of hands and was working on a stem of kangaroo paw.
‘Did you always want to be an artist?’
Miss Loveling nodded, and Elizabeth checked to see that Wendy had seen.
‘Why do you like it?’
Miss Loveling tilted her chin to the ceiling, and her face softened. ‘You can draw something and remember it forever,’ she said. ‘Plus it’s fun and I’m terrific at it.’
The girls grinned. Pride like this was not encouraged. It was a shock to hear a grown-up say it aloud.
Elizabeth asked, ‘What’s your book about?’
‘It’s about animals in a zoo and what they get up to when the caretakers lock up for the night.’
‘What are your characters called?’
‘Haven’t decided. Certainly not Elizabeth, Benjamin and Wendy.’ Miss Loveling jabbed the air near Benjamin with her pen. ‘That would spoil the secret.’
‘Where’s the zoo?’ Benjamin asked, colouring.
‘Not sure. Maybe nowhere precisely. There used to be a zoo in Hobart. It had polar bears, did you know that?’
‘I know it had Tasmanian tigers.’ He looked up. ‘But they’re all dead now.’
‘That’s what they think. They also kept lions.’
Benjamin said, ‘I wish they had lions there now.’
‘Do you? I think it would be a frightening place to live if you were a lion.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it isn’t in their nature to be locked up. They might not live as long.’
‘Have you ever seen a real lion, in real life?’ Elizabeth asked. ‘Has Colleen?’
Miss Loveling nodded but said nothing more about it.
‘What are you doing now?’ Wendy got up and stood beside Miss Loveling, placing a hand on her shoulder.
‘I’m looking for traces of my characters in you, and traces of you in my characters. I’ll need to make them … ooh, a bit less hearty. Their hair wouldn’t have shone this much.’
‘Why?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘There was hunger. Even here, in Tasmania, in the thirties, when your mother and I were at school and there were lions and polar bears at the zoo.’ She put down her pen. ‘Now. Who’s ready for judging? Do we have a prize?’
‘Benjamin, go check,’ Elizabeth ordered. She needed one more minute with her artwork.
Her brother abandoned his drawing, crushing it with his palm as he stood. He trotted downstairs. It was almost silent in the bedroom. They listened to Benjamin’s voice in the kitchen, her mother’s low and absent-minded hmmm. Elizabeth sharpened her red pencil one last time. She pictured her mother unhooking her handbag from the hat rack in the hall and digging through, unzipping her purse. Elizabeth heard glee in her brother’s voice. She imagined her mother’s face flushed from the heat of the oven.
Miss Loveling stood and moved to the doorway. ‘Val? Come up for the judging.’
Two sets of feet on the stairs, then, and Elizabeth waited to see what they’d return with. Benjamin entered the room with a ten-shilling note stuck to his forehead, his hands held up high in case it fell.
‘Wow,’ Wendy said.
‘It’s ten,’ Benjamin said, lifting it off his skin. ‘Ten!’
‘All right, Benjamin.’ Their mother smiled at the attention. ‘The competition was my idea so I thought I’d better come up with a good prize.’
Elizabeth wondered how much her mother knew about her secret jar from Paris stuffed with money.
Miss Loveling took the three drawings and laid them out across Elizabeth’s bed: Wendy’s hot air balloon floating over a vast yet unfinished green valley, Benjamin’s circus tent surrounded by animal performers, and Elizabeth’s scarlet-fingered kangaroo paw. For a moment Elizabeth thought Miss Loveling would decline to choose a winner, on the basis that they were children and therefore deserved special treatment. Or, worse, give the prize to Benjamin for no reason other than being the youngest.
‘Elizabeth, it’s definitely you.’ Miss Loveling turned to Benjamin and Wendy. ‘She’s done the best drawing and she deserves to win.’
They clapped dutifully and abandoned their own drawings on the bed, their interest in them now lost.
‘May I?’ Her mother held out her hand to Miss Loveling, eyeing Elizabeth for permission. The countless drawings they had shared since Elizabeth was a toddler. ‘Oh, darling.’
‘Quite the artist,’ Miss Loveling said, and returned to her own sketchbook. Her gaze flickered between Benjamin and the paper in front. Elizabeth saw countless Benjamins in all manner of poses and expressions: crouching (perhaps at a fountain); peering (perhaps through steel bars); arms thrown into the air; pointing; laughing; sulking. One in which his mouth was a dark circle of excitement.
‘She is indeed,’ her mother said. ‘Did you know, Pam, that El could draw faces – real, identifiable faces – by the time she was two, two and a half?’ Elizabeth liked this. She’d heard this story before. ‘It’s a gorgeous kangaroo paw, my dear. Ten shillings for you. Benjamin? To your sister, please.’ Her mother kissed her, retied her apron and headed back downstairs.
Val
Val ran a knife around the inside of the cake tin then turned the sponge out onto the wire rack, peeled away the paper and set it the right way up. With the raspberry jam it would be Pam’s favourite. A custard bubbled on the stove. Save a slice of the cake for Gordon, and he and Pam could share it later tonight over coffee, or for morning tea tomorrow.
If Pam could just see Gordon stepping down from the aeroplane, unwrapping his scarf, his cheeks flushed from the exertion of being an aviator, she might fall in love with him. Gordon could be directed this way and that – he’d go along with being fallen in love with. Val even imagined it was the aeroplane making all the decisions, her brother blinking, sitting up, murmuring into the control panel, Yes, whatever you think, over to you. After almost forty years of acquiescence, perhaps Gordon’s body had decided to get on with the business of making decisions and had even let a passing disease take hold.
She wished she’d known about Colleen’s mother’s death from a letter – the better to know what to say.
In the fridge she found the jam and dipped a spoon in and then into her mouth. She squinted through the window at the arrangement of native plums and swamp gums at the end of the garden. She stopped, the spoon on her tongue. Val would love nothing more than to catch Pam and her brother sharing cake at a table in the sun, or plucking at the leaves of a tree and smiling into each other’s faces. Stranger things had happened after people grew up together and all that good-natured fighting and name-calling fell away. Maybe their childhood would prove to yield all sorts of love affairs.
Elizabeth
All afternoon Elizabeth had fought off a strange tide of feeling about Uncle Gordon. The smooth white underbelly of the machine soaring from one side of the sky to the other would be magical to see. She both desperately wanted to see him in his aeroplane – maybe even a wave out the window – and desperately didn’t. Unease slithered through her at the thought of the complicated, heavy machine and its contraptions. Her uncle was not a strong man. He was gentle and easily distracted. And he was sick.
Suddenly, Elizabeth decided she’d had enough of Wendy and needed a break. She looked out her window towards the garden and jumped off the bed.
‘Wendy?’ She told her to take Benjamin into the lounge room and watch the television, whatever they wanted, which of course did the trick, since Elizabeth’s house was the only place Wendy got to watch any at all. And Benjamin was out of her bedroom like a shot, urging Wendy behind him, ‘Come on, come on.’
In the backyard was the woodshed. Elizabeth had seen a whole family of spiders there once, scampering out from under a bucket like spilt ink. White cockatoos liked to perch on the gutter above the double wooden doors, rocking and swaying, lifting their claws and putting them down carefully.
A fortnight ago she had come out to unlock the doors for Gordon, who needed something from inside.
‘Uncle Gordon,’ she’d said before she could stop herself, ‘are you sick?’
That’s like poison, her mother had said.
‘Only a bit, El. Lots of people get sick, I’m afraid.’
He cleared his throat, and she saw him not as a whole but as bits of a body, like the four-by-four-inch illustrations in Malady. His face was no longer his face but a cross-section, his skull an open-cut quarry. Ghoulish with its two rows of teeth alive and bared, the tongue a creature from the deep. Gordon had been wearing a blue jumper, and Elizabeth saw beneath it to his chest cavity: his heart the shape of a vegetable pulled from the soil. When he lifted his arm to cough: an exposed elbow joint. She saw the bones of his fingers and their hard eagerness to flicker and tap.
‘Dad’s a doctor.’
‘So you know, then. About people getting sick.’
Elizabeth nodded.
‘You’re a smart girl. And there are many types of being sick, and not all of them – as good as your dad is – have easy cures.’
‘What’s it called?’ she whispered. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
Uncle Gordon dropped his head.
It had been the wrong thing to say, she was sure. Anything else might have been better than that. Fear that began with her mother on the couch had grown, but wavered while she went to school and chatted with Wendy about hockey and tennis and whether there’d be a nuclear war soon. The fear was a fog around her head. Uncle Gordon won’t die, is what she had told her mother and her mother had rubbed circles on her back.
Elizabeth could now see the tops of Wendy’s and Benjamin’s heads in the lounge room. Benjamin bobbed up and down on the couch. Elizabeth laid her hand on a tree. She should bring the washing in off the line for her mother. She looked at the pond. Picture a tiny bubble, her mother had said about the frogs.
Elizabeth’s head felt untidy, not clear, not light.
One night last week she had dreamt of the aeroplane tumbling overhead. Out of the clouds it had appeared like a bird, Uncle Gordon a speck at the control panel. In that way of dreams, Elizabeth could feel his aliveness as though she was inside his chest cavity, and Gordon had been thinking about this moment for years, this part of himself that the aeroplane would prise open. The rhythm of the plane thrummed against the sky of her childhood – for the neighbourhood in her dream had slipped to the street she played in when she was younger.
