Fall Girl (4 page)

People often mistook me for Ruby's daughter, and sometimes for her younger sister. She was slender with a model's bearing, high cheekbones, coiffed hair the same auburn as mine, but sleek instead of my wild curls. She still has it set twice a week at Luigi's, in the High Street, where she makes appointments under another name and always pays cash. She taught me a certain refinement, a sophistication. She knew neither of us should wear pink or navy on account of our hair. Her eyes are a cool brown instead of green like mine.

She never laid a hand on me except that one day. When we pulled up outside Cumberland Street at the end of the long drive, she opened her door quickly and came around to mine. She yanked me out by my arm. Her crimson nails dug into my skin. She left the car door open and dragged me into the house, along the narrow hall, through the sittingroom and the library and into the kitchen. The kitchen is as large as a flat, with pale green-washed panelled cupboards and four sinks made from stone and hooks from the ceiling hung with saucepans and frypans and utensils of all kinds. The pantry, where the trapdoor opens, is the size of my room and filled with glass jars of peaches and pickles, bags of potatoes and bowls of walnuts. Ruby and my Aunt Ava are still compulsive preservers.

She opened the trapdoor by the hidden rope and led me down the stairs to my father's study. She banged on the door with the side of her fist, the rhythmic knock that let him know it was her. The door opened; he'd pushed the button hidden inside the top drawer. He was concentrating. He had his jeweller's loupe wedged to his eye and a velvet bag lying on the desk before him. I remember the bag vividly, the plush burgundy against the green leather of the desktop, its pile brushed in a sweep by his fingers.

‘Lawrence,' Ruby said.

He looked up from his desk. My father was also an observer: he must have noticed the way she said his name, the look in her eye, the way she gripped my arm. The loupe fell. He caught it before it hit the desk.

‘Well,' he said. ‘My little girl is back. How did it go?'

She spun me in front of his desk and folded her arms. ‘Tell him. Tell him what you said to me in the car.'

He raised one eyebrow, laced his fingers. I could see his pinkie ring gleaming in the lamplight.

‘I just thought that maybe it wasn't right, taking money from that lady,' I said, after a time. I spoke to the carpet. I could not lift my eyes from my shoes. ‘I thought maybe I shouldn't have done it.'

He stared at me for a moment, and his face turned grey. He wiped his brow with the handkerchief from his top pocket and I knew this was to stall before he spoke, that he was waiting until he was composed. When he was ready, his voice was soft. ‘Come here Della,' he said.

I wished I could melt down into the rug but instead I walked around the desk and stood in front of him. He had never punished me before, not properly, not once. One of my paintings was framed behind his desk: a gentle meadow with yellow sunbeams raining from clouds. I remembered the day I drew it, how happy I had been to give it to him.

He pulled me into his arms and sat me on his knee, then he opened my fist to find the ten dollar note, folded now, hidden. He sighed as though he was wounded. The shame that I had said this to him was such a weight on my shoulders I felt I could barely raise my arms. All I wanted was to say sorry and take it back, take it all back.

‘I can see you did very well, Della. But I think you forgot rule number four,' he said finally. He bit his bottom lip, then he said, ‘What is rule number four?'

‘To watch, until the mark is out of sight,' I said. ‘To never look at the money until you can't see the mark anymore.'

‘That's right,' he said. ‘You didn't, did you Della? You didn't watch her walk away.'

Sometimes you think a job is over, but it's not over. I'd been told this. But that day it was true. I hadn't been able to take my eyes off my ten dollars. I've never made that mistake again.

I shook my head. My father raised his eyebrows at Ruby.

‘I watched her,' Ruby said. ‘Five-eight or five-nine. Early forties. Medium build. Light brown hair with grey roots, short, wavy. Just over twelve stone. Bad varicose veins on her calves. I watched her walk to the end of the street and turn the corner. She walked tall. She was proud.'

My father straightened my skirt, and bent a little to pull up my white socks. ‘Della, listen to me very carefully. There are two types of people who give us money. The first type are greedy people. They think they can get something for nothing, or profit from other people's misfortune. They are opportunists. Look. See these stones?'

As he spoke he lifted with one hand the burgundy bag and five rectangular emeralds skidded on to the desk. They were twinkling, beckoning things of beauty. I had to restrain my fingers from touching them. My father picked one up between his fingers and turned it so it caught the light.

‘Greedy people will buy these stones because they think they are real. They will rush to give me four or five or ten thousand dollars, write out their cheques or count out their cash and shove it into my hand. I won't be able to dissuade them, though I will show suitable reluctance to take their money. They will buy them because they think they are worth many times that. They think they are stolen gems, smuggled from a country at war with itself, where people slave and die to find them. Sometimes even children have to dig in deep holes to find these jewels. Do you think it's fair, that children have to do that?'

‘No,' I said. No, it was not fair. Every child should have a room like mine and a father like mine and not have to dig in a hole. I was the lucky one.

‘And by the time these buyers realise the stones are not real, if they ever do realise it, the cheques are cashed and the account is empty and untraceable and I have vanished. They won't go to the police, either because they are too embarrassed or because they would have to admit they were trying to commit a crime. Now, don't people like that deserve to be punished?'

I nodded. Of course. Of course they did.

‘The second type of people who give us money might be rich, or they might not be. They can be old or young, or honest or not. But they have one thing in common. They need to feel better about themselves. That woman walked down the street with her head held high after she gave you that money. She would have felt better about herself as a mother, because
she
would never leave her children alone in the city. She would have told the story of how she met you to all her friends, who would have praised her generosity. Ten dollars is a small price to pay to awaken that woman's compassion, Della. You gave her a gift. Never forget that.'

I looked up at my father's wise eyes, then down at the note folded in my palm. I placed it carefully on the desk next to the stone.

‘You can have it,' I said. ‘It can go in the kitty, with everyone else's.'

‘Of course it'll go in the kitty,' said Ruby, and she walked around the desk with her hand outstretched.

My father shut his eyes for a moment, and pursed his lips. While Ruby waited he opened the bag to return the emeralds then picked up the note, spread open my fingers and placed it back in my hand. He curled my fingers into a fist around it.

‘This one time you may keep it. Buy something that you fall in love with, Della. We define ourselves by possessing things of beauty. But I want you to think carefully about this. Remember, who makes the laws of this society?'

‘The rich and the heartless,' I said.

‘And why do they make these laws?'

‘To protect their own privilege, which is the result of the luck of their birth and generations of oppression of the weak.'

‘And what do we think about these laws?'

‘We reject them,' I said. ‘Utterly.'

He stood then, and set me on my feet, and walked over to Ruby and squeezed her empty hand. ‘You did well today Della. No lessons this afternoon.'

Ruby opened her mouth to object and I ran in case he changed his mind, as fast as I was able back up the stairs to the kitchen. It was late afternoon now but I did not stop for a biscuit. I ran down the hall to the front of the house and up the grand staircase all the way to my attic bedroom. I did not look back although I could picture Ruby standing there, one hand on her hips, watching, thinking my father was too easy on me. All at once I was exhausted. In my room I lay on the bed, I curled into a ball. I fell asleep almost instantly.

The next day Ruby drove me to my father's friend Felix's house. In Felix's backyard was a long corrugated iron shed with rows and rows of trestle tables spread with piles of things: televisions, jewellery, toys. Not secondhand rubbish taken by drug addicts when people are at work. New. Still in boxes from broken shipping containers or backs of trucks or department stores.

While Felix and Ruby chatted and sipped tea, I walked the aisles with Timothy, Felix's son, who was Sam's age and who stayed half a step behind me, hands folded behind his back. He wore a child-sized apron, the pocket filled with pens, and he nodded at my choices like a miniature shopkeeper. I picked up this and touched that, thinking how best to spend my ten dollars, wondering which thing of beauty would define me. I came home with colouring books of fairy-tale princesses and a purple tin of imported chocolates, each one individually wrapped in foil the colour of emeralds.

We are all in the diningroom at our home on Cumberland Street, at our usual Thursday night family meeting where everyone takes turns discussing the work they are doing and the tasks they need the rest of us to do. My father sits at the head of a table not dissimilar to the one in the Metcalf mansion, but Cumberland Street is not aloof or pretentious. Our house is one of us, part of our family. It has been our home since before any of us can remember, although it is old now and has seen better days. The grounds were once a smallish apple orchard with privacy and space but the trees are uncared for and litter the ground with their fruit, wizened and sharp-sour. None of us is a farmer.

How Cumberland Street came to belong to us is a story my father is fond of telling. Over one hundred years ago, there was an ancient forefather who was a canny speculator. Through his friendship with a member of parliament, he knew in advance the direction a new rail line would take south toward the bay, and he showed remarkable foresight in buying up all the land along the proposed line. When the information was finally released to the public, he sold the land for a fabulous sum. It was an ingenious scheme and his only expense was a generous gift to his good friend the politician.

With the profits he bought Cumberland Street. A house this size would be impossible to find now but in those days homes were built for large families and servants and weekend parties. The land alone would be worth a fortune. But it is ours, free and clear, and we will never let it go.

There are no farms around here anymore. The outskirts of town have reached us. Neighbours encroach. Every few weeks a leaflet appears in the letterbox from a local real estate agent asking if my father wants to sell. He snorts and throws the leaflet in the bin.

Cumberland Street is large enough to be a private hotel or small hospital. It has a dumbwaiter, open fires and a warren of rooms painted different colours and wallpapered with stripes and spots and florals. The carpets don't match and the tiles are from other countries, from far away. Halls go nowhere, doors open upon themselves. It is a maze of extensions from different eras, the results of windfall jobs over decades. There are at least a dozen bedrooms in the main house and a number of liveable sheds under the apple trees where things can be hidden. There are cellars and shelters that only we can find, with doors buried flush to the ground under drifts of leaves. For us as children it was the most magical place to play, a land of hiding places and secret nooks.

Here in the diningroom is where we eat and work, although my father still has his study hidden under the trapdoor in the kitchen. On the sideboard are the dirty dishes piled from dinner. In one corner is the old blackboard we have always used for planning. My father won't be convinced to use a new-fangled whiteboard. Paper is, of course, out of the question. On a small side table is my father's ivory chess set. This is how he teaches us the importance of strategy. We all learned to play like demons when we were very young.

‘For the love of God, Dad,' I say. ‘A Nobel prize?'

My father is like a football coach, all diagrams and plans and assigning roles. He has chalk in one hand and the other dances across the buttons of his old-fashioned adding machine, the kind that feeds a trail of paper all over the table. He chuckles and twirls his pinkie ring. All the men in our family wear pinkie rings, genuine stones, as expensive as they can manage. It is an old grifters' tradition so that, if the worst happens, family and friends are never burdened with the cost of a funeral.

‘I didn't say I
had
a Nobel prize, Della. That would be foolish. I just hinted to your professor of an announcement that might possibly be expected in the next few weeks. I told him in the spirit of collegiate solidarity, in the strictest confidence.'

‘He'll blab it all over town.'

‘No doubt, seeing as he swore on his mother's grave he wouldn't tell a living soul. It's no matter. Your professor will tell the story with such conviction that not one in a hundred people will pipe up and admit they've never heard of me, or rather, the name you chose for me. The rest will just nod because they don't want to be thought fools. Besides, you'll have the money by then. No one will care.' He pats my hand. ‘Small fibs are no good Della. People see through small fibs in no time. Stun them into submission. Lie only if you must, but if you must, make it a colossus.'

This from the wisest man I know, the man who taught me to be cautious. Ten, even five years ago he would not have taken such a risk. He would have considered the consequences: that Carmichael would know the Nobel committee never inform candidates in advance, or that someone else was likely to win, or that the announcement itself was months away. It would take only two or three phone calls to unwind our story. It will be all right of course, but it is only my father, with his skill, his experience, who could get away with this. I worry about the bad example he is setting for my cousins.