Friday Brown (9 page)

The days went like this: we woke with chattering teeth and stumbled about in the dark as winter ended and spring began; the first person up boiled an ancient kettle that looked like a penguin, using stolen electricity from a series of concealed extension cords leading to the basement next door; ten chipped mugs were lined up, instant coffees were poured and distributed like hand-outs in a soup-kitchen. Low, inane chatter, like polite conversation at a funeral. Some days Carrie’s and Darcy’s niggling sped up the exodus and one by one we’d slink out through the cellar window, through the trapdoor.

There was a laundry roster: an off-white linen bag sat clumped by a back door that didn’t open. To keep costs down, clothes had to be worn three times before washing. Arden gave the rostered kids a stack of dollar
coins and they heaved the bag into a three-wheeled shopping trolley that veered left. It took two of us to steer the trolley to the laundromat, three blocks away. Everyone liked laundry duty. It meant fifty bucks off your weekly contribution because it was down time. It was nice to sit and daydream in the humid room, to inhale the scent of washing powder and damp air, time to not think about anything, to just listen to the rhythmic hum of clothes flopping and tumbling in the dryer.

Nobody volunteered for dinner or shopping. Only Carrie made an effort in the ramshackle kitchen. She tried to serve up healthy meals but the best she could produce was pasta with a packet of grated cheese mixed through, topped with Worcestershire sauce. It smelled good but anaesthetised my tongue for two days. Usually it was chips and bread, occasionally overheated pumpkin soup with clots of curdled cream. Our diet made me nostalgic for tuna on toast and fresh-picked mandarins.

In the first week I was given a reprieve by Silence. He slipped me two hundred dollars and shook his head when I tried to give it back. He knew that my purse was gone and sent his poisonous looks Darcy’s way whenever she was around. I hadn’t figured out a way to earn money, a way that wasn’t illegal or immoral, or both.

I had a soft spot for AiAi, who scampered about like an untrained pet, and Joe, who kept to himself but who occasionally let fly with his barbed wisdom. Carrie could always be counted on for laughs.

Bree was often absent as she divided her time between her two families. Of them all, she was the easiest to be around.

Arden was a stickler for routine and quick with her slaps. AiAi copped it regularly for not brushing his teeth and Darcy was adept at sensing one coming. I noticed her duck whenever something nasty came out of her mouth, even if Arden wasn’t around. Often there was so much talk flying back and forth that I would tune out. I learned to listen for the quiet.

Mostly, I watched Arden. I wanted her confidence. Apart from her occasional violent outbursts, I wanted to be like her, so at ease in her skin. I felt I could absorb her energy simply by being near her, spinning in her orbit. Every morning, I woke, convinced I would move on; every evening I found myself back in that kitchen, a small part of Arden’s universe.

On my ninth morning in the city, I got up early. Bree and Carrie were still sleeping. I went downstairs, expecting an empty kitchen, but Arden and AiAi were there.

Arden was teaching him to tie his shoelaces.

‘Bunny ears. Look. Over, under, bunny ears, over, under, pull it tight. Do it again.’

AiAi tried, but his bow fell apart.

‘Do it again. Hold the first bit down with your ring finger, then do the loops, otherwise it comes loose.’

AiAi sighed and his shoulders slumped.

Arden went through the motions again, counting each move aloud.

I was struck by her patience, her tenderness, as she guided AiAi’s fingers in a ritual that was familiar but too distant for me to remember it clearly. Where was I when Vivienne held my small hands like that?

AiAi tied his first bow, unaided. It was lopsided and loose, but it stayed together.

Arden tied it off in a double-knot. ‘See? Now, stop bugging me to do up your laces every morning. Or else get Velcro shoes.’

She spotted me in the doorway and smiled. When she did that, it was unexpected, and beautiful.

‘You.’ She pointed at me. ‘Me. We got a date later.’

‘What?’ I stammered.

‘I need you to do something for me.’

‘Why me?’

‘You’re small,’ she said in her cryptic way. ‘And Bree said you climb trees.’

‘Okay,’ I agreed, as if I’d made a choice.

I went up to the bathroom to brush my teeth. On my way back down, Silence was standing on the stairs, reading the walls. He did that a lot. By now I’d realised that it was him, pasting the clippings to the walls, and that it was more than something he did to pass time.

He’d started a whole new section, working his way through a pile of newspapers tied together with an old stocking. He ran his finger beneath the words as he read.

‘Can you show me where the uni is today?’ I asked him.

He nodded.

‘What are you reading?’

The clipping was from 1944. There was a photo of a smiling young man standing next to a bi-plane, taken not long before he was killed in action. Next to it was a guy with a Hitler-moustache, arms folded over his chest. He didn’t look like a person somebody would mourn. There were more like it—war stories and faded obituaries stuck together in a seemingly random way—but when I looked closer, I could see that Silence had cut the clippings into the shape of headstones. He’d created a graveyard. From a distance, the clippings blurred into a dirty, yellow pattern; up close there were all these interconnected stories, overlapping, joined by an event or a person or an emotion.

Further up on the landing wall, he’d stuck down advertisements with women wearing flouncy skirts, posed with household appliances.

‘That’s the anti-feminist section,’ I joked.

Silence shook his head.
Mothers
, I thought he said.

Carrie stomped past, overtaken by Darcy, who was trying to get to the bathroom first.

Darcy dropped her toothbrush on the stairs.

Carrie picked it up and brushed her hair with it.

Darcy screeched and threw a punch.

Carrie deflected it with a forearm the size of a leg of ham. She dropped the toothbrush down into the stairwell
and dusted off her hands. ‘My work here is done,’ she said and continued to the bathroom, unchallenged.

Silence rolled his eyes and began cutting out another headstone.

The university was closer, bigger and more daunting than I had imagined. I couldn’t have missed it, even if Silence hadn’t come with me. Some buildings just look academic. The sun was lazy and warm. Students were stretched out on the lawn with books on their laps.

It was obvious I didn’t belong.

I stopped in the middle of a walkway, jittering about like a haywire compass, getting in everyone’s way.

Eventually, a man trying to pass me with a cleaning trolley asked if I needed help. He directed me to an old, stone building.

Inside, the ceiling peaked like a cathedral. Rainbows of light poured through high, stained-glass windows and the floor squeaked underfoot. The ceiling was ornate and beautiful, but from eye-level the room became ordinary, divided into grey, compact cubicles with desks and computers. Everyone seemed to be busy.

‘Excuse me,’ I asked a woman moving paper around behind a long counter. ‘I’m trying to contact someone who used to work here.’

‘Name,’ she said, peering over the top of her glasses.

‘Professor Green.’

‘First name?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘There are three Professor Greens here.’

‘Oh.’

The woman resumed her paper shuffling and in desperation I placed the photo down on the counter.

‘He looks—looked—like this.’

She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and looked down at the photo. I counted nine seconds before she answered and I felt nauseous for all of them.

‘Yes, he teaches here.’

The man existed beyond that square of paper. ‘Where can I find him?’

‘I’ll check. Wait here.’ She went to a desk, picked up a phone and dialled.

I was a nervous, jangling mess. When she came back, I was leaning on the counter so I could stay upright.

‘He’s on leave. I can’t give you his contact details, but if you write your name and number down, I’ll put it on his desk,’ she said.

I took the pen and Post-it notepad she gave me and scribbled,
Friday Brown.
I didn’t have a number, so I wrote,
Vivienne Brown’s daughter.

She read the note and raised an eyebrow. ‘He’ll know who you are?’

No. I don’t know. I hope so.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

I went outside. Disappointment mingled with relief. Then I realised I would just be a name on a piece of paper to him. He might screw it up and throw it away. The element of surprise would be gone—I would never be
able to see his face when I said Vivienne’s name, I’d never know if his first reaction was an honest one or a practised denial.

A few seconds later, the woman left the building too.

I went after her. I wanted to tell her I’d made a mistake, to ask her to destroy the Post-it note.

She stopped and chatted to a man along the way.

I waited.

When they parted, the woman went into another building.

I followed, but I hung back in the foyer.

The woman trotted down a corridor and tried the third door on her right. She jiggled it, tutted, then continued to the end of the hallway. She reached up and slipped her hand into a wooden pigeonhole.

I figured it was just as easy to take the Post-it note myself.

The woman left through the sliding door.

As I passed the office she’d tried to open, I glanced through the glass window. And stopped. My eye was drawn to a pin-board on the wall just inside the office. I pressed my face up to the cold glass.

Professor Green was a popular guy. Always smiling, often with his arm slung around people’s shoulders. There were dozens of photos of him with his students, some obviously taken a long time ago. I scanned them all. There were none of Vivienne.

His desk was untidy. There were books and papers and
even a half-empty coffee cup, as if I’d just missed him.

When I saw the family photo propped on a shelf, it was like a door slammed in my face. He had four boys. A beautiful wife. A tyre swing in the backyard. He was smiling and he managed to put his arm around all of them.

I felt sick and foolish.

Maybe, over the years, I’d dreamed up the intimacy in Vivienne’s photo, imagined that they had some kind of epic romance. He hadn’t been pining away for Vivienne; in fact, he’d been loving someone else. And they had plenty of children to prove it.

I moved away from the glass. A ghostly impression of my face faded and disappeared.

There were dozens of letters and magazines stuffed into his pigeonhole. I found my note, the latest in a sea of yellow and pink. When I pulled it out, a few others came with it:

Congratulations, a baby girl is such a blessing, Jill x.

Finally, a little girl. Well done, mate. Brent.

Best wishes to you, Caroline and the boys, Ivy and Jack xx.

I tried to laugh it off. Friday Green had a bad ring to it, and there were a few lame jokes I could come up with about swapping one coloured surname for another. Anyway, if there had been a space for a daughter in that family, clearly the opening had been filled.

I screwed up the notes and dumped them in a bin outside.

CHAPTER TEN

When I left the university, I looked for Silence in the glasshouse with the fish. I looked for him in the shadows of trees, in the train station, on the street. I checked his hidden stash, but there were leaves piled up over the box and the empty wallets and purses seemed undisturbed. I saw his face in every slouched, hooded boy but it was never him.

I’d known him for barely two weeks, but I needed his devotion, especially after the Professor Green thing. I knew it was just loneliness and I wondered how many more days I could survive feeling that way, like my heart had caved in and just existing was too much effort.

The secret garden was starting to bloom but the ground still crackled with fallen leaves. Barefoot, I scuffed through the piles from one side of the park to the other.

Silence didn’t show.

I sat outside near one of the brick-arched entrance gates near a bus stop. Not too close that a bus driver would stop, not too far away that I looked like I had nowhere to be. I parked my boots next to me. The footpath was warm from the sun, worn smooth by a trillion feet.

From beneath a rose bush, I dug up a piece of chalky shale embedded in dirt. It was fifteen different shades, from pale ochre to a deep magenta. I drew a circle that became a burning sun and a slice of desert sky. The shale was so soft it melted onto the concrete and when it wore away to a stump, I dug up more. Traffic became a distant hum and above it I heard the insistent whisper of a memory.

I started to write.

At first I couldn’t remember the words—Vivienne’s voice had started to fade along with her face—but, one by one, the lines of her old bush poem came back to me.

Three roads there are that climb and wind

amongst the hills, and leave behind

the patterned orchards, sloping down

to meet a little country town.

I wrote two lines in each square, leaving room for people to pass without smudging my work. Each word had depth, as if I’d gone over and over it with a few different colours.

The road is rough
—
but to my feet

softer than is the city street;

and then the trees!—how beautiful

she-oak and gum—how fresh and cool…

The first dollar came after I’d completed six squares. It landed with a ping and bounced into a bush. I thought the lady had dropped it by mistake and I scrambled after her and tried to give it back.