Lilian's Story (21 page)

But Father could not let me achieve that, and filled the doorway before I could break apart and fly free of my body. All sound was drawn away into the tiles and past the windows. I watched as everything else fled and Father and I were left with each other. The brown buttons of the cardigan that Mother had given him made a small tinny noise like rats' feet as he took it off and let it drop to the floor.

In every room of the house, the air that I had stilled fled, and was replaced by trembling and fearful vibrations. I could hear my voice, a thin reedy cry like something choking and not being rescued. Father said nothing at all, but the sound of his breathing was like a thudding machine in the silence. All around us the house stood shocked, repelling the sounds we made. My cries carried no further than the carpet of the stairway. The silent rooms would take no part in my struggle, but swallowed the sounds indifferently.
No!
I heard myself cry with a feeble piping sound.
No! No!
The house gave back only silence, and the panting of the desperate machine that was Father.

Telling

Mother was back then, and might have wondered at her corset dangling on the knob of the bathroom door, but was busy giving us pieces of poker-worked wood that said “Voolalu” and coconuts all around. She smiled often now, at last a happy woman who had left all cares behind.
I have done all my duties
, I heard her telling her friends in the parlour.
No one needs anything from me now.
I had seen her take the gilt book and rifle through it wonderingly before dropping it into an empty flower pot on the terrace.
I
am as free as a breeze
, she told me with her eyes vague, but seemed to me more like a stagnant puddle than a breeze. Somewhere on her cruise she had lost a tooth and her smile now showed the blackness of that missing tooth in the side of her mouth.

I tried to begin.
Mother
, I began, and stopped. I could not start the sentence that would tell her what had happened. My mouth and tongue were someone else's now and even the words that rose into my mind had nothing to do with me. Whatever had happened—and I would not ask myself just what that had been—had happened to a mass of flesh called Lilian, not to me. I cowered in that flesh, my self shrunk to the size of a pea, but still I tried to speak to Mother. Perhaps she would release me from it all, or take me over, or save me. So I began again. The sentence I had to say began with “Father . . .” so I tried to begin.
Father
, I said. Mother turned with the smile that showed the blackness of the lost tooth.
Lilian.
She smiled so that I could not bear to look, and was about to make a joke.
I am not Father, Lilian, I am Mother.
She was pleased with her joke and tapped my knee with a bony finger.
Smile, Lilian, such frowning all the time is bad for your complexion.
She lost interest then, and took out her stop-watch and watched the seconds passing.
So, Lilian, what were you
going to say?
she asked at last, but I took the stop-watch from her, feeling it warm like an egg in my hand, and timed the flight of a gull.
I have forgotten
, I said, and it was almost true.

Father laughed at the bulls' pizzles
, John told me,
then he gave
me money and left me there.
From behind his dull face, John's eyes watched me and almost knew what I had to say, but he did not want to hear me say it.
I did not spend it
, he said with cunning.
Oh no. I have kept it, and am saving up.
Those were more words than John liked all at once, and he took up his tuba and entered its embrace.

I could not make the words come for Aunt Kitty either, but she did not try to joke.
What is it, Lil dear?
she kept asking, and the barley water she gave me was as dark as her own this once, and made me cough.
Drink up, dear,
and tell me.
But all the words I had ever learned did not seem enough, or the right ones.
Father
, I gasped into the barley water, slopping it down my chin.
Father.
When I woke up later on the mould-smelling couch, a headache behind my forehead, I still believed that everything mattered, but I now also believed that some things were better forgotten.

Too Much Skin

What is up, Lil?
Duncan asked on our beach, and held my knee.
Something is up with you, Lil.
I felt his breath on my neck as he bent close and tried to examine my face by moonlight. My face was not my own and I did not want it examined by one who had been my mate. I did not belong to myself and could not give even my knee to Duncan.
Nothing is
up,
I heard my voice say in an unwelcoming way.
There
is nothing up.
But his hand on my knee was intolerable and his face was too close to mine. He was about to enter my skin through my face and knee. He could breathe too deeply and scatter me into many fragments. Nothing was keeping me together now.

When I stood up, my knee continued to tingle where his hand had been on it, and my face was numb where he had been so close, looking so hard, watching each pore for its secret.
What is up, Lil?
he asked again, Duncan, that man of few words. But I did not answer, had no story to tell him, but rubbed with a handful of sand at my knee until I felt the skin raw and cold. Duncan, who had been my mate, sat watching the water while I was a housewife on the beach, smoothing the sand where we had disturbed it. I felt tears like gravel in my eyes but I could not cry, or tell Duncan what was up. He stood, and was taller than I was. His chin was manly.
Well, Lil
, he said, and did not try to touch me again.
Better get along back, eh?

Things were closing down like lights going out. I looked at the skin of my hand in the daylight and it was alien to me. My sturdy feet tramped over grass and dust, carrying a large stranger to whom people spoke, mistaking her for me.

Lil
, F.J. Stroud said, and there was a long silence while he blushed. We stood in the draughty gallery underneath the clock tower of the quadrangle while rain poured down beyond the doorway and filled the air with cold and damp. At last he said in a dull voice unlike his own,
Lil, I find I am
in love with you
. His voice was dull as if too much practising had jaded the words.
In love
, he said again, and tried to sound more convincing. Around us, cold stone was no help, and puddles were forming around the spikes of our umbrellas. I said nothing, but stood in that stranger's flesh, waiting, and listening to where some gargoyle had snapped off and was sending water cascading down over the doorway.
You are the only person who is real for me
, F.J. Stroud said in a different way, and fumbled until he was holding my hand.
All the others are fictions, and I am, too.
He had never held my hand before, and I could feel his fear. But I was full of fear myself and it was hard not to yell.

Don't
, I said, wanting no hand to touch mine, no one to be as close as he was to me.
What, are you betrothed?
F.J. Stroud exclaimed, and jumped back wards as if bitten.
Did
that f lannelled fool beat me to it?
When I began to cry he cried, too, but I did not want such closeness, or crying together. My tears stopped when I saw how wet his cheeks were, and the way his hands looked so white as he clenched them.
It is not that f lannelled fool or anyone
, I said.
It is just me.
I cannot bear it.
F.J. Stroud caught at my arm and cried,
Lil,
Lil!
and I tried to pull free, cruelly wrenching my arm from him, wanting silence and nobody near.
I will do anything, Lil
, F.J. Stroud shouted so that a man in a mackintosh stared.
And I will have those diamonds soon, remember.
His voice echoed wildly from the stone and was caught in the dark beams arching over us.
Stop crying
, I said, but I whispered and F.J. Stroud did not hear over the rain.
Look at me
, he said, and gripped my elbows so that I could not avoid his blotched wet face. Nothing had ever repelled me as his face so close to mine did then. All faces close are distorted and made hideous with emotion, and it was hard not to panic and flail. I tried to remind myself that this was just F.J. Stroud, whom I knew, who was my friend, who had shown me swans and ripped flowers off their stalks for me, and was not an enraged stranger, too big for me, with a face I could fight, thrust against mine and shouting.

Running Away

It could only be temporary, but it was necessary.
I am going
bush
, I told them.
Joan and I are going to collect specimens.
No one asked,
Of what?
and no one knew that Joan was not coming with me. Even her smooth sallow skin would have been more than I could bear. Under a country sky I needed to greet myself alone, like a stranger.

I was eyed as I mounted the bus at Central, but the boys with the wet-looking hair decided that, although I was young and pink, there was something about me to be avoided. They whistled instead, insolently, jeeringly, as my large blue behind laboured up the narrow steps into the bus. I wished then that I was old and immune.

Further north, over the sea, I had heard that the buses were full of brass spittoons into which old men spat red juice. On this bus there were not spittoons, only curling sandwich crusts in brown paper bags, and a ginger beer bottle that rolled backwards and forwards along the floor until the woman behind me stopped it and put it in her basket.

As the bus snarled around sickening bends, northwards, I decided that I would get down only when instinct dictated. It dictated, and I obeyed, in a flat ochre town and I crossed the road unevenly, my bag hitting the back of my knees, to the hotel. The shadow of a lizard was huge on the wall where men in hats stood with beer and stared. I knew that I had guessed right, and stopped in the right place, when I looked out of the window of the room they had given me. I stood wiping my face with a corner of the dampened towel, wiping my face with the word CALEDONIAN and staring out above an expanse of grey tin roof. Beyond that I could see some sheep moving tentatively across a paddock, watched by a man in a hat.
My country, right or wrong
, I told the towel, and changed to go downstairs.

It soon became clear that trousers on young women had not been seen before in this calm town of wide streets. On a young woman of my bulk they silenced everybody. To one man, whose blue eyes were brave enough to meet mine, I said,
It is men like you who are the salt of the earth.
Perhaps it was pompous. He blushed thoroughly so that his angry eyes were sharp flints of blue in his red face. His jowls, where the razor that morning had not been stropped for long enough, became mottled and purple. He shifted the beaded glass of beer to his left hand and hitched up his trousers so that for a moment his genitals bulged through the cloth. He would have liked to hit me, I thought, or perhaps kiss me, but could not do either.

Who do you think you are, young lady?
said the publican, safe under his grey hat.
Just who do you think you are?
I told him,
I think I am Boadicea
, and watched him frown.
But in fact I
am Lil Singer.
He had no answer and I saw him turn in the doorway, filling it like an outraged cow. Behind him a girl, too young to know better but tall, peered at me until her father's shoulder rose up and herded her away.

From the nearest glass I took a long swallow and gave it back to the hand from which I had taken it.
This is how
I became fat
, I lied to the man whose hand it was. He was a comfortable older man with thick veins like vines that threaded the backs of his hands and a face that had once been surprised, perhaps, when his first corpse fell headless at his feet in the trenches, and had never been surprised since.
Which way?
I asked, and he thought slowly, while I watched the stubble grow on his cheek, before he pointed down the dusty road.
Crik's that way.

I had not often swum in fresh water, the sea had always been my element. This was thin water. It did not cling to my skin or buoy up my body, but let me drop into its still depths like air. The clay of the bank squeezed between my toes like something slippery and good to eat. A duck skidded across the surface and a few reeds bent into the water. I could see nothing of my body in this yellow pool. I could have disappeared from the neck down and been a head like John the Baptist's, floating upright and reproachful on the surface.

The first small boy was no higher than my thigh, and he stared with one finger up a nostril. His stare and snot were pleasant enough companions as I stroked to and fro in the yellow water. But he was joined by bigger boys, whose grey shorts hung below round bellies and whose lizard eyes flickered in contempt. I did not wish to shock them with my bulk and staring nipples, and stayed stroking and stroking under the water.

A bigger boy, whose face came to a point like a badly made puppet, finally yelled,
What are you doing?
and I called back,
I am being wet
, which silenced them all for some time. They shifted from foot to foot, brushed flies away, scratched their armpits. Mainly they stared. When they spoke again, it was with stones. They flung them loosely, not aiming at me, and the splashes freed them to shout again. I did not allow their words to enter my mind. Noise jogged my eardrums, but it was not words. And in any case the stones were forcing me further away. At last I was behind a slime-covered sunken log where small creatures with legs scuttled under the bank as I grasped it. There the stones could no longer reach me and I massaged on my shoulder and neck the tender places that would be purple tomorrow, yellow next week.

I gave them a long time to lose interest and leave. My body became wrinkled like a sultana, my fingers puckered and white, my feet numb. Behind me the bank of the creek rose up, thorny, dense with aggressive bushes on this side. Aborigines know how to insinuate themselves through such bushes but I, with my large white body, soft as a grub, could not. When at last it seemed the boys had all gone, I never wanted to see yellow water again.