Something Special, Something Rare (16 page)

The sisters raised their eyebrows at each other.

Matthew took out his wallet, but Mandy's father was standing ahead of them, a fifty dollar note ready in his hand. He was watching Sue McInerney too, until Cathy nudged his elbow for the waiting checkout girl.

As they were driving home Matthew looked out of the window at the yellowing trees. He said, ‘It's quite beautiful here really. I could live here.' He didn't look at Mandy, but was watching the back of her father's head. ‘When we finish uni,' he added.

Dad looked only at the road.

After lunch that day the family drifted into silence. Dad was slouched in his armchair, reading a Thomas Keneally book with his glasses halfway down his nose. Cathy was at the end of the couch, with a little collection of nail polish remover and enamels and cuticle-softener bottles arranged before her on the coffee table. She had a foot up on the table, rubbing a nail with a cotton ball. Their mother had put on Handel's Messiah, as she did at every family occasion. Mandy lay on the carpet reading a magazine, propped up on her elbow. In quiet parts of the music she could hear her mother and Matthew chatting in the kitchen over the washing up. He was saying something about the local council and town planning jobs.

*

One morning out in the kayak she sees one of the enormous pale jellyfish they'd noticed much further out in the deeper water, from the boat. Now it glides alongside her. She wants to touch its fleshy, globular tentacles, the huge thickened dome of its head. She strokes the water once with the paddle to keep up, following its slow-motion dipping and surfacing. But after a while the jellyfish sinks deeper, and though she stares hard into the dark water as it lowers, it disappears.

The sun is hotter now. She turns to see the house in the distance, the shape of Matthew hunched over the railing of the deck, looking out across the lake towards her.

She waves, then dips the paddle straight down, feels the boat rotate, graceful as a dancer.

*

At the wedding her father talked into one of his microphones, huskily welcoming Matthew into the family, but looking at Mandy. She smiled back at him. Later, father and daughter danced awkwardly together. She was a little drunk. She called, through a space in the song, into her father's ear, ‘You've been happy, haven't you Dad?' He grunted, ‘Oh, love. Course I have.' Then he said, ‘I'm sorry about before.' And she put her head into his shoulder to stop herself from crying.

*

Over the week she teaches herself how to control the kayak, experimenting by keeping her elbows at her sides or lifting them, or by shifting her grip along the paddle. Sometimes she moves through the water smooth and fast, as though propelled by some force beyond herself. At other times she can't wield the paddle; it smacks at the water or bangs down on the side of the boat, causing it to wobble and rock. But on each outing she spends much of the time simply drifting, gazing into the water. Sometimes she comes across a single patch of bubbles. She tries to stare into the depths, but once again there's nothing to be seen except the sliding, bulbous surface of the water itself.

One morning she sees the small red swatch of a kite high in the air.

When she and Cathy were small their father had had a brief kite-flying craze, driving his reluctant girls to the highest of the bare hills near the town. He would lift his kites, delicate creations of dowel and bright tissue paper, from the boot of the car. Mandy would huddle in her nylon parka, hair whipping her face in the freezing wind. ‘I told you to wear something warmer,' her father growled while he untangled a cord. But Mandy had insisted on her pink tartan skirt and bare legs, and the wind was icy. The girls had to stand, each holding a skein of nylon line in both hands, while their father strode up the hill ahead of them. Then he would throw up each of the kites and shout, ‘Run!', and they had to run over the knobbly tussocky ground, holding the lines high above their heads. The kite would mostly swirl once or twice and arrow straight towards the stony ground. But sometimes, sometimes, it would lift, and the spool would whirl and tumble in her hands, the purple kite lifting higher and higher, and Mandy would begin to smile, and Cathy's green box kite would lift and she would shriek, her head thrown back and mouth wide open, and their father would stand and watch his children falling in love with the high space beyond that small town, with the possibilities of flight.

Now Mandy looks up at the distant red kite in the blue sky above the lake, anchored to somewhere on the distant shore. She remembers the rhythmic tug on the line, calibrating its pull against the weight of her own body, the pleasure of letting out the line, then resisting. She turns from it then, and paddles towards the centre of the lake. But all morning, it seems the kite stays with her, always above her, there in the outer corner of her sight.

The wind rises. She churns back through the water towards the house, breathing deep and rhythmically, pushing the high end of the paddle forward with all the strength of one arm as she dips deep and pulls the low end through the water with the other hand, the choppy little waves slapping over the prow of the kayak.

Afterwards she walks up the garden, her arms and legs pleasantly jittery from the last long stretch of effort.

When she slides open the glass door Matthew is reading the paper at the table.

‘I said I was going to come with you,' he says crossly. ‘But you didn't wake me up.'

The room feels small and airless after the wide gusty space of the lake, the red star of the kite stamped in the sky.

‘Oh, sorry,' she says, as she passes his chair. ‘I forgot.'

*

At noon they gather provisions to go out in the boat for the afternoon. Matthew waits on the deck, hands full with a fishing rod and one plastic shopping bag of bait, and another holding lunch things – a half-bottle of wine with a cork jammed into it, some bread and cheese. His straw hat dangles, sunglasses glint on his head.

Mandy puts a hand to the bench for the door keys, but they aren't there. Matthew watches her from outside, shifting his weight while she scrabbles through the things on the bench: coins, unopened envelopes, a banana, a bottle of sunscreen, three pens, some national park brochures.

‘Hang on,' she calls, moving to the other end of the bench where the owners keep a basket full of miscellaneous stuff. She peers into it. Fishing lures, magnets, pens, more sunscreen, a computer disk, some cassettes with the brown tape knotted in loops, a plastic tub of moisturiser.

‘Come on,' calls Matthew, irritated.

She straightens. ‘I can't find the keys.' She walks to the door. ‘Did you have them or did I?'

Matthew groans. ‘You did, because when we got home you opened the door and I carried in the shopping.'

This is true. She turns back, hands on her hips, thinking, scanning the room. The keys have an enormous plastic Bananas in Pyjamas key ring. Impossible to lose. Suddenly she feels a wave of dislike for Matthew, standing there ready for a picnic.

‘Are you going to help me look?' she asks, hands still on her hips.

He sighs, puts down the fishing rod and the bags, jostling them into a corner of shade by the door. She thinks she sees his eyebrows lift as he bends, pushing the things about noisily, but when he stands again he is smiling tightly. She wants, suddenly, to smack him on his smooth, shaven face.

‘I don't know where the fucking things are,' she says viciously, and begins striding about the room, flipping cushions and snapping pieces of paper.

‘Don't worry, we'll find them,' he says. But making it clear, in his tone, that the delay is her fault.

They each begin to wander round the house, bending and straightening as they search, and he calls out questions. ‘Did you take them out of the front door?'

‘Yes.'
She hurries to check. Not there.

‘What did you do then?'

From the hallway she can see him now in the bedroom, lifting shorts and shirts to shoulder height, listening for keys in pockets.

‘I don't
know.
'

He keeps yelling out questions, which she doesn't answer.

She moves, her body bent, through the rooms, lifting every cushion again, running a hand beneath each one. When she comes back to the kitchen he's standing in front of the rubbish bin below the bench. ‘I guess we should empty it. They could have fallen in.'

She does not think the keys could have fallen in. They would need to fall at a 45-degree angle, backwards and under the lip of the bench top. But she has nothing better to offer. ‘Mmmm,' she says.

She can feel her temperature rising, a headache beginning. They have been looking for twenty minutes. Matthew is still standing at the bin, hands on hips, his back to her. She is beginning to feel a panicky pain beneath her ribs. But Matthew is quite calm, standing there watching the bin as though it were a view.

It
is
her fault. This fact makes her angrier.

‘Where the – ' she lifts a pile of heavy books and then lets them fall from a height, slamming on to the table
‘–fuck
are they!'

She falls into one of the chairs, grabbing shoes from the floor, shaking each one.

She looks across at Matthew. ‘What if we don't find them?'

She hears her voice, the sound of her own panic. He doesn't turn around, doesn't answer.

‘What are we going to
do, Matt
?'

Then as she watches him she sees his hands in his pockets. He turns around slowly. She stares at him, and he smiles.

He's got them.

‘It's OK babe, calm down, we'll find them.' He takes his hands – carefully, it seems now – out of his pockets, steps towards her across the orange carpet that reminds her, suddenly, of pubic hair. He leans down and puts two hands on her shoulders. She feels her body stiffen, her head is hot.

‘Are you sure you didn't put them in your pocket accidentally?' she asks slowly, keeping her voice even, looking him in the eyes. He rears back, making a face. ‘Course I'm sure!' But his hands stay on her bare brown shoulders. She glances down at his pockets, trying to see any possible shape, but he moves off, soundless, back into the kitchen, and bends to open the fridge door. ‘My flatmate once put keys in the fridge,' he says, squinting into the square of light, reaching in to shift jars and bottles.

Mandy goes to the bathroom. She feels sick. She remembers the possums, his stroking her arm.

Breathe.
It's ridiculous; of course he doesn't have them.

They have just gotten married.

She hears the fridge door close and then another noise, his voice. She runs into the kitchen.

‘Ah, shit. Sorry, nope. My car keys.' He holds them up.

But he's still smiling that odd little smile. She sees him glance back at the rubbish bin.

Mandy's heart begins to jolt in her chest. She walks to the bin.

‘I'll do that,' Matthew says, but he stays where he is, running a hand lightly along the top of the fridge.

She feels all the blood has gone out of her somehow, she is suddenly exhausted. ‘It's OK,' she murmurs. ‘I lost them, I'll do it.'

He says, ‘Babe, don't be like that.' But he doesn't move.

She hauls the heavy, thin plastic bag out of the bin, across the carpet and over the sharp lip of the metal frame of the sliding door. The bag tears and liquid oozes out. She grabs newspaper from the outdoor table and crawls around the deck, spreading the pages about. She does not care that Matthew is standing there, watching her.

On the hot boards of the deck she crouches, upends the sweating black plastic and the thick, foetid smell springs up at her as the chicken bones and rotten fruit and oyster shells and nameless bits of sludge slide out. She lifts the bag away and a last wad of prawn shells falls wetly on her bare foot. The pink shells, and now her foot, are covered with tiny crawling ants.

She kneels then, in the rubbish, not bothering to flick off the ants, picking through the sodden remnants of the garbage with her fingers, knowing she will not find the glint of metal there in the coffee grounds and onion skins and Band-Aids, among the screwed-up tissues and the black plastic trays dripping with red meat juice.

She thinks of her father's warm, rough hands over her own seven-year-old ones, holding the whirring kite spool. She thinks of all his disappointments.

She does not look up when she hears Matthew cry out triumphantly from the living room. He appears in the doorway, holding up the keys on their huge blue and yellow plastic glob. ‘Would you believe it, under the bloody magazines! I'll just have a piss and then we can go.'

And smiling his smile, he tosses her the keys where she kneels.

She catches them in her two hands, cupped against her chest. She feels the sharp edges hit her breastbone.

CLOUD BUSTING

TARA JUNE WINCH

We go cloud busting, Billy and me, down at the beach, belly up to the big sky. We make rainbows that pour out from the tops of our heads, squinting our eyes into the gathering. Fairy-flossed pincushion clouds explode. We hold each other's hand; squeeze really hard to build up the biggest brightest rainbow and bang! Shoot it up to the sky, bursting cloud suds that scatter escaping into the air alive.

We toss our bodies off the eelgrass-covered dunes and down to the shore where seaweed beads trace the waterline. Little bronze teardrops – we bust them too. Bubble-wrapped pennies.

We collect pipis, squirming our heels into the shallow water, digging deeper under the sandy foam. Reaching down for our prize, we find lantern shells, cockles, and sometimes periwinkles, bleached white. We snatch them up filling our pockets. We find shark egg capsules like dried-out leather corkscrews and cuttlebones and sand snail skeletons, and branches, petrified to stone. We find coral clumps, sponge tentacles and sea mats, and bluebottles – we bust with a stick. We find weed ringlet dolls' wigs and strings of brown pearls; I wear them as bracelets. We get drunk on the salt air and laughter. We dance, wiggling our bottoms from the dunes' heights. We crash into the surf, we swim, we dive, and we tumble. We empty our lungs and weight ourselves cross-legged to the seabed; there we have tea parties underwater. Quickly, before we swim up for mouthfuls of air.

We're not scared of the ocean, that doesn't come until later. When we're kids we have no fear, it gets sucked out in the rips. We swim with the current, like breeding turtles and hidden stingrays as we slither out onto the sand.

We climb the dunes again, covered in sticky sand and sea gifts. We ride home and string up dry sea urchins at our window. We break open our pipis and our mum places each half under the grill or fries them in the saucepan, with onion and tomatoes. We empty our pockets and line the seashells along the windowsill. My mum starts on about the saucepans; she wants to tell us stories even though we know most of them off by heart, over and over, every detail. The saucepans she says, the best bloody saucepans.

Billy and me sit at the window while she fries and begins her story. I'm still busting clouds through the kitchen pane, as they pass over the roof guttering and explode quietly in my rainbow.

It was Goulburn, 1967, Mum would begin. Where's that? We'd say. Somewhere far away, a Goulburn that doesn't exist anymore, she'd answer, and carry on with her story.

*

Anyway, Goulburn, '67. All my brothers and sisters had been put into missions by then, except Fred who went to live with my mother's sister. And me, I was with my mother, probably cos my skin's real dark, see, but that's another story, you don't need to know that. So old Mum and me, we're sent to Goulburn from the river, to live in these little flats, tiny things. Flatettes or something. Mum was working for a real nice family, at the house cooking and cleaning; they were so nice to old Mum.

I would go to work with her, used to sit outside and play and wait for her to finish. And when we came home Mum would throw her feet up on the balcony rail, roll off her stockings and smoke her cigarettes in the sun. Maybe talk with the other women, most of them were messed about, climbing those walls, trying to forget. It wasn't a good time for the women, losing their children.

Anyway, all us women folk were sitting up there this hot afternoon and down on the path arrived this white man, all suited up. Mum called down to him, I don't know why, she didn't know him. I remember she said, ‘Hey there mister, what you got there?' A box was tucked under his arm. He looked up at all of us and smiled. He come dashing up the stairwell and onto our balcony. I think he would've been the only white person to ever step up there. He was smooth.

‘Good afternoon to you ladies. In this box, I am carrying the best saucepans in the land.'

Mum sucked on her cigarette and stubbed it out in the tin. ‘Give us a look then.'

The suit opened up the box and arranged the saucepans on the balcony, the stainless steel shining and twinkling in the sun. They were magical. All the women whooped and wooed at the saucepans. They really were perfect. Five different sizes and a Dutch oven, for cakes. Strong black grooved handles on the sides and the lids, the real deal.

‘How much?' Mum said, getting straight to the point.

The suit started up then on his big speech about the saucepans: Rena ware, 18/10, only the best, and this and that, lifetime guarantee, all that sort of stuff. The women started laughing. They knew what the punchline was going to be, nothing that they could afford, ever. Their laughter cascaded over the balcony's rails as they followed each other back into the shade of their rooms. ‘Steady there Alice, you got a little one to feed there too!' they said, seeing Mum still entranced as they went inside.

Mum sat there, watching his mouth move and the sun bouncing off the pans. He told her the price, something ridiculous, and Mum didn't even flinch. She lit up another fag, puffed away. I think he was surprised, maybe relieved that she didn't throw him out, and he rounded off his speech. Mum just sat there as he packed up the saucepans, getting himself together to leave. ‘You not gunna let me buy 'em then?' Mum said, blowing smoke above our heads.

‘Would you like to, Miss?'

‘Of course I bloody do, wouldna sat here waiting for you to finish if I didn't!'

He laughed. Mum told him then that she couldn't afford it, but she wanted them. So they made a deal. Samuel, the travelling salesman, would come by once a month, when money would come from the family, and he would take a payment each time.

Mum worked extra hours from then on, sometimes taking home the ironing, hoping to get a little more from the lady of the house. And she did, just enough. And Samuel would come round and chat with Mum and the ladies and bring sweets for me. He and Mum would be chatting and drinking tea until it got dark outside. They became friends after all that time. Three years and seven months it took her. When Samuel came round on his last visit, with a box under his arm, just like the first time, Mum smiled big. He came into the flat and placed the box on the kitchen bench. ‘Open it,' he said to Mum, and smiled down at me and winked.

Mum pressed down the sides of her uniform then folded open the flaps and lifted out each saucepan, weighing them in her hands and squinting over at Samuel, puzzled. With each lid she pulled off tears gathered and fell. ‘What is it, what is it?' I was saying, as I pulled a chair up against the bench. Under one lid was a big leg of meat, under another potatoes and carrots, a shiny chopping knife, then a bunch of eggs, then bread. And in the Dutch oven, a wonky-looking steamed pudding. Mum was crying too much to laugh at the cake.

‘I haven't got a hand for baking yet. Hope you don't mind I tested it out?' Mum just shook her head, she couldn't say a word and I think Samuel understood. He put on his smart hat, tilting it at Mum, and said, ‘Good day to you, Alice, good day, young lady.'

And when Mum passed, she gave the pots to me.

*

When my mother finished her stories she'd be crying too, tiny streams down her cheekbones. I knew she would hock everything we ever owned, except the only things we did – five size-ranged saucepans, with Dutch oven. Still in their hard metal case, only a few handles chipped. I run my fingertips over fingerprints now, over years, generations. They haven't changed much, they still linger patiently. They still smell of friendship. I suppose that to my grandmother, Samuel was much like a cloud buster. Letting in some hope from the sun. Their rainbow had been their friendship. And I suppose that to my mum, Samuel was someone who she wanted to stay around, like a blue sky. To Samuel, my mum and grandmother, I don't know, maybe the exchange was even, and maybe when those clouds burst open, he got to feel the rain. A cleaning rain and maybe, that was enough.