Every morning she would remove her black nightgown to bathe and weep at the moonlike whiteness of her body. After towelling off it flushed pink in the foggy mirror and that brought her also to tears. An old boyfriend once told her that wearing black all the time was a form of overcompensation which would make her complex worse. How does a black man feel, he used to say, when he gets naked after wearing a white all day? Like a toothy nothing. A shadow. His nickname for her was pearl and although he had been good for her at first was not part of her life anymore.
Daddy pushes her higher and higher and as she soars back and forth she has to quell the urge to leap off towards mummy who is standing on the tanbark with a camcorder. Hold on tight, daddy warns, or you’ll have a great fall. Like Humpty Dumpty? That’s right, all cracked and all that. And runny? And runny. But it would be nice to go gooey in mummy’s arms. Nothing would be nicer than that. Other kids’ daddies are pushing them even higher, except now she stops pointing her legs out at each push. And a mummy pushes but not as high and wonky. Tucks them in tight because she is a smart girl and knows that by tucking them in she will get lower and lower until it is only a safe little jump onto the tanbark, not a great fall, and then she can run right over to mummy. She is the fastest in her grade- faster than any of the boys. The sun is behind a big woolly sheep but not completely behind it. Purple spots still flash if she looks at it too long, and reddish ones too. Maybe mummy will play the guessing game with her; when she runs over there is no need to ask because mummy says let’s play the guessing game now Suzy-love.
One morning in a summer cold snap she was cutting her fringe over torn magazines in the kitchen when the phone rang. It startled her and she and cut it crooked. Twice a week she showered at night and trimmed her black fringe sheer across the forehead the next morning, just above her eyebrows raised as far as they could go. If too much skin showed through it affected her less at the level of appearance than of morality, just as an open-toed pair of shoes could reduce her, in her mind, to a person not worthy of anything but derision. She screamed and answered the phone in a voice quavering with fury. She grabbed at her fringe like mad. The voice on the other end belonged to the lawyer in charge of her grandmother’s estate, her estranged father's mother who had died four days earlier. Beverley has bequeathed her farm to you and would you come to the chambers in Queen Street to sign the papers. She had recently taken a job two blocks from the chambers at a call centre asking people if they were satisfied with their current energy provider, but broke for lunch at one and could sign the papers provided it was quick, and provided it wasn’t some sort of sham. Because what was a woman she hadn’t seen in ten years who had six adult children doing giving her a farm she never liked; anyway she would break for lunch at one and go. Did that fucker have any clue what he’d made her do. From a redwood bowl on the kitchen counter she took her mobile phone, tinkling the car and house keys, touching a few silver coins. She smelled her hands as if by reflex and they were the way blood tasted. It was just after nine. Her shift started at ten; if she skipped breakfast and wore the outfit she liked best and saved for the indecisive days there was at least half an hour left to devote to her fringe. Messages from men had been left on her phone in the night, messages to which she would flippantly fail to reply but obsess over in her imagination to the point of sickness.
Opening the blinds on the only window in her apartment, she saw an overcast morning and a woman exactly opposite from her, on the same floor of the neighbouring apartment block, sitting at a flimsy-looking table setting on her balcony spreading wax on her legs. They caught eyes and held the gaze an unusual length of time. Then the other woman went back to her legs. Just as a sheet was being torn off she lowered the blinds to half-closed, so the train lines were out of sight. While drawing the shutter chord she saw right through her pallid hands, like the extremities of a dying woman, laden with thick blue veins bulging from the skin. The nail polish was black but cracked; pink specks had begun to show.
She had not only to lock the toilet door but the door of the bathroom housing it and the door to her apartment. And as many times as the filling cistern would allow she flushed, muffling the noise of her own body. She never looked at her thighs and kept the light dim and had the clock radio in her bedroom up loud. One hand on the flush, ready to hit it as soon as the hiss of water quieted, she picked up an ornamental china dolphin from among the rolls of paper stacked on a small chrome shelf. The base pathetic aloneness of that stinking box. The dolphin was lacquered smooth and turned over easily in her fingers. She flushed. The dolphin turned over and over in her fingers with only the slightest coaxing, as if it were the real thing barrel rolling at play. Her cold knee jerked and her heart hurt- she flushed.
If I tickle you here and it tickles over here, what is that called. Sydneystheesha.
What can you hear. Kids and mummies and daddies, and cars. What else. Trucks, and birds, and the fountain and people throwing coins into the fountain, and whirring somewhere. What is the whirring, listen carefully. Cut it out Linda, says daddy. Come to think of it I’ve actually had it and I mean that this time. Don’t listen to him Suzy-love, just listen to the whirring – do you still hear it. Did you even really here it before daddy was so mean or were you just trying to impress mummy. She touches the tip of her nose. You’re going to mess her up with this hyper-conscience bullshit and I won’t let you, how about that, so stop or I’ll and he moved his mouth but nothing came out. His eyes were open like when he played peekaboos. Hyperconsciousness, and she wants to play, don’t you Suzy-love. The whirring is from the big box on that roof mummy. Very good. Then mummy began to cry and while she wiped her eyes with a tissue said she’s right, she’s right about everything, I know she is. And she looked at daddy. What is all of this though, she said crying with her arms out wide. What do you want me to say Linda. You’ve had too many great falls into oblivion and it’s your baby who has to suffer. And daddy took her but mummy held her arms, and it hurt being pulled in both directions. Mummy let go and daddy put her on his shoulders. He sighed, started to walk away, sighed again and turned back to mummy. She liked it up on his shoulders because she could play with his hair, which was long and curly like a girl. They were all sitting on a bench now and she was swinging her legs out and in the way she stopped doing when she was really high to come back down. In the middle of mummy and daddy. Mummy and daddy were still. The box on the roof was whirring and dripping some water too and a man was selling ice creams inside the tiny house with the box on top, in the middle of the park where the bench was. She could hear a drip drip drip now and told mummy so; mummy said you’re a very good girl. Her daddy said would you like an ice cream Suzy and she said she would, and could she eat it over near the slide because mummy and daddy have to have a grown-up talk, because mummy is off the planet and mummy said shoosh shoosh. The ice cream was rainbow swirl. The ice cream man had white hair coming out of his white apron with green stripes.
Still smarting from the phone call she began to cut, in the bathroom now; the paucity of hairs falling away each snip bordered on the absurd, like wood-shaves from a precious carving. What was an extra half centimetre if it meant it would be straight. The phone was switched off at the outlet. Her lashes kissed the mirror and every blood vessel in her eyes was there, arresting, too many, her breath a visible murk rubbed off and put on and rubbed. Evenness draws less attention but not fake evenness, anything better than accidental crookedness. What was an extra half centimetre. The perfume on her neck seemed to refract off the glass into her nostrils and when ten minutes had passed and her neck was clammy with concentration it was a nauseating bouquet. Her head ached from the perfume and from keeping her eyebrows raised up. No sooner had she contracted those muscles to their maximum than another tiny contraction was forced out, the way as a girl she would breathe in as much as she could for diving contests in nanna’s pool but manage some extra gulps right before going down.
Once she had done nearly two laps and heard nanna spluttering on the surface after less than half that. To the end and a final big kick off in the other direction and still nanna spluttered. The farmhouse had very high gables made of orangey wood with circle windows in them, white-rimmed, and drapes like wedding dress veils. There were a lot of cobwebs on the gables and on the big red trusses because nanna couldn’t get up to them with her broom. On rainy days she would look out the windows downstairs with those drapes pressed right up to her eyes; all was blurry, the raindrops gone, except for their pitter-patters on the iron roof. Mould between the shower tiles and in the back corners of the floor, and in the bath drain. Hairs piling silently on the floor like ash. Black nightgown undone, black lingerie becoming itchy. Work starting but this nowhere near finished. And gum leaves clogging nanna’s pool filter, gum nuts bird-pecked onto her tiny head from high high above. Still no sign of daddy, didn’t he say this weekend. So close the blood vessels were worms and the irises veined, more yellow than blue, she realised what it all meant, at which she stepped back and looked at herself, too exhausted to cry, then at the scissors, thinking it probable that today there would be no work or lawyers’ chambers. That she would turn down the farm was a certainty.
In the time it took for the headlights to die away completely in the night, nanna had got out and was halfway up their front path. Even then they seemed still to be giving off the faintest of faint glows. What was keeping them aglow. Their letterbox, which had stood askew for months, obstructed the front gate like a stalker. The roses had not yet come into bloom but still looked pretty as bulbs. Uncollected junk mail fallen from the crooked box and made sodden by the rain left a spongy trail of neglect all the way up the path. Peeking from upstairs, she divided her attention between nanna and the headlights, until the porch trellises blocked nanna from view; presently the porch lit up bright and the glow of the headlights died.
Always the precursor to that weak knock, the creak of the middle stair going down, that weak hug, the kisses. Not a perfume smell but special soap, the kind she kept in the vanity bound with string in threes, purple, red, white, would come at her in gusts as the embrace continued, fill her nose and her head with memories of similar encounters, stay on her skin until she showered. It was a sort of scarily beautiful smell that she imagined beautiful witches might give off. Then questions about how school was going and were there any boys she fancied at school. At the same time daddy would be in the kitchen making dinner and mummy would be fixing her a suitcase. None of her good dresses ever went in. I don’t want you to get mud stains on your fineries, no mud stains on your fineries, mummy always told her, or sometimes no mud stains, not on her fineries, mummy would mumble to herself as she packed.
Nanna had wide shoulders for a lady and smelt like freshly mown grass. Her eyes were spectacularly green, like baby grass, she never wore makeup like mummy, her boots sounded like a hammer if they hit on stuff by accident. There were fine lines in her leathery skin like the lines on a leaf from up close. With skin so brown she always looked the way people did when they got back from the beach, but she said it was from working out in the sun all day and you could even get burnt on a snowy mountain. She always wore the same blue jeans and one of three shirts, with the same heavy brown coat if it was cold. After dinner nanna would always give her a plastic bag with a chocolate bar and little packet of cashews and a two-dollar coin inside. But she never ate the cashews because they were soft and not salty at all. Then nanna would go with mummy and daddy to the rumpus room. Upstairs Suzy-love, go and play with your fairy dolls. Every so often someone’s voice got loud enough to hear, usually mummy’s voice, before things were quiet again, quiet even in the middle of a sentence.
And just once she had crept to the stair above the creaky middle one to listen except that in the excitement of being a spy she didn’t make out many words, mostly just the racing heartbeat inside her head. How long this time, how long this time, she did hear. When she slept it was on her stomach and she liked to be facing the wall. If she was facing a wall it made her feel safe and sleepy. If she wasn’t facing a wall she heard her heartbeat so loud, like drums or soldiers marching. At nanna’s her bed was in the middle of the room and against the walls were chests, wardrobes, a sewing desk with an old-looking lamp. Heavy things you couldn’t move. Out to Warrandyte with you precious girl, mummy and daddy would come into her room and say, out to the cows and the chickens. Nanna will take you to school and daddy will come and get you in just a little while. The little while was usually one week but often two and once it was nearly five weeks. Daddy always told her to enjoy herself but also, if mummy wasn’t nearby, that he was sorry; she didn’t understand. How would you like to feed the chickens, nanna always said. They miss you. She said she would like that but had to try hard not to cry. Then the porch went black and the headlights came alive again. There were no lampposts on the road to nanna’s; it was always so black.
Where did daddy sleep when he was little. Did he sleep in this room. Well you see, I only moved in here once your daddy and uncles and aunt were all grown up and your grandpa gone to heaven, but at our old home he slept in a little redwood bed that we made together, and his mattress was filled with feathers, and on his walls there lots of pictures of the planets and stars – did you know your daddy always wanted to be an astronaut. Being the youngest he spent plenty of time in my bed though, which was the room next-door. But he never lived in this house, not here - you're the only child who has. Did you see what was in the second suitcase. No I didn't open it yet. Well okay, wait until tomorrow. We learn about space at school. I like Neptune the best nanna, do you know, because it’s blue. And Pluto. Is it just. Your daddy always liked the moon, and Saturn for its rings.
