Charades (26 page)

“It's not
that
 —” Charade began.

“You got some objection to Liz?”

“No, but Mum —”

“Trev and Liz are my kids, same as you. Don't you ever let me hear you say different.”

“But Mum, what about Siddie? Which way did you get him? What about me, Mum?”

“Here's the goods about you, Charade.” But something would happen to her: frown, smiles, tightenings and untightenings chasing themselves across her face. She couldn't say the name. She couldn't be the one to start it. Charade had to wind her up.

“Was Nicholas my dad, Mum? Was he truly and ruly?”

“Yes he was. Quit pestering me, Charade.”

“Tell me about him, Mum.”

“Nothing to tell. He wasn't a Tamborine bloke. He was a university man, he had books coming out of his ears just like you. You sure didn't come in a car, if that's what you want
to know.”

Ten were noisy, ten sometimes crowded Bea out of the shack, especially Charade who had to know everything, another golden talker, a chip off the old tale-telling Nicholas block. Bea had to get away sometimes, had to slip down past the casuarina, past the curtain fig, walking deeper, deeper, to where the rainforest swallowed you down in one green gulp. It could do precisely that if it wanted. Once she took hold of a loop of monstera vine and it moved. Aghh, she screamed, and not a sound came out of her mouth. Eye to glassy eye, she and a python took stock. She watched it swallow, watched the undulation slide along its slimy throat. Goodbye world, she thought. But it spelled something out with its neck, skywriting, and slithered off.

She took slow deep breaths. She walked on. Here the light could barely get through, it was murky as night and pew! Oh God, oh pew, a stinkhorn. She held her nose and looked behind a fallen tree that was soft as foam rubber. Just as she thought: bloody maiden veil fungus.

That's me, she thought, watching how the flies came, how they drooled, how they couldn't stop coming, landing on the lace, crawling up to the stinkhorn cap. Weird things, maiden veils, pretty and demure as a bride, with a smell like rotting meat. What she saw: three white pricks, as fat and long (ten inches) as even Bea could wish pricks to be, jutting out of the squishy log, pushing themselves up a crinoline skirt, a bridal skirt, a skirt of white lace that fell around them like ballerina's tulle. Flies (dupes, go-betweens) crawled up the skirt to the helmet, the tip of the cock, the stinkhorn cap, getting spores on their sticky little feet.

That's me, Bea thought. Always got flies up me skirt: favourite fungus of the forest, the Queen Bea of Tamborine Mountain.

Would she ever lure Nicholas back?

Yeah, one day, she sometimes reckoned. But over there, outside the edge of the rainforest, beyond Beenleigh, beyond Brisbane even, beyond both the Stradbroke islands, where the rest of the world went wheeling: who could say where he was? Or whether …

Ah struth, in other ways she could never shake him off. Some days she didn't think he'd get rid of her too easy, either. Maybe he reached for her in his sleep, maybe she hung around him like a charm he couldn't get undone. What she could never figure out was
why.
It wasn't the Pom talk, he was the only Pom that she could ever stand; and she'd had lovers who were just as good, it couldn't be that. What he was, was the boy with the recorder, the boy who was under a curse.
Circe.
That was his word.

“Bea,” he'd moan, coming to her straight from that Ashcan sheila. “She's getting further and further away, I can't touch her. Literally. She won't let me. We're both of us under a curse.” Bea would cradle him in her arms and between her legs, he'd suck her breasts. “I can never make her happy,” he'd sigh. “And I can never get away. She's like Circe.” She'd stroke the soft skin inside his thighs. Time would stop, they'd slither in and out of the slick saucer of each other. “Ah Bea,” he'd sigh. “Bea.” He'd kitten-lick her, purring to himself. “You can shut down thought.”

She'd stiffen, she couldn't help it. I got thoughts, she would want to say, green snakes gliding through her brain. But thought was something he got somewhere else: from the Ashcan sheila, from Kay.

“Your little sister's quite something,” he said once. “A kingfisher mind.”

Hiss, hiss,
went all the green snakes, forked tongues flicking. And Bea saw
thoughts,
Kay's thoughts, darting blue as birds, sweet as bloody wild orchids, putting out branches, tendrils, spinning lawyer-cane hooks, reeling him in.

Did it work? In the world they had gallivanted off to, the world beyond Stradbroke Island, had Kay's kingfisher thoughts swooped off with him? Was he telling her the tales of once upon a rainforest night …?

She turned around and here was Charade back from Sydney, Charade the student, the university woman, up from Sydney with a torn bit of newspaper that she waved like a flag.
Sydney Morning Herald,
no less.

Would anyone knowing the whereabouts of Verity Ashkenazy
etcetera, etcetera, a post office box, please, in Toronto, where the hell was Toronto? In Canada, Mum.

Okay, Canada then. Bloody Kay, like a bad penny, could have counted on that, she supposed. So that's where she buggered off to. But was it good news or bad? Mr and Mrs Nicholas-Kay of Toronto, but if he was there with her … 
Verity Ashkenazy, possibly married, married name unknown but possibly Truman.

So he wasn't there with her.

Kay was fishing for Nicholas, that was what it meant. Though maybe not. Kay always had a thing about the Ashcan, she thought the Ashcan knew everything there was to know. Fat chance. That iceberg, that frigid snob, that manipulating bitch, that Circe.

Look: there was Nicholas. She always reckoned he'd come back as a bower bird, black as Old Nick himself, the stud of the rainforest, just his type, holding court in his bower. Bea stopped to watch. Bea held herself still as moss. Between the twin towers of twigs, all that peacockery, all that show-off stuff, the bower bird (male) stepped this way, that way, a mating dance. What a poseur. (That was a Nicholas word. He'd said it about some bloke who was keen on Kay, some university bloke. She had to ask Kay what it meant. And Kay said:
“Nicholas
is a poseur.” That was after the Glasshouse Mountains trip, Kay was mad, Kay was icy as a Melbourne swim. About what, about what? So Bea knew that something had happened.)

See what I have built, the bower bird said in his dance steps. Look at all my brocade: he liked blue and green, he pointed his left claw, his right claw, he dipped his long beak. Bea saw flowers, bits of paper, bits of glass, a piece from her own ripped blue floral dress,
that bloody thief!
taken from her clothesline last week. It was like a blooming modern painting, his bower-bird bower, blobs of colour all over the shop. Will you walk into my bower, little hen chick? Will you climb my twiggy towers, see my etchings, let me ruffle your feathers, kiss your downy arse, let me tell you another tall tale?
Oh oh oh totus floreo,
another Nicholas song, another bit of bower bird junk, what a wonderful bower bird am I. Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you walk into my bower? Will you, won't you let me add your little birdy heart like a charm to the hundreds on my chain?

Bloody Nicholas.

And just look at those stupid bower bird hens lining up: into the bower, out again, a bloody production line. Stuff it.

And then off they went, all the stuffed little, lonely little hens, to build the
real
nest, lay the eggs, hatch them, feed them and grow them, without a skerrick of help from His Highness, the Lord of the Bower. This was the Bower Bird Solution, the answer to the Scrub Turkey Mum.

Oh stuff it. That's the way it is: cop the sleepy smug look in that little hen's eye. She's not complaining.

Is Bea complaining?

No. Yes. No. As long as Kay hasn't got her kingfisher claws …

Bea turns around and there's a letter from Charade, two letters — one from England, one from Toronto — well whadaya know? Kay's just as much in the dark as Bea is. Bloody Green Island again. Star-shaped mole! Pull the other one, Kay.

God, she misses Kay.

She misses nosy Charade.

And where is Nicholas building bowers, holding court, telling tales?

2

Goodna

This was the pattern: first Bea had to get someone (Joe McGillivray usually; sometimes Mick Donovan) to give her a ride down the mountain to Beenleigh. There was a Golden Fleece petrol station with a restaurant, very fancy: printed menus, proper beer glasses, bread and butter knives, paper serviettes pleated into waterlilies beside your plate. It was right on the Pacific Highway, and that was where the Brisbane bus came in. Flashing arrows promised:
Anything you want while you wait! Queensland beer on tap. Yatala pies, six kinds, best meat pies in Australia!

“A bit pricey,” Bea sniffed, scanning the menu.

“Ah, c'mon, Bea. Once a month.” Joe McGillivray, publican, was keen to make a splash. “Pie's on me.” It was Joe's special joke, each time, to ask the waitress about the serviettes. “What's this then? Frilly toilet paper?”

The Halfway House they called it, meaning halfway to Surfers Paradise, halfway to those beaches clogged with johnnies from Melbourne and Sydney and God knew where else these days, Japan, America, you heard all kinds of gobbledegook. Once in a blue moon she and Joe would drive down with the kids in his battered Holden. Horrible. Not the surf, naturally, and not the miles of white sand which were as good as ever, a blooming miracle those beaches and always would be, world without end. But the place was thick as Vegemite with bodies. Not to mention the bloody arcades!
Aw, Mum, c'mon Mum, please, please, some more fairy floss, Siddie's got some, c'mon Mum.
And then getting the stragglers out of the shops and across to the beach and basting them so they wouldn't burn to a crisp in the sun and then once they got in, the little buggers, you couldn't drag them back out of the water.
Aw, Mum, just one more time, Liz has had lots longer than me, just one more go in the surf, Davey's still in, how come I gotta? aw Mum, c'mon Mum, please?
And every time you turned around, you tripped over someone's thighs, someone's buttocks, someone wearing nothing more than two bits of coloured string; you could hardly see the sand for bare flesh. “Funny,” she'd say to Joe. “I reckon I've lost me knack for people. I been living on the mountain too long.” Yeah, Joe would say. Him too. The few regulars in his pub were his limit. Otherwise, give him possums and wombats any day.

“So what's brewin', Bea?” they'd ask at the Halfway House. “Got itchy feet? Gotta blow the cobwebs away, gotta whoop it up in Brisbane once a month?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she'd smile. “Babs'll be waiting for me. Gonna kick up our heels.”

“Like back in their old Duke of Wellington days. You notice how she don't let me come along?” Joe raised bushy eyebrows. “I gotta put her on the bus and bugger off. Just what do they get up to? That's what I'd like to know.”

“Wouldn't you just.”

“Gotta send young Charade along to keep an eye.” Joe winked. “A kid in tow, they can't get up to too much, know what I mean? Keeps them outta trouble.”

Once a month Bea did this. Sometimes she took Charade with her, sometimes not.

But what did she and Babs do when the bus got into Brisbane, which, depending on traffic, took an hour or more from Beenleigh? Just how did they kick up their heels? Answer: those Duke of Wellington sheilas, those movers and shakers, they went and sat in the Botanical Gardens like any two lace-and-lavender ladies from the Eventide Homes. Sometimes they sat in the kiosk, more often they found a bench somewhere with a lot of bamboo and papyrus around, somewhere private, somewhere where you could watch more ducks than drunks or metho drinkers. While Charade, who was seven, eight, nine, climbed trees or floated boats in the pond, they sipped tea (or maybe beer) in paper cups, they smoked and swapped stories until it was time for the Ipswich bus. They'd check their watches, and Charade was twelve and curled up in a tree fork somewhere with a book. They'd get scones and jam and cream at the kiosk, and where was thirteen-year-old Charade? Down by the bandstand talking to boys, likely as not, and they'd have to drag her away because it was time for the Ipswich bus.

The bloody Ipswich bus.

Bea (and Charade, if Charade was there, but at the age of fourteen she put her foot down; she'd go to Brisbane all right, but you couldn't get her on the Ipswich bus), but back when, Bea and Charade would make the trip out, not quite all the way to Ipswich (but still, another hour in the bloody bus), get the visiting over and done with
(God!
Babs would say,
you gotta be off your rocker, visiting a place like that!),
and get the bus back into Brisbane. Babs would meet them again at the terminal, they'd drive out to Babs's flat in West End, and that was it. Some whoopee.

Maybe they'd have a church hall spree on the way to Babs's flat, pick over the secondhand clothing for the kids (Babs had four; she had a bit of trouble making ends meet). They'd stop in at the church in West End, the big one on Vulture Street where Babs went on Sunday nights every once in a while. Well you know, she said, it was the music mostly, for when she felt down — and when didn't she? — and also they always helped you out in a crunch, like if you ran a bit short on food before the end of the month.

“You ever go to church these days, Bea?”

“You gotta be kidding,” Bea would say. “Too many people still praying for me soul, I can't give in.”

“You send the kids to Sunday School, but.”

“Yeah, well.” Bea grinned. Shrugged. Looked sheepish.

Then the two of them, Bea Ryan and Babs McGinnis, ex-barmaids at the Duke, ex-George Street beauties, would discuss the news of the world, the significant and shattering events of history, the trends, the Great Depressions, the boom times. Remember McGinley? Babs would say. The one who used to come in after the sugar cutting gave out, back from Cairns regular as clockwork? Remember Ross Andrews? Jesus, Florrie Sears — remember her? — she always had the hots for him. Remember that bloke with the tattoo on his you-know-where? I wonder what happened to him. I tell you who I saw last week, you'll never guess, Pete Kennedy, remember him? the one with the crooked prick, it had a bend in the middle, old S-bend Kennedy, what a scream, what a riot, remember? Remember the night …? Remember, remember, a litany old as the hills, telling off men like beads.

“And what about Nicholas?” Babs might ask. “What about Charade's dad? You ever see him these days?”

“Ssh,” Bea would frown, looking over at Charade. “Little donkeys have big ears.”

“Okay, okay, the big N. You still carry a torch for him?”

“No comment,” Bea would say. “Scratch that one.”

Oh men, they'd laugh, throwing up their hands.
Men!

“Still, I got what I wanted,” Bea mused. “I got me kids.”

Babs screwed up her face. “I wouldn't say no to something better. Wouldn't kill me. I could do with a man around the house.”

“I dunno,” Bea said. “I dunno. I reckon I've had a good life.”

Come morning, Bea and Charade got the bus back to Beenleigh. Till the next time. Once a month, regular as moonrise, Bea left her Bea-lings and turned her back on the rainforest and went to see if Brisbane was still where she left it. “Siddie can
handle things for a night,” she'd say. “A regular scrub-turkey-father, that kid. More reliable than Charade, I'm telling you. Never can tell when she'll bugger off with her head in a book. The world could fall in, and she'd have her head in a book.”

“Bea,” Babs would say, as it got closer to time for the Ipswich bus. “Let it go. You don't have to do this. I reckon there's a rule that we don't have to do stuff like that. No one has to. It's bloody well morbid.”

“No way I'm going, you can't make me,” said Charade once she turned fourteen. “I'm staying right here with Aunt Babs. I've got a book, I've got exams to study for.”

“She's fine here, Bea. Let her stay. If you ask me, you're crazy to go yourself.”

“Yeah, well,” Bea would shrug. “I dunno. I reckon I gotta. If it was you, Babs …”

“If it's ever me,” Babs said firmly, “I wouldn't want anyone I know to see me. I'm telling ya, Bea. If it's ever me (Jesus Christ, touch wood!), I don't want you bringing me flowers. Ah
struth.''
She'd light another cigarette. “You never know when enough's enough, that's your problem, Bea. You never did.” She'd inhale and hold it long enough to wreck her lungs. “Was Jimmy the Bookie still in, last time you were there?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bea sighed. “Still taking bets on the side. He'll be rolling in it, if he ever gets out.”

“What about Maeve?”

“Not last time. She's in and out. She gets dried out and goes home for a while. Then she hits it again, and goes round exposing herself and they chuck her back in.”

“Jesus,” Babs shuddered. “We didn't do so bad with our lives, Bea. Touch wood. I'd never want to end up there, I'd rather die.”

“Yeah, well.”

“What about Sleeping Beauty?”

“Same as always,” Bea said. “Reckon I'll have another beer before I go.”

It was easier that way. Easier if she'd had just enough to make her
shambly
(a nice word that, Siddie's word) — though Bea would have to swipe a handful of mint leaves from some garden on the way to the bus stop. She'd have to chew them or they'd never let her past the front desk.

“Here we are,” the bus driver would say, letting Bea and Charade off at Goodna. “Sooner you than me, luv. I wouldn't touch that place with a forty-foot pole. Not if you paid me.”

What did Charade remember of the trips to Beenleigh and Brisbane and Goodna?

She remembered Babs. A high-voltage woman, that was how Charade thought of her in later years. She was someone who vibrated, who gave off the kind of steady hum that turned heads, that burned up anyone who came too close, that left Babs's own nerves in a constantly inflamed and smoking state. When Babs lit one of her cigarettes from the stub of the last, her fingers trembled. When she laughed, Charade believed she could see blue flame. There was a glow about Babs that few people could resist for the short run. In the long run, the charred men reeled from her house.

When Babs McGinnis and Bea Ryan walked down Queen Street to wait for the Ipswich bus, Charade saw people fall like dominoes in their wake. Not just men. People turned, people crossed the street to see them better, people looped around in their tracks and followed.

Babs McGinnis talked with her hands. She made manual lightning. And then Bea would laugh, and the laugh of Bea Ryan was something to haunt people's dreams: a throaty laugh, so sexy and infectious that children joined in, women felt edgy but couldn't stop themselves from smiling, men thought feverishly of ways to meet her, they racked their brains for something witty to say to her, they considered a mad sprint, a collision, anything to touch her. And Babs laughed with her hands, made her hands flutter like birds, whoosh, whoosh, how her fingers went off like sparklers, and Brisbane held its breath and stopped to watch.

On the bus, after Babs hugged her goodbye, Charade warily inspected herself for scorch marks.

And what could Charade say about Goodna, that place of lost souls? She remembered greyness, endless variations of greyness: in the grounds where even the flowers seemed defeated; in the reception room where grey officials asked grey questions; in the corridors where grey ghosts passed up and down, seeing nothing.

Close to Bea however, and Charade stayed very close indeed and held her mother's hand, close to Bea there was a bubble of light and colour.

Bea would stop in the common room where a woman wrapped in a grey housecoat stared at nothing. She might have been a goblin — no, a troll — folded up into one corner of a couch. From her crossed arms and clenched hands, knuckles and elbows protruded like little white arrowheads, and her hair writhed spiky and snake-like about her face. Charade shivered. Charade thought of someone dipped in a rubbish pit. She bit her lip and tried not to look at the woman's legs, but they pulled her eyes and she stared with horrified fascination. Was it real skin? It was shiny, wrinkled as used tissue paper, the shin bones pushing so close against it that they seemed about to cut their own way out. The woman wore grubby socks, short ones with the cuffs rolled over, and a pair of men's slippers a couple of sizes too large. The socks gave her a clownish look, a grotesque circus look: World's Oldest Little Girl. Perhaps the most awful touch was a satin ribbon tied to a lock of her hair, a dirty pink satin ribbon, its ends trailing across her forehead.

“Maeve!” Bea called, and the bubble of light fell across the woman's face. “Maeve darling.” And Bea would laugh and bend over and hug her.

Something happened then.

There was a thing Charade had seen at school, a thing her teacher had done to show the way plants breathed. First a jam jar was placed on the windowsill and filled with water, then red dye was added, then a lily was placed in the jar. Now the miracle: Michael Donovan took bets on how many minutes as the lily sipped up colour through its stem, blushed along the cheek of its creamy petal, bled along its flutes and curves, became a striped lily, then a strawberry one, then a blood-red bougainvillea lily.

This happened to Maeve. “Bea,” she sobbed. And colour began to move through her. “Oh Bea, oh Bea, where did my ribbons go?” And the colour moved past her socks, past her knees, over the bony elbows, up to her cheeks. “I hid my sequins, Bea,” she laughed. “They can't find my sequins, they can't take them away.” She gurgled. She began to do little bower bird dance steps in her floppy slippers. Her excitement spilled into tears and giggles, into strange behaviours.

Charade, fascinated, watched the housecoat open and close, open and close. She saw tattered lace drawers.

“There, there, Maeve.” Bea was motherly, calming, a gentle buttoner-upper, a re-tier of pink ribbons. “Let's just sit.”