The Red Shoe (12 page)

Frances and their mother dived straight in the water, swimming in circles around each other like dolphins. Matilda didn’t feel like going in. She sat barefoot on a rock near the water’s edge. She could feel her body burning, her skin was turning pink in front of her. We are white men in a black man’s country, her teacher said on hot days when she shooed them into the shade of the weather shed and they all laughed because, of course, their teacher was not a man and neither were they.

Uncle Paul, hairy like a mammoth, sat on the beach with Elizabeth. He stood burnt matches, head up, in the damp sand.

“This is my army,” he told Elizabeth. “You set up yours, come on. Anywhere you like.”

Elizabeth set up her soldiers neatly in rows. This was before she had her nervous breakdown, when she used to do what people asked. The burnt ends of the matches looked like little black helmets. Matilda remembered how she had asked her father once whether the dead soldiers would still be in their uniforms when they were in heaven, with helmets and guns over their shoulders, like the statue in town for all the dead soldiers. But he said nobody wore clothes in heaven, they didn’t need them any more. In heaven nobody needs anything at all, her father said.

Matilda liked the sound of that. She didn’t much like clothes and shoes and ribbons. She liked arms and legs and teeth and fingernails. She liked her feet, and her toes. She liked the feeling of the wet sand under her feet, as she sat banging the waves with a long, light, dry-leaved branch.

“Five pebbles each,” said Uncle Paul. “We take it in turns and see how many we can hit. You know, like the rifle range.”

After a while, Frances and their mother came out of the water, shivering, wrapping themselves in towels.

“The meat must be cooked by now,” said their mother. “Let’s go up.”

So they climbed up the sandy rocks back to the barbecue, but their father wasn’t there.

“Where’s Daddy?” said Elizabeth.

The food was all laid out on their blanket on the ground, warm meat and bread and tomato sauce and bottles of beer and lemonade. But their father wasn’t there. Their mother looked white, even her lips were white.

“He must have gone for a walk,” said Uncle Paul. “He’ll be back.”

“I’m hungry,” said Matilda. “Can we eat?”

They sat on the blanket and ate and their mother brought out a packet of biscuits and a thermos of tea and still their father hadn’t come back.

“What’s he doing?” said their mother and Uncle Paul answered softly, “Just let him have a bit of time.” Just a bit of time.

Elizabeth took a biscuit and walked over to the edge of the grass, looking out to the land where they lived far away. She kept walking, along the edge of the picnic ground, dragging a stick from the fire in the dirt behind her. Frances, restless, wandered away up to where other children were playing French cricket. She waited around at the edges of the game for a while until the ball came dribbling in her direction, and she picked it up and was part of it.

Then their mother said she was going to lie down in the shade and Uncle Paul said, Yes, good idea, I think I’ll stretch my legs a bit.

So they all went away and Matilda was left alone on the blanket. She lay on her side for a moment, full of food. Right next to the blanket were her mother’s red shoes that she had taken off before their swim. They glinted in the sunshine, red and gold and black.

Matilda reached out and picked one up. She looked around to see where her mother was, but she was flat on her back with a towel over her face, under the shade of a tree. Matilda kicked off her sandals. One at a time, she put her feet inside the red shoes. They were so small, she had to push her toes right down into them. Would she have feet as big as her mother’s one day? It was hard to believe.

Matilda stood up in her mother’s shoes. How tall she was! She took a tottering step forward. She had to be very careful to keep her balance so she held out her arms, like a tightrope walker.

“I’m the Queen,” she said to herself, “the Queen on a picnic.”

She forgot all about the giant sandcastle she had planned on making. This was much better. She could pretend she was the Queen on a boring picnic, who decided she would climb a tall tree to get away from all the bother of being a queen and having to shake people’s hands and wave at the crowds. Sometimes the Queen must feel like climbing a tree, thought Matilda, everybody did.

She staggered off in the red shoes in the direction of the bush, away from the picnic area. She nearly fell over, but the ground was soft and sandy and she managed to keep upright by bending her knees. She was heading for the very tallest tree. That’s what the Queen would do, Matilda reasoned, queens like the biggest of everything.

It wasn’t easy getting up into the first branch, and her feet were slippery with sweat inside the shoes. But then she pulled as hard as she could and the branches stretched up like a ladder into the sky and it seemed she could go on climbing for ever.

When she leaned back to catch her breath, she looked down at the world underneath her and was amazed by how high she had climbed. She could see the whole picnic ground. The children and the grown-ups, the old people on stools playing cards, and the cliffs and the grey and white water and a ferry leaving and further out yachts with white sails. She could even see as far as the half-hidden houses where rich people lived who only came to the mainland on their little motorboats with big dogs to buy fruit and meat.

If I lived there I would not come out for anything, thought Matilda. I would eat snakes like the Aborigines. Matilda had never in her life seen an Aborigine, but in the school library there was a book of photographs of children with the whitest teeth, laughing, leaping into water. Her father told her that Aborigines used to live in the bush around where their house was. That must have been before the cowboys and Red Indians came, decided Matilda.

But now she was safe from guns and bows and arrows, up high in the tallest tree in the Basin, with its white peeling trunk and leaves smelling of cough drops. I can see everything, Matilda thought, I can see the whole Basin. She could see everything, silver and grey like mirrors, like moths, she saw everything, high in the tallest tree.

But as she was looking, she saw something down in the bush and she didn’t understand. She wanted to look away, but she couldn’t. She kept looking, and she was afraid.

She was so afraid she jerked and started to slide down the warm trunk and she nearly fell off, right off the tree down onto the ground way below. But then she remembered Yvonne’s little brother and his lost brains, and just in time she grabbed a branch above her and saved herself.

She saved herself, but her foot slipped underneath her. And down from the tree, down from her right foot into the depths of the grey-green bush, fell her mother’s red shoe.

O
N
M
ONDAY THERE WAS STILL
no school because it was a public holiday. Their mother sat by the phone, dialling number after number again, to see if she could find their father. Matilda lay on her stomach in the living room, listening to her, cutting paper into little pieces. It took her a long time because she was left-handed and the scissors would not go the way she wanted.

It was hard being left-handed. At school when they did writing, she always made a mess of the letters on the page. The teacher hit her on the hand with a feather duster.

“You don’t even try,” the teacher said.

Perhaps her teacher was right, Matilda thought sadly, perhaps she didn’t try. She thought she did, but perhaps she didn’t really. Just as she thought she believed in God but didn’t really, not like Catholics.

“Can we go to the Show today?” asked Matilda.

“No,” said their mother.

“Why not?”

“We can’t, Elizabeth’s sick in bed,” said her mother, because Elizabeth had caught a cold from her walk in the rain the day before.

“We can leave her behind,” said Matilda.

She tossed up all the little bits of white paper she’d been cutting into the air, so they floated about her like tiny little snowflakes.

“Will Daddy come home soon?” asked Matilda.

No answer.

“When’s Daddy coming home, anyway?” said Matilda.

“I don’t know.” Her mother stood in the middle of the room, her hands in her hair. “I just don’t know.”

“Come here.” Uncle Paul beckoned to Matilda from the piano. “I want to show you something.”

Matilda went over. Uncle Paul lifted her in the air in his big hands and stood her on the stool. Then he opened the top lid of the piano.

“It’s like seeing inside a person,” he murmured, “like cutting them open and seeing what’s there.”

Matilda gazed inside. How full it was! There was a long, curved row of hammers, one for every key, Uncle Paul was saying, and then a line of hard strings like a harp. When you pressed a key, a hammer shot forward and hit one of the strings. That’s what made the sound of the note.

Ping! Ping! Pang!

“Hey presto!” cried Uncle Paul. “All mysteries revealed.”

Keys were made from elephant tusks, Uncle Paul said. Funny, wasn’t it? So many dead elephants just for piano keys.

“You know what he did, don’t you?” said Floreal, right in Matilda’s ear.

The lid of the piano slid from Uncle Paul’s fingers and closed with a sharp bang like a gunshot. Matilda jolted, she nearly tumbled from the stool. Uncle Paul grabbed her just in time.

In the bathroom, Matilda crushed up some toilet paper and put it in her ears, so she wouldn’t hear Floreal any more. Then she went out to the laundry to watch their mother wash the clothes. The laundry was hot and the clothes were so heavy, but how strong their mother was! She didn’t look strong but she was underneath. She was like a rainbow ball that you couldn’t crack with your teeth, the only way to eat it up was to suck it until all at once it was gone, you couldn’t even say when.

When the washing was over, Matilda followed her out the back to help her hang the clothes to dry. She held the pieces of clothing up one by one while her mother pegged. The wind blew the clothesline around and around like a merry-go-round.

There was a lot of talking noise from the garden next door. Matilda felt nervous. What if one of the men came over to the fence and spoke to her? Then their mother might find out about the lift in the black car, and how angry she would be.

“That’s done, then,” said their mother.

Her voice sounded strange because she had a wooden peg in her mouth. Matilda looked at her anxiously. They went back inside the house.

“What are you going to do now?”

Her mother didn’t answer. She picked up a knife next to the sink, and began peeling potatoes and letting them drop into a bowl of water. Then she started to cry and Uncle Paul came over. He took the knife from her hand and laid it down on the bench.

“Where is he?” she said, wiping her face. “Where can he be?”

“Don’t get in a state,” said Uncle Paul, putting his arm around her.

Matilda put her finger in the bowl and pushed the peeled potatoes around. They looked like giant pale pebbles. Then she ran out of the kitchen, down to her room. Frances was lying on the bed, reading. Matilda sat cross-legged on the carpet.

“I hate Uncle Paul,” she said out loud.

Frances looked over briefly, but she kept on reading. The carpet was dusty, it made Matilda’s nose itch and she sneezed. Then she remembered the giant lollipop, her wonderful prize, rotting in the darkness under the bed where she had left it. She lifted up the hanging bedclothes and reached out until her fingers found the wooden handle.

She sat up and inspected her prize. Some of the cellophane had rolled away and sugar had seeped through. Little bits of green wool from the carpet were stuck to it, like a green beard on a round face.

“Maybe if I gave it to Mummy,” thought Matilda suddenly, “that might make her feel better.”