Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The Mermaid



‘Pack your stuff,’ she whispered as I drifted back into sleep. I dreamt I was swimming in a blue-green rock pool. I could feel the breeze lifting the hairs on my arms with each stroke. The moss growing on the rocks swayed when the waves splashed over the edge. I could hear the sound of the surf washing in and out like someone breathing.
‘C’mon, it’s time to head south.’ More insistent now as the dream faded and my mother’s face lunged at me. I could smell the nutty tang of her breath.
I continued treading the waters of recent sleep.
‘Get up, Lily!’
Anger glinted in her voice. I watched her thin back, the tie dyed cotton dress already clinging to her spine in the heat as she stalked from my room. There were soft thuds as she tossed things into her fraying floral pull along bag. Threads hung limply from the pastel flowers and one of the wheels fell off a few years ago. I could hear her swearing at the cantankerous zipper.
I threw off the covers and walked to the bathroom feeling grit from the floorboards on the soles of my feet. I splashed my face with water and gazed at my reflection in the spotted mirror. The pillow had scored my cheek, leaving furrows like tidemarks in the sand. Someone older and sadder stared back.
I’d known it was coming. I could read the signs now. Mum hadn’t slept the last few nights. I could sense her in the room next to mine. Her disquiet jangled through the thin wall, demanding my attention. I imagined tears streaking her pale skin. I lay awake and watched the translucent fingernail of moon through greying muslin curtains, longing for morning.
Life was unexpected with Mum. There was a terrible, dizzying sense of freedom. School was my consolation. I felt safe in the routine and order of the classroom and was surprised at children who complained about being there. Miss Evans went to the canteen and made me a cheese sandwich when I didn’t have lunch and she gave me her own copy of Anne of Green Gables to read. I fingered the soft pages where the corners remembered faint folds from when she was a girl.
My favourite place was the library. I found solace in books, escaping from reality in pages of adventure where the conclusion was complete and satisfying.
Real life was never as tidy. Once or twice I was invited to play with a friend after school. I tried not to act like an observer in the peach living rooms and the bedrooms with beds piled with stuffed toys. I worshipped Annabelle Carter, mostly because of her mother. She invited me to play when no-one else could come. Mrs. Carter smelled of fresh makeup and served fairy bread on pink plates. ‘So, you’re from down south, are you Lily?’ She made it sound exotic. I nodded and reached for another slice of bread.
Away from Mrs. Carter, Annabelle wanted to know about my father. I told her he was the captain of a submarine hit by enemy torpedoes. The men’s skeletons still drifted in the sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean. It was too deep for them to retrieve the bodies. Her mouth made a pink ‘o’ as she dressed her dolls while she listened. She plucked tiny clothes from a box and wrenched plastic limbs into wedding dresses or miniskirts and crop tops with high heeled boots, holding them out occasionally for me to admire the complete outfit. She pondered handbags and miniature earrings with fierce concentration.
Annabelle’s bedroom was the pink of anatomical drawings in books we read furtively at the back of the library. Even her jewellery box was organ pink. I slipped a silver necklace into my pocket. A tiny mermaid hung from the chain and I fingered it compulsively until it was time to leave. I knew it wouldn’t be missed from the tangle of pendants and charms. Annabelle didn’t look up when I left, engrossed in a doll wedding which involved most of her toys.
Mrs. Carter walked me home when Mum didn’t turn up to collect me. At the mutinous front gate which had to be jiggled and cajoled into opening, her eyes widened as she took in the riotous garden, the verandah festooned with cobwebs. I ran up the steps, calling, ‘Bye, thanks for having me!’ before Mum came out. I glimpsed my mother through the living room window, her cigarette trailing streamers of smoke as she rearranged the bracelets on one white wrist, oblivious to Mrs. Carter’s agitated presence at the front gate.
Mum didn’t like the girls from school or their bossy mothers.
‘You don’t need them. You’ve got me,’ she announced, phoning the school to tell them I wouldn’t be coming back.
‘But I like school. I want to go to school,’ I tried.
‘I’ll home school you,’ she said. I heard the principal, Mrs. Clarke, her voice sounded high and thin though the receiver. ‘It’s the law, you know. Lily must attend school,’ before Mum put the phone down with a bright smile.
‘No wonder you hated it, Lil,’ she said.
I watched the cartoons until six then woke Mum and made toast for dinner. Bill was away a lot now.
I missed the classroom with its smells of lunch boxes and pencil shavings, where the day was divided up like the black lines on a wooden ruler. I wished I could say goodbye to Miss Evans.
I knew there was no going back when I woke to the sound of Mum and Bill shouting after his latest trip.
‘Why do you hate me?’ her voice was thin and high like the sound from a single violin.
‘I don’t hate you Maeve! I just can’t live with you anymore. Nothing’s ever right, you’re never satisfied. And the drinking…’
The words chimed through me as I lay holding my breath in the narrow bed.
‘You have to get your act together Maeve. Go south where you have family to help you. For the kid’s sake, you have to …’
‘Don’t bring Lil into it. She’s nothing to do with you!’
Finally, I heard Bill’s footsteps in the hall.
‘I’m going to stay at a mate’s for a few days. I want you out of my house when I get back.’ His voice sounded flat.
He left, closing the screen door quietly, as if he didn’t want to wake me.
I didn’t mind Bill. He was nicer than Nick, who slapped Mum when he came home from the pub. I learned to hide under the bed on Friday nights when we lived with Nick. Before Nick it was John. I don’t remember much about him.
Bill’s face was tanned and leathery except for his pale, vulnerable forehead. Some weekends, he took us out in his dinghy and Mum sat up the front, trailing her hand through the water, her fingers like white fish. She smiled a funny, crooked smile from under her faded straw hat and gazed at the houses lining the bay.
‘I wonder what you have to do to live in one of those?’ she murmured.
‘Marry a millionaire, I ‘spect,’ Bill answered shortly. I gazed down into the bay, watching for the flash of whiting darting in and out of the weed. I was itchy with sweat and longed to dive into the water.
I don’t remember my father. He drowned in a fishing accident when I was a baby. I sometimes dream he’s washed up on the beach, covered in seaweed and barnacles, with crabs crawling from his empty eye sockets. His skin is blue white. Mum sits on my bed and strokes my hair to put me back to sleep when I cry in the night. She talked about him all the time when I was little.
‘Your father had these dark blue eyes. Almost navy,’ she said, ‘the colour of stormy water, I used to tell him.’
My father loved to surf. Mum said he moved like a tightrope walker from years spent balancing on his board. I liked looking at a photo of me when I was newborn, small as a kitten in his huge arms.
He collected heart shaped stones for Mum when he went fishing. Mostly grey, the rocks were worn smooth from being tumbled in the ocean. For years she kept a plastic tub of little rock hearts in the bottom of her bag. I don’t think she has them anymore.
Mum threw the bags into the back of the van as the sun cracked over the red roofs and slid across the pavement. I knew better than to ask where we were going. I might have prayed if my prayers had been more successful in the past. I would have prayed for a miracle so we could stay here in this white house with its trimmings of blistered green.
I saw our neighbour Theresa in her faded chenille dressing gown taking a bag of rubbish to the bin and waved. She grew tomatoes and beans and sometimes passed me fresh veggies over the fence. Theresa cooked huge lunches when her grown up children visited. They sat on plastic chairs in the garden for hours, eating and talking, interrupting each other in their eagerness to speak. Sometimes I lay on the patchy grass in the backyard so I could listen to the banter of her family until the mosquitoes began biting and they went home in a flurry of hugs and kisses.
Theresa glanced at the van and, sensing gossip, came over to see what was happening. The footpath was littered with mauve trumpet shaped flowers dropped by Jacaranda trees lining the street and some blooms stuck to her slippers.
‘You two off then?’ she asked Mum, her face guarded, as if my mother was someone with whom conversations must be cautiously navigated.
‘Yes, heading south again!’ Mum fluted.
Theresa looked at me, concern creasing her face. ‘That’s a shame, you seem so settled, love.’
‘I’ll be right, Theresa. See ya!’ The sympathy in her face made my heart pinch. Theresa fiddled with the handle of the shopping bag and stood too far away, uncertain if she should say more. She brushed perspiration from where her moustache would have been and said doubtfully, ‘All the best then love.’
The engine spluttered into life as I climbed in next to Mum. I waved again to Theresa as we pulled out. A few minutes and we crossed the Harbour Bridge, the waters slightly shirred by the light breeze. The white sails of the Opera House reminded me of clean washing strung out against a blue sky. I wound my window down and felt the wind on my face.
‘We’ll go and stay with Nan and Pops for a while,’ Mum announced as if she’d only just decided what to do. I watched her hands at the wheel, the nails yellow and bitten short.
I didn’t mind staying with Nan and Pops at their unit in Bateman’s Bay. Sometimes they took me fishing off the wharf. We’d throw in hand lines, stunned by the heat and squinting in the glare from the water. I would sniff the plankton smell of the mud and stare out at the bay until everything dazzled and disappeared in the light. We never caught anything so we bought fish and chips on the way home, burning our fingers as we pulled the hot chips through holes torn in the paper.
I knew we wouldn’t stay for long. Mum hated the unspoken criticism, hanging in the air like dust motes. Last time we slept in the foldout lounge and Mum flung her arm across me in the night. I lay awake listening to Pops snoring from the next room. The days were punctuated by meals and cups of strong Bushell’s tea. A week of this and Mum offered to drive to town and pick up some shopping, appearing at the door pale and red eyed the next afternoon, smelling of stale beer. Nan and Pops gave each other looks that said, ‘Not again.’
My ears popped as we wound down towards Wollongong. Mum veered into the left lane, readjusting a thigh as she changed gears, her leg making a sound like a band aid being torn off as her flesh stuck to the warm vinyl seat.
‘Change of plan,’ Mum’s voice was girlish, ‘we’ll pop in and visit Rob at Stanwell Tops. I haven’t seen him since high school. I heard he was divorced last year.’
She nodded to herself and seemed to have forgotten I was there. ‘He probably needs cheering up. Be glad to see an old flame.’
‘Rob Hartwell,’ she raised her head and pursed her lips, as though tasting the name.
I looked out the window at the fractured cliffs and felt the pointed tail of the silver mermaid in my pocket.

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