Annabel - Kathleen Winter [77]
“Some places,” Thomasina said, “you go and you just feel like sighing and sitting down in an armchair like the one you’ve put right here.”
“Watch out for the spring at the back.”
“Its lumps are in the right places.”
“How are you doing?”
“You’ve probably heard.”
“When a hundred kids are going around with the news, you don’t need a story in the Labradorian. ’Specially if it’s about poo. And what’s wrong with taking a kid to hospital? Didn’t he have appendicitis? Maybe it would’ve ruptured if you hadn’t brought him in. Maybe you saved his life.”
“I should have done it differently. Victoria Huskins is not a well woman.”
“None of the parents blame you one little bit. They should go down to that school board and have you reinstated. But they aren’t going to. They talk about it but they won’t do it. What kind of a trip do you want to take?”
“When I sold my house, I got twenty thousand.”
“That’s the house the Michelins live in now, right? How come you sold it?”
“I paid my way through teachers’ college with four thousand. And I travelled on my own with another four.”
“Did you ever regret selling it?”
“I had no intention of selling it at first.”
Thomasina had begun, right after the drowning of her husband, Graham Montague, and their daughter Annabel, to clear out everything that might trap sorrow within the walls. For weeks she worked in the yard with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge, washing clamps, wrenches, sockets, and hammers, feeling them carefully with her hands the way her blind husband must have done, but knowing her hands could never interpret their shapes the way his had done. Part of her wanted to keep certain tools: his staple gun, his spirit level, the sixty-yard measuring tape in its leather case. But she had not kept them.
“Just like I had no intention of coming in here today.”
Thomasina had gone into her drowned daughter’s room and collected the dolls, the lavender sachets, the books. She had smelled Annabel’s clothes, then given them to Isabel Palliser for children along the coast. She had not kept the salmon pink cardigan with dog buttons.
“It was a house I couldn’t empty. I thought if I got rid of it . . . You’d think a grown woman would know better.”
“I wouldn’t think that. I think a lot of grown women hide a lot of different kinds of sadness.”
Thomasina Baikie found it hard to accept consolation. “I have twelve thousand left and I heard there’s a kind of ticket you can get where you can go around the world. You go to Heathrow and you can fly to Portugal and from there you can go where you want.”
“But you have to decide your route. You can’t backtrack. And you have to complete your trip within twelve months. It sounds to me like you might not want that.”
“I don’t know what I want.”
“You might want to sit in public squares and people-watch for an hour in one place and a month in another. I can tell by the way you’re peeling that grapefruit. You want to get lost. Somewhere where they have ordinary life you can join in. Slip right in there and have a bowl of soup in the clothes you have on now. Go hear a concert you read about stapled to a telephone pole. There are lots of places like that in the world.”
17
A Real Little Man
“YOU CAN'T TELL ANYONE,” Jacinta said.
“Not even Wally Michelin?” Wally stayed to herself. She got the highest marks in the school and went around with her chemistry text against her chest the way she had once carried Fauré’s “Cantique.”
“Not a soul.”
Jacinta was thinking of Wayne’s safety. Part of him knew this, but the new-found part, Annabel, wanted to tell someone. Wayne closed his eyes in bed and saw the hidden part of himself in the schoolyard, in a dress with a green sash and shoes of red leather with a little heel like Gwen Matchem’s. There were lots of things that