Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [40]
Tony came into the house and heard the cat snoring. Everything gave him pleasure: the cat snoring, the blanket the cat slept under, design and nap thereof, the ring of damp soil at the tank stand where zebra finches came for water, the sight of the yellow sponge cake with passionfruit icing under the mauve gauze fly cover on the kitchen table. It was a cake to celebrate his hitting his teens. He hummed along to the sound of the wind under the roofing iron. This was home and it wasn’t a dream: knitted tea cosy, butter board, carved emu egg on the living room shelf, Gundabooka Mountain waddy-donger tied to the hallway wall with fuse wire, and Pop’s Velocette motorbike propped at the garden gate when Pop came in for a cuppa. Tony thought himself into the photos the family had, of the son who died (diphtheria, buried in a sky-blue coffin). They’d taken on Tony to fill the gap.
‘My brother, Chicka,’ Tony whispered, awestruck by this idea of himself, the way it built and built and might never be covered over, if he lived long enough to see what could happen. ‘Tony Watson,’ he mouthed, looking down at his arms with their light gingery hairs. He reached for a tambourine and gave it a hissing shake at the level of his jug ears. Before this move his name was O’Malley, a little strop of a weedy biffed and bruised boy in a dormitory scrummage. Father: unknown. Mother: deceased.
Tony followed Mum Watson through the hallway to the front door, a screen door snapping open to a wide verandah and a view of red dirt, diesel drums and a shearing shed half a dust-churning mile away. More dust, from an arriving car, drifted across the front of the house. Mum stood with her fat white legs apart and reached over and took Tony’s hand. There was the sound of topknot pigeons flying low overhead—small tinkling bells of hope, they were.
Major Marks, wearing his Army jacket in the gritty blow, brought Judy in. The Salvos were always the ones. Judy Compton-Bell had frizzy hair, freckles, a snub nose like Orphan Annie. At eleven years of age she was ready for play. Tony grinned, and they ran inside together.
Tony drew her in pencil, tiny circles all over her cheeks, on a sheet of butcher’s paper. The wind blew the paper all over the room. They dressed up and played weddings at her command. He pulled her along in a billycart, the bridal car, and read stories at night, doing all the voices. Mum and Pop Watson stood in the hallway, listening. They’d lost one. Now there were two.
As far as Tony could ever remember (and his way of remembering wasn’t always this straight), Judy Compton-Bell was the last person he allowed to make rules relating to his domestic life. When he peeled a Blindale orange (the pith like kapok and the juice running down his arm) and hurled the peel over his shoulder, it landed on the dirt making a perfect J.
‘When I was married . . .’ he liked to say. Or: ‘At my wedding . . .’ It gave people something to think about—Tony Watson with a woman in his life who wasn’t a former prime minister’s grass widow or a similarly positioned needful one with whom (note the grammar) he attended the charity balls of the Eastern Suburbs set. The gist of it was: ‘I was putty in her hands . . . Not a grown woman—great heavens— Judy Compton-Bell was my kid sister.’
‘This was back in my Army days,’ Tony likes to say, watching for a reaction. See him in his first long trousers, stovepipes worn when shaking the donation box outside Fitz’s pub in Bourke. ‘My Life As a Salvo’ will be chapter two of his bio when he puts pen to paper. A story of interest, surely, but with an in-built quandary in the telling, the problem being that by the time Tony was taken under the Salvos’ wing (that is to say, taken in by the Blindale Watsons and their honest ilk) he was twelve years old, and of his first twelve years Tony has nothing to say. Never