Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [6]
I can smell them as they cart my body down the hall. Sharp smells of meat and urine—or is it me? My legs split apart, my dress gathered around my waist; I’m slumped like kill. I wrench my head from side to side—like a lunatic, I imagine—but I can’t tell if it’s really me or just an attempt to summon the family demons I’m sure I must carry inside me.
Someone has turned the water on for the bath. It beats against the enamel like a torrent as we approach. Too small for four in here, they don’t know what to do with me.
‘Do we take her clothes off?’ one enquires.
‘No, no,’ I beg, writhing my hips in mid-air.
‘Throw her in as is,’ my father says. ‘Just pull off her shoes.’
I feel them yank at my feet. I hear my school shoes fall like clods of earth onto the tiles.
‘Okay, boys.’
They have to fold me between them to fit around the door, and now with our bodies all drawn together in a grisly show of unity, I gather my spit and fire at the cheek closest to mine.
‘Bitch,’ a voice snarls, and I’m let go, falling into the pounding water.
I’m surprised by the soft landing. My clothes seem to expand to catch me. Looking down I see my smart school tunic rising to the surface, the wide green pleats swaying like leaves, brushed cotton ballooning on my arms, long white socks still standing stiff to attention. And now, surrounded by defeat and wetness, I sob for my loss of dignity.
Quietly, like a final word on the matter, one of the boys looks down on me. His lips fat with contempt, he says, ‘Who will marry that? No man will ever want her.’
Of everything that has been said and done in the last five to ten minutes, this is what makes my breath stop, for I realise he doesn’t see a little girl dumped in a tub of water, but rather the beginnings of a madwoman. I take a breath into my belly and let out a long and final cry into wilted air.
As usual, it pains me to see my eighty-five-year-old mother waiting for me on the pavement outside the cafe. We meet most days, out of habit. She knows I’m never on time but she refuses to take a table on her own. A rational side of me realises that if I was a better daughter I’d be on time, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Part of me wants to make her wait.
She’s wearing her little red shoes. They are flat with round toes and straps that button on the side—like Clarks for five-year-olds. Around her neck, I see the gleam of her Good Conduct medal, awarded to her by the Sisters of Mercy in 1937—medallions are in fashion, she says, and it’s gold, something of value. Unlike me, she has little of value.
The golden curls are long gone. Her hair is white these days, shaped like a basin and cut square around her eyes. As she spots me, she rises up onto the balls of her feet like a little girl in her cotton plus-fours, flexing her surprisingly shapely calves.
We sit at one of the small round tables, my mother taking the padded bench against the wall. She pats the vinyl for me to sit next to her, all the better to hear me, but I decide on the bentwood chair opposite, placing the large sack of washing I am carrying between my feet.
We now live in a little town on the east coast of Australia. It’s been years since we left New Zealand, shortly after my father died at sixty-two. Not by his own hand. They called it heart failure, but I’m more inclined to think it was a general sense of failure. They were sad times, my mother says on reflection, but then on other days she says they weren’t sad at all, we were all perfectly happy.
I often feel like we blend in with the locals in our straw hats and shorts, as though both of us being here was part of some grand plan, but in truth my arrival was pure coincidence. The others, of course, think it was destiny. You’d think I’d taken her hostage, reading the cards on her mantelpiece: Is she being good to you Ma? Come and visit us, if she’ll let you.
‘It’s all in good fun,’ my mother says, when I read these lines out loud. ‘You know they like to tease.’
I watch