Playing Beatie Bow Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Playing Beatie Bow

  Born in New Zealand, Ruth Park came to Australia to continue her work as a journalist. She married D’Arcy Niland and travelled with him through outback Australia, working in a variety of jobs, from shearer’s cook to fruit packer – all of which provided a rich source of material for her later writing.

  Ruth Park has written over fifty books for both children and adults, including several travel and educational works. Her many prizes include the prestigious Miles Franklin Award for her novel Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977), and Playing Beatie Bow was winner of the 1981 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award and the 1984 Boston Globe Award. In 1993 she was awarded the Lloyd O’Neil Magpie Award for services to the Australian book industry.

  Also by Ruth Park

  My Sister Sif

  Things in Corners

  The Muddle-headed Wombat series

  A Fence Around the Cuckoo

  Fishing in the Styx

  The Harp in the South

  Poor Man’s Orange

  Missus

  The Witch’s Thorn

  A Power of Roses

  Dear Hearts and Gentle People

  The Frost and the Fire

  Serpent’s Delight

  Swords and Crowns and Rings

  Home Before Dark

  PLAYING BEATIE BOW

  RUTH PARK

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 1

  In the first place, Abigail Kirk was not Abigail at all. She had been christened Lynette.

  Her mother apologised. ‘It must have been the anaesthetic. I felt as tight as a tick for days. And Daddy was so thrilled to have a daughter that he wouldn’t have minded if I’d called you Ophelia.’

  So for the first ten years of her life she was Lynnie Kirk, and happy as a lark. A hot-headed rag of a child, she vibrated with devotion for many things and people, including her parents. She loved her mother, but her father was a king.

  So when he said good-bye to her, before he went off with another lady, she was outraged to the point of speechlessness that he could like someone so much better than herself that he didn’t want to live in the same house with her any more.

  ‘I’ll come and see you often, Lynnie, I promise I shall,’ he had said. And she, who could not bear to see a puppy slapped or a cockroach trodden on, hit him hard on the nose. She had never forgotten his shocked eyes above the blood-stained handkerchief. Very blue eyes they were, for he was half Norwegian.

  Later she commanded her mother: ‘Don’t ever call me Lynnie again. Or any of those other names either.’

  Kathy Kirk knew that her daughter was referring to the many pet names her father called her, for she was very dear to him.

  Because she was a loving woman, she had put her arms round the little girl and said, ‘You don’t understand, because you’re too young yet. Just because Daddy wants to go away from me doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love you. But of course you may change your name if you wish. What would you like to be called?’

  Weeks and months went past, and the person who had once been Lynette Kirk had no name at all. She would not answer to Lynette at home or at school. There were some puzzled notes from her teachers, which fortunately never had to be answered; because soon after the marriage break-up Kathy Kirk sold the family home and moved into a unit her husband had given her.

  Her daughter was enraged that Kathy had accepted it. It was the finest in a high-rise tower her father’s firm had designed, a glistening spike of steel and glass jammed in the sandstone amongst the tiny meek cottages and old bond stores of that part of Sydney called The Rocks.

  ‘You ought to be prouder!’ she yelled in her passion and grief. ‘I’d rather live in the Ladies on the Quay than in something he gave me.’

  ‘Be quiet!’ said Grandmother in her razor-blade voice.

  ‘You!’ shouted that long-ago child. ‘You’re glad he’s gone. I know.’

  Because she was right, this was what began Abigail’s and her grandmother’s silent agreement not to like each other.

  Yet, strangely, it was through Grandmother that the ex-Lynette at last found her name.

  ‘You’ll have to do something about that hysterical little bore, Katherine,’ she said. Grandmother had this spooky habit of turning her eyes up and apparently speaking to a careful careless wave that curled down over her forehead. Lynnie always thought of it as Grandmother talking to her perm. Now she was doing it again. ‘Just look at her, dear. She looks like a little witch with those wild eyes and her hair all in a bush.’

  ‘You leave Lynnie alone, Mother! I’ve had enough of your sniping!’ said Kathy in a voice in which Grandmother heard the fury and Lynette heard the shakiness.

  ‘Well!’ said Grandmother protestingly to her perm, for her daughter Kathy was a sunny-natured young woman and almost never lost her temper.

  ‘Don’t mind, darling,’ said Kathy to ex-Lynette.

  But the ex-Lynette was taken by the idea of being a witch.

  ‘Tell me some witches’ names, Mum,’ she said.

  ‘Well, there’s Samantha, and Tabitha,’ Kathy began.

  ‘Oh, I don’t want soppy TV names,’ said her daughter. ‘Some real witches’ names.’

  ‘They’d have to be old ones,’ said Kathy thoughtfully, ‘like Hephzibah, or Susannah, or Petronella, or Abigail.’

  ‘That’s the one!’ cried the girl.

  ‘But it’s so plain, so knobbly, so … so awful!’ wailed Kathy.

  Grandmother smiled. Abigail could see quite easily that Grandmother thought she was plain and knobbly and awful, too. So that settled it.

  ‘From now on I’m Abigail Kirk,’ she said, ‘and as soon as I’m old enough I’ll change the Kirk, too.’

  So time passed, one way and another. Now she was fourteen and, as with many other girls of her age, her inside did not match her outside at all. The outside was nothing to beat drums about. Somehow she had missed her mother’s winning quaintness and her father’s ash-blond distinction. She was thin and flat as a board, with a narrow brown face and black coffee eyes so deep-set that she had only to cry for ten minutes and they disappeared altogether. This was one reason why she never cried.

  She was known in the family as a clever student, a reserved girl, self-contained.

  ‘More to that one than meets the eye,’ said her grandmother with an ice-cream smile. ‘Dodgy.’

  Instead of tweaking off Grandmother’s glasses and cracking them smartly across the edge of the table, as was her impulse, Abigail gave the old woman an ice-cream smile in return. Thereby proving that she was, perhaps, dodgy.

  Or a girl who wished to be private.

  Outside, she was composed, independent, not very much liked. The girls at school said she was a weirdie, and there was no doubt she was an outsider. She looked like a stick in jeans and a tank top; so she would not wear them. If everyone else was wearing her hair over her face, Abigail scraped hers back. She didn’t have a boy friend, and when asked why she either looked enigmatic as though she knew twenty times more about boys than anyone else, or said she’d never met one who was half-way as interesting as her maths textbook. The girls said she was unreal, and she shrugged coolly. The really unreal thing was that she didn’t care in the least what they thought of her. She felt a hundred years older and wiser than this love-mad rabble in he
r class.

  Her chief concern was that no one, not even her mother, should know what she was like inside. Because maybe to adults the turmoil of uncertainties, extravagant glooms, and sudden blisses, might present some kind of pattern or map, so that they could say, ‘Ah, so that’s the real Abigail, is it?’

  The thought of such trespass made her stomach turn over. So she cultivated an expressionless face, a long piercing glance under her eyelashes that Grandmother called slippery. She carefully laid false trails until she herself sometimes could not find the way into her secret heart. Yet the older she grew the more she longed for someone to laugh at the false trails with, to share the secrets.

  What secrets? She didn’t yet know what they were herself.

  The May holidays always made her feel forlorn and restless. Maybe it was the chill in the air after all the summer softness, the leaves turning yellow, letting go, whirling away. The dark coming earlier, as though the solitude of space were more tightly enclosing the earth, sunless and melancholy.

  It was not possible to go for a holiday, unless it were to her grandmother’s, which was unthinkable for them both. So, if her mother didn’t want her to help at the shop, she spent hours squashed into the corner of the brown armchair, which had once been a kindly bear and now was only a bear-shaped chair near a window which looked out on cranes and mast tops, on the deck of the Harbour Bridge and the pearly cusps of the Opera House rising through the gauzy murk like Aladdin’s palace.

  Mumping, her mother called it. But she was not doing that, or even thinking. Mostly she was just aware of something missing.

  When she was young she thought it was her father, for she had missed him miserably as well as hating him. Then with a new school and home, and new things to think about, she began to forget about him a little, though even now she could sometimes almost cry with pity for that woebegone, puzzled kid who used to go to bed and pray that her father would fall off a scaffold on one of his inspection tours, and the next moment sweat in terror in case he did.

  But now she wasn’t a kid she knew that it wasn’t the absence of her father that caused the empty place inside. It was a part of her and she didn’t know what it was or why it was there.

  She and her mother, although they were such different characters, had fought and hugged and scrambled their way through to a close friendship. Kathy became a businesswoman of flair and dash.

  When the Kirk family lived in a two-car garden suburb, she had been a fearful packrat, a collector of almost everything. Abigail remembered wet days when big cardboard cartons and wooden tea-chests were thrown open to her and her playmates, and they had turned the entire house into a gorgeous mess of twinkles, spangles, seashells, faceless calico cats; old shoes; a real clown suit still stained with red and black grease-paint; Victorian postcards, some rude; and books and books of dried ferns, painted rosebuds, and autographs with silly poems.

  After Abigail’s father went away, Kathy had given a last decisive sniff, washed her face, which was somewhat like that of a fat-cheeked finch with a finch’s shiny dewdrop eyes, raked her hair up on top of her head in a washerwoman’s knot, and rented a black hole of Calcutta in a Paddington lane. This she turned into a treasure-house of trendy trivia. She called the shop Magpies, and soon other magpie people flocked around to shriek and snatch and buy.

  What with Kathy being a success, and Grandmother getting more interested in Bridge and less of a carper, Abigail and her mother achieved a kind of happiness.

  Now she jumped up with a scowl, banged the door on the empty place, and went to visit the Crowns, her neighbours.

  That unit was in its customary state of theatrically awful mess. Justine Crown didn’t believe in housework. She said the children came first; but she hadn’t made a gold-medal job of them either. Usually Natalie, the four-year-old, was at kindergarten, and Vincent, the high-rise monster, at school. But as it was holidays they were both at home, and Vincent, who was in Abigail’s opinion the grimmest kid two agreeable people could be cursed with, was at his usual game of worrying Natalie like a dog with a bone.

  Natalie aroused in Abigail a solemnly protective feeling. This rather embarrassed her. The little girl was prone to sudden fevers, nightmares, fears, and had a kind of helpless affection for the frightful Vincent that did not allow her to defend herself against him.

  Vincent was a bundle of bones with a puzzling smell, as though he’d wet himself six weeks earlier and not bothered to bathe. He was as sharp as a knife and had his parents sized up to the last millimetre. Abigail did not see that his face was wretched as well as cunning, and she was sincerely flattered that he hated her more than he hated everyone else.

  ‘You’ve got Dracula teeth,’ he greeted her.

  Justine shouted from the kitchen, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t start on Abigail, you little beast.’ She came out, bashing around in a basin with a fork. ‘He’s been dark blue hell all day.’

  ‘Dracula teeth,’ said Vincent. ‘Big long white choppers. See them, Fat Nat?’

  ‘Don’t call your sister that, and if Abigail’s teeth are too big it’s because her face hasn’t grown up to them yet.’

  Instantly Abigail imagined herself with this thin nosy face and fangs sticking out over her lower lip.

  She was very depressed with her looks as it was, and had given up hope of developing fascinating high cheekbones or eyelashes an inch long. She liked her eyebrows, which were black and straight, and her long brown hair, which glistened satisfactorily. But although her mother assured her that her figure would arrive some day, she often despaired. Most times people took her for twelve, which was humiliating.

  However, she was not going to be bugged by any six-year-old dinosaur like Vincent Crown. She glared at him.

  ‘Knock off the wisecracks!’ To Justine she said, ‘It’s freezing outside, but would you like me to take them down to the playground till it starts to get dark?’

  Justine was so jubilant at the thought of being free of Natalie’s unexplained tears and silences and Vincent’s whining that she had the children into their anoraks and woolly caps before Abigail could think, ‘Curse it, why am I such a sucker?’

  The high-rise tower was called Mitchell, after a famous man who had been born just where it stood many years before. He was the Mitchell who founded the Mitchell Library. High-rise buildings near by were called Dalley, Campbell, and Reiby, after other celebrated people, though Abigail didn’t know for what they were celebrated.

  Mitchell stood amongst charming landscaping, which included a covered swimming-pool and a children’s playground. In spite of her resentment against her father, Abigail could never hate the building, standing up there severe as a sword, slitting each wind into two streams, reflecting fish-scale seas, and cherry-red sunsets, and a city which, when stretched and crinkled by curved windows, grew itself steeples and domes and trees like minarets, and escarpments floating in cloud. On the lobby wall in polished brass were the letters: Architects: Weyland Kirk, Casper and Domenici, Sydney, San Francisco, Oslo, Siena. Abigail tried never to look at it, for, try as she might, she couldn’t help feeling proud: she knew that this particular high-riser was all the work of Weyland Kirk.

  Now Mitchell was haughtily slicing up a barbed westerly, which did not seem to bother the children climbing the monkey bars, brawling thunderously inside the concrete pipes, or fighting like tom-cats inside the space rocket. Thankfully Abigail released Vincent’s hard, sticky paw, and he flitted off to torment a group of fat bundles climbing the stone wall about the playground. Let the fat bundles look after themselves, Abigail thought callously. Likely they’d have parents with them, anyway, who would pluck Vincent away from their darlings and, with any luck, half-strangle him in the process.

  The noise was shattering. Most of the children came from Mitchell, but others probably lived in the cottages round about. Abigail observed that those racing dementedly back and forth performed their charges in a certain order. They were playing a group game.
/>   ‘Would you like to play it, too, Natty?’

  Natalie shook her head. Her big grey eyes were now full of tears. Abigail sighed. Justine was for ever trailing Natalie off to a doctor who was supposed to be miraculous with highly strung children, but he hadn’t brought off any miracles yet.

  ‘Now what’s the matter, little dopey?’

  ‘They’re playing Beatie Bow and it scares me. But I like to watch. Please let’s watch,’ pleaded Natalie.

  ‘Never heard of it,’ said Abigail. She noticed Vincent rushing to join in and thought how weird it was that in the few years that had passed since she was six or seven the kids had begun to play such different games. She watched this one just in case Vincent murdered anyone. She could already hear him squealing like a mad rat.

  Natalie took hold of a fistful of her shawl, and Abigail held her close to keep her out of the wind. The child was shivering. Yet the game didn’t look so exciting; just one more goofy kid’s game.

  First of all the children formed a circle. They had become very quiet. In the middle was a girl who had been chosen by some counting-out rhyme.

  ‘That’s Mudda,’ explained Natalie.

  ‘What’s Mudda?’

  ‘You know, a mummy like my mummy.’

  ‘Oh, Mother!’

  ‘Yes, but she’s called Mudda. That’s in the game.’

  Someone hidden behind the concrete pipes made a scraping sound. The children chorused, ‘Oh, Mudda, what’s that?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ chanted the girl in the centre. ‘The dog at the door, the dog at the door.’

  Now a bloodcurdling moan was heard from behind the pipes. Abigail felt Natalie press closer to her. She noticed that the dark was coming down fast; soon it would rain. She resolved she would take the children home as soon as she could gather up Vincent.