Playing Beatie Bow Read online

  Bring up the reunited lovers music, and she falls into his arms and a bit later he dances up and down the stairs on his knees.

  Abigail could just imagine what the girls at school would say. Some, the sloppy romantic ones, would think it just lovely. Together again! But the others, the toughies, would think it disgusting. Love was for the young, everyone knew that. Like having no wrinkles or varicose veins. And besides, they’d say her mother was being grovelly. He whistles and back she goes like a well-trained dog.

  The more she thought about it the angrier and more embarrassed she felt. ‘There’s the shop, too. After all her hard work building it up. She’s not thinking straight – early menopause or something. And what about me? Turning my life upside down once more for him? A lot he cared about me when I was little and needed him! I don’t owe him anything,’ thought Abigail, white with fury. ‘Not one kind word.’

  But, oh God, there was Grandmother, chic and glittery and poisonous and probably thrilled to her long claw toes to get her hands on a lonely Abigail and teach her what’s what and who’s who. Grandmother’s house, expensive suburbia, with a surly houseman, Uruguayan or something, who lived in separate quarters at the end of the garden, the Bridge ladies, the theatre parties, and Abigail required to hand round the teensy bits of fish goo on decarbohydrated crackers. They were always on diets, the Bridge ladies, though not one of them had a soul in the world to care a spit if she turned into a porker or not.

  She went around the unit saying, ‘Norway!’ She saw it as a kind of iceberg with houses on it. And Lapps, weren’t there Lapps, with funny knitted hats with tops like two horns? Penguins? Polar bears, then. Norway, a million kilometres away from Sydney and the life she and Mum had made for themselves without Dad’s help.

  Alternatively she raged and sulked, and then reassured herself with little bursts of optimism. ‘Of course she didn’t mean it, that crazy lady. She’ll think it over and see it doesn’t make sense.’

  And then she imagined Dad dancing up and down the stairs instead of Gene Kelly; but instead of laughing she cried, because even though she hated what he had done all those years ago she knew she still loved him and was afraid that if they lived together she’d come to love him still more and so could be hurt worse.

  In this way the day went past dreadfully and speedily, and when the Bridge began to bellow with the home-going traffic she stirred herself, washed her face and, taking her shawl, she went next door.

  ‘I’m bored, Justine. Like me to take the kids to the playground for a while?’

  The young woman, who usually looked like a starved cat, now looked like a sleepless starved cat. She seemed at the end of her tether.

  ‘If you could just take Natty off my hands. Goodness, how super! Vincent has been moaning all day, and I’ve just pried open his trap to look at his throat, and it’s like a beetroot. I was just about to hustle him and Natalie along to the doctor. But if you could look after Nat –’ She threw her arms thankfully about the girl. ‘You’re a pet, Abigail, bless you. Good heavens, is that the family tatting you have on your dress? I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Abigail has big Dracula teeth dripping with blood,’ croaked Vincent.

  ‘Oh, shut up, you,’ she snapped. Justine looked pained and Abigail felt ashamed, for after all the little viper was sick. She busied herself putting Natalie into her outdoor gear.

  The child whispered excitedly, ‘When I was watching through the window I saw the little furry girl.’

  Abigail hugged her. ‘You and your little furry girl! And how could you see her all the way down there in the playground?’

  ‘I don’t know; I just did. I wonder where she comes from?’

  ‘I expect she lives in one of the little terrace houses,’ said Abigail as they went down in the lift.

  ‘I’d like to live in a little house,’ said Natalie, ‘with sunflowers higher than the roof and little hollows in the stairs. And a bedroom with a slopey roof. And a chimney.’

  The little girl, freed from the oppressive presence of her brother, skipped blithely along, looking at the children sliding down slippery-dips, hanging on the bars like rows of orangoutangs and climbing over the gaudily painted locomotive that stood near the sandpit. Abigail lifted Natalie up to the driver’s seat, but she was frightened at the height; and, besides, most of the children had begun their obsessive game of Beatie Bow, and she wanted to watch.

  ‘Why do you want to watch when the silly game scares you so, Natty?’

  ‘I just want to look at the little furry girl watching, because I like her, you see.’

  ‘You’re a funny little sausage.’ Abigail sat on a cement mushroom and watched curiously while the children formed themselves into their hushed circle, and ‘Mudda’ took her place in the middle. Natalie pulled at her shawl.

  ‘There she is, Abigail. Do look.’

  Abigail looked. At the edge of the playground, absorbed in the children’s activities, yet seemingly too shy to emerge from the half-shadow of the wall, was a diminutive figure in a dark dress and lighter pinafore. Her face was pale, and her hair had been clipped so close it did indeed look like a cat’s fur. Eagerly she watched the children, smiling sometimes, or looking suspenseful, as the game went on, and then jumping up and down excitedly as Beatie Bow emerged from her grave and frightened everyone to death.

  ‘I wonder why she doesn’t play. Perhaps she’s crippled or something,’ said Abigail. ‘Let’s go and talk to her.’

  They were close to the child before she noticed them, so engrossed was she. She was about eleven, Abigail thought, but stunted, with a monkey face and wide-apart eyes that added to the monkey look. She wore a long, washed-out print dress, a pinafore of brown cotton, and over both of them a shawl crossed over her chest and tied behind. Her feet were bare, and Abigail was surprised to see that the skin was peeling from them in big flakes.

  ‘Hullo, little girl!’ said Natty shyly.

  The child whipped around in what seemed consternation. She looked an ugly, lively little creature, but scared to death. With a stifled squawk she fled along the wall and dived up one of the steep stone alleys that still linked the many irregular levels of The Rocks.

  ‘Well, she didn’t like us,’ said Abigail. ‘Or perhaps she comes from another country and didn’t understand we wanted to be friends.’

  Natalie nodded, her eyes full of tears once more.

  ‘Oh, Natty, do stop crying. You’re like a leaky jug or something. What’s the matter now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ But when Abigail had delivered her back at the unit, she gave the elder girl a hug and whispered, ‘I cried because the little furry girl has been unhappy.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Abigail asked, but the child just shook her head.

  Kathy came home early. She had been steeling herself all day to face discussion of the problem of leaving Sydney.

  ‘Now, Abigail, let’s be straightforward and honest …’

  ‘I am,’ said Abigail. ‘But before we get on to that, what are you going to do with Magpies?’

  ‘Lucille said she’d buy it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be more sensible to lease it to her, so that you can get it back afterwards?’

  ‘Afterwards!’ gasped Kathy. ‘Of all the cynical …’ She had turned quite pale. ‘If you want to know, Dad said he’s never stopped caring for me.’

  ‘And now for the violins,’ said Abigail. The moment the words were out of her mouth she felt terrible, as if she’d taken up the vegetable knife and stuck it into her mother. As for Kathy, she exploded: ‘That’s a lousy thing to say. Especially from you. When did you ever feel anything for me when Dad left home? You were so wrapped up in your own troubles anyone might have thought no one else was hurt.’

  ‘Well, you might remember I was only ten,’ protested Abigail, aghast at this broadside from her mother who had never attacked her before.

  ‘You’ve been twelve since then, and thirteen and fourteen, the wideawake kid who knows all
about men and women and sex and love; and never, not once, have you ever said or asked anything about what I felt when Dad left. Did you ever think of me as a deserted wife, or just of yourself as a deserted child?’ shouted Kathy. ‘And now I have a chance to experience happiness again, you’re going to throw a spanner in the works, because you know very well I won’t leave you here with no one but Grandmother to look to if you get ill or … or … anything.’

  She hurried off to the bathroom and spent so long there that Abigail went unhappily to bed.

  The next morning Kathy said, ‘If you’re going to help at Magpies today we’d better get going. Are you?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Abigail, and she was glad to hear a voice that was hard and flip, as she wanted it to be.

  And for the rest of the painful day, and all the next, no word passed between them except those of ordinary civility. Abigail was glad they were busy, for crates of stuff arrived from the old farm at St Mary’s – oil paintings black with smoke and grease, battered colonial furniture, goldfish bowls and petit-point evening bags, and all the fascinating detritus of some unknown person’s expended life.

  Kathy looked as if she had been crying in the night, for she had put on eyeshadow, which she rarely did. She looked ridiculous, like a finch that had lost a fight. Abigail was so upset she felt dislocated; her emotions were so turbulent that she felt like some sea creature with horny shell and poisonous spines, and bits of weed and shell attached as camouflage. Except that all the camouflage she had was her cool expressionless face, and her green dress, which she kept stroking and touching, as though it gave her comfort, the way Natalie stroked her teddy-bear. And she went on doing this, unconsciously, until at last Kathy screamed:

  ‘Stop that! You’ve been doing it all day; you’re driving me up the wall. I wish you’d take that wretched dress off; it’s too cold for this weather. Why do you get so obsessed with some stupid garment? It just sends me round the bend.’

  ‘Maybe there’s s-something else you’d like to find wrong with me while you’re at it!’ Abigail could not keep her voice from shaking. It was unreal. She and her mother did not go on like this. They were friends.

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ yelped Kathy, turning to her work. Abigail grabbed her old patchwork shawl (it, too, had come from some deceased estate) and tore up to the corner of the street and caught a West Circular Quay bus. She sat there and boiled while the bus bumped and halted and jerked onwards, and inside the tears ran down and put out the fire of her anger.

  It was true. She did wear things until they almost fell off. But always before her mother had laughed.

  ‘That’s Abigail, always rapt in something. And why not?’ she had said. Already there was a change in both of them.

  ‘It’s true,’ she thought, sorrowfully, ‘I never did think of what she must have felt. Never once did I put my arms around her and say, “Don’t mind, I’m still here.” It was always Mum who did that to me.’

  A bus seemed an unlikely place to have your heart broken in, but she felt that was happening. She didn’t even have dark glasses to hide behind. All she could do was to open her burning eyes to their utmost so that the tears wouldn’t fall out, and put on the calm, slightly scornful face she had, thank God, practised for years.

  ‘It’s all his fault, trying to creep in, spoiling what we have,’ she thought. But it was not her father that her thoughts returned to over and over again, it was Mum. ‘If she’s loved him all this while, and not thought of anyone else, it must have been hell for her. But she’s never complained, and when I made those snide remarks about Jan she even said I was unfair. I don’t think I could ever say a good word for someone my husband left me for. But it’s true, I would expect my only daughter to stand by me. And I didn’t. I just thought of how awful it was for me, the way I’m doing right now.’

  She had left the bus almost without noticing it. Great steely skies, blanched with approaching winter, arched overhead, and amidst these floated the half-circle of the Bridge, spangled with crimson patches from the sunset, long gone but still painted on the high clouds. The windows of Mitchell and other tall buildings shone tremulously with this ruby light. A cold dusty wind blew from the south, bringing in gusts the iron voice of the city, the dirty, down-at-heel city around Central Railway, drowning the hoot of the hydrofoils, the swish-swash of ferries drawing in and pulling out at Circular Quay.

  There were still children tearing around in the playground, and she halted for a moment to watch them. Mothers and older brothers were calling them in. There were not enough to play Beatie Bow; they were chasing each other, screeching aimlessly.

  Her eyes turned instinctively to the corner of the wall where it met the street. There lurked Natalie’s little furry girl, looking cold and forlorn.

  ‘She looks the way I feel,’ thought Abigail.

  But how did she feel? Not quite lost but almost. Baffled. A sense of too many strange ideas crowding around her, a feeling of helplessness and difficulty with which she could not come to terms. She thought, ‘Maybe they’re right. Maybe there is such a thing as being too young and inexperienced to know your own mind.’

  Or perhaps it was something simpler. In Norway, if there was family discord once more, she would have no bolt-holes, no familiar places or friends, probably not even anyone to whom she could speak in English. At the thought of this her sensation of vulnerability grew so strong that she almost cried out aloud.

  ‘Mum’s got to listen to me,’ she thought. ‘Maybe she could cope if something went wrong, but I couldn’t, I know I couldn’t.’

  Distinctly she saw the little furry girl sigh, as though sadly disappointed.

  And for an instant she reminded Abigail of Natalie, when tormented beyond endurance by the demonic Vincent.

  ‘Poor little rat,’ she thought. ‘The things kids have to put up with!’

  All at once she had an irresistible desire to speak once more to this child, to find out why she watched, why her clothes were so poor, why Natalie thought she had been unhappy. Most of all she wanted to see her smile. She tiptoed along in the shadow of the wall. The little furry girl, looking hopefully at the children, did not see her.

  ‘Boo!’ whispered Abigail.

  The child leapt in the air like a trout, gaping at Abigail. Her eyes were a light hazel, and Abigail noticed that her hair was tufted and bristly as though growing out after having been shaved.

  ‘Did I give you a start?’ she said. ‘It was only a joke.’

  The other blurted, ‘I wasna doing naething! I were only watching the bairns!’

  Her voice was hoarse, her accent so extraordinary that Abigail caught only a word or two. But before she could ask the girl to repeat what she had said, the hazel eyes glistened and she said in a half-sob, half-cough, ‘I dunna want it to be true, but then again I do, oh, I do!’

  This time Abigail heard clearly. Involuntarily she stretched out a hand to this odd troubled child as she might have done to Natty, but the girl leapt away like a hare up the cobbled lane she had used the previous time.

  More for curiosity than anything else, Abigail stretched her long legs and raced up the steep alley.

  She could not remember ever walking up it before, though it was directly opposite the playground. It ascended as abruptly as a staircase between tall stone walls of warehouses or shops. She did not have time to look. At the top was a little flight of crooked stone steps, and there she could see the child’s shawl fluttering, as she hesitated and peered back at her pursuer. The shawl showed dark bottle-green under a street lamp.

  ‘Don’t be a silly little twit. I only want to talk to you,’ cried Abigail breathlessly. She bounded up the steps into the light and saw that she was in Harrington Street, a queer old road, not much used now, all different levels, so that sometimes one had to step down from the footpath and other times up. The little girl had flickered out of the light, but Abigail could see her bare feet and the edge of her skirt showing in the shadow of a thickety shrub that had
followed its network of snaky roots down the crevices of a crumbling stone embankment.

  She called out teasingly, ‘I can see you hiding there!’

  Just then, down in the city, the Town Hall clock began its baritone booming, distorted and half drowned by the traffic. But Abigail distinctly heard the first four notes of the simple tune which denoted the half-hour, and she thought, ‘Five thirty. I’d best be getting home, I suppose.’

  Something, she did not know what, made her hold out her hand to the hidden child and say, in a doomed, dramatic voice. ‘Oh, Mudda, what’s that, what can it be?’

  There was a muffled squeal of surprise or terror, Abigail could not guess which, from the little girl; but before she could make another move she heard a clinking and creaking and rattling and the unmistakable sound of a horse’s hoofs. And out of the gathering dusk at the south end of Harrington Street, its two side-lamps shining dimly, for they held only stumps of candles, came a high old-fashioned cab, glittering black in the wavering light from the street lamp.

  Abigail was stunned. She stood in the middle of the street, as though she’d lost all power to move, until she could see the very breath from the horse’s nostrils in the cold air, and the panic on the face of the tall-hatted cabbie. His lips were curled back, displaying a black gap in the middle of his teeth. He half rose.

  ‘Get outa the road, wench! D’ye want to be run down?’

  At that moment the little girl darted from the shadows, almost under the nose of the horse, and pushed Abigail sprawling out of the way. She crashed on what seemed to be wet cobblestones, while the cabbie leant over her and flicked at them both with the tip of his whip, shouting ‘Danged baggages! Are ye cracked, standing there like two dummies?’

  The cab creaked and clattered onwards. Abigail lay looking up at the lamp. The pedestal was a thick pillar of grooved iron; at the top was a glass-windowed lantern in which waved and waggled a blue fishtail of flame. She had seen pictures of such lamps before, and she knew the light came not from electricity but coal gas.