Marigold was fretting about old Mrs Nightingale, whose children still hadn’t found anyone definite to care for their mother while they went on their second honeymoon. Marigold felt guilty every time she saw them in the recreation room waiting for their mother to finish her game of Patience; she knew that if it hadn’t been for her promise to Lily she could have solved their problem quite easily. It was only three days, after all. Three little days. Perhaps Lily might make an exception for such a short time? And then Marigold remembered old Mrs Edwards’ stay with them (which had also been for three days), how the old lady had mistaken Lily for her mother, and cried every morning when Lily went off to school. Then there was Mr Roberts (two days) who’d kept going through their drawers and cupboards. Lily had come home to find him out in the front garden, wearing her yellow dungarees.
Mrs Nightingale wasn’t in the least like them: she didn’t wander, either with her feet or in her mind. She played her games of Patience and read her books, and she wouldn’t, Marigold knew, be seen dead in Lily’s yellow dungarees. And they had Lonnie’s room vacant now . . .
‘Lily?’
‘Yeah?’ Lily turned, and Marigold saw she was wearing that furious expression which always reminded her of Pop: Lily’s eyes were black and glittering, her cheeks had turned bright red. She looked very, very angry. Marigold drew back nervously. What could be the matter? A bad mood? Something wrong at school? Marigold didn’t like to ask, and it definitely wasn’t the time to suggest a visit from Mrs Nightingale – she’d simply be letting herself in for a lecture on being unprofessional. Instead she jabbed a finger at the screen. ‘Um, I just wondered . . . have you worked out who that woman in the big hat is?’
‘No.’
Marigold sighed and began to fret about another problem: this party her mother was having for Pop’s eightieth, and Mum’s insistence that Lonnie should be there. And how could that be, when Pop and Lonnie weren’t speaking, and any time you mentioned Lonnie’s name, Pop would roar, ‘He’s no grandson of mine!’ And Lonnie was so difficult to get hold of – Marigold had rung him several times this last week, and never once had he been at home. Which was preferable to having him lying in bed all day, doing nothing, getting older; except why was he out all the time? How long was it since she’d actually spoken to Lonnie? Heard his voice?
‘Lily?’
‘Huh?’
‘How long is it since Lonnie rang?’
‘Dunno.’ She added, disconcertingly, ‘Ages, isn’t it?’
‘How long is ages?’
‘Three weeks? Four? No, hang on – it was that time he wanted you to send his Army Disposals jacket over.’
‘But that was at the end of
June
. And it’s August now!’
‘So?’ Lily glared at the screen. ‘He’s okay, Mum. Or do you think his landlady’s bumped him off and buried him underneath the floorboards?’
‘Of course I don’t!’ Why couldn’t Lily be more sympathetic? It was awful never knowing how Lonnie was getting on, or what kind of place he was living in: this mysterious gentlemen’s boarding house at 5 Firth Street, Toongabbie. Marigold had occasionally been tempted to sneak over there and take a look, only, well – you had your pride, didn’t you? She wouldn’t spy, she wouldn’t stoop so low. Old Mr Parker at the daycare centre had once lived in Toongabbie, and last Tuesday Marigold had asked him if he knew Firth Street. ‘Never heard of it!’ he’d replied.
Though of course the Toongabbie Mr Parker had known was sixty years in the past . . . Still, it had given Marigold the most uneasy feeling; as if the place where Lonnie had told them he lived wasn’t really there.
And then there were the vanishing dreams. ‘I had another vanishing dream last night,’ she said to Lily when the next ad flashed up on the screen.
‘Right!’ said Lily, who’d dreamed Tracy Gilman was going out with Daniel Steadman. She’d woken feeling furious, almost on the verge of tears, and hadn’t been able to get back to sleep again. At school, Tracy Gilman had peered into her face and said, ‘Your eyes have gone all puffy, did you know? You look like you’ve been crying!’
‘Allergy,’ Lily had said shortly, because she certainly didn’t feel like telling Tracy Gilman that she’d been awake half the night. And how, groggily wiping the stove-top after the breakfast milk had boiled over, she’d squirted the can of Ezi-Kleen wrong way round.
‘I dreamed I got a parcel in the mail,’ her mum was waffling. ‘A big brown parcel like the ones your nan sends sweaters in, and I knew Lonnie was inside – it said so on the label. It said: ‘Fragile. Lonnie inside.’
‘Fragile!’ scoffed Lily.
‘Only he wasn’t inside. There were layers and layers of paper, and then – nothing.’
‘That sounds like Lon all right.’
‘Perhaps I should get him another mobile, do you think?’
‘No! He’ll lose it, like he lost all the others. Mum, you’ve got to stop worrying about him. He’s a big boy now, you know; he’s twenty-two! He can look after himself.’
‘I know,’ said Marigold. ‘It’s just that when you’re a mother –’
‘Your brain softens.’
‘Not at all,’ said Marigold coldly. ‘But you do always tend to think the worst. You lie awake, and you –’
Lily didn’t want to hear about lying awake. She thought being a mother must be like having an eternal crush. ‘If it makes you feel better, I’m going to Lon’s place tomorrow,’ she said.
‘Where? To the boarding house?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But you know Lonnie doesn’t want us to go there; he said he needed space.’
‘He’s had space,’ said Lily, who felt she had no space at all, because having a crush was also like a prison; it was like solitary confinement. ‘And I’m not going there to spy, Mum,’ – she saw her mother flinch – ‘I’m going because Nan asked me when she rang last week. She wants to be sure Lon knows about Pop’s party.’
‘Oh, that wretched party,’ sighed Marigold.
Lily understood her mother’s attitude. Parties in their family always seemed to end in fights. Or even start with them, like this one would if Lonnie came along and Pop was still disgusted with him. ‘I’m going there before school, really early,’ she told her mother, ‘so I’ll be sure to catch him in, and I’ll try and get him to make it up with Pop.’
‘Oh, Lily, do you think you can?’
‘Not really,’ said Lily. ‘But I’ll have a go.’
‘Your nan’s so looking forward to this party. And so is Sef.’
Lily stared at her mother, appalled. ‘Mum, do you
believe
in Sef? Do you think she’s
real
?’
Marigold’s face turned pink. ‘No, of course not! It’s just, I’m so used to her, you see. I grew up with Sef. She was like a sort of aunty.’
An aunty! Now Mum was getting weird. Lily shook her head sadly and turned back to the film, but she couldn’t get the hang of the story, and this time it wasn’t because she was daydreaming about Daniel Steadman; it was because she could sense Mum staring at her –
Lily swivelled round. ‘What are you looking at?’
‘Just you,’ said Marigold tenderly. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Lily.’
Lily flushed, pleased and embarrassed. ‘You’d fill the house with lame ducks, Mum,’ she said gruffly, ‘That’s what you’d do. And in the end –’
‘In the end?’
‘You’d probably marry one of them.’
‘Of course I wouldn’t. Though –’ Marigold smiled slyly at her daughter, ‘I have had offers.’
‘
Who
?’
‘Old Captain Cuthbert asked me to set up ship with him last week.’
‘Mum, he’s
crazy.
’ An awful thought struck Lily. ‘You didn’t say “yes”, did you?’
‘Of course not. Though I was tempted, mind you.’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you, Mum? Aren’t you?’
Marigold tweaked a lock of Lily’s hair. ‘’Course I am.’
They settled back down to the film, and now Lily
was
daydreaming: she was imagining Daniel Steadman saying to her, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Lily.’
‘Do you know what they’re all looking for?’ asked her mother suddenly, nodding towards the vague figures on the screen.
‘Search me.’
Marigold giggled, and then Lily began to giggle too, and a small mouse, emerging unnoticed from behind the curtains, stared at them in surprise.
13 BOARDING HOUSE FOR GENTLEMEN
Why did he have to live all the way out here?
Lily was fuming as she made her way along the early morning streets of Toongabbie, an icy wind whipping at the hem of her school skirt, the tip of her frozen nose, the sodden corkscrews of her hair. Why couldn’t he live in the kind of place where other students lived: a hall of residence, a hostel, a shared house somewhere near the university? Why live in a boarding house? Why live way out here? She’d had to get up at six and take two trains, and after she’d seen Lonnie and delivered Nan’s message safely, she’d have to take two trains back again to school.
Lonnie would have his reasons for living here, of course, but they wouldn’t be the kind of reasons anyone else would choose. In her family, people seemed to make important changes in their lives for weird reasons, without exactly meaning to. Look how she herself had changed: become an airhead obsessed with Daniel Steadman, simply because she’d grown tired of being the sensible one in the family.
And Mum had once confessed to her that she’d married their father because she’d loved his coat.
‘Coat?’ Lily had echoed, thinking (as any normal person would) that she’d misheard.
Only she hadn’t misheard.
‘He had this lovely coat his Great-Aunt Pearl had given him for his twenty-first birthday. She’d bought it in Peru. Oh, Lily, it had the most beautiful colours – colours I’d never seen before. I was quite young, remember.’
‘Yeah, but –’
‘And the most wonderful texture!’ her mother had gone on dreamily. ‘Like a combination of rose petals and the softest sort of fur –’
‘Mum, I don’t believe I’m hearing this! You married someone because you liked their
coat
?’
‘Oh no, of course not. But the coat was part of it, part of
everything –
’ Her mother had sighed then, the sort of sigh a very old lady might give, recalling childhood summers.
Lily skirted a row of icy puddles beside a construction site, and then stopped to consult the map she’d made from Mum’s street directory. The wind was vicious, stinging at her cheeks, flapping the piece of paper in her hand: Firth Street was next left, then third right. Lily walked on. Lonnie had probably moved out here because he fancied living in a boarding house for gentlemen, and 5 Firth Street was the only one left in Australia. Or perhaps, on the day he and Pop had quarrelled, Lonnie’s train had passed this place and he’d looked out through the window and decided, ‘I’ll live here!’
Or he might have simply liked the name Toongabbie.
Freakish, thought Lily; that was the word which best described their family. Not freaks, exactly, but – getting there. They were a family that somehow didn’t fit, at least not into the orderly suburb where they lived, a neighbourhood in which any human problem was tidied out of sight, clipped, wrenched out, composted, so that it seemed, like the vanished weeds in gardens, that it was never ever there. Sometimes Lily felt there was an aura about her; that a scent of danger as well as cooking smells hung about her hair and skin and clothes, so that people, without knowing they were doing it, backed off from her.
People like Daniel Steadman. He probably
knew
about her family. Last week, in the courtyard of the library, Lily had seen Tracy Gilman deep in conversation with Daniel. Tracy lived in Lily’s street, just four doors down, in a perfect house whose windows shone, whose paintwork was glossy and whole, whose lawns were like brilliant green velvet even in the middle of a drought. Lily hadn’t been able to hear what they were saying, and it might have had nothing to do with her (having a crush on someone also seemed to make you paranoid), but she couldn’t help thinking Tracy
could
be telling him about that afternoon she’d walked home with Lily, and old Mr Roberts, one of mum’s lame ducks, had been in their front garden wearing Lily’s yellow dungarees.
And you didn’t have to be paranoid to realise that there were people at school who remembered Lonnie. It was four whole years since he’d been there, yet teachers were still bailing Lily up in the corridors to ask, ‘How’s your brother doing, dear?’ and she could see a kind of avid goggle in their eyes, which meant they were expecting some disaster story. Okay, Lily herself got pretty fed up with Lonnie sometimes, but those goggle-eyed teachers with their fake air of concern made her angry because when you really got down to it, there wasn’t anything
seriously
wrong with Lonnie. It was simply that he could never seem to stick to anything, and hadn’t she once been like that? First she’d tried ballet and given it away, then Brownies, then there was the saxophone . . .
Though of course she’d been little then. Lonnie wasn’t little anymore. He was fully grown. And why should he get away and leave her stuck with being the sensible one of the family? No wonder she’d gone funny about Daniel, spending her lunchtimes walking past the senior common room. No wonder Mum was getting weird.
Lily skipped another icy puddle and a bunch of slimy leaves. Where on earth was Firth Street? She’d been walking down this road for ages and Firth Street never came. Perhaps that was how it was with Lonnie, she thought suddenly: he was like a person walking down a long, long road, waiting for the corner, the right corner, that led into the street where he needed to be. For a moment her heart softened, and then it grew hard again.
Wanker!
She was going to tell him off when she got there. She really, truly, was.
‘Gone?’ echoed Lily, gazing fearfully into the fierce blue eyes of Lonnie’s landlady. Although it had taken her such a long time to find the boarding house, it was still only 7.45, and her brother had never got up that early, even when he’d been at school. Poor Mum had had to call and call . . .
A sudden panic gripped her, a panic she recognised as being straight out of her mother’s vanishing dreams. ‘Do you mean he’s
left
?’ she whispered. ‘Gone to live somewhere else?’