She had settled something that first time. Entering into the night was like swimming. She felt cleansed.
And part of her unraveled.
It was like shedding a skin.
Before dawn the sky behind the hills turned a deep blue. Stars still shone. The blueness slowly flooded across the sky. She lay back on the ground and watched the first of the earth-colored hawks ascend and circle above her.
I was glad to see Mrs. O'Malley outside, surveying the street like an old seagull on a rock. She went inside rocking from side to side like a skittle doll. She came back with fifty cents.
Angela and I were collecting for Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's annual spellathon. We'd been to the two Mr. Murrays’ house. Marshall Murray had come down his front steps and gone through his brown trouser pockets and swayed a little in front of Angela and me.
“Tell us what you know,” he said as he gave us twenty cents, which was only ten cents each.
I could have told him a lot of different things.
Even when he smiled and showed his chipped front tooth his eyes looked like he'd just seen a terribly sad thing, for instance a slag heap falling on top of a school.
Angela tugged my arm.
Mum had told us not to knock on doors because we could be kidnapped and only to talk to people if they were in their front yards. We knocked on Miss Schmidt's door mostly for the dare. Mum said there was something strange about a woman who never
got married or had kids but that we shouldn't be mean to her either and call her names like Psycho Lady. We should just be wary. Little children had unfortunately been killed by strange lonely people.
“Cool. How?” said Danielle.
“Please, Danielle,” said Mum.
“I only want to know so I can be wary,” said Danielle.
When we knocked, Frieda Schmidt took a very long time to come to the door even though we knew she was there because her car was in the driveway. We heard her footsteps behind the door and even then she took a long time to open it as though she was preparing herself. When she opened the door she was fully clothed as though it was a weekday and she tried a smile on for size but it must have felt wrong because she stopped doing it.
I had introduced myself and explained about the spellathon and when she didn't say anything I told her I could even spell “corruption.” She tried the smile on again and then motioned for us to follow her into the house. It did feel a little bit like we were Hansel and Gretel being led into the candy cane cottage only it was exactly the same company house as ours only with different furniture. And only it was exceptionally neat and there was not a thing out of place. There was a TV and a chair in front of it and a sofa with cushions arranged on it with a plastic
cover over it. There was a tea set on the coffee table as though she might be expecting guests and a dining room table with six chairs.
In the kitchen there was not a dish or plate to be seen. There were no toast crumbs on the counter, not even a toaster. The oven looked brand-new. The fridge didn't have any magnets on it. And her air conditioner made a much louder noise than ours, a noise like someone saying shhhhhhhhhhh. The house smelled strange. It smelled like cleaning products and emptiness.
She gave us a one-dollar note. She held it in one corner and I took the opposite corner.
“Thank you so much, you've given the biggest donation ever in our history of spellathons,” I said.
It wasn't until we were on the front steps that we realized she hadn't said a thing. And that we were taking deep breaths of the Saturday-afternoon air as though we had been inside a mausoleum.
“What on earth were you doing in there?” Mrs. O'Malley asked.
I'd proudly showed her the one-dollar note. We'd done three streets and made two dollars fifty.
“Good on you, girls,” she said. “I like to see you doing such things. But here, tell me something, who are all these new girls keeping Beth company?”
She wanted to know who the Shelleys were, which side of town they came from, who their
parents were and where they'd come from and how they'd arrived.
“I'm not sure,” I said.
“I'm worried, you know,” said Mrs. O'Malley, looking down toward the end of the street like something was coming. “There's trouble brewing on this street.”
Beth grew wilder each day. She plucked her eyebrows into two thin lines. She painted kohl onto her bottom eyelids. She pierced her ears with sewing needles. She rarely smiled. The wilder she grew, the more she glowed. Her skin gleamed. Her eyes rained a soft blue light. She did not like to look at people for fear of frightening them with her beauty. The more she glowed, the wilder she grew.
Michelle Wright had broken ranks and given Beth a black rubber-band bracelet. She didn't say anything but held it on her outstretched palm. These bands were precious. They could not be bought or sold. Instead they were handed down like heirlooms. They were given by girls who left school, got married, had kids. Handed down by older sisters who remembered what it felt like to sit on the top step of the grandstand and survey a kingdom. They were hastily passed on by cousins who left town on midnight buses.
The bands provided order. They were the rules on
how a girl could gain entry to the circle. How she could leave. A girl had to have three bands before she could give one herself. The order they provided was delicate. Great reigns could be ended suddenly by the giving of bands. Plots were hatched and leaders were overthrown. Bands were removed from arms solemnly, secretly, and given to the preferred ruler. Fights erupted. Battles were fought.
“What are you looking at?” said Rochelle Peters to Beth one day after school assembly.
She came close. She rammed Beth's shoulder with her own. But the action was playful. She half smiled after she had moved away. It was her introduction. Beth would be tolerated.
Beth went with them to the top of Memorial Park, where the water tower stood. The tower was made of smooth white concrete. All around the base there were smashed beer bottles and cigarette butts. Graffiti covered the round wall. The graffiti said
SHEREE LUVS MARK
,
SUCK MY DICK
,
IF YOU WANT A GOOD TIME RING MARIA S
., and
ROSES ARE RED AND VIOLETS ARE BLUE YOU LOOK LIKE A SLUT AND SMELL LIKE ONE TOO
.
From the top of the hill the town was visible; the straight streets dissected the wide empty river, and the mine, like a giant dirty city, rose behind, billowing brown smoke into the cloudless sky.
Angela and I knew the place well. We had been to
the water tower many times before even though Mum said never to go there because it might burst and we would be drowned. She said she knew for a fact it had happened somewhere before. Perhaps in Spain.
We climbed to the water tower by a path through straggly bushland of snappy gums and spear grass. The red rock slipped beneath our feet. No matter how hot it was the tower was always cool to the touch.
Our favorite game was to lay our heads against the pipes that ran from the white concrete into the ground. Inside the pipes we could hear a ticking noise. It sounded like someone tapping a stone against the pipe. It was rhythmical as a clock. Angela said it was a water witch. When she said it we both laughed but my heart beat so hard that I had difficulty hearing.
We climbed the slipping rock path just to lay our heads against the cool pipe and listen to her tick. We were terrified and mesmerized by her. But there was also something else about the place. It was very still and quiet. When the hot wind blew, the grass made a noise like people sighing. The scrub trees whispered. It was only a few streets from home but it seemed far away. The view to Dardanelles Court was swallowed up by pale bushland.
Beth drank with her new friends at the water
tower. Miranda took rum from the caravan because it was easy and she said Kevin would get her some if she wanted because he would do everything she asked. Beth took Mum's wine from the cask without asking. She poured it into empty soft drink tins. Everyone brought something. They sat with their backs against the tower wall, waving the flies from their faces, and looked out over the town. The winter sun burned their faces.
After they drank, it was always Miranda who dared Beth to do wilder things. Beth dared Miranda back.
“I dare you to go to that house on Picardy Street,” said Miranda, “where the spunky man with the motorbike lives.”
“What do I have to do?” asked Beth.
“You have to knock on his door and ask him for a kiss.”
“You're crazy,” said Michelle Wright.
“She's a real slut,” said Rochelle Peters, but in a friendly way.
“I dare you to walk out onto the highway and lift your shirt up,” said Beth.
“That's nothing,” said Miranda.
“You've got to take your bra off too,” said Michelle Streeton.
“Yeah,” said Beth. “No bra and lift your shirt when cars are passing.”
“I can do that,” said Miranda.
They rode all the way to the house on Picardy Street but the man wasn't home and his girlfriend answered the door. They rode to the highway and took off their bras from under their shirts by pulling the straps down through their armholes. Miranda did it first. She waited for a gap between the trucks and ran out and performed the act. Beth lifted her shirt as a road train passed. Its driver released the air horn and started to slow down. They rode as fast as they could back to the park.
They talked about climbing the water tower. The lower section of the ladder had been removed to about the height of a tall man. Miranda said they could easily bridge the difference if one stood on the other's back. They tried it once but they were laughing too much and they fell on the ground. Beth cut her arm on a piece of glass.
“Blood sisters,” she said, touching some of her blood onto Miranda's finger.
“Blood sisters,” said Miranda.
“Imagine the view from the top,” said Beth. “I'd be able to see clearly from there.”
“We'd need a man to help us,” said Miranda.
“We'd need someone really tall,” said Beth.
“Kevin might do it,” said Miranda.
“But what would he want in return?”
Sometimes Beth allowed us up to the water tower
with them. Angela and I weren't allowed to sit close to them but we were made bold by the company. We put our heads to the pipes for longer. We tried to decipher the ticking messages. Angela said it might be Morse code. She said we needed a book about it from the library. I said witches didn't do Morse code. She said how could I be completely sure? I said I couldn't be, not completely, but fairly sure. It was before we did fractions and percentages with Mrs. Bridges-Lamb.
Beth closed her eyes when she took a mouthful of the wine. When she opened them they were bluer. Sometimes she looked disappointed that she was still where she was. She lit her Winfield Greens end to end. Always, after a while, she called out to me and told me to go home. It wouldn't even be getting dark. The shadows of clouds would be passing over the drinking girls’ faces. If I argued she got angry.
“Go,” she shouted.
Like there was a big rush. As though if I stayed one minute more I'd see something I shouldn't see.
“Why?”
“Because she said so,” said Miranda, who tried to act like she was my sister also.
“Leave her alone,” said Michelle Wright. She was the nicest of them all with her warm brown face and wide white teeth.
“You're so mean to her,” she said. “You're so mean to your little sister.”
Sometimes she asked me to show her my Hobbytex T-shirts. She asked me what they said like she couldn't read and I wasn't ten.
But we had to go when Beth was like that.
The tide is high but I'm moving on,
I sang as we went down the hill.
I'm gonna be your number one,
Angela sang back.
We sang it loudly to scare away snakes with the vibrations of our voices. We went down through whispering scrub and onto the freshly mowed grass of the park. We passed beneath the dark-headed trees and the evening sun rippled through the leaves and made moving patterns on our arms and faces.
Sometimes at the trees we could still hear their voices on the hill. The long shrieks of laughter, the wild callings. We left our patterned skins beneath the trees and went down through the turnstile gate past Aunty Cheryl and Kylie's house, where the kitchen light was already on and the smell of dinner came out through the window. And at the bottom of the hill when we turned it was impossible to tell that she was still up there with the others.
“Have you seen Beth?” asked Mum.
“No,” I lied, but not because Beth had told me to.
I had lied because I didn't know what to say. I lied to protect our mother. I lied to protect Beth. I lied to protect everyone.
In the shower I tried to sing one of Nanna's Latin carols even though it wasn't Christmas and for the first time my voice took a very long time to come.
Mr. Popovitch dropped us off at the supermarket on his way to a Panel Van Club annual general meeting. The shops hadn't even opened so we sat on the seats outside and waited. Angela had
The Book of Clues
in her beaded red Indian bag with tassels.
We had our beanies pulled down over our ears and gloves on also. Whenever we spoke our words smoked and hung in the air. We had a best-of-three word-smoking competition. Angela won.
We watched all the checkout ladies arrive. We discussed interesting facts like what to do if you get stuck in quicksand, how to prepare for a nuclear war, and different ways that humans might be able to go backward in time and then we had a fight about whether it was possible to keep a fairy as a pet.
“No,” I said. “It isn't.”
“But we could borrow Kylie's Barbie camper-van,” said Angela. “It could live in that.”
“It would die of sadness and starvation,” I said.
“No it wouldn't. What about all those tins and saucepans?”
“They're only painted on the campervan walls. They're not real.”
“Fairies are magic,” she said. “It'd use its magic.”
“It would die of loneliness and missing its family.”