One Whole and Perfect Day (11 page)
Her gaze swivelled westwards towards the suburb where her parents lived. She glanced at her watch: 10.35. She knew what they’d be doing. The same thing they did every night at this time: sitting on the sofa watching
Lateline
, poor Mum struggling to make conversation, Dad sitting stonily silent, listening to her try. ‘Oh Mum,’ whispered Clara, pressing her forehead against the cold glass of the window. ‘Mum!’ With a sudden savage tug she pulled the curtains across and shut the city from view.
Clara was mistaken: her mother wasn’t watching
Lateline
on the sofa in company with Clara’s dad. She had been for the first ten minutes, but when she’d ventured a comment on the programme and Charlie hadn’t answered . . . Rose had coolly said, ‘Goodnight,’ and left him sitting there. She hadn’t even asked if he wanted a cup of tea. She’d marched upstairs to the bathroom, filled the tub to brimming and poured in half a bottle of the Juniper bath oil Clara had given her for Christmas. She’d been saving it. For what? For tonight, it seemed.
Rose had never walked away from Charlie before, when he’d been sulking. She was one of those mild quiet people who dreaded arguments, who liked to keep the peace, and she wasn’t sure why, this evening, she’d finally made a stand. Unless it had something to do with that young woman who’d read the 10.30 news tonight. She’d reminded Rose of Clara, of a certain expression Clara had sometimes, her eyes looking out at you sternly from beneath her glossy fringe.
Clara had hated the way her father sometimes wouldn’t answer when her mother spoke to him. ‘Mum!’ she would say quite bossily to Rose. ‘Mum, how can you put up with that?’
‘It’s nothing, darling,’ Rose would always reply. ‘Your father’s simply tired.’
‘Tired? Rude, more like.’
‘Darling, you know he gets tired from work.’
‘So do
you.
’
‘I only work four days a week.’
‘And on the fifth you’re running around shopping and washing, and doing housework – and what about the food? What about the way he complains about everything you make? You’re such a good cook, Mum, and yet everything you make, it’s –’ here Clara had twisted her features into her father’s sulky scowl, ‘What’s this?’ she growled. ‘What’s this stuff, Rose? Are you trying to poison me?’
Rose had giggled.
‘It’s no laughing matter, Mum.’
‘Your dad had a very sad childhood, Clara. His parents never really understood him. They were old.’
Clara had wrinkled her nose and Rose had no trouble guessing what she was thinking. Old? Weren’t all parents old? Wasn’t that the defining feature of a parent? ‘He was a late child,’ Rose had told her daughter. ‘His mother was forty-five when he was born, and his dad was well into his fifties. They were more like grandparents, really. It was sad. Do you know, they actually had him wearing a suit when he was only three?’
‘Mum, having ancient parents is simply no excuse.’
‘It makes you into a certain kind of person, darling.’
‘A person who acts like a pig, who takes his miseries out on other people –’ Clara had paused for breath, and then said, ‘Mum, what about
you
?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes,
you.
You’re the one who had bad things happen in your childhood. Your parents died when you were seventeen, you were left all alone, you –’
Rose had flinched then, as she always did when her sad history was mentioned. ‘I know,’ she said quickly, wanting this subject of her parents to pass. ‘But –’
‘But but BUT,’ cried Clara, and her voice had risen to a shout. ‘Mum, why do you always make excuses for him? He’s just a rude old grouch!’ She’d stomped from the kitchen, where so many of their quarrels seemed to take place, stopping suddenly in the doorway, swinging round on Rose. ‘You could leave.’
At first Rose hadn’t realised what her daughter meant. She’d thought Clara was talking about the job at the library, which Rose enjoyed. She loved books, she even liked readers, and matching one to the other. ‘You will
love
this!’ Rose would greet Mrs Fitchett, holding out the latest novel from the old lady’s favourite author. ‘It’s his best, I think!’
‘Leave? But I like my job, Clara.’
Clara had clicked her tongue impatiently. ‘Not your job. I meant –’ She’d pointed to the ceiling, through which both of them could hear the head of the household splashing in the shower.
‘Leave your
dad
?’
‘You’ve got it, Mum!’
Rose’s right hand had risen protectively against her heart. The young were so
hard
; they saw everything so sharply, like – like traffic lights: red meant stop and green meant go and the amber one they had no patience with . . .
‘You’ll never do it, though,’ Clara had decided. ‘Mum, I know what you’re hoping for: some kind of miracle, the sort of thing that never happens, here on earth, so it’s not going to happen here at 46 Harkness Street, Lidcombe. Dad won’t change, you know, become the kind of person you like to think he is, deep down inside. It will never happen,’ she’d repeated, and marched off down the hall.
Two weeks later, after a row with her father about her fourth-year thesis topic, Clara had left home. She lived at the university now, and never came home to visit; she rang Rose at the library, and they met every few weeks at a coffee shop in town.
‘What’s your room like?’ Rose would ask her daughter.
‘Oh, just ordinary.’
‘What kind of furniture?’
‘What you’d expect,’ Clara would answer maddeningly. ‘A bed, and a desk, and a chair. Little sink in the corner, built-in wardrobe. You know.’
‘What colour are the walls?’
Clara would shrug. ‘Don’t remember. Never noticed, I suppose.’
They must be white, decided Rose, and in her mind she pictured a narrow cold white cell. Bare, too, because Clara hadn’t taken anything from home except her books and clothes. The room would have cold bright echoing floors. Rose shivered. ‘Would you like me to make you some curtains?’ she’d asked hopefully. ‘I could come and do the measuring, I wouldn’t interrupt your work . . .’
‘I’ve got curtains, Mum.’
Rose had been hoping all these months that Clara would ask her to visit, to see the place where she lived. Clara hadn’t, and Rose had been afraid to suggest it. What if Clara said, ‘No’?
The water in the bath was growing cold. Rose got out and wrapped herself in a deep green fluffy towel. Then she padded down the hall towards her bedroom, put on her nightdress, and lay down on the bed.
She could go there, she thought suddenly. She could go without an invitation, and visit Clara’s room. Why shouldn’t she? Clara was her daughter, her only child. Except for Charlie, Clara was Rose’s only relative on earth.
Yes, one day soon, she promised herself, she would go. Just to look, to
see.
On her day off, thought Rose sleepily – not tomorrow though, tomorrow was too soon. Besides, standing up to Charlie as she’d done tonight deserved a special little celebration of its own. Tomorrow she would take a different trip: back to the suburb where she’d grown up, where she could buy her mother’s favourite sweet: a whole lovely box of gulab jamun.
Downstairs in the living room, Charlie turned off the television, but he didn’t go up to bed. He was too unsettled. What was happening?
Rose had never done this before. Spoken to him in a cool sharp voice that sounded like a stranger’s, got up and flounced – yes, flounced, like Clara used to – from the room. She’d even slammed the door. And instead of feeling furious, as he had every right to, Charlie felt uneasy. Small shivers were running through him. What if Rose, like Clara, decided to – ah no, Rose would never do a thing like that. Charlie got up from the sofa and headed for the stairs.
Though often sulky and silent in terms of speech, Charlie could make a lot of noise about the house; his footsteps clattered on the stairs, doors slammed, taps were turned on full force. But tonight he walked softly and opened the door of the bedroom gently. He could see from the glow of the hall light that Rose hadn’t left him; she was fast asleep beneath the eiderdown. The relief that surged through him turned almost instantly to grievance. Asleep! As if it didn’t matter in the least that she’d wounded him.
Charlie turned and walked down the hall to Clara’s old room where the door was always closed. He went inside. The emptiness assailed him like a blow.
Grief fills the room
up of my absent child
, he remembered his frightening Year 12 English teacher declaiming, in her small chalky room at the top of the senior stairs.
Lies in his bed, walks up and down
with me / Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words . . .
‘Poetry consoles,’ she’d told them and she’d been wrong, because the lines slid through him like a blade.
Charlie crossed to the wardrobe and opened the door. Empty wire hangars jangled inconsolably. Beneath them on the floor lay something pale and crumpled. Charlie bent down and picked it up. It was the soft pink sweater he’d bought last year for Clara’s birthday; the sweater she’d worn every day for weeks.
She’d left it here. She didn’t want it anymore. No doubt it reminded her of
him.
Charlie folded the sweater carefully and reached up to place it on the shelf. As he did so, another line from his English teacher’s repetoire slid into his mind:
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
/
To have
a thankless child.
That was better, he thought. Now that really did console.
Lily switched on her bedside light and reached for the copy of
Bestie
she’d brought home. Normally Lily had no time for magazines like
Bestie
: they were full of scary articles like
Are you too fat for your cossie? What do they
talk about behind your back?
and
I can’t stop pulling out my
hair!
You didn’t have to be particularly sensitive for stuff like that to keep you awake at night, once you started thinking about it. Particularly if you had a crush on someone, because having a crush made you feel vulnerable, and even more vulnerable if the person you had a crush on didn’t know you existed. But this afternoon, waiting with her groceries at the supermarket checkout nearest to the news-stand, Lily had caught a glimpse of a tantalising heading on
Bestie’s
cover:
Does he notice You? And how to
make him.
Did he? Did he notice her? Lily had never worked out if that little tremor she felt between herself and Daniel Steadman when they passed each other in the playground or the corridors was real or simply in her mind. So she’d weakened and bought
Bestie
, hoping it might just, well, tell her something she needed to know.
Now, in the privacy of her room, she flipped through
Bestie
’s shiny pages: makeup, clothes, makeup, clothes, clothes.
What figure type are you?
Makeup, clothes, makeup.
I slept with my bestie’s boyf.
Yuk, thought Lily.
Clothes, makeup, clothes – and at last,
Does he notice
you? And how to make him.
But the article which had sounded so promising was really no help at all. It was full of guys talking about what they liked in a girl:
Beauty
Intelligence
Personality
Sense of humour
Kindness
In short, every gift a good fairy godmother, leaning over your cradle, could bestow. Every gift you could pretend to have. Because that was the gist of the second part of the article (
How to make him
)
.
Pretend.
And who wanted to pretend? Who wanted to
make
people notice you? Who wanted to make people do anything? She was out of touch with the world anyway, decided Lily: the ‘befores’ in the makeover section looked better than the ‘afters’.
She flung the magazine aside and set off for the bathroom, where if you stepped back far enough, the mirror showed almost the whole of you, from the middle of your forehead down to the bottom of your knees.
What figure
type are you?
Squat, decided Lily. When you were shortish, like she was, there was less actual room for any fat to spread, so you looked plumper than you should be, which surely wasn’t fair. She moved up close to the mirror to examine her face: small straight nose, curved lips, dark eyes, a face that persistently reminded her of someone she could never seem to identify. Her eyebrows were too thick, almost bushy. Lily pulled open a drawer in the bathroom cabinet and took out a pair of tweezers. Tentatively she tweaked at a stout black hair. And tweaked again, and again. Ouch! She was surprised how much it hurt, and it was a complete waste of time anyway, because when she tossed the tweezers aside and peered into the mirror, her eyebrows looked no different. Except that the skin around them had turned red, a nasty,
bulgy
shade of red. Inflamed. Gross, as Tracy Gilman would say.
‘What’s wrong with your eyes?’ her mum asked, encountering her in the hall.
‘Nothing!’ snapped Lily, and then, guilty at her mother’s hurt expression, she said in a softer voice, ‘I was just pluck –’ she paused, sensing that ‘plucking’ would be the wrong word for her mother, who didn’t go in for activities of that sort. Mum’s tweezers were for removing splinters and other small emergencies of a non-cosmetic kind. ‘I was just thinning my eyebrows,’ she amended.
‘
Thinning
them?’
You could never win. ‘Plucking them, then,’ scowled Lily.
‘Why?’
‘Because they’re too thick. Don’t you think they’re too thick?’
‘No.’
‘No? Mum, look properly.’
Her mother came closer. ‘They’re just definite,’ she said.
‘Definite!’ scoffed Lily, but she felt pleased all the same. Definite sounded good: clear and reasonable, strong. Lily retreated to the bathroom to look at her definite brows. The skin around them was even pinker now. Lily reached for the Savlon and dabbed it on thickly. Now she bore a distinct resemblance to Santa Claus. She rubbed the cream into her skin and her eyebrows went slimy, as if a snail had walked along them. ‘Never mind,’ she consoled herself. ‘Never mind.’
