That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (30 page)

Fawn figures had started to leave the courts in dribs and drabs. It was now the
de facto
end of the school day for the students playing sports at the reserve, the house prefect having recently been around to mark the roll. Once the prefect had been and gone there was nothing to stop you from wagging the rest of the afternoon.

‘
They were pigeons, or you’re going potty,’ declared Lillian, who lately had been staking out a no-nonsense territory of character. Joan felt a warming of the flush that the heat and the game had put in her cheeks.

‘
Well, cheerio, you lot!’

Lillian made a lazy about
-turn and headed off towards the bicycle rack at the other end of the court. Joining in with the returning cheerios, Joan felt her voice droop to a weak note.

While people changed their shoes and went back and forth to the drinking fountains and hung around talking, Joan made frequent eye
-contact with the sky, still hoping to see the futuristic silver cigars again. She had already sworn that the apparitions were positively silver and not grey or white, had no wings, and were therefore neither planes nor birds (nor, as one wag had joked, Superman and a few friends). And wings or no, they had been too high up for pigeons. But since common sense had chosen pigeons, she felt there was still some argument to be made.

‘
If they were pigeons, where did they go?’

‘
Probably flew down to a roof,’ said a blonde girl called Faye.

‘
Well, I was watching them, and they didn’t.’ Joan squinted at Faye, who shrugged and swung her racquet through the air, as if to salute her own happiness at being free for the afternoon.

‘
You must have looked away, then.’

Joan squinted
for a moment longer at the disinterest grafted on the other girl’s features and recognised the lost battle there.

She looked through the mesh fence at the flattish range of galvo and slate roofs
on the houses across the street. One roof had one lead-coloured pigeon on it. Hot light gleamed heroically on a new iron veranda. That was how metallic the gliding objects in the sky had been.

She was aware of holding, like an untasted sweet in her pocket, a wish to be a casual, easy come and easy go person like Lillian and Faye, as she walked to get her bike. But she felt painfully full of her own material, as if Joan Walker were a small stiff overstuffed chair
.

Riding home with the sun on the back of her head, Joan took one hand then the other off the handlebars and wiped her palms on her dress. The question of belief raised itself like a stalk in a field.

If the others had believed, or even if they had been interested in believing, might that have been enough to buy a reprise of the vision? And then, if it had been enough, might the reprise not have been a signal to the world to turn over a new leaf, recast itself, in one great genial spasm
– become, in one moment, hospitable, kind, sympathetic?

Not all of this matter shaped itself into words, but what remained underground in the earth of inarticulate feeling was close enough to the surface that its general contour was intelligible.

The road was paved with gravel like all of the streets in Strathgower except for a few in the town centre. A couple of grand polychrome brick villas from the boom years after the gold rush stood on double blocks. More attentive to the ordinary houses, the usual loitering presence belonging to the afternoon leaned a creased and flannelly shoulder against windows with curtains that gave a little in the middle. Parked cars offered it something to saunter around.

East, to her left, rising above the flat plain, the low ranges hugged the town edge, pressing their gumtree
-covered knees to the earth and gathering up a few streets into their laps. Instead of riding home, she turned down Dunstan Street, which led out to the railway line that passed in front of the hills.

Ten minutes brought her to the level crossing, after which the street rose sharply, so that she had to get off and push. The effort of climbing soon made her hot and flushed again. She mentally saw her own face
– a collection of large, important shapes, smoothed out with fat, in which were the looks of a great aunt or two. In contrast to the over-mature attainments of her face, her body had hardly grown at the end of childhood, remaining brevilinear; it had only thickened, seeming to find the short-stemmed plumpness of its first years too comfortable to give up.

This combination of face and figure did not go at all with any of her internal pictures of herself; not the ones in which she was a desirable woman, nor the more private, attractive but confusing ones in which she was a man. Yet if her face was false to her fantasies it was utterly true to her opinion of her soul, which she also felt was made of large charmless shapes that she would never be able to pack into a graceful, comfortable arrangement.

As for the body, it was too much like an unwanted Christmas present, so wrong that it made you wonder who on earth the giver thought you were, or what they were trying to turn you into. It could not be refused, you could only cast its shadow out of you with all your might.

But she had reached the top of the street. Here the town petered out. A single road, or rather a track, winding and studded with lumps of quartz, continued into the trees, more or less following the ridge of the hill. Joan stopped briefly to get her breath back from the climb, then rode onto the bumpy track
.

The bush was drowsy, half
-asleep in its bed of sunlight and wrap of slim pale eau-de-nil shadows, muttering the quietest
noli me tangere
. The greenwood, in its brownish and bluish local incarnation, where Robin Hood and cowboys and Indians had lived within recent memory, had not lost its magic. If anything, the magic was stronger for being nearly out of reach. Perhaps the old proposition of the bush still stood, the covenant it made with children, that if you dared to wander into its monotony until you got lost, the spirit in the miles of gum and stringybark would come out of hiding and lead you away through the thick doors of the air so that you would never be found. But where would it lead you to?

She stopped pedalling. Below the track on her right, inside the wire fence of someone
’s property, the old fort and hideout: a ruined stone chimney marking where a miner’s cottage had stood. All around, flies hummed in the bark-littered bays between trees.

Would
they
make a sound if they were close?

She climbed off the bike and stood squinting up, until that which had begun to break broke and she burst open with the sense of herself as a tragic being.

‘Your mood will no doubt settle down of its own accord once you are married and have children,’
the doctor had said.

Her mother had taken her to see the doctor earlier that year, when it seemed that she was not outgrowing the temper tantrums of childhood as quickly as she should be. As it had turned out, irascible high school teachers had through their own adult, sanctioned rages and storms of sarcasm frightened her temper into patience. Now it always waited until she was away from school, sometimes waiting so stealthily that she didn
’t know when it was already there, like a tiger in the underbrush.

She shoved the bike so that it fell over off the track. Letting it lie there, she climbed through the
wire fence and marched down to the chimney with her eyes unfocused. She stopped behind the chimney, which offered the sense if not the fact of privacy. One more stubborn time she looked up, and thought,
If you come back
– she promised in the way she sometimes made promises to God –
I won’t do this. I’ll be good. I won’t be angry anymore. I’ll change
.

The sky responded to her hailing a
t last:
But you won’t change,
it said.

She took a deep breath, preparatory; looked around to check that no stray person was observing, then slapped herself on the arm. She hit herself on the arms and legs, and slapped one hand with the other. The crime these blows punished was the crime of being Joan Walker. There was no other way to put it.

On the shelves of experience was the knowledge that in a minute or two the worst and most urgent energy of her mood would be exhausted, leaving behind only a stump that would take time and stimulus to reach such a state again, although while the rage lasted it felt as though it could last forever.

It came to an end. She frightened herself with her own vehemence at last. Something was appeased. So that now she could walk back, smarting and shaking but capable of normal movement, up to the track, as if she had only gone behind the chimney for a wee.

She picked up the overturned bike, but before she got on it she stood dazedly still in the bright sun, feeling that the stuffing had been beaten out of the chair.

And her interior state changed suddenly. A spirit looked out through her eyes, and observed that the firestorm was over, and that now there was a queer wonderful blaze of light without heat coming from all directions and none. It swept over her as the rage had done and she was just as weak before its strength. A magpie warbled and in the sudden song she heard a reminder that she had seen a wonder that day. Something inside her responded
– something that ached in a finer way than self-pity or self-disgust – though it was babyish, like a grub arching itself towards the unexpected light when a hand lifted the rock it had been living under, but too puny and inept to do more – except that it was also sensitive, and capable of swelling, as it did in church when they sang ‘Jerusalem’, or at climactic moments in films.

This grub enlarged suddenly, taking her by surprise, as if it had fed secretly on the emotional substance of the afternoon. To the magpie
’s handsome song she answered, as she rode back along the track, with ‘Jerusalem’, in a voice that even she found shocking, as it missed virtually every note.

Nonetheless she sang loudly and boldly about the chariot of fire and the sword and the green and pleasant land, which her mind had always conflated with the Jerusalem that was to be built; it did not seem necessary or desirable to separate them.

The smell of a beef casserole was flowing extravagantly out of the stove when Joan
entered the kitchen. Mrs Walker came away from shelling peas at the bench to kiss her on the cheek. Her weak eyes, close-set by the aquiline nose that Joan had inherited, like two pale flowers decorating a Roman grave, gave Joan a look of tender inspection.

Joan pulled
away to get a glass of water.

‘
Can I help with anything, Mother?’

‘
No, thank you,’ said Mrs Walker, turning back to the peas. ‘You get started on your homework.’ Mother never allowed you to help with dinner on a school night, but you knew she would be hurt if the offer were not made.

‘
Was school all right?’

‘
It was sports day.’

‘
Oh, well then.’

As soon as Joan had quenched her thirst, she went and washed her face and then shut herself in her room.

She took her books out of her schoolbag and dropped them on the desk. The desk was in front of the window, which looked out at the backyard fruit trees, around and up and down which Keith and the boy from over the road were running madly.

The light was finally starting to soften as the shadows stretched out. A few proper clouds had gathered at last in the now
-watery sky. Joan did not expect to see anything up there now, and that expectation was met in full.

She opened the French exercise book on top of the pile, studied the worksheet stuffed inside it, and began translating into English the set extract from
Contes et Légendes
. At the half-page mark her attention departed from the tedious work. She opened the desk drawer and took out a piece of loose paper. On it she doodled the UFOs, placing them in the arrowhead formation she remembered. Then habit took over and she began jotting down her usual things: ideas for her trousseau, schemes of decoration, menus for parties. Most of these plans were already established in her mind, but going over them supplied a soothing sense that it was only a matter of time before they all would be enacted.