The Red Shoe (13 page)

She glanced over at Frances, but she was still reading. Matilda quickly left the room with her prize and went down the hall to her parents’ bedroom.

The door was half open. Matilda pushed on it gently, and peeped around.

Her mother was sitting on the bed, alone, with her head bent, and she was holding one red shoe in her lap, sobbing softly to herself. The lollipop slipped out of Matilda’s hands silently and fell on the floor.

U
P IN THE HIGHEST TREE IN THE
B
ASIN
, the red shoe had tumbled down down from Matilda’s foot, down into the tangled bush.

Matilda clung to the warm trunk and heard the cicadas and bird calls in the wind and the lapping of the water on the world. She smelt the gum leaves and just next to her nose was a streak of sticky sap, glinting like the trail left behind by a snail. Her heart was beating hard.

Someone shouted and then someone else, but not about the shoe. Matilda looked down and saw her mother running through the bush and crying out, screaming, “Help me, help me! Someone help me!”

Matilda must have climbed down then, though she didn’t remember doing it, but she must have because there she was and she could feel the vibrations of people running past her up through the ground and eyes were staring at her and there were flies everywhere. She didn’t know where anyone was, not Frances or Elizabeth, but she could hear her mother crying somewhere far away.

Then a man she didn’t know grasped hold of her and wouldn’t let her go. He told her to sit still, sit down, sit still, stay here love, they’ll be all right. Matilda hid herself at the back of the trees and waited for someone to come.

She waited and waited and no one came. She took off the red shoe, and hugged it to her chest. She watched as people were packing up their picnic things, ready for the last ferry back to Palm Beach. Would nobody come? It was twilight and the ocean was silver in the sunset.

“Matilda, there you are!” said Uncle Paul, coming forward in the half-dark.

“Where’s Mummy?” asked Matilda, frightened.

“Down at the wharf,” replied Uncle Paul.

She couldn’t see his face properly, just a blur and the smell of him. He was smoking.

“I’m sorry,” Matilda whispered, “I lost one of Mummy’s shoes,” and she held the remaining shoe up to him.

Uncle Paul took it. He didn’t seem to understand.

“Your dad had a bit of an accident,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. “Come on, let’s get on the boat.”

Over at the wharf, people were huddled together as the ferry came in, like refugees escaping from the war that Matilda had seen in newsreels. There was Elizabeth and Frances, and their father and their mother. There they all were, safe and sound.

No one spoke. Uncle Paul gave their mother the red shoe, but she put it on absent-mindedly, leaving her other foot bare. She was gripping their father’s arm, but he stared out at the moon on the water, as though he was alone.

Matilda held Elizabeth’s hand as the ferry approached, gliding towards them like a floating palace, its windows glowing. It creaked and banged against the pillars of the jetty, and the wood made cracking sounds. Up flew the thick brown rope, catching the hook of the wharf like a lasso. The deckhand thrust the gangplank across the black water between the boat and the land. All the picnickers picked up their bags and baskets and moved murmuring forward across the little bridge into the warmth of the boat.

Elizabeth, Frances and Matilda sat with their father and mother and Uncle Paul, inside the cabin, next to the engine where the metal wall was hot. Their father slumped forward, his eyes closed. Their mother had her head in her hands. Matilda could hear her moaning faintly, Help me, help me.

Uncle Paul tapped Matilda on the shoulder. She was bright red on every part of her skin that you could see.

“You’re going to peel like a potato tomorrow,” he said.

It was too hot in there and it smelt of machines. Matilda slid off the seat and went out to the cool open deck. The benches were full of people and hats and towels and baskets and sand, sweat and seawater. The only place for her was the wooden life raft. She climbed up onto it and lay down on her back.

Then a voice somewhere underneath her, floating upwards like a balloon, said, “That poor woman.”

“It’s the war that does it to them,” said a second voice.

“He’ll try it again, you know,” said a third voice.

The boat rocked as it pushed forward through the waves, and the moon was a perfect half and yellow as teeth.

“Three little kids.”

“Remember that fellow at the club.”

“Lucky they got there in time.”

“Too sad.”

“He looked all right.”

“You can’t tell.”

“Lucky they saw him.”

“Lucky for who?”

“You never know what’s waiting for you round the corner, do you?”

“What a place to do it.”

“In the middle of the bush.”

“At Christmas time.”

“He brought the rope with him, you know, in the picnic basket.”

“He planned it all.”

“Those poor little children.”

“What a world.”

“What next?”

“Poor woman, poor woman.”

“How will she cope?”

Poor woman, poor woman. All those poor people, thought Matilda, remembering the news that morning, and how her mother had been so upset, those poor people who fell out of the train, down to the bottom of the river in New Zealand, those poor little dead children. All those poor sailors dead in the war lying at the bottom of the ocean, ping, ping, ping, all those poor people far away where bombs fell, with no homes left and all their children dead like a ladybird.

Poor woman. Poor woman, poor little children. All disappeared from the face of the earth. The engine of the ferry changed gear, and the boat was slowing down. They were coming into Palm Beach. Matilda felt the motor chugging underneath her through her bones, like blood through her heart.

T
UESDAY WAS STILL A HOLIDAY
from school and their father still hadn’t come home. Frances was in her room, thinking. She had decided that she wanted to grow up very soon. She didn’t like being a child any more and she didn’t like living in their house. She used to, but not now. It was all different, she didn’t know why.

She laid her warm cheek against the cool pane of glass of the window. When had it happened, that she had stopped liking it? She thought it might have been round the time Elizabeth had her nervous breakdown, but perhaps it was before that.

Whenever it was, she knew she wanted to be grown-up and live in her own house. She wanted to be twenty-one. That’s what a grown-up was. When I am twenty-one, Mark and I will have been married for five years, thought Frances, remembering what Mark had said. We will have our own babies then, and I will wear an apron and every Friday Mark will bring me a box of Old Gold chocolates.

But Mark had disappeared. They said he had polio.

“No,” said Frances, shaking her head.

She didn’t believe it. Perhaps she could go and find him, find where he lived, discover what really happened. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Mark’s house was not far from their school. His mother used to come to the playground every afternoon to pick him up. Everyone knew Mark’s mother. Mark’s mother was enormous, she wore great big dresses without sleeves and her back was broad and covered all over with flies, hundreds of them. The children laughed at Mark and pointed because his mother was fat, but Mark didn’t mind. He walked to where she waited for him, every afternoon, and took her hand.

One day Frances had followed them, without really meaning to. She’d been watching as they left the playground, and seen Mark pick some purple flowers that grew wild on the side of the street and give them to his mother. Then they’d gone on down the road, round a corner and up another street to their house, inside a gate, down a path, inside a door. Frances had stood with her scooter at a distance, watching. She remembered that the front fence was decorated with little coloured tiles. It was not like the fences of the other houses. It was beautiful, like a mosaic in a church.

I’ll know it when I see it, thought Frances. A kind of excitement was creeping over her. She could find him! She could go today! She could ride on her scooter to his house and go in the gate and up the path and knock on his door and say, Mark, Mark, where have you been? Where did you go? I’m here, it’s me, Frances. Remember? I’ve been waiting for you, we are going to be married.

In a moment she had got herself out of bed and dressed in her shorts and sandals.

“I’m going out on my scooter for a while,” she announced as she walked into the kitchen. “I don’t want any breakfast.” She didn’t want to wait, not for a second.

Uncle Paul smacked himself on the forehead in shock.

“She speaks!” he cried.

“By yourself?” asked Matilda.

“Yes,” replied Frances determinedly.

“What a good idea,” said their mother, trying to smile, but her eyes were somewhere else. “Let me pack you something to eat.”

She cut Frances a vegemite sandwich and wrapped it up in greaseproof paper, and gave her a little bottle of water.

“Where do you think you’ll go?” she asked, kissing her goodbye.

“I don’t know,” lied Frances.

She went quickly outside and put the sandwich and the drink bottle in the white wire basket of her scooter. She pumped up the tyres as high as she could, so she could fly on the air. Her father had told her that, when you ride on tyres you are riding on the air.

Frances had a strange feeling as she pushed on her scooter and began to slide away from her home, as though she was running away. No, not exactly that, it was more as though her home might not be there when she returned, that it would have disappeared into mist like a vanishing palace in a fairytale.

One of the black cars from the big house came down the hill past her, then another one, then another one. They’re driving too fast, thought Frances, they might kill someone. She pushed harder on the road, to get away as quickly as she could.

By the time she reached the top of the hill where the school was, she was already sweating and her head itched. She stopped and took a sip of water out of the drink bottle. The playground on the other side of the school gate was empty, of course, empty concrete and grass, empty trees, empty monkey bars and swings, like a haunted house.

Maybe it was haunted – there were stories about things that had happened at the school in the olden days. A boy who had fallen out of a window, a teacher who died of a heart attack during a thunderstorm. When Frances was in second class, there had been a big storm full of thunder and lightning and their teacher had made them all get under their desks until it was over, as though bombs were dropping from little aeroplanes in the sky. Their teacher had clutched her grey bun and sunk under her own desk at the front of the classroom, waving her ruler in the air. It was a big thick ruler with pictures of boomerangs on it.

Frances started on her scooter again. This was where she had to think. She had to try to remember the direction that Mark and his mother had walked. She glided past the houses, the trees, past hard yellow front lawns and thorny rose bushes and children running, past neat white fences and broken rusting fences and letterboxes. She could hear a baby crying from somewhere inside as she went past, crying and crying.

Matilda had cried like that when she was a baby, wrapped up in a sheet. Frances had been four when Matilda was born. A lady down the road had come and cooked their dinner while their mother was in hospital. She had made rice pudding. Frances didn’t like it at all, she had pretended to eat it and then spat it out in the back yard.