The Watch Tower (4 page)

‘Why? What would happen if they did?’

In pictures, at Saturday matinees, strangers addressed each other constantly. They also danced on tables and sang in the open air, and no one appeared surprised. As for simply being friendly—there was nothing obvious, that she could see, to stop her from speaking to the very next person who passed.

‘Why shouldn’t they?’

‘I know,’ Laura said unwillingly, changing her heavy bag from her right to her left hand. ‘Look out for that bus, Clare!’ They dodged their way across the street and walked under a dark avenue of Moreton Bay figs. It was true. If you knew no one, Laura thought, and were not allowed to speak to someone till you knew him or her, how would you ever get to know anyone? Because you were unknown yourself, and could not be approached either.

She sighed.

‘Laura. We’ve been in Sydney a long time now, haven’t we? I worked it out.’

Laura nodded, thinking of the factory. The sun had an angry heat. They toiled up the steep hillside staring
mutely into the bee-catching hibiscuses of apricot and watered-pink that lined the road.

Lying awake in bed, Laura heard the delivery car screech round the corner. Then the four tightly-rolled newspapers were hurled—ill-naturedly, it sounded—into the imitation-marble vestibule.

Clare was still asleep, invisible under the bed-clothes. Laura creaked cautiously out of the room, skimmed downstairs, skimmed up, and in the kitchen at the liver-coloured table, spread open the
Sydney Morning Herald
at the Leaving Certificate results. Curiously elated, she found her school and looked down the list, the omissions beginning to register in her mind. Jacqueline Smith had failed, and so had Paula, and so had Ruth. Yes, there were more names than Laura’s missing.

She jumped. In the bedroom the clock clanged frantically. If no one attended to it, it was capable of dancing off the dressing-table with every sign of bad temper. Her heart shook. Silence came abruptly and Laura breathed out and moved her hands abstractedly over the paper, attempting to fold it up.

After her shower she returned to set her mother’s tray and make the breakfast.

Even money can
’
t buy everything
.

The thought appeared vengefully in her mind as she tipped innocuous flakes of cereal into the three waiting plates. She paused, tilting the packet up, halting
the stream.

Money can
’
t buy everything
.

The thought came back with a stab of triumph that was not nice: Laura was shocked. Hastily she set the packet down, switched on the wireless and coffee percolator, cut the bread for toast and listened with extreme agitation to a cigarette commercial.

Some of those girls like Jackie Smith used to receive an allowance twice as big as the wage Laura contributed to the housekeeping purse. Paula was one of several who had been promised a car if she passed this examination. She had not even scrambled through!

Crunching cereal to drown the voices in her head, she sat opposite Clare and pretended to listen to advertisements for beguiling brassières and invincible headache powders. The time was announced. Singers sang.

‘And now we’re going to give you John Charles Thomas and—
The Bluebird of Happiness
.
A lovely thing, this.’ The announcer’s tone, coming through the small yellow radio, suggested that this was a piece of rare generosity on his part.

From chattering on about her history homework, Clare closed up instantly. Both girls buttered their toast and spread marmalade on it, chewing carefully not to miss a word.

Be like I
,
hold your head up high
,

Soon you’ll find the bluebird of happiness—

Was this true?

Gravely, they looked at each other over big coffee-cups.

You will see a ray of light creep through

So just remember this, life is no abyss

Somewhere there’s a bluebird of happiness.

Really?

They had heard this story so often—almost every day—and it was so sincerely sung, perhaps it must be true. If it was, though, and they could not fail to find the bluebird, why did it sound so—lugubrious? There was another livelier song about a bluebird in your own backyard which was also much-favoured by record selectors.

Blessed with the ability to believe in miracles and magic, Clare had looked down over the brick balcony wall to the small cement square where the clothes were strung up, quite willing to see an actual, but magical, bluebird if one felt inclined to appear. Laura’s nature was less elastic than that, but she had tried to imagine once or twice, when she was pegging sheets and dresses on the line, exactly what sort of event, what possible event, could occur in this small yard behind the flats that could change her life for the better. Or even in the flat itself. What could possibly happen?

Unless it turned out that her father had not really died?

Oh, but he must have. When she and Clare had gone home for a day after the funeral, all the neighbours had tiptoed in and out of the house with terrible faces.

You’ll find your happiness lies

Right under your eyes

Back in your own backyard—

Unless it meant devoting herself less selfishly to her family? Laura felt dubious, but she did want to be faultless and to please her mother. Oh, especially to please her mother. So she continued to absorb the lyrics of songs, as Clare did, with secret earnestness. They contained news about the world, just as books and films did, and were addressed to them by impartial adult strangers. Apart from these fabled supra-human people who sent communiqués about life to them, they only knew their mother, Mr. Shaw, their elderly neighbours and Clare’s teachers—none of whom were conversationalists, strictly speaking, or powerhouses of spirit and imagination.

Clare left her toast crusts and went to collect her mother’s empty tray; Laura took back another cup of coffee, then the two rushed round with dusters and brooms.

The factory day started at eight, so Laura was always first to leave the flat. Walking down the hill this morning, for no good reason that she could think of, she began to cry, to produce, disconcertingly, from her chest, slow extraordinary sobs. She had hardly known that anyone
could
cry exposed on a steep hillside in the sun. Luckily there were few people about and none close to her. She wandered over the footpath from side to side, giving awful, surprising groans.

Laura would never know what she wanted not to know, therefore her grief, and that peculiar shifting and weakening sensation in her heart which had returned, mystified her. Tears fell down and spotted the asphalt; Laura blew her nose and looked desperately at the view.

It was very pretty—as suburban views go. There were the three tangled flame trees, and on her immediate right the grassy oval where men dressed in white flannels played cricket at weekends. Straight down the hill at the very bottom were the Norfolk pines and the sea. The shopping centre lay stretched out to the right below her on the flat strip of land between harbour and ocean, buildings mostly of two storeys. Local inhabitants liked to call Manly ‘the Village’. Laura thought this sounded quite sweet, but for some reason Clare detested her saying it, and always screeched at her when she did.

‘Hiya, Laurie!’ Bernadette’s cracked voice greeted
her at the factory door.

Really, it turned out to be like every other day, except that she never forgot it.

‘Well, you’ve been loafing about the place for a fair while now.’ Mr. Shaw studied his wages book, and spoke to Laura without looking at her. ‘I guess we’d better give you a rise or something, eh?’ His voice grated with the effort of sounding cheerful. He had wanted to give this girl more money for months. He wanted very much to be generous and to have the reputation of being a generous man. He wanted so much to give, and yet he wanted not to, dreadfully. However, according to the law she was entitled to more money so willy-nilly, the increase was given. Laura hoped to keep some portion of it for herself, for her clothes were very shabby.

Clare had been allocated a place at a secondary school in town, and the ferry fares and the cost of her new uniform and equipment mounted never-endingly. Laura spoke about it to her mother when Clare had run down to the shops for some butter and eggs.

‘It’s hard on you, Laura.’ Mrs. Vaizey looked up from her magazine and trailed an arm along the back of the sofa.

‘I wondered,’ Laura leaned on the mop and picked at a loose flake of green paint on the handle, ‘I wondered if—out of what Dad left—you couldn’t—’

Stella Vaizey shook her head and gave her daughter
an oddly calculating smile. ‘I’ve told you how we’re placed. You know as well as I do what your father was like.’ Shaking her head again, she lifted a fine china teacup (one of the few relics saved from the sale) from the small table by her side.

Laura left the paint alone and looked at her mother tenaciously, still leaning her weight on the mop.

‘You’ll break that, Laura!—No, I suggest we put it to someone in the Education Department that we must have Clare at the local high school.’ Her small white teeth snapped a little coconut biscuit in two. She ate one half of the biscuit with paralysing slowness, watching Laura all the while in a bright, patient, impersonal way.

Laura took a deep breath through her mouth, pressed her lips together and lunged away with the mop, starting to push it to and fro over the varnished boards surrounding the emerald carpet. ‘No. They only give them domestic science courses here. I’ve got this rise. We’ll manage.’

‘If your father had thought of this instead of those stupid investments of his—’ Popping the other half of the biscuit into her mouth, she dusted her fingertips lightly together. ‘Look, I’ve sprinkled crumbs on your clean floor.’

***

In September a war started.

‘What are they
doing
it for?’ Clare asked, and her
mother said, ‘You can read. There’s the paper. Find out.’ And the reasons were listed there in order of merit.

People were dying.

‘How does—killing—fix all this? How does it—put this all right? Who does killing people please?’

‘Oh, don’t
prattle
,
Clare!’ her sister said.

‘Don’t be more childish than you have to be!’ her mother said.

‘I only—’

But it seemed the oldest sorcery to Clare. Strangers rushed out in the night to slaughter each other. Their blood seeped into the earth. Who benefited? In what way could lifeless flesh right wrongs?

‘You’re only a child,’ they said. ‘Be quiet. Nobody
likes
it.’

Nevertheless, it was happening.

She only knew she was a person. To be alive felt highly remarkable. She was a world. She felt this to be equally true of the people she passed in the street. Who had been given the power (and by whom?) to extinguish such creations? Who could want to make them bleed? To accede to the view that deaths could bring happiness and peace seemed to her wilful and terrifying insanity, like agreeing that black and white adds up to toads, and three and four make bones. How could she agree to give herself up since, in some way, she was not hers to give? How could she say, ‘Yes, torture those people in the street!’?

She was eleven and brooded on the possibility of reaching Adolph Hitler’s side. It was very clear that no one had thought to speak rationally to the man. He was terribly mistaken, did not understand. If a great voice from heaven would cry for all the world to hear simultaneously, ‘Stop!’ and if, in the universal silence that followed, during which all marvelled, mild and joyful and sorrowing, it could then be explained—

Mr. Shaw uttered jovial warnings to Laura from time to time as if, somehow, the calamity might affect her, but not him. (He did actually say that it wouldn’t interfere with him. Laura was relieved to know that she would not lose her job.) There were yellow newspaper placards to glance at walking home in the evenings, and activity, and elation, and even something strangely like jubilation.

Mrs. Vaizey shrugged at the great south land’s superficial restrictions on the purchase of food and clothing. ‘Austerity makes no difference when you’re as poor as us!’

At the factory the girls prepared to sacrifice themselves as war-brides and chanted off the contents of their ‘glory-boxes’ daily. Everyone had a boyfriend or a brother in the forces, it appeared, except the Vaizeys. Having no servicemen to contribute to the lunch-time conversation, Laura accepted her unimportance and humbly listened.

‘For his next leave I’m making this dress. It’s sort of
swathed
over the bust like this and very tight under
neath
the bust, and then it’s gathered like this at the waist, and—’ Bernadette, seventeen, boiled the electric jug five times a day and disappeared to wash her troublesome complexion.

‘Jimmy’s gonna send me one of them leather bags with all Egyptian mummies on it.’ Diane, who worried about her weight and dieted when she remembered not to eat chocolate biscuits.

‘I’m lookin’ for a dress-length at dinner-time and it’s gotta be the exact same colour as this Purple Wine lipstick.’ Shirley, who danced five nights at least out of seven, and was glamorous.

Laura liked the girls; they were good-hearted, but even after a long acquaintance it was easy to offend them. Bernadette looked astounded and scowled incredulously when Laura once said the word ‘cameo’.

‘
What
she say?—Would you mind not talkin’ Chinese, love? It’s too hard on me brain-box.’

Now Laura was astounded and mortified. She expunged ‘cameo’ from her vocabulary for ever. But it was almost as easy to inflame bad feeling by saying an attractive but not lethal word like ‘San Francisco’.

‘Well, what’s that?’ Diane looked baited.

‘The city.’ Laura’s voice was faint.

‘Oh.’ A very flat silence. Evidently she had given them a white-hot forty-seven-sided puzzle to pick up.

‘Where is it then?’ Greta demanded grudgingly. ‘Up north, do you mean?’