The Frangipani Gardens Page 7

  The floor was crowded, but they danced within a small space. The other couples’ movements appeared awkward, arthritic. The band played loudly, but it couldn’t disguise the silence that had swept the ballroom. Heads were shaken meaningfully; eyebrows raised.

  It was a war they danced out on the floor. Yet, when the music jerked to a halt, their passion seemed spent. For a moment their masked eyes were bewildered, they smiled dreamily. By the time they returned, they were as coldly indifferent as ever.

  It was hard to believe, as they small-talked lightly, that it had happened. But Swells was decidedly sulky and the Pierrots still eyed him with interest.

  There were four of them. They all had the same chalky faces and loose white calico costumes with a row of black pompons down the front. But one had lost his conical hat: this Pierrot was Lou’s favourite. He had a cheeky grin and a mop of curly blond hair.

  And now, as the band played a waltz, a flood of softly-shaded light fell on the dancers. Now they were covered with a rosy mist; then blue shadows touched them gently. And suddenly Girlie was Lou’s friend — she noticed her; she smiled affectionately, kindly, and said it was her turn to dance. Boy rose to take her arm, and then, as the amethyst light changed to pink, Lou was dancing — but not with Boy.

  For a figure in white seized her, and they skimmed over the polished floor. It was blissful. Waltzing with Pierrot, Lou couldn’t stop smiling.

  He wasn’t Valentino; you could never imagine him rescuing you from the fog-bound London underworld. His hair was a mop of curls, he had a comical nose. Lou wished he didn’t wear a mask. She suspected he was only a boy, not much older than herself.

  And then she saw Girlie watching them: Girlie danced closer with Swells. They were an ill-matched pair — the pantomime dame stooped over the elusive Child of the Dawn. Then, cursing as his high heels faltered, Brother Wells swung Girlie round: now it was he who stared suspiciously at Pierrot.

  And the band played louder and faster, and balloons, like rainbow-coloured bubbles, showered down from the ceiling. It was midnight, and Pierrot ran across the ballroom with a rose he’d plucked from Lou’s hair.

  On the barge’s roof the motion picture started again. A demure Eve selected her fig leaf; a wily serpent whispered temptations.

  7

  Anything could frighten Tom now — even the cedar chest in Aunt Doll’s hall. To begin with, though — before he looked inside — it was merely something to admire. It had carving on its lid and splendid brass clasps: you could pretend it held Spanish doubloons.

  But once it had been Auntie’s glory box, her hope chest, filled with doilies and tablecloths and nightgowns. Only Auntie was never a bride. The nighties stayed folded away in tissue paper; the linen was made everyday with iron-mould, without even a hint of romance. Now the chest was mostly full of photos.

  They were of all the lives that had gone before. Tom opened the chest and breathed in the mingled scent of camphor and cedar … and here was Granpa in the footer team, the best of the lot, with muscles in his arms and a wave in his hair. And he stood there forever and ever, but the timekeeper held out his watch: Granpa got married. Then, there he was with Gran — she, so shy, maidenly, with this terrible soft face she ought to hide, and the roses in her hands a bit trembly, for when the camera clicked she must have moved; he, playing at proud young man with a little tucked-in chin, a posy in his lapel. And Tom loved him (Tom was happy looking at the photographs at first) — he was so proud and fresh, just the man to have owned the encyclopedias. But the chest was deep; there were more photos, more. The years pressed on relentlessly and Granpa grew older: here he was with Ella on his knee, and the young pride and freshness were snuffed out, quite gone. He would never play football now. He was top dog at Flower Hill, he had two little girls. And Gran stopped being swoony-eyed and chopped off Ella’s plaits …

  And when Tom left the house he saw things just as sinister. On the lavatory wall, as well as bridesmaid’s fern, was a colony of corpulent slugs. They oozed silver sweat; their damp bodies wriggled and squirmed. And what if one crawled up your nose; what if a caterpillar slunk in at your mouth or an ant got into your eye? Since Tom had pulled the pins from the clay doll, anything — everything — could threaten. In the lane was spear-grass, porcupine-grass, wire-grass — waiting to wing their seeds in his ear.

  And Tom didn’t care for Lou’s friend. She drew him between her silky knees and told him Charlie Roche had fibbed. It wasn’t his name at all: his real name was Cockroach. And it was whispered round the Gully that he was back; that he’d been sighted approaching his hermit’s hut. And fleas hopped about on his beard, he had nails like birds’ claws; he was the bogey-man come to take you away. He was always creeping out from behind hedges and apple trees: to smother you in his flying cloak, strangle you with a lock of his eagle-feather hair.

  Tom never walked towards the creek, now. The bird could swoop on him; he might see Cockroach.

  But Tom had liked him when they sat under the willows — he’d been Charlie, a friend. But when Tom returned to Sorrento, the friendly feeling was wiped out by hate. All he could think of was hurting the birds. And each day the feeling grew worse, and on a whim it changed into fear.

  Really, Tom didn’t want to rise anymore. He wanted to hide cosy in bed, to pull the sheet over his head and disappear. Terror was down the passage; and there were the birds in the encyclopedia, the photos in the chest: indoors was as risky as out. Auntie suggested a spoonful of his tonic. But Trench’s remedy, though recommended by clergymen of all churches, tasted horrid. To escape it, Tom pretended to smile; he ate breakfast and entered the garden. But there were the slugs, and in the lane was the grass. Yet he had to keep walking, he had to go somewhere. And if you didn’t make for the creek — and because the orchard meant apple trees with Cockroach jumping out — there was only the Gully Road.

  It was a nice place to walk. As well as gum trees there were elms, sycamores, hollies, thorns, laburnums, acacias and pines. And then Tom looked over the picket fence, and down in the hollow was the jam factory. And once upon a time a Teakle picked plums and hawked them to no avail, so next day he sent for sugar and a copper and stirred the fruit into jam. And now Teakle’s tins were famous throughout the land; they found their way to distant shearers’ huts and went out with the troops to fight the Boer War. As well as plum, you might purchase apricot, quince, fig and all the berries.

  Occasionally horses’ harnesses jingled as they went down the slope to the factory. Tom watched for a bit, and then walked further along the road.

  And then he wished he’d never left Sorrento, for he saw a girl who was just a shell of flesh. Her spirit had flown away, she was empty inside. She lay on the ground like a small forest animal; she slept among the leaves and grass.

  She was a dead girl, though she breathed with little puffs. And now she saw Tom — she opened her haunted eyes, she bit at her poor pale lips. Her hands were grubbing in the dirt, as if they sought some object she loved.

  Tom was afraid. She was a girl like Lou, but she squirmed on the earth in her nightie. Tom ran away from her, and Cockroach caught him.

  But his hands were gentle. He was the devil who made lily tongues poisonous; spittlebug on blackberry leaves was cast by his mouth. But his fingernails were cut short; there were no fleas in his beard. Girlie had lied. It wasn’t Cockroach, but Charlie.

  The robin made his nest of moss and leaves, and hid it away in the ivy bush. The jackdaw preferred high towers; the rook chose the tallest tree. The jay gave a scream when intruders approached and flew to the heart of the wood. And Charlie Roche was a hermit who’d concealed his hermitage as cunningly as any bird. To reach it you must get down low; you must trip and slide and stumble.

  But at first it was easy going. Tom and Charlie walked through an orchard that differed from the usual Gully variety, in being old and abandoned. It had deteriorated into a neglected w
ilderness, which meant that besides apple trees there were all sorts of weeds and herbs and flowers. Butterflies zigzagged crazily, everything blistered and shimmered in the early morning glare. Then the ground dipped, and leaf patterns arched above them.

  Now the path was narrow, the grass tickled Tom’s chin; now they were deep in a jungle of blackberries and thistles. And here and there were coils of barbed wire — it was like crossing a battle zone, for next came trenches and traps and earthworks, and a tunnel you negotiated at a crawl.

  Tom might have been back at the lagoon, crawling through the tea-tree. But this was better, for you kept being surprised. You blundered into a cat’s cradle of wire and a bell rang; you emerged to confront a remarkable defence line. After the tunnel was the army of wild bees.

  They walked across the clearing towards the hermitage. All about it was Charlie’s garden. It seemed to be planted with weeds. Though, as they drew closer, Tom saw that the bushes were herbs. He’d never considered before how many different greens there were … and each variety of leaf had a shape of its own; each leaf smelled different when you plucked and pinched with your fingers. Sage was grey and smelled greasy; the dark green needles of rosemary were cough mixture spicy; mint was so pungent it made your mouth water.

  Charlie’s house resembled a log cabin. Inside, the walls were lined with wheat bags, painted whitish with lime and cement. The floor was a patchwork of stones.

  There was just one big room, interestingly muddled with books and bunches of dried herbs and shelves of bottles and jars. The room had the same smells as the garden. Charlie’s bed was spick and span in a corner; there was a colonial oven, the sort with iron bars standing on bricks, and a fire in the top part to boil your kettle on.

  A camp oven was an iron pot with legs and a lid — Charlie had one of those, too. He kept his food in a Coolgardie safe.

  But the best things were up on the wall. Tom remembered the travelling circus that had the Woolly Woman of Hayti. Well, Charlie didn’t own her, but the Jap Mermaid and the Nondescript were as good.

  They were perfectly hideous, Tom felt wonderfully happy. It had been another boy who’d flinched from a slug.

  The Mermaid’s head and body were those of a small monkey with prominent teeth; below the ribs the skin of a carp was so neatly joined that it was hardly possible to detect where fish began and monkey left off. The villainous Nondescript was mostly composed of cedar, with papier mâché overlay, artfully applied in wrinkles, admirably coloured.

  Tom left off looking, for Charlie had called him. Charlie was holding out his hand, and in it lay this other pretend thing.

  But the clay doll was part of a dream. Tom was content — he refused to remember. But, standing in Charlie’s room he felt he was somewhere else. He was alone in Auntie’s garden, lured from Sorrento by the dashing sun. And then he heard a little singer — it was always ahead, lurking in hiding, enticing him on. And, by the creek, the bird ceased being a shy garden warbler — cheerful chiff-chaff or neat willow wren. Instead, it was fierce and pitiless as a tiger or a volcano; it was a bird of battle, a feathered emblem of destruction. And it fixed Tom with its telescope eye: Tom was changed to a rigid statue of himself. It was a fabulous monster of old belief — harpy eagle, Sinbad’s roe; it was a fallen unfledged nestling …

  It was merely a doll, but it had power, and something awful would happen because Charlie held it. But it didn’t. Charlie was smiling. He moved towards Tom, he took his hand. Now it was Tom who held the clay doll — and nothing happened.

  For the manikin was as much a hoax as the Japanese Mermaid. Charlie began to talk. His voice talked away Tom’s fear.

  Sun came in at the window; Caesar wagged his tail. It was but a child’s plaything. Despite all the pin-pricks. For that was true, too — the part where Tom pulled out the pins. But why had they been there, who’d pushed them in?

  Charlie told Tom that the clay image was nothing to fear. It had power, yes, but its power only worked against you when you were lost, lonely, afraid — when you’d had a touch too much of the sun. But Tom knew, didn’t he, that he had a far more potent strength of his own?

  And yet he was weak, a child, he had the fits. Wandering through the scrub, conversing with King Billy, fingering his pieces of quartz, reading — always reading, were sure signs of incipient madness. The big boys in town had despised him. They stopped up their noses when he went past (TOM MUNDY STINKS was chalked on the grocery wall beside the Rosella sauce parakeet). They bit their thumbs at him; they pelted and spat and tripped him up. And one day the tea-tree was full of them; they were hunting him, as the man with the gun hunted birds. Everything familiar went dizzy with fear; Tom felt sick as they hedged him closer. Then it was the circus and he must stand on his head, he must hang from branches. And they fought him with sticks; they caught him and took off his clothes. He stood before them shivering and they pinched him, they stuck in their sticks to see if he was real. He was a zombie, they said, because of a voodoo curse.

  Charlie called him a Troubadour of God. It was like seeing with magic spectacles: Charlie had seen from the first that Tom was a fellow traveller. They were pilgrims, dwelling among a foreign race. They spoke the same language; they saw alike, felt alike. And the devil and the world looked at them angrily, they would always desire to strike and smite them. But there were guardian angels to preserve and protect against all dangers. And, in the end, nothing was unexpected. You counted wounds and prison, torture and death among God’s gifts.

  But the clay man … It had been made by someone in the Gully who was sick; a dabbler in esoterics — someone who’d started off pondering tea leaf patterns and gone on to easy lessons in dream interpretation and how to rule the stars. Mysticism was chic. It gave you an uplift as enjoyable as a Martini cocktail or a sniff at a Blackboy rose. It was something to do with gipsy bangles and incense sticks, the Curse of Tut and eating bean sprouts. And Lord Wavertree would do no yachting this year because his horoscope proclaimed a season of hurricanes; Armageddon was fast approaching — you had the date deduced from Biblical prophesies and the architecture of the great Pyramid of Cheops. And then you found you’d made a terrible mistake. One minute it was so thrilling: you were a sensitive, a child of the foreworld, sunk in a misty Gaelic dream; the next, you were in the grip of something elemental, malign. It was evil and it took you seriously, even though you were modern and smart as paint and knew about the Queen of Sceptres, the Horseman of Cups. There were things far more ancient than ghosts; spells that outlasted time. It was a chase and, without meaning to, you’d turned into evil’s quarry. You stuck your pins into your little clay dolly and hated, hated. And all the time evil came closer — to you.

  8

  When Lou had lived in the sandhills, there’d been a time when she went to school. It was like Hell, walking each day down the town’s neat streets, past proper people’s houses with slippery red verandahs and the pebble-dash like little sharp teeth. In winter it wasn’t so bad. Drizzles suited her; dwarfed by a lowering sky, a cold wind whipping your cheeks and no one in sight, you were brave. But in summer your shadow stepped forward to give you away. The flap marked LETTERS was Brassoed to a blinding perfection; there was always a hose coiled tight like a sleeping snake. Even though it was early, there were shivers of heat in the air. Lou longed to be in one of those gardens — lying lost under the walnut tree in shade. But the proper people ignored her approach. Those hedges were there to keep the likes of you out.

  Lou was a Mundy. She was in the same camp as Mad Bob who fell off the telegraph pole and would stay an infant for life; as Wriggle, who was half Abo and would show you his thing for a penny; as all those barefoot others whose sandwiches were only beetroot … and they ate the bogies out of their noses, and it was good when Teacher gave them the stick. They weren’t fit for Australia, being poor and common as dirt. Mother said Keep away. Though it was all right to give Wriggle a regular bashing —
the filthy pervert.

  And Lou Mundy was just as bad. Worse even, for with her shapeless dresses and downcast eyes she had you fooled she was convent-bound. The minx had this giveaway hair, though — gold, almost to her waist. Who did she think she was? She had the cheek to dream — her, whose mother would do it with anyone.

  Their eyes were constantly watching; whispered hate words pursued her down the streets. She went past the church, and its spire reached God in the sky, but he wasn’t on the look-out for her. One day by the newsagent’s it was all about Ella on the footpath, and Lou was sweating, she wanted to cry — walking into school on Monday was awful, for over the weekend you forgot the sniggers, the judging eyes. Your father deserted you by dying; the chalk marks said your mother was a whore. What does it mean? you asked Ella, and she hit your face.

  Dreaming was Lou’s only escape. It was a habit that softened the fact that she stood by herself at recess, and watched from under the pepper tree when it was hoppy or skippy or hidey. In the classroom she dreamed herself away from common denominators and history-book dates. Hard facts were Lou’s enemies: she shrugged them off, and banished Teacher’s droning voice. Till the cruel stick came down on her shoulders and she had to go out the front. Where, staring at the ceiling, she’d start off on dreaming again. Doing that, it didn’t matter that she never got an invite to parties; that she wasn’t friends with Dymphna Trott, prettiest girl in the school, who had the mulberry tree in her garden from which the chosen were allowed leaves for their silkworms.

  She wasn’t Lou Mundy at all, but had been kidnapped as a child, maybe from one of the summer visitors who came for the marine curiosities, and stayed at the temperance hotel. It was true, Lou was sure. She didn’t belong with the people about her. She might be anyone; anything could happen.