Mad Meg Read online

  Aunt Nina grinds her teeth and begins reciting loudly, ‘I sometimes think that never blows so red the rose/As where some bally Caesar bled.’ ‘Don’t be upset, Neeny,’ I whisper.

  ‘I’m not upset, darling.’ She clamps a wire hood down over the chook to keep the flies off. ‘Did you have a lovely ride?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I lie. ‘I can understand why Granpa wants to stay at Mountshannon,’ I say, though I cannot. Staying there means Aunt Nina has to ride out every day to feed him. She raises her eyebrows and wipes her chapped hands on a linen cloth. It is time to test her with my question, now. ‘Granpa doesn’t like foreign people, does he?’

  ‘What makes you say that, darling?’

  ‘I mean that Granpa doesn’t like Dadda, does he?’

  ‘Your father is a very talented man, and don’t you forget it.’

  ‘You don’t like Dadda much, do you, Neeny?’

  ‘He can be charming,’ she says unconvincingly.

  Although it’s incredibly hot in the kitchen, the slowly roasting chicken adding to heat that’s already in the nineties, I like sitting here. It smells terrific. Best of all, I like cutting the beans into long slivers with the beaner and eating a few of them while I sip from a glass of sherry I poured myself. In the back of my mind, I have a picture of my father feeding my mother sherry and beans. I’m sure that’s the magic combination, whatever Allegra says about sausages and tutti frutti.

  ‘Only,’ Aunt Nina says absently, ‘I don’t know why he insists on painting naked women. I think women’s bodies are so ugly, don’t you?’ I look at her, startled. I love the shape of Neeny: she’s petite, with a grand bosom and what she calls ‘dependable’ legs – they’re thick in the ankles. ‘Not little girls, darling. Little girls’ bodies are so pretty. Look at that child …’

  Aunt Nina stares dreamily out the window to where Allegra is doing a handstand to amuse Uncle Garth. ‘I’m a child, too,’ I mumble.

  ‘She’s perfectly formed. Like a dancer. I wish you girls hadn’t given away your ballet.’

  ‘It was the teacher’s fault. She called us spaghetti legs. I’m doing art on Saturdays now.’

  ‘Are you just?’

  ‘Yes. I am just. I painted you a picture for Christmas. Shall I go and get it?’

  It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for. I sock back the rest of my sherry, slip off the kitchen stool and race away towards the bedroom, where I’ve hidden my painting on a windowsill behind a blind. It’s my first oil. Mr Millership, the teacher, wanted everyone to do still lives, but I could think of nothing worse than painting a bowl of apples and oranges – instead, I painted a picture of The Abracadabra Lady riding full tilt into Mountshannon. But she got too big for the paper and I had to stick on an extra bit for the horse’s head. Mr Millership nearly had triplets. ‘We’ll make an artist of you yet, Miss Coretti,’ he said, and, when I took the picture home, Dadda said, ‘Well, well, well!’ Three ‘wells’ from Dadda means you’ve hit the jackpot.

  Allegra, who stays home on Saturdays now, for some reason suddenly fond of gardening, was very jealous. She even thought about art classes herself, but something about gardening holds her back. It isn’t love of plants; she’s already killed quite a few by forgetting they’re there and treading on them. It’s a band of high school boys who wander past our fence and push a certain person up our drive. The certain person’s name is Jimmy Coote. Once he gave Allegra four lamb chops – his dad’s a butcher. They nearly went bad before she’d let us eat them. She keeps the bones in a jewellery box.

  So now, of course, she wants to go to high school and she even saved her pocket money and bought a state high uniform from the girl next door. Aunt Nina and our mother want us to go to their old school so we’ll turn out nice, but at their old school you have to wear hats and gloves and you’re not allowed to eat your lunch in public. Allegra says that’s ridiculous and I agree. But she still has to keep the high school uniform under her bed and only dresses up in it when Mum’s not around.

  My painting still hasn’t quite dried. In the bedroom, Allegra has pulled up the blind and is prodding some of the wet parts with her finger. ‘Isn’t it funny,’ she says, ‘how it dries on top and stays wet underneath? I love this painting. It smells really terrific. You ought to be an artist when you grow up, Bel.’

  I don’t mind her touching it; it isn’t sabotage. I like to touch the lumps on The Abracadabra Lady’s chest myself, where the paint’s thick. Her bosoms have become quite dull with fingering. I’m so proud of this painting, I can hardly believe it’s my own work.

  ‘It’s re-al good,’ drawls Allegra, ‘but you haven’t signed it. You ought to sign it, you know.’

  ‘I have signed it. I signed it on the back.’

  I turn it over. Dubiously. Because I’m not sure it’s something I ought to let Allegra see. I’ve written in red ink: A painting of The Abracadabra Lady by Scarlet Coretti, aged 10, December, 1956.

  ‘Scarlet?’ I knew this would happen. I should never have turned the damned thing over. I scuttle out of the room into the vestibule. The wiry head comes round the bedroom door, wrinkling its nose.

  ‘Scar-let?’ I scuttle into Aunt Nina’s room, making straight for her dressing table where I seize a stick of carmine from her makeup tray and scribble wildly over the letters, deleting everything right back to the title. I can hear Aunt Nina’s bed creaking behind me and the sound of Allegra pulling tiny feathers through the pink taffeta of the eiderdown and cackling, ‘Scar-let?’

  I am standing in the corner of Aunt Nina’s room, fighting tears where the pink rosebud wallpaper meets in a splendidly concealed line. I have to keep the tears back for several reasons, not the least of which is that I’m holding The Abracadabra Lady right side up. Even the ceiling’s wallpapered, and it all matches, right down to the pillowslips where a froth of treacherous hair is quaking with silent laughter. I steady myself and breathe in deeply. ‘Well, you called yourself Sapphire once.’

  ‘Are you going to dress for lunch, Scarlet?’

  ‘No, Sapphire, not unless you do.’

  ‘I’m going to dress for lunch, Scarlet.’

  ‘Are you, Sapphire? What are you going to wear?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to know, Scarlet?’

  ‘I know what you’re going to wear, Sapphire. You’re going to wear your confirmation hailspot muslin, because it’s the only going-out dress you packed.’

  ‘I’m not going to wear the dress I packed, Scarlet. You can wear it if you like.’ Which comes as a surprise.

  ‘Can I?’ I spin round. ‘Can I?’

  ‘Only don’t get it dirty.’ She struts over to Aunt Nina’s closet and opens the doors grandly.

  ‘You’ll get into serious trouble, Allegra …’ but she is going for more than serious trouble, because she is pulling down Aunt Nina’s ‘hidden drawer’, the one with our uncles’ war letters in it. In there is a big box and in the big box is a lace wedding dress. Black lace. Aunt Nina dyed it black. When we told our mother about finding it, along with its dyed wedding veil and bouquet, she said, ‘Oh, that! H’mph! It was from your aunt’s first marriage.’

  ‘She’ll have a fit.’

  ‘No, she won’t.’ She plucks the dress from its box, throws it on the bed, kicks off her riding boots and begins to strip. She is terribly proud of her bosom buds and won’t let me see them. ‘Skedaddle,’ she says.

  The hailspot muslin doesn’t fit me perfectly. It’s too long for a start, and in the second place, I popped two of the pearled buttons trying to do it up over my asthmatic rib cage. And of course, I got paint on it, little vermilion dabs wherever the index finger of my right hand touched. There’s a streak of vermilion just under my chin. But I like myself in the mirror as I dash the two buttons round in my mouth, creating vacuums through the buttonholes so they stick to my tongue and I can click them on my teeth. The confirmation dress was bought by our mother off the hook at Georges because someone from the Sunday school offered her a
cotton sheet and a pattern. Our mother never sews a stitch. Allegra was the envy of her grade this year, though she chickened out of confirmation in the end.

  Back at Aunt Nina’s bedroom, I am having great difficulty opening the door, as The Abracadabra Lady has stuffed a towel under it to stop intruders.

  ‘Neeny’s going to have a fit, you know,’ I warn, as I finally enter the room and can see the nineteen-twenties bride shaping up before the mirror. She has rouged her cheeks and painted her lips.

  ‘She won’t,’ says Allegra, primly.

  ‘But she will. She had to get divorced.’

  ‘Why’d she keep the dress, then?’

  ‘Beats me.’

  Outside, the garden has gone sour in the heat. Birds are panting round the lawns with their beaks wide open. Aunt Nina’s standard reds are strewn on the ground as if some historical person like Cousin Vere had stripped her gloves off after a ride, made a pair of them and chucked them out the window into the Garden of Discarded Gloves. There’s a story about Cousin Vere: a soldier came courting her here once and he gave her a medal with ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ written on it. She chucked it out this very window into this very garden and then, after he’d gone away disappointed, she and Aunt Nina and our mother got down on their knees and searched the roses for half a day looking for it. But all they found was Granpa’s ‘implement’. No one will tell us what the ‘implement’ is. Dadda says it’s what he used to deknacker bulls, but when I called it the ‘deknackerer’, my mother, for some reason, was scandalised.

  ‘What’s a knacker?’ I ask Allegra.

  ‘It’s not a knacker, for your information, Isobel. It’s called an implement.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  But Allegra has changed the subject. ‘I wonder who her husband was,’ she says.

  ‘He ran away with a South African!’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You’re going to get into serious trouble, Allegra.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Well, I do. I’m going. Goodbye.’ I take my painting from the bed and, deciding that the muslin really doesn’t fit me, I return to our room to change into my organdie, laying Allegra’s dress on her bed and spitting the pearl buttons out on top of it.

  But she hasn’t chickened out, and I know that because when I am in the kitchen making my presentation to Aunt Nina, I can see Allegra’s reflection in the side of the toaster. She is cuddling up to Granpa in the dining room. When Aunt Nina says my painting is very nice, but why don’t I try painting ballet dancers, I am instructed to put it on the mantelpiece in the dining room so everyone can see it – except Granpa, to whom it has to be described. But later … because right now, Allegra is sitting on his knee, and even wearing the head-dress.

  ‘What am I wearing, Granpa?’

  ‘A … piece of toast.’

  ‘No!’ she laughs, ‘be serious. What colour is it?’

  ‘Puce!’

  ‘Cold! What colour’s the sky at night-time?’

  ‘Ivory.’

  It is not.’

  ‘Mauve.’

  ‘You’re making it up.’

  ‘Brown.’

  ‘Freezing!’

  ‘It is in a dust storm.’

  ‘Granpa …’ She nuzzles him. ‘It’s black, you old trout.’

  ‘I’m not an old trout.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘I’m a Murray cod.’

  When Aunt Nina comes into the room at last, Allegra is rolling on the floor in the black wedding dress, laughing. She springs to her feet and races towards Neeny’s arms, but Neeny is frozen stiff with rage, so stiff I doubt whether she can get her voice out. ‘Take that off at once,’ she says at last, and coldly. ‘You children have been told not to meddle in that drawer. If ever you do again, I’ll send you straight home.’

  Both of us weep immediately. It is the severest thing Aunt Nina has ever said to us. She turns on her heel to go back into the kitchen, ‘Go and find your uncle, Isobel. It’s time he washed for lunch.’

  Now Allegra is trailing away, crestfallen, down the vestibule and Uncle Garth is fast asleep on his chair under the clothesline, roasted hectic by the sun. His glass has fallen on the grass near his feet. I try to wake him. When talking won’t do it, I try shaking. His voice is the first thing to surface. ‘And when thyself with shining foot shall pass/ Among the gusts, star-splattered on the glass …’ He takes a tumble from his seat, sits upright on the grass and pulls himself together, suddenly, ‘Take no notice of the fellow, Isobel. He pees his pants at country dances. Isn’t worth knowing. Take my word for it. A fellow like that reflects no credit on his maker. Damn poor design. Never mind the elegant timbre of his voice, his impressive memory, the times he was kind to you. He’s a brute and he’ll come to nothing.’

  He hoists himself onto his feet and takes himself with military bearing to the outside bathroom. Aunt Nina insists that the men use the outside bathroom, because the cistern is sluggish inside the house and won’t take a pelting.

  We have been waiting quite a long time for Uncle at the table. Nina is still stern, and both of us still sorry. We’ve hugged her a couple of times, but she won’t budge. This is very unlike Nina. Anyway, we’ve had to start without him, Granpa ceremoniously salting and peppering the entire table, making the tip of my nose so itchy, Aunt Nina keeps asking if I haven’t a hanky because I keep smudging my nose up my face with a starched serviette.

  The dining room is huge. It looks out over the long wisteria trellis shading the way to the paddocks. There is a full-grown jacaranda on a green lawn just outside the windows. The lawn stays green because it is in shade from midday onwards. Like the wisteria, the jacaranda is in flower, so at this moment, Spanish armadas of purple light are cruising through gold-green seas.

  The walls of Clare are thick and it’s really quite cool in here, though the day is so hot. I have goose pimples on my upper arms. Allegra and I are trying to stop our knives and forks from screeching. Our plates are rimmed in indigo and gold and in their centres there’s a golden E for Euphrosyne on an indigo disc. I broke a sweet dish from this set when I was a baby. They’re always telling me, there are only four sweet dishes left now, and it’s supposed to be my fault, but I dare say someone else broke the other nineteen. Granpa’s denture clicks. We’re not supposed to notice, but how can we help it? Clicketty, clicketty, click! ‘Isobel?’ Aunt Nina wants me to go and find Uncle Garth.

  I can hear the shower going full pelt as I walk down the path towards the outside bathroom. ‘Uncle Garth!’ I call, but there’s no answer. Perhaps he can’t hear me for the water. I push the bathroom door open a little way … he is lying on the floor of the shower recess, fully dressed. He may have slipped, because his head’s jacked up in the tiled corner. He’s very red in the face and his eyes are shut. Everything he’s wearing is soaked through; I can see his underwear quite plainly. I don’t know whether to be frightened or amused, but I’m too chicken to reach over his big slumped body to turn the water off.

  Aunt Nina must suspect something’s happened, because, as I’m leaving the bathroom, she’s standing at the back door, clutching a serviette, uncertain.

  ‘There seems to have been an accident,’ I tell her, looking behind me to where Uncle Garth is still in the same position. Aunt Nina comes running. And I decide on fear. Aunt Nina turns the water off and asks me to help her drag him out of the recess onto the floor. With a strong feeling of revulsion, I am cradling his great heavy head in my organdie skirt to stop it bumping on the hard floor, as Aunt Nina drags him out by the feet. It is by no means easy and is going to take us a long time.

  I wonder why Uncle Garth is like this … Aunt Nina says he can’t help it. Mum says he does it because of the war. But Uncle Garth went to the first war and that was a long time ago. Granpa says Uncle Garth didn’t even go to the second. He stopped in Brisbane with General MacArthur. Granpa says he was medically unfit, but Aunt Nina says that’s disloyal and he was kep
t at home because all the educated men were. Uncle Garth studied as a doctor. But if he has an education, he doesn’t use it – only recites poems all the time, but isn’t reciting any now. And I lower his big red head and it goes ‘honk!’ slightly on the floor tiles. His hair is all sticky, it looks just like a run-over cat and he is dribbling. And making me cry just a bit, I feel so sorry for him. Aunt Nina keeps saying, ‘It’s only a man, Bel. No need to be afraid. It’s only a poor man.’

  She rolls up towels and places them under his neck, then frightens me more by feeling for his pulse.

  I couldn’t wait for her verdict. I came inside and sat bolt upright in my chair at the table, as if sitting up straight would restore tranquillity in a world stiff with doubts of the most nerve-racking kind. Allegra, in the white hailspot, went and lay down on the couch under the windows, face down. Over her head, the purple armada sails on through the coloured world. My shoes and socks, wet from the shower water, are lying next to each other neatly under the table and Granpa is prodding the floor rhythmically with his stick. ‘She should never have married that man,’ he says, over and over.

  Aunt Nina is speaking to the doctor on the phone in the vestibule.

  Sunstroke. Have you ever been sunstruck? It is like the bonging of a pendulum inside your head – right side, left side, right side, left side. Bong-bong, bong-bong, BONG-BONG. It is a horrible sensation, as if your eyes were fried and your skin were shrinking to tight elastic. Cold compresses and crushed mint under your nose … your fingers and toes blow up, your feet and hands, your ankles and wrists.

  It is only a man. Not a run-over cat. So I shall take the bottles of lemonade from the fridge and hold them behind his knees. I shall roll up ice cubes in tea towels and hold them to his temples, his wrists, his ankles. I shall save him.

  Aunt Nina is still on the phone, so I run to the kitchen in bare feet, fling open the fridge door and the bottle jumps from the shelf, comes down with a great explosion, peppering me with glass shards. I am bleeding. My blood fizzes through a pool of lemonade on the floor. I call out, ‘Don’t come! It’s all right!’ But it’s not, quite.