Came Back to Show You I Could Fly Page 12

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t you want ten extra years to live?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  Seymour stared at her.

  ‘The idea doesn’t grab me all that much,’ Angie said. ‘You know, sometimes I just want to go…home. Wherever that is. Home before dark…’

  ‘Your place?’ Seymour asked, puzzled. ‘I thought you didn’t like it there. You said your mum and dad pick on you all the time.’

  ‘I didn’t mean…oh, forget it. Get lost!’

  ‘Hey, Angie, what’s the matter?’

  For she’d suddenly rolled sideways, clutching her stomach and moaning raggedly to herself. Beads of sweat sprang up across her forehead, but when he touched her hand, it was as cold as snow.

  ‘Go away!’ she whispered savagely. ‘Go on, nick off, go away and leave me alone! You little pest, I never even asked you to…’

  ‘Angie!’ he pleaded. ‘Listen, I reckon I should go and tell someone. You might have appendicitis, you get a pain in the gut when you have appendicitis…Should I go and get your landlady?’

  ‘That old bitch! She’d kick me out. Don’t you dare let her in here stickybeaking…Oh God, I can’t stand this! Find Juliet for me, who took her? Where’s Juliet?’ She snatched up a battered rag doll from the floor and held it tightly, rocking to and fro. ‘Juliet, got her for my fifth birthday,’ she whispered. ‘Been with me through thick and thin. All the times I’ve moved, Seymour, you just wouldn’t credit the other things I…lost. My charm bracelet Dad gave me, that was worth a mint, I got a new gold charm every Christmas, you know, he’d pick them out specially, and I went and… I feel so ashamed. And Grandma’s little pearl earrings, real pearls…can’t remember where, Brisbane, I think. There was a photograph frame, all silver…Oh, God in heaven, all the things people gave me, and I just…just…’

  ‘Well, you didn’t lose Juliet,’ Seymour said, looking at the doll with astonishment and wondering how she could be so attached to it. It had a melancholy white cloth face and wasn’t particularly attractive, with dingy, frayed clothes needing a good wash. It smelled, but when he tried to take it away, Angie slapped out at him and started to cry again.

  ‘Okay,’ he said hastily. ‘It’s just I wouldn’t hold it close up to your face like that. That doll kind of pongs, Angie.’

  ‘I don’t care! You don’t know what she means to me, been with me through…Dad used to tell me bedtime stories, see, when I was little and he’d make up ones about Juliet, what she did every night when the whole house was sleeping. She used to dance round the garden in the moonlight in her little shoes…I believed it. I thought she was real, and she started school the same day I did…Oh, hell, I can’t bear this! I’ve got some tablets somewhere to take, not that they help…’ She pushed herself up on one elbow and scrabbled about in the drawer of the bedside table. She found a little packet and shakily peeled away the foil backing, swallowing tablets with the cold dregs of the coffee.

  ‘All that many?’ Seymour demanded, alarmed. ‘What is it, aspirin? I don’t think you should be taking so many all at once. Thelma gets tension headaches from where she works, but she never takes more than…’

  ‘Oh, belt up, it’s only prescription stuff I got from this doctor in Upton Street. That might be a lot for some people but I’m used to them, been on them for ages. It’s funny, I thought I had more, a whole new packet…maybe I used them up last night. Oh, God, I feel so crook! I’m sorry, love, I was going to take you out some place today, wasn’t I? Going to take you to the races, you’ll like it there…Don’t go away. I’m scared…stay and keep me company, keep me comforty I feel so cold keep getting these cramps remember when I showed you the beautiful…’

  She was suddenly asleep, drawn down into slumber like a pebble into deep water, not surfacing. Seymour had never seen anyone fall asleep so quickly, and suddenly feeling very frightened and alone, he lifted her eyelids, not even knowing what he was looking for. He recalled vaguely that you could tell if people had lapsed into unconsciousness by the state of their pupils. Angie’s were huge and dark, almost engulfing their rims of pale iris, and they stared at him, unmoving. He spread a blanket over her, tucked her cold hands under it and ran across the alley to Thelma’s house.

  He fumbled through the phone directory to Easterbrook, found a Merken number and dialled. After a long time, while his mouth went biscuit-dry with nervousness, for he’d made scarcely more than half-a-dozen phone calls in his life, someone answered, but it wasn’t Angie’s mother. It was Lynne, sounding breathless and slightly annoyed, as though she’d just been on her way out and had been obliged to run back to answer the phone.

  ‘It’s me, Seymour, I live near Angie. You know, we all had lunch together that day…’

  ‘Yes?’ Lynne said, after a pause.

  ‘Well, I’ve just been over to see her and she looks real crook,’ he babbled. Crook, he thought. I should have said ill, sick. Lynne doesn’t use words like crook, she talks posh… ‘Angie’s sick,’ he went on miserably. ‘She should see a doctor.’

  ‘Well, she’s been sick other times and she’s managed,’ Lynne said. ‘She’s got plenty of friends who help her out. Did she tell you to ring me?’

  ‘No, but I didn’t know who else. She took some tablets but they didn’t seem to help. She was all sort of peculiar, her voice sounded funny. One minute there she was talking to me and the next minute she just…well, sort of flaked out.’

  There was another silence from Lynne’s end of the line.

  ‘Is your mum home?’ Seymour asked.

  ‘No, she isn’t,’ Lynne said brusquely. ‘She’s gone out for the day and I can’t get in touch with her. I was just about to go out, too. Look, couldn’t you…There’s some doctor Angie goes to on and off, only I can’t remember his name or where he is. Couldn’t you wake Angie up and find out his number? If you rang him up, maybe he’d make a home visit.’

  ‘I can’t wake Angie up, I already tried,’ Seymour said, resentment rising at her slowness to help and at her apparent lack of sympathy. ‘And before she fell asleep like that, she was rolling around clutching her stomach as though she’s got appendicitis. Rubbing her arms and legs, too. And she’d been…well, sort of sick. Before I went there, I guess. It was on the floor next to the bed, only she didn’t seem to notice. I didn’t like to say anything, embarrass her…’

  ‘All right, then,’ Lynne said angrily. ‘I suppose I’ll just have to come over and see what’s going on. Wait a minute, I don’t even have her new address. She moves so often Mum doesn’t write it down in the Teledex any more. You’ll have to tell me how to get there, just a moment while I get a pen.’

  When he finished directions and she hung up, the thud of the receiver was like a sharp rebuke, as though she meant that he should no longer concern himself about the matter. It was as though she’d actually tacked such a message on to everything else she’d said, that he should mind his own business, but he went back across the alley all the same.

  Angie hadn’t moved, but the rag doll had fallen to the floor. Seymour picked it up and tucked it back into her arms, feeling foolish, but not knowing what else to do. He cleared a chair and sat next to the bed and waited, and it was a very long time before he heard footsteps outside. He leaped up to open the door, but Lynne gazed at him with such unfriendliness that he felt he’d done something horribly uncouth and wrong in summoning her at all. She went straight past him to the bed and stood looking down, but nothing in her face mirrored his own concern.

  She bent to shake Angie by the shoulder. ‘Wake up and tell me what the trouble is,’ she said. ‘No, don’t you dare go back to sleep, I didn’t come all this way and miss my lesson just to…Oh, it’s hopeless, the same old story, and I can’t do anything for her. You don’t have to look like that, she’s not unconscious, she’s…I’ll just have to ring Dad at work. Oh, this place, it’s such a pig sty, you couldn’t bring a doctor in here without cringing from embarrassment.’

 
‘You can use our phone if you like,’ Seymour said, shrinking from the distaste in Lynne’s eyes, as ashamed of the untidy room as though he were somehow responsible. ‘I live just over the alley.’

  Lynne nodded ungraciously and followed him across to the green gate and he suffered more embarrassment explaining that it was kept locked and she’d have to climb over. In those smart, freshly laundered clothes, she wasn’t really the sort of person you could expect to scramble over a gate. There was no softness about her, apparently no kindness at all. He pitied Angie for having such an uncaring sister and as he led the way to the phone, he tried to convey by his stiff back the way he felt.

  Lynne dialled a number and, while waiting, glanced about at Thelma’s possessions. Her eyes flickered over the cheap cane telephone table, the padded stool next to it, the garish oval flower prints Thelma had pinned to the wall. Then she looked coolly at Seymour and he found himself retreating, full of resentment, to the living room while she made the call. How dare she cast those critical eyes over Thelma’s genteel poverty? How could she be so unemotional and detached when Angie, her own sister, was obviously so ill? And the way she was speaking into the phone, asking for her father as though she were just ringing up to discuss something as ordinary as being picked up from one of her old ballet classes! She had the kind of voice Thelma and his mother referred to as ‘nicely spoken’, but Seymour didn’t think it was an apt description. Not if it meant only words clipped out so that you practically heard each distinct cold syllable.

  ‘I’d like to speak to Mr Easterbrook, please. This is Lynne, his daughter, calling, and it’s fairly important. Thank you, yes, I’ll wait till he’s off the other line.’

  He could hear the sound of her breathing, the impatient tap of her fingernails drumming on the cane table. He knew it wasn’t polite to listen to someone else’s phone conversation, but in that tiny cramped house there was nowhere else to go, unless he were to open the front door and stand casually on the veranda staring down Victoria Road. That would look stupid, and besides, Thelma had forbidden him to open the front door. He couldn’t go back into the kitchen, either. The hall was so narrow that when anyone used the phone, the passageway was effectively blocked. He stayed where he was in the living room and made a pretence of not listening.

  ‘Dad? Angie’s gone right off the top again, yes, the usual, what do I do? Mum’s not home…I’m not ringing from home, anyhow. Some kid phoned me, that little boy Mum told you about, the one Angie brought out to lunch that time. I don’t know anything about him, he just lives across from her…You should see the terrible dump she’s living in, it’s gross, nearly as bad as that boarding house…No, I didn’t see any, but I didn’t make a point of looking, did I? Dad, I don’t want to…I won’t stay with her! Mum said I shouldn’t have to ever…Oh, all right, then! Well, it’s a sort of flat in an alleyway. Yes, the alley’s wide enough to get the car down, but you be quick, okay? I don’t want to be with her on my own, having to talk to her if she wakes up, you know what it’s like…It’s always so…ugly!’

  She passed on all the detailed street directions Seymour had given her earlier, then slammed the phone down quite hard. The little brass ornaments which Thelma dusted so assiduously every day chimed against one another in protest. Seymour went back into the hall, hardly daring to look at her, but she said with composure, ‘Here’s thirty cents to cover the phone call.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ he said politely, though Thelma had a small slotted cannister on the cane table firmly labelled ‘Phone Money’. Lynne, however, had slipped the coins in already and picked up her neat leather overarm bag. She went out through the back door, not waiting for him, but Seymour followed.

  ‘You don’t have to come back there again,’ she said, halfway over the gate. ‘Thanks for letting us know. I should have said that before, shouldn’t I? Well, thanks, anyhow. Angela will be fine, my father’s coming from work and he shouldn’t be long. He’ll take care of everything.’

  ‘I was…I should…maybe I should stay with Angie, too, till he gets here,’ Seymour stammered, so unaccustomed to defying people that the words felt as brittle as dead leaves in his mouth. He couldn’t even meet her eyes, this cool, poised person who had more claim to Angie than he had. But he didn’t like to think of those eyes raking scornfully over the sad disorder of Angie’s room, and Angie lying helpless in bed, unable to defend herself against that intrusion. Angie needed someone else to be there during the waiting, a friend…

  ‘I said you don’t have to,’ Lynne snapped. ‘You’re not even related to her. It’s silly, you know, a little kid your age hanging around with someone grown up. Mum said so. She was very surprised your mother or aunt or whoever it is lets you roam about all over the place with a twenty year old. Specially someone like Angela.’

  ‘What do you mean, someone like Angie?’ Seymour said indignantly, and the indignation bolstered some feeble reserve of courage. ‘Why are you being so rotten to her? Your mum was, too, the day we went out there, not even looking at her birthday present properly…She just shoved it away in that cupboard, hardly even bothered to look at it! What’s wrong with your family? Not even asking her to that dinner you all went to…You all charged off to the theatre and you didn’t even ask her along, she was hurt about that…Angie’s feeling crook…sick. I bet you won’t even put the blanket over her if she’s knocked it off again! She’s got the flu really bad, she gets it all the time…’

  Please let Lynne say it’s the flu, he thought desperately.

  ‘You don’t know anything about it, so you can just go back inside your house and stay there!’ Lynne said. ‘You keep right away from Angie, you’re only wasting your time trying to help her and be nice to her. How dare you say we never…for your information, Dad’s got to leave an important meeting and take her to Rankin House! And that makes the third time since…’

  ‘Rankin House? Is that a hospital? How long will she have to stay in there?’

  Please, please say it’s the flu…

  ‘She never ever stays there more than a couple of days…Oh, you mind your own business!’

  Her voice was as final as a slammed door and he stood wretchedly in Thelma’s garden, listening to her footsteps across the alley. After a while, all defiance gone and replaced by sadness, he peered out through the slot above the padlock. He could see the grey flagstones and the open gate of Angie’s yard. He waited for a long time, chilled in spite of the blazing sun, and eventually a car turned into the alley. Seymour blinked. He’d expected Angie’s father to be a stern, forbidding sort of person, but the man who got out and hurried in through the opposite gate was too ordinary to be anyone’s idea of an ogre. Mr Easterbrook came out just as quickly, carrying Angie wrapped up in a blanket. Lynne held the rear door of the car open while Angie was placed inside, and then she and her father got in and the car edged back into the traffic of the main road.

  Seymour watched it all and raged silently, ‘All her family, they’re so rotten and stuck up, you’ve only got to look at them! They don’t give a stuff about Angie. That Lynne, she can hardly wait to get off to her old ballet class, doesn’t give a damn, you only have to look at her! Him, too…the way he just dumped her in the back of his rotten car like she was a sack or something…’

  But he knew that actually, that wasn’t the truth of it at all. He’d caught a glimpse of their faces as they’d carried Angie out to the car, and what he’d witnessed there was a kind of raw and hopeless grief.

  pram, cot, singlets, bassinet, baby bath, nappies, maternity clothes, talc, playpen, bunny rugs, pusher, bouncinette, bibs, jumpsuits, plastic pants, booties, nappy pins, baby album, ceiling mobile—cow jumping over the moon, night light—teddy bear one, shawl, carry basket, high chair, mosquito net, little woollies, rattle,

  NAMES:

  David, James Jamie Jimmy, Aaron, Troy, Stuart, Andrew, Patrick, Seymour.

  Melissa, Lynne, Jeanette, Juliet, Judith, Kylie, Samantha, Kirsty, Lyneve, Chantelle, Fleur.<
br />
  Supporting Parents benefit or whatever it’s called?

  Part time job somewhere, Jude might babysit for me?

  Put name down for emergency state housing flat?

  Share house with other single mums?

  Get help from Mum and Dad? (NO!)

  Get help from Jas’s sister? (NO WAY!)

  Adoption? (NO NO NO!)

  Get rid of it…

  Oh God!

  Chapter 11

  Seymour’s days seemed to have no focus now and worry about Angie filled his whole mind and soul. It even drove him to answer Thelma back the next evening at dinner. She was watching his unenthusiastic attempts at eating and reprimanded him with, ‘You shouldn’t waste good food like that. You’re moping again, young man, that’s what you’re up to. I know it hasn’t been much fun for you here, but it was all we could do under the circumstances. Your mother…’

  ‘Well, if you really want to know what I think, she’s always making a stupid big drama out of everything,’ Seymour snapped, weary of it all. ‘It’s like cloak and dagger stuff, this hiding out…It wasn’t even needed. She just likes all the fuss.’

  Thelma looked at him, astonished, as though a piece of her furniture had spoken.

  ‘Like a TV soapie, the way she carries on,’ Seymour said, not knowing the effect his outburst had caused, for he was looking with distaste at the plate holding the unappetising heavy food Thelma always served, no matter what the temperature. ‘Dad’s not really like what she makes out, he’s not a criminal. What’s he ever done that’s so awful, anyway, except going round the pubs? If people got off his back he might manage a bit better. You can’t blame him for wanting to see me now and then, either. She should have let me stay at that caravan park till school went back. I didn’t mind it. One night it was nice—everyone had a barbecue down by the river and Dad got hold of someone’s guitar. I never heard him play before, never even knew he could! She never asked me if I wanted to stay on there, just told me to pack my things up. It wasn’t…fair. He gets lonely, like everyone else…’