There are great places with big backyards.
I can pay next month’s rent. All of it. I’ll get a second job.
He shrugs and stares into the fridge.
They want me to go to Coburg? Why? You got elected living here. Don’t turn your back. You think you can force me? Do you not understand anything about me?
There is nothing the girl can do to affect this conflict, which she will relate years later. Anyone listening to her adult recollection will hear how little distance she has from the event. She may be a “habitual law-breaker” but she still knows what it is like to flee to her cold bedroom and switch on the blower heater. She can tell you how she locks the door and waits. All her room is vile and empty. She wishes she had a kitten. If she was dead they wouldn’t know.
It is an eternity before her parents understand what they’ve done to her, and then they come creeping up the creaking stairs. Then they love her. Then she curls up in her mother’s lap. Publicly, she is her mother’s replicant. Privately, she feels herself to be a plain square little thing. She traces her mother’s beautiful face with her finger and calls on all her will, the great engine of her terror, to make them laugh and love each other. She can do that. She does it constantly. She performs a handstand and reads a poem. She clears the table without being asked and, when she finds the stack of photographs, she hides them in the drawer reserved for string and rubber bands. She knows she has the power to make her parents love each other. She is the force swinging between them. She is the heat and electricity and she will turn it off, forever, if they frighten her by shouting.
Sando and Celine apologise for their “dreadful character.” They show their consideration by only fighting late at night (as if the girl can possibly sleep when she knows her whole life is at stake). She notices how her mother now refers to the “Labor Party machine” and “machine politics.” Likewise her father refers to her mother’s “radical friends.” “Your Carlton tribe,” he says, sarcastically. He says the Labor Party will die when it becomes the party of “your tribe” rather than the party of Coburg.
She begins to “sleep over” at friends’ and stay late at soccer practice and lock herself in her room and listen to Midnight Oil. There was no sleep. The beds were burning. She would recall the lyrics all her life. She turned up the music so loud the bass shook her windows and they did not even try to stop her. Ditto: there was nothing she could do to stop them, not even bite their legs.
She gets caught shoplifting from HMV but they do not even blame her. She smokes cigarettes that they do not seem to smell. They forget her thirteenth birthday until it is a day too late. So she gets into her mother’s closet and tears two sleeves off two different dresses. Nothing happens as a consequence.
There is a warm windy night when Celine and Sando fight until the early morning, stamping up and down the stairs, to the bathroom, to the fridge, out the door and in again. By dawn, they are all worn out and drunk and snoring. Then the child takes her backpack and her homework folder and her soccer ball and leaves the house by the kitchen door which opens onto a narrow bluestone alley.
Later she will hear that you could fix this feeling by cutting yourself. But she has no-one to advise her, so on this particular morning she does not know what to do about the pain. She dribbles the ball up the centre of Macarthur Square, and sprints across empty Rathdowne Street, the way to soccer practice. She has the power to make them seriously sorry, more than they can ever know. She catches the green light up at Swanston Street and dribbles across the silent tram tracks. The sun is behind her as she enters the empty streets of the University of Melbourne, into Queen’s College. She keeps the ball between the double lines without a mess-up, pushing with her laces, not slowing but anticipating College Crescent where she is stopped by two-way traffic. She waits, all lit up by yellow sodium, doing switch keep-ups on the curb, seeing the white startled faces in the cars. Where is that girl’s mother? Why is she abandoned? Then she is off, through the traffic, a clean calm line through a hysteria of brakes.
For the first time, by herself, she enters that long spooky path through the middle of the Melbourne General Cemetery. She sees herself from way on high: straw hair glowing, a dead girl risen from her grave, dribbling, cutting left onto the green field, completely, totally alone. She lies on the hard thirsty ground pretending to be dead. What else is there to do?
She can hear the lions and hyenas roaring in the nearby zoo. Now and then she opens her eyes to see if anyone is creeping up. There is dust in the wind. The yellow streetlights look like murder. She stays and stays until sun bathes the faces of the terraces on Royal Parade. No mention of 1975 at all.
6
IT MATTERS THAT she did not mean to slap the fox terrier or hurt its head but she got woken by its tongue dragging on her skin. She hit its face in fright. In return it bit her leg. There were four other dogs, maybe five. Maybe they just wished to play, she thought, years later on a microcassette. She had freaked. A spotted bitzer jumped and scratched her and she screamed and got her soccer ball and ran with her book sack thumping like panic on her back.
The dogs blocked the way to Carlton so she ran west towards Royal Parade. It was the little patch-eyed fox terrier who was the scariest, maliciously nipping at her heels as she ran straight across Royal Parade, behind the tram, before the truck. She heard the squeal, the awful howling, but she was already fleeing into The Avenue which runs around the back of the big old terrace houses on Royal Parade. There she recognised Frederic Matovic’s rusty corrugated back fence.
She did not know him well enough.
Blood was streaming down her leg as she let herself into the yard. Her sock had turned pink. She had never been invited into Frederic’s, but she knew that was it, ahead, a shocking tacked-on sort of shed with rusty corrugated walls like the back fence. His dodgy mother lived inside the house at the front, upstairs in a large single room which was apparently lined with the second-hand dresses which were her business. She sold stuff from her van and little shop.
This was Parkville and therefore fancy but the social structure here, from Royal Parade across to Nicholson Street, was always smudgy, layer to layer, Italians, Jews, skippy working-class, lawyers, academics, Housing Commission kids, playwrights, junkies, boarding house proprietors and fences of stolen goods. It wasn’t often that you saw a family slide from one group to another, but in Frederic’s case there had been a lurch. His father had once been famous, on the cover of TV Week.
Frederic, Gaby called his name. When she heard him breathing on the other side of the door, the hair rose on her neck.
Who’s that?
Gaby. From school.
What do you want?
Let me in, she demanded, waiting.
She knocked again. I’m sorry.
Just bloody wait.
I’m hurt.
Wait.
The chain shook and rattled and was withdrawn through its jagged hole. The door opened a little and there he was, blinking, the beautiful boy with long black hair and black fingernails, his face quite red as if from violent scuffing. He looked down his nose at her.
What?
I need someplace to crash, the child said.
The door opened and she saw that he had covered himself in a strange blue raincoat. You should come to the front door of the house, he said.
But I’m all messy.
He stepped back and she followed him. To her surprise he took a box of Kleenex from a desk. Obviously his mother had been removing makeup here. Gaby saw her stuff was everywhere in the sleepout, not just crumpled tissues but her trash and treasure, racks of clothes she could wheel into her van, from there to Footscray or her musty little shop on Faraday Street where everyone went to find fur coats, loopy wedding dresses, cups with triangular handles.