Birdseye Read online

  I was with Anthea on that one. Ma Bess was happy to pay for us to become ladylike, but she wouldn’t pay for Alice to conquer the academic world?

  ‘Anthea.’ Orville spoke quietly, but it was the sort of voice he used when he expected us to listen. ‘I have spoken to your grandmother. I have asked her, not once, but several times, if she could help us. As has your mother.’

  ‘And?’ Anthea asked.

  Even Alice stopped chewing and turned the beam of her intelligent gaze on Orville.

  ‘And … your grandmother believes that young women should leave home when a decent man proposes to them, marry, have children and keep a good home for their families.’ Orville’s mouth twisted on the words. ‘I’m sorry, Alice,’ he said. ‘We did try.’

  Alice nodded slowly and turned her attention back to her plate.

  ‘But it’s not fair!’ Anthea’s face was flushed, her eyes alive with anger. ‘Alice is brilliant! She’s won every prize there is to win; the nuns think she’s a genius. She’s only seventeen and we all know she’s brilliant. So what’s she supposed to do?’

  ‘Anth—’

  ‘No, Angela. It’s true. I could take a job, or you, or Bird even. But not Alice. She can’t spend her days helping stupid women choose stupid dresses or reading today’s specials to moron tourists. She just can’t. She’s too clever. We can’t let it happen.’

  Anthea sank back. I was warm with pride for my brave sister. Much as she could make me feel like a small brown turd, she never avoided the truth, no matter how hard it was, and how hard it hurt her.

  There was silence at the table. What else could be said?

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Alice said.

  ‘No darling, we want to,’ Annie said. ‘Maybe there’s something—’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Alice said. ‘I have a place in res and all my fees are covered.’

  Her words fell into complete silence.

  ‘I was going to tell you about it tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Once Sister Juliana had everything finalised. I’ve been granted a full academic and residential scholarship, based on my Standard 9 results. I’m doing a BSc – majoring in entomology. I’m not sure what my other subjects will be – Sister has organised a meeting with the Dean of Science. He was very interested in my paper on Drosophila.’

  Blank looks all around.

  ‘You know, the project I did on the fruit fly, for the Science Expo.’ We all nodded vigorously.

  ‘You mean when you kept all that old rotting fruit in your room and attracted all those flies?’ Anthea asked. ‘That one?’

  Alice nodded.

  ‘That got you a full scholarship?’ Anthea sounded stunned.

  Alice nodded. ‘That and my Standard 9 marks,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘My 94% aggregate.’

  ‘Shit, Alice.’ The shock was wearing off and now Anthea was angry. ‘You could have told us, instead of keeping us all hanging on like that.’

  ‘I told you,’ Alice said patiently. ‘I was waiting until tomorrow. I need your signature, Mom, and Dad’s. And we need to set up a bank account for me.’

  Orville looked stricken. ‘A scholarship. Of course. I didn’t know we’d be eligible.’

  ‘That’s okay, Dad,’ Alice said kindly, as if she was speaking to a seven-year-old version of my father. ‘You’ve got a lot on your plate. That’s what I told Sister Juliana and she said not to worry, she’d show me what to do. And now you don’t need to stress about my fees at all. For my whole degree.’

  ‘You mean …’ Annie whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said, loading her fork, ‘it’s a full scholarship. That means the whole degree, as long as I pass each year, and I reckon I should be able to manage that.’ She smiled, another of those rare Alice smiles that lit up her face and made me see what Anthea meant about her being beautiful.

  An almost joke. From Alice. The evening was becoming stranger and stranger.

  Annie leaned back in her chair and laughed shakily. ‘Well. Imagine what your grandmother is going to make of this.’

  ‘I’d like to tell her,’ Alice said, her voice as calm as it always was. ‘I’ll never need anything from her. Nothing she does will ever affect me again. She needs to know that.’

  ‘But Alice,’ Annie said, ‘res? Aren’t you very young? Surely you can stay at home and travel in to university by train? Live at home a few years longer?’

  ‘No, Mom.’ Alice spoke as patiently as she had done to Orville. ‘I’m leaving home next year. Jodie and I can apply to share a room. So you see, I’ll be fine.’

  She returned her attention to her food, and that was that.

  I never learned what Alice said to Ma Bess. All I heard as I hung around on the threshold of my room was the door opening and then, after about ten minutes or so, closing, followed by Alice’s firm tread on the stairs. I slid my head around the doorframe and caught a glimpse of my sister as she descended. The sun from the window on our landing caught her from behind and created a halo of the tendrils that had escaped her severe plait. Alice’s face blazed, her eyes burned. She looked like an angel who had gone to wage war and had returned, battle-weary but triumphant.

  19

  1990

  Do you think I should still be calling you the boys? Andy’s always talking about the guys. He has beers after rugby with the guys, he talks to the guys to see if anything’s happening over the weekend. So maybe I should call you that? It sounds odd though. Definitely wrong. Andy can be a guy. You feel like boys to me. That’s how I know you best.

  It’s funny, you know, Andy’s been part of my life almost as long as I’ve been alive and I still don’t know him. He and Angela are the perfect couple, she’s blonde and beautiful, he’s the kind of guy all the girls swoon over – tall, broad shoulders, thick brown hair, a straight nose. He’s sporty, he’s quite bright, he was head boy of Harbiton High. Like Anthea says, he’s a Mr Most Likely to Succeed.

  But it’s a bit worrying. More and more, when I think of Angela, I can’t hear her. She doesn’t have an opinion on anything, it’s as if she lets Andy think for her. And when she does have something to say he points out where’s she’s wrong. Not in a horrible way, but … Which helps to explain why she’s always saying ‘Andy says this’ and ‘Andy says that’.

  Also, Andy’s dad. He’s a bit pompous. That’s what I heard Orville calling him the other night when he and Annie came home after yet another evening spent discussing wedding plans. Yes, you heard right. Andy and Angela are going to ‘tie the knot’. That’s another thing Andy’s been saying a lot and I don’t like it. It sounds like he’s going to be doing the tying and Angela is the one who will be knotted to him, so tightly she won’t ever get away.

  We met Andy’s parents quite a few times in the run-up to the wedding. ‘A little bite to eat’ here, ‘a little tête-à-tête, just us girls’ there. Tête-à-tête: that was one of Mrs McAllister’s words.

  Andy’s father was a loud man, stiff-necked and solid, his mother a compact, surging kind of woman who sailed into the middle of conversations or clapped her hands and instructed everyone to ‘sit down quickly and let’s get this jolly old thing sorted out’. She adored her ‘men’ and was quick to defer to their opinions and wishes, particularly when someone suggested something she wasn’t in favour of: ‘Let’s see what the men want to do, shall we, and I’ll get back to you.’

  When Angela and Andy said they wanted to get married, Orville and Annie looked at their finances. The most they could afford was a very small wedding with a reception at Marchbanks. And then only if Ma Bess gave her permission.

  Even before Annie could ask Ma, Angela had resisted the idea. She hated having to tell them, she said to Orville and Annie, but they couldn’t have such a small wedding, with so few guests. There were all of Andy’s friends to invite, from just about every sports club in Harbiton, and then his parents had lots of friends.

  ‘So what Andy’s parents suggested,’ Angela’s voice faltered, ‘is that they pay for t
he wedding. They’re very happy to help us,’ she rushed on, ‘he’s their only son and they’d love him to have a good sendoff.’

  ‘But Angela,’ Annie said, ‘that means you’ll start your marriage in their debt. Is that what you want?’

  ‘It’s not like that, Mom,’ Angela said. ‘They don’t want us to pay them back. Not a cent, Andy’s dad said. It’s a gift and they don’t expect anything in return.’

  Anthea rolled her eyes, and I agreed with her. When it came to money, people usually wanted something in return.

  ‘So that means you’ll have everything?’ I asked. ‘The dress and shoes and flowers and car and wedding reception? Like in Bride magazine?’

  ‘Yes, Bird,’ Angela said. ‘Everything Andy and I have always dreamed of.’

  And that was it. Of course, Mrs McAllister said, she’d appreciate Annie’s input, perhaps on the flowers, and the dresses. She didn’t have a clue about those sorts of things, she tittered, living as she did in an all-male household, but for the most part Annie could leave it all to her. And with those words she took control.

  It felt like the run-up to the wedding had been going on for ever. I’d be glad when the running-up was done and we could all stop thinking about invitations and venues and menus and speeches and cake. I was growing more and more fond of the idea of eloping. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning did it. She popped out of the house one day: ‘I’m off to church for a short while, Papa.’ And there her love was waiting for her and they both tied the knot and adored each other so passionately that she found it hard to count the ways she loved him.

  20

  I didn’t go to the rehearsal dinner. By the time I’d been through my paces in the church, how far and how fast to walk up the aisle behind my beautiful sister, how to take her bouquet from her, it was getting late. More to the point, Andy’s parents had booked a table at the Beach Hotel but hadn’t included me.

  ‘Sorry, Bird,’ Angela said, leaning over and ruffling my hair. ‘Mom,’ she used the word self-consciously, ‘thought it would be too late for you.’

  And who was ‘Mom’ to decide, I wanted to ask. Shouldn’t that be left up to my mom?

  ‘It’s going to be a big day tomorrow,’ Angela continued, ‘so you get to bed. Andy and I will drop you off on the way to the restaurant. Ma’s at home if you need her.’

  As if that was likely.

  So there I was, again. The youngest, the smallest, seen into the house, watching from the front door as my sister and her fiancé zoomed off to join the adults. I wandered into the kitchen. Ma’s china cup was on a tray, the double boiler on the stove ready for Thelma to make her hot chocolate. Next to that was her breakfast tray – the Lapsang Souchong she had such a penchant for at the ready. A bowl of fruit stood next to it, waiting to be chopped into bite-sized pieces, first thing in the morning. I looked out the kitchen window. Thelma was in her room; the small panes of glass in her window shone brightly. I imagined her sitting on her bed, listening to the radio, waiting until it was time to come back in to prepare Ma’s evening drink. Or maybe she’d nodded off, closed her eyes for a few minutes, and was dreaming – of what?

  Even on 11 February – the day Mr Mandela was freed, and all us girls from St Agatha’s went in a bus to Cape Town and there were thousands of people there, lining the streets and yelling and shouting and crying and laughing – even on that day, Ma Bess wouldn’t allow Thelma to leave the house. ‘The Madam said I can go into Cape Town and see Mr Mandela,’ Thelma told me later, in the kitchen, slapping a sandwich together, ‘but if I do, she will phone the agency for a new maid.’

  Now I thought about opening the kitchen door, walking up the path to her room, inviting her to join me for a chat, knocking on her door, softly – ‘Are you busy Thelma?’ And then sitting in the kitchen with her. Telling her all about the wedding rehearsal and how bossy Andy’s mother was and she wasn’t even the mother of the bride. About how I felt about Angela leaving us all.

  I sighed. I couldn’t do that, of course. Annie’s words in my ears: ‘She doesn’t have much, girls. And what she does have is hers and you have no right to trespass on that. And that includes her time. Thelma works a long hard day. She needs her rest, she needs time to herself.’

  So, no, even if I was feeling lonely and lost, I couldn’t disturb Thelma. Instead, I could do what I did when there was no one around to tell me don’t do this, don’t do that. I could go exploring. Not that there’d be anything to find, but there’s something about being alone in an empty house. Ordinary rooms become mysterious, waiting to tell their secrets.

  Of course the house wasn’t actually empty: Ma Bess was upstairs, tucked like an icicle between her snowy sheets. And Ma Bess would always be there.

  But when I was alone downstairs, my magpie nature sent me exploring, gathering, looking for bits to add to the puzzle, all so that I could fill Oz and Ollie in. I’d make a good detective, sniffing out clues, getting to the bottom of things.

  I wandered through all the rooms, trailing my fingers over surfaces, breathing in so that I could tell them this is what Anthea smells like (hot, as if she held so much heat she had to leave some of it behind her), or Angela or Orville. Alice was home from university for the wedding, but she hadn’t been back in her room long enough to give it a smell. If she had, it would probably stink of embalming fluid. That’s what Anthea said – that Alice smelled like she’d been sleeping with a corpse. She lived in the lab – research, research, research.

  I stood outside the door of the boys’ room. I went in there often, even though no sign of my brothers remained. No clothes, or posters of rugby players, or fishermen, not even the framed photographs that Orville had taken of them when they came home with a big catch. Any one of us could have claimed the room – as a study, or a sewing room – but no one ever had. I opened the door and stepped inside and flicked on the light. Their twin bunk was still there, its ladder propped at the foot. The curtains were the same, bold splashes of blue on a white background. I stood in the middle of their room and breathed in. Nothing. Not even a whiff of the wide outdoors my brothers had cycled off into. I moved to the window and looked out. Ma Bess’s light was still on in the room above and a weak patch of light wavered onto the lawn.

  Next I headed to Angela’s room. So much had been going on in there in the last few weeks. And it all centred around The Dress. The long-sleeved gown my sister would be buttoned and laced into tomorrow. Marchbanks would be all hum and buzz, and for once it wouldn’t matter what Ma Bess wanted or if she didn’t approve of the comings and goings. There was going to be life and colour and action and Angela would be beautiful as only she could be. The Dress, hanging ghostly and white from a hook on her wall, would come to life once my sister put it on.

  I trailed my way into Annie and Orville’s room. Unusually untidy. Nobody had had time to neaten anything up in the last few days. Thelma had been run off her feet, busy, busy, busy, in the mad flurry of getting my sister to the church on time. Then Angela would stand next to Andy at the altar and say ‘I do’ and it would all be over, the Big Day done.

  Annie and Orville’s bed was littered with clothes, and the cupboard doors still hung open. That afternoon, as they dressed for the rehearsal, I’d overheard Annie saying to Orville, ‘I don’t know what to wear. It’s been expensive enough buying a new outfit for the wedding. I don’t see the point of all these formal dos. Why can’t we just go to them for a cup of tea? This will be the third time in two weeks that we’ve all been out for dinner, “to firm things up”.’ She copied Andy’s father’s voice exactly and Orville laughed gently.

  ‘They want things to be shipshape.’

  ‘And they obviously don’t trust us to ensure that they are,’ Annie said crossly.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling. Whatever you wear, you’ll look wonderful.’

  There was silence, which probably meant they were kissing, and then their bedroom door closed.

  The smell of Annie’s Rive Gauche, her speci
al perfume, still lingered in the air, mingling with Orville’s Old Spice, the aftershave his father wore too. Did it remind him of Gramps, I wondered, when he slapped it onto his freshly shaved chin? I looked at the shoeboxes at the bottom of Annie’s wardrobe, left open and empty, their shoes piled against each other on the floor, saw her underwear drawer spilling lace and ribbons. I didn’t want to look at that, found it hard to imagine my mother dressed in such silkiness under her everyday clothes. Those must be the special birthday presents that Orville gave her every year, the ones that made her blush and whisper, ‘I’ll open this later, darling.’ So no, I really didn’t want to look inside that drawer – and wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for the edge of the shoebox that I suddenly glimpsed.

  Bata Toughees. Yellow and red. Scuffed at the corner. The box I’d seen Thelma giving my mother after Pa God had left. ‘What’s that, Mom?’ I’d asked and Annie had told me to run along, but as I left I’d heard Thelma saying, ‘The Madam told me to throw them away, but it wasn’t right, they did not belong to her—’ Then Annie saw me lingering at the end of the hallway. ‘Off you go, Bird. Now!’ and that was the last I’d seen of the shoebox. Despite all my detective work – searching on top of shelves, behind books on bookcases – I’d never been able to find it. Until now.

  I slid it out carefully, taking note of the ecru slip that covered it, and the way a black bra hung crookedly over the edge of the drawer. Then I sat on the very edge of the bed and lifted the lid. A bundle of envelopes, their top edges slit neatly open.

  I looked at my watch. 8.15. They’d all be home soon. Annie said she was hoping to make it an early night, to be fresh for tomorrow. I had two hours, max. Time for some speed reading.

  I learned quickly enough that the birthday cards didn’t yield much in the way of information. Usually just a line or two about the present that Annie hadn’t received that year:

  I hope you like the necklace. The lady in the shop said it was just the thing for a girl turning ten.