Birdseye Page 4

  They were born within minutes of each other, laid side by side in the same cot, pushed in the same pram. They liked the same food; they both hated broccoli.

  Fishing was their passion. And now that they were ten they didn’t have to wait for Orville to take them. They’d cycle down Harbiton Hill to the harbour and cast their lines into the swirling waters. Some days they even brought home something for supper.

  But there’s more to fishing than the catch. When they came home, tired, sunburned and happy, they would regale us with tales of the fishermen they had met, all they had learned about the sea and fishing. The camaraderie of men and boys who needed nothing more than a length of line to join them to a brotherhood. The fishermen at the harbour knew Oz and Ollie by name. They shared their knowledge with them, showed them how to cast, pointed out where to stand for the best catch. And when the boys caught a fish, they helped them use ragged-toothed knives to scrape off the scales, slit the belly and scoop out the guts, then rinse the fillets so that the twins returned home with their catch ready for the frying pan.

  I loved my brothers most in the whole wide world. Sure, I loved Annie and Orville, loved and stood in awe of my older and beautiful sisters. But my brothers were my gods. Kind gods too. They included me in their games, made me a part of their team. We climbed the tree at the end of the garden, swaying in the breeze, intrepid pirates looking for far horizons. We turned large stones and coaxed crawling creatures into jars for later examination. We skinned our knees and grazed our hands and arrived at the back door grubby and thirsty, begging Thelma for a drink of water, promising not to trek muddy footprints across the gleaming floor of her kitchen. We made a daring trio, and our next plan was to build a tepee, defend our home from the hordes of cowboys roaming the Wild Wild West.

  But in the long summer holiday of the year they turned ten, things changed. Their world opened up and the faraway horizon moved closer. They were allowed to climb on their bikes and cycle away. They could go down to the beach with cossies on under their shorts and body-surf the waves near Lady’s Seat, or balance along the wall at Allies – Alexander’s Bath, the tidal pool where boys gathered during the school holidays and made plans for adventures that were never going to include me. The only place Orville and Annie told them they couldn’t go was up the mountain that sloped high and green behind Marchbanks. They could climb there on their own when they were older.

  As long as they followed the rules – always let us know where you are going, only cycle to friends’ homes, the shops, the beach and the harbour, be home in time for meals – they could do just about everything. While I, lagging behind by four years, was left counting the hours until they came home. Alone at Marchbanks.

  2

  When Ma Bess built Marchbanks, the house stood on the highest point of the road that wound its way up the mountain. Since then more houses have been built, but then it was the biggest, the grandest and most expensive house on the mountain. Carved into it, really. It sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by large terraced gardens which reached over four plots, leaving no room for close neighbours on either side.

  A gravel path bisected the lawns, sweeping up to the deep, shaded overhang of the stoep. The garden at the front of the house was carefully planned and pruned, filled with exotic plants, annuals and perennials that would have been more at home in English soil. Flowers formed thin beds of colour: daffodils and day lilies, foxgloves and forget-me-nots, primroses and pansies, each greening or flowering in its allotted space. Whenever the black-eyed Susans ran riot, Koos, the man who looked after Ma Bess’s garden, had strict instructions to tame them.

  The sunniest part of the garden was reserved for Ma’s roses: Mister Lincoln’s deep red head nodding next to the copper glory of Just Joey, Harmonie’s peachy pink, the soft gold of Johannesburg Sun. Annie tried sneaking in a rose called My Granny, but it wasn’t long before Koos was told to remove it. It blossomed too sweet and soft, not Ma Bess’s style at all. Every year, in the middle of July, Koos would approach the roses with his sharp long-handled secateurs, ready to nip, just above the bud, a quick clean cut which he then sealed with carpenter’s glue, an essential in his book.

  Koos never spoke all that much. Orville reckoned he saved all his words for his plants, coaxing them, encouraging them to grow. Sometimes he talked to Thelma in the kitchen and I’d hear them laughing loudly, but whenever I asked why, Thelma gave me a chore, so I stopped doing that. They were probably sharing a joke, Annie said, and I should respect their privacy.

  Along the sides of the house and towards the back was Annie’s domain, and there the garden relaxed and sprawled, indigenous plants and Koos’s vegetables growing happily together. Beyond the vegetables and my tall climbing tree, Orville’s studio and Thelma and Koos’s rooms, stretched the untamed greenery of the mountain.

  There was no shortage of space in Marchbanks. The house spread solid and wide and pushed upwards and back. The bottom floor comprised the scullery, Thelma’s huge kitchen and the study. Towards the front were three spacious living rooms – reception rooms, Ma Bess called them – the dining room, the sunroom and a big front room which looked on to the porch. When Annie was growing up, this was always called the drawing room. Ma Bess tolerated the word sitting room, but it was never to be called the lounge. People who had lounges in their houses were the sort of people who sat on settees.

  A wide hallway bisected the house as neatly as the path outside divided the garden into two halves. It led to a flight of stairs, broad and carpeted with a deep-red runner. At the T-junction on the second storey, a long passage led left and right flanked by bedrooms, one of them the room Ma Bess had once shared with her husband, the door closed, daring anyone to open it.

  A shorter flight of stairs led from the landing to the suite of rooms at the very top of the house where Ma Bess reigned supreme. Once Annie and Orville had started to breed in earnest, she’d left everything in her room on the second floor just as it was and commandeered the upper part of the house. The attic and storerooms had been renovated according to her meticulous instructions. Another bathroom was installed, a large room facing the road became her sitting room, and off that a bedroom, which none of us ever saw.

  Ma Bess’s strict supervision over the language used in Marchbanks was eroded when she moved to the top of the house. The drawing room became the sitting room, the looking glass in the hall became the mirror, and the small room under the stairs became the toilet.

  In the beginning, Ma Bess had said that the children could call her Grandmother Elizabeth. Nothing easy or soft like Granny or Gran. Maybe if Angela had been older when the decree had been issued, she’d have had a better chance of pronouncing the mouthful, but her best three-year-old attempt was Gamma Isabess. With Anthea aping her every effort, it didn’t take long for that to be shortened and soon a name stuck – Ma Bess. Not that the name ever travelled upstairs. We knew better than that. We avoided calling her anything when we had to speak to her directly, but downstairs all of us took to calling her Ma – Ma Bess.

  A few years after I was born, Ma Bess ordered a wheelchair from England, modern and lightweight, no expense spared. It wasn’t that she couldn’t walk but, as she grew older, her knees started to give her trouble. The wheelchair made getting around her spacious rooms easier and, more importantly, faster. Whenever she suspected something was happening in the garden below, she could roll to the window, lift the curtain and peer down. The doctor said her problem was arthritis, but Ma refused to make a trip into town to see a specialist. Annie suggested that she move into a downstairs room, but Ma Bess liked being at the top of the house. She didn’t need the convenience of living on the ground floor. She had us to do her bidding. She would jab at the button of her electric bell whenever she wanted us and follow that with a thump or two of her wooden cane just to make sure we got the message. We carried up her trays of food, ran her errands and showed her few visitors up the stairs to her domain.

  Once you walked into Marc
hbanks, the outside world – walks on the beach, shopping on Main Road, going to school, even seeing Granny Little and Gramps when they came to visit us – became paler and less real. It wasn’t because those things didn’t happen and exist; they did, and they kept us all in balance. But inside Marchbanks everything was different: Ma Bess ruled supreme.

  Her every whim was to be indulged, to the letter. She liked her meals, small and perfectly portioned, to be taken from the latest cordon bleu cookery books. There was always dessert after her lunchtime meal, and cheese and biscuits to follow the evening repast. She was partial to éclairs and tiny sandwiches at teatime. And just before bed, at ten, she enjoyed a hot chocolate and half a digestive biscuit. Small meals eaten in small bites, each meal requiring a tray to be set with fine china and a single bloom nodding in a crystal vase and ferried up two flights of stairs to where she sat waiting, her eye on the clock.

  Annie and Orville lived in their own world, cocooned by their love for each other. They loved us, there’s no doubt about that, but in the event of a fire, we all knew that Orville would rush to rescue Annie, and Annie would fling flaming timbers aside with her bare hands to reach him. And then, when they were outside, safe in each other’s arms, one of them would turn to the other and say – ‘Wait a minute darling … haven’t we forgotten something …? Oh my word! The children!’ and there we’d be, waving frantically from a second-floor window, flames leaping behind us, and Orville and Annie would dash back in and get us to safety. (Or send a fireman up in his basket on a crane. I wouldn’t mind that, stepping out of a sash window, hearing a gasp from the gathered neighbours as I balanced perilously on the ledge, hearing them all exhale in a whoosh as I descended to safety.)

  I couldn’t imagine Ma Bess throwing herself into the flames to rescue her only child. And if any of her grandchildren were at risk of being consumed by fire, she’d step away from the heat and tell them they shouldn’t have been playing with matches in the first place.

  My sisters were so much older than me, their worlds far removed from mine. Angela was defined by Andy, her boyfriend. Everything Andy said, or did, determined how she behaved. He was her world and had been since the two of them started dating, when Angela was fourteen and Andy a year older.

  Alice was shut off from us by her closed door and her ‘Do not Disturb’ sign. But that was fine because Alice was the brains of the family – destined for great academic glory. A special brain needs special space, and so we all learned to let her be.

  And then there was Anthea. Where Anthea was concerned, there were no rules. She did what she liked and said what she liked, shook herself free in whatever way she could.

  All these worlds inside Marchbanks, colliding, bumping against each other, rebounding when they came close to Ma’s force field. And in there somewhere, among all of them, floated my tiny world, kept safe by stories and the power of my brothers’ love. Because their space was the happiest of all: identical twins, whose joined lives revolved around the simple joy of being boys.

  3

  1985

  ‘Now boys, remember. Cross the road carefully. And watch the time. I want you home in time for supper.’

  Oliver glanced at the waterproof watch on his skinny wrist and Oscar looked at his. They’d each been given a watch for their tenth birthday – a sure sign that they could be trusted to understand the importance of keeping to a set time.

  ‘We’ll be back by five, Mom,’ Oz said. ‘Right, Ollie?’

  ‘Right, Oz.’

  My brothers were off on their bikes, and I was stuck at home. Again.

  ‘Pleeeeese can I go, Mom?’

  Usually it was easy to get Annie to give in. Enough whining and pestering and she’d relent. Let me watch TV for another half an hour, or have another biscuit – ‘Oh all right, Bird, but just one.’ But on important things like manners and being kind and never taking advantage of Thelma, she was really strict. And on having no fun ever just because you weren’t quite six. I knew, because I tried hard each time the boys went adventuring. But Annie held firm. ‘No, Bird.’

  The boys repeated her words. ‘No, Bird, you’re too little.’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ I said. ‘All you ever do is fish. Even when it’s raining. The only time you stay at home is when the wind’s too strong. All you wanted was fishing stuff for Christmas. And then you fished all holidays. Now we’re back at school and you went to the harbour last weekend and today you’re going again. All you want is to go to the stupid old beach and the stupid old harbour.’

  ‘Sorry, Bird.’ Oz grinned.

  ‘Yes, sorry,’ Ollie agreed.

  But they weren’t sorry enough to stay at home and play. They’d been promising for ages to help build a tepee, so we could be like Hiawatha, by the shores of Gitche Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water. Hiawatha lived in a wigwam, but they were much more difficult to construct. That’s what Oscar said, and besides the boys had just the right book for building a tepee, one that had step-by-step instructions, from when Orville was a boy. He’d told us all about how he’d huddled inside his tepee in the cold English winter, pretending that the wild open plains were just beyond the flap of its entrance.

  I could do that. If I couldn’t leave the garden, I could imagine myself being free. The boys could go off and do their stupid fishing; I wouldn’t need them for my adventures. But I needed my tepee, otherwise I couldn’t become Minnehaha. The boys had promised. They kept promising. But now they had their fishing rods over their shoulders, tackle neatly packed in a wooden box with lots of compartments. Hooks and sinkers and gut – I knew what all the bits and pieces were for, but I’d have to wait for ages until I could try anything out.

  As they cycled away, I turned in slow circles on the garden path.

  ‘Bird, whatever are you doing?’ Annie asked.

  ‘Looking at the world. The sea,’ I spoke as I turned, ‘the road, the mountains.’ Side to side the mountains curved, stretching their arms to meet the blue sea. Straight and narrow the road ran, cutting my world in two. ‘The sea, the road, the mountains. All the places I can’t go. I can only look at them.’ As I turned, Marchbanks loomed tall and solid. ‘The only place I can be is stupid old here.’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling.’ Annie stroked my hair from my eyes. ‘One day you will be big enough, I promise, but for now, why don’t you play in the garden? It’s a lovely day.’

  There was nothing for it but to wander around to the back. I circled the spot we had chosen for our tepee and kicked at an imaginary campfire, the one we’d never ever get to building because of stupid fishing. I tried a war cry, but my wooo wooo sounded sad, lonely, as if it knew there’d never be an answer. I made my way to the base of my tall tree and put my foot on the bottom rung of the rope ladder. Then I climbed, high enough to see over the top of Marchbanks down to the street, to the sprawl of Harbiton and the blue scoop of Harbiton Bay. I filled my lungs with air. I wasn’t going to think about fish, or fishing boats, or fishing boys. I was going to sing at the top of my voice, where no one could hear me and tell me that I wasn’t very good at keeping a tune.

  4

  ‘Thelma,’ Annie called, ‘are the boys back yet?’

  Thelma came through from the kitchen. ‘No, Madam,’ she said.

  Annie looked at her watch. ‘That’s naughty,’ she said. ‘They promised to be home in time for supper.’

  ‘Yes, Mom,’ I chimed in. ‘Five o’clock, you said, and they checked their watches.’ I still hadn’t recovered from being left behind.

  ‘Must I hold supper, Madam?’ Thelma asked.

  ‘No, no,’ Annie said. ‘If they’re much later, they’ll miss it altogether and that won’t be any harm. They have to learn to stick to the rules.’

  She went through to the dining room and sat down. I trailed after her.

  ‘Mom?’

  ‘Yes, Bird?’

  ‘When will I be old enough?’

  ‘Old enough?’ Annie was distracted.

  ‘To
go with the boys? To go out of the house on my own?’

  ‘I’ve told you before, Bird,’ Annie said. ‘You have to be ten. At least. And even then you can’t go on your own. Your brothers or sisters will have to go with you.’

  ‘Go with me?’ I swelled with indignation. ‘But Oz and Ollie don’t have to have anyone with them.’

  ‘They’re boys,’ Annie said, as if that was a convincing argument. She looked at her watch again. ‘Besides which, they’ve got each other.’

  ‘But Mom,’ I whined, ‘that’s not fair. They’ll be so old then—’ I counted on my fingers. ‘Fourteen! They won’t want me to play with them any more. I know because Sonja’s brother’s fourteen and he never wants to play with us.’ Sonja James was my friend at school and even when she was very nice to her brother and polished his shoes for school and made him tea and found his book, he never played with us. ‘He just says “Thanks, Sis”,’ I told Annie, ‘and pats her on the head and Sonja doesn’t even care. She likes doing things for him, because he’s her brother and she adores him.’

  But Annie wasn’t listening.

  ‘This can’t happen again,’ she said. ‘If they can’t be trusted to keep to the rules, we’ll have to change them.’

  Orville walked in. ‘Hello, darling,’ he said, touching Annie on the shoulder as he passed her chair. ‘What’s for supper? Thelma’s leftover Sunday special?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Annie said.

  ‘And how’s my little Bird? What have you been up to today?’

  I sighed. ‘Nothing,’ I said dramatically. ‘I had to stay at home and do abso-lute-ly nothing.’

  ‘Really?’ Orville said. ‘That’s a tragedy, Bird.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Orville,’ Annie interrupted as I was about to launch into a catalogue of my woes, ‘the boys aren’t home. They were supposed to be back an hour ago.’