Читать книгу Goodbye Lullaby - Jan Murray - Страница 16

Central Park, from the window of her ninth floor apartment on the Upper West Side looked spectacularly beautiful at this time of year; for those of a mind to consider it, thought Jude. She wasn't one of them. Not this morning. Not this early hour. Her thoughts were a continent away from the grand metropolis and its charms.

She stood, holding her cup and saucer, letting the brew grow cold as she surveyed the past through her window high above New York city.

They were two smart and happy girls back then, she and Miki as they walked to school, swinging their bags, kicking stones, punishing their Robin regulation black lace-up school shoes and taking for granted the majesty of the grey gums, the sunny skies and the vast open spaces. This morning she had an irrational yearning for eucalypts, not the imported ones in LA, but the true tall spindly Queensland bluegums.

She wanted to smell and hear the real thing, the crackling sound of the dry leaves and twigs beneath their feet as they tracked to St Brenden's. The pungent smell of eucalyptus and citronella oils when she and Miki rubbed the leaves and held their hands to their faces. Sunburnt faces. Schoolgirl faces. The faces of two hopeful teenagers with big plans

Standing at the window in her air-conditioned apartment high above the world's busiest metropolis, she continued to stir her sweet milky tea, lost in memories of scorching summer days back home. Skies filled with smoke from bushfires up in the hills. Dry gums and undergrowth, a volatile mix.

She laid down her cup and saucer, lit a cigarette and studied the lighted end. Bushfires served a special purpose in the life-cycle of the Australian Aborigines, Bernie had explained to her and Miki. Thanks to that spiritual woman, she knew a bit about the nature of bushfires. The spontaneous combustion, and how it played a part in regenerating the bush. The gums shed their bark every November and December, causing a thick carpet of inflammable material to lay about on the ground during the hot days, waiting for either the sun’s rays, or a lightening strike from a violent summer storm to ignite the dry bark and dead leaves, then the fires would take hold and rage, destroying trees and denuding the landscape.

Bernie explained how the pods exploded in the heat, and with the ground beneath the burnt-out trees denuded, the hardy little seeds fell on good soil and took root. In the following seasons it would all begin again. New growth would spring up amongst the ashes during winter to replace the fire-ravished gums. An amazing regeneration. A natural cycle, and one only the Aboriginal populations appreciated enough to work with, she reasoned.

But of course, Miki had rushed in to the conversation that day with one of her poetry quotes, one about rainforests, recalled Jude. Tagore. Everything is born, grows, dies and is born again. She blew a series of smoke rings into the air, and observed them slowly floating to the ceiling on their way to becoming nothing.

She felt homesick. New York was her home and she adored New York, but the concrete landscape down below couldn't compare to the drama of the Australian bush.

But why, for fuck’s sake Jude Brenner are you thinking about all this, she quizzed herself as she stubbed out her cigarette, grinding it to a pulp in the vintage ashtray and burning the tips of her fingers in the process, why?

She lit another cigarette and checked her watch for the tenth time in as many minutes.

Most times, her days of growing up in Australia felt like someone else’s life story, thought Jude as she returned to the kitchen to make a fresh pot of tea, aware she was going to miss their staff meeting today, but knowing it wasn't as important as what was about to happen back home. There would be votes aplenty for the old boy's latest amendment anyway, and she was not about to forego this phone call.

She checked her watch, shook it to make certain the hands were traveling in good order. Precision timing would be everything. It would be Tuesday evening, the ABC news broadcast would shortly begin, and then the sports news, and then the weather forecast. The national broadcaster wasn’t her aunt’s channel of choice by any means but, never the less, she knew tonight, Poppy would have her television set tuned to the ABC, as arranged.

She went back to staring out the window and chided herself that nostalgia was a waste of time. And so was worrying about something over which one has absolutely no control. Never did, obviously. It had been Miki's call.

Was it because of the geographic distance that those early years of her life felt like someone else's story, or was it more to do with the the emotional distance she put between herself and her youth, to the extent her own daughter knew not to quiz her mother too closely about her years as a girl growing up in Australia. That girlhood was best left where it had perished.

Her thoughts turned to Tiaré. Her daughter was growing up fast. It happened. Particularly in this hot-house environment of New York. You turned your back for a minute and next thing you knew was that the unsteady little toddler taking her first steps towards you was the same one tottering towards you on high heels. Standing up to you, giving you lip.

Her ex was an asshole and the twenty-something he was tied up with was an imbecile, the pair of them a bad influence on Tiaré. She told him as much when he radioed in to check on how their daughter’s flight had gone.

‘Any flight gets you down’s a good one,’ she'd said. ‘But while I’ve got you, buster, let me remind you; you’re her father. Start acting like it!’

Their daughter had returned from Hawaii last August wearing make-up and nail varnish and informing her mother she would be referring to her from now on as ‘Jude’.

‘You reckon, kiddo?’

The jaunty adolescent and she had stood cooling their heels at the cab rank. ‘I don’t think so, sweetheart. And don’t try it on, what’s more.’

Her beautiful child––all coltish limbs and cinnamon skin––had presented as a little tart in the outfit the fools had given her to wear home from the holiday. She gasped when she copped Tiaré coming through the airport gates. The off-the-shoulder sundress had been dispatched pronto the next morning via an Oxfam bag. Someone else might consider that little number suitable attire for a twelve-year-old but no kid of Jude Brenner's was having any part of such tripe. Nor a cosmetics bag; a little square number, silver, with a mirror inside the lid. It was tossed as well, and the ridiculous cork-heels the child had been teetering on as she came towards Jude.

All bagged up and dispatched to Oxfam, to be adored by someone who did Cute. ‘Cute fades.’ That was her comment as Tiaré, in tears, stood at the bedroom door wailing about her mother’s cruelty. ‘It’s up here that counts, sweetheart,’ she'd said, tapping her forehead. ‘Up here.’ Two weeks with her father and his foetal bride, and the child’s innocence was being corrupted. And apparently darling Daddy was insisting on being ‘Larry’ to his daughter.

Cool. Whatever. Was all of it the ditzy dame’s influence, the names, the outfit? The creature had nothing between her ears but expensive hairdos.

The dust-up with Tiaré had upset her. Angry words flying around the room. But the important thing to come out of all the angst had been her daughter’s accusation that Jude wasn’t entitled to tell her how she could dress because she wasn’t around enough.

From out of the mouths of babes. It had stung hard, packed a wallop because there was truth in the charge. She was absent most days when her daughter came in from school but Tiaré seemed to get on famously with her sitters and she was certainly keen enough to hear the latest on the UNY riots and sit-ins over their long suppers.

Tiaré punched above her weight with her grasp of politics. Nixon sending troops into Cambodia had triggered a brilliant essay, as insightful as anything her students produced. She was a cluey kid. And artistically gifted, she thought, recalling the devotion her daughter brought to those journals of hers, the lovely stories she wrote. The drawings, too. There was an imagination at work in that beautiful little head that was special. Miki would love her.

But the charge of neglect was a wake-up call. Even if Tiaré was cluey and gifted, she was still a little twelve-year-old girl who needed plenty of mothering at this stage of her life. A faculty Mom caught up in campus politics wasn’t a good look. Tiaré was right. More home time. Less Washington Square. And that’s what she promised at the end of the screaming match. It had been the extra push she needed to go to Zuckerman with her sabbatical plans. The Birthday Lottery business had got her thinking about Australia in a serious way. She had writing to do and some mother/daughter good loving to catch up on.

She stamped out what was left of the cigarette burning in the ashtray and ditched her cold tea in the sink. The letter and the press clippings were open on the table, the TDT palaver Poppy mailed her months ago. It had been enough to make her want to jump on a plane and fly home, but once she’d stopped applauding Miki’s chutzpah, reality kicked in and any thought of a kiss-and-make-up evaporated.

Clutching a glass of lemon ice water, she returned to her post at the window and stared down at the pavement below, at the steady flow of rugged-up New York break-of-dawn commuters scurrying down into the subway. Like bandicoots. Like rabbits darting into their warrens. The wide yellow green paddocks of home, alive and crawling with bunnies and kangaroos. Especially at sunset, which is about what it would be, over there now, she reminded herself, checking her watch, yet again.

The phone rang. She stubbed out her third cigarette of the day and walked into the hallway sucking ash from her fingertips, promising herself she was definitely giving up the filthy habit tomorrow.

‘Yes. I accept,’ she assured the operator and waited for her aunt to come on the line.

She could see the blisters forming on the tips as she held her fingers to the light. Maybe it was a good luck sign. And that was bullshit because she didn’t believe in luck. Or fate. Or any other Neanderthal nonsense. She believed in taking control, being in control of your destiny by being smart, clued up, on top of your game. Fate was too random. Like this God-Almighty Birthday Lottery business, she cursed as she waited.

They used the phone rarely, she and Poppy; a couple of calls a year, and mostly because Poppy felt sure her niece would want to be kept informed, first-hand, of the goings on of everyone she had ever known back in Australia.

They'd had their battle royals over the years, she and Aunt Poppy, but they had always maintained their own kind of family affection. The car crash that had taken the lives of Adele and Monty Brenner and left their small daughter an orphan had robbed Monty’s eldest sister of a fuller life, and it was only as she grew up and became a parent herself, that she appreciated her aunt’s sacrifice; to move to another continent, another hemisphere to rear her dead brother’s child. Her aunt had been in her forties when she became Jude’s guardian. Poppy never married. Had she left a lover in America? A married man? Someone who died in the war? It was weird that she knew so little of the woman who had loved her so well. She pondered this sad state of things as she waited for her aunt to come on the line.

‘Hello, Poppy Mom.’ She hadn’t always added the ‘Mom’ but more and more she found herself doing so these days as Poppy grew on in years. ‘How are you, darling?’

The old lady, knowing what calls between the States and Australia cost her niece, seemed compelled to want to give Jude value for her money with this one, and launched straight in with a running commentary about what the Channel Nine weatherman was saying, right down to the movement of isobars and fluctuating tide levels. The United Nations would do well to have Poppy Brenner on board. She could relay to the floor of the UN in real time. But talking of personal discomforts was where her aunt’s true strengths lay, and so the weather conversation segued into what was Poppy’s Hell on Earth; Brisbane’s humidity. And apparently Brisbane was still sweating and sweltering tonight under the heat of a scorcher, even at this hour on a spring evening.

‘Poppy Mom? I know it’s shit, the humidity… you poor darling … imagine what summer’s going to be like … but we have to hurry now. When I ring back, can you make very sure you’re on the ABC, and put the receiver right up close to the speakers, sweetheart. I’ll hear it first-hand then. Okay?

She couldn't handle the idea of the draw being relayed, marble by marble via Poppy's mouth.

'Then we’ll chat, darling. Hang up now, and I'll call straight back. Okay? Okay.’

She went into the kitchen, emptied the glass of iced water and returned to the hall to put in the call to Australia.

With the receiver to her ear, she waited patiently as Poppy came back on line and carried on about her local politician in particular, and Australian Members of Parliament in general. All the while, she kept her eye on the time, listening to her aunt but concentrating some of her attention on the patterns in the Sarouk rug at her feet. Anything to calm her nerves.

And then, all too soon, the ABC anchorman said goodnight and foreshadowed the all-important televised recording of the Birthday Lottery to be shown immediately after their station break. She lit her fourth cigarette, this time a Camel. Numerals were running through her head, numerals corresponding with birth dates.

We couldn’t be that unlucky, she thought as she exhaled several smoke rings in quick succession and watched them climb in slow, fading circles to the high ceiling where they joined with all those that had gone before. It was a wonder her ceiling wasn't showing nicotine stains, she reasoned.

As she stood, tapping her fingers on the phone table, waiting for the government official to announce the commencement of the draw, she tried to keep the ‘If only’ mantra at bay.

If only Naomi's mustard bath had worked. If only they hadn't washed up in that vile outback town. If only she had pinched the bottle of milk from the cafe's fridge that day. If only she hadn’t hopped on the motorbike. If only she hadn’t gone out that night. If only...

But the biggest "if only" of all––the one that had been up to Miki and not her––she kept in check.

That way, lay too much bitterness.

Best left behind.