The House Guest Page 3

  I went to the animal fair,

  The birds and beasts were there,

  The big baboon by the light of the moon

  Was combing his auburn hair.

  The monkey he got drunk.

  He slid down the elephant’s trunk

  The elephant sneezed and fell on his knees

  And what became of the monkey unky unky unky unky

  unky …?

  Robin punted one up from the bike sheds.

  Ask your mother for cash,

  To see the big giraffe

  He’s whiskers on his pimples

  And pimples on his …

  Ask your mother for …

  ‘Robin,’ said Miss Bowman. Shamed by her strong eye, he stirred harder.

  They progressed as cooks, they became dedicated. Later they shared their interest in food, swapped recipes, tended their herbs and discussed problems. Fines herbes for example. The chervil is always over by the time the rest are ready. Did Emmie find that? By the time he was fifteen Robin had taken over the cooking completely. Birthdays were recipe books. Christmas was money ‘for all those weird things you like, dear’. The narrow slice of Eileen’s kitchen shone with Robin’s batterie de cuisine. He had the sense to hide his interest from the other kids. It was a secret shared only with Emmie who was scatty and becoming more so each day.

  ‘Very nice dear, very tasty,’ said Eileen dabbing a napkin to her lips after a triumphant tarte citron, a succulent lamb shank. Sometimes he wondered if there was anything she would not like. He had never found it, though she had had to be brave about garlic and he knew without asking that raw meat was not on.

  The evenings when there was no meeting Eileen sat and watched television. All programmes pleased her until ten p.m. when they ceased to exist. They were too late. The blue square changed to a blink as she switched off and turned to plump her cushion. ‘Bed,’ she said, kissed his forehead and went. Sometimes Robin watched with her as she sat making little mews of approbation or dismay at successive images, trying to find if there was any programme which she did not like. He wondered if she would be just as happy in the launderette watching the periodic surge and slap of the washing cycle, the exuberant tsunami crash of the first spin’s wave, but decided this was a smart-arse thought and buried it. They lived in faintly uneasy harmony. Robin mowed the lawns. The garden had long since ceased to exist though rhubarb and parsley flourished. ‘That’s the thing about parsley,’ said Eileen. ‘Either it likes you or it doesn’t.’

  Gradually, over the year, Lisa became accustomed to his new persona, his suitor’s face. She had always been pleased to see him; now she leaped up laughing to greet her boyfriend who was mad about her. She took him to staff parties, worried over his clothes, put him right on socks.

  ‘Hi, I’m Robin!’ he yelled to a guy with a can of beer above the thump and grind of ‘Modern Love’.

  All right, keep your shitty name to yourself. I am here because Lisa works here and thank God I don’t.

  Something moved deep in the beard alongside. It was alive, there were pink lips. ‘Hi, I’m Sandy’s partner. Si. Futures. We were talking about the crash.’

  ‘Oh.’ He tried harder. ‘Eighty-seven?’

  Si looked at him for a moment in silence then dragged his palm over his nose and mouth. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Eighty-seven.’

  These people had shares. Money. Spare money they had put into shares so they could lose them when the market crashed.

  He was getting sour. Sour kinky old dropout son of widowed mother. Oh God.

  ‘Sandy says,’ said Lisa as they drove home, ‘she thinks you look just like Yves Saint Laurent. When he was young, of course.’

  Wasn’t he gay? ‘Oh.’

  ‘She thinks that older men are really sexy.’

  ‘Which one is Sandy?’

  ‘You know. The one with the neat little ring.’

  ‘Oh.’ He paused. ‘That one.’

  *

  One of the few things Eileen had told him about his father was his hobby.

  ‘He loved his stamps, you know.’

  ‘Yes.’ The stamp album was now Robin’s. He tried to like it, to imagine his unknown grandfather and father’s hands on the Side Faces, the 1898 five-shilling Mount Cook. The book had a dry wrinkled closeness, the pages crackled. He could not imagine a more boring occupation in the world than collecting stamps. King George V had been a philatelist. He had also shot birds; hundreds of them lay at his feet in faded photographs of triumphant massacres. A few of the legs stuck upwards. The beaters were at the back.

  ‘He loved his stamps so much that he wanted me to love them too and you know what he did?’ Eileen stopped, her hand at her mouth.

  Robin smiled. ‘You’ve told me before, Mum.’

  ‘Yes, but wasn’t it lovely of him? He wanted to get me interested so he started me off with my own collections of flowers and birds and fish stamps even. They were so pretty.’

  Did they sit side by side across the table, the lamp shining on the excruciating boredom beneath. Did she like it. Did she ‘take off on her own’. Had his father thought and hoped and longed for her each night as he came home from his day’s work to his collection. Robin had never asked. There was no obvious evidence, just the faded memory of togetherness, of sharing a hobby. A grisly word.

  No one could call tramping and the bush a hobby but he could see he would have to be careful in introducing Lisa to his passion. He did not want to put her off. She had never even been to Butterfly Creek.

  To his delight, his grateful down-on-your-knees wonder, she loved it all. It was all so pretty, especially the filmy ferns. Only one cell thick? No wonder they dried out, but weren’t they pretty when they hadn’t. In his excitement he bought her boots, a light pack, a floppy hat. She had always loved dressing up and was quick and agile. She crashed through creeks, was wary with rivers, used her head and loved everyone in the huts. They were so nice, each and every one of them. Sometimes they were even nicer than the last lot, didn’t he think?

  Robin, who sometimes had to force himself to talk to the clowns who were lousing up his space, sat beside her and her steaming enamel mug of tea and smiled. Billy tea really did taste different too, didn’t it? She’d never believed it before but what did the other guys think and had they really done the Saddle in three hours? Wow, had Rob heard that, it would take us miles longer wouldn’t it, Rob?

  It wouldn’t, or not him alone. He nodded.

  The hut creaked around them as he lay on the bunk below her and ached with longing. They would hear him he supposed. Wanking is not for huts.

  She tracked down a waterfall next morning. He had never seen it before and he had walked the track dozens of times. There was a sound of splashing, thin squeaks of laughter. Lisa turned and dived off the track to the left.

  ‘Don’t ever do that!’ he yelled, ducking beneath the spines of the bush lawyer to blunder after her.

  She turned, her hand pushing back ropes of supplejack. ‘What?’

  ‘Leave the main track like that.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Rob. Don’t be so bossy. I want to find the pool.’

  She turned, crashed on through the rough side track and rounded the corner. Sitting in the middle of the stony pool beneath the waterfall cascading from the bush was Emmeline; small breasted, skinny, henna hair piled high, her nipples dark. Beside her a naked child lay on his stomach kicking the shallow water into myriads of shining drops. Rays of sunlight shone through green.

  ‘Emmie,’ yelled Lisa. ‘What on earth are you guys doing here? Hi, Calvin.’

  Calvin kicked more strongly, water leaped higher, was caught in a mini-rainbow. A top-heavy wood pigeon achieved lift off, clattered above them in a glint of grey and blue.

  ‘Hi.’

  Emmie.

  Not here. Or not now. Not just now when it was important for everything to go right.

  Two

  So how would you begin. How would you start on the adult Emmeline
O’Malley. She wouldn’t see thirty again according to Bernie, which was true but not by much. She had been brought up by her aunt in steely poverty and pride. Robin’s earliest memories included Miss Bowman and Emmeline riding stiff-backed on ancient bicycles through wind and rain, through sun and drifting sand to track down the Specials in Kilbirnie, the Best Buys in Miramar, the Library. Miss Bowman, large, layered and strapped about the middle like an ill-assembled and badly tied parcel; Emmeline a pale-skinned follower, her flaming hair plaited and dragged around her narrow head. They wore black woollen stockings summer and winter. They spoke to few. Their woolly hats were of no known pattern; their histories were unknown. They were different.

  Maureen and Eileen agreed it was odd that Miss Bowman (no one knew her first name) should keep herself to herself. That there should be little popping in. She was friendly but distant, a mysterious bundle of a woman. She gardened, she cleaned the taps in the garden, she raked the gravel in her purple hat, in the fullness of time she sometimes wet herself. She loved Emmeline.

  She admitted Robin, but only by appointment. When he was about four he had climbed over her fence to watch her raking. ‘I’ve come to play,’ he told her.

  Miss Bowman scarcely glanced at him. ‘No, you haven’t. If I want you I’ll ask you. Off you go. Tout de suite and the tooter the sweeter.’

  Emmeline, swinging from the tyre swing with her mouth open, had smiled. He remembered that.

  Miss Bowman spoke differently. Not only the accent but the care with which she chose her words, the attention she gave to each. Bicycles, photographs, televisions, advertisements, apartments, Emmeline; none of them was short changed, all were delivered in full. Which was unexpected when you thought about it, her being American and the way they shorten worse than the Aussies. A where had all her stuff come from? Family. It must be family. She couldn’t have bought it here. It was not only old but weird. On entering Miss Bowman’s front room you checked the airlock, dived deep and sank onto an Edwardian seabed. When they did The Forsaken Merman at school, Robin felt at home. Pale light filtered, slid down the edges of drawn blinds onto green plush covering the round table. There were books bound in leather hungry and cracked as seaboots: The Ingoldsby Legends, The Scarlet Letter, Leaves of Grass. A stuffed ermine’s winter coat, snarling mouth and pointed yellow teeth were trapped beneath a bell of glass. There was a barometer, a button hook, three pieces of scrimshaw and unlit candles. An ancient naval sword hung on the wall, its handle covered in sharkskin so the wielding hand would not slip. In what Miss Bowman? Blood, boy, blood. The sofa and chairs were rounded reefs of ruby red or scratchy green with smooth mown areas around anemone flowers and swaying seaweed leaves.

  There were more flowers on the hooked rug on the linoleum. Egg-yolk daisies flowered before a log cabin. An eagle with widespread wings perched on one end of the roof, a windvane at the other. A briskly trotting black horse sped by.

  The pictures were not marine. Each one told him something. Everyone had a question. Why did the man (‘Napoleon, Robin, Napoleon’) have his right hand inside his coat? Why was the lady with the drooping head sitting all alone on top of the world? What was a Tiff and why had the lady and man had one? And tell me again, Miss Bowman, oh tell me again about The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner. The bare room, the faithful border collie, the only one who really cared keeping Vigil throughout the Night, head outstretched on the humble coffin. What’s humble, Miss Bowman? Poor, boy, poor.

  There was only one photograph on the plush-covered table. A woman stared straight at the camera, her hair hanging beneath the wide framing hood of a cloak clamped tight at the neck, the other hand resting on a long stick. Her face was unsmiling which surprised Robin. Seaward suburbs ladies usually grin like mad in photographs. He had seen them in chemists’ windows.

  ‘A friend of mine,’ said Miss Bowman and put it behind the ermine.

  Miss Bowman told them stories, her voice lilting as though echoing through water like dolphins on TV. She sat in front of the one-bar heater before the fireplace in the front room and told them stories of mystery and terror. About the little boy who put his hand through the wringer when he had been told not to and it was squashed flat as your hat, about the even smaller boy who went to the dump when he’d been told not to and got shut in a fridge and whose bleached bones were found years later. ‘Bleached bones,’ murmured Miss Bowman, her eyes on the glowing coil of the heater. About the seagull with only one leg at Lyall Bay which was always hungry because seagulls give no quarter and nature is red in tooth and claw and not only nature.

  Little Degchie-Head was one of her favourites. It had been her mother’s and its subtitle was apt. ‘An awful warning to bad babas.’

  ‘Robin’s crying, Aunt,’ said Emmeline from the comfort of Miss Bowman’s wide lap.

  ‘I am not.’ And he wasn’t either.

  They popped corn in a corn popper also sent from Cold Lake, Alberta. Emmeline and Robin took turns, tense with delight and careful of the hot stove because of Little Degchie-Head and Willy in his bright blue sashes who fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes.

  They did not go to the same primary school. Miss Bowman, for reasons known only to herself, took against the local one. She and Emmeline rode off each morning through the tunnel to Strathmore Park. Miss Bowman and her BSA were there to meet Emmeline each day as the bright gaggle streamed out the school gates by the safety crossing to be bossed across by the big kids with whistles and lifted barriers. Emmeline mounted her bike and rode home with Aunt to silence and dreams and ballet.

  And that was another thing. You couldn’t take ballet or indeed anything unless somebody paid. How did Miss Bowman afford it? Obviously she didn’t have a bean. They lived on the smell of an oily rag—ask Bernie. Their clothes were another layered secret. And Valentine’s Dance Studio was a tough outfit. Charity, according to Miss Valentine as well as Miss Bowman, was for the birds. There would be no reduction of fees for the impecunious, however talented.

  And Emmie was talented. Extremely talented and hard working, with none of the distractions of overheated girlish friendships or winsome boy-niggling charm, Emmeline seemed destined for a dedicated and brilliant career. Her skinny body was supple as a reed, her plaits had disappeared at secondary, her Medusa tangle of leaping red hair was once more wrapped around her head, her arms and legs were born to move.

  She began to be noticed. Murmurs were heard. Scholarship, overseas, the Royal Ballet even. Emmie O’Malley with the cast-iron belly, Emmie the loner, the ‘Don’t-Care was made to care’ nutcase, grew from ugly duckling to cygnet, from cygnet to young swan with a future.

  Wrapped in dance, in movement, in the slow tuning of an efficient instrument into a near-perfect one and the sweaty painful slog of achieving same, Emmie had remained on another planet even during her late teens. She practised three to four hours daily. Dancing was her life until she discovered Gary.

  Gary. Ah Gary. Little is known of Gary. His only point of interest is that he was the first. The first of tall guys and small guys and loutish apes and smooth bastards and mellow veterans who beat a path to Miss Bowman’s back door to see Emmeline because she was friendly and good fun.

  ‘Emmie there?’ they shouted at the bundle by the back door.

  ‘Do you mean my niece, Emmeline?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Ballet was not tossed aside lightly nor immediately. It just faded from the scene. Eileen and Maureen learned not to ask Miss Bowman when they met at the store about the latest medal, the next recital, the possibility of a TV appearance.

  Emmeline, clear eyed and graceful and draped in garments even more unusual than those of her childhood, gave no explanation. Her sartorial range was wide. She had the eye of an op shop falcon for camouflage combat fatigues, for shimmering diaphanous fabrics which might have been discarded by Scheherazade, for lace. She shrank the relic of a fifties twin-set to body-stocking dimensions. You couldn’t put your finger on her. She had class but no centre. She w
as splintered, flaky, generous and loved men.

  Was Emmie the town bike? Hating himself and the phrase, Robin had denied the thought. And it was nothing to do with him, for God’s sake. There was Lisa growing daily in beauty and in grace next door on the other side. Lisa.

  Miss Bowman kept her own counsel. If she was disappointed at the abandoning of ballet no one would ever know. If she was heartbroken they would know even less. She remained silent.

  *

  Ballet became too time-consuming and labour-intensive but there were other avenues for grace, for movement, for head-held-high attack, for the combination of dignity and up-yours approach to life Emmeline had learned at her aunt’s knee. She auditioned for acting parts. Nobody had ever heard of her. She had no agent. She joined Equity. She read the scripts offered, she stared the directors in the eyes, blinked and stared again. Both men and women gave her parts. A walk-on in Lorca, a dancer in Bohème (no singing required) a miscast Masha in mourning for her life. She worked her way up. There was something about her. She could act for one thing and her voice carried.

  She continued to live with Aunt. They liked each other and male visitors seemed of little interest or concern to Miss Bowman. She made them welcome as did Emmeline and returned to her front room.

  ‘Good night,’ she called from the passage. ‘You’ll let your friend out will you Emmeline? Good night, Sebastian.’

  ‘Night, Miss Bowman.’

  No climbing of silken ropes was required, no love-sick cries for Rapunzel, Rapunzel to let down her long hair were needed in the quiet back street of Seatoun.

  Emmeline’s acting career (Talented newcomer scoops pool) flourished. Several years later it was interrupted, but not for long.