A foreboding had got inside Ada and she couldn’t get it out again. Something felt threatening and inevitable. The sun had shrunk the whole town, turned it brittle as a pip and sucked the creeks dry. The cherry tree had died, even though Ada had emptied the cold kettle water under it every day. No wonder the people of the town were tired; if the sun didn’t stop drying everything to a cinder, their hearts would turn as black and hard as coal. They all needed to sit still and pant. Or lie on their backs in the shade. But they carried on, just like the flies that buzzed and thudded like fools against the kitchen windowpane.
‘These flies drive me crazy,’ said Ada.
When Tilly didn’t reply, Ada let out a loud sigh and added, ‘The way they carry on!’ She leaned over the stool and hung her arms as if they had just died. The flies weren’t really to blame, but it was relieving to blame something: something small enough to do battle with, something other than the scorched summer days that arrived, one after the other without stopping, emblazoned and glaring and wiped of detail. The density and darkness and edge of life was all gone.
Tilly was smoking a cigarette and wearing a nice dress. She had turned on the fan above the stove and was standing near the window, so their mother wouldn’t know. ‘There’s a fire at Mount Macedon. It’s burnt the whole north side of the mountain already. Because of the drought. That lemon tart shop has probably already burnt down,’ she said.
Bushfires didn’t scare Ada. There were enough people afraid of them; she wasn’t joining that queue. She had her very own fear and it belonged only to her and she preferred it that way. The heat and Ada had their own private struggle, but the heat was winning.
‘I heard about this woman,’ Tilly continued, fanning the smoke with her hand. ‘I heard her talking on the radio because she got burnt so badly by a ball of fire that her skin was black, and she nearly died. Well, she would have died if the neighbour didn’t put her in the pool. And she lay in the pool nearly dying and watched her blackened skin float around her. And when she was in the hospital, every breath she took was so painful the nurse couldn’t bear to watch it, and she thought she would die for sure. But she had two little girls who she had saved from the fireball by putting a blanket over them. She wanted to live for them. And she believed in God too. It always helps people survive if they think God is going to lend a hand.’
Tilly said this with a little sniff, and Ada knew what it meant. She didn’t like it when Tilly besmirched God. Ada believed in him. That ghost man who watched from the sky and looked like Gregory Peck and made your wishes come true if you were helpful to your mother.
‘Mum wouldn’t have done that,’ Tilly said. She squished her cigarette into the gold-rimmed china saucer and ran water over it.
‘Wouldn’t have done what?’ asked Ada.
Tilly shrugged. ‘You know.’ She leaned on the kitchen bench and sighed, pulling at her dark fringe to smooth it.
Ada got off the stool and turned it upside down and tried to stand inside the upturned legs.
‘She would have for Ben, though,’ Tilly continued airily. ‘She’d put Ben under the blanket first.’
Ada gripped the legs of the stool and began to rock it. She could ride it. She could ride it right out the door and keep going.
‘You’ll break it, Ada, or you’ll hurt yourself.’ Tilly’s sigh spread like a damp cloud over everything.
Ada stopped rocking. She squinted at Tilly suspiciously. If she looked hard enough she might see past the new Tilly through to the old one. The new Tilly was hard to understand. Even the way she stood promised something and hid it too. What it promised Ada didn’t know, but she did know it wasn’t a direct thing—it was smoky and silent and sideways. Tilly wasn’t a child anymore, and she wasn’t grown up either. She was seventeen and no one was grown up till they were eighteen, but Tilly was trying to be eighteen, and Ada thought it gave her an unnatural sort of poise. It wasn’t only because she was wearing lipstick and her hair was brushed, it was the sense of her being purposeful and sly. Tilly pulled at her shining dark fringe as if it might curtain her off from the world.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Ada.
‘I’m not going anywhere, yet. I’m looking after you, remember, till Dad gets back.’ Tilly spoke with a slow whisper. She lowered her gaze, as if it had been too heavy to hold. The flies buzzed at the window. Ada poked at a half-eaten piece of watermelon on a plate.
‘Why are you dressed up then?’ Ada stood the stool back up the right way and sat on it very straight and tall. She was uncomfortable again. The summer strain was mixed up with Tilly becoming different and she couldn’t quite separate the two feelings. There should be a way that this could be worked out and got right.
‘Well I’m just ready for the party.’ Tilly had turned her head away and was staring into the hot still air. What was she thinking? ‘Whose party? Will there be boys there? Raff Cavallo?’ Ada sang his name. Raff Cavallo had divorced parents around whom Ada sensed an enticing whiff of scandal. He was in the gang that included her brother, Ben, and Will Rand. Will Rand’s mother smoked marijuana and let her three children do whatever they wanted, but their father was strict, and all the children were frightened of him. Raff, who was in Tilly’s class at school, was the most interesting in Ada’s opinion because his mother was rumoured to have been a musical star when she was young, and she still dressed quite flamboyantly. Even better, she had never baked a cake for the school fete, let alone attended it, all because she preferred to play piano.
Both Ada and Tilly had heard the talk about these two women, and while it spiked Ada’s interest it had the opposite effect on Tilly, who looked at Raff as if he was a criminal.
‘Of course, there’ll be boys,’ Tilly said. ‘It’s Gwendolyn Bell’s party.’
Tilly was not explaining things properly, not in the way Ada wanted.
‘Who is Gwendolyn Bell?’ Such a name. Ada pictured her with windswept hair and a silver goblet in her hand.
Tilly made a tiny frown. She was bored with the conversation. ‘You always want to know everything. Gwendolyn Bell—there’s nothing particular about her, she’s just having a party. I hardly know her. She’s finished school; it’s her twenty-first. They’ve got a horse in their paddock. That’s all I know to say about her.’
‘Then why are you going to her party if you don’t know her?’
Tilly gave a withering look. She even sighed to show that the conversation had become tiresome, as if she had more important thoughts to attend to. Ada rolled her eyes to make a matching or even bigger bored expression, but then she realised she still wanted to know the answer and her eyes opened wide.
‘Oh, Snug, it’s just that everyone’s going. It’s that kind of party. You’ll see one day. It’s not like a kid’s birthday party. I don’t even know if I truly want to go. I’m not even sure I like those sorts of girls with those sorts of bedrooms, you know, where things match and there are standards.’ Tilly paused, and her hands drummed at the bench. ‘It’s too hot to think. I’m going to ring Alice. You’ll have to play on your own for a while.’
Ada didn’t get a chance to ask what standards. Tilly heaved herself up from the bench and with this one movement was gone from the kitchen and all that was left was a waft of cigarette smoke.
Ada watched the late-afternoon light stream in the window. It was golden and velvety, and caught the hovering motes of dust so that they sparkled as they turned slowly in the air. She drifted into a tender, sad mood because of the way the light and dust slowed time to a halt and opened up a soft hole of memory, and she had the sense that something had happened and would never happen again. She tried to think what it could be. It was the dying light that made her sad, because time died over and over again. Each day threw out its one last lone note of beauty like a plaintive howl, and then it was finished. Dead forever. Passed over. She sank onto the stool with a quiet thud. The clock ticked loudly and wickedly, the vine leaves on the veranda drooped and the enamel water jug gleamed on the bench as if basking in its own splendour. For a moment life was so deep and still that Ada felt she had dissolved all her Ada-ness and had become part of everything. She was a golden mote of spinning dust.
Ada had not forgotten the small pain of Tilly’s party. She resented it and she resented Gwendolyn Bell. The party was what was changing Tilly. Now Tilly composed herself carefully with her mind shined to a point, and she no longer crawled in the garden and she shunned the tyre swing and the wild, stumbling, searching beat of how things used to be. Tilly had just finished school, and in the lead-up to her final exams, she had begun to do homework instead of lying about outside by the trampoline. Either that or she played the piano. Ada had never seen any determination in Tilly before and she felt excluded by it. Tilly had become sharper, arrow-like and perhaps she even became thinner, slipping through doors quietly, as if she was deliberately fading herself out.
Ada’s heart flung itself into the gap between how things used to be and how they were becoming and strained to drag everything to one place. Soon there would be a breaking or a snapping or an ending. What would end she didn’t know.
She stood up and pressed her face to the window. The grass outside bristled beneath the weight of another day of scorching heat. The sun had squashed it down to pale straw colour. The cherry tree stood dead and stiff and as bare as a skeleton, with its branches reaching up as if it longed to wrench itself out of the ground and fly up to the heavens. Ada didn’t want to look at it all the time and think about how it had died. What was it like to die, for a tree? Ben was supposed to cut it down.
Ada could still smell Tilly’s cigarette. If their mother smelled it Tilly would cop it. But their mother was in Melbourne visiting their granny and her friend Glenda who had a sadness disease. Glenda wore long black dresses and had small round glasses and was given to staring mournfully into the distance and eating tim tams on the sly. Whenever Glenda got the sad sickness, Martha went to stay with her, and then she often came home with something new: a book or new clothes for herself. Ada was glad her mother wasn’t home, sniffing for clues. Old Sherlock, they called her. Ada could take all the fruit she wanted and not get told off for being greedy.
She leaned over the fruit bowl to see what she’d eat next. But there were only apples left and they were floury, and some had patches of brown rot. No wonder the flies were going at them. She should go and see what Louis and May were doing next door, see if they were watching television. But then she remembered that she hated Louis and she had told everyone that he was the meanest person in the world because he had punched her. Tilly said Ada had probably done something first to upset Louis. She always stuck up for everyone else.
Ada flung open the flywire door and let it bang shut. She went straight to the cherry tree and put her hands on it. Perhaps there was still a trickle of life in it, a little hum going up and down the trunk. Ada listened; she listened so hard, her face turned red.
Ben was never going to get round to digging it up. It would stand there dead the whole summer.