Goodna
This was the pattern: first Bea had to get someone (Joe McGillivray usually; sometimes Mick Donovan) to give her a ride down the mountain to Beenleigh. There was a Golden Fleece petrol station with a restaurant, very fancy: printed menus, proper beer glasses, bread and butter knives, paper serviettes pleated into waterlilies beside your plate. It was right on the Pacific Highway, and that was where the Brisbane bus came in. Flashing arrows promised: Anything you want while you wait! Queensland beer on tap. Yatala pies, six kinds, best meat pies in Australia!
“A bit pricey,” Bea sniffed, scanning the menu.
“Ah, c’mon, Bea. Once a month.” Joe McGillivray, publican, was keen to make a splash. “Pie’s on me.” It was Joe’s special joke, each time, to ask the waitress about the serviettes. “What’s this then? Frilly toilet paper?”
The Halfway House they called it, meaning halfway to Surfers Paradise, halfway to those beaches clogged with johnnies from Melbourne and Sydney and God knew where else these days, Japan, America, you heard all kinds of gobbledegook. Once in a blue moon she and Joe would drive down with the kids in his battered Holden. Horrible. Not the surf, naturally, and not the miles of white sand which were as good as ever, a blooming miracle those beaches and always would be, world without end. But the place was thick as Vegemite with bodies. Not to mention the bloody arcades! Aw, Mum, c’mon Mum, please, please, some more fairy floss, Siddie’s got some, c’mon Mum. And then getting the stragglers out of the shops and across to the beach and basting them so they wouldn’t burn to a crisp in the sun and then once they got in, the little buggers, you couldn’t drag them back out of the water. Aw, Mum, just one more time, Liz has had lots longer than me, just one more go in the surf, Davey’s still in, how come I gotta? aw Mum, c’mon Mum, please? And every time you turned around, you tripped over someone’s thighs, someone’s buttocks, someone wearing nothing more than two bits of coloured string; you could hardly see the sand for bare flesh. “Funny,” she’d say to Joe. “I reckon I’ve lost me knack for people. I been living on the mountain too long.” Yeah, Joe would say. Him too. The few regulars in his pub were his limit. Otherwise, give him possums and wombats any day.
“So what’s brewin’, Bea?” they’d ask at the Halfway House. “Got itchy feet? Gotta blow the cobwebs away, gotta whoop it up in Brisbane once a month?”
“Yeah, yeah,” she’d smile. “Babs’ll be waiting for me. Gonna kick up our heels.”
“Like back in their old Duke of Wellington days. You notice how she don’t let me come along?” Joe raised bushy eyebrows. “I gotta put her on the bus and bugger off. Just what do they get up to? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“Wouldn’t you just.”
“Gotta send young Charade along to keep an eye.” Joe winked. “A kid in tow, they can’t get up to too much, know what I mean? Keeps them outta trouble.”
Once a month Bea did this. Sometimes she took Charade with her, sometimes not.
But what did she and Babs do when the bus got into Brisbane, which, depending on traffic, took an hour or more from Beenleigh? Just how did they kick up their heels? Answer: those Duke of Wellington sheilas, those movers and shakers, they went and sat in the Botanical Gardens like any two lace-and-lavender ladies from the Eventide Homes. Sometimes they sat in the kiosk, more often they found a bench somewhere with a lot of bamboo and papyrus around, somewhere private, somewhere where you could watch more ducks than drunks or metho drinkers. While Charade, who was seven, eight, nine, climbed trees or floated boats in the pond, they sipped tea (or maybe beer) in paper cups, they smoked and swapped stories until it was time for the Ipswich bus. They’d check their watches, and Charade was twelve and curled up in a tree fork somewhere with a book. They’d get scones and jam and cream at the kiosk, and where was thirteen-year-old Charade? Down by the bandstand talking to boys, likely as not, and they’d have to drag her away because it was time for the Ipswich bus.
The bloody Ipswich bus.
Bea (and Charade, if Charade was there, but at the age of fourteen she put her foot down; she’d go to Brisbane all right, but you couldn’t get her on the Ipswich bus), but back when, Bea and Charade would make the trip out, not quite all the way to Ipswich (but still, another hour in the bloody bus), get the visiting over and done with (God! Babs would say, you gotta be off your rocker, visiting a place like that!), and get the bus back into Brisbane. Babs would meet them again at the terminal, they’d drive out to Babs’s flat in West End, and that was it. Some whoopee.
Maybe they’d have a church hall spree on the way to Babs’s flat, pick over the secondhand clothing for the kids (Babs had four; she had a bit of trouble making ends meet). They’d stop in at the church in West End, the big one on Vulture Street where Babs went on Sunday nights every once in a while. Well you know, she said, it was the music mostly, for when she felt down — and when didn’t she? — and also they always helped you out in a crunch, like if you ran a bit short on food before the end of the month.
“You ever go to church these days, Bea?”
“You gotta be kidding,” Bea would say. “Too many people still praying for me soul, I can’t give in.”
“You send the kids to Sunday School, but.”
“Yeah, well.” Bea grinned. Shrugged. Looked sheepish.
Then the two of them, Bea Ryan and Babs McGinnis, ex-barmaids at the Duke, ex-George Street beauties, would discuss the news of the world, the significant and shattering events of history, the trends, the Great Depressions, the boom times. Remember McGinley? Babs would say. The one who used to come in after the sugar cutting gave out, back from Cairns regular as clockwork? Remember Ross Andrews? Jesus, Florrie Sears — remember her? — she always had the hots for him. Remember that bloke with the tattoo on his you-know-where? I wonder what happened to him. I tell you who I saw last week, you’ll never guess, Pete Kennedy, remember him? the one with the crooked prick, it had a bend in the middle, old S-bend Kennedy, what a scream, what a riot, remember? Remember the night …? Remember, remember, a litany old as the hills, telling off men like beads.
“And what about Nicholas?” Babs might ask. “What about Charade’s dad? You ever see him these days?”
“Ssh,” Bea would frown, looking over at Charade. “Little donkeys have big ears.”
“Okay, okay, the big N. You still carry a torch for him?”
“No comment,” Bea would say. “Scratch that one.”
Oh men, they’d laugh, throwing up their hands. Men!
“Still, I got what I wanted,” Bea mused. “I got me kids.”
Babs screwed up her face. “I wouldn’t say no to something better. Wouldn’t kill me. I could do with a man around the house.”
“I dunno,” Bea said. “I dunno. I reckon I’ve had a good life.”
Come morning, Bea and Charade got the bus back to Beenleigh. Till the next time. Once a month, regular as moonrise, Bea left her Bea-lings and turned her back on the rainforest and went to see if Brisbane was still where she left it. “Siddie can
handle things for a night,” she’d say. “A regular scrub-turkey-father, that kid. More reliable than Charade, I’m telling you. Never can tell when she’ll bugger off with her head in a book. The world could fall in, and she’d have her head in a book.”
“Bea,” Babs would say, as it got closer to time for the Ipswich bus. “Let it go. You don’t have to do this. I reckon there’s a rule that we don’t have to do stuff like that. No one has to. It’s bloody well morbid.”
“No way I’m going, you can’t make me,” said Charade once she turned fourteen. “I’m staying right here with Aunt Babs. I’ve got a book, I’ve got exams to study for.”
“She’s fine here, Bea. Let her stay. If you ask me, you’re crazy to go yourself.”
“Yeah, well,” Bea would shrug. “I dunno. I reckon I gotta. If it was you, Babs …”
“If it’s ever me,” Babs said firmly, “I wouldn’t want anyone I know to see me. I’m telling ya, Bea. If it’s ever me (Jesus Christ, touch wood!), I don’t want you bringing me flowers. Ah struth.’’ She’d light another cigarette. “You never know when enough’s enough, that’s your problem, Bea. You never did.” She’d inhale and hold it long enough to wreck her lungs. “Was Jimmy the Bookie still in, last time you were there?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bea sighed. “Still taking bets on the side. He’ll be rolling in it, if he ever gets out.”
“What about Maeve?”
“Not last time. She’s in and out. She gets dried out and goes home for a while. Then she hits it again, and goes round exposing herself and they chuck her back in.”
“Jesus,” Babs shuddered. “We didn’t do so bad with our lives, Bea. Touch wood. I’d never want to end up there, I’d rather die.”
“Yeah, well.”
“What about Sleeping Beauty?”
“Same as always,” Bea said. “Reckon I’ll have another beer before I go.”
It was easier that way. Easier if she’d had just enough to make her shambly (a nice word that, Siddie’s word) — though Bea would have to swipe a handful of mint leaves from some garden on the way to the bus stop. She’d have to chew them or they’d never let her past the front desk.
“Here we are,” the bus driver would say, letting Bea and Charade off at Goodna. “Sooner you than me, luv. I wouldn’t touch that place with a forty-foot pole. Not if you paid me.”
What did Charade remember of the trips to Beenleigh and Brisbane and Goodna?
She remembered Babs. A high-voltage woman, that was how Charade thought of her in later years. She was someone who vibrated, who gave off the kind of steady hum that turned heads, that burned up anyone who came too close, that left Babs’s own nerves in a constantly inflamed and smoking state. When Babs lit one of her cigarettes from the stub of the last, her fingers trembled. When she laughed, Charade believed she could see blue flame. There was a glow about Babs that few people could resist for the short run. In the long run, the charred men reeled from her house.
When Babs McGinnis and Bea Ryan walked down Queen Street to wait for the Ipswich bus, Charade saw people fall like dominoes in their wake. Not just men. People turned, people crossed the street to see them better, people looped around in their tracks and followed.
Babs McGinnis talked with her hands. She made manual lightning. And then Bea would laugh, and the laugh of Bea Ryan was something to haunt people’s dreams: a throaty laugh, so sexy and infectious that children joined in, women felt edgy but couldn’t stop themselves from smiling, men thought feverishly of ways to meet her, they racked their brains for something witty to say to her, they considered a mad sprint, a collision, anything to touch her. And Babs laughed with her hands, made her hands flutter like birds, whoosh, whoosh, how her fingers went off like sparklers, and Brisbane held its breath and stopped to watch.
On the bus, after Babs hugged her goodbye, Charade warily inspected herself for scorch marks.
And what could Charade say about Goodna, that place of lost souls? She remembered greyness, endless variations of greyness: in the grounds where even the flowers seemed defeated; in the reception room where grey officials asked grey questions; in the corridors where grey ghosts passed up and down, seeing nothing.
Close to Bea however, and Charade stayed very close indeed and held her mother’s hand, close to Bea there was a bubble of light and colour.
Bea would stop in the common room where a woman wrapped in a grey housecoat stared at nothing. She might have been a goblin — no, a troll — folded up into one corner of a couch. From her crossed arms and clenched hands, knuckles and elbows protruded like little white arrowheads, and her hair writhed spiky and snake-like about her face. Charade shivered. Charade thought of someone dipped in a rubbish pit. She bit her lip and tried not to look at the woman’s legs, but they pulled her eyes and she stared with horrified fascination. Was it real skin? It was shiny, wrinkled as used tissue paper, the shin bones pushing so close against it that they seemed about to cut their own way out. The woman wore grubby socks, short ones with the cuffs rolled over, and a pair of men’s slippers a couple of sizes too large. The socks gave her a clownish look, a grotesque circus look: World’s Oldest Little Girl. Perhaps the most awful touch was a satin ribbon tied to a lock of her hair, a dirty pink satin ribbon, its ends trailing across her forehead.
“Maeve!” Bea called, and the bubble of light fell across the woman’s face. “Maeve darling.” And Bea would laugh and bend over and hug her.
Something happened then.
There was a thing Charade had seen at school, a thing her teacher had done to show the way plants breathed. First a jam jar was placed on the windowsill and filled with water, then red dye was added, then a lily was placed in the jar. Now the miracle: Michael Donovan took bets on how many minutes as the lily sipped up colour through its stem, blushed along the cheek of its creamy petal, bled along its flutes and curves, became a striped lily, then a strawberry one, then a blood-red bougainvillea lily.
This happened to Maeve. “Bea,” she sobbed. And colour began to move through her. “Oh Bea, oh Bea, where did my ribbons go?” And the colour moved past her socks, past her knees, over the bony elbows, up to her cheeks. “I hid my sequins, Bea,” she laughed. “They can’t find my sequins, they can’t take them away.” She gurgled. She began to do little bower bird dance steps in her floppy slippers. Her excitement spilled into tears and giggles, into strange behaviours.
Charade, fascinated, watched the housecoat open and close, open and close. She saw tattered lace drawers.
“There, there, Maeve.” Bea was motherly, calming, a gentle buttoner-upper, a re-tier of pink ribbons. “Let’s just sit.”
On the grey couch in the colourless room, Bea and Maeve sat in their bubble of light, and Maeve put her head on Bea’s shoulder, and sometimes Bea sang. Sometimes it was Lily Marlene. Sometimes it was the lullaby she’d used for Charade, for Siddie, for all of them, the same song that drifted out to the mango trees on the side of the Tamborine Mountain.
Charade would think with amazement: Mum loves Maeve. Mum really loves her.
Did Bea love the Sleeping Beauty? Charade couldn’t decide. When the bubble of light that moved with Bea fell across the Sleeping Beauty, nothing happened.
“Is she blind?” Charade asked.
“No,” Bea said. “She’s looking at something we can’t see. It gets in her way.”
“What’s her name?”
“Her name’s Sleeping Beauty.”
“No, but her real name, Mum.”
“That’s what the nurses call her.”
“Why hasn’t she got any hair, Mum?”
“The nurses shave it off. If they don’t, she pulls it out. She hurts herself.”
The Sleeping Beauty sat in a rocking chair by the window, her back straight as a ramrod, her possum eyes black and glittering and fixed on something only she could see. Her skin was as white as that of a china cup. There was something breathtaking about her shorn head. It was as though the bones themselves were … what? Charade fumbled through words and decided: proud. She had proud bones. All of them: the high cheekbones, the forehead, the gaunt sockets, that carefully held spine. Her feet were tucked under the long grey skirt and you could never see her hands, she kept them tucked somewhere too. But the head! It made Charade think of African sculptures in art books in the school library. An African or Egyptian queen, but white as milk.
This was what Bea did: she stood behind the rocking chair and stroked the down on Sleeping Beauty’s bony head. (Charade had seen her do that with Trev, with Tiz, with all the babies, stroking head fuzz with a fingertip while she rocked them to sleep.) Bea would push the rocking chair and hum. At the first movement of the chair, Sleeping Beauty’s feet would shoot out, rigid, and Bea would softly rock, softly rock, humming sounds without words, and the feet would relax, would disappear back under the folds of the skirt. That was the only sign the Sleeping Beauty ever gave.
Did she like being rocked and sung to? There was no way
of knowing.
When Bea was done, she would kiss the top of the downy head. “Say goodbye, Charade,” she would murmur.
And Charade, with a thrill of dread and awe, would stand on tiptoe beside the rocker and place a kiss on that high cold cheek.
Charade remembered how Maeve would follow them down the corridor, giggling: “They can’t find my sequins, Bea, I hid them good.” And she remembered the man whose breath smelled like a public toilet who called after them: “Put your shirt on Ulysses. Last race at Doomben, can’t lose.”
All the way back to Brisbane, Bea stared out the window of the bus.
“Mum, Mum,” Charade would pester. “What did Maeve do, Mum, before she went to Goodna?” But she had to poke Bea, and pull at her sleeve, as though Sleeping Beauty’s disease were catching. “Mum, what did Maeve do?”
“She’s a dancer,” Bea murmured, heavy-lidded. “At the Black Cat on Elizabeth Street. Leave me be, Charade. Stop pestering.”
“How long ago, Mum? She’s old as old can be, she must be a hundred. How long ago did she dance?” Charade tugged and tugged at Bea’s sleeve.
“She’s still a dancer,” Bea said, slurring her words, tapping her forehead. “She’s still Black Cat Maeve.”
“Mum, how come you’re so sleepy?” Charade jiggled in the bus seat, strangely excited, strangely frightened. “What about the Sleeping Beauty, Mum? What did she used to be?”
But Bea stared at the Darra cement works, flickering by.
“Christ,” she said to Babs every time, the second she got off the bus. “Christ, I could do with a drink.”