On a hot Brisbane night in February 1955, Marie made her way home, accompanied by two overexcited policemen. The first policeman, the one from the bridge, kept swivelling around in the front seat of the police car, asking her questions.
‘How’re you liking Australia, dear? I bet Brisbane’s a nice change, eh? The place is looking pretty spruce these days.’
She refused to talk to him. She had just watched a man jump to his death. She stood unveiled, exposed, contaminated once more by the imprint of death. She could not halt the throb of grief; her teeth had set up a shivering in her skull, as if it were cold, cold, cold, like the dismal nights in London she endured without heat, that perishing flat in a bad street in Primrose Hill, the eerie lines of the bombed house next door through the bedroom window, as if it were still cold and she was not now sticking to the upholstery, miserably hot. Was there to be no escape?
How did she even end up in Australia? She should have gone to Canada instead of being beguilded by Wendy McCann’s romantic nonsense about Brisbane. How random her existence, how haphazard! She had once had a mother and a father and a brother named Eric—an entire life. She had once been her father’s favourite, sitting on a high stool in his warm office watching him work, her kind moustachioed father, a prosperous manufacturer of leather goods, her mother unfit for anything, forever locking herself in the bathroom and threatening to kill herself or else packing her bags, screaming that she was leaving, because she was so unloved in her own home. Marie had once been thirteen years old, begging her father to let her go to boarding school in England not because she wanted to benefit from an English education, as she told him, but because her mother was cruel, depressed and overly dramatic. And while Marie was in England the war began and her old life disappeared, pouf: the elegant apartment, the hysterical mother, the kindly father, the brother named Eric—the miserable family dynamics—all of it, gone.
‘Your English is very good, dear,’ the policeman said. ‘Bonza, as we say in Brisso.’
‘My English is superior to yours,’ she said. ‘Australian is barely even English.’ She hated him. Would he never stop talking? She kept her eyes turned to the window.
‘Well, excuse me, Lady Muck.’
The other policeman, the one driving, tried to shush his colleague. ‘For Pete’s sake, lay off. She’s in shock.’
Marie had tried to tell him that she did not require assistance and, in particular, she most especially did not want to arrive home in a police car. She had attempted to march off but the chatterbox policeman restrained her by the arm as if she were under arrest. All the questions, all the questions, the throb in her chest, the hand on her arm, she was being marshalled, questioned, sitting in her English class, fifteen years old, an elderly, red-faced policeman arriving at the classroom door. Could she please accompany him to the headmistress’s office? Her heart stopped, every eye upon her, her hands sweated, she did not want to go to the headmistress’s office to be told whatever dreadful thing she was going to be told. Trembling, Marie said yes, yes, to the policeman asking her questions now, agreed to accompany him to a police car to shut him up, to stop him asking questions, to prevent attracting even more attention to herself than she already had. She longed to disappear into the crowd, to be indistinguishable, the same as the rest, not singular, picked out by her losses. She was not grateful.
Of course everyone came rushing from the house as soon as the police car drew up. Mrs McCann, Mr McCann—clearly in the midst of his tea, a napkin fluttering from the collar of his shirt—Wendy McCann, Terry McCann, with his withered polio leg, and Lance McCann, who had recently been in hospital with the gastric.
‘Oh, dear God, what has happened?’ Mrs McCann cried.
‘Mother! Language!’ said Mr McCann, unaccustomed to hearing his wife take the Lord’s name in vain. The McCanns were Catholics, with many more children absent from the house, but still willing to drive Marie to the hot wooden box that was All Saints’ Church of England, Chermside, every Sunday. The McCanns, tumbling down the front stairs of the wooden house on wooden posts, twelve feet in the air, spilling onto the treeless expanse of their front lawn, flinging up their hands. Not a tree in sight! Nothing, not a leaf, not a branch, not a flower, not a skerrick of blessed leafy relief from the humid air, thick and wet and smothering as the festering air of Asia, from the blast of the antipodean sun boiling in the sky, a great, molten, unblinking eye, glaring down. Roasted alive she was, sweating in her skin, day after merciless day.
Marie stepped now from the police car, shading her eyes against the glare coming off the house, still, the sun already retreated.
‘A cup of tea,’ said Mrs McCann. ‘Wendy, a slice of seed-cake for the officers.’
‘Yes, Mum,’ said Wendy, scooting fast up the front stairs. Safe little Wendy McCann, with her matching luggage, her good set of pearls from FW Nissen and her rosary, once a teacher with Marie for the overcrowded classes at Princess Road Junior Mixed and Infants School, Primrose Hill, London. Marie, at the beginning of her long disappearance, eating almost nothing, barely sleeping, and Wendy, a shadowless Australian girl, who soon had the room of scared four-year-olds entranced by her story of what had happened when she was four years old, just like them, accidentally dropping something through the front stairs of a house far away, in Queensland, Australia, and getting her head stuck. ‘What did you drop, Miss?’ a grimy boy asked.
‘Well, you know what,’ said Wendy. ‘I can’t even remember! I think it might have been my dolly, but at any rate I was trying to get whatever it was that had fallen through, sticking my hand down first, and then my arm, and finally squeezing my head and shoulders between the steps. But then I couldn’t pull my head out again!’
By now Marie, introducing Miss McCann to her new classroom, was listening as hard as the children. ‘What happened, Miss? What happened?’ the children said, shouting, laughing, leaping from their seats.
‘Well, I called to my mother and our neighbour, who had become such a close friend of my mother’s that we called her Aunty Bee. They were having a cup of tea in the kitchen and they rushed out to try to free me but, after several goes at trying to get me out, it was clear I was well and truly stuck. I was wedged right in.’
The children stared. ‘Aunty Bee said, “I’ll go and phone the fire brigade. They’ll have to come and saw through the steps.” Well, I don’t know which of the words it was—“fire brigade” or “saw”—but my head came straight out, pop, just like that!’
And now here was Marie, delivered to her future in the Commonwealth of Australia via a free passage courtesy of the government. Australian citizens did not even exist before 1949—she would have been a British subject if she’d arrived before then—and here she was, reborn, an Australian citizen walking up the head-swallowing steps.
She did not see Syd McAlister that week, or the next. The news came that he was alive, direct from his sister, Evelyn McAlister, the grade five teacher with whom Marie taught at Chermy, Chermside State School. ‘It’s a miracle,’ said Evelyn as they walked to the tram stop on Gympie Road. Seeing a tram coming, they made a run for it. The tram was open on both sides, and rain and wind blew in. ‘Oh, my hair!’ said Evelyn, reaching into her handbag for her scarf. Marie was not thinking of her hair but recalling the stumble of yes upon her tongue, of being the ruinous catalyst for Syd McAlister’s terrible ascent.
She heard her daughter now, moving around the kitchen. She would buy Penny a copy of that new diet book she had read about, a diet supposedly followed by cavemen or at least by hunter-gatherers, men and women who feasted when they had food and fasted when they did not. Penny was a child of fortune, untested, a woman who spent too much of her time worrying about love. The thought of her daughter’s good fortune did not make Marie happy, not exactly. Her thoughts drifted instead to a new idea, how she could easily convert the large garage area beneath Penny’s house into a granny flat. She added granny flat to the words diet book in the large invisible ledger she kept in her brilliant, vigorous old head. The lump near her eye was getting bigger.