Mothers and Daughters (22 page)

Macy tried to roll over again but the sheet rode up and stopped her, tangling around her neck. She lay there, tethered, staring at the wall, tears welling in her eyes. It was so unfair! She couldn’t believe they’d thrown her out of the eisteddfod for that—she was the lead vocalist. And her mother hadn’t even taken her side! Janice was probably just worried about how it reflected on her, thinking that everyone would be whispering about how the president of the Parents Association couldn’t even control her own daughter.
The goth one, that’s right. Sweet voice, but have you
seen
what she looks like?
Her mother should have just made her apologise and promise never to do it again, should have cut her some slack. That’s what parents were for, weren’t they? She hadn’t asked to be born, and her mother was meant to support her. She was doing year eleven. She was under pressure.

And as for her father . . . normally her dad was pretty relaxed, but this time he’d freaked out too. Sending her all this way for four days was ridiculous, as if she’d self-destruct if she wasn’t supervised. Macy groaned. She was sixteen! She could have just stayed at his place—she had the keys, she’d done it before. ‘Yeah, and that worked out well, didn’t it?’ he’d sighed down the phone. Macy knew what he was referring to. A few months earlier when she was arguing with Janice about something or other, Macy had begged to be allowed to stay at Andrew and Morag’s house by herself for the weekend while they were away with the boys on one of her dad’s beloved camping trips. Morag had been the one who’d talked him
in to it, but she was also the one who found the condom wrapper in the bin on Sunday night. Macy had tried to deny any knowledge of it, telling her father that it could have been one of his, but it hadn’t worked. ‘I haven’t used condoms since I was twenty-five,’ he’d shouted, then looked at her in disbelief and said, ‘I can’t believe we’re even discussing this.’ Morag had just muttered that she hoped Macy had washed her sheets, though of course she had. Duh.

So because of that one stupid little incident she’d had to come here, to the other end of Australia, packed off like a naughty child to boarding school. To kindergarten. How old were those other girls, anyway—twelve, thirteen? She hadn’t seen them for a few years, not since Morag had dragged her and the boys along to some ballet recital in a dusty church hall. It was hell in tutus, from what Macy could remember. She’d tried to beg off, but her stepmother was adamant. She intended to support her friends by watching their daughters perform, she’d said. Andrew was away on business, so the four of them—Macy, Callum, Finn and Torran—were coming with her. It had been a disaster. First Torran had dropped the Nintendo he’d smuggled in, which started beeping incessantly, then one of the junior ballerinas, an awkward, gangly one, had leapt in the air and fallen flat on her face, and Macy couldn’t stop laughing. Morag, at her wits’ end, had shot her a warning glance; when that didn’t work she’d reached across and pinched Macy hard on the thigh to still her giggles. The shock was far worse than the pain. Morag had never hurt her before. She was determinedly anti-smacking, and had put Torran through more time-outs than he’d had hot dinners. For the rest of the
performance, Macy stared at her lap, flagrantly refusing to watch one more spin or leap. She couldn’t be sure, but she’d bet it was the tall one that she’d been introduced to last night who had embarrassed herself at the recital. She still had that look, as if she wasn’t quite in control of her arms and legs. Macy’s hand went to the slender metal ring in her navel and rotated it gently, feeling it slide through her skin. What was her name—Belinda? No, Bronte. Then there was a dark girl who’d smiled and held out her hand, and the blonde who kept flicking her hair. Macy had seen her type before. They came to auditions expecting to be given the lead role, and ended up in the chorus instead—or dropped out when they realised that the spotlight wasn’t going to be on them. Thank God it was only four days.

With an effort, Macy tugged at the sheet caught around her throat and yanked it to her waist. She lay there panting for a moment—the room was already uncomfortably warm—then rolled over and groped for her handbag on the floor. There was no way she’d be able to go back to sleep now, but she didn’t want to have to get up and face the playgroup either. She pulled out her iPod, jammed the buds in her ears, lay back and hit shuffle. At first there was only silence. Her skin prickled. She loved this moment, loved the suspense of waiting, the thrill of anticipation, loved the way the music suddenly flooded her mind as if a tap had been turned on. Macy closed her eyes. Drumsticks tapping, then a gentle electric guitar . . . ‘One’ by U2. She knew it immediately, but then she knew all the thousand or so songs on her iPod, could identify them before the first few notes had faded away. And this was a good
one, soothing, hypnotic, perfect for her state of mind. Funny how it was her mother’s music really, how she’d only come to love it because Janice had played the album over and over all through Macy’s childhood. Strange to connect Janice with such a yearning, passionate song. All her mother ever seemed passionate about now was the Parents Association.

The song finished, and without opening her eyes Macy scrolled back with her thumb, starting it anew. She didn’t want to go on to something else; this was the right song for her now. Sometimes she would listen to the same tune eight, nine times in a row if it was speaking to her, and this one, with its themes of hurt and longing, perfectly captured how she felt right now. Music had always done that for her, taken her out of herself, transformed whatever she was feeling into something rich and pure and true. It had consoled her through those years of primary school before her dyslexia was picked up; it had been the backdrop to everything important that had ever happened to her. First kiss, first job; the first time she got drunk, got laid; the first time someone looked at her in astonishment and told her that she could sing, really sing. And it was true. When she sang she wasn’t herself anymore, Macy Whittaker. When she sang she was the song.

Except she wasn’t going to sing, was she? Macy’s mood plummeted again as she remembered the rehearsal and why she was here. ‘One’ finished for a second time and she lay still in the hush left behind, her stomach churning, sweat breaking out under her arms and between her breasts. It was
so
unfair! It was all wrong. Her mind raced. There were still three weeks until the eisteddfod after she returned from this
hell-hole and term four started. She’d work it out somehow; she’d
make
them take her back. Surely by then they’d have realised their mistake? Her understudy was crap.

On the wekend we went to one arm poynt to see my auntie and cosins. My mum took me and my sister and my brother. My dad didnt come because he wanted to watch the footy. My cosins are jack and sam and ruby. There house is right near the beach. we went fishing. Jack caught a baramundie and my auntie bort us coke and we had them for tea.

Amira sighed and reached for her pen. She read to the end of the page, then went back and circled the spelling and grammatical errors. By the time she had finished, the essay appeared to have developed chicken pox, every line disfigured by bright red circles. Twelve, she thought in frustration. The student who had written this was twelve years old. He was due to start secondary school next year, yet he didn’t seem to know that proper nouns needed a capital letter, or the distinction between
there
and
their
. Her grade three class last year could have done a better job.

She went to the fridge and poured herself a glass of orange juice. The sugar would help, she told herself. She shouldn’t be marking with a hangover, but she needed to finish it before the new term started next week, and with the house so quiet it was too good an opportunity to waste. She’d try to get it done before Tess got up, she thought, then she suddenly wondered if Tess was even there. The other girls were bound to be in their
beds—on their first day at Kalangalla, Janey hadn’t emerged until almost eleven. ‘That’s the trouble with kids,’ Caro had said. ‘You can never get babies to sleep, and never get teenagers to wake up.’ Amira had laughed—Tess had certainly liked her lie-ins back in Melbourne—but up here she’d changed. Now, some mornings when Amira rose it was to a kitchen with the blinds pulled up and a note on the table that Tess was out swimming or crabbing or simply with Tia and would be back before school or lunch, depending on whether it was a weekday or the weekend. She glanced around to make sure Tess hadn’t left her anything, then sat back down to the marking.

The next essay was even worse. Again there were no capital letters, but there were also no commas or full stops. Amira’s eyes darted to the smudged name at the top of the page: Jamaya, a skinny girl of nine or ten who was always barefoot. From memory she was in grade four, though it had become apparent to Amira that grades were a fairly arbitrary concept here. They rarely correlated with the same level in the east, and not at all with the new national curriculum that was being so optimistically pushed down everyone’s throats. Still, though, grade four. That gave Amira a bit of time to improve Jamaya’s reading and writing; there were a couple of years left before she’d need to be ready for high school.

Amira put down her pen. What was she thinking? Time—she didn’t have any time. She was going home in January, just three short months away. Going back to a classroom where daily attendance was a given and not a goal, where the kids wore uniforms and shoes and knew to put their hands up to ask a question, where show and tell had never once involved
a very angry goanna with a piece of string around its neck as a leash, as it had in her first week here. The thought worried her. In some ways she was looking forward to returning to Melbourne, but she was needed here. She was needed
more
here. If her upper primary students could barely put together a few coherent paragraphs about their weekend, how on earth were they ever going to analyse texts in secondary school, or write the essays they’d need to get through year twelve, or even fill out a job application? She’d known that literacy and numeracy levels would be lower here than in Melbourne, of course she had, but what she hadn’t been prepared for was how great the gulf between the two actually was. Some of the older children were still struggling to spell words like
house
and
should
. . . At fourteen, Tess had already had far more education than most of Amira’s current class would ever receive. And this was Kalangalla, a relatively stable and solvent community, where by and large her students’ parents were still together and might even try to help the kids with their homework, or at least see if they’d done it. She couldn’t imagine how bad things must be in some of the really remote areas. It was terrible, it was scandalous even, but it was also somehow oddly inspiring. She had always wanted not just to teach but to make a difference. She could make a difference here.

Tess’s bedroom door swung open and her daughter emerged, rubbing her eyes.

‘Good morning,’ Amira said. ‘I wasn’t sure if you were even here. No early swim today?’

Tess shook her head, her curly hair fanned out like a halo around her face.

‘I thought about it, but I felt too sleepy. It was pretty late last night, wasn’t it? And then I started reading instead.’

‘Oh? What book?’ Amira asked casually. Tess’s interest in the written word was still so new, so surprising and gratifying, that she was almost afraid to draw attention to it in case she scared it away.

Tess returned to her bedroom and came out clutching a novel with a purple cover.

‘This,’ she said, handing it to Amira. ‘I got it from your bookcase. I hope you don’t mind.’

Amira turned it over to see the title.
The Bell Jar.
Madness, suicide attempts, electroconvulsive therapy . . . did she really want Tess devouring this? Then again, it was preferable to
Twilight
.

‘Are you enjoying it? It might still be a bit old for you.’

Tess shrugged, taking back the book. ‘There’s bits of it I don’t get, and it’s pretty old-fashioned, but I like Esther, the girl in it. She’s not all perfect like the characters in some other books. She doesn’t know what she’s doing half the time.’

Amira laughed.

‘You’re right. The author based it on her own life, did you know that? She was a famous poet. I’ll show you some of her poems one day.’

Tess didn’t reply. She had already sat down at the table and started to read. Amira collected her marking together and went to turn on the kettle, dropping a kiss on Tess’s head as she passed.

‘Yesterday went well,’ she said five minutes later, placing two steaming cups of coffee on the table.

‘Thanks,’ said Tess, pulling the sugar bowl towards her. ‘Wajarrgi, you mean? Yeah, I think everybody liked it.’ She looked up and grinned. ‘Having all those hot boys there helped. Janey said it was the best day so far.’

Amira shook her head in resignation. ‘Janey would.’

‘Did you notice she was drinking last night?’ Tess asked. ‘Her mum let her have a glass of wine at dinner, but she kept refilling it when no one was looking.’