Mud Girl (9 page)

Was that Abi's mother? Was that how she saw herself? Too Perfect? So where did she go?

Exosphere. Outermost region of a planet's atmosphere.
Ha! Maybe that's where. She couldn't stay near water so she flew on the wind, up and up. A woman carried by the wind.

No, she left on her own two feet. There was nothing to stop her. Nothing to hold her.

No matter how hard Abi slams the dictionary, Dad isn't going to move today.

But it's heading into the middle of summer and the wind is pretty still. Does that mean it's going to drop something on them?

“H
e said he knows you!” Rhodes's voice chirps. “Funny though, he thought you lived up 60th. He seemed surprised when I pointed out your house!” On she goes, words Abi doesn't want to hear, something about “right by the bus stop.” “He even suggested a mechanic for Betty.” She fishes a piece of paper from her bag. “May I use your phone?”

Abi nods.

She can tell by Rhodesy's end of the conversation that the mechanic is too behind to help out old Betty. That is, until Rhodes says, “Horace the bus driver gave me your number.” Then it's different. Then she can bring Betty around later in the day.

“‘Why didn't you say Horace sent you?' That's what he said.” Rhodes does well with imitating others; she could be a one-woman show. It takes her a while to put everything back in her bag, an extravagant fabric affair that appears to be made from ancient curtains, with roses and hummingbirds all over it.

“And Horace said for us to see his railway train track, as soon as Betty is on the mend…” She breaks off. “Abi! What's wrong?”

“Nothing.” Abi looks away from her.

“No, something is.” Rhodes walks round so she's in front of Abi.

Abi stares back at her. “Okay,” she says at last, “I just don't want to see some old guy's choo-choo set.” Trains are supposed to be for kids.

“Well,” says Rhodes, “Dr. Seuss said that adults are obsolete children. Maybe your friend Horace is not so obsolete. Hmm…besides, he made it sound as if you two were friends.”

“Yeah, well.” Abi can't think what else to say. She doesn't like when Rhodesy does that “hmm” thing. And when she looks hurt.

Rhodes's voice is soft. “You do have friends, don't you, Abi?”

“Of course,” Abi says quickly. “I have…Jude. And…there's kids at school,” she adds. But a picture of Fiona comes to her mind and she has to look away from Rhodes's eyes.

“Who do you laugh with?”

Stop poking at me like this!
Makes Abi want to poke back. “I don't need to laugh.”

“You do,” Rhodes says. “More than anyone.”

She reaches into her bag and pulls out a crumpled paper bag. “Your colour,” she says.

Abi reaches in and pulls out a ball of yarn.

“Red?”

“I couldn't bring myself to bring black,” Rhodes says. She fetches the needles from Abi's room, and then sits, sets about looping the yarn around the needle, the fingers of both hands moving in a fluttering figure eight. There's something quite beautiful about those hands, something different. Abi's never noticed before, and she's surprised she hasn't. Those, and her
dancing hips. But these thoughts seem to be only in Abi's mind; all of Rhodes's attention is on the matter in her hands.

“It's called casting on. I'll show you how to do it with the next project. Now, I want to get you started.” She stops, counts the stitches under her breath. “Enough for a scarf.”

“It's July.”

“Good – it'll be ready for winter!”

“Planning ahead?”

“I like knowing exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, yes.”

There's not a speck of laughter in her as she says this. In fact, her tone is so different that Abi stares. Maybe it's just that she's counting the stitches as she speaks.

“Exactly?” asks Abi. “No surprises?”

“None,” says Rhodes. “Now, come on!” She puts the needles in Abi's hands. “Keep your hands busy, and free your mind.”

“My mind is free, thanks.”

“I don't think I believe that,” says Rhodes, “but we'll just go on.”

Of course, quickly she realizes that being left-handed, Abi knits in a backwards sort of way. So Abi makes up the lemonade iced-tea Rhodes brought, sets out the cookies on a plate, while Rhodes attempts to figure out how to show Abi this wondrous womanly art.

“Like this!” Rhodes is triumphant after ten or fifteen minutes. Abi brushes cookie crumbs off her hands onto her shorts.

Almost an hour later, Abi has about two centimetres of a scraggly red, stitches twisted, two dropped – Rhodes finds them, brings them to heel.

“Just why is it we're doing this?” Abi holds it out at arm's length.
This is ugly, face it.

“My mother always said that every girl should know how to knit.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Why?”

Rhodes pauses. In her thoughts and words, that is; her hands keep moving. “It's as I told you: you keep your hands busy, and your mind can be free.”

“Free?”

“Of what's around you. Like in
A Tale of Two Cities
.”

“Dickens wrote that.” Abi knows that much. “Yes. It's during the French Revolution, and atrocious acts are happening all around…and what do the women do?”

Abi shakes her head.

“They knit and knit and knit!”

Rhodesy! You're too much for me!
She's certifiable, that's for sure. Wacko. But all the same, there's something infectious about her enthusiasm, her earnestness.

“So you're saying that we should knit and knit and knit while atrocious things go on?”

Rhodes knows Abi's laughing at her, and she sighs. Abi's words finally cause her to set her knitting down. “A woman in the southern States began a project. With young men convicted of drug offenses. And to provide some comfort for the babies of drug-addicted women. She went to the prison with needles and yarn, and she taught the young men how to knit, and they knit sweaters for the babies. It started out as an act that the court ordered – so many hours of knitting – but many of the men couldn't stop after they began, and they continued on, making garments for the little ones. The sweaters warmed the babies, and the knitting soothed the unhappiness of the young men…” She breaks off. “You don't believe me?”

“No, no!” Abi protests. “I believe you. You being you and all…”

Rhodes raises her brows as Abi goes on.

“I have a hard time imagining it, that's all.”

“What do you mean by ‘you being you'?” Rhodes asks slowly.

“You wouldn't lie. You know. You're very…very
earnest
.” There it is. “In fact,” Abi goes on, “maybe
that
's what I will call you…Ernestine!”

Rhodes smirks. “Ernestine?! I'd feel a bit less as if I was in the army then. All this surname stuff.” She nods.

There's a great snurfling sound from The Chair.

Ernestine – yep, it suits her – looks up, alarmed.

“He does wake up once in a while,” Abi whispers. To her amazement, Rhodes – Ernestine now – sort of shrinks away as he stands. Of course, he doesn't even look at them as he makes his way to the bathroom.

She reassembles her bag while he's in there, sets Abi's knitting out on the table, prepares to leave. Her hands are busy, picking up, putting away, pulling the same item out again. Then as the bathroom door opens, she's perfectly still, as if she might blend in with the mildewy walls.

But Dad doesn't look toward the table and makes one of his infrequent trips out the back door.

“He's going to stand out there and stare at the river for about twenty minutes now,” Abi tells Ernestine.

Her brows crimp anxiously around her eyes. “He does that often?”

“No, not often.”

Abi doesn't tell her about the extra nails she hammered into the railing not long ago. He always leans too far over.

“I'd better be off,” Ernestine says then. Motions to the straggly knitting. “I expect you to be half finished next time I come.” She attempts to sound funny.

“You're not coming back for a long time then?”

Ernestine pats Abi's arm and for just a second, her hand rests there. “Make it a short scarf, Abi.”

Farce

F
arce.
It's not a new word. Abi's heard it before, but can't remember exactly what it means. Maybe it was something on stage.
Something ludicrous
, the dictionary reads.
An empty show.

Farce. An empty show. Dad in The Chair.

No, that's not how it is at all. Dad is exactly what he is. He's not putting on an empty show. He himself is empty, like a shell left hollow after some bug has withered away: tap him too hard and he'll crunch inward, a brittle husk of a person. But he's not pretending to be anything else.

J
ude said he'd call on Saturday.

By noon, Abi's knit about forty centimetres.

By 2:00, she has one third of a scarf. It's making a warm spot on her lap. The stitches have grown quite smooth and even. When did that happen? She holds up the fabric she's made, and feels strangely proud. She has an urge to show it to someone.

The phone rings and she leaps up, feels the yarn pulling at her ankles.

“Hello?” says a voice. “Mr. Bekell?”

“No – no! I'm not Mr. Be…whatever you said!”

The voice is squeaking “so sorry” as she thunks the receiver back into its place on the wall.

There is yarn across the floor. She gathers it up. The stitches hang from the end of the needle. One little pull, one little step farther, and it would be out. She jams the needle in, holds up the third of scarf, and looks at it with a critical eye.

Yes, there it is. The point at which her new-knitter muscle warmed up, and it began to feel somewhat natural. Must have been just after noon.

She pulls the needle and begins to unravel the wool. It feels good, stretching her arm out as far as it can go, scooping up more yarn, pulling it out again. It's all over the floor, like crimped hair, a wild Raggedy-Anne-of-Green-Gables gone crazy with hair-cutting shears.

She manages to put the needle back in when she gets to the last couple of rows. She has an idea that she might not be able to figure out all that about casting on. By the time the afternoon has hit the doldrums – no wind, no bugs, no birds – she's back to about thirty centimeters.

When she goes to sleep there is half of a Christmas-red scarf next to her bed. Her fingers feel as if they've been wrapped around a baseball bat and stuck in the freezer for a month.

The phone hasn't rung all day, except for the one call for Mr. Whatever-his-name-was.

My Beautiful Sunday

T
he sun comes up on Abi's side of the house, and it wakes her the next morning, and it brings a memory: when she was really little, and Dad singing, “This is my, my, my beautiful Sunday, when you say, say, say, say that you love me…” It seems as if he began every Sunday with those words. And Mum would laugh, wouldn't she? Or would she? Abi wants to remember it with her laughing; she likes it better that way. If she lies really still – doesn't make a move to get up – she can almost hear the sound of that laughter. No, it's the river, carrying mud from one place to the next.

The sight of her scarf takes Abi by surprise. It seems like a dream, the day before.

Then she remembers the waiting; the phone not ringing.

What's a promise, anyway?

Abi takes up where she left off with the needle and yarn, and leaves bed only when a hunger headache threatens.

It's hard not to think of Colm and Fiona every time she opens the cupboard now. She can hear Colm, all “chipper” as Horace would say, and she can see Fiona's miserable scowl.

Cereal, and back to the scarf. She can feel the sun warming the east side of the house, rising over the roof. Dad gets up, dumps cereal in a bowl, looks vaguely for the milk.