Playing Beatie Bow

PENGUIN BOOKS

Playing Beatie Bow

Born in New Zealand, Ruth Park came to Australia to continue her work as a journalist. She married D’Arcy Niland and travelled with him through outback Australia, working in a variety of jobs, from shearer’s cook to fruit packer – all of which provided a rich source of material for her later writing.

Ruth Park has written over fifty books for both children and adults, including several travel and educational works. Her many prizes include the prestigious Miles Franklin Award for her novel
Swords and Crowns and Rings
(1977), and
Playing Beatie Bow
was winner of the 1981 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award and the 1984 Boston Globe Award. In 1993 she was awarded the Lloyd O’Neil Magpie Award for services to the Australian book industry.

RUTH PARK

PENGUIN BOOKS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

In the first place, Abigail Kirk was not Abigail at all. She had been christened Lynette.

Her mother apologised. ‘It must have been the anaesthetic. I felt as tight as a tick for days. And Daddy was so thrilled to have a daughter that he wouldn’t have minded if I’d called you Ophelia.’

So for the first ten years of her life she was Lynnie Kirk, and happy as a lark. A hot-headed rag of a child, she vibrated with devotion for many things and people, including her parents. She loved her mother, but her father was a king.

So when he said good-bye to her, before he went off with another lady, she was outraged to the point of speechlessness that he could like someone so much better than herself that he didn’t want to live in the same house with her any more.

‘I’ll come and see you often, Lynnie, I promise I shall,’ he had said. And she, who could not bear to see a puppy slapped or a cockroach trodden on, hit him hard on the nose. She had never forgotten his shocked eyes above the blood-stained handkerchief. Very blue eyes they were, for he was half Norwegian.

Later she commanded her mother: ‘Don’t ever call me Lynnie again. Or any of those other names either.’

Kathy Kirk knew that her daughter was referring to the many pet names her father called her, for she was very dear to him.

Because she was a loving woman, she had put her arms round the little girl and said, ‘You don’t understand, because you’re too young yet. Just because Daddy wants to go away from me doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love you. But of course you may change your name if you wish. What would you like to be called?’

Weeks and months went past, and the person who had once been Lynette Kirk had no name at all. She would not answer to Lynette at home or at school. There were some puzzled notes from her teachers, which fortunately never had to be answered; because soon after the marriage break-up Kathy Kirk sold the family home and moved into a unit her husband had given her.

Her daughter was enraged that Kathy had accepted it. It was the finest in a high-rise tower her father’s firm had designed, a glistening spike of steel and glass jammed in the sandstone amongst the tiny meek cottages and old bond stores of that part of Sydney called The Rocks.

‘You ought to be prouder!’ she yelled in her passion and grief. ‘I’d rather live in the Ladies on the Quay than in something he gave me.’

‘Be quiet!’ said Grandmother in her razor-blade voice.

‘You!’ shouted that long-ago child. ‘You’re glad he’s gone.
I
know.’

Because she was right, this was what began Abigail’s and her grandmother’s silent agreement not to like each other.

Yet, strangely, it was through Grandmother that the ex-Lynette at last found her name.

‘You’ll have to do something about that hysterical little bore, Katherine,’ she said. Grandmother had this spooky habit of turning her eyes up and apparently speaking to a careful careless wave that curled down over her forehead. Lynnie always thought of it as Grandmother talking to her perm. Now she was doing it again. ‘Just look at her, dear. She looks like a little witch with those wild eyes and her hair all in a bush.’

‘You leave Lynnie alone, Mother! I’ve had enough of your sniping!’ said Kathy in a voice in which Grandmother heard the fury and Lynette heard the shakiness.

‘Well!’ said Grandmother protestingly to her perm, for her daughter Kathy was a sunny-natured young woman and almost never lost her temper.

‘Don’t mind, darling,’ said Kathy to ex-Lynette.

But the ex-Lynette was taken by the idea of being a witch.

‘Tell me some witches’ names, Mum,’ she said.

‘Well, there’s Samantha, and Tabitha,’ Kathy began.

‘Oh, I don’t want soppy TV names,’ said her daughter. ‘Some real witches’ names.’

‘They’d have to be old ones,’ said Kathy thoughtfully, ‘like Hephzibah, or Susannah, or Petronella, or Abigail.’

‘That’s the one!’ cried the girl.

‘But it’s so plain, so knobbly, so … so awful!’ wailed Kathy.

Grandmother smiled. Abigail could see quite easily that Grandmother thought she was plain and knobbly and awful, too. So that settled it.

‘From now on I’m Abigail Kirk,’ she said, ‘and as soon as I’m old enough I’ll change the Kirk, too.’

So time passed, one way and another. Now she was fourteen and, as with many other girls of her age, her inside did not match her outside at all. The outside was nothing to beat drums about. Somehow she had missed her mother’s winning quaintness and her father’s ash-blond distinction. She was thin and flat as a board, with a narrow brown face and black coffee eyes so deep-set that she had only to cry for ten minutes and they disappeared altogether. This was one reason why she never cried.

She was known in the family as a clever student, a reserved girl, self-contained.

‘More to that one than meets the eye,’ said her grandmother with an ice-cream smile. ‘Dodgy.’

Instead of tweaking off Grandmother’s glasses and cracking them smartly across the edge of the table, as was her impulse, Abigail gave the old woman an ice-cream smile in return. Thereby proving that she was, perhaps, dodgy.

Or a girl who wished to be private.

Outside, she was composed, independent, not very much liked. The girls at school said she was a weirdie, and there was no doubt she was an outsider. She looked like a stick in jeans and a tank top; so she would not wear them. If everyone else was wearing her hair over her face, Abigail scraped hers back. She didn’t have a boy friend, and when asked why she either looked enigmatic as though she knew twenty times more about boys than anyone else, or said she’d never met one who was half-way as interesting as her maths textbook. The girls said she was unreal, and she shrugged coolly. The really unreal thing was that she didn’t care in the least what they thought of her. She felt a hundred years older and wiser than this love-mad rabble in her class.

Her chief concern was that no one, not even her mother, should know what she was like inside. Because maybe to adults the turmoil of uncertainties, extravagant glooms, and sudden blisses, might present some kind of pattern or map, so that they could say, ‘Ah, so that’s the real Abigail, is it?’

The thought of such trespass made her stomach turn over. So she cultivated an expressionless face, a long piercing glance under her eyelashes that Grandmother called slippery. She carefully laid false trails until she herself sometimes could not find the way into her secret heart. Yet the older she grew the more she longed for someone to laugh at the false trails with, to share the secrets.

What secrets? She didn’t yet know what they were herself.

The May holidays always made her feel forlorn and restless. Maybe it was the chill in the air after all the summer softness, the leaves turning yellow, letting go, whirling away. The dark coming earlier, as though the solitude of space were more tightly enclosing the earth, sunless and melancholy.

It was not possible to go for a holiday, unless it were to her grandmother’s, which was unthinkable for them both. So, if her mother didn’t want her to help at the shop, she spent hours squashed into the corner of the brown armchair, which had once been a kindly bear and now was only a bear-shaped chair near a window which looked out on cranes and mast tops, on the deck of the Harbour Bridge and the pearly cusps of the Opera House rising through the gauzy murk like Aladdin’s palace.

Mumping, her mother called it. But she was not doing that, or even thinking. Mostly she was just aware of something missing.

When she was young she thought it was her father, for she had missed him miserably as well as hating him. Then with a new school and home, and new things to think about, she began to forget about him a little, though even now she could sometimes almost cry with pity for that woebegone, puzzled kid who used to go to bed and pray that her father would fall off a scaffold on one of his inspection tours, and the next moment sweat in terror in case he did.

But now she wasn’t a kid she knew that it wasn’t the absence of her father that caused the empty place inside. It was a part of her and she didn’t know what it was or why it was there.

She and her mother, although they were such different characters, had fought and hugged and scrambled their way through to a close friendship. Kathy became a businesswoman of flair and dash.