Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls (8 page)

When she got too hot Justine retreated to the porch, brushing ineffectually at the grass stains on her cream linen pants. She peered down through the trees to the bottom of the garden and saw that her father had taken down the old swing set that had been a present for her fourth birthday, and planted out a vegetable garden in its place. It made her feel partially erased. But she was pleased to see her oldest boots, their leather bleached and cracked, still in the tumble of outdoor shoes beside the back door. She was sure they were hers. Until she put them on and felt how they slopped around on her feet, their elastic sides not even close to hugging her ankles. Stay-at-home Jill must have had a pair exactly the same. And Justine’s own boots must, after all, have been thrown away.

Henri came home from overseas with a large white box tied up with pale blue ribbon.

‘I think it’s time we had a party,’ he said, placing the box on the bed and kissing her neck as she unravelled the loops and bows. She threw open the lid of the box to find a party dress in the same dainty pearlescent blue as the ribbon.

‘Oh,’ she said, lifting the perfectly folded dress out of its box by its shoulders and holding it against her body while her mirror-self did the same.

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘You like it then?’

‘Oh, Henri.’

She loved the length and the shape of the sleeves, the neckline and gently tapered waist. She loved the name on the label; a name she had only ever seen written in the pages of the most expensive of fashion magazines and had no idea how to pronounce. She loved every single thing about the dress, except:

‘I’m not going to be able to fill these out,’ she said, despondently, once she had calculated the amount of bosom required by the gathering at the bodice.

‘When will you learn to trust me?’ Henri asked.

Justine took off her clothes and stepped into the watery cool of the pale blue silk, expecting to be disappointed by puckers in unfulfilled fabric. But as Henri manoeuvred the zip up the length of her back, she felt her breasts bloom into the softly gathered cups.

On the night of the party, it was as if the house had dressed up too, and it felt to Justine slightly strange, slightly remote, as if she were seeing it for the first time in a tuxedo and starched shirt. She had that special, but faintly useless, feeling in her own body, too; her newly polished fingernails too easily spoiled to touch things, her coiffure too unsteady to move her head too far to either side. She didn’t know where to put her hands, or indeed herself, as Henri’s guests began, in the early evening, to arrive.

The women were not young, but they were beautiful and dressed to be stroked in furs and feathers. The men guided their women through the hallways firmly, with fat and signet-ringed hands. For a laugh, Henri had brought the mannequins down from the attic. He had put them together with mix-and-match limbs, and found wigs only for some. But they were each dressed in party frocks — of indigo, scarlet, saffron, aquamarine — that were nearly as beautiful as Justine’s own. On plaster-cast forearms Henri had balanced the caterer’s platters. Some of the mannequins stood in corners, or within the frames of French windows, offering up the delicate nibbles; others were stationed beside linen-draped tables, gesturing invitingly towards sparkling forests of brimming champagne flutes.

Justine stood at the edge of a group of guests, listening, waiting for any of the speakers to join her to the conversation — by way of eye contact, at least. But with their glances they made a spider’s web, and Justine could only watch it grow in complexity with each fresh exchange. She drifted away and tried several other groups, hovering on their peripheries until the embarrassment of her apparent insignificance became unbearable. She looked over to where Henri held court, his chest proud and puffed and covered by a waistcoat of the same claret colour as the fluid in his glass, but she did not want to go and simper at his side. She would show him that she could manage, that she could make herself useful. And so she went into the kitchen and took the plastic film from the top of a fresh platter of hors d’oeuvres.

She moved, purposefully now, between conversations, platter in hand, but the guests either waved her away as if she were an insect, or seemed not to see her at all. She made two complete circuits of the rooms into which the party had spread before giving up. She leaned on the wall just to one side of the open fire and popped a shrimp into her mouth, bursting its curled body between her teeth. Henri was looking at her from across the room, and suddenly she understood exactly what it meant to be caught in someone’s gaze. She felt herself to be held there for a moment, trapped. Then she was released, Henri’s eyes travelling to the ebony-skinned mannequin, who was bald but dressed in scarlet, standing with a plate of cheeses in her arms. He smiled and flicked his eyes back again to where Justine stood, identically posed. His smile broadened and she felt, first in her neck, and then simultaneously in her elbows and her knees, a stiffness that was creeping, seizing, cramping, aching. Before it reached her feet, her hands, Justine dropped the platter and ran. For the door. For her life.

Justine is living at home again now. Most evenings Jill brings home movies from the shop for Justine to watch, but she’s seen everything in stock. In the afternoons their mother tucks a crocheted blanket around Justine’s immobile legs and wheels her out onto the porch. Justine hates it, the horrible parody of it, her mother sitting with her as if she were a toddler, turning the pages of picture books prescribed by the woman from the rehab clinic.

‘Say “duck” darling,’ her mother says, pointing. ‘D-uck.’

‘Uck.’

‘Like this, love: d-uck.’

‘Uck.’

‘Not quite, sweetie. D-uck.’

When Justine gets tired, her eyelids fall closed with a faint click.

‘Don’t get frustrated, lovey. I know you’re trying. You’re improving so much. Just have one more go and then we’ll give it a rest. Have a try. D-uck.’

‘Daaaaa-ck.’

‘Oh, clever girl! Well done. That’s right. Duck. Oh, you’re doing so well.’

This is what her mother says, but Justine can see her wondering how it is that they have been so reduced, down to words of one syllable. And Justine has no means by which she might explain.

She had been found early in the morning after the party, face down in a garden bed freshly planted out with pansies, less than two blocks from Henri’s house. In the days that followed, the owners of the pansies told her mother their side of things, a hundred times.

‘I said don’t touch her,’ the woman said. ‘I said that’s the way you get stuck with a needle. I thought she was a druggie, you see. But he doesn’t listen to me.’

‘I thought it was too late,’ the man said. ‘When I put my hand on her arm she was all hard and cold. I rolled her over and she was stiff as a board.’

‘Then I had a good look at the dress,’ the woman said. ‘And I knew she must have come from a good home.’

Even now, two years later, Justine holds the same pose, both arms bent ninety degrees, the fingers of each hand locked together in neat salutes. And still the doctors stick to their story and call it a stroke. They just ignore the things that don’t make sense. Like the almost synthetic texture of Justine’s hair, which no longer seems to grow. And the fact that her feet, two sizes smaller than they were when she left home, are arched and angled downwards, toes crimped together and pointed, as if in permanent acceptance of a high-heeled shoe.

ART

Eden

O
n the first day, Eve began. Well, it wasn’t actually the first day. It had been four and a half weeks since they moved, but she had needed that time. She deserved a little holiday, and boxes didn’t just unpack themselves into a new house. But now that she felt rested, and everything had been put away, she was ready to begin.

First, she would need breakfast. She couldn’t begin on an empty stomach. And since it was such a significant day, she felt, breakfast should be somewhat celebratory. One of the farewell presents from the girls in the office was an apron printed with a picture of Michelango’s
David
. She put it on, wishing they could see her now: ducking out to the shed in her gumboots to get an egg from underneath one of her own hens. She made pancakes, stacked them with maple syrup and banana slices, and took her plate out onto the veranda.

It was on this veranda that Eve had fallen in love with the place. The real estate agent, a chestnut-haired woman whom Eve was fairly sure was on Valium, had brought them out onto it to show them the view. ‘Paradise,’ she had sighed, parking her tortoiseshell glasses on top of her head and gesturing to the thoroughly unexceptional rural scene before her. In one direction there were rugged-up horses in a field of apple-tree stumps, and in the other an orchard of gnarled trees that dropped economically unviable fruit onto the grass. But to Eve, it
was
Paradise, this old pickers’ hut flaking its green paint into a valley an hour’s drive from the city. She loved the ruffles of sweet william along the driveway and the letterbox that perched in the forked branches of an old peach tree. Inside, the hut was daggy and funny, with chequered linoleum lifting in all the corners and incongruous, ostentatious light fittings. But after the sale of the city apartment, they’d been able to buy it outright and still have enough left over to buy a nice car for Adam, to take the sting out of commuting.

It was still dark in the mornings when he came into the bedroom to bring Eve a cup of tea just before he left for work.

‘Today’s the day, hey?’ he had said this morning, and kissed her cheek.

‘Yep. Today. Today, I begin.’

Eve finished her pancakes and washed the dishes. In the shower, she shaved her legs and noticed that her toenails were quite long. When she got out, she trimmed them with clippers. Then filed them into a nice shape. And since they were such a nice shape, it seemed a shame not to paint them. And so she did, in a shade of polish called Rose Madder Lake, which was exactly the same name as that of pencil number twenty-one in her set of Derwent Watercolours.
Rose Madder Lake
. It really ought, Eve thought as she applied a second coat, to have been the name of a famous synchronised swimmer. She sat for a while with her feet in front of the fan heater. And smiled when she realised that she had just begun. No-one could say that she hadn’t painted
anything
today.

On the second day, Eve decided, she would begin properly. But what to wear? Everyone knows that there is no sense beginning a new gym campaign without a series of new lycra outfits; or horse-riding without jodhpurs and a nice velvet hat; or ballet classes without pointe shoes and a tutu. And Eve knew that she could not begin, seriously and formally, as a painter until she was dressed as one.

She had given away all her office clothes as a kind of insurance against going back and this had left her with a wardrobe full of smart casuals and party clothes. Back when she was only a hobbyist, dabbling with her paints in the sunroom of the city apartment on weekends, she used to wear Adam’s old T-shirts and track pants. And
they
wouldn’t do anymore.

There was a small town about twenty winding kilometres away. It had suffered a fatal blow ten years back when the arse fell out of the apple industry, but was being kept on life support by the hippies who came in once or twice a week from their shacks in the hills. It had no bank or post office, but it did have a café that made reasonable chai, and an op shop. Eve calculated that she could be back home inside an hour and a half.

‘Swednesday,’ said some passing dreadlocks to Eve on the street outside the op shop.

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s …Wednesday.’

‘Oh?’

‘Doesn’t open till two on Wednesdays.’

Eve looked at her watch. It was only noon.

‘Oh.
Two
? Thanks.’

So Eve sat on a lumpy leather couch by the café’s blue velvet curtains, drinking chai, reading old copies of
Wellbeing
magazine and watching the op shop’s door. It was not entirely unproductive time, however. She also thought some bitchy thoughts about the abstract paintings on the café walls; an activity that certainly counted towards artistic practice.

The op shop opened a little after two and smelled like a silverfish’s banquet of polyester armpits, mould and inner soles. But on a rack in the back room, Eve found what she was looking for. It was the perfect painter’s shirt: striped and collarless, the fabric worn through at the folded edges of the cuffs. Someone had already worn it for painting. Probably they had thrown it out because of its smattering of small, hardened circles of paint. These paint spots were mostly in earth colours, and in reds and yellows, which was a good sign, since these were the colours with which Eve herself felt most comfortable. In general she stayed away from the violets and the deeper, more aggressive of the blues.

At home, in front of the bathroom mirror, Eve tried on her purchases. She admired how the shirt fell off her shoulders but clung just nicely to the sides of her breasts. The timber handle of a fine brush speared her hair just above her ponytail, which was tied off with a purple scarf she had found in a basket by the op shop’s cash register. The trousers were loose and navy blue, the clogs leather and well worn. She felt pleased. Her canvas was blank and Adam would be home in half an hour, but she looked every bit the artist, and that wasn’t a bad start.

On the third day, Eve slept in. She woke to the digital clock binking 10.37am and knew that she would have to begin without breakfast. She lumbered her easel out through the narrow kitchen door to the veranda and assembled all her paints and brushes on a conveniently deep windowsill. This is what she had imagined, the first time she had stood on this veranda: herself painting while her hens clucked encouragingly from the lawn below. She was only there a few moments, however, before it became quite clear that she would soon be too cold in her striped painter’s shirt.

She took her easel back inside and set it down in the living room at an angle to the window that looked out over the orchard and some distant hills. Not that she was going to look at the view. But if she did happen to pause for a moment and look around, there would be a calming vista just over her shoulder. The window also delivered good natural light to the canvas she now placed on the easel, and to the spot on the table where she was about to set up a still life scene.