Highly commended in the Stringybark short story competition 2020 published in Anthology - Close to Heaven.
Contact Stringybark Stories should if you feel like purchasing the whole anthology. https://www.stringybarkstories.net/competitions/closed-competitons/close-to-heaven.html
Looking through the window she sees the girls sunbathing across the road. It’s a beautiful day. Rose lazes on her towel, an open magazine beside her, Sally’s girl lies next to her. A frown appears on the matriarch’s face. Rose may get burnt, she should use her hat, Rose’s clear skin is such a lovely feature. Turning to the right she glimpses a hunched figure, partially shielded by the rocks. Another frown, and a little murmur of frustration.
Sticking like a limpet. May is supposed to stay with the older girls, she bets
her youngest has smuggled a heavy book to the beach. How can two girls be so different? Why doesn’t May take up tennis? Rose is so good at tennis. “Mrs Rogers,” says a voice. She turns back inside.
In the final months of her life, my Grandmother started to talk. She rambled but her conversations’ ultimate destination was always a particular day in January 1955.
It started after her husband, who she tended faithfully for sixty years, died. Grandma continued to play cards, go shopping, make visits and then begin to speak about a matter locked away for over forty years. She didn’t limit herself to family members either; she talked to the home nurse, to ladies from the church, to people visiting other grandmas at her retirement village and to the local minister,(who informed my mother). She even spoke to the bank officer who indulged her by meeting with her in his office rather than at the counter whenever she did her banking. Always the same questions, “Did I do wrong? Did I not take enough care? Was it my fault?”
She normally started by describing the house they rented at Frankston during the summers of the bumper post-war years, when the sun shone on Australia as much as the sand.
The living room’s large front windows got the panorama of the shore and waves, the sunlight caused patterns of light to dance at varying tempos across the main room.
‘They went alone.” Her voice became soft and brittle, “Back then people let their children do such things. Fears centred more on Polio and Communists. There were three of them. Rose was almost a woman after all, in a few years she’d be a mother. It was such a lovely day.”
My grandmother’s attention had been booked some time in advance that day. She had a dinner party to organise. People were coming who were important to my grandfather’s business, which was booming along with the times.
Rose was hanging out at the beach with a girl from the neighbouring house. They had a transistor, listening to Jukebox Top Twenty or something similar. Upbeat tempos wafted around in the haze as they baked.
My thirteen year old mother, May, had sought privacy away from her beautiful older sister. There was less of a chance of them being compared. May went off to a corner of the beach to read uninterrupted. It wouldn’t be long before she would get the thick glasses that would stay with her for the rest of her life. Finding a rock that looked particularly poetic to perch on, my mother opened her Charlotte’s Web. Everything that happened from then, except some of the aftermath, she was told later or guessed. “I got absorbed in my book and missed it all.”
The man had mental problems. “I don’t know if he’d had a weapon,” Mum told me the story, one time forty years later, to help explain. Even then the tale was splinted, was fragmented. I realised she had pieced it together as best she could, alone.
“We didn’t talk about it. I assumed the man must have had carried something to get them into the car with him. Everyone kept saying Rose was a sensible girl. She did well at school, originally a little too well and our parents suggested she pull herself back a bit. University was a silly idea.”
During the lost hours Rose apparently managed to talk the man into taking them home and he dropped them on the lawn in front of her house.’ Mum took her glasses off and ran a hand over her face, then continued. ‘I always wondered whether she rushed straight in the door or curled up for a moment, pulling herself together on the freshly mowed front grass.’
That morning, if he had turned right to the rocks not left, he would have found my mother instead.
My mother although sheltered, wasn’t stupid. She remembered seeing blood on Rose’s dress when she stumbled in the door. Mum doesn’t know if the neighbour girl was hurt as she didn’t see her, never saw her again in fact, and the family left. The following summer (yes my Grandparents returned to the same house), there was a To Rent sign large and bright in next door’s front yard. “I can’t even remember the girl’s name,” Mum said.
There was no court case. The man was packed off to one of those asylums that have since been shut down. Whether he had died there or had been let out as part of a ‘care for in the community’ program, Mum didn’t know. Not talking about it meant not knowing. That made it easier for my mother, easier for everyone in fact. Was it easier for Rose? Maybe it was? My aunt would have hated it to be common knowledge. Maybe she did get proper counselling or whatever passed for it at the time. All who would know are dead now and it is clouded in a 1950’s mist of coal burning heaters and carcinogenic hairspray.
Thinking about it now, did Rose get her teenage daughter to ring her more often than most mothers? Did she seem just a little more anxious when Sarah was a few minutes late home? It is very easy to see significance where it is unintended, like novels you are forced to study in English class.
Rose hadn’t appeared to be the sort of person who had a dark trauma in her past as she decorated her Eastern Suburbs house in minute tastefulness, raised money for UNICEF, and embroidered cushions. Of course as it turned out I didn’t really have a clue. I guess my ignorance also extended to my grandmother. Not a hint was dropped during the years of shopping trips with Grandma when I tried to score all the
loot I could. Not during the overnight stays when she made me breakfast in bed with boiled eggs and toast cut into dipping soldiers. Certainly not when I played waitress at her many high stakes card games, with similar well-heeled, financially liquid, ladies, a pile of cash growing in front of her, gossip and tea flowing. The old dears turning to smile and ask me the same questions about my parents and school. Did Grandma think all that unpleasantness was dealt with long ago? Did she just forget for a while?
When I turned eighteen my Grandfather told us he only had a few weeks left to live. This went on for ten years. Grandma was the only one who would listen to him after the first year. However even hypochondriacs are right in the end. One of Grandma’s sayings had been, ‘Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,’ her hands hadn’t ever been still, at least not as far back as I could remember. There were always things to plan, bake and telephone. After Grandpa’s funeral however, her hands were empty. No longer a moving target, recollections found her.
In the end she was babbling, overflowing, from questions to justifications, “I thought she was safe there, nothing like that had ever happened before… She never seemed to want to talk about it… the doctor said not to mention it at all, to help her try and forget...,I tried my best… … I wasn’t a bad mother. I wasn’t… was I?”
Can it all boil down to one afternoon?
I was away when it stopped. She collapsed in the retirement village garden, during her morning walk. They took her to hospital but she had already lost conscious. My mother and Rose said goodbye at the bedside, but she wasn’t there.
She is looking through the window and sees the girls sunbathing, modest 1950’s one-piece bathers that cover their thighs. So pretty. “Mrs Rogers?” Her thoughts are interrupted by the maid she’d hired for tonight. ‘Can you verify the place settings?’ She turns back to organise the pre-dinner drinks, hors d'oeuvres; where the guests should put their coats; she hadn’t even begun to review the courses, and cheese platter. As the sun begins to dip and Mrs Rogers finally gets to sort the flowers by the front window, which of course haven’t been done properly, she looks over at the shore again. May is still reading. Oh why does she try? There isn’t much light left, she will hurt her eyes. Looking to the left, Rose and Sally’s girl are gone.