The Aunts’ House Page 5

  One day a church man dressed in black and white spoke to her and asked if she was lost. He had a pinched look to his face and spit at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘No! I’m not lost and touch me and I’ll bite your fingers off!’ She hoped there was lipstick on her teeth and it would scare him away.

  The church man spoke to the conductor and then the tram driver but all they did was shrug. The tram crews had got to know Angel. She paid her fare out of the rag bag she’d made, caused no trouble and generally, as strange as she was, they liked her. They admired her love of trams. There were not many who loved trams so much and drivers who knew her turned corner rails faster than they should have and ding dinged just to see her laugh.

  ‘She’s a bit over the edge but who cares. She never causes trouble.’ Angel heard that!

  After the tram conductor’s accident in 1942 his work mates slow-marched down George Street in front of a tram and afterwards passed their caps around for the widow. No one passed the hat when Angel’s mother took her pills or when her father, for that matter, died on the road. Not even the motorcycle club did, as far as she knew.

  She tried to remember what her father looked like before the accident but her remembrance was more a smell. Not a tram smell. Sunday was a tram smell, the electric smell of wood and rails and hot cables. No, the smell of her father she remembered was motorcycle racing fuel and the sight of it in leaked black patches on the backyard grass. Angel had always remembered the smell of racing fuel. Her father had won a star trophy for a motorcycle speed trial. It was gold-plated in part and set in a base of Bakelite. Angel had wanted to keep it but Missus Potts got three pounds for it.

  So, Angel couldn’t remember her father’s face but it must have been very nice, she thought. He might have been pretty, like her, but all she could actually remember was that he was the smell of racing fuel and her mother was the smell of hopelessness. But none of it mattered. After all, dead’s dead and that’s it, Angel whispered to Angel.

  From the city, the tram rails twisted and snaked ding ding through narrow streets and ding ding dinged on their way east, where the sun rose over the Bay, the sandstone and the ocean. The trams were, to Angel, her toys, her treasures, swaying, stopping ding ding and slipping along the Sunday rails with Sunday smiles all over them like a ride at The Easter Show. Then there were the wooden seats polished by a thousand bottoms to the colour of honey trees, passengers with their legs crossed cuddling shopping bags, or deeply reading newspapers close to their faces, and all of them keeping themselves to themselves and no one ever sitting next to Angel. There was the conductor and his running board, the pepper-and-salted breeze through the window as they got closer to the sea, the driver winding the tram, ding ding ding, up and down past the harbour houses with his lever like a plaything of his own. On and wonderfully on went the tram towards the edge of sandstone cliffs with an ocean below and the terminus made from four stout railway sleepers shaped like a cross. Angel knew every inch of the journey.

  One Sunday a boy crept up to Angel and poked out his tongue – not a word – just poked his tongue close to her face and Angel wondered if she still had lipstick on her teeth. Eleven years old and wearing her old, yellow top thin enough to show what she was developing. She knew there were passengers who thought she might be unusual or even worse than that but she had come to terms with it. Angel dressed up because she thought the tram drivers would like her more if they thought she was older.

  And it was a Sunday when Angel heard the driver tell a man that the trams were soon to be stopped and there’d be buses, and she was so horrified she clamped a hand over her mouth and smudged her red grease paint all over the place.

  ‘Where will they go?’ she cried to the passengers, to anyone who might be listening and would know. ‘Where will the trams go?’

  ‘A graveyard,’ shouted the driver, dinging! loud as he could. Angry. But Angel was familiar with graveyards and never saw one big enough to bury a tram.

  ‘They’re smashed up if they’re not sold – smashed up for parts and metal,’ he said. ‘And chucked away as though they were never born.’ The tram driver looked angry enough to go off his rails and told Angel she could buy a tram if she wanted and laughed. She kissed his cheek and left a stain.

  ‘I don’t have any money.’

  ‘Or shoes by the look. Why don’t you ever have something on your feet? You’d better sit down. And don’t forget to wash your face.’

  ‘I like bare feet.’

  ‘You’ll be a cripple,’ he said. ‘And there’s glass.’

  ‘I don’t care. How will I get to the aunts’ house then?’

  ‘Bloody bus!’ and he ding dinged his bloody way towards the end of the line.

  Bloody wasn’t the worst word Angel knew – the boarding house was a directory of swear words. She used the word herself sometimes but was sick of it. The words and the winks and the suggestions. She would go to the creek in the green place and scrub herself with moss. A terrible place, the boarding house. Everyone there was mad. Angel had come to the conclusion there was madness in all its forms all over the place.

  A passenger in the tram with her hair still in curlers and holding a string bag glared at Angel and shouted to the driver, with no kindness at all, ‘She should be in a home! You should be in a home, my girl, just look at you!’

  ‘But I am in a home,’ said Angel. ‘I’m in a tram.’

  After that day, Angel vowed to make herself a Book of Trams so as never to forget them and the things she saw because of them.

  For example: Once upon a time, in her tram, Angel found a love story. It was carved into the shiny, wooden slat of the seat next to her that was always vacant. Someone had carved a heart with an arrow through it with the initials B and K.

  Angel noticed it when the tram left the city and she knew she had at least an hour to wonder about B and K. In her mind she made up a story about them. Some of the story, she had to admit, was a bit strange but mostly it was good. B was for Bessy. K was for Kevin. Did Bessy or Kevin use a knife on the seat? She wondered about that. It would have been a pen knife with a red handle. Did they really love each other or did one just love the other, and the other didn’t know? The carving must have been old because dirt was stuck in the letters and she knew the tram cleaners would not have felt very romantic when they were told to clean it up, but maybe they did. Angel wondered about the cleaners.

  Angel liked to think B and K truly loved each other – she wanted them to love each other and she wanted them to be married and have lots of babies. But perhaps the whole thing might have been just a dream and nothing happened at all. It might just have been hearts on fire at first sight between stops.

  Angel called out to the other tram passengers and pointed to the carving. ‘What do you lot think?’ And of course, there was no reply. Newspapers were raised over eyes, women were suddenly interested in the view they’d seen a thousand times outside the windows but Angel thought of B and K and imagined a wedding veil and a suit and tie and she whispered to herself, If it wasn’t like that at all, it must have been nice to be loved by someone – even for a short time.

  As the tram made its way towards the terminus, there was a certain point where, if she looked out to the right, Angel could see glorious Sydney sandstone – great cliffs of ancient creases, jutting cuts and all the colours of monuments of stone. It was a great sight. So powerful was the view that the music in Angel’s head had Wagner frog marching with all the pomp of an army.

  The cliffs, south and north, were the gate houses of stone guarding the harbour from the ocean but there were no gates, no locks, only an invisible line, like a welcome mat always open to craft and sea creatures.

  Below the sandstone, to her right and beyond as far as Angel imagined, must be the edge of the world with an ocean powerfully huge, its depth beyond her comprehension and always grey or dark green. In her eyes it was n
ever sky blue, the clear blue that painters paint and writers write about. She had no idea why they saw the ocean that way, like the top of a biscuit tin. It was not the ocean Angel knew. If Angel had occasion to look at the ocean for any length of time it seemed to her to be another nation, alongside her own country, a parallel universe, vast and beyond the horizon. Angel discussed it with Angel and came up with a very good name for this world. It was Mariana, a nation with its own creatures – alien, not at all like her own – a language and culture not like her own, houses and shelters not like her own.

  Angel had learned from two library books (too big to keep) that Mariana had mountain ranges so high there was no safe way to reach their floor, ravines, rivers and canyons, and a trench that was seven miles deep. Can anyone believe seven miles deep? she’d asked herself when she’d read about it. There were great gardens of rock and flowering coral and giant kelp forests high as blue gums with fish birds winding through their fronds and whales big enough to sink ships. And in the depths where it was always night were creatures who could change shape, creatures with blue lights and no eyes. She’d heard some call the ocean the ‘open sea’ and some had run away to the ‘open sea’ as though it was something to play with. Angel had more respect for Mariana and was inclined to run the other way. It excited and terrified her.

  On that day the tram driver continued to ding louder than he needed to and for a moment she felt the rails were too close to the cliff but Angel laughed because though she could see the driver was angry she knew what he was doing.

  Jews understand music

  Music was constant inside Angel’s head and it had its own colours. Her veins ran with the blood of it. Her nerves twitched to it. She pulsed to the rhythm of it. Music and its colours played in her mind always. Soloists, mainly on piano, and full orchestras took up much of the space in her head. Angel loved most instruments and notes, except those played by the clarinet, which physically hurt her. She could not have possibly said why.

  Before her mother died Angel wanted somehow, some way, to make music – the piano, violin, tin whistle, anything at all would have done – but there was no money. So, by listening to the wireless she learned every note of every symphony or concerto she heard and sang them over and over, movement to movement, and became so familiar with them she was sometimes very angry if the conductor or the soloist made a mistake.

  Music played inside Angel’s head as soon as she woke in the morning and it was the last thing she heard at night. The compositions or their colours were not always what she would have chosen but she had no choice but to simply go along with it. Angel hummed. She hummed passages of music more often than she spoke. There were often complaints about her humming and the way she talked to herself but on the whole that she was making the sounds at all. But there were, on occasions, musical headaches that made her head so heavy that Angel held her hands hard against her cheeks to stop it falling off. Angel would find a Jew to help her understand. Jews were very musical – her mother had told her that.

  There was one terrible morning when Angel’s musical head almost drove her mad. The same music, a symphony with full orchestra and a passionate conductor, wouldn’t stop. Over and over and over they played and she was forced to listen. There were no mistakes but it was so relentless that Angel banged her fists against her head in an effort to make it stop. Even Missus Potts was sufficiently disturbed to call a doctor.

  ‘Now you can see there’s madness in that girl. I always knew it,’ she said, sweet as a razor.

  ‘I’m not mad. It’s just the music.’

  Angel developed a fever and became sensitive to light and she covered her head with a towel but still the music wouldn’t stop. The doctor was kind and curious.

  ‘I don’t really know what the matter is with Angel, Missus Potts. Some infection she’s picked up in the gully, perhaps. Maybe the creek. Do you drink the water in the creek, Angel?’

  ‘Of course! That’s what it’s there for.’

  ‘Well, Angel. You should go to bed for a day or two. I’ll give you something for the pain and to calm you but there should be no light. Is there a quiet room where the windows can be shaded, Missus Potts?’

  ‘Yes!’ Angel almost screamed. ‘There’s my room. There’re no lights in broom cupboards.’

  ‘Ungrateful brat!’ said Missus Potts.

  ‘Just by the way, Angel, what is the music you are hearing?’

  ‘Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony! Can’t you hear it? It’s loud enough.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. But I do like to relax with the radio at the end of a busy day. Go to your room, Angel, and pull the blinds and I’ll pop in from time to time.’

  ‘I’m not made of money!’ Missus Potts informed the doctor.

  ‘I’ll arrange something,’ said the doctor with fair hair and grey eyes and a kind smile.

  Angel’s torture lasted for almost a week. One of the boarders brought her soup and potatoes. The doctor had ‘popped’ in three times and gave her pills to ease the pain and gradually the symphony, the conductor and the orchestra became sick of the whole thing and stopped for a rest.

  Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony had been one of her favourites, a monumental work of glorious sounds, and she loved it. She could not understand why it had chosen to hurt her so badly. She could not understand why the colours of a composition of such passion had become so drab and shadowed. The backdrops, curtain and the concert hall were all grey. Suddenly, everything had turned grey and its colour was very loud. She hoped she would never hear it again but wondered why she’d suddenly become afraid of something so beautiful.

  Angel whispered to Angel that she would ask someone. She would ask a Jew. Angel loved it but her mother had told her Jews understood it. She confirmed this when one day after sneaking away from school and catching the train to Town Hall for a lunchtime concert she told the woman next to her that she didn’t think much of Scarlatti. The woman was angry and said ‘Ssshhh!’ and whispered, ‘Go away – you just don’t understand it – you’re too young. Go and sit somewhere else – you smell.’ Angel knew then that the woman was a Jew and she could not have been a Jew even if she tried. She thought it curious that she had to believe in a God to understand Scarlatti and wondered if not having a God at all made it impossible to understand music. She also wondered if she should think about finding a God to suit.

  In the aunts’ house there was music – upstairs there was always music and she didn’t think the aunts were Jews. The aunts’ house was music and trams and Sunday and ballet and colour. It was everything that mattered in Angel’s life at that time.

  There was a day in Brooklyn Street when all was quiet and the gate was shut and secured as Angel stood outside. It seemed as though the air around the house had slammed its door but Angel knew how to climb over the locked gate quietly and slip around the side of the house to where the bathroom window was always open or through the laundry if the aunts had forgotten to shut the door.

  The two aunts, one up and one down, lived in the old, flaking timber house but it was the up aunt, Clara, who liked music. It was mostly ballet music. Elsa, the down aunt, was more into keeping everything spick and span, with a sink scrubbed until she could see her reflection, the stove a’gleaming and dish towels hanging white with the corpses of bacteria boiled to death. Aunt Elsa had been to a school that taught domestic skills and Angel thought she must have got top marks – she had the red hands and chipped nails to prove it. It was an effort to visit the aunts in Brooklyn Street but Angel thought it was definitely worth it. They were so different. Interesting.

  Angel smiled a thin smile and whispered to Angel, I think I will learn more about Elsa and Clara later.

  Aunt Clara, who lived upstairs with old theatre costumes stuffed into drawers, books and music, once taught ballet but Angel was never one of her students. She loved Clara because of her music that always played in the background and the b
ooks and pictures about dancing she sometimes brought downstairs. She loved Clara for that, even though Clara did not love Angel.

  When Angel first started trying to find ways into the aunts’ house, Clara would shoo shoo her away, telling her to go to the Bay, the park or down to the rocks to play with the crabs. But when she refused, Clara would play her music very loud, so loud that Angel imagined Clara thought it would act as a barrier of some kind – at the very least interrupt the sounds Angel constantly hummed to – but she loved it and learned every note of Swan Lake and Giselle and The Nutcracker and even began to imagine the moods Aunt Clara might have been in when she played them. There seemed to be a different ballet for each one. Later, at the boarding house, Angel would dance around to the orchestra of music playing from her mouth until Missus Potts told her to stop her madness or she’d do it for her.

  There was a day when Angel was sure she understood Swan Lake and she said to Clara, ‘I think I might have been a Jew once, Aunt Clara, I’m beginning to understand the music.’ But Clara, suddenly red in the face and angry, slapped her and said, ‘Don’t ever, ever use that word again.’ Angel thought at the time she could only have meant the ‘Jew’ word and wondered why the key to understanding music was so offensive.

  ‘You’re not going to tell me you didn’t know!’ said Clara.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘We all knew what your mother was – your mother who took my brother from this world! A young son from his father!’

  ‘Well, she’s dead now,’ said Angel, still not sure if she understood what had made Clara more angry: brother or Jew.

  ‘And not before time! You’d better get up to the tram before it goes without you. Don’t think about missing another one. Don’t think you’re ever moving in here, because you’re not.’ Her words were spat out like slivers of ice and as usual they hurt.