The Happiness Glass Page 12

  Her daughter’s smile was tentative but not unfriendly, though her eyes held a new blankness. Lily saw that Gina did not care if they had suffered, and that there remained no vestige of the old mother-child body language.

  Breathless from the climb, Lily waited while Gina unlocked the door of her room. Inside, feeble light fell from an uncurtained window onto the scarred surfaces of second-hand furniture and a narrow bed made up with plain dark linen. When Gina flicked the light switch, a single unshaded bulb illuminated an interior devoid of personal belongings. This was where Gina slept, Lily thought. This was where she now lived.

  “I can make tea downstairs and bring it up,” Gina said. “Or it might be best to go out.”

  She was thinner, and the shed kilos revealed her delicate bones. A short choppy fringe exposed the perfect arcs of her eyebrows. Catching Lily staring at the fringe Gina flicked at it with her fingertips, a nervous gesture, and her eyes, rimmed with kohl, grew watchful.

  “The cut, it suits you,” Lily murmured. She remembered the warm weight of Gina’s hair in her hands as she divided and braided it for school. Not to weep required enormous concentration. “I would have rung first, but–”

  Gina shrugged. “There isn’t a phone” She went to the wardrobe and plucked out a black duffle coat. “We can find somewhere to eat along the Curry Mile.”

  Djuna slips into the dining-room towards the end of lunch and takes her usual seat opposite Mr MacInerney. When Milly delivers soup the young nurse hovers her spoon over the plate, a pucker gathering between her pierced eyebrows.

  Miss Fiddy’s hair gleams with lacquer in the ugly yellow light from the dining room’s brass chandelier. To Lily’s relief she excuses herself from the table after ten minutes, leaving her salad untouched.

  “Mark my words,” says Mr MacInerney as the door closes behind her. “Vesta Fiddy is up to something.”

  “She’s not the only one.” Djuna takes a paper from her pocket and steers it across the tablecloth with a fingertip.

  Mr MacInerney unfolds the letter and holds it at a distance. “Oh, my dear!”

  Despite Djuna’s war paint – thick eyeliner and black strokes under the lower lashes that make her look as if she’s cried wearing mascara – her face appears naked.

  “When I first moved into my flat there were no curtains on one of my bedroom windows,” she says. “The previous lodger had set fire to them. It was ages before the landlady bought replacements and in the meantime I was visible to all and sundry.” She has a defiant look that says if people pry and see things, it is not her fault. “This creep’s written to ask could I please leave the curtains open like they used to be when I’d get undressed. He says I’m spoiling his only pleasure.”

  Mr MacInerney hands back the letter. “Which he describes in graphic detail.”

  “Filthy brute!” Djuna screws the paper into a ball.

  Yes, that’s what was different about Miss Fiddy: there had been a look of veiled pleasure in her small grey eyes.

  She will always loath the smell of curry. It returns her in a flash to that walk with Gina along Wilmslow Road, stopping to peer at menus in the restaurant windows and all the while thinking helplessly of the miles the two of them had travelled together without effort – the long haul flights to and from Australia – and wondering how this single road lined with curry houses could feel so difficult to navigate.

  Gina didn’t seem interested in how they had found her. It was as if her life before the stark little room and the pet shop had faded, or been erased. Something was broken, Lily saw, something she had not known was fragile. How could she have been so blind to the brittle nature of their bond? Perhaps she had never been cut out to be a mother.

  After the meal they walked back the way they had come. Lily waited outside a Pakistani grocery, among bins of fresh dates and pomegranates, while Gina went inside to pay for a bag of pistachio nuts. Before the return journey Lily would stay overnight at the Ibis Hotel in Portland Street. Gina walked there with her.

  “Well, goodbye,” she said. “I’ve got work in the morning, otherwise I would come to the train station.”

  “What about Christmas?”

  When Gina did not respond, Lily began to cry. It was a mistake, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Gina put a hand on her arm, and her voice, though cool, was not unkind. “You shouldn’t care so much about Christmas. It’s only one day.”

  Lily fumbled for her handkerchief.

  “I don’t know why you came, just to be upset.” Gina dropped her hand and stepped away from Lily. “Look, don’t come again, all right?”

  Nothing could have prepared Lily for the blow of those quiet words. She would rather Gina had shouted, shown some strong emotion, even if it was negative. Instead, she was cut through by this kindly admonishment.

  In the bland hotel room, Lily muffled her grief in the pillows. Around two in the morning she pulled aside the curtain and looked down onto the empty street. She pictured her daughter asleep in the narrow bed, and remembered a night in the house on the quayside when she had gone up to Gina’s room to say goodnight and found her weeping. Earlier that day Gina had returned from a school trip to Italy. At the airport, her friends had rushed through the arrivals hall and thrown their arms around their waiting families. They had been gone ten days. At thirteen, it had been Gina’s first real separation from Lily, yet when she spotted her and Tom in the crowd she had not hurried towards them but looked as if she would bolt in the opposite direction. Lily had thought it was a desire to appear cool in front of her friends. But that night Gina had sobbed that she didn’t have the same feelings as other people.

  “You’re just over-tired,” Lily soothed. “It will seem different in the morning.”

  But now, staring into the empty street, she thought that Gina, in a rare moment of insight, had simply told the truth. It was not her fault that Lily had not believed her.

  In the kitchenette where she grinds her coffee beans, Lily finds Djuna. The nurse stirs the dregs in a coffee pot and tips them into a cup; she looks young and vulnerable, yet she has an inner fierceness that Lily envies. Her own existence lacks reality and permanence. It’s as if she is stuck in a routine she must continue with until she can return to her real life. But what is real life, and how will she get to it? She thinks of the Irish nurse, her astonishment that amounted to disbelief. Going back to Australia might be a foolish mission. But the leg is almost healed and she will have to make a decision. People will try to dissuade her; they will ask awkward questions.

  Djuna has her own troubles; she will not question Lily.

  “Have there been more letters?”

  “No, but I feel as if I’m being followed. It’s freaking me out, like there’s eyes on the back of my neck all the time.”

  “That’s natural, after such a letter. But it’s probably imagination.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Djuna’s mouth curves in a sad smile. “I hear old Mrs Arkwright’s on the way out. My friend nurses her.” Her blue hair is hectic where a beam of sunlight strikes it, and her skin is as white and smooth as a new bar of soap. “It’s weird to think of someone dying while you’re going about your everyday business,” Djuna says.

  Gina, Lily thinks. Darling Gina.

  Djuna drains her cup. “S’pose one day it’ll happen like that for all of us.”

  “The Snuff Club’s only amusing when it’s strangers doing the dying.” Lily instantly regrets how preachy and disapproving she sounds.

  But Djuna shoots her a level look. “Yeah,” she says, “I’m getting out before Queenie snuffs it and leaves me holding the blood money.”

  There had been a secret, though it was not the great family rift outsiders must have speculated about behind closed doors. She and Tom had adopted Gina when she was eleven months old, and they had never kept that hidden. What they had glossed over, for Gina’s sake, was her early life, the deprivation. Their social worker had spoken of malnutrition and the absence of affec
tion, but Lily suspected Gina’s ordeal began much earlier, her veins flooded by the nicotine and alcohol coursing through her unknown mother. There could have been harder drugs, and the physical violence of the streets. Gina had entered the world a jittery baby.

  Lily returned to Manchester, but by then Gina had left the pet shop. When she buzzed her room an Indian student spoke to her through the intercom. In the office near The Rover’s Return another detective took Gina’s details. This one was dark and weasel-like, and Lily dully wondered what had become of Mr Naseby. They were given another address, and then another, but the letters they wrote went unanswered. It reminded Lily of a failed heart transplant operation she had read about, except that in their case the transplanted heart had rejected the sheltering body.

  A photograph her mother once posted to Lily inside a birthday card shows Lily as a child sitting on a picnic blanket in the shade of a fig tree. A doll’s tea set is laid out before her, and the shadow of the photographer, the familiar shape of her mother, falls across a corner of the blanket. On the back Ginny has written a verse from the Christian Science Hymnal: For all the good the past hath had / Remains to make our own time glad.

  It is true, Lily thinks, for how else has she survived other than by the joy already accumulated. In her love for Tom she has experienced the immense heft of happiness, but the sorrow of not being able to conceive a child, and later her widowhood, are an equal and opposite weight. On the day they brought Gina home Lily had felt as if she could fly, and now, all these years later, her loss is a corresponding heaviness. That’s how life works. The weight of happiness decides the degree of misery you will suffer. Eventually, balance, of a sort, is found. Lily teeters, but most of the time she is level. And something quite small can tip the see-saw. She is considering this when Djuna arrives to take her blood pressure and check her leg.

  “Frances is off with a cold,” she says.

  Under her makeup the nurse’s face is weary.

  “I’m wondering if it’s one of my old boyfriends.”

  “Were any of them troublesome?”

  “I was engaged once. His mother broke us up.”

  Lily says, “Didn’t she like you?”

  “I never wrote to thank her for some money she sent me on my birthday. You’d of thought she’d cut off her left tit and given it to me, to hear her.” Djuna’s mouth hardens. “He sided with her, even though she never sent a note for anything I gave her. When I brought that up she said she’d never been given anything she wanted.” She lifts Lily’s feet onto a footstool. “He should have stuck up for me.” Her eyes shine with unshed tears.

  Djuna’s predicament reminds Lily of her own defencelessness, back in the time before she met Tom.

  “Why not take those letters to the police?”

  The nurse shakes her head. “Did you know Miss Fiddy’s rival died yesterday?”

  Lily remembers the pleasure in Vesta Fiddy’s eyes, and wonders whether surviving her boss’s wife will balance the misery of having only ever been his mistress. She watches Djuna’s gentle movements as she removes the bandage. Lily has money, enough to fund the small measure of happiness that will tip the balance for herself, and perhaps even for this young woman.

  “Djuna, would you ever consider going to Australia?”

  The young nurse raises her face to stare at Lily.

  From Tasmania, her brother’s wife had not been encouraging. “Jam has his hands full,” she said firmly. Their daughter was going through a messy divorce, and she and Jam had to be there for the grandchildren. Beth’s husband was battling cancer: Lily couldn’t ask her to help.

  “I’ve been waiting for the leg to heal,” she tells Djuna. “And now that it has, I’m going home.”

  “But–”

  “I’ll need a travelling companion,” Lily says quickly. “If it appeals to you, once I’m settled, you could stay for as long as you liked.”

  She hears her mother’s voice calmly reading the bible: I will return into my house from whence I came out. No, there would not be the comfort of those remembered rooms, but there would be no ghosts, either. Lily imagines a stone cottage with whitewashed walls in the leafy part of the city, a final spell of freedom before the need for another Avalon. She might buy a laptop and pick up her old pastime – that slow writing-breath that was once so soothing. Djuna will leave her, of course; it is to be expected.

  The nurse’s tears spill over. “What’s it like, Australia?”

  Lily’s gaze settles on the sleek blue curve of Djuna’s head. Home, in November, is a soft rain of petals; where jacarandas shed flowers on red brick paving the colours vibrate as in a Bonnard painting. She will speak persuasively of Adelaide’s clear blue skies, the dry bright air she craves.

  “There is no grey,” Lily says, “and you would love the jacaranda flowers.”

  Acknowledgements

  Some of these stories have previously been published, but I always knew that they were part of a longer, unwritten, autobiographical narrative. It wasn’t until I had the idea of combining the short stories with memoir that the work finally came together. It was exciting to discover that combining genres allowed the fiction to deepen the sense of place, and further interpret the sometimes painful subject matter of the memoir. I realised I had found a way to manage some of the difficulties of life writing, and there was a playfulness, too, as the memoir pieces spoke to the stories, and the stories answered. As a writing process it has felt very close to the way that one’s life and writing are always in conversation, the way they merge and diverge in a constant ravelling of lived experience and reworked story.

  To be clear: each section begins with a memoir piece or personal essay followed by one or more short fictions. While the borders between the two are somewhat fluid, the life of Lily Brennan, told in fragments, must not be read as if it were my life. For while we have lived in the same houses, and shared some life experiences, there are significant differences, and Lily’s stories are peopled with invented characters.

  But what is fact and what is fiction? Where in a bookshop should The Happiness Glass be shelved? To pre-empt those questions let me say that the five memoir pieces, to the best of my knowledge, only contain what I believe to be true. However, any life, as soon as you begin to tell it, becomes a story; told from a single point of view, it can never be definitive. It is inevitable, too, that there will be gaps – of memory, of discretion – so readers who require certainty should treat the entire work as fiction.

  Of the essays and stories, ‘Kissing it Better’ appeared in the anthology Family Wanted: Adoption Stories, edited by Sara Holloway, Granta (2005). An earlier version of ‘The Stars of the Milky Way’ was published in Wet Ink (2006) and an earlier version of ‘Changes of Address’ appeared as ‘Homeground’ in the anthology On Edge (Wakefield Press, 2005).

  ‘Burning with Madame Bovary’ was begun between drafts of a novel during a six-month writing residency at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. I am grateful to the Centre, and to the Copyright Agency, for that generously funded fellowship, which gave me space and time to write. I am also grateful for the continuing support of The Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, where I am a Visiting Research Fellow.

  Over time, friends have read and offered feedback on the stories, and in particular I am grateful to Gillian Britton, Gay Lynch, and Diane Schwerdt. Big thanks to my agent Fran Moore, and to Susan Hawthorne and Pauline Hopkins at Spinifex Press. Thanks to Dymphna Lonergan for her advice on the Irish language phrase in ‘The Borrowed Days’, and to Jason Hiscock for locating the photograph of Argent Street. Finally, endless gratitude is due to Christopher and Rafael Lefevre for their willingness to share my wyrd.

  Other books available from Spinifex Press

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  Adoption Deception

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