The Happiness Glass Read online

  Later, we were lying on our backs on the tiny square of front lawn, scouring the night sky for a sight of Sputnik; cricket song, the throbbing soundtrack to summer, was broken by occasional bursts of music from across the river.

  Beth said, “How many stars are there in the Milky Way?” She is always hunting facts. “Roughly.”

  Just as she said it, shouts and crashes erupted next door.

  “Countless,” said Mum, her voice calm as she leaned towards the slamming of the Brickles’ back door.

  “But there must be a number.”

  “Yes, but no one knows for sure,” Mum said, “so whatever we say can never be exact.”

  “But–”

  “Dorrie, let me in!” Mr Brickle attacked the door with his knuckles.

  From inside their house came the tinkle of breaking glass.

  “Lily, take your sister indoors and make a jug of raspberry cordial.” Mum’s old cane chair creaked.

  “I don’t want any cordial,” Beth said. Sometimes she can be incredibly dense, or else much more cunning than we give her credit for.

  “Never mind!” Mum jumped up and jabbed a finger at the house.

  We dawdled towards the front door, which stands wide open on breathless nights, our ears straining towards Brickles’ place.

  “If you don’t open this door right now–”

  Beth and I stared at each other wide-eyed, imagining the consequences for Dorrie Brickle, but as it turned out, we were wrong. Our neighbours’ back door opened; there was a thump, a shattering, followed by a rising wail and the solid slam of the door. Then Mr Brickle appeared, pressing his face to the gap in the fence and calling weakly for our mother.

  Her sudden intake of breath carried across the yard.

  “Mrs Brennan. Ginny! Help me. Help!” He was working up the kind of bawling tone young calves use to call their mothers.

  “Just let me get my shoes on.” Mum ran for the blanket on the lawn where she had kicked them off after tea.

  Beth and I edged nearer, and in the light from their kitchen window we saw Mr Brickle’s balding head where a dark patch oozed blood. It streamed on either side of his face in messy black lines, crazy paving set in the yellow kitchen light.

  “I’m coming.” Mum’s voice was high and cheery and unfamiliar. But by the time she reached the fence he had stumbled away, swallowed up by the darkness at the side of his house. “Oh Lord!” she muttered. “She must’ve hit him with a bottle.”

  From inside came further crashes, plates and glasses connecting with something solid.

  “Listen, girls,” Mum drew us back to the blanket on the lawn. “I want you to lie still for five minutes while I run to the phone box.”

  Beth began to grizzle, but Mum guided her firmly to the blanket.

  “You can count the stars in the Milky Way,” she said. “I expect you to be up to at least a hundred by the time I get back. Lily will help.”

  “But you said the stars were countless.”

  “Because no one has counted them yet,” Mum said. “You can be the first.” She took Beth’s stubby forefinger and pointed it at the sky, jabbing with each number. “One, two, three, four, five.”

  “Six, seven, eight, nine, ten,” continued Beth, calmed now by the wondrous light-rash above our heads. Mum gave my shoulder a nudge.

  “Ten, eleven, twelve,” I counted, falling into Beth’s rhythm.

  Mum paused for a moment on the edge of the blanket, listening. From beyond the fence came a splintering sound, and at that she turned and galloped away towards the front gate.

  We had reached one-hundred-and-fifty-seven by the time Mr Brickle broke through his own back door. Between counting stars we followed the progress of the battle from room to room, the blows, grunts, shrieks, and curses, only faintly muffled by the flimsy walls of their house.

  “Who do you think is winning?” whispered Beth.

  “I don’t know.”

  A moment of quiet was cracked by a gunshot; it seemed to ricochet off the Brickles’ tin roof and into space, silencing the crickets. Beth’s hand groped for mine on the blanket, but she kept her eyes fixed steadily on the sky.

  “One-hundred-and-eighty-one,” she said after a bit, “one-hundred-and-eighty-two.”

  Lunchtime, the police are still at the Brickles’ house. Mr Brickle was driven off in the back of the police wagon last night, but we haven’t seen or heard anything of Dorrie. Beth and I watch silently from the lawn as the police carry out something covered with a green blanket and then, with nothing happening, drift away down the yard and perch in the stuffy gloom of the chook house. It is not the mindless antics of the hens that draws us but the lure of a wasps’ nest high up in a dark back corner. We dare each other to poke it with a stick and have to run for our lives when the wasps turn nasty.

  Our mother gets out the calamine lotion, and Beth, peering with interest at my stung shoulder, says, “There are one-hundred-and-ninety-seven stars in the Milky Way.”

  Mum stoops over us, her eyes anxious as she scans Beth’s freckled and slightly sunburnt face; her fingertips are white where she grips the bottle.

  “It was hard,” Beth says, “with all the noise. But Lily and I counted a-hundred-and-ninety-seven stars,” she says. “So now they’re not countless.”

  Mum saturates a cotton ball with calamine and dabs at the place where the wasp’s sting has left a puncture mark.

  “One-hundred-and-ninety-seven?” she says.

  “Yep!” Beth looks smug.

  “Well thank the Lord for one less mystery to be solved,” Mum says, and when she’s finished with the calamine she gathers us, one under each arm. “Let’s wash your faces and we’ll walk to Murphy’s for an ice cream.” Her palms slide over our shoulders until she’s cupping a chin in each of her hands.

  “Goody! I want pink ice cream,” Beth shrieks.

  Mum squats on the yellow lino to rub a flannel over her grubby fingers.

  We never go to Murphy’s unless we’ve got birthday money, or it’s near Christmas. Mum picks up her old red purse, and as my mouth opens to ask her why we’re having a treat she nudges me towards the front room.

  “Lily, run and find your shoes,” she says.

  At the thought of pink ice cream, my mouth begins to water. Everything else goes right out of my head, as I rush to buckle on my sandals.

  At the Hotel Santos

  Josie van de Berg’s first task each morning was to administer to Albert the cook a pill that would make him crawl on the ground like a snake at the first drop of alcohol. Albert was a good chef but he could not stay sober, and after mulling over the difficulties of replacing him, she and her husband had concluded that another might be just as bad.

  “Better the devil you know,” Gerry said.

  Their doctor made up the pills to his own recipe. Albert swallowed one every morning while Josie watched it go down; he did not take the pill on his day off, and she paid extra for his enforced sobriety. At first Albert had been cocky, and sceptical about the pill, and the kitchen staff rolled their eyes when telling of the time he indulged himself with the cooking wine. Albert had writhed on the kitchen floor, as the Missus had promised, and now his mute despair as Josie produced the pill on her square, uncompromising palm each morning, was proof that he believed in its power.

  Josie was a natural blonde, with a deep bosom, strong bones, large teeth and a big voice. Her ambition when young had been to sing like Shirley Bassey. Instead, she had married Gerry and borne three blonde-haired children, and at almost forty, she seemed as calm and settled as her volcanic personality would ever allow. In summer, when the hotel was full, there was plenty to do in the kitchen, the linen room, and the Ladies’ Bar. In winter, she took the train to Cape Town and visited her parents, a retired English couple, who were always astonished at the turbulent daughter they had produced.

  A week before their tenth summer season opened, Josie and Gerry invited friends to the hotel for dinner. Afterwards they adjo
urned to the Ladies’ Bar, where the man, a lanky, sun-stained farmer, fell into a nostalgic mood.

  “Sing for us, Josie,” he pleaded.

  He’d had a bit to drink over dinner, and was now knocking back Van der Hum and brandy. His wife, shapeless after decades of childbearing, had just confided to Josie that she envied her hourglass figure. It was heavier than it used to be, Josie said. Ah, but it still went in and out, the wife insisted, which was more than she had managed.

  “Just one song,” coaxed the farmer.

  Gerry smiled at his wife; to hear her sing gave him pleasure. Josie strode to the upright piano and felt her way through a few firm chords. Then, her smoky voice launched into a song in which she grasped the notes and tamed them. Her friends flopped back in their chairs and raised their glasses, and she finished to a ripple of applause.

  “Lekker, lekker,” cried the farmers standing at the bar, regulars who drove into town for their Saturday night fill of beer, bright lights and feminine company.

  “Sing another one, Josie,” cried her friends.

  “Asseblief ! Asseblief !”

  Josie was in the mood now, and she sat for an hour at the piano, hands roaming the yellowed keys and her throaty voice soaring through song after song. At closing time, a wiry little man with a moustache and bright bow tie slithered over and handed her his card: Morley Trotter, Theatrical Agent and Promoter.

  “At your service, Madame.”

  Josie beamed at him: she knew she sang well, so it was pointless to affect modesty.

  Next morning Mr Trotter appeared in the Ladies’ Bar, where Josie was slicing lemons. The fruit were as big as oranges, with a dizzying, high-pitched scent. With fingers still sticky with the juice, Josie took his order for a pink gin and listened while he offered compliments.

  “Wasted talent is a crime,” he ventured.

  His bow tie was fuchsia pink this morning, and Josie noted that his hair was a touch too dark for his complexion. Perhaps his work kept him away from fresh air and sunlight.

  “I could fix you up with several most prestigious venues.” He rubbed his hands together. “Durban, Port Elizabeth, even a top club in Jo’burg.”

  Trotter mentioned one or two of the artists he represented. Josie leaned closer; they were names she had heard of. A bronze flash like an eel stirring sediment in a stream flickered in her green eyes, as she absent-mindedly rubbed a little of the pungent lemon juice over the soft insides of her wrists.

  During the long siesta, when guests retired to avoid the white afternoon light, Josie pulled on a bathing suit and crossed the road to the beach. She swam to the nearest of the three black barges anchored in the bay, and hauled herself up onto its rough, sun-bleached surface. There, with her head thrown back against the cobalt sky, she ran through her scales and vocal exercises. They were not bad, after all this time. Not bad at all. Back at the annexe flat she plunged her arms into her wardrobe and extracted dresses she hadn’t worn in years. With her skin covered in a fine glitter of sea salt, she stepped into one, but the zip could not be closed.

  Next morning, Josie ordered Albert to prepare a thin vegetable broth. She ate a bowl of it three times a day for a week, lost six pounds, and let an inch into the waistlines of her dresses. When a telegram arrived, she announced to her bewildered family that she was taking up a two-week engagement at the La Tropique nightclub in Durban. Unmoved by their cries of dismay, she summoned her mother Irene from Cape Town and put her in charge of the children, and Albert.

  From the moment Josie boarded the train, Albert grew shifty. He spat out the pill Irene administered on her daughter’s instruction, and by teatime was roaring drunk and waving a meat cleaver in the little yard between the kitchen and the annexe. Gerry sent the public barman out to deal with him. Oom Bubs was a burly Afrikaner with a gold tooth, skilled at handling drunks, and at least twice Albert’s size. He hit the cook squarely on the jaw, snatched away the meat cleaver, and a jab to the stomach finished the job. Albert was carried to his room, and next day, hungover and sore, he packed his belongings and skulked off to the native settlement.

  Gerry engaged a girl from the local cafe to help in the bar, and took over the cooking himself, but when the hotel’s owners announced their annual inspection tour, his face turned grim, and Irene grew tearful.

  Halfway through the second week, Josie materialised in a gust of steam and smoke as the train puffed away in the direction of Cape Town. She stalked into the hotel to find her husband perspiring over steaming kettles. Gerry’s face softened as it always did whenever he caught sight of her, and he ran a palm over his balding head in a habitual gesture of emotion and uncertainty.

  “The owners are coming,” he said, rolling his eyes at the chaotic kitchen.

  With her old sharp look back in place, Josie stowed her suitcase in the annexe and drove up the hill to the settlement. She found Albert squatting outside one of the huts smoking a roll-up, and wearing nothing but the filthy remnants of his checked chef’s trousers.

  Josie jerked a thumb towards the car’s back seat, and Albert slunk over and climbed in.

  “You’ll take the pill?” she said.

  Albert nodded. “Yeah Missus, I’ll take the pill.”

  The owners arrived next day and Josie greeted them calmly, and with a perfect lunch. The hotel had never looked so good, and they offered Gerry a pay rise.

  That night after dinner, the wife of one of the owners, a bird-like woman, leaned across and piped in Josie’s ear.

  “I remember how you sang for us when we came one year. I would love to hear you again.” She clasped her hands, pleading for Josie to agree.

  The flicker of bronze flashed once in Josie’s eyes, and then vanished. She raised her plump shoulders, and let them fall.

  “I’ve grown rusty,” she said. “Let me order you a liqueur.”

  The Wasps’ Nest

  It had been years since Lily thought of Dorrie Brickle. When Lily heard her name again she was living in Broken Hill with her Brennan grandparents and their two unmarried daughters. She was there because her parents had wanted a better school for her – Lily hadn’t minded the old one – but her father had insisted she was smart and the teaching was poor, and he had arranged for her to board with his family. Her sister joined her there after a year, but in her first winter Beth caught pneumonia and almost coughed herself to death. So their mother had come and taken her back to Wilcannia, and afterwards Beth’s chest was deemed too delicate for her to live away from home.

  With Beth gone, Lily had the long sleep-out to herself. The old people were kind, and her young and beautiful aunts, Sylvie and Grace, made sure Lily didn’t get lonely. It was the youngest, Grace, who first took her to the store in the main street where Brickle & Flacker: Quality Drapers, Haberdashers, Purveyors of Household Linens, was inscribed in flowing script above the glass and polished-wood swing doors. Grace was running an errand for her mother, buying sewing threads for the greyhound rugs Grandma Brennan sewed in the afternoons when Sylvie and Grace were at work and Grandfather Brennan was stretched out on the lounge-room floor in front of the air cooler. In a town where almost everyone kept a racing dog, her rugs were in great demand. Lily would come in from school and find her grandmother hunched over the treadle sewing machine, and to spare her arthritic fingers Lily would sit on the kitchen step and pull through the pipings for her with a bobby pin.

  Lily stood beside Aunt Grace at one of the long wooden counters while a shop assistant measured out yards of fabric for another customer. When the assistant took the money she fitted it into a wooden cylinder that flew across the store on an overhead wire. It went to the cashier’s office high up on the rear wall, and soon came hurtling back with the customer’s receipt and change. This was called a flying fox, Grace said.

  “That’s old Mrs Brickle up there behind the glass,” she whispered. “Edna Brickle doesn’t trust anyone else to handle the cash.”

  Lily stared hard at the cashier. Only the top half of Mrs B
rickle was visible – she was a big broad woman with fat shoulders and permed, reddish hair. Even so, there was something queenly about her up there, sealed behind the glass, only connected to the hubbub on the shop floor by the web of wires and the little wooden cylinders.

  Before they set out for home, Grace took Lily into the milk bar for a lime spider. Lily poked at a blob of ice cream with her straw and watched it froth to the top of the glass – she was still wondering about the woman in the cashier’s box.

  “Our next door neighbours at home were called Brickle,” she said.

  Grace nodded her small neat head – a few weeks earlier she had swapped her beautiful long dark pageboy for a pixie cut, and although it showed off her cheekbones Lily wished she had kept the old pageboy, like Aunt Sylvie.

  “That man who lived next door to you in Wilcannia used to own half the B & F store,” Grace said. “He was Edna Brickle’s husband.”

  Lily stopped stirring the fizzing soda. “But the woman he lived with was nothing like the cashier.” She thought for a moment, searching for the words to describe their neighbour, hearing in her head the voice at the fence and seeing Dorrie’s pale sheep’s eyes. “She was short and skinny,” she said, “with black frizzy hair.”

  “So Ginny said.” Grace began to gather up her shopping. “That was Dorrie Flacker. When she left school she had ideas of being an actress, and she bolted to Sydney without leaving so much as a note for her parents – they were lovely people, Bob and Iris Flacker.”

  Lily was trying to reconcile this information with her memory of their neighbour.

  “So Mr Brickle left his wife and married Dorrie Flacker?”

  Grace slid down from the stool and smoothed her skirt, a signal that she was ready for the long, hot walk home.

  “Well, he and Dorrie left town together.” A note of reserve had crept into Grace’s voice. “I never heard of any wedding,” she said. “It wasn’t that kind of relationship.”

  The heat hit them as they stepped into the street, and sunlight flashed on the chrome bumpers and trim of parked cars. Grace put on her dark glasses. By the time they reached the traffic lights Lily’s shift dress was stuck to her back with sweat. While they waited to cross, Grace pointed towards the green-tiled entrance of a hotel across the street.