One Life. Kate Grenville
While she’d been gone, her parents had moved again, left the Crown and taken over the Federal in Campbelltown, a township not far from Camden. Nance had hardly got used to the Campbelltown school before they were off to the Queensland Hotel in Temora, in the wheat belt in the south of the state. It was the grandest pub they’d had. In the middle of town, with carpet on the stairs and a chandelier in the dining room. Dolly sat behind the till in the red velvet she was partial to. Mrs Russell from the Queensland Hotel, that was something!
The time apart had made Nance and Frank awkward with each other. He was a boy now, playing boys’ games with other boys. They were still good mates, but not the one person, the way they’d been before, and Temora Public School was big enough for them to be in different classes.
Nance was nine. Temora was the sixth time she’d been the new girl. Six times she’d been out of step in class: at the last school they might have already done the Rivers of Europe, and here they hadn’t started it. For a while she’d be top of the class. But at the last school they might not have got up to Kings and Queens of England, 1066 to the Present Day, and here it was over and done with, and she’d missed it. At lunchtime being the new girl was lonely, unwrapping your lunch and chewing away as if you didn’t need company. She knew now that you didn’t wait to be asked. Wander over when they got out the skipping rope, join the line as if she’d always been there.
Somewhere between the schools she’d missed Long Division and Lowest Common Denominator, but she was a good reader. She liked poetry best.
There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around
That the colt from old Regret had got away.
At home they had a Bible and an old red Prayer Book. Bert had a few Westerns beside his bed and Dolly had Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and every morning the paperboy delivered the Temora Independent. Always a big headline with a photo: ‘Level Crossing Tragedy’, and there was the car on the tracks crumpled up like paper. ‘Demented Russian Holds Up Train’, a small dark man in handcuffs beside Constable Cassidy caught with his mouth open.
The strain behind every day was Dolly and Bert arguing, never in front of the customers but in the bar after they’d closed up. One evening Nance crept down in her nightie to listen. She could hear her mother going on and on. Not the words but the tone, that scorch. Suddenly Dolly came out, slamming the door behind her, her face crooked with feeling. She caught Nance on the bottom step.
Your father’s a rotten bugger of a man, she said. I might as well be dead.
Don’t say that, Mum, Nance said. You’ve still got us.
Oh, Dolly cried, you children! You children don’t matter!
Then they were moving again. Frank told her it was because of Benni, the nursemaid who looked after them. Benni was half Chinese, that golden skin. Her mother was ordinary Australian, was how Benni put it. That makes me betwixt and between, she said. Not like you kids, true blue. She had a lovely smile. Frank said, I think Dad’s on with Benni. Nance didn’t understand. How do you mean, she said. I’ve seen him, Frank said. Coming out of her room in the night.
Bert and Dolly and Max went to Beckom, a one-horse town twenty miles away. Dolly said the school there was no good, so Frank and Nance stayed behind in Temora. Frank was boarded with Miss St Smith, who took the photos for the Independent. Nance was left with the dressmaker who made Dolly her red velvet jackets.
Miss Medway lived with her mother in a little poky house on the edge of town. They were strict Catholics and strict in every other way too. Starting with the moment Nance put her bag on the bed in the sleepout at the back of the Medways’ house, it was awful. Miss Medway whipped the bag off the bed. Don’t ever do that again, Nance, she said. You’ll soil the cover. Her shoes had to be lined up exactly under the bed. In the wardrobe all the hangers had to face the same way. The Medways even had a special way of rolling the socks.
Everything was about your immortal soul and there was grace at every meal and no meat on Friday. There was a Jesus hanging over every bed and He was there again in the corner of the parlour, with a shelf underneath for a candle and a dried-up cross from Palm Sunday. Nance had to go with Miss and Mrs Medway to mass. When it was time for Holy Sacrament everyone glanced at her sitting in her pew with a little sympathetic smile that said, Poor thing, not a Catholic?
Nance was always out of step and Miss Medway or her mother always correcting her. They never hit her. It was the feeling of being watched every moment and worrying that you were breaking one of the rules that was so suffocating. A few times when she’d done something wrong she tried fibbing. That meant a lecture from Miss Medway about what a wicked sin it was to tell a lie. She sat looking at Jesus all through Miss Medway’s lectures. The first few times she was frightened but after a while she thought, Go on, Jesus. Strike me dead.
Now she and Frank became strangers. The playground was divided into the boys’ part and the girls’ part, and when they caught each other’s eye across the painted line she’d see Frank’s face go wooden and her own face stiffened instead of smiling. It was as if they both felt they’d get into trouble if they showed they knew each other.
Frank never came to visit her at the Medways’ and Nance only went once to Miss St Smith’s house, when Dolly wanted photographs of her and Frank. Nance was nine, Frank was ten. Miss St Smith was waiting with Frank on the verandah. Her house was in the good part of town and she was a big confident woman in an expensive-looking pale-blue costume. She had that well-brought-up loud way of speaking. Come along, children, she said. None of those long faces! Frank dear, buck up, won’t you? And Nancy, I’ll thank you to give me a better smile than that!
The only place she could go to be unhappy in peace was the woodheap. She’d sit there in the dusk, the chooks murmuring around her feet. People were always going on about orphans, she thought. How awful it was for them. She thought it would be good to be an orphan. At least you’d have the other orphans. And it wouldn’t be your fault that your parents didn’t love you, because they’d be dead. But why didn’t her parents love her? She knew she must be lovable because Auntie Rose loved her, and Frank loved her, even though they’d lost the knack of talking together. Her parents should love her, because parents were supposed to love their children. Instead, she was nothing but a nuisance to them.
She sat on until the chooks gave up waiting for her and put themselves to bed. There was no reason why anything would ever change. Oh, she thought, all my life is wasted!
When she went to Beckom for the next holiday, Bert and Dolly were packing up again. Off to Sydney, her father said. The Botany View in Newtown. Lowered his voice to what he must have thought was a whisper. Been punished long enough, he said and winked.
Dolly was full of how wonderful the Botany View was going to be. It was near the brickworks, thronged with thirsty workers every lunchtime. No house trade, no night work, easy to run. The place would be a gold mine. It was the same story: this time everything would be perfect.
Oh, what a silly thing I was, Nance thought. Sitting on the woodheap thinking it would be forever!
Then it turned out that Newtown was an unsavoury quarter. Nance would stay on with the Medways. This time she’d be on her own in Temora, because Frank would be boarding at Newington College in Stanmore. Max would go to Newtown Public.
When the school year ended she packed her bag to go home for the Christmas holidays. She went out and waited for Bert on the porch. She was ready too early, Miss Medway kept trying to make her come in out of the heat, but she perched on her case watching down the road. And there he was, a big man in a suit she’d never seen before, his familiar face, and the voice she knew. Well, there you are, Nance! His hand on the gate, his smile turned up to her. Something opened in her and the pent-up tears flooded out.
Oh, things could be so simple! It was nothing more than a matter of Bert saying to Miss Medway, I’ll be taking Nance back with me. That was all it took.
They all looked different, city folk now. Max loved the public school, the kick-about with a ball at