Days of Innocence and Wonder by Lucy Treloar

Author:Lucy Treloar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2023-09-21T21:13:27+00:00

Once Till saw Mrs Anderson moving from one sculpture to another, adjusting a hat, pulling at a metal arm, tying a kerchief about a freckled boy’s face, and the quality of her peacefulness reminded Till of her mother wandering the garden first thing in the morning, last thing at night, plucking off a yellowed leaf, deadheading a rose, watering the pot plants. The sinister became wholesome beneath her hands.

Till chatted with Mr Anderson if he was about, sitting on the Anderson porch. One evening he was surveying the sculptures and the solitary horse and its water trough in the sea of sparsely grassed dirt on the other side of the road and the sun setting across it, elemental as that, and he was part of it.

At sight of Till and Birdy, he raised a pipe with one hand and a cup of tea with the other, almost with gaiety, and said, ‘Girls are inside if you’re after them. Welcome to pass the time out here for a bit if you like.’

So Till and Birdy did. They didn’t have a lot to say, but this seemed to suit Mr Anderson, who was a quiet man of faded beauty. He must have been devastating once. He coughed and rubbed his chest and gave it a soft punch as if telling it to settle down in there. His skin was like fly-specked antique silk and his eyes were as pink as one of the salt lakes from down south, small discs of watery blue swimming like rare fish beneath the surface. Mr Anderson was dying. Till didn’t need anyone to tell her that.

‘She’s a good gel, my Marian,’ he said in his dry paddock voice. He said the ‘l’ in gel in the old South Australian way, as if it had a ‘w’ that went along with it – gelw – which Till loved, as she loved it when her grandma asked if she’d like some milwk in her tea. ‘Not her fault what happened. You know.’ He waved his pipe hand around in a few circles and the smoke lagged behind.

Till lifted her nose to the tobacco scent like Birdy after something unfamiliar coming in on a wind. ‘What did happen?’

‘That feller of hers.’ He tapped his pipe on the arm of his chair. ‘If I was what I used to be I wouldn’t be sitting here in this chair, no I wouldn’t. I’d be off. I’d be having a word. I’d be having more than a word. I’d be, I’d—’ He lifted his foot and moved it in the arc of a kick, a trembling shadow of that. His tartan slipper fell to the porch floor and then his toes couldn’t reach it and he slumped back, spent and dejected.

Till picked it up and he held out his foot like a good helping boy. It smote Till. She wanted to cry and couldn’t help thinking of George and when he might need such help.

‘Very cool slippers,’ she said. ‘Bet you didn’t get them round here.

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