They rode home, Mel still not talking to him. Jack decided to hang back a good ten paces. Mel had already been upset with him for not coming to the opera. The ticket cost a whopping seventy dollars, she’d told him, which he’d squandered. But what could he have done when his mother wouldn’t let him go? Eleven-year-old boys going to the opera—it would turn him into a… and there, again, was that word of which she was so fond.
If Daniel hadn’t been out late with work, he would have argued the case. Jack had heard the two shouting late into the night, which was a welcome relief only in that it was a contrast from the tepid exchanges or mute passages. Jean often goaded Daniel to fight with her, but he almost never did. Last night had been a troublesome exception in that he’d started the shouting. ‘How could you deny Jack the glimpse of a larger world?’ Daniel railed.
Jack, hidden under his blankets, had felt nauseous to think such anger resulted from him.
They who worked longer in the vineyard were paid as much as those who only worked a short time.
Observing his own parents, and the strange, strained connection between Juliet and Dash, it occurred to Jack just how incredibly lucky he and Mel were to have found work in the vineyard so young.
Jack was brought back to the present when Mel sped through her open gate just as he stopped to unlock his.
When he got home, no one was there. He checked for a note on the fridge.
Jack, your mother and I have gone to watch Simon at footy training. Dinner’s in the fridge – Dad.
Jack stared at it.
What else might the story be about?
Love, he’d whispered.
So what if Daniel and Jean fought about him?
Some people never find it at all.
Hadn’t he a right to a friend?
Ah, alas, Mel, I think that’s true.
He penned a note of his own, tacked it to the fridge with a ladybug magnet, and darted into his room.
He grabbed a knapsack, filling it with pyjamas and a sleeping bag. He then took the record he’d bought from behind his chest of drawers, where it had been hidden. Stuffing it into his knapsack, he hastily exited, going via the bathroom for his toothbrush.
Juliet was sitting under the back pergola, which was covered in vines and the odd spider web that must have been too high, even with a broom, to reach and brush away.
She was in her dressing gown, although a more elegant example than Jack had seen before, and her hair hung lank from a recent shower. She was still beautiful, but haunted somehow. Her eyes opened.
‘I thought I heard Puck in my garden.’
Jack apologised for the previous night. She refused his offer to reimburse her for the ticket. (Not that he knew how—he would have to ask Daniel.)
‘Keep the record,’ she said before pointing in the direction Mel had wandered.
He at last found Mel in a spot the two rarely frequented; the opposite fence-line to the one they shared. There was a slight depression with a copse of trees, and remnants of an earlier boundary, a crumbling fence-line made of hand-sawn wood.
Mel was tipping an imaginary hat at the fence posts.
‘Evening, Mozart… Howdy, Tchaikovsky…’
At the third post, she paused solemnly, and nodded a greeting. ‘Chopin.’
She resumed her step, expecting another post, but Jack had emerged from the shadow of the trees and was standing there instead.
‘Well, hi…?’
‘Borodin.’
Mel smiled her pixie smile, forgiving Jack in an instant.
Jack titled his own imaginary hat and executed a magnificent bow. ‘And hi…?’
After a thoughtful pause, Mel said, ‘Beethoven.’ She had recently become obsessed with his Moonlight Sonata.
‘Well, come hither, Beethoven, let us chargeth to the Cubby House.’
Mel cocked her head. ‘The Cubby House?’
Jack held up his knapsack and sleeping bag. ‘I’m staying over.’
Jack bounded off in the direction of the Cubby House. Mel stood dazed. What about always having to ask his mum’s permission, which was so rarely granted? Jack paused and called to her.
‘Beethoven? Beethoven! Are you deaf?’
Despite herself, Mel laughed at his joke. She ran after him to beat him on the head.
Daniel, Jean and Simon weren’t surprised any more to return from Simon’s footy practice and find no lights on in the house.
Jean beat Daniel and Simon inside and pranced straight to the fridge. Her fingers traced over the words of the note. With a start, she pulled it off the fridge, sending the ladybug magnet flying, and read it out to Daniel.
Mum and Dad, gone to Mel’s. Be back tomorrow – Jack.
With a small cry, Jean shredded the note in her hands. ‘We can’t let him, Dan!’
Daniel sighed. ‘I guess. Not unless it’s okay with Juliet.’
Jean threw up her hands. ‘You know that’s the least of my worries. But staying the night?’
‘Jean! Really?’
Daniel wondered how they’d ever come to get married. He was sure Jean must have speculated on that matter herself, over the years. Neither had been paired off in their late teens. Heading into their twenties, they were the only guy and girl in town still left unmatched. Although striking, Jean had been too intimidating for the men; Daniel, considered a dish, had perplexed the numerous girls who asked him out on dates with his painful taciturnity.
His and Jean’s pairing had been a match made by elimination.
Daniel regarded Jean tiredly.
‘They’re eleven, Jean.’
Jean was not satisfied. Daniel offered to ring Juliet.
‘Since you’re obviously still on such good terms, perhaps you can tell her to send Jack back. At once!’
‘Oh, no trouble at all,’ said Juliet over the phone.
Daniel rang off and turned to Jean, shrugging. He was expecting to be harangued for capitulating so easily, but Jean stopped pacing and shrugged in turn.
‘Well, what’s to worry about? He’s only eleven.’
Daniel felt he could give her a smile.
‘If Mel was with my Simon now… well!’
His smile vanished.
She put her hand on Simon’s shoulder, and shook it roughly.
‘Aw, Mum!’ said Simon, not liking the pressure she was putting him under.
She headed off briskly, as if that were that.
Daniel walked to the window, looking at the light in Mel’s house. Simon’s voice rang out behind him, the tone unmistakably sarcastic.
‘So, Dad, who’d have thought? Little Jacko’s got a girrrl-friend.’
Daniel remained staring at that hamlet of light under a vast, starry and mostly, he felt, loveless sky.
‘So it seems,’ he whispered.
In the same house, a quarter of a century earlier, he had sketched, painted, while she had danced, sung.
He headed for bed, pausing in front of Simon with a sudden, brilliant smile on his face. ‘Lucky kid, eh?’
With his father gone, Simon shot a glance at Mel’s house. He found himself chewing the side of his mouth. What did Jack have that was absent in him? No, not absent. Just… different? After all, he and Troy shared as close a bond as Jack and Mel. At least, it felt that way on Simon’s part. But was that okay?
Simon feared that he was in his own way as unusual as his brother. This perception led to another: ‘weakling’ Jack actually harboured a quiet inner strength. Did he, Simon, share that courage or was it in him mere bravado?
He shuddered, admitting to himself he was afraid.
Night had bathed the world in a rich, dark blue. There was the faintest sound of wind gently caressing the trees, petting the grass.
Jack and Mel were sitting in their pyjamas in the Cubby House, facing each other. Jack was holding his temples, concentrating. Mel was staring at a handmade card with a cross drawn on it, which she was keeping hidden from Jack’s view, like a fabulous poker hand.
‘What are you getting?’ she asked impatiently.
Jack rubbed his temples with his forefingers like she’d instructed him to do, scrunched his eyes closed all the tighter and tried—tried with all his significant powers of imagination—to mentally receive the image on the card Mel was transmitting with her thoughts. At least, that’s how he thought the game went.
‘Nothing,’ he said at last.
Mel threw down the card, which landed face up.
‘Damn.’
Jack noted the cross. He hadn’t ‘received’ the faintest tinge of that.
‘Mel, this is stupid.’
‘No it’s not. The Russians did it. They sent thoughts across Siberia.’
So that’s what she’d been reading about. She was always coming up with some new exotic activity, which mostly Jack enjoyed. But this time…
‘Well, we’re right next to each other,’ he pointed out.
Mel closed her eyes patiently before reopening them and cupping his with her gaze.
‘Only some people can do it. Only those who really know each other. And only with one person. Once in a lifetime or never at all. Now, how about you send the pictures? You’re better at that than I am.’
Mel shuffled through the pack the way she’d seen Juliet’s European circle do at Bridge club. She closed her eyes while Jack pulled out a card. He put it down flat on the blanket, as instructed, and started concentrating. He imagined the circle forming as a spinning hoop in his head, gaining in size and increasing in revolutions, till it popped from his brain like a smoke ring he’d seen some of the men outside the pub blow. Only, this was a fiery ring, which he imagined burning through Mel’s forehead and into her brain.
‘A circle?’ Mel offered tentatively.
Jacks eyes flicked open. ‘Yes!’
‘Balls.’
‘No, really.’
Mel cocked her head. ‘Really?’
Jack nodded solemnly. ‘I promise.’
Mel smiled. ‘Cross your heart?
Jack thumped his thigh. ‘Cross my heart, hope to die, stick ten thousand needles in my eye.’
‘Never promise to die, Jack!’ she scolded him. Her face relaxing, she beamed herself. ‘That’s fantastic. We’re telepathic.’
‘What’s that mean?’
Mel got all serious once more. ‘Well, tele—like TV. And pathic… um… Quick, do another one. Write it down this time, and don’t cheat!’
The accusation of cheating stung Jack. It reminded him too painfully of the incident with Higgins. Well, he had shown Higgins and now he would show her. Petulantly, Jack shuffled the cards and picked another. He then placed it face down on the doona. Unlike before, he had the new shape created in his head and popped into hers in seconds.
‘A square?’ Mel ventured uncertainly.
Jack affected nonchalance. Leaning back on his hands, he watched Mel flip the card over.
‘Blinkety Bill!’
Excited at this strange, strange world unfolding before them, the two continued, their pace not slacking. Symbol after symbol Jack successfully sent and Mel just as successfully picked up on.
‘Nine in a row!’ shouted Mel. ‘That’s amazing!’
Jack was not so enthused now; he was rubbing his head.
‘Can we stop now, Mel? My head’s aching.’
‘All right, but let’s—’
Mel was interrupted by Juliet calling from below.
‘Mel, Jack? Hadn’t you best go to sleep now?’
‘All right, Mum!’ yelled Mel.
Jack covered his ears. She certainly had a powerful set of lungs. Would she end up a singer like Juliet?
Mel got up and went into the antechamber, thrusting her head down the manhole. ‘Is Dash here yet?’
Jack became slightly uneasy. Rush—how would he face him after the episode in the library?
‘I thought he was coming tonight,’ said Juliet. ‘Perhaps he got caught up.’
The friends lay quietly, each knowing the other had not yet drifted off. Jack was thinking about the telepathy cards. He knew who must have introduced Mel to them: Rush. He’d already taught them so many things in a way that was so subtle it didn’t seem like teaching at all. The imagination… the imagination as a way to see the world better.
‘You’re lucky to see so much of Mr Rush outside of school,’ said Jack.
Mel immediately sat up, as if she’d been waiting for just that cue.
‘There’s something I must tell you.’
Jack knew. After all, they could read each other’s minds.
‘He’s your dad.’
Mel nodded.
Yet something remained unclear to Jack, something Mel kept hidden. ‘Then why aren’t they together?’
‘He isn’t… it isn’t my place to tell, but…’
Jack smiled encouragement in the semi-darkness. Mel continued.
‘He and mum weren’t meant to be but…’
‘…you were,’ Jack finished for her.
Mel blushed but then got serious again. ‘I knew you’d understand, Jack. I won’t ever mind about anything so long as you’re at my side.’
Jack had no intention of ever being elsewhere. How few found each other, how lucky were he and Mel! In such a wide world, with so many millions, that he should meet her, and she, him… the luck of it! He intuited Mel had thought the same but perhaps neither dared articulate this amazing fact of their finding each other for superstitious fear it could be undone. Yet how can magic be uncast, a spell dispelled?
But then I knew that very soon you’d leave me.
That damned melancholy of the Kinks! No, he knew the melancholy was not of the Kinks’ making but already present in the world. The Kinks were only exceptionally skilled at bringing it out. He wouldn’t let their cynicism get the better of him all the same, and pushed it down.
Mel was gently laughing at the contortions his thoughts were no doubt rendering to his face.
‘We’re very wide awake, the moon and I,’ she sang.
And Jack knew her greatest gift.
She would show everyone:
The world could be so good.
Sometime in the night, Jack woke with the possums scurrying across the corrugated iron roof, no doubt using it as a bridge between the branches of the trees enclosing it. They were pretty things, with their small twitching noses and glittering eyes, but there was nothing pretty about the screeching noises they could make.
He rolled on his side to see Mel’s unmoving back in the dark. How could she sleep through such a racket? Then he remembered her telling him how their previous home, a flat in Austria, fronted a main street with trolleys rattling past, cars, trucks, noisy revellers. Those man-made sounds would wake her, but nothing in the country had, except the almost personally welcoming call of the birds in the morning, sheep bleating and cows lowing, and Jack’s rooster from down the hill.
Something caught his eye through the window. There was a shape on the branch outside, the inverted teardrop of an owl. It moved its head silently to regard him, its shoulders and head outlined in white from the blue moon.
He stood slowly so as not to startle it and pressed himself against the cold glass, his breath fogging it up. Wiping it with his pyjama sleeve, he spied through a gap in the trees a sparser-leaved tree down a ways on the hill, its trunk a lonely, pasty white against a deep blue-black sky.
Jack recalled Mel’s words from their first sojourn between each other’s properties.
‘Well, it’s lonely. Even the trees are lonely. If I… died here, though, the trees would have me for company.’
The owl took to the air in a noiseless flap. Shuddering, Jack got back in his sleeping bag and inched closer to Mel.
He woke again, just before dawn. He got up with an energy he’d never before mustered so early, and peeped through the window. There was the very faintest tinge of light purpling the sky beyond the hill as the heavens paled with dawn.
Making sure not to wake Mel, he grabbed the Grieg record from his backpack, slipped the disk from its plastic sleeve and placed it on the record player. Conveniently, the track he was after was first. Pressing the button, the needle arm jarringly swung into position before dropping and finding the groove.
Grieg’s Morning Mood trilled to life.
Mel woke with the first sunbeams shooting over the lip of the hills and refracting through their window, illuminating like sparks the motes and dust in the Cubby House.
She rose in one unstretching, fluid movement, joining Jack at the window.
The sun now fully breached the horizon, its beams like the spokes of a half-shattered wheel of a wagon, fanning across the land, the paddocks, catching the edge of the trees, separating each one with its moulding light.
The mist burnt away with the warming of the land, revealing sheep rising from their huddles, lambs playing in the dewy grass, bulls unlocking their joints and sending them bellowing, while cows licked their calves, and calves suckled their mothers, and all made their way to the creek and dams for their morning drink.
Jack and Mel slipped on their sneakers, climbed down the rope ladder and wandered out to the frosted grass, the side of the Cubby House now bathed in a glorious golden light. All the while, the alternating flute and oboe of Grieg’s piece played in their ears and then, once they were too far from the Cubby House to still hear it, in their heads and finally on their lips. Oboe, flute, bassoon, violin and cello merged together as in a pebbly stream, combining to a barely tamed ferocity of feeling, a veritable flood.
As Jack and Mel ran, danced and rolled in the dewy grass, not caring how wet they got, Morning Mood faded with the mist.
They made their way down to the creek, fringed with willows, choked in places with weeds and smelling of wild fennel.
Mel hit Jack lightly on the shoulder. ‘You’re it!’
‘No, Mel,’ protested Jack. ‘Not now.’
But Mel had already disappeared among the trees. He searched for her, but in vain.
‘Don’t give up, Jack,’ reverberated across the valley.
‘Don’t ever give up,’ echoed, fainter and fainter.
Once more, Mel had simply vanished. Feeling sad and irritable, Jack turned for home, nursing the disturbing suspicion that perhaps these disappearances of hers were preparing him… but for what?
Toco Productions 