The Starlings Read online

‘One hundred and twenty-six points,’ he said. ‘One hundred and twenty-six points. Even against a sub-standard team, that’s not bad, is it, Nicky? Good for the percentage, too.’

  ‘Was it exciting?’ I asked

  ‘Hardly. Hardly exciting, but extremely satisfying. Judge, Brereton and Buckenara, all combining on the half-forward line. A sight to see! Magnificent!’

  ‘Was Matthews playing?’ I knew this was a good question.

  ‘At his lethal best,’ said my father, with his mouth full.

  Pippa had been out with her friend Gina that Saturday, and returned after dinner. My father was still watching the replay and I was sitting on the floor in my bedroom, trying to make sense of the Holy Grail. In spite of being able to explain it to my family, the Holy Grail did baffle me. It didn’t ever seem to do anything beyond floating midair and emitting a heavenly smell. The closest thing I knew to a heavenly smell was roast chicken, but that felt wrong, somehow, for the Holy Grail. I’d taken an old silver eggcup from the back of a cupboard: it was a shame it wasn’t gold, but I had to make do. It had an inscription on it which told me it had been a baptismal present for Pippa. I figured, since I hadn’t been baptised, I had a kind of moral right to her booty. This seemed to me perfectly rational.

  In the thick of all this, Pippa knocked and came in. She had that hopeful expression that meant she needed something. ‘Nicky,’ she said, sweetly. And then, ‘What are you doing with that eggcup?’

  ‘I’m just playing with it,’ I said.

  ‘It’s mine.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, handing it to her.

  ‘Oh, well…’ she said, after a pause. ‘I suppose you can have it. Not have it, mind you. But I suppose you can use it.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, receiving it back.

  She dropped to a cross-legged position on the floor. ‘I was just going to ask you,’ she said. ‘I’d be really, really grateful if you’d do a really, really small thing for me.’

  I looked at her.

  ‘I just have to go out for a little while,’ she said airily.

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘A bit later.’

  I saw why she needed me. All the bedrooms in our house were upstairs, but Pippa’s and mine were on the west side, our parents’ on the east. Mine was at the corner, and a large oak tree grew immediately outside my window. If you took the flyscreen off the window, it was easy to scramble out on to a large and almost horizontal lower branch. This led to a tree house I occasionally used, from which a sturdy wooden and rope ladder hung. Sometimes, when Pippa was younger and more of a tomboy, she used my bedroom window as a shortcut to the tree house.

  I was impressed by her intention, which represented misbehaviour on a truly grand scale, but I was also cautious. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Nowhere. Just meeting a friend.’

  ‘But why do you have to do it like this?’

  ‘I do, Nicky. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘You’ll get your jeans dirty,’ I commented. She was wearing new white jeans, which had been a constant topic of conversation for at least three weeks before she actually purchased them.

  ‘I won’t. I can get to the ladder without crawling.’

  ‘What exactly do you want me to do?’

  She gave me a brilliant smile. ‘I’m going out at eleven. You’ll be asleep, Nicky. Everyone will be asleep. All I want you to do is make sure the screen is out of your window. I’ll be very quiet. I’ll sneak out and then, maybe an hour later, I’ll sneak back in. There’s nothing to it. You don’t have to do anything. Honestly, I almost didn’t tell you, but I thought I might wake you and you might be scared.’ She amended this hastily. ‘I mean, if you woke up and found someone you thought was a stranger climbing in your window. Anyone would be scared.’

  She’d mistaken my expression: she’d thought I was annoyed that she thought I might be scared. What I was actually thinking was that if I became aware of someone crawling in my window in the middle of the night I would probably die of fright, because I would believe the intruder to be one of the monster ghosts from the Unscared Game, perhaps the dreadful Tree Man. But I wasn’t going to tell Pippa that.

  ‘But why can’t you just go out the front door?’

  ‘Oh give me a break, Nicky. By the time Dad’s locked and bolted it and everything I’ll wake the whole house up if I try to get it open.’

  This was true. My father liked to turn us into Fort Knox at bedtime. ‘But what are you doing?’ A thought occurred to me. ‘Are you meeting Adam Pascoe?’

  ‘Of course not,’ snapped Pippa, colouring. Then she returned to her wheedling tone. ‘I’m truly not doing anything much: it’s just for a dare, Nicky. You don’t even have to take the screen off yourself—I can do it. But I thought I might wake you if I do it.’

  ‘Do it now,’ I said.

  ‘But Mum will see it when she comes in to say goodnight to you.’

  We squabbled for a while about the logistics of the plan, and by then it was clear that I’d agreed to it, although I was uneasy. The uneasiness wasn’t simply because of a fear of discovery. There was something odd about Pippa—a nervous tension, a brittleness, a kind of emotional charge—that disquieted me, although I couldn’t define it. It crossed my mind that her adventure might have some connection with Romeo and Juliet. But I couldn’t pin it down, and eventually I decided that there was no link: Juliet had had a balcony and not a tree house, and anyway she hadn’t used the balcony as an escape route. I resolved to stay awake until she came home.

  But as it turned out, I was drowsy even when she left. When I woke in the morning, the screen was back up on the window. On Sunday morning we all usually slept in, unless my mother was going through one of her religious phases, so neither of my parents remarked on Pippa waking later than usual.

  I caught her later in the day. ‘Was it all okay?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Shush.’

  ‘What time did you get back?’

  ‘Not very late. For goodness sake, Nicky, shush.’

  I could discover nothing more. After a few days the episode receded and I no longer thought about it, except to hope it wouldn’t recur.

  ‘Do people in your class know who Mum is?’ Pippa asked me the following Wednesday, when we were walking home from the shops.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, do they know she’s a teacher at the school?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Don’t you ever talk about her? Do the kids in your class talk about Mrs Starling?’

  ‘No,’ I said, wondering where this was going.

  ‘I mean, don’t you ever skite that your mum teaches in the senior school?’

  ‘No,’ I said in horror. Skiting that my mother taught in the senior school was about the last thing I was ever tempted to do. My single ambition at school was to scoot as far under the radar as I could in practically every sphere, and my mother’s presence on the senior campus was just distant enough for this still to be possible.

  ‘So you don’t ever hear anyone talking about her?’

  ‘No,’ I said, mystified. ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason,’ said Pippa. After a few more steps she said, ‘I don’t suppose you know anything much about teachers in the senior school, anyway.’

  I saw no harm in admitting this.

  ‘You wouldn’t know anything about Mr Bloomberg, for instance.’

  I had never heard of Mr Bloomberg.

  ‘He teaches art.’

  ‘Do you have him?’

  ‘Not this year. I might, later on.’

  ‘Is he nice?’

  Pippa shrugged. ‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘He’s new this year. It doesn’t matter, anyway.’

  We walked a little further.

  ‘Have you noticed any difference in Mum? Recently, I mean?’

  I thought.

  ‘She’s more sarcastic,’ I said eventually, realising the truth of this only as I said it. ‘But not to us.’


  ‘You’re right,’ said Pippa. ‘Bit of friction, would you say? Between her and Dad?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. But I could see she was right. Our parents had been snappish with each other, lately.

  I was certain there was something going on here, but I couldn’t work out what it was. I knew that if I pestered my sister she would clam up, so I tried to look uninterested and to maintain an inviting silence, but to my disappointment she offered no more clues.

  The match that week was against Collingwood, and my father was optimistic. After a shaky start Hawthorn had crept to third place in the competition. Essendon had topped the ladder until now, except for one week when Footscray had somehow managed to depose them. Collingwood was lying sixth and my father’s confidence was boosted by the fact that the match against them was scheduled at Victoria Park. This was a contrary approach, since Victoria Park was Collingwood’s home ground, but it was also where the Hawks had recently thumped Fitzroy. Also, my father had a theory (without much evidence, so far as I could see) that the Collingwood players were too stupid to exploit their home-ground advantage.

  Hawthorn no longer played at its home ground. Until 1973 the club had in perfect contentment occupied a small local ground called Glenferrie Oval, also known by locals as the sardine can. At this stage the league (because of the Great God Mammon, said my father in disgust) had decided that home grounds ought to have greater crowd capacity, and Hawthorn had been assigned to Princes Park, the traditional home of Carlton, a team always to be despised. Of course, I hadn’t been alive in 1973, and I was glad this was the case, as the episode still aroused in my father a spectacular fury. The league, he said, had demonstrated that it understood nothing about loyalty, about tradition, about historical significance, about the value of supporters and about community and local networks. The league, in short, had no principles.

  My mother had told me privately that my father’s intense love for Glenferrie Oval dated from the day Hawthorn had forsaken it. Until then, she said, he had endlessly berated it for its crampedness, lack of shelter, discomfort, limited parking and general dysfunction.

  The club still trained at Glenferrie Oval, and my father went down there sometimes on Thursday evenings to watch them. From these expeditions he would come home either gloomy or energised, depending on how the team appeared to be shaping up. On Thursday evening that week he returned in a state of anxiety which veered between hope and despair.

  Since coming home that afternoon, my mother had been occupied in the kitchen with an intensity usually foreign to her. Cooking was for her an endurance test: I think she was probably what is called a good plain cook: we all enjoyed our meals, but she did not aspire to create gourmet dishes, and frequently suggested that it would be a pleasant idea for someone else in the house to cook. Nobody took her up on this.

  Dinner that evening turned out to be a roast chicken with lots of trimmings, followed by a spectacular meringuey sort of cake. Everybody made complimentary noises, but my mother seemed oddly tense.

  ‘Lovely!’ said my father, as he polished off his cake. ‘Just like Christmas! What have we done to deserve all this, Jen?’

  She glared at him. ‘You’ve got no idea, have you?’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ he said.

  Unexpectedly, she burst into tears. ‘You’re just hopeless,’ she cried. ‘Is it so hard to remember one or two dates? Is it? Doesn’t anything stay special for you?’

  ‘Jen,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. Distracted.’

  She stood and I saw to my alarm that the tears were running down her cheeks in little unstoppable rivulets. Angrily she brushed at her face.

  ‘I try,’ she said. ‘God knows, I try so hard, but you never notice, do you? I’m trying to—to hold everything together—trying to—make it all work—’

  She choked, then made a strange garrotted noise and ran out of the room.

  Pippa and I looked at our father, whose face was a study of dismay.

  He stood up and followed my mother.

  Pippa sighed and got to her feet too. ‘Men are so stupid,’ she said in her most patronising voice, gathering dishes. ‘I think you and I are loading the dishwasher, Nicky.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, bewildered.

  ‘It’s their wedding anniversary. Not a good time for Dad to forget it.’

  I thought about this incident a lot. I had seen my parents disagree, of course, but never with such raw distress. It seemed that the complicated masks usually worn by adults had been stripped from them, and that this had laid bare something beneath that I neither comprehended nor liked. I think this was the first time that I consciously felt that our normal routines were swaying on a shifting and treacherous foundation.

  For all his tentative optimism, my father studied the teams carefully on Friday morning. Knights and Buckenara were injured. Daicos, the star Collingwood forward, had a bad knee and was said to be out for the year. My father was not a vindictive man, even where a Collingwood player was concerned, and moreover he would have resisted any interpretation of a victory that depended on the absence of an opposing champion. So he simply noted Daicos’s absence and shook his head over Knights and Buckenara, the latter of whom was, in his opinion, too prone to injury.

  ‘Wet,’ he muttered. He did not regard Hawthorn as a strong team in the rain.

  During the afternoon I braved the rain (protected, through maternal decree, by both parka and umbrella) to wander around to Grandpa’s place, the jigsaw in mind. Although my glasses no longer made me dizzy, I was still getting used to them, and walked slowly so that I could properly see the blades of grass, the dead leaves on the ground, the pavement cracks, the weeds. I noted that I could read the number plates of passing cars, studied the shapes of the clouds, and avoided the dog poo. (This alone was a blessing.) When I arrived at Grandpa’s house, I paused to take it all in. I could see the brickwork, the tendrils of creeper, some smudgy marks on the eaves. I could see the wet autumn leaves in the grass, a Minties wrapper under a bush. I went up the drive and opened the green picket gate to the back garden, glancing through the big windows of the garden room. There were Grandpa and Rose, embracing.

  I stopped.

  My first impulse was pure panic, to run back home and pretend I had never seen them. Then I thought, that was silly, and anyway there wasn’t anything wrong with a hug. Was there? And, even if there was, they might still see me. I looked in the other direction and made a great play of rattling the latch of the gate. When I was inside, I closed it with care. I looked up again. Rose and Grandpa were disentangled—in fact, Rose had retreated halfway across the room. They smiled and waved to me. I came in the back door.

  ‘Hello!’ we all cried brightly to each other.

  Rose set up the jigsaw, made my Milo, asked about the glasses, about the holidays, and listened to my answers. She was as affectionate as ever, but there was a watchfulness about her.

  There is a place between knowing and not knowing. It’s a shadowy place, with unexpected shafts of light, perilous trip-wires and murky recesses. I found myself there. I felt as you might feel if the steady tick of a clock became hurtling and jagged. This was not my house, but it was close to the centre of my existence. Didie’s death had caused no more than a ripple for me. It was Grandpa who had always made me welcome here, and with Rose’s coming that welcome had felt warmer and more complete. Yet, when I saw them embrace, it was as if the ground beneath the house had jarred and shifted: I could still feel the tremor.

  I didn’t know much about romantic caresses, let alone sex, but I’d seen movies and television shows. I knew in a vague sort of way that there were different kinds of hugging and kissing, and I thought that the embrace I’d half-witnessed was somehow different. I knew that Rose and Grandpa were on edge; I knew they wondered if I’d seen them.

  I went to the kitchen for something; as I came back I heard Grandpa say, in a low, urgent voice, ‘I’ll have a quick word with him. I’ll say, if he doesn’t mind,
not to mention anything. Not just yet, anyway.’

  And Rose’s voice, low and clear, in return. ‘No, Dan. It’s not fair on him. And they have to know sometime.’

  ‘But it’s so soon,’ said Grandpa.

  ‘Even so,’ she returned, and I caught in her tone the flinty authority that had surprised me earlier. ‘Better to have it in the open. Better not to put Nicky in any sort of awkward situation.’

  I wandered back in, trying to look as if I hadn’t heard anything. With Rose’s clear green eyes on me, this was difficult. I sat down at the table and studied the jigsaw.

  As I left, Rose hugged me extra hard. Her eyes shone.

  ‘We don’t have secrets, Nicky,’ she said. ‘Your Grandpa and I, we have no secrets from you or anyone in your family.’

  I nodded.

  On the way home I puzzled over all of this. There had been a light in Rose’s face that perplexed me. If she and Grandpa had been doing something they shouldn’t (as seemed likely), why was she prepared to be so open about it? There was something almost triumphant about her when she’d hugged me goodbye and said there were no secrets.

  It was hard to fathom. But it was clear that I was under no constraints. This pleased me immensely, because I was in possession of information that might make me a focus of interest and appreciation. Still not quite understanding the force of the news, I thought about how I would break it. I wondered how to describe the embrace. There was a word dancing around the perimeters of my consciousness, but I couldn’t quite locate it.

  Ah, yes. Amorous. That was the word. It had been an amorous embrace.

  I remembered finding this word first in the Lambs’ version of Othello, in which Michael Cassio was described as a young soldier, gay, amorous, of pleasing address. (Obviously, Cassio lived in a nice house.) And then I stumbled upon it in Romeo and Juliet, relating to Juliet’s death: as if Death were amorous, a phrase from which I could glean no sense. I felt intuitively that this was the occasion to test it out.

  At dinner that night my father was inconsolable. There was almost nothing worse than being beaten by Collingwood. Pariahs of the league, the Collingwood club and its fans occupied the lowest possible position on some mythical ladder which represented truth and honour and wisdom and beauty. I couldn’t ever understand why this was so. My father had a battery of tired Collingwood jokes. Most of them escaped me. What do you call a Collingwood supporter in a suit?—The defendant. Two of the boys in my class at school barracked for Collingwood and they both seemed perfectly okay to me.