When the Lyrebird Calls Read online

  ‘I’m going to meditate and then we’ll head off to the pool.’

  Madeleine cowered under the covers.

  ‘Come on. I thought you were a wriggly girl like your grandmother. You brought your togs, didn’t you?’

  Madeleine tried to answer but her voice wasn’t working yet. She was wriggly – at home she never stopped moving; she loved sports of all kinds – but even Madeleine didn’t do swimming at this hour, and this close to the Antarctic.

  ‘Scrunch and hold, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten and out.’

  Madeleine peeked at Mum Crum, who was now lying on the rug doing her pelvic floor exercises, fingers curling as she concentrated.

  ‘Why couldn’t I get a grandmother who retires to Noosa?’ she asked.

  ‘Better than having a prolapsed uterus like some of my friends, Moo. Stand up and you have to check you haven’t left your gizzards on the seat. Millions and millions of dollars a year spent on medical research in this country and nobody has looked into that for women, have they?’

  Madeleine rolled over to face the wall. It was too early for politics. ‘Isn’t this my room?’

  ‘Virginia Woolf knew how important it was to have a room of one’s own, but no, this one is still mine!’

  Madeleine put her head under her pillow. She lay in bed and ignored her grandmother roaring ‘I am Woman’ in the shower; she ignored her grandmother while she waded waist-deep in laundry, swearing as she tried to find two clean socks; and she ignored her grandmother while she juiced seven types of vegetables. Madeleine found that she could not, however, ignore Mum Crum when she hauled back the doona and waved a glass in front of her face.

  ‘C’mon, Moo darling. Mixed veg with kale and chia seeds.’

  Madeleine sipped at the lumpy juice, which was disturbingly green in colour and tasted like mowing the lawn. Mum Crum patted her on the arm. ‘Get into your togs, Moo. You’ll feel so much better after a swim. It’s invigorating.’

  ‘I don’t care about invigorating. Is it heated?’

  Madeleine imagined Teddy tucked up at the Raos’ while Mrs Rao tiptoed around downstairs preparing French toast, seasoning the house with the smell of butter, cardamom and burnt sugar.

  Mum Crum looked at her granddaughter and her voice softened. ‘Given it’s your first morning, why don’t we drive?’

  Why don’t we drive? Why don’t you bake? How the flying heck did you think I was going to get there? thought Madeleine.

  They got to the pool just as the doors opened. The pool attendants were still crusty-eyed, rugged in layers of pilled fleece. ‘Morning, Mum Crum,’ they croaked.

  ‘Morning, Bruce. Morning, Emily,’ Mum Crum called through her Carlton scarf. ‘This is my granddaughter, Madeleine-from-Sydney.’

  Bruce winked. ‘You must be thrilled to be in a state where you can get a decent coffee, even in the country.’ Madeleine smiled the polite half smile that she reserved for adults who were trying to be funny and failing: not wide enough to encourage further banter, but big enough not to be rude.

  Madeleine followed Mum Crum into the changing rooms. Everything was still clean. Madeleine usually hated public pools because she hated the grot – the discarded shampoo bottles, the knots of other people’s hair in the shower. You learnt far more about strangers in public pools than was necessary. And they learnt far too much about you.

  Madeleine picked up her school bathers. She had to wear two pairs because they were both starting to go see-through, gnawed by the chlorine, and Mum said it was a waste to give almost perfectly good bathers to the poor. Madeleine looked up at Mum Crum. Mum Crum, it seemed, wasn’t so thrifty. Or modest. ‘You’re wearing a bikini?’

  ‘If you’re an octogenarian like me you don’t waste time in trainers, not when you’ve got the body of a fifty-year-old,’ said Mum Crum and winked. The bikini was this season’s – white with a palm tree design in turquoise. Madeleine pushed her towel towards her grandmother. ‘Please, Mum Crum, just until we get in.’

  The pool was freezing. It was so cold that it was hard to breathe. In the next lane, Mum Crum dived straight in and grunted as she swam in flippers. She whooped to herself at the end of each lap. The pool was filling with men in triathlon caps. Madeleine kept her eyes on the line of black tiles down the middle of the fast swimmers’ lane and tried to ignore her grandmother’s grunting and the aggression of the men slugging at the white water around her. Madeleine hid behind her goggles, the lines of her arms softened in the misty haze, the colour of her skin muted, like she’d been gently rubbed out.

  After the swim, Madeleine followed Mum Crum to the changing room. Her grandmother looked fragile out of the pool. Madeleine could see stripes of fake tan on the back of her legs.

  Madeleine stood in her bathers under the communal shower, water running over her shoulders and down her back. Mum Crum walked out of one of the changing cubicles lining the wall. Her bikini bottoms were strung between her hip bones like a hammock, and on her ankle a tiny tattoo of a tomato, greenish and smudgy, had sunk deep into the skin. Mum Crum’s hands were behind her back, fumbling with the straps of her bikini.

  ‘Excuse me.’ Mum Crum’s bather top shifted across small sacks of white breast as she headed for a thick-armed woman pushing her ponytail up under a blue cap. There was no sound in the change room but the marshy slap of Mum Crum’s thongs against the concrete floor.

  ‘You’d like me to help?’ asked the woman, perplexed.

  Mum Crum nodded. ‘I can’t undo the knot.’ Her voice was brusque, impatient.

  ‘Of course,’ said the woman, a little too brightly. ‘Turn around.’ She took the straps and picked at them, puckering the freckled skin on Mum Crum’s back. ‘Okay then, there you go.’ The woman picked up her goggles, and Madeleine tried to catch her eye in the mirror to thank her, but she was talking to another woman as they walked out of the changing room, her voice skimming the concrete floor. ‘It’s terrible when they get like that.’

  Madeleine wanted the woman to know that Mum Crum wasn’t senile – that Mum Crum had been like that for as long as her own mother could remember. She wanted the woman to know there was heaps that was great about Mum Crum, even if she was a bit much sometimes – especially for people who maybe just wanted Coco Pops, telly and a sleep-in on their school holidays.

  But the woman was gone.

  By the time they got back to the cottage, Madeleine did feel better, despite herself.

  Mum Crum set about cutting up a mound of oranges and flipping egg-white omelettes, which she sprinkled with hairy sprouts scooped from a jar on the counter. ‘Literally bursting with nutrients, these are.’

  ‘I’d rather raspberry jam on toast.’ Madeleine looked hopefully in the cupboard.

  ‘Jam on toast is special-occasion food. Not for breakfast.’

  Madeleine sighed a sigh deep and powerful enough to blow out a hundred birthday candles. She cut an egg-white omelette into eight pieces, distributing them around her plate; they were white and clear and bubbly in places, like frozen saliva.

  ‘I thought you could help me with the cupboard today,’ said Mum Crum.

  Madeleine yawned; she’d been hoping to sneak in another hour or so in bed. ‘Which cupboard?’

  ‘The one in your room. I was going to get rid of it, but I’m not sure how I’d get it out the door. It’s so enormous I suspect that the walls of Elf Cottage were built around it.’

  Madeleine loved the cottage’s name. It made her feel like a pixie. And the cottage was so small; it couldn’t have been better named. Besides, with her bushy bun, mismatched socks and wiry limbs, Madeleine’s grandmother did always look a bit like she’d just popped out of the ground.

  Mum Crum ushered Madeleine towards her room and the old cupboard. The cupboard was a great box of a thing, which took up the entire right wall. It was covered in chipped yellow paint, with a peeling strawberry sticker halfway up the left-hand side. The cupboard didn’t have a key, so there was a cor
ner of a skirt poking out through the gap between the doors to jam them shut. Madeleine pulled them open and two mothballs rolled out onto the floor. She took out the skirt.

  ‘That’s an old one. I used to wear it with a black turtleneck. You should see if it fits you.’ Mum Crum laid the skirt out on the bed.

  Madeleine flipped through the other clothes hanging in the cupboard. There was, indeed, a black turtleneck jumper with three gold buttons, as well as a grey coat and several suits.

  Mum Crum smelt one of the jackets and sighed. ‘Pete looked so handsome in this.’

  ‘What do you want to do with it?’

  ‘The jacket? I’ll keep it.’ Mum Crum shut the cupboard door.

  ‘I meant the cupboard.’

  Mum Crum’s voice slid from wistful back to businesslike. ‘It really needs to be totally stripped down, but it’ll have well over a hundred years’ worth of paint on it. I thought that for now you could give it a light sand and then we can paint it white. Just to freshen it up. Come on, let’s put this tarp down on the floor. The cupboard’s far too heavy for us to try to move from the wall.’

  ‘Sure.’ Madeleine swallowed. It was the very last thing she felt like doing. Holidays were for hitting the cricket nets with Nandi or poring over clothes in shops or cutting chocolate fudge, thick with glacé fruit, into squares for the neighbours. Holidays were not for renovating.

  Mum Crum thrust a block of cork wrapped in coarse sandpaper at Madeleine. ‘You get going with the sanding. Just lightly – enough to scratch up the surface, so the paint will stick. Let me see those glorious muscles in action! Here, throw these on.’

  Mum Crum passed her granddaughter a pair of overalls. There was a cloth badge tacked onto the front: Adam was a rough draft.

  Mum Crum laughed. ‘Do you get it? Eve was the final product! Isn’t that clever!’

  Madeleine rolled her eyes and turned to the corner to unzip her fleece.

  ‘What are you turning around for? We’ve all got bosoms. Of course I didn’t have them at your age and certainly not those whoppers, but you’ve only got the junk you consume to blame, or at least the plastic it’s wrapped in. I’ve always said the trouble with youth today isn’t sex, drugs and rock’n’roll; it’s sex, drugs and coffee scrolls. Anyway, you’ve heard it all before; I’m going to get back to putting up a clothes rack in the laundry.’

  ‘They’re not that big,’ said Madeleine, hot-pink and hunched over.

  Madeleine started at the bottom of the cupboard and worked her way up. She rubbed and rubbed until her shoulder pinched. The rubbing, although painful, was mechanical and soothing in a way. All Madeleine had to do was concentrate on the next patch of cupboard, without having to think too much.

  She paused for a rest, then opened the cupboard door. It was very deep, with a faceted timber face. It was the kind of cupboard that, if she had been younger, she might have hoped led to another world, with Turkish delight, fur coats and an enormous lion; another world with families whole and rosy, brimming with children and mums and dads, laughter and snowball fights.

  At the bottom of the cupboard were two drawers with big brass rings, like those threaded through a bull’s nose. Madeleine tugged one of the drawers open. It creaked a bit and then jammed. It was full of Mum Crum’s receipts; so was the second one. Madeleine shut the drawers and stared at the shelf of wood that ran all the way along the top of them, flush with the cupboard walls at each side.

  That’s funny, thought Madeleine. The drawers don’t go all the way to the sides, but the wooden shelf above them does. This left a small gap on each end – a little more than the length of a ruler in size – covered by the shelf and boxed in by the front panel. Madeleine ran her fingers along the edge of the timber where it met the cupboard wall on the left. She tapped. It sounded hollow, but the wood refused to budge. Madeleine moved to the right-hand side of the cupboard and felt along the timber shelf. It wobbled. She inched her fingernails down the small crack and pulled. A panel of timber flipped up.

  A secret compartment! Madeleine took a breath and dipped her hand into the hole she’d just discovered, taking in the sweet smell of dust and old timber. ‘Hey, Mum Crum, Mum Crum, check this out. The cupboard’s got a secret compartment!’ she called.

  ‘What was that, darling?’ Mum Crum walked into the room with a hammer in one hand.

  ‘Look!’ said Madeleine.

  ‘Wunderbar,’ said Mum Crum. ‘Anything in it?’

  ‘Hopefully not spiders.’

  ‘Pfffft! Let me.’

  In her excitement, Mum Crum tried to elbow Madeleine out of the way, but Madeleine resisted, groping around in the hole. Her fingers landed on a smooth piece of timber.

  ‘There’s something down here! I think!’ Madeleine stroked the object with the tip of her finger.

  ‘Grab it, then. Let’s see what you’ve got.’

  From the secret hole, Madeleine withdrew a box. It was made of plain wood, with metal hinges baked brown by time. On its front was a red enamel shield with a black stripe and three black clovers.

  ‘The Williamson family crest,’ said Mum Crum.

  ‘What do you think’s inside?’

  ‘Crown jewels?’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Madeleine. ‘But it could be a genie.’

  ‘Genies tend to arrive in bottles, but if it is a genie, I hope he’s hunky.’

  ‘Gross,’ said Madeleine.

  The box creaked as Madeleine opened it. It was filled with creamy tissue paper so old it had lost its crunch. Wrapped in the paper was a pair of shoes.

  ‘Just shoes. What a funny thing to hide in a cupboard.’ Mum Crum did little to conceal her disappointment.

  Madeleine unwrapped them. They may have been just shoes, but they were beautiful: long, fine court shoes with a Mary Poppins heel, all covered in creamy silk and alive with jewelled beads. The silk was so raw you could see the grains in it. The insides of the shoes were lined with ivory leather. Madeleine ran a finger along the instep. ‘They look like they’ve barely been worn.’

  Mum Crum turned one over to study the sole. ‘They have, but probably only once or twice. See the way the leather’s scratched? Must have belonged to some grand dame.’

  ‘Can I try them on?’ Madeleine didn’t wait for an answer – she was already peeling off her boots.

  The shoes looked funny popping out of the ragged ends of her overalls. Madeleine thought they were elegant, though. She took out her phone and snapped a picture of them.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’

  ‘I’ll send it to Nandi.’

  ‘And I thought our generation was vain.’

  ‘It’s not as if I spend the whole time taking photos of myself like some of the girls in my class. Being cool’s a full-time job. This is more like a visual diary – a record.’ Madeleine took a deep bow. ‘Now I just need a dress, a ballroom and some dance lessons.’

  ‘All those preening girls and they don’t offer dance lessons at that school of yours?’

  ‘Dance lessons? We don’t even have a library, or an oval with grass.’

  Mum Crum shook her head. ‘Sometimes I wonder what we bothered fighting for. All those rallies and burnt bras, and the states blame the commonwealth and the commonwealth blames the states and your mother can’t find you a local school with a library. It’s ridiculous.’

  Politics. If it wasn’t selfies or scrolls Mum Crum was railing against, it was politics. Madeleine shook her head. What was the point? You couldn’t change anything. Everyone was just knocked about like seaweed in the surf.

  Madeleine went back to the box. ‘Hey! Look at this.’ She pulled out a yellowed card about the size of an A4 sheet that had been poking out from under the box’s droopy tissue paper. It was covered in rows of neat handwriting. ‘It’s a list of names. Names and addresses!’

  Mum Crum peered at the card. There were about twenty names and addresses, all in brown spidery writing.

  Amelia Morris, 6 Surrey Road, Prahran.
>
  Polly Wilson, c/- Como House, South Yarra.

  Nell Wentworth, 12 Little Charles Street, Fitzroy.

  ‘What a funny find,’ said Mum Crum. ‘Addresses for a tennis club? A cake-bake fundraiser? War widows? Let’s take it down to the Muse with the shoes later on. They might be interested in them for their museum.’

  Lyrebird Muse, as Madeleine knew from previous visits to Mum Crum’s, was one of the old remaining homes at the edge of town. It had been a summer retreat for a wealthy Melbourne family in the previous century, when the big-bustled and high-hatted used to take to the cool of the hills to escape the heat and stench of a town then known as Smelbourne. Bits and bobs from the house and the area were exhibited in glass cases throughout the rooms.

  Madeleine kneaded her shoulder and stood back to survey her handiwork on the cupboard.

  ‘Lyrebird Muse. Were there lyrebirds here?’

  ‘Absolutely. Here and in the Dandenongs. Sadly they’ve all died out around these parts, though; victims of farming and urbanisation.’

  Madeleine sat down on the bed. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen a real lyrebird. Not even at the zoo.’

  ‘They’re extraordinary creatures, lyrebirds – birds of many voices. I wish we still had them here. Do you know they record sounds, copy them exactly, and then they pass those sounds on to their young? Lyrebird chicks will repeat things in their song that they’ve actually never heard – the click of an old-fashioned camera shutter; the crack of an axe. In a funny way, those birds are the keepers of our history.’

  ‘What a shame they’re gone.’ Madeleine stood.

  Mum Crum nodded and ran her hand down the cupboard. ‘This feels wonderful, Moo, darling. Next up: paint. There is nothing more magical than a lick of paint. Quite transformative.’

  Madeleine found herself smiling. DIY was as contagious as tinea. ‘Do you mind if I go down to the Muse now?’ she said, kneading her arm. ‘I’m sore and I could do with a break.’

  Mum Crum laughed. ‘Watch the new woman in charge down there. She’s an odd one, clinging to the grandeur of a world that no longer exists, yearning for its money and power, but inheriting nothing but airs – antiquated manners that might once have pleased King George.’