She could feel her heart palpitating like a rubber bulb. ‘You must tell me about your father, Viva, because I think I understand — sort of,’ she added to appease the part of herself which had learnt to be Australian.
Viva brushed back her fringe. ‘I’ll tell you and show you — when she’s out of the way. But you must promise never to tell. It will always be our secret.’
In speaking of her father Viva’s speech seemed to improve, her voice vibrated like some stringed instrument — a ’cello?
Irene saw that Viva might be acquiring power over her, but could not resist promising. A moment of complete physical repugnance occurred as she visualised herself sharing a warm bath with Viva Jenkins. As the water lapped against the sides of the bath it revealed a greasy highwater mark.
‘Ssh!’ Viva warned. ‘She’s coming.’
Mrs Jenkins had restored her face with smiles and a forced tranquillity. She was carrying a dish, on it a clutch of little cakes, and a jug of what looked like lemonade, but as remote from the lemon as her plastic flowers were from soil, sunlight, and natural grace. The jug of pseudo lemonade shared their gaseous glow.
‘These are very special cakes,’ Mrs Jenkins smiled, ‘from a recipe of my grandmother’s.’
‘Ah, them.’ Viva sounded disenchanted.
A rancid taste was soon mingling in Irene with the smell of gas.
Viva refused a cake, but began slurping at a glassful of the green lemonade.
Had Mrs Jenkins perhaps set out to poison you, and did Viva, the false friend, know of her mother’s intention? Together they would bury the body in the gas-saturated soil under their rotting house? You couldn’t very well spit out this rancid cake, only smile as you swallowed it by little, unhappy mouthfuls.
Mrs Jenkins said quite soon, ‘I’ll leave you to Viva, Maureen. I’m going down the road to look up a friend.’ She gave her daughter a sideways look.
Was she so confident in the effect of the cake, so callous that she was leaving her daughter to accept full responsibility? And could Viva be such a perfidious friend?
Mrs Jenkins went out as she was, in her thin dank hair, easy cotton frock and feet bare except for the pink corn plaster.
While her mother was still within earshot, Viva explained, ‘She’s after the gasfitter, Bernie Horan. A fat lot of hope she’s got of finding that one.’
‘The cake…’ Irene mumbled through her misery.
‘Yair. Spit it out.’ She offered a blue plastic bowl such as Mrs Bulpit kept her teeth in overnight. ‘Isn’t it poisonous! I couldn’t warn yer.’
To take her mind off the cake, Irene asked, ‘What were you going to show me, Viva? Something your father brought from Brazil — or was it Patagonia?’
‘Both. I’ll tell you. But you’ve gotter give me time. It’s a secret I never thought of sharing with anybody else.’
She went to a cupboard and after fumbling round at the back brought out a polished wooden box inlaid with ivory, ebony, and turquoise chips. The turquoise might have been due to light or inspiration or the mystic state Viva had invoked earlier on.
‘You don’t miss a trick,’ she said, still withholding the contents of the box. ‘My father got it when he was a merchant seaman — while he was on a voyage to Brazil. He made this horseback journey into the interior through the jungle, along the banks of a great river. He was in such good favour with the Indians — who recognised him for what he was — that they made him a present of a talisman which he always kept in this box.’
Again in speaking of her father her voice took on the thrumming tone of a ’cello string.
Irritated by delay, Irene urged, ‘Come on, let’s have a look at it.’ Mrs Jenkins might return too soon, or as a recurrence of unhappy nausea reminded, you might die of the grandmother’s fatty cake.
Viva opened the lid of the box. Inside was a white satin square beautifully stitched with gold thread. On removal of the sheet a black object not much larger than a fist was revealed.
‘You wouldn’t think,’ Viva said in an awful voice, ‘that this could have ever been a human head.’
Irene did not stop to think because she immediately accepted the object as an addition to her private world. A few threads of coarse hair were still adhering to the little scalp, and from the chin the bristles of a beard, less like hair than fine wire. But it was the slits where eyes and mouth had been which provoked the deepest shiver.
Not to show Viva the extent of the impression the shrunken head had made on her, she asked as casually as she could, ‘What does your mother think of it?’
‘Says it gives her the creeps. She’d have thrown it out after my father left, if I hadn’t told her it would probably come back — or revenge itself in some terrible way. So she lets it alone.’
‘You’re very lucky, to have it,’ Irene said.
Gil Horsfall’s stolen brooch was nothing to compare with Viva’s talisman from the Brazilian jungle. She herself had nothing but memories, images, and the threads of words and phrases which were constantly sprouting in her.
‘How does Patagonia come in?’
‘That’s where Carlos came from. He was a Patagonian Welshman.’ Viva immediately replaced the satin sheet and snapped the lid of the box shut. ‘They must never know at school,’ she said, ‘that I’m not like any normal Australian.’
Viva’s confession was so strange and unexpected you forgot for a moment your own abnormality. When realisation that the condition of which she was alternately ashamed and proud was one that she had in common with Viva Irene felt resentful.
She pursed her mouth. ‘I don’t know that it’s all that terrible — not like being a reffo,’ she added to show her willingness to shoulder Viva’s share of guilt.
‘I often feel all mixed up,’ Viva mumbled, quoting from a letter in a magazine Irene had found and read in Mrs Bulpit’s lounge room.
Any insecurity and confusion of your own became in consequence a distinction Viva would not have known about.
‘I think it’s time I went,’ Irene said soon after.
‘Promise not to tell,’ Viva called from the gate.
Not now that the secret had become more yours than Viva’s.
Irene waved back. A scattering of bats had begun weaving their evening flight. On the sky line the image of the shrunken head hung more purposefully, it seemed. Aunt Cleonaki must surely have accepted the mystic head as she would have approved some miracle-working black Panayia made respectable by the rigid vestments of Orthodoxy.
The image of the head only dissolved as Mrs Jenkins was seen advancing up the road.
‘I couldn’t contact my friend,’ she said with the composure of a lady returning from a visit to another. ‘Any messages will have to keep.’
It seemed in no way unusual that she should be hatless, gloveless, and barefooted, except that stones had drawn blood and the plaster was missing from her corn.
‘I wonder what nonsense that girl of mine’s been telling you,’ she said and laughed. ‘About her father, I bet. That lousy bastard — she can’t get over his disappearance. I could tell you — but won’t…’
Her denture wobbled, and cracks were reappearing in her composure.
‘Run along, dear,’ she advised, ‘It isn’t safe for a young girl, so many undesirables around in wartime — in peace too, you’ve got to face it.’
Irene continued on her way to Cameron Street. She felt strangely protected by the image of the head which she had appropriated as her talisman, and for the moment at least, indifferent to people and events.
* * *
Not long after, it seemed, though in fact they were strung out on the thread of months, perhaps even years, three important events occurred to shatter Irene’s sense of inviolability.