Illywhacker

Phoebe, gazing out the dusty window at the retreating pigs, knew exactly how beautiful she was. She had a creamy skin, brilliant waving red hair, long legs like a water bird's, a small waist and breasts which were just… so.

To look at a photograph you would not understand the extent of her beauty. There is no doubt that her face was not classic. The chin and lips were perfect, as if the imaginary almighty had lavished extravagant amounts of time on them and then, realizing it was getting late, had rushed on to the small nose and forehead, cramming them in where there was hardly room. In photographs the forehead looks a little low, the nose too high in the face, the magnificent chin and lips too dominant. Yet in life this was not the effect at all. Only the loveless camera shows these things in this way, blind to her strength, her spirit, the intensity of those small brown eyes, the porcelain complexion, the hypnotic way she spoke, hardly opening her mouth to allow the passage of words between her small, fine white teeth.

Annette Davidson did not doubt Phoebe's beauty. But she did not like the way Phoebe had begun to speak about it. She thought it was unhealthy, or unlucky. She brooded on the consequences but none of her insights, which were numerous, did anything to free her from her pupil.

"Your beauty", she said, "will be your downfall. You'll end up like Susan Bussell."

Phoebe groaned. "How could I be like Susan Bussell?" She turned from the window. She wore a short black dress with a flash of chartreuse on the shoulder. The light was behind her and Annette could not see the hurt in her eyes. "Susan Bussell is a cow," she said, and turned back to the street.

"A dull, complacent cow," said Annette, "who doesn't bother to think or feel because she knows she will marry a rich farmer and knows exactly what schools she will send her children to."

Phoebe pulled a face at the dusty window.

"She is waiting for life to come and court her, and it will, in exactly the way she thinks it will. She doesn't need to work, or think."

Phoebe flattened her nose against the glass. "A nose like a pig," she thought, "in a street full of pigs."

"You have to work," Annette said softly. "And think. If you go on like this, you're going to be very unhappy."

Phoebe felt it. She felt the unhappiness push into her, thread itself through her like piano wire, push out through her stomach and bind her wrists. "You're horrid," she said, betrayed. The face behind the rain-flecked dusty window crumpled and her shoulders collapsed.

Annette drew the curtain slowly, discreetly, so as to attract no attention from the curious Mr Wilson who was laying out tomato seedlings not twenty feet away, and then (only then) held the crying girl and buried her face in the blissful softness of her neck.

"Why are you so horrid, Dicksy?"

"Because", Annette hissed, surprised at her own passion, "you are waiting for something to happen to you. You must do something."

"I will do something," Phoebe said quietly, running a finger thoughtfully across her lover's lips. "It will just be something unusual. It will not be something I can plan for. It won't be what you expect or what I expect either."

"What will it be?" Annette whispered, but by then she was no longer interested in the answer and she rubbed her nose into the softness of my darling's eye.

"It will be something," Phoebe said. "I guarantee you."

Later, when she was in Sydney being notorious, Phoebe went around telling people that she had "foreknowledge" of the event. She had known she would see my aeroplane suspended in the sky above Vogelnest's paddocks at Balliang East. She convinced many people, and I won't say it can't be true. In any case, it is a pretty story, so I will leave it hovering there, like an aeroplane, alone in the sky, gliding towards her with a dead engine.

3

Phoebe sat on the big kitchen table and kicked her legs and listened to the commotion, the little cries of pleasure, as her mother and Bridget set about packing the hamper. Phoebe frowned and bit her nails. She watched her mother like a parent who knows a child will shortly stumble. In that odd household it was the parents who were the children: Jack and Molly fussing over each other, touching each other, walking around the roses hand in hand, turtle-doving and cooing at fifty years of age while their only child watched them, nervous lest they hurt themselves.

They did not understand Geelong society. They were friendly and neighbourly. They offered hatfuls of hens' eggs across the fence.

Phoebe understood Geelong all too well. She shuddered when she heard that her mother had invited the A. D. Collinses to a picnic at Balliang East. Molly and Mrs Collins were on the committee for the Wyuna Nursing Home, and although they were both on the committee because their husbands were rich, in Molly's case this was the only reason. Molly did not know the other reasons even existed. She thought she could ask Mrs Collins to a picnic.