A Descant for Gossips by Thea Astley Page B

shortening process. She held her pants up with one hand and switched off the light while she shouted good night down the hall to the family. In the darkness she heard their mingled replies, and then she edged between the layers of chill that soon would become layers of warmth, curling in a ball with her head turned to the sash window opened a few inches at the bottom. The sky was filled with pastings of cloud. She watched them and said little phrases to herself and whispered, ‘O desolate eves along the way’, and could get no further, her memory tricking her. Over and over the words emerged, passing like smoke between the old washstand and basin and the wardrobe, curling mistily in the darkness-becoming-lighter of the room with less and less meaning in the words as scenes from the evening repeated themselves in profiles of invitation from Mrs. Striebel’s clever face, or her hand touching Vinny’s shoulder, or her words ‘my dear’.
    â€˜My dear.’ Vinny said them aloud and turned to hug the pillow in a paroxysm of ardour. She smiled foolishly and ached with love and joy and a desire for martyrdom for her idol’s sake, and then went into a raptuous fantasy of herself and Mrs. Striebel in dangerous climates, with herself heroic at dying moments, nobly trying to stanch the flow of her friend’s tears.
    A wind rising all seagrass-scented and smoky from paddock burnings threw violence across the screen of her window with the clumped foliage of the bloodwoods flung like crazed mops across the star-white sky. Through their turbulence she sensed the outlines of her classmates’ hostility, their indifference; and although she tried to fight the image and recapture the tenderness of a few minutes before, she found herself whimpering with part-pain, part-annoyance in the darkness and burrowing her face into the pillow to cut out the vision of the sharpest shame of all. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no’, and ground her knuckles so hard into her eyes that the night exploded in flashes of colour that washed and waved together and changed shape like watermarks on paper and then became a steady golden oval with a diminishing black centre. It was ringed in orange light that was metamorphosed from diamond shape to cruciform and then it sputtered out into the soft blackness of her relaxed eyelids. The pattern was always the same.
    It had happened last summer term, her birthday term.
    Her mother had suggested asking them, but Vinny protested because she knew it wouldn’t be any good, anyway; yet in the end her mother won. So she had invited, with almost Christ-like humility of purpose, the very girls who disliked her most, hoping at the back of her mind that some miraculous volte face might occur, that after this birthday treat she would be accepted.
    The five of them came. They all lived on her side of the town. They came in their best frocks – which were not so expensive, perhaps, but made Vinny’s shrunken voile a sad matter. And they bore token gifts of the cheapest kind – a small bottle of perfume, a pocket diary, a plastic brush-and-comb set.
    â€˜It’s your first teen year,’ her mother had sentimentalised. ‘You must have a party, love. Oh, I can still remember mine! What a time! Dad, stingy though he was, God rest the old basket, asked every kid in the street. And they just loaded me with things. Hankies and books and stockings and undies.’
    Remembered Vinny bitterly, as the tiny packets lay insultingly on the blue quilt of her bed. The guests had jostled one another, giggling and gazing curiously at the poor room. They primped before the wardrobe mirror and plumped out fat fringes above their freckled or browned country faces. She saw Elizabeth Turton notice the hole in the mat beside the bed and with loathing watched her nudge Pearl Warburton into a shoulder-shaken spasm of suppressed giggles. Betty Klee’s great moon face swung round the room