By Gabrielle Blondell
‘I think you would be perfect for the television, Uncle Merv. I could help, if Maisie doesn’t want to do it.’ I was already pretty sure Maisie would say no. Ever since the twins, my cousin worried that her arse was too big and, in my opinion, she was right to. Plus, Mum said it was unseemly at her age to squeeze herself into her little satin costume and flounce about on stage.
But I could tell my uncle was still unsure. He was standing by the kitchen door, not propped against the wall or anything, just standing, his arms hanging by his sides. He had his long distance stare on and I knew he was stuck, not getting on with his thinking and not circling back, just stuck. That was the way he was since he got back from the war. That’s what they all said anyway – Mum, Dad, Maisie and Rudy, Maisie’s husband. They said he had the ‘shock’.
I asked Dad about it once and he said it was like Uncle Merv’s heart was hurt, just like Dad’s leg, which was missing below the knee. This worried me. I didn’t believe it was possible to live without a heart and said so.
‘No, you can’t, Iris. That’s right,’ Dad said. ‘It’s more like Uncle Merv’s heart feels too much. He feels everything too damn much, darlin’.’
I stopped talking about it then because this made sense. This was how I came to think of Uncle Merv. I’d imagine his heart banging away inside this chest whenever he went quiet and forgot we were there. But, when I thought of the satin costume and scrunching my legs into the magician’s box and whipping out the fake ones while Uncle Merv spun it on its scratchy old castor wheels, my heart sang.
‘I think you would be great, that’s all,’ I said.
‘What?’ It took a while for him to focus on me.
‘I said I think you should be on the television.’
Uncle Merv smiled at me then. ‘I know you do, Iris.’ Then he took Buster’s lead down from its hook near the door and whistled once, nice and sharp. Buster exploded into the kitchen, slowed, wiggled his stumpy tail and disappeared out the back door on my uncle’s heels.
It was Dad who first saw the ad in the paper. He laughed out loud and said, ‘Sounds like just the thing for Mervin the Magician.’
Across the breakfast table, Mum cocked an eyebrow. Mostly she frowned, except when it came to my uncle. Everyone had a soft spot for him.
‘The television is coming to town,’ Dad said. He peered through the glasses perched on the end of his nose. ‘It says here, they are touring the country and want local performers.’
‘Now Jack, don’t push your brother into anything,’ Mum said. ‘You know how he is.’
Dad grinned at me. Even I knew Dad had been pushing his younger brother into things their entire lives.
‘Did you ever think Merv might want to do it, Marianne?’ Dad asked.
Mum raised her eyes to the heavens and something I didn’t understand passed between them.
‘What’s the television?’ I asked. I was imagining something like the circus which came to town from time to time.
‘Well darlin’,’ he said, leaning toward me, ‘its a bit like the moving pictures but it goes out on the airways like a transistor radio. It’s the newest thing, they say.’
Mum made a tutting noise and stood to collect the dishes, but I could tell by the way Dad had leaned toward me that the television was something special.
That day at school, I wasn’t the only kid talking about it. Everybody was. The whispers on parade moved up and down our class lines like squalls. Rupert Flossing was going to play the bugle and I understood that. Rupert’s Last Post each Anzac Day made the whole town cry. Ginger O’Grady was going to recite The Man From Snowy River, which was great because every time he did, you could see those horses plunging down the mountainside and you held your breath until the last. It was when Jillian and Rosemary McInerny said they were going to do their Irish dancing routine, the same one they did at the Cattleman and Horsemanship Show last August, that my insides crawled.
‘Our dance teacher is putting us up for it,’ Rosemary trilled at lunch time, as if getting on the television was a done thing.
Jillian bounced about on her skinny liquorice legs, leaking excitement everywhere. There was something about Jillian and Rosemary, Rosemary in particular, which got my goat. Everything seemed easy for them. No Dad with half a leg, no uncle with an over-feeling heart, or a cranky Mum.
I looked over their heads, as if I had something important to say, and kept my gaze there. Rosemary noticed first. She put out a hand to grab her sister’s wrist. Jillian stopped her jiggling and I had their attention. ‘Well’, I said. ‘My Uncle Merv is going to do his magic act…’ I waited for dramatic effect. ‘…And I’m going to be his assistant.’
Rosemary gasped. I knew she was imagining me in the satin costume Maisie normally wore. She was seeing me shining up there on stage with my arms spread wide and then seeing her own self in her prim Irish kilt and long white socks, popping about like a cork. A warmth seeped into my stomach and curled there like a cat.
Before I knew it, word had gotten around about Uncle Merv and me. Everyone was coming up and asking if it were true. Even Mrs Montagna, who threw me out of Italian class most Thursdays. For the rest of the day my body fizzed like sherbet. I was as excited as everybody else. So excited, I almost forgot it wasn’t true. Only when I was walking home did my belly take a downward turn.
Mum was removing her apron when I walked into the kitchen, the long tails of it whipping around her. ‘I’m off to Shay’s,’ she muttered. ‘I’ve run out of butter.’
Shay’s was our nearest general store and, according to Dad, ‘the sturdiest branch of the neighbourhood grapevine’. It was no place for my mum to be right now.
‘I can get it for you,’ I said quickly.
Mum stopped and stared at me.
‘I’ll take Dad’s old pushbike.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yep.’
‘Alright then. Be careful and stay on the footpaths.’
I saw Mum’s face relax. She didn’t smile, but she wasn’t frowning, and, on Mum, that was as good as a smile.
I leaned Dad’s bike against the timber cladding outside Shay’s and peered through the shop window. Mr Wilkins was reading the newspaper by the paper stand. Beyond him toward the back of the store, I caught sight of Mrs Thackery. She was reaching into the tall shelves behind the counter and bringing down packets of flour and sugar, all the while chatting to a woman in a flash black hat with a curling white bow on top of it. I pulled back from the window. Rosemary and Jillian’s mum was the only woman in the district who could afford a hat like that.
I was squinting through the window again when Mr Wilkins caught sight of me over his newspaper and waved and I felt I couldn’t stand there anymore. I waved back and made my way through the front doors. Mr Wilkins nodded to me. ‘How’s it going, Iris? How’s your dad and your uncle?’
‘Good thanks, Mr Wilkins,’ I said.
He went back to his newspaper and I was just about to move on when he looked up again. ‘I heard you and your uncle are going to do this television thing,’ he said, tapping his finger on the newspaper. ‘It’s been a long time since Merv put on his show,’ he chuckled. ‘Break a leg.’
It was then that Mrs Thackery spotted me. ‘Hey there, Iris,’ she called from behind the counter. ‘How’s your mum?’
’She’s good. Thanks, Mrs Thackery.’
Mrs McInerny’s black and white hat swivelled and by the time I had reached the counter, she was looking at me with her twinkling eyes. ‘Well, hello there, Iris. I hope everyone is well?’
‘Yes, very well,’ I said in an accent not quite my own.
‘I was happy to hear that you and your Uncle Mervin will be performing for the television. Very happy indeed.’
When I got home, Dad and Uncle Merv were in the sitting room listening to the cricket on the radio. I carried the butter into Mum and returned to perch on the arm of Dad’s chair. I sat very quietly and didn’t fidget. I watched as my uncle took one long swallow of beer after another until his glass was empty and the long-necked beer bottle too. That was when I sprang to my feet.
‘Would you like another bottle of beer, Uncle Merv? I can get one from the fridge.’
Dad swivelled in the chair and crooked his neck so he could see me properly. His grin was big and wide and showed a gap on the side where he had lost a tooth. ’So what’s got into you, darlin’?’ he asked me.
’Nothin’. I was just trying to be helpful.’
‘Is that right?’ he said, still peering at me.
‘Yup.’
‘Okay, then. Your uncle would love a beer, wouldn’t you, Merv?’
Uncle Merv nodded. ’Sure would, Iris, and maybe you could get your Dad another as well.’
That night at dinner, I helped Mum carry the dishes through to the dining room and scraped the plates afterwards. I dried the dishes and stacked them away, with Uncle Merv washing up alongside me. I’d promised myself I’d let it be and not ask him about doing the magic show, but in the end I couldn’t help myself. He was draining the water from the sink, when I blurted it out: ‘So have you thought any more about the television?’
Uncle Merv draped the dishcloth over the spout. He kept his eye on it as if it might fall. ‘I don’t know, Iris. I don’t think I want to be going and doing something like that.’
‘Why?’ I didn’t mean to whine.
‘Because I don’t think I’d be any good.’
‘I could be your assistant, Uncle Merv. Maisie would show me what to do. She could train me,’ I pleaded. Mum came in just then and I could tell she had heard enough to work out the rest. ‘Iris, you leave your uncle alone. If Merv says he doesn’t want to perform for the television, he means it.’
In bed that night, I could see the smirk on Rosemary McInerny’s face, the curl of her pouty top lip and the gleam in her eye. I imagined her spreading the news, telling whoever would listen that she knew I had lied. It was the worst kind of defeat.
I crept into the kitchen and stole one of Mum’s ginger nuts from the biscuit jar on the high shelf and shoved it into my top pocket, my biscuit pocket, I called it. I tested the door which led outside to the back porch, turning the knob slowly, so it wouldn’t creak. There were many nights where I’d done this same thing, while Uncle Merv and Dad were away at the war. But it was the first time, I’d done it since they came home.
The moon was a sliver above the clothesline and the tall bushes along the back fence made a swishing noise in a light breeze. I sat on the back step and took out my biscuit. I’d eat it slowly. I’d take tiny bites and let it get soft all over my tongue before I’d swallow it down. I told myself that by the time I was done, I wouldn’t care about Rosemary Thackary or the magic act and the television anymore.
It didn’t work though. When the last of the soggy ginger nut trickled down the back of my throat, I felt the pain of it again, new and fresh and a tear leaked out and ran down the side of my nose and then another and another. A sob and a gulp. Now, I was no cry-baby. I took my medicine with the best of them, but as much as I tried to choke those tears back, they just keep coming and in the end, I didn’t much care why.
Above my own whimpering, I heard the slap of a footfall and some throat-clearing coming from the shadow cast by Mum’s hydrangea. I stopped my blubbering and wiped my snotty face. Just maybe in the dark, I’d pass for normal.
‘You alright, Iris?’
It was Uncle Merv. ‘Yep, I’m good thanks,’ I said.
He moved out of the shadows and came to stand by the stairs looking back into the yard. ‘Why aren’t you in bed? It’s very late.’
‘I could ask you the same thing, couldn’t I?’ I said. I didn’t like it that Uncle Merv had heard me crying.
‘I suppose you could,’ he said. ‘If I tell you, will you tell me?’
‘Maybe,’ I said, buying time.
Uncle Merv looked over at me as if he knew I was lying, but came to sit beside me on the stairs anyway.
‘I don’t sleep much,’ he said, ‘not since coming home, that is.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s the nightmares, honey. I have nightmares almost every time I close my eyes, so I’ve stopped closing them,” my uncle said.
‘But Mum says you can’t live without sleep.’
He looked a long way into the garden then. ‘Your mother’s a smart woman.’
’Smarter than Dad?’
‘A helluva lot smarter than us both,’ he said, and a smile curved his bottom lip.
’So you have to be sleeping, right?’
’Sure. I sleep in the afternoon, when I can hear your mother and your dad in the kitchen. They chase the nightmares away.’
’So what’s in your nightmares? People blowing up and stuff?’
’That’s about it, I’d say,’ Merv said. ’So what about you?’
The time had come and gone when I could reneg on my promise. Uncle Merv had been straight with me. He always told the truth and that’s why everybody loved him.
‘Iris?’
‘I wanted to do the television so much that —’. My crying started up again.
‘What did you do?’
It hadn’t seemed so bad when I said it to Rosemary and Jillian. I’d wanted them to feel jealous of me for once. But saying it now was hard. I couldn’t even make the words with my mouth.
‘Iris, what did you do?’
‘I lied, Uncle Merv. I told Rosemary and Jillian McInerny that you and I were doing the magician show for the television.’
My uncle made a rattling sound in the back of his throat and I couldn’t tell whether he was disgusted with me or laughing at me. I sat very still and waited.
’So, why would you do that then?’ His voice was thick.
‘I dunno,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders and dislodging his arm and burrowing deeper into the stair I was perched on. I was a little kid when Dad and Uncle Merv left. It was like Mum and me held our breath the whole time they were away, and we were still holding it because now, even though we had them back, everything had changed.
We sat for a long time. The sliver of a moon arced away from the clothesline toward the back fence and a night bird called from Rose Lane. In the distance came the chugging of the supply train to Melbourne, the sound building and then fading away again. I was thinking enough time had passed that I could stand and excuse myself, when I felt the weight of Uncle Merv’s arm across my shoulders again.
‘I can’t do it, Iris,’ he said. ‘I just can’t.’
‘But why? Don’t you think it will be fun with all those people watching on the television?’ I turned sideways to look him in the face. ‘We’d be like movie stars.’
Uncle Merv kept staring straight ahead, and I knew he was stuck again. The night bird called and the moon kept climbing until it was high above the gum tree at the end of the yard. Then, Uncle Merv shifted and leaned into me a little. I felt the warmth of his side against the warmth of mine.
‘I don’t do magic anymore, Iris. I just don’t believe in it,’ he said.
THE END