Penguin Books Australia

Belle Carson was a good-looker, the best looker for miles around; even those who didn't like her (which included most of the women in town and quite a few of the men) had to admit that. But they also agreed she was as nutty as a fruitcake, and in the manner of small communities the bush telegraph – which spread any gossip the least bit unusual or outrageous – frequently carried news of her.

Five-feet-seven, slim as a reed with soft dark hair and blue eyes to drown in, Belle couldn't help it; she was always unusual, and often outrageous. It was a recurrent nightmare for her eight-year-old son, Teddy. Whenever he and his dad were with her, he'd notice the sly looks and the way people raised their eyebrows and muttered to each other. Gabbing, George called it, a bunch of old boilers cackling, which meant his dad felt it too – the talk about them, the constant chitchat.

But it was worse at school. Teddy was on his own there. Piggy Morgan said Belle was a dingbat. Tom Parkes said she was as mad as a blue gum full of galahs. The rest of the class sniggered agreement and pronounced her a loony. Got tickets on herself, they said, even if she had been on the stage in the city, and was supposed to be famous. This was in frequent dispute, for none of them had ever heard of her and neither had their parents, so she couldn't have been all that famous. Bill Burwood, the son of the bank manager, reckoned the biggest part she'd ever played was probably the arse-end of a horse in a pantomime. So Teddy, though two years younger and three inches shorter, fought him.

Big or small, each time a boy made an insulting comment or a dirty joke about his mum, Teddy felt compelled to fight them. He'd lost count of the number of fights he'd had in Belle's defence, and was painfully aware he had managed to win none of them. He had suffered cut lips, bruised ribs and greater humiliations: his head held down the black pit of the school dunny by the big boys until the stench made him sick; treacle spread on his seat in class; and once an agonising Chinese burn on his wrist while the teacher, Mrs Lassitter, wrote on the blackboard with her back turned. Daily he went to school in dread, enduring more torment than he dared mention at home.

Meanwhile he kept wondering if one of the taunts levelled at him could possibly be true – that George was not really his dad at all and therefore he was a bastard. It was hard to know how to ask Belle about this, but ask he must. He thought about it when trying to sleep at night, rehearsing what he could say, and several times braced himself to try, but his mouth felt dry and his tongue too thick to pose the question. Then one day it just happened.

Belle was making a stew, peeling carrots and potatoes in their tiny kitchen, which seemed even smaller since the delivery of the new Hallstrom refrigerator earlier that week. It was an invention that ran on kerosene – Teddy couldn't understand how, but it kept food and drinks colder than their old icebox – and they no longer had to have the iceman call each day. George had been able to buy the machine at a special price on easy terms because he was in the sales department of Gable's of Gundagai, the big local emporium, and Belle had been in a good mood ever since it arrived, so this was the moment.

'Am I a bastard?' he blurted out, then was terrified when her face changed from shock to anger. For a moment he thought she might hit him. She never had raised a hand against him, but there was always a first time, so he was on the back foot and ready to run, in case. But her anger was not directed at him.

'Who said such a thing?' She knelt and put her arms around him, and he could feel her shaking.

'Just some kids,' Teddy mumbled, wishing he had said nothing.

'Who? Little brutes. Give me their names, darling.'

'I can't, Mum. I forget who it was.'

'No, you don't, my pet.'

'I do, honest.'

'Don't say honest like that when you're not telling the truth. We both know you're not.' She hugged him so tightly he could feel her whole body trembling, and he had a strange feeling she was going to cry. 'I won't make you tell, but you must promise me one thing.'

'What, Mum?'

'Not to believe them, or their nasty, stupid lies.'

He gladly promised, because it was the answer he had wanted. What a relief. It meant George really was his dad, so he couldn't be a bastard. After another hug Belle released him and stood up. There were tears in her eyes, but she quickly looked away so he knew he was not meant to see them.

'I'll get you a cold lemonade.' She went to the new machine. 'I hate this shitty little town,' she said, but it was more of a whisper, and he knew he was not meant to hear this either.

The gate always squeaked. George kept oiling it, but after a few days the squeak returned. It was a sound they lived with, like the rows every Friday night next door when Harry Lucas came home from the pub and started belting his wife Essie. Like the dog across the road that yapped when anyone walked past, or Mr Miranda cutting his grass at the same time each Sunday morning, the clatter of his mower waking people trying to sleep in. When he finished they knew it was an hour before church time, because Mr Miranda was a verger at St Thomas's who carried the collection plate, and he'd be showered and in his best suit – his only suit – before the bells rang.

George said Mr Miranda's lawnmower drove him batty, as did Harry Lucas yelling abuse at his wife, while the dog catcher ought to sort out the bloody yapper opposite, whereas the squeaking gate at least had its uses. After all, nobody could arrive out of the blue and catch them having a bit of a feel, or even doing it in the cot. Belle told him not to be so coarse in front of you-know-who.

Her name was really Arabella; Teddy had once heard old Aunty Ethel call her that, but Belle said she'd changed it when she was twelve, after her parents died. Even at that age she'd known Arabella was not the right kind of name for a theatrical poster. And now that Aunty Ethel herself had gone to heaven, no one called her anything but Belle.

On the porch behind their house was an almost-inside lavatory that had replaced the old thunderbox in the backyard, because Teddy's mum, who feared no man or woman, was terrified of spiders. One day while Belle sat there, absorbed in the local paper, a lethal red-back crawled across the page and onto the editorial she was reading. She emerged from the tin shed with a scream, spent the day in constipated discomfort, and that night said it was time George arranged for something a bit more civilised.

So George put on his best suit (the one the army had given him on his discharge, which he only wore to weddings or funerals) and went to see Clarry Burwood at the Bank of New South Wales. After a lot of talk and having to sign second mortgage papers, he managed to borrow enough money so they could install the new chemical system called a Hygeia Dissolvenator, which meant the dunny men did not have to call each week to empty the pan. Theirs was the only house in the neighbourhood with such a contraption, the only place the cart drove past on its weekly collections, and it made them different.

Teddy didn't like being different. It meant people talked about you, which was the worst thing that could happen in the town. Although, he had to admit, Belle truly was different from anyone else in Gundagai. Nobody else who lived there could say they'd been on the stage – a star. He'd seen the photos in her scrapbook and heard her friends talk when they came to visit. So whatever else he had to put up with – even the taunts and fights at school – Belle really had been famous; her name was on theatre posters and programs that hung in neat frames all over the house, and no other kid in town could claim that. At nights even after the worst days, trying to sleep and forget the teasing or the punches, he could at least rely on the fact his mum was celebrated.

It was a word she used, and he'd asked her what it meant.

'Well known,' she told him. 'A sort of fame, if I can venture to say that. What I mean is, if I walked into the Theatre Royal even now, Jimmy the stage doorman would know me. He'd remember. Jimmy used to say he never forgot a pretty face. My darling, it was a wonderful time in those days, so stimulating and exciting. Good audiences, packed houses, and after the shows at night there'd be chaps outside, waiting.'

'Waiting for what, Mum?'

'For my autograph, dearest heart.' She said it with a wistful sigh, as if there was more to it, but it was not something she could explain, not until he was older.

Behind their house a strip of land straggled down an unruly incline, a wilderness of paspalum, lantana and wild blackberry bushes. Almost obscured where the land ended was a muddy stream. Sometimes, on the far side of town this trickle of water managed to reach the Murrumbidgee, but only when aided by a downpour of torrential rain. Not that this mattered to Belle. She said it was a tributary of a majestic river on which paddle-steamers had once sailed. She never ventured close enough to see the stagnant seepage and the tadpoles that bred in it.

'Our house by the river' she was given to calling it, and some nights, after a few extra glasses of wine, she would refer to their tiny two-bedroom fibro cottage with its peeling paint and rusty iron roof as Notre maison près de Ia rivière. This was invariably said with the trace of a laugh and it always sounded a bit peculiar, as if she was talking with a clothes peg on her nose – a fact Teddy was once unwise enough to express aloud, only to be promptly told off by Belle in her most scathing style.

'Darling, try not to be a Philistine,' she scolded, 'even if we do dwell among Goths and Vandals.'

'Who, Mum?'

'Never mind. It happens to be the way the French speak, using the correct Gallic accent, mon petit, and I won't allow you to be an ignoramus like others in this desolate district who deprecate France, which is a cultured, civilised place . . .'

Teddy wondered what deprecate meant, and whether he should ask, but Belle was in full flow and there was no chance.

An aesthetic country, full of fine intellectuals and artists – quite unlike here – after all, it was the birthplace of Racine, Debussy, Voltaire and Moliere. Not forgetting Zola, Chopin or Claude Monet.'

He had never heard of any of them. But from that time on, Notre maison près de la rivière it was, which became awkward. Such things travelled swiftly through the town. It meant another three fights at school, all of which he lost.