The Last Summer of Ada Bloom Read online

  About the Book

  During one long, hot summer in a small country town, the Bloom family begins to unravel.

  Martha is straining against the confines of her life, lost in regret, as she busies herself with the minutiae of motherhood, the care of her drought-stricken garden and the unnerving visit of a man from her past.

  Mike is frustrated with his increasingly distant wife and tempted by the flirtations of her lascivious friend.

  And while teenagers Tilly and Ben are straining to step out into the world, nine-year-old Ada is holding on to a childhood that will soon be wrenched from her—as secrets, old and new, rise to the surface, with devastating effect.

  The Last Summer of Ada Bloom is a tender and life-affirming novel about the fragility of family relationships—about the secrets we keep and the power they hold to shape our lives.

  This one is for Mannie

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  1

  Ada found a forgotten windmill. She was walking with PJ in the patch of bush between her house and Toby Layton’s. She was already nine and still wearing her jumper back to front, but PJ was old and broad as a wombat, with only three legs that worked, so he waddled along slowly, and Ada often had to stop and wait for him. She swished a stick, absentmindedly whacking at the tea-tree and singing over and over again, Did you ever come to meet me, Farmer Joe, Farmer Joe? She couldn’t remember the next line. She wasn’t even sure the words were right, but because she was alone, and because it was her travelling-along song, she sang the words as loudly and confidently as a trumpet. The bush was unaffected by her song. This was the great consolation that trees provided—they heard her without commenting.

  It was early enough that the air was cool and there was a damp, silvery gleam and rustle to the leaves. The song ribboned ahead, as if escaping, drawing her through the thin trees and pale sky as if she belonged naturally to the landscape—as if she was not the child Ada Bloom with a bunk bed and a green bike and words to speak or homework to do, but a creature whose soul could rise with the trees and enter by the breath of song.

  Ada followed her song deeper into the bush, until the windmill loomed up before her. Its tin blades creaked and flapped like startled elbows, causing Ada to swallow her song whole. She gathered herself, with some indignation. She had never seen this windmill or the little clearing it presided over. Was it right that it should be there, hiding away in her own patch of forest? Its stature made it seem important, but also forbidding, like the headmaster at school, whose appearance caused in Ada the same sort of disobedient urge. And if Mr Gray had been a windmill instead of an old headmaster this was exactly the sort of windmill he would be: stern as a judge, with a ghostly clanging air and rotting on the inside.

  The windmill was cross, Ada could tell, because it had been forgotten. It was terrible to be forgotten. As if it was a curse to even think it, Ada dropped to her knees and scratched her name into the dirt with her stick. Ada is here.

  But the windmill didn’t care. It was bitter and stricken and so haunted with olden times and so neglected by current ones that its struts were as rutted and splintering as old people’s bones. From its damp wooden skeleton came the stink of rot. Ada never wanted to become an old person. The old windmill was secretly forlorn about it and probably dying. Yet it wasn’t this aspect of death that scared Ada, but more the sense that the old windmill was possessed of a life and that, with the remaining shreds of it, it rattled and stood, guarding its last tenure with mad gusts of faltering pride. Ada moved forward to touch it, half hoping for a nasty great-aunt shriek. Instead, and in a malevolent silence, it revealed a great never-ending hole, which it straddled, and from which came a chill breath of buried darkness. Ada stepped back.

  PJ gave the hole a wary sniff. This hole definitely had some intent; it was square and lined with wood, and fixed to one side was a wooden ladder whose first rungs had almost rotted away.

  The ladder went down further than Ada could see. She dropped her stick in and watched the hole swallow it down so far she couldn’t hear it land.

  Her mind began to dance. What lay at the bottom of the hole? Did it have a bottom, or did it go right through the earth into foreign nights? What would happen to her if she dropped down the hole? A pleasant tremor of danger passed through her; she squatted next to PJ for comfort. Then she stood up and pushed some dried-up leaves and twigs into the hole with her foot and leaned over to watch them fall. The sight made her almost black with dizziness and she ran back through the bush, as if something was chasing her, even if it was just the thought of climbing down into that hole.

  She ran home to get the others. There was no point if nobody saw her do it.

  Tilly was at the window, reading. She uncurled her legs and frowned disbelievingly. ‘Don’t tell Mum or we won’t be allowed to go there.’ She sighed, as if weary of the hole before she had even seen it.

  Let her be bored. Tilly was already seventeen and had taken on grown-up airs. Ada went to round up the littlies, and Raff Cavallo and Ben. Then Tilly decided she would come, after all. Ada led them through the bush to the old windmill. She planned to show Raff Cavallo her trees. Especially William Blake, who was the largest, a blue gum. Ada had found names for the trees on the spines of books on her mother’s bookshelf. In her mind, Emily Dickinson, who was a black-tailed wallaby, would stand nearby, marvelling at Ada’s courage.

  But Emily Dickinson wasn’t there, and Ada didn’t tell Raff Cavallo anything about William Blake. Instead, as they all followed her through the bush, she bloated up with a shy sort of importance, so that she marched irreverently like a grown up, ignoring the trees, even William Blake.

  When Tilly saw the endless hole, she pretended it wasn’t anything. She said it was only a mineshaft left over from the gold rush. She walked back through the bush without even dropping a stone in the hole. Ada watched her disappear into the tea-tree and fumed. Tilly had ruined the hole’s mystery. She had named it, even though it was too full of gloom and portent to be gathered up into a name.

  Raff watched her go too. He watched her intently for ages, and then he jerked his head away as if he’d been stung. He picked up a stone and flung it at the windmill blades, which it hit and ricocheted off. None of the others cared though. It was clear that the most thrilling way to use the hole was to dare to climb down the rotting ladder and to see how far it went.

  ‘I’ll go down first, since I am the one who discovered it,’ Ada declared. If she went down first, before the big boys, everyone would know that Ada Bloom was someone.

  The h
ardest part was that the first rungs were rotting. If her foot slipped or a rung gave way, then she would fall down the hole like that stick. She went as fast as she could, so as to not leave her weight anywhere for too long. Tilly was wrong—the hole was alive, swarming with secret blackness and doom. Ada could feel it. Hidden there were the earth’s very insides: the unseen, long-silenced, rattling bones of life’s endings. And it reached up and around her with a cold-tongue silence. She drew herself into a tight fist of concentration and went deeper. Down into elsewhere, while the world above her faded and the bush sounds hushed, and the daylight shrunk itself into a heartbeat of brightness above her.

  Ben was shouting at her. The panic in his voice came chasing her down the hole.

  Her stomach unfurled. If she didn’t get up right away, she would fall. She raced against the old windmill, against its endless, obliterating hole. A monstrous, unholy death suddenly had her within its grasp.

  She reached the top and wriggled out, blinking in the light and gasping with relief.

  Ben glared at her. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Ada,’ he said.

  But Ada was elated. She had gone so close to death and escaped it. She gazed up triumphantly at Raff Cavallo. For one glorious moment their grins burst together in a conspiratorial fire, but in the same instant his grin rode above hers, mocked it with faint amusement and then trampled it with a snort of laughter. ‘Crazy kid,’ he said, ‘You could have died down there.’

  2

  Martha walked with Ada to the bus. Ada didn’t need her, but Martha wanted to go; it was one of the simple rituals of motherhood still available to her. PJ needed the walk too. It was the right distance for a three-legged dog. It only took twenty minutes. She could give her whole attention to it. And Ada and PJ were the easiest beings to walk with: Ada’s little hand nestled in hers, and PJ’s lopsided waddle accompanied her bird-like chatter, so that the world felt as if it had been dreamed into existence. Someone had told Martha that listening to birdsong was good for one’s health. So there was that too. Health was important. And then to watch the morning take hold, to be borne up by the unfolding motion of it, as if she too was just a tree shaking its branches in the growing light.

  Afterwards, with just PJ, she felt a slight downturn in mood, as if through a crack in atmosphere, her simple, timeless morning was losing air. Was it that the bus had taken Ada and her task away? That PJ panted and plodded—an incontrovertible sign of old age, which was dismal, inevitable and looming? Soon she would be the one to plod and pant or hobble inelegantly along. And that now the walk was almost over, she would be home again, and life would surge in with all its vague dissatisfactions and petty irritations: the kitchen would be in a mess, the day would be too hot, the garden would need to be watered. Even worse was the sense that none of this mattered and that whatever it was that did matter eluded her.

  Today at least was swim club. Today she’d meet Susie at the pool. She could never talk herself into exercise; she had to arrange to meet Susie there or she wouldn’t go. Even then she was reluctant. She didn’t like swimming—she liked having swum. She liked moaning with Susie afterwards in the sauna. It was possibly more therapeutic to moan than to swim. She only swam for her arthritic toe. When she first got the pain and the doctor had said the word arthritis, her heart dived down and hid from the diagnosis. It was the first sign, a harbinger of the degradations of age. She had arrived on that other side of life where bodies start to undo.

  Of course, it wasn’t exactly like that. Life was fluid; she had been undoing for a long time, and every now and then something had the bad taste to make a stark announcement. The woman at the desk didn’t have arthritis yet, it had to be said. She wore cornflower-blue eye shadow and a sun visor. She was cheerful and always said, ‘Enjoy your swim.’ The pool had recently been subjected to a renovation. What satisfaction it must have given that cheerful lady to set that potted palm down in the reception area, endowing it with a hint of hotel-lobby pizazz.

  But Martha missed the old pool. Or she just missed the man at the desk who called her mate as he leaned on one over-sized arm. ‘Mate, it’s bloody hot, isn’t it?’ Always sunstruck or slightly hungover or just so lazy his voice dropped out as if by mistake. He had once mentioned the difficulty of getting his double bass in the car. It had surprised her. How had he mustered the energy to learn an instrument when he could barely be bothered to talk? Another time he told her that the pool was closed on certain Fridays for nude swimming. She couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. He was one of those men. Dry, large, laconic. She loved how devoid of ambition or drive he was. He was another country to her.

  Then, one day he was gone. No one knew what happened. He just skipped town. So he was a scoundrel, really. Martha was glad to have known a scoundrel. The pool was closed for months. And she hadn’t realised till then that the man at the desk, the scoundrel whose name she didn’t know, had been part of her life and now it didn’t feel the same to go swimming. The pool was bright now, as if someone had just turned the lights on and cleaned out all the shadows.

  Susie was all for the new brightness. She was in the changing room, already humming, one foot on the wooden bench, stuffing her hair under her rubber cap, and probably ignoring Sheila who was head down, drying her hair with the hand dryer, her showered body pink and gleaming like a pig. Sheila was older and doing pottery and waiting for grandchildren to appear. At that end of life. Brimming with observations, Sheila guffawed a lot and said things like, what rubbish, what utter rot, and since these disparagements issued from the authority of a naked body, they seemed to Martha irrefutable, even if she disagreed. Even Sheila’s flat sloping-down breasts were not obliged to be otherwise. There was some dignity in this. Sheila’s body was as comfortable as an old tracksuit. Martha’s body was a site of faultlines, from which she averted her own gaze with an anxious sense of failure.

  Sheila paused to give forth on her lover Peter—why did Martha always imagine him in striped pyjamas?—whose house had recently flooded and who bored her in most ways, but she put up with him for the sex. Martha blushed inwardly, but outwardly she laughed like a compatriot. As if she too would take a boring man as a lover just for the sex. But Martha could never be that casual about sex.

  Martha undressed quickly. Then she swam as fast as she could. She always did it this way. The idea of exercise made it tiring. She was tired of feeling there was something she should have done, have arrived at, have vanquished. She gave it all she had and then collapsed. Susie paced herself, went steady the whole way. Her doggedness was unnerving, if only because it accentuated Martha’s flimsiness.

  Susie had first approached Martha at the kids’ school, wearing lipstick and a tube skirt and showing straightaway that she had an animal nature. Since Tilly had made friends with her daughter, Alice, Susie thought she and Martha should have a cup of coffee. Martha didn’t drink coffee—her system was too fragile—but she said yes anyway, as she was ashamed of her fragility and the caution it required, and she sometimes staged minor, fleeting rebellions, which she later regretted. Susie instantly consulted a diary. Martha thought they could never be friends, but later in Susie’s kitchen, Susie had laughed avidly and given Martha the sense that there was something else to be got at in life, something Martha had not yet uncovered. She spoke of everything as if it was still alive with possibility. Susie had peered over her mug of coffee. ‘Well, my dear husband, Joe, kindest man alive, but he has some trouble you know…’

  Martha didn’t know. She waited.

  Susie put her hand to her mouth as if sheltering the admission, though no one was there except Martha, ‘Getting it up,’ she said.

  Martha had met Joe already. He was a big, kind, weary man, with a slight paunch. Martha felt for him. He looked like someone whose will had been stamped on early in life and who had given in to his own diminishment. Not like Mike. Mike strutted from one posture to the next, a real rooster. He was always ready for action.

  ‘Oh, my husband has
the opposite problem—of not keeping it down.’ Martha shocked herself for saying such a thing. She had meant it to be funny—even though it was true.

  But Susie didn’t laugh; she slid luxuriously forward across her peach laminate bench. ‘Honey, in my books, that is not a problem.’ She spoke the words with great dramatic effect.

  Martha laughed to cover up a sudden feeling of inadequacy. She felt so unwomanly, so lacking in carnal impulse. Yet it was thrilling to be in the midst of such a conversation and she wanted it to keep going. No one had ever before spoken to her about the deep and personal intricacies of relationships. Maybe she and Susie would be friends after all.

  Over the years, Martha had been surprised at how much she was able to divulge, how Susie’s candour had led her out of herself, and how it was a relief to say it: to admit she was bored; her husband was tiresome; he only thought about one thing, no two things—sex and tennis.

  That wasn’t completely true, of course. Though the possibility of it had shocked Martha, once she had said it. She tried to think of what she loved in Mike. His jaw for instance when he leaned in to kiss her. His good humour and steadiness. His reliability. If he said he would do something, then he would. That was something after all. Mike had nice hands too; when he irritated her, she would look at his hands to see if they might strike in her that little flare of love.

  Martha summoned another burst of energy and plunged into her laps again. She tried to keep her head down and watch the painted line beneath her and not think so much. When she fatigued, she thought of her big toe and pushed on. If she stopped for too long, the ache in her toe joint would get the better of her. There was another woman who swam for her arthritis, an English woman with buck teeth, who told Martha that when she was a young mother in England she had been so poor that she had eaten chips from a rubbish bin. Martha couldn’t offer anything that would compare. She wanted to have lived beyond the bounds of her own small existence. She wanted to be a loudmouth, to have skipped town, played the double bass, driven trucks across deserts, got drunk in dive bars and been dirt poor, lost in the wilderness or jailed for protesting. The things she hadn’t done seemed more character-building than those she had, and she suspected that those sorts of experiences were what she was lacking. She hadn’t transgressed. She had simply kept going. What had made her so careful?