Charades by Janette Turner Hospital

That’s something, isn’t it? A garbage and slops collector, a feeder of pigs, who painted. He used the sides of old tea chests and it was not a habit he admitted to; he kept it a deathly dark secret, I can promise you, but Michael found his hoard at the back of their shack and showed me. There were also crude likenesses of my mother in clotted ochres and greens, a Honey Bea deep in the wattles.”
    â€œAnd Verity,” Koenig prompts. “What did she look like?”
    â€œShe was tall and pale gold with brown eyes and long, long hair which she wore hanging loose to the waist. It was black and thick as a tree fern’s roots. I’ll tell you the tale of Nicholas and Verity that Michael Donovan’s dad told to Brian, his older son.”
    And her voice slid
    over the waterfall
    at the back of the Donovan
    shack and down down down to the basso pool at the very bottom of the beer-and-phlegm throat of Michael Donovan’s dad, who says, “There’s some women just waiting to be bruised. Don’t ask me how or why they got that way, but they give off something, you know? They got big dark eyes, set deep, asking to be made to cry — though they don’t, they won’t cry, these women. They just get silent. They bruise. That Verity woman — the Ashcan, Bea used to call her — she was one of those.”
    Mick Donovan could have sworn, so he tells his son, that she had a streak of Abo in her, that she stepped out of the Dreamtime, a ghost lubra with her hair black as sin and that golden body begging to be manhandled and eyes that could set a man to howling like a dingo, except she wasn’t even born in Australia. She was from somewhere else. “An Eyetie, maybe,” he says. “Some kind of wop. Foreign, anyway. I dunno where she was from, but wherever it was she shouldn’t have left there. Talked with a plum in her mouth.”
    He runs his tongue over his lips, licking at the beer mist on his stubble, and his son Brian looks away and winks at a cream- and-molasses barmaid.
    â€œAnd so did that Nicholas bloke who followed her around, so did he. Talk about plum in the mouth! He musta swallowed a fruit shop, an entire greengrocery,” says Mick Donovan with sudden violence. “Bloody Pommy, bloody fraud. His christly voice come out his mouth wearing corsets and crocheted knickers.”
    Brian says: “Keep yer shirt on, Dad. The bloke’s been gone for donkey’s years.”
    â€œI only met the bastard once,” growls Mick Donovan, “and that was one time too many. He walks into McGillivray’s pub on the 26th of January, 1963, not a day I’m likely to forget, the day Bea Ryan turned twenty-one.”
    Brian laughs. “Australia Day? Ma Antsy-Pants Ryan born on Oz Day? Pull the other one, Dad.”
    Mick Donovan swipes his son across the cheek, Brian lurches, knocks over his chair, a bystander thumps Mick hard on the back saying, “Watch it, mate!” and Brian raises his fists at the bystander: “Keep yer bloody hands off my dad.”
    Mick says: “If I ever hear you talk that way about Bea Ryan again, I’ll knock yer socks off.”
    He drains his glass and calls for two more and gooses the barmaid when she comes.
    â€œI reckon every man-jack of us wanted Bea,” he says, “and the whole of the Tamborine Mountain was gonna dance at her party that night. I dunno what it was about Bea. She already had a kid by then, Sid Andrews’ son, and Sid had buggered off to God knows where. But she still drove us crazier than any six virgins.
    â€œSo this party is planned and I have to take Maureen — God rest yer mother’s soul. Maureen — and every other sheila on the mountain — watches Bea as though Bea is a snake. But twenty-one is twenty-one, and the whole world is gonna drink at this shindig.
    â€œWell, it’s January and ninety-six in the