‘Just like a lot of conversation,’ Gran had said dryly on one occasion when Matthew squatting to observe the yeast had remarked that ‘it was talking’. He didn’t understand her tartness. That something could move constantly of its own accord fascinated him.
‘Can it hurt?’ he had asked.
‘No.’
‘But it moves.’
‘Yes.’
‘Things that move are alive.’
‘Not all things. If you throw a stone it moves.’
He sat back on his heels, wrestling with that idea, unaware that she watched him, wondering if he could think through the difference.
‘But I throw the stone, Gran. It moves because of me. It can’t move on its own. The yeast moves from inside like I do.’
She put an arm about him. ‘So it does. So it does.’ And she hugged him and laughed. ‘But it doesn’t hurt, Matthew. Not all sorts of living are the same.’
Now Matthew looked at the talking yeast from the doorway, at Gran, and at his mother who, also shrouded in a white apron, stirred a pot of jam. He sniffed the hot toffee-sweet smell of spilled sugar burnt upon the stove.
Their arrested arm movements gave them a fixed waxy appearance, like figures caught in time later to be paraded as examples of earlier life. All the artefacts were there: the blacked wood-fire range, with heavy iron-spouted kettle at one side and red polished stonework about its base; the small narrow window with lace curtains above the sink, its single tap and wooden draining board; the central wooden table and four wooden chairs painted dark green to match the linoleum; the wooden wire-meshed door letting in a few shafts of morning light.
A floury warm sweet gloom pervaded the room and the grey light in which the women moved, used to rooms which like themselves were merely adjuncts, the kitchen to the house and its central living areas, they to society and its important members.
Matthew, caught in his own fragment of time, recognised none of this. His perceptions grasped the familiar. Memory had told him it would be like this. He had visualised it as he ran home. Certainly the arrangements might have altered, like flowers in a bowl can be arranged in different modes, but the bowl and the flowers themselves could not change. This he believed with all the knowledge of his nine years. And of course it would be like this always. Time was not change to Matthew: only a repetition of the present.
Gran wiped her hands across her apron and held out her arms. Matthew threw himself against her stomach and chest so that she rocked on her feet and had to fix her back against the table.
‘I let them go, Gran, the yabbies. They aren’t like yeast. They stare at you and wave their claws and fronds above the water like this,’ and he lifted his hands and crooked his fingers and swayed his arms above his head. ‘And the crayfish Clicketty Tonkin brought screamed in the hot water. It’s nice and cool in the river.’
‘So it is.’ Sarah smoothed his hair from his forehead and smiled down into his hot anxious face. ‘So it is, nice and cool. I’ve often thought that myself on a hot day and waggled my toes on the edge. Cool and soft and kind. And you let the poor things go?’
He gulped.
‘And you were glad and upset and didn’t want to choose? It was hard to let them go after you’d been smart enough to catch them?’
He nodded.
‘And you didn’t want to choose?’
He shook his head and sobbed.
‘Poor Matthew,’ she sighed, and rocked him against her and crooned. ‘Ah, choices are terrible things to make.’
‘It took so long to catch them, Gran. I waited for hours and hours and hours. And Mother wanted yabby tails for her party. But they looked so sad. If you’d been there, Gran, you’d have told me what to do, wouldn’t you?’ He clung. Next time, he was certain, Gran would save him from such agony.
For a moment Gran stopped her rocking and her gentle indulgent smile left her face. He didn’t like it when adults changed their moods in this way. Something unpredictable had entered the room, a finger extended from somewhere unknown had touched him lightly on the shoulder in warning. Although of what he couldn’t tell.
A second passed and Gran’s eyes refocused on him. ‘Wash your face and hands and you can help me make bread rolls.’ She released him and gently pushed him in the direction of the outside laundry. With a hand on the door he hesitated and turned back towards her. His expression, without guile, was still confused, still distressed. She had not answered the question he most needed an answer for—not whether his choice had been correct, he wasn’t ready for that, but whether she would always be there to help him make his choices.
‘I’ll be there most times, Matthew. We’ll decide together.’
‘You and me, Gran.’
‘Yes, you and me, darling.’
He smiled, shoved the door open and with a whoop cleared the step in a leap. Flouncing to the crockery cabinet, his mother snatched a bowl with a clattering of dishes and strode back to the stove. She stirred the jam with fierce jabs, dug in the ladle, hauled it out brimming with froth-flecked jam and slopped it into the bowl. Her carelessness left a dark trail of red stickiness across the stove and hot burnt sugary fumes smoking in the kitchen.
‘I don’t know why you have to spoil him. All that fuss over a few yabbies.’
‘It wasn’t about yabbies.’
‘It seemed like it was about yabbies to me. He caught them. They got away and then he comes crying to you to help him catch them next time.’
‘He let them go. They didn’t escape.’
Margaret scoffed. ‘If you will believe all that rigmarole.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Margaret. Some people are troubled by decisions—unlike you. If you’d been more troubled by decisions you wouldn’t have that encumbrance
