The Best Kind of Beautiful Read online

  A single, purple flower fell on Florence’s shoulder, and she felt the soft shock of Albert’s hand plucking it off.

  ‘The first of the season,’ he was saying. ‘You know it’s good luck if a jacaranda flower falls on you.’

  ‘I thought it meant if you hadn’t started studying for your exams you were in trouble,’ she answered.

  ‘That too,’ Albert grinned. ‘Anyway, you were saying about Puck’s travels, do you worry about him when he takes off?’

  Florence shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘although I think my mother did when he was smaller. I used to too, probably more than anybody, because I was the eldest and thought it was my job to take care of him. But Puck has always known how to take care of himself. He got teased a lot at school, mostly because of his name; you can’t imagine how awful it was for him.’

  ‘Oh, I can,’ Albert answered. ‘I know how cruel kids can be.’

  Florence felt the rush of words to her lips before she had a chance to catch them. ‘No, you don’t Albert,’ she said. ‘You actually have absolutely no idea at all.’

  Albert had been twirling the jacaranda between his thumb and index finger; now he stood up and released it, the purple trumpet falling slowly to the ground.

  ‘Actually, I better get going,’ he said, ‘I’ve got some seeds I want to catalogue from the north end of the gully . . .’

  Florence saw the slight rising flush on his cheeks and across his neck as he picked up his daypack and slung it across his shoulder.

  ‘Sure. I’m going to stay for a bit,’ she said as she watched him walk away, probably off to join the usual suspects who, she suspected, didn’t bite his head off for expressing an opinion.

  Florence wasn’t entirely sure why she had, except, she supposed, that there were just so many times you could hear about parties you weren’t invited to with people you suspected you wouldn’t like anyway. And because nobody, least of all Albert Flowers, with his doughy mates Jeremy and Lydia and Siobhan Peters skipping about cluelessly in her wedding cake dress, had any idea how brutal children could be.

  Florence lifted her foot and slowly ground the flower to a sticky purple pulp beneath it.

  But Puck did. They all did, one way or another.

  *

  ‘It’s the song that gets beneath your skin,’ Jonathan ‘The Chart King’ Hammond was saying in his oozy, liquid voice.

  Florence felt her cheek against a dark green velvet curtain, her father’s hand pressed into the small of her back, Isolde somewhere behind jiggling every part of her body, and Amanda beside her with Puck, tapping his sticks together.

  ‘Tipped to be number one on the 1988 Christmas charts, let’s all put our paws together for the Saint Claire Swingers with “Santa Was A Jazz Cat”!’ shouted Jonathan, who had earlier pawed both Amanda and Lucas in the dressing room.

  They ran out onto the stage to take their positions, first Puck, then Isolde, Florence, Amanda, and then finally Lucas smiling in his corduroy jacket and running a hand through his greying hair while all of the women, and some of the men in the audience, looked straight through his wife and children to try to catch his eye.

  Lucas swept his arms out to each side, acknowledging his family, then drew Amanda to his side, curling his arm around her waist and kissing her on the cheek, before counting in the beat.

  It was a signature move, orchestrated at the start of every Saint Claire show, and the audience loved it. They lapped it up, Lucas once said, ‘like cats let loose in the Colosseum’.

  When Florence was younger, she had loved it too. She’d fizzed like a can of shaken lemonade when she ran out to take her spot and looked over to where her parents stood, bathed in their tungsten glamour.

  She had even loved the matching outfits the Saint Claire Swingers wore, each one dreamt up by Richard, and all with an embarrassment of sequins.

  Sometimes, people – Florence couldn’t bring herself to call them fans – would wait outside stage doors to meet the Saint Claires, among them, occasionally, girls her own age. The sort of teenage girls who followed Florence were not at all like the girls at Florence’s school, not the cool ones at least, who redid their lip gloss in the playgrounds at lunchtime, holding compact mirrors in their hands, snapping them shut when boys walked by. No, Florence’s groupies were usually girls who played viola or oboe in their school bands, girls who almost always had two long plaits draping over their shoulders. Once, a teenage boy had asked Florence for her autograph, and she, flustered, had obliged, writing her name in looping letters with, she later recalled with horror, little stars over the i’s.

  As Florence grew older, walking with her head down towards her teens, she came to like these moments less and less. She grew uncomfortable on behalf of the girls who hung around stage doors, embarrassed for them as she ducked past their outstretched autograph books into Richard’s van. ‘Don’t you have somewhere better to go?’ she wanted to shout at them. ‘Or someone better to look at?’

  On stage, she found herself increasingly envying Puck his position at the back, head down and half hidden by his drum kit.

  Isolde, being Isolde, never seemed to notice, or care, about the way the audience looked at them, the way their eyes flicked around her family, always settling on her father. Isolde would be Isolde, flapping around the microphone, doing her short, jerky little dance moves, just as she did at home when no eyes were upon her.

  Sometime around her fourteenth birthday, Florence began to resist, not in an overt way, but in a choreographed series of rolled eyes and long audible sighs whenever Richard arrived at their house with his bags of costumes and news of upcoming performances.

  Once, he had booked them to play at a country music festival and Florence had shouted at Richard that she hated the country, and its music, and that he’d be driving to Boondella, or whatever its stupid country name was, without her.

  She had gone, of course, overruled by Lucas and Amanda, Lucas annoying her by throwing in a lecture on the commonalities between jazz and country, Florence rolling her eyes as far back as she could get them.

  In the van she had sighed and shifted constantly in her seat all the way to the large paddock where the festival was being held, which Lucas insisted on calling a natural amphitheatre. She complained that Isolde’s knees were pressing into her back, and that Puck was drumming his fingers on the book in his lap too loudly, until Amanda had leant forward and turned the music up so that none of them could hear her at all.

  At the festival site they had been directed to the dressing rooms, four trailers at the back of the catering vans, and Florence had been going to roll her eyes about that too, but Amanda had said, ‘Just leave it, Florence, your father is very tired,’ while Florence simmered inside.

  Richard had arrived in the dressing rooms just before the performance and had pulled five pairs of white denim overalls and five differently coloured scarves from his bag.

  ‘Quickly everyone,’ he’d said, clapping his hands and speaking in what Florence supposed was meant to be a prairie drawl, ‘get these overalls on, and then pop one of these here kerchiefs around your neck so they can tell y’all apart!’

  Florence had taken her scarf then dropped it on the floor.

  ‘So they can tell I’m the one that’s not a dickhead,’ she’d said.

  Her father had laughed his full-bodied laugh and drawn her onto his lap, ‘She’s right, Richard, we do look a little hokey.’

  She had won that round, but not this one, and now here she was, standing on the Jonathan Hammond Christmas Show set, dressed from head to toe as an elf.

  She was in a red and green felt tunic that flattened and pulled at her breasts, red and white candy-striped leggings, and a hat with a little silver bell at its peak.

  Beneath the stage lights damp patches of sweat pooled beneath her arms like those ink blots they made people look at, then say if they thought it was a dog or the Eiffel Tower.

  ‘Maximum wattage, Saint Claires!’ her mother had
prompted just before they’d run on, but reaching her mark, Florence suddenly found herself to be an entirely different person.

  Although she knew what was expected of her, she found herself strangely unable to smile.

  Florence found herself unable to hear the count-in beat.

  Florence found herself removed from all that was around her.

  Florence Saint Claire, nearly sixteen years old, found herself set in stone.

  Florence Saint Claire had to be escorted off the stage like a marble statue being carried out of a museum exhibit.

  Afterwards, when she had sat looking at herself in the dressing-room mirror while her family performed ‘Jazz Cat’ without her, Florence wondered which was worse. Sitting here looking at the stranger in the mirror, or being out there where the strangers were looking at her. As she was being led from the stage by a woman who put her arm around her back and said into a headset, ‘I’m bringing her down now,’ the adults in the audience had shuffled quietly in their sets, and the teenagers who stood at the front had whistled and stamped their feet. One of them, a boy in a yellow jacket, had called out, ‘What’s the matter, kitty cat?’ as she passed.

  Florence sat in the dressing room with the door shut knowing she had just lowered the Saint Claire flag to half-mast, and had done it in front of, as Jonathan Hammond kept calling them, ‘a live audience’.

  Stupid man, as if they’d be doing it in front of a dead one.

  Florence stared hard at the mirror, its curved white globes giving off heat to her flushed cheeks, making them feel sunburnt.

  Stage fright, they’d say, they talked about it often enough at home, her mother and father recounting the horrors of other performers who felt the rushing in their ears and the words somewhere they couldn’t get at them, while their mouths hung slack and open. There was the ‘British Nightingale’, Gloria Shaw, who had simply walked on stage then turned and walked straight off again, or Sammy Stratford, from Sammy Stratford and the Straight Talkers, who had stood mute at the mic for an entire song while the Straight Talkers kept right on playing.

  Now, she supposed, the name Florence Saint Claire would be joining those who had stared at the dressing room mirror and known that the person who stared back at them had not let the show go on.

  It was the boy in the yellow jacket.

  As she had run on, she had looked at him and their eyes had locked for just one second. Then he had raised his hand and put it to his forehead, his thumb and index finger forming the letter L, the universally acknowledged teenage sign for Loser, his lips forming the word at the same time.

  Florence had felt herself falter, her face aflame.

  She had felt herself immobilise, her limbs stilling, her chest pulling itself in, her breath disappearing, felt herself climbing deep into her own bones.

  She had heard her father’s voice: ‘Florence is not feeling well, she’s going to have a sit-down and a glass of water and I’m sure she’ll be back for the next number.’

  Afterwards, the discussions swirled around the house for days, rising up to her on her bed, snatches of sentences wafting from beneath her door. ‘Just a teenager . . .’ ‘Do you think she should see somebody?’ ‘It’s never been a problem before.’ ‘I don’t know how this will affect the Christmas charts.’ ‘Fuck the Christmas charts, Richard.’

  Richard came to visit, bringing chocolates then eating them all himself as he sat on the end of her bed and explained to her why she needed to start pedalling again.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ he said with a mouthful of Turkish delight, ‘it’s like falling off a bike – you graze a knee, then you get back on the bike and you keep going . . . Want a peppermint cream? I hate those, like eating dentures.’

  Florence told him it was not like falling off a bike at all – not unless you fell off it in front of a live television audience and a boy in a yellow jacket let you see what everyone else saw when they looked at you.

  It was not like falling off a bike, unless you fell off it while wearing striped tights and a bell on your head.

  Richard kissed her on the forehead and said, ‘You’re right, Florence, I can see it’s not like careening off a bicycle and I apologise for not knowing better.’

  Then he’d blown her a kiss and left the room, taking the last of the chocolates with him.

  Her father came in to play his clarinet for her and said that if she felt ridiculous in her elf outfit, imagine how her old man felt.

  ‘I looked like a giant gnome,’ he told her. ‘I’m going to have a word with Richard, tell him to pull back on the theme costumes – would that help?’

  Florence shook her head, no it wouldn’t.

  Isolde buzzed around the house and said, ‘What’s the big deal?’ a lot. ‘So she froze like Frosty the Snowman, who cares?’ and not for the first time Florence thought how nice it would be to be Isolde, who somehow, in the midst of all her freneticism, saw everything in sharp relief and nothing at all in muddied shades.

  Puck said nothing but did put a pair of drumsticks inside a shoebox with Open in case of emergency written on its lid.

  Amanda wafted in on waves of Shalimar to say goodnight, and Florence waited for her to say she was not angry at her, but she was disappointed. This would be, Florence knew in the way all children do when they have let their parents down, so much worse.

  But instead Amanda passed her a mug of hot chocolate and slipped her hand beneath the covers, her sharp, curled nails making a slight indent on her palm.

  ‘It’s all right, darling, you know,’ Amanda Saint Claire said. ‘It’s all perfectly all right. So you missed your count-in, who cares? I once forgot to put knickers on before a show, and only remembered just in time before the high kicks.’

  ‘God Mum, that’s disgusting . . .’

  Amanda laughed. ‘My point is, darling, that to be a performer, to make art, you have to move past these things, you have to shrug it off, or laugh it off . . .’ She smiled at her daughter. ‘You have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again.’

  Florence looked at her mother, wanting to head off at the pass what she felt was just one beat away. ‘Please don’t start singing, Mum.’

  They both laughed, and Amanda patted her cheek.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ she said, and it was only years later that Florence would come to understand that Amanda Saint Claire really couldn’t.

  Not long after the Jonathan Hammond Christmas Show went to air, Florence returned to school, reluctantly.

  ‘Why can’t you just homeschool me, Mum, or get me a tutor when we’re on the road?’ she’d asked Amanda, who had laughed and said they were not the Partridge Family.

  ‘It will be fine, Florence,’ she had continued. ‘You get out there, look them in the eye, and knock ’em dead,’ and Florence had wished that her mother would understand, just once, that high school was nothing, nothing like Carols by Candlelight.

  Instead Hilda Park, the co-ed college the Saint Claires had chosen for their children because of its music program, and other parents chose because it was like grammar school for well-off hippies, was, for Florence at least, hell.

  The catcalling began as soon as she walked through the school’s bottom gates.

  A huddle of students let her pass, and then as she did, a rising chorus of meows reached her ears. Florence kept moving, head down.

  In French, Lucy Venables stood up from behind her desk and then posed like a statue. ‘Who am I?’ she asked as her cohort fell about laughing.

  For the rest of the week Florence was on the lookout.

  For snatches of Jazz Cat in classrooms, for laughter, for any opening so she could quickly close it by hurrying by, pretending not to hear, or getting in first.

  Puck would get beaten up by Scobie Andrews when Scobie called Florence ‘The Choker’ and Puck hit him, balled fist, straight in his face.

  Puck would get a detention, sitting behind the desk drumming his fingers instead of writing an essay on why violence
is never the answer, and when he got home Isolde would whisper he should have hit Scobie harder.

  Florence would finish high school without ever coming back, as Lucas had promised, ‘for the next number’.

  There was no next number for Florence and the Saint Claire Swingers; the Jonathan Hammond Christmas Show was the last time she shared a stage with her family.

  Over the years, Isolde, Puck and Amanda sometimes performed in a depleted version of the Swingers, usually at events where Lucas was being remembered one way or another, as if everyone was terrified that if they stopped invoking the Lucas Saint Claire name it would fade like lettering on curling posters.

  If anyone asked Florence why she had stopped performing, and there had been plenty of askers over the years, she would smile and say, ‘I guess I just didn’t have the music in me.’

  But that was not the truth.

  Music pulsed and played in her blood always; quivering strings and joyous doo-whops, Florence heard them all. But she had found ways to quieten its call, reading in her room while her family rehearsed in Lucas’s studio, concentrating on her school-work, then later at university tussling with the Latin words for plants and the occasional boy in her dorm room.

  The idea that she didn’t ‘have the music in her’ was laughable, Florence herself felt like laughing every time she said it.

  It was a throwaway line, casual in delivery, and designed to move the conversation on briskly.

  It also helped widen the space between her and the notes.

  Because Florence Saint Claire didn’t only have the music in her, she had the whole bloody symphony in there.

  Florence stood up from the park bench, picked up her daypack and headed down the path towards her home.

  Why had she snapped at Albert like that?

  He was not to know about kids who stood like statues when you passed, or beat up your little brother, or asked if your sister had epilepsy or did she always dance like that? Albert had no idea what it was like to have Lucy Venables and her crew sing ‘Santa Was A Jazz Cat’ loudly every time you passed, until, when you finally had enough and walked straight over to them and said, ‘Don’t you think it’s time you had a new song, Lucy?’, seeing too late that it was an open door for her to sail through and shoot back, ‘Don’t you think it’s time you did?’ and watch Lucy’s friends fall apart like bowling pins around her. He was not to know what it was like to have the first boy you liked whisper in your ear, his tongue at its lobe, ‘Can you get your dad’s autograph for my mum?’