A Lovely and Terrible Thing

by Chris Womersley

  The peace and quiet came to a halt, however, when a group of about fifty hooligans descended on a neighbouring house one night and proceeded to have the loudest party I had ever heard. I had observed them with some foreboding as they arrived by the carload throughout the afternoon. Marie chastised me for being a fuddy-duddy when I expressed the fear they would disturb our solitude, but my fears were well founded. From 8 pm, the night overflowed with a brew of the most appalling thudding music, the screech of drunken women and the hoarse arguments of young men.

  At first we tried to ignore it and passed the evening as we had passed the previous seven. I told myself that it was all fair enough, that I myself had most likely kept a few people awake during my more reckless years, but as the hours wore on, I became increasingly agitated. As a man, one feels the burden of having to ‘do something’ on such occasions, so when 2 am rolled around and the noise gave no indication of abating, I got out of bed and dressed.

  ‘But what will you do?’ Marie asked.

  I shrugged in the darkness. ‘Ask them to stop. Have some consideration for us.’ It sounded pathetic and I knew it.

  Marie sat up. ‘Well. Be careful. Don’t say anything foolish, Clive. Please.’

  I pulled on my sandals and reassured her but she insisted on getting out of bed and observing through her binoculars. I knew the set of her voice and declined to talk her out of it, even as I thought it pointless.

  The two properties were separated by nothing more than a large stand of pine trees and as I padded beneath them and out into the party’s penumbra of light and noise I felt as if I were entering an obscure circle of hell: people thronged about in various states of undress and evident intoxication; girls huddled here and there on the lawn. The music was obviously, unbelievably, even louder. I was aware of partygoers observing my progress with slightly bemused contempt, as they might a dog walking on its hind legs. And yet I pressed on.

  The house was larger than the one where we were staying and was lit up like a film set. People danced. A tide of youths ran past me, yelling and calling to each other. They all shone from a day in the sun and were smartly dressed, obviously enjoying the hospitality at the beach house of one of their parents. I crossed the lawn, ducked beneath a tangle of coloured lights strung across the terrace and stood on the threshold to a living room.

  In the short walk across the lawn I had run through a variety of scenarios, all of which involved me emerging victorious from whatever altercation I was about to engage in, but now I was here, in the thick of it, my resolve ran from me like water. I gazed around at them, at the way they sprawled on couches and bounded up the stairs. It was horrifying in a way that only came to me slowly as I stood there being jostled by passers-by; what galled me most, I realised, was that they all had life, were fairly bursting with it, while my daughter, dear Carol, lay crumbling in a box in the earth, cold and alone, miles from us. A couple smiled at me as they squeezed past. I wondered if Marie was observing me through her binoculars and could feel my masculine pride under scrutiny; I retreated nonetheless, back to our temporary home, back to bed.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked when I was under the covers ten minutes later.

  ‘Nothing, really.’

  ‘You didn’t talk to anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How old were they?’

  ‘Were you not watching?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted.

  ‘Well. They were in their mid-twenties, I suppose.’

  Marie drew a breath. ‘Carol’s age.’

  ‘Yes. More or less.’

  With seemingly endless goodbyes and slamming of car doors, the party finally dissolved shortly before dawn. Still, Marie and I got up early and set out for a walk not long after sunrise. The day was misty but, if the past week were any guide, would clear up by midmorning. We didn’t mention the party in detail, only to say how tired we were. I myself felt positively ancient, beyond living. We walked along the road for a short distance before cutting down a sandy track to a headland that looked over the curving beach. We stood and the wind whipped about our legs and shrilled through the stubby banksia. Marie peered through her binoculars out to sea in an effort to spot some bird or other she hadn’t yet ticked off her list. I huddled in my woollen coat and watched the progress of a person surfing far below. A man, I eventually discerned, who determinedly paddled out on his board through the roiling surf and waited for the right wave to ride back in to shore. He didn’t seem particularly good at it and was dumped repeatedly, often before he even had a chance to ride his board for more than a few seconds.

  I found myself willing the surfer on, urging him to stay upright longer, and felt unaccountable disappointment at his failures. After fifteen minutes of this, he appeared to get into difficulty. The board that had been lashed to his ankle came free in a smashing wave and he found himself past the breaking waves in deep water, flailing somewhat, his black, wet-suited arms waving about in the foam like a beetle drowning in milk. A quick scan revealed there to be no one else on the beach, indeed no sign of humans at all as far as I could make out, even though I knew the township was not far beyond the scrubby dunes. I tapped Marie and pointed to the surfer.

  She swung her binoculared gaze to where I had indicated. ‘Clive. Have you got your mobile phone?’

  I fumbled through my pockets and located the damn thing, as small as a matchbox.

  ‘Call someone. Call triple-0. Quickly. They can probably get the rescue people out there. A boat. Save him.’

  I was wrestling with my phone, struggling with the tiny keypad, when Marie, still with her eyes glued to the binoculars, placed a hand firmly on my forearm.

  ‘Wait,’ she said. A pair of gulls wheeled down out of the sky, landed on the grass nearby and shrugged their wings. ‘It’s one of them.’

  I managed to unlock the phone and was dialling. ‘What? Who?’

  Her voice was astringent. ‘One of those . . . arseholes from last night.’

  It was extremely rare for Marie to swear. Even throughout the trial, she had managed to withhold her anger, though I could detect its presence by the set of her mouth. I waited with phone in hand. The wind buffeted us where we stood, out there on the headland, exposed to the elements. We didn’t speak a word. I was aware of Marie, my beloved wife, steadying herself against the gusting wind. I was aware of her short, brown hair flicking this way and that, of her unzipped jacket flapping about, as if the fingers of the wind were searching for something hidden about her person – some grief, most likely – that might be taken away and discarded. Marie kept her hand on my arm. Her grip tightened slightly, almost imperceptibly. I understood at once what she was communicating.

  It was then I saw us from a distance – as one of the wheeling seagulls might have – two old things in their all-weather jackets on a windswept bluff, diminished by nature. I dropped the phone back into a pocket and we watched, Marie and I, somewhat greedily, I am ashamed to say, as the surfer struggled against the tide, his head disappearing and reappearing within the creaming waves, his dark mouth, visible even at this distance as it opened hungrily for air, until he reappeared no more.

  By the time we made our way down to the sand half an hour later, a small crowd was hovering around the fellow’s body like birds. As if she had read my mind, Marie coughed into her fist and began to speak above the sound of the wind. ‘Do you know,’ she said with some satisfaction, ‘that the collective noun for herons is a siege? A siege of herons.’

  Our progress was unwieldy; the sand was heavy and thick, our old bodies tired. We huddled and bent into the whippering wind until we approached the group, who were by now standing around with their arms across their chests, obviously waiting for the ambulance or police. We did not stop. One or two of their number looked up but if they recognised me from the party the night before they showed no sign of it, and we offered no greeting of our own. We kept on
and by the time we left the beach, stamped our shoes free of sand and went into the house – now quiet, now peaceful – I expect the ambulance would have arrived.

  The Mare’s Nest

  ‘Don’t tell anyone what happened here,’ were my father’s last words to me – to any other human being, as far as I know. ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They won’t believe you and then they’ll lock you up. Never tell a soul.’

  And then he let go of my hand.

  One long-ago dusk my father and I sat on a low hill overlooking a sports field. The air was raw and cold. I became aware, all of a sudden, that he would die one day, that it would be before I ever really got to know him, and that his death would be like something unravelling after being held together with sticky tape and paper clips. I felt an immense sadness, as if my twelve-year-old self were already casting ahead to the moment when I would recall this evening with fondness, with amazement and with regret.

  The soccer nets sagged and the white lines marked on the grass were faded to near invisibility. As it darkened, the grass would come to resemble a square lake, an impression intensified by the muddy smell blown up in the wind, and the susurrations of the trees, which were easily mistaken for the lapping of water. My father brought me here often, because it was from hereabouts that his own father was taken fifteen years ago.

  Although the police never solved the mystery of what happened to my grandfather, this was the word my father always employed so it became the one we used in the family. Taken. The word was now an heirloom, much handled, although its value and use were uncertain.

  On that night my father was talking in his quiet voice about a workshop near our house that cast medals and statues, the kind of awards given out at local tennis carnivals and flower shows and the like. This was an old theme of his; he believed the failure of so many marriages in the suburb – not to mention the suicide of old Mr Granger and the alcoholic tendencies of Megan Talbot at Number 16 – could be attributed to the workshop.

  ‘I know people think I am foolish,’ he said, brushing dried mud from his trousers, ‘but I have been there at night. I have wandered down and there is often a strange smell. Toxic. Toxic smoke comes out of that chimney at night and I believe there is something evil in it, some sort of – you know, some sort of poison. We should get it investigated. Get the authorities onto it.’

  The authorities. This was another theme of his. He talked often of alerting the authorities to some indiscretion or other but, as far as we knew, he never actually approached anyone. His complaints were regular but deeply regretful, as if in the very process of making them, he was already aware of everyone’s unwillingness to take them seriously, a misjudgement for which we all would dearly pay.

  ‘There are things, you know, that . . . defy description,’ he continued as he plucked blades of grass and rolled them between his fingers. ‘The afternoon that my father was taken was much like this, actually. The trees, the sky. Before it happened I had an odd feeling that only later I realised was a . . . premonition, I guess you’d call it. I thought at first they would bring him home again. I was certain. And I thought they would come back for me. But it’s been so long now. He held out for a long time.’

  For many years afterwards, when I was playing with my sister Peggy in the garden, I would glance up and see my mother observing us from the kitchen window, watching us for nascent signs of our father’s madness, as if it were a weed she might pluck before it spread. She would come into my room late at night and stroke my hair, for what sometimes seemed like hours. She made sure the bedroom windows were always locked. On these occasions I pretended to be asleep, but I could sense her tears. Checking I had not yet followed my father, wherever it was he had gone.

  He was convinced there were scraps of meaning to be found between the cracks of consciousness, the way one might find tiny pieces of paper – on which would be scrawled secret messages, codes, formulae – rolled into balls and stuffed into the fissures of a brick wall. He listened out for distant voices and would spend interminable hours slowly rotating the radio dial in the hope of finding transmissions intended for him alone.

  After he had gone, my mother and I found dozens of small notebooks in which he had written the meanings of obscure words that interested him, along with recondite facts he gleaned from God knows where. None of us had ever seen these books before or indeed seen him writing in them. We could only guess that he did it late at night when the rest of the household was asleep. I imagined him slouched over our kitchen table, eyeglasses perched in an approximation of a professorial bearing, laboriously writing out words he had looked up in the dictionary or asked someone the meaning of. It was an image that made me weak with sorrow.

  Occluded – closed off. Beans can be used as a homeopathic charm against witches and spectres. The word ‘panic’ comes from the god Pan. A mare’s nest is an extraordinary discovery. Obligato – a persistent but subordinate motif.

  My father was an ordinary man but aspired to be something more. Each time I visited him in hospital he regaled me with a new fantasy. He claimed to have invented clothes pegs, to have somehow caused the space shuttle to explode in 1986, to have memorised Pi to three hundred and twenty-two places. The chasm that exists in all of us – between who we imagine ourselves to be and the person we truly are – was to prove disastrous for him. Several times he calculated – by what means we never knew – the date for the end of the world and, when proven wrong, would lament the planet’s failure to accord with his predictions. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he would say. ‘I don’t get it. I guess I’ll have to, you know, get my shoes fixed for winter after all, eh?’

  Then a nurse would enter and give him some pills which he’d swallow without demur, without fear, like a child. From outside, on the wet lawn, I could hear the chatter of other patients and their relatives, the occasional hoot of wild laughter.

  One of these nights by the sports field, I heard a tinkling of tiny bells. Someone in one of the nearby houses must have had one of those wind chimes hanging from a tree.

  I sensed, rather than saw, my father look up. ‘I think you should go home now,’ he said after a long pause.

  Now comes the hardest part, the least believable part, which is why the official police incident report ends here.

  When I was about ten I asked my mother what had happened to my grandfather. I had, of course, heard much talk about him but I struggled to untangle the various strands and theories into anything coherent, a narrative I might be able to tell anyone.

  She sighed and pulled me to her. A long silence. For a minute we listened to a pot bubble on the stove. ‘Your grandfather vanished a long time ago. Your father was there and he claims he was taken by some strange . . . people one evening.’ Here she paused, tearful, shaking her head. ‘That’s when it all began, really. Your father’s problems. He wasn’t like this when we were married. That started after.’

  She showed me several photos stored in a box in her bedroom. My grandfather looked a lot like my father – the same slightly stooped stance, a way of looking sideways as if expecting to detect something from the tail of his eye.

  ‘Something bad might have happened to your grandfather,’ my mother went on, ‘but we’ll probably never know. I think he’d had enough. He had a few problems of his own. It’s very sad.’ No sign of him, she said, was ever found.

  ‘Maybe someone did take him?’ I said. ‘Like gangsters or something.’

  She looked at me long and hard. ‘I think that’s unlikely. You know that part of the creek down behind the oval? He fell in there and drowned. He was quite old.’

  ‘Why didn’t they find him, then?’

  She paused. ‘Sometimes people aren’t found when they drown. They get washed away and are lost forever.’

  Even in mid-winter that part of the creek was so shallow that it was difficult to imagine anyone drown
ing in there, let alone being washed away. My mother knew that as well as I did, but I decided against contradicting her. She must have divined my scepticism, however, because she held me out at arm’s length to regard me, as she did when she was trying to be serious and treat me like an adult. ‘So stay away from there, okay.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  My father stood and peered out over the sports field, which had by now become almost totally subsumed in darkness. He gave a short cry, strangely triumphant. ‘At long last,’ he said, and skidded down the dewy incline. He paused at the bottom and turned to face me. ‘You should go home now,’ he said again.

  I was terrified of leaving him there alone. Even then I probably had an inkling of what was going to happen. I shook my head.

  ‘Are you quite sure?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There might be no turning back.’

  I nodded.

  My father was torn. He looked over his shoulder into the darkness, then back to me. He held out one hand. A strange expression took hold of his features. ‘Then would you mind holding my hand? I am afraid.’

  Hand in hand we walked across the field towards the creek on the far side. I sensed an urgency in my father, but we walked slowly and deliberately, as if he were keen to prolong the moment for as long as possible. We didn’t speak. Our shoes squelched through the mud in the centre of the field. Although there was no wind to speak of, I heard more clearly and more often the tinkling of the wind chime I had detected earlier.

  He squeezed my hand. ‘I love you, my son, but I can’t resist any longer. I don’t really want you to see what I am about to show you, but I don’t want you to think that I was merely mad.’