Go on – I dare you. Marjorie glared at the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Try and drop just one holy red drop on Aunty Agnes’s carefully scrubbed lino. If you bleed even one tiny drop I swear I will blast your entire bloody colourful plaster body from here to kingdom come with every bit of water in my eyes.
‘Thought you would want to know all this, love,’ Aunty Agnes was saying. ‘It is best you hear it from us. We can go up on the train on the weekend. Bill can pick us up from the station. Take us out to the cemetery.’ Aunty Agnes stopped until Marjorie looked up at her. ‘None of this is your fault, dear. It’s not anyone’s fault,’ she finished.
Which bit did you think I would want to know? Do you really think I want to know any of this? What good is knowing? she thought. ‘She’s better off dead,’ Marjorie said, nodding at the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Nodding at its accusations.
‘You can stay here as long as you like, dear,’ was Aunty Agnes’s reply to that. And her voice was like her nephew’s. A kindly, soft breath coming out of her throat.
*
Aunty Agnes looked after Marjorie back there in the Mallee. She had Marjorie hidden behind the veil of a short-brimmed, black straw hat with spotted netting. She barricaded her behind a black long-sleeved dress, and black gloves Marjorie never took off. While Marjorie stood there in the naked sun of that cemetery. As Marjorie thought about the funeral this Mallee had, a short while back, produced for her sister. With its dust and its candles in that timid little wooden church, with Ruby lying stranded out near the altar – trapped in her coffin, in front of everyone. With Bill and Pa and Aunty Agnes sitting in the first pew, staring at Ruby’s new home. Although, thought Marjorie, Ruby would not have been stuck in front of everyone. Because not everyone was there. Mother and I were noticeably absent.
‘We put on one of our best for Ruby. No doubt about that. It was one of our best. A one-hundred-to-one perfect Mallee summer’s day,’ said a kindly Pa, nodding. And Marjorie was grateful. She knew what that day would be: with its strings of lacy thin clouds trailing high in the immaculate sky, its bleaching sun, its satisfied stubble with its collection of fat bags of wheat. So the sun and the sky and the stubble soothed her a bit. Because she also knew there would have been all the crying women with their bunched hankies; the staunch men with their lifted chins. All of their glancing-away eyes with their discomfited uncertainties. There would have been the cups of tea. The plates.
‘It’s good to see you, Marjorie,’ the platform standers had said when she got off the train that morning. ‘How are you doing, love?’ they asked.
Why is that? Marjorie wondered. Why is it good to see me? And she thrust her gloved hand at them to parry away the hugs before any of them could get near her.
Jesse wasn’t waiting on the platform. He waited at the cemetery. He didn’t come over while the depleted, bereft little family walked to the hump of red sand and limestone pebbles piled fresh in the Catholic section. Their covering offerings of roses and daisies and geraniums as burnt and dripping and dead as Ruby by now.
What do you say to a sister you have killed? thought Marjorie as she stared at the hump of dirt that had now come to be her sister. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t ever mean to do any of it, Ruby, she cried inside herself. That was the most she could say.
They were all lined up neatly there at the grave and, like anybody does, they stood and stared silently down at the dirt lump. Pa was standing on one side of Marjorie. Aunty Agnes and Bill on the other side.
Pa cleared his throat. ‘I’d best be heading back to the car for a sit-down,’ he said. But Pa had something else to say before he left the line of graveside starers. ‘I’ll be helping you with the dishes tonight, Agnes,’ he announced as he lifted his gaze to stare into the middle distance in front of him.
Agnes yanked her head around to look at her brother.
‘I can dry a dish if I want to, Agnes,’ Pa said to the air directly ahead. ‘Marjorie’s had too much on her plate lately. It won’t hurt for all of us to step in and give the girl a bit of a rest.’
Aunty Agnes nodded and the corners of her mouth moved a tiny bit as she watched her brother walk back to the waiting car.
‘Looking back on it, I don’t recollect giving you much of a hand about the place. But I didn’t see all this coming,’ said Bill. He was staring straight ahead, like a soldier on parade. Marjorie stood still and silent like she was one too. Then she raised her head to the bright, clear blue sky. To tip the lurking tears back into her eyes. What am I ever to do in the rest of this world now? she thought. Here without Ruby? Here in this world without Ruby? As her eyes drifted over the installation of the dead – dead body, dead flowers, dead pile of dead dirt.
‘Pa’s right. It was too much for your shoulders, Marjorie,’ said Bill. ‘Nobody is holding you responsible. You did the best you could, girl.’
Marjorie didn’t say anything. Aunty Agnes was busy with her hanky.
So Bill went on: ‘But there are some things in life that are more than anybody’s best. No matter how hard a person might try, some things in life are going to find a way to get the better of us.’ And it was his turn to stare at the sky. His hand went out – sideways – as he stared, as his chin wobbled. That sideways hand, all through the staring and the wobbling, gave his daughter a pat on the shoulder. Not too much, mind. Just enough. Then Bill and Agnes walked together back to Pa, waiting in the car.
Jesse stayed under a peppercorn tree. He circled them from there. Circling around that small mob of them, never taking his eyes off Marjorie – like a kelpie watching the leader of the mob. He only stepped out from his patch of shade when he could see that Marjorie was about to go.
‘I’m sorry about Ruby, Marjorie,’ he said.
Marjorie’s eyes blinked at him.
‘Everybody is,’ he added, watching her blinking eyes.
Marjorie’s eyes switched to blinking at the peppercorn tree. She watched as it sighed and whispered its support for Jesse. Her eyes moved then as Marjorie stood there out in the open in the middle of this fenced-in, boxed-in, cemented-in patch of ground with its collection of bones and other people’s memories. Those eyes looked up at this boy – a seeming stranger to her now; a boy that Marjorie had not so long ago believed she had known oh so very well, and loved oh so very well.
‘When are you coming home, Marjorie?’ this stranger asked.
Home? Marjorie wondered. Home? She shook her head. ‘I am thinking about staying with Aunty Agnes for a while,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I will be able to live here any longer.’
‘What about us, though?’ Jesse asked. ‘What about me?’
‘I am not so sure there is any us these days, Jesse. I don’t see how there can be any us anymore,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘There is no time left in my life now for us. Not after what happened here.’ Marjorie looked around like perhaps she might find some loose time she could use – maybe lying discarded among the stones and dirt here in the cemetery. But there was none that she could see. ‘There was never going to be any room for us after that night,’ Marjorie said, swinging back to face Jesse.
Jesse stepped towards her. ‘You can’t just decide that on your own, you know,’ he said.
Marjorie put up her hands – palms pressed to the warm dry air in front of her – ready to stop Jesse. Ready to push Jesse, if she had to, into the red dry dirt beneath them. ‘Don’t, Jesse,’ she said.
*
‘It is for the best. You know that. You need to get away from here for a while. Agnes will look after you. I’ve already talked to her about it. You can get a job in a factory like Bill did. Work in the city until all this has blown over,’ said a kindly Pa.
‘Yes. A fresh start away from all of this is the best thing. Give yourself a chance to get back on your feet. To get on with things,’ agreed Bill.
‘You’re no use to anyone moping about here, girl. Le
ast of all yourself,’ said Pa. ‘You take my advice and get yourself back to that city with Agnes. It’ll only need to be for a while. You’ll be home directly, when you’ve got back on an even keel,’ said Pa and his voice was tender again. But these sorts of words had overexerted Pa. He tried to keep the rest of his words in but he was too tired now and they managed to escape. They were still words kindly meant and softly said: ‘What the blue blazes do you think you could have done anyway to stop any of that flamin’ bloody bastard of a mess from happening?’ those words said.
‘Watch that bad language,’ Aunty Agnes said.
But Pa ignored his sister. He had some important facts to point out. ‘Your mother was a raving bloody lunatic,’ he said. ‘No point denying it,’ he said.
‘That’s enough of that talk. What good is that sort of talk now?’ said Bill.
‘Yes. So stop it right now, the both of you,’ said Aunty Agnes.
Pa ignored them. ‘What’s done is done and there is no flamin’ point going over and over what happened. So best to just get on with things. And don’t you listen to what anybody hereabouts is flamin’ well saying, girl,’ he said.
But I want to listen. I need to know what they are all saying, thought Marjorie. I need to know what is my right and proper punishment for all of this bloody bastard of a mess.
*
Marjorie stayed there for days with her father and Pa and Aunty Agnes – in that house – eating and roaming and sleeping once more in that house she had thought, not all that long ago, she would never see again. Tossing around, restless and staring-eyed in that house. Sleeping once more in that bedroom with its cold, accusing, vacant other bed. Until Marjorie finally answered them. ‘I think I will go back to the city with Aunty Agnes like you said. For a while. Like you said. I can’t stay here.’ She nodded at each of them.
Marjorie was nodding because she had now come to accept things as they were here. She knew now that even though it had only been a few small weeks – which isn’t much time in the life of a house – that this house would always be just the same as it ever was. And it had no damn right to be just the same as it ever was. It should have been so different. It should at least have had the decency to express in some way what had been happening there. What had happened there. It should at least have had the decency to admit to Marjorie, in the still small hours as the three o’clock train wailed across the horizon, at least some culpability. Instead of leaving all the blame to Marjorie. Instead of just standing there supercilious and silent.
So Marjorie found herself once more on that bright crushed-quartz railway platform. Standing there with Aunty Agnes. Standing there with her father and his shivering chin in the warm air, his eyes blinking and blinking under the shaded brim of his hat, the sideways arm around her shoulders. Standing there with Pa and his jammed-on stiff upper lip. She gave them both a kiss on the cheek: one cheek full of furrows and white stubble; one smooth and full of tremors. She turned then and climbed into the carriage to sit beside Aunty Agnes and look at the two of them out of the train window. The men waved. Two farmers lifting their chins and squaring their shoulders in the face of yet one more catastrophe as the train started pulling Marjorie out of the station and into the trip back to the city to live with Aunty Agnes. For a while.
Chapter 15
Marjorie took great pains with Aunty Agnes’s city. She didn’t at the beginning. Not when she first turned up there – all by herself and saddled with everything. Marjorie already had too much of her own pain then, lumped on her shoulders like a whole mountain of wheat bags. She couldn’t take on any more of anyone else’s – even a city’s. Marjorie’s wheat bags were so heavy then that she had no chance of lifting her head high enough to get a good look at anything else that might be going on around her. She certainly didn’t have any chance of really looking this city in the eye, to see it for what it really was.
And even if she had, she might have back then only seen it as so many others chose to see it. To see it as a taut place, a frantic selfish place crammed full of to-and-fro and noise. But that was only on the outside of itself. And if those who were so pitiless as far as the city was concerned would just bother to stop for a while and think, then they would realise things. Like: the Mallee wasn’t on its own with a three-o’clock-in-the-morning soul. Like: this city wasn’t without a heart. It had its own particular soft, three-o’clock-in-the-morning echoes when it quieted itself to a lyric drone and turned then to looking at things – things like Marjorie. When it nodded and hummed to itself because it could see what would be good for her. She was naked, it could see. And that was no way to live. Marjorie was just like so many others who had already done what she had done – run away from their certain somewhere to here. Arriving in fright, without any decent covering to protect themselves. It was time that Marjorie needed more than anything, as far as this city could establish. Time to fix things after all that naked running. That, and the same thing that all those others were after. All those runners just like her who had arrived here to hide within the camouflage of its bustle. It knew that all they ever wanted was a decent chance to be somewhere else – somewhere other than where they had come from. And a good city always had plenty of both of those things: time, and somewhere else.
And it had Aunty Agnes to help – her there doing the sagacious watching:
‘How is Bill going?’ That was the first question she would ask her brother down the telephone line.
‘What’s a bloke to do? He’s keeping a stiff upper lip. He’ll get through in time,’ said Pa.
‘He might need more than a stiff upper lip to get through this one, I think,’ she said.
‘Eh? What’s that you say?’ said Pa.
Aunty Agnes shook her head at the Bakelite telephone on the wall. ‘You know there are better ways of dealing with things than just ploughing paddicks and going out and killing more rabbits,’ she said.
But Pa was so tired. And there were no women anywhere in the house no matter how hard he tried not to look for them. And he and his son were rattling and bumping around that lonely, empty house like the last grains of broken wheat in the chook bin. And he actually didn’t know of any better methods for dealing with the sorrows of life than a good rabbit poisoning could provide, so he said nothing at all down the telephone line to that.
‘I’m worried about Marjorie,’ Aunty Agnes said into the silence.
‘Why? She’s doing alright there with you, isn’t she? She’s not the one stark raving mad and locked up in a bloody lunatic asylum,’ her brother pointed out. ‘She’s not lying dead and buried. She’s young. She’ll be right.’
‘She won’t talk about it.’
‘’Course she won’t. She’s got a good head on her shoulders, that one. What’s the good of yapping about a thing all day long? You think me and Bill sit around here all day long talking about it? What’s the bloody good to be got from that?’
‘A lot more good than two grown men pretending all day and all night.’
‘What?’ said Pa.
‘Marjorie just stays in bed all day. Won’t come out of her room,’ Agnes said.
Notions of gardens and bees stirred in Pa. ‘Eh?’ he asked, and he was crumpling and slumping even as he did. Because try as he might to consider 1080 the best answer to life’s unanswerable troubles, he did know what his sister was getting at. And he did know too that his son – out there every day from dawn to dark, furrowing up every paddock from here to kingdom come – he knew Bill already had far too much on his plate for one man to manage and the shotgun always ready and willing and capable there in the shed. ‘Well, what are you letting her do that for? Go in and get her out of there, Agnes. By the cripes, do you want her to end up like her mother lying about in bed all day? And Bill having two raving bloody lunatics on his hands along with an already dead daughter?’
‘She’s suffering. She’s like those soldiers you hear about th
at come back from the war all staring and not making any sound.’
‘Suffering? Of course she’s bloody suffering after what she’s been through! But what about her father? Does she think he’s not suffering? Put her on the telephone. Let me have a talk to her. I’ll flamin’ fix things.’
‘And just how do you plan on fixing her? With dead rabbits? Or by ploughing a paddick?’
Pa was quiet down the line again. He was punctured and squashed by his sister’s infernal questions; bewildered by lives that couldn’t be fixed by farming. ‘Does she ask after me, Agnes?’ he whispered into his silence.
‘She doesn’t ask after anyone.’
‘Go and get her please, Agnes. The girl can’t stay lying about in the bedroom all day and not talking to anyone. Tell her I want to talk to her, please.’
So Aunty Agnes did as she was told and went to tell Marjorie that Pa was on the telephone and wanted to talk to her. And Aunty Agnes was shocked, because Marjorie did come to the phone.
‘It’s Pa here,’ said Pa.
‘Mmm,’ Marjorie replied.
‘How’s the city treating ya, then?’ Pa asked.
Marjorie shrugged.
‘Starting to get on top of things then, are ya? Starting to settle in?’
Marjorie shrugged down the phone.
‘You can come back up here, girl. I could do with a bit of a hand with the rabbits. Your father and I are rattling around in the place now. It needs a bit of a woman’s touch.’ Pa tried to fight it, but it was pleading that escaped from his mouth and raced down the telephone line, because what he really wanted to tell Marjorie was I miss you. I miss both you girls. I am afraid for you and your father. But that is not what a man says.
How can I go back there? Why would I go back there? she wondered. The girl sighed.
‘Put yer Aunty Agnes on, will ya?’ said Pa as his nerves undid themselves.
‘The girl’s in a bad way, Agnes,’ he told her.
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