Path to the Night Sea

by Gilmore, Alicia;

She was lazy now that he had stopped hitting her. He just didn’t have the energy anymore. She couldn’t see how much it upset him when he had to hit her; she seemed incapable of understanding his pain. The stupid girl couldn’t see that he didn’t want to, that he never planned it, but she had constantly forced his hand. Her mother had too.

  ‘Dumb bitches.’

  He took a step towards his shed. Anything to be out of that house and away from Ellie. He was sick of her. Arthur closed his eyes as a fist of pain clenched his chest. He could hear a muted roar from the beach and pictured the dulled crest of a wave connecting with sand. He willed the pain in his chest away, picturing it receding with the wave. Sometimes it worked. Exhaling slowly, his breath whistling through gritted teeth, he opened his eyes. Dolores had always accused him of being an unfeeling bastard, but he sure as hell felt this. If only she could see him now… No. She was long gone. He and Ellie had been better off without her.

  His gaze drifted across the yard to the wired enclosure against the fence. God, he missed his dogs. A hoarse cough rattled up his chest and he spat onto the ground. He tried to take another step and faltered. How he had become this weak, old man, he couldn’t understand. This wasn’t him. I just need to lie down and rest, that’s all. Just a rest. He turned back towards the house with a sigh. Damn.

  Letting himself back inside, he cursed as the cat tore past his leg before he could lock the door. Shoes off. His slippers had been cleaned and lined up again. Good, she had done that at least. Another spasm crossed his chest. Angina, the doctor had called it. A rest was all he needed.

  He longed for the days back underground. Days when he’d been strong, hadn’t needed to rest every day like a bloody infant. Retirement was years ago. The mine had taken its toll on him but he’d stuck it out until he was fifty-five. Many mornings since, he had just shuffled around the house in a threadbare robe over an old flannelette shirt and pyjama pants. Some mornings there seemed no point in getting dressed. Who would see him but Ellie? He scratched himself. Stained grey underpants, once white, now hung saggy and worn under his pants, the cotton as loose as the once-elastic skin on his abdomen that had succumbed to gravity and that sank towards his genitals. His soft, checked shirt bore the stains of countless greasy dinners and splashes of tea. Clothing smeared with the monotonous passage of lonely meals. He had taken to eating in silence, whether Ellie was seated at the table with him or not.

  A lifetime ago, he had occasionally worn a collared shirt and tie. From Fossey’s, not from one of those over-priced department stores up in Sydney. Although he had shopped at Grace Bros in Wollongong back in the early days of courting Dolores and he was still out to impress.

  Arthur shuffled into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water, and switched on the wireless. A woman’s voice whining away: ‘and then I cried and cried; I was devastated, devastated…’ He switched it off. He’d listened to enough women wailing in this lifetime: Miriam, Dolores, Ellie. Even that bloody woman from next door all those years ago, that brat’s mother, the way she’d carried on… He’d spent hours with that blasted search party, keeping company with them along the desolate coastline, as they wasted time looking for signs of the missing girl. They’d found nothing. Not a single thing.

  He couldn’t say for sure he’d never cried. Most likely he had shed a tear as a babe, but anyone who’d be able to enlighten him on that point was long gone. Only the ghosts remained.

  His eyes travelled the length of the counter. There was a plastic bag of two-day-old bread. There would be butter in the fridge, maybe a cold sausage too. It would do for a snack. He could call Ellie to do it for him, but he couldn’t be bothered. He just wanted to be alone. A hiss of steam let him know where Ellie was. Good, the girl could stay in the laundry and do the ironing and he would be able to think clearly without her nervous fussing and fluttering at his side. He reached for the bread and had a vision of a younger hand, a girl’s hand, reaching into a bag of stale bread crusts and throwing pieces at the birds.

  ‘You know bread’s not good for them, right?’

  Miriam had shrugged, giving a noncommittal, ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Stay where I can see you, right?’ He looked at the waves. It was pretty calm, but you never knew when a rogue wave would come onto the rocks. He figured that he and Jack would be all right fishing, but Miriam…

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ Miriam looked up at him.

  ‘Just stay on the sand, ‘kay?’ He reached a hand into the bag, pretended to take a bite of the stale bread before throwing it up the air. A gull snatched it out of the air, and Miriam laughed. Arthur winked at her. She would be all right. She would stay on the sand with the stupid gulls and he could go out on the rocks and fish with Jack.

  It had been the two of them usually, him and Jack, though sometimes there had been other mates from school. Hand reels and basic rods. None of the fancy bullshit and gear those folk used today. He had loved the simple joy of casting in, the wait, watching for the rogue waves that could knock them off the rocks, the thrill of the tug on the line. The pleasures and the disappointments: laughing at the others, seeing who would stay dry, who’d catch the first fish of the day, and who would go home empty handed.

  Arthur had always been the first to reach for the knife, eager to cut up the small bream they had caught and slice it up for bait. After the first few times, his mates expected him to make the kills. Watching the frantic movements of the fish as they’d writhed beneath his grip, gills uselessly flapping as he punctured and gutted them, witnessing life slip away and all at his hands, excited him. But not as much as the gun had. Nothing compared to the feel of the rifle and the smell of the gunshot. He’d loved the hunt. The kill. Fish were too easy; hunting took skill.

  It was hard to believe he had once been a young boy with freckles and a quick and ready smile. His freckles had faded, replaced by age spots, his features grown cantankerous and hoary. The smile, long gone—the genuine smile at least. He had figured from an early age that if you didn’t know how to lie convincingly, you’d never know when you were being lied to. And everybody lied. He’d known that. He’d watched Jack lie in church. It was a cunning he had admired, cultivated, and then surpassed.

  Arthur looked down at the table. A half-eaten crust lay on his plate, a glass almost full with water. He couldn’t remember making a sandwich, let alone eating or drinking anything. He had gotten lost in reminiscences again. He grabbed the glass, but left his plate on the table. Ellie would clean it up; it was her job. Only blasted thing she was good for.

  He winced as another pain seared across his chest. Fucking angina. He felt older than his seventy-one years. Life had treated him hard, as hard as he’d treated it, but he still felt old before his time. Pushing his chair in, he shuffled down the corridor to his room, pausing before he opened the door.

  At first glance, he could tell that everything was where it should be. He walked over to the dresser and, taking his keys from his pocket, unlocked the top drawer. Light glinted off the small mirror and Arthur glanced sourly at his reflection. His eyebrows were thick, scraggly tussocks, a match for the unwanted and unwelcome hairs that now sprouted from his ears and nose. His whiskers came in thick, grey and white. He knew what else the mirror would reveal: long, dangling earlobes; narrow lips that had become thinner, adding meanness; a face made up of deep furrows that divided his brows, pointing to his lengthening nose. Everything had become leaner, crueller with age, in resignation to the inevitable. There were dark shadows under his eyes, remnants of another bad night.

  He placed the mirror aside and pulled out his worn bankbook, checking the meticulously recorded numbers. He had savings; he had been frugal. They didn’t want for much. He toyed with the string binding. He had a new book now; this one he would relegate to the shed. As he put the bankbook atop the dresser, the black and white photograph that had been underneath it in the drawer caught his eye. It was creased, slightly damaged and
faded with time. Two boys standing inside an aviary, arms outstretched with small birds eating out of the palms of their hands. Jack was looking at the birds, but Arthur had been staring directly at the camera, a goofy grin smeared across his face.

  He’d been happy then. If only Jack hadn’t let him down. He pushed the photo aside and felt for the photograph he knew lay below. He pulled this photograph out. His expression in this one was serious as he sat stiffly, posing with his gun across his lap and his two dogs sitting at his feet. This one he should have framed. The hunter and his faithful beasts. A longing for the pure excitement of the dogs, the hunt, the kill, flared within his chest. God, he missed those days.

  Arthur moved his glass of water to the bedside table and sat on the edge of the bed. He was sick of feeling tired. Last night had been one of those all-too-common times when he’d gotten up repeatedly to stand, frustrated, in the bathroom. The turn of the tap had been a scream in the night, but even the sound of running water hadn’t been enough to call forth more than a few futile drops.

  He’d left Ellie in bed, a softly snoring huddle under the blankets, clinging to the far edge of the mattress. ‘All right for some.’ He had used to sleep like a log, exhausted by work, but now there were too many hours in the day. In the night. He had stood over the toilet bowl and willed his useless body to work. Everything used to be so easy. Work, sleep. He’d made his way back to his room and sunk down upon the bed. Ellie had stirred.

  ‘Go back to your own room, girl; I’m done with you.’ She had staggered off through the doorway. He had done what was best, always had. Be dammed if anyone could say they would have done otherwise.

  Arthur had woken again before dawn, entangled in a panicked sweat of linen and pyjamas, as he’d twisted the sheet and blanket further around in his frantic attempts to free himself. The women were dancing on bloodied stumps. The women were dancing, and they weren’t alone. Miriam, Dolores, and Ellie spinning around in frenetic, ever-tightening circles, leaving bloodied trails on an ocean-blue floor, trails that led to Jack—a fishing rod in one hand, a cigarette in the other—wearing haunted eyes in a despairing face. Arthur had sat up in bed and fumbled on the bedside table for his cigarettes and lighter. He’d had no more sleep last night. Or the night before. That night, any night. They were all the same now.

  He hated nights like that, hated the thoughts that crept in, in those early hours. He’d done the world a favour, done his daughter a kindness by keeping her in. It was his right. She was his. And if his love had caused him to do things that other people wouldn’t understand, he’d brushed those doubts aside as out-dated childhood superstitions of hellfire and wrath.

  ‘No real harm done.’ More harm caused to him by yet another restless night. The quiet stillness of the early hours prompted unbidden thoughts. Events and people from childhood, Miriam, Jack, flooded back to him with such clarity he could picture them all sitting around the kitchen table, waiting to lay judgement upon him.

  ‘Feeble old fool.’ He blinked and shook his head. ‘What rot.’ He had been the strong one, surrounded by weak people. He had had to show them how the world worked. They were flawed. They had all let him down and that was—they were—unforgiveable. He couldn’t have kept them around. He couldn’t carry them all. Ellie had been young enough to teach. But still… Her mother’s influence, those genes. He’d had to break her, mould her.

  He sighed. If only he weren’t so old and so fucking tired. He had wasted his life surrounded by people who were inferior to him. And now he couldn’t stop thinking of them. Now he had to end his days with Ellie.

  ‘Fuck.’ Arthur lay atop his bed, smoothing the bedspread around him and sighing as he stretched his legs out.

  He remembered the bird that Jack had given him one Christmas. A whistling yellow canary in one of those small wooden cages Mr. Fordham had used for showing his birds. He remembered how each dawn and dusk as the native birds had chattered and called out, his little canary would sing, its humble tunes lost in the raucous screeches of the sulphur-crested cockatoos that flocked through the bush.

  Some days he had withheld seed and water from the tiny creature. It would live on his schedule. His mercy. He had kept it out the back in the small shed, away from his father who couldn’t stand its whistles and songs, who had threatened to wring its bloody neck, claiming it disrupted him whenever he wanted to listen to the wireless.

  Miriam used to follow him out to the shed, envious of Arthur’s little pet. She had dobbed on him for not feeding it and when he’d found out, he had twisted her arm so far behind her back that her face had whitened in pain and terror. She hadn’t told on him again, not even when she’d tearfully watched him plucking feathers from its body after it had pecked him viciously on the hand, drawing a perfect, scarlet orb of blood.

  ‘Jack.’

  Arthur took a sip of water, placed the glass back on the bedside table and reached for the small alarm clock. Ellie would be making tea shortly. The now-familiar pressure in his chest became a squeeze and he tried to take a deep breath. Useless. Arthur leaned back on the bed; he hated his stupid windpipes and arteries and whatever else the doctor had named and blamed. Just shrinking bloody tubes that served as an aching reminder that cells were mortal, that bodies weren’t designed to live forever, no matter how strong you had been or how much you’d fought.

  Arthur figured there was probably so much coal dust coating his lungs that he was flammable. If he were ever cremated, he would burn for hours. He choked out a laugh that induced a coughing fit.

  ‘I’ll burn hot.’ The audible wheeze was excruciating, matching the pain in his chest.

  ‘Damn you.’ He tried to picture smooth pipes, carillon smooth, instead of mine-damaged airways that grated with each exhalation. The air refused to leave, despite the barking cough and its rib-cracking force. It was a struggle to breathe; he was unable to fight the congestion sinking heavily in his lungs, that coarse, black rattle. It made sense. He had followed his father’s footsteps into the mine; it was no doubt time he followed the old man’s path to hell.

  He figured he knew how death would feel. A blessed relief to give up the fight. His whole life, one long, blasted battle. Someone had had to take control, someone had had to maintain order. Could he have done things differently? He could have tried again with Dolores; they might have had another child, a son. A perfect boy, scar free. He wouldn’t have been ashamed of a son, wouldn’t have had to spend his life protecting a son from the cruelties of the world. He should have kept his dogs. His ferocious, beautiful dogs. He should have locked that bloody gate. He should have drowned all the bloody cats. Never should have let her have one in the first place. That started the furry floodgates. He choked on another tortured exhalation.

  Christ, he hated getting old. Loathed the aches that accompanied waking, loathed the way memories of what happened yesterday were vague and intangible but events that had happened decades before replayed with unforgiving force. His mother’s memories had decomposed as she had aged; he figured his past would vanish in a similar vein. He’d be unmourned and unmemorable; no one would ever know what he had done. Still, he feared the patches left behind, those cloying strands that would reveal the web that tied his life together, and the secrets buried years ago that could bubble to the surface, inescapable. Time lied. Time brought it all back.

  ‘Ellie.’ Where was she? Where was his tea? The clock was in his hand, but he couldn’t remember picking it up. The numbers swam around the clock face in nauseating loops and made no sense. Pain swamped him, and he opened his mouth to call Ellie’s name.

  Ellie stood at the ironing board. She knew it was afternoon, but was unaware of the specific time. The light in the laundry was still bright, not the fading, orange light that meant it was time to start dinner. Time was fluid, something that stretched and shrank, unless Daddy wanted something. Then time was immediate and sharp. She had cleaned up Percy’s mess—she sho
uldn’t have fed him. It was as if he had waited for her father to come home to be sick. Daddy had lain down for a rest. He rested a lot these days; the slightest physical exertion caused a coughing fit to erupt from deep in his chest. He had cut back his smoking now that his trembling hands couldn’t roll his cigarettes so well. His fingers still carried the stains though. Some stains never faded.

  She thought she heard him call her name, but as she cocked her head, listening attentively, there were no further sounds from his room. It must be time for tea. Ellie unplugged the iron, looking at the small pile of stacked clothing. She couldn’t put his things away now, not while he was resting. She sighed. The tea; she didn’t need him to call her twice.

  Ellie entered the kitchen, lit the burner, placed the kettle on the gas top, and stood back, watching the flame burn blue, then red, her left hand tapping against her thigh: one, two, three. She moved his cup and saucer further along the bench, wishing she could turn the radio back on. The wireless Daddy called it. She smiled. He liked to sit and drink his cup of tea and listen to the afternoon news. It was a time she liked too. They both sat in silence and listened to the world outside. Surely it was time for the news, but her father had not appeared.

  Percival jumped onto the bench and startled her. ‘Get down,’ she hissed. Daddy didn’t let the cat up on the bench. She shooed Perce away with her hands. ‘You’ve been fed, greedy boy,’ she whispered. ‘It’s Daddy’s turn.’

  She wanted to hear the voices on the radio. She wanted the world, with all of its dangers and sorrows that the news reports faithfully narrated every day. What to do? Ellie moved to the corridor and cleared her throat. There was no sound from her father’s room. She cleared her throat again. It irritated him, she knew, when she made that noise, but he was late.

  ‘Daddy, kettle’s on.’ There was no reply. She moved closer to his room and hesitated before she reached the doorway. Would he be angrier if she woke him or angrier if she let him sleep and he missed his afternoon tea and news? ‘Daddy?’