Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

It was hopeless fighting the pair of them. Dermot had learned long ago to steer clear of him. Arriving at Paradise Downs brought them together, though, if only for a time. Mainly it was because of Sylvia.

  Sylvia was something new in their lives. Until now, they’d had nothing to do with girls. She was round-faced but pretty enough, Dermot supposed, although she didn’t have much to say for herself. To begin with, he reckoned there was nothing to her at all, that prettiness was all she’d got, but in time learned there was more to her than he’d thought.

  Anneliese told him she was shy but it wasn’t that. She was secretive, just as Sean was. She never even let on about the waterhole; they had to find that for themselves.

  It was Sean who found it; he was always prowling about, asking questions, taking things to pieces to see how they worked. As soon as they arrived at the homestead, Dermot noticed a line of trees half a mile away, the grass greener than anywhere else, but it was Sean who went to take a look. When he came back he was jumping.

  ‘A deep waterhole,’ he said. ‘We can go swimming.’

  The two boys went together. Sure enough, the pool was deep, twenty yards long and ten wide, shaded by trees.

  Dermot started to pull his shirt over his head, then paused. The water was thick with algae; no way of knowing what might be under the surface. There might by anything. Snakes; crocodiles, even.

  ‘Reckon it’s safe?’

  Sean was already out of his clothes.

  ‘Soon find out.’

  And leapt in, knees to his chest. There was an explosion of water, the pock of splashes cool on Dermot’s skin. Ripples surged across the surface and lapped against the exposed roots of the trees along the other bank.

  Dermot watched. Sean was in the middle of the pool, blowing and snorting. He seemed all right. He slung off the rest of his gear and went in after him.

  Next day Macdonald got him working. Dermot never had much time for swimming after that but, whenever he could get away from station chores, he was up there. Sean always went, too, and they fooled about in the water, ducking and splashing each other. Those evenings were the first time they had ever been close.

  They never invited Sylvia but it wasn’t long before she was there, too. At first Dermot didn’t fancy the idea of her sitting on the bank watching them fool around with nothing on, but he soon got used to it.

  One evening Sean decided to talk her into getting into the water with them.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What’s stopping you?’

  ‘My dad would beat the daylights out of me.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You’re boys.’

  ‘So what? You’ve been looking at us for weeks. Now it’s our turn.’

  Still she would not.

  ‘I’m coming to get you,’ he warned.

  He made to scramble up the bank. At once she took off but after ten yards stopped, looking back uncertainly.

  Sean stood facing her, his pale skin gleaming in the gathering dusk. Dermot couldn’t see his face but knew he was grinning at her, daring her to join them. Knew, too, that he was showing himself to her.

  ‘Come and help me, Dermot,’ he called, without turning his head.

  Dermot stayed where he was. He was fourteen and the idea that she might take off her clothes had aroused him. No way was he getting out of the water and letting them see the state he was in.

  Sean pranced a few sharp-toed steps towards her and she took off again, this time without stopping. He waited until she was gone, then strolled back casually to the waterhole.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

  Dermot never believed it would happen, but Sean was right. Next evening, she was there again. This time she’d brought a towel. Dermot couldn’t take his eyes off her as she peeled off her dress and shoes. Kept her drawers on, though. She clambered down into the water and stood at the edge, thin arms crossed over her chest.

  ‘You want to swim with us you got to take everything off,’ Sean told her.

  To begin with she wouldn’t so they ignored her, fooling around in the middle of the pool as though she weren’t there at all. She gave up in the end, fidgeted around under the water for minute, then chucked her wet drawers up on the bank.

  She glared at them defiantly. ‘Satisfied?’

  ‘No hiding when you get out,’ Sean warned her. ‘All of us got to be exactly the same.’

  Dermot began to wonder if he would have the same problem as the previous day but now she was in the water it didn’t seem to bother him any more. They started to muck around and soon he never gave the matter a thought.

  After that she came every day. If Macdonald knew he never said anything. The waterhole became their place. No one else came there; the world with its bellowing cattle and dust lay beyond the fringe of leaves that separated them from other people.

  It never occurred to Dermot that things might change but, a year later, they did. One day Sylvia didn’t turn up, nor the day after. It was three days before she was back, and then she only sat on the bank and didn’t get into the water with them.

  ‘Got shy all of sudden?’ Sean jeered.

  ‘Don’t feel like it today.’

  He winked at Dermot. ‘Maybe we should chuck her in.’

  The threat did not bother her as it would have once. She didn’t join them but, when Sean got out of the water, she didn’t run away, either.

  ‘Come on!’

  She looked calmly up at him. ‘No.’

  He made a lunge at her but she took no notice, so he did it again. It was a game, no more than that; then Sean lost his temper and grabbed her. Before Dermot could move, he’d dragged her to the edge of the water and pushed her in. She stood there, drenched dress clinging to her body, and for the first time Dermot saw that her breasts had started to grow. Nothing much, no more than a bit of a bump where before there’d been nothing. It was odd; when she’d had nothing on he hadn’t spotted it yet now, with the wet dress clinging to her, he could not see how he had missed it.

  She did nothing, only stood there.

  Dermot reckoned Sean might have been a bit scared by what he’d done but, being Sean, was not going to admit it. Instead, he jumped in after her and tried to duck her.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ Dermot warned him.

  Sean took no notice so he grabbed him and held his head under the water. Sean tried to kick but Dermot was too strong and wouldn’t let him go.

  ‘You want to get out, now’s your chance,’ he told Sylvia.

  She gave him a look as though she’d never seen him before and scrambled up the bank. When she was safe, Dermot let Sean go. He came up, gasping and red-faced, punching furiously.

  For a moment it seemed that Sylvia was going to say something but, in the end, she didn’t. Instead she turned, a small, sodden figure, and walked away into the darkness.

  ‘Keep away from here in future,’ Sean yelled after her, then turned on Dermot. ‘What’s the matter with you? Gone soft on her, have you?’

  He was still mad, so again Dermot held his head under. Only when he started to lunge to and fro as though he were drowning did Dermot let him go. Sean never said a word but was still mad at Dermot for taking Sylvia’s side. It wasn’t much but it turned him. They were never so close again.

  The next day, after work, Dermot went looking for her. ‘Get into trouble?’

  She shook her head. ‘I told Dad I’d fallen in.’

  ‘Did he believe you?’

  ‘Why not? It was true, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry about it.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  But it did. It changed the relationship between them. Dermot, the oldest, had always been a little apart from the others. Things they found funny had often seemed downright stupid to him. Now everything was different.

  Growing up was no fun. Everything in Dermot’s life was changing, not only around him but inside himself as well, and because it was happening to Sylvia as well it brought them together. Now it
was Sean who was on his own. He didn’t like it but they didn’t care. They started to talk to each other instead of just swimming although, in truth, Sylvia never said much. Dermot made up for it, telling her about all the things that interested him, what he’d seen on the track, what it was like to chase a mob of cattle through the bush — stuff like that.

  He never knew if she was interested or even listened but told her, anyway.

  Sylvia’s dad had good eyes in his head; he started to come up with all sorts of extra jobs he wanted done, so that Dermot had even less time than before. He still managed to see her occasionally, though.

  The trouble between Macdonald and Dermot was one of temperament. Sylvia’s Dad was a tough, hard-driving sort of bloke and Dermot wasn’t. He liked to stand and look at things, to feel the world about him, and Macdonald was not like that at all.

  ‘Let’s get on, Dermot. No time for dreaming. We’ve got a station to run.’

  There was certainly plenty to do. Mustering, branding and cutting, moving the herds from one section to another, putting out feed for them in the dry, rescuing them in the wet … No end to it, but it also meant that Dermot spent a fair bit of time with Dominic, and that was good.

  Dominic was better than he’d been for years. There was no liquor for him to lay his hands on, so he had no choice but stay sober. He broke out once or twice a year when they took cattle to the railhead. Then it was all fury and what he’d do to the king of England if he ever got him in a dark alley. Rubbish talk. Yet his feelings had to come from somewhere and, when he was sober and they were working together, Dermot pestered him to tell him the history of Ireland and why the Irish hated the English so much.

  ‘Ireland must be free.’ Again and again Dominic told him. ‘Ask your mother what happened to her in Africa.’

  For the first time Dermot heard about the children, the husband who’d died, the farm burnt to the ground. These same English had done it all.

  ‘Like devils …’ He found it hard to believe anyone could do the things these people had done.

  ‘Never forget it,’ she said. ‘In Africa they had ten times our numbers. They were bound to win, yet still they killed the children. Afraid what would happen if they let them grow up, I suppose.’

  Hatred was a new thing for Dermot, but he learned it, sure enough. Put it with a romantic notion of the world, and it was like making a bomb. How he was going to prove himself he didn’t know, only that he was destined for something tremendous.

  Two years after they arrived at Paradise Downs, they got news of the Uprising in Dublin, how the brave patriots had fought the English. Heard, too, of the reprisals the English took, the numbers who died.

  ‘Heroes all,’ Dominic said.

  It was the only time Dermot ever saw him weep when he was sober.

  He had still not learnt the distance between saying and doing, and repeated what he had said when he was a kid on the track. ‘When I’m old enough, I’ll go to Ireland to fight,’ he told Dominic, looking to please.

  Remote as they were, they still heard the news regularly. There was carnage in Europe as the war wove its bloody horrors over the lives of millions. In their corner of the world it would not have meant much but, with Macdonald’s son in the thick of the fighting, the arrival of the post was always a ritual fraught with terror.

  Paradise Downs was only three hours out of the town, so the mail was dropped off at the gate pretty regularly. Macdonald, never one to let others do his dirty work, rode out to pick it up himself. They used to watch his face when he got back to see if he were smiling or not. So far Gavin’s luck had held, although there was no saying when that might change.

  Other echoes reached them. The rejection of conscription; names they’d never heard before — Lone Pine, Mouquet Farm, Pozieres, the Somme — became household words; in Canberra, Billy Hughes was chucked out and somehow got back in again; there was rumour of a mouse plague in the Mallee and strikes in Sydney; Russia got rid of the Tsar and was out of the war; the first rail link was opened between Melbourne and Fremantle. Still the war went on. It was a strange business; as a family the Riordans hated the English, yet both Irish and South Africans were fighting with them against the Germans. It was hard to know what to believe.

  Finally, between one day and the next, it was over. It had been dreadful, yet its absence left a gap. Even for people like them, it had become so much a part of their lives that it didn’t seem right for it to have stopped so suddenly. Made them wonder what they’d have to talk about now the boys were coming home. Macdonald was laughing, though. Gavin had come through without a scratch. Soon he’d be back.

  Dominic said, ‘Maybe we’ll have to hit the road again.’

  He sounded hopeful. For a moment Dermot was hopeful, too, then remembered Sylvia and decided he didn’t want to go anywhere, any more.

  Sylvia had told Dermot during one of their talks that when she was a kid she’d wondered what she’d do if there were crocodiles in the creek. There never were, of course. Only the arrival of the Riordans, four years earlier, had been a threat.

  ‘When Dad told me a new family was coming to the station I was scared stiff,’ she said.

  Dermot was intrigued by the idea that anyone could have been frightened of him.

  ‘I was afraid of newness,’ she explained. ‘I didn’t know what to expect.’

  ‘Are there any children?’ the eleven-year-old Sylvia had asked her father. ‘Any girls?’

  If there were girls, it might be all right. Because it was a friend she wanted, above all things. Someone with whom she might exchange confidences.

  ‘There are children,’ her father told her. ‘Only boys, though. No girls.’

  Sylvia knew nothing about boys. Nothing about girls, come to that, but assumed girls would have been easier. A boy could not be a friend.

  Her father had said nothing about their ages. For some reason she had assumed they would be younger and smaller than she was. She would be able to pet them, perhaps. To discover that one was almost a man, the other rough and pushy, not in the least like a pet, was a disappointment.

  They had extraordinary names, foreign-sounding. ‘Dermot and Sean?’

  They were Irish, her father explained.

  Which might explain it. Yet their mother did not sound Irish, her accent like a thickness in the throat.

  Sylvia watched, saying nothing. It was safer not to become involved. Not necessary, either; she had already learned that life always came to you, if you waited long enough. Although she had hoped for a friend, being alone had never bothered her. Just as well; Gavin, her brother, might have been a tree for all the friendship he’d ever shown her. When he went off to the war she had hardly noticed the difference.

  Her father was little better. Not his fault; what did he know about eleven-year-old girls? He saw her from the outside, her height and colouring, the sound of her voice, her look. But to feel what was really her, to see the world through her eyes, that he could not do. Not surprising; she could barely do it herself.

  Her mother would have understood; she was sure of little, but that she knew. She remembered her smell and touch. The fact of her. Her mother had shielded her from the world. She had died before Sylvia could ask the questions she now would ask. About her own childhood, the life and knowledge and feelings that had been hers. Too late. Now no one could tell her, and Sylvia knew herself diminished because of it.

  She could not put her feelings into words. It was like groping after shadows she could neither understand nor describe. Yet she knew they existed, as dreams exist. Now, with the arrival of the Riordans, there was Anneliese.

  Anneliese looked at her and saw her heart. That Sylvia did not want. The idea of anyone truly seeing her was terrible. Only one woman could have helped. Without a mother to turn to, she was determined to keep everything that was herself to herself. Do that and she would remain Sylvia, intact behind her skin, the boundaries of Paradise Downs, the vastness of the land that protected her with it
s emptiness and heat. She would be safe.

  She never even went to Waroola, if she could help it. She wanted nothing to do with a world whose echoes menaced her stillness. Now, with these Riordans, the outside world had come to her. A girl might have been acceptable. One younger than herself, controllable, one in whom she might safely confide. Or not, as she preferred.

  The Riordans boys were not controllable. She used silence to fence them out.

  Yet watched. When they found the creek, she knew. It had been her place; now, violated by their pale and violent bodies, their noise, it was hers no longer.

  But could perhaps be reclaimed.

  She walked to the waterhole; sat watching, even in time submitted to their demand that she join them. She thought that safety might lie in showing the world the face it wanted her to have, so with Sean she was defiant, with Dermot dreamy, pretending interest in the things that mattered to him, the images that peopled his mind. He was so much older than she, almost a man, yet seemed sometimes no more than a child. The notion might have stirred her but did not. He had no business to be so vulnerable. He brought her pebbles, grasses, a corella’s feather. She inspected them gravely, feeling nothing. She held herself in secret behind her eyes. She was safe.

  Her own body betrayed her. The flow of blood, the developing breasts. The prospects of being adult threatened her, cracking the shell that surrounded her. She was afraid that the world might enter, now that the child was gone.

  It was something she had to live with. She put it to the test and found, as she had feared, that it was no longer safe to reveal even her body to a world determined to bruise her.

  Sean’s hands, violating her peace.

  The fact that Dermot moved so quickly to protect her gave no comfort; even concern was a violation.

  When she got back to the homestead her father took in the drenched clothes, bedraggled hair.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I fell in. I’m fine.’

  So she was, in the sense he had meant. The truth was different but there was nothing either of them could do about that. She knew she could not keep herself apart forever. Very well, she would choose the next best thing. Control was what mattered. Not of her body; that wasn’t important. Not even of her life. Of her peace: that was everything.