Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

by Aiki Flinthart

  We stand in silence for a few moments. Then Mum says, “How do you know?”

  “I saw him. From Rachel’s window.”

  Mum looks at me, a question in her eyes.

  “Mrs. Mac wouldn’t leave the gate open,” I say. “And there’s nowhere else Sybil could get out, even though she’s so small.”

  “It’ll be James’s word against Mr. Briggs’s if someone complains to the council,” Mum says.

  “I took a photo,” says my brother, “before I ran downstairs.”

  I grin at James as we go up to the door. “The boy detective solves another crime!” A photo. That’s pure gold.

  We knock; Mrs. Mac is slow to open the door.

  “So sorry, I was just wrapping up an online tutorial…Sybil! Finn! What have you been up to? Come in, please…”

  Mum tells the story as we go through to the kitchen. They introduce themselves properly and I learn Mrs. Mac’s first name: Morag. I hand Sybil over and make tea for everyone. James goes around patting all the dogs.

  “You might get a visit from the ranger,” says Mum. “Briggs is the complaining type. Though no harm was done. Your dogs are very well behaved.”

  “They are. I do have a council permit to keep more than the regulation two. Oh, chocolate biscuits, how thoughtful! I should be rewarding you, not the other way around.”

  “Any time,” Mum says. “You were giving a tutorial? In what field?”

  “Folklore. For the University of Aberdeen. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I can teach from anywhere, though I am semiretired now. What field are you in, Mrs. Gordon? Or may I call you Alison?”

  “Alison, please. I’m an accountant.”

  Mrs. Mac nods. “And do you enjoy that?”

  “It’s a job,” Mum says, fiddling with her cup. “Funny, thinking back. When I was Rachel’s age, I wanted to be a dancer. I was offered a scholarship, but my father put his foot down. It meant going to live in France, and he thought I was too young. Maybe he was right. How often do those childhood dreams come true?”

  Only when you make them come true, I think. The conversation feels somehow dangerous. I drink my tea and let the two of them talk. Mum has surprised me today, and not only by taking control out there on the road. A dancer. Why had she never mentioned that?

  “Rachel,” says Mrs. Mac, “your brother might like to see Frankie’s contraption in use.”

  We put the wheels on the little dog and take him into the hall, where he shows off his speed. Now that we’re out of earshot I ask, “What were you doing in my bedroom, James? When you took that photo?”

  My brother turns pink in the face. “Reading,” he mumbles.

  I lay my palm against the wood paneling of the wall and imagine the house is making me calm and strong. When I ask, “Reading what?” I manage not to sound angry.

  “That story about the dragon that gets woven into a carpet. I read some of it yesterday before you got home and I had to finish it.”

  I swallow harsh words. You know you’re not allowed to go in my room without asking! Who said you could read my story? But I did leave a printout on the desk where anyone could find it. And it sounds as if he enjoyed it.

  “Sorry,” my brother says. “I know you don’t like people reading your stuff. That story’s really good.”

  “Thanks.” He’s just a kid. And as brothers go, he’s not bad. “It’s just as well you did go into my room, I guess, or Sybil might have been run over. And there would be no evidence.”

  James flashes me a grateful smile. “Have you got any more stories I’d like?”

  “Maybe. But ask first next time, okay? Some of them are too grown-up for you.”

  I can hear snippets of conversation from the kitchen, and I’m glad we’re not there, because it’s really personal stuff from Mum, and the occasional comment from Mrs. Mac.

  She held onto my Washing the Plaid story overnight; I still don’t know if she thought it was any good. Is she telling Mum about my writing? I hope not.

  After a while, we take Frankie back to his bed. Mum and Mrs. Mac are still talking, but Mum looks at her watch and gets up.

  “I should be making dinner. Thank you so much, Morag. It’s been wonderful talking to you.” She dabs her eyes with a tissue. Has she been crying?

  “You’re welcome to drop in any time, Alison,” says Mrs. Mac. “You too, James. The dogs love a play. And thank you again, all of you. You saved Sybil’s life today.”

  I’m considering this as Mum and James go out ahead of me. Thinking of a story in which Mrs. Mac made the whole thing happen—the gate, Sybil’s escape, my family’s intervention, the kindness of strangers. Wondering why.

  “Wait a moment, Rachel,” says Mrs. Mac.

  “I’ll catch up to you!” I call to the others.

  Mrs. Mac waits until they’re out of earshot. “I loved your story, and not only because it’s about the Cailleach. It’s a remarkable piece of writing. I made a few notes, not corrections, just possibilities. I’d like to read it again tonight, if you don’t mind collecting it after school tomorrow. Writing is hard work, isn’t it? Frustrating sometimes. But there are moments of sheer magic. Like your story.”

  I can’t wipe the smile off my face.

  “I’ll find you a link to the course I teach at the University of Aberdeen. Folklore and Ethnology. A possibility for the future. It’s a postgraduate degree, so you’d have a good while to convince your father that a year of overseas study wouldn’t turn you into a wild creature.”

  And I think, down deep, I’m wild already. Trying my hand with the plaid. Freeing the dragon. Stirring the cauldron.

  “You could enter that story for the Young Writers’ Awards,” says Mrs. Mac. “You’d need to show it to your English teacher. Think about it. Another monster to be confronted. One that might prove very helpful. Now you’d better go, your mother would probably appreciate some help in the kitchen.” A pause. “I like her.”

  “She likes you. Bye, Mrs. MacEachern. I’m so glad Sybil is okay. And thank you for reading the story.”

  “It was a joy, Rachel. See you soon.”

  As I cross the street, I sense the presence of the Bridge House behind me. There’s no sound but distant traffic and the warbling of sleepy magpies, but I feel the house sigh and settle, like someone who’s done a good day’s work. I glance back. The neat, white-painted walls gleam in the warm afternoon light. Freesias bloom in Mrs. Mac’s garden; their sweet scent fills the air.

  It’s springtime.

  The Names of the Drowned are These

  By Angela Slatter

  Every so often, there’s a chance for reversal.

  For a thread pulled to drag things backwards.

  For the drowned places to rise. For the dead to walk again. To breathe air rather than water.

  Sometimes, there’s a chance.

  Adie Kane came home last week—just as she has done once a year for a decade of searching—to visit Nessa’s View. She took a room in the tidy little bed-and-breakfast at Ganymede, unpacked her suitcase, then got back in her rental and drove up to the lake (dam). She parked, and went to sit by the shore, careful to ignore the spillway and great curving concrete wall to her left. She sat on a rock (the same one, each and every time), and stared into the same black, unmoving waters—surely, it’s the same liquid, nothing flows, nothing shifts, not since that first flood settled—and thinks about the end.

  #

  Michael had been on the road for hours. Everything in Tasmania, he’d discovered, took precisely forty-five minutes longer to get to than Google said it would. It was his first trip, though his grandparents had both been bred here. And the roads... shit, the roads were an eclectic mix of blacktop, washed-out gravel, and fuck-you potholes that turned into gullies, abysses, or crevasses, depending on the personal inclination of each and every bloody hole. Barely wide enough for two cars, he’d had to back up five times this morning to let someone else by, someone with a much bigger vehicle.
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  There was an etiquette to it, he realized, a hierarchy on which he was the bottom rung due to his shitty little hire. He might as well have painted a red mark on his forehead. He kept seeing lips move in the shape of “fucking tourists” every time someone drove past him, the gale produced by massive 4WDs with mud on their bull bars and back windows shaking his flimsy Hyundai. The really serious ones had winches and steel cables for pulling idiots like him out of ditches and lakes.

  He was already regretting that he’d agreed to meet Adie here. That he’d agreed to meet her family. But the sex was good and he wasn’t quite prepared to give that up yet. Not quite. Michael smiled, thought about Adie. Felt things move lower down, thought about it too much and was almost run off the road by one of the too-big mining trucks that carried ore to the ports and took the ridiculous curves and corners as if they were auditioning for a Mad Max chase. Michael pulled over, half-on, half-off the bitumen; the engine coughed itself out. Kept his hands tight on the wheel because if he let go, he’d see how hard they shook, and he wasn’t sure he wanted that knowledge. He inhaled a deep breath, started the car again, took a good look around then drove gingerly back onto the road.

  #

  The first proper house had been the sandstone one built in the 1800s by Adie’s great-great-great-great grandmother, Nessa Kane. A structure built, rather, by convict labor, all the rough men assigned to the property that would eventually grow into a town. Adie’s aunt would tell tales of Nessa, though she’d never met the woman, and those stories were third-hand from her own mother. It was said Mistress Kane was far more feared than her husband or even the overseer. She would take the whip from that man’s hand and use it herself on any member of the work detail not pulling his weight. She’d make sure they bled, that she could hear the patter of their blood on the ground, on the stones. Like so many from the Old Country—wherever that might happen to be—Nessa Kane knew the value of red.

  She also knew that nothing stable or worthwhile came for free, and she was smart enough to make sure someone else paid the price on her behalf. Others might have called her a witch, though not to her face—her husband included—but she simply saw herself as a careful builder and protector of the family that was to come. And her husband let her have her way. He saw how she brought him a prosperity he’d not have had the will to wring from the earth. He didn’t question her, in the cold hours of a moonlit night, when she left their bed in the little ironbark hut they shared while the big house was being built. He did not follow.

  Nessa Kane led one of the convict men to the newly dug foundations. Younger and stronger than the others, he’d kept his shape better, not starved to string and sinew. He had good teeth, and was clean enough for her purposes.

  She took him to the required place, and though he hated and feared her in full knowledge of what he’d seen her do—felt her do, for he’d been no more proof against the bite of her whip than any other—she was beautiful, though older. She was alluring and demanding, and he’d not had a woman in months. So, when she came to him warm and wet, half-naked with breasts dark tipped in the moonlight, smooth thighed and greedy, he did not seek a deeper reason, for most men are fools.

  He did not think as he came inside her, did not think as a sharp, hot pain tore across his throat in the wake of the blade. He remained nameless, this father of Nessa Kane’s first child, voiceless but for his final moan, last act, last coming. He was what she needed: a man no one would look for, who might truly have run away into the wilderness and been lost just as she would claim. Yet he stayed; not by his will but he stayed. Buried in the foundations, he formed the family’s first connection to the land, paid the required tithe, gave them an anchor to the earth.

  A sacrifice to the past and the future.

  His blood, it was, kept Adie Kane coming back, year after year, like a leash that let her wander only so far. Kept her searching for what was needed, following a trail of relocations and feints, dying outs and changed names, as if someone was trying to hide it.

  It kept her seeking until she found it.

  #

  Adie’s hungry but she doesn’t let the rumbling of her stomach distract her. She’ll get something when Michael arrives. If there’s time. Instead, she sits on the rock, shivers a little in her coat; no matter how thick it is, there’s always that tiny piece of heart-ice to keep her chilly on the warmest of days—and this is not a warm day. The sun’s watery, too often behind the gray clouds that scud across the sky. The wind is like a slap in the face that she’s grown used to, can barely feel on her cheeks now.

  She doesn’t look down and far to her left, to where the new town sits. Instead, she stares out at the strangely still surface of the lake (dam). No waves are kicked up. It’s like glass. If she concentrates long enough, Adie’s convinced she might see the houses beneath, where Nessa’s View used to be.

  Ganymede.

  Ganymede was on a lot of maps because its mine produced a lot of copper ore. It was on a lot of other maps because the process released arsenic into the soil, turned the water red as blood, poisoned the surrounding areas for years and years and years. Almost as if it could only protest its own birthing in the most toxic way possible. Adie hates the place, though she’d lived there much of her life. She hates how ugly it is, how it scarred the land. She hates that something so ugly had been allowed to live—encouraged to thrive—when Nessa’s View had been condemned. Flooded one town, built another further downstream.

  Economics.

  Filthy word.

  Poor excuse.

  Not everyone stayed in Nessa’s View. Some moved away, to Hobart or the mainland. Some moved sooner, some later. Some even moved to the nascent Ganymede, got jobs in the mine. They found new houses, though not true homes; kept dying out until there was just Adie, almost alone in her generation. Aunt Miriam and Uncle Toby brought Adie up; however, they didn’t thrive. They put everything into raising her, yet she couldn’t help but feel they continued living only out of duty, until she could stand on her own two feet. Toby died a few years after Adie left high school, but Miriam went on until the girl finished university, then promptly succumbed to breast cancer she’d not bothered to have treated.

  Miriam taught her niece the things she needed to (Nessa’s ways hadn’t been lost, although not all the family approved), made sure the girl understood what she was meant to find. What she had to do. Miriam didn’t consider herself up to the task; she was too weary and worn by life and the loss of a home. Her niece and the other were the required vessels; two for Eden, two-by-two, two to tango. She’d left Adie alone with a burden to carry forward. The burden of names.

  #

  Michael locates the bed-and-breakfast sometime after lunch. The woman at the front desk looks him up and down when he walks in, suspicious. Not the best way to encourage the tourist trade, he thinks, but feels too tired to make a point. Instead, he hitches a smile—the same one he deploys when he’s occasionally unlikely to make rent because the costs of being a millennial have caught up with him—and detects only the slightest defrosting.

  “Uh, hello. My girlfriend’s already checked in? Adie Kane? A few hours ago?”

  The woman’s expression doesn’t get better or worse. Michael accepts he’s not going to make any friends here; his hostess’s got permafrost of the personality and his charm is wasted. But she fishes about under the counter and dredges up a key, big and old-fashioned, attached to a small chunk of raw copper. She holds it out like a lure and he half expects her to tug it away when he reaches for it.

  But no, there it is, hard in his hand.

  “Back out the front, turn right and take the path to the rear garden. Foxglove Cottage.”

  “Is Adie here?”

  She shakes her head, and Michael feels he’s been given all he’s likely to get; he beats a hasty retreat. It doesn’t occur to him that the hostility might be directed mainly at Adie, and only peripherally at him. He’s the center of the universe, after all.

  The co
ttage is sweet, blue and cream walls and furnishings, a large open-plan room; toasty air burring up through vents in the floor. A sofa, TV and coffee table mark out a sitting area; in one corner, a small fridge with a kettle and assorted items on top. A brass-framed bed and a spa bath take up the other half of the space. One door leads to a cupboard (where he sees Adie’s overnighter), another to a small loo, shower and handbasin (her makeup bag already on the sink). Michael unwinds his scarf—one of the ones his grandmother made compulsively in her final years, like she could knit her world back together as the memories were plucked from her day by day—dumps his backpack on the sofa, and makes for the bed.

  Starfished facedown on the soft mattress, he closes his eyes and moans. Stillness for a while, no more Tasmanian roads, warmth. Food soon, Adie sooner, he hopes. His pocket buzzes and vibrates beneath him. He groans, wants to ignore it. Obeys and pulls forth the mobile.

  At the dam. Bring food.

  He considers ignoring this for a moment too. Thinks about filling the spa bath and soaking there until she comes back. Looks at the minibar bottle of local wine, the artisanal cookies and the cylinder of Pringles. Michael heaves himself up with a grunt.

  #

  The names of the drowned are these:

  Rose McColl (single, fifty-seven, kept seven cats).

  Agnew Foster (forty-five, widower, owned the local grocery store).

  Sian Jones (eighty-nine, blind, made jam).

  Abel and his brother Cain Katzenjammer (fifty-three, unmarried, twin sons of religious parents).

  Scout Taylor (twenty-six, pregnant, daughter of a mother obsessed with Harper Lee; her husband did not stay).

  Elizabeth and Benedict Kane (Kane on both sides, a closer blood relationship than either church or state preferred, landowners); their daughter Sarah Kane (Adie’s mother; Adie’s father unknown).

  All those too stubborn to leave, too foolish to believe the government wouldn’t flood the valley. They all bore, to some degree, the blood of Nessa Kane and her sacrifice.