Two’s company, three’s a crowd, people said, and it was true. Ruth had known Mattie Howe almost as long as she’d known Fee, but now the two of them were engaged she felt funny being with them, like an extra leg on a chair. Mattie was lovely and said, ‘Here’s Ruthie!’ whenever he saw her at the door, smiling all over his broad freckled face, and meaning it, too, yet she still felt she shouldn’t be there. Fee and Mattie had a private world together now; you could hear it in their voices and see it in their eyes and in the graceful movements of their bodies, inclining towards each other: a secret place that was for them alone. There were certain kinds of happiness it wasn’t possible to share. So, ‘No,’ she’d said, when Fee had asked her if she wanted to come with them to Dubbo. ‘You two go together.’
‘We’ve got all our lives to be together,’ Fee had said, and Mattie had caught a little snatch of her yellow hair in his fingers and tweaked it gently as he echoed softly, ‘All our lives!’
For some reason this had made Ruth want to cry. She’d felt a sudden thickness in her throat and tears welling in her eyes and she’d turned to the window to hide her face from the others. ‘Please,’ she’d said. ‘Please just you two go. I – I’ve got to do something for Nan, anyway.’
Fee and Mattie had stood in the middle of the room, holding hands, gazing at her silently.
‘Please,’ she’d begged them, struggling to keep her voice steady.
‘But come over later, okay?’ Fee had insisted. ‘Round noon?’
‘Okay,’ Ruth had promised shyly, and then Fee had rushed over and given her a hug. ‘Oh, Ruthie, Ruthie,’ she’d whispered, ‘what are we going to do without you when you’ve gone away?’
Ruth glanced at her watch. It was nowhere near noon. She’d walked away from the crossroads and down the road towards town and then, somehow, though she couldn’t actually remember deciding, she’d turned onto the track that wandered along the creek bank and down to the little beach. She’d been sitting here beneath the willows for almost an hour, half waking, half dreaming, caught between two worlds. Sometimes she thought of Sydney and sometimes she thought of Tam Finn, and even when her eyes closed, she was alert to every sound, as if she was waiting for someone. Her gaze drifted slowly to the bank on the other side, to the clump of thick green bushes where yesterday she thought she’d caught a glimpse of his face amongst the shiny leaves. There was nothing there today, no sudden movement, no sound, no blur of pale flesh against the green. Had she really seen him? It was difficult to think of a person like Tam Finn hiding, here or anywhere. He was too bold to hide.
Bold. It was a word you could savour, like a shiny red sweet rolled round inside your cheeks and beneath your tongue. A word that didn’t give.
The Barinjii mothers whispered endlessly about him round the town. Everyone whispered about him and the whispers, vague and half heard, made him sound like some kind of demon from an old folk story. You could become a story in Barinjii, thought Ruth, you could become what others said about you, while your own self drew back deep inside your skin, deeper and deeper until it became a secret no one could discover.
She felt for the letter in her pocket, drew it out and sat staring at the thick plain envelope, the deep black ink of the letters which spelled out her name. She touched the crest with her fingertip, the jaunty little lion with the bright curly mane, and thought how when the letter had come this morning, Tam Finn had vanished from her mind; he’d hardly seemed real to her. But down here in this shadowy hidden place it was the letter and its promise of a different life which seemed unreal. How could she get on the train and go away from Barinjii, leaving everything behind?
Abruptly she remembered something. One day in those months when Tam Finn had been at their school, Ruth had walked past his desk on the way to hers and his hand had been lying there, the fingers spread, long fingers, narrow at the top, wider at the base where the springy black hairs grew. And the thought had come to her that if the back of his hand brushed against your skin you’d feel every one of those coarse, wiry hairs – and then her blood had surged in secret places and her legs had felt weak and Tam Finn had looked up and grinned mockingly as if he’d read those thoughts. The memory was so vivid it could have come from last week instead of more than a year ago.
She looked over at the bushes again. Everything had gone quiet, even the trickle of water running in the creek seemed to make no sound. Something soft and warm fell on her face. ‘Ah!’ she gasped, batting at her cheek, but it was only a raindrop – in the shelter of the trees she hadn’t noticed how the sky had clouded over. All at once this place she’d known since childhood seemed horrible to her: the drooping willows, the slow brown water, the thick fleshy leaves of the bushes on the other bank, the faint lingering smell of something rotting unseen. She jumped to her feet and scrambled up the bank onto the track, where she stood for a moment breathing in the scent of earth and rain, brushing the damp clinging sand from her skin and clothes. Another big drop of rain fell on her hand. It was a pinkish colour, big as a two-shilling piece, and she stared at it for a moment before raising her hand and licking the drop away. It left on her tongue the faint familiar taste of the dust of the western plains.
A crow swooped down onto the weedy verge and stood regarding her intently with its round white-ringed eye. It was huge, big as a cat, its feathers the same bold blue-black as Tam Finn’s hair. She remembered how in some fairytales the witches had familiars: if Tam Finn was a witch then his familiar would be a crow. The intensity of the bird’s stare was unnerving, and she wondered what kind of world lay behind that blank round eye: great skies, she thought, and the brown land beneath them, and down below a small huddle of grey fleece, its soft parts ripe for tearing—
The bird took a step towards her. ‘Shoo!’ she cried. ‘Get away!’ and it rose into the air on great slow beating wings.
Still it was too early to go to Fee’s place. She began to walk slowly in the direction of the town. The road was empty and the paddocks were empty and the only sound was the faint echo of her feet on the hard clay and a dry shushing as the wind blew through the dry stalks of the grass. Far off a crow called, perhaps the very same crow that had stared at her so avidly, but when she looked up the sky was empty too. Yet as she walked on through the empty landscape Ruth had a sense of someone, some watching human presence very near. When she looked round there was no one, but when she walked on she felt it again, like breathing in the air.
And then the whistling began, high and clear and strangely familiar. She walked faster and almost at once she recognised the whistler’s tune: it was one of the hymns they sang in church on Sundays, Come down, O love divine, Seek now this heart of mine— She swung round and the whistling stopped and once again there was no sign of anyone and no sound except the shushing grass and the eerie pattering of the big raindrops on the leaves of the trees. She started to run and the whistling began again, only now it seemed to come from the side of her, down the bank, somewhere along the creek. The whistler’s notes were perfect, clear and true, and somehow this seemed more frightening than anything.
She left the road and ran into the paddock on the other side, and then on into another paddock and then another, scrambling through fences, the dry grass prickling at her legs, and at last onto a narrow unfamiliar track which doubled back and then straightened out and then curved round again. It was a landscape that she didn’t recognise at first, but as she ran on it began to become familiar, like a place you’ve known and haven’t seen for a long, long while: the narrow road with a stretch of whispering she-oaks, the low, round hill with an old house on top, and below the house, the sly gleam of deep water. When she saw that water Ruth caught her breath and began to tremble. She was in Starlight Lane. She’d come all the way out to Skelly’s dam!
She never went near this place. Skelly’s dam was where her grandfather had died, slipped one rainy night when he was trying to save a calf, and drowned. She hadn’t been here for years and years, not since that time in pri
mary school when Mr Barlow had taken them on a nature walk. She’d felt she would die back then, seeing the dam up there on the hill like a great eye in the middle of the paddock staring down at her, and all the kids giggling because she was so scared she couldn’t keep on walking but stood still and trembled in the middle of the track. Then Mr Barlow had started shouting at her and Fee had said, ‘Close your eyes, Ruthie,’ and held tight to her hand until they’d got safely past.
She’d been nine then; now she was seventeen and knew it was ridiculous to be scared of a place just because something bad had happened there a long, long time ago. She turned her eyes from the dam and walked on quickly down the lane. The person who’d been whistling would be a long way behind now. Down the creek, she told herself, he went down the creek, and the creek was a long way from Starlight Lane. She slowed a little and glanced behind her: the lane stretched long and lonely, empty as the air.
‘Ruth,’ someone said, and out of the cluster of she-oaks beside the path stepped Tam Finn. He wasn’t very tall, no more than medium height, but his body had a kind of density about it – he was solid on the ground. And yet he was thin, too – when the wind flung the cloth of his blue shirt flat against his chest she could see the outline of his ribs. His face was heart-shaped, and above his wide forehead the thick black curls lay coiled and glistening. There was a kind of animal quality about those curls, they made you think of something hidden in a thicket, bright eyed, coiled and spry.
‘Ruth,’ he said again. Her name on his lips surprised her; she’d have expected him to have forgotten it or never known, and yet in another way his use of it had all the strange familiarity of her dream.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said.
A faint glimmer of amusement gleamed in his eyes. He slid his hands into his pockets. ‘Found me, eh?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Come off it,’ he said. ‘You’ve been looking for me all morning. Saw me down the creek, yesterday, eh?’
‘No! No, I didn’t! I haven’t been looking for you!’
He didn’t say anything. ‘I always go down the creek,’ she rushed on. ‘I like it there, it’s quiet—
’ ‘Good place to read,’ he said softly. ‘Only where’s your book, Ruthie?’
Ruthie! No one called her Ruthie, except for Nan and Dad and Fee. And Father Joseph, sometimes. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you, me being down there!’ she cried. ‘And I didn’t see you like you say I did, so how could I be looking? I—’ She stopped, hearing her voice going on like a guilty little kid.
‘Didn’t even see me, eh?’ Tam Finn wagged his head like a person who knew better, and a flash of pure hatred surged up in her, and then died away. His eyes were such a strange, sad colour: a dark shining grey, like the watery light of a rainy morning when you can tell without opening the curtains what it will be like outside.
Abruptly, yet with the most careless grace, he sank down onto the grass beneath the she-oak trees and patted the place beside him. ‘C’mon then.’
She stood still, clasping her hands together behind her back, and Tam Finn gazed at her without expression as if after all he didn’t care what she did, couldn’t be bothered with her, as if inside his head he was a thousand miles away. She thought of the crow, the landscape it saw from its cold eyes—
He studied the grass where he was lying, stroking it idly with one hand. ‘Too wet for you, is it?’ he said. Slowly, he unbuttoned his blue shirt and laid it on the ground. She tried not to stare at the hard brown chest, at the two lines of wiry black hair which followed the shape of his ribs and then plunged into the waistband of his jeans.
‘There you are,’ said Tam Finn, patting the blue shirt. He held out his hand to her, and for a moment she wanted to take it and let him pull her down beside him.
Something glittered on his third finger. The ring finger, where Fee wore her engagement ring, the beautiful blue sapphire which had belonged to Mattie’s gran. Tam Finn’s ring was gold, the kind of gold that made your eyes ache even though it was real. It was a snake, she saw – or rather a serpent, like the one Eve had met in Eden, coiled round, its head swallowing its tail.
He saw her looking. ‘Like my ring?’
She shook her head and he stared down at the ring, twisting it this way and that on his finger. ‘It’s me,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The ring. The serpent’s swallowing himself, see?’ He held his hand up, so the snake’s red eye gleamed at her. ‘Like me.’
‘H-how?’ she stammered. ‘How is it like you?’ She was frightened.
‘I’m swallowing myself.’ He stared into her face. ‘I am. All the way down.’
His words made her freeze and she looked away from him, searching the landscape for something safe and ordinary: Mrs Hogan hanging out the washing up there in her yard, someone’s dog out hunting in the long grass, a glint from behind that far-off line of trees where a cart full of milk cans might come jolting along the road. There was nothing but the paddocks and the dam, the silent house up there on the hill and the long lane down which no one else would come.
‘C’mon,’ he said again, and his hand reached towards her again. ‘Be nice to me.’
She tossed her head back and he smiled at her. It was the most beautiful smile and she realised she’d never seen Tam Finn smiling before. Not once. It was like a light going on in a darkened room, showing safe and peaceful things: a vase of painted gumnuts on the mantel, an armchair in a flowered pattern, a child seated at the table, colouring in. ‘You toss your head back like my peacock does,’ he said to her. ‘Really proud, like he doesn’t want to know me. But I think he does.’
Ruth didn’t say anything.
‘His name’s Dancer,’ added Tam Finn, and he smiled at her again. ‘Be nice to me, Ruthie.’
‘No – no, I can’t,’ she stammered. ‘No, thank you.’
The smile faded and the light went out of his eyes. ‘No, thenk you,’ he said in a mincing voice which mimicked hers, watching mockingly as she began to edge past him with small steps, eyes down, trying not to tread on the edges of the blue shirt. ‘No thank you kind sir, is it?’ he said, and she felt his eyes on her back, roving up and down. She turned and sneaked a quick glance at him. Big raindrops had begun to fall again and Tam Finn flung his head back and let them fall on his face. He closed his eyes and stuck his red tongue out to catch a drop, then drew it in again with a little sucking sound. ‘We could make love in the rain,’ he said. ‘It’s good making love in the rain.’ He yawned and stretched luxuriously, closing his eyes, so the raindrops settled on his eyelids and lay there like soft pink pearls. ‘The rain is raining all around,’ he recited, ‘It falls on field and tree, It rains on the umberellas here, And on the ships at sea.’ He opened his eyes. ‘Did you say umberella when you were little, Ruthie? I did. “It’s umbrella, Tam,” they’d say. “Speak correctly, you’re a big boy now.”’
She’d almost got past him when his hand shot out and seized her ankle; the long fingers with the tufts of black hair were strong as iron.
‘Let me go!’
Surprisingly, he did. The heat of his fingers melted away from her. It was like loss and the unexpectedness of it made her look down at him. The wind blew and the trees shivered and their shadows fell over his face so that all at once he looked quite different, like an ordinary boy who felt ordinary sadness and could be comforted if you put your arms around him and pressed your lips against the softness of his hair, and she remembered how gentle his voice had sounded that time in the playground when he’d said to Iona Malloy, ‘Your brother will be all right.’
The shadows moved and his face changed again and he laughed up at her.
She stopped. ‘What?’ she whispered. ‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Off you go now, little Ruthie.’
‘I—’ Some person inside her wanted to stay, but Tam Finn waved at her again and she began to walk away. Where the lane turned she looked b
ack and he saw her looking and leaped to his feet. She began to run then, running blindly, half sobbing, and the rain came pouring down and she ran and ran and she could hear him coming after her, and she hated it and yet she loved it too: the running and the rain pouring, and Tam Finn so close behind her she could almost feel his breath upon her skin. But when finally she turned to meet his face, he wasn’t there. No one was there. The lane was empty in the hissing rain.
seven
The path to the presbytery took Margaret May past the small graveyard where her husband was buried.
Don Gower’s stone was in the new section, second line, third on the right, a plain granite slab with his name and dates. Margaret May knew people in Barinjii thought it ‘funny’ that there was no more to the inscription, but she honestly hadn’t been able to think of any phrase which would be both suitable and true.
He’d had the most beautiful eyes, that was all. So soft they’d been, so deep – she’d been knocked all of a heap, opening the kitchen door at Fortuna and finding the tall young man with the beautiful eyes gazing down at her. They were eyes you could trust, she’d thought, being a green, skimpy know-nothing girl. ‘Here, let me do that,’ he’d said when she’d reached out to take the big box of groceries from his arms.
‘Here, let me do that.’ No one had ever said such a thing to her before.
They’d begun walking out together; it was barely a month before he’d asked her to marry him. She’d thought she’d be safe, married, but it was as though she’d been out wandering in a wilderness and a big storm had come and she’d found a cave where she could shelter and crawled inside, and then a great heavy stone had fallen across the entrance and shut her in. She’d felt no grief when he’d died, only a sense of relief, as if someone had come and lifted the stone away. ‘Thank you,’ she’d whispered at the funeral, not to God, exactly, but to the earth, the sky, and the great consoling trees.
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