Black Diamonds

by Kim Kelly

  ‘You choose.’

  ‘What about David?’

  ‘That’s very Taff, very Lithgow.’ She can call him whatever she likes, and that’ll do: ‘Dave.’

  She’s very pale and weak, even her eyes are so pale they are barely blue, but she manages a sharp little go at me: ‘You don’t call a baby Dave. He’s Davie.’

  ‘Davie, then. What made you think of that name?’

  ‘Close to Daniel. He looks just like Danny did, just like you, just like …’

  And now it’s too much. He looks just like his twin did too. She cries now, not loud, just forever.

  I stay where I am, I hold her hand, till she’s asleep again, and while she sleeps, I watch her.

  She wakes up a fair bit in the night from the cramping, low in her belly, makes her catch her breath; Mum says it’s nothing to worry about, often happens with second babies; means she’s healing inside. Mrs Moran and Nichols agree. But I remember cramps I’d very much like to forget, when I couldn’t move to flex them out, and I want her to stop hurting. She hasn’t cried again, but I know it’s more than the cramps that are hurting her. For want of saying something more useful, I tell her maybe she’ll heal quicker if she tries to move around a bit, just gently; she does, a bit more every day, and the pain gets less every night.

  After seven days she’s declared out of danger, but Nichols orders bed rest for at least another two weeks. France winks at me when he turns his back: see, I’m all right.

  When everyone leaves us alone, she comes out onto the back verandah with me. The sun’s streaming over the hill behind the orchard and it’s warm here, golden. Her hair has grown to her shoulders now and it’s flaming in the light; she’s got her yellow-striped dressing-gown wrapped round her: she is the sun.

  She says: ‘I think you can stop sleeping on the floor now.’

  Hmn. Don’t feel I should ever be in her bed again. But she has a point: I can’t do that forever.

  She adds: ‘And you can stop bleaching the life out of everything, too. For someone who can’t abide unnecessaries, you can do a decent job of being excessive.’

  That’s true. I say: ‘But you wouldn’t have me any other way.’

  ‘No. Couldn’t, could I?’ And she’s a bit sharp with that.

  ‘No.’ Poor girl; my girl.

  Her hand on my shoulder: ‘Mim must be run ragged with all the boys over at your mother’s.’

  ‘You’re not well enough for that,’ I say. And she’s not: Nichols hasn’t even taken the stitches out yet.

  ‘Daniel,’ she says, talking to her favourite moron. ‘I miss them being here. And shouldn’t you go back to work?’

  Work. She means the Wattle. Since the sale went through a month ago. Everything we wanted to happen has happened. Evan gave himself a moment for shock before saying, ‘As if not,’ and calling a meeting on the spot; three quarters of the miners have taken up shares; those that didn’t are those that don’t trust the boss because You Don’t Trust The Boss, and I can’t say I cared about them: more interested in getting back home to France that day, to tell her everything was good; still don’t care about them, mostly the sort who can only ever look at me like I’m about to threaten their grog money. Jesus, who’d be an alcoholic coalminer; it’s hard enough work without a headache. But it takes all sorts, doesn’t it. And Drummond proves you can’t ever be too certain of what a man will do: he rolled practically before I’d opened my mouth. I didn’t consider how happy he’d be to get rid of it, me, us; I think he was relieved, but he shook my hand, even wished me luck, all’s water under the bridge with the cheque in your hand, and now he’s gone, off to make a bigger profit elsewhere, with partners that won’t demand such horrors as cavil-out pay. Needless to say, I didn’t have to ask Robbenham to resign; quickest he’s ever moved. So now I need to run the company. Sign for licences to keep printing more money. Not been very interested in any of it lately, strangely enough. But France is right. Danny and Charlie and Harry can come back tomorrow, and I’ll go back to the Wattle. Mum’ll look after France.

  I’ll go back to … responsibility; first collective decision: blasting at the bottom of three. It’ll stop production there for a while, but it should have been done a long time ago, to bring down all of what wants to come down. That pinch, where Dad and the others were killed, is still there, though it’s unworkable now; men walk through it every day, or duck. Beyond it the seam has opened up, as if Drummond didn’t know that five years ago when he had the leaseholding extended to include it; but it’s haul by hand up to the pinch, too tight for ponies, up to the roof that still bumps like there’s dancing upstairs. So, get rid of the pinch altogether, stabilise the roof, increase production: blast a proper hole through two hundred yards and follow what appears to be an easy, ten-foot thick run for who knows how long. But I’ve put it off, till after France, well, till now. Because I want to see to it myself; get the slow job done quickly but properly, carefully. Haven’t mentioned it to her, though; not a conversation we need to have, and certainly not now.

  But France is still a witch; she says: ‘Penny for your thoughts.’

  Not for a million pounds. ‘I just don’t want to leave you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  No. I’ll try not to be.

  F R A N C I N E

  ‘It’ll be just as it was, Francine,’ Doctor Nichols says, taking out the stitches, only three of them: urgh. ‘But no, er, relations for another month. Still a possibility of infection, inside. There, all done. Good girl.’

  Good girl. Do I get a pat on the head or a lolly? Certainly won’t be having relations. I get a kiss on the forehead from my husband in the mornings and if he touches me at all it’s as if I’m made of china; barely spoken to me beyond the children, food and the weather all week. A campaign to keep France safe from anything and everything that might distract her from … I know he’s trying to do all the right things, but when he ironed the boys’ school shirts last night, he looked so slapped when I asked him not to any more, I could have slapped him. I don’t have anything else to do. And I don’t know what I want him to do. But I know how I feel: like I’m not a woman any more. And resentful, and twisted up … Oh, stop it, Francine, it’s only been a fortnight since … Sarah said I should try to give myself something she could never give much to her own self: time, to let my thoughts return to normal. I don’t want time; I don’t want normal thoughts; I want my Baby Joe to be alive. That’s not going to happen, is it, and babies die every day, fact of life, you’re not the only one, so pull up your drawers and try to be sensible, at least.

  But Doctor Nichols now sits beside me on the edge of the bed, not-to-worry tone replaced by grave and kind: ‘I should say, though, that it’s unlikely you’ll be able to have another child.’

  Oh.

  He talks about the trauma to my uterus, the inevitable scarring in there, says it’s best not to have expectations. I want to shout: do you have a crystal ball, then, to go with your medical degree? How can you say that to me? Because you’re a doctor, my doctor, and you’re trying to be kind and fair. I want to cry, I want to wail and wail and wail, but the sadness has lodged itself direct in my womb. No more babies? I am not a woman any more and I have no expectations.

  I am not sensible. Can’t even remember letting Doctor Nichols out the door.

  I am rubbed out. By my lack of attrition? I can hear myself snort. That’s what they call this war now: a War of Attrition. Not much fearing of God’s Wrath going on there, I don’t think: merely a phenomenal excess of death. A rolling abomination of infinite abnormalities. But oddly, I can feel God weeping into my soul, somewhere past emotion. No, the universe is weeping. It weeps as it tilts and tilts, throwing out stars like tears. Über aller Welt.

  Who am I to mourn my small bundle against this vastness? No one. Davie’s bleating for a feed: get on with it.

  Sensible now, sort of: kiss on my forehead and Daniel’s come home with that smell on him, that smell he had when we w
ere first married. It’s not coal; more acrid than that. He’s bending over the stove, sampling dinner, and I ask him: ‘What is that smell on you?’

  ‘What smell?’

  ‘That sharp, dusty smell.’

  Sarah says behind me: ‘Shot powder.’

  ‘Shot powder? Why do you smell of shot powder?’

  He says, ‘I don’t know,’ around another mouthful.

  Sarah has an idea: she’s just made a sound that’s half a laugh, half a sigh of scorn, and now she’s left the kitchen.

  I say: ‘How can you not know why you’d smell of shot powder?’ Since it’s a volatile substance with a very specific purpose … Oh. I realise before he replies. He’s not just running the Wattle, is he: he’s working in it. That’s why he looks so tired, too; and bleary-eyed, from the dust. And he’s hiding the fact, must be washing before he comes home, he must even take a change of clothes: because he’s done this before, hasn’t he, smelled like this lots before, when he was managing the mine. Sniff, sniff: smell from the blasting sticks in his hair. Oh. Oh. Oh. This was not part of our proposal.

  He says, reaching for a glass, not looking at me: ‘I hang about a mine. Why are you bothered about it?’

  Because …

  There’s no completeness to our union.

  I say: ‘I’m not bothered.’ I have no expectations and no valid opinion; even if I could speak. Everything I’ve ever done for you is negated now in this deceit, and I don’t care if it’s well- intentioned: you are a moron.

  ‘Good,’ he says, then kisses me on the forehead again.

  So much for promises, so much for locking you in your room if you misbehave, so much for true love. Kookaburra cackling sunset somewhere in the orchard: thanks for the note of ridicule.

  Bit more than sensible now; it’s been ten weeks and I am declaring myself well. I’m fit, physically, and inspired by my own epiphany in the bath this morning: while my body has resolved itself to be what it will be henceforth, bit bunged up but in good working order, so has my mind: I have decided that there is no such thing as a normal thought, not for me, when I doubt very much that there was ever much that was normal in me to begin with. Promise to myself then: proceed henceforth as I wish to continue. And I wish to do so as intrepidly as I can. The AIF have broken through Fritz at the Hindenburg line, and even the Troll has demanded they now be pulled out of the cauldron for a spell. I have my own line that needs to be broken through, my own demands as regards enough being enough, and it’s going to happen today.

  ‘I want to go to the paddock to visit Joe,’ I tell him.

  He looks up at me from the little truck he’s carving for Danny: sad lone dog. Not at all surprising: I’ve barely spoken to him since The First Night Of Shot Powder, as if I thought I might play him at his own game; make him talk to me. As if the words ‘yep’, ‘no’, ‘don’t know’ and ‘nothing’ could be used against the expert. I can’t bear this any more. Bleary and weird with my own grieving as I have been, I can’t blame him any more either. And I have sunk that low, if only to myself: it’s all your fault. If I hadn’t accumulated so much worry and so many tears on your account, then I wouldn’t have lost my baby. I wouldn’t feel as if I’ve been dragging myself through the gelatinous soup of my own guilt for weeks on end. Sinking low enough within it that when I discovered through Sarah via Evan that he’s been carving a big tunnel underground, appointed himself Chief Navvy, I even thought: I hope you do blow yourself up, since that seems to be a particular ambition of yours. Watching him picking at the savage blister on his thumb and thinking, I hope that hurts. Watching him sleep so deep he doesn’t stir a muscle even when Davie squawks out in the night, and thinking: you exhaust yourself deliberately because I am repulsive to you now. Juddering glimpses of throwing myself under a train, not to follow Joe, nothing as romantically daft as that; no, just murderous. And worse: imagined throwing Charlie under the next Mail instead just because he’d dragged me out to see the blue tongue he’d found under the verandah and wouldn’t stop his jolly burbling about it when I wanted to be stringing beans. Very ugly load of abnormalities. I want to cancel it all out; I want peace.

  ‘I want to go now. Today. With you.’ Because I have been avoiding this: the final proof that Joe is truly not here. I’ve told myself I don’t visit graves: not Father’s, in the Mick section of the cemetery which is always kept spick and span by donation to the tiny colony of mute nuns in town; and not my mother’s, not ever, because Father couldn’t bear it. I’ve told myself I don’t need to visit Joe’s because I see him every day, in David. But that’s only another reason why I do have to go, isn’t it. And I can’t do this alone, not only because it’s not my grief alone, but because I’m frightened.

  ‘All right,’ he nods, and the fear becomes a clenching round the swallowed cataclysm in my belly, but I will do this. He says, ‘Good,’ and I know I can do this, because I can hear that he is coming with me.

  It’s Sunday. We leave the boys with Sarah and Mim and drive round to the Wattle, past the office, the sheds, the toot, the black holes in the hill, and pull up on the flat, still mowed short like a rugby field by the pit ponies. A monument to Nothing’s Really Changed.

  We walk across it to the edge of the ridge and Daniel helps me down the rocky slope to the small flat at the bottom; he hasn’t said a word, and neither have I. Can’t; just need to keep hold of his hand. Whisper to myself: this is where our son is buried, this is real. And yet it’s not at all; fear falls away from me like the bark peeling from the trees. This place is too beautiful for fear, and somehow the thought that our little boy keeps Daniel’s father company here comes immediately to me, as a gentle fantasy, one I can keep. About two who live in this place, looking directly into the bronze-green skirt of the escarpment on the other side of the valley, who live beneath the gums that rustle above us, red-tipped with new growth, who live among the golden banksias and bright pink orchids that range up behind us. I can hear my whimpering, feel my knees buckle, feel Daniel’s arm catch me round the waist, feel the warm solidity of the rock he sets me down upon, hear myself ask: ‘Where is he?’

  ‘That little peppermint,’ he says, raspy and soft and warmer and more solid than the rock. ‘See, near that scribbly? That’s Dad.’

  I say, ‘Peppermint,’ as I see it. About three feet tall, with three very sturdy sprays of bright young leaf. Eucalyptus piperita, Sydney Peppermint Gum, and it’s very happy here. Thirteen to the dozen, but for the sprinkling of tiny, tiny daisies beneath it, so tiny … don’t know what they are. Except … too lovely.

  He says: ‘I thought you’d like it. You know, peppermint.’

  Like it? That I now know he’s chosen this tree for Joe, for me, that he’s nurtured it, that he’s been waiting, all these weeks, waiting for me … I don’t know anything. Except the pain washing and tumbling through me, waves and waves of it, overtaking me, and Daniel keeping hold of me and saying nothing because there is nothing to say. I am inconsolable, I will always be inconsolable for Joe, and that’s all there is to it; and that’s all right. My pain is soaring and circling out into the trees with my breath, my existence, the particles of my loss permanent in the atmosphere, permanent as this valley, and I want it to be. I howl for this injustice. I howl into the earth at my feet, between me and my child. I howl until I don’t, until I feel his arms around me tight with his acceptance, gossamer and firm, until I am quiet and I feel his breath through the back of my hair, until we are sitting, hip to hip, just here.

  And into this stillness I find I can say something I have to say, simply, with no tangles: ‘I don’t want you to work inside the mine any more.’

  I can feel his jolt at my voice, at my knowing that; but he only says: ‘It’s nearly finished, and I won’t after that.’

  Whatever that means, at least I’ve said it; and something else: ‘I don’t want you to come to bed and just sleep any more, either.’

  Silence. But I have to know this, now, today.

  ‘Dan
iel?’

  Into the earth: ‘I didn’t imagine that you’d ever want me again.’

  ‘I do.’ Please. Please don’t let this have wrecked us there.

  He looks at me and smiles, just, that heart-sore barely-there smile, and he stands up. ‘We should probably get back.’

  No. Yes: I need to feed David, probably a few hours ago. But … I take his hand and follow him up to the top of the ridge with my impatience stinging: this is hardly the time to have raised the subject. I have desecrated everything, us, everything, and somewhere across the paddock I blather: ‘I’m just awful, I’m twisted up and awful.’

  He stops and stares at me, and I don’t know anything and I don’t know him, and I want him to let go of my hand. I want him to stop looking at me, but I can’t stop looking at him. Heavy storm clouds are arcing above the valley, behind his face, and the low sun at my back strikes the gum leaves blood red, the peeling branches luminous white. A black cockatoo is screeching cold derision; a wallaby thuds away somewhere into the scrub and I’d like to follow it. I wriggle my hand away.

  He catches up my wrist and says: ‘No, France. Never.’

  Words are less than useless for what happens after that, except that I can say nothing is as it was, and I know now that’s all right too. It is fierce and it is infinitely gentle. Gloria.

  DANIEL

  ‘You won’t be making a habit of this,’ Evan says, following me in.

  ‘A habit of what?’ I’m still thinking about Francine yesterday, two miles backwards and about twenty yards up; I’m still watching her eat breakfast and hearing her saying: ‘That was a very good egg.’ She ate the whole thing, and two pieces of toast, for the first time since —

  ‘Labouring here,’ he says: yur.

  ‘No,’ I tell him. I’m that full of aches I’m never going anywhere near a shovel again after this, and for the last few weeks it’s felt like someone’s been drilling into my hip while I wasn’t looking: doesn’t matter how strong I’ve made myself, it’s the turning that does me in; I’ve got calluses inside and out. ‘But what’s your issue with me now?’