by Judy Johnson
‘I told ye, he’s not a wild black.’ He utters each word with infuriating slowness, as though I were a simpleton.
I go to stand near the open door, lift my cheeks to the breeze. Take a deep breath. Chant the word ‘calm’ in my head a few times.
‘What if your tame boys are in league with them?’
He sits on a chair near the table, plants his dirty, booted feet two inches from the bread. Pulls a sheath knife from his belt and starts picking his teeth with it. ‘Ye don’t know how it works. Darby and Charley would be first to go. Then John Pigtail. We’ll be last. Not enough salt in our flesh ye see.’
Percy looms in the doorway, blocking the light. ‘Ah, fresh bread.’ His nose twitches uncertainly. ‘It might be all right in the middle.’
‘Ye always were a greedy bastard,’ Bob says.
‘Better than being a dirty one. Get your feet off the table. Burned or not, I’d rather have syrup than toe jam on my slice.’
Bob jostles his medicinal balls carelessly. After a minute, just long enough for Percy to know he’s not being obeyed, he puts his feet on the ground.
Percy pokes at the bread with a finger. ‘Next thing you know, the goat milk will sour. You need to look after your wife better, Watson.’
Bob reaches for his knife again, but Percy gets there first. ‘Thanks.’ He wipes the blade on his trousers, then carves a rough wedge from the loaf. A rush of yeast steam belches out. ‘See?’ He holds up a slice. ‘The middle’s all right.’
‘Give my fecking knife back.’
Percy shrugs, puts it down on the table. He’s almost out the door when Bob throws it. The blade hits home in the doorframe.
I snap. ‘You’re mad. You’re as mad as your mother.’
He reaches me in three strides. Grabs my hair and pulls my head back. ‘Say that again, I’ll knock ye senseless.’
I turn my head away from the spittle spraying from his mouth.
‘Let her go.’ Percy pulls the knife from the wood and steps back into the room. ‘Only a worm of a man bullies a woman.’ There’s a layer of ice in his eyes.
Bob opens his fingers and I step back, rubbing my head.
‘Want her for yerself, do ye? Ye can have her. Just don’t expect too much, unless ye like hammering a nail in a plank of wood.’
The next few seconds pass in slow motion.
Percy moves towards Bob, knife in hand. Bob lifts a forearm to deflect the blade. Percy hits him so hard in the face with his other fist that Bob crumples to his knees. He doesn’t move for what seems a long time. Then he stands groggily, one hand supporting himself on the table. He gingerly readjusts his jaw, then staggers out of the house.
‘Where’s your sister?’ Percy’s breathing harshly.
‘On the beach.’
‘I’ll go and get her, bring her back here. Then you barricade the door and don’t let him in until he cools down.’
‘What have you done? We can’t go on like this.’
‘Yes, we can. For a while longer, at least. Just one more drop. The operation will be finished then.’
‘He’ll be impossible to live with.’
‘No, he won’t. He’s a bully. Once bullies are bested, they pull their horns in. He’ll go off for a while then come back as though nothing’s happened.’
I’m not convinced.
Bob slinks back at dinnertime. He doesn’t speak. Just heads for a flagon in the corner, and a pannikin. He sits in the rocking chair in the shadows.
I set the table. My body feels like a coiled spring. Even the soft clink of cutlery seems too loud.
Percy must have spoken to Porter. Both men come in for dinner, hats in hand, their movements excruciatingly ordinary. Ah Sam hurries in with the stew. I spoon some food onto Bob’s plate, take it over with a fork. He ignores me. Keeps rocking without looking up. His medicinal balls clatter and clank unsteadily in his pocket. The flagon is already half-empty.
I take the plate back and put it on the table.
Porter watches me push the same piece of potato around with a fork. ‘You’re not hungry, Mary?’
Bob gets up, his centre of gravity unsteady. Bangs into the corner of the door as he wanders outside. I hear a long stream of pissing. A few unintelligible words. I look down at the table, not wanting to meet the other men’s eyes. I sneak a look at Bob as he staggers back towards the rocking chair still buttoning his pants up. There are wet spots on his crotch, down the left leg. Old memories of Papa flood back with a vengeance.
I look over to Carrie. She looks at me. I wonder if we’re both thinking the same thing.
How could I be so stupid as to put us both back where we started from?
Porter breaks the silence first. ‘Are we going out tomorrow, Bob?’
I hear the tinkle of rum splashing into an empty pannikin. The rocker squeaks a few more times. ‘Aye.’ Nothing more.
My head throbs. It’s the child locked in the cupboard behind my forehead, banging her fists on the door to get out.
42
God looks after drunks
and, just sometimes, their wives.
From the secret diary of Mary Watson
11TH SEPTEMBER 1880
At eight o’clock, Bob sinks sideways in the chair. By eight thirty, he’s almost slithered to the floor. At nine, Porter and Percy half-carry, half-drag him to bed. I hear him fall with a solid thump onto the mattress.
Porter smiles wanly when they come back. ‘You’re better off with him this way, rather than argumentative.’
‘He might wake up later. I’m not off the hook yet.’
He goes over to the flagon, picks it up and shakes it. ‘No, he won’t stir this side of sunrise. He’s swallowed enough to put an elephant in a trance.’
‘Poker?’ Percy suggests. He’s already cleared the plates. He shuffles the battered deck, then cuts and flicks them together.
‘Sorry, old boy. I think I’ll call it a night. My teeth are playing up.’ Porter yawns, exposing two rotten molars at the back of his mouth. I’ve noticed him from time to time rubbing clove oil gingerly on his gums.
‘What about you, Mrs Watson?’ Percy asks. ‘You want to turn in with hubby, or can you spare the time for a quick game?’
I glance at the bedroom doorway. ‘Just one game. Then I think I’ll sleep in the rocking chair.’
Porter waves from the doorway and disappears with a lantern into the inky night.
‘Just let me check on Carrie,’ I say.
Behind the curtain, her back is to me and she’s breathing deeply. The sea is calm tonight, rocking itself to sleep.
Percy looks up and smiles. ‘Out like a snuffed gaslight?’
‘Yes. I’m sending her home as soon as I can. This is no place for her. It’s the kind of atmosphere I was trying to get her away from.’
When I don’t elaborate, he cocks his head towards the corner. ‘Would you like a drink?’
I shudder.
‘Oh, come on. You won’t turn into a boozer with just a few nips. And you need to relax. You’re like fence wire pulled too tight.’
He fetches two pannikins and pours an inch in each. The first swallow stings my throat. The sensation, not the flavour, reminds me of the drink I had in Captain Roberts’s room at the back of the pub in Townsville.
Percy laughs at my expression. ‘Now the area’s numb, try again.’
‘I’ve experimented with that strategy before. It doesn’t work.’
But I take another sip regardless. With hardly any food in my stomach, it’s enough to make my head feel like a kite in an updraught. I flinch at a rough-sawn snore from the bedroom.
‘Why did you bring Carrie here?’ Percy asks. ‘You knew she’d be one more complication.’
I run my tongue along my bottom lip. ‘I told you in Brisbane why I left home. When I went back to Rockhampton just before I married Bob, I learned my father had started drinking again. I was afraid for her.’
‘So you brought her here, to live with ano
ther drunk?’
‘I know how it sounds. I didn’t know what he was like. I thought I could handle Bob.’
I push my mug across the table for more rum.
‘Now, now, Mrs Watson, not too much or you might accuse me of taking advantage of the situation. I have my principles. You are another man’s wife.’
My mouth twists. ‘In name only. Are you going to take advantage of the situation?’
My words come out less crisply and dispassionately than I would have them. I blink slowly as I study Percy’s face in the lamplight. The green of his eyes would be indistinguishable at night but for the sparkling gold flecks.
He pulls out his pipe and a plug. When he lifts a hand to tamp the tobacco, the light picks up the sinews at his wrist. ‘Is that an invitation?’ he asks, looking into my eyes.
The taste of rum is drying to a bitter paste on my tongue.
A sudden gust of wind under the door wobbles the lantern flame for an instant.
Then, somehow, he’s behind me. I feel him against my back. He’s undoing the buttons of my dress one by one. His mouth is on the side of my neck. The dizziness in my head turns into heat that moves down my backbone.
‘Come with me. Back to my hut. Away from him.’
I close my eyes. The room still spins. ‘What about Carrie?’
‘He won’t wake. She won’t wake,’ he murmurs into my neck. ‘I promise.’
‘All right.’
My voice is thick, my nose filled with the sharp aroma of his smouldering pipe, an inch from my face.
Outside, the night rustles its silks. The moon hangs suspended in a gelatinous sac.
His door creaks open. He sits the lantern on the floor. Hastily sweeps away the newspapers on the bed. He seems so much larger in the small space. The lantern paints him in shadow as a hunchbacked monster gliding across the ceiling.
I turn to face him, and he finishes pulling off my dress. The material falls at my feet. I kick it out of the way. The camisole and petticoat are next. Then I sit on the bed while he unlaces my boots.
‘Look at your poor toes.’
I glance down at them. They almost all have hardened calluses. A combination of neglect and the filing-down effect the sand seems to have on everything.
He eases me back on the bed and kneels over me, undoing his trousers. ‘There’s a storm coming, hear it? The wet season will be on us soon.’
As he speaks, I hear a low rumbling in the distance. And then he’s on top of me, whispering something I can make nothing of. His muscular thigh between my legs. I open my mouth on the small, sweaty hollow of his shoulder, where a single cord pulls tight, releases, pulls, releases.
Now the lantern on the floor paints our movements on the wall next to his bed. The hunchback’s gone. He’s a silkworm. One long hitch-and-slide after another, moving forward and back, forward and back, trying to shake off a cocoon.
But my legs wrap tight around him. They’ll have none of his attempts to escape.
43
The care of a good man always brings solace.
From the secret diary of Mary Watson
2ND OCTOBER 1880
Percy’s been ignoring me for three weeks. Coolly, politely. Firmly.
I’ve no appetite. My dresses are loose. My wedding ring slipped off at some stage of the morning last Wednesday. I found it again in the bread box at dinnertime.
I’ve caught Porter watching me, frowning. Sometimes his gaze falls on my reddened fingers with their chewed nails. Sometimes he stares at the slight hitch I can feel at the corner of my mouth.
‘I’ve brought you something,’ he says now.
I’m kneading bread dough at the table: earthy spores of yeast up my nose, the peach light falling in segments through the shutters and onto the dirt floor. He pulls a hand from behind his back. It’s a cream-smooth nautilus shell with tiger-striped markings.
He’s apologetic. ‘Not as big as some of them can get. Up in the Strait, they can grow to a foot.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
The shell is cool and slick. I peer into the open cavity and up an endlessly twisting staircase.
‘The animal grows outwards from the shell, sealing each chamber behind it. The last fully open chamber is the living one.’
‘So it just closes all the old doors behind it?’
His glance grazes my face. ‘Yes. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if we could do that?’
I’m caught by surprise, distracted by his hands gathering up both of my own; the mausoleum-cool shell in the centre of our four warm palms. His eyes have a patient question at their centre.
‘What is it that you want, Mary?’
‘Right now?’
He nods.
Want, as opposed to need? I fix on a specific, tangible target. Something that’s not so big as to yawn like a cavern when I approach it.
‘I want Carrie off the island, away from here.’
‘Is that all?’ He lets my hands drop.
I don’t know what else to say that won’t betray me. He looks at me for a long moment then nods once, slowly.
‘I’ll go over with Bob when he next takes the slugs to Cooktown and see what I can do about getting passage home for your sister.’
And then he’s gone and I’m alone with the creaking house, the shell and the dough.
A week later and I’m staring at the shell again. So long, this time, that its stripes shimmer in the afternoon sun, orange into cream, until the surface looks like the mandarin dainties Grandfather Oxnam used to bring back in brown-paper packets on his weekly trips in the buggy to Truro. The taste of a miniature boiled-sweet sun is on my tongue. Saliva squirts into my mouth.
When Carrie comes in, I ask her if she remembers them, or was she too young?
‘I remember.’ Without being asked she ties the spare apron around her waist, fetches the bucket and the potatoes and brings them over to the table. She sits on the stool and starts peeling with the knife. ‘We used to eat them under the monkey-puzzle tree,’ she says. ‘I’d lie on my back looking up at the bits of sky. It was like lying at the bottom of a wolf trap, with all the crossed branches above.’
‘Funny, I always pretended the branches were the thatched roof of my own secret house, where only the people I invited could stay,’ I tell her.
‘Except you never invited anyone. You preferred to be alone.’
Today’s bread dough is shiny and smooth now. I set it aside in its dish, drape a cloth over it. Then fetch the beans Ah Leung dumped at the door this morning, and begin topping-and-tailing them.
‘Do you remember the fig tree in St Newlyn’s churchyard? The one with a curse on it?’ Carrie asks, looking up.
The corners of my mouth feel heavy, nevertheless I can’t stop a smile when I think of the old schoolyard chant. ‘Who plucks a leaf will need a hearse,’ I recall.
‘It’s not a laughing matter,’ she says, with a seriousness that doesn’t suit her face. ‘Didn’t you hear the story of the church warden who took his shears to it when the branches blocked the gutters? He fell off his horse shortly afterwards and died.’
‘Lots of men in the country have falls from their horses, Carrie.’
The ocean’s particularly calm today. We hear a swishing sound, accompanied by low, anti-tonal singing. Ah Leung with his scythe is clearing the long grass around the clothesline.
‘Well, then,’ she continues, ‘remember the Archdeacon of Cornwall? He made a visit to the church in sixty-four. He tore off a few leaves to prove that the power of Christ was stronger than the power of the Devil. And guess what?’
‘He had a heart attack and went to his maker. I know the stories, Carrie. He was ten years older than God himself. It was about time he kicked off from something.’
‘Well,’ she’s digging around in the salt pig with the wooden spoon, mounting her arguments, ‘what about the blacks?’
‘I didn’t know they’d been to Cornwall.’
She gives me a flat look. ‘Th
at bone that they point at their enemies. It’s a human bone. And it doesn’t matter if you know you’ve had it pointed at you or not. It doesn’t matter if you believe it’s nonsense. You waste away and die. Just like that.’
‘We all waste away and die,’ I say, ‘eventually. Who’s to say it wouldn’t have happened anyway?’
She shakes her head. ‘You’re so stubborn! Even to the point of being wrong.’
I feel a small shiver in my chest. ‘That’s possibly the most accurate thing you’ve ever said about me.’
I take Porter’s nautilus shell over to the sill by the shutters so that when the light shines through, it will fall on its smooth surface.
‘Mary, you didn’t ever … you know … the fig tree?’
‘Pick a leaf? Of course I did. Who could resist a challenge like that?’
‘How could you be so reckless!’
‘I’m not dead, am I?’
Ah Leung’s still carving up the grassy air outside. The evening birds chatter at the feeder.
‘Do you remember much about Grandfather, Carrie? Apart from the sweets?’
I’m thinking of Porter. Somehow I’ve conjoined the two men in my head. It seems somehow right, even perceptive of me, this balmy afternoon.
‘He had neckerchiefs in different colours. And a walking stick with an eagle’s head.’
‘Clever girl. That’s right.’
She’s encouraged by my praise. ‘He used to write letters with special paper. I remember the box. It had solid triangle shapes on it and palm trees. I asked Mama what the triangles were and she said they were pyramids.’
I nod. ‘Charta Egypta. From the land of the Pharaohs. I memorised all of the writing on the box before I knew what the words meant.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you know how, before you learn to read, when it’s the shapes of words and letters you fall in love with?’
‘Not really.’
I’ve lost her. But, we continue our work in a companionable silence.
Later, after the vegetables are done and the light has turned bruised-orange, she says, ‘I was jealous of you and Grandfather. You always went on walks with him. You used to come back knowing all the names of the trees and plants. He never took me. You were his favourite.’
