by Kim Kelly
Step out into this town of filthy rock-crushing metronomes thumping out the rhythm of my purpose. Listen: let that sound be my purpose: bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.
Past the ramshackle fence by the Wheelers’ tank stand the road bends away through the centre of the town, and I keep walking down it. One step after the other, my actions must be thus from now: small, alert, deliberate. Intent. A yard of knotted grapevines, gone wild with neglect, is strangling an apple tree as I continue into the town, and I ask this air: make me as wild and uncaring of what I will destroy. For who will suffer when I erase Alec Howell from this world? Who, truly? No one. Another surgeon will be found for the hospital; another candidate found for the Liberal League Free Traders; Mary will cry her fantasies to sleep in the kitchen. He is no saver of lives for any reason of compassion; a doctor only for the control over life it affords him; a politician craving power for the same reason. Life will go on once his is ended. The natural order of all other things will remain, such that it is. Bread will be baked; pots will steam. This town will go on, grinding itself into nowhere for the dividends of distant investors. The children playing hopscotch in this street between the draper’s and the next public house will still be runny-nosed and poor. Their mothers will remain trapped here, never having left the goldfields since they got here, or were born, and the window of the draper’s will continue to advertise Grand Prix P.D. Corsetry.
I reach into my pocket for the wishbone, and I feel the crumple of Mr Wilberry’s pound note around it. I push the rough edge of the snap through the soft paper, and I stab it into my palm.
We will be free.
Tomorrow: we will be free.
I am ready to succeed in this. Ready as I will ever be. I simply have to be. I turn around, and head back to the hotel – I want to be on the road as soon as possible. The time for thought is past. The time to act is here.
‘Morning, Miss Berylda.’ And Buckley is at the stable gate to meet me. Good. Excellent.
‘Morning,’ I reply before snapping out an order at him, too: ‘Have Sal ready within the hour. Please.’ As if we might crack out to wherever this Ah Ling is and back in time to return to Bathurst today. Impossible.
And Buckley underlines it for me: ‘I’m resting Sal today, miss. She had the longest day of all yesterday.’ There is rebuke in that, and I deserve it. Yes. Poor Sal. He says: ‘We’ll be taking the Wheelers’ mare out and when she’s ready.’
There is more than rebuke in that, and well beyond a servant’s place, but before I can make my rankling felt and understood, he says: ‘And you’d do well to take moment too – think about what you’re doing.’
‘I do beg your pardon?’ You don’t challenge me.
Yes, he does; he holds my stare for the longest time, sticking me to the gravel with his old black eyes. Then he says: ‘It’s not all up to you, Miss Berylda, whatever might be going on with all your rushing about, getting here, going there. I’m not too fussed if you want my word on it or not, but I’ll tell you anyway: you might miss what’s right in front of you if you don’t take a moment to see.’
‘See what?’ I blink into his impertinence, astonished.
‘What’s looking right at you,’ he says, remaining not too fussed at all, and he nods up the road, behind me.
I look over my shoulder and there is Mr Wilberry coming down the other way, returning from his walk, a slow loping streak of unbleached canvas and Huckleberry straw against the hazy grey hilltop behind him. He doesn’t see us; he has stopped to look at some sort of plant poking through another derelict fence there, a half-dead bracken frond by the look of it.
Buckley’s brick dust scours into me: ‘You’d do worse to look at one such as that feller.’
‘What?’ What is Buckley suggesting? I remain too astonished to ask.
‘You know what he was doing when he wandered off from us yesterday?’ Buckley is as unperturbed, informing me: ‘Following a platypus, he was. Lost track of the hour following a platypus up the riverbank. That’s the sort of feller he is.’
I know. He is wonderful for the wonder he takes at the life he finds around him. And Buckley has no business pointing that out to me. And at what suggestion? I turn to Buckley: ‘Mr Wilberry can do as he pleases.’
And I cannot. I cannot believe what have I just heard, either. Is the gardener playing fantasy matchmaker for me, in league with my addled sister, or is my mind beginning to unravel? Mr Wilberry is no solution to my rushing about; he is no timely and convenient rescuer. His loveliness can do nothing for me other than taunt from outside the bars of the cage. For Alec Howell is keeper of my keys, my guardian, and he will certainly do as he pleases: he will drag me by my hair to the altar before Mr Wilberry could so much as think the word wife. But Buckley doesn’t know any of that; couldn’t do. Just as he couldn’t possibly have been proffering marriage advice to me just now. Strange old man, merely being strange, telling me to take a moment to smell the half-dead bracken fronds. Being kind in his gravel-gruff way; catching me from a fall; being my friend. He shrugs into my wonder now and walks away, back inside the gate, and down towards the stables.
And I turn back to Mr Wilberry. I watch his powerful form, twisting off a sprig of whatever it is that’s caught his eye there. His hands, his back, the crouch of his knees: all powerful. And I have a power over him. Yes, I do, and I have known this from the first moment, too.
I could, if I must, make him do anything.
Whatever I must do, I shall. And courage, you will not fail me again.
Poison
I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness
will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Ben
‘How is your sister now?’ I ask Berylda as she approaches the stables from the rear verandah of the hotel, her hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun rising over the hayloft. As she strides straight past me. She has been busy for the past hour or so, that swift and heavy footfall charging back and forth from the kitchen to the room she shares with her sister, and now from the kitchen again with a basket of food for today over her other arm. Busy, busy, busy, she is. And possibly worried; no pretence in my concern, either: sylphlike as the sisters are, I wonder if there is not something more delicate about Greta. Perhaps Berylda didn’t hear my question?
I am about to ask again when she replies, to the mare at the head of the buggy: ‘My sister is comfortable enough, thank you for asking.’ She glances behind her, in my direction, as though she has only just become aware of my presence, or perhaps she is still embarrassed about having to ask for that bit of cash; terrible thing, being forced to beg and justify the smallest amount, as Mama always had to, as though she might have spent a ha’penny too much on a packet of pins or a length of ribbon for her table arrangements.
‘The headache powder?’ I ask Berylda. ‘You got some all right, then?’ I presume so, as she hurried in and out of the hotel earlier.
She doesn’t reply for a moment, though, settling the basket under the seat of the buggy, before glancing behind her again: ‘Oh yes.’ And I sense she is indeed embarrassed, so shut up about it, Wilberry.
‘Buckley,’ she asks the old man, who’s busy at the coupling straps of the harness, ‘what is the name of this horse? She’s a pretty thing.’
‘Whiskey,’ he says, not looking up from his work, a careful man checking over every aspect of the vehicle twice.
‘Suits her,’ Berylda says.
‘It does,’ I say, as the name might suit any sorrel chestnut. ‘She’s a very pretty animal,’ I add, as pointlessly, because Berylda still doesn’t look at me. But I will have her look at me. She will not shut the door in my face again, not so soon. So I attempt another line: ‘Cosmo won’t be joining us. He’s taken ill himself, in a manner of speaking – not interested in getting out of bed is
the truth. Couldn’t be bothered sending his apologies.’
‘Ha.’ Berylda turns to me now, slowly, at last, and with something of a sardonic smirk under her hat. ‘Ill? I should say your friend is by far the one in need of headache powder, no?’ She raises her face a little more and her eyes seem to be smirking too. Strike me but the wit amidst her beauty is a song; perhaps one only I can hear, but it is everywhere and real enough, to me. She’s asking me something; what? She asks me again: ‘I said, did he drink all that angelico himself or did you help him?’
‘Ah. Yes. Solo effort, that one was.’ I smile back, and cringe: how anyone can drink that sort of fortified cough syrup at all I don’t know.
She doesn’t either; she twitches her nose and our smiles are one inside the other as she says: ‘I saw the evidence of the empty bottles in the kitchen – you know that wine contains over twenty percent alcohol? It’s amazing that Mr Thompson is still with us. Mrs Wheeler and her maid are most impressed at the effort – and they thought you had shared it.’
‘He’s a problem.’ I nod.
‘One best left behind by the sound of it.’ She nods back, sharing the joke with me, a little twist to the smirk again; and she’s pleased he’s not joining us? Well, that’s good too, then, isn’t it.
And as much as my guts are twisting into idiot knots right now, I am struck and struck again with some kind of joyfulness: I am about to spend all of this morning and perhaps even some of the afternoon almost entirely alone with this girl. Berylda Jones. What sort of fortune do you call this? Of all the random occurrences in the world, I meet her now. Of all the drifting I have done, I drift here. At a time when I perhaps have never been more ready to believe –
‘Now, listen to me before we get anywhere,’ Buckley says as he steps up into the driving seat, warning above the creak of carriage springs: ‘I’ll say it again so you are in no doubt that I mean it – if I don’t like the look of things out at Tiger Sam’s, we will turn around, no arguments about it.’ This is for Miss Jones, but Buckley adds a nod to me: the pistol lies in his utility box, which sits under the swag roll at his feet there at the head of the buggy, should either of us need use of it.
‘Oh Buckley, I’m sure I’ll see worse than sly tobacco plantations in my time.’ She ignores my offer of a hand up into the vehicle too, grasping the side rail and taking the distance at a leap. ‘I intend to be a doctor, remember.’
‘There’s worse than sly tobacco out there – it’s an ope house too.’ Buckley is adamant. ‘You don’t know what goes on.’
‘As no one knows what goes on in any house,’ she mutters as she bends to sit, but I hear it clearly, and I want to know: what goes on in her house? What goes on at Bellevue? What sorts of worse has she seen already? But of more immediate concern: where should I sit? Beside her or with Buckley? Indecision grips me for a moment. Beside her is too near, isn’t it? The seat is so narrow. To be so close, for this journey of what will be at least an hour outwards, or even two, depending on the state of the road? But then, I should sit beside her, shouldn’t I, in case –
‘You getting in, cob?’ Buckley grunts like a cabman, a chuckle at me in it, one which is becoming a little too customary, and forces my choice as he kicks off the brake lever: ‘Git up, Whiskey.’ It’s beside her or nowhere at all.
I’m still half-standing on the footboard as we move off, calculating how I might avoid sitting on her. ‘Er, excuse –’ She shifts across with the slightest of glances, and as Buckley pulls out of the gate and heads slowly up a lane off the main dogleg, she remains turned away from me, looking out across the scarred hills to the west, over the tops of make-do cottages that might have been scattered here by the wind. An elderly woman looks up from her vegetable patch, harvesting marrows, and she waves a good morning to us; I wave back, but Berylda doesn’t seem to notice her at all.
‘Yes,’ she says, as though to herself as we pass a signpost at a fork, ‘this is Germantown – I remember. Germantown and Irishtown, funny names in this place … and that shaft well over there, ahead, I remember that, too.’
I cannot think of a single word of conversation to pull her back to me. What interesting facts do I know about mining shafts, wells, bald hills, signposts, marrows … I could possibly write a substantial paper on the perfection of her profile, her hands clasped one over the other in her lap, each ovate fingernail so flawless, a petal, a proof of nature outdoing itself. In every aspect of her. She is so small beside me, impossibly small, but she is the most magnificent being I have ever met. She is the sky. God, I think I love her. I’m sure I do. She moves her hands and the bruise on the back of the right one stares up at me from her lap. It aches; it throbs in me. I’m not sure why I don’t believe she had an accident with a door, as she said; perhaps because it looks more like she’s been kicked by a horse, rounded edge to it like the top of a shoe. Or more probably, simply because it causes me pain to look at it.
‘What’s the name of that shaft well? It was something funny, too.’ She leans forward now to ask Buckley as we pass an old mine works, stripped of half its timber and its winders idle but for rusting.
He says: ‘Just In Time, it’s called. Dunno why. Someone was thirsty when they got here, I s’pose.’
‘Hm.’ She smiles faintly to herself and resumes her study of the western hills above another dogleg of cottages, another signpost for the Mudgee Road, this one rotted and listing. What is she looking at? What is she thinking? Come on, Wilberry, think of something to say. Don’t the batteries pound it out around here? Echoing through the valley – chuck chuck chuck chuck chuck chuck. Imagine living amidst these crushers every day? Fascinating. Come on, man. What else is there to remark upon? Oh look, we’re heading into yellow box wood again now, both sides of the road, as we leave civilisation, such as it is, behind. What can I say about yellow box? These ones are not particularly interesting even to me: uniform and average in height and density. I’m not sure she’s much interested in trees of any sort anyway. There’s a spectacular avenue of exotics directly to the north of the township, which I saw on my stroll, some remnant of lost grandeur, but they are trees, too. Don’t talk about trees. A stand of long-abandoned plums now appears out of the bush, massed with fruit. Bloody trees.
I look into the spiralling weave of the top of her boater instead and see only hemp straw. You can smoke the leaves like tobacco, there’s some medical botany for you. Turns you into a proper imbecile, too, as Cos demonstrated to me the Christmas before last, at the Swamp, rolling round the floor with Susan, feeding her slivers of mango, imagining he’s Gauguin. I tried it too, at his insistence: thought the top of my head would lift off from coughing before I became distracted by my own imaginary conversation with taxidermied Kevin, which wasn’t very interesting either.
No, it appears the best I’m able to do at this time is belt my thigh into Miss Jones’s knee as we turn onto a rougher track and stutter something unintelligible at it, followed by something that I hope sounds like: ‘Nice track for a creek bed.’
She says nothing, and still she doesn’t turn to me. But is there a smile again on her lips? I don’t want to lean around too obviously to see. Instead, I stare far too long and closely at the arc of her cheek, this curve of the world I want to know, as she watches the hills disappear behind the steep side of the valley we enter now.
‘Here y’are, this is where it all took off, the rush of the seventies,’ Buckley splits the silence. ‘Golden Gully, called me right cross the country, the finds what they got here. You been this way before, Miss Berylda?’
‘No,’ she murmurs, a long, soft sound, and I follow her gaze up to the top of the high ochre wall that now rises above us, first this side of the road and then the other, rock sheared away by water, flood after flood, over millennia, forging through this narrow cleft in the earth – and hollowing out a great arch in it ahead. ‘Oh?’ she seems to ask some question of it as we pass under its impossi
bly fine span; perhaps the same one I am asking: How is it that this overbridge stands at all, comprised as it is of grains of sand held together by a few tufts of millet grass and a lone hickory wattle leaning worriedly out over the abyss?
Yes, if you were to look for treasure, you might begin here, along this channel of cool summer air, swallows darting from wall to wall, the sounds of water trickling somewhere unseen to emerge as blue pools marking our way.
One of the wheels finds one of the creek pools, and the buggy tips to the left, then to the right over a mound of gravelly silt, almost tipping me out, and I have to laugh at the ride. My laughter bounces round these ochre walls, but still Berylda doesn’t turn; she doesn’t move – she is grasping the rail on her side so tightly, her back impossibly straight. And a terrible wave rushes through me. A terrible want of her gaze. I’ve only known her a day – a day and a half – but if she doesn’t look at me again, and soon, I don’t know what I might do to make her.
Berylda
‘What are those tunnels?’ I ask Buckley, staring into them. Giant rat holes, burrowed into the walls of this sheer-sided valley, round and spewing rubble at their mouths. My voice is flat, dull and clanking metal, not my own, above the ceaseless drumming of my heart.
‘Chinamen’s ones, them,’ Buckley says. ‘None of that lot mining here now but.’
Gone they might be from these diggings, but my desire flies into their black rat holes, gathering my courage from inside each one. What preposterous courage takes one across the world to dig a tunnel in the side of a mountain at a blind guess? That of my ancestors. And they did it with hatred clawing at their backs. Blind hatred. Let my hatred not be blind but clear and cold as steel. Finer than a scalpel blade. Free of anger. Free of passion. Let it be a lightning strike of justice, for me, for my sister, for all the bent backs lashed by cruelty.
