Paper Daisies

by Kim Kelly

  I push past his next exclamation of, ‘Well, well – congratulations to you!’ and belt up the stairs.

  Into an empty hallway. But the door is easy enough to find, with Mr A. M. Howell, District Surgeon stencilled on it.

  My knuckles meet the polished surface of the timber, but I hesitate before I knock.

  I hear Berylda’s laughter, those cascading stars of her laughter: ‘Oh, Alec, my darling Alec – can’t a clever girl change her mind? Come to her senses? Of course I’ll marry you.’

  Berylda

  ‘Right then.’ He is so pleased, beyond all my hopes and expectations. So very pleased that I am here, perched upon his desk, giving him the smile he demanded I find for him. Giving him everything. He folds his arms, regarding me with triumph. His wolf grin glimmers. ‘This is a fine way to end a long day, I’ll say. I should let you traipse around the countryside more often, I suppose.’

  ‘I suppose you should.’ I nod, lowering my face to look up at him with some sort of coquettish admonishment and I gesture at the pastries: ‘I’ve called for tea.’ I’ve done no such thing. ‘A little afternoon toast, to us.’ I beckon him: ‘Come here, come to me. Let me practise, let me be wifely. Tell me, why has your day been so long?’

  The wolf and his grin steps back to snib the lock on the door, and he begins loosening his tie, unbuttoning his collar, preparing to take whatever he wants; and still, I know no fear of him. Not now. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It has been a long three days, without you, thinking about you and what our life will be. How I’ve been hoping you’d come around to the idea. Just as you are. Aren’t you capital, girl. Just capital.’

  ‘But you’ve been so busy, Alec, I’m sure. You haven’t been thinking only about me all that while.’ I pout; I moisten my lips, a promise that I will surely let him kiss me now without resistance. Or maybe not. ‘How did your Federation speech go? I’ll bet it was outstanding. How was the town hall ceremony?’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ he groans and I laugh, playing with him: winning. ‘Anyone of note was in Sydney, of course. The rest, you know, intellectual midgets round here. Oh God, Berylda. Insufferable bunch, I can’t begin to tell you. I need you by my side at these things … Together we will be the shining pair.’ His face edges ever close to mine. ‘Confined to Bathurst for a time, perhaps four, five years. And then it’s Sydney for us. Macquarie Street – consulting rooms there and a seat on the Legislative Council. Then who knows? The world is ours.’

  ‘Oh dear, what plans you have.’ I turn my face from his abruptly, shocked at the breadth of his ambition. What will he crave next: the prime ministership? My eyes fall straight upon the pastries, though, steering me back on course as surely. ‘I think we should eat something first, before we embark on conquering the world, don’t you?’ I say: ‘Look what Mary made. Mm. I think they might even be your favourite?’

  ‘You little vixen.’ He laughs, shaking his head once more at my change of heart, of mind. ‘I’ll never know quite what you’re up to, will I?’

  ‘Possibly not.’ I smile for him again. ‘That’s why you adore me, is it not?’

  He laughs again. He is a handsome man, it’s true, when he smiles naturally like this. Smiling at a custard puff, smiling at a witty to and fro. A mirage of the future he offers shimmers through my mind: the surgeon’s wife, the parliamentarian’s wife, the captain’s wife, the mother of four or five, a doctor in her own right. What a picture. Who wouldn’t want that picture? But that I don’t exist inside it. It is not me he sees when he looks at me; it is something else altogether. A cipher, perhaps, for what he thinks a woman is. A little China girl to have, to hold, to break. I do not ever care to know how his mind has constructed me; or any of us.

  ‘Can’t say I’m very hungry myself.’ He rubs his temples now over a weary yawn. ‘Really, the past few days have been hellish here.’

  ‘Oh? Do tell me.’ What is hell for you? And then let me stuff that cake into your mouth by all and any force I might muster. He is not leaving this room until he has eaten it.

  ‘Hm.’ He grunts, bored to speak of his tribulations. ‘Mining accident yesterday, dead on the table, blast wound to the neck, couldn’t stop the bleeding, hours at it – stop, start, miserable thing couldn’t decide whether to stay or go. And today a boy under a timber dray out at Kelso, waste of a day altogether.’

  As if the miner and the boy besmirch his reputation. The impudence of them.

  ‘Well, you can let it all go now,’ I say. I pick up the plate and hand it to him: ‘Eat. Restore your strength. I want to watch you eat your pastry. And then …’ I dare to play my highest card: ‘Then I want to begin our congress now. Here. I want you to take me for your own on this desk.’

  ‘Do you now?’ He grunts again, with rather more vitality, and bites into the pastry. ‘Mm. That is good.’

  ‘Good.’ My voice quavers under a flooding of disgust as he chews and swallows. That it is done, and I have done it. A sprinkling of tiny pastry flakes in his beard as he takes another bite, and a tremor in my hand as I take a cake for myself. The black curtain billows across my eyes. I move to the balcony door and stare through the shifting shrouds and shrouds of black. Stare until the world reappears. The hills. The white clouds that streak the sky. The coal cart coming up the drive. A nurse wheeling a patient into the sun. And a horse tethered in the shade of a tree: it looks like Rebel. Fear throttles at this close whispering of the familiar: this world is real. This act is real. What do I do now? Tonight. Tomorrow. I will be a murderess for all time, from this moment forward. How do I return to the world? Return to Gret this afternoon, return to my studies in a matter of weeks, return to Flo at Women’s, as if nothing more remarkable has happened but a summer holiday? How do I become a murderess in the world? How do I clean vengeance from me? It is now tattooed.

  ‘You’re not watching me eat.’ Alec Howell pretends a complaint, but it is in fact a demand: ‘I’m finished. Now I want to watch you eat. On your knees.’

  ‘On my knees?’ What does he want me to do? Pray to him?

  ‘Yes.’ The wolf nods. ‘That’s how we begin our congress.’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’ And I don’t, except that I know it will be a humiliation. I can hear it in his voice: that twist of sadism. A twist of power that confuses and erodes confidence, saps all defences and forces one into bondage; as he has done to my sister, so he shall do to me. Carry every second of her pain with me now, against fear, and against guilt.

  ‘I know you don’t know what I mean,’ he says. ‘But you will learn. You are a clever girl, my clever girl.’

  He takes off his jacket and waistcoat; hangs them on the back of the door, brushing a piece of lint from a sleeve. And now he steps towards me again, shaking off his suspenders, undoing his fly buttons.

  Whatever will be, will be, I steel myself for what comes next. I must hold my nerve. Take whatever it is that comes, and regardless know that I will never have to do again. I babble as he nears: ‘Wonder where our tea’s got to. Hm?’

  He ignores me; he says: ‘I will test your obedience to me now.’

  ‘Test me?’ He must hear my fraud, surely. He must hear my heart begin to crash and crash. He grasps the front of my blouse in his fist and I think he will throw me to my knees. I scramble and scramble to regather the game. ‘But you have our whole life together to test me. Love me now. Please. Love me sweetly.’

  That seems to stop him: he lets go of my blouse and looks at me curiously for a moment. He sighs, heavily, and moves away from me, looking down at the desk, and now he rests against its edge with both hands splayed, and he does look weary. He says: ‘You are quite right. I had intended to wait those few weeks longer, and so we must. Keep with the correct order of things.’

  ‘Must we?’

  ‘Yes.’ He terrifies me even as he sighs again, squinting contemplatively as he informs the blue hills: ‘There is so
mething I must tell you. Something that must be attended to before we commence our own relations. I had hoped to have it dealt with once you were back at the university, but now – well, your sister, I believe, may be pregnant, you might as well know. Don’t be alarmed by this, however.’ He raises a hand to quash any concern. ‘It will be taken care of, regardless of whether she has in fact conceived in this instance or not. I will perform the sterilisation myself. Removal of the uterus will be best for her, so that the problem is resolved completely.’

  I can hardly hear my voice over my terror: ‘Sterilisation?’

  ‘Naturally.’ He nods, as if we might be discussing the fate of a cow, and now he looks directly at me, into my eyes. ‘This can’t be allowed to happen again.’

  My mind races against my blood. ‘Again? But you will not need Greta any more. We will be married. You will not –’

  ‘Berylda.’ He rubs his eyes at the absurdity of my suggestion. ‘Is this what your visit here today is about? Is this why you come to me with your professed change of heart? Your deviousness is so transparent, it always is. You want me to keep away from Greta? What do you expect me to do when you are at the university? Or when you are with child?’

  ‘I expect you to control yourself,’ I say, but not to him. How long has he preyed upon my sister in this way? Weeks? Months? Years? How many times has he raped her? When did he begin? Only one thing I know: he will never stop.

  He is as vicious and as calculating as he is insane, this animal whose every desire is his entitlement. He says: ‘You do not make demands upon me, girl.’ Shaking his head at the ceiling lamp, a disbelieving chuckle. ‘You are as stubborn as Libby ever was. It’s the yellow tramp in you, I suppose.’

  It can only be the long habit of terror that restrains me from attacking him with the rage of all the yellow tramps he’s violated. How many? How many of us have you destroyed? And Aunt Libby the best of them, the gentlest; she bent to whomever asked her to bend; stubborn she was not. She sacrificed her own happiness to look after our grandfather; she would have done anything for us, for those she loved; her smile so warm I feel it still. And I will be terrified no longer. I let my hatred cry out at him with my grief: ‘She worshipped you.’

  ‘But not enough.’ He presses his lips into a dubious sneer, and he’s pleased that he has me upset. He is so pleased that he wins his game again, and again, and again. ‘Will you worship me enough, Berylda?’

  ‘We’ll have to see about that, won’t we,’ I reply. I am the blade today; not you. ‘I am yet to learn how much adoration a man might need, aren’t I. Tell me, Alec, darling, what did Aunt Libby ever deny you?’

  ‘She denied my will,’ he says, still smiling inside his sneer, measuring me inside his squint. Always measuring. ‘She denied my authority.’

  ‘What? How?’ He must be lying; he is lying.

  ‘Libby was not the saintly angel you imagine, Berylda,’ he says, dispassionate, regretful. ‘She sought to cheat and manipulate me, too. She was ungrateful, conniving.’

  ‘How? ’ I demand.

  ‘There is much you don’t know, isn’t there? You really are little more than a child.’ He is all revolted condescension. ‘You don’t know what your aunt did after I took you and your sister into my home, do you? You don’t know how she repaid my kindness. Well, let me tell you. She took it upon herself to consult with a solicitor, to ask that your parents’ estate be held in trust until your majority. That is what she did.’

  I blink at this; uncomprehending. ‘And how is that unreasonable?’

  ‘Let me count the ways,’ he says, counting them out on his fingers: ‘She did not ask my permission. She spoke of my business to another man. She sought to deny me the estate that the law makes rightfully mine.’ He holds three fingers in front of my face, shaking them at me, threatening to strike me.

  I tell them: ‘My parents’ estate is rightfully Greta’s and mine – it is not yours.’

  ‘Ah, now doesn’t that sound familiar.’ He scoffs: ‘That’s just what Libby said to me. And she would not relent. As if you were not going to be looked after adequately by me. She was so ungrateful.’

  ‘And so …?’ My blood is dead cold as I delve now, all my senses dulling as I move closer and closer to the truth. ‘What did you do to Libby?’

  The sneer falls away and he is cruelty pure and plain. Remorseless. ‘Never push me too far, Berylda,’ he warns. ‘Libby pushed me too far. Be a good girl and you will be looked after. Well looked after. If you are not a good girl, then …’ He grabs at my left breast through my camisole; he pinches and twists my nipple.

  I stand rigid inside this screeching stab of pain. ‘Tell me some more,’ I say. ‘What poison did you use to kill my aunt?’

  ‘Poison?’ His reptile eyes don’t move from mine, but his hand is cast from me as if he touches the lightning I have become. He licks his lips; I have him unnerved. I am so close, this may as well be his confession. He takes a step back, rubs his sternum with his fist, masking the action as consideration of his next words, but I hope with all the ragged hope left to me that some acid burns there, snaking its way through his body. He says: ‘Typhoid was Libby’s punishment, you know that. She was punished by God.’

  ‘And so shall you be,’ I tell him, I promise him, as I move past him, as I unsnib the lock and leave.

  Ben

  ‘Ben?’ Her eyes are wild: a small creature captured in flight.

  Howell looks at me through the open door, just for second, a blank, unknowable stare, before I take Berylda by the waist and down the hall, down the staircase, away from him, down through the foyer that is now quiet as a tomb. I tell her only: ‘I know now what you have suffered. I know what your sister has suffered by him.’

  She says nothing. She seems dazed, in a dream, as I carry her along with me, her feet barely touching the floor. I am barely here myself, after all that I have just heard. Who is Alec Howell? What man does these things? And what for? He meant to compel her into marriage to him? If only she had told me. Why didn’t she tell me? But how could she have told me? All questions leading back to his blank, unknowable stare. A creature unidentifiable, in form or purpose.

  As we step through the main doors and onto the portico outside, I look back to see if he follows. But there is no one, apart from a dustman sweeping the tiles behind us. The roan waits on the lawn across the drive, where I left him under the cedar there. The western sky is slashed amber and vermillion, a flock of sulfur-crested cockatoos sailing through it, calling out the end of the day.

  ‘Rebel, it is you,’ she says from her trance as we walk towards the horse, towards the road; she says to me: ‘I left my basket in his room.’

  I ask her: ‘Does it matter?’ I will retrieve it for her now if it’s important that she have it.

  ‘No. I don’t suppose it does matter.’ Her reply is a whisper; and then she asks the sky: ‘Do you know what I have done?’

  ‘Yes,’ I tell her. I know that she has done it; I know from all that I heard through the keyhole of the door, I know it somehow by holding her, too, as I am still holding her beside me now, and even in the cold shock of it all, what she has done seems somehow only natural. Horrifying. Harrowing. But natural. A logical correction of order. She has sought to crush a catastrophic force that by some trick of chance shaped itself into the figure of a man, one that would probably struggle to exist at all if women were considered to be equally worthy of life themselves; if Orientals were considered to be human at all. How can I blame her for what she has done? How could anyone blame her? What blame is there in nature? I tell her: ‘I don’t judge you for it. I never will.’

  ‘I did not ever mean for you … I did not want …’ Her voice drifts away. She looks out over the field of tall wallaby grass that stretches alongside the road below us here, her blue eyes searching the blond river, her face washed of any colour it had, and now she clutches my ha
nd at her waist, fingernails sharp in my palm, her words barely breath at all: ‘But I want to see him die.’

  I never want to see him again; his stare remains with me: the stare of nothing; no one.

  She says into this nothing, her voice returned: ‘Sometime tonight I will see him die. I have to.’

  ‘Yes,’ I tell her. I am her accomplice now; I will not leave her side.

  I am the road for Berylda Jones.

  Berylda

  We might be any two friends, walking on a Thursday afternoon, along the cartway at the back of Glynarthen. I look into the faces of the dairy cows at the fence line; they are brown cows, russet in this sunset light; their grass is bright; they chew contentedly. And I shall see Alec Howell die tonight, if anything like luck allows.

  I must keep myself from running back towards the hospital, to hover, to watch and wait. I must keep myself from shouting out with triumph what I have done – at last. Remind myself a thousand times inside each step that it is crucial I remain contained, that I walk along this cartway with Ben Wilberry as if nothing else on earth is occurring.

  Ben Wilberry walks with me. I can scarcely believe that he does, and yet I do believe it. Now. Would it have made a difference to today if I had believed in him yesterday? Had I understood the bargain we two had already made? Perhaps, but then love might have robbed me of this reckoning; this revenge. It sings through me. I look up at Ben as we walk, my hand resting in the crook of his arm, taking strength from him even now, and I want to thank him: without him, without his having wandered up to Bellevue on New Year’s Eve, I would not have been able to get away to Hill End, I would not have found the means to end Alec Howell. I would not have found the courage. But how can I possibly thank him for this? For helping me to damnation, and bringing himself with me. He might change his mind about me, regret his involvement yet.