by David Brooks
Tendrils, then, slipped from her shoulders, fingers of leaf toward the top edge of buttock, the outer curve of breast. She would lie on her side, her back, arms stretched out above her, never flinching, turning slowly as the months turned, until he found himself working on her thighs, her belly, the softest white below the collarbone, a small opening there, a patch of light: as branches, when you are lying on the forest floor, can open high above you revealing sky, their last tips almost meeting about the areola, touched only by the tautening spread of thumb and index finger, the tip of the needle, the necessary operations – one continuous, intricate scene, leaving only, at a place between and just below the breasts, a space a little larger than an child’s palm, a place he sometimes imagined, as he worked about it, as a glade, a clearing, where soft grass might grow, a space in which another might have asked him to inscribe at last a name, though she would not.
She paid him regularly a small but steady sum – in a way his most reliable source of income – but the money hardly mattered. At times delicious, beautiful beyond thinking, at others cruel beyond measure, the work eventually became a kind of torture, a drug he was powerless to resist, however much it racked him. He found himself in the last months working in ways and on parts of her body he would have found inconceivable, on designs and in secret places he could not think on, during the weeks between, nor turn into words for fear that he would break a dark spell and the creatures, the vines, the flowers, the elkhorns and shadowed spring would vanish like a phantasm – or that, having spoken them, the desire would overburden and drive him mad. He saw no one now. In the evenings of the days on which she had come to him he would return to his cramped flat on McMahon Street scarcely able to climb the last stairs for the ache in his thighs, the weight of his arms, so tense had he been as he worked – as though it had been his own body, not hers, he had been writing upon.
Until at last, the work still unfinished, he reached a point where there was nothing he could do but silently lay his needle aside, since this could not continue, and lay his head there in the soft indentation just above the hip where the needle had only seconds before been working on one of the great, arching feathers of a lyrebird, and wait, that long moment, for the flinch, or the blow, and the inevitable words of anger that would surely end it all, because it had to end, only to feel instead her hand laid gently on his temple and a kind of warmth and darkness descending over him, that did not leave him for the rest of his life.
They moved into a four-room, wide-verandahed timber cottage off one of the logging roads, a mile and a half from Nara, right on the forest’s edge. Spotted gums towered over the house, and because it had been forty years already since this patch had been cleared, cycads had reestablished themselves in what once had been the garden, and ferns grew tall beside the windows. A stone chimney divided the building and seemed to hold it together. Coming in from the road, where one of the logging trucks would drop him after a day at the saw-mill, Tony could initially find the cottage only by the wisps of smoke that rose from it through the trees. And yet it had been he who had wanted to live there, he who had determined they should find a place in the forest.
He had sold the business, such as it was, to an Italian named Galliano, almost ten years younger, who had been trying for two years already to set up for himself in the back of a barber’s shop in Newtown. Valerie, having long ago taken on a part-time assistant in order to free herself for her monthly trips to Sydney, now worked in the library three days each week, and would sometimes ride in with Tony on the truck that took him to the mill. Within months, the other man leaving and Tony having surprised all, even himself, with his aptitude for the work, the truck was assigned to him, and the rough track from the road to the house was widened and cleared so that he could drive it almost to their door.
At night there was no sound at all except for the hooting of owls or the quarrelling of possums or the occasional plash of a wallaby through the trees. There was a generator for electricity but they rarely used it after dark, sleeping instead with the seasons, going to bed and rising early, except for Sundays when he would sleep late and she would cook, or lie about reading until afternoon. The night and wood-smoke were a kind of drug to them. By candlelight and after the candle had guttered they would wander for miles into the forest of each other’s body, until they became indistinguishable from the forests they dreamed. Sometimes, woken by the light through the trees, or something leaping from a branch, they would lie for long minutes in a half-state, not knowing which of the forests they were in.
Almost a year and a half passed like this. Unaided by human hands, tattoos of ferns and forest creatures grew slowly on his arms and back, and such was the way that Valerie always dressed, in long skirts with blouses that buttoned at the wrists, that no one ever knew of hers. One day a wall of flame raging through the giant trees narrowly missed the house. Another, lying in bed staring at the half-moon through the upper branches of the iron bark outside, they thought they felt the very edges of an earthquake. Another, so heavy and persistent had been the week of rain, they woke to find an inch of water over the floors and dared not move the truck – it was a week they waited – until the ground had dried. And one day two men came from the mill, in a different truck, with Tony’s body, crushed when his own truck had overturned on one of the bad mountain roads. After two weeks of emptiness – again that white, bleached place – she came to herself and packed what she could, and took the train to Sydney. It was 1929. She was just thirty. By the time Tony Wu had been dead for a year his daughter – Valerie’s second – was nearly five months old. Jennifer.
8
Valerie’s First
(1932)
Cornflowers they were, the colour of the sky only a little deeper blue, a little colder, in a large jar on the windowsill. The sill white, or it used to be, yellower now: white with a grey-yellow tinge, cracked here and there so the earlier colour, a pale green, showed through. Pale green the colour of the walls in the hallways of the convent and still some of the rooms in the junior wing – Our Lady’s Wing they were supposed to call it but nobody ever did except the sisters themselves and then only while on duty talking to the school, never amongst themselves. That green, and a grey-yellow white, and the blue of the cornflowers, perfect, though they were probably completely dried and would feel like paper: she should touch them after to see, come back and touch them; if she focussed on them, that blue, not on the dirt on the sill or the dead fly upside-down six inches to the right of them, the blue of the cornflowers against the lighter blue of the sky and the deep black-green of the bay she could get through, mind over matter – just focus – the other thing not having worked that she and Edith had decided upon, that if ever it happened they would do, just push it out, shit on him scare him away make him sick with horror and disgust just shit or pee, whatever they could, but nothing would come like not being able to get the message through, not concentrate, too much pain in the other place, no, cornflowers it had to be, cornflowers, either them or pray and that had never done any good, never, no – cornflowers, cornflowers.
Something like that anyway, she might have thought, that third time, because how else do you survive it? Because it was the third time and she had had a chance to think – not prepare, but think, about the first and the second, second by second, what she could have done, what she hadn’t done. The mundanity of pain, the ordinariness of horror. That such things take time, that rape takes time, and that time has to be got through and she wasn’t going to struggle, not like the first time which only seemed to make him more angry and excited and he only ended up hurting her more, but she had to think of something or it was think of It as It was happening and she couldn’t no couldn’t even think why she couldn’t.
A man can’t imagine this, not really, not from her point of view. I try, but I can only project some savage hurt and violation of my own, some level of pain or shock, but has it ever been savage or painful enough? There’s no real knowing; just as you would have to
think one woman and another would have to feel it differently. And it would be different, from the first time to the third, at least a little. There would have been that time to think and there would be the resolve, growing, that this wouldn’t happen again and that she was going, despite the fear and the not knowing anyone: there’s a balance, a tip in the scales, one thing is better than another.
She hit him, with the cornflowers, jar and water together. Waited until he finished and was lying there as he had the first and second time, collapsed over her for a moment only but that was all she needed. He had let her slip out from under both times already, and had made no attempt to keep her there, as if once it was done he just wanted her gone. So with almost one movement she reached out and grabbed the cornflowers and turned and hit him at the side of the head. He hardly moved, just slumped, and there wasn’t even blood. Water went everywhere, in an arc around the walls and carpet, but the jar didn’t break and there was still water in it so she just put it back on the sill with the cornflowers the way they were and left him with his pants down around his ankles and his shoes still on, kneeling over the edge of the bed with his hairy bum out like he was waiting for someone to do it to him. And ran. Back to her room to throw her things into her suitcase and then down the outside stairs and across the yard through the gate and up the lane to the highway, leaving the door open for someone to discover him – she didn’t care who but hoped it would be Mrs Hingley – and let him do the explaining. The blood on his thing and everything, because there was blood again today – it was still, with his stuff, leaking out of her – and his pants down and the lump on his head. If nobody found him and he came around by himself then he wouldn’t want to say too much even if there was some fuss because she’d gone, and if he didn’t come around at all well then he’d have died with the evidence in plain view and maybe someone’d work it all out.
You work it out. A sixteen-year-old girl and a sixty-year-old ex-priest, the beloved brother of the publican, over from Ireland. Who could do no wrong but probably already had, since nobody knew why he was ex, or at least no one was saying.
***
As she passed the room again – he had cornered her this time in number three, at the end of the corridor so he could hear if someone came up the stairs, but it was also beside the door to the yard stairs – he was still there and still unconscious. On the way down and across the yard there was no one. They were getting ready for lunch inside and didn’t need her yet and usually left her alone to finish the rooms. So she was out, within minutes, and on the highway, and like clockwork there was a bus to the station, as if she’d arranged it all.
She felt for the Hingleys. They were good people, just as Sister Processus had said. Normally the nuns didn’t like to place girls with a publican, but Mr Hingley was an exception: the establishment was almost more a guest-house than a hotel, and large enough for her to be kept away from the drinking guests, and Mr Hingley was a member of the local council – he had been talked about as Mayor – and a Pillar of the Church, and his wife a good woman who had had girls of her own. The second daughter had married just recently, which was why there was a vacancy. Mrs Hingley, after she arrived, had told her that they had had two convent girls before, just after the war. When the second one of them got a better job in the City the daughters had been able to take over the work, but with them gone now they had thought of a convent girl again. And she could see the convent from the upper windows, just as the nuns, if they wanted to, could see the hotel. Down there – Sister Processus had pointed – almost as if she were trying to hint that they would be keeping an eye on her, protecting her, as they had done for so long. You would think that meant she could go back now, but that wouldn’t work. With anything else, perhaps, but not with this.
It would mean hell for the Hingleys, and maybe for the sisters also, and the family didn’t deserve it. Their beloved Martin. Elder brother. Guiding light. Who had come all the way from Ireland to see them. So good, he was supposed to be, that she had suspected nothing when he had come up during the six o’clock rush downstairs, red-faced and breathing whisky, and leant in her door, filling the whole space, and talked about her pretty hair; but then had come in while her back was turned – she was going to show him a picture of her convent class, like he had asked – and put his hand over her mouth and murmured things, and pushed her down, onto the bed, on her knees, pulling her pants down, fumbling with his trousers, spitting into his hand, wiping her with it. As if he had done it all before. As if he had had it planned.
At the station, which she reached within twenty minutes, there appeared to be three options. The first train, expected at 12.22, was coming from the City and going only three stations further, to the end of the Southern Line. The clock above the timetables now said 12.10. The second train, City-bound, was due at 12.31. Following that, twelve minutes later, was the South Coast Express, going as far as Eden, about which she knew nothing except that, to judge from the ten hours it would take the train to get there, it must be a long way away. The City train was the most logical. She still had most of the three pounds the nuns had given her to help set herself up in the world outside – the Hingleys had paid her only a pound so far but in all other respects had supplied whatever she needed – and so, provided that City prices were not too much more than the Hingleys’ own, she could afford to stay somewhere for a few nights while she looked for work. But if it was logical to her it would also be logical to the Hingleys or whoever might come looking for her. On the other hand the South Coast train would be more expensive, and she knew little or nothing about any of the towns on the route. At the ticket window she asked how far ten shillings would take her.
‘All the way to Paradise, love,’ the young man responded, breaking into a broad smile as if it were one of his favourite jokes.
‘Paradise?’
‘Eden,’ he said, as if it needed no explanation, ‘and you’ll get change.’
At the southern end of the country platform she stood almost alone in the midday sun, hidden from the platform entrance by the last of the timetable boards but able to keep an eye on it nevertheless. She would have sat, but her underpants were wet from his stuff and she was afraid that the damp might seep through. An elderly man and a younger woman sat on the next-but-one bench past the entrance to the refreshment counter, a huge black suitcase in front of them, a father and his middle-aged daughter; and further down, on the last bench, was a man in a pair of overalls reading a newspaper. But other than them, no one. She had twenty minutes to wait with nothing to do but read the timetables or lean carefully against the low wall behind the benches, watching the pigeons scamper about and the two city trains pass through, counting the minutes which she hoped against hope would stay empty, waiting for the burning between her legs to subside and keeping an eye on the stairs up from the platform underpass for the police or the contingent from the pub which she was sure was by now out looking for her. But nothing. At one point a dark cap appeared in the stairway and her heart leapt in panic, but it was only the stationmaster checking on something that can’t have been her since he did not even look in her direction. At another point four youths arrived, talking loudly about football, and walked down toward her. One of them looked curiously at her as they passed, but moved on with the rest to the very end of the platform, where they stood for a while as if at the prow of a ship, then walked back past her again to the centre, where the loudest and most opinionated of them was saying Car 4 would be. She looked at her own ticket, Car 2, seat 5, then at her own small suitcase. There was nothing else to her. At last in the near distance – it may have been from the next station – she heard the train whistle, and less than a minute later saw at first the smoke and then the small dot of its engine appear from around a bend in the line, then grow steadily larger. She straightened her dress, feeling carefully to see, then picked up her case, moved closer to the edge of the platform in readiness. Still no one had come after her. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or to cry.
Car 2 pulled up right beside her and she readily found her seat, in a compartment with only the one other passenger, a large, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman with olive skin who appeared to have been sleeping. The woman looked sharply and directly up at her, as if annoyed or surprised, it was hard to say which, then, rearranging against the window the folded coat she had been using as a pillow, closed her eyes and, as far as could be told, went straight back to sleep. A whistle blew and the train started to move. She stood in the passageway outside the compartment for a while, then went to the toilet to try to do something about the dampness in her pants. Back in the compartment and a little more comfortable, she arranged herself at the window seat and began to stare blankly as what was left of the city gave onto bush. The first stop would be a place called Waterfall, apparently, and then a string of coastal towns on the way towards Wollongong. The coastal towns might be interesting, and for a moment she experienced a kind of pleasurable anticipation at the thought of all she might be about to see. But for now it was just houses by the tracks, and crossings, becoming fewer and fewer, giving onto thick, low, monotonous scrub. She looked at the sleeping woman – who had shifted from the window and was now stretched out across the full length of the four seats on her side of the compartment – and found herself thinking of the nuns, and then of what an appealing face this woman had: not beautiful, but something else, that one wanted somehow, though she could not find a word for it. And it was then that the shaking started, a trembling that seemed to begin in her thighs and arms, her hands, and to reach her face in a sudden flood of tears, and sounds, anxious sounds that she could do nothing to bite off, nothing to stop. And before she knew it the woman was there beside her, at first asking what was wrong and then, because she had not been able to answer, holding her. And she was sobbing, moaning – it was almost a kind of muffled screaming – into her shoulder.
