The World Without Us

by Mireille Juchau

  He looks out beyond The Hive. An opalescent sky. Through a rent in the banking clouds he can just see into the stormy valley. He picks out the farmhouse, the tiny grove of hives, now the band of the creek, wider than usual, sees the cows in a place they oughtn’t be. They must have trampled the electric fences; is the power out? It takes a while for his eyes to adjust and then, the realisation: he’s looking at a maelstrom. Great cliffs of cloud massing in the north and east, and now a sudden, swift stream of vapour dropping the temperature. Up here he’s at the eerily tranquil apex of a coming storm.

  8

  Before their mother returned from searching, Meg arrived at the empty farmhouse, drenched from the lake, with her teacher. It was nearing midnight. Mr Parker had doubled her on his bike all the way from Nora’s – and the journey through dark streets, teetering on handlebars with the oiled whirr of his pedalling behind her, was surreal and wondrous. Had she ever felt that pure relief of rescue? She’d waded, wheezing, alone through black water while he came towards her, hands out. Nora’s porch was ten centimetres under. Meg’s inhaler nowhere to be found.

  Once home they stood in the empty kitchen wondering where Evangeline had gone in her searching. Meg found her spare puffer and sucked the cold Ventolin down. She took her wet clothes off in the bedroom and when she returned found the teacher on the porch.

  Mr Parker coughed hard when Meg offered some of her father’s dry clothes, smiled awkwardly, then declined. He stayed there, shivering and wet, scanning the mountain and far fields, as if he could summon mother and daughter by purely focusing, by a quiet abiding. Soon he’d closed his eyes, chanting something in a low tone. But when a vertical line appeared far off, he leapt up, his torso bent forward the whole way across the boggy paddock, his stride long and quick. From the porch Meg watched and wondered.

  When Evangeline reached the house her face was grey and pinched. Her soaked hair clung in snaky ropes to her face and neck. The colour on her skirt had run and her feet had gone blue from the dye. She had the look of a person clawing back from some limit. She’d walked too far in the rain for someone so pregnant, Jim said. Rest, he’d keep searching.

  Meg put her arms around that wet, cold body. Because of the baby, she could not join her hands at her mother’s back and did not know how to arrange them. She glanced up. Her mother hadn’t said anything yet about Meg’s going off or getting stuck in that flood, or the smell coming off her, of the lake’s miry stink and Nora’s liquor, though surely Mr Parker must have told?

  Evangeline stepped back, releasing Meg, and then began to shout.

  What if the road, what if Tess had gone up that mountain alone. What if someone had taken her!

  Mr Parker tried to quieten her.

  Don’t shush me, she said. I know what happens to girls on their own.

  Then call the police, he said, stepping off the porch, and Meg heard his neighbourly voice turn back into a teacher’s.

  But try to be calm, he said, for the baby.

  And he slogged across the marshy field, then wheeled his bike towards the lane while her mother called after him, Fucking hilarious telling me that!

  Then she walked inside and tore all the curtains from their rods and switched off the lamps so she could see more clearly through each window, in every direction.

  And Meg crossed the morass that was once the back paddock to ask the western neighbours, had they noticed Tess going by? But when she reached the creek dividing their land she saw how swollen it was already, that soon it would be impassable. She made her decision and leapt the flooded bank, and in the time it took to quiz the Stones – all five of the family filing in from different rooms and blinking sleepily at this new, ballsy Meg who’d braved the storm and now stood in mud-caked gumboots violently wheezing – the creek had become a bloated river seamed with fast-running currents.

  Now her mother cannot be reached, not even by phone because the mountain lines are down say the Stones. And Meg notices the candles and torches, the muzzy light in the rooms of their house. The road is closed now and dangerous and there’s no reception on any of the family’s five mobiles, because the friggin hopeless wireless in this hollow, though they all humour Meg by poking their devices, very blatantly, very sober-faced, at the kitchen table. So Meg must sit with her warm Milo and raisin toast in the collegial glow of the Stones’ concern and wait till it’s possible to get back home.

  9

  Wait there. Tess remembers now what the man had said before she’d drifted off.

  Won’t be long, Murph said as he clambered out, tweaking his puckered trousers at the crotch and slamming the car door.

  Groggy and starving, dry-mouthed from sleep, Tess peels off the blanket. A wet creaturely smell on her, her skin smarting. Horse blankets? Gross! She blinks at the car windows, her broad face reflected back, brows bent unhappily, an uncertain shape to her mouth. She hears the unfamiliar silence after rain, and breaks it with one word.

  Outside, her eyes adjust quickly. All things aglow in the pallid moonlight. Puddle mirrors on a concrete path. A square brick house with statues out front. An angel, a … frog? The lawn is clipped low, the bay windows black to the street. She leans against the car, watching the open moon and some stringy clouds, seeing the darkness changing, the swirling lilac and grey about the house and along the road. Where is she? It must be past midnight; tiredness tugs her limbs. But she isn’t scared, she’s just turned single-focused. Merely a maths problem, this disappearing. She must get from A to B. But where is B? B is simply away from where she no longer seems to belong.

  Now, she remembers – Murph had gone down the side of the house. A parcel – some package he had to deliver, or collect? Off he went, loping, a thick heavy body, those poor horses! Tess hobbles along the path, dead-legged from the car. Peers in a side window with cupped hands, then hears singing, high and lilting, pure and hesitant. She moves past conspiring agaves, motionless potted jade. In the dripping, overgrown garden there’s a young woman on a garden bench. A long fringe over wide-set eyes. Good evening, she says as Tess goes wooden with fear. The woman holds out a hand. On every finger, rings. Silver set with cloudy stones. Beside her, a wooden guitar.

  Am Marta, from Ukraine, she says, entirely unsurprised at this vision, this pale teen-wraith with her shroud of dark hair, shivering in a T-shirt.

  She offers a wide, gap-toothed smile. But have only three guitar strings! she says, exhaling smoke. Total bummer!

  Marijuana. Tess recalls the scent from her mother’s room. Pain relief, delivered before and after Pip, by Nora.

  Marta starts singing again. A song about stars, mountains, the sea.

  What’s the time? Tess asks, the words creaking out. Where are we?

  We are Fifteen Avenue Holmwood. Hold on, Marta grins, stamping out the rollie, I have Swatch … Is two twenty am!

  There’s an engine sound out front. Tess panics, turns to check.

  Where’s the man? Edward – Edwin?

  He was toilet, says Marta. Hold it, she puts a palm in the air, then jogs towards the sound of acceleration as Tess stays in the yard, mouth-breathing. The house is blank and quiet. White moths on the black windows, avid for light. Gun-metal clouds wall up the sky. And now, terse and rapid rain.

  Marta reappears, saying, Is gone!

  Then she sits, ignoring the downpour, to roll a cigarette, the Tally Ho paper dancing on her lip as she pinches out tobacco. When she finally glances up she takes in the terrified eyes, the girl’s hands compulsively wiping her shorts, the bare, rigid knees and struggling mouth.

  Oh! Don’t worry, little chick!

  But, why did he leave?

  Is spooked probably. Does it look good, I ask? Picking up some young girl at night. What if he’s stopped by police? He already has a record. Lost his licence even. DUI or an Apprehended Violence Order, I can’t remember which.

  She takes Tess’s hand.

  Sticking with me, kid, OK? Am also having to get out of here.

  10
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  Stefan. Is it you?

  Evangeline looks nervously down the hall. No one there.

  Outside, the weather’s built itself in: long pillars of rain, a ledge of slate-coloured sky. Tess, and now Meg, and maybe Stefan also, out in that somewhere.

  She puts a hand on her stomach, feels the muscles constrict. These are no Braxton Hicks but she’s lied to herself for the past hour – more, her heart speeding at each new contraction. Birth, no avoiding it. She leans against a kitchen chair, then feels that slight subsidence and watches, disbelieving, as the flagstones slowly darken. How long, after her waters had broken, had it been with Pip? Two hours? Less? A frantic birth, but without injury. With Meg, though, delivered by instruments, she’d been certain she would die. The surgeon’s face through the anaesthetic haze, the nurse’s cryptic comment as they tried to staunch the bleeding, what are you going to do about that? That was her body, scissored apart. This baby in even more of a hurry. Three weeks early.

  OK, she thinks, and turns strict, pragmatic, lucid. You’ve done it before – three times. Breathe. Better here than at St Catherine’s, where everything would remind her of the body’s frailty, better than The Hive birthing cabin under Hodgins’s tobacco hands while Lana Beaufort paced nearby, waiting to get a look at the baby she’d been promised.

  Evangeline walks gingerly to the bedroom, starts peeling away her wet things. But what’s the point of drier clothes; they’ll be coming off again soon enough. The girls – if she’s in labour – who’ll make sure they’re safe, who’ll find them? Stefan would be miles north by now. She turns to the weather, a sheer pane of rain partitioning her from the world. And then the two lamps blink out.

  Back in the lounge she gropes in the darkness for the phone, always left somewhere obscure – in a pot plant or down a sofa crevasse – but is ambushed by more insistent pain and must sit, empty-eyed, then lie on her side on the couch. She remembers what the women had taught her at The Hive – a signature incantation for breathing out the contraction. Everyone has their own sacred tone, they’d said. Hers was a hum with a hectic timbre. But why believe them? Hadn’t they been out to get her; in labour hadn’t she’d just been the means to an end? Lana Beaufort, priestly and waiting in her white linen shift and silver bangles, which Evangeline, in the dissociated delirium of transition, was certain she could hear clinking. Someone had informed Lana of the labour, or she would not have travelled up the mountain from the town. That someone, it turned out, was Nora. She’d done Hodgins’s bidding, when she ought to have sided with Evangeline. When Evangeline asked Hodgins, Why is Lana here? he’d said, because you promised. And then her mother had stepped in. For the two days and nights of that first birth Anita became newly gentle: attentive, wholly present. Time enough for negotiating when this is done, she’d said to Hodgins. An odd word – done – as if giving birth was like making a meal or a bed when it had ground on for more than thirty hours and was not progressing despite acupressure to ankle and foot. In the lunacy of that total, unyielding pain Evangeline became sure: her mother and Hodgins, and of all people Nora, were against her.

  Now, when the high-voltage peak of the contraction dulls, she levers herself from the couch. Heads for torch and candles under the kitchen sink. If this rain keeps up, the creek will break its banks. There’ll be no getting in or out of the farm. OK then, time the contractions, and maybe towels? The old ways, what did they do? Hot water, whisky?

  She spies the phone, inserted in the bookshelf, plods over, stabs at the numbers, buggering it up because of her shaking. How about a bath, the shower? But, Stefan first. She pokes the buttons again, puts the phone to her ear with a quizzical look. Dead. So the power lines are down.

  Her mother had stood back with her pinched lips, she’d let Hodgins step closer and put his hands where they shouldn’t be. Throughout the labour Evangeline had told herself the baby was the first thing in that shared life of the commune that would belong entirely to her. But Hodgins was determined to see his property deal through. Everyone was starting to bail out of The Hive – even Jack. The Beauforts had ample, fertile land in the valley. Jack might have a use for some. And Anita had put her hand up too. Just a small section, she said, for my retirement. It was only later that Evangeline realised: her baby was the down payment. Jack was the first to touch her daughter. Crowning! he’d said. Push! And finally, out she jolted, bluish and crying like a cat. She was side-eyed with oil-black hair and seemed wholly possessed of herself already, just seconds old. As Hodgins reached over to take her, the cord still attached, the small red lips mouthing the air, Evangeline said, Tess. Then bit down hard on his forearm. It wasn’t birth that had made her an animal, it was life, and she would hold fast to the one good thing she had conjured from herself.

  All right, she says now, on her hands and knees in the lounge. Back then she’d wanted to labour alone – but now it was happening she wasn’t sure she had it in her. The pain was tidal, ebbing and surging, with an undercurrent of wrecked and ruined things. Barely a minute now between contractions. From the roof, the unceasing buckshot of rain.

  In the short lull between contractions she goes fugue-like; stares at the far wall where a small painting hangs. An awkward landscape in limpid, imported tones from Europe. She’d finished it years back, at The Hive. She starts thinking of those outlawed pigments, now obsolete, with their hazardous or rare ingredients. Uranium yellow, arsenical Paris Green, volcanic Giallorino, Mummy Brown – a story that had delighted the girls; a tint that had contained actual Egyptian mummies. The name hinted at some sorcery they imagined in her studio where the long gone was summoned, and transfigured. Orpiment. Cinnabar. Hartshorn. Smalt. As she stares at her amateur canvas, she feels hardly worthy of her daughters’ wonder. The uncontrolled palette, her austere brushwork. She’d used the round sable and the goat-hair rigger – both had been gifts from Lana, they’d been her down payment. As the pain cranks up Evangeline thinks she has not been brave, that her art has risked nothing, that painting is an almost autistic withholding. Her works barely even communicate to herself. And then she realises what’s missing from all the aborted works in her studio: flame.

  At the next contraction, more flotsam dragged up in the wave. She slogs through the pain, unaware of her creaturely sounds, her soaked hair, how still and compact she becomes, how husk-like and purely at her body’s service, and then, how writhing. And she dimly recollects the spell for bearing pain – how the urge to escape amplifies the hurt. Try to stop running away.

  After some indefinable time, her jaw slackens. Still kneeling she bows to the cooler floor. Then, a sudden fanaticism for her husband’s stash of liquor and drugs. She crawls towards the dark kitchen, wondering which substances might tend the woman’s pain without reaching the baby, though she knows the two are inseparable, that the baby’s cells can cross the placenta and remain in the mother for life. When she’d learned this, after Pip, it had been a comfort. The cells – chimeras, the doctor called them – sought parts of the mother’s body needing healing. It was solace to think of Pip, chimerical, still doing invisible good.

  Evangeline gropes for the first-aid cupboard as the next contraction ratchets up. She runs a hand across a shelf of jars and packets, outdated prescription medicines. Somewhere in there, the locked box of hard drugs she’d kept after Pip’s death, the serious pain relief she’d once administered to herself, and she feels a surge, inside and out, but is it the baby, or herself, emerging into being?

  11

  Once they’re halfway down the Old Mill Road Tess sees right away: it’s impassable. Marta had hailed the taxi to Bidgalong, offering to pay the fare. She’s in the backseat now, still singing, her guitar flat across her lap. When she catches Tess craning her head towards the flooded Honig Farm, her melody trails off.

  Is your place? Marta asks, then puts one slow hand over her mouth.

  The house is a dark cube on a lake that was once a field. A torrent has torn up the tar of Fox’s Lane, gathered fence posts, wiring,
rubbish, branches, then flowed across the Müllers’ land. Though the wind and rain have died, the house, marooned, unlit in the motionless water, looks flimsy and defenceless.

  Tess’s face is chalky, her eyes rimmed red. Her gut churns. Are her family inside or have they left for higher ground?

  Where are you going? the driver calls as she slams the taxi door and strides towards the flooded road.

  Marta’s struggling with the door handle, she’s hammering at the taxi window.

  Tess! she calls out. You absolute cannot!

  But they have no idea how strong she is, what a swimmer, how she’s timed herself underwater at the town pool and in the bath. She tugs her feet through the grabbing mud and considers how long it’ll take to cross the front field and which way the submerged currents are flowing.

  Four

  Your aim is clear to us, clearer far than our own; you desire to live, as long as the world itself, in those that come after …

  Maurice Maeterlinck

  1

  Jim takes her out in a borrowed car. Sylvie wants to see the hinterland, where the new, intentional communities have sprung up. They cross a timber bridge. Built, he says, entirely by hand. Blackbutt piles and cross heads, corbels and stringers of grey ironbark.