The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  ‘Do you not want your cake then?’ Ani teases from the top of the cliff, hurrying him up. And Mac takes the stairs two at a time, breathless when he reaches the grass.

  3

  He’d remembered as soon as he reached the beach. Way down at the southern end, tucked under the line of Sandon Point, there was the old jetty, its boardwalk fractured here, disappeared there, and its pylons polished to smooth silver wood by the coming and going of the sea. He remembered, too, that when he and Iris were kids there were trains running along it, across the ocean’s waves, ferrying loads of coal to waiting ships. They would watch from the northern end of the sand, the distance reducing the engines and their carriages to tiny shiny toys. That was years ago; by the time he went to the war, nine years back, the jetty was already heading towards the piecemeal forest of trunks and planes that he sees now. By the time he went to war, it was already a relic, a ruin.

  This morning, it had come to him all of a sudden, the urge to shinny up the trunk of one of those pylons along the waterline and watch the tide ebb and flow from above. Back then, he’d never tried, but he’s lighter now, for sure, and more spry too. He’s seen the calligraphic dash of his own shadow as it runs alongside him and its narrow elongation across the sand seems dangerously accurate.

  All right, he’d thought, come on—pelting along so that the hard sand reverberated with his footsteps. St Simeon of Thirroul, will you be, Roy McKinnon? Perch yourself on your pole and wait for inspiration? And he’d set his foot against the vertical surface and pulled himself up, light as a feather.

  ‘But there’s nothing of you,’ Iris had said again and again over the first meal she made for him. And he explained how little eating he found he did now, how little eating, and how little sleeping. People used to tell him he looked like Fred Astaire, slender, and kind—although it was his friend Frank Draper who could dance like a dream. Now they used words like ‘scrawny’ and ‘gaunt’. And no one hummed ‘Top Hat’ when they saw him.

  ‘We’ll soon have you sorted now you’re here,’ Iris had said, plying him with potatoes and gravy, which he arranged on his plate, and then left.

  Balancing now on the pole’s narrow top, he wishes he could believe her. Or, better yet, that the midday sun might somehow transform him into an extension of this tall, thin trunk, taller and thinner and subsumed into its top. And if he never came down? Surely that would be no less daft, in his sister’s opinion, than opting into a war in the first place, or fancying yourself a poet in the middle of it, or taking three years after discharge to come home.

  Where he sits now, up in the air, hoping to disappear into the clear light of noon.

  From the top of the pylon, Roy McKinnon watches dolphins surface and dive like wooden cut-outs in a carnival shooting gallery. Up and down; above, then below: he raises his right arm, steadies it, and points his finger. He could take a clear shot from up here.

  How many men did you kill, Roy? How many times did you raise that gun and fire?

  Out on the horizon, he sees a ship making for Melbourne, retracing the route that brought him to Sydney and here, at last, just the week before. For the better part of three years, since the war’s end, he’d mooched around the furthest parts of the country, staying out of the way of people he knew, staying out of the way of his sister, her questions. There was a strange consolation in his parents’ dying while he’d been overseas—if his father had faced him down and asked about numbers, he could never have refused to answer.

  Coming back in ’45, he’d bounced from Sydney out west to the unknown emptiness of a sheep farm, then down to Melbourne for a disastrous spell back working as a teacher. He’d known from the first day that he’d lost his place in any classroom. Everything he’d loved about the children—their optimism, their noise, and their unbridled curiosity—now rankled and pinched at his skin and his nerves, poking him into impatience and frustration and a final, awful fury. The things I could tell you, he wanted to shout above their perceived uninterest, or disrespect. The things I have seen. He’d walked out of that schoolyard and never gone back.

  In Adelaide, then, he’d worked peaceably with a bunch of Germans making wine, thinking about the oddness of history. Then he went further west, across the whole body of the continent, until he landed in the West Australian wheat fields as a harvest was coming in.

  He’d carried a notebook in his left breast pocket, the exact size and shape of the metal-plated New Testament Iris had made him carry through the war. But for all the things he saw, all the people he met, all the places he visited and the things that he did, he could never tease out a single line or observation to write down.

  Messed up then, aren’t you, buster, he thinks now, taking another shot at a dolphin with his cocked fingers, if you can come up with poetry in the middle of some muddy bridgehead and not find a single sentence here. He’d almost put his name down for one of the farm schemes for soldiers—it would be something, he’d thought, to have someone else etch out a plot of land somewhere and tell you you had to make do with it. But in the end, he’d traced the edge of Australia from Fremantle around to Sydney, and caught the train down here, to Thirroul, to his sister’s place—the closest thing to a home he had now, he supposed.

  Back along the beach, on a verge thick with lantana, D.H. Lawrence once sat still a while and wrote a book—Roy nods to the low bungalow every time he passes it. If Lawrence could write here, he figures, maybe he can too. If it’s not having tickets on yourself to put yourself with Lady Chatterley, mate.

  A wave surges up around the pylon, drenching his feet, his shins, his knees—it’ll be a wet dismount, if he’s going to make it home for lunch. He shades his eyes and looks north along the beach, past the place where Lawrence worked, past a sculptural outcrop of rocks, and beyond to where his sister lives, across from the council pool’s pumphouse. He can almost see her, worrying along the edge of the sand, wondering what silly place he’s walked to now. There are dozens more pylons stretching away from him and out to sea, some still topped with wide, wooden girders and the last of the railway line’s rails; others bare and uncapped, pointing straight to the sky. One day, he thinks, one day I’ll run along here and dive out through the horizon.

  ‘And will you go for a job with the trains, then, Roy? Or will you try for a job in the mines? Though I suppose there’s the iceworks, or the ice-cream factory, if you wanted something . . .’—she had pawed at the air, perhaps looking for a kind word—‘sweeter.’ That was with his dinner too, the first night he arrived. The anxiety stretched across her elfin face, making it sharper, more judgemental. He’d forgotten how inappropriate his sister could make him feel—so short, she made him loom large; so fine, his own thinness did slip towards scraggy; so dark, his own brown hair looked mottled. He’d forgotten how different they were.

  ‘I don’t know, Iris, I don’t know what I’m doing. That’s why I came home—here. That’s what I want to find out.’ His fingers fiddled with the salt cellar until she reached across to settle it, perfect, in the middle of the table again.

  ‘I just always think it’s best to be busy.’

  Another wave surges up and he looks at his watch—midday; which he should have known, of course, from the sun. Perhaps I don’t pay enough attention anymore. And perhaps that’s the problem with trying to write, if he’s walking around with his eyes shut.

  He snorts: In for a penny. He’s sure his sister thinks him mad—a seawater suit is only going to confirm it.

  And it feels so good, so good to plunge down into the foamy surf—it’s only just lapping his neck when he touches the bottom. The way his suit, his shirt, his underclothes press in around him as if he could feel the edges of himself more clearly.

  Back on the shore, he’s laughing with exhilaration, feeling in his coat pockets for the miracle of a shell or a barnacle to take home as a souvenir. If he were a cartoon, he thinks, he’d have a seahorse poking through his lapel like a boutonnière and wreaths of seaweed looping around hi
s waist for a belt. And he laughs again, this tall, lean man made taller and more lean again by the tight wet fit of his clothes.

  4

  The next week, on the afternoon set for Isabel’s milkshake, Ani walks up through the village towards the station—past the grocer’s, the co-op, the haberdasher’s and the hairdresser’s, the café that sells fancy china, the two rival shoe shops. Glancing along the side street towards the railways’ roundhouse, her view of its windows—glittering like a rich chandelier—is cut by a passing engine, 3621: she registers its number, its pedigree, as Mac would say, and takes a deep breath of the thick cokey air.

  This place. Down the coast from Sydney, there’s a point where the border of Australia’s sheer sandstone cliffs pulls inland a little, and a tiny sliver of plain opens up. This is the bluff at Stanwell Tops where the trains’ tunnel emerges. This is the bluff where Hargrave flew his famous box kites, more than fifty years ago now. Ani’s always wished she could have seen one, soaring high and free.

  The ridge heads inland, forming a line that sometimes mirrors, sometimes offsets and counteracts the shape of the coast. And between these two lines, the water on one hand, the vast spread of the rest of the country on the other, a web of streets and avenues, groves and drives lace across the available land, held firm by the one road that feeds in from the north and out to the south.

  And then there’s the air, the nor’-easters that play along the shoreline; the westerlies that dump fractious moods over the edge of the escarpment; the smoky draughts in late spring and summer that telegraph bushfires and then spur them on. There are soft sea breezes that tease and tickle with the lightest scent of salty water. There are southerly busters, powerful fronts that push up the coast to break open the heat of the day—they smell clean and crisp, and Ani pushes her nose hungrily into hot afternoons in search of their coming.

  Reaching the bridge over the railway line, she pulls up short. A hearse is carrying a coffin up to the Anglican church, and Ani ducks her head quickly, her eyes down as the funeral procession passes. Don’t turn to look at a hearse; don’t count the number of cars following in its wake; touch a button after the hearse has gone by: her father trained her in these superstitions in the wake of her mother’s early death—Ani was only four. Now, she touches her finger to the button of her dress, and runs across the road towards the station, where Isabel stands with her nose in a book.

  My lovely little thing, thinks Ani fiercely, pulling her into a hug. She’s quiet, Isabel, and careful—when she bounds along the beach with Mac, her blonde hair flying, or follows his leap from a high board down into the pool, Ani can see the way she works at this playfulness, this exuberance, because she knows her father loves it. With Ani, just the two of them, Isabel has a stillness that Ani knows is not usual in a ten-year-old. And she knows this because she remembers it in herself.

  Isabel smiles up at her, then down at the page, as Ani scans the width of the sky, the line of the escarpment against its blue. It’s a happy thing to stand and to gaze—she reaches out without looking and pats down Isabel’s end-of-the-day hair, and her daughter catches her hand and squeezes it without looking up.

  The train is late.

  ‘What flavour milkshake today, Bella?’

  ‘Chocolate malted’—without a glance.

  ‘Chocolate malted’—the full stretch of available luxury.

  Across the tracks a pane of glass rattles. Ani glances towards the sound and sees a window open in the Railway Institute’s library. Such fascinating things, libraries: she closes her eyes. She could walk inside and step into a murder, a love story, a complete account of somebody else’s life, or mutiny on the high seas. Such potential; such adventure—there’s a shimmer of malfeasance in trying other ways of being.

  She loves their trips to the library, loves the sight of their three separate piles stacked on Miss Fadden’s desk—the family’s collection of daydreams and instruction. Isabel always arrives with a list, filling it as best she can and asking for the librarian’s assurances of happily-ever-after. But Mac loves to graze, weighing up the attractions and merits of different books as if he had really to choose between fighting off Mormons with Zane Grey’s spry heroine, or undertaking a secret mission with Hornblower in Central America. She loves watching him make his selection, as if it might open up new ways into his curiosity, his imagination.

  ‘What if I kept some books at work, well away from your eyes,’ he teased her once in a while, ‘for a little bit of privacy?’ Yet whenever she went to the library with him, she couldn’t resist watching his hand move along the shelves, choosing an adventure with aeroplanes and jungles, dismissing another with cowboys and wagons. She’d seen him pause at Gone with the Wind, and move on to Sons and Lovers.

  ‘What you looking at, Ani?’ he’d asked, without turning towards her. ‘You know where my loyalties lie.’

  Next to the railway was a field, with men and youths playing football for their lives. When Mac brought her to the coast, she’d carried Kangaroo like a literary Baedeker, trawling its pages for identifiable spots, even recognisable people—against Mac’s protestations that it was a novel, ‘a novel, love, that’s made up, you know, made up, and years ago to boot.’ But even now, she shrugs: here is the railway; behind her is the football, just like the book. This place belongs to Lawrence; she is living the next chapter of a famous story.

  From the football field now comes a surge of chants and cheers, and Ani turns towards the noise. It makes her shiver sometimes, that open stretch of grass: effigies were burned there in the war—Hitler first, and then rough approximations of the nameless Japanese men who were thought to be coming to invade. A high whistle rises up and Ani remembers the air-raid sirens, the dark stuffiness of the shelter Mac dug in the backyard.

  ‘Like being buried alive while you’re waiting to be bombed,’ he always said, insisting on sitting above ground, in the garden, so he could see if any planes came close. He’d been so certain of his own survival—his immortality—that she’d worked hard not to be anxious for him, out there and exposed.

  Now, a short, sharp siren comes from the north—probably the roundhouse, thinks Ani—and she turns away from remembering the war, and football, and Mr Lawrence. Above the ridge, the clouds are inching towards sunset, morphing from puffy, fluffy white shapes that Isabel might place at the top of a drawing to something longer and more elegant. It will be a glorious show, firing the clouds with colour while the greens and browns in the scarp and its trees drain towards darkness.

  ‘You’re for town, Mrs Lachlan?’ Luddy, the young stationmaster, is at her elbow. But as Ani nods, he shakes his head. ‘Sounds like there’s a problem with the trains coming through—an accident along the line and they’re not letting anything pass. Do you want to wait a while, or will I try to get a message to Mac, let him know you’re not coming?’

  Isabel looks up, her finger marking her place on the page: ‘My birthday treat, my milkshake . . .’

  Ani frowns, tucking Isabel’s hair back into its bunches again. She’s been looking forward to it too—walking down Crown Street, looking at the shops, sipping her own tall, cold drink. She hates problems she can’t solve, but: ‘I suppose you’d better, Luddy. Tell Mac we’ll see him at home?’

  And he smiles at her, nodding and tweaking Isabel’s neater hair.

  ‘Can we go to the beach then, Mum? Can we go to the beach on the way home?’

  ‘We can, Bella. Still a bit of a treat. We’ll go down to the rock pool, see if we can find a pretty shell.’ She holds her hand out to her daughter, who makes a great show of smiling and waving to Luddy.

  The sun has almost left the sand by the time they reach its edge, Isabel flying towards the water while Ani bundles up shoes, socks, bags and picks her way across to the rock shelf. Almost every day, she comes down to the beach, but nothing has ever taken away the surprise of seeing it. A country girl, grown up on the Hay Plains in the far west of New South Wales, the first time she saw the oc
ean was the first time she’d seen anything so big and so blue that wasn’t a vast, dry sky. When she was married; when she’d moved to the coast.

  Leaning against Mac, back then, on her first day in Thirroul, she’d had no sense that the sea would be so enormous. She could hear it; she could smell it. And she could taste it—it was salty, which she had expected, but it was sticky too, which she hadn’t. And all of this had seemed so much bigger, so much more impressive than the wide stretch of its colour, the vast stretch of its space.

  ‘I didn’t think,’ she’d said softly to her new husband, ‘I didn’t think it would be so many things all at once.’

  He’d squeezed her hand, kissed her shoulder. ‘At home,’ he said, ‘it’s mostly grey, but I like this colour, this briny blue aigeun.’ A wave roared at the edge of the rocks, and Ani had jumped back, startled at how high, how near, it reared. ‘It just wants to meet you,’ said Mac, laughing, ‘just wants to see who you are.’

  Now, in this late afternoon, Ani watches Isabel run across the rocks to the very lip of the land. A surging wave would no longer make her jump, and the tide is a long way out in any case, pushing a low burst of white water against the rocks once in a while. A crab scurries beneath a heap of seaweed that smells of pure salt; another scuttles under a rock at the bottom of a shallow pool. There are purple barnacles and tiny orange conches, striped shells and smooth rocks.

  Overhead, two seagulls swoop against the blue sky, making their barking calls. Isabel barks back from the shore and the birds settle on the sand at a safe distance as Ani laughs, leaning forward at the edge of one deep rock pool. There’s a clamshell down there, a beautiful thing, pearly silver inside and gold and rose-pink outside—colours that belong to pretty dresses, rich taffeta, and swirling dances. She pushes up her sleeve, dips in her arm, shivering. It will feel warm in just a moment. The strange tricks of distance and perspective—her fingers feel for the shell as deep as she thinks it is, but still wave uselessly above it. She inches forward and grasps the pretty shape.