The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  The number of rocks she’s taken from this beach in those twelve years; the number of days she’s combed along its shore; the number of nights she’s come down here with Mac. She closes her eyes and sees the two of them dancing along the sand in the weeks after the war, their eyes closed to the barbed wire that still looped its indecipherable script along the waterline. On those nights, if there’d been enough moon, she was sure they could have danced out across the ocean’s marbled surface, and said so.

  ‘You make me romantical,’ her husband had said then, and she’d laughed at the frolic of his words. He was many things, Mackenzie Lachlan, strong, and true, and hers. But he was purpose, and he was pragmatism—the moments of sentiment, of soft sweetness or high emotion, were exceptions, and she treasured them for that.

  ‘What about this, Isabel?’ she calls across to her daughter. ‘Treasure enough?’

  She loves her daughter’s careful attention—the paragraphs in her book; the shell cupped in the palm of her hand; completely considered.

  ‘It looks like something precious,’ says Isabel.

  ‘Like an evening dress?’

  ‘Maybe, but a listening to music one, not a dancing one.’

  ‘I thought dancing and swirling,’ says Ani gravely, ‘but you might be right.’ She rubs at the colours, brushing the tiniest specks of sand from the shell’s dents and pocks. ‘Home then?’ And her daughter surges back again, butting in at her side.

  ‘How long will it take Dad, if the trains are stopped?’

  Ani shakes her head, the opalescent shell heavy in her pocket.

  ‘Let’s see,’ she says. ‘You finish your book, and we’ll see how long it is before he’s coming along the street.’ She holds out her hand to her daughter and they climb the stairs cut into the cliff face two at a time.

  The house is quiet and Ani, cutting vegetables in the kitchen, can hear the drumming of Isabel’s fingers on the window sill in the next room as she sits and waits for her father. She smiles, singing a soft lullaby in her father’s old language in time to the gentle beat, its angular syllables studded with t’s and k’s and n’s. There are still no trains, and the silence is starting to ring.

  Then: ‘Mum?’ There’s a tightness in her daughter’s voice. ‘There’s a car at the gate.’ Ani hears her daughter shift, can sense her stiffen.

  ‘Mum?’ Isabel’s voice is less certain again. ‘There’s a big black car.’

  In the kitchen, Ani tries to stop the movement of the knife but the end of the blade nicks her thumb. She stares at the skin; just dented, she thinks at first, but then the blood comes and she hears Isabel say again,‘Mum?’—and feels her pressing in at her side, against the table.

  There’s a black car at the gate. She’s almost thirty-seven years old. Here is her daughter. Where is her husband? Her thumb is starting to bleed. The kitchen is very quiet and very bright, and Ani hears herself say: ‘Now, Bella, run next door to Mrs May and I’ll get you when it—when I—’

  ‘But I want to wait for Da—’ Isabel begins, and Ani hears her own voice, uncharacteristically harsh: ‘Isabel—so help me—I will not tell you again.’ The words scrape the walls like sharpness against glass and she squeezes her eyes tight as her daughter throws the shell hard against the linoleum floor—it shatters into five sharp pieces—and slams the door.

  So this is what happens, thinks Ani as the front gate unsnibs, the footfalls hit the stairs, a knuckle taps the wooden frame of the screen door, and the minister calls, ‘Mrs Lachlan?’

  She closes her eyes and sees herself lying next to Mac, nine years ago now, the day Australia’s war was declared. ‘But what does it mean, “Australia is also at war”? What does that mean for us?’

  ‘Needn’t mean anything,’ Mac had said. ‘They’ll need the railways to keep running, so I should be right.’

  ‘But would you want to go? Would you rather?’ She remembered her father’s friends trading stories from the Great War, teasing him for missing the fun, the adventure, and being stuck behind the ramshackle fence of some internment camp instead.

  ‘Don’t be daft, Ani love; leave you and Isabel and go off to be killed? They’ll need the trains, so they’ll be after us to stay—and I’m not the heroic type, now, am I?’ He tickled above her hipbone so that she giggled and squirmed. ‘I intend to go on living—always have, and always will.’

  She’d grabbed his fingers, pushing them away. ‘But if Australia’s at war, then we’re at war, aren’t we, you and me? Our melancholy duty, like Mr Menzies said? We’d have to fight, if the war came here. We’d have to be able to kill an enemy. And there’ll be dying, so much dying.’

  Keep us safe, she’d thought, over and over, keep us safe, through the next six years. As she watched women becoming wives without husbands, mothers without sons, Ani had an image of a searchlight sweeping around, illuminating this woman—widowed; that one—her son on a drowned ship.

  Now that searchlight has found her, catching her in its sweep and pinning her, arbitrary and irrevocable.

  So this is what happens, she thinks again—so distinctly that she wonders if she says it aloud. She presses a tea towel onto her thumb and walks towards the front door, the men, the news that the car has brought. The house has never seemed so long and at each step she thinks, This is how I will remember this.

  The door at the end of the hall is her last hope: Ani on one side and the men, and the night, and the news on the other. If I keep my eyes closed, she thinks, shutting them fast, perhaps I’ll open them and find I’ve been asleep this whole time. Fast asleep and dreaming.

  ‘Mrs Lachlan?’ says the minister again. ‘Can we come in?’

  5

  First came the knock on the window, and then the boy’s voice: ‘Mr Lachlan? Mackenzie Lachlan? Early shift.’

  Ani opened her eyes as Mac replied, ‘I’m here, I’m coming,’ and felt the bed pitch a little as he stood up. ‘Go back to sleep, love,’ he said then, without turning towards her. He always knew when her eyes had opened.

  She smiled and rolled onto his side of the bed, feeling its warmth and reaching out to touch him as he pulled on his trousers, his singlet, his shirt and his coat.

  ‘I’ll stay awake till I hear your train, you know that,’ she said, her palm resting against his back as he sat to tie his boots. ‘And I’ll see you at the end of your day.’

  And he leaned back then, turning so that she could feel his weight pressed down on her as he kissed her mouth, her forehead, the top of her bright, light hair. ‘The end of my day is when I come back to you,’ he said, kissing her with the last word. ‘Now go back to sleep—there’s not even a bird awake out there.’

  She listened as he opened the front door and closed it again gently, listened as his boots made the front stairs creak, as he stepped over the last one, which was loudest of all. She listened as he went out through the gate and onto the road. And she tried to picture how far he walked before his footsteps faded.

  It was early spring, 1945, and the war was over. The war was finally done. The night before, at the movies, they’d seen a newsreel of the celebrations in Sydney—images of a man dancing through Martin Place, spinning round and round.

  When the film had ended, and the lights came up, Mac had grabbed her waist and danced her out into the street—past everyone, past their smiles and their laughter. And on they’d spun, twirling and laughing, in and out of the puddles of streetlight, and all the way back home.

  Now, in the darkness, she heard the train’s whistle—there he was; off he went. And as she settled into sleep again, she reached out towards the place where he’d slept not a half-hour before and sensed the sure shape of Mac’s body against her own as clearly as if he was still there. Bright against her closed eyes, she saw that dancing man, spinning and leaping, an evocation of happiness, spinning into a line of light.

  6

  Slowly, carefully, Ani opens her eyes, but the men are still there, their hats in front of them like shields: Revere
nd Forrest, the minister; Luddy Oliver, the stationmaster; and a pale man in a dark suit who she knows, without asking, will be from the railways. She unlatches the door and holds it open, nodding at all three as they walk into her house.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, gesturing towards the shell, ‘I haven’t had a chance to sweep that up. I’m just trying to get a meal ready for Mac.’ His name falls hard in the quiet room, and the men smile; three small, uneasy smiles. She says, ‘Of course you should sit down,’ sitting down herself. The brightness of that searchlight is unbearable.

  ‘My dear,’ says Reverend Forrest, disconcertingly familiar. ‘I’m so sorry, but there’s been an accident.’

  She says, ‘Of course.’ She says, ‘Do you need to tell me what happened?’ Because whatever has happened, Mac clearly isn’t coming home.

  The room stretches as if her armchair has pushed itself miles back—a suburb, a desert, a continent away—so that she can barely hear the men’s voices. An accident, an engine shunting—she concentrates on the shorthand of ‘engine’; Mac would have told her its full number, its every particular, rivet and plate.

  An engine shunting, and Mac had jumped down and gone round to check the coupling. They think. They’re not sure yet— no one is sure. But there’ll be an inquiry later, and the coroner, they say. The coroner.

  What they are sure of is that an engine coupling with something—well, an engine coupling with anything—it exerts a powerful lot of force. And.

  Their voices fall away to nothing. Ani doesn’t move. She thinks, How dare they bring this into my house? Mac would never have allowed this sort of thing to be said, out of the blue, all of a sudden, and at dinnertime. She thinks, If we’d arranged to meet him earlier, this would never have happened. We’d have had our milkshakes and come home together. She thinks, I did not keep him alive through six years of war for this. She thinks, There’s been a mistake—it’s someone else’s man, someone else’s husband, anyone’s. She thinks, This throbbing in my thumb, I can feel it in my throat, in my forehead, in my stomach. She thinks, I yelled at Isabel, I said ‘so help me’. I don’t say things like that.

  She says, ‘I should make you some tea,’ and the minister stands up, touching her shoulder lightly, and saying, ‘No, no, let me—the kitchen through here? And what’s this blood?’ He peels the towel away from her thumb and stares at it a moment as if this might stem the flow. And it works. ‘You have to be brave, Anikka,’ he says.

  Her Christian name—she’s surprised he even knows it. But perhaps, she thinks, you can no longer be called Mrs Something when there is no Mr Something. Perhaps you stop being Mrs Someone when Mr Someone stops being.

  The man from the railways is talking again. About the accident, about the injuries sustained, he doesn’t want her to think of these, of course, but under the circumstances they will arrange for a cremation as soon as possible—it can be arranged for tomorrow, and he tells her this as if the arrangement is already in train. And, ‘You do not need to see the body, Mrs Lachlan. You do not need to see the body.’

  From the kitchen, she hears the kettle clatter against the edge of the sink, its bottom sizzling a moment later as the minister puts it onto the hob. She hears the scrape of it sliding in towards the middle of the stove, hears the stove door creak as the minister opens it to add a little more kindling, a little more coal. She closes her eyes and sees the leap of the flames, and their lick.

  ‘What a strange thing,’ she says at last, ‘when my husband can walk down to work one morning and be taken for cremation the next. It seems very—’ She shakes her head. The rush of it; the rank implausibility.

  ‘This is what we do, Mrs Lachlan,’ the railways man leans forward a little, reaching out to stop her words. ‘The inquiry will happen later, but we organise the cremation as quickly as possible. I’ll be there, and Reverend Forrest. But you do not need to see the body.’ And as he says this again, Ani finds that she cannot disagree with him, is not sure if she wants to, or even if she should. There is something hypnotic about the phrase.

  ‘I’ll be with him, Mrs Lachlan.’ The minister is passing her tea in a chipped cup she would never offer a guest, very milky and, when she puts it up to her lips, very sweet. ‘I’ll say his prayers.’ And she swallows, wondering about the pale black tea, no sugar, which she usually drinks. Perhaps she isn’t supposed to drink that anymore either. And this tastes surprisingly good.

  Through the wall behind her, Ani hears the kitchen fire spit again in its box and closes her eyes against the image of her husband’s body—muscular, burly, familiar—set among its flames.

  ‘Tomorrow, then,’ she says. ‘Yes, I see. Tomorrow.’

  Of course they will organise the notices, the railways man goes on, and the minister will be ready to talk with her, whenever she is ready, about a memorial service in the place of a funeral. ‘Whenever you’re ready, Mrs Lachlan, just whenever you’re ready.’

  And as they sit and watch her drink her tea, she tries to remember Mac’s voice and fails. Is that it? Has it gone? And how long will these three men now sit here, watching the rise and the fall of her cup?

  ‘We don’t want you to feel that things will be hard now,’ the railways man says then, patting his hands against the air as if he is trying to soften his own words. ‘You won’t be on your own with this.’

  ‘Of course I won’t be on my own. My daughter will be with me.’ Ani wonders that the words can fit through her tightly clenched teeth. ‘Thank you for the tea.’ It’s peculiar to be sitting in her own armchair, staring, wondering what she’s supposed to do, wondering if there’s anything she can say that will make it all a mistake that can be swept away, and Mac just home late for his supper.

  Now Luddy is crouching in front of her, balancing himself with one hand on the arm of her chair—so close she can smell the sooty steam on him. She draws in a huge breath and the room retracts across the continents, the deserts, the suburbs, and back to its normal size.

  ‘This afternoon,’ Luddy begins. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lachlan, I had no idea this afternoon. I did call through the message that you’d gone home. But of course he wasn’t, of course he didn’t . . .’ He means to comfort her, to say something big and warm—she can see that. But his tears drip onto the carpet while she stares at her thumb, and then her hand’s solidity dissolves somehow so she sees only the wet drops he’s leaving on the ground.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. There are a thousand alternatives, a thousand other possibilities for what else might be happening in the world this night. And Mac is at the centre of them all, walking along the street, whistling to Isabel, coming through the gate, food on the table, calling her name—‘Ani’—she smiles: There’s his voice.

  A sweetness, then, and she sniffs the air. ‘I’ve left the chops,’ she says. The smell of burning flesh is close and enormous; the stationmaster on his feet, the minister into the kitchen to pull the meat away from the heat almost before she’s finished the sentence.

  The railways man looks into the middle distance, his hands fiddling with the hat in his lap.

  As long as I keep them here, thinks Ani wildly, they can’t tell anyone else what’s happened. As long as I keep them here, as far as anybody knows, my husband is safely alive. And so she sits, and she waits, until she can bear the waiting no longer.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says then, ‘I’m sure there are all sorts of things that I should be asking and you should be telling me, but I think I need you to leave.’

  ‘Mrs Lachlan.’ The railwaysman stands up, extends his hand—it’s formal, like a presentation, or an introduction. ‘I’m so sorry to have been the bearer of this news. If there’s anything we can do . . .’

  But she shakes her head, follows them all to the door, and even thinks to send her wishes to the minister’s wife, and the stationmaster’s. From the corner of her eye, she sees Mrs May framed in her own doorway, imagines Isabel pressed in behind her, wanting to look but not sure if she wants to see.

&nb
sp; But where is his body now—right now? Anikka thinks suddenly. And who will drive it up the mountain to be burned tomorrow? Her mouth almost opens to call this last, terrible question across her front yard but then she sees the shape its words would make against the quiet night.

  Impossible.

  Its engine idling, the car’s noise is too round and warm to have brought such cold, hard news. Next door, Mrs May’s flyscreen opens slowly and Ani hears her call softly, ‘Are you there, love? Are you there, Ani?’ But her voice has gone and she doesn’t know if she could have cried out, or stopped herself from falling, if Mrs May hadn’t come through the gate then to put her arms around her and hold her up. Saying, ‘Sshhh,’ saying, ‘There,’ saying, ‘It’s all right—Bella’s inside.’

  ‘Sssshhhh, love. Ssssshhh.’

  Across the rooftops, across the backyards, across the grass and the sand and the shoreline, the sound of the ocean is rolling and turning; for the first time in as long as she can remember— as long as she’s been on the coast—Ani can’t think whether the tide is coming in or going out. She feels a saltiness in her mouth, like a great gulp of the sea, and realises she’s crying. Quiet and awful crying in the dark, as regular as breathing.

  This is how it will be, she thinks.

  In the darkness, then, she sees something move against the flowers on Mrs May’s side of the fence, and she calls out, ‘Bella?’ The girl is so thin against the night, slipping around, slipping through the gate, wedging herself in between her mother and the wall of the house. ‘I’m sorry I yelled before, Bella, but . . .’ She shudders, appalled that she doesn’t even know what to say to her own little girl, and can only let her head nod slightly as her daughter pushes close and asks one small, scared question.