by Ashley Hay
‘My dadda? My dad?’
The ocean rolls and turns, and there are stars above now, and a mopoke somewhere close in a tree, calling its own name. I don’t know what to say, Ani thinks again. And then, I’ve got to get the smell of that meat out of the house. The awfulness of wasted food.
She stands up, Mrs May holding her left hand, Isabel holding her right. ‘All right, let’s go in then,’ says Ani. ‘Let’s go in and see what happens next.’
And as she pulls the wire door out towards herself, she hears the rumble, the growl of a train moving along its tracks.
At the end of it all, she stands a while in her daughter’s room, watching her quiet oblivion. Every night for ten years, she’s done this. All those years, she thinks now, all those benedictions I made for your safety and your health, I was concentrating on the wrong person. I was protecting the wrong one.
It’s a nasty thought. She pushes hard at the side of her head to dislodge it.
‘Beautiful Bella,’ she whispers, leaning down to kiss her shoulder. You and me. You and me. You and me.
From some deep crevasse in her mind, she retrieves her father’s story about a rainbow bridge that spans the world of the mortals and the world of the gods. If she could find the right rainbow, her father had told her when she was young, she might skip along it to see her mother. But even in the wide space of the south-west, the beginnings of rainbows had been hard to catch.
‘You only need one dream to slip along, Ani,’ her father had said, ‘one moment, and you’re up one side of the rainbow and sliding down the other for the briefest visit, the shortest glimpse—but it’s enough. It can be enough.’
She smoothes Isabel’s blanket, the next thought so strong, so vehement, that her hand shakes and her daughter stirs against the movement. How could I not have known, not have felt it when it happened? I was on the platform. I was at the beach. I was slicing stupid carrots.
‘Mac?’ she says at last, climbing into her own bed. ‘Where are you?’ Outside, a few crickets are calling, and the waves are turning, gently and lengthily, below the staccato beat of the insects’ sound. A world with no Mac.
The worst of it is how normal, how usual, how familiar the house feels—But perhaps this is shock, she thinks, and some pummelling comes later. It would be easier if some part of the house had collapsed, if there was some destruction to see.
In the corner of the room, she sees his socks, a singlet, crumpled on the top of the laundry basket, and is puzzled by the idea of washing them. His feet will never fill out that wool again; his torso will never stretch that cotton to capacity. She makes herself think these things, wondering how she should feel. She recites his name over and over in her mind, wondering how she might manage to close her eyes—or open them again in the morning.
‘Mackenzie Lachlan,’ she says aloud at last, ‘I can’t sleep; can you tell me a story?’ The way she used to say it, when he was home, when he was here.
It’s the darkest, coldest time of night, and her only answer is three dogs passing mournful barks between them as the night’s breezes drop away. Aching with tiredness, her hands rub at her arms, creep across to her belly, up to her breasts, and she is thinking about the last time her husband touched her. Against any other memory she might find, here is this thing that was only the two of them—and she hadn’t realised it was happening for the very last time.
She stills her hands, her body uninterested in their cold, tiny touch. Never again, she thinks. Never again. Somewhere deep in the centre of herself, she senses that the decisions she will make tonight, tomorrow, in the world’s next days, will govern and dictate what happens in what is left of her own life—she’s never thought of that as a finite stretch before.
‘No matter,’ she says, too loud and reckless. As if she will ever care what anything is or isn’t again.
A car turns into the street and crawls past the window, its lights stirring up another dog and then the dog’s owner who yells, harshly, for the little bugger to shut up. Ani flinches, as if the command was a response to her noise, her words.
Rolling fast into the empty space in the bed, she presses herself—face down and hard—into the space where Mac should be and can almost feel his firm, strong shape. A mattress spring twists unexpectedly beneath her sudden movement, poking so sharply into the softness of her belly that she recoils fast onto the other side of the bed, her tears distracting her from the urgent surge of desire she feels and doesn’t want to.
The car’s headlights move back along the street, the dog silent this time, and as they turn and head down the hill it’s as if a little of their shine stays on, stuck in the tongue-and-groove of Ani’s bedroom walls. There are birds then, here and there, and then one massed and raucous outburst.
The dawn is coming, a new day; the next day. She sighs, turns her pillow over, and is suddenly asleep.
Ani Lachlan sleeps through the washes of the morning’s colours and the warm brilliance of sunrise. She sleeps in a world where she remembers, perfectly, every detail about her husband, this day, that sentence, another touch. She will remember it all in the deepest sleep, and lose it again the moment her eyes open and she wonders how late it must be for the sun to already be so high and then remembers, in the next instant, what happened the day before.
7
On the nights when he can’t sleep, which is most nights, Roy McKinnon breaks out of his sister’s shut-up house, silent as a thief, and continues the walks with which he fills his days. He’s used to the tiredness by now—years without proper sleep will do that for you, and he can’t remember having had a decent rest since he shipped out in 1940. He’s used to the strange pliability of the time when most people sleep—the way nocturnal minutes can drag out like hours; the way nocturnal hours can collapse into seconds. If war was good for anything, it was good training for boredom; God, the waiting—the noise and the waiting. These things were never what you expected them to be.
He slides the bolt in the lower half of the back door— the half that creaks less—and pushes open its panel, ducking underneath and shushing the chooks as they stir and mutter in their coop. It’s too quiet tonight; he hasn’t heard a train for hours, and as he thinks this, he hears an engine puffing up the line. What is it—nine o’clock? Maybe ten? Iris has been in bed an hour or more already, and most of the lights in the village’s houses are already switched off. Roy shakes his head: do people really need so much time to dream?
Stretching up towards the stars, he leaps the fence and pads over to the council baths. He’ll stay close tonight, he thinks; his legs don’t have the power to stride for miles.
The surface of the pool rocks a little as if it’s trying to level itself. It was beautiful here, before the war; its glorious underwater lighting turned the water into a pond of gold. No way they’d put that back—such extravagance, such luxury.
A cormorant raises its head from its perch on the lamp post, but nothing else stirs, and Roy settles himself cross-legged by the water’s edge, trailing his fingers through the cool, salty water, and letting them hang, dripping, above the concrete beside him. Once, a couple of nights ago, he was certain he saw the letter A in one of these wet splodges on the pavement, and he’d walked through the hours till sunrise calling out every word he could think of that began with A, in case one of them sparked some inspiration. On the top of the hill in Austinmer, someone’s window had rattled open and a man called, ‘For pity’s sake, mate.’ Further down, in the hollow below the station, he called ‘Ascendant. Anastrophe. Atlantes’—and a cat called back in reply.
‘Adumbrate. Aurora.’ Those two were particularly beautiful, he’d thought, shouting them as he passed the Presbyterian manse and imagined the minister and his wife sleeping peaceably inside. ‘Abatis. Ablation. Aboulia.’ It was like the dictionary game he’d played in his classrooms, declaiming words, suggesting meanings, watching the younger kids struggle with the spellings, the older ones puzzle at the definitions. ‘Aboulia: I think it’s
a flower, sir.’ And,‘I don’t. I think it’s a country.’ In the dark night of some battle somewhere, he’d remembered a classroom of voices learning how to spell ‘accommodation’, the way the letters came out naturally as a sweet and lilting song. A-double-c, o-double-m, o-d-a-t-i-o-n. He’d felt the beat, the rhythm, at the centre of himself, and he’d sung the phrase out, over and over like a salve, until the firing stopped at last and his world settled into another temporary peace.
He’d known that night, known that he’d never be able to teach a child a thing again, the weight of too many terrible stories pressing against his teeth, wanting to spill out across some innocent imagination, and too much fury and shock stored up in the muscles that used to guide children’s pens across their first pages, or kick balls as far as a lunchtime-playground-pitch allowed.
Now, he brushes his fingers across the pool’s surface and lets the water fall. Nothing. He stands, puffing out a mouthful of air as he looks across Thirroul’s scattered houses. Maybe he will walk a little after all, and he sets off past the pumphouse and up the hill; he’ll just nip round to Lawrence’s place, he thinks, and then head home. But every light in the usually dark bungalow is blazing and Roy scoots away from the illumination. What could the matter be? Something wrong? Someone ill?
Why do you always suspect the worst, Roy McKinnon? There must be other people who don’t sleep too—or maybe they’re having a party. People must still have parties, he expects, although he can’t recall that he’s been to one since 1939.
He’d like to set up a fraternity for his fellow insomniacs. There were doctors in the war who said that the worst cases of shock and hysteria could be cured by nothing more than a good night’s sleep. He remembers reading about it—it sounded so improbable. Exhausted air-raid and fire wardens were hypnotised into a restful sleep, he’d read, from which they awoke the next day refreshed and able to carry on.
He’d spent the next dozen nights or so swinging his own watch in front of his eyes.
Turning along Surfers Parade, a gust of wind buffets him from behind and he imagines himself for a moment surfing along this aptly named street, carried forward over its topography, floating and free. He always meant to try surfing when he was a kid—there must be such freedom, such poetry in gliding across the water’s surface on a big, wooden board. But the boys who surfed all knew what they were doing—there were competitions and carnivals, and Roy could never get up the courage to walk into the water and fail in front of their experience.
He surges forward, running now, with his arms out like he remembers a surfer’s stance to be. Maybe his missing words are etched further out on the deeper water—he’ll hunt around for a board to borrow tomorrow, old enough now not to care how he looks.
The wind pushes him again and he leaps, stumbling as he hears a woman’s voice, low and dreadful, coming out of one of the darkened houses. He stops, counts along. Was this the Mays’ place, or the Lachlans’ place? He remembers Mackenzie
Lachlan from the railways, from the football. Must ask Iris if they still live there—or if his counting, like his memory, is out.
Standing in the shadow of an oleander, he leans in towards the noise, its despair, its totality. If it is the Lachlans, is that Mrs Lachlan? He has a faint memory of someone tall and slender, standing very still beyond the rush of a game, with blonde hair, he thinks, that lit up under the sun. Someone quiet, contained; it’s not an image he can match to this terrific noise.
The sobbing breaks off; there’s a cough, then the rattle of a window sash. Roy sees the backlit shape of someone for an instant and senses a pair of hands tearing at hair, perhaps even at skin, it seems, before he darts on past the front of the house and along the street. Not wanting to be caught spying on whatever enormity is playing out inside.
Glancing up at the stars as he turns down the hill, he sees one shoot straight from the west towards the ocean. And he watches it fade, wishing that whoever is crying like a daemon in the weatherboard house behind him might sleep long, and sleep well, and sleep soon.
8
‘Mum?’ Isabel’s voice sounds far away, but urgent. ‘Mum? The car’s back—those men have come again. Reverend Forrest and the man from the railways. Mum?’
It’s three days, maybe four, beyond the accident—Ani has trouble distinguishing them—and as she pushes herself up out of sleep, the memory of Mac hauling himself over the edge of the swimming pool comes to her through her own movement. All the strength, all the push of his arms as he levered himself out of the water, back into his body’s weight, and up onto the concrete ledge of the wall; her own wrists feel thin enough to snap.
‘Bella? Are you all right? I’m sorry, darling, I must have been sleeping.’ She takes Isabel’s hand and pulls herself up, surprised to find she’s been asleep, surprised to find herself outside, in the backyard, on the grass.
‘Reverend Forrest’s here again, Mum, and I think it must be that railways man. They’re on the porch—I didn’t know if I should ask them in. But I can make some tea, if you like, if you wanted.’
Ani nods, rubbing the grass from her hair. ‘You do the tea, Bella, that would be lovely. And I’ll see what they want this time.’ She leans down to kiss the top of her daughter’s head.
But it’s strange, sitting in the dim space of the living room—Ani wonders if she’s awake at all, or still dreaming outside, as she catches at fragments of her visitors’ words. As the minister talks about a memorial service, how many people would like to pay their respects, she hears her own voice ask if it might be better not to have one, if she’d rather not be able to remember what her husband’s memorial was like.
‘Just a hymn or two, Mrs Lachlan, and perhaps a reading,’ says Reverend Forrest. ‘It needn’t be long. But I think you will regret this if you don’t do it. So many of the ladies in the village have asked if they might provide flowers.’
And she hears herself demur and say she’ll think about it, she’ll see.
The other man speaks then, as Isabel comes in with the teapot. ‘Whatever you decide, Mrs Lachlan,’ he says gently, ‘the railways are very concerned that you know you needn’t worry about your future. There’s a compensation payment for the accident, of course—and also in this instance it’s been suggested that you might take a particular job with us: perhaps you know the library of the Railway Institute, down at the station? Our librarian is about to retire, and it’s been suggested that you would be ideal for the position.’ And he recites the hours, morning and evening, the pay, the facilities—a heater, a piano—the duties and tasks she’d need to fulfil.
She watches Isabel stir the leaves in the pot. An evening shift would change their meal, their bedtime. An evening shift would change the way their family worked. So everything changes when one thing goes, she thinks, reaching for a teacup to pass to the minister and hissing as a drop of the hot liquid sizzles against her skin.
The idea of a job: she’d asked once at the pictures if they ever had an opening for someone selling tickets or ice-creams, but the manager had laughed and said he’d a brace of daughters and his own wife for such a thing, and couldn’t see he’d want anyone else’s. As for any of the other places she might have approached—the rubber factory, the nicer ice-cream one down south, or an office job with the brickworks, or a shop— it was all shifts and lines and tasks she couldn’t quite imagine.
‘What do you want that bother for, Ani?’ Mac had said. ‘We’re all right as we are—bit of care, now and then, with the shillings, but we come through each month.’
The more capable she felt in her own house, her own world, the more she wondered if she’d be any good in the wider space of anyone else’s. And so she’d made her home and nurtured her family, polishing the good fortune of her circumstances in her mind as she crafted a pretty quilt, folded a clean sheet, kneaded a good dough, or planted out a garden bed in spring. It was, she told herself, enough, and she relished her life’s small pleasures.
But: ‘It would be nic
e to have books coming in boxes again,’ she says at last, reaching for the cup again and steadying its saucer against her hand’s unexpected shake. ‘When I was growing up, out west, our books came in boxes from the city. My father ordered them and they came in consignments. So that would be nice. The piano . . . I don’t . . .’
‘No, no—it’s just part of the institute’s facilities,’ the railway man interrupts her as if he can countenance any objection. ‘Nothing for you to worry about other than taking the occasional booking for people who’d like to use it.’
Ani nods. ‘All right,’ she says, with what she hopes is a reassuring smile for Isabel. ‘But I might not be very good at it—I’ve never done anything like this before.’ She passes the biscuits to the two men, to her daughter, letting the rush of the job’s details wash over her—who she needs to meet at the institute’s library in Sydney; how opportune it is that the local librarian will be retiring in just a week or two’s time.
‘What about after school?’ says Isabel quietly. ‘What about my dinner?’
‘We’ll work something out, Bella, we’ll have to. This is how things have to be now.’ Ani’s fingers are clenched so tight around the handle of her cup that she expects it to break in two. She feels Isabel press in against her side and hug hard as the men stand to leave.
‘And we’ll see you back in Sunday school soon, little one?’ says Reverend Forrest, patting Isabel’s hair.
