The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  ‘The last thing I see?’ Mac spoke so quietly that his voice thickened and slurred around its consonants. ‘It’s the ceiling, I guess, or the wall—it’s the room where I’m sleeping: is that what you mean?’

  She shook her head, and the gesture made her hair glimmer against the pillow.

  ‘No. I mean, sometimes just before I go to sleep, or when I begin to dream, I see somebody—a figure, a person—caught in a beam of light. Sometimes they’re dancing. Sometimes they’re just standing there, still, in the brightness. And I watch them for a while, and then the light drops down, and then I’m asleep.’ At the other end of the bed, her toes brushed against his, and she flinched at the unexpected proximity of another person’s flesh in her bed—another person.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  The clock on the mantelpiece chimed once, and Mac frowned; he’d lost track of the time, even the day—was it one o’clock? Two? A Saturday? A Sunday? At least he knew it was almost summer, late November, 1935. And there she was, just inches away, his bride, staring into his eyes as he studied hers. There were so many colours in them: grey and gold and a green that was almost metallic. In the centre, near the pupil, was a flash of ochre so bright it was almost red.

  ‘Your eyelashes are different colours,’ she said at last.

  ‘Different how?’

  ‘Different to each other—you’ve got blond ones and ginger ones and brown ones. Like in your whiskers. I’ve never noticed that before.’

  ‘Would it have changed your mind about marrying me, my motley eyelashes?’ He smiled, squeezing her hand tight, and his legs hugged her feet, her toes. This time, she didn’t react.

  ‘Nothing would have done that.’ Beyond the room, the sky cracked open with thunder and lightning that had been menacing all day, and inside, safe and together, Ani and Mac Lachlan both jumped a little, and laughed. ‘Some omen, some portent, my dadda would say,’ said Ani. ‘Some message from his old northern gods.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what your people are, dancing and running before you sleep.’ His accent made the maybe mebbe; his accent made before afore. His accent thickened are and running into rich, fudgy sounds. ‘Maybe they’re messengers from your old country.’ Tucked this close to her mouth, he could smell her breath as she spoke, and wondered if he might get a little drunk on the perfume of her words.

  ‘That’s what my father says—Thialfi or the Valkyrie.’

  ‘My gran would say it’s the second sight.’ His eyebrows rose slightly, his lips making the smallest smile. ‘She’d swear she’d seen any number of happenings before they happened— I’m counting on it that she’s seen us married now without waiting for my letter.’

  She looked so young in this flickering half-light, but they had fifty years of life between them. Because he thought of them as added together now, he realised, rather than two separate tallies of time. It made him feel sure, more secure than he had in years.

  Here they were.

  ‘Nice to be inside with you, Mackenzie Lachlan,’ said Ani as the thunder rumbled.

  ‘Nice to be anywhere with you, Anikka Kalm—no,’ he corrected himself, ‘Anikka Lachlan.’ This new combination of words.

  Outside, the thunder collided with the sound of a train; one noise all air and movement, the other all weight and metal. ‘They’re late in with that loco.’ Mac’s eyes focused on the window, as if he might see the reason for the engine’s delay from where he lay, warm in his bed. ‘A good night to be indoors. A good night to be with you, Mrs Anikka Lachlan.’

  She leaned forward, kissing his smile. ‘Thank you.’

  And later, when she was asleep, he watched the occasional flicker of her eyelids, the rise and fall of her breath. Touching his fingers lightly against her wrist, he felt its pulse. Touching his fingers to her hair, he felt its silk. She was beautiful, without a doubt, and bright too. ‘She’s well able, lad,’ he imagined his grandmother saying. ‘And she’ll smart you up, my blatherskite.’ He wasn’t wanting for sharpness himself—Mac smiled against the darkness—but he did stretch the truth of things now and then, not an outright lie, but perhaps a rearrangement of a story’s dimensions to skate across an ignorance, or an elision.

  An’ look what it gets you—tracing the curl of Ani’s hair against the pillow—a fine, bonny firlie.

  She’d been ready to love him—he’d seen that—and he her. So what if he talked up the places he’d show her, the prospects he had, the things that he may have dreamed of doing? So what if he claimed her own favourite books for himself? If a man made the right guess at the right time, what harm of it, if it made his girl smile? He could read fast enough to make good the deception, and he’d sort out the settlement of any other promises later on.

  The pale fabric of Ani’s wedding dress picked up a chink or two of the lightning beyond the drawn drapes, so that one sleeve and a strip around the waist seemed to float above the rest of the dress’s material, as if animated by another bride’s body. Then the curtains flicked a little in the breeze and rearranged the dress’s highlighted illumination, now more, now less, now a whole panel, now a tiny speck.

  Her fine clothes, and how fine she’d looked. He’d felt his breath catch when she’d stepped up to him at the altar and let go of her father’s hand to take his. No matter a little thing about a fancy novel; a man only gasped at the sight of his true sweetheart.

  Beside him, Ani stirred, her free hand moving against his skin. ‘Sweet dreams,’ he whispered, feeling certain, feeling foolish. He closed his own eyes at last, while Ani, nestled against the unusual warmth and weight of someone else in her bed, headed deeper into sleep.

  And it was Mac she saw this night, Mac in his fine suit, dancing and twirling as he had earlier in the pale lamplight of the pub’s dining room downstairs.

  Maybe, she thought as the light around him dimmed, or mebbe it always was.

  12

  In the vast quiet of the Railway Institute’s central library, set at the end of Sydney’s Central Station, Anikka walks through the rows of shelving, watching as books are selected and sorted, packed and returned. They pride themselves, these real librarians—that’s how Ani thinks of them—on being able to source almost anything for anyone, dispatching volumes all over the state to their various and voracious readers.

  ‘I’m looking forward to all the reading I’ll be able to do,’ Ani says at last, and they smile at her benignly. A common misperception—everyone thinks they’ll have that time.

  When the meeting is over, Ani stands on the kerb outside taking great breaths of the steamy air pushed out by the nearby trains. Her mind is a fug of hours and requirements, this new busyness jumbled against the disappearing rhythms of her days. Before, she marked her hours around Isabel’s going to school and coming home, around the changeable pattern of Mac’s shifts. Before, she could watch the light move around the house as the day passed, around the garden as she watered here and weeded there. Before, she was the person who had time to think about what was happening to other people—to arrive on their doorstep with a cake or a stew when domestic disaster struck.

  When disaster struck elsewhere.

  She registers the hands of the station’s clock and moves automatically towards her platform, her train, her mind distracted by remembering her father’s voice, his anxiety about her money: ‘I took a boarder in when your mother first died— you might not remember. Another carpenter lived with us a while. The money was good. And the company. You could think about that—move Isabel in with you and rent out the room.’ Telephoning from the post office with condolences and suggestions.

  Just once, Ani has convinced her father to visit them on the coast, to come away from the plains, to come and see Isabel. When Isabel was just over a year old, he came and slept in the baby’s room, while the baby slept in her little crib at the end of Ani and Mac’s bed.

  ‘I don’t like to be away, Anikka,’ her father had confessed at last. ‘I don’t like t
o be far away from where your mother was—I still think of her sleeping there, under the feather quilt my mother sent us when we were married. I miss my bed, Ani; I’ve never told that to a living soul. But I miss my bed— I feel too far away from my wife.’ He blew his nose loudly, startling Isabel as she kicked on a rug in front of his feet. ‘Such closeness to a person, keeping watch as they sleep.’

  And Ani bit her tongue against saying, More than twenty years, Dadda; she’s been dead more than twenty years. And instead made him his favourite breakfast of porridge with butter and jam—ignoring her Scottish husband’s disapproval.

  That night, when Mac was asleep, when Isabel was asleep, when her father’s snores were shaking the hallway, Ani had crept into his room, turning on the lamp she’d set there when the baby was born. He was tall, still, but stooped a little now, and all the gold and red had finally bleached out of his hair, his beard, leaving him with silvers and the palest white-greys. But his skin was tanned and smooth, and his hands were still busy, even as he slept, flicking and fidgeting on the bedclothes as if he was trying to solve a problem of joinery somewhere.

  She’d never thought of it before, about keeping watch over someone, although she’d watched Mac while he slept, and she could not go to bed herself without sitting a moment with Isabel, just looking, just checking, just making sure her sleep was calm and sound. Mac laughed at this ritual—‘Do you think she’ll have climbed out the window and escaped?’—but Ani knew that he did it too, awake early for a shift, or on the rare nights when she was away from home, or asleep first. She’d laid her hand gently across her father’s busy fingers, and they curled around her palm in response, holding her there.

  More than twenty years, she’d thought, and his friends’ daft ideas of finding him some spinster or widow he could marry. They mustn’t know, they mustn’t know the way he carries her still.

  Easing her fingers from his grip, she had pulled down the blind and pulled up the blanket. This inversion of roles, the parent and the child: she kissed his forehead. ‘Hyviä unia, oman kullan kuvia’—good night and sweet dreams—as he had wished her every night of her childhood that she could remember. She loved the lilt of those words, the way they swayed.

  She opens her eyes, disoriented to find herself in some deep darkness. She doesn’t remember boarding the train, let alone the trip away from Sydney, through its suburbs, through the thick bush of the national park, and into her talismanic tunnel. It’s the tunnel’s dark that presses against her now, as if she was unexpectedly blind, or somehow sleeping. She soaks in the noise of the train’s progress: she loves the rattles, the thuds, the almost visceral percussion the carriages make, pulled unrelentingly along with the steam engine’s exertion.

  For thirty years now her father has carried her mother— forsaking all others, thinks Ani, almost smiling at the old-fashioned and nuptial phrase. She never questioned that he did, or wondered at his being alone. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might have had a choice about it. For herself, she thinks, there will be no boarder, no extra body in the quiet space of her home, no new and unknown being in her bathroom, her kitchen, or triggering the intimate creak of her floorboards, her front stairs. There can be no more change.

  Which is, she almost smiles again, the one thing there must be. This job, this library, this new, widowed life. Idiotic to believe she can control any of it.

  Opening her mouth, she takes in the tunnel’s thick sooty air—she can taste the cleaner steam on its edges—and pushes her nose as far through the open window as she dares to make the noise louder, the taste stronger, the risk (how far away is the tunnel’s wall?) more precarious.

  The carriage rocks and tilts and Ani braces her hands against the hard leather seat, steadying herself above its unpredictability. Once, a long time ago, Mac had told her a story he’d had from his grannie about sending her own daughter— Mac’s aunt—down to Glasgow for work. There were strange hazards to beware of, Grannie Lachlan had said. Don’t talk to young men. Lift your skirt on only one side when you prepare to cross a road; to lift it on both would reveal too much of your ankles. And when entering a tunnel in a train, put a pin in your mouth to stop any bold young man from kissing you. And we laughed and we laughed and we laughed.

  ‘Might I be so bold?’ Mac had said then, quiet against the train’s roar, although Ani was sure the whole train could have heard him. He was a broad man, and sturdy, and the way he pushed against her sometimes it was as if she could feel the full weight and momentum of his railwayman’s job behind him.

  Her mouth opens against the memory of it, and as she swallows a sob, the train bursts out of the darkness and onto the coast.

  The ocean is bright and sharp and the sky above echoes the water’s deep navy in its own thick colour. There is light in the leaves of the trees, blasting them into different greens, shiny and almost metallic, that might belong properly to jewels. There’s so much brightness it’s as if every light in the world has been thrown on; every flare, every candle, every beacon.

  Above the sound of the train, Ani catches the screech of cockatoos with their improperly loud voices. There are cars on the road below too, people walking on the beach, and wreaths of smoke winding up from chimneys, tracing illegible messages across the sky. Colour and movement and noise and bustle everywhere and it’s life, it’s life. All these stories going on, thinks Ani, while I sit in the dark and open my mouth for a kiss I can’t feel anymore. She looks up to the sky, down to the shore, out through the air—looking for kitemen; looking for seabirds—and across the face of the escarpment. The beauty of it all, the changing combinations of its shapes and its shades and its shadows: it’s as if she’s been delivered into the barrel of Isabel’s kaleidoscope.

  ‘Come away,’ her father has written again and again, and she lets the sobs come now, thinking of this. Never never never never. To lose this moment, this moment in every journey from north back to south. To walk away from this place she had found with her husband. Well, now it will be her shifts that fold around the working of the house, where it used to be Mac’s. Now it will be her job that marks the comings and goings in the days. Now it will be her job to sleep alone in her bed, and explain to her father that she cannot leave.

  Up ahead, the engine sounds its call and the train draws into Stanwell Park. Ani leans back, the brilliance of her realisation draining away to an ordinary day as the carriage shudders and slows. She wipes her eyes. She blows her nose. There are other tunnels, she knows, between her and home, but none of them give you this moment, this arrival, this bursting out like magic.

  The train pushes south, its line counterpoised between the ocean and the cliffs. Along the horizon, a trick of sunlight turns the water to the colour of metal, glistening like treasure, or a fine, thin blade.

  Alighting at Thirroul, Ani stands a moment with her eyes closed against the departing carriages—it’s bad luck to count how many there are. As the guard’s van leaves the platform, she opens her eyes and catches sight of the guard’s arm and the distinct shape—not much more than a dangling trinket at this distance—of his lamp.

  Directly opposite, across the tracks, sits the library, a pale, boarded box of a building rising straight up from the platform with one window open and—as Ani watches—the other pushed up to frame the shape of Miss Fadden, the librarian she is about to replace.

  ‘Hello dear,’ Miss Fadden calls, waving across the tracks. ‘I thought I’d let in some air for you.’ And Ani waves in reply, crossing the tracks to enter her new world, this library.

  It’s a nice place, not too large, and with big windows that look beyond the railway lines towards the sea. Inside, its floors are oiled up sometimes for a dance, and there’s a faint smell of cedar from the shelves, the librarian’s desk.

  Coming around to its front door, Ani pauses at the porch, raised just half a step up off the ground. Such a strange thing: on the building’s eastern side, where it abuts the platform, it sits hard on the gravel, as if the library h
ad been set down on top of it, like a child’s block. But this porch wants to make a distinction between itself and the ground; the porch wants to hold itself up a little. Ani takes the awkward step, rocking her weight back and forth to gauge its height.

  As she rocks, she notices for the first time that the four columns supporting the porch’s awning are decorated with pieces of dark black stone, sharply angular. They jut out from the smooth surface with jagged points, and when she presses the soft flesh of her palm into them, she’s sure she feels tiny pricks of blood on her skin. Is it basalt? Some sort of schist? Or coal? Can coal look this shiny, this sharp? She’s never paid attention to its shape as she’s shovelled it into her stove. Coal would make sense: all the mines running back through the wall of the mountain; all the men deep underground, hauling it out. Call it coal, then, she thinks, and she steps inside, calling the librarian’s name.

  Miss Fadden is crouched on the floor, trying to fit a pile of books into a large box like the pieces of complex jigsaw.

  ‘I’ve never got any better at this,’ she says, smiling as she stands to shake Ani’s hand. ‘Perhaps you’ll have a gift for it.’ And she holds out two Zane Grey adventures and a copy of Kangaroo.

  ‘Must that one go back?’ asks Ani, taking the Lawrence. ‘I’d like to find it here when I start.’

  The older lady nods. ‘There’s always someone wanting to read it,’ she says. ‘Looking for things they recognise, I expect— and finding them. You can find anything in a story if you look hard enough.’ She sets it square in the middle of the wide table, straightens her glasses and a pretty little fan just off to one side. ‘I’ll leave it here then, on your desk,’ she says, and it takes Ani a moment to register the designation.