by Ashley Hay
So right.
How many women and children since? How many market days? Back at the bottom of the hill, he takes a deep breath at his sister’s front door, his pulse quiet, his sweat dry. Across the road, someone is surfing on the wide sheen of the ocean, riding the smooth waves up and in, closer and closer, only to drop down out of sight at the last moment, before the break, and paddle out to do it again.
There’s something futile in it, and something quite beautiful.
One day, thinks Roy, one day I will try that. I’ll take a board out past the breakers and see what the sea makes of me.
A car honks as it passes, and he spins round as if he’d been caught in some terrible act—bloody Frank, with his new wheels, and probably off to deliver some baby. Ah well, Iris will be disappointed. On it goes. But there is consolation, even optimism, Roy tells himself, in the fact that he presumes it’s birth, and not death, that has his friend on the road so early.
He closes his eyes, the image of the surfer overlaid now with an image of Ani Lachlan, rising and falling on a sunlit sea. You’re gone, mate, completely gone. He’s done all he can, he tells himself—written the poem, and delivered it to her bookshelf. He breathes out, as if his breath has been held tight for years and years on end. The surfer stands, rides the glassy wave, drops down and paddles out again.
Going in, Roy keeps him in his sights as long as he can, almost shocked when the closing door finally shuts off his view of the water, the light and the surfer’s body, miraculously aloft.
30
She doesn’t know how many times she’s looked at the mantelpiece, how many times her eyes have scanned its books, taken one out, or another, and read it, and replaced it. But she’s never noticed this before, a thin red paperback like one of Isabel’s schoolbooks, its silk-stitched spine unblemished.
Her heart lurches as if she’d stepped forward and found no floor to stand on. And as she looks around, quickly, she catches an unexpected movement—but it’s only the curtain blowing against the window.
All right, she thinks. All right. But she cannot quite reach out to take up the book.
She’s tired, that’s all—it’s Anzac Day. She woke at dawn to watch the sun rise, the men march, the women weep or cheer. Standing so still as the parade passed by, Isabel’s hand held so tight, that she wondered if she was turning into something like the rock from which the cenotaph had been carved. Important to remember; it’s important to remember.
‘Good morning to you, Mrs Lachlan.’ As the last of the marchers rounded the corner, Ani had turned to see Iris McKinnon standing quietly alone. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d be here—it must be tempting to sleep in when you don’t need to get down for the library. And you were always keen to avoid being part of the war.’
‘Miss McKinnon.’ Ani had held out her hand, ignoring the largeness of this small woman’s words. ‘Iris, good morning to you. It’s a large turnout, isn’t it? The library, yes, it’s busy, and then there’s Bella . . .’ She ruffles her daughter’s hair. ‘I don’t know where the weeks go.’ She looked around for the doctor, expecting to see them here together.
‘He’s not here,’ said Iris McKinnon, riffling through her bag for a handkerchief and blowing her nose. But as Ani murmured something about the unpredictability of medical demands, Iris cut across her and said, ‘Not Frank, I mean my brother. My brother will have been sorry not to come.’ Then she blew again, and Ani jumped at the sheer force of the noise. ‘I think it means a lot to him, having someone like you here—I never was much for reading, you know. I never know how to talk to Roy about these things, or trying to write.’ She sniffed, and Ani wondered if she was crying, but she turned her head away. ‘Still, he seems better for being here now, and being busier with your books and things. It’s all you can ask for, isn’t it, that these men find their way back home.’
Ani blushed. ‘I’m pleased to be able to find him the books he’s after—it’s what we’re here for, after all.’ She gestured beyond the stone statue of the soldier to the railway and its library beyond.
‘I’m not sure I mean the library,’ Iris McKinnon said slowly. ‘I think it’s more than that. He thinks the world of you, you know—I’m not sure I should tell you that, but there’s something wrong with a world where such things aren’t said.’
And it was Ani’s turn to fumble for her handkerchief, to bring it up to her face, to look away. ‘Well, I’ve had a bit of luck in getting books down from Sydney,’ she said. ‘I’m sure that’s all it is.’
They stood a little longer, neither saying a thing, before Iris McKinnon took half a step forward, reaching out. ‘Whatever it is, it helps,’ she said softly, taking Ani’s hand and holding it a moment before she walked away.
Isabel circled, grabbing onto the hand that the poet’s sister had just held. ‘What’s “thinks the world”, Mum?’ she asked her mother as Iris McKinnon walked towards the war memorial. ‘What does that mean? How can someone “think the world”?’
Somewhere behind her, Ani could hear a group of women talking—something about a wedding, and a bride being married by the man she loved, instead of married to him. ‘Years of silence,’ someone said, ‘or wilful misunderstanding.’
And then there was talk of the poor speeches, a desultory dance and a short honeymoon to a flash hotel in Sydney. ‘And he doesn’t know, the groom, the poor fellow. He just thinks she’s a nice quiet girl, and he’s lucky in his choice.’
‘His choice?’ another crowed. ‘He had no choice about it, and never will.’ They laughed, although Ani, unable to identify whoever the story was about, could not quite see the joke. It’s too hard, she thought blankly, trying to keep track of all these different situations.
‘I like it, “thinks the world”,’ she heard her daughter say. ‘It’s like some funny riddle. “What would you think about to think the world?” The answer’d be twenty-four thousand, nine hundred miles, maybe, which is the world’s circumference at the equator, or maybe fifty-seven-and-a-half million square miles, for how much land there is.’
‘No one likes a braggart, Bella,’ said Ani quietly. ‘Let’s go home. It’s just a thing people say.’ And she’d spent the rest of the morning planting out rosemary bushes, Mrs May passing seedlings from the punnet, until the garden pulsed with that pungent, particular smell.
Now, as the sun clips the top of the scarp and slides through the west-facing windows of Isabel’s room, the street is quiet. In the shadow of the living room, Ani steadies herself against the mantelpiece. She had planned on going to the pictures that night, on seeing the latest news from Europe. Sometimes she meets Roy McKinnon there; sometimes she meets Frank Draper with him, who, once or twice if it’s a comedy, or a musical, has had Iris on his arm. And sometimes they walk home together, talking—the two men sometimes stammering, sometimes inappropriate, sometimes caught, one or the other, in a long, silent hiatus—about the movie, the news, the night.
‘We are all too old for this,’ the doctor had said once, and Ani had seen, for a second, their middle-aged parody of four young folk out for a night on the town.
He thinks the world of you: she isn’t sure she wants to know what that means, or what she’d like it to.
And now, the day feels overwhelming. I’ll stay in, take a long bath, forget the news of the world. So tired, she thinks, that she can’t even reach out and work this unfamiliar little book free from its place on a shelf.
This thing she’s been looking for, and she’s found it on this day of remembrance. But her hesitation has nothing to do with tiredness, she knows. You’re afraid, Anikka Lachlan. You’re afraid of what you’ve found.
The house is too still, too silent. For a moment, she thinks there’s someone standing behind her, but when she turns to look, it’s only the curtain again in the late-afternoon breeze, and Isabel’s slippers, forgotten by the sofa with the picture she was drawing the night before. She spins slowly, scanning the room, and sees the photograph of Mac facing her from the sideboa
rd, as if he was peering around into the sitting room, waiting to see her react.
A deep breath, and another. Ani lays her hand along the other books, walks her fingers across their creases and ridges until she reaches this new red thing. She feels its stiff cloth cover, slightly longer, slightly wider, than the papers it holds. She opens it, feeling the texture of paper that’s thick like velvet, and rough-cut. Luxurious.
Here it is, here it is at last. This untitled volume: what else but the present Mac meant for her? She pulls it out quickly and sinks onto the floor, cross-legged, patting at its bright shape.
There’s no title, no author, no words of any kind—she opens to the endpapers, the flyleaf, the frontispiece: all blank. A journal? she wonders. Or was it the beginning of something he never had time to finish?
But as she balances its spine in the lectern of her two hands, the covers fall open and there is text inside, typed, the letters pressed hard into the first page. She tilts it towards the light. Where had Mac ever found a typewriter? How had she never heard its keys?
But still, here he is. Here he is.
Holding her breath, she opens the front of the book again and finds a one-line inscription—For Anikka Lachlan, written neat and careful—before she turns to read its first poems:
Shakespeare’s lover like a summer’s day; Byron’s walking in beauty like the night. She skates across lines she doesn’t know, and lines she does, and on through stanzas and verses to Elizabeth Barrett Browning counting the ways of her love. And if God chooses, I shall but love thee better after death. Line after line of love, and of longing, and of other places and times. Title at the beginning, author at the end, all carefully transcribed for her.
She turns the page, almost at the end of the book, and finds the last poem, ‘Lost World’. Such a lull in the room. The curtains hang still and outside there’s not a breath of air, not a single bird. She leans back to look through the front door: not a single leaf is moving, nothing.
She’s holding her breath.
Let this be her.
A folding of the light
And she stepped through, candescent messenger
Announcing to my sight
Another sense,
In this lost world whose colour
And form flared round her, ever more intense,
And as she passed grew duller.
I took this place
For some cartoon of hell,
Among whose mud and mayhem I would pace,
The ill-drawn sentinel.
Instead I found
The water and the light,
Light on the water, light in which the crowned
Escarpment trees ignite.
I looked for loss
And found what pledges are:
Pale hair, brown cheeks and stone-grey eyes, across
Her breast a coral star
As silver-pink
As dawn. Life’s vortex spins
Around her. Come, she offers. Eat and drink.
Each door and window twins
Her moving presence,
Alive with promises;
She speaks, she laughs, among the iridescence
Of all her likenesses.
And her white dress,
So light she might float clear,
Were she not tethered by the limitless
Surprise of being here.
Still. She may throw
A shadow, but bears more.
I saw her too, too quiet, to and fro,
A figure on the shore,
Or in the snare
Of some wild dance, head back
And flailing, frenzied, almost unaware,
Almost demoniac,
Or heavy with
A sorrow not to quell,
The painting of a deity from myth
Lost on the lip of hell.
Which is not here,
No matter where I gaze.
With her the reckoning might well be near,
The tally of our days.
From where she stands
A single line’s drawn out,
Weightless meridian that from her hands
Will loop the globe about.
All this in her,
All things, all places furled
And folded in her, the bright messenger
Who comes for a lost world.
And then she’s glancing ahead, to the next page, and the next. But there’s nothing more, and no author at the bottom.
Squaring her shoulders, she reads it again from start to finish, only letting out her breath when she’s done.
Mac’s poem, she thinks. Mac wrote me a poem.
A folding of the light, and she stepped through. And her moving presence, alive with promises. And the limitless surprise of being here.
The limitless surprise.
Small noises fill the room, fluttering as if they’ve travelled a long way. It’s only when she leans forward that she realises they’re coming from her own mouth, like oh, oh and oh.
The miracle of it—not just the present found after so much looking, but that it’s this, this, as if she has somehow been allowed one more conversation with her husband, one whole new exchange. She presses her fingers lightly against the words and is certain, absolutely certain, that she can feel the pressure of his fingers pressing back as they set these letters onto this page—only now, right now.
And what more could you ever want, she thinks, than the chance of just one more conversation?
‘Sweetheart.’ The word rattles around the empty room. There you are. There you are.
She touches her fingers to the poem, word by word, and then reads it in a kind of rush, taking whole lines in a gulp, before she sits, quietly, her fingers stroking the fine red cover. Opening the cover again, she finds her own name—the writing, she thinks, I thought Mac’s A was more triangular, where this one loops around. But it’s a careful and considerate script—and he would have concentrated; he would have wanted to make the penmanship perfect. Who knew that he could make such a thing? Who knew he had it in him, she wonders, wincing then at how discourteous, how impolite it is to imply that a poem was beyond him. A poem, any poem, let alone this beautiful thing. And where had he found a typewriter?
Before a quarter-hour has passed, she has it by heart. She wants to run into the street and shout to everyone about her discovery. She wants to hold it close to herself and share it with no one, not even Isabel. That’s right, she thinks. That’s better.
Her fingers pick out the letters that form her name from random words in the poem, the way Isabel used to find the letters of her own name in any words on any page when she was first learning to read. Would he have read it to me? Was that part of the gift? And she can hear it in his voice, so clearly, the thickening of ‘lost’, the softness of the ‘g’ in ‘messenger’. No trouble remembering those sounds today; it’s as if their echo is rising up from the book.
After this, she thinks, everything changes. After this, she thinks, nothing can change. This strange feeling, as she reads the lines again, that she’s somehow been confirmed with him, connected to him—that all the aching, all the grieving can be put aside to make room for him, him himself, returned somehow, and revitalised.
It matters that he had the chance to do this. It matters that he had the chance to make this thing. He’s alive in it—she can almost feel his breathing—and when she presses the page against her chest, she can almost feel the shape of him again.
She stays there, sitting on the floor, and when she hears Isabel coming up the stairs an hour or so later, she pushes herself up, all stiff and awkward. Slips the book back into its place on the shelf as the flyscreen door opens, and has her arms ready for a hug.
‘What a day, Bella, what a glorious day. I was just thinking about a quick swim before dinner—I know it’s late, but what do you think? Will you come?’ And she swings her daughter into a kind of dance in the middle of the room, like she used to when Isabel was small enou
gh to be swung entirely off the ground, laughing when Isabel starts to laugh. ‘And a baked custard for supper, I thought. A baked custard—the way you like it.’
‘Like a special treat?’
‘Like a very special occasion.’ Ani squeezes Isabel close, rests her chin on the top of her daughter’s head, wonders how much longer she’ll fit in that way. You have these things for as long as you have them, she thinks, and then you get something entirely new.
But as they make their way down the narrow steps cut into the cliff, the sea roils and swells, enormous, from the shore below.
‘I don’t care,’ Ani calls above the pounding surge. ‘I’m going in.’
But, ‘Mum,’ Isabel calls, high and excited, ‘your green— look, your shiny green.’ The water is picked out with swirls and spreads of shimmering light.
Luminous, thinks Ani. Glorious. On top of the poem, it’s almost too much. She stows her shoes, her dress at the bottom of the stairs and skips towards the water like a girl of Isabel’s age.
The water is colder than she expects, but she ducks her head under and laughs at the way the shining colour runs down her body, her wet hair as she surfaces.
‘Come on, come in, it’s beautiful,’ she calls, dipping down again as Isabel walks tentatively towards her. ‘We won’t stay long; we won’t go far.’ And she watches her daughter’s head duck down and come up. What a crazy thing to do. The two of them diving, again and again.
They stand then, as still as they can among the movement of the choppy ocean, watching the lustrous carpet ebb and flow along the shore, Isabel tucked in against her mother, held warm and close.
‘So there’s your phosphorescence, Mum,’ she says, cupping her hands to carry the exquisite water ashore. ‘Maybe it was here lots of nights and we just never looked at the right time.’
Ani smiles, wrapping herself in her towel, her clothes, and feeding her sticky feet back into her shoes for the climb up the cliff. From somewhere deep comes the idea of asking Roy McKinnon his professional opinion of her husband’s first poem, but something in the thought makes her throat grab. Because it’s mine, she thinks, possessive: I want no one else to see it, to be able to breathe its words. Maybe one day, years from now. Maybe then. There’s always time.
