by Ashley Hay
31
On the first anniversary of the war’s end, Mac worked an early shift and walked the long way home, looping down to the library via a quick drink in the billiards hall and a haircut next door. To celebrate, he told himself. Lest we forget. Etcetera. He slid his books across to Miss Fadden, taking care not to knock her half-worked game of Patience. Not a bad life, he thought, to sit in a room full of books and have time for a card game now and then. He could think of worse ways to pass the time.
‘If you’d like something new for Bella,’ said Miss Fadden, shuffling her cards away in an approximation of busyness, ‘there’s a lovely book came down today about a little French girl called Madeline—made me think of Isabel; I think she might like it.’ She set it in the middle of the desk with Mac’s card on the top, waiting.
‘You’re good to keep an eye out for her, Miss Fadden,’ said Mac, running his finger along the shelves. ‘But what about for me? Any nice books about French girls for me?’
He liked to make Miss Fadden laugh. ‘Here, for you,’ she said, when she’d had her giggle. ‘A new Hornblower—and I do believe he sails up the Seine, so you can keep an eye out for your own Madeline while you’re reading it. And tell Mrs Lachlan I still can’t get her Brideshead Revisited—I think everyone must be wanting to read it at the same time.’
Mac smiled, pulled two more books from the shelf, and pushed his pile across the table, complete. ‘And what are you reading, then, Miss Fadden? If you’ve any time to read at all among the busyness of the library?’ He wasn’t sure he could remember a time when there was another borrower in the room beside himself.
‘There’s a lovely new Georgette Heyer romance I’m waiting for, Mr Lachlan, and I always like to read the children’s books, to make sure I know what I’m recommending. Lovely things, when they’re well written—but you’d know that, from reading with Isabel. How is she, little pet?’
‘It’s just an excuse for me to read them, of course.’ Mac laughed, tucking the books into his satchel. ‘And she’s grand, she’s grand. I’ll let Ani know about her book and tell her to keep her fingers crossed for next time.’ He waved as he went, whistling across the yard and calling to Luddy as he passed the stationmaster’s office, ‘Will there be fireworks down here tonight, mate? The anniversary? The victory day?’ He gestured over towards the empty football field where effigies had been burned, and bonfires lit.
Luddy shook his head, coming out onto the platform. ‘Doesn’t feel like anyone’s making that much of it,’ he said. ‘To be honest, I think most people want to forget it ever happened.’
Mac sighed. ‘I didn’t even fight in the thing and I reckon we should do better than that.’ He glanced up at the mountain, at the afternoon sun. ‘What do you reckon, Luddy? How many years of eternal peace will this one get us?’
But Luddy waved him away. ‘You go home and make your own memorial. It’ll be years before they sort out the statues and the sandstone.’
Coming across the football field, Mac broke into a slow jog—years since he’d played a game, but he could still hear the calls of his team and the sliver of a crowd that turned up to watch. You’re an old man now, with your rickety knees and your daughter outrunning you. He slowed, crouched down, and sprang out across the final yards of the pitch. There it was, the rush, the surge of acceleration he used to love, flying down the wing, heading for the line.
Mebbe I’m not so old after all.
He climbed the hill and turned into his own street—Surfers Parade, and Ani wondering when there’d be a parade of surfers coming along with their great, long boards. It sounded like a dream, or an apparition, but he’d like to have seen it himself. They could run along the road and dive out from its end— maybe they’d clear the rock shelf if they sprinted fast enough, flying with their boards out over the open water, away behind the waves.
Like Isabel, when the war ended and the barbed wire along the beach came down; she stood for hours watching surfers hover on the lip of unbroken swell. ‘They’re standing on the water, Dadda; they’re riding it. They’re riding it. How do they do that? Is it magic?’
And he’d wanted to tell her it was, wanted her to think that there was magic in the world.
32
On a winter’s morning in June 1949, Ani wakes suddenly in the darkness, wanting to be anywhere but in her bed, in her room, in her house. She used to joke about it with Mac, that latent Scandinavian sense of long, cold days; the uneasiness she felt in even this most temperate place. Now, she pulls on any clothes, any shoes, and one of his jumpers—the only one she’s kept— before she turns to see Isabel standing in the doorway.
‘The beach?’ Ani asks, and her daughter, already dressed, nods.
Two apples in a bag, the end of a loaf of bread, a piece of cheese and a jar of water: ‘I hate waking up this way,’ Ani whispers as she pulls the door behind her. ‘Let’s get down to the sand.’ And they run along the street, hand in hand, around the corner and down the stairs to the sand, almost tumbling with haste.
A smooth ocean to the east; a sliver of moon hanging over the dark escarpment to the west. Isabel flies along the shore, her hair shaking free from its plaits as she runs, and Ani stretches her legs out so that her steps match the footprints left by her running daughter. Isabel turns a cartwheel, another, and another, and Ani laughs. That’s better, she thinks. Much better. She wishes she were brave enough to try one herself, but she’s never quite understood how to push on her arms so her legs will spin up and around her body. She’s forgotten how light she herself used to be, springing all over the unfinished houses her father worked on—up to their highest point, and down again in just a step or two.
‘Just try, Mum, just try.’ Isabel is running towards her, spinning again, and springing into a somersault.
Slowly, deliberately, Ani puts down their bag of breakfast, pushes up the baggy sleeves of Mac’s jumper. The summer Mac had taught their daughter how to cartwheel, Ani had absented herself from the training; someone had to be ready with bandages and ice wrapped in tea towels. The two of them, she thinks now, they always made it look so easy.
‘All right,’ she calls. And then, quietly, ‘All right.’ And before she can think about it, she reaches her arms high up to the sky, leans over to plant her right hand on the ground, kicks her legs out hard, and finds herself standing again, standing and laughing, brushing the sand from her hands.
‘You didn’t look much like a wheel, Mum,’ Isabel says with a laugh. ‘But it was a good try.’ Then, ‘Try again,’ she shouts, making another cartwheel. But Ani shakes her head.
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ she calls. ‘I’ll need to work up to it.’ And she makes a great show of gathering the bag, settling its contents, looking up and down the beach for any unexpected spectators.
She sees him then, ahead on the sand, and probably looking straight along at her, at her mad jumping—she can’t tell, with the glare of the sun. She points: ‘And anyway, there’s Mr McKinnon.’ She nods towards him and waves. ‘He doesn’t need to see that sort of thing at this time of the morning.’
‘I don’t think he’d mind your cartwheeling, Mum.’ Isabel is balanced on her hands now, her feet pointing up towards the blue. ‘We never laughed at him about him perching up the pole, did we? Remember when we saw him? On my birthday? With Dad?’
Ani shakes her head. ‘We didn’t, no. But still, I don’t think he needs to see such an amateur display before breakfast.’ If he wasn’t here, she thinks, if the beach were empty, I’d do it over and over. There’s something embarrassing about his having seen; but there’s a tiny part of her that’s exhilarated by the idea of it too.
As for the cartwheel, the great loop itself—that had almost felt like flying.
‘Anyway, where are we walking? Along to the jetty, or . . .’ She trails off. Beyond the southern headland, beyond the next beach, sits the cemetery where the small box of Mac’s ashes has been placed. Maybe today, maybe this morning, maybe after a cartwheel and
a bread and cheese breakfast, she can manage to go there at last.
Isabel nods, following her mother’s gaze. ‘We should go, shouldn’t we? He’ll be wondering why we haven’t visited.’
And Ani flinches at the pragmatism of it, at the implied neglect.
‘Have some food, love: let’s sit here and have some food, and then we can walk along and find . . .’ She can’t say and find him. She can’t say and find what’s left of him. She can’t say and find his tombstone, because there isn’t one yet—she’s not sure she wants there to be.
She spreads their towel on the sand, slices the bread, the cheese, the fruit, and watches as her daughter eats. One of the greatest happinesses, she thinks, feeding a child—no one ever tells you that. And only as Isabel finishes her second helping does Ani begin herself.
At the cemetery, they jump over the low fence, heading for its coastal edge. ‘This is Catholics,’ calls Isabel, matter-of-fact. ‘And there’s Anglicans down here, and Baptists,’ walking further east again. ‘Kids’ names at school,’ she says to answer her mother’s unasked question. ‘Look: Rafferties and Larkins and that old lady who lived behind Mrs May. Here are the Presbyterians.’
Ani glances at the stones on either side of her, at the shorthand of their names, dates, relationships. In memory of my darling wife. My beloved mother. My son, Tommy, aged nine, killed on his way home from school—‘Oh Lord,’ she clutches her hands together. The date is more than a decade ago; the stone still as polished and shiny as if it had been set only yesterday. Our mother, and our father, she reads: is that her future, then, dug in here beside her long-dead husband? She feels Isabel pulling at her hand.
‘Here, Mum, I think. Here.’ After all this time, there’s a pile of wizened brown petals heaped up in a rotting mound, a small white cross with his name written in black.
Don’t think about it. She almost says it aloud: Don’t think about it.
Crouching on the grass, she presses her fingers into the rich, dark soil. Two rows over, Isabel’s bright hair bobs up and down among the stone angels, the granite blocks, the urns and the pillars and the open marble books. Life, thinks Ani. Her fingers fiddle with a loose pile of earth. And what comes after. She shakes her head. She cannot imagine that there is anything to do with Mac in this place. She cannot imagine any remnant of him being here.
Still, taking a deep breath of the salty air, she brushes some loose dirt from the little cross and murmurs, under her breath, the lines of his poem—Life’s vortex spins around her. Come, she offers. Eat and drink—while Isabel paces and prowls between the headstones and monuments, giving her father a wide berth. A few rows away, a spark of rosellas lights up a tree like tiny fireworks, their feathers brilliant reds and blues. Mac never tired of their brilliance or their beauty: ‘There’s nae a lass as bright as you in all of Scotland,’ he’d call to them, scattering seed across the grass in the backyard at Surfers Parade.
‘Nice that you’re here,’ Ani whispers to them now. ‘Nice that you’re near him.’ She closes her eyes against their movement and her mind flares with the colours of their plumage. How long does a bird live? she wonders. Did any of you see my husband in his prime?
‘Bella?’ She sees her daughter pause and turn towards her name. ‘I think I want to get home, love. What do you think? Can we make tracks?’ And she’s sure she’s taken care not to pass again the grave of that small boy killed on his way home from school, so shockingly accidental, until she glances sideways as she walks and reads, this time, its full inscription.
He left for school as any day
No thought of death was near
There was no time to say goodbye
To those he held so dear
The morning sun dries the tears on her cheeks as her running feet clear the cemetery’s boundary and reach the sand again. ‘Maybe there’ll be dolphins on the way home,’ says Isabel, catching up to her, and Ani kisses the top of her head, catching her breath, wiping her eyes.
‘Now that would be something, Bell,’ she says. The pod of dolphins they watched on the day Isabel turned ten, at the beginning of the last week of Mac’s life. How impossible not to have known that’s what that week would be; how impossible not to have seen that coming. How impossible, now, that Bella was heading towards eleven.
Cresting Sandon Point and heading north, Ani remembers the great marble map on the library floor in Sydney, the beauty of its waves, its ships, its angels and dragons, the straight line that stood in for this coast she’s walking now. Walking along a coastline that didn’t exist. The size of the oceans, the size of those old ships: what were the odds of anywhere being discovered?
About the same odds as a man called Lachlan crossing a country he’d just arrived in to see a river that had borrowed his name.
‘What chance your dolphins?’ Ani calls to Isabel. ‘What are the odds we’ll see them?’
Isabel shakes her head. ‘I don’t really understand how to do odds and chances yet—although Dad tried to tell me using this long story about billiard balls.’
‘Billiard balls?’
Isabel nods. ‘He said whenever he went to play billiards he worked on the theory that he had a one in four chance of winning every game and about the same chance of sinking the balls. There was something about the eight ball, and who else was playing and . . .’
But Ani has stopped in the middle of the sand. ‘Billiards?’ she says. ‘Your father never played billiards in his life.’
Isabel looks at her feet, twisting a little so they disappear below the sand.
‘He said he never played at the hall on the western side of the railway, but sometimes he’d pop in to the one near the shoe shop, on our side, if he finished early. It was a secret.’ Her voice drops to a whisper. ‘I wasn’t meant to say. But I saw him coming out one day. That’s the only reason I knew.’
Ani closes her eyes, sees a wide green table, a triangle of bright balls in the middle. Someone leans in and breaks the balls’ triangular pattern with a single swipe of a cue. She hates the crack the wood makes as it strikes the hard shiny bakelite. The balls fly away, running in all directions, a muddle of colour and motion. She opens her eyes.
A cloud passes across the face of the sun and she shivers instinctively. Out in the water, a single dolphin leaps and dives. The beach is empty; there’s not so much as a seagull along its length.
‘I wonder what other secrets your daddy had,’ Ani says then, as lightly as she can manage. That word, ‘daddy’; they never used it. It sounds spiteful now, and mean. But it still throws her to realise she’ll learn nothing more directly from her husband, only secondhand anecdotes about him. And such things can never be hers to claim.
Isabel paces out the beach, kicking an empty bottle that she’s found in some seaweed to make a strange, syncopated beat. Behind her, Ani makes hard work of her footsteps, deliberately labouring in the soft sand. What does it matter—a game of billiards? What does it matter, now and then?
‘I don’t mind the game,’ she calls at last, aloud, to her daughter’s running back, ‘or even the secret of it. I just wish I’d had him longer, to have learned these things from him.’
‘I never knew husbands were for learning from,’ says Isabel, slowing down to fall in step with her mother and taking her hand. ‘Does that mean it’s easier if you marry a teacher? At least you get someone who knows what they’re doing. Maybe that’s an idea, when you marry again. Try for someone who knows about teaching.’
Ani shakes her hand free, pushing her daughter away. ‘Damn it, Isabel, you say some ridiculous—’ And she sees the girl shrink into herself, her shoulders hunched, her head dropped down. Ani drops the bag, and kicks it, relishing the pain as her toes strike the thick glass jar. She can feel her teeth grinding against each other, and she wants to run and run and run. The second time I’ve yelled at her, she thinks, desperate at the thought. The second time I’ve yelled at my gorgeous little girl. ‘Bell? Bella?’ She holds out her hand, but Isabel shi
es away.
‘It’s all right,’ she says, her voice very small against the beach’s great space. ‘I know you’re sad; I know Dad’s dead; I know it was a horrible thing to see the tiny space for his ashes; I know it was a stupid thing to say.’ And she sets her pace just ahead of her mother’s, staying out of reach until they’re almost through their own gate, when she works herself under her mother’s arm, and lets herself be held.
At home, in the bathroom, Ani runs the cold water until her hands stiffen. If only she could curl herself into the white curve of the basin, and numb her entire being. I yelled at Bella; I yelled at Isabel. She stares at her eyes in the mirror, shocked that they look the same—grey, wide—instead of the flashing glare of some terrible monster.
On the afternoon Mac died, before she headed for the station, Ani had stood a while, surveying herself in this very glass: her suntanned skin; her spots of freckles; her cheek-bones—‘Your mother’s,’ her father always said, ‘she was known for them’; and new lines, deepening, around her eyes and the edges of her smile. Isabel had turned ten, and Ani had scanned herself, candid, for any evidence of that particular decade.
Now, nine months later, her skin is paler—less time spent out of doors—and the lines are deeper. The whites around her fine grey irises are specked with red, messier than she remembers, and thick smudges of tiredness reach down towards those famous, inherited cheekbones.
She’s never felt time so etched across her skin, and she rubs at it hard, pushing it up and around, trying to see the old face, the other face, the person Ani Lachlan used to be.
33
