The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  It comes from nowhere, the sense of being watched, and when she looks up she sees him through the library’s window—Roy McKinnon, looking in, but looking through her, beyond her, so that she’s not surprised when she raises her hand and smiles to no response. How long has he been there? Or is Ani herself no longer there, disappeared somehow? She pats at her cheeks, her collarbones, to check her own existence.

  A train pulls into the platform opposite, and Roy draws in a deep breath, pulls back his shoulders, and turns away. Behind him, in the gap between two carriages, Ani sees passengers moving towards the southbound train. He must have been almost against the wall to have been looking through the window in the first place, she thinks. And staring at what? She pats at her hair, brushes down her skirt, self-conscious, almost smiling.

  Roy McKinnon, she thinks. She likes it somehow, the idea of knowing where he is, of talking with him about his books, and the world. But then people do say the silliest things, turning simple friendships into galloping gossip and noisy surmise, in which I am now cast as librarian and relict.

  The other week, running into him at the pictures with his sister, and the doctor, she’d sat beside him in the darkness and watched the way the light from the movie refracted and lit up his hands, his lap, the cracked leather on the arms of his chair. The way a film’s images jumped around—a shot from one camera, the reverse angle from another. It would be nice, Ani thought, to be able to shift so smoothly to another person’s point of view—to see what her hands looked like, perhaps, if you were a poet, or what this dark room of picture-watchers looked like from up there on the screen.

  ‘Are you all right, Mrs Lachlan?’ His voice had been low and quiet, near her ear.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Ani, in the too-loud response of any word spoken in darkness. ‘I just . . .’ She gestured towards the screen. ‘My mind was wandering—sorry to disturb you.’ And as she watched, he raised his hand, and she half expected him to take hers, to grip her fingers, comforting. She had to work against a sense of disappointment when he didn’t, brushing at something in front of his eyes instead.

  At the picture’s end, they stood apart from Frank and Iris in the foyer, unravelling the movie’s plot and trying to remember other films in which they’d seen its stars. Then, ‘I wondered what you made of that bit-part engine-driver,’ Roy McKinnon had said. ‘He seemed a brutal man, and I would never have thought it a brutal profession.’ It seemed an oversized observation for a small and inconsequential character.

  Ani had frowned. ‘I didn’t really think about it as if it was anything real,’ she said—she’d hardly noticed this character at all, or anything much of the film. They never drew her in the way books did, as if her imagination functioned better when it had to make up its own pictures, its own movements, rather than having them all laid out in front of her. But she liked the pause they gave her, the opportunity to sit still in the dark a while, and not have to think much at all.

  ‘What I envy the railwaymen,’ said Roy McKinnon, ‘is all that motion, all that movement—the sense of spending your day travelling from one place to another and back again. I found the classroom bad enough, pacing around its four walls, but at least I had the children in there with me. Now it’s me, and a desk, a blank page, and nothing else. Perhaps I should write a movie—perhaps I’m attempting the wrong form. What do you think, Mrs Lachlan? A movie set here, with all the trains, and the coal, and a writer at work on the edge of a cliff.’

  Ani laughed. ‘I think I know what you have in mind,’ she said. ‘But I’d come and see it. I’d love to see this place all big and silver on the screen. I wonder if I’d see myself anywhere.’ And she’d smiled to see him blush, almost say something, and then hurry forward to help Frank with their ice-creams.

  ‘The first time Bella saw one of these,’ Ani said, taking a chocolate-covered ice-cream heart from him and holding it with care, ‘it was after the war—Mac had told her about them, all her life, when of course you couldn’t buy them. And she couldn’t believe such a treasure would really exist.

  “Chocolate and ice-cream,” she kept saying. You’d’ve thought he was handing her the stars.’

  And they’d talked then of things that had seemed wonderful to them when they were children—the delectable softness of pussy willow catkins, said Ani; the perfect sweet thickness of a custard’s skin, said Roy—and of the strangeness of realising that somewhere, sometime, for no reason either of them could remember, these things must have stopped feeling remarkable, or special.

  ‘I miss that,’ he’d said, gazing out from the theatre’s front steps as if he was trying to pinpoint the source of something wonderful now.

  Their ice-creams eaten, the other two despatched, they’d walked the long way home, with Ani telling the story about the night at the end of the war, when she and Mac had danced along the sand behind the loops and curls of barbed wire. ‘I can’t remember how long it was before they took it down,’ she said, ‘but I remember being shocked that it didn’t happen immediately.’

  ‘Did you trust that it was over, when they said it was, when you saw the man dancing along Martin Place? Did you really think a thing as vast and awful as all that could just stop?’ There was a tightness in his voice, and a sharpness.

  ‘Of course,’ said Ani quickly. ‘It was what we’d been waiting for for months.’ She looked across at him; he’d ducked his head down so his eyes must only have been seeing the forward steps of his own feet and the strips of road on either side. ‘Look, look there, I think I just saw a shooting star.’ A half-truth—she hardly knew what she’d seen; it might have been a gull in the light—but it made him look up, and smile.

  He stopped then, gesturing towards his sister’s house. ‘Here I am,’ he said superfluously. ‘I won’t offer to walk you home; I know the way people would talk.’

  And Ani had smiled—‘of course, of course’—and said something about hating town gossip. ‘I’m used to it now, hearing the same story about myself, told over and over. I suppose it’s a way of getting used to what’s happened, when you realise you’re hearing about your own husband’s death, or even talking about it yourself, and you hardly even register the conversation.’ But walking up her own stairs, five minutes or so later, she wished she hadn’t finished with a story about herself, about Mac. She wished she’d taken her leave with the story about wonder.

  The air shakes as the northbound train arrives, and through the window Ani sees Roy McKinnon straighten his coat sleeves, his hat, and step into one of its compartments. Does he look better now than when he first came? she wonders. Is his face a little tanned, a little rounder? Or is it that she knows what he looks like now, and is no longer surprised by his lightness, how whittled down he looks, how insubstantial?

  The train whistles as it prepares to pull away. Ani raises her hand again in acknowledgement, and when Roy McKinnon—through her window, through his—tips his hat, she’s not sure if it’s a response or a coincidence.

  Settling himself on the train, Roy tips his hat to the empty platform, to the edge of the library and his reflection in its window, to the beauty of the mountain rising up behind it. He has something at last, something to show, and he’s heading up to the city to meet a man at a magazine and pass on his poems. His first new poems in more than four years—written arduously, daily, in the month or so since Anzac Day. All that, for four or five he’s happy with. Four or five, that is, apart from Ani’s poem; he’s kept that back. That’s his; that’s hers. But four or five new poems nonetheless.

  The thought of it almost makes him laugh.

  The compartment’s framed pictures offer him the Hawkesbury River, the Blue Mountains and the view up the coast, from Stanwell Tops, where box kites were launched. Three options, where would you take her? He usually avoids thinking so directly about Anikka Lachlan—it’s too much, mostly, to look head on at so bright a muse or messenger—but it’s as if, this morning, a new recklessness, a new confidence is seeping from the lines he
’s written into the centre of himself. This is what Iris would call feeling better, he decides. And perhaps there’s something to be said for plain language. Stanwell Tops is too close to Ani’s world. And she came from the plains, he knows that. Maybe Katoomba, or the Hawkesbury—the mountains or a river. It would be something to take her somewhere new, to show her that other places exist.

  The most direct, the most proprietorial thing he’s ever thought about her. He wants to call out with the daring of it. But instead, he pulls his poems out of his pocket and skims their lines again. They’re a start, a good start, neither as sharp nor as fluid as the ones he managed during the war—and perhaps neither as lucid nor as elegant as the one he wrote for Ani. But they’re feeling their way on towards those things, he’s sure of it. All they need is to step clear of the last of the mud and the bodies.

  Which is what the editor says, looking over them quickly a couple of hours later while their lunches sit, untouched, in the middle of a rather grand hotel dining room. ‘You’ve got to get past the war now, McKinnon. You’ve got to find other stories to tell.’ And he slides the pages back across the table, pinning them with Roy’s fish knife as if a strong wind might rush through and blow them away.

  Roy stares at them there, a white rectangle under a silver bar. It seems disrespectful to take up this paperweight and start eating his fish, but he’s not sure what else to do. He shifts the pages to his bread and butter plate, flattened by the man’s easy dismissal but enjoying the fact that his unworthy words have almost disappeared.

  ‘I thought it might be too soon to show you,’ he says, awkward and blushing, ‘but I just wanted to feel as if I was . . .’

  ‘Absolutely, of course.’ The editor has almost finished his fish, is most of the way through his vegetables—three or four chews per mouthful and a swallow that makes his whole face shudder. ‘You wanted to feel you were back on track, back in your world. And you are, sir, you are on your way.’ He sits, a forkful of potato poised midway to his mouth. ‘You’re just not there yet.’ He chews. ‘But there must be something new you want to write about in this place you’re living down the coast?’ And he tells Roy the story of an envelope he’d received from another returned poet that had spilled the hard, parched landscape of some remote place across his desk that very morning, enough trauma and pain in it to sense what the man had seen and survived, but nothing explicitly, overtly military. ‘I accepted the poems immediately.’

  Roy nods slowly. Enough of this now, that’s what they all say. Enough of this. ‘It’s a beautiful place, where my sister is.’ He closes his eyes to see it. ‘This lovely escarpment folding into the Tasman Sea, the water and the light, and the trees. And there are people there, good people.’ He smiles, his eyes open again but seeing Ani’s brightness. ‘I’ve started writing about them already.’

  ‘Well,’ says the editor, wiping his plate with the corner of a slice of bread, ‘I’ll wait to see those. And if Lawrence could manage it, I daresay you will.’ It’s a generous comparison, a generous endorsement, but Roy can see it on the man’s face: It’s the least a chap can do, throw another chap a chance.

  The editor raises his glass. ‘There are fine poems to come from you yet, Mr McKinnon. If the war unearthed their source in you, the peace will make it flourish.’ He’s used this line on more than a dozen young men in this very dining room.

  Roy makes his way through his fish, his vegetables, as quickly as he can, aware of the other man’s empty plate. The editor is rattling through gossip from the publishing world— authors Roy knows only from spines and title pages, although the editor talks about them as if Roy is surely at all the parties and gatherings he himself attends. He invites him to one or two, and presses him to say he’ll accept when Roy demurs: the length of the train trip he’d have to make, the difficulty of getting up from the coast.

  In the hotel’s lobby, the editor stands on one big black tile while Roy shakes his hand from the middle of a big white one: they look like pieces stranded on a chess board. Remember this, thinks Roy, feeling for his pen as soon as he’s on his own in the street, and he scrawls the image on the back of the rejected poems and makes his way towards the station.

  Everywhere, the city is busy with lunchtime, and he stands a minute in the shade of the post office’s colonnade, watching as surges of people come and go. This is where she said it came from, the image of the man dancing at the end of the war. This is where someone had caught happiness for Anikka Lachlan to watch on a newsreel.

  And his happiness? He closes his eyes: Anikka Lachlan turning a cartwheel on the beach—a gift of a moment, beyond acknowledgement, beyond words.

  He opens his eyes and the city bustles on, a few shouts and sharp calls, the occasional horn, and not so much as a smile on most faces. That happiness, that big thing ending, thinks Roy: you’d think that joy as big as that would have hung around in this place always. But had he danced and spun when the news of the war’s end found him? No. He’d crouched on a beach and cried a while, for the waste of it, the time and the death and the waste.

  Stepping into the crowd, he sees a tall woman with blonde hair striding out in front of him, takes three fast steps to catch her in case it’s Ani, fumbling awkwardly with his hat, his lapel, when he draws level with her and sees that it isn’t. Of course.

  That’s his poem, he knows. Or rather, she is. And it’s the only one that’s any good, the only one that’s real. He’ll send it to the editor tomorrow; he’ll show him he has found something beyond the war.

  It’s nearly two months since he secreted it in Ani’s house— two months’ torturing himself that she hasn’t found it, or that she has and can’t speak of it to him. He hates himself each time he takes his leave from her without asking about it. A poem’s nothing without its readers, he thinks, recklessly. And she can’t ignore it if it’s in the world. It’s a simpler thing to stamp an envelope than say, ‘I wonder if you’ve found . . .’, or, ‘I made you this thing’.

  Settling into the train’s first carriage as it pulls away from Central, Roy unfolds his newspaper and distracts himself with its stories—strikes and blackouts, foreign ministers arguing in Europe, new missiles being built. June 14, 1949, and it’s as if the war never stopped. He turns the page: a denazification court has commuted a sentence for a top German banker— Denazification: that’s a mouthful of a word. Should have hung them all. And a father has confessed to throwing his two-year-old son onto a concrete path in a temper.

  Roy closes his eyes. This world, this bloody world. What chance could you have of happiness or joy? He pulls his papers from his pocket, crumples them one by one into misshapen balls, and throws them through the open window as hard as he can to clear the tracks and the wind the train drags in its wake.

  But then the train shudders, the wheels screeching against the rails as Roy scans the racing results with their grainy photographs of tiny horses. Such names, he thinks: So Happy. Jovial Lass. Full o Fun. Amused. He closes his eyes and sees Ani’s clumsy cartwheel against the morning sun, startled as the carriage lurches suddenly to a stop. All we want to be—So Happy. Full o Fun. There’s an eerie silence; the noise of his newspaper hitting the floor is too big, too amplified to seem real.

  Have they stopped the train to pick up my rubbish? he wonders half seriously as he looks back along the track for his jettisoned papers.

  A shout; a whistle; and then another cry. Roy opens the window as far as it will go, leans out as far as he can to look ahead.

  ‘Someone’s been hit,’ the driver calls from the engine. ‘At the crossing here; someone’s down.’

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’ He’s swinging down onto the tracks before he’s finished asking the question, his feet uncertain on the uneven ballast.

  As he draws up to the engine, the driver leans down. ‘You a doctor?’

  And Roy feels himself nod. Why not? I’ve seen enough bodies.

  ‘He came from nowhere’—the driver gestures towards the fender. A
mangled bicycle, a mess that had been somebody, shoes flung away, and a pair of glasses glinting on the other side of the tracks.

  ‘I see,’ says Roy. ‘I see.’ He leans forward, unsure if he should touch the man, trying to imagine what Frank would do or say.

  ‘Is he going to be all right?’ the driver calls, pale in his high-up cabin.

  Roy tilts his head, non-committal, taking off his coat and covering as much of the accident as he can. He’s not sure if he can see the man’s chest rising and falling, or if this is just terrible, wishful thinking. Either way, he thinks, and says, ‘It would have been very quick.’ And, ‘Are you all right up there?’ He likes the command he can hear in his voice.

  And the driver nods.

  Crouching down, Roy picks up the cyclist’s glasses and wraps them in his handkerchief. There must be a wallet in one of his pockets, something to give up the man’s name, his identity—but Roy draws back from touching him, certain now that he can see a tremor, a shudder, rattling through the body like alarm. Someone with real authority can take it from here; somebody with real authority can feel for a wallet. Still, he reaches for the man’s shoes, unsure where to place them.

  A couple of currawongs land beside the tracks and watch him; a car’s horn blares nearby. He touches his fingers to the smooth, warm metal of the railroad tracks, and thinks of Frank Draper’s stories. At the end of the war, at the end of a railway line, a camp full of leftover pieces of people, mostly dead, the rest close to dying, among mountainous great piles of the everyday things they would never have thought twice about before—sturdy shoes, good travelling bags and useful pairs of spectacles.

  Along the line of carriages now, windows and doors open, and passengers crane to look, pulling away as they realise what’s happened. Nothing to do with them, thinks Roy, just a delay on their way to or from somewhere else. He closes his eyes, sees Frank’s mess from the other side of the world, so far from here, from the sun, and the air, and the pleasant day passing. He can’t imagine that those camps would have felt any more real on this side of the world, even when that war was underway and being fought.