The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  Now, there’s this train, this engine, this driver, and how could anyone not know that this is happening? Yet even in the next street, people would be living their day without the slightest idea of this hiccup, this accident. The world is so many individual bits and pieces, thinks Roy. Millions, he supposes. Millions and millions.

  Bits and pieces: his eyes focus on a splat of blood, then another, and another. Who cleans up these things? Would the railways dispatch people with buckets and mops, or someone with a hose and a broom? Years ago, when he was younger, he saw a team of scrubbers on the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge—it must have been just before it opened—washing away the blood of a worker who’d fallen to his death. Roy was sure he could still see the mark on the silvery granite when they’d finished and gone home. He’d never felt safe crossing the bridge, seeing that, as if that stain might have tarnished or weakened it somehow.

  If he thought of his own war, he thought of bodies on beaches, face down along the shoreline where the ocean leached the marks and stains away. He has little sense that there was blood, but he knows this can’t be true. Perhaps he’s hosed it into some dark part of his memory where, if he’s lucky, it will never breach its levee.

  He wills himself to stare directly at the cyclist; he wills himself to see a glimmer of life. And can’t. How quickly it can stop, then, just like that. So you have to take your chance, Roy; you have to chance your arm. Make sure Ani Lachlan knows her poem. Send it to his editor for the rest of the world to read. Anything to shatter this inertia.

  Damn it but he is sick of the waiting, and it’s exhausting, he sees suddenly, to be unaware of something it would be so simple to find out. Maybe she hated the poem. Maybe she was embarrassed by it. Or maybe she simply hasn’t seen that there is something new sitting among her other books. Wake up, mac, he thinks, startling himself with the inapt appellation. Do something, once and for all.

  And so he moves the dead man’s shoes, placing them next to each other and aligning their toes: it seems an appropriate gesture to make. What was he doing here today? Roy wonders. Where was he going—and what was he thinking that he didn’t see the train, or hear it? Did he think he could beat it? Did he try to stop and fail?

  Or did he see the train and just keep riding? Did he push and pump his pedals even faster? Roy shakes his head, rubs his eyes. We’ve one way of coming into the world, he thinks, and so many ways of going out of it. Above him, the driver slumps down to sit against the wall of his cabin, cradling his head in his hands.

  ‘What’ll I tell the wife?’ the man asks. ‘What do I say when she asks about my day?’

  Who drove the train that killed Mac Lachlan? Roy thinks suddenly. Who was the driver—did Ani ever ask?

  Maybe she didn’t, and maybe she’d been right not to. Maybe it was better not to know.

  He looks down at the mess at his feet, the blood, the skin, the shredded clothes. Is this how he looked, the minute he died? Is this how Mac Lachlan went out of the world? He baulks at the way his pulse quickens, but there’s a perverse intimacy in seeing this body, in imagining it belongs to Ani’s husband. This thing she would probably die rather than see. But I can take this on—I can see this for her.

  As if this is anything to do with her at all.

  The currawongs call, and Roy turns in the instant they rise off the ground—a motorcycle is coming around the corner, its noise and movement startling them to flight. He brushes his hands together, straightens himself to attention as a young policeman gets off the bike.

  ‘Take it from here, sir,’ the younger man says, touching his forehead in half a salute. ‘What was your name?’

  ‘Draper, Dr Frank Draper,’ says Roy in that borrowed, stentorian voice. ‘He was dead straight away, I should think.’

  And he stands a moment, watching as the younger man lifts the corner of the coat up and away from the body. Then he turns and strides away from the train, towards the main road of this unknown suburb, glad to be back on the move.

  He should have said something over the man, he thinks, something soothing, or benedictory—in case he did have any sense of where he was, of what had just happened, or what was coming next. In case he had known it was the end and hadn’t wanted to be alone.

  What else is there, after all?

  But the only words Roy can think of, in this belated instant of concern, are from the Yeats poem he’d sent to Frank all those years before:

  I think it better in times like these

  A poet’s mouth be silent . . .

  Death has its own rituals, funerals and burials and prayers said and memorials written. Frank has told him of a German woman who killed all her children just before the war’s end—to spare them their denazified future, he thinks now, paraphrasing the newspaper—and then sat playing Patience, working the cards again and again, trying to get them into four neat piles of suits. Ani Lachlan has told him of a widow for whom she’d made food, arriving with a saucepan of soup and half a cake. As she reached the doorstep, she said, she was pulled up by a low and guttural howl that sounded like it belonged to some wild and cornered animal. She’d frozen, she said, hardly daring to breathe, and the sound had dropped away.

  ‘And then it began,’ she said, ‘a low, slow song like a lullaby, over and over. The woman was singing her husband out of being, singing her husband into the longest sleep he would have.’

  Ani had left the food and gone quietly away. And at the end of the day, she said, watching Isabel sleep, she had stood with her hand on her daughter’s blankets, singing the same lullaby and hoping that this newly dead man would hear it somehow, no matter where he was, and no matter who was singing.

  Roy wonders, now, if the story was about Ani herself— that terrible sound he had heard the night Mac died, as he raced along her street. And he wonders what song he should sing for this cyclist.

  He closes his eyes, sees the body on the tracks, the body of the little boy who’d been dashed down against concrete, the bodies of the first five hundred and fifty-five people Frank saw die in a world where war had ended. And as he takes the next step, he stumbles down the edge of a culvert—the shock of putting your foot out and finding nothing there.

  Shuffling cards, dealing cards, sorting cards, aces at the top. And your children dead in the next room. He brushes his eyes. This bloody world.

  His hands fumble in his pockets for his handkerchief and find instead the dead man’s glasses. He takes them out, looks at them a moment, wondering if he should return them to the body—or the policeman. Then he rubs one lens clean, and the other, and holds them in front of his own eyes.

  The world blurs.

  If they could show what they had seen—if they could show you the last day of this man’s life, show what happened to him, and why. He squeezes the glasses, their wire frames cutting into his palm. If he’s honest, there was something glorious in the shock of the accident; he squeezes the glasses harder, hoping the pain of their wire against his flesh will transform his reaction to proper abhorrence.

  Then he wraps them again, and puts them back in his pocket, aware of their shape and their weight, like a talisman, or a warning.

  34

  Pulling the heavy book box towards her across the library’s smooth floor, Ani is back in their first night in Surfers Parade, unpacking Mac’s box of books. She’d pulled Jane Eyre out of the box—he must have packed it last, because it sat on the top by itself, pristine and secure in a nest of recent news. It was 1936: people on the move—the Germans in Rhineland; the Italians in Abyssinia; the beginning of the war in Spain, and the British king abdicating for his love. She’d fallen in love with Mac himself, she suspected, when he told her Jane Eyre was his favourite book.

  Digging deeper into the box, she’d found Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett, adventures and westerns, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. And she’d laughed. Some were books she’d read; some she’d always wanted to read. And below that, a handful of magazines—Smith’s Weekli
es, some exotic National Geographics and a few Harper’s. She’d flicked to their contents pages, hungry for the stories inside, and laughed again.

  He’d come in at the sound, his face quizzical.

  ‘I didn’t know the extent of your dowry,’ she said.

  ‘It’s where my money goes,’ he said, as if he was confessing to horses or the dogs. He’d smiled then, and she felt entirely happy. What more did you need to share a life with someone but a stock of new stories to tell?

  ‘Samanlaiset linnut lentävät yhdessä,’ her father had written in her daybook on the morning of her wedding. ‘The same kind of birds fly together.’

  Now, as Ani takes the last of the last consignment of books from its trunk, a gust of wind catches the door, making it slam. And in the silence after its surprising noise, Ani realises she’s hearing a greater silence, a greater quiet, and has been hearing it for ten minutes, fifteen, half an hour, maybe more.

  There has been no train.

  She stands slowly, smoothing her skirt as she crosses to the window. There are passengers waiting on the two platforms—waiting. Waiting. She sees Luddy talking to this one, to another.

  ‘Sounds like there’s a problem with the trains coming through.’ That’s what he’d said to her. ‘An accident along the line and they’re not letting anything pass.’ She could still hear the exact pitch of his voice, the easiness of it. Just passing the information on, and offering to let Mac know that they were held up, and they’d decided not to wait, that they’d see him at home at the end of the day.

  And we went to the beach and found a shell that shimmered like an evening gown. And we went home. And I started dinner. And Bella sat and waited. And then they came.

  There was life before; there’ll be life after—sometimes, now, she thinks she can almost see what it might look like. That moment, that news—the dinner cooking, and the men, and the story of Mac’s death—that’s the dividing line. That’s all.

  She crosses the gravel, waving to the stationmaster.

  ‘An accident, a bicycle they said.’ He grimaces. ‘Nasty.’ Grimacing again. ‘They say the track’ll be right again soon.’

  Ani looks along the empty line, thinking about Roy heading north earlier in the day. It can be nothing to do with him, she thinks, safe in the size of the carriages. But still; but still.

  ‘It rings, the silence, doesn’t it?’ she says. And, ‘I still can’t hear the ocean—how is it such a big sound can disappear when it comes from something so close by?’

  Luddy shakes his head. ‘You’d notice the waves if they stopped too, I reckon.’

  To the north, the roundhouse windows glisten and sparkle. Ani blinks at their semaphore. ‘Did you know, that afternoon when Bella and I were waiting, and the trains were stopped? Did you know it was something to do with Mac even then? I know you said you didn’t, but . . .’

  He stares at her, his mouth open and his eyes blinking fast. ‘Of course not; of course not. Oh, Mrs Lachlan, of course not.’

  She brushes his words away. ‘I’m sorry, Luddy, I don’t even know why I asked you. I’ve never thought such a thing before.’ Maybe she’ll ask one day to read the coroner’s report; maybe she’ll fill in the excruciating details of a story she’s recast as a random disappearance.

  Luddy shakes his head, and the movement breaks her reverie as a bus rattles by. ‘I’ll just tell these people they’re better off with a bus,’ he says, waving towards the other platform.

  Ani nods, waving her own hand towards the library. ‘Could you come and tell me when they’re starting again? I think I’d like some warning of the noise—today.’

  And he nods, smiling again. ‘You don’t want them sneaking up on you.’ He blushes, but she’s laughing as she walks across the gravel.

  ‘Exactly,’ she calls. ‘Unless you can do me a big D57. Those things are magic.’

  Early one morning, just after the war, she’d walked to the station through a dawn thick with sea mist. It had softened hard lines, made edges disappear, and transformed the streetscapes Ani knew so well into surreal shadows, dubious connections, hovering impossibilities. The wall of one house blurred towards its neighbour; a bathtub of water for horses hovered above the ground; a jacaranda tree transmogrified into something from the northern fairytales of her childhood.

  Something had happened to sound as well, magnifying it. The scrape of a kettle on a stove; the slam of a flyscreen door; someone singing in a round baritone; someone else suggesting jam or marmalade for breakfast.

  Climbing the main road towards the railway bridge, Ani felt she was walking through one of her father’s memories of winter. That’s what she’d ask for for her birthday, she thought suddenly. She’d ask to be taken to see snow. She laughed. Let Mackenzie Lachlan solve that on the east coast of Australia in 1945.

  It was only when she stepped onto the platform that she realised it was there—a great steam engine, a D57 class locomotive, puffing and blowing, its front end sawn off with a stubby funnel above. She couldn’t imagine how she hadn’t heard it, but there it sat, its steam indistinguishable from the morning’s fog, and its big wheels waiting to spring forward, on and up the coast.

  It was like walking around a corner and finding a dragon.

  She looked for the driver but the cabin was empty, so she walked on, running her hand along the strong, smooth metal. ‘Two-fifty tons she weighs, with sixty-five square feet of fire grate, and two hundred pounds per square inch of boiler pressure.’ Mac could recite these figures like poetry—he loved these engines, their brawn, their sheer heft. ‘Get them going straight enough and I reckon they might fly,’ he said.

  She reached its nose, patted as close to the big round headlight as she could, and turned back along the platform.

  ‘Morning, Mrs Lachlan.’ The driver, a mate of Mac’s, swung himself into his compartment. ‘Early for you this morning— give us five minutes or so and we’ll have you underway.’

  And she’d smiled, following the engine’s line past its truckload of coal to the passenger compartments beyond. This great, powerful thoroughbred, just sitting there, breathing, and waiting for her.

  It was magnificent, and there wasn’t another soul in that morning to see it.

  Now, inside the library, the sun touches the cedar shelves, the polished floor, finding oranges, golds, like harbingers for spring. Pressing her hands to the warm wood, Ani wonders whose wife, whose mother, will open her door this afternoon to the insupportable news of a train, a collision. She’s still there, she knows, standing spotlit in her own hallway, hearing the news again and again. She’ll always be standing there, listening. And as she thinks this, she feels it, a sharp splinter wedged hard into her skin. How many times has she stroked this shelf, and why, just this time, did it harm her?

  If you cannot sit in a quiet room of words and pages and unravel the idea of random or accidental harm, or the illogical and unpredictable ways of protection, how much harder to walk through war asking why that bullet found that person, why that mine was there, and why do I keep walking clear?

  ‘I want to know,’ she says at last, surprised by the strength of her voice. ‘I want to know how to understand.’

  But all she can hear is the sound of her own pulse pounding in her ears.

  35

  They catch her unawares this year, these profusions of colour—purple first, when the jacarandas begin to bloom, and then the deep red of Illawarra flame trees, Brachychiton acerifolius, Isabel’s favourite proper name for a plant, because she thinks it sounds like a dinosaur.

  They follow each other into being, bursting out along the coast and up the escarpment. The jacaranda comes with the spring; the flame, a little later, lasts a little longer. They mark Ani’s months; they mark her year. And now, they mark Mac’s anniversary.

  ‘Did you want to do something, Ani, to remember him, these twelve months?’ Mrs May delivers the question directly, having arrived at the front door with an invalid’s food of soft butter
cake and some soup.

  ‘I’ll ask Isabel,’ Ani says, not wanting to have to answer. ‘I’ll see if there’s anything she wants to do.’ And she reaches out to hug her neighbour’s arm. ‘You take such good care of us.’

  This long and slow year. Wars have ended in Israel, in China, in India and in Greece, although there are bound to be new ones before long. There are planes that can fly around the world without stopping, and Russia has made a great bomb like those that were dropped on Japan; Ani still cannot think about these without shaking—paralysed by the idea of such noise, such heat, such silence.

  Now, as she waves to her neighbour, she sees the first purple blossoms: a jacaranda can cover itself with colour in a week, and then the red of the flame trees will come.

  Scooping potatoes, carrots onto her daughter’s plate that night, she says: ‘Mrs May was wondering if there was anything you’d like to do, you know, for the anniversary of Dad’s . . .’ To say ‘death’ still feels impolite, or somehow embarrassing.

  Isabel looks up from the schoolbook she’s packing away. ‘Are we supposed to?’ she asks.

  Ani shakes her head. ‘No, no, love, I don’t think that’s what Mrs May meant—I think some people . . . you know, they like to mark the moment. We could walk round to the cemetery again, or ask them to do a special reading in church. We could have a special meal, ask Mrs May to come in. I don’t know.’ She smiles, her hand resting on her daughter’s shoulder. ‘I told her I’d ask you if there was anything you particularly wanted to do.’

  Frowning a little, Isabel pulls her plate towards her. ‘Should we do something? Like it was a birthday? Is that what you mean, Mum, what you want . . .’

  Ani watches as Isabel pushes the rounds of carrots into a line, the largest discs on the left-hand side, and ranging down, perfectly graded, to the smallest on the right. It’s been happening most mealtimes they’ve eaten together, she realises, and she’s not sure for how long. ‘Isabel,’ she asks now, ‘what are you doing with your dinner?’ She wonders why she’s let it pass before.