The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  ‘I’m not really hungry,’ says her daughter, shrugging as she moulds the dollop of potato into a perfectly right-angled triangle.

  Anikka sits opposite with her own dinner; she’s not that hungry either, if she thinks about it—can’t remember the last time she was, the last time she actually tasted something she ate. ‘Maybe I should have warmed up a bowl of Mrs May’s soup—that’s never let us down when we’ve needed nourishing.’

  Her daughter’s smile flares, and Ani smiles wider: there she is, her bonny little girl, as Mac would have said.

  ‘Maybe we could take Mrs May for a picnic—down to the beach.’ Isabel spikes one carrot from the middle of the row with her fork, makes a great show of putting it into her mouth, chewing it twenty times. ‘Or we could go just the two of us; I wouldn’t mind that either. But you decide, Mum; I don’t mind.’

  Another single round of carrot disappears. When Ani looks down at her own plate, she sees she’s started to make the same orange line of vegetables through its middle. She mixes the mashed potato across it, destroying the symmetry.

  ‘Let’s think about it tomorrow,’ she says peaceably, ‘and concentrate on dinner now.’ Pushing the problem away.

  It was never a struggle to make conversation when there were three of them. It was never a struggle to eat. Ani scoops up the mashed potato: she’s never thought such a thing before about dinnertime, about any time with her daughter.

  And what did Mac’s voice sound like?

  Washing the dishes later while Isabel dries, Ani stares through their reflection in the kitchen window and into the darkness beyond. ‘Do you still hear him?’ she asks as her daughter stacks the plates. ‘Do you still hear your dad say things sometimes?’

  Isabel aligns the stack carefully. ‘Sometimes I think I do,’ she says after a long pause. ‘But there are lots of things I know I don’t remember now, so I don’t know if the things I think I can still remember are real or not. I think I remember him wishing me happy birthday that last time. But maybe I just remember the day and maybe it’s someone else’s voice. I think he sounds like my teacher at school, and I never thought that before. If people’s fathers have to die, someone should make a camera for their voices.’

  Her hands warm in the soapy water, Ani laughs. ‘Something like that. I thought your kaleidoscope might have caught a piece of him for us—I haven’t checked for a while, but I know he wasn’t there back at the beginning.’

  ‘I guess that’s because he was down under the water, and it’s hard to look all the way down to a bathysphere.’

  ‘You still think he’s there?’

  Isabel nods. ‘It’s better than thinking about ashes,’ she says— too pragmatic, Ani thinks, for someone who’s not yet eleven.

  She squeezes the dishcloth and hangs it on the front of the stove, as she’s done every night she’s lived in this house. She likes the predictability of it, that she can trust that the wet things will dry, always, and in a certain amount of time; that she can trust that process, that progression.

  ‘Anyway,’ she says drying her hands, ‘there’s your birthday for us to celebrate first of all—I’m looking forward to our bushwalk and our picnic lunch with pasties.’ She stokes the fire, smiling at its flames. ‘I’m still anxious about keeping the meat end separate from the jam, but Mrs May assures me it’s all in the pastry.’

  Her homework spread out again on the red laminate table, Isabel props her hand on her chin, her pencil poised. ‘Where do you want to go for your birthday, Mum? You haven’t said anything yet, about your excursion, or your dinner, or your heart’s desire.’

  The house creaks a little as the wind rattles its gutters and eaves. Ani reaches for the tea canister, the pot, wondering how to answer.

  ‘For my excursion,’ she says at last, ‘I’d like to take the train into Wollongong and look at the shop windows and have a milkshake, like we used to.’ The ritual never again attempted after that last aborted attempt. ‘For my dinner, I’d like you to cook me blancmange, with the peach leaf, like they taught you at school. That was beautiful, Bella, the night I came home and found that little dish waiting for me.’ She takes another long, slow breath. ‘And for my present,’ she says quietly, ‘my present . . .’ Her fingers turn the coral brooch her daughter gave her at Christmas; she wears it almost every day. ‘I don’t think there’s anything I need, my love.’

  Isabel contemplates her mother a while, sucking at the end of her pencil. ‘I think I found the thing Dad was making you last year,’ she says at last. ‘The thing he’d always wanted to make—I think I found it, under the house. I didn’t know what to do about it, how to tell you.’ And she’s out of her seat now and through the back door before Ani can say a word.

  The house creaks and settles again, the wind puffing a little smoke back down the chimney and out through the stove. Ani swirls the tea, wondering what her daughter is about to bring into the room.

  A scrape across the doorstep and Isabel appears, walking backwards and dragging something across the newly washed linoleum. Ani frowns—at the shape, rather than the mark its movement might be making—and tilts her head, as if the adjustment might transform the shape and being of the thing itself. But there’s no question: it’s the frame of a box, with brackets, shelves fitted to some of them, and it’s fixed on a round base, like a plinth, so that it can spin and turn.

  ‘It was under the house, behind a trunk full of clothes—I found it when I was putting away those shoes of Dad’s you wanted to keep.’ Isabel rocks it from one side to the other. ‘I’ve never seen it before, and there are tools down there as well. I thought it must be . . . whatever it was he was making.’

  ‘A bookcase, it’s a revolving bookcase—a spinner, they call them, although my dad used to call them bibliotheques,’ says Ani, stroking the smooth, dense-coloured wood. There’s a delicate calligraphy of whorls and patterns in its markings. Perhaps it’s silky oak, she thinks tracing its complexity. Her father would approve the choice. That’s a fine grain, Mackenzie, he’d have said, admiring his son-in-law’s efforts and checking that the mechanism that turned the shelves didn’t jar—just as Ani is checking now.

  ‘I didn’t know your dad was such a handyman. It took him two years to put up a shelf in the kitchen when we came here.’

  She presses her finger onto the wood’s lines: it’s like a fingerprint itself, or a piece of marbled paper. ‘Maybe the book was meant to go on the bookshelf,’ she says then. ‘A set, maybe, to start a new library.’ She laughs. ‘Which is funny, isn’t it, because a new library is exactly what I got for my last birthday, in a roundabout way.’

  ‘What book?’ Isabel parks the cabinet by the end of the kitchen table. ‘Did you find another present?’

  Fetching the book from beside her bed, Ani passes it to her daughter without a word, watching carefully as Isabel takes it and lets its spine rest on her hand. The book opens automatically to the last poem, ‘Lost World’.

  ‘He said he wanted to write a poem, your dad,’ she says as her daughter begins to read. ‘I didn’t find the book until months after he’d died. But I’ve been reading it at the end of every day. And it seemed’—she hesitates—‘it seemed a private kind of thing.’ She laughs at Isabel’s anxious blush, at her hurried closing of the page. ‘Nothing like that, Bella. Read it, it’s lovely. I’m not sure why I didn’t tell you. I found it on the mantelpiece on Anzac Day—remember, the night we went for a swim with the phosphorescence? Like you said, like you said about the green, it must have been there all the time.’ She smiles. ‘Perhaps he slipped it in while he was working on this.’ And she lifts the spinning shelves up onto the kitchen table, closer to the light that makes their wood glow.

  ‘Lucky we didn’t give you the spinner, though,’ says Isabel, concentrating on the poem again. ‘The piece of wrapping paper I’d painted would never have been big enough.’ Her fingers follow the lines down the page, tapping the rhythm of the final words:

  All this in her
,

  All things, all places furled

  And folded in her, the bright messenger

  Who comes for a lost world.

  From the other side of the table, Ani scans the poem upside down—not that she needs to look at it; she knows it by heart, reading it twice, three times a night, every night, before she turns out the light. Some nights, it conjures an angel for her, someone soft and light who watches as she sleeps. Some nights, it’s herself she sees, dressed in white and her hair pale in some spotlit glow. But never Mac, no matter what she does, or thinks, or hopes. Whether he’s asleep in that high room she imagines for him, or down fathoms with the stargazers of Isabel’s imagination, his poem is all there is of him now at the end of her day.

  ‘Oh Mum,’ says Isabel, caressing the book. ‘It’s like a proper poem, like they make us read at school. I knew he wanted to make you something special but I never knew he could make anything like this.’ She moves her hands to pin the book open on the table, her reading so concentrated that Ani half-expects to see the words sucked right off the page. ‘And it feels so nice, doesn’t it?’ Isabel goes on. ‘The way the rhymes work, the way the lines lilt. Dad really knew what he was doing.’

  My daughter the critic, thinks Ani, coming around the table to read Mac’s words again herself. Below her, Isabel’s shoulders pull back and her little-girl chest puffs out. And she’s proud of him, thinks Ani, proud.

  Pulling one of her schoolbooks across the table, Isabel opens a clean page and begins to transcribe her father’s ‘Lost World’—from above, Ani watches, mesmerised by the reenactment of these sentences coming into being. It’s like ventriloquism, through her daughter’s hand. She watches as Isabel’s pencil loops high on the capital letters and low, with a flourish, on the g’s, the y of ‘mayhem’. Her pencil slows as she comes up to the need for an s, and on the fourth or fifth time, Ani sees why: she’s pausing to replicate the precise way Mac would have written that letter.

  ‘I’ve never noticed before that you write like your dad,’ says Ani, tracing her daughter’s script with her own finger.

  ‘I’ve been concentrating,’ says Isabel, following her mother’s finger with her own. ‘I can always remember what his writing looks like even if I lose his voice sometimes. And I try to make my letters as close to his as I can.’ She holds up her schoolbook for her mother’s approval. ‘I think the f ’s are pretty good, and the g’s. But I can never get that kink in the top of the s’s, and you need the letter S for lots of words, you know.’ She blushes. ‘Like Isabel, and authoress.’

  Ani smiles. She can see the size of the revelation her daughter has made, the courage it takes to say this aloud, and she appreciates its distraction. ‘An authoress,’ she strokes her daughter’s hair. ‘That’s a lovely word, Bell, and a lovely idea.’ And she watches a raspberry blush flush Isabel’s face.

  ‘I mean,’ says Isabel, ‘it’s just a daydream, just an idea. I wouldn’t really know what to do. But if Dad could do this,’ she taps the velvety page, her fingers settling below the poem’s last full stop, ‘well, maybe, as Mrs May would say, it’s in the blood.’

  Laughing at Isabel’s impersonation of their neighbour’s turn of phrase, Ani pushes a blank sheet of paper towards her, uncaps a biro for her too. ‘I think the way you start is that you simply start,’ she says, straightening the rectangle of whiteness as she hears herself go on, unplanned and unexpected. ‘Or you could ask Mr McKinnon. I don’t know the difference between writing poems and writing stories, but they must all begin somehow. And I’m sure he’d be happy to know that someone else wanted to make new sets of words around here.’ The image of the two of them, sitting with their pencils, the air around them thick with sentences never before thought of—she likes it, and that thought makes her own face bright.

  Turning sharply, she knocks the teapot, gasping as the hot liquid scalds her hand and floods onto her daughter’s books. ‘Oh Bella, Bella, the mess I’ve made—’ which touches the thought of her daughter and the poet as much as the sudden puddle of staining tea.

  ‘It’s all right, Mum.’ Isabel has the books tilted high in the air, tipping the liquid down into her saucer. ‘It doesn’t matter; I can fix it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, love; I got distracted’—she tries for a joke— ‘thinking of the day I’d have your books to shelve in my library.’ And Isabel blushes again.

  ‘Don’t even talk about it,’ she says softly. ‘Don’t even pretend it might be real.’

  She was never a very childish child, thinks Ani, and whatever else Mac’s death has done, it’s pushed the last of that out of her. Or perhaps that was me, the way I was—the way I am. She digs her fingernails into the soft skin of her arms. I should have done better with this; it’s all I should have done.

  But she wipes at the spillage with her dishcloth, patting the table dry before she lets Isabel rearrange her books. And then she sits, very still, and very quiet, and watches her daughter’s busyness, watches her hand fly across the pages, filling their lines, watches her stop and pause, thinking of a word, working at a sum, before the writing starts again.

  If she thinks of Mac writing, he’s signing the register on the day they were married; she can still see the way his hand moved to shape his own name on the page. It was a looping, gentle gesture, like a caress. She’d never seen anyone write anything that way before. But it’s there in Isabel’s writing; it’s there in the way she does even this ordinary set of homework.

  As her mind settles into her wedding day, Ani looks at her daughter without seeing her, a fond, middle-distance stare as she reaches out and tucks a strand of Isabel’s hair behind her ear. Her fingers touch something unusual and she leans forward, back in the room, back with her little girl, worrying at whatever it is as she focuses, frowning. She frees the thing and holds it carefully between two fingers—a bit of a dandelion’s puffball; the kind you might blow on to wish.

  Ani smiles, opens the kitchen window and blows it gently into the night. Beyond, in the shadows, she has the sense of something good, something still and calm, nearby, and getting closer.

  ‘There,’ she says softly, tucking Isabel’s hair back again. ‘There. That’s better.’

  36

  It’s the children’s voices that wake him, laughter, and shouting, and the kind of sing-song banter he remembers from so many playgrounds. Roy stretches, yawns, and looks at his watch—almost four, and he’s slept since lunchtime. It’s long enough to feel miraculous.

  Out in the kitchen, Iris is clattering saucepans and their lids. Inching out of sleep, Roy can find no other explanation for the cacophony of sound, and he rubs his eyes and pulls on a jumper, intending on going out to help her.

  The kitchen, though, is empty, except for Iris’s three chickens, inside somehow and making their way around the shelves and the cupboards. A baking dish tumbles, another in its wake, and the chickens step on, unimpressed or unaffected by the racket.

  ‘Out, out.’ Roy runs at them, his arms flailing, as he herds them towards the open door. ‘Iris? Are you here? Your chooks have broken in.’ But there’s no answer—he can’t imagine she’d have left them pecking in the garden, or left the door open, for that matter. ‘Off you go!’ Shouting the last word, as if the hens might move if he matches them noise for noise.

  They regard him with their sideways eyes, and set their heads down to peck at the pattern on the lino. One of them drops a wet brown poo, and Roy yells again, imagining his fastidious sister’s horror.

  Amazingly, the chickens respond, bobbing their way across to the back door and on out into the garden. He closes them into their coop and looks around for Iris’s ever-present mop. ‘Our little secret,’ he whispers darkly at the birds. ‘But do it again, and I’ll have you in one of those pans.’ He’s never killed a chicken, and suspects he wouldn’t be able to. He wonders if the birds know this—they pay no attention to his words.

  Splashing eucalyptus oil liberally into the bucket of water he’s boiled, he takes
a deep breath of its aroma and sways with the movement of the mop. If this is cleaning, he thinks, he can see why Iris likes it—there’s a rhythm and a grace to it, and something seductive about seeing the difference you’ve made. Perhaps I’ve found my calling at last, he thinks, twirling the mop as if he was Fred Astaire. But he stows it again as soon as the single soiling is dealt with, rinsing it carelessly and knowing his sister will find fault with its treatment.

  Hat in hand, then, he makes for the beach, pausing on the esplanade to mark the snake of children heading north along the sand, the snake of children heading south. The beach at the end of your each day at school, he thinks. It must not get better than that.

  In the shadow of the pumphouse, a knot of girls has gathered, their bags piled haphazardly in the soft grass that fringes the sand, and their voices high in the afternoon’s air. Roy heads towards them, aiming for the jetty beyond, but slows as he hears the words they’re calling—‘Nert!’ ‘Jerk!’—and sees them trying to start a fire with a small pile of books. Enclosed in the mess is Isabel Lachlan, so still and quiet that it takes Roy a moment to realise she’s the butt, the centre, of whatever’s going on.

  ‘Hullo!’ he calls, watching the gang’s immediate reaction. ‘You should take care with those books on the beach—sand in the binding; it ruins the glue.’ Ignoring the insults, ignoring the matches.

  The girls step back, wary, watching for what he’ll do next. They’ve probably been warned about him, he thinks, the crazy man who walks around all day and night, calling out words to himself.

  ‘Are they your books?’ He turns now to Isabel, stepping towards her and smiling. ‘Would you like some help getting them home?’