The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  And Mac, without thinking, found he was shaking his head. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve never thought of it before, but no. It’s not my war, not my world. I’d stay here, you’re right. I’d stay here and keep my wife safe, and my children.’ He could feel his shoulders straightening with resolve.

  ‘White feathers this time? I wonder if people will do that again.’ But Dr Draper smiled. ‘I’m with you. It’s not to do with us and ours, you’re right. But I’ve a sense we’ll all be pulled into it, with some nasty inexorability.’ He fumbled in his coat pocket, drew out his cigarettes, and then put them away again with a sigh. ‘So when you do go, sir, as we all will, you make sure you leave someone here to take care of your people. That’s a better insurance than your waves and your stars.’

  Hitching his bag higher onto his shoulder, Mac tipped his hat. ‘Perhaps I’ll see you gents for that whisky some time— I shoot billiards now and then, if a run gets in early. We can unravel the ways of the world some more. You can tell me your plans for this war you say is coming.’

  Roy McKinnon coughed, rubbing his hands for warmth. ‘I suppose we’ll all end up in it, no matter what we think. Frank here will stop doctoring. I’ll stop teaching—and dreaming my silly poetical dreams. And maybe someone else will see your trains through the stops of their timetables.’ He pointed at the guard’s lamp that swung from Mac’s bag. ‘Hang on to your happiness if you can. We should none of us let them make us change what we do in the world.’

  Mac watched Roy’s mouth as it spoke its words. This man was the one who dreamed of becoming a poet: what a weightless thing to do. No momentum, no material, just a blind gaze out in the direction of the future. ‘So you’re the one who wants poetry,’ he said. ‘My wife’s a reader—read me Yeats this very night.’ His chest expanded a little with the story: Bet you’d not expected that.

  But from further along the road, he heard the sounds of an engine coming up to steam—he could hear clanking and grating and puffed exhalations, and he knew how every particular sound was being made. That was his world; he was a railwayman. The engine bellowed again, and Mac stepped back a little more.

  ‘An odd pleasure, to find you on my way to work—an odd pleasure to talk of this much in so short a time, and just here on the road I happened to be walking along. All the best to you both.’ But he nodded to the doctor. ‘You should meet my wife, Doctor. I think you and she could terrify each other with the ways you take on the world.’ He tilted his hat again, and headed towards the shunting yards, leaving Roy McKinnon and Frank Draper to head on to their whisky and their beds.

  And as he walked in and out of the puddles of streetlight, he thought about Ani, perhaps still awake, and waiting to hear his train. If she could see him now, as she waited to sleep again, she would see him walking fast, and free, and strangely exhilarated. If she could see him now, as the night crept towards sunrise, she would see him fly on to the yards and up into the guards’ van, his light bright with its beacons of red and green.

  Maybe a bairn next year, he thought, swinging himself into his carriage. Or mebbe a war. Who, apart from those old Scots’ women with second sight, who could ever know what would happen next in a story?

  A nice couple of chaps; he was glad to have met them— not that there’d been any proper introduction; he wished suddenly that he’d told them his name. But then it was such an odd meeting, he almost wondered if he’d dreamed it, if they’d both walk right past him if they met again somewhere in the village streets in the brightness of a day.

  Who knew which characters ended up in which story. Another question for that second sight, thought Mac. And as he jumped down to wait for the signal from his driver, another engine came surging along the tracks beside him from the other direction, leaving Mac to leap clear, and fast, out of its path.

  His heart beating, he climbed into his box again, and sat, his breathing rapid. You’re all right, you’re all right. He pressed his finger against his pulse, could feel his blood racing through his wrist. You always check, mate, you always check.

  He closed his eyes, and slowed his breath. Suppose there were so many accidents you didn’t have in a day, a week. Suppose there were near misses, close calls, some of which you didn’t even notice. One of them would find you sooner or later.

  He took Ani’s packet of sandwiches out of his bag, unwrapping the carefully folded paper. Egg. And two slices of ham with a slice of tomato carefully between the two to try to stop it from making the bread soggy. She made them with love, she said. On a morning like this, he could almost taste it.

  Yes, he would spread the universe beneath her feet, if it were his to spread—the thousands of stars, the stretch of the sky, and the vast deep of the oceans it held and everything in them. If he were a different man, he would write her a poem. He would write her a poem about this place, its colours, its sounds, its shapes. The mountain, the water, the sky, and this nest of a village held safe by all three—she’d love that; it would make her smile from the deepest part of herself, the part that was his. He wondered about how he might start—but nothing came except the signal from the driver that the train was ready to go.

  Mac finished his sandwich, flicked his light around to green, and leaned out of the window to taste the steamy air of the train as it pushed north.

  Out along the horizon, a smudge of red cut through the darkness, a bright and glowing start to the next day. He thought of the two men he’d just met, the horror they had been carrying with them. He tried to imagine the sounds of war—of bombs and burning, of loss, of dying—and shook his head at it. The world couldn’t come to that.

  But the sun on the water reflected the stories of the doctor, of the poet: the sun on the water that morning looked like blood smeared on steel.

  38

  When he opens his eyes, the room quivers with a sharp green light. Roy blinks and blinks again. After the first blink, the green light fades down to darkness; after the second, he realises he’s in Iris’s spare room, in Iris’s house.

  He blinks again. That green light: it must have leached out of his dream. His terrible dream. The guard’s light green; the train coming on; and Roy himself riding fast towards the engine on a flimsy bike, trying to beat it, trying to best it, trying to fly across the tracks. He’s dreamed this dream every night, every night for the three, four, five months now since the accident. He reaches for a glass of water, coughing as he takes too big a mouthful. From the hallway outside, he hears a clock’s chime— three times—and he lies still a moment, wishing for the power to advance the time closer to dawn, before he lets himself confirm it with the glowing green numbers on his watch.

  Just gone three. The cold, quiet time. The left side of his body feels pummelled and bruised as if it had been buffeted by something with the force of a train.

  Easing himself out of bed, Roy finishes the glass of water and gazes at the street. Three o’clock; he’s slept just over four hours, but it’s the longest stretch of sleep he’s managed yet. And he’s exhausted by the dream, the night, the waking.

  He creeps through the dark house, out to the kitchen, refilling the glass and draining it again and again. I am forty years old, he thinks. I may live another forty. The idea is somehow untenable.

  Back in his room, he feels around for clothes, boots, his coat and hat, in the darkness. His thumbs brush against his legs as he pulls on his trousers; his palms brush against his body as he pulls on his shirt. And in each touch, he feels papery skin against papery skin, as if the warmth, the blood, had already evaporated from his being.

  Navigating the desk for his notebook, his pen, his hand finds the rectangle of the magazine that came with the previous day’s post—his poem, his ‘Lost World’, so distinct and incontrovertible in its regular type. He should take it up to Ani now, he thinks; leave it in her mailbox for her to find in the morning.

  It’s breathtaking, the addictive powerlessness of unequal love, and the myriad explanations his mind can generate for Ani’s on
going silence. Maybe Isabel didn’t want another man in the way of her father’s memory; maybe Ani didn’t want to know. The permutations of whether the girl even told her mother or not branch and multiply like the complex maths problems he used to set, when all you have to do is ask her yourself. Easy to say at three in the morning, yet whenever he’s seen Ani, he’s stepped up to the precipice of this conversation, gulped, said nothing, and stepped back down, making his peace with himself with some line about her being his muse.

  Bollocks: you don’t dream of taking a muse by the hand, of holding her, of tasting her kiss—he makes himself stop, batting at his forehead like the dunderhead he is until his mind is blank again. And calm.

  Later, he will take it to her later. No secrets this time; no sneaking around; no anonymity. Just him, Roy McKinnon, offering up this thing he has made. He lets his hand rest on the magazine, wondering what Anikka Lachlan will think of her mistake. Well, his poem is beyond her now and out in the world. And he feels lighter for it.

  He slips through the front door and across the road, tracing the waterline as he heads south along the sand and over the rocks. A single light from a ship pulses briefly on the line of the horizon and he watches it a while, trying to remember the dots and dashes of Morse code. Perhaps it’s a message for him, he thinks, trying to count a pattern of dots and dashes until he rubs his eyes and the light transforms into a regular pulse of flashes.

  What are you thinking, mate? Why are you here?

  He crouches down on the rocks, away from the onshore wind, and watches as the light disappears. As if there was a message; as if there was a sign. His back stiff against the hardness of the cliff’s face, he flexes and tenses each of the muscles in his legs, trying to sit still a little longer. Some nights, he’s fallen asleep down here, waking up with the gulls as the dawn rolls around. That bloke who gave his address as Thirroul Beach when he joined up for the war; maybe this was his very spot. Maybe this was the place that he thought of as home. Guess he didn’t get back, Roy thinks out of nowhere, or I’d’ve run into him by now. He only realises he’s crying when the tears penetrate his trousers’ heavy fabric. He should build a cairn, he thinks then, and starts immediately, taking up the curved flutes of purple barnacle shells and smooth grey elliptical pebbles from the ground around him.

  This do in remembrance of me.

  Something moves along the sand, and Roy turns to see a fisherman casting out beyond the breakers. Balancing the last two pebbles on the mound, he gives it a salute. There you are, mate, he thinks, home at last. But before he turns to make his way along the beach, he crouches down again and scoops up handfuls of the stones, stuffing them into his pockets like candy or coins.

  ‘Much biting?’ he calls to the fisherman as he nears him, his fingers working the stones like a rosary.

  ‘Bit of bream, bit of tailor,’ the man replies, indicating a bucket with his foot. ‘Where’s your gear, mate?’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ Roy says. ‘Just came out to stop myself staring at the ceiling.’ He loves these nocturnal meetings, their accidental connections and random conversations. He crouches again as the man’s line tenses with a bite. ‘And another?’

  ‘Bit of power in him,’ the angler agrees, reeling in the line and dropping this next fish into his bucket. ‘Take one if you like; I’ve enough here to keep the wife busy a while.’

  But Roy shakes his head. ‘Thanks though, I’ve got some walking to do before I head in.’ Tipping his hat to the fisherman, falling back into his stride. Ahead of him, the old jetty’s pylons and crossbeams stand like a luminous forest of trunks and their branches, and as he nears them, he picks up speed, remembering his climb, his salty jump, when he first came home.

  All right, he thinks, come on—springing along the sand as fast as he can, and up. Do your St Simeon again. Thirty-nine years St Simeon stayed up his pillar—my whole life again, more or less. It still feels an unconscionable time.

  From the top, he counts the rhythm of the breakers, timing his breathing with their ebb and flow. Beyond their surge, something pale shimmers against the water, like a miniature iceberg, he thinks, although he knows that’s as daft an analogy as looking for Morse messages from a passing ship. He squints, blinks, and squints again. It’s a bloody albatross, and he wishes he was still standing with the other man, to have someone with whom he might share the sighting.

  ‘Hey,’ he calls back along the beach, pointing to the bird. ‘Hey look.’ But the fellow is too far away.

  He watches as the albatross rises and falls on the ocean’s tiny crests: wherever it’s flown from, or is flying to, it’s resting here, off the south coast of New South Wales. The distances it might have travelled; the expanses it might have seen. It would be something, thinks Roy, to be able to glide around and around and around the world, so rarely stationary, so rarely stuck on land. That’d be the life, he thinks, suddenly tempted to pack up his gear and move on. Whatever respite he had from coming here, from stopping a while—he shivers in the cold air, and his torso keeps shaking, impossible to still.

  But of course, to keep moving would be to move away from Ani Lachlan—or your ideas of her, you yellow-belly, he thinks, rubbing at his arms to try to stop their trembling. No, now that day is coming on, in no part of his imagination can he see himself approaching her, declaring himself—even managing to present her with the blessed magazine.

  Damn it, man, you never even asked her on a day trip. Cross-legged up the pillar, he pulls the stones from his pockets one by one, flicking them down into the water below. She loves me; she loves me not; she loves me; she loves me not. It’s a mug’s game of desire, but maybe there’s as much joy in the act of loving as there is in being loved.

  He pulls one last stone from his pocket, a perfectly fluted purple cone, and studies it a while in the dim light. Out on the water, the albatross bobs gently and Roy remembers how once, on one of the worst days of his war, he’d happened to look up from his gun’s sights at precisely the right instant to see a huge white ball of floss—feathers, he supposed, or some other sort of fluff—soft and gentle and floating above the mud. The impossibility of its purity, its fragility, its perfection. Now, with the purple shell balanced like a coronet on the plinth of his fingers, he pushes himself to his feet and stands on the pylon’s top, holding the barnacle high and then tossing it higher again into the darkness. And as the little thing soars and tumbles through its arc, he sees its edges catch the light here and there, watching it rise up and drop all the way down, into the wide, dark ocean. He can see the albatross out there too, waiting just beyond the upright of the jetty’s deepest stanchion, and he walks forward towards it, jumping between what’s left of the jetty’s girders, its beams, its old tracks and sleepers.

  Here I am, a railwayman at last, he thinks, and he laughs out loud at the idea of it. A man of spectacular movement and action.

  The next pylon, he reckons, is a few feet away, and so on by regular gaps out into the water. He’d be tall enough, lithe enough surely, to spring out along this causeway— he balances, carefully, his arms out like a crucifix. And then he starts to run, out towards the horizon.

  That phrase Frank had remembered—a solid man; I was a solid man. Roy laughs again as he feels himself surrounded by air. There’s nothing solid about me now. In the water ahead of him, he sees a dark shadow like a right angle, and he remembers his hunt for the signs of hidden letters, remembers walking through the village as it slept, calling out rich words.

  ‘L,’ he shouts, for the fun of it. ‘Levity, luminous, lampyridine.’

  Leap.

  On and on, faster and faster, his feet as light as Fred Astaire’s. In the end, he couldn’t have said if he jumped or fell. In the end, the fisherman said, it looked like he was flying.

  39

  On the last day of his life, Mackenzie Lachlan kissed his wife at the top of the steps, waved back to her from the corner of the street, and kept going without another thought. He walked most of the way t
o the railway with his daughter, telling her nothing stories about a tree here, a cloud there, the routes and runs his day would take. ‘And then your milkshake at the end, love: what’ll you have, chocolate malted?’ Her favourite; her automatic choice.

  He did not hug her harder than usual when they parted. He did not kiss her one extra time, or call some message after her. He did not stand and watch her go, did not think about her future or her past. He simply hitched his bag onto his shoulder, and walked down to the yards.

  ‘Morning, Mac,’ his driver called. ‘A great day.’ And it was. It was. The sun was high and bright, the sky cerulean, and he knew the ocean would be glittering when the train reached Scarborough, Clifton, Coalcliff.

  ‘Great day,’ he agreed, checking his lamp, swinging up into the van.

  ‘Thought of you this morning when I was coming in,’ the driver said. ‘In fact I almost came by and fetched you—they were out there again, a whole line of albatrosses as far as you could see. Reckon they stretched for a good three or four miles, just bobbing along on the water. A grand sight, Mac, magnificent.’

  And Mac laughed; let Ani have her phosphorescence. Let Isabel have her dolphins. What Mac wanted, more than anything else, was an albatross out on the ocean, or turning and gliding in flight.

  ‘Reckon they’ll be there when we get up the line?’ he called and the driver shook his head. ‘Third time lucky, maybe.’ It was getting to be a joke between them—the birds coming, and settling, and Mac never quite in the right place at the right time to see them.

  ‘Well, let’s get on then, and fetch me next time, will you?’ Mac added. ‘I’d get away early for that any day.’

  A harbinger of good fortune; a bright omen at sea. Let’s face it, he thought, a man needed all the luck he could come by.