In the second bedroom a glassed-in alcove held Fred’s desk.
The smallness of my new flat was a comfort. I had escaped the creaks and groans of an old house settling and found instead the hum of new cement walls and the distant pound of the sea. The lowness of the ceiling was the most difficult change to cope with—whether it was really lower I could not tell, perhaps everything felt diminished because the space itself was so much smaller. To make up for it, the balcony gave me a view, through the figs, of a strip of seemingly flat blue ocean and I began a ritual of sitting out there at sunset, drinking a gin and tonic, lady’s tears providing just enough blur to allow me to sleep. I watched the sun sliding away behind the distant horizon, a flat white disc, and thought of the Holy Communion. A wafer converted to Christ’s body, coming into me, swallowing God and all He was supposed to contain. How I had tried to hold Him close, to keep Him always part of my flesh.
I’d never been particularly attracted to the seaside but I would occasionally take an afternoon walk down to the ocean. I did not attend church, or hold lunches, or help at a charity. I tried my best not to think of that last scene with Mr Roper or the other moments that had contributed to my departure. Though I had not moved far away, in terms of physical distance, I had stepped outside of their hermetic world and felt it was enough to cook myself a meal every night and wait for the hours to pass.
†
I had visited Father Benjamin only once during his decline. He had gone to a religious hospice and received me, not lying in a bed as I had dreaded, but sitting in a wheelchair. His room was as sparsely decorated as his house had been and, if not for the careful tread of the staff down the corridors, we could have been as alone as when I had visited him at the presbytery. Father Benjamin looked as drained as a person could be without already being a cadaver, his hair in patches, and I was not surprised when he didn’t rise in greeting or offer refreshment. He simply sat, a blanket over his knees, and stared at me, trying desperately to hold to the strings of the conversation.
‘Are they looking after you well?’ I asked.
‘Yes, Mrs Smith. The good as well as the damned.’
I chose to ignore the second part of this. Mrs Bishop had warned his sentences did not always fit together.
‘I am glad to hear it. It is a beautiful place.’ I immediately regretted saying this for Father Benjamin began to look around, as though in search of beauty and, although the sky showing through the window was mid-summer blue and the grounds outside relatively well tended, I saw the walls themselves were an ugly cream, thickly applied, hairs and spots of dirt stuck in the paint.
‘Mrs Smith.’ Father Benjamin spoke my name, as if to remind himself of who I was.
‘Yes, Mrs Smith.’ I took a breath and smoothed out my skirt. ‘I took in Mary, do you remember?’
‘Mary.’ The word spoken in his mouth could have conjured the girl out of thin air as, in truth, he had once done.
‘I wanted to know …’ I asked. ‘I was wondering if they ever found her? After she ran away?’
In the time watching the poplars grow, I had never been able to ask him this question. Surrounded at church, as he always was, by the ears of the congregation, it had become a subject unspoken, like the hardness of Mrs Bishop’s ANZAC biscuits, capable of breaking one’s teeth. While I had planned many visits to his presbytery, to find the privacy to enquire, they had never eventuated, my courage petering out behind the steering wheel, forcing me to scurry back inside the house to easier ignorance. Once a coward, always a coward.
‘Mary?’ Father Benjamin repeated.
‘Yes.’ I nodded eagerly, trying to will him into memory.
The door of the room opened and a nurse stuck her head in. ‘Everything fine in here?’ she asked loudly, not bothering to step into the room. Her face, closeted by a tight white headdress, was young and pink, her cheeks flushed. I wondered if she had dropped in from some other hospital where breathless exertion was still worth the effort.
‘Yes, thank you,’ I replied. Her eyes were on Father Benjamin whose head bobbed, only just under his control.
‘Good. Let me know if you need anything. Tea?’
I worried this interruption would make it even more difficult to keep Father Benjamin on track.
‘No, thank you.’
The nurse stayed for another moment, still using the door as her shield against complete immersion into the room. I had the distinct impression she did not want to leave us alone.
‘Well, too-da-loo then.’
She closed the door quietly. Her footsteps were barely discernible but I sat, my head inclined towards the corridor, and waited until there was no chance she could still be within hearing.
I turned to the priest again and discovered he had his eyes closed.
‘Father Benjamin?’
His lids opened and I saw a strange milkiness in his eyes, as if a film had formed between the world and the supposed windows to his soul.
‘Mrs Grace Smith?’
‘Yes, Father Benjamin?’
‘You have not changed.’ Father Benjamin’s voice had the solemnity of a godly judgment.
I felt myself move physically away, pushing my body into the back of my chair.
‘I simply wanted to …’ I began.
‘There is nothing simple about you, Mrs Grace Smith.’ He said my entire name like a punishment. ‘You came here to pick at me.’
‘No.’
‘You came here to pick at me and pick at me. To throw her in my face once more. But I tell you, and will I tell you this only once, a healthy tree does not bear bad fruit, nor does a poor tree bear good fruit.’
His voice had become gravelly and his fingers twitched on the arms of the wheelchair.
‘For every tree is known by the fruit it bears; you do not pick figs from thorn bushes or gather grapes from bramble bushes! Do you, Mrs Grace Smith? A good person brings good out of the treasure of good things in his heart; a bad person brings bad out of his treasure of bad things. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.’
Spit dribbled down the sides of his mouth. I wanted now for the nurse to return. Surely the sound of the priest’s ramblings would be carrying to someone?
‘I only came here to see you in your convalescence, Father Benjamin.’
I stood up. I had used the wrong word, ‘convalescence’ implied there was recovery around the corner. Father Benjamin did not follow the movement of my standing, his head still turned to the level of my waist. Perhaps he could not see me at all, his mind transported to another time and place?
‘Can you tell me anything of Mary?’ I asked again, in as soft a tone as I could manage, pushing my irritation away as best I could.
‘For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of,’ he mumbled.
‘Goodbye, Father. I think you need to rest.’
I walked to the door, hearing a strange sound behind me and only understood when I turned to say my farewell that Father Benjamin had wheeled the chair after me in a fit of energetic derangement. His hands lay on the tyres, shaking wildly. The chair was so close I could not open the door. The smell of stale urine drifted up from his hospital tunic.
‘They never found her,’ he whispered, his voice had a completely different quality to it, the timbre of frightening sanity returned.
‘Mary?’ Though I knew he could not be talking of anyone else.
‘They searched and searched for her.’ His eyes were wide now, cleared of all whiteness. ‘Her mother, you see, Mrs Smith, found me. She begged to be allowed to see her daughter. She thought I was lying when I said Mary had disappeared. She stood on my doorstep and wailed. She said I had an evil spirit in me and that I would be punished. She would not believe a word I spoke to her. My word! I gave her my word.’
I could barely breathe.
‘My word,’ he said again finally and slumped back down into himself, the film back across his eyes. ‘What good is my word?’ He slurred the last, so it might have
been ‘world’.
‘I was trying to help her. Her mother—God, but how she wailed!’
He closed his eyes once again, his chin slumping down onto his chest. He seemed to be breathing heavily, I did not want to think he was crying.
I leant over and rolled the wheelchair back, far enough away from me so I could open the door and leave him. I found the nurse who had stuck her head in earlier and told her Father Benjamin was ‘distressed’.
‘Why would he be distressed?’ she asked, with an accusatory frown.
‘I don’t know,’ I lied and scrambled from the hospice with an image of Mary’s mother on the presbytery steps, cursing Father Benjamin to Hell.
†
Father Peter Benjamin passed away three weeks later. Peter, named for the rock of the Church. The funeral was well attended for a man with no family, although the formality of the homily from one of his fellow priests betrayed his separation from common order life. It was his parishioners who seemed to really weep for him, recalling his home visits and their sitting-room confessions, mournful and, perhaps, just a little relieved his knowledge of their sins was being buried forever.
I watched the coffin descend into the ground and, rather than praying, I found myself trying to recall if Mary’s mother’s letter had been given to me in an envelope or if Father Benjamin had simply handed over the pages on their own. If there had been an envelope, surely I would have noticed some kind of address on the back, or the ink stamp over the Queen’s face, a pointer to its place of origin? Even the briefest of glimpses would surely have stayed with me? If ‘the word’ was good for anything, it was for this: creating a permanency for fleeting thoughts otherwise lost. At the very least, I had remembered the surname.
Mrs Chilsom had patted me on the arm by the graveside. The groups had already begun to form after the end of the service, the clusters of quiet comments beginning. The Catholic clergy section of Rookwood was a rectangle, bordered by oaks.
‘At last he has rest,’ Mrs Chilsom said, her usual piousness pervading.
‘Yes,’ I replied uncertainly. I could not say if Father Benjamin really had peace.
‘And you?’ Mrs Chilsom asked. ‘How are you, dear?’
Mrs Chilsom was only a few years older than me yet she spoke as if addressing a child. She wanted to measure the state of her own completion compared to my own losses. The loss of Mary was a visible marker of my inability to cope.
‘I am smashing, thank you,’ I answered, using a Hollywood film term. It stood out oddly amongst the evergreens of the cemetery, but I needed a touch of glamour.
I didn’t attend the wake, already feeling the need to let go of this set of people and their view of me, standing on high, looking down.
†
Like Father Benjamin, I only saw Mr Roper once, alone, before I moved. He had dropped by with a new offering of fruit, as if nothing had changed, and I bustled on with packing up the kitchen around him, unwilling to leave any space for intimate talk. I had already put away the kettle so I could not offer tea and felt vaguely resentful he had, rather foolishly, brought a fruit basket to me which would just require another box.
The table and chairs were stacked to one side of the kitchen so Mr Roper had to stand, running his hands through his still-dyed blonde hair. I apologised over and over about the state of everything, hoping he would get the hint to go but, instead, he asked after Mary without the slightest embarrassment. With my back to him, I paused in nesting the saucepans together and the suspicions that had grown since Mary’s departure rose up before me: his screwdriver used to open the desktop, his supplication to her in the grotto, the long line of his corridor salted with paintings of children.
‘There is no news of her so far,’ I replied, now digging into the back corner cupboard to get the last of the cooking pots.
‘You should have called on me, like you did the other time.’
‘I didn’t want to find her myself, Mr Roper.’
‘Why not?’
My impulse was to tell him to mind his own business. It seemed as if a stranger was lurking in my kitchen, a man whom I had once sought to know, who had chosen, instead, to try and take away my little girl. I longed to be told exactly what his relationship with Mary had been, at the same time as I was terrified of it.
‘I am tired, Mr Roper.’
‘You have never called me John,’ he said quietly.
The stale smell of his cigarillo breath was closer; sometime in my busy-ness he had found his way across the linoleum. He placed his hands on my hips, my back against his torso, our height almost the same. I looked out to the garden, the curtains taken down and the absence of knick-knacks on the sill created a large, open vista of the jacaranda Fred had once sat under. I wondered if on the other side of the world he might be staring at a similar tree. I could barely feel Mr Roper’s hands on my hips, my mind distant from my body, all too aware his hands had been placed on me, not from true desire, but because of the freedom granted by my departure. For so many years, opportunities had arisen for more than this between us: the time when Mrs Mavis had left Mr Roper’s Sunday dinner unexpectedly, called away to the beginning of the end of her son, and I was the only other guest; the moments, even, on cleaning days—organised to save Mr Burrows from a humiliating dismissal—when we’d been left alone in the dusty recesses of the church. But afraid of public censure Mr Roper had never, in those private times, taken a step toward me.
I was not flattered by his touch. I found the stink of tobacco revolting, his breath quickening with this new found passion. In the window’s reflection I could see the top of his head and watched as it moved to my neck to kiss the bare skin exposed under my bun.
It would not be the truth to say I continued to feel nothing, for the wet touch of lips couldn’t be ignored as easily as the light brush of fingers. In the minute of his kiss, I was able to compare the sensation to all I had felt before. All, I say, as though there was a plethora of experiences, not one long-ago boy who farewelled my cheek after a church picnic, and the many-flavoured kisses of Fred. He had often tasted of cigarettes and yet I could not recall revulsion or wishing for it to end.
In the glass panel opposite, Mr Roper’s lips moved up my neck; insensitive to my aversion he blundered on, having been given no signal to stop. I didn’t move, taken to so many conflicting memories the present hardly seemed worth the effort.
Perhaps it was this confusion that made me see the flash of a black head over the far back fence.
Mary.
‘Oh my God!’ I yelled and pulling away from Mr Roper threw open the screen door and ran out into the yard. I stumbled over the flowerbeds, my heels sinking into the dirt, and down to the far end of the long block, throwing myself at the fence and peering down into the scruffy lane behind it.
‘Mary?’
Weeds and cracked dirt met my entreaty. The laneway was empty, only the withered dandelions appeared to sway as if someone had recently brushed past. Which way would she have gone? How could she have disappeared so quickly?
Behind me, Mr Roper thumped his way across the grass. I didn’t know if he had heard my call or not, if he knew why I had so abruptly left his embrace. I did not care. I tried to see how I could get over the fence, cursed the fact that there was no gate.
‘She’s not likely to come back now, Mrs Smith,’ Mr Roper said loudly, revealing his knowledge. Despite my resolution of only a minute before, I hated the fact he had witnessed this, and my brief hope deflated. My heart pounded from the exertion of the run and I panted loudly to regain my breath, still staring at the fence. If I had not been so acutely aware of Mr Roper’s presence, I might have cried.
‘She needs to be caught,’ I replied, addressing the weathered wood as coldly as I could. ‘For her own good.’
I pictured her among children of her own colour, smiles beaming. I poked my head over the fence again, just to be sure she had not materialised, and saw the dandelions, unmoving, the spores of their globed
heads intact.
‘I wish she’d come to me,’ Mr Roper said behind me and I held my breath, waiting for more. ‘She looked just like my little girl.’
‘Your little girl?’ I was talking to the fence, too weak to turn.
‘Mary was a reincarnation of her, only darker.’ I faced him. He smiled a small, sad smile. ‘My wife and daughter went missing in the Blue Mountains. Before I moved here.’
The lost children on his walls.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You never mentioned …’
‘You never asked.’
As we walked to the house, Mr Roper made no further comments, nor renewed his attempt to seduce me. The tan leather of my shoes was ruined and I tracked mud into the kitchen without concern. If Mr Roper regretted his advance had been rudely interrupted, he didn’t show it. He picked an orange from the basket he’d delivered and threw it into the air. The whoosh of the orange flying, the smack of it caught in his fingers. From love to fruit. As swiftly as it had come, the time of his touch, his kiss, had passed. I was sure Mary looked nothing like his daughter, his attempt at finding a replacement as foolish as mine.
I moved to the cupboards and asked Mr Roper to help me lift the cast-iron baking ware Fred’s mother had sent by sea all the way from England as a wedding gift, arriving so long after the day I had always associated it with Fred joining the militia rather than with our marriage.
‘Still clean as a whistle,’ Mr Roper noted of the bake ware, with admiration, mistaking the cleanliness of their surfaces as a result of meticulous care, instead of lack of use.
The Heaven I Swallowed Page 13
