Mother and I held hands as they lowered Father’s coffin and the crowd murmured and fidgeted in their dark clothes, solemnly watching one of their own go to his rest. He was like a king in this place, a hero, and they were sad to see he was mortal; I think they had expected him to rise up and laugh or shout out to God or whoever or whatever governed the business of living and dying, to fuck off and fight like a man. But he didn’t. The coffin stayed closed over the wasted remains of the man. He lay still, shut up with his war medals pinned to the breast of his best suit, and when the dirt tumbled over the box it stayed there.
*
I get confused about things. I confuse memories, thinking they are just stories in my head or films I have seen. This morning I woke up with the pain of my arthritis coursing through my body so bad I would have cried, but it’s hard to cry or even moisten my mouth these days. It’s like I’m all dried up, desiccating, the way the old husk of a cockroach or a spider will curl up on itself and dry until it’s nothing but the clean shell of itself. I feel like I am doing that already; I’m drying up alive. I think that maybe I’m dead, or close to it, or cursed so that I’ll never die and I’ll just wander around this old house forever, slowly drying, curling at my edges, forgotten. But the pain won’t leave me and it makes me wish I would just die.
I lie still in the hard bed, the whole left side of the bed straight and smooth as tile because I lie still and barely disturb the covers and I’m dreaming and awake all at once, but not dying, not even close. If Mother were here she’d help me along. I remember Mother coming through the door with her sewing scissors in hand, the silver scissors with the gold-plated handles that had been her mother’s before hers, and I think she might be here with me, come to cut this final loose thread after all.
*
When I wake, it is to a memory of Father holding Mother against the kitchen wall by the throat, saying something so low I could not make it out. The memory of Father’s violence is nothing new or strange, but there is something that catches about this memory. It’s my mother who is remarkable. In this dream, or whatever it is, she is sagging to the floor meekly, not fighting, as my father towers above her, having just released his grip on her throat, but something is happening in her eyes. I think that what I’m watching is the last light of any love she had for him dying.
Imagine a darkened house, and inside that house there is a tiny candle burning, burning so low that it gives off no light at all. It would seem that it couldn’t matter if that flame blew out because it is so small, but then, when it is snuffed out completely and the absolute dark falls, you can see that that little almost-flame was actually so bright, so bright, in contrast to this final darkness. That is what I see happening in my mother. Darkness falling. The tiny almost-flame being snuffed. I see her later, stoking the fire, making tea or something else mundane, and the way her knuckles go white around the iron poker is pure menace and I am eager, I am hungry for her to do something with that poker; my mind is a red field of blood.
*
I remember a children’s book with a brown fabric cover and worn gold script on the front. I was too young to read it, but the book had illustrations and I was fanning through the pages looking for them. On one page I found a beast. It was something like a dog or a bull, but like nothing I had ever seen as well. It was half submerged in a lagoon, a lagoon that looked remarkably, to my eyes anyway, like Horse Head Lagoon that sat at the farthest end of our property. In the illustration the beast stared dead ahead with rage in its eyes and its mouth was a fright of teeth, all sharp and uneven. Its tongue lolled out obscenely; its eyes were wild rolling orbs.
From the day I saw it, and took the book over to Mother to have her read to me the inscription underneath the picture, ‘The Bunyip,’ I was rapt. I dreamt of that bunyip, drew endless pictures of it and invented my own versions of it from my imagination.
In the dreams it would come for me and tear through the house trailing gushes of fetid water, pulling the stuffing out of the armchair, snapping the kitchen chairs in its jaws like they were twigs, its teeth white and long and foaming with bloody ropes of saliva; it had killed and it would kill again. It stalked through the house and sometimes it reached me and stood puffing steaming breath at my bedroom door with its yellow eyes glowing. I was never afraid of it in this dream; I knew that it waited for me, for my command. It was my beast. But there were other dreams too. In some dreams, it reached Mother first and I would wake with a scream caught in my throat. In every dream the bunyip was the same, the dark slick hide gleaming over the flexing muscle, the red around the rolling yellow eyes, and the teeth, the awful teeth.
*
There is a noise; it is piercing my sleep and keeping me awake. Something out in the dark night is calling, or crying. The sound is a terrible moaning, a groaning of despair so absolute I am not sure if it makes me afraid or sad. It makes me dream of the bunyip, when I can get to sleep at all.
The noise has kept me awake nearly all night for two nights in a row now. I don’t get much sleep in any case, but it is growing difficult to keep my head together throughout the day. I lie in bed with the dreams and memories fogging my mind and that ghastly bellowing that comes keening across the paddocks in the dark of night. I don’t hear it in the day, but I know it is there, waiting, or just drowned out by the sounds of the daytime, by the burbling of magpie song and the cawing of the crows and the endless susurrus of the wind in the grass and the trees.
I’m losing my grip on things; I tipped the kettle too sharply this morning and sloshed so much water over the mug that it tipped and the boiling water lashed across the table. I skidded back in time to avoid getting splashed and scalding myself, but the shock gave my heart a jolt and I had to sit in the armchair for several minutes afterwards.
The more tired I am the harder it is to keep the past at bay; people keep coming through doors. There is Mother, after Father died, airing out the house. I can see her as though she really is here and it is sixty years ago and she has taken to humming and singing as she scrubs and dusts. She fills the house with sunlight and the scent of yellow soap. I think my mother drew another of her lines after we put Father in the ground. And she had started her new life by cleaning the house and opening windows and dusting and polishing until the house felt clean and golden and new again.
*
In the last days of his illness Father lay in the darkened front room, in his and Mother’s bed. Mother took the sleepout bed as her own; she draped it in her favourite pink and red crocheted blanket and cut a handful of roses, which she placed in a crystal milk jug on the windowsill. The roses were falling open and so fragrant that it nearly knocked you over when you entered. She seemed happy in that room.
Father sweated and groaned in the throes of his sickness in the front room with the curtain drawn. He had tried to tough it out, but it wasn’t long before the sickness took him and he could no longer get up and get himself dressed and into the paddocks. His boots stood in the doorway where Mother had put them after giving them their last clean, but he never put them on again.
He began to rant and rave; his head tossing on the pillow looked like a hollowed pumpkin. His skin was yellow and waxy and his beard, gone mostly to a dull grey, was tangled over his dry lips. The things he began to say, lost in his fevered dreams, oh, they were dark things, secret, violent things; things he had seen in the war, things he had done. If Mother or I entered the room he would snarl at us and talk to us as though we were the ghosts of people he’d known. Once, he muttered, ‘Stewart asked me to shoot his hand, fucking coward wants to go home. To his fucking mother.’ Then he laughed, a dry-throated cackle, ‘I shot the bloody hand right off his arm.’ Another time, it was something crass about ‘French pussy’ that sent me tiptoeing out, embarrassed, my heart hammering, and disappointed that this was the only time I had ever heard my father talk of his time in France.
The doctor said
there wasn’t much we could do. Mother hurried him back to his car, pressing biscuits wrapped in a tea towel into his hands. She was embarrassed for the doctor to hear the things coming out of Father’s mouth and maybe she was worried because she didn’t know what he might say next, about whom.
Weeks passed like this, Father hollowed out by the cancer that was consuming his organs and Mother and I tending him; we washed him, ducking his limp attempts to swat us away, and all the while the poisonous nonsense he could not contain filled our heads until we were both irritable and pale with exhaustion.
*
It was night, just after dinner, and Mother was changing the pillowslips under Father’s head. He was so thin now it was as though some different man, some stranger, had taken his place. It was very dark inside the room. The small electric lamp buzzed faintly to the far side of the bed; Father was muttering something I could not hear. Mother slid the pillow into a crisp white slip in one efficient flip of her wrists. Her mouth was set in a line, her brow was dark; she looked so tired, so grim. I stood in the doorway. Neither of them had seen me arrive and I didn’t enter; I just watched.
Mother’s skin was a creamy white in the dimness; Father was yellowed with his sickness. Shadows crowded them. Father muttered and Mother shushed him, plumping the pillow between her hands. The pillow slipped from Mother’s hands and fell lightly onto my father’s face. I jolted forward, but stopped myself and recoiled behind the door. I waited. Mother reached out for the pillow, but when her hands met the white cotton, rather than grasp it to lift it, her fingers remained splayed and she leaned. From under the pillow Father produced a few muffled bleats, and his thin legs twitched, trapped beneath the heavy blankets. His arms rose, spidery hands opening and closing, reaching for Mother, but she simply leaned further, silently but resolutely pressing his arms down with the weight of her own body. He stopped moving finally and all was still.
Mother lifted the pillow and plumped it a little. She lifted his head gently and placed the pillow under. She stood over him then and looked at his face for what seemed like a very long time. Then she looked up at me, directly. She’d known I was there all along. Her face was not severe as I thought it would be; rather it was suffused with gentleness, more gentleness than I had seen in her face for many years, maybe since before Frankie died, maybe even longer ago than that. She didn’t smile; she just looked at me enigmatically, her face glowing with its new gentleness. I think she let herself love him again, now that she had killed him.
She walked up to where I stood, unable to move, in the doorway. She squeezed my hand. ‘It was mercy, Maggie darling, mercy.’ I nodded. I looked at my father, or what was left of him, on the big bed, and I turned and looked after my mother, who had walked slowly into the kitchen to prepare tea, and I felt a great and terrible relief, so much so that I cried in great choking sobs. When I sat at the kitchen table later, my face still red, hiccupping from the crying, Mother put tea into my cup and spooned extra sugar in and smiled lightly at me. She said, ‘I know, it’s such a relief, isn’t it?’
*
Later that night my mother and I sewed at the table together with Father’s body in the bed down the hall; we would call the doctor in the morning and he would be told that we had gone to sleep and woken to find Father had passed, unnoticed, in the night. I watched Mother sew and, as always, admired her small clever stitches. She could make the cleanest hemlines I had ever seen. For a moment the yellow kitchen light caught on her silver scissors as she pulled a thread to cut it and I remembered the Greek mythologies I had read.
Mother, in her housecoat and apron, her black and silver head bent over her work as she cut the thread, was Atropos, the eldest of the fates, the one called ‘the inevitable’ who was the cutter of the thread of life. Her silver scissors made a clean zipping sound as she snipped the thread that she held taut in her creased hands; she pulled the remaining thread away and let it fall into the wastebasket at her feet.
*
There’s a thunder of footsteps on the front porch, a burst of giggles and loud stage whispers. Kids. I don’t have the heart today to go to the window and pull the curtain aside and scowl theatrically at them, as I normally would. They come up here to see Maggie the Witch and usually I give her to them. I glower from the window, and sometimes I run a hand through my hair to get it to stand up madly before I go – they’re after a madwoman and I don’t want to disappoint them.
After all, it’s me and Jacob Ghost who provide half the entertainment in this town, only he is a ghost and has no say in the matter. I, on the other hand, could dispel the mystery of myself, should I start going into town and talking to people, and letting the kids see me walk down high street with a Zimmer frame and a plastic bag full of canned tuna and toilet paper. Then I would just be a regular old bird. But it has been a long while since I was anyone’s kind of regular, so I just can’t be bothered trying. After Mother died in ’85, I just didn’t really have the heart to keep up appearances. I was in my late fifties by then anyway and had long given up the notion of a family of my own, a husband or children.
I got close to all of that just once, with Billy Bird, the baker’s son. I’d see him nearly every week when I went into town for the shopping. I was twenty-five or twenty-six, Father was dead and Mother and I were enjoying our freedom up at the house; we were listening to records, baking sticky sweet jam-drops and gossiping viciously; I wasn’t thinking of courting anyone. Bess had always been the boy-crazy one, the romantic; I think that was half the reason she wanted to get out of Wren since she had, in her teens, stepped out with every eligible boy in town and found none of them to her standards. But Billy was cheeky and handsome. He wore his shirtsleeves rolled up high so you could see the long, wiry muscle along his forearm and when he smiled at me I’d feel the heat creep up my chest and over my face. Billy came up to the house a couple of times to chat and have tea – I think he would have liked something stronger but Mother would have no alcohol in the house after Father.
In the warm dark of a summer night, sitting with our knees touching on the porch seat and the cicadas drowning out our feeble attempts at conversation, Billy slid his hand up my skirt and along my inner thigh, far enough that his fingertips brushed the gusset of my underwear. I gasped and he whispered in my ear, his breath hot, ‘Car’n Maggie, ya don’t want ta be a virgin your whole life do ya?’ I pulled away and escaped inside, but the next time I saw him I let him go all the way.
We walked out along the southern fence line where there was a copse of trees under which I knew the grass was green and soft. I took off the light coat I had slung over my shoulders for the walk, even though in the warm afternoon it would have been unnecessary. I took it off and lay it on the grass beneath the milky gum trees and sat down. Billy lay beside me and for a while we lay there, on our backs, watching the sky turn a vivid pink through the branches and listening to the birds caw and call, telling each other the day was over, it was time to roost. I could hardly breathe and then Billy rolled over on top of me and stopped my breath altogether. He covered my mouth with his and his kisses were fierce and wet and I could feel the plunging of his tongue and the scratch of his stubble grazing my chin and I wrapped my arms around him and surrendered to it, thinking, I don’t want to be a virgin all my life, I don’t. But I didn’t love Billy.
Once it was over we tidied ourselves and walked back to the house. Billy kissed me goodbye and in his eyes was a puppy-dog look that made him seem just plain stupid to me, full of gratitude and eager affection. I went inside and made tea for Mother and myself and settled into my chair with Billy’s stuff trickling out of me.
The next time Billy came to call I had Mother tell him I was ill and the same again the second and third times he came. Two weeks later, I went to the bakery and ordered the bread and flour, and when I met his eyes and saw the hurt there I did feel a little bad, but I couldn’t imagine marrying Billy Bird, spending all day
with him, talking to him night and day about the stupid things a man might want to talk about. I was happy with Mother and that was that. So, now I am the old spinster Maggie the Witch, Old Maggie, Mad Maggie, The Turner Witch. I know all the names they have for me around the town. I don’t make any effort to change their minds.
*
Truth be told, I like my special status; it’s a laugh. Today, though, I’m bone tired and can’t be bothered going over to the window. I wait until the noises fade off and I think they’re gone and I shuffle to the door to make sure the kids haven’t lit something on fire or lain anything dead at the door; something dead might draw a feral cat over or at the very least a damned stink to high heaven. Kids from town usually don’t do such awful things, but there’s a bad egg or two among them, just like anywhere.
I crack the front door and peek through: nothing dead, no fire or damage, just a bunch of flowers. Picked flowers, stringy dry weeds and such, from the roadsides and fields, among them the yellow dandelions we always called wet-the-beds. I open the door a little further and bend down to grab them. I hear a gasp further down the front path and see my visitors haven’t left, but are trying to hide by the front gate. I can see them clearly through the gate’s crooked arch, the arch over which my mother tried tirelessly to grow something, anything, and was thwarted by the summer heat that burned the leaves and killed her best efforts. I gave up on gardening years ago and have let the front fence sag and the paint peel.
The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 9
