by Rachel Leary
...
He’d gone down the valley towards Primmy’s to hunt again. It had just started raining. She made tea, picked up a tin from the dusty shelf and looked through it. Behind the tin was a book, small, bound with rough leather, yellowed pages.
i dont no what the date is mary other wise id rite it down here for you thing is i aint got much need for dates no more aint had in a long time now if you seed where i were you probly wuld not beleev it tis not a place youd wanta live mary id ner of brung you out here bloody beutiful tho a place like nuthin i ever seen out here no one comes here much sept Trowsers and his lot and matt and them passen thru some times most of the time mary i am left alone wich is all i want any more for meself i had enuf of peple a long time ago now mary all i want now is to be left alone peple ner did mak much sense to me mary probly you no that i warnt no good back then not much good to you i didnt do the rite thing by you i spose ya wulda found an other man to live with you take care of them childrun i thort bout that a lot you livin with an other man used to get rale upset bout it nowdays i hope ya did that ya got some one to help you get by with the childrun and that he done all rite by ya i hope you mite of forgived me mary but its all rite if you aint i probly dont daserve no forgivnes is nerly winta here now mary in the spring mary ya shuld see it i wish you culd see it mary all the flowers come out the rivers flo is a site for sore eyes mary like hevan i recon mary like hevan Trowsers nos what to eat what you cant eat youd meet him if youd come corse ya not gunna be comin mary I know that i thort for a long time mary id get some money and come back but then time went by mary and i thort youd have some one and i didnt no if youd want me and its a lot to get back ther mary so I never come but I thort of you i hope you can forgive me mary
Bridget put the book back exactly where she’d found it.
...
Snow blanketed the mountain, fell on the hut.
She squatted by the edge of the river. The top of it was frozen near the edge again and she reached for the rock she’d left there and hit the ice. It broke easily, making a round hole that sent water flowing over the top of the ice sheet around it. She cupped her hands and plunged them in, threw freezing water on her face. Now she took the billy and pushed it down, let it fill, then brought it up to her lips. She drank and waited as the vicious ache produced by the cold water spread across her forehead. Around her boots bunches of thread-like icicles stuck up between the grains of rock that fringed the river, fine little structures that had pushed up out of the ground in the night, some of them balancing the tiny grain of rock that they’d displaced on the top of their ice stalks. She stood up and looked into the brilliant green of the canopy. The sun had come out and quiet drops of water dizzy with morning light gleamed like tiny heroes.
...
The air in the hut was brittle with cold. The fire had burned down to coals. She could see the lump that was Sully curled under skins. Bridget climbed out of the hammock.
The heat from the coals warmed the back of her legs. She lay down with her back to him, close to him but not touching. She felt him wake but he didn’t move. She shuffled backwards then so that her back was against him. She watched the coals breathe; bright and dull, bright and then dull, as though it were her own breath inside them. He drew closer to her, put the blanket over her. She could feel his hair, his coarse beard, smell the earthy smell of him. His rough palm went to her forehead and stroked her hair, brushed it away from her forehead, then rested there. For a while she could feel him awake, could feel that he was thinking about her, wondering something, but she didn’t know what. Worried—he was worried, she thought. After a while his hand grew heavy on her head and he was breathing deeply, was asleep again.
...
Primmy came with supplies, the boy Sy with him. They had come before; this was the second time. Last time they had left with Sully’s roo skins roped to the donkey. They took them into Norfolk Plains and sold them for him, kept a percentage of it for themselves.
Sy was a strange boy, talkative one minute and then falling into long silences the next. When they were here before he’d been out the front of the hut, jabbing at the air with an imaginary sword. ‘Take that. And that. And that.
‘One day I’ll be famous in the whole of Van Diemen’s Land. Sir Symon I’ll be called, and I’ll have so many medals I won’t even be able to walk. Gold medals they’ll be, won’t they, Primmy? They’ll be gold.’
Primmy didn’t say anything, kept piling skins onto the donkey.
The boy was quiet for a moment and then he came and sat down next to Bridget. ‘Have you ever seen one?’
‘What?’
‘A dragon.’
‘No.’
‘They’re up on the mountain. Big ones, with eyes like this.’ He opened his eyes wide. ‘One come down to our hut one night and were outside breathing fire. Haaaaaa.’ The boy’s breath warm near Bridget’s neck. ‘Last time it come I went out and I were gunna stick it through its heart only it saw me and run off back to the mountain to its cave where it lives. But one day I’m gunna go up there and I’ll get them all and then I’ll be King of Van Diemen’s Land and all the people who don’t do what I say can go in my dungeon ’cept for the ones that are slaves.’
Primmy laughed then and Bridget smiled.
Sy had just turned up one day, Sully said. Primmy had been assigned to a bloke out near the North Esk River and ‘one day this kid turns up starving and won’t say where he come from, who he belonged to or nothing. Been with Primmy ever since.’
The two of them unloaded the donkey—candles, flour, salt, sugar, tea, tobacco and gunpowder. They stayed the night in the hut and in the morning she sat outside with them, she and Primmy smoking pipes. They ate damper and Trousers turned up. Primmy passed him a pipe. Sully brought cider out. ‘Missus,’ Trousers said, and grinned across at her.
The morning was sunny and cold and their smoke lingered around them. ‘Your blokes,’ Trousers said, looked at Bridget, ‘that gov’nor say, go after them. Find them blokes.’ He drew on the pipe. ‘We take them out long way. Tell them, you go up there. That the right way. You find them blokes up thatta way.’ He grinned. ‘Them fellas gone way way away, not find your blokes, missus. We pull that colonel’s leg.’
‘Could’ve got yourself in trouble,’ Primmy said.
‘Trouble?’ Trousers grinned. ‘Already in trouble.’
‘They’re not my blokes,’ she said quietly. Only Primmy heard, glanced at her.
‘That gov’nor him mate come, he riding on that horse, say that one there, that one mountain—him called Brown Mountain. This other one—him called Table Mountain. What he know about that one name?’ Trousers looked over at Primmy. ‘I tell you—you name George.’ Sy giggled. ‘What you say then? You name George then because I say that one you name? You tell me bloody bullshit. “My name Joe Primrose. You bloody crazy fella?” That what you say.’
Primmy packed a pipe, nodded. ‘I might say that,’ he said. ‘I just might say that.’ He glanced across at Bridget, a smile on his face.
There was a long silence and then Sy stood up. ‘There was these knights, twelve of ’em…I think it were twelve…Anyway, it don’t matter. There was these knights and they was looking for something, something they needed to find real bad, only the thing were, they couldn’t find the thing. You know why? ’Cause it’s a mystery, that’s why. A mystery is a thing where there’s something what happens, only you don’t know the answer and you might not never know the answer. Which is different to God though. God ain’t a mystery.’
Sully laughed, ruffled the boy’s hair.
Trousers had sat in silence, frowning, during Sy’s story. After a while he got up and walked off.
‘He wants guns,’ Sully said. He spoke to Primmy, said Trousers had asked him to get guns for him. ‘Told him I couldn’t just get guns. “This hunting ground’s not yours,” he said. Told him I knew it wasn’t bloody mine. He says its theirs, gov’nor probably says it’s the king’s, some farmer’
ll come out here one day with a piece of paper says it’s his, and not long now neither. “I don’t know whose bloody hunting ground it is,” I said, “but I been giving you flour and sugar ever since I bloody got here, I do know that.” So then he says again that I have to get him guns. “Whitefella kill plenty blackfella,” he tells me. “Kill women, piccaninnies.” I asked him, “Do you think they’re going to stop killing you because you kill them?” He didn’t say much then, buggered off. Today’s the first day I’ve seen him since.’ Sully chucked the stick he’d been chewing on the ground. ‘They can’t win this.’ He used his boot to grind the stick into the dirt. ‘Can’t bloody win this.’
...
That night he sat by the fire drinking cider. ‘This time,’ he said—and his voice was quiet and he leaned down and put his drink down on the floor—‘I ain’t been in Van Diemen’s Land long. Were out hunting roo, few mile upriver from town. It were a windy day.’ He paused, squinted at the fire, and when he spoke again his voice seemed even more faraway. ‘I remember it were real windy. I come up this slope. Come to the top of the rise and I seen them there. I seen them. I knew what I were seeing. I knew it alright, but…sometimes you can see a thing, you know what it is, but you can’t figure it out. So I stood there. I just stood there.
Little kids and everything. The dogs sniffing at them. I turned round and just about run down the hill.
‘Blacks,’ he said. ‘All of them shot.’
He leaned over and picked up his drink. He didn’t look at her. Didn’t move. Just kept sitting there staring at the fire.
...
The next day Sully was still quiet. He sat smoking his pipe on the log at the front of the hut, looking up at the mountain.
When he first came to Van Diemen’s Land, he said, Hobart Town was just a few tents, mostly soldiers and convicts, hardly any settlers. The governor had sent him out into the bush to hunt kangaroo. He could have stayed out there then, he said, not gone back. In the years he’d been in Van Diemen’s Land—and there were plenty of them—more and more settlers had come, more and more land granted to them and the Van Diemen’s Land Company. He gazed into the trees. ‘West, out beyond the settlement on the Clyde River. A river out there—the Shannon—magnificent place. One place a person might still be left in peace,’ he said.
...
Winter in the valley had a face. A white ice face with no eyes. A voice that spoke through the cold mad blabbering of the river. The river flowed over rocks and played a tune of them, each one it touched a different pitch; it stroked and cajoled them and they told their musical stories that fell on all but deaf ears. The white face of winter felt nothing. It was a beautiful criminal. Adept. When the white ice face died, it would give off no smell.
...
Sully was bringing wood in when he dropped the logs, gripped his chest, put his other hand out to steady himself against the fireplace. When she went to him he pushed her away. ‘Piss off.’ He bent to pick up the logs and she saw the grimace, the stiffness in his movements.
A few days later, on a clear cold day, she sat with him and Primmy outside the hut smoking. ‘People say all sorts of rubbish, how a man should live, what he should do, shouldn’t do. They’ll shake their head, give it some kinda fancy name—call it sin, or whatever fine words they come up with. Most of the time, they don’t know nothing. In the end, it’s living and dying what matters. That’s it. Living and dying.’
‘You can do whatever you want then?’ Primmy said.
‘No. You can do what you have to do. And then find a way to live with it.’
‘Right.’ He grinned and Bridget saw the cheek glimmering in his eyes. ‘And what if you can’t, John?’
‘Then you drink, Joseph. You drink.’
Primmy chuckled and Sully was quiet a while then, smoking and looking into the trees. ‘A good place to die,’ he said, spitting a bit of tobacco out of his mouth. ‘Nowhere better,’ he said.
The next day, after Primmy was gone, he took her to the river downstream from the hut, said there was something he wanted to show her. He stood close to the edge of the river, pointed at the island in the middle. ‘That’s where I want to be buried!’ he yelled over the rush of the water. Bridget made a face at him. Why was he telling her this? ‘On that island. You see it?’
Of course she saw it.
...
Primmy and Sy came through snow with supplies and news—Primmy had been granted a Ticket of Leave, would be going. Beadle would take the skins into Norfolk Plains for Sully, bring back supplies. Sully said no, he wasn’t dealing with Beadle. Primmy didn’t say anything then, just that he was going, wouldn’t be back. Sy was going with him.
The hut where Beadle, Primmy and Sy lived was half a day’s walk from Sully’s. The men were convict shepherds assigned to a sheep thief called Albert Little. Primmy and Beadle kept his sheep for him out there where the law wouldn’t come looking. The sheep that grazed near Sully’s had also belonged to their master—some arrangement between Sully and Primmy. But Primmy had taken the sheep now, took them when he left.
...
Sully sat in his chair smoking. ‘Ain’t been off this mountain in three years,’ he said, ‘maybe more. Ain’t got no desire to. None at all.’ His smoke disappeared into the trees that he was talking to. ‘Don’t fucking trust him,’ he said about Beadle. ‘Be going into Norfolk Plains myself. Don’t trust that bastard.’
The first night Sully was gone she lay awake listening to every crack, every growl, every groan. He’d taken two dogs, three of them still there with her. ‘No,’ he’d said, when she said she wanted to go with him. ‘Stay here. Be back in a few days.’ With Sully gone the hut felt even colder. She’d sewn trousers and a coat, both from roo skins. She wore them now, more skins piled over her. Darkness and silence wrapped tight around her. So cosy they were, the two of them. Cheek to cheek, they danced a slow cold dance that sounded like, felt like, the waltz of death.
When she went outside in the night, she squatted, peering into the dark, the trousers dropped around her ankles, and then hurried back to the hut, shut the door hard and fast behind her, pushed the lock across. Then she took Sully’s shotgun, put it in the hammock next to her.
Now and then through the night came the squeal of the animals they called devils, or the low growl of a possum. In the morning she opened the hut door and looked out at the rain, later the sharp black rock shining in dull light. In the long, cold afternoon she saw her own past in the dark between the trees, just as she had been for weeks now. Everything that had never been and could not be spoken hissed through the cold white air.
...
She didn’t know how old she was when Barbara came to the small cottage with her three children, Philip, Maria and Susan, who, when food was low, were always fed before Bridget, Stephen and Kate.
‘Stupid girl. Say sorry.’ Smacks hitting her arms that were raised over her head. She tried to make it, tried to make the word sorry. Down at the river she threw sticks in the river, silently told her wish to the cool air. I wish my mother would come back.
...
Kate married Michael Knox, a wheelwright from a nearby village, Bury St Edmunds. The first baby, Alfie, came and then after the second one was born Bridget went to live with them. She helped around the cottage and with the baby Phoebe, who would sit on the floor and giggle, put out her fat little hand and pull Bridget’s face to hers, put her whole wet mouth over Bridget’s nose. A few years of peace there then, a few years to hold up to the light, see the sun shining through. Three of them, three years, and then the doctor writing saying Father’s cough was bad that winter, saying you’re needed there now, Bridget. That your father is asking for you. That perhaps he might not last the winter. But he did, and Timmy Crack came calling.
She had known Timothy Crack since she was a child. He had been her brother’s best friend and had always been around. She was seventeen when they were married, on a rainy November day. They lived in a hut then on the propert
y of Mr Rochester, the farmer who Timmy worked for. Bridget got work in the dairy. At lunchtime Timmy would grin at her across the table and at night they drank and he told her stories, his favourite an absurd tale about a one-eyed ferret. Then he started talking about Manchester. They would do well there, he said; have a good life. He knew someone there who could get him a better job. Bridget walked the four miles to Bury St Edmunds to tell Kate she wasn’t going; she was staying there with her. ‘He’s your husband, Bridget. You should go,’ Kate said. She didn’t look at her, hoicked Phoebe onto her hip.
...
Manchester. A wet rag of a place, a world of mud and shit and smoke and clatter, everyone climbing on everyone else to get a view of something they called the future. He led her through rain along muddy lanes where packs of soaked, barefoot children ran up and down, sliding in the mud, to a makeshift two-room cottage where his friend, Andrew Potts, known to most only as Potts, lived with Maggie and their two little children. Potts with his big-noting, loud, fun-loving ways. She saw straight away how Timmy looked up to him.
It had been alright for a while. There were people around all the time: music, drinking and dancing. Everyone living in the muddy lanes knew Potts, patted Timmy on the back and liked him because he was Potts’s friend. Then the baby came and three days later left again, her tiny face grey in the cold morning. Timmy, who’d been drinking with Potts, drank more then, was out all the time. Working with Potts, he said. And she knew by then what Potts’s work was—he was a forger, forging coins. In the night Timmy turned away from her as though she’d done something to make it happen, as though it were her fault the small pink bundle had left them so soon. Soon she started to think maybe she had.
The new life sagged and drooped. The expectation drained out of her and reality set like drying mud in the bottom of her stomach. Timmy started getting round with Milly Robinson. Bridget knew he was; everyone knew he was. Then one day at the bakery the woman turned the coin Bridget had given her over in her hand. She had not long left the bakery when two constables appeared, grabbed her arms.
