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by Larissa Behrendt

  Elizabeth tried not to be hurt by Miss Grainger’s cooler attitude towards her. She had been sick before and had been treated with sympathy and given a lighter load of duties. She knew something was different this time. From Miss Grainger’s distance, her unwillingness to engage in conversation, Elizabeth sensed she had done something Miss Grainger found unforgivable.

  Xiao-ying remained her only friend, but Elizabeth’s movements were now more closely monitored and restricted. Miss Grainger had kept her on an almost impossible schedule and timed her trips to the store. On those occasions, Xiao-ying could only offer consolation in glances and faint smiles.

  Rare were the times they could find to meet each other. Once, when the lump in her stomach was only just showing, in the morning cool of spring, she was sent on an errand to the shop. She sat with Xiao-ying on the crates at the back.

  “See, there’s a lump here how,” Elizabeth said, holding the fabric tight over her stomach.

  “How will you keep him?” her friend had asked.

  “Well,” Elizabeth paused, “I don’t know. But he can sleep in the bed with me. Back home, everyone just helped each other.”

  “I can’t see Mrs Howard holding the baby while you peel the potatoes.”

  The thought of Mrs Howard’s soft, flowery dresses covered in spit and baby sick made Elizabeth laugh. After a pause, Elizabeth added cautiously, “Maybe they’ll let me take the baby home, back to my family.”

  “That would be good. But,” Xiao-ying’s voice tapered, “do you think that could really happen?”

  Catching the way Elizabeth’s face clouded over, she added hastily, “I just mean, have they said anything to you yet about doing that?”

  Elizabeth shook her head slowly. “No.” Then she said brightly, “But I haven’t asked yet.”

  Xiao-ying left her for a moment and returned with some cloth. “This one was given to me by my mother. I like the blue colour in it,” she said, fingering the embroidery on the material. “These other two are just old dresses but there is enough here to make some baby clothes.”

  She placed the cloth on Elizabeth’s lap. Elizabeth touched them, the rough cotton of the discarded floral dresses and the shiny, smooth silk.

  “I’ll have the best-dressed baby in the world,” she said and smiled at Xiao-ying with thanks.

  Later that night, when making the tea, Elizabeth ventured to talk to Miss Grainger. The reply was short and sharp. “No. Don’t be stupid, girl. If you can’t be trusted here, what makes you think you can be trusted there?”

  Despite her loneliness in the Howards’ house, Elizabeth was excited that she was pregnant. She had her own shame — of being touched in the dark, of being silenced—but her swelling stomach was not part of it. Mr Howard stopped his night-time visits after Dr Gilcrest had looked at her. And now, with the blessing of life growing within her, she couldn’t comprehend the coolness of those around her. She sat silently nursing her secret joy — hands on her stomach, soft songs on her breath, kind thoughts and blessings for her belly, her birrawee. It was a boy, she knew, as she stitched together a frock and a bonnet with the material that Xiao-ying had given her. She could feel it. She would name him Euroke. Not Sonny, just Euroke, and she would no longer be all alone.

  The Protection Board suggested a new assignment for Elizabeth, to be taken up after the birth. Yet Mrs Howard insisted that the girl stay on, pretending to believe the exterior of her husband’s denial.

  “I see no reason why she shouldn’t,” Lydia had said to Edward, daring him to protest against the unstated facts that floated between them. Lydia was holding the pregnancy up to him, trying to break him. She had her triumph over him, had humbled him. She hated him for his weakness, yet some part of her was drawn to him more because she felt that she had beaten him.

  Lydia Howard was shrewd enough to ensure that the birth didn’t take place in the local hospital. She wanted no speculations, no connections and no contact between her husband and his little half-caste. She would send the kitchen girl to Sydney in the last month of her pregnancy.

  For the second time in her life, Elizabeth looked at the world speeding past as the rattle of the train carried her along.

  Frances Grainger made the trip with Elizabeth, walking her to the door of a large brick building in East Sydney that was a home for pregnant girls.

  “Try not to get into any more trouble,” Miss Grainger said curtly before turning on her heel and leaving Elizabeth on her own.

  Frances then made her way to Bondi Beach, to her own memorial. So much had changed since she had been there before the war. There were new shops and others had been painted, as though they were all trying to renew themselves and blossom now peace had arrived. She could see the spot on the beach where her brothers and Harold had placed their towels beside her. She imagined the young men as they were that day, running to and from the water, kicking the sand under their feet, splashing in the waves. Back in Parkes, Mrs Howard’s charity work on the Country Women’s Association Committee, particularly organising the war memorial, had become infuriating. Mr Howard’s indiscretion eroded her infatuation for him and he had been one of the main reasons that she had decided to exile herself to the country in the first place. She needed to escape the house and agreed to escort the girl to Sydney and back to Parkes after the birth. She would take the time to look for positions back in the city.

  Still, she thought, if only she had felt the touch of Edward’s hand on her skin or the sensation of his lips, as she did in her daydreams, she could endure the rest — the rudeness and vindictiveness of Lydia Howard, living in Parkes with only memories from before the war when there was a family in her life. What was the weakness, she asked herself when she looked into the mirror, that made others — Edward, her mother, her father — not want what she had to give?

  Frances, who had once felt affection and even pity for Elizabeth, now detached herself from the girl who had done the unforgivable. She would pinch Elizabeth on any slight provocation, enjoying squeezing the young girl’s flesh between her own strong fingers. She accompanied such impulses with cruel comments. “No wonder no one wants you,” she would say.

  Elizabeth’s brown skin became tainted for Frances in a way that it had not been before. Before the pregnancy the inferiority of her dark face and arms evoked sympathy. Now the hue would give rise to thoughts that Frances would never have allowed others to express: the darkies were a treacherous race with no morals. Frances felt betrayed by having, at moments in the past, felt a closeness, even an affection, for the traitorous native. She had treated the girl as though she were equal to any other girl on her staff. Now, all concessions and exceptions she had given to Elizabeth were withdrawn. Silence filled the vacuum.

  8

  1920

  WHEN THE BABY ARRIVED, the labour pains drowned out every other feeling Elizabeth carried. The force of life exploding from her, the unswallowing, was a most overwhelming physical punishment. Through her screams she cried for her mother. She cried for Euroke. She cried for escape from her loneliness. She cried for the bird’s-eye view of her family’s camp from her tree. She cried for a feeling of long-ago innocence, for a feeling so lost to her that she could not give it a name. As the pain ebbed and subsided, she fell into a deep sleep.

  In her waking moments she dreamt of her new life with little Euroke, his hands reaching out to her, her heart needing him. As she stitched clothes and booties and a little blanket, her bursting love for her child pulsated through her with each heartbeat. She lay impatiently awaiting her reunion with her son, wishing the door would open so her new life could be carried towards her, his limbs outstretched like a naradarn.

  The door did open but it was not the nurse. It was Mrs Carlyle. Elizabeth saw pale skin and a dark linen suit and thought of the terror of the train ride to Parkes, the pungent smell of the police cell and of her brother, her mother, her father. Elizabeth’s tightening flesh forewarned her that Mrs Carlyle’s presence was an evil omen. “Eurok
e,” she whispered. The lost brother. Now the lost son.

  “Well,” began Mrs Carlyle sharply, “I had expected more from you, though I don’t know why.”

  “Where is my son?” Elizabeth demanded, her eyes widening.

  “The baby has been sent off to a good home,” Mrs Carlyle replied briskly.

  “But I want to keep him. He’s mine. He’s mine,” Elizabeth fiercely demanded, clenching her fists.

  “How are you going to look after a baby? You have no money, no husband, and you are only sixteen years old.”

  “He’s mine. I want him. Don’t touch him!” she leaned towards Mrs Carlyle, who stepped back. Elizabeth saw that Mrs Carlyle was edging towards the door, “No,” she began to plead. “I’ll look after him. Please, please, please. Give him to me. Please!”

  Mrs Carlyle stared at the young girl’s face now wrenched with painful urgency. She also saw her clenched fists. She closed the door against Elizabeth’s sobbing pleas and comforted herself that she was giving the little boy a better life than the one he would have had with a girl who could behave so violently and irrationally. “How ungrateful. And how little they know.”

  She reflected on her theory that such children needed to be taken quite young to ensure the best chance of a better life. It was only later she would wonder how the girl could have known she had a son when no one had told her.

  Miss Grainger was silent, torn between compassion and self-righteousness, between the living and the dead. She had thought much about Edward Howard in her time away from the oppressive house in Parkes. She had esteemed him in a way that was undeserved and she had made herself subservient to both him and his discourteous and spiteful wife. She felt a bitterness growing within her towards the little darkie, and towards Edward Howard, and her tolerance of the abusive eccentricities of Lydia Howard now seemed exhausted. She felt that she had been used, duped into a situation that she should have found demeaning. Her desire that she would wake to find Edward standing over her bed confessing love had vanished into the same darkness in which she had lost so much already.

  Certainly, Edward had made no comments to her that would have led her to believe that he would act in a way that was inappropriate towards her; she had interpreted his distance as confirmation of the strong and immutable values that she had thought he possessed. But, she would also think, he could not be unaware of the way she looked at him, the way she felt, the extra effort she put into everything she did for him. She would, before the developments with the kitchen girl, have been content to have him acknowledge all that she gave to him without expecting anything in return. The awareness that he had longings that she had thought he was above and, even more hurtful to her, that those longings for someone who could not love him as much as she did, sunk her into the most resentful of moods.

  Now, accompanying the little darkie back to the Howard household, Frances looked across into the tear-filled, troubled brown eyes and could only see the enemy, the woman, girl actually, who had come between her and Edward. She could see on the dark face the desolate isolation, the abandonment, but she could not offer a touch or a kind word.

  The only comfort Elizabeth had on the trip back to Parkes was the rocking of the train. At the home where she had waited for the birth, there had been eight other Aboriginal girls. All, like her, had been taken from their families and placed at a house or cattle station to work as servants. They came from many different places — Kempsey, Junee, Forbes, Newcastle. One girl, Joan Morgan, came from Lightning Ridge and by tracing the limbs of their family tree they discovered that they were cousins. Through their mothers, they were both Eualeyai. With Joan, she could talk about people that they both knew, particularly Kooradgie who had joined Joan’s family as often as he had Elizabeth’s. Both remembered his permanent wink and his stories about every animal, every part of the landscape and every thing that hung in the sky. What neither of them spoke about was the circumstances by which they came to be carrying children.

  As the landscape blurred through Elizabeth’s steady gaze, she thought about how much had happened since she was first taken to the Howard house. Mrs Carlyle had been more imposing than Miss Grainger. Mrs Carlyle was pale in expensive dark clothes whereas Miss Grainger was lemon-coloured with her blonde hair and dressed in white cotton. When she had arrived at the Howard house, Elizabeth had thought that Miss Grainger would be kind to her, would offer her friendship and protection. She had worked hard to gain Miss Grainger’s favour, was eager to do all that was asked of her, to get the attention, affection and acceptance that would have made the routine of her life more bearable. There were moments where that connection had seemed to be within reach, but it had never been as forthcoming as Elizabeth had initially hoped and with the pregnancy it seemed to evaporate.

  Many other things had changed with the pregnancy. Before then, Peter would laugh and do thoughtful things for her. He had given her a shell that curled over itself and had a brown spotted pattern on it, the colour of her eyes, he had said shyly. But, as her stomach began to bloom, coolness seeped in to the way he spoke. When the bulge became visible, he would simply hand her the letters, not even looking her in the eye. His iciness hurt deeply, especially since she was unable to explain why it had happened, that it wasn’t her choice. She didn’t even like Edward Howard. Once she had, before he began coming to her room to stroke her hair and rub against her. She felt sorry for Miss Grainger, whose gaze still followed him, still thinking of him as a good man. Mr Howard had taken things from Elizabeth — her friendship with Peter, the trust of Miss Grainger, and the freedom to be with Xiao-ying — and he had done nothing to help her keep her baby. Mrs Howard watched her now in a way that she never had before and it made Elizabeth self-conscious and frightened; as she did her household chores, she felt anxious. Her breasts, full of unneeded milk, ached and reminded her constantly that her child was not with her.

  She wanted to lay in the grass with Xiao-ying and look at the sky, to tell someone what she felt. She wanted to be with someone who she would not have to talk to, who would know how she was feeling without having to say it. She wanted to be with Euroke. She wanted to be Garibooli again. And as the train trundled along, she could hear the old language repeating in her head. Euroke. Garibooli, Euroke. Garibooli. Euroke. Euroke. Euroke. Garibooli. Garibooli. Garibooli.

  Garibooli. The sound of my name reminds me.

  Another time, another place, another me.

  I could run fast, through the grass, amongst the trees, like the wind.

  Garibooli. My name means whirlwind.

  Say it like I say it.

  Garibooli. Garibooli. Garibooli.

  I say it over and over and over again.

  9

  1920

  ON RETURNING TO THE HOWARD HOUSE, Elizabeth thought of nothing but escaping. She thought of running, through the grass, side by side with the wind. She thought of the train — of moving further and further away with every rumble. She thought of holding her breath until life drained from her. She tried the latter — lying in bed at night trying not to let any more air in — but something, some unknown spark of life, would always make her gasp for air.

  Thoughts of a son that she could not nurse and a brother, who seemed her best and only chance to feel protected but whom she could not reach, were with her constantly during the day as she prepared the fire, or made tea or ironed Mrs Howard’s tablecloths. At night, when all else in the large house seemed still, she continued to scratch at her skin, harder and harder, the constant motion of her fingernails putting her into a trance. It stopped her thinking about Mr Howard’s hands on her.

  Edward Howard had gone to Sydney on business for what seemed like a longer than usual period. In his absence, the house was clouded with a thick, expectant atmosphere. Lydia Howard was more bitterly reserved and resentful of her husband’s absence now that his presence was focused on her. He would stand behind her, watching as she brushed her hair, as if he wanted to stroke it. He would offer to assist he
r to close the clasp on her necklace, touching her shoulder when he was finished. He would mutter awkward compliments about her dress and complexion. He withdrew less, begged silent forgiveness and she came to feel closer to him for the acknowledgment of her moral superiority.

  Elizabeth had never found affection in the Howard house. Even before the baby, her little Euroke, she was always an outsider and never able to break through to the hearts of the adults around her. But at least before her pregnancy she had human contact that sustained her — Peter and Xiao-ying. Now Peter was as cool towards her as the people she worked with in the Howard house. His change in attitude towards her cut deeply and she felt humiliated and distressed after each encounter with him. Xiao-ying did not withdraw her friendship, but her parents now told Xiao-ying to get back to her chores when Elizabeth would come into the shop. “They say you are a bad influence,” Xiao-ying would explain with a sigh.

  As Frances Grainger withdrew the hopes she had placed in Edward Howard, she retreated deeper and deeper into the world of the just-ended war. She resented people who treated life as though it could continue on so easily, as though nothing had happened, as though they had slept through the past years. Frances focused much of her resentment on those who had made the war an issue, a campaign and cause while it was taking place, only to move on so easily when it finished. Much of this stewing wrath was directed at Lydia Howard, whose pretence of caring was as easily evaporated as water from a burning log.