by Joy Dettman
Like the rippling scales of a grey dragon, the surface of that river. It looked alive tonight, the moon riding there, a dragon’s cold eye, and that rearing snag, its open mouth waiting to gobble her up. A cold shiver crawled along her spine. You can scare yourself with anything if you try hard enough, she thought. And you are not going to scare yourself into running back, because being married to Percy Cochran is more scary than being attacked by a herd of fire-breathing dragons.
Olivia had gone off to bathe after dinner. Nicholas and Father Ryan set themselves up in the library with the whisky, leaving Helen to read, or embroider forget-me-not serviettes for her hope chest, or sit alone, looking at empty walls. She’d sat at her embroidery and made a total mess of one corner before she heard Judge Cochran’s car drive in. Then, instead of going out to greet Percy as she was supposed to, she picked up her embroidery and raced up the passage to her room.
Nicholas and Olivia greeted them, and later when she heard the knock at her door, she said she was in bed: ‘Tell Percy I’ll see him in the morning, Father.’
He didn’t argue, and she didn’t go to bed. She took Rachael’s case from inside Molly’s wardrobe and unpacked it, wept over the frocks as she hung them, wept over the shoes as she placed them side by side and as she placed her underwear in the drawer. Then she stopped weeping and packed the case with her own things. It wasn’t a large case. It hadn’t seemed the least bit heavy when she crept with it down the passage and out through the kitchen. She hadn’t packed a lot, just some underwear and her new shoes, her two best frocks plus her gold frock – then one thing more, which she shouldn’t have taken, which was what made the case heavy.
She moistened her lips, took a deep breath, picked up the case and stepped from the shadows. One-sixth at a time, that’s what she had to do. Walk each sixth, put her case down for a rest, then plan the next sixth.
Whoever had been whistling had stopped, or had gone somewhere else to whistle. She stepped up her pace, following the moonlit shoreline until a huge clump of blackberry bushes, around the halfway mark of the second sixth, forced a decision: walk along the river bank to the bridge where it would be moonlight for most of the way, though parts could be muddy and in places the bank was steep, or turn off at the blackberry bushes and go up through the bottom of the wood paddock, following the horse paths, which would be much more spooky than the river bank, but no one was likely to see her there – unless she ran into one of the Johnson boys on his way home from courting. Too early for them to be coming home on a Sunday night.
That bottom paddock was untouched forest land, a privacy belt that Nicholas referred to as ‘The Woods’. He took his city friends riding in The Woods. It was too dangerous to take Arthur riding there – the paths were narrow and branches hung low. An old split rail fence went right down to the river bank, but once you climbed through it, there were no more fences until you got to the far boundary on Bridge Road. The Squire house was locked in by land, all of their secrets locked away from the town by that forest.
Something moved in the blackberry bushes and, like a startled hare, Helen ran by them and up a winding path that took her to the right of the blackberries and away from the river, the decision made for her. Easy.
Not so easy. Only spooky shadows ahead and she didn’t want to see them, so she looked at her feet, and where she put her feet as she counted footsteps, counted seventy-nine steps before she came to the old fence. Easy to push her case and herself through. And that was two-sixths done, even if they weren’t equal sixths.
The next bit would be the scariest bit, huge trees and little or no moonlight. If Nicholas wanted horses to breed, he put the stallion down here with the mares – then, oh boy, nobody dared to come this way. He wasn’t breeding any at the moment, so at least she didn’t have to worry about mad stallions.
‘Like an elephant in must,’ one of Arthur’s keepers had said, and she hadn’t known then what he meant. She knew now. It meant the elephant became frenzied by its need to mate.
Rachael had often come this way at night. She used to meet Chris down here. She’d come this way, too, when she wanted to post her letters in the postbox tree. Helen walked the horse paths with her some days – as long as that mad stallion wasn’t in the paddock – but everything looked different in the daytime and, with Rachael leading the way, the path seemed clear. It wasn’t clear tonight, and it was dark, and those trees seemed to be moving in closer, their aching branches creaking, stretching lower, threatening: Get out of our paddock, Helen Squire.
She probably wasn’t even on the right path. Everything looked strange. She’d have to go back and wait until morning. She put the case down, stepped back, turned to look behind and couldn’t see anything there either. If she was lost, and if she managed to find her way home, how would she be able to find that case in the morning? She wouldn’t, so if she went back, she’d have to carry it with her. And with Father Ryan probably in bed, the Johnsons’ dogs might be off their chains. They’d hear her, or someone would. Judge Cochran and Nicholas usually sat talking to all hours.
It was a stupid idea trying to do this in the dark. She hadn’t been thinking rationally. Nothing had been rational this whole day, nothing since last night had even bordered on semi-rational. Like Nicholas Squire in the kitchen at two o’clock. He rarely went into the kitchen. He called Mrs Johnson up to the library if he wanted to give her instructions. Last night he’d got that stove burning, got black on his clean white hands, had to wash them with kitchen soap at the old sink.
Arthur sat at the table, reading lamp on the cabinet beside the stove, Mrs Johnson’s old lamp on the table, both lamps lighting Arthur’s bad side. He hadn’t put his glasses on so even if she accidentally glanced his way she could see where his eye had been, see that paper-thin yellow skin stretched from eye to ear, almost see the shape of the wire used by the doctors to join his smashed jawbone. And his gruesome nose. It wasn’t only his face she was scared of, either.
‘You’re a man of the world, Mr Squire,’ one of Arthur’s companions, Mr King, had said. ‘There are women in Melbourne one could pay enough to look upon his face with less squeamishness. If we might accompany you to the city – if you could leave him in my charge for a day or two…’
Nicholas hadn’t listened. He’d gone there alone on business and left Arthur at home in his elderly companion’s charge. Mr King had been a heavy sleeper, which was good for Rachael and Chris, and for Helen. Every night she sat late, reading in the sitting room.
She was reading there one night when she heard Ruby limp by – it was easy to recognise her footfall, as she wore a heavy, built-up boot on her bad foot.
‘Are you making tea for Mummy? I’d love a cup, Ruby. And two biscuits.’
‘I’ll bring it, Miss.’
She hadn’t brought the tea, and when Helen heard an odd noise coming from the kitchen and went to investigate, she found Arthur on the floor, trousers around his ankles, having some sort of fit. The lamp was burning low so she didn’t see Ruby, but she raced up to Arthur’s door and hammered on it until his companion woke up and followed her back to the kitchen. He threw a dipper of water at Arthur.
‘Get off that girl. You’re like a bull elephant in must.’ That’s all he said.
Possums courting in the trees were making weird coughing sounds. Scary – but possums wouldn’t hurt her. Every living thing was driven to mate – except Helen Squire! Her hand complained when she took up that case. It would just have to keep on complaining, because she had to carry it, either forward or back, and it might as well be forward because if this was the right path then she couldn’t be too far away from Molly’s clearing. Once she got to that clearing, she’d know exactly where to go, and also, she would have completed half of the total walk.
She counted fifty steps, careful steps, then thirty more. Nothing looked familiar, until she sighted a ghostly white shape that had to be the old canoe tree, dead for hundreds of years but still standing tall like some giant’s s
culpture. She stopped to pat it – just for luck, like touching wood – swapped the case to her other hand, then walked on, aware she was close to the clearing.
And she could see it, or see a wide patch of moonlight ahead, which had to be where Great Grandma Molly lived in the old days. Not that there was any sign of her original hut, but you could still find bits and pieces of things if you dug for them. She wanted to run, to take a deep breath of space and light, but knew she couldn’t afford to race headlong into a tree, or fall over a root and break her leg, so she crept up on the moonlit circle, crept into the centre of it, placed her case down, then sat on it, her back marking the path she’d followed in.
And Lord, how strange it felt, how positively strange – as if she wasn’t Helen Squire at all, but someone else, someone much older and from another time. That moonlight, near bright as day, was making everything look so weirdly interesting – like all around was the tall dark forest, but she was safe within Molly’s magic circle of light, and if she turned around fast, she might even see Molly and her hut. She’d lived down here for years with only her two daughters. She hadn’t been afraid.
Rachael often used to come here digging for old pieces of history. She’d found bits of chain, the handle and side of an old jug, shards from broken plates. She’d found a small green bottle once, and they’d spent hours down at the river, taking turns poking sticks inside to loosen the dirt before washing it away. She’d loved this land and everything about it, had been proud of old Molly. All she’d wanted during the last weeks was to be allowed to move back home. A dozen times she’d begged Nicholas, and only yesterday morning she’d begged Olivia to let her stay.
‘In the eyes of God, you and Dave are joined for life, dear,’ Olivia had said.
‘God had nothing to do with that wedding, Mummy. That was a man’s wedding, not God’s. And you were there, and you did nothing to stop it – and you’ll do nothing to stop him when he marries Helen to Percy. Just because you’re married and miserable, it doesn’t mean that your daughters have to be married and miserable too.’
Olivia hadn’t tried to stop the wedding. She’d been delighted to get Dave’s ring on Rachael’s finger.
Aunt Bertha would have stopped it. Aunt Bertha would stop them from getting a ring on Helen’s finger too. Nicholas could import the crown prince, get him sent out from England with Squire Merchandise on a tag around his neck and a postage stamp on his forehead, and Aunt Bertha would post him back, Unsuitable Merchandise written in red on the back of his shirt.
Helen licked her lips. She’d been licking and chewing on them so much today that they were dry and sore, and her hands felt raw, both of them – probably both covered in blisters. Neither one wanted to pick up that case. And one shoe was rubbing her heel, and she’d have to leave this clearing and head off down another spooky dark path – But that would be her fourth sixth, and past the halfway mark.
Molly and her daughters made two good paths out of this clearing, one leading to the river, not far away, and one to the old orchard. Horses and the Johnsons had made the track through to Bridge Road and it was tricky. It forked in two places and she had to take the left of the forks each time. ‘Left is right,’ Rachael said the first time they’d come here. ‘Always remember, Heli, left is always right.’
She stood, sighed, then lifted the case onto her shoulder. Mr Johnson and his boys carried awkward things balanced on their shoulders, and if they could do it, so could she. She was robust.
Ruby had never been robust, never as strong as her twin, and her mouth didn’t flap like Tilda’s and Jeanne’s.
‘It’s not the first time it’s happened, Miss,’ she’d said that night, as she got up from the floor and tried to make Olivia’s tea. The wall bell in the kitchen was jingling, Olivia growing impatient.
Helen had made the tea and taken it to her mother. ‘Ruby had a fall in the kitchen,’ she said.
‘That clumsy girl.’
Helen didn’t tell her mother what she’d seen, but she told Rachael when she crept in near dawn and Rachael told Nicholas. He blamed Arthur’s companion, of course, and sent him packing. Judge Cochran found another one, Mr Paterson, a good one, and for a time everything settled down. Too late for Ruby, though.
A low hanging branch nudged her case and, with her mind so far away, the case fell. Helen had to stop thinking, keep her mind on what she was doing, or she’d miss the fork in those horse tracks, go right instead of left. She lifted the case onto her other shoulder and continued on her way.
It was foolish not to have worn gloves, and more than foolish to have worn these shoes, even totally insane, except that if she’d worn her old walking shoes it would have meant that she couldn’t have brought this pair, and they were her second best and she liked them, though she’d liked them better before the left one started rubbing her heel. Not much use thinking about her heel or her hands, not much use worrying about anything, really, except needing a drink of water, which she could get when she reached the station, so the sooner she reached it the better.
It was odd. She was feeling sore, but no longer afraid. Maybe when something terrible happens, it changes the way you think about all of the ridiculous things you used to worry about, like suddenly you understand that being scared of your own shadow is pretence so someone will hold your hand, cuddle you, prove they love you.
Rachael had loved her, and she was dead. Freddy had called her sweet, sweet Helen, so he must have loved her, and he was dead too. Aunt Bertha still loved her, and she was alive, and she was going to live forever, so that’s where Helen was going, as fast as her feet could carry her.
Moonlight was seeping through the forest ahead and it looked magical, like some enchanted land where witches dwelled and cast their spells, and there was scaredy-cat Helen Squire, escaping though that enchanted forest all alone, no one to hold her blistered hand.
The case began to rub her shoulder so she lifted it onto her head, finding a balance there – if she held her chin high and kept the case steady with one hand. It was good practice for her posture: chest out, tummy in, shoulders back.
She began counting steps, expecting at least a hundred more, when suddenly she came out of the trees onto the ploughed firebreak. It didn’t seem far enough, but before her was Bridge Road, and not far up it she could see Curtin’s lights glowing through the trees. They had a generator, and their house was always well lit.
At the boundary fence she tilted her head, allowing the case to slide off and bounce free, then, as Rachael had done, she placed her foot on the bottom wire, lifted the one above and squeezed through, picked up her case and ran with it into the centre of the road. She took a deep, deep breath of pure moonlight then, filling her lungs with it. It felt so good and clean and free. Rachael would have been so proud of her. ‘Good on you, Heli,’ she would have said. ‘Good for you, Heli.’
There was no one behind or in front of her. Any view the Curtins had from their windows was screened by their trees. Now she only had to get past Green’s house, which was set well back from the road, then over the bridge, and she would have reached the five-sixths mark – not a long sixth, just a symbolic sixth – then the dairy on the other side of the bridge, and the station not too far down.
She didn’t like Green’s dogs. No one liked them. She was allowably scared of those mad barking things, which anyone had a right to be scared of. They always hid in the trees where the bridge ended, then darted on their bellies to chase anything that dared to cross over – mainly bike riders and cars. If they chased her, then she’d put her case on her head again and keep on walking as tall as she could. ‘Sit down, you cur,’ she’d say, as if she meant it. That’s what Rachael had done when Johnson’s dogs came barking at her. ‘Never let a dog see you are afraid, Heli,’ she’d said. ‘Just stand tall, keep your hands out of the way and sound louder than the dog. Don’t run, because if you run, the dogs get excited and chase you.’ Helen hadn’t heeded that warning the night they tried to leave home. S
he’d screamed, thrown her case down and run. Tonight she’d remember.
She stopped in the shadow of a tree, looked at Green’s property, then took a handkerchief from beneath her sleeve, folded it, making a cushion for her hand and wondering why she hadn’t done it before. Turning her eyes to the bridge and her mind away from Green’s dogs and her sore heel, she walked forward.
Australia was lucky. There was nothing that could harm you in the Australian bush, no man-eating lions or tigers – only snakes. She shuddered, wondering how many snakes she’d nearly stood on down by the river and in the wood paddock. Why hadn’t she thought about them then? Lucky she hadn’t – anyway, it wouldn’t matter if a whole family of snakes had lined up on that bridge to wait for her, or if six man-eating lions had escaped from the circus and joined forces with Green’s dogs, she would not turn around and run home. Tomorrow she’d be on that train, and tomorrow night she’d be sleeping in Aunt Bertha’s spare room and Aunt Bertha would tell her what she should do next.
How long since she’d left the house? An hour? Less than an hour? No one would open her door before morning, and even then probably not before nine. And if they did open it tonight, they’d see hair on the pillow and a hump beneath the sheet, because she’d put her big doll in her bed, plus two pillows. Mrs Johnson might find that doll at nine, but by then Helen would be on the train to Melbourne – and her father and Judge Cochran would discover too late that she had been more robust and able than they’d thought, but not half as tractable.
The Cochrans arrived just after eight, and by the time she packed her case it must have been close to nine. She’d meant to check the time in the kitchen, but that clock was either broken or Mrs Johnson had too much to do to bother winding it. It hadn’t been ticking last night either, when Johnson’s dogs started barking.
