The First Week

by Margaret Merrilees

  Their wings beat around our heads. We are deafened with the roaring.

  Woe woe woe cry the beasts of the air. A time of tribulation has come upon the earth. The forces of darkness gather at the throne. All the plagues are loosed upon us. The ground itself is broken open and the sickness will last a thousand years. None will be spared. The baby at the breast will be devoured as it suckles. The young will couple in vain. There will be no more children. The last generation of men will die. The belly of the serpent will split and the righteous will come forth. But their mouths will be closed and their lives will be cut short.

  A mighty earthquake will bring down the palaces and let loose the demons and vile spirits that dwell therein. A star bigger than the sun will strike the earth with the power of a million armed horsemen. The rivers will flow with blood and the face of the moon will be covered. A god with eyes of flame and the wings of an eagle and thunder in his mouth will destroy with one blow the marketplaces and brothels. The infernal machinery will be sealed forever in the bottomless pit. Those who have traded in the substance of life will be struck down. The tainted money will be ash in their mouths. The horned beast will writhe in its own entrails.

  Marian put the sheet of paper on the table, took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.

  Was it some sort of code? In poetry?

  He was trying to tell her something. Was he? The baby at the breast, being devoured, was that him?

  What was the sickness that will last a thousand years? Did he mean the salt? No. It must be uranium. No doubt he was on to that as well. Any protest that was going.

  So what were the forces of darkness? It must be that bloody Lord of the Rings.

  Marian was furious. Suddenly and helplessly furious.

  Everyone, everyone, was blaming themselves for what he’d done, for two deaths, so many lives ruined.

  Everyone was blaming themselves. Except him, because he was busy with some hocus pocus bullshit out of the Bible, or Lord of the Rings, or somewhere. Some bloody fantasy.

  She looked at the paper again.

  Maybe he really had flipped? What did they call it? A psychotic episode.

  No. She didn’t believe it.

  Charlie wasn’t mad. He was having a go at her, leading her on. Pretending that he was going to trust her, tell her what was going on, write her a sensible letter. And then writing something that would make everyone think he was mad as a hatter.

  How dare he! HOW DARE HE! She crashed her fist down on the table and Jeb jumped away, whimpering.

  Marian put her head down on her arms and wept. ‘I’m sorry, Jeb,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  sunday

  No.

  In the moment of waking, before she had time to protect herself, the weight on Marian’s chest was unbearable, as though her ribs might collapse.

  She reached for the light and raised an arm to shield her face from Jeb, who was whimpering and trying to lick her. He needed to go out.

  The bedclothes were tangled around her waist and she seemed to be fully dressed still. Swinging her legs over the edge she pulled on slippers and staggered through the house. Jeb followed, snuffling anxiously while she opened the door and held the screen back for him. Once he had waddled out into the night she propped the door open with a pair of gumboots.

  Charlie’s letter was lying on the kitchen table where she’d left it.

  Letter.

  Letters were supposed to say how are you? And I miss you. And I thought this. Or I meant that. And they finished with lots of love.

  This letter, she had thought, would explain why.

  Picking it up by one corner she padded back to bed, plumped the pillows and tucked the duna around her.

  They sweep down through the clouds …

  But she couldn’t bring herself to read it again, and let it flutter to the floor.

  The reality was that there would be no neat explanation. No answer for other people or for her, nothing that would allow them all to breathe out and say oh I see, then we needn’t worry. It will never happen again.

  The question why, and the possibility of sudden inexplicable disaster, would hang over her forever.

  Returning her glasses to the bedside cupboard she slid down the bed and pulled the duna up to her nose.

  Charlie wanted to get at her. No doubt about that.

  And he’d succeeded.

  He had coldly and deliberately worked out how to get under her skin.

  But why her? Why hurt her, the one person guaranteed to be on his side?

  Perhaps that’s why.

  The thought filled her with despair. The bleakness of it. The self-destruction.

  Perhaps he was mad after all. Wasn’t it a sort of madness? To drive everyone away from you?

  Something was very wrong. Something she should have realised.

  Perhaps if she’d let him go sooner … not argued when he wanted to leave home. She’d tried to think about him, what was best for him. But perhaps she’d been selfish.

  If only he’d told her what it was. Why he was unhappy. Or angry.

  What was it? What had he needed?

  Together they could have found a solution, she would have done anything. Moved to the city. Been more available for him.

  The tears seeped from her eyes and she was furious with him all over again.

  And not only with him, with all of them. Mac, Brian, Michelle.

  I’ve done all I can, she thought. What more do you want?

  Even as the feeling engulfed her, she knew that it was old, older than any of them.

  I could kill.

  There was light behind the curtains. Dawn, she thought with relief. But when she pushed the folds of material aside, it was only the last of the moon.

  Impossible to sleep again. Her leg was twitching, her knees ached and she almost wished for Mac grumbling beside her. Stop banging your feet.

  She drew her knees up to her chest. That was better.

  But two minutes later she had to move again, lie on the other side, stretch her legs out. There were hundreds of leg positions and they all felt good to start with. But only for a few minutes.

  The house was no longer a refuge. It was a shabby old box, smelling of Mac and the boys. In this room, her room, the wardrobe was half full of Mac’s clothes. Charlie’s belongings filled another room, cassettes, videos, meccano, dinky toys. Brian still had junk stored here too. She should ditch the lot of it.

  At six thirty she pulled on clean clothes, went out to the kitchen and rummaged in a cupboard for a water bottle. She pushed it into the pocket of her rain jacket and opened the biscuit tin. There was only a half-eaten packet of gingernuts. They’ll be stale, she thought, it was months since she’d bought them. When she last went shopping in town.

  The biscuit she bit into was hard, not stale at all, and she was shocked. The idea of time disintegrated in her mind. The days and weeks slithered together and apart again. Only one week had passed. The biscuits were only one week old.

  Normal was a week ago. A run into town. A few hellos, a load of shopping, new library books. Home, put the gingernuts in the tin. One week.

  Shoving the biscuit packet into her other pocket she went out to the verandah and shook out dry food for Jeb. ‘Sorry, old boy. I’d take you. But you get so stiff in the car. You stay here.’

  Getting away was all that mattered, she didn’t care where she went. South would do. The easier country around Albany. Where they had decent sized trees and dairy cows and wetland meant green, not a white-rimmed waste of dead trunks.

  The shops in Albany would be open for Sunday tourists. She could visit that amazing florist full of tropical orchids and ask them why hers had never flowered again after the first time.

  Or she could go to the Blowhole, watch the water crashing on the rocks.

  There was a brief flash of sunrise as she swung south. The sun appeared between the horizon and a low bank of cloud, then disappeared as quickly as it had come so that she drove
in an eerie morning twilight. The mountains were a strange row of lumps on the horizon, like kids’ building blocks, the old wooden ones with triangular pieces. For a moment she had the illusion that they were narrower at the base than at the top, that if she ran her hand along the horizon she could squash them down then squeeze them back up again.

  Mt Trio, when she got closer, was solid enough, point upward, and was covered in grey-green velvet. The car trailed round the bottom of it.

  On an impulse she took the turn to Bluff Knoll and crawled up the steep winding road to the car park with the cloud coming down to meet her. A blast of wind tugged at the car door when she stepped out. There was one other car parked, a four-wheel drive, occupants nowhere in sight.

  Marian crossed to the lookout, the wind filling her face and pushing her backwards. She could see the path winding up the steep slope then disappearing into the mist. This was a mountain with no top. The cloud had swallowed it completely. And it was roaring. Behind its shroud, the mountain was roaring.

  Had the people from the other car climbed upwards into that?

  Struggling against the wind she wrenched the door open and got hastily back into the car. Big men climb Bluff Knoll.

  Not her.

  Southward again, along the flat between the ancient shapes of the mountains. A patchy sun broke through as she came to the sign for Toolbrunup. Taking the change as an omen she turned off. At least the mountaintop was below cloud level.

  The car park was overhung with trees. They met overhead when she stepped onto the path. From the road it seemed as though nothing grew more than knee-high. But once you got closer it wasn’t like that at all. Like Jeb. You thought he was shorthaired but long hairs, almost plumes, grew in the folds of his legs.

  She could be a flea walking up Jeb’s leg.

  A glint of gold caught Marian’s eye. Around the next bend was a whole bush of luminous flowers, each one a perfect globe of golden strands.

  The extravagance of it hurt and she turned her back.

  The path wound through trees, upwards, but not too steep. Even so she had to pause for breath. She reached down carefully to pick up a bit of plastic, but it wasn’t plastic, it was a fungus, its top a delicate wash of reddish pink. Scuttling across the same grey rock was a brilliant orange mite.

  The place was enchanted and she was not surprised when a large hopping mouse stopped its skittering to examine her, its plump body quivering only a metre from her foot. Evidently deciding that she was no threat, it retreated under a rock, darted from side to side, emerged, paused to look at her again, and then disappeared into the back of its crevice.

  Marian lost any sense of urgency, sitting whenever she was breathless, resting on each log. There didn’t seem to be anyone else on the mountain. Certainly there had been no other cars in the car park.

  The track began to climb more steeply, a tunnel through the undergrowth, opening out here and there onto great hillsides of loose rock. Marian was sweating with effort, her tee shirt soaked under her jacket. She stopped to take the jacket off and tie it round her waist.

  At the bottom of a slope of boulders she emerged from the trees into a buffeting wind. The path was marked by a sign. Flopping onto a neighbouring rock she examined it.

  Danger!

  Mountain Risk Area.

  Turn back unless you are:

  Fit and Agile

  Prepared to climb steep rocky sections

  Wearing sturdy footwear

  Prepared to encounter loose and slippery rock.

  But it’s too late, Marian thought sadly. It’s too late for warnings.

  Below her the valley spread into a wide amphitheatre facing south-east. An eagle, hovering in the air on the opposite side appeared tiny, dwarfed by the mountain. But nothing else hung in the sky with that silent gliding menace. Crossing the valley in seconds it floated above her, so close she could see the dappled cream and brown markings, and the gaps between each feather on the wing tips.

  On the farm they shot wedgetails. Mac wasn’t having any bleeding-heart government nonsense sacrificing his lambs. In the old days he used to hang eagles on the fence. Marian was shocked the first time she saw one dead. The size of it, the power. What chance would a lamb have?

  But now, watching the bird swimming on the air currents above the valley, she saw only beauty.

  The wind chilled her sweaty body. She untied the jacket, put it on again and began to clamber up the slope.

  Above her loomed the summit. From here it was not pointed, but a great knobby mass of horizontal rock layers. The weight of it hung above her. There was no obvious path up.

  The boulders were hard-going and Marian stopped often, her heart pounding with the effort. As she neared the saddle the clouds scudded faster overhead. Sometimes she was climbing in dense grey light, then there’d be a break, bits of blue sky, sheets of white mist. The top of the mountain came and went.

  The boulders fed her into a tube of undergrowth wedged against the rock wall. A trickle of water flowed down the path. She climbed in grey gloom, hands wet from the rock, feet slipping. Tough little trees with prickly leaves grew beside the track, their branches worn smooth by generations of walkers grabbing at them. Once Marian’s foot slipped away completely and she grabbed a handful of spiky leaves to save herself. Panting she leant against the cliff, spread her arms and stood with her face against the rock, letting the awkward points take her weight, trying to disappear into the mountain.

  The wind caught her as she came out of the bushes onto the saddle. She stepped back in fright, suddenly seeing the sky beneath her feet. Triangular peaks stretched away westward, appearing and disappearing between the vertical stripes of misty rain. Wind filled her ears and raindrops whipped into her face. Pulling the hood of her jacket around her head she faced the rock wall and climbed with her eyes half shut, peering for the painted sticks. When she did open her eyes she saw a great weight of stone, a cantilever, hanging over her head. A massive stone machine, beyond the understanding of humans, waiting for the right moment, the right millennium, to drop its load into the valley below. The path, barely an animal pad, led underneath it. Marian ducked instinctively and hurried on, panting and clambering until she emerged alongside the giant rock. Catching her breath she climbed again. And suddenly that was it. She was at the top.

  Away to the east she caught a glimpse of Bluff Knoll and then the whole world suddenly disappeared. Just her and a two metre circle of grey stone. The rest was soft impenetrable white. Finding a gap between two rocks she wedged herself in. It was a little less cold, out of the wind. She felt in her pocket for biscuits and sucked one against her teeth.

  After a few minutes the cloud lifted. The mountains reappeared, dark and louring. Emerging from her cleft Marian sat on a flat rock near the edge, legs hanging over, and stared down at the world between her knees—tiny roads, cars no bigger than the orange mite.

  She let the white mist scud through her head along with the cold, the effort of the climb, the eagle circling below, the unforgiving height. This was a place of judgement, beyond pretence.

  All the voices of the week, everything that she had heard and not heard, whispered around her and echoed away and away beyond the mist.

  Nothing would ever be the same. She would never again wake in the morning contented, comfortable with the rightness of things.

  It was only now, now that she’d lost it, that she understood the value of her old life, the good fortune, the miracle of a place in the world. What she had lost was the right to certainty. From now on she would always have doubt and fear, the constant possibility of disaster.

  She wondered about slipping over the edge.

  I thought we were good people.

  Her body would bang and smash against the rocks below and be dead before it reached the bottom. This clean cold wind would whistle through her bones. The mountain would take her without a flicker and still be the same, still squat there while time passed.

  But she couldn’t
do it. Her fate was to go on, exposed and shivering. Just keep on with the ordinary things she did. Every day, forever.

  A desolate howl escaped from her mouth, a cry from deep inside.

  Nooooooo!

  Again the noise swelled behind her lips. But the wind sucked it out of her and dispersed it. The mountain didn’t move, the eagle still hovered.

  If she went on, would it make up for Charlie? If she simply did her best, every day, kept trying?

  The rock beside her supported a tiny field of cream coloured lichen, overhung with ferns in the deepest part of the cleft. The waving filaments were crushed where she had leant on them.

  Going down was harder than coming up, much harder. Every rock set her teetering, trying to see a foothold, afraid to lean forward in case she pitched headfirst down the mountain. By the time she reached the second stretch of boulders her knees were trembling and there was no spring in her ankles at all. She stepped forward onto a shifting stone and threw her arms in the air to save her balance. Her foot slid sideways, but miraculously she stayed upright and nothing was twisted. Leaning forward she lowered herself onto a rock, winded, heart pounding.

  The sun was covered. The same wind that pushed her from behind was still towing clouds across from the west.

  Marian’s pulse slowed, and she realised that she was hungry. There were five biscuits left in the packet and she ate her way slowly through them, methodically sucking each one until it was soft enough to chew.

  The curve of the valley below was comforting, a cradle. Patches of sunlight sailed across the hillside. The opposite of shadows, she thought.

  By the time she reached the end of the boulders her left knee was protesting painfully. Going backwards was easier, lowering herself down step by step with the help of trunks and branches. Sometimes, for a break, she went sideways, sometimes on her bottom. The seat of her pants was sopping and muddy but she wasn’t cold. In fact she was sweating with every step.

  In a rocky glen she found a small wine coloured globe balanced on a single green leaf at ground level. Had it fallen from a tree? No, it was attached. Peering more closely she saw that it was a flower. Was it? Or a fruit? She couldn’t tell. Perhaps it ate insects, perhaps it collected dew. It was perfectly contained in its own small world.