She’d squirmed in his grip and, “I’m tempted!” she’d said. “But then I think of Ruthie’s obsession these days, with our family history. And I think, maybe I owe her some . . . effort! It says in St Matthew: Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with them twain. What do you think? If I go with her twain, will she be satisfied?” He’d had no answer and she’d loosed herself, smiling, from his grip. ”It’s all right! I mean, realistically, what could be so bad?”
He’d shaken his head: what indeed?
“Do me one favour then, Bri! Please! Have Ru’ with you when you read it!”
“Why?”
“Why? Because . . . because she’d appreciate the trust.”
Bridie had promised and gone home and ignored the promise. Trust was all very nice, she’d thought. But when all was said and done, Ruthie was thirteen! She didn’t need another ‘Agnes letter’ sprung on her. Thirteen was an age that wanted protecting .
* * *
She pushes the letter aside and stares at the blank surface of the desk. How often did she sit here as a child, in her father’s lap, watching the words spill out onto the page, watching the tip of his pen skitter along, barely able to keep up with the eager fecundity of his mind? It was like a form of magic, to know from his writing what, at that precise moment, he was thinking.
But in the last week before he left, she’d found him here once alone, head down on the desk, sobbing like a child. She’d touched him lightly, afraid more for herself and Ruth and baby Asael than for him. He was, after all, a grown man, a man of strength and she only a child. At her touch, he’d sat up and thrown his arms around her waist, pressing his face to her chest. He’d let his large hand slide up her side, over her ribs, under her arm and out onto her breast, all the while blubbering and mumbling into her dress. She’d stood impassively, looking down at him, hands on his shuddering shoulders, waiting for understanding.
This is a new memory for Bridie, but one clear and sharp-edged. Something, she guesses, from behind the wall. And she’s still waiting for understanding. Waiting for understanding of his need of her. Waiting for understanding of her mother’s letter, brought back to her after ten years. Waiting for understanding of Bessie’s motives in returning it. Waiting for understanding of what her life has been, what Asael’s life has been. Waiting for understanding of the great hollowness of shame that’s opened out inside her.
A second image swims into focus. Again, it’s her father’s face, but in a form that she’s never seen. Not the kind, beneficent face of the man in the pulpit but one with a twisted, broken grimace and a snarl of a voice. ‘All wickedness,’ it mouths. ‘The wickedness of a woman!’
It’s a vile image, a false betrayal of her gentle father – not the father she knew. She shakes it away, rubbing at her eyes and rolling her forehead against the cool wooden surface of the desk. Somewhere . . . she has always known this . . . somewhere in her past she has done a terrible, unforgivable thing. Something that has cowered for shame behind the wall. She’s long wanted to believe that what she doesn’t remember, no one else must remember either. How else explain the continued acceptance of her by the people of Sugar Town? But now she knows. Everyone must know the shame that drove her mother to suicide and her father to flee from his family.
“If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness,” she groans, “how great is that darkness?”
* * *
Once upon a time, on a night just like this, long, long ago, there was a little girl. And the world collapsed on top of her. It was a night of calamity, which the little girl’s father promised would be the worst she would ever know. Be strong, now, he told her. Don’t cry. God loves little girls. He loves you, even as I do. He wants to teach you your strength. Make him proud of you!
Whether God was proud of her, the little girl wasn’t able to tell. Because, indeed, the Lord did sniff out that little girl in her snug security, and find further ways to test her. Quake after quake, He delivered, until no two stones of the little girl’s life stood together. And when she was utterly empty, prostrate and unprotected . . . only then . . . only now, had she been allowed to raise her head. With her mother and her grandmother dead and her father turned away from her.
Bridie sits in her father’s chair, looking into the shadows of her life, wondering. Wondering where Asael and Ruthie have gone; wondering where her life has gone.
She rises, leaving the papers strewn on the desk, and goes to the cupboard where Dabney’s pills are stored. With them and a large glass of water, she makes her way to her bedroom where she folds back the coverlet, slips out of her t-shirt and jeans and rolls onto her back. For a time, she watches as her breasts rise and fall with her breathing. Rise and fall. Further down, the bones of her hips. Asael would know the names of those bones. Asael, who came into the world from between those bones. Asael, whose name means ‘God strengthens’! As though to say, ‘You wanted him! Now what can you make of him?’
* * *
Ruthie will be so angry with her, she thinks. Everyone’ll be so angry. But that’s okay. Anger is okay.
* * *
With Bessie gone back to her caravan, back to Arturo, Kevin sips a late afternoon coffee and reflects on changes the weekend has wrought. He doesn’t know what was in the papers she returned to Bridie, but he does know the town shares a certain culpability for the truncated life of Bridie McFarlane.
He walks into the streets, past Bridie’s house, hoping against hope to hear her voice and Ruthie’s and Asael’s – maybe find them sitting in the yard, waiting for the sun to set, talking about the unexpectedness of life. When he hears no voices, he knocks on the door. When no one answers, he turns the handle. Calling out, his concern growing, he allows himself to be drawn into the house. He sees the papers on the Reverend’s desk and, berating himself all the while, he reads the letter.
When he finds Bridie, laid out like an offering on her bed, her breathing is already indistinct, her hands limp at her sides.
“No no no no!” he cries.
Chapter 14 – Choosing Isak
One o’clock came and went and Bridie still hadn’t answered my text. I tried ringing her mobile but it went to call service. One of two things was going on there, I decided: either her migraine had completely incapacitated her and she was closed up in the house with all the curtains drawn or she’d gone off to the hospital to get medication for it. Either way, I was utter crap for not being there with her. There was never a day she would have left me suffering on my own.
On the other hand, how was I going to face her, knowing what I knew?
‘How’s your headache, Bri’? Would it help to know that the boy you’ve been thinking of as a brother is actually your son? And that everyone in town knows it and they’ve been nursing the McFarlane delusion for years? Not to worry, though! Iask Nucifora has plans to murder someone over related incidents, so that’ll be a nice distraction! Can I make you some camomile tea?’
* * *
I waited until Amalthea’d finished her shower. Isak rattled about in the kitchen the whole while, muttering to himself. Every now and again, I thought I heard phrases like ‘kill the bastard’ or ‘sorry, sweetheart’. It was obvious he was in a state of high excitement and I convinced myself he was probably capable of nearly anything. That thought, coupled with the fact that Asael sat about, playing contentedly with Rosemary and speaking to Queenie as though she and he were classmates – those two things started a conviction forming in my mind. Again, I knew I was utter crap even just for thinking it!
When she finally came into the living room, drying her hair, I guided her surreptitiously out onto the veranda and put it to her.
“Turn him in?” she said. “So you don’t believe his story?”
“Yes I do! But the problem now is, you see . . . Bridie! I honestly never expected any of this to be so . . . potentially catastrophic! And I’m terrified what it’ll do to her to find out! It’s been like, the town’s secret for
years! Mightn’t it be best to just let it go on that way? Look!”
I pointed out Asael, clearly unconcerned and blissful.
“I think Isak was right; he hasn’t taken it in! That means it’s only you and I and Isak! Nobody else is going to say anything; they’ve proven that with years of silence! So if we don’t talk about it, don’t do anything about it . . . it’s all over, isn’t it? And anyway, he’s talking about shooting someone! Maybe it’s our civic duty to . . . you know . . . get him locked up!”
I could hear Doctor Dabney’s threat to Isak: ‘I’ll have you committed’! Much as I hated to admit it, maybe Dabney was on the right track.
Amalthea sat down on the step, spreading her hair for the sun. “So,” she said thoughtfully from beneath the mane, “your thinking is that it might be okay to become part of the carpet that it’s all been swept under? And that if Isak’s right, and there were others involved in the rape, maybe those people should be left in peace?”
I didn’t answer, hoping that she’d say, ‘Yeah, that all sounds pretty right!’ But she didn’t. Instead she said, “And it would be for the greater good of the community if that old man was shushed?”
I swallowed hard. Why couldn’t she just back me up on this? A vehicle turned into the lane and rattled past. It was Alf, on his own this time, going I supposed to investigate the damage done by Queenie.
“You’re not a local, Amalthea,” I said. “You don’t know Sugar Town like I do. Nothing changes here. People get born, people get old, people go away and sometimes people come back. But the guts of the place stay the same. Maybe that’s a good thing.”
I couldn’t see her face and didn’t know how she was reacting. I focussed on the dye line in her hair, where the red ended and her rich black natural colour began.
She said, “Well, to paraphrase a wise man, a wise girl should be a lamp unto herself. You know what that means?”
“Of course not. I don’t know what anything means.”
She side-spied at me through her hair. “It means . . . ” she sat back, shook her hair out of her face and gave me a surprisingly fierce look before placing her palm on my chest; same spot Mister Bandini had touched. “It means what’s in here has to be your guide. It means that whoever we are – whatever’s been done to us – whatever we’ve done to others – it all becomes part of the light that each of us casts. We have to make our choices based on what that light reveals.”
Her touch turned into a vigorous, business-like pat, right over my wishbone, as though she’d straightened out the whole problem for me; and she went back to drying her hair.
“Great!” I muttered aloud. “One more thing I don’t understand!”
She laughed. “Come on, now. The world hasn’t ended! Make the best decision you can! Just remember, though! The truth will always be there, waiting in the background – waiting for someone to spill the beans! And they will be spilled, Ruthie! Make no mistake about that! But there’s nothing to say they have to be spilled by you! And if that’s what you want, I can promise it won’t be by me either!”
She got up and went inside, leaving me with my dilemma intact and the added mystery of her mixed up bean metaphor. I prowled through the names on my phone, wondering who else I could talk to. Something in my family situation (and more so in my attitude, I knew) had left me without any close friends of my own age. The only people I knew who would give even one hemisphere of a rat’s butt about my troubles, or whose feedback I was interested in hearing, were Bridie and Kevin. I played a couple of games on the phone to help clear my mind and, before long, Alf’s old Ute came rattling back into the yard.
* * *
“Hiya,” he said, leaning from the window.
“Hiya yourself. What’s the damage?”
“Not too bad. Thing’s gone though.”
“Yeah. It’s here, inside.”
“Yeah? Not dangerous then?”
“Only to some, it seems. Asael carried it here, no problems. But Sergeant Morrow tried to take it away and it shocked him half to death. And then it brought Garlic back to life.”
“Yeah? ‘At’s a good trick!” He got out of the Ute and stretched mightily, turning his leathery face to the sun. At that point, Amalthea and Rosemary came out on the veranda, followed closely by Asael and a very unsteady Garlic, who sniffed suspiciously at the air.
“Be buggered!” said Alf. He stamped his feet, lifted his hat and wiped the sweat from his scalp. “ ‘At’s a real good trick!” He gestured toward the Ute’s tray.
“Want me to haul The Thing away for yez?”
“I wouldn’t mind moving it on!” Amalthea said and we all turned discouraging looks on her. I realised that, at some level, I was as interested as Isak was to see what further wonders Queenie had to offer. “I wouldn’t mind but I’m thinking we should let Sergeant Morrow deal with it, Alf. Now that he knows it’s here. We’re just steering clear of it in the meantime.”
“Right, then.” Alf opened the door and backed his big bum onto the seat. And almost as an afterthought, he said, “No word on ol’ Isak yet. Don’ s’pose he’s popped up around here?”
Amalthea suddenly found something of concern on Rosemary’s shoulder and began fussing. I realised that she was leaving me to answer. Time to make my decision. All I had to do was say, ‘Yep, he’s inside, making plans to shoot someone.’ And the old man would be back in custody before the afternoon was out.
I knew he’d be listening from the living room. I thought of his suggestion for knee-capping Doctor Dabney. And then I thought of the tender way he’d handled Gramma Gracie’s ring and given it back to me and said how I looked like her. And how he regretted not staying with her after Les Crampton’s attack. And I thought, bugger it! He’s more on my side than he is on anyone else’s!
“I’d be super-surprised,” I said to Alf, “if he could get himself all the way over here! He was in terrible shape last night when we found him!” All of which was true!
“Mmm,” said Alf. “Poor ol’ bloke. He’ll turn up somewheres, I guess.”
He reached for his seat belt and, before I realised what was happening, at least one aspect of Amalthea’s ‘spilling the beans’ metaphor suddenly came clear. I needed to see Bridie. If she was ever going to find out the truth about the terrible deed, and odds were that she would, it had to be me who told it! Amalthea, I knew, would be content to let Asael stay and he’d be content staying. I could come back for him. Or she could send him walking, it was no big deal. I’d call her and let her know.
“Hey Alf! Are you going back through town by any chance?”
* * *
It was fascinating to watch Alf’s interactions as we drove. One sausage-like finger continually rose and fell from the steering wheel, a greeting for each approaching car. And once we were in town, he added a nod for pedestrians on both sides. Frequently his salutes led to him letting go of the wheel entirely. And each time, he’d speak aloud the person’s name, as though in a never-ending rehearsal.
“Davo.” The finger lifted. “Arlene.” He touched the brim of his cap. “Johnno.” He nodded to the side. In the country, everyone’s your neighbour and, for an old local like Alf, failing to speak their names, even when they couldn’t hear, would have been a dire rudeness.
“Alf,” I asked him at one point, “is there anyone in this whole region you don’t know?”
“Yep,” he answered. “That bastard been selling insurance policies ‘round the farms.”
“What, you don’t know him?”
“Nup! He come knockin’ on my door las’ week, I says, ‘You piss off outta here. I don’ know you’.”
“And did he?”
“Nup! Still around. But at least he ain’ around me!” Alf bobbed his head to the right. “Robbo,” he murmured.
“So, but everyone who lives here, or who’s been here for any amount of time – you know them, right?”
He scratched at the dark stubble beneath his chin, producing a pa
pery chitter and, “Myrtle,” he murmured in the direction of a tiny silver-haired woman. Then, “Old timers, I guess. Know a lot o’ them. Grew up with ‘em, ye see.”
At the town’s only cross-walk, a great shambling man stood, booted and hatted in the familiar garb of a farmer who, though it was Sunday, had too much to do to take a full day off. He’d come to a halt at the edge of the bitumen and seemed to be contemplating the distant shore. As we approached, a spry, slim woman stepped out from behind him. Alf brought the Ute to a trembling stop, raising his finger from the steering wheel.
“Geoffo. Marybeth.”
They launched themselves serenely onto the bitumen but, instead of crossing, they detoured to the windows of the Ute, Geoff to Alf’s side and Marybeth to mine. Marybeth had a pair of blackening welts on one cheek – exactly the sort that might be made by lollies falling at fifty kilometres an hour.
“Ruth McFarlane!” she said, crouching to look in the window. “How are you, dear? And aren’t you the talk of the town! Rumour has it that you’ve upset the mayor rather badly but made up for it by pulling Johnathon from the wreckage of that infernal machine!”
“Am I? Have I? I mean, I don’t know! I seem to have been so busy the last couple of days! I really . . . !”
“Of course you have, dear. So nice to be young and full of vim. And how is Amalthea, the poor dear? I presume that’s where Alf’s bringing you from? I hear one of her little pets has been fatally wounded! So sad!”
“Yes well, Amalthea’s fine! And Garlic – the goat – well we thought he was dead, you know, but – strangest thing – he’s come back to life!”
“Has he really? Well isn’t that interesting? You know, we were just listening to Mayor Lyle talking about that very thing in the newsagent’s! Well, of course we were all sceptical you know.” She made a drinking gesture and rolled her eyes resignedly. “But you’d know, wouldn’t you, love! Because you were there too! He says so! So it’s true then! And Lyle says it was the meteor did it! Is that right?”
“Yes. I mean no! I mean . . . I don’t know! My brother, Asael, he was holding onto it and they both fell against Garlic and, well . . . Garlic just woke up! Something electrical, I suppose!”
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