‘I only had a drop. Hope so.’ Rosemary seemed distracted.
‘You okay?’ Des said. He felt a small shiver of fear that he could not account for.
Rosemary picked up her empty glass. ‘Me? Yes, I’m fine. Do you think Cheryl got some sort of pay-out after Teddy died? There was talk of it in town.’
‘Doubt it,’ Des said. ‘First thing she would have done was trade in that old wreck of a Datsun.’ He stretched and stood up. ‘Look, Rosie, we can’t worry about the dead. We have to worry about the living. Speaking of which, how’s Katherine?’
Rosemary brightened. ‘Good. She’s booked the waterbirth unit.’
‘The what?’
‘Waterbirth unit. Where she’ll have the baby. She’s having a doula, too.’
Des looked down at his wife. ‘Are you going to tell me, or make me ask?’
Rosemary laughed. ‘It’s like a midwife. It’s an ancient practice.’
She stood up beside him. She’s lost weight, Des thought, with sudden clarity. ‘I don’t want any ancient practices for my future grandson,’ he said. He was looking intently at Rosemary, trying to work out what was different about her. ‘I want modern medicine. I want an heir. I want a dynasty.’
Rosemary smiled. ‘You’re a bit late for all that, Des. Katherine’s nearly forty now. And there’s no way they’ll move back here so you can forget those wild fantasies of yours about building a family compound.’
They both moved towards the stairs.
‘Anyway,’ Rosemary said, ‘who said it’s going to be a boy?’
Des grinned in the semi-darkness. ‘I did. I can be a bit spooky, too, you know.’
Des was snoring within minutes. Watching his chest rise and fall, Rosemary wondered whether she’d have been less of an insomniac if she’d spent forty-two years lying beside a quiet sleeper. She doubted it.
The possums hadn’t arrived. There’d been no familiar drum roll as they careered across the metal roof. Perhaps hit by a car. She often saw their smashed carcasses lying in the road at the front of their house, their sweet, pointed faces drying in the sun.
She sat up. Her hand moved automatically to her left breast. Through the cotton of her nightdress she could feel the hard lump down low on one side. She’d have to tell Des soon. She’d seen how he’d looked at her this evening; he knew something wasn’t right. Katherine had insisted she could stay with her after the surgery. For one breathless moment, Rosemary wondered whether she’d live to see her grandchild. She got out of bed, told herself to stop being so ridiculous. It’s not like the old days, she thought. Not like her mother. Best she didn’t think about it too much.
She looked out at the gums across the road. Eleven. She remembered the first time she’d stood at the window, wide awake in the middle of the night, counting them. Their quiet beauty always calmed her. It wasn’t as bright tonight but there they were, softly illuminated in the velvety darkness.
There was a small screech of metal. Rosemary knew it, instantly. The catch on the side gate. Three ragged scrapes and a high creak as it opened. Her heart pounded. She was turning to wake Des when she realised who it must be. Vincent. His hands had never quite mastered the sticky latch, and he always made a distinctive sound as he tried to get it open. She looked back at Des. He had one arm crossed over his chest. He was in a deep sleep.
What on earth was Vincent up to now? She put her glasses on and stole downstairs in the dark. By the time she reached the kitchen, the door of the back shed was standing open. Even though she was sure it must be Vincent out there, she felt adrenaline sweep through her. She stood near the sink window, shielded by folds of short curtain. April appeared from the shed, snuffling at the ground, puzzled and excited by the nocturnal activity.
Seconds later, the boy came into view, grabbing at the dog’s collar before she ran out of reach. He would have known that April wouldn’t bark.
‘April!’ he called out, before remembering to whisper. ‘April. Come here, girl.’
The dog turned back and nuzzled against Vincent’s hip. The boy sat down on the low stone wall and put his arm around her. Neither moved. They were just metres from Rosemary as she stood in the dark, the curtain moving slightly in the open window.
She watched Vincent push his face into the dog’s neck. Rosemary squinted into the darkness, wondering what he was doing.
‘Goodbye, girl,’ he said.
He was crying. Rosemary could see his thin shoulders rising and falling with each sob. Goodbye? Where was he going?
The dog stood patiently, staring into the back garden, making no attempt to escape Vincent’s chokehold.
‘You’re the best girl ever,’ Vincent said. He kissed the dog’s grey coat.
Rosemary could just make out April’s thin legs, the slow wag of her tail back and forth. She suddenly felt a surge of affection for the dog, more than any other animal she’d ever owned. She blinked back tears. Surely Cheryl wasn’t going to disappear in the middle of the night? And why? Rosemary wished she’d woken Des. She could see that Vincent was fully dressed. He had his prized football shirt on, the white number nine glowing faintly in the dark.
The boy led the dog back into the shed. Sniffing loudly, he closed the door. ‘Good girl,’ he said softly, through the wood. ‘See you, April.’
He sounded so young. When he turned his face towards the kitchen window Rosemary was certain he’d seen her, but he wiped his nose on the back of his hand and disappeared down the side of the house. She heard the gate close; a single clink as the latch fell into place.
Rosemary’s heart began to race. She moved through the dark hall to the front of the house and stood in the shadows, looking into the street. She saw nothing. Cheryl’s Datsun hadn’t moved. A couple of crows cawed to each other further down the road. No traffic. She knew it was very late.
She sat down in the chair just inside the window, pushing it deeper into the unlit room. Vincent must be running away, she thought. Katherine did that once, when she was about the same age. It was six hours before they found her, crouched on the back steps of the Jacksons’ place, drawing pictures in the dirt with a long stick. They were terrified she’d gone as far as the lake. From that day, Rosemary had never had a full night’s sleep again.
Sitting stiffly in the chair, Rosemary rubbed her arms in agitation. If Cheryl couldn’t be bothered looking after her son, she was going to do it. She’d keep watch over the Daleys’ front gate for the whole night, if necessary. The mere thought of Vincent trying to drive was preposterous, but he was tall for his age. It wasn’t impossible. And he loved cars. Before the accident, she’d often seen Teddy working on the Datsun, Vincent by his side handing up tools and talking non-stop. Poor little fellow, Rosemary thought. He’s been lost since his father died. Cheryl and the boy cooped up in that house. Once the police stopped calling, and those rude media people had finally gone away, Rosemary couldn’t remember seeing a single visitor come to their door.
She thought back to when the Daleys first arrived, pulling up in that same car, the side windows covered with bags and boxes. Vincent must have been about five. She remembered how he’d raced into the back garden. How she’d thought he was a girl, at first, because his hair was quite long. Rosemary had introduced herself to his parents. It’d been awkward. They didn’t give their names; she’d had to ask them. She’d offered them the small box of plant cuttings that she was about to put into her own garden. They’d stared at them as if they were poisonous, Teddy taking them reluctantly with his free hand.
When she’d asked where they were from, Teddy had said, ‘Queensland.’ Nothing more. Cheryl had stood, silent and unsmiling, plucking at her sleeves with nervous hands. ‘Near Emerald,’ Teddy told her when Rosemary pressed him further. She still remembered the strange look that crossed his face when she told him she’d spent half her childhood out that way. ‘Never liked the place much,’
he said, before making an excuse and going inside. Days later, she saw that her cuttings had drooped and died near their front door, still in their shallow cardboard box.
Rosemary smoothed the armrests of the chair. She realised that she knew almost nothing about the Daleys. Even Vincent, at his young age, seemed adept at revealing no details about the family. They’d simply arrived and unpacked to a quiet, hidden life, letting the shrubs and trees between the two houses grow unchecked, closing across their roof like the wing of a giant bird.
And then, the storm.
‘I felt him grip my arm,’ Ellie Gleeson told the inquest, her voice shaking. ‘He was holding me up in the water. He pushed me forward, yelled at me to swim for the jetty. I could see some headlights on the shore, and the flashing blue of the police lights. Everything else was swirling grey.’
Half the town had sat motionless in the stifling air of the old courthouse, listening to Ellie’s testimony. The storm had barrelled across the lake, she said, the rain pelting down, sharp as pins. She’d never heard wind so loud. The afternoon turned dark in moments. ‘It was like a tornado,’ she said. After the boat tipped, she told the hushed room, she’d never seen her friends again. ‘Not alive, I mean,’ Ellie said, staring around the room with a bewildered, frantic face. Rosemary recalled the Lennox girl’s mother, inconsolable in her loss, collapsing in the heat and being helped outside, sagging between two grim-faced sons.
Ellie Gleeson had been the last to see Teddy Daley. ‘I didn’t look back, after that,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see what happened to him. I just kept going. I didn’t think the lake could ever be that rough … I thought I was going to die.’ Dabbing a ball of damp tissue into each eye, she told the court what she’d seen: the back of Teddy Daley’s head, sinking under the churning water.
Rosemary was beginning to feel chilly, but she didn’t dare move from the window. She was sure the car keys were on the table in the hall. If Vincent had some mad idea about driving, she’d go after him, never mind that she was in her nightie.
She thought about the last time she’d seen Cheryl. At the mailbox, about a fortnight ago, she’d spotted her standing inside her front window, staring through the venetian blinds. She was smoking. Rosemary had lifted the fan of mail in her hand in salute, but Cheryl had reached up and tilted the blinds, leaving a small wreath of smoke clinging, momentarily, to the glass. Rosemary had wondered then, not for the first time, whether there was a past, whether she was hiding from something. Or someone.
The old blue upholstered chair felt very comfortable. I don’t sit here nearly often enough, Rosemary decided. She was amazed to find that she could hear Des snoring in the room above her. She envied him, the way he just turned off. Sometimes, she’d barely finish the page of a book and he’d be gone. That might change, she thought, and a wave of sadness swept over her.
She stared into the street. Nothing. Two cars passed, one going far too quickly. Silence. She was going to sit here all night, she decided, watching out for Vincent. And in the morning, after breakfast, she was going to tell Des about the cancer. Let him sleep for now. She was tired herself.
The Daleys’ gate creaked. Rosemary started, amazed to find that she’d dozed off. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was. Then she saw the window, the trees across from her, the night sky, cloudier than before. There was someone in the Daleys’ front garden.
Rosemary stood up, keeping back from the window. A man. A man with a suitcase in one hand, a bag in the other, both heavy. He slid them into the back of the Datsun, alongside other boxes already stacked against the seat. Rosemary peered at the house. As far as she could tell, there were no lights on.
Cheryl appeared. So, Rosemary thought, another man. Well, good for her. Why did she have to be so weird about it? Cheryl had her hair scraped back into a tight ponytail. She was also carrying bags, two soft hold-alls, clearly full. She heaved them into the back with the others. She did not look at the man, or speak to him. They each made a number of trips between the house and the car, passing each other on the path like phantoms. Still no lights. Rosemary was suddenly chilled by the thought that the windows might have been blacked out in some way.
The old Datsun, weighed down with luggage, hunkered low on the road as if reluctant to go anywhere.
The man appeared again, carrying a duvet and a bare pillow, which he stuffed into the back seat, making a little nest beside the bags. Cheryl came out, pulling up the hood of a dark top. She went straight to the car and sat in the passenger seat without closing the door. She kept her hand on top of a small, square bag in her lap, as if it were a restless lapdog.
And there was Vincent, walking towards the car. He was moving slowly, a patterned bag stuffed under one arm. Just as he went to climb in, he dropped the bag and ran towards Rosemary, stopping in their front garden.
‘Vinnie!’ she heard the man hiss.
The boy was standing in Rosemary’s driveway, looking down into the darkness towards the back. She couldn’t see his face clearly, but he gave a childish wave into the night air. Waving to the dog, Rosemary thought. She felt sure, then, that she would never see Vincent again.
The man walked over to the boy, holding a finger to his lips. He was thin, fit-looking. He had a close-cropped beard. He put his hand on Vincent’s shoulder. As they both turned towards the car, the moonlight passed across their faces. She could see the terrible resignation in Vincent’s face. As she watched them go, she realised that she knew them both. Bracing herself against the wall with one hand, her nerves singing along her arm, up her spine, across her open mouth, she was certain that she knew the man. It was Teddy Daley.
Rosemary’s breathing was so loud she was sure they would all hear her. She wanted to shout out to Des, but she did not move.
Teddy shepherded Vincent into the car. Cheryl stared ahead into the road.
‘Hop in, quick, Vinnie. Mind your head.’ Rosemary clearly heard him say it. She recognised his voice. There was no mistake.
Rosemary watched, her heart pounding in her chest, as Vincent curled into the nest of bedding while his father clipped the seatbelt around him. Teddy Daley. Alive. As she steadied herself, feeling suddenly nauseous, she wondered how a young boy might survive a lie this big. How it might be explained away. Why it had to be done.
Even Des might have woken if they’d started the Datsun. They were careful. Rosemary heard only the crack and pop of small stones as they let the car roll slowly towards the dip in the road just beyond their house. She waited, listening for the engine, heard the car sputter into life. She pushed aside the curtain, knowing that she would soon see its headlights as it climbed away from Burchardt Creek, past the old woolshed, the turn-off for the lake, the Gleesons’ big place on the hill, the road straightening towards the highway.
Rosemary pulled the curtains together, even though the first mauve light of the day seemed close. She would tell Des today. Tell him about the cancer, and the surgery. It would be hard for a while, she’d explain, but she would be fine. Just fine.
Rosemary let herself out the front door. She felt a slight chill on her bare arms. She stood in the driveway, just where Vincent had stood, where he’d waved in the dark to the dog he loved. There was a little more light. Dawn was certainly coming.
She vowed then, looking at the abandoned house next door, the sagging guttering on that side, that she would never tell a soul that Teddy Daley was alive. That for reasons she would never know, he had taken his chance when it came, swum away into the safety of oblivion. That whatever he’d done, a small boy needed him.
Rosemary looked over at the gum trees, their white trunks solid as ancient columns, their tight new skins waiting for the day.
Tying the Boats
A week after she married him, she cut her hair. The scissors made a hungry sound working their way through the curls.
‘You cut your hair, Eve,’ he said, when he came home. Nothi
ng more.
She thought he might have said, ‘You cut off your beautiful hair,’ but his mouth could not make the shape of beautiful, even then.
She kept the hair in a drawer. A great hank of it, bound together in two places with ribbon almost the same dark red. Sometimes, when she was searching in the big oak chest that she brought from home, she’d see it stretched against the back of the drawer, flattened into the joinery like a sleek, cowering animal.
Once, she lifted it out, held it up to the light to catch the last of its fading lustre. She weighed it in her hands. The hair was thick, substantial, heavy as the ropes they’d used when she was a girl, tying the boats when storms were coming.
The New Bride
We have arrived. Two couples in a white Citroën, nosing gracelessly into the last parking space. There’s silence at last after the rattle of the engine, the eternal meanderings of jazz. The smell of leather polish still clings to everything, swirls around me in the back of the car, in the pit of my stomach. In front, my father-in-law continues to clutch the wheel with both hands. It has been a long day.
‘The old hotel,’ he says, into the windscreen. There’s relief in his voice; the weekend in France has been his idea. He turns to his wife. ‘A good run, in the end, Caroline.’
She refolds her hands in her lap. ‘I suppose so,’ she says, without turning her head. ‘I hope we’re going to get dinner, David.’
I watch the slope of her shoulders, the careful sweep of ash-blonde hair curling in at the nape. We all stare ahead at the car park’s encircling wall. Here and there, excess mortar hangs from its yellow bricks in congealed drops. I glance across at my husband, who is squeezing the edge of the seat as if we’re cornering too fast.
Across the square, the hotel looks crowded. Beyond urns of flowering shrubs, there are people at every window. In the dining room, a woman peers out, points to the spinal curve of the church roof nearby. A man at the hotel door, dressed in holiday stripes, tilts his head back and laughs. The cobblestone lanes are fading in the evening light. I wind down the window, take a few breaths of mountain air. I do not want to be here. Not in this car, in this town, hostage to a language we all speak with a nailed tongue. Here, with these strangers.
This Taste for Silence Page 9