The Curlew's Eye

by Karen Manton

The words leaped from his throat. Even he looked surprised to hear them.

  ‘God,’ breathed Greta.

  The story rewound on high speed in her mind and played again on this new track.

  Magdalen was running from the outcrop, but instead of turning right to the mango farm, she turned left towards the lake. Devil was after her, but she had a head start, and there was Joel’s car! What a relief to see it, with the keys ready to go! And then the car wouldn’t start. She tried it again and again. Devil would appear any second. There was no time to run. The boot was the only place to hide.

  Tell him, Greta, she told herself, tell him what Danny said. Tell him why she was running.

  But Joel had more to say.

  ‘Magdalen was in the boot. She must’ve wrapped herself in the old tarp—that’s why we didn’t see her. I’ll never know why she did that. Maybe we were too rowdy drunk for her. And she was wild at me, over Lennie. For helping him leave, and for cutting off those bracelets.’

  He ran his tongue over his lips.

  ‘I heard her too late.’

  Greta saw it all playing out before her.

  The flames were licking the ceiling, the doors, the front seats. The car was an inferno. Gabe was pulling his leg, but Joel was hanging on to the back seat, to the voice he could hear behind it. He had a knife. He was cutting into the seat to reach that muffled voice. God knew how long she’d been calling out. The vinyl started melting into Joel. The air was a thick fog, his skin prickled with vicious heat. His own self might peel from his body. And pounding against his skull was that desperate thudding. The other boys dragged him out, with Joel screeching what he’d heard. His foot set off the handbrake as they hauled him out. He scrabbled upright and went for the boot.

  ‘Joel, Joel, she’s gonna explode!’ Danny screamed.

  Headlights zinged onto them. Gabe yanked Joel aside. Radek’s ute roared forward and rammed the burning car. As it left the bank, the boot popped open. Inside was a fiery wraith. Joel leaped after her. For a brief moment he caught hold of her arm. They were all one creature, Magdalen in the car and Joel reaching out. An airborne phoenix over the deep. And then the car plunged, and Joel dived into the poison water.

  ‘It was all too late,’ he said to the moonlit lake.

  ‘It was an accident, Joel. A terrible, terrible accident.’ Greta’s words were slow in her mouth. They belonged to someone else.

  ‘Maybe. But however you look at it we set her alight. Her own brothers.’

  ‘You couldn’t have known she’d be in there,’ whispered Greta.

  ‘Truth is I didn’t get her out of that burning car fast enough. I killed her.’ Every breath was a sob now. ‘Look after Magdalen. That’s all our mother ever asked of me.’ He shook his head. ‘Six brothers. Not one of us could do it.’

  A curlew wailed, and another set up its echoing cry. They called in tandem, faster and faster until one gave the final shriek. Joel took in a breath and wrestled to find a steadier voice.

  ‘There were people who used to say Magdalen wasn’t all there—because of how she was, with her wonky hearing and quirky ways, you know? People couldn’t work her out. She didn’t match their idea of normal.’ He’d found his usual voice again, his words were very clear in the quiet. ‘But in the end it was us who weren’t there. We weren’t there at all.’

  Suddenly Greta could see all the way through—the water and Joel and the secrets of this place. The car, the fire and the burning girl. Magdalen. Maria. Fedor. None of them was missing. They were all there under the surface. They had been there all this time, staring back at her.

  The moon guides Joel in through the passageway. He is thin and vulnerable, passing between walls of moonlit stone. The rock breathes into him. At the end is a tumble of boulders and stones. They have fallen from higher up, from the outside world, the sky even. He looks up at the steep spill of them to the dark night, the spray of stars that shiver.

  He walks up the haphazard steps to a smooth platform. The moon’s light casts a silver clarity over the landscape. He can see in every direction. From the dark shade of the mango orchard, through the valley, to the lake. And up the hill to the homestead.

  Behind him the shack has a soft glow inside. His wife has tethered it down with ropes of vine and stem. But above all his own children earth that little house to its ground. They wake up fearless, and live.

  A bush stone-curlew cries. He hears its wail in a different way, standing on this ground of stone in the dark. He hears a different note in the lament, an appeal, a salutation, an announcement. He is struck by it.

  The last cry courses through him. The rain is a mist, drifting in. Fine spray gathers on his skin. The rain thickens and the rocks gleam water.

  Below him where he cannot see a dark filament passes. It is Magdalen, his sister. She has paused beneath where he’s standing. Her palms are held flat against the stone, her ear is pressed to the rock. She is listening to that breathing, the quiet noise of him under the rain. It is the softest keening.

  34

  Greta walked up the firebreak alone with this new truth. She’d been stripped of a cloudy film. The image of the burning brother carrying his burning sister had seeped into her. She understood everything in a different light. The car, the lake and every anecdote Joel had told about his family. The photos and audio cassettes, Maria’s candlestick, the blood-red tulips on her shawl. And above all, Joel.

  The camping light on the table and Rex’s bark greeted her. It was like stepping out of a time warp. Rex came to her from under the verandah. She untied him.

  Everything was as she had left it. The beading boxes and the half-done necklace. The pot of stew snug among coals in the oven. She ate some of it, hungrily, and put the rest in the fridge for Joel.

  After a shower she set up her father’s lantern on the shack’s verandah as a beacon for Joel, and went to the cabin to wait for him. She found taper candles and lit one in Maria’s candlestick, and stood others in jars. Then she settled herself on the day bed on the balcony to wait for him. Rex curled up underneath.

  She wondered if Joel was at the hut. He might sleep in the very bed where Magdalen was abused. It sickened her. She would have to tell him Danny’s hideous secret, she would have to find a way.

  Beyond her the rain fell with a steady gentleness. She imagined again that shadow child Joel, slipping out a casement window to tiptoe along the verandah; stepping onto moonlit stones leading down past the red bead tree and in among the woolly butts and boulders. His mother was a silhouette in the spear grass. The stalks were almost as tall as her. Did she know he was there, a smaller silhouette behind her? She never turned. He cupped his ears and listened to her sing.

  ‘Where is he now?’ Greta asked Rex.

  She closed her eyes to listen for her husband’s footsteps. She kept seeing the car on fire over the lake, and the homestead ablaze, with flames reaching from every window, and Maria’s voice crying out, Greta! Greta!

  A hand shook her leg.

  Joel leaned over her. She moved back so he had room to sit.

  ‘Now you know.’ He touched her arm lightly.

  ‘Now I know,’ She found his hand to lock her fingers through his.

  He sighed and stretched out beside her. She waited for his breath to slow, the soft whistle in his nose to start its song. The deeper he slept the more alert she became. She turned to watch him. His face twitched with a frown. She wished she had Maria’s healing talents, to twist an illness of the heart or mind into an imaginary rope and pull it out through the top of his skull.

  All Greta had were words. It’s a terrible, terrible accident. This hideous guilt.

  She slipped away from him to see if the electricity was back on. She’d have liked a fan. No luck yet. She walked out to the garden to feel the night air. The rain had stopped. A dark finger of cloud curled through the heart of the moon. The vegetable garden, the cycads, sand palms and trees were touched with ethereal light. She shone her torch on leaves and s
tems, looking for any fruit to pick. All she found was a ripe golden eggplant on the ground, pierced with needle-point tooth marks. When she bent to pick it up her torch flashed ahead onto a child’s foot. She stood up and aimed the light at the nearest pawpaw tree. A boy the size of Griffin hid among the leaves. His face was a white mask. She recognised him immediately, though he was so out of place.

  ‘What are you doing here, Gavin?’ She hardly knew her own bewildered voice.

  He turned and fled to the darkroom. She heard the door bump against him, and his footsteps inside. There was an uncanny stillness then. He’d left the door ajar. She stepped gingerly up into the room and flashed the torchlight around the walls, under the table and in the dark space at the end. When she heard a squeak from him it gave her such a fright she dropped the torch.

  ‘What do you want?’

  He was cowering in the darkest corner. She went to shake him, but a scuffling at her feet interrupted. She scooped up the torch and shone it down on a bush rat escaping through a hole in the lino floor.

  There was no Gavin. Of course there wasn’t. You fool. She remembered the lanky rabbit on Magdalen’s bed in the hut.

  On her way out the torch flickered over the developer trays. A print lay sunk in the first one. The image had morphed into dark shapes.

  Did I do that? she wondered. Leave a print to distort itself? Yes, yes, it must have been you. The children are away, she told herself. She had rushed out of the darkroom when the power went off, then left to find Joel. She’d forgotten this last image. A version of the car from the lake. She shone the torch on the prints already pegged up. How innocently she’d chosen those negatives just a few hours before, without an inkling of the story that lurked there.

  She crossed to the shack with the chant of frogs ringing in the air. They sang with a quick beat that matched her heart rate. The lantern was still flickering on the table. She took it inside and went to the kitchen sink to splash her face and fill a glass with water. Hadn’t Magdalen said it to her, from up in the tree with the silver branches where the coats hung on their rusted hangers?

  Go back to where you came from. Fly south.

  She took down Magdalen’s photo.

  ‘You have cut a weakness in me.’

  The blue eyes shimmered behind the frame’s glass.

  Was this how it was to be from now on? Visions, images, presences slicing in. Or had they always been there, unrecognised? Something in her wondered if it was Gavin, not Magdalen, who was the puppeteer of these bizarre visitations.

  From his place on the wall, the swan boy watched Greta bind up the photo in bubble wrap and sticky tape. She did the same to him. The parcels sat side by side on the kitchen bench, ready for a box.

  The electricity still wasn’t restored by morning. Greta was up early to make coffee. She thought Joel might have mentioned the night before, but as he had been after his sleepwalking and the strange night at the meatworks, he didn’t discuss any of it.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, as they prepared the paint and rollers. ‘Maybe we should go to Fishermans Creek so I don’t have to send the picture frames. It’s too expensive. And I need to take my father back to where he belongs. It’s time.’

  He smiled at her. ‘I thought you might say that.’

  They started with the end wall in the children’s room, and then did the bathroom walls. The paint fumes soon made Greta giddy. She went outside and sat on the cabin steps. Joel’s story was spinning in her head; and with it she felt that vortex she’d seen in the lake when she was sick. It was the tug Maria had felt, and Magdalen.

  There’s nothing there, she knew Joel had said to them. And now the car was lifted out, he might say the same to her. He might say, ‘All of this is nothing to do with you.’ But here on the steps, with the sticky walls of the cabin behind her, and ahead the old ruin falling into itself, she knew that it did. Maria and Magdalen had made sure of it. She’d felt the ominous pull of the lake from the moment she first saw it.

  But she hadn’t expected glimpses of her own life to bleed into that poison water, or into the burned, gutted, buried vehicle now raised and exposed and ready to drive at her with Gavin behind the wheel.

  By late afternoon the river near Tori’s place had dropped enough for Joel to pick up the children. They came home to find open boxes stacked neatly against the room’s inner wall. One marked Op Shop was by the front door.

  ‘Why can’t we just stay here?’ Toby protested. ‘Axel thinks it’s weird we’ve got no real home.’

  ‘We’re it,’ said Greta. ‘We’re home. Wherever we are.’

  Toby was unconvinced. ‘Axel’s grandma came here when she was a kid, and Tori was born here, like Axel and Barney and Skye. They’ve never left Lightstone. Axel says they never will.’

  ‘That’s boring.’ Griffin was looking through the flywire with his binoculars. ‘And it’s not true either. Tori used to drive road trains.’

  ‘We don’t even know where we’re going.’

  ‘We will soon.’ Joel called them out to the mahogany table where he’d spread a map.

  The divining stick had been rediscovered under the verandah. It would be Greta’s pointer. Griffin found a tea towel for her blindfold. One, two, three, they turned her around. Five, six, seven. She pointed her divining stick. Both twigs had to count, she said.

  ‘Bullseye!’ called out Joel. ‘Esperance via Fishermans Creek.’

  ‘She peeked under the blindfold!’ claimed Toby. ‘I saw!’

  Joel circled each place several times with a pencil. ‘Done, no changes.’

  ‘You’re cheats,’ said Toby. ‘You talked about it before.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I can tell.’

  ‘Don’t you want to see our Mum’s beach?’ Raffy pushed him. ‘We’re taking Grandpa Frank back!’

  ‘What’s with Esperance?’ said Toby sulkily. ‘What kind of a place is that?’

  ‘It’s near where your mother and I met. Where you began, in fact, Toby.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘There’s no pleasing some people, is there, Raffy?’ Joel swooped the boy up over his shoulder. ‘Personally, either place suits me. Surf ’s great at both, they say. Beats once-a-year cyclone surf here.’

  Toby picked up the divining stick and snapped it.

  ‘Where’s Magdalen?’ Griffin asked. ‘What have you done with her photo?’

  Greta showed him the frames in bubble wrap on a shelf in the pantry.

  ‘I don’t want her packed away,’ said Raffy. ‘I want her out with us. Like we have Grandpa.’

  ‘She can go in the glove box with the maps,’ suggested Toby.

  Like an icon, thought Greta.

  The last few days passed in a whir, spinning faster and faster. Boxes were taped and packed into the trailer. Others waited for the op shop—the now-headless T-rex poked his neck out of one of those. Wood, bricks and all the items Joel had collected over the months were stacked in the open shed. The shack and cabin were cleaned, ready for Gabe, who would be caretaker of the property and oversee the cattle agistment for Dawson. He dropped in a couple of nights before they were due to go, to find Griffin raining olives onto a pizza base and Toby stoking coals in the oven.

  ‘Thought I’d come and see what you mob are up to,’ he said.

  He stayed for pizza, and sat up late into the night with Joel at the campfire. Greta left them to themselves. From the cabin she could hear their voices, and then long silences, with the fire holding their memories and the bond between them.

  ‘He’s the best person for this place,’ said Joel the next day. ‘Knows it like the back of his hand.’ He paused. ‘First thing he’ll do is smoke it for healing.’

  Greta could see Gabe there by the lake, and the kites watching him from the clouds.

  On their last day, Ronnie came over for a cup of tea, to say goodbye.

  ‘If you settle somewhere let us know, I’ll have this table trucked down to you.�
�� His hand smoothed the wood.

  Brynn arrived in the late afternoon to see how the packing was going, to mop the floor that Greta had just done, and to drink a beer with her on the verandah. Then Brynn said, ‘Well, I’ll be off then,’ and she went down the steps as briskly as ever. No kisses, no hugs invited. Just a last deep stare before she slipped into her car.

  Afterwards Greta walked down to the small stage of cycads. The sky was aglow with pink and gold clouds. Thunder still talked in the distance. She wished she could see the bush stone-curlew one last time. It would be hiding somewhere, keen to step out in the dark.

  Joel came and stood with her to watch the escarpment’s deepening colours. It held them both silent. Like the dark boulders near the creek. A place will go into you.

  ‘Are you ready, do you think?’ Joel asked softly.

  ‘Who’s ever ready?’ She smiled. ‘Not me.’

  It always caught her out, this feeling before moving on, this knowing that what she saw now would soon become an imprint in her mind. The long highway with its red earth and spinifex tufts would shift this landscape memory, with its magnificent clouds, and the cleansing storm that returns lost children and reveals truths. The burning sands, the crashing waves would become real.

  ‘Walk with me down to the lake?’ he asked.

  Magdalen’s death car was still there, with the new fence behind it.

  ‘I don’t think I showed you this yet,’ he said. ‘I found it in the boot.’

  It was the ninth bracelet. She held it flat on her palm, not sure her fingers wanted to touch it. Devil’s last treacherous gift.

  ‘I heard what Danny told you on Christmas Eve. It was me you heard on the verandah. I was shocked. And not.’ His boot scuffed at the dirt. ‘I couldn’t bear to talk about it.’ He looked at the bracelet in her hand. ‘I had to get it out. The last one.’

  ‘I put those other wrong bracelets in an envelope if you want to throw them out. The one Lennie made is wrapped up with everything else in Maria’s case,’ she told him.