Skins

by Sarah Hay

  ‘Don’t stand behind me.’

  Dorothea came across the room to the fire. His eyes followed her. She stared into the fireplace. He reached over and turned her face towards him. Lightly he touched the bruise on her cheek and when she looked into his face she was surprised by what she saw. And then he left the room. And she was uncertain whether she had really seen what looked like regret.

  She wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed them, watching the flames as they leapt into life. Light steps padded across the floor. She knew without looking that it was her sister. Mary clasped her shawl tightly and shook with cold.

  ‘Here, come closer.’ Dorothea grasped her arm and led her to the fire. ‘How come you’re wet?’

  ‘Rain blew into the tent,’ she shivered.

  Dorothea rubbed her back. Anderson walked in with an armful of firewood and they stepped back as he set it down. Soon the fire was bursting with heat and they seared their hands in front of it.

  ‘Jack,’ she started. Their eyes met and then she continued. ‘We’d be more comfortable here than in that leaking tent.’

  He nodded. Dorothea turned back to the fire and smiled to herself.

  ‘There ain’t nothing to worry about,’ she said quietly to Mary.

  January 1886

  Children used to come to the side door of this house to buy sweets and boiled lollies. They were happy sounds. Now there is silence. Sometimes I hear the steps of people passing along the lane to the houses at the back. There is George walking below. Stoking the fire and settling into the chair that was mine. It is beside the fireplace facing the front window. From there you can see the new jetty and the entrance to the Sound. I used to watch the steamers belch black smoke as they rumbled into the harbour past Possession Point, so different from the fine lines of the sailing ships.

  If he were to turn the chair so that he was looking straight ahead, he would face Big Grove across the harbour. That was where our father died. Burning lime. He and Jem bought land there after they sold the house on the hill. They would bring lime and timber across the water to the landing stage, which lay on the shore to the right of this house. I used to watch them steady the flat-bottomed boat that lay deep in the water. Once they had unloaded onto the dray and taken their money, they would walk across to the inn.

  Middle Island 1835, Dorothea Newell

  Through the doorway the grey light brightened. Isaac leant against the wooden frame and drew on his pipe. Smoke leaked from his nose and out the corners of his mouth.

  Mead looked up from the strands of grass he was twisting together on the table.

  ‘Are we taking her out?’

  Isaac shook his head and glanced behind him.

  ‘There’s more weather coming.’

  At the other end of the table Manning flicked the wooden chips, displaying the spots he had carved onto the surfaces. He picked them up again and held them between his fingers and then released them onto the table letting them clatter across it. Everyone looked up. He smirked. Church leant over the table and picked one up, turning it over.

  ‘Here, leave it!’ Manning snatched it back.

  Church shrugged and left it on the table. Dorothea knew Manning irritated everyone.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked, standing over him, knowing that he hated it when she looked down at him.

  She wanted to annoy him. There was nothing he could do to her, although she knew he liked to think there was. His eyes narrowed and he gathered up the dominoes in a piece of leather and wrapped twine around the top. It was almost a week since they had been trapped inside because of the weather. Hail had broken through the roof and wind bent the trees back.

  Mead coiled the twine and then began to sharpen his knife, rubbing it slowly across a round grey stone and occasionally spitting on it. She placed a cup of tea beside him but he didn’t look up as he moved the knife in careful circles. Hair grew out of his face, coarse and sparse, and the skin beneath it was raw. His eyes were blue as the sea on a clear day and enveloped in folds of scaly skin that creased in the corners. He laid down the knife and took the cup with both hands.

  Isaac left the doorway. She put down the other cup. She felt his eyes on her but she had grown used to it. She went back to the fire and filled more cups. She gave one to Matthew but as usual he ignored her. Church thanked her as he wrote on a piece of bark.

  She joined Mary at the fire and they drank their tea listening to the wind moan into the corners and whip the trees so that the branches scraped across the roof of the hut.

  ‘Where’s our tea then?’

  Dorothea looked over her shoulder at Manning and Jem.

  ‘Make it yourself.’

  She put her legs up on the stone ledge in front of her, warming her feet alongside Mary’s. Manning was always angry and it had fuelled her brother’s resentment.

  Anderson filled the entrance, wet and sleek, one hand around the neck of a big grey bird and the other around his gun. His mouth set like stone. Eyes swept the room. He dropped everything by the door and took off the skin cloak, flicking water from it. The fire hissed. His pale palms faced the coals and then he turned to warm his back.

  ‘Where’d you get it?’ asked Isaac.

  ‘Over the back. Nesting.’

  Isaac’s chair scraped the floor. He lifted the bird by its thick red legs and looked closely at the grey and brown feathers that were speckled towards the tail.

  ‘Good size and all.’

  ‘Went for me, the ornery bastard. There were eggs but I couldn’t carry them.’

  Looking at the bird but looking at Anderson, seeing the chest and the curve of his arm and the black bush winking between them. Isaac held out the goose towards her.

  ‘Here woman.’

  Anderson turned and acknowledged her. The bird’s feathers were the same colour as her gown. Mary lifted the pot of water onto the hook above the fire. When it had boiled Dorothea thrust the goose into it and then tied its legs with rope and hung it from a hook in the beam. It swung, wings outstretched, water dripping down the end of its black and yellow beak. And she stripped it: a pile of down pooling around her feet, wet feather smells and her hands itching from the wispy bits that clung to them.

  They roasted the big-breasted bird over a nest of coals and fat drizzled into the fire, sizzling and smelling of a rich man’s house. The other women brought in their wooden troughs filled with dirt-covered bulbs and roots and grubs that moved. Green potatoes were dug up from the garden at the back. And when everything was cooked, the fare was laid out on the table like the feast she had served for her employer at the Sound. They sat around the table, Anderson at the head, his back to the fire. But they ate with their fingers and the knives used for skinning and not with the silver she had helped Mrs McLeod unpack from the crates that came from England.

  Anderson glanced at Isaac. ‘We’ll put the boat in the water.’

  Isaac didn’t say anything.

  ‘Needs to be settled for a bit,’ he said. ‘And the wind’s dropping off.’

  Isaac nodded. Mary reached across for another potato. Dorothea was glad she was eating more. Her sister’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkled but it wasn’t the feverish look of a few days ago. Her hair was like the matted sponge they found on the beach.

  When Mary had found out Dorothea had known Jansen was leaving, she hadn’t been angry. Instead she had cried quietly for most of the day, grieving for her family who she felt were even further away than ever. But in the evening her eyes, although red, were brighter and she and Dorothea laughed together when Church offered to teach them their letters. They were looking at his brown-inked writing. Dorothea asked what he was doing. He frowned and pointed the quill into his cheek.

  His eyes stared unfocused for a moment and then he said: ‘I am trying to remember Pope’s “Ode on Solitude” but all I can remember is the last verse.’

  Mary started to say something but Dorothea interrupted: ‘Tell me, how does it go?’
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br />   He held out the piece of bark. When he realised her eyes were still on his face, he cleared his throat and read:

  Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;

  Thus unlamented let me dye;

  Steal from the world and not a stone

  Tell where I lye.

  She shuddered as cold air brushed the back of her neck.

  ‘So what else are you writing?’

  Church shrugged.

  ‘I’m keeping a diary.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because if I don’t, I might never have lived.’

  ‘That’s a bit sad, ain’t it?’ she said lightly, a smile in her voice.

  ‘Can you write?’ he asked, not hearing her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you know your letters?’

  Dorothea nodded but it was tentative. Mary looked away at a broken cobweb hanging in a single strand from the ceiling. They had missed it earlier.

  ‘I can teach you.’

  And that was when they laughed, probably more loudly than they should have. Church blinked slowly and a screen came down over his earnest eyes.

  They ate without speaking. Manning and Jem’s silences were heavy with unspoken words. They exchanged looks. Mary did not talk to Matthew. She was ignoring him and had been sleeping with her sister in the storeroom. But it was Anderson’s actions that Dorothea found puzzling. He knew they had taken shelter in his hut but he hadn’t tried to take her again. She was relieved. But as the days passed she became more aware of him. Matthew wiped his knife on his trouser leg and returned it to its sheath. She wondered if he was still sleeping in the tent or under the verandah with the men.

  Wood sparked and spat in the fireplace and a thin layer of smoke hung over their heads. She and her sister had discovered that the timber inland provided more heat and burnt longer than the twisted trunks of trees that grew closer to the beach. The hut was cleaner too. They had swept out the hearth and raked the floor and reached up into the corners for spiders. The table had been moved and they had brought an empty chest from the storeroom for the clean cups and plates. More hooks hung cooking pots. It could have been their home at the Sound when their mother hadn’t been drinking. It was only the skins hanging from the walls to keep out the draught that made it look any different.

  Isaac relit his pipe. His fat blackened knuckles pushed the long thin stem into the parting of hair that was his mouth. His eyes narrowed as he let the smoke seep through whiskers stained brown by tobacco. Mead pushed his chair back and lit his pipe too. He clasped the bowl of the pipe in the palm of his hand. The other end he placed in the corner of his mouth and puffed from the side as it caught alight. The smell reached over her like the soft comforting touch of a baby’s blanket.

  When she was small and cradled by the hard warm arms of her father the smell of rum and tobacco on his breath and in his clothes enclosed her and kept her safe. She was surprised she remembered. For that feeling of security she had felt in her father’s arms hadn’t lasted for long. Their father had lost interest in his children when there were more than three of them. The more children, the more he was reminded of his failure to provide. He had married his boss’s daughter because Dorothea’s grandfather had lost his farm to the creditors and he couldn’t pay his workmen. It was after Napoleon had surrendered and corn prices had fallen, terribly.

  Dorothea’s mother wasn’t prepared for labouring life. She followed her husband to a farm in Hampshire where they worked and were given a cottage to live in. Dorothea remembered that when her father came home at the end of the week smelling of grog and the pipe, instead of gathering up his children in his arms, he would silently stand over their mother and watch her exhausted attempts to finish the washing, which he thought should have been done on Monday.

  After William was born, her father lost his job. They returned to the village in Surrey where Dorothea’s grandmother was living alone, relying on handouts from the parish. Their father became an itinerant labourer, following the harvest: haymaking near London and then back to Surrey for the corn harvesting later in the year. Dorothea remembered her grandmother looking after the little ones while the rest of them worked in the fields, tying up the sheaves of corn. She saw then her dear papery face, powdered in patches for her eyesight was going, and heard her sweet low voice that never admonished anyone.

  Anderson finished eating and folded his arms behind his head.

  ‘Whales over the back.’

  Dorothea looked up.

  ‘Where?’ she asked, and when he turned she realised he had been talking to Mead and Isaac. But he answered.

  ‘Just below the cliffs. Two adults.’

  ‘It’s been a while since we seen a whaler,’ said Mead.

  Isaac nodded and spouted smoke from his nostrils like the dragon of her grandmother’s stories.

  ‘That was dirty, stinking work,’ continued Mead.

  ‘Wouldn’t know,’ said Isaac.

  ‘You was on a whaler, Jack?’

  Anderson nodded but his eyes looked beyond Mead’s head.

  ‘You know I can still remember what we had to eat,’ said Mead. ‘Monday, corn, beans and pork. Tuesday was codfish and beef; Wednesday, mush and beef; Thursday, corn, beans and pork …’

  ‘How interesting,’ muttered Isaac.

  Anderson’s eyes finally focused on Mead.

  ‘That were an Englishman’s whaler,’ he said and pushed his chair back and stood up.

  He turned his attention to Manning and Jem.

  ‘Come on, we’re putting the boat in.’

  Manning looked as though he was about to say something. Dorothea couldn’t see Anderson’s face but his expression must have stopped him for Manning quietly got up from the table, followed by Jem. And then they all left except Church.

  That was the other thing that puzzled Dorothea. Anderson left Church alone. He never told him to do anything. Church was a shadowy figure in a long ragged coat who hovered on the edge of their circle. Often she forgot he was there. She wondered what he wrote in his diary. She was the only one in her family who could write her name and that was because she was her grandmother’s favourite. She ran her hands along the rough edge of the table and remembered that her grandmother’s hands had been fine and soft. Her mother’s hands must have been like that before she married their father. Grandmother would scrub her palms and her fingernails and after she had wiped them dry with a cloth, starched white with pretty pink flowers sewn into the corners, she would rub perfumed oil into them. It was just as well that Grandmother never knew the place they had come to.

  She could see in Mary her mother’s likeness. They had married weak men. But she knew they didn’t have a choice. Both women were a burden to their families. Dorothea knew that her father would marry them all off if he could, even the younger ones. It was another reason why she had left for Van Diemen’s Land. She wanted a choice. She wanted a strong man who would protect her from other men. When the image of Anderson appeared and she remembered the heat of his hand on her skin, she quickly banished it, for he didn’t count.

  She wrapped her shawl like a scarf over her head and tied the skin around her shoulders. Damp sand stuck to her feet. The other end of the beach was shrouded in fine mist. The sea was black and fierce and its thick white edge washed the shore. Further out, where the swell rolled unbroken from the south, blistered by the wind, foam peaks formed and fell and were a jagged edge along the horizon. A mass of wet clouds tumbled above the waves and then a grey veil crossed the sea. Light leaked through the cracks and the mainland came and went. She breathed the damp air and pushed back her shawl, letting her hair free. The end of the beach came closer. Thick cloud crossed to the islands in the east. Above the sky lightened and the seaweed, gold and brown, shone in piles on shimmering sand. She wandered amongst them, a ragged grey figure, moving the wet silky strands aside with her toe, searching for signs of another world.

  Occasionally she knelt down to look at a shell or a piece of sponge
or some strange opaque creature. Animal or plant, she wasn’t sure. On her way back she walked closer to the waves, and they swirled warmly around her ankles. A piece of brown rubbery weed was being nudged further up the beach by the foam. But it wasn’t weed. Carefully she lifted it with both hands. Its eyes were only just still. It had a long nose, flared at the end, and its neck curved like a jaunty pony; its body was almost translucent and flowed into a tail that curled. Skin ribbed and ribbons of weed. It was a sea dragon.

  The bow of the boat nudged around the point. She felt for the sea dragon to make sure it hadn’t fallen from the shawl she had knotted behind her neck. She wasn’t sure why she kept it. She didn’t want it to smell like the large shell she and Mary had found washed up a few days ago. She walked from the wet sand onto the gently sloping rock, feet numb from the cold, trying to avoid the sharp broken shells that were dropped from the sky by the big black and white gulls. Water had pooled in small depressions in the rock. She also avoided the black patches of granite in case they were slippery. There in the corner of the bay the wind was still. But further out the tops of the waves were white and irregular. She sat on a section of dry rock and leant up against one of the boulders that were arranged like the pebbles of a giant. The boat was rowed closer to shore. The sail was wound around the mast and brought down. It lay beside each man and poked out over the stern. Anderson stood above them, head cocked to the shore, one leg raised against the leeward side, the long steering oar an extension of his arm as he manoeuvred them clear of the rocks. She thought it usually sat higher in the water but then she realised they had taken down the washcloths, the strips of canvas that were strung above the gunwales. It looked leaner and sleek and with each stroke moved cleanly through the water. When they nosed it up on the sand, the wind muffled Anderson’s words. She watched him though. He leapt over the side into waist-high water. His chest sucked in with the shock of it, his arms were held above his head. He ran his hand along the side of the boat, tracing the elegant curve of the empty vessel, and then stood back from the men as they lifted it forwards onto the first roller.