by Robbi Neal
‘It’s so easy,’ she said to the baby, ‘just to be done with you here. After all, you are a murderer, and it’s a fitting punishment for your crime.’
Beth thought if it was hot outside it must be fifty degrees hotter in the kitchen with the wood-burning stove. There was no choice but to have the fire going, they had to have sterilised bottles for the baby and warm milk and bathwater and Beth didn’t really mind doing anything if it was for Gracie. There was something about the baby that soothed Beth. When she held Gracie in her arms the world seemed a better place; when she sang to her, the baby seemed to sing along in sweet tuneful whispers. And when Beth held Gracie close to her chest, her heart was open.
So Beth couldn’t understand why Edie seemed so uninterested in Gracie. Sometimes Beth even thought Edie seemed to hate the baby, like this morning when she said she could drown it. Beth thought Paul looked like he was going to have a heart attack when Edie said that, as though he thought Edie might really do it. She never expected such venom from Edie, who was normally so kind and guileless. Beth was making chamomile tea for Gracie, which she would feed her in tiny teaspoons like an injured bird so that she didn’t choke. In the evenings when it had cooled a bit Beth would take her in the pram all the way down to Eddy Street, where she would rock the pram back and forward over the bumpy road while she chatted to her fella Colin. And at 8 p.m. Colin would walk them both back home to Webster Street and she would hand Gracie over to Paul, who would pace up and down the hallway with the baby until an exhausted Gracie finally fell asleep.
She boiled the water and poured it over the dried chamomile buds. She wanted it ready and cooled for when Edie brought Gracie back from their walk. Beth set the bowl of hot brewing tea aside and placed a doily over it. She had sewn tiny coloured beads around the edges of the doily to weigh it down so flies wouldn’t find their way under it. Later she would strain the tea from the buds. Beth’s mind played Edie’s words over and over in her mind and each time she became surer that Edie wasn’t joking. ‘Surely she was joking,’ Beth said out loud. She thought about it again. Edie could be a very determined person when she got something into her mind.
‘Has she come back yet?’ Paul stood in the kitchen doorway. Beth looked at him and their minds collided on the same path.
‘Come on,’ said Paul, ‘just leave whatever you’re doing. Let’s hurry.’
Beth and Paul ran up Webster Street and crossed over Wendouree Parade to the lake. There was a path that ran around the circumference of the lake but they didn’t know which way to go.
‘We’ll split up — you go that way,’ said Paul, pointing to the left.
Beth nodded and ran, her eyes scanning everywhere, stopping anyone she knew to ask if they had seen Edie, which they hadn’t, or they might have but wasn’t that at least an hour and a half ago? Beth’s mind spun furiously, losing more control with each spin. She saw all the possibilities and all of them were awful and becoming worse as she walked further and further and still couldn’t find Edie. Half an hour later she saw Paul walking towards her and she held out her hands full of nothing and he shook his head.
If something had happened to Gracie or Edie, Paul knew it would be his own fault. He’d been so consumed with his grief he hadn’t really considered Edie’s loss at all. He hadn’t noticed, not until now, when it all came flooding back to him. It was always Beth who bathed the baby, Beth who fed her, Beth who changed her nappies and took her out in the cooler evening air. And it was he who rocked Gracie to sleep each night and he who cooed lullabies to her. Edie never had anything to do with Gracie if she could possibly help it. Paul remembered the times he had seen Edie looking at Gracie as though she was the Devil’s baby. They were just fleeting looks, so afterwards Paul would think he had imagined it.
Paul was puffed from the run from the house to the lake. It was only a short distance, just four or five houses, but he hadn’t been able to breathe properly since Lucy died, the air just wouldn’t come to his lungs. He had walked furiously around the lake, trying to gasp in the air to fuel his pace; he had gone halfway around the lake when he saw Beth walking towards him, her arms held out. She hadn’t found Edie either. He stopped and they both stood still. He didn’t know what to do next. Around them were a few picnickers, mothers with their children; it was a Wednesday and the men were at work. Children were chasing swans, and some of the birds came and hid behind him to escape the bullies. He looked at the houses that gazed down on the lake, and then towards the area of tall grass and caught a glimpse of a woman’s straw hat. Edie’s hat. He ran towards it, pushing his way through the marshy grasses, spraying brown mud over his trousers, shirt and vest until he came to a standstill next to Edie.
He stood in silence. He knew he needed to be careful or they might all drown. Beth stood on the other side of Edie and Paul put his finger to his lips and Beth nodded.
Edie was holding the baby in her arms but Paul couldn’t see if Gracie was okay because she was covered with a cotton sheet. Edie looked at him but didn’t say anything. Her face was unreadable and he didn’t know if Gracie was alive or drowned. He hoped the cotton sheet was to protect her from the sun. But the baby was quiet, and that was a worry.
‘Ssshhh,’ Edie said finally. ‘If you look hard you can see a platypus. There is a yabby he’s been trying to catch. It comes out first and then he comes after it. Ssshhh.’
The only thing Paul wanted to see was Gracie alive and well. Then Edie pointed at a yabby scurrying for its life through the water and after it the hungry platypus, an odd creature from another world, gliding effortlessly through the water like a strange ugly bird. The animal’s grace filled them all and they stood in awe. Too soon the platypus captured its prey and disappeared.
They let the moment wash away slowly and carefully and embedded it in their memories. What they would remember was not the platypus but the mystery of another world touching theirs.
Finally Edie turned and walked out of Fairy Land. Paul and Beth followed and at last Paul asked, ‘Is she okay? Gracie, is she okay? Are you okay?’
‘Of course,’ said Edie and pulled back the sheet to reveal the sleeping baby.
Then she looked up at him and said, ‘She smiled at me, Papa, and everything changed.’
‘I know,’ said Paul. ‘She does that.’
Ten
The Doctor
If he has to give bad news it might as well be with a nice piece of orange cake.
Anyone who has had a baby knows the slightest change of wind is enough to wake it, and when a baby wakes its first instinct is to bellow and let the world know it has been rudely woken. The moment Edie placed Gracie in her crib she woke, looked crossly at the three faces staring down at her, noted their concerned looks and began whimpering, which then built momentum into wailing. Paul, Edie and Beth stood over her like the three wise men.
‘It’s the heat,’ announced Edie, as though she and Gracie had discussed the matter, and she picked the baby up and muttered soothing there-there-theres to her. She had carried Gracie back home from the lake, leaving Beth to push the empty pram. Every now and then she had looked at Paul and said, ‘She’s just so beautiful,’ and Paul thanked Lucy that their eldest girl had come to her senses.
‘We’ll shut her in the bathroom,’ said Beth. ‘That’s what my sister does with her bub. She says it’s the coolest room in the house.’
‘Perhaps we should try the bathroom,’ Paul said. So they laid Gracie on a towel on the bathroom tiles to see if that would turn her off. But still her flesh turned prickly and spotty. Rashes formed in the trapped moisture that gathered in the folds of her baby skin as the hot sun stole its way through the bathroom window to suck at Gracie’s life.
‘It’s not working,’ Paul said and wished again that Lucy were here. She would know what to do with a baby in the heat. ‘It’s cool in my study. I can take her in there and wait for Doctor Appleby’s visit.’
‘Oh, with the walk around the lake this morning I completely for
got he was coming,’ said Edie.
‘Well, he’ll have to make do with drop scones today,’ said Beth.
‘If you’re sure, Papa. I have some writing to do,’ said Edie, patting her pocket.
‘It’s never a problem to have you, Gracie, is it?’ he said. As he took the baby he felt Edie’s reluctance to give her up.
Paul’s study was a small room that replicated his office at work. He had an oak desk inlaid with a leather writing area, his swivel chair, his bookcases and a window that provided him with a view of the front gate so he could see who was coming and going. All that was missing was his pipe, which he had never smoked at home because Lucy hated the clouds of reeking smoke that wandered through the house and settled into the corners of the rooms. Paul sat at his desk, Gracie squirming in his arms, and remembered that Edie liked to be laid across an arm when she had colic. So he laid Gracie across his knee. Even at nearly six weeks Gracie was so small she lay easily on his lap. She made weak mewing noises that sounded like the pain in his chest.
‘Cry for her, my darling,’ Paul whispered. ‘Cry for her all you like, for I certainly do.’ And he put one hand against Gracie’s tiny chest, covering it entirely, and the other hand against his own aching chest, creating a circuit linking their hearts and their loss.
‘There will never be anything of her,’ said Doctor John Appleby as he stood in the doorway ten minutes later with his cup and saucer in one hand and his bag in the other.
The doctor had come in through the back door, straight into the kitchen so he could grab a cup of tea and a slice of cake or a biscuit from Beth.
‘What have you baked for me this morning, Beth?’ he asked, and she scowled like she always did. She needed to know her place, that girl, she needed to know that she served not only Mister Cottingham but Mister Cottingham’s guests if they so desired it, and she could wipe that forced smile off her insolent face too, he thought.
‘How do you think the bub is doing, Doctor?’ she asked, passing him a plate of drop scones smothered in jam and snowy peaks of cream. He was a bit disappointed, he couldn’t help it, he really liked her orange cake best and a piece of that was just what he needed this morning.
‘We’ve had a busy morning,’ said Beth, thinking of their anxious flight to the lake. ‘I didn’t have time to make a cake. So what about baby Gracie, what do you think?’
‘Ah well, that’s a conversation I need to have with your employer,’ said Doctor Appleby and off he trundled up the hallway, his teacup rattling on its saucer and spilling tea onto the drop scone that balanced on the edge, a plate of four more drop scones on a plate in the other hand, his satchel hanging from his arm. Beth took the kettle off the stove — they were both steaming.
Every Wednesday afternoon Doctor John Appleby made time to come by the Cottingham home to check the baby. Really, he just wanted to make sure she was still breathing. There was little he could do, but he hoped his visits gave Cottingham and his daughter some comfort, and Beth’s cooking was a nice little fringe benefit. He stood in the doorway to Paul’s study. Paul was sitting to the side of the desk looking over books on his shelf. John could see the baby lying restlessly on Paul’s lap; Paul had one hand on her chest to stop her falling off.
‘She’s always going to be fragile; it will be touch and go for many months to come. I don’t know if she’s going to make it.’ He felt Paul needed to know, bluntly, so there could be no confusion about what he was in for. One death on top of another was not going to be easy for him. John knew the best thing was to prepare him.
‘I didn’t see you come in, John,’ said Paul, and John saw the aching etched in the other man’s face.
‘You can breathe a sigh of relief if she manages to reach the age of say … hmm … seven years,’ he added, feeling maybe he had been too harsh after all and perhaps he should offer a shred of hope. He walked over and put the cup and saucer on Paul’s oak desk and it balanced uneasily where the leather met the wood. He put his bag on the floor, unclipped it and pulled out his stethoscope and put it against the baby’s back. ‘Hmmmm,’ he said noncommittally, then added, ‘Babies dehydrate quickly and get brain sickness, especially in this merciless heat,’ and he flipped Gracie over while she was still on Paul’s lap. He listened to her chest and put his hand against her head. ‘Is she lifting her head?’
Paul nodded no.
‘Is she holding her own weight at all?’ and again Paul nodded no. This was a concern.
‘Has she lifted her head at all?
‘I told you already John, no, she’s so tiny. I don’t remember Edie at this age. Maybe it’s too soon for head-lifting.’
He could hear the panic in Paul’s voice and said calmly and quietly, ‘Well Paul, it could be just that she’s small and she was early. But I’ve seen this before in the early ones.’
‘Come on, John, spit it out,’ said Paul.
‘There’s nothing to spit out — not at this stage. We just need to wait and see, but she could be damaged from the early birth.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Paul emphatically. ‘She’s perfect.’
‘I hope so, Paul, I really do.’ John left his cup and saucer on the desk, picked up his bag, put his stethoscope in it and walked to the doorway.
Doctor John Appleby turned to leave and as he always did he stopped and carefully put his bag on the ground as if he had just thought of something very important. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his brow. By God it was hot this year. He rested his hand against the door jamb to harness its strength and said, as though he had only just thought of it and it was the very first time he had ever made any comment on the subject, even though he said the same thing every week and Paul had become so accustomed to the words that he mouthed them in unison with him:
‘Don’t you think it’s time, Paul, to take the ugly timber boards off her mother’s room?’ He tried to say it in his kindest voice, knowing he was picking at an open wound.
Paul snapped, ‘No John, I do not!’ As he always did.
So John shrugged his shoulders, as he always did, because what else was there to do?
The sun fuelled itself on Paul’s anguish and aching and by afternoon it was blistering the tar and scorching the trees, incinerating the leaves to dust and showing no mercy to the gasping earth or the people who tried to live on it. It dried up the mines and shrivelled their walls, making them brittle and chalky. Choked dry by the sun, the mines no longer breathed their cold air into the town in the afternoon. At four o’clock the men emerged coughing mine dust from their lungs, their eyes red and stinging with grit and their clothes drenched in sweat.
Paul had to keep the sun out. It sucked the breath out of his lungs, and if the heat got into the house any more it would suffocate him and kill the baby. He felt that every breath he took was a breath stolen from Lucy, a breath denied to her. He couldn’t lose Gracie as well, no matter what the doctor said. He couldn’t lose the last gift Lucy had given him and something had to be done. The doctor was right, the heat could kill a tiny infant and Gracie even more so because she was weak and ill. But Paul couldn’t say any of this to John. Paul looked away from the doctor and stared out the window at the hazy air.
John Appleby sighed. The man was losing his brain. His wife dying and a sick child was too much for him. Such a shame in a fellow who had once been so smart and quick.
‘Have you ever been to Coober Pedy, John?’ asked Paul, looking back at him.
‘No, can’t say that I have.’ Yes, the man was losing it. If that baby survived, which it wouldn’t, it was likely to be an orphan.
‘No, neither have I,’ said Paul.
John sighed, picked up his leather bag, shut his concerns safe inside, secured the clip and set off.
Paul watched from the window as the doctor walked down to the front fence, his bag swinging in one hand, the other hand wiping the sweat from his neck with his handkerchief.
When the doctor had reached the letterbox and headed off do
wn the street, Paul dipped his nib into the ink and wrote:
I am advertising for four miners and I am willing to pay good wages.
He leant back and looked at what he had written. That would do it. That would get him workers straight off. He had never come across a miner who would take tributes if he could take wages. He kissed Gracie’s soft downy head and scratched out what he had written and started again.
Wanted.
Four Miners.
Immediate start.
Full day’s pay — no tributes.
Monday 18th, 7 a.m. Cottingham Residence, Webster Street.
Then he crossed out the four and wrote eight. Tomorrow he would get his clerk Jensen to pick it up, copy it and run over to The Star and The Courier.
Eleven
The Miners
18 December 1905, when it is agreed that Mister Cottingham has lost his marbles.
They wouldn’t come down the pathway even though he’d gone out and beckoned to them from the front verandah. They just shook their heads and then one of them called out that they were right to wait where they were. Paul, Beth and Edie stood watching them from the study window, Gracie in Paul’s arms. There were about twenty despondent men standing in groups of three or four, sharing smokes and occasionally kicking at the dirt. Men with uneven home haircuts, whose shoulders hunched and limbs hung gloomily. They were men whose egos were battered by never having enough to stand tall.
‘That one’s my brother-in-law,’ said Beth.
‘Which one?’ asked Paul.
‘Oh, you’ll know him,’ said Beth, ‘he’ll be the noisy one.’
‘They’ve been out there since five. What do you need with them?’ asked Edie, looking at the clock. It was now seven.