Year of the Beast

by Steven Carroll

  By late Saturday morning she was standing on the station platform. The view of the town hadn’t changed. It was still pretty. A little Switzerland in the Victorian countryside. And, above it all, the gardens and the many wandering paths it contained and which she could easily picture. No, the town hadn’t changed. Or the view. But the viewer had. She’d arrived in summer, now autumn had fallen. A short time. But enough to make her life different in such a way that it would never be the same again. And between the inevitability of two dates, there was now a story, the indignity and the security of a roll of notes in her handbag, and a swelling in her belly that would soon begin to show. The egg from which a story would be hatched.

  ***

  That was how it happened: common, grubby even, a gloomy back room painted in regulation brown and cream, hurried meetings and brief farewells before sneaking off. And yet like nothing else she had ever known before or would again. All changed.

  Maryanne stares out into the night. That touch of spring is leaving the air. The street is empty and still. She feels a sudden shiver. The yellow light disappears from the doorway as she closes the door and steps back inside, leaving the inky darkness to spread over the streets, cottages and rooftops of the suburb.

  Inside, Katherine is reading the paper, but looks up when Maryanne enters the room.

  ‘Gone?’

  Maryanne, still dwelling in that strange, fairytale world she entered and lived in for a short while, looks at her, puzzled. ‘Gone?’

  ‘Father Geoghan,’ Katherine replies, as if to say, who else?

  Maryanne nods as she sits. ‘Yes, gone for now.’ She pauses, her mind returning to the priest’s visit. ‘He means to wear me down.’

  Katherine says nothing, scrutinising her sister as she ponders the comment, both concerned but also alive to her sister’s flaws. Don’t think I don’t care, Maryanne, the look seems to be saying, but don’t think I don’t know you. You imagine something, and just because you imagine it, you think you can make it real. As if the world will bend to your will because you imagine it so, but are you taking on more than you know? Look at you, you’re exhausted already.

  Maryanne sighs, glancing at her sister. Yes. That’s it. That’s what she’s thinking. Little sister, too much imagination for your own good. Living some dream that is bound to collide with life and shatter because the world doesn’t work like that. Taking on something that is bigger than she understands. A permanent little girl with great expectations and grand dreams deciding things inside the grown-up Maryanne. Yes, that’s how Katherine sees her sister. Not quite grown up. And she may well be right.

  Maryanne studies her. They barely look like sisters. That they don’t think alike doesn’t surprise her. There is a seven-year difference between them, and since the death of their mother giving birth to their younger brother (neither mother nor child survived), Katherine has been both a mother and older sister. Their father, a police constable, continued to bring money in until he dropped dead one day on the street. But it was Katherine who ran the house. It was only when Maryanne was grown and working at the school that Katherine announced one day that she was off. Off? Off where? To see the country, said Katherine. She’d always wanted to see the country. All of it. She would travel it, she would find work, whatever came up. She would send money, to help keep the house. And so she did. She returned every year with tales of her travels, and then was off again. That was twenty years ago, and she is still travelling the country, for the country, she tells Maryanne, is large; she only has one life and fears she will never see it all.

  And as much as Maryanne enjoys her tales, she’s always shaken her head at the many requests she’s had from Katherine for them both to explore the country together. It’s a wide, wide world out there, Katherine would tell her. Come with me. But Maryanne likes cities and towns. They’re different. But what Maryanne will never understand is how she can walk the breadth of the country and not be cowed, yet defer to the likes of Father Geoghan in a way Maryanne has long ceased to do. So it’s with a puzzled look on her face that Maryanne addresses Katherine.

  ‘How can you still believe it all?’

  Katherine is a bit put out, for the tone of Maryanne’s question bears little of the respect for an older sister that it should. ‘Believe what?’

  ‘God, heaven, hell,’ Maryanne answers. ‘We’re not children any more. How can you believe any of it?’

  ‘How can you not?’

  Katherine’s response – impatient, like a parent talking to a clever child, one that may well be just a bit too clever for her own good – is said in a way that assumes this is all beyond question.

  Of course, Maryanne muses, contemplating her sister’s way of looking at the world: take away God, heaven and hell, and nothing makes sense, does it? And we can’t live in a world like that. It’s got to make sense. But that’s just it, it doesn’t. At least, not the way they tell you, dear sister. Certainly not the way the Father Geoghans of this world tell you. But perhaps, for Katherine, it’s a way of not being alone out there in the bush. And she’s never thought of it like that before: God as a sort of companion, someone to talk to. Like a mate. Perhaps, in the end, they found different Gods. Katherine’s is company, a friendly ear at the end of the day around the fire. I have warmed both hands, Maryanne suddenly finds herself thinking: an old poem, but whose? I have warmed both hands before the fire of life, it sinks … something, something … Is that the way Katherine sees it? Is that the God she found, and sticks to like a friend? Someone who’s there. Beside her, while she warms her hands by the fire. Whereas for Maryanne, there was only ever the God of Fear.

  ‘Oh,’ Maryanne eventually replies, almost lightly, picking up the conversation, ‘I might still believe in hell.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’ Katherine says, her frown suggesting that if it is, it’s not funny. ‘You’ve picked up some clever ideas since you stopped going to church, haven’t you?’

  ‘Oh, it’s no joke. I saw it today. Hell, I mean.’ Maryanne turns the tea-pot round in her palms, nodding at the newspaper: ‘Duty’, ‘Hun’ and ‘Yes’ written large on the open page. ‘And it was frightening, but … fascinating.’

  ‘That wasn’t hell, that was your imagination.’ And Maryanne notes again that Katherine uses the word ‘imagination’ in a way that suggests there’s something unhealthy about having it when you’re grown: something that will eventually get you into trouble.

  Maryanne ignores her and continues as if her sister hasn’t spoken.

  ‘There were two choirs on opposite sides of the street. One on the steps of the Post Office, the other lined up behind Mannix.’

  Katherine nods slowly at the mention of Mannix. A great man, the nod says: a great man we are lucky to have fighting our battles; come at just the right time, as the great do.

  ‘It was like watching opposing armies. All praying to their God before battle.’ Maryanne pauses a moment. ‘Rocks, eggs, drunks, choirs, fights, blood and this … this madness. As though everybody, every single last one of them, had given up their minds.’ She turns to Katherine, suddenly intense, almost, it seems to her sister, frightening. ‘That’s what I call hell. And it wasn’t my imagination. I saw it.’ An odd smile lights her face. ‘And it was fascinating. Horrible, but fascinating.’ She pauses again, caught by a thought. ‘And Father Geoghan …’

  ‘What of him?’

  ‘Do you really think he believes in God?’

  ‘What sort of question is that?’

  ‘I think,’ Maryanne says slowly, ‘I think he believes in hell. I think he believes in hell more than anything else. That he’d be lost without it.’

  ‘And what,’ Katherine asks briskly, changing the almost sacrilegious subject, ‘were you doing walking round the city?’ She doesn’t add with a belly like that, but she doesn’t have to; the look says it all.

  Maryanne answers her calmly, knowing how preposterous her words will sound. ‘I get restless. Confined. I have to get up and go out or I
feel like I’ll go mad. I have to go … somewhere. And today I went to a suffragette meeting. Oh, they don’t go around calling themselves that. What do they call themselves? Women’s Peace Army? I think that’s it …’

  Katherine stares at her, concerned. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve never been to one before.’

  ‘You’ve been with those types?’

  ‘What types?’ Maryanne asks with what she knows is a maddening incomprehension.

  ‘You know what types. Everybody knows. Those women who stir things up.’

  ‘I just wanted to see for myself. And they’re no different from you or me.’

  ‘Not like me, they’re not!’

  ‘That’s just it: you’re just their type, don’t you know?’ Maryanne smiles at her sister, remembering the meeting. ‘I felt … at home. For the first time in a long time. Nobody staring at me: no wedding ring, swollen belly. If it wasn’t quite home, at least I felt welcome. They gave me tea afterwards, and a card, and invited me to visit their offices whenever I wanted. Then I left and walked headlong into the mob.’ Here, she stares long and hard at her sister. ‘And, believe me, the difference was night and day. Things making sense, and then no sense at all. A place of reason, and a place of no reason whatsoever. That’s hell.’

  Katherine stares back at her sister with a mixture of admiration and reproof and shakes her head. The sympathetic reproof of an older sister who is sure she, not Maryanne, knows how the real world works. But she’s wary too, for there’s an intensity in her little sister, a sort of waywardness that was always there: laughing in church, giving the boys the eye, or giving them more of her eyes than was good for her. A kind of recklessness, a hunger for something more than life was giving her. And now this … consorting with these women. Bad as Bolsheviks. And the look on Katherine’s face also asks: Maryanne, aren’t you a little old for all this?

  A silence hangs between them briefly, a stand-off, before Katherine speaks, changing the topic once more. Changing her tone. Now it’s personal. Two sisters talking of something that matters: something that really matters.

  ‘Will you go to the home? See it?’

  Maryanne strokes her belly, scarcely believing what her sister has said. There is accusation in her reply. ‘Do you think it’s theirs?’

  ‘Perhaps we should see it.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No! But let’s see the place. And not because Father Geoghan says. Just to find out. No harm.’

  ‘You don’t think I can do this, do you?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. But don’t you think we ought to see it? So we know, if we ever need to?’

  Maryanne leans back in her chair, staring at the best ceiling of the best room in the house, her earlier suspicions now confirmed, eyes and head suddenly aching with tiredness. She doesn’t think I can do it. They all want me to farm the child out. Give it up. The priest thinks it’s theirs. Mannix thinks it is. God thinks it is, and God wants what’s God’s. Men and women in the street she’s known all her life look at her with either pity or contempt. And Eve, fallen woman, expelled from her garden by Mrs Collins, who lost her drawers, suddenly feels the loneliness of her expulsion, while stroking her belly. Now, it seems to her, huge: like the job in front of her.

  The world will call the child a bastard. A bastard child. She’s never spoken the word. At least, has no memory of ever using it. And why should she have? Or thought about it, until the child. But out there the world will call the child a bastard: a cruel word. One of those words that wound. And as she dwells on it she is suddenly in some cruel, distant playground. She is her child and the child’s pain is hers, as the blow of the word comes down upon it. And she knows she can bear her own pain, but not this, not the pain of her child. And, not for the first time, she’s asking herself: what if they’re right, after all? Father Geoghan and all the Father Geoghans? Will not the child be best removed from the stain of its conception, so that it knows not its shame? And then, and only then, the words ‘bastard’ and ‘illegitimate’ will not rain down on it and mark the child for life. So that it will not one day look about in that distant playground and see that everybody has gone, because no one will play with the bastard child.

  And what if they’re right, after all? For a moment, she almost agrees. Feels the weariness of a long day and a long evening taking effect. Weighing her down. Feels the resolve and the strength of the day going out of her. They wear you down, these people. They come back for you again and again. For that won’t be the last of Father Geoghan.

  Her eyes droop. She’s tired. No, exhausted. It’s true, she can’t do this. She barely has the strength to look after herself. They’re right. They’re all right. They were all along. The enormity of it all is suddenly apparent. It had been there all the time, only she never saw it. Or never wanted to see it. A child! Not just for an hour or two, babysitting for a friend on Sundays, but forever. At her age. And lately, she’s been feeling her age. For she has just progressed from thirty-nine to forty. And there is something in the change of numbers that makes her feel too old for all this. How will she work when the money finally runs out? If Father Geoghan is right, the school won’t take her back. How will she find the hours in the days and nights – and where on earth will she find the money for all the things she can think of and all the things she can’t think of yet because she doesn’t know what she’s in for? Hasn’t the faintest idea. And the enormity of it all, like some laughing Jack springing from a box, is suddenly obvious. Staring her in the face. She can bear the looks she gets in the street, in shops and on trams. Knowing looks. Day in, day out. She can bear that. She’s grown. But can she bear passing that weight on to her child? Have them all staring at the child the way they stare at her?

  Yes, she can bear her own pain – but her child’s? And even if she could, should she put the child through it? Is it fair? Wouldn’t it be better all round to give the child a clean break? A chance in life, a better chance than she can give it. And the strength seeping from her, she closes her eyes in surrender.

  ‘Yes, I’ll go to the home. I’ll see it.’

  ‘We both will,’ Katherine says, eyeing the weary frame of her sister. ‘Just so we know. No harm.’

  ‘No.’

  Maryanne has almost succumbed to sleep when she hears Katherine clearing the table and snaps her eyes open.

  ‘Let me help.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But …’

  Katherine shakes her head. ‘There’s no need. Rest.’

  Unresisting, Maryanne sinks back into her chair, and immediately dozes off, vaguely aware of the sound of cups, the pot, the plates, being taken to the kitchen at the back of the house. When she opens her eyes again the room will be cleared, everything will be gone. Simple. And in that moment, eyes closed while the room is being cleared, she can see how much easier and simpler for everyone it would be. Just close your eyes and let somebody else clear things up. Take matters off your hands. So that when you open your eyes, as she does now, there’s no sign that anything – cups, plates, pot – was ever there.

  4.

  Row after row of cots. All in neatly arranged aisles. Stretching out across a vast hall. It could almost be a factory. But the babies are not made here, they’re brought here. Every now and then a tiny hand reaches up into the air: a tentacle testing space to see if anyone is out there. And finding nothing, returns to the security of the cot. So many, and all so quiet. What do they do to make them so quiet?

  Maryanne is walking slowly along one of the aisles, Katherine behind her, and a nun, elderly and calm (as though she’s been doing this all her life and seen it all, which she possibly has), beside her. She talks like a kindly factory owner giving Maryanne and Katherine an inspection of her plant. She points to this child and that: mostly the babies of young girls, too young to look after themselves, let alone a baby. Young girls running wild, their fathers gone to war or gone to drink. And their mothers, worn out by a lifetime of having one baby after anot
her, too tired to look after their own – let alone the children of their children. And so here they are. God’s children now.

  And then, the nun goes on, there are the mothers who just can’t cope any more, the mothers who finished up with one baby too many and went a little mad for a while. And the husband-less mothers and the wife-less fathers with babies they can’t keep, as much as they might want to. Which brings her to the babies that nobody wants. Never intended for the world, never wanted. Little white elephants. She smiles at one cot after another, reeling off their names. If they’re lucky they’ll be adopted out to good religious homes. Or go to their special callings. If not, there is the orphanage. But all God’s children now, the little foundlings.

  Foundlings. The word is all wrong, Maryanne can’t help but think. Because they’re not found. They’re given away. Abandoned, even. And suddenly she’s picturing a world of abandoned things: children, toys, homes. All the things that nobody cares about or wants any more. Cast-offs at whiteelephant fetes. Like these babies. No matter what becomes of them, they will always have an abandoned look: an emptiness in them that a mother or father might have filled. Thrown into the world, casting around, picking themselves up and going through life with that lost look forever in their eyes. And so many. But you can’t call it the thrown children’s home, or the lost children’s home, can you? So it’s the foundling home, and she guesses there’s a bit of hope in the choice of words. But only a bit. For the very word, foundling, will always remind her of abandoned animals.