Year of the Beast

by Steven Carroll

  At some point Maryanne decides she’s seen enough. She tells Katherine, and her sister, gazing thoughtfully on the rows of cots, nods in silent agreement and they turn around, Sister Bernadette (for that, they have discovered, is her name) leading the way. There are occasional cries from a cot here and there, but the place is eerily quiet. And every now and then a little hand reaches up into the air, testing, once again, to see if anybody is out there. And finding nothing, falls back again to the security of the cot. And so it will be, Maryanne imagines, throughout the morning and the afternoon and the evening: all the mornings, afternoons and evenings. A hand will rise into the air, and retreat. Rise and retreat. Until, one morning or afternoon, someone comes along and takes that hand in theirs. Or does not come along, and the little hand tires of testing the air and eventually gives up.

  That baby, that one or that one, Maryanne tells herself as they leave the hall, could be my child. Testing the air, and finding nothing there, until it gives up. But she knows before she even leaves the place that the hand of her child will never become one of these tentative feelers, because she will never give the child up. And, for this, it has been worth the visit. Well, Katherine, we’ve seen the place; now we know.

  Suddenly, she can’t wait to get out. There are hurried goodbyes and thank-yous at the front door, Sister Bernadette watching them leave with the kindly eyes that have seen it all and know full well that this one has got away from them. For as enormous as the task of bringing up the child by herself may seem to Maryanne, the task will be her life’s work. Her life will be different from anything she ever imagined. And when her child’s hand reaches into the air – morning, afternoon or evening – it will discover that there is someone out there, someone who loves it. Not God’s child, but hers.

  As they are walking up the path to the front gate of the home, Maryanne comes to a sudden stop. For there, not far from the path (and they weren’t there when Maryanne and Katherine arrived), in a leafy part of the grounds is a small group of pregnant girls. One of them, Maryanne guesses, is no more than thirteen or fourteen. Katherine stops too, at first puzzled, until she follows Maryanne’s gaze.

  The girls – and Maryanne, at what seems the terribly advanced age of forty, can only think of them as girls – are sitting on benches in the shade. All dressed in simple smocks, pregnant girls. Possibly on a break from their duties at the home. There are roses and geraniums in bloom. Without the need of being told, she is certain that none of these girls will leave the home with their babies. There they are in varying stages of pregnancy, chatting or silently sitting with their thoughts.

  Suddenly, two of them jump up and begin chasing each other around the group. Girls, she tells herself again, still with the child’s impulse to spontaneously play, throw caution to the wind, and be children again. The group looks up at the two girls; laughter chimes in the morning air. The game finishes; the chaser and the chased sink onto their chairs, faces flushed and grinning. A stolen moment.

  Maryanne looks back at Katherine, slowly shaking her head. They move on, leaving the scene behind, having been unobserved the whole time. But the memory of hands like feelers reaching into the air and that garden of pregnant girls stays with her long after: throughout the afternoon, and the days and months that follow.

  ***

  Steam from the engine trails past the carriage window as they leave. She watches the station recede. Broadmeadows. It is a name that suggests pleasant English fields of grain or grass, swaying in a gentle summer breeze. But these paddocks of Scotch thistle and scrub are hardly what she calls meadows. The foundling home is only nine or ten miles from the city, but it may as well be in the country. White smoke – which, years from now, she will learn is the sign of a good fireman – obscures the view like sudden cloud, then parts just as quickly to reveal open paddocks, occasional houses and the odd shop of a small farming community. And, in the distance, Maryanne can see what appears to be a mansion.

  The train slows for the next station, for the small farming community has a station, as well as a flour mill and tall silos that rise before her like a medieval castle. A landmark, she guesses, visible for miles around. And as the train slows she is drawn into the view, as if being drawn into a painting. One that moves. Is alive. And it is strangely entrancing, as if the place itself has cast a spell on her. Or perhaps she is just tired, the way travelling makes you tired. The way Katherine is tired, close to nodding off in front of her. She turns back to the view, drawn into it again. She’s never laid eyes on this place before, and yet she knows it. Feels an odd connection. Strange, she muses, how some places speak to the very heart of us. They think us, and we cannot resist.

  The train huffs to a stop just before the station platform begins, almost as though it just felt like it. And Maryanne finds herself looking down a dirt road. A picket fence here, a street lamp a little way ahead. Two people are walking down the road: a soldier and a woman. She may be his wife, or a friend or sister, but the way the soldier is walking – his stiff upright carriage, the tilt of the head when he turns to her, that touch of formality – suggests she is the rather formal mother of a rather formal family. At least, it does to Maryanne. Besides, mothers are much on her mind. The soldier – an officer, for he wears an officer’s hat – is carrying not a rifle, but a tennis racquet.

  The train moves on then stops in the station. A horse and jinker, the driver holding the reins, wait on a sandy pathway that runs alongside the platform. The train moves on again, a cloud of steam obscures the view and when it parts the view is gone. Changed. She is no longer drawn into it. The spell is broken. But she can’t help wondering about the two people, and the odd image of a soldier striding off down that dirt road and into battle, carrying not a rifle but a tennis racquet, comes to her. Then she pictures a battalion of soldiers, an army of them, striding into battle, not with rifles but tennis racquets. Volley upon volley of white tennis balls flying forward and back and forward again over the net of the front line: white tennis balls, flying and bouncing from one side to the other, occasionally dropping into no-man’s land, where, no doubt, they would be collected at the close of the day’s play.

  It’s a fanciful thought that amuses her for a minute or two. But it’s just that. Fanciful. For the world has given birth to a beast. It is the Age of the Beast. Everywhere, in everything. And the armies of the beast are not clutching tennis racquets but rifles: firing off not white, fluffy tennis balls, but shells and bombs. Huge weapons to squash tiny tin soldiers. It is everywhere, this mood: a mass surrender to the beast in all of us. In shop windows, draped across public buildings, in every eye on every street, in the newspapers and magazines everybody devours on trams and in stations, howling with death and darkness and accusation, as if written by the threeheaded dog of hell itself. An awful time to be born into.

  And the Milhaus case, one of those scandals that consumes a city from time to time, in the newspapers day after day after day: a story to set the beast’s nostrils twitching with the smell of blood. And, for a moment, Maryanne can imagine what it is to live through the worst of a revolution, like the one sweeping over Russia right now and over the pages of the newspapers; can imagine what it’s like to be there when history shrugs, and the Father Geoghans of this world have their hour of mastery over human souls. But it’s the here and now she can’t escape. Ugly days. Days of a dark sun, even in glaring spring. Maryanne draws herself up in the carriage seat, rubs her belly, and looks out to this world she barely recognises any more as hers, as if about to do battle with the beast herself.

  Neither Maryanne nor Katherine has spoken since they boarded the train. Now Katherine, speaking slowly, drowsily, with a puzzled and thoughtful frown as she gazes out the window, asks, ‘Just what do they give them to make them so quiet?’

  Maryanne nods. ‘I was thinking that too.’

  ‘Babies aren’t quiet,’ Katherine adds, with the authority of someone who’s delivered a few in her time on remote bush stations, miles from doctor
s. ‘Not that quiet.’

  They fall into thoughtful silence, staring out the window. Neither of them has said as much, but it is understood, silently agreed upon, that they have seen the home. And will not be seeing it again.

  Gradually, Katherine’s eyes close and she nods off to the rhythmic clicking of the rails. Maryanne sits, haunted by the memory of tiny feelers testing the air, unable to sleep. But she is also comforted, has drawn strength from the visit, because her sister now thinks she can do it. Or, at least, thinks she must do it. And although Katherine has been beside her these last weeks, looking after her, doing what she’s always done, she’s now with her. In spirit, and Katherine’s, Maryanne notes, smiling at her sleeping sister, is a big spirit. And when she gives, she gives everything. And Maryanne sits, as if warming her hands by the glow of that spirit.

  One stop comes, then another. And another: Essendon. It’s a wonder, she muses, looking out the window, that they haven’t got around to changing that name. But they haven’t, and here this place is, complete with a station: a little Germany on the fringes of the city. She amuses herself with alternative names for a moment or two while passengers get off and on, but can come up with nothing satisfactory, and perhaps that’s what happened. Nobody else could either. And so here it sits, this little Germany: a foreign land now receding as it slips from view. Then it is gone.

  There is a novel on her lap. Hardy. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. She finished the book on the way to the foundling home and both likes and doesn’t like it, just as she both likes and doesn’t like Tess. A sad but annoying girl. And that’s all she’d be if it weren’t for the old family name, the local squire and the squire’s mansion and land. Money and a grand old name – that changes everything. An irritating girl becomes a heroine, and her story becomes tragic. A pure woman no more. If it weren’t for the squire and the horse, wouldn’t it be just plain pathetic? What if Tess were just an annoying girl with a vivid imagination who fell on her back in an open field with a farmhand and wound up with a swollen belly? Or in a city laneway with a factory hand? Or in the back room of a school house with a small-town shopkeeper? Not the same story. No woman fallen from purity there.

  But Maryanne can’t picture Tess riding into the forest on anything but a squire’s horse, her arms around the squire’s waist; the horse, rehearsed in its role, slowing to a trot in the moonlight; and Tess minutes from being a fallen woman. We might all be fallen, she faintly smiles, thinking of Father Geoghan on his Sunday pulpit, only some are more tragically fallen than others. Almost makes the fall worthwhile.

  Maryanne’s story, the thing that fills out the years between two dates, has no squire, only a shopkeeper. A draper and haberdasher, from a family of shopkeepers. No grand family name, no title, no family estate to come begging to, no wild ride into the forest on a black steed, no moonlight fall. And as much as she might like to imagine the child being conceived in the gardens amid birdsong and trees, it was more than likely in the dingy room at the back of the school: a dingy room with its allotted hour of afternoon sun and talk of beauty, but cramped and dingy all the same. Is that a story worthy of a miracle? To be jilted by a lord, deprived of the family fortune and cast out into a cold world that doesn’t care – that is one thing. But to be jilted by a small-town draper – that is another.

  And so, with the book on her lap and staring out the carriage window, her thoughts turn to the story life has given her, and the one that life didn’t, but could have.

  Yes, to be jilted by a small-town shopkeeper is unfortunate, at best. But to have the giant door of the family mansion slammed in your face, that is another thing altogether. Tragic. Noble. Worthy of a miracle. A story to stir more than just a shrug. Or a shake of the head before getting on with things. To have a titled door slammed in your face – that invites sympathy, compassion, sorrow. And anger, for there is injustice in slamming the giant family door in the face of a pure woman: it casts her into a contest she can never win. Maryanne nods slowly, looking out the window. That’s a story, like doing battle with some ancient god after it’s taken your virtue and cast you aside: pounced on your innocence, then, well satisfied with its sport, gone off laughing. And you, left huddled on some windswept, lonely road, the seed and fruit of the god’s sport in your belly. Yes, that’s a story.

  But she’s in a country without lords or squires or an aristocracy. And all those ancient gods have long since left the scene. But there are lords of sorts, and mansions of sorts: landowners with acres and acres of countryside, fathers and sons who’d think nothing of casually pouncing on a woman’s innocence, then casting her aside and slamming the family door in her face. Not quite gods and not quite lords, but godlike and lordly enough to make it a struggle that is nobly lost before it’s begun. Uneven. Unjust. Almost tragic.

  She opens the book at the last page. The black flag of Tess’s death is raised. Two observers of the sombre spectacle kneel in prayer, then rise. Homage is done. A tragic tale has been told.

  There is much to be learned from literature, and Maryanne is learning. The story must be large, a noble yet futile struggle against the gods of the day. And so Viktor, draper and haberdasher, is transformed, somewhere between the stops of Kensington and Spencer Street stations. No longer a shopkeeper from a line of shopkeepers that goes right back to some muddy little German town by a muddy little river, but a wealthy landowner. A married one. With a respected place in the community’s life. Marked out for politics. A future prime minister, even. She tilts her head from one side to the other, weighing it up. Possibly. Someone she might read about in the newspapers one day and say to herself, I knew you when …

  So Viktor – wealthy, married, respected – packs her onto a cart (she has worked as a maid in the family mansion that overlooks a vineyard) and dispatches her to the nearest town and then to the city. Never to return. Just after he’s given her a heavy bundle of notes. An indignity, but one she must endure: a pure woman, fallen from purity, watching herself being paid off like a whore. And so, with the fruit of having fornicated with the gods of the day swelling her belly, she catches a lonely train to the city, where slowly, bit by bit, those with whom she comes in contact learn her story. A story worthy of the child. Worthy of the mother. Worthy of them all. A tragic tale of tragic origins that the child will come to learn, pass on, never question and never forget.

  And who will there be to say it didn’t happen? She looks out the window, surprised by the inner city. There is much to be learned from literature. Life, Maryanne muses, watching the drab, soot-covered railway yards come into view, gives us little enough. And so, when we can, we have every right to give our lives a little something that life hasn’t. Who’s to know?

  The train pulls into Spencer Street station. Katherine wakes. On the platform, Maryanne waits for her sister while she gathers an umbrella and the magazines she never read. Beside Maryanne, the engine hisses and blows steam into the air. Like an animal in winter, sighing. And she is drawn to the engine as if it were alive, sighing steam and stamping its feet like a tired cab horse, speaking to her the way animals speak. Tired and in need of food and rest and a pat. It lives and speaks, this engine. And she is drawn to its tired sighs. And while she is staring at the engine, the driver, his goggles on his forehead, cloth cap pulled back and shirt and tie under his overalls, pops his head out the cabin window. He nods at her, a smile across his grimy face, and she nods back. And in that moment she envies him, for it is a face and a smile that want for nothing. This man, she is convinced, has the happy, contented eyes of someone who is doing what he was born to do. How wonderful. How splendid. He waves and disappears into the cabin, and she is left gazing at the engine, which is hissing, exhaling long, tired but contented sighs of white steam. Alive.

  Katherine emerges, waving the umbrella. Steam floats in clouds along the platform, following them as they make their way out to the street and into a hot burst of spring sunlight that seems to dissolve the sisters on contact. The smell of steam and soot e
vaporates. The spell with it. Everything is suddenly pale and washed out by the late spring sun.

  The first thing they see when they step from the station is a great banner stretched across a building on the corner: ‘ENLIST, THE EMPIRE CALLS’. ‘VOTE “YES”’ another banner screams in bold letters, while a poster beside it shows a laughing Kaiser and grinning Huns. There is a crowd on the street. The beast has reassembled itself, swaying this way and that, as the beast does. A speaker shouts, the beast roars. And at some point Maryanne could swear that the beast turns its vacant eyes to her, collective in its scrutiny, and lets out a slow, menacing snarl – recognising, with a deep, unerring instinct, one of those who stand apart.

  She stops, and Katherine glances at her, a question in her eyes. But she knows why her sister has suddenly stopped. She is afraid. Katherine looks at the crowd and sees a crowd. Maryanne, she knows, looks at the crowd and sees something else. Something that scares her.

  ‘Do we have to go this way?’ Maryanne almost pleads. ‘Must we go through it?’

  ‘It’s just a gathering of people,’ Katherine says quietly, trying to calm her.

  Maryanne shakes her head. ‘It’s not, you know. It’s not.’

  ‘Trust me,’ her sister says. ‘Hold my hand.’ Katherine extends her hand with a look that says: take it, trust your big sister. She’ll guide you through.

  And so with Katherine leading the way, parting the crowd with an umbrella that she gives every impression of knowing how to use as a weapon should the need arise, as if, indeed, wielding her rifle instead of an umbrella, they make their way through the swaying mob, surrounded by it, but removed from it. A seething mass, swaying this way and that, erupting into roars and hisses, craving something … something final.