Year of the Beast

by Steven Carroll

  ‘Good heavens!’ Vera smiles, as if counting her options. At least that’s the way it appears to Maryanne, who is calculating the years of difference between them. Twenty years, or near enough, she concludes. A generation. And as she contemplates this, she’s also dwelling on that curious feeling that these are not her times. That she’s been dropped into these awful years by mistake. That her times are out there, travelling towards her: a silver jet about to land in another age. And perhaps that’s it, the source of this affinity, that in this young woman with whom she has nothing in common she catches glimpses of the life she might have lived. Or the lives. But which she won’t. For as much as she may feel that her times are out there, travelling towards her, she will never step into them. Never calculate her options. Not the way Vera will. But when she’s with this young woman she catches hints of what it must feel like. To be able to take such things for granted.

  ‘I want to change things.’ And as much as Vera says this with what seems to Maryanne to be an impossible innocence, the morning still on her cheeks, there is also something quite steely in her resolve that she hasn’t noticed before. Even hard. As well as something else Maryanne can’t place: a sort of thoughtful distance in the eyes, which, in anybody else, she would call sadness. ‘I want to leave the world a different place. Better.’

  Maryanne, distracted by these hints of another Vera behind the privilege and clear skin, nods, conceding that she just might.

  Vera puts down her pen. ‘Will you see him again?’

  Maryanne smiles: this is the other thing about Vera – talking about one thing one minute, another the next. Mind like a butterfly. But a dazzling one, flown in from other times.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s exhausting. I can’t do it again. I couldn’t bear to be in that place again. It’s like nothing on earth.’ She slowly shakes her head. ‘Besides, he knows now. He knows he’s not alone. And I’m not so sure he really wants company. Or has ever been happy in it. Or perhaps I’m not the company he wants.’ She puts her cup down, her mind back on the mystery of Milhaus, gathers her coat and hat, and slowly stands.

  Vera notes the effort that goes into it. ‘When is the baby due?’

  ‘Not soon enough.’

  Vera stands with her, concerned, suddenly looking older.

  ‘And what of the father?’

  ‘There is no father.’ She says this more sharply than she intended, then corrects herself with a small laugh. ‘I don’t mean it was an immaculate conception. Of course, there is a father. There just may as well not be.’

  Vera looks at her in silence, as though not having thought of this and not knowing where to go from here. Not knowing whether to inquire is to intrude, or to not inquire is to be cold and uncaring. It’s all there in her face, even as she speaks. ‘I can’t imagine having children.’

  ‘Nobody can.’

  ‘And not in these times. Not here, not now. And not by myself.’ She pauses, calculating just what she can say.

  ‘I’ve got my sister.’

  ‘Good,’ Vera says, seizing on it. ‘A big sister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wish I had a big sister. You’re lucky.’

  And there is something oddly disconcerting in being told by Vera, of all people, that she is lucky. ‘Yes. I am. You’re quite right.’ She pauses. ‘No big sister?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Big brother, then?’

  ‘No,’ Vera says slowly. And, once again, with a kind of distance in her eyes that, in anybody else, Maryanne would call sadness. Then Vera’s face brightens. ‘I always think of having children as something other people do.’

  ‘Until it’s you.’

  ‘Sometimes I try to imagine it.’ Vera shakes her head, as if trying: a husband, a house, a child or two; the husband leaving for work every morning – a kiss – and returning every evening – another kiss. No, that’s the problem, her expression suggests, I can’t imagine it. Not for me. At least, that’s how Maryanne reads things. And then, weighing her words, she asks: ‘Is there someone? Is there a young man?’

  Vera shakes her head. ‘No. Well, there was.’

  Now it’s Maryanne who doesn’t know what to say: whether to inquire further and risk intruding, or say nothing and risk seeming cold and uncaring. In the end, she leaves it at that, wondering just what that means. Was.

  When she has her hat and coat on, Vera hands her a pamphlet for a meeting. An early-evening meeting in the gardens by the parliament. The day and the time on the pamphlet. ‘If you can make it,’ she says. ‘And, oh!’ she adds. ‘We’re going on a little march tomorrow. To hand out the pamphlets for the meeting. The more the merrier.’

  Maryanne smiles and says she may come. Why not? They nod their farewells and Maryanne waves from the lift as she closes the door.

  On the street, everybody looks down at their feet. Oh, this. She’d forgotten. And she braces herself before joining the flow. An army, marching from one day to the next. No one breaking ranks. Marching to the station; to the good fortune of a free seat on the train; marching to work and home again, to be greeted with an evening kiss as mechanical as a signature on a form. Maryanne feels a shiver run through her with the thought. Not for her. Not for Vera either. We’re not the ordinary run. It’s not, Maryanne imagines, what Vera would call living. And who can blame her? She wants to change things, and she just might.

  Maryanne smiles. Make a difference, indeed. Wouldn’t that be something? She boards her tram; it rattles down to the Town Hall. Indeed, wouldn’t that be something? To imagine you could? You have to be young to think like that. To imagine things differently.

  ***

  The next day, when she gets off her tram to join the little march of theirs, she is running late. She stops on the Town Hall steps, suddenly aware of a commotion ahead of her.

  There, approaching the Town Hall, is a small group of well-dressed women of varying ages. They are in a line, spread across one half of the street, and the traffic behind them – buggies and a few motor cars – is blocked. The drivers, part of the commotion, are yelling at the women, telling them to get off the street. But these women are not budging. There is Vera, in the centre of the line. And beside her, all around her, faces Maryanne recognises from the women’s offices. They have placards saying Vote NO and are chanting words of peace, calling for an end to war, handing out pamphlets to the small crowd watching them.

  They are festive, smiling, urging people to join in and swell their numbers, and as much as they know they are holding up the traffic, they will not be moved. Protected by their innocence, or so it seems to Maryanne, they march towards her. And Maryanne is suddenly afraid for them, for their numbers are so few. They call again and again for people to step forward, but nobody from the gathering crowd on the footpath moves. And all the time the traffic behind them builds, the crowd gathers on either side of them, and they start to look tiny. Easy prey. But they seem not to notice the position they are in or the jeers and sneers of the crowd.

  And it is then, seemingly from nowhere, as Maryanne is about to step onto the street and join them, that the police descend upon the march in numbers. Ten, a dozen, she’s not sure. Two of them on horseback. And she looks around, wondering where on earth they came from as the large flanks of a horse, its legs as tall as she is, press close, and the rider, high above her, directs the horse towards the women, its hooves clattering on the street as the crowd suddenly retreats. And while the horses divide the crowd from the marching women, the police on foot reach Vera and her colleagues. And straightaway they grab them, wrenching them from the street, twisting their arms behind their backs and pushing their heads forward. In an instant, a festive, peaceful march has turned violent. And Maryanne watches, helpless, as Vera – Vera for heaven’s sake, cheeks as fresh as the morning – is grabbed by one policeman while another locks her hands behind her and she is handcuffed. As they all are, their numbers are so few.

  Once handcuffed, th
ey are dragged from the street and marched like criminals caught in some lawless act towards a waiting van, which, like the police themselves, seems to have appeared from nowhere. And as they are marched away, Vera sees Maryanne, catches her eye and calls something out, but there is a man in a three-piece suit walking beside her, newspaper in hand, yelling at her, and in the din Maryanne can’t hear what she is saying. Vera calls again, but it is at this point that somebody spits on her, and Vera, turning in horror, no free hand to wipe the spittle from her face, stumbles and falls to her knees, her hat tumbling to the ground, while all around her the women are being dragged to the waiting van. The policemen yank Vera to her feet, hauling her to the vehicle, her face terrified, her legs limp as she attempts one last time to call something out to Maryanne, who rushes forward to help her, only to be stopped inches away by a huge hand forcing her back. She sways on the spot, everything spinning around her, trying to steady herself, and when she looks for Vera she has disappeared into the van. They all have. All the women, suddenly vanished.

  The police disappear as quickly as they arrived, and the man with the newspaper, who only a few minutes before was yelling at Vera, his face distorted with hatred, strides off along the footpath. The traffic, its way now clear, moves on. The crowd thins, and within minutes, it seems, everything is normal again. As though none of it ever happened. And it is only then that Maryanne sees Vera’s hat on the street and rushes out to retrieve it, dusting it on her skirt as she walks back to the footpath.

  What was she calling out? Maryanne, her body trembling, remembers that huge hand telling her to go back, and the frightened look on Vera’s face. A look that said, or seemed to say, that she had heard and read of such things, but had never expected them to happen to her. And the frightened looks on all the women’s faces might be read the same way. Both frightened and shocked that this had happened. At the same time, Maryanne asks herself if she could have done more, but she knows that, if anything, she’d been reckless enough.

  And it is only then that she realises there are tears in her eyes. And not tears of sadness or self-pity. But tears of sheer helplessness and outrage. How dare they? Is there no end to this beast? This beast that dons suits, reads newspapers and yells, screams and spits before returning to the paper and home. And she realises also that it is the first time that the beast has reduced her to tears. Stinging tears. For as much as she’s sought to stand back from it, today it scooped her up in its scaly claws and dragged her into its madness.

  She sits on a bench near the corner and waits until she feels ready to rise. She holds Vera’s hat in her hands, turning it round and round while people pass, eyes on the footpath as they tread home or to the station or tram stop, the street now just a street. The yelling, the clamour, the horses – all gone. No sign that anything happened, apart from a couple of placards lying on the footpath, people stepping on or over them, a few pausing to read them.

  And for the first time Maryanne ponders the brutal efficiency of the police. For they looked well prepared for the action. Knew exactly what they were doing. Almost as though someone had told them that at such and such an hour, at such and such a place, a small group of troublesome women would be disrupting the city. And suddenly the words of Milhaus come back to her: who can you trust? Did someone from within the group betray them? For it was an ambush. And she shakes her head, asking herself if this is what her world has come to.

  When she’s ready, the trembling gone, she rises from the bench and walks back towards the tram stop from which she stepped no more than half an hour earlier, when the sound of a commotion caused her to pause and turn. Her tram comes and she hauls herself aboard, deciding what to say to Katherine and what not to say to her.

  ***

  The next day, in the mid-afternoon, Maryanne goes to the offices, not knowing if Vera and the other woman will be there. But they are. The atmosphere is subdued, the talk quiet. She approaches Vera, who, she’s glad to note, shows no sign of bruising or injury.

  ‘How are you?’ she asks, trying not to think of the spittle on the young woman’s face and the sudden look of horror in her eyes.

  ‘Nothing broken.’ And then she adds, ‘Body or spirit.’

  ‘They were awful.’

  ‘The police or the people?’ Vera asks, her eyes hard. ‘We shouldn’t be surprised. We unnerve them.’ She looks out over the room and begins speaking, to no one in particular. ‘Das Leben gehört den Lebenden an … Life belongs to the living, and those who live must be prepared for change.’ She says this flatly, unemotionally, the poetry, this time, gone from the words. Vera is clearly in no mood for poetry. She sighs. ‘We bring change. We unnerve them. They think they hate us. So they lash out.’ She taps the table top with her fingers. ‘Of course, we should have known.’

  ‘It happened so quickly, they knew exactly …’ Maryanne says, trailing off, looking at the women behind them, then shaking her head. ‘How long did they keep you?’

  ‘Not long. They told us we’d been warned. We had no right to hold the traffic up.’ Here Vera emits a cynical laugh, which, coming from Vera, seems like blasphemy. ‘The traffic? People are dying in the most horrible ways, blown into bloody bits and sinking into endless mud. The world is tearing itself to pieces, and all they’re worried about is the traffic!’

  They pause, Maryanne looking round the offices, noting once again the sombre atmosphere. The quiet talk. And it is only then she remembers Vera’s hat. ‘Oh,’ she says, handing it over. ‘You dropped this.’

  ‘Ah.’ Vera’s eyes light up. ‘I thought I’d lost it. I shall wear it on the next march.’

  Maryanne nods grimly. ‘You were calling something out to me. In the street.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  Vera pauses, collecting herself. ‘It might just have been your name …’ And she shrugs her shoulders, as if to say, why not? It’s as likely as anything else. Then she turns to look at the group of women behind her. ‘They mean to scare us off. But they won’t. They’ll find out we’re not so easily scared.’

  And so it is a different image of Vera and the group of women that Maryanne takes home with her. It is still, when she thinks of Vera, a marvel that she can imagine things being different, and can imagine bringing about that change. But Maryanne also suspects that Vera and the other women have, quite possibly, all been reminded that change doesn’t come easily. Never has. And sometimes it can get dangerous. You can be hurt. The trick, Maryanne imagines, is to use it. To use the hurt. And with that thought she leaves the building and merges with the footpath traffic. Down the street, past the site of yesterday’s protest. There’s no sign that it ever happened, but the echoes of the incident trail after her.

  ***

  Ghouls. She can only think of them as ghouls. A smith with a black face watches her pass, hammer in one hand, wheel in the other, a furnace glowing behind him. Men and women from the boot factory, their faces tired, blank, sit on the footpath for their smoko. The coal merchant, arms and face black from coal dust, looks up for a moment while shovelling giant chunks of the stuff into hessian bags.

  The sun is low in the sky, shadows are lengthening. Maryanne is almost home. She knows all these people, at least by sight. And they know her. Some days it’s just the workers she sees, doing all the things that workers everywhere do. Nothing out of the ordinary. Other days, and it’s not just the effect of witnessing yesterday’s march, these moods come across her and it’s all an underworld. And these aren’t people, or workers doing all the things that workers do everywhere, but ghouls that stopped being people long ago. She knows them and they know her, and have watched her belly grow since she came back to her old neighbourhood. No doubt they’ve heard too that she’s the Hun’s whore and the brat inside her is a little Hun.

  These streets are full of factories, warehouses and workshops, big and small. Workers’ cottages are jammed in between: street after street, row upon row. Sometimes she and the workers greet eac
h other; sometimes this mood comes over her, comes over everyone, this living deadness, and nobody’s got the energy or the urge for hellos. And everything becomes a shadow world, everybody a ghost or silhouette. Maryanne too, just another shadow passing over the footpath. Just another ghoul. All of them underworld creatures in a waking dream as the afternoon sun sinks and shadows spread. Nothing quite real. But she can’t take her eyes off them, all the same. It’s not a nightmare. No, it’s not frightening. It’s almost marvellous. Almost wonderful. Like walking through a dark dream, the dream creatures looking up as you pass, the occasional eye asking: are you of the dream, one of us, or are you just passing through? We must stay here. But you, are you only passing through and can you really leave?

  But they’re not ghouls, they’re people. And this is not an underworld, this is life. She stops in her tracks, the smell of the smoko trailing after her, the coal merchant’s dust in the air, the clang-clang of the smith behind her. Life! The baby is still, and she can almost imagine it staring out from her belly, taking it all in, the world it will enter.

  But where is her world? For this surely isn’t it. Is it travelling towards her, or she travelling towards it? Over her shoulder, out of view, a silver jet prepares to land. A story begins, and Maryanne stands, stock still, a long shadow on a footpath of shadows, the story curled up in her belly, the egg that will give birth to it all.

  10.

  A letter is waiting for her on the kitchen table when she gets home. Katherine is out. She sits with the letter, puzzled. For the handwriting is Viktor’s. She knows this from the notes they exchanged in the town during the brief time that was theirs. It is spiky, controlled writing. And the moment she looks at it she can imagine him compiling the accounts for the shop in this very hand. But the writing also brings with it an unexpected rush of emotion. Feelings she’s almost forgotten clamour to the surface. The father? Of course there is a father, Vera: a father who once, in a dangerous, unguarded moment, told her she was beautiful – the only time in all her life anybody has ever said that to her, for she comes from a family that never wasted its breath on words like that. Yet the same Viktor stood in front of her in the gardens that overlooked the town, his fierce eyes as good as telling her that she was a crafty bitch for going and getting herself pregnant, who pronounced everything a mess and strode off, leaving her alone in the gardens, because they couldn’t possibly be seen together.