Year of the Beast

by Steven Carroll

When she opens the door the sound lifts in volume, the voice soars, notes hover and slide effortlessly in and out of each other, and the most heavenly music, a private concert, is all around her. And Katherine looks up from the kitchen table, tears streaming down her face, and stares at Maryanne, too entranced to speak. She lets the music speak for her. Words, golden as the music, fill the air: angels guard thee …

  The song rises to its climax, words and music linger, then fade into silence, followed by a scratching sound that repeats and repeats until Katherine, wiping her eyes, leans forward and lifts the needle.

  ‘I saw it in a shop window and couldn’t resist it.’

  Maryanne stares at the rich wooden box that houses the phonograph – a magic box, she can’t help but think of it as such – and looks back at Katherine, her eyes, like her sister’s, still in rapture. ‘How much did it cost?’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ says Katherine. And she stares at it in wonder: a marvel of civilisation that brings to them such wonderful sounds. ‘It’s worth every penny.’

  Maryanne smiles. ‘It’ll be good company for you. Out there, I mean. You won’t be so alone. Not with that. You’re right, it’s worth every penny.’

  Katherine shakes her head, then announces: ‘It’s not for me.’

  Maryanne is astonished. ‘You can’t mean that.’

  ‘I certainly do.’

  ‘But it must have cost a fortune.’

  Katherine smiles. ‘Not quite a fortune. But look what it does. Did you ever hear such things? A concert, at home? What’s a fortune compared to that?’ She wipes her eyes.

  Maryanne sits, staring at the magic, mahogany box. The disc of the recording still, the needle poised. The rich crimson lining shimmering before her. She’s never owned such luxury. She rises, goes around the table, hugs her sister, then resumes her place.

  ‘It’s for those days,’ says Katherine, ‘those nights, when that little child has exhausted you, and you need a little luxury. And, believe me, there’ll be plenty of them.’

  Maryanne nods, stroking the mahogany.

  ‘Shall we hear it again?’ Katherine asks, pleased with her farewell gift. And she grasps the handle at the side of the phonograph, winds it up, and gently places the needle on the recording.

  When the song fades, Maryanne lifts the needle and moves it to its resting place. The child, woken from his slumbers, begins to cry and Katherine picks him up from the pram and brings him into the kitchen.

  ‘Meal time,’ she says, passing him to Maryanne. ‘Then we’ll have to go.’

  When they’re finished, Maryanne places the baby back in the pram and pushes it up the hallway to the front door. Katherine follows her, swag and tent across her back, rifle in hand. Just before she reaches the door she pauses, gazing back up the hallway to the kitchen, her small room beside it, and the best room in the house just to her left. So much living in such a small space; rooms that hum and echo with it all. At least, these are the thoughts Maryanne puts in her sister’s head, and she may well be right. For when Katherine looks at her and the child, it is with an expression that says: Give me a moment … The rooms, the hallway, the house – all will remain, but they will be different rooms when I next return. Give me a moment …

  When she is finished, her moment up, she nods and the three of them make their way to the tram stop near the gardens and the parliament, where the Wart sits deep into the night, conjuring darkness from light.

  ***

  The engine hisses steam. White clouds rise from its wheels into the overarching roof of the station. Like an animal, a horse stamping its feet, steam hissing from its nostrils, it is impatient to go.

  Maryanne has strolled up to the engine while Katherine finds her compartment. The baby is in her arms. The platform is busy, travellers and well-wishers mingling, heads poking from compartment windows, last waves fanning the air. But at the front of the train, where the engine steams and stamps, there is no one but Maryanne and the child.

  She nods to the driver, his head poked out from the cabin, surveying the scene as if he has assembled it himself and is directing it all, then she looks down at the child, fully expecting him to be resting or sleeping, for the child is a good sleeper. But he’s not. The baby’s eyes are wide open, staring intently at this black steam-hissing animal in front of him. Alive. Almost nodding to the child; the child acknowledging it and almost nodding back. For the baby’s look is direct and unblinking: he is enthralled, completely under its spell, not so much staring at the engine as communing with it. When the driver waves to the station master, the baby’s eyes shift to the driver, as if he understands everything that is going on. And, noticing the mother and the wide, observing eyes of the child, the driver looks down at them, just below the cabin and laughs.

  ‘I think he wants to drive this thing.’

  Maryanne laughs too and the driver looks back down the platform. Master of the scene: the one to whom everybody, at one time or another, turns; the one who holds everybody’s fate in his hands; who will take them out into the world beyond the city, through the night and into the morning. The child looks from his laughing mother and back to the engine, steam once more hissing from it. Alive, impatient to be gone.

  It is then that Katherine suddenly appears beside them, waving the steam from her face. ‘What are you doing up here?’

  Maryanne turns to her, her sister’s presence almost an interruption. ‘Don’t you think it’s splendid?’

  ‘It’s filthy.’

  ‘I think I could be an engine driver. In another life. It’s so wonderfully solitary,’ Maryanne says as they walk towards Katherine’s compartment. ‘Oh, you’ve got your fireman stoking the fire there, but you’re the driver. In your own world. Out there under the stars. Steaming through the night. Free.’ She nods to herself and smiles. ‘Yes, that’s why they do it. They’re free. Themselves. No other people. No chatter. Imagine it, just the odd cow looking up. You leave the platform, the crowds, the whole city behind, and soon you’re under the milky heavens, released from it all. Released from your everyday life. Just this fiery, blazing thing and you, steaming through the night, trailing white clouds. Oh yes, I could do that. In another life. Couldn’t you?’

  Katherine ignores the question with a slight shake of the head that says, too much imagination, then gazes on the child. ‘Here, let me have him a last time.’

  ‘For now.’

  ‘For now,’ she says, taking the child and cradling him. ‘Now don’t you forget your Aunt Katherine,’ she hums to the baby, ‘because your Aunt Katherine won’t forget you. She’ll be thinking of you. Every day. You and those big brown eyes.’ She smooths the baby’s thick black hair. ‘And that widow’s peak, that Mama says is just like your father’s.’ Here she stops and looks directly at Maryanne, as if to say, one day he will ask about his father.

  The station master blows his warning whistle. But Katherine holds on to the child, as if still trying to comprehend the simple, astonishing fact that he has come into the world and will live on into another one that she, Katherine, will never know. But I’ll be able to say I was there, the pride in her smile seems to say, that I was there when you came into the world. I heard your first cries, and I too nursed you through your first hours and days. I was there when it mattered. And I will return, when you are walking and growing into the world, for the world is big and you will need someone to hold your hand while you grow into it. Your hand will rest in mine. Angels guard thee … Don’t forget your Aunt Katherine. She won’t forget you.

  She hands the child back to Maryanne as they climb into the compartment, and checks the bits and pieces of her world she came with and which go with her: her tent, wrapped; her swag; and her overnight bag. And, of course, her Enfield. No wonder she didn’t bother replying to Maryanne’s talk about being an engine driver. Katherine knows and has known for years precisely that kind of release and freedom. A tent, a swag, the open country. Cities, towns, the beaten path: they were never Katherine’s. We’re not t
he usual run. Never have been. Maryanne shakes her head, as if admonishing herself for never having seen it properly before: Katherine is a remarkable creature. And for a moment, she wants her big sister back. Just for one more day. Let it be as it was, just for one more day. The two women hug, the child nestled between them, feeling their bodies against him.

  Katherine steps back first. ‘Well, you know what you’re doing.’

  Maryanne can only nod, stepping down from the carriage with the child as Katherine turns and lowers the window, waving the soot and steam away with her hand.

  The train shudders into life. Great belches of soot and steam carry down the platform; the animal, its impatience at an end, heaves and puffs into motion; and everything is suddenly moving. Katherine is being taken from her; Katherine is going. Her head out the window, hand waving in a cloud of steam and soot, she fades from view like a ghost. In a minute or less the train is gone, yellow lights and white steam slipping into the late summer twilight. Maryanne waits, watching it go. The platform empties. Katherine was here; Katherine is gone. She and the child are alone. And, Maryanne suddenly realises, alone for the first time.

  When she looks down she sees the child’s eyes fixed on the last of the departing train. Outside the station, they take their tram up the hill to the parliament, where they will alight for the short walk home through the park. Home. And once more it sinks in that she and the child are, indeed, alone. And she hopes she knows what she’s doing. The tram passes the Post Office, tired banners for Yes and No still hanging there, no one having bothered to cut them down.

  Maryanne gets off at her stop and begins the familiar walk home. She is dwelling on the memory of Katherine’s face fading into the twilight, when she spots a man sitting on a bench in the park, his back to her, eating something. And she realises it’s Father Geoghan. She doesn’t have to see his face. It’s him. And for a moment, she’s a little taken aback. Even put out, for she thinks of this as her park, and Father Geoghan’s presence in it isn’t right somehow. It’s almost as though he’s intruding.

  She pauses, watching the priest, who has no idea he’s being observed, and her resentment fades. For he is a solitary spectacle. A black figure on a green lawn, staring out over the park. And as Maryanne watches him, she concludes that he is not just a solitary figure, but a lonely one. Quite possibly a man whose loneliness runs so deep he doesn’t even know it. She doesn’t know why she thinks this, only that she is convinced of it. It is an instinct, and one she trusts.

  And as he stares out over the park, she can’t help but wonder what is passing through the unguarded mind of Father Geoghan. What memories. For she has decided that he is more than a lonely figure: he is a sad one. Every now and then his hand rises, almost mechanically, and he takes a bite from his sandwich. But he seems barely aware of his hand or the sandwich. A few pigeons wander near and he tosses bread onto the ground for them. But, again, he barely seems to notice, and Maryanne can’t help but feel that somehow this world doesn’t touch him, doesn’t move him, that somewhere along the line he lost the knack and this is the source of his loneliness: an isolation, a loneliness so deep he’s unaware of it. Something he has simply got used to, like a limp, and doesn’t notice any more.

  Once again, her impulse is to reach out to him, but that would be futile. He is, she is sure, beyond reach. And has been for years. His hand rises, he takes a bite from his sandwich once again, barely noticing the bite or the sandwich. He tosses bread to the ground, the pigeons gather, but he pays no attention. He remains unmoved. This world does not touch him. Believe me, I know! She shakes her head slowly as she gazes upon him. What have they done to you, Father Geoghan?

  He rises, brushes the crumbs from his trousers, and leaves the birds to their feast. And as he walks away, his shadow trailing him back towards his church like an old dog, he seems to Maryanne to be the loneliest figure in the world. Only he can’t see it.

  He leaves the park, turns into a street, shaded and dark, and is gone. And as much as Maryanne tells herself that she could have said something, made a meaningless wave, a peace offering of sorts, she knows he is beyond reach. But she carries the image – a black figure on a green lawn, staring vacantly across the park, his arm mechanically rising and falling, the pigeons gathering – all the way home.

  21.

  The Angel of Death hovers over the page, a strange presence in the air. A dark, supernatural presence. It has been summoned up by the times, and is near.

  Maryanne registers a shiver as she stares at the newspaper. There they are: Milhaus, Lady Vine. Two photographic portraits, side by side, in the middle of the page. And the more she stares at the photographs, the more she feels the presence of the Angel of Death. They have that haunted look, Milhaus and Lady Vine, as the dead always do in photographs. As though they’ve been marked out for their fate long before, and have unknowingly gone about their days with the sentence of death suspended above them. And it is only afterwards, when the sentence has been carried out, that the dark angel becomes evident in their haunted eyes: there all the time.

  She slowly shakes her head from side to side. She has long since lost her fear of God, because there is no God. So why this feeling of some supernatural force hovering near? Does fear run so deep, and is the God of Fear never entirely banished? Always there in some form or other: some superstitious instinct that you can’t rid yourself of, left over after faith? The dregs of belief, living on in the superstition of the atheist?

  Whatever the reason, that dark angel is near and rises from the newspaper in the haunted eyes of Milhaus and Lady Vine. Marked for death before they knew it. The sentence suspended above them even in those hours when they stole away to country towns or wherever they went for their time together. Death was there, and death was waiting. Now it is satisfied.

  Maryanne moans, rocking back and forth. They got him in the end, after all. And the joy of seeing him set free has come to this. A short-lived freedom, short-lived joy. They got him. Of course. Now he’s gone. It’s like losing her shadow.

  Together, it seemed to her, she and Milhaus had endured and come through the days of the beast. Entwined fates. For she’d had the feeling that if she could see him come through, then so would she. If Milhaus was saved, the child would be safe. The mother and child. If one came through, they would all come through. And, for a time, they did. Together, they endured the gaze of the beast and deprived the mob of its satisfaction. But they got him. And to have come so far, only to fall now, is cruel. Like the fate of those soldiers who fall in the dying hours of a war.

  So, Milhaus is dead. We make these half-gods, Maryanne tells herself, we lift them up into the heavens, and then we tear them down. And the Milhaus that comes back to her now is the Milhaus that has just landed with a thud, with that lost look in his eyes. The boy standing alone in an empty playground, wondering where everybody has gone and if they will ever come back. And, at the same time, she’s asking herself what difference she may have made. Enough for him to know that he was not alone, after all? That there was somebody out there? For he was alone in a way that nobody ought to be alone.

  The account of the deaths of Milhaus and Lady Vine is long, taking up the whole page, and in the kind of detail unusual for the newspaper: the kind of detail usually found in those magazines that devote themselves to grisly murders in dark lanes or barren, windswept fields. But they can’t help themselves, and the newspaper, knowing that this is its last chance to feed off the story of Jack Milhaus and his Madame X, lingers on the details just like a grisly magazine. It’s grubby. And Maryanne feels the grubbiness rub off on her, because she can’t help herself and can’t help but read on.

  It happened the day before. The lady and Milhaus drowned together. In the lake of the estate. The late summer heat drove them to its cool waters. The husband and the children were away; Lady Constance Vine, having been banished from the fairytale kingdom and forbidden contact with her children, as if she might pass on her fallen state, her stain, to
them, had stolen her way back into the estate, just to see the children again, only to find them gone. And once there, alone, a desperate shadow of herself, she somehow summoned Milhaus to her side. How, the newspapers don’t know. The caretaker heard sobs and crying. The lady could not be consoled. Where, where are the children? Where, where are my beauties? The tears were endless. And, at some point, the tears and the heat drove them to the lake. The caretaker, from his quarters, heard splashing and cries. A man’s voice, the lady’s cries. The cries and the splashing continued, then everything went quiet. Silence fell across the grounds. And, at first, he thought nothing of it. Then, disturbed and drawn from his quarters by the silence, he went out into the grounds. The lights of the house were on, the front door wide open. He walked to the lake. The water was still. There was no breeze, no relief from the heat.

  As he approached the lake, where canoes and a small boat were moored to a wooden landing, he stopped. For there, by the water’s edge, strewn on the grass, dropped in haste, was the lady’s clothing. And beside hers, the gentleman’s. But there was no sign of them, no ripple on the waters. No splash, no sight nor sound.

  He stood by the lake, troubled, the clothes of the lady and the gentleman at his feet. When Lord Vine returned with the children later in the night, the caretaker met the car at the front door and told him all he knew. The children were sent inside. Their nanny put them to bed, the children soothed by milk, biscuits and stories.

  It was a long night. The lake was drained. Garden staff were called back from their Saturday nights off, and manned the pumps. By first light, the stink of the drained lake already heavy in the warm air, the two bathers were revealed near its centre, where the water was deepest. His lordship and the staff waded out into the drained pool in gumboots, and eventually stopped, staring down at the couple.

  Their clothes were strewn where they’d left them. The bathers were naked. She had her arms around his neck, the paper has been reliably informed; he had his arms around hers. They had dragged each other down into the depths. The staff were told to tell no one. Whether by pact, impulse, desperation or accident, Milhaus and the lady had died together. And lay all night at the bottom of the lake, entwined in each other’s grip, only to be revealed at first light like muddy statues.