by Sue Orr
‘Gabrielle,’ she said finally. ‘Your mum’s not … she’s not well. It’s complicated to explain … and I’d have to see your mum, talk to her, to know for sure, but it’s called a syndrome. That’s what your mother has. A syndrome.’
Yvonne was looking at Gabrielle, waiting for her to say something. She looked at Nickie, too. There was no chance in a million years that Nickie was going to say a word; she was barely managing to breathe.
Yvonne sighed. ‘This syndrome … it feels frightening, probably, for you. But sometimes, when people are in shock, or they’re stressed, they do strange things that have nothing to do with what’s just happened to them. They do something that’s really ordinary — like hang out the washing — while they’re waiting for their brains, their thoughts, to recover from the shock of everything.’
‘Like hang out washing when you’re being bashed up?’ said Gabrielle.
‘Like hanging out washing when you’re being bashed up,’ said Yvonne. ‘So the first time it happens — the first time the violence occurs — you do it without even thinking about it, because your body and your brain are shocked. Then, if the violence happens again, you do the same thing. It becomes a habit, without you even realising it.’
‘Mrs Gilbert does it in the middle of the night, even,’ Gabrielle said.
There was no sound in that library room. Nothing, except the scraping of the tree against the window and the sound of birds chirping outside.
Yvonne took her arm away from the back of Gabrielle’s chair. She lifted her glasses off her face and placed them on the table in front of her. Her smile was gone, in its place a thin line of lips. She closed her eyes and rubbed her nose in the place where her glasses normally sat. Finally she spoke.
‘Gabrielle,’ she said. Her voice was different now. Cold. ‘It is Gabrielle, is it?’
Gabrielle nodded. She looked at Yvonne. Her eyes were clear and bright. If ever someone was going to cry, it would be now. But not her.
‘What’s going on?’
Gabrielle said nothing. But she wouldn’t back down from staring at Yvonne. A hard, clear stare.
‘Nickie?’
Nickie gulped. Yvonne had guessed she was the weakest, the one most likely to confess. ‘If you girls are fooling around, making things up, wasting my time …’
‘No,’ said Gabrielle. She reached out and grabbed Yvonne’s arm, just as Yvonne was starting to stand up. ‘We’re sorry. It is all true, what we’ve told you. I’m not her daughter, they’ve got no kids, but the rest of it is true. I’ve — we’ve — seen what he does to her, to Mrs Gilbert. We’re witnesses to the crime.’
‘So why did you pretend, Gabrielle?’ asked Yvonne. She sounded really tired. More like the normal grandma she actually might be. ‘What was the point of that?’
‘I wanted you to take me seriously, when I rang you up. Also, I know how it works,’ said Gabrielle.
‘How what works?’ Yvonne said. Her voice was not quite so hard now, but she was still pretty annoyed, you could tell.
‘I know that …’ Gabrielle looked up at the ceiling, blinking quickly. ‘I know that the call for help has to come from someone in the family. The victim, or the children of the victim. Otherwise … otherwise you can’t help.’
Yvonne was quiet. ‘So Gabrielle,’ she said after a bit. ‘How is it that you know all about it? You say—’ Yvonne looked at Nickie — ‘you say you’ve seen the violence against this Mrs Gilbert?’
Gabrielle nodded. Nickie nodded, too. As long as she didn’t say anything, Nickie thought it might be okay. That she would not be involved.
‘You’ve both seen it?’
There was no escaping her attention now. She was concentrating on Nickie. ‘Nickie?’
‘Once. I’ve seen it once,’ Nickie said. It was barely a whisper.
‘But it happens all the time,’ said Gabrielle. ‘She’s got bruises on her all the time. Ever since I’ve known her.’
‘And how long is that?’ asked Yvonne.
‘About four months. My dad is their sharemilker. We live right next door. Well, not right next door, but we live the closest to the Gilberts out of anyone.’
‘Okaay …’ Yvonne seemed to be thinking things through. Nickie was thinking things through, too. Mainly she was thinking that there was hope for their survival after all, now that Yvonne knew they weren’t Gilberts.
‘Gabrielle,’ said Yvonne. ‘Have you thought about telling your own mother about what you know? About what you’ve seen? Because if your mother knew, she might be able to get Mrs Gilbert to come to see me. Like you girls have today.’
‘It wouldn’t work,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Mum’s dead. There’s just me and my dad.’
If Yvonne was starting to wonder how everything fitted together — Gabrielle knowing so much about men bashing women and syndromes and all the rest of it — well, she didn’t say a word about it. It hit Nickie, all of a sudden, how strange it was. Nickie Walker and Gabrielle Baxter sitting in the Thames Library on a Tuesday afternoon supposedly researching I am David but actually meeting with a person they didn’t know to report violence that they weren’t meant to have seen against a neighbour who never talked to them.
‘I … we should go now, Gabrielle,’ Nickie said, her voice quivering. ‘We’ll miss the bus back home. If we don’t go now.’
‘Nickie,’ said Yvonne. ‘What about you?’
‘What about me? What do you mean?’
‘Your mother, is what she means,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Do you think she could talk to her? They’re friends anyway … it’d be best coming from your mum. Don’t you think?’
Yvonne was studying Nickie’s face. Nickie could see she was trying to work out whether she was brave enough to get involved. Well, the answer to that was easy. No. So she said it. ‘No.’
‘That’s fine, Nickie,’ she said. ‘It’s a lot to ask.’
Nickie couldn’t bring herself to look at Gabrielle.
‘So, is that it?’ said Gabrielle. ‘We can’t do anything?’
‘I would say your best chance of helping would be getting another adult — a mother — to talk to Mrs Gilbert herself,’ said Yvonne. Nickie could tell she was really just talking to Gabrielle now. She’d worked out that Nickie was chicken.
The meeting was over. They all left the Children’s Room together. Nickie looked back as they walked down the hallway. One of the librarians was turning the sign on the door over, from Closed to Open.
Every time Nickie took a step, her shoes fought to become part of the footpath. Gabrielle was quiet. Nickie wondered whether she, too, could see that many frightening things could happen now. Nickie counted off the adventures they’d had so far. Rescuing the bobby calves. Spying on the Gilberts in the middle of a stormy night. And now reporting what they’d seen to people they didn’t know, official people whose job it was to interfere. Every one of those things put them on course for trouble, for them and for other people. People Nickie had lived with her whole life. People that Gabrielle Baxter had lived with for just a few months.
‘Gabrielle,’ Nickie said. ‘Can I ask you something?’
Gabrielle blew her fringe upwards. ‘Depends,’ she said.
‘On what?’
‘On what it’s about.’
She was talking about some of the things she’d said to Yvonne, Nickie could tell. Nickie wanted to ask her about those, but not yet.
‘How long do you reckon you’ll stay?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You and your dad … I just wondered. Some sharemilkers stay for years and years, until everyone sort of forgets they’re sharemilkers. Then they end up buying their own farm and you forget they ever were. But others just stay for a year, or maybe two years, then they move somewhere else.’
Gabrielle kept walking.
‘So I just was wondering, you know. Wondering if you and your dad had ever talked about how long you were planning to live here.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘We never have. This is
our first turn at sharemilking — since Mum died, I mean. I suppose we’re just … seeing how things go.’
‘I hope you’re the sort that stays,’ Nickie said. Did she mean it? She wasn’t sure.
‘Me, too,’ Gabrielle said. ‘Especially now. Now we know about Mrs Gilbert.’
They didn’t speak again on the way to the bus stop. Nickie’s silence was for all the usual reasons — shock at what they’d just done, and fear at what might happen if anyone found out about it. It was a feeling she should have been used to, or at least getting used to, being the best friend of Gabrielle Baxter.
The bus home was full. There was lots of noise, people chatting all around them. Gabrielle spoke, after a while.
‘So, will you do it?’ she said. ‘Talk to your mum about Mrs Gilbert?’
‘No way.’
‘You heard what Yvonne said. It might be the only way we can rescue her.’
‘Gabrielle, think about it. How am I supposed to bring up something like that with Mum? What am I supposed to say? That we were out in the middle of the night and happened to be looking in their wash house window and saw … what we saw?’
Gabrielle wriggled in her seat. ‘You don’t have to say when we saw it, Nickie. It wouldn’t have been the first time Mr Gilbert’s done it. You heard what Yvonne said. That’s why she acts so weird with the washing.’
‘Weird full stop,’ Nickie said.
‘You all go on about her,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Even the adults, I’ve heard them. You go on as though there’s something wrong with her. And all this time she’s getting beaten up by her husband and no one helps her.’
Nickie swallowed hard. Gabrielle was right. Again.
‘All the mothers, everyone who knows her. I can’t believe that someone hasn’t noticed the bruises. There must be bruises on her, Nickie, when you get up close to her.’
‘I know. I know there must be.’
‘So we have to do something. Don’t we? We have to do the right thing.’
‘Yes.’ It was barely a whisper.
In the end, it was easy.
Nickie dropped her bike at the back door. She’d get yelled at for that later, probably, but she knew she was going to get yelled at for a lot worse so it didn’t matter. She walked through the house, looking for her mother.
Joy was in her bedroom, sitting on the edge of her bed. For a horrible minute, Nickie thought she had a migraine, and how bad that would be for the timing of everything. But Joy wasn’t doing anything, just sitting and staring out the window. Her hands were in her lap. She was holding a handkerchief, twisting it between her fingers, as though she was wringing water out of it.
‘Are you alright, Mum?’
Nickie’s voice seemed to snap her out of a dream. She gave Nickie a strange look, as though she really wasn’t sure who her daughter was.
‘Mum?’
Nickie lay on the bed beside her mother and closed her eyes. ‘You know how a while ago, you wanted me to tell you what was wrong?’
Her mother didn’t answer. Nickie was beginning to wonder whether she was just thinking these sentences, rather than saying them out loud.
‘Mum? Mum. Do you remember that? Do you?’
‘Hmmm.’
‘What the fuck does hmm mean Mum? Is that a yes or a no?’
She waited for the lecture about swearing. It didn’t come. Things were more than weird now. They were creepy.
‘Well. The thing I was upset about was … Mr Gilbert bashes up Mrs Gilbert.’
Nickie’s mother said nothing.
‘Mum? He beats her up. We have to do something. To help Mrs Gilbert.’
Her mother stood up. Nickie didn’t roll over to face her. She stayed right where she was.
Why wasn’t her mother talking to her? Nickie could hear her opening the drawer of her bedside table, then shutting it again. She could hear her breathing deeply, as though trying to calm herself.
Nickie started crying. The tears came slowly at first, running down her face onto the eiderdown. They got thicker and faster and Nickie tried to swallow them but couldn’t keep up with the fast flow. They weren’t just for the Mrs Gilbert drama. They were for everything. Everything that had happened since Gabrielle had arrived in Fenward.
Her mother sat back down and put her arm around Nickie. Nickie’s body shook. If her mother had asked her then to tell her everything — everything — Nickie would have. But her mother just held her. It felt like it went on for hours. In the end, Nickie had no tears left, she was all dried out inside like a prune. She drifted off to sleep, and when she woke, it was dark in the room. The blinds were closed and her mother was gone.
She looked at the little bedside clock — it was six-thirty. PM. She’d only been asleep a few minutes. The bedroom door was slightly open. She stood up and felt dizzy, so quickly sat down again. The door opened.
Nickie was ready to tell her mother what she’d seen happen in the Gilberts’ house — even ready to get herself in trouble for sneaking out at night. Ready to tell her about Yvonne and the safe places for people like Mrs Gilbert. All her mother had to do was start asking questions.
She didn’t, though. She stood and looked out the window. When she turned around, she had her angry face on. Tight lips, that little frown above her eyes. Nickie wasn’t so sure now about being ready to confess.
‘Have you … have you talked to Mrs Gilbert? About this?’
‘No.’
‘Well then. What on earth makes you think these terrible things about Jack Gilbert?’
‘I … I just know about them.’
‘Jesus … if your father finds out …’ Her mother was shaking her head. She never blasphemed. But it was dawning on Nickie that she wasn’t angry with Mr Gilbert. The anger was for Nickie.
‘Nickie. Sometimes things happen and … well, it’s not what it looks like. I mean, it can look like something, like a fight, for example, if you don’t know exactly the situation. But it can turn out to be something else. Something completely harmless.’
‘We think you need to talk to her, Mum. If you just talked to her, there are some people that can help her.’
The look Nickie got then told her she was in trouble. Her mother’s face had frozen, it was so angry.
‘We? Who is we?’
‘Me and Gabrielle.’
Her mother nodded slowly, her eyes closed. ‘And who did you have in mind to … to help? With this so-called problem?’
‘There are really nice ladies who look like normal people who can rescue—’
‘Stop.’ Her mother spoke quietly, holding her hand up.
‘But, Mum … if we, if you talk to Mrs Gilbert—’
‘Stop it. It’s none of your business, Nickie. It’s no one’s business. What goes on in other people’s houses, between husbands and wives.’
‘But, if you could just ask her, Mrs Gilbert, go there for a cup of tea and bring it up—’
Nickie didn’t see it coming. Just the flash of pink across her eyes, the scrape of her mother’s ring, and then the sting of the hand hitting her cheek. And the smell of onions. Her mother must have been cutting onions for tea before she came into the bedroom. The smell stayed on Nickie’s face after she slapped her.
‘I’ll say this just the once, Nicola,’ her mother said. Her voice was calm and quiet, a little bit like Yvonne’s had been at the library. ‘You keep your nose out of other people’s business. Especially adults’ business. You and Gabrielle … you tell her that. There’ll be big strife if you don’t. Big strife for the pair of you, and for Dad and me, and for lots of other people if you go sticking your nose in …’
Nickie’s face stung. There was a thin line of blood from the ring. She had nothing to say.
‘Do you hear what I’m saying?’
Nickie nodded.
Ian Baxter
Fenward. Flat, green plains, drunkenly stitched with power and telephone lines that began as crucifixes, receded to ‘I’s, then finally to indecipherabl
e smudges in the distance. Somewhere past the limit of sight, the green merged into grey and the paddocks became sky became a smothering weight across his shoulders as Ian worked Jack Gilbert’s farm.
It was vast and open, this land, but there was no horizon. If there was no horizon, there was no boundary between here and elsewhere. The prospect of infinite plains constricted his chest, made him gasp. Of course, he knew none of this was true, it could not be true. But when he stopped and stared into the distance, there it was: the evidence of the existence of nowhere else.
They hadn’t spent much time at the beach, up north, after Bridie got sick. But knowing the coast was close had always been enough. He could taste it in the salty, just-bitter breeze when it caught the back of his throat. There was the cry, too, of the seagulls. And the sky, which was surely as deep as the ocean beneath it. Promises of elsewhere — those were what made you want to stay.
They had arrived in Fenward in winter and the skies had been so grey that day and night were only degrees of each other. Summer would be different, Ian thought. The air would stir and the sun would burn off the cloud and it would be possible — easy — to breathe. This couldn’t be summer, even though the skies were often blue, not grey. It couldn’t be summer because far away, where a horizon should be, black clouds hung low, waiting for a chance to roll on in. And there was still no air for breathing.
How long could a person be expected to hold his breath? What happened if a person held his breath for winter, then spring, then summer, then, when autumn arrived, with the assurance of a cool breeze, it turned out to be as suffocating as all the other seasons? At that point, a person would have no choice but to move on.
Jack Gilbert’s farm was devoid not only of hills, but of any feature of interest — a stand of native bush, or an old barn or shed, used or abandoned. Ian contemplated this, as he puzzled, weeks earlier, over where the extra calves had come from.
The milking herd had been waiting for him at the fence line as usual that morning. He’d pulled the heavy steel gate back across the race and clipped it to the fence. The cows knew what to do. They walked past him, streams of thick saliva stalactiting from metronome jaws. Steam puffed from their nostrils into the still, murky air. Ian leaned against the fence post, waiting for the stragglers. His new dog, Bounce, was tied up next to him.