by Kim Kelly
He blabbers away and I pray for our freedom. I pray for absolution from whatever I will do in these days to come. I pray that I am not to blame, for whatever I will do. Must do. To keep Greta from further pain. I pray there is another way; I pray that this whisper of a child is taken from her tonight by some other will, slipping from her, never to be. That happens all the time, doesn’t it? I pray that tomorrow, at dawn, I will by some other miracle have the power and the means to simply leave this place. To take my sister and leave. Leave to live our lives in peace, to live as our parents intended us to. I pray as if there is a God that listens to me. I pray as if the smear of custard in the bottom of my bowl is God: Hear me, hear my prayer.
‘Thank you, Reverend.’ Uncle Alec is standing now. ‘Might I follow those elegant words of gratitude and hope with one toast that may match it?’ He raises his glass and waits for all to stand with him, before he pours fourth: ‘To my dear nieces, Berylda and Greta. In gratitude of the beauty and light that you bring to my world, and in hope that it may ever be thus.’
‘Berylda and Greta,’ fills the air; my throat fills with bile, acrid over sickly saccharine. And a lump of deeper shame: how many times over the years have I allowed these moments of praise to fool me, just for a second: make me believe that if I were good enough, if I worked hard enough, some love might come. Some change.
‘Wonderful girls,’ Mrs Weston’s rich velvet reaches towards me but is as quickly lost. As Mrs Dunning calls shrill above all glasses raised: ‘And here’s to you, Alec. Such a wonderful man you are, taking the girls to your heart as you have. Sacrificing your own needs for theirs. And with such admirable, laudable results.’
‘Hear, hear!’ All hearty cheers.
Alec Howell is smiling his wolf smile amidst them. This congratulation society bestows upon him, in spades. Alec Howell is such a wonderful man, never remarrying, so devoted to his nieces is he, and they aren’t even blood relations. Who has ever heard of such selfless charity?
‘And last but never least, to my dear Libby.’ He charges his glass now even higher to even heartier cheers. ‘You are never forgotten, my dearest.’
Oh let’s drink a cup of kindness for his poor dearest departed wife, shall we? Poor, poor Libby. Libby Pemberton, such a dear little thing she was, fine and fragile, the fever swept her up and away like a leaf, taking his heart with it forever. Look at her portrait there, smiling over Mr Wilberry’s shoulder, on the wall opposite her husband’s chair. Those dark eyes and all that lush raven hair, what a divine woman she was. You could easily mistake her for a Spanish señora with those looks; the eyes of a Welsh pirate princess stole him away, he says to any who ask of her origins, her uncommon features. How Alec Howell must miss her. Too young, she was, too swiftly lost, and yet she gazes at him every evening still and lovingly; and why wouldn’t she? The man is a rock, a martyr, a model of moral responsibility and rectitude. He is superb. Browning should have written a poetic monologue for him.
And he is now smiling that wolf smile directly at me. The promise of retribution never more positively conveyed. Something is coming for us when the guests leave, be in no doubt, that smile is saying. Perhaps he will beat me; he will certainly need to when I bar his way to Greta with everything I have. He hasn’t taken his hand to me for what seems ages; not since I returned home for the winter break and he’d discovered through a colleague that I had been seen too often unchaperoned walking across University Park, and once noted laughing raucously on King Street in Newtown – cavorting was the charge. He slapped me in a perfunctory way, at the end of the remonstrance; nothing out of the usual. If only he knew what else I get up to off the chain: consorting with socialists at suffrage demonstrations and drinking gin-slipped punch at St Paul’s – before walking across the lawn alone in the dark. I return his smile now, raise my glass to him: Cheers dearest Uncle, and may the new year bring you some charge of malpractice that will see you sent away to be surgeon at Townsville Plague Hospital. But whatever you do, whatever you plan, you will not stop us from going to the Hill. Not now. You can’t. You don’t want our gallant strangers to see what you really are. Beat me – go on – but be careful about it. I gulp down the remains of my wine in anticipation. Was that my third glass? I really wouldn’t know.
‘And now, ladies, if you will please excuse us.’ He gives us our command to leave the men to take smoke in one end and break wind out of the other for an hour – or, rather, fifty-five minutes it’ll have to be, since we’re running so recklessly over schedule.
I glance over at Mr Thompson as I turn to file out with the ewes, will him to do something upsetting, but he doesn’t; he is busy stuffing a pipe.
And Mrs Weston is taking my arm as the door closes behind us, her voice low, keeping me to her side. ‘A word with you, dear – about Greta. Perhaps it’s time to start thinking about a suitable fellow?’
‘Time for what?’ I can barely conceal my shock, or my revulsion, at the suggestion: a suitable fellow? Greta, exchange one gaoler for another? And in this predicament? No.
‘Yes, time to consider marriage, perhaps?’ Mrs Weston persists. ‘Is there a reason she’s not in favour of the idea?’
‘Reason?’ If ever I might tell you. My sister is in no state to be married. I look around the drawing room for her, but she is not with us; taken the opportunity to sneak off to the closet, most probably.
‘She seemed to avoid the topic with me,’ Mrs Weston continues and I feel as if I might choke for all I want to say. For all I must say. But …
‘Did she?’ is all I can say. I pretend it’s none of my affair. ‘Greta knows her own mind about such things, I’m sure.’
My own mind turns inside out. Has Mrs Weston of her own accord guessed that something is wrong in this house? Is she inviting me to say?
She squeezes my arm affectionately, pats my hand in hers. ‘I only mean to be of use, that’s all, not meddlesome, dear. Greta is isolated here, or so I perceive, and she is too much a treasure to be shut away. While that uncle of yours seems rarely to notice any need other than his own, as is the way of most males. Hm?’
‘Hm.’ Can I dare hint at the truth of his ways?
‘I suppose he is too busy to care,’ she says, with sympathy. But does that sympathy extend to him, too? I can’t take that risk. That she will not believe me; not support us, if she knew. He rapes my sister. Would she think it a regrettable right of men to do this? A burden to be borne with a sigh; quietly.
I pretend that I am distracted elsewhere, breaking from Mrs Weston to hunt through the music in the piano seat. ‘Where is that song?’ The lines and dots of the sheets swirl around before my eyes. What am I looking for? Where are our answers? I might crawl under the piano and stay there, if that were ever an option. I scrunch back the corner of some piece or other under my hand, a grasp of desperation, and it reveals some sort of reply: Elgar and Rossetti’s ‘Song of Flight’ sitting there beneath it. A promise in it that we will fly, somehow, yes we will. Beginning with tomorrow, to the Hill. One step at a time.
‘Ah, here we have it.’ I straighten just as Greta returns to the room, and I hold out the sheet to her. ‘And there you are – in time to entertain us.’
‘Oh all right then, shall I?’ She smiles, taking it from me, smiling again at the music I have chosen for her; of course she would love to play it but she hesitates for one moment to doubt herself. The question that has crept into her soul: Do you really wish me to play? Her gaoler’s mark. She was not always this way, I would tell the room if I could. There was no sound Papa loved more, once: Play Gretty, play – play the cares of the world away. And she would, so sure of her skill she made me pout in envy. I want my sister back. I will have my sister returned to me. Whole.
‘Yes, dear, please,’ Mrs Weston insists. ‘Play for us – you must.’
Greta sits down at the keys, clever hands dancing across the melody, free at last inside this song. I
posted it home to her only in September but the sheet is imprinted on her heart, her eyes closed as her soprano soars, a summer breeze:
‘While we slumber and sleep
The sun leaps up from the deep.
Daylight born at the leap!
Rapid, dominant, free,
A thirst to bathe in the uttermost sea.
While we linger at play,
If the year would stand at May!
Winds are up and away
Over land, over sea,
To their goal wherever their goal may be.
It is time to arise
To race for the promised prize,
The Sun flies, the Wind flies.
We are strong, we are free,
And home lies beyond the stars and the sea …’
We are strong. We are free. I give myself over to this promise above all others. We will prevail. We will arise. We will fly to our rightful, natural home, one day. This is a race of endurance, not of speed.
‘Ah,’ Mrs Weston’s sigh of delight carries over the final chords, and above the small applause. ‘Ah,’ she repeats the sound, because there is nothing more that can be said of excellence.
I close my eyes to stay with it a while. Stay a good distance away from Dulcie’s turn at the piano now, her mother boasting, ‘So many pretty songs she brought home from abroad, I can’t keep up.’ She clumsily gets on with some dreadful ditty, strangling a lyric about hearts and flowers ‘a picture of what love should beeeeeee …’ Perhaps Mrs Weston is right about spider waists depriving the brain of oxygen. Dear God. ‘… a candy-coated fantaseeeeee …’ Shut up, shut up. ‘… but in your soul I’ve found the one my soul can seeeeeee …’ Who writes this nonsense? Honestleeeeee.
A lovers’ fantasy all right. I look up into the folds of the drapes; Aunt Libby’s joyful golden drapes. And I hear our aunt screaming through this house, a handful of moments after her honeymoon, screaming this house down. Screaming, and screaming, and screaming as she did at the end: No! Alec, no! Help me! Help me! Please, help me! Her intestines rupturing, her mind fracturing in the fever, until it finally let her go. And she was gone. So cold she was as we kissed her goodbye that final time. That final debt of nature paid. There is nothing that love can ever do to bargain it back. Nothing. The bridge that love cannot cross. But if it could, I would ask our wonderful, funny, cherished Libby if there is such a place as hell, just so that I might know he will one day go there.
Dulcie can sing him into the fire. On and on she whines, until the music stops again abruptly.
I snap into the present once more as the dining room doors open again at my back, with a rumble of footsteps and Uncle Alec toasting himself: ‘Sir Henry, I must admit, I am not. I mean what is the good of universal public education? What good does it do for those with little aptitude? Greta, for instance – should she have the same education as Berylda? Of course not. It would not have made a difference good or ill for Greta to never have attended school at all – apart from the expense to her parents, rest their souls. Why should we foot the bill then for those dull-minded types of the working classes and the racially impure? It is best for them to be made to be manually useful as early as possible – is it not best for the spirit to be useful at what one is best at?’
Manually useful. Is that what my sister is? I do not hear the replies of the men, some general hubbub of agreement as thin and as offensive as their cigar fug. I hear only that Alec’s words are deliberately chosen. Spiteful: meant and timed for me and my sister to hear.
I do not turn around. I cannot believe he stoops to this public humiliation any more than I can believe that no one speaks against it. This is the point, of course: a reminder of who is in charge. If he stood over her right now, smacked his hands together in her face and demanded she play ‘Yeller Gal’, just as he did in this very spot the night before last, would anyone speak against him? Would anyone care? Perhaps privately. But none will speak against him. And I cannot turn around, for if I do I might well scream. I cannot meet my sister’s eye for fear of the same; for the rush of desire in me: to kill him. Right here. Right now. I hold my breath. My vision dims and the room begins to disappear around me.
Until Mr Thompson dashes into it, coat tails flapping: ‘Don’t stop the music now!’ Bounding through the hubbub, bounding through my rage, for the piano. ‘Excuse me, miss, whatever you are,’ he shoos off Dulcie, and seats himself with a cracking of knuckles. ‘Let’s sing! Let’s sing until three!’ He appears considerably more intoxicated than he was when we left the men to themselves; he is bashing at the keys and yawping discordantly: ‘Ooooooooh! Do you like bananas, ladies, because my banana likes you. It’s fat and sweet and succulent, so I’ve been told, and nicely bent.’
‘Oh my Lord!’ Mrs Virginia Dunning’s shriek is almost as lewd as the song.
A mortified Mr Wilberry has his head in his hands, while everyone else has begun clapping theirs in time to the galloping music hall tune, whether they’ve caught the fruity innuendo in the lyric or not.
‘It’s Queensland’s best, you won’t regret this taste of sunshine once it’s et!’
Gret’s caught the gist and, hands clasped over her mouth, she’s shaking with laughter at the filth and uproar both. But I cannot find my own fun in this.
I turn to Uncle Alec now instead. Numb. Beyond exhaustion.
He looks back at me with vacant, unseeing eyes. His smile is tight. A pinched smile. I once overheard Buckley refer to it in conversation with the ice man as tighter than a cat’s craphole. That’s precisely the type of smile it is and Uncle Alec holds it until he can bear it no longer. Thunder stolen by the clown, bested yet again.
He claps his hands against the gathering rhythm, shouting over it: ‘Enough song, my friends! Enough! Come! Come out to the verandah. It is time for the fireworks display!’
A full six minutes early, too. Tick. Tick. Move along, everyone. We are so very nearly done with this evening’s farce. Tick. Tick.
Mr Thompson smashes down a final dis-chord: ‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba banana booooom!’
Fireworks
You must have chaos in you to give birth to a dancing star.
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Ben
‘God save the Queen!’
The first of the rockets roars up and it is red. A red bloom exploding across the night, a shower of red stars.
There’s your everlasting, dear son. See, it is here.
Her voice is so distinct this time, when I turn around I expect to see her. But she is not there. Of course she’s not. And I’m a bit drunk myself. Quite a bit drunk. I should not have taken that second port but I couldn’t stop myself – if I’d wanted to be trapped in a room full of self-important bastards outdoing each other for sanctimonious greed and bigotry, I’d never have left Queensland.
‘Happy New Year!’
‘Here’s to 1901!’
‘To the twentieth century!’
‘God save old fat ladies hanging on!’ Shut up, Cos.
Another whistle, another bang, and a bright lime chrysanthemum bursts out of the black above a bunch of whistling Catherine wheels, spinning out gold sparks. I laugh up into the night.
‘Good show, hm?’ Alec Howell directs my attention rather than asks me, then under all the spellbound ohhing and ahhing of his party he grips my left wrist and I bend to hear him direct me further: ‘You will not encourage my nieces to undertake this journey to the Hill, I hope.’
I will not? There is no greater guarantee that I will disregard such a hope. Just who does this fellow think he is, telling me what I might or might not do? With some West Country farmboy accent slipping further around his own one-port-too-many, he is no better of mine; he is not even a peer. He is an odious little turd, actually. I tell him: ‘You need not be concerned, sir. Cosmo and I are far more reliable than we appear. I’m very much lookin
g forward to seeing this fabled place of Hill End. Unexpected diversions can lead to the best discoveries, I’ve always found. An old gold rush town, isn’t it? Tending more to ghosts these days? No?’
His eyes narrow right down to a squint and his grip tightens for a moment, as though he will insist, but then he lets it go again, silently. Still staring for a moment longer as though promising consequences. I laugh again: what consequences could this man promise? He is so very little, in all ways.
‘Oh! Whoa wee, look at that one!’ The sister points up at the next rocket, a huge burst of silver. A little childlike she might be, I suppose, a little reticent, but no more than I am. Waste of an education, the little turd said. Who would say that of any child? Even Pater insists that the children of the blacks out at Eleonora be schooled, under the lash as God intended, keeping his flock of stockmen faithful. But to say this of such a young woman, any young woman, when she is so talented – quite obviously. Cos will frame her menu card, too, I have no doubt; after intense consultation with Kevin the Curator, he will hang it somewhere in the studio. Greta Jones’s watercolour fireworks will be kept and admired forever at the Swamp.
I look back at Howell now and down at him. ‘You like to pick on girls, do you?’ The question spills from me, but he is turning away. Don’t think he heard.
Which is just as well. I should get myself and Cos out of here before either one of us opens our mouths again. Where is Cos now? I look up the verandah and find him: shirt front hanging out, champagne swaying, harassing that magistrate, Wardell. Hopefully belching in his ear. Over the port, that paragon of justice declared he was all for striking miners as they keep his conviction rate looking healthy in the eyes of the Attorney-General, before thanking Howell for arranging the latest round of quiet venereal checks for all the local prostitutes. Good, clean town, this is, he declared.
I yawn as another rocket whistles upwards, and then another: bang, bang, bloom, bloom, orange and then blue, and then Cos falls backwards off the verandah and into the agapanthus below. Absolutely arseless. It’s time to go – immediately.