by Kim Kelly
‘Good.’ I smile too, and look up at the loft again. Neat and clean like the rest of this place, Ben Wilberry will love me on a blanket in a nest of hay here, amongst the rich earth smells of the horses, their leather and the sack of fresh tobacco. Our night. One precious night.
I return across the yard, head down against the wind, hands in my pockets, and I feel the bottle there as I do; the bottle of poison still wrapped in my handkerchief, and still there. Another oversight blasting away my breath now. Carrying the bottle around with me as if it’s a scant ounce of Jicky? Do not get on your skin, said Ah Ling. How very stupid of me: if it leaked there, would it not kill me first? I scuttle back to my room, taking the door to it directly off the verandah, and I push our freedom deep into my carryall under the foot of my bed.
As I rise again, rehearsing my next line, Oh heavens, how lucky, my watch was there in the buggy all the time, the mirror on the night stand tells me again what a disaster I am. And I am exhausted. I must be, with the too few hours I have slept since New Year’s Eve. I must be mad with exhaustion, as with everything else. I’m sure I am. Mad. But my face shows no sign.
The mirror mists slightly, as if from some breath inside the night stand, and I see now a bowl of warm water has been placed there for me; scented with some oil; how thoughtful. What is the scent? Orange blossom? No. Some rosy bergamot summery thing and Aunt Libby comes to me with it, a melody I can’t quite hear, the fringe of her shawl disappearing around the door as she leaves the room.
Oh Libby, I ask the mirror, what is this flooding and falling and rushing and crashing of love and hate in me? Will it end when he is gone? Will it all stop? Will it simply be quiet?
Help me! Help me, please! No, Alec – help me! she wails and wails through the night. The sound of grasping, tearing desperation that will never, never leave me.
The crushers seem to have gone quiet, though. Ended for the day. Distant thunder rumbles under the wind, over the mountains. I wash my face and I change into my organdie evening blouse. I arrange its soft ivory mantle around my shoulders to show them a little and pin Ben Wilberry’s wildflowers there, crimson and gold, in the gather between my breasts. My plaits, such that Greta remade them, are wind-blown and slipping again; I shake them out and twist my hair up into a tousled mess of tendrils. I am a gypsy tramp. A pirate princess. Oh Libby. I can barely recognise myself. I am mad, mad, mad. And still my face shows no sign.
Ben
Greta is playing the piano now, that Chopin thing of sweet melancholy, and here, in this mostly empty pub saloon, the notes move through the space like lengthening shadows, trailing off to some point towards infinity. How that uncle of theirs draws the conclusion that this woman is a waste of an education, I’ll never understand; she plays without the sheet. I can’t play ‘Chopsticks’. God, but the piece is endless. The music drags through me; the evening drags. It’s seven twenty-five. And we’ve already eaten.
Greta yawns over the keys; she’ll be asleep before it’s finished.
‘Your other guest isn’t lured out by the music, Mrs Wheeler?’ Berylda asks beside me on this old but comfortable lounge, and she remains perfectly poised despite the sag in the middle threatening to throw us together right here.
‘What?’ Mrs Wheeler almost jumps out of her chair, woken with a fright from her own drift. ‘What other guest?’
‘Oh? I thought I saw another woman here, this morning,’ Berylda says, ‘coming out of the room next to Greta’s and mine.’
‘You are seeing ghosts.’ Mrs Wheeler turns in her chair, to the room in question, the one marked PRIVATE. ‘This is no bedroom, this is where I keep the stores for the house – the brooms and the bleach. I wish she would help me clean this house if she is here.’
‘Funny.’ Berylda frowns to herself, and she shrugs. ‘Never mind.’ And then she rises, just as Greta looks set to rest her brow on the music stand inside the lid. ‘I think it’s time for bed anyway, don’t you, Gretty-poo?’
Greta turns in the piano seat and nods, so slowly, she is already asleep.
As Berylda glances back at me, down at me, where I’m half-sprawled on the lounge, and she whispers under Mrs Wheeler’s flustering over Greta about hot milk and honey: ‘Should have made it nine o’clock, shouldn’t I?’
I can’t respond to her in words; my body is overtaking all responses now.
She says, ‘But midnight it is.’ That smirk, teasing me.
And the women are gone, leaving me to contemplate the incredible for the next four hours and fifteen minutes. That there must be such a thing as destiny in love. Stars crossing, planets aligning, tea leaves spelling out our names and all that. How else is it that Berylda Jones would ask to be alone with me tonight? In a hay loft. Does she know what might happen? She must know something of it, mustn’t she? She is a very well-educated young woman, one with more than a passing interest in the biological structure and function of humankind, I would think. She seemed to dress differently this evening, too: her hair pinned back somehow more loosely from her face, her shoulders bared, the corsage of grevillea and everlasting drawing my eyes across the dining table to her breasts. I wonder if she dresses this way at her college in Sydney every night. I wonder if she smokes cigarettes at poetry readings. She seems so confident; she knows what she does here with me, doesn’t she? It’s me who doesn’t really know what might happen. Bloody hell. I haven’t been anywhere near that side of things since Cos dragged me into a place on Wharf Street, in Brisbane, for my twenty-first birthday. Arseless. I have no idea. I live like a monk in Melbourne, in an old but comfortable three-room terraced cottage on Swanston Street, nondescript but for the quantity of plants and cuttings that spill from the kitchen out into the courtyard and the amount of soil embedded in carpets and between the boards, and I can’t say it’s ever bothered me all that much. Nothing a long walk or a few hundred laps of the baths couldn’t address. Until now.
Cos snores from his place on the lounge by the hearth; I’d forgotten he was there. Not that I’m about to ask him for advice. He’s been out cold since five o’clock, missed dinner entirely, too contentedly grogged and serviced, and I haven’t missed his company. I stand up, stretch, stare into the embers glowing along the top of the fresh log on the fire, about to burst through with flame. I suppose I’ll have to go for a longish walk now, just to do something, fill in the time; have a bath: that, I suppose, would be the most important thing to do. Cos snores again, so loud I don’t know how that one didn’t wake him up. I throw the rug from the back of the lounge over him and leave him there.
Berylda
Doubt snicks me with the tip of the blade as I stare into the night: You can’t kill Alec Howell. You can’t kill anyone.
Because I love. I love Ben Wilberry. Do I? What else is this terrible force that racks me against the clench of my hatred? This delusion that says I might have a future with him. Ben. For it is delusion, isn’t it? That I could marry him. That Gret and I could fly away with him, make a home with him, and we could all live happily ever after, after all.
In hell. For what I must do to marry him will make me unfit to be loved in any way at all. I would destroy any such union, were it to ever occur. I would destroy his life, his gentleness, his happiness, by my sin. By this ultimate pollution of my soul. Cruelty’s chain will never let me go.
Gret sleeps in the bed by the window, the moonlight kissing her face, a peaceful dreaming smile upon her lips. She shows no sign of the pollution in her, but it is there. The night is still now, and silent except for the croaking of a few frogs.
One more hour and I will meet him at the stables. One more hour and I will tell him that I am sorry. I have deceived him enough. What will I tell him? That I am promised to another? Tell him the truth? That my sister and I exist only as Alec Howell’s whores? That is the last thing I can tell him. But I must tell him something, to turn him away. To change his mind about me.
Bec
ause I must kill Alec Howell. For revenge. For freedom. I have no choice.
And I cannot hurt Ben Wilberry. I will not hurt him any more. I will not encourage him further.
And yet my skin aches for his touch. The tick of my watch, tight in my hand, aches into my heart.
I am too evil, and yet I am not evil enough.
I will be free, and yet never free at all.
Ben
‘And what are you up to, creeping about as this hour?’ Cos shuffles in off the lounge and through the bedroom door, scratching his head. Impeccable timing – caught me just as I strike the match to light the lamp.
‘Going to the dunny,’ I say.
‘My hairy arse, you are,’ he grunts. ‘You’re going to her, aren’t you. You smell like a bride’s nightie fresh out of the box.’
I don’t respond. I smell like soap; clean people do. I find my trousers folded over the end of the bed and as I pull them on he repeats his warning: ‘Be careful, Ben.’
I don’t respond to that either. On my long walk around the town in the dark just a few hours ago, with only the moon and an inordinate number of feral goats to consult, I came to the most likely theory to explain his attitude: he’s jealous. Put out that his hopeless friend might well be hopeless no longer. In the history of our friendship, I’ve always been the awkward one with women, and generally socially inept. The one who the pitiable one might pity. This, and Susan has his nose out of joint with the twins taking her attention from him; together with his perennial frustrations at not having his genius recognised simply by imagining that it should be. And presto: he can’t stand that I might actually have stumbled across some sort of happiness – with someone as beautiful and brilliant as Berylda Jones. It must be killing him. Let it kill him, until it doesn’t. He’ll get over it.
I take the lamp out through the saloon and across the yard, but hardly need it to find my way, the waxing moon is high now and blazing tonight.
And in the dark of the stables, I find her first by her perfume, that fragrance of rosemary and –
‘Ben?’ she whispers, from above.
‘Yes.’ I raise the lamp, the light falling first across the horses dozing in the stalls, catching the black polish of the rounded back of the buggy, the peeling red paint of Wheeler’s heavy cart, the tack hung around the walls. And now Berylda’s small white porcelain face looking down the ladder from the loft.
I suppose I scale it in three steps.
‘You’re here,’ she says softly, taking the lamp from me.
‘I am.’
And she is naked, but for her nightgown falling from her shoulders, her dark hair falling all around her.
And she is waiting for me.
Berylda
‘You must be cold,’ he says.
‘Not now,’ I say to him, and I have no more words for him. No sorrow and no shame. The lamplight caresses his fair lashes and his lashes caress my cheek as buttons are rent furiously through canvas, through calico. And I look at him: his body is superb: he is da Vinci’s Proportions of Man. He is precisely what a man should be. I touch his face; I touch his chest; I touch the firmness of him and I am the lightning. I crack and open to him. The brittle shell of me shatters; I am ripped from my carapace. Skin upon skin, I guide him to me, I guide him over me, and then as nature would have him fill me, he does, and the further he fills me, the more I swell and shore around him.
Until we are one. In exaltation, and in pain. I have never known such pain, nor such a longing for it to remain. I hold him deeper and deeper to me; I am filled with stone; I am filled fire; I am filled with light. His kiss swallows my cry. We two were designed in every detail to be together in this way.
He holds me cupped in his arms and he trembles over me; he trembles into me, through me.
‘Ah!’ he cries out, and I feel his pulse within me; I feel the surge of a great wave; I fly into the heart of this pain.
And I hold him closer and closer as he subsides. I don’t ever want to let him go; I don’t want him to leave me.
He eclipses all malignance from me, hiding me under his too-long hair, under his body. He holds me as if I am precious, as if I am unbroken. He is my boat; I am the sailor and the sea.
I tremble now too. I tremble gently in his arms, and I grieve.
Ben
‘Have I hurt you?’ Please, no.
‘No.’ Her eyes are closed but she shakes her head, rustling the hay under the blanket beneath us. She holds my face in her hands, and whispers: ‘I’ve never been so still. So quiet …’
‘Oh good.’ Is that good? It must be. It has to be. There is no other goodness like this one that has just revealed itself to me. I am in awe of her; of us; of this. Holding her.
I am at some edge of thought aware that my elbows are beginning to suffer a little as I continue to keep my weight from her, but I can’t move from her, and she doesn’t seem to want me to. She pushes her hips against mine, pushing inside her quiet stillness so that I’m almost hard again. I don’t want to ever stop seeing her, here in my arms, above this stable, in this cool-warm summer air, on this perfect night, in this lamplight, frowning as she pushes against me, in some pleasure that is all her own, until she really is quiet, and still. I will never stop seeing her here, for as long as I am alive.
‘Berylda.’ I say her name, to somehow mark upon the rafters that we are here; mark it upon the air.
‘Hm?’ A faint smile but her eyes remain closed.
‘I love your name,’ I say, because I do. ‘Berylda. It’s a song. A spell.’
‘I love my name too.’ She smiles again, more fully, but she will not open her eyes, as though she is holding herself in some reverie, some spell she doesn’t want to break, as she tells me: ‘My parents invented it – Papa found a piece of beryl stone on one of his licences, out at Ophir, just as Mother wished me into existence. My sister’s named after a whole mine, though – little place called Greta in the Hunter coalfields, where Papa was born, before he ran away to make his first fortune in mountain shale – Shhhh, don’t tell anyone that either, will you? Rags to riches. Isn’t that romantic? A mineral love story, of daring Welsh prospectors and pretty China girls …’
I kiss her forehead, and her loss, and her luck at having parents who evidently loved each other and their children, as I tell her: ‘I’d like to see that piece of beryl. I bet it’s –’
‘You can’t.’ She flinches, and the frown sweeps across her face again; she holds her eyelids tight shut in it, and I hold her tighter in my arms. ‘Mother had it made into a pendant, oval-shaped, a cloudy sea-green, scallop-edged with gold. But it disappeared, with the rest of her jewellery box, after …’
‘Shhh.’ I kiss her again. ‘Don’t leave sweet dreams.’ I don’t want her to think of him – this thief, the uncle, their guardian; I will help her reclaim what she can of her parents’ estate from him, engage a solicitor – as I shall probably have to on my own account at some near time, to claim what’s mine of Mama’s. But now, I only promise her what I must: everything. ‘I will always be here for you. I will never disappear.’ I wonder if that sounds a bit dramatic and so I add: ‘Unless, of course, you’d ever want me to.’
She laughs through her dream at me, the sweetest mockery. A tear tracks across her cheek and I kiss it away; taste its salt. But her smile stays with me, and not with me, as though she is listening to some melody only she can hear; I want to hear it too.
‘Where have you gone?’ I ask her.
‘Over the chimney pots and far away,’ she murmurs. ‘Hm … a land of admiration and respect …’
Her face tilts a little towards the lamplight. I am a giant holding a small, beautiful world in my hands, and I do believe that she has fallen fast asleep.
Berylda
I gulp blindly at the blackness, the chain iron-heavy across my ribs, a massive link constricting my lungs as I fight to
drag in the air. What? But the chain is warm, soft. Flesh: an arm wound around my waist. I am sleeping? No. How did I allow myself to sleep? Is it dawn? No. My eyes are open, but it is still dark. Just: grey light creeping in from somewhere below. A lone bird chirps; the crushers are not yet thumping. Panic engulfs me.
‘Berylda?’ he rouses, confused, as I push his arm from me. ‘It’s all right. I’m here.’
It’s not all right. I scrabble amongst the hay for my nightgown and throw it over my sinfulness, my vast and unfolding sinfulness, my wailing guilt. I find the ladder and I am down it and across the yard, cold slap of dew against the soles of my feet. I fell asleep? How did I fall asleep?
What have I done? In the few moments it takes to reach the verandah, sense returns enough for me to answer that question with the cold-slapping facts: I have allowed myself to love Ben Wilberry, I have allowed him to love me, and none of this can ever be. Because of what I must do today. Today.
Today, there is no God, and I am a murderess.
‘Wait – wait,’ he whispers after me across the yard, his breath at my back, his stride quaking the earth, breaking the earth in two, for me.
But he can’t rescue me, us, and I can’t wait. Can I? Can I? Can I? The answer returns and returns and returns: no. The blackness is greying faster and brighter with my every step and I dare not look behind me. My heart is screaming each way, along the future and the past, as I turn the handle of the bedroom door.
To hear my sister moan, right into the centre of now: ‘Ryldy? Ryl, please, is that you?’ A gasping sob ragged as my mind.
‘What’s wrong?’ I rush to her side and as I do I smell the sick in the pot on the floor at my feet. ‘Oh, Gret. Greta, I’m so sorry.’