by Kim Kelly
‘Where were you?’ She is warm to the touch; her face clammy with sweat. This is not merely yesterday’s overindulgence of ginger beer, and I can’t answer her. She cries: ‘I’m the one who’s sorry, Ryldy. I’m sorry that I am ill.’
‘Don’t be so silly,’ I say. ‘We’ll find out what’s wrong, and we’ll fix it.’ And still I cannot tell her what I suspect this is; what I know this is: the seed that grows inside her, the germ twisting into life. But how? Why is it hurting her so?
‘I just want to go now, back to Bellevue – I just want my bed, my own bed,’ she sobs as I check under the bedclothes here, now, under her nightdress, for blood: none. She cries out at my touch to her abdomen now, though, pushing me away: ‘Don’t – please!’ But I persist. The injury is plain and raw within her hips as I continue to prod, yet even so there is nothing I can feel of it under my hand. What should I feel? What do I know? What is it? Could it be an infection after all? Or – what is that condition where the child in embryo strikes in the wrong place, before it reaches the womb? I can’t remember the word. But I know the consequence: haemorrhage and death. It kills hundreds of women every year. She needs a doctor, a hospital – a surgeon, possibly. And not the doctor in this town – slothful and incompetent, Uncle Alec called him, just an ordinary country physician. She needs an experienced surgeon. And one who is not also her abuser. Dr Weston, it will have to be – he’s mostly retired from those more arduous duties but there is no other choice. We must leave for Bathurst immediately.
‘Berylda, please.’ Ben is at the verandah door; beyond the lace, his head is pressed against the glass. ‘What’s happened? Is everything all right.’
‘No.’ I let him in; I have no choice. ‘Nothing is all right. My sister is dangerously ill.’
‘Ryl – please. It’s not so bad as that,’ Greta sits up in protest, or attempts to, clutching at her side. ‘I just want to go to my own bed, my own pillow. Truly. I will be all right.’
‘Greta!’ I scream at her. ‘You are not all right!’
I wake the house, ‘Please! Please!’ making my way towards the kitchen and finding Mrs Wheeler already arrived there from her apartment, already reaching for pots and knives in her cap and nightgown.
I will never know what I scream at her now, but she replies, ‘Yes, yes.’ Nodding, making noises of assurance, ‘I know, I know,’ wrapping sandwiches and stirring porridge, but her eyes hold terror: Don’t let your sister die here. Ruin the reputation of her already near invisible business. God forbid.
Buckley appears behind her, from another door beside the pantry, yawning and scratching his stubble but reliable as ever, already on the road and instructing: ‘Don’t worry, Miss Berylda. We’ll take the way through Turondale – it’s the longer way but faster. We’ll get there – we’ll be right.’ And he follows me back across the saloon.
Where he takes me by the wrist before he leaves for the stables. I gasp at him, this leather-skinned old gardener – You don’t touch me. But he does, and roughly. His eyes full of care and warning. Roo Buckley, my ally, my friend.
His brick dust scrapes into me: ‘Miss Berylda, slow down for a minute,’ he rasps, a whispering growl, not letting me go. ‘You need to listen to me. Stop right now and listen. I run into George Conroy last night, over at Kitty’s – you know, that bloke who Ah Ling done that miracle job on? He’s got two arms on him, all right. The Chinaman’s medicine does what it says, and I know what Howell has done to Miss Greta. I heard you talking to Ah Ling, yesterday, in his hut. I heard it all – every bit. I heard one of yous crying out in the night New Year’s Eve too. I shoulda come into the house there and then.’ He tightens his hold on my wrist: ‘I’m an old man. Let me do it for you, girl. I’ll get rid of him for you. Don’t matter if I hang.’
‘No!’ I shriek it at him, ripping my arm from his grasp, as Greta emerges from the door to our room. She is stooped, lost, frightened, and the dark shadows under her eyes are frightening me.
‘Ryl, I can’t find my boots,’ she says, as if that’s her fault too.
I turn back to Buckley before I go to her. ‘No,’ I hiss it though my teeth. ‘Whatever it is you heard, you heard it wrongly.’
If I have one atom of decency left to me, one power left to me, it is this: I will avenge myself and my sister. No one else will do it for us. No other will make this payment to hell. This evil, this poison, stops here: with me. Today.
Requite
The worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself;
you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests.
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Ben
‘Greta Jones seemed in fine form yesterday,’ Cos continues packing only his pipe. ‘Sweet as a pea, that one, in every way. Nothing wrong with her.’
‘Well, she’s not in a good way now,’ I tell him again, throwing his clothes on the end of his bed. ‘Just get dressed, will you, please?’
‘What did bitter little kitty witch do to her?’ he says at my back as I turn away to pick up our bags, and he’s pushed this once too far.
I look across at him. ‘What did you say?’
‘You heard me.’ He strikes a match. ‘No wonder Greta gets ill. You know, she does want to see what I can do to help her sell her illustrations, she asked me again yesterday, and I do know someone who might well be interested. Greta herself is very interested in earning some pocket money – no doubt to get away. Get a life. Spread her wings. And her sister could not be less interested.’
‘You’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,’ I tell him, with no intention of talking about what I know of the girls’ situation, that it’s Berylda’s intention to support them both, to get away together; it’s not yet my business to tell. ‘Just get up and get dressed.’
He continues to lie there, puffing. ‘And now kitty’s got her little witchy claws hooked right into you, too.’
I pull him up by the front of his nightshirt and tell him right into his face: ‘Get dressed, get outside, get back on that horse, or I will throw you through this fucking wall to save time.’ I shove him up against the liner boards. And then I let him go as quickly at the sound of my father’s voice that has just shot out of me.
‘Look who’s a man now, then.’ Cos gives me a threatening stare, but he picks up his trousers. Unlike him, I’ve never deliberately hit anyone or picked a fight; but at the same time, I’ve never been shy of a tackle or short on strength. I could probably actually throw him through this timber wall.
I give him some threatening stare back. ‘Don’t push me again. Soon as we get back to Bathurst, you can go – get out of my life.’
He says nothing to that – because I mean it. I don’t know who he is any more, if I ever did. There’s such a thing as being a difficult character, and there’s such a thing as just being a nasty –
‘Shit,’ he says when he sees Greta Jones, as he follows after me, pulling on his boots across the back verandah. ‘She’s not well, is she.’
One needn’t be too observant to see that the girl suffers badly. Berylda and Mrs Wheeler are half-carrying her to the stables. The girl is pale and visibly tense, keeping hold of her sister’s hand all the while as though that might help to ease the pain. I run over to help them; lift her up into the buggy. She weighs less than nothing, but she is heavy with distress: ‘Oh Mr Wilberry, Ben – I’m so sorry to make this terrible fuss and trouble.’
‘You’re no trouble at all.’ I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, wishing there was something else I could do, and Mrs Wheeler pats her on the knee: ‘There, there – it will come and it will go. All things pass.’ As Berylda glares at her; withering: ‘Pass? What would you know?’ And I look at Mrs Wheeler, who is stung, and apologise, very awkwardly: ‘It’s been a difficult morning for everyone.’ But she is already walking away, with a Baltic curse.
Mr Wheeler is holding out reins to me, somew
hat under the weather himself, and as I take them I glance up into the loft: this place where Berylda and I gave ourselves to each other only hours ago. If I couldn’t see the little bed lamp still resting there I would question whether it had happened at all.
‘Follow the signposts to Bathurst, east and then south, round Monkey Hill,’ Buckley urges, bringing the roan out for Cos, and grim as I am about what this day might bring. ‘Keep us in sight, will you?’ he adds, though he needn’t have, and we’re away as the dawn breaks, blazing through the needles of the black cypresses that tower along this road out of the town.
My back is soon cricked from turning in the saddle every few moments to see that they stay with us, watching for Buckley to tell us to break for the mare to catch her breath, and not bothering to watch if Cos stays with us too – if he delays at all, he can find his own way back. Or not. The road is sound, fairly recently graded, and bounded each side mostly by dense stringy bark and yellow box, and I’ve never hated a forest more. Never hated a forest before. Or the tight bends in a road, slowing our pace as we begin to descend now through a shaded terrain of jagged cliffs that I would otherwise belt down happily, taking in the broad forever view from this vantage across these tablelands of rolling green and gold and blue. Here, I am caught between looking back for the buggy and looking forward for a rock fall, a stray branch, a crumbled bridge, but the road remains clear, empty but for us.
We pass the fork for Bathurst and Sofala, turning southwards and back across the Turon at a shallow causeway, and still Buckley doesn’t signal for us to stop. I want to stop, to see how the girls are faring; each time I look behind me I see only the tops of their hats tight together and downcast so that I cannot tell them apart, never mind if they are going all right. But on and on we ride, and it’s not until the sun is well above the trees, above a gully flat, before we hear the old man call out, ‘Whoa there,’ for a small billabong, beneath the wide rambling canopy of an apple box. The coals of a fire smoulder beside it, and an old copper pan and sifter lie discarded by the stream that trickles down into the waterhole; we’ve interrupted someone’s prospecting, it seems.
‘Where are we – how far along?’ I ask Buckley as he takes the buggy past me to pull up by the water.
‘Jews Creek – just over halfway,’ he says. ‘The road will be more or less straight from here. Give us a half-hour resting and we’ll be in Bathurst about three o’clock, I’d reckon.’
‘It’s all right, please, gentlemen.’ Greta Jones turns and looks over the back of the buggy at me, blinking as though she might have slept through the last few hours, unlikely as that would seem. ‘Don’t push the horses too hard on my account. Really, please. I don’t feel nearly so dreadful now.’
Her cheeks are pink once more, her eyes alive and bright now she smiles. She does look much better than she did.
Cos groans behind me; I hear him slide out of the saddle and thud to the ground, muttering something or other, annoyed. Let him be. Does he think Berylda has somehow orchestrated all this just to get under him? I don’t care what he thinks. But it is fairly odd, for Greta to be so ill one moment and perfectly fine the next.
I move towards Berylda as she steps down from the buggy now; I want to ask her what she thinks is going on. I want to know what has happened to last night, to us. What happened this morning: why did she run from me? Did she somehow hear her sister calling to her? Perhaps when I was still asleep?
She glances behind her, at me, and quickly moves away as I near, towards the old man at the water’s edge. ‘Half an hour, Buckley – half an hour and no more,’ she says.
He doesn’t reply, but gets on with filling the billy and muttering to himself about ghosts that can’t kick their fires out. Cos stuffs his pipe; Greta settles by the water and begins sketching out the apple box tree as though indeed she had never been ill in any way. Cos says something to her about her drawing but his words are swallowed in the crash and rumble of a mail coach flying past.
I stretch and crack my aching spine. A mopoke blinks down at me from an elbow in the branches of the apple box, more tree than bird. I move towards Berylda again, and she moves away, to stand behind her sister, to stare into her pocket watch. This strange dance with her returns; what does it mean? Only hours ago, we could not have been closer; I moved inside her; I kissed a tear upon her cheek; I kissed her breasts. I harden just to think of it, and it’s me now who has to look away. Does she regret what we have done? Why? Why could that be? I want to pull her shoulder round towards me, make her face me; tell me. But I can’t do that. Not right at this moment.
I look over at the abandoned pan and sifter, copper greening by the billabong like weird mould. I don’t know what to make of her; of this; of anything. I take a look around upstream a little way, looking for more beryldii, in the dappled shade, where they’d best be found. Didn’t Buckley say they were abundant round this Monkey Hill way? They might well be, but I see none.
Berylda
Mr Thompson is saying something to me, from where he sits on the ground beside Greta, but I don’t hear him. He won’t stop looking at me with his cool grey eyes, though, with his overfed conceit, so I ask him: ‘What?’
‘I said would you like a sandwich?’ He has unwrapped one and is holding it up to me, the waxed paper beneath it fluttering limply in the breeze.
‘Oh. No. Thank you.’ I look at my watch again; the hands swim, as if their gold is melting in the heat of my palm. From my rage. This rage that grows by the minute within me, so that if I slipped my harness now, I might kick out, I might kick the sandwich from his hand, kick my boot into his fat complacent face as the face of Alec Howell’s proxy, tear off his too-neat beard, his vanity, as he lounges here by my sister, tear down the tree before them, tear down the hills and the sky.
‘Ryldy suffers such terrible anxiety on my account,’ Gret explains to him fondly, lightly, and I walk away to hurry Buckley up again.
My sister appears to have rallied, yes, but the condition persists. What else can it be now but some severe case of morning sickness? A lost line of newsprint returns to me from somewhere, some passing joke: ‘Morning sickness?’ I asked the Doc. ‘But I must be having triplets then, for it comes to me morning, noon and night.’ And with this severity which Greta is experiencing, logic from somewhere else tells me that the pregnancy might be further advanced than I had presumed. When did your last menses come? I asked her on New Year’s Eve, when she told me she was only so tender and sore because her whatsits were late. Oh three weeks, maybe four … My own ignorance scalds; that I do not know my own body either. Does it come for me next with Ben Wilberry’s seed? How stupid have I been? Wilfully stupid.
‘Miss Berylda,’ Buckley addresses me as I approach him, standing by the fire with his mug of tea and his cigarette. ‘Don’t do this,’ he tells me in his low growl, glancing up the little rocky stream towards Ben, who is searching the grass there. I look down at the ground; I cannot let my rage fall upon him. ‘Don’t go off on your own this time,’ Buckley says. ‘Let me help –’
‘No. You cannot,’ I tell the mat of dead grey leaves at my feet, dead grey dust. ‘There is nothing you must help me with.’
‘I can go to the police with what I know,’ he says, bending across me to poke the coals with a stick. ‘And I know Miss Greta ain’t the only –’
‘Ha!’ Contempt snarls through rage and warns him in return: no policeman would believe the word of an old convict labourer against the word of the district surgeon, the treasurer of the Liberal League, a captain in the corps. All that would achieve is our ignominy.
I glance up again, at Ben; he waves as he sees me, stepping down the gentle slope, stepping across the stream. I shrink from his warmth now, from this picture of the future that should be ours, and can’t be. What would I say to him if I could? How would I break things off? Tell him that I cannot allow him to be any further corrupted by me, because that is true, and
I am devastated, utterly devastated, that I will never know his breath upon my lips again. This pain drives a black rat hole of despair into my chest.
I look back at Buckley and my voice is death as I tell him: ‘It’s time to go.’
I return to Gret: ‘Come on, pack up.’
‘Oh, but I just want to fin –’
‘Finish it back at Bellevue – in bed. You are not as well as you think you are.’
Her eyes beg me to calm down; mine beg her to do as I ask. ‘Greta, please don’t argue with me.’
‘Oh all right.’ She tosses her pencils back into her case, but she snaps the lid shut, exasperated with me. Perhaps I am pulling her too sharply from her denial; perhaps she doesn’t want to know what this strange illness is, or perhaps she has guessed; I don’t know.
But I must remind her: ‘This morning you were so violently ill, you frightened me into thinking you might not survive this journey back to Bathurst. To lose you would be to lose all meaning to my own life. So you can be as cross with my impatience as you like – all right?’
‘All right,’ she sighs heavily but she smiles. ‘I am a bit tired, I’ll admit.’
I am. And not least because I need you safely, blamelessly in bed, my sister, while I do all that must be done this afternoon.
Mr Thompson continues to stare at me with his cool complacency, calculating perhaps what gibe he might serve to me next. But whatever it is, he keeps it to himself, which is possibly wise. For I am busily calculating too, beneath all the violence coursing through me, wave upon wave; as Greta stands up, still bent with pencil case and book in hand, I bend with her and whisper: ‘I’ll call for Mrs Weston when we get in – have her look at you first, before any doctor. All right? I’ll make sure he doesn’t come near, I promise you.’