by Lois Murphy
Milly comes good on the promise of scones, but I don’t have the appetite to do them justice. She’s disappointed when I turn up unaccompanied, curious to meet my visitor. She listens without comment to my account of the night before, only raising an eyebrow when I mention Alex’s claim of clairvoyance.
‘You believed her?’
‘I did, actually.’
‘Interesting. I’d have liked to meet her. She must have been a convincing woman.’
‘She was.’
I reach for another scone in an effort to avoid Milly’s eyes. I don’t want to tell her just how convincing Alex had been. She had rung me that afternoon, just after I’d finished unpacking my supplies, to say she was at the motel in Woodford and was feeling much stronger. She apologised for leaving so precipitously but – and here her voice had become firm, as if she’d reached some kind of resolution, a path that can’t be avoided – she hadn’t felt strong enough to face meeting the woman who would be the cause of my death.
The scone on my plate is still slightly warm, and the butter melts into it appealingly. Milly smiles at me. ‘Great comfort food,’ she says.
I’ve known Milly for twenty years or so, although for my first three years in Nebulah only on a professional basis. She and her husband Gavin had moved to the area as newlyweds in the late sixties: they bought five acres and built themselves their small house surrounded by bush and unkempt gardens. Milly taught at the local high school, and Gavin was a social worker attached to the shire. I’d met them over the Russell boys, semi-wild local kids who preferred stealing cars to sitting in classrooms. The youngest was eleven.
Milly and Gavin were idealists, but grounded too – while prepared to do their best, they were capable of recognising a lost cause when they saw one. The Russell clan moved to Perth anyway, always one step ahead of state revenue, not long after I arrived in town. It was a relief all round to see them go, even though it would be the end of the boys, who would be doomed to sink out of reach within the extended depths of the city.
I’d had a couple of late afternoon beers out at Milly and Gavin’s, largely due to the Russell question, and had always been impressed by their no-nonsense manner – amused cynicism rather than airy-fairy notions. Yet they were also the type to do anything they could to genuinely help. Their house remained free of the pandemonium of children, but they were the sort of childless couple who end up surrounded by strays: cats, dogs, a one-legged crow, and for a while an imbecilic goat.
Milly was always reserved and calm, but Gavin was a more volcanic personality. He used to erupt into peals of barking laughter, the kind of surprisingly distinct laugh – always at full volume – that would set everyone around off as well. They were a self-contained couple; to be around them and see them laugh together was to feel exposed to the ideal and rare state of marriage: of minds truly delighting in each other’s company.
I’d known them casually for a few years: I’d often run into Milly outside the IGA, laden with sacks of pet food, or the two of them bravely clutching plastic cups of woeful wine at community functions. Then I’d had to pay Milly the worst of official visits. A truck had lost control on a bend just south of Woodford; Gavin had been coming the other way when its trailer jackknifed and swiped him, crushing his car between it and the tree it ploughed him into.
News of the accident had electrified the town. Witnesses were kept from the scene, so speculation was rife. Milly hadn’t been at all worried when she saw me turn into their drive; Gavin was attending a council meeting in Woodford, but was supposed to be staying on for a counter meal with some colleagues, so she wasn’t expecting him back till later that night. She had no idea the dinner had been called off, and gave a wave from the clothes line, assuming I was looking for Gavin to help with a grieving family.
I was struck at the time by her composure, this almost gangly woman who tended to hunch into herself the way that tall girls who stand out for their height often do. She was quiet in the face of my news, and retained her calm even as the air around her reverberated with pain. I remember being awed at the time by the extremes in play – her terrible grief tornadoing around us, and the remarkable self-control she maintained in its eye. The only physical response she gave to my news was that she appeared, noticeably, to shrink. It was as though she’d developed a leak and was slowly but visibly deflating. She thanked me when I said I’d already formally identified the body, and was dignified in the face of my clumsy condolences. She refused my offer of a lift to a friend’s, saying she needed to feed the animals and would prefer some time alone at home to get her thoughts together. When I drove away she was hunched on her porch steps, distractedly stroking an ugly ginger cat that had wrestled its way onto her lap.
Much later she told me that her composure was simply the result of a lifetime of the emotional restraint necessary for survival in the classroom, and that once I’d left she pressed her bare forearm to the electric hotplate – the only way she could find to ground the emotional turmoil. Her grief was so intense it had been two days before she could breathe normally again.
In all the years I’ve known her, I have only seen Milly lose her balance once, when she collapsed under the strain of the horror of Gavin’s reappearance, in the first nights of the mist.
Death is a hollowing experience. The intellectual turbulence of grief is an external assault, as every part of the life you drag yourself through reflects the isolation of your future existence. But at least Gavin’s death had been natural – as tragic as it was, it had been an accident, and mercifully swift. The sort of death that can eventually be lived with, accepted, as the dripping intake of time slowly fills the void of the lost one. To have him returned, though, like some horrible monkey’s paw from a moral fable, to be set upon by the mist every night, was more than the strongest mind could endure. In the face of Gavin’s nightly pleas to her to come outside and help him, Milly caved in, her reserve rupturing like the crust of the earth when the pressure from below is too great to contain.
Those terrible nights were defining for us. Milly’s collapse was too profound, too confronting for the remaining Nebulah inhabitants to cope with. Although most of them were sympathetic, the situation was too disturbing for them, an internal combustion that simply couldn’t be endured given the external pressures we were under. Some, like Gail, simply lacked the basic human qualities of empathy and compassion, and disguised these shortcomings by attacking Milly, distorting their own callousness by insisting that what was in their own best interests was also in hers. They wanted her hospitalised.
We splintered. Milly and I had become close in the years since Gavin’s death, my initially dutiful visits becoming, in the face of shared interests and stimulating conversation, frequent and founded on friendship. When I was diagnosed with cancer – which softened my daughter’s hostility towards me but in no way dispersed it – it was Milly who nursed me through the treatment and my shameful moods; who kept Julie ‘informed’ of the situation – as she demanded – but placidly gave her to understand that her attitude was neither helpful nor endearing. I overheard one of these phone calls and I would have hated to have been on the receiving end of Milly’s tone, which was perfectly calm in the way that crushing weights often are when they’re in slow, gentle motion. She wasn’t rude, but she made it clear that Julie’s absence was far more beneficial than her presence. There was no way I would ever have considered having this intelligent, kind and incorrigibly funny woman locked away.
Li joined us. She had always been a loner of sorts, but not a hermit in the sense that Rolf had been. She was what is commonly termed in a small population a ‘character’, an aloof and focused woman with no time or respect for the usual female interests. Her humour therefore tended to be unexpected, which made it – and her – seem unpredictable. She and Milly were compatible by temperament, with the sort of unselfconscious nonconformity that was often labelled eccentricity. Li was a small person with an incredible backbone, which had supported her through
her flight from the massacres of Cambodia, carrying nothing but a battered photo of her husband and two sons, who hadn’t managed to escape the sanctioned atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.
Li never spoke of her lost family, or of the horrors she had witnessed before she managed to get out, or of the ironies of her subsequent persecution in Australia, as both an Asian and a refugee. These experiences fused into an insistence on survival that enabled her to establish and run her own farm singlehandedly, and saw her face the manifestation of the mist, so similar in many ways to what she had already lived through, with a fierce determination not to be forced to flee again.
Between the two of us we managed to get Milly through. I had some stashes of old sleeping pills left from the time of my treatment (and, I’ll admit, some antidepressants – I’ve never been a good invalid), which I’d stockpiled for the obvious reason, and these I administered indiscriminately: getting Milly through those excruciating nights took precedent over any other consideration.
The tablets made the nights endurable, and over the course of time, as we talked and reasoned, our shared, although disparate, experiences of loss and survival forged a bond that gave Milly the fortitude to withstand Gavin’s nightly entreaties. But while she recognised that the manifestation outside was only a ghoulish chimera and not really Gavin, who’d been cremated all those years ago, there was always a small but insistent doubt. As Nebulah was Gavin’s final resting place, there was always the chance that he was trapped within this travesty of a peaceful afterlife, and this possibility made her determined never to forsake him, even if it meant seeing out her days in the apocalyptic wasteland of what used to be our home.
So there you go. Li refuses to leave and Milly is unable to leave, and none of us would go without the others. I could never just leave them here. I’m not flattering myself when I acknowledge how vital my contribution is to our survival.
But harder to acknowledge is the real, unavoidable difference between us. Milly and Li are determined not to be driven from this place which is entwined with their souls, whereas I, quite simply, have nowhere else to go.
Dinner is a surprisingly jolly affair; under the circumstances we could do with some release. Li arrives with a hibiscus flower tucked behind her ear and two bottles of John Barry’s homemade feijoa wine. Milly has cooked a huge vegetable pie, with garlic bread and a trifle, and she overpowers the din of our nightly serenade with The Rolling Stones, turned up high. The wine is strong, and we shrug off the night bellowing the guitar riffs as well as the lyrics. We respond to the week’s crises in a typically human way, erupting into reckless abandon once the worst is over. We may have lost Rolf, but we’re alive, and I’m giddy with this after my close scrape the night before. I’m a middle-aged, scrawny Keith Richards in an Australian small-town kitchen, and I force Alex’s warning into a far corner of my mind and bolt the door.
Later that night it creeps out, though, as these things do. It squirms around the corner of my barrier to drag across my mind’s dream landscape: a tangle of snaking tendrils, mocking as they crawl towards me. They cluster together, entwining themselves to form a figure, human but bereft of features, just emptiness where there should be a face. As this looms before me, there is bulging movement and a sickening sound, and eyes split through the expanse of skin: Alex’s green eyes, glaring from the blank mask, probing and piercing. I am frozen, riveted by the intensity of that gaze, whose intrusion into my psyche is becoming unbearable, when there is another awful tear, and the lower part of the face yawns open into Milly’s mouth, hissing at me, ‘Soon …’, before raising its hands, fingernails extended like talons. My blood spatters the awful face, spilling from the gaping mouth as it shrieks with laughter.
Awake and trembling I pour glass after glass of water at Milly’s sink, but I can’t get rid of the foul taste in my mouth.
The morning is hard. We slump unenthusiastically over bowls of Weetbix, all subdued from the aftershocks of the feijoa wine. My dream clings to me like a shroud, and beneath it I feel drained and weak. In the mirror my face is haggard, unkempt, my eyes red and disturbed.
‘I look like a madman,’ I say to Milly.
She takes the scissors to me, longish silver tufts floating to the kitchen floor to surround us like a fairy circle. There was a time when this sort of thing would only have been done outside, but these days we’re superstitious, wary of leaving any part of ourselves outdoors.
Li has not stayed to see the results of my transformation, leaving us shortly after breakfast to get to work. Tomorrow I will help her harvest apples.
My haircut is an improvement, but there is still a feral tinge to me.
At home I discover my razor is clogged and almost useless, but there’s enough edge to scrape off the worst of my neglect. I have a long, hot shower, and cram every item of clothing I possess into the washing machine.
It’s when I’m on my knees in the laundry, trying to locate the long-lost iron in the back of the cupboard, that I begin to wonder what I’m trying to achieve. Some kind of resistance – denial? An attempt at control and order, as if this can keep Alex’s threat at bay? It will take far more than a shiny surface, shaving cream and scissors to ward off the legacy of my dreams.
I change into tracksuit pants and runners, and Gina and I hit the road.
It’s good. I’m quickly winded, but fighting against my unfitness gives me a sense of determination that makes me feel strong even while my legs are buckling and my breathing ragged. I concentrate on the rhythm of my feet, try to tune my breath in to it, but in my chest my heart betrays the truth, pounding a wild, desperate staccato. I turn back sooner than I’d intended, recognising the reality of my physical condition and accepting the long, slow process that I’m facing.
The next morning I’m shamefully stiff. I don’t even make yesterday’s distance. At home I shower briefly and change into work clothes. When I leave for Li’s I take only the lunch I have made us, carefully leaving my tobacco on the kitchen mantle.
Li is already towing a full crate in from the orchard when I arrive. We eat my unimaginative sandwiches and Milly’s leftover scones, and crunch into some of the freshly picked Braeburns.
‘They’re good,’ I say through a mouthful, ‘sweet.’
Li nods. Unlike me she has quartered her apple, neatly coring it and chewing it thoughtfully and methodically. ‘Good crop this year,’ she answers. ‘Didn’t even have to net.’
‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’
‘It does. By the way, you look very spruce.’
‘Milly should go into business.’
‘You should have female visitors more often. Good effect on you.’
‘Certainly an effect.’ I’ve told Li only the bones of Alex’s stay.
‘A shame she left so soon.’
‘It’s not a very welcoming environment. Hardly a holiday destination.’
‘True.’ Li is gently herding her crumbs into a pile, which she brushes onto her plate. ‘True,’ she says again.
‘Do you think you’ll ever change your mind about getting out?’ I ask.
She looks up. ‘No, not really.’ She shrugs. ‘Maybe.’
‘Would you?’
She sighs, looks away from me toward her shadehouses, the grape’s leaves just starting to turn with the cooler weather. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Everything I have is here. If I have to walk away it’ll be with nothing.’
‘You’d be alive.’
‘I’m alive now. Strange as this may sound, at least I know I’m safe here. I lock my doors and it can’t touch me. I’m not going to be driven away when it’s possible to survive. To give up everything I’ve worked for means my life will have been wasted.’
Twined with the fine crow’s feet around her eyes is the unsaid, inescapable: Again.
A sudden glare of sun breaks through the drifting cloud. ‘What if you won lotto?’
She laughs, incredulously. ‘Then, again, all my work will have been wasted.’
Sh
e flings the crumbs from her plate onto the ground. We pull on our caps and head over to the tractor. Li turns to me as she fires it up.
‘And I suppose I’d need a ticket.’
Once we’ve filled three more crates, Li wants to stop, reluctant to pick more till the co-op gets in touch with an order for the following week. She doesn’t think they’ll want more than three crates. We’ve just manoeuvred the tractor into the shed when her mobile rings.
‘Yes, he’s here,’ she says, ‘hang on.’
It’s Stick. There is an edge of irritation in his voice and sounds of a commotion.
‘Do you reckon you could come over to Tom’s?’ he says. ‘Gail’s had a bit of a fall.’
‘Bad?’
‘Hard to say with her. She’s carrying on. Could be a broken hip, though.’
It’s after four o’clock and they got their supplies the day before yesterday. Tom will be more than half sloshed by now. There is no way St John’s would dispatch to Nebulah this close to dark unless it was a real emergency. ‘Can’t you drive her to Woodford?’ I ask Stick.
‘Been here since lunch. Over the limit.’
‘Shit.’
‘Sorry, mate.’ He’s not. He’s only too pleased to handball it to me, concluding his contribution with a phone call. There’s only a couple of hours of daylight left. I think with longing of the beer I was about to open and reach for my car keys instead.
When I get to Tom’s I’m greeted by a fiasco. Gail had lost her balance carrying a load of washing from the line, straining her ankle and landing on her hip on the edge of a concrete step. Tom is bleary and useless, incapable of doing anything more than doling out a couple of Panadol. Gail is still lying on the path where she fell, disheveled and streaked with tears, and obviously in considerable pain. At least Stick had the sense to take her some cushions.
When she sees me she starts crying anew, but refuses to let me lift her skirt to examine her hip. Her ankle is swollen and already a violent purple.