The Other Side of the World

by Stephanie Bishop

  On the oval, a game of cricket starts up. An early crowd cheers and boys call one to another. There is the thwack of leather on willow. It gives Henry the pleasant feeling of being in company even when he is not. Summer is over, but it’s still ghastly hot and he’s glad to be working at his desk in the cool, dark room while the boys are on the bright green. It is right this way—the vicarious pleasure is real. He looks up and into the shimmering air outside: there is green grass, dark river water overset with glinting sun. Then he turns back to his notes. He writes quickly, the words scrawling themselves across the page, humming through his mind so fast he hardly hears them but merely channels them through the tip of his pencil.

  When the time comes to shuffle his papers and slip them into his briefcase he’s blunted several pencils and covered ten pages. His hand hurts. His eyes are tired. He thinks of Charlotte then, as he picks up his bag and begins to walk down the corridor towards the lecture theater. What is she doing? He feels a little pang of homesickness, of longing. He wants just to be near her, to hear her clattering about in the kitchen or calling to the children in the yard. The din of their family life. He thinks perhaps he’ll start off the lecture by reciting the poems they used to read to each other. He always thinks of these poems as having a kind of talismanic power. Were they happy poems or sad? He is never sure; they are sad poems that once made them both happy and now, for some reason, make him feel a little sad. He pushes the thought away; he is almost there now—he can hear the hum of the students, talking, laughing. Then the door clicks open and the voices die down.

  * * *

  After breakfast Charlotte takes a box of linen outside, thinking it a fine day for airing. She plunges in her hands and lifts out an embroidered cushion, sniffing it to see whether it still smells of England, of damp mustiness sweetened by the smell of toast and fried onion. She thinks she catches it for a moment, but then it’s gone. Charlotte holds the cushion out before her and shakes it, bright dust floating up and out. Then she takes the extra bedding, the quilts and feather duvets, and pegs them on the line. From the corner of her eye she can see Lucie and May playing in the square of dirt reserved for winter crops. Lucie is fast on her feet now. She fetches and carries and digs. Tomatoes and beans grow on either side of the children; behind them stand the tall, spindly lettuces, too bitter now to eat. It’s not much past ten but the sun is already hot, the children playing under its butter-yellow light, their chubby naked bodies turning gray with dust, and their wide-brimmed hats—pink and lilac—flopping down over their eyes so that they live in their own private, shady circles, unaware of their mother in the distance. Lucie soon tires of digging and finds the small red watering can buried among the pumpkin leaves. There is still water in it, so she sets about making little muddy puddles. May remains where she is, sifting the dirt with her fingers and popping handfuls in her mouth.

  Charlotte shakes out the blankets next, her gaze drifting away from her children and into the trees. The sun is still rising, its bright core hidden behind a net of leaves. In the margin around the sun the sky is white and parched of color. The leaves flicker in and out of this radiance, each one coated in light. The ­branches wave up, then down, then side to side, arching and dipping in the breeze. It reminds her of an underwater landscape, the strange plants pushed one way then another, their limbs floating and ­sinking at different times, moved by an invisible undertow. ­Breezes come and go. They meet in the trees and eddy out again. The branches sway and flap very slowly and when the breeze passes they fall back to their former shape.

  She can feel sweat trickling down the backs of her thighs. She wipes the perspiration from her top lip and brushes her damp hands over her skirt. The face of her watch flashes as she places the cushions and pillows on chairs and on the grass for airing; it is hours still, she notices, before the children will lie down for their nap. If only it were sooner—she feels so heavy, so very tired. She feels she lacks the endurance necessary for an ordinary day. Charlotte rubs the back of her neck. Henry will have finished his lecture by now. For a moment she envies him—moving about in the world, unaccompanied.

  Lucie calls to her. “More water? More water, Mummy?” The watering can is empty.

  “In a minute, sweetheart,” Charlotte replies. “Do some digging.” She turns her back to her child and shakes out the rug from the bottom of the box.

  “Now? Water now?” Lucie cries.

  “Soon. I’m busy, see?” says Charlotte, hoisting the rug over the washing line. If she can just delay for long enough Lucie will find something else to do and forget about the watering can. I don’t mind filling it up once, Charlotte thinks, but it is never once—it is five, ten, twelve times, bending over and standing up and bending over. It should not be so difficult. It should be a joy. I should know how to make it a joy. Today, though, the repulsion overwhelms—this need to be alone, away from the children. She is so tired, and it is so hot, so terribly hot now.

  “Mummy?” Lucie calls again, her voice plaintive.

  “Yes, darling?”

  “More water?” Her voice rises and cracks.

  “When I’ve finished here.” Charlotte knows she does not have long. “Just wait,” she says, her voice tightening. She knows it’ll only be a few minutes before Lucie begins to cry. She should go now and get it done with. If I just fill it once, she thinks. It takes no time to fill the can, no time at all, and it makes Lucie so ­happy, the splash of the water, the tiny streams that trickle out of the spout, the dirt that the silvery water turns to dark mud. Just once, she tells herself. But she doesn’t want to do it once. She doesn’t want to do it at all. The child must learn to wait and she must teach her, Charlotte thinks irritably, picking up a stick from the grass and testing it against her thigh for strength. Then she lifts the stick and swings, striking the carpet. Behind her Lucie begins to cry, but Charlotte does not go to her. She doesn’t want her daughter to think her fickle and changeable. “Mummy!” Lucie wails as Charlotte beats the carpet. “Mummy!” Charlotte swings the stick and hits again: once, twice, three times.

  “Not long now!” Charlotte calls, lifting the stick. “Not long—” she says again, bringing the stick—whump—against the carpet.

  “Finish now!” Lucie calls. “Nooooow!” Her cries ripple out across the yard and into the street. Charlotte catches her daughter’s gaze, then looks away. “Now! Now! Now!” Lucie screams, as the dull thwunk, thwunk of the stick continues, its pace increasing. Lucie’s separate cries blur into one long, loose-ended wail.

  As Charlotte works, she feels the labor give rise to a certain glory. The girls will not come near her while she strikes at the carpet. She is alone, free. This second is hers, goes the stick. And this one, and this one and this. “No, I cannot come now!” she yells at Lucie. “No, not yet!” There is only one stream of time and somehow it has to be divided into her time and the children’s time. She knows the waters cannot be parted like this, she knows it is useless, struggling to keep the minutes to herself. But that is all she has; there is the brightness of the outside world and then the starved, dark space of her own consciousness. It used to be wider and deeper, voluminous and rich. This moment is hers, thwack, and this one, thwack, and this one, thwack, thwack, the stick whistling through the air. She feels them, these severed moments, piling up like sandbags to hold back a deluge. The children will break through any second now.

  There’s a flash of color as Lucie steps forwards. She stands to the side, her face a mottled gray and red, streaked by the clear lines of tears. As Charlotte keeps on—thwack, thwack—Lucie screams, a wobbling, grating sound, half cry, half yell. Dust has stopped rising from the carpet. Charlotte sees this and knows that the job is done, knows that she keeps on now only to spite her child, only to prove that she will not bend to her. It is wrong. She understands this even as she continues. Lucie’s breath quivers and hiccups as she steps closer again, her chin held up towards her mother.

 
Charlotte stops and lets the stick hang at her side. She turns to Lucie and shame washes through her like acid. She feels her grip weaken. The stick drops to the grass; she is a selfish woman, she thinks. Lucie should turn away and be cross with her. It would be proof, she thinks, that she is not fit for this after all. It would be a blessing, to have the truth made plain. But instead of turning away, Lucie dives at her, clutching at her legs and pressing her face into Charlotte’s thighs, into the rough fabric of her mother’s skirt. Charlotte sways like a tall tree struck by the wind, then bends down over Lucie’s small body, slips her hands under her daughter’s arms, and hauls her up. Lucie twists her legs around her mother’s waist and buries her hot wet face in the curve of Charlotte’s neck. Her little hands pat her mother’s back as though she is the one in need of comfort.

  “There there, there there,” Charlotte says, stroking Lucie’s head. “Mummy’s here now, Mummy’s here.” She presses her face to her child’s sun-warmed hair. She feels Lucie’s belly expand and shrink with deep, trembling breaths. She smells her long, fuzzy hair, sweet like wax and biscuits and fresh hay. Loose strands cling to Charlotte’s cheek. She is always surprised by the relief she feels when her child is close, by the strange peace of feeling themselves joined, one creature once more. It is the struggle to be separate that pains them. Now their single, tall, bulging shadow moves slowly over the grass as they walk towards May, who remains in the dirt, cooing excitedly at her mother’s approach: she bobs up and down, then throws herself forwards into a crawl. Lucie continues to pat Charlotte’s back. Tears prickle in Charlotte’s eyes; she must be good to them, she must be better. They are so small, Charlotte thinks, holding one child and looking down at the other. Tiny. In her mind they seem so large, simply because they take up the whole of it.

  “Come here,” she says, bending down and pulling May towards her. “Shall we go for a walk?” she says. “Shall we walk down to the river?”

  * * *

  Over dinner Henry talks about his lecture and the plans for his book, his mouth full, fork waving in the air. Something about Richards. About the brilliance of his idea, that literature is of the body, that the response to literature is of the nervous system. Delicious, he says, spearing another chunk of meat. Bloody delicious. He tries out new words: bloody, mate, love. It is not him, though. He does not really know these words. They are sounds only. They are ideas, the jarring unbroken codes of a people. He swallows and carries on, speaking as himself again. Something about the surge and resurgence of an image in Hardy, not seen so much as felt, the image rising, sharpening, as if it were lifting up out of the blood, a shape out of the dark. Something about the transformation of one thing into another. Rain into seed. She loves this talk of his, the prattle of loose thought, the random leaps. He stops to think, chewing his food carefully. The thing about poems, he says, reaching out and taking a sip of beer—is that they can be so sad, so difficult, and yet the sound can make them into something lovely, something pleasurable, even if they are not about that lovely thing. Anyway, he says, he’s been thinking about that.

  “And your day?” he asks, wiping his forehead then his mouth with the cloth napkin. The weather is still hot. “How was your day?”

  She describes the trees, the midday light on the surface of the river. But it is hard to describe. The day is hard to describe. The silent happy children and the unexpected plunges into panic: spilled food, accidents, pains that arise with no outward sign. The beating of the carpet. It is not coherent, her day, the experience of it not captured by saying what she did. What did she do? “Yes, we went to the river,” she says. On the way home they stopped at the shop to pick up a magazine and the ingredients for dinner. As they walked home she thought about how she might surprise Henry, how she might please him with fancy meals, with the recipes she cut out from the Women’s Weekly. Potato salad with condensed milk and citrus served in the emptied halves of an orange. Beef Olives, Chicken Dijon. Sponge Sandwich and Butterscotch Tartlets. “Then we tidied up,” she says, “and we cooked dinner.” This royal we: a mother and her children. How easy the day seems in summary. How unequal to the event. Like a poem, she thinks. “Fine,” she says in conclusion. “My day was fine.” She is tired of these questions. Who did she see today? What did she do? It makes her anxious. As if each day must be accounted for. As if she were always failing at some task he has set for her.

  “I’m only trying to help,” Henry says, scraping at the last of the gravy on his plate. “Collins mentioned his wife goes to some Sunday painting group.”

  “And is that what you think I am—a weekend hobbyist?”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “No, of course not.” But as she speaks she realizes that this is exactly her fear, exactly her doubt. Has she already become this? Her paints and easel are still packed somewhere in the shed. She keeps a sketchbook in the kitchen drawer. She doesn’t know what to paint. It is a strange feeling, as if the world has stopped resonating, as if she’s lost her feeling for beauty. She tried sketching a tree the other day and it ended up looking like a scarecrow, all gangly arms and scruff. “Never mind,” she says.

  Later that evening Henry finds her leaning over the kitchen sink and weeping. She is halfway through the washing up, the children asleep. “What’s this?” he asks, placing his hands softly on her waist. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” she says, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “Nothing’s happened. That’s just it. You go to work and until you come home again nothing happens.” Nothing real, it seems. Nothing lasting. She’s tried gardening but the heat makes it unbearable. She would paint, if only she knew what. She goes to the park. She stands in the bush. She waits for the day to end. She cooks dinner. Once a week they go to the library. There is nothing here that is hers.

  “You should make friends with the neighbors,” he suggests. Wasn’t that what the book said? A memoir written by a fellow migrant. I went to work while my wife got on with the local ladies. “Or go to a playgroup,” Henry says. But he knows it is not what he’s meant to say.

  “I miss home,” says Charlotte.

  Henry drops his head. She’s being nostalgic, he reasons. Things will improve. He will see that they do. “Nothing is perfect,” he says softly. “Give it time.” She turns towards him. He reaches his arms around her shoulders and pulls her face to his chest. “There now,” he says. She sobs quietly, and when she lifts her face away the buttons of Henry’s shirt leave small red welts in her cheek.

  A stray cat has taken to visiting and now meows at the door. Charlotte slips out of Henry’s arms and fetches the cat some milk. Henry picks up his gardening shoes and busies himself unknotting the laces. He wants to find the snails that are eating the seedlings. He doesn’t know what else to say to her, what to do, so thinks it best to go outside and leave her be. “I’m going to lie down,” says Charlotte, and Henry nods.

  She spreads out on the pink chenille bedcover, her shoes still on and her feet hanging off the end of the mattress. She lies there staring at the strangely patterned wallpaper—row upon row of yellow and orange daisies—until the flowers blur into one long stripe of color.

  Some time later Henry comes in. Henry, her husband. She is still intrigued by the force of that title. When they were first married she used to blush every time she said it. My husband will get the bags. My husband will fix the bill. Their intimacy made public, official. To be a husband and a wife. To have become archetypes. To feel touched by something ancient although they were, are, still young. She lies there with her eyes closed; there is the meaty smell of his sweat and the smell of dirt. Charlotte hears him sit down on the slipper chair beside the bed. He hates the color of it. Turquoise green, the silk stained by spilled tea. The top of the chair thick with the smell of her perfume where her neck rests. She will change it for him. The color. He likes things matching. Likes things cheerful. Pink, perhaps, to match the bedspread. She hears him folding and refoldi
ng the newspaper, then hears the paper slip to the floor. She opens her eyes, rolls over. Henry bends down to pick up the paper and she sees the thinning circle of hair just back from the crown of his head. In the photographs, his father had lost much of his hair by the time he was Henry’s age. She reaches out and puts her fingers to this shiny patch of skin. Warm, softer than she expected. Fuzzed like the head of a baby. Henry sits up and takes her hand in his, running his thumb back and forth across her knuckles. The pad of his thumb rough from the garden.

  That night she dreams of England. She dreams of the fens in springtime: the grasses covered in dew, trails of mist rising with the pale sun, the grass and the vapor aglow. She even dreams the smell of it, the sweet rot of leaf mold and mud. She dreams of the cottage, the narrow stairwell, the creak and bang of the ­kitchen door; she dreams of the kitchen windows, the bluish winter light outside, the concrete courtyard, the yellowing willow in the yard behind. She dreams of tea-colored sky, low cloud, green light through tree leaves. She dreams of wind. The ancient wind in the ancient fields. The dreams are so vivid that when she wakes in the dawn she does not know where she is. It takes a moment to remember and even then she can’t recall the geography of her new house. When she thinks of the new bathroom she sees the bathroom of the cottage. When she imagines the living room she sees the living room of the cottage. These days she dreams of England more than she dreams of her dead father. A heart attack, seventeen years ago. There was a time when she spoke to him in her dreams. Long midnight conversations, so clear that she was sad to wake and realize they had not been true, real. Now he is reduced to myth. A man who lived and died a long time ago. She remembers his face, the side of his face, the stubble on the side of his face when he bent to kiss her cheek. She remembers his voice, how he said her name; how he looked when he was tired. His slow-booted footsteps on the wooden floor. But there is little else that comes to mind. The memory of him, so diminished. Now she waits for the memories of England to fade in the same way.