by JH Fletcher
‘Oh yes. I wanted you to be the first to know.’
Dougie would have to be told; Aunt Dorrie, too, still struggling along in her Topaz fastness but frail now, very frail. Both of them with a better claim than Patty Clark who was not even family. Yet driving home Ruth knew that, once she had spoken of the child, she would no longer be able to shut her own eyes to the real problem.
Dougie. The thin lips, sandy hair, the cocky toss of the head. The lack of interest in anyone but himself. The mystical pulse of the Outback, the sense of oneness with history, had meant nothing to him.
She drove up the winding dirt road to Mindowie. Dust boiled behind her — rains late, this year — the scattered gums leaned their gnarled branches over the road, she wondered aloud, ‘What am I going to do about it?’
Until they had gone away she had got into the habit of making allowances. But there was a limit. Ruth had known terror, too. Had been certain she would not survive yet somehow had. It was behind her now, or mostly. You could not make a life out of the anguish of the past yet that was what Dougie seemed determined to do. She had hoped that the trip into the interior would have brought him out of it, for a time had dared hope that it had done so. Now they had come back and nothing had changed.
Already he had started bitching about her preoccupation with the new book, the hours of incarceration that he resented so profoundly.
‘You’re my wife, after all. I got rights, too, I reckon.’
One way or the other the baby would bring things to a head. Perhaps the thought of having his own child would break the shell of his self-obsession where the trip into the Outback had not. Surely every man wanted his own child? She entertained sentimental images: of Dougie and the child walking hand in hand through the bush behind the house, Dougie pointing out its first kangaroo and wallaby, the two of them fishing for yabbies in the dam, laughing together at a raucous chorus of galahs exploding pink and grey against the sky. If, improbably, Dougie became the picture-book father of her imagination all might yet be well. She did not expect him to be the same as her, to share her awareness of the unity binding all things, but neither would she permit him to deny her right to her own feelings. Which was what she feared. The news of the baby might change him, she hoped it would, but if it did not something would have to be done.
It was a confrontation she dreaded: which was perhaps why, when it came, she made such a mess of it.
‘I’m having a baby,’ she said. She heard her voice harsh and tight as though challenging him.
‘You don’t sound very pleased about it,’ he said.
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘I was wondering that myself.’
He was suspicious, eager to take offence when her news should have been something to celebrate. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, tried again.
‘Of course I’m pleased. Aren’t you?’
He hesitated, trying to come to terms with this new thing in his life. ‘I reckon I am.’
‘Reckon? That the best you can do, is it?’
‘A bloke feels trapped,’ he admitted.
She felt pain at his honesty; despair, too. Because she saw now that her earlier thinking had been wrong. However Dougie reacted, she was as trapped as he was. The baby had changed the rules. She could no longer walk away; the child would need a father. Not without love, no child needed that, no wife either, yet she owed it to all three of them to try.
‘How do you think a woman feels?’
‘I suppose that depends what she thinks about the bloke that give it to her.’ Surprising her, as Patty had done, with the trueness of his perception.
‘You’ve no reason to doubt that. Have you forgotten Lake Eyre so soon?’
‘Lake Eyre was a holiday.’ Contemptuously he dismissed it. ‘This is for real.’ He took her hands in his bony hands, held them tight as his eyes searched her face. ‘Do you want it, Ruthie? Do you, really?’
Ruthie. It was a long time since he had called her that. She saw that the news had scared him. They were incompatible; that was the truth of it. To her it mattered less because she had her work. Dougie had nothing. He was afraid that if she turned to the child, as so many women did, he would be more alone than ever. She felt a healing wave of compassion for him. From his perspective she had married and then abandoned him to pursue ideas that were incomprehensible to him. Her career had become his enemy. All along she had laid the blame on him; now she saw that to a large extent it had been her own fault. She could not walk away from her work; it held her captive as surely as the child in her belly. But could try harder to share, at least. If he would allow it.
She put her arms around his neck, held him tight. ‘Our child? Of course I want it. Could you doubt it?’ Who had doubted it herself. ‘The three of us,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘that’s what matters. More than anything on earth.’
Hands clamped on her wrists, Dougie drew back. Stared at her. That raking blue gaze. Doubt, a yearning to believe, looked out at her. Her heart turned.
‘Believe me!’ Hugging him close, voice harsh with tears unshed.
Believe yourself.
They clung together, children seeking comfort against the dark.
Book and child took form together. The work went fast although there were times when she could not have said what she was writing about. Images flared like lightning in her head. London. Lake Eyre’s salt blink. Images of the inland surged through her consciousness, filling her like the waves of the sea beneath which it had once lain. Fish and birds, reptiles and trees. Through them all walked the spirits of her characters, black and white, daring, striving, enduring. Surviving. That above all. Filled with hope and the exultation and worship of life. Franz had told her of the X-ray pictures of the Outback, the ochreous drawings left upon the sun-bleached rock by the predecessors of them all, black and white, who had inhabited the land. She had never seen the originals but studied pictures in books, feeling some creative impulse stirring within her along with the kicking child which she would not allow to distract her.
That was the way, she told herself. The characters formed by the land, dream and bone and flesh, although whether the dream came before the bone and the flesh who could say, the characters forming the story, constructing their own myths and memories, so that all — flesh, story, land — became one. It was exciting, dangerous work, like hurling herself off a cliff and falling, falling, drugged with the exultation of flight, not knowing where she would end.
Somehow, in the midst of it all, she made time for Dougie, cosseted him, confided in him, discussed the book with him. He did not always understand but it was the confiding that mattered. They were closer, as they had been at Lake Eyre, if without the passion. Instead, for the first time in their relationship, there was tenderness. In the evenings Dougie watched her with kindness, placed his hands on her swelling flesh, his fingertips traced the blue course of veins, he listened to the thud, thud of the growing child.
‘Reckon you got a kangaroo in there,’ he said.
Yet there were times when she surprised him with a brooding expression of doubt and anxiety and remembered the old Dougie, bitter and angry and alone.
They were both waiting. For the book. For the child. For what might happen afterwards.
She finished the first draft, put it aside for a week. She was moving heavily now. It was difficult to sit at her desk, harder still to get up again. She had to lean forward a little to write, the edge of the desk pressed against her. Her stomach was enormous, cumbersome, swollen, ugly. She hated it. The business of birth was like a tunnel, she thought. You went into it, every day you had to go further, no light to be seen, yet you knew what was coming. A nine months’ tunnel, at the end of it some danger, a great deal of pain and fear, hopefully release. Hopefully fulfilment. To begin with, the prospect of the pain and fear filled you, yet as you started to swell and become uncomfortable and then a lot worse than uncomfortable, that became less important than the prospect of release. To be slend
er again, not out of vanity but because slenderness meant becoming yourself again.
She couldn’t wait, would allow neither the pregnancy nor the prospect of its conclusion to distract her from the rewrite. She finished it, hacking and hacking at the text, red pencil like blood all over it, a regular massacre. All the fine words, out. Phrases pregnant — God! — with beauty and feeling, out. A character’s actions needed changing. She changed them.
The child was fighting her now, fists and feet. Sometimes, it seemed, with the teeth it presumably did not have.
‘Go on,’ she told it. ‘Give me a hard time, I’ll make you pay later.’
A third rewrite. A fourth. It was done. She was empty although God knew her belly was full. To bursting.
Never mind. The script came back from the typist. She looked at the title page, the last thing she had written. People Of The Emptiness.
She did it up in brown paper, waddled into the post office, handed it across the counter to Enid Coogan, Larry’s wife. Who studied her with a sympathetic but appraising eye.
‘How you going?’
‘Good.’
‘Soon?’
‘Any day now.’
She had heard nothing from Richard, could not be sure whether he had been angered by her behaviour or was simply honouring her feelings.
I cannot. Forgive me.
The words burnt like acid in her memory.
Inside the parcel, in a sealed envelope secured to the script with an elastic band, a note.
Please let me know how you are.
She made it home. For some weeks she had been too uncomfortable to lie in the bed. Instead she had catnapped on the settee. At three in the morning she was woken by sensations she had never known but which she recognised, instinctively, for what they were.
She went to the bedroom door.
‘Dougie …’
‘What?’
‘This is it, I reckon.’
Pain, tearing, tearing. Joints wrenched apart, body wracked by forces the more terrifying for being within her own body yet beyond her control. Her voice, crying out. This was what you came to. The end of the tunnel, beyond which …
Nothing. Neither light nor ending. Only darkness. And the pain, tearing.
A face watched from the shadows beyond the bed. It was familiar yet where or when she had seen it she could not remember. Eyes, sloe-shaped. Hair wet with sweat. Merciful, bloodied hands, aiding, aiding. Her own hands. A voice, consoling. Her own voice.
‘It is a boy.’
The old woman’s cackle.
Trying to ride the pain. The pain swelling to engulf her. Oh. Oh. Oh God! She heard herself screaming. Why is there no one to aid me?
Another face, blurring with the first. Belligerent, shouting, a stench of oil and fear. A tree, a man hanging from bayonets hacked through hands and feet. A clean and empty room. Through the window the jungle stench of heat, vegetation, rot. A man and woman, bodies interlocked. An unbearable sense of rightness and peace, of inevitability. The clack of footsteps on rain-drenched pavements. A letter. I cannot. Forgive me. Forgive. Forgive.
Pain rose, overwhelming. A merciful easing, then the pain again, a bloodshot crescendo of pain. Again. And yet again.
Darkness. Peace. The slow seeping of blood. Exhaustion and release. At last. The child slippery in her arms, against her breast. A boy they had agreed to call Boyd, her mother’s family name. A finger gently touching the cap of dark hair. There. There.
One enduring memory, two letters.
The memory: that in the midst of labour her mind had reverted not to the banks of Lake Eyre where Boyd had been conceived but to the fortress at the end of her flight through the jungles of Burma. To Richard Hudson. She should have felt guilt but did not. The past, she thought. Why does my mind seem always to fix upon the past? Unless it refuses to accept that it is the past.
The letters were less enigmatic.
Andrew Hilliard, publishing director of Hudson and Thorne, wrote:
It is a book different both in style and content from its predecessor yet equal to or even transcending it in quality. A shattering exploration of the impact of the past upon the future, it stresses also the healing power of forgiveness and love. Once again it displays your unique vision of the wonder and holiness of life. In my view People Of The Emptiness is an achievement of monumental proportions that reinforces your status as one of the principal writers in English or indeed any other language to have emerged since the war.
With it came a sealed envelope, Richard’s handwriting upon it.
I am well and trust you are, too. Let me begin by saying that I understand and respect what happened (or did not happen!) when you were in London. That is why I have not tried to contact you since, although I think of you always. As you will see from Andrew’s letter we are over the moon here about People Of The Emptiness. Shortly we shall be writing to you formally with a contract that I trust you will find satisfactory.
You may be interested to know that we have decided, in principle, to form an associate company in Sydney. Nothing’s going to happen for another twelve months or so but when the time is right I shall be coming to Australia to set the wheels in motion. I shall understand if in the circumstances you don’t want to meet me but personally I hope very much that we shall be able to see something of each other while I’m there.
An eventful year. Things weren’t too bad between Ruth and Dougie. As she had hoped, the baby gave Dougie focus. No need for him to feel like a spare wheel any longer. It was as well; more and more Ruth’s time was no longer her own.
People Of The Emptiness was not the runaway best seller that Out Of The Depths had been but on the strength of her reputation it did well enough and the critics, once again, were ecstatic.
A Hollywood producer wanted to make a film of Out Of The Depths; his offer for the rights almost made her eyes fall out.
Every post brought requests for articles, short stories, interviews. She was invited to take part in literary festivals in Australia and overseas. To her embarrassed astonishment she had become a name.
‘If I agreed to do half what they want I’d have no time left for writing,’ she told Dougie. Who had no views but was good with Boyd, at least.
She began another book, guarding her writing schedule even more jealously because of the growing demands on her time. She was at her desk at quarter to five, wrote until seven, went walking in the hills behind the house, was back at her desk by eight-thirty. In the afternoons she dealt with correspondence and general business, after tea she spent time with Boyd, listened to music, read, had a bath, was in bed a little after nine. It contained little place for Dougie but you couldn’t have everything.
Always one thought lingered, denied, banished, ignored but there despite everything. Richard was coming.
In September, at the beginning of Spring, he came.
TWENTY-FOUR
Topaz in the spring: rhododendrons a dark fire upon the slopes of the hills. Ruth walked in Dorrie’s garden with her true love.
She said, ‘When I got back from Burma I came here. To be healed.’
‘And were you?’
‘My body soon recovered. But something was missing.’ She looked at him uncertainly, afraid he might not understand.
‘Tell me.’
‘It was the trees. Before I went overseas I felt I could talk to them. I felt they knew what I was saying.’
‘Did they talk back?’
She glanced sharply at him, fearing ridicule, but his face showed nothing but interest in what she was saying. ‘In a way they did. I can’t explain it. I felt one with them, as though we were all part of the same life force and in that sense all the same. When I came back the feeling had gone. Dorrie said the trees hadn’t changed so it had to be me. Perhaps it was.’ She laughed, suddenly self-conscious. ‘A lot of nonsense. Only it didn’t seem nonsense at the time.’
‘It doesn’t seem nonsense now,’ he said.
She felt the brillian
ce of her own smile bursting from her. She hugged his arm, binding them together. ‘You really do understand, don’t you?’
‘Of course. We are all part of the same life force. It’s obvious.’
‘Not to everybody.’
Dorrie was another who had always understood. She was over eighty now, the defiant orange hair subdued at last, although one or two threads still shone through the white. Her walk was fragile, the bones of hand and arm as delicate as a bird. Ruth looked at her, thinking how nothing remained of the young woman who had wandered through these hills with Lukas Smart. Yet that was wrong; without Lukas, Jamie and all the other ingredients making up her life she would never have become the woman she was now.
We are our past, Ruth thought. She leant forward, whispered in Dorrie’s ear, ‘Well? What do you think of him?’
‘He’s a man, at least.’ The bird-bright eye flashed. ‘Don’t let him go.’
Laughing. ‘I’m a married woman, for heaven’s sake.’
‘Then why are you here?’
‘So you could meet him.’
‘What’s the point, if he doesn’t mean anything to you?’
‘I didn’t say he didn’t mean anything. I said I’m married.’
‘To that empty man.’
‘That’s cruel.’
‘The truth often is.’ The bird’s-claw hands grasped her own. ‘And you, child, do you love him?’
‘With all my heart.’ Her pulse raced; it was the first time she had admitted it openly even to herself. There was enormous relief in acknowledging the fact at last.
‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You won’t be able to keep this one on a leash,’ Dorrie warned.
It was true. But … ‘You think I should leave Dougie,’ she accused, as though it were Dorrie’s fault, ‘and go to him.’
Dorrie would have none of that. Her hair might have faded but her spirit was as bright as ever. ‘What I think doesn’t matter. If you love him you have a duty.’