by Ashley Hay
It comes from the south; a huge surge of noise and movement and the train bound for Sydney is suddenly in the station, its sound amplified by the room. Carriage doors open and close; feet scuffle across the gravel. And then a sharp toot, an acceleration, and it’s gone.
Ani looks up to find the older woman’s gaze fixed on her, pensive. ‘I did wonder,’ Miss Fadden says quietly, ‘if it was indelicate of them, somehow, to ask you to work alongside such a noise as that all day. When, you know, it was a train that . . .’ And she waves her hand, so that it brushes along Ani’s sleeve once, twice.
‘I hadn’t thought of it,’ says Ani. ‘I’d rather not . . .’
‘Very sensible, dear. Now, perhaps you’d like to have a look at the shelving while I sort out this box.’ She’s through the door and into the smaller room, rustling through paper, before she’s finished speaking.
Ani turns carefully, staring across a row of paperback romances—Bella’s happy endings, she thinks—and other reassuring fictions, while the room sparkles with silence.
13
From the kitchen window of his sister’s house, on the corner of Ocean Street, Roy McKinnon stands with his hands in the warm, soapy washing-up water, looking at the ocean itself. There’s some trick of perspective in this place, as if the house, the road, the grassy verge beyond were set below the level of the water, as if the sea curved up, the horizon above the line of sight and the water, at any moment, about to cascade down.
A seagull cuts across the window, and Roy jumps, shocked at his own shock—A bird, buster, it was just a bird. He checks the clock on Iris’s mantelpiece against the time on his wristwatch on the table—as if to say, How long is it going to take, to get used to being back in the world? Behind him, on the kitchen table, is the slender rectangle of an anthology of poems, including his own from the war, with the publisher’s polite note about when they might see something new. What’s next, Roy McKinnon? the man had written. You know we’re all waiting to hear.
As am I, mate, he thinks. As am I.
Pulling the book from its envelope this morning, he’d been unsure where to place it in Iris’s neat house—not so much for fear of disturbing any of her possessions but because it was a house almost entirely free of books. There was a family Bible in the hall cupboard, he knew, and three well-thumbed romances tucked under the leg of the settee—he’d found them when he bent down to retrieve a shilling on the night he’d arrived, laughing as his sister whisked them away again like some illicit material.
He smacks at his forehead with his hand, surprised by the wet suds against his skin: the library at the station—Iris had said something about the librarian retiring, and even that hadn’t reminded him of its existence, its potential cornucopia. Sink down into the words of others, he thinks, plunging his hands back into the warm wetness and feeling around for loose flatware. That poor young widow was starting next week, Iris said. Roy tilted his head, trying again to remember something more of the Lachlans than long-ago football, a quiet spectator. He’d met the man once or twice, he thought—a drink, maybe, or a rack of snooker. But there isn’t much to his repository of pre-war memories. Sometimes he distrusts that there ever had been times, or places, before the war. Pretty, his sister had said of the widow—‘You’ll remember her when you see her’—and Scottish, of the husband. ‘You’d have seen them at the dances,’ she’d said, ‘before they had their little girl. It was Ani Lachlan who brought me your poem when it came out in that magazine.’
Still, even then, he’d stood wondering what she’d made of it, whether she’d read it. And still, even then, he’d found no way to ask—caught instead by the memory of overhearing Anikka Lachlan’s grief.
‘Roy? Are you here?’ His sister struggles through the door, her basket heavy—he should have gone to help her with the shopping.
A useful thing, you could’ve done a useful thing, mate. And he lunges so quickly to take the basket from her that he knocks it, sending a paper bag of apples, a bottle of milk, a precious packet of tea spilling out across the floor.
‘Oh, Roy.’ A sharp intake of breath, as if she’s trying not to reprimand a child. ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry.’ She takes the dishcloth from him, watching the milk soak into the still-rationed leaves. ‘Set the kettle on if you want something to do—I think there’s enough tea in the caddy for us to have a pot. I’ll go back and see what I can sort out.’
It’s her house that makes him nervous, he realises, not just its want of books, but it’s too neat and too ordered. There’s no living done here, he thinks, just Iris and her opinions. She should have married; she should have had her own children to reprimand, not just take that tone with him.
‘I saw Mrs Lacey today when I was coming along the beach,’ he says, following his own train of thought. ‘She said they’ve got the replacement doctor lined up at last—and you’ll never guess, Iris, you’ll never guess who she said is coming.’
His sister’s hand, wiping the cloth across the floor, stops, leaving a wide, white slick on the lino.
‘Well of course it’s Frank Draper; I was sure you’d know,’ says Roy, trying to position the tea caddy exactly as he had found it. ‘Did you hear from Frank, these past years? I always thought, you and he—’
‘Could you get me that towel, Roy, or must I do everything myself? That’s a whole pint of milk, you know, a whole pint of milk gone to waste. And no, I didn’t hear from Frank Draper. He said it was a lottery, if he’d come back from the war or not, and he told me not to bet on its odds.’ Her voice is pinched with a fury she’s sustained for years.
Roy passes her the towel, wincing at her words as he tries to collect the scattered apples and wipe them clean and dry. Of course he should have known this of her—it’s so brutal, clearly, so close to the neatness of her surface. And he remembers suddenly that he loves this about his sister, that she will say things, expose them, with no thought of the cost to herself. There’s something clean about her, and something ferocious. He admires that; he even envies it.
‘Be good to see Frank,’ he says slowly, rubbing a piece of the fruit against the front of his shirt and distracted from Iris by the shine it takes on, its freshness, its existence.
‘It will be easier to give it a good mop.’ And Iris is through the back door and away from the conversation. He can see her standing in the tiny square of garden that opens out behind the house, hardly big enough for the dunny and the chook run. He can see her standing there, holding the mop as if it were the mast of a ship in a storm. He can see her shoulders, rising and falling, rising and falling, and her dark hair a shadow against the day’s light.
Who knows what really happened, he thinks, pouring the boiling water into the teapot, setting it precisely on the mat she keeps precisely in the middle of her kitchen table. But maybe there’s a chance for living yet.
‘I’ll leave your tea here, then, dear,’ he calls, setting it next to the pristine anthology. ‘And I might take a walk along the beach.’ Heading through the front door, clamping on his hat, he turns to see her come in at the back with the mop, the bucket, and her sticky, wet face.
‘When will you be back?’ she calls, although he knows her real question is what could he possibly be doing out there, walking around, or gazing at the water, all these days and nights. He knows she distrusts his freedom, his idleness. And if anyone had told her they’d seen him perched up on one of the pylons around by the old jetty . . . He shakes his head.
Few poems in the middle of a war, mate, and you call yourself a poet.
At least his friend Frank Draper has made something of himself—has a job, an occupation, a profession. Dr Draper, coming back to the coast to tend to the sick. Roy laughs: Neither of us with anywhere else to be in the end but here.
The plans they’d made when they were younger men. ‘And you’ll be a poet, Roy, my friend,’ Frank would say, ordering up another drink and slapping his friend on the back. The doctor and the poet; the grandeur of young men’s dr
eams, while Frank learned his anatomy and Roy taught spelling and maths in forgotten country schools.
Then there was the war, and they’d both gone—Frank to England, Roy all over the place, Europe, and then the Pacific. Where’s Frank been to only just get home? Roy wonders, recasting his own aimless itinerary.
He pulls up in the shadow of the pool’s boxy pumphouse; further down the coast, further south, he can see heavy grey clouds and rolling banks of squall. There’s a storm coming. He turns and waves back towards Iris’s house—she’ll be watching, through the window, worrying about rain and wind, and him. But it’s a while away yet, he’s sure of it. And he jams his hat down further over his eyes, and sets off into the teeth of the gale, ignoring the lines of lightning beginning to shatter along the horizon.
14
‘This is how it was. I was a wee boy, away with my gran in the north, waiting for the lights.’
Mac as a boy, at the top of Scotland with his grandmother; the stories he told were thick with words like gloaming and baffies and puddocks. Around the turn of autumn, the turn of spring, the sky might light up with the aurora, sheets of grand brilliance, he called it, all purples and greens and bright shiny whites—sometimes reds and oranges too.
‘Better than any of that phosphorescent beach stuff you hanker after,’ he’d say. ‘Imagine it, Ani, out across the whole sky.’
Once, he told her, he thought he’d seen it in Australia too, taking an engine through a heavy summer night and seeing the sky bristle and shimmer.
But, ‘A bushfire coming over the plains,’ the driver had said. ‘We’re right; we’ll push on through,’ leaving Mac at the locomotive’s open doorway, staring at the colour, wishing it belonged to something less destructive.
‘I dream of a trip to the old country one day,’ he’d say to Ani. ‘One more trip, and the skies all brilliant.’ His trip, he always spoke of it as his trip, while she worked to eke out her own space in his fantasy by talking about herself meeting Grannie Lachlan, or travelling on again to her father’s country in that higher European north. It was a daydream, of course: as if the world would ever shrink itself for a railwayman and his wife.
Out to sea now, towards the horizon, the sky lights up with bands of white and yellow: there’s a storm out there, and coming on. Ani settles herself against the wall of the porch, watching. Another flare—she strains to hear its thunder. Her father used to tell her stories about the gods and their thunder and lightning. It was their hammer, thrown hard, that caused the brightness; it was their horses, riding fast, that caused the noise.
Ani starts: there is a horse coming along the street, drawing a little trap. She squints, her hand up to block out the rest of the world. The trap’s driver raises her own hand in return.
‘Mrs Lacey,’ Ani calls. ‘I thought you were my father’s thunder god, riding out towards that lightning.’
‘There’s more storm coming up the coast, Mrs Lachlan. You can see it from our verandah.’ The Laceys’ dairy farm, where Isabel collects their milk, looks south from the back of the hill from which Ani and her house look north. ‘But I look to be beating it home.’ She pauses. ‘I was sorry—’
Ani raises her hand again. ‘Thank you,’ she says. She gets her acknowledgements in so quickly now that no one gets past three or four words of condolence. ‘I can smell the edge of that rain,’ she says then, changing the subject.
Mrs Lacey nods, pulling her coat around her. ‘I was down to meet the new doctor,’ she says, steadying and readying her horse, ‘but he wasn’t on the train. Frank Draper—do you remember him? They say he’s just back from overseas, been on war business all this time. He used to come to the dances down here, before the war. I expect we’ll find him much changed after all of this. He was a beautiful dancer—made me feel like Ginger Rogers. Of course that was years ago now.’
Ani smiles; she can’t imagine anyone making Mrs Lacey feel like Ginger Rogers. The doctor must have been a magician. ‘I probably met him once or twice—I think I remember him dancing with Iris McKinnon.’ She rubs her hands against the suddenly cooler air. ‘Maybe he’ll come tomorrow.’
Mrs Lacey waves again, giving her horse a giddy-up, and Ani listens as the percussion of its steps disappears along the street. A new doctor, whose war has gone on three years longer than everyone else’s. That will give the village something new to talk about. Yes, she thinks she remembers him, dancing with Iris McKinnon sometimes, and sometimes laughing with her brother. He lived up in the city and came down for weekends and holidays, just as he had when he was a boy—they all did, the three of them. Then there was the war, and Iris came to stay. And perhaps, thinks Ani, she’s been waiting all this time; one for Bella’s happy endings. But it feels too hard to wish such things, even for other people.
Out at sea, the slabs of sheet lightning are overlaid with sharp forks of other brightness. The wind is picking up, the rain almost here. She’s read somewhere that lightning smells like salty air—would the aurora have that smell too?
A swerve, a little skid, and Luddy’s car comes up the hill and into the street, his arm through the open window to wave at Ani as he passes, and a man, tall, dark-haired, in the passenger seat. The doctor, Ani assumes, somehow missed in the train’s arrival, and being driven round to the Laceys’ for the night. The rain begins to fall as the two men pass her fence, its heavy wetness immediately washing away any hint of the car’s journey.
Out on the horizon, miles of light break out and hover, luminous, for just a little longer than Ani expects. Her breath catches with their flare—there’s something triumphant, magnificent, in it, like a loud chorus or a blast of angels. For he shall give his angels charge over thee; they shall bear thee up in their hands: she remembers the psalm from nowhere, and in the instant of thinking of it, the light flares again and she’s sure she sees the whole surface of the land and the water rising up a little with its blaze.
‘My angel,’ Mac had called her—twice, maybe three times, in all their years together. She’d liked the nickname, had wished he’d use it more, but it felt presumptuous to ask if he would. It was too much; and in the end, even she hadn’t been able to bear him high enough to be safe.
15
‘Outside, Luddy, outside.’ The two teams surged along the grass, Luddy with the ball tight against his chest, and Mac just behind him, calling for it, and calling again.
‘Here, Luddy, here, over here,’ watching the stationmaster swing the other way and pass—directly to his opponent from the other team. ‘Help ma boab!’ called Mac, pulling to a halt and bending to catch his breath. It was extremities that threw him back into his dialect—in bed with Ani, or when this baby was finally born, he suspected, or when his dreich team wouldnae play. He wasn’t sure how long he stood like that, stooped and panting, but when he looked up, he felt he was looking at a painting, or a photograph, as if everything from the trees and the people down to single blades of grass had been snapped into stillness. The world was quiet, and he stumbled, his breath thick, almost scared he’d been transplanted into the backdrop, the staged busyness, of someone else’s story.
The whistle blew for half-time, piercing whatever moment held Mac fast, and he shook himself back into the world and jogged to the side of the pitch, reaching for an orange. ‘What you doin’ out there, Luddy? M’a on yer deaf side, mon?’ His accent thickened again through exasperation and the fruit, and as he shook his head in disbelief, great drops of juice flew out from his face.
‘There’s half a game to go yet, Mac,’ muttered one of the younger blokes. ‘We’re only a point behind.’
Mac shook his head again, and threw himself down on the grass. ‘C’mon, lads, I need a win today—last match before the bairn comes, I’d wager.’ And made a great show of stretching and pulling.
‘Wondered where Mrs Lachlan was,’ said Luddy through his own mouthful of orange. ‘Maybe we just play better when we’ve got her cheering us on.’
‘Well, Mac plays fiercer when sh
e’s not here to see, that’s for sure,’ said the grocer. ‘You’re like a great engine, running us all down on the grass—and that’s us on your own team, mate. The way you take off, you’ll plough someone into the turf.’
‘Away w’ye,’ laughed Mac, standing up and ruffling Luddy’s hair. ‘Daft buggers the lot of you. There’s no danger of me hurting anyone—you know me, lads, couldn’t hurt a fly.’ And they laughed at his heft, his bulk, his wide shoulders and his fast legs.
‘Do your worst, Mac,’ called someone from the opposition. ‘We’ve got our own doctor on the sidelines . . .’ gesturing towards Frank Draper. ‘Do your worst; he’ll fix us up.’
Shading his eyes, Mac looked over to the western edge of the field, saw two men standing, talking, their hats tipped onto the backs of their heads. Draper, the doctor, and Iris McKinnon’s brother. He tried to think of the last time he’d seen them—they both worked away, he knew; came down for weekends here and there—but couldn’t place it. He frowned: no, it was an odd meeting, somewhere odd, or something odd about it. Whisht, I dinnae ken, I dinnae ken. He frowned again at his memory’s lapse into old words, and took a step towards the two men as if an extra yard or so of proximity might free a recollection.
Behind them, on the railway line, an engine chugged southwards, hauling a line of freight trucks. That’s a saddle tank, thought Mac. What’s that doing out of the shunting yard and up here on the lines? He watched its belch of smoke trace a line above the platforms, watched the clean round lines of its tank and light disappear around the corner, dragging its load behind it. The doctor and his companion slipped into another crevice in his mind, and he reached for another orange, wondering how Ani was, sitting at home instead of here, waiting through the last days before the birth of their child. A girl for sure, thought Mac. And I’ll call her Isabel, for my mum. Ani, he knew, favoured Elise as a name, but it was the only immortality Mac could think of to pass his mother’s name on to his daughter; the mother who’d been dead precisely as long as he’d been alive. He just had to make Ani think ‘Isabel’ was her idea.