The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  She brushes away the compliment as if it were a fly. ‘I didn’t know you knew my husband,’ she says.

  And it’s Roy’s turn to brush at the air, to clarify the words that hang there. ‘I wouldn’t say I knew him, but I met him, certainly. And of course there was that wonderful story about him and his blackberries—the railwayman jumping down to pick a billy-full of fruit, and his mates unhitching the engine he’s in charge of, and leaving it, while they drive on with the rest of the train. He takes off after them, full pelt, and runs into the back of their train just around the corner, where they’re laughing and playing cards on the side of the track, just wanting to give your man a fright.’

  ‘My man?’ She has no idea what the poet is talking about.

  ‘That famous story about your husband,’ he says. ‘You know, when he jumped down for some fruit, and the rest of his train made off without him. He had us in fits telling us about it.’

  It’s shocking to think that this poet knows some story about Mac that Ani herself has never heard. ‘Of course we’ve picked blackberries,’ she says slowly, ‘the three of us, up in the bush; we went every summer. But I don’t know what you mean about . . .’

  ‘It was well before the war,’ says Roy, ‘maybe even before your little girl was born.’ He turns away from her a little, as if he’s trying to see far enough along Thirroul’s main street to look into those days, those times. ‘Mr Lachlan, as I remember, was working a bank engine to shunt trains up the hill and from one main line to another. He’d got a good long train up there, and then rather than going on with it, he hopped down to fill his billy with berries instead. The blokes at the front of the train saw what he was doing, uncoupled his engine and took themselves on—just having a joke, you know. But when Mac looked up and saw his engine all on its own, he panicked, jumped in, and went after them hell for leather. Came round the corner expecting to be on the run after them, and didn’t have time to stop himself before he rammed into the back of their vans—derailed them, derailed his own engine’s bogie. Got six weeks off the engines and back on the platform for that, he said, before someone interceded and said he could go back to his job. But I wonder if the berries were worth it, if you don’t remember how he came by them.’

  Ani frowns, her basket heavy on her arm. ‘I just don’t see how it could have been Mac, if it’s a story that I don’t know.’ It’s hard enough accommodating death as the thing that interrupts a story you care about, let alone the shudder of realising that there must have been more stories of life beyond the ones you’d actually heard.

  The poet smiles. ‘There must always be things we don’t know, mustn’t there,’ he says, as if her thoughts are written across her face. ‘Impossible to know every moment of a person’s life, every instant of their day. And would you want to, in the end, if it was stories about that bloody war—I beg your pardon, Mrs Lachlan—rather than stories about berries that you had to take on? They’re the hard ones to put behind you,’ he says. ‘Perhaps you never do. My sister tells me Frank Draper’s not even sure about being a doctor now, although that’s what’s brought him here. Well, at least they’re talking. First, do no harm,’ he quotes from the famous medical oath, and his own wince mirrors Ani’s. ‘Who knew how far a group of doctors could move from that idea in the name of some dreadful politics?’ He shrugs his shoulders, the tops of his arms, as if to dislodge that abhorrent ideology and all that it spawned. ‘But what a thing to be saying to you, Mrs Lachlan, on a day like this, when I really just wanted to thank you for the poetry.’

  ‘Come down to the library whenever you like,’ says Ani, trying to put the blackberries from her mind as she shakes his hand again. ‘I can send a request for anything you’d like.’ A train’s brakes grate on the lines nearby, and she raises her voice, ignoring the interruption. ‘You know when we’re open, don’t you?’

  She’s never referred to herself as the library before—you know when we’re open—and she likes the sound of it. Walking away, she finds herself reciting the Sassoon poem as she turns and heads up the hill:

  Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

  And I was filled with such delight

  As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

  Winging wildly across the white

  Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on— and out of sight.

  ‘And I was filled with such delight,’ she repeats, her steps slowing a little as she begins to climb. But her smile twists and stiffens. No delight for Anikka Lachlan, she thinks. Not now, not ever, not ever again.

  In the brief instant of her eyes closing to blink, she sees an image like a black and white photograph of a body, dead, distended, horrible. And the worst of it is not knowing if she’s imagining Mac, or remembering the poet’s powerful wartime poem, or looking at some shard of the horror that the rude doctor found, one of the first Allied liberators to walk into one of the worst places on earth.

  But Mac did bring berries home from work sometimes, she thinks suddenly, turning the corner into her own street and marking her own house halfway along. Billycans of berries picked beside the tracks. She can even remember the first one, and how anxious she’d been when he told her about jumping down, running into the brambles, and rushing back to catch the engine he was working on before it went too far. If anything should happen, she’d said, and he’d said, but what could happen except berries for our tea?

  How long ago would that have been? And was it something as stupid as fruit behind the last accident? Stopping again, she hates him for a moment, for whatever stupidity ever sent him off after blackberries when he should have been working, and whatever inconsequential stories he’d told to other people and never told her.

  As she climbs the stairs to her front door, she sees a paper bag on the step, and opens it gingerly, afraid of more tiny purple berries that might appear out of nowhere, delivered somehow from the past. But it’s round blue plums, three of them, and a note from Mrs May. Because of your anniversary, and because they were always his favourite, she reads. These ones looked so fine.

  Plums? His favourite? All she knew about was peaches, his peaches. Mac’s peaches. And their anniversary? Their wedding anniversary? How could she have forgotten the date?

  It’s some kind of assault. Struggling with the key in the lock, she’s through the door and dropping everything— including the plums—hard on the floor, where she sits and cries for everything forgotten, unknown and undone.

  Which is where Isabel finds her when she comes home, the pulpy plum flesh sharp and sticky, and Ani sitting with her fingers pressed into her eyes and her throat dry from crying.

  23

  ‘Does it bother you, Mrs Lachlan, to ride in these murderous things?’

  Spinning around at his words, Anikka doesn’t know— never knows—what to expect from Dr Draper. In the handful of times he’s called at the library he’s been charming and obnoxious in equal measure, complimenting her on a bowl of flowers one day, and berating her as an idiot another when the book she’d requested for him proved to be the wrong one. He came once with Iris McKinnon, too, and leaned against the shelves, scowling, as the two women transacted the business of the books. It was the first time Ani had seen Iris smile—a bright contrast to the doctor’s face—and she wanted to wish them well for it. But then Iris had made another grand claim for time’s balm, and left Ani hating them both.

  Now, she shakes her head and tries to laugh, determined not to cloud another meeting. ‘I wouldn’t have much of a life left, nor much of a world, if I let that happen, would I, Doctor?’ She will not tell him how impossibly huge trains seem sometimes, or how she freezes, sometimes, in the middle of a journey, wondering if this engine, carrying her along so reliably, is the one that took Mac away from her. The one that killed him.

  ‘You’re of Miss McKinnon’s school, then,’ the doctor continues, moving closer to Ani on the platform. ‘The old “time heals all wounds”.’

  Against the glimmer of a smile on his face, she
steels herself and proceeds. ‘No, no—I hate that phrase, hate it. All the forgetting in it, all the ignoring, the papering over, the covering up, the pretending.’ Which is more than she means to say.

  He glances at his watch and then down the track.

  ‘Perhaps we’re travelling up to Sydney together,’ he says, indicating the oncoming engine. ‘If you don’t mind the company.’ The train slows, stops, and he steps forward, holding open the compartment door.

  ‘Of course,’ says Ani, ‘of course,’ wondering if it might have been possible to say anything else. She’ll have to concentrate on him now, on whatever he wants to say. Out of nowhere, she wishes Roy McKinnon was travelling instead. What would it be like, to travel with a poet? But there’s something treacherous in that thought, and she bats it away with her list of tasks for the city. Of course, she wishes no one were here. She wishes herself alone.

  Settling into the forward-facing seat, registering the photographs opposite—the Blue Mountains, the Harbour Bridge, the famous roundhouse at Junee—Ani smiles at Frank Draper as if their meeting is the happiest coincidence of her day, and hopes he might nod off soon, as some men do in trains.

  ‘Roy McKinnon speaks very highly of you,’ he says then, smiling back. ‘And your library,’ he adds and she hears in his tone some implication that this second point, at least, is quaint. But he looks polite enough, with his dark suit, his hat, and she gives him just a little more latitude as he goes on: ‘I am sorry I’ve upset you on some visits to your library. McKinnon says I must have left most of my manners on the other side of the world when I came home—and I think sometimes he’s right.’

  ‘He told me, Mr McKinnon, about the work you did—about where you were, at the end of the war I mean.’ Navigating things she suspects are probably best left unsaid but wanting some sense of how far he might be pushed in return, she blinks at the glint of the roundhouse’s glass as it passes her window. There are rainbows in its corners, small sparkles of treasure.

  ‘He told you about hell, did he?’ The doctor’s voice is coated again in ice, and Ani pulls herself into her seat, the boundaries clear, and is thankful to be able to look out of the window and see the next station, and who might be on the platform, who else might be making this trip. ‘I’m sorry,’ says the doctor as the train begins to move. ‘I find myself unable to say anything useful about it, so I wonder sometimes how it is that other people can tell its story for me.’

  The landscape through the window begins to blur with the train’s speed, the texture of the cutting changing from the roughness of individual rocks and layers to a rush of one uniform colour. ‘You get used to people telling the version of your story that they want to hear,’ Ani says, quiet. ‘Well, you get more used to it than you might have thought you would.’

  ‘How long has it been now, Mrs Lachlan? How long has it been for you?’

  But it’s still only months, the maths of her story, and his—she knows—is years. ‘It’s like Miss McKinnon’s recuperative sense of time,’ she says, trying to change track. ‘It’s not right, it doesn’t heal, you don’t forget, but you find some kind of accommodation. Don’t you? Don’t you?’ She’s making it worse, she can see, as he frowns and is silent. The train shapes itself around a curve, and she sees its engine away up ahead, dragging them on. She’s never noticed this before— must never have looked out of her window at precisely the right moment to see it happening.

  ‘I like that,’ he says suddenly, pointing towards the back of the train where the last carriages can now be seen curling around the track’s wide arc. ‘That sense that we’re all being safely carried along. It’s all we want, most of us, isn’t it?’ The coldness has gone from his voice again, and Ani recoils from this latest change. These slams that skew from placatory to hostile: it’s going to be a long journey.

  ‘Sometimes it’s nice to feel carried along,’ she concedes. ‘But mostly it’s nice to know we can jump off, don’t you think, if we want to, if we’re going too fast, or too far?’

  He snorts a little and stares at the ocean, until Ani wonders if she might get her book out of her bag without being rude. ‘Do you want to know, Mrs Lachlan,’ he says abruptly, ‘do you want to know what it was like when we went into that place? Do you want to know how far it was from here, from where you were, from your safe little village with its ordinary lives and deaths, its distant understanding of the scale, the mess of war?’ And there’s no ice, no coldness in his voice this time, just a great sense of tiredness.

  ‘I think we know how far it was, how unlike here, anything here, anything that has ever been here, Doctor,’ says Ani carefully. ‘And now, we hear more and more about it, and we understand less and less of how it could possibly have happened.’ She wonders how much he might tell her, and how much she might not want to hear. ‘I sat with women whose husbands had died, whose sons had died, whose brothers and fiancés had disappeared—none of them there; none of them where you were. But they seemed such individual deaths; there were still particular people attached to them. The way my husband is my particular story, the death people particularly associate with me.’ She smiles, quite a small, tight smile. ‘But where you were, what you saw, that was beyond— beyond anything, I think. Anything, perhaps, except those bombs at the very end.’

  There’s something about the accountancy of death, about how to look at more than one scale at the same time: hers now, for Mac; Mrs May’s, say, during the war, when her husband died making a railway in a jungle; the thousands in the bright blasts that ended the war; the thousands upon thousands in the long stretch of horror that predated it, and has outlasted it. She doesn’t know how to say this without making the war sound like a problem of mathematics.

  ‘They sent me to the sick bay when we got there,’ says the doctor quietly. ‘I couldn’t tell you how many people were there—it would be almost better to say there were none. There were remnants, shadows; there were bodies whose state, alive or dead, could hardly be distinguished. You have no idea, Mrs Lachlan. I don’t mean that to be anything other than a simple statement of fact: your world, your grief, what you understand of death. You have no idea. And there we were, the liberating army, to tell them it was over. To tell them they had survived, they had endured.’ He coughs. ‘Five hundred and fifty-five of those survivors died after we arrived. Five hundred and fifty-five people endured everything up until that point, and we could not heal them, could not make them whole, could not lead them back into the world that they must have been promising themselves the whole time. I heard it was three thousand a day, in one place. Three thousand deaths, every day. I don’t—’ He puts his hand up quickly as she moves to say something. ‘I don’t speak of this; I don’t usually speak of this. And I’m very sorry for your loss, Mrs Lachlan. I understand that everyone is, that it’s a certain tragedy, and that it has a certain weight for them—and of course, of course, for you. But I carry those five hundred and fifty-five people; I carry their weight. The doctor who found them and failed them.’

  He fits the tips of his fingers together while his lips purse and twist. ‘And I sit in this place, seeing people with their colds and their burns and their boils, and I find it impossible to think of doing anything for them, when I failed the people who needed me so much more desperately.’

  He coughs again, a thick heavy cough from somewhere deep in his chest, and she rummages for a small paper bag of cough drops—the smallest gesture, but she’s glad to be doing something—and holds them towards him.

  ‘Would you like—’

  He shakes his head, clears his throat, straightens himself so that his shoulders are pulled back and square and his hands rest flat on his knees.

  ‘We had this plan, me and Roy McKinnon,’ he says, ‘when we were kids down here for holidays. Me, off to be a doctor, and he had this mad idea to be a poet. I knew there’d been a medico on the coast who’d come from Ireland—knew Yeats, someone told me, and was a fine doctor, a good doctor, the kind of doctor who kept all
the good people from this good little place alive through that terrible influenza in 1918. That’s for me, I said. I’ll be that man—and our boy Roy will be a poet.

  ‘So we’d go off and make our way in the world, and we’d come back, older, respectable, with wives and children and yards of stories behind us. We’d come back here, and we’d talk about the world, where we’d been, what we’d done, and how it was to end up in a nice little place like this. We had it figured for a pretty good life too.’

  ‘Did you like his poem, Dr Draper?’ asks Ani, and frowns as the doctor shakes his head.

  ‘I’m sorry—I don’t mean I didn’t like it,’ he says at once. ‘I mean, I didn’t read it. I heard that it had been published, of course, and I did drag myself out of whichever mess I was in and write to him, saying that I was waiting to see it, to see what he’d done. He sent me a poem by Yeats instead: “On Being Asked for a War Poem”—do you know it? I don’t remember all the lines, but it starts, I think it better that in times like these, a poet’s mouth be silent. It took months for my letter to find him, his to find me. I never replied—never expected, I think, to see him again after that. I mean, I never expected to see anywhere like this again.’

  The yellow-grey stone of the escarpment flashes by on one side of the train, the different blues of ocean and sky flash by on the other. Perhaps there are different kinds of death, or dying, thinks Ani suddenly. Outside, there’s not a cloud to be seen, and the sun’s light picks out the different stripes and blocks of the world’s colours at their most perfect pitch. Perhaps there are different kinds of resurrection too.

  Tilting her head towards the window, she catches another glimpse of the engine surging forward, pulling them on.

  ‘I was up in the city—years ago, before the war, before my daughter was born. And when I came onto the platform at St James, the driver, a mate of Mac’s—of my husband’s—asked if I wanted to ride in the engine. I don’t know how many times I’d gone through those tunnels, peering out at the black walls, sometimes seeing the face of a workman staring out of an alcove, waiting for us to pass. But to ride up the front, to be looking into the tunnels head on, rather than from the side, to see the way the train’s lights pushed out against the darkness, illuminating the places I’d always seen as shadow—and then to see the day growing bigger and bigger once we’d passed through Museum and were on our way back out into the open. It was like I was on a train in another world. It looked so different, so exciting, from up there. I’d love to ride up the front around here one day—cutting through the trees, the tunnels, over the bridges.’