The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  From his side of the compartment, the doctor almost laughs, caught instead in another bout of such hacking and coughing that he has to lean forward and brace himself against it. ‘Perhaps Roy McKinnon is right about you,’ he says at last, taking one of her cough drops this time. ‘Has he started writing poems, do you know?’

  Anikka shakes her head. ‘Really, Dr Draper, I’ve only spoken to him a few times. There’s an etiquette . . .’ Her hands flail and she blushes. ‘I don’t know. But I know he’s reading a lot of poetry, because it’s all coming down in the trunks from Sydney—I’ve got another request list from him to drop in to them today.’ She doesn’t tell him that she wonders about the mechanics of writing poetry, about the way a poet’s hand might hold its pen. But she does say, finally, that she hopes he will write something soon; she does say that she hopes she’ll be able to read it.

  ‘Good old Roy,’ says Dr Draper, leaning back and settling himself in the corner made by the seat and the window. ‘I guess it’s something that we both made it back here. Whatever we might fail to do with ourselves after that.’

  As the train crosses the high viaduct near Stanwell Park, sunshine cuts stripes through the trees outside and Ani presses her fingers against her eyes so that sparks flare behind her lids. The train slows, stops, and she listens for doors opening and closing before the whistle sounds, and the engine begins to pull away. They’ll be in the tunnel soon, cutting away from the coast, away from the ocean, and on the long run up to the city. In the seat opposite, the doctor closes his eyes, and is asleep.

  She watches Frank in the light before the train plunges into the mountain—he looks tired, she notices, but probably doctors are often up all night, with one thing or another. Keeping watch over someone—who said that, about the grace of watching someone sleep? Reaching out, she surprises herself by moving his hand a little before it drops from the armrest of his chair, and she’s astonished by the weight of it, the solid, dead weight. She’s astonished, too, by how much his hand feels like Mac’s—Although of course, she thinks, he’s just a person, another person. And she feels Mac diminish a little, this fraction of his being so easily replicated.

  It’s shocking: Ani pulls her hand away, tensing and flexing her fingers in a silent exclamation. But it’s no more shocking than the next thought that comes: What would Roy McKinnon look like as he slept, she thinks, and more safely: or when he laughed, or leaned back at the end of a good meal?

  They’re still neither of them well fed or well rested, these men, and in a flash of neighbourliness, she thinks the village should be doing something about that. Taking care, keeping watch—that, she tells herself, is what her interest, her concern is all about.

  24

  Ani has been walking a good quarter of an hour before she realises she has looked at nothing but her own feet, one stepping in front of the other in the stoutest shoes she could find—the muddy boots she uses for gardening, their familiar dark-soil mud now brightened by the orange clay of the track that winds up from Austinmer to the top of the escarpment, hundreds of feet above.

  There’s a group of them, a dozen or so from the church: the new minister—Reverend Robinson, young, enthusiastic, and known to own his own compass—has organised the outing, or ‘the hike’, as he refers to it, and Ani has pretended to be merely acceding to Isabel’s pleas in agreeing that they will go. It’s a Saturday. It’s gloriously warm. And it feels good to stride out, her legs stretching and climbing, and to know that she will lie down tonight properly exhausted.

  ‘I wasn’t sure you’d come, Mrs Lachlan,’ the minister says, catching up to her as she climbs beyond tree ferns, sandstone boulders, a little marsh of reeds and bulrushes such as Isabel might hope holds fairies. ‘I mean, I wasn’t sure,’ he corrects himself, ‘if the library kept you busy on the weekends.’

  Ani steps carefully over a fallen bough. ‘No, not all the weekends—they leave me something.’ She makes a show of indicating the view so she can catch her breath. ‘There’s just more and more of it, the higher you go.’ She points out towards the sea, makes her breathing deep and slow.

  ‘Have you ever travelled over the ocean, Mrs Lachlan?’ Reverend Robinson asks, following her gaze.

  ‘No, no.’ She shakes her head. ‘My father came from Europe, and my husband of course. But I’ve always had the ground beneath me—apart from a little boat, here and there, a day’s sail.’ She hears Isabel behind her, laughing with someone from school. It’s lovely to hear that laugh. ‘Should we . . .’ And she clambers over a scatter of rocks, pressing on.

  The path tacks and weaves, straight up with ladders here, running along the cliff’s face there, out in the sun on some stretches and tucked into dankly fecund pockets of rainforest in others where the air is thick with the rich smell of the leaves, the vines, the growth all around. Below is Austinmer, the neat rectangles of its rock pools pushing out, constrained, into the ocean. Just south, Thirroul, with its busy space of railyards, and the straight streets of houses running east to the coast, west to the base of this scarp. Further south, beyond Wollongong, sit the steelworks, belching and sprawling—she had been so scared of their heat, their power, the ferocity of their furnaces and ovens when she first came to the coast. And then, during the war, her dreams had rearranged them to mirror its heat and ferocity. She was always grateful it was the trains, not the steelworks, that paid her husband—even now, she thinks, I guess, even now.

  A plume of white steam pushes up from one of the stacks. One of the last stories Mac told her was about a group of Baltic steelworkers with a grievance against their German foreman— she didn’t know if the grievance belonged to this part of the world, or had travelled with them from somewhere else—who’d taken the opportunity of some construction work to push him down into a smooth tablet of wet cement. ‘They’ll find him one day,’ Mac had said, and she’d hated his casual unconcern. ‘There’s always a war going on somewhere, I suppose.’

  She takes in the smell of the turpentines, the straight grandeur of one or two remaining cedar trees, and turns her back on the steel. The war is always going on.

  ‘And good morning to you, Mrs Lachlan.’ It’s Dr Draper, with Roy McKinnon at his side. ‘Beneficial to be out on the hike.’ His voice mocks the label, a parody of doctorly advice. ‘Plenty of fresh air; plenty of exercise; you know what they say.’ His skin is still sallow, his frame malnourished, and the darkness under his eyes is darker than even the worst crescents Ani has seen smudging her own face.

  ‘Dr Draper.’ She smiles, set on friendliness after their train ride together a week or so before. ‘And Mr McKinnon. You couldn’t ask for a better day for a climb, could you, although I suppose Reverend Robinson has more power than the rest of us to guarantee the weather.’

  The poet smiles, adjusting his hat. ‘It’s the sort of day you dream of, yes,’ he says. ‘But my sister’s not one for heights—or hikes.’ He laughs. ‘I used to do this each year we came when I was a boy, racing up here, trying to make my time faster and faster. When you burst out at the top, and you turn, and you see the whole coastline unfolded below you—that’s something, don’t you think, Mrs Lachlan? That’s a thing worth racing for.’

  Ani nods. ‘It’s years since I was at the top—I remember feeling I could see all the way to South America. It seemed possible; there was so much world out there.’ She starts to walk, and the two men fall in step behind her. ‘Are there mountains along the coastline in Chile? I always meant to look that up, to find out what I was looking at, all that way away.’

  ‘Well, you’ve the perfect opportunity now, all those books at your disposal.’ Roy McKinnon leans forward to pull a low branch out of Ani’s way, and Frank Draper steps through after her, changing the order of their line.

  ‘And all that time,’ the doctor says quickly. ‘I often wonder who uses that library—it’s almost always empty whenever I look in. I wonder how long the railways will keep it up, if there aren’t enough readers for its books.’


  This talent he has, thinks Ani, this talent for finding some brusque thing to say, some criticism. ‘We’ve a good number of readers for a branch our size,’ she says, a little surprised by her defensiveness. ‘They’re talking of changing the hours, and circulating the books more quickly between branches—and we’re taking more requests now, which our readers like. Mr McKinnon’—she smiles back to him—‘has often availed himself of this, of course.’

  ‘She can get you anything, Frank,’ the poet calls. ‘Anything you like.’

  But the doctor doesn’t smile. ‘I wonder if your daughter isn’t too young to try a climb like this—you must be more fearful, more protective of her now.’ They round a corner and there is Isabel herself, half hidden behind a rock with two giggling friends, waiting to jump out at whichever parent passes first.

  Ani laughs. ‘You can ask her, Dr Draper, but she looks all right to me.’ She tickles her daughter as she goes by and, glancing back, sees the poet tickle the top of her head as well. Isabel giggles again and ducks.

  ‘See you at the top, Mum,’ she calls.

  Up ahead, the first knot of walkers disturbs a tree full of white cockatoos, and they rise up, protesting, their vast wings reaching across the sky.

  ‘Did you see, when we were climbing, a whole tree of them, those cockatoos? We were up above it, looking down. It was like looking down into a Christmas tree, with row after row of candles.’ Roy McKinnon has swapped places with the doctor again, and walks close to Ani. ‘I was looking for the angel to put on the top—an angel was all it was missing.’

  ‘And the fact that it’s not yet December 25,’ Frank Draper adds, louder again. ‘That does work a little against your metaphor, Royston, my friend—you always were premature with your celebrations.’

  ‘My father always cooks a Christmas meal for the pitchest night in winter,’ says Ani, ‘as dark and as cold as he can get, to remember the old country. Apple bread and herring and Christmas mustard—joulusinappi—although I could never work out what made it different to the mustard he ate at any other time of the year. Or where he found herring in the middle of New South Wales.’

  There’s a bustle on the path behind them and a couple of women overtake, greeting the doctor as they glance at Ani and the poet, and asking Roy about his sister as they glance coquettishly at Frank.

  ‘Say it again, the mustard word,’ Roy McKinnon says as they pass, and he stays her steps with a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Joulusinappi?’

  ‘It changes, your whole voice changes when you say that— a different sound, a different pitch.’ And he steps back, letting go. ‘As if a whole other person was speaking. I wonder who you would have been, Mrs Lachlan, if you’d grown up speaking that language instead of this one.’

  ‘I’d have been someone even more enamoured of this sunshine than I already am.’ It’s good to feel the stretch and reach in her muscles, and there’s a sort of warmth from the climbing too—or the talking. And although she thinks she can see the lip of the escarpment, the end of their climb, not too far in front of them, she wishes she could go on striding and climbing, ascending forever. ‘I don’t know as much of the language as I should,’ she says, slowing down. ‘I meant to learn it before I came away from the plains, from living with my father— now he writes the odd word, here and there, in a letter. Like käy pian . . .’ She smiles at the poet’s blank face. ‘It’s “visit soon”. But I never seem to get away.’

  The path straightens and steadies and reaches the top. Ani pauses, staring at the pine tree that she usually sees from so far down below.

  ‘Here we are then’—the doctor arrives, Isabel and her friends hard behind—‘and the minister has made good on the promised lunch.’ He strides over to the picnic rugs, already spread and waiting. ‘Satisfaction, at last. The repayment of repast. There you are, Roy, that’s almost a rhyme for you.’

  ‘Your rhythm’s all wrong.’ Roy laughs, sitting himself down beside his friend.

  And it is good, Ani knows, to sit and eat and laugh— to look out across the view of the coast and not have every thought bound up with the last time she was here. It is good to see Isabel, smiling and playing. It is good to talk with the minister, with the poet—even with the doctor, although she wonders what entertainment he allows himself out of scaling an escarpment, as out of anything.

  But she smiles herself, and she chatters. When the poet mentions his plan to see a movie with the doctor the following week, and asks if she’d like to join them, she smiles again and finds herself nodding—‘Yes, I’d like to see that film; yes’—although she hasn’t, until that moment, ever heard of it. And when another tree lights up with cockatoos and the matter of Christmas is raised again, and Roy McKinnon wonders aloud about celebrating it, Ani talks about inviting him and his sister to join in their meal. And thinks it a fine idea.

  Reverend Robinson says grace, and they eat, quiet and busy with their sandwiches, their pasties, their fruit. To the south, the steelworks sends up another column of thick white smoke, and then another. Further south again, Ani sees a band of grey clouds—a storm coming up; it seems so preposterous in the middle of such a rich, warm reservoir of sunshine that the picnickers ignore it, relishing their food.

  But up it comes, so fast that they’re only just packing the last of the plates when the first drops of rain fall, heavy and huge.

  ‘If some of the ladies would like to drive back in the car that brought the picnic?’ the minister calls, and there’s a rush towards the car park. Mrs Floyd giggles and touches her newly set hair; Mrs Padman holds a tiny handkerchief over her head. The minister pauses, gesturing towards Ani, but she shakes her head.

  ‘I’ll walk back down—me and Isabel. We’ll get a bit wet, but we’ll be under the trees most of the way.’ She takes her daughter’s hand and they make for the track’s mouth, both of them laughing.

  ‘Come on then, come on!’ The doctor, of course, and the poet. And they set off, the track’s sticky clay already a little more slippery, a little more malleable than it had been when they made their ascent.

  Isabel darts ahead, Ani steadying herself here and there on rocks and branches as she tries to keep up. She sees her daughter sit down and slide a little way, and as she catches up to her, she sits down as well, feels the wet ground pressing up through her scruffy trousers.

  ‘This is great, Mum,’ Isabel shouts. ‘Isn’t this great?’ Thunder breaks out overhead and another nest of cockatoos rises up, protesting. ‘Your Christmas candles are back, Mr McKinnon,’ Isabel says, stopping to let her mother pass. ‘I’ve always wondered what they do when it rains—isn’t it bad for birds to get their feathers wet? Doesn’t it make it hard for them to fly?’

  ‘But what about sea birds, Bella?’ Ani says. ‘What about cormorants and albatrosses and oystercatchers?’ She takes the first rope ladder as fast as she dares, the uprights chafing at her skin as her palms rush over them. She can’t hear the poet’s answer, if he gives one, and for a moment she relishes the feeling of being completely alone and here, in the bush, in a storm, tucked in against the side of her mountain.

  She pushes water out of her eyes and jumps down another stand of steps, and another—she hasn’t felt this light, this nimble for the longest time. There’s a crash in the undergrowth to the side of the track, and she sees the back of a little swamp wallaby, with its delicate ears and tail, bounding away.

  ‘Bell?’ she calls. ‘A wallaby. Did you see it? Did you see?’ Her jumper, tied at her waist, is heavy with water, and her shirt clings and sticks to her like another skin. A sight we’ll look, when we get to the bottom, she thinks, hearing her daughter whoop and laugh. She springs down another drop, and another, takes the next ladder almost at a run, and slides away on the seat of her pants again, wanting to whoop as well. What would her father make of the poet, she thinks out of nowhere. What would my dad make of a man like that? A man like that, running wet, in the rain, running home, needing to be warmed, needing to be d
ried. Needing.

  She stops, hot and breathless, despite the drenching.

  ‘Bella? Isabel? Are you all right up there? Are you coming?’

  What is she thinking, out in the rain, her daughter soaked to the skin and running down a mountainside with two men she hardly knows. What is she thinking, being here at all. It’s another minute before she remembers the wet walk she took with Mac, and the way they pushed themselves together afterwards. But it comes, this memory, and just as quickly goes: she’s making a new story here, not reliving an old one.

  The bath’s water, clean and hot, is going to feel magnificent.

  A call—a coo-ee—echoes around her; the doctor’s voice, then the poet’s and then Isabel’s. And they come around the corner, one close by the other, and catch up with her, pressing on together to the track’s end, to the point where they began.

  ‘Now that,’ says the doctor, shaking his hair like a drying dog, ‘that is what I call a hike.’

  And for the first time, Ani sees him really smile.

  25

  Stretched out in the bath, on the night of Isabel’s tenth birthday, Mac ducked his ears under the water again and again. ‘Just listening to the house,’ he said as Ani watched his head dip and rise, dip and rise. ‘There’s such noise under the water; you can hear the pipes and the pressure and all manner of other sounds like some great machine pulsing away. When I get my deep-sea dive—no, now, Ani love,’ as she shook her head against this mad desire, ‘when I get my deep-sea dive, I reckon I’ll be able to hear the machinery behind the whole world. You’re an embarrassment to us coast-dwellers, you are, keeping your head above the water all the time.’ And he ducked away again, his eyes wide in mock ignorance of the words she was saying into the room’s air.