The Railwayman's Wife

by Ashley Hay

  A saucepan of apples sizzles as some of its juice spits onto the hot surface of the stove. It’s Christmas Day. There’s a table to be set. People will come and eat and laugh and be together, speckling her white tablecloth with food and festivity. Mrs May, of course, and Isabel, and Roy McKinnon and his sister. And Dr Draper—scooped into the invitation at the end of the bushwalk. Sit him next to Mrs May, she thinks as she sets out the cutlery. She knows enough stories of undiagnosed illness to keep him busy for a week. She places the glasses—wishes Mac could carve the pork, and then swallows hard against this automatic thought.

  She’ll put Isabel on the other side of the doctor; give him a dose of childhood and its optimism.

  In the middle of the table, a small pile of gifts sits clustered around a bunch of Christmas bush with its starbursts of dusty pink flowers. A special gift for Mrs May, for all her help, and a little something for everyone else to open. A box of shortbread each for the men—the first time Ani’s attempted Mac’s proper Scots recipe—and a jar of homemade jelly for Iris. She’s noticed them more and more, Iris and Frank, walking together, and Iris with that smile Ani remembers from a long time ago. Some rapprochement, she thinks; some recovery or some beginning—she’s heard the edges of its story whispered in the post office and the shoe shop, and politely turned away. Of course she wishes them the world.

  Isabel has wrapped the gifts, prettying them with ribbon and little sprays of the flowers. So the table looks busy with treasure, thinks Ani, and everyone has something to take home. In the dim room, she stands a moment, scanning the sideboard, the linen press—she pulls out a chair and is standing on it, leaping so quickly she might have flown.

  ‘What are you doing up there, Mum?’ The back door slams as Isabel steps forward, steadying the chair on which her mother is balanced. ‘What are you looking for?’

  Ani blushes up to the roots of her hair, her tanned face hot and prickled. ‘I just thought—I didn’t know if we’d looked—’

  ‘Your birthday present,’ says Isabel glumly.

  Ani sighs. ‘I’m sorry, Bell; I shouldn’t. And not on a day when I’ve had such nice surprises already.’ Her fingers brush the star-shaped coral brooch her daughter had given her that morning. ‘It’s greedy of me—I don’t know what I was thinking.’ And as she steps down, one of the chair’s legs bows, its wood splintering. ‘And now look what I’ve done . . .’ She drags the chair onto the back verandah, worrying about who might mend it. Of course the table will look scrappy now, a kitchen chair pulled in to make up the numbers—although she’d spent half an hour setting and unsetting an extra place for Mac, and left it, in the end, set, but with no chair. Her dining-suite six had been just enough to seat the living.

  Leave it alone, Ani Lachlan, she tells herself, packing up the extra place. Leave what’s lost alone.

  But the guests come and sit and eat and the pork is perfect and the pudding sweet and the conversation easy. Iris McKinnon tries to toast to absent friends, and Mrs May distracts her with an anecdote about someone’s son who arrived home unannounced after the war to be just in time for Christmas lunch. ‘And you know, his mother had set a place for him every single meal he was away.’

  Thank you, thinks Ani, smiling at her neighbour. She doesn’t want to cry.

  They pass the afternoon with games—charades, and codes, and Chinese whispers. A film; four words; and the doctor is miming Gone With the Wind, blowing up a storm until his cheeks are red and his veins popping. A book; one word; and Ani’s jumping around the room like a kangaroo. Towards evening, they cluster into the kitchen to sort out the washing-up, Frank Draper with his hands deep in hot water, and everyone else busy with tea towels and stacking and putting away.

  Turning from the ice chest, Ani feels a surge of gratitude for this busyness, this festivity, for the very noise of its process. She stands a moment, watching her Christmas guests, red dress, blue dress, two suits, and Bella’s bright golden hair; she sees flickers of their colours and shapes in the kitchen’s windows, in the facets of the dresser’s reeded glass doors. She stands a moment, still and pale, a light calico apron tied over her pretty white dress. She feels herself smile, and catches the edge of Roy McKinnon’s smile in return as Mrs May steadies her heavy brown camera and clicks.

  ‘A memento of our Christmas, then,’ Mrs May says.

  One last game of charades, one last cup of tea, and slices of pudding wrapped up to take home—Ani and Isabel stand on the front steps, waving their guests along Surfers Parade.

  ‘Still no sign of my surfers.’ Ani laughs, one arm around her daughter’s shoulder, her other arm looped through the crook of her neighbour’s elbow.

  ‘It was nice to have everyone,’ says Isabel, ‘and Dr Draper was funny, wasn’t he? He told me and Miss McKinnon the funniest jokes—I thought you said he wasn’t very nice?’

  ‘Well, he can be a bit odd,’ says Ani, squeezing her close. ‘But perhaps it was his Christmas cheer.’

  Later, as the night vibrates with the sound of the summer’s cicadas, Ani lies back on her bed. A good day, mostly, she thinks, and a happy one. Which seems surprising; she’s glad that it’s over. Someone along the street is playing a recording of Christmas carols, fruity voices singing about stars and angels and joy. The needle stutters and jumps into the next song. Ani closes her eyes, and it’s Isabel she sees, perched on top of a Christmas tree, her arms out, like an angel.

  A comfortable bed, a quiet room, a skyful of night stars and, one day, a morning. That’s better, she thinks as the light falls away. That’s better.

  27

  By the time she passes Austinmer, heading north under the hot sun of a New Year’s Sunday, the tide is running out, the dints and crevices re-emerging in the rock pools below the Headlands guesthouse. It’s silver this morning, and although the tide is ebbing, a thin sheet of the ocean lies across the rock shelf so that a fisherman walking out from the land with his line looks as if he’s walking on the surface of the water itself. The sky is silver too, overcast but glowing bright with the hidden sun. Behind Ani, beyond the edge of the escarpment and to the north and south, wild bushfires are burning—the smoke is part of the air’s silver thickness, and she can taste it every time she takes a breath. But down here, on the level of the sand, the silver-grey ocean curls down around the lip of the horizon. The world falling away.

  The fisherman reaches the edge of the platform, bends down to busy himself with something and then casts his line out so that it leaves the smallest trace of a signature across the air. Mac was never a fisherman, never liked the flapping and thrashing that was the end of the fish’s life; never liked the way the knife sliced so easily through the flesh for gutting—although he did it, when he had to, when they needed it for eating. Ani had always meant to offer to take on the task, imagining herself as someone more able to do it. But as she stands and watches the fisherman now, as she watches his line tighten and arc as he flicks it clear of the water with the slithering exclamation of a catch writhing on its end, she knows she’d have been just as bad as her husband. Or worse: she’d have thrown the fish back and settled for toast.

  Beyond the rocks, a great wave builds and builds and finally breaks as Ani holds and releases her breath. It’s the sense she has whenever she sits with her daybook, trying to retrieve another recollection of Mac. The store of memories had filled and grown for a while, just like this swell. And then, instead of breaking, it froze, suspended, not a drop more water to push into it, not a single extra moment or memory to be reclaimed. She cannot remember the last words he said to her. She cannot remember how much breakfast he ate that last day. She is trying to make her peace with these gaps, these elisions—pushing away her journal and pulling towards herself any story by anyone else instead, as long as it has a man and a woman falling in love; as long as it has a happy ending. She disappears into the safety of these pages and reads herself towards sleep, where it’s never Mac she sees now as the light goes down and she begins to dream.
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  Beyond the fisherman, further north, smaller waves crash against the edge of the continent, flaring into anemones and chrysanthemums. And further north again, there are surfers, three of them, slight shapes against the movement of the ocean, and then suddenly upright and balanced, riding improbably in towards the shore. If Mac wanted his bathysphere, wanted deep and down, he could have it. She’d take this any day, walking on water—or flying; maybe it was like flying.

  She watches the pulse of the waves, trying to feel their rhythm and then predict it. Her breath catches a little when she senses that this one, this one, is going to rise up high and smooth, and sees two of the riders rise up with it, as if in confirmation. They’re suspended then against the silver sky, cresting and gliding on the silver water, and as she follows the line carved by their heavy boards, it intersects with the straight black dart of an oystercatcher, diving down, hunting and hopeful.

  They’d taste of salt, the surfers, when they stepped out of the ocean. In the nicks and folds of a surfer’s body, she thinks, there’d always be the stickiness of salt, the way I could taste soot and smoke on Mac when he came home from work—here. She raises her hand to her lips, her tongue touching the crease where her fingers join her palm. Soot and smoke here. Of course she hasn’t forgotten him: he’s here—his smell, his taste, his being.

  It’s the sun, hard and bright as it pierces the smoky clouds, that breaks her concentration, blinding her for a moment so that she calls out, shocked, when she blinks and sees the fisherman walking towards her and quite close now, emerged from the blazing radiance.

  ‘I said if you wanted a fish . . .’ he repeats, gesturing towards the bucket brimming with fins and scales and the cloudy dead-end of so many dead eyes. ‘You’re Mac Lachlan’s wife, aren’t you? Seen you walking along the sand sometimes. Think my wife brought round a pot of stew when we heard the news—but then I guess every woman around here was doing that. It’s what you do, isn’t it, food and so forth. Did you want one of these?’

  Ani shakes her head, frightened of the fish, of the idea of carrying one home, and wondering if the man has seen her standing there, gazing out across the water, and licking at her own skin like an idiot.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ she says, and pretends to laugh, ‘but I’m not sure how I’d get it home.’

  The man shrugs. ‘I could fetch you some paper from up home, if you wanted.’ He gestures towards one of the low weatherboard houses set across the road and Ani, turning, is sure she can make out the shape of the casserole-cooking wife by a window, watching this conversation, and trying to conjure its words. Once, when she and Mac weren’t long married, she’d sat in a railway carriage, its windows jammed shut by too much paint, and watched the dumbshow of Mac talking to a woman with gorgeous red hair; Ani had never seen her before, not in town or anywhere nearby. When Mac came into the carriage, he pointed back towards the platform. ‘Woman who came out on the same ship as me—cannae believe she’d turn up out here, of all places.’ And Ani had smiled, and laughed too, and said something small about coincidence, intrigued by how frightening, how unsettling, it had been to watch her new husband have a conversation she couldn’t hear with a woman she didn’t know.

  Now, she makes a small wave up towards the house. ‘If you could thank your wife for the casserole—I was very bad with writing all the notes I should have written. But you take the fish; you take the fish. I’m not sure how long I’m going to stay here before I walk back.’ The water has retreated well beyond her feet now but she can feel the bottom of her dress pressed wet against her calves.

  ‘Must be troublesome, not having a man about to do for you,’ the fisherman says, as Ani watches him trace the line from her ankles, up around her wet hemline and the length of her legs, across her belly, her breasts, and up to her neck, where he stops, coughs, and turns to look out across the water.

  ‘You’ve not much choice but to get on with it,’ she says, her hand at the V of her dress. ‘Ask any war widow.’ It’s a harder thing than she means to say, but she gets a twitch of satisfaction from the man’s blush.

  ‘I’ll get these home then,’ he says, pointing again to his house, the idea of his wife. But as he turns to go, he pauses, the bucket swinging from his hand. ‘There were a group of us used to take a drink in the wine saloon sometimes—your Mac was there once or twice; some of the boys home from the war had a hankering for the sherries they’d had overseas. And Mac said those thick drinks almost touched the edge of the whisky he remembered. He’d be on his way home, calling in—I’m not sure you knew.’ His eyes are fixed on his own feet now, his downturned head dampening his voice as much as the sound of the nearby water. ‘He sang us a Scots song once, his booming great voice and all the words about light and heather and the wide ocean. Brought a lot of us to tears. But I could never remember the tune when I set out to hum it, and I never had the moment to ask him if he’d sing it again.’ And he touches his forehead, the barest implication of a salute.

  ‘There are days I can hardly remember the sound of his voice, the way his breath broke up sentences, the way his accent changed some words.’ Ani is staring into the nothingness, barely conscious of what she’s saying. ‘If he was famous, someone would have made a recording of his voice—singing, or saying something. A little bit of a movie, or a gramophone record you could play over and over. I can remember the way that man danced along Martin Place when the war was finally done with, but I can’t remember the way my husband said his own address, where he paused, where he spelled things out.’ She shakes her head and peers into the bucket of fish. ‘I will take one of those, then,’ she says, ‘if you don’t mind about the paper, and if you wouldn’t mind gutting it too. You’re right; there are things you miss having a man to do.’ And she clenches her teeth as his eyes sweep her body again before he goes.

  Alone on the sand, she watches the oystercatcher coasting in the shallows, its head ducking under the water every so often. The surfers have gone, ridden in, she guesses, and now standing warm in the sun with their big planks of wood drying next to them. But she feels such a hum in the air that she wonders if she hasn’t committed herself somehow to trying surfing, walking out across the water and gliding along with the rim of a wave, elegant and aloft and free.

  And all this from a conversation about Mac and a dead fish.

  She takes the parcel from the fisherman, nodding. ‘Thank you for this,’ she says, placing it near her feet, ‘and for the story. Makes me feel a bit of a beachcomber, hunting more bits of someone I thought I knew everything about.’ She waves across the road to the house, to the implied wife, as well—an extra thankyou. Behind its tin roof, the mountain puts up its high, solid wall, the facets and faces of its rocks lit by morning’s sun, and the smoke thick along the top. ‘Will it come down, do you think?’ she asks, pointing to the traces of the inferno.

  The fisherman spreads his hands like a question. ‘Must be due a burn through there,’ he says, ‘and it’s been a blessed hot summer for it. But there are a lot of houses between us and it, a lot of people would try to fight it down before it reached the beach. If it does come over the top.’ He squints. ‘You never really know how worried you should be, do you? You never really know what’s coming next.’

  And as she watches the fisherman go, an anyone in his rolled-up trousers, his smeary shirt, his felt hat, she squats down in the sand, next to the fish, her back to the sea, and one foot tucked beneath her so that it pushes hard against the hard bone, the soft space, between her legs. His skin would taste of salt, she thinks as he crosses the road and scrambles up the bank to his house. And he has a wife who might taste that.

  She licks at her own hand, and tastes tears.

  28

  Halfway through a lap of Thirroul’s pool, Roy stops, letting himself float like a starfish. The sun is a bright disc—a nasty red—through the haze of the bushfire’s smoke, and the air tastes sharp and bitter. This waiting for a fire to come, or not: he’d forgotten the powerlessne
ss of such time, and how unbearably it stretched. Ducking under the water, he opens his eyes and kicks out towards the pool’s edge, hooking his forearms up over the concrete and dangling, his back to the water, his eyes on the mountain. Through the previous night, he watched the red glow of the fire beyond its rim, wondering what he should do—or might do—if a runnel of flame suddenly leaped down over its edge. Wondering how glorious it might look if the whole face of the scarp was bright and ablaze.

  Behind him, a kid comes hurtling down the slide and into the water, dowsing him with spray. ‘Oy!’ Roy hears his own voice, too loud and too angry. ‘Oughta watch where you’re splashing.’

  ‘Oughta watch where you park,’ the boy calls, spluttering water and kicking away.

  Kids on holiday—what kind of a bloke’d scold a boy for leaping? Roy leans forward on the concrete, its sharp edge pressing hard somewhere so that his forearms shake uncontrollably. He watches, mesmerised. And what if that kid’d hit me? What if he’d knocked me under and held me there? Or pushed me down so my head slammed the concrete? What if I was down there now, down under the water, the life shaking out of me, some kid pushing me under, and all this, all this life and light almost over?

  ‘You right, mister?’ The slippery-dip kid pulls himself onto the wall, alongside Roy, pointing to his quivering arms. ‘You having a fit or something? My grandpa has fits. You want me to get someone?’

  Roy shifts his weight, pulling himself out of the water and holding up his recovered arms like trophies. ‘I’m right,’ he says. ‘See how far out you make it on your next go.’ Sending him back to the ladder, the leaping, the joy.