‘No, no,’ her mother says.
Hannah sits at the table. Her mother pulls plates from the oven and serves, then sits across the table from Hannah.
Hannah watches her between mouthfuls, carefully, almost surreptitiously. It feels like a challenge. She wants to ask: Am I doing this right? Do I still pass?
‘How is work? How’s your school?’ her mother asks after a while.
‘It’s a good place,’ Hannah says. ‘They look after the students.’
‘You know, there is a vacancy coming up in the school in the village,’ her mother tells her. ‘Mrs Wilson has left. You could live here, if you could bear it . . .’
Hannah looks up from her chop and pauses a moment before responding. Her mother’s hands are resting on the tablecloth, one either side of her plate. Each knuckle is thick and red and knobbly.
‘I know,’ Hannah replies finally. ‘That’s why I’m home. They’ve offered the position to me.’
‘Oh,’ her mother says, deflated. ‘I thought you were here for the holiday . . . And to see me.’
Hannah looks down. Guilt rises painfully in her stomach. ‘That too,’ she says, ‘of course. And this means I can stay. I have a while before I start.’
‘Will you be home for long, then?’ her mother asks. ‘I hope you’re not risking your career in the city, just for the island.’
Hannah looks up again. ‘Yes. I’ll be here a while.’
Her mother is still, looking at her. The pause sits heavy between them.
‘Good,’ her mother says. ‘Lovely.’
They finish the meal in silence.
She lets herself feel it when her mother has left her for the night. She sits on the end of her bed and lets herself think her way through the afternoon, the room soft and blue and musty around her. The first step, she thinks. Tenuous, but right. With the light out, the moon appears, casts watery shadows across the gravel driveway, holds her waiting car in place. It looks as though it is crouching, anxious. The strange excitement of the evening sits at odds with the familiarity of the mattress beneath her, the colour of the moon on the curtains. She thinks about the village, the drab faces of the shop and the pub, the dilapidation of the houses, and wonders if that is new or if she has just forgotten. It never seemed poor, but now the poverty is clear, even here, even in her own room, the carpet thin and dusty beneath her feet. She feels a moment of tenderness for her mother, and then realises the quiet loss of her childhood’s enchantment. How hard had her mother worked to hold that in place, to scrape a life? She thinks again about the village, the families down there, the ferry, and remembers the men disembarking when she boarded, bags over their shoulders. Shiftwork by sea, jobs on the mainland. So there is nothing on the island – only houses needing repair, sagging fences, hungry stock and over-grazed land. Was it always like this? She remembers shuffling the horses around in summer, trying to allow each paddock some rest, dust coming up behind them as they charged up for their feed. Remembers afternoons spent working their way across the back paddock, trying to clear the weeds by hand, and having to start again at the bottom as soon as they reached the top. And the desperate effort to protect the turf in winter, the paddocks dissolving into quagmire, the cattle standing up to their knees in mud. Three months of decent grass a year, and the rest of the time hand-feeding them from the back of the ute, her and Sophie on the tray, flinging each biscuit from the bales out as far as they could, making a competition of it. The cattle coming in at the trot, hollow bellies swinging. Her mother growling from the driver’s side window, yelling at them to keep the hay in a line, that the cattle would trample it. The cost of hay per bale when it had to be cut from their own grass or shipped across, second-grade, old and crappy and borderline mildewed, sweet-smelling with damp in the middle. She remembers one year stacking it outside under tarps nailed down at each corner – too damp to risk putting in the shed – and then losing half of it to the weather. Her mother kicking at rotten bales with her mouth tight. The horses fussy, sucking it in by the mouthful in winter, but picking over it, turning their noses up in spring. Everything coming back to them, to keeping them.
She thinks of their clothes, the furniture, their food. The endless silverbeet when it was all that was ready in the garden. Her mother fixing her old bed, the wood so soft she could mark it with a fingernail, but nailing the end back on, again and again, trying this time to make it hold steady with pieces of rope lashing it together. Her favourite trousers, her favourite hat, both hand-me-downs. The memories lap at her gently, like a tide coming in. She wonders about the brute effort of it. Sees her mother collapsed in the armchair every night, asleep in front of the fire. Odd, to be sitting on the end of her bed, remembering, but not odd at all in another sense, here in this space with her childhood like an open expanse laid out before her. She can feel the familiarity of it as something physical, comfortable, a softening of the muscles in her neck. It is still home.
She looks across the driveway, out into the paddock beyond. Her car is the only thing strange and out of place.
II
January 1992
Epiphany, 6 January
YOU MUST THINK I have forgotten Mary. I thought this would be easy to write, this part of the story. Before anything happened, back when everything was fine. I thought there might be some sense of redemption in it, that perhaps Mary could still exist in some way untouched.
It was strange, going home. Perhaps it was the weight of everything unsaid. I was like a stranger forced to witness a ritual, something stripped of meaning, or accidentally offered an intimate or unnatural knowledge. It felt like going backwards in time but still knowing the future.
Christmas that year, I watched my mother make a trifle, painstakingly slowly, the way I used to watch her when I was a child. I sat at the table with my legs tucked up under me as she layered fruit and boiled water for the jelly. She let me steam the puddings, and we neither of us mentioned mince pies. I itched, standing at the stove. I couldn’t tell if I wanted her there or if I was happier alone. My sister Sophie dragged her family over, and we all ate outside on the veranda: salad, fish and prawns that her husband barbecued on a portable grill he’d brought especially. The children argued, bored by the lack of a television. Our mother pretended to forget that there should have been a turkey. The desserts sweated in the heat until my mother asked me to put them away.
I said the wrong thing, constantly. The whole time Sophie was with us, I felt as though I was waiting for something to happen, a rising anxiety that never quite got to panic. Animals can feel place. Harbour seals can ‘see’ through gloomy waters using their whiskers. Mice, cats, horses, they all navigate in the dark using the sensitive nerve endings of their muzzles. The seal is more acute, but most mammals have the capacity. Currents in the air or water are picked up by their whiskers – the proper term is vibrissae – as information, working to form a mental map in combination with smell, with taste. When I teach this at school, I run an experiment. I bring in mice and an obstacle course. One mouse goes, finds its way through the tiny holes and narrow passages to the sultana in the middle. And then we trim the whiskers off the second. It gets me every time. I feel like a traitor, but each time I push it down. There is no obligation to ethics, when your subject is too small to have a voice. We sign all the forms for animal practice, but we are supposed to think first of the pedagogical outcomes. I have to force myself to watch. The poor mouse is stranded, darts anxiously about the first chamber, touches its shorn nose to wall after wall, looking for the exit. It was like that, our Christmas. I could feel the pressure to move, but couldn’t feel my way forward.
Her name wasn’t really Mary. I am lying about that. I think of her as Mary because that is who she became – the silent one, necessary and yet not really considered, not really part of it. The figure, the symbol at the centre of the story. They needed her. That’s all coming, I’ll get to it. But I can’t tell you her real name. Mary is as close as I can get.
MARY WA
KES TO THE sound of the starlings in the eaves beside her window. Tiny flashes of black shadow show in the gap between the curtain rail and the wall as they swoop and squabble. The room is warm, drowsy in the morning sun. Her hair is long and loose across the pillow. She lies in bed and listens, waits to hear the back door slam shut behind her father on his way out. Her mother is still asleep. From down below comes the shuffle of her father’s boots and then, finally, the door.
Mary sits up, lets the covers slide down off her body. Outside, her father crunches across the gravel of the driveway. She draws her legs over the side of the bed and goes to the window to watch him leave. He works for Mulvey, up on the hill. He works until he is near dead, he says. And he is underpaid. Under-appreciated. Under everything. Yesterday morning he caught her in the bathroom with a tampon, sitting on the toilet, holding it up to the light. The blood was thick and dark like jam. She was wondering how those colours came from her. But when he pushed in, it had felt suddenly shameful, wrong. He sneered and slammed the door behind him, left her sitting there feeling dirty under the memory of his disgust. Now, watching him from above, his shoulders are heavy and the back of his neck is sunburnt. His hair is greasy and seeing it immediately reminds her of his smell, cigarettes and lanolin.
He doesn’t look up. His ute coughs on its way out. An axe and a chainsaw rattle loose in the back. He is killing a beast today, she knows. He will bring them gravy beef cut rough for dinner. She imagines him butchering it, the gentle peeling back of the hide, the little nicks cutting down its gut. The soft weight of the heart, drawn out from the ribcage like a prize. She thinks about the blood from the tampon on her fingers. She wonders whether or not he enjoys it. She suspects perhaps he does.
From her window, Mary can see down across the village to the sea. It is still in the early light. To the west, the rail bridge catches the morning sun and shines silver. Mary stares at it, a chain, a shining path to the mainland. She can just make out through the haze the point where it meets land. On a clear night, it leads in a straight line to the town in the distance. Mary sits and waits until the sun is high enough to glint off the steel rails that run along it, and then turns away.
She takes her time dressing, first one pair of shorts and then another, a low-cut t-shirt, a singlet. The discarded items slowly build as a pile around her bed. She spends a moment in front of the mirror with her hands at her waist, examining her body critically, twisting her hips. She pulls her hair forward over her shoulders and curls it around her fingers. She turns away, frowning.
Downstairs, the kitchen is a history of her father’s breakfast. She can read it like a map – the coffee, the toast, hard-boiled eggs her mother had left him in the fridge, now shelled and demolished. The lunch Mary helped her mother prepare is gone. He won’t be back until the evening, then. She stares at the plates and the crumbs, the loaf of bread still out on the table, and leaves it for her mother. It is bright outside. She makes herself a bowl of cereal and slips out the back door just as the creaking of floorboards from upstairs tells her that her mother is awake.
She eats perched on the fence post by the gate. The sunshine has no heat to it yet, but she doesn’t go back in. When she is finished, she sits the bowl on the post and walks away, leaving the residue of milk and sugar in its bottom to dry slowly into a yellow crust. Coins in her pocket click together in a friendly sort of way. She walks without looking back, each step carrying her a little further down the hill. When she reaches the bottom gate, she turns out onto the dusty road and heads towards the village.
The store has not opened yet when she gets there, but the woman is expecting Mary. She meets her at the entrance, swings the bolt and props the door open, lets the faded fly-streamers loose to flutter in the fresh air. The counter is cluttered with the detritus of post-Christmas sale items. There is limp tinsel still sticky-taped around the bain-marie, and each of the plastic café tables has a painted pinecone as a centre-piece. Mary follows her in without saying anything, clutching the coins in her hand. It has the solemnity of a ritual.
‘You kids will be back to school soon, hey?’ Sarah says cheerfully as Mary loiters between the shelves, picks through the magazines, fingers the coloured wrappers of chocolates and lollies. Sarah busies herself at the register. Mary drops a pair of green-wrapped chews on the counter and slides her mother’s favourite magazine in beside them.
‘A couple of weeks,’ Mary replies.
‘Year eight now?’
‘Year nine,’ Mary says.
‘The grapes aren’t looking so bad up your way. Picking soon?’
‘Starting this weekend. The mail come in yet?’
‘No,’ the woman says. ‘Say hello to your mum for me.’ She smiles and holds out a hand for the money.
Mary nods, drops the coins into the woman’s palm and turns towards the door.
Outside, a little way down the street, Mary lets herself pause to pull the other magazine from the back of her shorts. It comes wrapped in plastic, a perforated strip sealing one section, marked 18+ in repetitive yellow lettering the whole way down. A woman with black hair in a black dress is smeared against a blurred background of dark green leaves. Her face is pale, her mouth open. Mary bites her lip, tucks a strand of her own hair behind one ear.
At home, her mother is sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea. When she sees Mary, she stands and pours what is left into the sink, as though guilty, as though she has been caught doing something she shouldn’t. She touches the golden cross of her necklace.
‘Mail?’ she asks.
Mary shakes her head and proffers her the purchased magazine, waits, tries not to wriggle against the slippery sensation of the other tucked back in her shorts.
Her mother eyes it and frowns. ‘Get on, then. Next time you go down, you can think twice about leaving the clearing up to me.’
Mary is already moving through the kitchen and away to her bedroom, tight with triumph. She sits on the floor behind her bed, facing the window. Her mother turns on the radio downstairs, and the beat of the music rises up through the carpet, steady and throbbing. A fly rattles in the windowpane. She opens the magazine and pulls away the strip sealing the sex pages. It curls into a roll as she tears. She pauses as it comes free into her hand, and peers towards her door, wondering if her mother has heard. She is tense like an animal but no one comes. When she reads, she bends her head close to the pages, as though the words are difficult to make out, mouthing each one as she goes.
They begin the picking without her father, before he comes home. To get a start on it for him, her mother says, ahead of the weekend. Just the two of them, slow by themselves, going frame by frame, the grapes warm under Mary’s reaching hand. Next week, all three of them are picking for Mulvey. They work their way down either side of the panels, each with a wheelbarrow lined with a chaff sack. Mary’s mother stops and stretches every few minutes. A single row takes them the whole morning.
At lunch, Mary’s mother pours lemon cordial over ice cubes. Water condenses on the outside of the glass, and Mary draws lines, teardrops down the sides.
‘We’ll go out earlier tomorrow morning,’ her mother says. ‘Too hot now.’
‘You okay?’
‘Fine,’ her mother says, but she still rubs at her back.
Mary clears the plates and stacks them on the draining board.
Her mother reaches out a hand to squeeze hers as she comes back. ‘We’ll need to get a bit more done this afternoon. But you can go for a swim this evening.’
Mary nods, and they pull hats over sweaty hair, don gloves side by side.
‘You’re a good one,’ her mother says, and smiles.
Mary smiles back, shrugs. ‘Got the snips?’ she asks.
It takes Mary no more than three minutes to change when her mother finally gives in. She has to force the bathers over her sticky skin. She pulls the morning’s shorts on over the top, and takes a towel from the laundry basket.
‘Don’t be too long,’ her mot
her calls after her. ‘Your father will be home soon.’
It has cooled, and the breeze feels clean over her shoulders. She almost runs down the drive, turns onto the road. Across the paddock, she can see Mrs Keillor standing on her veranda, watching her go. She raises a hand to wave, but the old lady has turned away. The paint is peeling on their gate and the lines of manicured agapanthus running up to the house are wilting with the summer. Mary walks on towards the village, turns off before the pub, down the foot track to the beach.
She can hear voices ahead of her as she makes her way through the dunes. The boys are there, the three of them from her year level, kicking a footy between them. She hangs back, walks slowly. They appear on a crest and disappear down the other side. She hesitates. She could join them. It would be fine. The breeze picks up again and she can feel her hair lank on her cheek.
She turns and walks back, takes the path down to the kiddies’ beach instead. There is a browning strip of couch grass, a faded swing set, a cypress tree and the inlet with its shallows sheltered from the swell. A wide, soft expanse of salt-smelling water, a blind estuary with nowhere to go. She drops the towel, strips from her shorts and walks across the sand into the water. It laps around her ankles, mild, tepid. There are tiny silver fish hanging suspended in schools, motionless until she disturbs them. Minnows. Every time they bring back the memories of herding them, trying to catch them in a yellow plastic bucket, her mother on the bank. They move in unison, each the length of a finger – tiny, hollow bones hanging suspended in the water. The water flutters with their flickering, barely noticeable vibrations, just ripples on the surface. She walks a little further and then simply lies down, stretches herself into it. Her hair fans out around her face, every breath she takes lifts her from the bottom to bob and then sink again. She rolls onto her stomach and pulls herself deeper, ducks her head under. She can hear the boys yelling around the point of the dunes. She ducks under one more time then pulls herself up to stand, wades out and picks up her towel.
The Salt Madonna Page 3