Hannah flinches, and he pulls his arm back.
‘It’s okay,’ he says, softer. ‘It’s not a bad thing. It’s just how it goes. You have to live your life.’
He is firm, and she can feel the rebuke in it. Outside the vines slowly give way to pasture and then forest as they make their way further up the hill.
*
The members of the Women’s Auxiliary sit at the front of the church hall, a pause in their discussion. Around them, the gathering waits belligerently for the next person to make a move. Almost the whole town is there, the husbands as well, variously angry or bored. The urn fills the moment of silence by clicking on and working its way to hot. Mrs Keillor has chaired the meeting, but without any sense of control. Father John is quiet at the back, waiting for them to finish. She watches him as someone starts to speak. He is staring at the doorway to the kitchenette, and she wonders if he is remembering the meetings they used to have, with proper finger food made by his wife and proper conversation about their problems.
‘So you’ll be paying for it?’ one man demands of his neighbour. ‘You’ll cover that, will you? Because I certainly don’t have the cash!’
‘We can’t afford not to!’
There is a general murmur of agreement.
‘That doesn’t change the fact that we haven’t the cash to risk!’
‘You still don’t get it, do you? We do nothing, we all go under.’
‘Speak for yourself!’ a woman shouts, laughing theatrically.
‘You think you’ll still be here in three years? You think the grapes will miraculously get better? You think you can manage when the rest of us have all packed it in? We can’t afford to keep losing on them, I know that’s for sure!’
‘Fuck me,’ the man spits. His wife slaps his arm. ‘It’s a bad year. It’ll come around!’
‘That’s what you said last year! Definition of stupid, doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Something has to change, or we’re screwed.’
The talk circles on. Their faces turn red. One woman is close to tears. Father John continues to stare, his eyes seemingly following some movement, some train of thought far removed from the group. There is a stain down the front of his trousers. Mrs Keillor sighs. All of them frustrated, and arguing now for over an hour . . .
There is a bustle as the meeting winds down, vague offers of a drink at the pub, men shaking hands in an attempt to patch over their resentments. The women lead the charge in cleaning up, overly formal in moving around each other, no one wanting to break the peace. Mrs Keillor sits it out in the kitchenette. Cups and saucers rinsed and dried, cupboards closed, the packet of biscuits bundled back into its wrapper. She can hear someone laughing out in the hall, genuinely now. Father John murmurs something. He is still sitting where he was, on one of the plastic chairs, staring off into the middle distance while they all move around him.
Slowly they run out of things to do, and one by one the women take their leave and make their way to the door. Mrs Keillor holds back, hovering in the kitchenette. Val sees her waiting and gives her a questioning look, but Mrs Keillor just shakes her head at her and says goodbye. She can see Val outside, dawdling to the car. She wonders if she should close the window to stop her eavesdropping.
‘I was hoping I could ask you something, Father,’ she starts, as soon as they are alone.
He looks up, seems to notice for the first time that the hall around him is empty.
‘There’s a woman in the village.’
‘Yes?’ the priest says. He isn’t smiling, his tone different from usual. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘Well,’ Mrs Keillor continues, ‘she’s worried about her husband and their son. He works on the mainland, you see. The son. She thinks her husband is upset he won’t take on the farm.’
‘And?’
For a fleeting moment Mrs Keillor remembers asking the same question when the others had first brought this to her, and wonders if she sounded as ugly, as tired. ‘Well, he’s quite forceful with her.’
‘You mean Mrs Spencer,’ Father John says. ‘I’m not sure what you want me to say, Mrs Keillor.’ He looks up at her for the first time. His face is drawn and grey.
‘You could talk to her,’ she suggests, trying not to frown.
‘She’s been talking to you? It sounds like you have it covered!’ He stands abruptly and runs his hands down the front of his trousers, fiddles with the keys in his pocket. She watches him and doesn’t know what to say. She can feel herself starting to panic. Perhaps he notices, because he steps towards her and extends a hand, as though to guide her out. ‘You’re doing a good thing here,’ he says. ‘Holding this community together, innovating . . . These meetings, tonight . . .’ He shepherds her towards the door and switches off the lights. In the sudden dim, the dustiness of the place reinstates itself, claims its territory.
‘But you could help her, I’m sure,’ she tries, one last time, following his arm out under the cover of the veranda. Please God, she prays internally, don’t let him leave me alone in this one. She thinks of his sermon, speaking of Christ and his love.
The door drags on the concrete step, and he has to haul at it.
‘I can’t change the world, Mrs Keillor.’ He is nothing more than tired.
‘But . . .’ She can feel her voice faltering.
‘But?’
‘But what about the moral centre?’ she asks, almost whispering.
‘Moral centre?’ he repeats, turning from the door to look at her. He is almost laughing.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘The community . . .’ There is something hard rising in her throat, a croak coming through with the words. She can feel disappointment prickling across her chest like a shawl.
‘The church will always be a moral centre,’ he says slowly, as though to a child. ‘You can lead a horse to water, but . . .’
‘Yes,’ she says quietly, cutting him off. ‘Of course.’
‘You’re doing a good thing,’ he says again. The bolt on the door slides home to its catch and he snaps the padlock on. ‘Shall we?’
She forces herself to smile as he walks her over to her car.
‘Very good, then,’ he says. ‘I’ll see you on Sunday.’
She nods and buries her face in her handbag as if looking for her car keys, to hide her dismay, stop the sick feeling in her stomach from showing.
She stops at the pub on her way home. There is a strange sense of déjà vu as she pulls in. She makes herself get out of the car but pauses just beyond the door. It is still mild, the gentle breeze coming up off the water stiff with the smell of salt and old seaweed. In front of her, the pub is alight. She thinks of her kitchen, where she could be waiting for him, safe and cosy. She imagines that she can make out Harry’s voice amid the murmur coming from inside. The place will be full of bodies, the pickers all gathering, men and boys and girls all drunk together. She can imagine the smell, the mustiness rising to be cut by sour beer, glasses slopping rings onto the bar, onto paper coasters, the faded velvet of the pool table in the back room sopping it up. She can’t make herself move, she realises. Her feet won’t shift.
The door swings open and for a brief second she can see the room clearly. Three bodies stumble out.
‘No,’ the woman is saying. ‘Let him go, Lon!’
But the men are fighting, throwing punches at each other and staggering across the street away from her.
Mrs Keillor inhales, steps aside into the dark of the doorway. The woman doesn’t see her, follows the men away from the pub, one of them with his hand at the throat of the other, a fist of shirt gathered tight, lifting him and dragging him.
‘No,’ the woman cries out. Her face is loose with alcohol and saliva. Her cheeks are flushed. ‘You’ll kill him! Lonnie, please!’
Mrs Keillor says nothing but watches with mild distaste. The woman begins to cry. She is wearing next to nothing, a tight dress and her cleavage bursting from it. Her gut sticking out is round, almost sol
id, and Mrs Keillor wonders if she is pregnant. Her hair spreads across her face, sticking in her eyes and mouth. The woman swipes at it like a fly, crying hard now, arms outstretched to the men. One staggers back suddenly and collects her, sends her down on the gravel at the side of the road, her skirt clutching up around her thighs. She gasps and the man laughs before the other grabs him again.
The woman stays down, sitting in the dirt, one hand to her stomach. From the shadow cast by the door, Mrs Keillor watches, does nothing, feels nothing. It doesn’t shock her, she realises. It should, but it doesn’t. She could spit at them. The most she can find in herself, looking at them fight, the woman on the ground, is a vague sort of despair. That she could conceive, this woman, when after all her own trying, there was no child, no family. There is nothing more in this world I can lose, she thinks. Her failing is made brutally obvious in the streetlight.
Eventually one man hits the other square in the face, sends him down cold. The woman screams and scrambles forward.
‘Stayin’ with him?’ the man asks her.
She says nothing but leans over the other’s body.
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn ya, then.’
She looks up at him. ‘I didn’t ask for this.’
He just laughs. Mrs Keillor starts at the sound of it. The man glances towards her, scowls and walks away. The woman ignores him, intent on the body lying prone on the road.
‘Lonnie,’ she murmurs. ‘Lon, come on.’
Mrs Keillor feels cold. Standing there, she fights to summon from within herself the sensation of control. The man on the road groans and lifts an arm. The woman hauls him upright, drags him away from the pub. Mrs Keillor steps forward, watches their unsteady progress up the road. She sniffs. Behind her, the pub has quietened. She turns back towards the door but she can’t make herself care that Harry isn’t home, that he is in there instead. We are all failing, she thinks. She turns back towards her car. Her footsteps seem loud on the gravel, and it is strange that such a small noise might be heard in comparison to the violence of the scene a moment ago. This is what he has left me for. Noise, movement. A sense of youth. She can almost find a glimpse of herself in the old scorn, but she is too tired, it is too late. She unlocks the car and climbs in.
ONCE, WHEN SHE HAD only just started at the boarding school on the mainland, Sophie called us, three times close together, clipped messages left on the answering machine, just her voice asking us to call her back, nothing more. We were out with the horses. When I did call back, she didn’t talk long. She seemed normal. I never asked her what was wrong. It could have been something entirely mundane. When I was at the boarding school myself, a girl told me in a shocked voice that a boy had called her a cunt. I didn’t react in the right way, wasn’t sufficiently outraged, and she spread a rumour that I had had an abortion, that I smelt like dead fish. Another time, Sophie told me of a girl who had been raped in the long grass of a sand dune while her friends danced by firelight on the beach, how she was distraught when they found her, how she made them all search in the sand for the wrapper of the condom because she couldn’t find it and she wasn’t sure if he had used one. For hours, cold fingers sifting in the sand, in the dark. She wouldn’t let them report it. Sophie stopped on that detail. I could imagine them, all of them together there, fingers stiff and unwieldy, but together. Hands held.
We all snuck out from school for parties down on the beach, and we all went drinking, lit fires. It was a rite of passage, at that school. When Sophie told me this story, we were sitting in a park, on a picnic blanket, drinking wine and watching her kids play. One of Sophie’s friends was there with us as well, and told a story of the time she was pinned against a fence by a man who told her she wanted it, again and again, until she actually began to think that she did and dated him for six months afterwards. She was laughing about it, how silly she had been. The past seemed a long way away, sitting in the sunshine. It was only much later that I remembered the messages on the answering machine and stopped to wonder who Sophie was in her story. The boarding school girls are a pack in my memory, slinking and sniffing together like dogs, but I can still name all the girls who were at school on Chesil with us. Three girls in Sophie’s grade, two in mine.
I underestimated those Chesil women, the strength of their desires, the minor miracles of their bodies. I didn’t really ever see them as individuals with their own weight of life. I didn’t stop to think that they might have stories. But you’ll see. That will come.
IV
February 1992
Candlemas, 2 February
HANNAH STARES AROUND THE tiny demountable. It is dank, it smells of salt and mice and teenage boys. It feels half-naked without its term-time debris of posters and schoolbags. There is a row of hooks along one wall, each one marked by a name card. She runs her fingers along them. On one, ‘James’ has been crossed out and replaced with ‘Picnic’.
‘They’re in age groups,’ the headmistress says from behind her.
Hannah turns. ‘Sorry?’
‘The hooks. They’re grouped by year level.’
Hannah looks again. There are three distinct clusters along the wall.
‘Right,’ she says, and hopes the faintness doesn’t come through in her voice.
‘Were there combined classes at your previous school?’ the woman asks.
Hannah thinks of the spacious classrooms and the state-of-the-art equipment, the luxurious private-school facilities.
‘No,’ she says. ‘It was quite small groups there. Different situation, though.’
‘Yes,’ the woman says. ‘It’s quite a small group here, too.’
Hannah smiles politely and turns to take a final look around the classroom, out the dirty windows and across the oval to the dunes and the sea.
‘Is that everything?’ she asks, and the woman nods. She steps aside to let Hannah pass through the doorway.
‘Yes, I think that’s everything,’ she says. ‘I’ll be here on the Monday, but the kids don’t come back until the Tuesday. You’ll have years seven to nine. I’ve got three to six, and one of the mothers runs the littlies from her home. If you make it through this term, we can reorganise before mid-year. We don’t have any senior students. They all head to the mainland in year nine or ten. Or they drop out.’
‘Yes,’ Hannah replies. ‘I know.’
‘Of course,’ the woman says. ‘I keep forgetting you are one of ours!’
Hannah laughs. ‘It’s been a while.’
‘I’ll bet the place has changed a bit.’
They walk out towards the front of the school where their cars are parked. The woman hands Hannah a sheaf of papers.
‘I’ve printed last year’s outlines for you. There’s a reading list there, too, but we have the texts already. Just let me know if you need anything else. Otherwise, I’ll see you on Monday!’
Hannah smiles. ‘See you.’
The woman gets into her car, starts it and drives off, her every motion efficient, businesslike, almost brusque.
Hannah pauses to look around once more. The old schoolhouse has been converted into an office. That is the only change she can see. It is strange being back here. She has to stifle the urge to wander along the back fence line and up through the shiny-leaf bushes, the places she used to go. It is easier to remember being a child than it is to imagine teaching here.
Her car is parked under a stand of casuarinas, and she reaches out to pluck one of the waving stems. They used to make bracelets out of them. The wiry feel of them reminds her of other pursuits, battles under the yonnie trees with spiked seedpods, and horrible attacks with the smoother, deadlier pods from the itchy-powder tree in the front garden. She remembers two of the boys holding a smaller girl down, sitting on her chest and shaking the powder down her underwear. There had been kissing. She can remember spending most of their time sitting on the apron of the asphalt multi-purpose court, talking about sex. Hannah sighs and opens her car door. As she turns out onto the road, the
printed papers spill across the passenger seat and down into the footwell.
Darcy’s ute is in the driveway when she pulls in. She climbs out of the car and gathers up her handbag, the loose bundle of papers. She is on the point of trying to juggle them both awkwardly in one hand when she remembers that locking the car won’t be necessary.
Inside, Darcy is sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of tea in hand. Her mother is propped against the sink.
‘How’d you go, then?’ he asks as she comes in.
‘All set,’ Hannah replies.
‘Good girl!’ he says, and pulls his feet down off the chair opposite. Hannah wonders if she imagines her mother’s wince.
‘Just a few months?’ her mother asks.
‘The semester at least,’ Hannah says. Her mother turns away.
Darcy flicks a quick look between them and smiles at her. ‘I’ll be off,’ he says. ‘Just wanted to hear how you went.’
Hannah smiles back. ‘Thanks, Darce.’
Her mother shows him to the door, stands watching as he thumps down the steps. Hannah sits in the kitchen and waits for her to come back, contemplates her lack of response. She is quiet when she returns. She doesn’t ask but puts the kettle on again for a fresh pot.
‘Do you remember going to the open day on the mainland?’ Hannah asks. She thinks of the school, sprawling and dirty, a maze of buildings swimming in concrete.
‘At the public school? Yes.’
‘Remember we were shown around by that coordinator? You called him the Fat Controller.’
‘Mmm.’
He had laughed at everything her mother had said. The classrooms all looked the same. The playground was asphalt and there was graffiti on the walls. The lockers all stood together in a giant tin shed, covered in stickers and scrawls of white-out, grey lumps of gum. It smelt of cigarettes and hospital-grade disinfectant.
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