Mary nods and looks out onto the road. It is empty, the dust settling in vague patterns. The clouds are moving closer, but everything is strangely still. She pulls her school dress straight and walks out of the cover of the trees. She can hear him exhale as she leaves.
*
Hannah almost drives past the gate. The farm is rundown, the house aching in the heat. A couple of scrawny steers eye her from the shelter of the windbreak, cypress trees lopsided with fallen branches. As promised, the shell of a car decomposes on blocks off to one side. She parks at the front and knocks on the heavy door. There are footsteps after a moment, and a small woman opens it, her hair a cheap blonde. She peers out at Hannah and stands blocking the entry to the house.
‘Hi,’ Hannah says, pasting on a smile. ‘Mrs Burnett? I’m Hannah Mulvey, Mary’s teacher at the school.’
It takes her a moment but eventually the woman steps aside and lets her pass.
‘Her father’s in here,’ the woman says. ‘What has she done?’
‘Nothing,’ Hannah says, surprised. ‘No, there’s nothing wrong. I was just hoping to talk to you . . .’ But the woman has already turned away. She follows her through into the lounge room, where a thickset man is stretched out on the couch. He sits up when he sees them, and runs his hands self-consciously down his front. The clouds outside gather to cut the light, make the room close and dim. Hannah moves towards him with an outstretched hand.
‘Hi,’ she says again. ‘I’m Mary’s teacher, Hannah Mulvey.’
He says nothing but stands and takes her hand in a grip that seems to be a test.
‘So,’ Mary’s mother says, beside him, ‘if Mary isn’t in trouble, what are you here for?’
‘I wanted to talk to you about the scholarship,’ Hannah replies. ‘I think Mary has a very good chance.’
‘Did she send you here?’ the father asks. ‘Did she put you up to this?’
‘No,’ Hannah says, taking a step back. ‘No, no. I just want to talk to you about her application, the exam.’
Mary’s parents look at each other, and the father flares his top lip. The mother seems to shrink under his stare. She reaches one hand to a gold cross around her neck, closes her fingers around it.
‘Did you sign the form?’ he asks quietly.
His wife shakes her head.
‘Where is the little bitch?’ he asks, and the mother shakes her head again.
‘Here,’ Hannah says. She pulls the form from her bag. ‘It is signed. Has there been a mistake?’
The father just looks at her. ‘We didn’t sign it,’ he says. His voice is low and dangerous. ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll pay for her to go to the city when there’s a school right here.’
‘But . . .’ Hannah says, opening her mouth and closing it again. ‘But . . .’
‘We can’t afford it,’ the mother says suddenly. ‘She can’t go.’
They stand in silence a moment, the three of them locked in a tableau. A screen door slams somewhere deeper in the house. The father turns, his mouth an ugly gash across his face.
‘Mary?’ the mother calls. Her voice is almost broken.
*
Mary avoids the car parked out the front, skirts around to the back of the house instead. She is still shaking as she enters, her body fizzing with adrenaline. Outside, the storm is building, and she can feel it like Thomas holding her, like the feeling on the bridge. It is dark, but alive. After Thomas, after the trees, the kitchen is an anticlimax.
The flyscreen bangs shut behind her and her mother’s voice floats through from the lounge. ‘Mary?’ Her mother sounds strangled. ‘Come in here, would you?’
Mary drops her schoolbag and sticks her head in the doorway of the lounge. It is almost dark in the room and it takes her eyes a moment to adjust. Her mother is there, beside her father, standing by the couch. His face is tight and black. Opposite them is Miss Mulvey, looking frightened, stranded awkwardly in the middle of the room. The application form is in her mother’s hand.
‘Did you forge it?’ her mother asks.
Mary looks from the form to her father and back again. Her mouth opens but she finds nothing to say. A scattering of raindrops come loose from the sky and rattle on the tin roof. Mary’s father looks up almost involuntarily and, as if it is a signal, Mary steps backwards, turns and flees. Her father roars behind her. Glancing back, Miss Mulvey’s shocked face is the last thing Mary sees.
The rain comes down as she runs. Through the paddock and into the vines, the leaves thrashing in the downpour. Lightning flashes somewhere behind her and each drop of rain is caught for an instant in stark relief. She follows one of the rows across and down the face of the hill, climbs their boundary fence and keeps going around the back of the village to come out in front of the church. Water is streaming down her face, her school dress is plastered to her back. She slows to a walk and lets the cold weight of the rain pull her to a halt. Standing there, out of breath, she can’t make herself move again, can’t work out how to.
The rain stops eventually. The clouds become a tapestry, black and purple out over the whitecaps of the bay. The sky behind her lightens to a watery gold in the flush of leftover day. A breeze springs up and she shivers. There is a small graveyard behind the church and she walks around into its shelter. She sits down behind a giant tombstone and rests her head against her knees. She feels stupid for running. She knows her father will punish her for it. The stone behind her is damp but warm against her back, a vague heat which slowly seeps through the wet cotton of her dress. The gold in the sky gives way to pink and violet-blue. When she cries, the tears run down over her chin to melt in with the wet of the rain at the collar of her dress.
She jumps when she hears her father’s truck pull in. Footsteps echo on the veranda of the hall, and then immediately disappear. He comes towards her around the end of the church. She raises her head but doesn’t get up. She pulls her skirt up to wipe the snot and tears from her face, and presses her back hard against the stone and stays where she is. The grit and dirt of it are grainy against the soft flesh of her arms. She closes her eyes and waits.
THERE ARE THINGS IN this story that I can only guess. Things I can’t tell you. And there are no words for some things, no way to write which will give meaning. I don’t know what happened, really.
Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I am simply caught on the memory of her running, and my role in it. Maybe there was nothing of cataclysm in the eye of the storm. It could have been entirely mundane, a moment of the everyday, insidious and sinister, reaching out into the future. Normal, even. But that is not what I see when I dream it. Dark eyes, fair hair, and the colours of the stained-glass windows bleeding out onto the grass of the churchyard. I can’t help this. I don’t want to imagine it. Her running again afterwards. Her knees skinned, a line of blood down one shin.
I don’t want to write this anymore.
VII
April 1992
Palm Sunday, 12 April
Good Friday, 17 April
Easter Sunday, 19 April
PLEASE DON’T JUDGE ME here. I know you will, I know you have to . . . I have been holding court over my own conscience for years, now. I have lived with this. Sometimes I can’t help thinking about what the aftermath must have involved, how she must have felt, how deep it must have gone. The unravelling. She would have thought it was her fault. It’s easy to imagine that much. She would have felt as though she herself was to blame, that she had brought it on herself, perhaps even that she had asked for it. It looks so stupid, that idea, written out. It is absurd. But I am quite sure she would have held that as a truth.
I did try to help her. More perhaps than is obvious. I cared. Deeply. Please don’t think I didn’t. (Even then, my conscience was pricking.) But I didn’t realise, at the time, what had happened . . . And it wasn’t so unusual, really. It was semi-regular, if anything, that a teenager would fall pregnant – it was condemned, but not the scandal that from the outside it seems. But I’m givi
ng my story away. You didn’t know that, yet. It took me a long time to realise, longer perhaps than it should have. Again, please, don’t judge me. It was a while before I even saw her again.
PARROTS CRY IN MORNING feeding, just outside Father John’s window, an ecstasy of colour and noise which seems at once prophetic and false. The woman’s voice is simple and homely down the telephone line. She is worried. Father John sits quietly at the kitchen table and lets her talk. The cord running from the phone to the handpiece curls lazily as it dangles, and he watches each slow rotation.
She hates to bother him, but will he come and see her daughter? ‘There’s nothing wrong with her,’ the woman says, ‘but she’s stopped talking. She just goes about a bit like a ghost . . . Please, Father?’ There is a despair in the question that is almost weightless. She is afraid. Father John stares around his empty kitchen, lethargy creeping up within him. A child, he thinks. It is hard to say no to helping a child. He wonders vaguely what it is about the girl’s behaviour that has her mother so spooked.
‘Yes,’ he says. Yes, he will come and see the girl. He pulls to the foreground of his mind the things he knows about the woman. Her name is Ellen. She has called him before; she is a good parishioner. When she talks, she clutches a cross she wears at her neck, twists and twists the chain as though it is a talisman. She is a member of the Women’s Auxiliary, quiet but always present. Her voice has a waver to it, a gentle vibrato. Her husband never attends.
He lingers in the kitchen when the call has ended. The fasting is nearly finished now, has resolved into a strange clarity, but still it has stolen the structure from his day. He can feel himself as gaunt, loose. For the sake of it, he pours a glass of water and sits at the table, spins the glass around and around in circles. A yellow ring wears slowly in the varnish of the tabletop. He looks up to the kitchen sink to see his wife leaning there, like she used to. She is frowning at him. He would make her laugh if he knew how. Sunshine floods through the window, warm on his face. He closes his eyes, feels the radiance, feels his wife there. When he opens his eyes again, she is gone. He stands and sighs and looks in the other direction as he drops his glass into the sink.
The air is balmy as he walks through the village. He can smell the grapevines on the breeze. They look cool and leafy in the last of their summer green. Easter is here, they will be falling soon. He wonders if they’ll stay green for the Easter parade, imagines their Virgin with a wreath of vine. The leaves flutter, a pattern of movement leading him up the hill. Watching it, following it, the hymn comes to him: Dance, then, wherever you may be. I am the Lord of the Dance, said he! Hanging full from their rows, the leaves lead him on.
At the gate, he pauses, caught by the sudden shift from the cheerful vines. A stand of giant old cypresses sigh overwhelmingly, blanket all other noise. They have dropped their litter and pods across the driveway, branches skewed at odd angles. The collection of sheds and the machinery cluttered around the house looks furtive, almost worried. Somewhere a loose sheet of tin rattles and bangs. Everything is dirty. He almost trips at the top of the drive. For no apparent reason, a trench has been cut deep into it. He pauses, breathless, on the threshold and wonders how on earth they survive.
The woman has been waiting for him. As soon as he knocks, footsteps hurry through the house and materialise as a dark shadow in the coloured glass. She leads him back into a cramped kitchen and gestures to the table. He sits. His legs ache. He feels old. The normal tea and cake is conspicuously absent in deference to his fast.
‘Thank you for coming, Father,’ she says. ‘I know you must be busy, with Easter coming . . .’ She fingers the gold cross that hangs around her neck absent-mindedly. ‘We just don’t know what to do. Nothing is wrong, but . . . We had an argument and now she isn’t talking to me.’
He nods. ‘And are you okay?’
‘I’m fine.’ She looks almost surprised. Her hands flutter before her like the leaves on the vines. ‘She doesn’t do anything, Father. I let her stay home for a while, but it’s been almost three weeks, and I can only barely get her out of bed. Even now, I have to drag her to school. Nothing has changed, she hasn’t changed, in all that time.’ Her voice rises a note with each new worry.
‘Is your husband aware of this?’
‘Yes. I just don’t know what to do, she isn’t getting better. And she’s never been like this before.’
‘It’s alright,’ he says, without having any idea of it being so. ‘It will be alright. I’ll talk to her.’
She smiles at him through a watery face. Relief, he thinks. Someone to help. Once upon a time, he would have felt something in return.
The girl’s bedroom is upstairs. It is hot and close; the walls seem to lean inwards on him. The child is huddled asleep under a plain white sheet, her back to him. Her hair is ash-dark across the pillow, and as he moves to the bed he can see she is biting her lip. There is the yellowing shadow of a bruise beneath one eye. Her mother tiptoes over to her and shakes her gently, and the movement makes the girl flinch.
‘Mary?’ the mother whispers.
The girl sits up, rubs at her face. She is staring at him, and he finds he cannot meet her gaze. He looks back to the mother, bustling around opening the curtains. Her equanimity seems to be restored by the normality of the movements. But the sudden light makes the girl wriggle, she pulls the sheet up as if to shield herself. Her hair is more blonde than dark, he realises. It was only the gloom that made it appear so.
‘Mary,’ he says, ‘will you talk to me?’
Her mother nods encouragingly. ‘It’s Father John,’ she says. ‘You know Father John, from church.’
He forces a smile. The girl just stares.
‘I’m just here to talk,’ he assures her.
‘Perhaps it would be better if I left you alone,’ the mother says.
The girl stiffens. Even Father John can feel his eyes betraying his alarm.
The mother nods. ‘Yes,’ she says, backing out of the room. ‘Yes. Good.’
Father John sighs. He wants to sit on the end of the bed but doesn’t dare.
‘Well, Mary? What’s wrong? Is there anything you want to talk about?’
Mary stares at his hands. He waits, but she doesn’t move. He reaches back through memory to his own teenage life. The room spins gently just thinking about it.
‘Is there a problem at school? Is it a boy?’
She cringes at that, meets his gaze. Almost without moving, she shakes her head. He waits for more, but she looks back down at the sheet and disappears into herself again. He sighs.
‘What happened to your eye?’
She doesn’t move, doesn’t respond. The door creaks and her mother appears again. She has been listening, he realises.
‘She tripped,’ she says. ‘Didn’t you, Mary? It’s nothing, Father. You should see the bruise I gave myself picking.’
Without looking up, Mary nods so slightly that he isn’t sure he has seen it.
The mother fusses as he leaves, but he pushes his way out all the same. He has no idea what he should be saying to her. He murmurs and nods, and escapes into the sunshine. From the driveway, he glances up at the window, half expecting the girl to be there. But there is only light reflecting off the glass. Perhaps it is nothing serious, he thinks. Teenage histrionics. There’s nothing he can really do, whatever it is, compelling as the girl was, lying there, silent. He walks away still wondering what he might say when inevitably the mother calls him again. This is the problem with helping, he thinks. Who is he to know what to do?
When he reaches the church at the bottom of the hill, he lets himself in to hide in the cool. It has been filled with flowers for the start of the Easter services. The pews are laid out with hymn books and sheets for twenty. The scale of their preparations, their ambitions, makes him snort. The hall, he knows, will be the same. Festive, garlanded. Lacking only a priest . . . Focus, he thinks. He should be worried about the girl, thinking of the mother. The cool of the church is a
relief, and the green smell of the cut flowers. He lets it soothe him, ignores the over-abundance of it all and lets himself catch his breath. Eventually, he goes home.
*
Mary sits at the back of her classroom, saying nothing, but watching her. Hannah can feel her eyes from every corner. She looks up, and Mary is staring down at her empty page, fiddling with a pencil, but Hannah knows that she was looking, that she has looked away, like duelling glances. Mary spins the pencil between two fingers, stares determinedly at the lined paper, traces the margin with the tip of lead. Her face is full of shadows and she has rings under her eyes. Beside her, Thomas finishes a line and turns his page. He glances at her and pauses, gestures with his book. Hannah follows them discreetly as Thomas turns the page back for her, feigns working as she copies his response word by word. It is painful, slow. Hannah can feel Thomas’s anxiety.
‘Mary!’ she calls, sharp.
Thomas snaps his head up, covers the page with his elbow. Mary looks up as well, but there is no surprise in her face. She just gazes back at Hannah.
Hannah bites back the reprimand. ‘You have half an hour left to finish that.’ Mary nods, looks down again. The pencil spins once, twice more between her fingers. Thomas exhales beside her.
Hannah continues to watch her the rest of the afternoon. Again and again she can feel Mary’s eyes. By home time, the essay is still not finished. Hannah looks it over when she is tidying up after the students have left. It is a series of fragments only. Sentences begin out of nowhere, trail into nothingness. It is bizarre. Like she is dissolving, Hannah thinks. She tries to remember the last time Mary answered one of her questions. At least, she thinks, today she came.
Mary is not there the next day, or the one after. Hannah calls the family home both mornings. Both mornings she receives the same response, the same one she was given in the week after the storm: Mary is not well, she won’t be in to school. Never a mention of the scholarship, or the form. Hannah can’t bring herself to ask.
The Salt Madonna Page 11