‘What?’
Darcy laughs. ‘We’ve been talking about old times.’
Hannah screws up her face. ‘What about them?’
‘Not much, just remembering – you kids, camping, the year you all lived with me . . .’ He trails off and Hannah pulls her keys out of the ignition. The irritation of her afternoon is still caught around her temples like a headache.
‘You’re not staying for dinner, then?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m heading down to the pub. She looks a bit tired – she’s been entertaining the village women all afternoon.’
‘They’ve been up here again?’
‘The Keillor woman and Val Matthews, I think. They’re on at her to go along to church with them.’
Hannah laughs in spite of herself. ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘Good luck to them.’
‘She might surprise you,’ Darcy replies warningly, pushing away from her door and climbing into his ute. ‘Might appeal to her right now.’
Hannah just snorts, but she waves as he pulls away.
Inside, her mother is in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. She is clearly tired. It is painful to watch, to see the peeler wavering between swollen knuckles.
‘You saw Darcy, then?’ she asks, by way of hello.
‘Yes.’ Hannah drags her eyes away, but can’t make herself stay there. ‘I’ll feed.’
The horses meet her at the gate, soft lips fumbling for treats, ears pricked with cupboard love. It makes her smile, the two old faces so eager. Ghost bobs his head up and down, up and down, impatient. The black horse just waits, eyes clear. She murmurs to them, leans her forehead against the black horse’s neck and lets his smell erase the image of her mother’s hands. He pushes her aside to get at the feed bins, ignores her completely in eating.
‘Fine.’ She smiles at him. ‘Be like that.’
But she feels better by the time she returns to the house. She leaves her boots at the back door and washes her hands. Her mother is still chopping vegetables, piling them neatly for the pot. Hannah goes through to the study to drop off her bag. Her mother has been in there, tidying the piles of folders into a neat row across the desk. The desk drawer is open and an antiquated notebook is just visible within the detritus. She pulls it out and shoves the drawer closed. It is a diary. The hand is unfamiliar. Her mother must have been reading it, she surmises. There is a bookmark in it, about halfway. She takes it with her back down to the kitchen, thumbing it open as she goes. It looks like a man’s hand. Hurried, assured. It is talking about crops, about wind direction. Her mother looks up as she comes in.
‘Chops,’ she says. ‘Hope that’s okay?’
‘Sounds good. You want me to grill them?’
‘Please.’
‘Whose is this?’ Hannah asks, holding up the diary. ‘Was it my father’s?’
Her mother looks up. ‘That? No.’ She puts the knife down. ‘It’s much older than that. He’d be your great-great-great-grandfather, I think. My side. Six generations?’
‘Jesus. It should be in a library.’
Her mother laughs. ‘Read it. You’ll see. I’d forgotten.’
‘What? Not library material?’ She scans the page. It is all weather and sheep.
‘Mmm, something like that. Put the chops on, would you?’
‘Sure,’ Hannah says, looking up. Her mother braces herself again the bench, and lurches over to the table. Hannah pulls out a chair, helps her sit. ‘Water?’
‘Thank you,’ her mother says, stiffly. ‘That grill will be hot by now,’ she adds.
Hannah puts the diary down.
After dinner, she curls up on the couch to read it. It records an expedition, sailing along the south coast, looking for land to settle. She starts at the beginning, 17 February 1829. The writing is clear but cramped. At moments it dips, plunges, as though the author’s hand was unsteady. The paper is dirty, worn in places and marked. In between the notations of wind and temperature, the barometer readings, the daily log of expedition details, come passages of lucid prose. They are a surprise each time – beautiful, clear moments of description.
‘This is a treasure,’ she says. ‘It’s lovely. And there is historical detail here. People should be studying this.’
Her mother is quiet. She has a symphony playing low in the background, a cup of tea on a table before her. ‘No,’ she says eventually, leaning back in her chair. ‘You’ll see.’
Hannah turns back to the page and reads.
This evening a strange animal in the trees, flew like a bird but built like a rat. It has skin which seems to stretch translucent as a membrane and caught the light when flying. I almost did not believe I had witnessed it.
The wonder of it takes her breath. Her ancestor, writing this, seeing this place untouched, pristine! It feels like a cliché, but she can’t help the excitement of it. There is a passage about rock art which is almost frightening, laden with the sensations of the Gothic; another about passing whales, with the hint of biblical prophecy . . . The writing is unexpectedly emotive, almost lyrical. And the notebook itself, its scuffed binding, fragile at the spine, heavy with authenticity. She finds herself holding her breath and makes herself read slowly, carefully, from the start. There is a pattern, she notices. Observations are clinical in the first part of each entry, and they become more and more indulgent the longer they go. She begins to feel him as a person. There are numbers: A group of 6 or 7 tonight, passing v. close . . . I am not sure of these 2 . . .
‘The numbers?’ she asks her mother.
‘Aborigines,’ her mother says. ‘He counts them when he sees them.’
Hannah turns back to the diary and realises she is right. The animals are named, but the people are numbered. It catches at her, but she pushes it down. Symptomatic of the era. He moves on to mending a sail, and she relaxes again.
Working, we looked up to see a line of soap floating down from the camp, meeting the water of the tide coming in. It was beautiful, silver, purple and gold in the sunlight, the water stained with tannin. Strange that soap could be beautiful.
She looks up to see her mother watching her.
‘He must have been educated.’
‘Mmm,’ her mother replies. ‘We don’t know how he came out here though, or how he came to join the expedition. They discovered and named the island.’
‘What, Chesil?’
‘Yes, after Chesil Beach in England. He talks about it in there. Something about the shape or the tides.’
Hannah flicks through the pages, looking for the name.
‘Don’t skip,’ her mother says. ‘Just keep reading.’
Hannah finds it after her mother has gone to bed. It is slow reading – so much effort in deciphering, so much missing context, and so much detail about the mundane routines of the expedition. But then:
3 seen today by the inland Swamp. The testing has brought nothing, still. We will have to leave soon. Supplies are running short. I don’t suppose W. is fool enough to let us starve. We have named the island Chesil, for the Isle of Wey Portland, which W. claims it resembles in shape, though it would be impossible to tell, and there is no shingle to join it in any way to the Mainland.
And that was it, Hannah thinks. The moment it started, the moment this place was born. Only it wasn’t. There were people there before them. She sighs and stretches her legs. Bedtime. But a passage on the facing page catches her eye. The writing is slanted, rushed.
Caught 1 this evening. Harvey has tied her with rope to a tree on the edge of the camp. She was stronger than expected, struggled hard. No clothes, no decency. Young, too. Harvey got her first. I could hear her scream. We can’t keep her, what would we do with a gin?
Hannah is shaking. This is it, this must be what her mother was referring to, the reason the diary can’t be made public. Her stomach turns but she keeps going.
A page later, two pages, four pages on, there is mention again and again: We’re keeping her for now. Harvey decided to teach her, W. is turning a bli
nd eye. And: Should have given her some water, she’s being held up by those ropes. And then, simply: I needed that. There is nothing that makes sense in it. There is nothing that Hannah can understand. All the beautiful prose, following the man as he falls in love with the landscape – none of it is real in the face of this.
Hannah forces herself to put the book down. She feels ill. This then, she thinks, is how I have come to be here. She leaves it open on the table for her mother to see. The light in the study is still on, she notices, going past on her way to bed. She stops to turn it off. Her files and her marking are all still piled in neat rows, waiting on the desk. The room feels almost sterile after the world of the diary. The school, the classroom, the problems of everyday reality seem a long way off. She thinks of Mrs Culliver that morning, talking about Mary. I wouldn’t. I warned you. She strides in and turns out the light. In the morning, she thinks, the diary will be gone. There will be no more mention of it. Life goes on.
*
Bull hears the rumours. It is impossible not to – they are handed to him with the dirty fists of small change coming over the bar whenever he pulls a pint. The younger men laughing, the older men not. When Burnett comes in, the bar goes quiet. The talk redoubles, though, when he leaves again, as if to make up for lost time. Bull washes the rings of foam from glasses and does his best not to listen. He finds himself turning the TV up, once, twice, far beyond its normal background level.
‘Got a chance, this season,’ he says.
Harry just looks at him. ‘Sure. You said that last week.’ He turns again to Darcy beside him. ‘You know Jenny Williams, don’t you? Her boy. He comes picking with her. She leaves him home alone when she works her shifts on the mainland.’
Darcy shakes his head. ‘One of the fishermen told me that the Holts’ kid beat him to a pulp. Out on the breakwater, ended up in the drink. Him, I reckon.’
‘You know what my wife is saying, don’t you?’ Harry continues, persistent. ‘About the grapes and all that?’
Darcy glances at Bull, and they both turn back towards the TV.
‘Turn it down, will ya?’ one of Mulvey’s young guys calls.
‘Piss off, Nugget,’ Harry calls back. ‘We’re trying to hear it over you lot.’
The young guys just laugh. They are all grouped around a table in the corner playing poker, occasionally arguing. There are no women tonight, so their jokes are more obscene, but it means their fights probably won’t escalate to fists, and Bull is grateful. They don’t find it at all surprising that the girl is pregnant, and they are amused by all the rest. Bull wonders if he is simply too far from his own schooldays to remember young love and what it was like.
‘Another round?’ Nugget calls, leaning back in his chair and looking at him across the room. Bull feels his hamstrings tighten, pushes himself off the edge of the bar. The glasses slop on the tray, and he ignores it, lets the beer drip on the carpet, their table. One boy snarls and pulls the cards out of the way.
‘A toast,’ Nugget crows. ‘To our blessed Virgin. We sat her up on a chair, but some lucky fucker sat her up on his cock!’
The room explodes with their laughter.
‘Jenny’s boy,’ Harry mutters again. Bull just shakes his head.
*
Thomas lies in bed and stares out his window. The sky looks swollen. He can hear his mother in the kitchen and his father in the laundry. He rolls over and closes his eyes again. Sleeps again, wakes again. There are voices outside his room, whispering.
‘His eye, last week . . .’
‘He’ll be okay, all boys fight.’
‘You think it’s about the girl? What if it was, what if it’s true . . .’
‘Let him be. Give him a few days, he’ll come good.’
He ignores them, lets himself slip back into unconsciousness.
Later, the sound of grape snips comes floating up towards him, a gentle, irregular clack. It comes in muffled through his window, fills his room. His father, pruning, in the house paddock. Thomas pulls the doona up over his head and sleeps once more. The sun wakes him, finally. Lethargy is thick in the back of his mouth. He should be at school. The grape snips still call, but quieter now, more distant from the house. Thomas levers himself from the bed. He smells. He can smell himself. His room smells. He hasn’t been outside in days. He stumbles across to the bathroom and stands under the fierce heat of the shower. He needs the pain, the heat. It makes him think of the bridge, of Mary. When he can’t bear it anymore, he cuts the water and drags a towel from the rack. His bedroom is still dark, smells of something deep. Reflected in the mirror on his dresser, the piles of clothes and bedding crowd in on him, the dark crowds in, the sharp blaze of light cutting through from behind the curtains is painful in comparison. He pulls a t-shirt from the floor and over his head, stares at his face in the glass.
‘Fuck you,’ he says, the words falling loose from his mouth. In the mirror, his chest heaves as though he is panting. He lifts the towel to cover his face, to stop whatever else would follow, whatever else he might see there.
His mother is waiting for him when he emerges. She has orange juice in a glass and bread in the toaster. He sits and eats in silence, ignoring her.
‘Your father is in the vines,’ she says finally.
He doesn’t respond, but he finds himself heading out there anyway. The sun is weak but bright. Thomas follows the sound of the snips and finds his father bent over a vine halfway down the paddock.
‘About time!’ his father calls when he sees him approaching. ‘Thought you’d take a bit of a holiday, hey?’
Thomas says nothing, shuffles.
‘There’re shears in the bucket.’
They work together in silence, two vines, three, trimming them back. He can feel his father waiting, wanting to ask. Three vines, four, a panel.
‘Your face,’ he says at last. ‘You been fighting with someone?’
‘It’s fine.’
‘I saw Picnic looked a bit busted up.’
Thomas says nothing.
‘Your mother’s pretty worried, mate.’
‘It’s okay, Dad.’
‘And she heard about your friend.’
Thomas drops the shears and walks up the row. His father follows.
‘They’re saying she’s pregnant,’ he calls, blunt. ‘Was that why you were fighting?’
‘It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ It comes out as a challenge; it comes out aggressive. He veers around to face his father.
His father has his hands up, pacifying. ‘No, mate. I never thought it was.’ But he is clearly relieved. ‘C’mon. It’ll be right. We should go find your mother and get some lunch.’
Thomas runs his hand along the vines as they walk. Without the summer leaf, their bones and limbs are exposed, heavy trunks grown deep into the dark soil. They look tired, he thinks, gnarled and painful. They could be burning inside. His father smiles at him.
*
Mrs Keillor stands on his veranda and watches as Father John comes from the church. He meets her at the door.
‘Mrs Keillor,’ he says. ‘I saw you coming.’
He is holding a heavy coil of rope, his shirtsleeves rolled back. For once, she realises, he looks clean and well-dressed.
‘I wanted to talk to you, Father.’
‘As long as you don’t mind if I work at the same time,’ he says, smiling and indicating the rope. ‘It’s for the bell.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘No, of course not.’ She tries to remember the last time she heard it rung. He opens the door and gestures for her to precede him down the hallway.
‘If you’d be so kind as to make it, we can have tea,’ he says.
‘Of course,’ she says. She puts her bag down, wondering what has prompted him to turn his attention to the rope of the bell. ‘I don’t think the bell’s been used since the last wedding,’ she says.
‘Oh? When was that?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she admits. ‘Five yea
rs? Maybe ten? Is there one coming up?’
‘No,’ he says, but doesn’t offer more. He sits at the table, head bent, intent on his work. The rhythm of his hands folding and tugging the rope’s frayed ends is strangely hypnotic. He is splicing it, she realises. Weaving each piece back into itself, binding it solid. She shakes herself and looks around for the kettle.
‘Oh, it’s in the cupboard now,’ he says when she asks. ‘I’ve had a bit of a clean-out.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Yes, I’d left it too long.’
She fills the kettle and sets it on the hob. ‘I brought you some cake.’
He looks up and smiles at her. ‘Thank you! And I never really thanked you properly for the last one. It was lovely.’
‘My pleasure,’ she replies, wondering more and more. He is really alive again, she thinks. He is back. It fills her with confidence.
They sit quietly for a while, listening as the kettle slowly builds in pitch. Only once does she notice his mind wandering. Always, always his hands move, slowly and gently making the join. The kettle comes to the boil. She makes the tea and sets it down in front of him.
‘About Mary Burnett,’ he starts. ‘If I asked for your help, would you come?’
I CAN BE THE voice of reason, if you like. It isn’t possible, what I’m telling you. That catching of faith, it is something from the twelfth century, Bernadette of Lourdes. I watched everything that happened, thinking the same things. I was never really in with them. And it wasn’t clear, from the outside, what I was looking at. You should know that now, before I tell you the rest. It moved like a current or a rip in the water – nothing was visible on the surface. All the power was in the undertow.
I read the whole of John Mulvey’s diary, that night. I read it cover to cover, poured myself into his life. He was a bad man, I told myself. Petty. He held a grudge, wrote constantly about incidental slights. It was easy for me to hate him. I can see, now, how that was misplaced. It was myself that I was hating. He showed me my family in a new light, made me complicit in everything I had previously ignored or denied. He reminded me of my uncle, a man of numbers, profits, calculations. His voice layered a history into the earth that I didn’t want to face, one that felt somehow akin to the bad blood between my uncle, Darcy and my mother. Things unspoken but brutal. Leaving the diary there open was an act of spite – I wanted my mother to share in the blame. It took me a long time to sleep.
The Salt Madonna Page 16