The Salt Madonna

by Catherine Noske

  ‘Lon,’ the publican says gently. ‘Lonnie . . .’

  The man wipes his mouth. He leans an elbow against the wall of the pub and raises his eyes to meet Bull’s. When he speaks, it is with a sense of great dignity and depth.

  ‘Fuck off, Bull.’

  Bull crouches beside him. ‘You’re a bit sick, mate.’

  ‘I’m broke.’ He spits. ‘Leave me alone. I’m nothing.’

  ‘Lon,’ Bull whispers. ‘Please, mate. You need a hand. Let me give you a hand.’

  ‘You haven’t heard? Of course you’ve heard. I’ve been laid off. I’m nothing now.’

  ‘You’re okay, mate.’ Bull pulls the hard body towards him. ‘You’re not nothing.’

  The man relents with the sudden fluidity of drunkenness and falls against him, turns from the wall to Bull’s solid chest and the cheap cotton of his button-down shirt. ‘There’s nothing,’ he moans. ‘Nothing here for me and nowhere to go. I’m finished. Just let me die.’

  Bull rocks him like a child. Smiles to himself at the thought that he is here again, that this ritual of preservation is the care his blunt arms can give. Bull murmurs nothing, nothing, soothes, shushes.

  A woman appears from around the corner, stumbling. She almost screams when she sees them, and Bull winces. ‘Lonnie!’ she cries, laughing. ‘Found ya!’

  ‘Yeah, I’m here,’ he mumbles, sitting up. He has stopped crying, but his face is still dark. Bull steps away and the woman takes his place on the ground.

  ‘You right, Bec? I gotta get back to the bar.’

  ‘Yeah, I got him. They’re looking for ya.’ She is almost glowing, pulling Lonnie’s arms around her neck. The power of being needed, Bull thinks, and wonders if he himself had looked as satisfied in her place. ‘You okay?’ she whispers to him.

  The man is propped against her, mumbles into her neck. ‘I’m orright. Just a bit sad.’

  ‘Sad?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she croons, as Bull turns away. ‘Don’t be sad. We’re all gonna be fine.’

  *

  It is near dark by the time Thomas makes it back to the church. He can hear his father a little way behind him, coming up the row across. They have not found her. They haven’t seen any sign of her. He was the one who suggested coming back to the church to check in, but no one is there. He stands under the porch, undecided. He shivers. Somewhere deep, his hope has become pure fear. It is cold. He is wet. He tries to imagine her but he can’t. The church is still open. He looks in, just to be sure it’s empty. There are still pew sheets scattered about from the service, they flutter with each draught coming through the door. Without really knowing why, he walks up the aisle and sits on a pew. Above him, the figures in the windows bend their soft faces down.

  ‘Help her,’ he whispers. It is not a prayer, but close. ‘Please. Help her escape. Don’t let her die.’

  The colours of the glass are deep, muted, in the fading light. It is too late, he realises. He won’t find her now. She is gone, one way or another. Somehow, the panicked feeling in his chest slowly fades into resignation. It is over, it is out of his hands. The gloom closes in, and there is only the impression of red and green left around him. He stares at the faces, struggles to make them out. St Francis of Assisi, the Madonna, St Christopher for travellers, dedicated to the soldiers in the war. They are familiar, they have always been here.

  You need to find her, says St Christopher, and Thomas freezes in place. The saint is lit, the colours have come alive.

  The lamb at the feet of St Francis stands and shakes itself. You need to help her, it says.

  Thomas twists, and the colours rise up with such force that the solidity of the wood beneath him flickers and pales. He can feel them pulling at him, drawing him up. The Madonna reaches out to him, and it is as though he is light years from reality, his feet have left the ground. They won’t let her go, she says.

  ‘No,’ Thomas says. His voice trembles and echoes through the church. ‘Where is she, where has she gone?’

  You are going mad, a voice tells him in the back of his head. And the lunacy of the dream – because this must be a dream, he thinks – the lunacy of it is suddenly funny. He imagines the pictures trooping out of the windows, following him. Protesting, waving placards and banners, all red and green, yellow and blue, fading in the dark. An army behind him, to save her. Not so funny, he thinks, and feels his world click into place. Outside, he can hear his father on the veranda of the hall.

  He hurries home, his father silent behind him. From the corners of his eyes, he can see coloured lights following him.

  ‘They found her,’ his mother calls as he comes up the drive. She is waiting for them at the door. ‘Thomas? They found her. She was down on the beach, they have her down at the store. She’s alright.’

  Behind him, a green light flickers and disappears.

  I AM MAKING IT UP, now. When Mary went missing, I didn’t join the search. I’ve no idea where they found her. Imagination is addictive. (I have wandered Chesil in my mind so many times now.) I took the river and the cave from my Mulvey ancestor’s diary. Because I’m no better than him, in the end, writing a revisionist history and calling it the truth . . .

  I wish I had been there, gone searching. Does desire count? But I wasn’t there. I was off in the bush on the black horse.

  Everything was still in the forest. The rain fell straight down like a blessing. It caught in the black horse’s mane. He didn’t like it, he shook his head. He was antsy, nervous, unsure. He was mourning Ghost, and every nerve in his body was raw with it. I let him fly when we left the road. The rush of the wind, the heaviness of the earth underfoot, it matched with the shoof-hoof of his breathing and carried me away.

  It was Darcy who bought our horses for us. Every time he got a new one, we would go down and watch them arrive. The black horse came special delivery in a fancy horse transport. He was a present for my mother. He came with papers and a stud-book name that she immediately refused to use. It’s unlucky to change a horse’s name, so he became the black horse. I’d never known my mother to be superstitious, until then. Now, it seems more significant. The day my little bay man came, it was so hot the ferry was invisible in the haze. He was part of a job lot from the sale yards – three ferals, two bays and a grey, peering wild-eyed from the slat-board sides of Darcy’s truck. Darcy broke them in himself.

  There is a power in riding a horse. It is not only the old power, the cavalry power, the strength of hooves, iron-shod violence and speed. There is something more subtle as well. Feeling that force rise beneath you and holding it only with a touch on the horse’s mouth, a piece of cotton in your fingers? The double-edged power of that: the lightest contact, making clear your own comparative helplessness, your own weakness, even as it speaks to your control. It involves a sense of abdication. There is no control at that moment, not really.

  I wasn’t there. I didn’t help her. I will know that about myself forever.

  I told you that Mary wasn’t her real name. But this is it, this is the point at which she became Mary, became more story than girl. Returned, restored to them, made sacred. A sort of shared hallucination, communal and projected. You couldn’t help but feel it. The whole island was caught in its momentum, whether we were willing or not – we were dragged by a force like salt water. And above, the grey, midwinter sky seemed to lower itself over the island in an effort to suppress us. She wasn’t real. We made her Mary through the timbre of our voices, the weight of our thoughts. This is how I know that she is still alive. You can’t kill a story.

  XIV

  September 1992

  The Nativity of Mary, 8 September

  Holy Cross Day, 14 September

  FROM THE WINDOW, HANNAH watches the children in the playground engrossed in some sort of game, her view warped by her own reflection on the glass. They are swooping in and around one child, standing in a circle and taking it in turns darting in to turn the boy around. He staggers, h
ead thrown back. His throat is achingly naked to the grey sky. The next child slips in, turns him again, and the white flash of skin is gone. They are laughing, the boy in the middle in great gasps between each new attack. Hannah turns away, but the image of their frenetic movement and his throat exposed and vulnerable stays with her.

  A memory of her mother comes into her mind: out in the forest, riding a mare the colour of yellow-box honey, pulling the horse’s nose around into her side, kicking her round in tiny, tight circles – Darcy’s cure-all for misbehaviour. And a single line, spoken in her mother’s soft voice: Like to see her try it when she’s falling over dizzy.

  ‘We’ll need to order more clay in if you want to do pottery with the upper kids for their art projects,’ Mrs Culliver says, appearing windblown from yard duty.

  ‘I was thinking perhaps a mosaic project.’

  ‘Not the pottery?’

  ‘The curriculum calls for “conceptual and perceptual thinking in design”.’

  ‘The pottery needs design.’

  ‘It would save ordering the clay.’

  A sudden squall of rain comes sweeping through the yard. The children scream and run for cover as the windows shiver in fright. Mrs Culliver starts dramatically and stands to switch on the light.

  ‘Well, then,’ she says, from the middle of the room. ‘Make it a mosaic, if you like.’ Her tone is relatively gentle. Hannah takes it for a ceasefire, though something feels uneasy in the truce. Silly, she tells herself, and forces herself to focus again on her lesson plan.

  By the end of the afternoon, the rain has cleared but the sky is building into an angry blue-grey. Waiting out the front for their rides, the children start their game again, a different child in the middle this time, but the same darting movement, the spinning, the release. As Hannah tidies the classroom, they sweep and blur in the periphery of her vision. It makes her think of Father John, the ladies at the church, the constant movement of the service. It has the same effect on her as the spinning of the children: a blur from the corner of her eye, something seen but not fully perceived. Standing in front of the heater, Hannah feels unutterably heavy. She has to resist the urge to lie down there on the carpet.

  Mrs Culliver pushes in through the classroom door, her head bent against the wind.

  ‘It’s going to storm,’ she says. ‘You better get home. Leave your prep, get back to your mother.’

  Hannah looks up at her, surprised. ‘Really?’

  The woman curls her lip. ‘Have you forgotten what a proper storm is like? Your mother’s home alone.’

  ‘Right,’ Hannah says awkwardly. She steps away from the heater, gathers her things from her desk. ‘Thanks.’

  She stops at Darcy’s on the way home, sits at his kitchen table and watches as he serves himself an early meal. Outside, the world slowly weighs itself down with lead.

  ‘You should be going,’ he says, but she doesn’t move, doesn’t want to disturb the calm that has settled over her. The kitchen is close and cosy, filled with the smell of sausages. She thinks momentarily of her mother at home, unable to light herself a fire, forcing herself upright to peel and cook.

  ‘Will you take the leftovers?’ Darcy asks her.

  ‘If you don’t want them yourself.’

  He grins, pats his paunch. ‘You two need it more than I do.’ He pulls an extra dish from a cupboard beside the stove, piles up the remaining potatoes, adds sausages and vegetables, covers it with cling film. Immediately they start to sweat, draw condensation to the plastic. Hannah watches and her heart sinks. Her mother will hate it, she realises, will think of it as charity, as sympathy for an invalid. Darcy looks at her and she can tell he is thinking the same thing.

  ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ she replies. ‘I’ll dish ’em up as new. She’ll never know.’

  He grunts and draws up his chair. He has set the table for himself with cutlery, salt and pepper, butter and relish, and as he eats there is the silence. He leans back in his place to reach for bread from the benchtop, and with the movement comes the memory of other meals, her mother and sister there, roasts in winter, sliced cucumber and tomatoes in summer with her mother’s mayonnaise. Eventually it fades and she lets the present back in.

  The sausages on Darcy’s plate are fat and misshapen, homemade.

  ‘Are they from Mulvey’s?’ she asks.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Does he make you pay?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I dunno. He could have gone soft in his old age.’

  ‘Wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t sell to me anyway, if he could help it. I bought them down at the store. Won’t be much more of that, now.’ He sits back a moment, cutlery resting on his plate. ‘You going to tell him about your mother? Has he heard the diagnosis?’

  Hannah shrugs. ‘What happened between you and him?’

  ‘Your uncle and I? Nothing. We just chose opposite sides when your grandfather kicked your mother out of home. And he’s a snob. He always looked down on me.’

  She reaches across the table to pick up the jar of relish, opens it and sniffs.

  ‘Like it?’ he asks. ‘Made it myself.’

  ‘Didn’t know you were such a domestic goddess.’

  ‘Get out.’ He reapplies himself to his plate, and she stands.

  ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘You should be home,’ he says again, but she reaches for the kettle anyway. The red kelpie slinks in from the lounge room to flop down on the lino before her, whines gently. She leans down to scratch his belly, and his ribs are hot from the fireside. Darcy glances back at them and snorts.

  ‘Don’t start. He’ll never leave you alone.’

  ‘A creature of comfort, hey?’ she says to the dog. ‘Like your dad.’ He rolls over onto his back and bears his chest for her. The kettle clicks. She gives him one last rub and stands to make the tea. The dog flops back onto his side and eyes her with disgust.

  ‘You want your special tea, Darce?’ she asks.

  He laughs dryly. ‘Standard’ll be fine.’

  ‘How old were we when we saw through that, d’you think?’

  ‘You feeling nostalgic?’

  ‘I reckon I would have been about ten.’ Hannah recalls the chipped enamel mug and the hip flask, Darcy’s tea that didn’t need hot water because it warmed you from the inside.

  ‘Haven’t had a drink since we had the news about your mother,’ he says.

  She looks up, surprised. ‘I hadn’t even noticed,’ she says.

  He nods. ‘I know.’

  ‘But the pub?’

  ‘Ginger ale. Gotta keep Bull in business somehow.’

  ‘Isn’t it hard?’

  He shrugs. ‘Sometimes. It all just sort of fell into perspective, with everything Laura’s facing. Have you spoken to her yet about going into care?’

  Hannah opens her mouth, but she is interrupted by the storm. There is a flash of lightning, not so distant, and a moment later thunder rumbles somewhere close above them. The dog sits up, whines again, more insistent. They both turn to look at him and Darcy sighs.

  ‘Get out of here,’ he says. ‘Go home.’

  Hannah picks up the teapot. Puts it down. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Okay, I’m going.’

  *

  Mrs Keillor joins the women in the lounge room, carrying a plate of biscuits in one hand and her teacup in the other. Betty Smith sits on the sofa, her daughter-in-law and the baby beside her. Mary is embedded deep in an armchair across the room, Ellen perched on one arm, a protective hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Outside, the wind curls and rattles around the loose tin of the Burnetts’ sheds and lean-tos, so that the weight of the gathering storm is given rhythm, percussion, strange and irregular but pressing all the same. Mrs Keillor can see Mary watching the baby, almost obsessively. She puts the biscuits down on the coffee table, sits herself and looks around at them again, pleased with the inherent balance of it, the layering of their generations. />
  ‘You shouldn’t stay long,’ Ellen says. ‘Not with this weather.’

  ‘No, no,’ Mrs Keillor says. ‘Just for a cup of tea. We wanted to make sure you were settled and okay.’

  Betty nods, prim. ‘We have to take care of you, now.’ She smiles ingratiatingly at Mary. ‘We owe you this little one’s life.’

  Mary is still watching the baby. He is sitting in his mother’s lap, her hand behind his back, looking for all the world like a puppet on her knee. The woman bounces him. Every now and again he babbles, he smiles. The wind outside, the room, the women all seem to intrigue him.

  ‘Here,’ Betty says, taking the baby from her daughter-in-law and thrusting him forward. ‘Mary, you should hold him. He’s such a good little man. So happy! You wouldn’t know now how difficult his arrival was!’

  Her daughter-in-law narrows her eyes, but lets her pass the baby over. Mary’s mother pushes Mary forward, glowing as the baby is placed in her lap.

  ‘Look,’ she whispers. ‘How beautiful he is. Your baby will be a boy, too, I know it!’

  The room seems to lighten, the wind to drop. They are all of them turned to the girl with the baby in her arms, the baby looking up at her, curious about the new face above him. Mrs Keillor can feel them all drawn towards her, like gravity. She can feel, suddenly, the artificiality of all her previous belief. There is only this: the inexorable pull of Mary, like the weight of water in a wave. The baby trembles, moves in her arms, and Mary bends over him automatically. He finds his voice and cries, once, and he is speaking for all of them, voicing the power of the moment, precious but not fragile. He gives form to her silence and her potential, he is the child that will be, and Mrs Keillor herself wants to cry. They are all of them leaning in.

  A noise comes from the kitchen. Mr Burnett is home. The women all jump to find there is normality still at play in the world. There is a rushing and fumbling as they all stand, fuss with cups and plates, gather their belongings to leave. The storm, the storm, they say. Mrs Keillor is among the last to leave, and there is an awkward moment when she realises she can’t remember Betty’s daughter-in-law’s name, though she knows it. They have all been emptied by the moment, hollowed out by her child’s presence and the power of Mary in the room. Mrs Keillor looks at her and sees her, perhaps for the first time, as a woman rather than someone known – a body, a container which has served to create, no more but no less either, and unable now to make itself anew. Wouldn’t want to. We are brutal, Mrs Keillor realises, in underrating that. It makes her feel for the absence of her own womb. All that power, all that loss. Mary is still sitting in the shadows of the armchair, and Mrs Keillor glances back at her. It is real, she thinks. There will be no going back. Like a wave, it will rise and wash with its own force.