‘Far out,’ Nugget says. ‘Fucking hell.’
The church ladies all ruffle and shudder. ‘You’re living in sin,’ one of them spits. ‘Go on, Father.’
Father John continues meekly, looking at the ladies. ‘Marriage is a sign of unity and loyalty which all should uphold and honour,’ he says. Bull can’t tell if he is reading the service or agreeing with the women.
A young kid appears in the window of the pub. Bull slinks out from behind the bar and opens the door to him.
‘Sam,’ he says. ‘In here, mate.’
The child is shivering. ‘They came to the house,’ he says. ‘They dragged Marnie away.’
Bull kneels beside him. ‘You all okay?’ he asks.
He nods. ‘One of them women slapped Jadey, but she’s alright.’
Outside, the bell suddenly stops, and the gathering in the road pauses momentarily.
‘Do you, Imani Donovan, take this man, William James Golding, to be your lawful wedded husband?’ the priest asks, filling the abrupt silence.
‘Yes,’ Marnie says. ‘Please . . .’
‘And do you, William James Golding, take this woman, Imani Donovan, to be your lawfully wedded wife?’
‘You bastards,’ Nugget says. ‘You know this isn’t legal!’
The man behind him pulls his arms tighter, raises a knee and braces it against Nugget’s back. A woman stares pointedly at Marnie and her belly.
‘Nugget, please,’ Marnie sobs, tears again down her face. ‘Just say yes, just say yes.’
‘Yes,’ Nugget spits.
The priest sighs, smiles. ‘And will you forsake all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?’
‘Yes,’ Nugget spits again.
The priest raises his arms, speaks to the group as a whole. ‘By the power invested in me, I now pronounce you man and wife. It is done.’
Instantaneously, the ladies smile and clap. Betty Smith is holding her grandson, and she raises one of his chubby arms, cheering. Another of them is laughing. The man releases Nugget and he falls forward, one hand to his ribs. Marnie collapses over him, and he pulls her close. People are shaking hands, oblivious to the couple at their feet. Everything is normal again. Quiet. Sam tries to pull away and make for the door.
‘Not yet,’ Bull says, one hand on his shoulder. ‘Wait a mo.’
When the street has cleared, and the people are all gone, Bull lets him go. The boy flies to catch the uneven pair, leaning on each other, walking back out of the village. Bull wipes a hand over his brow, finds he is sweating. He shuffles over to the door, bolts the latch, switches the sign. WE ARE CLOSED, it says, in cheery, red letters.
*
Hannah sits inside as long as she can bear it.
‘Stay with her?’ she asks Sophie. Sophie just nods, doesn’t even look. Hannah slips out from the bedroom and stands a moment by herself in the lounge. At last, everyone has left them. From the village, the church bell rings insistently. The noise of it pushes her towards madness. She pulls on boots, closes the door quietly behind her.
His ribs are showing, she realises, as she brings the black horse up the paddock. His coat is dull, too. She checks his feed bin and once again half the feed is still sitting in the bottom.
‘C’mon, old man,’ she says, and she brushes him with a strange fervour. Strings of nonsense stream from her, soothing words for a poorly child. He is slower than usual. Less arrogant. He tosses his head fitfully as they walk down the road, and she runs a soothing hand down his neck. But his ears prick as they reach the forest, and she smiles.
‘Good boy,’ she whispers.
He pulls a little when they get to the next hill, and it seems like a sign. It’s possible, she lets herself hope. She closes her eyes and builds images of her mother one by one in her mind. On the back veranda, hanging out washing. In jodhpurs with a pair of pliers between her teeth, dragging a roll of wire the length of the fence line. Singing as she swept through the house with a duster, motes flying up behind her in the sunshine. On the black horse. Beneath her, his walk is rhythmic through her hips, her lower back, his breathing becomes her breathing. Eyes still closed, she feels herself taking on the looseness of the muscles in his neck.
Darcy is there again, the next morning. Sophie is making them coffee, bitter and tar-like in the plunger.
‘Did she sleep?’ he asks.
‘Yes and no,’ Hannah says. ‘Not really.’
‘The morphine knocks her out,’ Sophie adds. She pours and passes them each a mug.
‘Thanks,’ Darcy murmurs, sitting himself at the table. He reaches out and pulls an old newspaper towards himself as a coaster. ‘You going to tell your uncle?’
Sophie glances at Hannah. ‘I was wondering if you’d go up there,’ she says.
‘Why me?’
Sophie shrugs. ‘I just don’t want to leave her.’
Hannah chews on her bottom lip, forces herself to breathe.
‘You went out yesterday,’ Sophie adds. ‘I can’t leave. And I thought it might be best to talk to him in person, given how she is now. If he wants to see her . . .’
‘You really think he’ll come?’
‘He’s her brother. He deserves to know,’ Darcy says. His voice has a bark in it.
Hannah sighs. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I’ll go.’
The day is fine – warmer than it should be. She passes cars going down the hill, the women from the church on their way back up to visit her mother again. She follows them in the rear-view mirror, fighting the urge to turn back, chase them, deny them entry. She imagines Sophie meeting them at the door, offering tea, coffee, not understanding. They round a corner and are gone from her vision. She looks straight ahead again, down the road, and forces herself to take the turn-off up to Mulvey’s place.
She stops when she gets there, stands at the threshold of the gate. The cattlegrid is open before her, the name HESSE curls in hot black letters on a tin board. All her feeling rattles like an empty trailer behind her. She has an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. She remembers hesitating like this at Mary’s gateway. How often, she wonders, can one person stop at a gateway, doing nothing? Small birds swoop and dive overhead. She imagines her uncle at the other end of the drive, standing like her, looking out over the salt paddocks and thin sheep. Well then, she thinks. The brutality of it is the only thing that makes sense. She turns and gets back into her car.
‘Not home,’ she says, when Sophie asks. ‘I’ll try again tomorrow.’
The women have been and gone, leaving a small statuette of the Virgin on her mother’s bedside table. Her mother is asleep. Hannah picks the figurine up and holds it tight in her hand. Sophie looks at her with something close to pity, but doesn’t stop her when Hannah slips the statue into her pocket rather than putting it back down. She pulls a chair close and sits. Already the bedroom has changed. The dark privacy of it has evaporated, become a common space. Sick bags and tissues cover the dresser. There is a bedpan sitting in the corner. Hannah settles herself to wait.
Their mother wakes again towards evening. Hannah calls to Sophie in the kitchen, reaches out to take her mother’s hand. Funny, she thinks, how easy it has become to touch her.
‘Our uncle,’ Hannah murmurs, leaning over her. ‘I tried . . .’
‘Do you remember the Bethlehem barn?’ her mother asks. Her voice is filled with water.
Sophie appears in the doorway. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We remember.’
Hannah can picture it, driving past in Darcy’s ute, the star lit in fairy lights over the empty old cinder-block cowshed. Still there, weeks after Christmas, the grass yellow around it.
‘It was Edward.’
Hannah looks at her. ‘Really?’ This doesn’t tally with her memories of her uncle. The only image she has of him is of the shine on his boots.
Her mother nods, breathless. Gathers herself. ‘The priest,’ she whispers. ‘Bring him to me.’
Darcy comes when he hears. The women stay gathered i
n there until the end, the priest with them. Hannah doesn’t want to see it. Their mother is twisted sideways to face him, unseeing but turned as though to warmth. Hannah stays outside, sits on the veranda, gazing at the forest. When Sophie appears, she is crying. Hannah finds she can’t breathe. Everything begins to ache, to disintegrate. When her sister reaches for her, she turns away. She runs.
Alone, she moves into the air as though it is solid. Like a bird does, she just steps into it and lets it bear her up. She finds herself flying over the top of the hill. The village looks dirty from up there. Backyards are rust-wired and shredded with long grass, the resting hulks of dead cars, shell-shocked parts and dismembered engines. The body of a horse is stretched flat in a bare paddock and she can see its ribs cathedral-like, spread and splayed beneath mouse-eaten skin. It is a pale bay, its yellow-red coat dull with dust. Its eyes are closed, enjoying the remnants of the afternoon sun. From her height, it could be dead.
‘We call it the forest,’ she says to Sophie, when finally she returns. She has no idea why her mind has caught on it, but it seems important somehow. She has left her mother’s body lying straight, still in her bed. ‘They all call it “up bush”. Why is that?’
There is a pause. Sophie says nothing. It sits between them, lungs filled with air.
‘Because of Mum,’ Sophie says eventually. ‘She called it the forest. She taught us to see it differently to them.’
‘I think she believed,’ Hannah begins, and doesn’t know how to finish. Her voice doesn’t quite fit the sentence. ‘Like they do. In Mary, in . . .’ Sophie doesn’t answer. The trees outside are quiet, the evening gentle. The light has a certain softness through the kitchen windows. A currawong starts up somewhere, others join it. Rain on the way, her mother’s voice whispers. Hannah sits at the table and lets herself cry.
XVI
October 1992
The Feast of St Francis of Assisi, 4 October
THOMAS SITS IN THE damp grass and watches Mary’s house. It is early. There is nothing else he can do. His chest is tight, as though the pressure of breathing is meeting something in there, something blocking it. The air tastes of salt.
The moisture in the grass makes him feel like a small child. The realm of school picnics, football games. He remembers suddenly being very small, with his mother, watching a butterfly unfolding itself from a cocoon. He remembers it being humid and green. Were they at a zoo? The dampness is what has stayed with him – both the place and the butterfly, its wings clammy and crumpled, waving them slowly back and forward in silent self-applause. Up at the house, a door on the side of the shed swings in the wind, groaning and banging.
Mary’s father emerges from the house, head down. Thomas stands to watch him. There is a fence between them, the expanse of a paddock. Huddled in the corner, a band of weedy steers prop and gawk as he moves, but Mary’s father doesn’t notice. He is throwing gear into the back of his ute: a chainsaw, a coil of rope. Thomas watches him carefully but doesn’t step forward. Mary’s father opens the door, gets in and turns the ignition. The ute turns slowly and lumbers away. Thomas sits again and thinks, tries to contextualise the actuality of the man with his memories of Mary, with her at school, with her fear, on the bridge, in the store. The brute force of him. The way everything changed. The fact that he is never there, never involved in it all. Nothing else moves.
Further down the road, a dog starts to bark. Thomas can hear a car door and voices, somebody calling to chooks. His legs begin to cramp. Above him, the wind picks up again and the young trees bend and gossip. Mary’s house is silent. He has seen what he came for. Thomas stands, walks down the road towards the village. He skirts around the main street and slips along a row of backyards to come out down the lane behind the pub. A dog rumbles at him from a back step but doesn’t bother to get up. As he passes Picnic’s place, he hesitates. The curtains are the muted red colour of the windows in the church, the robe over St Francis’s shoulders. He looks at his own hands, stretches them out imploringly as the Jesus did in the church. The path through the dunes appears before him and he slips down it, into the shelter of the dune grass and the softness of the coastal wattle.
*
It is strangely hot at the funeral. Hannah sits in the blue light of one of the windows and ignores the perspiration at her underarms and neck. Her dress scratches. Father John’s hands shake as he leads the prayer. He looks almost confused, as though he can’t quite remember what to say. As though normal life is outside his comprehension, now. These are the things she knows she will remember.
The service is short, quiet. More have come than she expected. All the village ladies are there, prim and proper in black. They sing with a high, wailing note in their voices. Sophie refuses to say anything or look at them, her husband Dan beside her. Mulvey is there. He catches her eye, and she doesn’t recognise him. His boots are not polished. She wonders what he has been doing up there, while everything has fallen apart. Darcy squeezes her hand every now and again, raises an eyebrow as they reach the psalm. Nugget is there. She doesn’t know what to make of that at all. Sophie’s children cry, more out of feeling overwhelmed than anything else. Sophie doesn’t cry. She looks quite calm, staring straight ahead, despite the way her hands are wound together in her lap. Her voice is steady when she starts to give the eulogy. Hannah looks down at her own hands and finds them similarly wound. She looks up again and catches Sophie’s eye. Her sister teeters between words. Hannah blinks. Not calm, then. Just a bit lost, like her. Sophie takes a breath and keeps on reading.
They carry the coffin to the graveside. The cemetery is too uneven for a trolley, though the funeral directors from the mainland have brought one with them. They travelled over on a charter boat, and Hannah wonders what the bill will be. Her stocking catches and ladders on the gate post as they go through. At the grave, the coffin is lowered on a winch with a green velvet sling, the cloth covering the sides of the hole. A fat man winds the crank to lower it. They pass her a small basket of dirt, and she takes a handful and throws it in. She understands immediately why they offered them potpourri. The dirt sounds hollow on the lid of the coffin. It is a harsh, empty noise. It rattles.
Afterwards, they go back to the hall, where the ladies have arranged sandwiches and cake on a rickety trestle table.
‘In the memory of our sister,’ one of them murmurs, and Hannah feels ill. She can see Sophie becoming more and more terse with them, her body more and more rigid. There is a strange energy in the room. Sophie’s children follow each other around, trying hard to be grown-up. Hannah focuses on them, blocks everything else out. It feels familiar, reminds her of following Sophie in the same way. Darcy appears beside her, his face tight with lines. One of the village women leans across to take a piece of cake and the table groans. There is a thump on the roof. Everyone looks up. Another comes from the veranda. A couple of the ladies peer out through the window, and gasp.
‘The birds,’ Mrs Keillor whispers. ‘They’re falling from the sky.’
The whole group pushes outside. Sophie, Dan, Hannah and Darcy, left standing in the hall, look at each other.
‘It’s an omen,’ someone calls from outside. Hannah can hear a car starting. Mulvey is in his ute, reversing out of the churchyard.
‘The kids,’ Sophie murmurs, looking at her husband. ‘Get them home?’ Her face is crumpled. He nods and shepherds them out of the hall, feeling for his keys as he goes.
There is another thump on the roof and they jump.
‘Easy now,’ Darcy mutters, as though to a horse. ‘C’mon.’
The ladies outside are clustered together, looking at the bodies of the birds. Each one is swollen, bloated. The women are crying.
‘We’re wrong,’ one of them slurs through her tears. ‘We’re still not right, not worthy.’
One of the ladies is praying.
‘They’re swallows,’ Sophie whispers. She has one in her hands, its body already stiffening impossibly. ‘Look at them.’
&nb
sp; Hannah stares. ‘Have they been poisoned?’
Darcy grimaces and urges them both towards his ute. The woman praying looks up, looks across at them and locks eyes with Hannah.
‘This is your doing,’ she hisses. ‘Your fault. Pariah. You’ve never believed.’
The group quiets, its focus on Hannah, who stands frozen by the ute.
Darcy steps up beside her. ‘They’ve been poisoned, you stupid bitches,’ he says, the word coming from low in his throat.
The women as a whole recoil, shudder.
‘Look around you,’ Mrs Keillor calls. She thrusts a dead bird towards them. ‘The world is wrong! You’ve never seen it, have you? Your mother knew! We’re being tested! And you, the lot of you, you’ve failed!’
There is a shocked silence, a beat before the women take it up, repeat her words. They are still looking at Hannah. She can’t move. She opens her mouth but nothing comes out.
‘We will all pay,’ one woman screeches. ‘The sins of the individual will be visited upon the heads of the whole.’
‘Laura believed,’ Mrs Keillor says, her tone rising to hysterical. ‘You weren’t worthy of her.’
‘How can you say that?’ Sophie gasps. Her whole body is livid. ‘She’s gone. How can you say that to us?’
‘Well?’ Mrs Keillor demands. She is addressing Hannah, ignoring Sophie altogether. Her face is iron. ‘You came, you saw. Do you believe?’
‘I believe . . .’ Hannah starts weakly and immediately regrets it, her hands at her mouth.
‘Go away!’ Sophie screams. She is crying now. ‘Leave us alone!’
The women don’t move. Darcy opens the passenger door of the ute and Sophie climbs in, still shaking.
‘Hannah,’ he murmurs. ‘C’mon.’
Hannah lets herself be directed into the cab, lets Darcy close the door against her leg, feels Sophie wrap her in her arms, squashed together in the passenger seat. Both of them are wet with tears. Darcy climbs in beside them and reverses the ute around, jolts through the gate and onto the gravel road.
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