The Salt Madonna

by Catherine Noske

  ‘Mary’s gone,’ the woman beside her shrieks. Mary’s mother wails, and a man grabs him by the shoulder. ?’Did you see her go?’ the man asks him. Thomas recognises him as Mrs Keillor’s husband.

  ‘No,’ Thomas says. Food, he is thinking. And clothes.

  The man is looking at him with sharp eyes. ‘You’re the same one, aren’t you?’ he says.

  ‘No,’ Thomas says. ‘No.’ He tries to hold himself calm, to stop the panic from rising. He needs to go.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ the man says. ‘You’re the one we flogged. And you spoke to her, in church just now.’

  Thomas stares at him. He can’t think, he can’t move. There is a voice in his head screaming that this isn’t fair, but he can hardly hear it over Mary’s mother’s howling. Everyone is pressing in around them. Thomas can see his own mother trying without success to push through the crowd, his father behind her, both of them desperate to get to him. It is a wall of people, leering at him, leaning in. Watching, he realises they won’t ever let him go.

  Thomas smiles and punches the man in the face. The man drops and the people all around him cry out. Thomas swings again, kicks him in the ribs, the stomach. He can feel people grabbing at him, trying to pull him away. Thomas goes at the man on the ground with everything he has. ‘Bastard,’ he is screaming as they tear him off. ‘Fucking arsehole!’

  Thomas is on fire. It takes three people to hold him. His parents are finally there, tears running down his mother’s face. Mr Keillor is standing, though there is blood on his lip and his collar. Thomas struggles, and the men grip him tighter.

  ‘What are you doing with him?’ Thomas’s mother asks. ‘What do you think you are doing?’

  ‘Get your fucking hands off!’ his father shouts.

  ‘Put him in the church,’ one of the old women suggests.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Thomas’s mother cries again.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ Thomas spits. ‘Is that what you want to know?’

  There is a second of hush. Everyone stares. The men start to drag him towards the church.

  ‘It wasn’t Picnic and it wasn’t me,’ Thomas says, louder, struggling against the men who are holding him. ‘She was raped. Ask her. I think she was raped.’

  ‘No! No no no no, no no no . . .’ Mary’s mother wails, hands at her mouth. ‘No no no, not true, not true!’

  The men lift him clear from the ground and carry him, legs flailing, to the church. They lock him in, and because he doesn’t know what else to do, he runs. Up and down the aisle, again and again. He can tell from the shouting that they are searching for Mary. He runs, and he runs. He can hear his mother’s voice outside the door, hear her pounding at it, shouting, her voice high-pitched and muffled through the door.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ she is saying. ‘You can’t keep him in there, he’s my son!’

  It quietens eventually, as people start to leave. Thomas can still hear his mother, calling to him now. He stops running, sweat streaming down his face, his neck, his back. The colours in his vision are gone, he realises. He sits with his back to the door, and feels it move as his mother sits on the other side.

  ‘The bridge,’ he calls to her. ‘She’ll go to the bridge.’

  ‘What?’ she calls back. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The bridge,’ he shouts. He hears his father. Their voices float through the dead weight of the wood but he can’t make out their words. He lets it go, lets her go. His chest is tight, fluttering with movement. He closes his eyes and imagines Mary free, safe. Walking across the bridge and away.

  Light hits the stained-glass on one side, and the church is suddenly ablaze with yellow and orange. The candles flicker. He stands, looks up at them, the mustiness of the drapes and the altar cloth, the vases of dried eucalypt. Everything in there is wooden, he thinks. There is a bottle of oil behind the altar, and he splashes it over the cloth. He touches a candle to it, leaves it lying on its side, wick spluttering in the pool of spilt wax and oil. The cloth catches. Thomas takes another candle and works his way around the church. Smoke starts to fill the rafters. Flowers, branches of leaves, drapes, cloths. He tears the pages from the Bibles. The pew sheets. Everything catches. Everything starts to burn.

  *

  Hannah cannot believe what she is hearing, standing barefoot out in the driveway. Darcy leans out the window of his cab, out of breath, impatient.

  ‘Mary?’ she repeats stupidly. ‘Missing?’

  ‘Harry Keillor was there,’ he says. ‘They locked the boy in the church. They need help.’

  ‘Which boy?’

  ‘The Holts’ kid. They’ve all gone mad. He said it was rape . . .’

  Hannah turns cold. She glances back towards the house, empty and silent, and thinks about Mary’s crumpled form. Thomas’s black eye. The fear in Ellen Burnett’s face. ‘I’ll be right down.’

  ‘Meet me at the store,’ Darcy says, and drives on without saying goodbye. He is angry with her, she thinks. She notices her hands are shaking.

  The day has turned fine, the morning opening into a gentle sunshine. They have been split up into groups, the search organised methodically. Everyone seems calm to start with, but Hannah can feel the anxiety rising as they go. They walk slowly, at first. They call her name regularly. People are anticipating her, seeing her everywhere. But gradually the mood shifts. The searchers fall silent. Their shadows grow longer. They search in lines, groups fanned out across paddocks. They search houses, the village, the school, the beach. At the pub, Bull makes up packets of sandwiches and drinks, sends them out with children to each group. A boat comes in and there are police on it. People stare at them. No one seems to know who called them.

  Hannah walks with a group headed towards the dunes. The wind meets them, cold off the water, heavy with salt. The searchers reach a fence and come together to help each other through before spreading out again. The wire is rusted and barbed. It grabs at her like a snare. Her head is still full of Darcy’s words. He said it was rape. No, Hannah tells herself. She walks on.

  When they hit the shoreline, they follow the beach back to the village to reconvene. No one is there when they arrive at the store.

  ‘All searching,’ Sarah says. They all linger in the main street awkwardly.

  ‘We’ll split up,’ the man leading them says, after a moment. ‘I’ll go further down the beach, join in with the groups there. Some of you go up to the school, and someone should go back to check in at the church.’

  Sarah sits back down on the steps to the store. ‘I’ll stay, let the others know where you’re going,’ she says.

  The man nods. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Good.’

  There is a lot of shuffling as they split into groups and move off. Face into the breeze, Hannah follows the group turning down to the beach, goes with them along the sand towards the shadowy line of the bridge.

  The salt and seaweed are rank, the smell rising in a dense fug off the ocean. Rotting things. Her blood comes alive, her eyes sting. The noise of her shoes in the sand is abrasive, they squeak. She follows a rabbit path winding along the crest of the dunes, gazing down at the line of debris at the water mark: pieces of frayed rope, foam buoys, the occasional beer can. There is nothing, no sign of Mary. The energy in the group is dropping, fear sets in. They keep walking. It seems less bizarre, more possible down on the beach, that she could have simply vanished. Swallowed, perhaps, by the dunes, or sucked backwards into a wave. They reach the bridge and walk under it. The pylons are coated with salt and a strange, grey-green algae. The waves lap around them gently. Hannah licks her lips and they too taste of salt. It should be beautiful. The sea is such a deep and brilliant blue.

  They walk and walk. The sun moves slowly towards the horizon. Hannah can feel herself tiring as the colour melts out of the afternoon. Finally they stop. There doesn’t seem much point in going on. It is as though they have been waiting for a signal, a sign that the search is futile. There is nothing so concrete. Mary isn’t the
re.

  ‘We’ll head back,’ the man says, glancing at her. ‘See if there’s any update. They’ve probably found her. We wouldn’t hear anything from this far around.’

  They all murmur in agreement and turn. They walk back down the beach as a group. It feels strange after so long being spread out. Hannah floats on the periphery. She has salt-eyes, they itch. As they round a point, a woman gasps, hand outstretched – a plume of smoke is rising from behind the village. From where they stand, it is impossible to tell where it is coming from. But: the church, the church, they are all saying, they are all thinking. The smoke is black, thick. Their walking gains a new urgency.

  Dusk closes in. The smoke becomes a smudge against the darker sky, the air becomes cool. People around her start to shiver. Her feet are lumps of wood. By the time they get to the bridge, the pylons are indistinct. Looking out along it, for the briefest moment Hannah thinks she sees a figure on the silver line of the rails, almost halfway across. She blinks and it is gone. There is nothing. She imagined it, she tells herself. The group is ahead of her now and she hurries to catch up. On the other side of the bridge, she looks up towards the old siding. The fence along the rail line is tall, taut, ring-lock wire crowned with barbs. She remembers the padlock on the gate at their excursion. She looks one last time out to sea. The bridge is silent, still. No one moves along it. Hannah walks back up towards the village with the rest of them, out of the wind, away from the darkening water.

  *

  Mary waits, out on the bridge. She isn’t sure why. It is getting dark. She feels nothing more than tired. She cannot walk any further. The bridge rocks and shifts beneath her, the boards singing. As the sun disappears, she sits in a workman’s loop, feet hanging over the water. With one finger, she traces the grain of the wood. She can see the lights coming on in the village, people still moving as shadows along the beach. Something is on fire. She simply lets herself drop.

  The water is cold. She can feel the baby moving inside her, fluttering as though in protest. She feels it tight in her chest, pressure, as though she might burst. She shivers. The water is carrying her away. Her legs trail like seaweed. Her dress is heavy, it billows beneath her like a sail. She can see it glowing white through the water. She can’t see much else. The water is gold on the surface, black beneath. Out beyond the current, more and more lights appear on the shore. She is sleepy. She has come a long way. She stares out at the lights and watches as they drift away.

  XVIII

  I HAVE BEEN TRYING to remember, writing this, what it felt like to be there. I keep thinking of the shoreline, the way the waves move in and out. That border: shifting, liquid, opening out to the possibility of the ocean – but also utterly, utterly final. My world contained by fluidity.

  My world. There are so many others. In my head, all their voices have started to come back to me as echoes of my own.

  There is nothing I can say, really. Perhaps I shouldn’t have written this story. My sentences are breaking down. It’s the shoreline at work in me. Nothing is stable. It melts like sand. And I’m afraid of what will happen now. I need to find a way to feel it all – properly though, without breathing into it, without keeping it alive.

  I promised you I would imagine, but I can’t anymore. It has become harder and harder. I have done it wrong, I shouldn’t have, it isn’t right.

  WE ALL ENDED UP back at the church. By the time we got there, it had already been consumed. The women were in a frenzy, truly hysterical, blaming each other, calling on each other to repent. They were feral, they were scratching and screaming. When a vacuum implodes, it is sudden and violent.

  One of the search parties found Father John by the jetty, face down in the water. They left him there, walked away. By that time the police were present; they dealt with him. Back at the church, the men avoided saying his name, though the women were calling for him. They couldn’t stop the fire. The stonework survived, but they couldn’t get water to it in time to save the rest. The windows shattered, tiny pieces of coloured glass scattered over the grass. Thomas was dragged unconscious from the smoke and taken to the mainland. I don’t know what happened to him.

  And like that, it was done.

  Mary simply disappeared, we never found her. She never came back, never emerged years later, living on the mainland. The police put divers in the bay. Pointless, given the current. We all assumed the same thing. She would have been carried out to sea.

  I don’t remember that night very well – only flashes and moments, as though I was drunk. The weight of my failures all coming down upon me. Darcy took me home, and Sophie came and got me. She helped me pack up the house, took me away on a boat. Most people left. It was hard to stay, after.

  There were answers to it all, of course. The storm, the salt on the Virgin. It wasn’t so strange in hindsight, or at least, it was explicable in the terms of science. Old wood can seed salt crystals if it is soaked enough in salt already. The grapes, even: a horticulturalist suggested it mightn’t have been that unnatural, if the summer lingered, if the grapes were picked early and some fruit was overlooked. That was her suggestion – the fruit was there already, just overlooked, and that once the larger part of the harvest was removed, it had enough light to grow and ripen. I liked that idea, that something neglected could find a way to live.

  The school closed. Darcy stayed, and some of the old folk. Mrs Keillor stayed, though apparently her husband died. The Holts left, took Thomas away. My uncle Mulvey fled to the mainland without paying the wages he owed. I don’t know about any others.

  That’s all, that’s the end.

  I AM SORRY. I am so sorry.

  I REMEMBER SOME OF the good things, now. Camping with Darcy, down the paddock in the tractor, a fire and swags. Cooking damper with honey, melting chocolate inside bananas wrapped in foil. Darcy in his fingerless gloves, pointing us to the best configurations of coals and solid wood.

  I remember Darcy kissed me as I was leaving on the afternoon of the storm, not something he did very often. And in his kitchen, there was a picture of my mother, Sophie and I, sitting on top of his fridge. I have no memory of it being taken, but I often think about it now. We are in a paddock somewhere up the hill, the water just visible on the horizon. Only our mother is looking at the camera, laughing, the wind taking her hair back and away from the fine bones of her face.

  At home. Sophie and I as little kids, building a course of logs and sticks in the bottom paddock and ‘riding’ over them with a skipping-rope for reins. And just once, just one time, our mother coming cantering across the paddock to jump them with us, her arms and legs flying, laughing. Out in the forest, racing the horses. Her teasing us, holding the black horse in, keeping him just a nose in front. The memories come like this, each over the top of the next, reduplicating, opening up into others. I miss the black horse. Darcy looked after him for us, let him live out his days in peace. But I miss him. I miss the forest. I remember all three of us, one afternoon, stopping out in the forest to sit in the sunshine on a fallen log. We ate scrumpie out of a zip-lock bag, the horses tied to trees. Our mother pointed out fourteen different types of wildflower, each one more hidden, more surprising than the last. Tiny, fragile jewels.

  I AM HERE NOW, on the island. It is the strangest feeling. The place is different. I have to remind myself it has been almost two decades. But Mary deserves to be found. I will try to follow her steps, go from the church out onto the bridge, see where she might have gone.

  I am home. I am quite snug. I have lit candles and pulled the drapes off the furniture. It would be nice to light a fire, but there isn’t any wood. I feel peaceful, strangely calm. I can hear the forest outside. There are some ancient, dusty cans in the larder. Lentils. It must have been me who bought them. It feels like a lifetime ago.

  There is a horse in the top paddock. He is grazing up near the fence line now, I can hear him. A bay fellow, a handy type. It looks right to have a horse in the paddock. He reminds me of my little bay man. He must be
one of Darcy’s. I should check him, before I leave. I might go and make friends.

  Acknowledgements

  THIS BOOK HAS BEEN over a decade in the writing, and many people have supported me in the process. I am grateful to the early encouragement, feedback and support of Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, Chandani Lokuge and Chris Worth at Monash University. Likewise, thanks to Maureen Freely, David Morley and Sarah Moss at the University of Warwick for input at a crucial moment. Post-PhD, the insight of Susan Midalia was invaluable and much appreciated in the process of reworking the manuscript from its thesis origins. My thanks to the team at Varuna for their support in the PIP Fellowship at the same point. And finally, I’m grateful to the people I’ve worked with in the last few years, here at the University of Western Australia, in particular my wonderful colleagues in English and the team at Westerly.

  The experience of working with the team at Picador has been nothing short of joyful. Huge thanks to Mathilda Imlah, Ali Lavau and Brianne Collins, not only for guiding me through this process and supporting me in developing this story, but for taking it on in the first place. Alongside, I’m incredibly grateful for the support and encouragement of Clive Newman and Natasha Solomun, agents extraordinaire.

  Beyond all, I am impossibly indebted to Lucas and to my family. Thank you for everything you have given me, including the opportunity to write.

  This work has been supported by research funding from the Australian Postgraduate Award and Monash University, and more recently by the University of Western Australia.

  About Catherine Noske