‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘Please don’t go.’
But Lex hobbled down the steps.
The nurse was standing on the grass.
‘If the Kombi won’t start, make sure you take her home,’ he said, as he limped towards the heath. ‘I want the house empty when I get back.’
When he returned, the cars were gone and the house was quiet. He was glad of it. He needed solitude, space around him, the cleanliness of empty air. The past twenty-four hours had been too much for him—the storm, resuscitation again, Callista . . .
He went next door to check Mrs B’s house. Things had blown over there too. A corner of the roof had lifted. The old bus had toppled over. The front door was hanging loosely on torn hinges. Out the back, he found the peacock crushed under a sheet of tin, its bright feathers already fading. Of everything, that upset him most.
Sitting on the back steps of his neighbour’s house, tears came from nowhere. He cried for Isabel, for Mrs B, for the peacock, for his house. Even for Callista. There were parts of all of them gone forever.
PART III
Aftermath
Sixteen
After he buried the peacock, Lex drove into town to see how others had fared in the storm and to organise a glazier to replace his windows. At the far end of town, the street was clogged with police cars. Lex was sure they hadn’t been there when the nurse drove them home a few hours ago. As he parked the Volvo, he noticed that the front door of the butchery was sealed with yellow tape. He ducked into Sue’s, wondering what was going on.
In the café a cluster of dark-suited strangers was hunched around a table against the wall. Sue was nowhere to be seen so Lex slipped into the kitchen looking for her.
‘Sue,’ he hissed. ‘What’s happening?’
She looked up from the bench, stressed and white.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. Her face melted into tears. ‘It’s been a terrible day, Lex. A terrible day.’
‘What are all these people doing here?’
‘Henry Beck died in the storm. It was an accident.’ She sat down on a stool and wept.
‘What happened?’
‘I found him,’ she said, wiping away tears. ‘I came in early to check the café after the storm and I noticed lights on in the butchery and the back door open. So I went in, to see if there was anything I could clean up for them. Henry was in there, all curled up on the floor with a knife in his stomach and a huge lump of meat hanging over him dripping blood on his head.’ She shivered and wept. ‘I’ll never forget the sight of it.’
Lex felt useless. He didn’t know what to say.
‘I rang the police straightaway,’ Sue said. ‘And they rang Helen.’ She started crying again. ‘I should have rung her myself, but I wasn’t brave enough. I was such a wreck after finding him, you see.’
‘What happened then?’ Lex asked.
‘Helen came down to see him, of course, but they wouldn’t let her in, because the forensic crew was still working in there.’
‘They made her wait?’
She nodded. ‘Poor Helen. They made her wait, and she kept wringing her hands and asking me why they were calling Henry “the body”. Kept asking if that meant he wasn’t Henry any more. That he wasn’t human.’
Lex tried hard not to imagine Helen standing at the door, anxious, terrified.
‘Then they let her in,’ Sue said. ‘And they were all lined up against the wall, you see, because they wanted to watch her reaction so they could tell whether she’d murdered him or not. I knew what they were thinking. Wretched souls. Well, when they let her in, Helen just stood there, holding on to the door. She was so white, Lex, and shaking all over. I don’t know how they could even think she’d murdered him. She walked so slowly across to him, and sat down beside him in that pool of blood, and she pushed the hair back from his face, so gently. It breaks me up to think about it.’ She oozed fresh tears. ‘There was blood all down his face and she sat there picking it off with her fingernails. She was so careful and gentle about it, so as not to hurt him. Lex, it’d tear your heart out to have seen it.’
He patted her arm.
‘Those stupid policemen just stood there watching her,’ she said. ‘They didn’t know what to do. So I pushed my way in there past them all and I took her home. I had to whisk her past her poor son Darren so he wouldn’t get a sight of the blood. Poor boy. He was in the hallway, waiting. He didn’t know what was going on. So I got her past him and I put her in the shower so she could wash herself clean. Poor thing. Then I got the boy to call Mrs Jensen. There was nothing more I could do after that.’
‘What’s happening now?’ Lex asked. ‘Have the forensic crew sorted it out?’
She jerked her head towards the door into the café. ‘That’s what they’re doing in there now. They’ve got their theories.’
‘Like what?’
‘No witnesses, you see. They have to work it out.’
‘And?’
‘They’re saying that Henry was probably out the back sharpening knives, with the side of beef out ready to carve. They reckon a blast of wind bashed the door into the beef and rolled it onto him. Forced him down onto his knife. They reckon he stabbed himself.’
Lex could picture it, even though he didn’t want to.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ he asked.
Sue shook her head. ‘No, she’s got the church around her now, giving her support. That’s where she belongs. With her own folk.’
The funeral was surprisingly large. Lex was amazed at the scores of cars parked outside the church when he drove up in the Volvo. He wandered up the hill with all the other quiet, serious-faced people and found a standing space down the back of the church. Several people he didn’t know nodded at him as they passed. He was surprised and wondered what it meant. Perhaps that was what people did at funerals in the country.
The church was packed. Lex hadn’t imagined Henry to be so popular. He’d seemed such a difficult person, loaded with arrogance and uncomfortable edges. Whenever Lex had bought meat at the butchery, he’d watched Henry lording it over his assistant, glaring at him and waving instructions with hands as meaty as steaks. He couldn’t forget the patronising way Henry spoke to his wife whenever he was ordering her about, and the fear and submission in Helen’s eyes.
Helen was there, of course. She was down the front, stiff and straight in black, with the boy holding her hand. Lex saw her glance over her shoulder at the crowd and then quickly turn back to the front again. There was fear in her eyes. Henry was still in control.
The coffin was polished wood, sleek and expensive. It was long, for a long man. It reminded Lex of Isabel’s coffin. But hers had been white and obscenely small. He’d cried when they chose it. He didn’t want to bury her under the ground, away from the sunlight.
Isabel’s funeral had been big too—huge crowd, tiny coffin. Jilly had insisted on a church service, even though they weren’t religious. Something about concern for Isabel’s soul, just in case there was a heaven up there. She didn’t want to think about Isabel missing out and burning in purgatory. But Lex knew that purgatory was here on earth, being left behind with the terror and the grief. Isabel had only been dead a week and it was already destroying them.
Before the service, everyone had wafted around outside the church, patting him on the shoulder and calling it a tragedy. There were tears, an endless tide of them. The memory of being engulfed by hugs. People gripping him as if they were drowning, when it was really him that was going under. The thought of going into the church and watching that tiny coffin throughout the service had withered him. He didn’t think he could do it. Didn’t think he could sit there knowing that Isabel’s tiny fragile body was lying in there. Already decomposing, no matter how the funeral parlour had tried to disguise it. Death was supposed to be for old people, for people worn out with life, their bodies broken and past their use-by date. Isabel’s life had barely started.
In the church, he’d sat stiff by Jilly.
She was a red weeping mess, seeping constant tears. But Lex’s tears were locked somewhere inside him and he couldn’t even reach out to hold her hand. Jilly’s mother had to be the prop for her that day. Provide the support that Lex couldn’t. He ought to have been strong for her. But everything inside him was broken, and without the scaffolding of his meagre self-control he’d have collapsed beneath the weight of a feather.
The service had passed in a blur. Lex remembered nothing of it—none of the soothing words that must have flowed from the eulogy, no recollection of the colourful flowers that must have adorned the church to signify new life and resurrection. All he remembered was the coffin. The shiny white wood, the handles glinting gold, the terrible thought of burying his child deep under the ground.
At the end of the service, he had carried Isabel from the church. When he lifted the coffin from the stand, it was so light Lex thought it might fly away down the aisle, out into the bright day and up into the sky. It would have been better that way. But it ended in the cemetery, with the dull thud of clods of dirt being dropped onto the coffin. Each thud like a hammer battering on his soul. It was as if he were being buried too, the essence of him sealed away in the coffin with Isabel. His heart torn out and interred.
In the Merrigan church, staring at Henry Beck’s coffin, Lex felt his heart back within him now, altered, but somehow regrown, thundering with the stress of memory. He saw the minister step up to the podium—a tall man, imposing in his black suit and white dog collar. Elevated above the congregation, the minister stood with his head bowed while the organ burst lustily into ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. It was incongruous, with Henry’s coffin lying there at the head of the church. Nobody sang. And it was too much for Helen Beck. Lex could see her shoulders shaking while she cried.
After the music faded away, the minister raised his head and hands and his voice poured out over a concealed microphone. The service was lengthy and dry, lots of inane preaching, a touch of fire and brimstone, endless talk of love and forgiveness. Lex eyed the door, wishing he could escape. He had come to pay his respects to Henry, strange though the man had been, but he hadn’t counted on flashing back to Isabel’s funeral and now he was emotionally exhausted and wanted to leave. This was going to be a long haul. But now that the service was under way, it would be difficult to walk out.
To distract himself from the weight of memory and grief, Lex took a look around him. All the Merrigan church-goers were seated in the front pews with commanding views of the coffin. Lex summoned an internal smile. He supposed there had to be some advantage in coming weekly to pay your dues to God. Mrs Jensen and her husband were to one side of Helen, and some other people sat on her other side. Lex assumed they were her parents.
The non-church people were crammed into the back half of the hall. Sue was there, of course. She hadn’t been a close friend of the Becks, but she had fostered a working relationship with them, given the proximity of her shop to the butchery. A few of the other people must be farmers who sold meat to Henry. Sue had told him Henry’s meat came through the abattoir further up the coast, but it was all grown locally. Henry preferred to have contracts with farmers he knew.
He noticed Sally there too, with Sash and Evan. Sash looked bored and restless. She probably didn’t understand what had happened to the butcher, and maybe that was just as well. Lex hadn’t known Sally was particularly friendly with the butcher, but he supposed she must have bought her meat from Henry too, like everyone else local. In a small town, perhaps everyone attended funerals.
He searched about for Callista but she wasn’t there. He shouldn’t be surprised. She didn’t like the Becks much. And she probably didn’t want to risk running into him after the storm. Lex couldn’t believe he hadn’t worked it out sooner . . . the fact that she was a Wallace. Everything about the Wallaces and Callista’s defence of them made sense now. Lex wondered where his head had been not to notice. Even so, they shouldn’t have argued after the storm. He should have held back. He should have quietly asked her to leave and left it at that. But he had been unhinged by the wreckage of the house. And they were both so raw from the storm. He shook his head. He was making excuses for himself. After Isabel’s death and the damage he and Jilly had inflicted on each other, he should have known better.
The evening after the funeral was luminescent. The sea was calm and silvery in the late light. Lex left the photo of Isabel on the kitchen bench and went down to the beach. The funeral had reopened all his dark corners, and he had spent the afternoon staring at Isabel’s photo, trying to find the shape of her in his memory. Beneath his skin, sadness was welling. It was mixing with the anger that had been boiling slowly there for weeks now; anger at himself for losing his hold on Isabel, anger for forgetting, anger at Jilly, at Callista.
Trying to let his mind slip with the rhythm of the sea, he walked slowly in the wet sand as far as the lagoon. Down by the quiet brown water, he scooped a hollow halfway up a low dune and sat down. In the lap of the sky he watched evening fall. Beyond the sandbar he could hear the muffled crash and roll of the sea. The lagoon lapped peacefully. In the darkening blue-black sky of early evening a few stars blinked. Way across the lagoon, swans whistled and honked intermittently. Occasionally a fish flipped. And always that steady flush and thump of the sea.
Night slowly whispered across the beach. Lex leaned back in his hollow and tried to release himself into the invisible breeze and the cool air. As dark fell, the skies grew larger, until above him the heavens thrust in a dome, spangled with glittering stardust, the arc of the Milky Way. Confronted with the infinite, he felt the smallness of his existence, his own inconspicuous irrelevance.
It must have been the sea that lulled him to sleep, but he couldn’t tell where consciousness and sleep merged into the vapour of dreams. Helen Beck swept over him, with her desperate face from the funeral and her white hands. Her eyes were madness—black orbs that sought him, delved into him. Then a different mouth floated over him, softer. A smile he barely recognised, but which somehow knew him. The lips were kind, humorous, comfortable. He ought to know this face. It was so familiar. There was a smooth feeling of generous hands running over him, running through him. Of course. It was Callista. Happiness curled into a dull ache that intensified and slowly split open like a chasm. Cold air, turgid with sadness, gushed up, engulfed him, cleaved him open with a heavy strike. Isabel now, flying over. Her face whipping through the heavens. Grief swamped him, like fresh blood. He felt the horror of Isabel’s non-existence and the loss of her. She was being sucked away and he couldn’t reach her. He was calling her name, stretching to touch her. But he was clamped to the earth, sinking knee deep in it, while she arced away, deaf to him, transfixed on something else, somewhere else. She was gone.
He was alone in black emptiness. Hollow. There was nothing.
Seventeen
Callista knew the funeral was going on in town, but she didn’t want to go. She’d never had much to do with the Becks. Sure, she felt sad for his wife. But then Helen was free of him now, wasn’t she? Henry’s death might be a blessing in disguise.
She heard a car coming down the hill and wondered who it might be. Her mother hadn’t dropped round for a few days. But no, it’d probably be Jordi. He’d know she’d be boycotting the funeral.
The gully was humid this afternoon. The rain that had come with the storm had steamed things up and the air was still. Callista could smell Jordi’s sweat as he gave her a quick hug and sat down on the deck beside her.
‘What’s doin’?’ he said.
‘Nothing much. Couldn’t face Henry’s funeral.’
Jordi flashed a smile. ‘Didn’t think so. Knew I’d find you here. Heard you had a blow-up with Lex.’
‘Did you hear the rest? How the house blew in and the bed filled up with glass? It was lucky I wasn’t cut to ribbons.’
Callista tried to sound light about it all, but the events from the storm had clotted in her chest and she had been finding it difficul
t to breathe.
‘Thank your lucky stars you were out rescuing Mrs B,’ Jordi said.
‘I’m still trying to come to terms with it,’ she admitted.
‘What happened with Lex?’
‘He found out my name at the hospital.’
‘You didn’t tell him?’
‘Didn’t get a chance.’
Jordi grunted. ‘No wonder he threw you out. So the house slips out of reach again.’
‘It wasn’t about the house.’
‘Not even a little bit?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of being alone.’
‘So you’re over Luke then, and all that?’
Callista smarted. ‘What do you mean, over it? Are you over Kate?’
Jordi winced and she wished she hadn’t dug at him.
‘That’s low,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry. But I’ll never be over it. You know that. Didn’t you tell me I had to move on? Lex was my chance.’
‘Was?’
Tears came, sudden as a spring rain shower. ‘He lost a child. And he has a wife.’
‘Ah.’ Jordi’s quick smile was cynical. ‘The plot thickens.’
‘I think they’re getting divorced.’
‘Just as well, given that he’s been entertaining you.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘What was it like then?’
Callista’s tears renewed. ‘It was going well. Sort of.’
Jordi’s eyebrows lifted.
‘He enjoyed the fishing trip. And he’s even been talking about getting a job.’
‘That’s marvellous, now that he’s been here three months.’
She ignored him. ‘It was only when we got on to Wallaces and whaling that things fell apart.’
‘And you complicated it by hiding your name.’
‘You think he’d have been all jolly about it if he’d known?’
The Stranding Page 17