Yours forevermore,
Constance
12.
Toby at his mum’s place
Brisbane
Sunday 18 January
Mr Roberto Garcia
c/o Ashbury High
Castle Hill
Dear Roberto,
You recall I once asked you if my dad was a black hole?
And it turned out to be a stupid question cos you made it into a homework assignment that ripped the heart out of my last year?
Nah. Just kidding. You didn’t rip the heart out of my last year, I did that myself — you gave it a heart, if I’m going to be honest (and sentimental), when you gave me Tom.
Plus, I didn’t spend much time researching black holes, if you want the truth. I Googled them for 20 minutes. And I kinda liked them. Not as much as I liked Tom, but you know. Black holes. What’s not to love?
Anyhow, that’s all an aside.
I’m chillin’ with my mum in Brisbane here — back in a coupla weeks to start that Certificate in Music Industry (Technical Production) I told you about — and you know I’m going to produce Amelia and Riley’s first album one day? — make myself a fortune and spend my life doing woodwork and kicking your arse at pool.
Mum’s chasing a blowfly around the room right this moment, so she’s not chillin’ I guess, but, you know. She was. Her kid, Polly, is having an afternoon nap, and Mum’s got these banana-chair lounges that flip right back, and we’ve been sitting in those, drinking ginger beer, looking through the windows at her overgrown, overgreen backyard.
There goes Mum now — she just jumped over my legs, flapping a tea towel, trying to direct that blowfly out the open window.
What was I saying?
Yeah, I wanted to tell you that he’s not any more.
My dad, I mean. A black hole.
Or anyway, seems to me he’s got his head out of the hole, and he’s taking some good, deep breaths of a sky full of stars.
I spoke to him on the phone this morning, and he’s cleaning out the house. He had that excited, proud voice of someone who has never even picked up a duster, explaining exactly how you wash a window to avoid streaks. And turns out he’s throwing away Mum’s stuff. He was thinking of shipping it to her but he couldn’t be bothered. He actually said those words. Then he sounded guilty and asked if that was wrong, and I said, no sir, it is exactly right.
He wanted to know about the giant wooden M, though. M for Megan. M for Mum. I made it for her to hang her keys on when I was ten. She left it behind when she left. Dad said he didn’t want to throw that away, as it’s pure genius. He still can’t figure out how I got the angles so right.
And something came to me right then.
What the f—was I thinking, planning to give my cabinet to Mum?
That’s what I was planning. I told you that, didn’t I? My prize-winning major work, which I am sorry to show off here, but I think it’s almost as beautiful as I intended it to be — I was going to give it to Mum. I thought she deserved it cos she didn’t get me. I mean, cos I didn’t come with her to Brisbane when she left.
She left behind her giant M, she’s not getting my cabinet.
Anyhow, there’s Dad talking about how black the water was in the bucket after he cleaned the skirting boards. He was so excited about the colour of that water. He also told me that the other parent rep from the committee is coming over for dinner tonight and asked which of his pastas he should make.
‘You think Patricia would like my boscaiola?’ he said — and I thought, damn me, he’s remembered her name.
Anyway, I’ve decided Dad can have the cabinet.
Funny to be writing this now while Mum’s in the room. She’s given up on the blowfly. She’s back on her banana chair, reading a novel. Right beside me.
Look. It’s not complicated. She’s nice, my mum, but she shouldn’t have left the wooden M behind.
While I’m here I might even tell her that, and she’ll say something like, ‘But I left it there because it was so wonderful — you and Dad deserved it more than me.’ Something like that, is what she’ll say. She always does that. Twists things around so I feel bad for her again, and want to make her feel better.
But not this time. Whatever she says, I’ll say, ‘You bet, but you shouldn’t have left it.’
Just chillin’ here, and it’s not so bad. I’ve still got her, she made some mistakes, but here she is beside me and she loves me. Whereas other people’s mums are not so great. I’m thinking here of what I’ve heard lately about Amelia and Riley’s mothers.
Anyhow, speaking of mothers, that brings me to the real reason I’m writing to you. I couldn’t wait until I got back.
Just before I came here, I went to the Mitchell Library and looked up the originals of Tom’s letters home.
Not just the photocopies that you gave me. Suddenly wanted to see his actual handwriting.
And there was one more letter.
I’m not kidding.
The last letter in my collection was the one that Tom’s friend wrote — the guy Tom was hiding out with in the bush for all those years. He made it back and he wrote to Tom’s mother to tell her that Tom did not.
But in the collection at the library? That’s not the last letter at all.
There’s another one, written two years later. I’ve enclosed it.
I guess I must have lost it, or it never got copied, but there’s something keeps waking me at night — and it’s this. Maybe it was never there at all.
Anyhow, whatever the explanation — sure, and isn’t it the strangest tale you ever heard?
Love,
Toby
My Dear and Beloved Mam,
I’ve learned today that, two years back, you’d a letter from my dear but restless friend, James, telling you that I was dead!
You may now be pleased to hear that I am not.
But for a little scratch in my throat, sure, my health is grand altogether.
I’ll tell you the story of what has befallen me, and sure, if it isn’t the strangest and most wondrous tale you ever heard.
Now, James, as I think you know, was my companion in the bush, and didn’t we have a rough time of it, year after year, foraging for what we could. And many’s the cold night we’d lie under the stars, and didn’t I long to be safe by the fireside in your own home?
So, and there came a time when there’d been drought for upwards of three years, and nothing to eat but the skin of our own knuckles, and we bethought ourselves that we’d best take our chances with the soldiers back here or be dead within the week.
So it was that we found our way back one hot afternoon, just as a furious storm was coming on, and there were the old stone barracks. So weary was I that I fell to the ground, and I knew in my heart that I was done for.
‘James,’ I whispers, ‘go on without me, but tell my poor mam that I loved her.’ Or somesuch, as I wish I hadn’t now, for it seems that James set to work at once, soon as he’d had a good meal, and wrote you that I was dead.
Then he promptly sets out to make his fortune up north, being as he always was, a restless fellow. He’s back again today, and wasn’t he surprised to see me alive? He gave me a copy of the letter he sent to you (he kept it about him all this time, as a record of our time in the bush), and so it is that I learned that you took me to be dead.
But ah, never mind, back to my story.
What happened next is a wonder to me, and it will be to you as well.
There I lay on the dirt while the rain pummelled my face, and the thunder roared out the world’s despair. Or so it seemed to me, anyways, at the time. The spirit seemed to ebb right out of me, I could feel it leave via my fingertips, when a voice spoke soft in my ear.
Ah, says I to myself, that’s an angel with the voice of my Maggie.
Then the angel grabbed a hold of the ear and twisted hard, which I thought to myself, now that’s not the way of an angel. I found my voice to ask it to stop, when the angel slapped
me hard across the face!
Sure, and if it wasn’t my Maggie.
I opened my eyes and there she is kneeling beside me, ready to slap me again.
It’d been years since I’d seen her but there she was, more beautiful than ever I remembered, bedraggled by rain which beat on her head, and rushed down her eyelids, and dripped from her chin as she leaned over me, that fury in her eyes!
She saw that my eyes were open and she gave me a mighty severe look and, ‘I thought you were dead,’ says she, and then the fury flew from her, and it was my soft, sweet Maggie again.
My Maggie in my arms, and me in hers.
I could hardly speak, what with the wonder and with being half-dead from starvation.
She dragged me into shelter, gets me dry and warm by the fire, and feeds me, bathes me, brings me food, and sure if it wasn’t a week before I believed that I was not dead and in heaven.
Then one day I came to my senses, and there was Maggie, her tongue pressed in the side of her cheek the way she does, and I knew that it was not a dream, and the tears came, my heart up in my throat ready to choke me.
But I looked around and saw, so far from being in heaven were we, that in fact we were in a sort of hell. The long and short of it was, we were in a lunatic asylum.
The barracks, you see, Phillip’s barracks, had been made into a place for those of feeble minds, and them that had lost their wits. It had fallen into the worst sort of disrepair, with maggoty food, and damp everywhere, vermin of every description, bedclothes black with mould, and clothes patched together out of nothing but thin air.
But still and all, we were in heaven, because we were together.
And here is where Maggie told her story to me.
How she tried to carry out her plan, but couldn’t bring herself to steal. In the end, she joined up with the Rebels, thinking she’d change the world and then bring me home. But they arrested her and shipped her here, so the result was the same.
Then, when she got here, and I was nowhere to be seen, and the men of the colony were sniffing around her like dogs, she’d a notion to pretend the passage here had sent her mad.
So she ended up here in the asylum.
It’s years she waited, hoping I’d return, reading and rereading the letters I’d sent her — she always kept them close, says she, to give her courage. But all the time, says she, her courage was fraying at the edges. If it was not for a strange new friend she met, a girl who used to sit in the garden by her side, with a curious manner of speech and dress, she might have given up that much sooner. Even with her friend though, in those last few hot, dry weeks — weeks of oppressive, wearing weather — she found that her heart had worn right through. She’d given up on hope, you see. No way home, and it seemed that I wasn’t coming for her after all. And I suppose if you spend your days with lunatics, it might be like to get your spirits down.
The long and short of it is, the day that I was crawling my way back to the colony was the very day that our Maggie decided she wanted to find her own way home.
She’d run from the asylum, and thought she would take her own life.
Sure, and you’ll recall that Maggie has a dreamy way about her, but she swears that the story you’re about to hear is true.
As she tells it, she’d the rope, and the tree chosen, and the rain was pounding down, and her heart, she said, was dead, and she’d only to take that one step, that final step — when she saw me running towards her.
Through the rain, she swears, there I was.
I was running with the rain streaming from my hair, and I was calling to her. She swears it. She says that I was calling something like, ‘Don’t give up on me, I’ve not given up on you,’ over and over, and her heart woke up again, and she sobbed with joy, and took the noose from around her neck, and ran into my arms. She said that I held her, and lifted her up off the ground, and we looked into one another’s eyes —
And then she says, she was alone in the rain and I was nowhere to be seen.
But across the way she caught a glimpse of colour, in the storm shadow just beyond the barracks. Something made her run to that colour — and there I was on the ground, near dead.
That’s when she shouted my name, and pinched my ear, and slapped my face.
And if that’s not the most wonderful tale you ever heard, I don’t know what you’ve been listening to.
We made the best of a bad case, and we petitioned the governor, and he gave us our pardons, and a plot of land of our own, and sure if Maggie and I haven’t got a farm under way?
She’s seen some terrible things has my Maggie, as have I, and she’s suffered things she’s not even shared with me yet. Sometimes the weight of her suffering stops her in her track, and her movements are those of an old woman. We’re broken a little, the pair of us, is what I’m trying to say, but at least we’re broken together.
And there’s nights when we’re warm and snug at home, a good fire blazing in the hearth, and Maggie’s young again, and moves about the room as nimbly as a cocksparrow. Then we talk of that strange, strange day when she saw me running towards her through the rain. She’s thought and thought about the matter, she says, and has begun to fancy she had only been dreaming. But I remind her how we used to believe in the future — it’s a great unfolding set of mysteries, I say, with chasms of wonder between. Then her eyes, they twinkle as keenly as the stars on a frosty night.
So there’s an end to this letter, trusting it might cheer you to know that Maggie sends her love, as do I, and that your son, Tom, has a heart so full of joy it can hardly bear the weight of it.
With love,
Tom
13.
www.myglasshouse.com/shadowgirl
TUESDAY 5 FEBRUARY
My Journey Home
Behind the red door,
blue glow
of dusk,
sharp rise
of telegraph poles,
and a splinter of
moon.
Three planes
fly
in uneasy formation,
they seem too fragile
to be up so high,
tentative
delicate —
the moon.
Had coffee
with
Toby
earlier.
He told us
a crazy story
about:
me
a ghost
a lunatic asylum
and
a letter.
We laughed
at him
and he laughed back,
it’s a fine, fine splinter
of moon up
there
blowing shadows away
with
the planes.
Riley on his back
on my bed
studies a schedule
of surgery,
physio,
his broken hands.
the things you can repair
the things you can’t
my mother on the phone
today
now that the truth
is the truth.
the things you can forgive
the things you can’t
Riley says:
She should have come for you,
she should have put up
lost posters.
I’m still by the window
but when I hear those
words I feel
the sadness and
elation of
truth.
Riley keeps reading.
I think about Toby
and his theory.
The lunatic asylum
that’s gone now,
the day that I tried to show
Riley and it wasn’t
where it was,
the girl with the same
colour hair as my own.
I think, what
if I was talking
to a girl from the pas
t,
what if I became her,
the girl from the past,
what if
Toby became Tom.
What if
we got a message across?
What if,
between us
Toby
Riley
Emily
Lydia
and I
changed history that day?
Then I’m laughing
hard
because
I think we did
and if we can change
things that have
already happened
if those planes can fly in
uneasy formation
if that splinter moon
can blow away the shadows
then anything,
anything at all.
Riley sits up,
puts the schedule down,
and he laughs too.
Historical Note
Although Tom is an invented character, he might have been any one of the young Irishmen who were transported to Australia for stealing sheep (or cattle or pigs) in times of great poverty in Ireland.
The story of the Castle Hill Uprising is based on actual historical events. Phillip Cunningham, a stonemason and Irish Rebel, was transported to Australia in a ship called the Anne in 1800. Tom’s narration of the voyage of the Anne is based in part on actual events that took place on that voyage (including the attempted mutiny and punishments that followed), and in part on events that took place on other voyages to Australia from around that time.
Phillip Cunningham was sent out to the government farm at Castle Hill, and oversaw the building of a stone barracks in 1803. The barracks housed mainly Irish convicts, many of them political prisoners (or Rebels) who had been involved in insurgencies, or associated with ‘rebel groups’, back home.
Along with another Irish convict, William Johnston, Phillip secretly planned an uprising, writing nothing down until the note that was intercepted. The uprising then proceeded in Castle Hill, more or less as Toby describes, culminating in the battle at which Phillip (and William) were tricked into coming forward, thinking that the rules of engagement would apply. The consequences, including the hanging of Phillip at the public store, and the random executions of every third man, were as Toby describes.
Dreaming of Amelia Page 39