by Cate Kennedy
To begin with, people were nice to me. I run – ran – the chemist, so I guess they had to be. It was Stuart who was the outsider, after all; I was born in this town. Fourth generation. Girls I’d babysat, braided their hair and coached at netball came into the chemist with their own children and mentioned in loud voices that their husbands had invested in the new units out next to the fake lake with black swans brought in from Adelaide. ‘We’re looking for tenants,’ they said, eyebrows raised at me before enquiring if the costs of goods had gone up recently or had my prices gotten a little bold? When I took the week’s takings to the bank Sally widened her eyes at my numbers, even though I’d been banking with her for fifteen years. She said a few times, loud enough so everyone could hear, ‘It’s not as if you’re stuck for choices, Margaret,’ banging the notes crisply against her desk, making neat stacks. People call me Margaret now. Sometimes it’s Mrs Cedar for real emphasis.
I’d always wondered about the wives of men in court over some sex scandal, how they dealt with the newspapers and the television cameras, everyone knowing. I studied their expressions on the six o’clock news. Pointy chins jutted forward as they held their husband’s hand. I always thought these women were weak, even when it was all over the news – they still believed their husbands. How could they have not known what these men really were?
When Stuart and I first met, before the children came along, he had wanted to have sex with me there. He tried a few times but I wouldn’t let him. I thought – I think – it’s unhygienic. Why didn’t I know then? It’s like Janice used to say: if you don’t let them do what they want with you, they’ll do it with someone else. But Stuart was different. He wasn’t from here. He didn’t force things like the boys we had grown up with. It’s almost like a religion I think now, when I see images of women supporting their husbands. You can’t just stop believing in them – especially after twenty-two years and three children. Soon the chain chemist the town had been so against for the past three years opened up in the arcade opposite me and I closed up that same month, arranging a deal with the chain to buy my stock at a loss.
In the evenings, when the rescue boats have left, I paddle out on the kids’ old boogie board. I touch the marble heads of angels peering above the water line, the tips of their wings poking up like fins, trying to guess which granite curve is my parents’ gravestone. I float under the houses of all the people I knew, their pocked dartboards half-submerged like sinking suns, the basketball hoops where the kids mucked around after dinner when it was daylight savings. In the main street I pull myself along by the parking meters until I reach the chemist. There is graffiti on the shop sign hanging over the footpath. Red paint scribbled over the mortar and pestle my father painted when I was a girl. Faded signs for hay-fever tablets and acne cures are still in the window. Stuart asks me what I do out here on these night paddles; he says it with fear, like I’m meeting with the rest of the town and conspiring against him. I don’t say anything; let him think he’s going to get tarred and hung from a tree. Dipping my arms into the water, I feel the odd flank of fish.
I used to tell the kids a great big carp lived in the river and it was his whiskers, not reeds, that lassoed their legs when they went swimming. This carp lived on children whose siblings had not kept an eye on them, because that was all it took, I told the boys, reminding them that Beth was the youngest. A glance at the sky or the small study of an insect, and the carp would rise up, gills full of mud, smacking its Botox lips, wet and hungry. All of our children managed to avoid the carp. They managed to avoid this small town altogether, escaping to the city as soon as they got their P-plates, except for Beth, who was so impatient she left on her learner’s licence. The Felthams’ little girl wasn’t so lucky. Or Mrs Shaw’s husband, who got drunk on a forty-degree day and drowned. There was Lucy Stone, who went to school with me. And now Jason. I never thought to tell Stuart about the river and its silent takings. It was just a silly story I told the kids to make sure they looked after each other. ‘We had been drinking rum and coke but we weren’t drunk,’ Stuart had first insisted to me. ‘The others had gone on to the pub to keep celebrating but I didn’t join them. I was coming home. You know that – I texted you.’
He had texted me. At the station Stuart made me show the police the message, demanding they read it. Even the woman at the front desk had to read it. Still celebrating w students be home in half hour, it said. When the main sergeant shrugged and handed the phone back to me, Stuart went crazy. ‘This is evidence – shouldn’t this be filed somewhere?’ In the end one of the policemen put it in a plastic bag and dropped it in a filing cabinet to shut him up. I hated Stuart for that. It was my phone.
‘What if the kids are trying to call me?’ I asked Stuart after we left the station.
‘The kids don’t call you. You call them,’ he spat back at me.
The night it happened Geoff phoned me, telling me to bring some of Stuart’s clothes down to Townsend Road, at the bridge. Geoff had been an outsider like Stuart – they bonded over it, Geoff the policeman and Stuart the teacher from the city. But this evening Geoff sounded different: not cold, but distant. I know now that, like everybody else, he was probably weighing up his loyalties. When I asked him what happened, if Stuart was okay, he said, ‘He’s okay … Look, you better get down here,’ and hung up. The whole road was lit up when I got there, with searchlights and dogs, and I forgot to slow down, still doing eighty kilometres until a man I’d never seen before waved me down furiously.
‘Can’t you see we’ve a situation here?’ he yelled when I wound down the window. ‘If I had any time I’d fine you on the spot. Jesus.’ He stormed off and I pulled the car over slowly onto the gravel. There were small groups of police I didn’t recognise. The Townsends’ house in the far corner of the paddock was lit up, and I could see the kids’ faces pressed up against their windows. John was out the front, talking to a policewoman – I started to walk over but then he saw me and scowled. He said something to the woman and disappeared inside.
The policewoman came over to me, holding her hand out formally. ‘Mrs Cedar?’
I was holding Stuart’s clothes and by the time I had swapped hands to return the handshake, her arm was back by her side, hitched on her holster.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked her. ‘I’ve Stuart’s clothes. Where is he?’
The policewoman gently tried to take the clothes from me. ‘I’ll make sure he gets them. We need to take him back to the station.’
I wouldn’t let go. We both held on to the bundle until a T-shirt fell out of the pile onto the ground. I let go and picked it up, handing it over. ‘What’s happened? Where’s Stuart? Can I see him?’
‘We’re not at a stage to know. A young man has disappeared and we need to talk to your husband about it.’
‘Who – which young man? One of his students?’ I looked around. ‘Who?’
Torchlight was panning the gum trees; the trunks were like white spindly ghosts. Men in black wetsuits slipped in and out of the river, their headlights glowing under the water. Police wearing rubber gloves were picking things up with tongs and putting them into plastic bags, clothes I recognised as Stuart’s. ‘I’m sorry, we can’t say who …’ the policewoman started – but then I saw Marie Strand kneeling on the muddy banks, her mouth gulping silently. Two policemen were hovering around her, their hands splayed out as if spotting her.
‘Jason? Is it Jason?’
Marie’s head jerked up and stared at us. The policewoman noticed and tried to pull me away. ‘Like I said, I can’t say anything at this point.’
‘But maybe he’s at the pub? Has anyone checked the pub?’ I was getting panicky. ‘Didn’t they all go to the pub?’
A slow howl rose up out of Marie, a guttural sound as she sprung from her haunches towards me. The police grabbed her, held her down. I stared at them. She was screaming. Quiet, meek Marie, who worked everyday at the canning factory, was screaming and swearing at me. The policewoman took my
elbow and pulled me away. ‘A police car will drop him home,’ she was saying. ‘Go home – get some rest. Things will be clearer in the morning.’
She left me at my car, satisfied after I pulled the car keys out of my handbag and put them in the door. It was then that I saw Stuart. He was in the back of the ambulance, the doors wide open – he was wrapped in brown blanket. He looked up and caught my eye. Without thinking my arm shot up and I waved. He stared at me and then looked away. I stood there for a long time, hand in the air.
Two weeks later Marie Strand went through Jason’s English essays and photocopied Stuart’s comments. Phrases like You have such a beautiful way with words and This is penetrating stuff, Jason and Jason, I think you have real talent – I think if we work together we can get some of your writing published. It all sounded so predatory. She ran off about fifty copies of his comments and did a letter drop around town. In thick black Texta she wrote at the top of each page, Stuart Cedar hunted my son. He is a Killer.
Things got worse when Jason’s VCE external examination results came in. He just scraped a pass in the English exam. Mr Robbs wrote a piece for the local paper after Marie asked him to read Jason’s short stories and essays. ‘Nothing within these stories indicated to me that Jason had been an exceptional student, let alone a talented writer,’ he stated. ‘How Stuart Cedar had become so enthused over Jason’s writing is a mystery to me. It would seem, to me, that he held no genuine literary aspirations for this young man, on the cusp of his adult life.’
The evening that was published a rock came through our window. The article was wrapped around the rock. It knocked over a clay vase Beth made in primary school when she was learning how to join coils. Stuart was furious. He went outside onto the veranda and yelled that everything this town did was a cliché, that throwing a goddamn rock through the window was a cliché and no one in this town could think of anything original and a goddamn rock through the window was a cliché. I collected the broken pieces of Beth’s vase and carried them to her bedroom as he paced and yelled. I lay on her bed and cried. The next night someone threw a garden gnome through the kitchen window. Miraculously, nothing broke except the window, sending shattered glass all over my clean dishes. The gnome lay on the cork floor, nose chipped, staring at us. Stuart laughed. ‘Well, at least they worked out what a cliché is,’ he said proudly, as if he had educated the rock thrower. After that I slept in Beth’s old room and Stuart in the boys’ bunk bed. Neither of us wanted to sleep in our bed.
On the fifth night of the flooding I tied the boogie board to our stairs. I tested how many steps were underwater, counting four before clambering back up, my legs dripping and muddy. I’d paddled to the edge of town this time, looked up at the green highway sign pointing towards Adelaide. The roadhouse was ruined; through the windows I could see the tables and bar stools covered in a mould, the fridges and food counter ankle-deep. This was where we used to sit, us girls, and watch people leave town. Especially at graduation time, the place would be feverish with plans of escape, dreams of getting a job and a flat in the city. I’d met Stuart there. He was just a boy then. A writer, he said. Hitching his way around Australia. He stayed for a week, camping by the river at a spot I showed him. I went home only once, to pack a bag and leave a note. It was the wildest thing I’d ever done. I honestly thought I was never coming back.
I missed him then, under the highway sign and drowned roadhouse. I turned the board homewards and paddled. I crawled into the bottom bunk and saw his eyes were woven shut with salt. He’d been crying. He looked so young. I saw our two sons in his face. I put my face in his neck and kissed his skin. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ I said, over and over, prying my arms around him. I lifted him off the mattress and held him. Tears, his and mine, ran down my neck and onto my breasts. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I kept saying. ‘I love you.’ And it’s true. I still love him. We sunk into each other like we had been starved by the silence. Butting our heads hard. Like horses. For a moment I thought I felt the bunk beds lift, bobbing in the flood, until I cried out, a spasm going through me and into the empty town.
We lay together, on the bottom bunk, for the rest of the wet. Our bodies shifted into their habitual curve around one another, as if in sleep we knew no grudge.
Things will be different when the water recedes, as though sucked away with a straw. The crows will be the first to return. Picking at the bloated flesh of drowned dogs and sheep stuck in the mud, river shrimp and crabs coming out of their mouths. Pecking at the eyes of stranded fish, the silver gills fanned open. The hovering powerlines will return to the ground, and puddles will remain, like a great big mirror has been broken over the town, each reflecting pieces of the sky. They’ll find him. Jason Strand. Blue like a swimming pool. Toes and fingers nibbled. Stuart’s thumbprints all over him. The streets will fill up with new cars, tyres spinning in the bog. And our house will probably collapse, its knees rotten.
Griffith Review
Get Well Soon
Antonia Baldo
My sister Rebecca is fierce and has always carried something inside connecting her to a beat I can’t hear. I’m the fusty one, ready with a stable hand and an aspirin. I can imagine myself standing at the gate, waving a little hankie to all my loved ones as they leave. It’s true that I walk slowly in the hope that we’ll all be kept safe.
At the fag-end of summer dogs piss up against letterboxes and then sniff around the twisted frames of bikes that the kids have dumped on front lawns. Fathers drag nets through backyard pools that are as blue as toilet bowls while mothers put their feet up and sigh. I can imagine those sighs coming together to form a single cloud that bounces down our road like a huge wobbly balloon, shaking hedges as it goes but unable to get off the ground.
Upstairs, Rebecca lies alone, throbbing with woe among a twist of Bo-Peep sheets. Time is very slow in her room. It moves backwards, a long way back, to a past before either of us was born. It crawls forward to a future where the whole race is dead or dying of our own malignant humanness. Sometimes, in that room which is full of things from a more joyful time, when objects were fingered and scrutinised, when her mind was a wonderful child that clasped onto everything that came near and squeezed, time doesn’t move in any direction at all.
*
My grandmother Teresa left Malta in 1949. Over the years she’s given us many reasons why her family migrated, none of them heroic. She bores her mates in the Italian café rigid with talk of a home more imagined than real.
‘The most bewdiful place in the world,’ Nana says over her coffee. ‘And friends that know your family right back.’
‘What the hell you know about Malta? What kinda history you got there anyway?’ shouts Ugo from behind the counter. He’s wiping grease off the plastic menus. ‘I leave you to your memories, Teresa,’ he says, and scratches a fat belly. ‘Enjoy.’
‘Don’t get me started on history.’ My Nana’s mind is groping for some detail about Mussolini. She’s trying to waggle her finger at Ugo but she’s pointing at the cash register instead. Her joints, riddled with arthritis, are askew. And then Nana goes silent. Details have slipped.
*
My father, Frank, is home all day now. He sits at the desk in his office and scribbles. There’s a line that he can’t finish. He can’t find the rhyme. He’s been staring at it for nearly an hour and now he reaches for the whisky bottle beneath his chair, optimistic that one little drink will be the key to unlock his thorny arrangement of words.
All my father’s drawers are bottom drawers, stuffed with reams of scrawled pages. Before he was a compulsive poet he was a teacher of ancient history, a specialist in oracles and divination. His walls are covered with certificates and postcards of eroding stone sites. But knowledge that has no market value, the dean of his old university told him, is difficult to fight for. Looking at Frank the dean didn’t see a fighter.
My father likes to joke that ancient history is ancient history. He took his pay-out with a shrug and dec
ided he’d be a poet instead.
*
And here’s my mother, Helena, parking her shiny car and clacking her way up the garden path in silly shoes, the office laptop swinging at her side. She peeks in the door of Dad’s study and kisses him somewhere between his eye and his ear. She can’t find his mouth anymore, even though it’s right where it’s always been. His neck is stretched up, his own lips are parted, ready to give and receive.
‘Where the hell is my mother?’ asks Mum, disappearing. ‘If she’s gone off to that damn café again, I’ll send her to a home. Don’t think I won’t. And I suppose you haven’t made a start on the dinner.’
*
Outside, the gutters are clogged with leaves and the shrubbery needs a prune. My Nan’s two goats gnaw the yellow grass. Ford looks at Holden and Holden turns his efficient head to Ford. They stare a while before returning to their meal. God, how simple it is to be a goat.
I spread out the vegetable peelings and watch them chew.
We’re a disaster of a family; rootless, no religion or politics, no sense of a culture beyond the concrete buildings and the football fields we visit. Our past is a mishmash of Irish and Maltese. Migrants hunger after dining suites and qualifications and somewhere along the way something important gets lost.
I look up and see that Rebecca’s curtains are drawn. She’s depressed. Her cannibal mind is eating itself.
*
She got back from overseas a week ago. We celebrated her homecoming with wine and watermelon on the back lawn. Nana opened the windows wide to hear Juliette Greco on the record player and danced a two-step with the goats.
‘When I was young,’ began my mother, ‘we thought we were lucky if we made it over to the beach. Fifteen miles was all we dreamed of.’
Rebecca didn’t say, ‘Mum, you should have dreamt more. If only you’d dreamt more.’ Instead, she lolled against our father and started handing out presents. There was a bottle of brandy for Dad. For Nan, a crushed packet of biscuits. A watercolour of fishermen for Mum, who put it to one side with barely a glance. A T-shirt with an inane slogan for our little brother, Karl.