The Good Mother / In The Wake Of The Raftsmen

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  Volume 5: Issue 3

  Mary-Rose MacColl & Inga Simpson

  Imprint

  Published by Review of Australian Fiction

  “The Good Mother” Copyright © 2013 by Mary-Rose MacColl

  “In the Wake of the Raftsmen” Copyright © 2013 by Inga Simpson

  www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com

  * * *

  This project has received financial assistance from the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

  And support from the Queensland Writers' Centre

  Editorial

  Kate Eltham

  There’s something in Mary-Rose MacColl’s voice. You hear it when she reads to you. A slight tremor underneath the husky edge of it, so that whether you’re hearing her tell you about floating in the ocean off Byron Bay, or about a child who has nearly drowned in a friend’s backyard pool, as I did when I heard her read in Brisbane’s Avid Reader bookstore, you know you’re not entirely safe from bursting into tears. Not safe at all.

  That’s MacColl’s voice on the page too. Not safe. Hard and real and, sure, husky-edged. But not safe at all. Which was the feeling I had as soon as I began “The Good Mother”, the story she has contributed to this issue of Review of Australian Fiction. The titular character in “The Good Mother” teeters on the line between sympathy and madness, and it’s her uncertainty that MacColl drives so skillfully throughout the story. It is a deeply moving story, with a touch of the gothic that I know will hold you in its grip.

  Mary-Rose MacColl’s first novel, No Safe Place (1996), was runner-up in The Australian Vogel Literary Award. She went on to publish Angels in the Architecture (1999) and Killing Superman (2003), and just last year, her new novel In Falling Snow (2012), a multi-generational tale of love and friendship set against the drama of World War I.

  A few years ago I helped establish a program at Queensland Writers Centre with publishers Hachette Australia to identify talented emerging writers with unpublished manuscripts. Inga Simpson was one of the early participants in the program with her novel manuscript “Mr Wigg”. I’d already been well aware of Inga in the Queensland writing scene, where she had been mentoring other writers at Olvar Wood Writing Retreat and through her postgraduate studies in creative writing at QUT. But reading the first fifty pages of “Mr Wigg” was my first introduction to her beautiful, spare, stripped-back prose that patiently examines and polishes the tiny details of every day life.

  Inga is also a nature writer, having won the 2012 Eric Rolls Nature Writing Prize and being selected for the University of Montana’s annual Environmental Writing Institute workshop. It shows in this story, “In the Wake of the Raftsmen”, where even the roll-and-sway pace of these characters gliding down the river, or pushing toward their deadly goal, is not too fast for Inga to stop and examine the loamy details of the forested world around them.

  I am impatient for Inga’s novel, which succeeded well enough at the Manuscript Development Program to be selected for publication and is due for release later this year. In the meantime I have this bittersweet tale to tide me over.

  Enjoy.

  Kate Eltham

  Director, Brisbane Writers’ Festival

  @kate_eltham

  The Good Mother

  Mary-Rose MacColl

  The builders had been digging under the house since first thing. I’d left with Declan, intending to drop him at daycare and get to the lab early. But our builder Dave called me to come back to the house. You’d been with us for two years by then, and I should have known.

  There were three police cars parked in the street and a van, which Declan declared was a forensics truck, halfway up the dirt track where the driveway was planned. I pulled in behind the van. ‘How do you know it’s forensics?’ I asked Declan, without getting out of the car, punching Mark’s number on the phone. ‘I’m just going to ring Daddy at work,’ I said. Mark wasn’t answering. Declan didn’t respond to my question and I looked up and saw Forensics painted on the back doors of the van. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Forensics. You can read?’ Declan just smiled. He has the dearest smile. He must have seen a forensics unit on television with Mark.

  They’d run police tape across the front of the house, like a blue checked bow on a gift. The people over the road were standing on their verandah watching us, along with the man next door who’d told me his name which I’d forgotten.

  I got out of the car, took Declan from his seat and carried him up the makeshift steps the builders had put in when they’d knocked down the front wall. Declan often says he’s too big to be carried but today he didn’t say it. We’d reached the police tape and I put Declan down to go under it, keeping a firm grip on his hand. A uniformed policeman stopped me. ‘Sorry, no entry,’ he said.

  ‘This is my house,’ I felt a spark of anger, looked around for Dave.

  The officer turned. ‘Ken!’ he called out in a flat voice, gesturing towards Declan and me. ‘Owner.’

  A tall man in a suit broke from a tight group huddled under the house as if around a campfire. His pants were too short and his pointed shoes looked too big. I noticed Dave then, off to one side with two others, work boots and shorts, t-shirt and unbuttoned long-sleeved checked shirt, the uniform of builders everywhere. Dave hadn’t seen me, was looking towards the group, arms folded, shaking his head.

  ‘Morning,’ the man in the suit said and smiled. His smile unnerved me. I kept getting flashes of something, just off to one side. ‘G’day young fella,’ he said to Declan who stared.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I said.

  ‘We’ve found...’ His eyes went to Declan. ‘Your builder’s found something. I’m Detective Sergeant Ken Poole.’ He looked back to me, holding out a hand to shake which I didn’t take. ‘Let’s go up a ways,’ he said then. Dave had seen us now and was walking towards us, doing his best to smile. He looked worried. I looked back at the police officer who was looking hard at me as we walked up the dirt track to the house.

  When he reached us, Dave crouched down to Declan’s height and said, ‘Where’s your helmet, buddy?’

  ‘In the car.’

  ‘Well you can’t come on site without your helmet. Let’s go get it.’ He flicked a look up at me, those clear blue eyes like water. ‘We were just digging and...’ Poole shook his head and Dave stopped.

  While Declan went with Dave, Poole led me further under the house. He asked my name, my husband’s name. He wrote what I said with a pencil stub in a small notebook. I was just about to ask why he wanted to know when he gestured me to come further under. We had to bend our heads. He pointed still further, where a man in a white plastic suit was digging with a small shovel, tipping the dirt through a sieve into a large white bag. Two others, same white suits, were crouched around the man digging, but they were turned now to look at me. Another was raking dirt further under the house.

  ‘Your builder’s found human remains,’ Poole said, ‘a jawbone.’ He rubbed his own, as if to check it was still in situ, and looked at me. I was silent. Now there were teeth, he said, leg bones, the top of a skull. A burial, Poole said, not too deep.

  I thought I might fall over so I leaned against a post. ‘Do you know me?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said, a look of surprise on his face. I must have fainted then because the next thing I knew I was looking up into his face with Declan beside him and Dave beside Declan. ‘I need to call my lawyer,’ I said.

  * * *

  We’d bought the house accidentally. I may have told you about it. It was halfway along a street of beautiful old houses on the top of a cliff over the sea. All the others were well kept, most renovated. But thi
s one, above an old stone wall, was an aluminium-clad box around a worker’s cottage, now adulterated beyond recognition of its original self. The front verandah had been boarded in, with two small barred windows glaring down at the street. Rickety stairs led up to a plain front door. The interior smelled stale, not like a house at the sea at all. The original timber walls had been replaced by asbestos sheeting, easier to paint than boards I guess, although there’s no doubt asbestos will kill you, slowly and agonisingly: mesothelioma, asbestosis, lung cancer, all nasty diseases. The ceilings had been plastered at some stage and were now flaking onto the furniture. Plaster dust won’t kill you but any fine dust will make you sick. The floors were covered in a khaki colour of carpet that looked as if it had never been cleaned. I could smell mould.

  The day we visited, a middle-aged man was sitting in a chair watching a small television. He didn’t even look up at us. I saw the tell-tale purple pen marks on his forehead. Outside the house, the agent told us the man had a brain tumour. She whispered it even thought he couldn’t have heard. He wasn’t going to live long, I thought.

  The position’s fantastic, Mark said to the agent, north–south on the side of the hill, protected from the western sun and wind, protected from the sea by the high cliff. Our friends who knew about houses said it looked perfect, when Mark sent photos, but I had reservations. It was out of our price range once we figured in the amount of work needed. I was relieved we couldn’t afford it although I couldn’t have said why.

  Just after you came back that first time, we’d decided to sell our little condo in the city and set out on what we hoped could be a new life. I wanted to be near the beach so I could swim. Mark, who would have done anything to help, had found a little town on the coast, aptly called Hope Springs, with a sheltered swimming bay and small beach. When he got a job at the community library further down the coast, we made the move. We’d been renting an apartment for nearly a year now while we searched for a home. I was still commuting to the university’s southern campus three days a week when I felt up to it, lecturing first year medical students and working in the lab. They liked me in the medical school, a doctor who’d become a scientist. Mostly, they left me to myself.

  Head for home, my GP said to me when I told her about the move. Home is where the heart is. But to head for home, you have to have a homing instinct, and all my instincts had deserted me. Mostly now I felt that the life I’d been living was going on just to the left of me, out of frame, its sound slightly muffled, its colours dulled. And every now and then–I never knew when it would happen–I’d be doing something, talking to someone, and I’d have to get out, find somewhere small and safe, a bathroom, a car, a cupboard, and hide. I’d fall to the floor, my whole body trembling with fear, and scream, into a pillow or towel so no one would hear. You told me it wasn’t your fault, and I agree it wasn’t.

  It was Mark who suggested we see the counsellor, but I knew you were never going to agree to that. You had other plans. I had to deal with you in my own way. You wanted my body. There’s nothing you can counsel about that kind of desire.

  * * *

  Months after we’d first seen the house, the agent called and said she was taking all offers to the owners: five children of deceased parents, four of whom were wanting their share of the money, the fifth, with the brain tumour and living in the house, to be moved into care. We should offer, the agent said, because you never knew. So we offered hundreds of thousands less than what they were asking. Mark was keen, I wasn’t and I didn’t think it would come to anything.

  I was at work when the agent rang to say they’d accepted our offer, and I got off the phone and did the silliest thing. I’d been working up a protein with a PhD student and I don’t know why but I added valine instead of alanine. Three weeks, wasted. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t make mistakes like that.

  I called Mark. ‘Oh, sweetheart, we’re on the way,’ he said. Although he didn’t say it, he meant we could move on now, I’d be better, and I wanted to agree but instead told him about the valine. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he was saying. ‘We’ve got a house.’

  I drove by with Declan on the way home that afternoon. I told myself we could renovate the house. We could make sure it was environmentally safe for Declan. A lot of people don’t realise that modern houses give off enough chemicals to induce respiratory difficulty in otherwise healthy children. I tried to keep the thought of a healthy house in my head but it slipped away. I caught Declan’s eye in the rear-view. I must have been frowning. ‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ Declan said. ‘Daddy is not a good builder but I have been learning from Granddad and he is a real builder.’

  ‘That’s a good point,’ I said. ‘I feel so much better.’ I looked up at the house perched on its rock wall; implacable, it seemed right then.

  * * *

  More police from the city came during the morning so that by lunchtime the whole street knew something had happened in our house, police cars lined up behind one another like a police convention. I could hear muffled voices but never loudly enough to know what they were saying. The building work had stopped and Dave and his men had left to go to another job. The first officer I’d met, Poole, had come upstairs.

  I left him in the living room and went into Declan’s room whereDeclan had poured Lego all over the floor. He asked me why the policemen were digging. I told him they’d found some old bones. ‘Like archeology,’ I said. ‘That’s why they’re going to keep looking.’

  ‘A mummy?’ Declan said.

  ‘Exactly.’ I didn’t say more. I tried to call Mark again but got his voicemail, left another message, more urgent this time. I turned around and there was Poole, standing in the doorway. ‘Are you watching me?’ I think I said. He didn’t respond.

  I led Poole back out into the living room. He was looking carefully at me. ‘I really don’t know what came over me,’ I said. ‘The shock.’ I was nodding, I realised, trying to convince myself.

  ‘I can imagine,’ he said. He went out and came back in with a glass of water. He handed the glass to me. I wanted to ask had he used the filtered water – the pipes are lead. ‘How many kids you got?’ he said, crouching down in front of me. I’d sat down on the floor. Just the one, I said carefully. He smiled. ‘So, can we just go through the dates again? When you arrived, how long you’ve been here.’ He looked around. There were clothes and toys and books and groceries over every surface, even the floor.

  I told Poole what we were doing to renovate the house, that we’d moved in a year ago but the work had dragged on and on. I asked when they might know something about the child. I started crying.

  ‘I didn’t say it was a child,’ he said. ‘We don’t know anything yet.’ I wanted to say, it’s a child, I already know it is, but I knew I mustn’t say that. Now I couldn’t stop crying. Poole looked away, uncomfortable, finally said I should call my husband and have him come home, that they’d need to talk further with us if that was all right but he’d come back later. He took his leave and if I didn’t know better, I’d have said he was kind.

  * * *

  The day the contract on the house settled we went over and drank champagne. Although it was empty of the detritus of a family’s sixty years, the interior was cloying, as if one couldn’t take in enough air. The frosted glass in the windows allowed only dim light on the western side and so the living areas were dark. The bedrooms, which opened to the view of the sea, were light and airy but I felt uneasy in the main bedroom, nearest the front verandah, almost an experience of vertigo, as if the house might be unstable there. When Declan jumped up and down in the room, I yelled at him to stop. Mark just looked at me. I couldn’t explain.

  In the other rooms, the plaster ceilings were mouldy and the air was dank. We quickly gravitated to the back yard. We returned the next day with the architect, and the same thing happened. We walked through the house and met in the yard. It was as if the house pushed you out.

  Before settlement, we’d employed a surveyor who told
us the western edge of the house was sitting in the neighbour’s yard. It was an occasional problem, he said, from the days they couldn’t measure properly. Mark asked him why they didn’t just change the boundary. It’s over the boundary, the surveyor said. I know, Mark said, so why don’t they just change the boundary to reflect the house? It’s over the boundary, the surveyor said again. Mark shook his head, frustrated. The solution, the surveyor told us, was to move the house or buy the neighbour’s land. Our solicitor assured us she could get us out of the contract. No, we said. I think Mark was still chasing a dream, a house, a family, normality, and I was desperate to return to the life I’d once had, or to go forward into something else.

  We’re no renovators. Mark is a librarian, I might have told you that. He’s interested in history without needing to recreate it, and I’m a scientist whose whole career has been devoted to making the world plain to itself. Neither of us wants to pretend we live in the 1890s in the 2000s, except to the extent that we, well I more than Mark, want Declan to live in a house free of the poisons of modern building. I’m sure you’d understand that.

  ‘Look at that view,’ our friends, Lana and Greg, who brought the champagne said, and it buoyed me up. Mark squeezed my hand, put his arm around me, happy for the first time in months. I felt irritated, as if his happiness was wrong-footed but I couldn’t have said why.

  * * *

  Mark arrived home at five, just after the police left. They’d told us we weren’t to go under the house until they cleared the site. I’d kept Declan upstairs with me all day. We were in the middle room, sorting the washing. If my thoughts went to what was under the house, I put them elsewhere, on Declan, the washing, Lego.