I thought we’d talk about it, but we never did. I guess there’s things best left unsaid.
There was a wilfulness about him that put his own needs first, as though there was something owed, and if it wasn’t given, he would take it. If I were more like him, I might have stayed longer with the horse and fed the stone to it. Its breathing was slow and regular, a constant beside me, like the wind. I wondered what would happen if it stopped. And what would the damage deliver?
I stooped and tugged a fistful of grass from the ground and approached the horse. It swung its head and took it from my fingers with barely a brush of its lips. All I felt was its hot breath soft against my skin.
*
The girl was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother and Mrs Criely when I got back. She was older than I’d thought, barely a girl at all. Mrs Criely must have walked the long way round.
‘Michael,’ my mother said, ‘this is Liddy. She’s come to visit.’
The girl started from her chair toward me then stopped, and there was a moment of awkwardness that has stayed with me where I didn’t know what to say or whether to reach out or smile or nod. I had no idea why she was there. She braced herself against the table as though she might fall into the space between us.
‘Hello,’ I said.
She was Brendan’s age or older, a woman really. She had pale, washed-out eyes and thin lips smudged with lipstick.
‘I’m Liddy,’ she said. ‘I’m …’
Her fingernails were bitten to the quick.
‘Liddy. I’m Liddy.’
She was like some creature in a spotlight. She looked from me to Mum to Mrs Criely, then sat down again and folded her hands in her lap. There was a crucifix around her neck, the kind you bought on card from the piety stall at the back of the church.
She must have been there a while. There were cups of tea and a half-finished plate of biscuits. Mrs Criely pushed the plate towards me.
‘Where’s Dad?’ I asked.
‘Out,’ Mum said. ‘He’s gone out.’
Liddy didn’t take her eyes off me.
‘Michael collects stones,’ Mum said, as though to change the subject. ‘Don’t you, Michael?’
Liddy leaned further towards me and smiled. She wanted something from me that I couldn’t hope to understand.
‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘They’re not very good.’
‘Why don’t you show them to Liddy?’ Mum said. ‘She’d like that.’
She was out of her chair before I could answer.
‘Go on,’ Mum said, and I could tell she and Mrs Criely wanted to talk.
*
I kept the stones in a box by the side of the shed. Most of them were unremarkable: sandstone, bluestone, limestone. Some shards of quartz. But there were some with lichen stains that might have been fossils, and a piece of polished chalcedony I’d bought from a shop. I’d made a start on grouping them. I had labels stuck to the inside of the box and a coloured chart on cardboard.
Liddy wanted to know about every one: where I’d found it, how long I’d had it, how I knew what it was called. She stood closer to me than she needed. There was the faint smell of mothballs about her, beneath some cheap perfume.
‘They’re lovely, Michael,’ she said. ‘They’re really lovely. They are.’ Though even I could tell they weren’t. ‘Is it what you want to do?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘When you grow up. Is it what you want to do? The stones?’
She was only asking, but she didn’t take her eyes off me and it made the whole thing – the box, the handwritten labels, the earnest attempts at scientific classification – seem like something I should have outgrown.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It’s just something.’
‘It’s more than something,’ she said. ‘You should do the things you like.’
I could feel the piece of basalt, still heavy against my leg. There were more like it in the box, dull black specimens of ordinary rock. I should have thrown it on my way back home, or left it near the horse. But I hadn’t. I’d carried it back, and as I pulled it from my pocket to put back in the box, she saw it.
‘That’s a nice stone,’ she said. ‘Did you collect it today?’
She moved even closer to me. I could smell her hair and see the small cracks in her lips where she’d chewed the lipstick off.
‘It’s nothing,’ I said, and I pointed to the other pieces in the box. ‘It’s just basalt.’
She reached out to me then and touched my hand, and when I didn’t move, she closed her thin fingers over mine to hold the stone. She was trembling. The longer we stood there, the tighter she clasped my hand. But still, her arm kept shaking and her eyes kept their hold on mine.
‘Michael,’ she said.
Nothing else. Just ‘Michael,’ in a broken sort of voice as though she was about to cry.
Eventually, I prised my fingers free and handed her the stone. She held it to her chest like something precious.
*
‘They never wanted him, really,’ Brendan said. ‘Neither of them, but they couldn’t say it.’
It was the same night when he’d come searching. He’d given up looking for whatever it was he wanted, and was stretched out on the floor.
‘You couldn’t blame them. I mean, Mr Criely never wanted a replacement. He wanted his own boy back. How’s he meant to feel? Colin was hardly gone when they handed him over the fence like a parcel of meat.’
‘Who?’ I said, but he kept talking, lying flat on the floor like I wasn’t there. It took me longer than it should have to realise he was talking about Lonan.
‘Right there where they cut the gate. Dad was happy to see him go. I mean, they never asked. They never even asked. For all those years, there’d only been me. You weren’t coming in a hurry and they just assumed that was it. There’s the three of us, and the other room with no one in it, so they just thought. Only they didn’t think. Did they? I mean, how’s Dad supposed to feel? Like there’s only the one, then nothing. Then the nuns come knocking at the door like they do and Mum can’t say no because they’re nuns and we’re Catholic, and it’s only for a while.’
‘For a while?’ I say. Everything changed then. How could I not have known? ‘How long did he live here?’ I asked.
‘Eight months,’ Brendan said. ‘He was as good as ours. As good as Mum’s, anyway. Then Colin Criely goes and dies, and there’s a gap next door in need of filling.’
I don’t know how long he lay there on the floor, but in the morning, he was gone, and not long after that, he left for Queensland and the mines. The only times we saw him were when he flew back for a visit.
*
Liddy was gone by the time Lonan returned. Mum and Mrs Criely kept refreshing the pot and stayed talking in the kitchen for an hour or more, their voices rising and falling in degrees of confidentiality when I came near.
Eventually, there was a knock at the door, and it was the nuns. Lonan was standing between them. They didn’t come in, just delivered him to the door and left. Lonan told me he’d been with them all day. He was going to make his confirmation so he’d been to church first, then he’d worked all afternoon in the nuns’ garden, pulling weeds and shovelling dirt into the beds. We didn’t talk about the horse. Mrs Criely finished her tea and the two of them walked home together. Later, I heard Mr Criely sweeping out the birds and muttering to them the way he did.
They’re long gone now of course, the Crielys and the birds. The fence was replaced some years after they left and the aviary went with it. I remember thinking how long Mr Criely used to spend there and how little time it took for it to go. There was nothing to it really, just a rectangle of open space enclosed by wire.
I eventually found what Brendan had been looking for in my room that night.
It was years later. The Crielys had gone. Brendan had married and moved back to Melbourne and his stuff was still jammed in the wardrobe, all but forgotten when he’d cleared out the other room. It was at the back of the chest of drawers where it had fallen into a closed space.
I didn’t realise what it was at first. I assumed the handwriting was Brendan’s. It was small and neat with twenty-five entries to a page. Half the pages were filled: more than five hundred sightings recorded in his small, tight script. Greenfinch. Song Thrush. Indian Mynah. Spotted Pardalote. Magpie Lark. Each was dated and annotated. On the wing. Perched. Nesting. And on the centre page, in an even smaller script, Colin Criely had recorded his tally of sightings and birds he’d yet to claim.
I thought of him and Brendan out there, working for Neary with one eye on the plantings and one on the open sky, looking to fill the gaps. Black Kite. Satin Bowerbird. Golden Whistler. And after that, empty page after empty page.
Aftermath
Kevin Brophy
They were good people and perhaps this was the real cause of their troubles. The hallway in their house had two bicycles leaning on the wall, an old wedding photo hanging precariously by a nail that had chipped the plaster when Matt had hammered it in. There were scarves on the back of the front door, some helmets rolling under the wheels of the bikes and their son’s razor scooter down the far end near the kitchen. It was tricky walking to the front door, and they had learnt, more or less, to angle themselves away from the scooter, sway past the bikes, step over the helmets, avoid scraping an ear on the wedding photo and brush aside the scarves to get to the doorknob that opened the front door to a rare visitor. Mostly they used the back door from the side lane. Their friends had learnt to do this too. It took a surprisingly long time to get to the front door from the kitchen where they spent most of their lives, so whatever stranger was knocking would usually knock again, louder, or sometimes walk away before the door was opened. Matt would call out, ‘Coming, coming,’ but not so loud that the sound of his voice penetrated to the outside. It was more like an instruction to himself to gather his person into a social presence in preparation for the stranger at the door.
On this day he managed to open the door before the third round of knocking to find in front of him in the sunshine of the late afternoon two young men in crumpled suits. They had American accents. One of them looked vaguely Japanese. They smiled as though they had just begun their day and it was going to be a good one. Of course he understood what they were and what they wanted. They were concerned about the world, and he was too. They wanted a better world, and he did too. It was almost enough to break your heart to see two young men so sure that they had all the important answers and the important questions as well in a pamphlet in their hands, the whole text learnt by heart. He asked them in. Sarah was not happy about it but she put on the kettle and got out some fruit scones. The fruit scones were fresh but a bit crumbly. She had put a little too much butter in the mix because she’d been watching one of those American crime shows while she made up the batch. No end of evil in the world to entertain and distract us, Matt was fond of saying. In this particular series the evil ones were not truly evil, for they were usually dim characters who acted impulsively then tried to cover their tracks, which they could not do against the formidable brains of the team on the side of the law. She told Matt that these stories were modern allegories, small miracle stories that Jesus would have made up if he had arrived two thousand years too late for his crucifixion. He would have written screenplays instead of sermons, because that’s what screenplays really are, they’re sermons.
‘Here you are, boys,’ she said, as she arranged the scones and butter and jam in front of them with their steaming cups. She could see that they considered they were receiving an authentic welcome from authentic locals. This was something they would write about on a postcard, an experience brief enough with the main ingredients clear and unmistakable.
They spoke of Jesus and of the end of the world and of the church just opened down the road with a new preacher and a new message, one that would bring people’s hearts closer to the divine presence. Matt asked them if they had experienced the divine presence themselves. He was curious in that way. They nodded gravely. He asked them to describe what it had felt like for them, but he asked so quietly that they did not feel they were being set up for ridicule. They spoke openly of the way their hearts had burst in their chests, their heads had been spinning and their vision had blurred so that light was spreading everywhere until they were inside the very dawn itself. Their hands had been shaking, they said, and their tongues were loosened in their mouths, their teeth felt like they were being smashed on stones and their ears were ringing. Sarah exclaimed, ‘That’s enough, that’s enough for anyone. Don’t tell us any more.’
The missionaries sipped their tea. A boy of about eleven or twelve came in from the backyard where he had been sitting with the cat, teasing it as usual with a furry toy on the end of a string. Either the cat would never learn it was being tricked or it enjoyed the game as much as he did. The boy, Tristan, their son, was introduced to Malchiel (‘Mal’) and Joshua, who stood up and shook hands solemnly with him, one then the other. They also greeted Tristan by using his name back to him, ‘So good to meet with you, brother Tristan, on this fine afternoon.’
Tristan got himself a scone too and sat down at the table for he wanted to listen to these formal men who seemed to be so awkward in the world and so new to it. They are like kittens, he thought, but they’re so big. Matt did not ask more questions for he knew that the answers would be long-winded, over-confident and infuriatingly short on logic. Tristan, though, wanted to know if the devil was as real to them as God. ‘Anyone,’ Mal said, ‘who slanders the Lord speaks the words of Satan. You know the devil when you feel the walls of his prison building up inside you, trapping you away from the light, and you can smell the flames that would eat you for eternity.’
Matt steered the talk to somewhere else, asking where they came from. They said they were both from Kansas, from a town that hosted the largest military prison in the United States. Malchiel said his father was a lawyer who dealt in properties. Joshua’s father worked in a hospital as a guard. They were both from wholesome Christian families, they said, and they complimented Matt and Sarah on the homeliness of their cottage. They said that this was the first cottage they had been invited into. They found it delightful. They had no idea that tea could taste so refreshing. Almost like a drug, Joshua laughed. He was slightly less pious than his partner. Tristan wanted them to leave now so that the family could go back to saying whatever came into their heads, which was usually much the same things in much the same phrases every day, but it felt right and it felt comfortable, as comfortable as the soft sound of rain on their roof that went on for months and months, eventually greening everything around them. The boys made no sign of being about to leave. They wanted to know if Matt and Sarah and Tristan too would come to just one service in the hall down the other end of the village next Sunday. It will be just simple Christian folks, they said. The word ‘folks,’ it sounded special in their mouths. They lengthened the ‘o’ in the middle and almost made a thing of the silent ‘l’ in their cheeks as they pushed out the last two consonants. Tristan wondered if the word really did have a plural form but he let it go. He would look out for it in books, he might even look up the dictionary at school if he got there early enough in the morning and Mrs Scillion the librarian would let him into her domain, as she called it.
Matt finally said yes, they might go, and the boys were pleased with themselves, and with the luck the Lord had brought them. They could have sung a hymn right there in their suits and no one would have been surprised if they had then revealed wings kept under their coats. There were handshakes all round. Matt’s handshake was limp. He did not know properly how to shake hands because it had happened rarely in his life that anyone shook his hand. Either people knew him too well to need to
touch him or the situation was so formal and Matt so insignificant that he did not put himself forward for a shake with anyone’s hand. He felt special, however, when these boys held out their big hands. He smiled without having meant to smile. After they had left, Tristan leaned over to the plate of scones to help himself to another one. ‘They’re good, Mum,’ he said, ‘but they could have been more cakey.’
The service in the old guild hall at the end of High Street was an occasion that rattled the couple. There was so much singing, and more shaking of hands, and then there was the moaning that came from the congregation as the sermon on the topic of the wounds of Christ was delivered. None of the people they knew from their many years of drinking and eating at the White Horse or the Cock on the Corner were there. The couple supposed that the people who had materialised for the service must have mostly been staying at one of the string of caravan parks between this town and the next along the coast. Afterwards the two boys crowded round and begged them to come again, saying that they could feel the two of them were such good people that their goodness had spread among the others in the room, making a golden atmosphere. They said yes, they would come again.
So they fell into it, and further into it, so far into it that Sarah was taking scones up there on Sundays and Matt was scraping up whatever coins and notes he had around the house at the end of the week to give to the new church. That’s what they called it. The New Church. Those who went there began to think of themselves as the New People. Matt rather liked thinking of himself as one of these New People, even though he was contradicted by the mirror in the bathroom and by the way his bones were becoming exquisite carriers of many fine distinctions in arthritic pain. Tristan noticed changes in the way his parents spoke and thought. None of it he liked. As far as he was concerned his parents had been bewitched. There are no new people, nobody has ever been new, not for two or three hundred thousand years, he thought to himself as he scooted around the streets after his friends or just went to and from the café where that girl with bright cheeks, brown eyes and sarcastic lips served him his soft drink. Maybe not for five hundred thousand years, he decided contradictiously. Those American boys knew nothing. He had been reading a bit in the library at school where Mrs Scillion, librarian to the bottom of her soul, had taken a liking to him and had begun to say, ‘My domain is your kingdom, young man. I’ve never seen such a reader in this school.’ Mrs Scillion showed him books that explained how ancient was the species we call human according to Darwin and those who follow him. Tristan was pleased to read these books. The pictures and the colourful timelines in diagrams made a lot of sense to him. He preferred these books to television for a while. He thought that one day he might be a librarian himself. Or an archaeologist. He would try to talk to Sandra at the café about which she thought would suit him better in the end.
The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 19