by Ashley Hay
She pulled the little carton towards her, blowing at the dust. The tape gave way at once, as well as one end of the box, and a mosaic of photographs spilled down through the gap. Past the cases and onto the wooden floor below—the thick, matte cardboard of old black-and-whites; the slightly bleached colours of the sixties, the early seventies. There were men, women and children. There were cars and buses, streets, beaches, parks. And this house, this very house.
Climbing down from the stepladder, Lucy gathered the heap of rectangles and flipped over some to read the words written there. Mount Nebo. Mount Glorious. Marcoola. Wellington Point. A ball was going on in Cloudland—there was the back of a woman in a shimmering silver dress. And there were children: one generation, then another.
A woman, often pictured, who might be Elsie herself. Why not? Nice to meet you. Lucy smiled, shifting this last picture from side to side, as if some more of this person might appear.
The woman in the picture smiled back.
And you must meet Ben. Lucy let the conversation run on. He’s overseas at the moment. I think you’ll like him. How easy was this daydream of a game.
‘Of course we’ll be fine on our own,’ Lucy had said as Ben left for the airport earlier that morning. ‘You have a lovely time.’ Now, squaring the photos into a pile, she noticed a heavier silence.
‘Tom? What you doing?’ she called. ‘Are you OK?’
He was standing at the front door, pointing, a huge grin on his little face. ‘Mummy! No rain! Look! No rain!’
She left the photos where they were, racing to harness him into his pram and get out into the air before the next shower came through. The street was bustling with people taking advantage of the break in the weather—checking letterboxes, dumping garbage, carrying parcels from the car. Somewhere nearby a brushcutter roared into life, working against the lush tropical growth brought up everywhere by all this water.
The vines, the trees, the leaves and branches on every plant in this place: she could almost see them growing while she watched.
On an earlier walk, a few streets from home she’d seen an old weatherboard house, the same dimensions, probably even the same layout as her own. In its front yard, and all around, the garden’s plants had grown up to the guttering and beyond—they passed the roof’s apex in some parts and were heading for the sky. They reminded her of the jungle that grew in the boy’s bedroom in Where the Wild Things Are, and she’d said as much to Tom as they stood and regarded the thicket.
‘Look, sweetheart, a jungle, like in Max’s room. Do you think there are wild things in there?’
It had looked a sad place—abandoned, she’d thought. Until today, as they came around the corner and she saw that the entire yard had been threshed down to the ground and a path cut from the pavement to the front steps. Did someone live there? she wondered. Had they been in there all the time, unable to leave, waiting for some fit young relative to come with a scythe, a mower, and one of those loud machines with razor-sharp line? Or had the occupant had to fight their way out in the end, pushing through to the shed with inappropriate knives and scissors, whatever came to hand?
The idea of nature’s reclamation. The idea of disappearing, being overrun and immersed. No wonder this place made no sense, the shapes, the directions of roads and the river. Perhaps they, too, were constantly being overrun and diverging to find themselves a clear new path.
She saw a laneway to the left and ducked along it, blinking when it delivered her just up from the end of her own street—‘A wormhole, Tom!’—as the clouds broke and the rain came down again.
And she ran, the pram’s wheels humming, and fetched up drenched on their porch.
‘Well, we made the most of that!’ Lucy laughed, peeling off Tom’s wet things and rubbing at his hair. ‘Mind Elsie’s pictures—they’re just there on the floor.’ Watching him barrel back into the house, his legs wide like a cowboy’s, as she fiddled with the hinges on the pram.
After she’d dried herself, she squared the stacks of photos on her lap and sat them gently on Elsie’s star-shaped doily, as if some magic might spark between the other woman’s objects. Tom drove his little train back and forth across the floor, its wheels making a satisfying clack as they turned. He had rich brown hair, unlike hers, unlike Ben’s. His own mother’s hair, Ben had said.
She’d thought more about Ben’s mother since they’d moved up north. Perhaps it was to do with being new herself, to this place, and to motherhood.
A single mother. Brisbane. The early 1960s. Had she known people by the time her husband left? Had there been money sent, support somehow maintained? All the practicalities that Ben had never mentioned—perhaps he’d never thought of them himself.
What would I do?
Mrs Carter wound up working in the office of the school that Ben went to—the only solution, Lucy saw now, to the necessary demands that he made on her time.
Did you love her enough? she wanted to ask her snoring husband once as she lay awake in the kind of sudden 3 am funk when everything felt hopeless. Did you thank her for all that she did?
How had she borne it, this hot strange place, so far from London, and on her own? How had she found the way, the means, of feeling capable, sufficient, by herself?
Lucy wished she could have told Ben’s mum that her boy would turn out well. She wished she could have known her. She thought of her own parents in a kind of shorthand as distinct and perfect opposites. She’d never known them together—had always bounced between their separate lives. Ben’s mother was a blank canvas that she could imagine and enrich. Sometimes, holding Tom, she wondered what shorthand he’d design for her, for Ben, when he was grown up himself.
She’d been flicking through Elsie’s photographs—once; then again—and now she spread them across the floor, well away from Tom’s trains. All these moments, caught on film. Perhaps they’d slot together like a jigsaw. A blue one; another blue one—she reached over as she sorted them, selecting different variations of the same colour.
‘Look: we can make our own picture,’ she said at last, perching on the edge of the sofa to admire the collage that she’d made.
And as she angled her phone to take a shot, it buzzed once—a message from her father, checking in on Tom and the rain.
All good here, she tapped back, and look what we found—Elsie! Sending through the collage-photo in reply.
What a thing to leave behind, thought Lucy, on top of having to leave here at all.
‘She’ll be so thrilled to have them back—’ she started to say when another sound came from above and Tom jumped too.
‘What do you think? Is that a possum living upstairs?’ Lucy spoke quietly, trying to lessen her own heart’s thump. She just hoped it wasn’t a snake.
There was another bump, and a rustling noise like the sound of rain. And then there was rain—another wall of it. Lucy sighed and leaned her head back, looking up.
‘No possums in London,’ Lucy observed to her son. ‘And I never had one in Sydney either. Perhaps it’s come in from the wet too.’
This astonishing place: sit still long enough and the wildlife took such liberties. It was as if there was only a porous border, at best, between what was outside and what was in.
Tom climbed into her lap and they settled themselves on the sofa. The collage lay like a rug across the floor.
All these moments: Lucy glanced across the images. Here were the people she took to be Elsie’s family—Elsie herself, as she guessed, her husband, her boy and her girl. Here they were with a steam train. Here they were with a wedding car. Here they were arranged across the front steps of this house. A record of a life now left behind.
‘I hope she didn’t know,’ Lucy whispered against the softness of her son’s hair, ‘about the photos or having to leave her own place.’
She leaned back again, resting her head on a cushion. The smell of warm rain, swelling and swelling, came in through the window, and the day’s grey light touched the surface of
a patch on the bathroom door. There was a strange patina on it, broken by glossy streaks.
With Tom on her hip, Lucy crossed the room and brushed its paintwork. An oval of fine white dust clung to her finger.
‘Talcum powder,’ she said, showing it to Tom. The only people she knew who used talcum powder were her two grandmothers, both long dead now.
She dotted the white on her son’s forehead, on her own, a tiny brand, and they made faces at each other in the bathroom mirror as the rain ramped up another notch outside and the frogs called louder and louder.
‘Here we are,’ Lucy crooned. ‘Safe and sound, warm and dry.’
‘Sing, Mummy. Sing.’ Tom swept out his arm like a conductor, sending a shelf of bathroom products crashing to the ground and littering the floor with glass and goop.
‘Tom—’ She heard the quick, sharp fury in her voice and stopped. She counted through five breaths—so much for safe and sound and warm and dry.
And breathed again.
‘Let’s get all these photos off the floor,’ she said, leaving the mire, the glass, the disaster behind them as she closed the bathroom door.
They sat together on the sofa again, Lucy gathering the different moments of life into one bundle, while Tom squirmed and slithered around. Perhaps she’d parcel them up while he was asleep and they’d take them to the post office later. She could send them to Elsie’s daughter—Elaine, wasn’t it?—care of her solicitor. The daughter would know what to do.
‘Or I could just wait till she comes over next time.’ The footsteps on the grass. The noises in still rooms. She smiled to herself. ‘We could have tea.’
‘Tea! Mummy, tea!’ Tom was piling his train set up on the floor, precarious arrangements of carriages made with his right hand and then batted down with his left.
‘I know.’ Lucy bounced up, scooping him with her. ‘Bread. Let’s make some bread. Lovely fresh bread for your tea.’
She hadn’t made bread since her twenties, some share-house phase, but it would be fun and Tom could get messy and then it would smell good and then they would eat. She held his little hand steady as they measured the flour into the bowl. And then they mixed and kneaded and set their loaf to rise, Lucy opening the jam and honey in anticipation.
It smelled glorious as it baked, that warm, slightly malty scent of the yeast and the crust. Lucy washed the bowl, the cups, the spoons, staring through the window above the sink without seeing the wet street beyond it.
Here we are. Safe and sound. Warm and dry. She loved these moments of contentment, shored them up against the other times. It was peaceful, Tom was playing, and there’d be fresh bread to eat.
And then she stepped around the doorway and saw the game that he had made, the honey and the jam taken from the table and slathered onto every single frame of Elsie’s life.
She pulsed with a hot, fast rage at herself for not paying attention and swept Tom into his cot, where he sat howling at being taken away from his activity.
I have spent my working life fixing up messes, she told herself. I will stay calm and I will make this go away. In the living room, under the sound of the rain beating on the roof, Lucy pushed the pictures into one pile and shovelled them into the bin. The sweet slick of the two spreads smelled like spring—she couldn’t resist licking her fingers.
Now she had to clean the bathroom before she could clean Tom. She opened the door and stepped straight onto the slimy, glassy puddle. And she felt herself starting to cry.
9
The crow
It was a cawing kind of cry that Clem heard as he sat on the back deck in the warm sun, his eyes closed. What you see behind your eyelids, it’s never really black—black as coal, black as pitch, he thought, opening his eyes to try to focus on the crow. He’d seen a flash of purple and a soft, round brownness, and now the black bird blurred and shadowed in his gaze. He winced; must be something that eyes weren’t supposed to do. Or he was getting old. At forty-three, with his kids grown and his daughter almost a mum now herself, he didn’t want to think so much on that.
Years before, back when he and Elsie were looking to buy a place, they’d walked down from Clem’s mum’s, up on the ridge, to this one—a little box at the end of a row of other similar boxes, and the backyard a mess of mud and clay and paspalum. It was new, and might be theirs, and Elsie liked the view out through the kitchen window towards the swamp and the wide eastern sky.
Picking among the green as they stood on the back step, a baby crow had been following its mother, mouth open, squawking.
‘Look at that, Clem,’ Elsie had said softly. ‘I’ve never seen a baby crow before—their feathers glisten, don’t they? Such a beautiful thing.’
Then she’d wanted to live in the house more than ever, and talked about the crows—how special it had been to see the baby; that it boded well, surely, for two people raising a family of their own. The twins were bigger now, she’d said, and perhaps there might be another child, one day. And she blushed when she said this, the way he liked, a tiny frill of pink rising up from her chest towards her throat, and he kissed her cheek and smiled. He was sure of her, the things she meant to say.
The day the mortgage papers were signed, he could hardly speak for the shock of the amount they owed. And then they shifted down from the rooms they’d had at his mum’s since they were married, seven years before, and put the twins’ beds in the bigger bedroom, taking the smaller one for themselves. He and a mate had added a deck as the summer came around.
‘Look at us, with our very own place,’ Elsie said, positioning a palm in a pot. ‘Our tropical paradise.’
She washed the floors daily and the windows once a week. This new house, and them the first to live in it: he could see how seriously she took that responsibility, as if it touched on everything she said or thought or did. Laying down a good impression; laying down their family foundations. She had a bigger sense of herself, somehow, with her own house as a backdrop. And no worries about the mortgage size for her—he envied her that.
‘My little homemaker,’ he’d say, hugging her, and then the kids would run up and burrow in as well—Donny like a shot, and Elaine a moment later, as if she knew she ought to—and he’d say something glowing about their mum. That was love, he’d thought in those moments. And she’d nestle against him, telling him again she loved that they were the first family to call this place home.
It fascinated him how much she loved this sense of ownership, this sense of being the entire story the house had had so far. ‘I mean, that bedsit, on the northside,’ she’d said to him as if it was a desperate kind of confession, ‘I never knew how many folk had been there before me. I never knew the number of people who’d already slept in that room.’
‘People come and people go, Else; like the birds. There’ll be other people living here sometime, and none of it our story.’
‘Oh no, Clem, no. Here’s home for us. It’s ours.’
But she’d never stopped wondering about the crow—‘Never saw it again, did we, love? I was so excited to have it to show Lainey and Don, but we never saw it again.’
‘Must’ve moved away—maybe crows do that. I don’t know.’
He’d never mentioned the day he and a mate had brought the bathtub—a day or so before they’d moved in. Straining across the grass, the white enamel blinding him as it caught the sun, Clem had turned at a strange noise and seen a rough brown dog busy with something by the back fence.
‘Take a spell,’ he said, lowering his end of the burden and walking towards the noise. There was the little crow, crumpled and bleating among the sticky paspalum stalks. ‘Go on with you!’ Clem shouted at the dog, his hand flinging out above its head and his voice harsh. He watched it slink into the shadows that filled the swamp beyond.
What now? he’d thought. What the devil do I do with you now? But as he crouched down he saw the gash in the bird’s body, the way its wing was creased out awkwardly.
With his friend beside him then, Cl
em had shaken his head. ‘Young crow—that dog was at it. Poor blighter.’ And he’d raised his boot and stamped before he could think about it twice. It was only then that he noticed a strange silence, as if every nearby bird had stopped calling.
And then the cries began, a litany of long and wide laments—every bloody crow in the neighbourhood. He’d plucked some paspalum as if to line his hands before he had to touch the bird. His hands, he saw, were shaking; he knew about crows and their mourning.
‘Don’t tell Elsie, eh.’ His voice caught, and he carried the broken bird to the lowest corner of the yard where the dirt was moist. Scrabbling a hole, laying the baby bird’s body inside, his shoulders hunched against the swoop and peck he expected from its mother at any moment.
Overhead, the crows’ noise built and built, and then at last it dropped away. And Clem, leaning over his brand-new diamond-wire fence, let his head drop as he threw up. It felt as if every piece of food he’d ever eaten was raking itself out of his guts.
‘Geez, you’re a soft touch,’ his mate had said. ‘Put it in the bin, I would’ve. All that fuss for a crow.’
All that fuss for Elsie, thought Clem now, and for all the crows. He watched as this new black bird balanced on the railing. He’d never told a soul that crows made him nervous.
Behind him, in the kitchen, his wife was singing, her lovely voice thickening as it dipped towards the song’s lowest notes. It was always Elvis at the moment, and he loved to hear her sing. Lainey had better have a little girl, or Elsie would be after her to call it Elvis. And what would Elaine think of that?
They rubbed each other the wrong way, his wife and daughter—that’s how he saw it. It had to happen sometimes, like him and his scratchy old dad. And Lainey, there was something rare about her—something special, something different and fine—where Elsie always looked for a carbon copy of herself. Clem sighed. The friction she endured with their girl: he wished she didn’t make it all so personal. He didn’t; they were good kids, well done, let them be now as they pleased. While Elsie fussed and grabbed and fretted.