From the Wreck

by Jane Rawson

  He heard talking at the door: Sarah’s voice and another woman’s. His head went out again but they had retreated inside the house. Midwife – must be. He would write out the orders and that would take maybe ten minutes and then he would take his time walking by the bedroom. Just to check. He was within his rights to check, surely?

  Butter. Stove wood. Latch. They were written. He sought out Stan Pieters, asked if he would be heading to the pub this afternoon, would he mind dropping off a few orders on his way? Pieters was only too happy, but did ask how the missus was doing, which George got held up answering.

  Sarah heard him rattling the doorknob and slid herself out into the corridor before he could get a look at happenings on the bed.

  ‘She’s fine, George, leave her alone. The midwife is here. She’s very experienced.’

  ‘Will the baby come soon?’

  ‘That’s up to the baby, George.’

  George went to look for the cat, but she wasn’t coming for meat or threats. He cut down a tree because he could. In the end he walked down to the pub and bought himself a small whisky and a few more for luck. And it was as he was once again on his own doorstep wondering if he would ever be a father that he looked up and saw her, at the window, just once. It was her. There was a wave of sickness up from his belly and he left the whisky behind a bush in the yard. He righted himself and slammed the door open, stomped upstairs as fast as his slightly drunk-blurred boots would carry him, counted doors along the corridor to find the window she’d been at. The room was an empty one, perhaps to be filled when the family grew, for now just boxes and drop sheets. She wasn’t under them and nor was she in them.

  He heard a baby cry.

  Was there a woman here? he wanted to yell at Sarah but listen, his baby had been born. He collected himself. He opened the door to their bedroom. Eliza was there and she was alive. Sarah was there too, watching Eliza, who was holding a tiny baby creature.

  ‘The midwife?’ he asked; he couldn’t help himself.

  ‘Gone half an hour since,’ Sarah said.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, gathering his senses, ‘she was paid?’

  ‘She said she would call back for her money, as you were nowhere to be found. I’ll make something for your dinner while you rest, Eliza.’ Sarah kissed her sister’s forehead and stroked a thumb across the baby’s hair.

  The woman would be back. George pulled up a chair beside his wife.

  ‘Look, George,’ Eliza said, and George ran a lightly exploring hand over the child’s body, wondering in how many ways that woman had marked his boy.

  ‘Henry?’ he said.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Henry Walter Hills. Your son.’

  4

  I am fleet-footed fur, feeding at the fingers of my first-known, my upright. This is a good life, sun on the belly in the morning. Feathers and fur all scampering about and me with my mouth full of their hot blood.

  The other furry fleet-foots know me for what I am, hate me, but then they hate their own kind for the most part anyway. And from the uprights an occasional rock pitched at the head, a foot in the direction of my rump: small pains. The pleasures balance them. Find yourself a patch of fine gravel, stretch yourself as long as you’ll go and onto your back roll, roll, roll: there isn’t much finer unless it’s to be flattened against the tickling grass one foot soft before the other, chin down low in that tickling grass, rump twitching and tasting already the wriggling between teeth, the wriggling below paw. They squirm so mightily!

  But I have not come all this long way just to lose myself in the wriggle of life against teeth. Universes die while I sleep stretched in the sun.

  Where are my others? How did they fare? I leave my dusty bed behind and gather myself into seventeen more forms to search them out. In a crevasse under-ocean I see a flicker of familiar – eight writhing limbs and a coruscating skin. I am joy and all-over welcome but the creature flushes me with ink and flees. Nothing in its mind matches mine. We are siblings in shape only; I crush my hope and shift once more. I slide cold between stones and fly feathered to watch for my others from above but if we are still a proud race of warriors then we are being proud under a rock because I cannot find hide nor hair.

  I cram myself once more into that upright form I’d held and take a turn about the rooms of my first-known’s domain. But he comes stomping after me with fists all flailing so I take the chance to skitter small and claw-footed out of there. Remember me, I ask him, but if he hears me he doesn’t say.

  There is sun on my back but no one, no one to share it. The greatest adventure and no one to tell.

  There is beauty and power and the throb of life but all of it is wrong: the wrong beauty, the wrong power.

  These meagre joys of sun and dust are fine if you know no better but I had more, I had more. Sweet, yes, the momentary crunch of tiny bones and yes, how wonderful to be alive in the moment, yes? Yes. I want to be home. What is this place where some feeble race of uprights totter about the place in constricting rags, flailing their tentacles, and all other life stumbles quailing in their wake?

  I watch my once-known and wonder in what world I end up wedged tiny in a crack in the wall trying to communicate with some foot-pounding menace whose brain is closed to anything that doesn’t come in by eye, ear, mouth, nose or hand.

  I am stuck here. There are no others of my kind. Day, night, day, night I have searched wet and dry and up and down and they are not here. Maybe they found a better place and no one ever sent for me. Maybe none survived. Maybe I am lost, confused; a wrong turn and I am in a dimension unexpected by any of us.

  I squirm in my tiny furred form. There is too much dust here!

  There is too much dust.

  Upright has stomped elsewhere so I wriggle out. I pace on tiny feet the wooden floors of this place. Back; forth. My tiny heart pounds and aches. My tiny eyes see only to the corners of the room, not even strong enough to look outside. My tiny brain tries to remember how it felt to rule a world. I slip out under the door, scuttle down stairs, scamper myself into a room where a small one of this killer species is screaming its superior lungs out, biding its time before it, too, gets to roam about on its giant feet crushing bugs, ants, mice, hopes. This is your world, I tell it; yes, I know by now it will not hear me because nothing less than wavering sound will do for those fine ears, that fine mind. This is your world. Then I attach myself to its neck, its back; smooth and almost hidden, a birthmark that will never wash off. We are one now, I tell him, you will be my other. I dream him a dream of the endless sky, the hum of the stars. I dream him a world all ocean.

  HENRY

  1

  ‘When you were wrecked,’ Henry asked, ‘what did you eat?’

  ‘We didn’t eat,’ his father told him. ‘There was nothing to eat.’

  ‘Why didn’t you eat the creatures in the sea?’ Henry asked.

  ‘What creatures? The fish? How would we have caught them?’ His father took his hand and steered him through the traffic towards the crowd forming at the gates of the Glanville Estate. ‘With our hands?’

  ‘Yes, with your hands. You would have reached into the ocean and grasped them as they fled slippery by.’

  ‘Henry, a man can’t catch a fish with his bare hands. You need a rod or a reel – a hook at the very least. We had none of those.’

  ‘The native man catches fish with his hands.’ Henry felt sure it was true.

  ‘Where do you learn these things, Henry? If he does, it certainly isn’t in the deepest ocean, waves towering over his head and crashing on his freezing skin. He’d be in a meadow, wouldn’t he, lying happy in the sun and dandling his hands in a pleasant burbling brook. Grab himself out a trout or two, maybe. Are there trout here, Henry?’ Henry’s father ran his fingers tickling over Henry’s chest and arms. ‘Slippery little brook trout that a blackfella could catch with his hands?’

  Henry didn’t know about that. He couldn’t quite remember why he’d asked.

  ‘Have you
seen this football before, Father?’ he asked, squirming from the man’s grip. ‘Do you expect anyone will be hurt?’ The butcher’s apprentice, Mr Sidney, had told Henry he’d be playing today, that he meant to revenge some obscure crimes committed on him by various lads of the Port. Henry was keen to see it.

  ‘It may happen. Perhaps a man will fall and hurt his head or his leg. Slow down, Henry!’ But Henry dodged between horses, carts and a crowd of gents on foot and didn’t care whether George could follow.

  The game had already begun when they found a spot on the field where they could see the action, such as it was. The crowd milled about, following the ball as it tumbled and bounced first one way, then back the other, the players sprinting after it and trying to bring it under control.

  ‘Do you know which men are Port?’ Henry’s father asked a man standing beside him.

  ‘In the blue and white,’ the man told him.

  ‘Is there a score yet?’

  ‘No score yet, sir.’

  ‘Not surprising,’ he told the man. ‘Even the players don’t seem to know which way they should head to the goal.’

  Henry was staring into a pile of men, where, deep in its midst, he could see one had another’s private-most parts gripped in his fist. The gripped man wriggled and tried to flee but the fist was too tight.

  ‘Show them, Port!’ Henry muttered. ‘Beat those Young Australians!’

  Overhearing the boy, George asked, ‘Henry, shall we go up to the house and find some lemonade?’

  ‘Oh, not now. I think Port will be champions!’

  As it turned out, though, they were not. After some hours of play, the score was still nil all and, as the sun had gone down, the spectators began to disperse.

  On the walk home, an hour or more, Henry watched his thoughts play about behind his eyes. His father, sat enthroned on a pointed jumble of wreck, watching as silver bodies sped past just out of reach. All around him, the purple-white faces of his shipmates scanning the waves for help. Sharks, leaping, teeth flashing sunlight. An arm torn from its socket and a spout of blood shooting for the sky.

  Mother had left them tea on the kitchen table and Father took his away to his office. Little Georgie, Wills, the new baby, and Mother had all gone to bed. Henry would sleep soon too but for now he sat chewing on a pie crust, swinging his feet. He had wanted to ask Father if they could get a cat to keep, but he had forgotten. There were cats everywhere – they prowled the stable out back, living on rats and mice – but Henry would have liked one that was mostly his. Cats were never really anyone’s, he knew that, but it would be nice to have one that was mostly his. Henry slipped his hand inside the collar of his shirt and stroked at the edges of his Mark, using just the tips of his fingers. He would feed the cat scraps and it could come with him on his walks around the neighbourhood. Sometimes it would sleep in the cupboard under the back stairs, where Henry kept his experiments. Henry picked some pieces of sausage meat from his pie and held them to his shoulder so his Mark could eat, then he washed the crumbs from his mouth with the last dregs of his milk and went upstairs to bed.

  2

  Beatrice Gallwey had come to South Australia from the colony of New South Wales. Her husband had died, the way husbands so often do. A bite from a flea or a mosquito, they said, and some infection of the blood. It hadn’t taken terrifically long. They didn’t like each other much, Bea and her husband, and she didn’t miss him but still, she’d rather they’d got around to leaving one another than that he was cold in the ground. She wouldn’t have held it against him had he found somewhere else to go.

  That left Bea and the daughter. She hadn’t paid Meredith all that much attention for most of her life. She appeared to be well-behaved if a little grim. So it had come as quite a surprise to discover that a year after her father’s death and not that long since her seventeenth birthday, the girl was planning to have some fellow’s child.

  The man meant to marry her, Merri told Bea when she asked. ‘Well, that’s good, I suppose,’ Bea had said, assuming that was generally the way things went. No point kicking up a fuss now, the deed’s done, the kid’s on the way. ‘I suppose he’ll have a way to look after you?’ she’d asked. ‘This husband?’ Merri supposed he would – he had a business fixing shoes and pans, sharpening knives. ‘So he’s a gypsy then,’ Bea had suggested, and Merri had been outraged though she’d meant nothing by it other than to establish whether the chap was, in fact, a gypsy.

  It turned out the chap was a gypsy, which Beatrice confirmed on meeting the man and his family at the wedding. It was a nice wedding and Bea had been happy to help pay for it, happy to see her daughter less grim, happy to see her with someone to care for and to care for her now her father was gone. The dancing had been fevered. Bea hadn’t minded at all, had danced with gusto. A brother of someone’s wife had joined her and when he’d left her bed the next morning she had been sorry to see him go.

  The baby came along, born safe and happy and the mother safe and happy too. They’d named him Ivan, which Bea thought a little extravagant, but kept his middle name as Edward in honour of the child’s maternal grandfather. Bea had been thinking about moving somewhere a little smaller, now it was just her. Maybe to the country. Cessnock sounded lovely, and enough people there to keep her in work. She’d begun selling off some of her heavier belongings, the leather armchair her husband had fawned over and the hundred or so books he’d read and re-read while sitting in it. His writing desk. His mother’s silver tea set. His gold watch she put away for Ivan, and Merri had insisted on keeping Daddy’s set of ivory and ebony pens. Bea gave some of the money to Merri and the rest she put aside in preparation for the move.

  Merri showed up on the doorstep mid one Sunday morning. Bea had been giving her viola a going-over and didn’t hear the door for a while. By the time she did, Merri was a little red-faced and glowering, which was nothing Bea wasn’t used to.

  ‘Come in,’ she told the girl, who was carrying little Ivan all wrapped up in a blanket far too warm for the weather. A small suitcase sat forebodingly at her feet. Merri didn’t come in.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ Bea asked, noticing the husband’s cart across the street, packed to the brim with household goods.

  ‘We’re going up the Hawkesbury,’ Merri told her. ‘Michael’ – the husband – ‘has had enough of Sydney. He says we need some space around us.’

  ‘The Hawkesbury? I’ve been thinking of moving to Cessnock myself.’

  Merri dismissed this with a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Yes, but we really are going. We’re going now.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’ Bea wondered if the whole family was going, or just these three. ‘Well, let me know where you settle, if you settle. It would be good to know where you are.’

  Merri looked impatient. ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘And I’ll leave my details with the postmaster here, should I ever actually stir myself to leave town. So you can find me, should you need to. Now, do you need anything else of your father’s? I intend to sell the lot of it. Oh, I should at least give you his watch, for Ivan. Wait,’ she said, ‘and I’ll fetch it.’

  ‘Mother, there’s no need. I want Ivan to stay with you.’ She held the baby out. ‘Take him, please.’

  ‘I don’t want your baby, Merri. What do I want with a baby?’

  ‘Well, I don’t want him either. He cries all the time. He doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t want my milk. I’m sick of him. Michael’s sick of him too. We have things to do. We want to travel. What?’ Merri glared at her mother.

  ‘You could take him to the orphanage,’ Bea suggested.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! He doesn’t belong in an orphanage, he has a perfectly good family. I’ll come back for him later,’ Merri said. ‘When he’s bigger. When he doesn’t cry so much and I don’t have to watch over him every single second of the day. Just take him!’

  Beatrice folded her arms and stared at her daughter. Merri responded by putting the baby down on the doorstep and walking off. M
ichael waved from the cart and then they were gone.

  Bea tried not to let the fact of a baby in the house get too much in the way of her plans. But she had to admit, it made it much more difficult for her to go out to work. One of the places where she did a little cleaning didn’t mind so much if she left the baby in the laundry while she worked; the others were set against it. It was as though she had no moral right, a woman her age and with a husband well and truly dead, to have a baby with her. She explained the situation but the feeling about the place was that she was clearly in the wrong.

  Merri never did send word where she’d gone – no surprises there. Bea wondered if she could offload the kid to her sister, who had a fondness for family that Bea couldn’t claim. The sister, Anne-Marie, had set sail for Port Adelaide seven years back, and once or twice a year Bea got a letter from Burnside, where the family had settled, extolling the virtues of the colony and now and again suggesting Beatrice and her husband make the move. It would be lovely to see you, Anne-Marie always claimed. Then lovely it shall be, thought Beatrice. Why not South Australia? There’s nothing keeping me here in St Peters. I’m sure Burnside has just as much to offer as Cessnock. Perhaps I could pick grapes.

  So Beatrice sold off the rest of the furniture and booked a passage for herself and Ivan to Port Adelaide. She told the postmaster she was leaving, on the off chance Merri ever came looking for her boy, with the promise she would send more details once she was settled. And she wrote ahead to Anne-Marie to let her know she was coming. Ivan did not get a mention.

  They arrived in the new colony on a perfectly horrid day, cold wind and a putrid spitting rain that made Bea want to get back on the boat and go home to the soft warmth of New South Wales. Instead she found a hotel that would take her and the boy for a night. She washed them both and changed their clothes, then set out to find the post office to see if Anne-Marie had replied to her letter.