by Jane Rawson
‘Scarlet fever,’ the letter said. ‘Better not to come now. We have all been very ill. It would not be safe.’
They had a poor night’s sleep, men downstairs in the public bar yelling till all hours, and Bea wondered if that kind of thing was legal here in South Australia, and of course as soon as they stopped the baby started up. Some kind of breakfast and Bea, determined to see for herself how things stood, found someone who would take them to Burnside. Their seachest stayed behind.
No one answered the door of her sister’s house but a neighbour, seeing her there, asked if she had come far. ‘From Sydney,’ Beatrice said, and that was enough to earn her a cup of tea and as much information as she wanted. Her sister’s husband and one of the children had died. Anne-Marie had taken the other children to live with the husband’s family in Hahndorf, perhaps two weeks ago. The neighbour couldn’t say for sure whether the arrangement was permanent but a woman with five children to raise, well, it was unlikely she’d be back here trying to fend for herself. Beatrice, with her one feeble hanger-on, was inclined to agree. The neighbour had a cousin in the Port, though, ran a boarding house and could probably help with finding Beatrice a position, if she decided she’d stay. The weather was less revolting today and so Beatrice thought she might as well. She took the cousin’s name and address and a letter of introduction and wondered what a woman would have to do to get a drink around these parts.
No one likes a screaming baby in a boarding house. Working men are particularly against the whole idea. That situation lasted three weeks before Bea found a woman, single like her, willing to rent out the unused stable at the back of her place for a measly sum, with use of the house’s kitchen and a place where she could wash. It was a step down in the world from her pleasant little villa in St Peters, but Beatrice liked the strangeness of it. No one bothered her there. No one asked stupid questions about the child or where her husband or her daughter had got to. Her landlord was happy to send the houseboy now and again to buy a bottle of gin they could share, and on warmer evenings – it turned out Port Adelaide had many warm evenings, much pleasanter than Sydney after all – the three of them would spend a civilised hour or two on a couple of upturned crates in the paved area between the stable and the house, sipping their drinks and musing on the funny ways life has about it. Sometimes Bea would get out her viola and the boy had his flute and they’d have a bit of a sing. Otherwise, Bea was left to her own devices. Ivan got used to sleeping in a drawer and eventually started tottering about on his own two feet and making up nonsense words, and the houseboy was happy to watch the kid when Bea needed to go out to work. If all family life was like this, Bea thought, perhaps she would have been a better mother and wife.
3
When Henry was small, Mother told him, she had sometimes worried about his birthmark. She’d scrubbed at it to wash it off, but it hadn’t gone. She’d even taken him to the doctor once, but the doctor had said of course it was nothing to worry about. And that’s what she told him, too: that it was nothing to worry about. He’d asked, when he was three, who his Mark was and Mother had told him not who but what, that Mark was part of his skin, that Mark was Henry. But Mark gets so hungry, he told Mother, and sometimes even when I’m not hungry. And Mark likes fish and I don’t like fish. And Mother had kissed him and told him to stop being silly, not to talk like that, and so from then on he never had.
Anyway, they had always been together. And Mark was his business, no one else’s. Whenever father saw Mark he always told Henry, ‘Put on a shirt,’ though he never said why.
Mark told him things no one else knew. When Henry talked about those things Mother told him to change the subject but other people either stared or laughed or sometimes they got angry. Father got angry. At first Henry hadn’t realised he was the only one who knew about these things. He’d wanted to talk to other people about the world that was entirely ocean, about the taste of skin felt through your tentacles and why his tentacles could never taste a thing. Henry had seen into space. Henry knew how it was to catch a live and slippery thing between your teeth. But no one else knew about these things and so Henry stopped asking. Sometimes Henry would pretend that the things he knew were just things he’d thought, imagined, wondered, and then he could tell them to Uncle William and Uncle William would tell him things back. Sometimes Aunty Sarah would help him draw pictures of the things inside his head. Today they were drawing what might happen if you were a human and you tried to live under the ocean.
‘What would you drink?’ Henry asked. ‘How would you breathe?’
‘Well, I think humans need air to breathe,’ Sarah began.
‘How do fish breathe, then?’
Sarah drew him a quick picture of a fish and showed him the place on the side of their heads where they have long holes, covered by flaps of skin. ‘These are their gills,’ she said. ‘Fish pull water inside them through the gills and then they suck all the air out of the water to breathe it, then they push the water back out.’
‘There’s air in water?’
‘There’s air in the water. Think of the bubbles in the bath – they’re full of air.’
Henry thought about them. ‘So humans could build a city under the water if they could learn how to get the air out of the water?’
‘I suppose so. Perhaps they’d use a machine. Do you want to draw a machine? I suppose it would have to be small so the human could carry it around with him.’
Henry drew what he thought that would look like, and Sarah did too. Henry’s machine was on a little wheeled cart and the air went from a tube right through the human’s chest and into his lungs. Sarah had drawn a machine that looked like a knapsack, and a breathing mask the human could wear over his mouth.
‘Can humans drink salt water?’ Henry asked. ‘Isn’t the water in the ocean salty?’
‘The water in the ocean is definitely salty,’ Sarah told him. ‘I’m pretty sure we can’t drink it – I think it makes us sick and maybe even kills us, though I’m not sure why.’
‘Then how would people drink under the ocean? What do fish drink? Can fish drink salt water?’
‘I don’t know if fish need to drink,’ she said. ‘Maybe because they’re in the water all the time they don’t ever need to drink it.’
‘But humans would need to. What do humans do when they’re out on ships for a very long time? What do they drink then?’
‘They have to take barrels of water with them. If they run out, they’re in trouble.’
‘You should ask your father,’ Uncle William butted in. He’d been reading, ignoring Henry’s questions all afternoon. ‘He’d know. They had no water on the wreck, he says. Nothing to drink for days and days. Seems impossible to me, but that’s how he tells it.’
‘Shut up, William,’ Sarah said. ‘Don’t ask your father, Henry. We can figure it out ourselves.’
But Henry already knew it was true they had had nothing to drink when they were stuck on the wreck. His Mark had shown him; he’d seen it over and over. Sometimes Father would talk to him about it but sometimes he got angry and told Henry to leave him the hell alone, but Henry was never sure which it would be.
‘I have an idea,’ Henry said, and he drew a human under the water with a tube that went up to a tank, floating on the ocean’s surface. ‘Every time it rains,’ he explained, ‘the tank fills up with fresh water and the human can take a drink from the tube. There’s a plug in the end of the tube under the ocean but anyone who’s passing by can pull the plug out and take a drink.’
‘Perfect!’ said Sarah. ‘A perfect solution.’
‘Probably what saved them on the Admella,’ William said.
‘If you’re not reading,’ Sarah told him, ‘why don’t you come and help? We’re trying to draw all the animals in the sea. Sharks we know about, right?’ Henry nodded vigorously. He was particularly good at drawing sharks.
‘And of course there are all the eating fish, mulloway and mackerel and John Dory.’
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p; ‘How many fish do you think there might be in the sea?’ Henry asked.
‘An uncountable mass,’ William said. ‘Beyond imagining.’
‘Hmm. It is quite something to think on,’ said Sarah. ‘It was a busy day for God when he created the creatures that swim in the waters, I expect.’
‘That is one way to see things.’ William found his bookmark and closed the volume he was reading, put it down on the table beside his armchair. ‘On the other hand,’ he continued, ‘it is enlightening to think that all those fish came from a single species which diversified and diversified, changing to match its circumstances, over millions and millions of years.’
‘I’m not sure which idea I find more fanciful, or more delightful,’ said Sarah. ‘Both have their charms. I think I shall suspend judgement for now.’
‘Did we come from fish?’ Henry asked. ‘Did we used to live under the water?’
‘You and I?’ said William.
‘Yes. You and I and all the other humans. All the animals. Were we all fish once? Were all animals fish?’
‘Well, now, let’s see,’ said William. ‘If one goes back far enough, the ancestor of you and me was an ape, like a chimpanzee. But that chimpanzee must also have had ancestors, I suppose – some simpler kind of mammal, perhaps like mice. And those mice must have come from somewhere, though I can’t say for sure where.’ William stood up from his chair and began searching the bookshelves. ‘Ah, yes, here.’ He flicked through the pages then placed the book open on the table where Henry and Sarah were drawing. ‘Now here is what scientists are calling a tree of life. And let’s see.’ Henry’s eyes scoured the diagram, trying to understand what it all meant, and he could feel his Mark pushing him to try harder, think harder, learn harder. William pointed to the picture. ‘Here at the top, that’s us: MAN. And as you see if you follow that trunk down, you soon get to apes, then semiapes, then primitive mammals, which is the point where we join all our furry warm-blooded friends. You see, Henry? If you trace our ancestry back this far, that is where we become one with the horses and the sheep and the tigers. Now follow the tree down … Well, yes, if we do keep going down it seems that although life began as amoebae – little creatures so tiny we can’t even see them, Henry – before long it was turning into crustaceans and molluscs and primitive fishes.’
Henry stretched out his arm to touch the page, ran his finger over the drawings of molluscs – the nautilus, the octopus.
William carried on. ‘It does appear the primitive fishes became the amphibians who became the primitive mammals who became the apes who became us. So yes, Henry, I guess we did all come from fishes.’
Sarah was leaning over Henry, trying to get a good look at the diagram. ‘What are the whales doing all the way over here with the horses and the sloths? Shouldn’t they be down the bottom with the fishes?’
‘Hmm.’ William stared closer. ‘Well, that is perplexing. A transcription error, perhaps,’ he said, and closed the book.
Henry reached to grab it from him. ‘No, wait!’ he said. ‘Show me again!’
William opened the book.
‘These are the creatures,’ Henry murmured. ‘Soft and shifting. With strong tentacles and suckers that grip.’ He stroked the pictures again, felt a sad, grasping kind of comfort seeping from the Mark on his back.
‘The molluscs?’ William said. ‘A kind of soft animal, a creature without bones. You know the only hard part of its whole body is the beak it uses to eat? A very early animal, Henry. No one really knows where they came from.’
‘Older even than the fishes?’
‘That’s right. Because fishes couldn’t exist until bones were invented, and it took a long time to evolve bones. Your creatures got a head start because they decided bones weren’t necessary to their development. They could get on just fine without them.’
‘So maybe that’s where we all came from?’
‘No, it doesn’t quite work like that. We all came from the soft worm that turned into the first fish, you see?’ William ran his finger over the diagram.
Henry nodded. ‘And once, everyone that was lived under the water. Once the whole earth was ocean.’
‘Well, not technically, Henry. There was still land, plenty of land, it was just that nobody lived on it.’
‘How strange,’ Sarah said. ‘In a sense, then, the whole world was ocean.’
‘Yes, in a sense,’ William agreed.
‘What a thing to think about,’ she said. ‘I really never have before. That all the life on this earth lived in the ocean. Everyone there was, was a fish.’
‘Or a soft worm or some other kind of mollusc. A sea squirt or maybe a starfish. Perhaps some kind of sponge,’ William went on.
‘And we once were fish,’ said Henry. ‘Once we could live under the ocean too, and breathe the water and drink the water. And then we changed, and we had to come out onto the land or we would have drowned or died of thirst. And then we couldn’t float anymore and we had to learn how to stand up and walk around, which was a lot harder. And when we were standing up we got embarrassed because everyone could see us, and we invented clothes. And now we wish that maybe we could go back under the water and live and breathe and drink there, and just float all the time and never wear clothes. We could be fish again.’
He reached for a fresh piece of paper and began to draw. He drew his mother and his father and Georgie and little Wills, and he drew Sarah and William, and none of them were wearing clothes and they were all shaped as though they had no bones, just floating about. He added tentacles here and there, and gills on the sides of their heads. Around them coloured fish were swimming and sharks and there were starfish and four tentacled creatures. Up in the top corner a boneless tiger was swimming after a boneless sheep.
Across the bottom he wrote ALL ONE ANIMUL IN THE UNDER WATER WURLD.
‘Everyone lives together,’ he told Sarah, ‘and each animal has a home to live in and a type of thing it is all right for them to eat. They shouldn’t eat other things – that would be unfriendly. And they each just do that and don’t try to be different or to run things. Even the humans. See? The humans swim about and eat the creatures they’re allowed to eat and they don’t kill anyone else they shouldn’t. They stay in their niche. The tiger eats the sheep but it doesn’t eat the shark.’
‘Their what, Henry?’
‘Their niche. They stay in it.’ Henry dropped the pencil he had been clutching. ‘Are there any more biscuits, please? I feel very hungry now.’
‘Yes, I think a biscuit might be a good idea. And a cup of tea? Dear, tea for you? William?’
William was staring fixedly at Henry’s drawing.
‘Pardon? What?’
‘You should have a cup of tea, William.’
‘I should? Oh, yes. A cup of tea, thank you. That would be lovely. Henry, this is a marvellous drawing – do you think I could keep it?’
‘Oh yes, good idea, Uncle William. Could we keep it, Henry?’ Sarah asked.
Henry picked the picture up off the table by its corner and stared at it. He shrugged, and passed the picture to his aunt. She slid it between the pages of Haeckel’s guide and put the book back on the shelf, tapped its spine a couple of times as though to make sure everything was safe and locked away. Then she went into the kitchen.
‘So you like sea creatures, Henry?’ William asked.
But Henry was sick of thinking about being under the ocean and what it might be like to be always wet and to breathe water. He wanted to live here for a moment. It was warm here. Being dry was actually rather nice.
‘Uncle William,’ he asked, ‘can you die from drinking flowers mixed with water?’
Uncle William rubbed his hand over his eyes and sat back down in his armchair.
‘I guess what I mean really is,’ Henry continued, ‘is there a way to find out if flowers in water could kill you without actually dying?’
‘What kind of flowers are they, Henry?’
‘White.’
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‘Oh, Sarah, tea! Thank you, just the ticket! Now, your Aunty Sarah has been working on a new recipe for apple cake, haven’t you, Sarah? Maybe she’d like to try making one? Maybe you could help her? What do you think, Henry?’
‘Would you like to make a cake with me?’ Sarah asked.
‘When it’s made will we eat it?’ Henry asked.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Aunty Sarah,’ he said, as they went into the kitchen. ‘Did you know that old Missus Gallwey who lives in the stable behind us has a baby in a box in the attic?’
‘I didn’t know there was an attic in the stable,’ she said. ‘That’s very interesting. She isn’t really that old, though. Maybe only ten years older than I am.’
‘She’s a grandma. The baby is her grandson.’
‘Well, I suppose she is very old then. Now, do you want to peel the apples for me? Perhaps you’d like to take some cake to Missus Gallwey and her grandson once we’re done.’
‘I’m not allowed to play with her, she’s a washerwoman and a reprobate and maybe even a witch,’ Henry said. ‘Though I don’t suppose giving someone cake is playing.’ He arranged the apples in a pyramid on the bench, then took the top one from the pile and started peeling it with the lovely sharp little knife Sarah had given him. ‘Look,’ he told her, ‘your lovely sharp little knife can make one very, very, very, very long piece of apple peel.’
‘Oh, that might be as much the work of my lovely sharp little nephew,’ she said, perplexingly, and kissed the top of his head.
4
Three children. A happy wife – happy enough. Work. A home to live in, money enough to live on. Legs that walked, arms that lifted, eyes to see and teeth to chew. Everything in order, tiptop, shipshape.