by Jane Rawson
Black anger, black dread and a heart that stopped, stopped, stopped then started again. Lungs made of tin, wouldn’t stretch to let the air in. And trying to walk around like a man with children, a happy wife, work, a home to live in and all the rest of it. Smile like a man. Laugh like a man. Drink like a man. Work like a man. But this thing inside was something else.
‘Go to the doctor,’ Eliza had said, when she’d found him that day slumped on the front doorstep trying to breathe like he’d run in terror from some ancient monster reared dripping from the sea. There had been no ancient monster. He hadn’t even run. He was standing and then he was passing out and then he’d come back to his senses with the grip of terror still on his heart. The dead smoke of some monster still in his nostrils and behind his eyes. ‘It could be your heart,’ she’d said. ‘Please, see the doctor.’
If it was his heart, what could the doctor do except tell him he was doomed and to take to his bed? There was no fixing a busted heart. Worse, the doctor would open him up and tell him, ‘Sir, there’s nothing in you but oily muck, just a stinking green paste I don’t know what it is, I’ve never seen the like of it, sir.’ They’d prop him up in some doctors’ museum and they’d all poke at him. ‘Look at him,’ they’d say, ‘a man but not a man, how is he even alive when he has nothing inside but muck?’
So he went to the doctor. ‘Could there be something the matter with my heart, Doctor? With my lungs?’ He asked with the voice of a man with a family, responsibilities. ‘I cannot leave my wife and three children, Doctor. Can you tell me what’s wrong and then can you fix me?’
The physician was unnervingly young. His dark curly hair extended into sideburns that expanded across his face in mutton-chops. As he peered into George’s eyes, George noticed that his lips were somewhat too moist, but that his nostrils seemed uncommonly clean.
‘Turn around, please, sir.’
The doctor tapped on his back, then listened to it with some instrument.
‘Is there anything there, Doctor?’
‘Please be quiet, sir. I need you to be quiet.’
He breathed quietly and shallowly.
‘If you could please breathe a little deeper, sir.’
The air shuddered into George’s lungs, and back out again.
‘All right, thank you. Please put your shirt back on, sir.’
George tugged the shirt over his head and stood up to tuck it in. The mirror stared back at him, showing his grey hairs, his yellowing eyes. Death was all over him.
‘Have you any idea what it is, Doctor?’ he asked.
‘Mister Hills, I have never felt more confident in saying that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you, sir. A fitter and healthier man I have rarely seen. Now –’ he looked at his notes – ‘you say you suffered some physical trauma in the past?’
‘Yes, I was on a shipwreck. The doctor then, the one who looked me over when they rescued me, he said that I would not live. My organs were smashed, something inside – the main mast of the boat fell on me. I was beaten badly from being thrashed about in the ocean, too. We couldn’t drink or eat. It was … it wasn’t so good out there. Rough on the body.’
‘And –’ the doctor looked at his notes – ‘you have a broken thumb. From the same event?’
George nodded. Thumb? Who cared about his thumb?
‘But you did live, despite that diagnosis, and I have to say that aside from some scarring, you appear to have suffered no long-term effects from your ordeal. How long were you without food and water?’
‘Eight days.’
‘Eight days? The doctor was right – you should be dead. You are clearly a man of substantial constitution.’
‘So what’s the matter with me? My heart is weak?’
‘Your heart is in no way weak.’
‘And my lungs? Is it pneumonia? Consumption.’
‘There is nothing. Your breathing is better than one could expect for a man your age.’
A man my age, he thought. I could beat you within an inch of your life, a man my age, you scoundrel. ‘There is nothing?’
‘Nothing at all. There is nothing wrong with you.’
George did not want to ask but he was here now and so he may as well find out the worst of it. ‘Then why does my heart stop beating for no reason at all, Doctor? Why can I not draw breath in my lungs if I am such a strong, healthy man?’
‘It could be …’ The doctor looked uncomfortable, tapped with his pencil on the wood of his desk.
‘What? Is it a tumour?’
‘It could be your mind has become unsettled. There are things we are only just beginning to understand about how thoughts in the mind may disturb the functioning of the body …’
‘Are you saying I’m imagining it? That I’m imagining my lungs can’t breathe?’
‘No, sir, no – not at all. It’s more that it’s possible there can be things hidden deep in our minds that, well, display themselves as physical symptoms …’
‘Insanity. You’re saying I’m losing my mind.’
‘It isn’t that. But if you like I can refer you to a very reputable hypnotist who may …’
‘Thank you, no.’ He would not have some crank delving about in the workings of his head. They would lock him up as soon as look at him once they found the greasy muck he had hidden inside. No, he would solve this thing himself. ‘No. Thank you, Doctor. If there is nothing wrong with me then there is nothing wrong with me. Whatever it is will surely pass. Good day.’
She was walking around out there in Ballarat or Morphett Vale or wherever the hell it was she’d ended up, living off the thing inside him that had made him human. And now his heart didn’t work like a heart should work and his lungs were flaps of useless paper in his chest and even his mind had turned on him, was telling him there was something behind him, something behind him, always something behind him and there never was.
She had been in his house. He had seen her, that day: the day Henry was born. She had been in his house and she had touched his wife and his boy and God only knows what she had done to them. When he couldn’t find her, when she never returned for the money but sent another woman in her stead – oh, Sarah said of course this was the same woman, ‘What are you talking about, George?’, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t, she had pulled the wool over all their eyes – he had tried to tell himself it had been his mind playing tricks. A trick of light, of shadow, that he had seen her face up there in that upstairs window. But she had been there in the room that now was Henry’s room, Georgie’s room. What had she left in there? How might she have touched his boys?
She had been in his house. He had let eight years pass, had let himself be fobbed off with comforting thoughts that it was his imagination, that another woman had been the midwife. He had let himself believe that Henry had escaped unscathed but he knew it wasn’t true. That thing on his back, the oddness of his mind. George needed to stand up, be a man, take responsibility. The time for comfort was passed. Not another minute.
He stormed into the Sailors’ Home, heard Wills crying and Eliza trying to hush him, heard Henry and Georgie chasing one another up and down the stairs and called to them to keep quiet, let the baby sleep. He ignored Pieters, who was asking if he’d heard back yet from the new woman who was meant to be coming to clean, and went into his office and locked the door. He pulled all the papers from the bottom drawer in his desk – they were a terrible mess, just pile upon pile – and dumped them on the floor, spread them in a circle about him. Not that, not that, not that: this. And this. The two letters from the alleged Bridget Ledwiths. Of course he had hung on to them. Of course he had slid them into the bottom drawer of his desk when they moved here to the Sailors’ Home. He had known he would need them again one day.
‘Dear Miss Ledwith,’ he wrote, then stopped. He had been about to write, ‘It is George Hills who lay by you for eight days and nights on the wreck of the Admella. You have destroyed me. I need you to give me back what is mine.’ But of course that wouldn’t do. Only
one of these women was Ledwith. It was possible neither of these women was Ledwith. And what would a woman think, who wasn’t Ledwith, on reading such a thing? She would call the police and the police would come and they would lock him up in an asylum.
‘Dear Miss Ledwith,’ he wrote, ‘It has been many long years since we last saw one another but I trust you will still remember me. My name is George Hills, and I was a cabin steward on the steamship Admella. I am sorry to remind you of that unfortunate incident and I hope that thinking upon it does not cause you too much discomfort. However, I hope that you may be prepared to correspond with me. I know you have taken pains to keep your privacy since that event, and if you choose to reply to my letter I will certainly respect that wish. Since the wreck I have found certain difficulties and physical symptoms have arisen for me. Doctors have been unable to help. I merely wish to speak with someone whose experiences match my own and who may be able to shed some light on whether there is a connection between that unpleasant incident and my current state of ill health. If you would not mind corresponding with me, you may reach me at the address above. Otherwise, I wish you all the best. Yours sincerely, George Hills.’
He then wrote the letter again, this time addressed to Mrs Avage.
When Henry got home, carrying some kind of cake, he told the boy to go down to the post office and have them sent. He saw Henry walk out the front door, still carrying part of the cake, and head off with the letters tucked in his pocket.
It was done.
Neither of those women was likely to be her. Neither of them was her: he already knew. They were too – what was the word? – quotidian. He would take out an advertisement, place it in the papers in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. Surely she wouldn’t have gone further than that.
He sat back at his desk.
Are you Miss Bridget Ledwith? Were you ever her? I am not a newspaperman or a detective. I was on the ship. I have something of yours. Please get in contact.
Are you or do you know Miss Bridget Ledwith? I need to find her urgently.
Are you Bridget Ledwith? I know secrets about you. Write to me at this address and I will never tell.
Spirit woman, you were on the Admella when she went down. I know you were not what you seem. Write to me at this address so I can sleep at night and breathe like a normal man.
The last, that was the right one. Only she would know what he meant. He wrote it neatly, clearly. He could not give this to Henry to do. He could not do it from the telegraph office here. He would have to travel to the city, where he was not known. His piles of paper back into the bottom drawer; the advertisement, the ink dry now, slid between the pages of this morning’s Register.
‘I’m going into Adelaide,’ he called to no one in particular, but Pieters heard and asked, again, whether the new cleaning woman would be coming today. George put the newspaper down but kept one hand on top of it as he searched through the Home’s journal.
‘Tomorrow, she’ll be here tomorrow. Anything else?’
There wasn’t. He stuck his head in to his own kitchen and asked loudly whether anyone needed anything in Adelaide, but as no one replied he felt he had done his duty.
As he settled into his seat on the Adelaide train, George suddenly remembered his childhood dream of being a duck herder. Aged eight, he’d been, back in Chigwell: he’d told the old man he wanted to grow up to farm ducks. That’d be the life, herding his flock of ducks about the countryside from pond to creek and back again, sitting in the shade of a tree and watching his flock splashing in the water, eating a Scotch egg and drinking a mug of porter. An eternal English summer, forget the damp and wind and snow he would face half the year, the death of ducks taken by foxes and all the other unpleasantness that would go along with such a life. You couldn’t do it here, though, could you, where not foxes but dingos would prey on the ducks and summers would be spent desperately seeking out water for the flock. Did men even farm ducks in South Australia? He had no idea, he realised, and could not in fact pinpoint the last time he had seen a duck.
5
Henry was bored.
He had cleaned his room.
He had helped Mother bring in the firewood.
He had fetched down the winter coats from the attic – found Georgie curled up among them, pretending to be a bear – and then hung them outside to air.
He had sat with Wills on Mother and Father’s bed and tried to teach the baby to bark, but Wills had just giggled at him and, after a while, cried.
He had talked to each and every last sailor in the home. He had interviewed them one by one, asked whether they had ever been bitten by a shark or seen someone else eaten by one, or if they had met a pirate or even been a pirate once upon a time. One man said he had seen his shipmate fall overboard and be eaten by a shark, and Henry had asked him if he could please give some more detail, like exactly how big was the shark and how many bites did it take to eat the man and did the man make any interesting faces while he was being eaten, or did the shark start with his face. And he had stood there with his pencil and his paper ready to write whatever the sailor said, but the sailor had said he couldn’t remember all that much of it, that he had turned away almost as soon as the shark appeared. And Henry closed his book of paper and put his pencil back in his pocket and wondered why a person would turn away when they could watch a shark eating a man. How often does a person get a chance to have an experience like that?
Henry had eaten a bun.
He had eaten a handful of grapes from the bunch he’d been told not to touch.
He had gone out the back to the apple tree he was not supposed to climb and he had climbed the tree and got one of the very best apples from the top and sat there eating it until all that was left was the core.
Henry had added the core to his experiment shelf. The shelf was in the cupboard under the back staircase where nobody else ever went. It was the seventeenth core on the shelf, and the first and second ones had some quite lovely worms living on them. Next to them was the rat that one of the home’s cats had caught – its tail was missing and its eyes, but so far he couldn’t see any of the rest of its skeleton.
He shook his jar of scabs. It was still only about a quarter full. He thought about grazing Georgie’s knees and ankles and adding Georgie’s scabs. That could ruin the experiment. He didn’t know what the experiment was, so he wasn’t sure.
Henry sat for a while and stared at his experiment shelf, wrote some notes on his pad, sat for a while and a little while longer.
He was still bored.
Henry put his ear against the door of the cupboard to make sure neither Mother nor Georgie was outside. He cracked the door open and double-checked, but he was alone. He closed the door behind him and pulling a hair from his head placed it across the door jamb. If anyone else went in there he would know right away. Quickly he picked himself over for cobwebs so Mother wouldn’t ask any awkward questions, and went to look for something else to do.
Georgie was in the garden now, woken from his hibernation and collecting eggs from the chooks. Henry squatted behind the hedge and watched him for a while. He was singing a song to the chickens. ‘Little eggs, little eggs, let me have your little eggs, move your funny little legs and let me have your little eggs. Little eggs, little eggs …’ Georgie loved the stupid chickens; loved the eggs even more. What he wanted with eggs Henry would never know, but he rolled the things around in his palms, tucked them away in pockets, pulled them out when he thought no one was watching. If it wasn’t the eggs and the chickens, it was cats and dogs and frogs and rabbits, ants and bugs.
‘Henry!’ Georgie had seen him. Henry ducked his head down but it was too late. ‘Henry! Eggs!’
‘I saw,’ Henry said.
‘You can have one if you want.’
‘You keep them.’
‘What are you doing, Henry? Are you doing experiments?’
‘Not right now.’
‘Some ants were eating a beetle before, do yo
u want to see? They left its wings and everything else went down into their holes. Just hard bits left behind.’
‘They ate its guts?’
‘All its guts, Henry – you want to see?’
‘And its skin, they ate all that?’
‘Do beetles have skin, Henry?’
‘Wait there,’ Henry said. ‘Don’t follow me! You can’t follow me. Wait there. I want to see the ants.’
He slipped quietly through the back door, listening to the sounds of the house. No one was about. He took the hair from its spot across the cupboard door and grabbed his half-rotted, dried-out rat from the highest shelf. It was sticky between his fingers and he wished he’d stolen a rag from the kitchen.
Georgie was singing to the chickens, but he stopped as soon as he saw what Henry had in his hand.
‘Who’s that, Henry?’ Georgie asked, and Henry felt a ripple run through his Mark.
‘One of the cats left it. I’ve been waiting to see its skeleton but it’s taking forever. But maybe the ants would eat the other bits and leave the skeleton?’
Henry felt the rushing of ocean water, the swelling of his other self, his own self fading, and his skin tingled with the presence of his Mark as Georgie said, ‘Oh, you want to put it on the ants! What a good idea. Let’s see what the ants do!’
I am all fingers now, the feel of the animal, small sticky feet, damp sticky fur. We crouch over the dirt pile, the three of us, and their little legs swarm them upwards to the half-rotted beast. Henry grabs towards it, scared to see the whole creature carried away underground, a bubble of heartcracking regret bursting in his brain, but little brother tells him wait, wait, wait, Henry; watch. Watch.
Tiny teeth they sever the flaps of skin, bite away the strands of hair. Clutched in jaws, passed back and back and back, the animals seethe over and past one another, sniffing and learning, talking and telling and no words, no sound, no ears for these little friends. All smell.
Henry churns with joy. White bones clean and shining in the wet sun. Little brother’s ‘Who, who, who is it, Henry?’ tingling still in my heart. We are one bundle of kind-cruel happiness today, aren’t we, boy? Little brother fetches a stick, passes it to his Henry, ‘Do you want to poke them, Henry?’ he asks. Is there any other thing to do but poke a creature on a sunny wet day like today? Of course he does. We do. Black dots scattering over sand and dragging the last bits of flesh down under with them, the gravel landscape left still and silent. Henry lifts his prize and all of us, we all breathe a sigh of great content. Cradled in his hands, the stick dropped now, its toothy skull still attached to neck bones, spine bones, rib bones, leg bones.