From the Wreck

by Jane Rawson

  ‘Thank you, Georgie,’ he says and his heart fills with the urge to kiss, which he squashes down deep and instead flashes a smile of generous teeth. ‘You should help me put it on its shelf,’ he says, and just look at little brother’s wriggle of joy. In we trot, into the house, depleted of Mother, Father, wandering sailors and just we three crammed into the cupboard. Georgie on his highest tips of toes to see the top shelf, the sprawled corpses of small souls.

  ‘Did you ever put eggs there?’ he asks, and Henry tips a little more towards love. ‘What happens to the oldest, oldest of eggs?’ says Georgie, and Henry promises he will find out – first, chickens but oh if life is kind, if fate is smiling, sparrows too and crows, currawongs and magpies, the butcherbirds that swoop on tiny wrens and gut their children. All eggs, all in a line, all stinking and exploding and spraying colours never seen before from this end to that.

  ‘Good idea, Georgie,’ he says. ‘And Georgie,’ he says, ‘when you bang yourself next time, you know, on your knee or your elbow or your head? When you bang yourself and get a scab, can I have the scab?’ He unscrews the lid of the jar and Georgie, solemnly, looks inside and accepts the responsibility he has been given. ‘Always, Henry,’ he says.

  ‘Georgie!’ Mother calls from the kitchen. ‘Henry! Where are you, boys?’ They hear the back door open and Mother’s call across the garden. She thinks they are hidden behind the chook shed, and both boys smile at the trick they’ve played. They hold quiet, still in this tiny moment. ‘I’ll go,’ says Georgie. ‘Sit here, shh, I’ll go and you escape,’ and Henry presses little brother’s hand in his just for a moment, a second of warm skin. Then Georgie is off and Henry is gone, gone, gone, out of the front door and over the fence.

  *

  Henry wished just Joe had come with him. Or just Mick. But it’d been both of them there, outside the baker, and when they’d asked him what he was up to he’d said, ‘Going down to Semaphore.’ ‘We’ll come too,’ they’d said, and they’d dropped the end of the pie they were sharing into the road and Henry had seen a rat creep out and drag it under a box.

  He could have said he was on his way home and left them there but sometimes he wondered what it would be like to be one of those boys at school who ran in a gang, who he’d see sometimes on a Saturday afternoon or even a Tuesday evening in a huddle where they shouldn’t be, crouched over something or other that his mother usually steered him away from.

  So he’d said Semaphore and they’d said they’d come too and he’d imagined, for a minute, what it might be like on Monday to have Joe and Mick come over to him outside school and say, ‘Don’t go home, come with us. We’re going on an adventure.’ And he and they and five other boys would light out for who knows where and come back muddy and hungry and Mother would be angry but she’d know he was getting too big now to yell at, not with all those other big boys there with him, standing in the yard, watching as he went inside.

  But now they were here at the rock pools. Henry had a line out and he’d got a gull to come ever so close to the end of it but Mick and Joe just wouldn’t shut up. They threw things at each other and the birds, they’d chucked a rock in the rock pool to try and crush a crab scuttling there. They didn’t know that if you were slow, and quiet, you could wall a crab into a corner and then you could trap it in your hand and it was yours. Do what you want with it. Put it in your pocket and feel it scratch against your leg. Leave it in a teacher’s drawer. Ask its secrets. Draw its tiny hands.

  Or crush it with a rock. But first you had to catch it. Like the gull. Once it was theirs they could do whatever they wanted with it, so why throw rocks and yell at it now?

  The bird flew off and Henry pulled the line back in.

  ‘You have to be quiet,’ he told them.

  ‘What?’ Joe said.

  ‘You have to be a bit quieter, if you want to catch a gull,’ Henry said.

  ‘Who says we want to catch a gull? I want to bloody kill it, just hit it with a rock,’ Joe said. ‘Chuck rocks at ’em till one of ’em falls out of the sky – why don’t we do that?’

  ‘We could fill this pool up with rocks,’ said Mick, ‘and watch all the fish get squashed.’

  ‘We’re meant to be catching a gull!’ Henry said.

  ‘Who says?’ Joe asked him. ‘Who says that’s what we’re doing?’

  ‘Me,’ Henry said. ‘I do. We came down here to catch a gull. That’s why we came here!’

  ‘Who died and made you boss?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mick, ‘why would we do what you want?’

  ‘Because it’s my adventure,’ Henry said. ‘And you came on it. So you have to be quiet while we catch the gull.’ He turned back towards the rock pool and scanned the sand for hungry birds.

  ‘Shhhh!’ Joe hissed into his ear, ‘Shhhh!’ Then he spun around and around yelling, ‘Everyone be quiet! We’re in the nursery and baby Henry needs to sleep.’

  ‘Don’t cry, baby Henry,’ Mick said, and threw a rock that bounced and stopped just by Henry’s toe.

  ‘Be quiet, Mick! Baby Henry needs to sleep!’ and Joe started making crying noises, wah, wah, wah, and Mick was laughing so hard that a little bit of pie came back up into his mouth and he spat it in the rock pool where a tiny fish snatched it away into a crack.

  Henry rolled the fishing line up, put it in his pocket and walked away. Joe and Mick kept laughing at his back until he couldn’t hear them anymore. When he turned around he could see they were trying to push each other into the water and Mick was knee-deep and stumbling and would probably tumble in any second now.

  He walked to the end of the jetty where he lay flat on his stomach, chin on his hands and the boards pressing deep into his fingers. He hung his head over the end and looked upside down into the water. There were no sharks. Silver fish flickered by. He closed one eye, tried to see inside their minds. He dropped his line into the water, baited with a piece of bread and jam. The bread went soft and floated to the surface where a gull swooped down and away with it.

  ‘You can use some of my bait if you want,’ a woman said behind him, above him.

  Henry rolled over onto his back and let the sky blind him for a moment, propped himself up onto his elbows. The woman was a black shadow against the white sky. He blinked, blinked again.

  ‘You’ve got fish guts on your lapel,’ she said. ‘You could use those instead of bread.’

  He blinked. It was Mrs Gallwey, from next door, sat on a vegetable crate and dangling a line into the sea. He pulled himself up to his knees to look in the tin bucket at her side.

  ‘Big fish,’ he said.

  ‘Gar,’ she said. ‘Good spot for them. You’d know that, though.’

  ‘I mostly get flatties,’ he told her. ‘Me and Father. Once we got a shark, though, a little one. We cut it up and Mother stewed it with turnips and onions and greens and I got to have one piece by itself, fried, so I could just eat it and think about how I ate a shark.’

  ‘Good shark fishing in Sydney,’ she told him. ‘You should try it some time. They catch man-eaters there.’

  ‘You could eat a shark that ate a man?’ Henry sat down by the bucket and dangled his feet over the water. ‘Really?’

  ‘I heard once,’ she said, pulling her line in and rebaiting her hook, ‘about a shark they pulled in off Newport beach. A big one, almost ten foot long, and when they cut it open a little girl fell out with its innards. No one ever claimed her but they said it was probably this English girl, fell off a ship on her way out to Sydney with her family, way off the heads. Guess she finally made it to New South Wales.’

  She threw her line back in and nudged a soggy roll of newspaper towards him with her foot. ‘There’s bait in there,’ she said. ‘Pop a bit on your hook, why don’t you.’

  Imagine being that little girl. Tumbling through the water, over and over and over and the water around you churned by the giant ship as it sailed away, away, away from you. Then quiet. Still. So quiet. You pop to the surface and th
ere is nothing, nothing, nothing. Water. An ocean of quiet. So cold. Your coat heavy around you, it pulls you down. Before the air is squeezed from your lungs there it is, huge and grey, the bleak joy of its broadened teeth. You turn into nothing but in the second before you are full of the whole world.

  ‘Boy. Henry, is it?’

  Henry nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Pop some bait on your hook.’

  He did, and sat there, line and legs dangling.

  ‘Missus Gallwey,’ he said, ‘have you seen any other boys in attics?’

  ‘Others?’

  ‘Not just your baby,’ he said. ‘Other ones. Grown boys, like me.’

  ‘Do you think Ivan lives in the attic?’ she asked, and he remembered the baby’s name: Ivan.

  ‘He lives in a box in the attic.’

  ‘Does he now,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Henry said. ‘Are there others, do you know? Or in cellars?’

  ‘In Port Adelaide, do you mean?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yes. I was thinking it would be good to make a gang, like a pirate gang perhaps. To roam the streets and perhaps set sail. We could steal a boat.’

  ‘But you need boys,’ she said, and Henry nodded. ‘You don’t know any boys who would make good pirates?’

  ‘None.’

  A pirate would need to be brave and quiet and most importantly to do as he was told, when Henry told him.

  ‘I see. So boys hidden in cellars or attics would be the ticket. For your gang. Boys with no history or family or schooling.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Henry said.

  ‘If I see any others,’ she told him, ‘I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Henry said.

  ‘Do you want Ivan?’ she asked. ‘I’m trying to find him a good home. Perhaps a pirate ship.’

  ‘Too small,’ Henry said, and Mrs Gallwey agreed because of course he was. Ivan was just a child.

  ‘Oh, I have a fish!’ Henry said, and he pulled in his line and he did have a fish, a whiting, yellow on the tips of its fins as it wriggled and thrashed and fought.

  ‘Will you do it yourself?’ Mrs Gallwey asked him. Henry said he would, and she passed him the knife and he drove it through the fish’s skull. It was still. Henry put it in the tin bucket and rebaited his hook.

  ‘That’s a lovely fish,’ she said. ‘Your mother will be very pleased with that.’

  A while later the sun went down. Mrs Gallwey walked home with him, Henry carrying the bucket, though when they were almost at his gate he said that if she wanted she could keep the whiting, perhaps for Ivan. She shook his hand and said she would.

  Mother kissed his face and told him tea was ready, could he please wash his hands. She rubbed at the fish guts on his jacket, smacked him gently on his behind.

  6

  George heard from Mrs Ann Avage.

  ‘Dear sir,’ the letter said, and continued in that cold way. ‘I assume you have found my address from The Register. I do not welcome your correspondence. Shipmates we may have been, but that time is gone now: a decade passed or more. I will not think on it. I know nothing of the physical symptoms you describe, beyond what a physician could already have diagnosed. Please do not write to me again. I appreciate your condescension in this matter,

  Mrs Ann Avage.’

  George tore it in half then in half again. It was not her. Black-hearted and avaricious she may be; an otherworldly witch, even. But she was not this kind of cut-crystal bitch. For good measure he tore the pieces even smaller, then dropped them in the fireplace.

  He heard also from the woman calling herself Miss Bridget Ledwith of Morphett Vale. She simpered and cajoled, asked that he meet her in Adelaide, could she pay his fare? Perhaps dinner? He disposed of that letter similarly.

  But then a reply came to his advertisement.

  ‘George,’ it said, and he felt momentarily hollowed out by the familiarity. He pulled the rough draft of the advertisement from where he had hidden it. No, he had not mentioned his name. Mr Hills on the return address, of course, but not George.

  ‘George, your mystery is solved. I am she. Rest your weary head. Let me know when and where we can meet and I will remove the spell. I only did it to bind you to me. I had always hoped you would one day seek me out. Your one and only Bridget.’

  He should tear this too, and burn it. He crumpled it into a ball and threw it in the cold ashes. Retrieved and smoothed it flat, smearing the desktop grey. He turned it upside down and right way up and it made no more or less sense seen either way.

  Bridget. George. The spell. She knew. It must be her, surely. Who other could know? No one other. What would it cost him to meet her? Nothing. A fare into Adelaide perhaps. He checked the envelope for a return address and saw it was care of the postmaster in Unley. Perhaps a little more, then. Or perhaps everything: wife, children, home, job, mind, legs to walk on and arms to lift. Eyes to see, teeth to chew. She could lure him to her so he could never return but must live on always as her slave. She could destroy him utterly and toss him back into the ocean. Or she could return the scraps of his health and sanity and let him rejoin the living. She could tell him that the worst of what he had done out there was a dream, perhaps, or if not a dream, only what anyone else would have done. That he was human still. Not monster: human.

  ‘Will you meet me,’ he wrote, his hand not particularly steady, and he tried to think of somewhere that no one he knew would see him. William was his only true fear. William who thought nothing of a ride in to Adelaide to visit the Institute Museum, the library. He could not risk North Terrace, despite its convenience for the railway station. He thought of William pulling that newspaper story from his pocket all those years back and still felt a little sick. The man was too clever by half. ‘Will you meet me,’ he started again with a fresh piece of paper, having smudged the previous one, ‘at Victoria House in the Botanic Gardens, by the waterlily, at two o’clock on Thursday the 9th of August.’ Two weeks – that would give her time to reply, to change her mind, for him to cover his tracks. Would they need a way to recognise one another? Surely not, he thought. He would know her anywhere, even from a glance at an upstairs window, drunk.

  Her reply arrived four days later. ‘George,’ she said, ‘I walked by you today on the street. Didn’t you know me? My arm brushed yours and I am sure you caught my eye for a moment. I have been near you, watching you, since first I saw your notice in the newspaper. We do not need a physical place and time to meet. I am always with you. Close your eyes, go inside yourself, and you will find me there on a deeper plane. Call my name and I will come. Always. Always. Bridget.’

  He checked the return address. She was definitely still in Unley. What was she on about? He double-checked no one else had crept into the room, then closed his eyes and tried to go inside himself, but within three seconds he felt an utter fool and opened them again.

  ‘Miss Ledwith,’ he wrote, and this time his hand was firmer, ‘please stay away from my house. It would not do for me to be seen with you. It would do you no favours either.’ Didn’t she value her privacy? He had thought she did. ‘I understand you are a mystical creature but please condescend to lower yourself to the material. I am a simple steward and not familiar with the goings-on of higher beings. Can you meet me in the Victoria House? If the 9th of August is now too soon, please let me know a better day. Yours, George Hills.’

  ‘Henry!’ he called. ‘Henry, are you home?’

  The boy didn’t answer.

  He checked the kitchen and the boys’ bedroom and the backyard but there was no sign of him. When he went back into the house, he saw Henry shutting the cupboard door behind him.

  ‘Were you in the cupboard?’ he asked.

  ‘In the? Oh, in the cupboard! No. No.’ Henry looked at his feet, then looked up and smiled confidently. ‘Were you looking for me, Father?’

  ‘I know you were in the cupboard. We can discuss that later. Come into my office.’

  George could he
ar Henry dragging his feet, and he told him to pick them up and walk properly.

  ‘Shut the door behind you,’ George said. ‘I need to talk with you about that mark you have.’

  ‘Mark?’ The boy was playing innocent.

  ‘On your back.’

  Henry nodded.

  ‘You still have it?’

  Henry nodded.

  ‘Does it hurt ever? Itch?’

  ‘No. It’s fine, it’s no problem.’

  George could see Henry’s fingers move to touch his mark, then drop back to his side.

  ‘Take your shirt off for me,’ George said. ‘Come on then, I’m not going to hurt you.’

  He turned the boy around, gently, his arms still so thin and brittle, and ran his fingertips over the sprawling birthmark. Somewhere inside him – and it was not his brain but somewhere lodged inside his guts – that rough coolness felt under his fingers the way that she had, clutched against him and the only talisman he had left against madness, death, despair.

  ‘That hurts,’ Henry said, and George released his grip on the boy’s bony shoulder, leaving purple fingerprints on the skin. He took Henry’s shirt from his lap and handed it back to him, gestured for him to pull it back on. Henry’s face was dark and George couldn’t tell whether from shame or anger or something else.

  ‘Your shoulder is all right?’ George muttered.

  Henry nodded.

  ‘Well, good.’

  George shuffled some things around on his desk, then realised his letter to Bridget had been uncovered and rapidly reshuffled everything.