From the Wreck

by Jane Rawson

  She dropped the cash in her purse. ‘Come and see me on the stage again some time, Mister Hills. Bring your brother. Is he as handsome as you?’

  ‘Brother-in-law. He’s a wiry sort. Impressive moustache, though. Do you like an impressive moustache? Perhaps you could take him off my hands. I’m sure he’d be up for a bit of hypnotism. Yes, might just do that, young lady. We might just do that.’

  ‘And let me know if you find this ocean-going witch-siren. I’m fascinated.’

  ‘It’s not funny,’ he said. ‘She’s destroying my family.’ And as he watched Alice Jarvis swan her way out of the park, heads turning to watch her, he felt the weight of it all descend on him again. Perhaps he should have gone to see her fake hypnotist. Perhaps it would have helped. Without a doubt, he should have followed her home. For the last half-hour he’d felt almost normal; another half-hour wrapped around her skin and he might have remembered how it was to be a human man. Instead he stepped back into all that was waiting for him. His life, still unchanged.

  8

  Henry lay face down on his bed, his fingers brushing across his Mark, waiting for the moment it would vanish. He slid a fingernail under the edge of it, felt it peel away and wrap itself tight around his finger. His oldest friend. The twist in his brain; the always-suck of it. His mother’s eyes glancing off him and away. His father, revolted. How would it be, to have skin that felt dry inside and out? To have feet that felt only dirt?

  He’d been fighting the oceanic tug of it for many months now, trying to force his brain to stay here on dry land, where his body lived. But today might be the last time. He let himself go and found he was not in the oceanic depths but instead flung out, out, out into the black. And there, just a speck of it, was a planet, formed in the perfect spot in a vast, cold universe.

  Spinning through the black he watched it shift and change - rock planet, ice planet, ocean planet, land planet and then in a haze of clouds and under the eye of one warm star it became ocean, land and sky. Just right.

  There were creatures – tiny, so many – a swarm of them struggling and fighting and out of them came babies and blood and all the heat of that one warm star turned to grass and to muscle and to life.

  Teeth tearing throats. The guts of a rabbit are the eyes of a newborn dingo pup are the food that fuels the towering termite nest are the shade where a small skink rests. In a river, in a pond, in the shifting desert sand, in mountain rock and the cold ice of glaciers and in one yard of earth.

  The disease that devoured one and passed over another. The rat’s little body all thick with ants. The apple cores food for worms. All of it, life.

  The great joyous throb of it.

  He plunged into the swarming ocean, felt its wriggling abundance. Slumped and lay soft on the currents of it, drifting. Henry sounded the ancient depths of his Mark – like this today and yesterday and tomorrow and always. No shadows fell, no teeth snapped and there was a stillness amid the frenzy. Henry felt his place in it – just to be this boy and never wonder why or who or how to be better, braver, otherwise. Just to be and to love. To notice it fresh every day. Not to fear it leaving; to know it always was and always will be, and that when this body stops and rots and makes itself food that still it will all go on just like this, just like always. Tiny tragedies, tiny triumphs and none of it meaning a thing against the great still monstrousness of forever and always. This always ocean, this always world, these always stars, this stretching, boundless, eternal universe. This quiet space.

  ‘You can let go of that thing,’ his father called as he passed down the hallway, ‘it’s not going anywhere. You’re stuck with it. And your mother says to go and fetch her eight sausages.’

  Henry’s head broke the surface of the water and he breathed and breathed, lungs not gills, and his eyes stung so from the salt that he didn’t see them, there underwater, his father’s boots stomping and smashing and crushing as the dirt poured in over everything and broke the universe into past, present, future.

  9

  At the butcher, Henry rubbed his wet, dirty face on his sleeve and took his place in the queue. ‘Let it be Mister Sidney, let it be Mister Sidney, let it be Mister Sidney,’ he chanted to himself, no idea what he’d do if he got to the front and Mr Felton was serving.

  ‘What’re you after, boy?’ Mr Sidney called him out of the line, round to the side of the counter.

  ‘Special order, sir.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Special. Order.’

  ‘For your mam, is it?’

  ‘No, Mister Sidney, for me. I just … oh, never mind,’ and Henry felt his eyes begin to leak again with the stupid frustration of it all, these useless grown-ups and their nonsense world.

  ‘Oh!’ The apprentice’s grin turned wicked. ‘Special order. Wait a moment.’ Sidney slipped through the curtain covering the door to the back room, but he was back within seconds. ‘Sorry, Hills, nothing left out there today. Mister Felton must have taken it all round to the blood-and-bone man already.’

  Henry had been hoping for a head, or maybe even a heart. This was such a terrible day.

  ‘Well, thank you anyway. Just eight sausages then.’ He would go walk on the beach maybe. Or run away from home.

  ‘Though if you’re not busy after, perhaps you could pop back then.’

  ‘After? After what?’

  ‘Keep your voice down. After … you know. After we close. Can you come back after we close?’

  Henry nodded. ‘You’re getting another beast in? To cut up?’

  ‘Oh, something much better than that. Come back in an hour.’ Sidney called to the queue, ‘Who’s next?’

  Henry gave the apprentice the secret sign as he left, but Sidney never could learn the secret sign and just frowned at him.

  When Henry got back, at the time the shop was normally closed, Sidney was waiting out the front for him.

  ‘That Felton could do with a lesson in what’s right and what’s wrong, if you take my meaning. He needs to learn to respect a man, he does. In three more months I’ll be eighteen and done with all this and maybe I’ll head to Victoria and find my own Welcome Stranger and he can just do his own dirty work.’

  Henry didn’t really know what Sidney was on about, so he nodded and made his own face look very serious and a little angry.

  ‘It’s down here.’

  Sidney led him down an alley which ran from Ship Street to an open space beyond. Behind one of the buildings, thick weeds had grown and it looked as though some animals had made nests there.

  ‘In there.’ Sidney tipped his chin towards a particularly dense patch of weeds.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Go look. You’ll soon see.’

  Suddenly Henry wished he was at home with Mother, maybe even helping Georgie collect eggs from the hens.

  ‘What’s in there?’ he asked again.

  ‘Are you feeble? Get in there. Here,’ Sidney grabbed a stick from the ground and thrust it at Henry. ‘Take this. Poke about a bit.’

  It was probably a snake, Henry thought. Snakes were fine. He once had half a snake skeleton in his collection. If Sidney wanted to frighten him with a snake he was going to be sorely disappointed.

  ‘There’s nothing there, is there, Mister Sidney?’ Henry said, after three or four pokes about in the weeds with the stick and still not a single snake. ‘Maybe it’s left?’

  ‘Left? It can’t leave. Here, give me that.’

  Sidney thrashed the stick about in the weeds. ‘Ah, here it is! Some dogs must’ve been at it. Can you see now?’

  Henry squatted down, unsure what he was meant to be looking at. It was something dead, no doubt about that: there were maggots seething all over the thing. Sidney knocked at them with the stick, and as they tumbled into the grass Henry saw that they had been feeding on a person’s arm. He peered closer.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Who? It’s nobody. A swaggie.’

  Henry hadn’t seen a dead person befor
e. He hadn’t expected it would be quite so damp and soft and swollen, or would smell quite as strong. Cats and birds and snakes seemed drier, more like a husk. This was a bit hard to look at. He forced himself to look anyway.

  ‘How’d he get here?’

  ‘Well, I dunno, do I? How would I know?’

  ‘Do you know where his head is?’

  ‘Why so many questions, Hills?’ Sidney smacked him across his shin with the stick, and Henry fell back into the dirt. ‘Are you done looking?’

  Henry was and he wasn’t.

  ‘Come on, time to get out of here. Don’t go telling no one, all right? Or I’ll have to tuck you up with him.’ Sidney smiled.

  Henry didn’t reply and, though he felt like running as fast as he could, he headed back towards the street at a leisurely stroll, whistling a little.

  ‘He’s a good one, isn’t he?’ Sid yelled after him. ‘Beautiful and ripe!’ And he laughed like it was the best joke anyone had ever made.

  Where would his head have got to? Henry waited until Sid had gone off in the direction of the pub, then went back down into the weeds. How had he got here? Did someone kill him on purpose? Did he just come down here one day, sick, and did he go to sleep and die? You’d still have a head, though, wouldn’t you, if that happened. Your head wouldn’t rot clean away before the rest of you.

  Maybe he’d never had a head.

  Maybe the man had stalked around the streets of Port Adelaide at night, just a bloody neck stump on his shoulders. He wouldn’t have to eat or drink. He couldn’t, could he: no mouth to eat with. Unless maybe he’d caught rats and cats and torn them to bits then pushed the meaty chunks down into his neck hole. Or maybe he’d wring them out till the blood dripped down his open wound!

  But what would kill someone like that? What would kill a monster who walked the streets all night without a head? He’d drag a metal pole behind him, clack, clack, clack over the cobblestones, and anyone who heard him would know that was it, they were doomed. There wasn’t anyone in Port who could fight a monster like that, a blood-drinking headless monster with a ferocious metal pole. Unless it was another monster. A bigger monster. A fiercer monster. A monster like that would come back to check the headless monster was still dead. And maybe kill it again if it hadn’t died properly the first time. Which maybe it hadn’t. As soon as dark came he’d be up again, walking the streets and dragging his metal pole behind him, looking for cats to wring for their blood. Or children.

  It was after five and the sun was starting to go down and Henry thought it would probably be a good idea to go home. Mrs Gallwey was leaving the pub with a jug of beer, so Henry fell in step beside her. Mick and Joe hissed ‘Witch, witch!’ from their usual haunt in the doorway of the bakery as they passed, but Mrs Gallwey didn’t even look their way.

  Henry could hear the fading wails of Mick’s best baby impression as they turned the corner. Mrs Gallwey kicked a rock along before her. She didn’t seem inclined to speak, but Henry was bursting with the thing he’d just seen.

  He tried to think of a way he could talk about it without getting himself in trouble with Sidney.

  ‘Do you know Sidney?’ he asked.

  ‘I used to live there,’ she said. ‘I know it very well.’ The rock fell into a drain and she swore quietly.

  ‘The butcher’s apprentice?’

  ‘Who?’

  The wind off the water was cold, the waves slapping hard against the piers of the jetty. No one else much was out and all the shops had already closed. It was quiet enough that Henry could hear a horse and carriage coming towards them long before he saw it. It passed them by in a mess of steam and sweat.

  ‘There’s a dead swaggie down behind Ship Street,’ he said.

  Mrs Gallwey nodded.

  ‘He doesn’t have a head,’ Henry said.

  ‘You saw him?’ she asked. ‘They were talking about him in the pub. Filthy business. Treating him like a freak show.’

  ‘Who is he?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Who cares? Nobody cares, Henry, and you won’t get far if you do. Dead swaggies, dead blackfellas: the forest that’s cleared to till the field of civilisation, young man. Stack them up and get on with the job.’

  ‘But what about all the ghosts?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘All the ghosts. All the headless monsters walking the streets after dark, wringing out the bodies of cats and rats to drink their blood. They won’t leave us be.’

  ‘You’ve seen these ghosts?’ Mrs Gallwey stopped at the corner of their street and took a swig from the beer jug.

  Henry nodded. ‘He carries a metal pole and he drags it behind him when he walks the streets at night. We killed him and he’ll never let us be.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘We did it.’

  Henry could feel a mountain of corpses shifting inside him, the wet bodies of a billion slaughtered creatures and the headless swaggie tossed on top. He squeezed his eyes shut but it just made the smell of them, the clutching seaweed smell of them, rise up in his nostrils. He shook his head, bent over to breathe, or to vomit – he didn’t know which.

  ‘Stop it!’ he hissed at his Mark, and then he remembered she was leaving him and he sat down suddenly in the gutter and clutched at his shoulder.

  Mrs Gallwey sat beside him and he watched as the bottom of her skirt darkened from the mud.

  ‘You know your mother will probably see you sitting here if you stay much longer,’ she said. Henry saw they were out the front of his house. ‘And now that I’m sitting here too I can only imagine what people will say. That strange Henry Hills, they’ll say. Just like him to be drinking in the gutter with that gypsy witch Beatrice Gallwey. Maybe another few months and it’ll be us down the back of Ship Street.’ She smiled.

  ‘Missus Gallwey?’ He didn’t think she was listening. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘I have no doubt,’ she said.

  ‘Did you ever see anyone whose skin was theirs and wasn’t theirs?’

  ‘Like wearing a mask made from another human’s face, do you mean? Or gloves?’

  ‘I …’ He couldn’t think of a way to explain it, that it was his body and not his body. That it had a mouth but no one else knew. That he could feel under the edges of it but Mother, who touched him every day, thought it was all one with his skin. ‘Can I show you?’

  Why was he asking her? Because she was strange, and old, and because she’d come from New South Wales and she knew gypsies and because she understood about catching fish and because he had never seen another adult who wasn’t drunk sitting in a gutter.

  ‘That depends how far we have to travel. This beer won’t drink it itself, and if it does Missus Frome will have my hide.’

  ‘It’s here,’ he said. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘In that case, why don’t you get yourself out of this gutter and we’ll pop over to my place for a bit.’

  Henry sat quietly in the kitchen while the beer was poured. Mrs Frome and the man took their beer outside. Henry took off his shirt. Mrs Gallwey held a candle close to see better, and Henry felt the edges of his Mark ripple away from the heat.

  ‘Can you see that?’ he asked her.

  ‘It’s alive, isn’t it,’ she said.

  He nodded.

  ‘How astonishing,’ she said.

  ‘I imagine having another creature living on you creates problems. What does your mother say?’ Gallwey asked once his shirt was back on and she’d put a small glass of beer in front of him.

  ‘She says it’s nothing to worry about, I’m a healthy, normal boy. She won’t look at it. I mean, she sees it but she doesn’t see it. She just sees my skin.’

  ‘Do you want it off you?’

  ‘No! No. Sometimes. But no.’ He didn’t know how much to tell her. ‘Father is trying to make it go. He hates it.’

  ‘He knows it’s alive?’

  ‘I don’t know. But he asks me questions about it. “Does it make you dream evil dreams?” He says
he knows someone who will make it vanish. Next week, he’s seeing him next week and this person will make it vanish.’ Henry gulped the beer, forgetting that was what was in front of him, and gagged and coughed on the bitter taste.

  ‘Does it make you dream evil dreams?’

  ‘No! It’s my friend.’

  ‘But you can hear it inside your head, can’t you?’

  He shouldn’t tell her. She was strange but she was a grownup and grown-ups wanted everything normal and usual and clean. ‘I should go. Thank you for the beer.’

  ‘Sit down, sit down. You can go in a minute. First, listen. In Sydney I met a man. American, from Monterey, California. Loved the ocean. You want another glass of beer?’

  Henry shook his head.

  ‘He had a mark, like yours, across his back. I thought it was a tattoo. You know what a tattoo is?’

  Henry had seen pictures of the fierce Maori warriors of New Zealand and had long thought that once he turned thirteen he would demand a tattoo on his upper lip. He nodded.

  ‘But when I ran my finger across it, it rippled. It lived. It was just that tiny bit cooler than the rest of his skin.’ Henry felt his Mark ripple too, its clutch on his skin tighten. ‘Aquatic, it was, like yours. Nothing you could pin down, not shaped like a fish or anything, but you knew as soon as you looked hard enough that this had something to do with the ocean. Yours too, isn’t it?’

  Henry nodded again and felt his Mark seethe and stretch, the edges of it crawling across his back, up his neck, and he wondered if today would be the day it would eat him entirely and all his problems would be gone.

  ‘He said he’d learned long ago to keep his mouth shut about his shade. That’s what he called it, his shade. He wanted me to believe it was a tattoo but it wasn’t. “Tell me about your shade, Aden,” I kept asking. I think that was his name. Aden. Hm, maybe it was Adrian. No, no – I’m pretty sure it was Aden. You’d probably like me to get on with the story, wouldn’t you?’ she said. ‘Yes, well, first I’m going to need more beer. Why don’t you run outside and get Missus Frome to fill this up for me?’ She handed him her glass.