by Jane Rawson
Missus Gallwey drained her glass in one impressive draft. ‘Thank you, Mister Hills,’ she said. ‘Now I really must go.’
4
I don’t know days. Down here it is just me and the light of a thousand crazy headlamps. Have you seen them? No, you’ve never been down here. All jaw, they are, and out in front bobs a little lamp. The tiniest fishes, the ones with no brains, can’t help their little selves and simply must look, must see, what is it? And they find out it is mostly jaw.
So I watch that. I have watched that. For some long time now that is what I have done: watched that. We call it entertainment. We is me, because there isn’t anyone else here. Everyone else here is either food or I am.
This has been a mistake. I could have done nothing much better in the shape of fleet-footed fur.
My eyes are shut down. I have only one shape, soft and tentacled. Everything that was me means nothing at all here, in this freezing trench on an alien world. So instead I live there and then: the once-upon-a-time world that was all ocean, nothing but.
We eat and live and wait. I think.
A mass of flesh drifts down from our sky, a creature softened by death, all the shape gone from it. It hangs above us long enough for me to stop my conversation with myself, wonder at this cloud of fat, lit from inside by a thousand crazy headlamps. It hangs above us long enough for me to forget it’s there, and to start the conversation again. This could be there, I say; this could be home. No cloud of fat there, though, was there? I answer. Not that you ever saw, I say, which doesn’t mean there wasn’t. Were you ever this deep before? I say. I don’t answer. I wasn’t. But this could be there. I could be there, down deep, where I’ve never been before. I wouldn’t know anyone here. I could be home. I could have slipped. Home, before. And if I could just get a little closer to the sun, that star, I could look and see that all this was just the way it always had been, always was.
The cloud settles to the ocean floor. I am not the first to leave my rocky crack and strip my portion, but for once I am not the last. I coil about it, fill my belly. I eat it and I watch my back, but my tentacles and I are not so tempting when this giant lump of fat sits flaccid and unfighting on the ocean floor. Everyone comes from all around – those crazy headlamps and their friends, cousins and future enemies are all here. Is the world all ocean, nothing but? I throw the thought out there while we’re all filling our guts, but no one here knows anything but the deep, cold dark and they can’t say if it’s all there is because for them it’s all there is. They can’t say because saying isn’t a thing they do.
How do they live like this, without ever knowing day or night or how many times this forsaken planet has turned one face and the other to the sun, that star? This forsaken planet is your planet, I tell myself, but I will not believe it. We have not slipped, I reply; we are at the very bottom of the deepest of deep seas on the rim of a land that is full of tromping uprights with monkey-brain ideas. We will sit here for what will probably be years but who knows and then we will die too and everyone will gather around, charming and chumful the way they are now, and they will eat us until we are gone and then the first and fastest will eat one another until everyone speeds out of there. And that will be the end of this story, which may as well already be ended because what is there down here but dark and cold and the occasional floating lump of rancid fat? And while we, while I, am down here rotting, up there they will wrap themselves in metal and go to my home and kill everything that’s mine. And whoever I am then and there will flee back here and all of this will start again.
We eat. I eat. I crawl back to my dark cavern to slowly die. I returned here to this wet somewhat home and I have found that all the loneliness there has ever been waits here still.
You should get up there and look. Up there near the sun, that star. Go up. Look. Listen. You’re full of wet fat now. You will never be this unhungry again. Living on scraps of grim white-eyed bone monster? That won’t do it. This is it. Now.
You understand you have to come too, I remind myself. Well, I hadn’t. But I do now. And I still think we should.
And not right then but soon after, when this ocean floor is settled, when all of the fat is gone and the bigger of the things with teeth dispersed, when we’ve remembered that yes it is possible to be even lonelier than you are when you are feeding on wet, rotten fat with the cousins of some crazy lantern heads, then. When we remember that it is one thing to be in a world all ocean when that world is your own and quite another to be in a world all ocean when no one down there gives a holy damn about you and the only one who does on the whole bereft and stinking planet is some skinnylegged filthy-fingered swollen-hearted little upright on some dusty island up there where the sun is hot and the air is dry, well: then. That’s when we go. Then.
That is when I go.
I cling. I slide, crawl and climb and I cling. I rest, rest, rest, rest. I slide. I stop. I jet and swim, swim, swim, swim. I stop and cling and for an hour a day a week I hide and shrink in terror. I check and check and check and slide and then I jet and then I swim.
And there it is, its tiny dot in the corner of my eye which turns out to be that warm, beautiful life-giver, the sun. That star. The sun. It is dot, it is shilling, it is saucer and then here it is in my eyes and ears, and all around me the breaking of the ocean on the shore.
Just me, here, on this world that maybe once was but certainly isn’t now all ocean, and I am filling my eyes with ships and boats and people and jetties and even look a horse there and a man and yes, it is: I am right back where I started.
You should go find Henry, I tell myself, and then I remember that I don’t have anyone to talk to anymore and if I want someone to talk to ever again, that’s exactly what I should do.
SOME JOURNEYS
1
‘Put your head … just put your head through … oh goddamn it.’
The shirt had torn. It was Ivan’s last shirt and it had torn nearly in half and there wasn’t another one to replace it. His arms didn’t fit his sleeves anymore. He kept changing shape in inexplicable ways. He wanted new things, like food he could chew and to walk around.
‘Can I put this thing in some kind of harness and hang it from a wall?’ Beatrice asked Mrs Frome, who was halfheartedly pulling weeds from the gaps between the courtyard cobblestones. ‘Not all day, you understand. But for a good portion.’
‘You tell me, love,’ Mrs Frome replied. ‘I’ve never had the misfortune. Did you try it with your own baby?’
‘I can hardly remember yesterday, don’t ask me to remember twenty, fifty, a thousand years or whatever it’s been.’ Bea rummaged through her own clothes until she found a camisole small enough to look like a pinafore for the child and slipped it over his head. ‘I have to get this baby some clothes.’
‘Well, he’s not really a baby anymore, is he? Which I suppose is the problem.’
‘One of the problems. Can you watch him for me while I go down to Military Road?’
Mrs Frome nodded, which Bea assumed meant yes she’d be in the vicinity but no she didn’t make any promises about actually watching, which was good enough for now.
As she nursed a small glass of beer in the back bar of the pub, Bea wondered how terrible it would be of her to buy a ticket on the next steamer back to Sydney and just leave the boy here. She hadn’t wanted him or asked for him. She was fond of him, but she wouldn’t say she loved him, as such. It wasn’t that she wished him ill or even that she had anything in particular to do that she couldn’t do with Ivan around. But after all those long years of putting up with a husband she couldn’t abide, she had no inclination to spend what was left with someone else’s uninteresting child. Better loneliness, she thought. At least loneliness gave a woman time to think.
Oh but what about the poor child? How would he feel, abandoned first by his mother and then by his grandmother? What great weight of sorrow mightn’t the unfortunate sod lug through life? Could she really condemn him to live the life of an Oliver
Twist, a David Copperfield, an impoverished, neglected orphan thrown into a life of crime and despair? But ah, she reminded herself, it all turned out fine in the end, didn’t it? Twist and Copperfield both ended up comfortable children, well-off men. And happy, too. Though of course that was thanks to their mysterious relatives appearing out of nowhere and spiriting them off to a new life. Bea was Ivan’s mysterious relative. And Bea was tired of spiriting.
She chanced her luck and ordered another beer. The barman complied.
She had no great ambition for her life, but she did have a little. Forty-five years old and many might say that was it, not much left that an old dried-up widow like her could hope for. But her body still worked fine, head to toe and everything round the middle section as well. She could dance. She could drink. Men were happy to come to her bed and maybe one day she’d find one she liked for more than a day or two at a time. She would like to see what else life had to offer. Work a little harder and make a bit more money, then spend it on a passage to San Francisco, New York, maybe Italy or Jordan or Zanzibar. The Spice Islands. All that was possible with a child, of course, but why would anyone intentionally take an unwanted guest with them on a journey of adventure? You wouldn’t see some man invite his ancient aunty along for the ride as he cavorted off to New Guinea. He’d go alone, or with someone whose company he actually enjoyed. Why shouldn’t she – as capable of drinking a beer as any man, as capable of managing herself on an ocean voyage, of mastering her own feelings, of earning her own passage – do the same?
She emphasised the point by ordering herself a third beer, which she drank at speed. On Military Road the tedium of shopping for miniature shirts and trousers was much relieved by the light buzzing in her head and thrilling of her skin, and so with time to spare she bought a little trinket for Mrs Frome as well.
‘What’s all this then?’ Mrs Frome asked as Beatrice plunked the package down on the kitchen table.
‘You can easily answer that question yourself by unwrapping it,’ she replied. ‘Is Ivan still in the yard?’
‘I suppose so,’ Mrs Frome said from the depths of the larder.
Ivan had fallen asleep with his bottom in a puddle, which would have been a problem had he been wearing any clothes. As it was, Bea dried him off and wondered if really there was any point at all dressing a person with so little sense of selfpreservation. Though if she was honest with herself, given the chance she’d much rather lounge about stark naked. And so she decided to let him be for the remainder of the day. The weather was warm. And besides, if she was going to leave him at an orphanage, then he would probably never get the chance to run naked again.
Was she really going to leave him at an orphanage? A good orphanage, mind you. Not one of those orphanages where they send the children to work in factories and starve them and beat them. The kind where they feed them properly and they have a comfortable bed and warm clothes and where they get an education. That kind. She should probably wait until she sobered up before she decided, but deep down she thought that yes, she probably would. That big building on the beach at Largs – wasn’t that an orphanage?
‘Come here, Ivan,’ she called into the courtyard from her bed in the stable. ‘Ivan, are you out there?’ Ivan!’ And after a few more tries the child tottered in. She sat him on the bed next to her. He wasn’t a bad boy. Nice-looking, funny. ‘Where’s Mama?’ she asked him, and preoccupied with a strip of rabbit skin he’d found somewhere, he waved one hand absently and said, ‘Gone’.
‘And Papa?’
‘Gone.’
She watched to see if he cried or even scrunched his little face up as though he was having sad thoughts, but there was none of that.
‘Ribbit?’ he asked.
‘Rabbit,’ she told him. ‘It’s fur from a rabbit.’
‘Mumum,’ he said, even though she kept telling him not to call her that, ‘the ribbit’s gone?’
‘Somewhat,’ she said. ‘The rabbit’s fur is here, but most of the rabbit is gone. Yes. Rabbit gone.’
‘Where’s the ribbit?’
‘Gone.’
He fondled the fur a little longer.
‘Where’s the ribbit?’
‘The rabbit’s gone.’
‘Gone?’
She nodded.
He tucked the piece of fur into the pocket of her shirt.
‘Mumum, the ribbit’s gone.’
‘That’s right,’ she said.
He pulled it out again.
‘Ribbit!’ and he squealed with glee and bounced on the bed. ‘Mumum, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit!’
‘Yes, it’s a rabbit. Do you want to take your rabbit outside?’
He tucked the fur into her pocket.
‘Ribbit’s gone.’
She had nothing to add.
‘Mumum, ribbit’s gone.’
He stared at her.
‘MUMUM, ribbit’s gone!’
‘Yes, the rabbit is gone.’
He pulled the fur from her pocket and squealed again, louder than before. ‘RIBBIT! Ribbit, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit!’ and bounced on the bed until he fell over and banged his elbow and started to wail.
She picked him up and rubbed the sore spot until he calmed down, dabbed a little ointment on it to reassure him something was being done, then tucked him into the bed thinking she’d lie quietly beside him for a few moments until the temperature cooled down outside. He fell asleep immediately and, as he always did, stretched his little limbs into every corner of the small bed, smushing his heels into her kidneys and forcing her back to her feet.
Outside she rolled herself a cigarette and listened to the houses around her. She could hear that boy Henry telling his mother about volcanoes in excruciating detail and his little brother chiming in with outright fictions about a giant volcano from the sea that will swallow them all. From an upstairs window, Bea heard the shrieks of a furious toddler. The little girl who lived next door to them was reciting her times tables and getting most of them wrong. Bea exhaled smoke and watched it curl up to the pink and orange clouds above the little colony of South Australia, where no one was of convict stock and everyone went to church and life was lovely and calm and polite. She yelped and dropped the butt, which had burned her finger. ‘Hang this,’ she said.
Mrs Frome was stirring some kind of stew when Bea went into the kitchen.
‘Don’t you ever want to live somewhere else?’ she asked, taking over the chopping of carrots so Mrs Frome could rest her buniony old feet.
‘What do you mean, darl? The only other place I’m likely to live is the hospital, and not for very long at that.’
Mrs Frome was all of fifty-five, but she’d been in this house since her father died and left it to her thirty years ago.
‘You never wanted to go somewhere? To travel? Even to the mother country?’
‘England? Bloody damp in England. All grey and everyone in their grey suits muttering about the rain is what I’ve heard. Why would you leave all this for that?’
Mrs Frome was a strong advocate of the young colony, a lover of the wind off the ocean, the new museum, the jetty at Semaphore, raucous dances in the run-down blocks where the itinerant sailors lived. She’d been known to fraternise with the local tribe in the park in town, sharing a little fire-cooked meat – anyone who sang and could teach her a song was someone Mrs Frome thought worth spending time with.
‘I’d never waste my time with England. Stuck-up, they are.’
‘South America, then. The Argentine. Cowboys and pampas and ancient pyramids and mystical jungles.’
‘I expect that’s Egypt you’re thinking of. I’ve no time for any of that. Disease-ridden fleshpots, those places, uncivilised savages with over-spiced food and no notion of how to make a decent cup of tea.’
‘I hear the tea is good in India.’
‘No, no – I’m South Australian born and raised, I’ll live and die here and nowhere else. God’s country. Speaking of tea …’
Be
a added the last of the vegetables to the stew and put a pot of tea on, then sat down at the kitchen table too.
‘So you’ve got itchy feet, do you, lassie?’ Mrs Frome asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Beatrice, and she didn’t know. She remembered why she’d come to South Australia in the first place, to dump the child on her younger sister, and wondered if that was still a remote possibility. There’d been a letter or three between them since her sister’s husband had died. Anne-Marie, the sister, had gone to live with her husband’s elder brother and his family until the lack of space became too much for them all. Then came the great good fortune that the younger brother had taken a shine to her and was happy to marry her and the whole bunch of them, given they were as close to being his children as a man could hope without being the natural father. Anne-Marie never mentioned her feelings on the matter – whether the brother was an appealing prospect not just as a safe harbour but also as a man. But when circumstances are straitened, Bea supposed, best not to put too much importance on that kind of thing. Since the marriage, which had been a small affair and Bea informed that it probably wasn’t worth her while making the trip, correspondence had dried up. Now and again she thought of making the journey up through the hills to the German village. Action had not yet followed inclination. Would it be worth some exploratory questions to see whether Anne-Marie could inconspicuously add another to the brood?
‘Well, as you’re so forthcoming, maybe we should just eat our dinner in silence,’ Mrs Frome said.
‘I’m sorry.’ Beatrice tried to look attentive. ‘Would you like me to serve the stew?’
‘Oh, if it’s not too much bother, dearie,’ Mrs Frome said, easing herself back into her chair and raising her feet again on her tattered footstool, embroidered with a dachshund gnawing at its own tail.
She could visit the orphanage. Just to see. And maybe send a letter to her sister. When dinner was done and Mrs Frome napping in her armchair, Bea scratched a little something out.