by Jane Rawson
‘Dear Anne-Marie, If you are properly settled now, Ivan and I would like to take an opportunity to visit you. I cannot remember if I told you about Ivan – he is my grandson, left with me by my daughter before I came to South Australia. Please let us know when it might be convenient to visit, and whether we might stay a night or two. Your sister, Beatrice.’
2
It was a black joke the day George had squatted, breathless yet again, oh yes, that old thing once more, his back against a wall down a side alley just off the esplanade, his guts choking him, his eyes spotted blind, his heart a monster in his chest that fought the ribs holding it as though it would tear itself free and flop dead on the ground before him. He’d been nearly a year out of this. He was free! He thought he was free. He propped himself against that wall down a side alley looking for all the world like a washed-up drunk or a shattered old man. A black joke that, unappealing as he must have seemed, he was unerringly targeted by a frantic sailor, tugging at his coat sleeve and urging him please sir, please sir, you must come, you must help.
Help who, what, how, when all around him dizziness swirled and his throat clamped shut and he could feel a thrill of electricity up and down each hair on the skin of his arms. Leave me, man, he wanted to yell, I am dying and just want to be left alone to die. But his vision narrowed down to the dimmest of pinpricks, his voice broken to pieces by his trembling heart, he could not manage even a single word.
Instead he struggled to his feet and swallowed back the vomit that rose in him as the earth tipped and yawed, pulled on by this limping, scatter-witted man at his elbow.
‘Hurry sir, hurry.’
‘What is it?’ George managed to breathe out, and the man told him a boat, sir, a ship, run aground, more than a hundred aboard but how will we save them, sir? And George nearly fell to the ground laughing but that he knew only a crazy man would find a terrible wreck the world’s most hilarious joke.
There is nowhere here a ship could run aground, he wanted to tell the man, but the urgency in his voice pulled George on though as he looked about him he did not see the running crowds you’d expect at a tragedy of that size.
‘There,’ the man told him, and pointed towards the horizon. Dry land all the way, it was, and buildings, carriages, shops, homes, hotels. ‘There! Can’t you see? Do you need my glass, sir?’ and the man began fumbling in the filthy bag slung over his shoulder. Finding nothing he abandoned the search. ‘There! Eight days it has foundered and almost all aboard are dead.’
‘Eight days, you say. Food? Do they have food?’ George muttered. ‘Water? Do they have water?’
‘Nothing! They have nothing! Eight days in this freezing wind!’ he howled, as the harsh sun of late summer burned down upon both their heads. ‘This freezing wind! How will they live? Their poor, damned souls!’
George grabbed the man and shook him until he stopped screeching, shook him until he dropped the bag, shook him until he began to whimper and when he was weeping openly he threw him to the cobblestones and kicked him once for good measure. ‘Why don’t you send the fucking lifeboat, you heartless prick?’ he hissed into the man’s purpled face, and then he turned and strode away.
It felt better. It felt a hundred, thousand, million times better. His chest swelled, his lungs full of air for the first time in ten years or maybe a lifetime. A grin spread across his face and he filled that grin with one whisky then another, until he settled enough to turn to beer. When the beer had done God’s good work he washed his hands, smoothed his hair and turned his face to home.
‘Come with me, boy,’ he said to Henry, who was hunched over another of his drawings in a corner of his room. ‘Now!’
He took the boy’s hand and marched him downstairs, where he slammed open the backstairs cupboard door. ‘Let’s take a look at what we have in here.’
Jars – pickling jars, preserving jars – full, half-full, onethird-full – with bubbling, lumpy liquids in greys and greens and, once, an acid pink. ‘Fetch a box, boy. Be smart about it,’ he said, and when Henry was not back within the minute yelled after him, ‘from the larder. There are boxes in the larder.’ Another jar of flaked, reddish-brown skin. Apple cores in all states of disintegration.
‘Put them all in there,’ he said, and when Henry stood shocked, ‘the jars. Put them in the box. Then take them to the laundry and clean each of them until they shine and then you can return them to your mother’s kitchen where they belong.’ He pulled the boy’s shirt collar down. ‘That filthy thing’s back again, I see. Maybe I should slice it off. Take it off with a knife.’ He gripped a little harder. ‘This has all gone too far, Henry. All of it. You. You need to behave like a normal boy. You need to think like a normal boy. What’s this?’ Something’s skeleton, small; not human, thankfully. ‘You’re killing things now? Saving their corpses?’
‘The cat killed it. Years ago.’
‘The cat did it, did she? But you thought you’d keep the rotting corpse in a cupboard inside the house? Well, you won’t be needing it anymore,’ and he dropped the skeleton to the floor and crushed it with his boot. ‘Fetch the broom and clean all this out, then wash those jars like I told you. Your mother and I will think about what to do with you.’
Where was the boy’s mother?
‘Georgie –’ his second son was daydreaming as always, sitting on the hallway floor and staring out the window when he was supposed to be polishing the family’s shoes – ‘where’s your mother?’
Georgie scratched his forehead with the polishing rag, leaving a black smear across his eyebrow. ‘Shopping? Maybe she went shopping with Aunty Sarah?’
‘Well, get on with cleaning those shoes. And don’t play with your brother anymore.’
‘Wills?’
‘No, not Wills. Henry. I don’t want you playing with Henry. He’s a bad influence.’
George could feel a headache creeping up on him. He cut himself a slice of bread. That wasn’t enough so he cut a chunk of cheddar, too. He sat on the back steps chewing away at them, listening to the clink of jars in the laundry and squinting at the sun. There was a power in him, he felt it now. All this pain, all this fear: he was coming through to the other side of it. Whatever eggs had been laid inside him on Carpenters Reef, they were beginning to hatch. He had been equal to it. He had never turned his back on it. He was starting to see what it had all meant.
He heard the front door open and the voices of Eliza, Sarah, William.
‘William!’ he yelled up the hallway. ‘Just the man I want to see.’
‘George,’ Eliza said as he hunted them down in the kitchen, ‘you’re tracking dirt in on your boots. Can you leave them inside the back door?’
He ignored her. ‘William,’ he said. ‘I need to talk to you. Outside.’
‘George, what’s going on?’ Eliza would not stop. ‘What happened to the cupboard?’
‘I’ll tell you later. Tend to the child, will you.’ Wills was coughing and had gone quite red in the face. ‘William?’
‘Excuse me, ladies,’ William said, tediously cleaning his hands on a napkin. ‘What is it, George?’
He’d already told the man they needed to talk outside, so he took his dirty boots back out there to wait.
‘Not near the laundry,’ he said, when William eventually made his way out. ‘In fact, let’s walk. We can go to The Rifle Range. We won’t know anyone there.’
‘George, can you tell me what this is about? Sarah and I were just about to head home.’
‘Well, tell Sarah you’ll meet her there. It’s important.’
‘Have you been drinking already?’
‘Most likely. Go on, let her know – I’ll meet you out the front.’
Come on, man. Come on. George kicked his toes against the front wall and waited under the sweating sun. That infernal hot wind was picking up again, driving grit between his teeth. No place for a civilised man, Port Adelaide in the summer. Should all learn from the natives. Strip off. Get in the river. Sleep under
a tree till the worst of it passes. Perhaps he’d take another trip into town and have a bath in that lily pond.
‘Finally.’
William’s ridiculous straw hat blew off the second he stepped out the front door and George enjoyed watching him chase it for a moment down the road.
‘Got your hat?’ he asked, laughing.
‘George, really. What’s all this about?’
‘Walk, walk.’ They walked in silence until the corner of the street, then, ‘You remember Bridget Ledwith?’ he asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Bridget Ledwith. From the ship.’
‘The ship?’
‘The Admella, William. This isn’t very hard for a man of your learning. The Admella.’
‘Oh. Yes, the woman survivor. I know who you mean.’
‘You told me once to keep away from her.’
‘I did?’
‘You did. Back when I was still sailing. Before I married Eliza. You warned me away from her. Not in so many words. Marry Eliza, you said. Stop searching. You didn’t say it like that, but you warned me.’
‘George, what’s going on? Are you all right? How much have you been drinking?’ William had stopped walking again.
‘It was good advice, I’m not angry. Keep up, William. I don’t know how much you really knew about us, about Bridget and me. Keep walking! We’ll get you out of this heat soon, put a beer inside you.’ He took his brother-in-law’s arm. ‘Feeling faint, are you? Need a bathchair, perhaps?’ William didn’t reply. ‘Whatever it was you knew, it doesn’t matter now. The thing is, she’s a witch, I’m sure of it. Some kind of witch. Or maybe a succubus or a siren. Not a real woman. Not a human woman. It explains how she appeared on board the boat – I told you about that, didn’t I? She wasn’t there when we left Port, William – I’m sure I’ve told you. She appeared, among the horses, like some wraith. And then after we sank, she was there with me, the whole time, on the wreck. Naked. Wrapped herself around me, she did. She’s the reason I lived. I should have died – at least, that’s what I thought until today. That I should have died. I didn’t die because of her. She warmed me with whatever hellfire sustained her own breath. And she fed me human meat. Oh, don’t look at me like that, you know we were cannibals. You’ve never left me alone about it. And all this time I’ve been tearing myself apart over it, why did I live, I should have died. I’ve been physically sick every day of my life with the self-loathing of it. But that’s changed now, William. It’s changed. I see it now. Chin up, man, get in here and I’ll buy you an ale.’
He left William sweating at a table and fetched two beers.
‘You follow me so far, don’t you?’
‘George, did you fall down? Have you hurt your head?’
‘Drink up, William, you don’t look well. Stop fretting and have a drink. I’m telling you I’m fine now. I was so, so unwell before. I’ve been unwell for so long. But not now. Did I tell you I’ve been hunting her? You know she disappeared? Of course you do, that’s right. You told me to stop hunting her. I didn’t though, William. I did marry Eliza, you know that. But I didn’t stop. You see, I saw her the day Henry was born. Sarah knows, she’ll tell you. Bridget was there, when Henry was born … what? What is it?’
‘What do you mean, Sarah knows?’
‘Sarah knows, about the midwife. She was there with the midwife. Ledwith, the midwife was Bridget Ledwith. She didn’t look like her, she wore a disguise, but it was her. But then she disappeared again and I almost gave up. You see, William, I had to find her because I was convinced she’d cursed me somehow, taken away my humanity, destroyed me with an illness that stole my breath and my sleep and my mind. I was going to find her and kill her so I could be a normal man again, William, like you. Well, maybe not like you. No, I’m just joking, brother – you’re a good man. Another?’
William was a terribly slow drinker. George finished the last of his brother’s glass and got them two more.
‘The thing is, though,’ he said, as he put the glasses on the table, ‘I’ve realised now that whatever this is she did to me, it’s a blessing, not a curse. Oh, I’m pretty sure she meant it as a curse but through my strength and my perseverance I’ve changed its form. What was it you were telling the boys about sandstone and limestone the other night?’
‘When you put sandstone under pressure it becomes limestone. I don’t see how this —’
‘Exactly! She gave me a pale, crumbly curse and with the pressure of my forbearance I’ve turned it into a pure, white, strong blessing. Exactly! I thought I’d found her, you know, a few years back.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Met her in the gardens. All arranged by letter. Gorgeous, she was. It wasn’t Ledwith. Turned out it was some showgirl, running a confidence trick, passing herself off as Ledwith. Gorgeous, though. Spicy character. She wanted me to come back to her place. Said you could come along too. If you ever get the urge, let me know, I have her address.’
‘Please, just stop talking for a moment. Can you stop?’
‘This is the important bit. I’m nearly finished. What I’ve realised is that whatever it was she did to me on the Admella, it’s become a power now, a strength. I don’t understand yet what it’s for, but I can feel it inside me. And I know the first thing I need to do. I have to fix Henry. I need your advice – how do I fix Henry? Wait, wait –’ George held up his hand – ‘I just have to make sure you understand. She was there, at his birth. She gave him that birthmark, that thing on his back, I’m sure of it. And it twisted him inside, he has some part of her evil oceanic wickedness inside him. The mark went, but not the evil, not the evil.’ He suddenly remembered: the mark was back. No surprises there. You can’t erase wickedness that easily. It had to go. The mark had to go or the boy had to go. ‘You saw what he had in that cupboard? Bodies, corpses. Festering jars of muck. And those things he draws. He’s not normal. He’s not a normal boy. We need to fix him, William. The women can’t do it. Eliza can’t do it, she doesn’t even see it. She thinks he’s sweet. She doesn’t know anything about what the world is like. But you and I do. I’ve seen terrible things. You’ve read terrible things. Tell me what to do. Wait, I’ll get more beer.’
3
He had to go. They had to go. Over and over and over in his head the voice saying go go go go go go go.
To California? I can’t, he kept saying. I can’t go there, I can’t take you there.
You want your father to slice you open with a knife? He’s out now, he’s gone out now, but he’s coming back and he’s already told you, he’s going to slice you open with a knife. We have to go.
I don’t even know where! I don’t know where to go – you still want to find this man? This shade? I don’t ever remember his name, Mark; that was so long ago. I don’t know where he lives, I don’t know anything. I don’t have any money!
Ask that woman. Find him. We have to go.
Why don’t you just go? Henry said. Why don’t you go and leave me like you left me before? Why did you even come back if you’re just going to go again?
He had felt the cool ooze of her mind back into his in the middle of a fierce summer storm, Georgie sleeping as Henry lay with the covers thrown off, watching lightning crack open the sky. Her sandy skin slipped across his, the clutch of it firm and Henry felt pulled back together again, sound, all of him back inside himself where it belonged.
Henry had remembered the French cricket, the help with homework, the football matches, his father’s hand proud upon his back.
And he had remembered the dry rustle of his lonely thoughts and the world shrunk small and knowing that it wasn’t him, that boy playing cricket in the backyard, that boy who Father boasted of to his friends.
He probably should have peeled her off, dropped her out the window to the street below and carried on as a proper, normal boy, blithely happy in a world of a marbles, pies and playground beatings. But he had not. Mark knew that and Mark knew why and Mark and Henry both knew that if either of them was leaving
they both were.
So Henry made plans for the two of them to leave. He crept under the parlour window. Mother, Aunty Sarah, talking about babies. He pressed his ear against the back door. No Father.
He crept in, upstairs, into his and Georgie’s bedroom. He pulled his schoolbag from the cupboard, packed a jumper, his book about volcanoes, the rock candy that said ‘Glenelg’ all the way through from end to end, one more shirt. He needed apples and pie from the kitchen.
‘Are you going somewhere?’ Georgie called to him from the hallway, where he was still half-heartedly polishing shoes.
‘Shhh!’
Georgie put the shoe down and gripped for a moment at his belly. ‘Ow,’ he said. He leaned back against the wall rubbing at his belly button.
‘Is it your tummy still?’ Henry asked him, but Georgie shook his head, said it was nothing. He unfolded himself and came into the kitchen, asked again, ‘Where are you going?’
‘Just to Missus Gallwey’s for a minute.’
‘Why do you need your schoolbag?’
‘I’m going to hide it there in case I ever need to run away.’ Henry didn’t want to say he was going now, he didn’t know if he was going now, he had no money and nowhere to go.
‘You should tell me if you’re going to run away, in case I want to come too.’
Henry nodded.
‘You shouldn’t hide pie at Missus Gallwey’s,’ Georgie said. ‘It’ll rot before you’re ready to go. Then your clothes will smell terrible.’
Henry looked at the pie in his hand. ‘This is for now,’ he said, and he broke a chunk off for Georgie.
‘I’ll come with you. I’m sick of polishing.’
He needed to talk to Mrs Gallwey. He needed to find out the man’s name, the man with the mark, the shade. He needed to know where, exactly, he lived. He needed ideas about how to get there. Georgie couldn’t hear any of that.
‘Aren’t you sick?’ he said. For days, Georgie had been complaining about his swollen, aching belly.