From the Wreck

by Jane Rawson

  ‘Exactly!’ The woman grinned massively at this revelation. ‘Exactly! That’s it precisely!’

  Silence fell again. Bea watched as Miss Sidney tried to lift her glass to her mouth. She seemed to be struggling with its slipperiness. The girl held her hand up before her face and tapped its back once, twice. A circle of flesh raised itself, pop, on her palm and she took the glass up once again, this time with great success. Her lopsided mouth broke into a grin. She took a great draught of the beer then promptly coughed it up and over her chin, into her lap.

  ‘Gah!’ she said, and poked her tongue out. ‘That’s beer?’

  ‘So they say. Do you need a cloth?’

  ‘Cloth? Oh no,’ Miss Sidney said, and she stood up and shook her skirt until most of the beer had sprayed onto the surrounding tables and floor. She sat down again. ‘You drink that?’

  Bea nodded.

  ‘It’s a bundle of mysteries, isn’t it, this world?’ the woman said. ‘Always something else. Horses. Sandwiches – have you tried those? Walking on two feet. Leather – it’s made out of the skin of other living creatures, I found out. Singing, and sometimes everyone knows the song and they all sing too. You can take the fat from a whale and put a flame to it and then you have a light to read. Or sew – that’s a thing people do. Well. And now beer.’

  ‘And now beer. Perhaps you’d prefer gin?’

  They sat quietly again for a moment, until Miss Sidney said, ‘Thank you, I have to go now.’

  ‘Well, it was lovely to meet you,’ Bea said to her back, and watched as the woman took slow and tiny steps towards the door. Almost there, she turned back and stared towards the table where George Hills sat, slumped and staring. She raised a hand and waved to him, and it was the strangest thing Bea had ever seen.

  The moment seemed to stretch and stretch as George sat with his chin in his hands, staring at her, and her little hand waved left, right, left, right, left, right. ‘Hello, George. George, my friend,’ she said.

  He leapt from his chair and flung himself at her, knocking her backwards onto the floor.

  ‘Monster, monster, monster!’ he was yelling, ‘what did you do to my boy? What did you do to my boy? You filthy monster, show yourself!’

  ‘Mister Hills!’ the publican said, and set about dragging himself from behind the bar, but long before he’d finished wiping his hands and tucking some glasses safely away, George was trying to tear the woman’s dress from her body.

  ‘Show yourself! Show your true self!’

  ‘I’ll get the police,’ said the publican, and left the room. The woman was burbling, ‘It is me! It is me! I am here to free you! It is me!’

  Bea stood up to intervene, but stopped short when she saw that George’s hands, rather than rending the dress’s fabric, were stretching its edges into unthinkable shapes. Miss Sidney’s arms were elongating as he grasped and grappled with them. Her face had sagged down on one side and her eye had taken over half her cheek. Her dark hair flickered and swarmed and Bea’s brain revolted against the shapes it made.

  The door swung open again and Bea looked around, dreading to see the police. This could not end well for George Hills. But instead it was the boy Henry, wet with rain and wide-eyed with shock.

  ‘No, Father, don’t!’ he said. ‘She has to tell you!’ And he flung himself into his father’s flailing arms. George’s fist knocked him down – inadvertently? – and Beatrice called the boy to her side.

  Miss Sidney was blurring, shifting, drooping and sliding. George’s arms met more and more often with nothing as the thing that had been Miss Sidney smeared itself across the carpet, while Bea swallowed against the vomit that tried to rise in her throat. What horrible creature was this, this ball of purple sticky matter rolling across the filthy floor, coating itself in lint and grit? The thing stretched and Bea squinted to look at it. From one eye she watched as it firmed itself into the shape of a grey and white cat. The cat jumped onto the bar, to the windowsill, out the window and was gone.

  ‘You saw it,’ George said, pulling himself up from the floor. ‘You saw it!’ He turned to Bea. ‘You saw that thing, that monster. You saw it!’

  She nodded.

  ‘And you!’ he said, turning on Henry, who had leapt onto the bar himself, where he was calling through the window to the cat. ‘Why are you here? What are you doing? Who are you?’

  Henry turned his face to his father, his back against the wall.

  ‘Tell me who that is,’ Henry said.

  ‘You know, you know what it is, it’s part of you, you’re part of it.’ George leant, puffing, on the bar, half muttering and half yelling at the child.

  Henry tried to shuffle back further. ‘Say her name,’ he said, trying to snuffle the weeping away. ‘Who is she? Why is she here?’

  ‘Mister Hills, calm down,’ Bea said, but George paid her no attention.

  ‘I don’t know what she is,’ he said instead. ‘I summoned her. I made her, I fed her, she is the darkness of my soul made flesh. I am sorry. I’m sorry.’

  George’s hands went to his knees and he bent unsteadily forward, took a deep, ragged breath and then another. Then he raised himself up and shuffled to the nearest wall, leant against it.

  ‘Come here, Henry,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Beatrice said.

  Henry slid down from the bar and walked slowly towards his father. Bea picked herself up from her chair, just in case she was needed.

  ‘I knew she was no woman. I knew it!’ He called the last in Bea’s direction. ‘And you told me there was no such thing as haunting.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said a woman couldn’t be a spirit, an evil haunting spirit, you said it was just my wounded manhood making her into something she never was. But you saw! You saw that thing!’

  ‘I did see that thing. I did.’ She walked up behind Henry and as his father leaned forward again to take a gasping breath she quickly flicked back his collar and looked at his neck. ‘Yes, I see,’ she murmured. ‘Of course it was.’ Henry slapped her hand away.

  George finally sat down in his chair again. ‘Henry,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to hurt you. Come here.’

  Henry did, holding his place firm a little further away from his father than the man’s outstretched arm could reach.

  ‘Did you kill your brother?’ he asked. ‘Tell me now. Your mother doesn’t ever need to know. No one will ever know but you and me. I know it isn’t your fault – I know it was that thing. But you have to tell me.’

  Henry shook his head.

  ‘Say it. You have to say it.’

  ‘I wish I had saved Georgie. I wish I’d believed him when he told me he was sick. I wish I hadn’t asked him to come to the drain with me. I wish I hadn’t sent him home to fetch supplies. I wish I had just run away and left him at home and he was happy and alive and you and Mother would forget you ever had me and just love Georgie and Wills and especially Georgie, because he was the best boy that ever lived,’ and Henry burst into sobs again.

  ‘But did you kill him?’

  ‘I didn’t kill him!’ Henry yelled. ‘I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t. Why do you think I’m so wicked? Why can’t you like me how I am?’ His face was red and crumpled and spit flew from his mouth and sprayed his father’s face. ‘Why?’

  George had nothing to say. He sat back in his chair with his face in his hands and Henry watched him weep.

  ‘She’s only small, Father,’ Henry said. ‘We all are,’ and he reached out a hand towards his father’s shaking leg. But Beatrice didn’t think that George had heard.

  After a while George said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then, a little later, ‘But you saw her, didn’t you? Both of you? You saw her.’

  Beatrice nodded.

  The publican came back, a policeman with him.

  Beatrice looked around. A man, in a chair; a boy, no longer crying, sitting on the floor at his father’s feet; a middle-aged woman, not afraid, standing at a sensible distance. No
thing to see here.

  ‘I’ll take my son home,’ George said, standing and offering his hand to the boy. Henry pretended not to see.

  ‘Nothing’s broken,’ Bea told the publican. ‘She left right after you did.’

  ‘That child shouldn’t be in here,’ said the policeman.

  ‘You’re right,’ said George. ‘I’m taking him home now.’

  ‘Perhaps best if you stay home for the next little while, Mister Hills.’ The publican turned to the policeman. ‘Sorry to bother you, Ted.’

  ‘No problem. Is this the child’s mother?’ the policeman asked. Beatrice placed a protective, motherly hand on Henry’s back and the three of them walked out.

  ‘Let me get you a rum, Ted,’ she heard the publican say.

  ‘Well,’ she said, once they were out of the building, ‘that was a little more entertaining than I’d expected.’

  ‘Missus Gallwey,’ said George, ‘would you mind … that is, could you not …’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone?’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘Good news for you, Mister Hills – I intend to sail for Albany later this week.’ From there, Colombo, then Calcutta. The world was too full of surprises: she couldn’t lock herself away in a sausage shop.

  10

  I could have killed him. I could have. Put him in the ground with little brother, his face all bloodied. I could. That man. My first-known human. My lifelong enemy. My friend. My brother my curse.

  I could do it. I could kill him right now and I could disappear and no one would ever find me.

  No one has ever looked.

  Who cares where I am or what I do?

  I am wet, shaken and stretched. I am angry, scared. I am here all alone again alone alone alone. I am so sick of all of this, this stupid world of running and hiding and hiding and running and pretending to be someone I am not and never have been.

  Here where there is no place for me. Where there is no one I know and no one who cares if I live or die. Don’t get me started on Henry, he would be stupider and narrower without me and that would make him far, far happier than he is today. If he never sees me again he will live like a normal boy and grow up into a healthy man and take his place in the great parade of stomping.

  Perhaps if I had made myself a man instead of a woman. But what did I know? Nothing. I knew nothing then and not much more now. Ten years, eleven, twelve, whatever it’s been of hour after hour living the life of a small boy. I know bones. I know death and rotting. I know cats and fights and fear and scabs, I know trees and the treachery of other boys. I know pies in pockets; I know sweets stolen from counters when the shopkeeper’s back is turned. I know mud. I know volcanoes and far-distant jungles, I know tribes who eat dirt and tribes who eat other people. Between us we know every squirm and drop of the underwater life. I know nightmares. I know my mother’s hand between my shoulder blades, stroking me quietly back to sleep.

  I do not know where my people are, I do not know how to live like me. But I cannot be a human boy for the rest of my life. I cannot.

  I am wet. I do not care about cold but I feel cold. I am tired of every last bit of all of this.

  I want to be home.

  11

  As they reached the pier, George slipped his hand from his son’s and asked Mrs Gallwey if she would mind seeing the boy home.

  ‘Tell your mother I’ll just be a little while,’ he said. ‘A bit of time, and air. Just to clear my head. I won’t be long.’

  He took the bridge across the inlet, walked through Glanville until he reached the ocean, then headed north, the rain drenching his jacket and his hat, soaking through to his shirt, his hair dripping water freely into his eyes. He socks began to squelch inside his shoes. On the beach at Semaphore, after walking for perhaps an hour, he stripped himself clear of the clinging wet of his clothes and left them piled under the pier. He slipped into the water there, hidden from human eyes, and lay on his back in the shallows, breathing between the small waves that broke over his exposed face.

  His poor boy. There was nothing he could do now, but he would have liked to have felt Henry’s skinny fingers clutched between his own one last time. He would like to think the boy might forgive him.

  George’s palms felt the sand shift under the tiny currents. He closed his eyes and let the water float his body, cold and old and tired. His beard, the clinging weed, they wrapped in all together and he told the ocean that was fine, they were together again now, this time he would stay. A hand slipped into his, cold and rough, and his eyes stayed closed because he knew who it was: of course, of course. Her skin coiled around his and still he lay, calm, floating, because everything between then and now had been a dream, hadn’t it, dreaming he had been saved, been warm and dry, married, had children, seen his boy die; had eaten food and slept in a bed, felt his wife’s hot skin beneath his, the sun on his back; that he had walked among the living. A dream of an addled, forsaken mind that clung to a wreck out of reach of humanity, still, here on Carpenters Reef. He saw it now. He knew. He opened his eyes to stare once again upon the reeking, frozen pile of ruined ship that was his eternal home and instead saw above his face the timbers of the Semaphore jetty and, wrapped around his arm and chest, the tentacles of a mythical creature: a giant blue octopus.

  ‘Fuck Jesus!’ he shrieked and grasped the tentacle in his free hand, tugging it from his skin. It would not be shifted. He thrashed about in the shallow water and the suckers clung ever tighter across his chest, the monster pulling him deeper, under the waves.

  ‘Quiet, George,’ he heard the thing say, its voice somewhere inside his head. ‘Shut up and lie still and this will all be over in just a minute.’

  ‘Help!’ he cried. ‘Help!’

  But the thing was in his mouth, in his brain, and he could not find enough of himself still living to make a noise.

  His body lay still, his mouth barely breathing, the cold water breaking over him and the only difference from that time before was that now he had no belt and not even one shoe.

  ’You didn’t understand anything, George,’ it told him, his own brain told him. ‘Why were you so angry? You lived, you fool! You got to have a whole wonderful life on a beautiful world and all you could do was rage against it. I should pull you under these pitiful waves and let you drown in three inches of water. You mean nothing – nothing. None of anything that happened on that ship meant anything at all. You’re a speck, a tiny speck in time, in space. Nothing. Look.’

  And then the voice showed him a story.

  On a planet, all ocean, there was a small, happy person living small and happy and quiet in her own small niche, her own small place, her own quiet space. Born, grew, ate, grew, lived, loved, ate. The sun, that star, shining on her one happy face.

  One day they came out of the sky and her world filled up with dirt and everyone she knew died. She fought and killed and everyone else she didn’t know died and everyone who was left fled. She, they, all of them tumbled into another time, space, dimension and she fell into a new ocean in a place called earth.

  And she lay there under the ocean for time and time and time and time until she was brave enough and scared enough and sad enough to come out. She grabbed the first thing passing by – a boat, it turned out to be – and she made herself the first shape she saw – a woman, it was – and she made her first friend on this new planet and his name was George.

  And George saw himself, there on the wreck, through the eyes of another: his exhausted, shivering, starving form, so young, and he wanted to wrap himself in his own arms, tell himself that it would all be over soon. That he would be safe. That this was nothing – just a moment – and that the rest of life stretched before him. That someone would love him. That he would wear warm socks and drink water cool from the larder. That he would sleep in a bed. That he would close his eyes and sleep in a bed and wake warm under a kind sun.

  ‘And then off you went and off I went,’ said the voice in his head, and George
felt himself torn from that kind person who had looked at him and held him and kept him safe, ‘and for a while I was a cat that lived near your house and you would sometimes feed me scraps, and later I was there when your boy was born, and then I came to live with you,’ and George saw her, in his house, and felt the fear rise up in him again and wondered why it was.

  ‘So many years I was there, trying to learn how to live in this world. From Henry, from you, my first-known. And all you could do was hate me and fear me and all I wanted was a place to be safe.’

  George tried to remember where it had come from, all that hate.

  ‘Show me her again,’ George said.

  ‘That Ledwith creature?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She isn’t real.’

  ‘I know. Show her to me.’

  And George watched inside his mind as Bridget Ledwith lay beside him on the Admella’s wreck, flickered past his upstairs window, wrestled with him on the floor of the pub not two hours ago.

  ‘She’s only me,’ the voice told him.

  ‘She’s you and you’re me. We’re all together. Show me the journey again,’ George said.

  ‘Your sinking boat?’

  ‘No, your journey.’

  So she did. And George looked into the hearts of stars and wondered how he had been so blind to it his whole life, that there was more to his existence than just this, than homes, jobs, children, family, ocean, sky, food and shipwrecks. The fear that sucked at him: it was from out there, from the great cold blackness beyond his thin, blue sky. But when he plunged his face into that black, felt it wash over him like icy water, the fear pulsed hot joy in his skin and he felt the edges of himself smear and stretch. The great, quiet space of it. Something inside him broke open and the oily fluid that had gummed the workings of his heart spilled out and into that eternal, infinite, endless space and was gone.

  He breathed.

  Then, ‘Where are the rest of them?’ he asked.