Bess sipped her beer and looked at Vic who squeezed her hand. She took a deep breath and continued.
‘Anyway, I had a job in town, cleanin the café. One day me brother was late pickin me up. I got impatient, started walkin home by meself. I was halfway there when I heard the truck. It was drivin slow and I turned around and saw it comin across the paddock. I heard the boys yahooin and laughin. I knew I was in trouble.
‘I started runnin so fast I thought me heart was gunna burst. I zigzagged across the paddock, like Ma told me. She reckoned it slowed em down long enough to get away. But it wasn’t workin and I tripped over a log and fell down. I thought, I’m gone, they’re gunna kill me.
‘I heard the truck stop. I heard em yahooin. Then I heard the doors slam. I was prayin to the Lord to get me outta this mess. Promised I would always wait for my brother. Would always do the right thing if he’d save me.
‘Then I heard an almighty bang. It was a rifle. I thought they’d kill me right there. They wouldn’t just rape me; they’d kill me. Then I thought bugger it, I’m not gunna lay here with me face in the dirt and let em shoot me in the back like a mongrel dog. They was gunna have to look me in the face before they done it. I turned over, and I saw Merv and Big Jim and a couple of other blokes from town. Ya father was standin there with the rifle pointed at em. They was tellin him to calm down. Big Jim was sayin, “She’s only a gin. They love it, mate.”
‘I sat up and looked at em. Then I heard ya father say, “Look at her. She’s just a kid. You mob of animals git back in the truck and piss off before I blow ya heads clean off.”
‘Merv, Jim and the others got back in the truck. Merv was givin ya father cheek. He was sayin he was weak as piss. Accused him of goin soft, of turnin on his mates for an Abo. Ya father told em to piss off. He wasn’t muckin round anymore and fired another shot in the air. They got into the truck and took off, still yellin cheek at ya father.
‘He walked over to me and, somehow, I just knew it was gunna be okay.’
Della’s face was white. Tears were streaming down her face. Even if she had wanted to speak, she wouldn’t have been able to. She was struck dumb by what she was hearing. Vic continued the story.
‘Gawd I felt like a bastard. Stupid too. The lads asked me to go huntin. I thought they meant for wild pigs or roos. When they saw Bess walkin and started yelling, “There’s one, let’s git her,” I couldn’t believe it. I was tellin em to wake up to their selves. But they wouldn’t take any notice.
‘Big Jim kept drivin like a maniac. Then Bessie fell and Jim stopped the truck. They jumped out and I knew what they were gunna do. I couldn’t let it happen so I grabbed me rifle and fired it into the air. They were full of cheek, but like the cowards they were, they weren’t gunna take the chance so they left. I walked over to ya mother. She looked so little and helpless, but she seemed to trust me so that when I put the gun down and offered her me hand, she took it and I helped her stand up. She was shakin and terrified. Then I looked into the brownest eyes I’ve ever seen. I knew there and then I’d marry her. No matter what, Bess was gunna be my wife.
‘While we were standin there a mob arrived from her camp. They were in a panic. They thought someone had been shot. They saw me and ya mother. Saw the shotgun on the ground. I explained what had happened. Told em how sorry I was. How ashamed I was. Bess’s dad asked me back to the camp for a cuppa. Told me I was a bigger man than those mongrels would ever be.
‘Then I started goin back all the time. Just to visit Bess. I remember the first day I drove her and me to the pictures. Everyone was lookin at us. In those days they made Aboriginal people sit in a roped-off section of the theatre. So I sat with her there.’
Bessie squeezed his hand and continued on with the story.
‘The manager came up and told him that he shouldn’t sit there. It was for the Abos. He said he was with me and if I couldn’t sit in the other section then he wasn’t gunna either. Gawd we copped some shit. We’d walk up the street and blokes would call him a gin jockey. He wanted to belt em, but I wouldn’t let him. He’d just wind up in gaol. They weren’t worth it.
‘Then he asked me to marry him. I told him he was off his rocker. I didn’t mind if he just came and visited me, took me out. But I told him he’d be better off marrying a white girl. I told him his family would hit the roof. He said he didn’t care.’
‘And she was right, baby girl,’ said Vic. ‘I didn’t care. She was then, and she still is, the only girl for me.
‘I asked her father for her hand, he said yes, but he warned us of the hard road ahead. I took her home and me folks hit the roof. Said they’d cut me outta the will. I’d git nothin. But me old grandma said me and Bess could have her old property. She reckoned we could make a go of it. She loved Bess from the day she met her. And we did make a go of it. Together we made it the best sheep station around. Then you come along and, well, everything’s been great.’
Della looked at them. ‘How could you forgive Old Merv and Big Jim? How could you speak to those animals let alone be their friends? There was Merv talking at the party about what a wonderful couple you are. How great Mum is. He’s nothing but a fucking hypocrite.’
Bess took Della’s hand and quietly said, ‘Darlin, I didn’ bring you up to use language like that.’
‘What do you mean language like that?’ screamed Della. ‘Those men are pigs!’
Vic stood up and walked over to the edge of the veranda and, after what seemed an eternity, said, ‘I don’t expect you to understand, but when we got married something came over Merv. He came over one day with Dulcie. She had a trifle with her. Ya ma asked em in and Merv stood there with his hat in his hand and he asked for our forgiveness. Said it had been preyin on his mind. Dulcie reckoned he’d been evil, but he should say sorry and ask for forgiveness and even if we refused, at least he’d tried to be a decent man and make up for what he done.
‘I said it was up to ya ma. She was cryin and said of course she’d forgive him. We cracked a couple of bottles of beer and we’ve been friends ever since. Through thick and thin. Hatred gets ya nowhere, bubby. I thought we’d taught you that.
‘Big Jim felt bad too. But he took to the drink until he got married. Even then it took a few years for him to say he was sorry. They were the only two that did. None of the other boys did. But we didn’t and we still don’t need em in our lives, bubby.’
Bess stood up and taking Vic’s hand said, ‘It’s time we was goin to bed. You need time to think things through, bub. Just remember, me and ya father had the best marriage. We wouldn’t change a thing. A lot of women never find the measure of their men. I saw his the minute I met him. It doesn’t matter how we met. What matters is that we met.’
Della sat in the dark for a long time after. I sat there with her, just holdin her hand. Hot, salty tears were soaking her face and dampening the crisp, white cotton of her party dress. She couldn’t get over what had happened and kept askin why.
She felt angry that her beautiful mother had gone through such brutality. And, worse, it had been at the hands of men she had known and trusted all her life. She asked me how she could look at them in the same way anymore. I reckoned I didn’t know.
Then she felt a strong hand on her shoulder and looked up at the sad face of her husband.
‘You heard?’ she asked.
‘Yeh. Let it go, Dell. It was their decision to forgive. It’s nothing to do with you.’
Della told me the next day that she wanted to scream at him. Ask him if he could understand how she felt. But in her heart she knew that he was right. Anger was their prerogative, not hers. She wiped the tears from her eyes with the hem of her dress, took his hand and said, ‘Let’s go to bed. It’s been a long night.’
I reckoned it had.
Born, Still
Jane Harrison
Playwright and author Jane Harrison is descended from the Muru
wari people. Her plays include Stolen, Rainbow’s End and The Visitors. Her novel Becoming Kirrali Lewis won the 2014 black&write! Writing Fellowship, and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
Friday afternoon. The colour of the sky. The yellow green of jacaranda leaves against the intense blue sky.
It is August. I sit on the edge of the hospital bed, looking out the window. There is nothing else to do. Yellow green against blue.
It’s midafternoon. I wait alone.
Yesterday, Thursday, and I am wiping the kitchen cupboards. The brand-new kitchen is covered in fine brown building dust. It’s warm for August, which is why Possum is running around wearing only a T-shirt. Wipe, wipe, rinse the cloth. Then I am lying down on the cheap sofa we’d installed while we owner-built. An island of foamy comfort in the tsunami of a building site.
‘Mummy, why are you lying down?’
My two-and-a-half-year-old, who seldom saw me prone. Especially with a house to build. Especially as a mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old.
‘Mummy’s waiting to feel the baby move.’
I am thirty-six weeks pregnant. Hugely. Since it’s my second baby I don’t look like I have a size-five basketball shoved up my T-shirt – it’s more like a big messy pillow.
‘Is the baby moving?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m not sure. Let’s just lie still together and see.’
I lie still. There’s so many jobs still to do. Small tedious jobs, like wiping cupboards, and big jobs, like packing up the rented house, painting walls and building steps to the veranda. Who would owner-build? It’s never finished. Never finished until you split up and have to sell it and then it’s finished and fabulous. But never before then.
Possum has wriggled off, out of sight. I hear her grunt, at the same time I hear a car on the gravel driveway. The latter is the TV antenna man, winding his way up the long drive. The grunt is that of the toddler who has taken a dump on the lounge-room floor. Shit! Literally.
‘Just a minute!’ I call out to the antenna man. Where’s the paper towel?
Friday morning. I am wearing my mother-in-law’s coat, bought in London when she was thirty. She knows I like old things. It’s not ‘vintage couture’ but it serves its purpose. Can’t tell if I am fat, or pregnant, or pregnant and fat.
I am shopping with my sister-in-law. I need slippers. I should have been more organised.
In the lead-up my mother said, ‘Do you have your port ready?’ Who calls them ‘ports’ these days? No, my port is not packed. I am not organised. Now if I had some help …
I did ask. My mother said, ‘When do I have time to help?’ She is too busy being retired, painting pictures and maintaining the garden (it’s a big job). But still.
Pissed off, I ring my sister. She is always happy to trade complaints about our mother. But she’s in one of those moods. I do my ‘poor me’ routine; her eyes narrow. I know, it’s a phone call, but I can feel her eyes narrowing down the phone line. I step into the trap. ‘Can you come and help me?’ I whine.
‘When did you ever help me? When I was pregnant and we were moving into our new house, surrounded by mud. When did you give me a hand?’ She goes on and on. That was twenty-one years ago! I was sixteen. I didn’t have a driver’s licence. There was no public transport to where she lived; I was doing my HSC and as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Did I say any of this to her? No. I listened and then I got off the phone and sobbed. And not for, like, three hours. Literally three hours. And I vowed, I am never going to speak to either of them, ever again. Not even if something really bad happens. I am never going to speak to them again.
Something bad happens.
Friday arvo. I sit on the tightly made hospital bed staring at the jacaranda leaves. I have a newspaper for company, bought from the booth in the hospital foyer. My sister-in-law has left. I urged her to go; she has a long drive home.
I have been induced with prostaglandin gel. It will be hours before my husband arrives as he is moving house. Flicking through the arts section of the paper, I see my old friend Greg has won a short film award. Yeah, go Greg, awesome. I want to ring and congratulate him, but I don’t have his number. Also, it might be awkward to talk to him right now.
God, I really should ring my mother.
Thursday afternoon. The antenna man has left. The poo has been cleaned up. Possum has a nappy on. I lie on the couch. We brought up a few pieces of furniture, because, as owner-builders, we were here so much. A kettle, a table, folding chairs, the couch. I lie waiting for the baby to wriggle, to dance the merengue. Waiting.
Finally, I ring my obstetrician. I can’t feel the baby move. He tells me to come into the hospital.
‘Have I got time to shower?’
I am grimy from the kitchen cupboards. I have been living in these trackie daks for weeks. The same trackie daks. You only have one pair, when you are pregnant. A humungous pair.
‘Yes, have a shower, then come in.’
Have I got time for Nick to come home from work so we can drive up together?
‘Yes, come in together.’
He sounds calm. I call Nick and he leaves work, a little earlier than usual, but that’s okay, he’s the boss. The three of us pile in the car. In the country everything is sixty kilometres away. I’ve had my shower and I’ve thrown a few things together, just in case. But I haven’t packed my ‘port’.
‘Sorry you had to leave work early,’ I apologise to Nick. He’s okay about it.
At the hospital we are ushered into the ultrasound area. The midwife is upbeat as she smears my belly with the gel, cold and oozy, thick and clammy. She swipes the instrument across and across and across my broad belly. She remains cheerful. She leaves to fetch another midwife. The second midwife repeats the motions of the first.
‘Sometimes the heartbeat is obscured by other body parts,’ the second midwife says, also cheerful.
‘Let me know when I should start crying,’ I say, because I’m not one for hysteria, because I’m not going to be one of those neurotic types of pregnant women, am I? But they don’t reply, they don’t reassure me. They continue to smile but leave to ring the doctor. We wait. It’s probably his dinner time.
The obstetrician hasn’t ever met my husband but doesn’t introduce himself or hold out his hand for a handshake. He gets straight down to it.
‘I am afraid the worst has happened.’
Does he always say that? Did he rehearse that line on the way in?
I don’t cry yet. He tells me that I can continue to carry the baby until I go into labour naturally – there’s no hurry – or I can be induced. I book in to be induced the next day.
I am carrying a dead thing. Where there was life and hope and dreams and a future human with a name already chosen, there is now death. Inside me. I scream, ‘Get it out of me.’ But I’m just thinking the scream, I don’t actually do it. But I do cry. I am human.
We leave the hospital and by now it’s seven thirty and two-and-a-half-year-olds need food, no matter the emotional devastation and the fact that Mummy is weeping. Naturally we go to McDonald’s, conveniently situated on the freeway out of town. I’m red-eyed but holding it together. Ordering normally. Waiting for our order normally.
The young McDonald’s girl hands over the food. ‘Have a nice night,’ she says. Normally.
‘What the fuck, my baby has just died. How can I have a good night?’ I don’t yell at her, because she is fifteen or sixteen and why ruin her night too? Imagine how traumatised she would be, poor thing.
The country shack we are renting while we build the ‘dream home’ has gently undulating floors and is held together with pink priming paint. The landlords are salt of the earth but the house should be razed. I decide that I can’t come home from
hospital to this dump. So we agree to move as planned, the next day, Friday, to our half-built house on the hillside.
There is a knock at the door. Unexpectedly, it is my brother and sister-in-law, on their way home from a camping holiday. They thought they’d pop in to say hello. Hello! They are greeted at the door by our swollen-eyed faces. They offer to stay the night. My sister-in-law will drive me to the hospital in the morning while David helps Nick with the move.
Friday morning. I shuffle past the removalists, wearing the heavy coat that obscures my belly, my head down, sobbing. I wonder if anyone tells them why. At least it is a good excuse for how disorganised we are. On the way, we stop to buy slippers. I dread anyone asking me when I am due. I avoid people’s eyes. At the counter of the department store I pick up a bulk pack of man-sized hankies.
It’s Friday afternoon. I have read the paper. I have not rung Greg, the award-winning director.
I stare at the jacaranda. I ring my mother from the hospital payphone. It is her grandchild after all, and she needs to hear it from me.
The world doesn’t shift on its axis.
Friday evening. I think I ate the hospital food. Nick has arrived, exhausted. The doctor has given me another application of gel. I haven’t dilated. The hospital is quiet, all the visitors gone. We have the whole place to ourselves. We sprawl in the waiting area and share a bottle of red wine. It’s not going to make much difference now, is it?
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