Eating the Underworld (36 page)

Yes! thought Rachel. She could see Conrad now, glowering and muttering to himself, his rough, peasant hands clenching and frustrated. He would have seen her hair and wanted it; reached out to pluck it, just like that, as if she were nothing—a tree or a plant.

In hospital, that was always happening. Your body was poked, prodded, stung, cut—as though it was an inert container, as though you did not live in it. And the worst thing, Rachel thought, was that you were complicit in this. When the blood technician arrived, with her fake cheeriness and long needles, Rachel had held out her arm, quiet and obedient. Even though her body was shrieking and saying,
Not one more cut! Not one more abuse!
Rachel
had remained traitorously silent. She had held her hand steady, pretended it was alright, as the technician fumbled and jabbed at her shrinking veins. Her veins knew what they were doing. They were running and hiding. As far and as deep as they could. It was Rachel who was mad, lying there and smiling politely as a stranger stabbed and stabbed with a needle, into an arm that was connected to her heart.

But that was what you did in hospital, thought Rachel. It was called ‘brave'. You lay quietly co-operating, when really, you should have been kicking and fighting, calling to the high winds of heaven to scream through and blast it all away. But who would have heard you? No, it was more than that. Who would have
listened
to you? You would have been just another hysterical patient; a troublemaker, fighting what was good for you.

Was fighting good for you? Rachel did not know. She had not been a fighter, not for herself. For others, she would stand up and speak out. She hated injustice, hated the tyranny of the powerful over the weak. But there was always an excuse for not standing up for herself—it would cause too much trouble, it would give others discomfort, it would draw too much attention, it was this, it was that. And after all, as she would inevitably conclude, she could cope by herself, she could manage. She always had.

But the Princess had fought back at last. How odd, thought Rachel, that in the other, larger matter, she had done nothing. She had defended herself from the theft of a few gold hairs, but not from the theft of all that she was—her identity, her self, her name. What sense did that make?

Rachel went back to the beginning of the story. For the fourth time, she steadied her concentration and let herself into the words. The clue had to be in there.

She read slowly, through the Queen's preparations, the gifts, the departure and then—the blood drops! With their loss, the Princess had been rendered utterly helpless. The answer had to lie in the blood drops.

Rachel rested her head in her hands. ‘So,' she thought, ‘what was it about the blood drops?' She felt weary. She was sick of this story. It was nonsense. The Queen giving her daughter the blood drops—cutting into her own tender flesh to draw them—should have imbued them with a powerful magic. And yet they were impotent. They didn't stop the maid's cruelty; they simply lay there, crying out about how heartbroken the Queen would feel if only she knew. But they didn't tell her.

That was it! thought Rachel. The blood drops offered no protection. How strange. She had never before read a fairy story where the magical gifts offered no magic. The Queen had loved her daughter, Rachel was certain of that. She had given her daughter her blood. But the maid, to whom she had entrusted her daughter's care, was the Queen's maid, who had hated and envied the Princess. What did that mean? Rachel wondered. Surely the Queen had not known? Surely, she would not have allowed her daughter to set forth by herself with such a companion?

Rachel had been so angry at the Princess, so infuriated by her refusal to speak, to tell what had happened. But that, she saw now, wasn't the problem. Something had preceded the Princess's silence. Slowly, painfully, the pieces were beginning to weave themselves together.

And at the heart of them lay the blood drops, provided by the Queen, in anticipation of danger. She had given them to her daughter as protection. And yet the only protection the Princess had in the world was her mother. But the blood drops did not send missives back to the palace. The blood drops could not make their message heard.

Why was that? Rachel wondered. Surely if your daughter was in danger you would want to know? But what if you could not save her? What if the threat came from someone you had trusted and you were powerless to intervene? Would you still want to know?

The Princess must have understood that her mother could not bear to know. And if her own mother could not bear to believe, how could she expect the belief of others? And so the Princess had kept silent. There was no-one there to hear.

It was hard to believe in abuse, thought Rachel. Even the Princess had not wanted to believe. When the maid had attacked her for the second time, the Princess had been shocked; she had already forgotten the first attack. That was a lot of forgetting, thought Rachel—an attack out of the blue from someone you had been told to trust. How had the Princess been able to deny her own experience so easily? But Rachel already knew the answer. She knew how difficult it was to acknowledge gritty, twisting reality; how much easier, instead, to cleave to the fantasy of how it ought to be.

Falada, the magic horse, was the Queen's other present. Falada was important, Rachel thought. In sending Falada, the Queen had really tried to take care of her daughter. But she had not been up to it. She had given
her daughter two talking gifts. What she had not been able to give was someone who could hear.

And without someone who could hear, thought Rachel, you were helpless—like the abused child who is attacked because her truth is too horrifying for listeners to bear; like Falada, whose words were so dangerous that he had to be destroyed. People were delicate packages; their first instincts were to protect themselves. It was the messengers who were likely to be killed.

Conrad was furious with the Princess. He had tried again and again to snatch a lock of her hair. But each time, she called on the wind and the great force blew down from the sky to whirl Conrad's cap away until the Princess had finished her grooming. Finally, Conrad could bear it no longer. He announced to his master, the old King, that he would no longer work with the girl. Curious, the King asked his reasons.

‘She vexes me the whole day long,' Conrad burst out. And told the whole story—the talking head of the dead horse, the Princess's strange behaviour and the wind that whisked out of nowhere at her command.

The old King was intrigued. The next morning he hid behind the gateway and heard Falada's head speak to the Princess. He followed her into the fields, saw the shining radiance of her hair and the way the wind attended to her and he understood that there was a mystery to be solved.

That evening, he summoned her from the fields and asked why she did these things.

‘I may not tell that,' said the true Princess, ‘and I dare not lament my sorrows to any human being, for I have sworn not to do so by the heaven above me; if I had not
done that I should have lost my life.'

And then the King, who was wise and astute with his years, nodded, realising he would draw nothing from her. ‘But if you will not tell me anything,' he said, ‘tell your sorrows to the iron stove over there.' And he went away.

Left alone, the Princess crept into the iron stove, which closed like a great womb around her and, weeping, she told her story to its comforting walls.

Without her knowledge, however, the King had stationed himself by the stove's pipe, so that her voice carried straight to his ear. He heard everything and understood more.

He helped the sad young girl from the stove and gave her royal garments and finery. He summoned his son, the Prince, to meet his true bride—who was revealed now in her shining beauty—and a great feast was arranged.

At the head of the feast table sat the Prince, with his false bride, the maid, on one hand and the Princess on the other. The Princess was so dazzling in her new clothes that the maid was blinded and did not recognise her.

‘I have a riddle for you, my dear,' said the King to the maid. ‘What punishment would you see fit for someone who has committed the following deeds?' And he relayed the story of the maid's treachery. ‘What sentence would you pass upon that person?' he asked.

‘Ah,' said the maid, ‘for this, that woman deserves no better fate than to be stripped entirely naked and put in a barrel which is studded inside with pointed nails and two white horses should be harnessed to it, which will drag her along through one street after another, till she is dead.'

‘It is you,' said the King, ‘and you have pronounced
your own sentence. And thus shall it be done.'

Rachel always winced and turned away at this part—at the brutality of it, the cruelty of that terrible punishment. And yet, it was as the King had said. The punishment was the sheer reflection of the perpetrator; her hatred made visible and turned on her. It was what she had wished for others, that had now been given to her.

It was terrifying to read and horrifying to think about, and yet that was one of the things that she appreciated about fairytales. They were like Falada. They were not frightened of saying what was there, even when you didn't want to hear. They had been speaking for hundreds of years. They would speak for hundreds more.

Rachel had read of a campaign to sanitise fairytales, to take out the violence, the sadness, the pain. Rachel knew this would never work. Children would never believe. They could not open bank accounts, drive cars or hold down jobs, but they understood. They knew something truer about what the world was really like, than all the philosophers, scientists and thinkers put together. They were there, in a way that adults had learned not to be.

The body was like a child, Rachel thought—direct and undisguised in its dealings. She remembered its nudgings and whispers, as her symptoms had developed. And how she had ignored it, dismissed them as a creation of her mind, trivialities not worth listening to. It happened all the time; the world was filled with people ignoring lumps, changes, bleeding. Terrified to hear what their bodies were telling them. Turning to illusion instead. How strange it had been for her to finally listen, to recognise that she could trust what was being said.

That was something the Princess had done, Rachel realised. The Princess had not spoken out; she had been sworn to silence and she must have had her fear. To see what happened to Falada was to see what could happen to her. She had kept silent, but she had believed in herself. That was why she had defended herself from Conrad, in that pivotal action which had set the rest of the story going. She was not an object. She knew who she was and it was that knowledge in the end which saved her.

She had known who she was … And then at last, with a slow in-drawing of breath that felt both sweet and unbearably sad, Rachel finally understood the Queen's real gift—the blood drops and Falada, the magic which spoke the truth. Her mother's love had not been enough to protect her, but it had given her something even more precious. The words, the simple recognitions, the daily quiet reminders of her own truth.

I would like to thank, as always, my stalwart husband Martin, who can arm-wrestle a computer into submission before it has time to realise what has happened, and my darling Amantha, budding psychologist, singer-songwriter, prize-winning playwright and daughter extraordinaire, for their constant love and support.

I would like to thank my dear friend Eve, who has the rare gift of being able to see into the heart of things and the even rarer gift of enabling others to see as well. Her wise and perceptive comments were always unerringly accurate and a sustaining force during an often difficult and painful labour.

And thanks too, to Evelyn, Mickey, Liat and Marie—those wonderful friends who took the time and trouble to read the manuscript in its early stages and come up with sage and thoughtful comments.

I would like to acknowledge as well, the other person whose story is at the heart of this book—my beloved mother, Rose. A woman of immense compassion, love and courage and one of the most inspiring human beings I have known. I am grateful to have been her daughter.

Jeanne Ryckmans and Nadine Davidoff, my
publisher and editor respectively at Random House have been unflagging in their enthusiasm for, commitment to, and belief in this manuscript and have been a joy to work with.

I would also like to appreciatively acknowledge the research support of Victoria University and in particular Susan Hawthorne and Michele Grossman.

Doris Brett is a writer and clinical psychologist. She lives in Melbourne with her husband and daughter.

Her books have ranged from poetry to fiction, from psychological self-help to bread-baking and have been translated into several languages.

The poems included in this book have won several of Australia's most prestigious literary awards, including the 1994 Queensland Premier's Poetry Prize, the 1995 Northern Territory Government Poetry Prize, the 1998 Judith Wright Poetry Prize and the 1998 Gwen Harwood Memorial Poetry Prize.
In the Constellation of the Crab
, which features a number of the poems re-printed in
Eating the Underworld
, was short-listed for the National Book Council Literary Awards in 1996.