Remembering Babylon (11 page)

Time and again, in her loneliness, even with her other children about her, she went and stood there among the rusty fallen spikes and monkey-puzzle light, gazing down at the rain-streaked stones with the names and dates, hoping to look up and find that he too had come. But it had never happened. If he came there on occasions, and she thought he did, their times had never coincided. All this was something they did not speak about, because there was too much space, up here, between words, even the simplest, as there was between objects.

But that was another of the changes. She felt sometimes, as now, that they stood together there beside the two little humped places in the ground.

‘Ah miss Kate,’ she said very quietly. ‘And Alex.’

He nodded. He was turning the little white pea-flower in his hand. Then he bent down and placed it, very tenderly, on one of the mounds.

‘Oh, and a thing Ah saw once, a tightrope walker –’ she felt no oddness in the transition. ‘He had a rope fae wan side o’ the street t’ the ither, and he walked on it, in baggy troosers, wi’ a bar in his han –’ She held her hand out, balancing, and took a step or two above the earth. ‘It wid be grand to see something,’ she said.

What she meant was to have something so rare, so miraculous even, to show the girls, as her father had shown her. (It was her father’s hand she had held when she looked
up breathless to see the tightrope walker, with his slippered feet, walk.)

‘Where was it?’ he asked.

‘Airdrie.’

‘How auld were ye?’

‘Seven. Eight maybe. Aulder than Meg.’

‘How did he do’t? Show me again.’

She showed him. Held her arms out and took three steps, very slowly, raising one foot then the other, over the rough earth with its sticks and dried leaves, as if she were walking thirty feet up in the air.

He followed her with his eyes. Then reached his hand out and caught hers, as if he was afraid she might fall.

‘Ah’d gie aenethin’ t’ hae seen it,’ he said. ‘You, Ah mean. T’ hae seen you.’

G
EMMY’S VISITORS HAD
appeared on a Thursday. In the days that followed one or two little things began to go wrong around the place. None of them was unusual, but that they should happen just now, and that there should be a string of them, was unsettling. Accidents, Jock told himself. Coincidence. He was trying hard to hold on to the normality of things, to resist in himself the wave of panic and suspicion that was running uncontrolled through the settlement. He did not believe the bit of trouble he was having was the work of blacks, and it had not yet occurred to him that it might be a neighbour. He and Lachlan fixed the break in the fence – he did not involve Gemmy – and he kept to himself one or two later breaches in the daily run of things. But when three of Ellen’s geese were found with their throats cut, and the stones of their little yard all alive with greenflies and sticky with blood, the enormity of the thing could not be concealed.

The geese had names. One was Hereward the Wake, another Jemima, the third Lucie. The children were brokenhearted, but frightened too. Who could have done such a thing? Little Meg, through her tears, gave him a look that went right through him. He had been powerless to protect Jemima, so why not her, or any one of them?

He was shaken. Who was it? Who could have done the thing? He looked in one man’s face, then another’s, and could not tell, or what was worse, save himself from the poison now of suspecting each one of them. He was a stunned animal, all his strength, now that he was staggering, the weight that might bring him down. Ashamed to admit to his
friends, even to Barney and Jim Sweetman, what was happening, he chose not to go out.

Lachlan was full of outraged defiance. ‘We dinnae have t’ tak this,’ he insisted.

He wanted Jock to demand of him some proof of absolute affection. He would defend them, the household, his uncle’s honour, their blood, no matter what. ‘Just tell me what,’ he told Jock, who was touched by the boy’s fierce loyalty, ‘and Ah’ll do it. Ah’ll kill them.’

But when he looked a little and saw what it might mean, he too fell quiet. The idea that they should draw in close behind an invisible stockade and pretend that nothing had been done to them was shameful to him; but even more shameful was the business of admitting before Jeff Murcutt and the Corcoran boys that they had been set apart, and could be so openly terrorised.

Once again the responsibility, Jock felt, was his. It’s a’right for me, he thought, but he’s too young for this.

His aunt too saw it. ‘Lachlan,’ she told him gently, though she too was bitter, ‘we’ve done naethin’ wrang, you know that. We’ve done naethin’ to be ashamed o’.’

‘Ah’ll kill them,’ he repeated, ‘gin Ah find who ’tis.’

As for Gemmy, he simply vanished; not into the bush, as one or two fellows predicted, but into his own skin, behind his own dim but startled eyes. He knew what was happening and that he was the cause of it.

One morning early, three days after the slaughter of the geese, Jock was making his way down the slope towards the gully when he came upon Gemmy half-running up the track towards him, wild-eyed and stumbling as if someone, or something, was after him. Jock put an arm out to stop him, but Gemmy shot him a look, of desperation Jock thought, and ran on. He called after him but he did not turn. Jock went on, and the feeling of dread that came over him was like the faint, far-off smell of some new violation that was on its way towards them. He came to the foot of the track, and there it was.

Just where he should turn off and enter the gully was the shed Gemmy had been mending when his visitors arrived, the
new planks in its wall, the new nail heads showing plainly in the weathered grey of the rest. And there, smeared across them, was a stain, a gathering of greenflies that heaped and bubbled, and the air that came to his nostrils rich with its stink. Someone had plastered the place with shit. Someone else – Gemmy he guessed – had tried to clean it off with a handful of grass but had only succeeded in spreading the filth.

He stared and his gorge rose. Snatching up a handful of dry grass, he smashed at the loathsomeness of the flies that were feeding on it, as if the abomination was in them. They leapt away, but some of them, drunk on foulness, were caught and smashed. He threw the soiled grass from him and sank to the ground. Drugged himself, he began to roar through his clenched teeth and his body swayed.

The flies returned. They climbed over one another’s backs in their eagerness to feed and wallow. He felt maddened that such creatures should exist in the world, and would have rushed once again to smash them. But what had they to do with it? Some man had done this. That was the real abomination. Someone he knew. Someone whose eyes he had looked into, and recently; maybe at the very moment when he was planning the thing. That fellow had squatted here, somewhere here – he swung about again as if he might catch the glimpse of a retreating shirt-tail – and with a grunt of satisfaction squeezed this filth out of himself, fouled his own hand with it, and spread it as an insult between them, made public and stinking in the sun. He saw the hand with its load of filth moving across the wall and understood now that what it was setting there was a word. What word? He shook his head wildly to prevent it forming, to prevent the possibility of it getting in there, of himself giving it form, and was glad that the only other man who had seen it was Gemmy, who could not read. To have that word in his head, where it could never be scrubbed out, would be madness to him. Even now –

He got to his feet and went swiftly to the creek, his breath racking him like a wounded animal’s, and stumbled into the smooth and liquid light (it was the same spot where he had seen his bird), and scrubbed his hands, and would have
stripped and scrubbed his whole body, but discovered that he had no belief any longer in the water’s power to cleanse.

What horrified him was that he might find himself face to face with the man whose smell he had on his hands, in his head too, a thing so intimate, so personal, that surely he would recognise it on the man himself, and the word would leap up in the air between them, taking form from the stench. He swung about again. And it seemed to him now that it was the sky that had been smeared, the earth, the water. The word was on them; some old darkness out of the depth of things was scribbled there for ever, and could never now be eradicated.

A
NDY MCKILLOP’S
visionary powers were greater than he knew. The blacks had brought Gemmy something, though it wasn’t a stone.

When all the proper formalities had been exchanged, and the necessary questions asked and answered, the silence between them as they sat, all three, and faced one another, became a conversation of another kind; and the space between them, three feet of baked earth where ants in their other life scurried about carrying bits of bark and other broken stuff in the excited scent of a new and foreign presence, expanded and became the tract of land up there under the flight of air and the stars of the night sky, that was the tribe’s home territory, with its pools and creeks and underground sources of water, its rock ridges and scrub, its edible fruits and berries and flocks of birds and other creatures, all alive in their names and the stories that contained their spirit, for a man to walk into and print with the spirit of his feet and the invisible impact of his breath.

For longer, much longer, than the ten minutes Andy McKillop counted from his side of the hill, they moved together through its known places. And Gemmy – as he recognised one and then another feature of it, the site of old happenings, strange encounters, or stories, or lean feasts – felt the energy flow back into him, and saw, in the sudden access of it, how weak he had grown in these last months, with the dry little cough that plagued him, and his stomach troubles.

The air he breathed here did him no good, the food too. The ground he walked on jarred at every step. The land up there was his mother, the only one he had ever known. It
belonged to him as he did to it; not by birth but by second birth, by gift, and not just for his lifetime either but for the whole of time, since it was for the whole of time that it existed, as he did too so long as he was one with it. This was what the blacks had brought him, in case he needed it. They were concerned that in coming here, among these ghostly white creatures, he might have slipped back into the thinner world of wraiths and demons that he had escaped, though never completely, in his days with them. They had come to reclaim him; but lightly, bringing what would feed his spirit.

They spread the land out for him, gave him its waters to drink. As he took huge draughts of it, saw it light his flesh. Watched him, laughing, bathe in it, scooping great handfuls over his breast. In the little space of dust between them as they sat, they danced, beat up clouds, threw rainbows over their heads. Then they rose, exchanged the formalities of parting, and went. A day and a night it would take them to reach a place that was already humming all round him as he took up his hammer and sent the blows of it leaping with such clarity in the release of his spirit that they might be flying, he thought, thirty miles off, like stars his arms could fling over the furthest ridge to light their path.

Then that bloke Andy appeared; came stumbling out of the scrub with his crooked jaw and restless, runaway eyes, and stood leaning on air, with the odd, empty look that anything, any madness might fill; hinting, demanding. The air around him was immediately infected, sucked into the emptiness he made just by stepping into it. Gemmy felt the good health that had been given him weaken. As if he had looked into a pool – that was how this Andy affected him – and seen an image of himself that was all unfocused pieces that would not fit.

With an effort he pulled his eyes away, and the man, or the furious emptiness rather that wore a look and held a shotgun and was trying to find the
shape
of a man, went still and vanished.

It was the kind he was, this Andy. If you refused him your attention he mumbled, dithered, boiled with his own hopeless impotence, and disappeared.

But when, with a hiss, he did turn on his heel at last and stalk away, Gemmy felt his heart fall. He was real enough; the emptiness was real. And they stood too close to one another on the lowest rung of things in the settlement for his ferocity to accept defeat.

Slowly, over the months, he had learned how to handle such fellows. He stepped into their skin, looked about quickly, stepped out again, then dealt with them as they dealt with themselves.

One or two of them knew this and kept clear. They did not care to be exposed, even to themselves. Others felt it but did not know, and the less they knew the more openly hostile they grew; these were the ones you had to watch out for. He watched, allowing himself no illusions, and since there was a kind of agreement among them, or so it seemed, that open savagery was not permitted, he survived.

He had no real tormentors here. Even the crudest among them affected a bantering tone – though he soon saw through it – as if any mischief they might get up to was an expression of an irresistible jollity, and when it went too far, and he was roughly used, the fault, if anyone’s, was his. They got him to his feet, brushed him down, told him he wasn’t hurt, that he was a good fellow and that they had meant no harm. (It was true. They thought they didn’t.)

His real tormentors were in his head, and they came after him more and more often now as their shapes rose clearer in his memory and grew faces and fists in the dark hours of his sleep. And as always, it was Mosey and The Irish who were the worst of them: Mosey with his high thin voice and fair wisp of a beard, soft as a girl, and The Irish with gunpowder pits in his cheeks and two fingers gone from his right hand.

‘What have we got here, now? A boy, is it? By Jimminy yes, I reckon it’s a boy, a boyo. But what a scrawny, thin-necked, weasel of a boy,’ and with each new taunt they would begin to push him back and forth between them, ‘what a snub-nosed –’

‘Red-eared –’

‘Big-mouthed –’

‘Low-arsed –’

‘Knock-kneed –’

‘Imitation of a boy it is! More like a scrap of old cheese –’

‘Or the sole off me boot –’

‘Or a bit of stale pie crust you can’t hardly get your teeth into –’

‘Than a boy, a boy, a boyo!’

All the while leering and lunging as they sang the words back and forth and bowled him back and forth between them, till they began to thrust about under his clothes, and the cries that broke from him as their fingers pinched and poked and teased and twisted were the cries of a child, but the pain now was that of a grown man, outraged and powerless, who had to stand by and see it done, and for all the fierce howls that came out of him could neither drive the devils off nor prevent what, in a moment now, unless he wakes, will be past all remedy …

He wakes from such a dream. A clammy hand is over his mouth, a mouth, close in the dark but not his own, is roughly panting. He struggles; half waking, jerks his body to get free, but as so often, the dream hangs on, tough arms hurdle his ribs. It hangs on just that breath longer than sleep, but the breath, indrawn, is very deep and the fear comes to him that this time he may not be able to shake it off, that the tormentors he carries within him, who have been so long hidden and have begun, more and more often now, to come to the surface in him, will this time break clear, get out into the real world, where he will have no more control of them than he had in the days when they were real and he was one of them.

And it is true. This time it is true. He is awake, and these others, all knuckled hands and shoulders and rough heads and breath, are cramped close under the lean-to with him, shoving, whispering instructions, at one point giggling.

They have got him hooped about with their arms, they are pulling a bag over his head, and with the choking chaffy roughness of it against his mouth, and in the dry breathlessness of nightmare, he is being hopped and dragged over stones, and when he stumbles, jerked upright by a crowd of bodiless whisperers who are trotting along on all sides of him,
as if all his tormentors had found one another at last in the dream-space of his head, and discovering now what they have in common, have joined forces to gallop him to some corner of the dark where he is flat-handed this way and that, and when he throws up his hands to protect himself, falls, but at other times merely hovers on the brink, and is baited and played with; not brutally but with hands, neither fisted nor frenzied, coming at him from every direction, and without sound save for the grunted effort it takes to haul a man to his feet so that he can be knocked down again, and the breathing in the darkness, which is huge even inside the sack, of many mouths.

Suddenly there is water round his ankles, and when he stumbles this time there is a splash that scatters moonlight through his skull.

His arms are jerked back, his head pushed down. His head, roaring into the sack, is thrust under water and the darkness in the sack turns to mud. He gasps mud. Then goes under again, and yet again, till a voice rises in protest. The others say hush, but it changes things. The grip on his arms weakens.

He is released and on his knees in the creek when he hears a voice he does recognise: Jock’s. It is shouting.

A scuffle, the barging all round him of bodies in the dark, and the next moment he is upright, gasping, breathless inside the sack, and the sack, muddy and streaming, is torn from his head.