Skylarking (18 page)

THIRTY-EIGHT

I
T WAS A MONTH BEFORE
I
GOT AWAY FROM THE COTTAGE
, creeping out, avoiding the anxious faces of Mother and Father, and dashing into the shelter of the bush where I could hide in the shadows. It was a cool day, but I felt clean in the air, blowing as it did through my hair that had grown matted and stale as I lay, day after day, in my room.

As I hurried from the cottages, I thought I heard my name called, but I dared not turn around. It was only ghosts who spoke to me now, and I was not yet ready for what Harriet's ghost might say.

I wandered without thinking. Trying to let my eyes fill with the familiar sights, but everything, everywhere was Harriet.

I did not mean to end up at the hut. It was only when I smelled the bitter wood smoke that I knew I was close. I came upon the track, and then the door, and I knocked.

There was the sound of a chair pushing back across the floor. Soft padding feet. McPhail opened the door. For the longest time he did not speak. It seemed as if he might just turn away. But then he stood back and swept his arm towards the room. I stepped across the threshold.

‘You're cold,' he said.

‘No.'

‘Tea?'

‘Yes, thank you.'

He motioned for me to sit and moved to stand over the billy on the stove. The water boiled; I could hear it roiling and spitting.

‘The tide is high this morning,' I said.

‘Yes.'

‘The catch?'

‘So-so.'

‘You'll bring it up?'

‘Perhaps.'

He picked up the billy. Pinched the black tea leaves inside. Poured the steaming water. Turned it once, twice, three times. Again he did not ask how much sugar I took. I watched the granules fall as he spooned it in. Three spoonfuls. Strong and sweet.

My eyes moved around the hut. Skipping to the shelf, to the scratched surface of the table, drawn inevitably to the corner, where the gun had sat.

‘The gun?'

He raised his eyes to mine. ‘They took it.'

‘Of course.'

I reached for the cup he offered me. My hand was shaking so much that hot tea splashed up and onto it. Putting the cup down, I drew my hand instinctively to my mouth and sucked the fleshy part between thumb and index finger that was already glowing red.

‘Cold water,' he said. ‘Here.'

He grasped me by the elbow, helping me stand and move towards the stove, to the bucket beside it filled with rainwater. He guided me to kneel down and plunged my hand in the cold water. He held me by the wrist. My sleeve wet to my elbow. I cried out at the pain of it.

‘It will stop the burning.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said, and I didn't know what I was saying it for.

‘It's no matter.'

‘No.'

We crouched there. He and I. By the stove, by the bucket. I felt the heat leaching out of the burn.

‘It was an accident,' he said.

I began to cry. I could not stop. He did not ask me to. I could not look at him. I was bursting, falling, dying.

He removed my hand from the water and lifted it to his mouth. He placed his lips on the burn. He closed his eyes.

His lips were dry. Rougher than my own. Than Harriet's. I found that my tears had ceased. While his eyes were closed I could look. There was a deep crease across his forehead, as though it were an unbearable thing he was doing. As though it were causing him pain.

I wondered if he'd ever had the chance to do this to Harriet. If she had kept more secrets from me. I was sure he had wanted to touch her like this. I'd no doubt that he had imagined this and more. Fingers on button-holes, lips on the neck.

But this was mine now. An ache strummed between my hipbones and fizzed in the pit of my stomach. Like a pinprick of light, intense, so bright.

We crouched there for a long time, McPhail and me. His lips on my hand. I leaned over the bucket and lifted my other hand to the side of his face. His beard was thick and scratchy. He groaned in his throat and inclined his head towards my hand, so that I was cupping the arc of his chin, my fingers stretching up towards the lobe of his ear.

If I do not speak, I thought, we might stay like this forever. This man, this grown man, was trembling at my touch. I feared he would begin to cry and I would not know what to do. But now, for now, I knew everything.

He opened his eyes. They flashed.

‘Harriet,' I said, dropping my hand. ‘You think of her.'

‘No,' he whispered, but he could not hold my gaze.

I turned my face away and closed my eyes. ‘I think of her, too,' I said. I think of nothing else. Harriet twirling in the light, laughing, hair slipping over her shoulder. Harriet's face so close to mine, her kiss.

I stood. ‘I will go.'

There was a thunderous pounding on the door.

‘Open up, McPhail! I know your game!'

‘It's Albert,' I whispered.

The voice was clear and angry. The banging louder now.

‘I'm coming in!'

McPhail got up; in his haste he knocked the bucket with his knee and water slopped over the edge and onto the floor. Before he had a chance to move to the door, Albert flung it open and stood there, silhouetted against the pale light.

‘Kate, come with me,' he said, striding across the room to where I now stood and grabbing my arm. I shook him loose.

‘Watch yourself, boy.' McPhail took Albert by the shoulder.

Albert, enraged by the touch, turned on McPhail, striking out. It was odd. I remembered what Harriet had said – what I had also noticed. He was the same height as McPhail. Smaller in stature, but strong.

‘Have you not done enough?' Albert shouted. ‘Do you mean to ruin them both?'

McPhail froze, then lurched forwards, grabbing Albert by the shirtfront with both hands. He roared into Albert's face, a wordless roar. I had to look away.

The small room echoed with the sound. When I turned back it was to see McPhail pushing Albert away, crossing the room hurriedly, grabbing his coat and hat, and walking through the open doorway. He did not look back.

We both watched him go.

‘You need to come with me now, Kate,' Albert said. He reached his hand out again and, this time, I let him take me by the elbow, lead me out the door, shut it behind us.

When we had moved a few feet from the hut, Albert dropped my arm and turned to face me.

‘I saw him touching you.'

I was silent.

‘I did. And I want to belt the man.' At this Albert clenched his fists by his sides, and I could see him gritting his back teeth together. ‘But I am prepared to forget what I saw. As long as he leaves and does not return.'

Over Albert's head the gums were rustling and whispering against the grey clouds.

‘It was nothing. I burned my hand.' I held it out towards him, and he glanced at the red mark, fainter now, but visible, as if I'd been branded.

He stepped towards me and took my hand in his. ‘Why were you here?'

How could I tell him when I did not know myself? Because of Harriet. Because of McPhail. Because there is a great weight in my chest and I cannot breathe for it.

Because no one is angry at me but no one can look at me. Because I killed the person I love most in the entire world. Because I did not mean to.

Because sometimes I think I did.

‘I walked. I was cold. I saw the smoke. He made me tea.' I wasn't making sense.

Albert cocked his chin, turned away from me, turned back. ‘Have you thought more on what I said that day?'

‘What you said?'

‘What I proposed.'

‘What?' I laughed bitterly. ‘Marriage?'

‘Yes.'

‘You do not mean it.' I pulled my hand away and began walking towards the track.

‘I mean it, Kate. I still want to marry you. I would marry you. You should consider it.'

All the fear and guilt that was curdling away inside me came foaming up. ‘Why?' I shouted. ‘Because no one else will marry me now?'

‘I never said that.'

‘You didn't need to.' I took a deep breath, looked him square in the face. ‘You shouldn't have followed me here, Albert.'

‘I was worried about you.'

‘Don't. I will be well soon enough.'

‘Will you think on it?'

I did not reply.

His face, the softness there. There was something in him that gave me peace. He was right. I could marry him. No one else would have me now, not anyone who knew, anyway.

‘Will you see me home, please?' I asked.

‘Of course.'

Tenderly, he took my elbow, and we walked back to the track. Not fast, not slow. At some point he began talking of the vegetable garden, the supply boat that had come a week late because of a storm, the younger boys' escapades trying to catch crabs. I listened and nodded and felt his warm hand on my arm. Where McPhail's touch had scattered me – blown me into millions of pieces so that I could focus only on the tiniest points, the pressure of his lips on my hand – now I felt centred. I felt as I had before. I was walking with Albert and he was talking and the light was changing and the birds called
curlew! curlew!
in the treetops around us and it could have been any day from my past.

Perhaps Albert could remake the world for me. Perhaps it would be easy to pretend with him. Perhaps, in time, we could move away from the cape and find ourselves a little house, and I could tend to it and he could find some work, or we could go to the city or follow the gold and perhaps, in time, I might be able to breathe again.

I might forget.

THIRTY-NINE

I
T RAINED INCESSANTLY FOR WEEKS
. R
AIN THAT
brimmed over the gutters and fell in sheets so that I had no choice but to remain inside.

Mother ushered me from my room early each morning, so that I wouldn't sit in there all day feeling sorry for myself, she said, and we spent our days in a kind of a fervour of busyness: cleaning the store cupboard and house; baking breads and teacakes so that the oven roared with heat, and we sweated in the kitchen despite the icy rain outside.

I hadn't been down to the beach or past the hut again or ever to the grave, for I was trying desperately to keep myself in the present, the future, to find a way forwards and out of this. I was leaving soon on the next supply boat. Bound for Bendigo, for six months with my father's distant cousin, whom my parents had begged to have me, to get me off this godforsaken cape and see if I could shed the grim shroud of my recent past.

No one on the cape had made me feel as though I had to go; Albert had been persistent in his kindness, and I ached to be able to let this kindness wash away all the tumult that I felt, but there was this weight in my chest. A cold heaviness that I did not know what to do with. I could not feel anything other than its presence there.

One morning I had woken to the wind, only the wind with no rattle of drops on the tin roof. I was up and away before anyone had the chance to stop me.

I knew the grave was some way from the lighthouse, in a little clearing that one could reach from the track. Far enough away to not make Mrs Walker desperate with grief, close enough for her to take the walk each day. It was marked simply by a white cross inlaid with a heart-shaped plaque. Her name, the dates, a poem.

Oh, we miss her and how

Sadly bleeding hearts alone can tell

Earth has lost her

Heaven has found her

Jesus doeth all things well.

As I stood beside the grave for the first time, I was filled with a mixture of sadness and guilt and selfish, selfish pain at my loss. I questioned whether Jesus did indeed do all things well, for this felt like a terrible mistake. If Harriet had always been intended to be taken up early to serve her Heavenly masters, why, then, did the invisible hand of fate not choose to wash her from the rocks, have her fall from a horse and snap her neck, be bitten by a treacherous brown snake slinking across her path? Why, dear God, in all your infinite wisdom, did it have to be by my hand? My jealous hand, moved at times by an energy I felt came from outside myself.

I kneeled down beside the cross and wiped my hand across the face of the plaque. In truth, it was not because I had been so racked with grief that I could not bear to come, but because I was terrified of communing with Harriet in the afterlife. What could I say that would ever recompense for what I had done? Not that she could hear my innermost thoughts, the ones that whispered:
You meant to do it. You meant to pull the trigger. You're better off without her. You would always be second to Harriet.

I was terrified that when I kneeled down to pray, to confess, the words would gurgle up from the depths of me, and my true self would be revealed in all its duplicity.

‘Harriet?' My voice came out croaky at first. ‘I am sorry not to have visited till now.' I folded the hard little hem of my apron in my lap, turning it over, and over again.

‘I am leaving the cape.' The wind whipped in the treetops above me, and I glanced up at the noise, pulled my shawl in tighter around myself. ‘Just as you said.'

Every word I spoke was wrong. Should I try to explain how sick with guilt I was? How I would never, ever forgive myself?

‘I don't know what to say to you, Harriet. So I'm just going to start talking. Your mother is well. I mean, she's not well, she … survives, I suppose. But she is out of bed this week. She and Mother are both seized by this need to scrub and clean everything down. As though we have, all of us, been soiled somehow by the accident.' At this I hesitated. ‘Your death, I mean.'

I startled at a cracking noise behind me. When I swung around, I saw nothing but the dense bush for a moment, and then, there, stepping through the trees, was the black girl. Had she followed me? I stood up. She wore the same thin skirt as before but had discarded the scrap of waistcoat for a man's shirt. Her feet were still bare. Why was she here and why show herself now? She looked at me and past me to the grave. I remembered the last time I had seen her, high on the hill, in the heat, as I watched the supply boat leave, with Harriet on it.

It started to rain again, a thin drizzle, misting through the trees. I could feel the drops beginning to bead on my forehead and drew my shawl over my head, not daring to turn away from the girl who watched me. She motioned for me to come. Her head inclined, her shoulder turned. An expectation that I would follow. I realised with a start that I had often made the same motion to Harriet. Not waiting, just expecting. An arrogance of sorts, a pride.

I did not want to stay there by the grave, and I did not want to go home. I followed, under the now dripping ti-tree across the swathes of slippery bark that had fallen from the tall eucalypts. She walked ahead of me, and she did not look back to check that I was there. Just moved through the bush, following no track that I could see.

I turned once and wondered how I would find my way out. Perhaps it was better that I became hopelessly lost. That I did not make my way home. I was no use to any of them anyway. I was broken. The only thing that had made me feel anything in the month since Harriet's death was the burning touch of McPhail. I craved it. Oh God, how I yearned to feel something again.

The girl had stopped. She waited until I was close behind her, then moved ahead a little into a copse of banksia trees. It was darker in there, shadowed by the layers of twiggy bare branches, but sheltered from the rain. She moved to stand before me. She was just the taller. I wondered how old she was, how close in age to me. To Harriet.

When I had seen her before, I thought that her boldness came from her ease with her body, the way she stood with her shoulders back and her breasts barely covered. But it was not that, for now she was dressed as I might be – shabbier than me, true, but essentially the same. It was the boldness in her presence. As if she were challenging me. Questioning me.

She reached one hand out towards me, and I shrank back. She paused, but when she saw that I did not retreat again, she moved forwards and placed her hand on my chest, on the exact spot where I felt the great weight. Her hand was warm through the damp fabric of my dress. She did not look at me but began to speak. Her voice was low, her language a cadence that was not like the harsh calls I had heard before. It did not sound so foreign to me here, as though she were singing the words of a lullaby that I couldn't understand, but I knew was meant to comfort me.

She stopped speaking, raised her hand and tapped it against my chest, once, twice, and lifted her chin.

‘It is like a rock,' I whispered, knowing that she probably could not understand. ‘Like a great weight I cannot move.'

She did not draw her hand away. Instead she took my own hand with her other and laid it on her chest. I could feel the faint thud of her heart. She held my hand there, but she needn't have, for I did not want to pull away. She looked at me, her eyes steady on mine. As though she could see into me completely. As though she could see the rotten foulness of my interior, all the guilt and the grief and then back further to the envy, to the lust and jealousy. Still her hands remained, one on the great weight in my chest and the other holding my hand against her heart.

She began to speak again, but this time it was only noise, as if there were no words but only a mournful, calling wail. Where her hand lay on my chest I felt warmth spreading and imagined that it was curling in through my skin and its long tentacles were twining around the rock inside of me and finding invisible fissures. She sang, and I felt the warmth begin to crack the rock, letting the light in, and the air in, so that at its very core it was not solid anymore and, as we stood there, hand to chest, the song wound around me and the rock gave an enormous crack so that I gasped and it exploded, exploded all around me in light and I could breathe.

I could breathe again. I took in great gulps of air and wept.