Skylarking (3 page)

FIVE

A
YEAR PASSED
,
PUNCTUATED BY HORSEBACK ADVENTURES
, and foraging for mussels and crabs at Blackman's Bay or Murray's Beach or one of the many sandy stretches of our cape. The Jacksons settled in, and it was as though they had always been around. Albert and Harry joined us at our desks at the schoolhouse; Mrs Jackson gave birth to another little one, Edward, whom we carried about as our doll when she would let him from her sight. I remember Harriet's hair in plaits. I remember clouds of flour in the kitchen when our mothers left Harriet and me to make scones one afternoon. I remember the first time I realised Harriet had grown taller and slimmer and rounder all at once – and I recall feeling bereft.

It is funny what we choose to remember. And what is forgotten. How some events bed themselves down with permanence; even as they happen, we know that they will be imprinted on our memory forever. And then a scent, a change of season, a recollection of the way the wind was blowing on the day the thing happened will bring it back with such force, that we relive it all over again.

Such is my memory of the night the
SS Alexandria
was wrecked against the rocks the winter I turned eleven.

A storm had been brewing for days, and I'd watched the lines on Father's forehead grow deeper as he wrote in the readings from the barometer while a bank of slate-grey clouds roiled on the horizon. I lay tucked under the bedclothes that night, listening to the wind keen against the sandstone. I could hear things shuddering and clanging in the yard outside. Above all this, I heard the trilling of the telephone line from the light tower and then the shouts of my father.

‘Ship down! Man the lifeboats!'

I jumped out of bed and went to the window but could see only the splattering of rain against the pane. Emmaline stirred in her bed.

‘What is it?' she said sleepily, and though I know I should have reassured and calmed her, as Harriet might have done were she the big sister, I did not.

‘Shipwreck!' I said, and Emmaline leaped up, her eyes wide. It was lucky that Mother rushed in then, otherwise I might have worked Emmaline into a right panic.

‘Quickly, girls,' Mother said. ‘Emmaline, into my room and to bed at once.' Emmaline scurried over to Mother, who allowed her to nestle into her nightgown for a moment. ‘We'll need your room for those they pluck from the water, God willing. Kate, you must go and sleep in with Harriet, come now, put on your coat.'

I hurried into my coat and followed Mother out into the wild night. We had to bend against the wind, and Mother gripped my hand as she held the lantern above her head. She was fearless as the storm whipped around her. A true lighthouse keeper's wife. We huddled in under the porch of the Walkers' cottage, and she rapped at the door.

‘Now see you go right to sleep and don't keep Harriet awake with your yabbering,' Mother said as we listened for footsteps in the hall.

Harriet murmured as I slipped in beside her. It was warm under the bedclothes, and they smelled of sleep. I waited until Mrs Walker had pulled the door closed and then I snuggled in against Harriet's back and whispered in her ear. ‘A shipwreck, Harriet!'

Her body stiffened, and she rolled over so that her breath, faintly sour, was soft on my cheek.

‘Truly?' she asked. ‘Is it lost?'

‘I don't know.' I pulled my hand free of the blankets and felt in the darkness for her face. Under my fingertips, her lips moved as she spoke.

‘Are there many on board? Oh, the poor men.'

‘Shush,' I said, and kissed her cheek. I may have been a poor older sister to Emmaline, but I knew how to comfort my Harriet. ‘Our fathers will bring them in. Mother will look after them.'

Harriet's body relaxed, and I curled my arm around her shoulders. We stayed like that, our breath mingling and making the air warm between us. Her breathing deepened again, and I felt that this was my duty. To stay awake while the storm raged about us, to keep watch over my friend, just as my father kept watch over all who travelled past our cape. I thought about my mother out there in the darkness and wondered how she had learned to be so brave, to do her job so well. I wondered whether I could ever do as she had done.

She never intended to be the wife of a lighthouse keeper, or so she always told me. But, swept up in the whirl of romance, she did not take heed of her fiancé's hankering for the sea. She was shocked when he knocked on her door a few months into their engagement, brandishing a letter triumphantly.

‘I am to be a head lighthouse keeper. We shall be the first family of the light!'

My mother had to sit and fan herself as she processed this news.

‘You will love it, Bea, you will make the perfect light keeper's wife,' my father had said.

And when my mother told me this story I could sense the bitter aftertaste in her pride. She
was
the perfect lighthouse keeper's wife. Just as Father presided over the tower and the light and the coastline, Mother took charge of the cottages, the supplies, the animals, we children. She did as she must, for she loved my father and respected his wishes. It's simply – and this thought sometimes snagged at the back of my mind – that she never wanted to be the wife of a lighthouse keeper on an isolated headland. But who was she to decide her own future?

Mother was dignified in her role. Remained dignified even when she had every reason to grow hard and resentful, even mad with grief. For it was in the rocky earth of this cape that she buried her firstborn, George, before his ninth birthday.

George was, as older brothers are, bossy and sometimes cruel, but I loved him and loved – more than anything – the way he could bring a smile to my mother's face. When George got ill a frown set across mother's brow and it never fully lifted.

I was six when I first knew that George's cough was serious.

‘We have to send for a doctor, Tom,' I recall my mother saying. ‘It's not just a cough.'

‘It might be a week at least before I can get Walters out from town,' my father said. ‘By then George'll have broken the fever, no doubt, and we'll all feel foolish and have a pretty penny to pay the doctor for his troubles, too.' My father was kind, but he was practical. I don't think Mother ever forgave him, though – not entirely.

I used to sit with George on the verandah of our cottage.

‘Do you ever wonder where all your memories go when you die?' George asked me one day.

‘No.' I was clever then, at six, but not that clever.

Unperturbed, he went on. ‘I understand what happens to the body, the science of it, decomposing and all that, earth to earth.' He stopped to take a ragged breath. ‘And I understand, at least I think I do, what happens to the soul.' At this point my brother had to stop, racked as he was by guttural coughing.

I didn't really understand then what he was saying, but some part of my brain was committing it to memory, so that I could turn it over and over again in the years to come. I stayed quiet until he started again.

‘What I don't understand is whether the things that were in your mind cease to exist when you do. Say, the memory of a pattern I made with the pebbles down on the tideline at Murray's last month.'

‘You're not going to die.' It was all I could offer, and I knew he was disappointed.

‘We're all going to die.'

‘Not if I can help it,' I said, and stalked back inside, not wanting to be around George when he was being so gloomy.

But I thought about our conversation later. I thought about it as I listened to my mother's keening cries, and when the doctor finally came to pronounce the cause of death as pleurisy, not that it was of any use to us. I thought of it when I crept into the hushed room and couldn't bear to lift the starched sheet in the candlelight because, if I didn't lift it, it couldn't be him. And I thought about it when we buried him, and Harriet stood beside me and held my hand, and I whispered to her, ‘Where do your memories go when you die?' and she couldn't answer.

I thought about what George had said again that night of the shipwreck as I lay curled around Harriet, and again in the morning when my father's long face at the Walkers' door revealed that men had been lost.

My mother took to her bed that day, exhausted from tending to the injured, but I knew that her grief for her boy had been revived again. I thought about those poor souls drifting out there, their memories unravelling into the deep, dark currents, lost forever. I wished that George had found an answer, or that he would send me a sign telling me where to look for the memories of those who had departed. It would not be the last time I wished such a thing.

SIX

O
UR EDUCATION WAS UNDERTAKEN IN THE WHITEWASHED
Junction School. The schoolhouse was nestled in a hollow at the junction, halfway between the light station and Bennett's River, where the track wound back over the mountain range towards Edenstown, two days hence. Our teacher, Mr Jamieson, and the shire council chiselled a place of order and discipline out of the wilds around it. We may have run like forest sprites once that last bell of the day sounded, but until then we were perfect examples of the civilising influence of education.

Most of the desks at the Junction School were taken up by us children from the lighthouse, but there were a few children from Bennett's River, too, who were absent as often as they were there. One of these was Davey White, a fisherman's son; people said his mother was on the drink before he was born, which accounted for his being a bit slow.

Mr Jamieson was young and fervent and approached our education as though it were the most important thing in the world. But, some afternoons, as the sun slanted through the windows and one could feel the quiet hum of the waves through the hardwood boards, it was almost impossible to pay attention to him as he read us poems or scratched out the wonder of an equation or tacked a great map to the wall and identified countries for us. Whenever Mr Jamieson pointed out England and then pointed to us – in the colony – Davey White would gasp and say, ‘But why are we at the bottom, sir?'

Of course, my day had always long since begun by the time I made it to my desk. It was my job to check the vegetable patch on the way to the schoolhouse. Harriet always dithered as she got ready and so it was Albert who had taken to joining me on my rounds. We would walk in the dewy bush, soft-soled in the quiet.

There was no soil to speak of on the cape, only sand and rock and grit but, despite this, Mother had insisted on starting a vegetable garden. She and Harriet's mother had worked and worked a piece of ground a half a mile or so inland from the lighthouse. It was tucked in behind a rise, and we watered it with buckets fetched from the little soak close by, which was thick with reeds and the gurgle of frogs.

Over the years Mother and Mrs Walker had collected the goat and horse manure, the kitchen scraps, even, now and then, a pile of kelp they would have one of the horses drag up – Blaze, usually, as she was the most agreeable of the three of them. Sadie was our favourite but older and slower, and Shadow was prone to misbehaviour.

Slowly the sand got some substance and grew darker and started to clump together, and the little vegetable patch was born. What we grew in there mostly came out small and tough, but it was enough, when combined with some of the local plants, the spinach and native currants, to keep our teeth in our heads and the scurvy at bay.

I had to check the fencing around the garden early every morning and make sure there had been no break-in by a kangaroo or a wombat ramming at the wire, trying to get through to the vivid green of the vegetables.

Although I was fairly tall for thirteen, Albert, younger than me by over a year, stood a handspan taller than I did. He was broad in the back and could throw the great logs for the fire around as though they were twigs, but he was still a quiet boy. I always wondered whether the death of his mother when he was so small, and his father's taking up with the new Mrs Jackson, had dented his confidence in some vital way; made him uncertain of his place in the world.

I liked his company nonetheless. If an animal had broken through the fence in the night, I'd have a pile of cleaning up to do, banging the poles back into the soil, mending holes in the wire with smaller pieces threaded in or, if the spot was low to the ground, pieces of timber I forced into the soil to stop the wombats burrowing under. Albert would help and could dig a good hole in half the time I did.

But he didn't treat me like a girl. We just worked at the job until it was done and, if there had been no night invasion, we surveyed the garden, checking to see if purple caterpillars had munched through any of the leaves, or if there was a handful of produce we could take back to the kitchens.

One morning as we came through the ti-tree to the clearing, I noticed movement in the vegetable garden. Ahead, a black girl was stepping over the wire fence. She moved fast; she'd obviously been disturbed at her task. As she went to run, I saw her arms were full of carrots.

‘Stop!' I called, before I had time to think.

But she did not stop, just looked my way, momentarily, then ran into the cover of the bush, where I heard her call out to me, guttural and foreign, ending in a laugh.

‘Thieving black,' I said angrily, turning to Albert for his agreement, but he had walked on ahead to check the state of the garden. I thought perhaps he hadn't heard me and hurried after him. Albert was a boy of few words, but surely I could count on some level of conversation after an incident such as this.

‘Well, what do you think of that then?' I said, coming up next to him, and sounding like my mother.

‘Of what?'

‘Did you not see the black girl making off with our carrots? The whole crop, I'd reckon. After we've worked so hard.' Albert's dismissal of my annoyance caused it to gurgle and froth within me. ‘You don't see them toiling over the earth like we do, trying to make something of it, trying to grow a crop. Not them, wandering around with their babies in the dust and all on show. It's shameless. Thieving! Father won't stand for it.'

‘I don't know, Kate.' Albert was careful and quiet and slow. ‘You might find he's content to let it go. What's a few carrots, really?'

I looked at him as though he had lost his mind, and turned my attention to the section that had been so messily raided. I kneeled down and started picking at the small stray carrots that had been left behind, raking the soil over with my fingers.

‘It's not only the carrots though, is it, Albert?' I stood up. I knew what I wanted to say now and all my righteousness and earnestness came spewing forth. ‘It's also the goat last Christmas, and Dot's chickens before that, and the way the wild blacks walk over the cliff near the lighthouse, with nothing but their shirts to hide themselves, laughing at us when we try to hide our eyes and shoo them away.' My face was heating up. ‘They should be rounded up like the rest of them and sent down to Lake Myner, where they can learn to be good and decent Christians. Who knows when we might wake up to find that it's more than carrots they've taken? What's to stop them doing what they've done to some of those families further inland? You've heard the stories, Albert – you know as well as I what those men are capable of, what a well-thrown spear can do.'

Let him argue with that.

‘They're just stories, Kate. No one's getting speared round here 'less they deserve it, that's what I reckon.' He smiled wryly.

And that was all it seemed I was going to get out of Albert.

‘Looks alright,' he added, and started back for the track.

I was fuming and too proud to follow behind so I stomped around the garden for a few minutes more, sensing that I had been laughed at twice this morning, and not liking the feeling at all.