Skylarking (4 page)

SEVEN

I
MUST HAVE BEEN FOURTEEN WHEN
M
RS
J
ACKSON
,
WHO
was pregnant once again, lost a baby. Late one evening Albert came banging on our door.

‘It's the baby – it's coming!' I heard him panting to Mother as she pulled on her housecoat.

‘Kate,' she called back to me, ‘gather some towels and bring them to the Jacksons. Get Mrs Walker on the way.' She hurried out after Albert.

I remembered the births of my brothers and sister, but only in the half-light of a child's memory. I remembered sleeping in Harriet's bed, and Mrs Walker making us porridge in the morning, and going back to our cottage to find Mother in bed with a bundle of blankets at her breast. But until this night, I had never been privy to what happened between the swollen bumps under my mother's dresses and the squashy pink babies that came after.

Mrs Walker and Harriet were already at the door of the Jacksons' cottage when I rushed up. We could hear a muffled wailing coming from inside and let ourselves in. Mr Jackson had made himself scarce, but I could hear Albert reading to Harry and Lucy and little Edward in the front room as we hurried past.

‘Doesn't it sound awful?' Harriet whispered.

‘Ungodly,' I said.

Mother let us venture as far as the half-closed door of Mrs Jackson's room before she sent us back to the kitchen to get some water on the boil. I caught a glimpse of strewn bedclothes and the shocking sight of Mrs Jackson's hair come all undone and falling about her shoulders and across her face. Then Mother pulled shut the door.

Harriet and I made the trip between the bedroom and the kitchen so many times that night I lost count. I went outside and filled the pail from the tank and put the kettle on the stove and tidied away the plates and the cups. No doubt Mrs Jackson would find them in the wrong place when she returned to her kitchen and would click her tongue at the fact that I was so inept in matters of the hearth.
That's what you get when you let a girl run wild,
I could almost hear her say.

I tidied and fussed until the screaming reached fever pitch, and then could do nothing but draw a wooden chair next to Harriet's at the table and clutch her hands. The screaming became a rhythmic grunt that sounded like a wild pig, nothing human about it. Harriet and I stared at each other, our eyes wide. I'm certain that Mother and Mrs Walker had forgotten they had left us there in the kitchen, for otherwise they would surely have shooed us away.

Mother's voice carried down the hall, anxiety clear in its cadence. ‘Come now, Mary – you're nearly there. One last push.'

This babe would be born very soon, I was sure of it. If I went up the hall, ever so quietly, I might be able to see the moment. Get it clear in my head how this strange women's work got the baby out.

‘I'm going up to look,' I said.

‘You mustn't,' said Harriet.

‘They won't even know I'm there. I'll only peep through the door.'

‘Truly, Kate. Think of Mrs Jackson. She'd be mortified.'

‘She'll never know I'm there.'

I stood up and moved towards the kitchen door. The grunting rose and fell, and I heard my mother's voice again.

‘One more. Hard now. I've got the head but the little one is tiring.'

Behind me, Harriet insisted. ‘Don't you do it, Kate.'

But I was on my way. I crept up the hallway to where a faint light fell through the open wedge of doorway. Shadows moved across the walls in there, giant and grotesque.

‘Bea,' Mrs Walker murmured to my mother, ‘I don't like this colour.'

I wondered what colour she meant as I inched ever closer. I tucked in the shadow next to the doorframe and stared into the bedroom.

Mother and Mrs Walker had their backs to me as they crouched at the foot of the bed. And Mrs Jackson: well, Harriet needn't have worried she would see me, for all I could see of her were her knees high and naked on the bed and beyond that her white face pressed sideways into the pillow, looking away from me.

As my mother and Harriet's shifted in the low light, I saw what it was they concentrated on. The gaping space between Mrs Jackson's thighs. A space that, even from my hiding spot, I could tell was grotesquely rearranged with a bloody white circle at its centre.

I squeezed my eyes shut, but an unearthly moan caused me to open them again. I watched as that bloody white circle grew larger, and I wondered how Mrs Jackson could be still living and have this thing coming out of her … from there!

Then in a great rush a small body sluiced out in a bloody mess, and Mother grabbed it and held it over her arm and appeared to push and push against its back.

Mrs Jackson asked, ‘What is it? Why doesn't it cry? Where's the baby?'

Mrs Walker hurried to hold Mrs Jackson's hand and smooth back her brow, and my mother kept pushing against the baby, all mottled white and blue, as she held it over her arm.

‘Come now, come now,' Mother mumbled and pushed again and again.

After a time, Mrs Walker came to my mother's side. She laid her hand on her arm and said, low and gentle-like, ‘No more, Bea.'

My breath seized in my throat.

Mother pushed once more and then bowed her head. She whispered a prayer. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace …'

I slipped back to the kitchen and to Harriet's wide and questioning eyes.

It was impossible to get to sleep that night. Everything I'd seen swirled in my mind, and I was sick and sad and guilty all at once.

I could not ask Mother as she ushered me home to our cottage and to bed, for her face was closed and blank, and she did not, of course, realise I had witnessed the shocking scene. But I heard her as I tossed and turned and tried to get to sleep. She was weeping. Thinking, I suppose, of Mrs Jackson's babe who'd been lost before he even took a breath. And thinking, too, of her own boy, her baby once.

The next week, as we trod quietly around the Jacksons and their awkward sadness, the pounding in my head and deep throb in my centre revealed itself as the brown heavy blood of my first curse. I was shocked, but then pleased.

In truth I had been wishing for this, ever since Harriet had told of hers twelve months back. I had sulked for a time that she would get it before I did, even though I knew full well that she had no control over such a thing at all. It seemed to accentuate the gap in our ages, which had hardly ever mattered at all. I wondered if this blood would mark the same change in me that I had witnessed in Harriet: a blossoming, luminous quality, a gentle swell under her skin that made her seem infinitely older than me.

My mother surprised me in the laundry as I was trying to rinse out my undergarments. She must have known at once why I was there.

‘Has it come, then?' she said.

I nodded but did not look up, relieved that she would now take me with a sure hand and tell me what to do.

‘That's good and healthy. When you're finished up here, come into my room and we'll get you sorted out.'

‘Thank you,' I said, meeting her eyes.

‘You know what it means, don't you, Kate?'

I did and I didn't. I knew it was a line I was crossing, from childhood to adulthood, and I wanted to stay and I wanted to go, and I wanted to be able to be in both places forever more.

‘You're getting ready to make babies.'

My jaw dropped.

‘Not right away, of course! It's the body's way of saying that everything is working and that you'll be a mother one day, is all.'

Harriet had not said. Of all the secret, whispered things I thought might be revealed by this event, this was not one of them. The knowledge of it stole something from me. Stole the careless way in which I had considered my body until now. And my blood became linked in my mind with the blood of Mrs Jackson, talk of babies with dead babies; and every time I felt that cursed cramp and heaviness, anxiety pressed in on me.

I realised then what a burden I carried as a girl, as a woman, and could not believe Harriet had not prepared me better.

EIGHT

I
T WAS A FEW WEEKS LATER THAT
I
FIRST HEARD THE
name McPhail. I was at home, no longer eligible for school because I would turn fifteen that year. My days were now filled up with fetching and mending and washing and baking and hanging out the laundry. Harriet was thrilled that I had finally left the schoolhouse and joined her.

Sometimes we would plead with our mothers to relieve us of our chores and, if they agreed, we would whoop and yahoo as we raced down the hill away from the station to hide ourselves on one of our favourite beaches. Every so often, I would long for my brain to be tried and tested as it had been by Mr Jamieson's lessons, and I would sneak away from both Mother and Harriet, to be with one of my books.

But this particular day was not one for books. Mother and I were serving tea and scones to Dot Appleton, who had brought eggs and fresh gossip. She had it from Mr Jamieson who heard from Mr Prucherp from Bennett's River that a man, not young but not old, was moving to the area.

Daniel McPhail was his name. He'd come from somewhere out bush in New South Wales and was looking to take up the abandoned hut down at the cove. Apparently he'd been left it in a will, but no one could remember who'd last lived there or why on earth someone would journey out all this way to claim it. No wife. No children. Just him and a swag and a want for someone to buy the fish he planned to catch.

Mother made interested noises and asked me to fill the kettle again. By the time I returned and placed the full kettle back on the stove, the women had moved on to another tale.

‘Met him just today on the road back from the junction. Nice enough,' my father said that evening. ‘Tall – good hands – he'll do well enough for himself with the fishing if he's as good as he makes out. Been a long while, but he said the sea had never left him, that he was itching to get back out.'

I had finished washing my face and was heading for bed, but I stopped in the hall. I could hear Mother at the dishes.

‘He's already talked to the men from Bennett's River,' Father continued. ‘They reckon there's a small boat going from when Tommy McGregor got sick and gave it up. This McPhail thinks he's got the coin to buy it straight out. Reckons he can keep us in fish. The men from down there will work the coast the other way and not have to bother about getting round here to us.'

‘And what about Blackwell? He's been keeping us in fish alright till now.'

Father snorted. ‘Blackwell spends as much time catching flies with his drunken mouth as he does catching fish! I told McPhail if he got up here with his catch first then we'd welcome it and keep him in tea and sugar and flour.'

‘Your decision, dear,' Mother said.

I knew I should go to bed, but there was something in the name, even then, that caught me like a tiny silver hook.

‘I told him there weren't much but the fish and the sea and the bush and the wind. He'd come to the wrong place if he was looking for drinking companions, or to find a woman to keep his hearth and his bed warm.'

‘Tom!'

‘Men's words, my love; it's how it goes.' My father's voice was bright. ‘He said that suited him fine – that he'd had enough of women. That sea and fish and a fire in his hut would keep him warm enough.'

‘He'll have a past he's running from sure enough, then,' Mother said, clattering the dishes into their rack above the bench.

‘That may be so, my love, that may be so.' Mother laughed quietly, and my father's footsteps sounded on the boards, as he added, ‘And it's no business of ours what business a man might be running from.'

Mother's answer was muffled.

I crept back up the hall to my bedroom where I could mull over the fact of this new arrival to the cape.

I didn't have long to wait before I saw him in the flesh.

I was in the washhouse beating the soap out of the sheets and entreating Emmaline to hold fast to her end of the tangle, lest the whole lot fall onto the floor and we'd have to start again.

‘You pull too hard!'

‘You're weak,' I muttered.

‘What did you say?' She tugged hard at the sheets so that I lost my balance.

‘Don't be such a child!' I said, and wrenched the sheets back.

‘I. Am. Not. A. Child!' She tugged the sheet hard with each word.

‘Are too!' I loosened my grip so that she relaxed a little. Then I pulled sharply, and she lost her footing and fell onto the dirt floor of the washhouse.

She yelled as she scrambled up, and I dumped the sheets back in the tub and raced out the door, shrieking as I went. I knew she would give me a right pummelling if she got to me. I probably deserved it.

I raced around the corner of the washhouse, laughing, and heard her slam the laundry door and follow on my heels. I ran towards the fence line and slipped behind the goat shed, thinking I might lose her that way. But her footsteps kept coming, along the other side of the shed.

‘You can't hide from me!' she called, and I shrieked and ducked out from behind the shed.

‘You'll never catch me!' I paid no heed at all to my flying skirts, my arms helter skelter, my hair unpinned, as I ran straight into a man.

Heaven only knows what he thought when I came around that corner and fairly landed in his arms.

I pulled up fast, shocked, and a big hand clamped on my shoulder to steady me.

‘Whoa there,' he said, and I looked up at him. He had a broad face framed with thick dark hair. Grey eyes, like the sea at dusk. He wore a beard, quite short but full and thick. He did not smile but was not severe. Perhaps I amused him, for his eyes widened a little as I stepped back from his grasp.

‘Thank you,' I said. ‘I am fine.' My breath was all ragged, and I could not get my mind to still, jumping around as it was, at this man before me, the sensation on my shoulder where his hand had been.

‘I see that,' he said.

I heard Emmaline come to an abrupt halt behind me. I turned my head, reluctantly I'll admit, for it was not often that dark strangers arrived on our cape, and scowled at Emmaline. She, in all her childishness, clapped both hands over her mouth and erupted in a fit of giggles before she slunk away behind the goat shed.

‘McPhail,' he said, and I whipped my head back to face him. ‘I'm after the head keeper.'

So this was the man. Of course it was. I found myself looking at his hands. I sensed a blush begin to creep up my neck.

‘That's my father.'

I made no move, and we stood there together. Only a couple of hand spans between us. For everything that came after, I have held the fact of it warm in my heart:
I saw him first, Harriet, I saw him first.

‘Your father?' He tilted his head to one side.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Come with me and I'll show you to the work shed. He's in there. They have not sent the part. The part that was to come for the light, that is. He's had to make do, which he does very well, of course, being the head keeper, but he wouldn't normally …' I was babbling, I knew it, for the words tumbled out, fast and unmatched and not fitting together as they should. I fell quiet.

He followed a few steps behind me as we crossed the yard. I looked over my shoulder once, twice, but he seemed to pay me no heed. We approached the shed, and I called out to Father. He appeared in the doorway, raising his hand to his hat when he saw the man.

‘Ah, McPhail. You've had the pleasure of meeting my daughter then?

‘Indeed.'

‘What brings you to the station today?'

‘I'm in need of a saw, if you have one to spare for a few days.'

‘That I do,' said my father. ‘It'll cost you though.'

McPhail raised his chin and kept his eyes steady on my father.

‘I'll take a salmon next week, if they're biting,' Father said, and smiled.

McPhail loosened his stance and nodded, a glint in his eye.

I was taken aback by the fact that this man did not seem to place any particular regard on my father's position as head keeper. Often when men from Bennett's River came by they appeared to bow their heads before Father. It made him uneasy but it seemed to me to keep order in the world.

I hung outside the shed while McPhail and Father did their business, talking the foreign tongue of tools and lengths and what was required to fix the little hut. When they emerged, they shook hands, and Father turned to me.

‘Still here? Are you waiting to show our visitor out?' He chuckled, and I blushed.

‘Of course not.' I knew the red in my cheeks grew ever brighter.

McPhail glanced at me. ‘No need – I'll be off.' He began to walk away. ‘My thanks again.' He tipped his hat and strode towards the track that led down to the cove.

He had not even asked my name.