The Burial (9 page)

She ran her hands through the hair on his head and pulled at the roots, which sent a tingling from his scalp to the soles of his feet. He felt a suction on his forehead as she drew breath through the towel and then she thwacked him on the head and it sounded like a hammer, though it did not hurt at all. She unwrapped the towel and replaced it with another that was hotter and smelt of eucalyptus and made his eyes water.

She removed the towel and worked up a lather against his jaw, moving the brush in small circles into his beard, and then she began to shave him, flat blade from the neck. She scraped the blade up and over his chin, his cheeks and the curve between his nose and his lips.

And then she did it all again.

His skin felt like it was finally breathing air, not dust.

She patted him with a warm, soft towel and then she whispered into his ear,
Jack Brown, time for show. Will you watch me?

Jack Brown had not planned it; beyond cleaning himself up, his sole purpose for the day was to visit the police sergeant. But now he was in no mood to ride off suddenly.

Let me make your mind up for you
, said Lay Ping.
You will stay.

Whatever you think is best, Lay Ping
, said Jack Brown.

Lay Ping led him out of the wet room and through the entrance hall and down a corridor to a single door.

Go through
, she said.
Maybe I see you later.

He opened the door. It was a side entrance to a large hall. Within the hall were the owners of the horses, twenty men or more, and Jack Brown could smell them better than he could see them. The lights were dimmed right down and as he walked along an aisle to find a seat he could smell the stench rising up from their torpid bodies. He wondered if, below the neck, he smelt the same. No man acknowledged him. Their eyes were fixed ahead on the red curtains which rippled with the promise of women behind them.

Jack Brown sat down in a seat three from the front and cast his eyes along the row of men. He thought it curious how none of them were speaking to each other, how they were all looking ahead, only the jangling sounds of a piano saving them from their own silence.

When the lights went down and the curtains drew back, the men shifted upright and to the edge of their seats. Jack Brown felt the row tip forward with the weight of them. The men broke from their silence, clapping their hands and stamping their feet on the boards. One by one, women appeared on stage dressed in silver smocks that showed off their legs and shoulders. The pianist played a more melodious tune and the women danced, arms linked, around the stage. Each woman took the hem of another woman's smock and drew it up more and danced in circles, six women in each, revealing the tops of their thighs as they turned. There were three circles and they merged like petals forming a flower. Then the curtains were drawn again and the men stamped their feet and yelled for more, more, more.

When the curtains reopened, the stage was filled with something like smoke, although it did not smell of burning, and the women pitter-pattered out and formed circles again and merged into a flower. Then they slowly sank down as a single woman in a feathered mask rose up from between them and stretched out two silk wings. The only thing covering her breasts was a sash. A half slip draped from her hips.

It was Lay Ping.

The men drew breath as the other women rose up again, concealing her. The women made a line at the front of the stage, their shoulders touching, and then they split to each side and disappeared from the stage as Lay Ping danced, her sash edging slowly from her breasts and slipping down her waist until it was caught by her hips. Her wings were still outstretched.

Lay Ping fluttered her wings and danced until the other women returned bearing pitchers. Then they stood in two lines either side of Lay Ping and each woman took a turn at pouring water on her shoulders. The water trickled over her breasts in curving streams and a man in the audience yelled out,
I'm thirsty
, and then all the men laughed as one.

But they fell silent again as the water soaked into Lay Ping's slip and revealed the darkness between her legs. She brought up her wings and twisted her shoulders until the wings fell to the ground. Then she turned her body slowly until she had her back to them.

Jack Brown had never seen Lay Ping's bare back. But here it was, a perfect back covered in tattoos. From a distance, it looked to him like the window of coloured lights with its sign that said open all day all night, only here, in the clear space remaining between her shoulder blades, was a single word sorrow.

As he read it the other women ran in and folded around Lay Ping. Then the curtain was drawn and the music reached a crescendo.

Sorrow.

The word was on the men's lips as they sat in the darkness of the hall and it was still being whispered around as the front doors were opened and the daylight swept in.

On either side of Jack Brown, some men sank into their seats while others stepped over him to get out. He did not move from his seat.

As the men departed, dust poured in through the open doors of the hall and covered the men who had saved enough money to stay. Jack Brown decided then, like any free man, that at last he should be one of them.

MORE DAYS AND nights passed with the sounds of the storm and the sounds of the dog and the forest and the old man and old woman arguing. Jessie was biding her time. She tended to Houdini when she could but most of her energy was spent keeping out of the old man's way.

She could not collect supplies for her escape as there was nowhere to hide them, so she spent nights mapping their location in her head and charting the surest, fastest way to move through the house, to the stable and then away.

Early one morning she woke to silence. She did not understand why the silence sounded so vast until she realised the storm had finally died down. The cottage was utterly quiet.

She lay there for some time recalling the map to her mind, knowing the time had come, and she was about to launch herself out of bed when she heard the door of her room open. Her skin bristled as she saw the silhouette of the old man moving towards her.

She lay perfectly still as he stood squarely over her. And then her hand rose quietly in the dark and even her fist hitting his jaw was quiet and her legs swinging out. It was the sound of his head hitting the chair that finally made an awful crunching.

She did not care what damage she had done. She shut the door behind her and moved into the kitchen, collecting from the cupboards and the drawers a knife, a gun, a packet of matches, apples, the old woman's coat, the old woman's boots. The feeling of escape was familiar and she did not care to feel it again and so soon.

She set everything on a tablecloth and then bundled it up. She was tying it to her waist when she noticed the old woman standing in front of the fire.

Go
, the old woman said.

Jessie pushed out into the yard and up to the stable. She mounted Houdini and rode him out. She rode up the steep slope and did not look back. She could not tear straight up the mountain in the dark so she zigzagged as far and as fast as she could. The bundle loosened on her waist and she wrestled with it as she rode, tying it tighter, prizing all of its stolen contents. She steered Houdini by his mane and felt a strength pulsing through her arms and across her chest, as if her body was remembering itself as she rode.

As soon as the sun tipped the horizon she tore up the slope. It was only when she reached a solid ridge that she dared to look back down into the valley.

There was no sign of any human presence and she could not see the old woman and the old man's cottage or any other hut. Below were empty fields but for clusters of trees and the river. The river stretched south and wound its way across cleared paddocks, a measure of how far she had come.

III

THE EARTH, AS I can feel it, is pressed together at points and ruptured in parts. And so events seem to fold into each other, like burial and birth. It's not like the smooth and undulating beauty of a ribbon streaming out. No. The earth buckles with the stories it holds of all those who have cried and all those who have croaked.

The dying began in 1903 when my mother was nine and then it happened again in 1904 when she was ten. No dream or nightmare could have prepared her.

Life until then was riding horses in and around The Woods and climbing trees and at night lying in her bed and sending out love from each side of the single chalk line that divided her. The horses were real and so were the trees but the chalk line was a thing in her head though she saw it clearly enough, running over her body and over the bed, and she slept knowing that equal parts of her were apportioned to the two people she loved most, her father and Mrs Peel.

They lived in Mrs Peel's house—Septimus, Aoife and the five children. As a single man, Septimus had boarded with the widow, Mrs Peel, and kept her gardens and set up his blacksmith business in her back shed. She welcomed Septimus's burgeoning family and became like a grandmother to them, midwifing each one of them.

Jessie did not know how, as adults, they divided their love between five children but she felt their devotion wholly: Mrs Peel performing all of the duties under the sun, seeming to overflow with a bottomless well of devotion, and Septimus working every day from his shed to feed and clothe them. Each afternoon he would take a break from his work to lead a procession into the forest, a procession of children running after imaginary creatures and collecting pine cones or taking turns at riding on their father's shoulders.

Through all of it, Aoife slept. Her room was a fortress and the children were forbidden from knocking on the door or entering. It seemed to Jessie that her mother had slept for most of her life and when she did appear, pale and tall and drifting around the kitchen, she was always groggy or annoyed and Jessie knew better than to bother her.

The household ticked over well enough even with Aoife's occasional appearances. Most days and nights they forgot she was there. Mrs Peel sat at one end of the table and Septimus sat at the other and Jessie felt that the world was at least in perfect balance, if not in perfect harmony.

One winter morning the children were slinking around the table in their pyjamas but there was no breakfast to eat and there was no Mrs Peel. The two older boys were already out and working with their father, which left Jessie and her sister, who was older by a year, and their little brother, who was four. They raced to Mrs Peel's room and, pushing open her door, found her sitting upright in her bed, her mouth agape and her teeth in a glass beside her. Her eyes, too, were wide open.

They climbed on her bed to wake her from her open-eyed sleep but though they tugged and pushed her she did not stir but fell sideways. Jessie's sister screamed.

Septimus appeared and ordered them to get down from the bed. They watched as he put his head to Mrs Peel's chest and his fingers to her neck. Then he sat down beside her and pushed her eyelids shut. He turned to face the three of them. They were swinging from the brass ends of the bed.
Children, Mrs Peel has passed on.

Passed where?
they said.

I'm afraid Mrs Peel is dead.

Until then, Jessie had not known that anyone could die or leave her. Her father's words left her with a lopsided feeling. It was as if one half of her was just a dull outline in the air and the other side of her had vanished completely.

It was less than a year after Mrs Peel's death that Jessie woke to hear a rattle and a groan from the direction of her father's shed. She lurched past her sister's bed to the window. Outside, Aoife was wheeling what looked like a body slumped in a barrow. Jessie ran past the other bedrooms and into her father's room. Finding his bed empty she ran down the hallway to the back door and over the lawn to see her father's cart pulling away and weaving a terror up the road.

She ran after it and when she could not catch it she veered off the road and ran through the neighbours'paddock and caught one of the horses in their yard. She cantered back to the road and followed the tracks of the cart. She rode until she reached the outskirts of the city, until the dirt became bricks and pavers and the streets narrowed and there were people, strangers, stepping in and out of shadows, and there were no longer tracks to see or to follow.