Wild Decembers (26 page)

“I can’t believe it.”

“You better believe it.”

“You’ve got thinner.”

“Not from shagging,” she said, and from one of her bags she pulled out a sheepskin and held it to his chest for him to smell, to remind him of that smell of before.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he said, looking from her to the naked bulb on which the dead flies from the summer had scummed.

“That’s because you don’t expect miracles,” she said, burying his face in the sheepskin, which brought it all back, the station, his favourite dog that lost a paw, the dark of the mornings, the weird lonely bleating of thousands of lambs, rain and drought, the old macrocarpa trees always creaking, full of magpies, thousands of magpies cawing and Rosemary coming one day into it to bail him out.

“How long was the journey?”

“I don’t know, thirty hours or something.”

“You must be exhausted.”

“That’s not a romantic thing to say.”

“Oh, baby, baby,” he said with her mouth everywhere on him, his face, his neck, his chest.

“Yes, I’m your baby, and you were beginning to forget her.” She pulled him down on the sheepskin then and began to undress him with a remembered excitement for his body, his flanks, his knowing cock, the same sequence of words, half girlie, half whore, words that he was too shy to tell even his best mate Stuart of, when Stuart asked how they did it. Words that were triggers to some mad voltage in him and would be to any man, and he knew now that he would make love to her for days. She knew it too, she had come, his piece of pie.

It was the same as before and yet not the same. In that other place with the mates, jealousy, her spunkiness, there was a thrill to it, a danger, but in this place it did not seem so right.

Not her fault that something had shifted inside him. Not his fault, either. Remembers the good times, that first day when she sallied into the sheep station in her woolly jacket, all businesslike, determined to keep her end up, not to be intimidated by so many blokes. “What’s it like to be the only female around here?” the Swede asked, and Kitty, the wizened cook, called out from the kitchen, “Hey, cheeky, I’m a female in case you didn’t know.” All Rosemary did was shrug.

“Why do you all carry knives?” she had said, looking down the length of the mess table at the weathered faces, the totem knives, and the piled plates of greasy stew.

“In case we have to slit a sheep’s throat,” the Swede said. He didn’t like the idea of women coming there, women took all the simplicity out of things and got the men into scrapes. He tried to frighten her then with tall tales about wild dogs and wild shearers having fighting bouts because there always had to be a winner and a loser. She ignored him.

“Ever see an eyeless sheep?” he said.

“Not that I recall,” she said, and he insisted on describing how the gulls swooped down on the unfortunate sheep and took an eye out, then a second eye, for a snack.

“That’s interesting,” she said, and began to write it down for her report.

Out on the trail the mates were betting as to which of them would get a leg over her. That next Saturday night with the old roustabout, the guitar, and the beers, things got heady. Her sitting on the arms of different chairs in a short satin dress and the guitarist getting fresh with her and pulling her onto the sofa. Having to take him outside and give him what’s what. That did it. They danced, and it was from that to his quarters, the mates on the veranda with their ear to the door, wondering how in hell’s name he got her in there so fast. Academia no more. A little avatar. Like being with a bloke. Picked him, she said, because he had a good bum. Love didn’t come into it. She didn’t want love. Wouldn’t allow for sleep either. Why sleep? Eskimos sleep. Not shepherds. Shepherds wouldn’t miss the razz, would they?

Within a week things had changed. She had resorted to old-fashioned things like hand-holding, kissing, and on the last night admitted to be “absolutely melting inside.” Got to like her more from her letters. Stories of her childhood on the beach, baked from the sun, boys and girls up to no good in the bamboo huts, and then at fourteen deciding she wanted a good education. Wanted it for him too. Their huge appetite for passion made it all the more essential. She would take him out of there. He was wasted on a sheep station. He was made for bigger things and a shepherd was not that. Promising him the trip of a lifetime, not just in the sack but in the workplace. He’d lie on the bed pulling at the florets of the candlewick bedspread and imagine her naked and wet under her jeans and sweatshirt, her nipples a dripping painted cocoa colour. He was homesick, Rosemary sick. He wrote poems and soppy letters. Very soon he was in the city working as an assistant in a shoe shop, which, as she said, was step one. Daddy would see to step two. Daddy a right pseud, flaunting his atheism.

She wakens baffled, not sure where she is. He has been watching her while she slept. Watching the fire flames licking the brown-black nap of soot in the chimney stack and thinking what he would say. For a moment he was quiet. Looking at him she sensed that in the time since he left her he had altered.

“Are you okay?”

“I’ve come halfway across the world and you haven’t even asked me why.”

“Tell me why.”

“I was starting to feel unsure, Mick.”

“You needn’t.”

“I think the deep-down passion isn’t changed . . . But your letters . . . Your letters made me quite angry. Don’t expect miracles. Shit.”

“That’s me, Rosemary.”

“No, it isn’t . . . You’re hiding something.”

“You’re just tired.”

“I’m just tired,” she says, and holds her engagement ring to the light of the fire, the blue stone itself a lit spark. He remembers with a qualm the Saturday he bought it, the second-cheapest one on the velvet-backed tray, the only one he could afford.

“Did you think this would keep me quiet?” she says, holding it up.

“You know I didn’t.”

“I don’t know . . . Maybe you thought, I’ll scoot back here to Ireland and leave her dangling . . . I wasn’t in good shape, Mick.”

“I know, I asked you to come with me.”

“And I said, I’ll come when we’re married . . . Try to understand, Mick . . . My folks . . . They wanted the best for their daughter. The country is small, even if it’s big, the society is small, they want a wedding.”

“They’ll have it.”

“You don’t understand how much I love you,” she said.

“I do,” he said.

For the first time he realised there were no curtains on the window and that anyone could have been looking in. Jumping up, he jerked and pulled on the buckled shutters that had not been dislodged in years and when he closed them there was a hollow clatter. Then a folded butterfly drifted out and opened up before his eyes into a tautened beige-and-orange fan of tortoiseshell.

“A visitor,” he said as in his cupped hand drops of moisture leaked from its thin fidgety fibres.

“T
HIRTY
! She’ll never see thirty again, or thirty-one or thirty-two.”

“And the skin—sallow.”

“Excuse me, Josephine . . . It’s yellow . . . It’s jaundicy.”

“And what about the accent?”

“Deadly, Miriam . . . Deadly.”

How they chuckled, how they gloated in their demolishment of Rosemary. They were back from Mass, they had made their Holy Communions, and they pushed two tables into the corner of the bar, then sat on stools and window ledges, each bettering the other in their dissection of her. To Breege it was as though the words came down out of the air, disembodied, ugly words, about a woman who had no existence for her until a short while before when she saw her linked to Bugler in the chapel grounds and people congratulating them.

“Yous are very pass-remarkable,” Derek said, bringing their tray of Irish coffees while the Crock predicted that they would outdo each other in their choice of wedding presents.

“June, I’d say.”

“Sooner . . .”

“What do you say, Breege?”

She doesn’t answer. She thinks, If they come in, I will have to go out, but I can’t go out yet, I might bump into them, and so she sat there, half heeding, and then saw him put his head through the door and withdraw. He saw her at once and touched his hat, but the look he gave her was inscrutable, neither a liking nor a disliking, a blankness as if something had been erased in him.

Within minutes they had returned, and there was something almost rehearsed about it, the way Rosemary linked him as he introduced her to each one. The women were lavish now in their welcome, each offering her a place as she was being begged to hold out her hand for each one to admire the engagement ring. They marvelled at its blueness, one minute sapphire, the next minute amethyst, rating it much more original than the ordinary diamonds that you see in the jewellers’ shop windows. It was Miss Carruthers who asked her if she missed home.

“I haven’t had time,” she said, and looked at Bugler and smiled knowingly.

She made a note of each of their names and said they would have to come up for the Christmas party and bring their hubbies.

“Christmas!” Josephine exclaimed.

“He’s promised me snow,” Rosemary said.

“You’ve never seen snow?”

“I’ve never seen it falling . . . I’ve never seen that bit of magic, have I, Mick?”

“We’ll pray for a snowstorm,” the dressmaker and her twin sister said.

Breege would always think that Rosemary had followed her into the ladies’ room because she saw, she sensed. There were two Rosemarys in there, one in the mirror and one in the room itself, her high heels blatant on the tiled floor.

“And what do you do, Breege?”

“Nothing . . . I look after my brother.”

“No boyfriend?”

“No,” Breege said, very distant.

“If Mick gave me a good reason to shave my head, I’d shave it,” she said, opening a tin packed with flat discs of lipstick that were like the paints in Aziz’s paintbox, only cleaner. She blended the colours, brushed them on, pursed her lips, and smiled at herself. Then she held out the ring, and as if it had an enchanted power she said, “He’ll always come back to me . . . Because I have this.”

Breege stayed there, not looking in the mirror, feeling the cold truth of things run up and down her body, and then it happened. When she tried to say something to herself the words would not come out. It was as if a stone or an implement had been put down her throat, cutting her, cutting the words, and when she tried to say just one word, any word to reassure herself, it would not come out. She opened her mouth and looked in at her gums, which were moist and beaded, and she tried desperately to say the letters of the alphabet as she had first learned them at school, but she couldn’t. They would not come. Holding on to one bit of ledge and then another and then to the glass door handle, she told herself to remember the things out there, normality, coffee, conversation, biscuits, Rosemary, Bugler.

“I’m getting a stroke,” her mind said, though she did not know what a stroke was. Something awful had occurred and there was nothing else at all in her shattered world.

Derek, who saw her run out, said that she ran like someone called to judgement.

M
RS. NOONAN, THE
sacristan, about to lock up, hears noises in the rear of the church and runs to the sacristy calling “Help, help!” She lifts the intercom to the priest’s house and waits, fearing there will be no answer. No one there, no one to come to her assistance, only the vestments laid out for next morning’s Mass, white vestments, ghostly in the gloom. She had already turned off the lights and is now too afraid to walk out to the side of the altar and turn them back on again. Her heart is churning. She who used to be afraid of dead bodies in the coffins that were put there for one night is now more afraid of vandals. Half of her wants to escape through the sacristy door and out the garden, but her long years of service oblige her to stay. To leave now would be to allow the intruder, whoever it be, to rob the collection boxes and do unspeakable things in the sanctity of the chapel of which she is so proud—the scrubbed tiles, the polished pews, and the jugs of berries on the altar steps, there being no flowers in season. It is December. She thinks of this vandal as a him, out there, a sacrilege to the red glow of the sanctuary lamp, to the Host in the tabernacle, to the priceless stained-glass windows, those rivers of blue within blue, virgins and martyrs with infants being born not from lower down, but coming out of their chests in clean and undefiled incarnations, others holding the bruised and bleeding heart of Christ in an ecstasy.