A River Town

  “No shy-acking then, Johnny,” Tim called out. He didn’t utter any warnings to Lucy. For she seemed a changed child. She knew about witnessing angels.

  As they walked down into the saddle, dragging their feet through clumps of button grass, the Big Nobby maintained its gradual character. Not like cliffs elsewhere—not a case of grass running sharply to the definite and dramatic precipice, and then the sudden fall. You knew that somewhere to their left the black cliff began. But here, because of the headland’s gentle angle and its thick grass tufts, each one a rung of its massive ladder, there was no sense that you could topple and roll.

  “Prickly, prickly,” said Annie as they reached the thickets, flapping her long-fingered hands at him, pleading to be picked up. She had those delicate fingers utterly unlike Kitty’s. They came from his sister Helen, who’d married the newspaper editor in Brooklyn.

  He lifted her and followed the path the others had taken. These strange, olive green banksia bushes with their black cones. Splits in the cones like eyes and mouths. “Look,” said Tim, holding one of the cones. “The Banksia Man. He’s an evil little fellow.”

  Annie threw herself about in his arms with fake shudders.

  They came back up out of the banksias to Big Nobby’s grassy southern crest. Ah yes, you could see down to where the grasses grew steeper and the rock layers began and the hungry surf worked away. A number of birds wheeled around the semi-circle of this rock wall. It seemed to Tim to be the mad energy of the waves that kept them up, since none of them flapped their wings. A little way up from the wall above the sea, a sea-eagle considered a dive. A sharp, pearly, commanding shape with black wingtips.

  “That one there’s a sea-eagle,” he told the others. “When they dive, they bloody dive.”

  “This is the place,” said Mamie. “You could have a tea-house up here.”

  “A pub perhaps,” amended Joe O’Neill, who was sure to crack more ale once they got down. Lucy stood beside Joe and on the other side of him, still quiet from respect for this soon-to-be uncle, Johnny. Good. They were still. They watched the sea-eagle. Its circles had them hypnotised. It had authority over the air. It put the frenzied children in their place.

  “Will you carry me down like you carried me up, papa?” asked Annie ceremoniously, at his side.

  “To walk will be good for your little legs.”

  “I don’t think that’s true. My little legs don’t agree.”

  He heard Mamie laughing. The sea-eagle banked and Tim took a new sense of it, that it was no mere natural wonder of some kind. A sudden gust came up to them as if the bird had manufactured it for them with its banked wings. Tim felt the stirred air all around him. The damned wheeling thing had command of the day. Its very ease, he felt at once, was a frightful temptation and the young should not be exposed …

  He heard Mamie shriek, and Habash cry, “Stop this!”

  Somehow the bird had by its malign circling and its sending a breeze engendered something unspoken but at once mutual between Lucy and Johnny. In all their campaigns, had they ever exchanged a word? If they had, no one had heard it. They planned it as if by fishing in each other’s mind.

  This was their venture now. They were running down the incline of the headland, their hands clasped. Johnny could be heard laughing in between Joe’s shouting, but Lucy was silent. It was such an inviting slope, and from some angles you found it hard to imagine or give credence to the drop, the indented face below, the Nobby’s true, black sting. So piteously confident were they of their impunity, that seeing them you were possessed by an absolute panic of pity. Pity could be heard in the way everybody howled.

  Now they all followed—Bandy, Joe, Mamie. Then himself, dropping Annie’s hand, since she could be trusted. All the party running with their heels thrust forward to avail themselves of the holding power of the grass. All yelling direly. Pleas not to be remembered afterwards word by word. Simply a general, frantic, fatherly pleading of the two little buggers running hand in hand. Ahead the feverish sapphire sea, and a sky of acid blue. Tim feeling his ankle yell at this strange usage as he ran madly towards the gulf. The younger men and the one young woman still ahead of him, all helplessly shrieking. Nooooooooooo! So steep now where the children were, and Johnny leaning back, Tim saw with hope, but Lucy thrusting skinny shoulders forward. Welcoming the fall. And still hands locked. Soon they would go flying over together. This beat the stern of Terara. This beat the Angelus tower. This so clearly a venue worthy of their shared will that he cursed himself for allowing anyone but Mamie and Joe to approach this climb.

  But when the result seemed obvious, Johnny simply sat on a tussock. The grasp was as easily broken as that. Lucy sailed out alone. Shrilling but not with terror. And vocal now she had taken to the air. So close to the fall of the cliff was everyone that they saw only the first liberated segment of her fall. Tim continued down the awful grade and yanked Johnny upright by his collar. Johnny’s face was ghastly. He had been playing. Had expected her to sit too after the joke had been played out. Look, we are reformed! You only thought we were playing the old games!

  Nonetheless, Tim couldn’t stop himself striking the boy on the head in a kind of horror and gratefulness. Bandy was working energetically around the rim, the only one not screaming and exclaiming. He wanted a better view. To see if Lucy was frolicking or fluttering in and out on the waves in that chaos down there. Everyone, whimpering and pleading, worked their way around the edge as Bandy had, so that they could see into the cauldron.

  “There is nothing,” Bandy yelled against the wind. “Nothing to be seen.” The hugh masses of white there contained none of Lucy’s whiteness or white fabric. She had been swallowed.

  Above them, Annie—who had had the best view—was wailing for him to come back.

  It was Bandy’s idea to rush down the hill and alert Crescent Head’s four families of fishermen. Tim followed, arriving back down to the bottom with stark-eyed Johnny and with Annie just in time to see Bandy and two fishermen put out in a rowboat from the creek.

  Kitty was standing, frowning at the boat. She turned. “How could this happen?” she asked in reproach.

  “How could it be bloody stopped?” Tim howled so furiously that both children began to sob.

  By Bandy’s later report, the fishermen rowed him around right up as close as the surf would let them to the face of Big Nobby’s cliff. They were so long coming back that Joe, Mamie and Tim climbed the Nobby again and looked down on them. You could understand why such a scrap had been devoured without trace. Such a bullying, sucking, rending sea. So much chagrined. Bandy could be seen down there, standing in the dory, agilely shifting his stance at each swell.

  The boat returned to Front Beach in late afternoon, and by then Tim and the others were in place to give it a bleak welcome. The offspring of Port Macquarie convicts, these Crescent Head fishermen. The younger fisherman came to speak to them. His father utterly leathered and browned, but Viking blue eyes glittering in there amongst the creases, kept quiet.

  “See, a kiddy like that. Would be taken straight down. Tumbled over and torn out by water getting away. Straight out to sea. Only a long way out there would she be thrown up again, see. Ought to come up on Back Beach in the long run.”

  The rugged fish-takers and eaters didn’t want demented people from town hanging around to spoil with questions a tranquil evening meal. And because they knew it was no one’s child who had fallen into the gulf, they were very honest about the chances.

  “Could she be crying for us somewhere on a beach?” asked Tim.

  “No, she’s drowned. You can bet on that. She drowned, and nothing to be done about it.”

  After midnight, Tim woke so vastly angry and walked so heavily up and down the bedroom in his bare feet, hoping his fury would wake Kitty. It had of course been a dreadful journey home over Dulcangui, with Annie gone tearfully asleep in Kitty’s arms on the blanket in the back of the cart and Johnny still and staring. In their trance of surprise and
grief, their suspicion that there was something further to be done they hadn’t done, they did not once, these two queenly folk Kitty and Annie, complain of the roughness of the mountain or the jolting of the corduroy road through the paperbark swamps.

  There had been a comedy, an awful one given the history of the day. Unsupervised, Pee Dee had made a feast of cunjevoi root which lay along the banks of the creek at Crescent Head. The root was succulent and poison, and most livestock had the sense to avoid it. Not Pee Dee, and it had got to his bowels. Mamie had had to sit beside Tim with an opened parasol while Pee Dee blurted, farted, and bucked his way up and down Dulcangui.

  “Bandy,” said Tim as they crossed the Macleay by punt. “Could I leave you to take a note to the priest? That Bruggy feller? He’ll tell Imelda.”

  Strange not to ask Joe, but in this tragedy Bandy seemed more trustworthy.

  “I will do that,” said Bandy, bowing a little in the saddle. Shaking his head. No one could believe the day. The brain had to be shaken into accepting it.

  Tim knew he needed to face the police, the sharper civil priesthood, the real binders and loosers. They would certainly be confused into their normal suspicions if he and Bandy presented themselves as joint reporters of Lucy Rochester’s supposed drowning. But he himself would be less ashamed somehow to face the constables than the priests.

  “You send me though I am not a Christian,” Bandy remarked.

  “You’re a better poor bugger than most Christians, and if you give him ten bob for two Masses I’ll repay you tonight out of the cash box.”

  After making town Tim and Joe had found the younger constable minding the station, the one who had no grievance yet, and he had taken their deposition without showing any tendency to define blame.

  “You can ask the nuns,” said Tim. “Always given to climbing things. Mad on heights.”

  As if he had not killed her by keeping her out of his house.

  And now he woke enraged over that.

  And of course she woke, sitting up awkwardly, using an elbow, and watching him stamp around.

  “Timmy, what is it?” she cried.

  “I would take her in!” he accused her. “I would bloody take her in. But she couldn’t be fitted for Kennas. This is something fairly regular on the Macleay. Jerseyville pub could not be fitted either. For the sake of Kennas. Kennas marrying, Kennas arriving, Kennas suiting them-bloody-selves!”

  Kitty looked appalled, but he could see with a perverse further annoyance that she didn’t intend to fight the matter. “Oh Jesus, Tim. Not all that at this moment. We all feel badly enough.”

  “I should have stood up. I should have stood up to your sister. But she wanted everyone on that mountain for the vanity of teasing the hell out of poor Joe.”

  “It’s not Mamie’s fault, Tim. Be a sensible fellow.”

  “So mother and father departed from Lucy. Mrs. Sutter wouldn’t give her the time of day. We hived her off on Imelda. No wonder the poor brat took to the air like a bird!”

  Kitty struggled to an upright stance now and came towards him. Seeing this fraught little woman, he wondered how she could ever have been considered beloved, this hard creature who hadn’t room for orphans. Who had wheedled him into having no room.

  “Our own child will be cursed, you bloody know!” he told her. “That child you have there. Bloody cursed!”

  Kitty so nakedly alarmed. She moved in and tried to embrace him. He fought her off.

  “No, no,” he yelled. “Facts are facts!”

  He still hoped she would combat him, that there could be mutual screaming this intolerable night. But she was both so measured and so frightened of him.

  “Timmy, listen to me. I am too busy giving life to one child without carrying the blame for another. None of us took her there from ill will. She was at Crescent Head as a kindness.”

  “Then she was killed with bloody kindness. A pretty miserable bloody kindness.”

  “I won’t have this, Timmy! You’re going mad in front of my eyes. Pull back, for Jesus’ sake.”

  He thrust his long, long finger at her. “We will not be let off this, Kitty. We will not be forgiven this.”

  With a strange exaltation he saw how he distressed her. Her face bunched in pain. Good! Bloody good! Did the world operate for her convenience? Did the tides of pain flow to suit her awful, freckled, pushing clan?

  “Oh God!” she roared.

  He hoped that Mamie on the back verandah would be awakened and suffer for all this. Taking children to a precipice so they could watch her play off Bandy against Joe O’Neill.

  Yet he had not thought it likely that Kitty would so easily accept his condemnation, take it upon her frame. Which now looked far too small and too much at risk. Her face cracked and an awful cry came out.

  “For mercy’s sake don’t judge me, Timmy! The world’s full of orphans, but they don’t go flying off cliffs!”

  Her cries seemed to raise an echo somewhere else in the house, an outburst on a higher, weirder pitch.

  “Johnny,” he told his wife.

  He left Kitty, turning into the corridor and so into the room where Johnny was sitting up in his sleep wailing, while Annie, who had been jolted awake by everyone’s rage, complaints, defences, uttered more usual sobs. Kitty went to comfort her daughter while Tim shook Johnny back to the world and said the usual, blessed things.

  “All right, Johnny darling. You are here with Papa. You didn’t fly off.”

  But Lucy had of course, and no one could get beyond that.

  “You see, you see,” Kitty called to him as she caressed Annie to sleep. “John stayed, he’s here, here. No earthly reason she couldn’t have been. Here on solid ground. No reason.”

  Staying indeed seemed at once to Tim the most important achievement miscreant Johnny had ever been responsible for. Staying proved his innocence of real malice. It had been a joke to him. He had sat down at the end. While Lucy flew off seriously and with intent.

  Now that Johnny was fully awake he had nothing to say to his father but sat rocking in his arms. “I’ll stay with him,” Tim told Kitty. He looked at her dim, night shape. His beloved accomplice. It was all certain and fixed and nothing could be done. Between them and in concert with others they had encouraged Lucy to embrace the thin air.

  Kitty said, “You’re the one who must rest, Tim. You’ll only grow madder still.”

  “Bugger it, woman!” he warned her, and so when drowsiness overcame Annie, Kitty went off. Johnny leaned into Tim’s arms and began to sleep with a few complaining moans. How unfair to the child it had been to begin screaming at night. He saw now that attaching blame was an exercise best pursued in morning calm. They would need to watch John and ensure Lucy had not done for him, for young John, the thrower at cricket stumps, the circus performer.

  Un-sleeping Tim held Johnny in the dismal hours and for the sake of his own much-needed stillness of mind he began to think of certain protocols of the living which must somehow be attended to.

  First of all, he went and pulled on a shirt, his drawers faintly yellowed in the Macleay’s muddy water in which the women washed them, grey coat and pants. Old hat with the required sweat around the band. Ruined forever in shape by too much rain followed by too much sun. But part of the habit worn in the valley of the living.

  Twelve

  THE BUSINESS DAY would have started before anyone got from Crescent Head with fish and news, good, bad, nil. So put a saddle on Pee Dee and ride him to the dawn Mass. Imelda and the Waterford nuns and some of the boarders were there, praying for the lost child. On a plinth, the Angel Gabriel flourished a trident at the serpents and ministers of hell. Had Lucy taken a special note of his plaster wings? She wouldn’t have been tempted by them if Albert had lived, and taken her to the Primitive Methodists.

  Imelda walked down the aisle towards him. He stood to meet the big nun. She leaned towards him and her breath smelled of communion wafers and almonds. She asked him if he had any hope.

>   “No,” he said. “The poor child fell into the total maelstrom.”

  He felt nothing while telling her. No anger at all now. How curious. No anger against Lucy, Kitty, Mamie. No blame against Imelda pointing Lucy to Gabriel’s wings.

  Imelda said, “I spent summers by the sea when I was a child.”

  Tim tried to discern the child in that huge face.

  “Are you familiar with Mullaghmore?”

  “No, Mother.”

  “I know enough to believe that we should perhaps reconcile ourselves to God’s will. I’ll convert the rest of her school fees to Masses to be said either for her safety or eternal rest.”

  He would have welcomed even fifteen bob of that money heartily. But so profane to think like that.

  “Yes,” he said. “For Lucy by name.”

  “By name, yes,” she said. Putting her hand to his elbow briefly to ensure that he would stay upright.

  “You see,” she said. “Remember the Angelus tower? She is a very hard child to predict.”

  All right, he would have said, except that it would soil Lucy’s memory. You win that bloody argument!

  As he moved out of the church, he was astonished and consoled to see Bandy in the rear row, kneeling very neatly. A formal Muslim in the house of the infidel.

  Bandy the sole hero in all this. Innocent in all Mamie’s little dramas. He was the one who had taken the fishing boat to where Lucy had entered battling waves which hissed like acid. Bandy raised a tear-streaked seraphic face to him.

  “Come outside,” Tim told him.

  Out into the morning’s velvet, fraternal air. Bandy, Tim noticed, had not shaven. The features of the satiny upturned face seemed a little swollen with earnestness.

  “Have you slept, Bandy?”

  Bandy bowed his head. “I waited here. I didn’t wish to go anywhere else.”