The Heaven I Swallowed Read online

  Five months too early I felt the pain. I remember a great deal of blood and one of the nurses whispering how sad it was my husband was not able to be there. I thought it was said with pity but in the week they made me stay in the hospital I saw that nurse again, a thin old woman with the stink of misery upon her and the well-meaning smile of the secretly bitter.

  ‘You are looking better,’ she said, touching the bulge of pillow beside my head. ‘You will be as good as new before you know it.’

  I smiled back at her, as I was obliged to do, knowing I was never going to be ‘new’, no matter how hard I tried. I had never been ‘new’. For four years I had been trying to conceive and, at thirty-four, it now seemed an absurdity. Nothing about me was fresh or promising. Like Anne Elliot in Persuasion, my ‘bloom had vanished early’.

  How false it was to pretend it was simply a matter of time. How could I know when, or if, the war would end? Time was my greatest enemy and, there Fred was, away from me for who knew how long. Everything shrivelling up inside me while he wrote poetry and turned into a man I did not know.

  I wanted to leave the hospital as soon as possible but the doctor insisted on keeping me there day after day, for ‘recovery time’, as if I had lost a limb. I had no visible wound, though, and saw the frowns of other patients’ visitors wondering why I lay there amongst the truly ill, seemingly whole. All my tears were left for the night hours when none of these hard, cold faces were visible, when it was just the lost Mary and me. No flowers beside my bed to offer the consolation of their scent, I was grateful they put me far away enough from the maternity ward, I did not have to hear the crying, or see the suckling, of babies who wanted to stay.

  Returning home empty was not the hardest part. It was the avoidance of the neighbours, their heads ducking out of sight as the taxi-cab pulled in, and the frozen silence of the church lot who acted as if I had been on a holiday, at a ­featureless destination, for a time unspecified.

  ‘Good to see you back,’ they said, ‘safe and sound.’

  I did not receive one word of sympathy. Rationally, I could not blame them. A veil of stern silence was always drawn over such moments: when the Mavis boy was arrested for ‘indecent behaviour’ or the Thompson’s girl sent to Tasmania for her lonely nine months. The body was always in revolt; speaking of its rebellions only exposed you further to the filth.

  But, then, could I really be blamed for the dreams that came to me? For all the rumours flying around you would’ve thought I had turned into one of those mad old women who shuffle along the footpaths muttering to themselves, singing invented, tuneless hymns, one step away from the loony farm. I hadn’t come close to that. Yes, I did not leave the house during the week, letting milk bottles accumulate on the front verandah and only finally taking them when the milkman hammered at my door as if it was doomsday. My appearance when I opened the door was quite dishevelled I’m sure (‘looking like the Wild Woman of Borneo’ I imagined the milkman’s wife saying at the next church gathering), but none of this—not the overgrown grass nor the accumulation of weeds, only obvious because my garden was normally so meticulous—added up to the ‘breakdown’ I was labelled with.

  I would not have such rumours resurface now, to threaten the new Mary in my life.

  ‘Mrs Smith?’

  Mr Roper had Mary’s hand in his and was looking to give it to me. Mary was, once again, directing her gaze somewhere else but this time I followed her line of sight towards nothing more threatening than a row of baby poplars next to the front brick fence, a mimic of the line at the ANZAC memorial. These were saplings, waiting to grow and become a shield between the church and the noisy, nosey streets beyond.

  I stood and took Mary’s hand. Was it my imagination or did the colour of it seem less startling?

  ‘Time to go back home, Mary,’ I said in a louder voice than I intended. It felt like I had not spoken in so long, as if the church service and the subsequent dizzy spell had taken away my ability to communicate with the here and now.

  I took a step towards the car. Mary’s hand tugged at me.

  ‘But why, Auntie Grace? What did I do wrong?’ Her voice was panicked and she was suddenly unwilling to move.

  ‘Come on, girl.’ I tried to keep my temper. I’d already had enough unwanted attention and could feel the threat of another hidden buzz waiting to rise up around me.

  ‘Please, Auntie Grace.’ To my astonishment, Mary had tears in her eyes, wells of water in the bottom lids. Her legs remained stiff, as surely as if she was made of rock.

  ‘Church is over, we have to go home, Mary,’ I hissed through my teeth.

  ‘Home?’

  ‘Of course, home.’

  ‘Your home, Auntie Grace?’

  ‘Yes, Mary.’

  A wave of relief ran over her face and, as quickly as the tears had come, they retreated. She started to walk, her hand now pulling ahead of me. I picked up my pace to match her suddenly eager strides.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Roper,’ I called over my shoulder. I caught a glimpse of his sombre face. Behind him stood my fellow parishioners, looking at us, sharing his disbelief and wonder. Or was it disapproval?

  Mary thought I meant to send her back to the Girls’ Home, I realised during the return walk from church. She had misheard somehow or other and the word ‘home’ brought up very different connotations. What a place the institution must have been to elicit such a response from her! I should have guessed by the state of her on arrival. Such dread was a powerful weapon. I could hear Sister Clare: A child’s fear can be your greatest friend. There would, no doubt, be times in which the prospect of being sent back would have its effect.

  ‘Here we are,’ I said, as we arrived at the driveway. ‘Home.’

  Mary ran to the front door to open it for me, though I had not asked her to do this.

  ‘Thank you, Mary.’ This was her way to ingratiate herself, I knew, not sincere. I was willing to let her do this, willing to pretend I didn’t know where this new-found courtesy came from. It would not last long. She was not the kind of girl to be cowed by phantom notions. Only when she believed I was sending her back there, in front of the gaping doors of Saint Aloysius, did she remember the past.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea, Auntie Grace?’ she asked with such polite fervour it almost took my breath away. I nodded my yes.

  In the living room I sat in the green velvet armchair once moulded by Fred and listened to the sounds of Mary lighting the stove, filling the kettle, feeding the pot. Had these sounds ever been made in this house except by me? It was unusual to hear them from a distance. I could not recall a time when Fred had made anything, not a drop of tea.

  I contemplated his photo up on the mantelpiece, as I had so many times over the seven years since his departure. The glass of the picture frame was free of fingerprints. It had been a long while since I had picked it up; his dark eyes, black hair and meticulously trimmed moustache were preserved in a silver oval. The three-quarter profile in his uniform was so admired by the women of the Widows’ Group—Mrs Chilsom, of course, that was her name. I remembered her telling the story of her husband’s death at the battle of El Alamein, a handkerchief pressed up against her nose. The rest of the widows had fumbled into their handbags to bring out their own miniature flags of grief and I had had to excuse myself, retreating into my bedroom to give the necessary appearance of sorrow.

  Mary placed the cup of tea quietly on the side table next to me, a column of steam rising. She was astute enough to know I did not want to be disturbed and sat down softly on the leather footrest she had adopted as her own.

  ‘What is your real name, Mary?’ I asked, the question sounding loudly into the thick ticking of the glass-domed timepiece sitting next to Fred’s photo. There had been no papers, no certificates, no signatures, no suitcase accompanying Mary’s arrival. She had come to me with only her name.

  Mary did not look startled at my question. It seemed beyond my ability to surprise her.

  ‘I d
idn’t lie, Auntie Grace,’ she said with something like a smirk in her voice. ‘It really is Mary.’

  ‘I know you did not lie.’ She was irritating me again. ‘I meant your tribal name, or whatever it is you call it.’

  Immediately she was wary.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout, Auntie Grace.’

  Ironically, she had reverted to the accent of her people in her very denial of them. Part of me should have been pleased. After all, she was going to have to take this stance in the future if she wanted to get anywhere. Take inside what was undeniable from the outside. Maintaining the illusion of a lie is easier when you forget it is a lie. Another part was a little sad, something about the allure of the exotic, another part of me which needed to be suppressed.

  Sipping my newly made tea, still warm and mixed with just the right amount of milk, I felt strangely content, given the spectacle I had just made of myself at church. Would they be talking about me now, in their married homes, raising their eyebrows at lonely Mrs Smith and her sorry little ward? Would they remember those rumours and wonder if I had retreated into the same, half-mad state? Would they talk over their Sunday lunches about whether it was really fair to leave the child in the care of someone whose life had been so marked by tragedy?

  ‘I am the best one for her,’ I found myself saying out loud. Mary looked over at me. She could not know I was defending myself, and her, from all the do-gooders who never did any good, from those who talked piously but acted slovenly, from those who wanted to deny the problem, to forget the men in the park with their bare, dirt-encrusted feet or girls like Mary on their doorstep, a child of twelve who looked more like an eight year old with arms as thin as rope.

  Not the done thing, to make them visible. It should have occurred to me when I read the newspaper article that their idea of the proper way to make a difference was to simply give more, to increase the weekly donation dropped into the padded green velvet of the church collection plate or continue with their afternoons at various charity shops. No one really wanted to see Mary there, to be reminded of a problem, which, if left well enough alone, would sort itself out. The Aborigines were dying off after all, or so they kept saying.

  ‘Do you want a piece of cake, Auntie Grace?’ Mary asked with a tone that reminded me of a healthy person talking to the sick.

  She stayed on the footstool, poised for my answer. Though she was small, she had strength to her, only the incident after church had shown me the layer of fear underneath. I had read her people left their old behind when they moved on. Left them to die, apparently. Like all primitives, they had no room for the un-productive, for those who could not contribute to the tribe. But what was considered old in their world? Would I have been deemed useless, a forty year old with no progeny? Would they have said I had nothing to add to society? Would I have been left to wither under the desert sun? At least, now, I had made myself useful. I had rescued one of their half-caste babies, otherwise rejected, and smuggled her away to succour in secret.

  I smiled.

  Mary continued to watch me.

  †

  The next time at church, less attention was paid to us. I could not say there was a real acceptance of one black face amongst the congregation, only that the disapproval had become stale, a faint buzz under newer waves of gossip. Tongues wagged about more pressing news: Father Benjamin had some kind of tumour in an unspeakable place on his body and the Mavis boy had been missing for a week, leaving his mother to wring her hands in agitation while her husband stood by, looking faintly relieved.

  It seemed no one told me of these events and yet I knew. If I had been asked to testify as to how the knowledge came my way, I would not have been able to say definitively, to point out the person who had first spoken of Father Benjamin’s ‘delicate problem’. I wondered if everyone else was thinking how his illness might have been caused by lack of use, though no one would talk out loud of celibacy as a cause for disease.

  After the church service I let Mary again join the group of children who collected at the saint’s grotto. I kept an eye on her and could only guess at what they talked about. I saw the strawberry-haired Gibson twins place their arms up against Mary’s, their red freckles like angry flashes compared to the uniform darkness of Mary. It made me feel slightly sick, this comparison. The three girls seemed to find it funny. Their giggles made heads turn.

  I tried to pretend this did not affect me. Yet after so many years of having to take responsibility for only myself, I found my chest constricting over these possible transgressions. What were the rules? How close was she allowed to get? I suspected there were mothers who had forbidden their sons or daughters from speaking to Mary. I saw these children sulking under the church eaves and heard their resentful whispers against the ‘abo’, ‘nigger’, or ‘darky’. It was strange to think Mary had created such exclusion.

  †

  One of the hardest things about Mary’s arrival was adjusting to the sounds of someone else in the house. On the first night, the thud of the back door pulling open and the creak of the screen door startled me from sleep and I jumped up to investigate. As I reached for the handle of my bedroom door I stopped, suddenly not sure if I had heard the noises or if I had dreamt them, as I used to do when I still believed Fred was coming home. The confusion of it made my head fuzzy and the shapes around me—the wardrobe, the dressing table—became larger than they were.

  In the darkness, for just a moment, it seemed possible I could turn around and find Fred lying in our bed, his massive body in the middle of the mattress, leaving me only a sliver. In my thick cotton nightgown I stood, like Lot’s wife, trying hard not to turn around, to see the reality of a flat, featureless rectangle, trying hard not to crumble into the harsh space of abandonment. Even without turning, I knew. Caught by the smell again or, rather, the lack of smell, the absence of anything male; the strong odour that would come out of his body when he wanted me, as if desire itself had seeped through his skin. It was different from the hard saltiness of his spent desire. Even that was lost to me after the washing of our sheets. If I’d known, I would not have been so hasty to clean them, to find myself left only with the residues of my cheap perfumes.

  Then I heard Mary cough, returning from the lavatory, and felt all the sadness, and relief, of knowing I was well past the time of Fred. It did not matter which way I faced, he was not in my bed, he was not out there, making his way up the side fence. How many times had I got out of bed to check in the past? Imagining the wind, a cat, an overturned garbage can, were his returning footsteps. I slipped back into bed and, despite the disturbance, was overwhelmingly grateful Mary was in the house, that the noises were, at the very least, real.

  For the rest of that first week, I listened for the squeaks and opening of the screen and back door. The glory was that Mary, unlike Fred, did not want to leave. Her mother was dead and she had no alternative except the Home, a place without appeal. Father Benjamin had told me some of them disappeared with dubious relatives into the north, returning to their bush ways, but I was confident Mary would not be one of those. When Mary returned from the outhouse, I could always make out the sound of the mattress springs adjusting under her weight again.

  She did not ask for a light for these night-time trips. I would not have admitted to her that I never went to the outhouse after dark. I made sure all my toiletries were done well before the sun went down. Hardly worth dwelling on why a girl should not be afraid when a grown woman was. Mary did not have my memories, after all. Or perhaps her blood led her to communion with the night? Either way, though it made me shiver to think of her outside in the darkness, tasting the natural world, I could not follow her. It was beyond me, to enter the echoing stillness again.

  †

  Dear Grace,

  I have entered the region of Death and I don’t think I will ever come out of it. We’ve been marching for days and I write this without any expectation that it will find its way to you. All of the unit are
desperately scrawling, as if we know this could be the only part of us left behind. The mud, the flies, the heat, these are beyond my description, but I accept them gratefully, knowing you are in the land of Life. You and my child are safe. I feel Death on my shoulder at every moment and I keep Him close, content in the knowledge that He cannot hurt you, so close is He to me. I hear Him breathing, wanting me. The other men, so many from the country, they seem to understand this landscape better than me. Their eyes are quicker, their hearing clearer, they smell the enemy, alert to the movements of birds and animals, they are able to talk to the natives. I blunder along with them and can only suppose my escape from Death is blind luck. A city man is useless here, no training could have prepared me for this. I have no belief that heaven is watching. Take all that you know of me, Gracie, and keep it close. If I stood on the threshold of Life, knowing what I now know, I think I would decline the offer to enter.

  Out of the depths, I hear a cry,

  Choked in a dry throat, as it begins to die.

  My mind is struck blind, I do not want to hear,

  I cannot conceive that God is near.

  Fred

  3

  Toward the end of the third week after Mary’s arrival we visited the local school. It was a short walk from my house although I had never had reason to pass through the sandstone pillars of its gateway before. Father Benjamin had arranged the appointment for late morning, well after the children had been called inside, so Mary and I entered a silent playground, the main building directly in front an old convict’s cottage with narrow windows. Stamped into the sandstone were the words ‘Established in 1883’.

  I held Mary’s hand again, aware of its lightness and maybe the trace of a tremble. She wore her new dress, yellow with white flowers, found for her by the eager women at St Vincent de Paul. I had taken her to the local charity shop, a more appropriate place for her to buy clothes after the exhaustion of the shoe expedition. The old ladies there, half of them half-blind, made it easy to buy several, less-than-perfect frocks. It did not matter if they were a little torn or frayed or splotched with dark, unidentifiable marks. Her new shoes, in contrast, were scuff-free and polished to an almost indecent shine.