Dreamhunter (6 page)

Chorley clambered back on to the platform, restrained his wife and got his niece to her feet. He moved her away from the converging driver and stationmaster and flung out an arm to ward them off. Then he gathered Rose to him too and strode away towards his car.

Grace faced the stationmaster and, before he could speak, said, ‘Just name your amount, your fine for
Laura’s stunt. Go on, give me a figure.’ She gripped the stationmaster with one brown hand, and put her other hand into her dustcoat and produced a wallet.

The stationmaster blustered, ‘You think it’s enough to offer me money? This is a serious incident. That child needs a good talking to, at the very least!’

Indeed, the child, the curious onlookers thought. What had she seen? Some dropped treasure, or injured animal? They imagined the extravagant childishness of a spoilt rich girl. They peered at her as her uncle hustled her past, pale and tear-stained. And some saw that what Laura Hame had in the fist curled to her chest was a large rust-stained rock. A rock from the trackbed.

When the special train pulled away from Sisters Beach station something very strange had happened to Laura.

She was walking along the platform with Rose, Grace and Chorley. She was dragging her feet, feeling defeated. Her father had gone, and she felt that he had
left
her. She felt abandoned, resentful, deeply anxious about her Try. And then — all at once — she felt all these things as a howling emptiness, like extreme hunger. Hunger without exhaustion. It was as though a gap opened within her, and yawned wide. For a moment Laura felt the emptiness of this open chasm, then something rushed to fill it. Something was suddenly
in
her — it felt like sorrow and need and power too.

Laura stumbled. Then she came to a stop and her family went on for a few paces without her. Laura looked over her shoulder, back along the line, through
the haze at what she thought was the back of the receding special train. Then her gaze drifted down, and she found herself staring at the rocks between the bright rails. She looked at one in particular. It occurred to Laura that, if she picked up that rock, the thing that had rushed to fill the gap inside her, the weighty, cold, roaring thing, would jump out of her and into the rock. It was a mad thought, but it seemed true. True and urgent.

Laura jumped, and caught up the rock, and turned, meaning to fling it after the special train. She could see only the back of the guard’s van — like a black door in the heat-distorted air. But, of course, what she really saw was the express bearing down on her. The rock stayed in her hand.
In fact
, it seemed to stick to her hand.

Then Chorley jumped down beside her. He lifted her up on to the platform, and Aunt Grace took her arm by the wrist and shook her hand hard, twice, to make her drop the rock. Grace was shouting at her, but Laura kept her fist clenched.

Then Uncle Chorley intervened, he put an arm around her and urged her to go with him. He and Rose had hurried her along the platform. They walked her out of her shoes. They seemed not to notice that she’d lost them. The soles of her feet were scorched by the hot pavement. Then she was back in Chorley’s car. She was crying. She sat beside Rose, who put an arm around her and kept quiet — which must have cost some effort.

Laura felt that her family were thinking she’d behaved badly — but were sorry for her, and so wouldn’t say anything about it, would let her forget it. Except Rose, of course. Rose, who held her with one firm, friendly arm, but vibrated with suppressed excitement.

BACK AT SUMMERFORT
the norwester was combing all the grass clippings missed by the gardener’s rake out of the new-mown lawns, and was scattering them across the polished floors of downstairs rooms. Grace went around closing the doors. She sent Rose and Laura upstairs to bathe.

In the upstairs bathroom Laura climbed into the bath and turned on the taps. Tepid water splashed her feet. She pulled the chain that diverted water to the shower head and stood in the downpour. The water coaxed a saner self back into her body, so that when she got out and wrapped herself in a towel she began to wonder about the rock.

She went into her bedroom and found the rock where she’d put it, beside her jewellery box on the dresser. It was quarry stone, a lump of crushed granite. Its edges were still sharp, although its whole surface was softened by a velvet of accumulated dust, the iron rust that slowly salted from the rails, ground away by the wheels of trains. The rock had made a mark on Laura’s dresser, as it had marked her palms. She stared at — a dirty stone.

Rose came to the door of the room. She stroked it with her knuckles. ‘May I come in?’

Laura put the rock into her jewellery box and closed its lid. She carried a string of amber beads to her bed and put it down on the outfit her aunt had laid out — some of the extravagant sleepwear fashionable people wore to dream palaces.

Rose came in, kicked off her beaded slippers and sat on Laura’s bed. ‘So —’ she said, ‘we’re on our own.’ Rose said that the girls — Summerfort’s two servants — had gone for the night. ‘Ma is doing something with chopped egg and chives and bread.’ (Dreamhunters ate sparingly before each performance of a dream, enough for comfort, but no more.) ‘Dad’s threading the projector. He’s screening his film of the sand-sculpting competition. He finished it this morning when we were asleep,’ Rose said, then asked, ‘Shall I brush your hair?’

Laura dropped her towel and got into her pyjama trousers and jacket. Her pyjamas were pale yellow, her robe pale green with a broad band of dark pink around its hem and collar. Laura sat on the edge of the bed and let her cousin tame at least the surface of her bushy hair. Rose made noises of effort — and once or twice clicked her tongue, as the matron at Farry’s had done.

After a moment Rose said, ‘Have you still got that rock?’

‘I put it in my jewellery box.’

‘Is it like — a memento?’ Rose was cautious.

‘No.’ Laura was happy for Rose to think that her feelings were Rose’s business. She did want to be
checked on and worried about. But she didn’t know how to explain herself.

‘Maybe “memento” is the wrong word, since a memento would be to remind you of a time you treasured,’ Rose said. ‘Just a reminder then. But, Laura, your Da let you down. He did. I’m really mad at him.
I
won’t need reminding.’

‘I was going to throw it at the train.’

‘I see. But if you’d thought to throw your
shoe
instead you wouldn’t have had to jump down in front of the express. I bet Ma and Da are worried that you meant to kill yourself.’ Rose hurried on. ‘
I
know you wouldn’t do that — but I’m still pretty puzzled by what you
did
mean to do.’

Laura turned around and stared at Rose. ‘Why would anyone think I’d do something like that? Try to kill myself.’

‘You jumped down in front of a train.’

‘It was still a way off.’

‘Laura, it was close, and you were dithering on the tracks.’

Laura gathered her hair out of Rose’s hands. She began twisting it into a thick, crackling rope. ‘I had to pick up the rock, because something was in me and when I saw the rock it occurred to me that, if I picked it up, the thing that was in me would go out of me and into the rock.’

‘That’s crazy,’ Rose said — though not as if she disbelieved Laura. ‘
What
was in you? And why
that
rock and not the one next to it?’

‘I think it could just as well have been the one next to it,’ Laura said.

Rose asked whether she could see the rock and Laura pointed at the dresser and her jewellery box. Rose wriggled off the bed and took out the rock and gave it a serious inspection. She said, ‘So — what do you think you put into it?’

‘I don’t know. Bad feelings. Disappointment. And I meant to
throw
it. But I got mixed up about how many minutes had passed. I thought the express was the special train still pulling away.’ But, Laura thought, she hadn’t thrown the rock. She couldn’t release it. And, although she was angry, what had seemed to pour from her into the rock was more longing than anger. Longing for what she believed she deserved from her father — his undivided loyalty, and love in any measure she asked or needed.

Rose caught Laura’s eye and gave the rock a little shake. ‘So you want to keep this?’

Laura nodded. Rose put it back in the box, then came back to sprawl on Laura’s bed. ‘You know, you Hames have always been kind of peculiar about dirt and sand and stones. Uncle Tziga is always feeling the soil, as though he’s a farmer planning to buy some land. You do that too. You love sandcastles, and do you remember all your little earthworks in the kitchen garden at Founderston? “Mucky Laura” the cook used to say. There’s a word for it — all that fiddling with dirt.’ ‘There’s a word for people who
eat
dirt,’ Laura volunteered.

The cousins gazed at each other, grimacing, and trying to remember what they’d learnt from a book they’d sneaked a look at. A girl had brought it to school. The girl’s father was an asylum doctor. It was a book about mental aberrations. Rose turned pink then gave a shriek of laughter. ‘I can only remember the sex disorders!’

They swapped a few words and definitions, and had a good giggle. Then Rose changed the subject. ‘Did you get a look at the body tied to the top of the stagecoach? Did you hear what the men said?’

‘I didn’t manage to keep my place in the front. I didn’t push hard enough.’ Laura sounded prim, even to herself.

‘Oh, blah,’ Rose said, impatient. ‘Please show some interest, Laura.’

‘I’m listening,’ said Laura.

‘Being sullen doesn’t suit you,’ Rose said, annoyed.

‘You sound like your mother,’ Laura said, ‘telling me to be “ladylike”. No one ever says that to you! They think you won’t need to be.’ She lay down and began to cry. ‘They think you’ll succeed and I won’t. I’ll have to be “careful of my station in life”, like the women in novels about women who make mistakes and end up miserable.’

‘Laura,’ Rose said. She stroked Laura’s back. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. They don’t say those things to me, because I bite their heads off. Instead they do this thing of pretending to be brightly positive about me and all my habits. “Rose is a big, robust, forthright girl,” they say, as if by describing me I’ll start feeling properly
selfconscious and pull my head in. It isn’t anything to do with our Try and what they think of our chances. Your Da never tells you to be ladylike. Nor does mine. Your Da is too artistic, and my Da is a
real
gentleman and a lot less worried about being proper than poor nervous Ma and our teachers. Our teachers have had to think about being
respectable
to get on themselves. And Ma was
poor
. She’s had to put up with all sorts of snubs since she got rich and married Da. Ma’s worried about
both
of us, but only
you
ever listen to her when she gets on to how we should be ladylike.’

Laura had stopped crying to listen to Rose. She kept still and let Rose pet her. After a moment Rose said, ‘I’m bursting to tell this story.’

Laura lay quiet. This was enough of an invitation to Rose. ‘The dead man tied to the top of the Sisters Beach stage was a ranger. The driver said he staggered out of the Place — not in the safe spot beside the old telegraph pole, but in the middle of the road, right in front of his horses. The man was trampled and died on the spot. Or almost.

WHEN THEY PICKED
him up he was still “making mouths”, the driver said. And when the driver, stage post manager and Da climbed up on top of the stage and unwrapped the ranger, Da discovered that the man’s mouth was full of sand — fine, silvery sand. And in the sand was a fragment of paper, with fragments of words written on it.’

Laura rolled over, sat up and swept her hair back from her face. ‘That’s what your Da was saying under his breath when he got into the car. Fragments of words.’

Rose nodded. ‘I got a glimpse of the paper,’ she said. ‘The phrases were separated and stacked.’

Laura scrambled off the bed and found a notebook and pencil. She gave them to Rose.

Rose wrote. She then said, ‘I’m pretty sure there was a gap between “as” and “D”. And I think the D was a capital.’

They put their heads together and looked at what they had:

ours
as D
ecre

‘The “as” is the end of one word, and the “D” is the start of another,’ Rose said.

Laura said, ‘Should we check this with Uncle Chorley to make sure we have it right?’

Rose shook her head. ‘He was angry with me for being so nosy. Or bossy.’ She wriggled her shoulders, shrugging off her father’s disapproval. Then she slid off the bed and bounced up. ‘That poor ranger,’ she said, bringing the talk back to the dead man briefly, only to dismiss him.

‘The border can be dangerous. It’s like diving into a river when you can’t see the bottom,’ Laura said. ‘He
was only a few feet off the safe path, and unlucky in his timing.’

‘The sand is a puzzle, though,’ Rose said. ‘How did it get in his mouth?’ She rubbed her stomach. She was thinking about dinner. She gave her cousin a hand and hauled her up. ‘Eggs and toast,’ she said, and led Laura downstairs.

CHORLEY’S FILM WAS
less than ten minutes long. He’d filmed a sand-sculpting contest held six weeks earlier on the beach. Grace had been asked to judge it, and there was a lot of footage of her with the mayor and several other dignitaries, going about the entries and asking the competitors questions. Grace holding her sun hat and bent at the waist to speak to sand-caked children. Grace inspecting shell-studded ramparts. All in ghostly black and white — the small waves flickering in, soundless, and a little too fast.

Grace told Chorley he should put this footage together with his balloon flight and his film of whales stranded on the western shore of So Long Spit. He should hold another public screening.

Chorley had held a number of public screenings. His most recent hit was a film of a state funeral. People were grateful for the record — for film’s power to capture a real event, and to repeat it infinitely.

‘People like to see themselves,’ Grace said. ‘A newspaper can only report.’

‘Miss Laura Hame and Miss Rose Tiebold, the niece and daughter of the competition’s judge, whilst not
eligible to enter the competition, were still able to join in the fun,’ Rose said, imitating a newspaper’s social events page.

On the screen a sandy Rose and Laura were sculpting sand with butter knives. Laura’s father stood between them, his feet bare and his trouser legs rolled up. He was giving the girls advice. ‘Miss Hame and Miss Tiebold’s “reclining man” was admired by all the other competitors,’ intoned Rose.

Chorley had caught the moment when Laura’s knife slipped and the sandman’s nose collapsed and crumbled down his cheek. The black-and-white Rose burst into silent giggles, Tziga Hame’s hands flew up in mock horror. Black-and-white Laura paused, then smoothed the sandman’s face with her knife, like someone spreading icing on a cake, till the mouth and eyes had gone too.