Magpie Hall (23 page)

Rosemary

As with all good Gothic novels, this story is full of ghosts. The pages of the books I have been studying reveal them — women long gone, lovers torn apart or reunited in death, the ghosts of dreams and of the imagination, products of too many novels or of an unstable mind. Unreliable narrators.

I never talk about my sister Tess. As much as I can, I try not to think about her, but it is she, not Dora, who is the ghost in this story. She is my Bertha, my Rebecca, my Catherine. She has shaped who I have become in my life, the paths I have chosen. She is there, hovering around the edges of every incident, over every minute of my stay at Magpie Hall — in the attic, in the bedroom, in my dreams, in the tower. Especially in the tower. The time has come to let her out. And to face up to my part in her death.

Perhaps I need to go back further, to the May holidays of the year I turned thirteen. My parents had once again sent us to the country for the two-week break. The winter had arrived early, with sub-zero temperatures overnight and ice on the puddles of mud that we jumped on to hear them crunch underfoot, with hailstorms and dreary, lowlying cloud. Grandpa and I huddled together in the workroom as often as we could, listening to talkback radio with the door shut and the heater on full bore.

I didn’t notice then what Charlie got up to, but he was a resourceful child, and stayed out of Gram’s way. Of course I now know that he was often away with the farm kids on horseback, skulking around the caves and smoking cigarettes. It was always easy for him to make friends. He pulled them in with his endless banter, his willingness to take risks.

Tess, on the other hand, simmered with boredom. She was soon to turn sixteen and was livid at being left in the clutches of two old people and her younger siblings. She slept until midday and stayed up past midnight, watching horror movies and cop show reruns. She barely spoke to me. Instead she skulked around the house with
Wuthering Heights
in her hand, a wispy, long-bodied girl who was looking more and more like a woman. She was an enigma to me. Back in the city, she ran with a crowd of musicians, played in a band. I knew when she told our parents she was at parties that she was really at a pub, drinking, playing her guitar, falling in love. She was always home by midnight, but I heard the catch on her window as she left an hour later. I watched her and I listened to her, but we hardly spoke.

Tess called me a weirdo. She bad-mouthed Grandpa behind his back, making fun of his false teeth, his untidiness, his obsession with dead animals. She never came into the workroom, and I saw her scuttle past the birds in the living room, averting her eyes, as if afraid
they might come alive and fly at her. Grandpa seemed unsure how to talk to her. He and I shared the language of taxidermy, but he and Tess had only a chasm of years between them. It made me mad, the way she talked about him, how her face screwed up as she brushed the dog hair from her clothes. I just wanted her to go, to leave us to our work.

One night, we were gathered in the kitchen for dinner. The dining hall was way too big and formal and too hard to heat. Gram was standing at the kitchen bench, helping Mrs G, when she made an irritated growl at the back of her throat.

‘Who’s that out there? Percy, there’s someone out in the garden. Go and see who it is.’ She shook her head, making her pearls rattle. ‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘he’s just standing there looking in, like a lost mutt.’

Grandpa went out the door and reappeared a few minutes later with the farmhand, Josh. The old man was shaking his head and talking: ‘… won’t hear another word. It’s not much warmer in here, but the food will take off the chill.’

Josh hung his head and shrugged.

Gram folded her arms. ‘Well, what did you think you were doing out there, boy?’

‘Sorry, Mrs Summers. I was passing and I just liked the look of you all there in the kitchen. I didn’t mean to snoop.’

Mrs G laid another place at the table and sat him down with a pat on the shoulders. ‘Nonsense, Josh,’ she said, ‘you’re most welcome. I expect you haven’t had a decent home-cooked meal for a while.’

‘Baked beans,’ was all he said. He took up more than his share of room at that table; he couldn’t help it. Over six feet tall and built like a brick shithouse as Grandpa would have said, out of Gram’s hearing, of course. He made me feel small just looking at him and
I shrank into my seat. Having a stranger at the table — a stranger to me, anyway — changed the dynamic and we all ate quietly, apart from Charlie, who tried to impress Josh with some terrible jokes he’d collected from somewhere, jiggling his legs as he ate and talking in funny voices. I groaned inwardly. Josh laughed politely. Tess picked at her peas and tossed some meat on the floor for the dog. She stared openly at Josh. After a while, he began to return the look.

‘Who do you live with up there?’ she asked suddenly. Startled, Josh was caught with a mouthful of food, which he attempted to swallow before answering.

‘Just me and sometimes a couple of the other blokes,’ he said. ‘Shearers.’

‘Don’t you get bored up there?’ Tess ignored Gram’s glares. It was one thing to have the help in her kitchen, interrogating them was another.

‘Not really. I guess.’

‘Do you have parties?’

Josh looked at Grandpa, as if the old man had laid a trap for him. ‘Nah … sometimes.’ He wiped his black hair away from his forehead, revealing the thick bushes of his eyebrows. ‘Just a few beers. Nothing much.’

‘It’s all right, son,’ said Grandpa. ‘You’re entitled to your fun. Lord knows it’s lonely enough up there, and you all work hard. I appreciate it.’ He smiled, and I wondered if I was the only one to notice that his false teeth wobbled in his mouth.

After dinner, Grandpa unpacked the game of Trivial Pursuit that we had played so many times we had memorised the answers. ‘Will you stay?’ he asked Josh.

Gram huffed and left the room, clutching her pack of cigarillos, while Mrs G pottered around with the dishes.

‘I’d better be getting back,’ Josh said. ‘Early start and all that. Thanks, though, Mr Summers, it was real nice.’

‘My pleasure,’ said Grandpa. ‘You know, Josh —’

At the door, Josh turned to look at him as he shoved his feet into his gumboots.

‘I’m keeping an eye on you. You’re doing a great job. Keep it up. I’ve got plans for you, son.’

Josh coloured as much as his swarthy cheeks would let him. He nodded his thanks, took a last look at my sister, slouching in her seat, twisting her long dark hair, and he was gone.

‘Terrible business,’ said Grandpa as he sat down. ‘Both his parents dead. He doesn’t talk much, but I think he’s a good boy.’

Looking back now, I remember being puzzled by Grandpa’s referring to Josh as a
boy
. He was in his twenties. Now I see it for what it was — a casual reference to class that someone of Grandpa’s status and generation wouldn’t have given a second thought.

The following school holidays, in August, was when it all happened. August was when lambing began, and Grandpa wasn’t around much. He took us all out with him one morning, and I remember being surprised that Tess was so willing to go. It was raining and we all donned raincoats and gumboots. Tess’s eyeliner ran. Charlie was quiet and a bit pale as we rode the back of the Landrover with the dogs, and for once his running banter was absent. I stood up and held onto the bars, riding the bumps in the road like a surfer, letting the rain fall on my face.

Josh stood over a ewe that was moving weakly, ready to give up. Tess ran over to him as soon as the Landrover stopped and they
exchanged a few words before she stepped away and made room for Grandpa, who crouched down beside the distressed animal.

‘We’re going to lose her,’ he said. He moved down her body, to where a purple blob was emerging from her rear end. Charlie stood with his mouth hanging open, then turned and ran back to the truck, which he climbed inside, and refused to look any further. Tess also just stood there, face hidden by the huge hood of her raincoat, fiddling with the silver rings she wore on most of her fingers.

I crouched down beside Grandpa to get as close a look as I could. He grabbed hold of the blob and pulled. With a sucking sound, like mud, the lamb fell onto the grass in a mess of blood and umbilical cord. The ewe gave a last sigh and then was still.

‘But what will happen to the lamb?’ Tess asked. Her eyes had become red. Josh moved quickly to stand beside her and she leant against his big body. A hand patted her on the back, but when Josh noticed Grandpa looking he stepped away, causing Tess to stumble a moment. The rain kept coming and all I could hear was the sound of it on the hood of my raincoat, incessant.

In the end, the lamb was saved. It was given to a ewe that had lost its own lamb. For a while it was touch and go whether she would accept it, but the desire to mother something must have been too great, and she was soon licking the foster lamb and encouraging it to feed from her.

When it was time to return to the house, Grandpa told Tess to ride in the front with him. I don’t know what they talked about, but I could guess. I watched them through the back window. Grandpa did most of the talking. He gesticulated as he spoke. Tess sat hunched in her seat with her arms crossed. She raised her voice at one point, said, ‘All
right
! I get it,’ and after that, it seemed, nothing more was said. She stared out the window beside her, and Grandpa reached over
once to pat her arm. When we pulled up, Tess jumped out and ran straight to her room, where she stayed for the rest of the day while Grandpa drove back up the hill and I continued to work on a stoat that one of the dogs had brought home.

One afternoon a couple of days later, I emerged from the workroom and found the house empty. I walked through the rooms, looking for my family, but the house wasn’t giving them up. Even Mrs G wasn’t in the kitchen. A quick look outside told me she’d taken her car and must have gone to town, but where was everyone else? Even Tess wasn’t in her room or the library, and I had no idea where to start to look for her outside.

The tower was the best place to go to find out. There I could see in one glance whether Charlie was out with the other kids on their horses, and Grandpa up at the paddocks. The rain from the previous days had disappeared, and even though the clouds still hung thick and uncertain, Gram was likely to be tending to the spring flowers that had emerged to brighten the garden.

The staircase to the tower was as muffled and dark as ever, and my small socked feet felt their way on each step, slowly, slowly. I was sure that one day I would slip and fall and be found in a heap at the bottom, so I trod as carefully as I could.

When I opened the door I was surprised to find that all the blinds were down. As I crossed to the nearest window, to let in the dull light, I heard a small sound in the air, a swallow and a breath, barely audible, not even a sigh. I turned towards it.

I saw a pale shape emerging from the shadow, a surprising shape, with blossoming hips and a narrow waist. Long dark hair piled loosely, and below, a picture, drawn onto the skin. A bird, curving with the shoulders, a long arched beak and claws curled around a thin branch. Wings stretched out. Below this, another shape: a large
brown hand resting in the small of the back as her body rose and fell, full of concentration. But this shape was no tattoo. It made a tiny movement, a caress.

I stood there for only a few seconds, deciphering what it was I was seeing. I must have made my presence felt, because the figure turned her face towards me, twisting her whole body so I could make out the edge of her bare breast before her eyes found mine. Beyond her, and beneath her, the large shape of Josh, lying as still as possible, trying to make himself invisible.

‘Get out, Rosemary,’ was all Tess said. ‘Get out now.’