Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (37 page)

The late-afternoon air is keen with coming rain. Lost people die in this valley. You will have to find shelter, water, warmth.

You return to Woondala, your best bet. A huge, spreading pine grows to the side of it and the wind whistles strangely through its needles as if it is telling you to be gone, this place is not for humans, the rest have been pushed out in the dropping light. The house is neglected except for the corner you found him in: he’s obviously working his way through the rooms, waking it up, but it’s an enormous task.

The kitchen has been fixed to a serviceable level. Just. A kettle on a portable gas hob rests by a wide, whitewashed, colonial hearth. A bathroom has rusty-coloured water from its tap – water, thank God – and a toilet that flushes when a broken chain is yanked. A box of tissues is beside it. A bedroom has a mattress on the floor and a single pillow with the indent of a head in it and not much else. His workroom is locked, the battered iron knob of its door won’t budge.

The only thing locked in this place.

You thread through other rooms, the thick stone outer walls like a blanket around you. The house has the feeling of being abandoned in great haste, as if news of a coming pestilence
has forced everyone to flee in a single afternoon. There are scatterings of past lives, generations of them – convicts, fragrant mistresses, Edwardian children, Aboriginal cooks, ghosts.

Various walls are covered with newspapers from the last century and pages from the
Bulletin
magazine, and in one room sheets of old bush poetry, at head height by a bed: Percy Russell, Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, Dora Wilcox. Thick wide plates crazed with age from some grandness long ago line the pantry, spotted silver spoons and forks in rusty old billy cans are collected on a bench along with encrusted black cooking pots. A tarnished silver candelabra is lonely in the grate of a fireplace. A grand piano awaits in what looks like the remains of a drawing room; keys are missing and possum droppings are scattered on its lid and a stool is drawn and quartered with its horsehair matting tumbling out. A line of five attached theatre chairs watch – God knows what – in an incongruous row. A hessian chaise longue broods in a corner, pining for another chance. Leather-bound books are stacked upstairs by the frames of iron bed heads. Dropped cigars, whisky bottles, stirrups, buttons, empty cotton reels, mustard jars, coins – they all litter rooms gloomed down by corrugated-iron sheets over windows, the insistent light of afternoon straining through in precise pinpoints.

That light feels like it will eventually triumph in this house, it will one day reach into every window and corner and through the roof until only the strong outer walls will be left. Some rooms, on the top floor, already ring with air and emptiness.

And waiting.

You could do so much with this place. With all your bush knowledge, all the watching over the years, everything your father has taught. You spin – a smile filling you up – imagining where you’d start.

Now you’re standing tall in the attic with its windows punched out to the sky, surveying the vastness around you. This is big sky land. What a find, what a jewel, secure in its corporate disguise as a disused mine. Clever, that. Beside the house is a small, muddy dam the colour of milky tea that looks perfect for a dip on a stinker of a day and rocks like sentinels litter the hills and you stare at the stately migration of clouds across this tall ceiling of blue and the hum of the wind crawls into your skin and always, somewhere, are birds, their sound cramming the air – bellbirds, whip birds, currawongs, kookaburras.

Kookaburras!

Which means that somewhere, soon, is rain. You look to the south, a chill is already staining the sky. A southerly buster is hurrying upon you, ready to crack the back of the heat. You wrap your arms around your thinness and retreat, alone and not welcome in this place.

Need distraction. Something that eats up the wait. You return to a room upstairs of stacked books, flick through them. Old farming manuals, geology guides, a book of sheep
breeding, a volume of Shakespeare,
For the Term of His Natural Life
and some type of manual for women,
A Woman’s Thoughts About Women
.

The thick card cover falls away in your hand and you yelp – you’ve broken it.
1858, London
, it says on the brittle first page that is spotted with the circular droppings of insects.
Hurst and Blackett, Great Marlborough Street, London
.

Great. Impossible to replace, and probably worth buckets.

You begin to read. The reassuring voice hooks you like a hand around your neck, drawing you in. You smile and settle on your belly, caught.

Yes of course. It’s the only power you’ve got, the only way to be noticed in this life.

Who was this woman? You flick through the book, the front, the back. It doesn’t say. Anywhere. All you’ve got to go on is the warm, knowing tone of her voice. It feels like she’s been married for decades and had a dozen kids; there’s a richness of living in her words; a certainty you’ve rarely known.

You stand, pocketing the little tome.

Now you’re wandering his house, agitated, the air laden with its coming storm. The stillness is banking up at the windows, pushing at the walls, wanting in before the rain comes and hammers the valley in great sheets; you can read this sky. His sky. Yours. You are nervy, skittery, you take off your flannelette shirt and wipe your brow with it; bathing your skin in coolness, God knows when you’ll get rescued from this place. You return to the bedroom and lie like a Goldilocks on the mattress, your head in the hollow of the pillow. It smells adult – hair oil, male sweat, ingrained sleeps.

Time slips by. The storm threatens, all talk no substance. Your cheeky little Victorian manual is your only comfort in the fading light.

You wonder what a ragged school was, smiling as you curl on the bed, devouring the tiny print. The sky is still pregnant with rain yet it doesn’t fall, everything is waiting, poised: the world outside softens as night comes stealing in, dusk is like a thin film of milk washing over the land. You read on, fast, before you lose the light; there are candles but no matches in this place. The night pushes up the band of sunset in the sky and finally you close your book, defeated by the gloom. The distant thunder rumbles in the floorboards, far away, moving on to somewhere else and you can feel the house talk, willing you out, leaving it to its darkness. If you don’t return to Beddy soon it will mean search parties – your father will be home shortly from his afternoon shift, wondering where you are. It will mean helicopters and sniffer dogs and you stand, in panic; don’t want anyone to find this, your fragile discovery, don’t want anything from your real world crashing in on it.

Taking it from you.

Your hidden place, that you will find a way back to.

To help. To mend. To patch up. To watch his hands as he works, as he caresses his dog. If he is like that with animals what must he be like with people? A tenderness you have never
seen in a man before, a grace, and you just want to watch, nothing else. You have not grown up with the expectation that someone will look after you and it’s not what you want from this world – it’s the promise it holds. Of a different life, a different way, an escape. You just want to watch and learn and be nourished by it. So much enchantment in this place.

But first you have to get home.

To keep it safe.

A car. Its sound as it climbs, carefully, the rough winding road. You leap to a window. Can see the search of its headlights threading through the dust. Rescue. You shut your eyes in relief.

The old Volvo. Back, thank God, back. You are safe, this world is safe, no one will find it; you can go home now. A screech of the handbrake and a slam of the car door and then he is here, the great loom of him striding in strong and you are rushing out with his dog jumping about you in a mad flurrying cacophony of barks. The dog grabs your wrist in its jaws and has you tight by its gums and its owner is exclaiming in shock and stepping back, as if he’s seen a ghost, dropping his groceries and a bottle of wine is smashing and a thread of red shoots out fast across the floor.

‘What –’ In absolute bewilderment.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ as you try to bend down and clean up but the dog has you firm.

He can’t comprehend, someone here, in his space,
now
. How? He sees the book you’re still holding.

‘Is that –?’

Your face reddens. ‘I wasn’t stealing.’

You hand it back with the quickness of guilt. He looks at the the title, the cover falls off. Frowns as if he didn’t realise he had it. Is it his, is it yours, did he break it, did you?

‘Any tips?’ he murmurs.

You don’t know what to say, whether to laugh or explain or run. Totally stumped. By this man, six foot tall with his vigorous strap of black hair over his high forehead, and green eyes, curiously pale, a paleness that doesn’t match the vigour of everything else about him, that feels all of the mind, seems so wrong in this house. Physically, he is not of this valley world. The dog still has your wrist in its gums, you try to extricate yourself. He suddenly realises.

‘Bec, down!’

Free.

‘I – I got stuck. By mistake.’

‘What?’ As if it’s impossible that anyone but him could be in this place, could have stumbled across it let alone got into it.

‘The gate was open. By accident. You drove away and locked me in. I want to go home.’

‘But no one lives around here. Where on earth did you come from?’

‘B–Beddy,’ you stumble out.

He looks at you as if he has no idea what language you’re speaking; sideways, as if he can’t make head nor tail of it. Looks at the book – nope – it’s not going to yield a clue.

‘
Beddington
.’

Your head indicates, frustrated, over the ridge.

It dawns – obviously not from these parts. He nods. Right. One of
them
, now he has you placed. He looks you up and down and you see, suddenly, what he is seeing – the horror of your clothes, wild hair, general grubbiness – a bush scrap of a thing. Everything that you are, that you represent. He looks at your pockets as if he suddenly expects them to be bulging; at the book as if he can’t believe someone from there would be reading it. Would be reading full stop. Flips it open like he’s expecting stolen sheets of gold to fall from it. Snaps it shut, pockets it in ownership.

‘Can you leave now, please. I have work to do.’

You stare at him, rooted to the spot.

‘Shall I involve the police?’

As if you are about to bring an entire mining community of thieves and claimants crowding into his place.

Too much gap.

Not
seeing
you. Who you are, who you’re not.

Just wanting you gone and his world back.

The piracy of indifference; and your hackles rise at it.