The Heaven I Swallowed (14 page)

‘And you?' Mrs Chilsom asked. ‘How are you, dear?'

Mrs Chilsom was only a few years older than me yet she spoke as if addressing a child. She wanted to measure the state of her own completion compared to my own losses. The loss of Mary was a visible marker of my inability to cope.

‘I am smashing, thank you,' I answered, using a Hollywood film term. It stood out oddly amongst the evergreens of the cemetery, but I needed a touch of glamour.

I didn't attend the wake, already feeling the need to let go of this set of people and their view of me, standing on high, looking down.

†

Like Father Benjamin, I only saw Mr Roper once, alone, before I moved. He had dropped by with a new offering of fruit, as if nothing had changed, and I bustled on with packing up the kitchen around him, unwilling to leave any space for intimate talk. I had already put away the kettle so I could not offer tea and felt vaguely resentful he had, rather foolishly, brought a fruit basket to me which would just require another box.

The table and chairs were stacked to one side of the kitchen so Mr Roper had to stand, running his hands through his still-dyed blonde hair. I apologised over and over about the state of everything, hoping he would get the hint to go but, instead, he asked after Mary without the slightest embarrassment. With my back to him, I paused in nesting the saucepans together and the suspicions that had grown since Mary's departure rose up before me: his screwdriver used to open the desktop, his supplication to her in the grotto, the long line of his corridor salted with paintings of children.

‘There is no news of her so far,' I replied, now digging into the back corner cupboard to get the last of the cooking pots.

‘You should have called on me, like you did the other time.'

‘I didn't want to find her myself, Mr Roper.'

‘Why not?'

My impulse was to tell him to mind his own business. It seemed as if a stranger was lurking in my kitchen, a man whom I had once sought to know, who had chosen, instead, to try and take away my little girl. I longed to be told exactly what his relationship with Mary had been, at the same time as I was terrified of it.

‘I am tired, Mr Roper.'

‘You have never called me John,' he said quietly.

The stale smell of his cigarillo breath was closer; sometime in my busy-ness he had found his way across the linoleum. He placed his hands on my hips, my back against his torso, our height almost the same. I looked out to the garden, the curtains taken down and the absence of knick-knacks on the sill created a large, open vista of the jacaranda Fred had once sat under. I wondered if on the other side of the world he might be staring at a similar tree. I could barely feel Mr Roper's hands on my hips, my mind distant from my body, all too aware his hands had been placed on me, not from true desire, but because of the freedom granted by my departure. For so many years, opportunities had arisen for more than this between us: the time when Mrs Mavis had left Mr Roper's Sunday dinner unexpectedly, called away to the beginning of the end of her son, and I was the only other guest; the moments, even, on cleaning days—organised to save Mr Burrows from a humiliating dismissal—when we'd been left alone in the dusty recesses of the church. But afraid of public censure Mr Roper had never, in those private times, taken a step toward me.

I was not flattered by his touch. I found the stink of tobacco revolting, his breath quickening with this new found passion. In the window's reflection I could see the top of his head and watched as it moved to my neck to kiss the bare skin exposed under my bun.

It would not be the truth to say I continued to feel nothing, for the wet touch of lips couldn't be ignored as easily as the light brush of fingers. In the minute of his kiss, I was able to compare the sensation to all I had felt before. All, I say, as though there was a plethora of experiences, not one long-ago boy who farewelled my cheek after a church picnic, and the many-flavoured kisses of Fred. He had often tasted of cigarettes and yet I could not recall revulsion or wishing for it to end.

In the glass panel opposite, Mr Roper's lips moved up my neck; insensitive to my aversion he blundered on, having been given no signal to stop. I didn't move, taken to so many conflicting memories the present hardly seemed worth the effort.

Perhaps it was this confusion that made me see the flash of a black head over the far back fence.

Mary
.

‘Oh my God!' I yelled and pulling away from Mr Roper threw open the screen door and ran out into the yard. I stumbled over the flowerbeds, my heels sinking into the dirt, and down to the far end of the long block, throwing myself at the fence and peering down into the scruffy lane behind it.

‘Mary?'

Weeds and cracked dirt met my entreaty. The laneway was empty, only the withered dandelions appeared to sway as if someone had recently brushed past. Which way would she have gone? How could she have disappeared so quickly?

Behind me, Mr Roper thumped his way across the grass. I didn't know if he had heard my call or not, if he knew why I had so abruptly left his embrace. I did not care. I tried to see how I could get over the fence, cursed the fact that there was no gate.

‘She's not likely to come back now, Mrs Smith,' Mr Roper said loudly, revealing his knowledge. Despite my resolution of only a minute before, I hated the fact he had witnessed this, and my brief hope deflated. My heart pounded from the exertion of the run and I panted loudly to regain my breath, still staring at the fence. If I had not been so acutely aware of Mr Roper's presence, I might have cried.

‘She needs to be caught,' I replied, addressing the weathered wood as coldly as I could. ‘For her own good.'

I pictured her among children of her own colour, smiles beaming. I poked my head over the fence again, just to be sure she had not materialised, and saw the dandelions, unmoving, the spores of their globed heads intact.

‘I wish she'd come to me,' Mr Roper said behind me and I held my breath, waiting for more. ‘She looked just like my little girl.'

‘Your little girl?' I was talking to the fence, too weak to turn.

‘Mary was a reincarnation of her, only darker.' I faced him. He smiled a small, sad smile. ‘My wife and daughter went missing in the Blue Mountains. Before I moved here.'

The lost children on his walls.

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘You never mentioned …'

‘You never asked.'

As we walked to the house, Mr Roper made no further comments, nor renewed his attempt to seduce me. The tan leather of my shoes was ruined and I tracked mud into the kitchen without concern. If Mr Roper regretted his advance had been rudely interrupted, he didn't show it. He picked an orange from the basket he'd delivered and threw it into the air. The whoosh of the orange flying, the smack of it caught in his fingers. From love to fruit. As swiftly as it had come, the time of his touch, his kiss, had passed. I was sure Mary looked nothing like his daughter, his attempt at finding a replacement as foolish as mine.

I moved to the cupboards and asked Mr Roper to help me lift the cast-iron baking ware Fred's mother had sent by sea all the way from England as a wedding gift, arriving so long after the day I had always associated it with Fred joining the militia rather than with our marriage.

‘Still clean as a whistle,' Mr Roper noted of the bake ware, with admiration, mistaking the cleanliness of their surfaces as a result of meticulous care, instead of lack of use.

‘Yes,' I replied and packed it away.

†

To his credit, Mr Roper did send me formal invitations to a few of his lunches after I moved. Handwritten notes posted, not hand-delivered and signed ‘John' with a flourishing ‘J'. They spoke of ‘pleasure' and ‘company' and ‘good friends' and on the first few occasions I replied with carefully worded letters of thanks, my own ‘regret' and ‘disappointment' and ‘prior engagements'. Refusals which could not really offend except in their speciousness. Gradually, the months between the invitations extended, and I took longer and longer to write back. I was struck by the farce of writing to say no to a lunch long since baked and eaten and, finally, I left the next card from Mr John Roper unopened.

10

On certain afternoons, living in the flat, I would make my way down to the beach to watch the seagulls and the young people who had begun to loiter in groups on the promenade. Boys and girls who, after school, found the chance to escape their parents' chores and whisper to one another across the great divide between the sexes. This had become more common than it ever was in my day though I could see the familiar face of girls in my office awaiting the strap, now leaning against the pillars of the pavilion, cigarette in hand, hair pulled back in ponytails or, even more astounding, shorn short. They did not see me, as invisible as the ‘old' are to youth, so I could watch them closely enough as I walked by. I could see the doubt in their stance: these femme fatales who still wanted to go steady and get flowers from their rebel boys, who weren't quite sure what they were rebelling against. I would catch the smell of tobacco in the air and hear astounding assertions, like ‘My mother says I am going to hell'.

I would try to hold myself tall, my skirt now loose around my waist and my blouse blown by the sea wind. I followed a regular track: down to the end of the promenade and onward to the post office to pick up my payment.

I had not written to Fred of my move. Given that I had always travelled here to collect his money orders, there seemed no need to alert him to the change. We had long since ceased personal correspondence. The crumpled remains of his letters were once again locked in the desk, now repaired. I had paid a locksmith to come to the house, rather than engage Mr Roper, and the evidence of Mary's break-in had been erased.

The lady behind the post-office counter knew me from my years of collecting the envelopes. She was married to one of the postmen—I had seen him leaning across the desk for a quick farewell kiss before rounds—and she wore floral dresses that had become brighter as the war receded. She would see me in the queue and smile, happy with a familiar face and task. I had never asked her name, preferring for us both to remain within the one exchange: I would say ‘good morning', she would say ‘good morning, Mrs Smith', then move to the pile of registered post and hand me the envelope to receive my ‘thank you'. The thin paper of the envelope spoke of rice paddies, peasants in triangle hats and a mountain called Fuji—romantic landscapes conjured by prints I had seen in
Women's Weekly
. Others had moved past hatred and derision and entered fascination: the exotic East rising from the ashes.

‘Good morning,' I said one afternoon, in my customary flat tone.

‘Good morning, Mrs Smith,' the post office woman replied. Her voice had a slight trepidation in it I attributed to nervousness at the number of people waiting. She bent down and seemed, as usual, to be locating the shelf that held my post. When she straightened, empty-handed, I knew she had known there was nothing for me.

‘Um, nothing for you, Mrs Smith.' Though she had never known the contents of the envelope, she had felt my reliance on its arrival.

‘Can you check again?'

She obliged, though her repeated movement had no tinge of hope in it. There were no Japanese stamps on the envelopes, their temples and oriental plum trees standing out against our kangaroos.

‘I am sorry, Mrs Smith.' She spoke as if someone had died. The violets on her skirt seemed suddenly darker, like patches of mildew.

†

I faced up to the post office one more time, a month later, hoping for a double delivery, the delay a consequence of some tidal change or shifting winds. The postal lady visibly blanched when she saw me enter and as I joined the line of waiting customers she loudly declared to her co-worker that it was time for her break and disappeared out the back through the swinging wooden door with a portal window like a ship. The young girl who served me asked for my full name and wanted to look at my identity card, giving me hope.

‘Oh.' She stopped, squinting at the tiny writing. ‘I don't really need this unless there is something for you.'

She giggled and flicked her way through the pile under ‘S'.

‘No, nothing,' she said flippantly.

I could not see through the frosted circular window of the post office's back room, yet I swear I could feel the other lady watching, waiting for me to leave.

†

Strangely, I did not believe Fred was dead. Perhaps because I had been the one controlling his death before, I couldn't fathom him stepping off this earthly realm without my permission. Or maybe because his particular way of recovering from the war had seemed to promise such long life—finding, as he had, his own Shangri-La—I could not imagine it being cut short.

I wrote to the most recent address I had, in Kyoto. The letter came back to me, unopened, with black characters scrawled across the front of it, strange, spider-like strokes which I could only assume were the equivalent of ‘return to sender'. There was no way of knowing if they had been written by
her
or by some even more foreign hand, the new occupants of Fred's vacated house?

My situation was not immediately desperate. I had money in the bank to keep me in groceries for another year and I owned my flat, although much of the money left over from the sale of the house had been eaten up by the cost of moving. There was no fear in me I would end up on the streets, as such. The tremor came from losing a regular top-up to my savings. Without anything new being added, the pile would begin to diminish quickly and there was no escaping the fact I had to re-enter the world of work.

When I had time to think, I found myself angry. How dare Fred let me down again? What sort of man was he to leave me to the pity of postal workers? To make me go out there again? What could have possibly happened on his cherry-blossom island to justify this new level of selfishness?

†

Dear Gracie,

Do you remember the fruit bats in the gardens at twilight? Do you remember we used to pass under them when you would come to meet me after my working day at the bank? Their squeaks like budgies, their wings expanding like prehistoric yawns, hanging from the trees like trumpet flowers (too many similes you would tell me, I know). Packets of fur and black skin, ugly things up close, we used to laugh at them together. The fruit bats come to me now. It is as if I hear their chattering everywhere.

I have tried to understand but I cannot really help her. I look into her face and I do not see what I once did. The Nips stick their noses into our pram and say ‘how the daughter holds the sins of the fathers'. I tell her not to care but she is ashamed.

I have the blackest dreams. The war days have returned and it is all I can do to struggle towards the light. If I let myself go I do not know if I will ever come out of it. You stand alone under a shooting star. You told me you had wished for me to come home and when you told me—you are not supposed to tell!—I knew it could not come true. You would have known, my superstitious Gracie. I imagine you looking at me with the cold clear eyes of the righteous. Is there a home left for me?

The fruit bats are hanging in the trees and I try to claw into the light. The fragrance in the dark stinks of rotten fruit. In the light, it is jasmine. Where it is clear of all scent I do not know,

Fred

[Letter returned: no longer at this address]