The Heaven I Swallowed (15 page)

11

Once again, I found myself sitting in the morning sun looking through the newspaper, drinking tea. The breeze through the open balcony door was a clear easterly, tasting of salt. I scanned column after column of ‘Positions Vacant—Women and Girls' and knew the world had awoken to prosperity. Fred had forced me to do the same.

The position I obtained was in the administration wing of a hospital. It was far less responsibility than I could have had—I could not face the prospect of teaching again—but I was happy to succumb to the excuse of leaving higher employment for the returned men.

‘The younger girls, well, they leave us when the babies start arriving.' The chief administrator, Mr Anderson, a man whose thick moustache was matched by his bushy eyebrows, frowned at me during the interview. ‘I have lost many a good female clerk to the natural way of things.'

‘Yes, of course,' I said and adjusted myself in the leather chair to avoid the beam of mote-filled light falling across my hands.

‘But we will not have that problem with you.' He smiled, as if he had paid me a compliment. I would learn later that Mr Anderson's wife had six children, her skin turned to crushed paper by the weight of them.

My office was a small room next to Mr Anderson's. It had one window looking down to a courtyard with a flame tree at its centre, where the doctors and nurses gathered for irregularly timed lunch hours, to smoke and flirt. I watched as the women chanced their arm and the doctors, aware of both their appeal and their scarcity, left them to dangle under the fiery flowers for another day. I did not join this outside theatre. I ate lunch at my tiny desk and days could pass without me hearing a single voice except Mr Anderson's on the telephone next door, either loudly conveying instructions to his employees or murmuring words of reassurance to his over-run wife.

I read the stories of the patients whose files I retrieved and replaced inside the steel filing cabinets lining the walls of my room. I saw files grow and grow, the sick whose papers were extracted to add another page to the saga, detailing diseases and maladies: polio, rubella and eczema, tinea, cancers and the occasional mention of ‘war neurosis'. I was pleased to feel little sympathy for most of the cases—I was still hard enough to cope with the horror, a necessary coating to keep me going—and I only felt the slightest shiver when the list came in, at the end of every fortnight, of those files to be moved into the ‘closed' cabinets in the basement of the building. Thankfully, it was not my job to carry the files of the recently deceased down below. I placed them in a tray on my desk every second Friday and by Monday they would be gone.

If I were honest, I would admit I read patient files with an eye to the past. Father Benjamin was dead and Mr Roper out of my life, and I felt Mary was lost to me. I could only foolishly search for her in the patient files, knowing the city held many hospitals and the chance of her crossing my path was small. Still, they were known to be often ill, their weakness for alcohol increasing the possibility of a visit to these wards. My heart would skip a beat when the words ‘octoroon' or ‘half-caste' popped up and I would look away, just glimpsing the surname out of the corner of my eye so as not to be confronted head-on with the name. Mary Rose Fraser. When it did not appear my trepidation dissolved, only to rise again with the opening of the next file.
For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of
.

†

The tree in the courtyard dropped its flowers and one of the nurses announced her engagement to a senior doctor, the one I had deemed the ugliest. A party was organised, which I did not attend, and the ‘closed' list appeared to be longer that Friday, as if diligence had slackened in the face of a new future embarked upon.

That night I felt a presence in my bed, almost the same I had felt as a child when the Virgin visited, except the essence of the arrival was, unmistakably, male. It was not as simple as the spirit of the Mother of Christ. This wandering, unnamed spirit scared me just as much as the spectral Mary. I could feel his need, the burning beside me. I lay, repeating to myself I no longer believed in such things—surprised to find this was the truth I harboured—but I could not shake the sense a soul had entered the room. I did not turn my head toward him and, eventually, I fell back to sleep.

I would not have convinced anyone, had I had anyone to tell of my nighttime experience, yet I remained certain there had been a visitation. I had only to discover who he was.

†

The next Sunday afternoon I caught the tram into the city, wanting the bustle of strangers, their expressions of indifference. I alighted at St James with the help of the conductor—‘Mind your step, Missus,'—and, with some intention, I stood near the Archibald fountain, the spray pushed by the winter wind towards my face, fine droplets sticking to the back of my gloves. I tried not to look as if I was searching, casually strolling around the edge of the pool, reading the bronze plaque. I wore a black dress, one of the few dresses I had, the smallness of my waist now allowing me a full skirt, one I thought reasonably fashionable, although my straw, wide-brimmed hat was from ten years ago. I should have been wearing a tight fitting cloche but they seemed, to me, to provide no modesty at all. There were many women now who didn't bother with such things. Two such twenty-year-old creatures sat on one of the park benches in pencil-line skirts, chatting loudly, swinging their shiny, curled hair around as if they were at a dance.

To resist the pull of the War Memorial I headed toward the harbour. In the Domain, the huge expanse of open lawn holding out against the city's encroachment, cricketers in white called to one another, hastening to finish their game before the sun drained from the grass bowl. There was a crowd at Speaker's Corner. Bordered by Moreton Bay figs and their leaf litter, groups of firebrands declaimed against whomever or whatsoever they thought hadn't brought them joy. Prosperity had not spread everywhere, pockets of malcontents remained. They stood on stepladders, perched high enough to proclaim their answers to the world's problems. I had caught some of their ranting on previous Sundays, as I skirted past them, following the path down to the Point.

I intended to do the same this day but as I walked I found my gaze drawn to a small crowd focused on a man standing precariously on a fruit box. He was silhouetted against the pale-blue afternoon sky, a glimpse of the Harbour Bridge just above his head.

‘We were sent to the other side of the world,' the man spoke. ‘Sent to kill, to maim, to starve, to die, all to maintain the Empire and what did the Empire give us in return? She betrayed us. How many died because the Brits were more concerned with themselves than with us? Abandoned us like we were nothing more than rats. And, so the Yanks came in with their super-bombs and did … and did … and did … what they did. And then Korea.'

I knew the voice. Perhaps I had known from the first. He was, essentially, the same man, his moustache, his lean shape, his hair sleekly black. He raised his hands to encompass the crowd and—here was the difference—his fingers were ­quivering.

‘Should we really go into all these wars without question?'

I heard the murmur of ‘pacifist', spoken with clear disapproval.

‘No, sir, I am not a pacifist. I simply ask the question: when does it end? When does … when does … when does the light return?'

I was still some distance back and could only just make out his shiny brown suit. It'd once been a fine suit but the pin stripes were faded, an outfit from St Vincent de Paul. His hat had also lost its firmness, joining his shoulders in a slow sloping towards the ground. I stood behind rows of similarly garbed men, mustiness rising off them. A few glanced in my direction, clearly surprised to see a woman.

‘Surely we have a duty to God, to our fellow man, to ­question the need for all this … this … blood … shed?'

I could not follow the train of his thought, though I could hear the weakness in his voice and the men around me could hear it too.

‘Catholic,' I heard someone else murmur and the group began to move away towards another speaker calling out passionately about the rights of the workers.

I remained still while he climbed off the rickety box. He stood looking down at it, as if it was to blame for his deserting audience. Fred. I thought of those I had wanted to return—my mother, my father, Auntie Iris, Mary—and could barely believe it was my never-dead husband who had, instead, come home. Had his spirit visited me the other night, as a calling card for his imminent arrival? I had enjoyed my mourning. At some point along the way, the loss had become embedded and I did not need, or want, to lose it. This ghastly figure beside the box was inconvenient enough to cause flight.

He had not yet noticed me; I could walk away, let the shadow remain a shadow.

‘Fred?' I said.

He seemed to take a long moment before raising his head, the Domain suddenly quiet, only marked by the sound of my breathing.

‘Gracie.' He said it simply and raised both his hands to remove his hat. The distance between us was the same. I had not moved from my position at the back of the vanished crowd. He looked to the ground and I foolishly followed his gaze to the grass, thinking I had missed something important.

‘Gracie,' he repeated, his head coming up now to find the point over my shoulder.

‘Hello, Fred.'

‘I wondered … I thought you would find me, some way.'

‘I haven't been looking for you,' I answered. I needed him to know this, for there to be no misguided perception of weakness in me.

‘But you have found me.' He smiled meekly, a mere joining of the lips, and took a step towards me. ‘Gracie …'

I wanted him to stop saying my name. With his frame hunched forward, his hat pathetic in his hands, he could have been a tramp about to ask for spare change.

‘Where are you living?' I asked.

My coldness seemed to stop him.

‘Here and there.'

I could not imagine how his Oriental woman had agreed to living ‘here and there'. They were Here, after all, no longer There, where they belonged.

On closer inspection, Fred's moustache was ragged and patches of grey hairs were littered all over his scalp. The quivering in his hands was not, as I had hoped, just a sign of his emotion while orating, it was a constant shake that reminded me, horribly, of Father Benjamin. He kept licking his lips though the moisture he gave them seemed to disappear again immediately and his skin had a haggard pall. He had aged, as I had, the traces of his distress/despair/pain plainly visible, lost dreams dragging him down. Only his eyes held the same come-and-go spark.

†

We sat not far from the cricket, Fred producing a grey blanket from an old suitcase and laying it out like a picnic rug. I tried not to look at the stains and holes in it or to imagine why he would have such an item with him. I tucked my legs up under myself, hoping to appear as a curious spectator watching the wickets fall with her aged beau beside her. Fred sat with his arms wrapped around his knees, his shoes, like everything about him, scuffed and un-polished.

‘Did you get my letter?' he asked.

‘Yes, I got your letters,' I replied shortly, wondering why he would want to dive right into the painful past.

‘And you didn't want to help me?' His voice accusing.

‘Help you?'

‘I was in despair, Gracie. As a Christian woman, I would have thought …'

‘In despair? You?'

‘I would have thought …'

He ran his middle finger along the hairs of his moustache, his head tipped up to watch the clouds hurrying across the sun.

I did not want to hear of his despair. None of his feelings could compare with mine. All the words I couldn't speak to him. How could he talk to me of those letters with their joy of new-found happiness when I had no one to replace his withdrawn love?

‘I sold the house, Fred.' A simple statement of fact seemed the easiest option.

‘The house?' He turned his gaze back to me. ‘The house?' He repeated, as if only just remembering there had ever been such a place.

‘I got a good price for it and I bought a flat. The difference has been keeping me going since your money orders stopped arriving. And I work. At a hospital.' I felt proud of this announcement and was frustrated by Fred returning his attention to his hat, sitting there beside his feet. He picked it up and I had a sudden fear he meant to put it on and walk away.

‘I like the work, Fred,' trying to soften my voice. ‘I file.'

‘You file?' He was asking his hat, rather than me.

‘Yes, I file.'

We had come to a dead end.

‘Do you do good, Gracie?' Looking up at me, he had a smirk on his face and I supposed he was making fun of me.

‘I do what I must to live.'

‘Yes, we all do what we must to live.'

He glanced at the suitcase closed on the grass beside us. I had seen briefly what was inside when he opened it to retrieve the blanket: a razor, pair of trousers, and crushed shirt, one thick pair of socks and a brown-paper bag twisted around a bottle. This, I suddenly realised, was Fred's life. Any trace of her, the woman he had abandoned me for, was no longer evident. I could not decide if I was elated or sickened.

Evening was falling, dusk making it difficult for the batsman to see the cricket ball. One of the fielders called ‘Time? Time?'

†

On the tram, I tried to recall asking Fred to come home with me. Perhaps it was assumed between us, that he would pack up the blanket and bring his worldly possessions along with him. As we rode I anticipated his entry into my flat with trepidation, acutely aware of letting this erstwhile stranger into the sanctity of my isolation. What items remained of our time together? I felt shy of pieces that might indicate any kind of shrine to what had been and wished I could snatch some time before he entered, to have things arranged properly. I was not a slovenly person—the dishes had been washed and put away—but I knew the cushions were scattered on the lounge and the smell of last night's meatloaf still hung in the kitchen.