Alone on a Wide Wide Sea (10 page)

Outside though Marty and I really came into our own. We did everything that Aunty Megs had done. There was no time any more for swimming or fishing or climbing trees. Most mornings we’d go off, as she had done, up to the main road, searching for any surviving orphans. We fed those we had in the compound, and every so often we rode off into the bush, the animal cavalcade following behind, hoping one or two might stay up there. We milked the cows and the goats, fed the hens, took pot-shots with Aunty Megs’ gun at any dingoes that came too close. We even learned to be brave with the geese, and to keep Henry out of the house – we were only partially successful in that. We learned to cope. And, to be honest, we liked it, every moment of it, even the laundry and the shopping.

We’d ride off once a week into town, one of us on Big Black Jack, the other on Aunty Megs’ horse. We took it in turns to ride Big Black Jack because neither of us much liked Aunty Megs’ horse. He was easily spooked, a bit
nervous too, and not only by kangaroos either, but by just about everything. Whenever I rode him into town I felt the same as he did, always on edge, always twitchy. I could never forget that it was his fault Aunty Megs was lying there with a broken collar bone. He’d heard something rustling in the trees, she told us, and he’d reared up in sudden terror – that’s how it had happened. I could never forget that, so I could never trust him.

Then there were the visitors who came to call, usually for tea. Aunty Megs didn’t like these visits any more than we did. She swore she’d never fall off a horse again, nor ever get ill. It wasn’t that she didn’t like people. She did. But the trouble was they clearly liked her more than she liked them. Now she was incapacitated, they came visiting all too often and there was nothing much she could do about it.

When the vicar turned up, she didn’t like it one bit, and didn’t trouble to hide her feelings either. I was there when he came. She was pretty blunt with him. “I’m not at death’s door yet,” she told him. “Just broken a collar bone, that’s all. No need for the last rites.” He wasn’t amused and went off quite quickly after that. And Marty and I didn’t like the intrusion of these visitors much either. We felt that some of them were checking up on us to see if we were looking after
her properly. They’d bring baskets of food, and all of them, without exception, would ask if there was anything they could do to help. We loved it when Aunty Megs told them that her boys were looking after her wonderfully, that everything was just fine.

It was about this time though that I first began to notice a change in Marty. He’d grown up a lot recently. He’d always been a lot taller than me, but now he seemed much older too. Until now I’d hardly noticed the four-year difference between us. But I did now. He was becoming the man of the house. Marty would sit with Aunty Megs for hours on end, listening to the stories of how her family and Mick’s had come over to Australia from Ireland a century before, driven out by the potato famine, she said. They had found this valley and settled here. Marty loved looking through Aunty Megs’ photograph albums with her too. He wanted to hear about Mick in particular, and she loved to talk about him too.

I remember sitting there watching them, and feeling a little jealous of Marty for the first time. Marty seemed to be able to talk to her in a way I couldn’t. He wasn’t just one of her “boys,” he was becoming more of a friend. And she still treated me more like a boy, like a child. Up to now that had
been fine, but suddenly it wasn’t. Sometimes I couldn’t bear to sit there and watch them, and I’d go off to bed early. It made me feel very alone again. I’d sulk about it from time to time, but with Marty I could never sulk for long. He wouldn’t let you. One way or another he’d talk me round, get me smiling again.

Once we were alone in our room at night he would be the same old Marty again. We’d share our deepest secrets in the dark. We’d talk into the early morning sometimes. It was during one of those long nights that Marty told me his worst fear, which then became my worst fear too.

“D’you know what I think, Arthur?” he said. “Sometimes I think this is our real home, that we really are her children, that we’ll be able to stay here for ever. Then I think: but we’re not her children, are we? We’re like her family of animals out there, her little fellows, her orphans. We’re orphans too, aren’t we? She hasn’t said anything, but sometimes I think she wants us to go, just like she wants them to go. That boy in the photo with Mick. He’s her real son. She won’t say anything about him. But he must have gone, and when he went he didn’t come back, did he? But I don’t want to go, not ever. I feel like I’m a part of her proper family, that you’re my brother, that Mick’s my real father
too. I’m going to be just like him one day. I am.”

Then he added, “You’ve still got that lucky key of yours?” I had, though I didn’t wear it any more – maybe because I thought I didn’t need to. For some time I’d been keeping it in the drawer in my bedside table. I’d look at it from time to time, but it no longer seemed quite so important to me as it had been at Cooper’s Station. I must have thought that I couldn’t get any luckier anyway, so I just didn’t need it any more. As for the cross Piggy Bacon had made us wear, I must have lost it. But I can’t remember how or where. Marty chucked his in the river one day and I wondered then if he was throwing away his luck, our luck.

From that night on I couldn’t get out of my head what Marty had said about Aunty Megs wanting us to leave one day. When we were alone, the two of us talked about nothing else. We decided to wait until Aunty Megs was up and about again, and then we’d ask her. But even after her shoulder was better and things were back to normal again, and she was doing the cooking and we were eating something else besides scrambled eggs and baked beans, we still kept putting it off. In the end we put it off for good. The truth is, I think, that neither of us really wanted to know the answer because we feared too much what it might
be. It was to be another couple of years before we found out, and then we didn’t have to ask her. Aunty Megs wasn’t one to beat about the bush. When she told us, she told us straight.

Aunty Megs had been quiet for a few days. She was like that. There’d be times when she seemed very preoccupied. She wouldn’t sing. She’d sit alone on the verandah and read her poetry. She’d go for long rides. Marty said it was because she was missing Mick. And it was true that when his birthday came round or the anniversary of his death, that’s when she went most noticeably quiet. But this time there was a difference. There was a nervousness about her
we’d never seen before. It was almost as if she was avoiding us.

In retrospect, of course, we should have guessed what was coming, but we didn’t. I put it down to Henry. Henry had gone missing a couple of days before. We weren’t that worried, because Henry was always going off on walkabout into the bush, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few days. He always came back. I’d just been outside to see if he was down his hole. I came in for supper and was washing my hands in the sink. “He’s not back, Aunty,” I said.

“Well, maybe he’s gone for good this time,” Aunty Megs was serving up as she talked. “Maybe Henry’s finally decided it’s the right time for him to go. ‘Bout time too, I’d say.” She took a deep breath before she spoke again. “Well, I reckon this is as good a time as any to tell you boys.”

“Tell us what?” I asked, sitting down at the table. My plate was piled high in front of me with tatty pie – Aunty Megs’ meat and potato pie with crusty pastry. I was longing to get at it, but we always had to wait till everyone was served. Aunty Megs was very strict about such things. “I’ve been writing letters,” she went on, “to a friend of mine in Sydney – an old friend of Mick’s from the navy, Freddie
Dodds. It’s taken a while, but now it’s all set up.” Up until now she hadn’t been looking at us, but now she was. “I decided to wait till you were both old enough, till you were both ready, and now I reckon you are. Freddie says you can start work in a couple of weeks’ time.”

My appetite for tatty pie had suddenly gone. Now we knew. Our worst fears were about to be realised.

“Freddie Dodds runs a boatyard, makes boats just like we do in the shed, only bigger of course, the real thing. He wants to take you on as apprentices. It’s all fixed up. A proper paid job in the yard and a place for you to live.”

While she was talking Henry nudged the door open, and came wandering in. None of us paid him any attention. “I’m not going to ask you what you think,” Aunty Megs said. “But I am going to tell you why I’m doing this. If I’ve learned anything in this life, I’ve learned that you can’t cling on. After Mick died, after I did my crying, I had to let him go. With all those animals out there in the compound, I mustn’t hang on to them. They’re not mine. They have a life to live out there. And you’re not mine either. I have to let you go. You have a life to live.”

Marty was on his feet, upset like I’d never seen him before. “But we’re not dead. And we’re not a couple of
bloody joeys either. This place, it’s our home. I don’t want to go to Sydney. I don’t want to go at all.”

Aunty Megs went to him then, and put her arms round him and held him. “Do you think I want you to go?” she said. “Do you think I want to be here on my own? You’re my boys, aren’t you? The Ark is your home, always will be. It’ll be here for you whenever you want to come back, and I’ll be here too. I’m your mother, aren’t I?” She turned to me then. “Don’t just sit there, come and give your old mother a hug too.” The hugging helped stem the tears after a while, but then the numbing reality set in. We were going. In a couple of weeks we’d be leaving home, leaving Aunty Megs.

We lived out those weeks as if every day was our last. They passed in a blur of riding and fishing and swimming. We groomed Big Black Jack every day till his coat glistened as never before. Henry was fed his bottle several times a day, spoiled rotten even more than usual. And all the while Aunty Megs was growing quieter and quieter. We so hoped she would weaken and let us stay, but she remained resolute. Every night she was darning or mending something. She couldn’t have her boys going to Sydney looking like a couple of raggedy scarecrows, she said. And,
while she was doing it, and because we knew she loved us to do it, we recited poems for her. Marty did
The Yarn of the Nancy Bell
, always his favourite because it had a rollicking rhythm and a gruesome twist to it at the end which we all loved. And I’d do my party piece,
The Ancient Mariner
.

The last time I did it, she looked up at me and said: “Thank you, Arthur dear, I shan’t forget it.” I haven’t forgotten it either. She came into our room on the last evening, and put a book in each of our suitcases – mine was
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
, Marty’s,
The Yarn of the Nancy Bell
. I have them by me now, as I am writing this. They are still my most treasured books.

Out of a leather shoelace I made a new tie for my lucky key that night, and hung it around my neck. I wasn’t at all sure I really believed in that kind of thing any more. At fifteen it seemed to me it might be a bit of a childish superstition, but I wasn’t sure enough of myself to abandon it. Besides, the key was my last link to my sister, to the Kitty I remembered, or imagined. Memory or imagination? Already I couldn’t be at all sure that Kitty had ever existed. Only the key told me she had. And the key had been lucky for us. Hadn’t it brought us to Aunty Megs all those years
before? So I kept my key. And I’m glad I did, very glad indeed.

The last I saw of Aunty Megs she was holding her straw hat on her head and standing there, disappearing into the cloud of dust left behind by the bus. For Marty and me this was the first time we’d been on a bus since the day we first arrived in Australia ten years before. Then we were leaving Sydney. Now we were going back. As I remember Marty said just about the same thing to me that he’d said then. “We’ll be all right.”

We sat silent the whole way, neither of us believing this was happening. Both of us knew we were leaving our childhood behind us for ever. It felt just like we were heading off into the bush again, into the unknown.

Together we might have been, but each of us felt very alone on that journey. When I felt the tears welling inside me, I tried to cheer myself up by thinking of Henry’s horrible hat hole, or trying to get an
ee-aw
out of Barnaby. But sooner or later I’d think of Aunty Megs, and the moment that happened I’d be overwhelmed by a sadness I’d never felt before, a sadness so painful it gnawed at my stomach. I’ve only got to think about her even now, and I
can feel the same pang, faint perhaps now like a distant echo, but still there. That’s how much I loved her, loved our glowing time with her.

Memory is a great and powerful magician. It plays tricks on you that you simply can’t understand, no matter how hard you try to work them out. In my case it obliterated my early beginnings almost entirely, the lucky key around my neck being the only clue that I’d even had a beginning at all. And of my sister Kitty, the memory magician left me nothing but a shadowy phantom, which became more shadowy with every passing year. Yet I can remember the
nightmare years of Cooper’s Station and Piggy Bacon as if they all happened yesterday. But fortunately for my sanity, those healing, life-affirming years with Aunty Megs and Marty at the Ark are even more vivid to me than the nightmare time that preceded them.

I’m guessing now of course, but for me I think maybe it’s partly at least a question of intensity. During those periods of my early life, maybe before I built up my protective wall around me as most of us do as we get older, I felt everything so strongly, so deeply. Good, bad or ugly, it stays with me. But that still doesn’t explain why so much that has happened since those early years has been lost in a haze, that I seem to have forgotten as much as I’ve remembered. It’s as if time itself had taken its time during my childhood, but once I got off that bus in Sydney it picked up speed, and from then on it was a roller coaster of a ride, and a bumpy one too, that brought me from then to now, leaving me with only fleeting moments of clarity, the highs and the lows, with so much in between, but lost to me for ever.