Magpie Hall (16 page)

Henry takes her hand. There are beautiful yellow and black butterflies. I will show you. You will love them.

She nods, puts aside her disappointment. She’s not sure if she wants to go through with it now, but she has come this far. Very well, she agrees.

Very good. And did we decide where we wanted this butterfly?

She can hardly bring herself to say it and she feels herself blushing. She won’t look at him. Here, she says, and points through her skirts to her lower thigh.

Very good, he says again. Well, you just get the place ready in your own time.

She sits on the armchair and Henry moves behind her to rest a reassuring hand on her shoulder. She pulls her skirt up gingerly, then rolls down her stocking, exposing the area. Her skin looks very white, like pristine bone china, and she has an urge to pull the stocking back up and float right out of the tattoo shop. But Henry’s hand on her shoulder is firm, as if he senses what she is thinking and what she needs to keep her there.

McDonald pulls up a low stool to sit beside her, dips a pen into an inkwell and begins to draw on her leg. He works in feather-light strokes, and by necessity he leans his right arm on her lap. His left hand pulls the skin of her thigh tight, his great palm wrapped around her, as if it is nothing to him to be handling a lady thus. Instead of being offended however, she finds it quite thrilling, this huge bear of a man treating her as if she were a sailor. His hands are unexpectedly clean, apart from a few ink stains — she expected more dirt. He is so close to her that she can smell him, a mixture of pipe tobacco and sweat and alcohol; she is not sure if the latter is from drinking or from sterilising. She does not want a drunkard working on her with sharp needles, but his hands are steady. Only a fine down covers his great bald head and diamonds of perspiration are caught within it. She is feeling quite hot herself and the tattooing has not even begun.

Is that to your satisfaction, madam? He has stopped drawing and is now looking up at her. She glances at where his hands still rest on her leg. The butterfly is rendered beautifully in black lines, as if the
man himself were a lepidopterist sketching his latest conquest.

She nods.

Then we will begin.

Henry picks up a stool from nearby and puts it on the other side of her. He sits and takes her hand. He is trying to comfort her, but she feels the sinew in his fingers taut and anxious. He squeezes too hard.

Dear, she says, and extracts her hand with the other. She pats his arm.

McDonald lines up his needles and picks one up. He dips it in a tiny pot of ink.

Are you ready? he asks.

She nods and takes a deep breath. This is not how she imagined it, although she had no clear idea of what receiving a tattoo would be like. Some nights she has dreamed of a man in shirtsleeves and a neat waistcoat with a pocket watch performing the task. Other nights she awoke sweating after she was held down by leering sailors who wanted to do more to her than mark her with a butterfly. She could still feel their callused hands on her ankles and wrists and the searing pain of the needle, as if she were being branded with a hot iron.

Instead, here she is with this curious man, so rough-looking and formidable, and yet polite and gentle, with clean hands.

She had imagined it would be like a deep scratch, that he would drag the needle across her skin like a quill, ripping through her flesh. Instead he plunges the needle into her skin and out again, prick, prick, prick. The pricks are hot little bee stings. It does not hurt as much as she thought it would. He pauses to wipe away the ink that spills and to dip his needle in the pot again.

She lets out the breath she realises she has been holding and turns to Henry.

But it doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would, she tells him.
He takes her hand again, but this time it is more relaxed, even though she is conscious of how damp her palm is in his.

That is good, my love, he says.

Instead of abating however, the pain grows as the area of the tattoo expands. She notices that when McDonald rubs away the ink now, it is coloured red with her blood. But she finds that if she concentrates on the pain rather than trying to ignore it she can transform it into heat, or pressure; she can deaden her own senses at will. Besides, it is a small price to pay for the result — her favourite insect in all the world, and the bond that this will create with her husband. She thinks of their first night together again, of how she ran her hands over his body and how it responded to her touch. She imagines him doing the same to her, running his hands up her thigh and lingering on the delicate wings of her butterfly. She will never regret what she has done.

Rosemary

Half an hour after the intruders had left, and I had tried to go back to sleep, the phone rang. The noise filled the house: the old-fashioned mechanical bells of the downstairs phone and the newer, electronic sound coming from my grandparents’ bedroom. It was a melancholy sound, the way it kept going and going, and I pictured those two empty single beds with the phone between them, and nobody there to pick it up. I lay there and listened to it ring five, ten, twenty times before it stopped.

I didn’t need to answer it to know it would be one of my family calling to berate me. Let them call, I thought. I didn’t have to answer. Finally, I relaxed enough to fall asleep. I had intense, loud dreams, with lots of action and purpose, but when I woke up, I couldn’t remember them. They played just out of reach, like a piano in another room.

I spent the day with my feet by the heater, working. I amazed myself with the level of concentration I was able to muster. Towards late afternoon, however, I became distracted. The day was still, which was particularly eerie after the storm of the day and night before, and was puncuated only by distant farm noises — a dog barking, or a sheep calling; a distant engine. The sound of the river had once again died down to nothing, and the sun had even managed to stay for most of the day. But as I worked I became aware of a shift in the atmosphere of the house. Magpie Hall was always creaking and groaning, so I didn’t worry too much about that, but the noises I started hearing were different somehow. Scraping sounds. Light thumps. Even though I was finally warm enough, I felt cold air on my neck like damp breath.

I got up without making a sound and poked my head out into the hallway. I was pretty sure the noises had come from the other end of the house, so I headed in that direction, past bedrooms and the stairs to the attic. The hallway turned sharply right and took me past what used to be the servants’ quarters, once separate from the other rooms but now, with some wall removal, incorporated into the rest of the house. The bedrooms here were tiny, with narrow single beds as bowed as a ship’s bottom, where we were made to sleep as children. It was in one of these rooms that I had woken that morning to the mist and the ghostly music coming from the home paddock, like a harp string amplified in the still air. To this day I don’t know how she made that soulful note; I have tried and failed to replicate it many times.

The door to the room at the bottom of the tower steps stood slightly ajar. I pushed and it opened to reveal a clean, quiet place with bookshelves and, on the walls, a few insects behind glass. It lacked the chaos and clutter of some of the other rooms. I often wondered, with no proof, whether this was where Henry had kept his cabinet of
curiosities. There was something about its awkward size and almost round shape, the way it was hidden away behind a door more suited to a cupboard. Grandpa had talked about hearing Henry pacing and muttering, and this seemed like the most apt place for a madman to ponder his past regrets. Apart from the tower itself, of course, but that wouldn’t be the most practical room to house anything precious, with its windows on all sides, its exposure to the sun and the wind.

More sounds, closer now: a light tinkling, a clicking, coming from over my head. My scalp prickled. Rather than backing away, I decided to go up there for the first time in twenty years. Even if I found nothing, the tower would give me a vantage point like no other. From there, I would be able to see Sam, know that he was far away and that the noises were just my imagination. And there might be an earthly explanation — a trapped bird trying to find its way out.

The staircase was a tight, suffocating spiral, with such tiny steps that I had to walk on tiptoes. It was absolutely dark with the door at the top shut. I had to lean my weight against it to open it. I expected to blink in the light but it was gloomy. Blinds covered the windows. It smelt of cold and something else. Smoke. Stale tobacco. As I walked slowly around the column created by the stairwell, my ears started to hum. I closed my eyes and took a few more steps.

She was there again, under the far window. Her back emerged pale in the murky light, her hair piled languidly on top of her head. She was hunched over something; the tension in her back suggested concentration, and she hadn’t heard me come in. The bird appeared to hover above her shoulder blades, all curves and dipping wings, waiting to take flight. She was completely silent, and the sound of my breath filled the room. It was only a matter of time before she heard me, and sure enough she sat up straight, alert, and her shoulder began to turn. Soon I would see her face. It was all happening exactly as it
had on that day all those years ago. Perhaps she had never left this room, had been waiting all this time for me to come back. I closed my eyes. But as the moment stretched out I felt a sharp, cold wind on the back of my neck and the door to the stairs slammed shut. Instinctively, my head snapped back to see who or what had closed it, and I was just in time to see a curtain shiver and settle. An open window.

When I turned back, she was gone. I froze, looking right and left without turning my head, and called out into the thick air. ‘Hello?’ The only sound was the curtain stirring in the breeze. I pulled it back to let in some light and to close the window. Although the figure was no longer there, the room was not empty. A telescope was aimed at one of the windows. Against the wall, where she had been, lay a mottled and lumpy-looking single mattress, with a grey army blanket bunched at the end. An ashtray sat to one side of it, overflowing with roll-your-own cigarette stubs, the source of the stale smell. I went over and kicked at the mattress — no way of knowing how long it had been there or when it had last been used. Had someone been here the whole time? Sleeping here?
Living
here? I felt sick, and more scared than I had moments before. Ghosts I could handle — cigarette-smoking intruders I couldn’t.

This was too much. Although I didn’t feel that my business at Magpie Hall was done, it was time to leave. I had always known that the house was an eerie place, but now I felt truly frightened.

I tried to open the door to the stairs but it was stuck. I pulled harder. I jerked at the handle and felt a stabbing pain in my shoulder from the effort. This was not just a sticky door. This was a
locked
door.

‘Help!’ I shouted, and hammered on it with my fist, but the only person who would be able to hear me would be the one who had
locked it in the first place. Better to stay quiet and find another way out. I looked around for something to bash the door handle, but there was nothing useful up here. I went to the open window and looked out. This particular window faced north, over the river, and I could see it meandering, reduced now to its pre-storm state, a benign stream. The sun was sinking in the west, rimming the clouds with gold. I moved to the western window, where the telescope was positioned. I could make out someone up in one of the paddocks on the hill, riding a quad bike, flanked by dogs. A waterfall of sheep cascaded down the hill in front of it. A quick look through the telescope told me it was Sam, or Josh, I couldn’t be sure. Josh, I thought: he was a big man, broader than Sam, a darker, more solid presence. Another person stood by a gate, watching — an androgynous figure in a raincoat and a hat, though my instincts said it was a woman, or a girl. She was short enough to lean on the gate without bending.

Both of them were too far away to hear me if I yelled and they wouldn’t be able to see me inside. I knew there was a ladder outside that climbed the side of the tower to a small balcony. It was easy enough to get out there, though I’d never done it before. The father of a childhood friend had slipped from a roof and broken his back and that fact had long kept my curiosity at bay. But today called for decisive action. I pushed the window as far open as it would go and stood on tiptoe to get my leg out, my skirt hitched around my waist. I held tightly to the window frame as I lowered myself down. The ladder was a few feet away and I eased myself around to it, a little at a time, not realising until now just how scared of heights I actually was. My hands were slippery and hot and my chest felt tight with the effort of breathing. Once I had the ladder in my grip I relaxed a little, and prepared myself for the short ascent.

At the tower’s balcony I jumped down to safety and crouched to
catch my breath. My skirt was immediately soaked by a dirty puddle filled with autumn leaves and I stood up again.

It was magnificent. I couldn’t believe I had never been up here. From the top of the tower I felt as though I were a bird soaring over the farm, with a 360-degree outlook and the biting wind swirling around my slight body. But I barely felt the cold; instead I turned and turned and looked out over the roofs of the house, over its chimneys and turrets and to the land of the farm beyond. The land that had been in my family for five generations and was now going to be lost to us forever.

I heard a shuffle and looked left to see a pair of magpies staring at me from one of the chimneys, no doubt surprised to see a human up here. They conferred for a moment, then flew away, leaving me to my fate.

The figures in the distant paddock were still there, but I could see now that it would be futile trying to get their attention. I waved my arms over my head a couple of times, but they were too far away.

There was nothing for it but to find a way down off the roof by myself. The sun had sunk dangerously low now. Soon it would be dark and I didn’t want to stay up here all night — the cold would kill me.

I’d never exactly thought of myself as a lucky person. I’d had too much of my share of misery and grief for that. But as I stood there, on that tower, looking in vain for a place on the roof that looked safe to descend, where I wouldn’t slip on the tiles and slide to my death, I slowly became aware of a sound that I hardly dared hope for.

I heard it coming from the east, where the wind was blowing from; as I turned towards it the last of the leaves were fleeing the poplars and flying towards the house to gather in its gutters. The
deep rumbling faded in and out as a car rounded corners and drove up and down the hills and valleys of the farm.

I stood, waiting. Finally, an old cream Mercedes rolled into view: my brother Charlie. I laughed. I had never felt so much relief, so much tension dissipate at the sight of anyone. I jumped up and down and waved, but he didn’t see me; I could picture him hunched over the steering wheel, hands at ten and two, concentrating on avoiding the puddles so his precious classic car would stay as clean as possible. I lost sight of the car as it pulled up in front of the house. I would just have to wait and hope that my voice was loud enough that it wouldn’t be whipped away from me by the wind.

The heavy door thudded and I heard his footsteps crunching on the gravel. I took a huge breath and called out to him.

He stopped walking for a second, then resumed. I heard the boot of his car open and close. I called again.

‘Charlie!’

He had stopped walking. I heard him, barely. ‘Rose?’

I leaned as far over the balcony rail as I dared. ‘I’m up here! On the tower!’

He didn’t call out again. Instead I heard him walk up the steps to the house. His every movement was so loud, carried to my ears by the wind, but he seemed to be having trouble hearing me. He knocked on the front door.

‘Charlie!’ I called again. ‘I’m up here!’

I could hear his footsteps as he walked down the drive again. And then there he was on the lawn, looking up at me.

‘What the hell are you doing up there?’

I laughed. I could have flown down into his arms.

‘I’m locked up here. You need to come in and unlock the door to the tower. Please,’ I added.

‘Okay, but the front door’s locked.’

Damn
. I had barricaded myself inside the house. I had no idea how he would get in.

‘You might have to break a window. Please hurry. I’m freezing up here.’

I crouched down to shelter from the wind and hugged myself, waiting for the sound of breaking glass, but it never came. Five minutes later, his voice came from just below me and made me jump.

‘Rose.’

When I got to the bottom of the ladder he reached as far as he could out the window and I took his hand, steadying myself as I crept towards him. He pulled me through the window and I reached up to give him the biggest hug of his life.

‘Thank God,’ I said into his neck. ‘You don’t know how glad I am to see you. I thought I was dead.’

‘Okay,’ he said, bemused. ‘You can tell me later what you were doing up there, but you should know — the tower door wasn’t locked. In fact, it was slightly open. You weren’t stuck up here at all.’

My cheeks began to burn. ‘How did you get into the house?’

‘That was easy too. The kitchen door was open. Like it always is.’

‘But I locked it!’

‘I don’t think so. Why would you do that?’

I didn’t answer.