Skylarking (16 page)

THIRTY-THREE

P
ERHAPS IT HAD ALL BEEN FOR SHOW
. H
ARRIET SOUGHT
me out the next morning and would not leave my side. She did not know why I had run, why I was angry; she had been talking to Albert about me, I had misunderstood.

‘I don't care, Harriet. Please stop speaking of it,' I said, and turned back to the mending pile.

The sock I was darning was scratchy and old, and the wool refused to lie the way I wanted.

I sighed in exasperation and threw the whole lot back in the basket.

‘Let us finish this later,' Harriet said. ‘Let's take a picnic together down to our beach.'

I was still mad. Mad at her and hurt, but I could see she was trying cheer me up. I thought of what I'd promised myself.

‘Fine,' I said. ‘The socks will have to wait.'

She took my hand and leaned in to kiss my cheek. ‘Come on. Mother's made ginger cake. I'll steal us some.'

It had rained that morning, but now the sky was clear and blue. Wet leaves gleamed in the bright sunshine. Where the sun pooled on the track, steam rose from the earth. I breathed it deeply as we walked.

‘Will you go back to Melbourne, do you think?' I asked after some time.

Harriet kicked at small stones, swinging the picnic basket as she moved. ‘I don't know, Kate. I so wish we could go together. Can you imagine it?'

I was quiet as I listened to her. She spoke of what we might see together, how we could have matching dresses made, and promenade along Collins Street arm in arm. She would have her aunt take me to the grand public library where I would see as many books as ever there were in the whole world, all there in one place.

‘And we can go to dances,' she said. ‘And you will have suitors, we both will, of course, and there will be parties and, Kate, it will be wonderful!'

I wondered if it would be. Yes, I wanted to see all of it, know all of it, but I wondered, as Harriet spoke, if it might not be the adventure I had always imagined it to be. Here was Harriet, after all, back from Melbourne, with nothing more than the fleeting memory of what might have been if her Patrick's intentions had indeed been true.

‘Do you ever think we might be just as happy here?' I asked her, and she stopped and turned to me and put her hand out to stop me, too.

‘No, Kate. We must go away – if we are to marry and have our own lives and families. There is no life for us here.' She was earnest as she spoke, in a way she had never been before. ‘Remember all of those adventures you always wanted to have? The ones you read about. Well, you can have them. I know that now. There is a whole other world out there. It really exists.' She gripped my hand. ‘You will adore it, I know you will. Why, you might do anything at all!'

We continued on.

‘You know,' she said, ‘there are women there who write books. I heard Aunt speak of them. They write books, or they teach. They are so clever, like you are.'

We walked down into a dip and the air grew a little colder as we crossed a small stream, come alive from the rain.

‘Why,' Harriet was saying, ‘if you still refused to think of marriage you could live with me and my rich husband who will look after us both, and you can write or read or do as you wish.'

I laughed with her. ‘You'll still have to convince Mother to let me go,' I said. ‘Perhaps when Emmaline is a bit older and James is old enough to help Father more.'

‘They are old enough now. We should ask, today, as soon as we are back. Won't it be wonderful!' She shivered, and I didn't know if it was from the cold breeze or excitement. ‘Look, there's McPhail's hut,' she said. ‘Let's go and tell him! He can be the first to know of our adventure together.'

I had been so engrossed in our conversation I had hardly realised we had come to the place where the track forked down to our beach, McPhail's hut clearly visible through the trees ahead. I was surprised at her suggestion and had no desire to see him. ‘I'd rather not.'

‘Go on, let's tell him that we will both soon be leaving.'

‘I hardly think he'll care,' I said, although I knew that he would care if Harriet were to leave again. I wondered at her sudden keenness to visit him when she'd been so reluctant that earlier time.

She pulled me along and, despite my resistance, I followed her. After a little way, Harriet stopped and put down the basket she carried. She gripped me by both wrists and spoke to me in that same earnest way again.

‘Truly though, Kate, I do not want to go without you again. I missed you so.' It was as if she could not say this seriously enough. Her gaze was intense. ‘You know that, don't you?'

‘Of course,' I said. ‘And I you.'

And she took my face in both her hands and leaned right into me, and her face was so close I could see the high pink of her cheeks, and the fine white hairs on her upper lip. Then she kissed me. Her lips were dry, and a puff of her breath, a little sour but warm, went straight into my mouth, and I closed my eyes and inhaled and opened them again. She was still there, and as her lips moved, ever so gently across mine, I was pierced by a feeling so acute I gasped, and felt her tongue, for a moment, just a moment, flicker against the inside of my lower lip. And then she pulled away.

‘That is what it is like,' she said, smiling at me, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘That is what it is like to be kissed.'

I hold it, that memory, in a deep recess in my mind. I take it out and examine it, again and again and again. The light in it has grown old and worn; the features of her face, the colour of her hair are blurred now; but each time, it is like the first crack of a newly laid fire, the moment the flames begin to lick. The second that is not before and is not after but is only now and now and now.

Oh, Harriet, my Harriet, that we could have stayed there, that we had not gone forwards. That we had been content; that we had turned and gone home.

But we did not turn back. We walked on, me fervid with her touch and with the strange fantasy of Melbourne in my mind. We walked on to McPhail's hut to tell him our news, not caring if it sounded childish for we had such plans in our imaginations. We laughed and skipped. All my hurt at the previous day's events melted away as though it had never been, for who was Albert anyway, of what import was he when I had my Harriet, when she had me.

Happy and chatting is how we came upon McPhail's hut, and it barely dented our merriment that it was empty for we were as high as kites, playful and foolish, and we let ourselves in, as bold as you like, to take our picnic at his table, to drink his tea, to pretend.

THIRTY-FOUR

‘L
OOK
,'
SAID
H
ARRIET
,
AS
I
UNDID OUR PICNIC
things on the table. ‘He has left his hat.' She placed it upon her head and growled. ‘Who goes there in my hut?' Her voice broke, and we both erupted in laughter for she was truly hopeless, her voice so high and sweet that it could sound nothing like that of McPhail's or any man's at all.

‘Here, let me try.' I took the hat from her and stood back, clearing my throat to deepen my voice. ‘Why, come in, Miss Harriet, you look parched,' I said gruffly, and she laughed, stepping back towards the open door.

‘Oh!' she cried dramatically. ‘I couldn't, Mr McPhail. I am all on my own and it wouldn't do at all for me to take tea with you alone.'

I lowered my voice. ‘Don't think of it, Miss Harriet, for you are quite safe with me.'

She backed further away, out the open door and into the light as I advanced, a leering grin on my face, and the hat pulled down low to shadow my eyes.

‘Please, Mr McPhail, don't look at me so, for I am quite overcome!' She raised her hand to her forehead and threw back her head. Harriet in the sunlight. Picking up her skirts, a fistful in both hands, swishing them about, her hair slipping over her shoulders, a strand caught on her lips, as she turned this way and that, this way and that.

As I came to the doorway, I saw McPhail's rifle, leaning there against the wall. I took it up in both hands.

‘I have ways of making you do as I say, young lady,' I growled in the make-believe voice, and held the gun in front of me. It was heavier than I expected and awkward, and Harriet's eyes widened as she gasped.

‘You are very forward, sir,' she said, and lowered her eyes, peeking through her lashes and smiling.

Laughing, I raised the gun to my shoulder.

‘Oh!' said Harriet and brought both hands to her mouth, her long fingers stretched over the O of her lips. She ducked her head, turned as though to run away from me, held up one splayed hand in mock horror.

There was a sharp crack. A bitter, burning smell. A shocking kick against my shoulder that spun me sideways so that I never even saw her fall. I dropped the rifle as I turned back. Saw a squawking flash of cockatoos go reeling and wheeling into the sky. The soft secret underside of their wings so close, so tender.

I heard a thud, cushioned by leaf litter, a strange gurgle of breath.

‘Harriet.' My eyes told me one thing and my mind another, as if they were conversing in foreign tongues. I could not make what I saw and what I felt and what I heard and what I knew make any sense at all.
What a strange feeling,
I thought.
I must describe this to Harriet.

‘Harriet!'
It is part of the game, part of the scene,
I think. She has fallen, one arm flung dramatically away from her body, a white hand across her stomach, her legs tangled in her skirts; it's like a moment from a theatre piece.

Bravo, my love,
I think, for we have never played like this before – and a slippery, dark thought, like a snake, sidewinds in the undercurrents of my thoughts. This is not a game. She is not playing. Something is wrong.

She has fainted, I decide. The shock of it. The cap has gone off. Somehow, I have fired the gun. I have frightened the birds and I have frightened Harriet, and she has fainted clean away and has crumpled to the ground there, and I shall hold her up and she shall open her eyes and blink and say,
Oh Kate, what an awful fright I have had. I thought that you had shot me.

I take five steps and am beside her. I kneel down and slide one hand behind her shoulders and say softly, for you must always speak softly to one who has fainted, ‘Harriet, Harriet. You fainted.'

But when I raise her up her head drops back, and her mouth gapes open and there is a wetness on my arm, a thick, warm wetness. Again my mind seems not to work for I cannot interpret what I see. I am firmer now; I am angry with Harriet for not having fainted because this is something else altogether but I do not know what. That snake again, glistening and black, sliding through my mind down to my chest, and it is looping, looping around my heart and squeezing and squeezing and, heavens, I am gasping, gasping, gasping. I cannot breathe.

Time unwinds. I am very still.

When we were young, I convinced Harriet to climb to a fork in the old gum at Murray's with me. She did not want to do it. I cajoled, I sweetened her up. I climbed slowly behind her, letting her feel my reassuring presence close on her heels, bracing for her if she fell.

Up and over the swirled knots of the gum we went, reaching around the white trunk to find a foothold. The only sounds, our leather boots against the grain of the tree, the heave of our breath as we climbed.

‘Don't look down,' I told Harriet, and she did not, steadfastly, determinedly, going higher and higher, her eyes only on the next hand hold.

It was when we reached the fork that she realised how high we had come, how far below were the patchworked colours of the earth, the glinting surface of the sea. It was then that she froze, astride the branch, her arms hooked about the girth of the tree, and she whispered to me, ‘Kate, I cannot move, I cannot move. Do not leave me here. Do not go.'

It grew dark while we were in that tree. I knew that I must go for help, to fetch her father, who could climb up and hoist Harriet over his shoulders if she could not be moved.

But every time I gently insisted that I would run, that I would run so fast she would scarcely notice me gone and that I would be back and we would climb down, she would grit her teeth and tears would choke her.

‘Do. Not. Leave. Me. I cannot bear it.'

For hours we sat there. Hours while I spoke calmly and told her stories, recited great swathes of my favourite books, sang a hymn even, knowing that to climb down away from her would surely kill her.

It was late when the lanterns came moving through the bush, and the calls of the search party reached us.

‘Up here,' I shouted. ‘We are up here', and even when they climbed up and reached us, Harriet held me there with her strangled voice, saying, ‘Do not leave me.'

She wept as her father carried her down. All the way down, I stayed close.

And when we got to the bottom, she clung to me and then she pulled away and yelled, ‘I hate you! I hate you!' And buried her face in her father's chest and let herself be half carried home.

My own father took me kindly by the arm and walked with me in the dark hush of the bush. I ached with tiredness, my arms, my legs, my weary eyes and throat, and my father just led me forwards and didn't say a thing.

I am frozen here holding Harriet. She is not moving, and the dark pool is spreading below her head and it creeps towards my foot, and I shift the toe of my boot so that it doesn't touch and still I crouch here and still I do not move and inside my head I am screaming for help, I need help, I must get help.

I think I hear her voice, too, and I hear it say,
Do not leave me. Do not leave me here alone.
He will come, I think. He will come and find us here, and she will wake. He'll make her wake. She will sit up and shake her head and look at me and smile. And he will hold my shoulder and say,
There, there now, all's well.
Surely, he must come. The day is getting long, and the boats will return, and he will come, he'll come. He'll make it right.

It is only when I can no longer move my foot, when the sticky crimson pool has inched its way all around my black boot, and the sun is falling low in the sky that I know I must go. I lay her head down gently and stand, and my bones crack, and there is just that strange fallen expression on her face.

I fix her skirts and straighten her legs and say, ‘I will be back so soon. I will run, I will run so fast and I will be back and everything will be well.'

The track disappears into the bush ahead of me, into those branches that will reach out like fingers to my face, the screeching calls of the birds, the shadows that will move and flicker and trick me. I am scared. I am so terrified.

I look back at Harriet and cry a little and say, ‘Harriet, please don't make me go on my own.'

She does not answer, she does not move. I fall down next to her again and grab her hand and kiss the long cold fingers, and I
will
it, I
will
her to respond. I wish with every single breath, with every moment I have ever had, and every one to come. I say, ‘Harriet, Harriet, please.'

But she is so still.

I turn and run.