The Heaven I Swallowed (4 page)

‘Thank you.'

I was making a spectacle of myself and could just imagine the whisperings about how it was ‘all too much for her'. For years they had tiptoed around me, without knowing the real reason for my troubles.

‘I am fine,' I said to Mr Roper. Unfortunately, he was no longer by my side and I remembered he had gone to fetch me a glass of water. He had muttered something about the heat getting to me, his excuse for any social oddness. Yet I was not going to faint. I had only become confused about what life I was leading today.

I spotted Mary in a group of children near the saint's grotto: a half-egg stone construct with an effigy of what could be Saint Aloysius himself, although the plaster of his youthful face had been too eaten away for positive identification, only the lily he carried still survived. Mary was standing next to Ronny Thompson who seemed to be holding court over the other two girls and one boy in the cluster. The noise and distance made it impossible for me to hear what he was saying but when he stopped they all laughed, even Mary. I knew it was about me.

‘Here you are.' Mr Roper handed me a glass of lukewarm water. The glass had love hearts etched into it.

‘Could you fetch Mary for me, Mr Roper?' I asked.

‘Mary? That's her name is it?' He glanced over to the group of children with an interested expression. Once again, I thought of how much better his hair would look if he left it natural, instead of running a blonde dye through it so it shone, a harsh beacon in the sun. If anything, this vanity made him seem older than he was. What would a few grey hairs matter around such a face, almost free of wrinkles?

‘How long is the trial for?' Mr Roper asked.

‘Trial?'

‘You haven't agreed to have this … child … living in your house for good?'

‘The terms of her stay have not been formerly determined,' I said to him in a voice from my working days, the same one that had tamed the deliverymen.

Unfortunately, Mr Roper was not a deliveryman. He replied with a grotesque snort and strode off to fetch Mary. The children scattered as he approached, leaving Mary to stand alone, crumbling saint behind her shoulder.

Again, I could not hear what was being said and now Mr Roper's back blocked me from a view of Mary. For the last five days she had barely been out of my sight. Perhaps the church people were right. Maybe this was too much for me? Waiting for Mr Roper to come back with her, I thought how foolish I'd been, not thinking of the possible consequences, of the true size of things.

†

I would have named my baby Mary if I had been given the time. In the hospital they did not tell me whether it was a boy or a girl I had lost. Still, I knew, as surely as anyone could know, it had been a little Mary forming inside me, with my eyelashes and her father's nose. She would have loved me as no one had ever bothered to love me before, with the fierceness only a child can have.

Five months too early I felt the pain. I remember a great deal of blood and one of the nurses whispering how sad it was my husband was not able to be there. I thought it was said with pity but in the week they made me stay in the hospital I saw that nurse again, a thin old woman with the stink of misery upon her and the well-meaning smile of the secretly bitter.

‘You are looking better,' she said, touching the bulge of pillow beside my head. ‘You will be as good as new before you know it.'

I smiled back at her, as I was obliged to do, knowing I was never going to be ‘new', no matter how hard I tried. I had never been ‘new'. For four years I had been trying to conceive and, at thirty-four, it now seemed an absurdity. Nothing about me was fresh or promising. Like Anne Elliot in
Persuasion
, my ‘bloom had vanished early'.

How false it was to pretend it was simply a matter of time. How could I know when, or if, the war would end? Time was my greatest enemy and, there Fred was, away from me for who knew how long. Everything shrivelling up inside me while he wrote poetry and turned into a man I did not know.

I wanted to leave the hospital as soon as possible but the doctor insisted on keeping me there day after day, for ‘recovery time', as if I had lost a limb. I had no visible wound, though, and saw the frowns of other patients' visitors wondering why I lay there amongst the truly ill, seemingly whole. All my tears were left for the night hours when none of these hard, cold faces were visible, when it was just the lost Mary and me. No flowers beside my bed to offer the consolation of their scent, I was grateful they put me far away enough from the maternity ward, I did not have to hear the crying, or see the suckling, of babies who wanted to stay.

Returning home empty was not the hardest part. It was the avoidance of the neighbours, their heads ducking out of sight as the taxi-cab pulled in, and the frozen silence of the church lot who acted as if I had been on a holiday, at a ­featureless destination, for a time unspecified.

‘Good to see you back,' they said, ‘safe and sound.'

I did not receive one word of sympathy. Rationally, I could not blame them. A veil of stern silence was always drawn over such moments: when the Mavis boy was arrested for ‘indecent behaviour' or the Thompson's girl sent to Tasmania for her lonely nine months. The body was always in revolt; speaking of its rebellions only exposed you further to the filth.

But, then, could I really be blamed for the dreams that came to me? For all the rumours flying around you would've thought I had turned into one of those mad old women who shuffle along the footpaths muttering to themselves, singing invented, tuneless hymns, one step away from the loony farm. I hadn't come close to that. Yes, I did not leave the house during the week, letting milk bottles accumulate on the front verandah and only finally taking them when the milkman hammered at my door as if it was doomsday. My appearance when I opened the door was quite dishevelled I'm sure (‘looking like the Wild Woman of Borneo' I imagined the milkman's wife saying at the next church gathering), but none of this—not the overgrown grass nor the accumulation of weeds, only obvious because my garden was normally so meticulous—added up to the ‘breakdown' I was labelled with.

I would not have such rumours resurface now, to threaten the new Mary in my life.

‘Mrs Smith?'

Mr Roper had Mary's hand in his and was looking to give it to me. Mary was, once again, directing her gaze somewhere else but this time I followed her line of sight towards nothing more threatening than a row of baby poplars next to the front brick fence, a mimic of the line at the ANZAC memorial. These were saplings, waiting to grow and become a shield between the church and the noisy, nosey streets beyond.

I stood and took Mary's hand. Was it my imagination or did the colour of it seem less startling?

‘Time to go back home, Mary,' I said in a louder voice than I intended. It felt like I had not spoken in so long, as if the church service and the subsequent dizzy spell had taken away my ability to communicate with the here and now.

I took a step towards the car. Mary's hand tugged at me.

‘But why, Auntie Grace? What did I do wrong?' Her voice was panicked and she was suddenly unwilling to move.

‘Come on, girl.' I tried to keep my temper. I'd already had enough unwanted attention and could feel the threat of another hidden buzz waiting to rise up around me.

‘Please, Auntie Grace.' To my astonishment, Mary had tears in her eyes, wells of water in the bottom lids. Her legs remained stiff, as surely as if she was made of rock.

‘Church is over, we have to go home, Mary,' I hissed through my teeth.

‘Home?'

‘Of course, home.'

‘Your home, Auntie Grace?'

‘Yes, Mary.'

A wave of relief ran over her face and, as quickly as the tears had come, they retreated. She started to walk, her hand now pulling ahead of me. I picked up my pace to match her suddenly eager strides.

‘Goodbye, Mr Roper,' I called over my shoulder. I caught a glimpse of his sombre face. Behind him stood my fellow parishioners, looking at us, sharing his disbelief and wonder. Or was it disapproval?

Mary thought I meant to send her back to the Girls' Home, I realised during the return walk from church. She had misheard somehow or other and the word ‘home' brought up very different connotations. What a place the institution must have been to elicit such a response from her! I should have guessed by the state of her on arrival. Such dread was a powerful weapon. I could hear Sister Clare:
A child's fear can be your greatest friend.
There would, no doubt, be times in which the prospect of being sent back would have its effect.

‘Here we are,' I said, as we arrived at the driveway. ‘Home.'

Mary ran to the front door to open it for me, though I had not asked her to do this.

‘Thank you, Mary.' This was her way to ingratiate herself, I knew, not sincere. I was willing to let her do this, willing to pretend I didn't know where this new-found courtesy came from. It would not last long. She was not the kind of girl to be cowed by phantom notions. Only when she believed I was sending her back there, in front of the gaping doors of Saint Aloysius, did she remember the past.

‘Do you want a cup of tea, Auntie Grace?' she asked with such polite fervour it almost took my breath away. I nodded my yes.

In the living room I sat in the green velvet armchair once moulded by Fred and listened to the sounds of Mary lighting the stove, filling the kettle, feeding the pot. Had these sounds ever been made in this house except by me? It was unusual to hear them from a distance. I could not recall a time when Fred had made anything, not a drop of tea.

I contemplated his photo up on the mantelpiece, as I had so many times over the seven years since his departure. The glass of the picture frame was free of fingerprints. It had been a long while since I had picked it up; his dark eyes, black hair and meticulously trimmed moustache were preserved in a silver oval. The three-quarter profile in his uniform was so admired by the women of the Widows' Group—Mrs Chilsom, of course, that was her name. I remembered her telling the story of her husband's death at the battle of El Alamein, a handkerchief pressed up against her nose. The rest of the widows had fumbled into their handbags to bring out their own miniature flags of grief and I had had to excuse myself, retreating into my bedroom to give the necessary appearance of sorrow.

Mary placed the cup of tea quietly on the side table next to me, a column of steam rising. She was astute enough to know I did not want to be disturbed and sat down softly on the leather footrest she had adopted as her own.

‘What is your real name, Mary?' I asked, the question sounding loudly into the thick ticking of the glass-domed timepiece sitting next to Fred's photo. There had been no papers, no certificates, no signatures, no suitcase accompanying Mary's arrival. She had come to me with only her name.

Mary did not look startled at my question. It seemed beyond my ability to surprise her.

‘I didn't lie, Auntie Grace,' she said with something like a smirk in her voice. ‘It really is Mary.'

‘I know you did not lie.' She was irritating me again. ‘I meant your tribal name, or whatever it is you call it.'

Immediately she was wary.

‘I don't know what you're talkin' 'bout, Auntie Grace.'

Ironically, she had reverted to the accent of her people in her very denial of them. Part of me should have been pleased. After all, she was going to have to take this stance in the future if she wanted to get anywhere. Take inside what was undeniable from the outside. Maintaining the illusion of a lie is easier when you forget it is a lie. Another part was a little sad, something about the allure of the exotic, another part of me which needed to be suppressed.

Sipping my newly made tea, still warm and mixed with just the right amount of milk, I felt strangely content, given the spectacle I had just made of myself at church. Would they be talking about me now, in their married homes, raising their eyebrows at lonely Mrs Smith and her sorry little ward? Would they remember those rumours and wonder if I had retreated into the same, half-mad state? Would they talk over their Sunday lunches about whether it was really fair to leave the child in the care of someone whose life had been so marked by tragedy?

‘I am the best one for her,' I found myself saying out loud. Mary looked over at me. She could not know I was defending myself, and her, from all the do-gooders who never did any good, from those who talked piously but acted slovenly, from those who wanted to deny the problem, to forget the men in the park with their bare, dirt-encrusted feet or girls like Mary on their doorstep, a child of twelve who looked more like an eight year old with arms as thin as rope.

Not the done thing, to make them visible. It should have occurred to me when I read the newspaper article that
their
idea of the proper way to make a difference was to simply give more, to increase the weekly donation dropped into the padded green velvet of the church collection plate or continue with their afternoons at various charity shops. No one really wanted to see Mary there, to be reminded of a problem, which, if left well enough alone, would sort itself out. The Aborigines were dying off after all, or so they kept saying.

‘Do you want a piece of cake, Auntie Grace?' Mary asked with a tone that reminded me of a healthy person talking to the sick.

She stayed on the footstool, poised for my answer. Though she was small, she had strength to her, only the incident after church had shown me the layer of fear underneath. I had read her people left their old behind when they moved on. Left them to die, apparently. Like all primitives, they had no room for the un-productive, for those who could not contribute to the tribe. But what was considered old in their world? Would I have been deemed useless, a forty year old with no progeny? Would they have said I had nothing to add to society? Would I have been left to wither under the desert sun? At least, now, I had made myself useful. I had rescued one of their half-caste babies, otherwise rejected, and smuggled her away to succour in secret.