Through Splintered Walls, page 2
I beeped my horn in desperation and he shrugged, faded. I looked in my rear view mirror and he was gone.
For one terrible moment I thought, Is he real, in danger, and I left him to die? I always wondered at the woman who rescued that English traveller, who was escaping the Backpacker Killer. What made her pick him up, assume he was in danger rather than dangerous? And her with children in the back?
I was glad I hadn’t needed to make the choice.
With the stop-starts, Milo woke up. ‘Jesus, let me drive,’ he said, wanting control back.
As we reached the peak of Temptation Tor, I felt a headache beginning.
‘I need some air,’ I said.
‘Open the window.’
‘I need to walk around.’
He drove for a while longer then sighed and pulled over.
‘Five minutes,’ he said. He walked to the edge, cutting himself off from my pain, not wanting to know.
From the corner of my eye I saw movement, and it was her again. Pale yet clear, she stood by Milo and mimed; Push.
She looked at me.
PUSH.
And that’s when Temptation took me.
I pushed him.
As an afterthought, I threw my hat down. I told people he’d been bravely trying to retrieve it.
One famous children’s author often has, ‘Once a struggling single mother,’ after her name. An American actor has, ‘Still recovering from the death of his Australian wife, Cassandra.’ And in one magazine I saw, ‘…who once escorted Joan Collins to a nightclub.’
After my name, which, invariably, is preceded by ‘Successful middle-aged TV chef’, I often find, ‘…who lost her husband in a tragic accident.’ I didn’t lose him at all: he’s exactly where he belongs. In Parkwood Cemetery.
That was ten years ago. My daughter performs children’s concerts; she’s interviewed on TV and mobbed for autographs. She’s married to an accountant.
My son married early. He’s still a bully, but he married a woman who laughs at him for it. He’s happy with her. He loves his two sons.
My mobile café was a great success, hardest of work, a clear path to where I am now. Morning spot on TV, my own cook books, feeding the people.
I ride Temptation Tor often. It’s not that I’m fearless; it’s just a good through-way, and I don’t want to spend an extra two hours travelling in order to avoid a place which had scared me years earlier. I sometimes see shifting amongst the trees, the hint of humanity. I never saw the murdered woman again.
There is a strong pull. I can be myself there.
Real.
Sometimes you need to change the recipe. Toss out one of the ingredients. I knew that other women lived with good men. I knew my son could be a good man, that my daughter, if she chose, could live with a good man.
And I knew, in that one moment of temptation on the mountain, that there was one sure step to break that chain and I took it. I saved all three of us.
‘We’re ready,’ the director said, and I pulled back my shoulders and began to cook.
Creek
The creek on her brother John’s farm was quieter than most, the water a trickle. Worms wriggled in the mud, leaving relief prints of their movements.
Olivia’s niece and nephew came screaming up behind her, fighting over the fishing pole. Their father, already a bottle into his night’s drinking, walked behind them, calling, ‘Watch out for the creeky ladies. Those nasty wet ladies will get you if you don’t watch out.’ His voice creaked, like an old rusty door.
Olivia and the children exchanged glances. ‘He always calls them that,’ her nephew said.
‘We know they’re the Quaking Women.’
‘And how do you know if they’ve been nearby?’
‘If you’re ever by a creek and see sticks crossed, you’ll know they’ve been there. You might see drag marks. That’s them when they’re tired.’
Olivia nodded at them. They loved the horror story of the Quaking Women and would make her tell it every time. They were the only ones who really listened.
‘Tell us,’ her nephew said.
‘The Quaking Women rest in creeks around Australia. Sometimes they might poke their noses out of the water but mostly they hold their breath for a long, long time.
‘Doesn’t matter where they drown. The dead bodies’ll swim to a creek, rest in the mud down the bottom. They’ll try to make it out to sea. That’s what mermaids are. Quaking Women who’ve made it to sea. They’re sad and full of loss. If you listen in a shell you’ll hear the soft sigh of the mermaids wishing they were back in the creek.
‘They come out of the mud all clean. Big round faces, shiny cheeks. High cheekbones sticking out shiny and red right under their eyes.’
Her nephew paddled at the water’s edge. She pulled him back. ‘Never swim in a place you can’t see the bottom. Concrete walls are best. When it’s cold, they live down the bottom, grasping at your toes.’
‘Tell us what they’re looking for,’ her niece said. She loved a mystery, was always deep into a fat crime novel although she was only nine.
‘They’re looking for the people they loved. It makes them angry, because they’re lost and lonely. So angry they shake and quiver. And they’re cold. Even in the shimmering Australian heat, when mirages of water dapple the long dark highways, they shiver with cold. They are looking for families a hundred years dead, or children long grown.’
‘What did they say to you?’ her nephew asked. This was the best bit.
‘“Bring me my baby boy,” one screamed. “Bring me my little William.” Then she came at me with her long, rubbery fingers like eels, and they were so long they tangled in my hair and that’s why I have a bald spot.’
She pulled back her hair to show them; the children screamed, as they always did, and ran to their father’s arms.
There, they quivered and shook, then they settled by the water’s edge with John to catch some fish. In the quiet, Olivia thought she could hear the women whispering, as she sometimes did. Sometimes she’d whisper back. Words like, ‘I’m sorry to inform you, but your little William passed away in 1952 due to a heart attack.’
Olivia stood back from the water’s edge, watching them, thinking of the quaking women and the time her father and she had been almost drowned by them, twenty-one years earlier.
Olivia had watched her father pack his bags for a month away. ‘Take me. I’m bored here.’
‘Go on,’ her mother said. ‘You two are like peas in a pod. Smart, observant and dry around the humour gills. You’ll get on well on a long trip like this.’
Tucker shook his head. ‘She’s too young.’
‘She’s eighteen. And she loves the bush.’
Olivia said, ‘Especially after the rain, when it all feels possible. When life feels livable.’
‘Life isn’t livable otherwise?’ Tucker asked, looking at her. ‘All right. You pack. Not too much, though. We’re not going on some fancy dancing holiday. We’re renaming creeks. I’m not promising excitement.’
The old colonial creek names no longer made any sense (Five Miles from where? Dinner for whom?) and there was little interest in using the traditional names, although Tucker had suggested this would be the easiest, cheapest and best option. Instead, he would survey the land and rename the creeks for the current topography.
Tucker and Olivia stopped at every creek within a hundred kilometres radius, meeting the rare person along the banks. They took photos, made sketches, and chatted to the locals in the nearby towns. Everyone was proud of their creek. Tucker would ask about the yabbies, or how deep the water got, or how often it dried up. The locals loved to talk and the history they gave helped him develop the nomenclature.
The creeks were very high. There had been rain, more than average, and the roads were hard to travel in some places. They camped out or spent the night in cheap motels, and they called home every couple of days. Her siblings cursed her for her luck; you always get taken out, they said. It’s always you who gets the luck.
That’s because I’m a good person, she told them.
The creeks gave off a steady hum. Pink noise. Each one slightly different and Olivia wondered if you recorded them, would they make music?
It was at Dinner Creek they saw footprints in the muddy bank. Toes spread wide, someone who always went bare foot. Olivia placed her own feet over the prints; this person was much larger than she was. Heavy. She looked up and saw a woman ankle deep in the water with her hair slicked back, her clothing sodden. She seemed weighted down. Her head was bowed.
Olivia, stunned for a moment, stepped forward to help. ‘Are you okay?’ she said. The woman shivered and quaked, although the day was scorching hot. Her whole body quivered; her face, her arms, her thighs.
The woman walked towards Olivia slowly. ‘Dad!’ Olivia called softly. ‘Are you seeing this?’ He’d been setting up the stove to make a cup of tea, but he came around beside her.
‘Where’d she come from?’ he asked.
Olivia reached out to the woman. ‘Are you okay?’ she said again. The woman lifted her head then and Olivia saw that she had not been okay for some time. ‘What?’ Olivia said. ‘What happened?’
The woman’s skin was green, mottled. Her eyes may once have been blue but now were white, bleached by the sun or damaged by water. Her fingernails were short and cracked, as if she’d been clawing her way along the creek bed, which was lined with tiny stones and sand. She shivered and quaked.
Olivia stepped back.
Another woman emerged from the water, and Olivia turned. This woman moved like crashing water and grabbed her, a cold, hard hand on her shoulder, and pulled her close. She screamed in Olivia’s ear, ‘Where is my husband, where is he? Where is Alan Barnett?’
The other woman screamed, ‘Give me back my baby. You stole my baby. Where is my Gloria Rose Milton?’
Another woman rose out of the creek, her hair slicked back out of her eyes, streaming down her back.
Four of them, a fifth behind, a sixth. All of them screaming names at Olivia as if she were the record taker. Where is my little William, my William Tollis?
Olivia wrenched herself away from the women, turned and ran. She heard a gurgle behind her and saw that Tucker’s feet were glugged in the mud and that he’d fallen to his knees. He dragged himself forward, like the women had, by his fingertips. One scraped her fingernails down his left arm, drawing blood. He managed to get himself away from them and the women fell back, sank into the high water. Tucker pulled himself to Olivia and collapsed at her feet. She tugged at his hair.
‘Let’s get to the truck. Come on. They’re back in the water now but let’s get to the truck.’
Her voice sounded echoey in her head, as if her ears were blocked. Tucker nodded. He said loudly, ‘Jesus Christ, what were they?’
They ran to the truck, Olivia fiddling for the keys. It was unlocked; they’d gotten into that habit, and she started the engine before either of them had their seatbelts on. They left the camp stove behind.
The hum of the motor was a comfort, but seemed very low. ‘God, I hope the truck’s all right,’ she said.
She backed up the dirt road, turned around, and drove until they were ten kilometres or so away.
She pulled into a rest area, and they sat, the truck still humming, for a minute.
‘I need the toilet,’ Tucker said, and he threw open the door. He was shaking, his whole body taken with it. His words bounced in her head; she wondered if this was how a migraine began.
Her head rang as if there was broken glass inside it.
‘I’ve got that too,’ Tucker said when he came back and saw her with her hands cupping her ears. His hands held aloft, wet from washing them with tank water. ‘It’s like bells going off in my head.’ He was still shaking.
‘Those women,’ she said.
Neither of them could drive. The shakes had started in Olivia, too, and the ringing in her head made it hard to think. Tucker tried to be the father, take control, look after her, but in the end they had to call her mother and brother to come and collect them.
Olivia rode in the truck with John, who was not annoyed at being dragged away from his life because Olivia never asked for help and neither did her father.
He gave her the picnic rug out of the boot. It was dirty, muddy and there were bits of dried food and spilled tea from the meals Olivia and Tucker had shared on it, but it was warm. She shivered uncontrollably for the first hour of the trip, then it was just her hands that shook. They would always shake; Tucker would always have that all-over body shake.
They spoke about the quaking women, John asking confused questions that she couldn’t answer. ‘So where did they go then? Where did they come from?’ She scrabbled for paper but all she could find were their maps so she wrote the names she remembered them screaming at her around the edges in a purple texta she found under the seat.
There were no name changes of the creeks of Australia.
The air chilled and Olivia realised the family was walking back up to the house, leaving her alone by the creek. In the creek. She’d wandered in, so lost in thought, and her feet were stuck in the mud.
It felt good; soft and cool. She thought she didn’t mind the water, the gentle lapping against her shins, but then she felt fingers grab her toes and she screamed, panicked, tipped backwards and landed in the water.
Her family didn’t come back for her, but neither did the Quaking Women emerge. She pulled herself up and walked, dripping, to the house, enjoying the silence.
No one noticed as she walked in. No one banged on the bathroom door for her to hurry for dinner. When she emerged, the meal was done, and she was left to scrape left-overs out of the pot.
She heard her brother on the phone. ‘It’s your turn. I’ve had her for a week,’ and wondered which sibling he was talking to. She thought she’d been helping. Watching the kids, making the breakfast. But she knew as well that most families have their ways and don’t like them to be interrupted.
Her siblings all had strong marriages. Olivia didn’t envy them. The confinement of it, always having to think of others; she hated the idea. She didn’t want to love anyone with that intensity. There were the nightmares, too. She didn’t want to inflict them on anybody and she knew how she sounded at night. Lovers had told her so. It wasn’t water she dreamt about, but the dry creek bed, imprinted with the faces of those women. She woke up dry in the throat, choking.
She didn’t think anyone should have to hear that.
She ate her dinner watching the news. Drownings were on the rise; nobody could explain why. Children taken, fathers. Husbands. Bones spat out, perhaps, when they weren’t the right ones. On the news they blamed crocodiles; only the bones are found. Every one of them much loved. Greatly missed. Much adored in the community.
On the news, there was footage of the creeks of Australia. The tragedy of it made the commentators screech. Olivia thought she could see bobbing heads in the water. Muddy women looking for the banks to climb out. She worked on her map, marking down the drownings.
‘If you go see the Quaking Women, can I come too?’ Her nephew, in his pyjamas. He picked at the lint on her jumper as he spoke.
‘You can’t come. I’ve heard of them dragging a wild piglet into the water. Thing squealed like a newborn and its mother too, but she got dragged under. I heard you could see her trotter marks, dragging against the pull.’
Her hands shook as she reached for garlic bread. Her siblings had always pitied her the shakes, and their children did, too. The children didn’t mind being around her; they said she vibrated. It made her skin seem loose around her flesh, made her hair frizz out. Made her voice quaver when she spoke, as if she were sick or scared.
‘You should come and stay with me a while,’ Tucker said. Olivia guessed that John had called him and asked him for this favour. Tucker’s voice was far too loud; he over-compensated for the tinnitus in both of them. ‘Come and be peaceful with me. We’ll play some Scrabble and the only words allowed are creek names.’
‘It’s okay, Dad. I want to move on, anyway. There are things that need to be done.’
‘I know what you want to do, and no. I say no.’
‘Dad.’
‘I say no.’
‘Dad, the drownings. There are more of them. More losses by the week, by the day. I need to do this. I think the creeks are full. That’s why loved ones are drowning. They are full and those women are busting out. I think they are coming out of all the creeks in Australia. If it’s muddy they’ll drag themselves by their fingers. But if there’s water, even a centimetre, they can swim. That’s why they quake. They’re not used to walking. They’re used to swimming. Their legs shake and quake. They can’t support themselves properly.’
‘Let them shake.’
‘I want to tell them, though. William Tollis. He was seventy-five years old and in jail half his life. Not a good man. He had not done a good thing in all his seventy-five years and I wonder, is it ’cause his mama died? How would he have been if his mother was alive? If she’d been there for him?’
‘I know this. I wrote it all down, remember?’
He’d written what she’d told him to; the names, the details, the voices from her head.
Sometimes there was rhythm to the clamour, and sometimes she thought she could discern words. ‘Oh, my love, my love,’ over and over. On repeat.
Sometimes the tinnitus was like a child screaming in her ear. Other times, a wake-up alarm went off, non-stop, no matter how many times she pushed the button. Blark blark blark blark until she snarled.
Her father said it sounded like a tea kettle whistle so he always felt like a cuppa.
It drove Olivia’s mother mad when she was alive. ‘My God,’ she’d say. ‘You drink more tea than any man I know.’ He tried to explain why but it made no sense to anybody except Olivia.
