Читать книгу The Styx - Patricia Holland - Страница 37

Chapter 6

Rememory 31

Today the sea simply doesn’t exist.

School holidays are lonely, but so are Sunday mornings. It hurts to tell you how it feels waking up to my father’s hangover. The hours of waiting for his liver to process last night’s alcohol. Then finally when the heat sweats him awake, his stinkin’ breath splutters all over me, alone in my cot, alone in the house. No one wants to revisit that. But sustained hate is well fed.

Rememory 32

I haven’t seen the sea for three days. My father has been away and Sharon diligently pops into my room three times each day to change my nappy, takes me to the kitchen to eat and drink, then puts me back in my cot in-between. Not even the delights of 90210 video reruns to pass the time. I feel I have missed so much.

This morning my father is expected back, so I’m verandah-ing at last, and the sky is pink, impossibly merging to blue, then falling behind an opaque and corrugated grey-green sea. Despite today’s incandescence, foreboding breaths of wind float through.

When he told my mother she was dead to him, my mother didn’t fight. Not enough. Every night I fight for her. But it counts as little in my dreams as it did for her. Perhaps it wasn’t love or courage she lacked, merely a sense of self. Away from me, she shrank, withered, and was no more. He must have known how little fight she would have against him. He was grooming her for the end. The judgement of a person is by their treatment of the fragile and vulnerable. Some so strong, so large, are capable of acts so delicate, so humane, so humble. Some so greedy, so drowned in self, are capable of enjoying, crushing even—especially—the most delicate and vulnerable.

My mother told me of a man two metres high, weighing one hundred and forty kilograms, hard muscle encasing an invisible neck, who refused to swat a fly on the windscreen. His passenger wanted to squish the fly, but the man said, “No.”

He said, “Wait,” and stopped the car.

Two giant overstuffed fingers moved slowly, gently, closer parallel to the fly, mesmerising not just the fly, then closed on one wing drawing it safely to freedom.

“This man was Wuku,” my mother said.

Rememory 33

The sea’s blown up. Swamp green with white caps. The islands are withdrawing, sinking.

I remember when he sold her books. It was about six months after she left and a definitive action of a mean mind. The books were all I had of my great-grandfather who was nicknamed “Shakespeare” by the local grazier William Northampton.

“These men were both your great-grandfathers,” my mother told me.

Every night when she put me to bed, my mother told me stories about her past—our past. She often repeated the stories, but I was never sick of them, not like 90210 re-runs.

My mother said Northampton settled Styx River Station in the late 1800s when he ventured north from Brisbane in search of adventure and the rumoured “promised land”.

“Rumour had it that there were extensive holdings of lush pasture and abundant water gushing from the earth,” she told me.

“The grass was always green and the water, that appeared like magic whenever needed, held healing and other magical properties. The rumours said no white man would ever be able to take these lands, as all who tried had perished—disappeared without trace.”

“They were describing The Great Basalt Wall,” my mother said. “It was known as The Wall to locals, and had magnetic properties that rendered all normal senses of direction useless. The diatomaceous earth, with underground water springing up seemingly at every clump of trees, earned its ‘magic’ tag by offering year-round livestock fat­tening opportunities regardless of drought conditions elsewhere. This land was a veritable nirvana, an actual Promised Land,” she said.

“Rumour has it that Northampton listened to the rumours and, unlike most Europeans back then, respected their validity. He searched for the local people—the Wuku Wuku—and developed an initial rudimentary communication system. In time, he learnt to speak the Wuku dialects—three quite different language systems—but of course nothing is documented,” my mother said.

“Northampton was presented with a Wuku bride—the greatest honour bestowed on a non-Wuku—which meant he was immune to The Wall’s curse. They weren’t too worried that he already had a Mrs Northampton. Perhaps he didn’t tell them. What probably happened is that Northampton made sure he always had a Wuku companion, so he was never in danger of becoming lost. As he was recognised as a Wuku, he was also never in danger of being harmed, which is another possible explanation for the disappearance of everyone else. Wuku idolised and held all animal life sacred—all animal life, that is, except non-Wuku people.”

Shakespeare (my great-grandfather, not the playwright, hey) would no doubt, these days, be diagnosed as being on the Autistic Spectrum, the previously named Asperger Syndrome. He learnt to read and write English in a very short time and his resulting speech was, even for the times, oldfashioned and formal. He could remember word for word everything he heard or read. To test him out, Northampton gave him some of the real Shakespeare to read. My Wuku grandfather had an obscure sense of humour and from then on, in retribution for being treated as an amusement, he forever more, until the day he died, regaled them at every opportunity with quote after Shakespearean quote. That’s how he got his name, hey.

“Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.” “Cowards die many times before their deaths.” “Nothing can come of nothing.” Northampton loved this wicked side of Shakespeare, and bestowed on him a beautiful hand-tooled, leather-bound Complete Works of William Shakespeare and a set of huge historical dictionaries. Shakespeare cherished these books and passed them on to my grandmother, who gave them to my mother, and then on my eighteenth birthday, they were to go to me.