The Day They Shot Edward Read online

‘Like mine. Gone years ago. You couldn’t say fate had been kind to me.’

  ‘Fate! What had fate to do with your choice?’

  Margaret’s voice rose: ‘Everything. Everything! It’s a wonder I can be as brave as friends say I am—vital, courageous, making the best of my personal tragedy.’

  It was Gran’s turn to sniff. ‘Then be more understanding of Matthew. His burdens should come a little at a time.’

  Matthew washed himself half-listening to their bickering. He did not return to the kitchen preferring to avoid its risky eddies of feeling. Instead he took the little path that passed around the side of the house. The captured yabbies and their pitiful helplessness had left him troubled. Only yesterday he had come upon the cat growling over the body of a bird, softly dead with feathers plastered, askew. When he appeared the cat grabbed its prey, the deep mewing in its throat a subterranean threat to Matthew not to intrude.

  A few days earlier he had rescued a tiny drop-tail lizard from the same cat. Cunningly, this time, he had offered the cat some of his yabby meat, dropping it on a string and then twitching it out of reach. Tantalised the cat dropped the truncated lizard, which then skittered into the warm recesses of the stones by the path. It had looked ignoble without its tail, mutilated, only half a creature. But it was alive, like the yabby with one huge claw.

  Matthew wondered if it had hurt the lizard to lose its tail and once or twice he experimented by pulling his own hand as hard as he could. He wondered what it would be like to have a detachable hand and visualised the skin folding over to close the hole. The lizard didn’t bleed when the tail dropped off. He wondered why. In his imagination he saw his hand lying on the path and shuddered. There was something threatening in wholeness being destroyed. It was like a worm in an apple, insidious, disgusting, a message from the present intruding into the future.

  As he approached the side verandah his step slowed and he sidled forward. The verandah was sealed three quarters of the way up the outer and end walls. Above the wooden slats heavy canvas covers closed but did not seal the entrance between roof and wall. A wooden door at one end was partially covered by wire mesh. Another door from the inside wall of the verandah opened into the house.

  Matthew’s father lived in this improvised room. The doctor had said he needed plenty of fresh air but he must be kept away from the rest of the family. He had his own plates and knives and forks, always kept in a special place in the kitchen and washed separately. His apartness worried Matthew. Gran and his mother were whole people not just because they were healthy but because they lived each day in a normal, predictable, undisturbing routine. The security they gave to Matthew did not merely rest on his relationship with them. It was acquired through his feelings about their relationship with the house, the garden, the neighbours, the streets where they shopped and the river and the beach where they sometimes indulged their leisure. They belonged comfortably in the busy world of sunshine and the quieter world of moonlight. The outside world filled their lives and made them whole.

  His father lay forever in one place—a little grey room—cocooned and entrapped in his bed. Its half light was the half light of death.

  Matthew tiptoed to the door and holding his breath peeped through the wire mesh into the room.

  ‘Piss off, you little bugger!’ the breathless voice with its suppressed rage sent him scrambling backwards. He fled to the sound of thin rasping coughs interspersed with the high whine of breaths caught in bronchial tubes, thrumming like wind protesting in high wires.

  Matthew had never been inside the room on the verandah. His father had lain there for a long time now. Sometimes he emerged, a gaunt shuffling creature leaning on Margaret’s or Sarah’s arm to visit the lavatory at the end of the garden. He wore an old brown dressing gown in all weathers, and a towel, draped over his head and around his neck, gave him the hooded look of a large bird with hunched white head and long brown back. The clothes hung on his frame as if the body inside them had dissolved.

  Sometimes Matthew watched covertly these painful and exhausted efforts to maintain the remnants of privacy and dignity. He tried, as he had tried with the lizard, to imagine what his father’s feelings must be. But he could not overcome his aversion and fear. The lizard had been little and vulnerable lying in the sun amid the glossy pink pig-faces. It was a part of the brilliance of the morning. His father he could never imagine in sunlight. His father was a creature of greyness, of half-light, something you trembled to meet when you scuttled out to the lavatory in the night, seeing his grotesque shape in the shadows across the path, expecting it to loom over you and reach out greenish half-dead hands.

  His mother and grandmother never knew it but for Matthew death became an evil and terrifying presence in the house. Sometimes he imagined the women as angels in heaven in their tented white aprons and his father in the grey room as the devil. When they told him at school that the devil tempted people to come to him Matthew saw himself creeping up to the hellish outside room and wondered what would happen if ever he opened that door and stepped inside. He suspected he would die. His fears were augmented by his grandmother’s anxiety and constant warnings to not go near his sick father, to never use the plates or utensils he ate from.

  His dread of being shut away from others as his father was became Matthew’s understanding of hell.

  He had other memories of his father but in the selectivity of memory they were all part of his picture of the devil. He remembered how, very long ago, there had been a thunderous hammering on the door and how his mother in a long white nightdress, her flaming unbraided hair reaching to her waist, had sprung from her bed. She thought he was asleep but he had crept to the door, trembling and watchful. He had seen her standing in the middle of the kitchen, her terrified eyes on the outer door which shuddered beneath the blows someone outside inflicted on it. Suddenly the sharp edge of an axe broke through the wood and jammed. She screamed as the axe was dragged free and struck again.

  It was winter and the range dampened for the night. She snatched an unburnt log and little specks of fire leapt into life as she hauled it into the air. With the smouldering log she waited. For Matthew the scene was set—the angel with the burning brand, the devil at the door reaching in from blackness. When he burst through she shrieked and rushed at him. The axe fell to the floor, he howled with pain and fled into the night. His mother sat in the kitchen all night guarding the damaged door but he did not return. Several days later Gran had arrived, her luggage piled on a cart.

  To Matthew the scene had no human dimension. His mother had not been a frightened wife, his father had not been a violent drunkard. His mother was an angel, his father an intruding devil. Heaven and Hell had their counterparts in Matthew’s home. He knew Heaven had the warm, yeasty, floury smell of a kitchen and breadmaking. He knew Hell was the sectioned-off verandah where the devil was trapped; the devil who might for his amusement entice you to enter, who might perceive your secret fascination to discover his face.

  It was the same fascination that enthralled him when he stood on the edge of a cliff or high step or bridge. He could jump. The power was there to destroy himself if he so willed. It was a shuddery feeling seeing himself stepping into nothingness. How would he fall? Would he dive like a gannet, plummeting into the water, or would he float, drift like tumbleweed caught in wind currents?

  But he hadn’t jumped and he didn’t enter the room. Whatever the fascination he could resist and must.

  Gran did not fear his father. Gran had a box and in it she kept some sort of magic. Matthew had asked her about the box one day and she had told him that it held the ‘keys to the shades’. He said he did not understand and she had told him quite seriously that it was her circle of privacy and she would not invite him into it. He was hurt. Gran did not usually exclude him. She saw his hurt, tipped her head sideways and sighed.

  ‘The shades are no place for you, Matthew. The young live in the present but as we grow older the past and the future intrude more. We
distort the past by what we choose to remember and we measure the future by what we desire. Past, present and future become the shades of each other and these,’ she took some cardboard cutouts of letters of the alphabet from her box and laid them in a circle on the table, ‘these are my keys to the shades of the past and the future.

  ‘To be free of time, Matthew, to control it by perceiving it in some other way. Chronos, clock, timepiece, chronology. The chains of sequence which bind us to inevitability. To have every day a surprise. What would that be like, eh? To see the sun rise upside down?’

  He struggled to follow her and gave up.

  He liked her words although his mother disparaged them. They stretched his mind, made him wonder, made him wrestle with meanings that reached beyond a series of sounds on the tongue. Sometimes he felt that in catching the yearning in her he was able through an osmosis of feeling to share her thinking. But he had no words to express what it was he understood. He could not step from the filmy world of feeling into the clearer atmosphere of the mind, could not draw up his perceptions from the depths of the river of his consciousness to the shallower, brighter surfaces where things were clearer, but less mysterious, beautiful and subtle.

  He knew that she used the ouija board to speak to her husband and he had heard her murmuring conversations. She would sit for hours while the glass slithered and bumped across the surface of the table. She did not invite him to share these occasions and ignored his peeping presence at the window. She accepted his curiosity without feeling compelled to satisfy it. Knowing to her was important, but so too were these moments when she acknowledged none of the demands of the present.

  He knew Gran’s husband was dead but this death had nothing to do with the little grey room. Whatever Gran did was safe. Her secrets did not trouble him. He would have taken her hand and slipped with her through the magic circle into the shades with confidence.

  Once he had asked what and where he had been before his birth. His mother had responded coyly ‘a twinkle in the eye of God’ to which Gran countered abruptly: ‘Nothing, as far as we know.’ Since he could not imagine himself without a body, since indeed he could not imagine himself without an ‘I’, he assumed that Gran meant that he floated in nothing. The loneliness of it horrified him.

  To return to nothingness, to such imagined isolation, was unthinkable. He shuddered and grew sticky with sweat at the thought of it.

  Sometimes Edward came to visit. He came on his bicycle bringing large golden oranges tucked into the spokes of the wheels and books in a hessian bag strapped onto the bar. He brought Matthew copies of Treasure Island and The Gorilla Hunters and Robinson Crusoe and White Fang and The Call of the Wild and when he was gone Matthew sat in the sun on the step of the back verandah and lost himself in foreign lands that the writer had never visited but which took on a reality from the words that created them.

  Edward was Gran’s friend, not his mother’s. Gran and Edward talked for hours but sometimes Edward took him to the sea. He sat Matthew on the crossbar of his bicycle and rather wildly and erratically they made the two-mile journey. Where they stopped the sea was mostly gentle, lying in aqueous strands of clear green between sandbars. Here everything smelt cool, the breeze salty and sharp. On still hot days a mist hung on the horizon, heavy, oysterish. Tinged with mauve, it rested on the sea but as it climbed into the sky it melted in air which glittered and glanced from the surface of the water.

  The gulls squabbled and squarked and squatted in white-backed flocks where the shallows washed their pink legs. Edward said that on still days the clearness of the water was as lucid as good thought and he stretched his arms wide and breathed deeply. He said he was breathing in miles and miles of space and filling his lungs with timelessness and he laughed a deep, throaty laugh and grabbing Matthew’s hand ran with him along the edge of the water. Matthew’s thin white legs twinkled like sandpipers and their two shadows mingled and moved together.

  Finally exhausted he was the first to collapse in giggles on the sand and Edward fell beside him and rolled him over and over as a mother dog a puppy and tickled him until Matthew shrieked. Edward stopped then. He never went beyond the point where excitement and pleasure became a painful rejection of sensation. Sometimes Matthew just lay at his side. Sometimes he took Edward’s hand and played at burying the fingers one by one. Edward teased him by popping them out of the sand just when Matthew thought he had succeeded in covering them all beneath a mound. Or he just flexed them so that the sand cracked and seeped into the tiny valleys breaking the surface. The game was for Matthew to try to repair the little mound faster than Edward could dislodge it. Of course he did not want Edward to either dislodge the mound entirely or to leave it whole. Both suggested an end to the ritual, the wordless communication between them.

  Sometimes when Edward’s hand lay lifeless and unresponding Matthew sat on his chest or put his hands on either side of his face and shook it a little. And then Edward’s eyes would fly open and he would grin, not smile, but grin with half the real warmth of himself and half the actor’s grimace and he would clutch Matthew to him and hug and shake him and growl a little. He would jump up, a lithe, strong movement with Matthew still in his arms, plump him on the sand on his feet, brush himself clean of sand and say: ‘Come on, let’s find some pippies.’ And the two of them would walk slowly along the tide edge turning the wet sand with their toes or occasionally kneeling to dig with their hands where the wet sand slithered between their fingers, more water than grains, and grey below the surface.

  ‘It won’t hold,’ Matthew said once as he sat back on his heels and watched the sand slip together. ‘I can’t separate it. It just joins up again. Even when I put my fingers at the side of the hole it just fills up.’ And he tried frantically with both hands to hold the walls of a tiny hole apart.

  ‘Why can’t I stop it, Edward?’ And in frustration he jumped up and kicked the sand away from where it had slid together.

  ‘Hey!’ Edward laughed and picking him up swung him around in a great circle. ‘Hey! What’s the use of trying to do what’s impossible and then getting angry over it? There are things you can control and things you can’t. Things you want to control and things you’re happy to leave alone. You didn’t want to stop a bird flying.’

  ‘No, but I could. I could kill it.’

  ‘What a bellicose boy. All puffed up with human power. You couldn’t kill all the birds and stop everything from flying.’

  ‘I could! I could!’ Matthew shouted, insulted by Edward’s adult amusement and logic.

  ‘Would you want to?’

  ‘I could! I could!’

  ‘Yes, but would you want to?’

  ‘I might …’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Or I might not. But I could choose.’

  ‘Oh, yes, we can all choose but why get so mad about sand in a hole?’

  ‘I hate it.’

  ‘What a sulk. Well, you keep trying then but I don’t intend to waste my afternoon.’ And Edward strode off leaving Matthew to trot after him. Their difference didn’t last long and soon they were eating ice creams and wandering along the pier.

  Sometimes Matthew heard Gran and Edward talking, in words that were strange to him, and the quietness of their tone and the seriousness of their faces distanced him from their enclosed and secret world. Sometimes his mother interposed with raucous, rough comments, but on these occasions neither Margaret nor Matthew were minded. Seeing the frustration on his mother’s face he would stand close to her and reach for her apron or her hand and she would cling to him as if afraid.

  ‘Anarchists, presses, pamphlets, revolution!’ she shouted at them one day. ‘You’re all buffoons! Jokes, just great big jokes! Who’s going to start a revolution here? Yesterday you were paddling on the beach and eating ice creams. What a dedicated revolutionary you are. Who’s going to take you seriously? And in front of Matthew, too. What if he uses some of those words at school?’

  ‘An - ar - chist.’ Mat
thew tasted it on his tongue.

  ‘There! See?’ Margaret shouted. ‘Be quiet, Matthew!’ And as he opened his mouth again: ‘Be quiet, I tell you! Aren’t we alone enough?’ she stormed on. ‘Victor ill. Myself a virtual widow trying to cope. Don’t I know that they jibe at me, calling me “The Merry Widow” and winking at each other. And you, a mother who reads books no decent woman would borrow from a library. “Red Grandmother” they call you! We came from the quality. I played the piano in the best houses and now our family friends are waterfront anarchists.’

  She broke into sobs but neither Edward nor Gran moved. The scene had been repeated many times—the anger, the reviling, the tears. Edward looked slightly embarrassed, Gran annoyed. And as his mother wept loudly Matthew felt his tears run too.

  Immediately his distress became the centre of the conflict, the cause for blame, for attack and counterattack. The burden of guilt grew and grew inside him until he felt the wrongdoing of the world weighing on his shoulders.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ he yelled at them all. ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ But they didn’t understand and their shouting continued. And Gran and Edward’s strange words became something for Matthew to fear; they entered him and gave him feelings of unbearable guilt.

  Matthew hated school, that brick cage with arrowed windows close to the eaves, bitumen playground and high enclosing walls. On Mondays children crowded along the footpath outside the iron gates jostling, shouting and chanting but once inside all noisy freedom vanished. Sullen, listless, they lined up in ranks in front of the double-entrance doors. From these doors stretched the long, empty corridor with echoing wood floor. It led like all institutions into desolate, anonymous spaces in which people existed but seldom lived.

  From where he stood Matthew could see the rows of unused round-tipped clothes pegs set in the walls and disappearing in diminishing lines into nebulous recesses. On one side the line was interrupted by doors painted a browny green. They were closed and like the pegs denied that this building could ever be a place of warmth or comfortable habitation. Light at the ground level had a dusty gloom about it as if decades of chalk dust perpetually thickened the air. Higher up the light from the windows fell in pale oblongs on the opposite wall but struggled to reach into the gloom below.