Captain Starlight’s Apprentice

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Kathryn Heyman is the author of four novels, including The Accomplice and Captain Starlight’s Apprentice, published internationally and in translation. She has received an Arts Council of England Writers Award, the Wingate Scholarship and the Southern Arts Writers Award, and been nominated for the Orange Prize, the Scottish Writer of the Year Award, the Edinburgh Fringe Critic’s Awards, the Kibble Prize, and the West Australian Premier’s Book Awards. She has written several radio plays for BBC radio, including adaptations of her own work. Kathryn Heyman’s fifth novel, The Floodline, will be published by Allen & Unwin in 2013.

KATHRYN HEYMAN

This edition published by Alien & unwin House of Books in 2012 First published by Headline Publishing Group, London, in 2006

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from the National Library of Australia

If we could embrace, even in the house of the dead, we might gladden each other in our icy grief.

Rose, 1956

The deep shine on the floor of St John of the Cross Rest Home for Women was not the result of the bee-sweet wax poured on each Friday and licked into the surface with a white electric polisher, but of tears. Each woman housed by these cool walls was crippled by her own unhappiness, and there were usually tears. Once or twice there had been blood, but these were accidents and only to be expected in the course of discovery. Not ideal, but hardly the rule, either; though detractors would suggest that blood ran endlessly in here, trickling across the floors, running down through the corridors and out on to the city streets. To hear them speak, you would think that everyone in there, in that building, in the whole city, was coated with blood, which rose from the room in a great tidal wave of distress. Which wasn’t the case at all. Healing: that’s what this place was about. Being made right.

Like all the others, she said, ‘It’s a mistake. Please. I shouldn’t be here, I’m just—’

They all said that, or versions of it: Why am I here? You’ll regret this; it’s him who should be here, not me. Protestations were parcelled up and sent flying, like yellow kites, to the high ceiling of the grey-green room. You could see, if you looked hard enough, the scuffmarks along the paintwork, the places those cries had hit the walls and bounced back, fruitless, to the crier. Rose had not struggled, not once since she arrived, which was a blessing.

‘Lay her down,’ said a tall, snake-mouthed nurse. She looked down at Rose and said, ‘I’m Nurse Sich.’

The nurse’s lips folded down, touching her chin. ‘Nurse Sich. My father was Mr Sich and my mother Mrs Sich. Next year I will marry Dr Kingley and I will be Mrs Kingley. I will escape, you see. Like you.’

The smaller nurse, pink on her cheeks, looked at Nurse Sich, looked only at her chin, not at her whole face. ‘Perhaps we should be silent?’

‘It does no harm to talk.’ Nurse Sich pushed Rose back, pulled her jaw down towards her breasts. ‘Here. This will help. Take it now.’

Liquid slid in, sleepily, shimmied down through Rose’s veins and she slipped back, watching, watching everything.

And then she remembered. Her tongue was a thick eel in her throat, swimming for her gullet. She pulled at it with her hands, pulled it out, slapped at it, trying to give it shape, substance.

The small pink nurse leant close and whispered, ‘Your baby is fine. You just worry about getting well. Your husband—’ A pink flush appeared on the nurse’s neck. ‘Everything is under control.’

Sammy. Her mouth was closed, but the word was there, darting about inside her head, looking for a way out.

Dr Kingley prodded at her belly. ‘All right, are we? All right?’ He leant close to her ear and called, ‘All right in there?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Everything’s all right, isn’t it?’ He nodded at Nurse Sich.

‘Here we go, then.’ He tapped Rose’s arm, pulled a grey strap tight around it and stabbed with a white needle. ‘This will help you; help you forget all that trouble.’

The strap across her ankles cut into her, though she noticed the thickness of the leather, the coolness of it. There was nothing more to say, so she didn’t speak. Metal, heavy as teeth, bit into her wrists, one, two, buckle-my-shoe. Another buckle on ankles, waist, chest; like being tied to a tree, or to a mast. She thought of the story, taught in school, of Odysseus, roped to the mast to stop him leaping into the depths of the sea, called by the singing of – what were they? Mermaids?

Pressed back with the weight of those woodthick straps, she became as weightless as water. She dissolved into it: she thought of her darling Vincent’s powders, collapsing into glasses of water. Back then, when she bothered mixing them with water. God knows, when you’re downing eighteen powders a day, you don’t notice the slight grain in the throat, the tightening of the tongue: there was only the relief from the pounding head, a moment of silence while each granule tickled its way down, down. Nurse Sich’s hands were wet with heat, slipping against the skin on Rose’s forehead. It was not unpleasant: the being strapped, the hands on the forehead. She had only to give herself over, Vincent’s powder to water, to dissolve away, and she would be free. That was what they told her: she had only to let this happen and the unhappiness would stop.

Glass-cold metal discs pressed against Rose’s forehead – one at either side. Dr Kingley nodded at the smaller nurse, who stepped back nervously. Dr Kingley was a curved frown, grumping over the bed, tugging at the straps round Rose’s wrists, slipping the metal discs closer to her eyes. He stood, raised one arm and nodded at Nurse Sich. Her hand was on a red lever, attached to a black panel. Batonless, Dr Kingley conducted Nurse Sich. She pulled the lever down as though bowing a cello: one fluid stroke. The sound was a harsh note, a catapult of a noise, as low as a cat’s underbelly, as strong as a siren.

Restrained by the straps, Rose’s body pressed skywards, seeking flight, seeking a catapult of its own. Dr Kingley was always amazed by this, how the body longed to soar, as though called by some far, wonderful music. Nurse Sich looked at her hands, at the narrow lines flecking her nails, at anything but the arching body in the bed. It wasn’t the body that bothered her, but the way the face pulled back into itself, so that you could see the skull beneath the skin, so that you could feel the raw terror lurking in your own flesh. Dr Kingley watched, observed the arcing upwards and saw the shadow of a tall birch tree, held briefly in a wild kiss of lightning. There was one once, he recalled it, on the lawn of Trinity College. He had spent the whole night sitting alone, watching the storm rage across Cambridge, and had found himself weeping when the yellow crease spliced the sky and left the birch bent over, halved. He welcomed Australia with its lack of birches, welcomed the grey stubble that passed for countryside, welcomed, too, his own lack of tears. The woman – Rose, he knew her name, it was simply easier not to notice certain details – the woman was shivering, which was unusual. He stepped over to the board, lowered the lever himself, and watched the woman on the bed rise again, several inches off the white sheets. Watched her hit the surface of the bed with the sound of a house falling. He checked his watch, made a note: 11.05 a.m.

She could feel the volts pass through her. Each cell in her body readied itself, became taut with waiting. Her bones pushed back, melted, collapsed into themselves: as her body lifted she saw a light, then a ridge. Rocks. Red sky. A woman on horseback leaping across a rocky ravine. Words on a poster: half girl, half horse! A whitegum, twisting out of black earth. Lightning striking: it spliced her again; her eyes drifted back, back in her head; voices were whispering; singing; calling her name.

Jess, 1914

You want to watch me leap, watch me fly, watch my body blending with the lightning and with the horse, but you only want the pretty pictures. I am not a diversion. That is not what I am here for, and I am calling you, asking you to stay; I will show you what is possible and I will help make you whole.

Look at this, my tumbled body: ha! How strong I’ve been, and as fast as lightning, it’s true. That eagle, circling, watching, casting its shadow larger than the trees. Wirripag, he’s called by Billy’s mob. Oh, and I’ve been as fast as you, Wirripag, as high. Hard to see now which is blood, which is dirt, which is bone. Perhaps, in the end, they’re all part of each other.

When I was a child, I longed for adventure. Lying awake on the small metal bar bed, listening to my parents’ voices murmuring through from the room next door – sometimes louder than a murmur, sometimes sharper than a voice; a thump, say, or a slap, these things have a different sound. I would lie there, pressing my hands into the bones of my hips, even then – and, Lord, I can’t have been more than eight – even then, I would look straight into the dark and say, ‘I am not afraid of you.’ They were the words, anyways. Words aren’t always same thing as feeling; but they’ve got a big, sharp, overfull way of making one like the other. Would seem that way, anyhow, if you wanted to spend some time looking at this chickadee’s life. Cripeys, when wasn’t I frightened? But so what? Fear is just fear – can’t eat you, can’t buck you off it, can’t even punch you in the face. No – fear is not the thing that causes pain or danger. So this is my rule: know what does cause pain and danger. Know it, and then run at it with your head down, before it even sees you coming.

Here I am, just twelve, even barely that. There were four of us in the house, if you want to know, and I suppose you do or else why would you have gathered me up, called out to me like this? So, then, if I was going to be truthful with you, really straight-up, I’d tell you that it wasn’t even a proper house. Half a house more like. One room for sleeping, one for eating and farting in. Sorry. Too long on the trot, me, too long in my own company and too long before that in the company of men. For her, that woman (my mother, technically, but I’d hesitate to say it out loud in case it burnt my lips down to my arse), he was a come-down, a let-off, a never-was. As for straight answers about why she walked herself down the aisle with him then – because, Lord knows, no one was asking her to, I could bet you that much – well, nothing came out of her mouth but regret. And regret doesn’t give you answers, doesn’t give you truth. Doesn’t give you anything except a belly-ache and lips wrinkled like a sultana’s bottom. Apologies for the ‘arse’ earlier. I know how to say bottom, behind, posterior, as well as the next person; know how to say derrière better than most. Four of us, and him with his glorious plans all the time, his schemes, his useless, brilliant hopefulness. It was the hopefulness that did us in the end, if I got the story right. What to do but farm us out: Mikey to the priests, and me to the circus. Thinking on it now, I could bet my derrière that I got the better deal out of it, got the better life. Yes, I would, even now, with everything I’m going to show you, I’d still say that.

Look: me and my daddy. You can feel the heat coming off him, feel the need pouring out of his skin along with his damned gin-soaked sweat. My hair in two tight braids: they pulled at my skin, stretched me so tightly that I would burst if you came near me with a needle. My mother did the braids, the blue hairbrush pulling roughly through my hair, that woman’s sniffles of tears plopping into my frizz. I knew where I was to go or, at least; what the Plan was. My mother held me tight, whispered into the braids: ‘Know that I love you.’

And there I am, tugging at my temples, smiling in that same tight way at this man. Mr Ariel, of Ariel’s Great Circus Show. Behind him a green tent, round and pale like spit, fluttered weakly. The Big Top! The centre-stage! With each shred of breeze I could see the threads of canvas, spooling out like fine green worms. Two wooden caravans, white paint flaking off, leant alongside the tent. Untied swag tents were spattered about the brown-green grass; plopped down like cow dung, you might say, if you weren’t a lady. On the other side of the field, a lady in pink bloomers and a red dressing-robe was poking a billy on a fire. Nearby, a woman on a bicycle rode – standing up! – until a man as tall as a small sulky shouted at her to piss off and she toppled almost into the billy fire. It was like a laundry, that humphing field – the steam of activity puffing up in delicious bursts. The man who had shouted at the bicycle lady played a tiny ukulele and the plonking notes caught in my fingers, my hair, pulled at me everywhere.

My daddy said: ‘She can ride like a demon or like a feather sent down from Paradise, Mr Ariel – whichever one you want, she can do it. Do it, Elizabeth.’ I lowered my head, bent my neck, yes, a dragonfly wing softing in the wind. The smell of need on the man. I cannot even imagine that he is my father.

‘Elizabeth.’ Mr Ariel, his face a yellow pat of butter melting on the bread of his neck, bobbed down to me. ‘Elizabeth? Would you like to have a ride on Prince Vic?’

I kept my tongue firm, tucked behind my teeth, kept my words from tumbling out in a shock of loud, just nodded. Once, twice. A smooth-faced, liquorice brown man was currying a palomino. Eighteen hands, I reckoned. Plaited tail and mane; too ruddy fancy for a gelding. Mr Ariel called to the bushfire-skinned man, ‘Billy, the girl’s going to have a ride. Good, you think?’

A pearl-coloured wedge pushed into Billy’s face, a slice of smile puffing him out. ‘Good luck, hey, if you can manage him. He’s yirrakato, this one, hey? Bloody wicked fellow, him. No good for pulling them wagons, no good for nothing but looking. Try him, but.’ He squeezed on the barrel of the horse and pulled the stirrups up.

I always knew how to blend into the breath of the horse, how to make myself liquid on the horse’s back, how to be upright and firm, yet loose as air all at the same time. I don’t know where it came from. Neither of them had it, that mother or that father. My father, if you could be bothered calling him that, he was loose as wheat on a horse’s back: he flopped around like an old hat on a fat man in the rain. Soggy and not much use. Any horse could feel it, of course. And that mother! She was worse, if such a thing were possible. Nervous as a sparrow in a flock of cockatoos. Fluttering and waltzing around, never sure which side to be on, how close to stand, whether the horse would just rear up and snap her in two with its huge yellow teeth. But me, now, I was another thing entirely, always, from the beginning. My daddy put me on a horse – for a joke, I think, though no one ever said as much – he put me on a horse when I was three, my black hair still curled round my dumpling soft face, if what they say is true. I can almost remember it, though I’m never sure whether it’s a true memory, or the memory of something that has been told so often that I believe my body recalls it. Both of them watching me, laughing, clapping; my mother calling, ‘Oh, clever darling, brave girl,’ until the rattle of a wagon somehow started the young mare, quite as if she was a locomotive engine, and off she trotted across the little paddock, with me on her back, the tiny child who seems like another person, holding on tight, sitting upright, rising and falling in time, bless me!

That woman who was my mother always wiped her eyes, said, ‘We’d never have believed it possible, but that child, well, she comes from somewhere else.’ You could tell she believed it, too. Believed somehow that the scramble-faced girl that I turned into had come to her, ready formed, from some far continent and she, the mother, had no say in any of my strange skills, or in my whip-sharp unhappiness.

Look: Prince Vic arching his goldy neck, staring down at me, snorting. I leant in close, palms out, body soft, and snorted softly back. Stepping around, careful as a colt, I pushed one foot into the Great Ariel’s cupped hands. I kicked him away as my leg scissored over the saddle, foot sliding neatly into the other stirrup. Knees squeezing, I tugged on the reins and gave a poke with my heels. I didn’t need to kick; Prince Vic had my scent and knew what he was dealing with. Just a walk at first, my hands loose, back stiff. My daddy called out, ‘Give him a kick, girl, do a gallop, do some of your jumps.’

Listen to him buzzing on to the Great Ariel: I could hear him just before I dug my heels in, flicked the reins, and leant in close to the neck of Prince Vic.

‘Go, boy,’ I whispered, so soft that it was just thought, passing straight between me and the palomino. ‘Just go and I will come with you.’ And the horse knew I meant it, knew I planned on staying put. The heels slivered down, balleting on the grass. The paddock was a long thin one, barely big enough to pasture a horse this size. Smack in the middle was a three-bar jump, nowhere near as high as the fences I could leap even without a flaming horse. Prince Vic’s back was rippling with pleasure; I could feel the length of him as I leant down, flying with him over the jump. Ariel was applauding, and I kept the horse going, galloping on. I was laughing in his ear, and there wasn’t a moment of hesitation between us, not even when the Great Ariel called out behind us Stop, no, Stop; the fence was nothing like a proper bush jump, and we took it easily, and I couldn’t help the neighing laugh that bucked its way out of me. I reined him in, stroked his neck, cantered back round to the paddock entrance. Ariel was there on his own, teeth the colour of clotted cream spooned on to his face.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, indeedy. You will be our girl rider. A horse rider. Yes, that will do fine.’

It was then that I noticed the empty space beside the Great Ariel. Beside Ariel, where my daddy should have been, was my red-stringed hat-box, its round lid dinted.

Ariel held up the box, said, ‘Your things are in here. Your daddy said to wish you well. He’s –’ His face melted into pity, clotted-cream teeth curdling. ‘He said he’d take your first month’s wages. But you mustn’t worry, not a bit. We’ll take care of you here, we’ll always do that.’

And that was that, really. Scheming bastard sold me for the price of his debts and one month’s rent.

That first night, I sat up on the high row of ladies’ seats and looked down at the men standing and swaying near the front, but I didn’t see the sandy hair of my daddy. Ariel stuck me up there, watching and waiting and watching and waiting. Night after night. An apprenticeship, of sorts. That was what he called it. There were four rows of wooden seats, banged together by Ariel and the ukulele man, just for the ladies. Never even half full. Standing to the side of the seats, the clumps of men swayed like grass, in time to the snake girl’s dance. Her name – the snake girl – was Gladys. After my daddy swam away, to whatever ruddy sewer he’d come from, Ariel took my hand and said, ‘Come and meet your new family.’ Family, ha! Circus people always like to say that, family. But, good Lord, it’s only folk who haven’t known it who would think of ‘family’ as a word of praise. There was a scrap of stained canvas dangling over a rope – one end wrapped round a fat gum and the other hooked on to the paint-peeling caravan – looking about as clean and pretty as the back end of a sheep in summer. Sticking her head out of the tent, Gladys looked as stained and rumpled as someone’s knickers, too. Nose too long for her face, the point of it trying to stretch for the crooked line of her upper lip. On her shoulder, the diamond point of a brown snake. Both of them – Gladys and the snake – squinted their eyes up at me and I could practically see Gladys’s sharp little tongue whip-flicking around. That brown diamond on her shoulder, though, glinted and looked as cool as a bag of nails; I held my hand out flat and rested it on the dry skin. That was when Gladys smiled, her nose moving upward, and a laugh rumbled through Ariel.

At night during the shows, the men standing at the front smelt of the sticky-sweet hair cream and they pulsed together like a breath when Gladys peeked her way into the circle. The horse-tall ukulele man, Heap, with his moon-bright bald head, picked out delicate notes while Gladys stood, swelling, with two pythons licking their way round her almost-bare belly. I was the half-shadow at the back of the ladies’ seats, barely flickering. The snake girl was the peak of interest, all that breath being held while they eyed that bare belly. After that, it was all shuffling and pulling out of pocket watches. Heap lifted Tilly, the bicycle girl, still on her bicycle, high above his head, while the wheels spun, and I was the only one who clapped. Two wooden flats, painted with stars, covered the tent flap, but even so you could see the hefty ruddy gape when Heap pulled it open. Ariel squeezed in, huffing past Heap, wearing a red cape. Even to me – and I was, let me tell you, more than a little unsophisticated then, in spite of being able to leap on a horse’s back and make a stockwhip cry out louder than three galahs – the cape looked like a curtain, yanked down from a drawing-room window in a mad hurry. Ariel stood straight, his palms pointing to the stars; I held my breath. He took his time, letting them take him in, his bare palms. Standing there, as still as darkness, the man was the centre of the world, was the one shining star in a cloud-darkened sky. He was someone else, there in the tent: not the head-bobbing man of the paddock, no. Someone like a parade leader, or a general, or a king. He rumbled a word – I couldn’t tell what it was, it sounded like thunder – and his hands blinked shut. When they opened again, he held three silver rings in each. I clapped and stamped and shouted until my eyes stung. Every night, for eight nights, I sat on the harsh wooden bench, watching the ladies clapping politely and the gentlemen swaying along with Gladys; I watched Ariel turn into a king, and I stamped my feet and shouted More. And every night for eight nights I looked for my daddy, and then I knew he was never coming back.

We packed up on the ninth day. Billy, who broke the brumbies, showed me how to hitch the horses – three Clydesdales, a chestnut mare, Prince Vic and a newly broken brumby – to the caravans and to the loaded-up wagon. For three months, in twelve towns, I watched the show from the wooden seat, fourth row. Daytimes, Billy started teaching me smart tricks with the whip, and with the brumbies. Flicking a whip round his ankles, then up to his waist; he could do it back to me so that the whip landed as soft as butter round the curve of my belly. By the time we got to Gundagai, I could leap from the back of Prince Vic and land one-footed on the stubborn ruddy back of the piebald Clydesdale. When we got to the South Australian border, I taught myself how to flip into a handstand on Prince’s back: still I sat in seat four each ruddy day and each ruddy night, while Ariel counted out the flaming ticket stubs, sighing so that he rattled like a flame-torn paperbark tree. I stood beside him, tugging on his shirt, asking, When, when?

In Tabulum, two crumpled-looking men sauntered past me and Ariel after a matinée and the traces of their words flew back at us: ‘The snake girl was all right, but, Jeez, the rest of it wasn’t much, hey, and a bloody chinky ringmaster, jeez.’ Beside me Ariel stood still, his long face sucking in on itself.

Out the back of Tabulum we were camped in a wide, flat crater: a dry lake, curved into the shape of a keyhole. We could hear the packs of brumbies – those mad, wild horses – thundering above us on the ridge top, leaping over logs so that, from the lakebed, you’d swear they had wings. By the fourth day, there was no one in the audience. Not one person. A girl called Maggie had insisted on joining us in Gundagai. Mad about bicycles, and men. That one, that show, was supposed to be her great flaming début. So she lurked at the backflap, hopeful as a red-eyed coot, until Ariel called out that no one would be going on – no one at all – and he had a bloody headache like the billy-oh, and that we should all rest up, then get ready to pack up and move on to Somewherebloodyelse. Right next to Cape of Lost Hope, if his face was anything to go by. Up on the ridge, a herd of brumbies thundered past. Billy called out, ‘I’m gunna go up and catch some, boss. Good for workhorses, or for this one, this wungunbai: she a good jumper, hey?’

I watched Ariel stalk off to the other side of the lakebed, his back a dry stick. Look at me: my braids have gone and I’m all frizz and freckle and already hard-skinned. Ariel, he’s another thing entirely. Hard-skinned, yes, but burnt orange, and his tilted eyes with a way of holding the sun, shining it back out at you. I can trace my hands across his shoulders: in my imagination, I do.

Stretching one handspan after another across his back, that’s what I imagine; counting out twelve spans as I push my palms across the thin bones, the brown shoulders. Once, in Nambucca, he said his shoulders weren’t big enough, that he couldn’t carry us all, though he wanted to, wanted to find a way. There had been some blokes outside the big tent, calling out something about Chinks, Chinks, and one had spat at Gladys, too, called her Lady Slut. Ariel stood in front of her, his big chest bellowing in and out, a firebolt coming from him. Maybe they saw the hulking great shadow of Heap creaking around, or maybe they could see that firebolt – but they muttered sorry and scampered like a pack of half-shot ruddy wallabies.

On the other side of the lake, he was creaking, stretching up and down, his hands pressed against his head. He looked up at me, watching him like I always was. He didn’t turn his back on me, so I counted myself invited, and ran to him. Could barely speak when I huffed to him there on the other side of the lake.

As if he needed to explain the act of thinking to me, as if I didn’t understand the great pressing weight of thoughts that jumbled out of your head, trying to push out and be born.

Then he burst open, like a cloud, his face splitting with a smile. ‘Yes – I have it, I do.’

And he lifted his bony knees, took my hand, and swung me round, laughing so hard that I laughed too, though I had no idea what the ruddy joke was, or if there was one.

‘Here it is.’ He stepped, all magical flourish, to the side, and waved his hand, as though demonstrating a theatre curtain. ‘The whole show needs to change, to become new. Something new. And you,’ his hand flicked towards me, an extra flourish, ‘are the key, Elizabeth. Oh, indeed.’

I stopped nodding, sat up and took some ruddy notice then, I can tell you. ‘The leaping on those brumbies of Billy’s. And cracking whips and – we’ll be the World’s Greatest Buckjumping Show. Forget the regular circus. Rough riding, that’s the thing. With a story. Yes! A girl, taken from her farm – no – wait.’ He pressed his hands to his head again. ‘My head is aching with it. Oh, the billy-oh. We’ll still have the cycling, and Heap, but – I’ve got it – it’s an outlaw story. We’ll have the story of Captain Thunderbolt himself, we’ll act it all out, with horses, and cycles, and sharp-shooting and whips: him emerging from a poor family. Oppressed—’

‘Yes. So perhaps only the cattle duffing, bailing up the police. Him becoming a hero of the people—’

‘The traps themselves wouldn’t like that, us showing them being bailed up. Wouldn’t they?’

‘No. No – not that. You will be disguised as a boy – a wild boy – perhaps a young wanderer, lost, aimless – no work, no hope – you’ll wear a goatskin, then you’ll come on as a man – riding in different styles – yes—’ He was shouting then, ‘You’ll be the damsel in distress, and the mentor of the boy, and the wild boy, and perhaps even one of the traps – a mistress of disguises, queen of horseback. You will be – I’ve got it – Athene of the Antipodes.’

‘Athene?’ I didn’t like fancy names. Still don’t. Flower names are fine, but not these fussy, dancy fancy names like Zirinthia, Vanessa, Clementia. ‘I don’t even like Elizabeth. It’s too—’

He grinned. ‘You need a name that is strong and brave, beautiful, but plain and – Jess.’

‘Rhymes with yes,’ I said, and he lifted me and swung me round, a planet orbiting the sun.

Ah, I tell you, it was all so long ago that it seems only like a sigh, seems to be right here with me now. And this is where it brings me to, though, this love of him, this clumsiness of me. Here, with this crooked body, the grey and yellow stone around me; the earth beneath my skin.

War is beginning on a faraway rock of land, that’s what they said; but I am here, knowing the battles have ended, gloriously ended. I feel that I’ve been swallowed up, that I am shouting from across a ravine. I am caught, twirling, in a swirl of smoke, and no one hears me across the crackle of the fire and the singing of the earth. Except you. Finally you are listening.

St John of the Cross Rest Home for Women was a progressive institution. Experimental, attempting to cure rather than to hide. Rose could see all this, she was no fool, and understood that the machine, the straps, were meant only for her good, meant to save her from herself.

Rose’s breasts were milky round, the day Joe brought her in. After the kicking and shouting, she stood staring away from him, letting the weight of her hands pull her arms straight down so that you’d think she had rocks in her fists, or gold. Even when Joe left, without a kiss on the cheek, without a by-your-leave, she kept her arms, legs and face as calm as bark. Only when the echo of his footsteps began to gentle away, only then a sound, a sigh, a whoosh: the sound of a tap being turned on. Damp began to spread on her new regulation green tunic, began to spread first across her chest and then to spurt, so that pale milk dripped down her front, drenching her to the waist. The days merged with the nights. Several times Rose woke and rolled over to see shadows of her wardmates moving as though flying, flitting like moths.

On Tuesdays – the nurse said it was Tuesday, as though it mattered – a doctor would appear at her bedside, a white badge on his lapel: Dr V. Dwyer. She thought he was Japanese, perhaps. Oriental-looking, anyhow. Each Tuesday, when Dr V. Dwyer arrived, he held his dusk-coloured hand out to her, as though she were a friend, not a woman losing everything. He walked with her to a cream room with a print of sunflowers on one wall, two framed diplomas on the other. Two chairs, that was all; no desk. He sat on one of the chairs, and she sat on the other, staring at the diplomas.

Each Tuesday he said, ‘What shall we talk about today, Rose?’

And each Tuesday she shook her head, unable to find words. Sometimes, he sat in silence, while she wept. Once, he said, ‘It is not good, to separate a woman from her child. But,’ he stretched his hand out towards her, smiling, ‘you will become well, that is the thing. You can survive all manner of things, Rose.’

‘I’ve always been happy, before. I didn’t plan – I don’t know how I got here.’

On the other days Dr Kingley came to collect her. He held his arms out to her, and though there was no corsage offered, she had the feeling that he would like to waltz with her, that he was planning dance steps in his head, even as he placed one foot neatly in front of the other in a plain straight line. Together, they swayed down the corridor to the blood-swelling room, where Rose obediently stepped behind the white screen. Slipping into an open-backed gown, Rose tilted her chin and straightened her back. She could try, at least, to be brave. Like Athene of the Antipodes, she thought. Then: Now where did that come from?

She stepped out from behind the screen, head lowered so that you would think she was a new bride showing off her trousseau. Almost did a twirl, though she stopped herself in time. The long bed was covered in crisp sheets, as though it were for sleeping, or resting, reading. Without the panel on the wall alongside it, without the wires dangling on to the edge of those inviting sheets, it would seem a place for quiet slumber, for peaceful nocturnal activities. Dr Kingley smiled thinly at Rose, waved his hand in the direction of the bed. When she hesitated, he said, ‘Come now, you know this is for your own good. We are here to take away all that terrible weeping.’

Rose knew it was true. Indeed, she had no desire to give in to the weeping, she did not call it on herself. She drew a picture in her head: of Joe, of Sammy especially, but not just of them. Of herself. The way she could look, could be. When she was dreamed out. She thought of it like this, being dreamed out, cleaned out, and the shocks were not unwelcome. She did feel – how to put it? – clearer. Less silted by muddy thoughts, by the effort of pushing every thought through sand. She had a picture of herself, not entirely plucked from the photographic pictures of the Women’s Weekly but owing something to them. She was mildly, healthily, distracted in the picture. Wearing a pink dirndl – no, she tried again, strained for something flatter, sensible. Cotton pants, with a grey striped pinafore knotted over the top. There. One hand was on Sammy’s head, the other was engaged in something motherly, competent. Perhaps cracking an egg? Rose strove again, here, to create the perfect picture, wanting to be concerned with the whipping of the egg and timing of the vinegar, concerned with effortless mayonnaise creation, with the pleasure of it. She could remember the pleasure she had in such moments. Careful, too, with where she placed Sammy in the picture. Too close and her stomach knotted, her cheek burnt where she imagined him placing his hand, reaching up to touch her. She could see him, could see that his face was button-sweet, and was able to notice the pleasing fatness of his ankles, the way his toes kicked up when he was tired. Yet all his softness was not enough to pull her back, to stop the dull dread that had struck up inside her chest every morning since her long-awaited boy had pushed out of her with the pummelling of a violent storm.

All that hope on the ship, rocking across two oceans. Joe with his teacher’s certificate folded like a kiss in his black leatherette case.

There he was, Joe. Yellow dusk shifting round him, the Isis slugging past. Icicles gathered on the outer edge of the window; inside, steam sucked across the panes. He spread the two-page advertisement across the new red laminex table and looked at Rose, just looked.

Finally: ‘There now. What do you think?’

Rose sat opposite him, her bare hands linked in her white-skirted lap.

The wireless was on in the sitting room, Doris Day calling out ‘Secret Love’. ‘They need teachers. British workers of all sorts. Think of it, Rose.’ He reached his hand up, left it hovering, waiting, then lowered it again. ‘A beginning, an adventure.’

‘How many beginnings can we have?’

‘Rose.’

KATHRYN HEYMAN

Captain Starlight’s Apprentice

Contents

Rose, 1956

Jess, 1914