Ashley Hay - The Railwayman's Wife (Extract)

7/23/2019 Ashley Hay - The Railwayman's Wife (Extract)

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/ashley-hay-the-railwaymans-wife-extract 1/19

Railwayman’s

Wife Th

A s h l e y h A y

‘A tdr prtrat f a marrag ad th ptry ad grf

t cta. A bautfu, dramy, machy bk.’GAil Jones, authr f Five Bells

FREE

extract





Railwayman’sWife Th

A s h l e y h A y

Copyright © Ashley Hay 2013





1

She sits, her legs olded beneath her. Te ngers o one hand

trace the upholstery’s pattern while the other hand holds the

pages o the book.

It could be any day, any year: call it 1935, 1938, 1945,

or somewhere decades away in her uture. Perhaps it’s the day

ater her wedding, the day ater her daughter’s birth, the last

day o the war, the last day o her lie. Whenever it is, Anikka Lachlan is reading, swallowed by the shapes and spaces made

by rows o dark letters on pale paper. She wets one nger, not

slowly, but absently, and moves it to turn the next page.

From outside, across the roos o this small town, comes a

sharp line o noise—a train’s brakes and the squeal o wheel on

rail, metal on metal. Ani looks up rom the page but at nothing,

and at nowhere, as i the room she’s sitting in and the rest o this whole cacophonous world do not, at this moment, quite exist.

Te sound ades. Te silence holds. She looks down, and nds

the next word.

T Raiwaman’ wif



2

Tis place. Down the coast rom Sydney, there’s a point where

the border o Australia’s sheer sandstone clis pulls inland a little,

and a tiny sliver o plain opens up. Tis is the blu at Stanwell

ops where the trains’ tunnel emerges. Tis is the blu whereHargrave ew his amous box kites, more than ty years ago

now. Ani’s always wished she could have seen one, soaring high

and ree.

Te ridge heads inland, orming a line that sometimes mir-

rors, sometimes osets and counteracts the shape o the coast.

And between these two lines, the water on one hand, the vast

spread o the rest o the country on the other, a web o streets andavenues, groves and drives lace across the available land, held rm

by the one road that eeds in rom the north and out to the south.

And then there’s the air, the nor’-easters that play along the

shoreline; the westerlies that dump ractious moods over the edge

o the escarpment; the smoky draughts in late spring and summer

that telegraph bushres and then spur them on. Tere are sot

sea breezes that tease and tickle with the lightest scent o salty water. Tere are southerly busters, powerul ronts that push up

the coast to break open the heat o the day—they smell clean and

crisp, and Ani pushes her nose hungrily into hot aternoons in

search o their coming.

Reaching the bridge over the railway line, she pulls up short.

A hearse is carrying a cofn up to the Anglican church, and Ani

ducks her head quickly, her eyes down as the uneral procession

passes. Don’t turn to look at a hearse; don’t count the number

o cars ollowing in its wake; touch a button ater the hearse has

gone by: her ather trained her in these superstitions in the wake

o her mother’s early death—Ani was only our. Now, she touches

her nger to the button o her dress, and runs across the road

A ha



3

T Raiwaman’ wif

towards the station, where Isabel stands with her nose in a book.

My lovely little thing , thinks Ani ercely, pulling her into a

hug. She’s quiet, Isabel, and careul—when she bounds along the

beach with Mac, her blonde hair ying, or ollows his leap roma high board down into the pool, Ani can see the way she works

at this playulness, this exuberance, because she knows her ather

loves it. With Ani, just the two o them, Isabel has a stillness that

Ani knows is not usual in a ten-year-old. And she knows this

because she remembers it in hersel.

Isabel smiles up at her, then down at the page, as Ani scans the

width o the sky, the line o the escarpment against its blue. It’s a happy thing to stand and to gaze—she reaches out without look -

ing and pats down Isabel’s end-o-the-day hair, and her daughter

catches her hand and squeezes it without looking up.

Te train is late.

‘What avour milkshake today, Bella?’

‘Chocolate malted’—without a glance.

‘Chocolate malted’—the ull stretch o available luxury. Across the tracks a pane o glass rattles. Ani glances towards

the sound and sees a window open in the Railway Institute’s

library. Such ascinating things, libraries: she closes her eyes. She

could walk inside and step into a murder, a love story, a complete

account o somebody else’s lie, or mutiny on the high seas. Such

potential; such adventure—there’s a shimmer o maleasance in

trying other ways o being.

She loves their trips to the library, loves the sight o their

three separate piles stacked on Miss Fadden’s desk—the am-

ily’s collection o daydreams and instruction. Isabel always

arrives with a list, lling it as best she can and asking or the

librarian’s assurances o happily-ever-ater. But Mac loves to graze,



4

weighing up the attractions and merits o dierent books as i he

had really to choose between ghting o Mormons with Zane

Grey’s spry heroine, or undertaking a secret mission with Horn-

blower in Central America. She loves watching him make hisselection, as i it might open up new ways into his curiosity, his

imagination.

‘What i I kept some books at work, well away rom your

eyes,’ he teased her once in a while, ‘or a little bit o privacy?’

Yet whenever she went to the library with him, she couldn’t resist

watching his hand move along the shelves, choosing an adventure

with aeroplanes and jungles, dismissing another with cowboysand wagons. She’d seen him pause at Gone with the Wind , and

move on to Sons and Lovers .

‘What you looking at, Ani?’ he’d asked, without turning

towards her. ‘You know where my loyalties lie.’

Next to the railway was a feld, with men and youths playing

ootball or their lives. When Mac brought her to the coast, she’d

carried Kangaroo like a literary Baedeker, trawling its pages oridentiable spots, even recognisable people—against Mac’s pro-

testations that it was a novel, ‘a novel, love, that’s made up, you

know, made up, and years ago to boot.’ But even now, she shrugs:

here is the railway; behind her is the ootball, just like the book.

Tis place belongs to Lawrence; she is living the next chapter o

a amous story.

From the ootball eld now comes a surge o chants and

cheers, and Ani turns towards the noise. It makes her shiver some-

times, that open stretch o grass: efgies were burned there in the

war—Hitler rst, and then rough approximations o the nameless

Japanese men who were thought to be coming to invade. A high

whistle rises up and Ani remembers the air-raid sirens, the dark

A ha



5

T Raiwaman’ wif

stufness o the shelter Mac dug in the backyard.

‘Like being buried alive while you’re waiting to be bombed,’

he always said, insisting on sitting above ground, in the garden,

so he could see i any planes came close. He’d been so certain o his own survival—his immortality—that she’d worked hard not

to be anxious or him, out there and exposed.

Now, a short, sharp siren comes rom the north— probably the

roundhouse, thinks Ani—and she turns away rom remembering

the war, and ootball, and Mr Lawrence. Above the ridge, the

clouds are inching towards sunset, morphing rom puy, uy

white shapes that Isabel might place at the top o a drawing tosomething longer and more elegant. It will be a glorious show, r-

ing the clouds with colour while the greens and browns in the scarp

and its trees drain towards darkness.

‘You’re or town, Mrs Lachlan?’ Luddy, the young stationmas-

ter, is at her elbow. But as Ani nods, he shakes his head. ‘Sounds

like there’s a problem with the trains coming through—an acci-

dent along the line and they’re not letting anything pass. Do you want to wait a while, or will I try to get a message to Mac, let him

know you’re not coming?’

Isabel looks up, her nger marking her place on the page: ‘My

birthday treat, my milkshake . . .’

Ani rowns, tucking Isabel’s hair back into its bunches again.

She’s been looking orward to it too—walking down Crown

Street, looking at the shops, sipping her own tall, cold drink.

She hates problems she can’t solve, but: ‘I suppose you’d better,

Luddy. ell Mac we’ll see him at home?’

And he smiles at her, nodding and tweaking Isabel’s neater

hair.

‘Can we go to the beach then, Mum? Can we go to the beach



6

on the way home?’

‘We can, Bella. Still a bit o a treat. We’ll go down to the rock

pool, see i we can nd a pretty shell.’ She holds her hand out to

her daughter, who makes a great show o smiling and waving toLuddy.

Te sun has almost let the sand by the time they reach its

edge, Isabel ying towards the water while Ani bundles up shoes,

socks, bags and picks her way across to the rock shel. Almost

every day, she comes down to the beach, but nothing has ever

taken away the surprise o seeing it. A country girl, grown up on

the Hay Plains in the ar west o New South Wales, the rst timeshe saw the ocean was the rst time she’d seen anything so big and

so blue that wasn’t a vast, dry sky. When she was married; when

she’d moved to the coast.

Leaning against Mac, back then, on her rst day in Tirroul,

she’d had no sense that the sea would be so enormous. She could

hear it; she could smell it. And she could taste it—it was salty,

which she had expected, but it was sticky too, which she hadn’t. And all o this had seemed so much bigger, so much more impres-

sive than the wide stretch o its colour, the vast stretch o its space.

‘I didn’t think,’ she’d said sotly to her new husband, ‘I didn’t

think it would be so many things all at once.’

He’d squeezed her hand, kissed her shoulder. ‘At home,’ he

said, ‘it’s mostly grey, but I like this colour, this briny blue aigeun.’

A wave roared at the edge o the rocks, and Ani had jumped back,

startled at how high, how near, it reared. ‘It just wants to meet

you,’ said Mac, laughing, ‘just wants to see who you are.’

Now, in this late aternoon, Ani watches Isabel run across

the rocks to the very lip o the land. A surging wave would no

longer make her jump, and the tide is a long way out in any case,

A ha



7

T Raiwaman’ wif

pushing a low burst o white water against the rocks once in a

while. A crab scurries beneath a heap o seaweed that smells o

pure salt; another scuttles under a rock at the bottom o a shallow

pool. Tere are purple barnacles and tiny orange conches, stripedshells and smooth rocks.

Overhead, two seagulls swoop against the blue sky, making

their barking calls. Isabel barks back rom the shore and the birds

settle on the sand at a sae distance as Ani laughs, leaning or-

ward at the edge o one deep rock pool. Tere’s a clamshell down

there, a beautiul thing, pearly silver inside and gold and rose-

pink outside—colours that belong to pretty dresses, rich taeta,and swirling dances. She pushes up her sleeve, dips in her arm,

shivering. It will eel warm in just a moment. Te strange tricks

o distance and perspective—her ngers eel or the shell as deep

as she thinks it is, but still wave uselessly above it. She inches

orward and grasps the pretty shape.

Te number o rocks she’s taken rom this beach in those

twelve years; the number o days she’s combed along its shore; thenumber o nights she’s come down here with Mac. She closes her

eyes and sees the two o them dancing along the sand in the weeks

ater the war, their eyes closed to the barbed wire that still looped

its indecipherable script along the waterline. On those nights, i

there’d been enough moon, she was sure they could have danced

out across the ocean’s marbled surace, and said so.

‘You make me romantical,’ her husband had said then, and

she’d laughed at the rolic o his words. He was many things,

Mackenzie Lachlan, strong, and true, and hers. But he was pur-

pose, and he was pragmatism—the moments o sentiment, o sot

sweetness or high emotion, were exceptions, and she treasured

them or that.



8

‘What about this, Isabel?’ she calls across to her daughter.

‘reasure enough?’

She loves her daughter’s careul attention—the paragraphs in

her book; the shell cupped in the palm o her hand; completely considered.

‘It looks like something precious,’ says Isabel.

‘Like an evening dress?’

‘Maybe, but a listening to music one, not a dancing one.’

‘I thought dancing and swirling,’ says Ani gravely, ‘but you

might be right.’ She rubs at the colours, brushing the tiniest

specks o sand rom the shell’s dents and pocks. ‘Home then?’ And her daughter surges back again, butting in at her side.

‘How long will it take Dad, i the trains are stopped?’

Ani shakes her head, the opalescent shell heavy in her pocket.

‘Let’s see,’ she says. ‘You nish your book, and we’ll see how

long it is beore he’s coming along the street.’ She holds out her

hand to her daughter and they climb the stairs cut into the cli

ace two at a time.

Te house is quiet and Ani, cutting vegetables in the kitchen,

can hear the drumming o Isabel’s ngers on the window sill in

the next room as she sits and waits or her ather. She smiles, sing -

ing a sot lullaby in her ather’s old language in time to the gentle

beat, its angular syllables studded with t’s and k’s and n’s. Tere

are still no trains, and the silence is starting to ring.

Ten: ‘Mum?’ Tere’s a tightness in her daughter’s voice.

‘Tere’s a car at the gate.’ Ani hears her daughter shit, can sense

her stien.

‘Mum?’ Isabel’s voice is less certain again. ‘Tere’s a big black

car.’

A ha



9

T Raiwaman’ wif

In the kitchen, Ani tries to stop the movement o the knie

but the end o the blade nicks her thumb. She stares at the skin;

just dented, she thinks at rst, but then the blood comes and she

hears Isabel say again,‘Mum?’—and eels her pressing in at herside, against the table.

Tere’s a black car at the gate. She’s almost thirty-seven years

old. Here is her daughter. Where is her husband? Her thumb is

starting to bleed. Te kitchen is very quiet and very bright, and

Ani hears hersel say: ‘Now, Bella, run next door to Mrs May and

I’ll get you when it—when I—’

‘But I want to wait or Da—’ Isabel begins, and Ani hearsher own voice, uncharacteristically harsh: ‘Isabel—so help me—I

will not tell you again.’ Te words scrape the walls like sharp-

ness against glass and she squeezes her eyes tight as her daughter

throws the shell hard against the linoleum oor—it shatters into

ve sharp pieces—and slams the door.

So this is what happens , thinks Ani as the ront gate unsnibs,

the ootalls hit the stairs, a knuckle taps the wooden rame o thescreen door, and the minister calls, ‘Mrs Lachlan?’

She closes her eyes and sees hersel lying next to Mac, nine

years ago now, the day Australia’s war was declared. ‘But what

does it mean, “Australia is also at war”? What does that mean

or us?’

‘Needn’t mean anything,’ Mac had said. ‘Tey’ll need the rail-

ways to keep running, so I should be right.’

‘But would you want to go? Would you rather?’ She remem-

bered her ather’s riends trading stories rom the Great War,

teasing him or missing the un, the adventure, and being stuck

behind the ramshackle ence o some internment camp instead.

‘Don’t be dat, Ani love; leave you and Isabel and go o to be



10

killed? Tey’ll need the trains, so they’ll be ater us to stay—and

I’m not the heroic type, now, am I?’ He tickled above her hipbone

so that she giggled and squirmed. ‘I intend to go on living—

always have, and always will.’She’d grabbed his ngers, pushing them away. ‘But i Aus-

tralia’s at war, then we’re at war, aren’t we, you and me? Our

melancholy duty, like Mr Menzies said? We’d have to ght, i the

war came here. We’d have to be able to kill an enemy. And there’ll

be dying, so much dying.’

Keep us sae , she’d thought, over and over, keep us sae , through

the next six years. As she watched women becoming wives with-out husbands, mothers without sons, Ani had an image o a

searchlight sweeping around, illuminating this woman—wid-

owed; that one—her son on a drowned ship.

Now that searchlight has ound her, catching her in its sweep

and pinning her, arbitrary and irrevocable.

So this is what happens, she thinks again—so distinctly that

she wonders i she says it aloud. She presses a tea towel onto herthumb and walks towards the ront door, the men, the news that

the car has brought. Te house has never seemed so long and at

each step she thinks, Tis is how I will remember this.

Te door at the end o the hall is her last hope: Ani on one side

and the men, and the night, and the news on the other. I I keep

my eyes closed, she thinks, shutting them ast, perhaps I’ll open them

and fnd I’ve been asleep this whole time. Fast asleep and dreaming.

‘Mrs Lachlan?’ says the minister again. ‘Can we come in?’

A ha



11

T Raiwaman’ wif

At the end o it all, she stands a while in her daughter’s room,

watching her quiet oblivion. Every night or ten years, she’s done

this. All those years , she thinks now, all those benedictions I made or

your saety and your health, I was concentrating on the wrong person.I was protecting the wrong one.

It’s a nasty thought. She pushes hard at the side o her head

to dislodge it.

‘Beautiul Bella,’ she whispers, leaning down to kiss her shoul-

der. You and me. You and me. You and me.

From some deep crevasse in her mind, she retrieves her ather’s

story about a rainbow bridge that spans the world o the mortalsand the world o the gods. I she could nd the right rainbow, her

ather had told her when she was young, she might skip along it

to see her mother. But even in the wide space o the south-west,

the beginnings o rainbows had been hard to catch.

‘You only need one dream to slip along, Ani,’ her ather

had said, ‘one moment, and you’re up one side o the rainbow

and sliding down the other or the brieest visit, the shortestglimpse—but it’s enough. It can be enough.’

She smoothes Isabel’s blanket, the next thought so strong, so

vehement, that her hand shakes and her daughter stirs against the

movement. How could I not have known, not have elt it when it

happened? I was on the platorm. I was at the beach. I was slicing

stupid carrots.

‘Mac?’ she says at last, climbing into her own bed. ‘Where are

you?’ Outside, a ew crickets are calling, and the waves are turn-

ing, gently and lengthily, below the staccato beat o the insects’

sound. A world with no Mac.

Te worst o it is how normal, how usual, how amiliar

the house eels—But perhaps this is shock , she thinks, and some



12

pummelling comes later . It would be easier i some part o the

house had collapsed, i there was some destruction to see.

In the corner o the room, she sees his socks, a singlet, crum-

pled on the top o the laundry basket, and is puzzled by the idea o washing them. His eet will never ll out that wool again; his

torso will never stretch that cotton to capacity. She makes hersel

think these things, wondering how she should eel. She recites

his name over and over in her mind, wondering how she might

manage to close her eyes—or open them again in the morning.

‘Mackenzie Lachlan,’ she says aloud at last, ‘I can’t sleep; can

you tell me a story?’ Te way she used to say it, when he washome, when he was here.

It’s the darkest, coldest time o night, and her only answer is

three dogs passing mournul barks between them as the night’s

breezes drop away. Aching with tiredness, her hands rub at her

arms, creep across to her belly, up to her breasts, and she is think -

ing about the last time her husband touched her. Against any

other memory she might nd, here is this thing that was only the two o them—and she hadn’t realised it was happening or

the very last time.

She stills her hands, her body uninterested in their cold, tiny

touch. Never again, she thinks. Never again. Somewhere deep in

the centre o hersel, she senses that the decisions she will make

tonight, tomorrow, in the world’s next days, will govern and dic-

tate what happens in what is let o her own lie—she’s never

thought o that as a nite stretch beore.

‘No matter,’ she says, too loud and reckless. As i she will ever

care what anything is or isn’t again.

A car turns into the street and crawls past the window, its

lights stirring up another dog and then the dog’s owner who yells,

A ha



13

T Raiwaman’ wif

harshly, or the little bugger to shut up. Ani inches, as i the

command was a response to her noise, her words.

Rolling ast into the empty space in the bed, she presses her-

sel—ace down and hard—into the space where Mac should beand can almost eel his rm, strong shape. A mattress spring twists

unexpectedly beneath her sudden movement, poking so sharply

into the sotness o her belly that she recoils ast onto the other side

o the bed, her tears distracting her rom the urgent surge o desire

she eels and doesn’t want to.

Te car’s headlights move back along the street, the dog silent

this time, and as they turn and head down the hill it’s as i a littleo their shine stays on, stuck in the tongue-and-groove o Ani’s

bedroom walls. Tere are birds then, here and there, and then one

massed and raucous outburst.

Te dawn is coming, a new day; the next day. She sighs, turns

her pillow over, and is suddenly asleep.

Ani Lachlan sleeps through the washes o the morning’s col-

ours and the warm brilliance o sunrise. She sleeps in a world where she remembers, perectly, every detail about her husband,

this day, that sentence, another touch. She will remember it all

in the deepest sleep, and lose it again the moment her eyes open

and she wonders how late it must be or the sun to already be so

high and then remembers, in the next instant, what happened

the day beore.





In Thirroul in 1948, people chase their dreams through the books in

the railway’s library. Anikka Lachlan searches or solace ater her lie is

destroyed by a single random act. Roy McKinnon, who ound poetry

in the mess o war, has lost his words and his hope. Frank Draper is

trapped by the guilt o those his treatment and care ailed on their frst

day o reedom. All three struggle with the same question: how now

to be alive.

Written in clear, shining prose and with an eloquent understanding o the

human heart, The Railwayman’s Wife explores the power o beginnings

and endings, and how hard it can be sometimes to tell them apart. It’s

a story o lie, loss and what comes ater; o connection and separation,

longing and acceptance. Most o all, it celebrates love in all its orms, and

the beauty o discovering that loving someone can be as extraordinary as

being loved yoursel.

A story that will break your heart with hope.

‘The Railwayman’s Wife illuminates the deepest placeso the human heart.’

DEBRA ADELAIDE , author o The Household Guide to Dying

‘An extraordinary light alls on every page o this tenderand gripping story. The lives o a widow and a war poet,

mending and dreaming in a tiny coastal village, revealmovingly a wider world o catastrophe, violence and beauty.’

BELINDA CASTLES , author o Hannah and Emil

This is an abridged extract o The Railwayman’s Wife by Ashley Hay. It is notrepresentative o the fnal text and is or promotional use only. Not or resale.

Documents

Ashley Hay - The Railwayman's Wife (Extract)