Fiona McFarlane - The High Places - Stories

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. The light was low and green and the glass cases seemed to swim out of it, full of leafy foliage, full of fake creeks and desert rocks and their jewelled inhabitants, mostly sleeping.

‘Lizzie!’ called Rose.

‘You killed her,’ Lizzie was yelling, over and over. ‘You killed her! You pushed! You killed her.’

There was another sound, thinner: Alex crying out, high-pitched. Somewhere in the dark he was struggling and crying. The snakes didn’t move, except one python that continued to bury itself in the sand of its tank.

‘You killed her!’ Lizzie yelled again, and Alex cried and Rose ran through the corridors into the green darkness, afraid of what might be at her feet. Then Susan was there too; she also ran, breathing loudly, calling, and Rose saw her every now and then flashing against a lit case.

Rose found them first. They were deep in the reptile house, on the floor below the tank of a large, pouchy lizard. Alex lay on his back and Lizzie sat astride his chest, pinning his shoulders with her knees. She hit at his head again and again with her palms, her face teary and furious. Alex was half hidden beneath her; his legs rose slightly with each blow, his hands opened and closed, and his shoulders strained as Lizzie pressed tighter with her knees. She hit at him until Rose dragged her away, and even then she kicked at him with her bony shoes, and scratched and bit at Rose.

Lizzie quieted when Susan reached Alex. They were all quiet until they came out into the light, then Lizzie pulled herself from Rose’s arms and began to scream. She opened her throat and a large noise came from it, much larger than she was. The effort of it shook her whole body, and closed her eyes, and turned her red. Children walking past the reptile house stopped to look; their parents hurried them on. ‘Someone’s tired!’ called one jovial man. Rose smiled at him. She realised he thought she was Lizzie’s mother.

‘Elizabeth Rose,’ said Susan. Alex had slithered to the ground and pressed his face against his mother’s legs. Now Susan shouted, ‘Elizabeth!’

Lizzie stopped screaming. She sat on the ground, limp, worn out by the exertion of being so angry.

‘Explain yourself,’ said Susan. ‘We are going home immediately, you have ruined our day, but first you will tell me why you behaved so badly, so terribly, I’ve never been so ashamed of you. And no nonsense, Lizzie, no silliness about anybody killing anybody else.’

‘But he did,’ said Lizzie, collected now, and sullen.

Susan smacked her lightly on the arm. Lizzie opened her mouth as if to scream again, but she looked across at Rose and didn’t.

‘I’m not lying,’ she said. ‘Alex killed Julia.’ And now she began to cry in messy, unfeigned gulps, staring at her mother.

‘What are you talking about?’ said Susan.

‘Alex pushed her off the ferry. While we were getting on the ferry he pushed her off the bridge we walked on and she fell in the sea and drowned and she’s dead forever.’ This through sobs full of air and water.

‘She did not drown,’ Alex called out. He turned to Rose and she noticed blood in his hair. ‘She didn’t.’

‘You hurt your brother,’ said Susan. ‘You attacked your brother. Where does this come from, Lizzie? Why do you make these things up?’

‘All right!’ Lizzie cried. Then her voice became very quiet. ‘ I pushed her. Not Alex. I pushed her because there’s no room for her on the big boat. No, I didn’t push her. She fell in the water while we walked across the bridge because there were too many people. I didn’t help her. I didn’t help her because she can’t come in our window on the boat. And now she’s dead forever.’

Lizzie lay back on the dirt of the path that led to the reptile house.

* * *

Rose waited for a long time on a bench outside the zoo’s first- aid clinic. Below her the lions slept in the afternoon light. She wondered if the flying boats passed over the lions as they lifted out of Rose Bay. She wondered what Robert was doing now, with his wife and children; they might walk past her here at the zoo, gathered together, weary, cross, loving, bound for home; it seemed as likely as having seen Adelaide Turner on the hillside with the giraffes and Harbour Bridge behind her. The clinic door opened and Susan stepped out. She was red with worry; her eyes were swollen and red.

‘The children won’t co-operate with me in there,’ she said. ‘They won’t let go of my arms. It’s best I leave them. I think it’s best.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Rose. She stood beside her sister; she was the taller by at least an inch.

‘They’ll only be a minute,’ said Susan. ‘Just being checked over. Getting cleaned up.’

‘Shall we go right home?’

Susan nodded. Rose wished, at that moment, to be quick with comfort and easy with words. But it was Susan who spoke. She said, ‘Is there anyone for you, right now?’

Rose watched the lions and their sunned flanks. They breathed deeply, rib-movingly, as if the light were a weight upon them.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Will we meet him? Or is that … difficult?’

Rose shook her head, very slightly, perhaps to say no, perhaps to shake off her sister’s question. ‘You don’t know him,’ she said.

‘I don’t expect to know him. I don’t know anyone in this city of yours. Just looking at it, I think might be too much for me. All this water, those boats, the houses. And I don’t know a soul in them.’

Rose looked out over her city.

‘There are some schoolfriends,’ said Susan. ‘I should have looked them up, shouldn’t I? A few girls. Married.’

‘Married’ sounded to Rose like a white, tall, marble word. It sounded like a word she might stand on — not to crush it, but in order to see farther. The city rose up out of the harbour, not far away, but it seemed to float on the opposite shore of an unplumbed sea. If Rose hadn’t left for Sydney, Jonathan might have told Susan; they might have left together. There would be no Alex. But Jonathan would still have got sick. What I most want, thought Rose, is to be quiet, and private, and not to upset anybody. She knew, at the same time, that this could not be what she most wanted.

The children emerged from the clinic. Lizzie held Alex’s hand, and he didn’t mind. They looked happy and tired. Their father was dead.

* * *

Rose left work at lunchtime on Monday even though Robert had made plans with her for the early evening. She told people she was sick, and because she was never sick — because she was ‘particularly pleasant’ — they believed her. Robert could be, this once, unmet. She sat by her window all afternoon, waiting for the Coral Sea to sail between Rose Bay and the zoo with both Susan and Adelaide Turner on it. When it did Rose tried to count its windows, none of which belonged to Julia. She watched the small shapes on deck in the hope of finding somebody she recognised. Jonathan would have had binoculars. The harbour and the afternoon sun took turns with the light. Rose Bay rocked on the edge of the Coral Sea ’s wake, a small sea with tides in it. Rose wasn’t sad. She wasn’t lonely. She sat at her window and watched the ship disappear, little by little, toward America.

Mr Kidd’s bird looked like an ordinary budgerigar: blue, with a yellow face, black dots at the neck, and zebra-striped wings. It spoke three words: ‘hello’, ‘knock’, and ‘Violet’, which late in the night sounded like ‘violent’ and worried Christopher, at first, as he heard it through the thin walls of his room at the St George Hotel. His room was small and oppressively tidy; the television attached to a bracket on the ceiling above the writing desk made Christopher think of a hospital; his clothes filled no more than one-third of the wardrobe; and the words ‘violent, violent’ issued through the left-hand wall from a voice not quite human.