Maggie stripped down to her knickers and stood in front of the open bedroom window, her arms wide, her body tantalisingly exposed; except with no visible moon, the room and the street below were as dark as each other. There was nothing beyond her tiny room: no river flowing freely, no endless sky, no stretches of Calingarry’s undulating landscape. The sash window, still broken from when she’d occupied this room as a teenager, was propped open with a long chock of wood. The moon was up there somewhere, hidden behind a thick layer of cloud that had gathered through the evening. Only the red glow from her clunky old clock radio, a sixteenth-birthday present from her brother, illuminated the room.
Sheer, lace curtains billowed from an occasional puff of air and Maggie moved her body closer to let the fabric brush between her legs. She closed her eyes and breathed deep. Her breasts prickled, turning her nipples hard, the sensation enhanced as lace fingers scraped against her skin. Moving closer still, she willed the curtains to continue their caress, imagining a time when she’d enjoyed the thrill of Brian’s fingers stroking her body.
He might not have looked like the old Brian in the café the other day, but when she’d closed her eyes as they hugged, there was a moment when she remembered a younger man who’d once been all spice and sex. She missed sex. Not the orgasm part—she could manage that all by herself—but the intensity and completeness that came from being adored and wanted by a man, that first teasing touch that held the promise of more and warmed everything from her toes to her ears.
‘Argh!’ Maggie took a frustrated swipe at the curtains, jerked the roller blind halfway down and threw herself on top of the bed sheets.
This was all Fiona’s fault. Being stick insect skinny, yet pert, pretty and alluring was everything else Maggie missed. Was she jealous of Fiona? Who wouldn’t be? Even the giggling grey nomads in the bar tonight had stirred Maggie’s green-eyed monster. Life wasn’t fair and sometimes it really hurt. Fiona had Amber’s looks and an inheritance that put a little country pub to shame. Material objects had never featured in the Lindeman household. Maggie had learned early to make do, with her mother regularly sorting the family’s wardrobes into boxes and bags and giving anything not worn in the last six months to charity. ‘Farmers are always needy,’ she used to tell her daughter, ‘even if they never say it outright.’ The throwaway lines had painted a hopeless picture of farming and convinced a young Maggie that if she was to make something of herself she’d have to get out of Calingarry Crossing.
She’d grown up hearing about hardship. At night over their family dinner her parents would use a kind of code to talk about which farmer was losing the battle, refusing to let bullying bureaucrats and poor policy decisions push him off the land he loved. Sometimes a sombre Reverend Joe Lindeman would discuss an ‘accident’—another code that Maggie had figured out. In a small town some deaths seemed easier to stomach when called that.
But ‘reckless stupidity’ was how her heart-broken father referred to the act that had killed her brother. Even though he’d stopped saying it aloud a long time ago, Maggie knew her father thought it still. At least he had up until the moment he could no longer remember the tragedy of Michael’s death in much detail at all.
Maggie fell back against her pillow, wishing she could somehow shut out the memory. That night seemed like only yesterday.
They didn’t let her see him. They didn’t let her say sorry.
Sorry for being a brat.
Sorry for the time she’d faked bruises on her arm with purple eye shadow, telling everyone he’d given her a horsey bite.
Sorry for writing I hate you in indelible ink on the wall above his bed one day.
They didn’t let Maggie say goodbye, even though Michael’s death changed her life forever.
Her sixteenth birthday had started out predictably enough—predictable for Maggie who, for the last three years, had looked after a house, a father and a brother. Homework was always her first priority after each school day, followed by the chooks, the dogs, the laundry and household chores. How three people could dirty so many clothes was beyond her understanding. Every evening she’d cook, usually for two—her and her dad—as Michael was … Well, he was a restless teenage boy and who could control them? Her father couldn’t; everyone’s favourite minister was too preoccupied fitting his life around the needs of his congregation. Nothing left for family.
If only he’d been there the day that big brown snake had decided to seek respite from the burning summer heat, coiled up under the old laundry copper on the back veranda of the Manse. It took a sleepy snake to strike down the otherwise indomitable Mary Lindeman two weeks before Maggie turned thirteen, the keystone of the Lindeman family snatched away. Maggie was desperately sad, her father sadder, while Michael—two years older—took a bull-by-the-horns approach to life. If her father even noticed, he did nothing to curtail his son’s unruliness. Their mother had been the only one who could control Michael and she was gone.
Maggie missed everything about her mother.
Mary Lindeman was a kisser. Good morning, goodnight, hello, goodbye, she was forever kissing someone, adopting the European double-cheek air kiss thing because she’d dreamed of going to Italy one day. The sound of Mary’s soprano voice would fill the house, her strange medley of church hymns, Italian opera and Broadway musicals, audible several houses down. When she died, the loss of this mother’s love had left her family with the most impossible emptiness and silence. Maggie’s father, too lost in his own grief, struggled to meet his clergyman’s duties, let alone domestic chores. That’s when nurturing and housekeeping responsibilities fell to Maggie. After a quiet dinner each night the Rev would silently, mournfully, but methodically wipe as Maggie stacked the dish rack. Sometimes Maggie tried to hold off serving dinner in the hope her brother would lob with his hungry hangers-on, even though stalling usually meant singed or soggy food. Maggie didn’t care. She craved noise and the chaotic clamour that Michael and his mates brought into the house and her humdrum world.
Her sixteenth birthday fell on a Sunday. Michael’s friends always came over on weekends when the Reverend, occupied with his religious duties in the adjacent church, didn’t have time to worry, or the inclination to care about what sort of mischief his son might be up to at home. The all-male invasion took over every chair in the living room where they watched ‘Wide World of Sports’, swigged on cans of beer and Pepsi and ate Cheezels straight from the box. Pesky younger sisters—birthday girl or not—were definitely barred. It wasn’t that Maggie was interested in her poser brother’s chorus of swearing and farting as he carried on like a dork in front of his mates. Michael was not the reason she wanted to hang around.
If Maggie could have wished for anything that birthday, it was that sixteen was old enough to drink beer, make noise and get up to no good—especially with that boy she liked, that brooding mate of Michael’s, the one her father labelled reckless, but who always acknowledged Maggie with a smile and silent g’day when his mates weren’t looking. Michael and his friends were loud and blokey, constantly making mischief around the town, up late, playing drinking games by the river and taking girls to Cedar Cutters Gorge.
Yes, even he did that, although she chose not to believe everything she heard. Such shenanigans always made the rounds of the playground and no one dared dob on the cool kids like Michael and his mates.
Maggie didn’t want to be cool as much as she did loud. Wasn’t life meant to be big and colourful and exciting? It seemed not in Calingarry Crossing, especially at night when country town silence did the opposite of soothe Maggie.
Maggie’s sixteenth had been no different to any other Sunday. After scoffing down dinner the boys left the house, ejected by the Rev whose tolerance for tomfoolery—any kind of happiness—died along with Mary. From behind her louvred bedroom windows, Maggie watched her brother and his friends go, their drunken attempts to hush each other making more noise. As usual, she stifled her giggle behind a hand to remain undetected. But tonight—maybe because it was her birthday—he turned around and looked up towards her window. Then, walking backwards, he doffed his hat and promptly tripped, falling flat on his bottom. Maggie had fallen on her bed, burying her laughter in the pillow. When she looked again, the boys were gone, the night was silent and she was alone.
She lay on her bed in the dark for a long time, staring at the bright red numbers of the new digital clock radio she’d unwrapped that morning. She must have fallen asleep because the little LED numbers read 11.30 pm when she looked again. They kept turning over, until at 2 am all the familiar night noises changed and a curious, curved beam of light travelled over the foot of her bed. The white glow illuminated the bedside table, passing over the walls and the ceiling until the room fell into blackness again. A car door banged and the front gate clanged back against the old milk can mailbox. Feet shuffled over the gravel path and a fist pounded on the front door. The crickets that chirped unfailingly each night suddenly stopped, as if they wanted Maggie to hear the voices. The only night noise that continued was the muted and ominous oom-oom, oom-oom sound of the tawny frogmouth with its bird’s-eye view of the porch from the big, old tree out front.
Sneaking a peak through a gap in the louvres, and under a full moon, the police car was easy to make out in the street, the sight of it speckling Maggie’s neck and arms with goose bumps, despite the warm September night air. The bare bulb on the porch flickered, illuminating the uniformed figure at the front door. As daughter of the local minister she’d been woken plenty of times by either a late-night visitor to the Manse or the shrill of the telephone. She didn’t need to hear the policeman’s words tonight to know a visit at such an hour generally meant bad news. Someone, somewhere in town, or on one of the properties further out, needed consoling or counselling. Any minute her father would invite the policeman in while he quickly changed out of his pyjamas and into the clothes he customarily laid out each night, kind of like a fireman’s outfit, ready to slip into when time was of the essence.
Only her father didn’t swing into action at all. Rather, he sank back into the darkness of the doorway, and she heard a sound she had never heard before, an inconsolable roar. ‘Not my boy! Not my Michael!’ The cry rose from the shadows, ripping through the early morning calm and sending a flurry of squawking birds from their perches.
The silence that followed was deep. Maggie fell back onto her bed, covered her head with the sheet and sobbed silent tears, scared that her life would never again be loud.
To this day, when she closed her eyes, Maggie could picture the policeman walking away from the little church residence, once her family home. He’d stopped to stare at the glass louvres as if sensing her there and Maggie saw his face. It was one of those sad, tired faces. Tired of being the bearer of bad news.
The aftermath of Michael’s funeral tore the town, and Maggie, in two. Half the folk were left shaking their heads in disbelief, while the other half vehemently and openly condemned one young man.
That memory from long ago wouldn’t allow Maggie to close her eyes tonight. The little pub bedroom was no longer dark, the combination of moon shadow and pressed tin on the ceiling creating strange shapes and playing with her mind. Maggie’s life had changed forever on that sixteenth birthday. The only thing to help her get through it then, and now, was telling herself Michael was with Mum.
God had had them both for so long.
And what did Maggie have? An absent, fame-obsessed musician husband, a stagnant marriage, an ailing father, a dwindling bank account, and now an all too alluring twenty-two-year-old female occupying a room not far away from an increasingly restless seventeen-year-old son.