In the Beginning
In the beginning, Charade says, when Kay was a child in Melbourne, she was taken Sunday after Sunday to a church where the pastor spoke lightning and thunder …
In the beginning, thundered the pastor, and the child watched the Word skipping and sliding up ladders of sunlight, watched it wink at her from high up in the cave of the church before it slipped through an air vent and escaped. She heard it rumbling about, baying above the trams and trains of Melbourne, that wicked city, and demanding repentance: a barker for God. It called to her: not Katherine! but Kay, Kay! it whispered, enticing. She closed her eyes and saw it on the carousel in the Fitzroy Gardens, going round and round in the eucalypt air, skipping higher and higher until it was with God again.
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God.
It was God, said the pastor, and the same was in the beginning with God.
The beautiful shimmering Word: round and round and higher and higher it went, in the beginning and world without end, amen.
In the beginning Katherine was surrounded by the Word and by pastors and preachers and grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins and God and the Powers of Darkness. The air through which she moved was thick with presences, for we are at all times surrounded, said the preacher, by a great cloud of witnesses. What else, therefore, could she do but walk with them and talk with them and know them all by name and by shape, even the Noisome Pestilence, whom she thought of as long-legged with a leer and bad teeth and fingernails curling like black smoke. When the Noisome Pestilence passed overhead there was a roaring in the air and flames fell.
He had passed over Darwin. He had dropped bombs. He flew in Japanese planes.
So thick, so dense with threat was the air, that the windows of the house (it was in Ringwood, on the outskirts of Melbourne) were painted black, for the terrors that stalked about at night battened onto lighted windows. In the mornings, however, as the trains rumbled by the house on their way into Flinders Street station, the blackened casements were thrown open to the sun and Katherine watched to see who would come riding on the shafts of light. Once a funnel of soot came twisting and dancing in, pointing its toes, lifting its long graceful legs and baring its teeth.
Katherine screamed.
“It’s the Noisome Pestilence,” she sobbed into her grandmother’s bosom.
“We’re not afraid of the noisome pestilence,” Grandma Llewellyn comforted. “The noisome pestilence can’t hurt us.” This was because they lived under the shadow of the Almighty. “He shall cover you with his feathers,” Grandma Llewellyn said, “and under his wings shalt thou trust.”
Katherine looked up into the downy feather-breasted air. It smelled of warmth and pillows and of the Velvet soap her grandmother used. A dash of lavender drifted by, a twisting falling feather of fragrance, the smell of sachets kept between clothes in a wardrobe. As it fell it cast a purple haze, the shadow of the Almighty.
Out of the shadow on a mauve day came Katherine’s father, riding home from Point Cook in his RAAF uniform. He’s got
his wings! the older boy cousins said, excited. Her father came on a dragon that belched sparks and smoke but she had never seen its wings. She hid under the golden-leafed hedge.
“Katherine!” they called, laughing, unable to find her. “Kay, Kay! It’s your daddy on his motorbike. Don’t you have a big hug for your daddy? Don’t you want a ride in the sidecar?”
Katherine watched her mother climb into the motorcycle’s side pocket. She watched her father kick at its flank. It snarled, it spat sparks, it roared down the street and under the railway bridge, breathing smoke. The long white aviator scarf around her father’s neck ribboned back in the wind like a pennant, the sun touched her mother’s copper hair, there were tongues of fire above her mother’s head.
“Oh I want to! I want to!” cried Katherine, crawling out from under the hedge. The sun swallowed her parents up. She shaded her eyes and squinted into the brightness until they flew out of it again. “I want to, I want to,” she cried, jumping up and down.
Her father scooped her up and kissed her. “Well now,” he teased, “and who might this little girl be?”
“I’m Kay,” she said, “and I want to.” She wanted to right up until the moment her father set her down in the motorbike’s pocket, until she felt how it trembled and hammered at her bones. She screamed.
Grandma Llewellyn came running. “Really!” she said to her son-in-law. “Terrifying the child like that.”
Katherine’s father looked sheepish. Through dinner he sat silent, as though all the aunts and cousins left no room at the table for his voice. He played with his fork and made his fingers gallop on the tablecloth, tan-ta-rum tan-ta-rum, and his eyes kept waiting for Katherine’s mother to look at him. He whispered something in her mother’s ear.
“Why are you whispering?” Katherine clamoured, and one of the aunts said in a low voice: “You can have our room for a while,” and the other aunts all said: “Shhh! Little donkeys have big ears.”
“I’ve got big ears,” Kay told her father, climbing onto his lap and pushing back her hair to show. “I can write my name.”
She showed him with her new crayons. K, she wrote.
“No,” he said, “it’s not finished. Like this, see? K-A-Y.”
But before she learned A and Y it was time already to go. So there were hugs and kisses and Kay promised to practise with the new crayons and he was gone. She saw his motorcycle disappear under the railway bridge and after that she saw it spread its wings, passing clouds, heading back to Point Cook.
“My father flies,” she told Bea.
Bea stuck out her tongue. “My father was in Egypt,” she said. “But your father won’t fight. If the Japs get us, it’s your father’s fault. If the Japs get us, they’ll cut off our fingers and kill our dads and rape our mothers.”
“What’s rape?” Kay asked with round eyes.
“Like grate,” Bea said. “Like with cheese.”
Kay thought of her mother’s cream skin being shredded by Japanese graters. Into her sleep that night fell flakes of her mother, a bloody rain, and she woke in terror, crying out.
“Why won’t Daddy fight the Japs?” she sobbed.
Her mother and Grandma Llewellyn came running in the dark. They stroked her hair. The Japanese, they corrected, are God’s children. We are all God’s children, they said. And your daddy is fighting. It is simply that he cannot kill. It is right to defend your country, but it is wrong to kill. So your daddy looks after the planes and he makes parachutes and things like that.
“I don’t want you to play with Bea again,” her mother said.
“Oh, Bea’s all right.” Grandma Llewellyn blew out the hurricane lamp and opened the blackened window so that Katherine could see the moon. “You can’t shield the child from talk. We are not afraid of what people say, Kay. And we are not afraid of the Japanese. We are not afraid of the terror that walketh by night, nor the destruction that wasteth at noonday. They shall not come nigh us. Because we live under the shadow of the Almighty.”
Nevertheless, nevertheless, they prowled about, the great cloud of pestilences, and at nights, when it was necessary to make the long trek through the garden to the outhouse at the back of the yard, Kay looked up in vain for the umbrella of lavender feathers, for the wings of the Almighty. At night the Powers of Darkness stalked unchecked. They were twelve feet tall, she could hear them rustling the leaves, whispering to each other, plotting felonies.
Bea had told her what they did to little girls: they took off all your clothes and tossed you about like a ball, playing Devil’s Catch; you could feel their claws in all your softest places; and then they made you drink blood. Bea said it had happened to her.
Katherine would hold tightly to Grandpa Llewellyn’s hand, watching the long dark toes of the Terror that Walketh by Night, watching those toes flirt with the edge of the path. She was grateful, then, that her grandfather was taller than the Noisome Pestilence, that he was as safe as the shadow of the Almighty, that he dwelt in the secret place of the Most High. As she sat on the wooden outhouse seat in the darkness, listening to the tinkle of her own water, Grandpa would whistle to keep the presences at bay. Rock of Ages, he would whistle. Or Men of Harlech perhaps. Or Jesu, lover of my soul. And beyond the circle of his breath Kay could hear the night powers gnashing their teeth. Kay, Kay, she could hear them calling.
“They’ll never catch me,” she told Bea.
“Oh yes they will,” Bea said. “They can get through cracks in the house. They’ll suck you out one night when nobody’s looking.”
Bea was older and went to kindergarten already. She lived round the corner, but their two back fences made an L around a paddock of long grass and thistles and buttercups. Every day, when Bea came home from school, they slipped through the fence railings and met in the buttercup patch.
“This is what they do,” said Bea, sliding her hand under Katherine’s dress and tickling her secret places.
“Don’t! Don’t!” Katherine shrieked in a pleasurable terror. “They’ll never catch me, they’ll never !”
“Oh yes they will,” promised Bea.