Sugar Town Read online

Sugar Town

  Robert Nicholls

  Copyright 2013 by Robert Nicholls

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 - The Parade (Friday)

  Chapter 2 - Sideshow Alley

  Chapter 3 - Garlic and the Gourd

  Chapter 4 - Life in Death

  Chapter 5 - Hospital Visit

  Chapter 6 - A Baker’s Perspective (Saturday)

  Chapter 7 - Waking Isak

  Chapter 8 - Questions and Strategies

  Chapter 9 - Bandini and Johanson

  Chapter 10 - By Moonlight

  Chapter 11 - Finding Queenie (Sunday)

  Chapter 12 - Sunday Morning Visitations

  Chapter 13 - Waiting for Understanding

  Chapter 14 - Choosing Isak

  Chapter 15 - Home

  Chapter 16 - Allies

  Chapter 17 - Fires Kindled

  Chapter 18 - Night Walkers (Monday)

  Chapter 19 - Exposure

  Chapter 20 - Reconsidering

  Chapter 21 - Revelations

  Chapter 22 - More Revelations

  Chapter 23 - Looking for Bridie

  Chapter 24 - Queenie Goes Home

  Chapter 25 - Ways of Healing

  About the Author

  Extract

  They were not boys. They were men, all three of them, each approaching his fourth decade of life. And she was not a woman. She was thirteen, in a long-legged body that, despite her inattention, grew fuller every week. Her father should not have let her walk alone in the dark. She was awkward, though – had knocked over a chalice and insisted on moving about the church while he practiced his sermon.

  “Go home,” he had said. “Tell your mother I’ll be along soon.”

  “Can’t I stay and listen, daddy? I’ll be still. I’ll sit down the back and not move. Promise!”

  She stood in the aisle of the church, hands behind her back, looking up at him in his pulpit. He looked at her there, on her long legs, saw the curve of her hips and the high, small swell of her breasts. Lately, he’d begun to fend her off when she wanted to sit on his knee or throw her arms around him.

  “You’re getting too big for that,” he’d say. She was his first child.

  She stood in the aisle of his church and he looked away from her, down at his Bible. The Song of Songs was there. ‘My love,’ it said, ‘you are as beautiful as Jerusalem, as lovely as the city of Tirzah. Turn your eyes away from me; they are holding me captive.’ He became unaccountably angry.

  “Do as I tell you, Bridie!”

  And so she’d gone into the night. She’d left him to his resounding communion with God and walked into the sight of men whose interest in communing was much less inspired. This is how things sometimes end and also how things sometimes begin.

  She didn’t see them, but she heard them. She tried to run but her sandals tripped her up. She turned then to face them, to show them her courage, but a blow came out of the dark. She fell, she hit her head and she woke, alone, in the deepest, loneliest darkness she’d ever known. Her father was nowhere in sight. The church was nowhere in sight. Her shoes were gone, her panties were gone and she burned inside. She vomited for a while and, when she could, she got up and edged her way toward a distant street light. That was the night of Harvest Festival, 1997.

  * * *

  I was two years old in 1997 so nothing meant anything to me. Even the disappearance over the next few months of half my family meant nothing to me. When you’re little, you don’t question how the world is. But I grew. I grew past surprise, at how odd my family was, and I grew well into resentment; right up to the door of resignation. Then, one week in 2008, when I was thirteen, the past came hurtling forward, like a rock out of a slingshot, knocking me arse over teakettle, fair into the middle of ‘Now, I need to know!’

  I can be very precise with the starting time. Make it October 18, 2008, at four o’clock in the A.M. Things were happening then, not so far away in space, as the other things had happened not so far away in time. October 18, at four o’clock in the A.M. That’s when the space thing (or ‘Queenie’ as we came to know her) was stalling out over the south-western Pacific, slanting in out of the void, a peppering of stars above and the black ocean below. Maybe a shaft of sunlight tried to catch her, high over New Zealand. But she glided away into the western darkness and came to us – to Sugar Town.

  We, of course, had no awareness of her approach. Juiced-up fruit bats were taking their usual bearings for home and bossy roosters were clearing their throats over the usual lie-abed hens. In roof spaces all over town, possums were hunkering down, shoulder to shoulder, snouting their tales of tall trees.

  By the time anyone saw her (and a surprising number did) she was already past the long grace of her flight, tumbling and turning and flaring, reduced to a howling streak of light.

  * * *

  Asael thinks something in our dreams called her to us. Asael takes medication and his contact with the world is sometimes iffy but, nonetheless, it was a dream that had us McFarlanes up and alert at that hour. So who am I to say he’s wrong?

  The dream was the recurring property of my sister, Bridie, who is twenty-four years old and, maybe to her detriment, not a jot less than beautiful. A little before four, she was lying alone, as always, in her bed, across the hall from my room, in our parents’ house. Her long legs telescoped up to her chest, her eyes behind her lids darting from side to side. It was a dream that skirted the edges of nightmare and one I’d crossed the hall to wake her from many times before. In the midst of it, she twitched and moaned and the hammering of her heart was so loud, it would vibrate the air in the middle of the room. And it was always about our town – Sugar Town.

  You can find Sugar Town, under lots of different names, on any map of North Queensland. From the highway, in daylight, it looks like a colony of fibro and metal barnacles attached to fields of irrigated emerald green. At night, from high above, (the first view Queenie would have had) it’s little more than a sprinkling of lights around the volcanic glow of a sugar mill.

  * * *

  In Bridie’s dream, a girl walks the streets of Sugar Town, past the familiar mouldering houses and droop-palinged fences. She could be me, this dream girl – tall, thin, angular. Thirteen. She approaches a great door above which looms a massive cross, trembling on an invisible plane of air. The cross and the door, both luminous with grace, speak somehow to the dream girl’s soul – a promise of meaning, of insight into her place in the world. She reaches for the door.

  Before she can touch it though, something, some irresistible weight crushes her to the ground. She is instantly suffused with pain. Agonised! Confused! Wiped clean, in a heartbeat, of all hope. Only a single, irreducible spark of resolve endures, prompting her to fold her hands over the agony and, with all the strength of her being, to press it down, a full arm’s length down, into the soil of memory where it’s too dark and cold for anything to survive. And like a creeping tide, numbness edges in.

  Waking, Bridie knew and I knew and all of Sugar Town knew that there was a wall in her mind, with at least a pair of years utterly concealed behind it. She was resigned to it. More than that, she’d convinced herself that she knew the reason for it. It was part of a penance that she was being charged for some terrible, unremembered sin. Part of a penance that included being abandoned, in one way or another, by almost everyone she’d ever loved. Except for Asael, who is our brother, and me. Two kids, dumped on her when she was barely more than a child herself.

  Funny how people can imagine something and then accept that imagining as truth. Asael’s imaginings about Queenie; Bridie’s imaginings about her lost years; my own, about the history of my family. Some people say that the truth can set you free, but I think it’s a tricky and dangerous
thing that can just as easily push you into a prison you can never escape from. Bridie’s dream girl, of course, knew that right from the start.

  * * *

  Ordinarily Bridie’s dream ran in a continuous, unchanging loop. But on the night of Queenie’s arrival, the night before Harvest Festival Weekend, there was one new thing. A voice. The dream girl, while wrestling her pain into stillness, heard – little more than a fleeting, fading hiss – a command. A command containing our mother’s name.

  “Reconcile yourself to it, Rita!”

  That voice brought the dream to an end, but the voice that woke Bridie was her own. At the edge of my own awakening, I heard her.

  She lunged from the bed, as you do when nightmare struggles to be reality. You know what it’s like. Your body is awake but the wet, woollen feel of monsters remains. You stumble to the window, panting for breath, sweat prickling on your belly and thighs. You mop your throat, insisting to yourself that, whatever it was, it wasn’t real. But unreal things have just as much power as real ones to pluck at your skin, pull up the hairs on your neck and whisper terrible, incomprehensible things in your ears.

  ‘Reconcile yourself to it, Rita!’

  Bridie fled into the hallway, flicking on lights, whimpering like a small, terrified animal. She went to the shower where she scrubbed at herself with punishing ferocity – scrubbed until her skin burned and the nightmare at last began to fade.

  In the mirror, as she slid back into her nightie, she saw herself, still close to tears and she shook a menacing finger at the reflection. “You stop that!” she demanded. “Right now!”

  In the hallway outside the bathroom, Asael jerked upright. For the past several minutes he’d been crouched at the door, his eye pressed to the keyhole. He’d heard her cry out in her sleep. He’d seen lights and heard the shower running. He’d had to go to the toilet anyway, which meant passing by the door to the bathroom. So, as he always did, he’d stopped for a peek. He was eleven.

  “I only wondered why you’re up!” Even from my room, half snagged in sleep, I could hear the sniffle in his voice. “It’s not even four o’clock yet! Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Asael! I just . . . had a bad dream. I’m washing it away with a shower, that’s all. Go back to bed!”

  * * *

  You have to picture Asael. He’s not built like Bridie and me, tall and rangy. He’s pale and small. Also, he wears glasses, which not many kids his age do. And lots of people believe he isn’t entirely all there. Or maybe, in some infernal way, that there’s too much of him there! At the start, it was because he was so introverted – so turned in on himself. Then, right around his eleventh birthday, he started seeing things – lights, mostly; sometimes faces and figures. And once or twice he went completely blind, though only for a couple of minutes at a time. Late Onset Childhood Occipital Epilepsy, Doctor Dabney said, which still left all of us, including Asael, poorly prepared for what was to follow.

  In some ways, I think his sense of that particular illness got swamped by his overly morbid (understandable, considering what had happened to our family) and depressing obsession with death and dying.

  Once, long ago, Bridie put him off a burst of persistent questioning about Rita’s death by saying: “People just die, Asa! Every day! We can’t know why! It’s just God’s will!”

  People die every day? And we don’t know why? No way! And from that moment, he’d developed a sort of paralysis of watchfulness. Any cough, hiccup or sneeze from any one of us could launch him into a state of high anxiety. He even started studying illnesses, memorising their faces so as to properly recognise them if they showed up at our door.

  “You know what ‘fatal arrhythmia’, is Ruthie? You know why polyps grow in our sewer pipes, Ruthie? What if you had a weak blood vessel in your head, Ruthie, and you fell down? Know what would happen to your brains?”

  The year before, at Christmas, we’d given him books just to get him off our backs – a copy of ‘The Visual Dictionary of the Human Body’ and an edition of Barcsay’s ‘Anatomy for the Artist’, (142 full-page plates’). So he was well up on the osseous and muscular systems and on a first name basis with ‘flexors’, ‘extensors’, ‘iliums’ and ‘ischiums’. It’s important to know, he said, because disaster is sneaky. Which, interestingly, is pretty similar to what I feel about truth!

  * * *

  So anyhow, morbid obsession was one reason he was watching Bridie through the keyhole, snivelling out excuses and dragging me the rest of the way out of my beauty-sleep. And the other, much more obvious reason, of course, was that he was a hormonally rabid eleven-year-old boy.

  “What’s going on? Why’s everybody up? It’s four in the morning, for God’s sake!” Not happy, shielding my eyes from the light, hair in my face. Itchy bum. Not happy.

  “She had a bad dream,” he whined. “She’s having a shower to wash it away. I had to pee. Can I come in with you?”

  “What? Don’t be stupid! Go back to bed!”

  He nodded agreeably then followed me into my room and climbed under the sheet beside me. I didn’t really care. It was too late, or too early, to fight. Overhead, the fan ticked slowly.

  “God!” I said. “This family!” And I turned my back on him.

  * * *

  When I say ‘family’, of course, there were, as I’ve said, just the three of us. Rita (or ‘mum’, as the other two insisted on calling her, but I wouldn’t because I’d hardly known the woman) had been gone so long that only Bridie truly remembered her. It seemed she’d barely had time to give poor little Asael his life and his odd name and get him home to Sugar Town, to this house, before she was gone, dead.

  And there’d been Gramma Grace, but she’d got herself murdered the year before Rita died. For a couple of years after that, we’d still had a father, the Reverend Jacob McFarlane, who’d lasted with us until the start of the new millennium. And then he’d gone off, missionary-ing in New Guinea.

  I was five when he left, so I know I’d’ve had memories of him. But I’ve worked actively at forgetting them. People who abandon you cancel all rights to space in your head, as far as I’m concerned. Ironically, the one memory I wish I’d kept is a memory of how he left. Whether he took a suitcase or called a taxi or waved from the gate or promised to come back. What does someone look like as they walk out on their family? There were times I could have used a memory like that.

  Still, try though I might, I couldn’t get rid of all of him, because of the letters. Most years we got two or three; just enough for us to understand, I guess, that he wasn’t dead like the others. And I suppose I could give him this much credit, that the letters were pretty interesting in some ways; full of stuff about ‘God’s great work’ and sinners and pagans and strange practices! Whenever one came, the three of us would troop into his study, which Bridie insisted on keeping like a shrine, and she’d read the thing to us. Interesting, but surreal. Like having a ghost sending us drafts of exotic stories.

  I should mention too, though, that they weren’t solely for us. Parts of them were always clearly marked for passing to Brian Johansen, for publication in the ‘Sugar Town Weekly’. It was important, Bridie told Asael and me, to remind ‘the congregation’ of the Reverend’s ‘selfless work’ and his ‘continued prayers’. Etcetera - etcetera - yada - yada. The real story was that we and the Reverend lived pretty much on donations and hand-outs and the good will of the town. So the true purpose of the letters, I always knew, was to fortify the illusion of his and our usefulness.

  In the long, slack periods between letters, Bridie did her best to compensate. “We’re so blessed!” she’d tell anyone who’d listen. “Show me another town with a minister doing such important work! So important that he can’t come home! Not ever!”

  His letters and her delusions were enough to keep Asa’ and maybe a few other fanatics on side. But not me. Never me. If I wasn’t so flat-out busy not caring about him, I’d have written him a note saying, ‘Get over yourself! Br
idie needs you here more than they need you there; so come home!’

  Not that I felt sorry for myself. I didn’t. Seriously! I felt sorry for Bridie! Landed with Asael and me, and too precarious about everything to claim a life for herself. But being sorry for people – even for people you care about – wears thin. Like I said, she was twenty-four. Sure, she had an amnesiac block and ‘nervous problems’ but I figured hey! Do those things break your legs? Or can you still stand up for yourself? Which takes me back again to those comments on truth. It’s way complicated.

  * * *

  So anyhow, when I turned my back on Asael in bed and said, “God! This family!” I was thinking of all those people, just a little bit.

  “You shouldn’t,” he whispered, “take God’s name in vain!”

  “No? Is that worse than peeking through keyholes?”

  “I wasn’t peeking to see her, Ruthie. I was peeking to see if she was okay.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Thousands wouldn’t, but I do . . . believe you. And don’t call me Ruthie. Call me . . . Genuflecta.”

  “Genuflecta?”

  “Yeah. I’m thinking of having a holy week this week.”

  “Okay.” He rolled on his side and touched my back. “Genuflecta?”

  “What, Asael? Can you see I’m trying to sleep?”

  “I had a dream too.”

  “Mm. That’s nice.”

  Asael had a regular X-box thing happening in his head. Sleeping and waking. Seating for only one. Hence the medication.

  “Mum. It was the mum dream.”

  “Uh-huh. And how was she?”

  “Like always. Beautiful. Like Bridie. And sad. Like Bridie.”

  “Uh-huh. Well! I guess that’s being dead for you. Same feet as always?”

  In Asael’s ‘mum dream’, she always had skeleton feet. Creepy, I know, but it had to do with the way she died.

  “Yeah.” I could feel him pulling one of his own feet up to touch. “Twenty-six bones,” he muttered. “Tarsus, metatarsus, phalanges.” Then he lost interest and started on at me again. “She talked to me. She said my name. Asael. Then she said, ‘God strengthens. But you have to help.’ What do you think that means?”

  I rolled over to face him. He was weird, but he was my brother. And I knew he had a guilt thing about Rita. Post-natal depression was the only explanation we’d ever been given for what she did and, of course, he was the ‘natal’ that the depression came ‘post’ of . . . if you take my meaning. So I gave him a bit of a hug.