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Aunty Megs had been quiet for a few days. She was like that. There’d be times when she seemed very preoccupied. She wouldn’t sing. She’d sit alone on the verandah and read her poetry. She’d go for long rides. Marty said it was because she was missing Mick. And it was true that when his birthday came round or the anniversary of his death, that’s when she went most noticeably quiet. But this time there was a difference. There was a nervousness about her we’d never seen before. It was almost as if she was avoiding us.
In retrospect, of course, we should have guessed what was coming, but we didn’t. I put it down to Henry. Henry had gone missing a couple of days before. We weren’t that worried, because Henry was always going off on walkabout into the bush, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few days. He always came back. I’d just been outside to see if he was down his hole. I came in for supper and was washing my hands in the sink. “He’s not back, Aunty,” I said.
“Well, maybe he’s gone for good this time,” Aunty Megs was serving up as she talked. “Maybe Henry’s finally decided it’s the right time for him to go. ‘Bout time too, I’d say.” She took a deep breath before she spoke again. “Well, I reckon this is as good a time as any to tell you boys.”
“Tell us what?” I asked, sitting down at the table. My plate was piled high in front of me with tatty pie – Aunty Megs’ meat and potato pie with crusty pastry. I was longing to get at it, but we always had to wait till everyone was served. Aunty Megs was very strict about such things. “I’ve been writing letters,” she went on, “to a friend of mine in Sydney – an old friend of Mick’s from the navy, Freddie Dodds. It’s taken a while, but now it’s all set up.” Up until now she hadn’t been looking at us, but now she was. “I decided to wait till you were both old enough, till you were both ready, and now I reckon you are. Freddie says you can start work in a couple of weeks’ time.”
My appetite for tatty pie had suddenly gone. Now we knew. Our worst fears were about to be realised.
“Freddie Dodds runs a boatyard, makes boats just like we do in the shed, only bigger of course, the real thing. He wants to take you on as apprentices. It’s all fixed up. A proper paid job in the yard and a place for you to live.”
While she was talking Henry nudged the door open, and came wandering in. None of us paid him any attention. “I’m not going to ask you what you think,” Aunty Megs said. “But I am going to tell you why I’m doing this. If I’ve learned anything in this life, I’ve learned that you can’t cling on. After Mick died, after I did my crying, I had to let him go. With all those animals out there in the compound, I mustn’t hang on to them. They’re not mine. They have a life to live out there. And you’re not mine either. I have to let you go. You have a life to live.”
Marty was on his feet, upset like I’d never seen him before. “But we’re not dead. And we’re not a couple of bloody joeys either. This place, it’s our home. I don’t want to go to Sydney. I don’t want to go at all.”
Aunty Megs went to him then, and put her arms round him and held him. “Do you think I want you to go?” she said. “Do you think I want to be here on my own? You’re my boys, aren’t you? The Ark is your home, always will be. It’ll be here for you whenever you want to come back, and I’ll be here too. I’m your mother, aren’t I?” She turned to me then. “Don’t just sit there, come and give your old mother a hug too.” The hugging helped stem the tears after a while, but then the numbing reality set in. We were going. In a couple of weeks we’d be leaving home, leaving Aunty Megs.
We lived out those weeks as if every day was our last. They passed in a blur of riding and fishing and swimming. We groomed Big Black Jack every day till his coat glistened as never before. Henry was fed his bottle several times a day, spoiled rotten even more than usual. And all the while Aunty Megs was growing quieter and quieter. We so hoped she would weaken and let us stay, but she remained resolute. Every night she was darning or mending something. She couldn’t have her boys going to Sydney looking like a couple of raggedy scarecrows, she said. And,while she was doing it, and because we knew she loved us to do it, we recited poems for her. Marty did The Yarn of the Nancy Bell, always his favourite because it had a rollicking rhythm and a gruesome twist to it at the end which we all loved. And I’d do my party piece, The Ancient Mariner.
The last time I did it, she looked up at me and said: “Thank you, Arthur dear, I shan’t forget it.” I haven’t forgotten it either. She came into our room on the last evening, and put a book in each of our suitcases – mine was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Marty’s, The Yarn of the Nancy Bell. I have them by me now, as I am writing this. They are still my most treasured books.
Out of a leather shoelace I made a new tie for my lucky key that night, and hung it around my neck. I wasn’t at all sure I really believed in that kind of thing any more. At fifteen it seemed to me it might be a bit of a childish superstition, but I wasn’t sure enough of myself to abandon it. Besides, the key was my last link to my sister, to the Kitty I remembered, or imagined. Memory or imagination? Already I couldn’t be at all sure that Kitty had ever existed. Only the key told me she had. And the key had been lucky for us. Hadn’t it brought us to Aunty Megs all those years before? So I kept my key. And I’m glad I did, very glad indeed.
The last I saw of Aunty Megs she was holding her straw hat on her head and standing there, disappearing into the cloud of dust left behind by the bus. For Marty and me this was the first time we’d been on a bus since the day we first arrived in Australia ten years before. Then we were leaving Sydney. Now we were going back. As I remember Marty said just about the same thing to me that he’d said then. “We’ll be all right.”
We sat silent the whole way, neither of us believing this was happening. Both of us knew we were leaving our childhood behind us for ever. It felt just like we were heading off into the bush again, into the unknown.
Together we might have been, but each of us felt very alone on that journey. When I felt the tears welling inside me, I tried to cheer myself up by thinking of Henry’s horrible hat hole, or trying to get an ee-aw out of Barnaby. But sooner or later I’d think of Aunty Megs, and the moment that happened I’d be overwhelmed by a sadness I’d never felt before, a sadness so painful it gnawed at my stomach. I’ve only got to think about her even now, and I can feel the same pang, faint perhaps now like a distant echo, but still there. That’s how much I loved her, loved our glowing time with her.
Memory is a great and powerful magician. It plays tricks on you that you simply can’t understand, no matter how hard you try to work them out. In my case it obliterated my early beginnings almost entirely, the lucky key around my neck being the only clue that I’d even had a beginning at all. And of my sister Kitty, the memory magician left me nothing but a shadowy phantom, which became more shadowy with every passing year. Yet I can remember the nightmare years of Cooper’s Station and Piggy Bacon as if they all happened yesterday. But fortunately for my sanity, those healing, life-affirming years with Aunty Megs and Marty at the Ark are even more vivid to me than the nightmare time that preceded them.
I’m guessing now of course, but for me I think maybe it’s partly at least a question of intensity. During
