D Brookfield

Brookfield

The chicken ran round and round the yard, blood spurting. It had no
head. Watching it, Roma went white to the lips. It had been so many
years but she was never likely to forget. Whenever she thought of that
winter's day so long ago there were feelings of regret and feelings of
grief but she remembered too that when it happened there had been a
feeling almost of relief because she had known, deep down, that it was
going to happen.

She had married John Soames because she was in love with him. He was
five years younger than her and he had a reputation as a bit of a wild
man. He had rarely shown her the temper he was well known for, the
temper that went with his red hair and an Irish ancestor in the shape
of a great-grandfather also named John Soames. The story went that he'd
been hanged for murder. A drunken fight on a back road in County Cork
had turned into a charge of murder. His wife emigrated to Australia to
escape the disgrace taking her two sons with her. More important to
Roma than any family history was the fact that John Soames seemed to
like and accept her son Jimmy, five years old when they married. Jimmy
was the product of a casual affair that had only lasted two months. No
deep feelings on either side. Jimmy's father was a carpenter, a
traveller who couldn't stop travelling. He never stayed anywhere long
and he blamed this on the fact that one of his ancestors had been a
Viking warrior who'd raped and pillaged his way through the world
aboard a longship. Stephen Palmstad, Jimmy's father, was blonde, blue
eyed and beautiful and so was his son. Jimmy was an angelic looking
child with a sweet and affectionate nature.

John Soames was not good looking but he had a strange, powerful face,
long and pointed like a fox's and a magnetism that drew people to him.
It drew Roma to him too. Later she shuddered to remember it. Later she
thought of him as the spider and herself as the fly and she thought of
Jimmy as someone who watched the spider catch the fly and didn't know
what he saw. She turned twenty-seven the day after the wedding and she
could still remember thinking that she was like a boat anchoring in a
safe harbour after what had been a fairly turbulent voyage.

Roy caught the chicken by the legs and held it upside down. It flapped
its wings and the blood dripped from it on to the dusty ground. It
twitched a few more times and then was still. There were tears in
Roma's eyes and she turned away.
"Nice big bird and not too old either. You can do mashed potato and
beans and I'll pick some of that new corn," Roy said.
He was a big man, tanned and fit. He'd been a farmer all his life and
he had pale blue eyes and silver hair that had once been jet black,
razor cut short all over his head. He had brought her back from the
brink of madness and taught her to trust again. He'd given her four
daughters, all grown and married themselves now and he was like a part
of her after all these years. He couldn't take away the past though. No
one could do that.

How had it started? Hard to recall the beginning of something that had
begun so subtly, so long ago. She remembered a day in Queen's park.
Jimmy on the swing and John Soames pushing him.
"Higher," Jimmy had shouted. "Higher."
So John had pushed him higher and higher and then still higher until
Jimmy was screaming with terror and Roma had run across the park on
that perfect day of spring sunshine and bird calls and grabbed John by
the shoulders.
"Stop it!" she shouted. "Can't you see he's scared?"
John Soames laughed and turned on her the face of a thug, a schoolyard
bully.
"He's okay," he said.
Other people were now watching the screaming child and the man who
wouldn't stop pushing him higher and higher. He only stopped because a
man who turned out to be an off duty policeman came over.
"He's had enough, mate," he said. "You better stop now."
Roma could still hear the voice the man had used. He was used to
dealing with emotional cripples. Burning with shame she realised that
that was what the man she had married was.

Even when he stopped pushing he held the swing so high that Jimmy's
feet couldn't quite touch the ground, watching him cry hysterically,
the way boys watch bees burning under a magnifying glass. Finally Roma
pushed past him and snatched her son off the swing.
"Calm down, for Christ's sake. No big deal," he said.
Then he flopped down on the tartan picnic rug and lit a cigarette. His
face was serene and untroubled. No sense of wrongdoing showed in his
eyes. Roma comforted her distressed child and felt the sensation she
remembered from going down in a lift - dropping in an emotional
freefall. She was almost sure that was the first time. That was how it
started.

"I'll have to pluck the bloody thing now," Roy was saying. Giving her a
rueful grin. "Bugger of a job. Make us a cup of tea love."
He sighed and sat down on a low stool with a large pot of boiling water
at his feet. Roma went into the house and put the big, battered kettle
over the flame of the woodstove. Reaching up on top of the kitchen
cupboards she brought down a dusty photo album. On the first page was a
photo of her and John Soames with Jimmy in the middle. Jimmy was about
six and already he was cringing away from John Soames and holding his
mother's hand as if he was afraid to let go. Looking at the photo she
asked herself why. As she had so many times over the years. Why hadn't
she gone? Why hadn't she got Jimmy out of that house and away from John
Soames? The answer - pathetic after all these years and what they'd
taught her - was that she was still in love with Soames. He had a
powerful sexual attraction for her. He also owned two farms and she
believed that he could give her what she'd always wanted out of life -
a man she loved and financial security. Hypnotised by this fantasy,
like a rabbit caught in blinding light she went on trying to make it
work. Trying to believe it was her dream come true, in the face of all
the evidence to the contrary.

She turned the page. A photo taken at a barbecue. She went cold
remembering that night. She was having a good time, sipping wine,
laughing and talking. Glad to get out of the house; glad to see Jimmy
playing with the other kids and enjoying himself. The warning signs
were all there but she ignored them the way she ignored all the things
she should have been paying attention to. John Soames was drinking
heavily, always a sign of anger or unhappiness with him. He was glaring
at her and he was snapping at Jimmy but he controlled himself until
they got back to the farm. Then, as soon as they were in the door - the
car keys were still in her hand, she remembered - he backhanded her
across the face and she fell sideways and slid across the polished wood
floor. Jimmy started crying with fear and John Soames grabbed him by
the collar and shook him the way a dog shakes a rat. Jimmy was
screaming and holding his hands out to her.
"Mummy," he screamed. "Make him stop!"
Dazed and uncomprehending she got to her feet.
"Stop it!" she shouted. "John stop it!"
She started to cry and he dropped Jimmy and grabbed her by the
hair.
"Had a good time, did you? Ignoring me all night. Talking to Graham
Roberts. I saw you. Think I'm blind or something?"
"Who?" she could hear herself babbling, couldn't stop. "What do you
mean?"
Jimmy ran over and hid behind her.
"Who? What?" he mocked. "Don't give me that bullshit!"
She swallowed, steeled herself. "Look. You're drunk," she said firmly.
"Go to bed." She sounded calm, though she felt anything but calm. He
stared at her for a while, then, surprisingly, he turned around and
walked away up the hall. She stood in the silent house, holding her son
to her, afraid to move until she heard Soames snoring. Then she picked
Jimmy up and let him burrow into her neck. He was gasping with holding
in sobs he was too frightened to cry. He made muffled little fear
sounds while Roma felt the same shattered, shocked feeling she
remembered from a car crash when she was sixteen. It all seemed unreal.
She knew now that that was the night she should have left. Instead she
told herself that he was drunk, that he didn't know what he was doing.
She held Jimmy and dried his eyes and told herself that tomorrow was
another day. The next day John Soames left a box of chocolates on the
kitchen table. Not wrapped. No card. No apology.

The piercing shriek of the boiling kettle went through her and made her
jump as if she'd been shot. She made the tea and put some biscuits on a
plate. She put the photo album back on top of the cupboard. When she
carried the tray outside into the bright, dry autumn sunshine Roy
looked up from the half plucked chicken.
"Thanks, love," he said. "You all right?"
She could never hide anything from Roy. That rough exterior hid a
sensitivity that was almost intuition.
"Just thinking, that's all," she said.
"Umm," he said, sipping his tea.
He knew when to leave her alone too. The product of twenty years of
cohabitation. Then she thought, no, he's always been like that. He just
knows.

She didn't want to but she started thinking about that last winter. She
would always think about it. That was her punishment. It was the winter
Jimmy turned eight; the winter they moved to the old farm; the one
where Soames had grown up. The big farm, "Wyreema" was left in the care
of a manager, a man with five unruly children and a wife who'd looked
Roma over with a sour look. As if she'd swallowed a bucket of lemons,
Roma thought. The old farm, "Brookfield", was a run down place near
Dalby where they ran a herd of dairy cattle. Foxes had killed the black
hens they'd brought with them. There were frosts every morning and she
miscarried a baby soon after they got there, the summer before. Soames
wasn't responsible, though her pregnancy hadn't made him any less free
with his fists or his abusive language. She thought now that she had
made herself lose the baby because she wanted to punish him and because
she couldn't inflict him on another child. She'd cried her eyes out and
fallen into black despair but looking back from where she was now, she
thought how good it was that she hadn't had that baby.

The day it happened was fiercely cold and windy but a day of bright
sunshine. Soames woke up angry and he stayed that way. In fact he got
angrier as the day went on. By the time he came in for lunch he was
irrational with anger. She'd seen him this way before and she thought
that if she kept out of his way and told Jimmy to stay in his room it
would blow over but there was no placating him. It was three o'clock
(she heard it on the radio, which was on in the kitchen) when it all
began to go wrong. He'd come up from the dairy at half past two. It
wasn't unusual for him to eat that late but he got a beer out of the
fridge and that was.
"Look at this place!" he suddenly burst out after the third beer. "Look
at it! I work like a dog and look how I have to live!"
"I'm sorting out some summer clothes to give the Simmons for their
boys. I have some Jimmy's grown out of," Roma said, beginning to feel
that sick feeling in her stomach. He never drank in the daytime. "I'll
clean it up when I'm finished."
"That little shit!" he yelled at the mention of Jimmy. "He's not even
my kid. I work my fingers to the bone and he looks at me as if I'm
Attila the Hun."
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and put the bottle to his
lips again. Roma felt the blood draining out of her face and her heart
speeding up. Whatever was wrong was not going to go away.
I'll listen to him, she thought. Let him talk and I won't say a
thing.

By four she decided she would move the rifle from where he kept it in
the downstairs laundry. She still only thought of it as a precaution.
She put it in the linen press.
"A man'ud be better off dead," he was saying. "Better off dead."
She knew now looking back down the distance of the years that this had
been coming for a long time. Probably all his life. Later she found out
that one of his brothers had committed suicide and an uncle had died in
an asylum.
"Runs in the family," his rough, leather-faced old mother had told her
much later. Too late. If she'd known she could have faced facts and she
would have, wouldn't she? Stopped blaming herself and the fact that she
had Jimmy and seen that Soames was the problem? Even now she didn't
know the answer. What did it matter? No one had told her.

By five he was prowling around the house looking for the gun.
"Where is it? You've taken it haven't you? Give it to me," he roared
and then he went up the hall and threw open the door to Jimmy's room.
He dragged him out; Jimmy was white with terror. Too scared even to
cry. Almost casually Soames produced a small but extremely sharp knife
he always had in his coat pocket.
"Give me the gun or I'll kill him," he said, holding the knife against
Jimmy's throat.
Dry mouthed, unable to catch her breath, unable to think she stared at
the knife. Then she ran to the linen press to get the rifle. If she
gave it to him he would kill them all, she knew that.

When she got back with the gun Soames had dragged Jimmy out on to the
verandah.
"Give me the rifle, you bitch," he raved. "Give me my gun."
She faced him on the verandah with the rifle. Desperate, she realized
he would never back down. Not when he was like this.
"Let him go," she said, in a voice that shook.
"Bitch!" he roared, his normally pale face red with rage. "Give me the
gun," he said, then glanced at Jimmy. "You don't love me do you?"
If she'd been able to convince him that she loved him, half-mad with
terror as she was at that moment, would it have made any difference?
She looked at him; she was bewildered but still hopeful, tears in her
eyes.
"Let him go," she pleaded, pointing the rifle at him.
"Okay," he said with a mad twitch of his shoulders. "I'll let him
go."
Then with one swift, slashing movement he brought the knife across the
child's throat and pushed him away. The boy put his hands up to his
throat and tried to run, stumbling down the stairs. He ran in
staggering circles in the dusty yard, blood running between his
fingers. Then he fell and was still.

Someone was screaming. She realized it was her. Briefly she met Soames
mad, triumphant gaze and then she aimed the rifle at him and pulled the
trigger over and over again until it was empty. They told her this
later. She had no memory of doing it. She only remembered carrying
Jimmy up into the house; a wax doll in her arms. He died in the
kitchen. The radio said it was 5.45 PM. She whispered to Jimmy that no
one would ever be able to hurt him again. This comfort, so hard and
bitter that she thought it would stop her heart was all she had and if
she hadn't hung on to it she would have reloaded the gun and blown her
brains out.

The sky was pitch black and the radio told her it was 6.30pm when the
police car pulled up near the verandah. They told her she'd phoned
them. She couldn't remember. She heard the siren scream up to the house
and suddenly stop, choked off. They found her in the kitchen, lying in
a pool of blood with Jimmy still in her arms.
"My husband's dead," was all she said before they pulled Jimmy out of
her arms and took him away.

A court hearing cleared her of any blame but she knew better.

"Have a biscuit, love," Roy said. "Go on."
"No Roy. I'm not hungry."
"Come on, old girl. You've got all of this to eat yet," pointing at the
chicken.
She shook her head and he put his arms around her. She leaned her head
on his shoulder. Looking up into the blue infinity of the sky she
watched a small cloud chase other clouds. It was like watching a child
at play.
7

1