The Submerged Cathedral Read online

  Only after the eleventh, Paul, Sean Michael Dobbin, does she realise she has been barely breathing. She moves to the last cross, puts both her shaking hands to it, smoothing the grasses away, hair from a brow.

  Matthew, Timothy Ford.

  She finds herself gulping air. She stands and walks back to the gate, cannot understand why she is crying suddenly. And then it comes thundering in, her shame at believing he has ever been here, that he has left something here for her, this always stupid faith, this folly.

  This total absence is worse than death.

  Forty-Two

  THE WARATAHS ARRIVE. So she carries them, one by one, awkwardly in their heavy earth against her body, into the cloister. Each time she must let the plant drop, the weight of its roots and the earth around them too great for her to lower gently. A hundred times through the afternoon she takes a breath, hauls a plant in its wet, hessian-wrapped earth ball to the edge of the truck tray, and lifts it up to her shoulder like a heavy and sleeping child, carries it the three minutes up the track. It’s hot, the sun bears down, the air crackling. The mosaic paths are bright beneath her feet.

  At nightfall the plants stand crookedly where she has let each one fall from her arms, leaning, resting, waiting for planting. Pain runs in rods down her arms and her thighs, spreads punishingly across her lower back. She opens her bedroom window and stares down on the four sectors full of wavering plants. The night is still warm, the sky clear and starry. In this light there is something human, and something reverent, about these tentative things. She undresses and falls into bed, praying, as the first watery shifts of a dream begin.

  One late afternoon she hears a truck coming, from a long way off.

  She’s bucketing the waratahs in the cloister with her bath water. There has been no rain for months but the tanks, amazingly, have not yet run dry and the bore still works. She listens, hearing the truck’s low grinding purr and boom, but when she reaches the verandah and stares down the track there’s no vehicle.

  Then she turns and sees that beyond the ridge the sky is a flat wall of dark purple, and the cloud is huge, roiling and bruise-coloured. The thunder booms again, and then a sheet of lightning flashes the earth white.

  She wakes in the dark, smelling smoke.

  She had sat out watching the electrical storm through the night, praying for rain, but none came. She fell into bed at one in the morning, the heat still crackling, the lightning parting and splitting her dreams.

  Now she hurries into her clothes, the little carved stone a nub in her pocket. She runs down the stairs, out to the verandah.

  Through the dawn gloom she can make out a thread of red light between the dark mass of the ridge and the lightening sky.

  She stands there, trying to believe what she sees. For a second she contemplates returning to bed. She walks to the kitchen in slow motion, makes a cup of coffee, sniffing, inhaling the air all the time to decide if she has imagined the smell. Trying to pretend there is not that hot, terrible wind coming up the paddocks.

  When she comes back outside the fire has reached the top of the ridge, bright, moving.

  Oh, Jesus.

  The smoke is already stronger. She drains her cup and walks briskly, then breaks into a run. First to the shed, the water pump, dragging it down to the half-empty dam, hauling the black hose back up to the garden, up the stairs, willing the water out onto the wooden verandah boards, seeing it jolt out, leaving it there to run.

  In an hour large patches of the top of the ridge are red, and the smoke is thick now. Palm-sized burning flakes sail over her in the air.

  She stands in the garden hosing the building, thinking of clapboard curling up like paper, straining her eyes to watch the ridge. Scanning about her, running now and again to stamp on a spark, a bright flake landing.

  Please help me, does not know who she is asking.

  At ten o’clock she is on the verandah with a wet shirt wrapped around her face, and the sky is dark and the fire tears up through the grasses, and then her dam is burning and sending flakes of ash to the dirty sky. The ridge still smoulders beyond, the fire spreading to the east. She has hosed all the gutters full, hosed the main building and the abbey until the water pressure drops badly. But still she can’t stop watching, standing unmoving on the verandah. Her throat burning, and the grasses alight, sending their flames eight feet high and the smoke sweeping horizontally along the ground before the fire. And then the melaleuca catches and makes a flaming maze towards her, ripping and popping.

  She runs, tripping, crying, thinking only Help me.

  If it reaches the eucalypts the whole garden will go up, the house. She’s closed all the windows, pressed towels under the doors. In the abbot’s room she finds herself kneeling beneath a crucifix, crying, and then she can hear it, the roaring eucalyptus, and she bolts through the rooms – concrete, cement, is all she thinks – down the steps into the dark cement laundry, where she has turned on the taps until the water runs down the floor and out into the cloister. All she knows is adrenaline and her moving limbs. She slams the door, yanks a dripping blanket from the tub and kneels, sobbing, rolling herself in it. She lies on the concrete floor coughing, and crying and whispering, Martin, God, help me.

  It seems hours later, when it is quiet and she gets up from the floor. The stench is terrible and it’s dark as night. She listens and listens, there on the cold floor, but there’s no sound.

  It is noon, and when she opens the laundry door she can see only smoke.

  She wraps the shirt around her face again. As far as she can tell the buildings are almost untouched. She walks around the house, to the front steps. A huge patch of the ridge is black and smoking, but she can no longer see any flames.

  The path up to the grave is bald as a scar in the distance.

  She does not want to look around her at the garden, but starts walking, a bucket of water in her hands. She walks the paths. Miraculously, inexplicably, the ground is burnt only in patches. She’s so tired she can barely move. Her boots crunch over charcoal, smoke everywhere, the sky bloody in the distance. Some of the plants still stand, scorched ghosts of themselves. The trees remain, she thinks. Through the smoke she can see the eucalypt trunks, but their branches end in stubs. Other plants shift in the wind, dry and fine as brown paper. Perhaps they are only ash.

  She walks, coughing, through the smoke drifts, the bucket slopping water and sending up clouds of hot steam. She should be elated. She is alive, the buildings survived.

  But the garden is a skeleton. Everything not burnt to the ground is blackened, lifeless, scrappy. She walks around to the terrace and looks down towards the dam. All the reeds are burned to black stubs. The remaining slick of water is oily black and the boardwalk charred, half-destroyed, still smoking in places.

  She walks back towards the buildings, holding the shirt over her mouth and nose, through the destroyed cutting garden, to the cloister which she knows is unharmed.

  But when she rounds the corner, through her coughs and hacking she starts to sob. She treads her mosaic path, understanding fully now that it is finally time to leave. She sees her work clearly for the first time, the ash and the smoke revealing, suddenly, what it has always been: ghoulish, uneven, an amateur’s garish imitation of something grand. Nothing has ever been less subtle, uglier.

  She spends the rest of the day and night in bed. She lies in the sheets howling and it is not for Martin any more, it is for her own failure after failure, up to her knees in animal shit or searching the sky for rain, or scanning the paddocks for wallabies, or for birds, caterpillars, diseases. It is for all the useless, fucking pointlessness.

  She gets up, eventually, in the middle of the night. Stumbles to the kitchen and opens a bottle of whisky, then walks the house with a glass of it, gulping and wiping her face with her sleeve, pushing out air from her lungs, trying to stop crying. Back in the bedroom she starts pulling clothes out, drags a suitcase from under the bed, draining the glass and filling it again and hurl
ing things into the pile. She hauls the suitcase down the corridor and leaves it there. In the kitchen she opens the fridge door for food, and then lurches – she’s suddenly starving – grabs at bread, meat, pickles, a banana. Then suddenly, oh no, the scrape of chair feet on wooden floor and she bolts, leans into the space between the dishes in the sink.

  The taps dribble brown water as she vomits and vomits.

  The dawn screams of a cockatoo wake her, still in her filthy clothes, on her bed. She has got here somehow. The light is yellow over the catastrophe of the bedroom: the open cupboards and the near-empty whisky bottle, the clothes and scarves and shoes in a hump on the floor. Her head hammering.

  She rolls over, something hard in her pocket.

  She lies, alone in the space where an abbot once lay, with the small stone held against her temple, her lips. It is cool, it calms her. Colo, it says.

  PART FOUR

  Martin & Anthony

  1984

  Forty-Three

  ANTHONY REMEMBERED THAT first, decades-ago day when Martin lay on a bed in the square of hard sunshine in the infirmary.

  Now he watched out of the window to the driveway, the road, and beyond it, the ocean. He had an ache in his kidneys this morning. He pulled his cardigan more tightly around his slight waist.

  Today they would have fish, if Martin caught a little bream from his rowboat moored off the jetty round the bay. Anthony liked a little plate-sized bream sometimes. Had come, over these last years by the sea, to enjoy a rest on the verandah and, if his stomach could take it, a little fillet of bream for dinner.

  The sea had a yellow look today, but when he closed his eyes out here on the daybed he saw a field not of water but of pale farmland.

  The decline during those last years began to happen without them noticing. The trickle of novices slowed, then stopped altogether. The country out there had become godless and they didn’t know it, like soldiers hiding in jungles for years after a war is over.

  Until there were only six of them left, sleeping in the big dormitory in their narrow beds. And then, too quickly, a desertion and a suicide. Pneumonia, another burial. The abbot, finally, having a stroke while fencing on a winter morning. Martin found him there nine hours later, unable to speak, his eyes watery with the effort of staying alive, just until he was found.

  Anthony said the last rites over their friend’s bed, Martin kneeling by with aching shoulders from carrying the dead man in like a child from the paddock.

  Martin dug the grave himself, nailed together the white wooden cross to match the others. He had wondered about the monasteries of Europe, the fields of dead monks buried across the centuries and the land, while he knelt here alone beneath the highest sky.

  Then it was only Martin and Anthony, the two of them, trudging through their days, their world shrinking until it was simply a weary path between the sheep yards and the abbey.

  Anthony’s earliest memory was the sound of a sheep coughing outside his bedroom window. It had got into the house garden and it woke him in his room with the tall pale walls and his little bed, blue for a boy. His mother shouting at it, clapping her hands. All these sounds and him, three years old, lying in a bed and blinking at the ceiling.

  When you are old these little things, he was surprised to find, come flittering back to you. Little birds of memory, hovering, landing.

  Then the command came from Ireland to sell the land and everything on it, the order would pay the rent on a house, Anthony could get the old-age pension.

  Martin did not want to be still there when the local hordes came to see the inside of the monastery for themselves. Making a circus of it, children jumping on the beds. Women clasping vases to their chests, dogs running through the scraggly roses.

  Martin asked to be near the sea. It was 1974, and they drove like any other travellers on a highway. Stopped at petrol stations, money for the first time in their pockets. At first they were foreigners, counting out the coins, feeling a mixture of stupidity and excess at this new weight in their hands.

  Now Martin came walking up the road, plastic bag in hand. He moved to the gate. He did not look like the young man on the infirmary bed any more, though sometimes, in the sun, Anthony could still see the resemblance.

  He came up the steps, a hand open. ‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’

  Banged the flywire door behind him. A minute later banged it open again, cups dangling from one hand, teapot held steady in the other. They sat at the table there on the porch, watching the waves.

  The first time Martin had injected the morphine Anthony was horrified at the skill in his hands. Then he, this doctor, had finally told him his story. And in two or three days, Brother Martin had almost gone, and this country doctor was in his place.

  Now they drove to the morning Mass in a church not their own. Anthony wasn’t sure if Martin still even knelt at home for prayer. Now there was shopping, and fishing, and talking. Though they were both, from habit, still mostly silent.

  The shock, on that leaving trip, of all the roadside colour and size. There had been billboards for Coca-Cola, covered in frolicking youths. Another billboard, for the Hawaii Motel in a dusty New South Wales town, its cutout palm fronds spiked against the blue sky.

  There were advertisements for radio stations, for restaurants. For beer. Anthony sat beside Martin in the passenger seat of the new car that smelt of plastic and polish. In the boot were their two suitcases, and the back seat and other space was crammed with belongings from the abbey. Candlesticks, the holy statues. The tabernacle in a cardboard box, seatbelted into place. A panel of stained glass tilted under the back window, lighting up the inside of the car, green and blue. Altar wine in bottles poked into available holes in the baggage, Anthony’s boxes of decades-old lotions and mixing bowls that Martin had not the heart to tell him to abandon. A set of books from the library, the Psalter. The car weighed down with it all, and privately each man felt like a thief.

  They stopped by the side of the road for sandwiches pulled from Anthony’s bag. Chewing, they stared up at the billboard for Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, women draped all over it like tinsel. At that moment, for the first time in many years, Martin had remembered the seaweed mistletoe, the memory filigreed like those from childhood.

  All things pass.

  The drive took two days. On the second morning they ate their breakfast in the bright dining room of a Griffith motel. Anthony wore his habit. He was stared at. Martin was suddenly protective of the old man, and he turned and glared at the young woman goggle-eyed at Anthony’s aproned lap.

  And seeing Anthony there in the too-bright motel light, Martin saw him as the woman did, a frail and blinking pensioner, and he saw in a rush that Anthony was old.

  Once they got to the new house Martin himself was exhausted. They ate dinner from plates on their knees in the living room, two chairs and a small table the only furniture.

  They went to their beds, over which Martin had tucked, at least, their familiar but too-small sheets and blankets.

  And on that first night of no sleep in a strange double bed, the sea sweeping outside, that Pittwater summer had come flying back and his need for Jocelyn came reeling, reeling in. And set in like the steady rain of a flood.

  Now the old man watched Martin hang the washing, two legs walking beneath the plume of white bed sheet swelling out along the clothesline. The wind gathered beneath it, billowing it, sinking, swelling.

  You wouldn’t know, is what Martin had said to him this morning. Then apologised, but the slap still hung between them. Martin thought he knew nothing of women, said how could he?

  Anthony lay back in the chair under the blanket. There were worse things, he thought, than this sun on the face. Despite his unwantedness, there were worse things.

  The sun and the willow’s shadow moved lightly over his closed eyes. Further off, the flat green sea slid back and forth on the sand.

  He swallowed again, dozed.

  When they first came here they
would walk on the beach in their bare feet, Anthony still in his habit. They walked morning and evening when the tide was coming in. Once they stood among the swatches of green weed over the sand, left by the waves.

  ‘Like old coats,’ Martin had said, but Anthony knew him too well, and they were women’s dresses draped there on the sand, green with the night and party lights.

  They had stood together, watching the grey sea for mermaids.

  After a few years they bought a television, and sat watching it after dinner, first shocked, then thrilled by its flickering and noise. One evening Martin called Anthony in from the kitchen. On the screen a bushfire tore through valleys and plains. ‘It’s Victoria,’ Martin said. They each stared, not speaking, at the flames and the smoke rising up from the bush-covered hills and pale paddocks, listening to the reporter’s voice over the helicopter’s noise. The landscape was familiar. Martin quietly left the room.

  Anthony’s dozing was filled with the sounds of the schoolyard behind the house. The primary school children’s lunchtime shouts and odd thumps. He had not heard a child’s voice for fifty years – and now the sound was frightening. They made screeching car-tyre noises with their voices, they groaned, grunted. There were murderous screams, terrible thumps, layers of it, the squealed and scuffled sounds of the playground. The sound moved, too, sometimes behind him, sometimes seemingly in front.

  But all he could see before him were the bricks of the waist-high verandah wall, the red concrete stairs, lawn, wire fence, a parked car or two, bitumen, straggled grass. Then the invisible dip and then, wide as heaven, the ocean.

  He coughed, swallowed. He thought of the nurse from long ago.

  A child’s wail went up from the schoolyard, then a shout, shrieking and running feet.