Beyond the Bay

IsobelThe night before Esther’s ship was due to dock, her sister dreamed of her. Isobel lay on the thin mattress, irons of the bed frame piercing her sleep and, on the inside of her eyelids, she saw Esther, younger by seven years, in the plaid dress their mother sewed and saved the fabric for, running carelessly through meadows toward the brook. Scabby-kneed and ripe like an apple, the girl shrugged off Isobel’s hand—Isobel already matronly at fourteen—and thundered through grass and flowers, trampling down cowslips and daisies. Esther’s strong brown legs shouted fire and heat and, in her dream, Isobel knew her sister had been arguing with their mother again. Then Esther was in the brook, squealing as water squelched through her toes, not caring that the stream was cold enough to leave ice on her skin. She even lay down in it; Isobel saw her, seeming to look down from above on the girl with red hair who spread her arms wide in the shallow water. Esther tugged at her dress and Isobel saw that the plaid was heavy and soaked and threatened to weigh her down. And then Isobel woke, just as Esther pulled at her shoulders, baring skin, making ready to shake the garment off. It was dark outside as Isobel woke, her mind struggling to right itself from sleep. The eiderdown had been kicked away, over her husband’s side. The air in the room moved and was cool, and her exposed skin felt numb. Her nightdress had risen—she had rolled in her dream. She pushed it down quickly, though Brendan snored and showed no sign of rousing. The memory of her sister, Esther, lingered in the dampness of the bedroom. There was a musty smell, a scent of dirt. Isobel heard the grind of the Kauri Timber Mill down on the foreshore and a distant, rhythmic thrust of a saw on wood, from somewhere on Customs Street. Auckland woke up to itself, this year of 1893; her sister’s ship was due to make land today and Isobel had to move. * * * Brendan grumbled over tea and left early. The leaves were old and stale and he was angry there would be no fresh tea until the end of the week, when his pay seeped in. Sleep stuck to his face and hair as he drank, tufts of thick brown that refused to lie flat despite smoothing with water and oil. Timidly, Isobel offered to cut it again—she used to cut her father’s regularly enough, before it thinned and disappeared—but Brendan tutted her away. He held his body taut and firm at the tiny table, seeming to crouch beside it like a bear. His voice was guttural with fatigue and the curds of anger. He left with the morning paper, knowing she wanted to read it. Isobel cleared away the breakfast dishes and washed them at the tap outside, muttering to Mrs Hilda Riley, as she usually did most mornings. The women talked in the soft rain, Mrs Riley wiping smears of bacon fat from the plates into her palm—precious morsels for cooking and not to be wasted. Mrs Riley had read the morning paper; there was talk of a regatta in the harbour. She wouldn’t go, Mrs Riley—such extravagance was irritating, especially when most of Auckland had no access to adequate drainage. There were much better things to spend money on, much better ways to mark another year in Auckland’s pock-marked life. Isobel said little; she was on safer ground when the conversation switched to the stone houses on the right side of Queen Street—the ones furthest away from Freeman’s Bay—which might have mending to send out. As always, such valuable information was shared easily between the women, for Mrs Riley had seen Isobel in her nightdress, nights when Brendan was in the drink and locked her out. They had both helped with an unexpected birth from one of the women boarding on Sale Street, where prostitutes gathered. Isobel never spoke of that night, and floundered on the occasions Mrs Riley took a brutal satisfaction in recalling how she slapped sense into mother and babe, before it was too late. Mrs Riley did not tolerate buckling or weakness. There was a little time before Esther was due to land. Isobel swept the one-roomed cottage, pushing back the bed she and Brendan shared, and shook out the one decent rug. She scrubbed the floor beside the iron box that served as the colonial oven, and pounded the cushions of the arm chair. The wind was up, shouting through the street, urging women to leave their washing and head back inside their little timber houses. Salted air from the docks curled back the newspaper from the walls again, undoing the stickiness of flour and water paste fixing strips of grey and black text to the inside of the room. Isobel had been nonplussed when she first saw newspaper used in such a way. In the early days, soon after landing, she’d step inside a house down on the wharf to ask after mending and the rooms would be crowded with sideboards and heavy furniture from home. She’d see torn newspaper stuck to the walls, a rudimentary, colonial way to keep out the wind. Mrs Riley showed her how to mix up a paste with a tiny amount of flour, and she lined their room as best she could. It was a constant battle to keep the paper on the walls. Now, after putting away her brush and cloth, she mixed sawdust and water together and stuck the paper down again. The abattoir had been alive for hours. Occasionally the bray of a horse carried in the air and, further into Freeman’s Bay, a man on a ladder shouted down to his mate about a broken gaslight. He must have produced a hammer, for Isobel heard a banging. She wondered if Brendan had sent him along to fix it, if that was one of the things he did in his new job at the gas company. She imagined him coming back that night, proudly strutting, chest swollen as though full of fluid. He’d sit down for his dinner and ask casually if his wife had noticed the lamp lightening the street outside. A lamp to which he had sent a man to repair. Isobel turned her attention back to making the room ready. She found an old sheet and tacked it to the ceiling, so that it fell like a veil around a corner of the room, the furthest corner away from the bed. This would be where Esther would sleep. The sheet would give her a pretence of privacy. Isobel had sewn up potato sacks, bought for a few pence from Elliott’s Grocers on Hobson Street, and stuffed them with hay. The makeshift mattress lay on top of packing boxes, the ones she and Brendan filled all those years ago with their life, ready for the voyage out. A last clean sheet covered the lumpy bed, and Isobel had mended a patchwork blanket as a coverlet. She stood back now, hands on hips, looking at her creation and wondered how her sister would sleep. A church clock chimed that it was time to leave, and Isobel pulled on her coat. Her mouth felt like she had swallowed a spoonful of lemon juice. It was a thought that made her snort softly; she could not remember the last time she had money to buy a lemon. She thought of her sister, and the long years that separated them. A cast about the room and a sigh that little could be done to improve it, and Isobel made for the off. Forcing on a pair of gloves that were several winters too thin, Isobel hurried out into the street and the wet pelt of the morning. * * * Another building was being thrown up down near the quay, great hunks of quarried stone hauled up on ropes above the heads of passengers belching out of ships. Isobel stepped over horse manure as buses lined up. Hoteliers and vendors crowded the harbour side, shouting out wares and prices, tittering among themselves as white-lipped, blinking new chums stepped off their boats with jelly legs. Queen Street wharf stretched far out into the dirty water of the harbour, and crowds jostled and pushed. Someone was slapped, a child found his ears boxed. Isobel stood back as two boys, no older than ten, rolled on the ground, hissing at each other like stray cats. She kicked out at one when he snagged the hem of her dress mid-fight, aiming deliberately for his white, wasted arse, hoping that nobody saw. Their mother had telegrammed with details of Esther’s ship. A boy had run round from the post office and Isobel had paid him, nauseous at the cost of sending words from London to Auckland. She’d opened the paper and read, imagining each letter unfurling on the sheet. Letters made out of shillings. Esther was on a steamer called the Lady Jasmine. She had been booked into first-class quarters, for which Isobel was grateful. She’d seen steerage passengers when she crossed with Brendan ten years ago; men, women, babes forced below deck by bad weather and drunkenness. Cabins like sweat-boxes or ponds. She could see the Lady Jasmine now as she stood on Queen Street wharf. It had docked at the far end of the quay, funnels belching black smoke into the grey air. Emigrants stumbled onto the wharf, gingerly finding their land feet after weeks at sea. Most wrinkled up their noses, the smell of sewage and drain water unmistakable. First-class passengers disembarked before the others. Hurrying over, Isobel straightened her dress and coat, noticing for the first time and cursing a small hole in the collar. Her tongue moved sourly in her mouth, though her stomach and bowels felt wet and loose. Ten years of distance lay awkwardly in her body; she felt the lines of it in her face. A thousand emotions jostled for prominence, her flesh falling in upon itself, her mouth working silently. She longed to see something familiar so she could anchor herself to it. She wondered if Esther still wore her hair long and flowing down her back, if the tiny scar between her sister’s nose and eye from a maddened dog had faded. A horn from a ship somewhere, and Isobel jumped, jolting loose unexpected tears. Rain fell, she passed a hand over her face, and suddenly Esther was in front of her. At least, Isobel thought it was Esther; the woman had the shocking red hair of her sister and her features were arranged in the same fashion. But Esther had been a girl of eleven when they’d parted—she’d worn a pinafore and a scowl back then. The woman on the dockside seemed to have stepped into the child’s skin and thickened her blood. But the way Esther held her fingers to her lips, pinning her mouth closed—she was the Esther that Isobel remembered. She looked, transfixed, as the woman on the quayside pinched her face, and Isobel was back—back in the parlour, in the house on the border between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, and Esther was holding herself in, holding back insults for their mother. On the Auckland quayside, Isobel needed to see Esther’s mouth. The urge was sudden and frightening. She reached out and touched the woman she had not touched in ten years, folding her sister’s rigid bones into her own cupped hand, seeing Esther’s mouth, the gnawed lips, and then the women were crying freely, not caring who on Queen Street saw them. * * * ‘It’s not far, we can manage without a bus or dray.’ Isobel took hold of Esther’s trunk. A few moments had passed. The sisters glanced at each other sheepishly, tears wiped away. Esther had produced a handkerchief and passed it over. Isobel had paused before blowing her nose, touching the lace trim carefully, thinking back to the last time she had seen such delicacy. Nothing Isobel owned was so pretty. In their embrace, she noticed Esther had a smell about her. Weeks of sea and salt had dulled—but not removed—a smell Isobel seemed to remember in her gut. Earthy, dense, like the smell of clothes hanging on a line for too long. Of wet undergrowth and tilled soil. Her face buried in her sister’s neck, Isobel closed her eyes and thought of the house, on the border of two northern English counties, a childhood marked out by wood and hill. Esther carried their home in her clothes and skin. They walked, pushing on through the crowds. Esther paused every now and then, as if curious at the bodies around her. At one point she stopped completely, observing a noisy reunion between a man and a younger, rawer version of himself. Isobel had seen too many of such meetings to be startled; families came and went in the new colony, and her mind was already racing ahead to the moment she showed Esther into her home.