Shatten’s Ledge

Shatten’s Ledge-

When I was a child, my elders told me in sincere Liverpudlian accents to listen to the quiet, I don’t know how many times. But I had a busy, belligerent mind, an anxious list maker who ploughed through life with head down and eyes closed to slits.
I’d grown up with constant noise, not only those sounds I was aware of, like the sound of my voice and the voices of my companions, the sound of my breath and of the TV I watched daily, but also the incessant barely discernible noise that filled the gaps in-between. This was the noise of millions upon millions of people, living in and out of one another’s pockets, spread evenly and continuously for hundreds of miles in every direction. It was the noise of mundane existence, of the near inaudible growl of cars on a main street blocks away, the muted clanging of boom gates on distant train lines, the muffled rumble of TVs, radios and raised voices that easily penetrated those membranous walls that sliced faceless red brick tunnels into streets of terraced housing. Beneath these noises were other sounds, the murmur of a million sets of footsteps, the moist wheezing of countless pairs of lungs, creaking of tendons, gurgling of moving bowels and jangling of car keys; a million simultaneous groans of indifference and exasperation, curses hissed under the breath. From the heartwarming burbles of babies finding their first words to the wrenching squeal of metal on twisted metal in brutal road smashes, these sounds were colliding and grinding into stark, dissonant wave forms over a nation’s worth of anonymous habitation to form a homogenous paste, a grey goo, a choking aural smog. The hum of suburban sprawl.
To the unaccustomed this hellish noise would be bewildering and deafening, but, like the fifteen pounds per square inch of air pressure and ten metres per second of gravity that tirelessly push and pull me to the ground, I was born to it and inured to it until one day, much later in life, I found myself in a wilderness and just like that it was gone. The first time I heard the quiet I didn’t recognise it. I only felt a vague sense of loss. As time passed, and I saw it for what it was, I grew to love it.

***

Laverson is a small town in the mountains in Victoria. Its inhabitants look upwards at slopes thickly forested with gum trees and downwards over cleared planes of segmented farmland that stretches for miles. When the rains come in, columns of vapour hang on the forests like mountain spirits in Taoist paintings. This is the place where the first snow falls in winter.
The town must have been settled by Germans at one time as the landmarks have names like Kleinsman’s Hill and Dührer’s Creek. It’s a one street town with a post office, café and a two-aisle supermarket. A pared back cinema shows one film on alternate weekdays, and, as is sometimes the way with these places, there are a disproportionate number of imposing, sombre grey-stone churches, one at each end of the short main street and the third at the centre, now godless and converted to a general hall. Laverson is a good twenty miles from the next settlement of any kind. It’s one of the very few inhabited places, outside the dark hours around four A.M., that I can hear the quiet. This is nothing so disquieting as silence; there are voices and car engines, tinkling shop bell and wind chimes, and the beginnings of the Yarra River trickle nearby, cold and fast so high up, but in-between, the quiet is crisp, cool relief.

When I go up to Laverson, it’s like I’ve stepped out of a crowded room, my ears become hypersensitive, so on the morning I first encountered Hugh and Maddy I was aware of their approach some moments before they arrived. I was on the balcony of the hostel where I usually stay, a skeletal conversion of an old colonial house, which is cheap and clean, and open to whatever extremes of cold and heat the climate brings. The decks of the balcony are at least forty feet across and furnished with threadbare gleaned armchairs and couches. When it rains I like to sit at the rusty balustrade on the verge of the deluge, under the rattling tin roof. It feels like I’m watching the rain on a massive cinema screen except I can feel the sudden chill and fresh scent of the fall. It was this kind of morning when I heard Hugh’s overloud, slow, precise voice, coming from the end of the driveway, resonating metallically through the corridors and staircase that led to the balcony.

-We can stop in here ‘till the rain goes on.
There was no reply and a long pause before I heard two feet and a set of motorised wheels crunching the gravel to the entrance. –We can stop here ‘till the rain goes, eh? he repeated. –Yes, love, came Maddy’s reply, terse and shallow, affectedly friendly. I didn’t recognise either voice. Though I was a regular visitor to Laverson, I was just a tourist, on nodding terms with the café workers and the old hippies who ran the hostel, the McNiels. Nothing more.
-Be nice in here. I come and see the Maccas now and then for a drink. They tell me I should come more often, but I’ve got work and my mum and Kelly to see. I don’t get the time nowadays. You know the Maccas?… You know the Maccas, eh?
-Yes Hughey. Everyone does.
-Good people them. They’re a good pair. Used to mind me when I’d come home from school, when mum was still working the buses. I learned draughts and checkers off Peter. He let me win mostly. You know old Peter, eh? As Hugh drew closer, I could hear he had a Greek lilt in his ponderous voice and the words came crescent shaped through a broad ear-to-ear smile. I pictured his face in spite of myself, dark with a five o’clock shadow, bushy brows on clear eyes and a short cropped fuzz of hair over a wrinkled brown forehead.
–Yes love, Maddy replied.
-No sign today. I think they’ll be down to the market in the city, eh? They head there, start of the week.

He talked constantly as they moved through to the back of the house. The wheels droned as far as the staircase, where the rider dismounted and took the steps awkwardly, one by one. I realised the rider was Hughey because his words became strained and breathless as he descended, barked in quick succession at each step. He used… totakemedowntothepark… seethebirds…everyweekendtofeedthem,, goodman… youlikehimeh? Goodfeller?
At the bottom of the stairs, they took the carpeted corridor rather than the wood panelled slope which led to what had once been the servant’s level on the lower floor, with its exposed copper plumbing and small, opaque windows. This meant they were coming to the balcony. I was drowsy and had been floating between consciousness and dreams, lullabied by the hypnotic rhythm of the rain. I didn’t fancy conversation, I never made much conversation in Laverson, so I closed my eyes and turned my chair away from the main part of the decks.

-Oh yes, this’ll do. Do you need a drink Maddy, eh, the Maccas don’t mind if I use the kitchen. No? Okay, let’s just stop till the weather blows over...
His voice trailed away as they caught site of me. I felt their eyes running over me. It is surreal and uncomfortable in adulthood to feign sleep, but I held still, slouched and dishevelled in an old recliner, breathing deeply. They took me as part of the furniture.

-Come on Hughey, sit down here.
-Did you see Holly in town today? She’s had all that blonde hair shaved off while she was down in the city. Like a soldier. And dyed black. She came in the shop… told me she’s going to America, January or some time. You see her? She looked pretty funny.
-Come love, said Maddy, sit down! I don’t know Holly, she must be one of the kids come in for Summer?… How’s your mum keeping now?
-Good! Real good! She’s getting about more after the fall, but she was laid up almost a month. Erin came in some days, you know Erin… she’s doing nursing work at the hospital now, with the old folks. I hadn’t seen her for a while. I thought she’d moved.
-She did, Hughey, her and Zoë, when Doc Shandoes’ surgery closed down.
-Yeh. Well anyway, Mum was laid up all that time so I was round the house most days for then. She’s better now but I’m still going to stay on a while. I’ve got me wheels now, and I always planned I’d get out on my own, get my own place when I got the wheels. Just be a bit longer…
-Your mum’s been here a long time. She worked the trains when the line still came up here, when I was a girl. (The line was a single track out from the city, smoothed over years ago with tarmac to make a bike path that ran through bush and farm land for miles in either direction.) –She looked after us at lunchtime at the school now and then. Kind lady… you can’t let her keep running your life though love… you’re a big lad now.
-Yeh, huh. It’s not easy. She gets upset; doesn’t like that Kelly doesn’t come up to see us here, says terrible things about her, Kelly’s my girl, y’know… But Kell’s on sticks, she can’t get all the way up here, not working full time too. I need to stay ‘round just while Mum gets herself back to normal, then I’ll move out. Local still, but my own place, local so I can stop in on Mum now and then, see how she is, eh? Can’t leave her up here all alone. She had a lot to do, you know, looking after me when I was little. It must’ve been real hard. But I’ll move out soon enough, no worries.

The conversation paused. I opened my eyes a little and looked up through the rainy haze at the mountain, following its ridge against the slate sky. The mountain had no real peak. I’d been told once that in Australia the land is very still, so the peaks have become eroded and blunt, dwarfed by the young European mountains. From the mountaintop over Laverson, the slope is so gradual that you can’t see the town below, except from an unsteady observation deck on a thirty-foot wooden tower. In my somnolent state, I recalled a summer a few years back when a freak change in the weather brought snow to the mountain months early. I had trudged the virgin snowfall, shivering in open sandals and beach shorts, unable to see more than a few feet in the mist. The snow at Christmas had reminded me of my childhood, years ago and many miles away.

Hugh broke the lull -How’s your boy, good lad eh. Must have grown a bit now?
-He’s in the school up here, year 9 now. He didn’t want to leave his friends. You know, Hughey, I don’t live up here anymore.
-No! You moved? Where?
Against Hugh’s unwaveringly optimistic voice, Maddy’s was almost exotic, though her tone was restrained. I had no doubt that this odd couple ordinarily exchanged no more than a few words of familiar greeting. Maddy sounded infuriated by the rain, uncomfortable with this forced incarceration. Hugh reminded me of a shy child having a leg cast signed by his classmates; suddenly the centre of attention.
-I left Dave. Everyone knows that, Hughey. Her voice took on a maternal aspect, softened to lessen the blow. I heard defiance too, and a contrived carefree matter-of-factness. It was a survivor’s voice. –It’s okay, it’s best Hughey, don’t feel bad… you hardly knew Dave. It’s fine…
-But it’s the boy, eh? Hard to… hard for the boys and girls when it happens. Hughey stumbled, the smile that lifted his words seemed to fade a little.
-The lad’s fine, Hughey, he sees Dave on weekends and they go to football or cricket in the city or he takes him out to the swimming holes or fishing. It was over a year ago now, Hugh.

I found myself wondering what Maddy looked like. I saw flashes of clothing and faces, tartan, checks, beige, wiry hair tinted up against the grey, skin smooth at cheeks and temples but furrowed around dry, narrow lips and dark shaded eyes. I saw her waiting at the school gates, and a blonde bowl-topped boy in flapping grey shorts running to her over a yellow and white lined netball court. He said something like –I want to…I need to… can I… before the half-dream toppled. I heard myself snort incontinently as my head fell forward and then jerked back in a violent reflex that brought me abruptly to a kind of consciousness.

-I commute up here with him on the bus, ‘cos we’re down at my sisters until the solicitors are through. (Hughey groaned) –It’s all friendly Hugh, but we want to sell up the old house. Then Dave’ll move closer to work and I’ll get a new place.
-It’s just the kids, eh? The boys and girls. Hugh’s voice was that of an older man, in his late thirties I guessed, but he had an infant’s naïve insensitivity. –Old Jens and his wife split up too, did you hear? Eh? Jens and Clara. She was a beautiful girl. It was sad ‘cos she ended up going back home to Russia.
-Poland, Maddy corrected absently.
-Poland. ‘Course they didn’t have kids, just the dog, Hëlber. Good dog, that. I see him on Köhler’s Flats some days. Jens just lets him run wild nowadays. I’d like to take him out walking. He’s a big dog for me, but on me new wheels I’d keep up. What do you reckon Maddy, what do you think Jens’d say? I could maybe take him up some whiskey, he likes his whiskey. Do you reckon he’d let me take the dog out?

There was silence from Maddy. Was she answering with her eyes, I wondered, or with a bitter, tired smile? Or was she gazing vacantly at the gentle clouds forming and dissipating cyclically on the mountainside? Was she perhaps digging her fingernails into her palms to ward off tears? Or were her eyes closed resignedly, was she hiding in the quietness within?
-I could take him up the hills. Let him run out there. He’d like that, eh? They say there’s rabbits up there, Old Carl said he used to go shooting them there, years back… Hëlber’s a kelpie I think, he’d be after them quick enough. You ever have a dog Maddy? Eh?
Maddy still didn’t reply. The rain had faded a little and my ears had habituated to it, as to a ticking clock. I heard breeze in the box hedges way below at the foot of the tiered gardens. There was no birdsong. From among the wild ferns I could hear the scratching and mewing of the litter of a feral cat I’d seen slinking across the balcony railing that morning.
-You had a dog then? I never did… but I wanted one. There was frustration in his voice. He was pleading. He was losing his audience. –Mum wouldn’t have them in the house… her first husband left too, before she met dad. She never told me ‘till I found some photos of him. He left for the war and never came back. Imagine what it did for her, stuck up here alone?

I drifted, experiencing that peculiarly dull and formless clarity that comes only in dreams. In the dream, I found an absolute belief that I had always been in Laverson, that it was my ancestral home. I suddenly knew Peter, Erin, Dave, Jens, Clara, Old Carl intimately. I moved among their faces and voices with such familiarity. We interacted with an off hand easiness. A closeness as if I had known them from the day I was born, as if they had ruffled my hair in greeting when I tramped the icy paths to and from the school.
In spring, I had run with the children over the flower blushed fields on Köhler’s Flats, up the slopes of denuded grassy hills to the foot of the mountainside where the first ancient gums stood a perfect line like bars on a window. I had run with the child Maddy, known her soft puppy fat face so well, her blonde hair and white lacy dress. There was absurdity in this shallow dream; I saw Maddy in a pinafore and heavy brown boots, and the boys all ran in woollen flat caps and thick tawny shorts. They were wearing clothes from the gold rush days over a hundred years ago, from the frayed sepia photographs that hung on the library walls. I ran with them past the hostel, seeing it in its glory days of masters in sports tweed and servants in rigid black and white. We laughed wildly and thumbed our noses at this opulence by throwing the virgin winter snow up at the high leaded windows.
I held myself in this reverie as Hugh’s voice penetrated the stillness, - Did you hear Maddy? Did you hear what happened? He spoke haltingly. I didn’t realise at first that he was playing an ace, fearful of the consequences.

-Did you hear about the Stephenson’s little ones? Eh?
-Let’s not talk about that Hugh, she was prompted to respond, doing so in a hushed voice. The voice remained caring, as if to a misguided youngster, but it was also ancient and insubstantial.
-Do you know what Jens said… about when he found them, when him and Hëlber found them?
-Everyone knows. Please Hughey, let’s… let’s not. Now with an urgency, a grandmother’s sternness. This brought me up to the surface, to the verge of my subconscious. I kept my eyes closed and my face impassive.
-He said it was like they had been taken by wild animals. Can you imagine, Maddy, poor little --------- and -----------. He said he didn’t recognise them at first, I heard, said he didn’t see them as people… I remember them so clearly. If I close my eyes I can see their faces. I saw them most days.
Taken… like that. And left there at the Ledge. For more than a day, I heard, before he found them.
Maddy didn’t reply. But I could I sense her lips moving noiselessly.
-Taken by animals.
-That was a man, Hughey. Everyone knows that. The police caught him. Don’t let it upset you sweetheart. Nothing we can do.

He went on undeterred in his slow assured rhythm -But here, Maddy, here in my town.
How could it be that I hadn’t heard anything about this? I hadn’t the slightest suspicion something like this had happened. The TV news here reports car crashes and house fires. How was it possible that I had missed something of this cold brutality? Some news only lasts a day or two, I supposed. Perhaps I’d been busy.

-I just can’t believe it Maddy. Every day seems like normal, sometimes I forget it for a while. Like today, sitting with you... No one…no one talks to me about it. I used to overhear them sometimes, whispering, but as soon as they knew I was listening they’d change the subject. I’m not as stupid as some of them people think! I knew them, I knew them kids better than any of you, I think maybe even better than the Stephensons… They were my friends. But I’m not some little kid. I know what people think of me. I see them… looking at me. Like I need to be wrapped up in cotton wool. Like I couldn’t handle it. But I see more… know more than you think. I’m not some stupid kid!

-No one thinks that, Maddy said in a small voice that betrayed the lie.
-I just can’t believe it happened here, he said.

We waited, the three of us on the windy decks. I felt a blinding nausea from what I’d heard, like my head had been smacked down on concrete. Unable to open my eyes I recalled times in my childhood when I had lain awake in the dark, dreading sleep. Nights when my one recurring nightmare returned. Though I could never recall the dream, even at the moment I awoke, I recognized it instantly when it came in my sleep. I felt something similar now.
Maddy’s voice finally came. –It’s happened before, Hughey, when the town was smaller, when I was small. Exactly the same.
I saw the young Maddy again, but her cherubic face was contorted and streaked with tears. She was snatched in arms like stone, immoveable and unfeeling. I saw her terrified wide eyes as she was being taken; then I realised that she was watching someone else being taken, helpless to stop it.
-My brother, she said, and his friend… they disappeared in the winter when I was nine. They were near the same age as the Stephensons’. No one talked about it to me either, love, but I heard enough to know what had happened.
I heard it had happened even before then, years before. Back then the police didn’t get the man who did it… the locals did, and took him to the mountain top and he never came back.

What I was seeing in my half dream lost all form. I was mesmerised by her voice, by its timeless, unforgiving despair. I imagined that she had lost sight of Hugh and was talking only to herself, through her memories, though I also had a surreal feeling that she was talking directly to me. –They found them in the same place each time,she mumbled, -same way. Down by the river at Shatten’s Ledge.

Now, in an instant, it all made sense. In that intangible comprehension of dreams, where I could live a lifetime in seconds, I dreamed I was old, truly old. I’d grown old with Laverson at my roots. I’d grown old with Maddy and Jens, survived with Maddy the horrific fate of her brother. I’d looked on helplessly as Jens became lost and reclusive, numbed by whiskey, his wife long gone leaving him to be demented minute-by-minute by the unyielding images of what he had seen at the Ledge. Images that stopped him from leaving his house even to walk the dog that now ran wild on the hills and flats of Laverson. I’d grown old with Hughey and the Stephensons and Carl. And I’d been there before, long ago, even before Laverson had existed. I’d seen the same thing happening over and over again, more times than Maddy dared imagine.

But that was just a small part of what I understood. What I saw and felt so clearly, at the core of my being, was Shatten’s Ledge, though I’d never heard the name of the place before that day. I saw it hidden at the edge of Laverson, invisible and silent to the uninitiated, on a track beaten through the bush that bordered the bubbling infant Yarra. Under the thick white-bough forest canopy, in a place to find nothing, I found the Ledge. A grotto, which I entered through a narrow breach in the rock face. The walls twinkled like wet gossamer on ebony in the miserly red light that trickled through gum leaves and the fissures in the stone roof. The walls seeped icy water like a cold sweat. There was a quietness so acute that I could hear the earth heaving under my feet, though I couldn’t hear the slow town life just a few hundred yards away. I couldn’t see my hands in the darkness. Though I held them inches from my face, my fingers would not obscure the luminescence of the walls.

I’d known this place as long as I’d known anything. As intimately as I’d known anything. It had always been there, hidden beneath the background hum of my life. At once microscopic and unimaginably massive, so huge it surrounded and suffocated me, though I was barely aware of it. It was inevitable these things would happen in Schatten’s Ledge.
It’s that kind of place.

In the cave, standing on smooth stone, I furled and unfurled my fingers. They were dripping and I thought I was wet from the forest air and the heavy condensation on the walls. I touched my cheeks with my fingers, leaving wetness behind, feeling what I couldn’t see. I felt a fading warmth in the wetness, not the forest chill I expected. Then I smelled a sickly ferrous odour on my hands and face. These were all of my senses, there was nothing else. I could no longer see the glimmer of the walls or hear the drip-drip of moisture from the walls.

With this, the sudden, appalling clarity came again, and I knew that there was blood drying on my face and dripping from my fingertips.
I knew that, beneath me, were the dead.

It was impossible to resist the urge to look down, so I bowed my head in supplication opening my eyes wide and white to see through the blackness that had descended. But as I found some focus in through the shroud, I felt my feet lose their grip and my body fell heavily. I waited submissively for the sickening moment the bones would shatter on the rocks. I fell inside and out, waking, gasping, with the air knocked out me. I felt the dream slipping and, for some perverse reason that I can’t now understand, I hung on dearly, desperate not to lose the glimpse I had had of that place.

I must have cried out when I awoke as both Maddy and Hugh were staring at me in alarm. The noise would have been like a gunshot.
I recognised Hughey instantly. How could I not have recognised his voice? I must have made a connection subconsciously, as my minds eye had produced an accurate caricature of his features. In life, however, his head was large, disproportionate to his body even though his shoulders and arms were heavily set. Under this bulky torso, his legs were thick like tree trunks, but short and underdeveloped from a growth disorder so he had to walk using his whole body, propelled in awkward spirals by those broad shoulders. I knew him because he worked in the café some days. He knew everyone it seemed, and they knew him and were fond of him. The town’s very own boy, who would be called son,and sweetheart. He wore the widest of smiles. Even now his smile didn’t falter under startled, uncertain eyes.
I didn’t know Maddy. The woman I saw was stretched thin over hard, angular bones, with jet black hair and heavy jowls. Her face was weary, but her eyes were an unsettlingly bright blue, and her penetrating stare revealed to me that she knew I’d heard everything.

I let my eyes glaze over and the lids settle lazily, slowing my breath as if I was falling back into sleep. I hoped they might go on, but the moment was lost. The rain had turned into drizzle and there was no reason for them to stay.
-Well anyway, I need to pick up my boy, Maddy said with exaggerated nonchalance.
They rose and walked back the way they had come. Hugh talked relentlessly, grunting the words as he climbed up the staircase and into the scooter’s saddle. Listening to them heading up to the driveway, I noticed that the clouds on the mountainside were nearly evaporated by the emerging sunlight. The scooter buzzed beside Maddy’s heels over the gravel to the gate, Here, after many words from Hughey (-Yeh, well this was good, eh? We should do this again some other time. I’ll see you for lunch at the café I suppose, say hello to the boy…), Maddy gave a few brief, friendly farewells as, I imagine, she took short backward steps to ease her on her way. They separated. Maddy’s step quickened as she headed downhill toward the town. Hugh’s motor raised a pitch as it strained to climb upward, perhaps towards his old mother’s house.
It’s so quiet up there. I swear I could still hear that tiny motor’s obedient buzz even when it was several miles away.

(W Moseley, 2007)