As the Earth Turns Silver by Alison Wong Read Free Book Online

constable came to see her, told her Donald had been drunk when he fell into the water.
    Katherine did not stop to cry. She thanked the constable and waved him away, sent the children to school with apples, a bagful of biscuits. She added two tablespoons of kerosene to the copper, let the bedclothes boil in yellow-soaped water.
    All day she scrubbed the skin from her knuckles, pulling linen, frocks, seven white shirts through the mangle and into blued water. The rain came down as Katherine pegged the last of the wash on the line. Inside she watched the slanting cuts of water, five pairs of trousers – brown, blue, black – blown full of cold air.
    Every evening he came home with the Post , devouring it with whisky and half a pack of cigarettes before dinner. A pack of wowsers, he’d say, as he mocked the Women’s Christian Temperance Union or the three women who’d just crossed the Southern Alps by the Copland Pass. ‘If Misses Perkins and Barnicoat spent more time developing their womanly arts, then perhaps they’d find husbands. As for Mr Thomson—’ Donald roared with laughter. ‘How the devil did he snare a wife like that?’
    Katherine watched a column of ash fall from his shaking hand. Let the house burn , she thought, but she walked into curling white smoke and stubbed it out with her shoe.
    Afterwards as he sat at the table, hands and the cuffs of his sleeves still smudged with ink from the paper, Donald expounded the victories of his day. The latest in a war of words. As Katherine served sago and stewed apple or banana, he smiled, gave Robbie a wink. Pulled a word he’d rehearsed out of the print of his mind. ‘Robbie, spell me: enatant .’
    Robbie gazed up out of the corner of his eye, as if to catch the black letters as they swept by. ‘E,’ he said, ‘E-N-A—’
    Donald filled in the blanks, overwriting the incorrect letters. ‘So what does it mean, son?’
    Robbie thought for a while, a flurry of questions creasing his brow. ‘Something that’s very hard, Father.’
    Donald laughed, praising his son for an excellent answer. Then looked at Edie.
    Edie wrapped the white tablecloth round her fingers. Her lower lip quivered, her lips parted slightly, as if a word, or perhaps just an expectation of a word, might slip from her tongue and tumble into the unsuspecting hands of her father. And yet she said nothing, only looked into the face of her mother.
    Katherine could not bear to see herself in her daughter. She gazed out the window at a small piece of sky – a piece of blue-grey fabric sewn over and over as if to cover a hole. She hesitated. Turned to see Donald laughing furiously. What had she said? What do you say over and over when no one hears you?
    Now Katherine watched his empty clothes on the line. He was not coming home. She did not have to conjure up the meaning of words – his words; watch as he listened and laughed at her. Or tell anyone who asked that he was a newspaperman, neglecting to mention Truth. She did not have to find Robbie, on Saturday afternoons, reading the sex scandals passed down from the hands of his father. She gazed at Donald’s chair, closed her eyes. What would she tell the children?
    *
    That night Katherine lay on the left side of the bed, feeling the space beside her. Robbie had stopped sobbing. Only the rattle of a tram as it slid down the tracks of Riddiford Street, the thud and wheel of a horse-cart, a drunk’s thick call as he passed on his way from the Caledonian, the Tramways, some godforsaken hotel.
    She woke sprawled across the double bed, filling Donald’s absence with her own body. Breathing in the freshly starched sheets, two fat pillows squashed beneath her. Nothing left of him, nothing conjugal. She turned, her face brushing his pillow. Even now with its new white slip, a faintly familiar smell. His smell.
    He would come with the closing of her eyes – a