Illywhacker

If she softened her natural vowels a fraction in keeping with her role as a Protestant lady, she did not put on dog or act in a snobbish manner. If she laughed too much or talked too much or swung her arms or ran when she should have walked, it only seemed to make her more attractive. Her cheeks burned. Her eyes, even in that dismal Presbyterian service, were feverish with secrets she could not share.

The town approved of her courtship with Jack McGrath who may not have been the town's only teetotaller but was certainly the richest and the best-liked one. As everyone said, he had not a nasty bone in his body. Molly yearned to lay all her twisted secrets on him. Yet when, behind the small wooden pavilion on the river flat, a building known locally as the "Football Stadium", Jack McGrath attempted a bit more with his hands than she had expected, there was a great deal more than maidenly modesty to make her leap back from her beloved, her face colouring, her voice shaking.

Molly did not intend that the belt should ruin her chances of marriage. It would have to be done away with; yet it could not be done without. She still, in spite of the belt's magnetic forces, had palpitations of the heart. She did not associate these upsets with the moments when her mind strayed into that minefield, her betrayal of the one true church. Rather, it seemed to her, it was a question of heights. Sometimes, on a high stool in the hotel larder, reaching for a ham or a string of onions, she was overcome with something that was not quite vertigo. It was as if two seconds had been snipped from her life, and the remainder, the past and the future, roughly pinned together. She felt a tiny explosion, a little jump, followed by a wild galloping of the heart. She did not dare think of what would become of her without the belt and yet, if she was to marry this big gentle man, she knew it would have to go. Who, after all, wants to marry a mad woman?

So, on a Tuesday morning in November, just one day before her wedding in a Protestant church, Molly Rourke went out walking in the hour before the sun had entered the valley and when the dew lay thick on the grass and fell from trees on to the tin roof of the Grand Hotel. She walked along one side of the single street. She walked past the last of the new macadam where Reilly's cow stared mournfully at the bracken and blackberries in its neglected paddock and then, just past Crooked Creek, took an old footpath said to have been a Chinese millrace in the 1850s. The path, so she had been told, followed the river to the big swimming hole and the falls beyond.

She had never been along the path before and she did not like it now. She did not like the blackberries that grew along it, the prickly acacias that bent, heavy with dew, across it. She did not like the small dry scurrying sounds amongst the untidy wet floor of the bush. She picked up her skirts and held them tightly to her. She stopped, continually, trying to hear the sounds her beating heart were overpowering.

Black cockatoos filled the air above her and their harsh screeching seemed only to echo the hostile nature of the bush. If she had seen the brilliant scarlet on their tails she would not have thought it beautiful, but rather a confirmation of danger, like the red spot on a black spider.

The path rose higher above the river, along across a rock face. At one place there had been a fall. There was a small gap in the track, easily cleared by children, but when Molly Rourke jumped it was as if the fires of Hell, not a tangle of blackberries, lay below her skirts.

She did not like being so high above the river, but she hurried on (not swinging her arms) until she found herself above the swimming hole; the falls spilled off one end like water from an overfull bowl. People had told her stories of things being swept off the falls and how they were never seen again. It was dangerous, they said. Once a child had been swept away and not recovered.

The water moved blackly over grey rocks. She did not wish to descend, as the children did easily, the rock steps that led to the water's edge.

She stood on the path above, twisting her hands, and young Dave McCorkell, squatting a little further up the hill with two dew-wet rabbits in his hand, thought she looked like a princess in a fairy story. Her long grey dress had a sheen like the underside of gumleaves but it did not camouflage her form or even, with the skirt clutched to her, hide her tiny feet.

He thought he heard her praying, but whatever the words she spoke he never heard them, or if he did hear them they were driven from his mind by the force of his feelings as he watched her hitch, first her skirt, then her petticoats, and remove, in a flurry so confusing he could not be sure of what he had seen, a garment of some type.