The Curse of the Cold Cook

Icarus fell

The sirens sing

Persephone returns with blissful spring

But Old Thanatos comes on silent wing

Grief is hell

A fragile thing

To knaves and knights and the lordliest king

Old Thanatos comes on silent wing

Merindah’s mother— God rest her soul— used to radiate formidable disapproval the way only a Koori woman could, the way the full moon casts subtle, dark light. And because Merindah was more often than not the source of her mother’s displeasure, Merindah would be less than thrilled to know that she could scorch a man at ten paces with that same fierceness.

She turned that glower now on the eerie verse hanging in the waiting room of Horson & Owl Undertakers.

‘White people,’ she muttered like a curse or an explanation and looked instead to the painting above the inscribed verse— which wasn’t any more inviting if she’s being honest. A pale sky over a Sydney sandstone cliff face, barren and wind-striped, with a single gnarled banksia bare of all but a smattering of leaves and a single yellow flower. Upon the twisted ebony branches sat a dowdy barn owl, head twisted towards Merindah. The bird was unremarkable except that Merindah couldn’t look away; she was caught in its dark, sad eyes.

Her mother would have hated that too. Evil omens, owls, she used to say, mysterious, ghostly buggers. You keep on the right side of them creatures, Merindah, or they’ll bring on all kinds of spirits and mischief, you hear?

But Merindah was curious, at least she had been as a girl before the world beyond her mother’s coddling had beaten it out of her with cynicism, slurs about government benefits, and how little there truly is for a black woman in a stolen country. It wasn’t often she let herself stray into curiosity anymore.

The curiosity was powerful when it did strike; a niggling, itching pull that she rarely ignored, no matter how much trouble it ended up getting her into. The tug was there now, pulling her towards the grim painting.

Maybe it was a last laugh at her mum. Maybe now the old girl and everything she reminded Merindah of was gone, she could dream again. Whatever the reason, Merindah turned away from the painting and the verse below it and towards the woman typing behind the red cedar counter.

‘What’s with the painting?’ she asked, sharp and smiling all at once.

The woman— Harriet, the name badge announced— glanced over Merindah’s shoulder, lips pressed flat. ‘Some heirloom of Ms. H’s.’

‘Who’s Ms. H?’

‘Ms. Horson. Mary Elizabeth Horson, the owner. Her great great great… a relo of hers painted it way back in 1800, I think it was. Check the date. Bottom right.’

Merindah turned back to the unblinking owl on the banksia and found the artist’s name and date almost obscured by the frame encasing it. Mary Elizabeth Horson, 1801.

‘Says your girl Horson painted it,’ Merindah replied.

‘It was the grandma’s name. Old family, all called Mary or Elizabeth as far as I know.’

Tug, went her curiosity. Pull.

Before she could indulge her curiosity, the little brass bell above the front door tinkered and a young woman with pale, pale blue eyes entered. She carried a leather handbag in one hand and a shopping bag in the other. Upon seeing Merindah, she stopped dead in her tracks.

‘Ms. Horson,’ Harriet said in a rush. ‘Your nine o’clock is early. I invited her to wait inside.’

Mary Elizabeth Horson was staring, in fact she hadn’t looked away from Merindah since she entered the building.

Merindah cleared her throat. ‘Nice to meet you. I’m—’

‘Merindah,’ Mary Elizabeth interjected crisply. ‘Merindah Madden.’

‘Sorry, have we met before or something?’

Like premature spring melt, Mary Elizabeth thawed with a thin smile. ‘Not ever.’ Gently, she closed the door and stepped into the waiting room. ‘You’ve been in my diary for a week now.’

Tug. ‘Right.’ Tug-tug. ‘Thanks for seeing me.’

‘Of course.’ Those pale eyes swirled and softened and her tone became almost apologetic. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’

Merindah forced a laugh at the reminder of why she was standing in Horson & Owl in the first place. ‘Don’t apologise; you didn’t kill her, the cancer did.’

Both Merindah and Harriet winced.

‘Well,’ Mary Elizabeth continued despite the bristling awkwardness, ‘I’ll certainly do my best to help you through this time. We’ll find the way that best fits your mother and return her to the Earth.’

‘Uh. Cool.’

Mary Elizabeth glanced at Harriet. ‘I shan’t be long. Harriet, have you offered Ms. Madden tea?’

‘It’s brewing,’ Harriet chirped, standing straighter.

‘Lovely.’ Mary Elizabeth favoured Merindah with a final washed out smile. ‘If there is anything at all I can do for you, please do not hesitate to ask. I am entirely at your disposal.’

Tug! Tug-tug-tug-tug-tug—

‘That’s real nice of you, Ms. Horson—’

‘Mary. Please, call me Mary.’

With a nod, Harriet swung open the red cedar countertop, and Mary Elizabeth passed through the opening and left by the ornate timber archway behind Harriet.

Merindah joined Harriet at the counter. ‘That’s Mary Elizabeth? Has she had the place long then?’

Harriet took a deep breath and set down the countertop gently. ‘Her family’s run this funeral home since the early nineteenth century.’ She pointed to the ornate wrought iron sign hanging behind her. Horson & Owl, est. 1805, it read. Here, Harriet grinned and glanced over her shoulder to the archway. Tug-tug-tug! Satisfied that they were alone, Harriet leaned nearer, eyes lit up the way eyes do when gossip and secrets lurk behind them. ‘It’s been around so long there are actually ghost stories about it.’

Despite her buzzing curiosity, Merindah played the sceptic. ‘Ghost stories about a funeral parlour? I’ll be honest with you, that doesn’t sound too original.’

‘Not just stories.’ Harriet’s brow arched high above her right eye. ‘A curse. And four murders.’

Merindah sucked her bottom lip between her teeth, narrowing her eyes at the smug look in Harriet’s; the cheeky bugger knew she’d hooked her audience. ‘Alright, I’ll bite. Tell me about the curse and the murders.’

Harriet grinned, red lips in a white face.

—

The Governor’s a man with no wife but he’d a daughter. Captain Arthur Phillip, made governor of New Albion, lowers himself to a convict’s purse and from it spills a wee babby coin.

The girl does not gleam. Ugly is her nature.

She doesn’t gleam and worse: She makes ugly the world around her.

—

‘New Albion?’ Merindah interrupted. ‘I thought this was about Horson and Owl?’

‘New Albion’s the name Governor Phillip gave the colony. No one knows why it was changed to Sydney, after Thomas Townsend, Lord Sydney maybe.’

Tug.

The hairs on the back of her neck bristled; Merindah glanced over her shoulder at the hollow-eyed owl.

—

The Governor’s illegitimate girl grows up among convicts and the wounds they carry from a land that gave them up for lost. The girl learns the Convict Way. The girl learns to look out for herself only. The girl learns that the blacks aren’t friends, aren’t anything. The girl thought… she thought she’d been friends with Myaree and her sisters.

But with one thrashing, her mother puts end to that.

—

‘Beaten for being friends with a black girl?’

Harriet’s cheeks are red, her eyes regretful. ‘Sorry, it’s not very PC, I know.’

‘No, it’s not.’ Merindah swallows an old, tired anger. ‘But it’s what happened.’

—

Men grow cold, women colder, and a people are cast as savages in the eyes of the Governor’s colony of convicts.

Not friends, the girl’s mother reminds her when they pass the Aborigines in chains under the baking sun. Not anything.

The girl’s step-father had slapped her about the head when he’d caught her picking flowers with Myaree. I see you with them kids again and I’ll do more’n slap, girl. You hear?

She heard.

So when Myaree and her sisters appear silent as ghosts in the garden at dawn, their mother too, the girl tells herself Not Friends even though she doesn’t believe it.

She is beautiful, Myaree’s mother, straight and silent with dignity, calm in the eyes in a way the girl has never seen in her own mother.

Budyeri kamaru, the beautiful mother says. Hello.

The girl sees the pox scabs on their arms, the plea for help in Myaree’s frightened eyes, the quiet sharpness in the beautiful mother’s.

The girl remembers her mother’s harsh lessons, her step-father’s threat.

The girl shouts for the men.

—

‘She betrayed her friend!’

‘So the story goes. Remember what it was like back then,’ Harriet interjected, a wheedling quality to her voice, ‘between black people and white people.’

Merindah shook her head, scowling down the old anger that was now wide awake. ‘Oh, bullshit; history and time don’t have shit to do with being a decent fucking human being.’

—

Hours pass. Salt and seagull squall. The distant tidal roar. And voices. White voices on the wind.

—

‘Where do they chase them? Myaree and her sister and the beautiful mother?’

‘Are you sure you want to hear the rest?’

‘Where did they chase them?’

—

The cliff is stained with insipid sunlight, its baking heat swept away in the coastal winds and made cold. Salt stained tongue. Sandstone underfoot. The beautiful mother’s calm is stolen by fear.

Screaming; hurry up, girl, hurry—

Whoops and hollers and animal bays.

Hurry, girl!

The beautiful mother is wind whipped and distraught. She yanks a girl child in each hand and screams to the third, the one she doesn’t have hands enough for.

The animals pursuing growl and bray as they crest the hidden track through the brush. One cocks a weapon.

The beautiful mother screams her eldest daughter’s name.

The girl’s step-father shouts rabid, ugly, glee. A musket shot tears the air and the beautiful mother’s skin.

Myaree and her sister call for her as she slips from the sandstone cliff and falls.

—

‘They say a barn owl took flight from an old banksia when they killed those girls, flew right out to sea. And now the ghosts of Myaree’s mother and her daughters haunt Mary Elizabeth for what her ancestor did and this building where those men dragged their bodies and strung them up,’ Harriet finished but her voice was restrained now, quieted. Gone was the coyness, the bravado, the theatrics of a juicy story.

The tragedy echoed down the centuries, all the way into this sunny room in 2022; Merindah, subdued, and the white woman with the red lips grimacing at an uncomfortable, inconvenient, violent past.

Merindah felt her mother in that moment, not beautiful perhaps but strong and fierce and protective when Merindah was too small a thing to help herself. She never told the silly old thing that she was grateful for that. Never heard her mum tell her she was proud.

Harriet saved her the heavy burden of replying. ‘Um, why don’t I show you through to the parlour? Mary Elizabeth will be ready soon.’

‘Yeah. Thanks.’

And they left the painting of the mournful owl on her ebony black banksia behind in the thick silence of the waiting room.

—

Mary Elizabeth closed her study door as Merindah and Harriet passed by. The building tingled with the story told. The walls shivered, the floors groaned, but the spaces between wailed and sobbed.

Amends. She had made them a dozen times over, she had a duty after all, a penance. Steward the dead, respect the passing of life, return bodies to the earth, comfort the grieving. And she did not resent it or even fight it, not anymore. Self-loathing had long ago ben replaced by acceptance. She bore the weight of her crime, bore the burden of a stupid, cowardly, horrific mistake.

Hands shaking, Mary Elizabeth closed her eyes as her curse rose and overtook her.

It had been years since she had heard her story and yet she buckled to her knees, moaning into her hand, as though she were back there watching those girls dragged through the streets. Tears tracked down her cheeks and saliva dribbled around the skin of her fist as she tried to stem the messy weight of centuries.

Pointless, she knew. The memories came anyway.

She remembered chasing after her step-father and his men, sick with regret; she remembered the blow that made her ears ring when he knocked her to the ground. She remembered following them anyway, following blindly through the bush, unseen by men with their blood up. She remembered the sickening scent of salt and blood, the desperate fear and fury that was knife-sharp in Myaree’s mother’s eyes.

Mary Elizabeth curled into herself. The barn owl on the silver perch behind her shuffled her feathers in her sleep. Through a blur of tears, Mary Elizabeth looked to the ancient creature; the beautiful grey-bluff splotched back, the snowy chest, the heart-shaped face and long, proud wings. The owl had been with her since that day on the clifftop, her wide, mournful eyes watching, always watching. Over the years, she’d learned to hear what laid behind those eyes, had stopped drowning in her guilt long enough to understand what they said. Learning to listen made her curse bearable. The owl gave her suffering a purpose. She had a debt to pay and the owl ensured she made payment.

Wiping at her eyes, Mary Elizabeth watched the owl’s restless sleep, for the owl slept not with her head under wing, but with those dark, watchful eyes wide and turned to the distant headland cliffs that Mary Elizabeth still could not set foot on. She wondered for the umpteenth time at the bird’s name. Myaree hadn’t spoken English; Mary Elizabeth never asked her mother’s name.

The beautiful mother had been important to her people— a witch, the convicts would have called her, but Mary Elizabeth knew well enough that she was something closer to a priestess. A holy woman. She’d had a connection with owls long before her spirit became one. When she fell from those cliffs, some part of her took flight on silent wings and turned Mary Elizabeth’s betrayal into 233 long years of stewarding the dead and grieving with no end in sight.

Merindah had her world-weary curiosity. Mary Elizabeth had her reparations. Over the years, she’d found ways to carry her curse— by painting her crime, by putting words to it. Drawing herself into a ball, she hummed the verse under her breath:

Icarus fell

The sirens sing

Persephone returns with blissful spring

But Old Thanatos comes on silent wing

Grief is hell

A fragile thing

To knaves and knights and the lordliest king

Old Thanatos comes on silent wing

It calmed the storm enough for her to peel the parts of herself from the floor, paste them shakily back together, and make her way to where Merindah waited to bury her mother.

Amends. She’d made them a hundred times over but amends take generations to make.