Featured Writer: Coral Hull

I MET THE DEVIL IN AN ABANDONED RAILWAY YARD

The Devil flaunts his sexuality. He always offers you something good, in return for your soul. It was coming on dark in Liverpool, I thought I loved him on the outskirts of Sydney. I stood by a piece of jagged metal and concrete pipe, at the abandoned railway yard near the train station. The grass had caused an itchy rash to appear on both my thighs. My mother was off at the plastics factory in Lidcombe. My father was drunk in the outback and had been lost in the floods up near Naromine. Later I found out that he had got so stoned out on a property, that he had slept it off on a stranger’s grass mat floor for three days. A couple of flies hadn’t shifted from his shoulders in the heavy weather. The dull heat was trapped beneath the persistent outback rain. It was the kind of heat that made the wings of mosquitoes heavy and sluggish. My father’s sleeping form had again offered itself up to insects, both as a lifeboat and a dinner plate. When he finally stood up, the floodwaters that had drowned millions of other insects, lizards and snakes were receding. He walked out into the blue muddy day, bleary eyed and amazed at the world like a boy. He was surprised that he had again come back to life, even after he tried so hard to destroy himself. He was a professional drunk.

Meanwhile, back at Flemington station my mother struggled home from afternoon shift at the factory, carrying her old brown coat on her front as though it was her next baby. She was so hard and callous inside, that she would have the rest of her life to be dissatisfied, in the company of men weaker than herself. She spent her mornings before work in a constant state of flight, never keeping still enough to be acknowledged or talk to a daughter like me. On days off she would restlessly sort through her jewelry box, trying to untangle the chains or pick up autumn leaves that littered the front yard lawn. ‘They get into the swimming pool,’ she said. And there they would drown. It was love she was really looking for, but she was never still enough to receive it. Whenever she stopped suddenly she saw her situation for what it was and got frightened. Inside this anxious woman, as inaccessible to her children as lawn frost in autumn, was the great fear of death without love. At about the time the flies shifted from my father’s shoulders out on the floor of a derelict house, my mother stumbled across her first dead body in the gutter outside the Collingwood hotel, on her way home from the factory after midnight. I never knew where my brothers were and was tired of cooking tea for them.

Instead I hung around in the abandoned railway yard that afternoon. I stayed there long after I should have left, my forehead falling into shadow like the side of a hotel wall. I was beginning to believe that it didn’t get any better than this, so I turned to delusions for sustenance. The weeds that had lifted the hives to the surface of my legs were oozing sticky white milk. My face was plastered with zits. I thought I am going to have to toughen up. I wanted the gift of not feeling anything at all in the world. The gift of no pain and no joy. I was prepared to forfeit all hope to stop feeling. I believed that to stop feeling altogether, was the only way to alleviate the terrible lovelessness that existed all around me. Each time I was ready for the final hand over, it was the same Devil who was waiting there for me; his black wings tucked into his lapel. I saw visions of the world I half lived in every time I closed my eyes. In the early hours of the morning nightmares of disembodied hands coming out from the darkness to strangle me or knock me down. On other nights I ran barefoot down hallways of smashed glass in abandoned haunted houses towards my mother. She was always walking away; her cold frail back turned on my desperation.

The Devil placed these dreams inside me. He slipped them through my open mouth whilst I slept and into the corners of my eyes. It was like he was trying to force my tears back in, or making me eat what I had screamed out. Beneath his suit he was the god of another land, a place more lonely and beautiful that I had ever imagined. The dark hair emerged from his sleeves, running along the backs of his hands like wild horses throwing up sand along a windy shoreline. His smile was inviting me to run like an untethered mare beside him. But I was too afraid to begin the fatal transformation, where hand became hoof. Yet he seemed intent upon cutting my fear to pieces. Pretty soon these visions were to walk with me, through the parks and along the streets. They appeared each time I closed my eyes, because to look out at the world was too painful. Each time I created darkness by a blink, that space got filled by a heart intent upon my murder. Floaters sailed across my eyes like yachts, so that when I stared out into the world, it was like looking through a broken window. When I closed my eyes it was so painful, that I thought my pupils were being cut to pieces, and the tears I wept were blood from my vision cut into by glass.

This world was hard enough to face. It was cold and callous and would predate upon me whenever I gave it the opportunity. So I didn’t often let it in. When I got weary I hid myself in the giant industrial pipes, where some kids had played and others were murdered. It was simply a matter of not being picked off, before you were big enough to defend yourself. Inside there was the other predator of self hate smashing me up, until pretty soon I was perpetually hiding from all of it. The gap into which I could squeeze into in order to escape became narrower, until it was like being wedged in-between two walls that were closing in on me. My head was beginning to split from the pressure, whilst in my heart I fell apart. I felt that there would be that final snapping sensation, where I would begin to giggle a path to hysteria. It so happened that years later, when I was lying mad on a mattress on the south coast of Sydney, that I just kept yelling out, ‘Mrs. Walker Mrs. Walker Mrs. Walker,’ to the person who was looking after me, until he began to laugh. Then I laughed too, and cried out her name all day and all night. I didn’t know why and concern was a thousand miles down from that height. I could have been saying the words, ‘salt ‘n’ pepper salt‘n’pepper salt‘n’pepper,’ for really it was only an excuse to perpetually scream, falling through the worlds of myself.

I met the Devil in an abandoned railway yard. He was hiding up in an oleander tree wearing a black hat. He wanted to fuck me but wouldn’t say it outright. I was a sixteen year old virgin and wanted it with no one. He said that he didn’t have to touch me and promised death with love. This prospect of an ending seemed to excite me, and he was quick to notice my indecision. My pain was that intense that his invitation to leave the world, was a welcome mat placed down at the doorway to a better existence. He was offering worlds to me on a platter, if only I would be lead there by him. They were all the little boxes on his magic table and he was about to lift the lids. I thought because he offered this, which deep down he really loved me. I was so screwed up inside, that I thought that simple intimacy meant to leave the earth. How could I know what love or touch felt like from another human being? ‘I am all human beings to you,’ his dark lashed eyes spoke to me like feathers. Inside his enormous chest was the heartbeat at the centre of the cosmos. If I could just fall in I would never be lonely. He was the mother I never had calling me inside for tea or back home, so I could start all over again. But I always declined his invitation. The truth was that I didn’t know how to accept him. I didn’t think I was worth an invite from anyone, let alone a handsome supernatural being. So when I said ‘no’ I was left alone. Even he was shocked and disgusted by my sense of self worth. It was only predators worse than the Devil that ever pursued me, and only my damaged frightened heart that always ran away to be lonely.

Yet the Devil himself didn’t give up so easily. In between his stylish visitations to other lost souls, and all the fucking and galloping in his sodden fields, he came back to make sure. It was his job to attend the wars of the wounded fighters, offering his coarse hand with the promise of lifting them up through their injuries. Many of them died wrapped up in his cape before they ever woke. The Devil appeared in all the bottlebrush trees I moved past on my way back home from school. He said, ‘this is your last chance. I’m losing interest.’ He tossed me down some amphetamine and said that he would be the only one to ever love me. He said, ‘deep inside your heart is where I live. We’re from the same side of the city, angel.’ His propositions were sexual in tone. He was somehow gorgeous. But in reality he wanted nothing less than my soul, and my soul wanted someone to want it. It seemed to be a good offer. For years on he would visit me in dark rooms. Even after my first boyfriend had gone home, he would smooth talk his way into my life to try and angrily take his place. But that was in the future five years from now. Today I walked right past that tree and swallowed the drugs. He was so close to consuming me and I was so willing to be eaten. The maggots moved up to the surface beneath the ground, my school shoes sinking in. He promised that we would be together for eternity, and that if only I would truly take him in, that I would never be frightened again. You know I might have succumb but I didn’t know how to. In the end the Devil himself couldn’t convince me that I was worthy, even of him.

This dark god deserves points for persistence, and I don’t blame him for becoming testy. But I was just a girl terrified of personal contact, even of the vague intimacy one could have with the Devil himself. The days I spent in the abandoned railway yard at Liverpool station were filled with indecision. I was unable to leave my old life and unwilling to enter the new one he offered me. I was looking for another way out, through the industrial waste of this world. If that’s what we start with, that’s what we’ve got to find our way out of. I went home on my own and completely lonely. No one came into my life to replace the Devil or to offer me what he had offered. Many years later, when I was lost, I lit a candle each time I saw the dark figure with the long mane and shiny black boots entering through the front gate. Fortunately for me I was frightened enough to keep everything out. I did not distinguish between the good and the bad. I judged everything on whether it would be good for my own survival, on its ability to love me or threaten me. Or to get close enough to me to find out who I really was which was dark. I stared at the world in such a wide-eyed way that the largeness of the eyes gave a warning, to all but the worse of the predators. These predators who thought stupidly to themselves, her fear is what will lead me into her. So even when I didn’t want them, my fear was like a net hauling them in, so that once touched by what I had inside, they could have their time of being lost and afraid.

Coral Hull is an Australian writer. The work represented most recently in Ascent is from her current work in the outback. For more of her work and her mission take a look at her magazine, Thylazine.

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