by Neil Grant
The train pulls into Woy Woy and the woman with the wispy beard gets up, wrestling her discontent and a clutch of bloated plastic bags. The last thing he sees is her talking to the stationmaster. He gives her an ironic wave as they pull away.
They cross the spit at Pelican Island – through Koolewong and Tascott with their scattering of yachts, a Heron dinghy sailing over Brisbane Water, its sky-blue sail tightened to the breeze. It is good to be home, thinks Rudra.
They stop at Point Clare, pass Central Coast Stadium and into Gosford. Rudra shoulders his bag and leaves the train.
And there she is – Mum – smiling and pressing her palms together.
‘Namaste, Rudra.’
‘Namaste, Mum.’
They hug each other. Rudra feels her tears on his shoulder. ‘It’s okay,’ he says.
‘I know,’ she answers. ‘I know it is. Come on, let’s go.’
They walk to where the Solace ute is parked. Mum opens the door and gets in the driver’s seat.
‘I’ve never seen you drive.’
‘That doesn’t mean I can’t.’
‘Can you?’
‘Of course I can.’ She lurches onto the Central Coast Highway. ‘You’ll need to get your learner’s soon.’
‘I guess so.’
‘A lot of things are going to change around here, Rudra.’
‘Good. They needed to.’
‘Yes, they did,’ said Nayna.
Instead of heading back through Woy Woy, they take the road to East Gosford.
‘Mum?’ says Rudra. ‘Do you know where we’re going?’
‘I’ve been living here longer than you have been alive, Rudra Solace.’
‘But this isn’t the way home.’
‘It’s the long way.’
‘It’s a really long way.’
‘There are too many left-hand turns if we go via Woy Woy.’
‘What?’
‘I need practise turning right.’
They motor through Green Point, Kincumber and down Empire Bay Drive.
Nayna says, ‘Remember those animals that were killed?’
‘Yes,’ says Rudra.
‘Turned out to be a wild dog in the end. Really big. Swimming back and forth over the creek and killing wallabies and possums and people’s pet cats. Wallace shot it.’
Rudra doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know where that leaves his weirdo tiger dreams. Does this stone-cold fact make any of the shadowy stuff that has gone on this summer any less real? Is it the cord or the holes between that makes the net?
As they drop down the hill from Daleys Point, the engineering marvel of the Rip Bridge approaches. He remembers Maggs being dangled above the rip and how he fell, all brittle-boned and goose-fleshed, to the water.
‘I used to hold my breath when I crossed this bridge,’ he says to Nayna.
‘Why is that, Rudra?’
‘I never trusted those engineers even though I was always told I should.’
‘And now?’
Rudra looks behind them – a trail of cars up the hill and beyond. ‘You’re driving a little slower than I’m used to,’ he says. ‘The need to breathe is greater than my fear of this bridge collapsing.’
Finally, they wind their way through Umina and up over the headland towards Patonga. A glimpse of Pearl Beach between the points, scrub blackened from recent fire, and a vapour trail scrawled across the sky.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think Didima is happy back in the Sundarbans?’
‘Well, she is dead, Rudra, so I doubt there is much happening by way of happiness – or anything else for that matter. But to answer your question in another way, it’s what she wanted when she was alive.’
‘Yes, but so far from us.’
‘She’ll always be with us, Rudra.’
Rudra looks at her. ‘Did you seriously just say that?’
Nayna grimaces and grips the wheel tighter. ‘If I start telling you she is in the clouds and the leaves on the trees, can you please slap me?’
‘I will.’
‘What I mean to say is that I kept some ashes.’
‘You did what?’
‘I held a little back.’
‘What for?’
‘Your didima needs to be here as well. That’s for us.’
30
THE PHONE RINGS IN THE HALLWAY. The sound breaks open the emptiness of the morning, rolls across the photos on the wall. Men long dead, a tiger. The Solace boys on the beach, the nets limp in their hands. A woman beneath a parasol stepping from a boat – caught forever between places, not of the land but not of the sea.
And others, new photos – Didima and Dadu, smooth-faced and terrified in their wedding finery. Didima with a nose-ring – a half moon; Dadu with a tightly wrapped turban, hands slim in his lap. Their hair partings drenched in vermilion that can hardly be imagined in black and white. Not daring to look at each other. And Nayna Solace in a graduation gown, flying from her parents at a speed no one could have reckoned. To a new life, a new land, a husband, a child, a renunciation. These photos showing both sides now, what with Cord Solace in hospital and all his rules broken.
Propped between the phone and a small brass elephant-headed Ganesha – the god of letters and writing – is a postcard with a triple-headed lion stamp. Slightly grubby, faded, imperfect.
Dear Rudra and Mummy,
I am here – Bollywood! I have never seen Manisha Koirala still she evades me and I have not serving milktea and biftek to Amitabh Bachchan quite as yet but once I did see him in Leopold’s Café in Colaba where I am having a job learning how to cook the Indian, Chinese, Continental foods and the other good things. I am having one job starting tomorrow in a film where I will be an extra character and this is one gangster film so I will be awesome. I think fame is not so very far from me now. I hope you are well. Love and namaste to your good daddy Mr Solace.
Your very good friend and guide,
Raj.
The phone rings and Nayna in the garden, with a job application half-filled in, thinks about what she’s missed and what she can go back and get. She thinks it might be Cord on the phone because he’s taken to calling lately, now his speech is coming back. She ignores it this time and goes back to her application.
And the phone keeps ringing because that is what phones do when no one answers. Rudra Solace stirs. His sheet is wound into a rope that he should climb to reach his pillow. At the foot of his bed, his dreams are scattered like so much sand. If he were to drift his fingers through, he would come across pieces of the Sundarbans here and there – a meendhara girl, a gossipy aunt, woodcollectors and poachers, honeymen. But that tiger is nowhere to be seen or dreamt.
The phone rings and Rudra, dragging himself upright, goes to answer it.
‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Maggs!’
The swell is massive, a glut of whitewater across the bar. The channel has lumps three foot high into which surfers are swallowed and regurgitated. The luckiest ones are getting dropped out the back in boats. Some are getting tow-ins on jet skis. It is that big.
‘Maggs, I dunno, mate.’
‘You’ll be fine.’
‘It’s pretty huge.’
‘It just looks big from here.’
‘Reckon it’ll look even bigger close up.’
‘Just get your wettie on. I haven’t seen a south-easterly swell like this and I’m not sitting it out.’
They push into the channel on the outgoing tide. Rudra knows immediately it is going to be hard to sit still out there with all this water churning through the exit from Brisbane Water. But he knows all he has to do is to wait it out. Maggs can snare a couple of waves and then they’ll paddle in for pies and a milkshake at Ettalong. Easy done.
Of course it isn’t so easy. It never is. Out there on the wild sea with men twice and three times his age – not so easy. And Maggs all over the waves; almost snaking; almost dropping in. Rudra nervous, way out on the shou
lder with the kids on bodyboards, half-hearted and half-paddling. He sees Judge, avoids his gaze. Judge’s dreadlocks are a salted fleece across his head. He looks smaller and a little sad; on the outer now. The older guys are deeper and the hottest surfers are deeper still, taking off with a fizzing spit, freefalling and driving hard off the bottom, freight-training down the line.
Nothing has prepared Rudra for this. He is a weekend surfer and not even that. He belongs on a boat. Here the sea is too close and too real. Here the sea can bend and break and doesn’t care who you are.
He watches Maggs paddle for one. He is deep, real deep. The wave struggles and gathers behind him, reaching out its lip like a rock ledge, and Maggs drops, pushes his board beneath him, freefalls, bird-arms, hits the bowled bottom of the wave, throws a quick turn, rises to the lip, smashes it, drops mid-wave and sets a rail. The wave, angry now, vomits a tonne of water above his head and Rudra can see it fringe over Maggs – so very deep. But then Judge paddles further along the shoulder, preparing to drop in. And Maggs, now speed-crouching, racing that lip, sees him, grabs a rail. It’s either hit Judge, or have the wave hit him hard, and he has to make a choice right there.
Then there is whitewater and plenty of it. And more of it. The sea is a boiling mess. The noise fills the air. And everyone abandons boards and dives for the bottom, for the sweet weed and sand.
And when Rudra rises, it is to a hissing fit of water, like someone has dumped bicarb out the back and turned the world to bubbles. And in among the white, there is red. Blood thinned by seawater.
Rudra paddles. He knows it is Maggs. Knows it. But another wave comes, bigger this time, drumming sand up inside it. It goes unridden. And he dives again, feel his board tugging at his ankle – his legrope an umbilicus. He turns up and catches the fleeting gold of the sky before the wave burns everything.
Up again and pulling at the air. Nothing so sweet. And another wave comes, smaller this time but still deadly. Rudra waits until he can wait no more and dives again for the bottom.
Once it is past, he swims for the surface, to a world shot free of sound. Everyone around him seems stunned, pulling their boards towards them, climbing on and paddling as far free of the line-up as they can. No one wants to face another set like that.
Rudra looks around. There – in a patch of blood, floating face down. He swims towards him. Wrenches him over. Rudra can’t face another death; he’s had enough to last two lifetimes. A huge gash across the forehead, draining blood, lidded eyes, a flood of dreadlocks, a Southern Cross tattoo. Judge.
Maggs is paddling back out. ‘I did that, didn’t I?’ he says, screwing his eyes against the guilt.
‘We need to get him in.’
They drag Judge onto Maggs’s board and together push him towards the shore, catching anything they can. Someone calls an ambulance and it arrives quickly, sirens blaring. The ambos work on him, right there on the sand. Maggs keeps people back. ‘What’re you gawping at, you ghouls!’
They pump Judge’s chest, give him mouth to mouth. One of the ambos rushes back with a defibrillator. ‘Stand back now.’ They hook him up and give him a jolt. He bounces but lies still.
‘Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die.’ Maggs is shaking though it isn’t cold.
They give Judge another shock. He rises and falls; coughs a lungful of seawater onto his chest.
Rudra hears Maggs release a huge breath. ‘Thank you,’ he whispers to the air.
‘No worries,’ says one of the ambos. ‘Is he your mate?’
‘No,’ says Maggs. ‘I wouldn’t call him that exactly.’
Judge blinks and looks at the circle of people. ‘Where am I?’
‘Ettalong,’ says the ambo. ‘You had an accident out in the water. These two guys pulled you out.’
Judge looks at Maggs and Rudra in turn. The gash on his head is raw. His lips move on words but they fail to exit. Rudra and Maggs turn their backs and, grabbing their boards, walk to the road. The sea continues to roar in the background. It’s like they’re leaving a packed stadium.
‘It’ll be all over The Advocate in big bolds,’ says Maggs. ‘CURRY-MUNCHER SAVES DREADLOCKED LOCAL ZERO.’
They dump their boards in the bushes on the foreshore and head to the Ettalong shops, stripping wetties to the waist. They order pies and choc milks at the bakery and sit on the bench to eat.
‘So was India much chop?’
‘It was sort of familiar and strange at the same time. My mum and Didima told me so much about it, and then to see it for real, I dunno, it was like something slotted into place. I felt like some part of me belonged there. And I liked it – the people, the craziness, the food and colour. I liked it a lot. I don’t know why but I didn’t expect to. People are always on about how dirty and poor India is, but that’s just a smokescreen for its awesomeness.’
‘What about this girl you met?’
Rudra takes a sip of his milk. ‘Can we not talk about that? Not just yet.’
‘Tell me something else then.’
‘I guess I found out that I really am half Indian. And that’s something to be proud of.’
‘You’re half Indian?’ says Maggs, mock shock all over his stupid face. ‘Like Tonto?’
‘Piss off, Maggs.’
They eat their pies in silence for a moment. The hot sauce drips across their fingers, and they splay their legs so the overrun hits the pavement.
‘Your dad’s a racist, isn’t he, Rudra?’
‘He can’t be.’
‘He hates you.’
‘He does not.’
‘The half of you that’s Indian, he does.’
‘How can you hate half a person?’ he asks.
‘If anyone can, it’d be your old man.’
‘You’re an idiot, Maggs.’
‘I am,’ Maggs agrees. ‘But your old man, he’s not Robinson Crusoe in hating on his own folk, is he?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Australians hate people who come here from somewhere else – even though most do. Even though the “them” are really “us”. We’re just one big mongrel mob.’
‘Maggs, this is hurting my head.’
‘Don’t think that’s going to stop me,’ says Maggs, but he does pause for a moment. Just to catch his breath. ‘Why’d Cord even marry your mum?’
‘Can we just drop it?’
‘He pretends she’s not even Indian. Why would he bother to marry her?’
‘I guess he was different back then.’
‘You think so?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And why (and I really mean why this time) did your mum marry him? She could have married anyone.’ He knots his brow at Rudra. ‘I’d marry her if I wasn’t your mate.’
‘Maggs, this isn’t something I want to talk about.’
‘Fair enough.’ Maggs balls his pie bag and tosses it at the bin. ‘Two points, right there.’ The ambulance rolls past. Maggs nods at it. ‘Reckon old mate Judge is braver than your dad.’
‘What has Judge got to do with any of this?’
‘He’s a racist, but at least he has the courage to come right out and say what he thinks.’
‘Reckon that’s bravery?’
Maggs thinks for a moment. ‘Could just be stupidity.’
Rudra walks the length of the beach from Ettalong Point to Kiddie’s Corner. Out on Umina Point he stops, laying his board carefully on the rocks. There is another storm coming, or the same one looping back for another shot. The swellmaker prods the horizon, sky almost black with a slice of bright light along the seam where it meets the sea. The seabirds are drawing themselves to the cliffs. The waters around Lion Island are swollen with fish. Off the southern point the water is boiling with them. The penguins are out hunting, and so too, the sharks.
Maggs was right: Cord Solace is a racist, and a coward of sorts. He is scared of the world moving on without him. The place he has known is one he can never return to. One morning he put to sea and when he ret
urned all he had known had been swallowed. The bund he built against the world had been breached by tigers and tides beyond his imaginings.
‘Just let go,’ Rudra whispers. ‘Even though it feels like giving up. Let go.’ And he imagines the words drifting past the island, past the gaping maw of the Hawkesbury, down the coast, along the spindrift beaches – Palm, Newport, Narrabeen, Curl Curl. Past Freshwater where the Hawaiian, Duke Kahanamoku, introduced surfing to Australia. Past Manly – named for the whale-eating Guringai men who speared Captain Arthur Phillip. A sharp right round North Head, past Chowder Bay and Shark Island. Into the harbour, by the Opera House, once a lotus, now baring its sharpened teeth at the sky. Beneath the Harbour Bridge, walkers easing across its spine – the carcass of a slaughtered Minmi, a dinosaur a hundred and thirteen million years dead. Up through the Rocks, where the first white men and women pitched their ragged tents; along the clotted, winding streets of the city. To the hospital.
And Rudra sees Cord Solace lying in a four-bed ward with the screens pulled round. One half of his face slapped flat, watching Judge Judy and running the sheet hem through his hands as if it is a net. Cord shuffles off his bedclothes and limps to the window. Great boiling clouds are rolling over the suburbs. He looks through Naremburn, Northbridge and Willoughby into the guttering grey beyond. There, the outline of the pines as clear as if they are stapled to the window. The kite, uttering her keening cry and swooping across the bay. Look, the cutlass blade of the beach where he played pirates with his brother and built weed humpies through the winter, tithed to the swells and garrulous winds. He is ten years old, a muttonbird smuggled inside his gut-flecked jacket; its beak pressed into his flesh, the mechanical knock of its heart. He is ten and his father is a lump of fear in his marrow – a cancer of which he will never be rid. They walk on eggshells each night, when he’s back from the sea, smelling of it, anger flaring off him like spindrift. When even the scrape of a knife on a plate could earn a ‘clip’. That’s what he called it, but it could cause blood. You had the chance to be different, Cord thinks, and a sob escapes him.
