by Tim Winton
Doris didn’t reciprocate. She flicked her plaits. A rattle of impatience, irritation.
There was a silence between them. The hectoring music. Falling darkness.
Tell me, she said. Are you married to that beard?
Why, because you used to be?
And what’s that supposed to mean?
Someone said it makes me look like Dad.
Who? Who said that?
Gemma Buck.
Hmm.
You’re not going to ask about her?
Doris shut down a moment, pushing her glass in circles.
I thought there might be more important things to deal with. Before we got all nostalgic.
Like what, for instance?
Faith. She’s worried.
She hasn’t even seen the beard. She’s watching brokers leap from skyscrapers. What I’d like to know is why can’t she get more of them to take the plunge. God knows, we need a cull.
Tom, love.
What?
You’re being a bit of a nong.
I imagine so.
You can always desist, you know.
But here I am, vindicated and persisting.
I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned the … thing.
You want me to shave the beard?
Forget the bloody beard.
I’m sorry.
She took up the bottle, but he covered his glass like a man in regal control of his impulses. She refilled her own, sat back and restored herself.
So tell me about Gemma, then, she said with a wan smile.
Not much to say, really. I just saw her in passing.
What does she do? How does she seem?
Dunno, he said. It was just a chance encounter.
Family?
There’s a grandkid. A boy.
Good for her.
He glanced up, saw her appraising stare, felt the lost moment in her false brightness.
I often think about them, Baby and her.
He nodded, wishing he could go back, begin the evening again, but it was hopeless. He lacked the gumption to set things right, he was too accustomed to the logic of defeat. He saw it now, the rest of the meal. They’d eat in fraught politeness and leave the moment the last fork was laid down. She’d insist on driving him home. He’d protest, pile in anyway. And she’d want to come up and see the flat once and for all but refrain from asking. She’d take his kiss on the cheek like a lowball tip and wheel the boxy old Volvo away, looking game as ever, masking her hurt and disappointment as he stood limp and seething on the forecourt.
The task at hand was getting to that final, miserable moment as quickly as possible.
Keely was halfway along the open gallery, digging at his temples, when he noticed something flapping in the security mesh of his door. Some civic announcement, no doubt: a plea for a lost kitten, a notice about building maintenance. But when he pulled it from the grille he saw it was a child’s drawing, a crayon outline of a bird. Dumpy, earthbound, like an overfed kiwi.
Once he got inside he clamped the sheet of paper to the fridge with a magnet. At other people’s places – friends from work, people with kids – he’d always looked with an inner sneer at their fridge doors plastered in clumsy daubs. Everything their brats committed to paper was so special, so important it required immediate and prolonged display. The kids probably forgot their work the moment they put the brush down, never thinking another thing of it. And now here he was, chuffed to have it there. This peculiar burst of colour, this lovely intrusion.
He banged down a couple of Panadeine Forte with a chaste swish of apple juice. It was ten-thirty but from his balcony he saw that the lights were on over at 1010. A few moments later he was outside her kitchen window, tapping lightly. The curtain ricked aside. Gemma squinted out, tense, alert, annoyed.
She cracked the door but left the chain on. A gust of fried onions and menthol smoke blew past her. In the gap he saw she wore a faded housecoat. She was barefoot.
Sorry, he said. I know it’s late.
You orright?
Yeah. Just got home.
Right.
We’re all set. Tomorrow.
Fair enough.
Meet you out the front at ten?
Like we said.
Yeah. And hey, I got his drawing.
You what?
Kai’s drawing. Of a bird. It was in my door.
Little bugger. I’ve told him a million times. Jesus. He’s not sposed to wander off.
He’s okay?
Asleep.
You look tired.
Because I am.
Right. So I’ll see you in the morning?
She closed the door on him.
Keely slunk back down to his place. He glanced at the bird on the fridge. Thought of his mother. Knowing Doris, she’d still be up. So he called.
Are you okay? she asked gently.
Sorry about tonight, he murmured. We didn’t really get to talk.
I was talking, she said.
I know. Like you said, I was a goose. A stupid mood.
Doris was quiet.
You’re working? he said.
Reading, she said. Charles Birch.
So, you’re a pantheist now.
After menopause, she said, all bets are off.
Very funny.
If you still need the car, the keys are on the sink. I’ll be in church.
You still go?
You know perfectly well I do.
The Anglicans. It’s come to that.
Well, I am the demographic. Sometimes I’m half the congregation. You should come one day.
What, and spook the poor buggers?
Is this about the beard?
No, Mum, it’s not about the beard.
It does make you look like him. It’s … well, it’s a little unnerving.
I hadn’t realized. To be perfectly honest. It just grew of its own accord.
Tommy, love, go to bed. You’re slurring.
Slurring? I had two glasses, he said truthfully.
My mistake.
But shit, he thought. I’m sober. Slurring?
Tom?
Yeah?
What’re you doing? Are you talking to me or thinking aloud?
I’m going to bed, he said, hanging up, rattled.
But to get off he needed help. A sleeper slug. Just the one. And a couple of Valium to ease past that hunted feeling that lingered of late any time he had to entrust his head to the pillow.
It was nine when he woke. So he had to scramble. Burnt his mouth gulping tea. Wasted time searching for a clean shirt. Then, halfway to the station and hopelessly late, he hailed a cab he could sorely afford.
Doris lived in a stately Edwardian weatherboard in a riverside suburb of Perth. From just below her place, at the water’s edge, you could see upstream, past the snaking coils of the river, the thousand-eyed towers of the business district with the shimmering red-roofed plain behind. The hills were shrouded with bushfire haze that formed a dirty yellow rampart against the world beyond. At times Perth really did feel like an island, a country unto itself. This brassy little outpost of digging and dealing tilted relentlessly at the future, but these days it lived on life support – desalinated seawater and ancient shrinking aquifers. Behind the veil of smoke lay the wheatbelt and the salt-ravaged badlands that only a century before had been a teeming woodland half the size of Poland.
Up on Doris’s verandah, however, there was no view, grand or troubling. Her place was much of a piece with its neighbours but for the telltale wind chimes and the signs of a garden run amok. He dragged the dinghy and trailer down the drive, swept leaves from it hurriedly, stuck the bungs in, then hitched it to the old Volvo. Somehow he still had the presence of mind to check the outboard fuel and when he saw the state of it he poured it guiltily against the wall behind the shed. He’d stop in at a servo along the highway.
Stalking back past the house with the petrol tank, he was startled by his mother standing in her
nightie on the deck. She held up a coffee mug and he nodded. While she was indoors he checked the motor, the oars, the mouldy lifejackets.
I thought I was going to have to use it as a fishpond, Doris said, handing him a mug.
I thought you were putting it out on the verge. And shouldn’t you be at the nine-thirty?
Late night, she said, blowing across her mug. I’ll go to the eleven o’clock. Uproar at Saint Whatsit’s, no doubt.
Everything alright?
Hope so, she said, without quite glancing his way. She looked a little frail without the armour of her fabrics and bangles. Her silver hair was loose, fanning in skeins at the whim of the breeze.
Keely said nothing, just sipped his coffee. He wanted to say something kind, conciliatory, but he was stranded. She seemed relieved when he finally passed the empty mug and shook the car keys.
* * *
Gemma looked surprised, even concerned, to see the boat in the street beneath the Mirador, but Kai seemed delighted. Keely drove them down to the riverside ramp and shoved the dinghy off its seized rollers. Neither the boy nor his grandmother had the first idea about boats so just getting them aboard was a mission. He had to wrangle the kid into a lifejacket and once she saw him in it, Gemma decided she needed one too. There were slips, tumbles, a shriek or two as he swept them out into the channel and steered upstream with the wind ahead and the tide behind them.
I thought this was a birdwatchin expedition! yelled Gemma, dashing the hair from her eyes, hunched awkwardly beneath the cumbersome roll of the jacket collar.
It is.
On the bloody river?
Exactly. I’ve got a point to prove.
You blokes, you’ve all got that, she said, bracing against the smacks and bumps.
It was funny, in its way, seeing her scowl and wince, clutching the child in fear, but after a short while he relented and eased off the throttle to slap along sedately. Kai stared at the tiller, the wake, the scum of rotten leaves at his feet. Was he anxious? Keely thought perhaps he could have launched somewhere closer to where he planned to take them. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that the jaunt upstream might be a trial. God, he thought, negotiating the slop from a passing ferry, don’t let me make a meal of this.
But by the time he had them round the bend and into the lee of the limestone bluffs of Blackwall Reach, the boy had lifted his head a little and Gemma managed a game smile. Keely pointed to the teenagers jumping from the cliff above them, yodelling as they fell. The water boiled where they speared in.
Keely motored over as a pale youth broke the surface with a hoot and gave Kai a thumbs up. The boy seemed at a loss to respond.
You want to steer? Keely asked.
Kai shook his head.
It’s twenty metres deep here, he said. At night you can hear fish down there, big mulloway, croaking in the dark.
The idea did not seem to appeal to the boy.
Is there really a bird? asked Kai.
We’re getting there, mate.
But is it true?
You’ll see.
You promise?
Hold onto your hat, said Keely, banking out across the channel to the next bay. It’d been months since he’d seen the ospreys he had in mind. Maybe he should have checked first to spare himself a disaster.
Christ, said Gemma. Look at those houses.
Keely grinned. He thought of Balzac’s line – behind every great fortune, a great crime. Where was Jehovah when you needed Him for a good old-fashioned punitive landslide? And, yea, swept were the wicked unto the darkest deeps.
He steered wide of waterskiers and wankers on jetskis, slowed down to take in the terraces and lawns, the swanky boathouses. Gemma turned in her seat, gazed up, wide-eyed, beginning to enjoy herself. He eased them past a chaotic and giggly regatta of little sailboats at Freshie, rounded the point into the next bay. Here picnickers sprawled on blankets beneath the peppermints, dragged kayaks across the obstacle course of fig roots at the bank. Keely didn’t cut the outboard until they were past all of it, deep into the slough where the shore was obscured by a confusion of native cypresses, melaleucas and gnarled gums. Above them a limestone ridge whose brows knitted, hatching everything before it in flickering shadow.
Is everything orright? Gemma asked.
Will be in a moment, he said. Are we looking? Do we have our eyes open?
The breeze wafted them by slabs of stone, blond tablets freshly pupped from the bluff. They lay in a monumental jumble at the water’s edge, misted with dancing insects. There were jellyfish all round the boat, big as pumpkins, and Keely breathed in the estuarine miasma of algae, cypress and invertebrate slime that reminded him of holidays, exam week, summers gone. He watched their faces. Gemma wore a look of heroic forbearance but the kid blinked miserably.
I’m no good at this, Kai said in little more than a whisper.
Keely wiggled his eyebrows in encouragement, but the kid didn’t appear to appreciate the suspense. He caught Gemma glaring at him, face like a spanked arse. Christ, he thought, how many promises had this kid seen come to nothing? He hadn’t thought of that. This better bloody work.
Lie back, he murmured, trying to reassure himself as much as the boy. Both of you. Just lie back and watch.
What for? asked Gemma. What’re we lying down in a boat for?
Just for the view, he said with a brightness that already felt thin. Up ahead, the ancient marri upon which all his hopes rested began to emerge from the shadows, more skeleton these days than living tree, a barkless grey column topped by contorted white limbs that towered out across undergrowth, rocks, shadow, water. He’d come here a lot with Harriet, then alone sometimes when he visited Doris. Back when he actually bothered. You could hike down the scree-slope from the road, but the view from the water beat everything. That tree, he thought. It stood before whitefellas even dreamt of this place. It was here when the river was teeming, when cook-fires and dances stitched the banks into coherent song, proper country. Just to see it was a mental correction, a recalibration.
The boat yawed, the tree hung right over them. And Keely realized he’d been seeing it for seconds already, seeing it without taking it in at all. Thank God. There it was on the outermost limb, the same colour as the bleached and weathered wood, motionless, watching them, plotting their drift, not yet deigning to stir. The bird of his married years, the stolen weekends, of even the long puzzled silences near the end.
Still there. What a bird.
But what was it seeing? Three bodies in a silver boat? Or just background, faunal wallpaper, nothing of the slightest interest?
The raptor unfurled its wings, propped, let out a scratchy cry. Beside him the boy gasped. His face suddenly open.
There!
Look at that, said Keely. I told you.
Will it get me?
Get you? No. You don’t look much like a fish to me.
It’s creepy-lookin, said Gemma.
Nah, said Keely. It’s beautiful.
And it was. A severe, stately bird, watchful, poised, tensing even now.
Osprey, said Kai.
The creature tilted its head, twisted slightly, then gathered itself. It rose, languid, powerful, to reach into the air.
Osprey, said the boy.
It climbed without effort, wheeled up past the supplicant fingers of clifftop trees and retreated to the shadows, leaving only a harsh cry to signal its presence.
Did we scare it? asked Gemma.
Nothing scares him, said Keely. He’s just seen something else, I’d say.
The boat drifted back into the noonday light. The boy blinked skyward. And then the chalky flash blew past them, hit the water in a weltering flare and hauled itself up again, climbing off at a loping tangent with something shining but doomed in its talons.
Keely refrained from commentary. The act itself was enough. The boy and his grandmother craned their necks, watching the sky, waiting for more.
By the time he’d taken the ot
hers home, returned to Doris’s to park the boat and flush the outboard, left the keys to the Volvo under the mat and caught the train back to Fremantle, it was past mid-afternoon. His exalted mood had decayed somewhat; he was ravenous and the sun had gotten to him, but for all that he felt better than he had in weeks. He showered, gulped a couple of beefy brufens, made a sandwich and sat in his armchair sipping water.
At dusk he was still there. Half the sandwich dry and curled in his lap and the pint-glass capsized on the carpet beside him. He brushed the bread away, glanced an uneasy moment at the new watermark and went out onto the balcony to clear his mind.
Dreams. Feverish sequences. Beyond him now; he didn’t care to recall.
In the mild evening breeze he caught a flash of movement at the edge of his vision. Kai. A few balconies down. Dressed only in shorts. Actually, truly there. He smiled but the kid seemed not to notice. Keely felt strangely self-conscious, anxious that something about his being out here wasn’t quite right. He was dressed, wasn’t he? Awake. And sober. What else could it be unnerving him but the queasy scraps of dreams? But this harried feeling, why wouldn’t it let go?
It was none of his business whether the kid was out there or not, but he wished Gemma wouldn’t let him do it; it wasn’t safe. And he hesitated, reluctant to move for fear of startling him. But Kai was facing his way. Such an odd, affectless gaze. It felt awkward, even creepy, to just stand there, not acknowledging him. Keely raised a hand. Kai lifted an arm from the rail, returned the wave shyly, and went inside.
Keely had promised himself a proper meal that night and he was cooking with the spoils of Thursday’s shopping spree in Coles when Faith rang. Once more she was in a crowded room. In the background there were stabs of noise – announcements, exhortations – as if she were at an airport or train station.
You didn’t call, she said mildly.
I meant to.
A man of grand intentions.
Where are you?
London.
Hell, that’s sudden.
It’s freezing. I’m waiting for the driver. Hey, I was thinking about that canoe we used to have. Was it really just the roof off an old car? Am I remembering that right? We used to push it out through the reeds, across the swamp. Am I imagining all this?
Faith, why’re you in London?
