by Joan London
If he told her at the station that he’d changed his mind, would there still be time for her to catch the train back home, go to the top drawer, screw up the note, put her jewellery on again?
By now he was nearly half an hour late. Another minute and Toni would have left. He had pushed fate to teeter for a moment, to see which side it would fall. A minute could decide his future, could even mean life or death. By the time he reached Armadale his blood was thumping in his throat and his eyes had blurred. When he caught sight of her standing just inside the station entrance he was flooded with relief as if she had become his only friend in the world. He realised suddenly how tired he was of himself, how he could no longer face going on alone.
For the first half of the trip they did not speak. The VW’s heater didn’t work, the windscreen misted up and Toni sat shivering. She still smelt of perfume, of the city. The car had no radio or tape deck and shuddered violently if pushed past ninety ks. They sat stiff and cold and silent, checking behind them every few minutes. Without ceremony they had become a couple, making their bid for survival.
They turned inland, towards the wheat-belt, and the rain stopped. According to their plan, to put Cy off their scent, they didn’t drive directly to ‘Karma’, but headed for a bay on a remote part of the south coast, to a beach house where Toni had once stayed as a child. It was owned by an old couple from her parents’ church, the Richardsons, who couldn’t often make the long trip there. At this time of the year the house would be empty and they could stay for a night or two. Toni said she knew the way. She had never forgotten that holiday.
It was understood between them, though neither said this, that before they started their great communal venture they needed some time alone. Were they committing themselves to it separately or as a couple? When he glanced at Toni she looked serious and self-contained. They knew nothing of each other in the everyday. Yet this commitment was, for the time being, final.
They stopped in Warton for petrol and for Toni to phone her mother. She was directed to a coin phone in the bar of the Federal Hotel. Nig answered, to her relief. She told him she was driving north to Broome for a long holiday and would be in touch when she came back. ‘Right you are, lovey,’ said Nig cheerfully. No questions. No hurt feelings. Year after year, in this way, they rang each other on birthdays. He was probably running late for bowls.
So much for Daddy’s broken heart, she said as she sat on a bar-stool next to Jacob, but brighter nevertheless. They each ordered a pie and a beer.
The Federal was empty, apart from the barman, a surprisingly exotic man, slim and tanned with a head as bald and shining as Yul Brynner’s and a manner so cool and ironic that he didn’t even take a second look at Toni. It was a great brown dusty room, once grand, now cluttered with pool tables and coin-machines, reeking of cigarettes. They saw their faces in the tarnished mirror over the bar, small and smudged like newsprint. Did it stick out all over them, they wondered, that they were on the run? The beer went to their heads and for a moment they felt daring and glamorous like heroes in a movie, safe because heroes always won through in the end. Even the enigmatic barman, now reading the paper, seemed part of this, their great adventure.
They had to stop for a train that was crawling across the main road towards the silos with an interminable clanging of bells. A good scene for an outback thriller, he thought. The barrier lifted and they drove off without a backward glance. There was no hint or omen that it would be here, in this sleepy town, that their real future lay. (By that time the bald barman had gone, leaving no trace in the town’s memory.)
As soon as they left Warton the land grew flatter, the sky larger. On one side was a low silver lake, its shoreline lapping around the ankles of dead trees. A road sign announced: You are now entering the Great Southern.
‘The Great Southern what?’ Jacob asked. Toni didn’t answer and he saw she was asleep.
For a while he was alone with nothing for company but the sad pop-pop of insects hitting the windscreen and the disturbing little rattles and missed breaths of the car. The horizon rose up out of the flatness. They passed through a grove of trees he’d never seen before, the slender white trunks splashed with orange as if stained by gravel dust, their branches tapering into broccoli clusters of waving, gleaming leaves.
He became aware of a shadow lurking in the corner of his eye, a tracery in smoke-coloured pencil along the right-hand horizon, that as the miles passed, like a theme in music, grew ever more present, until there it was in full symphonic impact, a range of mountains towering above the plains. He slowed down to study the humps and turrets of its outline, sharp as a paper cut-out against the sky.
‘The Stirlings,’ Toni said, awake.
‘I didn’t know.’ He meant he had no idea about the landscape of his own country. He’d trekked mountains in Nepal, crossed deserts in Afghanistan, jungles in Sri Lanka, but he’d never been past the hills around his home town. There’d been no bush holidays in his childhood, no picnics, no relatives on farms. Rural Australia never entered his consciousness. He wondered what the Aboriginals called this range.
And now it was as if they’d entered another zone, an airy land of space and sky, with silver lakes and long-grassed roadsides and plains in great clean sweeps shadowed by clouds as big as airships. Sheep were grazing right up to the foot of the mountains and a trembling line of birds hovered over the vast horizon, stretching and shrinking like the tail of a kite.
Something lifted in his spirits. It felt so far away. There was no other car on the road. The few houses they saw were small and lonely, fibro bungalows with a shed and water tank. One sat with its back turned, its tiny verandah facing the mountains. What would it be like growing up here, he thought, in this magical, Tolkienesque land?
There was a flock of parrots on the road ahead. Toni reached over to sound the horn and just in time they rose in a green cloud. But a wedgetail eagle, busy with something brown and fluffy on the tarmac, stared them down with eyes so vengeful that Jacob wound his window up and took a wide berth around it. The sun was sinking. Light speared under the clouds, and the roadside scrub glowed emerald.
‘We’ve got to be on the lookout now.’
‘Why?’
‘Kangaroos.’ She was an old hand compared to him.
They took a turnoff onto a gravel road. The VW began a valiant course of bumping and bucking. If it can just make it to the house, he prayed, in dread of having to expose his total lack of mechanical competence to this unknown woman. There were no houses anymore, no help if they broke down. Just acres of shining bush as far as the eye could see, the land as once it would have been. The mountains loomed huge, in the shape of a resting lion. They raced through bush-covered cuttings, ripe for ambush.
And then the road rose up, there was a lightness on the horizon, a flash of white desert hills far in the distance, the dunes of the coast. It was dusk now, the sky was a deep religious blue. They stopped to pee, leaving the doors open, the engine running for fear it wouldn’t start again. He stood at the front of the car, Toni crouched at the back. He remembered hippie girls on his travels squatting in the dust beside him, hitching up their long skirts.
In the last light they bumped up a white track to the beach house. It stood remote, a dark shape on a headland overlooking unseen water. They stepped out into the great hollow murmur of the sea. A fumbling of matches in the wind, Toni crouched under the water tank, emerging triumphant. The spare key was still there on a stump, as it had been all those years ago.
Nature had found protection in this empty house from the storms of winter. Like a warning to keep out, a spider web fell onto Toni’s face as soon as she opened the door, so that she stood gasping and swiping at sticky threads in her hair. Inside was pitch black, with the stale reek of mice. They shuffled in, feeling their way. They hadn’t thought to bring a torch, and now as they stood in the kitchen, they realised they’d neglected the matter of food. The deep chill in the place seemed to be lying in wait for them
. They struck matches and found candles on the kitchen bench. The light flickered over armchairs covered in sheets, drawn curtains, a Tilley lamp on a table, a kerosene fridge with its door ajar. They felt a primitive need for fire, to keep the devils out. There was a basket of kindling and newspapers beside the potbelly stove. They achieved a small blaze for half an hour. There was a woodpile at the back of the house, Toni said, but – her voice trailed – snakes could be hibernating there.
The house creaked in the wind, windows rattled, creatures scrabbled in the roof-beams. A bleak loneliness took them over so that they couldn’t speak. What else did fate have up its sleeve for them? They knew too little of each other to offer comfort. They took a swig each from an old bottle of sherry and ate some stale digestive biscuits sealed in a tin in the mouse-riddled cupboards.
Beneath the green chenille cover of the Richardsons’ bed, mice had made a nest in the hollow of the mattress. Toni screamed, Jacob quickly pulled the cover up again over the frenzy of scattered kapok. There remained the bunk-beds in the loft, left over from the young Richardsons’ childhood. Zipped up to the chin in Jacob’s sleeping bags, on separate narrow berths, they blew out the candle and hastened to fall asleep.
The town was ten kilometres away, along a gravel track that wound around the escarpment, past the bluffs and bays, the heave and sparkle of the Southern Ocean, the miles of white beaches where nobody went. It was no more than a handful of buildings scattered around an inlet, some modest houses, a fishermen’s co-op, a general store with petrol pump. A caravan park overlooked the ocean, empty until summer. Surely Cy Fisher’s long arm didn’t extend this far. They bought what provisions were available, eggs and bacon, Weetbix, milk, chocolate, tins of baked beans. The newspapers were five days old. They fell on the chocolate as soon as they sat in the car.
The ocean was the dominating presence, the reason for everything here. From the first morning when he pulled back the living room curtains to the shock of it, the great turquoise bay spreading out below him, he was conscious of it, its moods and colours changing hour by hour. Across the water was a long headland that led out to the open sea. Beyond was the Antarctic. They used Doug Richardson’s binoculars to see the headland’s yellow cliffs lashed by cruel waves.
The Richardsons had built the house themselves out of concrete blocks. Outside it looked rough, rustic, amateur: inside it had all the trimmings of genteel housekeeping, old floral armchairs, crocheted runners, vases of everlastings, little machine-woven rugs strewn over the floors. Everything spoke of the old couple’s rigour and industriousness. Polite instructions were written on a kitchen pad in an upright spidery script. Note to Visitors! Firewood at back of house. Please replenish! Biscuit tins with pictures of Highland dancers were labelled First Aid and Sewing Kit.
The bookshelves were a time warp, bestsellers from past generations, A Town Like Alice, East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, a whole series of cowboy tales in paper covers.
Nothing at all had changed, Toni said. She went from object to object with cries of recognition, as if she were still twelve years old.
On the bookshelves was a snap of the Richardsons, Doug and Rosemary in overalls, huge and craggy-faced as the Whitlams, standing over the foundations of this house brandishing their trowels. Good Christian people, Toni said, pillars of their church, with a grown-up family who’d all done well in life. When she was a kid she was rather frightened of them. But a few years ago Rosemary came walking towards her on St George’s Terrace and, unlike others from her mother’s circle, didn’t purse her lips, or toss her head and look away, but greeted Toni warmly and asked her how she was and seemed genuinely pleased when Toni said that she was well. The Richardsons had always stood apart. They weren’t interested in social life, but were loners who did everything together. They loved driving off to this bay at the bottom of the world.
One summer Beryl must have confided in Rosemary that they couldn’t afford a holiday. Beryl would have been in one of her states. She must have trusted Rosemary a great deal to speak like this, without fear of losing face. Rosemary offered them the house.
Here, Toni explained, for a short time, the first and only time she could remember, her family was happy. Nig sat smoking and drinking beer, reading cowboy stories one after the other. He teased his women all the time about sharks and mice and snakes. Beryl didn’t wear lipstick or set her hair, but slapped around in rubber thongs, bare-legged, showing her veins. At night they played Cheat in the light of the lamp, yelling and laughing and throwing down cards. They ate grapes on the verandah and spat their pips out into the bush. Something had melted between them all. Even Karen told her a disgusting joke from the upper bunk, and they lay chortling on their lumpy mattresses. They fell asleep listening to the sound of the waves. She had never felt so safe.
On the drive back, Beryl snapped at Nig and then, miles further on, apologised. Nig went silent. They all froze up again.
She often dreamt about this place, Toni said. She lost her reserve when she spoke of it, became warm and intense. He wanted to touch her.
They passed a third night separate in their sleeping bags, even though he’d poured them each a large glass of the Richardsons’ sherry and suggested a game of Cheat, when he hated card games. He lay awake for ten minutes in a drunken rage. The wind whistled around the house and the sea pounded discouragingly.
The issue was palpable between them. It was a stalemate, a standoff. Their voices creaked in their throats, they could no longer talk naturally to one another. They were no closer than they had been eating pies in one of her roadhouses. If anything, they were growing further apart. What did he really know about her? She was so silent. What was he to her, some sort of sexless knight errant? Had he outgrown his use now?
Don’t think I will automatically sleep with you, her silence seemed to say.
What makes you think I want to? he silently answered. Like all beautiful women, however disingenuous, at heart, he detected, she was vain.
They went for walks alone and came back hours later, their faces freshened and hopeful from the air. All day they went in and out, separately. Outside, stepping off the verandah, all was wild, ramshackle, vivid in the light. The dizzying play of sun and wind was like childhood.
Everything seemed to be in a perpetual state of motion. All along the limestone track to the bay pods snapped, crows called, the wind rustled in the peppermint trees. The sun glinted on the shot-silk surface of the sea as it shifted in invisible currents. The sky came right down into the bush, filled in all the gaps, and rose up, a wall of royal blue above the line of the olive green escarpment.
Clouds passed overhead as he stood on the beach, their shadows racing towards him, dimming everything for a moment and then releasing him into light. The sand squeaked under his feet, so white he was snowblind. Only he seemed to be in stasis.
Sometimes he struck off along weedy tracks where nobody went. Myriad birds chattered amongst the trees, like the occupants of a thousand miniature tenements. If he could turn the sound up he would be deafened. He sat on a fallen log. Dense bush crowded in on him. He felt watched by creatures he would never see.
He was a stranger here, a stranger to nature, and yet it seemed to accept him. He tried to listen to the voice of the wind as it ran across the trees, each gust a variation of a theme. What did it say? Something he could never decipher.
That evening the little niggle of rage started up again as he stalked home along the track. He was going to speak. He was going to have it out with her. One more night and they would drift past each other forever. All they had between them was a dream.
Toni was hanging out her towel on the line between two verandah poles. The bay lay before her at its loveliest, all pastel shimmer, the coastguard lights twinkling like diamonds. The air was luminescent gray. A giant yellow rim was rising up behind the escarpment.
Her long hair was wet and she was barefoot, in his sarong. She looked like a hippie or a gypsy, but in fact, he reflected bitterly,
she was anything but.
He walked straight up to her.
‘It’s OK, Jacob,’ she said. ‘It really is.’
They sat down on the plastic chairs overlooking the ocean. He folded his hands on the rickety table.
‘You have lovely hands,’ she said, as if this was a matter of record.
One thing he’d learnt about women, they always knew who they did or didn’t want to touch them.
Darkness was flowing in and at that moment they heard the hum of a motor. A pair of headlights came swerving up the track. They rushed into the house, locked the door, closed the curtains and spied through the gaps. The car wavered to a halt at the water tank, but left its headlights shining on the house. Luckily the VW was parked amongst the peppermint trees out the back.
‘Dear?’ they heard a woman’s voice calling in the stillness. ‘Did we leave our towels out all this time?’ In the car light they saw a big woman in a headscarf like the Queen’s, standing at the driver’s side, looking towards the house. Stiffly, a little stooped, she made her way around the car to the passenger’s door. Inch by inch, a little old man emerged, and stood shaking, bent and helpless, gripping onto his wife. Toni gasped. ‘Something terrible’s happened to Doug.’
She turned to Jacob. ‘I can’t face them,’ she whispered.
‘It’ll take them a while to get to the door,’ he said, watching. Now Rosemary was propping Doug’s back against the car as he fumbled with his fly. The poor old guy must have been at bursting point. Rosemary bent down to help him.
They rushed around collecting their possessions. They had so little that there was even time to sweep the crumbs off the bench and shove their cups and plates back into the cupboard. He tipped apples out of a bowl into a sleeping bag, Toni threw the dust sheets back over the chairs. Just as they were letting themselves out onto the verandah, they heard the feeble scrabble of the key in the front door. Stooped over their bundles, they ran around the other side of the house.
