Cherry Beach

by Laura McPhee-Browne

  About the Book

  We arrived on a Tuesday, I can remember that. I can remember Hetty’s hand in mine as we moved slowly down the steps of the escalator, as if standing completely still would have been harder than moving.

  Hetty and Ness, best friends since childhood, have left suburban Melbourne for the first time to live abroad. Hetty is charming and captivating, the life of the party. Ness is a wallflower, hopelessly in love with her. In the student quarter of Toronto, the pair take a room in a share house full of self-assured creatives. Hetty disappears into barkeeping work and a whirlwind nightlife, while Ness drifts aimlessly.

  But when Ness finds Hope one day in the art gallery, an intense affair develops. There are new friends, too, and a job: at last her life starts to make some sense. And Hetty’s starts spectacularly to fall apart, in a mess of bad drugs and bad men.

  As winter freezes the lakeside city, the dark undercurrents of Hetty’s character—abusive relationships, a dangerous obsession with bodies of water—become ever stronger. Ness may lose the person she loves more than anyone else in the world.

  Beautifully written and intimate, Cherry Beach is a revelatory story of friendship and desire.

  For my grandparents, Helen and Max, and for my oldest friend, Isabel

  Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Not Much of Anything but Open Water

  Sâkahikan

  Lac

  Channel

  Oasis

  Wash

  Rip

  Dam

  Mouth

  Ria

  Cove

  Well

  Mere

  Wetland

  Tributary

  Creek

  Kettle

  Seep

  Sound

  Brackish

  Pool

  Meander

  Lake

  Sea

  Glacier

  Yarro-Yarro

  A Billabong Is a Dead River

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright page

  And indeed I remember believing

  As a child, I could walk on water—

  The next wave, the next wave—

  It was only a matter of balance.

  Gwen Harwood, ‘At Mornington’

  Our love and our love alone

  Keeps dowsing for water.

  Sinking the well of each other, digging together.

  Each one the other’s phantom limb in the sea.

  Marin Sorescu, ‘Fountains in the Sea’

  (translated by Seamus Heaney)

  Not Much of Anything but Open Water

  It is very cold, and the wind flays my cheeks as I walk down Cherry Street. I don’t know if I can like it down here. It’s industrial and lonely until you get to the beach car park and see the water, and there are hardly ever any other people to make you feel like you are still a part of something. Someone told me that the police used to take people down here after they picked them up so they could punish them with abandon, in peace. I can imagine that, that power in the dark, with only the noise of the water to drown the body blows.

  When I walked down to Cherry Beach in spring, I passed the Mini Blossom Park and saw the cherry blossoms. They were so happy—puffs of breath and grandmother hair. It’s early winter now, and I can see as I near the little park that the trees are naked and cold. The grandmother hair is in my head these days. It feels puffy and woolly and stuck, and I didn’t get to do what I planned to do today because I couldn’t push through the thick of it.

  The new tattoo on my back hurts. I wonder if it needs some cream and a bandage. I don’t remember getting it, but that’s not surprising. There are blanks, these days, between the light. I almost like the way I don’t seem to have to deal with the whole of anything anymore. I could see the shape of the wound in the mirror when I turned away, looking over my shoulder. My back is clean and bony. It will always be like this.

  I can hear the lapping of the water, wet and gentle against the sand, and can smell rocks and stones. Beyond that is the almost-moan you can hear if you listen closely to an ocean at night, from all the things that are happening beneath its surface. Move closer, says the voice that is always with me now: Move closer. You deserve it. Move closer.

  I want to spread out across the water and let my body become wavy and romantic. My hair will tendril and float like a long sea plant. It is alive and so is the water, but this city doesn’t feel alive like that anymore. I know the salt will refresh me; I have been needing refreshment for so long. Water washes away what people are thinking and all the wool and pulse in my head, even when I am just in the shower or beneath rain clouds without an umbrella. I’ll swim for a long time to really clean it all away. I don’t think it will be as cold in the sea as it is out here in the air.

  I have reached the car park. There is a high street lamp above me, pouring white light across the gravel. There are no cars, but plenty of tyre tracks and littered chip packets. I can see a sock and a pair of sandals someone has left to die alone. The sock is frozen. I pick it up and crunch it a little to feel something between my fingers—I like the delicate slices of ice that coat it. Someone wore this on their foot, once, not that long ago. I am wearing two pairs of socks: one blue burly pair and one white cotton pair with dirty soles. My feet are still cold.

  The sand is cool and wet when I pick some up to let it go. I imagine I am the sand and someone is picking me up and letting me go, scattering every grain of me below them. I pull off my coat and my boots. I walk towards the ocean; I dive.

  SKAHIKAN

  cree for lake

  We arrived on a Tuesday, I can remember that. I can remember Hetty’s hand in mine as we moved slowly down the steps of the escalator, as if standing completely still would have been harder than moving. It was cold even in the airport: the first time I realised how cold can seep through. I remember Hetty’s hand was cold too, and that she felt tired next to me. We’d been in the sky breathing fake air for longer than a normal day and night. Hetty’s long body couldn’t fall asleep in an aeroplane chair, and the only movie we could both agree to watch together—with our separate plastic headphones—was a French film with lots of boring silent bits and close-ups of skinny faces.

  It was a relief to stretch and stand, free and wide on the lino in the airport, and to feel like we were nearly where we had wanted to be for so long. I remember that the chewing gum in my mouth had lost all of its flavour, that my jaw hurt from moving up and down, but that I kept it in the corner of my mouth as the only familiar thing. I was standing on the edge of something, next to Hetty but a little bit alone, and it could have been a cliff or a diving board. The only difference was that I didn’t feel scared.

  That crackling, swirling feeling of being somewhere completely new was in me as we waited for our bags. We’d tied red ribbons to our luggage so that we would recognise it among the grey and khaki and black, and it came quickly. We took everything as an omen back then, Hetty and I, and told each other as we walked to the taxi bay that it was a sign—our bags had arrived first because we were meant to be there. Hetty had her long dark hair pulled back and her face was clean and bright, even though she was wilting. I hadn’t looked in the mirror since we’d left Melbourne—I shrugged off grooming as if it was a waste of effort, and didn’t try to make myself look better. My thick eyebrows, the cross-over of my front teeth, the woolly hair that sat unbrushed against my shoulders: these were my messages to the world that I didn’t care, that I wasn’t the kind of person who worried about what others thought of them. I can see now that this was just a different type of vanity.

  ‘It doesn’t feel real,’ Hetty said. We were waiting for a
taxi, breath coming out of our mouths in huffs. ‘It’s like we’re not actually here yet.’

  I knew what she meant. Dark took away the edge of a place, and it was after midnight. The airport was busy but no one was looking at us, and I couldn’t hear anyone talking above a low murmur. I had been looking forward to hearing the Canadian accent all around me, but I’d heard nothing. There wasn’t anything yet to compare ourselves to, to stand separate from.

  ‘Maybe we’re not. No one actually said, Welcome to Canada.’

  I crossed my eyes and poked out my tongue, and Hetty laughed and shivered in her coat, jumping up and down a little to warm herself. She was tall, Hetty, as I’ve said. I was medium, and Hetty was tall in the way that made strangers stop her on the street to see if she was wearing heels. She didn’t roll her eyes but preferred to smile and answer that no, no, she’d never played basketball. Didn’t like sport at all, really. Wasn’t good at it. Hetty was a peacemaker.

  Inside the taxi it was close and warm and the driver smiled big at us in his rear-view mirror. We told him where we needed to go—to the house of a couple we’d found on a couch-sharing site offering a room and two beds—and he was so enthusiastic the air was thick with it, along with the candied scent of his air freshener hanging from the mirror in the shape of a red delicious.

  ‘I’m so happy to be able to drive you,’ he told us. He was a large man, with rolled-up shirt sleeves, salmon-coloured skin and the air of a new grandfather. He had a whiff of white hair at the top of his head and the skin around it was shining, even in the dark. I thought back to men like this who drove taxis in Melbourne. They never seemed happy to be able to drive me; rather they knew they had to, that they needed to, in order to make it through another work day. That had always felt right to me. I didn’t know how to smile enough to make it okay that this man was being so kind.

  ‘I’ve been driving this cab for twenty-seven years,’ he told us, rolling out the words carefully, with a smile at the tip of each of them, as if he loved us, which he couldn’t have, and we were important, which we weren’t. ‘I try to make each passenger feel a little better as they get out than when they got in.’

  I decided to smile once more, then look out the window. I wanted to see the city—you could tell something about a place from the drive in to the guts of it from the airport. I didn’t want to miss anything. The driver’s enthusiasm made him seem malleable. I wondered if he had a wife, or a husband, and if they were bossy. Outside the cab, Toronto was rushing by: a hazy dark-green pan of tree leaves, verandahs and basement windows, almost hidden by the black air. I opened my eyes wider to try to see something.

  Hetty was leaning against the window, managing to look as though she was comfortable, despite the turning and bumping and braking. A swell of gladness popped in my heart as I looked at her, reminding myself that she had agreed to come, that she must really love me.

  The cab driver was humming, and as we slowed down along a narrow street that had come off a wider one I realised what the song was: ‘Killing Me Softly’. I wondered where he had heard it, where it had seeped into the pink of his brain. I wondered whether he knew the lyrics or just the tune. I tried not to hum along with him, above the gasp of the radio. I struggled with displays, of emotion or tenderness. I still do, though now I know how important they can be. Humans like to be shown. It has always been hard for me to take care of a stranger the way Hetty could.

  We slowed down to a stop outside a squat apartment building. The driver smiled so wide in the rear-view mirror that I had to smile back, and this time the smiling made me feel excited. I reminded myself that we were here, in another country—really far away. This was what I had been waiting for. We paid the driver, who refused a tip and wished us such luck that it felt like he had handed us a heart. Outside the air was breath and spit.

  LAC

  french for lake

  We were staying with Jo and John. Jo had hair dyed the colour of wet rust, and she maintained heavy eye contact. She looked at us like she wanted us to know she was there, from the moment we walked in with our bags, waving goodbye to our driver from the door as he drove away. She was thin, as though she didn’t have time for eating, and wore a cross studded with diamantes around her neck.

  ‘We’re so happy to have you stay with us!’ Her voice sang out above her partner’s as he helped us drag our bags into the living room, directing us to the best place to land them. ‘We’ve been so excited for you to arrive!’

  ‘Thanks so much for having us,’ Hetty replied, brightly.

  ‘Oh—your accent!’ Jo squealed. I reminded myself to talk as little as possible. Since I’d opened my mouth at the airport to say thank you to Passport Control, I’d been struck by how rural and peculiar the Australian accent sounded against the gentle wash of the Canadian. ‘It’s so amazing!’

  ‘Ha—thank you. It’s ridiculous.’ Hetty laughed and stretched her arms out in a way that told me she was relaxed.

  ‘Oh, no—it’s not ridiculous at all. No, no, no. I love it.’

  Jo eyed us from where she stood next to the couch. John had sat and made himself comfortable. He had small eyes and a thick nose, and creases around his mouth that made it look like he was smiling even when he probably wasn’t. Big hands tucked neatly below a big belly, a shy shrub of hair planted at the neck of his shirt. I imagined Jo and John in bed together: stroking each other’s bodies, so different from their own. They were alien bodies when you looked at them together. I could already imagine that John kept Jo from spinning out into the night. She was eager to show us something—that she loved her life, that she was a happy person, that we were so welcome. She was humming with the effort of it. I wondered if Hetty could hear it too.

  Jo showed us where we would sleep—a large room with curtains already drawn across the window. She stood at the door and asked us questions as we made ourselves comfortable. I wished so much that she would leave, so I could pull back the fabric and look out at Toronto.

  ‘It must be so different here to where you’re from, eh?’ Jo asked, leaning against the doorframe, eyes sad—as if we had come from a strange and distant planet and could only stay on Earth a short while.

  ‘Different to Australia?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Australia.’ She said it in a way I had never heard before—sounding out each syllable like she was learning a new concept, a new word she didn’t yet understand.

  I looked over at Hetty and saw her smile at Jo and then at the carpet. I was tired, and Jo itched at me with her energy. I wanted to lie with Hetty and stare at the Canadian ceiling, to talk about our hosts and see if she felt as loose as I did.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it then, ladies!’ Jo said, her teeth smiling bigger than her mouth. She had started to massage her neck with one small, veined hand, and I remembered my own body as I watched her. I saw that Hetty was rubbing at her neck too.

  As soon as Jo had shut the door behind her Hetty looked at me with wide eyes and I snuffled into my jumper sleeve.

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘So intense!’ Hetty said.

  ‘Is it just me or did she not know that Australia exists?’

  Hetty laughed and fell back onto the mattress. She told me she was too lazy to get undressed and I threw a pillow at her. Lying down on my back I felt the cotton beneath me.

  ‘I really thought we’d actually be sleeping on a couch,’ I said.

  ‘I’m going to keep that to myself and enjoy the bed,’ Hetty replied, yawning at the end. I heard her shuffle off her shoes, their plonk against the carpet, as I yawned back.

  I lay on my temporary bed and felt myself fall into something just above dreams. I tried to think back to whether I had told Jo where we were from, whether she had known before we arrived that we were Australian. For some reason her lack of clarity made getting my footing here seem further away. I couldn’t recall our email exchange, and then I was sleeping.

  We woke early the next morning after a stop-start sleep and crept aroun
d the kitchen trying to find a way to make coffee, until Jo came down in a short red dressing gown and fluffy slippers.

  ‘I’m an early riser,’ she told us, reaching up for something in the pantry and showing us her undies. ‘John sleeps as much as he possibly can, like a big old hibernating bear, even in summer!’

  Jo laughed at this and I heard that when she laughed it sounded as if she was choking slightly and that it went on and on. So nervous was her laugh, and her presence in the kitchen, that I realised we would have to find somewhere to live pretty quickly, or I wouldn’t be able to keep laughing when she laughed and would end up offending her.

  ‘We’re going to go for a walk. Might see you later?’ I said, looking at Hetty as I did to try to make sure she didn’t ask Jo along.

  Jo’s eyebrows knitted briefly, then she smiled, wishing us well, and suggesting we move towards one of the other neighbourhoods so we could start to understand Toronto. I had a map I’d printed back in Melbourne in my pocket, and I patted my jeans and pulled Hetty out the door.

  On the street it was brisk and bright, and there were people walking by the apartment building in parkas with fluffy hoods. I didn’t have a winter coat and was wearing five layers of jumper. Hetty had a duffel that she’d put on over a skivvy.

  We stood and looked at each other. Hetty was smiling and I felt something winged soar up towards my throat.

  ‘Where do you want to go first?’ I asked her.

  She moved to my side and looped her arm through the circle of mine.

  ‘Wherever you think we should go, Nessy.’

  I could see from my map that the area we were staying in was called the Financial District. Above us and to the left was a very tall tower with a bulb and a spike at its top. The map told me this was the CN Tower, from which you could see everything, and eat a tourist dinner. The people walking by in their parkas were carrying briefcases or shiny handbags, and had heels or dress pants on under the puff, but the buildings weren’t as high as they could have been. It looked as if we could walk away from here and quickly be in other parts of the city.