Stillwater Creek

by Alison Booth

  After fastening her bra in front of the mirror, she smiled at her reflection. Bill didn’t know about these underclothes. He’d lost interest in her years ago. She’d been devastated by that neglect until she’d met Miss Neville. Now she was glad he left her alone. Now she felt revolted at the thought of the act of love with her husband. And revolted too by the sight of him, although everyone else seemed to think he was good-looking and good-natured. Everyone, that is, except for Miss Neville.

  Cherry turned from the mirror and picked up the pale blue dress from the chair. She watched Miss Neville’s face as she stepped into it and slowly did up the front buttons. Leaning over her lover, she kissed her tenderly on the mouth. ‘I’m the luckiest woman in the world to have met you,’ she said.

  ‘Oh shit, Cherry, don’t come over all weepy on me.’ All the same, Miss Neville looked pleased.

  Cherry fastened her shoes before giving Miss Neville another kiss. After retrieving a lipstick from her pocket, she repainted her mouth a bright red. Her nose would have to remain shiny. Next the usual routine: clattering down the stairs, peering out of the kitchen window to make sure there was no one in the yard next door, creeping out the door and through the gate leading to the narrow lane behind the houses. An excuse was ready if she met anyone, but so far no one had ever noticed, let alone asked what she was doing. If they did, she’d tell them how she was learning French. ‘Je veux parler Français,’ she would say. ‘Je veux parler Français.’

  Miss Neville had taught her the French word for every part of the body and had promised to teach her some verbs next. Cherry started to hum; she couldn’t remember knowing such happiness as this. If only she’d met Miss Neville ten years ago at sweet sixteen; if only she’d met her before being swept off her feet by Bill Bates.

  But when you came to think of it, she’d been extremely fortunate ever to get to know Miss Neville at all. They might have just continued passing one another in the town, nodding and smiling, for years. It was sheer luck that they’d both happened to be in Burford on that Sunday afternoon nearly three years ago. They’d met at the bus stop and cemented their friendship as the bus trundled along the winding road between Burford and Jingera. Just as they were descending the last hill into Jingera, Miss Neville had invited Cherry to afternoon tea. After that, there had been no looking back, although it had been some months before they’d become lovers. An unlikely friendship, Cherry always thought, between the barmaid and the teacher. And not one that Bill could approve of. He thought Miss Neville was too bossy, and that bossiness might be contagious, like chickenpox or measles. If he knew what she was really like he’d approve of her even less. So would everyone else in town. Corrupting the morals of our kids, they’d say. Just as they’d said all those years ago when she was at Burford Girls’ High School when Mr Ryan, the maths teacher at Burford Boys’, had got thrown out of his job and the town because he was a poofter. The humiliation if people found out about her and Miss Neville would be impossible to bear. Bill said she cared too much for appearances but it was all very well for him, he hadn’t been brought up with his dad beating his mum, and poor Mum trying to pretend everything was okay until one night Dad had just slammed the door behind him and never come back again. Though life was better after he’d gone, Cherry – conventional little girl that she was – pretended to the other kids that he’d gone out west shearing. Couldn’t bear anyone to know the family secrets. Thought they’d start to hate her, and so she’d developed her laughing self as a form of protection. If she smiled at people they seemed to respond by unburdening themselves. Smiling was a good defence. Being married to Bill was a good defence too.

  Now she slipped into the hotel by the back door and sauntered into the bar. A dozen or so men were drinking there. Bill scowled at her and glanced pointedly at the clock on the wall behind the counter. Again she was repulsed by his appearance: big body, thinning blond hair, ruddy face and thick neck. Funny how things change. She’d thought him so handsome when they first met. Everyone had told her how lucky she was and she’d believed them.

  After smiling sweetly at him, she pulled four schooners of beer for a man who seemed to be in no hurry to take them back to his mates. Then she moved around the tables picking up empty glasses. Pausing in front of a window, she peered out at the street. The late afternoon sunlight cast irregular slabs of shadow from the buildings opposite. The curtains of Miss Neville’s bedroom were now drawn and there was a lamp on in the sitting room downstairs, although more than that she could not see. Further down the hill, the woman with the purple hat and her child were leaving the post office.

  Bill came out from behind the bar and stood in the doorway overlooking the square. ‘There are the reffoes,’ he said loudly. ‘Been here for over a week now and hardly been out at all. The woman’s spent the whole time scrubbing out the house and playing the piano, Mrs Blunkett said, but I saw the kid hanging around outside the post office the other day.’

  All of the drinkers, even the most morose or loquacious, gave up what they were doing and flocked to the windows. Cherry seized the opportunity to dash into the hallway. She took a compact out of the drawer in the hallstand. In the bar the men were now commenting so loudly it was a wonder the reffoes didn’t hear.

  ‘Jeez, have a perv at that,’ said one. ‘Wouldn’t mind gettin’ stuck into ’er.’

  ‘Good looker, sport. Where’d ja say they were from?’

  ‘Didn’t. Just bloody reffoes from Sydney.’

  ‘Better than bloody Abos, eh?’

  ‘Yeah, the reffoes work and the coons don’t.’

  ‘What’re they doing down here? The season don’t start till November. Don’t get no holidaymakers from Sydney this time of year.’

  ‘Dunno. Why doncha ask? Satisfy your curiosity the bloody obvious way.’

  In the hallway Cherry finished powdering her face. Silly gossips, she thought as she slipped the compact back into the drawer; far worse than a bunch of women. For a moment more she stood listening as the conversation continued.

  ‘Poor little kid looks a bit lost.’

  ‘Sydney, you say they’re from?’

  ‘Yeah, but they’re reffoes from Europe. Husband dead. She’s a widow.’

  The men sobered up a bit at this. Probably thinking it could have been one of them or one of their sons, Cherry thought. Could have been their widow and daughter beached up in Jingera.

  Slipping out the side door onto the verandah, she found she was too late to meet the reffoes. They were walking on the other side of the road, heading down the hill towards the McIntyres’ cottage and not into the square as she’d hoped. Then the woman and the girl both turned at the same time and looked straight at Cherry, who smiled and waved. The woman hesitated before waving back. The girl had an engaging grin.

  She watched the pair walk down the hill and turn into the front gate of the McIntyres’ cottage, a shack rather than cottage, held together more by vines than nails. A bit like the place she’d grown up in, only that didn’t have the vines.

  The clock struck the quarter hour. Back in the bar, she collected empty glasses and wiped down the messier tabletops. Then, putting on a bright smile, she returned to the serving side of the counter to take more orders.

  Six feet underground were bones. Catholic bones, Protestant bones. But none of the other denominations. Ilona picked her way around the listing gravestones and the signs partitioning the faiths. The cemetery, on the top of the headland, was bound on the cliff side by a white-painted fence. Beyond that, on a narrow ribbon of land, bloomed blue-flowering shrubs of a type she’d never come across before. Standing here she could see in all directions. To the north lay the long yellow arc of the next beach, ending in another headland that looked not dissimilar to this. To the east the ocean swelled endlessly in. To the south stretched Jingera Beach, a sweep of sand rising into high sand dunes. Behind the dunes lay a wide strip of dense bush that separated the beach from the lagoon. Jingera was built in the wrong place, she thought.
It would surely have been more convenient for everyone if it was at the southern end of the beach with easier road access. It must have been located here for other reasons; someone had fallen in love with the view, or the fishing was perfect, or the river convenient. Although she knew by now that not everything could be explained by logic, by one event leading inexorably to the next.

  Seated on the top rail of the fence, she could see the school, where Zidra was at this moment, a clutch of houses and, beyond them, the roof of the hotel.

  A headland was a strange place to bury people, she felt, with a panorama that the dead would never see. Man is born astride a grave. Samuel Beckett had been Oleksii’s favourite playwright. There, she had thought of Oleksii again when she had promised herself she would not. Despite being in Jingera for several weeks, she had avoided the headland until today. She hadn’t wanted to be reminded of Oleksii. She looked again at the signs segregating parts of the graveyard. Years ago she had converted to Catholicism in a half-hearted sort of a way, for Oleksii’s sake, and now he was buried six feet under in the Catholic section of Rookwood Necropolis.

  Breathing deeply, she tried to distract herself from these thoughts by listing all the good things about Jingera. When she had finished, and the list was rather long, she began again. By now tears were obliterating the view; she pulled out a handkerchief and wiped them away.

  It was no longer possible to deny that she felt more lonely now than in those first few weeks after Oleksii’s death. A death that had been so sudden. How could she have guessed that what appeared to be a mild cold might turn into pneumonia? One day he’d staggered home from the factory at lunchtime, lurching so much that initially she’d wondered if he was drunk, although putting a hand to his burning skin soon disabused her of this. So high was his temperature that an egg might have been fried on his forehead. So delirious, too, that his incoherent ranting was impossible to interpret. At one point he’d even become violent, imagining she was some assailant from his soldiering days, and so she’d given up trying to put him to bed. Eventually she’d convinced him to lie on the sofa while she dashed out to find the doctor. By the time she returned he was only partially conscious and struggling to breathe. The doctor prescribed sulpha drugs – pink cubes that were supposed to be swallowed in batches of six – but Oleksii had been unable to keep them down. That whole night she’d lain awake beside him, sponging him when he became even hotter, and trying once more with the drugs.

  Early the next morning the doctor had visited again but it was too late. Afterwards he explained that asphyxiation had killed Oleksii. Pockets of pus around the lungs had made it impossible for him to breathe. That the delirium would have insulated him from any awareness of what was happening was at least some comfort to her. Why this illness had come on so quickly she did not understand. Most likely Oleksii had felt ill for days and had simply not bothered to tell her. His detachment had dated from soon after they arrived in Australia but it was something that he could not, or would not, talk about. Disappointment, she had guessed, that he could not get a job as a musician. Working in the biscuit factory was probably a bit like a prison sentence to him.

  She dried her eyes and looked out over Jingera township. She could just see her cottage, its roof a splash of rusty corrugated iron in the dense foliage that surrounded it. A sea hawk sailed into view. It wheeled around the headland, gliding on some updraft, and drifted north over the long crescent of beach towards the next headland.

  After a time Ilona retraced her steps through the cemetery and down the road past the school. Inside, children were singing to the accompaniment of a slightly out-of-tune piano. She sighed. So far there hadn’t been a single enquiry about the piano lessons. Her funds were going down; slowly, it was true, for living in Jingera was cheap, but she would have to get some pupils soon if she wasn’t to eat too much into her savings.

  Passing the hotel, she exchanged a greeting with sweet-faced Cherry Bates, who was washing the hotel verandah floor. She would have liked to stop and talk but didn’t feel able. In spite of what George Cadwallader had said about Cherry’s interest in the piano, she hadn’t approached Ilona about lessons. On through the town she walked, past her house, screened from the road by a dense hedge, and down the hill to the lagoon. There she turned along the track to the jetty.

  It wasn’t until almost reaching the end of the jetty that she noticed the man sitting on the steps leading down to the water. She stopped at once. Never had she seen a full-blooded Aborigine before and she couldn’t help staring. Never had she seen such black skin.

  He glanced up and smiled.

  Smiling back, she rested one hand on the splintered jetty railing. Dressed in ragged clothes, he continued to look her way although not directly at her. One hand held a fishing line and next to him was a bucket whose contents she could not see.

  ‘I am Mrs Talivaldis,’ she said eventually. Her words seemed to hover rather awkwardly in the air. ‘We have recently moved here from Homebush in Sydney. Before that we lived in England and before that in Latvia. We are refugees.’

  ‘Tommy Hunter,’ the man said. Although he didn’t seem disposed to add anything else, Ilona realised she would like to establish some sort of communication. Why, she didn’t understand; perhaps it was because she felt so lonely or because his silence seemed friendly.

  ‘What do you do, Tommy?’ This was too direct; she realised at once that it could be construed as impertinence.

  ‘Fish, and when I’m not fishin’ I pick beans.’

  ‘Where do you pick beans?’

  ‘Wherever they need pickin’. ’Ere, there and everywhere.’ The man shrugged.

  An itinerant bean picker. That was the sort of job Oleksii would have been doing if he were here with her; he would have been looking for a job as a peripatetic labourer.

  And perhaps she would be looking for work like that soon if she didn’t get any pupils. Leaning on the jetty railing, she looked across the water. In the middle of the lagoon was a white-painted timber post and on the top of this a pelican was balanced. Its beak was the colour of a fragile rose, the palest pink.

  She found she wanted to tell Tommy about Oleksii. The Aborigine was unlikely to spread what she had to say all round the town. ‘My husband died in Sydney,’ she said slowly. ‘He hated it there. He was a musician, a composer. He worked in a biscuit factory though.’ She hesitated and glanced at Tommy, but all she could see now was the back of his head. Dark wavy hair covered the collar of his shabby black jacket, which must once have been part of someone’s best suit.

  ‘No one cared much for Oleksii’s music, either in Sydney or in England,’ she said. ‘He was ahead of his time. And became increasingly unhappy with his work at the factory, and with the need to feed our daughter and me.’

  Tommy now pulled in a fish. Averting her eyes, she inspected the bushes on the other side of the water; she had heard them described as ti-tree. Behind that grew some stringy trees that she intended to identify one day with the tree book she’d seen in the library.

  ‘Good tucker,’ Tommy said. She understood that he meant the fish.

  ‘My husband couldn’t get work in an orchestra,’ she said, when Tommy had cast his re-baited line back into the water. ‘And he didn’t want to teach. He wanted to write music. So he went to work in the biscuit factory, but he wasn’t happy there and he wasn’t happy at home. He had become a very unhappy man. That found its way into his music, and it is a strange thing how so much unhappiness can make such good music.’ Perhaps one day in the future she would play his music again. But not yet, not for some time yet. The pelican was still balanced on top of the post. It looked as if it were contemplating something profound but it was probably waiting for one of Tommy’s rejected fishes.

  ‘Now I must go,’ she said at last. ‘I thank you for listening to me.’

  The man mumbled something in reply and it was only when she had walked the length of the jetty that she realised what he had said. She turned around but he was
not visible from the shore. To show that she had understood, she shouted his words back at him:

  ‘We are both refugees,’ she called. Then she saw, above the boards at the end of the jetty, a black hand waving a farewell.

  It was only later, when she was almost back at the cottage, that she wondered if Tommy might actually have been offering her a fish for tea. Fish for tea; refugee. It was all too easy to misunderstand and be misunderstood.

  Cherry Bates stood in the side entrance to the hotel and watched the children streaming down the hill. When she heard footsteps behind her, she didn’t need to turn to know they were Bill’s. He stood so close to her she could feel his breath on her hair. She stepped forward one pace.

  ‘Lovely little kiddies,’ he said and sighed.

  ‘Noisy little blighters.’ Cherry didn’t want to encourage any sentimentality. ‘I bet Miss Neville’s glad to see the last of them. Rather her than me any day, even though you work me like a navvy here.’ She laughed though. There were a few customers in the bar and she didn’t want them to think she wasn’t a good sort. Wouldn’t be good for business, and the good Lord knew they could do with more business. It might stop Bill griping on about all the expenses and maybe they could fix some of the rotting woodwork and get the wiring redone. Bill reckoned the wiring was fine but she wasn’t so sure. She’d always been a bit nervous about living in a weatherboard building, ever since she was a kid and the house two doors up had caught on fire, and the old lady who’d lived there burned to death. In her sleep, Cherry’s mum maintained; she hadn’t stubbed out a cigarette properly. So each night Cherry prowled around the hotel after ten o’clock closing, checking and rechecking that all the ashtrays were empty and that there were no cigarette butts smouldering anywhere. At least Bill didn’t smoke, thank God.