Stillwater Creek

by Alison Booth

  The boat puttered past the Cadwallader boathouse. The doors were firmly shut and a new and very large padlock held them together. Maybe the boys had told Mr Cadwallader that she and Lorna had been hanging around the boathouse. She turned around to check on the others. Mr Bates was staring straight ahead. Andy and Jim were sitting side-by-side on the middle seat. Andy was leaning over the side of the boat and trailing his hand in the water while Jim was staring into the distance with that faraway look he got sometimes. ‘That boy is a dreamer,’ Mama had said of him. ‘And practical at the same time, but I do not think he will follow in his father’s footsteps. A butcher he will not become.’ Zidra rolled the last sentence around in her mouth. She would love to have spat it out in Mama’s voice but, without Lorna here, there was no one she trusted enough to tell. The only person who was allowed to laugh with her at Mama was Lorna.

  ‘Would you like to steer for a bit, Zidra?’ Mr Bates called out. She clambered down the length of the boat and sat next to him. ‘Put your hand on the tiller like this.’ Resting his hand on top of hers, he showed her how to pull the tiller to the left or the right, so that the rudder moved and changed the flow of the water. It was easy to do. Although she hoped Mr Bates would move his hand from hers, he didn’t. His skin felt calloused and his palm slightly sweaty. Glancing down she saw, between the freckles, golden hairs covering the top of his hand and running right down to the first joint of each finger. Hurriedly she looked at the river lying ahead. Eventually she said, ‘I’ve got the hang of it now. Can I do it on my own?’ Laughing, he moved his hand away.

  After a few minutes, when Zidra had negotiated the next bend of the river, Mr Bates whispered to her, ‘You haven’t told anyone our little secret, have you? You taking the boat out when you shouldn’t have.’

  ‘No,’ she said, her voice quavering. She coughed, so Mr Bates would think it was hay fever rather than nerves, and wished he hadn’t raised this, especially with the two boys in the boat. They’d agreed it was to be their secret and here he was whispering about it with Jim and Andy only a few feet away. But she added, ‘Did you see the boathouse is padlocked now?’

  ‘Can’t say I did. It’s a good thing if it’s going to stop certain people from taking the dinghy out and nearly drowning themselves, but.’ He chuckled a bit at this, but not loudly enough to be heard by the boys over the puttering of the motor.

  ‘Maybe Mr Cadwallader saw us. Or Jim and Andy told him.’

  ‘Probably just coincidence. They didn’t see anything and I didn’t tell anyone. It’s just a secret between you and me.’

  ‘You and me and Lorna.’

  Just then Jim turned around. ‘Can I have a go now please, Mr Bates?’

  After Mr Bates agreed, Zidra changed places with Jim. Watching the dark green water slip slowly past, she started to feel hungry. Perhaps they could have some of Mr Bates’ cake soon.

  Andy must have been thinking along the same lines. He said, ‘Where are we going to have lunch?’

  ‘There’s a nice little beach further upriver,’ Mr Bates said. ‘I thought we could stop there and have our lunch on dry land, and maybe have a bit of a swim after our lunch has gone down.’

  ‘Mama says you should wait at least an hour after eating before you swim. Otherwise you get cramps.’

  ‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ said Mr Bates. ‘We must do as your good Mama says.’

  Jim made a sort of snorting noise. Zidra looked at him closely to see if he was making fun of her but he was staring over her head at the river.

  Ilona, sitting in the old cane chair on the side verandah of her cottage, heard a squawking and looked up from the book she was reading. Half-a-dozen grey and pink cockatoos flew over the backyard and swooped around the eucalyptus tree before joining a larger flock heading south along the river. Flying low, they soon vanished, hidden by the fringe of dense forest. By now the birds would be flying over Zidra, and she too would be watching them.

  Ilona’s watch showed one o’clock. Nearly four and a half hours since the boating trip had begun, and only ten minutes since she had last checked the time. Perhaps her watch had stopped but it was still ticking when she held it up to her ear. It was almost impossible to concentrate. It was not that the book she was reading was dull, but more that she was distracted by other thoughts. The heat and the folly of allowing Zidra out for so long, and whether or not she had given Zidra a big enough bottle of cordial to drink.

  Putting the book on the verandah floor, she went inside and turned on the radio. Too late for the one o’clock news but just in time for the local weather forecast. A fine day. Temperature expected to reach ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit. The bushfire danger level was high and a total fire ban was in force right across the state.

  At least Zidra would be safe from fire in a boat. Water water everywhere. No fire danger there.

  Hoping to find some music, Ilona twirled the dial of the radio. A church service was being broadcast from somewhere in Sydney. The singing was appalling, far too slow. Although the organist was playing at the right tempo and the choir following the organ, the congregation had a mind of its own and en masse was lagging behind.

  She retrieved her book, but knew she would not be able to concentrate on it. A niggling little anxiety gnawed away inside her. Even the beauty of the lagoon, coruscating in the sunlight, could not distract her. It was not really the heat or the fire danger that was worrying her. It was Zidra’s sadness, which seemed to date from when Lorna had left, and she didn’t know what to do about it.

  Last night, when Zidra had slipped into her bed and talked about communicating with Lorna, Ilona had remembered how she used to feel that she and Oleksii communicated by telepathy when they were apart. Just as Zidra claimed she did with Lorna. Her own communication with Oleksii had been nothing concrete, of course; just a sudden deep feeling of warmth and understanding. A sudden intuition that Oleksii was thinking of her with affection, with love. He too had claimed he felt it, that there were times when he had felt that she was transferring her thoughts to him.

  But that was a long time ago. That was years ago now.

  A fly landed on her nose and she brushed it away impatiently. She should face it; her marriage to Oleksii had ended long before his death. One had to be realistic and confront the truth. One should not pull the wool over one’s eyes.

  Sighing, Ilona picked up her book again, and the sheet of paper and pencil that she always kept to hand when she was reading English. There were so many words whose meaning she did not yet understand and she refused to skip over any of them. She gathered them in sets of five nowadays, although to begin with it was in sets of three, and then consulted the dictionary. Today she had deviated from that practice to look up one single word. Sunstroke: collapse or prostration, with or without fever, caused by exposure to excessive heat of the sun.

  Again she hoped she had not been unwise in allowing Zidra to spend all day out of doors. If anything happened to her daughter, she didn’t know what she would do.

  Jim saw the cockatoos screeching over the strip of bush lying between the lagoon and the ocean. Their noise drowned out the conversation of the others as they flew closer. Before heading in the direction of Burford, they traced out a wide semicircle overhead – a mass of pink and grey and white.

  ‘Never seen galahs this close to the sea before,’ Mr Bates remarked. ‘Must be the dry weather driving them east.’ The four of them were sitting, in the shade cast by some she-oaks, on a tartan rug that Mr Bates had spread out on the grass. Andy and Zidra were still munching apples; they were such slow eaters. Below their picnic spot lay a narrow strip of white sand and beyond that the boat lay anchored several yards from the shore. ‘Those birds are almost as noisy as the schoolyard at lunchtime,’ added Mr Bates. ‘We can always tell when school’s out by the din.’

  ‘That’s what Mum says about the pub,’ said Andy, who was getting a bit overexcited. ‘You can always tell when it’s closing time by the racket.’

&n
bsp; Laughing, Mr Bates stretched himself out full-length on one end of the rug with a hat over his eyes. ‘Reckon I’ll have a nap for a few minutes,’ he said. ‘All this sunshine makes an old cove like me pretty tired.’

  Jim was beginning to get a headache and, much as he disliked being close to Mr Bates, decided to stretch out on the other end of the rug. That way he’d kill two birds with the one stone: keep an eye on old Batesy and maybe get rid of the headache at the same time. Zidra and Andy scrambled down onto the beach and started to play in the sand, constructing a castle with a moat around it.

  The sunlight, glittering through the leaves above, made a dancing red pattern on Jim’s closed eyelids and he sat up again. Mr Bates appeared to be asleep and the moat the others were constructing was becoming larger. Taking the tea towel in which the fruit had been wrapped, he folded it into a little rectangle, cool and slightly damp. With the folded towel covering his eyes, he lay flat on his back and listened to the soothing sound of the breeze whispering through the she-oaks and the lapping of the river water against the little beach. And the faint murmuring of Andy and Zidra as they endlessly talked.

  When he awoke, he was alone in the glade. Thinking for a brief moment he’d been left behind, he sat up too suddenly and, through swimming eyes, saw that the picnic things were still scattered on the rug and the boat was anchored just a few yards off the beach. The sun had moved over though; the trees cast longer shadows across the grass and the beach.

  He stood up, and at once felt even dizzier. The trees and the sky twisted around and he nearly fell over. Grabbing hold of the gnarled trunk of a she-oak, he waited until the surroundings stopped shifting before shouting, ‘Andy! Zidra! Andy! Zidra! Mr Bates!’ There was no response. His heart was racing so fast he could feel blood drumming in his ears. What a fool he’d been, he should never have fallen asleep when charged with looking after Andy and Zidra, never. Wherever they were now, he had to catch up with them and fast.

  There was a narrow, rather overgrown path at each end of the glade. Quickly pulling on socks and sandshoes, he took the southerly direction, upriver away from Jingera. Occasionally stumbling, he ran along the path, which became even more overgrown the further south he got. Now he started to wonder if it was a path at all, rather than a slight bending back of the long grasses and low bushes that might have been made by the passage of animals, kangaroos perhaps. Slowing to a walk, he fought past the increasingly dense bush. The river he made sure always to keep in sight; it wouldn’t do to end up getting lost himself. Just as the point when turning back seemed the only option, he thought he could hear distant voices. Rounding a thicket of low-growing wattle, he saw ahead, in a clearing by the water not five yards away, two bodies lying on the ground.

  He gulped and stood still, and his heart seemed to stop beating. Then the bodies moved. The bodies of a man and a woman. On a tartan rug that was not dissimilar to Mr Bates’, they lay entwined and red-faced, and staring at him in surprise. He didn’t know them though; they must have come downriver from Burford. It was the kissing rather than embarrassment that brought such a rosy glow to their faces and he felt himself blushing on their behalf.

  ‘Have you seen anyone?’ he asked, staring resolutely towards the river, where a small motorboat was moored. Out of the corner of his eye he observed the woman pulling down her dress and the man sitting up awkwardly.

  ‘No, can’t say we have,’ the man said. ‘Apart from you, that is. Are there many more of you wandering around?’

  ‘Yes. A man and two kids. Have you seen them?’

  ‘We’ve been here an hour or two, and we haven’t seen a soul.’

  ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ Jim muttered, feeling even more awkward. ‘They must have taken the other path.’ He turned and started walking back the way he had come.

  Once out of sight, he started running again, hammering along through the undergrowth. His headache was returning, a relentless thump-thumping in his temples. High in the tallest trees, a group of magpies carolled, their clear wailing calls distinct against the thrumming of the cicadas.

  There was no one in the glade, but the picnic things were still there and the launch still at anchor. He took the other path, north towards Jingera, along the river edge. Faster and faster he ran, the pounding of his feet in time with the banging in his head. Although beginning to feel slightly dizzy again, he went on, over the unyielding earth, the vegetation becoming dryer as he moved into the sclerophyll forest. Tripping over a rock, he fell hard onto the ground, grazing a knee. It began to bleed but he barely noticed in his haste to carry on. After several hundred more yards, the path opened into another small glade next to the river.

  And there were Zidra and Mr Bates, sitting side-by-side on a rocky shelf at the river’s edge, with their feet dangling into the water. Neither of them seemed to notice his arrival. There was no sign of Andy anywhere. Leaning towards Zidra, Mr Bates now put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. At this point Jim strode across the grass, which muffled his footsteps, and stood behind them.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Both Zidra and Mr Bates jumped. Mr Bates had his left hand over Zidra’s, just as he had on the boat.

  ‘I’m showing her how to attach a sinker to the fishing line.’ Mr Bates removed his hand, revealing Zidra’s small hand that was indeed clutching a fishing line wound around a piece of cork.

  ‘You’ve been asleep for ages,’ Zidra grumbled, putting the fishing line down on the rock. Her face was tinged with green but it might have just been the light filtering through the trees.

  ‘Where’s Andy?’ he shouted. ‘Andy, where are you?’

  ‘Right here.’ Andy emerged from the bushes. ‘Do you want to fish?’

  ‘No, I hate fishing all the time,’ Jim said crossly. ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘What do you think? Having a pee, of course.’ Andy grinned. ‘Then I got a bit distracted by the cicadas. Look, I found a Black Prince!’ He held out a clenched fist. Slowly opening it, he revealed the dark locust. Without interest, Jim gave it a perfunctory glance. His head was thudding and he desperately wanted to lie down.

  ‘If you don’t want to fish,’ Zidra said, ‘you can help me finish the sandcastle. It needs more work.’ She jumped up and stood by his side. Fishing or building sandcastles, he didn’t know which was worse. Puzzled by what he’d seen, he nonetheless didn’t understand why. Batesy was showing Zidra how to fish, that was all.

  ‘Well, are you going to help me finish the castle?’ Zidra said.

  ‘Okay.’ He thought of what Mrs Bates had said that morning and added, ‘We should all stick together, you know.’

  ‘Were you scared?’ asked Mr Bates, standing up. ‘We’d never have left you alone if we thought that.’

  At last they were back in the boat and heading towards Jingera. Soon the sun would sink below the escarpment and Jim could hardly wait for that moment. His head was throbbing even more now, and every flicker of light seemed like a spear piercing his skull with a sharp point of pain. The relentless putt-putt-putt of the launch’s motor didn’t help, shattering the peace of the bush and the river, and the stink of the diesel fuel made him feel even sicker.

  There was something strange about the way Mr Bates looked at Zidra. He fawned over her too much and he stared at her all the time, as if she was a little doll or something. As if he worshipped her. Might be because he didn’t have a daughter of his own, that could be the reason. Some men wanted daughters rather than sons and Mr Bates didn’t have either.

  Jim pulled at the top of a fingernail that had got snagged on his fishing line that morning, and yanked it right off. The pain, as the nail tore off below the quick, distracted him for a moment from his anxiety and nausea.

  He was desperate to get back home. A boat was a pretty claustrophobic thing. The others seemed tired too. Everyone had gone very quiet now. Even Zidra, usually so talkative, seemed subdued.

  At last the jetty was in sight. Two figures were standing side-by-side, looking
out for them. Mrs Bates and The Talivaldis began to wave when they saw the launch. Mrs Bates up and down, The Talivaldis from side to side as if she was royalty. Jim was glad Roger wasn’t on board to make fun of that.

  Jim glanced at Zidra just as she glanced at him. In spite of his headache and general irritation, he smiled. He wasn’t going to allow her to think that he might find her mother ridiculous. Or that he was worried about Batesy fussing over her all the time.

  Another Saturday night. George finished his bath and dried himself slowly. After donning pyjamas, he carefully combed his wet hair and wondered if Eileen would forgive him for that argument after dinner. It was the worst row they’d ever had. The boys had gone out in the yard to play after tea and he and Eileen had bickered again about the scholarship. It isn’t fair to Andy was her latest war cry. She’d abandoned the previous one – just think of the expense – only days ago.

  However it was Saturday night and he would try to make love to her. Surely it was one way of making up their differences, although he didn’t feel much like it. For once, thinking of her naked breasts wasn’t arousing. Shutting his eyes, he pictured her cleavage as he’d seen it over dinner, on display in the V-neck of her dress. He imagined sliding his hands down into that cleft and unbuttoning the dress-front and gently releasing those lovely breasts, and afterwards sucking at the nipples, those strawberries that he so loved to roll around his tongue, and lick and tease, though tonight the images didn’t help. There was not even the slightest tingling in his groin.

  There was nothing for it now but a spot of manipulation. Opening his eyes, he undid the tie on his pyjama bottoms and picked up his penis in his hand. Lifting it and rubbing it had no effect: it remained as flaccid as a condom. They would have to be reconciled before he was able to make love to her again. Maybe he’d never be able to make love to her again. Suppressing a sigh, he refastened his pyjamas and went into the bedroom.