Turbulence

by Maggie Rainey-Smith

  ‘Na, na, it’s fine, old chap.’

  Old chap. How on earth did that slip out?

  Louise frowned at him.

  He turned to the woman on his right, her name already forgotten. He was supposed to know, but he would ask anyway.

  ‘And how do you know Louise?’

  She looked at him, startled.

  ‘Everyone knows Louise.’

  And sure enough, they did. She was a big success and he ought to be proud … and he was, he was. Perhaps some of the other men envied him? Possibly. But nothing was ever quite how it seemed to others. He wasn’t unhappy and wasn’t particularly happy, either. Right now, watching Louise across the table holding court about her Why Not Wellington? campaign, he was irritated. But what was irritated compared to devastated? He knew the difference and he knew irritation could easily turn to infatuation; they were two sides of the same coin. No, he’d done devastation when he’d left Judy and lost Michael. Louise was his future. He raised his glass of tainted red and toasted Louise across the table. She wasn’t looking.

  The woman next to him rabbited on about a flight from Heathrow to Los Angeles on which the inflight entertainment system had crashed. She stressed first class about three times and whinged about how cold London was (it was winter, for Christ’s sake). By the time they got to the first course, she was elaborating on how many times she’d pushed the hostess buzzer and no one came (not hard to imagine). He nodded, inclined his head sympathetically, and was very relieved when she finally stopped herself.

  ‘Oh, but I am going on.’

  Yes, indeed.

  ‘What do you do, Adam?’

  It always ended up like this. They asked him what he did, and when he mentioned running a factory, they ran out of questions. Except that this woman was more resilient than most.

  ‘Oh, and what do you make?’

  ‘Bar stools.’ (There, that would shut her up).

  But no, she found the idea quite fascinating actually, and of course once he mentioned Tahiti, she was off again, on a yacht this time (a luxury motor-sailer no less), parked outside the coral … ‘And you have to row, you know … people think it’s idyllic, but it’s hard work …’ Blah blah blah. Tahiti, idyllic Tahiti, was reduced to nasty coral, difficult beach access — and fresh fruit, well, it was so-o expensive.

  Adam excused himself and found the toilet. Better not light up in there. So, on his way back down a long and rather wide passage (it was one of those pseudo-Italian spec homes where big was better), he found a doorway to a deck. The southerly had passed over, the stars were emerging and the monastery on the hill beckoned. He imagined being a brother when the monastery was in use: shut up on the hill, enclosed, praying all day, running around in robes (did they?). And then cynicism put a damper on that thought. You’d have to be a mad sort of bugger to want to run around in a skirt and pray all day.

  He was back in time for dessert. Hadn’t been missed. The woman on his right had moved and was regaling some other poor sucker with details of black ice on the roads in England and how dangerous it was to drive in such conditions. Catching a lull in the general conversation, she was forced to repeat loudly — to one and interested all — each excruciating deprivation of her disastrous flight home first-class, Heathrow to Los Angeles (not to mention the air points she’d earned).

  Dessert was pears poached in red wine with vanilla, cinnamon and what tasted suspiciously like packet custard. He could never understand people who flaunted flash houses, made a fuss about corked or uncorked wines and then served second-rate custard in bone china as if you ought to be grateful. He wasn’t much of a cook, but he could make a bloody good custard when called upon. You had to have eggs and, as far as he could tell, there were no eggs (not real ones) in this.

  The first-class woman was exclaiming how delicious the custard was, and could she have the recipe? He could never tell with women if they intended to be bitches or if it was all accidental.

  Then a quiet bloke at the far end of the table (whom Adam admired because he too had eschewed a replacement glass of wine) brought up the topic of wines again — enquired of the table in general whether wine could be corked in a screw-top bottle, or would it be screwed?

  On the way home, Louise thanked Adam. She knew he hadn’t enjoyed himself, but instead of picking the evening to pieces, criticising the first-class woman, complaining about the custard … they turned up the radio and sang all the way home. Music could do an awful lot for a man’s equilibrium. Louise even played a tune on her teeth. He was on a roll.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The stars he’d seen while furtively fagging at dinner had been a fair indication — Sunday was a perfect day. He got up early, took Louise breakfast and the newspaper. She loved to lie in on a Sunday; he loved to garden. He crept past Frankie’s room and out to the garage for his trowel and wheelbarrow. Ness joined him. She had the same affection for the garden that he did. It was a space they could inhabit together, no questions asked — just companionship.

  The roses showed signs of blackspot and yellowing leaves were dropping into the garden. He picked up each and every fallen leaf to prevent further contamination. Then he noticed how bare some of his rose bushes were — just thorny sticks at the base — and it occurred to him there might be a possum in the garden eating his plants. He had a trap in the shed but he’d never been successful with it yet. There was always something to blight your joy if you let it. Bugger the possum: he would ignore it. They could coexist. He (or was it a she?) hadn’t attacked all the roses. And it was early autumn; the roses would die back soon, apart from his Nancy Hayward, which would flower all year if he sprayed it.

  Ness had the radio with her and they tuned into the National Programme, listening to a political summary of the week, a sporting round-up and then someone who’d got their chance to talk uninterrupted on a topic dear to their heart. He admired people who were articulate and able to express their views passionately. His own efforts were usually hampered by the elusiveness of words and their meanings, and quite often by an inability to retain a fixed position on the topic he was discussing. So often, in seeking to clarify his thoughts, he ended up questioning them. Louise said she liked that about him. She was used to the glibness of public relations and preferred his lack of certainty, his honesty. Well, that was what she’d said when they’d first met.

  Ness was articulate, though not in the glib sense of the word. She chose words carefully, and she tried them out. Her writing was sometimes beyond him, but he knew it was good. No doubt Phillip understood it. Smarty-arty-farty Phillip.

  ‘Phillip says I have an obliqueness that is my uniqueness.’

  Well, fancy that. He wondered what it could mean.

  ‘Is that good?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Read me something, then. Go on. I won’t understand it, probably, but I’d like to hear it.’

  Ness ran inside and came back with an A4 page.

  ‘This is not my creative writing. This is an assignment I’ve started. Phillip helped me. See what you think …’

  Ness cleared her throat, looked self-conscious and then began:

  Sex as a literary device never fails. A novel without sex drive will need an extraordinary narrative drive. Sexual and personal identity in the twenty-first century seem to be inextricably linked. Aldous Huxley, Anthony Burgess and Doris Lessing explore in their novels Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange and Mara and Dann the idea of sex as entertainment or a commodity, sex as violence or power, and sex as survival of the species.

  Aldous Huxley creates a Brave New World in which sex is available without the constraints of love or complicated relationships. In fact relationships are the one sure thing to put a damper on sex. The reader might be temporarily seduced, but she will probably require regular doses of soma to remain so. Huxley’s sex is free of guilt, free of responsibility, free of fertility (babies are made in test tubes) and is now a commodity to be consumed. Huxley has disposed of mothers
and fathers so, without them, Freud and sexual guilt have been eradicated also. It sounds terrific, but in abstracting morality from his characters, Huxley is preaching morality.

  Adam had been listening intently, wondering which bits Ness wrote and which Phillip contributed. Well, he’d read Huxley, he knew about Burgess, but who was this Lessing woman? And what was soma? Obviously Phillip knew.

  ‘So, literature is your thing, eh?’

  ‘Oh, it’s fun, I love it. Our tutor for this paper is like, ancient, he must be fifty and he’s like, so cool, and we get extensions if we want, and he lets us do group presentations, and he’s so on to it.’

  In her enthusiasm, Ness had stopped being articulate and become a teenager again. She was in the twilight zone of adolescence, with more responsibilities than most young women (an absent dad and a sister her dad wanted absent). She had poise and confidence; she was on the brink of being something.

  He might not fully appreciate her writing (he recalled A Clockwork Orange as a popular violent flick — he must have missed the moral overtone, or was it undertone?), but he was proud of her.

  They found a dead baby weta near the wood shed. Adam picked it up to marvel at the intricate detail and pay homage to a living fossil. The legs were bent, vanilla coloured, and the weta’s backside was striped like a bumble-bee. As Ness took the weta inside to show Louise and Frankie, Adam swept up brown macrocarpa needles that had blown over the path the day before. He loved autumn. It spawned wetas, rusty leaves and a chill in the sunshine that sharpened his senses. The neighbour’s plum tree, bowed all summer with fat red fruit, now shook and shimmered in the breeze.

  As a boy, he’d loved greengage plums, their sweet lime flesh. He would guts himself on plums until his stomach rumbled like Ruapehu. He’d been going to plant a plum tree in memory of Michael, but never got around to it. And now he knew that Michael didn’t belong in this garden, with this new family.

  Michael’s first steps had been outside under a plum tree. He’d been shifting around on his backside for some time and without warning he stood up and walked. They’d almost missed it. As a reward, Adam passed a piece of sweet plum from his mouth to Michael’s. Judy’s face was a mixture of censure and concern (what if he was too young to eat an uncooked plum?). Later that day, Judy inspected Michael’s nappy, checking the contents for undigested plum. She found a piece of Lego instead. In the poo lay a plastic hand, which she washed and replaced in the Lego box.

  I told you he was too young for Lego.

  Motherhood had taken Judy from fearless to fearful.

  Spinning Michael around and around, tossing him in the air.

  You mustn’t shake him, Adam. It will jiggle his brain.

  Watch you don’t drop him.

  He’s tired, aren’t you, Mummy’s angel?

  Some of it was real, some irrational, and the line between became blurred for both of them. When Adam allowed himself time to dwell on these moments, he felt guilt. Guilt was good. He could do guilt. It was the amnesty that Judy had offered that he couldn’t deal with. He indulged the idea that it was all his fault — Judy crossing the line between normal caution and fear, irrationality. Maybe she had sensed Adam’s pulling away and, by pulling Michael closer, shielded both of them from his absences. At first, it was just diving on the weekends, and then on a Wednesday evening. Adam would arrive home full of underwater wonders while Judy drowned at home alone with Michael.

  In direct contrast to their emotional distance, their sex life improved. He made love to Judy, though he thought about Louise. He tried to convince himself he loved Judy more as a result. For a time, he would forget Louise; promise himself he would give up diving. But the weekends came around …

  Do go diving, Adam, it makes you happier!

  Guilty, he would take Judy’s advice.

  What came before and what came after?

  Afterwards, after Michael’s death, guilt sustained him like formaldehyde through a bloodless corpse.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Gardening was about digging up memories. Diving was the only activity that could truly restore Adam’s equilibrium. He needed to be under water and under pressure to alleviate the burden of innocence that Judy’s outburst had placed on him. He told Louise he was going to the gym. She was reading and barely looked up from her book. Frankie was still sleeping, and Ness was back on her writing project. He slipped almost unnoticed from the house, which was what he’d intended. Anonymity in his quest for identity.

  He was diving alone, breaking all the rules, but he knew these waters, and he needed the risk. It was calculated. He needed to know for certain, away from all influences, just who he was — and why he was who he was. Underwater, weightless, dependent on a limited supply of oxygen, he had a finite time to uncover the truth. He wasn’t resurfacing until he ran out of air, if that was what it took.

  Childhood memories flooded in. Cycling to the mudflats with a whitebait net on his head (a hat of sorts), the wooden handle safely behind him with a white hanky tied to it to indicate extra-long load, like a lorry or a ute. Peering through the fine netting at the world, seeing asphalt through a mesh lens, waving to Mr Gillespie at the IGA corner and then around and down past the trashiest house (eleven children and she was a widow), and then further on past the lady who made the home-made ice cream that tasted like felt with pink wafers that broke and splintered and tasted of nothing … not talking in case you scared the whitebait away.

  His grandma’s bushy brows over brown eyes that twinkled; shoulders that hunched and a back that bent in a small traditional working-class hump that meant witch or grandma (but at least it wasn’t a goitre like the lady up the road). She looked like a turkey but you couldn’t say that because it was bad manners. Like the lady with diabetes who lived behind Adam’s family: the lady whose eyes popped out of her head … an insulin deficiency. Adelaide, they called her. A city in Australia, foreign, and it was no wonder her eyes bulged.

  Then there was the boy who fell from the wharf. Quietly into the water, straight down, retarded from birth and now dead. A three-storey house with a banister and polished stairs with a Persian carpet runner that ran forever into a dark landing where the poor mother and father, who stood on the wharf distracted for a moment and lost their son, slept in a room with a door that had wooden panels and muted light from a gap between the door and floor that shone like a secret on the wide matai panels of the landing. Adam knew, because he had been chosen (hand-picked, no less) by the father as a companion to his retarded son. It was an honour he was too shy to refuse, and a burden that became an embarrassment. The boy loved pulling petals from daisies and sniffing petrol, slipping the cap from the petrol tank on the motor mower. Adam was there on Thursdays after school and sometimes overnight on weekends to ensure that the boy didn’t disappear out the front gate and on to the street; and even with all their vigilance, eventually, with both parents at his side, he slipped from them between the wharf and a docked ship (carrying phosphate from Nauru), straight down, beneath the surface of the chunky iridescent green that was wharf water. Legend, with embellishment, retold the father’s reaction and the mother’s despair over and over. The father wanting to leap into the small gap between the wharf and the boat, the mother restraining him (some said because she was glad her son was gone) …

  Now when Adam looked back on his memories of these things, his own innocence, his lack of real knowledge seemed an extraordinary blessing and he realised that for him, Frankie embodied that time in his life. Through Frankie he was able to revisit that innocence, but with a wisdom and knowledge he wished he’d never earned.

  Even through his wetsuit he could feel the recent southerly influence in the water. This part of the coast was notorious for shifting tides and he needed to be careful, make sure he didn’t drift too far out. Halfway into the dive, he knew how foolish he’d been. Goddamn stupid, in fact. He’d wanted to find the truth, and the truth was his family didn’t know where he was. He was risking everything —
and for what? A craft of some sort passed overhead, highlighting the dangers of diving alone and without a marker. He recalled reading about some guy up north sliced by a propeller while surfacing. But he knew he had no death wish: he was diving for life.

  Michael is dead.

  There on the south coast, in the cold light of the underworld, he repeated it.

  Michael is dead.

  It was here in the underworld that he had cherished Michael’s memory, imagined his first day at school, his first broken heart, his first dive, his future. Here in the underworld, Michael had lived. He’d seen Michael graduate, watched him win races, accepted accolades about him, had stern heart-to-hearts with him, confided in him and, most of all, loved him. But now Adam recognised that holding on for so long had become more about him, and less and less about Michael.

  He had to consider not only a life without Michael, but also a life without guilt. It was time to move on. Moving past him was a sand flounder and eyeing him from a distance was a crayfish. Neither of them cared. The tide was pulling him out, the water wasn’t clear any more and he could no longer see the crayfish — he had no idea where he was. This was why you dived with a buddy. His breathing grew shallow and rapid; he checked his oxygen supplies and found them lower than he’d anticipated. He took large breaths instead of small, dived deeper instead of moving up, spun around, panicked.

  What was he doing here, risking everything with no marker flag, no buddy, breaking all the rules? When he’d begun his descent he had believed his own foolishness about diving for the truth. But the truth wasn’t under water.

  Now he imagined his own death and not Michael’s. At first he experienced physical pain, a tugging at his lungs, a burning in his stomach, and then an ache that he recognised as pity: pity for himself. He saw his own corpse, imagined his own funeral, wept at his own death. He was ashamed. It was time to let go of Michael. He’d turned Michael into a campaign. Holding on to Michael and in particular his own part in Michael’s death was both ballast and buoyancy. He sank and floated because of it. It was time to move on and move up.