Watermark

by Joanna Atherfold Finn

  ‘Austin would be. We’d still be out the front of his place staring at that half-painted fence that he was going to get around to finishing one day because he was such a good tenant.’

  ‘Lachy.’

  ‘We’d be giving him a lift because he always behaved like a uni student with fuel, somehow thinking he was saving money by only putting in twenty dollars’ worth.’

  Anna lets out a brittle laugh.

  ‘I’d be beeping the horn and he’d be running out with his boots in his hands and his fly undone and he’d say, “You know, I wasn’t that fond of the bloke anyway.” That’s what he’d say. And he’d have trouble getting the door open. He’d drop one of his shoes in the gutter and he’d laugh. He’d laugh like he does in my head when I close my eyes. I’ve never heard a laugh like it. Christ, he’s such a klutz. He’s … he was such a klutz. He probably slipped.’

  ‘Oh, Lachy, don’t.’ Anna shakes her head. Strands of her hair are stuck to her cheeks, like whiskers on a cat.

  ‘He was probably just staring out to sea, staring at the boats, or a breaching whale. A seagull, for fuck’s sake; who’d know? He was so easily distracted. He was probably picturing how he’d paint the view. And he tripped over a rock. He tripped because he was clumsy.’ Lachy sighs with a mix of defeat and exhaustion. ‘Why there? I go to that spot all the time. Why did he have to do it there?’

  A grimace flitters across Anna’s face. Lachy throws the umbrella on the ground and grabs her by the shoulders. He pulls her face into his chest. She feels his voice vibrating on her forehead. ‘He’s not here, Anna. I know it. And I reckon he’d be annoyed. More than annoyed. He’d be fucking narky if he saw us looking for him in a place like this.’

  They stay like that, the middle ground between Anna’s car and the ceremony. When Anna finally pulls away, Lachy’s shirt is smeared with puckered black marks, like contusions.

  ‘We’ve made a mess,’ she says.

  • • •

  Lachy considers a pub, and then a park, but he ends up driving until the land stops, at the bluff. It is obscene in a way, here of all places, but it also makes the most sense. Anna doesn’t protest; she just winces, the skin around her eyes crinkling.

  He opens his door but neither of them moves; they just take in the blurred horizon. The faint edge of grey. It is hard to see where the ocean leaves off and the sky begins. Drops of rain blow in on the sharp breeze and settle on his lap. Anna doesn’t complain about the cold. She doesn’t say that the interior will smell fusty if it gets wet.

  ‘I always think of that night,’ Lachy says.

  ‘Yeah, me too,’ Anna says. ‘It was a bad night for it.’

  ‘A weeknight. Weeknights are always bad.’

  ‘Before you and Austin got back with your catch, I was helping Oscar with his homework. He had to draw tessellating shapes. I’d never heard of them. I had to look up the meaning.’ Anna looks at the blunt russet headland and thinks of Oscar’s fingers intertwined with hers. The way she guided his hand to draw a tessellating maze, a chaotic, never-ending pattern. ‘He’s a good boy,’ she says forcefully. ‘He’s not complicated. I don’t think he’ll be trouble.’

  Lachy smiles at the thought of his son. At the way he and his wife muddle through parenting. He is a good kid. Happy too. That’s what matters. Oscar loves driving the boat as fast as he can, even though he can hardly see over the bow. He loves slamming over the waves full-throttle. Austin had been the same. Lachy had always thought of Austin as happy too. Most of the time, anyway. The sort of bloke who went out and tackled life even though it kept battering him around. He was like one of those roly-poly dolls. Oscar had one when he was a baby. It didn’t matter how many times he hit it with his fist, it just kept coming back for more, grinning idiotically. Never the first to tire.

  Austin had been like that on the boat on his last day as Lachy’s deckie. On their way back to shore he kept tipping and righting himself in what was just a gentle swell. He stumbled so many times that he ended up studded with sea urchin spines. They were lodged in his arms and his legs. Even his head.

  Lachy reaches over and clutches the fabric draped across his wife’s leg but she doesn’t respond. She is sobbing again. Sobbing and tracing her fingers across the window, drawing rows of hexagons that fit together like honeycomb.

  ‘He was a hopeless deckie. He was a liability out there. He could’ve killed me. I’m amazed he didn’t kill me,’ Lachy says.

  ‘You were hard on him that day.’

  ‘You weren’t there. He was responsible for me. It was just sheer luck that I put my head up out of the water and saw him drifting over to the rocks. I had to chuck all the urchins out of my neck bag and swim back to the boat. He was having a kip, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘I think we were responsible for him. He could have stayed with us while he got his act together. Oscar loved him. He was like a crazy uncle. We didn’t even offer.’

  Lachy clasps his hands around the back of his neck and bows his head. ‘That’s really cruel. He had family, you know.’

  ‘He had his mum, but he didn’t have a wife and a child to go home to. He was such a deep thinker. Imagine being stuck in that head all the time. God, it must have been exhausting. All those quirky things he came up with.’

  ‘He told Oscar that he invented the question mark.’

  ‘Maybe he did,’ Anna says grimly.

  Lachy pictures the four of them out in their backyard that afternoon, the last day he fished with Austin as his deckie. It is etched into his mind like a watermark. Hidden from view but always just below the surface. Oscar was on his trampoline and Anna was perched on the clapped-out green lounge, her face dappled with grape-leaf shadows. The vine was supposed to be ornamental, but it insisted on producing bunches of bitter purple grapes. Lachy was holding Austin’s head up to the light and gouging urchin spines out of his skull. Austin had a breadstick clenched between his teeth and he kept moving his head to watch Oscar on the trampoline. He kept saying, ‘Oscar, how are you doing that? You must have big bouncy things on the ends of your legs.’ His son kept checking his feet while he picked around Austin’s flesh with a needle. When Austin started to whine, he told him to take it like a man, but he said it in a voice that let all of them know how much he cared. At least he did that.

  ‘Remember the palaver getting those spines out of his head?’ Lachy says.

  Anna swallows back a laugh. ‘When you were in the shower, Austin washed out your wetsuits. He was gabbling on about how he was going to cook us dinner. He was just hosing right over the top of everything, filling all your gear with grit.’

  ‘He was good-natured,’ Lachy conceded. ‘Frickin hopeless, but good-natured.’

  They both laugh. Anna rifles around in the glove box for another tissue.

  ‘I slugged him in the shoulder before we left. I asked him how the fuck he got the spines in his head. He must have been rolling around the boat like an empty can. If I hadn’t come up to the surface we would’ve been stuffed. The boat. Everything. No insurance for something like that. It was on the cards that I’d have to let him go. It was only a matter of time.’

  Anna sighs and holds her hands in her lap. The window is foggy. Lachy switches on the wipers and they scrape out a clear arc that exposes the gaping ocean.

  ‘It’s probably over now,’ Anna says. ‘The service,’ she adds, needlessly.

  ‘They’ll be up in the complimentary refreshments room,’ he says, scowling. ‘Queuing for cups of tea and cucumber sandwiches.’ Lachy clenches Anna’s hand. ‘He called me a few weeks ago.’

  ‘What?’ Anna turns to face him but he keeps staring at the sea. ‘What?’ she says again, a sudden memory falling into its proper place. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Austin had called her too. Called her a month ago to say that he missed her. She’d brushed him off. ‘Oh, I miss you too, you lunatic,’ she’d said. He wanted her advice. He was thinking about asking Lachy for his job back. She told h
im it wasn’t a good idea. Said that the boy they had was working out well for them. He was a bit young but he was trying to make a career of it. Studying for his Coxswain certificate. Getting his hours up. Then, obscurely, Austin asked her about his cookbook; he thought he’d left it there. She told him she had a lot on. She said she’d give him a call if she came across it. A week later she did; it was in the pantry. Flicking through, she found a sketch. It was of Lachy’s boat out on the ocean. She was in the drawing, her hair as it had been until recently, long and brown. She was perched on the bench seat with her arm around Oscar. Pointed towards the horizon, behind the wheel, the other person had to be Austin; the outline had the clean line of his shaved head. Lachy wasn’t in the picture, though there was a hose dangling in the water, so Austin was probably sketching the obvious: her husband, as always, was out of view. She hadn’t told Lachy about the call. She’d put the cookbook back in the bookcase, but she’d screwed up the drawing and binned it. She’d felt a bit funny about it. There’d always been something unspoken, something tacit between her and Austin. She looked out for him. Made excuses when he botched things up. He told her once that he didn’t trust many people. As a boy, he’d trusted his teacher and now, as a man, he trusted her. The comment had, at times, made her more attentive towards Austin than she was to her own husband.

  Anna puts her hand in Lachy’s lap.

  ‘He said he missed being out in the boat with me,’ Lachy says. ‘He missed sitting on the hull, sucking the roe out of urchins. He missed stacking the crates and solving the world’s problems on our way to the freighter.’ Lachy takes a deep, jagged breath. ‘He said he missed you and me looking out for him. He’d seen someone to try to get himself sorted out.’

  Anna feels a tiny culpable rush. ‘A woman?’

  ‘Nah. A shrink. He’d been to one as a kid, and he got it in his head that it was worth giving it a go again. Apparently the guy stifled a yawn in their first session, before, in Austin’s words, he got to the good bits.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him … shit, Anna, I told him it sounded like a waste of time.’

  Anna stretched out her neck and tapped, agitatedly, against Lachy’s leg. ‘Did he … did he give you the impression he was going to harm himself?’ Harm. The word wasn’t strong enough. A watered-down, smooth-edged word.

  ‘No. He just sounded worn out. His sentences were garbled. I didn’t know if it was the grog or nostalgia. He said he scrubbed his skin every night but the coal had worked its way into his fingers like ink. He said he was sick of being buried in the shadows, blasting holes for a living. He felt like he was suffocating down there. He talked about doing up a yacht. Tucking it into a sheltered cove at sunset. Sleeping in his swag. You know what I said?’

  ‘No.’

  Lachy grabs Anna’s hand in his and wipes his eye with her wrist. ‘I said he was a dreamer. I said he was a dreamer, and then I said I didn’t think the ocean was big enough for both of us.’

  When he speaks again, his voice is detached, like a long-distance call. ‘Look, this had nothing to do with us. There was stuff you didn’t know about. Stuff from his … from when he was a kid.’

  Anna tucks her legs up onto the seat and crosses her arms against her chest. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Heavy stuff. Some days he opened up a bit, but I reckon he wasn’t even scratching the surface. That night … that last night he was at our house. I think that’s why I reacted the way I did. Anyway, when he called I almost told him to come out for the day. Not for work, just for a bit of a fish.’

  ‘He would’ve loved that.’ Anna presses her head against the back of the car seat. Lachy looks across at her face, at the tears leaking out of her.

  ‘Yeah. Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve, didn’t,’ he says. ‘Anna, the only way I can get my head around this is to think about how I feel when I’m out there on the water. When it’s rough and I’m tired and I’ve pulled up short and not made enough to put my body through it. I mean, look at my hands.’

  Anna didn’t have to look. His hands felt as rough as bloodwood bark. They caught on her skin when he touched her.

  ‘It’s like I’m falling apart. I’ve got cracks in my feet like fissures. But when the ocean’s surging and the gulls are swooping in on the swell, I feel this sort of release. I don’t know how to say it.’ Lachy puts his head in Anna’s lap and clenches at the silver fabric of her dress. ‘And I think the ocean … maybe it set him free. Maybe it let him breathe again.’ He stays burrowed in his wife’s lap for a long time. Her hands fall to his head; she drags tufts of his hair through her fingers, and his broad shoulders shake.

  • • •

  Lachy stares up at the bedroom ceiling, and follows, as is his habit, the intricate pattern of the antique architrave. Earlier that night, just as Anna had promised, they’d gone out for Oscar’s birthday dinner. The meal was a blur of prawn chips and sparklers and deep-fried ice-cream. Lachy had tried to smile through it. He’d smiled until his jaw was sore. They’d poured Lego pieces all over the table and built a spaceship together but it hadn’t worked out. Some of the pieces were missing. Maybe they’d slipped under the Lazy Susan. Oscar had a ball, oblivious to his parents crumbling before him. For once Anna surrendered to his request for a sickly fire-engine-red drink, but she swatted away the fortune cookies; she told the waiter to take them back and waste them on someone else. Lachy’s mum folded up the wrapping paper in a neat pile and talked incessantly, her opinions gleaned from talk-back radio. Just days earlier, when Lachy had broken the news about Austin to his mum, she’d refused to discuss it, to acknowledge the circumstances under which he’d gone. All she said was, ‘Well, that just takes the cake.’

  Anna rests her head in the crook of Lachy’s arm. Their bed is old and lumpy, a hand-me-down. It always takes Anna time to mould her body into the right position. ‘You didn’t eat tonight,’ she says. ‘You couldn’t even get through your soup.’

  ‘Maybe they had a new chef on. The sweet and sour, it was gristly. Not quite as bad as Austin’s Chicken Mole, though. Nothing’s topped that yet.’

  Lachy puts the palm of his free hand on his wife’s chest and she slides his hand down to her stomach.

  ‘I didn’t have the energy for him that night.’ She blurts it out like a child confessing.

  ‘I didn’t expect him to come back. I’d already dropped him home on my way to the freighter. I mean, he knew he was out of a job. I made that crystal clear. He just didn’t seem to comprehend it. I thought I’d finally gotten rid of him for the day and then there he was at the front door, right on dusk, loaded up with grocery bags.’

  Anna pictures the bags now, overflowing. ‘He was fussy with the ingredients. Day-old bread and corn-fed chicken and dark chocolate. He was annoyed that he hadn’t been able to get Mexican chocolate. I can just imagine him asking the girl at Coles about it.’ She kicks the white linen sheet off one leg.

  Lachy lets his mind travel back to that night. He’d sat at the dinner table with his wife and son as though they were in a restaurant. A squat aqua candle flickered from a hurricane lantern in the table’s centre. Austin had arranged placemats and dimmed the lights and put on one of Anna’s compilation CDs. He’d wanted to make amends for almost losing Lachy’s boat on the rocks that day.

  Sitting at the table, he’d told them to relax, they were under his watch. He seemed so genuine, so intent on making things right, that they’d given in. He poured them red wine from a pink-flowered teapot with a dishcloth slung over his forearm. He hadn’t been able to locate a carafe but he was adamant about letting the wine breathe. He asked them to taste the difference, but they couldn’t. ‘It’s mellower,’ he said. ‘Full-bodied. You’ve got to hold it in your mouth and let it sit there.’ He whisked dank tea towels over their laps, then walked backwards, bent low, to the kitchen. ‘Remove scum from the surface,’ they heard him yell through the wall. ‘Now stop your mind, Austin … Oar-sten. Stop it jibber-jabbering.
’

  They resigned themselves to it. Even when increasingly desperate noises filtered through from the kitchen and they heard their utensil drawers being flung open and the sound of knives scraping across the melamine. Oscar would normally have relished the novelty, but that night he was irritable, pulling on Anna’s arm and swinging on his chair. He said he was starving.

  They sat there for what felt like hours, perhaps it was hours, talking inanely and making silent gestures to each other over Oscar’s increasingly sullen face. When Lachy finally gave up and went to investigate, Austin was surrounded by bowls of herbs, chopped and forgotten. He stood in the corner mashing hard lumps of sweet potato, a port glass propped in his free hand. A pot of chocolate, portentous as the Volcán de Colima, gurgled behind him. The chicken was dissected with forensic precision, cold and grey, on the cutting board. He seemed to have used every piece of equipment they owned, including the apple-corer and the blender. ‘Hell,’ Lachy recalled saying, and it was then, as Lachy considered the best course of action, that the chocolate sauce erupted over the stovetop and along the bench, then pooled on the floorboards.

  ‘He made the mother of all messes,’ Lachy says, rubbing Anna’s hip.

  Anna sighs. ‘It took me a day to clean up. He’d arranged knives and forks over the burn marks in the bench. That’s something a kid would do, don’t you think?’

  ‘I think what we ate had been scraped off the floor.’ Lachy raises his arms above his head and locks them underneath his pillow.

  ‘I got a hair in mine, and Austin’s hairless. Do you remember what you said to him?’

  ‘Not really,’ Lachy says. ‘I know I said a lot that night.’

  Anna turns her face towards him. He pushes her blunt black hair off her cheek. ‘You told him he’d Master-chefed the shit out of it,’ she says.

  Lachy smiles and nods.

  ‘Do you think Oscar knew something was up tonight?’ Anna drags one of Lachy’s hands back down to her own and picks at the dead bits of skin.