Vertigo

by Amanda Lohrey

  Praise for Vertigo

  ‘A carefully crafted little gem of a book …’

  —THE ADVERTISER

  ‘Lohrey achieves a kind of perfection …’

  —THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

  ‘Extraordinarily vivid and compelling …

  A stunning and memorable novella.’

  —THE AGE

  ‘This finely crafted novella took my breath away.’

  —THE MERCURY MAGAZINE

  ‘Vertigo will keep you up much too late

  but it’s worth a one-sitting read.’

  —THE WEST AUSTRALIAN

  ‘There is something enormously satisfying, both

  aesthetically and morally, about this delicate

  tale, as sense that – as with a perfectly executed

  piece of music – no mistakes have been made.’

  —AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

  Vertigo

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  37-39 Langridge Street

  Collingwood, VIC 3066, Australia

  email: enquiries@blackincbooks.com

  http://www.blackincbooks.com

  Text © Amanda Lohrey 2009

  Images © Lorraine Biggs 2009

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  The National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Lohrey, Amanda.

  Vertigo / Amanda Lohrey.

  2nd ed

  ISBN: 9781863954303 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 9781921870026 (ebook)

  A823.3

  Cover design by Thomas Deverall

  VERTIGO

  a pastoral

  Amanda Lohrey

  with images by Lorraine Biggs

  I

  LUKE WORLEY GREW UP ON the edge of the city, in a neat suburban garden with a green lawn and a date palm, and in all that time he never developed the least interest in birds, not even, as a boy, to throw stones at. But now, at the age of thirty-four, he has taken to bird-watching. It’s true he might once have laughed at this, but since then much has changed. Now, with his wife Anna, he has moved to the coast.

  There are birds in the city, but in the city you rarely notice them; there is too much urban jazz in the air: the drone of jets roaring in, the manic whine of sirens or the thumping bass line of a neighbour’s latest dance-music craze. Near Luke’s apartment block there was a mournful bird cry that could be heard at around three in the morning when he happened to wake in the dark, perhaps from a bad dream, but somehow he never got around to identifying it. He meant to, but it was one of those things that fell out of your head with the hot monsoonal wash of an early morning shower or your first avid gulp of coffee. On one occasion he did think to ask friends who lived in the same street if they knew the bird with the mournful call, and while they, too, had heard the sound, and could imitate it over a drink, no-one could say what it looked like. He thought his parents might know – older people knew things like that – but Ken and Marg proved to be as ignorant as anyone. Ken was unable, when pressed over dinner, to distinguish with certainty between a raven and a blackbird. So much for the wisdom of the elders.

  When interest rates rose for the third time in eighteen months, he and Anna despaired of ever buying in the city. In the first weeks of winter, Anna developed a chest infection she couldn’t shake and when diagnosed with asthma, she took it badly; it made her feel like an invalid. It was Anna who prided herself on her fitness; it was she who went jogging every morning around Sydney University oval (Luke was the couch potato, always with his nose in a book) and now she was being told that for a long time, perhaps even decades, she would have to inhale steroids. For days she felt weepy and vulnerable, as if she were no longer the person she thought she was, or had willed herself to be. As for Luke, for the first time ever he felt his innate optimism beginning to metabolise into something jittery. That burnish of rough glamour that had once overlaid his city seemed suddenly shabby. He could feel the future coming towards him, indeed it was almost at his door, and it was not what he had hoped for.

  In the past he had felt free of encumbrance, had looked on as his friends locked themselves into immense mortgages from which they saw no escape. Now, absurdly, he began to feel burdened by his inability to shoulder the very debt that he had once scorned. Was this a muddle? Yes, it was. The clarity of thought that enlightened his twenties had begun to darken, in the way that a smog haze settles by degrees over a bright morning.

  The moment of truth arrived late one night as he lay in bed with his wife. Outside the rain was hurtling down; inside they were breathing mould and damp. Anna was propped up awkwardly with pillows, wheezing and sucking in gasps of Ventolin from the small metal tube of her inhaler. Her short blond hair stuck to her skin in limp strands and when she slumped back against the wall, sallow and greyish, he knew it was time to go. He could not bear to see her deflated and diminished in this way. It was as if her robust beauty, an athletic glow that had first attracted him, was being preyed upon by an invisible vampire.

  The next evening, over dinner, he broached his proposal, and found her receptive.

  ‘Wouldn’t you miss the city?’

  ‘I might. I wouldn’t know until I tried it.’

  And so, in a moment, the ground shifted. They would move to the country and work from home; they would look for an affordable house and if they couldn’t find one they would rent. As editors of corporate and legal documents they could transfer their small business to just about any where; they were established, and in the past twelve months had scarcely been able to keep up with demand.

  ‘We’ll give it two years,’ Luke told his bemused parents. ‘It’s not as if it’s a life sentence.’

  ‘I warned you about living in Bridge Road,’ his father said. ‘It’s all that fine particle pollution, it dehydrates the organs. In parts of Los Angeles, babies are being born with shrunken hearts.’

  Good old Ken; always the optimist.

  Anna’s GP cautioned them against the country. ‘Asthma rates are just as high in rural areas,’ she said, ‘if not more so. It’s the wheat dust, among other things.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Luke, ‘we won’t settle in wheat country.’

  To her friends, Anna appeared to put up little resistance to this migration and they assumed she was concerned about her health. What they couldn’t know, because she didn’t tell them, was that like her husband she found herself troubled by a falling away of her youthful élan. There was so much money around, a dizzying spiral of excess, and yet she and Luke struggled. They worked long hours but still they could not afford anything better than the rental on their cramped apartment. The paint on the ceilings was cracked and peeling and the rooms were dark with a sombre brown varnish on the woodwork. At dinner parties people spoke solemnly of their renovations; with the air of diplomats renegotiating the Geneva Convention they discoursed on the problem of installing a second bathroom, or whether they could trust advice from their broker on how to finesse their share portfolio in a volatile market.

  When she was in her twenties Anna had thought of herself as bohemian, a free spirit who was serious about the right things and carefree about the rest, but now she was turning into some other woman, a woman on the edge of becoming anxiously acquisitive. Though scornful of the crass material ambitions of others, she was secretly ashamed of the shabbiness of her apartment, and fed up with cheap holidays. But this was only material lack; what was worse was the corrosive effect on her goodwill towards the world. That most acidic
of beasts, envy, had a fang-hold on her heart. She was past thirty, she was in a spiritual impasse and she needed to find a way out of it.

  One quiet Sunday afternoon they opened the glove box of their car, took out an assortment of road maps and laid them out across the kitchen table. Their first task was to get oriented, to compile a list of rural towns and coastal hamlets that had good mobile access and reliable broadband. Next they Googled these on tourist websites to see if they liked the lie of the land; they knew these virtual postcards could be deceptive but still, it was a beginning, and when they had agreed on a short-list they set off on weekend reconnaissance. Once out on the open road they felt free again: the further away from the city they drove, the more the world expanded into a mysterious limbo, a potential space waiting to be filled. And to their great delight, on each of these journeys the boy chose to accompany them. In the claustrophobic spaces of their dark little apartment his appearances were erratic and unpredictable, but once out on the freeway they would glance behind them and there he would be, lap-sashed on the back seat and with an inquiring look on his face; that dreamy, expectant expression that children get when they are travelling to an unknown destination.

  And how little they knew about ‘out there’. Some inland towns stood frozen in time: a dusty high street; a melancholy war memorial; perhaps a faded Mechanics Institute from the 1920s; a café with chipped laminex tables; a general store with window displays of headless wooden dummies in drab clothing. But there were other towns that could almost have been outposts of the city, where an art gallery with kelim rugs and carved wooden birds might be found beside a sleek new wine bar. The Worleys agreed that they wanted to live in neither, not the old or the new, although what exactly they were looking for they couldn’t say. Then, late one Saturday afternoon, in a fit of irritable fatigue, they took a wrong turn-off and drove into the small coastal hamlet of Garra Nalla.

  Garra Nalla could scarcely be described as a town. It was a settlement of eighty or so houses, each one nestled in among a grey-green cluster of casuarinas and shaggy old banksias laden with masses of black seed cobs. The turn-off led straight to a wild beach and as they caught their first glimpse of breaking surf the boy suddenly sat upright. Roused from his torpor on the back seat he craned his neck to see out, and wriggling free of his seatbelt scrambled up onto the seat to press his face against the window.

  The road in ran alongside a narrow brown river that flowed into the sea through a sandy trench. Beyond the river lay a wide lagoon, sheltered behind a ridge of sandhills and on the other side of the sandhills was a long white beach. On the near side of the river lay the hamlet of Garra Nalla. The approach to the settlement was an avenue of flowering gums, a palette of pinks and orange and gold, and yes they were pretty, but almost too picturesque, thought Anna, like a crudely printed postcard. It was the she-oaks that engaged her, soft clusters of them dotted among the houses; a subtle blur of fine filaments swaying against the sky, or drooping to the ground in wispy canopies.

  Slowly they drove down the dusty unsealed roads and could see that most of the shacks in the settlement were fibro or timber, and shielded from the rocky foreshore by dense thickets of tea-tree and boobialla. There were no letter-boxes and no street lights. They drove up to the grassy windswept headland and looked out to a wild arc of the coastline, framed at its northern end by a rocky outcrop known as Rittler’s Point and at its southern end by the settlement of Garra Nalla. Here, where they stood, it was bare save for three great Norfolk pines that must surely have been planted in the colonial era and that loomed above them now like sentinels. They could see where the ocean tides flowed into the river, and how at high tide the shallow trench would rise in depth until it merged with the lagoon. But on this day the tide was out and the lagoon so uneven that it emerged in a pattern of curved sandbanks and warm, shallow pools. It was only in its northwestern corner, furthest from the ocean, that the broadwater remained both deep and still, and here it was graced by a colony of black swans.

  For a long time the three of them stood at the edge of the headland, gazing out to sea. The incoming waves swept into a narrow canyon beneath their feet where, after a momentary stillness, a curtain of white water reared into the air, drenching them in spray. As each wave came crashing into the blowhole the boy hunched his shoulders in anticipation and as the cloud of salty spume sprayed above them he shrieked with delight, his feet running up and down on the spot with excitement. And they laughed, and wondered how on earth a place of such grandeur had escaped development. Why wasn’t it a resort?

  By the time they started home it was late and they stopped for a meal at the nearby town of Brockwood, and fell into conversation with the waiter who warned them that the beach at Garra Nalla was known for its dangerous rip. Four people had drowned there in the past five years. Only a fool would swim there and tourists gave it a wide berth.

  Perfect, they thought; just perfect.

  ‘But there’s nothing here!’ their friends would exclaim when later they came to visit. No shops, no hotel, no community hall, no boat ramp or barbecue area. And this was true, and it was the reason they had chosen the place. They felt that in some essential way it was uncultivated, a landscape out of time, and as such it could not define them. Here they could live, and simply be.

  And then there was the house, a weatherboard homestead from the Federation era with a gabled roof and dilapidated gravitas they yearned to restore. It had a stately hallway down the middle and a wide veranda on three sides, and while it did not directly overlook the water, the beach was only an eight-minute walk away. There was a big farm kitchen of spacious intimacy and all of the rooms were square, so that no matter where you stood in the house the proportions seemed somehow right, with you at the centre. In every room there was a fireplace, and at the heart of the kitchen was an old cast-iron stove with black enamelled doors and a tin flue that disappeared into the ceiling. When the agent remarked to the Worleys on how easily the stove could be removed, they looked at one another with the same thought: they would keep it. It came with a boiler that heated the hot water and they would learn how to fire the slow combustion oven. Here, at last, they would have their own elemental hearth. As for the asking price on the property, they could scarcely believe their luck; because it had no water views the house had been classified as just another run-down rural homestead. With the help of Luke’s parents and Anna’s mother, they financed the loan.

  There were nights when Anna lay in bed with last-minute misgivings but Luke, typically, was resolute. And so, in the middle of a humid January, they packed up and moved, though not before Luke had upgraded their espresso machine to a more expensive model. When friends joked about the perils of rural living, of snakes, bushfire and drought, he assumed a deadpan expression. ‘Not a problem,’ he said. ‘It’s the coffee I’m worried about.’

  …

  Their first night.

  It was just after seven on a mellow Saturday evening when they turned off the highway and drove into Garra Nalla. A deep coral sunset flared along the ridge of the western hills; beside the silent headland the lagoon glittered in a wash of silvery pink. The house was musty and dark but when they entered its cobwebbed hall they trembled with a frisson that could only be described as ownership; it was as if the house had been waiting for them. While they unpacked, the boy prowled through the house on his own so that they could hear the squeak of doors along the hallway and the creak of floorboards as he peered into the corners of empty rooms. He was way ahead of them, and he was restless.

  That night, on a mattress on the floor, they lay in one another’s arms and looked up through the unclad window to a moon swollen with radiance. Anna was too excited to sleep; for a time she would drift off, and then wake in a state of relaxed alertness. On the roof a family of possums hissed and snarled like devils, riffs of such comic malevolence that they only made her smile, but the boy was afraid and would not settle. For a long time he wandered up and down the hallway, until at last she c
alled to him through the gloom and he came and nestled beside her at the edge of the mattress. But still he was agitated, and his tiny limbs jerked, so that she pulled the white sheet up to his chin and kissed his blond curls, and stroked the delicate hollow between his shoulder-blades until he was becalmed in sleep.

  *

  Now instead of heading for a coffee-shop on Saturday mornings they lounge together on the wide veranda. Luke, the early riser, has taken his breakfast outside and as Anna opens the screen door to join him, she looks around absentmindedly for the boy. It’s almost as if she expects him to be here every morning, and she must be careful of this; if she begins to take anything for granted, anything at all, then she might break the spell.

  Lazily they begin to browse through the thick weekend papers that Luke has collected from a shop ten kilometres down the highway, but before long these have been left to lie scattered on the deck while they sit quietly outside the kitchen window, staring intently at two small birds that feed in one of the river wattles near the back door. Luke has fetched his binoculars, but he is having trouble adjusting the focus. The binoculars are new, a present from Anna.

  ‘Take your glasses off,’ she says. God, he’s so impractical. Clever, but always slightly distracted and sometimes, even, clumsy. It worries her that in the country, where men are expected to do much of their own maintenance and repairs, he will not be able to keep up with the demands of their run-down property.

  Luke continues to fiddle with the focus. ‘Get the bird book out,’ he whispers. ‘It’s on the coffeetable in the living room. Quick, before they fly away.’

  Anna returns with their newly purchased copy of Simpson and Day’s Field Guide to the Birds of Australia.

  ‘Just get a pad,’ says Luke, ‘and write down the markings. We can look it up later.’