Refuge

by Richard Rossiter

  When he took her hand, she was surprised. She left it there, clasped in his, because she did not know what else to do. She imagined he had a picture in his mind of two lovers walking romantically along an empty beach. Perhaps that was unfair—perhaps he just wanted that minimal, friendly contact of skin on skin—but it felt intrusive, as if he were claiming her. She did not walk with anyone hand in hand, but of course he was not to know that. She had carefully removed her hand, saying she wanted to cool off in the water.

  They did not know each other very well, although they had shared dinner and a film the night before. Then he’d turned up in the morning, wanting to go to the beach again, as if they were the best of friends. He wanted more from Greta than she could give. It would not be the last time that this would happen to her.

  Now, sitting there in the still of the night, she knew she was at a loss, and too full of living in a sadness that she needed to shrug off. She needed a friend. There was Skyler, but she wanted something more: the tactility of flesh, the boldness of a naked body, the race of a heart beneath her.

  She should stop believing everyone she met was lacking in something that was important to her, even though she hadn’t been too sure what that was. Now she thought she knew—she had a word for it, even if it sounded clinical and therefore not really the right word for what it was that she craved. It was Skyler who had provided it for her. Interiority —that was the English word. Innerlichkeit, she said. It seemed strange to her that it wasn’t until she had a label, in English, that she realised she had failed to translate the concept of an inner life to her existence in this country. She had not brought it with her as a package, fully articulated, from Europe to Australia. Now she realised that, both with Skyler and, very differently, with Marvyn, she possessed a life of the imagination, a life that enabled the spirit of self, and place, to come into existence. She needed someone who did not live, only, on the surface. Someone who could see and feel beyond the chatter of everyday life. Someone who believed in mystery.

  She thought again about Marvyn, who largely failed the test of putting feelings and thoughts into words, and who was, of all her friends, lovers, the one who most lived a life hidden away from the public gaze. But because he did not seem to know himself well enough, it was hard to grasp, then and now, what it was they were sharing, apart from intensity of feeling. Maybe, after all, words were not so necessary. Perhaps there was a vocabulary of the senses. Sometimes a shared gaze was sufficient. Anyway, it was all too late now. Again she felt that tightness in her chest and her breathing became shallow.

  She poured a glass of wine and sat there, staring out into the darkness of the night. Perhaps she was too much alone, with too much time to think. She picked up one of the two books she’d started, stared at the print and couldn’t remember what the story was about. She was left with that insistent train of thought that would not leave her alone.

  Unlike Marvyn, Skyler was skilled with words; she felt he knew the language of the soul, but did not possess the depths of Marvyn. Such contradictions. Somehow Skyler was more of an articulate onlooker, almost as if he knew what he should say to her, as if he could mimic empathy and understanding and insight. And yet she felt it was not all pretence; perhaps it came down to the experience required to anchor the words, to provide authenticity, and an acknowledgement that there was a place for silence.

  And then there was Oliver; they had never really sorted out their feelings for each other. She smiled at the thought of his easy embarrassment. She could remember so clearly the very first question he’d put to her: ‘What are you writing about?’ And her response, sounding so formal, no matter how hard she tried: ‘It’s about traditional land-management practices and their relevance for contemporary Australians.’

  ‘By traditional, you mean Aboriginal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He’d nodded and said, ‘I think we have a lot to learn.’ And immediately she’d warmed to him. They had met by chance at a public lecture; they’d got talking and didn’t really stop until he died. His only child, Fyn, lived overseas; she knew Oliver missed him. Perhaps she was some sort of replacement for him, but there was more than that.

  Later, she’d told him how her circuitous journey to the Pilbara had begun, years earlier, in a school project on German explorers. She’d chosen Ludwig Leichhardt, and learned about his attempt to cross Australia from the east coast to the Swan River Settlement in the west. He and his sizeable team had disappeared, and she’d dreamed about becoming an explorer, of going to Australia and finding his remains somewhere in the Great Sandy Desert. Some believed they’d been attacked by Aborigines. She made no mention of her excitement—some years later—in discovering Leichhardt’s re-emergence in the figure of Voss in Patrick White’s novel, which she’d read as part of her Australian fiction course at university. That time of her life had not ended well.

  Now Oliver was dead, and again the feelings of responsibility returned. His absence added to that emptiness in her that she felt would never be filled.

  Greta was not sure she could ever, finally, resolve how to think of herself except as a traveller in a maze that might trap the mind and body, where she might have to, reluctantly, call for help to extract herself from staggering from one blind turn to another. But who could she call? She did not think it would be her elusive neighbour—who was neither Quentin nor Tinny nor Mr Thompson—except for assistance with a firebreak. There was always Skyler, but she thought he was getting sick of her. Too much of the same story.

  Outside, the wind had picked up and the rain was loud on the tin roof. Greta put some of her precious mallee roots into the stove, and after a few minutes turned down the damper. She stared into the heat of the fire. If only simple movement were sufficient.

  To the list of the recent dead in this country of her mind she could add Hetty. Her unlikely friend whom she’d met in the local library. Another victim of the fire. They were in the new books section and Hetty had asked her to reach up to the top shelf for the Jeanette Winterson book she wanted, Lighthousekeeping. It was a title that Greta had recently read. They started talking, and over the following months a friendship began to develop.

  Hetty, with the wisdom of age and experience, which certainly did not always go together. Someone who ignored conventions and who knew about gardens and flowers, the significance of wild and cultivated spaces, how their existence brought a different self into being. She remembered Hetty telling her about her expectations from friends and her disappointments. Until, she said, she realised that it was herself. It was what she lacked—that’s what she was disappointed in. Hetty said it was late to learn such an obvious lesson, but to be grateful that she had done so. By then, of course, many of Hetty’s friends were dead. She had told Greta, ‘You are the first person I have met in a long time who I can talk to about such matters.’ Greta remembered her own pleasure at hearing these words. Did she blush? With Hetty she started to be the woman she thought she was capable of being. It was different from the self that emerged with a man.

  She was just at the point where she would call Hetty a friend—and then the day came when the old woman had gone out of her house, left it behind, presumably to escape the fire, but was caught in its path. Had she stayed put, she would have survived. Her house was in no danger—but how was she to know? All three, Marvyn, Oliver, Hetty, were still with her; at times she could hear one of their voices, glimpse a smile, even sense breath on her cheek. But she did not think, then or now, that their bodies required solace or companionship. They were not lonely; they were not available for a death notice or an email that would be read from some heavenly site. She could not understand how rational people wrote messages to the dead, how governments could announce that the bodies of soldiers returning from battlefields would not be left by themselves in a plane or a train or an ambulance. Always someone would be there with them to hold their cold and lifeless hands. This constant blurring of life and death puzzled her. Was it really because, after all, there
was a belief in life after death? In spite of shallow and shoddy materialism, was there a tenacious, contradictory belief in the world of the spirit? Or was it, simply, that death was such an insult in these times when everything was under the control of humankind? All she knew was that the bodies of three people whom she’d loved were rotting in their graves, or their ashes scattered on the ocean, and that she had not forgotten them.

  Thirteen

  Tinny watched the movement of the wave breaking near the shore, then looked further out to sea. Nothing. There was a flat spot coming up after the set that had just rolled in. He pushed his dinghy into the water, far enough for the outboard not to snag. He reached over and pulled on the cord. On the second go the motor started. Beautiful. He shoved the bow into the waves and at the same time levered himself into the boat. He put the motor into gear and slowly increased the revs as he threaded his way through the narrow channel in the reef out into the bay. He was wary of the incoming swell, which was side-on to the direction of the boat; every so often he pushed hard on the steering column of the motor, pointing the dinghy into the waves. He didn’t gun the motor like some people did. He didn’t like the juddering thump of the boat when you travelled too fast. It wasn’t as if he was in a hurry to reach his fishing spot, and he liked the excited feeling in his bum from the rise and fall of the boat in the swells. If you didn’t look back at the houses clustered on the hillside of the bay, you could be anywhere, he thought, looking at the huge expanse of ocean in front of him. Then he glanced at North Point and spied the cluster of surfers straddling their boards, waiting for a wave that was better than the last one as it surged underneath them.

  When Tinny reached the patch of reef that was one of his favourite fishing spots he dropped the anchor, letting out a long line so he hung back a safe distance. He certainly didn’t want to be caught up in a breaking wave. The wind was blowing offshore, so the berley that he’d mixed up to bring in the schools of fish would drift further out to sea and close to the reef. Tinny preferred using a handline on the boat, not his rod. That way he felt a close connection to the ocean, the tug of the fish, the pressure of the line on his fingers as it zinged from side to side if the fish was a big one. Sometimes he took the boys fishing but the truth was he preferred being in the boat by himself. Not just because it made fishing easier—you didn’t have to worry so much about getting your lines tangled, especially around the propeller—but because you could just sit there and feel the swell, the wind, listen to the rush of water against the boat, sense the excitement of a fish on your line and know you belonged there, that you were part of it. If there was anyone else present there was always some talk, some necessary chat that took you away from the moment. And anyway, Skel and Rock could come with him to the coast whenever they felt like it. He knew they got bored in the dinghy if the fish didn’t bite.

  He watched the slow spread of the oil slick, the quick dispersal of the berley, and then saw the flick of fish as they broke the water five metres behind the boat. Herring. His heart beat faster. Already he imagined them in the bucket. Such lovely fish for frying, and for smoking and pickling. He cast his line baited with a piece of fresh, white bread pushed into a ball on the hook. Straightaway he felt the thrill of a fish nudging, then taking the hook. Then momentarily pulling the light line out of his hand. Tinny was in his element.

  ‘C’mon, c’mon,’ he called to them. ‘You can do it, fish. Open your mouth, swim faster. C’mon fish, c’mon and take the bait—take the bait, you little beauties.’

  Later, a small school of garfish arrived. He caught three of them. Gardies, so nice to sashimi with some soy sauce. They used to be his mother’s favourite, and they were Skel’s favourite, and Prudence Peachblossom’s. Tinny would present them to her cleaned, but with their elegant heads still attached, all shiny on the plate. In the early evening he would cook for her, the carefully boned fillets, the flesh white and delicate. She would pour herself a glass of white wine and he would have a beer. That must have been before the arrival of babies, before she began to be unhappy.

  Fourteen

  Prue was thinking about Alex in ways she would not have dreamed of years ago, when she lived with Tinny. The current Prue was a surprise, even to herself. She did not think she had become harder or more calculating in her response to other people, especially lovers; it was simply a case of being realistic. She had learned that you could look at men—and probably women—who might be of some interest and consider, objectively, rationally, whether they were, potentially, of more interest. First of all, you tick all the obvious boxes of what you had in common, then the generic boxes of what she thought constituted basic human values, like thoughtfulness and compassion and honesty and unselfishness and so on. Next were the sensible boxes, the ones you expected in any potential partner—a steady job, a reasonable income, a lack of encumbrances (harder to find as she, and they, got older) and a sense of security about their sexuality. She had gone through all this preamble before she and Alex had become serious about a relationship, when they both acknowledged it was more than a pleasurable interlude.

  But now Alex had proposed something that would take it—or them—to a different level. He wanted not only to live with her, but to buy a house that they jointly owned. He’d said: ‘If I move into your place, or you move into my place, it’s still yours or mine. Someone feels more proprietorial, as if the other is a visitor, a little less in control. I don’t want that. I think both of us should feel equally advantaged—and disadvantaged.’

  She’d replied: ‘We could decide to rent a place together—a trial, if you like.’

  And Alex had said: ‘I don’t think I’d be comfortable with renting. It’s like putting something off, or not really being at home. It would mean both of us were in someone else’s house. Neither of us would belong. So, to buy or not to buy. To move in or not move in. What do you think?’

  Prue was now trying to work out what she thought, and not only about moving in with Alex; she was also revisiting what she thought of Alex in general. Beyond the boxes there was a cluster of highly subjective characteristics or qualities in him that she knew she valued. She liked the tone of his voice, the way he smiled, the smell of his skin. She realised, for the first time, that these were the things that had attracted her to Tinny. She could see now that the problem with Tinny, for her, was that most, if not all, of what she had come to think of as the necessary preliminary boxes had a cross in them, not a tick. So the relationship was doomed to end. Once it got seriously burdened with domesticity and children, you needed those other boxes. The only problem she could see with this logic was that she was the one who’d ended up leaving the children behind—but that was not what she’d wanted. Tinny flatly refused to let them go. She believed the longer she stayed, the worse a mother she would become—and the worse a wife, if that were possible. They would all be better off without her. Or was this simply a self-deceiving justification? In the end it wasn’t a rational process. She felt she’d reached screaming point, where everything was closing in on her. Those flimsy tin walls, the never-ending noise of the ocean, the dismal sound of the black cockatoos, not to mention the crows. She was no longer a person. She’d cried for weeks, but knew her only option was to get out. For many months afterwards she felt she would have to return because she missed the boys so much. If she did so, she believed she would destroy all their lives and so she stayed away. Visiting them would only prolong the agony for all of them. Eventually the pain lessened, but her children’s absence was always there at the edge of her consciousness.

  She came back to the present, pressing question. Did she want not only to live with Alex but to share property with him? On a practical—that is, economic—level she could see no great problem. Both of them would bring to the arrangement similar financial security in terms of their jobs (he was a senior teacher in a government school) and, she suspected, similar bank balances. She earned more money than he did, but then his superannuation was better than hers. On the o
ther hand, looking further ahead, she had two children who would outlive her in the normal course of events, and who would thus expect to inherit whatever she possessed, whereas he had no children. Would her children expect to inherit property that belonged to both of them—to get Alex’s share as well? He did have an aged mother, whom he helped to support, and a younger sister who had three children and a rich lawyer husband. There were some potential problems, but all in all she could see no serious impediments in regard to shared property.

  The problem she did have was simpler and, she thought, more complex. She didn’t love Alex. She enjoyed his company, liked the sex, respected him, knew they could spend long periods together without getting on each other’s nerves, and so on. In recent years she, Prudence Browne, had learned to think in terms of systems, mapping the big picture, seeing clearly, disinterestedly, the forces at work in particular circumstances. She could stand back from the idiosyncrasies of the individual person, including herself, and make judgements about likely outcomes. That was her skill as a clinical psychologist—to explain to her clients how they were a part, often a very small one, of a much bigger world in which they had some control, a degree of influence, but it was nothing like the autonomy claimed by the popular gurus of self-determination.

  The challenge, now, was to work out where love came into the equations that she was so good at establishing.

  Fifteen

  It was a Saturday afternoon and the weather was overcast. A string of such days created a heaviness of spirit that Greta found difficult to overcome. The appearance of summer had been brief and deceptive. Visiting Tinny’s was not likely to lighten her mood, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do. When she arrived, Tinny and Skel were sitting in the kitchen. Without asking, Tinny poured her a cup of tea.