Refuge

by Richard Rossiter

  ‘Yes. But I suppose your wife and son can only die once.’

  ‘If that’s the whole story—if that’s all it was. I wonder if the two of them, this Steve and Clive, were in it together somehow. Why did Steve tell such lies? Because I didn’t want to talk to him in a coffee shop? It seems ridiculous; it looks like hate. I’m almost certain that he lit the fire that destroyed everything—well, not everything—at Oliver’s. And that killed Hetty. That’s what the police now think, but they can’t find him, so they say. His behaviour is out of all proportion.’

  ‘What’s this about the coffee shop?’

  ‘Oh. Well. This Steve came up to me once, in town, when I first arrived here. I was in that new cafe, sitting by myself and reading. Suddenly he was standing next to me, and then he sat down without even asking and started a very strange conversation. About how he knew just by looking at me that we were soulmates. Sleazy and creepy, I would say. He said something about how we must have met before; I think he meant in another life. It’s never really stopped. It’s possible he’s also been hanging around the shed, and maybe sort of following me. I caught sight of him once down at that part of the coast that’s hard to get to unless you come through here.’

  ‘What else did he say? How did you respond to his special friend line?’

  ‘I suppose I didn’t really. I was a bit shocked and just turned away and said nothing. I suppose his strangeness frightened me. Eventually he stood up and pushed his chair in a bit violently. I think he’s really odd, and, as I said, he’s also a friend of Clive’s, which is not surprising. As he was leaving, he said, “Remember one thing—I’m your neighbour, and God said, ‘Love your neighbour’.” The way he said it was like a threat. Sneering. And not long after that he approached me again, when I was in the supermarket; he came up behind me and stood very close, without actually touching. I could feel his breath. It was horrible.’

  ‘Yeah, there are some strange people around. I’ve had some of them as friends—even a wife—but I don’t think they were odd in a threatening, nasty way.’

  ‘Tinny,’ said Rock, who’d been listening and pretending he wasn’t really there, ‘please don’t start again. I’m sure Greta doesn’t want to know any more about you and Mum.’

  ‘Mum, eh?’

  ‘Yeah, Mum. And you,’ said Rock, as he moved towards the door.

  ‘Well, let’s forget about Peaches. Do you think what happened was enough to make Steve hate you?’

  ‘Not any normal person. But I think he was convinced we were somehow meant for each other. Some decree from up above—from whatever strange god he believes in. It’s ridiculous. I didn’t even know him but, in addition to some divine plan, I think he was convinced of his charm, his irresistible magnetism. And I started getting these odd, cryptic notes in the mail, with quotes from the Bible. I’m sure they were from him. There’s no one else … I presume what he wanted was a relationship. Crazy. And, because he couldn’t get what he wanted … Childish, dangerous, vengeful, I know. I was slow—it just didn’t cross my mind that anything would come of it. And there’s one other thing: I don’t understand how Clive now knows differently—knows that I wasn’t anywhere near the accident.’

  ‘It’s a small community—someone could easily have known you weren’t around at the time. Or your strange friend might have told him himself. Maybe he got some pleasure out of making Clive look an idiot, a dangerous one at that.’

  ‘Perhaps … And he is not my friend.’

  ‘No. Sorry. Of course not.’

  Twenty-six

  The days following her visit to Tinny’s had not been easy. The more she thought about Clive and what he’d told her, the angrier she became. What he’d done to her at the coast was a planned, calculated attack. He must have followed her on previous occasions, got to know her patterns—the fact that she walked all the way, the fact that she was alone. She was sure it was not an opportunistic, spur-of-the-moment action. And then to hang around afterwards—doing what? Watching her, unconscious, at the edge of the ocean? She became even more convinced that he was sick in the head. In the end, it was this that stopped her going to the police a second time. The man was capable of anything and she would not be safe, could not be protected from him, especially living here, no matter what the authorities said. Perhaps Skyler could give her some advice, but that would mean one more person would know what had happened, one more who might think the police should be involved.

  Now she locked the doors and the windows, even during the day. Summer had arrived early and the shed was swelter-ing, it needed the passage of the sea breeze in the afternoons and evening to cool down. Her nights were broken, troubled. She woke one morning with tears streaming down her face; she could feel Marvyn’s breath on her cheek. She did not believe it was a dream.

  A week later, she got out of bed at first light, woken by a pair of kookaburras that anticipated the sunrise with their crazy laugh. She would walk along a track parallel to the ocean and go for a morning swim at a little bay not far south. She felt safer outside and she was not going to let fear of a madman affect everything she did, or wanted to do.

  By the time she got there the sun was up and the water sparkling. Confident that there was no one about to see her, she entered the water without her swimmers. For some reason she still couldn’t call them bathers; to her it sounded like the person, not the costume—but then so did swimmers, so there was no logic. It was hard to explain why swimming naked was so different from the experience of swimming with such a small portion of your body covered with two pieces of light fabric. For a moment the water took her breath away, but then she dived in and swam strongly out to sea, stroking and breathing and kicking with such ease that she felt she never wanted to stop. When she slowed and trod water and looked back at the shore, she was surprised at how far she had come. Far enough for the sharks to get her at feeding time. There was no resistance to the movement of her feet and legs and yet she stayed buoyant, her head out of the water, like an inquisitive seal or turtle pausing to look around. This is where she belonged, with nothing between her skin and her watery surroundings, there and not there, like air. She thought of the woman she’d seen, years ago, at this beach, so petite with her long, black hair in dreadlocks, dark eyes like pointed olives, swimming out until she all but disappeared from sight. Presumably she had finally turned around, but maybe not. Did the temptation to keep going, stroke for stroke, kick for kick, breath for breath, overcome her? She’d looked like a mermaid anyway, going back to where she belonged. Greta rose to the height of an incoming wave and kicked her legs, eyes on the distant shore.

  She lay for a while on the cool sand, in the slowly warming day, stilling her breath. Nothing could spoil this morning, the calm she now felt.

  As she approached the two-wheel track to her house from the pathway to the beach, she caught sight of a figure thirty metres or so in front of her, walking quickly. For a moment he was no one she knew—and then he became Clive, purposeful and, most shocking, once again wearing heavy leather gloves like she’d seen on men who were welding. She turned around and went back to the beach.

  Twenty-seven

  Sometimes Skel needed to run. Like this morning, in the school holidays. He couldn’t remember what his dream was about but he had to get up and have a piss. He went outside and peed onto the trunk of a small marri tree. That was where he went if he didn’t use the toilet. He stood there, wondering why he always used the same spot, the same tree. The wind was chilly at this hour, but later it would warm up, get hot. He didn’t want to go back to bed and read his book, and it was too early to start breakfast. Tinny would be up soon; ages yet before Rock would move.

  He pulled on his shorts and sandshoes, and a T-shirt that was a bit smelly, but that didn’t matter. He started running as soon as he left the shed, slowly at first, but then faster, until he felt that the rhythm and speed of his arms and legs and the air breathing into his chest and out again was just as it should be, all together,
everything smooth, like an engine. That’s what he felt like, moving along—nothing could stop him, he could run forever. When he got to the coast and ran up the last small sandhill before the rush down to the water, he stopped. He stood there, his hands on his knees, gulping in air, waiting for his heart to slow. He walked down to the water, took off his shirt and shoes and ran into the ocean, screaming like a madman, and bellyflopped into the shallows, spray all around him. He was a whale thrashing the surface, white everywhere. He was unstoppable.

  He lay on the sand, his head on his hands, still drawing long breaths. The sun drying and warming his back. He shivered a little.

  He walked along the coast, towards the little bay where Tinny liked to fish. His feet sank into the sand when the waves rolled in, tumbling a million fragments of pink shell in their ebb and flow. He could see schools of baitfish in the waves and hoped he would spot something bigger chasing them. Sometimes you saw whales migrating north, their spouts spraying water, or their flukes beating on the surface. If he kept his eye out, he would see dolphins and maybe a seal. Their flippers could trick you—they looked like a shark fin, until you saw a whiskery face poking out of the water. He thought they looked confused, like he did when he went snorkelling and put his head up to see where he was.

  Skel came to some rocks poking out into the water and had to walk around them. He put his shoes on because here the reef was sharp. He walked with his head down, looking into the holes for fish and other sea creatures, maybe an octopus. He inched his way under an overhanging ledge, scattering the rock crabs as he went, some with orange claws, others with black. Tinny said the orange ones were the best bait if you wanted to catch a groper.

  When he came out at the small, sandy beach he could see a woman walking into the water. She was naked. It took him a moment before he realised it was their neighbour. He retreated a little and stood there, beneath the overhang, waiting. He could see the white patches on her body, her breasts, and where the bottoms of her bathers would be. He couldn’t look away from her. She didn’t look in his direction, but he stepped back further under the ledge and watched as she entered the water with a neat dive. His dick was tight against his shorts. His eyes followed her movements: every now and then a part of her body would show—her shoulders, her white bottom—as she swam strongly, parallel to the beach. He watched her walk out of the water, saw the dark patch of hair between her legs, and then he turned around, feeling excited and ashamed. When he looked back she was lying on the beach in her bathers.

  As he walked home, he could bring the picture of Greta to his mind. Years later he could summon this image of his neighbour on an empty beach without her clothes on, although after a time the edges of his memory blurred and he couldn’t be sure how much he was remembering and how much he was making up.

  As he neared the shed, he could hear Rock and Tinny talking and remembered he was worried about his brother, or himself. Last night Rock had said that he had really liked being in the city and seeing their mother, and maybe he would like to live there, if she would have him.

  Twenty-eight

  The way they found out that Greta was no longer staying in the shed was when Rock and Skel went to visit her. They were sorry she wasn’t there. They reckoned she understood what it was like to have Tinny for a father, and a mother who’d left to find herself. And to live in a tin shed a long way from your friends and neighbours. To top it off she’d caught Skel in her house when he shouldn’t have been there, prying—and she hadn’t yelled at him. They knew why she was worried about Clive, who, up until she’d talked to Tinny, was someone they knew by sight because of his scars, and everyone had heard about how his wife and child had been killed in an accident that wasn’t his fault. They felt sorry for Clive but couldn’t understand how he could have followed Greta to the coast and tried to strangle her. All on the word of a mate.

  They walked slowly, dragging out the time it would take before they got to her place. They didn’t have a reason that they knew of for going to visit her. Perhaps they would think of something along the way. Some question, or a problem they wanted to discuss. Or maybe there was something they could help her with—perhaps she wanted a hole dug somewhere for her rubbish, or to shift the dunny. Rock pinched his nose with his fingers and said, ‘Would you like a hand with your dunny?’ Skel pushed him off the narrow track that had started to develop between their place and hers.

  ‘I think we should call her No-name and be done with it. That’s sort of a name,’ said Skel.

  ‘Greta?’

  ‘No, stupid. Our mother. Tinny has enough names for all of us, so we don’t need to have one.’

  Rock thought about it for a moment. ‘Maybe we could call her Mum, someday. I mean when we’re with her, not just talking about her.’

  ‘I don’t reckon. It’s too late. We’re too old for a mother.’

  ‘Everybody needs a mother, and a father, even if you don’t know it.’

  ‘Even Tinny and Greta?’

  ‘Maybe they’re old enough. But the way Tinny goes on about Prudence Peaches makes you wonder. There’s something missing for him.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Skel. ‘And they’re all dead, aren’t they? Our grandparents. That makes them orphans, Tinny and Peaches.’

  ‘But if you’re really old, like sixty, you can’t expect to still have your mum and dad. You can’t be someone’s little boy or girl then—it would be ridiculous.’

  When they reached Greta’s they still hadn’t thought of an excuse, but as it turned out they didn’t need to because she wasn’t home. They turned around and walked back again, feeling disconsolate. ‘She doesn’t seem to miss anyone, Greta. She’s not like Tinny.’

  They went to visit her the next day, and the day after that, at different times. They asked Tinny if he knew whether she’d gone away.

  ‘Didn’t say anything to me about it,’ he said. ‘You’d think she would, just to keep an eye on the place.’

  Twenty-nine

  No matter how familiar, her hands tensed, she saw the white of her knuckles in the brown skin, nearly black. The whine of the engines reached fever pitch, she closed her eyes and the plane rushed down the runway towards the bump of hills in the east. She was doing it again, she thought, running away. She did not feel the plane lose contact, the earth slipping away from them. Later, it sat there, presumably at a great height, throbbing and motionless, nowhere; she could be sitting in an elongated picture theatre.

  In Singapore she changed planes, and the silent man who sat next to her on the first leg did so again. She ate couscous, drank shiraz, watched a film about Keats, another about an Aboriginal band, singing and dancing. After eating, the man became talkative: he told her he was in mining, that a plane had crashed, killing many friends. She was weightless, closed her eyes, slept, dreamed, woke. She was moving backwards. In London, at the airport, people looked at her. She was wearing sandals and the air was freezing. She must be from Australia. In Hamburg, Eve met her at the airport. She moved there from Berlin; she had a beautiful child. They drove to her apartment and drank coffee, ate cake. She was home again. ‘Welcome home,’ said Eve. ‘We didn’t think we would ever see you again.’ They talked in English, at Eve’s request, although she was already very competent. Greta did not ask about Reinhard, Eve’s brother-in-law, and hers, the father of two girls almost the same age, cousins and sisters. She wondered, when Eve looked at her, who she was seeing. She did not know herself. She slept for twelve hours.

  Eve showed her the Elbe Philharmonic Hall, finally completed. She spoke about it as if it belonged to her, as if it was her dream, her building, a sign of what Hamburg— Germany—was capable of. It was ‘majestic, awe-inspiring, already an icon’. It was built on top of an old warehouse, it was the past and the future, at night a ship moving down the Elbe, by day a giant bird spreading its wings. It was a cultural masterpiece and a desired residential address. ‘Phoenix rising.’ Out of what ashes? Eve did not tell her that the authority responsible for
the building had run out of funding. Instead, she said: ‘We must get you some clothes, something warm.’

  It was true—she should have thought more about snow and ice. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was foolish of me. I left in a rush. I needed to get away.’

  Eve did not press her for an explanation, and she felt grateful. That would come later, the interrogation, and she had not decided what she would tell her. I got frightened, so I hopped on a plane for twenty-four hours, travelled halfway around the world? All because a man told me about the death of his wife. And he wore gloves. He put his hands around my throat … Unlikely.

  Thirty

  Tinny was absorbed in the challenge of his body. He was still worried about his bum and sat on the outdoor dunny, straining away. It was either this or the opposite—a desperate sprint to get there in time. And although it was hard to be sure, because of the distance of the long drop, he thought his turds had changed. The colour and texture and smell. He thought he might be rotting from the inside—but what to do? He was inclined to blame Peaches for causing so much upset in his life. She should have kept her distance and then he wouldn’t be having arguments with Skel and Rock, and Rock wanting to leave, and asking questions that were difficult to answer. And there was the further worry about his neighbour, who seemed to have disappeared. He hoped she was alright; he missed her occasional visits, and she was often now in his thoughts. Rock and Skel continued to check but she was never there, and the shed was locked.

  Tinny tipped some lime over the poo, then put the lid down. He liked this lid. It had a snake on it that he’d made out of a strip of iron heated up in a mate’s forge. It curled around on the seat and lifted its head up for a handle. In the dark, it was easy to mistake for the real thing. On the dunny, Tinny had been thinking about lots of things.