‘How much is it?’ He tried to sound only lightly interested.
‘This one’s one-fifty. Greys Bay’s real estate is quite extraordinary,’ Shoulder Pads said. ‘People buy these places over the phone, sight unseen — and they’re only fishing shacks, mostly. Hardly comfortable. They’re all on rainwater tanks. It amazes me.’
The wooden house was at the bottom of a steep, downwards driveway. On stilts, on tiptoe, the house faced the ocean; the bay curled at the bottom like a foetus, Hut’s Beach nestled calmly between Surge and Edge points. When they walked in, Cray passed straight through the house to a set of sliding doors that were moist and misted with salt air. He opened them to a verandah perching over a view so wide that it would need four or five photos, side by side in panorama, to do it justice photographically. He could almost make out the earth’s curve at the edges of his vision. The water reached out ahead of him and away to the sides in infinite directions.
Rosie came out, stood beside him.
‘Cray.’ He knew she was grinning. ‘Don’t you want to see the rest of the place?’
6
Liza looked surreptitiously at the couple at the next teller.
They were unfamiliar faces, and the bank was one place you didn’t get tourists, not inside, anyway. Most visitors just queued up outside at the machine in the wall, even when there were tellers leaning against their section of counter inside, serving no one, swapping weekend stories. Liza could hear the couple talking about opening a new account. ‘Curran,’ the girl was saying. ‘Like the raisin but without the “t”.’
Must be newcomers, she thought, wondering how long they’d stick it out. Why was it always here, Margaret River, that people ran away to? Couldn’t they find somewhere else to go? Margies was already too busy.
‘Liza, could you enter your PIN, please.’
Liza snapped her thoughts back to the bank teller. ‘Sorry, sorry, Sarah. I’m in a bit of a daze today.’
‘Aren’t we all on a Monday.’ Sarah’s fingers flew over the keyboard, entering account numbers, transaction amounts, her eyes steady on the screen. ‘How’s Sam?’
‘Really well, thanks. Doing well at school. He’s clever on the computer,’ she said, nodding at Sarah’s. ‘How are things with you?’
‘Oh, you know. Steve’s giving me the shits.’ She sighed. ‘He’s decided he wants to move up to Perth.’
‘And you’d rather jump under a passing bus.’
Sarah managed a laugh. ‘Yeah, well, I love it here. My family’s here. Everyone knows us, there’s always someone to talk to. But Steve reckons we’ll get stuck here forever, me at the bank, him at school. I said maybe, but look at the pros of staying …’
She opened her hand, ready to count them on her fingers, and then shook her head and said, ‘There are so many.’
People walked across the office behind her, folders, pens in hand. A potted palm stood dead in the corner.
Sarah looked like she was trying to stop herself from welling up, and Liza began to feel uncomfortable, and sad. She glanced again at the couple standing next to her. The arriving and leaving. This town. She looked at Sarah, and at Mrs Donnelly waiting patiently at the Please wait here until you are called sign, and said, ‘If he wants to go, he has to go, Sarah. You never know how you feel about this place until you see it from a distance.’
Sarah nodded weakly and straightened up a little. ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right,’ she said.
As Liza walked towards the glare of the main street she heard Sarah say, ‘Yes, please, Mrs Donnelly. Sorry to keep you waiting.’
7
‘Kapok-filled piece of crap!’ Cray kicked the bed they’d bought second-hand from a guy leaving town. ‘The next thing we’re buying is a new mattress. A new one, not some hippie snoozer’s cast-off. This belongs at the tip!’ He punched the sides of the futon to try to spread some of the compressed filling towards the bum-shaped dip in the centre, but only managed to create a cloud of dust.
Rosie was shifting the bits of lounge suite around — armchairs side by side, opposite the sofa; either side of the sofa; diagonally opposite one another — but nothing helped the brown and orange seventies relics they’d found at the salvage yard for fifty bucks. She sighed. Piece of crap. Piece of crap. She started singing.
‘Cray,’ she called, laughing, ‘remember that Neil Young song — the one where he just shouts out “piece of crap”, over and over?’
Cray was deadpan. ‘Never heard of it, Rosie,’ he said.
‘Yes you have!’ She looked up at him. He was red in the face from his struggle with the bed.
He started to laugh. ‘Personally, Rosie, I think you’re a fruitcake, and I hate this fucking bed.’
Rosie stopped herself from insisting But you must remember! and instead went into the kitchen, grabbing a bizarre combination of jars from the fridge and concocting a much-needed sugar hit.
In the afternoon, when she had done all the arranging and rearranging she could manage for the day, Rosie walked towards the open sliding doors, out onto the warm wooden balcony that looked over the town, the ocean, the world. The variously coloured wetsuits at Edge Point moved rhythmically with the water’s push and pull, Cray one of them, though she couldn’t tell which of the small shining figures was his.
She rang her parents, to tell them about the house, about Greys Bay; to say hello, really.
‘Rosie! Where are you? How are you!’
‘I’m talking on our new phone, in our new house, Mum — we’ve just moved in. How are you two?’
‘Oh, fine, fine! It’s lovely to hear from you. How’s Ray? And tell me about this house.’
Rosie gave her the run-down excitedly, was pleased her mum wanted to know all the details, to take the guided tour: ‘You walk in the front door and off to your left is the laundry, then you come into the kitchen …’
Her mum sounded pleased. Rosie tried to describe the view, and their verandah overlooking it.
‘You’ll have to come down sometime, you and Dad. When we’ve sorted everything out.’
Afterwards, Rosie was relieved, and felt terrible for the dark things she’d thought about everyone when she and Cray had been leaving Freo; felt like maybe it was her making a big deal of it all along, not them, that she’d got her parents’ expectations way out of proportion. And everyone else’s. Then she remembered the rock on Zoe’s finger, Marty’s twenty-five-year mortgage, and she wasn’t so sure.
‘Life’s so complicated,’ Rosie sighed to Cray, the soles of her feet feeling raspy-dry against the sheets. She was too lazy to think more specifically about the problem, about what was complicated. Often she just couldn’t be bothered unravelling her feelings — it was hard work. And it saved her from getting depressed, if she didn’t think too deeply about whatever it was.
‘Life’s not complicated at all,’ Cray said gently, turning to her, lying beside him. ‘It’s we who make it complicated. We fill it with pieces of crap.’
They looked at each other.
He shook his head. ‘God knows why, but we all bloody do it.’
Rosie farted appallingly. It sounded like a trail bike accelerating. It required emergency action. She pulled the sheets back and flapped a magazine wildly at her bum.
‘Rosie!’
She looked over at him. ‘What?’
His eyes widened. ‘What?’
Rosie nestled down into the bed, opened her book.
Cray tried to organise some words around his indignation. ‘That act of atrocity, that’s what! That … fart! I should call Amnesty International — for bloody domestic torture!’
Rosie grinned. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about, Cray.’
As the smell crept out of the bedding, Cray said, trying not to breathe in, ‘We’re making a bit of headway in simplifying our life, I reckon.’
She looked at him and smiled. They were.
8
Rosie woke with the dust from the move settled on her face, encrusti
ng her eyes, filling her sinuses. She turned to Cray sleepily, peering out of the one eye that would open. Cray was sitting up in bed, his torso bare. ‘You’ll get cold,’ she said, trying to pull him back.
But she saw him looking out at the gathering and ungathering of the water, and she sat up and looked, too, despite the autumn chill to the air.
The water came in, pummelled the rocks and sand, then retreated. It seemed to woo the land, with an intensity of lines and heaves and movement that didn’t exist further out, closer to the horizon. Why is it, she thought, that where the two meet, water and land, there’s this struggle?
She flopped back, closed her eyes against the crisp blue day and tugged at Cray. He flattened his cold fingers on her stomach.
‘No-o-o-o!’ Her eyes peeled open. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Go away!’
Cray rolled on top of her, squashing the air out of her. They lay there a moment, feeling the warmth of one another.
Rosie said, ‘I’m a bit scared to get up, in case I don’t like the place anymore.’
Cray looked reproachful, alarmed.
She laughed. ‘No, no, don’t worry, I’m only kidding.’
‘I can’t wait to get up,’ he said. ‘I’ve been awake since about five. Waiting for you to wake up. Since when did you sleep in, anyway?’
‘Since when didn’t you?’
Rosie stayed in bed while Cray got up like a kid on holiday and started cracking eggs rather dramatically in the kitchen.
‘What are you doing?’ she laughed.
‘Scramblers. Up to it?’
‘Of course.’
She heard him put the things down then, and cross the house to the ocean side. She heard him yank open the sticking sliding doors and the creak of the verandah as he stepped outside. She felt, and smelled, sea air fill the house.
9
Tassie blue gums reached orange tips to the sky. Liza walked in line with a row of young trunks, thermos in hand, wishing the poor buggers didn’t have to be planted in such an unerring grid. She stopped, listening for sounds of Ferg: rustling, pruning, muttering. Sam was at home, eating vegemite on soft white bread — his favourite — and browsing on the internet. Sometimes she’d hear the odd Wow! coming from his room, and she didn’t regret him getting that computer at all. Not as long as they were on the farm and he was still interested in life outside his bedroom; in the river, where she knew he went sometimes before it got dark, though she didn’t let on, not to him, not to Ferg. She often saw him heading off through Mrs Perry’s place, into that striped evening sky. He always went on his own, and she’d watch him moving away from the house, crouching down sometimes to examine some small thing that had caught his eye.
Mike had rung earlier, in high spirits. The doctor said he could come down, had teed up a nurse at the local hospital to keep him on track with the program if he wanted to make the move. Liza wanted to say Don’t come down, don’t come down and get Ferg all messed up again, but how could she — Mike was family, and he was over the moon about his decision. She was going to need to remind Ferg that everyone deserved to feel wanted.
So here she was with a thermos of coffee to tell Ferg what he didn’t want to hear. And she was going to be on his side about it. She would not even insinuate how he ought to feel.
She held a foil package lightly, so the heat from her fingers didn’t melt the chocolate. Mint Slices, her favourite.
‘Stand up, you stubborn bastard.’ He was trying to prop up a young tree against a stake, but it kept sliding away and bouncing back to its angled stance.
‘Maybe a piece of rag tied around it would make it stay, Ferg.’
He turned around. ‘Christ! I didn’t hear you coming. A rag, yeah, I know, but I ran out of your old t-shirts the other day. Mmmm, I hope that’s what I think it is, and what’s that?’
‘Yep, coffee. And some biscuits. My old t-shirts,’ she gave him a death-ray glare.
‘They’re great for farm jobs.’
‘So glad I’m useful for something.’
Ferg let go of the tree, laughing. He sat down on a dry patch of ground, patting the earth next to him for her.
They poured the coffee into enamel mugs, talked about their day.
Eventually, she said, ‘Um, Mike rang. Earlier.’
Ferg looked up at her, learned from her face what he needed to know.
‘Oh, shit.’ His head lolled into his free hand, coffee sloping dangerously in the cup. ‘Shit. When?’
‘Well, he said he’s not sure. He wants you to ring him and you can sort it out together. I think he knows he might be imposing, Ferg, cos he said he’d probably rent a place in town.’
‘Good.’
Liza stopped herself from saying anything more. Ferg got up and walked back to the young tree. He yanked the stake out of the ground. ‘I’ll see you this evening,’ she called out, watching him stride over to the truck, rummage in the tray and locate a mallet.
‘Yep,’ he said, not looking up.
The dull sound of Ferg thumping the stake into the earth echoed around her as she walked back to the house.
10
When the boys were small, Pip carried them over to the orange tree in baskets, and left them under there in the shade like babes in a bible story while she pottered among her fruit trees. Pip could remember, vividly, talking to Fergus and Michael from over in the apples, as she snipped and yanked at the perfect shapes; how she’d hear the boys’ little gargles and squeals, and go over and pick them up, both at once, one in each arm. Fergus was bigger than his brother, but there wasn’t much between them, just a little more than twelve months. Her two boys and her orchard — how they’d helped her to survive those early years, those long cold winters, those twelve-hour days of Jack’s.
Strolling past the dormant lavender, Pip wondered when she’d let the gardening slip away. She cast her mind over the number of decades she’d lived, the way her joints tweaked when she moved around too fast, and how Fergus and Liza stopped her and said, Sit down and relax, Mum, when they thought she was doing too much. Now they did most of it. When had those things become too much? One day? Just too hard? Those salvias needed their old flowering stems cut back. Pip fought back the disturbing thought that actually she might still be capable of these things but had given in to the weakness of age, the laziness of afternoon television and ladies’ bridge, of being someone’s grandmother, and in so doing, had lost something of herself. She reached down and pulled hard on a clump of lovegrass, releasing a spray of sand as it came up.
11
In the fading hour before dinner, while they were waiting for Ferg to come home, Sam stood by Liza as she read the paper, peered over her shoulder.
‘Whatya doing, Mum?’
‘Reading.’
‘Yeah, but what?’
‘The world’s bad news. That’s all they put in here. Terrible stuff. We’re better off without it, it’s depressing.’ Liza flopped the broadsheet over.
Sam said, ‘That’s like the stuff we do in Social Studies. About other people. They have bad lives, don’t they? Poor people in India and places, they don’t even have enough water.’
Liza looked at Sam. Kids, she thought, know everything, and nothing. ‘Come here,’ she said, reaching out for him, and tickling him into a cuddle. ‘That’s true, we are really lucky. We have our health, food on the table, a lovely house, and each other.’ She grinned into him. ‘Shame about the last one, hey?’
‘Yeah. You’re horrible. You guys are lucky to have me. I could be someone else’s son, you know.’ He poked her in the side.
Liza felt it, would feel that poke for a long time afterwards, and she tried to keep her voice light as she said, ‘But we wouldn’t let anyone else have you, Sambo.’
There was a small pause then, before Sam got her a beauty while her defences were down, working his wormy little fingers into her ribs. She hoisted him off her, crying, ‘Dirty rules!’ and he scooted out the door and ran, all the way to where Mrs Perry wa
s watering the hibiscus along the fence.
‘Safe!’ he called.
12
Rosie went into the hotel to get an idea of whether or not there was any part-time work going, and came out with a full-time position, and heat creeping up her back. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to work there, and now she was completely roped into it: uniforms, tax forms, bank account details.
They could do with the money, though, what with the bond and rent in advance they’d had to pay for Greys Bay. And the folks would be pleased, she thought, slightly grimly. Shit. She needed to think this through. She could ring up and say she’d changed her mind. What about the grape-picking thing? Where was Cray when she needed to talk to him? Then again, she didn’t have to think too long over that one.
From the rocks at Surge Point you could almost reach out and touch the surfers. The rocks led right up to the waves, after a thin dusty track that began at the boat ramp and wound through the low bush. You could see their individual take-off styles, you could see where they should be sitting, wanted to shout out Over to your left a bit! when you knew they weren’t quite in the take-off zone, when they’d hump over the frayed edge of the wave as it carried off some other stoked punter.
Rosie perched on a rock waiting for Cray to turn around, feeling like a bit of a surf groupie waiting for her man to come in, which she was, she supposed. Surfers passed her, heading towards the dark water. Most of them were older than the Perth crew; these guys, and the odd chick, thankfully, were at least thirty, they walked quietly, often on their own, with boards under their arms, leg ropes slapping beloved glass with every step. Most did a few back stretches, balancing on a rock, before paddling out from one of the two entry points. Once in, once slippery black, they paddled parallel with the shore for about fifty metres before turning head-on into the swell.
The Break Page 6
