The Break

by Deb Fitzpatrick

  He shouted through the starting drizzle, ‘When the wind’s down, you can surf that wave.’ He pointed to a heaving mass, the white whipping the water to cloudy turquoise. Tiny pins of rain began to hit their faces.

  ‘Christ, look at the sky! We’d better go back.’

  ‘But your news …’

  ‘I’ll tell you when we’re home.’

  When they stepped back, on to the town side of the hill, out of the wet, salty wind, warm stillness filled their ears, and Rosie’s cheeks glowed. They ran for it, up the steep grey bitumen that skirted the houses, till they met the street that stole away towards their own place.

  Rosie and Cray watched the sky through the sliding doors. Inside it seemed stuffy, after all that air. But the violet sky would move on soon enough, and the turquoise lagoon of Hut’s Beach once again reflect up at them.

  ‘It was a guy called Gus, on the phone before. He runs a board-shaping place out the back of Margies.’

  Rosie turned to look at him. ‘Are you getting a new board made?’

  ‘No. Well, I might.’ He laughed. ‘But I rang him to see about … work.’

  The horizon and the sun reached for each other, the slow release of post-storm colours.

  ‘Work.’

  ‘Yeah. Shaping boards.’ Cray ran his hand through the air, his arm cutting a smooth line before the evening water. He looked over at her, grinned. ‘What do you reckon?’

  Rosie was still slightly over-oxygenated, she thought. She tried to remember back to when they decided to move away, to how impossible everything had felt then, with their jobs, how stuck they felt, how funnelled. She nearly caught it, that desperation, it dipped towards her and then away like a cautious bird, but it was enough to remember the rest.

  31

  ‘They’re going to think I’m strange with this skirt on,’ she said to Cray in front of the mirror. ‘I know Dad won’t like it.’

  ‘Won’t he? Why not?’

  ‘Not Country Road enough.’ All the colours, she thought. A bit hippie-looking. And it reached right down to her ankles.

  Cray was gone, though. ‘A quick surf before they arrive,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be long! Can you get back before they get here? Cray? It’s important!’

  The flywire door creaked, and she heard Cray’s knee cracking all the way up the driveway.

  Rosie looked back in the mirror. Her throat felt laced up like a school shoe.

  Rosie concentrated on making the tea not too strong.

  ‘What a super skirt, love,’ her mum beamed, unpacking a bag of fruit and biscuits and magazines, putting them neatly on the counter.

  Rosie looked at her mum.

  ‘It’s lovely, lovely and colourful. Young people only seem to wear black these days.’

  ‘Yes, very nice, Rosie,’ her dad said.

  ‘Where’s Ray?’ her mum asked.

  ‘Oh … he’s probably just getting out of the water, he’ll be back in a minute, he’s looking forward to seeing you guys.’

  They looked around. Her dad tried not to appear impressed by the view but Rosie saw how his eyes hung on it, and how they swung around the room over the furniture, the TV, the dust, the multiple Tracks magazines, the coffee mugs (shit, she hadn’t noticed those when she was cleaning).

  ‘Good view, though those sliding doors could do with a bit of a clean,’ he said.

  She glanced at them. He was right, but was that all he could say?

  ‘And has Ray found some work yet?’ he added.

  Rosie’s mum looked across at her. Don’t mind him, she winked. Your dad worries.

  ‘Well, yeah, I have, and Cray’s been talking to someone about work.’

  They sat up slightly in their chairs, then. Tried to avoid looking at each other in surprise. Failed.

  Don’t ask, don’t ask where.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you want sugar today, Dad, or did you bring your sweeteners with you?’

  ‘Oh, no, I didn’t. Yes, half a teaspoon please, dear,’ he said, sending another look to her mum, who tried to shake her head without moving it.

  Rosie carried the cups over, and when she’d sat down, she looked at them and said, ‘Cray might be starting work at a local surfboard shaping business, designing boards, and I’m working at the hotel.’ And waited for the silence.

  They waded through it.

  ‘Well …’ her dad started, ‘are you enjoying it?’

  What? Had he popped a valium or something? Not: Where’s that going to get you?

  He relaxed his forehead at her look, nodded at her to go ahead.

  ‘Yep. It’s not bad,’ she said guardedly.

  ‘Well, that’s good,’ he said. And he settled back to drink his tea.

  Rosie and her mum stared at each other. Rosie got the Tim Tams quick smart. Cray came in dripping, enthusiastic, noisy, and the three of them exchanged kisses and handshakes as Rosie looked down at the patterns on her skirt.

  32

  It was hard to see the original words under the scrawly work of the vandal. Liza studied the poster, finally making out the original: RAID (Residents Against Inappropriate Development). It was an action response group (sounded like a kid’s toy, Liza thought, complete with battlezone vaporiser) and there was an emergency meeting to be held that night at the recreation centre. The rec centre was where all the town’s events took place, from footy matches and theatre productions to underage gigs for the town’s kids. As she walked down the highway, Liza saw the flyers stuck up on the windows of the burger joint, the hotel, the hardware store and the crystal shop, all of them defaced to re-read: RAVE (Residents Against Valuable Employment). Liza laughed briefly; it irritated her that this was clever and funny, and momentarily she felt like ripping it down.

  She wandered down to the arcade to pick up the things she’d come for. She needed to replenish their house supplies, since she’d been putting a lot of things into Mike’s cottage over the last few weeks — soap, loo paper, shampoo, that sort of thing. And she wanted to get a new pillow for him, since the other one was lumpy, not that he’d complained. She bought a stack of five plain soaps in addition to the fruit flavours she chose for their own shower. Ferg would mutter at the appearance of an effusive orange cake, but she and Sam loved them, reckoned that tangerine and grapefruit were the truest-smelling, came out of the shower and cracked each other up with fruity jokes.

  That night Liza wondered what to wear, knew there’d be a lot of the town’s hippie community attending (certainly more than the town’s farming community), and she worried that she’d look straight, motherly, in her gear. Standing in front of the wardrobe, she chastised herself for wasting energy on that stuff — hadn’t she got over it years ago? Crossly, she yanked on her most misshapen farm gear, and tried to ignore Ferg when he raised his eyebrows in surprise at her. Before he changed her mind, Liza said, ‘Right, where’s Sam? Let’s go,’ and headed out the front door. Behind her, Ferg grabbed the car keys and slammed the door.

  Liza rolled and unrolled the sleeves of her shirt, looked over at Sam and Ferg and then around the hall. There were about a hundred seats set up, and people were flowing in, some heading straight for the front rows, others seeing friends and piling into spare seats around them. Two chairs were set up on the stage next to a big silver seventies microphone. As seats filled up, Liza began to notice who wasn’t there. The hotel proprietors, she mused. Members of council. Predictable.

  After a minute Ferg leaned over and mumbled, ‘Uh, what does RAID stand for again, Lize?’

  Cray caned the Woody along Rockcliffe Road. They weren’t going to miss this, he thought, it was an opportunity to get into the community side of things, to do something useful. He was aware of how much he and Rosie had kept to themselves since moving down, didn’t want it to become too much of a habit. Rosie didn’t agree, he knew, though she was the one who found out about this whole development thing in the f
irst place, but there was a limit to the kind of solitude she talked about. And sometimes he wasn’t completely convinced by Rosie’s What I really want statements. He flicked on the high beams, lighting up the road in advance, and felt for Rosie’s hand.

  ‘Have you heard both sides of the story here, Liza?’

  Liza and Sam turned to look at Ferg.

  ‘What exactly is the other side, Ferg?’

  Ferg looked at Sam to the left and Liza to the right of him, and drew a breath. ‘Yes,’ he began wearily, ‘there usually are two sides to most stories, guys. But I can see you’ve made your minds up.’ He looked at Liza, shook his head. ‘Try to teach Sam the broader view next time, Liza, so he can decide for himself.’

  ‘Oh, really …’

  ‘I did decide for myself, Dad!’

  Ferg nodded. ‘Yeah. Okay.’

  Liza hung a look on him before the three leaned back into their plastic chairs.

  Sam shut his eyes for a moment against the talking and moving around him, tried to bring a constellation into his mind’s eye. Just black and the perfection of those clustered bluewhite places.

  Across the hall, Liza saw the couple from the bank that day, sitting a few rows over from them. They were talking, looking relaxed, laughing occasionally. Liza looked away, looked past Ferg at Sam, and though she felt a small, empty balloon in her gut, she winked at him. Between them, Ferg drummed his fingers across his knee.

  33

  Rosie strolled up the main street; she had fifteen minutes to kill before her shift started. The main drag, she thought, grinning, was a classic mix of daggy country-town shopping and alternative gift shops and cafes, punctuated by the heavy roar of road trains carrying everything from massive tree-trunks to tankers of fuel. Heading south, up the slow hill, she looked across the road at the draper’s, the oldest shop in town and not known particularly for its movement with the times. Decades-old mannequins posed naked and limbless in the window. Rosie had ventured in once or twice. Marketing tricks certainly weren’t employed to get people in. The dusty gloomy place had racks jam-packed so tightly with haberdashery, underwear, leisurewear, sports gear and workwear that you could hardly part it to look. Or it was stacked on shelves reaching right up to the ceiling so you needed to get one of the grey-skirted ladies to climb up a ladder to retrieve your size.

  Further up the road was the local Retravision store, which, unlike its city counterparts, sold underpants. And garden hose attachments, packets of screws and nuts, gas cylinders, TVs, letterboxes. Out the front of the shop, in bargain bins, were packets of pegs (500s), sets of tea towels, and the loose, unpackaged undies. You could touch them, pale blue daisies or racing cars, take your pick.

  Then, of course, there was the Rainbow Shop, which sold wind chimes and aromatherapy stuff, gypsy girl clothes, jewellery from Thailand and funky rugs. Incense burned as you entered, and Bob Marley sang mantras from the stereo. The dressing room was a cubicle constructed from hanging sarongs, and in it were handwritten signs mentioning shop-lifting and threatening karma.

  Free time up, Rosie walked into the hotel, swapping hellos with regulars and staff, tying her apron around her hips. Phil and Tony leaned against the bar, hands on weeping glasses, staring at nothing. They moved a little when she stood behind the taps to survey the afternoon business. A few touros having coffee, the Rainbow Shop woman having an early beer with the bloke from the gourmet cheese factory, Cole and Corynne and Rebecca winding down from their lunch shift, about to approach Rosie for a freebie.

  Phil’s stubby was empty. ‘Staying for another, Phil?’

  ‘Yeah, why not.’ He laughed, the grubby sound soon turning into his wheezing Craven cough, sending his colour up a few notches.

  Tony chuckled. ‘Gotta kill them cancer sticks, Phil,’ he said, flipping the top on his own Benson and Hedges Special Filters.

  After serving them, Rosie went outside into the sun, to collect a few glasses from the early-afternooners. People relaxed around the wooden tables, sunnies taming the brightness of the day.

  A gaggle of kids passed on their way to the river, science teacher heading them up, grimacing enviously to a mate in the beer garden. Catching one of the kids’ hats as it flew off the small head, and witnessing an exaggerated tip of his mate’s middy glass, he complained: ‘Look, that’s just unnecessary. I’ll be there in about an hour.’

  Rosie thought about those schoolkids, wondered if they studied any environmental stuff in class in between growing mould and doing liquid nitrogen experiments. After last night, she couldn’t get it out of her head how they had to have a new generation of ideas, how totally out-of-date and inappropriate some of the ‘brains’ in high-up positions were. How they seemed to have little care for a future beyond their own. She wondered if those kids even knew about what was happening at Nurrabup. Watching them as they passed, though, Rosie reminded herself that these kids were part of a community that prided itself on being exactly that — a community.

  She checked her watch. Hopefully the kids would make that teacher thirsty as hell, and he’d be here by half three: Rosie wanted to talk to him.

  Mister Stokes was a nice guy, Rosie thought, heading back to the bar with glasses tucked under her arm. He’d said to call him Bernie, but it was that teacher thing — she kept calling him Mister er Bernie. It turned out that he was one of the RAID committee members, and was planning to approach the school headmaster and the parents for permission to take the kids to one of the meetings. ‘So educational,’ he enthused, ‘and totally grassroots. You couldn’t invent a better case study. And they’d actually be interested too. For a change.’

  Rosie felt glad, said she’d look out for them at meetings.

  ‘Yep,’ Bernie said, ‘I just have to find the right approach with the principal, that’s all. Even if just a few of the kids could come along.’

  Rosie’s manager walked past, then, meaningfully wiping a nearby table of broken chips and glass rings. Rosie grabbed Bernie’s glass, though there was still a little left in it. ‘Sorry. Gotta get back to it. Good luck with the principal. Might see you guys at the next meeting.’

  34

  Gus’s call came through a few days later and Cray thought he’d go to the pub and celebrate. There’d been a bit of a spike in demand in the board-shaping business, apparently, and Gus was happy to have him sooner rather than later. It would be on a part-time basis. There would still be plenty of time to surf. Cray wanted to see Rosie and tell her the news and he could have a beer or three at the same time. That morning, all morning, she’d sat out on the verandah with a book, but every time he’d looked over, she wasn’t reading, she was looking ahead, at the ocean, at the panel vans and Kingies pulling up at the Edge Point carpark. She’d wandered in a couple of times, quietly made herself a cuppa and went back out again, hardly saying a word. Cray didn’t think she was angry or upset — he’d certainly know about it if she was — but she seemed far away, and that worried him.

  Later, he’d surfed out at the main break, and it wasn’t huge, but a few nice sets came through, and being the middle of the afternoon midweek there were only a few people out, unlike the weekend head count. On the weekends you almost needed crowd control out there; testosterone from Perth dropped in on waves others might have waited ages for, ruining the scene for everyone before they piled into cars and headed back to Perth, declaring wicked surf. Filth.

  Cray looked around. It was that lovely time between afternoon and evening when the light began to change, the temperature dropped, and the sky juggled the sun and the moon. People sat outside the hotel with cold middies. Through the doors he could see Rosie. She was talking to a couple of old codgers behind the bar. He hoped, fleetingly, that they weren’t chatting her up.

  Cray’s hair smelled of salt. Rosie leaned close to him as she put his beer down on the table, loved that smell. Ocean. Wind. She smiled at him, glad he’d come.

  Coming to the pub, even for work, had snapped her out of an odd feeling she’d h
ad all morning. Even though Cray’d been at home, even though he’d been near her, when she looked out at where she was, so far from everything, so far from their family and friends, and her favourite Italian deli in Freo with crates of tomatoes and zucchinis out the front; when she looked and saw all that water in front of her, and the depth of the bush behind her, she saw strangeness all around. Nothing familiar, or safe. Just all this wild land and somewhere among it, a tiny community, and somewhere in that, her.

  ‘C’mon, who wants another?’ Liza did, and she wanted an excuse to talk to the woman behind the bar — the one she’d seen at the RAID meeting the other night, the bank couple. She looked lovely, and Liza admired the way she chatted to the regulars, had a laugh with them. Liza wondered what she — a newcomer — thought about the Nurrabup development.

  ‘You’re meant to be keeping me on the straight and narrow, Lize, not plying me with beer!’ Mike flooded sweat into his clothes, slid into his regular evening drowsiness, the effects of the methadone kicking in.

  ‘Oh, c’mon, it’s just a belated welcome-to-Margaret-River drink.’

  ‘Go on, then, Lize.’ Ferg did his best Yorkshire accent, burping. ‘There’s nowt on telly, so we may as well have anoother, then.’

  Sam was trying desperately to convince his folks to let him have one, too — ‘Just a shandy, go on, Mum!’ — but it fell on deaf ears, and he rolled his eyes at Mike, who gave him the nod to have a sip of his when Liza and Ferg weren’t looking.

  As Rosie was pouring the beers (‘and a lemon squash for the little bloke’), the woman on the other side of the bar said, kindly, ‘You’re new in town, aren’t you?’

  Rosie looked up, surprised. ‘Yeah. How did you …? Well, I suppose it’s not that hard to tell.’

  ‘No, actually, it’s really hard to tell, they turn over staff at this place like snaggers at a sausage sizzle.’ She laughed. ‘But I saw you at the bank a few weeks ago, and at the rec centre the other night.’