The Break

by Deb Fitzpatrick

  ‘Oh yeah. New town, new accounts. And the Nurrabup development thing, well, I just can’t believe that.’ Rosie trod carefully. ‘I can’t imagine how people who’ve lived here for years feel about it.’

  Liza leaned comfortably on the bar. ‘There’s such a mix of people here, you know — farmers and greenies and families and young people. Not everyone’s worried about keeping development to a minimum — there’s a lot of jobs to be had out of it.’ She sipped from the first middy and said, ‘But I might be giving the wrong impression. Last night — there were a lot of us there. It was great.’

  Rosie let the tap snap back into place. ‘That’s encouraging, I suppose.’

  ‘How are you liking it down here?’

  Rosie liked her directness. ‘Well, it’s a whole new lifestyle for us, really. We came down to try to make a break — from the city and everything. Like Perth’s a big smoke or something.’

  Liza nodded. ‘Margs is a popular place for that — for a change of lifestyle, I mean. Lots of room to be on your own, if you want that.’

  ‘But it’s still a small town, isn’t it, despite that. I mean, once you get into the scene, I imagine it’d be pretty hard to sort of … extract yourself.’

  ‘Absolutely. It’s either one or the other, unfortunately. We keep to ourselves, generally. As much as we can.’ Liza turned around to where the others were sitting.

  At the next table were the town accountant, a couple of local councillors and the newspaper editor, downing pints of Guinness and eating peanuts and laughing over-heartily.

  ‘Have you met that lot yet?’

  Rosie pressed the lemon post-mix button. ‘They’re in here most evenings. Who are they?’

  Liza’s face clouded. ‘Sharks. Developing their way to the bank. Crooks wearing shire councillor outfits. The accountant’s in with them, I reckon. Helping them diddle the figures. The newspaper guy’s not too bad. He’s the one with the beard. He’s stuck up for a few good things over the years. Helped stop a few bulldozers. Be interesting to see what he thinks about Nurrabup. Shame he had to do the dirty on his missus with the seccy, though.’

  Rosie laughed. ‘God, it’s terrible, isn’t it? Imagine knowing that everyone knows that about you.’

  ‘I know, and I shouldn’t join in, especially after telling you we keep to ourselves. It’s just so hard not to. It’s such a small place.’ She looked slightly ashamed.

  ‘I’m Rosie, anyway.’

  ‘Liza.’

  Lining the middies on the counter, Rosie smiled and said, ‘Really nice to meet you. Enjoy your night.’ She almost added, Maybe I’ll see you in here again, but another customer came, and after that, the moment had passed.

  35

  On the way home, while Liza thought about Rosie, and Sam tried to see the saucepan in the sky as the car zoomed along the bumpy road, Ferg and Mike talked. It wasn’t until the marri came into sight, with its reaching, dark branches, that they started shouting.

  While Ferg parked, Liza snaked an arm behind her seat to give Sam a reassuring leg squeeze.

  ‘What you’ve got to understand is, I never particularly wanted to take over the farm. I had no choice — you’d already pissed off with your stoner mates.’

  Liza decided that Sam probably shouldn’t hear everything they had to say to each other, so she told him to go inside, find Pip. Ferg and Mike went silent as Sam shut the car door and slouched up the steps.

  ‘There’s no need to be so fucking personal about it, Ferg, it’s not like I fucking well set out to —’

  ‘Not personal? Mate, are you dreaming? What hole have you just crawled out of? This is personal! It’s about our lives, and how ours, how our life, has been shaped by yours, Mike, by your shithouse choices.’

  ‘And don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I know how I screwed everyone, how I’ve fucked up … I lost Jen, for god’s sake. I missed out on spending time with Dad. I shafted the folks, and you all know, and I know you all know —’

  ‘Except Mum, of course, who thinks Jesus made you for a fucking sunbeam.’

  Mike nodded with forced patience. ‘Yep. That’s right. That’s something else I can feel like a piece of shit for. And it’s all completely my fault. But look at you. You’ve got everything! Look at you, with Liza, and Sam.’

  When finally he responded, Ferg sounded like he could have wept, or slugged him, or both. His words came slowly. ‘What about what Liza and I’ve missed, while we were having to be responsible, having to look after the farm when we just wanted to go travelling and piss off, piss you and Mum and Dad off. Jesus, Mike! We missed out on all that. Lize and I missed out on all that stuff you do when you’re young, when you can. And now, yeah, we’ve got Sam, and he’s … well, he’s incredible, but I don’t know what there’d be without him. We’ll never know what else we could have been or done if we hadn’t had to stay here, while Dad’s heart was breaking.’

  Liza picked at a loose thread she couldn’t even see on her shirt. Ferg unwound his cramping fingers from the steering wheel.

  Noise came from someone’s throat. From their blood.

  The old tree leaned over the house in the evening wind, flung nuts like hail across the tin roof.

  Sam’s bedroom light went on, and after a minute, the blue flicker of his computer screen.

  36

  Sam didn’t want to go and find Pip. She’d be watching TV, boring stuff, love stories with people twirling parasols and skipping down paths and stuff to make you puke. Then again, Pip stashed chockies in her room, all different sorts.

  Nope. Sam shut his bedroom door, felt the air suck out. No trespassers! No one was coming in, not Mum, not Dad, still smelling of eucalypts and beer, and not stupid Uncle Mike. He remembered now, how it had been when Mike was here that last time, how grumpy Dad had been (but he and Mike hadn’t shouted at each other), how Mum had cooked and cooked until they were all chockers, second and third helpings every night, and how his bum had been in season, with its stupid tingling. It scared him, how his bum knew stuff before he did.

  There was only one thing for it at times like this. He imagined the black shining screen coming alive with information, colours, things to click on, taking you further and further in. The World Wide Web. It was an amazing place. And he wasn’t going to turn his light off at eight. They could get lost. Especially while they were sitting out there in the car arguing like people in movies did.

  Sam was going to browse and surf to his heart’s — and bum’s — content, and he wasn’t going to ask anyone’s permission to do it.

  37

  Pip lay on her bed, remembering when the boys were kids, perhaps nine and ten, playing backyard cricket. The Crowe Ashes. The prize? A handful of wood ash from the pit fire outside, sometimes rubbed into the winner’s hair. Fergus and Mike hadn’t changed much at all since those days. They were still competitive, they still loved and hated each other in the same breath. Fergus would just stick it out at the wicket, knocking away Mike’s efforts but not hitting anything too wildly; no showy sixes or broken windows. Eventually Mike would raise the stakes and start bowling aggressively, making his brother duck for cover and causing their father to yell out, ‘Steady on, mate!’ And Mike’d reach the point where he couldn’t stand it anymore, and he’d slam the ball down into the dust and storm off in a rage. Ferg’d drop his bat eventually, and slope into the house for a pear or an apple at the kitchen table. Mike wouldn’t show his face again till dinnertime, and it would take him until the next day to make eye contact with anyone again.

  Back then, she and Jack were sweating it out on the farm — and trying to stay alive in the dark winters. There wasn’t a winter past or present in this town that Pip didn’t detest with all her soul. They were long, bitter affairs. As a young wife, she did what she could to make the house comfortable, kept it clean and tried to brighten it up with curtains she stitched herself, fabric thrown across the kitchen table. She remembered choosing the material at the draper’s
, lugging it back and hiding it until the curtains were finished. The day they were done, Jack came in (he’d been nudged flat against a fence by a haughty cow that day, Pip remembered how he laughed about it) and she had them up, hanging brightly, hems not quite straight, but his eyes lit up and she felt that all the secret curtain-making hours were instantly justified by his pleasure.

  She saw the same feeling in Ferg for Liza, though he kept it closer to him. She saw the lack of fulfilment in Mike’s life, the lack of joy. Of course, she let them think she didn’t have a clue, for it was a child’s prerogative to know that their parents knew nothing about them.

  Pip looked out her window at the shapes of the now-mature avocado and fig trees and remembered how they had begun — seedlings in hessian sacks. She’d never thought they could become trees, offering and denying with perfect reliability every year.

  The trick to being a mother, she thought, was what you did with what you knew. Unless someone asked directly, you had to be so careful, you had to tread lightly.

  Pip reached for a Turkish Delight, a pink one, and decided to keep out of things. She could only watch her children flounder, as though maybe they were just actors on a screen after all, not real people — her people — just outside, shouting in the car, parked on the farm that she and Jack had built from nothing.

  38

  Mike climbed over the fence into the plantation, and caught his t-shirt on the wire. Your shithouse choices. He fiddled a moment or two, trying to release his shirt. The moon was big and yellow, and cast tinted light over the place. Mike’s fingers moved about hopelessly. In frustration he yanked away from the fence, leaving half his shirt hanging from it, and went towards the trees.

  Why not. Why not, he thought. Why not!

  A dip in the ground surprised him, his body dropping awkwardly down in the darkness.

  It’s what I am. Addict. Junkie. Stoner. That’s who I am. Who I have been and will be, whatever happens. I’m no different now. It’ll be years, this, years … it’s never gunna be over.

  He thought of the pub. He knew he could get it there, knew there’d be a source, there always was, everywhere, you could get it everywhere.

  His head was thunder. It chanted, Why not, why not, why not.

  The Tassies stood straight, dwarfing him. Mike looked to his left. His breath was jagged. Trees and trees and trees, rows of them. He looked to the right. Rows and rows and rows of the motherfuckers. He stank of sweat, like he did every night. Stinking, disgusting, pathetic man. A bird flapped secretly above him. Things bustled in the undergrowth.

  In a tripping, running panic under a low moon, Mike stumbled all the way up the river to where he knew — roughly — their father’s ashes had been buried. It was the first time he’d been there since he moved back to Margaret River. He’d been there plenty of times before that, even from three hundred kilometres and a million people away, up in Perth.

  The moon came through in shafts. He sat on his haunches, like a child, in front of Jack’s stone, yearning for a reprieve from his guilt. His litany of failures. But forgiveness needed to be given, and Jack was gone.

  39

  Cray woke with the sun rising over the bay and glassy peelers calling to him. His head was foggy from the beers at the pub last night. Greys Bay was quiet, except for the crunch of country roads under early surfers’ tyres, and the barking of a dog calling to his owner. There were only three other guys out. Cray could just make out their dark figures straddling boards, rising and falling with the irregular, perfect heaves of the water.

  Rosie moved a little, and he got out of bed quietly, pulling on his cold boardies and rash vest. He waxed up his rhino chaser outside, the bubblegum smell of it in his nose. What could be better than this? An unhassled early morning surf in perfect conditions, a couple of hours of ‘work’ later on (he almost laughed at the idea of board-shaping as work), Rosie to be with, time for another surf later on. He breathed in the cool blue air as he walked down the sleeping dawn street towards Edge Point.

  Rosie woke to the satisfied sounds of Cray brushing sand from his board, and the rather less appealing sound of him blowing sea water from his nose. She staggered out towards the kettle, squinting at him through morning slit-eyes in distaste.

  ‘God, you’re a bit much. Mister Fit and Healthy and the-world-is-good.’

  He laughed. ‘Yeah, unlike you, despite your tender years. How about we do time trials around the oval and see who comes out best?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to embarrass you. And just for the record, let it be known that the only time you get up early is when the swell’s up. Not for anything else.’

  But he was too zen after his surf to bite.

  Rosie had the day off. Cray’s sandy feet scratched over the lino as he dropped slabs of bread into the toaster. Rosie thought she should do something outside in her time off. Sitting around the house reading, well, you could be anywhere: Perth, Margaret River, Costa Rica. There was no point being here, coming down south, if you weren’t going to make the most of what it offered. Yes, something outside, she decided. Maybe it would help. She’d heard at the pub about the two teachers who’d lived in the house before she and Cray moved in, two women who’d been posted to the Catholic school in Margaret River, who’d left after a year. They’d rarely left the house except to go to work. Didn’t go for walks or for an evening dip in the bay. And it wasn’t just because one of them had missed her fiancé in Perth, or because the other had had to endure the deputy head feeling her arse after the children had gone home for the day. It was because they’d hated the place. And Rosie could understand that now: it made you slightly nervous, all the space, the lack of people. But she was determined not to become like them, not let the place push her away. When she’d heard that story, Rosie remembered how cobwebby and dusty the wooden furniture out on the verandah had been when she and Cray moved in, a week after the teachers had gone. She’d swept it clean with a small brush, had carefully unclung the grey webs.

  Rosie went for a drive, the radio announcer’s familiar voice reassuring, and found a beach where there were no cars parked in the limestone patch. Following the path down to the water, she walked over the dunes, hands on Koppers logs to steady her, towel slung over her shoulder. She passed through the creamy dune sand to the coarser shell coating on the shore, felt the shiny, broken pieces dig into the soles of her feet.

  She saw the dark blue of the coming wind sweep the sea like a vacuum over carpet, felt her hair pull lightly away from her neck, fly with the air.

  In the rock of the headland, among the highest bush and the red crusty strata of earth, swings a falcon, tiny legs of a mouse kicking in its mouth.

  The falcon powers away to a cliff nest, a few strokes over the plunging and lifting water beneath, where a pink mouth waits wide, and where the sun comes in golden, late in the day.

  It has every view of the world, this bird, and takes in the speck of a young woman on the beach below.

  The search for sustenance, the ferrying of nourishment, is now an hourly mission. And so the bird flies, back and forth, dipping and rising, across and through a world, until the gangly, surprisingly large eyas can make its own way out over the cliffs, into the stinging spray, leaving the mother alone.

  40

  Cray had on his oldest, tattiest King Gee shirt, and his gardening shorts. Worker’s green. No sterile business shirt or tie around his neck. (Who invented ties? he fumed momentarily.) After all, at this job he’d be working with his hands, with fibreglass and resin. He looked down at his hands. The simplicity of that, of making things. Things for people to use for pleasure, for leisure, to sustain them.

  Gus was there, having a coffee with the other, much younger, apprentice when he arrived. Cray was an apprentice too, now, and that was a bit of a worry, he knew, starting from scratch at thirty, but why exactly? As far as he knew, there was no book of rules: The Way To Go About Life: A Compact Guide by D. H. Knob-Jockey, PhD. At the end, he’d be lying on his death
bed facing nothingness, and he’d be the only one looking back over this life. No one else would be too concerned about what he’d done or not done. An old codger like any other, he’d have made it through to the end, and how he got there wasn’t important, let alone interesting, to anyone else. That’s if he made it to codgerdom. He reminded himself of the proverbial bus just around the corner, and slowed his thoughts.

  ‘Want a brew, Ray?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks. It’s Cray, actually. Uhh … it’s a nickname from way back, just stuck.’ He struggled to explain without going into it. ‘From when I worked the crayboats.’

  ‘Righto, mate.’ Gus raised an eyebrow in good humour. ‘Whatever you prefer. We’re used to funny names round here.’

  Cray scanned the workshop, at the boards in the making, at the blanks and the vats of resin, the airbrushes and Gorilla Grip, the belt sanders and foam shavings littering the floor like fake snow; at the finished products drying on racks, waiting to be tried out. Each board was unique, a creation of surfer-specific engineering. The thickness and curve of the plank, the shape, number and position of the fins, the angle of the nose: these were all custom-designed to aid the individual surfer’s ocean needs, depending on where they surfed, their height and weight, their surfing style. You wouldn’t make a Malibu-style plank for a hardcore young guy who was out there trying to carve his initials into the water, to feel the adrenalin zip through his system with sharp turns and avalanche drops, just as you wouldn’t make a super-lightweight thruster for a middle-aged bloke who only wanted to go out and get wet, relax into the waves, feel the motion of the water under him.

  Just being around boards made Cray want to plunge into the cool, spritzy stuff. Natural exfoliant, Rosie always said about the whitewater. More women should try it.