by JH Fletcher
‘Yes, mother.’
‘We’d like to see you settled. We’re getting no younger, after all.’
‘Yes, mother.’
‘Your father’s a worrier. As you know.’
‘Yes, mother.’
‘Charles is a fine man. Everyone looks up to him. A real pillar of the community.’ Although the citation, much to her sorrow, had not materialised. For which she blamed Charles himself, whose attitude had been at fault.
‘Yes, mother.’
Kathryn did not scream. Had learned, like a choirboy, to look alert during the sermon without hearing a word. In addition, she remained tolerant, or at least resigned; in her own way her mother did indeed want what she believed was best for a daughter who persisted in not recognising opportunities, even when they shoved themselves at her.
Of artists, or an artist, of the dangers and pitfalls of artists, Marge did not speak. While Kathryn guarded her thoughts and feelings and said nothing at all. But she remembered: the music; the thunder of the surf; Cal’s hands, kindling fire.
Kathryn said sharply, ‘Because I don’t want to!’
Sparks flying in the mid-north. Charles, alerted to danger by what his mother had heard from Marge Fanning, was suggesting they should team up with a couple of mates, head across to the West Coast, spend a few days on the beach at Streaky Bay. Now. Tomorrow.
‘Chuck a line in the water, see what we can catch …’
Of which fish, Kathryn knew, would matter least.
‘It’s too far …’
‘Seven hours. No big deal.’
Distance was not the problem. Cal had promised he would phone; stubbornly, with little faith, Kathryn was still waiting. Yet now it was nearly three weeks; she did not want to be left high and dry. She liked Charles, too, which made things difficult. She sought another avenue of escape.
‘It’ll be too hot over there.’
He seized the opening. ‘We can go somewhere else, you’d rather. Darren and Lucy won’t mind.’
Nor would they; the fishing they were planning had nothing to do with the sea.
Suddenly Kathryn was indignant with Cal, who might have been playing with her. She opened her mouth to say, Sure, why not, let’s go. At the last moment, stuffed the words back into her mouth.
‘Give me a couple of weeks, okay?’
Of course it wasn’t okay. Charles’s pained expression tried to come to terms with what she was not telling him.
While Kathryn was thinking, It’ll be five weeks by then. If I haven’t heard from him, I never will.
Charles remained dubious. ‘I don’t know what the others will say …’
‘Do we need the others?’
Her bribe came from nowhere. If that was what it was. Certainly she understood the implications, her heart going pit-pat.
For Charles it was like a dam breaking. Two weeks was suddenly acceptable; still too long, but for quite another reason. It seemed to him the moment to be serious.
‘You know I care for you, Katie …’
Yes, she knew. It made things even harder.
‘The practice is a good little earner. I thought maybe we could open more rooms in Clare. Place of the future, Clare.’
It was as close to a proposal as made no difference but, typically Charles, worded in such a way that he could pretend he had said nothing, if the need arose. All she had to do was show interest, and the question would follow.
Panic brought sweat. ‘We’ll talk about it later. Okay?’
And fled.
That’d be right, she thought, driving up the dirt road that led to the farm. Charles is so damn cautious I’ll just about have to propose to him. Yet knew she was being unfair; any man who slung out an offer without checking the ground first would have to be a mug, and who needed that?
She felt suffocated, all the same. He has no life in him, she thought. No spark. The future everyone wanted for her would be like a box. Closed and dark, padlocked. She remembered a rock, slick with spray, herself posed theatrically upon it.
A woman on a rock? What is she?
The dark eyes, laughing back at her.
Rheingold’s opening, the gathering momentum of the E flat major chord swelling from silence, spilling its message into the hushed auditorium. The darkness growing growing growing into brightness. The crash and thunder of fulfilment.
The concussion of the great waves, hurling spray.
A woman on a rock? What is she?
Two weeks, she thought. Could not determine whether it was prayer or threat.
SIX
Cal mooched, following the cliff path. Imagination burned, tantalised by half-formed images.
There was a stiff wind; the surf burst along the shore in salty pillars of foam, seemingly tumescent. Erections in the shape of waterspouts … His mind was busy with priapic visions. Form was everything; there had to be some psychic connection between objects that resembled each other so closely. Think of Marie Desmoulins, he told himself, the most famous of twentieth century Australian artists. When her friend Pete Marchant had killed himself over the woman Phyllis Gould, Marie had commemorated the event by a picture of his bier with, in the background, a funereal candle flame shaped like a brilliantly lit vulva. In a single painting, she had mourned the dead man and celebrated the sexuality of the woman for whom the man had died. Jack Huggett, another of the group, had slept with Phyllis that same night. Putting his seal of approval on his friend’s relationship? Or getting a slice of Phyllis Gould now that she was once again available? Jack had been notoriously wild; from what Cal had heard, either motive would have been possible.
Images within images.
Kathryn poised upon the rocks, laughing. A woman on a rock? What is she?
A question above all questions that needed answering. The enigma of Charles Chivers tantalised. An old ballad unravelled its facile notes amid echoes of the pounding surf. Who is Sylvia, what is she?
What, indeed.
He scrambled down to a postage stamp of beach where no-one ever came. This, at least, he had inherited from his father, the kingdom of the sea. To it had added his own imagery, had sought to tether it within a noose of paint, capturing and revealing all.
Once this world had been enough. Then Gianetta, and the world had changed. Now it had changed again, the old visions tangled with other urgencies.
Cal had never been jealous in his life, but now was jealous of this unknown man whom Kathryn had never mentioned, the hidden life of which he knew nothing.
‘There is no reason for her to have told me anything!’
So he accused the black and silent rocks. It was true; all the same, he resented it.
He stripped off, lay face down on the coarse and yielding sand.
I am a sponge.
That was how he had always thought of himself, a sponge soaking up the emotions and sensations of life. Now, feeling the sun’s bite on his naked shoulders, hearing the rumble of surf beyond the rocks, he thought he was once again a sponge from which was draining all the fatigue and self-disgust that had choked him for so long. He dozed, dreamt of childhood, beginnings.
A brightness. He thought it was natural, that all boys saw the same vivid flare of colour that soaked him in ardour, recognised the significance of form that enchanted him. Soon he came to realise that it was not so, that others played footy with greater enthusiasm. He played himself; was no stranger to the surreptitious boot, the bright flag of blood amid the sweat of muddy battle, but even there constructed images in his mind, sought to render on paper the action, ferocity, exultation, pain.
Pain came from sources other than football.
His earliest memories were of his father. The smell of brine-starched skin, tobacco, booze. Mick Jessop’s face was like his fists, broken and scarred by violence, bearing also the purple-veined memories of booze-ups with mates. Mick had fished the coast, man and boy, and was not slow to say so, an iron man for the iron cliffs that tumbled in a welter of foam.
At sea he never drank; made up for it by never being sober on land, hitting the bottle and more than the bottle. Wife and son learned to lie low — not that it did much good. Cal carried his bruises to school, blaming doors, other kids. If the teachers doubted, they said nothing. They, too, had learned to lie low.
Cal picked up things from his ratbag dad, all the same. How to endure, look out for himself. How to fish for snapper, whiting, cray; how to be one with the sea. Other knowledge came from nowhere: a sense of unity with everything about him. The need, and ability, to express it, and himself, in crayon and paint.
Mick, predictably, was disgusted.
‘Painting? What the hell you want with that crap?’
Yet in truth was not much bothered, unable to take seriously anything so much at odds with his whole life’s experience.
A schoolmaster encouraged Cal, introducing him to the fancy-pantsy garbage of poetry, music and — shit! — dance. A poor bloody bastard, that was for sure. Mick thought seriously about having a word but, in the end, let it go. The sea was Cal’s blue destiny, as it had been his own and always would be until booze or storm carried him off. No poncy schoolteacher was going to alter that.
A day came for Cal, the first of days. Years later, it remained a haunted, haunting memory of what he still thought of as the Sea House.
A grey stone building, visible only from the sea, not far from Kidman’s Inlet. Beneath a slate roof, its stern face weathered spray and gales, sturdily. In an adjoining paddock, sheep counselled the thin turf.
Mick had decided that this was the day he would bring his twelve-year-old son into the real world of work and fish and men.
Cal had been aboard his dad’s boat hundreds of times, had watched from the hatchway as the winches reeled in the nets with their cargoes of fish, but that had been different, make-believe. This time, and forevermore, he knew he would be expected to work, and Mick was not one to waste energy on instruction.
A clout round the head was the best teacher. He said it, and meant it.
Over the years Cal had learned to spot trouble coming; for the first time was reluctant to go aboard. Mick soon sorted that out, taking him by the scruff and hoisting him over the bulwark.
‘Move your backside, lad! Let’s go!’
Lesson One.
He was supposed to give Big Daley a hand. Big Daley the deckhand, his own hands as big as shovels, who nudged Cal, grinning, showing him what had to be done, while from the wheelhouse, Mick Jessop screamed a blue streak.
At last the nets were ready for shooting.
‘Keep your feet out the way,’ Big Daley warned, ‘or you’ll go with them.’
‘I can swim.’
‘Not with half a mile of net around you, you can’t.’
Cal straightened, looking towards the land, and saw the house. He stared at the solid building, the solid life, a place in the world for which he yearned, obscurely, not yet knowing what that might be.
After Gianetta’s death, out of the valley of anguish and despair, Cal returned to that moment. He remembered it, not as he had seen it as a twelve-year-old boy, but with the imagination and experience that sixteen more years of life had grafted onto his mind.
I dream of the house, of a sister, younger than myself, with whom I share a room, tenderly. The beds are neat, with white sheets. At night the moon throws patterns of white through the window. The sea is a distant beauty of dark and white, its voice a quietness filling the night.
I live inside the house, silently. I walk within the stone walls that separate the rooms, I slip between the crevices. On one side darkness and the growling sea, the other golden with light, or silver with the shadows of the moon. In the shadows she dances, the white girl my sister. Her robe is whiter than the moon, her skin is whiter still. A symphony of whiteness. The colour flows between my fingers, warmly.
Twelve-year-old Cal awoke from his daytime trance. The steel deck heaved. The sea roared in a cascade of frothing bubbles. From the wheelhouse, his father yelling.
‘Move yer bloody arse!’
Secrecy guarded Cal’s eyes. His heart lay with the white girl. In the Sea House she knelt by the bed; white robe, white bed, white dreams in the white and sacred night.
One more thing: a magical event to end the day of magic. In the wide sea depths, something stirred. A form, lifting from the void. So close that it spilled its identity in front of him, becoming personal, at one with himself.
That night, the night of beginnings, Cal took a pencil, drew upon a piece of white card a picture of the house. He could not put words to the vision, did not understand it, yet somehow, within the drawing’s lines, insinuated a hint of what he sensed but did not know.
Years later, Cal learned that the house was owned by a bachelor, a misanthropic farmer with bad teeth and breath, who never washed. Cal knew that if he had indeed been born in the magic house of dreams, he might never have become an artist, known the anguish and the glory. Always there was a story within the story, another destiny.
After the catastrophe of Paris, Cal looked back at an innocence long vanished, at his memories of that day. Evening, with the fishing boat approaching harbour, the grey and frowning house watching the sea. It had long become familiar to him, its magic gone, but that did not matter. In place of magic there had been another magic, newborn.
On that trip so long ago, close enough to see the barnacles on its flukes, he had seen a whale.
Mick had a squint at the drawing. Not bad, he supposed. As pictures go. But.
After Cal had gone to bed, he said to Cal’s mother, ‘Dunno what we do about him …’
Not that he was asking for advice. Mick used his wife as a sounding board, expecting his own opinions to come back to him.
Cal’s mother was a case. Mixed-up Millie, not only in her husband’s eyes. Her name, for starters. Known to everyone, herself included, as Em. Of whom she spoke as of a stranger:
‘Em doesn’t like the sound of that.’
‘Em will walk out of here, one of these days.’
Although she never did. Had promised herself a hundred times she’d stick a knife in Mick’s gizzard, but part of her believed a real man had to keep his woman in line. Was proud, masochistically, that the man cared enough to beat her.
She never let on, though. Screeching battles ricocheted off the walls of the small stone house. Made sure she dragged Cal into it, too.
‘Look at him.’ A voice to etch brass. ‘Wanner grow up to be like your old man, eh?’
So that beery Mick, who had been intended to hear — who could not have failed to hear what would have drowned out a steam whistle — felt it his manly duty to leather them both.
Cal tried to teach himself to look into things. He studied a boat, a rock, a piece of wood, yet knew that until he could discover the essence of himself the essence of these objects would evade him. To do that he had to understand, and to understand he had to paint. Catch 22.
When he thought he was up to it, he had a go. He painted his old man at the nets, the steep, fish-slimed decks and donkey engine, stanchions corroded by rust, the ugly, lovely sea.
Mick scratched his head before a painting of machinery, of the man who looked more like an explosion of energy than anything you could call human. Did not recognise himself, but suspected, baffled.
‘Never seen a bloke looked like that …’
As always, perplexity led to anger.
‘Not a bloody poofter,’ he threatened.
No son of Mick Jessop dared be that different.
Next bloody drama: Cal started listening to music. Not what everyone else listened to; what he called real music. Opera was his favourite. Wagner, for Christ’s sake. Drove Mick bananas, hearing that racket thundering through the house, but at least it wasn’t ballet. Would perhaps have sorted the kid out with his fists but Cal, eighteen now and strongly made, was beyond fists. As to being a poofter …
Cal knew the truth of that, as did several of the local girls.
‘Fishing’s a man’s life, never mind this painting lark. Get you out there, we’ll soon see if you’re up to it. If you’re a real man.’
So Mick challenged. Made sure that Cal, young from school, went to sea on the first tide.
‘Get some fish scales on his hands,’ he told the pub, ‘he’ll soon forget this other shit.’
Years later, Em reminded her son of the old days.
‘Remember what I said, eh? About you growing up different from your dad?’
He remembered, no errors. For better reasons than she knew.
As a small child, the ongoing drama between his parents had not worried him. Once he began to get a handle on what went on in the world, it was a different story.
Em, smiling at his father around a broken mouth.
Cal understood respect, or so he believed. A woman needed a man she could respect. But this new knowledge was greasy, disquieting. He saw that the concussion of fists and words was no more than a prelude. It kindled excitement in eyes that signalled hot messages to each other, led invariably to the concussion of loins that he had begun to visualise, the cries that in the small house he could not avoid. He learned to dread the squalls of fury, knowing where they would end.
He did not understand how one form of violence could lead to another, but promised himself that he, too, would punish his women when he was old enough. In time he did, although never with his fists.
A girl from the next town had hung around always, hoping he would notice her. In the end, he did. Screwed her on the cliff top, did a portrait of her that ripped holes in her psyche.
She studied it, turned to stare at him. She went out silently. He never saw her again.
‘Doesn’t pay to be that vulnerable,’ he told the portrait. Felt bad, all the same; yet the painting itself had been true, and he did not destroy it.
There were others whom he had used. Margaret Videon, or so she would have claimed. Stella Loots.
‘How you going, lover?’
‘I’m good,’ Cal said cautiously; after their last parting, he had not expected to hear from her so soon.
