In the channel that ran alongside the rail tracks she killed the motor and took off her shoes, stepping carefully into shallow water and foul-smelling mud. As she unlooped the rope from the bottom of the dinghy, she saw immediately that the boat wasn’t close enough to the rocky bank for her to tie off around the post at the top, and glutinous mud gripped the hull. She gave the boat a fruitless push, and felt another prickle of sweat break out on her forehead and under her arms.
She took off her jacket and laid it carefully on the rocks, above the watermark, next to her black, heeled shoes. Looking at her feet, she saw they were covered with thick mud. As she approached the boat for one last try she felt like climbing inside and lying down on the bench, drifting out onto the silent river in the fog. Where was Ben? Where was his train? Like he’d get down in the mud and help, anyway.
She couldn’t think about the day ahead. She needed to tie off the boat, that was all. Pulling her skirt high around her waist to keep it out of the icy water, she waded back in and leaned against the stern. She heard the growl of a large boat behind her, roaring into the channel, ignoring the speed limit. She felt its wake surge up her legs, wetting her skirt, lifting the boat free of the mud, and pushed again. When the wake calmed, the boat was a metre further into shore. That was when Ben appeared. She dropped the anchor in the mud and scrabbled up the rocks to tie off. When she’d finished, he took her hand.
‘Haven’t seen you in a suit since graduation,’ she said quietly.
‘It’s the same one.’ He looked like a rock star at a wedding, his mad curls at odds with his clothes. ‘You’re drenched.’ He looked her up and down. She nodded, and fought back the urge to cry. She carried her jacket and shoes in one hand and held his arm as she walked with muddy feet down the dirt road towards the car park. A train emerged from the gloom on the tracks above them, rushing into the mist that enveloped the river, lights gleaming in the fog. It left a wind that chilled her wet legs.
‘I saw Billie the other day,’ he said. ‘With James.’
‘It’s all right. You know, he’s really a bit of a tosser.’
‘You don’t say.’ He put his arm around her. ‘What are you going to do about your feet?’ They both looked down. Mud gleamed all the way up her long shins.
‘I think there’s a towel in the car,’ she said.
There was glass on the ground as they approached her car, a green Hondamatic, and she peered carefully around her feet, trying to avoid it. ‘Bugger,’ he said quietly. She looked up and saw that it was her windscreen that was broken. She put a hand to her face and took a breath.
‘It’s all right, mate,’ he said. Again that urge. She wanted to lie down on the ground and sleep, wake up in summer and all this be gone. ‘We’ll get the train,’ he said.
‘No, we’re going to have to drive. There won’t be another train for an hour.’
In the back seat was an old towel. She dried her feet before brushing the glass off the front seats. They’d done a thorough job, anyway. The windscreen was entirely gone. So were her CDs and her stereo. ‘Wankers,’ Ben muttered as he eased himself into the passenger seat.
They took the old highway; she couldn’t get on the freeway without a windscreen, especially not in this weather. She took it as fast as she dared, the mist making it hard to see even to the next bend, the dense bush looming, uncanny. Occasionally the highway came so close to the freeway that the rumble of trucks was almost deafening, though she couldn’t see them, and shafts of light appeared then vanished as the traffic blocked out the weak sun between the trees above. It was strange to drive with the air directly on her face, and she concentrated on that: on the cool wetness of her skin, her hair damp against her neck, her glasses fogging and needing a wipe every few minutes.
‘What happened, Rose?’ he said eventually.
She heard herself tell him, but her voice seemed remote, unnatural. ‘A truck rear-ended his van on the freeway. I saw the smoke, from my verandah. I was having dinner with James. Didn’t know what it was, till later. It seemed— beautiful at the time.’
He put his hand on her knee and she trembled for a second. They said nothing on the long descent through the bush until they reached the glaring stretch of suburbs that lay between the national park and the ocean. The mist had lifted and the sun was growing hot on their faces. Outside a bungalow, a table of paintings was propped up next to a sign on which was daubed ‘$60’. ‘Doesn’t change, does it?’ he said.
She shook her head. They were passing the browning oval of the high school, the one they’d both attended, where her father had been the music teacher, until the week before. ‘The bay does, though. You been back lately?’
‘Saw Mum a couple of weeks ago. There’s some crazy money down on the beach. She reckons she’ll sell up, eventually.’
‘Oh, no. Where would she go? She’s been there forever.’ He shrugged. ‘She coming today?’
‘Yeah. She liked your old man. Everyone did. Between you and me, I think she had a bit of a crush on him.’
‘No!’
‘I reckon. Then I could have been your brother,’ he laughed. She blushed, and stared straight ahead at the white- and yellow-brick houses, the orange roofs, peeling away towards the ocean.
When they reached the little blue church, a block back from the beach, there was a sea of shining cars, baking on the grass verge, on the street, on the path. Must be people from school, she thought. He’d known so many people she didn’t. All those children—not just the ones he’d been teaching now, but all the ones that had grown up, and remembered him, and had heard somehow. He’d been a presence in so many lives, and now she had to share her grief with them, give up a little of her claim to each one.
The door was still open, but the pews were full. She made for a space in the back row, but an elderly woman— tiny, hunched, a distant relative she recognised but could not immediately place—ushered her forward firmly, gripping her still-damp arm. ‘There’s a place for you next to your sister, Rosie dear, at the front,’ she whispered. ‘And your friend,’ she said, glancing up at Ben. ‘Go on, love. It’ll start soon.’
As they passed the crowd in the back rows, she spotted three of her dad’s on–off girlfriends—the hot chickas, she and Ben always called them. He always brought home stunners, but none as beautiful as the portrait of her mother he had once painted—so like Billie now she was an adult—that leaned against the wall at the back of the garage, dusty and wrinkled with moisture. She’d always felt sorry for the chickas and intimidated by their sleek womanliness all at once. Always was a sucker for a pretty face, her dad.
In the front row was her sister, her wide silk ribbon of blonde hair clinging to the back of her suit. Next to her was James, and it was beside him that there was empty space. ‘Can’t we sit at the back?’ she said under her breath as Ben guided her, hand on her back, down the aisle. She could feel heads turning towards her, as though she were a bride.
‘You’ve got to be at the front,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay with you.’
She tried to duck past Billie quietly, nodding hello, but her sister threw her arms around her and pulled her close. ‘We were so worried about you! Where have you been?’ Rose drew back. Billie put her hand on Ben’s shoulder. ‘Bless you, Ben.’ She was as fresh and lovely as ever. Her eyes shone moistly from an unlined face. If she was wearing make-up, you couldn’t see it.
‘I see she hasn’t lost any sleep,’ Rose whispered to Ben as they sat down.
He put his hand on hers. ‘Shhh,’ he said gently. ‘Not now.’
Rose dared herself to look at James; he was as handsome as always. It was a shock when you hadn’t seen him for a while. His eyes were fixed firmly on the casket. She took it in, the impossibly long box that held the body of her father, and sat down quickly. ‘Christ,’ she breathed. A tear slid down Billie’s beautiful cheek.
Rose didn’t listen to the pastor. He hadn’t known her dad, who hadn’t been even faintly religious. The wool of James’s
suit grazed her elbow. She glanced again at his profile. The last time she’d seen him he’d been naked, in the house on the river, passing Rose her mobile across the bed. He’d dressed in another room when he saw who was calling, left when she whispered the news. That was just under a week ago. She’d heard nothing from him since, but Billie had told her she’d rung him. He’d gone round, when he heard, and stayed. Rose had taken it with grim resignation. Of course he did, she thought. Of course.
‘Where’s the wake?’ Ben whispered to her when it was finished. She was staring blindly at the curtains behind which the coffin had disappeared.
‘What? Oh God, the wake. I don’t know. Our house, I suppose. I’m not going.’
‘Rose—’
‘You go, if you want. I’m going back to the river.’
She made her way quickly down the aisle while Billie was talking to the pastor. She caught James’s eye quickly as she passed but kept moving. His eyes had already slid off her face, down her body and away. ‘People will want to see you,’ Ben said, as he hurried after her. The house, it would still smell of him—cigarettes, the reheated junk he brought home from the school canteen, his home-brew. The house of a man without a wife.
An aunt, her father’s sister, grabbed hold of her arm as she picked her way through the cars to her own. ‘Rosie,’ she began, but lost her words in a constricted sob. Rose watched her from another place. Her eyes were Rose’s father’s to the closest detail: pale green, so pale they seemed almost blind. Rose put a hand on hers and lifted it gently from her arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly and turned her back on her aunt, walking quickly to her car. Ben took the passenger seat, saying nothing.
She drove, limbs rigid, to the nearest garage, where she paid a small fortune to have the windscreen repaired while they waited on plastic chairs in the warm sun, blinding against the white wall of the garage and the pale brick houses all around. One of the mechanics made phone calls at the counter in the workshop and stared at her legs. After a while, Ben noticed, put his hand on her thigh. She longed for the space to cry.
Back at the village, he spoke, finally. ‘Let’s go to the pub, mate. We’ll have our own wake. Talk about him, if you want.’
She shook her head. ‘I’ll have a drink. But I don’t want to talk about anything.’
‘All right, Rose. Come on. I’ll shout you.’
She attempted a laugh. ‘Since when? You robbed a bank?’
‘I’ll shout you the first one, anyway.’
They sat on the terrace outside the pub in the winter sun until it grew chilly and Ben told her stories about work. He worked in a bar in a leather club at night; he was studying for his Masters in the day. He always had something new to tell her. But then he’d always had something new to tell her when he worked in the weigh station on the freeway in their uni holidays. He was like that. Reckoned some of the truckies from those days turned up at his leather bar, but he’d tell you anything for the sake of a story. She drank slowly, was still on her first as he started his third. Halfway through it, she felt sick and knew she had to stop. ‘I’m not up to this,’ she said.
‘Don’t tell me Rose Baker is off her beer.’ For a moment she thought she would tell him. His face, though, when she said she’d been seeing James. And she wasn’t certain herself yet. ‘Do you want me to help you get home?’
She looked at him. He would never have asked, before. He would have just camped out at her place until she kicked him out, tomorrow or the next day.
‘I think I just want to be on my own for a while.’
He nodded. It felt like the end of something, but she couldn’t think about that now. He hugged her at the train station. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said.
She looked at his face. As though she knew this was it, that she’d be alone on this river from now on, she said quickly, ‘He was my favourite person in the world. When I was a kid, I spent whole days planning tricks to make him laugh.’
Ben bit his lip, took her in his arms. ‘I know.’ He smelled as he always did, slightly dirty hair, tobacco—like her dad, beer.
The light was fading as she walked along the muddy road by the train tracks, thinking of nothing, watching the ferry chug in and a boatful of junkies circling recklessly at the fish co-op, yelling and shoving each other. ‘Want me to break your fucken nose again, Angie?’ one of the women shouted. When she reached her mooring, she had taken her shoes off and hitched up her skirt for the scramble down the rocks before she realised the boat—James’s boat—was gone. Stolen.
‘Unbelievable,’ she said quietly. Down by the marina, the ferry was approaching. She ran along the muddy path to the wharf in her heels. ‘Come on, wait,’ she whispered. ‘Give me something.’
She made it, just, found an empty plastic seat at the back among the tired, sullen commuter crowd and watched the shore pulling away. Beyond the narrow windows of the ferry the short winter day was ending, the grey-blues of the river and the sky deepening, the wooded hills turning black, pinpricked in clusters with the lights of the houses.
Rosie lay on the sofa, her hand on her large belly. The winter seemed so long ago. It was like a serious illness, from which you recovered, restored but changed. She seemed like a convalescent to herself, a shadow wandering the gardens of a high-walled hospital in a foreign country, easing herself off painkillers, nervous of life without assistance. Out on the river, the silence had deepened to nothingness. Her body brimmed with solitude and the dark.
Chapter 2
Danny woke to a clear island morning, the air fresh, eucalypt-scented after two days of rain. The sun flickered through the trees outside his window, making patterns on the thin white curtains of the shed. As he stepped outside to pee in the bush behind his shed, the air was crisp and cool. The river below, down through the leaves of the spindly gums past the main house, was a blue mirror.
His shift started late today, so he made a coffee on his camping stove and sat on the sun-warmed flat rock outside his door. The gums were bone-white against the blue sky, and it was a great thing for it just to be morning, to be drinking coffee, to feel the sun on his face. It was still new to him, though he’d been on the river for a little more than seven years now.
An urgent whisper came from behind him, in the shed. ‘Where’s the toilet?’ the girl asked. He turned and smiled. For a moment he couldn’t remember her name. You wouldn’t forget that hair, though, long and red and wavy and thick. He’d spent most of the night with his arms buried in it. Warm, silky, alive.
‘You’re looking at it,’ he said.
‘You’re joking.’
‘Afraid not, April.’ How could he forget? Month he was born. He brought the camping stove outside and got some more water going while she looked for a spot where neither he nor the neighbours would catch her out. The river sparkled through the trees below and the summer opened up in front of him. He’d be working almost every hour of it, but he’d be out on the river—who in their right mind could call that work?—and this would be the last summer he’d be working for someone else. Big Alf was going to sell him the taxi service so he could buy out his partner in the chandlery. He’d worked for two men in the eleven years since he left high school; Alf had been a damn sight better than the old man, but after this summer, he’d never let someone else be his boss again.
On the way down the track to the beach he let the girl walk ahead a little so he could watch her hair some more. Sunlight fell in shafts and dapples through the trees and it shimmered like a liquidambar in the breeze. When they emerged from a short overgrown path onto the beach his dory was sitting on the mud. ‘You hop onto the jetty over there,’ he said. ‘No need for you to get covered in mud.’ He watched her walk along the beach—the slight sway of her hips in the little white sundress she’d showed up in at the pub last night, her long, skinny chalk-white legs, her hair. Come on, Dan, he told himself. Get a move on.
The tide wasn’t too far out; he rolled up his jeans and waded in. The water was cool though th
e sun was warm, and the seaweed and mud seeped between his toes and around his ankles. He clambered into the dory, hanging his feet over the side, sloshing them about to rinse off the mud, then pulled the boat free of the bottom with his running line. It stayed shallow all the way out to the end of the jetty, and he tapped the bottom with his oar until he was alongside the pontoon. She peered at the narrow boat, the mud beneath it, uncertainly. ‘Hang on a sec,’ he said, and tied the boat off. He jumped up onto the platform next to her and helped her in. She climbed down unsteadily, gripping his shoulder. She had her own smell. There was the usual stuff—clean hair, the faint tang of sweat after a night with him and no shower, but something else, too. Nuts. Salty, buttery, good. Once she was seated, he was in front of her in one smooth movement and untying the rope.
He barely had to row to clear the bay. The tide was still pulling strongly. Once past the point, though, he had to turn almost 180 degrees, back upstream against the tide. She relaxed once they were moving. Touched his knee a few times. Asked him about his job. He had to row hard; she had a train to make. By the time he reached the channel his skin was glistening and liquid gathered on his top lip, but he could feel himself grinning, his whole face stretched in a way he couldn’t control.
Alf was waiting for him on the wharf of the chandlery, his vast gut poking out above his waistband despite the fact that he was wearing a T-shirt you could have made a decent sail out of. Behind him was a thin, pale young bloke with longish hair and a goatee, dozing against a backpack in the sun.
‘Late, Danny,’ Alf said. ‘Need to pick up Sue over at the beach. Young fella Kane’s going over that side. Gonna be working on the Durham place. Take him on the way.’ He handed him a bunch of keys and shuffled back along the jetty and into the chandlery.
The River Baptists Page 2
