Islands

by Peggy Frew

  But at the time she didn’t even register his nervousness, if it did exist. At the time, she said, ‘Yes, of course,’ and leaned against him again as they walked towards Cindy, lifting his arm around her because it was late now and she was getting cold.

  Cindy had a stroller and loaded the child—asleep already—into it. She stumbled as they went down the driveway.

  Drunk, June thought, and a stiffness came into her. How could you, with a kid?

  In the night, in the dark, she woke to a clear, thin call. Blurrily she wallowed from her side to her back, lifted her head from the pillow. A bird? From the dunes—lost or trapped somewhere in their yard, or on their roof. But it came again, resolved into a voice, human, youthful.

  ‘Mu-um! Mummy!’

  It was the child, Cindy’s daughter, in the next room.

  ‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’ Sobbing. Then the crash of a door swinging open and the light thud of bare feet.

  June hauled herself upright, elbowing Paul.

  ‘Mum!’ came the cry.

  She put on the bedside lamp and got out of the bed, reaching for clothes.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Paul blinked, rumpled, his bare chest flushed.

  ‘She’s up,’ whispered June. ‘The little girl.’

  More wailing from the main room.

  ‘But what about Cindy?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. She must be still asleep.’

  ‘I’ll try to wake her,’ he said, pulling on some shorts.

  He went out first. June followed, buttoning her pyjama top. The child was standing by the couch, silent now, a shadowy figure beyond the spill of light from the bedroom.

  ‘Misty?’ Was that really her name? It seemed like a dream, them walking along the beach road, Cindy pushing the stroller, her skinny elbows stuck out, staggering slightly when they reached the corner. When they got to the house it had been Paul who lifted the sleeping child and carried her in. Cindy’s face was white and sharp-boned under the porch light. She went to the railing and lit a cigarette. She’s a beautiful kid, said June. What’s her name? Cindy didn’t turn around, spoke into the darkness, so low June wasn’t sure she heard properly. Misty.

  June stepped closer, moving slowly. ‘Misty, it’s okay.’

  She could hear Paul in the other bedroom: ‘Cindy? Hey, Cindy …’

  She knelt. ‘Hi, Misty, you don’t know me but I’m a friend of your mum’s.’

  Paul came out. ‘I can’t wake her.’ He switched on a lamp. ‘She’s okay,’ he said. ‘She’s just really fast asleep. She was a bit … you know.’

  June turned back to the child. ‘You okay, Misty? Did you have a bad dream? It’s all right. Why don’t you hop back into bed with your mum?’

  In the light the kid’s eyes were huge. She had thick, dirty-blonde hair and freckles, and there was a bruise on one of her bare, pale shins. Her lips, her open mouth, looked very red. She was wearing a pink dress with stains and a picture on it of a rabbit in a pair of sunglasses.

  ‘Come on,’ said June, and held out her hand.

  Misty took it.

  Then June put her other hand on the seat of the couch to lever herself back up, brushing against Misty’s dress and feeling the wet patch, and at the same time smelling the smell. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Misty, did you have a wet bed, is that what woke you up? It’s all right, come on, let’s find you some dry clothes.’

  Paul brought a clean t-shirt and June took Misty’s wet dress and underpants off and slipped the t-shirt over her head. Misty went on staring, open-mouthed, but she didn’t resist. Once the clean clothes were on she took hold of June’s hand again.

  ‘What do we do now?’ whispered June to Paul.

  ‘Shall we make you a bed on the couch here, Misty?’ said Paul. ‘Your bed mightn’t be very nice to sleep in, if it’s a bit wet.’

  Misty stared.

  Paul brought a blanket and a pillow and arranged them. ‘There you go,’ he said.

  Misty tightened her grip on June’s hand.

  ‘Hop in, Misty,’ said Paul.

  Misty shook her head.

  ‘We can leave the lamp on,’ said June.

  Misty put her free arm around June’s leg.

  June and Paul looked at each other.

  ‘Do you want to sleep with us then?’ said June. ‘In our bed?’

  Misty didn’t answer, but when June took a step towards the bedroom she shuffled with her, not letting go.

  They lay with the kid between them. It felt wrong. June switched off the bedside lamp but they’d left on the one in the main room and she could see Misty’s open eyes shining in the dimness beside her.

  Paul turned his back and might have been asleep, but as soon as there was a sound from the other room—rustling, and then Cindy’s quiet call: ‘Misty?’—he got up and went out. June heard him saying something about towels and then the opening and closing of the hallway cupboard.

  Paul came in again. ‘Come on, Misty,’ he said. ‘We’ve fixed up your bed so you can hop back in with your mum.’

  Misty scrambled down and left the room, gliding silently in the oversized t-shirt.

  June lay awake for what seemed like hours. The sky was beginning to lighten and the birds to call before she finally fell asleep, and the next time she woke it was late.

  The house was quiet. The mattress from the second bedroom was out in the backyard, propped against a bush in the sun. In the laundry the washing machine whirred and rocked.

  ‘Hello?’ called June.

  The second bedroom contained nothing but the bare-slatted bed base. In the main room the sunlight fell evenly on the timber floorboards, the shabby couch, the bookshelf and cobwebs and jars of shells and the paintings on the walls, all of which belonged to Paul, from before June’s time.

  The front gate opened and Paul came in, his hair in damp spines, his wetsuit a flapping skirt around his hips. Through the glass door she watched him strip the suit off and hose it and his surfboard down. The bend of his lean back, his brown arms.

  In the kitchen she said, ‘What happened to Cindy?’

  He shrugged, propped against the bench in his towel. ‘She must’ve left. Walked back round to Dave’s, I reckon, to get a lift back to town.’

  ‘So you didn’t see her?’

  He shook his head. ‘I slept in, too.’ He came closer, put his arms around her. ‘But not as long as you did.’

  ‘It took me ages to get back to sleep.’

  He tried to kiss her but she moved out of his hold. There was anger in her, prudish and tight. She glanced out at the mattress, a glaring white slab against the green. ‘Did she leave a note?’

  ‘No. She was probably really embarrassed.’

  She sliced some bread and put it in the toaster. ‘How could you do that? Get drunk like that, with a kid? So drunk you couldn’t even wake up when she needed you?’

  ‘I think she’s pretty good, usually. I don’t know her that well, but from what Dave says she does it pretty tough, and … I mean, it must be hard, on your own. She probably didn’t intend to get drunk. And it’s not like she needed to drive or anything.’

  June thought of the automatic, world-weary way Cindy had raised the glass to her lips, of Cindy’s pale face under the porch light, the cigarette—and in her soft, ripe body there was no sympathy, only cold judgment.

  For years Cindy was forgotten.

  That summer went on. June advanced into the waves at the surf beach, her belly clenching with Braxton Hicks contractions. She struggled up the dune path, laughing and holding on to Paul.

  The baby was born and everything shifted. They brought her to the beach house on weekends and tiptoed while she slept. They carried her in a sling and sheltered her little face from the sun, the wind, the spray; they stood close together looking down at her.

  June’s body retracted, dried out, took on a new form, narrower in some places, wider in others. It bore small silvery marks. Eventually it filled again, with hormones, fluids,
and there was another child, and, later, a third.

  Time sped up. The children grew. When the youngest was a baby June passed through the period of dreadful possessiveness. Whenever Paul was home she snapped at him. She held herself back all day, dampening the surges of irritation, the queasy anxiety, the pain in her body, the exhaustion. She forced her voice to be patient and gentle. She trudged home from picking up the oldest child from school with the baby crying in the pram and the others bickering. She had urges to hurt them. She went into rooms and closed doors behind her and wrenched at her own hair and let her face contort in agony. Sometimes she did this in front of the children and saw them become still and watchful. Once she did it in front of them and they took no notice, and that was when she resolved to do it only in private.

  Certain pockets of calm would open, always when Paul wasn’t around, and her love for him would swoop down on her as she lay feeding the baby on the couch, the toddler asleep and the oldest at school, and she would fill to bursting with the need to be near him, to let him know, to unblock the neglected channel between them. But then later, when the chaos closed over her again, she would forget—or not forget, but not be able to summon the sweetness again, to have the energy for it—and she would snarl at him from under the smothering mantle of her resentment, her fatigue, and her bewilderment, because she didn’t quite understand how she had ended up where she was.

  At night, when she couldn’t get back to sleep after feeding the baby, she would go into the study and open Paul’s box of personal things—old photos and worn paperback books with aeroplane boarding passes inside them. A couple of the books had inscriptions and were clearly gifts from lovers. She read them over and over, flayed herself with them. She searched the faces in the photographs—which showed Paul alone or with friends, other young men mostly, but also mixed groups—and was violently, caustically, envious of them all, male and female alike. She studied Paul’s face—younger, fresher, in the richer tones of photographs taken in the 1970s and 80s—and ached at not having known him then, at not having been there with him, at not having had him all to herself, always.

  Later, she will wonder if what she had been envious of wasn’t Paul’s having loved others, but Paul’s former life in general—which she had chosen to see as free and diverse and bold, the opposite of hers. His former self stood grinning with surfboards by cars, white-hot under the sun, while hers sat in the shadowy kitchen, smoking, tarnished with shame and fakery.

  When she does think of Cindy again, one day, she is unable to bring her into focus. Cindy remains a blurred figure, dark and unknowable. What June finds herself thinking of, with shock, is her own judgment—so clean, so categorical, so entirely and regretfully unworldly.

  She realises that it wasn’t only Cindy’s lapse in parental responsibility that provoked in her such condemnation. It was more—it was Cindy’s unhappy, bony face, the aura of dissatisfaction that clung to her, the unwillingness in her pointed elbows as she ploughed the stroller down the gravel driveway. Had Cindy been drunk and happy, she realises, she—June—would have felt differently about her.

  She sees herself: not yet a mother, not one at all, but thinking herself one. How, kneeling, speaking gently, helping Misty out of the wet clothes and into dry ones, she had, in part, been putting on a show for Paul, of being capable, motherly. A demonstration of how things would be when it was their turn, of the fact that they would get it right. She sees how the warm light under which this display was performed threw Cindy, insensible in the wet bed—flawed and unpalatably discontented, but surely, surely, deserving of compassion—into impenetrable darkness.

  And she sees Misty, her white skin, her bruise, the redness of her mouth. How readily she took June’s hand and followed her, how passively her small body accepted June’s touch. She remembers this and groans aloud.

  RED ROCKS BEACH

  Here is his burrow, where he can listen, and he can have his fire, and smoke and drink. When the fire is really hot he gets a tightening of the skin on his face and the backs of his hands. He waits for it, and then he takes the first sip of cold beer, and this is true pleasure. True pleasure.

  He sleeps, when the beer’s finished. Stars show through the holes in his burrow roof. Waves shush him to sleep, and his fire sucks its flames back in and just glows enough for company.

  Rabbit, rabbit.

  Certain birds wake him. Wrens are best, sweet and polite, very close, so small they are just a flutter, soft brown or magic blue. Gulls, well, they’re not subtle but they are cheery in the mornings, they celebrate, all in a gang, passing over, down to the beach for fishing. Plover are the worst. They start while it’s still dark, angry faraway yelling and scolding, and once you’ve heard that all you can see in your mind are those crazy yellow eyes.

  Rabbit, rabbit.

  He waits for the sky to do its colours. Pink means time to get up.

  He has a system of dunny markers, so he won’t dig the same place twice.

  Then down to the beach, which is all his in the pink morning. Little waves, little shells winking. Ah, this beach loves him, shines for him. The pink light cleans him and a string of gull voices ties itself around his shoulders and he is beautiful. Beautiful.

  But now he has to go back, into his burrow, he has to thump his feet, run and dive.

  Dive, rabbit.

  And hide, squat behind his leaf wall, so still even though inside his heart is speeding. His eye to a peephole. If he keeps still, look, he is invisible, his eye actually takes on the colour of the leaves around it, his skin too, his face. No wonder they get such a fright when they see him, mottled brown and grey and the silver of paperbark trunks, and the dark green of ti-tree leaves.

  It’s a horse, on the beach. Girl on top. Smart horse, does a sideways jump, nostrils at him, shakes its flying hairs. It rolls its big eye, blows a trumpet breath. In the bushes, says the horse.

  Rabbit.

  Molly! says the girl, mean voice. She’s smart too, she frowns and stares but all she can see is brown and green.

  It’s all right, Molly, says the girl, nice voice now. Come on.

  This Molly! Her neck, so strong and bendy, her round marks like the sun dots that fall into his burrow, her legs that go so narrow before they hoof. She is lovely. Lovely! And she feels him loving her, she goes along nicely now, she puts her tail high for him.

  Daylight. It’s time. Mum is waiting and telly, but he can’t. There’s a feeling like needing the dunny, but it’s in his brain. He hates when this happens. He whacks his hands on his thighs, come on, what is it, it’s keeping him, it must be dealt with.

  What happens, nowadays, as opposed to before

  when he was a boy

  when he wasn’t brown and green

  when he walked out bright

  when he wore swimming shorts and walked out bright

  his chest bare and normal skin

  a boy!

  What happens nowadays is things get stuck. It’s mostly when unusual things happen, like this

  unusual thing

  which was

  rabbit, rabbit

  something coming along

  which was

  on the beach

  big and bendy, hooves and jumping

  animal

  Molly!

  He very easily loses his thread. There are things he needs so as to keep his mind in more or less working order, and they are

  his burrow

  his beer

  his fire

  the stars

  his own pink morning beach

  and then home to Mum and telly

  Argh, what is it, this thing that’s stuck? A shape in his mind, wrapped up soft, he will need to squeeze it out.

  But Mum and telly! He is waiting too long! He will get caught here in his burrow when people come!

  Breathe. Breathe. It’s okay. This happens, it happens. He knows what to do.

  Hop, hop, rabbit.

  Lie down on his soft floor. Put his h
and to the white bones of his fire, so it nearly hurts. Close his eyes and squeeze. Start with one thing and try to follow, don’t get tempted to go off

  albino rabbit on the top of Red Rocks

  actually a toy

  someone left

  with the stuffing coming out

  where its ear was gone

  and

  No, that’s wrong. Come on. Breathe. Start with

  washed-up stingray

  flipped on its back

  pale

  u-shaped thing, a mouth?

  No, not that either. Slow down. Start again, what about

  the Shell House and Mum bought him a box all covered on the outside with shells

  and inside there was felt, dark blue

  for your treasures, she said

  and then

  it was lost

  fell

  from his bag

  when he was riding

  his bike

  No. No! Shh. Calm. Breathe. Molly. Molly.

  Molly! Yes, that is the start!

  Molly’s hooves, black in sand

  Molly’s sun dots

  Molly’s white hairs

  furry ear cups, going front and back

  Not quite it. Breathe, squeeze, he’s close. It’s not quite Molly, it’s

  the girl

  girl

  on top of Molly

  dark hair, mean voice

  he knows this girl

  knew

  this girl

  when she wasn’t big

  when she wasn’t sad

  Ah, and it’s all connected, see, because how does he know this girl? From other times when he stayed too long, when he got stuck in one of his burrows and had to creep and run and dive with absolute caution, with the utmost care because

  rabbit, rabbit

  people

  daytime people

  big and pink

  with bags and buckets and sticks

  all bright colours

  shoes

  tromping through

  They don’t look. As a rule. As a rule, he is safe. But. Once a boy, little, walking behind, he saw, round eyes and a jump in the air, pink mouth and wet crying and legs running away. And once a woman, quick stop and flat hand on her chest, then walking off fast.