Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “Who did you think?” sighed Merridy and threw back her head on the pillow. The surf boomed. Another spoke of light rotated on the ceiling, raking the night. “The bloody Dong?”

  Walking back towards his ute, Alex resembled a bird at the top of its swoop, wings clipped to its side. Chesting the air like a bowsprit.

  He drove home. North along the coast road and then down a small trunk road that led, five windy miles later, to his farm. Carrying in his head an image that he wanted never to fade. He hoarded up in his mind the smallest detail of their dinner. Her forthright way of speaking. Her sudden seriousness. Her mannish laugh that made him feel nothing so funny or delightful had ever happened to anyone. He had talked about his past in a way that he was not accustomed to talk with anyone, and said to her all the things that a young man might feel inspired to say who had lost his heart thoroughly. And yet when he pulled into the drive, he had, as inevitably he did on reaching this blind corner, a flashback of a white Ford Zephyr with his parents inside juddering forward.

  Five drops of rain splashed onto the windscreen and then others. He shivered, struggling to invoke Merridy, and touched his cheek where she had brushed it with the back of her hand. But his younger self had ambushed him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WAS FOUR YEARS before. He was twenty-three. He felt raw and nervous as he stood at the edge of the road where out of some superstition he had parked his hired car. Suddenly, he did not want to walk for half a mile up the worn-out drive of pale gravel that had lost its guts; past the windmill and the Oyster Bay pine, to find, as he knew he would, the house as he had left it; he did not want to squeak open the fly-screen into the kitchen; he did not want to stay.

  So when he started up the drive, he was more resolved than ever to sell the place.

  The house he climbed to was a low brick one with whitewashed walls and a green corrugated-iron roof that sagged at the back. It was single storey and stood next to a farmyard squared off by sheds and barns. On an unmowed lawn in front of it, obscuring the windows, was a large tree. The pine had grown enormous since his childhood, so that its lowermost branches reached out and all but brushed the roof.

  He walked through the long grass to the base of the tree and stood before two slabs of Maria Island granite inscribed with the names and dates of his parents. He looked at the simple head-stones and thought of his mother and father beneath, their bones blending with the roots.

  Something was wrong with the iron windmill. The machinery creaked wildly and gouts of water streamed down from a pipe and into the yard. He delayed going into the house in order to fix the leak. For whatever reason, it was important that he stop the flow of water. But in trying to repair the windmill, he gashed his hand.

  The blood oozed out of the cut. He washed his hand under the leaking pipe. Then took off his left boot and sock, and bound the sock around the wound.

  He could anticipate Sarah’s reaction.

  The grassy air was scented with cow dung. He breathed it in and clenched his fingers to dull the throbbing. The water splashed from the pipe.

  He leaned against the windmill and took a long look at his childhood home. The house had a flower bed around it over-spilling with bottle-brushes and wild daisies. It lay in a hammock of barley fields and grazing paddocks that rose on either side to hills planted with black wattle and gums; and beyond, into Crown land of thicker bush and old-growth forest. Behind, paddocks sloped down to a windbreak of macrocarpa and through the trees a lagoon glittered. These were the smells and shapes to which he was first exposed. He knew their features better than his own.

  He picked his way through the long grass, oppressed by the weight of memories. Their vividness had come to an end when he left Australia for England. Twelve years in that cold, foggy climate had blurred him. Everything that he had succeeded in keeping at bay behind a screen, as it were, of sycamore, beech and elm, threatened now to dart out into the open and overwhelm him.

  His thoughts gallivanted off. He had the illusion that he could recall with extraordinary clarity almost every day of his childhood better than any day at boarding school or university. His memory struggled along a ditch. Was it here that he had sat with his father and watched the eels wriggling across the wet paddocks to the dam? He heard his father ruminating: “You know, no one has ever seen an eel mate.” Or over there that the tiger-snake had wrapped itself about his father’s leg and only uncoiled after being lured away with the glass of Beefeater that he happened to be holding? Afflicted with the memories, Alex trod across the lawn, ignoring the pain in his hand, ignoring the hives on his legs made by the grass, and opened the fly-screen to the kitchen and went in, to the damp and stringent odours of a house that had not been lived in since he was a boy.

  He inhaled. Smells of dripping and Mortein insect spray. Another stink turned out to be a dead possum in the disused rainwater tank, heaving with a fleece of maggots.

  Alex dug a hole in the flower bed and buried the rancid corpse with a rusted spade that he discovered in the shearing shed. Then he came back in and sat at the blackwood table and ate the sandwich that he had brought with him.

  He looked around. Some things remained in the darkness beyond the lantern glow of memory. Though not the image of his parents playing Scrabble at this table. He heard their shouts as his father got up to refill his glass and upset the letters. His mother saying: “Piers, your legs are younger than mine. Run to my room and get the dictionary.” She had been dead set against the idea of a dictionary on ideological grounds. But that was before her husband gave her one for their tenth wedding anniversary. From that moment on, she pored over her dictionary every night, ransacking it for obscure words. Especially words composed of two letters. She never knew what they meant, but was categorical that they did mean something. “Darling,” she would say testily, “everyone knows that your luck is determined by the flow of qi”–although, when challenged, it usually transpired that she had confused the Chinese life force with the Egyptian spiritual self or a Vietnamese monetary unit.

  Let to Bill Molson, who had lived the other side of Coombend and was interested only in grazing the land, the farmhouse did not show evidence of having been interfered with by any spiritual or human agency. Everything wore an aspect of distress and mismanagement.

  There was a black telephone on the table. Alex finished eating his sandwich and picked it up. Dead. But sounds came back to him. The voices of the girls at the manual exchange. The party-line number: three short rings and one long. The occasions when he would listen carefully so as not to answer the neighbours’ calls. He gently replaced the receiver.

  Piles of mail lay where they had tumbled onto the kitchen floor. Alex started to open the envelopes, but his eyes only followed print that he did not take in. An appeal from Merton College for the renovation of the chapel. A brochure from a hotel in Cumbria addressed to his parents. A postcard from Sarah, sent ten days before he left London–Hurry home, XXX S–and bulletins from museums in Denmark and Germany that housed collections of ships in bottles. Plus forty-nine issues of Bottleshipmagazine that someone had stacked on the dresser.

  This was the first hour. It caused a glugging in his heart to disentangle the kitchen from his rememberance of it. The sink against which he had groaned as a kid, a boy with the innocence rubbed off, hugging his elbows, watching the water running out clockwise–“In Cumbria,” his father maintained, “it drains the other way.” The windows that no one had cleaned since that horribly sad day. The Ruber calendar with Waterhouse’s Circe Individuosa hanging behind the closed door, stuck fast in January 1972. His father liked to keep the grandfather clock half an hour forward, but his mother was the tardy one. She never flipped the page on the calendar until well into the following month. Another three weeks before she hurried into his bedroom on her way to the auction of fine furniture and linen in Campbell Town. “Your cricket whites are on the line, and, Piers, you can offer them breakfast if you like,” while his father yelled from the kitchen, “H
ista! Marjorie, hista! Unless we leave this instant we will miss the auction.” About to close the door, his mother had darted back into the room and pulled open the curtains. “We should be back in time for tea,” kissing him. “Good luck with the match. Who are you playing? Fingal? Bowl well.” In her thick black hair a streak of white and on her breath the scent of something medicinal. Then, louder: “Coming.” His last sight of her: from the back, the strong light splintering onto her peacock jacket before he retreated into sleep. The sleep in which he hoped to find the courage to tell Cheele how dreadfully sorry he was.

  When he had opened all the mail, Alex stood up and went into the corridor that led to the two bedrooms and his father’s workshop. His Blundstone boots were stiff, and the dry boards creaked like ice under his sockless foot. Alert, he avoided looking at the ratty frames of Huon pine that hung along both walls. He knew by heart their homespun wisdom. Occasionally in England, a sentence from within one of these frames had wormed its way into his head and stayed there. And he had gathered together homilies of his own that he might like to put behind glass.

  No one reaches the end of their life and wishes they’d spent more time marking papers.

  If you want to make the gods laugh, tell them your plans.

  When you’re skating on thin ice, you might as well dance.

  Don’t sleep with anyone who has bigger problems than you have.

  Holding his breath, he creaked through the rooms. Saliva filled his mouth when he found his parents’ clothes hanging in the oak wardrobe. His father’s jacket and waistcoat fleece, his mother’s blueberry frock. He pushed his face into the tweed suits and dresses, gulping in the odour of mothballs mingled with musty wool, and a shudder ran through him. “Oh, Dad, oh, Mum.”

  Alex unhooked the clothes from the rail and threw them onto the bed.

  He fled into the living room and opened the curtains, sending up puffs of rodent-scented dust. The light slashed into strange, half-remembered furniture and paintings: a sewing machine, a watercolour of the River Tamar by Gladstone Eyre, a Lear lithograph of a cockatoo. Mice had eaten the arm of a red chair, revealing four springs.

  He plumped up the cushions, shaking out the dead flies. He had inherited all this, down to the Brussels carpet, but he hardly knew anything about these objects. Except for those in the room at the end.

  Alex turned the handle, pushed open the door. His heart pounding.

  He stood on the threshold of what resembled an operating theatre. In the centre of the room was a worktop scattered with scalpels, tweezers, twist-drills, long scissors; all from the same surgical suppliers in Melbourne, all left where his father had put them down.

  He rubbed his nose vigorously at the familiar smell of varnish and gave a slow look around. Sunlight winked through the window blind on shelves of gin bottles placed horizontally, of light bulbs and injection capsules. Each contained a miniature vessel under full sail.

  Upright on the worktop, a bottle with a coin in its mouth.

  At the sight of the coin, Alex started forward. His sudden movement disturbed a huntsman spider and a ghost in red braces who sat hunched over the bottle and stared intently at a match that burned at the bottom of it. On hearing Alex enter, the memory looked up and searched for him with fading eyesight: “You need to be original, you need to be different,” in a voice curbed by exile. “Not like Johnny-round-the-corner.”

  It was to this room that Alex now made his way upon returning from his dinner with Merridy. His first act was to sit down at the worktop and retrieve the three satay sticks from his pocket. He reached over to the model of the ship that he had started to piece together and measured the sticks against the hull. Perfect.

  Then, about to scrub off the legacy of the dried chicken, he noticed an orange trace on one of them. He pressed it to his lips.

  And in the morning sketched a single enormous word on the green vane of the windmill. He read and reread the letters drying in the sun, then put the top back on the marker that he used for identifying sheep and climbed down the ladder.

  When Alice came to clean on Monday, she found Alex trying on a new shirt that he had bought a year before and never worn.

  “Anything the matter?” she asked, although she had heard some of it already from Debbie.

  “No. Why?”

  “You look like a washing machine set on spin.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The WELLINGTON POINT READING GROUP met at the Bethel Teahouse on Tuesday last. The small audience was disappointing. However, the moment was rescued by a wonderful presentation by Mavis Pidd who in response to our suggestion that her talk be abandoned went on with enthusiasm to describe her vibrant and whimsical upbringing in Tomahawk.

  Tildy stared across the counter of the cocktail bar and examined the face of her childhood friend with respectful astonishment. “Alex Dove took you to dinner? He’s never taken anyone to dinner. You know what I reckon?”

  “No.”

  “It was the lip gloss I lent you!”

  “Very probably,” laughed Merridy. Whatever had passed between her cousin and Alex, it relieved her to find that she was not upset.

  “So. What did you make of him?”

  Merridy picked up the brick and wiped the counter under it and put it down. “I liked him.”

  Tildy’s eyes rattled in her head. “Oh, everybody likes Alex Dove. But Ray’s right. Say what you want, he’s still a Pom. And you know what they say about Poms. Where the heart should be there’s a jellyfish.”

  “He was born in Australia, you goof,” said Merridy. But she felt defenceless. Tildy was her employer’s daughter. Not for the first time, Merridy resented the position this put her in. To be an object of Keith Framley’s charity.

  Tildy was not done. She rotated her glass. “Tell him about your brother, did you?”

  Merridy frowned. “I did.”

  “You did?”

  “Well, more or less.”

  “Oh, Merridy,” she sighed. Then, matter-of-factly: “I don’t think you’ll ever get over it.”

  “Of course I will,” flashed Merridy. “You can get over anything. You just have to put your mind to it.”

  Tildy was not ever going to be able to conceive of getting over Ray Grogan. Not in two hundred and ninety million years.

  “Anyway, he’d understand,” Merridy went on. Battling to keep the anguish from her voice. “After all, his parents…He got over that, didn’t he?”

  “I suppose so,” said Tildy, and stood up. She was on her way to the Returned Servicemen’s Club to meet Ray. “I suppose so,” retrieving her handbag from the counter. “But you do like him?”

  “Like, yes.”

  Impatient as she was to see Ray, Tildy paused. She had known her cousin long enough to be aware that Merridy’s confidence was under siege. Something Tildy had not witnessed before.

  “Would you like to be in love with him?” with exaggerated patience.

  A dry silence. In which Tildy’s father could be heard talking in the kitchen to Debbie.

  “…wind’s started to blow again. Reckon if it’d stop, we’d fall over.”

  “We’ve had winter before we’ve even had it, Mr Framley…”

  “Merridy?”

  “Of course. Of course,” in a whisper.

  Tildy looked at the cousin she had danced with as a child and shook her head. “Oh, Merridy, you’d better start living. We’re dead an awfully long time. You may not have liked Mr Twelvetrees, but sometimes he was right–‘Unknown makes unloved.’”

  Her cousin’s words ate into Merridy. She saw the regret in Tildy’s eye and it moved her as umpteen young men’s entreaties had not succeeded in doing. The following afternoon, she leaned against an ochre wall that suited her colour better than the dark jacket that Keith Framley obliged her to wear behind his bar, and stroked Alex’s face again.

  “Why do you touch me like that?” he wanted to know.

  “Like what?”

  He took her hand and s
howed her.

  “It’s a family thing. Don’t all families do something? Yours must have had its idiosyncrasies. This is one of ours.”

  He moved forward at her inflection to read the intention in her mouth. Then they were kissing. He felt her breath inside him, warming and expanding, snapping the threads that bound him.

  She pulled back. Fighting to catch her breath. And to keep above the surface. “Know what Ray Grogan says about you?”

  “What?”

  She struggled for distance, but something drew her to him once more. She touched his face with the tips of her fingers, the fair unprotected hairs at the borders of his temples. Like the hairs on a baby’s legs.

  “Go on,” he said. “Tell me.” Losing himself in her eyes.

  She swallowed and tried to look mean. “He says you’re the biggest spurt of piss ever let out of an English prick.”

  “He said that!”

  “Also, you’re so tight-arsed that if you rammed a bluegum up your bum it would come out wood chips,” and her mouth, with the lipstick overrunning the lips, where she had kissed him, smiled as if he were something that she had in that instant decided to defend to the death.

  In a sparsely decorated room less than a hundred yards away, Sister Surrage inspected a plate of melted ice cream. “How are we doing today, Mr Bowman? Not eating, I see.” And clucked. “I suppose you know it’s home-made?”

  Propped up on blue cushions, Leonard Bowman had lost his appetite but not his taste for poetry. His gaze remained fixed to the wall of the bowls club opposite, and the couple kissing there. Unsuspecting on the other side of the wall, his wife scuttled forward two steps and released a black ball onto the grass under the critical eye of her plump partner.

  “What’s that you’re saying?” Sister Surrage hovered with the tray.

  He tried to speak, but the words were sewn to his tongue. A piece of doggerel memorised from the Talbot’s Newsletter, and adapted.