Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Up until that time, there would still be the Newsletter to compile, proofs to correct. He opened his eyes and stood at the third go and shuffled over to the table under the skylight.

  WELLINGTON POINT RSLA. ANZAC DAY, April 25.

  11 a.m. service at the Cenotaph–marchers to assemble at 10.40 a.m. opposite Talbot’s Store. Wreaths will be laid out for pick-up at the Uniting Church.

  Not until late afternoon did Alex return home. He checked the bonfire for embers and was walking towards the house when he almost trod on a tiny brown object.

  Dead on the ground, a beautiful bird.

  He picked it up. A young swift. He held it in his palm, but even as he ran his finger over the porcelain-white throat, the minute legs and feet, the wings trembled and a drop of saliva oozed from its black bill.

  With the utmost tenderness he placed the bird on its back on the flower bed, and opened the fly-screen and went inside.

  Merridy had not left her desk. “I meant to ask you to get olive oil. But there’s butter in the freezer. And, Alex, you didn’t forget that cereal, did you?” still writing.

  He stood behind her. His eyes on her sideways face, the exposed bra strap, the new yellow dress that was too large for her body. Almost seventeen years together and he did not recognise her. She was stranger to him–suddenly–than the young man who had wrecked all the ships in this room.

  She felt the force of his glare and twisted in the swivel chair.

  “Or did you?” She looked radiant.

  He crossed his lead arms. “Are you pregnant?”

  She blushed. “Now why would you ask that?”

  He looked at her very closely and saw her eyes rocking with new colours. But her gaze did not meet his. Her face eloquent of something that she would rather not reveal, not yet.

  “Are you? I was in the post office. Mrs Grogan suggested you were.”

  “A ridiculous idea.” She occupied herself with screwing the top back on her pen. “What a bunch of stickybeaks people are.” She did not quite believe it herself.

  “Did you buy a pregnancy test?”

  With a desperate smile, she said: “Everyone in Wellington Point seems to know what I’ve done.”

  “Yes,” he said. “They do.” But still he waited for her to mention Madasun. When she did not, he said with terrifying gentleness: “I also bumped into Tildy.”

  “You did? And?”

  “I don’t want to hear any more until you decide to tell me the truth.”

  She cooked the chicken for dinner. They were eating in silence when she pushed back her chair and rushed past him, prolonging her smile until she reached the bathroom and then vomited into the basin.

  He came into the bedroom a few minutes later, holding a glass of water.

  She sat on their bed and stared blankly ahead at the faded wall where the wardrobe had stood. “Perhaps I undercooked it,” in a whisper. And watched Alex step in front of her, into the space where Kish had sought to shut himself away.

  Alex had sold the wardrobe to an antique shop in Campbell Town. A broken piece of furniture with a promise attached. But Merridy had interpreted it as something mystical and unravelling. The room was bigger without it, both of them smaller.

  In silence, she accepted the glass. She did not look at him as she drank.

  “Are you?” he repeated, in his gentle voice.

  His gentleness had the impact of a cudgel.

  “I was going to tell you tonight,” her head bowed, clasping the empty glass. The water had wiped the taste of vomit from her mouth.

  “Is it mine?”

  Her smile fluttered on her lips, then was inert.

  “I’m not that stupid. Not a fool,” and felt out of breath.

  She lifted deadly, sad eyes. Alex’s expression was terrible. His face not constructed to express his hurt.

  “It’s not mine, is it?” blinking against a blow he had yet to receive.

  She had trouble getting the word out. “Alex…”

  The noise of air sucked through a dry throat.

  His mouth hung open a little. Around him the silence burned.

  “Alex…”

  But his gaze was crumpling under its load of sadness. As if the moment of illumination would snuff him out.

  Now he would ask who was the father. She braced herself to tell him. And stopped. Was there not an outside chance it could be Alex–even after all this time?

  But he did not have to ask. He knew. Had seen it with his own eyes.

  It was curious. In the four months since Kish’s disappearance, Alex’s sleep had been largely untroubled, pacified by a not disagreeable sensation that everything was out of his control, and by the parallel conviction that Kish’s destruction of his collection of ships had in a sort of way released him. But soon as he woke, before he could reassure himself that all was well: the despair.

  Even after Sergeant Finter finished putting his questions to them, Alex did not ask Merridy about the events of that night. The image of her embrace with Kish had not penetrated. It remained suspended, so that a small part of Alex was able to persuade himself he had not seen it. Or rather that what he had seen was of a parcel, somehow, with the ghostly figure suggested by the Friesian cow beneath the macrocarpa, a product of humidity and moonlight, of fever and shadows. A mist-mirage. And so he blotted out that night as he had learned to blot out his parents’ death. In the days that followed, he explained it away as something that could not be explained, and did not refer to it again. What else could he do? Kish had gone, vanished off the map. As for Merridy, he could not interpret her face. Her thoughts lay unreadable, like letters on a jolted Scrabble board.

  Since the discovery of her brother’s remains, Merridy had been careful with Alex and attentive, which made him unhappy. He was reminded of the expression in her eyes at their first encounter, her childlike eyes that found it hard to settle on an adult surface in case they might be scalded. And he, in his turn, avoided looking at her in case he saw what he did not expect. Especially, he did not want to discover how infantile she might still be. Her life so firmly organised in response to her own childhood that she had failed to move beyond her childlike beliefs.

  So they settled back into an uneasy truce.

  More frequent than moments filled with the image of Merridy and Kish in their shocking embrace were those of immersion in the farm.

  The windmill worked. Alex could not decide if he regretted or not that Mr Scantlebury, in the course of stripping it down, had scrubbed Merridy’s name from the vane. The main thing was, it drew water to the feeding troughs–and in an uninterrupted flow that his father’s cattle had never enjoyed. Alex would look at the spinning blades and see the widening ripples of a trout feeding on mayfly. “Good dog,” he would call. As he rounded up sheep below Barn Hill. Driving slowly behind and giving the occasional toot to hurry them up and to make Rusty bark. Trees were in blossom and the mutton-birds were in. Out in the bay the sea was bluer than ever. Once, for no good reason he could think of, a snatch of a football song from Sedbergh came to his lips: The sunshine is melting the snow on the Calf/And the Rawthey is loud in the dale. Meaningless now. He went through the motions of living.

  While at her desk, or down at the oyster shed, or out in the bay on the Zemmery Fidd, Merridy glowed. She did not think of what her body had done on a splintery floor, or that she had betrayed her cousin or husband or herself. It had taken place in a dream, her atrocious outburst of lust or whatever it was, so that the dull fact of its having taken place was all she remembered, and not any history. But her eyes skipped away from the primary school whenever she had to go into Wellington Point.

  Above all, she succeeded in driving from her head all thoughts of Hector. It was extraordinary, the degree to which her pregnancy had dissolved her brother’s memory. She had discovered that she was pregnant two days after Minister Twelvetrees conducted the burial ceremony in which Hector’s friends, all middle-aged and married now, stood with their puzzled childre
n behind Mrs Bowman and Doss and tried to remember the seven-year-old boy and also to imagine him as an adult. From that moment on, it was as if Hector had soared up into the sky to disappear out of her life as emphatically as the young man whom Alex had rescued from the sea.

  “Do you know what happened to Kish? Have you seen him? Does anyone know where he is?” she had asked Tildy, to whom she had grown close again.

  “Not a thing.”

  But Alex did not have this consolation. To Alex, Kish was the reason. The awfulness. It was Kish who had made them enemies. Whose child swelled under his wife’s yellow dress.

  It was therefore a double assault for Alex to look back at the past four months in which he had accommodated and denied what he had seen.

  Sudden as a fist jagged into his chest, winding him, and with a lucidity that tore at his heart, he now understood the fury that had slashed his mother’s collection of samplers and trampled his father’s precious ships into smithereens. The tears trickled down his cheeks.

  Merridy could not bear to look. He stood there like something painted on wood. A rattle of breath in a too-small jersey.

  She got up from the bed. Her excluding voice saying something. Her mouth running after the words. Trying to sound adequate.

  “He will be our child,” she said. “We always wanted a child.”

  He reached to touch her stomach. Their barrenness so often had caused him pain. Yes, he had wanted a child, a better version of himself. Out of his love for Merridy, he had grown as impatient as she to put something into the future and not to have to look back.

  Then stopped in the middle of the bedroom with his hand up, like something farewelled, not able to touch, not able to look. Aware that what Merridy was saying was a snakebite whose venom had yet to reach his heart, but was sluggishly and intently heading that way through his bloodstream, and he knew that he must not encourage it even by the smallest motion.

  If only he could concentrate hard enough. He wished he was a boy again so that he could weep without embarrassment or scream his pain at the sea instead of bolting it behind an awkward smile. His hands colliding with a living creature, he stroked the dog.

  Slowly, he sank onto the bed. But only for a moment.

  He was trembling. He felt the chilled anguish in his soul, a choking. His voice sagging under the weight of what she had done to him, he mumbled stupidly, “I’m going to see if that bird’s all right.”

  He lurched to his feet and manoeuvred past her and she saw, then, the abolished light in his eye.

  Her stomach rumbled.

  “Alex!” She had never been good at shouting. “Alex, where are you going?” as if they were her last words to him. He walked on. Into the bare corridor. Through the kitchen. Vigorously outside. He was going to the unrevived swift; he had always been at ease with dead things.

  When he kneeled to recover the bird, it was gone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HE STUMBLED DOWN THE drive. The windmill called after him, and the young dog that he had shut behind the fly-screen, but he pressed on, his feet slipping on the gravel that he scattered, rolled downhill faster by the impetus of the seething in his chest. And did not stop when he reached his boundary fence.

  He walked on for two miles, along the Avoca road–gorse hedgerows and a red track bounded by low rolling hills with clumps of dark green eucalypts. Another farm, also empty: the bark of locked-up dogs and horses under blankets.

  He heard the sound of a car and hurried on. He pushed his way through the bush. Touching the branches for company; the wire barbs.

  The swifts that were spending their night in the sky saw him tracking west beside a river. The gums smoky green, the trunks covered in a tight plumage of ivy. Between the trees, he made out horizons of forest like the coat on Mrs Grogan’s poodle. Wads of cloud appeared high up. There was a shower and then the rain stopped.

  In a clearing, he passed a white fibro shack. A dog yammered at him and stood still and shivered. More dogs followed, trotting over the ground with their tails up and the dying day in their eyes glinting red from the darkening pools. It rained again, harder this time, and the rain swept across him until he was a figure that had been rubbed out. The lead dog licked a raindrop from its snout and turned back.

  At the top of the hill, he heard a thuck thuck thuck and turned to see a figure below, chopping wood. The damp crunch of firewood after rain carried the sound of someone axing their own flesh.

  An hour later, the shape of the skyline that he had left behind stood black and solid against the grey sky. His boots were soaked through and he felt blisters on his heels. He did not know where he was, didn’t care.

  Bathed in the light of dead stars he staggered on through the moist undergrowth, a creature in his shambles. Smell of wet rock and Kish’s child beneath her freakish yellow dress. Branches snapping and the reek of mould.

  In the darkness of the woods, with the fronds scoring his face and his sore feet and a devil growling not far off, he was the Piers of his childhood.

  Merridy.

  He stopped moving only when fatigue overpowered him. He lay where he had tripped, his cheek resting on a bed of damp leaves. Once, hearing a voice, he looked up. But it was himself gabbling. His words spinning off in a senseless stream, his blubbering orphans, their fading cries inarticulate.

  He slid back into sleep.

  Waking, he saw that he had slept beneath a pine tree. He blundered through the next day and into the night. He did not stop to differentiate, where he had been, what he had done, and mouthfuls of brackish water and hours on hard ground. Pink tentacles bunched with unripe berries plucked at him. He tore off the berries and crammed them into his mouth. The juice tasted marshy, rancid almost. His scratched hands toned in with the strips of bark and the smell of deserted barns came off his clothes. He remembered the wind blunting the young maize, the sneeze of a gun, a curtain across a room and on the stove a saucepan from which an old woman was about to feed her cat. And all the time the soft pad of wings in his chest.

  He imagined his chest sawn open. Merridy had scooped up the swift and freed the terrified bird into his darkness and the scars had healed and this tiny thing flapped and squeaked and tormented its beak on his sides.

  Sometimes in the stillness of wind he heard a cockatoo laughing at him, cackling out the word: Kish, Kish, Kish, Kish–Kish.

  On the third evening, he climbed a hill and peered into a deserted cottage with a high-pitched shingle roof and small panes, where he slept. The noise of rats in the walls was someone eating crisps in a cinema. In his jealousy, he summoned the unexplained chuckles, her mouth red and contented.

  At first light, he stepped from the shack and saw the Midlands Highway below and the metal roofs of Ross. Out of habit, a bruised hand patted his trousers to check that he still had his wallet. He pulled it out and a piece of damp paper fell to the ground. He read the words written in blurred ink. Without you I am so unhappy, I am.

  In Ross, he sat in a café with a busload of raucous, fat tourists, the windows fogging up and a westerly coming through.

  The tour guide called out: “Do we have any New Zealanders with us? No? Oh, I’m going to have a great day today.”

  The group hollered dutifully and tucked into their scallop pies, paying no attention to Alex. He looked down at the jersey that Merridy had given him and saw how burrs had stuck to it, how wire had ripped it, how filthy it was. Stenchy with the bitter smell of mud, he waited for his coffee.

  Night had fallen when he entered Green Ponds and saw the red lights of the Old Ship Inn. Because of his father, he avoided pubs. Now he dragged himself towards the neon blare.

  He pushed open the door and stood blinking in the dowdier light. Then bent his back and crossed the floor to the U-shaped bar.

  Sitting over their six-ounce beers, three beards tracked his advance from the far side of the polished counter.

  Separate from them at the end of the same counter, a clean-shaven man in a green jacket s
at eating a sausage off a paper plate. He, too, studied Alex: his bristly cheeks, his bloodshot eyes, his hair all over the place like slashed wool, the tired swing of his arms as he came up to the bar.

  “What can I get you, mate?” asked a pleasant Aboriginal face.

  Alex looked at the bottles all hanging upside down, all full. As he remembered them on his father’s shelves. And waved at one.

  “Shot of that. No, make it a double.”

  So he drank his father’s favourite gin. Smiling back at the uncaring beards. His thoughts with their children’s masks on them as if he could disguise his hurt with false cheer.

  It was almost the first thing that he had noticed on his return to Tasmania, twelve years after the death of his parents: the sight of so many massive beards. There came into his mind, nudged by the gin, the unkempt face of the man who visited Moulting Lagoon Farm six months after Alex had taken up residence again. Alex had mistaken him for an itinerant Jehovah’s Witness: Harry Ford had warned that they were operating in the area.

  “Are you Mr Dove?” bunching his hat.

  “That depends,” Alex said. “Are you seeking contributions?”

  “No,” said the beard, hopping from one foot to another. In the paddock, the horses lifted their heads and went back to tearing the grass. His eyes kept looking out of their corners at Alex. “I need to know. Are you Piers Dove?”