Drift

by Penni Russon

  ‘Did you stay in touch with him?’ Trout asked Grunt as they walked up to the yellow house.

  ‘I wrote to him. We talked on the phone a few times. I liked him. In some ways he was very switched on. I don’t think I would have gone travelling if it hadn’t been for him. I’m starting my postgrad mid-year.’

  ‘So what have you been doing? Besides surfing.’

  ‘Driving up to Far North Queensland, taking my time. Camping. Bushwalking. Doing some cycling. Just … soul searching, I guess. Looking for …’

  ‘For what?’

  Grunt shrugged. ‘Answers, I suppose.’

  ‘What was the question again?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Grunt said, with a wry, humourless smile.

  Trout nodded wearily. Undine. Clearly she was the same sharp stone rattling around in Grunt’s empty spaces as she was in Trout. He’d always suspected Grunt was in love with her, though he didn’t think Undine knew that. He thought about seeing Undine on Friday night at the docks. A whole human girl, shimmering into existence, stepping out of the air, out of nothing. Should he tell Grunt? But what was there to say? It would only be like losing her all over again, Trout knew better than anyone. Trout’s word couldn’t conjure her presence, he could only emphasise the absence of her. It wasn’t an answer, it was just another, more complicated question.

  So he didn’t say anything more, but the ghost of Undine seemed to hang around in the Bay that morning. She was everywhere he looked and nowhere and that, he supposed, was the crux of the issue, the dark heart of the contradiction, both for Trout and for Grunt when it came to Undine.

  Undine felt the last of her strength ebbing out of her. Although the water was cold, the sun was beating down fiercely. She could no longer drag her arms through the water, she was barely able to keep herself afloat.

  She closed her eyes. Sleep. She just wanted to sleep. She wanted to dream herself back into her bed, back to the world where Stephen would be downstairs, where warm soft bread would be waiting for her, spread with honey that smelt of flowers. Bread and flowers, she thought hazily …

  ‘Sleep,’ a voice said – her own voice. There was no going back now. ‘Trust the magic,’ she murmured. ‘Trust the magic to bring you home.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Lou, Mim and Jasper arrived together. Grunt made more tea.

  ‘Hey, stranger!’ Mim said warmly when she spotted Trout. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages.’

  Trout shrugged. He liked Mim, but she made him shy. She was kind of not old enough to be a real grown-up and not young enough to be a kid. ‘I’ve been around,’ he said.

  Jasper poked about in the garden, looking for insects. He sidled up to Lou. ‘Where are the kittens?’ he asked her in a soft voice.

  ‘They’re not really kittens anymore,’ Grunt said, leaning towards Jasper to answer. ‘My mum found them all a home when Prospero went into hospital the first time. She kept one herself. They couldn’t find the mother cat, so she’s probably still about somewhere. She’s half wild anyway.’

  ‘And the dog?’ Lou asked.

  ‘My sister is looking after her temporarily, but she can’t keep her – her landlord won’t let her have a pet.’

  Lou nodded vaguely. ‘So,’ Lou said tiredly, ‘shall we do this thing?’

  ‘Stay here with me, Jasper,’ Mim said. ‘I’ve got some stickers and stuff in my bag for you.’

  ‘I want to go with you,’ Jasper said softly to Lou. Lou and Mim exchanged a worried look.

  ‘I don’t know, sweetie.’ Lou bent down to Jasper’s level. ‘Are you sure? We’re saying goodbye to Prospero, remember? Undine’s daddy?’

  Jasper nodded. ‘I want to say goodbye too.’

  ‘I’ll come. I can take him if it’s … too upsetting,’ Mim said to Lou.

  Before they made their way to the beach, Lou walked heavily up to the car. She came back carrying a polished wooden box made of huon pine. It was beautifully made, low and elegant. It took Trout a moment to realise it was Prospero, or his ashes.

  They all walked down to the beach together.

  At the water’s edge, Grunt said, ‘Prospero wanted me to read something.’ He pulled out a piece of paper. The beach was still and windless. Trout had never seen it so still. Jasper leaned against Lou, listening.

  Grunt’s voice carried over the still surface of the water. Trout recognised it as dialogue from The Tempest. Maybe because of his name, Prospero had a bit of a thing for it. The part he’d chosen for his funeral service seemed to Trout a strange choice. Surely the play’s final soliloquy would have been more appropriate, the one the character of Prospero delivers about giving up his magic, his power. A lot of people thought it was autobiographical, about Shakespeare giving up writing – his own kind of magic – at the end of his life. But the part of the play Prospero had chosen was dialogue, though Grunt read each character’s part in one voice so that it was a suitably sombre eulogy.

  ‘Caliban: Art thou afeard? Stephano: No, monster, not I. Caliban: Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices that, if I then had waked after long sleep, will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, the clouds methought would open and show riches ready to drop upon me that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.’

  Jasper clung to Mim’s hand as Lou walked towards the sea. She picked up a handful of stones at the sea’s edge and slipped them into her pockets.

  As if in a dream, Lou walked into the water till it was up to her waist. Trout could see Lou’s lips moving and guessed she was saying her own goodbye. Then she emptied the old man’s ashes into the sea, her arm flung outwards. She weighted the box with the stones she had collected, emptying her pockets so her skirt ballooned up to the surface of the sea. Lou lobbed the box as far from her as she could. They all watched it land in the water with a loud splash and it sank into the soft rise and fall of the peaceful waves. Lou gazed at the space where the box had been until the disturbed water settled around it and everything was still and smooth, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  And to the Bay, Trout reflected, nothing had. It accepted death every day: of fish and squid and the tiny floaty things that dwelt in the forests of kelp; of weedy sea dragons and crustaceans that crawled around on the rock and sand of the deep sea floor, their whole lives spent in darkness, so that they had evolved to be colourless and eyeless.

  Lou walked past Trout and Grunt without looking at them, her head down. She took Jasper’s hand. ‘It’s over,’ she said, quietly.

  A seagull wheeled overhead. From up there, Trout thought, they must have seemed a tableau of grief, each of them hopelessly separate from the other. Standing looking out at the sea, the five of them – Lou, Grunt, Trout, Jasper and Mim – were like a reflection of the angels, the large columns of stone that stood sentry out to sea, eroded by tide and time, altered by degrees, but still standing, still resolutely the same.

  The seagull climbed in the sky and Trout felt himself growing smaller and smaller, until he was just a blemish on the earth’s surface, on the shifting sand, the uncertain boundary between land and sea.

  ‘Don’t go too far!’ Lou called as Jasper wandered away up the beach towards the rocks.

  ‘I’ll stay with him,’ Mim offered. Lou gave her a quick, grateful smile.

  Trout continued to watch the horizon as Lou and Grunt began talking about packing up the house. It was funny how, now Prospero had died, his house and his stuff were called the estate. It sounded kind of posh, Trout thought, like a stately English home, though the little yellow house was not at all stately. Though, he supposed idly, the land was probably worth quite a lot. Everyone in Hobart talked about the boom. His parents’ house had more than tripled in value in the last few years. And this was a big block of land right on the water, with access to what was pretty much a private beach since there were no paths except
the one from Prospero’s garden. Some mainland yuppie would probably bulldoze the house and build their own McMansion instead, storing their yacht in Prospero’s boatshed.

  Trout wandered away from Lou and Grunt’s conversation; he wasn’t a part of it. For a moment he wondered what he was doing here at all. But he knew the answer to that, or he had known it, when Lou first rang to tell him about the service. He’d come here to say goodbye to Undine. Maybe they all had. ‘Well,’ he said to the sea. ‘Bye, Undine.’ But the sea stared back blankly. The words didn’t mean anything, not after last night.

  Trout sighed. He turned from the sea and followed Mim and Jasper’s footprints up the wet sand at the tideline.

  Trout wondered if more people would come and dive the wreck. Grunt said it was pretty significant historically and there was no reason why they shouldn’t now, was there? Trout felt grim inside as he remembered that gaping hole of light under the sea, pulsing like a dying star, throbbing like an underwater rave with a bass and a beat all of its own. He had seen Undine inside it when she was supposed to be in Greece. He had wondered then if Undine and the Bay were joined in some way, if this ball of what seemed to him to be pure magic had somehow been Undine. That she had been inside … how to explain it? But herself, an external, physical manifestation of herself.

  He and Grunt had discussed it a few times. Grunt had even dived the Bay again looking for it, for some evidence of it, but it had gone. And the more they talked about it the more it didn’t make sense. The magic resisted scientific inquiry, empiricism, all the things Trout had thought he could always rely on. Maybe that was the real reason he’d turned to photography, to art.

  Trout kept walking up the beach, the sun was hot on his face. The air was still, but it was lighter than in the city, fresher. He breathed in deeply.

  Trout had never been up this far, past the boatshed. It really was an amazing stretch of coast, a sheltered crescent-shaped beach, rocks at either end creating a completely closed-off bay. It was surprising that boats didn’t come here more often, though given the character of the coastline he supposed it was easier to skirt around the angels on the open-sea side rather than trying to navigate through them to the beach. But maybe it was more than that. Perhaps the Bay protected itself somehow, kept itself forgotten. The angels themselves were such an impressive, unique feature of the landscape that you would have expected them to appear on the cover of inflight magazines and tourist brochures. And yet they were apparently undiscovered. They themselves were witnesses to the Bay, observers of its secrets, but they were secret, unobserved.

  Trout caught up to Jasper and Mim. Mim was on her knees, digging and patting down sand while Jasper collected things and brought them to her – flat shells, stones, long strands of bobbly brown seaweed and even a few pieces of blue and white ceramic, from an old vessel of some kind, long since broken and ground smooth by the sea.

  ‘I’m making a mermaid,’ Mim said. ‘Want to help?’

  Trout smiled and shook his head. He wandered over to the rockpools, looking for crabs. He poked his finger into the centre of a scarlet sea anemone and it closed over, sucking gently. Trout felt bad – the anemone had been looking for sustenance and found only emptiness. He extracted his finger.

  ‘You do the eyes,’ he heard Mim say, and, ‘What shall we use for the mouth?’

  Finally Mim sat back on her heels and brushed the sand from her hands. Trout walked over to stand behind her and Jasper. They looked down at the finished mermaid.

  ‘Her eyes are sad,’ Trout commented.

  ‘It’s the shape of the shells,’ Mim said, tilting her head. ‘It can’t be helped.’

  The mermaid’s seaweed hair was long and swept up, as through streaming in the water or the wind. She wore a necklace of shells and ceramic. Her mouth was an open O hollowed out of the sand.

  ‘Is she going to swim home?’ Trout asked Jasper.

  Jasper didn’t even consider the question. ‘No. The tide will come up and wash her away.’

  ‘Her sisters might come to save her,’ said Mim.

  ‘Trading their hair,’ said Trout. ‘Or was it their voices?’

  ‘Hair,’ Mim said. ‘She gave up her voice.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Jasper said, ‘in the story, the mermaid dies.’

  ‘Does she?’ Trout asked. ‘I thought she married the prince. I thought they all lived happily ever after.’

  ‘The prince marries someone else,’ Mim said.

  Trout laughed, surprised. ‘I didn’t know that ever happened. I didn’t think princes were allowed to do that. So what happens to the mermaid?’

  ‘She dies,’ Jasper said again, with relish. Trout looked at him, raising one eyebrow. He really was a creepy little boy.

  ‘No, she doesn’t!’ Mim said, tickling Jasper’s side. Jasper giggled. ‘Remember? She becomes a spirit of the air and does good deeds, spreading the scent of flowers where there’s pestilence. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Jasper said, as if he liked his version better. But when Mim said they’d better get back to Lou, Jasper asked suddenly, ‘Will she be lonely?’

  ‘No,’ said Mim. ‘I think her sisters will come soon.’ Mim thought for a minute. ‘I can’t decide if they should keep their hair or not. I suppose they need to give something up. But their hair seems so …’

  ‘Trivial?’ Trout asked.

  ‘That wasn’t what I was going to say. The opposite,’ Mim admonished gently. ‘It doesn’t seem fair to make them sacrifice so much.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jasper said, as if he were just deciding. ‘The sisters can come.’

  Mim put her arm around Jasper and they set off up the beach towards Grunt and Lou, Trout following behind.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Liv was writing the cakes of the day on the blackboard in coloured chalk. Phoenix came up behind her, circling his arms around her waist.

  ‘I’m not even open yet,’ she said.

  He took the chalks from her hand, unwound his arms, and wiped off the words she had written on the blackboard.

  ‘Hey!’ she protested. But she settled back, leaning against a table to watch Phoenix draw. She knew she was going to get a story. ‘A circle,’ he said, and he drew one with a big gesture. It was a bit bumpy in places, but it didn’t matter. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Like us? Like people are circles?’

  ‘When I was a kid I saw the world like this. Kind of big and overblown, a green and blue balloon suspended in an inky night sky.’ He drew in the green and blue on his lumpy world. Then the stars in the sky, like little white pinpricks. ‘At first I thought she wasn’t gone at all, it was merely a matter of surfaces. I walked on green, the inky sky surrounding my head.’ He drew himself in. ‘And she lived underneath the blue, breathing water like it was air. She was a sea-thing, her bones living coral, her hair streaming kelp, the jellies of her eyes two jellyfish, undulating upwards. Her breath was a dying wave.’ As he talked he drew her, underneath his world, with a dotted line and an arrow’s head pointing out of the blue, connecting them up.

  Liv examined the drawing. ‘Very nice. Who is she?’

  ‘My half-sister.’

  ‘Older or younger?’

  ‘You know,’ said Phoenix, contemplatively, ‘that’s a surprisingly complicated question.’

  ‘Really?’ Liv looked at the drawing again. Then she sighed.

  ‘That was a big sigh,’ Phoenix said.

  ‘Every morning, I wake up, get out of bed, shower, eat toast. I ride my bike to work. I make cakes, write on this blackboard. I open up the café. And every morning I think … what if it’s today?’

  ‘What if what’s today?’ Phoenix asked.

  ‘The day you don’t come. The day you’ve gone away.’

  ‘Who says I’m going anywhere?’

  ‘You did. The first time you came here. You told me you were just passing through. That you never know how to stay. And I can see it, you’re wandersome. Even in your mind, your dreams, your s
tories – you travel to places I can’t follow.’

  ‘Did I say that? How callous, when I already knew …’

  ‘Knew what?’ Liv asked.

  Phoenix stepped forward and tugged a lock of her hair gently in his fingers. Liv smiled. ‘As soon as I met you,’ he said, ‘I knew I had to learn how to stay.’

  They had only got a little way up the beach when Jasper wriggled out from under Mim’s arm. ‘Wait right there!’ he said. ‘I forgot something.’ And he ran back along the beach towards the mermaid.

  ‘Jasper?’ Mim called. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I want to get the jewels to show Mama,’ Jasper called back, without looking back.

  ‘What …? Oh right, he means those pieces of ceramic,’ Mim said to Trout. But a minute later she said, ‘What’s he doing?’ Trout turned and saw Jasper clambering over the rocks.

  ‘I’ll get him,’ Trout said. The sand slid around under his boots as he ran up the beach. Where the sand gave way to rock, Trout leapt from one to another, his feet slipping on the wet surface. Jasper had made astonishing time, and for a moment Trout couldn’t see him at all.

  And then he did. The small boy was standing on a bare patch of sand that was like an island in a sea of stone. He was dwarfed by black rocks that loomed much taller than himself.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Trout asked.

  Jasper was staring at something between the rocks and moved closer to see what it was. Suddenly Jasper started shouting, his voice carrying in the still flat air. ‘Mama! Mama! Mama!’ He repeated the word over and over again. Trout went up behind him and laid a hand on Jasper’s shoulder and in that instant Trout saw what Jasper had seen. The boy turned and grabbed Trout, who lifted him up. Jasper wound his spindly arms tightly around Trout’s neck and squeezed, craning his head around to look again. Trout had never held a child before, certainly never Jasper. But they stood together like this until the others came. Trout heard Jasper’s raspy breath, seagulls, then Mim’s voice – ‘oh my god oh my god’ – but from the body laid out in front of him all he heard was a heavy, deathly silence.