Salvation Creek

by Susan Duncan

  'Jesus. Big swing. Parents freak?'

  'Not for long.'

  As we drive, the sky drifts from black to grey to hot blue. Golden wattle fluffs alongside the highway making it feel like spring and we discover we were born in the same hospital in a small country town on the border of Victoria and New South Wales. Our parents might even have known each other.

  'Heard your brother died. And your husband.'

  'Yeah.'

  'My mother and sister, too. Six months between them. Nursed them both.'

  'Hard, huh?'

  'What about you? How're you doing?'

  'Good, yeah, really good,' I lie. 'Don't understand this dying shit though. I mean, what's the point of it all?'

  'The Buddhists understand it. Only ones who do.'

  'What's their take on it?'

  'Well, years ago, when I was in my hippie phase, my dad died. I was in Katmandu when I got the news. We'd always had a shocking relationship but I was completely devastated. I wanted to know why. Why him? Why at that particular time? Why ever? I went to see a monk at a monastery. Know what he said?'

  I shake my head.

  'Everything that is born must die.'

  Everything that is born must die. So simple. Utterly inevitable. Accept it.

  'Once you understand that, you should try to look for the gift in the death of your husband and brother.'

  'Gift! Are you mad? What kind of gift is it to have half your family die?'

  Sophia smiles smugly and doesn't answer. The highway switches from dual to single lanes and the speed limit drops. I need to concentrate so I don't kill us both. Half an hour or so later, my anger has flattened and the highway has switched back to dual carriageway.

  'So what was the gift you got out of the death of your mother and sister?' I am aggressive with her. I want to put her on the spot.

  'Oh, that's easy,' she says. 'I learned anything can happen to anyone at any time and you must live each day the best way you can.'

  'Do good, do you mean?'

  'Oh yeah. But be the best person you can, too. You know, nothing gives wisdom faster than a good attitude to death.'

  We are silent again, for a while.

  'So just how do you pronounce your name?' I ask eventually.

  'Oh, I dunno. Never been able to get it right.'

  'But is it So-fi-ah or Sofee-a?'

  'Depends what school you went to.'

  We burst out laughing. We both went to schools where snobbery was rampant and thumbed our noses at it. Anyway, my family, pub keepers with fluctuating fortunes, didn't have the money to support any kind of snobbery. When school fee time came around, they sometimes had to ask an old uncle – who came for a holiday and then lived with us until he died nineteen years later – to dive into his old boot for a fistful of pound notes. He'd push aside the cheese he matured in the dark recesses of the toe and hand over the required amount. The money always stank like dead rats but no-one ever refused to take it.

  By mid-afternoon we cross the long straight bridge that spans the Murrumbidgee River and the lush river flats where fat cattle graze in the thin, sharp winter light. We know, by now, we will be lifelong friends. We bypass the little black dog on the tuckerbox at Gundagai, and whip Fearless Fred up gut-busting hills of shale to the edge of the icy, treeless Southern Tablelands, the colour of taupe in mid-winter. An hour later we cross the Yass River into a wide main street speckled with solid old buildings that date back to the days when a good wool season turned struggling farmers into instant millionaires.

  I itch to continue. So near. Just a little longer. Three or four hours, tops. But Sophia is firm. She won't push the limits.

  'There'll be a lu-verly motel here.'

  She grins. I give in.

  'We'll find the cheapest. All we're gonna do is sleep there. They're all the same in the dark,' she adds.

  The motels look like clones. Low slung brick buildings, flashing neon lights saying Vacancy. We scope a Chinese restaurant where we agree to eat. A little further on, we check into a tired motel where the beds have faded orange chenille covers and the rooms smell used. Dingy lace curtains frame the window and the brown carpet is worn through at the door. I get twitchy. Worry about clean sheets. Other people's detritus. Sophia is pragmatic. Pulls incense out of her handbag. Lights it. Sandalwood. Knocks out even the scent of cheap air freshener from the bathroom.

  'I've stayed in places fleas have rejected,' she says.

  'Oh.'

  'In India.'

  'Oh.'

  'This is five star compared to them.You take the double bed. I'm used to a single.'

  I go out to the ute and bring in our bags. Dump them on the brown carpet. We fiddle around until it's time to go to dinner, finding pyjamas, our novels.

  'Oh shit. I left my new shirt at home,' I moan, 'Bought it for the party. Bugger.'

  'Got anything else?'

  'Yeah, but this was one of those big flowing things. Supposed to hide the rolls.'

  'Just have to let 'em hang out.'

  Pride and ego are big no-nos in Buddhism. Vanity is right up there with them.

  We go out to dinner.Two beers each. The food is sugary with a sticky coating on the beef. We chew it slowly, under the dazzling red and gold flocked wallpaper, delaying our return to the motel.

  'What's the plan tomorrow?' Sophia asks.

  'Get up and go. But we've gotta find a present for Fleury. What about flowers? Heaps of them. From the wholesale markets. We drive past them on the way into Sydney.'

  'Fill the house with them.'

  'Look great for the party.'

  We beam at each other.

  Back at the motel, Sophia climbs into her pyjamas and mumbles some prayers, doing a series of prostrations on the worn carpet.

  'Shouldn't you have a prayer rug or something? For that?' I'm worried she'll pick up some awful infection.

  She doesn't answer. Ten minutes later, she slides under the orange chenille covers, flicks off her light and falls asleep.

  I sit in bed, wide-eyed, with a book. The sheets are thin and clean but the bedspread smells of other people, not soap. If I had a mattress, the dog and it wasn't two degrees outside, I would have retired to the back of the ute and the comfort of my own smells. I try to read in a little pool of weak, blue fluorescent light to wind down from the long drive. But I can't concentrate on the words. My head spins with recipes for possible party dishes. Lots of people. Keep it simple. One dish lunch. Plenty of nibbles and a huge dessert. Think about the practical. Put off the personal. Busy. Busy. Busy.

  I turn out my light. Run through the possible guest list. There'll be lots of old friends. Will they care how fat I am? Can't believe I'm finally going to Pittwater. Fleury has tried to lure me there for years, stepping up the pressure after the boys died.

  'There's a guest cottage behind the house,' she told me after Paul's funeral. 'Use it.' Fleury is the kind of woman who stays in touch whether you've become a star or a drunk.

  'I'll think about it.'

  But I never did.

  In the morning, the cold makes our noses dribble. The heating in the room doesn't help much. We have a quick cup of tea and eat the two little complimentary biscuits in a plastic rack next to the tea bags and kettle. That's breakfast done. Neither of us talks. Thank God.

  Cold water on the windscreen cracks and melts the frost. Start the engine, switch on the heater. Duck the first cold blast of air. Silently urge the heating to kick in quickly. My hands are blue on the steering wheel. Our breath erupts in clouds.

  Sophia belts up carefully, folds her hands in her lap. Glances at me almost regally and indicates with a slight incline of her head that she is ready to move. I slide into gear and pull out of the motel.

  'I'm not sure but I reckon we'll miss the market. Closes around eight and I don't think we'll get there until after nine,' I say.

  'Let's give it a go anyway.'

  'Check out the directions in the street directory. I don't know m
y way around that part of the world. Are you a good navigator?'

  'Excellent.'

  'Great. Because my marriage nearly ended every time I did the navigation.'

  On the radio, regional news floods the car. Cattle prices are recited so quickly it sounds like an auction. The value of lamb is down. A detailed weather report warns of a cold front coming through. There's a stock alert. Sophia listens as though she has a flock of newborn lambs at risk. Once a country girl, always a country girl.

  Turn down the heater a little as the sun beats in the windows.

  But the glass is still icy. We make our way through folding blue hills along a highway edged with twisted silver gums. The road hums an endless single note. Signs tell us which radio station to tune in to. A small white truck is for sale in the middle of nowhere. Light rain falls and we're going so fast it tadpoles up the windscreen.

  It's nearly 10 am when we veer off the Hume Highway to go to the Flemington markets where there's acres of cold, concrete emptiness except for one bloke with a few buckets of pink tulips. We scoot over to him. Settle into bargaining mode. But he's our only chance and he knows it. The price doesn't drop much. Sophia, a seasoned negotiator from years of travelling in India and Nepal, tries to get him to throw in a bucket to hold the flowers but he won't do it.

  'Bastard,' she mutters, not used to defeat.

  'Very un-Buddhist of you.'

  She grins.

  We lay armloads of tulips, deliciously pink and feminine and still in tight buds, gently on the back seat. They remind me of ballet dancers, sitting with heads bowed, fingers touching their toes. I turn off the heating. Don't want them to burst open before we get there.

  Sophia grabs the street directory. 'Right. Now let's see. Where are we meeting Stewart?'

  'Somewhere around Surry Hills. He's going to call us.'

  Sophia gets us out of the market and onto the highway without mishap. I'm impressed. I just don't get map reading. Even holding the book upside down.

  We weave through awful city traffic. Sydney roads don't work. It's a city that grew out of cart tracks and a convict population that probably believed it would go home to England one day. Not much planning needed for a short-lived convict colony.

  Stewart rings when we're still twenty minutes from the city centre. 'Where are you?'

  I pass the mobile to Sophia. He asks her the same question. She turns to me. 'Where are we?'

  'About half an hour away.'

  'Stewart, we'll be there in half an hour,' she shouts. She scratches an address and directions on the inside flap of the novel she's reading. 'Right,' she tells him.

  She turns to me. 'What do I do with this thing now? How do I turn it off?'

  Mobile phones are irrelevant in her ordered life and she has resisted the trend to own one. I grab it and show her the button to press, one eye on the traffic. She holds the dashboard like the handlebar on a roller coaster.

  'Would you please keep your eyes on the road!'

  Stewart waits in his car outside his office in Surry Hills with his highly strung German shepherd–cattle dog cross, Gus, beside him in the front passenger seat.

  We wave madly and stick our heads out the car windows, yelling happily. 'We're here! Gidday.'

  'Follow me,' he shouts, pulling in front of us.

  Everywhere I look I see places where Paul and I once ate or drank. When we drive past his favourite pub I half expect him to step a little unsteadily out of the doorway, his face moony with contentment. Paul always loved a jar with his mates. Every Friday afternoon he held court in a favourite corner of the bar and relived old scoops and glorious moments and argued too, about Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Vonnegut. He charmed and entertained, stimulated and provoked. His mind moved like mercury but not much held his interest for too long.

  We met in New York when I was twenty-six and he was thirty-nine. At least that's what he told me. Three years later, when he was still having a thirty-ninth birthday, I tackled him. He cheerfully explained that like W.C. Fields, he intended to remain thirty-nine forever. He must have been forty-one or even forty-two when we met and I wonder, now, if he wasn't already disappointed with the way his life had turned out. Everything came so easily to him when he was young that when his luck dried up, as it always does for a while, he couldn't handle it. Or maybe, like me, he'd reached the age when the seedy side of journalism wore out his hubris.

  When we returned to Australia from New York a few years later, after filthy streets, decrepit subways and lunatics on the loose lost their charm for us, we bought our first house in inner city Sydney. My mother always referred to it as the Kowloon Slum. It was small – eleven feet wide – and the only renovated terrace in a truly depressing street of decaying, cockroach infested houses with garbage-tip backyards. But it fulfilled our criteria: we could afford it without borrowing too much. It was within easy walking distance to the city. It was close to the pubs where journos hung out. And the neighbourhood, after living in New York city, was tame.

  We sold it about three years later for almost triple what we paid, when plans were announced to rebuild Darling Harbour on our doorstep. That's when we bought the big white elephant on the Nepean River where Paul intended to write books and screenplays.

  'To be a good journalist you need an interest I no longer have,' he told me. For him, journalism had become the same old story over and over again. After a while it's impossible to hose down your cynicism.

  The door of his favourite old pub stays shut as we drive past, though, and we claw through the clogged city to sort out the jumbled lanes of the Harbour Bridge and then cruise through suburbia.

  Stewart is covered in dog hair when he gets out of the car in the vast open air car park of the supermarket in Mona Vale. He tolerates a hug and shouts at Gus to shut up at the same time. Gus keeps barking. Like us, he's excited.

  Sophia looks sideways at Stewart, smiles. 'Helloooo, Stewart.' She kisses his cheek and the three of us – greyer, fatter, slower and less sparkling than we remember ourselves – go shopping.

  'Does Fleury know we're here?' Sophia asks.

  'Nope. It's still a surprise.'

  'When's she coming to Pittwater?'

  The party is a Saturday lunch. It is Thursday.

  'Tomorrow night.'

  'But the surprise will be ruined! Can't you make her stay in town until Saturday lunchtime?'

  Stewart is agonising over the different types of mustard. 'No one makes Fleury do anything. What do you reckon? Hot English and French. Is that enough?'

  Sophia says we only need one kind. Hot English.

  I say get both. And seeded mustard. And the honey mustard sounds good, too.

  When we've filled three trolleys with everything from fillets of beef to chicken wings (hot English and seeded mustard only) Stewart pays the bill. There's enough food to feed an army for a week. We load the shopping into Stewart' dog-hair encrusted car and follow him to Church Point.

  We scoot past million dollar houses, a few rackety old holiday shacks from the fifties that haven't succumbed to property developers, and a couple of swank marinas. Where the sea tickles the roadside, a few mangroves cling to muddy flats and further on, little dinghies bob up and down on lazy waves. Yachts crowd coves like floating car parks and people in shorts and T-shirts pound along the waterfront track with tongue-lolling, tail-wagging mutts and combed designer dogs. It is a sparkling, summery, seaside day and the gloom of Melbourne fades into a shadowy memory.

  Just past a bucolic general store, ferry wharf and a motel and restaurant that looks as though they've seen more halcyon days, Stewart turns into Mitchell's Marina where he keeps a boat, because the only way to get where we're going is across the water. There's a chaotic collection of long, slender yachts loaded with tackle, glamorous motor cruisers, and bare-boned runabouts with outboard motors. At the end of the jetty, a tanned boy in navy shorts, navy polo shirt and navy boat shoes fills the tanks of a three storey motorboat from a rusty old petrol bowser. The
skipper, all in white, leans back in his cosy captain's chair as though he's king.

  'What's that worth, the boat at the end?' I ask Stewart.

  Stewart squints into the distance. 'Few million.'

  'Jesus.'

  'You know what's worse? Most of these boats don't get used. They just sit here and rot.'

  Halfway along the jetty, Stewart's bright yellow commuter boat is already loaded with six cases of wine, delivered earlier and left unattended.

  'Don't you worry stuff will get stolen?' I ask, unable to believe you can just leave wine out in the open for a few hours and it will still be there when you return.

  'Stuff gets knocked off from time to time but everyone knows who's done it and the word goes around,' he says.

  As commuter boats go, the Yellow Peril, as I'm later told it's nicknamed, is a Rolls Royce. Padded seats. A canopy for shelter from the rain. A steering wheel instead of a tiller. Ignition, not a pull start. But to me it looks small and bouncy. I wonder, not for the first time, about the mysterious physics that make boats float when by rights they should sink to the bottom.

  Gus jumps aboard without being told to. He lands with an easy balance and scrambles into the front passenger seat.

  'Yeah. Good dog, Gus. Good dog,' Stewart says.

  Gus turns his long speckled snout forward and stares ahead, front paws at attention. Like he's on the bridge of a naval ship with a very serious job to do. Sophia and I are told later that they're known throughout the community as the General and his loyal lieutenant.

  Stewart follows Gus into the boat. We hand him bag after bag of shopping. Then our baggage. Then the flowers. Sophia and I fossick for a seat. We are clumsy and flat-footed in the confined, unsteady space. Neither of us likes boats much. Only the whimsical, fictional romance of them. Stewart offers to move Gus but they look too content and comfortable together.

  'So this is Pittwater,' I say.

  'Yep. It's been home to smugglers, convicts, fishermen, farmers, layabouts, entrepreneurs, brothel owners, artists, writers and, until the last few years when real estate prices surged, the odd bloke who was doing it a bit hard,' Stewart says.

  Sophia shuts her eyes, raises her face to the sun. A closed smile creeps into her lips.