So no sodding school, said Fflint. Hooray.
And no student courses. No student assignments. No plays or exhibitions to visit. No one to meet. No football, cricket, swimming, netball. No Aussie Rules, no athletics that I was supposed to oversee. No need even to open the strange little shop I ran, in Goolwa.
My bedroom was the back of the shop. Like a junkroom, really. Full of books and tapes and DVDs through an old green curtain.
And as the green sunlight poured through that morning, I remember thinking about nothing at all. Because everything was sorted out. There was no need to drive anywhere.
So, yeah, I remember lying in bed with that green light streaming through the window. Over my hairy legs. My hairy belly. All dark green.
Fateful day, looking back. It was seven o’clock, late for me. I was usually gone by six. Would be in school at 7.15. And OK, as you’ve asked, I’ll bloody tell you.
We’re waiting, said Fflint.
There was a woman in my bed. She had never slept in that bed before. She never slept there again. Her name was Libby and she was a teacher at the same school in Adelaide.
Teachers, laughed Mina, looking serious.
I know teachers, said Nia.
Don’t tell me, said Fflint. From the art department. It’s all women’s libby there.
Spot on, said Parry. Now, are you listening? Because I’m not saying this twice.
Listening, said Mina. Honestly. The man further down the bar had ordered another drink. The black mist on his sleeves was dull now. His coat was sodden.
Then I got up. Slowly. Bit of a heavy night, if I’m honest. I think Libby put on one of my sports shirts and went to the kitchen.
I could hear her in the next room. Said she’d make the tea and asked where the breakfast was. Fat chance. Usually I had porridge but there wasn’t a crust in the house.
So, I dressed. Just tee shirt and shorts. It wasn’t summer any more, but that’s all it took. Warm enough compared with The Caib. I went into the kitchen and found a mug.
No comment, said Fflint.
And I must have said something to Libby. Something that took a few words. And she looked at me strangely. Asked why I was speaking as I did.
Speaking like what? I asked. But I noticed it too. Speaking with a slurred, drunken accent. When I wasn’t drunk. Heavy night or not, I swear I wasn’t drunk.
Yeah. Sunday morning coming down, said Fflint.
It turns out, children, said Parry, that I’d had a stroke.
Iesu, said Mina.
My God, said Nia.
Cut a long story short, I was in hospital for a week. Brain scan, heart scan, carotid investigation. The works. Had some time off and yes, could have returned to teaching. It was a real option. But thought better of it. So the school asked me to stay for three months. To find a replacement. Couldn’t have been nicer. But that was it.
And Libby? asked Nia.
She had a shock. That’s all. It’s not as if I died on top of her.
Tut, said Mina.
But I have to say…
What? asked Fflint.
That Libby was the headmaster’s wife.
Better and better, said Fflint. Like I said, those art teachers…
Two children of her own, said Parry. She was thirty, I suppose. Much younger than me. Much younger than the Head. Can’t say I even…
What? asked Nia.
Even liked her I suppose.
Just enough to get her into bed though, said Mina. Poor cow. If she wasn’t Australian, I’d feel sympathy.
I’m sorry for Libby, said Nia. She was risking everything for you.
For me? Yes, said Parry. I understand that. Now.
VII
Slim, always dark. That was Libby. Yes, Libby in black bondage trousers and black lipstick. Or, possibly aubergine. With her hair dyed black. And cut short in black feathers.
Libby, who imagined she was an artist. Who thought Parry was funny. Or original. Or at least, novel. Parry the pom who drove in from the sticks somewhere. Way out near Lake Alexandrina. The bloke who hated sport and took her to the Chinese cafés in Gouger Street market. Who once bought her a Chinese dragon amulet carved from water buffalo bone.
Yeah, Libby. He’d left her as he found her. Undamaged and possibly untouched. A long respectable life ahead of her, as the headmaster cruised towards his pension, then bought the Rough Guide to Western Europe. For the tour he’d always planned. As her sons went to university and into business. Two boys who never thought about art. Who never dreamed of asking their mother about that cobwebby canvas rolled up in the attic. The pieces of her installations scattered around the garden.
Yes, he remembered waking. And Libby waking at the same time. She must have turned over because she asked him something.
What’s that? Libby had wondered.
Parry had pulled himself up to look. There was a greasy plate on the bedside table, piled with oyster shells. An empty sauvignon bottle. Beside them was a pebble he had brought from The Caib. He’d had it for years, found on one of his expeditions around Caib Caves. A grey pebble with a white ball of quartz in its centre. Within the white quartz was a core of red quartz.
Parry had discovered it and his friend Severin had wanted it.
Like a red eye, Sev had insisted. Can I have the eye? Go on, I’ll be your friend forever.
Parry had considered the request. The pebble fitted his fist. It felt exactly right, the heft of it. He licked the stone and tasted its salt. Then looked into the quartz, the white, the red. It was smooth after aeons in prehistoric seas.
Libby had picked up the pebble and balanced it in her palm.
The evil eye, she laughed. My God, don’t tell me this has been looking at us all this time? At us in bed? It gives me the creeps, this thing. And it’s hot? Why’s that?
Coming to, Parry had shrugged. But on the day he had discovered it he had kept the pebble all the way home, Sev whining about friendship. Which wasn’t Sev’s style.
On one occasion Sev had complained so loudly, Parry had made ready to fling the stone into the sea. But he had held on.
The white quartz, the red quartz were, yes, Sev was right, like an eye. And the pebble was perfect in his palm. He resolved to keep it.
EIGHT
I
Parry walked into the fog. The air was salty and saturated. It was foolish to persist but he felt determined. In Goolwa he had dreamed of a fret such as this. Even more so on his expeditions out of Adelaide. In that red dust country of iron meteorites, the days were dry as ash.
Now he remembered a nearby cove, no more than an inlet. It was impassable terrain, a scattering of enormous rocks. He had often wondered how many thousands of years those stones had lain there.
The rocks were at the bottom of The Caib’s highest cliff, as if tipped from the summit. Each boulder was the size of a room, the largest as big as a house.
Parry had always thought the crags looked cut from carding by a tailor’s scissors. Impossibly shaped boulders in relief against the cliff.
Like flowers, he had once said to himself. As extraordinary as flowers could be. Ice-grey lilies, beneath a rind of salt. But here the lily petals were pearls of limestone.
Parry moved on through the mist. It tickled his eyebrows. He remembered his friends used to camp in that inlet, sharing flagons. Sometimes they lit driftwood fires that burned with iodine’s green flame.
A loose gang of girls and boys, maybe ten in all. Vine was sometimes there, always with Sian. They had married early, the fools. Weren’t they called the invincibles?
And Gil? Gil who was going to do great things. As they all were.
But usually there were only four or five in the group. From sixteen, Parry was one of those who stayed all night, sand-rashed and tipsy. Before a final plunge into the surf and the crawl home.
II
Often it was the girls who led the way. The girls Parry recalled, who smelled of vinegar, tasted of salt. Their hair stiff and bla
ck as wrack.
There was Lizzy with her sunglasses hooked on her bikini strap. And Branwen, a local Aphrodite, cuttle-white skin, floating in foam.
Yes, those all-nighters, he thought now. Talking coal strikes and the iniquity of scab hauliers on the motorway. Or whatever were the best tracks from ‘Exile on Main Street’. The riff from ‘Tumbling Dice’ was still in his head. Its underwater throb.
Despite that, he’d hated the Stones. There was something calculating in their communal sneers, the band’s indestructibility.
But what was the inlet called? Immediately, it came. As few other things did these days.
The Horns, that was it.
Going over The Horns tonight? was the question everyone asked.
But ‘The Gods’ was Parry’s private name. And the moment now returned.
Yes, The Gods. Grey polygons, those boulders. Streaming even at low tide in summer, surrounded by rock pools. The Gods of the Caib. If there were ever gods in that godless place, there they were. And still were, under the cliff. Hulking stone toads. Strange melted megaliths.
Or that’s what Parry could remember thinking. The maze at the cliff’s base was never free of shadow. There was a continuous settling of the limestone lagoons.
He remembered one occasion. He had scrambled down the cliff alone. To find no one else from the gang had appeared. And yet he decided to stay.
Far out, the surf was a silver stave. But no other swimmer was to be seen. Gradually Parry had become afraid. That time in the dark he had listened as intently as he had ever listened. As a kestrel listened. Looked and listened, poised above the darkening thrift. The hawk electric in its last stoop.
III
Summer-cold and uneasy, Parry had waited for whatever was out there. His belly was shrunken, the hairs on his nape erect as the eyelashes of anemones.
He had listened until he overheard the sighing of his own blood. And, yes, he was sure he had heard the boulders. Heard the boulders breathe. An endless exhalation that was not the distant tide or the wind that riffled the surface of the rock pools. The boulders breathing. As alive as he.
Such was the beach at night. And the beach was always a different world in darkness, a salt forest of groans and whispers. To the south was the surf’s drone. But there was something else. Inaudible yet always present. The murmur of great engines cooling. Liquids returning to equilibrium.
He imagined the rock roaches on the cliffs around him. Those sea lice were almost fragments of the stone themselves. Some lice were three inches long, armoured, alien, as they crept over the stone tablets. The girls hated them.
Down at The Horns, Parry had crouched in the starlight, amongst the phosphorus and fizzing lime. This was where the fossils were found. For Parry the fossils resembled pocket watches. Frosted jewellery, ghostly in the rock.
And again he overheard the boulders sigh as they settled. As the stones gasped in their sockets. On their immemorial plinths.
He remembered even then there were satellites crossing the sky. All that starry traffic, for those who cared to look. Dared to look. But when had Parry ever looked?
Years later, Lulu had looked. Yet it had not saved her.
Yes, Lulu, yes, he now heard his own voice. A man in the mist on the coastal path, muttering to himself.
One day, girl, they will name a star after you.
And he saw the child again, Lulu raising her forefinger to her lips. And then to the bloody pinprick of Mars. As if that dry world could explain her own. So Parry had stared into himself. And found nothing.
IV
Maybe near here, he thought.
One Saturday afternoon, he recalled, it was cold, dry. He had been walking with Severin at low tide. Gulls had been attracted to something in the water. The boys had gone over to explore.
Yes, Parry supposed. Possibly near here.
A net, about thirty yards long, had been washed up. Sev took one end and pulled. He succeeded only in raising the closest edge. The net, of green nylon mesh, rose and fell with each slack wave. Parry examined what was caught in its stave.
Durex.
Okay.
’Nother Durex.
Yeah, well…
Dead fish.
Spiny dogfish, said Sev. Big fucker. See the barb? Through the roof of the mouth. Through the excuse for a brain.
It’s speckled, said Parry. Brown and cream.
Camouflage. But dogfish can glow in the dark.
Christ, it stinks, said Parry.
I can see the backbone, said Sev.
Look, said Parry. A crab. Inside the fish. Eating it.
Shore crab.
A crab eating a fish from the inside?
That’s what crabs do.
Fuck me.
Found a sheep once, said Sev. Just a sack of crabs it was. All wriggling. You could see the belly move.
Double fuck me.
Ever heard crab music?
You what?
They whistle, do crabs.
Oh yeah.
Believe it.
Don’t think so.
Choose a hot night. Come down here in the dark.
What’s that? asked Parry.
Soft-bodied crab, said Sev. Bait for bass.
Tampon, said Parry.
Jamrag, spat Sev. My mum hides her jamrags all over the house.
My mum…
Don’t wear no jamrags, laughed Sev.
’Nother Durex.
Yip.
’Nother Durex.
Some fucker got lucky.
’Nother dead fish.
Yeah. ’Nother dogfish.
Seaweed?
Dead man’s rope.
What’s that there?
Sinker, said Sev. Line still attached. You see sinkers on The Horns. Look, spider crab. The French eat spider crabs.
Gives me the creeps, said Parry. They’re like…
Massive fucking spiders, said Sev.
And what’s that? asked Parry.
Some kind of fucking abortion come down the sewer, said Severin.
Both boys spat.
What’s that, then?
Sun tan lotion. Ambre Solaire. What’s written on that box?
It’s a sea chest, said Parry. No, it’s an icebox. Says ‘Fulton Street Fish Market’. Where’s Fulton Street?
New York, said Sev. Seen one before. Currents, see.
Oh yeah?
Might take years, nodded Sev.
Tin of paint, said Parry.
Tributyl chloride. They paint hulls with that. Goes on silver. Seen my dad.
Got a boat, has he?
Loves it. Your dad?
Nah, said Parry. Not his thing, boats. Can’t even swim, my dad. Hopeless, my dad. ’Nother fish.
Yeah, sunfish, said Sev. Little one, considering. They’re rare. Looks deformed, that fucker. Like that thalidomide kid. Fucking mong of a fish. Mola mola they call them.
And what’s that?
’Nother Durex.
No. That?
Oh yeah. Dunno. It’s weird.
Jellyfish, said Sev. Big bastard.
Biggest I ever saw, said Parry.
Know another word for jellyfish? asked Severin.
Parry considered. No, he said, finally.
Sea cunt.
No.
S’true.
Ya lying jellyfish.
God’s honour. Sea cunt.
Why?
You’ll find out. Maybe. And maybe not.
Aerosol, said Parry.
That could be Japanese writing on it, said Sev.
’Nother fish.
Mullet, said Sev.
Sure, are you?
Yeah, sure. Ever seen a goat?
Course.
Mullets are like goats. Eat anything. Eat thorns, goats will. Eat stones, do goats.
What’s that then? Pollution?
Mullet shit, said Sev. When there’s a big shoal of mullet you get mullet shit. Stands to reason.
Durex.
And another. Christ, there’s hundreds.
From the outfall, said Sev.
How d’you know all this stuff? asked Parry.
How don’t you know all this stuff?
Sev spat again into the water. It might have been the very moment that the tide remained constant. And then began to turn.
I was up The Tramlines last week, he said. Had a fire going. Good driftwood.
On your own?
Yeah. On my own. Maybe it was eight by then. And this bloke appears. Really quiet, he was. Wearing green, like a uniform.
One of those wardens?
Yeah. Careful, he says. Gotta be careful with fires, he says.
I know, I say. Why?
Beetles, he says. There’s a rare species of beetle around here. It lives in the driftwood.
Oh, I said.
Yeah, he says. And that’s the beetle’s habitat you’re burning.
Habitat? asked Parry.
Habitat, yeah. Straight after that, he was gone. Sloped off up the sand.
What you do?
What I did was chuck another log on the fucking fire. Burnt every fucking piece of driftwood around there.
Yeah?
Yeah. But beetles. What can you do?
V
Long ago, Parry had dreamed a plan. Yes, he would photograph each boulder. Show each rock as separate. Not a mass of stone, no, he would picture every boulder distinctly. Because The Gods of The Horns were unique.
He remembered his excitement. But for all the planning he had lavished on the idea, he had not taken the photographs.
What he recalled was the confusion of shapes at that cliff base. Yes, it was dangerous there, especially with the tide racing in, the spume flying. Each boulder possessed, it seemed to him, its own personality. Parry had always remembered that. And smiled to think of it, forty years later. The souls of stones, he said to himself. And such grotesque creations.
Yes, he should go back, take a camera and agonise over the shots. And, why not, display them in Badfinger? Local art? He owed it to himself. Show the features of the landscape here. The power of limestone…
Yes, something like bones, he thought now, those boulders. Impossible vertebrae, crudely hexagonal. Peculiar as people, The Gods of The Horns. Barnacled gods, veined with paler zigzag minerals. Inset with shells.
Because everywhere ran quartz in its seams. Quartz and calcite in mauve veins, in white capillaries. Yes, quartz, as white as milk. Quartz milk. Those were the stones he had once supposed might make his name.
Limestone Man Page 7
