About the book
The River House is a spellbinding debut novel, resonant of childhoods past and the beauty of the Australian countryside.
It is the late 1940s, and the Broody River runs through a maze of sandbanks into the Coral Sea. On its southern bank lies the holiday town of Baroodibah. But its northern shore is wild – unsettled except for the River House, an old weatherboard box on stumps where the Carlyle family take their holidays.
For four-year-old Laurie Carlyle the house and its untold stories fire the imagination. It is a place of boating trips and nature collections, of the wind howling, the sheoaks sighing and the pelicans soaring into the blue sky.
But when a squabble between Laurie and her older brother Tony takes an unexpected turn, she detects the first hints of family discord. As the years pass, the River House holidays seem to shine a light on the undercurrents in the family: the secret from her mother’s past, the bitterness between Tony and their father Doug, and her sister Miranda’s increasingly erratic and dangerous behaviour …
Following the family’s story through the decades, The River House is a richly nostalgic novel about love and betrayal, personal tragedy and thwarted ambition, illusion and remorse. Above all it is about change, and the slow but relentless march of time.
‘Evocative, deeply Australian and beautifully written. A treat to read’ Susan Duncan
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1: The River House
Chapter 2: Tricks of Light
Chapter 3: Currents
Chapter 4: The Sleep of Reason
Chapter 5: Gypsies in the Wood
Chapter 6: Catching Eggs
Chapter 7: Stingers
Chapter 8: Actinia Tenebrosa
Chapter 9: Initial Conditions
Chapter 10: Imago
Chapter 11: Rip
Chapter 12: Deltaic Strand
Chapter 13: Cumulonimbus
Chapter 14: North
Chapter 15: The Rule of Twelfths
Epilogue
Reading Group Questions
A River House Playlist
About the Author
Copyright Notice
To Eena
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss
~ W. H. Auden
The mouth of the Broody River never stayed the same. Sometimes the bar was a broadwater of sandy shoals and shallow rills stretching south for half a mile from the dunes of the northern shore. Sometimes it yielded to a deep sluice rounding the wooded spit to the south and meeting the open surf with a bolt of sun-shot blue and green. Lofty cypress and gums with a century of girth toppled into the flow when the channel was to the south; when it was to the north, spinifex and sea vine were torn away and cast up again as ropy tangles on the spit’s returning sand.
Something was started, that year at the River House when Laurie was small – a long undoing of her settled way of seeing. The channel was shifting southward, the current nibbling at the shore with each high tide, carrying it off in tiny, cataclysmic cave-ins. With them were dissolved the haunts of small creatures secure for generations – nests, burrows, hoards, trails – and systems of allegiance that had seemed enduring. Properties of living matter. Part of the nature of things.
CHAPTER 1
The River House
i
1949
Patrolling seagulls would have seen footprints making a beeline over the ribbed sand to the surf side of the bar and ending in a churned-up muddle. Three sets of prints would have led away, one uneven, veering off first this way then that, but joining the others in the end.
There he went again, singing out whatever came into his head. He could have been seagulls for all the notice Laurie took. On her side of the sandbar everything happened silently. Sunlight flashed off the ripples. Everything winked and lapped and nothing was still. She was inside the sea’s din, squatting at the water’s edge with no before or after, as if a net had fished her up from nowhere and tipped her out here.
Then the din and silence washed her name into her ear and made her look.
Behind her was just glare, sky to sand, and – when she squinted hard – Tony, a bit of a thing in a rag hat, way off across the sandbar. She chewed her hat string, tasting salt. But the glare sent her back to the lazy games of underwater lights at her feet. Here the river slid glossy and brimful, and sunbeams made wobbly patterns on the soft, white bottom. She felt the water close around her ankles as she sank very slowly in the sand. Her feet grew big and pale, and ribbons of tiny fish undid in the current to come and taste her skin.
Hey, watch this, Lol! Hey, Lol …
Laurie eyed him over her shoulder. He’d stopped scooting about and was swaying from foot to foot, whooping and crowing and swinging something around his head. The tricky light made sticks of his legs.
She stood up to get a better view. The waves of the ocean stood up too, glassy green, and peeped at her over the dunes. Then ducked down. The sunshine stabbed clear through her eyeballs, making the inside of her head as lit up as the sand.
The other way, far off and little on the edge of the shining river, her father was casting daintily.
That was a rope Tony had. He was swinging it hard, his legs planted wide, cocky as a cowboy.
With your hands on a rope, you had the say.
She threw back her head.
‘Can I’ve a go?’ she shouted. The words were snatched up by the gulls and the sea. She stood with empty hands, sinking. She wanted with a great longing – she needed – to have a go. The need made her hands jiggle and her feet dance.
‘Give us a go!’ she yelled, and in another moment she was running. Hard sand met her feet. A flock of terns in her path floated up and settled again, like a cloth thrown and sinking over a table.
‘Watch out,’ Tony warned as she neared, dealing jealously with his rope as if he’d never called her over. It wasn’t a rope. It was a runner of sea vine, stripped of its leaves.
‘Can I’ve a go, Tony?’ she pleaded. ‘Can I’ve a go?’ But his ears were stopped by the new ideas in his head.
‘Hang on … hang on …’ He backed away from her, leaning into the action, working up the speed. He cut it smartly short and the end of the vine coiled itself around his arm.
‘No, wait on,’ Tony corrected himself. ‘That’s not it.’ He adjusted his hat. ‘You can make it crack like a bunger if you do it right.’ The vine was strong and whippy. He twitched it experimentally.
Laurie felt a terrible impatience at this delay.
‘Watch it!’ Tony warned, testing the orbit of a short length. ‘It’ll nip ya if ya don’t watch out!’
Laurie ran on the spot. ‘Gimme a go-o-o-o!’ The surf boomed, close and far, making her voice sound distant even in her own ears.
‘I wanna go-o-o-o!’ she wailed.
Her father heard her and glanced around.
A teasy look came into Tony’s face. He swung the vine higher and harder, paying it out slowly. ‘Okay,’ he said, grinning and backing away, ‘here y’are!’
He let the vine go limp, and she moved in hopefully to take it. But quick as a wink he dodged away grinning, whirling it just beyond her reach. The waves of the sea rose and sank behind him.
‘Tony, gimme a go-o-o-o!’ she whined, lagging after him, weak in the middle. Whoosh! went the vine, getting up a hum. Then, as Tony grinned and hopped from side to side, black madness got her. She flung herself at him in stupid rage.
When the lash caught her across the face, it seemed like something wickedly alive. The shock sucked the air from her lungs and silenced the
sea. All she could hear was the shush-shush-shush of the blood in her ears. Across the bony socket of her eye was a brilliant, ringing pain.
She clapped a hand over the pain while her other hand flew out stiffly, quivering as she felt the space for breath.
‘Ha ha …’ Tony was saying uncertainly, ‘serve you right for …’
Laurie’s mouth was open, but no cry came.
‘Aw, come on! You’re all right! You’re … Lol? You okay? You okay, Lol?’
Her eyes were squeezed shut. All she could see was the world turned black, with bright spots and splashes where the shadows had been. Her lungs filled. She heard herself scream just as she sensed the shape of her father streaking towards them over the sand. Then he was blotting out the heat of the sun, squatting in front of her, his rough fingers gripping her arm, prising her fingers away from her eye. ‘Lemme see. Lemme see,’ he was saying.
She hadn’t finished with her screaming, but she opened her eyes a crack, and there was the bright-white day, just as it had been before. The scream shrivelled up in her throat. Her father pushed back the lid of her hurt eye and exposed the ball of it. She could smell his fishy fingers.
‘Look up,’ he said. She looked at the sky.
‘Look down.’ There was the hill of her cheek.
She saw her father turn away. She saw it closely, the sunburn fierce on the back of his neck, under his old army hat, as he slowly stood up. His hand gently let go of her arm, and she brought her fingers up to examine the throbbing welt on her face.
There was a white high-water mark of salt across the seat of her father’s baggy khaki shorts. The hems were frayed. His long legs were scissoring wink-wink away from her.
Tony made a whimpering sound. He had dropped the vine and was backing away, but Daddy had picked it up and was coiling one end around his palm. Slowly. Then his whole big man’s body tensed and he darted forward, grabbing Tony hard by the wrist and twisting him round between his legs. Scuffling. As if he was playing.
‘Want to see how it feels? Eh?’ Daddy was saying through his teeth. ‘Want to see how it feels?’
They were jerky cartoon people, doing comic-book antics. Twisting and ducking and kicking up the sand. Tony’s hat came off and got scrunched up under their feet.
‘I didn’t mean to! I didn’t mean to!’ Tony shrieked, trying to dodge the stinging lash as Daddy whipped him hard around the legs, first from this way and then from that. Sometimes he missed and whipped the air and the vine sang. He whipped him until at last something held back his raised hand. He lowered it, gave Tony a rough shake with the hand that was gripping his arm, and let him go.
Tony sobbed in gasps with his chest caved in. His shaky legs were crisscrossed with red stripes, and finger marks were printed on his thin brown arm. He turned away and tilted back his too-big moppy head, as if he was looking for an answer in the sky.
On the way home Tony sat with a straight back on the seat in front of the throbbing engine, looking out over the bow. The drying tears had left salty tracks on his cheeks. His mouth was loose, as if he was having trouble breathing through his nose. He said nothing, all the way home. He didn’t beg to be allowed to take the tiller. He didn’t take up position on the bow, watching for shoals and shallows. He didn’t call out, ‘Starboard beacon comin’ up!’ or, signalling smartly, ‘Channel thataway!’
The Cockle found the deep water and made two cool, green bow-waves. Laurie fingered the welt on her face. It had stopped hurting and she could hardly feel it at all.
Her mother was changing Miranda’s nappy on the verandah table when Laurie told her what had happened on the sandbar. She tried the word ‘antics’. It seemed right and wrong.
The river lights coming through the windows were playing on her mother’s face and on her palely freckled arms. Her hands stopped still for a moment, and she looked out across the river to where the campers had set up their tents on the far shore. The shouts of kids drifted across. Close by, the water mouthed the bottom of the boat. ‘Luck,’ it said. ‘Galoot.’ The pink and green bubble glass in the corners of the windows made small other-worlds – sunset worlds, and worlds-under-the-sea.
Laurie looked up at her mother’s face and scratched the sandfly bites on her legs. Her mother went back to holding down Miranda’s squirming body while she fitted the clean nappy and pinned it snugly. She had always been hands, her mother – doing up buttons, tucking in sheets, working heads through jumpers, steadying and guiding and holding back. Without looking at Laurie she said, ‘We better get some calamine lotion on those bites.’ With a grunt, she heaved Miranda onto her hip, looked around, and wiped the sprinkled baby powder off the tabletop with her palm. ‘You keep scratching them and they’ll get infected. Then they’ll never heal.’
The sound of voices woke her. They were coming from her parents’ room; not loud, but in a tone that made her insides hollow. At the other end of the verandah, in the darkness, Tony was standing in his bed, slowly dancing.
The Christmas tree tinkled in the breeze and she could smell the scent of she-oak. The sea was droning far away on the bar.
It wasn’t Tony dancing. It was his mosquito net, its white, ghostly shape just moving. Under it, Tony lay sleeping.
Mostly it was her father’s voice she could hear, low and sing-song. She listened for the bed springs to creak as one of them turned over. It was a sound that comforted her when she woke from a bad dream. But now there was no creaking sound. No movement at all.
Silence, and then the murmur of her father’s voice starting again. It seemed as if he was talking to himself, only now and then she heard her mother’s whispered answer. A dry, thin, gone-away voice. On the edge of her sleep, it could have been the whisper of soldier crabs vanishing over the sand.
The sea and her father changed places with each other in her mind. The sea droned, her father murmured. Her father droned, the sea murmured.
She watched a star. It peeped at her when the curtain blew back and flapped against her net.
Her eyelids drooped, and for some moments she was lost in a river of sleep. But she forced herself awake and lay watching her mosquito net sink and billow.
Towards dawn the surf on the bar grew loud. The sky was pale as pearl. Her star had vanished. When she woke again the mosquitoes were humming in the grey half-light and she could see the outlines of trees. The first birds were trying out their notes.
Miranda began to babble in her cot. After a while she grew weary of that and started rattling the rail.
‘A-a-a-h-h bub-bub-bub!’ she called.
At last Laurie heard her parents’ bed creak and the sound of bare feet on the lino. She saw that the sky was flushed with colour, and she closed her eyes and slept.
Her father was pumping the primus stove to get it going for breakfast when at last she straggled into the kitchen in her pyjamas. He looked round and gave her a little smile of greeting.
‘Sleepyhead,’ he said, his voice coming out of the warmth of his chest.
The table was set. A quartered orange was waiting for her on a saucer. Tony had finished his and was spinning his knife on the table.
They never used the big wood stove in the Christmas holidays – unless it rained for days on end, cooling everything down. And then they would scout round for dry kindling and carry split cypress logs up from the woodpile, and everything would smell of cypress smoke for days.
But there’d been no rain this holiday. The sea breeze blew every afternoon just as it was getting sticky and they started watching for storm clouds in the south. The wind made the tents across the river flap gaily. Sometimes it blew so strongly they all clapped their canvas sides, as if they were an audience and they liked the show. Laurie liked it too: the river patched with lime and mauve; the boats bucking at their anchors; the white frill of surf on the bar; the she-oaks sighing; the sea howling distantly; the pelicans getting up above the wind as high as small aeroplanes, up into the blue.
Laurie hoisted herself onto a chai
r. Daddy pumped hard, crouching down to give himself power. He was wearing only his old shorts, and the tan of his arms and the sunburn on his neck made the sharp outline of a singlet. Laurie could see the muscles of his arm and back jumping underneath his skin as he pumped.
‘Whoomp!’ went the primus, and began to roar.
Her father stood up straight. ‘She’s away,’ he said.
‘A-a-h-h a-a-h-h a-a-h-h,’ sang Miranda, in sympathy with the primus. She banged her spoon on her highchair tray.
Mummy had the frying-pan waiting. She set it on the primus and let the fat melt before dropping in the fillets one by one with floury fingers. Then she stood by, holding the pan steady and the egg flip raised in readiness. The fish sizzled and the smell filled the kitchen, making the spit start in Laurie’s mouth. She sucked on an orange quarter, wiping the juice from her chin with the inside of her wrist, and watched her mother cooking. Her shorts with three buttons up each side. Her rounded shoulders and her hair coming adrift from where she’d pinned it up. Somehow her untidiness was more graceful than neatness would have been, making Laurie think of the slow-stepping crane that watched them from the swamp.
Daddy came up behind Mummy and slid his arms around her waist, bending his head down and rubbing his whiskery chin against her cheek. She was turning a fillet of fish. She put the egg flip down, carefully undid his fingers, then picked the egg flip up and finished turning the fish.
Daddy stood back, rubbing his stubble with the back of his wrist.
Mummy laid the crisp fillets on their plates. Then she looked Daddy full in the eyes.
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