The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  Near the landing they began to smell the river, and their spirits lifted. They saw it twinkling at them through the trees. Then the she-oaks parted and it was right there, broad and calm and pastel blue in the afternoon, making hushing, clucking sounds of comfort – sounds that followed them along the foot-cool path to the house.

  With the nearness of home, Laurie began to recall the snake scene with some pride. Tony had been brave, pushing her off the log, and she herself had been at the centre of it, the one in danger of her life.

  ‘Wait’ll we tell Mummy and Daddy!’ she said, thinking of their faces when they heard.

  ‘No! Don’t tell!’ said Tony sharply.

  ‘Why not? Why can’t I –’

  ‘No!’ he said.

  iv

  Laurie flinched and grimaced but on the whole bore it bravely when her scratches were dabbed with Dettol. Tony told their parents she had fallen in some bushes. Laurie looked at them sidelong; then she twisted her arm around to view the scratch on her elbow.

  After tea they all went down onto the riverbank just to get out into the cool. It was a sticky evening. There might be a storm after all. They had to be covered with citronella, of course, Mummy’s long, strong, oily palms running over their skin, down their arms and legs, and that made Laurie’s scratches start stinging all over again.

  Down on the beach they lit a mosquito coil, too, for the mozzies could be fierce. Miranda was parked on the sand with her bucket and spade, which she clung to loyally, though she had only a hazy notion of what they were for.

  Tony and Laurie practised running-jumps in the sand, and soon there was sand all over them, sticking to the oil. Tony always won, until he was given a handicap to even things up and he lost interest. ‘It’s not fair,’ he grumbled. ‘My jumps are miles longer’n hers and she gets to win!’ He flopped down and ran the sand through his fingers. A shag flew low over the water to settle on a nearby beacon and hang its wings out to dry.

  The late-afternoon light picked out the tops of the ripples on the river and turned them silver. It picked out the white canvas of the tents on the far shore, the small beach that curved in front of them and, farther over towards the sea, the long sandy spit and the low dunes of the bar. Up-river was the row of holiday houses, raised on stumps like theirs. For a few minutes a verandah window on one of them burned like fire. When they looked up the river they could see, far to the west, the tip of Mount Baroodi over the treetops. The air was loaded with smells – smoke from the coil, citronella and the fishy breath of the river. They were the incense of memory, belonging to a fetch of time that went way back beyond the four-and-a-half years of Laurie’s life.

  The sky lost its blue and turned to dusty yellow. Ripple by ripple the tide was sneaking up the beach.

  Miranda had crawled into Doug’s lap and was now asleep. Rosie gathered up her bucket and spade and Doug carried her, still sleeping, up to the house.

  ‘Don’t stay down here too long, kids,’ they called.

  Dusk came, and then the darkness.

  Tony was flashing the torch about. Laurie could see the beam of it shooting this way and that through the cracks in the lavatory walls.

  ‘Hurry up,’ he moaned.

  She said nothing, just listened to the crickets. She was perched in a hunch on the seat, holding her pyjama shirt clear with tight fists, her heels pressed hard against the wooden door of the box. She gazed up in the darkness at where the daddy-long-legs hung in the corners above her. She knew where they were because they’d been caught for a moment in the torchlight when Tony had flicked it around to check for snakes.

  The lavatory wasn’t as smelly now as it was in the heat of the day, when she had to block her nose and hold her breath as long as she could. Now it smelt mostly of sawdust.

  It was very dark, except for the torch’s flashes. So dark she could see swirls of colour in front of her eyes.

  Tony was out there in his pyjamas, standing guard.

  ‘Tony,’ she said, just to be sure.

  ‘Yes,’ came his voice.

  Thoughts were batting about in her head like moths. There was something she wanted to say, but she was not sure what it was. It had to do with her being here, him being there.

  Her muscles let go. She heaved a sigh and, eyes rolling in the darkness, trusted to the soft excitement of the night.

  Something was making Laurie feel sad. It was the droop on the trees through the window. It was the note the cicadas used to shriek H-E-E-E-A-T!

  ‘That’s it,’ her mother said. ‘We’re out of ice. And the milk’s on the turn.’

  It was the emptiness of the Christmas bonbon jar.

  Mouth pursed in a silent whistle, her mother lifted the brimming drip-tray at the bottom of the ice chest. ‘Doug?’ She kept her eyes on the tray in her hands. ‘You’ll have to make a run across.’ Laurie began to watch and listen. Her mother made it to the kitchen door and tossed the stale water onto the grass below.

  Doug swung Miranda up into her highchair and tied her bib. ‘Tide’s still on its way out,’ he said, ‘and she’s a ten-inch low. Better give it a few hours.’

  Laurie eyed her father closely, holding still for what would come next. He was sitting sideways on his chair, waiting with a spoonful of cereal while Miranda smeared the spillage on her tray. ‘I’ll take the kids, if you like. Get ’em out of your hair for the afternoon.’

  Baroodibah! Laurie’s heels drummed against the chair rung.

  Rosie emptied the ice chest and mopped it out with a rag. They had evaporated milk on their cornflakes and oily butter on their bread. The rest of the watermelon they ate warm, the juice dripping off their elbows. Miranda was sticky all over, even her hair.

  That was the scent of Christmas too, Laurie was thinking – that fresh, cut-grass scent of melon. As she was thinking that thought, a fishy pong suddenly rose up to them, wiping out the scent of melon, she-oaks, river, sand – the memory, even – of every other smell. It was as if the hot sunshine itself was stinking.

  Laurie wrinkled her nose. ‘Pyew!’ she shrieked.

  Her father looked over his shoulder. ‘That’ll be that confounded goanna getting into the frames.’ He pushed back his chair.

  Tony and Laurie beat him to the top of the stairs and were in time to see the great lizard working at the grey sand under the old lemon tree. At the thump of their feet on the stairs the goanna looked lazily round and paused as if considering. The flecks of light and shade that fell on it from the lemon-tree leaves made it hard for Laurie to see it clearly. Only when it moved slowly off into the bush could she make out its shape, the splendid black-and-lemon length of it. It took its royal time, its tail swinging grandly from side to side like a ball gown’s heavy train.

  By the time Doug had fetched the spade to rebury the turned-up fish frames, the flies were already finding them. While Laurie watched, matching her interested slouch to Tony’s, a question grew loud in her mind. She spoke to her father’s bent back.

  ‘Has it got X-ray eyes?’ she asked.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The g’wanna. Has it got X-ray eyes?’

  He looked up at Laurie from his digging. ‘Now whatever put that idea into your head?’

  Tony and Laurie whacked at the stop-go flies, never hitting them. ‘Well, how come he can find the fish heads when they’re under the ground?’

  ‘Smell, Dumbo,’ Tony said. ‘He can smell ’em.’

  Laurie screwed up her mouth to consider this. She could see the tip of her nose. ‘But they were underneath!’ she protested.

  Doug grunted as he dug. The sand was soft and the spade bit cleanly into it, but a tree root here and there made work of the task.

  ‘Yeah, but they got super-duper noses,’ Tony said. ‘Who doesn’t know that!’

  Laurie felt the force of Tony’s scorn, but the X-ray idea still held her. She scratched an ankle. ‘They could have, hey, Daddy? They could have X-ray eyes!’

  ‘Might as well have, Lorelei. They
smell with their tongue, in fact. A forked tongue, like a snake.’ And for an instant the king brown was there, over her shoulder. ‘They flick it around – you’ve seen ’em, yeah? – well, that’s how they smell. Taking little tastes to see what’s in the air. And they can pick up the faintest whiff of scent. So.’ He stopped to wipe his nose with the back of his wrist. ‘It’s a bit like they can see through solid ground.’

  The hole was a neat square.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Eh? Why what?’

  ‘Why can they smell so good?’

  ‘Well,’ Tony corrected her. ‘So well.’

  ‘Yeah, well, they eat dead things, so …’ Laurie followed her father’s words for a bit and then, still keeping a polite, listening face, let her thoughts go where they wanted. To Baroodibah. Seeing in her mind’s eye the shore nearing, the painted boats all in a row, bucking in the wake they made, the tribes of kids halting in their games to watch them land …

  ‘… a bit of rotting fish within cooee and they’re in like a shot. And that stuff’s pretty ripe.’ Doug nodded towards the scattering of fish guts, the spines and tails, the heads with ant-hollowed eyes. There was a pause as he chopped through a hard root. Sweat trickled round the curve of his ribs.

  Tony shredded a leaf uncertainly. ‘You could just throw it in the river, but. The crabs and that would eat it up.’

  Their father grunted, but didn’t reply.

  ‘Why don’t you?’ Tony persisted. ‘Why don’t you throw it in the river?’

  Their father blew out a huff of air, and when he spoke his voice was strained with the effort of digging. ‘Wouldn’t do the lemon tree much good then, would it? It likes a feed, same as you an’ me.’

  Laurie looked up at the old lemon tree, where lacy lichen grew like doilies on the trunk. ‘Is that why you’re digging the hole here?’

  ‘That’s why, sweetie-pie. Just got to make sure we outsmart that old-man goanna with his X-ray tongue.’ He paused and looked at her. ‘It wasn’t a silly question, Lorelei. Not silly at all. Now if you kids’ll just stand aside I can get these stinking things back where they belong.’

  He turned his back on Tony, raked the fish remains into the hole and shovelled in the sand, beating it down firmly with his spade.

  Laurie stood twisting her hair around her finger. Without knowing why, she suddenly wanted to cry.

  Laurie sat with her chin on the windowsill, staring at the river. The tide was still way out; sandbanks had risen up and made low, flat islands in a puzzle of channels that shone like tin, and the beacons were standing up gawky and tall. Soldier crabs spread in blue stains across the banks. Below, watermelon rinds that had floated in were left high and dry on the shore, a scattering of big green grins. The Cockle was stranded too, keeled over on her side.

  Soon the tide would turn. The river would be wide and blue again. The boat would be afloat, chucked under the chin by the water. Each in a hat and sun-crisped clothes from the line, she and Tony and their father would sling the string bags and the sacks for the ice in the bow, haul in the anchor and scramble rockingly aboard, and they’d breathe the eggy mix of seaweed and petrol that was the boat’s own breath. Bilge water would slosh about under the slats in the bottom, and Daddy would be taking position, winding the belt tight around the flywheel and cranking it back hard. Again. Again. Grunting. A machine himself. And they’d wait for the thoomp thoomp thoomp thoomp, like the throbbing of a deep heart, and Rosie and Miranda coming down to wave goodbye, and they’d be off, making bow-waves and a breeze for their faces, heading for the far shore and Baroodibah.

  Tony had disappeared somewhere. His aeroplane was lying unfinished on the floor. Laurie rolled over onto her back, drowsily fitting the plug into the valve of the water-wings, pulling it out, pressing the clammy, vanilla-scented plastic against her cheek …

  ‘Ready, kids?’

  Laurie thumped eagerly down the stairs into the midday heat. She was painted up with zinc cream and trailing her hat. Everything was still in the yard. Monkey-rope vine hung unmoving from the trees. Tony, already down there, was drawing arcs in the dusty sand with his big toe.

  ‘Shake a leg, you two. The tide’ll be out again before we head back, at this rate.’

  ‘Reckon I’ll stay here,’ Tony mumbled distantly. He picked up a stone and shied it at the trunk of the old paperbark.

  Their father shook out the hessian sacks he’d fetched from the shed and folded them roughly. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘You coming, Laurie?’

  Laurie had stopped dead in her tracks and was gaping at Tony.

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’ she asked in astonishment.

  ‘Nuh,’ said Tony, not looking at her. His mouth hung slightly open.

  It was then she knew that the things that happened on the sandbar had not ended; that they might never – even when the talking in the night was done and forgotten, when they had gathered on the riverbank and played till the sun went down, or even when the holiday was over and they had packed their things into the car, taken the ferry across and left the Broody River far behind – have an end.

  ‘Laurie?’ called her father, being busy, loading up.

  She looked at the full river, and across to the tents and holiday houses of Baroodibah. She thought of the rows of lolly jars in the shop, the frosty bins of ice-cream where Mrs Driscoll dug with her scoop up to her elbows, the striped canvas, the kids playing rounders and bellyflopping off the boats. Tony was behind her. She fancied she could hear him breathing.

  ‘Reckon I might stay here too,’ she said.

  CHAPTER 2

  Tricks of light

  i

  1950

  Laurel Ruth Carlyle started school in late January 1950. This cardinal fact of her life, recorded in the dry annals of the local school roll and in the torrid impressions of memory, introduced two momentous changes. She became confined for hours at a time to a classroom, and she entered the jostling, unsentimental society of children unknown to her.

  ‘When irritated by a piece of grit such as a grain of sand,’ Rosie read, holding the iron upright on one end of the board as the child held the book open for her, ‘the soft-bodied oyster inside its shell secretes nacre, which covers the grit and hardens to form the lustrous pearl. Don’t frown, dear.’ She picked the iron up and began working it over the tunic again, pushing its nose in between the shoulder buttons, pressing so hard that the veins in her hand stood out, her wrist swivelling and her elbow cocked, her other hand smoothing the gabardine fabric over the board, and then nipping the folds into sharp-edged pleats.

  The child adjusted her expression. ‘Secretes,’ she repeated. Secrets.

  She had just started school.

  There was something in that description of the pearl in The Illustrated Children’s Encyclopaedia – the grit that irritates, perhaps, or the hardening, protective coat – that brought memories of that Christmas stealing to Laurie’s mind. Or, rather, to feeling. She felt the presence of them somewhere, not ideas but sensations: salt-air mirages; a bitter pain in the dazzling sun; the shiftiness of things; the sudden creepiness of the bush while still the bright sun blazed.

  And then, ambushed by din, dust and smells, she lost all but the faintest consciousness of it.

  The school was mapped by odours: new leather and overripe apples on the porch where the schoolbags hung, chalk dust and plasticine in the classroom; milk curdling in the sun; sodden bread crusts and foetid, greasy water around the drinking taps; and from down beyond the old fig the scandalous reek of the overflowing dunnies. And each place, each smell, had its own emotional shadow, its own heady mix of repugnance, exhilaration, anxiety.

  Here was Laurel Ruth Carlyle, nearly five. Suddenly sized up – sized down – by rows of other eyes, reduced to something tiny and faraway by the clanging bells, the scottiness of teachers, the rowdy kids, the indifference of the great hoop pines that stood by the school gate. Somewhere a man, seldom glimpsed, with whipping powers.

  Ch
ildren were well scrubbed in those days. Their clothes were starched and ironed, their eyes bright. But their feet were in the dust, and behind their backs was the disgrace of excrement – unacknowledged but for a rich scatology that the boys were fluent in, its appeal lying in the powerful sense of transgression that came with its use. For the girls the disgrace was unspoken. The stench of the cans was a collective shame that even the daintiest was tainted by. They lifted their crisp skirts, downed their pants and poised their small white bottoms gingerly above the unspeakable hole. By some process of counter-suggestion, perhaps, this daily indignity produced in them a robust priggishness.

  Blood, too, flowed more often then. There was a split head in Laurie’s first week at school. An older boy had disobeyed the rules by running under the building among the concrete posts. He was still dazedly on his feet when they saw him being led to the sick room, blinded by blood. The everyday uproar was suddenly hushed – though distant yells still came faintly, ignorantly, from other parts of the school – and the crowd parted before the boy and his escort as they royally passed.

  This is an incident that Laurie connected, inaccurately as it happens, with Dr Fearnley. She hadn’t encountered him then.

  Here is Laurie then, a preppie, new at school and a little lost. But she has the prestige of an older brother, and she always finds a seat waiting for her in the thick of the throng at lunchtime. Best of all, she has teamed up with Ursula, whose self-confident cheekiness makes people forget the sharpness of her freckled face, and with dark-haired Carol, doctor’s daughter.

  ‘Well,’ said Dr Fearnley, rubbing his hands together and surveying the table. ‘What have we here, eh? Salmon mornay? Mmm? Mmm? And. Let me see now. Am I right in supposing that this is Rosie’s girl?’

  Laurie shifted nervously in her seat; the question didn’t seem to be addressed to her, even though the doctor’s sidelong gaze was now directed at her, his big head tilted, his emphatic eyebrows raised. It was hard to read the degree of seriousness in the doctor’s tone, in the angle of his eyebrows. Still harder to know how to answer him.