The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  ‘And take a torch!’

  Dale received a plate from Laurie and patted it ineffectually with a tea towel. ‘Can’t say I do,’ he said.

  ‘Torch? Why?’

  ‘Bulb’s gone down there. We haven’t got a spare.’

  ‘It’s funny how just skewing the rhythm of those da-de-dums completely changes them,’ Laurie went on. ‘Don’t you think? Makes them – I dunno –’

  ‘Bouncy.’

  ‘Who’s got the torch? Who’s got the torch?’

  ‘Exactly! Full of beans.’

  ‘Hmmm … Yes. Lots of legumes to the bar.’

  Laurie gave him a wry look. ‘Dale!’ she said. ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘Oh. Here it is.’

  Tony flicked Laurie’s arm with his tea towel. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a bit more efficiency here. You keep grinding to a halt, Laurie. You’re slow as a wet week!’

  Dale was holding a bread knife and looking around helplessly. ‘How could you not?’ he said, answering Laurie. ‘It’s so very – likeable.’

  She shot him a glance and then went back to sloshing water around the pan in the sink. ‘That’s bad?’ She shook the drips off the pan and balanced it on the rack.

  Dale shrugged. ‘Nine out of ten people agree … Who am I to say they’re wrong?’ He waved the knife. ‘Where does this go?’

  Miranda came with Laurie to the old landing to watch the sunset. It seemed odd that they should walk together side by side, and a vision sprang to mind of Miranda skipping backwards in front of everyone so that she could see their faces as she chattered. She used to do it all the time. Laurie noticed the habit for the first time now, when it was gone.

  Between the shore and the Island the river ran cleanly, troubled only by a branch that had fallen almost away from the old casuarina but remained partly attached, rising and dipping in the current. Miranda gave no sign that the place disturbed her.

  They watched the colour drain away from river and sky.

  ‘Those boys,’ mused Miranda, ‘how about when they get all pickle-faced and solemn!’

  Laurie smirked. ‘What do you mean, pickle-faced?’

  ‘Oh you know, all that palaver.’ Miranda dragged down the corners of her mouth and wagged her head. ‘Moo-moo-moo …’

  ‘Is it all a wee bit over your head, ducky?’ Laurie teased, pleased to have the advantage for once.

  ‘Don’t pretend.’ Miranda eyed her sister from the cover of her shoulder, shrewdly. ‘You don’t know what they’re talking about either. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Dialectic something. Anyway, I’m gonna bags us the chess-board when we get back. They’ll just keep hogging it if we don’t get in first.’

  Laurie’s thoughts had snagged on the mystery of the word ‘dialectic’, but now she suppressed a pang of anxiety. It was the idea of playing chess in front of Dale. They’d be cross-legged on the floor, being stepped around, Dale glancing down on them, on their thought processes mapped out in chessmen. Her mind got busy with ways to excuse herself in advance. I’m a bit rusty, she could say …

  Miranda leant forward on her hands, over her dangling legs. Her face was a pale patch in the dusk. Eventually, she spoke. ‘Don’t pretend, Lol,’ she said. She looked away, towards the trace of white that marked the bar.

  Laurie could think of nothing superior to say. Miranda was changing, getting gawky, growing breasts. Such calm was rare in her and Laurie was afraid that any response of hers would see it off. She glanced at her little sister, a bowed shape in the gathering darkness.

  Laurie reached out and knuckled the bumps of her bony spine.

  The tideline was messy, and for that reason interesting. A warm nor-easter was ruffling the sea and littering the beach with tokens of marine life. Seagrass lay thick and gleaming where the highest wave had left it, like the ragged windrow of an estuarine harvest, and in it were tangled the dying remains of thousands of slight-bodied sea creatures. Fresh from a swim, Laurie roamed the shore, turning them over with a toe and now and then crouching down to examine one more closely.

  Hundreds of sea snails had been cast up, oozing froth and fading in the sun from inky purple to palest mauve. There were moon jellies, too, translucent intimations of the sky. And so many life forms in shades of indigo – countless by-the-wind sailors, little oval disks with whimsical sails; minute, fringed porpita; glaucus, looking more like fantastical inkblots than living things. Here and there a bluebottle, blown-glass bladder still inflated, trailing its stingers in yard-long threads.

  Sargassum, janthina, aurelia, velella …

  Laurie had left Tony and Dale in the crowded beer garden of the Coral Sea Hotel, better known as the Broody Heads pub. They had showed no inclination to leave, despite ashtrays overflowing, the stench of stale beer and the rowdiness of drinkers, which all but drowned out the strumming of the local band. The pub had been modernised. A veneer of brick smartened up the old weatherboard facade and mood lighting brought a classier ambience to the bar. And the beer garden, where the dress code was relaxed, struck a note of sunburnt informality.

  Before she made her escape, Laurie had been feeling increasingly glum. The heat, noise and side-stream smoke made her head buzz and she couldn’t make out what Tony and Dale were talking about, only that the dominant note seemed to be scorn – scorn for their lecturers, fellow students, poseurs, pseudos, erroneous ideologies … An ancient paperbark in the middle of the courtyard was shedding leaves and dapplings over everything – the brick paving, the valiant band and the drifts of people collecting at small round tables and before the palm-roofed bar. Now they were onto monogamy, the artificiality of marriage, the repressiveness of bourgeois love …

  The place was unnatural to her. The indolence, the rank sensuality, the glazed but avid eyes. The willing confinement in a small space of so many people, while outside lay the broad, sunny world. She picked at her fingernails.

  Tony noticed her over his beer. ‘Cheer up, sis,’ he said, and drank. He looked from her to Dale, and then, as if Dale was in on the joke, leant across and patted her arm.

  They think I’m a prig, she thought. And that was when she announced that she was going for a swim.

  Away from the din of the pub, sounds separated out – the sigh of the breeze, the fall of the breakers, the passing of cars.

  Laurie looked up and down the street, settled her sunglasses on her nose and crossed the road to avoid the lairs who hung around the slot machines.

  So here she was, toeing jellyfish and whacking at the march flies that settled on her bare arms and legs and back, her hair ratty with salt and wind and the brine drying on her skin. The wrack gave off a raw, fresh smell, like whipped egg-whites, and the waves came rushing sidelong at her shins. She could have been the only person in the world.

  As if to make it clear that she was not, a small group of people up the beach entered her awareness, coming erratically towards her. There were four of them, one with a fishing rod. Plainly the march flies were troubling them too, for they were all flailing arms and legs, as if they had been infected by the same St Vitus impulse that had taken hold of her, and now and then they’d reel away from one another to spin and caper.

  The sun was in her eyes, so she missed the point at which the figure with the rod detached itself from the others and approached her. She shielded her eyes with her hand.

  The fisherman. Wearing a breeze-blown shirt and a broad smile.

  Laurie cast about for something witty to say as he neared. She cleared her throat and raised her head to greet him.

  ‘Hunterer-gatherer off to work again?’ she called – and was instantly aghast. Hunterer! How could she be such a fool? The mangled word beat in her ears, foreclosing further thought, drowning out whatever it was he was saying, his references to that wild August day.

  She shifted her feet, adjusted her glasses, squinted at the sea.

  ‘You’re –?’ he rumbled, glancing perhaps at her legs.

  ‘I’m �
��’

  ‘– alone?’

  ‘Yes –’

  ‘So would you like –?’

  ‘– that is, no. I’m with … My brother and his friend are back there …’ She glanced vaguely over her shoulder.

  ‘Oh.’

  Hunterer. It hung there between them, march flies providing distraction.

  He wagged his head in the direction of his friends, said something polite in conclusion – though what she hardly heard, her eye being caught at that moment by the line of his neck – switched his rod to the other shoulder and briefly touched her arm in farewell.

  ‘Idiot!’ she groaned, hurrying on. ‘Fool!’ She screwed up her eyes and pressed her wrists against her forehead. Then she threw back her head to the sky, letting its light fall on her glasses and illuminate the plain fact of her gaucherie.

  The breaking waves rushed, foaming, up her legs and she ploughed through them, losing herself in the effort. Remembering the fisherman’s fluttering shirt, his sun-browned chest.

  She could hear in the surf the register of his voice.

  What had he been going to say? The question washed about in her mind.

  Another dip was what she needed. She thought of diving in where she was, but there was a strong sweep and no one to notice should she be carried away. Besides, it was possible that Tony and Dale would have left the pub and be looking for her. She should return to the flags.

  There were white caps all over the sea by the time she found where she’d left her towel. She dropped her glasses, ran down the sand and plunged in, and the sea received her with frothy attention to every inch of skin. She was glad the surf was up and the wind was blowing. Glad to be young.

  So thankful was she to the sea, so alive to its kisses, that it was with a kind of detachment that she registered the first hot trace against her thigh. Then a moment later she was in its grip and it was slashing her with razors, calling up a scalding, vicious pain.

  Laurie gasped and clawed at her thigh, and the pain leapt to her fingers as well. A wave caught her by surprise and playfully upended her, as if unaware that the game was over, and as she struggled to find her feet she wanted to howl like a child.

  Tony and Dale came running.

  ‘Bluebottle,’ she gasped as she staggered out. She gritted her teeth. Dale grabbed a handful of sand and began to rub at the welts on her leg. She leant against his shoulder. He was crouched over, rubbing, picking the stinging threads from the tender skin of her inner thigh and flicking them away.

  ‘Physalia,’ moaned Laurie, trying to stop the tears. ‘Physalia utriculus.’

  ii

  Autumn

  They met in the city on a day when a westerly was blowing, a day brightly alive, when fountains were feathered by the wind and monkey-nut palms tossed their tresses and cats sprang at shadows.

  His long grey flannel overcoat was unbuttoned, and as he came towards her it flapped in the wind like a priest’s cassock. His forehead was puckered by a slight frown, as if he was bothered by the brightness of the air, or perhaps, it occurred to her, by the urge to smile. As he neared, he allowed his mouth to skew in greeting, and some clownish reflex, a ghost of his boyhood perhaps, set his head unconsciously awag.

  She felt his fingertips just touching the small of her back, as taut as the prongs of a cattle prod, but held back. Delicate.

  She put a finger to her glasses.

  Long after the bluebottle welts had faded, the touch of his fingers had burned on her inner thigh. It burned at school, under the desk, on the bare skin between her stocking and her groin. It burned when she watched the television. It burned with a fierce urgency in bed, and consumed her in her dreams.

  Dale had been achingly slow to press his suit. His visits to the Wiley Street household had become more and more frequent, but he talked almost exclusively to Tony, and when from time to time his leg touched Laurie’s under the table, she retired within her mind, heart beating hard, to calculate the probability that it had happened by chance.

  His circumspection gave Laurie time to study him. His air was detached. If news was carried to him, he received it with a barely perceptible nod or a plain ‘Yes’, as if he’d known it all along. His fingers were deft with his pipe, feeding it teased-out strands of tobacco, tamping them into the bowl, his eyes crossing slightly behind his glasses as he gave himself to the ceremony of lighting it, and then his focus relaxing, swimming apart under half-closed lids in dissolving wreaths of smoke. When he performed this rite, or picked a speck of tobacco from his lip, or half-smiled at Tony and said his say, it was as if a fracture in him was, for the moment, healed. It was the same when he sat down at the piano and began to play. Two slightly out-of-register Dales came together, and were one.

  She had him by heart. His glasses, his thin shoulders. His wry, provisional smile. But at the same time he eluded her. As he and Tony sat and talked, she strained to follow, but it was as if they spoke a foreign tongue.

  ‘What do you mean, Australian ugliness?’ she asked. They spoke as if it needed no explaining, as if the sea wasn’t blue and the sky wasn’t heavenly and raindrops didn’t sparkle on the trees. As if this cool old shambly house they sat in didn’t open its doors to the breeze or smell of leaves and earth.

  They glanced at her. Dale turned back to Tony before replying, and then his gaze slid about, never meeting her eyes.

  ‘It’s not self-evident? Suburban sprawl. Take Australia’s domestic architecture. It’s banal iteration of borrowed themes made pretentious by featurism. And not only domestic. Office blocks. Supermarkets. It’s the corrupting effect of the profit motive. Were you at that lecture on Boyd the other day, Tony? Where old Mason argued …’

  And they were off. They talked about brutalism and lyrical abstraction, and the stifling reformism (accent on the first syllable) of Architecture II. They talked, as they drained mug after rough-fired mug of Nescafé and Dale puffed on his pipe, about McCarthyism and the war in Indochina, about alienation, hypocrisy and ontological absurdity, about the military-industrial complex and the fear of freedom, their hair growing a little longer and the suggestion of beards appearing on their chins.

  Laurie was struck by the transformative power of their opinions, which cast an under-light on her familiar world, like a torch shone up into a face so that it looked strange, and ill-intentioned, though you’d thought you knew it well. But there was such zest beneath their world-weariness, such philological relish, that she was captivated despite herself.

  Tony delivered his opinions with more intensity than Dale. Dale was more cerebral. Cooler. Tony generated opinions in his sleep. They gave him grit and fire.

  Had Tony’s father had opinions too?

  Laurie and Carol agreed. They had nothing but scorn for the schoolgirl huddles that formed at every opportunity – for the avidity of the interest in long-trousered pups, the gushing promiscuity of the confidences, the hanging-court judgments. Even more did they scorn the winsomeness that outdid sisterhood whenever a release of pent youths sauntered by, eyeing them from under seedily lowered hat brims. Scorned, too, high-mindedly, the shuffling at parties under cover of dim lights, the lingering hands.

  Laurie’s own preoccupations went deeper. Her passion was purer, her panting more private, the object of her dreaming older, cleverer, more complex.

  In the end it was Laurie who made the first move. She caught Dale on the verandah as he was leaving.

  ‘Don’t go yet,’ she pleaded.

  So they stood there in the shadows, leaning against the wall, the moonlight broken by trees, close but not touching. Barely talking. They stood there so long that the air turned cold and the moon left. Lights went off in the house. Only a faint illumination from the distant streetlight reached them now, and shone dimly on their glasses. The hairs stood out on Laurie’s arms.

  ‘It’s very late,’ Dale murmured. He sighed, as if a deadening poison had flowed through all his limbs and his body had lost the power to move. The last bus would hav
e gone long ago. In any case.

  They were found there by Tony, putting the milk bottles out.

  ‘Mum thinks you’re in bed,’ he said to Laurie. She could hear in his voice that he was frowning.

  A day or so later Dale rang and asked to speak to Laurie.

  So it was that they walked out on a windy autumn day, at the beginning of the Beginning.

  iii

  It seemed to Laurie that she spent her winter in the subterranean gloom of the Primitif coffee lounge, dressed in tights and a floppy jumper, her hair in Indian plaits or crushed under a black felt hat or springing electrically from her head like the fur of a scared cat. And whether the soft rain came or the westerlies blew or the sun struck the city askance from a depthless sky, none of them knew, until they shuffled out, blinking, from their crypt and looked at one another, and noticed how young they were, in the daylight of the street.

  In the Primitif they drank strong coffee and smoked black Sobranies while thin young men in wispy beards and berets moped darkly, and sometimes lifted their horns to their lips and wailed. Candles burned in empty Mateus Rosé bottles, adding their drippings to the baroque cascades of wax that had solidified there, like the accumulated memories of other afternoons. At times there was poetry-reading, one or another denizen-of-the-dark mounting a stool to read some lines in a rapid-fire monotone to sparse applause.

  Dale’s leg jigged uneasily until the moment came to jam. Then, at the muted urging of others, he’d leave Laurie alone and slouch absently to the keyboard. Gripping his pipe with his teeth or laying it aside, he’d send his hands off over the keys as if he had no say over them, and with his eyes closing and his head dropping forward now and then in a nod, he might have been falling asleep. He was lost to her then, given wholly to his musical ruminations, communing only with his instrument and the exclusive brotherhood of musos. Sometimes he woke and played teasingly. Sometimes he played as if worrying an ache – feeling for the sore place and never leaving it alone, prodding it, pressing it, drawing a morbid pleasure from the pang.