The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  As she shifted Miranda’s paraphernalia off her bed to climb in, her eyes registered luminous blurs in the dark world beyond the house. She reached for her glasses and pressed her face close to the window. Lights were going out at Baroodibah, only a few stalwarts remaining. In the black river, the wooden navigation signs were just visible as a faint lustre here and there. The moonless night had erased everything else, except for a bright light near the opposite shore, which hung over its reflection as if over a pole of gold.

  It was a couple of hours, now, since she’d seen the greenish glow of the fungus in the swamp, and in that time she hadn’t thought of Dale at all.

  ‘Mum, come here!’ called Miranda from downstairs.

  ‘Must I?’

  ‘Yes! Dad and Laurie! You come too!’

  Miranda was standing in her pyjamas in the light that spilled from the bathroom, her towel tucked up under her chin. She was pointing into the shadows.

  ‘What’s that?’

  There was a shuffling movement among the leaves. They approached warily.

  ‘It’s a small animal of some kind,’ said Rosie.

  ‘A water-rat, maybe?’ Laurie suggested.

  They peered closer.

  ‘It’s a toad!’ shouted Miranda. ‘Really ugly! Like in a fairytale!’

  The creature turned, gathered itself and hopped off into the darkness.

  Laurie shook her head. ‘We don’t have toads in Australia,’ she said.

  ‘Well!’ said Miranda, her glance sliding after the recently departed creature, needing to say no more.

  Doug quickly set them straight. ‘So they’ve got this far south!’ he sighed. ‘Miranda’s right. It’s a toad, all right. A cane toad. Well, whadaya know! If one’s here, there’s gonna be more.’

  They got a torch from upstairs and searched the yard. They spotted three more – sluggish, pigeon-toed brutes with repellently warty skin and snouts raised, dully waiting.

  ‘Well, that’s the end of that,’ said Doug, as they trooped back upstairs.

  ‘Of what?’ the others asked. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. Of something. Of the way things were.’

  ix

  November

  Laurie surfaced reluctantly from the depths of sleep. It seemed she’d only just gone to bed, and now here she was, wide awake, knocked out of sleep by a deafening racket coming from the back of the house.

  Someone was at the piano. It was ‘Ode to Joy’, played poundingly and with heavy reliance on the pedal. Laurie folded an arm over her eyes and prayed for it to stop. Stray phrases from learning theory still ran in her head.

  From under her arm she saw a shadow flit along the hall. That would be her mother, going to see about the disturbance. Laurie waited, willing Rosie all power, willing the banging and booming to end.

  It continued without a pause.

  Laurie groaned and threw her legs over the edge of the bed.

  Dum dum dum dum

  Dum dum dum dum

  went the piano in two-four time.

  Anger carried her down the hall to where the noise was coming from. She burst in. There was Miranda, raising the roof, lost in her raw, rapturous, fortissimo performance. Rosie was remonstrating with her, a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘It’s the middle of the night, Miranda. Come to bed. People are trying to sleep.’

  Miranda played on, though with a slight stiffening of her shoulders.

  ‘Come along, dear. Save it for daytime.’

  ‘For god’s sake, Miranda,’ said Laurie as she stepped in, hugging herself. ‘I’ve got an exam in the morning!’

  Miranda looked around at them and banged out a few more chords. She seemed very pale. Her eyes were all pupil, dark and hollow. She hit a crashing discord and sprang to her feet.

  ‘You don’t like the night?’ she asked, lifting her head on her neck primly. ‘You want daylight? Right.’

  Out of the room she flung and into the kitchen. ‘Let there be light!’ she muttered, flicking the kitchen light on. ‘Let there be light!’ And she flew around switching on every light in the house, not excepting the verandah, and the bedrooms where her father and Tony lay tangled in their sheets, till the whole place was ablaze.

  ‘All right. Is that good? Let there be light.’

  His arms holding her close, he went to look into her face, but their glasses clashed and he had to remove them – first his, then hers. Hands thus occupied, he leant his forehead hard against hers and gazed at point-blank range into her eyes. Moaned. Stroked her hair clumsily, with cumbered hands.

  x

  The day they went Christmas shopping was hot and close. The heat was personal, metabolic. It was as if the city was enveloped in the body warmth of a great organism and the air they breathed and moved in came used and humid from its lungs.

  ‘Tel-e-e-e!’ sang the barefoot newspaper boy. ‘City fin-a-a-l!’ He sidestepped out onto the road to hand a motorist a paper and pocket his pennies, then hopped back over the softened bitumen to his stack of papers. Laurie wove through the Christmas crowd, dodging gobs of spit and puddles of melted ice-cream. The city’s heat smelt of waffles and ancient grime.

  Earlier that morning Laurie had washed her hair with chamomile to make it shine. She’d dressed in a navy polka-dot mini with cut-away shoulders, a matching polka-dot babushka and hot-pink strappy sandals. She was recklessly, childishly happy.

  The cause of all this – her high mood, the care taken with her toiletry – was Dale’s last-minute reprieve. A few hours before he’d rung to say they didn’t need him at the soft-drink factory for another week and, yes – despite his misgivings about taking even a marginal part in this orgy of commodity fetishism – yes, he would meet her in town.

  Dale was waiting for her at King George Square, leaning against a lion, a cigarette hanging from his fingers. (The pipe had been found to deliver its satisfactions too slowly, and was now reserved for quiet evenings.)

  It was hard to keep her mind on the shopping with Dale there beside her, holding her parcels as if he was her husband. She kept glancing at him. Grinning. She wondered if he was as happy as she was. She wanted to ask him. She wanted to squeeze his arm and say, ‘Are you happy, Dale?’ But he would just say something sardonic. ‘Deliriously,’ he would say. Then she would say – she sneaked a look at his inscrutable profile – she’d say, ‘You’re so predictable!’ And kiss him lightly on the cheek.

  ‘We should take in a picture afterwards,’ she said instead. ‘As a reward for all this tedium.’ She gave his arm a pinch. ‘The Night of the Iguana’s on …’

  Though the heat was oppressive, her mind felt rinsed clean by happiness, ready to receive in detail the memories that she carelessly laid down.

  Piano music met them as they walked out of the heat of the street and into the refrigerated cool of Finney’s Accessories Department. It was a rippling medley of Christmas carols, ‘Silent Night’ passing seamlessly into ‘Deck the Halls’ with no change in mood or tempo. Laurie craned around the sea of heads. Over to their left, seeming because of its proximity to the florist section to smell of flowers, was a grand piano, its lid raised like a wing and so shiny-black that all its blackness was effaced by mirrored lights. Seated at it was a man in tails, the piano’s high shine repeated on his hair and in the rill of notes spilling from his hands.

  Laurie nudged Dale. ‘You could do that,’ she said. ‘Do you know “Jingle Bells”?’

  ‘That was my big toe you just ground under your heel,’ Dale grumbled into Laurie’s babushka as she was pressed back by the crush in the aisles. ‘No, don’t worry about it. I’m just grateful you’re not wearing stilettos.’

  They’d come to a standstill, the shoppers approaching from Queen Street locking with the glacial flow from Adelaide Street to form a solid jam. Then they began to inch forward again. ‘This is giving me an insight into how lab rats feel.’ He caught at Laurie’s shoulder until he had her ear. ‘Look. I’m gonna split. I gotta ha
ve a quiet smoke. We can meet up somewhere when you’re done.’

  His casual defection came like a cuff over the ear. So much for her pleasant schemes.

  She breezed away her disappointment. ‘Okay,’ she answered on a rising note. He couldn’t be expected to endure the dreariness of Christmas shopping, even if he was in her company; his heart was unlikely to warm at the cosy two-someness of it. She puffed out her cheeks, doing a quick mental calculation. ‘Okay. Tell you what. Give me an hour. Let’s meet back here, on the ground floor. Near the piano. If I haven’t finished I can pick up something on the way out.’

  ‘Suits me.’

  ‘At the piano, then?’

  ‘The pi-ar-no.’

  ‘In an hour?’

  ‘In an hour.’

  The pianist was playing ‘Broken-Hearted Melody’ when Laurie returned to the ground floor in search of men’s socks. It was a relief after the carols. Her hips swayed secretly in time with the beat and Sarah Vaughan’s yodelling wail started up in her head. She sang softly. The lovelorn lyrics spoke to her personally – the longing for lips to kiss … She laughed inwardly, thinking of the look Dale would give her if he caught her humming along like a girl guide at a jamboree.

  Faceted mirrors on the pillars multi plied everything to infinity – piano, tinsel, surging rivers of people. From the tail of her eye she caught a glimpse of a strapping girl in a babushka, with a cloud of honey-coloured hair glinting under the shop lights. The image was endorsed on every side.

  She bore the pleasant impression away with her.

  The brain is a versatile organ, thought Laurie. Here was one part warbling along with the piano while another was comparing socks; yet another was dreaming of iced coffee; and another was already in the cool dark of the pictures, with Dale close beside her, his glasses catching the light from the screen. And then, of course, there was the part surveying it all.

  There was another bit, too, plucking at the sleeve of her awareness – a small ruffle on the surface of her equanimity. A memory. Of Carol. Of seeing a shadow pass like a moth across her face.

  Her conscience was clear. She’d checked the reasoning and could find no fault with it. The River House was too small for more than one guest, so she’d had to choose. Carol or Dale. And of course her choice was Dale. Of course it was. Carol understood. Still, there was no doubt that, when Laurie told her …

  She settled on a fountain pen in a faux crocodile-skin case and replaced the socks.

  The brain was a versatile organ. It registered all this as Laurie stood with her money at the ready, waiting to catch the cashier’s eye – registering, too, the smell of the bank-notes as she paid, a smell that stayed on her fingers after she’d handled them, while she did a quick reckoning in her head and decided that she had just enough time to race up to the first floor to pick up something for Miranda.

  The escalators had broken down. They were clogged with people, shuffling at a maddeningly slow pace up and down them. There goes Miranda’s pants, thought Laurie. An attendant was standing beside a sign at the base, directing people to the lifts, which were marked by wall lamps fashioned to look like mediaeval torches, and to the nearby stairs.

  The stairs were the best hope. They were stairs such as Scarlett O’Hara might have descended in taffetas and satins – wide and noble, of veined white marble with a polished brass rail down the middle. Tall, gilt-framed mirrors hung on the walls. As Laurie was edging her way through the crush, murmuring ‘’Scuse me’ and watching her step around her burden of parcels, she caught sight of Dale, climbing the stairs ahead of her.

  ‘Dale!’ she called. But of course he couldn’t hear her. She hurried to catch up with him, but people kept filling the space between them, blocking her path.

  Then she saw Carol. She was coming down the stairs on the other side of the brass rail. Laurie knew that long dark hair swinging forward, that mulberry linen shift, that big battered bag over the shoulder, that small hand on the polished brass railing. She went to catch her eye with a silent, open-mouthed call, but Carol was looking elsewhere. She was looking at Dale, half a staircase in front of Laurie, and both of them – she saw now – had stopped. Laurie stopped too. People bumped past her. She saw Carol and Dale standing still on either side of the rail while the current of people moved around them, Carol on a step above, looking down, and perhaps they exchanged a word. Then, as the floor sank under her feet like the deck of a ship, this is what she saw: she saw Dale reach across the rail and brush Carol’s bottom lip – that bottom lip, a little open – with the knuckle of his forefinger; and then (did she see this, or was it something her mind filled in as she closed her eyes?), then she saw him kiss her.

  The gilt-framed mirrors bore witness.

  She ceased to exist, then. She was nowhere at all. And she knew that all those crowds of people were nothing too, for them, for Dale and Carol. Only she, with her pile of parcels, was more nothing than any of them, more nothing than she had ever, ever been, even before she was born. And it was inconceivable that she would ever be anything again.

  The rhythmic clunking could be heard from the street. Laurie hesitated before leaving the baking heat of the derelict markets and turning down the steps into the basement. The string handles of her shopping bags were cutting into her fingers. A pulse throbbed in her head.

  Down in the basement, the clunking took material form as an antique Gestetner, smelling of ink and metal and coughing out a steady stream of paper. There was no sign of Christmas here. Political posters were pasted on the grimy walls and the light that leaked in through the door and the high-set window was dimmed by dust and cigarette smoke. The commotion had separated out into four distinct elements – shuffle-grind-thunk-fshht – amplified by the concrete walls to a volume that made conversation difficult among the handful of people at work there. They were languidly dancing attendance, adjusting the pressure of the rollers, keeping an eye on the ink, forestalling paper jams.

  Tony looked up.

  ‘G’day, Lol! What’re you doing here?’ he called, pitching his voice above the racket.

  Laurie dumped her parcels, pulled off her polka-dot babushka and worked the stiffness out of her fingers.

  ‘I thought you might need a hand.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I SAY I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT NEED A HAND.’

  ‘Okay. Great.’ He came close. ‘We’re just finishing up for the year, but there’s a whole stack of stuff to be collated.’ He pointed to piles of printed foolscap on a trestle bench along the back wall. Then he held her elbow, turned to the others and lifted his voice. ‘EVERYONE! THIS’S MY SISTER LAURIE. SHE’S GONNA HELP.’

  Laurie nodded as Tony demonstrated the procedure. It was very simple. She picked up the first page.

  DEATH LOTTERY! OPPOSE CONSCRIPTION TO UNJUST WAR!

  The words seemed grey and abstract.

  Page one, page two, page three, page four, she said to herself as she walked the length of the bench, picking the pages up in sequence. Her heart beat mechanically. Page one, page two …

  It was so hot. Her nose was clogged with dust. Sweat ran down between her breasts. Page one, she said to herself, page two …

  Laurie worked all afternoon. When the machine fell silent and the pamphlets had been collated and stapled together, she found an industrial broom and swept an accumulation of ancient dirt into a pile in the back corner. She was rank with sweat, and filthy.

  Someone handed her a chipped enamel mug full of strong, black, scalding tea. She waited until the mug was a comfortable temperature to hold and then drank to quench her thirst.

  How could she have ever thought he would be in love with her? She was big and gawky and myopic, her shoulders were too broad and her hair was like a haystack. She had big hands.

  CHAPTER 8

  Actinia tenebrosa

  i

  1965

  Laurie could feel her hip bones. She was all knuckles buttoning the waistband of her army-surplus shorts, and when she wa
s done they hung loose on her.

  Miranda, on the other hand, was putting on weight. A Juno, Doug said. Her hips were broad and her bosom proud. Her chin had softened. A dimple appeared in the smooth flesh of her shoulder joint.

  ‘It’s the new medication, I think,’ Rosie replied when Laurie asked, a well-worn crease appearing between her brows. ‘It’s a case of balancing side effects against benefits …’

  Even though Laurie’s unhappiness was entirely real, she did not fail to notice, in the mirror, the glamour of hollow cheeks and haunted eyes.

  ‘Come across with us this time, dear,’ said Rosie, tossing togs and towels into the car.

  ‘Yeah, come on, Lorelei,’ Doug urged. His encouraging note masked his impatience. ‘No point moping about here.’

  To escape the crowd on the beach, Laurie took to the headland track and walked it to its end. Then she followed wallaby trails through the heath of the bluffs until they dropped suddenly away and she was looking down onto the endless curve of the southern beach. This was the sea’s dominion – the coast low, the vegetation stunted and wind-shorn, the blue so voluminous that it seemed to mount towards the horizon and nothing but the notion of a shoreline prevented it from annulling the land.

  Far to the south, though, almost beyond view, was a vertical shimmer declaring a cluster of high-rise. And in the middle distance, still miles down the beach, the ambitions of a raw little development were sketched with geometrical clear-felling on the low undulations of the windswept dunes. Linking them, rising and dipping with the contours of the land but veering to neither left nor right, was a new bitumen road. It was laid over the desolation of the wallum like a theory of progress superimposed on wilderness – a categorical line, smudged in places by sand blows, occasionally sinking from sight, and here and there dissolved by the heat into a mirage. But always returning to view. Along it crawled a few isolated cars as small and hard as beetles, glinting in the heat, making the trip that logic decreed between one newly construed place and another.