Miranda and her parents were swimming when Laurie got back to the patrolled beach, and she joined them in the sea. To her relief, she saw no one else she knew.
‘A letter for you, Lorelei,’ said Doug.
A fist closed on Laurie’s heart.
Laurie left the letter unopened until late afternoon. Then she took it to the low sandhills that separated the river from the sea, beyond which the surf beat in abstract fury.
My oldest and dearest friend, it began.
This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I’ve been tortured for weeks about the best way to reach out to you. I cannot bear this breach in our friendship, and so I’m writing to say that I’m so, so sorry for the pain I’ve caused you. I can only hope that you will find it in your heart to forgive me.
I should have been aware of what was happening, but instead I sleepwalked like a fool into something beyond my control. I won’t try to explain how the whole thing came about – I hardly know myself – except to say that I hope you will believe me when I tell you that, when I finally woke up, I did my utmost to resist the inevitable. By then, of course, it was far, far too late.
Your friendship is immensely important to me, Laurie. I know We have been through so much together. I know you to be a person of perceptiveness and philosophical depth, and I can only hope for that reason I have faith that you will forgive me – and Dale – for the injury we have done you. I can only plead that it was beyond our control, that social conventions like sexual exclusiveness are inevitably overridden by the laws of natural attraction.
I know Dale has tremendous regard for you. It is our dream that we three can be warm friends together. Forever.
Yours tenderly,
Carol
Laurie narrowed her eyes to view the horizon. Somewhere between here and there, agitation ceased, and the line where sea met sky was pure and untroubled. But close by, at the foot of the foredune where she sat, the sea rose up and raged against the stone of her heart.
The way home led through the scrub where the fungus grew and then, near the house, along the shore. Laurie’s mind was strangely lucid, receiving the full sensorium: the flock of terns rising and settling further back from the river; her father hauling the Cockle as high as he could up the shore against the coming of the king tide, securing her anchor in among the runners of the spinifex with a grinding motion of his foot; the string of runabouts moored for the night near the far shore; the body of warm air rising off the river as the sun sank; Miranda standing in the dusk of the back yard in a rain of lemons, shielding her head with her arm, one hand still grasping the branch she had been shaking; from the house, the smell of onions frying. It was all as vivid, and as disconnected, as a dream.
And all the while certain phrases repeated themselves, bell-clear, in her head: Soaring through infinity … laws of natural attraction … far, far too late … Though she recognised them as Carol’s utterances, they seemed quite devoid of meaning and she attached no importance to them at all.
Sleep was a long time coming that night. All her senses were sharp, her eyes penetrating the textured darkness through the mosquito net, her ears picking up the lap of the over-full tide and then the diminuendo of its steady retreat, her skin feeling the subtle seaward movement of the land-scented air.
When at last she slept, her mind made note of the fact. Her dreams were shallow, a dull iteration of the same phrases that had looped through her mind while she was awake, and she knew them to be dreams.
She woke again when the moon was high and could not get back to sleep. Her eyes were wide open. It might have been midday, so awake did she feel. By holding her watch up to the moonlight, she could read the time. One-thirty. Ten past two. Quarter to three.
On the music stand in front of her was a piece she knew nothing about except that learning to play it was a matter of the utmost urgency. She understood that it should be familiar, but the more she peered at it the less it yielded to her. She struggled to comprehend the score, but the notes danced before her eyes, and her fingers kept playing something trite. Despair seized her. The music withheld itself from her. It was forever, pitilessly, out of her reach.
She woke to find her face wet.
There was no more sleep that night. The patterns of sounds changed – Miranda’s breathing, her father’s occasional snort or snuffle, the hoarse cough of a koala and the drone of the surf out on the bar gave way to the creaking of her parents’ bed and the waking of birds.
Though the sun was not yet up, the morning was already warm.
Laurie pocketed a box of matches and, taking the letter down to the shore, made a small bonfire of it. The flames licked the paper reluctantly at first, tasting the ink greenly. There was a brief flare, the fire burned for a moment in her eyeballs, and died. A few black moths rose and drifted away.
She toed sand over the remains and turned her back.
After the first shock, the spider remained for some moments splayed at the centre, riding out the wild rocking, her legs arranged in four diagonals along the main spokes of the web, which was still faintly silvered with the night’s moist exhalations. Computations were occurring in her nervous system. They concerned the direction of the blow and the force of the upheaval. She had built her web in a flight path of insects drawn from the dark of the trees by the river’s light. The drawback was that lumbering Christmas beetles often crashed there, tearing holes that required hours of repair work. But this was different.
The spider withdrew one leg from its alignment and felt for the soundness of a transom. It was fatally slack. The mainstay must be down, the suspension cable spanning the gape to a tree on the other side. It would require strategy to repair, and painstaking work. First, she must gird the section of rigging now swinging in the breeze.
She skirted the hazard, found an overhanging leaf and, dropping neatly, slung a guy to the rig below.
Laurie, some distance past, picked from her arm a length of sticky web. She was elsewhere, riding the queasy swell of her thoughts.
Here was the nub of it: for close on three years Dale had been the pivot of her days, the sweet recourse of her nights. The world had taken on its meaning with reference to him. Now he was unthinkable, a vortex, and when she felt the soft, insinuating suck of him in her mind …
Laurie turned on her heel and started back the other way.
Then there was Carol. Laurie brushed aside a single strand of spider’s web that barred her path. Ha! Carol. Who’d taken everything.
The logic was inescapable. The letter, and all that was behind it, had made nonsense of her life. Dale, Carol, childhood. That leggy girl waltzing idiotically into the future. It all came down to nothing. The present was the outcome of things remembered; her memories were false; therefore her present was pointless and her future blighted. Premise, premise, conclusion.
She got her mother to drop her at the crossing and, cloth hat pulled down low over her eyes, took the ferry across to Teebah, and then the bus to Broody Heads.
Oh! Susanna, went the song on Laurie’s brain as her legs took her down the beach and out towards Pandanus Point, Oh don’t you cry for me … The sun was hot on the bare backs of her knees. Her jaw ached, her eyes were raw. She was so very tired.
I come from Alabama with
My banjo on my knee
Rocks interrupted the rhythm. She stepped from boulder to boulder, her feet conforming like a lizard’s to the hard, warm curves of their surfaces. Beyond were the many points of Broody Heads, extending rockily into the sea. Sandy coves separated them like webs between fingers.
There was a man with a rod up ahead, who looked alarmingly like the fisherman of her chance encounters. She turned on her heel. The last thing she wanted was social chitchat.
She went back over the boulders, the way she had come, and reached the scrappy shade of a pandanus. There she cleared a sandy spot among the prop roots to sit and, dashed by light from the sea, groped in her bag until her fingers found what she was after.
A stale, misshapen joint. First she rolled it delicately with the tips of her fingers and thumbs to straighten it. Then she put it between her lips. Matches. She took the box from her pocket, selected a match, struck it, once, twice, until she had a wavering flame to hold to the twisted end of the joint, cupping her hand around it as smokers did, and inhaled deeply. She gasped as the fumes hit her lungs.
The smoke made her instantly dizzy.
Back down the beach people were moving about like languid fish. They formed loose shoals, and frayed apart, and formed again. A bird, a gannet perhaps, beat south.
She drew on the joint and held the smoke in her lungs. Below the tumble of rocks where she sat was a strip of shell-and-pebble shingle that chinked in the backwash like threepenny-bits, and in the glassy shallows the waves sloshed dreamily around a reef of low rocks that ran out at an angle from the shore – an eroded spur of the point, fringed by indigo where the reef was submerged. When the tide was low like this, rock pools were exposed, where blood-dark anemones bloomed.
Anemones. Pulsing moués on the rock’s hard face. The memory of an interest in them stirred her faintly, like a breeze riffling the surface. Then it passed.
The sea, singingly blue, rose and sank, rose and sank. The waves broke slowly, taking their time. Now and then, far out, a fishing boat winked as it lifted on the swell and the sun caught something shiny.
The joint had burnt away to nothing. Laurie spent a long time considering the idea of getting up from her seat among the pandanus roots. It seemed to her an abstract proposition that did not concern her closely. She could see her brown shins. Blades of light along the bones. She gazed at the sand on the palms of her hands, at the pattern it made on the mounds and gullies. The individual grains.
Then she found that she was picking her way across the rocks. Over the chuckling, wave-washed channels, where the lank yellow weed threshed sleepily. Past crusts of salt that glittered like crushed glass. A ditty came into her head.
My mother said.
I never should.
Play with the gyp-sies
In the wood.
If I did.
She would say …
Laurie felt her way through a mist of tears to the outlying rocks. There she stood, blinded, and now and then from the emptiness thoughts came to her, and washed away.
Carol Fearnley. Ca-rol Fearn-ley. A name. But not like Actinia tenebrosa – Contractile Filaments Dwelling in the Dark. People’s names, beyond the crude index of parentage, were arbitrary. What did ‘Carol’ tell you about the girl? About her habits, tastes, affinities? She tried to picture her, to see the shining hair and the head turning this way, that way, the tongue waiting behind the small white teeth. But it was all piecemeal. She knew the features by heart, but the face itself was vague.
It seemed to Laurie that Carol had been for a long time out of focus. Off-centre. Ambiguous.
Laurie swayed a little on her stem. Between her and the horizon there was nothing but oceans of sunlight, and the gently heaving sea.
Water licked her feet. Her eyes swam down. The rock she was standing on was gleaming. It was smaller than before.
The tide was coming in.
A memory came to her of her father hauling the Cockle in and planting the anchor in the spinifex, and the terns rising and settling higher up on the shore, of the moon growing rounder every night, and water nosing up among the dunes on long-dry sand. This would be a king tide.
Darts of light. She glanced here, there. At the sea. At the reef that was her causeway to the shore. All around her glinted and swayed. She squinted into the brilliance. There was no mistaking it. The tide had risen a lot. What had been ridges and slabs of shelving rock, separated by narrow channels and crossed intermittently by foaming runnels as a wave washed in, were turning into islands. And though the sea and sky were still as blue and the sun was still as warm, Laurie could not blind herself to the fact that a gulf, too wide to leap, had opened up between the rocks where she stood and the spur that ran out from the shore.
The rule of twelfths. How did it go? The tide rises one-twelfth in the first hour, two in the second, three in the third and fourth, then back to two, then one. It was coming in fast. This had to be the third – fourth? – hour of rise.
Of course, if the worst came to the worst, she could swim from here to the shore. She wouldn’t drown.
Drown. The child at the back of her mind heard the word and whispered to her with voluptuous self-pity. What if she did? What if she took her chances with the sea, launched herself in, and was dashed against a rock? What if she tried to go back the way she’d come and a wave caught her wrong-footed, and she fell and struck her head and was washed unconscious into the deep? She’d drown without ever knowing her fate. She’d be down there, still moving with the water as if languorously alive, trailing back and forth as loose-boned as seaweed. What would they think then? Then she would trouble their dreams.
At the same time she was soberly assessing her chances. Too risky to swim for it. She reckoned the distance. Thirty yards, maybe, before she’d be safe. She had to get going now. Though her vision was still unreliable, the shore adrift, rocks melting into light, she set out resolutely, watching her footing.
She edged her way along the higher outcrops, skirting the deep channels, which cleared when the surge retreated to show, below their glossy surface, fathoms plush with arsenic green. Breakers rushed at her from behind and turned to foam and romped around her feet.
Then she made her mistake. If she went via the ridge, she reasoned, she’d lose valuable time. Rule of twelfths. She’d chance the more direct route. Her glance flicking from wave to footfall to shore, she misjudged her step, slipped, and came down hard on rude rock. There was a dull pain in her hand, her leg, and then in each a sparkling sting. Her glasses had fallen off, but she could hazily see that she’d skinned her palm and the bony protuberance beside her knee. Fibula, she murmured. Styloid process. As she groped for her glasses, another wave came up and lolloped around her, like a big dog wanting to play. For an eternal moment it seemed to her reasonable that she should join it. Then it was gone and something was bumping against her foot, something she knew she should attend to. Her fingers found a grasshopper with delicate legs in disarray. She fished up her glasses and held them to the sky. Smeared and scratched, but unbroken. She allowed herself a small ration of relief; then, woozily on her feet, she buttoned the glasses with superstitious care in a deep hip pocket of her shorts.
The tide was racing in now. Crawling from rock to barnacle-encrusted rock, a newly opened cut in her shin flowing with brine and blood, she felt her hold on her courage grow shaky. Each fresh wave announced with frothy indifference that she was helpless against the sea. If she tried to wade across the next channel her feet would be swept from under her and she’d be out of her depth, washed this way and that. A piece of sargassum. She was soaked, sore and frightened. Too cold, went an old refrain in her head – though it was not too cold; the water was as warm as her blood – too cold a day for a ducking. Not cold. As warm as a mouth. As soft. But like a mouth it bit, broke skin, ground bone.
Everything shimmered, light running and water ablaze, so that at first she could not be sure if what she saw coming towards her over the rocks, like a shadow breaking up and re-forming, was a person. A man.
Whom she’d been hearing distantly for some time.
‘Hoi there!’ – the voice separating at last from the sea’s boom – ‘You need a hand?’ And a hand it was that reached her. A large, brown, steadying hand.
Palm docked against palm, fingers clewed, thumbs locked.
What a thing, that meeting of hands! Each hand taking its form from the other like ropes in a well-tied knot. Where moments before Laurie had been utterly alone, now she was grappled to another mortal, another set of sinew and grit, another source of will.
‘Here. Hang on. Got it?’ grunted the man behind the hand. ‘That’s it. You’ll be right.’ Not just another mortal but the f
isherman, who had found her wandering like a half-drowned rat on a rain-swept northern shore. He’ll think I’m an idiot, her mind began … but the words fell away unthought. All things considered, wasn’t it nicer and friendlier, not to mention safer – and so what if it was a bit humiliating? – to submit to being saved again?
Step by careful step he led her, bracing himself and her against the surge, sometimes chest-deep, sometimes scrambling, sometimes edging forward over slippery, shelving rock. Grinning his encouragement, calling jokes to her over his shoulder, singing her in –
Oh! Is it weed, or fish, or floating hair –
A tress of golden hair,
A drownèd maiden’s hair
Above the nets at sea? …
– until she felt something strangely like happiness, a sweet, free lightness of heart, a kinship with the gulls. Adrenalin-induced euphoria, said the realist in her, but softly, from the wings.
There were no more channels to cross. They were traversing the baking shelves of rock that connected with the shore. Now that she was safe, she could barely trust her legs to carry her.
Her hand held fast in his, they hobbled over the shingle and up onto hot, dry sand.
‘Sit here,’ he said, lowered her down in the pandanus’s shrinking shade and took up a position beside her. They silently beheld their feet.
‘“Oh Mary, go and call the cattle home”,’ said Laurie. And glanced at him for confirmation. At the brown-limbed bulk of him.
He completed the verse for her. ‘“And call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, Across the Sands of Dee …”’ Adding, ‘You better get something on those oyster cuts. They can turn septic.’
Laurie looked indifferently at her scrapes and grazes. She was remembering howling darkness and wild, unholy bush and a rackety, tin-pot jeep. ‘It seems like you’re always rescuing me,’ she said humbly.
The River House Page 20
