The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  His arms hung over his bent knees. He began to speak, to brush it aside, but then he stopped and turned and looked at her instead. Under the cover of his hat, water lights played across his nose and around his mouth and eyes, as if, though his lips were still, he couldn’t keep the smiles off his face.

  Sunlight bubbled through the shifting leaves and lit up the faded pea green of the tent.

  ‘There’s something mindless on at the flicks tonight,’ he said, dabbing acriflavine on her grazed hand.

  She flinched. ‘Mmm?’ She could smell him. A salty male tang. Jerry, she said to herself, trying his name in her head.

  ‘How about coming with me?’ He addressed her shin. She braced herself for the sting, her fingernails digging into her calf.

  ‘To the pictures?’ she asked with a quick intake of breath, looking down on him. There was something of the peasant about his nose, about its unassuming bridge and its bulbed tip. But she liked the line of his jaw and the shapeliness of his lips. And his cheekbones, broad almost to the point of being flared, were noble.

  ‘Mmm,’ he murmured, pressing those lips together as he added saffron accents to her abrasions.

  ‘I haven’t got anything to wear,’ she said, looking down at her salt-rimed shorts. A hand rose to her head. ‘Or a comb …’

  Crouched at her shin, he looked up at her, tilting his head, considering her first from one side and then from the other. The depth of colour in his irises changed with the light. They were as contained as a cat’s-eye marble, only blue. Eucalyptus blue.

  ‘Cumulo,’ he said, summing up her hair. ‘Cirrus. Little bits of nimbus. Against the sun.’

  She grimaced ruefully.

  ‘Anyway, it’s dark in the pictures. No one’s gonna see you.’

  ‘How would I get home?’ she asked. ‘The ferry doesn’t run after dark.’

  He dabbed more scrapes. ‘Don’t go. Stay here.’

  Stay here. The idea floated up between them and hung there. She pushed her glasses back up on her nose.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, deciding at last. ‘Parents – you know.’

  But when, at his urging, she rang them from the public phone, while he stood by on bare brown feet, her mother cheerfully accepted her story about running into friends.

  ‘Have fun, dear,’ she said. There was relief in her voice. ‘See you tomorrow.’ It was as if anxiety was linked in her mind with Tony and Miranda, and it was unnatural to worry about Laurie. Laurie had found some friends. They would cheer her up.

  They sat with screen-lit faces in the stalls, swallowed up in a canvas chair. And as they sat so, looking straight ahead, there began a slow and delicate raid on Laurie’s person.

  She could feel the heat of him, the heave of his chest as he remembered after some moments to breathe. While yet the opening credits rolled his hand stole under her arm and, as her heart racketed softly, fumbled for hers. They sat with fingers interlaced, afraid to move lest the hard-won access be compromised. For some time they sat thus. At last the fingers of his free hand found her cheek, her chin. He turned her face towards him, his head blocked out the action on the screen, and they began to kiss.

  Oh, and the kisses tasted so salty and were so warm and soft and enveloping and produced such a gentle, rushing sound in her ears that Laurie felt she would sweetly drown.

  Once she surfaced.

  ‘What do you think about Vietnam?’ she asked. Her words were indistinct, being obstructed by his lips.

  ‘Eh?’ he muttered.

  ‘The Vietnam War. What d’you think?’

  He pulled away for a moment and searched her eyes in the darkness. ‘I think it’s a crying shame,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’ And she closed her eyes to receive his mouth again …

  ‘Do you know the rest of it?’ Laurie asked, looking at him in the gloom, his image fractured by the scratch on one lens of her glasses. They were eating Maltesers. During the interval they’d talked a little, and smiled, and examined each other’s eyes. Now the remaining lights dimmed and a sleepy, outsized lion head turned inside its wreath and roared.

  ‘Of –?’

  ‘Of “The Sands of Dee”.’

  ‘The western wind was wild and dank with foam … Hmm. ’Fraid I’ve forgotten it. But I can do “Dover Beach”.’ He glanced over his shoulder at the scattering of heads behind them and then bent his down close to hers.

  ‘Ah, love,’ he rumbled, ‘let us be true to one another! for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams … Film’s starting.’ His mouth was hot at her ear. ‘I’d better shut up before I get pelted with Jaffas. I’ll do the rest later.’

  On the way back to the camping ground, as they walked hand-in-hand along the sandy verge of the road, passing under the full moon, under streetlights dimmed by clouds of insects and through patches of she-oak-spiced shadow, he completed his recitation.

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  The sea breathed close by. Their footsteps fell on bitumen and sand. Hath really neither joy, nor love … How could you say really?

  After a pause, Laurie said, ‘They’re mostly barnacles, on the rocks. Chthamalus antennatus. They’re related to prawns, believe it or not.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Barnacles. You said oysters.’

  Jerry gave her a lingering sidelong look. ‘Chthamalus antennatus,’ he confirmed.

  Prudence kept them chaste that night in the tent, along with shyness, cuts and grazes, clothes, and a newly awakened sense of strangeness – astonishment, even – that they should be together here, in such proximity. Until, in the tender light of dawn, it seemed no more than natural to let the fingers find bare skin, to outwit underwear and, stiff and sore, to transubstantiate their dreaming.

  ‘Darling darling,’ Jerry groaned.

  It came as a mild shock to Laurie to learn that Jerry had a job, that he was working as an observations officer in the Bureau of Meteorology and doing research for a PhD on thermal lability in the Western Pacific. For in Laurie’s mind he was simply the Fisherman, sprung like some pelagic myth from the hazy seashore, with rod, untidy spill of hair and winter-blue, far-seeing eyes.

  ‘What are you studying?’ Jerry asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m doing a Dip Ed. That’s the default for us girls, isn’t it, if you don’t want to be a nurse? Teaching?’

  ‘What sort of teacher?’

  ‘Biology. I’m majoring in Biol.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I thought you were going to say English and French.’

  She looked at him sharply. ‘Why?’

  ‘No good reason.’

  ‘Do you disapprove of languages?’

  ‘Not at all, I –’

  ‘Because I’m doing English Lit as well. You aren’t – you don’t go along with that “two cultures” claptrap, do you? Mutual incomprehension? All that?’

  He smiled. ‘After that, how could I admit to it, even if I did?’

  ‘But you don’t, do you?’

  ‘No. Well, perhaps just a bit.’

  ‘Why on earth?’

  ‘Sometimes feel sneered at,’ he admitted.

  She frowned at him, bemused.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said with a wave of his hand, brushing the admission aside, ‘what aspect of biology are you interested in? Anything in particular?’

  Laurie was about to say no. Then she looked off into the distance. ‘I’m interested in bioluminescence,’ she said, and realised at that moment that of course she was.

  Or was it the other way round? You announce yourself in
some way, you say ‘This is me’, and then that’s what you become.

  Jerry was easy in his manner when he met Laurie’s parents, neither talkative nor silent. Once Rosie had adjusted her neck to his height and her ear to his kindly woof, she spoke to him without strain. She seemed comfortable with the level middle-distancing of his gaze and the self-effacing tug at the corner of his mouth.

  He gratified Doug by taking a real interest in his boatshed apparatus.

  ‘Improvised from the bogie of an old cane-train wagon,’ Doug told Jerry man-to-man. ‘Picked it up at the old Co-op. Derelict. But the rails, here, I got them from Teebah. They came from the old Teebah jetty. Trolleys were standard on jetties in the old days, when all the goods came by river. I found them dumped on an empty lot. Junk. Took a few years off my life getting ’em over here, I don’t mind telling you …’

  Another letter came for Laurie. She opened it without feeling.

  Dearest Laurie

  Just in case you haven’t heard this from Tony – no, even if you have, because my happiness will not be complete until I am sharing it with you! – Tony and I have at last realised that we love each other and want to be together for the rest of our lives.

  It happened in the strangest way! Dale and I were seeing a lot of Tony – because of course they were such old friends – and one night after we’d had a wonderful day we started dancing together, just the three of us (we were a bit stoned), and one thing led to another and then next thing I knew Dale was saying these incredible, bitter things. I don’t know if you noticed, but there is something craven about Dale. To cut a long story short, now he has cut all contact with us both. In the end, though, he is only hurting himself.

  Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on sad things when Tony and I are so happy. We don’t see any need to prove our commitment to each other by getting married, but you can be sure that the vows have been made in our hearts.

  Do you see what this means, girl? No more barriers between us! We can be sisters again, as we were in days of yore!

  I can’t wait to see you, my beautiful friend.

  With love always,

  Carol

  Laurie found her mother and handed her the letter without a word. Later, pulling up short, she remembered the bit about being stoned, and blushed with shame. One thing led to another … What exactly did it mean? What would her mother take it to mean?

  They were packing up. Laurie, thinking new, unfinished thoughts, collected her things from about the house. Miranda had been distracted from her chores by the graphic possibilities of a charred banksia stick and was now sitting like a Buddha on the verandah floor, trying them out in an old sketchpad of Rosie’s. Doug, who’d been in and out of the house all morning, was standing by for instructions and Rosie had his ear.

  ‘It seems Carol has taken up with Tony,’ she was saying between strokes of the broom as, shooing Miranda briefly out of the way, she swept the sand with particular vigour and thoroughness from under beds and tables and behind doors and out of corners towards the stairs.

  ‘Eh?’ Doug said, looking around. ‘These go down in the bin?’ He waved a hand at some empty bottles that stood near the stove.

  ‘What? Yes, they can go down. Did you hear what I said, Doug? Carol. Tony. It seems Tony has succumbed. Though on past performance –’ She took the broom briskly to a cobweb on the ceiling. ‘On past performance, it won’t last.’

  CHAPTER 9

  Initial conditions

  i

  1965

  Jerzy Zebrowski was born in Warsaw in 1939 to Wasily Zebrowski, industrial chemist, and Amelia Pawlak, dilettante.

  ‘Did she have any other profession?’ Laurie asked.

  Jerry mused. ‘She dabbled in dress design …’

  It was not a good year to be born in Warsaw.

  ‘Do you remember much of the war?’

  ‘Not much. I remember more of the DP camp in Germany.’

  ‘DP?’

  ‘Displaced persons.’

  The family were given free passage to Sydney in 1948. They travelled north by train to Brisbane and thence through dry scrub to the flat, mirage-haunted clearings of Wacol. They were among the twenty thousand migrants who came to Australia that year.

  ‘Were you fleeing communism?’

  ‘I suppose so. Yes.’

  ‘Were your parents German sympathisers?’

  ‘No. Oh no.’

  ‘But they were anti-communist.’

  There was a pause. ‘It’s not as simple as that. They were sick of big ideas. You know. Visionary schemes. Glorious futures and, for now, funerals. Sick of being frightened.’

  While they were still in the Wacol migrant camp, Wasily, industrial chemist, got a job as a heavy-machine operator on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, and there was astonished by the high blue skies by day and the bone-aching cold by night. And there, too, one filthy, wearying, bushfire-menaced afternoon, Wasily – thinking, perhaps, to stretch his legs – dropped down out of the cabin of his lumbering, twenty-ton shovel, was struck on the back of the head by the unsecured drop-flap of the dipper, and very shortly died.

  Amelia and the children had not long moved into a tenement in Darlinghurst to be closer to him. When he died, Amelia found work as a presser at a main-street dry-cleaning business. A teacher at the overcrowded local school taught English to the migrant families in the evenings, cramming them into the classroom’s child-sized desks, adults and all. He gave Jerry the nickname Jerzy Cowski, smirking at his own wit as he rapped the conjugation of the verb to be up on the blackboard in a haze of chalk dust. (There was something bovine about Jerry, Laurie admitted to herself, with his bulky shoulders and his broad head jutting forward. ‘He’s like a big, wholesome, friendly buffalo,’ Carol later remarked, after meeting him. Laurie loyally demurred. ‘His eyes twinkle,’ she protested. ‘He doesn’t plod.’)

  ‘It was old Munro who introduced me to “The Sands of Dee”. I’ve always been grateful to the bugger.’

  ‘For “The Sands of Dee”?’

  ‘No. For the English lessons.’

  ‘Despite the nickname?’

  ‘Despite the nickname.’

  At Darlinghurst Jerry learnt the slipshod vowels of Sydney slang. But the boy had never forgotten his first leaping, skidding, careening footfalls on the hot, soft sand of an Australian beach five hundred miles to the north. He and a score of other young Wacol inmates had been loaded onto a bus smelling of diesel, dust and warm Vegemite sandwiches, and it was judderingly flogged – past railyards, stands of dreary bush, small holdings where watermelons grew, green hills topped with silky oaks in tawny flower, salt-pan flats, and at last the sea! the sea! – all the hot, shimmering, interminable miles to Tallebudgera Creek. There he entered the green water and felt it cool his hot skin, and it was a baptism, a sacrament, a transfiguring rite. So when his mother died –

  ‘She died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Seven years ago. Of cancer. Probably breathing perc fumes for all those years didn’t help.’

  ‘Perc?’

  ‘Perchloroethylene. Chlorocarbon.’

  ‘Perc. So you haven’t got any family now?’

  ‘No, yes. I’ve got a younger brother in Edinburgh and a sister in Sydney –’

  ‘Oh.’

  So when his mother died he applied for a job – of course, there’d been a stint at Sydney Uni, Earth Sciences, postgrad studies and so on – he went for a job with the Queensland Bureau of Meteorology –

  ‘And here you are.’

  ‘And here I am.’

  ‘Where?’ she said cosily, parting her legs to accommodate him.

  ‘Here.’

  Jerry narrowed his eyes, abstracted. ‘Beats me,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, there’s these weird figures …’

  Laurie understood the need to find an organising principle to understand things by. Whereas for her it was elementary taxonom
y, fitting the extravagant muddle of life into a schema that plotted hidden affinities and accounted for everyone, for Jerry, she found, it was the epic turbulences of weather systems – great ocean currents, fronts, upwellings, Coriolis vortices, temperature gradients, isobars. The vast, foot-loose trade winds.

  He was puzzled, though, by anomalies, by wild switch-back changes born of tiny variations, which his theorems and equations could not account for.

  Jerry scratched his head. ‘I’m not a mathematician’s bootlace,’ he lamented.

  At a Valley trattoria with dark doorways, an uneven concrete floor and an atmosphere of garlic and drains, Jerry introduced Laurie to a bushwalker named Miles. He rose to shake her hand across the table and was immediately eclipsed by Kit, who entered in a blaze of crimped red hair. Kit threw down her backpack, pointed to a murky corner and said, ‘Rat.’

  Three heads swivelled to look, saw nothing and returned to the nods and smiles of greetings and introductions. Their voices were pitched above the knock and scrape of furniture on the hard floor, the rising gabble from other tables, the clatter of dishes and the whack of the kitchen’s swinging door as a small, cross waitress came and went. The smoke of charred viands hung about the lights.

  After the briefest of preliminaries, Kit and Miles launched into a story about Jerry from their shared past. Jerry chuckled. ‘Yuk yuk,’ he went, like water sloshing in a drum, eyes cast down, basking in the warmth of the banter. His hair under the lights was the colour of leaden pewter and hung dead straight from the crown of his broad, foreshortened skull. Laurie imagined her hands spanning the breadth of that skull and wondered at the private thoughts it housed.

  Miles, also laughing, was rearranging the cutlery in ranks and sunbursts and glancing at Kit, who was knotting her tresses loosely at the back of her head. The waitress, halted in her bustling by the sight of the disordered knives and forks, shot a dark look at Miles and returned the implements to rectitude.

  A speaker on the wall cleared its throat and through the scratches the ghost of a long-dead tenor began a lilting barcarolle.