The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  Distantly, a car door slammed. Sounds in the hall. Fading.

  ‘Yep, we were all young once,’ said Doug, speaking to his hands. ‘This lass of ours –’ he waved a hand at Miranda without glancing in her direction, ‘she goes on about “a foreign country”. Well, that was it. Full of butterflies.’ He looked squarely at Jerry. ‘I’m talking about the jungle.’

  Rosie plucked at the back of her hand. ‘Doug, I think Hitchcock would be on now,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we all go and watch that. Have you seen the Hitchcock program, Jerry? Do you like it?’

  Doug nodded his head. ‘The place looked like paradise from the boat. Then they off-loaded us at Moresby and we got the picture …’

  Doug got up from his chair and went and stood at the door. His eyes were on his shoes and he lifted his voice without looking up. ‘Tony,’ he called. ‘Come here.’

  Rosie stood and laid a hand on his arm to stop him.

  ‘No no,’ said Doug, tilting his head and raising his hand for quiet, ‘it’s all right. I just want him to hear this. He might learn something.’

  Tony did not appear.

  Rosie shrank back to her chair.

  Doug looked over his shoulder at the others, gathered around the table. ‘I want to set you straight on this,’ he said. They’d all fallen silent, looking down. Miranda, backed up against the sink, began to twist a lock of hair.

  Doug took his seat, and when he was settled he said, ‘I’m talking about 1942. That’s – what? Twenty-odd – twenty-three years ago. I’m not talking about play-acting, like …’ He waved a hand. ‘This’s something you oughta hear. So you know. All right?

  ‘We’ve been up at Ioribaiwa, see, and we’re being pushed back. You heard of Ioribaiwa? No? No. Well, it’s in the Owen Stanleys. You’ve heard of Kokoda? Yeah. Well, what went on up there soon wiped the smile off your face. Ioribaiwa’s, say, forty miles south-west of Kokoda as the crow flies and a blessèd lifetime as your poor blessèd digger went. Get the picture?

  ‘Anyhow, we’re up there and I’ve been crook. I mean crook. Just a whiff of bully beef and I puke. Spend half the time with my strides down round my ankles. The Japs have gone quiet, but you never know when it’s going to start again. No time to be too particular. I was rank, I can tell you. But this day, I’m perpendicular again, but I’m feeble, y’ know? Flat out managing my Tommy gun and kit, so Dave’s hefting the old two-o-eight for me.’ He looked up and saw their incomprehension. ‘Wireless. Twenty-five pounds of it. I lugged that thing up, down, no let-up. Shocking country. Treacherous. You’re perpetually wet. Your feet rot in your boots. Perishingly cold at night. Leeches.’ He meditated into his glass. ‘Slopes like that’ – without taking his eyes off his glass he raised an arm to a near vertical and shook it for emphasis – ‘like that. It wasn’t just the Japs. Half the time you didn’t dare move a muscle in case you copped a bullet from one of your mates. Anyhow, this day we stumble on a native garden, deserted, and we’re all looking at this weird imprint in the mud of a Jap boot – you know, with a pocket for the big toe – when all at once we wake up. The Japs are so close we can hear their rifle bolts cocking. Then a grenade explodes in my right ear, it seems like, and we scatter. Leaves and twigs are coming down like rain. Machine-gun fire’s bringing ’em down, see, but I can only hear it faintly. It could be a dream. Dave and I – I’m sticking to him like dags to a sheep’s bum – the radio, y’see, and my ear’s ringing so loudly I can’t even hear us crashing through the kunai – it’s as if we’re not making a sound – anyway, we put as much distance between us and the Japs as we can. And when we get a chance to take a breath we’re way off the track and we’re bushed.’

  He leant forward confidentially. ‘The whole show was a blinkin’ muddle from beginning to end,’ he said softly, wrinkling up his nose, breathing brandy fumes across the table. ‘A blinkin’ muddle.’

  From the corner of her eye, Laurie noticed a movement, and when she looked she saw that Tony was standing at the door, listening.

  ‘So there we are and it’s night and we haven’t got the foggiest notion where we are. There hasn’t been any gunfire since nightfall, so we can’t get our bearings from that. But I’ve kept my dinner down and I reckon I’ve got no choice, so I’m monkeying up trees trying to pick up a signal, but all I’m getting is a storm of static.’ Doug leant towards Jerry. ‘The ringing in my ear’s still there, but a few decibels softer.’ He straightened. ‘And then I get this different signal, and I freeze. It’s some Nip. Jabber jabber. Crackle. Jabber jabber. So I shimmy down and go to tap Dave on the shoulder to tell him to keep mum. It’s pitch black, see, except for the fireflies, and you can’t see your hand in front of your face. But when I touch Dave I realise something’s wrong. He’s not acting normally. He’s raving. I tell him for chrissake shut up, thinking he’s got the willies. And then I realise something. Even though for once it hasn’t rained, he’s sopping wet.’

  Behind Tony a shadow moved. Carol.

  Doug reached for the cognac. His tone changed, became distant. ‘Young Tony has this idea that there was something fine and noble about dying up there and he wishes he had the chance to do the same. Be a hero. In point of fact, if you want to know the truth, we were lost, sick and beaten. And bloody scared.’ He shook his head slowly and poured another slug of brandy. Then he looked up. ‘Nothing bloody heroic about it at all.’ He jerked his thumb. ‘So I scrag the poor coot most of the next bloody day. From first light I’m cursing and coaxing and hefting and heaving. Eerie silence after all the gunfire, just cicadas and birdcalls. I’m keeping an ear cocked all the time. Lying low when I have to, m’hand clamped over his mouth. It’s like a bad dream. He wants to throw in the towel. Just curl up in a ball. His teeth are chattering like castanets and I’m shit-scared he’ll give us away.’ Doug examined his hands as they lay on the table on either side of his glass, first one, then the other. ‘Don’t mind telling you there were moments …’ He nodded grimly. ‘Fact is, the Nips have packed up, shot through, but we don’t know that, see. And here’s me, trying to keep him mum. I could’ve smothered the poor blighter for no reason. Now that would’ve been a joke, wouldn’t it, eh?’ His gaze fell on Jerry, who was in his line of sight, and he fixed him with hard eyes.

  ‘Hero,’ he said. ‘Yeah, well, you could say he was, my mate Dave, putting up with my stink, lugging that two-o-eight. Not letting on about the sweats. It’s not the most dignified thing in the world, malaria. That’s what got him. Not a bullet in the head. Not a – ssst – swipe from a samurai sword. Malaria did for him,’ he clicked his fingers, ‘like that.’ His chin lifted as his lips shaped a silent ‘poof!’ and then sank again. And something about the cleft chin and the way he tucked it in to his neck brought to mind the crumpled chin of a child about to cry. ‘I got him back and before you knew it they’d shunted him off somewhere. Field hospital. Delirious. Didn’t know me.

  ‘They cry for their mothers, you know. The dying.’

  He brooded awhile, hunched over his glass. ‘Never saw him again. Except.’ He cast a look over his shoulder at the doorway where Tony stood. ‘Except there. In that boy. That boy who is so fucking innocent he thinks he can play the hero by cocking a snook at society.’

  Tony’s face was white. Rosie had risen long ago, and gone to him.

  Not long thereafter, Tony moved out. He’d found a part-time job as a surveyor’s assistant, they heard, and was staying with comrades; he was picking up occasional work as a sign-writer; he’d been taken on as an apprentice draughts-man by an architect sympathetic to the cause. He’d moved in with Carol and her parents.

  He was calling himself Tony Morgan.

  ‘Have you changed your name by deed poll?’ Laurie asked him when she ran into him at uni. She felt slighted. First, by his alliance with Carol, he had discounted her bitterest betrayal and – by implication as well as in plain fact – embraced its perpetrator; now, by his change of name, he had renounced not only Doug’s paternity but also his kinship
with her, Laurie, his staunchest ally.

  ‘No. Why?’ Tony retorted. ‘I don’t need some bureaucrat’s say-so.’

  ‘It will confuse people,’ Laurie argued.

  ‘Lol,’ he said, ‘it repudiates a lie.’

  The house did not seem more relaxed with Tony gone. His absence was as silently observed as, before, his beloved presence had been.

  CHAPTER 10

  Imago

  i

  1966

  This Laurie knew: if you went to the seashore on a very dark night, you might see the breakers glow. Walk in the wet sand and you would leave a trail of luminous footprints, as if you were a god.

  Witnessing again the spring felicity of fireflies, Laurie found herself full of questions. Whence? she wanted to know. Wherefore? The tiny beetles were calling to one another, of course, and by this means they mated and passed on their minute flame. Genetic memory’s brief, recurring flare.

  But what of phosphorescence? Was this photochemical reaction, this dreamlike radiance, the algae signalling desire?

  Sepsis was the great killer during the American Civil War, but it was said that when the soldiers’ wounds glowed blue, they healed more readily. A bacterium, lethal to insects but sanative to injured mammals, was the source of this faint, blessed light. To what end, then, this blue light? Whose eyes, as Photorhabdus luminescens dissolved its victim’s tissues, were meant to read it?

  So here was Laurie’s conclusion: bioluminescence, and all its lovely analogues, began incidentally, as nothing more than a chance outcome of life’s chemistry. Pointless, mute. It was in being noticed that it began – fitfully but irreversibly – to learn its own code.

  Whatever the truth of it – why Jerry’s breath was warm and phosphorescence glowed, whether randomly or to some end – this planet went cycling on, carrying its peach-bloom of living things into their chancy future.

  ii

  When the phone rang, Laurie was curled up on a chair with Jerry in front of the fire. They were watching The Twilight Zone on TV while she tried not to think about the end of the holidays and the new term starting, or to let her face betray her awareness of Jerry’s surreptitious arousal, or the way he stirred himself, discreetly, against her leg. Her arm rested along the back of the chair, her fingers toying with his hair. It pleased her, that presence of Eros even in the domestic torpor of the parental living room.

  Doug was at his ease on the couch, legs crossed, slippered feet propped up on an ottoman, watching the TV from under his brows. Rosie, beside him, was knitting. She’d begun a jumper in red wool, and her lips moved silently, counting stitches.

  At the phone’s shrill summons Laurie heaved herself to her feet, pulling Jerry’s corduroy jacket cape-like around her shoulders, and shuffled in her socks out to the draughty hall, leaving Jerry to restore propriety as best he could.

  The receiver was cold against her ear when she said hello. It made her faintly breathless, answering the phone, waiting …

  ‘Oh,’ she said. Dale. His dry, threadbare voice. She turned her back on the fire-lit doorway, aware that her heart was thumping uncomfortably.

  ‘Who is it?’ Rosie sang out between countings. Laurie didn’t answer.

  Thank god for the TV, giving cover to the awkwardness on each end of the line, the on-screen melodrama, the moody score, keeping from other ears the – ‘So …’; ‘Hmm? …’; ‘And you?’; ‘Yes, well, much the same …’ – all so clumsy, so banal, that Laurie grimaced for them both, with screwed-up eyes and bared teeth.

  Laurie felt a sensation on the back of her neck. She swung around. Jerry was standing in the hall, watching her.

  Dale said something she didn’t hear distinctly, or perhaps, light-headed as she was, she didn’t take it in. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and dropped a meaningful shoulder at Jerry.

  ‘Give me a moment?’

  Jerry held his ground at first, but then, perhaps because of the parental presence in the living room, reluctantly withdrew. She pressed the receiver to her ear.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that –’

  A sigh. ‘Forget it. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No, go on, what did you say?’

  ‘I said’ – another apathetic sigh, and then the words came faintly – ‘I need to see you.’

  Laurie’s spirits began to float. She was borne up on what became, in the timelessness of that moment, a wave of benevolence for all humanity – for her parents, made uncomprehending by middle age; for Jerry, mentally pacing; for Dale in his wintry phone box, looking the other way.

  Of course she was with Jerry now. Any second thoughts from Dale were really of no consequence. On the other hand, here he was … ‘I can’t,’ she said, dropping her voice, and at the hushed tone Jerry came and stood in the doorway with folded arms. Firelight played behind him. On the TV, violins swelled.

  ‘Please.’

  She grunted, not risking words with Jerry there.

  ‘The entrance to the new library. At uni. The new library.’

  ‘Ah …’

  ‘Tomorrow. Ten-thirty. All right? You understand? I’ll be there. Ten-thirty.’

  ‘Yes.’ She replaced the receiver carefully so that the bolt of elation that shot through her would not make it rattle in its cradle. Yes, she’d said. Yes, she understood? Yes, she’d come?

  Jerry did not move. Laurie glanced towards the living room and her parents. ‘That was him,’ he said flatly. He kept his voice down, but there was an explosive edge to it. An odour of saltpetre.

  ‘Yes.’

  Jerry’s hair had grown. It hung down over his forehead and bothered his eyes. Now those eyes took cover there. His voice was low, but each word was articulated carefully.

  ‘Get him out of your life,’ he breathed.

  Laurie frowned. She’d as good as accepted. And she didn’t like Jerry’s overbearing tone. Rescuing her did not give him proprietary rights to her life. ‘Who I see is up to me, Jerry,’ she returned, as loftily as whispering would allow. Wondering vaguely whether she should have said whom. Feeling cold, she wrapped Jerry’s jacket closer around her. It was a perfectly reasonable thing to say, she told herself, but even in her own ears the words sounded tinny. They went on racketing there as Jerry looked at her unblinking and she uncomfortably held his gaze.

  Without a word, he held out his hand for his jacket.

  The exchange was made. Laurie hugged her arms. Jerry punched his fists through the sleeves and tugged at the collar.

  ‘You off then, Jerry?’ Rosie asked, concentrating on her needles.

  It was very awkward, her mother and father being there, within earshot. Laurie couldn’t speak freely. She couldn’t take Jerry aside, talk some sense into him, kiss him. Make him stay. She didn’t want to relinquish this new, bracing sense of – whatever it was that made her feel so alive. But she didn’t want Jerry to go, either. She wanted him to stay.

  But her parents were calling their goodnights and Jerry was shuffling in the doorway, throwing out a hand.

  Leaving.

  She caught a glimpse of him, just before he disappeared down the steps and into the shadows, in the light thrown onto the verandah through the French windows, and in that moment saw that in his haste he had put his jacket on inside-out, with tags and rough seams showing and the collar lopsided, tucked half in, half out; and something about the comedy of it, his unconsciousness of the figure he cut, suddenly pierced her with such tenderness that she felt her bones dissolve.

  Jerry.

  She heard the gate click.

  There’d been a sentence prepared in her mind and it surfaced now, even though its time was past. Well, she said to herself, if that’s what he wants to do …

  When she tried to ring him at his share house, he wasn’t there. His house mates were vague. No one had seen him since – when was it? They couldn’t be sure.

  Laurie saw Dale first. She saw him freeze for a fraction of a second, stub his cigarette out on a feature rock and move a st
ep or two to meet her.

  They didn’t embrace, but when he was close she could smell him, that reek of tobacco in his sweat and clothes and hair. A familiar feeling of constraint came over her. The old nervousness. He wasn’t so very much taller than her, but something about his withholding intensity belittled her and held her at bay.

  Now, standing in her French Resistance beret among the turfed hillocks of the new landscaping, she wasn’t sure why she’d agreed so readily to come. She’d thought there was an element of fellow feeling in it, for a sufferer, but also – she should admit it to herself – a need to turn the tables, settle the score.

  Or had it all along been just a reflex? Dale whistles, she comes running.

  But now, for the first time in Dale’s presence, she felt a rising impatience. He who tries to belittle others – who had said that? – only succeeds in making himself look small.

  It came to her as a novel idea: this was a timid man. Unlike Jerry, with his interest in everything, his big, boofy warmth. Who couldn’t posture to save his life.

  Jerry. Where was he? How long would he be gone? Did he mean to come back?

  Walking with Dale, she felt an impulse to turn away.

  ‘About that day …’ Dale said over coffee. He got up to fetch some sugar and when he returned fell to measuring it out and stirring it with care.

  He was referring, of course, to the betrayal in Finney’s. Two of Laurie’s fingers drummed beside her thick-china mug. His maddening obliquities were dragging this out. She wanted to be gone. Glancing through the glass doors into the bright winter sunlight of the crowded forum, she felt a surge of the old anger in her veins. She turned to him squarely, cutting him short.

  ‘I loved you, Dale,’ she said.

  Bitter reproach though it was – though she intended it to be – it was a relief to pronounce the word ‘love’ at last.

  He was reaching inside his jacket for his cigarettes, tapping one out, placing it between his lips. A slow flush crept up his face. He couldn’t get the match to light at first, and it took several strikes to achieve a flame and moments more to have the cigarette burning satisfactorily. He took a lungful of smoke and breathed it out as a sigh.