The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  ‘I notice you use the past tense.’

  As he spoke she realised that the anger had gone. Simply gone. She saw the last molecules of it disintegrate in the bright winter light that filled the doors.

  ‘Yes,’ she said gently. ‘Past tense.’

  Laurie fought free of the ruck of office workers now filling the street and, one hand on her beret, broke into a weaving, ducking and sidestepping run. In the midst of her urgency was joy. She flew. Feet nimble, bones buoyed, lungs mighty, and an airborne, feathery heart. Stitched a zigzag seam along the street. Nipped the corner. Now the hill. Up the steep incline she beat, under the grid of trolleybus cables, past soot-darkened buildings and over the soot-darkened railway bridge, into the upper sunlight, with the air cold and rough in her chest.

  And there above her was the Trades Hall, commanding respect, relic of a hopeful age. On the west it was flanked by old fig trees and, hard by it, Jacob’s Ladder, a soaring ambition of stairs that linked the humdrum street she stood on with the prospects of Wickham Terrace. To its east, facing away, rose a small, three-storeyed tower. The office of the Queensland Metropolitan Bureau of Meteorology.

  Laurie studied the Bureau with personal interest, noting, with ragged breath, the plain interwar design and the rows of standard windows, imagining their outlook. She tried to place Jerry inside, but she had only a vague idea of what he did there. He was as inaccessible to her as an imprisoned damsel to a prince. She’d pictured him lunching alone under the trees, and spying him there, and walking into his arms. But the prosy materiality of the building, which did not accord in its particulars with her imaginings, made that happy vision fade. Maybe he kept to his desk. Or ate in the staffroom, between mouthfuls swapping opinions with his workmates. His colleagues. Female colleagues …

  Did they joke with him? Did they notice the fall of his hair, the span of his skull? The neatness of his hips?

  From here what she saw above her was just a perpendicular structure of dirty cream, capped by a red-tiled roof with overhanging eaves. Hoarding its secrets. Narrow stairs led through a high concrete retaining wall to an unprepossessing lower entrance. Off to the right, above the wall, was a level area; and it was only here, in an enclosure that contained an assemblage of arcane apparatus (gauges, balances, twirling cups; all manner of mechanical fingers lifted to the wind) that –

  A movement. Off near Jacob’s Ladder. Someone entering the shadows of the trees.

  As Laurie darted through the banked-up cars and up the stairs, hand clamped on her beret in a twist of wind, it occurred to her that her heart was a moon jelly, opening and closing, all convulsing nervous tissue. Aurelia coerulea. But when she peered into the shadows, the man settling himself on the slope with his lunch had shrunk to a middle-aged chap with a paunch.

  She slowed to a stop, one foot on a higher step, and turned half circle, taking in the view with hope-primed eyes.

  So began her watch. With half a compass before her, Laurie made this Jacob’s Ladder her main-mast, scaling it from earth to heaven and back, alive to new movement in the northern dazzle, the Trades Hall’s massy shadow, the dusty, winking street.

  Gusts of wind took her eye. A girl in a black-and-white shift and high heels, clicking up the stairs. Two laughing lovers struggling with the slope. A young man in a dark suit coming down the stairs two at a time. Three hefty, grey-suited officials climbing out of a taxi in front of the Trades Hall, the slamming of doors and unabated conversation coming to her clearly on the wind.

  The City Hall clock donged half-past the hour.

  Fewer people about now. The office workers had all been gathered in. A paper bag danced along the pavement. The Trades Hall and the Bureau of Meteorology grew taller and darker under a powdered sky.

  All she could do was wait for knocking-off time. Waylay him then.

  She sat under a tree, kicked leaves, listened to the City Hall clock tolling the hours, climbed up and down Jacob’s Ladder. Counted the steps. Sat on one, picking at her pants where they bagged at the knee. Waited.

  Botanical Gardens trolleybuses sank with a sigh down the steep incline to the city hubbub below, and no sooner was one gone than another rose.

  Wheeling pigeons – sky-diagrams of fluid motion – made her look up. Stand. Turn on her heel. Moments later she was in the foyer of the Bureau, and there she made inquiries and received an answer she did not want to hear.

  Someone went to check.

  ‘Jerry? He’s gone to Willis Island.’

  People were leaving, pulling on parkas, shouldering bags. They gave her curious glances. A muted chattering sound as of many mechanical voices issued from somewhere deep in the office.

  Laurie’s mouth had gone dry. Willis Island? Where was that? Somewhere up north, far away, utterly beyond reach. She stood on a sinking floor amid the coming and going. In the background, the machines chattered on like a roomful of gossips.

  He wouldn’t. No, it was inconceivable. He wouldn’t just go like that, without –

  ‘You after Jerry?’

  The question came across the foyer from a shaggy, homespun-looking inmate. ‘He’s left all right,’ he called, ‘but just for the day. Not Willis yet.’ The man detoured over to her. He looked so rumpled, bearing glad tidings in his Argyle knit, that Laurie loved him with a pure, maternal love. His eyes were baggy but a smile lurked in his beard like a small animal in the undergrowth. ‘You’ve just missed him. Shot through couple o’ minutes ago. Basement door.’ He indicated the lower entrance with his thumb. ‘If you’re quick, you might spot him bolting down the hill.’

  Laurie tripped over her feet to get out the door.

  She ran. Along the footpath. Around the forecourt. There was the plunging street under its grid of cables. Immediately a figure caught her eye, crossing the intersection below. There was no mistaking that big frame, those blue jeans and corduroy jacket, or the soft-footed, desert-booted lope, head jutting forward, shoulders loose. Laurie’s mouth formed the first syllable of his name. Jer–. But it was pointless to call out. He was heading for the train. In a minute she’d lose him in the grimy, deafening underground of Central Station.

  She skipped down some stairs, taking them sideways like a dancer, galloped down the sloping pavement, and then ran flat out, her head thrown back, one hand on her beret and another on her shoulder-bag, keeping Jerry in view. She could see him, head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd, held up by a stream of turning traffic. Pieces of newspaper sailed above him. Now he was moving again.

  She shot a look each way and dodged, nimble as a goat, between impatient cars.

  iii

  January 1967

  During the night they were wakened by the wind blowing a gale, bringing with it sheets of rain. The tent had begun to sag and belly. Outside, the trees were roaring.

  And now, amid the roaring, the unmistakeable whacking sound of something that had come adrift.

  Naked, warm from sleep, they crawled out into the rain and wind. The guys, still slackening and straining violently, had wrenched some pegs from the sandy ground, and the fly had taken off like an unsheeted sail.

  Out of nowhere, a tissue of wet, gleaming nylon sank into the torch’s beam, then with a crack and a whoop vanished again in the darkness. Slick as frogs, they too came and went in the torchlight, tripping over guys and pegs, cauled by clammy membranes, laughing so hard they could barely keep to their feet.

  ‘Avast, me hearties!’ Jerry bawled into the wind. ‘Belay the mains’l.’

  At last, with pegs hammered in and ropes secured, the tent was sound enough for them to creep back in and huddle until dawn while the walls luffed and sucked and clapped around them.

  The storm spent itself before the sun rose. When, with the first light touching their tent, they crept out and stretched their limbs, they felt as novel as insects emerging fully formed. Tall, reborn, they passed resplendent through a corridor of she-oaks, the deep sand giving underfoot, out into a hallelujah of birdsong.

>   In the daylight the beach was littered with the leavings of the storm – a mess of small, sea-nourished lives, exquisitely formed, drying to sludge in the fierce heat of the sun.

  They slept much of the day away.

  The next night was so dark and the air so warm that, but for the sound of the sea close by, they might have believed that space had contracted around them to the dimensions of their own bodies. Only the slosh of falling waves and their strange, half-seen lustre suggested a large ‘out there’.

  ‘Oh look, Jez!’ Laurie gasped, sensing him next to her rather than seeing him. ‘Phosphorescence!’

  The tide had retreated, leaving a depression of scummy sand that stuck to the soles of their feet and, with each step, glowed for a few moments, and faded away.

  ‘You’re a ghost,’ Laurie whispered. ‘I only know you’re there by your eerie traces!’ She scuffed a bright trail backwards and then turned into the darkness, striding blindly out.

  ‘Go easy, Nim, or you’ll disappear down a melon hole,’ Jerry called behind her.

  She glanced over her shoulder at her luminous footprints. They restored, briefly, the sense of space that had been lost in the blackness of the night. There was Jerry, barely distinguishable but given away, like her, by his glimmering spoor.

  She turned and smiled in the darkness. Trailing clouds of glory, she thought, and blundered more or less into his arms.

  ‘Were you really going to go to Willis Island?’

  ‘I was thinking about it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Experience. Money.’

  A pause.

  ‘And to punish me?’

  ‘That too.’

  He cocooned her in the sheet and when she’d fought free they lay still on their cushion of air. His feet stuck out beyond the bottom of the sheet, his sea-cleaned toenails showing pale in the evening light. How cunningly those feet were moulded, with their ankle shafts, articulated arches, fanned metatarsals, ordinal toes. They could have been the feet of Michelangelo’s David, they had that marble sheen and muscularity. Only they were as brown as Bendigo pottery instead of white. How lean the sinews were! How tender their hollows.

  And yet, and yet … She would be able to think if she weren’t so sleepy.

  He turned over stones in her, and surprising things were there.

  Squid are gone almost before you spot them, and all that’s left is a puff of ink.

  iv

  1968

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive …

  Nineteen sixty-eight was such a year that it seemed the world would never be the same again.

  Mutiny flared now here, now there, as if the oppressed of the world were one organism whose veins coursed with fire.

  On current affairs programs, sober analysts gravely discussed the prospect of widespread revolution.

  Tony was exultant. On the evening news, a wiry protestor with a mane of dark hair – Was that him? Was that Tony? – Dragged off in a police headlock? Bending down with darting eyes over a reporter’s microphone to explain the confusion behind him with urgent authority?

  ‘He’s so fervent,’ said Miranda, amused, proud. Disconnected.

  Disconnection creeps up on you under Brisbane’s blue winter skies, Laurie thought. Looking at the crowd gathered again on the hillside, she saw that each of them stood in their own personal chrysalis of sunshine. They couldn’t agree on song or slogan, and the chanting would die away before it ever really got going. Yet there they were, holding placards in the Roma Street Forum, where the old markets had been, when they could be sipping cappuccinos or memorising the pathways of afferent nerves or lying in each other’s arms.

  ‘What if it had been the other way round?’

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘What if you’d been in trouble – swept off a rock or something – and I’d come to your rescue? What then?’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Yes, would you have been, you know, attracted? To me?’

  Jerry mused for a while. He screwed up his mouth and viewed her across the pillow with one eye. ‘You’ve got good legs …’

  ‘It would’ve been different, though, wouldn’t it. It’s strange.’

  A long pause.

  ‘What about you?’ Jerry asked.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. Would you have been attracted to me?’

  This time it was Laurie who gazed into the distance. It was very hard to reverse their roles that way, even in her imagination. Of course Mr Rochester had fallen in love with Jane Eyre when she’d come to his aid. The thrill was in the strength brought low. Power deposed. But with Jerry there was no transgression, no class barriers stormed. With Jerry …

  ‘But I was already …’ she began.

  ‘Me too. I was already …’

  ‘Interested.’

  It was a bad sign when Miranda scraped her hair back from her face and imprisoned it at the back of her head with a tight little rubber band. It meant there was a rage in her. Her mouth, then – usually soft – went tight as a rubber band too.

  v

  Spring

  They went camping again when the tides were right. A south-easter blew up and played with the fly as they slept in the afternoon.

  Without looking, Laurie felt the space on the air mattress with the flat of her hand, confirming that Jerry had gone from her side. Her eyelids had rung shut some time ago and still hung there, as heavy as stage curtains.

  ‘What are you doing, Jerry?’ she called drowsily.

  No reply.

  She opened her eyes a slit and turned her head. The green tent walls, yellowed by the sun, were in constant, gentle motion. She could hear sounds of rummaging over at the car.

  ‘You’re not still looking for that packet?’

  She heard the thump of a small object hitting the ground. Then several more in quick succession. A general clattering.

  As she raised herself onto her elbows and squinted out through the fluttering tent flap, something hurtled past and crashed against the trunk of a banksia. Gear lay strewn about.

  Silence. Shifting green-gold light and the tent flap fluttering.

  Laurie fell back, her arm thrown across her eyes. He knew it was a dangerous time of the month. She was not prepared to risk it. ‘There’s no point getting worked up about it,’ she groaned. She listened, not expecting a reply, knowing he was beyond reach.

  He’d be down on the beach, walking off a private, inaccessible rage.

  The wind rustled the pandanus leaves. Laurie whistled softly between her teeth. Soon it would be time to collect some kindling. She sniffed her shirt. Everything smelt of woodsmoke.

  In a minute she would get up and throw everything back in the crate. Fill the billy from the water container, light the gas stove. Make a cup of tea.

  vi

  ‘Laurie,’ said Rosie, coming quietly to her room, bringing the smell of milky tea on her breath, ‘can I have a little chat with you?’ She didn’t wait for Laurie’s assent but sat heavily on her bed. Then gave Laurie a sharp glance.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? You look peaky.’

  Laurie shook her head noncommittally and closed the anatomy book she’d had open on her desk.

  ‘Anyway, it’s Miranda,’ Rosie continued, her eyes lingering for a moment longer on Laurie’s face. ‘Your dad and I are worried. Miranda’s –’ she rose from the bed to pick up and neatly fold a pair of jeans that lay on the floor, ‘behaving recklessly. The fact is, I think she’s sexually active. Indiscriminately, I mean. Promiscuously.’

  Heat began to rise in Laurie’s face.

  Rosie went on smoothing the jeans as she spoke. ‘She’s at that age, there’s only so much I can do. It’s not unusual for adolescent girls to be resistant to authority. And she … I’ve had the doctor talk to her – about the risks, you know, and what can be done to avoid – but she’s ignored him, as far as I can tell. She’s not realistic; she operates according to some – She needs to be using a reliable form
of contraception if she’s not to get herself into terrible trouble. I’m worried, that’s the long and short of it. I’m worried.’ She tossed the folded jeans on the bed, took them up again and, with some cursory resorting, fitted them into a drawer. Sat down.

  Laurie waited.

  ‘Here’s the point I’m coming to. I thought she’d be more inclined to listen if it came from someone from the same generation. Who’s more up to date with the current methods.’

  Laurie shifted in her seat. Repositioned her glasses. This was very uncomfortable. It infringed the carefully observed proprieties of their relationship. Her sex life was secessionist territory. She didn’t want her mother trespassing there. Sex was not something she wanted to discuss with anyone in her family. Certainly not her mother, let alone her loose-tongued sister. Who knew what she might come out with? Even Miranda’s monthly theft of her tampons was something she preferred to let slide, thereby keeping at bay acknowledgment of their common baseline carnality.

  ‘She wouldn’t listen to me, Mum,’ she said with a frown.

  ‘You’d have a better chance than me, Laurie. I’d like you to give it a go.’

  Laurie sighed and stared at the ceiling.

  ‘She looks up to you. Yes she does. You have influence over her. Please.’

  Laurie could see it from her mother’s point of view. She could just take Miranda aside, one day when her hair was loose. Get talking with her. Give her the benefit of her wisdom. She almost laughed at the irony of it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last. ‘It wouldn’t work.’ She stared down at her thighs. Then she submitted to the burn of her mother’s gaze and turned to face her.

  Rosie looked her daughter in the eye for several moments. Then she got up and went to the door. There she paused.