The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  Laurie caught the word. ‘Someone’s in trouble?’ she asked.

  Sobered, Jerry swung Cora off his shoulders and into his arms.

  ‘That’s what they said …’

  An onlooker explained. ‘Someone got swept out. A couple of the boys on duty went after ’em, but now …’

  Laurie hoisted Vit and his mechanical digger onto her hip.

  The sand was fine and deep, and it yelped under their feet as they bore their children down onto the beach.

  It was a big sea for such a calm, sunny day, and a haze hung over it. The waves were breaking at an angle, rushing up the sand and sweeping away to the north. A deep gutter ran parallel to the shore and then veered out to sea in a welter of cross-waves and churned-up sand.

  Most of the swimmers had left the water and backed out of the way of the dozen or so lifesavers who, marked out by their red Speedos, had taken centre stage on the beach, two or three shouting instructions and waving their arms, one sprinting in a flurry of sand up to the clubhouse, others running awkwardly down towards the sea, a rubber ducky with an outboard slung between them. The craft was snatched by the surf, and while it bucked and swung in the foam two of them leapt in, one beginning at once to wrench the starter cord as another took up a position in the bow and the others pushed and towed it through the crashing waves.

  ‘There’s someone in the surf,’ Jerry said. ‘There. Look. They’re bringing someone in.’

  Laurie followed his gaze. A head – no, two heads, close together – appeared and disappeared in the foam. Making for them was a small troop of lifesavers, breasting the breakers, pushing urgently into the sea.

  As they watched, one head fought clear of the water; a back showed, convulsed above a laggard weight, which the other rescuers quickly closed upon. As they struggled to seize something in the water and lift it to their shoulders, a figure broke free and floundered backwards towards the shore, waving an arm wildly; and in that moment they saw it was just a boy – slick and brown, but diminished, hollow-bellied, with long, bleached hair stuck wetly to his face. Clear at last of the dragging wash and with people crowding around him, he hunched forward, head hanging, hands on bony hips. So he remained, while the other rescuers brought their burden out of the sea and laid an exhausted man on the sand – until people came and took him by the elbows and helped him sit. Paramedics came then, and ministered to them both.

  But the lifesavers had returned to the sea, wading in as far as they could without being swept off their feet, gazing far out, gripping the nape of their necks or clasping the crown of their heads, tugged this way and that by the waves, their legs braced against the undertow. Beyond them, the bright-red rubber ducky bounded over the ocean swell, left a white trail, spun, moved in tight circles and then in great arcs, surfed the rollers, crested the breakers, circled again.

  Vit grew restless and patted Laurie’s chest to get her attention. ‘Can we go for a swim now, Mummy?’ he asked.

  ‘No swims today, Vit,’ said Laurie, and stroked his warm leg.

  ‘It’s a lifesaver,’ came the word down the line of onlookers. ‘They’ve lost him.’

  The sun shone, the she-oak tassels hung, and out on the blue, blue sea the rubber ducky sped and drifted and circled and sped again. Now and then they heard its whine through a lull in the surf’s thunder.

  It was still circling when they left.

  They’d just made the river crossing when they heard a helicopter beating towards the sea and glimpsed it briefly through the trees. They heard it from the River House, intermittently, until the sun went down.

  During the night it began to rain. It rained the next day too, and then came the wind.

  There’d been weeks of rain before Christmas and the swamp was full, clear water running over the track as they drove in. In the yard the ground was squelchy underfoot.

  ‘We’ve got to go, Laurie,’ Jerry said. ‘The river will be rising and the ferry will stop running. We’ve got to go now.’

  They’d scarcely finished unloading, and now they must begin the dismal chore of packing again in the wet.

  ‘But we haven’t had a swim,’ Vit complained.

  Laurie’s hands fetched, wrapped, carried, stowed away, offered pieces of apple, retrieved purloined pots of zinc and refolded sheets, but her thoughts were out on the wild sea. How long had he survived? Could he by some miracle have been washed ashore miles to the north, still breathing? There was no news. The anxiety was like an elbow in her ribs. It made a rite of her fetching and folding and fitting and stowing. A propitiation.

  Jerry was hurrying, loading the boot, securing the rods on the roof rack, shuttling between the house and the car and dodging the small boy who, suddenly helpful, plied up and down the stairs, trailing sheets. Laurie knew that in the forefront of Jerry’s mind was the river, rising higher. She looked down on him from the house as she stuffed toys and nappies into bags. His beard was spangled with raindrops. His hair, grown almost to his shoulders, was bluntly cut and fell around his face like the hair of a Bohemian prince.

  With Cora on her hip and arms loaded, Laurie laboured down the stairs and handed him the bags. It was true she felt possessive about him. Proprietorial. Of that there was no doubt.

  She thought of the lifesaver, built to the same basic plan as her Jerry, a lovely contrivance of bone and sinew and muscle, of breath and brain and beating heart.

  They drove past Broody Heads on their way home. There was a break in the rain, and they climbed out of the car and pushed against the wind between the howling she-oaks to view the ocean.

  They heard it first, a booming drum-roll. Then they saw it. It was a dark, wild sea, breaking way out, exploding on the rocks and boiling up the beach into the dunes, smoking with mist.

  As the rain came driving in again they retreated to the car. The windscreen wipers slopped back and forth. They peered ahead, tasting brine on their lips.

  This was the beginning of the great January flood. They stood in raincoats on the cut-off street with neighbours they had never met before and watched the brown torrent surging past. Objects rolled into view and plunged away – trees, fence posts, sheets of roofing, caravans, the carcases of cows. Curios of a pastorale that had seemed eternal.

  In the city the river went exploring up every suburban creek and gully, eased out over back yards and football fields, climbed stairs, crept into shops, inched up walls and scaled the steeps of roofs.

  The Broody River, meanwhile, was carving out a fresh channel through the lawns and swimming pools of Baroodibah. At the Heads, aged trees tumbled as the bar shifted south, the main street lost its buffer of sand dunes and caverns gaped under the foundations of beachfront apartments. The sweetly arcing beach with its fringe of she-oaks had simply gone, and the sea beat up against the last defences of carparks and road.

  There was a public outcry. Plans were made to build groynes to direct the sand flow onto the surfing beach and a rock retaining wall to stop it eroding away again. The fragile sand spit on which the booming Broody Heads town was built was to be protected by extending it, with sand dredged from the river mouth, a kilometre to the north. Rock training walls would stabilise the bar. The maze of shifting channels and sandbanks that lay behind the spit were to be formalised as a complex of canals and islands, which would be surveyed, pegged, subdivided and sold for development.

  Fresh water from the swamp had flowed through the stumps of the River House at the height of the flood, but the river itself was slow-moving near the northern shore, and the family, returning after the water subsided, found that no real damage had been done.

  The flood swept many of Brisbane’s landmarks away, among them the Blue Moon skating rink, which Laurie and Carol had looked across at from the verandah of the Boathouse dancehall. The Boathouse itself went. Slippages closed North Quay. The docks and storehouses of South Brisbane, its factories, pubs, tenements and boarding houses, were derelict. The gasworks at New Farm closed down.

  They had been
landmarks not only of the city, but also of memory.

  ‘Tell us the story about the eggs, Mummy,’ said Vit.

  So Laurie did.

  iv

  October 1976

  ‘Hold still, Cora,’ Laurie mumbled, taking pins from her mouth and sticking them in along the darts.

  ‘But you’re pinning it to my skin!’

  ‘Nonsense. Turn now. Clockwise.’ Laurie made a stirring motion with her hand. Cora, who was standing on a chair in underpants and an inside-out, tacked-together bodice, revolved obligingly. ‘What do you think, Mum? She’s got to have a bit of wriggle-room, but dirndls are meant to be nipped in at the waist.’

  Rosie, at the ironing-board, peered over her bifocals at the skinny child. ‘I wouldn’t be too worried. It isn’t as if she has a waist to speak of. The fullness of the skirt will do the trick.’

  The place was a mess of threads and shreds and tissuey scraps of pattern paper. Through the French windows came a breath of distance, a rumour of dry grass.

  ‘Hey, Maris!’ sang Cora from her heights. Maris was on the floor sorting through the leftover scraps of material. ‘Maris? Want me to teach you some ballet? Want me to teach you some ballet, Maris?’ Maris looked up. ‘This’s first position …’ Cora bent her knees to help with the repositioning of her feet.

  ‘Not now, Cora,’ said Laurie. ‘Hold still.’ Cora sighed. Laurie made adjustments. Cocked her head.

  ‘Arms up,’ she ordered.

  With her mother’s help, Cora squirmed out of the bodice and then leapt with a thump to the floor. She took her place beside her cousin, swept her arms into position and swivelled her legs.

  ‘Look, look, Maris.’

  Maris looked.

  ‘Hop up!’

  Maris stood.

  ‘Now this’s first position …’ Cora glanced down at her cousin’s small white feet. ‘More out, like me … That’s better … Now –’

  But Cora’s lesson was ended by a fit of contagious wobbling, a whoop, a tumble and two spread-eagled girls. And from Maris a trill of rare, sweet laughter.

  Laurie gazed at the child’s merry face, searching in it for a trace of Miranda. Not there. As usual, Miranda was absent. Absent from her child’s face, absent from her life.

  ‘You haven’t said …’ Laurie, adjusting pins, sent her voice softly over the giggling, supine bodies, as if by its modulation she could keep the meaning of her words from small ears. But both girls stopped, lay still and watched.

  Rosie looked hard at her daughter. ‘I haven’t heard,’ she said.

  Sometimes, in the early years after the children began school, Laurie was met at the door of their little Hill End house by a kind of galloping emptiness, to which all the still things within were witness – the matchstick blind, the tins of Estapol stacked in a corner, the cane lounge, the pile of books beside it, the microscope up on a high shelf, where it had been stowed years ago, out of reach of small hands, the sewing machine, the breakfast washing-up, yet to be done.

  The cello.

  Now and then she’d take the cello out of its case and pluck a note or two from it, or draw a bow across its strings to hear it moan.

  Uncertainty was the note it struck.

  She was uncertain, of course, about technique: controlling the bow, sustaining the vibrato. But the cello’s uncertainty was another thing altogether. It plumbed the silence. It made her hold on what she’d built seem flimsy. Something was at work against the very notion of repose. All this – the four-cornered house, Jerry, the kids – was an attempt to appease the spirit of disorder, which cruised the far shore of her awareness, biding its time, entering the house via memory and dreams.

  ‘Are you happy, Jerry?’

  He looked at her suspiciously. ‘That sounds like a reproach.’

  ‘No, are you?’

  ‘Let’s see. Happy on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Not happy the other days. Okay?’

  v

  1981

  chimera, once the Chimera Gallery in Clayfield, had outgrown its premises, its initial capital and its ‘gallery’ appellation. Now housed in a shining post-flood cube of glass and raw concrete that sat artfully among the old red-brick warehouses of Teneriffe, it had the latest in climate control and specialised lighting. So it was a considerable surprise when Miranda was approached by its fastidious, French-speaking, Beirut-born director to prepare a collection of her sylvan mindscapes for exhibition.

  Miranda called her exhibition Skid, a title that met with M. Saliba’s purse-lipped approval.

  ‘Welcome to chimera,’ M. Saliba said as he greeted Doug and Rosie and their entourage, pronouncing chimera with just a delicate throat-clearing at the hard ch. There was a packed-down look to him, like a stubby firecracker. He’d moved with cat-like grace to their side when they appeared hesitantly at the entrance, with an embracing flourish that launched his shoulder pads (Italian, raw-silk) clear of the black-skivvied voltage of his body to the root of his polished skull. ‘You are Miranda’s family?’ He led them in. Reflections of recessed spotlights slid over his skull as it glided, brilliant, among woolly afros and shaggy manes.

  ‘We’re some of them,’ said Doug, pushing Rosie before him and shepherding in Laurie, Jerry and the children.

  Where are Tony and Carol and the boys? Laurie wondered, accepting a flute of champagne. In honour of the occasion Vit, Cora and Maris each received one too, and sipped at them with a show of nonchalance. Laurie peered in at the enormous, illuminated canvases that were like windows onto daylight in the dark bunker walls, at the serried lights, and people casting faint, muddled shadows as they milled about under them.

  It was hard to know where to start. She would have to use her eyes intelligently – blinkered though they were by the frames of her glasses and the unvoiced opinions of people on every side – because at some point she would have to comment, and the comment would have to be both spontaneous and thoughtful. The obligation pressed itself on her attention and made it hard to concentrate. All about her were subdued murmurs that rose to a babble as flutes were filled again.

  Vit was sticking close to her side. There near her shoulder was his silvery head, beginning to tarnish, his gawky arms and legs. Cora, by contrast, had instantly teamed up with Maris and was leading her from canvas to canvas, studying them briefly with a quizzical eye and moving on.

  And here they were, her sister’s paintings, big and baffling, spot-lit where everything else was effaced and dropping from view. Planes of ambergris and rust. Snail trails and sinewy traces. Daubs of paint so thick they gleamed in high relief. After a while, she began to see things in them – certain coppery contortions recalling apple gums in the bush, as they were when they first shed their bark, and hanks of something, like hair or seagrass or half-seen mist, shrouding ranks of verticals that could be paperbarks or sunbeams, or power poles vanishing. And then the way these branches twisted and held the light, they seemed watery, leading into clouds that could be mountains or sea billows if you looked at them that way. If she just let her eye wander about among the shapes and shimmers, she could begin to see – or feel, at least – some dissolution of one vision into another as if this led to that and one could go journeying here, and time could pass.

  It was vulgar to want artworks to have stories. Was it vulgar to find them there?

  Jerry seemed comfortable, ambling from painting to painting with his glass, standing back, peering close.

  Oh, there was Miranda. She was drifting to and fro with a drink in her hand, caught in nets of light and looking somewhat lost. People were advancing on her, introducing themselves, bending towards her and pressing self-deprecating hands to their chests; she receiving them, wearing a broad, noncommittal smile, a pair of old-lady lace-up shoes and a jade velvet opera coat of 1930s vintage, from one armpit of which (Laurie saw with dismay as Miranda gestured towards a painting behind her) fluttered a large, round St Vincent de Paul price tag.

  Rosie had seen it too. She eased discreetly
through the small crowd and laid a hand on Laurie’s arm.

  ‘You wouldn’t have a pair of nail scissors in your bag, would you, dear?’ she asked.

  Laurie shook her head. Moments later she saw her mother in conference with the woman serving drinks. Then she lost sight of them. M. Saliba had raised his arms and was calling for everyone’s attention. He flung out a declamatory hand and drew Miranda to his side. She stood head-and-shoulders above him, fingering the moonstone brooch pinned to her coat, thereby displaying the price tag to all those waiting, looking on.

  ‘Friends,’ he began.

  Rosie hove up beside her daughter as he was speaking, wordlessly snipped the tag from the coat and crumpled it in her hand.

  ‘It is not for me to attempt to speak on behalf of works that are themselves so eloquent …’

  ‘There’s Inigo!’ squeaked Cora, suppressing a squeal of pleasure and side-skipping towards the entrance as Laurie put a shushing finger to her lips.

  Laurie looked around. There, indeed, was Inigo. Also his younger brother, Purcell. And with them Carol – mincing across the caulked boards in dark Katharine Hepburn slacks and a scarf of acid green. But no sign of Tony. She smiled a dutiful greeting at Carol and turned back to the speech.

  ‘… they combine energy with delicacy – I speak here not only of technique, but also of le sensibilité – and here, in le sensibilité, the perception, perhaps we find, or at least we are, how is it said? made alive to …’

  Carol was standing next to her now, sipping the wine that Jerry had brought her.

  Inigo, having taken his place with Cora and Maris, was listening to the speech with his chin drawn in.

  Though cousins, they couldn’t have been less alike. There was Cora, all vivacity, her eyes reduced to slits by her excitement, and those legs, so hummingly strung that they flexed back like bows at the knees. Next to her Maris, taking a close interest in her wine’s effervescence in a way that reminded Laurie of herself. And of course Inigo, sturdy and handsome, taking charge, his hand at Maris’s back, directing her to a better vantage point. And there his satellite, Purcell, small, dark and diffident, seeming to accept his inferiority as fundamental to the nature of things.