The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  The things that saddened her most about her mother were the dusty cobwebs on the windows and the scum in the corrugations on the draining board of the sink. More than her mottled hands and rounded back. Laurie thought of the smells that used to hang about the place in the old days – bees’ wax and Brasso, the honey-heat of ironing – and all at once the road before her fractured and blurred with tears.

  Doug – Laurie laughed aloud, thinking of her father – he took a passing interest in phase-change cooling technology, but it never seized his imagination as bagasse had done. It lacked certain elements: organic material, deployment of a waste product, redolence of childhood.

  You bypassed the cane farms now, on the way north.

  One wet afternoon not so long ago Laurie dragged Jerry from some occupation in the garage to go for a walk in the rain. They ended up at the river, watching the ferry ply the grey breadth at an angle. As they stood side by side in the rain they had to turn their heads to speak, so cut-off were they by the blinkers of their hoods, by the amplified dinning of the rain against their ears. Laurie fancied she could feel the heat of his arm through the double insulation of their raincoat sleeves, but when she turned to speak to him again she found that she was alone. There he was, gone some distance along the leaf-strewn path, already small under the great figs.

  Laurie associated those figs with dewy-skinned post-grads learning the meteorological ropes, fascinated by chaos.

  If her heart had been in this mercy dash, she would perhaps have been less resentful of Jerry’s desertion when she needed him, of the way his eyes were always on some horizon, figurative or literal, overlooking what was underneath his nose.

  His peasant’s nose …

  Laurie lost touch with her grudge then, thinking of Jerry’s face, for time had been at work upon it. He’d developed a pterygium in his clear blue eye. It gave it a reddened, bloodshot look, as if he’d been recently crying – a look that triggered some reflex sympathy in her and made it hard to stay angry.

  Pterygium is derived from the Latin word for ‘wing’, and that’s how Laurie saw it, as a wing unfolding, reaching across the sky-hued translucencies of Jerry’s iris to shroud the pupil from the final blackness of the sun.

  She regretted that she’d ended her call to Jerry impatiently, with no proper goodbye. She should have said goodbye.

  Less traffic now. At intervals, on either side, the Italianate villas – blotted out by rain and then suddenly there, in wet, lavish colour under the sun – gave way to wind-shorn bush. Returning again, to take up the sturdy masonry-topiary-portico theme where they’d left off.

  Laurie had seen Ursula’s name in the New Year’s honours list a year or two ago. She’d been doing groundbreaking research in microbiology. Something to do with phages.

  Good work. Good for everyone. Good for her.

  Her phages. Laurie’s fireflies, minuscule denizens of the wilderness, blazing with their own small, glorious light.

  What had come of her youthful hunger for something more?

  Secrets.

  Secrecy it was – others’ secrets – that had debauched her judgement and skewed the inclination of her heart. Not just Dale’s perfidy, oh, long before that: her father’s rage on the sand spit, the spot of red in her mother’s cheek, and Tony. Tony. His legs crisscrossed with welts and his face closed. Stained with tears.

  By the time the car crawled into Baroodibah the rain was continuous. The river, dark and flowing swiftly, was visible for only a few yards, cut off by shrouds of rain so thick that the far shore was wiped not only from view but also, it seemed, from memory.

  Laurie drove in low gear through the streets, obedient to the dissolving reds of the stop lights, the smeared greens of the gos. The gutters were cataracts that here and there broke in sheets over the road and the tyres raised a wake high enough to seep in under the car doors.

  She shifted in the seat to ease the ache in her hip joint.

  Her mind had jumped ahead to the ferry. What would she do if it was no longer running? She thought of Miranda, marooned at the River House, reckless, wild with loneliness …

  So it was with enormous relief that, arriving at the crossing, she saw the ferry coming towards her through the rain, straining at its cables on the swollen river, fully loaded with cars.

  CHAPTER 15

  The rule of twelfths

  When the ferry reached the shore, the cars filed off in a manner so meek and orderly, each one easing ashore at the same angle as the one before and then straightening for the sharp incline of the bank, that they could have been sheep taking a hurdle or beads on a string. Laurie counted five.

  She pulled over to one side as the ferryman waved them off with redundant traffic-cop signals. This was the next generation of ferryman, George’s son no doubt, clad in a sweeping raincoat that shone wetly in the cars’ headlights. George himself had long gone. ‘Oh, he’s a card, that George!’ Mrs Driscoll of the Baroodibah General Store used to say. ‘Oh, he’s a trick!’ Though crossings were always so buoyant with expectation or loaded with dread that Laurie couldn’t recall ever having heard him speak, still less perform for them, laconically, as Mrs Driscoll affirmed he reliably did.

  Seeing Laurie waiting, young George came to her window and tapped on it. She wound it down. He bent to speak to her, his dark, shining bulk filling her view.

  ‘You wantin’ to cross?’ Water dripped from his nose.

  ‘Yes. Why? Aren’t you going back over?’

  ‘Oh, I’m going back over, all right. There’s more on the other side waiting. But I’d advise yez to stay put. There’s water over the road in more’n one place and the rain’s not finished yet. There’s more where that come from. Yez’ll have trouble getting through to Irwin’s Creek.’

  ‘I’m not going to Irwin’s Creek. I’m just going to our place downriver …’ She gestured vaguely.

  His chin went up as he understood. ‘Oh, y’d be a Carlyle, then. You shoulda said. Okay.’ He took her fare, waved her aboard and got busy with winch and cables. ‘Didn’t pick a great time for a holiday,’ he called. ‘This weather. King tide ’n’ that. Mornin’ high’ll be the big one …’

  I’ll ask if he’s seen Miranda, Laurie thought, when I get a chance.

  But the chance never came. He was out of earshot for the rest of the crossing, and when they reached the other side the cars waiting there with their engines running and their headlights on took all his attention. The best he could do, as Laurie’s car left the barge and nosed up the bank, was give her an old salt’s parting salute through the driving rain.

  BROODY RIVE RIP IA ETLAND

  CONSERVANCY

  the sign read. The scrub had grown up around it, making it less obvious from the track, and a dead banksia had fallen across it. It was pockmarked with gunshot, the paint faded to a washed-out yellowish-green, but the lettering, thrown into relief by the headlights, was legible even through the heavy rain. Laurie mentally clucked her tongue. We’ll have to chase up the responsible authority, she thought. Make sure the place is properly maintained.

  From here on the bush seemed truly a wilderness – wilder in the rain and her aloneness than it had been even in the fifties. The trees bent down over the road so sodden and gloomy that it was only by checking her watch that she had any idea of the time.

  It was after five. Late afternoon. But it was midsummer, and true night would not fall for a couple of hours yet.

  The rain cut her off, closed her in, as if she subsisted in a realm quite separate from towns and gardens, roads and bridges, where the continuities of geography – of memory, even – were annulled.

  Water was running over the track from the swamp in a rippling flow. The tyres sank into the peaty tracks as if into sponge, and a wake fanned out behind.

  She heard the phone ringing only after she’d turned off the engine and opened the car door, and even then it was so faint through the rain that for a few moments she failed to make sense of the sound. She was too
busy staring at the house, where there was no sign of life, and at this novelty here before her: this new, extraordinary closeness of the river.

  Her mind was still taking in the sight of a shining current where her eyes expected sandy turf, when the meaning of that faint, shrill tone came home to her. Forgetting the cramp in her leg, she tumbled from the car into the rain, rushed, panting, up the stairs and tried the door.

  Locked. The padlock hung in the latch, firmly closed. The phone continued to ring within.

  Down the stairs she clattered to the tank stand, on an overhead beam of which, among the wet cobwebs and blown sand, her searching fingers found the key. Over to her right the river, which coursed very close to the boatshed, mounted up in two low, elongated waves, as if it passed over a weir. The tram tracks, it was, their bedding washed away and now suspended there, resisting the surge.

  She was back at the door, fumbling with the padlock, when the ringing stopped. She slumped down onto the top step and pressed her head against the closed door as the rain blew over and around her and plastered her shirt to her back, feeling as if she had missed the most important summons of her life, as if with that call she’d have been received back among kin, and would have understood why, in this forty-ninth year of her life, she was here, on the northern shore of a river in flood, alone.

  Mum or Jerry, it would have been, she reasoned. She got to her feet and fitted the key into the padlock. It gave freely. She drew back the latch, pushed open the door and, jabbing her thigh against a corner of the kitchen table in her haste, made for the phone.

  Rain on the roof made it hard to hear the dial tone. It was dark inside. Waiting for Rosie to answer, she let her eyes drift to the silvery dimness of the verandah windows. To the squares of pink and green bubble glass losing their colour to the advancing dusk.

  There was a strange smell in the house, overlying the usual mustiness. Something other than mouse and mildew, salt and she-oak, river and rain. Something unexpected, cleanish, mineral, spiritous –

  Through the crackling, Laurie heard her mother’s voice. It was a bad line.

  ‘Mum!’ she yelled.

  ‘Oh, Laurie, thank god –’

  ‘Mum, Miranda’s not here! She’s gone –’

  ‘Laurie, I know! She’s here! I’m so sorry, dear! I’ve sent you on a wild-goose chase! Look, Jerry’s been trying to get you. He’s on his way –’

  ‘Mum!’ Laurie shouted. ‘I can’t hear you!’ The buzzy crackle was loud in her ear. ‘Mum!’ She rapped at the button in the cradle. ‘Mum!’

  It was useless. The wires strung out between her and her mother seemed to carry only the charge of her own anxiety.

  She tried Jerry’s number at work. Nothing but static. When she lifted the receiver again, the line was dead.

  Laurie sat staring at the phone, hating it for its dumb repudiation of her yelling and rapping, her finger stabbing at its dial. And as she sat there she became slowly aware of dreamlike visions at the margin of her consciousness. They persisted like after-images. She turned her head and gazed around.

  It was as if the walls of the house had become translucent. As if the outside world, glimpses of which were visible through the windows, was no longer occluded by the walls but instead, faintly but unmistakeably, continued.

  Laurie narrowed her eyes. Took off her glasses, cleaned them with a tissue she fished from her pocket, and looked again.

  Despite the last of the daylight seeping in the windows, it was hard to see clearly.

  She moved as carefully as a cat through the room and flicked the light switch.

  Nothing happened. She flicked it on and off a couple more times to be sure.

  No power.

  Where was the emergency gas lamp?

  Rain was misting down the stove flue and had pooled on the floor. There was a lantern on the shelf, but it was empty of kero, and none to be found nearby. Under the sink, though, were some mouse-nibbled candles. Matches, too, dry enough to strike.

  Laurie lit several candles and ranged them along the windowsill, standing each of them in a pool of its own wax. Then she took one in her hand and looked about.

  The first thing that met her eye was the painty mess of empty and half-empty tubes among the gecko shit on the table. There were more on the floor in the corner, and others on the verandah sills. Brushes were bunched here and there in bottles of water on the table and the sink. She picked up a tube and squinted at the label. ‘MATISSE GOUACHE’ it read.

  She put it down and turned back to the visions.

  The candlelight was wan and wavering, but it was enough for her to see that all the walls of the room were covered with pale, subliminal images of the bush-and-river-scape outside. Trees seen through the windows touched the ceiling, reached their branches out on the adjacent walls and poured their trunks down to the floor. Over window frames the light-filled river flowed. Patches of cloud and blue sky showed through here and there, and even, in one corner, a cluster of stars. It was as if the walls had almost, but not quite, dissolved in the rain. The vertical lines of the tongue-and-groove boards were still visible, but more as a kind of scrim, through which the deep, perpetual reality of wilderness persisted. Intruded.

  Sealed off by the din of rain, Laurie wandered through the house as if she had blundered into the Cave of Altamira and was gazing on the works of minds removed from hers by tens of thousands of years. These scenes of the bush were equally familiar, and equally strange.

  This was her sister’s world. Seen through her sister’s eyes. Through her sister’s unreachable mind.

  Years ago, when Laurie was pregnant with Vit, Miranda had laid her hands on her sister’s belly.

  ‘It’s a boy,’ she’d announced.

  ‘How do you know?’ Laurie had asked.

  She’d just raised her palms and her eyebrows mysteriously.

  ‘Well,’ Laurie had said, ‘you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of being right.’

  Laurie smiled drily at the memory. Miranda lived in a para-material world, interpenetrated by light, and for a moment it seemed to her that she could abide there too.

  Miranda was material enough to leave the double bed disordered, though. She must have slept there without bothering to make it. It occurred to Laurie that she should check under the house while there was enough light to see by, but first she set down her candle, fetched clean sheets from the cupboard, and stripped back the cover. Now that she was here, she might as well get a good night’s sleep. She had shaken out a sheet and set about smoothing and tucking when her hands stilled. Miranda had been at work here too. The candlelight had been throwing out hints. Now, as Laurie straightened, it showed her a misty intimation of sand dunes seen through casuarinas. It was as if, just there, was the sea, held back by nothing more substantial than a forgotten intention and wandering sand. Laurie shook out the top sheet. There it would be, tonight as she slept, decrying the assumption that she was safe.

  Her ears were registering a difference of tone in the noise that never ceased outside. She couldn’t distinguish the rush of the river from the din of the rain, but it seemed to her, nevertheless, that the river had changed its tune.

  As she felt her way down the stairs, the rain suddenly eased and all she could hear was the wind howling in the she-oaks. Away to the north-east the moon must have risen. A discernible pallor there showed massy black clouds, showers blowing like veils from the sea, and, close at hand, the river, pushing up the sandbags stacked against the stumps of the house. But the river was glutted. Hushed. In the hesitation of the turn, the seaward current, which had been backed up by the incoming tide, gathered itself, and the river crept quietly higher.

  Laurie thought of the gleaming wet shape of young George, dealing in the rain with winch and cables. Didn’t pick a great time for a holiday … King tide and that …

  But the tide was full. It hadn’t broken through.

  And now it would start to fall.

  Mornin’ high’ll be the big one … />
  Laurie began to calculate.

  The rule of twelfths. The water would fall slowly at first, then more quickly until some time around midnight. But after that it would start to rise again. At first slowly, and then …

  In the blackness of the bathroom she found a torch. It had been left on a shelf by the door, and it responded to her probing fingers by spotlighting a huntsman that was sheltering in a corner of the corrugated-iron wall.

  Underneath the house the beam of the torch found stacks of woven-poly sacks, filled with sand and stored there against just such an emergency as this. It called up bits of junk – broken windows, an old ice chest, discarded boards. The ground sloped up slightly in a natural buffer before falling to the river, and the stumps at the front were barely tall enough for Laurie to stand upright. She had to crouch and at the same time pick her way through obstacles, brushing cobwebs from her hair, watching out for nails.

  Laurie grappled a bag from the top of the stack and, without any consciousness of a decision made, though with an acute sense of her own lonely heroism, took its weight in her arms.

  Laurie knew that time, during that long night, was not disordered, that minutes turned to hours with orthodox regularity. And yet it seemed to her that she’d already lived the night, and saved the house, and lost it, while still the slickness of the bags in her hands and their sullen weight bearing her down was new; that time flooded up against a levee of disbelief and churned and eddied, returning her to scenes already witnessed and thoughts already thought.

  Through most of it a sense of unreality preserved her. The yoke of pain across the back of her neck and the knees locked with strain had her full attention, but the effort – the grunting, the shuffling, the labouring heart – was impersonal, distant. Now and then, over the flood’s roar, she would hear someone breathing hoarsely, and would stand up in a fright and listen. Once she whacked her forehead against a rafter and swayed on her feet while fireflies danced.