‘Leave it all to me,’ he said, fingers clasped, chunky gold rings glinting as we sat at Gino’s, an outdoor cafe in Fremantle, watching the locals. They were all a lot more colourful than the people we knew back home.
‘Thanks,’ said Catherine, her hand clutching mine underneath the table.
‘At least he waited for your mother to die,’ said Uncle Gary, and Catherine’s nails bit into my palm and I winced with pain. Uncle Gary mistook it for distaste and started to apologise, not to Catherine but to me. We left soon after, amicably enough, Catherine’s macaroon untouched on the plate, and when I looked over my shoulder Uncle Gary was raising it to his mouth, watching us as we went.
We stayed that night, and the next, with Catherine’s mad, lovely Aunty Dot, in a beautiful old weatherboard house in Cottesloe that reminded us both of our own home in Albany. We drank wine with her and ate Coq a Vin from a recipe she’d brought back from France thirty years ago at the end of her bohemian sojourn. Around midnight, we both took pills to help us sleep.
We woke to the smell of ocean and pine trees and sunlight streaming into our room and I pulled her slight body close and she opened up to me and we rocked back and forth very slowly, very gently, aware of a squeak in the innards of the bed, until both of us were done.
Aunty Dot had left beach towels out for us the night before so we walked to the end of her street, across the road and onto the beach. The sand was clean and white and much finer than it was at home and the water not as cold. We swam out past the Cottesloe buoy and floated on our backs, side by side, talking rubbish to each other and to the gulls as the diazepam wore off.
Later that morning, we went to the house Scott had been sharing with two fellow architects on the Swan River, near Claremont. Though it was rundown, with cracks in the walls and a trough for a laundry, it had a great view of the river and must have cost a fortune to rent.
Inside, the walls were covered with art, some of it Scott’s. There were too many pastels for my liking, though his latest, still on the easel, had great blocks of textured oil and even the bright colours had a dirtiness to them that suggested Albany and the paintings of Guy Grey-Smith.
‘He always said you had to travel north if you wanted to make it,’ said Catherine as I surveyed his room, noting the absence of photos, stepping around piles of crumpled clothes. ‘To be where the action is,’ she added. I knew all about this. Scott had referred to both of us, more than once, as ‘moss on granite’. She was looking for something and it felt like I was intruding so I left her in his room and walked out to the back of the house.
The backyard was a wasteland of sand. One of Scott’s housemates was sitting at a plastic table, smoking. He picked up his pack of Winnie blues and held them out to me but I shook my head. He saw me taking in the shambolic backyard.
‘We’re just renting,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t afford to buy anything around here if we saved for a thousand years.’
There was a surprisingly large turnout for Scott’s funeral. Uncle Gary was happy to take the credit for that and moved among the guests like a hot-dog vendor at the footy. Pressing the flesh, generous with homilies and kind words. We stood in the shade of a lemon-scented gum as the funeral director spoke about Scott’s love of the outdoors, of art and how it was impossible to take the country out of the boy.
Catherine dropped a postcard she’d found in his room into the open grave. Dog Rock, the dog shaped rock in the heart of Albany. His favourite rock in the world when he was a kid, when he still wanted to be a geologist.
Scott had visited us in Albany once or twice, checking to see if Catherine was looking after his share of the inheritance – the little weatherboard cottage we thought of as home. Over beers he’d talked about the houses he designed.
‘Terrible things,’ he told me. ‘No eaves. No verandas. Feature garages.’
I laughed at that.
‘Every time you park your car you gas the kids with carbon monoxide. Only the poor people buy them.’
After the service, we drove back through the river-viewed parts of Nedlands, Claremont and Peppermint Grove, awed and appalled by the wealth. Albany’s old, tired money – its shabby gentility, its stone houses with whitewashed walls scoured by wind – was nothing compared to this.
Around three am that night, when the drugs and the wine had again lost their battle with my mind, I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. Aunty Dot was at the kitchen table, wrapped in a dressing gown, a tumbler of whisky at her side, playing patience.
‘Can’t sleep?’ she asked.
‘No.’
She gathered in the cards and shuffled them expertly. ‘Fancy a game?’
‘Sure,’ I said, sitting down opposite her.
‘Strip poker?’
I laughed out loud.
When I went back to Catherine there was a bowlful of moonlight spilt on the bed and I thought some of God’s carelessness is beautiful but I knew that ‘carelessness’ was really too kind and that He was just utterly indifferent. But we were returning today, to our little cottage clinging to the side of Mt Clarence, the wind straight off the Southern Ocean, ceaselessly trying to fling us northward. But we wouldn’t shift. There was nothing for us here.
I stood in the doorway. Catherine was curled up, fast asleep, her hair dark against her pale face, the shadows in the folds of the doona like tiny ravines and gullies scoring a miniature mountain range. The image of Aunty Dot coyly removing the gown from her shoulders – perhaps her last mad bohemian flourish – to reveal two pendulous, milky-white breasts, flitted across my mind, but I was comforted by the thought that soon we’d be gone from this sandy place, back to the granite country, the south, the eons-dense rock beneath our feet.
Sunlight
For three days straight, Anna had stayed inside, limbs aching, senses dulled. She heard Tom come and go – mainly go. She lay on the bed, watching the fan spin slowly above her. The fever had gone. She felt drained but light. Hungry. Downstairs, in the kitchen, she made herself toast and coffee.
It was Saturday. She had a ten am appointment. Harry. On the table in front of her sat a jar of lemons, packed in salt.
Tom wasn’t sure why he’d followed Anna to Fremantle. They’d met in Kalgoorlie and lived there in an old miner’s cottage on a wide street one back from the row of gaudy, corrugated-iron brothels in Hay Street. It was a fine life – endless, disused tracks to explore by car, frosty winter mornings, an earthy rawness you couldn’t find on the coast. Tom had never told her about his vasectomy. He’d had it done before he knew her. He’d agreed with her that children were a blessing, had been attentive in the bedroom, had encouraged her to become an art therapist. He had done what he could.
With her notebook and art gear arranged beside her on the upstairs balcony, waiting for Harry, Anna thought again of a conversation she’d had with Tom before she fell ill.
Tom had come home late from work. Harry’s drawings were on the kitchen table. When she walked into the kitchen she saw Tom, stubbie in hand, looking at one of them. It was a picture of Harry flying above the rooftops of the houses on the hillside below their balcony window.
‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ said Anna.
‘For an autistic kid, I guess.’
Anna hesitated.
‘What would be the magic power you’d most like to have?’ she asked.
Tom flinched and came out of his dreaminess, defensive.
‘To be invisible,’ he said at last, keeping his eyes on the picture.
‘All the time?’ Anna asked.
‘No.’ He looked at her. ‘I mean, to be able to turn invisible when I want to.’
‘Why?’
‘Fuck! What is this?’ Tom slammed his stubbie onto the kitchen table, making Anna jump. ‘I need some space,’ he said, walking out of the room.
Harry kneeled on the veranda, a sheet of paper on the easel in front of him, a row of watercolour pencils in a neat rainbow at his side. He loved this place, this upstairs verand
a perched high on the hill overlooking Fremantle.
‘That’s good,’ said Anna, looking over his shoulder.
Harry ignored her, crushing blue pigment under his finger to make sky. Anna took a sip of water and looked at Harry. Thin legs, small-boy shorts, black curls against a bright red T-shirt. She knew she should be trying to engage him, to find new ways to bring him out of himself. But this was clearly what he loved. Sitting above the world, drawing himself into it. Always the same picture.
She sat cross-legged on the veranda, breathing in the jasmine entwining its rails. And she had made real progress. Months had passed since she’d had to hold Harry to her, rubbing his back and his thin shoulders as a tantrum subsided.
The alarm clock beside her rang. Harry put his hands over his ears until Anna turned it off. He started to pack away the crayons, placing each in its rainbow order. Anna pointed to the picture he’d just drawn, to his hair swept back by the air rushing past him as he flew.
‘I love that,’ she said.
‘That shows you’re moving,’ said Harry, carefully not looking at her.
Tom pulled out into the traffic on Stirling Highway, glad to be on his way home. He hated doing house maintenance – even more for the eighteen dollars an hour it gave him. At times he felt as if he was the only person in Western Australia earning less than a hundred thousand a year. Living in Fremantle, earning this sort of money. It couldn’t last. In six months he’d gone through most of his savings, and knew it was probably the same for Anna. In another six months he’d be in debt. He thought of going back to Kal, working on the mines for a year or two. He’d come back and put down a deposit on a simple two-bedroom house, as close to Freo as money would allow. The car in front slowed then turned left without indicating and he gave it a long blast with his horn.
Anna poured herself another coffee and took it out to their tiny backyard, separated from the others like it on both sides by an untidy brush fence. The young mother next door had laid on morning tea for her playgroup. Anna sat down, waiting for Tom to come home. She could hear the hungry squawking of a newborn, chatter from the new mothers.
‘Sunlight is a natural disinfectant,’ she heard someone say, and she thought of the lemons on the kitchen table. She felt good, strong. The sickness nearly gone from her body, she felt on the verge of being well, and the feeling was somehow better than wellness itself.
Anna lay on her side in bed, watching Tom as he placed a glass of water on his bedside table and climbed in beside her.
‘It was Harry’s last day today,’ said Anna. ‘They’re moving to Victoria.’
Tom lay on his back, staring at the ceiling.
Anna hesitated. ‘I wonder how we’d cope with a son like Harry,’ she said.
‘We wouldn’t.’
‘You just have to, don’t you?’ said Anna, surprised by Tom’s response.
‘I wouldn’t cope. I’d be at the pub.’
Tom rolled away from Anna, towards the wall.
‘You can talk to me, you know.’
Tom closed his eyes.
Anna sat at the table, dressed simply, but with her hair tied up. The table was set for two, complete with champagne and flutes. She checked her phone and dialled a number. Tom’s voice answered. ‘Tom’s phone. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’
She put the phone down and rummaged through the papers on the kitchen bench. She found Harry’s painting and stuck it on the fridge with masking tape. Later, in bed, Anna was woken by a noise downstairs. She sat up and heard the rustling of papers and then footsteps in the hallway and then the front door opening and closing. She lay back down and closed her eyes.
In the morning, still dressed in her pyjamas, the first thing she saw when she entered the kitchen was Harry’s drawing, screwed up and left on the table beside a half-empty stubbie. The sun was just above the horizon, shining through the kitchen window.
Anna went back upstairs and began stuffing clothes into her backpack. In the kitchen she unscrunched Harry’s painting, rolled it up and stashed it with her clothes. She squeezed the jar of preserved lemons in, turned, and walked out of the room.
On the doorstep, she hesitated. Below her was the crazy, cramped roofscape of Fremantle. An image of Tom, in bed, rolling away from her, filled her mind and she started walking, the first rays of sunlight on her face, the breeze off the ocean making streamers of her hair.
Semaphore
I had no intention of killing anything. In my defence, I had not slept for twenty-four hours and was unhinged. As you would be, given what happened last night. But no more on that. It doesn’t reflect well on me.
After breakfast, Sarah put her arm around me. She asked if I could do her a favour, and of course I said ‘Yes’. I am, after all, her brother-in-law.
She had an assignment to deliver – the last essay for her social work degree.
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Leave them to me. We’ll take a walk down to the beach. We’ll have fun, won’t we girls?’
Her two girls nodded dutifully, clearly dubious. But when I mentioned ice-creams, their spirits lifted. They were six and eight.
As she got ready to go to uni, I listened half-heartedly to some wank on Radio National about the amorality of tourists and their lack of obligation to anything but their own enjoyment and experience.
We waved goodbye to Sarah on her way to town. Her house was in Semaphore, five untidy streets back from the seaweedy pond they call the ocean. On my arrival the previous day, I had immediately felt at a disadvantage. Unfamiliar territory. I was surprised by the general shabbiness of things. It seemed that the poor lived by the water, as if the Sydney dictum of banishing the unwashed and needy to the west had been transplanted to Adelaide, regardless of the fact that the sun sets over water here. Perhaps Adelaideans think living by the ocean is vulgar.
Sarah had organised the girls’ bathers, towels, food and water. They made it clear that I was their pack mule. I acquiesced in this, unclear about where I should draw the line, or what the line even looked like. I’m not used to children – not even my brother’s. Todd shouldn’t have left Sarah like he did. He shouldn’t have gone off with a woman ten years younger than her and put me in this situation, with choices to make and regret.
The beachfront was a short stroll away, past a row of unkempt flats and a low-roofed boarding house. All the tables were taken at the little cafe on the esplanade, full of women in tracksuits and big sunglasses, keeping watch over their Caitlins, Jaydyns, Zacs and Jacks, playing on the boat-shaped playground. I let the girls play there until they got bored, then we walked down to the beach.
From the moment I saw the dog I knew there was going to be trouble. It was the way it loped past the seagulls, not bothering to chase them. Of course, the type (bull terrier) and the accessory (studded collar) did nothing to help, or the fact that the person holding the leash, to which of course the dog was not attached, was perhaps thirteen, with a rat-tail and a sour look to match.
The dog kept slouching towards the girls, and I raised myself from my towel. Emily, the eight-year-old, saw the dog and stopped digging. I called out to them as it closed in. They looked blankly at me as I ran at them. Fiona put her hand out to pat the dog and it snapped, grabbing her hand and dropping its front legs. She screamed. The boy was there now, hitting his dog on the head with the fleshy, bottom part of his fist. I didn’t bother with subtleties. As I reached the group at a full run, I jumped feet first into the dog. It grunted, releasing its grip on Fiona.
‘You bastard,’ yelled Rat-tail. I rolled over and got to my knees as the dog leapt at my face. I just managed to knock it slightly off course with a forearm and grabbed a handful of fur near its neck. I lifted it off its feet and fell on it, my elbow wedged behind its jaw.
‘Get off him!’
‘Piss off,’ I said. I felt his fist land on my head and I swung around with my free elbow and collected him in the face. He screamed.
At that point I was stuck. I cou
ldn’t let the dog go: it would bite me or one of the girls. There was nothing else to be done. I slipped a hand under the dog’s collar and hoisted it over my shoulder. The dog grunted and struggled, strangling beneath its own weight. The kid was still lying on the beach, holding his face and crying.
I strode out towards the horizon. An elderly man in red Speedos watched me as I went. A young man fishing from the jetty stopped reeling in his line. The gulf bed angled gently downward, and it wasn’t until perhaps sixty metres from the shore that I was in deep-enough water. I didn’t look around. I knew everyone would be watching.
The dog was still struggling. It was weakened by now and it was a very simple matter to roll it over my shoulder and into the water. I kept a tight grip on its collar and its head underwater. It was surprisingly simple to drown. The boy was wading out to where I was, tears streaming down his face. By the time he got out to me, I could let the dog go. I pushed it gently at him, as you would a toy boat, and walked back to the shore.
Rat-tail followed us home, carrying his dripping, dead dog, swearing at me the whole way. On the doorstep I turned to him.
‘You’d better go now. I’m sorry about your dog. You should’ve had him on a lead.’
His face was flushed from the effort of carrying the dog.
‘You’re fucked mister, fucked in the head.’
‘Just keep going,’ I said, motioning with my hand.
‘I’m going to bring my father over. He’ll fuckin’ kill you.’
‘Well it’s not my house. I don’t live here.’
‘Where do you live then?’
‘Nowhere.’ And I slammed shut the door and let the sound of two girls’ gentle sobbing wash over me.
The Wind and the Salt
By the time they arrived at the caravan park, Martin hadn’t spoken to his son for an hour. A sea breeze whipped across the camping ground. Daniel, still silent, was pressed by his father to help with the tent. Rachel busied herself emptying gear from the boot of the car. At a critical point the wind gusted and Daniel dropped the pole he was holding. The tent sagged and Martin swore as Daniel looked on, his fourteen-year-old face void of expression. For Martin, the squeal of the wind in the casuarinas bordering their site was almost as bad as the closed-up silence of the car.
The Colour of Kerosene and Other Stories Page 2
