“I was afraid you were sick,” she said, and he almost fell off his chair.
“Jesus!” he spluttered, lurching round and clutching at his heart. “Don’t do that!”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.” She had a deep voice, almost gravelly, but soft, full of smoke and mist. “When you weren’t on the beach yesterday … Have you been all right?”
Embarrassing, the way it pleased him that she had noticed his absence. “Jussa … ju … just a touch of old age,” he stammered, but it came out self-pitying instead of sardonic as he’d intended. The way she stared at him, gravely, right between the eyes! It made him flounder. Once upon a time, girls lowered their gaze; you saw their lashes and the blush on their cheeks. Good girls, that is. If they didn’t do this, you knew something right there.
“Are you all right now?” she persisted.
“Fit to fish all night.” But his voice was playing up, sliding and slipping about, turning scratchy, as though he were nothing more than a show-off in a schoolyard.
She said earnestly, “You can sit still for so long in the cold, it’s amazing. I wish I could learn your secret.”
He laughed, a crude sharp sound, startled. “My secret?”
“Your patience. Your tranquillity.”
He had to laugh again, it was involuntary. Him, the original cantankerous, irritable husband, father, grandfather. In Mosman and Cremorne, his daughters braced themselves for his visits. He didn’t know what to say. He gestured vaguely at the surf, tongue-tied.
“Yes,” she said. “I know. That’s why I come here too. On Saturday, there were skindivers in around the rocks up there.” She pointed to the Long Reef end of the beach. “That would be even better, I think. I wish I were a stronger swimmer.”
“You’d freeze –” But he checked himself from telling her she’d freeze her tits off. “You’d turn yourself blue,” he said.
“They had wetsuits on.”
“Just the same.” He couldn’t fit her into a past or present. She was as different from the bottle shop girl with green-streaked hair as a star is from tinsel. He couldn’t think of anyone less like his teenage grand-daughters. She was not of course the kind of grand-daughter he would deserve. More the kind Lew might have had if he hadn’t stayed on in New Guinea. “Anyhow, you’d take such an awful battering on the rocks.”
“I don’t know.” Her smile was strange, secret, full of private desire. “I think it would be nice. One of the divers told me that if you stay down deep … below the surf, you know there are caves down there. He said it was still as a church. He said there were fish that glowed like lamps.” She drew something in the wet sand with a pointed toe; it might have been a flame, or perhaps just a crooked line. “It’s only when you have to come up through the surf … He had blood all over his face and hands from the reef, but he dived back in.” She gazed down the beach at the rocks, smiling her dreamy smile. “I would like to see those caves.”
In the time she might have come from, he thought, she was the kind who would have worn a hairshirt and whipped herself with penitential cat-o’-nine-tails. He understood why nuns drove soldiers to rape; and old men to dreams.
Old men, old men. He was where he belonged: in one of the rooming houses strung along the Pittwater Road, a club of sorts. The rooming houses were desiccated outside and in by the corrosions of sea salt and of stubborn cardiovascular systems that went on pumping breath and even hope through an assortment of derelicts, all of them left stranded by old age and widowerhood. He picked his way along the high tide line. He knew this route, messy, wavering, a shifting seaweedy border.
Nothing was stable.
Housemates came and went, anything could claim them: death, a son or daughter whose conscience got the upper hand for a while, loss of memory. (Sometimes the police returned a dazed lodger from the ferry docks at Manly, or from Wynyard Station.)
Cockroaches whispered to one another when Gabe came in, snickering among their dustballs. He crumpled up another newspaper (someone’s find at the pub) and stuffed it into the window space. Perhaps he should learn skindiving. Stranger things, he believed, had been accomplished by old men.
He took off his coat and laid it on the bed. He huddled under it.
Something glowed in the corner of a dream. It was the girl.
Once, when the tide was fully in, he saw her standing on the rocks at the end of the beach and thought she was going to dive in. The shivers hit him.
She’s a loony, he thought. A real loony.
There was absolutely nothing he could do. It would take him at least ten minutes to reach her.
If he saved her, would it cancel out the other?
She just stood there, a silhouette against the sky and the waves, while the morning did a slow hapless slide towards noon, and ten thousand cars made their zombie way along the Pittwater Road to Manly and the Harbour Bridge. The spray threw itself around her in a frenzy. She must have been drenched.
He watched, shivering, until miraculously she turned and picked her way back across the rocks, leggy as a gull.
He was trembling with anxiety and outrage. Long before she reached him, he could smell – or fancied he could smell – her body heat, her denims steaming at the crotch, the musty soaked wool of her sweater. He left his fishing rod propped against his chair and hobbled to meet her like a broken toy, overwound. He planned to take her by the shoulders and shake her. You’ll catch your death, he planned to shout.
He was stopped short, however, by her radiance.
There was no other word for it.
She brushed the sodden tendrils of hair out of her eyes and asked, puzzled, “Is something the matter?”
Now the army ducks came rumbling nightly, two by two, through sleep. They were crowded with the past, packed tight with faces pale as communion wafers. Lew’s face was always among them, his eyes on Gabe no matter how Gabe twisted and turned.
Once, Gabe staggered out of bed and shouted: “Damn it, won’t you ever let up?”
Someone else with a hangover came reeling in and offered a tumbler of booze and an oath.
In the morning, the shivers came, a daily companion. Gabe dosed himself with rum chasers, he headed for the beach with his fishing gear, he waited for the girl.
He had decided she could save him.
He had decided she was a visitant from somewhere outside of the known. He had only to look at the girls who hung around the newsagent’s or the fish and chip shop, snapping gum, sucking on cigarettes, dressed in cheap tight clothes, to know that he was right. She belonged in a different dimension.
He would watch her paddle her way along that shimmering nowhere, that space between sand and sea where the undertow fans its fluted way back to the deep, her canvas shoes laced together and slung over her shoulders like the nubs of clipped wings. Her oversized sweater was infinitely suggestive. It was pure as a nun’s habit.
That kind of person, he thought (and he meant, vaguely, white witches, crazies, saints), that kind of person has a certain touch, a gift. If he could walk into the circle of light that came from her … It was a kind of underwater luminousness, the sort that tropical fish gave off in deep caves.
He became obsessed.
He watched the tenth floor of the concrete building, he became an expert on the movement of curtains, the language of lights switched on and off, of shades raised. He watched by day, and also by night when the sand crackled with frost and the skin of his fingers swelled and split from the cold. He plotted her routes.
One night, as he shivered down by the water’s edge, he was certain he saw her standing naked at the tenth floor window. He considered seriously, then, the question of whether he had become nothing more than a dirty old man.
But he absolved himself.
It was something else altogether.
She was on to him though. That kind of pers
on knows when her powers are being sapped, and it got harder and harder to cross her path. He would see the cream-coloured fisherman’s sweater, like a peace flag, against the cliff or the rocks. He would wait and wait. And then finally a fluttering up at the tenth floor would catch his eye, a window opening or closing. She had given him the slip again. Yet if he walked along the Pittwater Road to the top of the cliff, she would take the beach route.
In dreams, on the bad nights, Gabe would wave the girl’s sweater. Truce, truce! he would plead, and the magic worked. Lew would smile. He would give the thumbs up sign. I’m okay, he would call. Save your own skin, for god’s sake; that’s what you’re supposed to do.
There was a bad spell when he did not so much as catch a glimpse of the girl for three days. The beach was grey. Fish avoided his line. His pension cheque was late – the threatened postal strike? – and he had to take a bus into the city to see about it. The bus was much too full of rude teenagers who might have belonged to a different race altogether from the girl. No one gave him a seat. It rained.
He waited in line to see about his cheque. You should have got it, they told him; it has already gone out in the mail. If you haven’t received it by Friday, come and see us again. No one offered him an advance for the purpose of buying a beer in the pub near Wynyard Station. He thought of calling his Mosman daughter, or the one in Cremorne, but decided not to. Instead he waited in line for the return bus, which was late. At the Spit Bridge it was stalled in traffic for an hour. When he finally got off in front of the Collaroy Post Office, he walked along the length of the beach without any hope and stood on the rocks. There was no sign of the girl. The rain was not heavy, merely spiteful and persistent, and he was soaked to the skin. He could feel the cold everywhere. It was a dark time.
He did not expect the shivers or the weather to lift again.
* * *
“Have you been fishing all night?” she asked, startling him.
Her dark hair was fanned loose over her shoulders, she paddled into the shallows in front of his chair, the morning sun was behind her. He squinted into the light, his eyes watering.
“Where have you been?” he demanded.
“Oh, I had to … you know. I come and go. But you’re always here, you’re as reliable as morning. Do you fish all night?”
He shook his head, not trusting himself to speak. He could feel July squirming like an eel, making way for August, could feel the warmth coming back. In front of him was nothing but brightness, so much sun on the water. He could barely see.
“Have you caught anything?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” he laughed.
“What?”
“What’s your name?”
“Look!” she said. “The army ducks are coming back. Training exercises. They do it every few weeks, he told me. He said they’d be here again today.”
“So you saw him again,” he accused.
“Who?”
“The young officer.” (Really, this was ridiculous, this grief, this jealousy.) “I thought I saw him paying court.”
“Paying court!” She repeated the words as though they were objects in glass cases, fragile beyond belief, evoking wonder and amusement. “Paying court!” She laughed and flung up her arms and did an odd pirouette in the water. “You remind me of my grandfather. You make me wish …”
“What?” he prompted.
“Oh, you know. For some time before all the mistakes.”
“Mistakes,” he sighed. What would she know about mistakes? The army ducks were close enough now that he could see the little yellow oilskinned blobs, toy men on obsolete make-believe boats.
“Would you believe,” he said, “in New Guinea at the end of the war, I watched them drive hundreds of those things into the sea and scuttle them? Hundreds of them.”
“They sank them? But why?”
“Blessed if I know. Not that any of us cared. The war was over and they’d flown in beer and we cheered when each bloody duck went under.”
The girl stared at the approaching ships. “The man my grandmother was engaged to was killed in New Guinea. That was before my grandfather, of course, but I guess she never really got over it. She used to talk about him sometimes, I suppose she felt I was safe. She always kept his AIF badge in her underwear drawer. Hey, are you okay?”
“It’s nothing. These shivers come and go.”
“Doesn’t look like nothing. You want me to help you back to your house?”
“No, no. Your young officer is coming.” He could make sacrifices, he was not incapable of nobility.
“Oh, my young officer.” She laughed, a haunting sound. He thought of novices in a cloister listening to a nearby circus, seeing only skyrockets and the tip of the ferris wheel. But she is more remote from men than that, he thought; she puts up a higher wall. The energy, the light that she gave off – he sensed it came from stamping out the constant fires that flared from stray sparks.
“My young officer,” she said again. “You mean the one with the offbeat tastes? So you think you can pick my type, do you?”
“Your type?” He never knew what to expect from her. “I didn’t think you had a …”
“Yes,” she said lightly. “The wrong type. Come on, let me take you home.”
He thought if she touched him, he would catch fire. He would go up in smoke, a blissful death. But the moment had to be right – not with temptation leaping onto the beach from an army duck, distracting her.
“I’m all right,” he said. “It’s nothing. I’m better off sitting out here in the sun. The last three days were terrible.”
“Oh well. Winter. We can’t complain.” But she looked oddly disconsolate, as though reminded of something unpleasant. She dropped unexpectedly onto the sand beside him and began scooping out channels with her hands. The creeping wavelets filled them, they silted up, she scooped out fresh canals. “Oh well,” she said again, as though lengthy deliberations had been concluded. “So. New Guinea. Did you lose many mates?”
He was caught off guard. “Lew,” he blurted, and stopped. The long slow loss, so unlike Lew who did everything else like a bull in a china shop. He wanted to tell her: “It took hours, and there wasn’t a thing I could … Snipers thick as flies, it would have been useless.
“Nevertheless, nevertheless …
“There were men who did that kind of thing. There are widows who keep the Victoria Cross, awarded posthumously, in their underwear drawers …
“Once I heard him call my name and I couldn’t move for terror and nausea. Lew himself was the kind who would have rushed straight out and thought later …”
He said none of this. He said only: “Everyone lost mates. It was a bad time.”
She looked at him out of her grave unwavering eyes. “Your generation,” she said, “you give something off, you know? A kind of strength, or … I don’t know, you’re real, that’s what it is. It’s because you’ve done things with your lives.”
Oh Jesus, he couldn’t stand it, a fraud like him. “Listen,” he began. He had to confess.
“Just seeing you sitting here every day,” she said, “a part of the beach …”
Oh Jesus. This had to be the moment. Now he had to confess and now she had to touch him.
The first army duck was waddling into the shallows, ungainly, its webbed wheels feeling for sand. It lurched out of the muffling water and the roar of its engine spattered them.
She put her hands over her ears and said urgently: “Let’s get away from here. Let’s go down to the rocks.” He could barely hear her over the engines and the even louder thudding of his jubilant heart. She paused: “Oh, but your chair. And your fishing rod.”
He cared not a pin for them. He dismissed them with a wave of his hand. From the army duck, the young officer was scanning the beach. Too late, too late, Gabe telegraphed; you lost. When the girl to
ok his arm he could feel himself dissolving into light. By the time they reached the rocks, he was weightless, nothing but pared-down soul. Far away, the trio of army ducks wheeled in meaningless circles, spitting sand. On either side of the girl and himself, the surf seethed into chasms and leaped skyward, anointing them with spray. The girl was rapt, she appeared to him translucent, there was a light inside her.
“I have to keep coming here,” she said. “I have to.”
“I know.” He understood. He understood she was not what she seemed. “I know what you really are.”
She raised her eyebrows, startled, and looked at him: a shocked look that hung there and then dwindled into sadness. Then she got up and picked her delicate way across the rocks to the last tall peak above the caves. She stood poised there, but he felt neither apprehension nor time passing.
She turned at last and came back and sat beside him in the niche near the cliff.
“So even here it shows,” she said heavily. “I suppose that’s inevitable.”
“Yes,” he said. “It is, I think.” He’d known, really, from the moment she had mentioned the seminary tower at Manly.
“Anyway,” she said, “today’s my last day, what’s the use? I’m going back.”
“Would you still let …? I’d like to see you from time to time, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Her eyes widened. He counted thirty seconds by the thump of his heart. “Even you?” she said at last.
“It’s forbidden?”
“Oh,” she shrugged. “Nothing’s forbidden.”
“Well then,” he said. “When would be a suitable time?”
It seemed to him that the air itself was bruising the skin around her eyes. She is seeing my death, he thought. He put out his hand to touch her arm and she flinched. There were tears – or it could have been salt spray – in her lashes.
“Don’t be sad,” he said. “I really don’t mind.”
The army ducks were wheeling back into the sea. He watched them as in a dream. They seemed impossibly distant, matchbox toys, quaint mementoes of a time long gone.
Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories Page 25
