For Emmy, todays and tomorrows were always better than yesterdays. But she did treasure one particular at-the-beach day from a couple of years ago – it was the day after New Year and it was hot and stormy, and lightning broke out over the sea. She loved electrical storms, though at home they meant fire if they struck when everything was dry. But here, when they rolled over the sea, nothing could catch alight but her imagination. She told one of her cousins that it was Heaven and Hell meeting and arguing, and her cousin told Emmy’s mother and Emmy got into trouble for blaspheming. They weren’t really a churchgoing family – only at Easter and an odd Sunday here or there – so she couldn’t work out what all the fuss was about; what’s more, she thought it was the truth about that storm! Only over the sea can Heaven and Hell meet and the world survive the consequences.
But it was this day, this afternoon, running up to her towel, running up out of the luscious water dripping and laughing to herself about how good life felt, that she altered. She did not know what had altered, but she felt a shift, and she felt that the land and the sky weren’t just extensions of herself, but something connected to all people. She thought of the people in the congregation in the church back home. She thought of the stained glass in the little windows and how they’d always reminded her of a bright, brilliant storm. Red, blue, green … She wished her family went more often. She wished she was going to church that very Christmas Day, although until that precise moment she’d always been delighted that was not what her family did. She reassured herself that all nature was her church. God didn’t want people closed in, speaking to the floor, the roof, themselves, to no-one in particular. The shack is a better church than that, she thought. She liked the way light found its way through cracks, the way the sea breeze curled up under the roof. That seemed more in agreement with God as she understood him.
And back at her towel, reaching down to pick it up but catching sight of something, someone in the hills, someone bowing down on a blanket and speaking to the hills, she thought of that God. The outdoors God. Whenever the minister did his performance, his song and dance in the pulpit, as Grandpa termed it, Emmy thought it a great performance. The best part about church. The man she saw in the hills reminded her of this, though he was so different. But was it a performance or prayer? She was mesmerised.
Adding to her intrigue, the man was black. Black people worked on the farm but she was never allowed near them. Nor in town. Keep to your own people, her parents said. And you’re a girl, they added, for no reason at all. She asked Peter at the time why they said that, but he just turned his back on her and walked away. She wondered what a black man was doing on the coast. It was a long way from the farm to the coast. She wasn’t sure what she was thinking. And he was dressed in a way she’d never seen before. She wondered if he was wearing a dress. Part of the performance, no doubt.
She stood there, towel half in the sand, poised midair. The man in the hills was crouching and muttering or speaking or praying. She was suddenly certain it was praying. It wasn’t a performance – the man seemed alone with himself and nature. And God.
Her skin tingled as it dried in the sun and she became aware of that salty, cracking feeling. Her shins and her forearms and her face glowed white outside her bathing suit, and she felt uncomfortable. Was this why Peter had turned away? She was confused and couldn’t make sense of what was happening, but couldn’t stop watching. The man was a way off but not too far off. He seemed to be facing nothing in particular – not the sea, not inland to the farm. Maybe just a sand dune. He wasn’t aware of her presence. She followed the ripples of sand the breeze had cut like mirages into the dunes, up into the strange wet-looking though dry vegetation that clung to the peaks. That’s what holds this whole place together, Pete had told her. She liked Peter. She knew Peter thought she was smart, and she liked that a lot. Emmy knew that she loved what this man was speaking to … what he was praying to … and she knew that one day she would know its name.
Sensing the man had finished and was about to roll up his blanket and vanish, Emmy quickly turned away so the moment would never be complete or forgotten. She wasn’t sure if this was what her mother called a woman’s intuition, but she didn’t really think it had anything to do with being a boy or a girl. It’s to do with the storms. It’s now and it’s tomorrow, she said to herself.
Without thinking, Emmy looked straight up into the sun and stared until everything lost colour and the world became black and white. Giddy, she ran back to the water and plunged in. Her younger cousins called out, Emmy! Emmy! And Emmy, seeing the world clearly again in its bright array, and looking further out to sea than she ever had before, began to perform for her cousins, hooting and shouting and splashing, sensing them coming up behind her. And the louder she got and the closer they came, the quieter she went inside. One day I will know its name, she thought amid the noise. One day.
MAGAZINE
That section of the beach and all the area behind, which was sprawling sand dunes and scrub, had been closed off from the public for forty years. Now, looking at the mansions nudging the sea, you’d never guess that it had been a munitions storage area – the Magazine. For a decade after they’d cleared it, it was still yielding unexploded shells that seemed to have crept out of their storage bunkers. Not something you think about, wandering the white sandy beaches of the south-west of Australia. But the war went there too, and the old concrete gun emplacements on the hills are only part of the story.
I was a kid during the war, when the ammo dump was a hive of activity with munitions coming in and out, from ships sailing in from factories and out to feed the battle fronts. There was a long wooden jetty that’s gone now. The last stumps of pylons went with storms and barnacles not too long ago. They say a marina is going to be built in the vicinity.
Even during the war, with soldiers patrolling, we’d sneak under the barbed wire and venture a few feet into the forbidden zone. That’s a common story, especially after the war, when they’d cleared out most of the dangerous stuff. Kids wanted bragging rights. There were rumours of mines bobbing in the waters, but all my mates’ fathers who had boats got in close to the shore, chasing the King George whiting. Sometimes I meet with old mates and we talk it over. The daring, the risks. Truth be told, most never ventured far, never went in deep.
But I did, and that’s why seven years of my life are unaccounted for, and why my wife filed a missing person’s report, and remarried because I’d been declared dead and gone.
How did it come to that? My teachers would often observe that I had an overactive imagination. But that’s the easy way out. It is true that I’d sit on the beach, reading my ‘children’s version’ (illustrated) of Homer’s Odyssey, and stare out to the islands and across the barbed wire, thinking I was Odysseus and they were the lands I’d visit. That gods and demigods awaited me there. It was all so real to me.
Not being able to cross into the forbidden zone without dire consequences was a bugbear from childhood. One of those things that needle your sleep and lead to poor choices in your waking life. Something not quite in focus. An irresolvable paradox: I wanted it to be dangerous, but it was just too dangerous to risk all. To cross over entirely. Thinking about it hurt my head. It’s why I didn’t go on to study after leaving school. Such thinking wasn’t healthy for me. I was happier labouring. That, and the fact my father died and my mother relied on me to help get us all through. I couldn’t have afforded university. But even later, much later, when I could have done so under a government scheme, I didn’t. Yet I’ve always read, read and read.
The beach is a short drive from Fremantle, and not far from the industrial strip where I ended up working. I was made a production foreman at the fertiliser plant, and later supervised seasonal workers cleaning up railway wagons caked in superphosphate. It sets like rock. Rock phosphate. Have to take to it with shovels and even sledgehammers. I remember when I started off cleaning wagons, my first season – the medical – the doctor telling me I wasn’t
a great specimen but at least I had well developed thigh-muscles. I’ll leave that to your imagination. Something to brag about down at the hotel after work. And a rough hotel it was. A regular soak for a well-known bikie gang clubhoused in the area. And, of course, I married a barmaid who took to my jokes … and, I guess, my thighs.
I’ve always loved the Sound and surrounding coastline, even with the factories dumping their shit into the once-teeming- with-life ocean. It still looks blue. Just south, I’d walk across the sandbar at low tide to Penguin Island simply for the sake of it. Just for the hell of it! And I love the penguins. I gave one pissed young bloke a good thumping when I saw him tormenting a bird in its burrow. I said to him my only regret was that the penguin had to witness such violence. But don’t get me wrong, I am not a violent man. That was a one-off, and I didn’t do much damage. Not really. Just hurt whatever little pride he had.
Strange working for the factory. The phosphate coming in from Christmas Island, doing the plant’s circuits and coming out sacked or wagoned ready to boost the state’s wheat cheque. The aeroplane warning lights on the great central smokestack provided endless hours of joy when I worked nightshift: staring out of the office, fixating. And that acrid stench that leaves the throat and nose and mouth burning got kind of addictive. And the malarky between the blokes. The stories I could tell!
Funny what you remember. What you take to fondly. A pod of dolphins arcing alongside the loading jetty. A chemical spill. Seagulls defying pollution, the odds; never giving up. The ships coming in, drawn by tugs, the pilot boat as steady as a life contract. Never had one of those. No real permanence. Always on short-term contracts, even as foreman. Waiting for the job to end. No way to live, said my wife. No way.
But then suddenly I went over the barbed wire and up into the sandhills, into the Magazine. That was seven years before the fence came down. There were patrols and more people than you’d think in the NO GO area, but nonetheless I was in there seven years, and my shrieks and calls were never heard, and no signs of my presence reported in any way. Later, it wasn’t a case of ‘that explains those noises’ or ‘how on earth was that missed?’ Nothing. Just a black hole.
I couldn’t say with real honesty that I never looked at another woman during the years I was married. Couldn’t say that. I mean, when I first met her, she was a ‘skimpy’, and she was going out with one of the other regulars who worked on the industrial strip. In the refinery. He’s the one who told me that if the burn-off pipe ever went out we were all doomed, that the whole place would go up. The pilot light goes out, he said, and BOOOOOM!
So, occasionally, I got drunk and another skimpy took my fancy. Mostly I struck out; I mean, I’m not much to look at. But I can be generous on payday when I’m pissed. And my wife didn’t mind the company of the bikers who broke pool cues over those who gave them lip.
To hear the sea, to be so close as to taste it through five feet of stone, down through the narrow ventilators, over the smell and saturation of cordite and powder, but not be able to catch even a glimpse of it, is the most extreme of torments. Year in, year out. Occasionally, during a storm, spray would find its way in, lifted and hurled, dampening and colluding with rainwater lashing the roof. At such times she, the keeper of the house in the dunes and my captor, would love me most. The sea, she said, sent her wild. Me too, I said, let me free to see it, swim in it. Watch fish swim the shallows, waders test the foam, skimmers take the surface, pollution’s oily film rainbowing a still, fine day. In answer, sometimes, she’d bring me shells, but they were small and often broken, and the sea barely lived in them.
I’ve no doubt she loved me. And I can say now, with her so far away, with it all so far away, that I loved her in my own way. If I’ve ever really loved. But I shouldn’t say that. As a child I loved mystery, risk, the unknown. I loved that beach because of the forbidden, because of the fence. Over there, the sea was rich and the blue reflecting and absorbing at once. The sand tingling. The magazines with their roofs poking up over dunes, the rocket ship in the moon’s eye.
Imprisonment? Against my interests, I’ll say that’s a complex term. I mean, her voice through the bunker’s ventilators, the door opening into the night and my inability to step out at such moments, to execute an escape; her weaving the crystalline guncotton into carpets of explosive brilliance. With her, time stood still. I was immortal, that most impaired and unlucky of states. My beard didn’t grow long, my skin didn’t suffer from the lack of direct sunlight. Her beauty was the beauty of war. If you can get my meaning, and I am no warmonger.
But the days are long even for the obsessed, the besotted. And a wish fulfilled is quickly a wish to be moved on from. I retraced my childhood steps in the long time granted, I retraced my every movement under and over the fence, my desire to cross. Gradually I thought about where I had been allowed to walk, swim, play. That had been wondrous, too, but I hadn’t realised it at the time. I thought of the meatworks up near the rocks and the blood spilling out and the sharks gathering, and the risk there, where no-one much cared about me going. I thought of the rusting wreck exposed at low tide, where I cut myself on toxic protrusions. Of the times I swam out too far and tired out swimming back, and almost drowned. I thought of perving on that woman sunbathing topless in the shallow hills on the ‘safe side’, where we sheltered from the sand kicked up by a strong sea breeze. She looked like a magazine model you could own by cutting her out and sticking her on your bedroom wall, hiding under your pillow, burying under your bed, listening to the wind lift the sea out of the dark into your empty, lonely head. She knew we watched. That I watched. Sometimes, she leered back with burning night eyes that caught you.
When the authorities began dismantling the Magazine, I waited with bated breath. I could hear them working, pulling it down bunker by bunker. Soon they would reach me. I told her our time was up. Soon, soon I would be free. I would be gone. Our love ended. She said nothing, just looked sad in the paling light.
My bunker, our bunker, was the last standing. I could sense her anxiety, that my going would be her death. She would fade with each piece of ammunition disposed of, with each stone removed. I hugged her hard to me as the door opened and I was welcomed by astonished workers back out into the light. Let me see the ocean, I said! I forgot to say to her, I am sorry you loved me. I am sorry I looked where I shouldn’t. I am sorry I heard you. But I forgot and didn’t look back and that was an end of it.
No! I don’t agree. No crime was committed. Not by her. And not by me. They can’t produce evidence. Of course, ‘no evidence of harm is not evidence of no harm’. But I know the reality. And there was the war. It is eternal. There are no armistices, no sides. All is war. We don’t seem to be able to get beyond it. And there’s childhood. And there’s the factory. And there’s the Sound.
BONFIRE ON THE BEACH
The fog came as a surprise, even to the locals. Even to Syd. One could usually predict it easily enough, but this fog was odd and unsettling to even those on solid ground. For those still out in small boats, it smothered and confused them and had them flashing lights and calling into the soup. Syd’s boat was alongside Carnac Island, and he thought of how the first colonial ships had offloaded their human cargo there after hitting a sandbar. He thought about such things a lot of the time. He liked to ruminate on history and facts. He felt that it would be safer sitting close to the island than braving the fog, but he couldn’t persuade his old fishing mates to listen, and they moved further out from the rocks and disappeared into the fog like the other craft out there in the Sound.
He wondered why he listened to his mates, who were novices when it came to boats. But they played bowls together and they were better at that than him, so Syd followed the usual course of things. He told them to keep calling into the murk every ten seconds, then listen. The outboard putted slowly but surely, and they headed south. Syd estimated they’d need to do this for about twenty minutes before swinging in to where the beach should be. He plotted the course
in his head: the shape of a set square.
It gives me the shudders, too, he said, but was surprised at how jumpy his burly mates were becoming. They all wore life jackets; he was an experienced sailor.
No need for name-calling, he said, trying to laugh their barbs away. Why were they blaming him? Should have known a fog was likely. That’s probably true, but he’d seen no signs, and other boats with experienced skippers had headed out at the same time. Came up out of nowhere. They do that sometimes. Clichés exist for a reason. Yes, it should be in his bones after all these years, but it was the first trip of the spring and he’d not been down at the shack for many months. The bones were settling back in. He was finding his sea legs after a break, but it was all there. He’d been sailing and skippering small boats all his life.
Call and response. Yes, we’re over here. Calm down, fellas, just one at a time, you’ll confuse them. Swearing won’t help. And I won’t tolerate being spoken to like that on my boat. One boat, one skipper! They wended their way through crossing voices. To make matters worse, it was getting dark. Always trust the compass; nothing else matters. The shore can only be in one direction.
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