Riptides

by Kirsten Alexander

  ‘What are you doing?’ she says.

  ‘Morning, Miss Sarah,’ I say.

  Dad turns his head and offers her a small smile.

  The woman next door has left her hose whipping like a cut snake in wide arcs on her driveway.

  ‘Are you fighting?’ Sarah asks.

  I flick my dead cigarette over the railing. ‘Not anymore.’

  Abby asks me to keep an ear out for the kids while she’s in the shower. I say yes, though I’m not entirely sure what she means. Mark is outside washing the car. Dad walks into the kitchen, sits, and watches as I unwrap a slice of cheese.

  ‘I’m making a grilled sandwich,’ I say. ‘Want one?’

  ‘Strange breakfast. Is that what you eat in Bali?’

  ‘I have tomato, onion, cheese.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  I rest the knife on the chopping board. ‘You’ve got to eat, Dad.’

  ‘We’ll aim to get to the commune before sunset. Too early in the day and they’ll be working outdoors. And once it’s dark we won’t have a hope of finding him. Two-and-a-half-hour drive, I’d say. We’ll leave here at two o’clock.’

  I spread mustard onto a slice of bread.

  ‘Plenty of time to gather yourself.’

  ‘I’m gathered, Dad. Just not sure I want to steal a child.’

  He stands up. ‘I’ll find a reason to borrow Abby’s car. Setting off on the dot. I hope you’ll be with me. You could be an asset.’

  ‘Asset?’

  ‘Long hair and unwashed t-shirt, you’ll fit right in if we’re seen.’

  ‘Thanks. Thought I might be an asset because I’ll stop you getting killed.’

  He raises his eyebrows. ‘Your old man’s tougher than you think.’

  I drop a lump of butter in the frying pan and watch it sizzle. ‘You want me to go or not, Dad? It’s not much of a pitch so far.’

  He walks around the bench to stand by my side. ‘I need you, Charlie.’ Suddenly everyone needs me.

  Outside, a tinny rendition of ‘Greensleeves’ grows louder as an ice-cream truck drives along the street. Sarah thunders down the hallway, shouting for Abby.

  I use the spatula to flatten my sandwich. ‘Broad daylight, Dad. That’s a dangerous choice.’

  ‘He can’t answer to his name if he’s asleep.’

  ‘If you call his name, other people will hear you. People you’ve just told me are brainwashed and growing dope for corrupt cops and most likely protecting that crop with guns. People who’d rightly be suspicious of two strangers rocking up with no good reason to be there.’

  He doesn’t bother offering any rebuttal, just huffs. There’ll be no talking him out of this. It’s the shittest plan I’ve ever heard. But I can’t let him attempt this alone. For my grieving father, for the woman I ran off the road, I’m in.

  ‘Don’t cook anything for us tonight.’

  Abby is mopping the bathroom tiles, beige ceramic with spider veins of brown. I don’t know who their tiler is but he’s laid the tiles too far apart from one another; the grout’s thick and it’ll crumble. And he should’ve used caulk in the joins. I learned about tiling from Ketut, when we remade the bathroom at KD. I watch water pool in the grooves in the wake of Abby’s mop. Though she’s opened both tiny sliding windows, the room is crazy hot. I never know what’s going to bring on a wave of protectiveness for my sister, that weird feeling that I’m not looking out for her the way I should be. But tiling, evidently, is one of those things.

  ‘Why don’t you do this later?’ I ask.

  ‘Because I want to do it now.’

  ‘Less muck in the air at night, isn’t there? You’ll get all kinds of tree gunk coming onto your floor now.’

  She turns and closes the windows. I’d wanted to offer her a reason to leave the job alone until the air cooled but she’s misunderstood me. ‘Since when do you know anything about cleaning?’

  ‘I clean at KD.’

  ‘Should’ve gotten you to do this then.’

  ‘Sure, next time.’

  She stands with one hand over the top of the mop as if it were an outsized walking stick. ‘Where are you going again?’

  ‘Dad wants to help his friend Rick. You remember him? He used to have all those half-made old cars in his backyard.’

  She nods.

  ‘So Rick needs help moving a bunch of stuff. He has a van. We’re the muscle.’ I hold up my arm as a joke but I’m fit from surfing and KD so I do, in fact, have muscle. She shrugs. ‘Anyhow, we’ll help him out then probably stay for a barbecue or go to the pub.’

  I hate how easily this lie tumbles out of me. I could keep going, layer detail on detail. That Rick’s wife would most likely want to feed us, that their older son who’d normally help his dad out had a hernia operation last week.

  ‘Okay.’ She narrows her eyes. ‘You’re not going to say anything to Dad, are you? Not now.’

  ‘Nope, that urge has well and truly passed.’

  This really is one spotless bathroom. No mean feat with three kids, a dog, and a husband who showers twice a day. And those tiles.

  ‘Dad’s driving, right? I guess I can ask Mrs Lewis to pick up Sarah.’

  ‘What about Mark?’

  She rolls her eyes. Which is fair. He’s never here.

  The phone rings. ‘Don’t answer,’ she says. ‘It’ll be Constable Roberts. He’s been calling me with strange questions. It’s like he and the sergeant are following different theories. I don’t understand, but it’s making me nervous.’

  ‘He’s going to be more suspicious if you avoid his calls.’

  ‘Don’t answer it.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Monday 23 December 1974

  Charlie

  An empty chip packet falls out into the gutter near my feet when I open the passenger’s-side door to Abby’s station wagon. What is it with chicks and cars? It’s like they don’t care. I pick up the ripped plastic bag, throw it back on the car floor and sit on the crumb-dusted seat.

  ‘Why did you tell Abby we were helping Rick? I told you I’d come up with something,’ Dad says.

  ‘It’s not that bad of an excuse.’

  ‘It’ll do, I suppose. Won’t matter soon.’ He turns on the engine and slowly backs down the driveway. ‘Suspect she’ll be glad of some time alone.’

  ‘She spends plenty of time alone. Seems like the world might implode if Mark made it home before his kids went to bed.’

  ‘Stay out of it. Their marriage is none of our business.’

  I close my eyes. I can’t figure how Skye put up with his old-school thinking. A woman who had a kid without being married, lived on a commune, then wound up with my dad. Weird. Though maybe it was his old ways that appealed to her. I could see how, given what I’d heard, she might crave stability, predictability, a man who used the words ‘chivalry’ and ‘gentleman’ without irony. Dad is rigid in his thinking about women’s roles, but he treated my mother like royalty. He opened doors, pulled out chairs, poured her drinks, made sure her petrol tank was always full, bought her flowers. I don’t recall seeing him do one thing that could be called domestic, but I think my mother felt loved. And safe.

  ‘So you’re clear on the plan?’

  ‘Dad, if you tell me again I’ll throw myself out of the car.’

  ‘It’s important you understand.’

  ‘Okay, for the last time: we head towards Eumundi, into the hills, take one road to another road, find a sign that says Arcadia, laugh at it, and walk for about a half-hour – not making noise. Once the trees start to thin out, we look down the hill and see communeland. At which point we become invisible and steal a kid who won’t make a single noise because we will have rendered him unconscious. We’ll take turns carrying him and, magically, no one will see us. Tell me a word that rhymes with failure and I’ll make a poem out of it.’

  He frowns at me. ‘Don’t you know that calling this a failure before we’ve even left the city is a cop-out? You’re gi
ving in before we’ve begun. It’s the same old –’

  ‘Same old what, Dad?’

  ‘We have a plan. I know what to say to the boy. And this will work.’

  ‘Same what? Same way I live my life? I’m helping you carry this out and you want to judge me?’

  We ride in silence for a while until he says, ‘Your friend sorted, the one in Bali?’

  ‘Not quite. It’s complicated.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure she can survive without you for a while. How much longer do you plan to live in that place anyway?’

  ‘Forever.’

  He’s pursing his lips to resist saying the things I know he wants to. I watch him calm himself. ‘You have friends in Brisbane. We have beaches here, the best in the world. You wouldn’t need to work as a waiter if you moved back.’

  ‘When I wake up in Kuta I feel happy. The morning smells like incense and watered plants and heat, and people smile when I walk down the track to KD. It’s awesome.’

  ‘Did you lose your manhood over there?’

  ‘Say what you want, Dad. Doesn’t change a thing.’

  ‘We’re not lacking sunshine here. Friendly people aren’t unheard of either.’

  ‘I like having rice for breakfast and surfing in the morning. I like hearing Made’s sister practise the gamelan in the afternoon. It’s –’

  ‘Escapism,’ he says.

  ‘Home.’

  He turns onto the freeway that will take us north. ‘Good luck to you then.’

  When Dad nudges me awake we’re driving in rainforest on a winding road made shady by the tall gums that arch across the bitumen and knit into a blanket of mottled green, brown and grey, letting in needles of light. I open my window to the forest air, better than anywhere aside from the beach. Rainforest air is moist, rich. You can smell the wet leaves giving back over to the soil, the eucalyptus and myrtle oil, the rot and renewal of it all. Strips of peeling bark hang from tree branches. Whipbirds ‘whoee’ and bellbirds ‘ping’.

  ‘Here,’ Dad says. ‘Open this up.’ He takes a piece of folded paper from his shirt pocket and passes it to me. ‘Map.’

  ‘Skye drew this?’

  ‘I told you I was going to come here for the boy. Hadn’t planned on these circumstances, obviously . . . The first turn-off road should be near here. Once we’re on that we’ll need to follow her instructions carefully.’

  I unfold the hand-drawn map and a sheet of lined paper with tidy writing on it. The two sheets of paper have been folded and refolded so many times they’re near transparent on the crease marks. A small tug from each end and they’d fall to pieces.

  He brakes. ‘There. The purple sticks. Those are what we’re after.’

  We turn onto a dirt track humped in the middle and marred with holes. Dad drives slowly but the undercarriage of Abby’s car occasionally scrapes and bumps the earth. I study Skye’s map. ‘This road goes for five miles till we turn onto the next one.’

  After a while, the road becomes smoother and flatter, the surrounding landscape lush.

  ‘Read the part where she says what we do now.’

  ‘Uh, five miles blah blah, sign blah blah. Okay, she says, “The road will get steeper. On the passenger’s side of the car you’ll see a cluster of big boulders, three of them, clumped together. There’s a sunrise painted on the middle one and the scrubbery has been brushed away to make a clearing.”’ I look over at my father. ‘Scrubbery?’

  ‘Keep reading.’

  ‘“After you pass the sunrise rock, drive up the hill until the road forks and you see a path barely wide enough for a car. Go up here but not too far or you won’t be able to get back out. Only go so far that the car is hidden. From here, you need to walk. At the top of the track you’ll find a cleared spot – a lookout. You can see the whole commune from here. Hoping there’s no one on duty when you show up.”’ I sigh. ‘Well that’s encouraging.’

  ‘Sunrise.’ Dad points at a cluster of boulders, one of them painted as Skye described.

  ‘What are they, two-year-olds?’

  ‘Would’ve thought you’d like that kind of thing. Living with hippies.’

  ‘Totally different scene.’

  He mumbles something but I don’t care that I can’t make out the specifics. I don’t want to tell him how different our tribes are, that sunrise aside I reckon these guys won’t have a childish bone in their bodies. From what he’s said, I think my life of surfing and bonfires, fresh fruit and running water would seem like Play School to them. Now, seeing how cut-off they are and with a bit of educated guessing, I know these outliers will be hardcore, self-righteous. And they’re in bed with the cops. To the untrained eye our clothes and hair might look similar, but we couldn’t have less in common. Creedence acoustic vs Zeppelin on acid.

  ‘Sign,’ I say. ‘Arcadia.’ Neither of us laughs as Dad drives deeper into the rainforest.

  ‘You know I’m not one for violence,’ I say. ‘But these folks might be, especially if they catch us with Beau. I brought a few things.’ I reach for the canvas bag I put on the floor behind my seat.

  ‘What’s in there?’ he asks. ‘I have everything.’

  ‘You don’t have weapons. Neither do I. But I found these – better than nothing.’ I pull out a spanner and wrench. ‘From Mark’s toolkit. Mint condition.’

  ‘We don’t need those.’

  ‘Correct. We need rifles. But this is what we have.’

  I watch Dad fold one arm across the other to make the turn into the wannabe driveway. The skin of his forearm, where no hair grows, shows lines like wood grain. My father is getting old. He needs a foot soldier who won’t dick around and undermine his plan, however dumb it is. He needs me to help him.

  When I step out of the car door I imagine I’m in the wilds of Vietnam, a strange place for my subconscious to bring me since I went to such epic lengths to not go there. And nobody went on more anti-war marches than Ryan and me. We were front of the crowd at the moratorium.

  I adjust my bag (makeshift weaponry, two apples, matches, fags), check my shoelaces, and once again try to convince myself I’m doing the right thing. We’re not about to kill innocent peasants and babies; we’re not acting in the name of colonialism or capitalism. We’re rescuing a kid from abusive adults.

  ‘Hurry up, Dad.’ Now that I’ve found my focus I want to get on with it, and Dad is taking forever getting his pack from the back of the car.

  He stands beside me and keeps his eyes on mine as he untangles the straps on his pack. ‘Settle down.’

  We walk along the track, not talking, Dad in front. Mostly, I watch my feet. Left, right, left. There’s usually a song in my head when I walk, but not today. I hear my footfall, the crunch of leaves, the peep of birds.

  Panic hits me, and I make one last-ditch effort to get my father to see reason. ‘If Doyle knows about this place, and about Finn and Skye, Abby’s house and your farm will be the first places he looks for Beau. This is a suicide mission, Dad.’

  ‘We’ve been over this. He cares about Beau less than Skye.’

  ‘Well, his dad then. He’ll come for him.’

  ‘I’ve never given the slightest indication to anyone except you lot that I’d want a child in my life. As far as they know, why would I want another man’s son? They don’t know if she ever told me about him. They won’t suspect me. We’ll leave no trace. It’ll be like he ran off and got lost in the bush.’ He doesn’t slow his pace. ‘Control your jitters.’

  He stops and points through the bush to a clearing in the valley below. There is plant life to shield us, but through the gaps I can see about twenty teepees, a couple of humpies and a scattering of kombi vans in a sprawling circle around a large grey fire pit. To the far side of the commune, close to the base of another wall of hills, is a river shaded on both sides by trees. On the side closer to us is a huge tilled field divided into rectangles. Two lie empty but the rest are growing crops, neat rows of thriving, verdant dope plants with a side area for what
I guess are the vegetables. There’s a discipline in those fields that troubles me. They know what they’re doing. I hear a goat bray, answered by a low moo. There are small clusters of people sprayed across the site: kids playing in the river, a dozen men and women squatting in the fields, a girl in a green dress climbing out of a kombi. The scene is peaceful, idyllic, Arcadia. But it’s more industrious, quieter than any commune I’ve heard of, and now I notice there are men pacing the periphery of the clearing.

  ‘Dad, I don’t know about this. Seriously.’

  ‘We’ll head to the lookout. I need to see the boy before we go down the hill.’

  ‘How will you know which one’s him?’

  ‘Leave that to me.’

  We walk on until we reach an outcrop of rocks that offers shelter and a panoramic view through the tallest pair of boulders. There’s no one else here. Dad takes a thermos of water out of his bag and hands it to me while he peers down at the camp. Then he takes his wallet out of his back pocket.

  ‘You going to bribe him?’

  He pulls out a photograph.

  ‘Is that Beau?’ I put the thermos down. ‘Let me see.’

  He holds the small photograph in front of me, won’t let me touch it. It’s a picture of a smiling baby sitting on the sand. He has a mop of curly blond hair and a toothless grin.

  ‘Why didn’t you show me this before?’

  ‘I don’t show this to anyone. It’s Skye’s.’

  ‘Didn’t you think it would help if I knew who we were looking for?’

  ‘That’s not your job. I’ll find him. I’ll show this to him. You help with the rest.’ He puts the photo back in his wallet with great care, opening it wide and placing his fingers on the bottom edge of the card as it slides in so the picture isn’t creased. ‘She took it when they lived up north. He’s older, but it’ll do.’

  We head down the hill, down to the commune. The sound of rushing water rises. I hear an axe strike wood.

  Dad walks in front of me, making as little noise as possible, ducking under low branches, holding others aside. Soon we are almost at the clearing and there is little bushland left to hide us.