Sheerwater

by Leah Swann

  Teddy had already stuck a fork into the top pancake when Gerald said: ‘Hold your horses, son. Wait till Tillie sits down.’

  His stomach growling and his mouth watering, Max waited as Tillie took her place. Teddy’s eyes were fixed on his plate like a hungry animal’s. He didn’t let go of the fork. He didn’t pull the fork out of the pancake. Gerald sat at one end of the table and Tillie at the other and the boys were facing each other in between.

  ‘Okay. Dig in,’ said Gerald, and Teddy lifted the whole pancake and took a huge bite.

  The pancakes were thicker than the ones their mother made, nearly a centimetre thick, Max reckoned, fluffy on the inside and crisp on the outside. He’d seen Tillie add ricotta cheese to the batter, which once would have worried him, but today he was too hungry. He sliced them up and ate them fast.

  ‘Slow down, Max,’ said Tillie. ‘You have to chew or you’ll get a sore tummy!’

  ‘Those were the best pancakes ever! Even as good as Mum makes!’ he said, watching Tillie pour milk into his mug. His plate was clean in front of him, every last crumb gone.

  ‘Guess you were pretty hungry!’ said Tillie, smiling at him.

  ‘I was,’ said Teddy.

  ‘How long till the policeman gets here?’ asked Max.

  ‘Be a while yet,’ said Gerald. ‘Near an hour. They’re coming from Colac.’

  ‘Are we in Sheerwater?’ asked Max, trying to remember what Gerald had said on the phone.

  ‘No, not in Sheerwater. We’re in Mering, nearer to Warrnambool.’

  So Kirsty had lied.

  ‘Is Mum still hurt from the smoke? The lady we were with, Kirsty, she said that Mum went to hospital because of the smoke from the plane.’

  ‘I don’t know the details. The policeman said she was alright.’

  ‘Can’t you ring her again?’

  Gerald looked at Max for a moment as though considering this and then said: ‘I’m sure we’ll find out everything when the police get here. Don’t worry, it’s all going to be fine.’

  ‘Come and sit on the couch with me,’ said Tillie. ‘Gerald, go find those Little Golden Books, would you?’

  Her husband sighed. ‘Now where would I find those, Til?’

  ‘They’re in the spare room, under the bed, in the little suitcase.’

  ‘You mean I have to bend down?’ said Gerald, rolling his eyes at Max to make him smile again.

  He returned with three children’s books. They were lovely and old and faded. One was about a rooster and had repeating words: Run, run, chase the sun. One was about a train that kept going off the tracks and racing horses and dancing in the buttercups, and another was about a pokey little puppy.

  When Tillie read it to them, she sang: ‘Where oh where is the pokey little puppy?’

  ‘We’ve got a puppy like that,’ said Teddy, with some pride in his voice, when she’d finished reading. ‘Called Winks.’

  ‘She’s not a puppy,’ said Max.

  Gerald flopped down on the couch and unfolded a newspaper. ‘What’s a seven-letter word meaning “mirage”, third letter “i”?’

  ‘Chimera,’ replied Tillie, turning the page.

  Gerald clicked his tongue. ‘Got it just like that, huh? Suppose you think you’re as smart as me.’ He reached for the remote.

  ‘No television,’ said Tillie. ‘The news, Gerald. They can’t see the news.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do, then?’

  ‘Why don’t you organise your game of golf?’

  ‘What – go off and miss the police? No, I think you need me here to tell them what’s been going on.’

  ‘There’s always the breakfast dishes. Stack them in the dishwasher?’

  Gerald caught Max’s eye and winked. ‘Now, where would I find the dishwasher, Til?’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. Boys, see what I have to deal with? The man doesn’t know where the dishwasher is in his own home!’

  It was ridiculous. Surely he did know, really. Max laughed again. It felt so good to laugh! Before this morning he hadn’t laughed for days, not a real belly laugh like this.

  His little brother was looking across at Gerald with his head on one side. ‘The dishwasher,’ Teddy announced, beaming, ‘is in the kitchen!’

  3

  When the doorbell rang, Max leapt to his feet to follow Gerald.

  ‘Wait with me, love,’ said Tillie but Max’s tummy was flipping like the pancakes. He wanted to see the policeman for himself.

  As soon as he got to the doorway between the kitchen and the hall he knew something wasn’t right. His tummy stopped flipping. It went hard as a cricket ball.

  Max paused, and clenched his hands when he heard shouts. It wasn’t Dad, was it? It couldn’t be Dad. He couldn’t make out what was being said. His legs had gone stiff like when he was in the tree at the back of Kirsty’s house.

  And when he heard a loud crack he felt that horrid wateriness inside. He wanted to run away. He took a few steps forward. He needed to find out.

  Max forced himself to go through the doorway. He saw old Gerald had fallen to the floor.

  LAWRENCE

  1

  The three old women had moved inside and slept a few hours before starting up their chant again in the early hours and it seemed they woke no-one but Lawrence. He wrapped his arms around his head to try to block out their noise. Beyond the women he heard the first birds and the ocean’s distant boom. The hall smelled of sleeping bodies.

  His vertebrae touched the floor through the thin mattress and he stared up at a ceiling full of moving shadows. His throat felt scraped and coarse and his eyes stung with some germ he’d picked up on the road and there was the anguished sense of loss he often woke with, an ineffable disappointment caused by Ava.

  He put his hand over his chest. Strange that one could sense the heart and not the brain, though the brain was the heart of everything. The brain that learns, dissects, accounts, makes its ledgers, a vast storehouse to hold and catalogue philosophies, opinions, histories, sciences, mathematics. The last being the best. Poetry might be the silk of expression, refreshing and renewing the senses, but mathematics was precise. None of this circling, this apprehending, this cloudy meaning-making. In mathematics there was one solution. In no other field of endeavour had humanity achieved such exactness.

  These people oppressed by self-hatred lying motionless in their wrinkled sleeping bags had no conception of the potent and lawless power of their brains. The brain has no humility. It’s a phenomenon, non-partisan, clear as glass. This was the clarity for which he strove. Desire was the enemy. Desires hold you in thrall. He must be master of himself. And yet he was riddled with desires so deep they almost choked him.

  These desires were some biological impulse, sometimes called love. He pictured himself pressing a pillow over Ava’s face till her body buckled and writhed and went still. The mother of his sons smothered. The word smother containing mother. How interesting.

  He kicked his way out of the brown sleeping bag, got up and grabbed his backpack. At the door of the church hall, he passed the three chanting women. What dimwits to think that singing could bring his disobedient sons home! Those silly boys would be tired and hungry and sorry by now, and that would teach them.

  Lawrence stepped out onto the street and looked down towards the beach where the sea shone darkly under the rising sun. He was hungry. Probably some awful breakfast would be served here, cereal and toast and cheap coffee; no, he wouldn’t put up with it – last night’s vulgar bean soup was bad enough, he’d get going before it came to that, get to a café to eat bacon and eggs and smashed avocado and drink a long black and read about the police on his trail. No café would be open yet. He went back inside. He needed more sleep.

  He approached the three old women and knelt and said: ‘Thank you for your song. I am tired. Would you mind stopping?’

  Two of the three ceased singing and looked at him. What lay behind their indifferent faces? Nothing in his inner cata
logue quite matched it. His physical beauty had no effect on them. They were beyond his reach in that way. To them he was little more than an insect. His personal need for significance drove through him, from his bowel to his tongue, ending in a sharp metallic taste.

  ‘I haven’t slept all night. I am so tired. I need rest.’

  He tried his winning smile. No reply, nothing. One woman’s eyes were almost obscured by her eyebrows and a pale hair grew like a weed from her chin. Another stared at the floor. The third kept singing.

  ‘Hey,’ said Lawrence, white-hot rage flashing through him at this madwoman with dried-apple hands clapping her knees, this woman who smelled of garbage. ‘HEY! I’m talking to you.’

  She crooned on. A few people were stirring in their beds. The singing was horrifying and constant, slipping under his consciousness with deadly repetition, lacing his ears with endless needling.

  ‘Shut up. Shut up.’

  He shook the woman’s shoulder and felt incredible heat as if he’d picked up a burning coal from a hearth. The woman stopped singing. In a voice as unemotional as it was crisp, she said: ‘Fuck you.’

  It took a moment to register. He was stunned.

  And when his hand went across her mouth to punish her, she anticipated him. They’d slipped into some empty space that he did not know – but she did. She bared her teeth and bit down hard and gave his hand a single, vicious shake.

  2

  Lawrence didn’t stop to tend his wound with the bandage in his medical kit. Instead he wrapped the bloodied hand in a strip of paper towel and headed for the street. The pewter sea was now blue. He turned left and walked up Smoky Point Road, blowing his nose with tissues from his pockets and dropping them as they filled.

  He pressed his wounded hand to his chest and crossed the road. Cars were pulling up and parking. A group of women stood around chatting on the footpath. One carried a laundry basket filled with rags and cleaning products in plastic pump packs; she was opening the gate to a house with a purple door. Lawrence paused. A man was hammering nails into the wooden front step.

  So early on a Monday morning, not much past dawn – why weren’t these people getting ready to go to work? When he asked what was going on, he was told that the poor woman who’d lost her sons was coming home from Colac hospital later today. So this was where Ava had planned to live with his sons!

  ‘I didn’t realise there was a hospital nearby,’ Lawrence said to the woman telling him all about Ava. ‘Is there a casualty department? I need to get this tended to.’ He held up his hand in its bloodied paper.

  ‘Oh dear, oh yes, that does look bad. There’s a clinic up the road . . .’

  ‘I’d rather go to the hospital in Colac.’

  ‘Well, my Harold has to get something in Colac, he could take you, I’m sure. Harold? HAROLD? Oh dear, come with me. He’s as deaf as a post some days, usually when I’m calling him.’

  They walked through the house. They passed the living room and Lawrence recognised the wedding album lying on the couch. In the kitchen they found Harold putting milk and butter into the fridge.

  ‘Harold? See this man here, he’s got to go up to casualty at Colac. Think you could drop him in?’

  ‘I don’t want to be any trouble,’ Lawrence said. ‘I could get a bus . . .’

  ‘No trouble,’ the man Harold said. He was soft all over like a bag of dough stuffed into a shirt and trousers. ‘Let’s get you in the car, mate.’

  Lawrence got into the sedan beside him and they drove up Smoky Point Road and turned right into Main Street passing the shops and cafés. Beyond were cliffs and the sea now shining like a photo on a postcard, a picture-postcard place for his picture-postcard wife. Trust her to find somewhere beautiful, he thought, blinking away that hair of hers streaking across his mind, so soft to touch and so fragrant. He sneezed and shivered. He had a fever. He was sizzling and his scalp was slick with sweat. A memory of home came unbidden, of Ava bringing him hot lemon tea and pressing a cool hand to his brow and the sounds of his sons playing outside. He could never get back to that place. Sweat trickled down his neck. He needed to shower. He needed rest. He had nowhere to rest. While Harold chatted, Lawrence pictured Ava suffocated by a pillow, her slender body as lovely and limp as a rag doll and life leaking from each limb till she was as dead as the sparrow that lays its eggs, sings its sweet song, and passes beyond usefulness.

  ‘Not far now,’ Harold said. ‘I’m taking you my secret route; avoid the morning traffic.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Lawrence. ‘It’s good of you.’

  The sea beside them was shot with brilliant fragments of light and held within it millions of sea creatures, strange, squishy, vulnerable organisms, the kinds of things he’d liked to look at as a boy. Lawrence’s mother always said it was wrong to break open seashells and birds’ eggs to see the creatures inside and leave them to wither in the sunlight, when in fact his activity was scientific. His poor muddle-headed mother had never used her mind for organised thought.

  ‘So are you local? Visiting?’ Harold asked.

  ‘Passing through,’ muttered Lawrence, hunching his shoulders against further conversation.

  The car clung to the road’s rapid curve and Lawrence caught glimpse after glimpse of the rich sandstone stepped into ridges by wind, rain and sea. Vanessa had told him that when she’d visited Sheerwater she’d been running along the cliff edge one morning when the edge broke beneath her and she’d fallen onto a ledge below which also broke, and she’d tumbled all the way to the sandy beach with the tide coming in, and had to make her way out of the cove as fast as she could with a broken ankle. She’d climbed hand over hand back up the rock knowing it could give way at any moment, her ankle banging painfully as she dragged herself up out of the reach of the water and then further up, onto a ledge where she could rest.

  Harold made a left-hand turn inland.

  Lawrence closed his eyes as one minute passed into another.

  3

  In the emergency room at Colac Hospital, Lawrence joined the queue and was told there was a three-hour wait. He asked for a bandage – why waste his own? – and sat picking away damp clumps of bloody paper from serrated tabs of tooth-marked skin, much to the horror of a nearby child, who tugged at her mother’s arm and whispered and pointed.

  ‘Do you mind not doing that here?’ the mother said.

  ‘Where else should I do it? Look around, darling. This is a casualty department, it’s busy,’ Lawrence said. Then he added in a low voice: ‘All is chaos.’

  The woman gave him a look of – what? Disgust, fear, contempt? She picked up her daughter and moved to sit as far away as possible. Yeah, you keep away. He tied off the bandage with an elastic clip and set off in the direction of the women’s ward in search of Ava. A sign directed him to level two. He pulled his hat down firmly as he entered the lift and noticed with interest that people kept a distance from him and avoided his gaze. His skin felt greasy and he was running a temperature and yet his mind was clear and tapping something into him. His head was clear as ice, his brain an ordered structure forming a matrix that extended in all directions. He was an evolving life form moving along a corridor in a hospital built on the solid ground of the earth beneath the sun and the stars.

  He’d find her. The women’s ward had only six rooms. Ava was in one of them. He kept his head down to make himself inconspicuous, his eyes to the ground, looking up when he entered each door. His eyes searched the beds and bodies. In the fifth room he found one patient asleep in front of the morning show. The second bed, nearer the door, was empty but not unoccupied; there he saw the clutter of an absent patient – a jacket over the back of a chair, a phone plugged into the wall, a handbag, a cup of water and a bunch of car keys on the bedside table. The handbag was made of faded leather and had tassels and was smudged with red marks. Was it Ava’s?

  He glanced at the sleeping woman and pulled the curtain between the beds, then took the bag and went through its contents. He foun
d a roll of cash bound with an elastic band and pocketed it. Then he saw the green leather purse he’d given Ava two years ago. He flipped it open and saw snapshots of Teddy and Max. He took out the photographs, intending to keep them – she wouldn’t even have these photographs of them – when he saw a pen sticking out of a pocket of the jacket on the chair. It was a man’s jacket. Whose? What man had left a jacket at his wife’s bedside?

  He took the pen and marked both of the boys’ photographs with a large X, crossing out each face, and slipped them back into Ava’s wallet, careful to leave it open at the top of her handbag. That would put the fear of hell into her.

  He put his head out of the door to make sure that no-one was around, and was about to make his dash when the phone on the bedside table started to ring. It was Ava’s ringtone. He snatched the phone off the charger and the car keys off the table and darted out of the room. He crossed the corridor and turned a corner with the phone still ringing in his hands.

  He swiped the screen and heard a boy’s voice. ‘Mum?’

  That little voice belonged to Max. How many times had he heard his son’s voice calling up the hallway for his mother, a questioning, uncertain voice, a symptom of the boy’s fatal timidity.

  Lawrence went through a fire escape door, hearing Max’s voice in his ear: ‘Mum?’

  So, his sons were safe. He’d known they would be. Now he must get to them before Ava or he might not see them again. He would not let her have them. Now was his chance. In the car park, Lawrence turned the keys over in his hand and read the silver lettering on the tag: BMW. He hurried along the rows of parked vehicles, pressing the button on the car keys till he found it. No-one was watching. He got in. The engine stirred with a smooth rumble. He typed Gerald King’s address into the satnav and followed the directions to the freeway, where the hard road rose to meet him.

  The powerful car stretched effortlessly into speed. The interior smelled of aftershave and was full of gum wrappers. Lawrence would have liked to pull over and look for clues about Ava’s male companion in the duffel bag cast carelessly on the back seat, but he could not be sure that Gerald King wouldn’t make another phone call, to a police station perhaps; he could not be sure of anything except the hateful knowledge that Ava had violated their contract.