And in the significant waters, flowing so coldly around her, in a scene where the only decent light was Gus’s torch, she saw without warning and with a casual but exact sharpness, down to the last nuance of their hair, their scent, the faint and particular musk of their womanhoods, the women with whom she had shared the last Sunday she ever spent aboard Kozinski Constructions’ yacht, the Vistula. She saw as well the young Mrs. Kozinski, not transmogrified yet by the raw protein of Jack Murchison’s kitchen, not even seriously threatened with change.
In thin torchlight reflected by the inside of the signwriter’s hood, she felt her shoulders itch, a different sting from the normal rankling of her scar tissue. It was a shadow not of the sun’s assault on her, but of the way it had more jovially nipped those children, bit Siobhan and Bernard lightly through the fabric of their shirts.
Before they’d left the house for the Vistula Paul had been cautious in describing the coming day. He said the guests would be a consultant and three building union officials. They were going to bring along what he wrote off as their party girlfriends. It seemed to Kate a ridiculous phrase, and she threatened to stay home. But he pleaded. He wanted to see the children.
A competent sailor, Paul took the helm, and the young deckhand the Kozinskis used for weekends worked the shrouds, and they tacked their way up lovely Pittwater, the Palm Beach houses flashing light from their picture windows across plum-blue water. On their left, the great cliffs of West Head, thickly dressed with Australia’s eccentric botany, a hanging garden from before the flood. No more beautiful place: that was established between Kate and Paul Kozinski, and was a proposition subscribed to without prejudice by all O’Briens and all Kozinskis at once.
The unionists were apparently some powerful triumvirate from what Paul called with reverence the peak council of all builders’ federations council. One small and very muscular. The other two large and strong yet flaccid. Their skins were pale with what the young Mrs. Kozinski took to be the pallor of conspiracy. They might have argued with some justice it arose from a working-class raising in Newtown or Alexandria.
In the flood by the signwriter’s truck, with water in her boots, Kate could still imagine their pallor, and the traceries of minute purple veins they showed either side of their noses.
They were jovial enough. They had a nice little patter going with Paul. He was a capitalist bastard they got on well enough with.
All of them drank steadily as if they knew that was what they were here for. Their three girls sat in bikinis on the coaming of the forward cabin, the one in which old Mr. Kozinski and Paul sometimes said they’d be happy to live while sailing the Pacific. None of the women were shy, but the young Mrs. Kate Kozinski noticed that they didn’t know each other at all. They were trying out each other’s unfamiliar names, whereas the men standing around Paul at the helm closely knew each other’s names and were onto other matters: reflections and anecdotes.
These women who had never before spent any time with each other all smoked hard, just as the men around the helm drank hard. When the young Mrs. Kozinski went forward to socialize with them, she could smell the cigarette chemicals which their hair had filtered out of the air.
Even with her boots full of the serious waters of the Myambagh flood, she remembered the names of two of these women. She handled both names as if they were flat stones. She saw both sides of the stones. Denise and Chantelle. The name of the third would not come to Kate on this spirit-laden water.
For some parts of their conversations, they dropped their voices. For others they were boisterous. Their main talk with Kate Kozinski was about how they liked the boat. She saw that they all seemed to shave their pubic hair, for some of the shaven spikiness of it was in each case visible above the line of their bikini bottoms.
Extraordinary that she should now have such a sharp memory of three women with shaven pubes, two of them called Denise and Chantelle. Extraordinary that the day of the women on the Vistula, along with the memory of Mrs. Kozinski screaming at gravesides, was all she had brought with her on the road.
All three women made a casual loud fuss of the children. The children had tested the fuming, near-naked, loud and discreet girls with a couple of their best tricks. Siobhan stood on her hands on the roof of the forward cabin, extending her legs in the air, so that the V of her body could have served as a navigational directive to her father at the wheel. Bernard Kozinski showed how fast he could do half a lap of the deck, pounding forward on his flat feet to the bows, then aft to level with his father, who applauded him from the helm.
The girls twisted on their thighs and yelled at the children, Clever boy! and, I wish I could do that!
The children could tell all this was just politeness, a break in the women’s absorption in each other. And so both went down into the cockpit instead, to get an occasional flurry of notice there, to listen to the men’s stern, barking chatter.
And again this choice made by the children showed that the women on the forward coaming wanted to give most of their attention to getting to know each other, whereas the men already did and had therefore space to devote to handstanders like Siobhan.
Paul and the deckhand hauled the Vistula around West Head and anchored in a limpid bay called Jerusalem. They let down the platform aft. From it it was possible to go swimming. The prospect prompted the three women to put their shirts back on.
—Aren’t there sharks? they asked at various stages. Paul assured them as he assured all visitors. No one had ever been taken by a shark in Pittwater or in this part of the Hawkesbury. Look, his own children were already in swimming. What long clean strokes Siobhan made. She knew the water was sharkless. Bernard swam more hectically, bobbing upright every twenty frantic strokes to take breath, but getting a smile on his face, tickled pink to find the kindly air was there, and utterly unafraid of predators.
The woman called Chantelle hugged her shirt to her.
—They’re so lucky. Living near the water. Makes all the difference to kids.
Paul came down to the galley, where Mrs. Kate Kozinski had now begun shelling prawns and sundering chicken for lunch.
—You know, you don’t have to be anything more than polite to them, he told her as if he was worried Kate and the women might become friends. They aren’t lost cousins.
She got a little peevish and argued that anyone who came on the boat, anyone it was worth spending Sunday with, deserved a basic courtesy. She asked if the women knew each other, it didn’t seem they did?
—I don’t know, he said. I only asked them along to keep the boys happy.
She was going to ask what that meant but he smiled excessively, the disarming Slav, and thundered up the companionway again.
When lunch was ready and she went on deck to tell them, Paul had already gone. She could see that he was rowing the three union men and their girlfriends ashore to a little beach beneath the nearly vertical façade of bush and sandstone. Everyone had then vanished into the bush except Paul and the deckhand, who sat on the beach like servants, chatting. Of the unionists and the others there was no sign now. Both the children sat listlessly in the cockpit.
—He didn’t let us go with him, Siobhan complained to Kate.
Kate said it didn’t matter. You come swimming with me. So she stepped with them onto the grating which had been lowered from the stern, and all three of them took to the water. Habitués, both children. The union officials and the shaven-groin women did not have that competence.
Soon they all descended from the bush: the three unionists, their girlfriends. Dropping down through the ancient flora, amongst the banksias, olive green and black and gray, knobbly and bristling with black cones. From her buoyant place amongst the swimming children, Kate saw them on the beach, saw Paul and the deckhand rise to greet them. While her husband and the deckhand were rowing the guests back to her, she took her mouthful of the deep, brown, brackish, clay-laden estuary water, retained it in her mouth for long enough to give a sense of its full charact
er, and then released it.
The night of the Vistula day, once the children were asleep, she told Paul that she would not go on any more cruises like that. Not with Siobhan and Bernard, and not without them either. They were procured tarts, she said. Chantelle and Denise and the one whose name, by the time she drank from Myambagh’s flood, she could not have recalled.
She remembered this argument not in the painstaking way in which she had remembered the women and her mouthful of brackish water. She remembered it only in general terms. It was the standard argument between them.
Paul: Kozinski Constructions was the basis of their lives, above all of her leisure to be the supreme mother. Yes, you could call the women whores if you wanted. That was why she’d heard one of them say, as they made themselves up and combed their hair in the bedroom behind the galley, that she had always worked for Kozinski Constructions. But did Kate think the world was an idyll? Did she think her children could be protected for good from the commerce of the flesh and the allied commerce of bricks and cement? She kept her children hostage in an unreal world, and for one day, without knowing anything about it, without suffering any harm, they had inhabited the true world. So if the union officials had had small erotic adventures up on the sandstone ledges, that sort of goodwill went into Kozinski projects and paid for Mrs. Kate Kozinski’s great motherhood project, which was strangling her children to death!
This was the question, then in Palm Beach and tonight on the Eglington Highway: Had she been the one who took her children’s air from them? In Myambagh she had been growing out of that idea, not fast enough but fueled at least by all Jack Murchison’s old-fashioned food.
Waiting for Gus to vivify the signwriter’s engine, she lowered her hand and stirred the cold waters of Jelly’s dissolution.
Kate, arguing on the Vistula evening: She believed the Kozinskis liked doing business the way they did it. Would not have wanted to operate under any other system. The snaky corruption of the old world dancing along nicely with the hairy-arsed corruption of the new! She wasn’t afraid of the realities of life in the construction business. She believed Siobhan and Bernard should be exempt though from being patronized by women bought by the hour to perform favors for building trade unionists in Jerusalem Bay.
(Becoming heated)
The next time he wanted to award union officials a boatload of women, he ought to provide one for himself!
But again, calf deep in floodwater, stirring it with her hand, she remembered the women and the estuarine water far more intimately than she remembered the fight with Paul. Maybe he was right: he always counted for less.
She did remember one point she had made: that old Mr. Kozinski wouldn’t have put his own wife aboard a boat where the frank exchange of bodies was the order of the day. Old Mr. Kozinski might be corrupt, but he knew the protocols, the decorousness necessary for doing business that way. Paul was too Australian and did not have any grasp of the etiquette of tainted business.
Gus seemed to be enjoying himself within the limits of this astounding night. He said he was now ready to start the engine by any means necessary, but would she look under the rear bumper bar to see if the signwriter had taped a spare key there. And yes, wading out of the water to the high and dry rump of the vehicle, she ran her hand along the underside of the blade of bumper bar and the key was there.
Carrying it thickly in cold fingers, Kate got into the cabin and turned on the ignition as instructed by Gus. There was a throaty shudder from the engine. Hearing it, Gus laughed. He knew that after a few more convulsions, the engine would start outright. And so it happened. Gus shut the hood, the triumphant slam of a man used to having his way with machinery. With him urging her with hand motions and taking care of where the beasts were at this stage of their inquiries into the earth, she backed out of the flood.
She got down then from the driver’s seat to see to the loading of the beasts. Gus fed Menzies into the back of the truck in that peculiar way, lengthwise, since there was barely room for him to stand. Menzies reclined on his backward-bending, tucked-under, sticklike legs. He had been trained to do this by the dimensions of so many of the vehicles which had come Gus’s way. Chifley, similarly well trained, stood sagely amongst the paint pots. He had entered a new phase of meditation. He sunk himself for the journey by truck in a style of thought for which no movement was necessary.
Gus rolled down the back door on them, and then as of right, went around to the cabin and took the wheel. Kate in the passenger seat, they drove west. They had a sense of the wide swamps and seas of the western sheep pastures. Semi-arid farming they called it. But not tonight. Rice paddies tonight. Fens.
Gus turned on the radio, and the newsreader began to read statistics about the flood. The unfortunate town of Myambagh. Twice stricken in the one year. Two hundred-year floods in twelve months.
Gus said, The centuries pass bloody quick in Myambagh.
—On a lighter note, said the newsreader. On a lighter note, a kangaroo and an emu up to now employed by the owner of a Dubbo entertainment park to provide the living elements in the tableau of the Australian coat of arms have been stolen. Chifley is a mature, male big gray kangaroo, eight years of age. Menzies is a male emu, nine years old … A police inspector from Dubbo was recorded as saying that this was not being treated as a light matter.
But that did not take the levity out of the news item. For Gus had heard the announcer say, On a lighter note …
—People bloody amaze me. Out of the back of the Railway Hotel, Jack has every dog in Myambagh that hasn’t drowned, and that’s big news, part of the bloody headlines. An act of humanity. That’s not on a lighter note. But a kangaroo and an emu? That’s comedy in some people’s book.
With the aftertaste of the floodwater still in her mouth, Kate considered the issue of what was to be done with this truck in the end? As far as Girilambone, it was licit: a truck Gus had rescued from the flood. After Girilambone, it could be considered stolen. It had the owner’s name—O’Riordan—on the side. The name was a personal plea: don’t take away my instruments of trade just when I’m hardest hit; just when flood, and the decline of towns along all Australia’s aged waterways are narrowing down all business. She could still guess at the desperate feelings of Mr. O’Riordan, prickling with insomniac fear, watching the bush’s one late-night television channel.
It was apparent that Gus too thought of O’Riordan, both nobly and practically. About O’Riordan’s convenience but also about his red and blue name on the sides of the thing. A dead giveaway.
She watched Gus slide his jaw sideways away from his upper mouth, making a crooked gate of teeth.
A tall hayshed presented itself, open to the road, piled high with what even in half-light could be seen as strata of old, brown fermenting hay with blond bales, recently cut, on top. Around such a shed Chifley and Menzies, even if seen from the road, would look au naturel. Even if one was spotted by a passer-by, they would not present themselves to the eye as kidnapped performers.
Kate and Gus abandoned O’Riordan’s van and crossed the wet paddocks to climb in amongst the bales in the hayshed and mount from level to level of stacked hay. As they rose, Menzies stood by the glossy trunk of a she-oak and seemed utterly detached. He might be able to fend for himself in what was sentimentally called the wild. Chifley kept a distance, off amongst the tea trees, but Kate felt the shock again, the phantom of pleasure who always stood there by Chifley’s shoulder.
Gus said, Just watch out for tiger snakes.
Everyone knew tiger snakes spent slothful winters in places like this.
Gus erects a little cold- and windbreak of hay bales. It is a blind, a vantage point. Behind it he and Kate can sleep amidst the blue, pungent miasma rising from the bales. Moisture, heat, the furious bacteriology of cut hay.
Gus has brought the signpainter’s dropcloth with him too, and now spreads it across the surface of the bales.
—Best I can do. Sorry to say, it’s pretty spiky. Not the
Hilton bloody Hotel. Sorry to say.
About to sleep, Gus remembers Jelly every few seconds.
—What about poor Jelly, eh?
There seems to Kate to be a large black-blue space in the corner of the shed which is Jelly’s absence. She feels the substance of his loss, the changed world, rather than any active frenzy. It is the weight that is awful. Again she looks to the idea that Chifley might lift it.
Kate and Gus, utterly dusted, have crept into each other’s arms, Kate in the chaste widowhood of the detonation she can still feel like a block of wood in her stomach and in either eardrum. Gus is reliably a gentleman, following the virtues which he picked up together with his farm mechanics from his battler father. Out in the seeping coldness, Menzies is asleep on his locked knee joints. Amongst the tea trees, Chifley sprawls for a moment, his enormous legs spread. Kate is always aesthetically offended by an image of Chifley in repose. Never did he look so much like a beast of hindleg-heavy imbalance as he does now. She wants him to give her the consolation and easy air of bounding, the air which over-brims with every bound instead of, as in the human model, being emptied out. There is no air for her in the image of his repose.
North of the Darling, on the Schulberger farm, now owned and tended by Gus and his sister-in-law, stands a 1920s derelict building. It dates from a time of hearty intentions. Australia contributed to a fantastically remote war in Europe a larger number of its youth than did most of the real combatants, two out of three of these boys from the bush being casualties. Trying to say: here we are, here we are! Europe in the South Seas! Redeemed convicts! True Britons all, even the Irish!
A Woman of the Inner Sea Page 20