White Sands of Summer

by J. H. Fletcher

  Shannon was hobbling down the Proserpine main street when she met Hal Maitland. Of course; it was school holidays time.

  For once she hadn’t been thinking about him, her mind taken up by the watermelon business and how Irma and that Ollie Gadd had cheated her, but when she saw him her heart gave a hop and a skip, in double time when he smiled.

  ‘You need to be careful,’ he said.

  She looked at him but did not speak.

  ‘Charlie Hong’s watermelons?’ he said. ‘I saw you.’

  For five years Shannon had been telling herself how much she loved this boy yet the first words she ever spoke to him were a repeat of what Ollie had said two days before.

  ‘I dunno what you’re on about.’

  Up close he was even better looking than she’d thought. He smiled at her and it was a nice smile, so that she was tempted to smile back.

  ‘My father owns the land next door to Charlie Hong’s farm. I was there and I saw you. How you got back over that fence the way you did I’ll never know. Didn’t that barbed wire rip holes in you?’

  ‘Some,’ she said. She didn’t mind telling him; she felt comfortable with him. Warm. What had Mum said when something nice turned up unexpectedly? Like all our Christmases rolled into one.

  ‘Sore?’

  ‘Nah.’ Until two minutes ago, but not now.

  He looked at her, still smiling, his head a little to one side. ‘I never told anyone.’

  ‘Why?’ Although it was a relief to hear him say so.

  His smile broadened. ‘I don’t believe in telling tales,’ he said. ‘But like I said, you need to watch out if you plan to do it again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I hear Charlie Hong’s bought a couple of Dobermans. They’d do you a lot more damage than the barbed wire. They’d tear you apart.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning to do it again,’ Shannon said.

  ‘Why’d you do it this time?’

  ‘Put up to it, wasn’t I?’

  ‘By whom?’

  She was no more into telling tales than he was. ‘Some people I know.’

  ‘How well d’you know Ollie Gadd?’

  ‘Not at all, really.’

  Hal hesitated. ‘It’s none of my business but if I was you I’d steer clear of him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Got a bad name.’

  ‘He left me standing. And never give me anything for those melons I got for him, neither.’

  ‘There you are, then.’ Again he hesitated, eyeing her awkwardly. ‘You ever done any sailing?’

  ‘Sailing? My dad works at the mill. Where would I get money to go sailing?’

  ‘I know what he does.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I’ve seen you around, so I asked.’ Kicking his boot this way and that at the stones on the dusty road.

  Like a little kid, Shannon thought. ‘I didn’t think you knew I existed.’

  ‘I’ve seen you around,’ he repeated.

  ‘Shannon the thief,’ she said.

  ‘Watermelon bandit sounds better,’ Hal said.

  They laughed.

  Both of them laughing together. My oh my, Shannon thought.

  ‘It wouldn’t cost you anything if you came sailing with me.’

  She didn’t know what to think. ‘I don’t know anything about boats.’

  ‘They aren’t boats. They’re yachts.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about yachts, either.’

  ‘I’ll teach you.’

  She remembered the time with her mum, eating a sandwich as they sat and watched the racing yachts. When she grew up she too would ride the wind. Oh yes, she remembered it well and, remembering, her decision came like a rush of blood to the brain.

  ‘You’re on,’ Shannon said. ‘When d’you want to do it?’

  ‘Next Saturday? Eleven o’clock at the Airlie Yacht Club. Can you get there?’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  She thought it would be fun to ask Charlie Hong for a lift but that might be pushing her luck too far. Besides, Charlie wasn’t the sort to give lifts. She’d ask Syd. He drove in every Saturday. He had a soft spot for her. Knew how to keep his trap shut, too. Syd would do it.

  God knew what Dad’s wife would think, but that problem was easily solved. She didn’t tell her.

  SEPTEMBER 1932–MARCH 1936

  Shannon

  Grace might have forgotten Shannon’s thirteenth birthday but she had no problem remembering her fourteenth. She went to see Mrs Girdle, the school head, and said she was pulling Shannon out of school at the end of the week.

  ‘That would be a tragedy,’ Mrs Girdle said. ‘Especially from Shannon’s point of view.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Grace said, not sounding sorry at all. ‘You don’t get it, do you? My hubby’s fixed Shannon up with a job and we need the money.’

  ‘I don’t think you realise how bright Shannon is. Always top of the class. And so hard-working… If you let her stay on at school, she has a good chance of winning a scholarship –’

  ‘I never seen much point in all this education,’ said Grace. ‘Like I said, she’s got a job waiting, and in these times that’s not to be sneezed at.’

  ‘But to waste her potential seems such a pity. It means –’

  ‘It means food on the table,’ Grace said, ‘and that’s good enough for me. Beggars can’t be choosers, Mrs Girdle, as I daresay you’ve heard. Seeing you’re that set on it, I’ll let her stay on to the end of the term but that’s as far as I’ll go.’

  When Shannon heard the news, her first thought was that she’d twiddle her toes and do no more work. What was the point of busting her guts if she was going to leave anyway? Yet she surprised herself by going on working as hard as ever – not to prove anything or to get a reprieve – she knew Grace too well to think there was any chance of that – but because she’d acquired a taste for it. She worked because she enjoyed working, read because she enjoyed reading. She couldn’t remember a time when she couldn’t read but now she went through the school library like fire through a gum forest.

  Mrs Girdle watched approvingly, even as she mourned the coming loss of her star pupil.

  ‘Knowledge and culture,’ she said. ‘Whatever you are forced to do once you leave school, no one can take those things from you.’

  ‘What’s the good of knowing things?’ Shannon said.

  ‘They are most important and will become even more important to you in the future. Knowledge and culture teach you who and what you are. Without them you are no more than dust, blowing on the wind.’

  Well, maybe. When Shannon started work that December, the day after school was out, she felt more like soap bubbles blowing on the wind than dust. She’d known she was going to work at the Clover Leaf, her father’s drinking hole in Proserpine, but hadn’t known what she’d be expected to do. She thought Mike Mulligan, the publican, might want her to serve behind the bar and that seemed a difficult job, needing to know the various drinks a bloke might want, how much each one cost, how to reckon change and deal with any drunks who might come on to her, and wasn’t sure how well she’d handle it, but it turned out Mulligan wasn’t thinking about that at all.

  ‘He’s got me scrubbing away in the kitchen,’ Shannon said the following morning. ‘Washing up glasses, washing up plates. Hundreds of them! If I never see another glass it’ll be too soon.’

  ‘What you expect?’ Grace said. ‘A barmaid’s gotta have tits. Something for the customers to have a squint at. You ain’t got enough in that department, not yet.’

  ‘They’re coming,’ Shannon said.

  ‘So’s Christmas,’ Grace said. ‘I wouldn’t worry, I was you. That Mulligan… He’ll be after you soon enough when you got something to show the customers.’

  In the meantime it was the kitchen or cleaning out the bathroom upstairs or taking cups of tea up to Mrs Mulligan, hollow eyes and yellow complexion, who people said was sickly and who seldom left her bed and never
left her room.

  A skivvy, that’s what I am, Shannon thought.

  She never saw the money, either, which Grace grabbed for herself. Grace claimed it went to pay off Dad’s bar bill but Shannon had her doubts. What with one thing and another, Shannon still hadn’t got a brass razoo, just the way it had always been.

  If it hadn’t been for the two positives in her life she’d have gone barmy, but luckily they were enough to keep her trudging on.

  She’d stayed in touch with Mrs Girdle and Mrs Girdle kept her well supplied with books. No cartoons or baby stories, none of the adventures of Rupert Bear and his friends, but real literature. In this Mrs Girdle was unrelenting.

  ‘The great writers and stories of the past,’ she said. ‘Let us concentrate on those.’

  The myths of ancient Greece and of the siege of Troy, of Agamemnon and Achilles; the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, of Marlowe and Shakespeare; the novels of Marcus Clarke and Jeannie Gunn, of Dickens and Fielding, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; the legends of Beowulf and King Arthur; the poetry of Lawson and Paterson, of Chaucer and Yeats.

  Shannon borrowed the books from Mrs Girdle; every time she brought a book back the schoolteacher sat her down and wanted to know what she thought of what she’d read.

  Shannon talked, as well as she could, and understood what she’d read, as well as she could, and admitted freely what she did not know or understand, and Mrs Girdle shed light on the dark corners so that what Shannon had read ceased to be a mystery, while the wonder of it all remained. She had thought herself alone but no, the voices of the past surrounded her, shouting aloud their awareness of all that embraced her, the knowledge and the feeling and the understanding extending back over thousands of years, a succession of voices of which she was now a part.

  ‘I shall never be able to thank you enough, Mrs Girdle,’ Shannon said. ‘Everything you’ve done for me.’

  The second positive in her life was Hal Maitland. He was still at school down in Brisbane but whenever he came home it was her he came to see before anybody, and his smile when he saw her made her hope that he cared as much for her as she did for him. When she’d first seen him sailing all those years before she’d thought herself in love, yet the feelings of those days were only a pale shadow of what they had become.

  In a small town like Proserpine everyone knew everybody else’s business and she knew people were talking about the labourer’s daughter and the rich man’s son. She was only just fifteen now but that didn’t stop some blokes giving her a thoughtful eye. After all, if she was giving it away to Hal Maitland there might be something left over for them. And, let’s face it, she was a bit of all right, or would be before she was much older.

  For herself Shannon didn’t care what people said or thought but she was scared the gossip might frighten Hal away. It never did, thank goodness.

  She felt that without him life wouldn’t be worth living; there were mornings she woke to the conviction that this would be the day he’d tell her he didn’t want to see her any more. At such moments she felt death would be preferable to the pain of losing him. That might be a stupid thing to think but the pain was real; even though he’d never said anything about breaking up, common sense told her it was inevitable. She was a skivvy in a pub; he was educated, handsome, the son of one of the wealthiest men in Queensland. They were as different from each other as it was possible to be; losing him was a certainty.

  Yet somehow it never happened. She had one day off a week – Sunday, when the pub had few customers – and they used it to go sailing, when the weather permitted. They sailed and were happy together, days of sunlight and laughter and, at least in Shannon’s case, a longing she could not put into words: that the day would come when they were truly together, doubt a thing of the past and the future bright with hope. And – yes! – with joy.

  One day in early September, a warm spring day, they were out on the water. There was a light breeze, the sea quiet, and they were sailing along the channel between Hamilton and Whitsunday islands with the open waters of the Whitsunday Passage ahead of them when he looked at her and smiled.

  ‘Come and take the helm,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ She stared, terror drying her mouth.

  ‘Come,’ he said again. ‘Take the helm.’

  ‘I daren’t.’

  He smiled, eyes fixed on hers, and she was helpless. She got up from the thwart where she’d been sitting and went to him and sat beside him, the polished wood of the tiller separating them. Still smiling, he took Shannon’s hand and placed it beneath his on the tiller, and for the first time she felt the throbbing of the unseen rudder buried deep in the water as it guided the cutter through the waves.

  ‘Bring the tiller towards you,’ he said. ‘Gently.’

  She obeyed. At once the yacht changed direction.

  ‘Bring it back again.’

  Again she obeyed him and the yacht corrected its course. She stared at Hal in wonder. It gave her the strangest feeling, that by a gentle nudge of her hand she could direct the movement of a twenty-five-foot yacht.

  ‘How does it feel?’

  ‘Wonderful. Power…’ She had no words to describe her feelings. It was strange: never before in her life had she thought she might have anything to do with exercising power; it gave her a completely different view of herself that such a thing might be possible.

  It was an awareness that warmed and exhilarated her during the days of drudgery that made up the rest of her week. For the first time she no longer thought of the Clover Leaf’s sordid kitchen as her destiny but as a tunnel through which she was passing, with the light of freedom shining at the other end.

  In fact things changed for her sooner than she’d expected, although not necessarily for the better.

  Mike Mulligan had been eyeing her developing bosom for some time and when Easter came round he announced he was taking her out of the kitchen and giving her a chance behind the bar.

  ‘I told you,’ said Grace when she heard of Mulligan’s decision. ‘Now you got something to show, he’ll want you to show it.’

  ‘Looking won’t hurt me,’ Shannon said, delighted to be out of the kitchen at last, but it didn’t take long for her to realise that serving behind the bar had its disadvantages. There were days she thought she would never be rid of the stink of beer and tobacco smoke or – worse still – the hands that touched her accidentally on purpose, the gazes that slid down the front of her dress, crawling over her like snails.

  She tried wearing high-necked dresses but Mulligan soon put a stop to that.

  ‘Boobies on show, if you please, Shannon. The customers expect it. Tis part of the job, as you well know, and I won’t have you disappointing the boys that pays your wages. And mine.’

  If she wanted to keep the job she had no choice, which meant it was back to the only low-cut dress she owned and not a word to say about it. It was the first time she’d discovered she could be defiled without being touched.

  She scrubbed herself all over every night when she got home and it made no difference: the degradation went too deep to be cleansed by soap and water.

  Hall said he would like to come to the pub and watch her at work.

  ‘No way,’ Shannon said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because.’

  It was the only answer she’d give him. Luckily it was enough so she didn’t need to tell him the real reason. Her self-confidence was improving but she still hated to think of him watching her in a place like the Clover Leaf, scared it might make him see her as she was rather than how she wished to be.

  Grace moaned about their relationship, muttering about folks getting ideas above their station, but Shannon didn’t care what Grace thought. Hal was important; Grace was not. She worked in the pub six nights, did Mrs Warburton’s ironing and more housework than Grace ever did; she wasn’t willing to sacrifice what had become the most important time in her week.

  In the following April Grace, who in recent weeks had been mo
re edgy than ever, did something she’d never done before. She decided – out of nowhere, it seemed – to have a woman-to-woman chat with her stepdaughter.

  Mostly it consisted of Grace complaining about how her life had turned out. ‘Not much of a life if you’re a woman, is it?’

  Shannon made non-committal noises.

  ‘You know, I didn’t have to take your dad. There was lots of blokes after me. Some with money, too. I coulda had a good life if I’d picked one of them.’

  ‘Why didn’t you, then?’

  Shannon thought Grace was talking crap. Having rich blokes after her? Grace? A labourer in the Bowen salt works? For one thing, maybe, but anything else… Didn’t sound very likely, did it?

  Grace ignored Shannon’s question. ‘There was other blokes too,’ she said. ‘Blokes who knew how to give a girl a good time. Quite a few like that. I coulda had any one of ’em.’

  ‘So why’d you pick Dad?’

  Grace’s teeth were savage. ‘Fancied the idea of being married to a bloke with his own plantation, didn’t I?’ She laughed like she could have thrown up. ‘Plantation… Gimme a break! One hundred bloody acres? And he couldn’t even hang on to them. A no-hoper, that’s the one I picked. Cause I was a mug.’

  ‘There’s a lot worse,’ Shannon said. She’d married him, hadn’t she? Her choice. Wasn’t Dad’s fault he’d lost his land, like millions of others. Dad didn’t say much but Shannon knew how much it had cut him up. At least he had a job. At least they weren’t starving. Grace should be sticking up for him, not running him down all the time. But that had never been Grace’s way, because when you came down to it Grace cared only about Grace.

  Jess

  Jess had started her second year at primary school back in February, when the school opened after the Christmas holidays. Now it was August, a cool day, with rain spitting in the wind. The cane harvest was in full swing and the sky was dark with smoke and swirling embers from the burning trash. Here and there fires flared and ran flickering through the ripe cane, each stalk six feet and more in height, while overhead flocks of predatory birds waited to swoop upon the small creatures driven into the open by the flames.