The Curlew's Eye

by Karen Manton

  Raffy walked down the firebreak with her, noting the camera was always with her these days. Danny, Joel and the other two boys were at the edge of the bank looking down to the car. Ronnie’s tractor was parked where Joel had pulled up when he first showed them the lake. A long chain led from the tractor to the bank. Joel was in diving gear with tanks on his back, holding a yellow-and-blue rope attached to the end of the chain.

  ‘Is it safe?’ Raffy asked Greta, as Danny lowered Joel to the water with a climbing rope.

  The sun was high and the poison water clearer than ever. They watched Joel swim to the car. Danny fed the chain from the bank. Toby helped, bristling with purpose. Greta and Raffy could see Joel moving around the car in slow motion, checking the silt inside. He attached the chain to the tow bar. When he surfaced with a thumbs-up, Danny gave Ronnie a shout. The tractor revved and the chain pulled tight. Griffin shouted. Joel ducked under again to check the chain was secure and swam to the bank. Danny helped him up on the climbing rope. Rex circled them both with wild excitement.

  The poison water is all over him, Greta thought.

  Joel took off his mask and the tanks and peeled the wetsuit down to his waist. Then he showed Toby how to check the chain was ready and signalled to Ronnie. The tractor groaned and pulled. Nothing shifted. Again the tractor revved. Still there was no movement in the water.

  Danny went to talk with Ronnie then returned to the edge of the bank. ‘We’ll try again.’

  The tractor’s engine strained louder. There was a rumbling in the lake. Silt billowed across the steel drums, the bones, the debris on the lake floor. The surface of the water bubbled and spluttered. The back of the car appeared. There was a tug of wills then, between the water and the humans. The tractor moaned. Mud skidded under the huge tyres, while sucking, gurgling noises came from the lake, until finally the water parted and let the car go.

  ‘There she is.’ Danny whistled as it eased over the edge, water gushing from it.

  Ronnie hauled it well clear of the bank. Two deep wheel lines gouged the red dirt. When he stepped down from the tractor everyone converged on the car. Rivulets of mud water laced the rusted shell. Silt and blood, thought Greta. The ground might have been birthing or burying it. Again she remembered those sand cars she and Gavin would sculpt to sit in and wait for the tide.

  ‘Whose car was that?’ Griffin wanted to know.

  ‘Your dad’s.’ Danny circled the car.

  ‘Our dad?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Sure. I thought you knew that already.’ Danny looked through the driver’s window to Greta.

  She shrugged and smiled at him. She’d assumed Joel had told the children about it.

  ‘Stand back,’ she warned Toby, who was too close to the car that dribbled poison water.

  ‘The seats are like skeletons,’ he said.

  He meant the front ones. They’d lost all their padding. Only the rusted metal frames remained. One was leaning forward, the other had fallen sideways on its mate.

  ‘Nice work, thanks,’ Joel said to Ronnie, moving around to the open boot. He peered inside.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Greta asked.

  ‘Nothing. Just seeing what’s here.’

  ‘You’re stressing me out with that poison water.’ She frowned at the drops dotting his skin.

  ‘One-off like this doesn’t count.’ He gave her one of those smiles that knew it mightn’t convince but would try anyway. ‘It’s sustained exposure.’

  ‘You need to wash it off.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I will.’

  Ronnie shook hands with Joel and Danny, and nodded at Greta before leaving. She moved away a little from the two brothers at the car.

  They were solemn, remembering their youth.

  As the tractor started up and chugged off to the firebreak, Toby and Griffin ran after it, urging their uncle to keep up.

  Danny sprinted to catch them, but soon dropped out of the race. ‘Old age!’ he called back to his brother.

  Joel didn’t seem to hear. He was taking off the diving suit.

  ‘It was a burn and dump then, was it?’ Greta asked him. ‘Insurance scam?’

  He laughed at the idea of insurance, and picked up the chain lying like a fat snake next to him. She helped him drag it across to the four-wheel drive and hoist it into the back.

  ‘What was the upgrade?’

  He found a laugh. ‘Another vamped-up ute from Seb.’

  He seemed fatigued by the dive, the drama of the car, the weight of the chain.

  ‘Will you finish the fence?’ She looked down to where it stopped further along the bank.

  ‘Guess so.’

  Only now did Greta register that Raffy hadn’t left with his brothers. He was leaning against a rock draped with Joel’s wetsuit, arranging empty cicada shells across his singlet.

  She felt a dart of guilt that she’d not been counting heads. No wonder things slip from you, a voice in her said.

  ‘I like your cicada brooches,’ she told him.

  ‘Will you give me a lift up the hill?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘If you help your dad pack up,’ she said. ‘I’m going to take a few photos.’

  There were five left on the roll of film. Her fingers had a tremor. Raffy’s chatter floated behind her. He lifted the air tanks with Joel and carried the wetsuit to him, draped across both arms like a gift.

  33

  Do you know where we’re going? Greta asked Joel.

  ‘Always,’ he replied as he drove along.

  Danny was leading the way on his dirt bike along mud tracks that disappeared into grass and came out again. As he pulled up at a weatherboard house with a Land Rights sign leaning against it, Sandy came around to meet him.

  ‘Aunty Hazel said you lot might come by for a swim.’

  When he suggested she come with them, she laughed and leaned her arms on the children’s window.

  ‘Keep an eye on those grown-ups—no leavin’ me cigarette butts, no beer bottles.’

  ‘Not us!’ Raffy laughed.

  ‘And no jumping from the waterfall!’

  She gave the car a friendly thud with her fist as they ambled away.

  They passed a billabong covered with green lily pads, and purple flowers rising through the water, open to the sun. Griffin spotted a white-bellied sea eagle clutching a limp magpie goose. It hopped to a low branch to watch them pass, then bent to its prey.

  Danny was waiting for them further along by a creek. They walked single file beside the rollicking water, through a narrow rock gorge where the stones were deep purple with jagged white lines. The boys stopped to pick up glinting mica, or marvel at a curled leaf spun into a cocoon and hanging from one thread. The sound of falling water drew them on into rainforest, where damp tree roots sprawled across the ground and above was a mosaic of green. Danny and Joel led the way, remembering. They passed old figs with swarming cable roots and were brushed by glossy dark leaves. Greta felt as if she was passing through a womb. Before she expected it, the shadows opened out onto a rock pool. Spray drifted to them from the surge of white water tumbling over the cliff.

  They were all silenced, as if to speak might break some element of its beauty.

  Then Danny dived into the water and Toby went after him, with Griffin quick to follow.

  ‘Are you sure we’re allowed here?’ Raffy asked Joel from the edge. ‘I don’t want to be illegal.’

  ‘Your father’s been illegal all his life,’ Danny spurted water from his mouth, ‘but not as illegal as me.’

  Joel took Raffy in on his shoulders, saying, ‘Aunty Hazel wouldn’t say yes if she meant no.’

  Greta went in after them. Griffin called to her to follow him up rocks to a ledge behind the falls. Joel assured her he and Hazel’s children used to climb up there. Her muscles strained as she made her way from one rock to the next. Griffin grabbed her hand to help her up the last step onto the ledge. They stood side by side in a veil of spray, the rush of water mesmer
ising them both.

  ‘If you stare at it long enough,’ said Griffin, ‘then look at the rockface, you’ll see the stones moving.’

  She tried it, this water illusion, seeing rocks dance to the same rhythm as the falls. Joel appeared beside them with a grin. He stood with his toes curled over the rock ledge. He seemed different here, stripped of that heaviness she’d noticed in him over the weeks. Cleansed of the poison water, she thought, come home to some point in himself. They didn’t speak, there was only the pounding of the waterfall, the soft spray. She breathed it in beside him and felt she could face anything. There was no time, they could be the only people in the world; protected by these rocks and their fierce curtain of water.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Joel asked her.

  ‘I want to leap into it.’

  His arms slid around her and his chin hooked over her shoulder. ‘Not without me, but not here.’

  He kissed her shoulder. Drops of water hung from his eyelashes, beaded his skin.

  ‘Danny says a tourist drowned here once,’ Griffin’s voice interrupted. ‘They shouldn’t’ve been here without asking.’ He paused to check both parents were listening. ‘But that’s not why they died. It was because they forgot they couldn’t swim.’ He stepped aside to see the rock pool below. ‘How can you forget you can’t swim?’

  He left his parents to wonder on that while he explored a ferny alcove behind them.

  Afterwards, when they came out of Hazel’s track to the road, Joel stopped the car so they could farewell Danny. His paniers bulged either side of the bike, bespattered with good-luck mud, he said. He’d wanted to make the waterfall the last place he was with them before leaving. An old favourite spot, Joel had explained. And a soft spot for Sandy, Greta suspected. The children held onto him, begging him to stay.

  ‘See you when I’m lookin’ at you then, bro,’ said Joel.

  ‘Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you,’ said Danny, stretching on his gloves.

  ‘Hug each other!’ Griffin commanded, and they did for a brief moment, before racing to grab the other’s arm for a lighthearted punch.

  Greta went to him last. ‘Goodbye you,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks for everything.’ He eased the helmet over his head, but kept the visor up to add, ‘You can tell Joel if you want.’

  She nodded, and then said, ‘I’m not the judge of you.’

  Danny pulled down the visor and started up the bike. She gave him the peace sign. The children ran after him as he sped away and were met by a curtain of rain that had passed over their uncle and settled in above the four-wheel drive.

  The rain became a deluge through the afternoon. The children complained that nothing was the same now Danny was gone. About four o’clock Greta drove them out to Tori’s for a last sleepover. As they crossed the floodway sunlit arcs of water fountained up beside the car.

  ‘This’ll be it for goodbye to you lot,’ Tori had said on the phone. They were going to Bali in a few days for the rest of the holidays. ‘Send me a postcard from this Fishermans Creek place, so I know it’s real.’

  When they arrived at the bridge on Tori’s road Greta understood her friend wasn’t joking about flying to the airport in a mustering helicopter. It was a new river, swollen into a swift body of brown current and white foam, carrying branches, leaves, flotsam. The wet had truly arrived. The bridge was submerged and water lapped up either side of the road. The give-way sign showed only the word Give. Tori, Axel, Barnie and Skye waved from the other side. Jed put-putted across in a tinnie. As Toby, Raffy and Griffin climbed in, Axel yelled out a warning about crocodiles. Raffy kept his eyes on Greta all the way across the river.

  On the way home she passed errant creeks cutting through bushland, rollicking over grass and between trees. The land was remapping itself. She wanted all the creeks and the rivers to rise, to cut off the property like an island and keep her there in a secret time and space where no outsider could enter.

  She drove in along the track with this thought, that they could remain here, cocooned, witnessing a transformation of land and water in which every human element, construct and invention might be cleansed, carried away, submerged.

  She found Joel sitting at her table with a mug of tea. He’d spread out Magdalen’s chimes in front of him like he might dismember them or was looking for a sign in them. There was a restlessness in him.

  ‘We’ll paint those walls in the cabin tomorrow?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  When the rain eased he set off to work on the new lake fence.

  Greta set up her beads and wires. She felt compelled to make bracelets, as if by making new ones she was expelling the counterfeit ones made by Devil and Vadik.

  Of the three brothers, Vadik had been the clown once, she’d heard Joel telling the children.

  ‘What happened?’ Griffin had asked.

  ‘He made friends with Devil,’ Joel replied. ‘Devil ate him up.’

  Greta cut a long piece of wire and started threading on beads. She kept arranging and rearranging colours and combinations. The design eluded her, like obstinate clues that wouldn’t line up. In the end she left them, escaping to the darkroom to develop her prints of the dredged-up car. All five were good enough, she thought.

  She had four pegged on the line when the strangest thing happened. As she adjusted the focus on the enlarger for the last negative, she saw—for a fleeting second—Gavin and Magdalen sitting in the car. They were in colour, though the car was black-and-white. Gavin was driving with a look of sheer exhilaration, as if speeding down the highway. Magdalen laughed beside him, her mother’s shawl twisted as a scarf around her neck. The embroidered red tulip rested at her throat.

  Focus, blur, focus. They were there and then not.

  There was a bang in the distance, like a shot. The orange safe light flickered on and off. Greta finished exposing the negative and hurried the paper over to the developer. The safe light fizzed off. She slipped outside.

  Already it was dusk. The four-wheel drive hadn’t returned. She went to the fuse box and shone a torch inside. None of the fuses had tripped.

  ‘Must be a problem out at the transformer,’ she told Rex. ‘Where’s Joel?’

  He thumped his tail eagerly.

  She lit her father’s lantern on the verandah. The full moon was easing up over the escarpment. Microbats darted around, flying in close and out to the darkness again. She cupped her hands and called Joel’s name. No answer, and no sign of him over at the cabin, or of torchlight at the homestead.

  She decided to cook a curry.

  ‘If he’s not back soon,’ she told Rex as she lit a fire in the oven, ‘we might have to go looking.’

  Rex kept his eye on her through the flywire door while she chopped vegetables and meat and scraped them into the cast-iron pot. When it was sitting snug in the middle of the coals in the oven she made her decision. She whistled to the dog and, tying him up on a long rope, promised to return soon and told him to guard the house. If she could trust him not to run off after wallabies she would have taken him.

  A search for torches led to nothing. Joel probably had the best one and the boys kept losing the others. The phone torch would have to do. She took the lantern as well.

  The track was slippery, the red dirt embossed with watermarks. On either side of her the slender blue-green stalks of spear grass were knee-high. A python with a jet-black head and a creamy brindle body emerged onto the track. She let it pass. The light and the dark, the light and the dark, she heard Vivian say. Beside her the barbs on the new fence glinted in the moonlight. She followed its taut strength down around the poison water to the raised car.

  It was an eerie shell in the moonlight. The four-wheel drive was further along the bank where the unfinished fence ended. Joel was sitting on the other side of the wreck, looking over the water. His shirt glowed unnaturally white. The scarred arm was alive, a rush of silver feathers.

  The damp earth was soft underfoot. Spider’s eyes glinted
up at her like stars. He jumped a little when she sat next to him on a low, flat stone. The lantern sucked air in the quiet. Insects flickered against the glass. Quietness settled around them, drew them in. She felt the presence of the lake, the same breathing that Maria and Magdalen had known.

  ‘I never really told you the story of this.’ His hand lightly brushed the marks on his arm.

  ‘The car fire,’ she replied.

  He kept his hand on the scars.

  ‘I always thought it happened on the highway,’ she added.

  She saw in her mind the car twisted around the tree near the mango farm.

  ‘It was here,’ he said. ‘By the lake.’

  ‘Here?’

  She was shocked. Here! She’d been wrong and wrong again. From thinking it was the highway to believing what Trapper had told Toby.

  His boot kicked the dirt, cleared a space.

  ‘We were clowning around—pissed. Just over there.’

  His hand indicated the spot. He licked his lips; she could hear the dryness of his mouth, smell it.

  ‘Me and Gabe, Danny. A couple of others. I’d run the car dry the day before. We came back with fuel. I started filling it, but Danny couldn’t hold the funnel straight. I tipped the jerry can too far and dropped it. Petrol everywhere. We were laughing, carrying on; legless, you know. I flaked out on the back seat to get myself together. The others were mucking around outside. Someone must’ve dropped a cigarette. Bang. The car was alight. Real fast, the whole thing on fire. And there was a thumping behind the back seat, right by my head, coming from the boot. Gabe had me by the leg to pull me out. I said, “Wait, wait,” because I couldn’t work out that other noise. It was always hard to shut that boot. You’d slam it and two seconds later it’d pop open. When we’d arrived it was up. A couple of us jumped on it real hard, to close it. None of us thought someone’d be in there.’

  Greta stared at the moonlight shimmer on the lake, the stiff arms of the drowned tree.

  ‘It was Magdalen,’ he said.