The Curlew's Eye

by Karen Manton

‘If I could light up Lennie’s old fire bowl, I’d melt those wrong bracelets to nothing,’ he said.

  Greta slipped away to the new fence and pressed down one of the wires to duck through and stand at the edge of the bank. The water was very still. Above, wisps of cloud wafted downwards in golden shafts. Others curled and drifted across the darker presences behind. The sky and the water had identical dancers, moving in mirror opposites.

  She took the bracelet and spun it out across the lake. It skimmed close to the water and sank.

  ‘Not long till you’re standing at your water’s edge,’ she heard him say.

  ‘No, not long.’

  They left after breakfast as the sun climbed above the escarpment. Greta locked up and put the keys under a rock behind the front steps for Gabe. She’d left him the coffee pot on the bench.

  The car horn tooted. Raffy called for her to hurry up. She took a last look at the escarpment and went to them. The children had stacked highway entertainment underfoot. Frank’s tin was hidden in the toolbox strapped behind the back seat. Rex jumped up beside him.

  ‘How long till Fishermans Creek?’ asked Griffin.

  ‘Five days, a week maybe,’ said Joel. ‘If the car doesn’t break down.’

  The track out was muddy; wet dirt spattered the windows as they splashed through puddles. The land was luminous green. A black-necked stork paused its red-legged step through flooded ground. Sunlight glinted on its emerald neck.

  ‘Are you excited to be taking us to the beach where you lived?’ Raffy asked Greta.

  ‘Of course,’ she lied.

  It felt so much more like dread. Like she was on a conveyor belt with no way off. And the car was a time capsule, crammed with its humans, dog and gear, and their past, present, future. Depending on how you look at it, Griffin would say. He spoke up now, ‘It’s been a good home to us this place, hasn’t it?’

  Raffy leaned forward and tapped Greta’s arm. ‘Where’s Magdalen?’

  Greta opened the glove box and passed the photo to him. He pressed the frame against the window.

  ‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ he called softly.

  The green grasses passed by the window and stones flicked up at the car. Greta thought of Magdalen running after her brother, calling for him. He would stop and wait for her, scratching his legs where grass seeds had spiked his skin.

  Rex pushed his head past Toby’s shoulder to rest his snout on the open window.

  At the gate Raffy handed Greta the photo. She shut the girl away in the glove box and stepped out to open the gate. A pheasant coucal was on the ground with its tail feathers displayed.

  ‘Goodbye!’ Raffy called to it.

  ‘You’re nothing to a pheasant coucal!’ Toby protested.

  As Joel drove through, the bird leaped up to a tree branch and squawked farewell.

  Greta dragged the gate across wet stones, wound the chain into place and snapped the padlock shut. She waited a moment, hand on the top rung, secretly willing Magdalen to show herself one last time. The image of the girl in the long, green grasses had taken a hold. The ever-present sister, following, following. As a human child and then a spirit one.

  She looked back up the dirt track that had carried her family in the first night.

  Clear as Magdalen’s voice she heard the words. I only ever wanted to look after him.

  The angel shadow.

  35

  A week later they pulled into Fishermans Creek. Joel drove down the main street and parked at the end where there was a sea wall and steps down to the beach. Next to them was an old bluestone church enclosed in a white picket fence. It faced the sea and a windbreak of pine trees. A labyrinth had been raked in the sandy soil under the pines. The paths were scattered with pine needles. The boys tumbled out of the car, Rex on their heels.

  ‘Did you ever go there?’ Joel asked Greta, gesturing to the church.

  ‘Out of hours. My friend Cassie’s father was the priest.’

  He turned his back on it and sauntered to the pine trees. Raffy was on the beach building a sandcastle. Toby was at the shoreline, jeans rolled up. He yelled out that the water was freezing. Greta pushed open the gate into the churchyard. A sign on the church said Community Hall. The green copper bell was still on its post. Gavin and Greta had been given detention once for sneaking out of the school next door to ring it. I am supposed to punish you, Vivian had said and left a chocolate on the bench.

  The door was as heavy as Greta remembered it. Only a few pews were left, pushed against the white walls. All the other trappings of a church had been removed except for the altar. Too difficult to extract, she guessed.

  Hard to believe she was standing where Gavin’s coffin had been, with him inside, like and not like himself. His eyelids sunken. His forehead a cold stone. She’d dared to touch the hairs at his wrist, snip a curl from behind his neck with her dead mother’s nail scissors.

  ‘Quick,’ Cassie Blake said then, because Gavin’s mother had arrived for a last viewing before the funeral.

  Greta was not allowed to attend. Cassie whisked her out through a side door into the laneway before Mr Blake came to comfort Gavin’s mother. Greta ran off, clutching the white spider conch shell in her pocket like it was her friend’s bony hand. She’d forgotten to leave it with him.

  Griffin’s far-off voice called her outside. He’d reached the centre of the labyrinth. Joel was walking an outer path. Greta started it herself.

  The thing about a labyrinth, Janna would say, is there’s a clear way out. Forward. It’s not a maze.

  Joel drew up close to her on the path next to hers, caught her hand, let it go again. He gathered speed and leaped over into the path Griffin was on and raced him to the end.

  When Greta finished she stood between the pine trees. They whispered high up in their branches and she realised she’d missed them. On the beach Toby was infuriating Raffy by tunnelling through his sandcastle. It imploded.

  ‘You’re a wrecker!’ shouted Raffy.

  Toby danced around him laughing until Joel started towards him.

  Janna’s place was a nine-acre block about twelve kilometres out of town. She came out to greet them. A magpie carolled welcome from the balcony railing.

  Janna squeezed Greta tight. ‘I haven’t seen you for so long.’

  They spent a moment remembering each other, smiling at their older faces, flecks of grey hair. After bringing in bags and setting up the children to sleep in the living room, and herself and Joel in the spare room, Greta unwrapped the photo frames.

  ‘Perfect, perfect,’ Janna smiled, handing her a cup of chai. ‘Sarah will pick them up tomorrow. She’s organising the show, she’ll love them. She’s keen to meet you.’ She quietened, taking in the homestead images. ‘You know you can stay here, come to the opening.’

  ‘We’ll move on before then,’ Greta said. ‘But thanks.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anyone left here who’d remember you,’ Janna said.

  ‘Art shows aren’t my scene, even friendly amateur ones.’

  Greta set her father’s tin on the windowsill.

  ‘You’re taking him to the quiet inlet?’

  Greta nodded. ‘Tomorrow. I’ve booked a boat.’

  ‘You waste no time.’

  ‘I’ll settle him first and then concentrate on those boxes. Gives me the chance to visit him if I want.’ She sipped her tea. ‘Show me this shipping container.’

  They walked through the house paddock, past candlebark gum trees and red gums with burls and long, peeling strips of bark. A brown kookaburra laughed the old way Greta knew.

  The door to the container opened with a screech. A musty, damp breath exhaled from the dim space inside. Greta shone her torch across boxes stacked to the ceiling and furniture draped in old sheets. She lifted a cover from an armchair. It had tilted to the side. The leg was chewed short. Deposits of wood dust spotted the floor. Behind it her father’s fishing nets were disintegrating.

  It gave her a surreal fe
eling to see her mother’s photo boxes. She remembered how they’d lined the shelves in their house. Now they were damaged from damp and insects. Greta’s heart sank. The prints were stuck together and eaten away. When she touched them silverfish streamed from the sides. The next box fell apart in her hands. Shreds of paper slipped out in a waterfall of powdery dust.

  Janna covered her mouth in horror. ‘Oh God, Greta, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have left them here like this. I don’t know why I did.’

  ‘You had to leave, that’s why,’ said Janna.

  ‘Yes, I had to leave.’

  She felt a surge of guilt to discover corroding cameras and mould-spotted lenses. On the back shelf was a last box of black- and-white photos. She managed to prise a few prints free. Among them was a self-portrait of Vivian looking out a window. Light was cast over her face, but her body was part of the room’s shadows. Which window was it, Greta tried to remember. She found one photo of her father’s fishing boat. None of him. At the bottom of the pile was a photo of a small beach cave set into sandstone rock. Vines dangled over the entrance. An unreadable sign stood to the left. The photo had a haunted, timeless look. It could have been taken years ago or yesterday. There was no date on the back.

  She took the photos of the cave, her mother and her father’s boat and said, ‘Not much point keeping on looking for now. Most of this is for the tip.’

  The river was a few kilometres from Janna’s place. They pulled up not long after sunrise. Greta wanted to avoid people. They were the only ones in the car park. The children followed her to the remains of the riverside cottage her father had loved and her mother hated. Greta felt herself standing between them, feet parted evenly in the sand. The house looked as if it had tried to walk to the sea.

  The front room had nosedived and broken free from its other half. Sand mounds had gathered inside. Orange tape surrounded the site. A council notice flapped in the wind: Condemned.

  The cottage was the last in a row of five fishing shacks and sheds on a rib of land that edged the river. They were all abandoned. Vandalised by humans and the weather. The river had changed its course, widened, eaten away at the earth.

  In front of the collapsed house a finger of land jutted out to sea. The water was a confused swirl there, where the river and the sea met to converse, to pull with and against each other.

  ‘Did you ever bring me here?’ asked Raffy.

  She looked down at him and remembered her own salty innocence.

  ‘Yes. You were two the last time.’

  Raffy had sat on the floor and clutched the old man’s toes. Her father had looked at her with the sea still shifting in his eyes. Griffin had asked to see through the binoculars. Frank drew his grandson in close and held them up for the boy at first because they were heavy. In the end he said, ‘Keep them.’

  ‘We’ll be back, Dad,’ she’d promised.

  But they hadn’t made it in time.

  Rex barked, jolting her back to now. She breathed in the place, the beach to her right where the land swept around in an arc of sand and the sea churned hidden currents into waves. The calmer town beach was around the point. It had seemed far off to her once, another world in the distance.

  Behind her, Toby dragged a belt of sand-coated kelp and called his brothers for tug-of-war. Rex leaped around him.

  Raffy ignored them. His gaze was on a flying pelican. He ran underneath it, arms held out like wings. Griffin didn’t respond either. He was at the river.

  ‘Careful, Griffin!’ she called out.

  Careful of the deep, swift river with its deadly pull beneath the surface.

  I can feel it snatching pieces of me away, Vivian used to whisper.

  Greta let the wind push her in Griffin’s direction. He was inspecting her father’s old jetty. It had sunk a little way underwater and was ensnared by reeds.

  ‘Don’t try to walk on it,’ she cautioned him.

  He crouched to find a flat stone and skipped it out over the water. A moorhen came running and jumped into the adjacent reeds where her chicks peeped.

  Joel whistled to Greta on his way across the sand. He was carrying the tin.

  They all walked upstream to a pontoon. It was much sturdier than the one she’d known. Made to last, her father would say. How strange to be on a floating platform, holding him this way. It was like waiting for a boat to the underworld with a temporary pass.

  ‘Can I take a photo?’ Griffin asked.

  She nodded and he took the camera.

  He crept up behind a cormorant on a pylon drying its wings. She heard the shutter click. The bird didn’t move. Clever boy, she thought. Frank would have liked to see it. He would have liked to see all three children here where the river and the sea met.

  The burbling engine of a vessel came through the quiet. The sound of it and the whiff of fuel clothed her in an old self, the child that used to stand here.

  The boat was called Kingfisher and the owner, Sol, was cheery enough. Crab pots, fishing lines, buckets and nets were stacked on one side of the deck. The engine room had a slim berth in it. He didn’t say much but was happy for the boys and Joel to stand with him. Greta sat with her back to the engine room and her father’s tin beside her.

  They went upstream to a bend in the river and entered a narrow estuary lined with rushes. A pelican flew ahead of them.

  Sol manoeuvred the vessel alongside a small jetty. He helped each of them step out over the gap between the boat and the pier. The jetty shuddered under the children’s feet as they hurried ahead, calling out thanks. The boat honked a farewell.

  Greta led the way along a track through bushland.

  ‘Are you sure there’s not quicksand here?’ Raffy asked.

  ‘Positive,’ said Greta.

  He hooked his finger through a belt loop in her jeans because both her hands were carrying the tin. It seemed heavier than usual. She wondered if it was because she was about to release him.

  The beach was a quiet inlet. She’d often camped here with her father. They’d fish and melt marshmallows in the campfire and lie back to watch shooting stars. The dunes she’d known had eroded to low platforms. The beach was strewn with fallen trees weathered to a silver grey by rain and wind, sand and water.

  ‘Do you think Grandpa will mind that it’s not his beach near the river?’ Raffy wanted to know.

  ‘You can’t own a beach,’ growled Toby.

  ‘It’s all the same water in the end.’ Greta led them across hot sand to the shoreline where they could walk without burning their feet.

  ‘You could’ve done this over the side of the boat,’ Toby pointed out.

  ‘I’d rather stand with him.’

  She found her spot in the end, where a dead tree’s branches met lapping waves.

  Joel followed her into the water. Griffin kept by her side. Raffy walked behind, placing his feet in the dents she left on the sandy floor. Toby waited at the shore, his toes just touching the foam edges of a broken wave.

  ‘I don’t want them sticking to me,’ he said about the ashes.

  Rex stayed with him, darting left and right and then stopping to watch Greta.

  The sun burned her shoulders. A faint smell of bushfire smoke wafted in. She waded into the water, relieved at the coolness, the clarity of the sea.

  ‘Stand upwind of me,’ she told the others.

  If she’d thought ahead she might have brought some words. Instead she looked to the horizon, that thin blue line between sea and sky that had always fascinated her. The line that doesn’t exist.

  A Pacific gull glided low to the water to skim up a fish and fly on.

  It was enough. Frank wouldn’t have wanted more.

  The stream of ash sifted quickly down. Sand meeting sand.

  ‘Now they will find each other,’ said Raffy. ‘Vivian and Frank.’

  He kept watch over the water for his grandmother’s spirit. She would come through the water and find her man. Gri
ffin patted the surface of the water softly. Joel put his hand on Greta’s shoulder.

  She rinsed out the tin. She was tempted to let it sink and become the home of sea creatures. Toby would tell her she was littering. She held it out for Joel to carry. Griffin waited behind. His left hand was raised. Her mother’s broken necklace was threaded between his fingers. He smiled at her and let the beads slip into the water.

  ‘Frank might like them,’ he said quietly, without a flicker of guilt.

  They waded back to shore side by side.

  Toby gamely checked inside the emptied tin while his parents loitered at the shoreline. The breeze picked up, and with it a gentle swell. Waves curved, sighed, broke, pulled back and made themselves again.

  ‘Well,’ said Joel, ‘we have buried them.’

  Greta smiled but didn’t answer. The hot sun made her cheeks tingle. She turned to look at the dunes, the melaleuca, the banksias. She half expected to see Magdalen there, watching. Vivian even, with her bright headscarf. Or her father in his green-and-black flannel shirt, moving along in that steady, stooped-shoulder walk.

  They are never buried, she thought. They are only set free, or not.

  36

  After Greta’s last run to the op shop and the tip she parked at the beach wall and took the main steps down to the sand. Joel was there with the children. Toby and Griffin were floating on lilos near the lone pylons of a long-gone jetty.

  ‘Don’t let them go out too far,’ she reminded Joel. ‘There’s tricky currents.’ She licked her lower lip. It was cracked and peeling in this dry, hot weather.

  Raffy tapped her arm. ‘Shut your eyes!’ He pressed a secret into her hand. ‘Open!’

  It was an abalone shell, rough side facing her.

  ‘You’d think it was nothing,’ he said, and flipped it over to reveal the pearl and rainbow shimmers on the other side. ‘You can have it,’ he said. ‘It’s my gift to you.’

  Like the girl with her amethyst and her insights. You have lost someone. Someone very young.

  She called out her thanks, and then said to Joel, ‘I think I’ll go for a walk around the point.’