Cherry Beach

by Laura McPhee-Browne

  Hetty was there a lot those first few weeks and needed to sleep when she wasn’t, so I walked around alone each day trying to find somewhere I thought I could see myself working, looking up at things and counting the weird dogs everyone seemed to have with them on brightly coloured leashes. It was the beginning of May by then, the weather was warming up and on my own I got to know how beautiful spring could be in Toronto. Trinity Bellwoods was bare one day and when I came back the next, flowers had bloomed everywhere. They grew where no one had planted them, like our russet-coloured ones back home, but they were blue and purple and pink, like lollies.

  I walked all the way to High Park one morning, huffing along in a parka until I had to take it off and tie it around my waist. I had never been in such a beautiful park—it was impossible not to get lost, because it was so wild and thick, and there were hills and large neat green spaces and thickets where dogs were allowed to jump and run. I wished so much that Hetty was there; it seemed less special on my own, though I was trying hard to be happy and in the moment and free, like everyone around me seemed to be.

  I sat down on a bench in the middle of nowhere—tall thin fresh trees standing all around, and a damp forest floor—and had a little cry. I was glad I was there, in High Park, in Toronto. It wasn’t that. It was just hard sometimes to keep smiling, to keep moving and looking and trying, when you sensed you were being left behind.

  One night I was in our room in bed early, trying to sleep, when someone knocked quietly on the door.

  ‘Ness, are you there?’ It sounded like Steph, who had a voice that was dry and close. ‘We’re having drinks downstairs if you’re awake.’

  I loved how the Canadian accent came out gently, no matter who was speaking. It was easy to say yes, to say no, to a voice that didn’t ask anything of you. In Australia I avoided conversation to avoid the commitment that came with it. Here, I felt more like I could speak. I sat up and said I was coming.

  In the living room there were bodies lying or sitting on every bit of comfortable space. I was handed a mug of wine by Robin, who was wearing a pretty cardigan that looked like it was made out of lichen or wool mist, if there were such a thing. I reached out to touch it, then asked if I could, the wrong way around. He laughed and rubbed the sleeve against my cheek.

  Robin was so beautiful he seemed to glow when he walked into the kitchen in his pyjamas in the morning or when you came upon him in the hallway. He was the only one of us other than Dill who could pick up Whitney—I had tried every day since we had moved in, and she was only now starting to let me tug and scratch at the soft hair behind her ears. Robin had pale hair and pale skin and pale eyes and thick, dark eyebrows that moved more than the rest of him did. He touched and kissed often, and never interrupted, only speaking after he had waited and heard properly what the other person was saying. His careful attention made me feel a little anxious, though I wished that it didn’t.

  ‘Were you sleeping?’ he asked, smiling and watching me.

  ‘Just resting,’ I answered.

  He pulled me down to sit next to him on one of the big green couches. It sank low, and smelt like moss. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. I took a gulp of the wine, which was sweet and cold. It travelled through me, lighting up parts along the way. I could see Hetty wasn’t here, and for once I was glad. Maybe I could forge my own friendship with the house and all the people that visited it so often. It was tiring to need Hetty by my side. Especially now that she was so often nowhere near me.

  I sat and listened to the voices of everyone—all different but all with the same lilt. It seemed like I might be able to sit without talking for a while. It was nice to be warm and down deep with the fabric all around and voices keeping me company. There were people I had seen and met before, and others I hadn’t.

  A very attractive girl with long, tangled ash-blond hair was sitting on the floor opposite me. When she laughed I noticed she had a gold tooth, nestled back behind her front ones, and that she was a little too on, like a supermarket bulb. I watched her until she looked over at me, probably feeling the heat of my eyes on her face, and then I pretended I was lost in thought. I was looking at the edge of someone else when I heard a voice ring out above the others. I looked over and saw the gold-toothed girl looking straight at me, her eyes hard and clear.

  ‘Are you Ness?’

  I nodded, after a little while, and tried to smile. Sometimes when I was nervous and I tried to say something or move my face it was as if the corners of my mouth were being pulled back and forth, up and down by an invisible string, like I was a puppet and someone else controlled me. I held my hand up and a little bit over my face and looked back, trying to sit larger against the sagging foam.

  ‘Where’s Hetty, then?’ the girl asked.

  Someone laughed, then someone else. I couldn’t tell if everyone had stopped talking and the laughing was because of me and Hetty and because it was embarrassing that I was never apart from her because I relied on her so much and needed her even though she didn’t need me.

  Robin touched my leg and looked over at the girl, who was taking a long drink from a tall beer can.

  ‘Hetty’s not here, Sylvie. Ness is our favourite, anyway.’

  I smiled with embarrassment at how untrue that must have been, and Robin scooted an arm around my waist and leaned in, whispering hot in my ear. ‘Ignore her. Sylvie loves being a bitch.’

  Sylvie, was all I could think. Sylvie. It was a beautiful name. Hetty wouldn’t like her, but wouldn’t say she didn’t. It would be one of those times her nose would wrinkle up, pleats appearing on either side of the length of it. No narrow words, no heated opinion. Just that disapproving nose. I heard words again around me that I didn’t need to make sense of and felt Robin next to me, his voice responding slowly to questions and suggestions. The wine warmed against my leg. I let the voices fade.

  WASH

  the water disturbed by a moving boat

  One morning I was lying in bed on my side, my eyes slightly open, watching the leaves of the Norway maple outside our window shimmer with green and sun. Hetty stirred next to me, sat straight up and yawned. She looked down and shook me a little with both hands, leaning in to whisper in my ear, ‘Let’s go to the islands.’

  Her breath was cosy against my face and I was tired, but I sat up straight too and smiled. I’d been so scared that she had stopped wanting to do things together, just the two of us: that our time had passed again.

  The Toronto Islands were close to the mainland—a few bits of land that had dropped from the mouth and been forgotten about. You could get there on a small ferry that didn’t take very long, and we had heard there were houses there and pretend beaches, places where people sunbathed nude and drank tallboys of beer on blankets. As we walked down Spadina, down the hill that eventually led to the dock, Hetty told me what she knew about the various islands already, facts from the people she worked with mixed with things she had read when she googled behind the bar at night.

  ‘People live on the islands—Torontonians, or Toronto Islanders maybe they’re called? It’s hard to get a house there, though. You can’t buy one. You have to go into a ballot and then you get to rent.’

  ‘That sounds ideal.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Hetty said. ‘And it’s pretty hippie over there—to live—I’ve heard. Like, you can’t just have a pool and a four-wheel-drive and go waterskiing. You have to respect the culture that already exists.’ She stopped to pull at her ponytail, taking out a bobby pin and putting it between her teeth while she tied her hair up again. ‘It’s nice.’

  I could feel the wind coming off the water as we crossed over the bridge that stood above Lake Shore Boulevard and ducked through the bushes to walk along the bike path. The water of Lake Ontario shimmered in the near distance. Hetty was smiling when I looked over at her. I loved Toronto just then, and the feeling of being in a place where you lived but didn’t come from, where you were essentially invisible. We could explore without having to be t
ourists, and pretend we were locals until we opened our mouths and spoke. We could live without the eyes of people who had known us a long time watching and waiting. I took Hetty’s hand, curling each of my fingers around hers.

  After we had bought our tickets at the terminal, Hetty said she wanted to sit near the water to wait for the ferry. To the side of the gates there was a little spot of grass and we lay down with our bags as pillows. There were so many noises—water splashing stoutly up against land, tyres on bitumen, children screaming, parents laughing and yelling and pleading. I wondered if it was school holidays but couldn’t work out when they might be. The sky above was beautiful, with chubby clouds hanging in little groups as if they were talking to each other: little cliques of clouds and a sun in the middle that warmed my eyelashes. The clouds were prettier here. Even when it was grey the sky seemed perfect.

  The honk of the ferry as it approached the dock was long and swollen. We stayed stretched out on the ground, then slowly gathered ourselves. If Hetty hadn’t been there I would have been rushing. I didn’t like to be late for things: arriving at the last minute after everyone else was settled twisted my insides. Hetty arrived whenever she did with a cute face saying sorry and such lazy grace that no one could blame her.

  I picked up my duffel bag slowly, deliberately, to make sure the day was meditative and I would enjoy it. With Hetty there, hurry clotted and waned. She had always told me that I helped her see more clearly and remember what she needed to do and when. Maybe this was true, but my constant inner paddling dismayed me. Hetty was a piece of grass swaying lightly in any kind of wind. I couldn’t deny that it felt like the happier way.

  We decided to sit outside on the deck, to watch the water and let the wind mess our hair. There weren’t many others coming with us: a few older women in walking boots with kerchiefs at their necks; a solemn young couple and their tiny dog; a family with two little children who were screaming, their small red hands held tight by the parents’ larger ones. There was a feeling moving through the air inside the ferry that I couldn’t put my finger on—a sadness that didn’t involve the heart. I was glad we were sitting outside with the view, and the green smell of lake water.

  ‘I just can’t make myself believe this isn’t the sea,’ Hetty said, leaning over the edge, her face raw. ‘It looks like ocean water. It feels like it when it sprays up on my face.’

  ‘You can’t see the edge of it. That’s the problem,’ I answered, though it didn’t really feel like a problem, but more of a curiosity, an odd fact.

  ‘Oh well. It’s a beautiful lake. A beautiful whatever-it-is.’ Hetty spread her arms out a little in the hard air, and turned to grin at me.

  As the ferry moved slowly across the water Hetty brought out a bottle of rum, the label eaten half away. She swigged and passed it to me and I followed, the liquid burning down my throat and into my chest like a tiny fire. The bottle was small and we shared the whole thing while Hetty told me about how she felt all sorts of things for Dill, but he didn’t seem interested, and I disagreed and told her how his face moved forward and up and down more when she was there, and sometimes it froze, as if he wasn’t sure quite what to do with it. I told Hetty how it felt funny to be in the room with the two of them, with so much heat, and how I reckoned he was actually obsessed with her, and who wouldn’t be.

  She laughed a little, and asked me if I was just saying that, and I told her I wasn’t. I could feel the warmth in my chest fading at the thought of Hetty being in love with someone proper, someone kind and real, because that would really take her away from me. I resigned myself to trying to find someone of my own, someone else, while Hetty told me how she thought about having sex with Dill in the shower and wished he would walk in on her. Then we arrived, and stepped off the ferry, our faces flushed and our hair wild, and we were there on the islands.

  I felt I should ask Hetty more about her plans for Dill, whether she was imagining they would become boyfriend and girlfriend. It seemed almost boring, to be with him, to settle into something, to be contented and slow, but I knew that was probably what she wanted. When I was little, my dad had often told me that I was ‘determined to be miserable’, and I had taken this very seriously. He must have known me best, my father, with his weak chin coated in bristles and his certain voice, because he saw how impossible I really was.

  I didn’t ask Hetty anything more. She let things go, Hetty; she didn’t push conversations if she felt someone wasn’t interested, and though I had never taken advantage of this part of her before, I did that day. It seemed like it would be exhausting to go over it any longer, and I had nothing helpful to offer her. I didn’t know how she could find out if Dill liked her too, though I was pretty sure that he did, that he would have to, if she had shone her eyes in his direction. It wouldn’t be helpful for her to ask me how to do it. Maybe I was burnt out from Sean, from the years of holding Hetty together when a man had pulled her apart. I knew Dill was nothing like Sean, but it didn’t seem to matter.

  A large white cat greeted us at the dock, despite appearing weary of visitors. I leaned down to ask if I could pat it and it sprang away, its big fluffy body moving quicker than I would have thought possible. It was colder here than on the mainland, and the air was slightly wet. We were on Ward’s Island, the part where people lived, because Hetty wanted to see what the houses were like, and the people.

  As we walked up the path towards some buildings that might have been public toilets or a community centre or a shop, I imagined what it would have been like to grow up in a place like this. It was quiet, and the air with its little droplets and occasional puffs of sharp was not like the air in Toronto. The cool seemed to be coming from a bigger sky with more clouds. As a child I would have cycled around here on a little bike, with my hippie island friends, and we would have been able to hide behind the bushes I could see, from our parents and our siblings, and our cats and dogs, and the mainlanders who would have been coming over for a peek, even back then.

  I told Hetty I would have liked to have lived here as a child, and she agreed. We hadn’t seen anything yet, but it felt a little bit special, with the silence and the green all around. The grey-haired women with their kerchiefs had stayed on the ferry for the next stop, as had the teenage couple and the harried family, their expressions making me determined I would never have kids. We were alone.

  Hetty loved the houses. I watched her face as we walked down a sort of street near the water lined with one-storey brick veneers. Most were mute and earthy in their decoration, but one was loud and crowded with sculptures made of forks and a skull as a doorknocker. There was a tabby licking itself on the porch next to a looming Peruvian torch cactus in a black pot, and music coming from within, slightly too loud. That house seemed out of place, and I wondered how tolerant the islanders were to those who moved in and didn’t maintain their home as well as the rest, or had different ideas and tastes.

  I told Hetty there would be an older man somewhere behind those curtains, that brick, with long grey hair and collapsed cheeks from forgetting to eat. He would have won the Toronto Island lottery because he had entered when he was drunk, or as a joke, or because he was quietly insane and made tiny decisions that upheaved his existence all the time. He would talk in grunts that were barely audible, and would own no cats but feed hundreds of them.

  Hetty laughed and nodded so much she fell sideways into one of the trees at the edge of his property, decorated with loops of FRAGILE tape, making me laugh and the cat get up and angrily meow at us to go away. I thought to myself that the old man’s efforts were beautiful.

  We walked a large part of the island that day, the wind in our ears telling us to move forward. Hetty wanted to get to the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, which she had heard was made of crooked bricks and a bright-red door. The occasional person would pass us as we neared the end of the residential section—mostly older men or women with burnt cheeks and practical haircuts. We walked through what seemed to be an abandoned children’s adve
nture park, then past a beautiful, clean area with a fountain and monuments and couples sitting on stone benches.

  On the bushy road nearing Gibraltar we saw groups of teenagers and older hippies trailing along with dogs and blankets and bongs or guitars, one group wrapped up in their coats and carrying an old couch. I could feel that there was life behind the bushes, and I knew that would be where the edges of the island met the water of Lake Ontario.

  At one point we dipped down through an opening in the foliage and a clear view of the water, and walked along the dirty sand. There were men there, lying or sitting on coloured towels, and some of them were naked. They were middle-aged, with pot-bellied stomachs and skinny, vulnerable legs, and when I saw the penis of one of them it looked so small and harmless I didn’t feel anything. Hetty pulled at my arm and I looked at her face, which was big-eyed. She was mouthing Sorry but I shook my head and told her later she hadn’t needed to be. It would have been like being upset about a worm.

  We flopped on a bit of beach that was brown and crunchy, past the nudists and their quiet displays. I wanted to feel close to the environment, so while Hetty lay on the towel she had brought, I lay on the sand itself, picking up a handful and moving it between my thumb and my finger. I wondered why there was sand here, on the edge of a lake. Maybe it had travelled here with the ocean.

  ‘Hey, Hetty, maybe you’re right—I think you are right, actually. This is the ocean. There’s sand and everything.’

  I brought a handful up to my face and let it scatter. It felt cold and heavy against my closed eyes, skin.