Cherry Beach

by Laura McPhee-Browne

‘You always know how to make me feel better,’ Hetty replied. My eyes were still shut, and I was wondering how to open them without the sand getting in.

  ‘It’s so nice to hang out,’ I heard her say, and I brushed the sand from my skin, feeling my heart beat a little faster. I opened my eyes and looked over.

  Hetty was lying on her back on the towel, which she had brought with her from Melbourne, the one that I had seen her dry herself with after swimming since we were young. It was tattered around the edges but intact in a way it really shouldn’t have been after so long. Her legs were bent, one crossed over the other, one skinny foot hanging free.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been around much,’ she said.

  I told her it was okay. It was okay, now that she had acknowledged that it wasn’t really. That was all I needed. I was partly weak, partly docile, partly aware of how much I still needed her. She wouldn’t be pushed away easily, but I didn’t want to try. I believed we had decided to come to Canada together because we were both invested in our friendship, despite my feelings which she knew nothing about, and that since we had been here she had neglected it. I also knew that it wasn’t deliberate, this neglect: it wasn’t purposeful.

  ‘How are you, anyway?’ she asked, studying my face for a few seconds. When Hetty looked at you, it was like she was right there with you—like you weren’t alone.

  ‘I’m fine!’ I answered, in a voice she could have questioned for its quaver.

  ‘Good,’ she said, smiling at me as if she believed it. ‘That’s so good to hear.’

  Later I would wonder what it would be like if Hetty and I had a different kind of friendship, or if we were different people: the kind who laid it all out and hoped for the best. I had been hurt and I hadn’t been okay—not really. But I didn’t tell her. I didn’t want to ask more of her, to tie her down. And I didn’t want a reaction. Instead we questioned, gently, her first and then me, and didn’t try to tether each other. It suited us both, suited our passivity and our fear. But our friendship hadn’t grown in years.

  We ended the day silently, on the ferry back to Marjorie, our hair damp from a long swim in the lake water. Hetty held my hand occasionally and put her chin and then her ear on my shoulder as the water moved beneath us. I could feel her hanging on. We both wanted to be each other’s person, but our bodies were moving apart. She seemed to need me to know it was just a brief change in the current.

  RIP

  cutting through the lines of breaking waves like a river running out to sea

  I got a job at a small, strange cafe across the road from the crystal-ship building of the Art Gallery of Ontario. It was called Cafe Art Song, and was trying to be a place that hung paintings, where people would come and play music, as well as one that served food and drink from a comprehensive menu—sixty-five dishes and fifty different beverages to choose from. It was both overwhelming and underwhelming when I first walked in, and daggy enough for me to feel I could ask about a job without the usual sense of inadequacy.

  They said I could work as much as I wanted. The owner was a tall, cold white guy called Sim who was never there, and my direct supervisor was a tiny woman called Minnie, who seemed never to leave. I couldn’t work out if they were lovers, or a forever-married couple, or whether Minnie was just the kind of person who devoted herself to whatever she was doing and they were merely colleagues with a common interest—the success of this funny place. It didn’t really matter. It was warm and quiet, and I needed money, occupation, distraction: something to make it feel like I was moving again.

  The first few weeks I worked every day, and it quickly became a happy time to walk from our big, messy house up along the lather of Spadina and then right onto Dundas Street, letting the warming air remind me it was nearly summer. We had been in Toronto for two months, and I loved the organised grit of the area where we lived and worked.

  Customers came into Cafe Art Song in trickles, but we kept ourselves busy turning paper napkins into origami swans, and telling each other where we had come from and how we felt about it. Minnie’s parents were Korean, and though she had been born in Canada she told me she felt confused inside—as if she might never feel right in either place, Korea or Canada. The food she cooked for me and the few customers each lunchtime was so fierce and delicate, I wanted Hetty to try it. There was always a small bowl filled with kimchi beside the plate and I ate it slowly, concentrating on the shouty red of it and the bubbles I imagined on my tongue. I pushed out each small thought that came while I sat and ate, and tried to just enjoy.

  One morning Minnie and I were sitting out the front because there was a slip of sun we wanted to catch. It was sugar weather—warmer days but still-cold nights—and somewhere near us sap would be starting to flow from the maple trees. Minnie had made us tall glasses of sweet thick milk and whipped cream so we could pretend we were customers to attract real customers, and we were talking about Australia. Minnie had heard that there were spiders everywhere there, and I was confirming this with a story about the huntsman that had dropped on my head when I was small. She was aghast at the name ‘huntsman’, I could barely believe she had never heard it before, and I was explaining that not all spiders dropped but that these ones did sometimes. All of a sudden, moving through the burning sun was tall Hetty, and after she bent down to hug me I couldn’t grasp what I should say. I had forgotten she even knew where I was working, and she had a friend in tow who looked sharp and pointy, like an arrow.

  ‘Hi, I’m Ness,’ I said finally, standing up and holding out my hand to the girl.

  ‘Hi,’ she replied, hands untouchable in her jeans pockets.

  Hetty told me her friend’s name was Elaine, which sounded old-fashioned and separate from this barbed person standing defiant on the concrete, sun in her eyes and no hand up for shade. I’d never heard of Elaine, but I hadn’t said much to Hetty in weeks—had just listened to her slow breath in the dark next to me after she crawled into bed each night and quickly fell asleep. I told Hetty that Minnie was Minnie and told Minnie that Hetty was Hetty, and they smiled at each other. I was glad to see Hetty, my body suddenly warmer near hers.

  She said they’d come to see me, so they sat on two of the plastic chairs and Minnie went inside to make them sticky milk drinks. I told them they should eat too, wanting to say everything good to Hetty about Minnie’s cooking but worrying Elaine would think me tedious, or artless in my praise. Hetty said she wasn’t hungry and I watched her arms move towards her glasses, the fabric of the jumper hanging over the skinny of her.

  Elaine only seemed to look at me when I wasn’t looking at her and every time I tried to catch her eyes they darted back and forth, like a squirrel. She didn’t smile at any of my half-jokes, though I knew that they weren’t actually funny. She seemed like the type of person who was scornful of sincerity, and back then that was all I had.

  ‘Remind me how you two met?’ I asked. I could pretend I knew what was going on in Hetty’s life and her head if I told myself I already knew that she had a new person.

  Elaine still didn’t look at me, but uncrossed her legs and sat forward a little, moving her eyes up from the ground towards Hetty. I wondered if she was blinking more slowly than people usually blink, or if it was just that tense calm some people had, as if they were daring you to bother. I noticed that she had scars on the inside of her arm near her elbow pit. They were long and white and thick.

  ‘I’m Hetty’s manager,’ Elaine said. She didn’t smile, or move her face at all. ‘At Ronnie’s.’

  ‘Oh, cool! And you guys became friends? That’s great.’

  Elaine finally looked at me. Her eyes were black holes edged with black eyeshadow and short, thick black eyelashes. She didn’t reply.

  I glanced at Hetty, who was grinning at me in that worried way she sometimes did. I picked up my milk and took a long sip through the straw, a sweet waterfall down my throat. I disliked Elaine so much already, I didn’t know how long I could sit there. I couldn’t be rude back, not
in the way she was to me: so carelessly, slightly, as if I didn’t exist. I remembered that I was at work, that I would or should have to go back and do something soon anyway. Hetty couldn’t expect me to stop my shift and speak to her just because she’d finally thought to come by and say hello. She was so fluffy sometimes.

  ‘That’s a Frank Gehry, you know,’ Elaine said, nodding her head at the gallery, where it stood like a big dry ship, beautiful, like it was every day. I hadn’t been inside yet. I’d kept telling myself that I’d go in after work one day and wander around, but it had never actually happened after my shift was over and my hands smelt like sweet flour and my feet were sore from standing.

  We watched the building. It was golden and full of windows and I wanted to live in there. I felt like that every time I looked at it. I wished I had known the name of the architect, known that he was worth mentioning. I would google Frank Gehry when I got home.

  I stood up and picked up my milk glass and Minnie’s. She hadn’t come back out after she had set down the two tall glasses of froth on the table for Hetty and Elaine. I suddenly wanted only to be inside helping her.

  ‘I’d better get back to work, anyway,’ I said, looking at Hetty and not at Elaine.

  ‘Oh, of course—yes—of course,’ Hetty answered, her eyes pleading with me or maybe just wild with fatigue and a lack of something, perhaps safety, which I couldn’t help her with right now.

  ‘Thanks for coming to visit!’ I said, grabbing her hand to squeeze it. It was cold, and felt like recycled paper. I started to walk down the steps towards the cafe and waved.

  ‘Later,’ Elaine said, but I didn’t look over and I didn’t reply. I was sick of being friendly, and of the reminder that one nice thing once in a while was not enough anymore—never had been, though I had pretended for so long. I hoped Hetty would come again without her.

  DAM

  a dam is a barrier

  Since we were young, Hetty had been the one people looked at. Men, women, other children. She captivated them, and I saw that once they were captivated they didn’t want to lose her. This fear of loss sometimes resulted in strange behaviour—girls at school following her around at lunchtime, day after day, as if in a trance; the man behind the counter at the milk bar lost for words whenever she came with me to buy a dollar’s worth of bananas and teeth; my father staring at her and then asking her question after question in our kitchen on the rare times she came to my house, his eyes following her as she moved around, waiting for her glass of orange juice.

  I was never jealous, because I didn’t expect that kind of adoration. The way I looked didn’t capture anyone, and no one seemed to feel the need to let their eyes linger on me, or tell me how impressed they were by my height or my hair or my face. I could see, like everyone else, that Hetty had beauty. I wasn’t jealous, because I was captivated too.

  There is a memory that sticks with me, that I come back to sometimes, of Hetty and me as girls. The memory is of a day about five years after we had met, at a time when our friendship was close and innocent. We were twelve and it was the summer holidays, with many long, languid afternoons stretched out in front of us like a horizon. There is a blurred edge to the memory, and I am unsure why. When I asked Hetty about it over the years, she told me she remembered very little of the day, and seemed to have nothing at all to say about it. I still don’t know whether she had repressed the details, or couldn’t tell me the truth.

  We had pleaded with our parents—my mother, Hetty’s father; both difficult to convince for different reasons—to let us spend the day at Hetty’s uncle Tom’s property in Kangaroo Ground while he was away, and they had agreed, with the proviso that we wear our hats, clean up after ourselves and not swim in the dam. I had realised by this point that parents were terrified of water, of children drowning, of floods and disease, and though we both knew how to swim, Tom’s dam was wide, and deep in the middle. When I had asked my mother if I could go, I saw her anxiety bring her there, to the middle of that dam, where I would flail and start swallowing water, despite my years of swimming lessons and the fact that I never put my body in danger. Hetty’s father was also protective, but in a more extravagant, aggressive way. He had told her he would kill her if she went swimming, though we all knew she would do it, and the threat hung above us that morning after we were left there on our own.

  We spent the morning in Tom’s shack. It was dark inside, with wooden floors and walls and a kindling ceiling, a ruffled bed shy in one corner of the only room. There was a strong smell of must, though it faded quickly, and reminded me of the smell of my sleeping bag after months rolled up and packed away for winter. The only photos on display were of Tom’s sister’s family—Hetty’s mother and Hetty’s siblings and Hetty. They all watched us from frames above the fireplace. I asked Hetty to tell me about her uncle, curious to find out about this man who didn’t seem to inhabit much of his own life.

  ‘He has depression,’ she said, carefully. ‘He gets really sick sometimes. But then sometimes he’s okay.’

  I knew about depression—my mother had it. My father had used the word only once but it had stuck, and back then I ascribed all of her behaviour to that word, without nuance or understanding. With my mother, the depression was a blanket that covered her entirely, that I lifted when I could find the edge, and that she told me was too warm or too cold, depending on the day. With Tom, I imagined it to be even more impenetrable, like a splintered piece of wood stuck fast in his chest across his heart.

  When Hetty showed me the only photo he was in, I could see he was tall and young, at least younger than the other adults in my life. I liked him and I liked his tiny house that didn’t seem to be the way most people thought a house should be. Hetty seemed to like him too.

  We cooked a sort of lunch on Tom’s stove. I can’t remember what it was, that meal, but I remember there were only two aluminium plates in the cupboard and one sharp knife. I remember we ate with our hands, licking each finger clean, and that we enjoyed it. I ate more than Hetty, I’m sure; she never had much of an appetite and hated to feel too full, as if the stretch against her stomach was dangerous. We gulped down tepid water from Tom’s tap, Hetty reminding me to drink more than I wanted, to keep my body wet. It was a warm day, and hot inside Tom’s shack, with its steel roof. We changed into our bathers in separate corners, me sneaking a glimpse of Hetty as I bent to pick up my undies, knowing even then that her back was more beautiful to me than mine would ever be to her.

  There was no question of not swimming. Down by the dam I threw my towel up above me so that it billowed and let it spread out against the red ground. It was both dusty and sticky there, near the edge, but I didn’t care if my things got dirty. I wanted to be cool and free, so I took off my T-shirt and sat down in my old bathers on the towel, feeling the fabric creep up in between my legs because they were too small and I needed new ones and it hadn’t seemed important until right then.

  I wanted to watch Hetty’s body as she waded, so I urged her to go first and she did, so freely, making little bird noises as the water swallowed her. I found her beautiful and too perfect, but that day it didn’t feel painful. Soon after, I joined her, and we both grew brave enough to sink right into the water and swim around in the caramel colour of it. I don’t remember if it was cold but I imagine it must have been. I know the afternoon sky grew dull before we came out again, Hetty long after me because she was a water baby.

  At some point I needed to go to the toilet. Tom only had an outhouse that sat far away from both the dam and the shack, over where the smell of it would only disturb the kangaroos and the skinks, under a dying yellow box. I told Hetty I was going and she answered with her eyes closed, lying back on her towel to soak in the sun. Her hair was even longer back then, and in its half-dry state it looked like seaweed soon after it has beached itself: dark and thick with previous life. I saw how the curve of her hip was round in a way that no boy’s body or man’s body was. I knew briefly that that was what I wanted, t
hen let the knowing go.

  My walk to the toilet and back took longer than it should have. I was barefoot, and careful to avoid the burrs and the ants, of which there were many. I sat long on the toilet and sang a song to myself: I remember that because a bird outside the outhouse seemed to be singing along, until I stopped and it kept warbling. After I had scooped in the right amount of sawdust from a bucket near the door, I opened and closed the door of the outhouse carefully and looked for the bird that had been singing in the big tree above. There was no movement and no feathers that I could see, but as I turned to walk back towards Hetty and the dam, there was movement and a rustle in the grass near me, and I stopped still to see what it was.

  More rustles revealed the small spiked body and thin snout of an echidna, making its way along, trying to find a snack. I watched the way it moved, precisely and with great purpose, snuffling at the earth for ants, safe in the knowledge that it was covered in spiky armour. It didn’t appear to notice me, but I wondered if that was an echidna’s way—to appear unruffled in order to stay that way. I watched it a while, backing carefully away as it neared me so I wouldn’t frighten it; then it turned and started to move in another direction. I realised that I was hot and should get back to Hetty.

  I turned and began walking back towards the dam, seeing then that there were two bodies there now, and that they were close together. My feet sped up before I could register the sight. I had left her, where we weren’t even supposed to be, down near the water. I had been singing and sitting while she had been bothered, or caught. I didn’t stop for the burrs as I ran towards her.

  Getting closer, I could see that the second figure was a man. Where had he come from so quickly, and what was he doing so close to Hetty, who was sitting up now, facing him? I felt like crying as I ran, and my chest hurt despite the short distance.

  They turned towards me as I neared them. Hetty’s face was pink, and she was almost smiling in a small way, as though she didn’t know what else to do with her face. The man had picked himself up from where he had been kneeling, close to her—and now that I could see the whole of him, I understood that he wasn’t really a man. He was an older boy, or perhaps a younger man in his early twenties, and had long hair that was unwashed, and brown arms coming strong out of the sleeves of a red flannie. He didn’t look like he was planning to go swimming. There wasn’t a smile on his face, this man who had interrupted everything, but he wasn’t frowning either, as if I didn’t matter enough to him either way.