Cherry Beach

by Laura McPhee-Browne

  Hetty wrapped the towel beneath her as far as it would go around her torso, and I watched him reach his hand down towards her thigh and squeeze it until the air was still. Then he turned and began to walk away, and we watched him, and when he was near gone he turned back and said to Hetty in a loud voice, ‘Too bad your friend came back, hey?’ letting the dust he had kicked walking in his big boots gather around him like a tiny tornado.

  After he’d gone, Hetty wouldn’t tell me what had happened between them, though I asked her the same question in every way I could think of. She’d never been secretive before, and I couldn’t understand the tight face she kept making. I watched her rub at her thigh where his hand had been and hoped she would stop staring out into the distance, until she did, saying sorry, and should we call her mother to come and get us. I remember feeling so separate there next to her, knowing I didn’t want or understand whatever it was that she had just had, and that I would one day lose her to this thing I could never give her that she wanted, despite the violence I had smelled in the air when I had seen them together.

  After we had gathered our towels and pulled our dry clothes on over our damp bathers, we walked to the house in silence and used Tom’s phone to call Hetty’s mother, Patricia, who told us to wait on the side of the road for her. We walked to the road and sat on the gravel together, and I wanted to touch Hetty to snap her out of it, but I also didn’t want her to sense that I didn’t understand.

  It was so long before Patricia arrived, the two of us waiting there in silence, but only as the car appeared on the road did Hetty turn to me. Her face was pale.

  ‘We touched each other a bit. Him first.’

  I tried to nod my head, so she would go on. My neck felt like it was broken.

  ‘It wasn’t that scary,’ she said, and stood up to dust the brown off her dress, the dam coming back through the fabric from her bathers beneath.

  MOUTH

  the place where the river flows into the sea

  As the weeks in Toronto passed, it felt like everyone around me was touching and kissing and lying in bed together. Marjorie was full of new relationships blooming, or old ones reigniting after too many beers at Ronnie’s on a Thursday. Steph started inviting over a guy called Morris, who had curled hair and thick arms with meaty hands at their ends. Clark introduced us one morning in the kitchen to his new girlfriend, Isabel, who was so beautiful she was almost annoying. One night after there had been people and drink in the courtyard, I walked into the bathroom to find Steph and Clark entangled. They both told me later that they weren’t getting back together, that they were with Morris and Isabel now, and it had only been the alcohol. I’d never even known about the together part, and felt I had no right to an opinion.

  Minnie even had someone who started coming to visit on her lunch break, which she had started taking. His name was Paul, and he was very tall and awkward, and made her cheeks turn the colour of a Roncesvalles Avenue sunset.

  I stayed me, barely touching my own vagina, not admitting what really made it swell, what caused that flicker in my pelvis to thrash. Not letting myself have a crush on anyone, for fear of who the anyone might turn out to be; watching everyone around me dive deep.

  The few boys and then girls I had in my bed through the years before we went to Canada had Hetty’s lips and Hetty’s lines and arches in the dark, and I let them. I suppose I was in love with her, but I tried to pretend it didn’t matter, and I succeeded, mostly. She didn’t know, because I knew she didn’t feel the same way and I was scared she would try to, so I hid it and encouraged myself to deny it, like a sickly feeling in your gut that you try to pretend isn’t the beginning of food poisoning.

  Hetty’s boyfriend Sean had known. He used to watch me when I would watch her, the furtive pauses I would let myself take, and I heard him yelling at Hetty once that I had a thing for her, and it was so fucking obvious that she was an idiot not to see it. Hetty had told him to shut up, and then they had closed her bedroom door and I could only hear muffled voices, followed by muffled sobs, followed later by muffled moans. I hated that he could see something about me that I had tried to keep hidden. It was like he had come across me naked, and had laughed at the ripe vulnerability of me without my clothes.

  I didn’t want to have a relationship with anyone, and I definitely didn’t want one with Hetty, because I knew it would be a disaster and my heart would end up even more cloistered than it already was. I decided, on the nights when I let myself think about it, that I would be that woman who didn’t need anyone. It seemed like I might be able to pull it off, that I could base myself on an old friend of my mum’s, who had called herself Juniper, and worn colourful smocks and amethyst stones to take the focus off her loneliness. It wasn’t true, anyway, really, that she had been lonely. Juniper seemed one of the most content people I knew—even her walk was more purposeful, her gait more free, than those in relationships around her. Couples were weird: that had always been very obvious to me. The happier they were, the more weird, the more room they took up with all their private specialness, alienating themselves and everyone around them.

  A few weeks after Hetty had visited Cafe Art Song with Elaine, I made myself cross the road after my shift and walk through the heavy doors of the art gallery for my first visit. No one looked at me when I got inside, in my black jeans and sweatshirt. I smelt a little like bread or milk or sugar, and cheese, like something dense like pasta, but it didn’t seem busy in there, and I felt safe in the sound of not many people. I walked around and up the sinuous walkway that led to the ticketing desk and breathed long breaths as I felt the design of the building lean on me. It was beautiful inside as well as out, like the National Gallery in Melbourne with its streaming water wall that made you feel like you were wet from swimming or a water fight when you looked at it, and the grey fort body of the gallery that stood behind.

  The woman at the ticket counter told me I could wander the exhibitions that dotted the building as I wished. It felt kind, the way she pressed the ticket into my hand, encouraging me gently. I left my bag in the cloakroom and set out under the wooden walkway ceiling that Frank Gehry had imagined, up the stairs to the second level. It felt special up there, and because there were not many other people I felt as though I was in a film or a song, almost putting my hands out and closing my eyes to spin my body around and around.

  There was a photography exhibition in the main gallery, with its high walls and silent attendants standing in the corners of each room. I imagined they would have soaked in so much excess and metaphor and keenness and energy through their skin, being around art all day, every day. I wondered if it started to get boring. There were beautiful photos all around me, and I decided I would choose a favourite. Usually I did this with Hetty in galleries, and we often chose the same piece. I was determined that day to do it all without her.

  It was the photo I stood in front of the longest that I chose—a snapshot of a group of friends having a picnic on some grass next to dark-blue rippled water. They were eating cake, the group of friends, and laughing at something. Some mouths were open; some were pinched into wry smiles. Each wore an outfit I imagined was their favourite, and there were no cleavages, just flat muscled chests half covered by a dress or a pointed collar. I wanted to be part of a group like that. The water behind them was almost aqueous and they would have jumped in after finishing their cake, after the photo was taken. It was a glorious picture, Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston—the first time I saw a Nan Goldin.

  As I came back out of the photo I noticed the weight of someone near me. I turned and saw standing behind me and to the left a small woman, about my age, with long, wispy brown hair. She smiled when I turned, and moved slightly away, perhaps shy. I turned back and felt myself blush. The woman was pale and possibly plain, she seemed to be nothing, but I could feel the skin of my face and neck was pink from locking eyes with her.

  She shuffled behind me, and I heard her footsteps as she walked away from me, on to the next
photograph, then the one after that. I didn’t want to turn but I did need to know that she was leaving. I couldn’t enjoy the art with someone unfamiliar on my skin.

  When I finally pulled away from the picnic and looked to where the woman had been, she was gone, and there was only the attendant standing near the door looking at the wall with his hands behind his back. I hoped I wouldn’t see her again. I wanted to be the kind of person who went to look at art on their own and didn’t need or want to meet anyone, and I really felt like this was who I was that day. Talking to someone interesting and trying to find the right words—linking what I was saying to what was going on inside—seemed so far away from what I was trying to do.

  I kept standing long before each photograph, beginning to grasp that every photographer was American, and that I loved most the images of friends or lovers where their eyes were on each other and the camera was an afterthought, or not a thought at all. I decided to get my camera out and use it at Marjorie next time everyone was home and we were all sitting in the courtyard or the living room.

  The other part of the gallery I wanted to see was on the lower level. I walked slowly along the balcony that squared an open area full of light, and stepped down the first staircase I saw. The Thomson Collection was on permanent exhibit, and I knew it included a few Emily Carr paintings. I had loved Emily Carr since I started wanting to visit Canada, for her paintings made of wild strokes and brave, thick colours. She painted trees and sky and clouds and grass like a vivid dream made real, and I wanted to see a canvas she had touched. The photo I had seen of Carr in her later years—a large stern woman with thick eyebrows like mine, arms crossed before her—was wonderful to me. She wasn’t elegant, or apologetic. She was whole and fierce and unusual, and she saw things in a way that she believed mattered. I could see that in her paintings.

  When I’d first discovered Emily Carr’s paintings and learned as much as I could about her life, I told Hetty about her. Hetty was a good listener and could become enthusiastic about things that weren’t hers. She appreciated every painting I showed her, and loved that Carr had been an explorer, that she had travelled all over the world and stretched herself across Canada so that she could get the most authentic understanding of indigenous Canadian life for her art.

  Hetty’s favourite Emily Carr painting was Stumps and Sky, because she said it could be anywhere, the scene of that painting, that it could be Australia, even though Carr had never been there. Stumps and Sky hung at the Art Gallery of Ontario and we had planned to come and see it together, but Hetty seemed to have forgotten, and I didn’t want to have to ask—so I would see it on my own and keep the experience for myself.

  I walked through the smaller rooms, muted with their bone-hued walls, watching out for it. There were many beautiful paintings, but I didn’t want to stop at any of them in that moment. Finally, around the corner of what was possibly the last doorway, there she was. I walked over and stood just in front, glad to be the only one there.

  The painting was oily; and the colours—blue, orange, forest—were brighter than they had been on the internet; and the whooshing of the clouds, their curls and flurries, was moving. I remembered hearing that Carr used expensive, good-quality paint—she came from a family with money and must have thought it senseless not to use some of it for this purpose. Quality paint can last forever, and Stumps and Sky looked like it could have been painted a week ago.

  The thing I had loved most about the painting, when I first saw it, was the rust-orange colour of the dirt at the bottom of the scene, and—standing in front of the real thing—it was still the best thing about it. I wondered again whether there were parts of Canada that had the same red dirt Australia had, though I was sure this wasn’t true, couldn’t be true, that I didn’t even really want it to be.

  As I stood there, rolling my eyes over the up and down of the trees and the horizon, I heard the noise of someone behind me. I turned and saw that it was the girl with the long brown hair. She was standing looking at a painting on the opposite wall, of a man standing in the snow in a wooden coat with a dog next to him, and I took the time to see what she was wearing and leave my eyes on her a little longer. She had blue jeans on, and a red-and-white-striped top, and stood compact, sure, like a dancer.

  I took a breath and let it out, then another. I made sure they were quiet, those breaths. I turned back towards Stumps and Sky and wondered if she was as thoughtful as she seemed to be, standing there. I wondered whether she was wondering anything about me, whether she had even realised I was the same person as the person she had seen before, up there in the wooden sky.

  ‘Hi,’ I heard from behind me. A small, round voice, like a circle.

  I turned and saw her smiling. She wasn’t plain at all, really. Rather she was pretty in a noiseless way.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ I answered, trying to stay as still as possible so I didn’t go red or wobble my words in my throat. There wasn’t enough time to think about what to say before I needed to say something else. ‘Do you like Emily Carr?’

  I hoped I didn’t sound like I was trying to prove that I knew the name of an artist, but she smiled, revealing fingerprint dimples in both cheeks. Then she laughed. ‘I don’t know who Emily Carr is! Is that bad?’

  ‘Oh no! No! She’s the only artist I’ve ever known the name of, ever. It’s just that this is a painting of hers’—I pointed at Stumps and Sky, its vivid blue and red—‘and I came here to see it.’

  She smiled again. She didn’t seem to feel the need to say as much as me.

  ‘But no!’ I repeated, and then stopped, telling myself not to say anything else, even if the silence became unbearable, even if the air split in two.

  ‘Oh good,’ she said, making those dimples deeper. Her little hands were by her sides, and I let myself look at her eyes. They were brown and curved, like kidney beans.

  She walked to stand next to me and I turned back around and we both looked at the Emily Carr. This time I saw how carefully Carr had made the wind and the clouds look like the essence of wind and clouds and not just swirls of white paint, and how there must have been the beginning or middle or ending of a storm on the day or night that she painted the scene.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’ She said it with certainty, and I nodded.

  ‘It is.’

  She told me her name was Faith, and I told her that my name was Ness. We stood in front of the Emily Carr and she told me she hated her name—her parents were born-again Christians and had her later than most people had children, after finding themselves able to under the protective shadow of God. They had named her in honour of it all, and she thought that was concerning, as if she embodied something that wasn’t real. I noticed that she had the lightest of dark circles under each of her kidney-bean eyes.

  She looked at me squarely, carefully. ‘Are you Australian?’

  It was the first time since I’d arrived in Canada that someone had picked it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and tried not to beam.

  ‘What’s it like there?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s big, so it’s different all over. I’m from Melbourne, which I guess is kind of like here a bit, and it’s cold sometimes there, but gets very hot too. We have lots of bushfires.’

  ‘I didn’t know it got cold in Australia. I don’t know much about it, actually. Which is terrible.’

  ‘That’s not terrible. There’s not much to know about Australia. It’s big and there aren’t many people living there. Just a big selfish island!’

  She laughed bigger this time and I heard a slight shriek at the end. I liked it when people had strange laughs. It was like a small bit of eccentricity that they usually hid was revealed every time they found something funny.

  ‘You know that we’re perpetually drunk there, yeah?’

  She laughed and let out that small shriek again. ‘Yes, I had heard that. So it’s true, eh?’

  ‘I’m drunk right now!’

  Her laugh made me want to kiss her, suddenly and overwhe
lmingly. She opened her mouth and closed her eyes and leaned her head back, and I saw the pale of her neck, just briefly. There seemed to be a smile she would make only after she laughed like that. It was a smile like she had more to let out but was too shy to. Her mouth held together tight and creased to stop it.

  I’d never walked through a gallery with someone like her. We looked at every painting in the Thomson Collection and said things to each other about each one. When I looked at art with Hetty she would always ask me to tell her what it was about. I would leave feeling exhausted, questioning every answer I had given, all of my understanding. Faith seemed to have ideas about what each artist had been trying to do, but she didn’t sit within those thoughts like they were important. I felt myself spreading out around us, covering every piece with my eyes and my sticky fingers and the saliva trails of my tongue.

  When we f inished and the gallery was closing and we seemed to be the last ones there except for the attendants still at their corners, drooping slightly, we walked together through the heavy glass and wood doors, and stood awkwardly opposite each other at angles on the concrete outside. I could smell heat and light, and Faith had a sheen on her skin, and we smiled at each other with the corners of our mouths and our eyes.

  ‘It was so nice to meet you,’ I said, my heart banging against my ribs.

  ‘Oh, you too!’ she replied, her mouth curling slightly at one side.