Cherry Beach

by Laura McPhee-Browne

  Just as Belle raised her small red fist to knock again, the door opened. The man standing there was tall and grey, with strong shoulders. He wore a red wool jumper full of holes and jeans, and behind him I could see rows and rows of books on shelves, from the floor to the ceiling. He smiled lightly, as if he understood something beyond us, and as Belle told him who we were I watched his face move to say hello. There was an air of quiet to him in that moment that stayed, despite how much we went on to talk to him and to hear him talk, despite all his words.

  Hetty shook his hand too long and stared—I remember that because he commented on it, gently, and we laughed. He thanked Belle and she left to get started on ‘lunch for the ratbags’. I felt their personalities separate against each other as she left and started across the flat ground towards the kitchen. She was no-nonsense in her capability and foresight, her face like the dawn sun. He was complex and faltered against his own darkness.

  We did all sorts of things during those few weeks. Pulling weeds, mixing cakes, sitting in the nurse’s station with the delicately injured children while she had her lunchbreak, watching for brown snakes as we mowed the angry grass. I drove us around and up and down bump-hills in the ATV, with Hetty hanging on behind me, her warm arms wrapped around my stomach, my heartbeat a little quick. We picked apricots and plums in the orchard, and ate too many; we lay around in the library after all the kids had gone home, letting the cool air indulge us as we read and rested. We talked to each other, as we always did, and were free with our thoughts about the place and what was happening there.

  A tiny school for children whose parents wanted a different sort of education for them—a special one. A teacher who seemed to understand young people in the way he wrote and spoke, as if he wasn’t that far away from that time in his own life, though he was. A thick bush surround, with creek maps. I told Hetty I wondered if David was too critical of mainstream education, that it might be a bad thing that he wasn’t open to it, that his vision was idealistic and inaccessible. Hetty disagreed in her easy way and told me she thought he was the realistic one.

  I got very sunburnt one afternoon a few days before we were leaving and had to go to bed early, placing a wet towel over my red chest and naked body, with the fan on and near. I felt sick and thirsty, and wished I was back in Melbourne, where there was less dark and more noise outside the windows. Hetty decided she would go alone to a dinner that David had invited us to—after I insisted over and over that I would be fine—and I was sad to see her go. It was at the house of a friend of David’s who also taught at the school, and we had been so excited to be asked, feeling it was confirmation that David liked us and thought we were interesting. I see now he was likely being polite, and using the dinner invitation as a way of thanking us for our time on the farm, but we were hopeful back then, and unsure of our worth, and this edged our minds towards the grandiose.

  After she had left, dressed in a linen shift with nectarine lipstick, I tried to rest. It was a slow night and I woke often, getting up to let my bladder loose of the large amounts of water I had drunk to ward off heatstroke, noticing each time that Hetty hadn’t returned yet. Her bedroom door was wide open and the light of the moon made her untidy bed glow. It looked so empty without her long, edged body. I didn’t worry, because I was too hot and sore and tired.

  I woke early in the morning and pricked my ears to hear Hetty in the next room, snoring, but there was nothing. When I got out of bed, slowly to avoid the crinkling of my damaged skin, and went to check, she was still not there. I wondered who I could check with, who might know where she was, and whether it was too early to do so. Outside the grass was dewy and I could see Bill behind the fence sleeping in a dried-up mud bath, his fleshy face slack against the dirt. I didn’t know where I was going, but walking up the hill towards the school felt purposeful, and I could see people rushing around preparing for the new day, which eased my anxiety.

  No one in the kitchen area or the eating area or the nursing area had seen Hetty. I kicked at grass and walked around the grassy hill behind the main building deciding what to do, and could only think of the author, David, and how he had seen her last, at the dinner, and how he would be the one to know where she was, if anyone did. It didn’t feel right to go and knock at his office door, as we had done on the first day with the support of Belle, but I couldn’t think of anything else that would be easier, or more helpful, and I reasoned that he would probably not even be in there yet.

  It was still early, and there were still signs of dew. No children had arrived for their day yet, and breakfast was still a plan in Belle’s head rather than a pile of egg sandwiches. I carefully moved myself down towards David’s office, making sure to go slow and sideways like a crab. It was slippery and steep, and I was sleepy.

  He answered his door almost as soon as I had finished quietly knocking. He was smiling in his knowing way, and beckoned me in before I could tell him I was there to find Hetty. Further inside was stacked with books—piles and piles of them hiding other piles, a bookshelf absolutely crammed. They were teetering and worn, well loved.

  ‘I’m looking for Hetty,’ I told David after he had asked me how I was, and I had politely answered.

  He raised his eyebrows and laughed, took his glasses off and looked to be wiping at one of his eyes.

  ‘Hetty? She not back yet?’

  He told me that she had stayed on at his friend’s place after dinner, too tired to journey back to the farm and not able to get to the car for a lift with David and his wife. I understood this to mean she had been drunk, and I pictured her sleeping on a couch in an imagined house, with big windows and tall gums watching her from outside.

  David smiled a small smile and told me not to worry. It had been a pleasant evening; she would be back soon; his friend would give her a lift as soon as she woke. I cringed for her inside, and made myself laugh lightly, to make sure it was nothing. Hetty drank when she was nervous—more than me because it gave her pluck rather than a muddy head. I hoped she hadn’t lost herself.

  That evening, after Hetty had returned and recounted, with lifted shoulders, details about David’s friend’s house and the meal they had eaten and the way she had woken up without any memory of why she was there, arms covered in thin sleep lines from lying in one place too long, we ate eggs on toast on the verandah and swatted the mozzies away. I made mine into a sandwich, and Hetty sliced hers up into tiny yolky squares, and I let the feeling of her next to me make me happy, as I often did. She didn’t apologise for scaring me. I liked it that way. We laughed at Bob snuffling some banana peels and planned our trip home along the Ring Road.

  KETTLE

  formed by retreating glaciers

  Dill and I arrived at the purple house as the light was dusking into pink behind the clouds. It was just off Bloor Street West in the middle of the Annex, and looked like a giant piece of iced gingerbread, complete with musk-stick pillars either side of the porch.

  We had stopped talking for the last part of the walk—both of us retreating inward to our own versions of Hetty, to our own versions of what might have kept her away for the last few days. I wanted her to be inside that house so badly, and I performed the superstitious ritual I had been compulsively doing since I was young: crossing my fingers and my toes as we waited at the door, closing my eyes just briefly, telling whoever could hear me that this wish was important.

  The door was opened by a woman about our age with short blond hair in a grown-out pixie cut curled around her ears. Dill exclaimed, and I knew it must be Shauna. A small dog came running up to the doorway, yapping and skitting on its tiny paws. I felt I should say hello and pat Guy but I didn’t particularly want to—the dog was so skinny its eyes were popping out of its skull and it appeared to be agitated. Shauna gave Dill a long, clinging hug, acknowledged me in a tired way and led us into the house to show us to Rick’s room.

  I had expected the inside of the house to resemble the outside, but just as the human skin hides something
else entirely, the walls of the place were tastefully cream and the furniture plain and comforting. I was relieved. Hetty hated the colour purple—had said many times it reminded her of her inevitable future, of purple smocks and purple hair and purple dangly parrot earrings—and I didn’t want to know she had been lying around in it, letting it seep into her skin.

  We ended up down the back of the house, where a staircase was hiding between bits of wall. Shauna told us to climb to the top and knock at the door there; she didn’t seem to want to take us up, to be engaged in anything any longer, and she left us, telling Dill to text her, which he agreed to, and looking at me one more time with her clouded eyes. Dill and I glanced at each other, our eyebrows raised, and he shrugged and gave a small laugh. I wanted to ask him if Shauna was always so vague, but I couldn’t find a better word and I felt like there was history there, between them, and that Dill wouldn’t want to be cruel.

  ‘Shall we?’ Dill said, and gestured up the stairs with his hand.

  ‘Oh, please, after you.’ I gestured back. I didn’t want to be the one to knock on Rick’s door, to be the face that he saw first when he opened it. Dill would be much better at explaining that we were just worried, and if Hetty was there, he wouldn’t overreact. I needed to stand back and breathe deeply.

  He winked at me, smiled with all his perfect teeth. ‘She’ll be okay, you know.’

  After Dill knocked and we stood perched on the top step waiting, I could hear a shuffling and a murmuring and the shifting of at least one body. Dill and I looked at the wood we were standing on and listened, but there were no more noises. Then a loud voice asked, ‘What?’

  I answered back, my heart fast, wanting this to be over. ‘Hi, Rick, we’re looking for Hetty. It’s her friends Ness and Dill!’

  The brightness in my voice surprised me. I wanted Rick to give her up.

  We waited, my palms damp with anxiety, Dill wiping the back of his hand across his upper lip. It was hot and close.

  ‘Hang on,’ the loud voice said.

  The door jutted open, the wood shrieking, as if it was hardly ever required to perform such a task. I could immediately smell grass, and ashtray, and spray deodorant, all three scents equally overwhelming. Rick was standing tall, hair in eyes, no shirt on, one hand on a slim hip. He was Hetty’s type—the wrong type that she often chose. He was almost leaning back into the air around him, boyishly thin.

  He turned away and pushed the door open wider, nudging at the darkness behind him with his head.

  ‘She’s sleeping.’

  I couldn’t see anything in the space behind him, but my eyes began to adjust as I entered. Through the thick air I could see that the room was spacious, and there was a couch and a large bed with messy sheets across it, and in the middle of the bed was a length that was Hetty. I blinked and leaned forward: she was curled up with her thighs against her chest, almost kissing her own knees, like she did when she was cold or sad. I breathed all the air out of my tummy and murmured thank you to something.

  Dill was next to me, and when Rick moved aside he walked past me and towards the mattress.

  ‘Hetty?’ he whispered.

  I watched Rick, who was still standing and still had his hair in his eyes.

  ‘I’m Hetty’s best friend,’ I said to the growth of him, to his long spine and his bony boy fingers.

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘Is she okay?’

  Rick clicked his tongue, still staring straight ahead from behind his hair, at nothing. ‘She’s fine. We just had a big one last night, eh.’

  Dill looked over at me from where he stood beside the bed.

  ‘She’s just sleeping,’ he said, in a quiet voice that reminded me this would be hard for him.

  All the anger I hadn’t been allowing myself caught fire in me then. Hetty wasn’t okay; she wasn’t communicating; she was asleep in a nasty man’s bed; she was curled up the way she curled up when she didn’t feel good. I couldn’t go and lie next to her, because it wasn’t our bed and she didn’t even know that I was there, and I felt like crying and hitting this idiot in the stomach and any place I could get him for taking her away. I tried to douse it, the reality of what was happening to us, but it just stayed there, aflame, and so I asked Dill if we could leave. ‘She obviously doesn’t care anyway,’ I said to no one as we stepped carefully down the wooden stairs.

  Dill answered me, ‘She does, Ness, she does,’ and the tears came out of my eyes then because he might have been wrong.

  SEEP

  formed by a spring

  Faith and I had breakfast together the next morning. Hetty hadn’t come home that night and I had tried to enjoy having the bed to myself, stretching out and leaving my book beside me on top of the doona when my eyes started to droop, but it hadn’t made me feel any better. I was still angry, and it felt like I was about to choke when I thought about how much things had changed between Hetty and me, slowly but surely and then all of a sudden, since we had arrived. The leaves swishing outside our window, on a stage lit by the street lamps, seemed cruel as I lay there. I wished they were gum leaves.

  Faith had her hair plaited and the plait circled her face. Even though I felt sick from residual anxiety about Hetty, I ordered a pile of maple-syrup pancakes with blueberries and banana, and we shared them, cutting through the layers side by side.

  ‘It’s so nice to see you,’ I told her. ‘You look really beautiful.’

  She leaned towards me around the side of the table, small smile and pale-pink lips lined like shells. She reached out to hold my face with both her little hands and kissed it all over, all down my nose and along each cheek to my forehead. My pelvis and kidneys and lungs burned for more of her. I didn’t care that there were people at every table around us who had only just realised we were lovers and not friends, and that their faces would probably show me how they felt about that. I didn’t look and I didn’t care.

  ‘It’s so nice to see you too,’ she said.

  She poked her fork into a slice of banana and brought it to her mouth, licking at the sides as she chewed and swallowed.

  I wanted to tell her about Hetty, and Dill and me trying to find her, and the circle of her body on the dirty bed, but when I tried to work out how to explain how sad it made me that she was there with a man like Rick, as if time had sucked itself in and popped itself back out from the beginning, I couldn’t think of the words.

  ‘So, you found her. Where was she?’

  I had texted Faith when I got home from the purple house, leaving Dill with Robin and Steph and Clark and Ingrid in the kitchen to climb the stairs and lie down. I’d told her Hetty was okay, that she was safe, and that I had seen her to make sure. No other way of telling had come to me, as I kicked my shoes off and lowered my body onto the cool covers. I’d turned my phone off after sending it too, to dull any extra sensation, to black myself out. Faith’s reply had blinked at me in the morning when I turned it back on. Oh, thank goodness. Thank goodness. x

  ‘She was at some guy’s house. Rick.’ The name dug at my stomach. ‘She was asleep in his room, on this big bed. All curled up.’

  Faith’s face crinkled and she took my hand.

  ‘Oh, Ness. I wish she’d told you where she was. Did you get to speak to her?’

  ‘No.’

  The word was choked and I worried I was about to cry again. I didn’t want to start crying in the cafe and make my face all red and snotty.

  ‘I just felt so angry.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ Faith said.

  ‘Anyway. I don’t want to spend all our time together talking about Hetty.’

  Faith laughed. ‘Neither do I!’

  She looked at me carefully and put her arms on the table in front of her, leaning forward a little in a way that almost didn’t suit her.

  ‘Do you think Hetty is beautiful?’ she asked.

  I had known this would come eventually. I had imagined my response and hadn’t been able to think of something that didn�
�t sound false, or inadequate. I couldn’t say no; I couldn’t say yes—but you are much more. I couldn’t get upset that we were having this conversation now, when I knew why she was asking me.

  She was waiting for me to answer, with a clear face and no lines. I took a breath but only from my chest, not my stomach. I couldn’t pull the air down to there.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I asked you,’ she replied evenly.

  I sighed so she could hear me. It wasn’t fair, but I did it. A sigh could tell her that it was pointless to go where we were going, and encourage her not to go there again.

  ‘Yes, Hetty’s beautiful. She’s not as beautiful as you, though.’

  Faith’s eyes were still on me too much. It felt near the edge of painful. ‘I don’t care about that. I’d rather be free than beautiful.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s so lost. It’s like she’s playing a part in a sad indie film. Hoping everyone will fall in love with her so she won’t have to stand up on her own.’

  I felt my love for Hetty in my chest, where it always was, and at Faith’s comment it roared like a cub. Of course she was jealous—I would be. The deeper Hetty sunk, the deeper I would stretch out my hand for her. It was so obvious, despite all the energy I used up trying to hide it.

  I couldn’t open that window so Faith could see in, though. It was the part of me she wouldn’t be able to live with, and I couldn’t work out how to give it up.

  ‘That’s not fair, Faith.’

  I don’t know if there were tears in the corners of her eyes but her neck was red by then, plotted with rash circles, and she told me she had to go. The tight loyalty in my chest kept me from asking her to stay, or admitting defeat, but I wanted to run out of the cafe after she had walked out the door like I was in a cheesy movie and yell for her to come back. There wouldn’t be any words I’d need to say but she’d know what I wanted, and it was her. We’d kiss in front of everyone and there would be clapping.