by Robert Drewe
Eventually he stopped tapping and took out his old Ronson and lit the cigarette. Before putting the lighter back in his pocket he snapped it open and shut a few times and examined it carefully as if he’d just got it for Christmas. Then he adjusted his haunches into a new squatting position, leaning his right elbow on his knee to steady himself, and drew on the cigarette. The careful, frowning way he smoked it, you’d have thought he was new to it. You wouldn’t have guessed he smoked sixty a day or that he bought his cigarettes not by the packet but a dozen cartons at a time.
He blew smoke self-consciously into the breeze and removed a speck of tobacco from his tongue (even after all that tapping!) and flicked his ash on the lawn. He coughed and cleared his throat right down to the bottom of his lungs, like he did first thing every morning, and then he hawked and spat heavily into the garden bed. He looked at his watch and he looked distractedly up the road again and got to his feet.
Nonchalantly, he began patrolling the grass on the edge of the road, gradually extending the territory under patrol. Soon he was pacing not just our front border but also the boundaries of our next-door neighbours, the Stockwells and the Dolans, on either side. Grimacing with distaste, he kicked a dry dog turd off the Stockwells’ buffalo grass into the gutter and gave Shandy a glare. Sighing, he bent down and began plucking stray dandelions and onionweeds from all three verges and throwing the weeds into the street.
I wondered what had got into him while I was in hospital. I also wondered why, even while he paced and tidied and gardened so intently, he kept himself positioned between me and the road.
His community lawn patrol was making me more and more curious. It was enough of a surprise just to see him outside. Apart from Sundays, he didn’t often appear outdoors. Sunday morning was official gardening duty, an activity involving the compulsory donning of his old airforce khaki shirt and trousers which showed no signs of ever wearing out. Otherwise outdoors was considered kid territory. He wasn’t the sort of father who threw balls in the yard. Apart from Sunday morning gardening, only once a year did he stay outdoors for more than a few minutes and look calm and happy. This was when he organised my little sister Janet’s birthday party in the garden. He directed her party games – the treasure hunts, the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, the oranges-and-lemons – with rare patience and good humour.
But this evening, with dusk approaching, there was an urgency in his eyes and movements. He constantly glanced up the hill. He was marking time while he waited for someone or something. Who or what?
Just then I began to smell something burning. I wasn’t sure if it was a fire or just me. Since the meningitis I sometimes smelled a graphite smell high in my head. I associated it with electrodes on my scalp and temples, a sensation of flickering lights and a feeling of nausea. The smell and the nausea still returned when I was near fluorescent lights or glaring white sand. Unless I moved away I vomited. They’d even come back the week before when I was watering the garden and staring vacantly at a bed of white daisies. I hoped my brain would sort it out by next summer or the beach would be a big problem. I couldn’t let myself think about my brain too much.
A moment later, however, a stream of smoke and sparks gusted past the front of the house. The incinerator at the bottom of the back yard was alight. Apparently my father had lit the incinerator and left it burning while he patrolled the front garden. The incinerator was burning briskly.
I was about to ask him if he wanted me to check the incinerator (they would be the first words from either of us for the past half-hour) when a green Austin convertible came down the hill and slowed as it approached our house.
It was the newsagent. The car slowed without coming to a stop, and with his sideways-overarm throw the newsagent flung a newspaper – thin, tightly rolled and bent like a boomerang – up and over his car and over the width of the road and into our garden.
Suddenly the schoolboy high-jumper and footballer he’d once been, my father sprang into the air, an athletic feat I’d never have guessed at, and snatched the newspaper with an outstretched hand. Still on the move, he unfurled the paper and began reading it while he strode across the lawn, around the corner of the house, down the side and into the back yard.
Normally, I wouldn’t have dared to be so obviously nosy but I followed him. For three or four minutes he circled the incinerator, reading avidly while he walked and squinted in the fading light, turning the pages hurriedly and never quite coming to a halt or acknowledging I was there. Then he got to the back page, quickly scanned it and dropped the newspaper in the fire.
It was the Mirror, the local Saturday sex-and-scandal sheet. The Mirror was the only paper that published details of brothel raids and divorce-court proceedings, indeed the only one that printed the words ‘prostitute’ and ‘brothel’ and ‘co-respondent’. Women and decent people didn’t read the Mirror. It was never seen in our house.
I stood by the back gate and watched the rising glow of the firelight on my father’s scalp as he stoked the incinerator. The Mirror had only about twenty pages and the flames jumped up quickly.
There wasn’t enough time for my brain to begin to react badly to the flickering. The paper took only a couple of minutes to burn but he stayed by the incinerator, prodding and turning the ashes, until it was dark and I’d gone inside.
THE MORAL AGENT
One morning on Rottnest Island I walked down to the bakery at six o’clock to buy fresh bread and some of the bakery’s famous jam doughnuts. In the job roster at the holiday cottage the bread run was my responsibility. You had to get to the bakery before the rush. The fresh loaves lasted until about nine, but the warm jam doughnuts were so delicious they quickly sold out. Despite the necessary early rising – my friends were happy to do the general shopping, washing-up, cooking, cleaning and sweeping in the heat of the day, anything but get up that early – I liked the job.
I enjoyed the quiet walk down to the settlement under the Moreton Bay fig trees lining Thomson Bay. The yeasty smell of the squashed figs under the trees, the salty air of the early summer morning, the overnight coolness still in the sand, even the jarring cries of the crows and squabbling seagulls, charged the day with promise.
When I reached the bakery, the door was open but the bread-shop section in the front was empty. I could smell the freshly baked bread and the cakes and pastries and I could hear people moving and bumping about near the ovens in the back. I called, ‘Hello, there!’ but no one answered. A puff of warm floury air drifted out of the bakery into the shop.
I walked behind the counter and peered into the bakery. There was a disturbance in there, in the hot, sweet air. Utensils were clattering and clouds of flour were billowing. Something metallic fell with a clang on the floor. At first I thought it was a fight. A ghostly white figure was straddling another ghostly white figure.
The one-armed girl who helped in the bakery was lying on a table covered in flour. Her white legs were up in the air and the baker was riding her. Or was she riding him? Anyway, they looked uncomfortable and strangely menacing rattling away. They still wore their bakery hats – not chef-type high hats, more like shower caps – and puffs of flour rose as they rode and rocked. Although they were caked white, occasional patches of pink skin screamed out. Against their floury faces their teeth were yellow grimaces. The flour was making their breath wheeze and rasp, but not enough to make them stop what they were doing.
The baker’s back was turned but the girl saw me. She didn’t stop when our eyes met, however, or indicate to the baker that someone was there. She closed her eyes and shut me out and hugged him tighter to her with her good arm and her stump.
I left the bakery then and went and sat on the seawall nearby and stared out at Thomson Bay. I had a lot to think about. The sun was still low in the east over the mainland. The coastline of Australia was just a thin straight line of yellow light. The only part that stood out was the dark clump of pine trees at Cottesloe. For a few minutes as I sat there I felt as alone as a sh
ipwrecked sailor in a desert island cartoon. I watched a man purposefully rowing a dinghy out to a yacht. He was rowing to the same rhythm as the bakery ghosts.
Half an hour later, when I thought things might be back to normal, I returned and bought my three poppyseed loaves and dozen doughnuts. The door between the bread shop and the bakery was closed and I was served by an older woman with two arms. Our transaction was the same as every morning. I searched her face for some hint of the goings-on in the bakery but it was as expressionless as a cottage loaf. You’d think I’d dreamed everything. I carried the bread back to the cottage and waited for Sten and Dogs to wake up so I could tell them about it. I’d never seen the sex act before. It was even more dramatic than I’d expected.
I loved the smell of ripe Moreton Bay figs on Rottnest Island because they made me think of sex. To a greater or lesser degree, everything to do with the island made me think of sex. Long before the episode in the bakery, any passing mention of the name ‘Rottnest’ made me think of sex.
This wasn’t just my reaction. Everyone I knew associated Rottnest with sex. Just mention the name of this little lime-stone-and-coral outcrop nestling on the horizon and people either winked or looked nostalgic. Or, in my parents’ case, disconcerted and suspicious. Rottnest was legendary. Only thirteen miles off the coast, it could have been thirteen hundred miles away. It might have been passed over by the old Dutch explorers, then the French and the English, but now it had a reputation as the most relaxed and seductive place anywhere. People – well, girls – were supposed to do things which on the straitlaced mainland would give them a ‘bad name’. Rottnest was different. It was where West Australians lost their virginity.
There was a strange irony in this. The holiday spot had a long dark past as a Devil’s Island. It had been a prison and a concentration camp. Its original role wasn’t exactly trumpeted by the tourist authorities. But my hosts, Gordon and Irene Schwabb, knew the place intimately and were authorities on its history. They pointed out the old gaol block and warders’ houses. They knew where the bodies were buried – Aboriginal bodies. They said proudly that our cottage, overlooking the sea at Thomson Bay, was named Vincent Cottage, after Henry Vincent, the one-eyed Battle of Waterloo veteran who was superintendent of the Aboriginal Penal Establishment for thirty years.
Vincent was something of a Rottnest hero. ‘Oh, yes, he lived here,’ said Irene Schwabb. ‘We get his cottage every year.’
According to Gordon Schwabb, Vincent was a ‘no-nonsense sort of character’. He was suspected of killing some of his prisoners. Others who misbehaved had their ears ripped off. He fed them all on cabbage leaves, quokkas, rice and seaweed boiled up together. ‘But he got things done,’ Mr Schwabb said.
The Schwabbs knew their island lore. At the meal table they liked to recite the name of every bay and inlet on the island. They worked their way around anti-clockwise, loudly correcting each other if they missed one. When they were done, they named all the lakes and hills. This litany took about five minutes and when they were finished they looked very pleased with themselves.
They were very proprietorial about these places. ‘I noticed Coke bottles at Geordie Bay today,’ one of them would announce solemnly. Or, ‘I spotted six day-trippers at Little Parakeet. I wonder what they were up to?’ It was important to display their island knowhow to their guests. I didn’t mind. There was a status in knowing these things, in being seen as ‘an old “Rotto” hand’.
The early English colonists had thought the island the ideal place to exile troublesome blacks. Then it had doubled as a boys’ reformatory. In the early nineteen-hundreds it had been turned over to public recreation and vice-regal shooting parties, but World War One saw it become an alien internment camp for Germans, Austrians and Middle Europeans. The same thing in World War Two: Germans, Italians and Japanese were interned. For more than a century people of various ages and races had been imprisoned there.
Now it was promoted by the State tourist bureau as ‘The Isle of Girls’, the most fancy-free place in the country. My parents certainly believed it. They’d never even allowed me to make a day trip on the ferry. Without giving any reasons – and they’d never set foot on the island themselves – they implied I’d get a bad name the moment I stepped off the gangplank.
I couldn’t wait. But with their views on bad-name getting, I hadn’t expected to see the island’s white sands and crystal lagoons, not to mention its easygoing girls, much before twenty-one.
My hopes didn’t rise when the Schwabbs invited me and four other friends of their daughter Wendy to stay with them in the cottage they’d rented for a fortnight in January. Everyone else’s parents agreed. Mine said no. So what else was new? It was hardly worth it, but I went through the motions.
‘Why not? What could possibly happen?’ I wheedled, straight-faced.
‘Rottnest’s got a bad name,’ my mother said.
I didn’t expect them to give in. But the Schwabbs had a word to them. They impressed on them the high standards required of their teenage guests. No alcohol, of course. We’d have to share chores and earn our holiday. It went without saying the sleeping arrangements would be above board – girls at one end of the cottage, boys at the other.
I couldn’t believe it when my parents gave in. They drove me to the ferry wharf at Fremantle and saw us off on the Islander. My mother gave the girls the once-over, but she farewelled me with good grace. As the Islander headed out of the harbour into a choppy southerly swell I couldn’t have been more excited if I’d been sailing off in the same direction to Africa or Europe. Three hours later I was on Rottnest Island kissing Suzette Minchin.
Suzette and I had been viewing the sunset from Vlamingh’s Lookout. This was a traditional thing to do and I was happy to observe all the Rottnest traditions. Indeed, I craved to observe them. The lookout was named after the Dutch explorer who’d landed on the island in 1697. Willem de Vlamingh hadn’t stayed long. He’d thought the island was infested with rats, so he named it Rat’s Nest. The little animals were actually marsupials called quokkas, tirelessly scavenging members of the kangaroo family. Though looking a little moth-eaten three centuries later, the quokkas were still in residence. In fact, they were nibbling and fossicking around us right now.
Poor Suzette had been seasick on the ferry trip across, spewing helplessly over the rail while the rest of us rushed to the other side of the boat. But once the Islander was in the lee of the island her colour had come back, and by the time we berthed she was looking her usual sulky, healthy self. A couple of hours had passed. We’d unpacked, settled in to the cottage and had a meal. We’d all set off on an after-dinner stroll, and somehow managed to split up into couples. Suzette and I hadn’t exactly gravitated to each other, but Wendy Schwabb was keen on Ross Woolhouse (known, for some long-forgotten reason, as Dogs) and Jenny Steinberg liked Sten Gunn. We were the last two left.
Suzette was a year older, so usually acted rather aloof with me. We’d never spoken more than a word or two. But the way I looked at it, I was on Rottnest at last. She was a girl – big, olive-skinned, sultry-looking. And, suddenly, she seemed quite keen. On our climb up to the lookout, as she reached for my hand, I succeeded in pushing the memory of her retching to the back of my mind. What with the warm pressure of her big, damp hand and the knowledge that we were staying in the same cottage, I was nervy with more or less pleasurable anticipation. I didn’t mind what happened. It had to be pretty good.
When we reached the lookout I gave the sunset a long, thoughtful glance. But early Dutch navigation was far from my mind. Neither of us spoke. Suzette was breathing heavily. To steady herself, she leaned against me. She was the same height and about fifteen pounds heavier. I subtly adjusted my footing so I wouldn’t topple.
Coming after the extended hand-holding on the trek up to the lookout, I took her leaning on me as a seductive gesture. The sea breeze was blowing in our faces. Quokkas rustled in the shrubbery. My heart was thudding. As the red sun sank romanticall
y into the Indian Ocean, I turned and embraced her. Our cheeks brushed and our lips smeared together and her mouth kept moving sideways as she pushed me aside – but not quite far enough – and vomited over my shoulder.
Fish and chips, coleslaw and beetroot. The quokkas quickly moved in.
After only a week on Rottnest I could look back on the floury fornicating ghosts and my first-night tryst with Suzette Minchin with the sophistication of the seasoned islander. Suzette and I didn’t mention the embarrassment at the lookout. In fact, we didn’t talk at all. When we passed each other on our way to the bathroom we coughed or looked the other way.
Those incidents seemed centuries ago. Rottnest was like that. Since then I’d turned sixteen, fallen in love and, to impress my new love, killed a shark.
I didn’t admit it, but I’d desperately hoped to find my first real girlfriend on the island. Despite our endless talk of sex I was a romantic. If you couldn’t get a girlfriend here you weren’t trying, it seemed to me. From what I’d gleaned at the dinner table, as Gordon and Irene Schwabb chanted the names of bays and twinkled at each other over the freshly caught crayfish (or crayfish mornay, or curried crayfish), every adult who’d ever been here – since the prison era, anyway – regarded the island in a sensual and nostalgic light for the rest of their days.
I regarded it in a sensual light from the moment I saw Roberta Ainslie’s shoulder-blades. I’d never given girls’ backs much thought before. I was too busy with the idea of girls’ fronts. But she was tall and tanned and elegantly curvaceous and wearing a one-piece turquoise swimsuit cut low in the back. She was walking gingerly over the reef into the Basin, the reef pool which was the island’s favourite swimming spot. She looked about seventeen.