Watermark

by Joanna Atherfold Finn

  I made a conscious decision to move here when my husband died. So far I would have to say that it’s been the right decision. I’ve been making the most of my surroundings on the recommendation of Doctor Bunt. ‘Deidre,’ he said to me, ‘Deidre, look at where you live. You live in paradise.’

  He’s right. It does look like paradise when we travel around in the minibus that makes us look as though we’re not the full quid. We drive up to the Lighthouse Cafe for Devonshire tea and then around to the marina where leisure boats arrogantly glisten and kids lie on their stomachs with their heads dangling over the pier. The bus does a big loop, right past The Gateway campground, but Phil, our driver, doesn’t stop there. ‘Not much to see,’ Phil says every time. ‘Why would you spend your life saving up to build a house and then go and squat around at a joint that looks like something out of Nauru.’ I have noticed, though, that they’ve fancied it up. It’s got a putt-putt course and a kids’ playground and even an on-site convenience store. I wonder what Juliette would make of it.

  When Phil stops at the beach, I gather up my terry-towelling duffle bag and my sunscreen and I wriggle along the seat. I wipe the trail of sweat off the vinyl with my towel. I don’t say sorry if I bump anyone with my bag or my elbows or my hips. There’s a lady called Jill from the Sanctuary who sits opposite me on the bus and gets off wherever I do. She’s always decked out in dark colours, even in summer. At the pool, she sits on the concrete blocks and reads her book, but whenever I look across she’s always got me in her sights. She nods her head back down into her novel, clearly thinking I’m too dim to know that she’s stalking me.

  The swimming doesn’t really help with my weight but it does, for a time, make me feel weightless. I like the sensation of the salt water fizzing over my skin and running in snaking rivulets down my chest. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’m optimistic that one day I’ll meet a fella down here. Not another husband, mind you. Just a companion. The men at the Sanctuary are a bit lacklustre, but they’re as frisky as seals down at the ocean baths.

  Lately I’ve started to walk across to the surf beach when I finish my swim. Jill keeps her distance, but she’s never too far away. I lie on my back and scoop up the sand and let the grains travel through my splayed hands. I close my eyes and listen to the low murmuring voice of a woman. She tells me to keep still as she folds a towel around me. Her fingertips run along my forehead in smooth strokes like tide marks. She lets me know that my mum and dad aren’t far away; they’re coming to get me. She’ll stay with me for as long as it takes. If I squint up the beach, squint into the sun, I can see the shimmering mass of a crowd. Then comes the high-pitched wail. It isn’t the sound of a child. It certainly isn’t human.

  I think too much sun can do things to your mind. That’s why sunbathers constantly dip themselves into the ocean. I trudge down to the waves. I take in the young girls with their swimmers wrenched up their bottoms and the boys who flick their wet heads back and forth like bunting cats and I think about how conservative the swimming costumes were that Juliette and I wore with their low-sided bottoms and wide shoulder straps. The kids these days look as if they haven’t got a care in the world. They’re brazen. Imagine what they must make of me with my hair sticking to my face and my thighs wobbling with each step and Jill blackly preying on me, shadowing me like a crow in the sand.

  When I was young I’d look at my mum with her rolling skin like wind-blown sand and I’d wonder how she let herself get in such a state, but you know what, it’s a gradual thing. It’s like when you stand in the ocean. I still won’t go in very far. I stand right where the waves break. I end up with a swimming costume full of grit. My straps hang off my shoulders and sometimes the whole kit and caboodle falls down. Some women make it look elegant, but I’m so busy concentrating on the next set of waves, the water hectic with children, their blazing eyes and their high squeals, that I don’t notice that I’m moving with the current. I get a bit of a shock to see that I’m almost out of the flagged area. A bit panicky.

  That is when I see Juliette. Her face is just under the surface and her hair is fanning out like red weed. I hold on to her to stop myself from sinking. Bradley is carving through the water, almost upon us. He’ll reach us soon. In the water, his arms are strong. As strong as a man’s.

  Reunion

  The last time I saw my friend he was heading towards the ferry with a half-skip, his white shirt trailing like a ripped sail seeking out a breeze. The shirt caught my eye. The shirt and the half-skip. I didn’t recollect him arriving in the same way.

  I met him at Manly Wharf. I wondered, after forty years, if I’d recognise him, and he, me. When the Freshwater docked, I kept my eyes at waist level. I think I was expecting, or wanting, a nine-year-old boy. He was one of the last to get off, caught behind some world-weary teenagers, and he walked straight towards me. He was wearing crinkled cargo shorts, the white shirt, and military boots. He had a silver cross dangling from a neck chain and I thought it could have been the same cross that his mother wore when we were kids. As he moved closer I saw that his blue eyes were unchanged, though magnified now behind black-rimmed glasses. His hair was still mousy but the boyish curls had unravelled into sinewy strands. He looked undernourished. Inner-city pale. He was thinner and I was taller and I wondered how I could feel euphoric and miserable at the same time.

  ‘Gordon,’ he said, and he held out his hand. I clutched his palm and felt it tremor. I let go too quickly.

  ‘Malachi,’ I said in a voice that came out deep and distant.

  He lowered his face for a moment and then he looked up and smiled his thin, warped smile. I don’t know what he was picturing in that moment, but I saw us scavenging for pram wheels and fruit crates, two shirtless kids with gappy grins and scabby knees fossicking around at the local dump. Here’s a good-un, Goddy. Sturdy as a nun’s bum. What do ya think?

  He’d called the night before, right on six, the time I always have a coffee and watch the news. I’d almost not answered. When I picked up I could hear a cat-call siren and then his crackling voice. He said he was glad there weren’t too many G Kavanaghs in the phone book and it made me think that maybe it was the first time he’d tried to find me. He said he’d started with the dodgier suburbs, not expecting me to live somewhere quite so up-market. We both laughed at that. His laugh was the same, quick and juddery. He was living in the Cross now, not far from the bohemian nightclub where my dad had been the bandleader. ‘Just a temporary arrangement,’ he said, till he got things sorted with his ex-wife. He wanted to catch up, but he didn’t have a car. He could get a bus and then the ferry across to Manly. We could meet halfway.

  ‘Talk about out of the blue,’ Susan said that night. We were watching a wildlife show and I was finding it hard to concentrate. After her comment, a pelican scooped up a startled duck in its beak. The duck thrashed around in the pelican’s pink, translucent pouch. We could see its wings beating and the outline of a webbed foot. ‘There are some things we don’t need to know in life,’ my wife said. She pointed the remote at the screen and switched it off. ‘How that duck ends up is one of them.’ I didn’t hold out much hope for the duck. As I stared at the blank television, Malachi’s childhood voice merged with my image of its final confused moments. Its slow, inexorable slide to oblivion. Do ya reckon we’re going to hell, Goddy? Do ya reckon?

  • • •

  Malachi and I crossed the road and I breathed in the salty air and the toasted-waffle smell drifting from the Copenhagen. I thought about hokey-pokey ice-cream and body-boarding and Josephine, my teenage daughter. We stepped onto the granite waves of the Corso and he pulled a cigarette from his bag and propped it against his lip. It took him three flicks of the lighter to get it going. He twisted his mouth and blew the smoke away from me but it wafted back with the breeze.

  ‘Want one?’ he asked, and I shook my head. I thought of us hiding behind his dad’s shed, sucking up heady drags from a pilfered rollie and spinning in circles. Munching on le
aves to get rid of the smell. Goddy, there’s three of ya. Three of ya standing afore me.

  We walked towards Manly beach, towards the cluttered horizon. I wasn’t really sure which one of us was leading and which one was following. I pointed out the catenary wires suspended above our heads. I’d seen them lit up at night when they looked like fallen constellations. Malachi was watching a small boy running and screeching as he dodged water spouting from an installation. I asked him if he had any children. He shook his head but didn’t ask me the same question.

  Up ahead, tufted cabbage tree palms stroked the sky and back-packed tourists slouched against circular seats. The Australian flag blew backwards from the Hotel Steyne.

  ‘Coffee?’ I asked, and Malachi nodded. We turned the corner and spotted an alfresco arrangement. A row of racing bikes was lined up outside. Malachi smirked, taking in the lairy fluoro colours of the cyclists’ shirts.

  ‘The lycra set,’ he said, easing his bag off his shoulder and taking the nearest seat, the one that faced him away from the ocean.

  ‘Poofter bikes,’ I said, scrunching up my nose and winking at him. We’d both learnt to ride on his sister Meara’s Malvern Star. She’d peer at us as we careened up and down the hallway, pedalling furiously, wobbling and yelling, our fingertips trawling the worn gold wallpaper. I pictured her then, her startling red hair and the green glass eye she’d promised to me in the childish scrawl of her handwritten will. As a kid I imagined her eye as a perfect sphere; I thought it would make a great marble.

  Malachi pressed his fingers up under his glasses and rubbed his eyes. His nails were frayed and grimy. I pulled out the other chair and pushed my back into the aluminium struts. A black-bobbed waitress came out with two menus and a spray bottle. She squirted and wiped around my wallet and keys and the salt and pepper shakers. I said I’d start with a coffee and a mineral water. Malachi raised his eyes at me and did a bizarre movement, a sort of Indian head jiggle. He asked for a schooner of New. She looked at her watch and said she’d see if she could arrange it.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘There must be a cliché for this moment.’

  Malachi bent forward. ‘Haven’t seen ya for ears and ears, but I still nose ya.’ He went to grab at my face and I laughed and blocked him. ‘I can still see your scar,’ he said, looking at me more intently. He pointed to his chin and I mirrored the action, moving my hand against the numb tooth-sized slit under my bottom lip. ‘I thought you were dead. I kid you not; I thought you were a goner.’

  ‘You were just a kid,’ I said, but then so was I. We’d kicked off our school shoes and raced each other to a building site after school. We’d moved with stealth, like combatants, through the timber carcass of a two-storey dwelling. Malachi leapt soundlessly over the bearers and joists and I slinked after him. He turned and peered at me through the studs. We’re innocent. We did naught, I tell ya. As God is our witness. We’ll jump to our freedom. We’d been friends for two years and I was becoming used to dramatic soliloquies. While we hunted for lizards or made billy carts, Meara sat on her parents’ verandah and wrote convoluted seven-act plays about purgatory. The promise of her glass eye and turns on her Malvern Star made me a reluctant participant. She only ever gave me minor parts. I was always the miserable sinner, gravely wounded in the second act so she could resuscitate me with benevolent kisses.

  Malachi had climbed up the scaffolding, crossed himself, and leapt out into the scribbled sky. I’d sucked in my breath as his limbs wheeled and flailed. He’d landed with a thud, starfish-style, in a pile of sand. When he stood, there was a perfect mould of his body left behind. He was covered in powdery silt, a blue-eyed ghost, detached and eerie like one of Meara’s conjured characters. He took faltering steps and started to hiccup. That was all the encouragement I needed. We took turns until we had grit crammed into every orifice. When the light changed, I looked at my watch and thought about Mum’s elaborate chore illustration taped to the back door. I had to walk and feed the dog, practise my scales, and load paper and kindling into the grate before she got home from work.

  Go up ta the next lot then; go on, I dare ya.

  Nah, I’ve gotta get back and walk Bluey. Mum’ll go crook.

  Ah, ya big chook. Big scaredy chook. Bruuuuk, bruuuk.

  I’ll give you a big chook, Malachi.

  I climbed the scaffolding, balanced on the beam and then, peering down at him, full of bravado, I misjudged the edge and teetered backwards. Malachi’s voice rushed through the air towards me. Goddy, Goddy, ya ma’s gonna kill me. I was in the free fall of one of my dreams and I flapped my arms anticipating the soar of flight, the uptake of the wind. Instead, my body and his voice collided into a pile of disused bricks. My legs concertinaed and my knee forced my tooth out through my chin. It was all salty blood and Malachi’s scream and rock shards lodged deep within my skin. Malachi drifted above me, wild-eyed, framed by the fading sky. He stood and turned away. I closed my eyes and the vibration of his footfall, his characteristic half-skip, waned, out of sync with my drumming chest. Malachi, stay with me.

  ‘I got a belting from Ma that night,’ Malachi said, dragging me from my thoughts. His voice sounded just like it had when we were kids. ‘She gave me Doctor-Cure-Em-Quick on the buttocks and said I wasn’t worth purgatory. Then Meara kept eyeballing me.’

  ‘Yeah, well, by the time the police found me I was crawling through the rubble like a nutter. The next day I got tweezed and stitched to death by Doctor Gillespie.’

  ‘I had to scythe the back lawn for a month and Ma told me I was feckless as a Protestant.’

  ‘Mum took it upon herself to rehabilitate me with mushed tripe, castor oil and Perry Como. I think you came out on top.’

  The waitress arrived with our drinks then and I rearranged things on the table to accommodate her. I took a sip of my mineral water. Malachi dipped his thumb into the froth of his beer and sucked it.

  ‘Not gonna have a beer with an old mate, Gordon?’

  It’s been three years, three months, twenty-five days and seven hours since my last drink. ‘No, I’m driving.’ I held an imaginary wheel in my hands and turned it. My mind travelled back to my rehab stint. My wife and daughter visiting me in a sterile room. The dent of their bodies on the edge of my bed. My body, drenched, in blue pyjamas. ‘Hey, remember old Jerry Woodberry?’ I said, changing the subject.

  ‘Good old Woody. Silly old bugger.’

  ‘Remember filling up his petrol tank with sand?’

  Malachi snorted. ‘And the mud we chucked all over his spanking Customline. He was gonna kill us.’

  ‘And we bolted up the road and you trod on that plank of timber.’

  Malachi lifted his glass; when he took a swig, his hand was shaking. ‘The nail went right through the sole of my shoe and into my heel.’

  ‘You were shuffling down the street, howling and pattering like some sort of demented tap dancer.’

  ‘It was like a bloody ski, and there was Woody gaining on us.’ Malachi sat forward and his eyes lit up like they had when he was a kid.

  ‘I wondered what the hell you were doing.’ Mary, mother of Joseph, I’m stuck, Goddy. ‘And then your ma came out and said, “Mr Woodberry, leave the wee boys alone, if you don’t mind. Whatever they’ve done to upset you, God will be the maker of their punishment.” Then she glared at you and said, “Malachi, get that hunk of timber off your boot, you look ridiculous.” ’

  Malachi laughed. He put his hand in the air and motioned to the waitress for another beer. Beads of sweat patterned the front of his shirt.

  ‘Is she still around, Malachi?’

  ‘No.’ He pressed his fingers against his neck.

  ‘Mine either.’ I looked out at the Norfolk Pines slowly relenting to their sea-borne decay and their stunted, cordoned replacements dotted along the promenade.

  ‘She was a stunner, your mother,’ Malachi said. The waitress put another schooner down and he gulped and grinned at me through frothy lips. ‘She did that thing with
her hair, curled and swept up at the back. Everything matched. She was like one of those women off the movies. Lauren Bacall. That’s who she looked like. Why don’t sheilas look like that anymore?’

  ‘She had a magnified mirror and she’d pencil her lips and her brows and colour them in. I’d sit on the bathtub. She treated her face like one of her drawings, outlining and smudging and smoothing until it was perfect. You know, I’ve only got one or two photos. She tore them up. And her drawings. She threw them all in a forty-four-gallon drum and flicked in a match.’

  Malachi raised his eyebrows and his eyes danced. ‘Smouldering good looks.’

  ‘Funny. When the doctor said he couldn’t fix her eyes, she gave up. I wonder about that God of yours, Malachi.’

  Malachi pressed his lips together and fidgeted with the salt and pepper shakers. ‘He’s got a pretty bent sense of humour, that’s for sure. Hey, remember when you bundled up your mum’s life drawings and spread them out on the kitchen table to show Ma.’

  ‘Well, she had Landseer’s stag and Jesus with his flowing tresses and his glowing heart. I thought she must have had an appreciation for quality artwork. I was all bloated up with pride and she went pale and slack-jawed and clipped me around the ear.’

  ‘Ma looked at those voluptuous, swooning bodies and nearly carked it. I think Da appreciated your efforts, though. For the few seconds he got to lay his eyes on them. He sat there, tea-slurping and nodding while Ma gathered those breasts and hips up like dirty dishes.’

  Get that filth out of my house, Gordon Kavanagh. You’re all depraved. This country’s full of salt-headed, dim-witted degenerates.

  I thought of his ma’s pinched mouth and her flushed cheeks and her Sunday sausage coddle. ‘You hungry, Malachi?’ He looked hungry. He looked as though he hadn’t had a decent meal in months. I was trying not to stare at his hands; he was pressing one over the other as if trying to stifle the tremor. ‘I thought I’d get some Turkish bread or something.’ I caught the waitress’s eye. ‘Do you want some?’