Watermark

by Joanna Atherfold Finn

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’ He smiled between puffs in a distracted way.

  ‘You stuck one up your nose once. You couldn’t stop sneezing. Your ma thought you had some sort of incurable illness.’

  Malachi looked at his watch again. ‘I reckon I’m gonna miss the ferry.’

  ‘There’s always the next one. Hey, you know when my daughter was about five, I showed her how to play soldiers. That game you taught me, striking the grey heads off those plants. She thought it was hilarious. She showed my wife how to play. She said, “Hold it still, Mummy; I’ll knock your block off.” ’

  ‘Ha,’ Malachi said. He was walking faster but not gaining any real distance, two stumbling strides to each of my long ones.

  ‘We’ll go back to that park,’ I said. Parks don’t change, I thought. We could dig in the spot where we’d buried the kitten. It was down near the creek bed, across from the play equipment. We could climb up the monkey bars again and Malachi could shout from the top and I could duck and weave down the bottom. I’m the king of the castle, and you’re the dirty rascal.

  • • •

  At the jetty entrance, Malachi put his hand on my shoulder and I gave him a clumsy embrace that he fell out of. The ferry pummelled the side of the wharf. He searched his bag for his ticket and waved it around in front of me.

  ‘I’ll pay you back, with interest,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you during the week. You’re a sport, Goddy. You’re a good sport. And I’ll buy lunch. It’s on me next week. At least you won’t cost me in booze.’

  ‘Yeah, you’d better. Anyway, I know where you live,’ I joked.

  ‘Wuff Wuff,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘And your mum. Like I said, your mum was a stunner.’

  I looked at Malachi and his shaking hands and his neck raw from scratching. I looked into his faltering gaze and his boots that kept on shuffling. As he stood facing me, I considered his sleeves. Long white sleeves on a summer’s day. I thought about grabbing them and pushing them up. He turned and did an awkward half-skip towards the ferry and his shirt flapped out behind him. I put my hand in my pocket and took out his number. I stared at it for a few moments and then I counted the digits. I counted them again and then I called out his name. The deckie raised the ramps and set the ferry free from its mooring. A deep sound like a moan signalled its departure. That was the last time. The last time I saw my friend.

  Tessellating Shapes

  It is overcast. Drizzling rain obscures Lachy’s view. He winds up his window anticipating the industrial stench from Kooragang Island. Normally he likes the breeze in his face, but for now the glass is a protective layer, a numbness that will fall away soon enough. There is a drum roll of thunder in the distance. He smirks, wondering if his old mate Austin has somehow colluded with the weather.

  Lachy rests his hands at ten and two o’clock on the steering wheel of Anna’s work car. He doesn’t like driving it, but it seems disrespectful for them to arrive in his ute. He glances at his ratty nails, his skin scoured from coiling ropes, scraping his knuckles on barnacles, hurling fish crates into the tray-back. The tips of his fingers are blunt like stones pummelled into shape by the sea. He slots a disc into the CD player. He’s been more careful with his actions lately, more aware of his own mortality. Now, when he selects the song track, he does it by feel alone, not taking his eyes off the road. The song is called ‘Shiver’. With its subtle shifts and harmonies, it has a vulnerability that makes it today’s perfect travel companion. It is darker than his usual taste. A sense of the path less travelled. That’s another thing he’s been doing more of lately: not just listening to music, feeling it.

  Anna sits next to him. Her presence is like a shadow he can almost make out from the corner of his vision. She’s recently had her hair cut into a bob and dyed black. It is shaved at the nape, graduating into two sharp points that rest on her collarbone. She’s wearing a silver cocktail dress and black stockings, sitting with her shoulders hunched forward and her head down, wilting. Austin had once told him that Kooragang meant a gathering of birds and it is a bird that Lachy thinks of now when he glances at his wife. She’s always had a sort of avian grace about her, but today, in her slumped stillness, that elegance is missing. Instead she is like one of the birds he’d dodged on the beach during the week when he’d gone for a run, unable to stay asleep. At first he’d seen just one. Its head curved into its wing as though resting. Then he’d spotted another, and another. A rancid line of mutton birds half-burrowed in the sand. It was a phenomenon he was familiar with. They died from exhaustion trying to find a place beyond their reach.

  Anna’s lethargy is understandable. They both had a bad night’s sleep. Apparently his leg had been twitching, convulsing like a fish on the bottom of a boat. She’d nudged him in the shoulder a couple of times and then pressed his leg between hers, but nothing would stop the movement. In the small hours, she’d padded down the hallway to their spare room. Over the years, when Oscar was a baby, when Anna had worked night shifts, they’d become accustomed to sleeping in separate beds. But when he woke without her next to him in the morning, he’d been jittery, tapping out a random tune with his fingers and clenching his teeth.

  It seemed, now, like another day, but just hours ago they’d sat in the kitchen. Anna, dressed in a frayed yellow T-shirt that he’d normally have found arousing, had placed two bowls of muesli on the flaking kitchen table. She’d boiled an egg and cut toast into soldiers for Oscar, who carried his plate into the lounge room and turned on the television. Oscar had seemed out of sorts, but Lachy hadn’t had the energy to make sense of it. His days were dictated by the tides and the swell and it was unusual for them to be together for breakfast. Anna sat opposite him and he rested his foot on hers and watched her distractedly scoop up mouthfuls of food. She spilt some of the milk down her top. Her eyelids were swollen and her lips looked puffy, her cheeks too; her whole face, in fact. Lachy guessed she’d been sobbing all night. Quietly, though. She hadn’t woken him from his nightmares. Over breakfast, she’d called out practised directions to Oscar about teeth and Tupperware containers and catching the bus. Lachy had let the words flow over him. He’d dwelled, instead, on the birds on the beach, bloated in death, and, in turn, his mate Austin. He’d thought about the things that people would say about his friend, and also the things they wouldn’t say about him. He knew he would be the same. To dwell too much was risky, absurd too, like trying to reconcile a trail of small and senseless deaths.

  The downward slope of Stockton Bridge makes Lachy pick up speed. He eases his foot back and negotiates the smooth arc of the roundabout. He always feels unsettled by the muddled junction of industry and nature on the tract of land heading from Stockton to Newcastle. Gantry cranes jut out like prehistoric creatures roaming a succession of black dunes. If there’s a hell, he thinks, then we are skimming its perimeter. Lachy wonders if any of that coal has come from Austin’s mine in the Valley. Whether he’s played a small part in bringing it here.

  He looks at Anna again. From her expression she seems to be thinking the same thing. They’ve been together long enough to function in this way; to understand each other’s moods and unspoken thoughts. He supposes it could look like indifference, even boredom, to an outsider, but they can be together without having to talk. Sometimes a downward glance or the press of his palm on her shoulder is enough. There is no need to fill in the gaps.

  ‘This is too hard,’ Anna says. ‘I’m not ready for it.’ She undoes the clasp on her bag and takes out a card still in its plastic wrapping. She puts it on the console between them as though presenting him with the evidence of her statement.

  Halted in the merging lane, Lachy looks down and sees that the card is black and white with a small tree in the centre. The tree’s leaves are heart-shaped, suspended against the plain background, unattached to the trunk. It is the sort of artistic card that Anna is fond of. She hates anything tizzy. It could be a card for any number of occasions. A thank-you card, perhaps. Or a card to expl
ain a change of address.

  ‘I’m going to give it to his mother,’ she says. ‘It’s blank inside.’

  Up ahead, past the lone wind turbine, Lachy notices a bevy of swans. He thinks they should be gliding along a pond, not here, hobbling in the marshes near a major intersection. What is it with birds? He wonders if these ones are clustered so close to the traffic out of stupidity or sheer resolve. ‘On a death wish,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, well done.’ Anna bursts into tears, sniffling and patting at the base of her eyes with her thumb as though blotting out a mistake. ‘I can’t stop,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how to stop.’

  He thinks about his comment. His stupidity. He knows he too might break down at any moment. He wants to rest his hand on Anna’s lap, but if she puts her hand over his, that will be the end of him. He clutches the wheel tighter instead.

  ‘I’ve asked your mum to get Oscar. To get him after school.’ Anna speaks in short bursts as though she’s having trouble getting enough air.

  Lachy thinks of his son’s rumpled blond hair and his gawky frame.

  ‘I said we’ll meet her. At the club restaurant. She’ll bring the presents.’

  It is only then that he remembers that it’s Oscar’s birthday. He feels a sudden bitterness realising that the anniversary of his son’s arrival to this world will be forever intertwined with this day. He wonders, for an irrational moment, if Austin has orchestrated it that way.

  Lachy’s mind travels back again to the muddled movements of that morning. His mind had been on Austin. He hadn’t said goodbye when Oscar left for the bus. Hadn’t even said good morning, let alone happy birthday. When Oscar had run into his room before breakfast, Lachy had been standing in his board shorts, flicking through his shirts, his eyes falling on the blue checked one with the top three buttons missing. The one he wore the last time he’d been with Austin. The shirt Anna refused to mend, wanting nothing to do with what she called their Fight Club shenanigans. The shirt he’d refused to throw out. ‘Guess what today is, Daddy,’ Oscar had said, and Lachy had nodded with a grimace and then pushed past him to get to the ensuite. He’d stood there for a long time with his head pressed against the faucet.

  ‘We can’t do it tonight,’ Lachy says, focusing on the road again, startled that he’s let his mind wander momentarily while a steady stream of traffic flows towards them. ‘We’ll take him to the club next week. When things settle down.’

  Anna shakes her head slowly, her black hair swaying in two neat points. She refuses to be overruled. ‘I said to your mother that we’d be back by five. This morning I wanted to crawl into a heap, but I sent Oscar off on the school bus with twenty cupcakes. How do you think it felt doing that, Lachy? We’ll go to the club and he’ll have his birthday like he’s meant to. We should be back by then. I mean, how long do these things take?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a set time.’

  Anna makes a small wheezing sound. ‘I don’t think I can do this.’

  ‘We’re not doing it,’ Lachy says as he winds down his window. ‘We’re what’s left.’

  • • •

  By the time they reach the car park, the drizzle has turned into relentless rain. Anna pulls on a black cardigan with a spidery weave and Lachy does up the top button of his white shirt. He is wearing his only suit. A charcoal one usually reserved for weddings and Anna’s work functions. His usual garb is heavy boots, tradie shorts and a navy singlet. He walks around to Anna’s side of the car and opens the door like he used to when they first dated. She eases herself out, her black-stockinged legs first, while he opens the umbrella. When she stands, it takes so much effort that it seems as though she’s injured herself. He takes in her eyes, encircled with dark eyeliner to camouflage the redness.

  God, how can they be here? He thinks back to when he told Austin, for the second time, that he wasn’t welcome back on his boat. He told him he needed to sort himself out. He wasn’t going to have him as his deckie anymore. Austin had been throwing loose punches into the air. It was midnight but he was still wearing his aviators, half-stumbling, half-swaggering, singing ‘This is Tomorrow’ at the top of his lungs. Lachy had an order to fill the next day and he didn’t have a back-up plan, but he wasn’t giving in. Neither of them had been fit to drive. He’d only walked with Austin to make sure he didn’t fall onto the road and get cleaned up by a car.

  It had been a full moon. They’d stood outside Austin’s fibro shack and Austin had kept at him like a nagging kid. He said he’d see Lachy in the morning. He’d be ready at five. He promised. He wouldn’t even go to bed, just in case. He’d pack them some sandwiches and strong coffee. It’d be a ‘kill the pig’ day. They’d punch out over the swell to Broughton Island and load up with urchins before lunchtime. He’d anchor out wide and watch the conditions like a hawk. He knew he’d stuffed up, but tomorrow would be different. Lachy shook his head. He said their friendship was toxic. He didn’t want him around Anna and Oscar anymore. He hadn’t been joking about the deckie job. There was a young bloke down the road who wanted it. Super keen and fit. Cheaper too, no doubt. Hell, Oscar could probably do a better job. He’d definitely be better at filling out the paperwork. Austin always made errors, got the catch amounts mixed up or wrote them in the wrong columns.

  Austin had smiled and pointed up to the sky and then he’d cracked his fist into Lachy’s tilted jaw. They’d stared at each other for a moment, both in shock. Austin looked mortified, but then he smiled. ‘Houston, we have a problem,’ he said. Normally it would have made Lachy laugh, but instead he responded with a low jab that took the wind out of his mate. Under the moonlight they tackled each other until Austin backed away covering his face with his fists. Lachy got out of it with three missing buttons and a bruised friendship. Austin ended up with cracked glasses and three broken ribs. Lachy didn’t know that at the time; he found out from the local publican months later. When he observed Austin that night, doubled over, he was too stubborn to help. He turned and walked back home. Left him there, moaning at the moon.

  Lachy shakes his head as though it might help him to shake off the memory. He looks ahead to a pink-gravelled driveway lined with pine trees. He gives Anna the umbrella, takes a crushed piece of paper out of his pocket and turns it on an angle as though trying to get his bearings. He walks with her past ornamental gardens and perfectly manicured lawns, and the metal struts of the umbrella bang down on his head.

  ‘We’re in the big one up there,’ he says, motioning towards a white-columned building past the pine trees. The structure is grand and extravagant.

  ‘I hate pines,’ Anna says. ‘I hate the sound they make when the wind blows through them. And this place. Whose idea was this place?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe this is where the family goes.’

  ‘Well, don’t ever take me to a place like this. I mean it, Lachy. And this is a mistake. It wasn’t meant to happen. If he’d meant for it to happen, he wouldn’t have had a shower. What would be the point? That’s what his mother told me. She said he had a shower at her place and then he got in his car to go to work. She said he was spending more and more time with her. Staying a couple of nights a week. He was making great money in the mines. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘You’ll do your head in, Anna. You can’t work these things out.’ Lachy holds her hand as they step over a series of marble pavers.

  Anna pauses, halfway across, and stares at the words beneath her feet. Names followed by years. Sayings just like the ones in the cards she’d flinched from at the newsagency. In the distance, pouring out from the grand white building, she can hear a recording of Leonard Cohen singing ‘Hallelujah’.

  ‘Did he ever say anything to you about Cohen?’

  ‘No. He liked Bryan Ferry. That’s what should be playing.’ He thinks of Austin cradling his smashed aviator glasses, arched in pain in the moonlight. ‘This song almost makes me want to kill myself.’

  ‘Don’t. Just don’t. How c
ould you?’

  Anna slowly turns her head towards him and raises her eyebrows the way she does when Oscar disappoints her. That is her nature. She always tries to be reasonable. If Lachy does something to hurt her she says, ‘I know you have a reason for doing this. I just can’t for the life of me work out what it is.’ Her measured contemplation is worse than yelling.

  ‘And I think we’re walking on people,’ she says. Anna jumps so her feet are on either side of the pavers. ‘We’re right on top of them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look at them. They’re memorial stones. We shouldn’t have come this way.’

  Lachy looks down at his feet and then straight ahead to a suited man in a doorway handing out brochures. He knows exactly what is ahead, past the double doors. There’s a slide projector and a podium and people milling in small groups or easing their way along planks of polished timber. There’s a woman he hardly knows who’ll give him a perfumed half-kiss because that is what is expected. There’s a group of burly miners. Fishermen with pitted faces. And, worse, a stranger with a limp handshake who’ll tell him that Austin is at peace.

  ‘We’ll be okay.’ He takes the umbrella from her and puts it down and then he grips her hand again, tighter this time. He turns, slowly but with great control, and Anna spins around next to him. It is like a slow dance move. It is as though they are unravelling. Lachy heads back down the path with resolute strides and Anna stumbles along beside him, uselessly putting her hand on her head so her hair stays in place.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she says. ‘We’ll be late. We can’t be late for something like this.’ Anna is never late to anything.

  He walks faster. If he slows down he’ll change his mind. He thinks about how Austin would have been late. That’s what he was like. Bloody unreliable. Always did a half-job.