by Jessie Cole
‘What are you drawing?’ I asked.
‘A picture.’
I could hear the scratch of the texta against the paper.
‘Of what?’
‘It’s a map.’
I turned my head to look over my shoulder at him. ‘Hold it up for me.’
Milla drew one more line and then lifted the scrapbook to show me. Abstract oval lines and blocks of colour. I was always surprised by Milla’s drawings.
‘What’s it a map of?’
‘It’s a map so no one ever gets lost. I’m going to roll it up and get a rubber band so it will be a … a … you know those things?’
I thought a minute, delving for the word.
‘A scroll?’
‘Yeah, a scroll, so no one ever gets lost.’
‘That’s pretty fancy,’ I said, wondering who he worried might get lost.
‘Mum, can I draw on you?’
‘Where on me?’
Milla climbed carefully up on my back, a brown texta in his hand. He sat on me and bounced lightly and I smiled, my face turned to the side.
‘Can I draw on your back, here?’ Pressing his fingers softly into my shoulder, Milla rolled over to lie beside me.
‘Just a little picture,’ I murmured. ‘Just one.’
Sitting up, he leaned forward and set to work. He was quiet and I closed my eyes.
‘Finished,’ he said after a minute or so.
‘What did you draw?’
‘Daddy. I drew Daddy on your back.’
I rolled over and looked at my oldest boy. ‘You miss him?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘He’ll come next Friday—you’ll see him then.’
Milla nodded, turning his face away, and then smiled at me, a glancing, sideways smile.
‘Can we go to the beach now, do you think?’
≈
I drove with the boys to the fisherman’s beach. Milla and Luca rushed out of the car, their faces bright with recognition.
‘It’s the hook beach, Mum!’
Their voices swept towards me as they raced down to the water. I looked along the sand for the fisherman’s silhouette, but the beach was deserted. An emptiness welled inside me at his absence, and I trailed after the boys down to the shore. They bounded about—tousled and playful—and I watched them with a secret longing. I envied my boys their freedom. They moved as though nothing pinned them down, no swamping dark history, no obdurate grief—as though they could at any time jump into the vast blue ocean and swim away, lively and free.
After a while I sat down at the shoreline, the ends of the waves washing up over my feet. My shadow stretched out before me on the sand, the sun low at my back.
‘Jessie?’
The voice behind me was deep, and I knew it was him. The fisherman. I stood up quickly, trying to brush sand from my dress.
‘Hi.’
He was the same, in his tatty fishing gear. The sun shone in my eyes, and I turned away from the glare, fighting the urge to cross my arms in front of my breasts.
‘How you been?’ he asked.
‘Good.’ I looked across at the boys.
‘How’s his finger?’
‘It’s fine. It just looked bad with the hook in it.’
The man watched my face, as if waiting for a sign. I could feel myself begin to blush, and I held up my hand to shield my eyes from his gaze. It shamed me that my body responded so overtly to his presence. He was silent and I moved to stand beside him with my back to the glare.
‘How have you been?’ It seemed a safe question.
‘Yeah, all right.’
The boys spotted the fisherman and came wandering over, shells falling from their fingers. Sand encrusted, they smiled up at him from beneath their hats.
‘Mum, do you know him?’ Luca looked from me to the fisherman and back again.
I glanced at the fisherman’s face and saw his quick smile.
‘He’s the man who got the hook out of your finger. Don’t you remember?’
‘I remember. But do you know him?’
‘Well—’ I realised that I’d never even asked the fisherman’s name.
‘I’m Sam.’
The man bent down and shook hands with Luca and then with Milla. Luca giggled, a bubbling, infectious laugh.
‘What about Mum?’
Smiling, Sam held out his hand to me. Staring at the creases on his knuckles and the blunt curves of his nails, I willed myself to take it. Awkward, I squeezed his palm in my fingers, a tight, swift shake.
‘There, now we’re all friends.’ Sam’s voice was easy, as though the boys’ presence had brought him a sudden lightness.
‘Sam, come and see our castle.’ Milla was excited, and I could see him trying to decide whether he should touch the fisherman’s arm, his fingers lingering in midair. Sam moved towards the castle, turning to look at me as I followed. He crouched at the base of their odd-shaped creation and smoothed his palm across the top.
‘What do you reckon, Jess—could this castle do with a tunnel through the middle?’
‘Boys?’ I knelt beside the fisherman on the sand. ‘A tunnel through the middle?’
‘Will it fall down?’ Milla asked.
‘No,’ Sam said. ‘There’s a secret method. You boys start digging from that side, and I’ll dig from this side. We’ll meet in the middle, okay?’
As he pushed his fingers into the wall of the castle, Milla’s face was sceptical. He scooped out a handful of sand, waiting to see if the castle would crumble. It held its shape, and Milla began to dig deeper inside. Luca stood watching.
‘I think you’re going to make it,’ Luca piped up, always the optimist. He walked from one side to the other.
‘Gotcha!’ The fisherman smiled as he snagged Milla’s fingers beneath the sand.
Lying on his belly, his arm stretched out inside the tunnel, Milla laughed and dropped his head, resting his cheek on the gritty beach. Sam pulled my son’s fingers, making him giggle. I watched the man’s smile, how the creases spread out from beside his eyes.
‘Okay, let’s look at this masterpiece.’ Sam pulled his arm carefully from the tunnel of sand and sat back on his heels. Luca wandered back to me and flopped down into my lap, flicking off his wet hat.
‘Looks good,’ Sam said.
My smaller son sighed, peering up at the man beside him. Sam glanced between us, and I could see him searching for our resemblance. Leaning forward, I squeezed Luca in a tight embrace, hiding my face in his hair to escape scrutiny, but Luca wriggled and pulled his arms free.
‘You have a little man drawn here.’ Reaching out, Sam pointed at my back. He leaned towards me to get a proper look, and I tried not to tremble. My body seemed to find Sam’s proximity unsettling. Dipping my face into Luca’s damp curls again, I held my breath, forcing myself not to shift away.
‘A tattoo?’ Sam asked, glancing from Milla to Luca.
‘I drew it,’ Milla said, banging a hand down in the sand. ‘It’s my dad.’ His face was suddenly pink and shuttered. ‘He drinks too much and says fuck for nothing.’
Milla paused to take in the fisherman’s response, but Sam was quiet.
‘He doesn’t wear his seatbelt,’ Milla added, and the air shifted around us, a sharp, stinging breeze. I wanted to reach out an arm to my oldest son, to run a soothing hand along his shoulder, but I was pinned beneath Luca.
‘Sweets, come here,’ I said softly. ‘I’ll give you a cuddle.’ But I knew he wouldn’t.
I could feel the fisherman’s gaze on me, but I didn’t turn to face him.
‘Can we go and get something to eat?’ Milla collapsed crankily into the sand, knocking into the sandcastle.
‘It’s getting late, hey?’ I nudged Luca from my knee and stood, brushing sand from my shins, avoiding the man’s eyes.
Pulling Milla up, I drew both boys in against me.
‘Sam, thanks for showing us your secret method,’ I said, turning us all towards him.
>
‘Bye, Sam—we’re going now,’ Luca said.
‘Bye, Sam,’ Milla whispered, looking down at the sand.
Lifting my arm over Luca’s head, I held out my hand for Sam to shake, my self-consciousness suddenly gone. The boys wrapped their arms about my hips and I laughed as they pulled me away from the fisherman’s touch and up towards the car.
‘Mummy, you made a friend!’ Luca’s voice was high and questioning, and he looked sideways at me as I tried to remember where I’d stashed the keys.
‘Yes. Sam. The fisherman.’ I looked back at the beach with a surge of hope.
Sam lifted his arm and waved.
≈
In hindsight, it seems odd that I would experience such a sense of triumph in making a single friend—that a random guy snagging my son’s finger with a fishhook would come to mean so much. Perhaps it was a good indication of the depth of my isolation. I latched on to the idea of him, the fisherman, as though he had caught me with his hook. But what I liked about Sam, right from the outset, was the way he didn’t look away from me. It made me visible, where I had felt myself not to be. The power of the smallest kindnesses. In his unwavering gaze I came into the light.
That night, beneath the cover of darkness, I dreamed I was at the beach and lay naked on the sand with the fisherman. I lay on my side, my back to him and my cheek rested on the soft skin of my upper arm. I stared at the infinite white before me. The fisherman reached out and laid his palm on the curve of my shoulder.
‘Trace the lines of my back and tell me what you see,’ I whispered.
Motionless on the blanket of sand, I felt the touch of his fingertips across my back. In murmurs, the fisherman spoke of the sloping of my shoulders. He told me of the shallow hollow that ran straight down the centre of my back. His fingers drifted, and he traced the lines of the stretch marks that edged around from my hips. He spoke of the feel of my skin beneath his fingers. Meandering along an invisible path from dark freckle to dark freckle, he whispered to me of the exact point at which they each lay, and in my dream I closed my eyes and pictured the shadowy landscape of my own body, the parts of myself that I had never really seen. Lying still, his low voice filling my ears, I could feel the strong beating of my own heart.
When I woke the light was low. Curled up on my side, I thought of the curves and hollows of my back, the freckles and paler skin along my ribs. The room slowly brightened into day, and an image made up of this man’s whispered dream-words formed inside my mind. I had been wounded, bent out of shape, but I was coming back together. Wrapping my arms about myself, I grasped gently at my shoulders. My skin was smooth and cool and firm beneath my fingertips.
≈
Living in the forest almost all of my life, there were some things I’d learned. I knew how to be still and listen. I could saw down the odd branch, tell what bush-fruit was edible. I often knew when it would rain, or if a storm was coming. I could step over a python without batting an eyelid. I didn’t get frightened by spiders, bats, toads or wasps. I could catch a frog if it got tangled in spider webs. I could pump up water from the creek, get the air bubbles out of the pipes. I was exceptionally good at lighting a fire. Then there were all those things we’d always done for pleasure. I could swing off a rope at the waterhole, ride the creeks on a bodyboard in a flood, jump from bridges into the river, float for hours in a pond, tread barefoot up a mountain. These things might not be all that useful out in the world, but they are skills, and I had them.
But at twenty-five, with two kids under six, I was yet to learn very much about my own romantic proclivities. With just the one relationship under my belt, I hadn’t had much chance to test those waters. Since Gabe’s departure I’d come to see myself as not romantically inclined, or perhaps just not ‘a romantic’.
When I’d told Billie I was separating from Gabe, she had tried to be upbeat.
‘Well, it gives you a chance to meet someone else.’
‘I don’t know if that will happen,’ I’d answered.
‘It’s not a matter of if,’ she’d said confidently, ‘but when.’
I’d loved her fiercely in that moment, for being so sure.
But until you test those waters, you can’t know how you’ll be. It turned out I had a rampant romantic imagination that fed off the tiniest titbits, blooming wildly with the minutest encouragement. It took me some time to work out that I was not the pragmatic type at all. It was rare for me to happen upon someone I liked, but when I did, the sheer force of my feelings seemed uncontainable. And with that discomfiting discovery came others. It was in romance that all my woundedness surfaced. Where the word ‘trust’ came to have such a dark, complex shadow. I didn’t fear infidelity the way some people did. I was paralysed with fright over things trickier to determine. Would this person start off one way and then fundamentally change? Would they, if stretched to breaking point, lose their capacity to love me? Lose their mind? Would they, when push came to shove, abandon me in some final crazed act? In romance, everything felt slippery to me—there was nothing to grip on to. But at twenty-five, when I first met the fisherman, I was unaware of these dark fears. I was wary, yes, unused to company, and afraid no one would be able to bear the weight of my history. But I hadn’t yet experienced myself as a wounded adult in love. That was all still to come.
≈
‘How come you never bring your kids down here?’ I asked, looking sideways at the fisherman, a cautious glance.
At the hook beach I sat on the sand above the waterline. He sat beside me, the sleeves of his green flannelette shirt rolled up past his elbows. I watched his hands as he scooped up the dry sand and slowly released it from inside his closed fists, making tiny pyramids at his feet.
‘They’re big now. Teenagers.’ He paused, patting the pyramids flat. ‘Sometimes they come down for a dip, after school, when it’s real hot.’
I added that information to the image of him I was building in my mind.
‘They used to love coming fishing with me. After my wife took off I used to bring ’em here every day. Stopped me going mad.’
I’d been wondering about his wife. Whether or not he had one.
‘When did your wife leave?’
‘Years ago now. The kids were little, littler than yours.’
‘They still see her?’
‘Nah, she took off to Darwin. Some other fella.’
‘They must miss her.’
‘I guess. Sometimes she rings, but they don’t really want to talk.’
‘Do they talk with you?’ It was easy to ask him questions, deflect things from me.
‘Nah, they won’t talk about the big stuff.’ He looked out to sea. ‘Sometimes I try, but they won’t really listen.’
‘What would you want to tell them?’
It was hard to imagine my sons all grown up.
‘It’s not telling them, it’s just talking. I try, but they just look at me like it’s not what they’re after. Like I’m off the mark,’ he sighed. ‘She’s got another family now, with a couple of little kids. Sometimes I wonder what she tells them.’
‘About your kids?’
‘Nah, none of that. The type of stuff she might talk to our kids about if she was still around—if she’d never left, you know?’
He didn’t sound bitter.
‘Do you miss her?’
Sam looked across at me, his eyes dark but faintly smiling. ‘It’s hard to live with someone unhappy, and she was always unhappy with me.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess I just wonder how it might have been.’
How it might have been. The age-old question.
‘We had this bookshelf in our room,’ he said, ‘all her girly books. And when she first started acting strange I used to lie in bed and stare at those books, sometimes all night.’
I knew all about sleeplessness.
‘When she took off, she left them,’ he said. ‘I got curious, picked one up and started to read. I read the lot of them in a couple of weeks. It was like being
able to live in another world. Bitchy boardroom slags, you know? The rich and famous. You ever read any?’
‘Yeah. I’ve read some.’ I pushed my fingers into the sand.
He looked at my face. ‘I thought they’d help me make sense of her, but they just got me thinking instead. All that time my wife had been reading those books and I didn’t know what kind of world she was living in.’ He smiled, a little sadly. ‘Like all the real living we’d done, it was on the outside, and on the inside she’d had this other place I’d never even been to. I started to feel like I hadn’t known her at all.’ His fingers curled into a soft fist. ‘And it wasn’t just the books. She had a whole other life.’
‘People are mysterious. You can’t live inside another person’s head.’
I thought of Zoe’s letters home, how little they revealed of her inner landscape. How we’d never known what was going on. Picking up a handful of sand, I reached out, trickling it slowly over Sam’s fist. He stretched his fingers out and I watched the fine white flecks nestle in between the dark hairs.
‘I know. But I didn’t know it then.’ He stared back out at the ocean and I wondered what he was thinking.
‘Where are the boys today?’ he asked.
‘With their dad. He takes them sometimes for a day on the weekend.’
‘They like it?’
‘Yeah, Gabe’s reformed nowadays. Not so much drinking.’ I wasn’t sure how much to say. ‘It’s funny how some people only seem to learn by losing something.’
Sam kept staring out to sea. ‘Yeah … me too, I guess.’
I hadn’t meant to draw this parallel, but now it sat there between us. I leaned forward, smoothing a spiral in the sand with my finger.
‘I’m sorry about your wife, Sam.’ I was struggling to speak coherently. ‘Sometimes the lesson is way harder than it should be.’ Trying not to mumble. ‘Irreparable. Irrecoverable. I know that.’
‘How do you know, Jess?’ His voice was quiet, sad. Like he already knew it was something bad.
Pulling my knees up, I wrapped my arms tightly about them. Sharing the facts never ended well. I wanted to reveal something to this man, but I knew how this went. I was afraid of Sam’s silence, of his withdrawal from me, and at the same time I was afraid of his words, of what he might say. Trust was a fragile thing.