Isabelle the Navigator

by Luke Davies

  He came to dinner a couple of times at his boss’s place. Maybe Terry and Emily were setting us up. I got to know him better. He was twenty-seven and had been working on the cray boats—or during the off-season on trawlers down south—for nearly two years. He was from Sydney—this news pleased me—and was out here on a mission: to save enough money to go back soon and start his own small band management company. He wanted to be able to pay a year’s rent up-front and to set up an office. I would come to learn that he was methodical like that. In later years there were times I would wish he was more impulsive. At any rate all our habits and traits and quirks come to nothing, in the end.

  In his early twenties he’d played guitar in a band that released a couple of singles that made it halfway up the local independent charts. I knew of the band, kind of thrash-pop-fuzz like the Ramones with a surf theme, and had even owned and liked one of the singles, though I’d never seen them play live. Matt left the band, he claimed, when he realised that the combined mass of the members’ egos had come to grossly outweigh their actual talents and success. Besides, he said, he knew he was never going to be any great shakes at the guitar. For a couple of years he worked at running the small Sydney office of a Melbourne record label, Buzzcut. Ground up, he learnt a lot about the business. He was all but managing the label’s Sydney bands when he decided that he’d be better off doing this for himself, and doing it properly. He’d heard about the good money to be made on the Western Australian trawlers and cray boats and had come over, knowing no-one, to try his luck.

  He hadn’t mixed much in the pub life of Geraldton. Over there, in the cowboy towns, alcohol could effortlessly soak up all savings. He’d spent a quiet eighteen months, he said, doing not much else than working, sleeping and reading books. He was certainly, I noticed from the start, an obsessive reader in the widest range of subjects I’d ever seen, including my own great love: poetry. Now he was pretty much cashed up; his goal had been achieved. He was going to do the three-month season on the Abrolhos Islands, a few odds and ends back in Geraldton, then call it a day and head back to Sydney. He had been keeping in touch with events back home and had a couple of young bands in mind, including one who had sent a demo to Buzzcut but had never been signed.

  There was his younger brother Peter, too, and his band Spud Gun. Peter was nineteen now, had continued to send Matt demo tapes, and it was clear that Spud Gun had emerged from the inchoate mess they had been as a high school band.

  ‘You know,’ Matt said one day, in his understated fashion, ‘I think they can be big. I think I can help them get there. I know the ropes. I like the idea of looking after my little brother, too. He’s smart, that’s no problem. It’s just that he’s young.’

  In these early weeks Matt never made a move on me, nor I on him. From my point of view I knew it would come, so I felt I could relax. From Matt I learnt later, with great amusement, that he thought I was unattainable and hadn’t even bothered torturing himself with the possibility. It is so exquisitely funny and sad, the way we view each other; how very little, despite our best efforts, we communicate. But I was flattered to have been elevated to goddess status.

  We barely knew each other. Everything smelled of the possibility of love. Terry asked if I would like to come out to Big Rat Island for the three-month season and be the cook. Four of the boats would pool their money for my wages. I would be cooking for ten men—Matt included— and have my own fibro hut.

  ‘I think I’d love to,’ I said.

  It is easy, off the Western Australian coast, to begin to fall in love with the ocean. Everybody likes the ocean. But to love it is to feel that boom forever in the chest. In the journey out to the Abrolhos it is easy to drown in a blueness that on land is otherwise impenetrable, impregnable and always ‘up above’. In the formless expanse of ocean and sky it is easy to feel comfortable with the swooping sense of vertigo that results from the sudden realisation that either there is a god and if so he or she infuses this place too, or there is no such thing and the atmosphere is indeed a frail membrane inside which, in the blue light scattered everywhere by air molecules, we can nonetheless feel moderately happy to be here at all.

  It is all ocean. I sat on the prow of the boat, my legs dangling over the edge, as it cut through the rolling swell. The islands are so flat, with a maximum elevation of about three metres, that it seems you must have hours yet to cover, and then suddenly you are upon them. The first thing you notice is a change in the swell: the waves roll quicker and choppier as the boat nears the reef. Then I was looking at a row of huts that appeared to stand up out of the surf. On the sheltered side of the island were the rickety jetties. We moored and when Terry cut the engines there was not silence but from outside the reef the roar of the surf which would become, after some days, the same thing.

  I wouldn’t have gone if I hadn’t liked Matt. He was obviously still blissfully ignorant of this fact. But I was immensely interested in exploring the possibility of falling in love with him. I sensed it would be exciting to find out if we could get along. On the very first night, made slightly braver by the joint I had smoked after dinner, I took a deep breath and walked from my hut and down the crunching coral path to Matt’s, the last one of the row. He was in bed, reading by the light of a kerosene lamp, and seemed a little surprised to see me.

  ‘Hey Isabelle,’ he said softly, rising up on one elbow. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much,’ I said, almost losing my resolve. ‘It’s just… I don’t really like my hut.’

  ‘Ah… Oh, okay,’ he said, fully sitting up now. ‘Right. So… that’s all right. Would you like to swap? We can swap huts. I don’t mind. They’re all the same to me.’ I couldn’t work out if he was genuinely thick, or just blind in his awkwardness.

  ‘I don’t really want to swap, Matt. I just thought it’d be nicer if I stayed here.’

  I watched his thoughts pass across his face like slow-moving clouds. And then, as a late arrival, the bright sun of his enthusiasm.

  ‘Sure! Great! No worries…er, well, I’m going to stay in bed here because I haven’t got any clothes on.’

  ‘Well, I’ll just take mine off, then. And that’ll make us even.’

  For three months I felt as light as air. We didn’t talk much. All the boats worked hard, long hours, seven days a week. I was left to wander the tiny island all day. I swam in coves where the water was so clear I could see every pebble, every fish, and the contours of the coral formations. I drew in my sketch book images whose simplicity could in no way capture the stark minimalism of the bare landscape: bleached coral and a bleached sky, a few tussocky dunes whose curves added an almost hallucinatory focus of detail, and the emerald encirclement of ocean in all directions. Out here it seemed that the top of your skull came completely off and the wind roared through, leaving very little room for thought to gain a foothold.

  In a depression between the dunes I found the only place on the island where the endless clamour of the surf almost faded away, and my mind would spin at the sudden drop in sound. Sometimes in the late afternoon, when the sun was low enough that the hollow was in shadow, I would lie down there on the sand, look up at the sky framed perfectly by the ellipse of dune and think about nothing at all.

  I went through all the books in all the huts on the island and wished I’d brought more with me. I’d always expected James Michener to be bad but I was surprised at just how unreadable he actually was.

  The grocery runs came back well-stocked with whatever I ordered. The kitchen hut was abundant with supply. My imagination ran wild with the daily preparation of dinner. I invented dishes I never knew existed and we lived in a greasy-fingered feast.

  For the first time in any relationship I felt no rush. The work of a deckhand was so utterly physical, and the hours so long, that often Matt would be deeply asleep within minutes of flopping into bed. At other times he would seem alive with electricity and we’d make love long into the night. Always, afterwards, as I drifted into sleep,
he would lie on his side and trace his fingers all over my body, the lightest of grazes, in gentle repetitive motions, a kind of hypnosis of the skin. It occurred to me that my body was empty like a black and white page in a colouring book, and that his fingers were brushstrokes, or the flaking of crayons, and that were he to continue his tracing each night then eventually I would become complete.

  We learnt little of each other during these three months. I barely wanted to. There would be plenty of time to talk later. On the island every event seemed suspended in a separate reality from that of the mainland. I found myself sometimes wanting to be back on the mainland, in case the urban Matt was different, so that I would feel safe enough to open up my voice and to let go of that flood of stories we tell each other when we embark on a journey. Later I discovered that he’d been dying to talk during those twelve weeks on the island, but that without any prompt from me he had decided that the best and most polite course of action was to return silence with silence.

  I think it may have been in Kalbarri, before we ever got back to Sydney, where the next phase began, where love commenced to enter. It was in Kalbarri, his long two years almost over, that we began to talk, and all the words entwined themselves more passionately than lips and arms. In Kalbarri I saw him for the first time away from the sheer exhaustion of work. It was like a door opened up to the inside of him. I felt myself relax and grow even calmer with the concept of his being in my life.

  We were back in Geraldton. The Abrolhos season was over. I was ready to return to Sydney and Matt planned only a week or two more of helping Terry do some end-of-season maintenance on the boat.

  ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen in Sydney,’ he said. ‘I want it to keep going. I mean, I’d like it to keep going. That’s my, ah, hope. My desire.’

  I nodded, smiling. I found him so attractive in his awkwardness.

  ‘But first,’ he continued, ‘let me show you Kalbarri. Terry’ll give me three days off. He said he wouldn’t mind a short break himself, spend some time with his kids. I’ll drive you up there. It’s very different from Geraldton. It’s pretty beautiful.’

  ‘Let’s go now,’ I said. ‘I’m ready.’

  Kalbarri, a tiny fishing and holiday port sixty-six kilometres off the main highway that runs on through to Monkey Mia and beyond, was an hour and a half drive north from Geraldton. Terry Breen had fished out of Kalbarri for most of his life; it was only in recent years, as his children grew older, that he was forced to move to Geraldton, where there was a high school. He gave us the keys to his house. He was unconditionally generous, as was Emily, as the children would no doubt become.

  It had been a spell of dry weather in the west but we turned off the highway and drove towards Kalbarri under gathering clouds. The two-lane road was lined on either side with a bright-red shoulder of dust. In all directions grew low hardy scrub. I had seen photos of the moors in England and was reminded of them now in the eerie darkness beneath the thunderclouds beginning to bunch. The day was still hot.

  ‘Weird weather,’ mused Matt. ‘I don’t know how much it rains at this time of year. Sure looks like it’s going to.’

  Scattered across the landscape were native flowers in bloom, bizarre and enormous like giant, bright-pink cauliflowers. We saw a kangaroo nibbling at a shrub by the side of the road. We slowed down to watch and it loped away unhurriedly as we passed. An old Beach Boys tape played on the car stereo. A while later we saw another kangaroo, dead several days and bloated with gas, its neck broken by the impact with a car, its mouth twisted open in a grimace. At exactly the moment we came over the hill and could see in the distance the ocean, the first splats of rain began to hit the windshield.

  I have no idea where personal mythologies come from and I’m sure my own is not unique, but I took it as a sign that the whole sky relaxed and the scorching day was flushed away by the cold air and the storm. It was good to be alive, to be with Matthew Smith.

  Again, the whole Breen sensibility flowed through the house in Kalbarri, five times more lived-in than the house in Geraldton, and therefore five times more lovely. The yard was a wonderland, filled with tyre swings and an intricate three-level treehouse. Terry had even constructed a flying fox from a high tree to a lower one. Inside the house the high ceiling fans hummed and the air washed past the back of my neck and the noise of the rain drumming on the tin roof was like a massage for the brain. We made love straight away.

  Later we drove back out through the national park, back the way we had come into the town. Matt knew that if the rain kept up, the road out to the Murchison River Gorge and the Hawks Head lookout would very quickly be impassable.

  The rain softened a little. The dirt roads held. The little carpark at Hawks Head was completely deserted. We were soaked walking the hundred yards to the lookout. The river wound through a landscape utterly unacquainted with any form of human habitation or settlement: red dust and dry scrub made suddenly wet by the rains. Across the river we saw two feral goats high up in a cave.

  We clambered down to the bend in the river where a pool formed. The gentle rain pocked the surface of the water with bubbles but made no sound. We stripped off our clothes and eased ourselves into the water from the mossy rocks. It was the first time we ever saw each other naked, outdoors. An obvious turning point in getting to know one another. I only felt a little shy. I noticed the red tinge in the black mass of his pubic hair, and the weird thought crossed my mind that, given my own genetic background, we would have red-haired children. I was getting ahead of myself. I dived fully into the water and swam through the murky green with my eyes wide open, trying not to think about crocodiles. When I burst back through the surface I turned and floated on my back; the sky was a bowl and I was its centre, so I was back in the moment and not thinking about genetics. Two birds flew overhead.

  We had nothing to dry ourselves with. We drove back into Kalbarri in wet Tshirts and underwear. The Beach Boys sang about the girl who has fun in a T-Bird until her daddy takes the keys back off her when he realises she’s been hanging around at the hamburger stand and not the library.

  In the late afternoon Kalbarri was in the midst of a blackout. Buying candles at the local store, we learnt that so much dust settles on the power lines and the electricity plant during dry spells, that often at the first big rain the whole system shorts. The rain fell softly through the long dark evening. We tried to play backgammon by candlelight but the black pieces kept disappearing in the flickering shadows as if the dark bands of the board were doors that swallowed up the play. We lay on the couch and I played with Matt’s toes as he told me more about his dreams for the management business.

  ‘If Spud Gun works, I’m going to buy a house on the edge of the ocean,’ he said.

  Smiling in the dark, I pictured myself living in it.

  The next day we slept in late and had lunch at the pub overlooking the bay. The clouds had lifted. We drove out the Red Bluff Road to the coastal gorges, past Madmans Rock and Goat Gulch to the Natural Bridge and Bluff Point. The whole continent sweeps flat and empty across the outback and the Great Western Desert then drops off suddenly at craggy cliffs into the ocean. The proposition that love, already nudged, would enter most readily into hearts made open and quiet by such vertiginous power in the glare of the sun, makes sense when I consider it now. So much else is a mystery, there are times it is hard to breathe. But I can say with certainty that, leaning against the safety barrier at the Bluff Point lookout, when I kissed him I knew I loved him.

  It was the most languid of kisses and he groaned faintly. Below us along the curving cliff walls the swallows swooped and dived. The green sea heaved and the cliffs eroded, a pebble, a grain at a time. In a million years this would not be here. You seem to receive, on the edge of the ocean where the earth disappears, a sense of the size of the sky. I looked out across the Indian Ocean. Next stop Africa. Behind me there was an average population density of one person per ten square kilometres. I was glad not to be alone.


  We walked hand in hand back to the car. From the scrubland we could hear the thrum of insects.

  ‘Good, huh?’ Matt smiled, and squeezed my hand. I was willing to go for the ride with this boy.

  On the long stretch of beach just south of Kalbarri we went for a swim at the Blue Holes, a lagoon protected from the waves that broke on the reef a hundred metres further out. I was used to the grainy golden sand of Sydney’s beaches, so the fine white sand like talc between my toes as I waded out was an odd sensation. At dusk we went to the fish-and-chip shop and took our hot parcel over the road to the park by the edge of the river, looking out to where it emptied into the ocean. The park was raucous with the delighted evening screechings of the pink and grey galahs and the white sulphur-crested cockatoos. They filled the trees and perched on the power lines and chased each other tumbling through the air. We would drive back to Geraldton in the morning. I would take the bus to Perth and the next day fly back to Sydney.

  ‘I like you a lot,’ I said.

  ‘Is that all?’ he said. ‘I really like you.’

  ‘No, “really” and “a lot” mean the same thing. I just said, “I like you a lot.” That means “I really like you.’”

  ‘Okay then,’ he said. ‘In that case, I guess I really, really like you.’

  ‘I really, really like you too, Matt,’ I said, though at such points of embarkation, it seems that our words might be beside the point.

  Matthew Smith

  I WENT BACK TO SYDNEY, ALL MY NERVES TINGLING and Matt, the bringer of light, now looming so strongly in my life. Matt of the future, with eyes so blue they hurt you, all that dazzling reflection I’d seen back there on the islands. The way I’m trying to tell it seems exactly the way it was. Nothing is more correct than memory, in that once a lover is dead, it is the only version left. When Matt returned from the west a few weeks later it was as if we leapt right inside of each other.