by David Brooks
A dozen excited children danced about the truck as it came to a halt, calling out Mrs Biggs’ name, competing to carry her various bags and boxes to a kind of open-air shelter – a corrugated-iron roof on bare poles over smooth, well-trodden ground – where it appeared the service was to take place, trying as they did so to look inside them to see what she had brought, though it seemed that their probing fingers, her smacking them back, telling them that they were late already, that the service must start, were all parts of a familiar game. Clearly – and this, after the drive they had just had together, did not surprise Valerie much – the old Scotswoman was loved, if not for herself, though this might have been the case, then at the very least as a source of entertainment and golden-syrup biscuits. To judge by the quick messages exchanged with the adults who greeted her, the arrangements hastily made to talk about this thing and that thing afterward, she was also respected, although there were, as Valerie also noticed, some adults, mainly men, who held back.
Not even the warmth of the reception, however, prepared her for the service itself, the way it moved, even transported her. Unlike those conducted in the tiny, close room in Hoburn, with their long prayers, their meandering and sleep-inducing sermons, and where the organist’s enthusiasm struggled vainly against the dismay of the congregation, this consisted largely of a joyful and whole-hearted singing, and Mrs Biggs’ role principally of choirmistress-conductor-singing teacher, stopping, leading them through a hymn they did not know so well, singing out amongst them, giving them a measure for those hymns that were evidently favourites as much of her own as of these dark, bright people rocking back and forth, their eyes and their teeth shining almost like their voices in the thin shadows under the shelter with a warm breeze from the ocean drifting through it and the sound of the waves behind.
When it finished, most of the children went off to play a kind of football that appeared to have no rules and used the entire settlement as its field, and those of the adults who had stayed for the singing accompanied Mrs Biggs into one of the houses where it seemed there was something important to talk about. Valerie found herself left under the shelter with a wide-eyed, stick-thin boy of nine or ten whose scarred face – a deep, livid line ran from his upper lip almost to his cheek-bone – she had noticed earlier, their task, apparently, to set up a trestle that had been leaning in readiness against one of the uprights, then lay out the plates of sandwiches, cakes, biscuits, fruit and boiled lollies from the boxes the old Scotswoman had brought them in. Some of the aboriginal ladies came out early from the house with pots of fresh-brewed tea, bowls of sugar, tins of milk and a large assortment of mugs, thick glasses and odd, saucerless cups. They had scarcely set these out when, as if at an invisible, inaudible signal, almost everyone but the old lady herself gathered about and everything as quickly disappeared, sandwiches, cakes, biscuits, lollies, tea, cups, pots, glasses, mugs – all except for Mrs Biggs’ plates, which she and the young boy, as suddenly left alone again as they had been surrounded a moment before, then stacked in one of the empty boxes.
There now being nothing else that she could see to do, she followed the boy, whose name, he had told her, was Andrew, over to the sea rocks. There, hands held sometimes with an unexpected tightness, as if he were as bewildered as she to find himself where he was, on these rocks jutting out into the ocean, the waves sometimes spraying them as they crashed – that is how it had happened, he told her, almost a year before: a wave had swept him off his feet and he had sliced his cheek on an oyster-shell – they picked for a long time about the tide-pools and crevices, now and again joined by clusters of other children, pointing out crabs, open anemones, a groping sea-slug, the best-tasting shellfish, but for the most part left to their own absorbed selves.
He wanted, apparently, to show her the little beach just around the point, and as he said it wouldn’t take long, and as Mrs Biggs had still not appeared from the house where the meeting was going on, she went with him.
It was deeply set, not so much between two points as in a cleft within the one – she thought of the space between two fingers – so that, as the gleaming, whispering boy explained, the tide – he had a name for it, which she tried in her own mouth but could not make work – rushed up and back so strongly that there was no sand there, only a deep bank of uncountable pebbles, in all shades of brown, red, grey and black, miraculously smoothed and polished by the waves and constantly rustling in the sea-wash. He had dug down, he said, as far as he could before the pebbles began to fall back in and the hole fill up with water, and as far as he could tell it was all pebbles, nothing but pebbles forever.
Along each arm of the beach there were low rock ledges thickly encrusted with shellfish. Clambering over these, helping her up behind him, he took her to a shelf of sand, safely out of the waves’ reach, topped by a small patch of grass so soft and short she thought someone must have been tending it. Kneeling down, crouching over the side, he showed her, beneath it, where it fell away abruptly to the shining, perfectly-rounded pebbles, not soil as she might have expected but a thick composite of shells, packed to rock hardness. ‘Good eatin’ here,’ he said, ‘long time,’ then, seeing her puzzlement, ‘Oysters!’ pulling her to her feet again and leading her into the thick scrub behind them to a small, covered place beneath a rock-shelf. On his knees again, motioning her down, he moved aside a large piece of the slate that seemed to have hived off all about these low coastal cliffs, to show her, wrapped in an ancient piece of oilcloth, what was obviously his collection of secret, treasured things: small pieces of thick green or cobalt-blue glass as smoothed and rounded by the waves as the pebbles on the beach, the large, bright-red nuts of some tree or bush, as hard and round as the pieces of glass themselves, a pair of deeply corroded empty spectacle-rims, and a book that she had seen before, a small, thick, blue-covered book, with a little golden mermaid beneath the writing on the spine.
‘You read?’ he asked, and when she shook her head said it again, more emphatically, this time not a question at all: ‘You read,’ handing it to her, as if it were a gift, a solemn gift. And not knowing what else to do, she took it, put it into her pocket, behaved as if fully apprised of the significance of the transaction, unable to tell him. They knelt there in silence for a moment, looking at the wave-wash over the pebbles below, then, suddenly remembering, she stood, motioned to him, told him that they must get back, and when he had covered his cache again moved off with him, holding his hand as he seemed always to want, back around the point to where Mrs Biggs was already reloading the truck.
They left on the verge of the late-summer twilight, and although the journey must have taken half an hour longer as a consequence, the old lady was in no hurry and drove far more slowly than she had before. If anything, she was even more pensive on the way back to Hoburn than she had been jubilant on the way out, and hardly needed a question to begin thinking aloud.
It was a man named Fryer, she said, who lived on the long beach, around the point from the aborigines, about two miles away on the Hoburn side – Mrs Biggs pointed out, as they passed it, the overgrown track leading down to his house – and who had been somehow interfering. She did not say how. It was as if she could not quite put her finger on it, as if there had been no one thing. But interfering nonetheless: appearing at the settlement, not always sober, as likely as not, and talking to them, asking questions probably – whetting their appetites, as she could tell from the kind of issues they were raising. She had suspected something like this, had been waiting for it to happen, in fact. And it was clear enough now that it had, although the men at Disaster Bay would not admit that it had anything to do with him. He had boarded in her house, she said, when he first came, but had moved over to the hotel – Val could see that this was part of the problem – and then bought the old shack at the far end of the beach a bit over a year ago, and moved into it and fixed it up. He had been a schoolteacher down in Eden but had given it up, although in all likelihood he had actually been dismissed for his drunkenn
ess, or his ideas, or both. ‘You’ve probably seen him already,’ she said, ‘staggering out of the hotel. He comes there every few days to buy his drink, and usually has too much before he leaves. A thin man, with a beard, black hat; a face that looks like it’s been kicked by a horse … ’
Fryer then. The man on the train.
And something else, that she had heard mentioned before but never understood. Now, in the early dark as they topped the ridge above Hoburn and were about to descend, she could see a light moving far out to sea, or rather a line of light, turning slowly, sweeping the sky. ‘The lighthouse,’ Mrs Biggs said then, seeing that she was watching. ‘You don’t always see the light moving like that. Only when the cloud-cover is right. If it’s clear, you can’t see the beam at all, only the one small, steady light. The beam is adjusted so that it goes out to sea, not back across the bay here. You can see it from the beach or the rocks at the inlet, but the trees on the point are too high to see it from the house or the wharf.’ And Val listened as she talked, then, about God, the protector of sailors, how we were all sailors on the dark sea of life, until she had to shift the gears down for the descent and the roar of the engine and the rattling of the truck as it bumped about on the dark, rutted road made it too difficult to hear.
There might be no going back, but there is at least sometimes the choosing of the paths you go forward by. It was a huge world suddenly, far bigger than the old one but also, and this puzzled her a very long time before she worked out why, strangely smaller. She would go up to the top of the hill at dusk on Mondays and Thursdays to watch the train arrive from Nara and the places before it and, having deposited its passengers or picked someone up, move off again, with a whistle from the conductor and a slow creaking of its wheels, and a great deal of smoke and steam, to wherever it was going further down the coast. And in the mid-morning, any morning when she could get away, she would go down to the wharf to watch the fishermen unloading their catch, relishing the sight of the gleaming fish and the exotic creatures that were occasionally sorted out from amongst them: octopuses, strange sharks, large rainbow-coloured parrot-fish, squid. She used to walk along the river path that began at the wharf and continued through the bottoms of the yards and gardens of the larger, river-fronted houses until it disappeared into the trees and, overhung by vines and willow branches, groped its way past ramshackle huts and houses, rotting boatsheds, dinghies sunk at their moorings, little jetties with rafts or row-boats tied to them, fishing tackle, nets, drying racks, brackish tidal reaches, muddy oyster-beds only the birds ever visited, forgetting the train and the blacksmiths’ dray, forgetting Mrs Biggs, dreaming instead that the path might continue, start climbing, around bends, past falls, the estuary thinning to a river proper, then a creek, a stream, until familiar trees and rocks and gullies reappeared, and the new world became the old.
Sometimes, explaining the way things were, the old lady or one of her lodgers would talk about the War and Val would listen carefully, grateful for whatever titbit she could get. Mrs Biggs would talk about it in her sermons too, but then – at least as far as she could tell, for there was talk of Egypt, and Palestine – it was so much a matter of Satan and things from the Bible that the actual facts, if there were any, were even harder to work out. Even when they spoke about it at dinner it was never in much detail, but always with a sort of gritting of the mind around it, as if it were a very evil thing, but also a thing that it had been generally agreed should happen, and was now somehow a fact of life. When Val at last worked herself up to asking her landlady where this War was, and what it was about, and why it was so evil, Mrs Biggs took the back-end first and said it was because eighteen men from the town had gone already, and there weren’t many more than twice that at the best of times, and that was why things were so empty and run down. And you couldn’t call some of them men anyhow: some of them were only boys! And most of them wouldn’t come back. It wasn’t as if they were having a good time over there in Turkey and France, like they seemed to think they would. It was that they would all be dead: a little bit of childhood, she said, and some knocking around at the pub where they goaded one another on, and then misery, then nothing. And when Val asked why people had wars then, and why people went, Mrs Biggs said only and very confusingly that it was because they had to, because it was the right thing to do. They were fighting for the Lord, after all, and against the Kaiser and the Hun, and they had not started it.
Mrs Biggs didn’t seem to want to go into details. Perhaps she had none, or perhaps it was just that she didn’t think it right to do so. When Val asked her where France was, and that other place that they talked so much about, Turkey, she only said Overseas, and that it was a cruel distance to send anyone. But where was Overseas? Boats went out to sea from the town but they always came back, or when they didn’t directly it was because they were heading up or down the coast to Nara or Eden or Sydney, and you could get to those places by train as well. In her mind she couldn’t get rid of the notion that you should be able to take a train to France and the other place too, or even walk there, if you were very strong and persistent.
The War made people very angry. At least that, if very little else, was clear. You could hear fighting over at the pub sometimes, and Mrs Biggs said it could be about anything, but was probably the War. And when she saw Mr Fryer pushed or thrown out of the pub shouting and then stagger off down the street, that was very likely the War too.
6
Fryer
(1915–1918)
She was surprised that the shack hadn’t appeared earlier than it did. The distance had caught her unawares, perhaps because for so much of the time it had not seemed distance at all. After the first long beach there had been three small headlands, then two beaches more, the first of them cut by a narrow creek she had to wade across, which she realised must at lower tide be the sandbar between the lake and the sea, but the walk had been so interesting, so full of shells, dead mutton birds, shark eggs, fish washed up, sand-polished driftwood, and when one had gone so far it seemed so wasteful that one not walk the rest, and then, finding no one at home, not wait. He couldn’t be too far away. She knew he had not taken the Eden train, or the train that came back on Tuesdays making for Sydney, and she had chosen, as best she could, a day when he would not be likely to come in to Hoburn for supplies, for that always seemed to be the day after mail-day. And she hadn’t encountered him on the beach. She could always walk back by moonlight, if it came to that. And face out Mrs Biggs, who was not as indomitable as she had at first thought, though she might not tell her specifically where she had gone.
The forest came down almost to the sand. The shack, in a natural, grass-covered clearing, was surrounded on three sides by the tall trees. The inner door was open and she could see, through the fly-screen of the outer, the simple shape of the dwelling: a large front room with a desk, a big, overladen bookcase, a table with the remnants of a meal, a couch with an old tartan blanket thrown over it, and beyond this, to the right, a half-closed door that might have led to a bedroom, and to the left an open archway into a kitchen, part of a back door visible on the other side. Although the screen door itself hung ajar a few inches she did not go in, but sat instead on the edge of the verandah, staring out over the bay, drinking the silence, the balmy shadow, the wide field of light and the steady rhythm of the low waves.
The time might have been considerable, but it seemed only a short while before she saw him, a small figure on the rocks in the distance, growing gradually larger, becoming at last a man with a long fishing rod over his shoulder and a bucket – no, an old paint-tin – in his hand, the tails of two fishes protruding. They had each, thus, time to prepare for the other, although there was still some puzzlement in his voice when, yet a few yards from the verandah, he spoke:
‘You’re the girl from the train, aren’t you?’ though clearly he knew.
‘Yes …’
‘You’re still at Mrs Biggs’?’ – as much comment as question, for surely if she h
ad seen him more than once then he must also have seen her. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Nothing. It’s just that I wanted to bring this,’ and she bent over to pick up the bright-covered book.
‘My Crime and Punishment? Where did you get that?’
‘I found it. Well, no, a boy, at the aboriginals – at Disaster Bay. Andrew. He must have found it, and had it under a rock … ’
‘“The aboriginals”? So she has taken you there?’
‘Yes. I help with the singing, and the tea …’
‘Yes, I suppose you do. Well, thank you. And good for Andrew. I had wondered what had happened to it. I suppose I must have dropped it somewhere. But you needn’t have come all this way with it. Why didn’t you give it to me in town?’
So he had seen her. Though never given any indication.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, knowing, ‘I wanted to see this,’ gesturing about her, hesitantly, at the house, the trees, ‘I mean, I wanted the walk. It was an excuse …’
‘Well, thank you –’ a moment’s pause – ‘but hadn’t you best be starting back?’ And then, as if realising the abruptness of this, ‘The tide turned a while ago. If you don’t hurry you won’t be able to get around the headland. The tide covers the rocks there, at Point Clear; it’s bad, dangerous. Even then you’ll have trouble with the sandbank at the entrance, if you don’t get moving.’ His eyes searched her face as he said this, with concern perhaps, but also as if looking for something there that she might not have told him. It unsettled her – there was nothing, after all – and she welcomed the excuse to leave without ceremony.