by David Brooks
‘Yes, well, thank you; I’ll go then. I didn’t know. I’ll go,’ taking a few steps backward already, then turning, him nodding, standing there motionless for a long time, watching her, or perhaps only thinking, not really watching at all.
***
She could see the difficulty from half-way along the long first beach. It had become cooler, and the breeze stronger; spray was rising from the rocks almost at the cliff base. She couldn’t have left it any longer, and now walked as briskly as she could. She hadn’t realised how long she had been sitting there, waiting.
A small space was still left for her to pass, but only if she picked her way over the rubble at the foot of the cliff and, where this was not possible, ran quickly but carefully over the exposed rock shelf that every third or fourth wave already washed over. She reached the point within minutes and, almost a third of the way around, relieved to think the worst over, paused atop a large boulder to pick out the rest of her path. Seagulls mewed overhead. The wind had picked up, and it had quickly become colder. Spray had already wet her cheeks and hair. Setting off again over the wet rock she misjudged her step and slipped, landing heavily on her right hip, her ankle buckling beneath her and sending her sprawling into the sharp shale from a recent cliff-fall. In the shocked seconds she lay there, taking stock of her body, a wave washed up to her finger-tips and soaked the hem of her dress.
She had gashed her left shin, or just to the side of it, and although it did not bleed profusely the sea-water stung it painfully. She might nonetheless have been able to make her way back to Hoburn had she not also twisted her right ankle so badly that she could barely hobble, let alone clamber about the point. Even should she somehow do so, the probability that she had now so slowed her progress that she would face as much difficulty rounding the second point, or might not be able to round it at all, left her no alternative but to start back to Fryer’s house, wading through wash now up over her ankles, clutching at the base of the cliff for support.
Reaching the beach again she eased herself down on the sand to rub at her ankle. In the ten minutes it had taken her to retrace her steps the waves, ever larger, had completely covered behind her the path she had chosen and were crashing directly and loudly into the cliff itself, their spray rising dramatically into the near dusk. She could see now that the cliffs were carved by such beatings, indented at the tide-line, shaped themselves like the waves that hammered them. Any thought to the embarrassment of returning to Fryer’s shack in her wounded and bedraggled condition, or to spending, instead, the night in the dunes, exposed to the raw power of this place, paled in the face of what she had just escaped. As she struggled slowly back along the beach that she had almost run along an hour before, the dusk thickened about her and a misty rain added itself to the spray from the breakers. She paused frequently – to rest her ankle, but also to breathe deeply and look at the transformations about her. The gentle wash of earlier in the day had turned to a broiling whiteness and the balmy haven into a wild and fierce place which, for all the pain of her hobbling and the conviction that it was a weather she must find refuge from, so strangely exhilarated her that the distance back to the house, that might otherwise have seemed an eternity, proved almost too short.
He had seen her, evidently, limping back through the twilight, and came out saying something that she could not hear through the wave-sound and gripping her almost delicately by the wrist and upper arm, where she had been momentarily afraid, as he approached, that he would lift her. But it would almost never be like that.
Inside, he gave her a heavy dressing-gown and a clean pair of pyjamas of his own to put on in the bedroom while, in the larger room, he stoked the already-blazing fire in order to dry her wet clothes. These arranged, he sat her down in the armchair and, sitting himself on a footstool by the rush-lamp, tended first her shin, washing the cut with wads of clean lint dipped in warm water to which he had added drops of eucalyptus oil, then binding it with a length of torn sheeting before turning to bind the twisted ankle. She was at first embarrassed then amazed by the intimacy – the slow, heavy breathing as he concentrated, the movements of his eyes which almost never glanced up toward her, the furrowing of his brow, the strength and wrinkled brownness of his fingers – and then as much amazed to find it suddenly over, and that the only thing she had felt inclined to protest was its finishing. She had expected some reproach, some comment on her foolishness, but it had not come. He had spoken of the size of the waves, that was all, and the trickiness of those rocks in the half light, and something that she had not quite caught about the full force of the ocean …
He brought her a strong drink in a water glass – it seemed to burn her tongue at first, then started to taste of something she couldn’t quite identify, like nuts, perhaps, or apples – and told her to continue to sit and warm herself while he went to cook the fish. The liquor, the fire, the intimacy, or perhaps it was the shock of what had happened, drugged her strangely, made her feel as if she were dozing with eyes wide open, so that it was only seconds before he was offering to help her to a table already set, a thick candle burning at its centre, two plates, upon each of which a baked fish and steaming potatoes lay waiting.
***
She woke to a room full of sunlight and the sound of long combers rolling lazily into the beach, an occasional shifting of the air, not quite a breeze, lifting the thin curtain at the window above the couch, as if the house were breathing to the same rhythm as the sea. Her ankle throbbed when she moved it, and she could feel the cut place on her shin though she might not have called it pain. And then, conscious somehow that this was a delicious luxury, that it could not happen often or perhaps even again and also because there was nothing else that she could do, began weeping and found that she could not stop, that the weeping became a sobbing she could not hold back.
An hour, several hours, half the day, for much of the second part of which Fryer, returned from somewhere he had gone before she woke, moved quietly about the house, hearing her at first in confusion and then, recognising despite himself, resigning himself, not trying to stop her, fashioning a second bed from planks and a discarded base, and when it seemed to be the time, preparing a second meal. It seemed clear that when she stopped she would be hungry, that all this outpouring would have drained her as such things always did, leaving all the more appetite for living, whatever the causes of the grief had been.
In fact he had walked to Hoburn, to tell Mrs Biggs what had happened and not to expect the girl for another two or three days, perhaps more, until she could walk more easily, and even then he might have to help her – unless the Scotswoman could arrange for a cart or the truck to come to take her back. Although he could hardly have expected a welcome, he had been quite unprepared for the reception. Mrs Biggs had heard in what direction the girl had gone – not much could pass in so small a town without notice – and with a long, sleepless, ghost-ridden night to work on it, had already decided upon the reason. Instead of understanding or concern, he had found the old lady waiting at the halfopened door – she had seen him through the window as he walked up the street – glaring at him as if he were the Devil incarnate, the girl’s bag already packed beside her and her jaw hard set against the flood of vituperation built up behind it. Whether he liked it or not then, and with scarcely a word spoken, what had begun as a strange visit, uninvited, a whim of the girl’s own, had become somehow a conspiracy. A collusion which, he realised the very moment he reached out instinctively to take the battered case, was bound to be confirmed, not only for the old woman but for the town at large, by that very act itself, let alone by his carrying it, as he now had no choice but to do, back with him down the main street and into the lane above the fishermen’s cooperative, down the beach path, and then – eyes, as he was convinced, everywhere behind the doors and curtains watching him – all the way along White’s Beach until he could disappear safely from view behind the point.
So that the girl’s weeping, or his encounter with it, was alr
eady made up of many things, and a great deal more than he could ever have anticipated appeared already to have been decided. It was no more, after all, than some of them had long expected. And what is long expected is half made. When you turn up, a stranger, in a strange place, keep to yourself, do not fraternise, even in your drinking, decline to offer up your past to those who probe for it, you will be given whatever past they see fit to give you, and in all likelihood this will be some thing or set of things that they do not themselves wish to keep. As if strangers, if they are not strange too much, offer themselves unwittingly as psychopomps. And in this sense, he wryly reflected, perhaps they had been destined for one another. He and the town. He and the girl.
In the next days, as she kept nervously to herself – for he had told her, that second night, of the ultimatum they had been given, and they had both been abashed by how little they were truly surprised by it, or perhaps even how little it disappointed – he built a rough shelter by the woodshed into which he then moved the wood in order that, sealing the shed more effectively against the weather, giving it a rudimentary floor, he could in turn clear into it the contents of the lean-to behind the house, thus making of the lean-to a place that she could have as her own.
On her part, since the house was clean already and she could see little else that she could do of use inside, she did what she could to extend and encourage the small garden he had tried to establish over at the forest edge within a chicken-wire enclosure to keep out the wallabies and kangaroos. He was surprised at her ingenuity and adeptness until he began to suspect that the garden was one of the places of her past, and was sustaining her, and that she knew its habits and rhythms far better than he. Once her ankle had fully recovered and she could walk easily again, having first quizzed him on what from the rockpools and rock-ledges could be eaten, she would disappear for hours on end with a bucket and a rough spear he had made for himself from fencing-wire, and return with whatever she had found – crabs, pippies, a parrot-fish trapped by the ebbing tide, once an octopus, and once, having roamed farther than usual, a mangrove spike encrusted with oysters from the beds behind the sandbar.
She asked him to teach her how to fish, and beginning with the seaweed-filled channels for the rock cod, he showed her, one by one, the techniques he had learned for the different kinds of fish to be had from the rocks and beaches – the tricks for flathead, the times and baits and tides for whiting, luderick, gar. Much of the first months was spent practising what he had shown her. By the end of the winter it was not unusual for her to return with more than they could eat. Then for the days following, while the excess cured slowly in the rough smoke-house they had made, she could return to the garden, which had continued to respond to her in a way that surprised and delighted them both. The world began thus to burgeon about him. And thus freed he started to spend more time with his books and the papers on his desk.
It was a kind of contract. Rent, or board, but also payment for the lessons that had begun even before the fishing (since that had had to await the right clothes, the healing of the ankle, and some tacit understanding about what she might or might not do next): on the second day she had come in from the rough bed he had made up for her and found him writing. She had sat in the armchair and he had looked up and nodded, but neither as yet knew quite what to say to the other. He had taken refuge then in the thought he had been struggling with and become engrossed again, and for several minutes – it may have been a quarter of an hour – almost forgot her, only to look up once more when he felt that he had sketched out his idea, to find her staring, not at him, but at what he was doing, in fascination, as if, to her eyes, no human being had done such things before – as indeed none ever really had, for Mrs Biggs had shut the door. The writing, the turning of pages, the sitting, pen partly raised, staring into the nothing in the middle distance, thinking.
In embarrassment he had offered her the freedom of his bookshelves, to read anything she liked while she was trapped here, while her ankle healed, while they worked out what to do, apologising at the same time for his own absorption: there was a deadline he was trying to meet, for a journal in Sydney that had been kind enough to show interest in what he was doing.
‘I can’t,’ she said, and he had thought it politeness, a kind of exaggerated respect, missing the point.
‘No, really, you are welcome to anything you want. There are all sort of books here.’
‘I can’t read,’ she said at last, ‘I don’t know how.’ And it became apparent suddenly, for both of them, that there had perhaps been this other reason all along, for the book, for her expedition, if not exactly for the waves or for the fall.
So the lessons had begun, as easily and readily as that. It was not so much teaching, since her appetite and readiness were so great that after the first week she had virtually taught herself what she needed to take the first steps into the great labyrinth of things, as it was a guiding, a gesturing, the answering of a thousand questions. She would take, at first, the ideas, the lesson offered, and disappear into the lean-to with it, or out onto the verandah, and return hours later, sometimes in delight or amazement, sometimes with something gone badly askew, but almost always with some lessons learnt, some matters taken in, keen for the next step.
He had no primers. Within days, instead, he had begun reading small fragments of poetry with her, no more than two or three lines at a time, of Gordon, or Kendall, inching over the letters, putting the sounds together, having her make them out as he read them, coaxing her to take the next word, the next line on her own, completing the thought or sentence or rhyme. And then, amazed at her progress, he moved on by the end of the second week to the beginnings of stories he had selected, as he had the poems, because they might contain things that she might know.
She was voracious, almost insatiable, obsessed by how much she had to make up. In all his years as a schoolteacher he had never known a mind to work so rapidly – so that he could see it working, growing in front of his eyes. By the end of the third week she had made her way to the end of a first story. By the end of the first month she was reading almost a story a day. By the end of the second she seemed to know the small handful of authors they had started with almost as well as he – indeed had noticed things as she went that he had never seen – and was fingering the spines of de Maupassant, Chekhov, Turgenev, Poe, in such a way as made him wary of whom else he might mention to her, for fear that they too would become automatically the objects of this fervent desire.
In each story she found a world that, before she had begun it, would have been impossible to anticipate. And sometimes, it seemed, within each paragraph, each sentence. More than once he found himself, at his own desk, watching her through the window with fascination as she read, fingering her way down a line or two – sometimes coursing through a page or more – then looking up to some invisible, open space before her, utterly absorbed by what was going on behind her eyes, and realised with a kind of baffled awe that something had come rapidly full circle.
It was not always easy. With the awe was mixed a measure of apprehension, even alarm, though it was not clear whether for her or for himself. Even in the first days, with what seemed a kind of foreknowing, there had been the need for escape, for distance, as if too much had come upon him too soon. It had been a Thursday when she first came. In the evening of the second Monday afterward, overtaken by a restlessness, an anxiety that had been building all day, and unable to concentrate on even the most routine of things, he told her he had to go to Nara the next morning and would not be able to come back until the Thursday train.
He returned with a parcel of clothes for her. It had not been why he had gone, but had seemed a way back. They were not chosen by himself, he said, though he did not specify further. In the parcel, amongst a number of young woman’s things, for he had seen that she had almost nothing, were a pair of men’s trousers and a pair of boots, each in the smallest size available. She would not be able to move about the rocks with any great facil
ity otherwise.
At other times he would walk into Hoburn for supplies – but since supplies were brought to them every second week by the ridge road on Mr Ewing’s dray, she knew this could not be the only reason – and return, if he did return that night, very late and, to judge by the sounds she heard from her bed in the back room, very unsteady on his feet. The next morning, when this had been the case, he would rise late and, saying little, take his fishing gear and walk off toward the far point in the direction of Disaster Bay, though she did not think he went all the way there. Some mornings after he had been to Hoburn, he would come in with hat and clothes crumpled and sandy and his face haggard, and she would know that he had been sleeping on the beach. He would smell, then, of stale beer or whisky, sometimes of vomit. He was different from her father, immeasurably, but she knew none the less that at these times she should not go near him, that she should leave, as much as possible, a clear space around him. He would go out, these times, when he woke again, and come back with fish – large leatherjack-ets, or grouper, that she could almost never catch – and their companionship would be all the easier for their having said nothing.
It would be just over three years – three years and a season – before she was on the train again. She had come in mid-summer. When she left it would be almost spring. On the other side of the world, supposedly, leaves would be falling at such a time. Here leaves appeared or fell or stayed on the trees according to other laws. Days simply got warmer or cooler, shorter or longer, there were months when the wind would come, and the rains, and the sea would be more disturbed by storms; dead mutton birds, blown off course, would become more frequent on the beach as the flocks commenced their annual migration; the sky would be more overcast, whole days would be grey, and then the blue would come again and the relentless sunshine, so relentless sometimes that one could not go into it.