by JH Fletcher
Yet she spoke uncertainly, unsure even of her own outrage.
‘It was the right thing for you, too. I was thinking more of him. Of course. I admit it. But I was hoping you’d get together and you did. Good. I’m glad. It’s what he needs.’ Again his eyes assessed her. ‘You, too, I think.’
She said nothing, unwilling to admit, unable to deny.
‘That doctor fellow,’ Dave said, ‘is no good for you.’
‘You’ve never even met him.’
‘I’ve been meeting men like him all my life. You don’t love him. You can’t. You love Cal.’
It was an intrusion she would not tolerate.
‘Cal is missing. He may be dead. Don’t you think that talking about him like this may be wrong?’
May tempt providence was what she meant.
Her uncle watched her, eyes hawk-bright in the soft face. Nodded, satisfied. ‘You do love him.’
‘And what use is that,’ Kathryn cried, ‘if he is dead?’
And ran. With tears.
Later Dave found her in the garden.
‘I did not mean to hurt you.’
She blinked at him, managing a smile.
‘It wasn’t you …’
He watched the petunias. ‘I know myself very well,’ he said. ‘I cannot tolerate too much civilisation.’ He saw she did not understand. ‘Art is its highest manifestation and that has been my life. But when it comes to consideration for others …’ He shook his head. ‘Civilisation shows me up, you see. It spells out all my inadequacies.’
As an apology it wasn’t much, yet Kathryn could not resent for long the man who had brought her Cal.
‘I want you to do something for me,’ she said. ‘I want you to take me through Cal’s studio, explain to me what I’m seeing.’
‘Why?’ He watched her, promising nothing.
‘Because Cal is in his paintings. I need to know them if I’m going to know him.’
Dave was dubious. ‘He’s planning to dump most of them, anyway.’
‘He won’t.’ Kathryn was positive. ‘You’ll see; they’ll be very well thought of, one of these days.’
‘You believe that, you don’t need me to explain them to you.’
She smiled at him, caught his hand. ‘Humour me.’
‘Anonymity in the use of pigment,’ Dave said. He gestured at a painting that leant against the studio wall. ‘It was the hardest thing of all for Cal to learn. His personality is so wrapped up in his work. He had to learn to be objective; it didn’t come naturally to him. He was heading in that direction when the Paris business cropped up.’
‘It must have been a terrible time for him,’ she said sadly.
‘It nearly killed him. Literally. I was afraid that one day I’d come here and find he’d done away with himself. Artists feel things more intensely than the rest of us. Even men like Picasso, who behave like monsters in order to protect themselves.’
He walked around the room, touching paintings here and there with his fingertips.
‘They’re all saying, Look at me, look at me. They’re clever, of course. Too clever. He was inclined to be that, at the beginning. He was getting out of it; then, after Paris, he went straight back. All these’ — his flung arm discarded them — ‘are too indulgent. Too full of self-pity.’
She could not bear it. She had asked Dave to come here, yet now found that this dissection of Cal’s work was like picking over the bones of a man whom they did not even know was dead.
‘Self-pity? Or pity of humanity generally? The human condition?’
He turned to stare at her, looked back at the stacked paintings.
‘Perhaps some,’ he admitted, grudgingly. ‘He was beginning to get over it again, even before he met you. You see,’ he gestured. ‘Here. And here. He is very disciplined, you know. You hear about his wildness, all the garbage the media loves. It’s crap. He works harder than any artist I know.’
He moved on, picked up another canvas.
‘The tonal construction is so important. The freshness of colour. He told me he saw a lot of Matisse when he was in Europe. You can see it, yet what he is doing here is absolutely original. He captures the emotion, you see. The painting is the emotion. He uses unconventional means to provide texture. He is a very tactile artist. It’s why he went to Paris, to study engraving. He experiments with materials, too. Here.’ He showed her another painting. ‘Sand, embedded in emulsion. He’s always pushing into new areas.’
‘Into utter darkness,’ said Kathryn, remembering.
‘What?’
‘He told me about it. The darkness where no-one has been before.’
‘Exactly,’ Dave said. ‘He’s never believed in being safe.’
All this was technique. It meant nothing to Kathryn, who wanted to discover not the artist, but the man. If it were possible to differentiate between the two.
Perhaps, after all, there were other ways.
She went to the island, to the long, flat stone that Cal had called his sacrificial altar. Sat. The sea’s silence howled.
Oppressively, amid the grey shapes of rocks, the foaming heads of seas, the desert stretched away. The dunes of red sand beat like drums under a remorseless sky in which were reflected all hope, all dreams, all desire. The mountains reared implacably.
He is not dead.
The sluggish sea broke.
You love Cal …
Her uncle’s voice amid a cacophony of gulls.
He will live. He will come back. To me.
Sea and gulls wove their rhythmic dance above the blood-red land. And faded, faded, leaving the distorted image of the man striding beneath a sun the size of the sky. A fragile skein of footprints stretched behind him, across shattered rock, the tufts of wire-like grass, the cliffs and defiles that rose steeply into the pitiless air. The pigments — red and blue and brown — were on fire behind him. An infinity of stone, the devouring maw of wilderness.
The lichen on the spray-dark rocks would have mocked, had she permitted.
Once again Cal was filled with the awful fear that Hennie was dead. He ran to him, turned him over. The pilot’s eyes were open, his face purple. He was breathing, a steady, snoring sound that enhanced horror.
‘Hennie … Hennie …?’
Nothing.
Cal sat on his heels and studied him. This was more than fatigue. He remembered the terrible crack on the head Hennie had taken when they crashed and wondered whether there might have been some form of brain damage that was only now coming to light.
He did not know what to do, whether in fact there was anything that could be done, and was filled with the most terrible sense of powerlessness. He tried to move the pilot, to make him more comfortable, knew even as he did so that it would mean nothing at all to a man so deeply unconscious.
He stared up at the ridge. He had been so determined to get there before dark, to find out what lay on the other side. He looked again at the pilot. No change. He thought he might as well make the climb to the ridge, see what lay beyond and then come back. It was most unlikely that Hennie would come round while he was away; if he did, he would just have to wait.
He opened the breast pocket of Hennie’s shirt and took out the precious compass. He put it in his own pocket, buttoned the flap carefully. He turned and started to climb.
Again he found that he made better time by himself. It was as though, while they were together, Hennie’s clumsy presence held him back. The ground was still very rough, but he was able to find his way with far less difficulty than when he had first climbed alone. He skirted the first cliff, leaving it behind him as he forced his way up the boulder-littered defile that led steeply to the high ground.
At last he came out on the ridge and looked at what faced them: another steep descent, another valley, and beyond it yet another line of hills.
They were as lost, as far from civilisation, as ever.
‘Good night’s rest, I’ll eat you up,’ he told the valley, the blue ranges. Of
Hennie he would not think; do so and he would be forced to accept that Hennie, even if he came round, would never be able to make it to this point, never mind continue beyond it on what was beginning to seem like an endless, futile march into oblivion. He put the thought away from him; did not wish to be confronted by it, not now that he was tired, not tonight.
There seemed to be more and more things he could not permit himself to think about. The forbidden subjects hemmed him in, crowding closer and closer until it seemed sometimes that it was impossible to think about anything at all.
He took out the compass and drew a bearing on the furthest ridge. The setting sun was warm on his neck. He squinted across the top of the compass, bringing the needle into line with the highest point of the ridge and reading the degrees off the scale. Fifty degrees. Still on course, he thought. Still heading more or less north-east.
Then he spun on his heel as a sudden thought struck him.
Behind him, on the far side of the valley, the sun was going down in a haze of golden light. He looked at the sun, then back at the ridge upon which he had just taken the bearing.
The sun had to be setting in the west. Which meant that the ridge towards which he had intended to march in the morning should have been at a pronounced angle to the north. He lifted the compass, again read the bearing. Fifty degrees. As before. Yet it was not. Standing with his back to the setting sun the ridge was immediately facing him. Due east.
The compass was out. They were more lost even than he had feared.
* * *
Now the third day was almost over.
On every newscast, the television had gone on and on about the planes searching the Outback, how still no trace had been found of the missing men. The sombre-voiced reporter spoke of temperatures in the high forties and more, of the impossibility of sustaining human life in such conditions beyond a few days.
They had trotted out a doctor, complete with white coat and stethoscope, looking like an advertisement for pain killers. Four days, the doctor had said, gloomy as a pall bearer. Five for tops.
They had interviewed her uncle. Dave Holt had described Cal as the brightest in the constellation of Australia’s artists. He had called him a dear, close friend whose loss, if he were indeed lost, would be a tragedy to art.
It had been terrible, terrible.
‘I don’t care about bloody art!’ Kathryn had screamed at the smug images. She could have massacred them all. What about me?
But that she did not say.
The media did not interview her. They did not know she existed. She watched the news. Had they found his body, there would have been a report, but there was not. Instead she saw Monica Lewinsky prancing, thought, thank God.
Cal had told her about his parents, his dad’s tricks. Had pointed out their house, one of a row two streets back from the harbour. It had looked too small for Cal himself, never mind for the three of them. They must have lived in each other’s pockets, she thought.
Earlier that afternoon, trembling, in trepidation, she had gone to see them.
Em stood in the doorway; doughy face, suspicious eyes. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m a friend of Cal’s.’
Em’s expression did not change, but she stood back from the door. ‘His dad’s here. You’d best come in.’
It was clear they didn’t know what to make of her, wavered between resentment and indifference. Cal, their manner said, had known lots of girls. What made her special?
It was a question to which she did not know the answer.
She had imagined they might be able to comfort each other, each with a son or lover missing in the far north, but the parents made it clear that Cal no longer meant much to them. If he ever had.
Mick, over sixty and thinking about giving fishing away, hanging on only because he was scared of shutting the door on life, now carried a grudge that he was only too willing to parade for her benefit. ‘Raise a boy to take over when the time comes,’ he said, ‘then he buggers off and leaves you to get on with it. Not good enough. Not by a long bloody chalk.’
He licked thirsty lips and eyed the clock surreptitiously, hoping to sneak away to the pub, to bellyache to mates who had given up listening long ago.
Cal had moved on; that was what Mick resented. Em was resigned, had watched her son, like life itself, leave her stranded. She had expected nothing else, did not think of life as something over which she had control.
‘Gunna get a paper,’ said Mick, and left them to get on with it.
‘Got mates down the pub,’ Em explained. ‘He dunno what to do with himself now he’s given up the fishing. Always sayin’ he’ll go back to it. That’s why he’s hung on to the licence. Could get a good price for it nowadays, but. Goes his own way,’ she declared, fatalistic yet clearly proud of her difficult man. ‘Always has, always will.’
She made them a cup of tea, moving painfully on feet that, like life, had let her down. Now she was willing to chat, but defensively, guarding herself against the intrusive woman she did not know.
‘Cal had a good life here. Dunno why he turned his back on us. His dad didn’t like it, not one bit. When he found he was going into this painting lark, he kicked him out, told him not to come back.’ She cackled at the antics of the violent man who had dominated her life. ‘Can’t blame him. What’s a son for if he’s not going to take over the business from his old man? Mind you, I don’t complain. Slips me a quid now and then — not that I ask, but it helps. Don’t let on to his dad, mind. Lose his rag if he found out.’
Kathryn didn’t understand. ‘Why should he mind Cal helping you?’
‘Not his place, is it? His dad ain’t a cot case, not by a long shot. Up to the husband to look after his wife, i’n’ it?’
‘I hope and pray Cal is safe,’ Kathryn said.
‘He’ll be right. Take a deal of killing, my Cal.’ Topped up the teacups. ‘Nothing we can do about it, either way.’
‘I would sacrifice myself willingly,’ Kathryn told her, ‘if it meant he was safe.’
‘Yeah?’ Em’s eyes acknowledged the gulf that separated them. ‘You think like that when you’re young. Get a bit older, you’ll find there ain’t nothing you can do about things. They just happen.’
Kathryn left, more tired than when she’d arrived.
Now she watched a reporter once again talking about the missing men in the far north. Suddenly, a change as he began to interview the pilot’s wife.
Kathryn remembered walking with Cal along the path past the little island, the house with its face turned to the sea. She heard Cal’s voice. Stella. The wife. She makes out all right.
So she did, apparently. Kathryn watched her composure as she answered the interviewer’s questions: Yes, you could say they lived apart. He worked out of the gas plant, whereas she preferred to stay here, by the sea. Someone had to look after the house, after all.
The reporter, who worked for a channel that prided itself on its liberal views, was nevertheless uncomfortable with the idea of a wife who chose not to follow her husband.
‘Doesn’t it get lonely, down here by yourself?’
There were daggers in Stella’s laugh. Her dark eyes gashed him. ‘You making me an offer?’
Kathryn, watching, believed the wife was going through the motions, was not as tough as she made out. But strong, certainly. Perhaps I could gain strength from her, she thought. God knows I need it.
Stella Loots was the daughter of a shearer who was home so seldom that her conception might have been an act of God or at least of Neptune. She never saw the sea until she was ten. Her mother, sick of keeping house for a man who was never there, took off one spring day with Stella and a battered suitcase, leaving the briefest of notes — I’m off. See ya. — and a pile of ironed shirts. Found a willing truckie, swapped a free ride to the coast for half an hour in the back of the cab, walked with her daughter along a beach quaking with the drum roll of the surf.
Stella, enchanted by this new world of spray and space,
walked at one with the sea of whose existence she had barely been aware.
The sea wooed and overthrew her, the rhythms of the surf entered her being.
How they lived she did not know. When she grew older and learned about things, about the dole, a bit of grape-picking, the occasional bloke, she didn’t care. Knew only that she had been wedded to the sea from the womb, that even there, swirling, had answered its insistence. She entered into its lightness, married a man, beer-bellied, much older than herself, who had charmed her by his total commitment to air and flight, the shared mystery of freedom from the mundane land.
Her mother took off with her latest bloke, Hennie proved so wedded to flight that he left her for months at a time in the house on the island beset by water. I am repeating my mother’s experience, she thought. She took Cal for a lover because his need matched her own; the spirit of the sea moved in him as in her. When they made love it was as though the sea itself entered her; she experienced the ecstasy of salt in the thrusting body of the man.
She lost him, turned again to the sea, her true lover, regained Cal, briefly. Yet knew that in truth he was gone from her, however much he might deny it. The sea entered and possessed her, shaking her once more in its powerful embrace.
A knock on the door brought Stella hurrying.
A young woman she did not know. She thought, Not another one.
People were always doing it. They saw the house overlooking the sea and came, cool as you please, to inspect. As though house and occupants were exhibits. One couple had even walked through the unguarded door to check out the view, they said, from the living room.
Stella in no mood for nonsense like that.
‘Can I help you?’
Her razor smile offered nothing of the sort.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you. Especially now …’
Stella endured the limping apologies, wondered what was going on.
‘I wanted to meet you.’
On guard, eyes narrowed. ‘Why?’
‘Your husband is also missing …’ Sensing Stella’s exasperation, she said simply, ‘I am a friend of Cal’s.’