The River Baptists

by Belinda Castles

  It was cool and dark in the shade of the cave and he could stay close to the fire without being seen. He lay on the ledge and pressed his cheek to the cool sandstone. Ah yes, there was Steve, off the ferry already, pointing at the fire, shouting instructions, buggering about with the hose. Even with the wind and the fire and Channel Ten he could hear him clearly, he was so close. Call this lot fire fighters? He could see the yoga teacher from the island in her overalls and boots. Sixty-five if she was a day, rolling out the hose like it was the linen from her glory box. Lord help us. They got the water going but they might as well have been pissing on it. Then the fire helicopter came and emptied his bucket straight into the dam. Nice work, mate, Tom laughed. Another appeared soon behind him as he disappeared behind the ridge to refill from the river. There were too many trees crowded around the dam to get his bucket in up here.

  It took them a couple of hours to bring it under control. Best morning’s entertainment Tom had seen in a while. As he watched his fire his mind emptied of Alf, of Molly, of the Mancinis, of the thing that was eating away at him down there. The sound of the brush crackling, the smoky, scorching wind, the water pouring from the sky; all this filled his mind and spirit, and for those few hours in his cool cave, the bush around him flaming, he was at peace.

  Chapter 7

  Rose woke in stages, trying to hold onto sleep, slipping in and out of a dream in which she’d had six babies, and she could never remember when to feed them or where they all were at any one time. But then something stirred her, some change in the air, in the light.

  It was dark and cool in the little room, in spite of the thin bamboo blind in the window. The house faced due west, with a cliff at its back, and the deep verandah would help keep the sun out of the room for several hours yet. The room was furnished with old, mismatched furniture: a 1930s chest of drawers, a ’70s tubular bed, an Afghan rug. On the drawers was a photo in a frame, a picture of a little boy—James, a beautiful boy. His mother had moved back to Sydney when he was a child. This was a time capsule. She shifted slowly from under the blankets, crossed the floor to the photo and placed it in the top drawer of the chest.

  The baby rolled and gave her a sharp kick in the ribs. It was getting crowded in there. Her sister was right, she should have told her about the baby. It was a new sprout of their family, when it seemed everything was gone. But what was the point of telling part of the truth? Would she ever tell her all of it? If Billie and James broke up? If the baby looked too much like him? What is there to lose, really? she thought. But she’d told him she wouldn’t say anything, and it was almost Christmas. She wouldn’t do anything right now.

  She’d been trying to avoid thinking about Christmas, but now she sat on the bed and massaged the baby inside her, and felt the fragments pushing their way into the room. One Christmas Eve, when she was very little, she knelt by her bed, squeezed her hands together tightly and prayed to Jesus to make her as pretty as her sister. The next morning she woke, electrified with excitement, and ran to the mirror in the bathroom. Everything was blurry; she had to put her glasses on. But Billie didn’t wear glasses. When she saw it was just her—the same frizzy, dirty blonde hair, same freckles, same beanpole body—she burst into tears. Her dad found her sitting on the bathroom floor, sobbing. ‘Hey,’ he said, picking her up. ‘What’s this, on Christmas Day?’ She told him what she’d prayed for between sobs. ‘Oh, Rosie,’ he said while her tears and snot leaked through his shirt. He pulled her away from him, looked her in the eye. ‘I’ve told you, mate, there is no Jesus. Don’t you go wasting your time on that old fraud.’

  Rose peered at the water, glinting through the blinds. She pulled them up. There was a strange light on the river. The water looked orangey. And it was hazy out there. She padded along the dark corridor to the living room. Through the wall of windows along the front of the room she saw a man walk onto her wharf, stop and look at the hazy air, the water. Across the river she could see a tower of smoke, a helicopter buzzing around it. She stared; there was a momentary gulf between what she knew she was seeing and belief. The man rapped sharply on the front windows.

  It was Kane. She hadn’t recognised him in the shadows, the strange light behind him. ‘Do you reckon we should get across now? I can take you in my boat.’

  She pulled her dressing gown around her bump and nodded. ‘Let me get dressed. I’ll be right there.’

  As she followed him down the wharf, she forced herself to look up at the ridge behind her. Black and red smoke billowed from a spot to the south of the strip of houses and in another above the village across the river. As she stepped into the tiny boat, she felt it dip a good twenty centimetres further into the water. ‘I’ll sink it,’ she said. ‘I’m getting huge.’

  ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘You’re just right.’ He smiled at her for a long time before busying himself with the motor.

  She put a hand over her face for a moment, tried to breathe slowly. Last winter she’d stood here, watching the smoke from a fire on the freeway billow towards the village, not knowing he was in there, her dad, and that her whole life had changed and the news just hadn’t reached her yet. It was a beautiful fire—like she’d told Ben—a column of black smoke with an orange core, shooting straight up into the cobalt sky. She and James were eating salmon and roast potatoes that he had cooked and drinking cold white wine on the verandah in the smoky sunset. The light was magical. ‘You’re the most beautiful girl I know,’ he’d said, and what she heard was: You’re more beautiful than your sister. She’d had a few hours to believe it, and then she was plunged into a deep, black hole there was no scrabbling out of. Stupid, vain idiot.

  Crossing the river, she focused hard on Kane’s eyes, bright and blue and distant as he watched the smoke rising from the trees on the cliff. The smoke cleared and ballooned in surges as the wind caught it. One moment he was clear as day, almost glowing in the strange light; the next the edges of him were blurry and unstable.

  ‘Don’t worry, mate. It’s just fire. Bush needs it. Helps the regrowth and that.’

  She nodded silently, tried a small smile. ‘Seems like there’s a lot of fires, here.’

  ‘Guess this one’s the drought. Or some silly bugger with a ciggie.’

  ‘Easy to get cut off.’

  ‘Get yourself a boat, Rose. You seen the mums round here, jumping on and off their tinnies with their bubs strapped to ’em? No sweat.’

  ‘I had one but it got cut loose. Haven’t bothered with another one. I found it a bit hard to handle, you know?’

  ‘Just get a little one. That’ll do you. Or borrow mine, when you want.’ She smiled at him and he looked away quickly this time.

  Over at the marina, the channel was full of people in boats, chatting, shouting to others up on the wharves. The ferry ploughed out into the smoke on the river, the deep growl of its motor opening up as it left the channel. She hoped the trains were running. As they pulled in, a couple of teenagers—a boy and a girl—shuffled about near the petrol bowser. They were watching the boat, eyeing her and then Kane. Kane nodded to them as he pulled in. ‘I’ll drop you here, mate,’ he said to Rose. ‘I’ve gotta check on a few things. Maybe you should go into town for a bit, till the smoke clears.’

  ‘Thanks for the lift.’ Behind her on the wharf and in the shop and in their boats on the water were a hundred people she didn’t know, who didn’t know her, who would have left her there, even when the flames reached her house. He was the one person who’d thought to check on her.

  ‘No worries,’ he winked, and disappeared into the fog.

  She took the twenty-minute train ride to the suburbs, passing within metres of flame and heat in the bush. She looked around at the other passengers. Some watched the fire, but most were reading the papers, headphones on, tapping laptops. There was a thrumming of their thoughts, the air was crowded with them. The carriage seemed thick with frustrated energy, abortive plans, dreams falling short.

  She spent the afternoon in the cine
ma, away from the smell of smoke, away from the possibility of it. She chose a romantic comedy, because you could cry easily and unashamedly. Every moment of sincerity, of clichéd intimacy between the man and the woman, every kiss, reminded her that she was alone, and that there was no possibility of being otherwise. Even the scenes when the characters were hanging out with their friends slapped her with her own solitude. She watched the credits through a blur of tears and a pain in her throat from trying to cry silently. She passed her hands gently one over the other, as though she was washing them, as though each hand belonged to a pair of lovers who could not believe the wonder of them. I need to touch someone, she said to herself. I need to be touched. In her head were the scenarios she invented for a living, for her adventurous ladies. There were the memories of the men she’d slept with: James, men in the city, old colleagues at the magazine, Ben one drunken, slightly embarrassing time. She missed Ben. And she could never ask him. They’d spent years keeping things light, funny—with that one lapse. She knew from the way he looked at her then, the way he still did when his face slipped, when he forgot the world might be watching, that his feelings for her ran deeper than either of them would ever say out loud. She didn’t want tenderness, for anything to be asked of her. It was just skin on skin she wanted, warm breath in her hair, a kind presence as she slept.

  The smoke finally clearing at sunset, Danny came off his shift with his skin smeared with soot and his throat dry and raw. He was exhausted from ferrying people, pets, kids from their homes over to the car park at the village. He’d have a cold drink and call it a day; his bed was calling to him.

  At the marina café there was a new girl behind the counter. Dark hair, skinny, tired. ‘You new?’ he said as she handed him a lemonade and some change. That was all it took with some. She flashed him an enormous smile, an ordinary face transformed. Friendliness in her blood, he reckoned—a family of talkers and drinkers and dancers.

  ‘New to here. Back up the river before this. Dad just took the lease on this place. Me and Mum moved down here to look after it. He stays on his nights off from the old place.’ One of those girls who told you everything, straight off.

  ‘Know anyone down this way?’ he smiled. ‘You’ll meet plenty, working here, anyway. More than you want, probably.’

  Before she had a chance to speak, a shadow fell on her face from behind him. Then came Alf’s customary grunt, the announcement he was here. Danny felt the bulk of his presence. ‘Girl at the tables. Waiting for you, I reckon.’ Alf shuffled back into the shadows to tend to the mysterious mechanics of his business.

  He turned to see a woman with her head laying on her arms, on the table, her back to them, hair pale in the glary light. He knew the hair; it was Rose. There was a little knot of resistance in his stomach. He’d been hoping to keep his distance from those people for a while. He didn’t know what it was. Just trouble, sadness, things he tried to avoid. ‘You should get her out of the smoke,’ the girl told him. ‘Bad for the baby.’

  ‘Listen,’ Danny said. ‘I sometimes go up to the pub after my shift of an evening. Come and say hello, if you like. Meet the locals when you’re off-duty.’ She nodded, beaming. ‘I’d better go. Don’t work too hard.’

  He walked towards Rose, the only person out here among the plastic tables and chairs. ‘Excuse me?’ he said quietly, but she was asleep. He tapped her lightly on the shoulder. She lifted her head, bewildered. He had brought her back from another place, and she was lost. Tears brimmed in her green eyes. ‘Sorry to frighten you,’ he said softly. ‘I’ll come back in a minute.’ He went to the toilets and washed his hands, his reflection staring back at him from a discoloured, streaked mirror. He barely knew his face, saw it rarely—there was no mirror in his shed. His skin was dark and he looked older than he remembered. That girl, Rose, was a well of sadness. He would take her across the river where she could be alone, not stared at by strangers like him, and then he’d go to the pub and sink a few, and maybe the new girl would be there, and he’d think of nothing but good times and the next few hours, and taking her home.

  Chapter 8

  Rose listened to his motor idling as she climbed the verandah stairs. He seemed a decent bloke, that Danny, in spite of his reputation as one for the ladies. He was scruffy and tanned, like everyone who worked on the water here. His hair was darkish, short, probably cut it himself with an electric razor. His eyes were grey, and though he was cheerful and friendly he always appeared to be thinking. He had that boaty middle-distance gaze, thinking his own thoughts or perhaps nothing at all, wearing a look that worked, ready for the next girl to appear on the horizon.

  She dragged her heavy legs up the last step and smelled it before she saw it—three twists of light brown faeces on the decking. At first she thought of that half-feral dog next door, but something about it, the deliberateness, the neat spacing, looked human. She’d been trying not to think about what Tom had said to her at the doctor’s. Now she could think of nothing else. It wasn’t that no one knew her, that she could be abandoned here in a fire through lack of knowledge. They did know her, and they hated her.

  She found a piece of bark on the grass at the bottom of the steps and did what she could to remove it. She threw the bark next door and hosed down the deck, then disinfected it. Afterwards, she scrubbed her hands for ten minutes. She felt the germs she could not see, making their way inside her, infecting her baby.

  In the last light, she sat still—rigid—on a camping chair on the deck. If she didn’t move, if even her breath made no sound, there would be no pain; there would be nothing of her to feel. The cicadas throbbed, and the light from the living room illuminated an enormous spider in her web across the deck awning. A train roared over the bridge and she heard a tinny on the water, its motor slowing as it curved into the bay over at the island. There was no moon tonight, and she could see the water to the end of her wharf and then nothing. Someone laughed, long and hard.

  She stared into the blackness. James had told her that the river was addictive, that people found it hard to leave after only a few days. It was familiar to her now, but its mysteries seemed to go on and on, up the twisting creeks and into the endless little bays, drawing her further in with every day she spent here. The mist lay over the oyster beds early in the morning and you were in another world. Pelicans spent hours lined up on the pillars of her wharf. From the ferry you caught glimpses of falling-down shacks—some with washing out, some abandoned—in still, dark places on the water.

  Everyone seemed to rush around, unsurprised by the place. Perhaps she would become a local, too, but she doubted it. Before now she had only come to the river to cross it, travelling between her dad’s place and the city. Then it had always seemed like a glimpse of a secret country, crossing low over the wide blue water, catching glimpses as the road wound up through the bush, of lonely gullies and wrecked trawlers. She thought of the city and dreaded the moment she would really be asked to leave. Maybe she should just rent something else. But it was this house too, in spite of Tom. It seemed full of memories; she could feel James’s childhood here. The baby was growing in the place that its father did. It was a piece of continuity in Rose’s life, just a little one.

  She closed her eyes and let herself see for a moment the thing she fought. A couple of kilometres from where she sat, the truck had ploughed into his old van. It had burst into flames, the smoke sending her a signal that she hadn’t understood until later. She’d grown up with that van. Her sister was always up front; Rose in the back with his band gear, staring at Billie’s shiny hair, listening to her laugh and joke with their father.

  She remembered drifting in and out of sleep on the hot vinyl seats, her hair wet at the back of her neck. They were on the way home from the city to the coast. She would have been thirteen, perhaps. They thought she was asleep. ‘Rosie’s quite pretty, isn’t she? Bit chubby, though, don’t you reckon?’ Billie said. And she had been, at that age, compared to her sister, who’d been dieting since the ag
e of ten.

  ‘Billie,’ her dad sighed. ‘You got your mother’s looks. Rose is a clever girl, and pretty enough in her own way.’ Rose had kept her eyes closed for the remainder of the journey, unable to speak. When they’d pulled into the driveway, she launched herself out of the car and up to her room, only emerging when it was time for school in the morning. No one seemed to notice.

  She remembered Billie’s carrot sticks for lunch, her turned-up nose when Rose and Ben had giggling midnight feasts of chocolate, chips, lemonade. Have you ever been full, Billie? she thought. Have you ever given yourself a day off from being beautiful? I can’t keep doing this, she thought. She didn’t used to think about her, before her dad died. Lived her own life. Drank, worked, laughed, made friends. How did I get so alone? She wanted to change something—her life, herself. Recover something.

  She closed her eyes, leaned back in her chair, withdrew from the world and its lack of sense, far beneath the surface of life into a dark, cool, silent place, a night-time river, a dreamless sleep.

  ‘Rose,’ a voice was calling to her, bringing her back through the layers of darkness. ‘Rose,’ it whispered. ‘It’s getting cold out here, mate. Wake up.’

  There was a hand on her forearm. She looked at it, tried not to flinch. Wait, Rosie, she told herself, wait. She followed the hand, the arm, to a man’s old, old white T-shirt. It was Kane. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I fell asleep again.’

  ‘No kidding,’ he smiled. You’ll get eaten alive by mozzies if you don’t cover up.’

  She rubbed her eyes. ‘Thanks. I’ll go in.’

  He paused for a moment. ‘I’m going over to the pub if you’re interested. Fancy it?’

  People, she thought. Noise. Distraction. ‘OK. Why not? That’d be nice.’ She rubbed her eyes.

  ‘I’ll let you wake up. Be back in ten.’

  Rose wondered whether old Tom would be there. It was one of those pubs where they looked at you as you walked in. She felt her bump grow in the eyes of the locals—a mix of scruffy male-only groups and the odd slightly slicker-looking couple—as she made her way past the high tables and stools to the bar. There was tinsel draped haphazardly among the bottles, brightly coloured flashing bulbs around the mirror. It had been an age since she’d been in a pub, and the smell of the beer- and tobacco-soaked carpet hit her as though she’d been picked up and put back into her old life. Kane was right behind her as they walked in, but he stopped to talk to a group of pissed-looking young boys near the door so she caught the barman’s eye and ordered. She bought him a schooner of tap beer and waited at the bar.