The Landing

by Susan Johnson

  Now Penny lived with the injustice of seeing not only Scarlett and her offspring every day but Pete, too, and fat-gutted Paul and Paul’s cast-off wife, who, like Penny, remained in the family home but who, unlike Penny, remained smiling. Penny did not understand Rosanna: it was galling enough for Penny to endure Friday nights at the Orpheus, seeing her impulsive, dim-witted daughter slow dancing to ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ with her balding partner, but how could Rosanna stand it? If Paul were her husband, Penny would never again have spoken to him after the violent manner in which he had left a twenty-five-year marriage, withdrawing all their joint money and running off to live in Paris for six months with a pregnant teenage girl. How could Rosanna remain upright? Yet there she was, fifty-three years old, the same age as Penny, wearing a little short dress of the kind that girls wore these days, like a child’s dress, a scrap of cotton held up by two threads at each shoulder. Rosanna, of hopeful temperament, dancing alone at the Orpheus, a deranged, blissed-out hippy smile on her face, holding her age well, not because of Botox or a healthy diet, but because of a fluke of genetics. Rosanna smoked. Rosanna drank too much. Rosanna’s face was unlined except for a fan of wrinkles around her eyes, which encouraged a view that she was a happy, contented kind of person.

  Every morning in the milky yellow dawn, before the wind rose, Rosanna walked down to the brown shallow lake to swim, way past the scummy, soggy bottom that discouraged new swimmers, their feet sinking as if into slime, and out into the deeper water with its unseen sandy bottom, right out to where the sailing boats flew by, the early-morning kayaks, the rowers, the fishermen checking their crab pots, the occasional small fish briefly skimming upright across the surface of the unruffled dawn water. She swam among the ospreys, kites and white herons, among fish gently breaking the skin of the water, leaving perfect concentric circles radiating outwards. Rosanna swam on her back in shimmering light, opening her eyes to the creamy swirl of dawn clouds against the brightening sky, a single morning star still sparkling, the water indivisible from the sky, turning the whole world into liquid silver, letting her arms, her legs, her fingers and toes open out into the universe. It was so still, so quiet, she could hear the surf from the far side of the lake, from over the dunes and across the sands, smashing up from the ocean, reaching her ears like the sound of a distant jet. Rosanna was free. Rosanna refused to hold on to her pain. Rosanna had let everything go because forgiveness is a choice not to suffer.

  THREE

  The wrong side of the lake

  On the far eastern bank, opposite the settlement known as The Landing, the world’s oldest sand dunes separate the immense lake from the ocean. Laced and tethered to the earth by fleshy-leaved, purple-flowered pigface, goat’s foot vine and spinifex, held safe from the wind, the dunes rise up from the clean sweep of beach facing the ocean. Behind them runs a heath, scrubby with low-lying pandanus and other hardy plants, which in turn becomes a scribbled forest of melaleuca trees, wrinkled, grey, ghostly. Sprinkled throughout are spiny, needle-like grass trees and sweet-nectared yellow banksias, bursting and round as pompoms, and native fungi, brilliant red, curled like sea anemone or bright orange, leaping like frozen licks of flame.

  At his holiday house on the western edge of the lake, at 36 Waratah Street, Jonathan was opening up. It had been months since Jonathan’s last visit and the air inside smelled trapped, old, and he passed from room to room, opening windows, so that freshness rushed in, the scent of trees. It was a brand-new house, a year old, and a Sarah-free zone; a project they had originally planned together but which Sarah had never seen completed. She had chosen the architect: a rising star who happened to be the daughter of his best friend, Will, and only a few years older than their own daughters, Madeleine and Amanda. Sarah had sketched out rough designs and when she left him, in the middle of their lives, in the middle of their plans not only for a new holiday house but in the very movement of life itself—or so it seemed to him—he had stalled. At first he did nothing, apart from asking Sarah what she wanted to do about the house, to which she replied, ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Can’t you decide?’ And so he pressed on, to distract himself from pain, choosing bench tops and vanity basins and the colour of floorboards, everything Sarah would have done. He and Sarah still shared joint accounts; she was not interested in how much the house cost—and its costs were considerable—for she had never cared about money, and now she did not have to care, being an only child who some years before had inherited her widowed mother’s multi-million-dollar estate.

  The new house was built on one of The Landing’s rare waterfront blocks, on the street running around the western edge of the lake, considered the best street in the village. The house featured glass, corrugated iron and sober, modernist angles. It sat in a cul-de-sac, tucked away amid the trees. The only sounds were birds, wind and water, and the occasional cries of windsurfers or men rigging their sailing skiffs; the knock of metal against the masts of moored, drifting boats. Jonathan’s front lawn ran right down to the lake itself, to the rushes and reeds growing in the soft sands and water, where he had planted native waterlilies, purple and white, floating among the fat glossy leaves on the surface of the water. The lake was now a sailing hub, because of the reliable high winds which blew up most afternoons—and less often in the mornings—gusting among the trees around the house, tossing their leaves about in frantic chatter. On some nights, the many trees around the property shook and rattled throughout the long black hours, the brittle gums, the rustling pines planted more than one hundred years ago by an old bushie, one of The Landing’s first white settlers. The land originally belonged to the Gubbi Gubbi people, who feasted on the animals of the lake and the sea—dugong and eels, black swan and other water fowl.

  Jonathan could have made a bit of money renting out the house, particularly in high season when the sailing regattas were on. But he enjoyed the idea of a house just for him, a house cleaned and ready and waiting only for his key in the lock. The cleaner was the aged mother of the owner of The Landing’s only shop, who ran the shop and much else besides as if he were a mobster and the village his fiefdom. Jonathan did not much like Phil Watson and his enormous, slatternly, chain-smoking wife, Sylvia, known as Sylv; nor did he like the idea of Phil’s gossipy, hard-bitten old biddy of a mother, Phyllis, snooping about his house. She had a face shaped like a bent shoe, her large jaw curled as if rushing to meet the tip of her nose. It was the face of a wicked witch in a children’s story and Jonathan was both repelled and oddly fascinated. He had once brought a woman up for a disastrous weekend, a leggy divorcee with a son at Grammar, who turned out to have a drinking problem and who told him soon after they arrived that she much preferred Straddie, where all the other Grammar parents had beach houses and where everyone went, and which she declared to be ‘very, very social’. Phyllis rang his office first thing Monday morning to tell him the leggy divorcee had left something behind. ‘She left her flirties,’ she said, and instead of posting them to his home, as requested, she sent a pair of lacy crotchless knickers—with no accompanying note—to his office, where his secretary opened the envelope.

  When all the windows were open, the house felt empty, full of echoes; at once Jonathan decided to wander out later and see who he could rustle up for a barbecue the following night. But first he put on a Miles Davis CD, opened a good bottle of red and took the bottle and a glass out onto the veranda. The veranda was high up in the trees, like a treehouse. The trees made a clearing, revealing his little private beach with its waterlilies below, the slap of frilly waves joining the leaves jostled by the wind, together making a sound like rushing water. There was the rattle of metal against metal; the flap of unseen sails on craft out on the water. The lake, spread out, always moving, never quiet except for sweet moments in still, noiseless dawns; dark and glossy beneath the late-afternoon sun. The wind was rising now, shaking the trees, whipping the leaves and lifting his hair. Jonathan was growing it; he still had a full head, silver now, but thick, ab
undant. He was vain about his hair, pleased to have it blowing about his face—attractively, he hoped. He was vain about his figure, too, long and tall and rangy like his late father, and free of the little pregnant belly Will and other men his age carried tenderly before them. If there were no mirrors in the world Jonathan might suppose himself to be the same man he was at twenty-nine, standing in the leafy garden of his parents’ Clayfield house, marrying Sarah. His hair was long then, too, but dark, romantic. He had black eyebrows, straight as an artist’s line of paint, and full lips Sarah called ‘adorably kissable’. Sarah, aged twenty-two, with her lopsided smile! She was exuberance itself, a portal for joy, a great, whooshing rush of life, sweeping up friends and admirers and lecturers and bosses and him, him, him. Sarah had pinned him to existence, tracing all the points of his circumference, filling him in like a map. It was the saddest day of his life when he finally supposed her love for him had been extinguished. ‘I got married too young,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know who I was.’ He looked up at the sky now, at the faint glow of emerging stars, bright stains against the sky’s cloth, and, not for the first time, felt bewildered. I am still alive, he thought. What am I to do now?

  The birds woke him, noisier than a schoolyard: two kookaburras led the charge, followed by a string of notes like a chime, a whistle, some curly ascending scales, whipbirds, the squawking of cockatoos and parrots and, at the centre of it all, the two loud-mouthed kookaburras, calling and answering. It was that bright moment just before dawn, the flush of light coming into the world, a tender beam of radiance. He lay in bed as the world emerged like a developing film, the chair, the end of the bed; the room his photographic darkroom. He had deliberately left the shutters open, pulled back to each side of the wide window overlooking the swoop of the lake. Already, in the pre-dawn, the shutters were beginning to chatter, rattling softly in their tracks. A gecko on the ceiling emitted a comforting tick. It was late September, spring, the days not yet putrefying in the Queensland summer heat.

  Jonathan rose eagerly from the bed, restored by the birds and the dawn. He threw on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and opened the back door to find Bites, the village dog. A big, dopey golden retriever, she wagged her tail at the sight of him. Bites liked to follow random men, slavishly, devotedly. ‘Morning, Bites,’ he said. ‘How’s it hanging?’ Possibly this was not the appropriate question to ask a bitch, but she appeared to forgive him, looking up with love-struck eyes. She belonged to old Gordie, a retired doctor, a Scot, from up the road, one of the many retirees who lived full-time in the village, alongside dozens of old hippies: men who had smoked too many spliffs, their feet bare and their greying hair in scraggly ponytails; women with tanned skin wrinkled from the sun, pieces of aged coloured cotton around their wrists, wearing Balinese sarongs, teaching yoga or offering a safe space in which to experience past-life regression therapy. Anyone young, or youngish, and still working travelled to jobs at one of the small towns close by; only a handful had work requiring them to travel as far as Brisbane. At just under a two-hour drive (or one and a half if you mercifully escaped the traffic and floored it), The Landing was considered a tad too far to be within the city’s commuter belt.

  A good number of houses at The Landing were left empty or leased as holiday rentals, and some belonged to wealthy barristers, cardiac specialists, ear-nose-and-throat men, property developers and CEOs who, like Jonathan, used them as occasional weekenders. Not all were as swish as his house: a few dated from The Landing’s beginnings as an early-twentieth-century holiday spot, when farmers and working men knocked up what amounted to barely more than shacks, some built of the softwood timbers from forests further inland but most made of poisonous asbestos, requiring specially trained men in masks to take walls down when it came to renovating them.

  Jonathan and Sarah had been coming for years, on and off, and he could still pick out all the houses they had rented when he believed they were happy, when Madeleine and Amanda were little and the lake was perfect for two small, paddling girls; when unsporty Amanda surprised them in the summer she turned ten by becoming—briefly—enamoured of sailing. Because the community was small and everyone knew everyone, they had come to be regarded as regulars; they had friends they caught up with every summer and now everyone knew better than to mention his fugitive, soon-to-be-ex-wife.

  Accompanied by the genial Bites, Jonathan walked down the back steps of his house, past the rustling bushes beginning to be tickled by the wind, down through his long garden and out into the street. The light was pearly; up ahead he saw that the newly erected shower and toilet block, still unfinished on his last visit, was now open. This facility had been championed by Phil from the shop, unofficial mayor and vice-president to Sylv’s presidential role at The Landing Progress Association. Several members were unhappy to have the overbearing husband-and-wife team ruling the roost, but no-one could find a clause in the rules which forbade it. ‘They probably wrote the bloody rule book,’ said old Gordie; he had once been a member of the association but had resigned in protest over the Stalinist dictatorship of the Watsons.

  Jonathan wondered if there had been a ceremony, with pompous Sylv in all her hefty glory cutting a ribbon, declaring the dunny open. Out of curiosity, he ventured inside: the doors were swung wide, revealing stainless-steel toilets—flushing he noted and not compost toilets like those in the camping ground. See Sylv for a good time, some wit had already written above the sink, alongside Chrissy is a slag. Big news for The Landing, he thought, as Bites gave the back of his calf a lover’s lick. ‘Outside,’ he said. ‘Come on, Bites.’

  On the bright new flag of white cement outside the toilet block, edged upon the scrappy grass like icing on a cake, a little drawing made in pink chalk stood out. Designed as a hopscotch, words and drawings lay within the squares rather than numbers. This is me, the first square read, followed by an image of a stick figure, with rather alarming curly hair emerging from its head. My name is Giselle. I am seven, said the words in consecutive squares below the stick figure, then My fafit food is. He couldn’t make out the next words. Cheese was it? Chips? Whatever it was, the child could not spell it.

  This is me. He marvelled at the audacity of it.

  FOUR

  Power walking

  Penny was up early too, power walking around the lake, feeling the wind against her cheeks and rushing under her arms as she swung them. She was lengthening her stride, conscious of the big muscles of her thighs, the stretch of her hamstrings. She refused to wear exercise clothing, to bestow free advertising on a new lycra range, names emblazoned over everything. Since when did ‘fitness’ become a hobby, something you listed as an interest on an internet dating site? If she saw another new mother dressed by Lorna Jane, slimmer than a twelve-year-old, jogging around the lake while pushing a specially designed three-wheel pram containing an infant less than two months old, she would trip her up. Penny wore an old T-shirt of Pete’s, which still carried the shape of his body, and a stained pair of shorts she now used only for gardening. Running shoes were a different matter: she wore a pair of top-of-the-range Nikes, fluorescent orange, necessary to support the healed bone in her foot (embarrassingly broken falling off her new high-heeled shoes while dancing at the Orpheus. Oh, age, where is thy mercy?). She was scared of decay, of dissembling, of losing her shaky place in the world and ending up like her friendless, embattled mother. Marie—whom she never called ‘Mum’—lived unhappily in a retirement village, having failed to manipulate either of her two daughters into living with her. Marie made enemies of everyone, her only pleasure derived from flirting with hapless ancient gentlemen, smitten by her Frenchness which—like flirting—she practised reflexively, having long ago cultivated the art of being ‘French’. Her mother’s only surviving friend, a saintly old woman named Wendy O’Brien, visited Marie in order to be lectured about everything she was doing wrong. To Marie, other people existed simply to cause her grief and interfere with her plans; she was constitutionally unable to see ano
ther person’s point of view. Her mother—who had an uncanny ability to scramble other people’s brains—also had a genius for alienating everyone.

  Penny was thinking about Marie and did not notice tall, gangly Jonathan Lott, trailed by Bites, moving towards her from the opposite direction. By the time she noticed him she barely had time to pull in her stomach, which must have been sticking out, the wind flattening the T-shirt against her belly which, mercifully, was always slightly smaller in the mornings. ‘Morning,’ she said and Jonathan smiled. Bites wagged her tail.