From that night on, Nat was reinstated as Gil’s greatest fan. Whenever I said anything even vaguely critical of him, especially in later years or in front of the kids, she would immediately make a mitigating remark. ‘He wasn’t being selfish for his own sake, was he?’ she said, not courting dissent. ‘It was for his writing.’ I distinctly remember in one argument her stopping me mid-sentence with: ‘At least your father had a passion – the balls to follow it. At least he acted!’
Nat used to love making love. Fierce in her hunger and her generosity, she was tender, too, and would coil round me, giving and seeking solace. Her love-making took me to the edge of myself and opened me up to the possibilities of all that lay beyond. Sex is something you can have, but love you have to create. When we stopped making love, for a time we were left with its shadow, the sex. Then that too began to fade. As the tectonic plates of our relationship shifted, rubbed, and then slowly drifted apart, our sex life became desultory. In bed, the expanse of sheet between us became a vast desert which my longing fearfully traversed. As often as not, my advancing hand would be brushed aside – from tiredness, for sleep. Repelled, my desire for connection shrivelled within me. Resentment blooming in its place.
To the few friends who asked, I used to joke that after our love lights went out, Nat and I drove around on parkers for years. Although everything was grey and shadowy, we could still make out the road, which, I thought, was leading our kids to adulthood. Nat worked longer and longer hours, so we were only awake together in the same house a few hours a day, and even that time was spent doing domestics or relaxing apart. We used to watch TV together, the news or Lateline, gorge ourselves on an HBO series, but then Nat bought herself a tablet and began spending her evenings answering emails and playing computer games, chopping fruit with her finger, flinging birds from a catapult. She said it released tension. I suggested she would end up in a gaming version of AA: ‘Hi, I’m Nat and I’m addicted to slicing fruit.’
Once she would have laughed at that.
When the kids were young and Nat and I were still in love, the best holiday we ever had was on Gabo Island, an old lighthouse station, now a national park, off the coast of Mallacoota. An abalone fisherman dropped us at the dock with our week’s supply of food and luggage. Out of courtesy, Nat travelled in the ute with the ranger who had come to collect our gear. Noah, Sunday and I walked the couple of kilometres from the dock to the lighthouse at the other end of the island. The kids were wide-eyed and smiling with wonder, and I, too, felt transported back to the fantasies of childhood, in my case to the worlds of Stevenson, Blyton, Ransome and Defoe. Adventures beckoned at every turn. After a while, the scrubby bush lining the road dwindled and disappeared. Rounding a bend, we suddenly saw a pink granite lighthouse pinned to the horizon, its tip pointing to the sun. Two houses, the ranger’s and ours, made from island stone, sat resolute against the wind and sky, and the white-capped sea beyond.
Ever after, our week on Gabo gleamed in our memories as a golden time when we were all happy in each other’s company, before the kids’ hormones had kicked in and Nat and I had succumbed to the temptations of discontent. Back then none of us had smart phones, and even if we had we wouldn’t have been able to use them for lack of coverage. On the island there was no television, no shop, nothing to distract us from ourselves and each other and the natural world around us – which, it must be said, put on quite a show. The warm-up acts were impressive enough: a pair of sea eagles patrolling the skies, floating on the island’s warmer air, their eyrie on a ridge overlooking the dock and the tiny bay; a Port Jackson shark gliding in and out of the wavering shadows cast by the planks and pylons of the dock; a kamikaze shearwater, its switch-blade wings slicing through the sky, plummeting into the sea, re-emerging jostling a fish in its beak. And the harem of seals sunbaking on the rocks by the lighthouse, periodically slipping into the ocean to snack or cool off, the younger ones seeming to play tag, one of them laying on its back, flippers propped on its chest, as if reading a book in a bath.
If Sunday were doing the running sheet for this faunal variety show, the seals would have had top billing. For me, that honour would be split between the thousands of tiny penguins that nightly arrived in squawking flotillas to invade the island’s shores, hopping and waddling hundreds of metres to their bunkers, all the while dodging the deathly swoops of sooty owls. And the southern right whales with their calves in tow drifting across the horizon, flapping their flukes and periodically – unexpectedly, even when expected – rising from the waves like the exclamations they provoked as they made their way to Antarctica.
We spent the days walking the island’s coast, exploring its coves and gullies, finding the cemetery and the ruins, sheltering from the wind. The kids and I made drawings of the lighthouse and the keepers’ quarters and Noah and I built a cubby near the abandoned garden buried deep beneath creepers and blackberry bushes close to the island’s heart. Sunday, determined to baptise her brand-new bathers, splashed and squealed in the clear, cold water of the bay. At night, when not spying on the penguins’ D-day re-enactments, we read or played cards. I taught Sunday gin rummy and she became as keen on it as I had been at that age, and Noah, who was by then already an old hand, joined in. So, too, did Nat. We took turns to read aloud Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword, and on the final night, after reuniting the Balicki family in Switzerland, put on a performance for each other: Sunday singing, Noah doing card tricks, me reciting the first fourteen lines of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (the full extent of my remembered repertoire), and Nat, far more impressively, retelling – first in Italian, then in translation – a folktale about a woodland hermit.
The next day, Heinrich, the abalone fisherman, ferried us past Tullaberga Island, the site of the tragic wreck of the Monumental City, and, timing his run with the incoming tide, surged us over the sandbar and returned us to the mainland and to the ordinariness of our lives.
It was my idea to return. I knew we couldn’t enter the same river twice, but just because a river changes doesn’t mean it gets worse. Besides, this was an island, not a river. If we had been able to go when I’d first suggested it everything would, perhaps, have been okay. Unfortunately, I had to book it a year in advance and by then Sunday didn’t want to be deprived of social media, or Noah his gaming conquests, and things between Nat and I had deteriorated.
All the portents were bad.
The morning we left I did my usual panic packing the car. ‘There’s no way we can take all this crap!’ I lashed out at Nat, who, in response, spent the whole six-hour drive either asleep or on her phone.
By the time we reached Mallacoota the wind had picked up. When I rang Heinrich to confirm our travel arrangements for the following morning he said the forecast wasn’t good, that he would ring me at 6 a.m. I spent the night lying in the motel bed listening to the wind whistle through the she-oaks outside our window. I got up as soon it was light. When Heinrich hadn’t called by 6.30 I rang him, getting him out of bed. I imagined him pulling back his bedroom curtain: ‘Doesn’t look great,’ he said, his voice croaky. ‘I’ll go down and check it out.’
He rang soon after eight and said the ocean was like the menu in a bad Chinese restaurant. Falling for it, I asked what he meant. ‘All chop suey.’ We’d try again the next day.
All of us were frustrated. Noah complained about having been woken for nothing and went back to bed, pulling the blankets over his head. Nat, I suspect, was only pretending to be upset. She was preparing for a big case – in those days she was always preparing for a big case – and this gave her an extra day of wi-fi. She sat up in bed and worked on her tablet.
With nothing else to do, Sunday and I walked down to Bastion Point to assess the ocean ourselves. The waves were all wearing white, but they didn’t look particularly big to my landlubber eyes. ‘We could cross in that, surely?’ I said, as much to the Fates as to Sunday.
Mallacoota is a beautiful place, but because it wasn’t where we
were meant to be, we couldn’t enjoy it. With Nat working and Noah sleeping, we spent most of the day cooped up in the motel room together. Because I’d had the idea and made the bookings, and I was the one who had delivered Heinrich’s news, somehow I had become the villain, the dasher of hopes, the spoiler of dreams. This, despite me being convinced that I was the most disappointed of all, for wasn’t I the one who had suggested we return, made the bookings, negotiated with Heinrich …
Conditions were the same the following morning. Detecting the frustration in my voice, Heinrich tried to reassure me. ‘The wind’s meant to go round by midday. We might get out there this afternoon. I’ll call you at one.’
The prospect of finally completing the journey lifted our collective spirits. Then, moments after I delivered the news, Noah said something that had Sunday in tears, sending her storming from the room, slamming the door behind her. Later, packing the bags, I chipped Nat for not having pulled Noah up. She and I then shouted at each other in whispers to spare the motel’s other guests. By the time we were on the boat, all four of us were feuding and could barely look at each other.
We reached the island late in the afternoon. The crossing was rough enough to make Noah seasick, even though he was dosed up on pills to prevent it. He’d been susceptible to motion sickness his whole childhood, throwing up whenever we went on winding roads, forgoing the rides at fairs and fun parks. Somehow the dizzying CGI of videos games didn’t bother him; real life, it seemed, was different.
The worst of the tension fell from me as soon as I stepped onto the jetty. Jim, the ranger, shook my hand, his thick beard splitting open with a smile. ‘You’re lucky to have made it. A big southerly’s on the way.’ Nat and Sunday travelled with him in the ute and I walked with Noah, who needed the air. I tried to patch things up with him, reminiscing about the last time we were there. ‘Don’t suppose our cubby will still be standing. You remember where it was?’ He gave me nothing. After a while I stopped talking, and focused on the world around me: the peppery smell of the bush, the tiny wrens flitting across the path, the rhythmic scrunch of my boots on the gravel.
Rounding the bend, I saw that the lighthouse retained its capacity to enchant. The warmth of that earlier visit flooded back at the sight. Noah was deliberately dawdling, and took the circuitous route of the road rather than the more direct approach of the walking track. I suspected he was avoiding having to help me carry in the supplies.
Nat and Sunday were nowhere to be seen. As I approached the ute and its mound of boxes and bags, the old resentments began to rise. Either I unloaded things myself and felt bitter about it, or I nagged the others to help and felt bitter about having to nag them.
I had already made several trips back and forth to the kitchen by the time Nat emerged from the side of the house. ‘You should come down to the lighthouse – it’s beautiful. The sun’s making it so pink. How can something so solid look so delicate?’
Rather than take up her invitation, I clung pathetically to my role as the martyr. Heaving another box of food towards the house, I asked, ‘Did you think we’d lug this stuff in the dark?’
‘I was coming back for it.’
‘Course you were.’
‘You’re insufferable, Mick. You really are.’
I have often wondered what would have happened if I had gone with Nat down to the lighthouse and seen the rays of the setting sun blush the granite pink; had sat with Sunday on the point and watched the seals jostle and play. How different might things have been? In truth, I imagine whatever good effect that might have had would not have lasted long. My poor behaviour was part of a long-established dynamic with a momentum of its own that rolled right over passing moments of pleasantness. If this had not been the tipping point, something similar would have presented itself soon enough. It reminded me of how, soon after turning forty, I discovered I could no longer drink red wine. Suddenly, a mere sip of a substance I’d always savoured made my head spin, my stomach churn. That is what it was like with Nat. Even when we were in love, without knowing it, we were depleting our tolerance for each other’s toxins.
By the time we’d eaten tea, the southerly had arrived. The house’s thick granite walls were impervious to the gale, but something was rattling on the roof. Sunday and I went out to inspect. The door was wrenched from my hand as I opened it, slamming hard against a rubber stopper that prevented it from smashing into the wall. Struggling down the steps, Sunday leaned into the wind and was shuffled backwards. Our shouted words were whisked away like shrieking gulls. When I opened my mouth, the wind billowed my cheeks, making it hard to breathe. It was like drowning in air. We clung to each other and edged our way to the front of the house where the beam from the lighthouse illuminated the horizontal rain. Drenched, battered, we retreated. Back inside, we marvelled at the sudden calm, the silence.
The wind died the following afternoon, but the rain survived. On the morning of the third day, desperate to escape the confines of the house, I announced I was walking to the farthest point, where the island tapered to a tip and you felt you could swim the narrow channel to the mainland.
‘It’s pouring,’ Noah said, stating the obvious.
‘I’ll get wet.’ I shrugged. ‘Any takers?’
‘I’ll come.’ It was Nat calling from the bedroom, where she’d spent most of the past two days reading Middlemarch, the book that, along with The Falling Part, had most influenced her as a teenager and to which she regularly returned. We had barely spoken since the spat over the luggage, so I was surprised to hear her accept my invitation. We set off in the rain, which had lightened to a gauzy drizzle. The track to the point was narrow, forcing us to walk in single file and in silence. The tide was going out. Standing at the island’s northernmost tip we watched the current surge through the channel separating us from the mainland.
‘Could you swim it?’ I asked. ‘If you had to? To survive.’
Nat saluted a hand to her forehead and scanned the coast. ‘If I had to, I guess. To escape.’
As we walked back, the sun broke through the clouds and the rain seemed to sigh … then stop. The track was steep and slippery down to Boulder Bay. Resting against one of the massive pink boulders, we stared out to sea, where a shaft of light pierced a cloud and played on the surface of the grey-green ocean. The cloud shifted and the beam disappeared, the water subsiding to a duller sheen.
‘I think we should go our separate ways.’
I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly and wondered what she meant, given there was only one track back to the house.
‘I know it’s a cliché,’ she said, still staring straight ahead, ‘but I can’t settle for this. I thought I could. But I can’t. I don’t think you should either.’
It felt like a movie; bad TV. I couldn’t believe this was actually happening. Happening to me. To us. I had imagined this moment many times over, but it had never been like this: the setting so spectacular, the words and sentiments so ordinary. The cold of the rock was seeping through my clothes. I knew I should respond, but couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt cold, numb. Apart from that, I didn’t feel anything because it didn’t feel real. I wanted to say that I still loved her, but I couldn’t because it wasn’t true. I still loved the idea of her. Of us. That was true.
Nat started sobbing. I turned to her, my hand hovering above her shoulder, ready to offer comfort. She shook her head. ‘Don’t.’ She paused to draw breath, gather resolve. ‘It’s so typical! After seventeen years I tell you we’re finished and you’ve got nothing to say? That’s the problem right there. I need a reaction, Mick. I need something – action, reaction. Something. Something more than nothing.’
The Sons of Others closed the MTC’s landmark 1984 season, becoming the first play produced in the Playhouse, its new home at the Victorian Arts Centre. The opening night was a gala event attended by a who’s who of the Australian arts community, along with a long list of dignitaries that included the then Victorian premier, John Cain, and one
of his predecessors, the driving force behind the creation of the arts precinct, Sir Rupert Hamer. Directed by John Sumner and starring Julia Blake, Edward Hepple, Robyn Nevin and John Stanton, The Sons of Others was hailed ‘an instant Australian classic … an audacious, ground-breaking piece of theatre’.°
As if imitating his own success in Freedom Falling, in The Sons of Others Madigan again reversed the direction of narrative time. The play opens with Mark and Amy Powlett (played by Stanton and Nevin) standing in an airport transit lounge, anxiously awaiting the arrival of their adopted Vietnamese son, Tam, an orphan from the war. The action spools back to the conflict in the marriage caused by Mark’s impotence and his crisis of masculinity, which, the next act reveals, has its roots in his relationship with his father, Lionel (played by Hepple). Having travelled back to the late ’60s, we see father and son in heated dispute over the Vietnam War. Mark, a committed pacifist, is a draft dodger; Lionel, decorated in World War II, accuses him of cowardice and suggests he must be ‘some other man’s son’. Still in reverse, we encounter Lionel and Merle (played by Blake) as a young couple, married in a shotgun wedding soon after World War II. Lionel, struggling to adjust to civilian life, finds solace in the bottle. As he sleeps in a single bed in the centre of the stage, the audience watches scenes from his nightmares projected onto a thin, tremulous screen draped above him.
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