Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Who do you see, sister, who do you see?

  When you enter this room and stand looking at me:

  Are you thinking: a crabby old man, not very wise

  Uncertain of habit with faraway eyes

  Who dribbles his food and makes no replies?

  But inside this old carcass

  A young man still dwells

  And now and again his battered heart swells

  I remember the joys, I remember the pain

  And I’m loving and living life over again

  So open your eyes, sister, open and see

  Not a crabby old man, look closer–see me.

  But all Sister Surrage heard was a low steady drone uttered through dry lips.

  Moments later, the door handle turned and Merridy came into the room. “All right, nurse. I’ll take over.”

  Once Sister Surrage had left, Merridy dragged over her Glory Box from the foot of the pneumatic bed and sat on it beside her father. She was conscious of the quickness of her breathing. She did not believe what her heart was telling her. The idea was absurd. It was only a kiss. And yet something remained, some strange tingling or taste, a presentiment even, that made her want to see Alex again already.

  Another moment before it dawned.

  She turned. “Dad, did you just see us?”

  Seated in his wheelchair beside her, Mr Bowman had nothing to say. Even so, she heard his thoughts.

  Good thing your mother’s playing bowls! She wouldn’t have understood what I witnessed. Once upon a time, perhaps. But I understand. It sweeps me back to my first sight of Leticia. On her way to a daffodil competition when this impatient young fellow overtakes her. Did I tell you ever about that afternoon? It was raining and we were both trying to get out of the wind. I noticed this girl in front of me, ducking her head and leaning forward at an angle as if she were running from a helicopter, and before I knew it I was tangled up in her legs. We fell head over heels, literally, but I was first on my feet. I pulled her up from the footpath and when I looked into those eyes I couldn’t let go of her hand. Simple as that. I was heading out that afternoon to Burnie, but twenty minutes after meeting your mother I called up Mr Bathurst at the pulp mill to say I was crook and that night booked into a B & B–as it happened in the same part of town where she lived, though it took me a few days to track her down. Sometimes you have to act like that, straight away. If I had not cast caution to the wind, I might have missed out on a whole lot of heartbreak and bother, but I would not have had you. My own little miracle. That’s what you are to me. You know that, don’t you?

  Some ice cream had dried on his jersey. Merridy licked the corner of her shirtsleeve and wiped it away. She switched on the table radio that she had bought him after his accident. The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra playing Sibelius.

  “It’s all right, Dad. You can go to sleep. Unless you want to watch Mum losing at bowls.”

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  Bang! A black shape tumbled from the gum tree in a blur and clatter of feathers. Bang! Another.

  Alex was out with his father’s shotgun, shooting crows before they picked out the eyes of the lambs. It gave him no pleasure to kill. Almost his first act on taking on the farm at Moulting Lagoon was to forbid the swan shooters from crossing his land. This had alienated an element in the community, foremost among them Ray Grogan, who had enjoyed unfettered access to the lagoon under Bill Molson’s tenancy. Alex also banned 1080 poison, laid by other farmers to prevent marsupials from devouring the young plantations. This meant, though, that he had to cull. Unable to afford a wallaby-proof fence, he depended on his father’s Purdey to protect his barley from anything that nibbled.

  He left the dead crows for the devils. He picked up the plastic cartridge cases and put them in his pocket and walked home. At this hour, he usually made himself a sandwich, but he had no appetite.

  Meanwhile, Alex’s hunger for Merridy was a bread that he tore at. He had not expected love. For the first time, he began to find his isolated life depressing. The most trivial excuse took him back into town.

  The following afternoon, he was at Nevin’s garage filling the ute for the second time in two days, when he caught sight of Tildy’s blonde head. She was squeezed into jeans and wore a man’s white shirt with the gold cufflinks still in.

  “Hi, Tildy,” and nodded to her over the sack of Bismarck potatoes and jump-leads and rolls of wire. “How was the Jazz Social?”

  “Wonderful,” she breathed. She rested her arm on the side of his vehicle before deciding that it would dirty her elbow. “Just wonderful.”

  “I heard about you and Ray. That’s great.”

  “Thank you,” and stretched her arms. “It’s the first time I’ve felt like this. It really is.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  She studied him. “OK, who is it?” cunningly.

  “Merridy—” and stopped, embarrassed at having spoken–that it was so close to the surface.

  Tildy fell silent at the mention of her cousin’s name. She folded her arms and waited while Alex hooked the nozzle back on the pump. “Alex…a word in your shell-like,” very seriously.

  “What about?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “C’mon. What is it?”

  She exhaled. “Don’t get involved,” biting her lip.

  “Who says I’m involved?”

  “She’s my oldest friend as well as my cousin. But it’s not just her. It’s the whole situation.”

  “What whole situation?” And tried to picture it from Tildy’s angle. Merridy’s father refusing to die; her mother a religious nutcase.

  “Did she tell you about her brother?”

  “She said that he disappeared.”

  “Explain what happened, did she?”

  “No. Just that he disappeared.”

  “Well, I hate to say this, and of my own cousin too, but you’ve got to know something about Merridy.” She whispered, as if to mock her own words: “The fact is, she’s madder than a cut snake.”

  “Seems pretty normal to me,” hunting around for the cap.

  “Oh, she doesn’t look mad, but she is. Don’t believe me, have a word with Ray.”

  “Ray? Are you joking?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  KEITH FRAMLEY ALLOWED MERRIDY one afternoon off a week. At 2.30 p.m. on Tuesday, Alex collected her from the hotel.

  It was a cutting cold day. Smells from a recent rain rose from the paddocks and the sky was grey with flotillas of thick cumulus. Early March and Wellington Point was still exposed to sudden showers.

  They talked pleasantly about not much at all on the journey. But Alex felt nervous as he rounded Cerney Hill and approached the last bend. It was raining again and he wanted her to like what she was about to see. And Merridy, sensing this, stared out through the windscreen with a concentrated expression, her hands in their gloves of brown wool laced in her lap.

  The entrance to Alex’s property was on a blind corner concealed between two bluegums.

  “I live by myself,” he explained unnecessarily.

  “Tildy said.” But it was Ray who had told about the Scania log-truck. In the Bethel Teahouse, he had described for her the trailer stacked with gigantic eucalypts, careering down this road as though the driver had but a moment to live. She pictured the log-truck swiping the car that emerged from between the trees, and scattering Alex’s childhood into fragments.

  They jolted over the cattle-grid and up a long drive of white gravel. She watched it dead-end into a tidy lawn in the middle of which was a large and solitary pine. Like a finger pointing upward in the Methodist Hall. Minister Twelvetrees’s finger.

  Alex parked beside a rotary clothes-line and they climbed out. It was raining heavily now.

  She stood on the gravel, looked around, started to walk towards the house.

&nb
sp; “No, this way,” said Alex.

  Ignoring the downpour, he insisted on first showing her the view. A veranda stretched around the back of the house, a deck of cedar planks which the sea salt had blackened. She stood beside him and cast her eyes out over Moulting Lagoon to Oyster Bay. It was, as Alex’s father never tired of repeating, a top spot. But not on this day, perhaps.

  Rain dripped from the gutters and leaves. A scratching and a whining sounded from inside. Alex opened a door and a young Border collie, jackdaw-coloured, bounded out.

  “Hey, Flash!”

  Merridy, who was unbuttoning her wet coat, sank to her haunches. “It’s all right,” shutting her eyes to the dog’s tongue.

  “I’m still training her.”

  In the tactile warmth of the kitchen, he twisted the stove on and offered her tea.

  “It’s Bushells.” Not the Glen Valley that his mother insisted on.

  “I’d love a cup,” shaking the raindrops from her head and throwing off her coat. She wore a green jersey underneath with large yellow daisies knitted into it and the brown gloves that she would not take off.

  He brought Merridy her tea, thinking of the tanned arm with the fair hairs.

  “You heard about the prang?”

  She nodded.

  Silence. Just the rain.

  “I was standing here,” moving to the basin. “I’d just got out of bed and I saw a policeman outside and Miss Pritchard, our teacher. I thought: She’s come with the cricket team and do we have enough bacon, and I went out in my pyjamas and I said: ‘Hello,’ and Miss Pritchard, white as a shirt, came towards me and lifted me up, and I said: ‘My parents?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “‘Dead?’

  “‘Yes.’”

  The accident had happened out of earshot after Alex had gone back to sleep. Composing an apology to Cheele.

  “I must see them,” he was moaning, and moaning.

  The suddenly orphaned boy.

  Merridy sipped her tea. Inside the kitchen, the grey light had solidified with the bacon fat from the stove. She was staring into herself and nodding. That expression again, at once absent and focused. He would have hated it if she had said anything.

  “More?”

  “I’m doing all right,” and looked around. At the Welsh dresser painted green. The cherry pips in a saucer. The view through a rain-streaked window onto the solitary tree.

  She moved and a yellow daisy rose. She had noticed the frames.

  “My mother collected them,” coming up behind.

  “What are they?”

  “Samplers. Young women made them on the voyage out as proof of a skill.”

  She stood before the first frame.

  Alex went on: “To try and win themselves a husband, I suppose.”

  “Those were the days! But what kind of man would fall for this one?” Merridy murmured the words, embroidered below deck in coloured wools: “Emily Highmore, aged 13, December 4, 1840: Early will I seek thee/Now that my journey is just begun/My course but little trod/I’ll stay before I further run/And give myself to God.”

  Alex smiled. “Someone who’s not going to see too much action outside a church?”

  She passed to the next. “Delay of repentance is a cheat upon ourselves.”

  He said: “Mainly they sewed the alphabet. And numbers. My mother liked the ones with verses.”

  She put down her cup on a cabinet of white-bound Encyclopaedia Britannicas. Stitched in a frame above was the line: Worked by Florrie Winch 1887: There is a mystery in every meeting, and that is God.

  “I like that,” tapping the glass.

  Excitement was in her now. The samplers drew her further into the leaden reaches of corridor, something in their faded colours arousing her to pause before each, read aloud, move on.

  He who says all he knows does not know himself.

  Beware the anger of the dove.

  Remain a child so that your children will always love you.

  At the bottom of the devil’s bag, one always finds his bill.

  When the moon is full she shines over all.

  Beautiful are the heralds, crying, O traveller enter in.

  Until she came to his bedroom.

  She took in with a quiet glance the wide mahogany bed and the large wardrobe of dark oak with claws for feet.

  “That’s…” She had been about to say “a good piece of furniture”, but it did not seem adequate.

  “It’s my mother’s,” Alex said. “She brought it with her on the ship from England. I don’t know how old it is. She used to boast that it was older than Australia.”

  The wardrobe was the colour of a blackboard. One of the doors, she could not help noticing, was hinged back against the curtain, reflecting her and Alex, their two shapes.

  She moved closer.

  Some wind had filled her up and she skimmed over a surface where before she might have sunk. It was a novel sensation not to be repelling someone, a relief.

  She closed the door, but it swung back on its hinge. She tested it again, with the same result.

  “Doesn’t it shut?”

  “It was damaged in transit from England. They never got round to fixing it.”

  She pulled open the other door that was also pierced with a hollow heart and a cross above it, and heard her higher pitched voice: “No key?”

  “My mother lost it.” Or never had it.

  Now both doors gaped. She stared inside at the divided interior: one side for hanging space, the other with five tray shelves.

  This velvety darkness. It roused in Merridy a faint remembrance of something, right on the edge of memory. She searched her mind, but whatever it was stayed the other side.

  She felt a tightening in her womb and at the same time a pleasant unravelling of herself, a clarity. “Do you want children?”

  Merridy had never before said such a thing to a man and did not know how she had managed to utter it. But once the phrase was out of her mouth she followed it.

  Beyond the curtain was the whirring of a windmill.

  “I’d love children,” she said. “Mobs of them.” And poked in her head as if already she could hear them crying.

  A little while later, she would carry away the soapy smell of his shirts; and the image of him in the tight white underpants, his cock straining.

  Now, in the darkness of his folded clothes, she panicked. She wondered if anything she had could be important to Alex, anything at all about herself.

  Sensing his gaze on her, she turned, hoping to catch him sneaking a look–at least to have that certainty–but his attention was trapped by the clawed legs of the wardrobe.

  “What are they holding?” she wanted to know. “Is it a globe? Or just a ball?”

  He might have been in their grip. “Do you always ask so many questions?”

  “Don’t ask, don’t get,” she replied in the words of her mother, who had herself mislaid the key to a number of things.

  But his eyes daunted her. She looked back inside. Up a shelf. And saw something to make her raise her arms in a way that caught his breath.

  “Hey, what have you got there?”

  “Oh, those,” of the bottles stacked on their sides. “They’re my father’s. Here, come and have a bopeep.”

  He piloted her to another room, at the end of the corridor. Opened the door.

  “You made these?” staring at the shelves. Ship after ship. Each with its thorn-sized sails and cargo of dreams.

  “My father taught me,” Alex said, not yet adding that it was a way for him to preserve one of his few unfading impressions of a tall man with crinkled grey eyes who Sunday mornings, early, would drive Alex to the canal in Lauderdale and launch his models in the company of enthusiasts; perhaps his only link, apart from a handful of isolated phrases and a distinct memory of the two of them both sitting under the stars on Barn Hill while his father, smelling richly of Balkan Sobranie, knocked his pipe against the ground and talked about white-throated swifts an
d eels and the uncommonly clear sky, damn well suited for an astronomer.

  Less distinct was an excursion to New Norfolk when Alex was five or six, to visit the asylum where another fellow Cumbrian had been incarcerated. The composer John Woodcock Graves had written the words to the hunting song that Alex’s father was always humming: “Do you ken John Peel?”

  Otherwise, Basil Dove came to him second-hand through the memories of others, smoking a pipe as he swam in the river and holding a billycan filled with speckled trout. “Your father,” Harry Ford said, “could catch fish in a bucket.” It was not a memory you could argue with. Over the years Alex had constructed a less bucolic image of his parents. A middle-class English couple who sailed to Australia a decade after the war, married and settled in the outback, and when it ceased to suit them took their consolation in drink. Or so he understood from Harry, who fed him peppery morsels that added up to a depressing picture replicated all over Australia: exile, exacerbated by alcohol and a clinging to outdated habits. Like making ships in bottles. And thought of Harry, with his bomb-shaped head and a touch of malice about him, grinning at Alex over a large glass of South African port: “No shortage of empties!”

  Across the room, something was stirring up in Merridy. She stared at a 1,000-watt light bulb that contained a minuscule ship.

  Alex lifted the large glass bulb for her to see. “Five-masted clipper. Thirty sails in there. And you have to build them up one by one. I’m never doing that again. It’s probably why my father went blind.”

  “How come it didn’t explode?”

  “Good luck,” and smiled.

  “Alex, tell me,” impatient. “I know about light bulbs. It ought to have exploded.”

  He drew closer. “Right. You tap with a screwdriver on the contacts. There’s a small sigh as the vacuum escapes,” and imitated the sound. “Then you keep chipping till you get down to the filament. Once the filament is removed, you clean the rubbish out.”

  A vacuum was escaping in her, too. Solemnly, she said: “When I was the size of a deck-fitting, I once designed a boat.”