Merridy slumped back. “I don’t know why I’m talking about this. It never leads to a good place. Let’s forget it.”
But Tildy was on a jag. “For God’s sake, when are we going to talk about it? You know one thing reading has taught me? It’s that you may as well talk about it because it’s there. Everyone has felt dreadful for you over the years, but at a certain point your refusal to talk about Hector has turned to poison. To be honest, until you talk about him no one will ever know you–and can you tell me what is so great about not being known? I bet you don’t talk about it with Alex. In fact, I bet you chose Alex because you knew you wouldn’t have to talk about it with him.” She took a final puff and stubbed it out and picked up her empty glass. “Another?”
At last, Merridy pulled herself to her feet. “I really must go.”
“Well, go then.”
“You’re not staying, are you?”
“I don’t know, I might. Just for a little. Like I said, it’s been ages. Anyway, Ray’s probably not finished his oh-so-important business with Mr Talbot,” with an embittered laugh.
“Then I’ll say goodbye.” She moved unsteadily to kiss Tildy’s cheek, but their heads bumped and they were kissing on the lips.
Tildy clung to her. “It was lovely to see you, Merridy. You’re still my best friend.”
Merridy left her there.
It was dark outside. A harvest moon was slung between the Norfolk pines. The white chips of the whittled clouds that the south-easterly gathered across it provoked a dread in her.
Merridy walked on legs that felt drugged. Gulping the air, she stumbled towards her car when she saw a dog in the middle of the road, hunched over something. And observing the dog, a tall figure silhouetted against the moon.
The English voice spoke half to itself. “Pretends he’s deaf when he’s eating roadkill. He is deaf anyway, but he’s even more deaf then.”
“Goodnight, Harry.”
“Goodnight, Mrs Dove. Don’t forget–my affectionate regards to Alex.”
CHAPTER SIX
ALEX WAS SURPRISED THAT there were no other cars at the Alexandria Beach Retreat. All was explained. The guests had fled the convict-built cottages because of the stinking whale.
The owner, a small and talkative nurse from Burnley, had lived twenty-five years on this spit. She was relieved to greet two clients who did not appear to mind the stench.
“I live on a farm,” Alex said.
“It got so bad I had to spray the room every half-hour. You had to cover your face. You can still smell it faintly,” and sniffed. “There.” She stepped back from the reception desk and pointed through French windows to where the adult sperm whale had rolled onto the shore, yards from her hotel. “That whiteness on the rocks was made by the oil. See the sea eagles?” Two grey smudges on the pines at the end of the beach. “I think that’s some of the intestines over there. Yes. Bits of intestine are sitting over there.”
Cormorants wandered along the sand with pieces of blubber in their beaks.
“It was fifty foot long when Parks and Wildlife did their post-mortem. They think it was the storm that made him lose his way, poor thing.”
“Is there a toilet?” asked Kish, face taut.
“Over there.” And to Alex: “I’ll just get the keys.”
She went into another small room. Kish headed straight for the lavatory while Alex looked at the newspaper that she had been reading.
A black-and-white photograph on the front page caught his attention.
He was still arched over the Advocate when the woman came back.
“I’m putting you both in the deluxe cottage. It has a spa-bath. I assume you don’t mind sharing with your son.”
Alex looked up. The colour had drained from his face. “I’m sorry. We are going to have to leave at once. I really am sorry, but this is an emergency. Could I use your phone?”
When Kish returned, he found Alex pacing up and down.
“We’re going home.”
“What, now? But it’s right on dark.”
“I have to see Merridy.”
“What about?”
“It’s about her brother. I can’t tell you any more.” He did not want to talk at all until he saw her, was with her.
“Then what about your windmill?” a good deal puzzled. “Isn’t it going to be ready tomorrow?”
But Alex was already out of the door.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MERRIDY HAD A DANGEROUS drive home. Coming down Cerney Hill, her car hit a wallaby. Startled, she drove on. Around the next corner a possum stared at her, two bright pins of light, then scuttled onto the verge. It seemed that the road would never end.
She was in a tremendous state from more than one source and disturbed by her conversation with Tildy. She was ashamed to have been outed by someone with whom she had always felt safe. What she felt now was exhaustion and darkness–anger even–that she had had a drink and stirred it up in the first place. And overriding it all a feeling of dread, as if it had a force of its own and she was in its grasp.
It had happened long ago, but it was still there in her head. At the mention of Hector, she was overwhelmed by a resurgent grief. As she drove back to Moulting Lagoon Farm, she ached, she physically ached, for her brother.
On the dark, winding coast road she thought of her family’s shack near Wynyard. She was standing on the deck, staring into the bush. It was morning, in late summer, and the large gums threw thick shadows. She could hear a wattlebird and the roar of the waves breaking on the stony shore. Her father was in the house, and her mother was saying something to him. She had no reason to think this, but she already knew that she was not going to see Hector again. She knew that the world for which her mother had a moment before been washing her face and grabbing the towel off the floor had altered, and that whatever now happened she was exiled from it.
Her headlights picked out the entrance and swept from the road. She drove through the gate, over the cattle-grid, into the drive. A little drunk, a little floaty, and enormously upset, she switched off the headlights. Her eyes scoured the sky. No stars, nothing but a yawning blankness. Only the white track beckoned, a pale arm that reached down out of that blankness and drew her in.
She followed the gravel drive up. The smell of horse and sheep manure rolled over the paddock. Grasping the wheel and staring at her thumbs, the moonlight on the polished nails, she was conscious of the trees reaching over the drive and animals watching. She shuddered, but she was not cold. Severed from its previous life, her heart had gone to ground. Tugged back into a hole that led to who knew where and was inhabited by God knows what.
Alex drove for five hours, stopping only in Epping Forest for petrol and a cup of bitter coffee and to ring Merridy.
Again, no answer. She had to be down at the oyster shed.
In his distress, he telephoned Tildy. He rehearsed what he would say: “Could you dash to my home? Please go out there and get Merridy before she reads it herself, or is told, or hears it on the radio.” He did not want her to hear it on the radio. As he listened to the dialling tone, he thought: What about the Mercury? But he was confident that the Mercury, being a Hobart newspaper and concerned more with stories from the south, would not yet have reported the discovery.
It was Ray who answered. Rattled when he heard that it was Alex. “No, I have no idea where she is and I’m too busy to go chasing around town…”
Alex crunched his paper cup and threw it away. He called over to Kish and they drove on.
Night fell as they came into Campbell Town and turned onto the Lake Leake Highway. The ute’s headlights roamed through the bush. In some of the shacks–makeshift cabins set among the she-oaks–Alex could see sofas on the deck and corrugated water tanks. Every now and then a wallaby hopped across the road, stopping to peer at the lights that approached at such speed, and hopped away.
After an extremely long journey, they arrived back at the dark house shortly before ten o’clock. It lo
oked a strange place under the full moon, the windows blacker than overcooked coffee and the light glinting on the ripple-iron roofs. But no sign of Merridy, no sign of her car.
“Well, I’m going to have to see if she’s at the shed,” he said to Kish. “I’ll drop you here.”
It crossed his mind to wonder how safe it was to leave Kish alone in the house. He always thought twice about leaving his Purdey around when Kish was at home and had taken to locking the shotgun in his office. But Kish showed little inclination to go inside. He stood on the drive, stretching himself and looking up at the moon.
Alex left him there and drove down the hill, fast, towards Moulting Lagoon.
Her eyes not yet adjusted to the night sky, Merridy parked on the lawn and switched off the engine. The moon had floated into the treetops. It shone with unnatural brightness on the roofs and on the grass, save for a dark patch where the fallen pine soured the land.
She made her way, tripping on the edge of the lawn, towards the house. She could hear the telephone ringing as she opened the kitchen door, and then it stopped.
She undid the top button of her dress, not bothering to turn on the light. The night was hot and the kitchen still smelled of the simple red sauce that she had left on the table and the walnut cake that she had baked for the men’s dinner. Relieved to have the house all to herself, she kicked off her shoes and tramped along the corridor. Through her rum eyes the place was alive; the samplers glowed; and the cockatoo looked bigger when she went into the living room where she had shut Rusty. She followed the puppy out of the room and fumbled open the door into her study. The moonlight fell across her Huon pine trunk. With a sigh she sank to her knees and unbolted the lid and plunged her hands inside. Throwing out the cotton sheets and lace curtains that she had never unpacked, now speckled with dead insects, the cassette that she had never watched, until, at the bottom, her fingers encountered the edges of a plastic bag.
She shook the objects onto the floor, and in the lozenge of moonlight picked through them: the orange feather; the photograph of Hector on the beach near Wynyard, taken the day before his seventh birthday and that she had never been able to stick in a book; the scrapbooks of cuttings from local papers; the messages relayed through Taffy; the scuffed Blundstone.
Merridy held the child’s boot to her face, in quick breaths inhaling the smell of leather and rubber.
Something moved on the deck with the intimacy of an animal’s footfall that had walked there for years. And she heard the dog addressed and the shoe-squeak and the twanging of the closed door.
“Hello,” he said, speaking from inside.
Who was it? Not Alex–nor Kish. They were north.
She saw, then, it was Hector.
“Hector?” fluting, and stood. There was the sound of what she had held dropping to the floor. She brought her fingers together in the way people did when they were helping one another over fences.
In that narrow passage lined with admonitions and hopes, he came creaking towards her on the cedar floor.
“Hector…” She pronounced it to herself as though licking the bottom of a bowl. For she had never spoken his name, never. Apart from that once. He had survived somewhere in the catacombs.
His shadow blended with the samplers, a long dark blade shucking her.
She had become a little girl again. “Hector,” she repeated, licking the last leaves so that she would not have to read a fortune. And felt her hunger and panic rising.
A smile crawled along his face.
“You look nice.”
“Hector!” A name to shout through her palms. She could not stop herself. His eyes quivered as if he had heard shots. Never had they seemed so strange and round and listless. His hard, deep mouth like an initial engraved.
He came closer. He smelled of stars. She wanted to tell him how much she had missed him; her brother.
“I was just out looking at the moon,” he said and smiled.
She heard her young girl’s laugh. The Advocate was open on the floor. They were dancing around a newspaper. And over in the corner Mr Twelvetrees was playing the piano.
“You’re back.” In a voice that she used for another person from another world. And threw a hand over her eyes against any thought of the future. “Thank God, you’re back,” and ran forward in her drugged state to embrace him. Her shirt was unbuttoned; she was sailing towards him in the Otago, the gulls cawing, the spray nicking her face and the wind licking at the ice-cream mast and up between her legs. The whole planet was sailing on a wave across the floor towards him.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
She plastered herself onto him. Longing enamelled her lips. She had bandaged him away inside herself, but all burst out when she touched him. She kissed his face, squeezed away the years, in the ferment of her passion unbuttoning his shirt, taking off his glasses.
“No, no, nothing’s wrong.” As sobbing she lost herself in his flesh.
He seemed grateful for her outpouring of affection. For a moment he gave in to her embrace.
But he was so unhappy, or sick. Or burning. His mouth made an ugly shape. “No,” he said–like that. When she touched him.
Ungluing, she felt his eyes on her. His trapped look.
She looked at her sky-blue hands on his face. Her fingers like tubes squeezed out. Her capacity to touch had dried like paint.
“No,” he simply said. And pushed her.
The illusion that it was Hector passed like a shadow down the corridor. Leaving behind Kish. “Pull yourself together.”
“Kish…?” She looked at him, incredulous. “I thought you were someone else.” And heard her lunatic words fade away. As he ran from her.
A door slammed.
“Kish.”
She flung open the door to his room and stood there, her head dishevelled. Nobody.
“Kish!” She was snivelling now. Suspended between her childhood and Kish.
One by one she flung open the doors along the passage. Until she came to her bedroom. No one there. But something had changed. She looked slowly around. Flicking her eyes back and forth. Before she saw what it was.
The wardrobe door–closed.
She started forward and hammered on it. “Kish…let me in.” But the door was locked fast, from the inside.
Merridy stooped, peered through the keyhole. Filled with his damned piece of pine. She listened to his breathing. And moaned. “Kish! Let. Me. In.”
In the kitchen, the telephone was ringing again.
The gate to Oblong Oysters was locked.
Alex returned along the lower road, stopping now and then to check the troughs. He parked next to the shearing shed and after satisfying himself that the bullocks in the paddock had sufficient feed decided that he was too tired to climb back into the ute. He left the vehicle where it was and walked towards the house through the farmyard.
The route took him past his old workshop. Out of habit he looked up at the window. Still no light on inside the house, but over on the lawn the bright moonlight reflected from the roof of Merridy’s Toyota. Thank God, she’s back, he thought. But how funny she hasn’t turned on the lights. There must be a power cut. He was about to walk on when he heard the sound of someone talking in excited tones. He stepped across the flower bed and pressed his face to the glass. The door to Merridy’s study was open.
He could make out Merridy in the corridor. She was standing sideways on, one hand up to her face. Instantly, he had the feeling that had seized him when he first saw her. And remembered her forthright laugh and how gamine she was. He was about to tap the window to get her attention, but something about her posture stayed his hand. Then her knees straightened and she ran towards a figure who stood framed in the kitchen doorway, flinging her arms about his neck and clinging to him.
And the man clinging to her.
The news that Alex had to give her bled away. He stumbled back, tripping over roots, heart thudding. He picked himself up.
A door slam
med, then another, excluding him. Not knowing what he was doing, he forced his way through the shrubs and bottle-brushes, obedient to a blind force that dragged him around the house, over the flower bed that encircled it, until he stood outside their bedroom window.
He put his neck forward to the glass as if shaving himself. Merridy was in the room. So, evidently, was the man she had embraced, because she was calling to him in a voice haunting and low–the most entreating sound that Alex had ever heard.
“Kish! Let. Me. In.”
Alex had no response, no defence for this situation. He remained where he was, absolutely stationary. A tiny bit surprised that Merridy did not see him as she flew out of the house a moment later.
He was rooted to the spot for as long as it took Merridy to scramble into her car and accelerate away down the drive.
This was too much. He did not want to talk to Kish. He did not know what he wanted. He was going to go away and think to himself what in God’s name was he to do with his wife and this young man, who would have to get out of his house at first bloody light.
He blundered off, as on the morning when his parents were killed, letting his body take him in the direction of the sea and the sanctuary of his lichen-spattered rock.
The moon shone white on fields where convicts had been flogged for speaking. Blasted with grief, he roamed the paddock that he had walked through ten minutes before, a different person then. His shadow snaked after him, blending with charred stumps. Startled cattle looked up at him as they might have looked at a spectre. And all the time the thumping in his chest.
He staggered towards his rock.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FROM ITS SHELF HIGH up on the Welsh dresser Kish seized the bottle with the Otagoin it, and fled the appalling house. Across the drive, the clothes-line reared up. The silhouette of the Hill’s Hoist against the moon sharper than any gallows.
Secrets of the Sea Page 31